Word: normalization
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...after all, the business of farce to restore order to radically disordered situations. The fun arises as we helplessly witness the mad logic by which, step by tiny step, chaos asserts its dominion over normalcy. Take that naked fellow on the roof. Until today, he was a perfectly normal lawyer, a trifle nervous about meeting his fianc?e's family, but steadying himself by taking what he thought was a Valium. Not his fault that he grabbed the wrong pill bottle and ingested a hallucinogen instead. And so it goes - the obsessive, the insecure, the clinically demented, the madly narcissistic...
...shootings over the past decade, psychologist Bernardo Carducci and his team at Indiana University found that the young shooters in these incidents shared nearly all of 29 personality and behavior characteristics that Carducci categorizes as cynical shyness. This form, says Carducci, who directs the Shyness Research Institute, differs from normal shyness in that sufferers disconnect with others when their efforts at socialization are rebuffed. "These are people who want to be with others but who are rejected in a very harsh way," he says. While normally shy people would continue to try, and eventually succeed, in connecting with others, cynically...
Still, is there anything wrong with medicating normal sadness if you don't mind side effects? Horwitz and Wakefield take no position on this. They point out that women giving birth take painkillers even though pain is a normal part of the process. But the authors also note that "loss responses are part of our biological heritage." Nonhuman primates separated from sexual partners or peers have physiological responses that correlate with sadness, including higher levels of certain hormones. Human infants express despair to evoke sympathy from others. These sadness responses suggest sorrow is genetic and that it is useful...
...normal, he wants you to know, he is obviously not as ridiculously vanilla as the characters he's played. Like, he's totally not anti-kissing, even though he and Hudgens didn't do it in the first Disney movie. "I'm the last person to think a kiss is going to corrupt any child. Kissing is a great thing," he says. Also, he plays video games. Violent ones. "It's bull____ that guns in video games cause murders. The last thing I would ever do is hurt another person, and online I probably kill 200 guys a day." Moreover...
Though he masks it with charm, Efron pushes hard, maybe a little too hard, on the normal-guy thing. He frets about coming off as arrogant. He lives in a rented apartment in the Valley--not even a nice part of the Valley--which he cleans himself, or, more accurately, doesn't. He says he has no interest in fame, which is why he is one of the few High School Musical stars not to have signed a record contract. And why he refuses to have lunch at the Ivy, where people go to be shot by paparazzi...