I had a shitty week-end.
Maybe not the shittiest week-end ever. There were two light point, namely the impromptu water art session on Saturday night and two hours of dance classes on Sunday. Just for that it was not all that bad.
Nevertheless, except for these few light hours, I spent pretty much the entire time severely depressed. Thinking about how I was feeling alone but with no energy to go out and meet people. Thinking that all my friends were having a nice time whereas I had to stay at home working, catching up and preparing stuff for the next week. Doing laundry, shopping, other miscellaneous house maintenance stuff, yet not seeing the point of having such a big home for myself only if it was not shared regularly. On Sunday I stayed in bed late, not wanting to face a day of physical and intellectual boredom. I even had the frustration of receiving extremely good reviews for an article I wrote, yet by reviewers that were only "exercising" (meaning the article does not get published although the reviews were positive).
Except for the two hours of dancing already mentioned, Sunday ended up being quite bad overall.
So when I came back home in the evening I went to bed and I had a serious sleep issue. Indeed when I am depressed it becomes difficult to sleep, because I can't easily accept to integrate the feeling of hopelessness into the start of my night.
Yet at I was pressing my face between two pillows and my giant plush shark, the light shone again. Retrospectively this would be best described as an "Eureka" moment with a light bulb; at that moment it was just a "let's try that see if it work" idea with an optimistic intuition.
I simply visualized memories of my loved ones smiling. One after the other. Like others visualize jumping sheep, I visualized faces turning over to face me and starting to smile. R., smile. M., smile. R., smile. S., smile. N., smile. M., smile. M., smile. S., smile. M., smile. N., smile. M., smile. B., smile. A., smile. H., smile. D., smile. T., smile. J., smile. T., smile. P., smile. A., smile. X., smile. S., smile. R., smile. M., smile. D., smile. F., smile. C., smile. A., smile. P., smile. R., smile. M., smile. N., smile. C., smile. S.-B., smile. C., smile…
I fell asleep with the biggest smile of all on my face. Obviously tonight I'll continue with the gallery!
Something is up, this is not my "normal" self. Lately I wake up often to vivid dreams; with rich imagery and rich scenarios, diversified in place, duration, characters, intensity, atmosphere, colors, moods. I did not use to dream this much.
Last night was an itinerary through a series of houses and apartments that I had memories of living in, although I really did not. I visited each of them in turn along a path, a path I had taken trying to find a bathroom to wash myself after a sleepover in one of my high school's classrooms. How I got into this classroom is itself a story however the memory of it evades me now. Yet the rest could become weirder. For each home I reached on the path I had extremely clear memories of what it was to live in it, yet each time when I arrived to the building it saw it was abandoned, nearly in ruins and taken by dirt and vegetation. Then each time I would remember that I had sold it or gave up my rent long ago, that I was thus not entitled to enter it although I had a key. Looking through a window of one of the houses, I could see the empty rooms and imagine my furniture and books organized in ways I never experienced in reality. Another home was organized in two parts, a main building and then a treehouse with a lovely sleeping room in the branches, with enough space for an entire library, yet no kitchen. I had a clear memory of having to get down the tree and go to the main building to cook breakfast, although I did not live in the main building otherwise. On the path, I also entered a building which at first I thought was also an ex-home, yet at the top of a flight of stairs I recognized from the corner of a rail that the memory I had of the place was from a one-time sleepover at my ex-dad's new wife's late father's home fifteen years ago. At that point I got fed up with the dream and I wished to find my real home on the path, and I started to think very hard of my current address to get there. I thought I recognized the street at the corner of my imaginary path, but when I got to the right house number I eventually woke up.
What is wrong with me?
I woke up from strange dreams every days for a week. Every other day is a nightmare. I am terrified of going to sleep today.
The scene takes place during daytime, at the frame of a door giving to a veranda in a wooden house. This must be a public place for there were a number of strangers around us. Two friends and I. Talking about past and recent achievements, one of them highlights that I seem to push my boundaries and spend an inordinate amount of energy and time accomplishing tasks and helping my friends and colleagues.
The question comes: how can I sustain this rhythm? What motivates me? In the midst of the conversation my answer comes naturally: well, I might as well die tomorrow, so I live as if I'm running out of time every day! Then I ignore the semi-confused look; I recognize the blissfully ignorant gaze of someone who has not yet consider their own mortality.
As the conversation resumes on other topics, yet a silence befalls my mind. I tune out of the ambient noise and feel a darkness around me. Was that the honest answer? I know the truth: I will die soon, and I keep myself busy to avoid thinking about it.
The thing about dreams is that there the subconscious self does not let itself be overridden easily. As the painful understanding cristallises, my conscious self is forced to acknowledge it, and for perhaps a couple of seconds only is forced to consider the life I'm leaving behind, missed opportunities, and the relationships with friends and family that will die with me.
I fall on my knees, bursting in tears. My friends do not understand; yet one sits to my side, catches me in his arms and tries to soothe me.
I woke up then, just starting to feel his warmth in my back.
Dear you, self-appointed stranger from outer space,
it took me Dream On, after Turning Tables, Light Up the World and Don't Stop Believin' before I got started tonight. Spotify is good at hinting inspiring tunes. More truly, both my psychologist and my recent muse have advised I elaborate on a number of topics, as an exercise for me in reaching out. And as always around here, privacy and discretion mandate that the words stay shaded, which you might also appreciate for plausible deniability.
The first topic is a direct exercise follow-up to my session today. I was explaining how I had issues projecting myself in a new group-oriented activity, such as theater which I would love to try out, by fear of rejection. To summarize the intermediary steps, it happens that I have issues interacting with new people, where I often quickly get a clear feeling that my ways and background are tremendously foreign and incomprehensible by my new peers; and conversely, although possibly less often, that their ways feel equally foreign to me. This wakes up unpleasant feelings and memories, not the least those of an age, fifteen to twenty years ago, where foreignness implied immediate exclusion from the group. As a result I often opt for voluntary isolation, of which at least I can claim control over.
Forced isolation is the commonly accepted price for a breach of the social contract. However, my opinion has always been that the social contract seems unpleasingly restrictive. How cruel is it not that we must follow silly rituals, for example silly moral values, the mandatory awareness of the latest fashions, or perhaps more disturbingly the signs of machismo and violence expected from masculinity, in order to avoid being excluded from the social norm, and its ultimate reward, social acceptance?
For so far I can remember I have always rejected this constraint with pride, and I struggled to face the consequences. On its own, this attitude is productive: it places you "outside of the box" and opens a realm of opportunities to become creative, and a source for inspiration to yourself and others. There are a few aggravating factors however that make the burden more difficult to bear.
The one I'll share today is the circumstance where this self-determined choice combines with an unavoidable, "part of who you are" psycho-physiological difference. Maybe you are slightly higher on the intelligence scale than your peers; maybe you rank slightly "higher on the autism scale"; maybe you feel you are an introvert in a world that values extroverts. Maybe also your personal history has given you an extra, out-of-the-ordinary cultural, skill and knowledge baggage which is now part of your identity. You might be also considering non-standard gender identities or relational preferences–although in my case this last point was irrelevant because I had no other image of myself than "boy-next-door-still-virgin-heterosexual-male" until much later (but that's a story for another time). The real issue here is that you don't get to choose these parts of who you are, and the cruel world is quick to pick on those "real", "natural" differences. On any of those grounds, even without considering the occasional physical violence, those I had to grow up with had sufficient motives to either pick on me at one end of the scale or ensure that I receive minimal social attention of the "good kind", the loving kind really, on the other end of the scale. You can probably imagine a situation where all are combined.
(Your Killer Toy now playing)
That "life sucks" and "most people are either stupid or cruel," when not both, is really the lesson you don't want to have first in life. I despise it, and I still cringe at the number of years it cost me to fix my resulting perceptions of fellow humans.
One of my deepest regrets was to not reach out earlier and let my friends help me in this process; it could have been sped up much earlier had I trusted them!
(As it turns out, there is a sweet and sour realization that comes much, much later, when you eventually realize that most bullies end up having terrible, terrible feelings about what they inflicted on others, and that they eventually turn out "ok" out of shame or simply maturity. I don't like it too much, but it does mean that a population of humans at a later age is factually more accepting of diversity than at a young age. Disclaimer: within a given generation. This does not apply across generations. For example my parents are more accepting than themselves or their peers when they were younger, not necessarily more than the current youngsters.)
Hopefully, at some point in life the page turns and the bad stuff is no more than an unpleasant memory. However, the differences stay, and their impact on social contact need to be dealt with. The word "omgaan" carries the meaning more than I can find in words from other languages. In most cases, I just learned by trial and error: does that behavior pay off? Keep it. Does that one cause discomfort or disapproval? Drop it, or keep it only for closer friends. Vanilla process.
Still, I do have more ambition than that. I am impressed by people with charisma and I want some of my own. This requires me to really "connect" and put myself in the shoes of others to properly entice them into my ways. But how satisfying is it to project myself into those who, most of the time, are either slightly less smart, or slightly more uncomfortably extroverted, or have synapses arranged in a different way, or are less educated, or are less tolerant of cultural diversity? That's where the little extra effort happens: I accept the mandatory distance, bridge it and accept that I am the one who has to make the extra step in their direction and not the other way around. Sometimes it is boring, sometimes it seems non-rewarding (who wants to "waste time with idiots"?), and it is certainly always taxing my energy levels. Draining actually. Yet… It works, much better than trial-and-error on interactions. It allows intimacy, closeness, and an emotional bound that makes it totally worth the effort.
As I see you, you probably already know all this. Yet I have sensed in your company a shadow of my own former indecisive self, searching outwards for confidence and missing the opportunity to find it "here and now," combined with a tremendously greater ability to achieve and accomplish, deliciously decorated with an awesome eclectic relationship to music and visual art, and complemented by various physical abilities and attributes with far greater potential than I will ever hope for my own. I look at you and I see "man, this one is going to get further in life than I will ever hope." And then I also see an extra hint of unhealthy destructive self-depreciation, and a form of fragile and vulnerable bluntness, which I, perhaps mistakenly, identify as fresh scars or recently closed wounds. Then I think "man, that seems cumbersome." And then maybe, I figure, you are still hesitant to acknowledge that you are not alone, and that there are others who will understand you and help you navigate this strange world.
Well, obviously, you're not alone. And you'd be surprised how good it feels to share. And you can expect comfort and support. It's all legit and fair. I'd have given you a hug already, but unfortunately, y'know, there is this set of silly social stigmas and assumptions that makes it weird when two guys hug for no apparent reason, and I figured maybe you have enough "weird" already around you. So it's your call.
As a closing word. I remember a story from last year. I'd like to dedicate it to you today.
As the big "other" writing thing is nearly complete, time has come to resume over here.
Today's question was what occupies my mind. The question came at the corner of a conversation where I had to hear first how "not transparent" I appear to be in my social interactions. The provider of this comment explained that lack of transparency may be a liability to some people, although we both eventually agreed that others, such as ourselves, value the corresponding lack of predictability as a clear feature of welcome originality.
I had no immediate answer. The subsequent required self introspection, to reflect on my own state of mind and come to an answer that would fit into words, probably has hurt our communal time together in the hot waters of the De Miranda pool through the ensuing silence. Besides, I failed to satisfy the inquiry. I ended up trying to compensate my failure by a feeble invitation for dinner, but it did not work out. I took this circumstantial rejection as a homework challenge to get my act together.
There are factually two topics on my mind lately, intertwined like the beams of a golden braid.
One is the interaction between my expectations and abilities regarding my interaction with a psychologist, specifically how I should manage and exploit our next upcoming session. While these interactions in general seem useful to characterize and formulate a number of questions using the immediacy and unavoidability of words, as opposed to the nebulous play of imagery that usually hold them at the back of my mind, I am still unsatisfied at my general lack of connection with my practitioner. In her pattern of speech and behavior she suggests that I am pushing her out of her usual boundaries and frames of reference. In a different setting, I would find this realization charming and a possible ground for a friendship; unfortunately in this specific setting I find it unsettling: if she does not really know what she is doing, I would rather play with my feelings and my uncertainties without interference from someone else's. And then, despite these vague feeling of inadequacy, I cannot summon any confidence that I would find any better support elsewhere, as the person seems otherwise both friendly and competent. To summarize, out of sheer necessity I am taking charge of my interaction with the therapist, and it keeps my mind busy. In particular, we agreed last time somewhat vaguely that I would formulate a number of topics or activities where I feel that my uncertainties play as an obstacle to my further development. When we had that discussion I was considering theater and music as two such activities; there my subjective lack of self-appreciation in these domains, combined with my objective lack of financial means to support the kind of interaction I would seek (private courses), are clear obstacles. I will probably bring them up, and yet I have no idea about what will come out of that discussion.
Maybe more worryingly, I am not really interested to seek the outcome of that specific discussion, since I already figure I have reached a point where I could venture on my own into either music or theater without help. Our previous sessions and some self-study have already helped me overcome those barriers already.
The tricky topic where my uncertainties prevail, and which I am not too sure I want to talk about with my psychologist, is truly an emotional and logistical minefield. This is, by the way, the second bead of the golden braid. Reason and privacy dictate that my words here stay shaded and void of specificity.
The only specific and determining statement will be that my recent exercises in introspection have helped me acknowledge and consciously observe the feelings I experience towards outside of myself, where I would previously either ignore or suppress them. My recent foul burst of nightmares are merely the (relatively small) negative side of this new reality; truth is that my daily existence is far more exciting since I started to become a willing subject of my social interactions, and acknowledge that the experience of fellow humans is similar. Exciting, but also disorienting. The minefield is a metaphor, although the results of stepping on the metaphorical mine would likely be as much invalidating. Moreover, the mines come in multiple layers.
Today, I danced around the turmoil of my maturing appreciation for someone whom I shifted from their self-appointed position as suitor to mate and relative. Should I share my recent emotional developments and risk losing the safe havens we have constructed together over these many years?
Today, I danced around my frustration at my inability to share a sudden, unexpected and yet peaceful and determined fondness towards an acquaintance about whom, despite the dramatically small number of wholehearted conversations over the course of a few years (countable on the fingers of two hands), I now entertain the hope we will keep geographically close and able to regularly renew our relatively superficial (by my standards) encounters. Again, should I share? Would they even understand the nuances of the situation?
Today, I danced around the turmoil caused by a flurry of recent discoveries around a self-appointed "entity from outer space"; on the one hand, I see there a subtle shadow of my former indecisive self, searching outwards for confidence and missing the opportunity to find it here and now, combined with a tremendously greater ability to achieve and accomplish, dotted with an extra hint of destructive self-depreciation, and complemented by various physical abilities and attributes with far greater potential than I will ever hope for my own. Curiosity and respect would tend to make me pass on that one; on the other hand, I also see open wounds, or maybe fresh scars, similar to those I struggled to heal alone for years, by lack of suitable external support. Recognizing these has re-activated a fierce protective instinct that I had somehow forgotten; now how can I can communicate my desire to comfort and support without giving wrong signals about my intentions and hurting the wounds even further?
Meanwhile, opportunities to find solace and entertainment from other sources have started to cross my path. I dance around these, out of respect for their expectations: how can I trust myself to return any favors I would receive, when my mind is so busy dealing with a maze of emotional discoveries? How should I carry the point that my multi-layered and diversified interests do not signify lack of focus, but rather my modest attempt at distributing my strength and confidence? Should I get the point across at all, or should I keep it internalized?
These are but a few example internal symptoms of an onion kernel of uncertainties.
A hundred and sixty pages in eight weeks. Twenty pages per week. Four pages per day. This constitutes the challenge I have set for myself, to report my work activities of the past three years. The global view must be collected entirely in writing before October, because past that time frame I will start to forget my past accomplishments through new beginnings.
Reading and writing have been my main activities for the past few months, as I realized recently – and in retrospect, they were so the past few years too. I find it selfishly interesting to notice how I slowly shifted my thought focus in the last two years from considerations about myself and my own existence to considerations about my developments at work and my social interactions. This blog is a victim of that change: the frequency of my posts decreases not because I write less; actually it decreases because I write more, elsewhere. Because of this, I will probably not write for myself too much until the end of this year. 2011 will thus be a period of hibernation over here.
Back to reading and writing. Writing, lately, is nearly always about work, in many forms. Helping others to work; helping myself to think; helping my peers to understand what my colleagues and I do for a living. In the coming two months, it will also be about dumping accumulated knowledge and understandings so that my memory becomes free again for fresh stuff. Reading, on the other hand, is more diverse. Next to the mandatory work-related reading I have built a healthy mix of responsible reading (news reports, facts of the world, and comments about them) and entertainment reading. Entertainment is further split between random factoids about stuff and people (mostly from Wikipedia and MeFi), erotica and amateur novels in digital form.
There is something to be said about the two latter forms, which I source mostly from Nifty.org. (I should probably tell those things to a therapist, but I decided therapy would wait until I am done with my summer writing.) The main issue that I try to solve through reading is isolation. Not the social isolation that comes as a side-effect of the kind of work I have currently, which I mostly solved by ensuring regular meet-ups with friends. The isolation is one of culture, the lack of regular instances of that "yeah, me too" feeling in interactions that enables the human individual to feel part of a group. My favorite texts are lengthy, multi-episode running novels about young adults going through college life, mostly American. While I find the peculiarities of American culture thoroughly uninteresting (especially the fascination for sports, the superficiality of relationships, the focus on cars and financial independence at all costs), college life rings close to my own: students everywhere, a university setting, daily study, all mixed with a sense of unrooting from one's origins – most college students in those stories move far away from home, as a plot device that prevents parents from interfering with story lines. The stuff that makes my day is the turmoil of these fictional youngsters, of course - who they meet, how they meet, what they do, what they say, what they think and what they understand from what they do together. Beyond allowing me to live vicariously my emotional development through the life of these characters, reading of this sort is also a source of examples, models to follow and not follow, inspiration as to what to say and do in potential social circumstances.
A thought on the aside. As my reading experience grows, so does my ability to recognize what constitutes good and bad writing, especially with regards to the realism of the depicted personalities. Lately, I have become especially sensitive to the various ways this depicted American youth culture, one of exuberance and shortsightedness, fundamentally mismatches the one I observe at home, which is one of measuredness and care for consequences. This proves problematic to apply everyday what is described in those stories as a "winning recipe": daring, trying, and accept undesired outcomes as innocuous inputs for character building. Over here, actions have consequences and require more forward thinking, since any experience gained via unsuccessful approaches may become intertwined with complex social consequences. I would give much for reading stuff that targets more my geographical and cultural surroundings.
Any how, this reading proves a pleasant complement to my everyday life experiences. What I do not get from reading though, is the ability to share my own experiences with others. Not the experience about "stuff", that is objective knowledge and reason about reality – those things I do share already. What I miss is the sharing about the other "stuff", the one from the heart and blood; every interaction I have with my current social surroundings is a repeated confirmation of their ignorance and foreignness to the side of the emotional world where I happen to stand. I can't blame them, after all the luxury of living the life of a social minority has its own advantages regarding experience and strength of character so I can't feel sorry to be there. However the isolation still seriously sucks big time.
Part 1
http://ask.metafilter.com/116162/How-to-avoid-politely-replying-to-Where-are-you-from
http://ask.metafilter.com/135105/Excuse-me-are-you-from-around-here
http://www.winningaway.com/top-6-faq-frequently-annoying-questions-expats-get-asked/
http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2011/03/14/where-are-you-from-part-3/
"""
Because the crux of “where are you from?” is that the person being asked is assumed to be from elsewhere. We are never allowed to belong here, and it’s only our history elsewhere, which may or may not exist, that matters. We’re always other.
"""
http://www.thefword.org.uk/blog/2011/03/where_are_you_f
http://dcentric.wamu.org/2011/04/where-are-you-from-thoughts-from-a-second-generation-american/
http://www.etiquettehell.com/?p=1418
"""
“Where are you from?”, is the sloppy, awkwardly abrupt way many people communicate an interest in another person or as a way to start a small conversation.
"""
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/travelbuzz/704850-i-hate-when-people-ask-me-where-you-3.html
http://www.racialicious.com/2010/03/19/the-what-are-you-game-rules-and-regulations/
Part 2
http://www.denizenmag.com/2011/05/chosen/
"""
Had I not known, for so long, the other kind of home — not where you’re from but where you are taken — I never would have known the joy that arises when you choose.
"""
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_culture_kid
http://www.denizenmag.com/2008/11/the-white-lies-tcks-tell/
http://www.denizenmag.com/2011/03/a-tcks-quarter-life-crisis/
A recent video of a victim turning against his bully has made the news and is being discussed on MeFi. A specific comment is worth reading twice:
You know, something just struck me.
> People relentlessly bullied as children never forget that bullying. They remember faces, names, places, and the precise actions. And that makes them angry for a good long while, possibly forever. It makes the angry and it makes them hate bullies of all kinds. It might even fuck them up psychologically. Actually, of course it does. They were kids and they were bullied while their brains were growing and while they were assimilating experience on what their life was going to be like. So it becomes part of them - they were one of the bullied kids who got pushed around, humiliated, psychologically and violently and sexually assaulted for, and this is the real kicker, absolutely no reason whatsoever. That's now part of the structure of their brains. Speaking only for myself here, but I don't forgive them, I have no compassion for them, and I'm not intellectualising it away.
Which leads me to only once conclusion: people who excuse bullies and say it's not their fault because daddy was a drinker and mummy was a stripper and really they just need to be understood and talked to, they are intellectualising and therefore tacitly excusing their own experiences as bullies and this means that they were bullies themselves. Why do they say that the bullied and picked-on should go and tell a person in authority and then we can all sit around and talk it out and maybe we can do some counselling and let's just all get along and be friends why don't we? The reason violence isn't the "answer" to them is because all that time they were bullies - and now they're sympathising with the bullies themselves because they remember what it was like to be one - they were afraid of getting their fucking jaws broken, their chests kicked in, their fingers crushed, their necks snapped, their balls smashed. Because nobody deserves that, right? What's a few fat jokes, a few small tits jokes, a few small dick jokes, a few pimple jokes, a few jabs in the arm, maybe tripping them over now and then, maybe giving them a wedgie, maybe a few pushes and shoves, maybe a few punches to the gut or knuckles across the cheek? Come on, it's just kids, right?
> Well when those fat jokes and small tits jokes and small dick jokes (or, in my case, small dick [I didn't do it on purpose, after all] and big fat boytits, to the extent that I either didn't shower for weeks on end at boarding school, and when I did, did it with shirt and underwear on, because it was hilarious fun for the other kids to pull back the shower curtain or run after my towel) and pimple jokes and jabs in the arm and tripping overs and wedgie givings and pushings and shovings and punches to the gut go on day after day, week after week, year after year, that is actually the purest definition of the purest kind of vindictive, evil torture: inflicting damage on an innocent person.
I guess my point is, if you were bullied, you remember, and when you see a film like this, where a bully gets what he has had coming to him for a very long time, your heart jumps with joy.
> If you were a bully, you worry about a film like this, and you hem and you haw, and you say well the bullied kid should have done this, or done that, but not fought back. Because you're still afraid, after all this time, of getting your fucking face smashed into the ground for somebody who has had enough of your bullshit.
I guess it taught me a few useful lessons, though, what I went through in school. Firstly, I've learned to love animals more than I love people, it's taught me to have zero interest in people's opinions of me, and it's resolved me to the fact that, if I am picked on ever again in my life, I might end up in hospital or in jail or both, but I'm not going down until the other guy loses a fucking eyeball. -- tumid dahlia
The rest of the MeFi thread is worth reading, too.
In his essay Mind the Gap, Paul Graham (a well known LISP supporter and brilliant programmer) defends that wealth is not something you steal away, that it is something you can create.
As an example he cites the wealth creation performed by Apple, driven by Steve Jobs, where the accrued value of the individual manufactured products is duly and rightly channelled through the company to the main inventors.
(Go read it, it is well written)
What bothered me however, is the missing link in his reasoning about the process of wealth creation. What is the true expense of creating wealth?
Crafting an idea, it can be argued, amounts to pure creation. Nothing is taken away and something new is creating.
Implementing the idea, however, definitely transforms certain things into other things that embody the idea. The transformation here can be either an assembly or an actual transformation: the individual parts can be either re-decomposed in the end or they are lost to create the new form. In either way, implementation takes away the material ingredients of the creation from their provider.
Wealth creation supposedly still occurs because the value of the created object should exceed the sum of the ingredient values. The question remains however:
Is the created wealth enough to compensate both the inventor/creator and the provider of the individual ingredients?
And as a secundary, but no less important concern:
If it is indeed enough, are the ingredient providers getting their share?
It is likely that the creators/inventors at Apple are getting at least a fair share of the wealth they have been creating. However, one can observe at the same time that the providers of the raw materials stay in relative poverty.
Hence the real question, what is the true cost of creating wealth? It seems obvious that wealth creation bears a responsibility (that of fair redistribution) which is rarely properly assumed. I wonder what Paul Graham would have to say about this.
Sweetness
Smoothness
Rigid meets the tongue
Pleasure
Explosion, taste
It melts — Goduria!
Bitter and sweet
Warm to swallow
--oh tasty fluids
Wanting more.
Chocolate, orange flavoured
Bamboe
voor een muur
open raam
werkzaamheden
doorzicht, door het gebouw heen
kijken naar de plein
een café
verdieping
uitzicht op bamboe
uitzicht op de plein
--in de verte
zittend in een café
met uitzicht tot honderd meter
--door een muur
--door de vernieuwing
-- van oud naar nieuw
-- van leeg tot ondoorzichtig
geen dak
A bit annoyed at myself for missing the January update. Somehow at the end of last year I set myself as a goal to post at least monthly, and I didn't start 2011 very well. I'll try to make up for it, promise.
Also I celebrated this month the end of my fifth year in the low countries, a personal milestone on a path to success. Yay to myself \o/
The topic of the day is a small frustration at communication channels.
As both my academic interests and my work-related social network are starting to grow somehow, needs start to show to "market" a public online persona in some specific ways expected in the field; in particular a "profile page" with achievements, interests, worldly writings, etc. is in order.
This implies a communication "hub" of some sort. An avenue where I can both write semi-professionally, receive comments, and link with other news feeds. In technical terms, this in turn implies a personal publishing platform with "serious" features like decent support for syndication and comments.
Self-hosted, of course.
And no PHP nor MySQL, Thank You Very Much. Wordpress is a no-no. Simple is beautiful.
And with this I have no idea where to look at. Any suggestions?
Araud took the opportunity of the visit of the U.S. members of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly to offer, in his typically plain-spoken fashion, a thumb-nail history of U.S.-French relations since World War II, including our different approaches to NATO. Recalling an Cold War bromide, Araud said that NATO"s original purpose had been "to keep the Germans down, the Russians out, and the Americans in." Its current purpose is -- for the newer central European and Baltic members, given their fear of Russia, "rational or not" -- to keep the Americans in. For other members, NATO provides a way to meet their defense -- without having to pay for it. Araud decried the abysmally low defense spending by the European allies. Among the Europeans, only the French and the British come close to carrying their weight, an exception which can be explained by their history as global powers, and their residual desire to exert influence. —— cable 07PARIS743
Sharing is what makes people like each other. Exchanging gifts is the first form that comes to a child's mind; grown ups know that real sharing happens when you do something you like and the person next to you happens to like it as well.
The best sex works this way, for instance.
But maybe here I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself.
Jocks joking about the results of the latest game, whichever team they are supporting, are enjoying each other because they happen to both like football. They are sharing what they like and that's what makes them special to each other in that particular occurrence.
Family members who enjoy being part of being a family usually do because they enjoy caring. When doing what they like, i.e. actually caring, they enjoy being part of each other's family. The corollary is why people who don't care cause dysfunctional families: they just don't belong.
There's just something so special about bringing up a random conversation topic and see the eyes of the other person/people sparkling up before they exclaim "hey that's cool, I like this too!"
It feels better than the mere euphoria of serotonin, it's like a shot of adrenalin with the sweetness of anticipation before a friendship to come. In fact, media and entertainment are simply popular, despite all the bullshit they carry, because they are mass manufactures for common habits and "likes", the basic currency for sharing — the basic building block for what makes human cluster with each other and want to stick together.
Well, one of them anyway. Maybe there's other stuff at hand, like economies of scale about shelter/health/food benefits? Anyhow. When you don't connect to people in the way I just explained, you very well feel how much you're missing out and how much it hurts.
Subnormality one of my favorite web comics. This strip in particular corroborates my own assumption that the space that separates individuals is begging to be filled up.
“Try and let yourself be surprised” is a constructive motto, that can be applied to every moment not otherwise busy with basic survival. But that's also disruptive. It makes people change. It exposes weaknesses and uncovers challenges; the process of addressing either is the stuff that evolution is made of.
Change is painful. To go through change one sheds old skin and grows new layers. Useful change is significant. Significant means leaving behind habits, but also large chunks of one's identity. New layers mean new habits, that need to be exercised. Meaning effort. Lots of it. New identity layers too. To be recognized, to be acknowledged. Lots of effort too.
A dynamic self has a tremendous cost. At each step, either forward or backward, one needs to keep the barriers of individuality low and reach out for others. To receive dynamic acknowledgement, to be recognized, but foremost to repeat the pleasure of sharing with new friends because one's interests evolve and existing friends might have evolved differently.
Here lies a fundamental conflict between the emotional comfort of conservative self-preservation, and the distressing necessity of adaptability through healthy self-renewal. The recognition and acknowledgement of this conflict seems an important step, but I don't feel it brings me anywhere near a resolution — yet.
Movies influence me.
This is unusually difficult to put into words. To start with, in my world there are no “good” or “bad” movies. I do not care, unless explicitly briefed beforehand, about the “artistic value” of images or the efforts put into a piece by directors and actors alike. For the most part, I do not care about realism or “texture”. Plain characters and simple stories suit me well. Popular or “artsy,” from Hollywood to Bollywood, black and white to animated 3D, I do not evaluate other than giving a chance to the pictures to pass before my eyes — or, should I say, my heart.
Big cars? Not interested. Big boobs? Nothing. Big money? Meh. Big explosions? Boring. Electronics? Boring! Science fiction? Bo-ring! (I get my SF from books, thanks) Big trial? Maybe, if there's some irrational issue being considered. Action? Only to support something that counts for the characters. Big love? Okay, although not too much if too much predictable. Fantasy / fantastic environments? As long as it gets my right brain moving right away: large, different, creative. Sex scenes? Only if properly introduced, with decent emotional context, and not if a female is involved.
What gets me going, is the stuff “in between” what most movies try to show — the head stuff only in a handful of “alternate” movies. The stuff “in between” are the parts that are not put into words. How the music matches a particular scene. How the lighting coincides with a specific emotional state I'm in. What's a character's reaction to a situation that would otherwise touch me. What parallels my imagination builds between what is shown and what could have been but is not. And so on.
A movie, whichever it is, will not go through my left brain at all as soon as it touches my right brain. My suspension of disbelief is total and both the physical world, logic and reason disappear to let the work reach a rougher and rawer part of myself. I am rarely left unscathed. The ravaging inner turmoil I go through with every single watching experience influences who I am to an extent I would never fully admit even to my best friend. There is no scale, no judgement, no comparison going on; only a passive contemplation of the raw feelings I experience, and and a fleeting attempt to identify whichever interesting aspects of those feelings I will want to memorize and cherish afterwards. A successful movie experience will rip me apart, let me experience briefly the intense realization of how human I am, and leave my inner self agape for a few hours. Even with less interesting / intense viewings, there will be always a few minutes of scarring needed during which I am particularly vulnerable to matters of art and heart.
During this small period after moving going, the mere utterance "so, how did you like it?" seems both incredibly stupid and incredibly offensive. Stupid because the phrasing invites a small answer, whereas thousands of world would not even begin to suffice for a decent answer. Offensive, because the suggestion of an answer made of words totally disregards the purely nonverbal nature of my potential appreciation. There is just no valid answer to that sort of question at that sort of time, so I hide both the most awesome and the most despicable times of my life behind a blanket "I'm not sure yet" or "I'll have to think about it."
The most painful part of this is the frequent intense need to hug someone after a movie experience. I simply don't know how to ask for a hug in a crowded exit hallway in a cinema. And for the most exciting films I see at home, there is simply no one to hug — I watch my home movies alone, since the movies I find most interesting don't seem too interesting to most of my friends.
Don't get me even started on philosophy and the impact of language on identity and self-perception.
Video games. Food tastes. The occasional mix on Digitally Imported. I like to share those sometimes. It's good enough to feel socially connected I guess.
Experimenting with pie charts in OOo: time spent on thoughts on a random day...
