plotting for kisses

San Francisco

Sat, 21 Apr 2012 20:26:00 -0400

“It’s only warm here two weeks out of the year,” she claims, her orange sundress fluttering softly against a backdrop of water and daisies.

“What was it Mark Twain said?” I shift in my seat, uncomfortably aware of a bead of sweat threatening to form on my brow. “Ah, yeah, the coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.”

Behind her, heavy light filters through a sloped array of gentle trees, falling upon patches of flowers strewn about, quivering, seeming like they might at once suddenly sprout into stained glass, color refracting brilliantly, brilliantly, everywhere. Slightly further beyond, one can catch the ruffle of lazy sails set at bay as, between, cars whistle by.

I breathe in, tasting the live scent of spring, and arch my back slightly and search her eyes, two reflective obsidian orbs in focus, slowly, suddenly, wide and intelligent and sharp.

“Do you want to stay here forever?” I ask — a half-second too early, her eyes tightening almost imperceptibly slightly. A half second matters urgently, I think to myself. It is, perhaps, the difference between a life spent floating through perpetually unfamiliar houses and one spent in a well-lit condo, artwork calming mood scattered gracefully, everywhere.

I wish I could convey this moment to her. This understanding of unrepentant urgency and permanence — actors taking our parts, characters in a painting. But I don’t have the words, the poetic stripping and beauty painfully out of focus.

Unobserved, she answers eagerly and earnestly, “No, I think I’d like to move to Los Angeles.”

I’m aware of the vast chasm of experience separating us. I berate myself for being so judgmental, but I know — suddenly, clearly: we might as well speak different languages; we only share a glimmer in our shared unconsciousness, an uncomfortable heat and slight sense of befuddlement. Touch and gaze are what keeps most of us humans together.

I, slightly embarrassed, wipe away a streak of sweat and tiltingly respond, “I don’t envy you in the slightest,” and we share a laugh.

Later, the worst of the midday heat has subsided and I am staring into space, feeling vast and self-conscious. Sensitive to a paralyzing hollowness, I feel every mote of sun and wind, a line from a Dunn poem floats through, temporary, fleeting, painful — somewhere a philosopher is erasing \ “time’s empty passing” because he’s seen \ a woman in a ravishing dress. \ In a different hour he’ll put it back.

Ritual

Sat, 24 Sep 2011 20:40:00 -0400

We get into habits.

Writing was difficult — to write was a mood I couldn’t see myself in. Force myself into.

Now it is an itch. I face others and wonder ‘they seem so alien.’ And uncomfortable. I want nothing more than to be ghostly; to move in the realm of thought, to wield those hieroglyphics that control a world imagined.

I wonder.
I wonder if these are the things we carry on for a lifetime, returning to again and again, when everything else we seek escapes us. I wonder if these habits somehow become imbued into our psyche — become an inseparable statement of who we are and how we think. What calms us, stabilizes us and lets us be coherent rather than a collection of wonton and ragtag impulses.

Orpheus, in daring to descend, returns remembering only the laurels he is missing.

Light Touch

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 23:46:00 -0400

Waking from an afternoon reverie, it surprises me that we’re not all insane and I take a few minutes to stare out my apartment windows and watch the traffic lights slowly flicker from red to green. In the fading light, everything seems strangely romantic and naive but I am left with a lingering sense of unease.

It suddenly seems inappropriate that we live our lives like this; each day blending into the next, years stretching onwards, highway into desert horizon. I don’t know what brings on this dizziness but I instinctively close my eyes — and am awash with the muggy air preparing to seep into the Pittsburgh night.

Some time later, I am brought back by the gradual sounds of my neighbors preparing dinner. A wok sizzles to the background hum of an indistinct foreign conversation. My roommate has turned the central air on. Feeling older, I count the shadows on my wall before sitting up and bracing myself for everything that lies ahead.

Meeting Others

Sat, 10 Sep 2011 01:41:00 -0400

Our souls are molded not so much by the imprints of biology or schooling or status — at least not primarily — but rather by the trials and tribulations and sorrows of loneliness. The only story that truly matters in a person’s history is the one about their loneliness. Through it springs every other major tale: the pleasures and disappointments in work and love, family and friends, spirituality and art. No other story skirts so close to pure psychic DNA — no other story means as much.

And yet, sadly, these are the stories that are least told, both to ourselves and to our closest loved ones. Many a man has lain in a fallow grave without heaving any true understanding of his own condition to rest at another’s feet. The tragedy is two-fold: that we don’t have the skill or compassion to excavate and that the target of our affections has entrenched denial and forgetfulness at the heart of their self-defense.

The declaration of loneliness is an act periled with social shame. So much so that most of us can barely bear to think of ourselves as lonely. Instead, we distract ourselves with ephemeral and peddled cures. Some of us distract ourselves with work and curiosity, or similar vices. Others with church and community: the local PTA or synagogue. Most of us find friends and lovers and take solace in bickering and other familiar dramas.

Occasionally, the terror slips through our crude defenses. Most of us can scrape by for years – some lucky ones for decades – before such an event occurs. But when it does, we are encountered by the poverty of our worldly trophies and learned routines. Usually this brief malaise ceases as soon as we manage to find and throw ourselves into anything or anyone new.

For others, an unmistakable pattern emerges and begins to infuse itself deep into one’s entire psyche. For what modes of transportation are fleet enough to outpace this frantic cat-and-mouse game? Like the inexorable dripping that eventually forms labyrinthic caves and caverns, this incessant call-and-answer becomes a steady tempo through which to meter out life.

To trace the path of loneliness is to gaze at the secret moments in life – all the pain and disappointment tempered with imperfect and unsatisfactory reactions. And yet, I think that is the kindest and most intimate act one can perform for another. We can never, by definition, really be with someone in their loneliness. But we can take solace in the a posteriori telling and expression of such.

That said, it is also the most difficult act one can undertake. No one freely admits weakness and even when prodded, the bravest of us have the hardest time talking about the moments they’ve lost courage. Moreover, we know that others are attracted by displays of strength, not existential tragedy. What fool or fatalistic oaf would risk answering immediately truthfully and tip the balance of respect to an exit stage left?

Thus, when deliberately gazing at someone else, we can only guess at the preceding rain and sorrows that have formed the caverns and fractures that lie buried forlorn and forsaken. If we are astute and trustworthy, we may begin the long intermittent process of digging and sifting and studying.

There is a certain spell of calculation to the task; a certain open and inquisitive nature that serves to impart context and temperament. But as explorers blundering down one keyhole or another, attempting to construct a cartography of our lover’s histories and accidents, we risk carelessly displacing undisturbed and fragile grounds. Worse yet – much like the tourist who attempts to see all of Paris in a weekend – in our rush to understand everything at once, we inevitably end up with a one-dimensional caricature. A map, perhaps, but one that charts only a race from start to end.

You see, the most important qualities in a person, and the ones we fall in love with, are the small ones. The way they breathe when lying in slumber, perhaps, or how they furrow their eyebrows ever-so-slightly while chewing on a difficult composition – mayhap even the way they’ve learned to bend down in speaking with children or lightly brush the shoulders of conversation partners.

Over time, and with study, we learn to interpret these signs. For example, the way a person kisses is indicative of how they’d prefer to give and receive. And the way they sit betrays awareness of space and sensitivity to strangers. Listen to the strength of their heartbeat after dancing, perhaps, and compare it to the tempo avant and après lovemaking.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that we can know three layers of a person. The first, and most shallow, is the bibliographic layer of facts and timelines, family and education. The second is the realm of movement and emotion – how they perceive and orient themselves to the world, their natural rhythm in life – how much room they have for people and what they’d like those people to do to them. The last and least evident layer is the one of recurrent boredom and barely audible fears.

The last layer is tricky to describe. There are innumerably more novels about the first than the second; and still innumerably more about the second than the third. As they say in journalism, the average journalist reports the facts; the capable their meaning; and the truly skilled, what was left unsaid.

If you put my feet to the fire, I suppose the way I’d put it is thus: imagine a friend or loved one. Now, remove them from their lives: what would they think about and how would they act with no external stimulus? That is to say, if they had no work, no one around, nothing else to do, or future to attend to. In short, a state of forced boredom. How do they play with themselves? What then become their preoccupations? Naturally, one drifts towards the past – which portions and why?

These are, by their nature, private and guarded moments – not to mention, in practice, exceedingly rare and fleeting – the tempo of such as critical as the content. The best we can do as observers is to seek out proxies. We look for echoes of loneliness in how they are now. In surveying the formations of a subterranean labyrinth, there are a million hypothetical past reactions, but only one true sequence of events.

Getting at the “true sequence of events” is part skill and part art. Part skill because the true history has long been forgotten and our lossy reconstruction draws upon both volleyed questions and deft interpretation. All three layers are tightly interwoven and it takes a sensitive eye to begin to spot the incision and inflection points.

And part of it is art because we choose how to mold our disparate understandings of a person into a unified psychic whole. The “truthful” interpretation fades in importance to our intensely personal one – the one that determines the shared space through which our narratives intertwine and repurpose one another.

Just as every play can be interpreted as a story about status, every event in a life can be portrayed as a story about loneliness. And these are the tales that we can barely stand to tell in relationships and to our closest loved ones. Partly because in some senses it is saying “You aren’t enough,” but more so because we don’t even know how to begin expressing ourselves. It’s not a simple “I’m lonely.” It’s an overwhelming sense — that no matter how perfect everything is, there will still be a gaping hole, a sense of ethereal unease. And how can one explain that when we’re all suffering? It is not something to be cured, just something to be nursed.

There are years and even decades where the spotlight we win for ourselves is so bright, one has to squint to see. But light can only be sustained for so long and it is many an old and wizened man who stares back at his life and wonders where all the time went. The function loneliness serves for those of us sensitive enough to hear its cries is one of caution. It is not a reminder to be considerate to our fellow actors, but rather a warning that in the end, when the lights dim, we return home alone.

Each of our journeys is our own to keep. That might be the saddest and most tender truth about humans. And yet, we’re drawn to each other for comfort and understanding. In an almost obsessive and manic way we cling to friends and lovers and sometimes feel like our very souls ache when they at times inevitably leave.

My interpretation of such is fragile. Sometimes I forget how beautiful other people are. And sometimes I don’t want to be reminded of the fact. Yet, being drawn back again and again, I find myself always tracing the contours of their soul and catching glimpses of myself in their very peaks. Hope does indeed spring eternal.

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

Passive

Mon, 25 Jul 2011 19:39:00 -0400

All of us have two minds, a private one, which is usually strange and a public one, a social one. Most of us stream back and forth between those two minds, drifting around in our private self and then coming forward into the public self whenever we need to.

But sometimes you get a little slow making the transition, you drag out the private part of your life and people know you’re doing it. They almost always catch on. And sometimes the public mind is such a total bummer and the private self is alive with beauty and danger and secrets and things that don’t make any sense but that repeat and repeat and demand to be listened to, and you find it harder and harder to come forward.

The pathway between those two states of mind suddenly seems very steep, a hell of a lot of work and not really worth it. Then I think it becomes a matter of what side of the great divide you get caught on.

Some people get stuck on the public, approved side and they’re all right, for what it’s worth. And some people get stuck on the completely strange and private side of the divide, and that’s what we call crazy.

— excerpt from Endless Love

Curiosity

Fri, 03 Dec 2010 22:37:36 -0500

It’s arguable that living your life well is the most important mandate humans have. Why is it, then, that we place so much deliberation into becoming masters at pottery, or web development, or love making — rather than living well?

In talking about his fellow Athenians:

To point out the peculiarity of their passivity, Socrates compared living without thinking systematically to practicing an activity like pottery or shoemaking without following or even knowing of technical procedures. One would never imagine that a good pot or shoe could result from intuition alone; why then assume that the more complex task of directing one’s life could be undertaken without any sustained reflection on premises or goals.

Possible explanation for those not inherently drawn to this activity:

It is impossible to quantitatively judge who is living well. (Related: what does it mean to live well?) Therefore:

From an outsider perspective, looks like those who systematically attempt to live well may be doing no better than those not. That is, no evident value proposition.
Thinking in such an unstructured environment is mental gymnastics. That is, high cost.

In short, high cost, no return, why bother?

Possible explanation for those inherently drawn to this activity:

Summarizing frustrated anecdotes from numerous friends: thinking systematically and engaging in self-reflection do not contribute to the task of living well and may actually detract.

Supporting evidence: How often do you hear of a happy philosopher?

In short, why bother?

Status Anxiety

Tue, 23 Nov 2010 14:46:00 -0500

Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories. The first—the story of our quest for sexual love—is well known and well charted, it is socially accepted and celebrated. The second—the story of our quest for love from the world—is a more secret and shameful tale. If mentioned, it tends to be in caustic, mocking terms, as something of interest chiefly to envious or deficient souls. And yet this second love story is no less intense than the first, it is no less complicated, important or universal, and its setbacks are no less painful. There is heartbreak here too.

How may a word, generally used only in relation to what we would expect or hope for from a parent or a romantic partner, be applied to something we might want from and be offered by the world? Perhaps we can define love as a kind of respect, a sensitivity on the part of one person to another’s existence. To be shown love is to feel ourselves the object of concern: our presence is noted, our name is registered, our views are listened to, our failings are treated with indulgence and our needs are ministered to.

No more fiendish punishment could be devised, were such a thing physically possible, than that one should be turned loose in society and remain absolutely unnoticed by all the members thereof. If no one turned around when we entered, answered when we spoke, or minded what we did, but if every person we met ‘cut us dead,’ and acted as if we were non-existent things, a kind of rage and impotent despair would before long well up in us, from which the cruelest bodily torture would be a relief.

The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others’ appraisals to play a determining role in how we see ourselves.

Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgments of those we live among. If they are amused by our jokes, we grow confident in our power to amuse. If they praise us, we develop an impression of high merit. And if they avoid our gaze when we enter a room or look impatient after we have revealed our occupation, we may fall into feelings of self-doubt and worthlessness.

Bourgeois Status Anxiety

The essence of the charge made against the modern high-status ideal is that it is guilty of effecting a gigantic distortion of priorities, of elevating to the highest level of achievement a process of material accumulation that should instead be only one of many factors determining the direction of our lives under a more truthful, more broadly defined conception of ourselves.

This notion that “decency” must be attached to wealth—and “indecency” to poverty—is the essential focal point of one line of skeptical complaint against the modern status ideal. Why, the system’s critics ask, should a failure to pile up riches be taken as a marker of a flawed human being, rather than evidence of a deficit in one particular aspect of the far larger, more complicated project that is the leading of a good life? Why should wealth and poverty be read as unerring signposts for human morals?

The reasons, it turns out, are not mysterious. The very act of earning money frequently calls upon virtues of character. Working at—and keeping—almost any job requires intelligence, energy, forethought and the ability to cooperate with others. And the more lucrative the position, the greater the requisite merits. Lawyers and surgeons not only earn higher salaries than street cleaners; they also typically bring to bear on their work more sustained effort and greater skill.

In the bourgeois lexicon, any financial or critical failure in business or the arts rises to the level of a significant indictment of an individual’s character, given the ideological assumption that society is essentially fair in distributing its rewards.

Bohemian Status Anxiety

Bohemians, however, refute this punitive interpretation of outward failure by pointing out how often the world is governed by idiocy and prejudice. Human nature being what it is, they reason, those who succeed in society will rarely be the wisest or the best; rather, they will be the ones who are able to pander most effectively to the flawed values of their audiences. There may indeed, bohemians hint, be no more damning marker of a person’s ethical and imaginative limitations than a capacity for commercial success.

Whereas the bourgeoisie accorded status on the basis of commercial success and public reputation, for bohemians what mattered above all else was openness to the wider world and devotion to the primary repository of feeling that was art. The martyrs of the bohemian value system were those who sacrificed the security of a regular job and the esteem of society for the opportunity to write, paint or make music, to dedicate themselves to travel or to spend time with their friends and families.

Just as money cannot purchase honor within the bohemian value system, neither can possessions command it: seen through bohemian eyes, yachts and mansions are merely symbols of arrogance and frivolity. Bohemian status is more likely to be earned through an inspired conversational style or authorship of an intelligent, heartfelt volume of verse.

To the role-models of the lawyer, the entrepreneur and the scientist, bohemia has added those of the poet, the traveler and the essayist. It has proposed that these characters, too, whatever their personal oddities and material shortfalls, may be worthy of an elevated status of their own.

To sum up its significance, one might simply suggest that bohemia has legitimized the pursuit of an alternative way of life. It has staked out and defined a subculture in which values that have been consistently underrated or overlooked by the mainstream may finally be granted their due authority and prestige. Bohemia’s garrets, cafés, low-rent districts and cooperative businesses have provided a refuge where that part of the population which is uninterested in pursuing the bourgeoisie’s rewards—money, possessions, status—may find sustenance and fellowship.

Status Anxiety in Art

Standing witness to hidden lives, novels may also act as conceptual counterweights to dominant hierarchical realities. They can reveal that the maid now busying herself with lunch is a creature of rare sensitivity and moral greatness, while the baron who laughs raucously and owns a silver mine has a heart both withered and acrid.

In the summer of 1848, a terse item appeared in many newspapers across Normandy. A 27-year old woman named Delphine Delamare, after running up huge debts on extravagant purchases, had embarked on an affair. Under emotional and financial pressure, she had taken her own life by swallowing arsenic. As a newspaper story, the case had been seized upon as an example of the declining respect of marriage, of the commercialization of society and of the loss of religious values.

Among those who saw this item was an aspiring novelist named Gustave Flaubert. Flaubert’s audience would hear of Emma’s naive ideas about love, but they would also learn where these had come from: they would follow her back to her childhood, read over her shoulder, sit with her and her father through long summer afternoons. They would watch as she and Charles stumbled into an ill-matched marriage. They would feel Emma’s need to escape her cloistered life, ironically fueled by her lack of experience with men outside third-rate romantic literature.

Flaubert seemed to take an almost deliberate pleasure in unsettling his readers’ inclination to find comfortable answers: no sooner had he presented Emma in a positive light, than he would undercut her with a mordant remark. And then, just as readers were losing patience with her, he would tell them something about her inner life that would make them cry. By the time she crammed arsenic into her mouth, few who knew her history would be disposed to judge her.

We set down Flaubert’s novel feeling a mixture of fear and sadness—at how we are all made to live before we can even begin to know how, at how limited is our understanding of ourselves and others, at how great and catastrophic are the consequences of our actions, and how often pitiless and uncompromising the responses of upstanding members of the community when we err.

Every great work of art is marked (directly or not) by the “desire to remove human error, clear human confusion, and diminish human misery,” just as all great artists were imbued with the “aspiration to leave the world better and happier than they found it.” They might not even be aware of harboring it at all and yet embedded within their work, there was almost always some cry of protest against a status quo, and thus an impulse to correct the viewer’s insight or teach him to perceive beauty, to help him understand pain or to reanimate his sensitivities. “Art is the criticism of life.”

Status Anxiety in Religion and Philosophy

Finally, the idea of death brings an authenticity to social life: there may be no better way to clear our calendar of engagements than to speculate as to who among our acquaintances would make the trip to our hospital bed.

In good health and at the height of our powers, we are spared any need to wonder whether those who pay us compliments are doing so out of sincere affection or in some evanescent quest for advantage. We seldom have the courage or the cynicism to ask, Is it me they’re fond of, or my position in society? Illness, by felling the conditions of worldly love, renders the distinction quickly and all too cruelly evident.

Whatever other differences there may be between them, Christian and secular concepts overlap substantially on the subject of what is meaningful in life when viewed from the perspective of death. There is a strikingly similar positive emphasis on love, authentic social relations and charity.

Christianity bids us to look beyond our superficial differences in order to focus on what it considers to be a set of universal truths, on which a sense of community and kinship may be built. Whether we are cruel or impatient, dim or dull, we must recognize that we are all of us detained and bound together by shared vulnerabilities. Beneath our flaws, there are always two driving forces: fear and the desire for love. There is no such thing as a stranger, a Christian would say; there is only the impression of strangeness.

The idea that other people might be at base neither incomprehensible nor distasteful carries weighty implications for our concerns with status, given that the desire to achieve social distinction is to a great extent fueled by a horror of being—or even being thought—“ordinary.” The more corrupt the community, the stronger the lure of individual achievement.

Take the philosopher Chamfort:

Once we have resolved only to see those who will treat us morally and virtuously, reasonably and truthfully, without treating conventions, vanities and ceremonials as anything other than props of polite society; when we have taken this resolve (and we have to do so or we will end up foolish, weak or villainous), the result is that we will have to live more or less on our own.

Nature didn’t tell me: “Don’t be poor.” Nor indeed: “Be rich.” But she does beg me: “Be independent.”

When we begin to scrutinize the opinions of others, philosophers have long noted, we stand to make a discovery at once saddening and curiously liberating: we will discern that the views of the majority of the population on the majority of subjects are perforated with extraordinary confusion and error.

Painful though it may be to acknowledge the poverty of public opinion, the very act of doing so may somewhat ease our anxieties about status, mitigate our exhausting desire to ensure that others think well of us, and calm our panicked longing for signs of love. Only that which is both damning and true should be permitted to shatter our esteem.

In Bohemia, perhaps, we find a bridge between the dichotomous draws of individuality and community. Most bohemians recognize that their peace of mind may be only too easily shattered, and their commitments brazenly challenged, by conversing for a few minutes with an acquaintance who feels, even if he or she does not say so explicitly, that money and a public profile are ultimately estimable. The same disruption may result from reading a newspaper or magazine that, by reporting exclusively on the feats of bourgeois success stories, insidiously undermines the worth of any alternative ambitions.

Bohemians in consequence tend to take particular care in choosing their companions. Some attempt, like Thoreau, to escape the corrupting influence of society altogether. Others assiduously create communities of congenial spirits, refusing to indulge in the kind of socializing that the rest of us so readily fall into with whoever happens to be on hand—usually an assortment of characters with whom we are thrown together at school, in our families or at work.

However unpleasant anxieties over status may be, it is difficult to imagine a good life entirely free of them, for the fear of failing and disgracing oneself in the eyes of others is an inevitable consequence of harboring ambitions, of favoring one set of outcomes over another and of having regard for individuals besides oneself. Status anxiety is the price we pay for acknowledging that there is a public distinction between a successful and an unsuccessful life.

We are tempted to believe that certain achievements and possessions will give us enduring satisfaction. We are invited to imagine ourselves scaling the steep cliff face of happiness in order to reach a wide, high plateau on which we will live out the rest of our lives; we are not reminded that soon after gaining the summit, we will be called down again into fresh lowlands of anxiety and desire.

Life seems to be a process of replacing one anxiety with another and substituting one desire for another—which is not to say that we should never strive to overcome any of our anxieties or fulfill any of our desires, but rather to suggest that we should perhaps build into our strivings an awareness of the way our goals promise us a respite and a resolution that they cannot, by definition, deliver.

A mature solution to status anxiety may be said to begin with the recognition that status is available from, and awarded by, a variety of different audiences—industrialists, bohemians, families, philosophers—and that our choice among them may be free and willed.

Philosophy, art, politics, religion and bohemia have never sought to do away entirely with the status hierarchy; they have attempted, rather, to institute new kinds of hierarchies based on sets of values unrecognized by, and critical of, those in the majority. While maintaining a firm grip on the differences between success and failure, good and bad, shameful and honorable, these entities have endeavored to remold our sense of what may rightfully be said to belong under those weighty and dichotomous headings.

In so doing, they have helped to lend legitimacy to those who, in every generation, may be unable or willing to comply dutifully with the dominant notions of high status, but who may yet deserve to be categorized under something other than the brutal epithet of “loser” or “nobody.” They have provided us with persuasive and consoling reminders that there is more than one way–and more than just the judge’s and the pharmacist’s way–of succeeding at life.

— remixed from

The Power of Names

Sun, 14 Nov 2010 00:00:00 -0500

When you name something, you own it. When you assign a symbol to something previously without, you have created meaning. Part of the loneliness of growing older is that as we become increasingly more complex and specialized, the vocabulary for modeling our shared cognitive landscape becomes increasingly scarce to the point where it’s hard to ask a person what you hold in common.

The purpose of good conversation is to discover these shared boundaries. In describing your intuitive thoughts, you struggle to model them in cumbersome phrases and paragraphs; discussions peppered with deep pauses, “uhms,” and “ahhs” are my joy. To agree with someone that you feel some way; the mutual struggle to define and name it — like two ancient hunters exhausting prey — is a bonding experience.

Sadly, most of my conversations are far more mundane. They are information-seeking or persuasive or jocular in nature. It is hard to talk about deeply-held values and beliefs. Partly because the issues are touchy and the context never quite right, and partly because most people prefer to tame their lawns rather than their psychic landscape. But it is such a unshakable need to share and feel connected, most people inadvertently reach out anyway.

We create online communities, sports leagues, book clubs. And we talk and talk but still feel lonely. The problem with most of this is that talk is limited to the shallowest of those present. The meek shall rule the earth and the simple shall dominate the conversation. Arguments always devolve to the lowest common denominator, at least in the case of vocabulary. Academics may invent increasingly nuanced ways of expressing themselves in their own circles, but as soon as you place one in front of a television audience, they become a babble of incoherence, struggling to find shared ground.

The most courageous of us dive full-heartedly into the fray, breaking complexity into increasingly simple building blocks, losing small amounts of meaning in each iteration. The meekest of us give up the game, choosing to live in their self-contained intellectual towers. I feel unhappy with both approaches. The former seems to be such a waste of time: a perfect storm of sound and fury. The latter quickly loses touch with the reality it sought to model: keeping out the riffraff also deters the stray wiseman.

So I bide my time and sharpen my wit, shaping and defining more of my own psychic landscape. Writing is a conversation with oneself, the pen etching out questions and the mind carefully answering. And in staking out territory, if someone else stumbles upon the same land, the signs shall announce: “Come all ye weary travelers, for we offer sojourned shelter and a lay of the land. Nothing human is foreign to us — homo sum, humani nil a me alienum puto — for I hunger for the unfamiliar.”

Appreciating Art

Sat, 13 Nov 2010 00:00:00 -0500

As we grow older, we trust less other people to fill the gaps in our soul. We become more complacent with goodbyes, the rotating carousel of people in our lives. When I was young and had so much faith in people, it felt so devastating to lose someone — sometimes, someone I never had. You pin your hopes and dreams on stolen glances and dark thoughts. Every love was so full of possibilities. Growing older is largely the collective process of becoming more realistic and guarded. There are plenty of fish in the sea and no one is really as they seem.

So we bide our time and decorate our souls. Some of us bury ourselves in our work, finding joy in the most arcane of places. Others sink into their own psyche, treating every goodbye as an opportunity to grow. Still others despair, seeing so much unrealized beauty in every passing glance. The best of us become a little of all of these, finding companionship where we can.

And so we grow and drift, admiring the naivety of children and seeing the brevity of all things. And who can blame us — we all desperately seek out our own place in this world, canvassing mountains and ancient, hallowed forests. Every encountered traveler is a gift and reminder of old times: of winters with family, a first shared heartbeat, long conversations into the night.

When we are twentysomething, we offer these pieces of our soul to others, searching for someone whose jigsaw matches our own. But that all fades as well and we learn to love the isolated vistas, the high plains, the frigid air. And maybe, if wisdom is in our stars, once we are weary and realize nothing in this world is new, we settle down, pitching sticks into dirt, constructing a ruin for future generations.

No one can truly live together and no one can truly part. The best we can do is surrender the best of ourselves — a serendipitous clover, shells from a distant sea, three nuggets of silver — as gifts to future explorers, the remoter the better. In hopes that when they stumble upon your individual monument to ego, they’ll clutch some semblance of your soul and in so much overbearing loneliness, weep. We all share the same starting point, but strike out in so many innumerably different patterns as to inevitably uncover more virgin land than settled cities — if we do not irrecoverably tire along the way. The sight of anything remotely human is sweet to sore eyes indeed.

So head out and explore. The further the better. Resist not the frontier with its clarion calls. The best of you is contained out there. And, I promise — the best of all of us as well.

Depression

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 13:26:06 -0500

Depression exaggerates character. In the long run, I think, it makes good people better; it makes bad people worse. It can destory one’s sense of proportion and give one paranoid fantasies and a false sense of helplessness; but it is also a window onto truth.

You survive depression through a faith in life that is as abstract as any religious belief system. Depression is the most cynical thing in the world, but it is also the origin of a kind of belief. To endure it and emerge as yourself is to find that what you did not have the courage to hope may yet prove true.

If you can knock out your depression, you can live in wonderful peace with the real-world problems you may have to confront, which always seem minimal by comparison. I called one of the people I was interviewing for this book and politely began the conversation by asking how he was. “Well,” he said, “my back hurts; I’ve sprained an ankle; the children are mad at me; it’s pouring rain; the cat died; and I’m facing bankruptcy. On the other hand, I’m psychologically asymptomatic at present, so I’d say all in all that things are fabulous.”

— remixed from

An Essay of Four Parts: How I Would Run the World

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 13:14:00 -0500

One of the most insightful observations I have received regarding my personality was this: “Edwin, if you ever do become ruler of the world, the rich and the poor will be fine. It’s the middle class that will suffer.” I think this explains much of my behavior, from dating mistakes to choice of literature. What separates the middle class from everyone else is their uniform failings. Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

1. Education and Free Will

The poor can be divided into two classes. The first are the ones opportunity left behind. I’m a believer that free will is limited by knowledge: our choice of behavior is constrained by what we think to be possible. Research in human development mirrors this statement, as does our legal system: while it sets the age of majority relatively arbitrarily, it still sets one.

The rationale behind our laws is that we are incapable of making informed decisions for ourselves before a certain age. The median for this certain age happens to be 18 in America. In other cultures, it has ranged from as young as 9 to as old as 25. In all cases, it is the parents’ responsibility to ensure that children are provided with an adequate level of experience and reasoning capabilities to choose their own path through life.

Upbringing is a delicate topic. Political scientists and parents both struggle with the notion that generationally, wealth does not change hands readily. Money tends to concentrate in the upper 5% and fails to trickle down. With few notable exceptions, the poor stay poor and the rich stay rich. Is this a failing of genetics or environment? When one witnesses the cycle of drug use and incrimination in inner cities, one is tempted to say environment and thus becomes a liberal. When one witnesses the sudden rise of Italian small businesses and the nouveau riche of the 20s, one is tempted to say genetics and thus becomes a conservative.

The core question becomes: at what point do we have enough individual responsibility to accept the burden of free will? Of course there is no right answer, but the legal system still depends on a best answer. From what I have observed working in soup kitchens and inner-city mentoring programs, I would venture that it is when we are strong enough that we do not resign ourselves to fate.

It is a curious conundrum. In accepting free will — responsibility for our actions — we burden ourselves with the consequences of our own poor choices. And in denying it, we free ourselves from responsibility. Why would anyone willingly choose to be free?

And yet, it is a theme I see again and again. In my four years of working with and supervising a small New Hampshire soup kitchen, I grew very close to the regulars. They had very little in common except for their own particular brand of resignation. Life was life, they reasoned, and the stresses of everyday life were something to be endured, not challenged.

This dichotomy was especially apparent when placed in juxtaposition to my high school, a mere half-mile away. There, the sons and daughters of the privileged were taught — indoctrinated, even — that the world was in their grasp, if they would only stretch out and reach for it.

Thus I ran the soup kitchen and they came. Freedom is not optional: after a certain level, it is the inevitable choice — because with its barbs of responsibility comes the intoxicating scent of opportunity.

2. Physical Disability and Psychological Neuroses

The second major bastion of the poor consists of those who, through some combination of bad luck or misgiven circumstance, are saddled with physical disability or mental neuroses. The obdurate nature of the physical preordains sympathy. But the psychological is more interesting; its crushing nature is counterbalanced by the high-functioning of many medicated individuals.

Out of some sense of unsophisticated wonderment towards the tragic, at one point I dated, in rapid succession, a series of depressed, schizoid, bipolar or otherwise afflicted individuals. My first lesson was that it was a mistake: in spite of whatever lingering curiosity I possess, romance does not seem to be the correct vehicle for enabling objective empirical observation. (Surprisingly, it is for most of the cases of the more mundane.)

My second lesson is more nuanced and harder for me to admit. Inevitably, I would try to fix her. That was, after all, the raison d’etre of the relationship in the first place. It is hard for me to admit because it reveals an incredibly high level of naivety, and more significantly, because it reveals what I now realize as an incredibly manipulative personality.

What ended this streak of destructive behavior was my realization that I no longer held any affection towards these girls — only contempt. That scared me because my initial impetus was to help — and because I was genuinely attracted; the neurotic have far more interesting views of the world than the well-adjusted. And I am repelled by the mundane.

Even in the most desperate plea of the depressive — “why?” or “Why me?” — lie the seeds of self-examination, a process that is usually fruitful. The unexamined life is unavailable to the depressed. That is, perhaps, the greatest revelation I have had: not that depression is compelling but that the people who suffer from it may become compelling because of it.

Sometimes you see more in the scattered memories of a time than when you were actually there. At the time, it seemed like a noble undertaking. What these girls were missing, I reasoned, was a grip on reality: some dose of rational thinking. They are simply letting their emotions run wild.

I can pinpoint where this perspective comes from. Over time, I have learned that my personal experience of emotions is vastly different from much of the world’s. For me, emotion is something to be controlled — filtered through the rational part of the brain. In experiencing an emotion, the first question I ask is whether it makes sense to be experiencing the emotion — and closely following, whether experiencing the emotion will help my life in a practical manner.

As I grow older, I gain better tools through which to control my emotions: better metrics to measure their impact, more experiences to predict their outcomes. So I assumed that all they needed was to be taught better tools and then they would be able to control their actions and thus be “normal.” At this point, I’m sure a licensed therapist would throw a fit.

Of course, you can guess what happened. It turns out, for most people, emotions are like stomachaches. You tell yourself that you can ignore the pain and go through your daily routine (or at least I do) but then you end up sprawled on the toilet anyway — and no amount of persuasion, short of an incoming nuclear warhead, will budge you.

Depression and its related family of illnesses are the same way. On the outside, they seem to be rationally defeatable. But when you stare at them up close, they turn out to be far less benign. Even I lose control of my emotions sometimes; it just turns out that I have a higher threshold for emotional “pain” than most people. Mental illness, left untreated, is just that same pain turned up to a torturous level. The appearance of an inaccessible logic belies the breakdown of logic altogether.

3. Wickedness and Inevitability

With regards to the rich, they too are generally dividable into two castes. The first is easy to describe and requires fewer than two paragraphs. They are the cliché: the ones for whom the sound of two stones clicking together bears greater enjoyment and entertainment than their self-indulgent puppy-babble and consumerism. Their upside, however, is great: just as the poor are quickly fleeced of their earnings, they too are quickly fleeced of their savings (read: inheritance). One rich idiot can power the economy of a mid-sized county for at least a decade or two.

4. Ambition and Courage

The other caliber of the rich is far more interesting. Eliezer Yudkowsky, in one of his more accessible articles, describes the power-elite as actually being more intelligent and high-functioning than one would be led to believe. This is despite his and our general cultural assumption that “executives were just people who, by dint of superior charisma and butt-kissing, had managed to work their way to the top positions at the corporate hog trough.”

It is true, however, that socioeconomically, we could probably afford to pay them a slight bit less. The question becomes: how much less? What is the elasticity of the rich? If we decrease executive compensation by 1% across the board, what percentage of them decide instead to engage in more self-fulfilling activities? Or is it a situation similar to Ayn Rand’s world where they all suddenly quit after one last straw?

I suspect the answer is somewhere in between: that as we increase their taxes, some portion of the most qualified executives drop out of the rat race, but once we hit a certain point, the trickle becomes a torrent. Money is an important incentive. To much of the intelligentisia, it is valued as a unit of self-worth. Platitudes are endless; supply meeting demand ensures their worthlessness. Money is objective.

My solution would be to drastically increase the estate tax — although allow its proceeds to benefit a charity of the deceased’s choice. I generally trust the self-made rich: outside the financial world, there simply aren’t that many bozos that just get lucky. I don’t trust, however, their offspring. While genetics may count for something, it is a stretch to believe workaholic executives take the time to genuinely coach their children. I’d rather let the market be the judge of them.

Conclusion

If we exclude the poor with their educational, physical, and mental disabilities and the rich with their puppies or genuine capabilities, what do we have left? The middle class. A class of people for whom the gifts of an adequate education have already been bestowed, but who simply refused to make use of it. A class of people who chose comfort over nobility.

I do realize this is somewhat of an arbitrary cutoff point and that there are exceptions. Sure, some were unlucky in the gene pool or subject to unfortunate external circumstance. But all-in-all, the vast majority of the middle class seem useful for little more than paper pushing and water cooler conversation.

In my mind, the typifying example of this phenomenon is the baby-boomer generation. An entire generation that, due to some lucky combination of technological progress and diplomacy, lifts its collective asses into the middle class. And what do they proceed to do? Wreck the environment, bankrupt social security and medicare, lose the goodwill of hundreds of nations, and leave a spiraling national debt to fix everything with. And then, best of all, have the impudence to write a hit song whining that it wasn’t their fault.

Admittedly, this entire essay is not meant to be taken incredibly seriously: it has more holes in its logic than Wall Street has waylaid zeroes. It really is less a political manifesto and more a personal statement regarding free-will, education, and social responsibility with some leaky generalizations thrown in.

The main point I am trying to drive across is that our free will is limited by the choices we know how to make. The average American has the widest range of possibilities in the world: free primary/secondary education and world-class universities, a liberal passport that others would kill for, access to the strongest venture capital market. And yet, we make terrible use of it all.

It wouldn’t bother me so much if it weren’t so stunningly hypocritical. In listening to others air their views on a sensational crime, many have little but intense contempt towards the perpetrator. Note that only 32% of the incarcerated have high school degrees (compared to 90% in the general population). To me, their lack of education is a point of sympathy, not fury: environmental circumstance far outstrips any real degree of free-will. The real criminals are those who have choice but proudly choose selfishly. It seems to me that they have far more to account for. And yet, there’s no outrage here.

Two Parables of Rage

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 12:09:00 -0500

As they start, so too do relationships end: emotionally. The initial attraction, curiosity, and anxiety towards another person is (hopefully!) reciprocated and contentment soon settles in. At this point, relationships diverge in destination. Some lovers mimeograph each other well: their beliefs, eccentricities, and pacing converge over time. Most others are less fortunate. Compromises are won and lost, dates are made and rearranged, sutures ripped out before healing. The emotional riptide crashes progressively weaker, until one realizes what was once turbulence has become little more than lurid staleness. There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love.

The tragedy in all of this lies in our fickleness of perspective: we go from love to (self-)destruction so quickly. While one day, our hearts might leap into our throats at the sight, sound, touch of the other, a few months of bitterness can transform that passion into deep-seated resentment. Some proclaim they would die for their love while others profess that they would kill (who?) during some fit of rage. In too many cases, all that separates these disparate portraits is time.

One could argue that the other person has changed or that the relationship brought new information to light. In the minority of cases, maybe. But usually, what has changed is us. We come to view our lover’s flaws and features in a different light: what was once an adorable clumsiness becomes a hair-trigger for argument, what was once sweet timidity becomes an object of scorn. We cannot even imagine our previous joy: how silly we must have been!

What we are reacting to is not the actual physical object — what we are reacting to is our own particular mountain of hubris and neurosis. Her habits were always there, but now they are ladled with unconsciously assumed meaning. Resentment is not created in a day: it is the product of many small moments that together serve to remind us, when she is there, that we should be happy, sad, lonely, or angry.

The Iliad begins, “Sing, O Goddess, of the Rage of Achilles, son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans—” It has been nine years since the beginning of the war between the Trojans and the Achaeans and neither side has come close to victory. Achilles has successfully besieged and taken several Trojan towns and islands, the latest of which has yielded the two beautiful maidens Chryseis and Briseis.

While Agamemnon, the supreme commander of the Achaeans, takes Chryseis as his prize, Achilles claims Briseis. The Iliad opens by describing the vengeful Achilles threatening to duel and kill Agamemnon over Briseis. Agamemnon has foolishly insulted Chryseis’ father, a priest of Apollo, who has sent a plague upon the Achaeans. In return for giving Chryseis back, he demands Achilles’ prize, Briseis.

Homer’s epic is usually read as primarily depicting Achilles’ struggles with his own pride and wrath. In giving up Briseis, he invokes a hex upon his own countrymen and refuses to help them against the Trojans. In doing so, countless men die and the Achaeans come close to defeat. They are saved only when Hector kills Patrocleus and misdirects Achilles’ anger back at Troy. The performance anticlimactically ends not with the fall of Troy or the death of Achilles, but with Achilles coming to terms with his rage.

A secondary subtext exists in the machinations of the gods. They can be seen at once goading the two sides into bloodshed: Zeus stepping into the actual battlefield to rally the Trojans at Achilles’ behalf. Other times, they act as protectors and peace-bringers: Hermes guiding King Priam into the Achaeans’ camp to finally ease Achilles’ grief and anger.

One interpretation is that they serve to magnify our hero’s struggles and attach to him greater power to inflict revenge, thus heightening the drama. This interpretation pushes them out of the limelight as merely supporting characters. It misses the primary role that religion played in ancient Greek life: the gods were seen as capricious creatures, much mirroring the mortals that sought to worship them. In picking heroes to champion, they played out their own eternal drama. Indeed, the entire war starts out of a vanity contest between Athena, Aphrodite, and Hera.

In this reading of the Iliad, we see Achilles not as the central character but as an illustrious pawn. He is held captive to his own emotions by cosmic forces that control the battle raging around him. If we were Achilles, recognizing our own smallness, would it be nobler to entertain the gods by taking part on their stage or recognize their humanity by refusing to indulge their whims? And if we refuse to acknowledge their stage, would any mortal one matter?

In Yukio Mishima’s masterpiece, Spring Snow, the empirical and rationalistic Shigekuni Honda is paired with the anxious and passionate Kiyoaki Matsugae. The center-point of the story is in depicting the lens through which each view their shared circumstances of life:

Kiyoaki and Honda were perhaps as different in their makeup as the flower and the leaf of a single plant. Kiyoaki was incapable of hiding his true nature, and he was defenseless against society’s power to inflict pain. His still unawakened sensuality lay dormant within him, unprotected as a puppy in a March rain, body shivering, eyes and nose pelted with water. Honda, on the other hand, had quite early in life grasped where danger lay, choosing to shelter from all storms, whatever their attraction.

Just as all roads lead to Rome, it seems the ultimate destination of all rage is melancholy and regret. At least one system of religion seeks its banishment: Zen Buddhism focuses on shifting one’s perspective to accommodate external circumstance. All that we are is the result of what we have thought. It is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts.

In practice — zazen — one focuses entirely on breath: simply breathing in and out. The meditator strives to be aware of his or her stream of thoughts, allowing them to arise and pass away without interference. In doing so, one discards ego and overcomes personal emotions.

The one tragedy of this lifestyle is that in turning the eye inward — in taking shelter from all the storms — one risks, at once, simultaneous indictment and absorption into the rest of the world. If one has no individual emotion or attachment to objects discrete from oneself, then what makes one one? The practitioner is simultaneously there and not there, but all-in-all, ultimately non-existent.

Is it possible to have deep love without throwing everything into the ring? Passion risks vulnerability, rationality risks passion. In rage there is glory: we become the hero-character. In rationality, we risk dooming ourselves to passive irrelevance. ‘Tis nobler, indeed.

Ink Blots and Ten-Year Plans

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 02:43:42 -0500

If you lose your purpose in life, one of the first diagnostic exercises a guidance counselor will give you is to ask what you would do if you had ten million dollars — if you never had to work again. A Rorschach inkblot test of sorts. (Incidentally, works great as an icebreaker as well.)

I never had a purpose to lose or a guidance counselor to keep track, but I have administered this test to myself several times over the years. Early results were inconclusive: one says “keep working,” another: “join the Peace Corps,” many left blank.

Over the summer, I had a long stretch of uninterrupted time to ponder on questions like this — sometimes actively, but moreso as constant background noise as I crept along my day. “If I were rich, what would I be doing instead?”

Perhaps if were wiser, I would have realized that the question was silly; that my actions at the time spoke magnitudes louder than any worries. Because I was so free, it seems safe in retrospect to assume that my leisure years would bear at least passing resemblance.

My typical day would begin at the early strike of noon. I would scramble to brush my teeth, shower, and dress — simultaneously, as possible — before clambering onto my silver workhorse and speeding towards the Strip District.

The afternoon would begin with a mug of coffee and cigar as I chewed on a book I was frantically trying to get through. (One of my goals for that summer was to read all the literature I had accumulated over four years of procrastination.)

Between alternating through the book and doodling ideas on an open notebook, after a couple of hours, I would start to get antsy. At that point, I would unlock Silverado and pick up a late-afternoon snack on the way to the library. (Another goal was to figure out how to incorporate my startup.)

Before heading to a late dinner, I would take a jog, meditate, or play frisbee depending on mood and schedule. Jogs work better for anger and lethargy, meditation for when muscles ache, frisbee trumping both anytime.

The last couple of hours would be spent working on my startup or some open-source toolkit. Hours stretching by in an empty computer lab, broken up by occasional smoke or snack break. I would emerge shortly before dawn to peddle slowly homeward, eyes bleary and red-shot.

So what would change if I were rich? What activities would continue and which would drop? Would I continue on the startups? Read more books? Exercise more? Travel the world? Retire to a small mountain monastery?

In one aspect, these questions are flawed. As detailed extensively in Stumbling on Happiness and more eloquently in Cuando Vuelva A Tu Lado, we are not very good at predicting future emotion. We superimpose our present feelings and make slight situational changes that never quite compensate correctly. One day the world and its entire horizon seems dark and impossible, and the next… well, what a difference a day makes.

But in another aspect, these questions hint at a deeper conundrum. Happiness is only one facet of a life well lived. Perhaps the more relevant question is: “what do I want to be remembered for?” And then again, perhaps that’s reading too much into things. Maybe we are just a collection of chemical bonds destined to dissipate back into the great unknown.

And if so, would I be content in just being happy? Assume for a moment that this is all we get: no heaven or hell, no plastic Buddha in the sky. What would you do differently? Happiness is but a small fish next to the thunderous waves of the ocean. And yet, we work with the tools we’re graciously given.

The cruelest part of this farce is that one has to take a stand. Not making a decision is a decision in and of itself. Sophie’s Choice embodied — its most impossible application.

Working backwards for a moment, maybe the question is flawed. If there’s no possible right answer, is it a question we should be asking at all? A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess? But how is it possible to not play when the question stares us in the face day-after-day?

The development practice at many software companies is increasingly tilted towards agile development: to begin building out an application without a blueprint, trusting that as it tends towards completion, its final shape will become obvious. The rationale behind this methodology is that clients don’t know what they want until they see it.

An elegant proposition: I don’t know what I want until I have it. If that’s the case, the prudent choice is to answer the question repeatedly and change course accordingly. If we are lost at sea and our destination is somewhere in the northwest, it seems reasonable to head north and west — sometimes south and east as obstacles arise — and to just check our heading ever so often.

Choosing a direction at onset and stubbornly sticking to it would work only for the most skilled navigator. The longer the journey, the larger any initial error will compound itself. Soon enough, though you were heading for New York, you’ll find yourself in Greenland. And life is a long journey — the longest one, in fact.

The problem with this conclusion is that it effectively bars one from accomplishing some dreams. Some goals are lifelong ones: to play the piano well, one must devote a couple years of study. To play it as a professional demands a lifetime of devotion. And maybe these are the goals worth pursuing: maybe a lifetime ultimately scales more than the collective remains of periods of scattered years.

These are the questions that keep me up at night. These are my half-formed demons. ‘Tis better to have loved and lost, Than never to have loved at all., laments Sir Alfred Tennyson. After all, it’s not the one you choose that you lose: it’s all the others, in that choice, that you truly forsake.

So time marches inexorably forwards and I’m left saddled by my own self-doubts. The best I can manage is to burn candlelight and stretch my passions in hopes that the answer lies not in darkness. People seem to think I work hard because I’m addicted to work. No, I work hard because I’m being chased by monsters. To sail the open seas is to risk life and limb by its ancient depths and howling storms. All for the glory and promises of riches on its farthest shores.

Why Blog?

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 05:36:00 -0500

Contrary to the prevailing opinion of my peers, I wish interview processes were longer. I wish college application processes were more detailed, had more essays. I wish exams were multi-day affairs, complete with bed and breakfast. And ideally, relationships would be judged on past performance instead of a wink, nod, and quality (quantity?) of drunken sex.

I have a hard time conveying myself in a short time. How does one communicate everything they stand for in a thirty-minute conversation with a total stranger in an utterly forgettable blanched interview room? You can’t just tell someone, “I care so much about what I do, in one semester I pulled more all-nighters than nights with sleep.” To compress so many hours of life seems impossible as to be practically paralyzing.

Most people seem to be fearful that they won’t have enough to say: that the grilling will end and they will be left stammering questions memorized from some interview preparation website. For me, the words tumble out in streams, torrents of questions and answers both. Because fundamentally, I realize what both of us are looking for is fit.

I used to think of interviews as a brick wall to be overcome; the interviewer as a gatekeeper with unguessable metrics, notebook in hand scribbling evidence damning me to a life of menial labor. (And to be honest, I’ve worked in my fair share of restaurants.) In many cases, rules have been institutionalized and scores will be computed with little regard to exceptions or exceptional.

But in many other cases, it is shared perception that the interview process is holistic. That the brick wall is as much to keep you out as to serve as a general indicator of the quality of your future coworkers. That the important factors are how well you jive with the culture and would be happy working with them. Far, far more people have been fired because they weren’t passionate enough than because they weren’t smart enough.

So ideally, I would reach over the table and say, “Look, I get what you’re doing. Talk to me. Tell me about what you’re passionate about, what your coworkers are passionate about. Tell me about how you feel about working at XYZ, Inc. What are your hopes, dreams, and aspirations? And then I’ll tell you about whether I think I fit in. If that works for you, test me out for a week and I’ll show you what I can do.”

I’m sure you can already spot the holes in this proposal. The vast majority of people work for the paycheck, not for the work. For them, interviews are about signaling instead of substance: they are about getting past the gatekeeper. If word got out that a simple timeout chat worked, companies would be deluged by “passionate, just-searching-for-the-right-fit” candidates. And in my limited experience, others are better at faking passion than I am at showing it.

This is why I like the internet so much. There are two ways of conveying yourself to another person. The first is to genuinely connect with someone. It takes time and is very hit-or-miss. Investing so much of yourself into one person is a recipe for disappointment. (Admittedly, this depends on your standards.)

The second way is to play a numbers game. Instead of flirting with one gatekeeper, flirt with all of them at the same time. Anonymity is a blessing: it levels the playing field. You can’t stand out (as much) because of who you know. You have to stand out based on who you are and what you’ve done.

If you begin a startup online, the market will judge you more based on the quality of your product than on the quality of your sales team. In a traditional company, the bottlenecks are external: making sure suppliers are reliable, staying on good terms with distribution channels, sending salespeople to tradeshows and cold-calls to find potential customers.

The internet has made it so these functions are self-contained. There is a glut of hosting companies willing to sell you bandwidth and the marketplace for digital services and payment scales brilliantly (App Store, Steam, Paypal). Best of all, reaching customers is not an archaic and closed process: it is well-known how to attract initial customers and secure referrals. The barrier to entry is incredibly low.

Not incidentally, that is the reason this blog exists. I don’t have the time or patience to screen potential friends in real life. The internet makes it a self-selecting process. I post who I am and trust that the people who find it interesting will eventually come. As a bonus, friends who don’t know me well might find this via some social platform and get a better glimpse into my psyche and decide how quickly they want to flee for the hills.

Plotting for Kisses

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 09:13:00 -0500

A boy of seventeen who has been trying for weeks to work out what it is about his girlfriend that is “driving him mad” — the frustration, that is to say, for which he uses her — arrives at his session in an unusually bumptious mood. He has realized, he announces to me triumphantly, what it is about her: “She doesn’t kiss properly.” He mooches around in his mind for more to say, but to his own surprise he is blank, so I offer him a suggestion: “When people kiss they’ve stopped talking. If her kisses were words, what would they be saying to you?” “You can’t really love someone that you don’t love kissing,” he replies, as though oblivious to my question.

And although there are clearly conventions in literature and life governing the giving and getting of kisses, it is really only from films that we can learn what the contemporary conventions might be for kissing itself. Styles of kissing can be seen but not easily described, as though kissing resists verbal representation. It is striking that, unlike other forms of sexuality, there is little synonymy of kissing. It has generated no familiar slang, acquired virtually no language in which it can be redescribed. It is not merely that in the romance of appetite the details of salivation are not compelling. Apparently for the sake of interest stories often ignore, in a way films do not, the fact that the kiss itself is a story in miniature, a subplot.

From a psychoanalytic point of view, the kiss is a revealing sequence containing a personal history. The way a person kisses and likes to be kissed shows in condensed form something about the person’s character.

So in psychoanalytic terms kissing may be, among other things, a compromise solution to what Freud saw as the individual’s primary ambivalence, and a way of gratifying that other appetite he recognized: the appetite for pleasure independent of the desire for nourishment or reproduction. When we kiss we devour the object by caressing it. Kissing on the mouth can have a mutuality that blurs the distinctions between giving and taking (“In kissing do you render or receive?” Cressida asks in Troilus and Cressida).

— remixed from

Old Friends

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 09:29:00 -0500

One of my most bitter misgivings is that I never quite figured out who I am or what I stand for. In some ways, I stand as a paragon of rationality: I carefully think through my lifestyle decisions to make sure they are coherent. But at the same time, I realize that in a larger sense I am not rational at all. Logical systems need frameworks of assumptions to have external purpose. No matter how efficiently I drive myself, it’s useless in the end unless I have a destination.

I am a very different person from when I was in high school, and yet, those ghosts still haunt my life. Paul Graham wrote that the best way to determine what you love to do is “to try to do things that would make your friends say wow.” I think this cuts to the heart of my problem: I am not good enough at being pressured by the rest of the world, by prestige.

Let me tell you a little bit about Exeter, the high school I attended. It sits on 619 acres of gorgeous wilderness — rivers, lakes, forests, plains — nestled next to a sleepy New Hampshire town. Autumns and winters are especially breathtaking: one constantly feels part of an elaborate landscape oil. Maybe one of the anonymous weekenders in Seurat’s famous Un dimanche après-midi à l’Île de la Grande Jatte:

Just as they observe time sail slowly by, one can’t help but begrudge a feeling that these might be the best years of my life. Not a constant reminder, but more of a background hum that sharply spikes on particularly winsome days. One moment you’ll be fading asleep against a languid spring sun, and the next you’ll feel a sudden chill as dusk presses overhead. The passing of seasons is particularly poignant in New England.

It was a collective feeling. I think the greatest gift Exeter gave us was not an education or a ticket into college — it was a glimpse into our own mortality. It was an unspoken thought that what we were journeying through was not some passing phase: it was a camera pinhole into our days in the wider world. Like that old Semisonic song: “time for you to go back to the places you will be from…”

Even years afterwards — years after I have last seen or heard from many, if not most, of them — when I think about what I want to do with my life, I recall their voices. What we had in common was a sense of our own urgency. That what we do with our lives is sacred, that it matters deeply. No where else begs that sense of sincerity.

Their voices tell me that I should try harder. Strive to make something of myself. Reach for power, the ability to make a difference. It doesn’t matter what you do so much as being unique while doing it. To rise up the corporate ladder is good but not enough. The important place is not the bottom-line: it is in the infinite starry sky.

I’ve followed this exhausting compass for years. It has been with me through rough roads, calm skies, euphoric celebrations, abject failures. Ultimately, I believe it is a gift. To regard one’s own life as a noble undertaking is enough a reason to live it. But it is also a curse. Throwing away the mundane means foregoing pleasant commonalities and feeling every disappointment deep in your bones.

“Life would be so much easier to live if I hadn’t met you.” I’m sure the saints and martyrs had their own private moments of self-doubt. I’m no saint. I long for the familiar, for the easy. I wish life were a happier coincidence of moments. I wish my ambitions were smaller; I wish more things made me happy. Every lover has wondered is there a way to go back in time, to when things were simpler…

EMILY: I can’t. I can’t go on. It goes so fast. We don’t have time to look at one another.

She breaks down sobbing. The lights dim on the left half of the stage.

I didn’t realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed. Take me back—up the hill—to my grave. But first: Wait! One more look.

Good-by, Good-by, world. Good-by, Grover’s Corners. Mama and Papa. Good-by to clocks ticking… and Mama’s sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new-honed dresses and hot baths… and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you.

She looks toward the stage manager and asks abruptly, through her tears:

Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it-every. every minute.

STAGE MANAGER: No.

Pause.

The saints and poets, maybe— they do some.

The Bell Jar

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 08:19:00 -0500

There seems to be two ways to explore the literary world with any sense of true enjoyment. The first is to find an author that is like oneself and to discover yourself in their works. The second is to find a person that is like oneself and to discover yourself in their adulations, consolations, and eulogies. Anything else and you’re not reading for yourself but for someone else: a teacher’s commandments, a career’s demands, cocktail conversations and girls at bars.

That is not to degrade this second form of reading. A life practically lived has its own rewards for the liver (adianoeta!) as well as his friends and relatives: jobs created, cars maintained, families supported. In comparison, a life of literary enjoyment seems almost selfish: nights of brooding, contemplation, red wine and abusive thoughts. Demands on others’ time, patience, and sanity. All for the sake of a richer, more vivid personal experience.

And yet, we, as a society, celebrate the latter. We celebrate the young poet, the starving (adianoeta again!) artist, the depressive-manic playwright. It’s romantic and cheap and raises an important question: why?

In an economic sense, culture is a public good. We all participate in its consumption and my enjoyment of Harry Potter takes away nothing from your enjoyment, unless I am one of the pricks screaming “Snape killed Dumbledore” at release parties. Given that, it would seem the rational thing to do is to convince someone else to produce culture while sitting back and reaping the benefits of yet another vampire masterpiece coming down the publishing tubes.

But if we were all rational about it, vampire novels indeed would be the only things coming down the publishing tube. The only cultural artifacts being produced would be the ones worth the money to produce. Entertainment and short sentences. Sex and violence. And yet, many twentysomethings seem wired to seek out hard culture careers.

This highlights the inherent conflict between genes, memes, and us as individuals. Evolution is frequently misunderstood in the details: the imperative “survive of the fittest” gives no indication of context. To an average adult, this context is supposed to be the individual. The fittest individuals survive to procreate: a species becomes adapted to its environment.

Just as the fable of Copernicus and the church teaches, we are predisposed to believe that we are the center of the universe. It is in fact our genes that are the essential competitors in this story. They move across generations and replicate themselves to survive. Our mortal bodies serve only as their transient vehicles.

The mistake is easy to forgive. In most cases, our genes and ourselves share the same goals and incentives: when we live and produce offspring, they also live and replicate. But sometimes we diverge: genes do what is best for themselves, not us.

In one case, t genes in mice have a 95% precedence rate (compared to the normal 50%) and is fatal if dominant. Needless to say, mice populations introduced to the t gene quickly die off. But not before the gene, in every generation, manages to replicate itself like wildfire.

One of the most interesting advances in recent years is the use of memes to explain cultural artifacts and individual choice. Dawkins postulated that the process of evolution applied to any phenomena with variation, fitness, and replication. Our own thoughts and ideas fit these criteria: we inherit a certain set of norms (culture) from our environs, form our own opinions (variation), and spread them to others (fitness, replication).

And like the almighty gene, the intuitive approach of believing ourselves the center-point of this replication process is flawed. Again, we serve as mere vehicles: we inherit, mutate, and spread memes. If anything, our individual goals are even more grossly misaligned with these cultural units.

A simple example would be to bring up the meme of celibacy. But given its irrelevance to most people, a more salient example can be found in Powdthavee (2009): in one longitudinal study, mothers had their happiness measured over the course of their lives. It was found that their joie de vivre reached a nadir shortly after childbirth and did not return to pre-child levels until after the child left for college.

One thus wonders why remaining childless ranks somewhere above dying completely alone but below using the last piece of toilet paper on the social acceptance scale. Well, how well would a society advocating blissful childfree marriages do?

So now back to the writer and reader. When Franzen in How to Be Alone guesses that writers write and readers read to preserve a community of like-minded folk, a community where “nothing in the world seems simple to them,” perhaps he is all too right. Perhaps they are preserving a community, a shared culture, a powerful idea. And perhaps that shared culture is the reason why nothing in the world seems simple to them.

Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas.

Tales of Brilliant Scientists

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 10:15:00 -0500

I am currently reading The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. The part that interests me is not the theory on evolution but the details on how we are constructed from basic building blocks — how atoms form molecules/amino acids/nucleotides/DNA which are subsumed by cells which in turn construct many-celled bodies … and eventually, if you go up this chain far enough, you find us.

Part of what makes this engaging is simply the process of demystifying a very fogged-up part of my brain. I didn’t do so well in biology/chemistry in high school — I didn’t have the tools to put structure behind the unending stream of nonsensical vocabulary. I was confused about how atoms created molecules, how amino acids and nucleotides were related, how cells reproduced and created larger structures such as livers or hearts, how chemical messages (hormones/neurotransmitters) were constructed and sent, etc., etc., etc.

(As an aside, I am ashamed to admit that I never had the wherewithal to ask partially because I couldn’t foresee a practical use but moreso because I was too busy doing my next period’s homework.)

The older I get, it seems, the less patience I have for gaps in my understanding of the world. Paradoxically, this feeling only increases as I learn more. I think this has something to do with how knowledge is construed. Imagine that the sum total of everything we could know as a mass on a map. No matter how quickly we explore, the horizon always expands faster. [1]

Picking up molecular biology means unlocking the doors to a dozen other subjects: biochemistry, biophysics, neurology, cognitive science, bioinformatics, genetics. Each of these unlock the doors to a dozen more. Even if you manage to reach the coast, it is always possible to explore the ocean (that is, do a PhD or original research).

So the more you know, the more you don’t know. It’s a maddening chase that is hopelessly lost even at the beginning. In high school, I was confident about my knowledge of the world. In retrospect, this confidence stemmed not from brilliance but its opposite: because I knew so little, I consequently had a much smaller pool of unknowns. Since then, my pool of unknowns has grown monstrously, while its counterpart has remained relatively inconsequential and lonely.

If ignorance is bliss, why bother at all? If all the light of knowledge does is make you curse the expanding darkness, why string up lanterns and roads at all? The answer, for me, has less to do with some noble belief in humanity and more to do with my own compulsions. The same gene that makes brilliant scientists makes lousy people. So it goes.

[1] To be precise, a better data structure / model would be a directed acyclic graph. Any given node might have multiple prerequisites. Bioinformatics might require some degree of knowledge in genetics, molecular biology, and computer science. Of course, this is still coarse: to make the model more accurate, one would have to break each subject into more atomic bits of knowledge.

Fear of Commitment

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 08:36:00 -0500

Silly as it seems, for a brief moment in time after watching House (one of the four television series I’ve ever watched), I wanted to be a doctor. I think this has more to do with my current inner job turmoil than any love for the medicinal persuasion. As elegant as I find organic chemistry, I can’t imagine making a career out of it.

I was attracted to the MD not (primarily) out of prestige, money, glamor, working hours, or opportunities for recreational drug abuse. Far more simple fact: after committing yourself to medicine, your life is mostly determined. There are only so many specialties and hospitals to choose from: the parameters are already set. It’s mostly a matter of distinguishing yourself within those bounds.

In contrast, right now I need to pick which game to play. I worked hard to keep my options open and I wonder if that was a mistake. I committed myself to not committing and giving that up seems like defeat. That’s why I’m having such a hard time settling on a job. I’m worried that I’m locking myself (even if only partially, and even if only for a couple of years) into a career.

The reason why this is particularly grating is that I work best (and am least stressed) when I am hyper-focused on one problem. If I could just man-up and pick a damn profession, life would be easier and my risk for coronary heart disease would probably drop five-fold.

Unfortunately I’m curious. For me, curiosity trumps easy any day. And so I’m stuck. Curiosity might not have killed the cat directly: might’ve just starved it to death.

Medium is the Message

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 07:12:00 -0500

A friend and I were talking about why I tended towards books and she tended towards films. At the heart of it, we engage for the same reason: as a metaphor for our own lives. To learn ephemerally. To think from an objective outside perspective. But what are the differences between the mediums that turn me onto the written word and her onto the visual one?

The core argument I was trying to make was that the mediums encourage different methods of interaction. Just like how users tend towards default configurations, readers and watchers tend towards what the medium makes convenient. Classic medium is the message argument:

All media have characteristics that engage the viewer in different ways; for instance, a passage in a book could be reread at will, but a movie had to be screened again in its entirety to study any individual part of it. So the medium through which a person encounters a particular piece of content would have an effect on the individual’s understanding of it.

Her argument, I think, stemmed from the fact that television and films tend to be more culturally relevant. As technology cheapens and becomes more ubiquitous, our society naturally tends towards higher definition media. That’s true. If you want to learn about 19th-century London, read Dickens. If you want to learn about 21st-century Baltimore, watch The Wire.

There is an argument to be made that classic novels talk about the human condition — and that is universal. If you want to learn about yourself — if you want to learn how best to view the world from your own eyes — philosophy hasn’t changed for the last couple hundred years. We still grapple with the same questions as our great-grandfathers before us.

But this doesn’t detract from television’s place. If you want to learn about the real world — your place in it: how the world views you — your best bet is to learn from others who are stuck in the same broken era. You’ll learn far more about how to navigate the modern hospital from watching House and looking up the more wicked-sounding maladies than from reading an org-chem textbook.

She said: “I’ve watched so many movies i think they are a better representation of real life, of things that actually happen to people.” I guess what it comes down to is that I’m probably an idealist, an escapist, both. I might be good at dealing with practical realities, but in the end, I do so out of necessity, not inherent love for the game. (Okay, maybe just a little.)

This is too much philosophizing, so fuck it, I’m off to watch Southpark.