I have to admit that the holidays never really held any special significance for me. Sure, as a kid they mean getting stuff, stuff you don’t really need, but as an adult, the holidays basically just amount to a blip on the budgetary radar wherein you have to spend money on things you wouldn’t normally spend money on. Despite my uncharitable view on the holiday, this particular Christmas has finally managed to cut through the fog of materialism and really get my attention.
To my co-workers, I gave only as chance dictated. My boss got a book on the proper use of the rhythm method of birth control, my co-workers received a simple plastic glass, a copy of the Necrocomicon and a Satanic Bible as their own personal tastes dictated. Amanda and Isabella received very nearly what they asked for with the exception that Amanda is also the proud owner of a large, natural barnacle scraped from some sea-side edifice. Buying for children is always far too easy to be properly satisfying. For that one particularly special person in my life, I simply poured out my soul as best I could. Circumstance is not yet my ally but I had endless enjoyment devising and executing new ideas to express myself through the physical manifestations of gifts.
No, what took my breath away was not the act of giving in this case, but instead what I received. The closest analogy I can draw is that the giver tore away part of her soul and handed it to me. The giver, one of my closest co-workers, is remote to my office in Indy, which makes this all the more astounding. She sent me a bit of her original artwork, one that she describes as ‘her best’ and I have to admit that it’s pretty impressive. It is indeed a very powerful piece and quite frankly I’ve not yet gotten my mind (or my ability to articulate) around the fact that she sent it to me. What makes me shake my head even more is the fact that when I tried, most inadequately, to express my gratitude, she said in the most self-effacing way that I can imagine, “If you decide to throw it away, please send it back to me first.” Sitting here looking at it hanging on my wall, I want to cry even considering such an act. That someone could send such a gift and at the same time consider that the receiver might simply “throw it away” boggles my mind. It is, simply, unthinkable.
What is even more amusing to me is that at a couple of weeks ago when I heard that she’d gotten me a gift, I racked my brain for a few days considering what I could possibly get her, remembering that in order to do so it had to be truly meaningful. It didn’t take long for my mind to wander around to our previous discussions of art and it quickly dawned on me that the only reasonable gift for her would be an original work of art. Sadly, there wasn’t sufficient time left to produce such an item and Monday found me completely off guard, completely trumped and beaten to my own punch. I stand here agog.
What is truly ironic is that this person may never know just how much of an impact her gift had on me. As I sit here in my empty apartment, listening to the putting of some noisy and mysterious engine outside in the parking lot and the echoes of my own keystrokes, I’m reminded of just how incredibly lonely I am. In the past year I’ve given up absolutely everything; my life has been utterly torn asunder. With a few very scant exceptions, I’ve lost all the people I cared about or even talked to on a regular basis. Her gift gives me very real and potent hope for the future. I may be alone now, as alone as the singular, falling leaf on an autumn day, but I rest assured in the knowledge that I’m only as alone as I allow myself to feel.
Thank you, Amy, for being a shining light in my life and inspiring me to seek out true friendship.
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Sunday, December 21, 2008
On the Futility of Ownership
(Edited from a Tattered Thread blog entry originally made on April 16, 2004)
As I sit here watching Fantasia for only the 3rd time with my 5-year-old I'm reminded of the futility of actually attempting to own anything. Those who know me with more intimacy than that transmitted by mere blog entries are no doubt sitting agog in their chairs at those words.
The 5-year-old in question did NOT want to watch Fantasia; instead she was dead set on watching Lion King 1 ½ which due to some unknown circumstance had made itself unavailable at the moment. Anyone who has a child this age knows that quickly the entire purpose of this child's existence became the capture and interrogation of any individual who knew the whereabouts of her lost movie. Clearly, the child has gone from possessing the possessions to being possessed BY the possessions. My daughter's resultant meltdown caused two distinct threads to unravel themselves in my mind.
First, what exactly is the purpose of the cinematic and other visual art forms? It seems clear that the primary purpose for consumption of the arts is the simple visceral reaction invoked by the artwork being consumed. In short, the arts make us feel good.
Secondarily, the work acts to expand the general realm of experience for the viewer. Since humans are the sum of all that they see and hear in a lifetime, art makes us better and broader people no matter what the format. If we take these two statements as axiomatic, then it follows that the greatest possible benefit is derived from any artwork at first encounter while subsequent repetitions provide diminishing returns on time and energy since they are naught but further study on an already familiar concept.
So now one might ask: what exactly is the purpose of accumulating a library of anything when the value of every item in that library diminishes with each use? It would seem the only items worth owning are those that you wish to study and refer back to over a long period of time. Surely my 5-year-old can have no plans to study The Lion King in depth over the next 15 years and refer back to it in her doctorate thesis? Doubtful, so then why own any but the keenest and most worthwhile of items? Why spend one's hard-earned monetary resources on items which depreciate in value and take up space causing you to need special furniture or a bigger house? Are we so materialistic as a people that the act of owning the possession is actually more important than its real value?
This is a tough pill to swallow for me since I tend to approach my library like a collector rather than a reader. On one hand, my tendency to hoard makes me want the entirety of world literature at my fingertips. Rationally, I realize the sad truth: despite the moniker of "classic" many of the novels in my collection are, in fact, obscure and valueless crap. At least I feel I'm a step ahead of the people running garage sales piled with Danielle Steele paperbacks and the complete series of Rocky movies on Betamax.
Post Script:
The entry above was written over four and a half years ago and since then a lot has changed. I've disposed of an unprofitable collectables business and reduced my material footprint on the world (not counting household necessities) to the referenced collection of classic literature (still numbering about 400 volumes), a small collection of other books and the remnants of my foreign coin and currency collection. As I left my abode the other day I realized, quite abruptly, that if all of these items were to vanish, I would really not be all that upset. I maintain the library merely as a symbol of my own bookish nature and the coins and currency are simply too difficult to dispose of in anything but the most profitless manner. This is significant progress considering that in 2004 I had 400-500 square feet of my house devoted to objects which served no purpose whatsoever. It's still a long way to "own no more than you can carry on your back" but I think a few more garage sales should do the trick. Until that time, I think it's time to enjoy a bit of classic literature.
As I sit here watching Fantasia for only the 3rd time with my 5-year-old I'm reminded of the futility of actually attempting to own anything. Those who know me with more intimacy than that transmitted by mere blog entries are no doubt sitting agog in their chairs at those words.
The 5-year-old in question did NOT want to watch Fantasia; instead she was dead set on watching Lion King 1 ½ which due to some unknown circumstance had made itself unavailable at the moment. Anyone who has a child this age knows that quickly the entire purpose of this child's existence became the capture and interrogation of any individual who knew the whereabouts of her lost movie. Clearly, the child has gone from possessing the possessions to being possessed BY the possessions. My daughter's resultant meltdown caused two distinct threads to unravel themselves in my mind.
First, what exactly is the purpose of the cinematic and other visual art forms? It seems clear that the primary purpose for consumption of the arts is the simple visceral reaction invoked by the artwork being consumed. In short, the arts make us feel good.
Secondarily, the work acts to expand the general realm of experience for the viewer. Since humans are the sum of all that they see and hear in a lifetime, art makes us better and broader people no matter what the format. If we take these two statements as axiomatic, then it follows that the greatest possible benefit is derived from any artwork at first encounter while subsequent repetitions provide diminishing returns on time and energy since they are naught but further study on an already familiar concept.
So now one might ask: what exactly is the purpose of accumulating a library of anything when the value of every item in that library diminishes with each use? It would seem the only items worth owning are those that you wish to study and refer back to over a long period of time. Surely my 5-year-old can have no plans to study The Lion King in depth over the next 15 years and refer back to it in her doctorate thesis? Doubtful, so then why own any but the keenest and most worthwhile of items? Why spend one's hard-earned monetary resources on items which depreciate in value and take up space causing you to need special furniture or a bigger house? Are we so materialistic as a people that the act of owning the possession is actually more important than its real value?
This is a tough pill to swallow for me since I tend to approach my library like a collector rather than a reader. On one hand, my tendency to hoard makes me want the entirety of world literature at my fingertips. Rationally, I realize the sad truth: despite the moniker of "classic" many of the novels in my collection are, in fact, obscure and valueless crap. At least I feel I'm a step ahead of the people running garage sales piled with Danielle Steele paperbacks and the complete series of Rocky movies on Betamax.
Post Script:
The entry above was written over four and a half years ago and since then a lot has changed. I've disposed of an unprofitable collectables business and reduced my material footprint on the world (not counting household necessities) to the referenced collection of classic literature (still numbering about 400 volumes), a small collection of other books and the remnants of my foreign coin and currency collection. As I left my abode the other day I realized, quite abruptly, that if all of these items were to vanish, I would really not be all that upset. I maintain the library merely as a symbol of my own bookish nature and the coins and currency are simply too difficult to dispose of in anything but the most profitless manner. This is significant progress considering that in 2004 I had 400-500 square feet of my house devoted to objects which served no purpose whatsoever. It's still a long way to "own no more than you can carry on your back" but I think a few more garage sales should do the trick. Until that time, I think it's time to enjoy a bit of classic literature.
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
What I learned today: Random Astronomy Tidbits
OK, technically this was from last night but I had neither opportunity nor inclination to write it all down at the time. These bits are from the tail end of “Death by Black Hole and other Cosmic Quandaries.” One thing that was brought immediately to mind was the unscientific fact that it’s often much harder to read on a topic that you know something about than one about which you are a complete novice. Of all the sciences, my grounding in astronomy is pretty solid (I have a state champion medal from the Academic Decathlon to prove that much) so when I pick up these books on astronomy it is with no small trepidation. The last thing I need is yet ANOTHER retelling of how stellar spectroscopy works. This forces me into a bit of a pattern of random skimming which makes it hard to find the bits that may be new to me. In the end, nothing struck me as particularly new but it was interesting to be reminded of a few amusing facts about the universe we live in. Let’s begin…
Like a large man with a dermatological condition, the sun is constantly shedding. This is surely not surprising as the sun does put out a hell of a lot of energy. You’ve got the constant onslaught of the cosmic wind and all that heat and light. What may be surprising is the magnitude of the shedding. Yes, boys and girls, it is calculated that the sun sloughs off 4 Million TONS of mass every SECOND. Yes, that’s every second. Not a typo. This gives one a right and appropriate scale of just how BIG the sun is. Welcome to the universe. Two million pickup trucks just gone into the vapor every time the second hand on your watch ticks.
Gravity, in the realm of the four basic forces of the universe, is a complete wuss. The somewhat pathetic example that the book gives is that if by some physically impossible process the Apollo astronauts had brought back the electrons (and just the electrons) from a thimble-full of moon dust then the electromagnetic attraction between those electrons and their orphaned protons back on the moon would have been greater than the gravitational attraction of the entire planet.
Totally unrelatedly, the book goes into some small detail about the so-called fourth state of matter, plasma. In short, plasma is just uber-excited matter. If you heat anything up enough then it’ll fall all over itself and become plasma. To those of us bound to the Earth this is most typically expressed as lightning. When lightning strikes, the air around the discharge becomes plasma and behaves according to a wonderously new set of rules. In my book, plasma is boring. What we really want to talk about is the TRULY degenerate states of matter. Let’s start with the stuff of dwarf stars. Think back to high school physics and chemistry and imagine the model of the atom. You’ve got the happy nucleus with its boisterous cloud of rotating electrons. That’s the stuff of normal matter but think for a moment what happens at the heart of super-dense stars. Eventually these massive furnaces run out of fuel. When they do, then they begin to collapse. A typical star is a constant battle between the energy pouring OUTWARD from nuclear fusion and gravity pulling INWARD. I won’t go into the details here but when a star begins to run out of fuel, then gravity begins to win the battle and slowly the star compresses. Eventually, the compression becomes SO intense that the atom itself is compromised. Rather than being comprised of a nucleus and a cloud of electrons, imagine the empty space being crunched down to the point where even the electrons are bound together in the nucleus and the nuclei are stacked right on top of each other. This is the stuff of the dwarf star. All the empty space has been most rudely removed leaving a super-dense material that the sci-fi aficionados refer to as “Dwarf Star Alloy”. Super dense and super tough, this is the no-nonsense material of the universe.
In some cases though, we go even further. If a dwarf star becomes TOO dense then it condenses even more. Based on the description of dwarf stars though, you may ask “how can this possibly be? There’s nowhere else for the matter to go?” And this is exactly true. Dwarf stars are comprised of matter packed tightly together to the nth degree. There’s no empty space left. Neutrons and protons and electrons are stacked on top of each other like a child’s building blocks. Beyond a certain point, the very laws of physics themselves are compromised. Above a certain mass the dwarf star actually punches a hole in the very fabric of spacetime. Once this happens, the star has become a black hole. At this point, the star has collapsed into a quantum singularity, a location of infinite mass and yet no volume. The very laws of physics have been violated. This is the stuff of which quasars are made; perhaps a good topic for another post. The point is, quite simply, that when your physics teacher lectured on solids, liquids and gases, he or she skipped the most entertaining states of matter.
Lastly, the book made some interesting statements about the Earth’s ‘radio bubble’. This is the sphere around the Earth that which has been exposed to radio transmissions from the radio and television age of the planet. Going back to the earliest transmissions this bubble has a radius of about 100 light-years and includes about 1000 total stars; many of which have been shown to have planets in orbit around them. So from a purely technical standpoint, it is entirely possible that a civilization somewhere is enjoying the first days of television on our planet. The problem, however, is one of reception not distance. Simply to detect the carrier wave of our signals a civilization at 100 light-years distance would require a radio telescope 15 times the size of our largest, Arecibo. To actually decode anything would require a radio receiver 20 miles in diameter. Sadly, the omni-directional nature of our transmissions works against us in a major way here. In the popular culture on the subject we like to show alien’s listening in on our every move with ease but in reality they would have to be pretty damn determined to do so.
Like a large man with a dermatological condition, the sun is constantly shedding. This is surely not surprising as the sun does put out a hell of a lot of energy. You’ve got the constant onslaught of the cosmic wind and all that heat and light. What may be surprising is the magnitude of the shedding. Yes, boys and girls, it is calculated that the sun sloughs off 4 Million TONS of mass every SECOND. Yes, that’s every second. Not a typo. This gives one a right and appropriate scale of just how BIG the sun is. Welcome to the universe. Two million pickup trucks just gone into the vapor every time the second hand on your watch ticks.
Gravity, in the realm of the four basic forces of the universe, is a complete wuss. The somewhat pathetic example that the book gives is that if by some physically impossible process the Apollo astronauts had brought back the electrons (and just the electrons) from a thimble-full of moon dust then the electromagnetic attraction between those electrons and their orphaned protons back on the moon would have been greater than the gravitational attraction of the entire planet.
Totally unrelatedly, the book goes into some small detail about the so-called fourth state of matter, plasma. In short, plasma is just uber-excited matter. If you heat anything up enough then it’ll fall all over itself and become plasma. To those of us bound to the Earth this is most typically expressed as lightning. When lightning strikes, the air around the discharge becomes plasma and behaves according to a wonderously new set of rules. In my book, plasma is boring. What we really want to talk about is the TRULY degenerate states of matter. Let’s start with the stuff of dwarf stars. Think back to high school physics and chemistry and imagine the model of the atom. You’ve got the happy nucleus with its boisterous cloud of rotating electrons. That’s the stuff of normal matter but think for a moment what happens at the heart of super-dense stars. Eventually these massive furnaces run out of fuel. When they do, then they begin to collapse. A typical star is a constant battle between the energy pouring OUTWARD from nuclear fusion and gravity pulling INWARD. I won’t go into the details here but when a star begins to run out of fuel, then gravity begins to win the battle and slowly the star compresses. Eventually, the compression becomes SO intense that the atom itself is compromised. Rather than being comprised of a nucleus and a cloud of electrons, imagine the empty space being crunched down to the point where even the electrons are bound together in the nucleus and the nuclei are stacked right on top of each other. This is the stuff of the dwarf star. All the empty space has been most rudely removed leaving a super-dense material that the sci-fi aficionados refer to as “Dwarf Star Alloy”. Super dense and super tough, this is the no-nonsense material of the universe.
In some cases though, we go even further. If a dwarf star becomes TOO dense then it condenses even more. Based on the description of dwarf stars though, you may ask “how can this possibly be? There’s nowhere else for the matter to go?” And this is exactly true. Dwarf stars are comprised of matter packed tightly together to the nth degree. There’s no empty space left. Neutrons and protons and electrons are stacked on top of each other like a child’s building blocks. Beyond a certain point, the very laws of physics themselves are compromised. Above a certain mass the dwarf star actually punches a hole in the very fabric of spacetime. Once this happens, the star has become a black hole. At this point, the star has collapsed into a quantum singularity, a location of infinite mass and yet no volume. The very laws of physics have been violated. This is the stuff of which quasars are made; perhaps a good topic for another post. The point is, quite simply, that when your physics teacher lectured on solids, liquids and gases, he or she skipped the most entertaining states of matter.
Lastly, the book made some interesting statements about the Earth’s ‘radio bubble’. This is the sphere around the Earth that which has been exposed to radio transmissions from the radio and television age of the planet. Going back to the earliest transmissions this bubble has a radius of about 100 light-years and includes about 1000 total stars; many of which have been shown to have planets in orbit around them. So from a purely technical standpoint, it is entirely possible that a civilization somewhere is enjoying the first days of television on our planet. The problem, however, is one of reception not distance. Simply to detect the carrier wave of our signals a civilization at 100 light-years distance would require a radio telescope 15 times the size of our largest, Arecibo. To actually decode anything would require a radio receiver 20 miles in diameter. Sadly, the omni-directional nature of our transmissions works against us in a major way here. In the popular culture on the subject we like to show alien’s listening in on our every move with ease but in reality they would have to be pretty damn determined to do so.
Monday, November 24, 2008
Thought for the Day: Blundering into Success
Over the years the random inputs to my mind have been rife with examples of the fact that sometimes you can just try TOO damn hard. Yes, I remember back in the late 70s I saw a Dr. Who episode in which the only way to solve some bizarre quandary was to simply stop trying to do so. Not long after, the “Key to Time” storyline from the same series has the Doctor escaping his somewhat dualistic enemies by randomizing his own destination so that not even HE knows there the fuck he’s going. Even later we find Douglas Adams’ Dirk Gently proclaiming that the key to learning to fly is to simply “throw yourself at the ground… and miss.” Clearly Dirk’s modus operandi is doomed to a painful conclusion in the cold, hard light of reality but I think that in some twisted way there’s something to be said for the general concept.
This idea was brought to mind today as I was creeping up on 5:00 and writing the same UI for what is at least the 5th time. As a sidebar, let me say that when I say “the 5th time” I do not mean “the engineer-exaggerated version of the phrase which really means the 2nd time but has become the victim of hyperbole to elicit sympathy” 5th time but the more than a little annoyed version of the 5th time. This is the 5th time that comes just before the 6th time when you actually throw a coffee cup at your screen. Sidebar ends.
The clock was hovering around 20 minutes to 5 and therefore, as any employee knows, I had exactly -0- interest in what I was doing. The only purpose of even TRYING to do anything was the knowledge that doing NOTHING would simply make the remaining 20 minutes of the day seem even longer than they were already doomed to be. So as I was diligently and apathetically typing out code I had absolutely no interest in I was shocked to find that what I had carefully crafted out of my own ennui and general desire to be anywhere else but in the office was actually… working…? No… no, no, no, no, no… At this point I must take reality by the short and curlies and shake it until it yelps in an unmanly falsetto.
But no, gonadal agitations aside, it was indeed true. What I had TRIED to do 4 times without success despite much careful research and care and feeding had in fact appeared quite figuratively out of nowhere. Unluckily for my new creation, its sudden call into existence, though miraculous, was insufficient to keep me in the office even one nanosecond past 5:00 but I did ponder the significance of the event long enough to at least consider immortalizing its spontaneous generation with a blog entry. It was during that mental memorialization of the miracle that other strange examples of this came to mind.
My eldest daughter Amanda, for example, is profoundly personally apathetic. She walks down the hall and kids will trip all over themselves to say hello to her. She is the most accidentally popular kid in the class but her universal response to all such greetings is a stony silence. Her reaction isn’t due to snobbishness; in fact it’s quite the opposite. She is absolutely CONVINCED that she has no friends so the people who say “Hi, Amanda!” with such enthusiasm must most certainly be greeting some OTHER nearby person who happens to share the same name and therefore she needn’t embarrass herself by responding to them in error. In counterpoint you see people every day who try *SO* hard to be liked and to be popular and inevitably they are universally disregarded. They’d give their left arm for even the tiniest measure of what Amanda garners so effortlessly yet despite all their trying they come up empty.
On a personal level, I’ve noticed this bizarre phenomenon come into play for me in the most unimaginable ways. Invariably, the greatest things befall us when we least expect them and when we weren’t even really looking for anything to happen. The surest way to fuck them up, of course, is to overanalyze them too much and start asking questions of The Fates. Nothing pisses off a woman with a pair of shears more than unnecessary cross-examination. If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the past few years it’s that sometimes you just have to grin, shake your head and quietly accept the gift that life has given you.
Lastly, if you think about it, this actually really makes perfect sense. The entire body of life on Earth is the product of a lot of time and a hell of a lot of random chance. A billion years ago the planet was a ball of chemicals, a huge chemistry set waiting to find its true potential. As time passed, a little bit of this met up with a little bit of that until you had simple cells. Once those cells learned to reproduce then the wheels of fate and fortune really hit their pace as every conceivable organism that the laws of nature and probability could dream up found its place in the Cambrian Explosion. Forms came and forms went but in the end, standing at the top of the tree of life you find the miracle that is man. We really are the luckiest of the lucky, the pinnacle of success from a billion years of throwing dice. Should it really be any surprise that from time to time life smiles on us when we’re least expecting it?
This idea was brought to mind today as I was creeping up on 5:00 and writing the same UI for what is at least the 5th time. As a sidebar, let me say that when I say “the 5th time” I do not mean “the engineer-exaggerated version of the phrase which really means the 2nd time but has become the victim of hyperbole to elicit sympathy” 5th time but the more than a little annoyed version of the 5th time. This is the 5th time that comes just before the 6th time when you actually throw a coffee cup at your screen. Sidebar ends.
The clock was hovering around 20 minutes to 5 and therefore, as any employee knows, I had exactly -0- interest in what I was doing. The only purpose of even TRYING to do anything was the knowledge that doing NOTHING would simply make the remaining 20 minutes of the day seem even longer than they were already doomed to be. So as I was diligently and apathetically typing out code I had absolutely no interest in I was shocked to find that what I had carefully crafted out of my own ennui and general desire to be anywhere else but in the office was actually… working…? No… no, no, no, no, no… At this point I must take reality by the short and curlies and shake it until it yelps in an unmanly falsetto.
But no, gonadal agitations aside, it was indeed true. What I had TRIED to do 4 times without success despite much careful research and care and feeding had in fact appeared quite figuratively out of nowhere. Unluckily for my new creation, its sudden call into existence, though miraculous, was insufficient to keep me in the office even one nanosecond past 5:00 but I did ponder the significance of the event long enough to at least consider immortalizing its spontaneous generation with a blog entry. It was during that mental memorialization of the miracle that other strange examples of this came to mind.
My eldest daughter Amanda, for example, is profoundly personally apathetic. She walks down the hall and kids will trip all over themselves to say hello to her. She is the most accidentally popular kid in the class but her universal response to all such greetings is a stony silence. Her reaction isn’t due to snobbishness; in fact it’s quite the opposite. She is absolutely CONVINCED that she has no friends so the people who say “Hi, Amanda!” with such enthusiasm must most certainly be greeting some OTHER nearby person who happens to share the same name and therefore she needn’t embarrass herself by responding to them in error. In counterpoint you see people every day who try *SO* hard to be liked and to be popular and inevitably they are universally disregarded. They’d give their left arm for even the tiniest measure of what Amanda garners so effortlessly yet despite all their trying they come up empty.
On a personal level, I’ve noticed this bizarre phenomenon come into play for me in the most unimaginable ways. Invariably, the greatest things befall us when we least expect them and when we weren’t even really looking for anything to happen. The surest way to fuck them up, of course, is to overanalyze them too much and start asking questions of The Fates. Nothing pisses off a woman with a pair of shears more than unnecessary cross-examination. If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the past few years it’s that sometimes you just have to grin, shake your head and quietly accept the gift that life has given you.
Lastly, if you think about it, this actually really makes perfect sense. The entire body of life on Earth is the product of a lot of time and a hell of a lot of random chance. A billion years ago the planet was a ball of chemicals, a huge chemistry set waiting to find its true potential. As time passed, a little bit of this met up with a little bit of that until you had simple cells. Once those cells learned to reproduce then the wheels of fate and fortune really hit their pace as every conceivable organism that the laws of nature and probability could dream up found its place in the Cambrian Explosion. Forms came and forms went but in the end, standing at the top of the tree of life you find the miracle that is man. We really are the luckiest of the lucky, the pinnacle of success from a billion years of throwing dice. Should it really be any surprise that from time to time life smiles on us when we’re least expecting it?
Sunday, November 23, 2008
Movie: Nosferatu (1922)
This ancient silent movie adaptation of Dracula is set in 1838 in the fictional town of Wisburg and if there’s one thing you can say for it it’s that it certainly doesn’t fuck around with any of that silly “setup” crap. The first lines of actual dialog occur when our protagonist Hutter brings his wife Ellen some flowers and she responds by saying, “Why did you kill them… the beautiful flowers?!” One gets the feeling immediately that something is amiss. The second line of dialog occur in the street only a minute later. After exchanging friendly greetings with someone… (we know not who) Hutter is greeted with the words, “Don’t be in a hurry. No one can escape his destiny.” I’m sure this is a lot to digest for someone who only 2 minutes and 37 seconds before was happily standing before his shaving mirror.
An almost immediate observation on the silent movie genre is that in a bizarre way it leaves much more to the imagination than even reading the story. It’s clear from the action that a lot more dialog is occurring then the audience is privy to. Since actually conveying dialog in textual form requires the filmmakers to cut away to a printed card the use of words is pretty scanty. The primitive state of film-making is also glaringly obvious. Outside scenes appear in either blue and white or red and white while inside scenes are a happy brownish tone. The action scenes, such as when Orlock’s coach appears to retrieve Hutter, leave one laughing a bit with their almost claymation-like choppiness. Clearly we’ve come a long way to our HD DVD players.
Anyway, back to the story. Hutter is apparently on his way to work for Knock, the local real-estate agent. The film finds Knock reading a page of what is obvious gibberish but is apparently a letter from Count Orlock of Transylvania. He wants a home in Wisburg. Since he is of noble birth he of course has requested something abandoned and run-down. Something like the house just across the street from Hutter. Knock hypes Hutter up with promises of a “lot of money” and assigns him to travel to Transylvania to negotiate a deal. Hutter is ludicrously excited and runs back home to tell the wife, “I’m going to travel far away to the country of thieves and ghosts!” Ellen doesn’t bother to voice the worry that cascades most obviously across her face and so Hutter is off to his presumed doom. This will be a lesson to all of you young wives out there. Speak up, men are idiots.
Hutter eventually arrives in the Carpathians where one mention of Count Orlock puts the natives on their guard. Staying the night in a local inn he happens to find a copy of a tome on the subject of “Nosferatu” but poo-poos it with a hearty but unheard laugh. The next morning he finds natives who will drive him within sight of the castle but refuse to go any further on the grounds that the castle is “creepy”. I’d like to thank the makers of my particular copy of this movie for their BRILLIANT rendering of the movie’s subtitle cards from their original German into Leave it to Beaver-Style 1950s English. Creepy… unbelievable. ANYway… since the villagers won’t take Hutter to the castle he sets off on foot but no sooner does he step down than a coach arrives unbidden from the castle driven by someone who looks a LOT like the villain wearing a pointy hat. Wordlessly the coachman directs Hutter into the coach and then to the main gates of the castle.
Hutter is greeted inside by another man who has the same ghastly look as the coachman. He offers Hutter a meal despite the late hour. Our unwitting hero cuts himself slicing some bread leading our host to another bit of wonderously opaque dialog, “You’ve hurt yourself… The Precious Blood!” Said blood he of course licks from his guest’s hand. It should be noted that this is standard guest etiquette at Slaven dinner parties. To hell with band aids, we’ll drink the blood right off your bloody finger! After his snack, the host comes on to Hutter with the words, “Should we not spend a little time togther, my very dear friend? Sunrise is not far away.” This is also standard Slaven parlance for “get the fuck out, it’s late.”
Hutter awakes after a fade cut with a cut finger and a sore neck but is greeted with a fresh meal including wine but absolutely NO vanilla vodka. Very sad in my book. After his meal he goes outside for a morning constitutional and to write a letter home. He writes, amusingly, that “the mosquitoes are a real pest. I have two bites on my neck very close together.” Transylvanian mosquitoes ARE the worst in my experience. Despite the fact that no villager will come near the castle, the place does apparently get mail so our hero can send his missive and retrieve the incoming mail for Count Orlock. While giving our good Count the mail, he drops a picture of the beloved Ellen. Upon seeing her, the count remarks simply, “Your wife has a beautiful neck…” I can relate to the man’s viewpoint on women. Personally, I always look first at a woman’s kneecaps, then left pinky toe and then her neck but to each his own. Driven by lust, the Count agrees to buy the beautiful, deserted house across the street from Hutter. Definite stalker tendencies coming to the forefront there.
Hutter returns to his room and peruses the book he found at the inn for more details on Nosferatu. Somehow, after all his giddy chortling he finally starts to take things seriously and exactly 30 minutes into the film we find Orlock standing in the doorway in that iconic pose that we’ve ALL seen a million times. Hutter finally realizes that he’s in deep shit. Meanwhile Ellen is somnambulating on the balcony in a most precarious manner as her husband is again set upon by the Count. Hutter awakes to a seemingly deserted castle and finds his way IMMEDIATELY to the casket of the Count who lies with his face exposed to the sun. In horror, Hutter runs away and swoons but awakes in time to find the Count packing to move. The count exits via carriage and Hutter makes his escape.
At this point, the movie either takes a horrendous turn into the unfollowable or else the wine has finally taken hold. OK, so Knock goes a bit inexplicably insane and starts eating bugs. This is a callback to the Renfield character after which he’s based but in the context of this movie… makes NO sense whatsoever. Ellen, in response to all this, decides to go to the beach while wearing a long, flowing black dress. Meanwhile Hutter is recovering in a hospital and sets sail for home. It’s a bit odd that he didn’t need a ship to GET there in the first place but needs one to get back. OK, so Orlock has booked passage on a ship and the whole crew is taken out by a plague. The first mate goes below to hack open one of the boxes below deck for no reason and out pops Orlock. The first mate is horrified and jumps overboard while Orlock takes out the captain.
It is at this point, that I completely lose the thread of the story. Orlock has presumably entered the neighborhood, the plague has taken hold. Hutter has returned home but his wife is worried and reading Hutter’s book about Nosferatu… OK, I have to admit that this movie makes no sense. Even when I was less distracted by the wine, it made little to no sense to me and lacked continuity. The town has turned on Knock which makes sense since he caused this mess by selling a house to Orlock, I suppose. Four minutes from the end, another iconic moment in movie history; Orlock is creeping up the stairs and all we see is his shadow. He’s closing in on Ellen… Oh the suspense! But wait! Orlock has failed to notice the sunrise! The cock has crowed and Orlock dies in most dramatic fashion! I failed to mention that Ellen read in the book that if someone gives willingly of their blood and distracts the Nosferatu from the coming of dawn then the villain shall be undone. Apparently that’s what I missed in this grainy dialog. In summary: yay. The forces of good prevail and the plague is ended with the death of Orlock.
Boy. That was a bitchin’ movie.
An almost immediate observation on the silent movie genre is that in a bizarre way it leaves much more to the imagination than even reading the story. It’s clear from the action that a lot more dialog is occurring then the audience is privy to. Since actually conveying dialog in textual form requires the filmmakers to cut away to a printed card the use of words is pretty scanty. The primitive state of film-making is also glaringly obvious. Outside scenes appear in either blue and white or red and white while inside scenes are a happy brownish tone. The action scenes, such as when Orlock’s coach appears to retrieve Hutter, leave one laughing a bit with their almost claymation-like choppiness. Clearly we’ve come a long way to our HD DVD players.
Anyway, back to the story. Hutter is apparently on his way to work for Knock, the local real-estate agent. The film finds Knock reading a page of what is obvious gibberish but is apparently a letter from Count Orlock of Transylvania. He wants a home in Wisburg. Since he is of noble birth he of course has requested something abandoned and run-down. Something like the house just across the street from Hutter. Knock hypes Hutter up with promises of a “lot of money” and assigns him to travel to Transylvania to negotiate a deal. Hutter is ludicrously excited and runs back home to tell the wife, “I’m going to travel far away to the country of thieves and ghosts!” Ellen doesn’t bother to voice the worry that cascades most obviously across her face and so Hutter is off to his presumed doom. This will be a lesson to all of you young wives out there. Speak up, men are idiots.
Hutter eventually arrives in the Carpathians where one mention of Count Orlock puts the natives on their guard. Staying the night in a local inn he happens to find a copy of a tome on the subject of “Nosferatu” but poo-poos it with a hearty but unheard laugh. The next morning he finds natives who will drive him within sight of the castle but refuse to go any further on the grounds that the castle is “creepy”. I’d like to thank the makers of my particular copy of this movie for their BRILLIANT rendering of the movie’s subtitle cards from their original German into Leave it to Beaver-Style 1950s English. Creepy… unbelievable. ANYway… since the villagers won’t take Hutter to the castle he sets off on foot but no sooner does he step down than a coach arrives unbidden from the castle driven by someone who looks a LOT like the villain wearing a pointy hat. Wordlessly the coachman directs Hutter into the coach and then to the main gates of the castle.
Hutter is greeted inside by another man who has the same ghastly look as the coachman. He offers Hutter a meal despite the late hour. Our unwitting hero cuts himself slicing some bread leading our host to another bit of wonderously opaque dialog, “You’ve hurt yourself… The Precious Blood!” Said blood he of course licks from his guest’s hand. It should be noted that this is standard guest etiquette at Slaven dinner parties. To hell with band aids, we’ll drink the blood right off your bloody finger! After his snack, the host comes on to Hutter with the words, “Should we not spend a little time togther, my very dear friend? Sunrise is not far away.” This is also standard Slaven parlance for “get the fuck out, it’s late.”
Hutter awakes after a fade cut with a cut finger and a sore neck but is greeted with a fresh meal including wine but absolutely NO vanilla vodka. Very sad in my book. After his meal he goes outside for a morning constitutional and to write a letter home. He writes, amusingly, that “the mosquitoes are a real pest. I have two bites on my neck very close together.” Transylvanian mosquitoes ARE the worst in my experience. Despite the fact that no villager will come near the castle, the place does apparently get mail so our hero can send his missive and retrieve the incoming mail for Count Orlock. While giving our good Count the mail, he drops a picture of the beloved Ellen. Upon seeing her, the count remarks simply, “Your wife has a beautiful neck…” I can relate to the man’s viewpoint on women. Personally, I always look first at a woman’s kneecaps, then left pinky toe and then her neck but to each his own. Driven by lust, the Count agrees to buy the beautiful, deserted house across the street from Hutter. Definite stalker tendencies coming to the forefront there.
Hutter returns to his room and peruses the book he found at the inn for more details on Nosferatu. Somehow, after all his giddy chortling he finally starts to take things seriously and exactly 30 minutes into the film we find Orlock standing in the doorway in that iconic pose that we’ve ALL seen a million times. Hutter finally realizes that he’s in deep shit. Meanwhile Ellen is somnambulating on the balcony in a most precarious manner as her husband is again set upon by the Count. Hutter awakes to a seemingly deserted castle and finds his way IMMEDIATELY to the casket of the Count who lies with his face exposed to the sun. In horror, Hutter runs away and swoons but awakes in time to find the Count packing to move. The count exits via carriage and Hutter makes his escape.
At this point, the movie either takes a horrendous turn into the unfollowable or else the wine has finally taken hold. OK, so Knock goes a bit inexplicably insane and starts eating bugs. This is a callback to the Renfield character after which he’s based but in the context of this movie… makes NO sense whatsoever. Ellen, in response to all this, decides to go to the beach while wearing a long, flowing black dress. Meanwhile Hutter is recovering in a hospital and sets sail for home. It’s a bit odd that he didn’t need a ship to GET there in the first place but needs one to get back. OK, so Orlock has booked passage on a ship and the whole crew is taken out by a plague. The first mate goes below to hack open one of the boxes below deck for no reason and out pops Orlock. The first mate is horrified and jumps overboard while Orlock takes out the captain.
It is at this point, that I completely lose the thread of the story. Orlock has presumably entered the neighborhood, the plague has taken hold. Hutter has returned home but his wife is worried and reading Hutter’s book about Nosferatu… OK, I have to admit that this movie makes no sense. Even when I was less distracted by the wine, it made little to no sense to me and lacked continuity. The town has turned on Knock which makes sense since he caused this mess by selling a house to Orlock, I suppose. Four minutes from the end, another iconic moment in movie history; Orlock is creeping up the stairs and all we see is his shadow. He’s closing in on Ellen… Oh the suspense! But wait! Orlock has failed to notice the sunrise! The cock has crowed and Orlock dies in most dramatic fashion! I failed to mention that Ellen read in the book that if someone gives willingly of their blood and distracts the Nosferatu from the coming of dawn then the villain shall be undone. Apparently that’s what I missed in this grainy dialog. In summary: yay. The forces of good prevail and the plague is ended with the death of Orlock.
Boy. That was a bitchin’ movie.
What I learned Today: Lagrangian Points
While reading “Death by Black Hole and other Quandaries” I was reintroduced to a REALLY cool concept referred to as a Lagrangian point. You can read the long-winded Wikipedia version of this concept here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point.
The short and sweet description of this concept is that if you put an object out in space at a Lagrangian point then it’ll quietly just sit there forever. On the surface, yeah, I admit, this is pretty unassuming but think about it. In the vast majority of locations in the solar system if you set an object down it’s going to slowly make its way toward SOMETHING. Usually that something is the sun and anybody who’s had a sunburn knows that THAT is no fun whatsoever. So a Lagrangian point is the universe’s version of Free Parking. If you fly a satellite and park it at such a point then it’ll hang out there for a long time which in the grand scheme is damn convenient. These points have been used already by NASA for various long-term missions which you can read about in the Wikiepedia entry.
Executive Summary: Lagrangian Points – Solar System’s version of Free Parking. Mega-cool.
The short and sweet description of this concept is that if you put an object out in space at a Lagrangian point then it’ll quietly just sit there forever. On the surface, yeah, I admit, this is pretty unassuming but think about it. In the vast majority of locations in the solar system if you set an object down it’s going to slowly make its way toward SOMETHING. Usually that something is the sun and anybody who’s had a sunburn knows that THAT is no fun whatsoever. So a Lagrangian point is the universe’s version of Free Parking. If you fly a satellite and park it at such a point then it’ll hang out there for a long time which in the grand scheme is damn convenient. These points have been used already by NASA for various long-term missions which you can read about in the Wikiepedia entry.
Executive Summary: Lagrangian Points – Solar System’s version of Free Parking. Mega-cool.
Monday, October 13, 2008
Notes for “The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules our Lives”
So now we begin…
Evolution is apparently no guarantee of success at even the simplest of tasks. When faced with a light which randomly blinks red or green, humans are regularly out performed by rats. If the light blinks green 75% of the time, rats and lower mammals will choose the food dispensing button linked to the green light every time, guaranteeing themselves success 75% of the time. Humans who take the exact same test tend to believe that they can perceive a pattern in the blinking of the lights and their attempts to outsmart the randomness results in a success rate of around 60%.
Humans are also easily fooled by the patterns of randomness in their daily lives. One example given is a group of Air Force pilots in training during World War II. Their flight instructor stated emphatically that his brutal methods of roundly and publicly criticizing his trainees when they did poorly was much more effective than praising them when they did well. His reasoning went something like this: When his pilots did well, if he praised them then the next time they went out they did much more poorly than the previous flight. If, on the other hand, he simply criticized them when they did terribly then their next flights were invariably better. What the instructor failed to realize was that the good and bad flights were merely statistical outliers. So if a trainee had an exceptionally good flight then chances are good that no matter what feedback he was given he would have a worse flight the next time. The same holds for the opposite case. This phenomenon is known as “Regression to the Mean”. As a general rule, exceptional outcomes are typically followed by more average ones.
The author is also obviously a big fan of sports and gives us several pleasant statistical tidbits from the sporting world:
* The odds that a player with Roger Maris’ career home run stats will break Ruth’s homerun record in any given year: 1/32. [So you Mantle fans can sit down a shush for a while]
* From a statistical viewpoint, the 7-game playoff series in many sports is woefully insufficient. If two teams A and B have a probability of winning 55% and 45% of their head-to-head games respectively then the inferior team will still win a 7-game series 40% of the time. You’d need a series of 269 games to really prove anything. Think your teams aren’t that closely matched? If the teams compete at 66% and 33% then the inferior team still wins 20% of the time and 23 games would be required to determine the true champion.
* Justin Wolfers analyzed the outcomes of 70,000 college basketball games and found that when compared against the point spread there was a significant surplus of games that ended just below the predicted point spread at the expense of those that ended just above the point spread.
The Greeks had no proper concept of the laws of probability and this may have at least partially had to do with the fact that they had no dice. Instead they have astragali, the heel-bones of sheep. To the Greeks, the result of every throw of the astragali was the direct will of the gods themselves. This belief persists in the NFL where every touchdown reception is still the direct result of divine intervention. [at least if the touchdown celebrations are to be taken at face value]
DNA evidence in the courtroom can identify a crime suspect with a probability of error of 1:1 Million to 1:1 Billion. What is not typically talked about is the fact that the incidence of laboratory error is 1%.
This author, like so many before him treats us to an exposition of the “Monty Hall Problem.” The issue goes something like this. You’ve given three doors with three prizes. Behind one is a brand new car and behind 2 are goats. You pick your door, it doesn’t matter which one and in response Monty opens one of the remaining two doors revealing a goat. So now there is one door with a goat and one door with a car. To make your chances of winning as high as possible, do you stay with your original door or do you switch? As it turns out, if you stay with your original door your chances of winning are 1/3. If you switch, however, your odds are an even 50/50. This result, to say the least, is TERRIBLY unintuitive. To make it clearer though, it’s useful to extend the example to 100 doors with 99 goats and 1 car. Just as before, you pick your one door and in response Monty opens up 98 doors revealing 98 goats. Now you’re left with your original door and the one tantalizing door that remains unopened. So do you switch in this situation? Hopefully the answer now is a “damn right you do.”
Geralamo Cordano (died 1576) was one of the founders of probability theory though like so many never really lived to see his work used or popularized. The technical bits of his work aren’t all that interesting but his life in general was an odd one. His mother was unwed at the time of his birth so she tried to abort him using an evil brew of wormwood, burned barleycorn and tamarisk root. This obviously failed making Garalamo a pretty lucky fellow (or his mother a pretty shitty pharmacologist). He died a pauper after his own son testified against him in some uninteresting civil matter or other just to get himself a plum job as a torturer with the inquisition.
In 1995, the German lottery pulled 6 balls from a set of 49 as it always does each week. This would not normally be news except that the result was exactly the same as one week in 1986. The chances that a lottery of this sort will pull the same numbers twice in this time period: 28%.
Blaise Pascal gave up mathematics and went into religious seclusion near the end of his life, presumably after pondering an enigma termed “Pascal’s Wager”. It runs something like this. Assume there is no God. In that event the best you can do is to live a life of debauchery and then you die and it’s over. Contrarily, assume there IS a God. If you live a pious life then you have gained an infinite reward of an eternity in heaven. If you don’t, then all you got, again, was a brief life of pleasure. So, if one assumes there’s a 50% chance that God exists, the risk that he does NOT exist is dwarfed by the INFINITE reward you can receive if he DOES exist. Therefore, you should just assume that he does and thus at least take a shot at your life of bliss for all eternity. It’s obvious from Pascal’s behavior after this revelation which path he chose…
In 1992 the Virginia State Lottery offered a prize of $27,000,000. The lottery is configured to 6 random numbers from a pot of 44, a mere 7,000,000 possibilities. An investment group in Melbourne Australia got the bright idea to buy 7,000,000 tickets, one with each number combination. After a massive logistical nightmare, 1.4 million tickets filled out by hand, the group was almost too late. They managed to only get 5,000,000 of the numbers submitted in time but none the less did win the prize and collect the jackpot.
Joseph Jagger took his statistical prowess to Monte Carlo in 1873 to turn himself a tidy profit. He and six assistants took careful note of the outcomes on six roulette wheels over a 2-week period. At the end of that time, it was found that one of the wheels had a distinct bias towards certain numbers. A few days later exited with the equivalent of five million dollars in winnings. He was eventually foiled when the casino noticed his turn of luck and began reconfiguring the wheels at the end of each night.
The Greeks had far too much time on their hands it seems. Zeno, yet another Greek philosopher, postulated that you can never actually go anywhere. His logic runs this way. In order to travel 1 meter, you must first travel half a meter. Before you can travel half a meter though, you must first travel a quarter of a meter and so on. Therefore, to travel any distance at all requires you to travel an infinite number of finite distances which would of course take an infinite amount of time. Zeno, it seems, was married to the Red Queen. You’ve got to run TERRIBLY fast just to stay where you are! The Greeks had far too much time on their hands it seems. [This Geeky Greek sandwich is known as ‘Zenos Paradox’]
Bernoulli originated the idea that in order to obtain a good estimate of something’s true value you must first obtain a large sample of data for analysis. Unfortunately, in practice his original formulae are a bit off and often require the ENTIRE dataset to be obtained before any certainty is obtained. [U.S. political polls under the original Bernoulli mathematics would require polling 80% of the houses in the country]. This concept is known as the Law of Large Numbers.
On the other side of the fence, Kahneman and Tversky coined the ironic Law of Small Numbers to describe the tendency of the human population to assign inappropriate significance to vanishingly small data samples.
People pay respect and homage to numbers when clearly they shouldn’t. One large example given was the business of rating wines. When asked about the system the editor of Wine and Spirits Magazine was quoted as saying, “On many levels the rating system is completely nonsensical.” His colleague at the Wine Enthusiast is no more enthusiastic as he states simply, “The deeper you get into this system the more misguided and misleading it is.” Apparently even at the aesthetic level things are no better. When subjects are presented with five bottles of wine whose contents are identical but have different labels and prices ranging from $10 to $90 they will invariably state that the $90 wine is significantly better. In a similar test, most can’t tell a red wine from a white wine that has food coloring added. Perhaps most damning of all, when wine experts were presented with three wines, two of which were identical, half the time they could not even determine which wine was which.
The human mind is very poor at detecting randomness even when it encounters it. In a string of 1,000,000 random 1s and 0s, for example, one should expect to find strings of hundreds of 0s or 1s in a row. Recently, Apple’s iPod received hoards of complaints about its shuffle feature. Customers complained that sometimes the same song was played twice in a row; statistically, a very normal occurrence even in large libraries. Apple has since revised their shuffle algorithm to be LESS random so that it’ll appear MORE random.
People have a fundamental and deep-seated problem with randomness because it messes with our need to be in control. Ellen Langer did a study with nursing home retirees. In one group the retirees were allowed to arrange their own rooms and pick a plant to take care of. In the other it was all done for them and they had no say in the arrangement of their rooms. After 18 months the mortality rate in the group that had no control over their rooms was DOUBLE that of those that got to pick their own room layouts. [This is a stunning conclusion but one that lends itself to sample-space bias. Sicker individuals are going to a priori be placed in the no-control group so this could be a total red herring.]
The idea of Confirmation Bias also tends to skew our view of events. If a situation arises about which we have pre-conceived notions then we will tend to fit the facts to meet our theory rather than viewing them with complete rationality. David L Rosenhan demonstrated exactly that when he sent 10 people, 5 of them doctors, into a psychiatric ward. He told them all to act completely normally but to claim only that they were hearing voices that were not there. All 10 were admitted to the hospital. After being admitted, the subjects dropped the pretence of insanity and went about their normal activities while in the mental ward. Despite the fact that the participants were acting perfectly normally the doctor’s notes for the patients reflected obvious psychosis. Every simple everyday action the subjects performed pointed at some mental condition or other. The subjects were eventually released from the hospital after an average of 19 days.
It’s not just enthusiastic wine enthusiasts who can’t make qualitative judgments on a consistent basis. In a recent music experiment 14,341 participants were given the chance to download 48 songs by bands they had never heard of. The test subjects were divided into 9 different groups. The first 8 groups could see the average rating of each song by previous downloaders and how many times it had been downloaded but only for subjects in their group. So what you ended up with was 8 distinct music microcosms that had no connection to each other. The 9th group rated the songs but they couldn’t see the ratings of anyone else. Ostensibly this was the group that was totally unbiased by the influence of other participants so these ratings were more akin to true musical quality. Unsurprisingly, the 9 groups differed wildly on their ratings for the 48 songs. One song in particular was a #1 smash in one group but a #40 bomb in another. The control group ranked it at #29. Apparently what happens is that some songs jump out to an early and random lead and this results in their popularity. The pop music charts have little to do with the actual quality of music it seems.
Our author also relates one anecdote that jives perfectly with my notion that Bill Gates is just a normal schmuck like the rest of us who happened to just get lucky. The story goes somewhat similarly to this. Back in the day IBM came to Gates and said they needed an OS for their new personal computer. Gates initially balked at the idea and sent them to someone else. Well, the someone else apparently didn’t impress IBM much so they came back to Gates. Gates in the mean time had heard of a bit of software that might do the trick so he brought it up to IBM. After what must have been a comical bit of shrugging and “what do we do now” Gates obtained the software for $50,000 from this unnamed source, modified it slightly and then licensed it to IBM. The rest, it seems, is history. Gates didn’t do anything special. He just happened to be a software nexus of sorts. I gotta get me a nexus.
Vodka, it seems, is a masterfully marketed product. Despite the fact that it’s intended to be non-distinctive and neutral every vodka out there seems to make some weird claim to be unique. Ironically, when the New York Times put 21 vodkas to a blind taste test, the winner was the bartender’s cheapest, Smirnoff.
Publishing too is no stranger to the laws of luck. When the Sunday Times of London took the first chapter from two winners of the prestigious Mann-Booker prize for fiction and submitted them to publishers, not only did the publishers not recognize the pieces, 19 out of the 20 publishers rejected the books for publication. Gotta get lucky in this world I guess. Or maybe just verbose…
Saturday, June 07, 2008
Random Observations: Buying a Car
I've said before on this blog and in person to anyone who'd sit still long enough to listen that one of the biggest rules I try to live by is that of simply telling people the truth. That ranges from, "Dude, you really smell BAD and people are SO making fun of you behind your back" to "Honey, you are simply incredible and I'd do anything to keep you in my life."
I was reminded on Monday, however, of my one exception to this rule. Car dealers are exempt from the necessity of honesty and deserve as much spin and deception as you can possibly throw at them. Case in point... on Monday I went to trade in my wife's van towards the purchase of a smaller commuter car. The first car dealer I went to was very accommodating; we haggled out a reasonable price and I was quickly on my way. Ever interested in getting the best deal possible, however, I made my way to a neighboring dealer to perform the same task. After countless delays and negotiations this dealer arrived at a price $4,000 more than the other dealer. Seeing that this situation was clearly hopeless I thanked the salesman for his time, let him know that his price was $4,000 short of the offer he was competing against and made ready to head home. Before I could complete my exit, the salesman asked me to be patient and said he could work out a better price with the sales manager. To facilitate this he wrote out a little miniature contract in his awkward left-handed scrawl:
For the price of $XX,XXX plus tax, title and destination, I, _______, will buy this car today.
X ________________________
Then he asked me to sign his little contract. My reaction to this was a simple, direct, and blunt, "OK, I'm not signing your little contract; can you get me a better price or not? If you can, I will buy the car today but if you can't then just forget it." His response was to say simply, "Alright, I was just trying to help you out. I'll see what I can do."
After another 5 minutes of "seeing what he could do" he came back with half-priced all-season floor mats, a grand total of $121. So again I thanked him for his time and made ready my exit. However his bag of tricks wasn't done yet. He went on to enumerate all the reasons he thought I should buy from his dealership in checklist format:
Salesman: Well, you live on the south side so shouldn't you buy from us? We're closer.
Me: I can drive to the west side quite a few times for $4,000.
Salesman: You've used our service department before, shouldn't you buy from us?
Me: I bought my last Honda somewhere else and you didn't refuse to service that one.
Salesman: How about I throw in the floor mats for free?
Me: Um, $4,000 worth of floor mats?
So finally after 90 minutes of entertaining but pointless dickering I was left with my original offer. Why, simply, can't they say honestly, "we can't meet that price, thanks for shopping" and be done with it? Why must my time be wasted by these yahoos?
I was reminded on Monday, however, of my one exception to this rule. Car dealers are exempt from the necessity of honesty and deserve as much spin and deception as you can possibly throw at them. Case in point... on Monday I went to trade in my wife's van towards the purchase of a smaller commuter car. The first car dealer I went to was very accommodating; we haggled out a reasonable price and I was quickly on my way. Ever interested in getting the best deal possible, however, I made my way to a neighboring dealer to perform the same task. After countless delays and negotiations this dealer arrived at a price $4,000 more than the other dealer. Seeing that this situation was clearly hopeless I thanked the salesman for his time, let him know that his price was $4,000 short of the offer he was competing against and made ready to head home. Before I could complete my exit, the salesman asked me to be patient and said he could work out a better price with the sales manager. To facilitate this he wrote out a little miniature contract in his awkward left-handed scrawl:
For the price of $XX,XXX plus tax, title and destination, I, _______, will buy this car today.
X ________________________
Then he asked me to sign his little contract. My reaction to this was a simple, direct, and blunt, "OK, I'm not signing your little contract; can you get me a better price or not? If you can, I will buy the car today but if you can't then just forget it." His response was to say simply, "Alright, I was just trying to help you out. I'll see what I can do."
After another 5 minutes of "seeing what he could do" he came back with half-priced all-season floor mats, a grand total of $121. So again I thanked him for his time and made ready my exit. However his bag of tricks wasn't done yet. He went on to enumerate all the reasons he thought I should buy from his dealership in checklist format:
Salesman: Well, you live on the south side so shouldn't you buy from us? We're closer.
Me: I can drive to the west side quite a few times for $4,000.
Salesman: You've used our service department before, shouldn't you buy from us?
Me: I bought my last Honda somewhere else and you didn't refuse to service that one.
Salesman: How about I throw in the floor mats for free?
Me: Um, $4,000 worth of floor mats?
So finally after 90 minutes of entertaining but pointless dickering I was left with my original offer. Why, simply, can't they say honestly, "we can't meet that price, thanks for shopping" and be done with it? Why must my time be wasted by these yahoos?
Cormac McCarthy - The Road
Firstly let me say that about half-way through this somewhat slight slip of a book I was non-plussed to learn that it was an Oprah bookclub selection. See previous posts for my counter-cultural tendencies but in this case the content was dark enough to justify breaking my own rules. In short, McCarthy's "The Road" is the story of a father and son as they make their way across the U.S. after an unspecified apocalypse. The details of the plot in and of themselves are not all that interesting but the book does make several interesting points about the human condition.
On the surface, the book is a simple admonishment to the reader to appreciate the state of the world under the orderly governance of human law. The unnamed protagonists are assailed by cannibals, faced with the possibility of starvation and constantly on the alert for an untimely end to their fragile lives on the planet. All this is relatively standard for the post-apocalypse genre. What is very slightly unusual is the idea that in such a situation pockets of benevolence will persist. The father and son travel in search of "the good guys" who, we presume, will take them in. What is not clear is how the couple knows that such people even exist given that they haven't fallen in with them up to this point. Further, it's ironic that despite their claims to being on the side of "good" (whatever "good" can really mean in such a situation) they demonstrate benevolence towards the other human beings they encounter only begrudgingly.
To sum up, this is a fine example of the genre but not really one that introduces any grand new ideas. The standard plots and subplots apply in the same expected ways. A good introduction to the idea for those who may not have read the 1,000 books on the same topic which preceded it or been blessed with having watched the 20 TZ episodes that deal with the situation...
Sunday, June 01, 2008
The Neighbor's Gift
As I sat outside my house today I glanced over at my neighbor's house and realized there's an incredible irony just across our yard. Here; see if you can see it:
There! Isn't that awesomely ironic?! Oh... You don't...? OK; let me be a little more specific then.
My neighbor's done a lot of work on the exterior of his house and gone to a hell of a lot of trouble. I've seen him out there for hours pulling weeds and putting in borders and keeping everything watered. That's no small task let me tell you because I've watched him do it all. Note, however, that from his house he can't see even flower one. It's all on the other side of an opaque fence that's on the other side of a brick wall. If he wants to see the fruit of his own hours of labor he has to go and plant himself in the least comfortable place in his entire property, the drainage ditch that straddles the property line. But I, the lucky neighbor, get to enjoy his work every time I look out the window for absolutely nothing. I can sit on the patio and read a book and enjoy his hours of labor in complete comfort. In a very real way, those flowers are his selfless gift to the people around him because he certainly can't enjoy them very easily.
In a way, my neighbor's gift is an allegory for a larger life lesson. Just as my neighbor decorates his home with beautiful flowers he can't see, we all decorate our own lives with similar trappings that don't really benefit us directly. A kind smile shared with a stranger is utterly invisible to the giver. Kind and patient counsel given to a friend in need is an investment that may return nothing to the one who spent the time giving it in the first place. Ultimately, we must each decide if we're going to live our lives like my neighbor, erecting bowers of flowers for the enjoyment of others or letting our lots grow wild and weedy.Since Last We Wrote ... June 1st Edition
Alrighty then... it has been very nearly four months since last I wrote in this public missive to no one and to be QUITE frank and QUITE honest, if I tried to encapsulate the missing time and present it for your amusement I'm sure it would be utterly and completely unbelievable even to *ME*. At any rate, it must be said that I look back on the last few blog posts from January and February and rate myself a "right wanker" as they might say across the pond. I seemed to have been utterly consumed in a cloud of self-pity that's really quite disgusting to behold from my current position. Looking back on the blog posts of the past though, it is regrettable to me in the extreme that I don't keep a more private journal of my life's goings on as I'm pretty sure I've utterly forgotten those details that I failed to "belabor my readers" with so many months ago.
Today begins a new chapter; see if YOU can tell the difference...
Today begins a new chapter; see if YOU can tell the difference...
Saturday, February 09, 2008
Since last we wrote...
In many ways, I feel like a large bear who just awoke from a long, deep slumber and has shaken the snow from his fur to look about him on an unfamiliar landscape. In retrospect, I can't really be at all sure what happened over the past few months or what caused it but I think that now, finally, it's over. With the help of many dear friends including my greatest and dearest friend, my wife, I think I've come out of this funk a better and happier person. I will not bore you with the details certainly but I will share a few observations and experiences...
Last week at this time we went to my friend's wedding and it struck me as the sort of thing you'd see in a Lifetime Original Movie. Stuff this good just doesn't HAPPEN in real life. I'll let him write his own story in his own time but suffice to say that he married his elementary-school sweetheart after decades of separation. The lesson here simply seems to be that happiness doesn't just come to you; sometimes you have to wait for it and work for it but it's there to be had if you just keep trying.
Relatedly, you may recall that I had some concerns about the various spheres of my existence touching at this event. In retrospect, I'm not even sure what the hell I was worried about. My wife carried on with everybody I knew like they were old friends. When we got into the car to leave she seemed really excited to have met all the people I've regularly talked about for four years and said simply that "your friends are really funny." Clearly she had more fun than I did because I was wrapped up in my own silly concerns while she was just there to have fun and managed to do so with great ease. I can't help but wonder how long before my friends from work start calling up the house to talk to HER rather than ME.
Turning serious for a moment, I have to admit that in the past two months I have had to completely demolish my self-image and rebuild it from scratch. This morning my wife and I had a long talk and during the discussion it became clear to me that six months ago my self-image was basically still the one built for me during my childhood (see my autobiography Part 1). It wasn't really new information to me, I'd realized that much long ago but hadn't admitted it aloud to anyone. A lot of the problem over the past few months has been trying to rectify the conflicting ideas in my head. On one hand, my self-image said simply that while I might be an intelligent and articulate person, on a personal level I was more akin to a moldy sack of potatoes, that I had the social skills of a bowling ball with greasy finger holes. For 35 years this was all good. I continued to make no effort to get to know people and in exchange they dutifully ignored me (or more commonly were forced to ignore me after I ignored them). But then there came a break in the cycle. In a few specific cases I stopped ignoring people and instead turned myself toward them. I gave them my time and my attention and to my astonishment they reciprocated in kind. This too was all well and good until the conundrum was noticed. The results of my reaching out to people could not co-exist with my self-image. One or the other had to be explained away or revised. As I sit here I realize there are two paths away from this dillema because I've seen someone in my family take the darker path:
The dark path says that your self-image must be correct. If you believe you are unlikeable then who knows you better than yourself? It must certainly be so. But if the self-image is correct then that means the results of your experiment are wrong. There must be some REASON why people act in a friendly way towards you. What could they possibly want? Do they want my money? Are they going to rob me or break into my house? I had better keep these people at a distance because there's NO way they could really like me. They must have selfish motives of some sort... This is the path my mother took when she told me to "stop calling her god damn it". She cannot possibly rectify in her mind the conflict between the belief that she is a worthless lump of shit and the fact that I cared enough to call to see how she was doing. She has no choice but to corrupt my intentions with the belief that I worry only about how she spends my inheritance. To do otherwise would force her to amend her own concept of who she is.
Personally, I choose to amend myself and I will openly admit that it's INSANELY hard to do; typically I'm a relatively self-effacing person so it's difficult for me to look at myself and admit that it's just possible people might enjoy being around me. But given recent developments it's really the only reasonable conclusion I can come to. This is also not to say that it's over. It's a task of Herculean effort to tear apart one's very soul and piece it together again in a more amicable form but I am determined to do so because I've seen the darkness and pain of the alternative. More important even than me, I suspect, to this effort is my wife. As I look back over the past few weeks I realize more than ever how deep is her devotion to me and can't help but believe, now more than ever, that she was the greatest and best Choice I ever made in life.
Now normally, I would stop a blog entry right there. Big emotional and devotional crescendo right there at the end to carry with you around the house as you do laundry and chase the kids. Well, not today, boys and girls. Today we cleanse the palette a bit before we go because life lesson #65 for this month is that people don't like to be the victims of constant negativity. This is a trap I fall into often with people. When I'm describing something I tend to be complete and hit it from all angles. I'll exclaim the positives and then at some point roll around to the trivial negative points, if any, and give a nice, rounded picture of whatever I'm describing. I'm just about totally convinced that people just don't want to hear it. The alloy of 90% giddiness and 10% negativity somehow works out to be "well that sucked."
Lastly, and I think most importantly, is the realization that the key to life isn't what you do... or where you are... or what you happen to be eating at the time but rather who you're with. People, it has become clear, are the fuel on which life runs.
Last week at this time we went to my friend's wedding and it struck me as the sort of thing you'd see in a Lifetime Original Movie. Stuff this good just doesn't HAPPEN in real life. I'll let him write his own story in his own time but suffice to say that he married his elementary-school sweetheart after decades of separation. The lesson here simply seems to be that happiness doesn't just come to you; sometimes you have to wait for it and work for it but it's there to be had if you just keep trying.
Relatedly, you may recall that I had some concerns about the various spheres of my existence touching at this event. In retrospect, I'm not even sure what the hell I was worried about. My wife carried on with everybody I knew like they were old friends. When we got into the car to leave she seemed really excited to have met all the people I've regularly talked about for four years and said simply that "your friends are really funny." Clearly she had more fun than I did because I was wrapped up in my own silly concerns while she was just there to have fun and managed to do so with great ease. I can't help but wonder how long before my friends from work start calling up the house to talk to HER rather than ME.
Turning serious for a moment, I have to admit that in the past two months I have had to completely demolish my self-image and rebuild it from scratch. This morning my wife and I had a long talk and during the discussion it became clear to me that six months ago my self-image was basically still the one built for me during my childhood (see my autobiography Part 1). It wasn't really new information to me, I'd realized that much long ago but hadn't admitted it aloud to anyone. A lot of the problem over the past few months has been trying to rectify the conflicting ideas in my head. On one hand, my self-image said simply that while I might be an intelligent and articulate person, on a personal level I was more akin to a moldy sack of potatoes, that I had the social skills of a bowling ball with greasy finger holes. For 35 years this was all good. I continued to make no effort to get to know people and in exchange they dutifully ignored me (or more commonly were forced to ignore me after I ignored them). But then there came a break in the cycle. In a few specific cases I stopped ignoring people and instead turned myself toward them. I gave them my time and my attention and to my astonishment they reciprocated in kind. This too was all well and good until the conundrum was noticed. The results of my reaching out to people could not co-exist with my self-image. One or the other had to be explained away or revised. As I sit here I realize there are two paths away from this dillema because I've seen someone in my family take the darker path:
The dark path says that your self-image must be correct. If you believe you are unlikeable then who knows you better than yourself? It must certainly be so. But if the self-image is correct then that means the results of your experiment are wrong. There must be some REASON why people act in a friendly way towards you. What could they possibly want? Do they want my money? Are they going to rob me or break into my house? I had better keep these people at a distance because there's NO way they could really like me. They must have selfish motives of some sort... This is the path my mother took when she told me to "stop calling her god damn it". She cannot possibly rectify in her mind the conflict between the belief that she is a worthless lump of shit and the fact that I cared enough to call to see how she was doing. She has no choice but to corrupt my intentions with the belief that I worry only about how she spends my inheritance. To do otherwise would force her to amend her own concept of who she is.
Personally, I choose to amend myself and I will openly admit that it's INSANELY hard to do; typically I'm a relatively self-effacing person so it's difficult for me to look at myself and admit that it's just possible people might enjoy being around me. But given recent developments it's really the only reasonable conclusion I can come to. This is also not to say that it's over. It's a task of Herculean effort to tear apart one's very soul and piece it together again in a more amicable form but I am determined to do so because I've seen the darkness and pain of the alternative. More important even than me, I suspect, to this effort is my wife. As I look back over the past few weeks I realize more than ever how deep is her devotion to me and can't help but believe, now more than ever, that she was the greatest and best Choice I ever made in life.
Now normally, I would stop a blog entry right there. Big emotional and devotional crescendo right there at the end to carry with you around the house as you do laundry and chase the kids. Well, not today, boys and girls. Today we cleanse the palette a bit before we go because life lesson #65 for this month is that people don't like to be the victims of constant negativity. This is a trap I fall into often with people. When I'm describing something I tend to be complete and hit it from all angles. I'll exclaim the positives and then at some point roll around to the trivial negative points, if any, and give a nice, rounded picture of whatever I'm describing. I'm just about totally convinced that people just don't want to hear it. The alloy of 90% giddiness and 10% negativity somehow works out to be "well that sucked."
Lastly, and I think most importantly, is the realization that the key to life isn't what you do... or where you are... or what you happen to be eating at the time but rather who you're with. People, it has become clear, are the fuel on which life runs.
Saturday, January 26, 2008
It's All Fun and Games Until...
Tonight the Tattered Thread household hosted the monthly euchre party. The concept is a relatively straightforward one: 12 people get together (plus interested spectators) and play euchre, exchanging partners and tables in an intricate dance after every 10 tricks. Four rotations later, a winner is determined based on total points and a small amount of non-existent money changes hands.
What I completely don't understand is how we manage to get along. If you look at the group on paper, the only real common thread that ties it together is some connection to teaching (all the participants are 1st or 2nd degree friends of Kathy's) but that thread doesn't seem to actually come into play very much. There is some amount of low-level "shop talk" but not enough to account for even 10% of the actual interaction. No, somehow if you put 13 people in a room and give them something to do they'll find a way to entertain themselves together. From a purely logical standpoint I simply can't fathom it. Even more puzzling to explain is the fact that I manage to participate in it in some positive way but could not for the life of me tell you how. I just do not understand frivolity. I can apparently do it (not all that well mind you) but I just can't explain it.
Now, it was all fun and games until ... the "internet video" screening. I should mention that these get-togethers do have at times a somewhat adult thread running through them. This is natural of course whenever adults get together but sometimes it can run horribly amok. I won't state which of the many "worldwide internet fad videos" we watched (as a group) at one of our guests suggestion but suffice it to say that it was, by far, the most disgusting thing I've ever seen. It was personally difficult to resist the temptation to vomit on my own floor. If I'd been standing over someone else's floor I might not have tried so hard. This is exactly the reason you invite hip young people to your parties. They know all about this... wait a minute... maybe that's why you DON'T invite... Any rate, no harm done except for the large, brown stain on my eternal human soul.
The one thing I'm not overly thrilled about is the choice of activities. Despite the fact that the party is billed as a 'euchre party' the cards actually seem to have very little to do with it. In fact, in the past when we've had substitutes for missing players who were actually intent on the game, they were a detriment to the enjoyment of others. Playing cards is really more of an excuse to get together than a reason to do so and while the structure of the game forces a regularly timed mingling, in the end it gets in the way and creates moments of awkwardness. Depending on how the rotation works out, you may end up stuck at a table for 20 minutes with the 3 least compatible people in the room or you may find the people you enjoy the most stranded at a distance for the entire night. This was a much more enjoyable format BEFORE we'd done it a dozen times and got to know each other well.
There is also a bit of a quandary on the topic of alternative party activities. During one of our monthly club meetings we were short of the necessary quorum for the usual game by a significant amount so we played charades instead. This, in my opinion, was an order of magnitude more enjoyable than euchre. Where euchre divided us, charades brought us all together to play and have fun as a unit. What is odd about this is that many people simply refuse to play and I'm puzzled as to why. Technically speaking, being a reserved person I shouldn't play a game that requires me to get up in front of other people and act the apparent fool but for some reason I enjoy it. It forces me to crack open my shell and let the world see what's inside. Having brought this up to others though it seems like it's actually the more outgoing people who refuse to play and I have absolutely NO idea why. You would expect that being in front of people and having their undivided attention should be natural to someone who is extroverted. Several in our group though flatly refuse to even attend if charades is the game of choice. It makes me question the true nature of what it means to be extroverted; why am I, socially clam-like as I am, willing to expose myself to the universe in this way while more outgoing people are not? Is this a universal trade-off that I've failed to notice until now?
Even further from the original topic of this post, this makes me question the entire dynamic of friendship and interacting with people. I've always viewed extroverted people as open people who are out there to be befriended by anyone. They were, in my mind, always ready to share of themselves and that's what made them everyone's friend. Introverts were clams that you had to pry open with a screwdriver. They were hard to get to know and you had to really work at it.
It seems clear to me now though that it's actually the opposite. Outgoing people put a good face on it, they have a version of themselves that they show to the world and is available to anyone who merely wants to take the time to look. This is not to say that the face you see is fake, it's certainly them but it's only a part. To get to the heart, the true self, of an extrovert you have to first dig down past those outward layers. The hardest thing about this process I suspect is knowing when you've actually finished. How do you know when you've finally gotten to a person's true feelings? Is it when the office clown suddenly becomes serious? Perhaps when the pious man admits he has doubts? I just don't know but it's certainly an adventure trying to find out.
Anyway, it's officially 1 A.M. and I've suddenly realized that this post that took you a whole five minutes to read took me two and a half hours of typing and analysis to generate. I'm not sure I've come to any new conclusions except that there are some people I'd like to try to get to the very heart of (but won't know when I get there). Further, I'm going to nag my wife to schedule a charades party and invite every person I can think of. Then we'll see who shows up and who doesn't... Then those of us who do show up can psychoanalyze those who don't.
What I completely don't understand is how we manage to get along. If you look at the group on paper, the only real common thread that ties it together is some connection to teaching (all the participants are 1st or 2nd degree friends of Kathy's) but that thread doesn't seem to actually come into play very much. There is some amount of low-level "shop talk" but not enough to account for even 10% of the actual interaction. No, somehow if you put 13 people in a room and give them something to do they'll find a way to entertain themselves together. From a purely logical standpoint I simply can't fathom it. Even more puzzling to explain is the fact that I manage to participate in it in some positive way but could not for the life of me tell you how. I just do not understand frivolity. I can apparently do it (not all that well mind you) but I just can't explain it.
Now, it was all fun and games until ... the "internet video" screening. I should mention that these get-togethers do have at times a somewhat adult thread running through them. This is natural of course whenever adults get together but sometimes it can run horribly amok. I won't state which of the many "worldwide internet fad videos" we watched (as a group) at one of our guests suggestion but suffice it to say that it was, by far, the most disgusting thing I've ever seen. It was personally difficult to resist the temptation to vomit on my own floor. If I'd been standing over someone else's floor I might not have tried so hard. This is exactly the reason you invite hip young people to your parties. They know all about this... wait a minute... maybe that's why you DON'T invite... Any rate, no harm done except for the large, brown stain on my eternal human soul.
The one thing I'm not overly thrilled about is the choice of activities. Despite the fact that the party is billed as a 'euchre party' the cards actually seem to have very little to do with it. In fact, in the past when we've had substitutes for missing players who were actually intent on the game, they were a detriment to the enjoyment of others. Playing cards is really more of an excuse to get together than a reason to do so and while the structure of the game forces a regularly timed mingling, in the end it gets in the way and creates moments of awkwardness. Depending on how the rotation works out, you may end up stuck at a table for 20 minutes with the 3 least compatible people in the room or you may find the people you enjoy the most stranded at a distance for the entire night. This was a much more enjoyable format BEFORE we'd done it a dozen times and got to know each other well.
There is also a bit of a quandary on the topic of alternative party activities. During one of our monthly club meetings we were short of the necessary quorum for the usual game by a significant amount so we played charades instead. This, in my opinion, was an order of magnitude more enjoyable than euchre. Where euchre divided us, charades brought us all together to play and have fun as a unit. What is odd about this is that many people simply refuse to play and I'm puzzled as to why. Technically speaking, being a reserved person I shouldn't play a game that requires me to get up in front of other people and act the apparent fool but for some reason I enjoy it. It forces me to crack open my shell and let the world see what's inside. Having brought this up to others though it seems like it's actually the more outgoing people who refuse to play and I have absolutely NO idea why. You would expect that being in front of people and having their undivided attention should be natural to someone who is extroverted. Several in our group though flatly refuse to even attend if charades is the game of choice. It makes me question the true nature of what it means to be extroverted; why am I, socially clam-like as I am, willing to expose myself to the universe in this way while more outgoing people are not? Is this a universal trade-off that I've failed to notice until now?
Even further from the original topic of this post, this makes me question the entire dynamic of friendship and interacting with people. I've always viewed extroverted people as open people who are out there to be befriended by anyone. They were, in my mind, always ready to share of themselves and that's what made them everyone's friend. Introverts were clams that you had to pry open with a screwdriver. They were hard to get to know and you had to really work at it.
It seems clear to me now though that it's actually the opposite. Outgoing people put a good face on it, they have a version of themselves that they show to the world and is available to anyone who merely wants to take the time to look. This is not to say that the face you see is fake, it's certainly them but it's only a part. To get to the heart, the true self, of an extrovert you have to first dig down past those outward layers. The hardest thing about this process I suspect is knowing when you've actually finished. How do you know when you've finally gotten to a person's true feelings? Is it when the office clown suddenly becomes serious? Perhaps when the pious man admits he has doubts? I just don't know but it's certainly an adventure trying to find out.
Anyway, it's officially 1 A.M. and I've suddenly realized that this post that took you a whole five minutes to read took me two and a half hours of typing and analysis to generate. I'm not sure I've come to any new conclusions except that there are some people I'd like to try to get to the very heart of (but won't know when I get there). Further, I'm going to nag my wife to schedule a charades party and invite every person I can think of. Then we'll see who shows up and who doesn't... Then those of us who do show up can psychoanalyze those who don't.
Friday, January 25, 2008
Black and White just make... Gray
For various reasons, over the past month my life has been composed primarily of dizzying heights of absolute bliss and depressingly abysmal lows. I haven't laughed so much or enjoyed life so much in any of my recollectable history but conversely, I don't remember having been so randomly worried, depressed or pissed off either. Overall it has been a great few weeks but I tend to think I'm handling it the wrong way; I'm mixing the black bits of life with the white bits and getting gray rather than keeping them separate and enjoying them in their purer forms.
For example, today I went out with some co-workers who are, as has been mentioned, very pleasant and at least similarly-minded people. For some reason I can't fully explain though, something in the course of the day pitched me into the very depths of fury. I had a name for the target of my rage but it wasn't exactly justified or completely comprehensible, even to me. Yet as ineffable as it was, this blackness consumed what was otherwise a perfectly pleasant situation. I'm still a little surprised that we went to lunch without the actual guest of honor (ok, not surprised, horrified) but be that as it may it was no reason to let unrelated fury consume me so. It wasn't constructive; nothing was gained whatsoever. Yet consume, it did and everyone felt it.
Then just as I was about to come down from that stratospheric fit of annoyance I arrived home to find a message on my home answering machine from my boss's boss. It seems that while I was meeting with the rest of the department one of my customers called my boss's boss's boss to complain that I hadn't resolved the issues they had reported just a mere three hours ago while I was in a meeting. Further, they complained that they hadn't heard from me all day. This was especially surprising since we had one phone conversation and exchanged six emails in the morning before the meeting but be that as it may, this was officially an emergency of the highest caliber. The appropriate response is, of course, to panic so I spent the next four hours snapping people's heads off, being a general asshole and trying to sort out problems while all the interested parties had long ago gone home for the weekend and stopped worrying about whatever was so important before. This bit of black ink in my life consumed the entirety of a Friday night.
If it were just me wrapped up in this, that would be fine. I can suffer alone. But it's not just me, there are other people involved in every step of this, some of whom I love and care deeply for. From my puzzled lunch mates to my family they all suffered in some way whether they just took the time to inquire after my mental state and offer words of encouragement or made me dinner. I feel bad that my ink splattered on their lives; people have enough ink of their own to deal with.
For example, today I went out with some co-workers who are, as has been mentioned, very pleasant and at least similarly-minded people. For some reason I can't fully explain though, something in the course of the day pitched me into the very depths of fury. I had a name for the target of my rage but it wasn't exactly justified or completely comprehensible, even to me. Yet as ineffable as it was, this blackness consumed what was otherwise a perfectly pleasant situation. I'm still a little surprised that we went to lunch without the actual guest of honor (ok, not surprised, horrified) but be that as it may it was no reason to let unrelated fury consume me so. It wasn't constructive; nothing was gained whatsoever. Yet consume, it did and everyone felt it.
Then just as I was about to come down from that stratospheric fit of annoyance I arrived home to find a message on my home answering machine from my boss's boss. It seems that while I was meeting with the rest of the department one of my customers called my boss's boss's boss to complain that I hadn't resolved the issues they had reported just a mere three hours ago while I was in a meeting. Further, they complained that they hadn't heard from me all day. This was especially surprising since we had one phone conversation and exchanged six emails in the morning before the meeting but be that as it may, this was officially an emergency of the highest caliber. The appropriate response is, of course, to panic so I spent the next four hours snapping people's heads off, being a general asshole and trying to sort out problems while all the interested parties had long ago gone home for the weekend and stopped worrying about whatever was so important before. This bit of black ink in my life consumed the entirety of a Friday night.
If it were just me wrapped up in this, that would be fine. I can suffer alone. But it's not just me, there are other people involved in every step of this, some of whom I love and care deeply for. From my puzzled lunch mates to my family they all suffered in some way whether they just took the time to inquire after my mental state and offer words of encouragement or made me dinner. I feel bad that my ink splattered on their lives; people have enough ink of their own to deal with.
Sunday, January 20, 2008
My Bored Bubble Popped
After a lovely chat with the Mrs, my bubbles are back in the bottle again. It's amazing how well she knows me after 14 years. She always knows just the right thing to say to put my train back on the tracks. The funny thing is that nothing has really changed. Television is just as boring... These books are just as dull... This laptop is just as scalding hot on my lap as before... yet none of it seems to matter quite as much.
The question remains, what to do about it long term. I think my original propositions stand; I need to get out more and widen my sphere but it's no longer an emergency. I need to reconnect with my work in a strategic rather than a reactionary way. I need to remember to relax and not view everything (even recreation) with such urgency. *yawn* *stretch* Luckily tomorrow is another day to practice.
The question remains, what to do about it long term. I think my original propositions stand; I need to get out more and widen my sphere but it's no longer an emergency. I need to reconnect with my work in a strategic rather than a reactionary way. I need to remember to relax and not view everything (even recreation) with such urgency. *yawn* *stretch* Luckily tomorrow is another day to practice.
Saturday, January 19, 2008
Bored, Bored, Bored and Grumpy x3
It has become clear to me that weekends are my downfall. There is just NOTHING to do around here. Saturday began at 2:30am as the whole house found itself awake for no particular reason. The wife and I concluded a conversation we'd dropped the night before before bed (since we had little else to do) and finally faded off to sleep around 4:00. After a dull breakfast the kids and I hung about the house while my wife dined with a friend for lunch. After lunch we hung about the house while waiting to go to dinner. We shared an uneventful and somewhat quiet dinner which was, in fact, so quick that our movie plans changed from Sweeney Todd to Atonement. I was completely unaware just how much I did NOT need to watch a 2-hour movie about a frustrated love affair. *sigh*
When I wasn't bored today I was just plain grumpy. For whatever reason, this usually happy clam has a bit of sand in his shell. Frankly, I blame the weekend. Those things which seemed merely typical the day before became damned annoyances today. There is a black fog over the planet as of late that I'm unable to penetrate. The piles of books that seemed so entertaining before are merely doorstops today. Television is even less entertaining than usual. All the fizz has left my soda pop it seems.
Anyway, I'll stop complaining now.
When I wasn't bored today I was just plain grumpy. For whatever reason, this usually happy clam has a bit of sand in his shell. Frankly, I blame the weekend. Those things which seemed merely typical the day before became damned annoyances today. There is a black fog over the planet as of late that I'm unable to penetrate. The piles of books that seemed so entertaining before are merely doorstops today. Television is even less entertaining than usual. All the fizz has left my soda pop it seems.
Anyway, I'll stop complaining now.
Saturday, January 12, 2008
Words, Edgewise and Otherwise
Last night we had one of my wife's FABs over for dinner and during the ensuing discussion I was struck by a few unrelated thoughts.
Firstly, I have to wonder if all people have conversations like the ones my wife and her friends share. They seem to have examined the people around them in vast psychological detail. I'm not sure I'd categorize this as gossip per se as it's not done in a vindictive manner but it's just astounding how much thought they've spent on this analysis. Where other people might discuss politics or world events these two do detailed psychological profiling. I have to wonder if this is some unique characteristic they share and that makes them deeply compatible in that way or if it's just what normal people do. That said, much of it, on the surface, is somewhat redundant from one conversation to the next; I've heard many of the same observations occur in multiple conversations but I think this is really because the purpose is not to exchange new information. Through this communication they're trying to draw new conclusions about the situations and people at question. It's as if they're constructing some vast mathematical proof together and at the end, both parties actually have MORE information than they started out with, some of it generated on the fly. After the conversation is over, those new conclusions are taken into the field and put to the test. Days or weeks later when they come together again results are compared and new conclusions reached. In this way they both come to a deeper understanding of the people around them. It's really quite freakish that all this is hidden in the guise of idle gossip.
Aside from the profiling I'm also astounded at the depth of their conversations about very personal topics; when I defined a FAB a couple weeks ago I don't think I took into proper account the level of emotional intimacy. I'm sure this is more common than I realize but it is somewhat surprising to see it in action. I tend to consider myself a very open person; I'll answer any question put to me almost unholy honestly but I'm not really sure that this makes me at all exceptional. I think that on some very low level people want to be honest and open with others but the variable is the level of trust required for this to occur.
On a personal level, this reminded me of my 'bystander' problem in group situations. I've noted many times before that in 1-on-1 situations people find me relatively amusing because I have a captive audience and the rules of conversation are clear and simple. If the other person's not talking, you talk. Easy enough. However, if you add a third or fourth person all the easy rules go out the window and often there isn't really enough silence to interject very much. I've never quite gotten over the lack of available silence. Luckily in situations where I'm the 'disconnected spouse' this isn't really a concern. If we're out with the wife's friends then being a bystander isn't really a problem and even at my most exuberant I'm still seen as "just sitting there" so additional and costly effort seems unlikely to have a positive impact.
What makes this even more of a concern is the fact that in a few weeks we'll be attending the wedding of one of my former co-workers and for the first time in several years, my wife and I will be with my friends with her as bystander. Frankly, these situations terrify me to no end. In 14 years this has only happened a few times; it's a standing joke in all my workplaces that my wife does not actually exist because so few people have actually met her. The spheres of work and personal life are so utterly separate for me that when they collide I worry about even more unnecessary details than usual: Is my wife uncomfortable? What is she thinking about my friends? Did I say something that offended my wife/my friends? Am I paying enough attention to my wife? If you ask yourself these kinds of questions often enough you can ruin an evening pretty quickly. The real problem, I think, is one of balance. I don't want to focus on the wife too much and exclude my friends as it's these non-work interactions that act as the basis for real and lasting friendships. Sitting here on a Saturday morning with plans to do little except work and write blog entries it's clear that I need more interaction outside the 50-hour workweek. Conversely, I can't ignore the wife because ultimately she's the one I have to connect with my friends. If I can establish a connection between her and the people I enjoy being around then everyone will have fun both at the wedding and outside it. At any rate, if I worry about this enough I'm sure I can manage offend everyone.
Firstly, I have to wonder if all people have conversations like the ones my wife and her friends share. They seem to have examined the people around them in vast psychological detail. I'm not sure I'd categorize this as gossip per se as it's not done in a vindictive manner but it's just astounding how much thought they've spent on this analysis. Where other people might discuss politics or world events these two do detailed psychological profiling. I have to wonder if this is some unique characteristic they share and that makes them deeply compatible in that way or if it's just what normal people do. That said, much of it, on the surface, is somewhat redundant from one conversation to the next; I've heard many of the same observations occur in multiple conversations but I think this is really because the purpose is not to exchange new information. Through this communication they're trying to draw new conclusions about the situations and people at question. It's as if they're constructing some vast mathematical proof together and at the end, both parties actually have MORE information than they started out with, some of it generated on the fly. After the conversation is over, those new conclusions are taken into the field and put to the test. Days or weeks later when they come together again results are compared and new conclusions reached. In this way they both come to a deeper understanding of the people around them. It's really quite freakish that all this is hidden in the guise of idle gossip.
Aside from the profiling I'm also astounded at the depth of their conversations about very personal topics; when I defined a FAB a couple weeks ago I don't think I took into proper account the level of emotional intimacy. I'm sure this is more common than I realize but it is somewhat surprising to see it in action. I tend to consider myself a very open person; I'll answer any question put to me almost unholy honestly but I'm not really sure that this makes me at all exceptional. I think that on some very low level people want to be honest and open with others but the variable is the level of trust required for this to occur.
On a personal level, this reminded me of my 'bystander' problem in group situations. I've noted many times before that in 1-on-1 situations people find me relatively amusing because I have a captive audience and the rules of conversation are clear and simple. If the other person's not talking, you talk. Easy enough. However, if you add a third or fourth person all the easy rules go out the window and often there isn't really enough silence to interject very much. I've never quite gotten over the lack of available silence. Luckily in situations where I'm the 'disconnected spouse' this isn't really a concern. If we're out with the wife's friends then being a bystander isn't really a problem and even at my most exuberant I'm still seen as "just sitting there" so additional and costly effort seems unlikely to have a positive impact.
What makes this even more of a concern is the fact that in a few weeks we'll be attending the wedding of one of my former co-workers and for the first time in several years, my wife and I will be with my friends with her as bystander. Frankly, these situations terrify me to no end. In 14 years this has only happened a few times; it's a standing joke in all my workplaces that my wife does not actually exist because so few people have actually met her. The spheres of work and personal life are so utterly separate for me that when they collide I worry about even more unnecessary details than usual: Is my wife uncomfortable? What is she thinking about my friends? Did I say something that offended my wife/my friends? Am I paying enough attention to my wife? If you ask yourself these kinds of questions often enough you can ruin an evening pretty quickly. The real problem, I think, is one of balance. I don't want to focus on the wife too much and exclude my friends as it's these non-work interactions that act as the basis for real and lasting friendships. Sitting here on a Saturday morning with plans to do little except work and write blog entries it's clear that I need more interaction outside the 50-hour workweek. Conversely, I can't ignore the wife because ultimately she's the one I have to connect with my friends. If I can establish a connection between her and the people I enjoy being around then everyone will have fun both at the wedding and outside it. At any rate, if I worry about this enough I'm sure I can manage offend everyone.
Wednesday, January 09, 2008
Plenty of Tension
I've been up all night catching up on everything I completely failed to get done during the normal work day so you'll have to accept a much abbreviated epistle from my soul tonight.
As I sit here mere minutes from the comforting warmth of my bed, it occurs to me that my entire day was REALLY tense. I spent literally the entire day either IN a nerve-wracking, uncomfortable situation or dreading one. That said, it was a good kind of tension. Today exemplified the kind of intensity that you only get out of life when you don't simply go around and around in the same well-worn groove.
For several years my life has been relatively stress free. Sure there were moments of "how are we going to get all this done?" but it was always known that what we promised to do would be done. Perhaps not in the best way and perhaps not at the best time but it would get done because it was, frankly, just busy work just like the previous 10,000 units of work that preceded it. There was no real challenge, no real possibility of failure, no sense of adventure. Today, however, was a totally different story and I fervently hope that my trip out of my groove is not merely a temporary visit. It's time to wear some new ruts in the universe.
As I sit here mere minutes from the comforting warmth of my bed, it occurs to me that my entire day was REALLY tense. I spent literally the entire day either IN a nerve-wracking, uncomfortable situation or dreading one. That said, it was a good kind of tension. Today exemplified the kind of intensity that you only get out of life when you don't simply go around and around in the same well-worn groove.
For several years my life has been relatively stress free. Sure there were moments of "how are we going to get all this done?" but it was always known that what we promised to do would be done. Perhaps not in the best way and perhaps not at the best time but it would get done because it was, frankly, just busy work just like the previous 10,000 units of work that preceded it. There was no real challenge, no real possibility of failure, no sense of adventure. Today, however, was a totally different story and I fervently hope that my trip out of my groove is not merely a temporary visit. It's time to wear some new ruts in the universe.
Tuesday, January 08, 2008
Life Without Regrets
Today was less than giddy. In fact, I experienced some regrets. I did a lot of pacing about the house trying to figure out what I should have done differently. I lectured to the walls about this option and that. I pondered several imponderables aloud and vociferously to no one. But in the end I think I concluded that you simply can't carry around any regrets. The only true regret is that which comes from inaction. If you act at all times in accordance with your own best judgment at the time, then certainly you can go wrong but that's no reason to regret anything.
No, the only real regret I can imagine is the one you experience on your deathbed when you realize you missed your chance, that one moment of realization that you let opportunity slip from your grasp out of fear or laziness. If you tried and failed, then often that's satisfaction enough to know that you did your best. There are a few things I'd like to say I did before I die:
I'd like to see my name on the spine of a book. Not from one of those silly publishing houses that'll print your life story in book form for $1000 but a real, proper, commercial book. My adoration of the printed page has been so complete since even my earliest years that I feel it only apropos to give something back to the art form. Or, if nothing else, at least use up valuable paper resources that would have gone to pulp romance novels.
Earn the real, sincere applause of an audience. Yes, I know, this is totally out of character for me. I'm the type who hates to do anything in front of people it is in fact my greatest dread. But something inside me yearns to perform, to cast off the shackles of reality and assume the personae of someone totally different, to sing a song (badly in all likelihood) or tell a series of awful jokes in a bad rendition of someone else's voice. Doubtless this is just another form of escapism, a momentary rush to be experienced and described in minute detail later but it still earns a place on the list.
Host a really exclusive party. One to which I invite only friends I've known and talked to on a regular basis for 20 years. Preferably, of course, there would be someone to invite.
Lastly, and probably most importantly, I'd like to make a difference in someone's life. Not in a family member's life, that comes by default generally for good or bad. But just once I'd like to know that I helped a person in some significant way, that something I said or did had a real and positive impact on them. It'd just be nice to know I made a difference to someone outside the sphere of my own family. And this, I think I can safely say, is something we all want before we die.
Alright, I think I may have meandered a bit there but now that that's all out in the open let's get to work people. Make your lists and make sure that each day you do what it takes to have a peaceful deathbed. None of this pointless thrashing about at the very end screaming, "Oh!!!!! If only I'd planted daffodils instead of narcissus in the front flowerbed!" Let's figure out what we want to get done before we die and do it. No fear, no regrets!
No, the only real regret I can imagine is the one you experience on your deathbed when you realize you missed your chance, that one moment of realization that you let opportunity slip from your grasp out of fear or laziness. If you tried and failed, then often that's satisfaction enough to know that you did your best. There are a few things I'd like to say I did before I die:
I'd like to see my name on the spine of a book. Not from one of those silly publishing houses that'll print your life story in book form for $1000 but a real, proper, commercial book. My adoration of the printed page has been so complete since even my earliest years that I feel it only apropos to give something back to the art form. Or, if nothing else, at least use up valuable paper resources that would have gone to pulp romance novels.
Earn the real, sincere applause of an audience. Yes, I know, this is totally out of character for me. I'm the type who hates to do anything in front of people it is in fact my greatest dread. But something inside me yearns to perform, to cast off the shackles of reality and assume the personae of someone totally different, to sing a song (badly in all likelihood) or tell a series of awful jokes in a bad rendition of someone else's voice. Doubtless this is just another form of escapism, a momentary rush to be experienced and described in minute detail later but it still earns a place on the list.
Host a really exclusive party. One to which I invite only friends I've known and talked to on a regular basis for 20 years. Preferably, of course, there would be someone to invite.
Lastly, and probably most importantly, I'd like to make a difference in someone's life. Not in a family member's life, that comes by default generally for good or bad. But just once I'd like to know that I helped a person in some significant way, that something I said or did had a real and positive impact on them. It'd just be nice to know I made a difference to someone outside the sphere of my own family. And this, I think I can safely say, is something we all want before we die.
Alright, I think I may have meandered a bit there but now that that's all out in the open let's get to work people. Make your lists and make sure that each day you do what it takes to have a peaceful deathbed. None of this pointless thrashing about at the very end screaming, "Oh!!!!! If only I'd planted daffodils instead of narcissus in the front flowerbed!" Let's figure out what we want to get done before we die and do it. No fear, no regrets!
Monday, January 07, 2008
From Giddy to Slightly Less Giddy in Six Hours
I have to admit, I was giddy to the point of inappropriateness this morning. Everyone was out of the house for the first time in two weeks and I could walk around shouting nonsense words at the top of my voice and nobody complained. I could dictate emails aloud to myself without interruption. I put on some music and turned it up so loud that I couldn't even hear myself dictating emails. It was pretty much the pinnacle of bliss. (Well, maybe not the pinnacle but at least somewhere up the slope.)
To add to that I think I've re-figured out my requirements for enjoying a job. Infinite power over the processes that impact me you might suggest? Nah. Gobs and gobs of money? Um, no. A chance to wield all my powers of intellect in a maximally entertaining and productive fashion? Hardly. The adulation of my co-workers and bosses on a job well done? Not necessary. Processes that make optimal use of my time and don't make me perform unnecessary steps to get a job done? Not even that. No, I think the only real requirement is that I have a job where I can actually succeed. A job where I can come in, sit down and do what's expected of me and have those expectations not be utterly impossible. That's it. Give me a job I can do and I'm good. Heck, give me a job I can do 80% of the way and I'll have fun stretching to get to 100%.
Now, that's not to say that the other things wouldn't be nice. Clearly it's in a company's best interest to provide interesting work that puts their employees to the best possible use but that's not necessarily a requirement from the employee's point of view. I need to constantly remind myself that the point of work is to make money. Nothing more. If it's enjoyable at the same time, all the better but it's not required and generally the exception rather than the rule. It's also not my fault if I'm not put to the best possible use after I tell the people I work for again and again and again what I think that best use is. There's only so much I can do. Despite what Henley may say to the contrary, I am not the master of my fate when it comes to work.
Unrelatedly, I'm starting the believe in the power of 'presumed familiarity.' Someone once told me simply that she assumes people are her friends until she hears otherwise. I think that's a powerful concept; there are a couple of people that I've tried this out on recently and it really seems to work. The trick seems to be to just convince yourself that you've talked to this person at least 10 times more often than you actually have and when you take that stance people can't help but reciprocate. This of course makes future contact all the more likely and chances are good that you'll actually fill in the presumed familiarity with real familiarity or at least have a lot of fun presuming. Again though, the theme is the same. Smile and the world smiles back... Scowl and the whole world scowls back... Be friends with the world and the world calls you for coffee on Saturday morning... Just remember to go dutch.
To add to that I think I've re-figured out my requirements for enjoying a job. Infinite power over the processes that impact me you might suggest? Nah. Gobs and gobs of money? Um, no. A chance to wield all my powers of intellect in a maximally entertaining and productive fashion? Hardly. The adulation of my co-workers and bosses on a job well done? Not necessary. Processes that make optimal use of my time and don't make me perform unnecessary steps to get a job done? Not even that. No, I think the only real requirement is that I have a job where I can actually succeed. A job where I can come in, sit down and do what's expected of me and have those expectations not be utterly impossible. That's it. Give me a job I can do and I'm good. Heck, give me a job I can do 80% of the way and I'll have fun stretching to get to 100%.
Now, that's not to say that the other things wouldn't be nice. Clearly it's in a company's best interest to provide interesting work that puts their employees to the best possible use but that's not necessarily a requirement from the employee's point of view. I need to constantly remind myself that the point of work is to make money. Nothing more. If it's enjoyable at the same time, all the better but it's not required and generally the exception rather than the rule. It's also not my fault if I'm not put to the best possible use after I tell the people I work for again and again and again what I think that best use is. There's only so much I can do. Despite what Henley may say to the contrary, I am not the master of my fate when it comes to work.
Unrelatedly, I'm starting the believe in the power of 'presumed familiarity.' Someone once told me simply that she assumes people are her friends until she hears otherwise. I think that's a powerful concept; there are a couple of people that I've tried this out on recently and it really seems to work. The trick seems to be to just convince yourself that you've talked to this person at least 10 times more often than you actually have and when you take that stance people can't help but reciprocate. This of course makes future contact all the more likely and chances are good that you'll actually fill in the presumed familiarity with real familiarity or at least have a lot of fun presuming. Again though, the theme is the same. Smile and the world smiles back... Scowl and the whole world scowls back... Be friends with the world and the world calls you for coffee on Saturday morning... Just remember to go dutch.
Sunday, January 06, 2008
Habits, Old and New
OK, I saw a promo for this new Fox show, "Moment of Truth" and while I'll guarantee that I'll forget to watch it, one of their promo questions did remind me of something. The question was, "Have you ever touched a co-worker in an inappropriate manner?" Ugh, dammit. Yes, I have, but here's the stupid story.
Year and years ago when I'd known my current wife for a couple years I got into this habit of playfully swatting her on the rear whenever we'd pass by each other. Well one day I was working in the Terry Courts kitchen at Purdue as a waiter and a female waiter I knew somewhat (but not well) was leaning over cleaning something. By now you've probably guessed that something in my brain short-circuited and I playfully swatted her on the rear. I, of course, was three heartbeats from having my head explode with embarrassment and the only thing I could think to say was, "Sorry, wrong rear." Luckily she seemed unabashed and perhaps flattered more than anything.
In the same vein, whenever my wife and I end a phone conversation we generally give it the "bye, love you" at the end and on SEVERAL occasions I've barely stopped myself from saying this to female customers on the phone. This isn't surprising really; you have a lot of contact with a spouse and you build up habits that are hard to break with others of the opposite gender. I'm sure Freud would have something to say about all this but let me assure you my affection for our customers is purely platonic no matter what I may accidentally utter on the phone. The worst danger in this area is people who tend to hug. Aside from my wife, I get hugged about once a year so I'm happy to accept your hug but remember that the previous 499 hugs I gave out came with a little bit more than a hug.
There aren't a lot of stories from my childhood kicking around in my brain but there's one that I can remember word for word. If I have time I'll transcribe it for you: "You took forever to learn to talk but once you did you never shut up." OK, that's it. That was pretty long by the usual standards. The point here may be that at some point I did shut up again. And I think that to a large extent any success I've had at these "job" things has been due to my ability sit down, shut up and work. In fact, I've been told that people avoided me specifically because I "looked like I was doing something important." (It's an easy face to pull off: lips together and slightly puckered, narrow your eyes and eyebrows down as far as they can go. Then stare determinedly at a fixed point. No one has ever been fired while assuming this face.)
Lately though I've gone completely the opposite direction. I can literally blast away an hour and accomplish absolutely nothing except lively banter about the lifestyles of Italian nuns. And I can see why people do this; it's damn amusing. It's probably the most entertaining thing I can think of. That said, we really need a short, polite, unambiguous way of saying, "Listen, I'm really enjoying this conversation but to be honest I have to get back to work because if I don't... well, there's going to be some sort of personal hell for me to pay later. So if we can, let's just pick this up later, OK?" Perhaps a code word of some sort. Not rutabaga, that's already being used to indicate when someone really needs a breath mint. No, I'd suggest watercress. It's short and gentle sounding, "Sorry, man, watercress." Who can get mad at watercress?
Anyway, watercress.
Year and years ago when I'd known my current wife for a couple years I got into this habit of playfully swatting her on the rear whenever we'd pass by each other. Well one day I was working in the Terry Courts kitchen at Purdue as a waiter and a female waiter I knew somewhat (but not well) was leaning over cleaning something. By now you've probably guessed that something in my brain short-circuited and I playfully swatted her on the rear. I, of course, was three heartbeats from having my head explode with embarrassment and the only thing I could think to say was, "Sorry, wrong rear." Luckily she seemed unabashed and perhaps flattered more than anything.
In the same vein, whenever my wife and I end a phone conversation we generally give it the "bye, love you" at the end and on SEVERAL occasions I've barely stopped myself from saying this to female customers on the phone. This isn't surprising really; you have a lot of contact with a spouse and you build up habits that are hard to break with others of the opposite gender. I'm sure Freud would have something to say about all this but let me assure you my affection for our customers is purely platonic no matter what I may accidentally utter on the phone. The worst danger in this area is people who tend to hug. Aside from my wife, I get hugged about once a year so I'm happy to accept your hug but remember that the previous 499 hugs I gave out came with a little bit more than a hug.
There aren't a lot of stories from my childhood kicking around in my brain but there's one that I can remember word for word. If I have time I'll transcribe it for you: "You took forever to learn to talk but once you did you never shut up." OK, that's it. That was pretty long by the usual standards. The point here may be that at some point I did shut up again. And I think that to a large extent any success I've had at these "job" things has been due to my ability sit down, shut up and work. In fact, I've been told that people avoided me specifically because I "looked like I was doing something important." (It's an easy face to pull off: lips together and slightly puckered, narrow your eyes and eyebrows down as far as they can go. Then stare determinedly at a fixed point. No one has ever been fired while assuming this face.)
Lately though I've gone completely the opposite direction. I can literally blast away an hour and accomplish absolutely nothing except lively banter about the lifestyles of Italian nuns. And I can see why people do this; it's damn amusing. It's probably the most entertaining thing I can think of. That said, we really need a short, polite, unambiguous way of saying, "Listen, I'm really enjoying this conversation but to be honest I have to get back to work because if I don't... well, there's going to be some sort of personal hell for me to pay later. So if we can, let's just pick this up later, OK?" Perhaps a code word of some sort. Not rutabaga, that's already being used to indicate when someone really needs a breath mint. No, I'd suggest watercress. It's short and gentle sounding, "Sorry, man, watercress." Who can get mad at watercress?
Anyway, watercress.
Saturday, January 05, 2008
Random Notes of the Day
I have to ask, do all women go around sniffing their significant others? I don't wear any cologne of any kind yet my wife's always telling me how 'good' I smell. What I wonder is whether she's just gotten accustomed to my specific scent and associates me with it or whether people fall into certain 'scent groups' that somehow signal a level of biological compatibility. The latter seems to be suggested by the fact that there are other men in her sphere that smell 'good' and others that she describes as 'stinking'. Similarly, there's a 'my baby' smell too apparently. When our daughters were small my wife always said they smelled 'good' while all other babies were, again, 'stinky'. This is a measurable phenomenon since studies indicate that mothers can always smell the difference between their own baby's blanket and those of other babies. Someone should commission a man-stink study but I think the thing to remember may be to smell your man (I'm told the neck is the best place to put your nose) and if he stinks you may have a problem. Similarly, give that baby a good whiff before you bring it home. If it smells sour then check the hospital's records.
On a completely unrelated matter, I realized recently that it's been literally years since I've seen a "man" movie. For 14 years, almost every time I enter a movie theater it's to see one of those "romantic comedy" movies or worse a children's movie. Now don't get me wrong; I can appreciate a woman movie with the best of them but give a guy a break. Well I'll tell ya, I'm seein' this damn Sweeney Todd movie; if blanket invitations to all the eligible people in my sphere are ineffective I'm druggin' a wino and propping him up in the seat next to me. Yes, I know it'll suck and be nothing like the stage version but that changes nothing. Some things you have to see for yourself. Oh... what's this...? my wife's putting in a DVD. What could it be... well crap, When Harry Met Sally. Dammit.
90 Minutes later.... this movie's puritanical views are bullshit.
On a completely unrelated matter, I realized recently that it's been literally years since I've seen a "man" movie. For 14 years, almost every time I enter a movie theater it's to see one of those "romantic comedy" movies or worse a children's movie. Now don't get me wrong; I can appreciate a woman movie with the best of them but give a guy a break. Well I'll tell ya, I'm seein' this damn Sweeney Todd movie; if blanket invitations to all the eligible people in my sphere are ineffective I'm druggin' a wino and propping him up in the seat next to me. Yes, I know it'll suck and be nothing like the stage version but that changes nothing. Some things you have to see for yourself. Oh... what's this...? my wife's putting in a DVD. What could it be... well crap, When Harry Met Sally. Dammit.
90 Minutes later.... this movie's puritanical views are bullshit.
Itches of the 7, 14, and 21-year variety
Firstly, not like that, perv. Secondly, I'm a big believer in itches. The idea that after you've been in a relationship for several years you might want a change of pace seems pretty natural. The key, I think, is how you put this energy to use and whether the results from that are positive or negative.
Fourteen years ago I scratched an itch and broke up with one girlfriend and not long after met a woman who completely took my breath away (and I haven't breathed since); regardless of how 'out of my league' she was or how completely backwards I was, she stood by me and we muddled our way through until I was at least passable as a human. To this day I have *NO* idea why she didn't go off and find someone who was a little less of a fixer-upper. But now, of course, she's stuck with me and can't run off because she's invested too damn much work in me. Ahh, the blessings of human inertia.
Seven years ago or thereabouts we had our first child and the earth shook beneath us. Before, we were two separate people revolving in opposing orbits. We were together and yet not REALLY together. To the outside eye we were one person but there was little holding us together except legality and a common mortgage payment. After our first child, suddenly there was this whole other center around which to revolve and after some complicated adjustment we tightened our orbits and in time came to love each other like never before.
Today... well, you've seen the latest itch in crazy detail. You've heard enough about it over the last month to want to vomit so I'll not repeat it. The point, I guess, is that there went another seven. I think the main point that came from all that scratching is that while marriage is a thing I'd never disparage, it's not everything. No matter how much my wife and I may enjoy gazing into each other's eyes, it gets extremely old after we're stuck with only each other and the kids for company for two weeks. She needs to get back to school and all her outside inputs as much as I need to get back to mine. It doesn't mean we love each other any less, only that we still can't do without the rest of the planet.
So now that that's apparently over, I think it's time to make plans for seven years from now. So far, my plan is to celebrate my 42nd birthday (That's DDA - Double Drinking Age) by having a shot of whiskey. It seems an appropriate first drink for a 42-year-old man.
Fourteen years ago I scratched an itch and broke up with one girlfriend and not long after met a woman who completely took my breath away (and I haven't breathed since); regardless of how 'out of my league' she was or how completely backwards I was, she stood by me and we muddled our way through until I was at least passable as a human. To this day I have *NO* idea why she didn't go off and find someone who was a little less of a fixer-upper. But now, of course, she's stuck with me and can't run off because she's invested too damn much work in me. Ahh, the blessings of human inertia.
Seven years ago or thereabouts we had our first child and the earth shook beneath us. Before, we were two separate people revolving in opposing orbits. We were together and yet not REALLY together. To the outside eye we were one person but there was little holding us together except legality and a common mortgage payment. After our first child, suddenly there was this whole other center around which to revolve and after some complicated adjustment we tightened our orbits and in time came to love each other like never before.
Today... well, you've seen the latest itch in crazy detail. You've heard enough about it over the last month to want to vomit so I'll not repeat it. The point, I guess, is that there went another seven. I think the main point that came from all that scratching is that while marriage is a thing I'd never disparage, it's not everything. No matter how much my wife and I may enjoy gazing into each other's eyes, it gets extremely old after we're stuck with only each other and the kids for company for two weeks. She needs to get back to school and all her outside inputs as much as I need to get back to mine. It doesn't mean we love each other any less, only that we still can't do without the rest of the planet.
So now that that's apparently over, I think it's time to make plans for seven years from now. So far, my plan is to celebrate my 42nd birthday (That's DDA - Double Drinking Age) by having a shot of whiskey. It seems an appropriate first drink for a 42-year-old man.
Friday, January 04, 2008
From Heaven to Hell and back to Earth
It seems clear that grandma was always right when she said, "too much laughter now will be tears later." Today completely and utterly sucked and, just like yesterday, I'm totally responsible for having caused it. As usual I will not encumber my readers with the details but instead let it simply be said that I take full responsibility and am sad to have dragged other people along in the wake of my misery. I honestly don't remember a more maddening day in the past five years and all because I jumped to conclusions and misjudged the intentions of her with whom I am one. On the positive side, I think the air is finally clear and we can now proceed down the road to happiness again. I have to admit that getting out of the breakdown lane and back onto the highway was one of the most difficult processes I've been through in a while.
Annnnyyyyyway, on to more mundane topics. After all that we went downtown to the IRT to see Tuesdays With Morrie. In the past couple months I have come to appreciate live entertainment like never before. While sitting through this thing, I cried for the 11th, 12th and 13th times today but oddly I laughed at least 20 times; for a play about death it's surprisingly funny. What really struck me though was the echo of my own life in the play. I've been throwing around the word 'epiphanous' a lot lately but when the actors said, "you have to be who you want to be every single day of your life and act as if it's your last" (or words that effect anyway) I hardly resisted the urge to stand up and shout to the crowd, "Yeah! That's what I've been talking about!!!" It's hard to know how I've been doing with my resolutions to be positive about things and more outgoing and friendly (there's no yardstick to measure these sorts of attributes) but with the exception of today it certainly seemed that the world was smiling back at me. In any case, the rest of the world will have to wait until tomorrow because tonight... I'm completely worn out.
Annnnyyyyyway, on to more mundane topics. After all that we went downtown to the IRT to see Tuesdays With Morrie. In the past couple months I have come to appreciate live entertainment like never before. While sitting through this thing, I cried for the 11th, 12th and 13th times today but oddly I laughed at least 20 times; for a play about death it's surprisingly funny. What really struck me though was the echo of my own life in the play. I've been throwing around the word 'epiphanous' a lot lately but when the actors said, "you have to be who you want to be every single day of your life and act as if it's your last" (or words that effect anyway) I hardly resisted the urge to stand up and shout to the crowd, "Yeah! That's what I've been talking about!!!" It's hard to know how I've been doing with my resolutions to be positive about things and more outgoing and friendly (there's no yardstick to measure these sorts of attributes) but with the exception of today it certainly seemed that the world was smiling back at me. In any case, the rest of the world will have to wait until tomorrow because tonight... I'm completely worn out.
Thursday, January 03, 2008
From Blog to Reality
I spent another day in the office today and I've got to admit that on the relative scale of amusement this one was incredible. In sharp contrast to the last time I spent an entire day in the office I had an almost overwhelming number of inputs from wonderful and friendly people. It was, frankly, incredible and if today is representative of a normal day in the office (when everyone's actually there) then I'm an idiot to have ever left. I will not, however, belabor my readers with details but will take the opportunity to draw a few general observations.
I'm increasingly amused by the number of conversations that are drawn from or include some reference to this blog. In a way that's somewhat ironic when you consider that this forum basically amounts to the innermost recesses of my mind turned inside out for public display. Given the level of detail available in these 233 posts I'm not sure what else there could possibly be to talk about? (Have I mentioned that I often feel like I'm repeating myself?) I must admit that it's particularly amusing when someone sees themselves in a post and later asks for clarification (but possibly more amusing when they fail to see themselves entirely). When they do ask for more about themselves it's like you're starting a conversation at the end and you've skipped to the really interesting bit at the end. You know that part, it's the one where you get to find out someone thinks you look like Brad Pitt. I sometimes wonder how many people just never get to that part. Quite a shame really. Life's too short to deny people the right to hear phrases like, "You are just the nicest person I know" or "You look like Brad Pitt if he were a woman" because you're too embarrassed to utter them.
Speaking of repeating myself, I'd intended to write about how incredibly friendly the world was today. I wanted to write about how I went out the front door with a completely jubilant attitude and how the whole world was one big mirror and reflected my great mood back at me. I even had all this formed in my mind and ready to put down in 1,000 words or less. I wanted to describe my friendly banter with pretty close to strangers, my smiles shared with small children playing tennis and the tinkling sound of laughter and the knowledge that I had caused it... Well, I was going enumerate all this and point it all back to the fact that I started the day with a positive attitude and from there I'd point out what a great epiphany this was and how glad I was that I'd made this discovery. Then I realized that I already said that three years ago. Have I mentioned that I often feel like I'm repeating myself?
As I was driving home (Have I mentioned how many ideas come to me when I'm driving home?) I remembered the power that music has over us. Somewhat ironically, these thoughts made it completely impossible for me to pay any attention to what was coming out of my speakers at the time. But the point is that over all the years of my life I remember the people that gave me music. Dad gave me an incredibly diverse baseline from the 60s through the 80s in the person of Zappa and the Beatles when I was a lad. My grandparents gave me a handful of songs and an appreciation for Bing Crosby. Of course these are people I'm supposed to remember but even into college I remember the guy who gave me They Might Be Giants. I'm carrying around tunes from The Beautiful South, Prozzak and Miranda! in my head from my first job. In a very real way music ties us together. Now if I find the person who gave me this Lou Bega CD I'm going to shoot them.
< ... turn over CD to continue story ... >
I'm increasingly amused by the number of conversations that are drawn from or include some reference to this blog. In a way that's somewhat ironic when you consider that this forum basically amounts to the innermost recesses of my mind turned inside out for public display. Given the level of detail available in these 233 posts I'm not sure what else there could possibly be to talk about? (Have I mentioned that I often feel like I'm repeating myself?) I must admit that it's particularly amusing when someone sees themselves in a post and later asks for clarification (but possibly more amusing when they fail to see themselves entirely). When they do ask for more about themselves it's like you're starting a conversation at the end and you've skipped to the really interesting bit at the end. You know that part, it's the one where you get to find out someone thinks you look like Brad Pitt. I sometimes wonder how many people just never get to that part. Quite a shame really. Life's too short to deny people the right to hear phrases like, "You are just the nicest person I know" or "You look like Brad Pitt if he were a woman" because you're too embarrassed to utter them.
Speaking of repeating myself, I'd intended to write about how incredibly friendly the world was today. I wanted to write about how I went out the front door with a completely jubilant attitude and how the whole world was one big mirror and reflected my great mood back at me. I even had all this formed in my mind and ready to put down in 1,000 words or less. I wanted to describe my friendly banter with pretty close to strangers, my smiles shared with small children playing tennis and the tinkling sound of laughter and the knowledge that I had caused it... Well, I was going enumerate all this and point it all back to the fact that I started the day with a positive attitude and from there I'd point out what a great epiphany this was and how glad I was that I'd made this discovery. Then I realized that I already said that three years ago. Have I mentioned that I often feel like I'm repeating myself?
As I was driving home (Have I mentioned how many ideas come to me when I'm driving home?) I remembered the power that music has over us. Somewhat ironically, these thoughts made it completely impossible for me to pay any attention to what was coming out of my speakers at the time. But the point is that over all the years of my life I remember the people that gave me music. Dad gave me an incredibly diverse baseline from the 60s through the 80s in the person of Zappa and the Beatles when I was a lad. My grandparents gave me a handful of songs and an appreciation for Bing Crosby. Of course these are people I'm supposed to remember but even into college I remember the guy who gave me They Might Be Giants. I'm carrying around tunes from The Beautiful South, Prozzak and Miranda! in my head from my first job. In a very real way music ties us together. Now if I find the person who gave me this Lou Bega CD I'm going to shoot them.
< ... turn over CD to continue story ... >
Wednesday, January 02, 2008
Another Day, Another Blog
Funny thing about today. Once I hit 'Publish Post' on this little editor, that'll be 29 posts. 29 posts in 21 days. Now that I've gotten into the rhythm of posting every day I'm not exactly sure that I can stop. In many ways, the daily routine of turning on the computer and dumping an entire day of feelings and observations into a little rectangle has become a necessary cathartic. So.... on a prime number post where to begin...
Much like many recent days, today has been a bit of an emotional roller coaster. I practiced my motto of 'honesty in all things' but my delivery sucked so while my message was delivered, it was received like a hedgehog from a cannon. Clearly the honesty rule needs a corollary or two involving the gentle extraction of emotions before delivery. It's enough for the receiver to deal with the content of your message without having to pluck the emotional quills from their forehead because you were irritated at the same time.
I accepted another invitation today from one of my ROWs and not, as he said, merely to "shut him up." My ROW invited me to read the book he gave me two years ago (I'd forgotten how much I love these old posts) on a specific schedule throughout the year published by his church. As much as some people hate proselytizing I tend to take it in the spirit in which it's done; it is a pretty kind sentiment to concern yourself with the preservation of someone's eternal soul. This is not to say that I expect my ROW to accomplish his goal but I have enough interest to sustain the study of the Bible as a literary work. I'll offer up my observations but I'll create another blog for that so as not to clutter up this one. I'd hate to be seen as a preachy agnostic.
My wife suggested I send the Charlie Wilson's War entry to the paper. To be honest, I'm not sure what they'd do with such a thing but I've been married long enough to know that sometimes you just do the thing being asked and don't offer any questions. We'll see if anything comes of that. Oddly, we don't actually subscribe to the paper so it's possible that we'll never know if it's published.
For dinner tonight we went out with one of my wife's high-level male FABs. I have to admit that I'm mystified at my wife's ability to attract high-quality friends (particularly of the opposite gender). We've officially been out with them enough times that they've crossed the line between, "Rob doesn't talk much" and "My, Rob was talkative tonight!" I have to admit that when I'm in a group (larger than 2 people) it's still a somewhat queer feeling when I start to say something and 3 faces turn to look at me. There's just enough time for the thought "hey, they're listening; better make this good!" to run through my mind before I'm expected to talk. I think the next landmark is the point when this thought doesn't enter my mind at all. Overall though, I have to admit they're great company despite the fact that we have absolutely NOTHING in common.
In summary, today's roller coaster ranged from profound (but temporary) depression to utter and complete giddy elation. In one day I feel like I've screwed up, worked like hell to fix what I broke and had the giddy realization that I'd done something right where I usually do screw up. Overall, a great day with a few minor potholes. To top it all off I get to go see real people in a real office tomorrow! What could be better than that!
Much like many recent days, today has been a bit of an emotional roller coaster. I practiced my motto of 'honesty in all things' but my delivery sucked so while my message was delivered, it was received like a hedgehog from a cannon. Clearly the honesty rule needs a corollary or two involving the gentle extraction of emotions before delivery. It's enough for the receiver to deal with the content of your message without having to pluck the emotional quills from their forehead because you were irritated at the same time.
I accepted another invitation today from one of my ROWs and not, as he said, merely to "shut him up." My ROW invited me to read the book he gave me two years ago (I'd forgotten how much I love these old posts) on a specific schedule throughout the year published by his church. As much as some people hate proselytizing I tend to take it in the spirit in which it's done; it is a pretty kind sentiment to concern yourself with the preservation of someone's eternal soul. This is not to say that I expect my ROW to accomplish his goal but I have enough interest to sustain the study of the Bible as a literary work. I'll offer up my observations but I'll create another blog for that so as not to clutter up this one. I'd hate to be seen as a preachy agnostic.
My wife suggested I send the Charlie Wilson's War entry to the paper. To be honest, I'm not sure what they'd do with such a thing but I've been married long enough to know that sometimes you just do the thing being asked and don't offer any questions. We'll see if anything comes of that. Oddly, we don't actually subscribe to the paper so it's possible that we'll never know if it's published.
For dinner tonight we went out with one of my wife's high-level male FABs. I have to admit that I'm mystified at my wife's ability to attract high-quality friends (particularly of the opposite gender). We've officially been out with them enough times that they've crossed the line between, "Rob doesn't talk much" and "My, Rob was talkative tonight!" I have to admit that when I'm in a group (larger than 2 people) it's still a somewhat queer feeling when I start to say something and 3 faces turn to look at me. There's just enough time for the thought "hey, they're listening; better make this good!" to run through my mind before I'm expected to talk. I think the next landmark is the point when this thought doesn't enter my mind at all. Overall though, I have to admit they're great company despite the fact that we have absolutely NOTHING in common.
In summary, today's roller coaster ranged from profound (but temporary) depression to utter and complete giddy elation. In one day I feel like I've screwed up, worked like hell to fix what I broke and had the giddy realization that I'd done something right where I usually do screw up. Overall, a great day with a few minor potholes. To top it all off I get to go see real people in a real office tomorrow! What could be better than that!
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