There’s a little human in there, making her will known.

Man, I’ve gotta stop saying things like “shit just got real”; both because she might repeat it, and because people who are allowed to use lingo like that don’t use semicolons in sentences. Nor the word “lingo”.

I like the idea that it’s sunset for 12 hours a day. Absolutely true, that. Basically it’s golden hour all day — which is probably why it looks gorgeous to me all the time.

We do have some cloud-cover where we are right now (Issaquah, about 20 minutes East of Seattle), but we’re far enough away from the coast and into the foothills that I think our area misses a lot of it. Either that or global warming is burning it all off.

It’s pretty much perfect here. I may get kicked out for saying that.

I have a Galaxy Tab for work, and it too has issues. Also a Samsung. I love the opportunities provided by the environment, but I hate that all the vendors dick with it. Using Android devices feels like buying a tradeshow PC in the mid-90s: you get decent bang for your buck, but then you bring it home and the W95 install is cluttered with free Prodigy/AOL installations and 500M of crappy shareware. Also it was built by a front for the Russian mafia*.

This Captivate, while an excellent device, has been an issue because of the company. It was released with promises of an imminent upgrade to Froyo. The declared date loomed and passed and eventually I received an upgrade about 9 months after the fact. Fixing some serious bugs, mind you. Such as the GPS just not working. “Here’s this device, by the way sometimes it doesn’t work but don’t worry we’ll give you an update to fix it soon. Also we’re lying about that last part.”

And then Samsung announced they weren’t putting the latest version of Android on my phone because they couldn’t fit it as well as their crappy bloated software on the phone at the same time. Put another way, it’s as if you can’t upgrade your 1 year old Sony laptop to Windows 7 because Sony can’t find a way to make their crappy mouse software work with it. People would be livid about that, but this is just how Android manufacturers are.

That last Samsung announcement basically made me swear off another Samsung device. It also freed me to get around and mod the thing and put Android 4 on it myself. If Samsung won’t, I’ll just take over and do it. My plan was to upgrade the phone and then explore something like winphone, such as the HTC Titan, when my contract was up.

Here’s the thing: ICS (Android 4) works perfectly on my phone, even though the version available from the modding community is effectively alpha software. This device is faster and more responsive than it ever has been, and it makes me happy to use it every time I pick it up. It used to be I’d go between iOS interfaces and Android interfaces and feel kind of claustrophobic. Totally gone now, this is an amazing experience.

And Samsung screwed it up for me. They’ve since backtracked on their statement about No Ice Cream Sandwich for Galaxy S and they’re “looking into it”, but they’ve lost me as a customer. Their business decisions seem to be from the standpoint of “accept whatever the elders give you, even if they are capricious”. Homie don’t play that.

I still want to love the Android environment. It fits my personality better and I feel freer using the OS than I do the ipad or my wife’s iphone. But the companies really make it hard for me. So we’ll see.

And if you’re feeling spunky, the two things I needed to do to flash my device were

1. Use a Windows machine with Heimdall to flash ClockworkMod Recovery onto the phone, by following these instructions
2. Subsequently use the ROM posted here. As of this writing I am using build 12 and it is excellent.

Also use a decent USB cable, such as the one that comes with a Kindle. The one Samsung ships is a piece of crap.

Your mileage may vary, and be warned that you can destroy your phone if you do it wrong — because this is kind of technical crap the manufacturer should be doing for you.

—

* That happened to my parents, back in ’97. True story.

I need to shake it up a bit, so here’s a video I shot today. My wife and I signed up for Amazon Fresh, which is online grocery delivery. Only Seattle-area so far, so I guess we’re lucky on that count.

But the bonus is you get dry-ice with the cold stuff.

I didn’t end up learning a hell of a lot of French this past month. Je suis desole. I think I need a little more structure for learning something like a language. I’m starting an online class at uncollege.org for human computer interaction, next month; perhaps when that’s done I can explore an online French class.

My wife and I are moving yet again, in a month. This time to a swankier new place in an area built up by Microsoft, not too far from here. Super excited by it… Fiber to the house! Tankless water heater! The former equals gigabit internet and the latter equals Infinite Shower. Huzzah!

Anyway, I know the new year is an arbitrary point, but I still enjoy observing it. It’s fun, and even if a thing is artifice you can still get something out of it. At the very least you can use it as a flag planted in time to make observations. With that in mind, here at the Death of the Year I’d like to offer up something I’ve learned across the past 12 months.

You can have resolutions, or you can avoid them. You can enjoy Valentine’s Day, or you can skip it. You can be happy for someone’s fortune, or you can be indifferent. There’s a term I ran across the other day: “compersion“. It’s kind of a made-up term that basically translates to, “I am happy to see that you are happy despite it having nothing to do with me.” It actually has romantic connotations, because the word comes from the polyamorous community.

I like a more general sense of it, though. Other people’s happiness does not depend on you at all. Your friend got a promotion? Excellent! Sister is excited about an upcoming wedding? Good for her! Seems pretty reasonable right? There’s no real reason not to share in someone else’s joy. Translating for the nerds: Happiness is not zero-sum.

It’s really not as obvious as it sounds. Have you ever made fun of someone’s New Year resolutions? Have you ever been depressed that someone was dating while you were single? Ever been bitter at a wedding? Hell, have you ever been jealous? Have you ever told someone, “Dude, that link was going around months ago! Old.”

All of that is the exact opposite of compersion. At best you’re just feeling superior, at worst you’re belittling someone’s joy. It’s a pretty hard habit to break if you’re human. I’m still working on it — it’s bites me in the butt to this day.

So that’s my New Year’s wish for you and me. May we all be a little more compassionate to each other, a little more understanding, and a little less narcissistic.

Happy New Year, everyone!

Say you go up to La Conner and you have lunch in a greasy spoon. Waitress is sort of weathered, like smoker grandma. Gunsmoke on the television. Dirty burber carpet. A guy in Carharts is eating his over-easy breakfast food while sitting next to a guy who looks like Old Man and the Sea. Feels like a maritime version of any down-home diner from the midwest.

Next thing you now, the guy in Carharts pulls out his smartphone to look something up the seafarer next to him said about a thing he read on the internet. Rather than an uneducated drawl, the diction is crisp and precise. The waitress offers erudite alternatives to the conclusions the old man declaimed. A thoughtful silence falls across the room as they ponder life’s mysteries.

Or you drive around the boonies of the western peninsula. Heavily forested, thinly populated. Logging trucks and Ford F150s abound. It feels a lot like Michigan and you expect a rural, fairly simple set of amenities when you spot a town down the road.

And then you drive down the main drag and there’s an espresso hut, there’s a Japanese bistro, there’s an organic grocery. Right next to the townie bar with the Coors signs that has an assortment of Chevys pickups and Subaru Foresters out front. Along the highway instead of signs about Jesus Saves and/or eternal damnation, there are billboards about protecting the waterways or saving the air.

It’s a little bit of a culture shock. There’s such a mix of different people, cultures, and interests it even extends into the boonies.

I really like it here. I feel like I fit in everywhere and could talk about any subject with any person here and not be made to feel an outsider. I could go up to the guy in Carharts and talk about Japanese culture, or the dudes in the rural townie bar about tablet computing.

Maybe it’s just that most people we’ve met by and large try to get along with everyone else. Maybe it’s just that the overriding culture here fits who we are right now, better. Maybe it’s a honeymoon phase.

But I’ll tell you, this is what makes it and typifies our experience thus far. The greasy spoon didn’t have any per se vegetarian food, so my wife improvised. The fact that the lady came back to our table later with some ideas how to make my wife’s meal a little fuller goes a long way. That’s more than any waitress at any diner ever did back in Indiana.

That’s what makes this place a keeper.

For example, it seems like politics are more fraught with peril. While there’s a general trend to commercialization and punditry, I think this has probably always been the case. At the very least you can look at archived news quotes and see e.g. people weren’t so up in arms about things like religion or abortion in the 50s. The “issues” change, I’m not sure if the discourse necessarily has.

But family drama is another matter entirely. You think you have a contiguous history in your mind, but really it’s modified through the remembering. That’s demonstrable — though right now I can’t find the experiments supporting that statement, alas.

Was there always an undercurrent of angst at family gatherings? Were our parents always at odds with their folks? How about their parents’ parents? I could see it, because parenting hasn’t changed a whole lot, as far as kids being pissed at their elders and elders being exasperated at their kids goes.

But then I can also see it as a general cultural progression, where it’s more and more likely that a child will both acknowledge and point out the flaws in a parent’s life-choices. But the parent will be incapable of understanding what the child is even talking about. I’m fearful of the day that happens to me, but I think it’s inevitable.

My Christmas was good. I got out of it what I wanted — I set my expectations for enjoyment around things I could control: providing food for people, setting a comfy home as far as possible, enjoying what conversation was there to be had. I was particularly excited to give my wife her gifts, and to see if my daughter enjoyed the toy piano we got her.

There were some stressors to be sure, but my recipe for happiness lately has been to only use the ingredients that I can provide.

Not to take the metaphor too far, but don’t go to your mom to make sugar cookies if all she can provide is salt.

My natural reaction as a geek is to point out ways that someone might be wrong, or point out edge cases. It’s just how programmer minds tend to work. “Sure, but have you considered this option?” “Perhaps you are projecting your own feelings onto them.” Other people tend to jump into those kinds of conversations with different motives; however, the core driver is the same: someone else is dicking with your world view and you need to fix it.

Facts and reproducibility of experience aside, everyone constructs a worldview based on things they’ve experience or that “they just know”. You learn that the earth is round once and then you don’t go testing it each time. No, you just learn it and that becomes a model of reality. Pluto is a planet and that’s that. You learn that a savior was born Christmas dah and that becomes fact in your mind as truly as gravity. When someone challenges that, it’s like a slap in your face.

What does it really matter if none of those things are true? What does it matter if a friend believes this is the time when god dies so that he can be reborn again in spring? What does it matter if someone is irate at Christians wishing him well? I have personal beliefs about each of those and how they’re misguided, but their maintenance of belief is no skin off my nose.

Furthermore, if this is a firmly held worldview, any argument I make will never be believed. I can never, ever convince anyone that something they know is true is actually incorrect. Put another way, anything I say will be interpreted in the same way as me telling you that girls have penises and boys have vaginas. I can argue as much as I want and give you sound reasoning, but everything you know and have experienced tells you otherwise.

So my friend is angry and just as he’d love to teach the people irritating him that his model is the correct one, I’d love to teach him it’s not so bad and there’s no need to be so angry. But that’s not my job, and I couldn’t do it if it were my job. My practice has been to just let go of the idea that I need to convey my difference of opinion.

Only then do I respond if I still have something to say. It’s basically the “who asked you?” principle. I’m acknowledging that they didn’t ask to have their mind changed.

You know what? it’s really kind of freeing to let go of trying to convince people.

That is all, and it’s my gift to you. Merry Christmas.

Right now I just want to say how happy I am to have a short trip to work.

It’s been about 6 years since I worked more than 5 minutes away from my employer. Driving from Issaquah up to Kirkland and back, through traffic, is one of the crappiest ways to start your day. It sets you on edge, there’s inherent danger. The only mitigating factor is you can see the sunrise and the morning fog, which is quite beautiful.

But really, entering your day unstressed is so much more conducive to productive work. I don’t think I ever want to go back to that.

I’m enjoying my pajama pants, right now.

A year ago you were born. You popped out as a wrinkly little post-fetus, wet and crying (but not too much), and now here you are all plump and walking and beginning to communicate. You started off as an alert, albeit dopey, little baby — you’re now an alert, engaging little girl with a winning smile. It’s been amazing to watch you grow over the past year. I am such a lucky daddy.

I want you to know that I tried to go into parenthood without too many expectations how to make you turn out. My overarching goal has been to follow your lead and try not to get in your way. I want to support you and give you reassurance when you need it, but I don’t want to make you be any particular person or try to mold you somehow.

It’s so wonderful to watch your mind work and develop! The other day I watched you playing with a block; suddenly you stopped and peered intently at the sides because you just realized that there were tiny shapes printed on them. You pointed at it, looked at me, and said “ki-tee” in astonishment. I concurred that there were indeed kitties on the side of the block. That was your discovery, I didn’t force it on you to learn. I want life be like that for you.

I know you’ll look to your mom and me to learn how to react, what to think about things, how to live life; my hope is that I can teach you how to figure those things out for yourself. I don’t want to hover over every fall you take or stubbed toe, screaming “oh my God”; I don’t want you to fear pain or failure. But that’s probably the most difficult part of being your parent — each scratch you get hurts me, each time you bonk your head my heart wrenches in pain.

You’re such a tenacious girl, though, that I think I’ll have to work pretty hard to make you fearful of failure. You try so hard at everything! If you fall over, you laugh. If you hurt your hand you might cry, but then you realize it wasn’t so bad and try things again. You’re stubborn just like your mom and dad. No scratch that, you’re stubborn like yourself.

Your engagement with the world is so neat. You’ve said, “Hi” (well, “ha”) for quite a few months now; it’s your general statement of acknowledgement, in fact. Sometimes you say it to things and I suspect it’s that you’re recognizing other items within or on the larger thing. A star on a tree. A kitty on the shirt a stuffed animal is wearing. Leaves and flowers on plants or bushes. Kittens on the side of a block.

I’m glad that in the past year you have soaked up life and keep looking for more. I hope that your mom and I can help you grow that wonder. I hope that we can illustrate, not tell. I hope we don’t get in your way too much. If we do, it is accidental and I am sorry.

I hope I don’t go too far in the other direction and come across as reticent. You are a well-loved little girl and I want you to always know that, dear-heart.

I love you very much, my daughter. I’m glad to be your daddy. Happy Birthday.

Just finished a launch for a project I’ve been working on for quite awhile. A little tired for a post so I’ll just put this here.

Anyway, you should read this adaptation of a talk given at Stanford. It resonates with me because it reminds me of something I was told a lot growing up: You must have a lot of time on your hands.

Radiolab has a new episode up talking about a guy who catalogues minutiae and tells stories about the things that you don’t notice. In the very beginning he makes a statement that goes something like, “Every corner of every building, every join of a seam represents a conscious decision by someone, and there are a whole sequence of stories supporting those decisions.” I really like that idea.

Think about it, someone sat down and planned the pattern of the fabric that makes up your clothing. Or didn’t; perhaps they just got lucky and a random attempt turned out stylish. There’s a pattern and an apparent reason behind everything you interact with.

Or at least that’s what we tell ourselves. I doubt that’s true, personally.

Do you ever think about things you’ve learned in life and how you got there? I do, quite a lot. And I think about things I wish the previous generation were capable of learning, but they just don’t have the sheer time to do it. Realizing that someone is probably incapable of growth is one of the saddest things, and is one of the only fears for my own future that I have. I hope I’m always able to change and adapt, but the statistics seem stacked against me on that one.

But it makes me ponder the narrative behind that. “Are you living up to your potential?” And I think: What if you aren’t? What if you have the skills to be an artist, but you never ever act on them? What if you have talents to write, but you never write anything. Is it a waste? What is “it” that you are wasting?

Why is that so bad? Why is there such antagonism to people who, for example, get humanities degree? Why does science have to be justified with practical applications? Why is it called selfish, indulgent, or even irresponsible to want to do something that makes you happy?

I feel like there’s a subtle obligation that you have to use whatever skills you might have, but only in a practical way. Steady hands? Gotta be a surgeon. Perfect pitch? Practice the piano every day then get thee to a symphony. Never mind if you don’t actually like whatever it is that you’re talented at.

Which brings me to the linked article in the beginning. It basically is a talk to some freshmen saying, “Look, you’re here for a lot of reasons. Are they your own?” It goes on in detail what that actually means, and the comments show that a lot of people miss the point.

Simply, if you’re in Stanford, ensure it’s because you want to be in Stanford. If you’re on the path to be a lawyer, ensure it’s something you really want to do and not because people kept telling you, “You must have a lot of time on your hands” whenever you showed them a piece of art you created, or an interesting bug you found in the field.

It’s like there’s a tacit story. Your talents become a proxy and evidence of how the story is supposed to go — if you don’t follow the script you’re breaking the rules. And then people say you’re being irresponsible.

Let me tell you: There is no overarching story to your life. You aren’t ruining fate if you don’t pursue medicine, regardless of how much skill you have at remembering the bones of the body. You are the captain of a destiny that is recreated every single moment. Thinking there’s something you are “meant” to do or that something is “meant to be” is just you abdicating your choice.

It took me 30 years to figure that one out. I am much happier for the knowing.

And I dearly hope I never tell my daughter she has too much time on her hands. It would be a dishonesty: she has as much time as she wants.

Does that happen to you? You get a gift card, or something free but consumable and suddenly you have this brain freeze. “How shall I spend it???” I mean, I purchased a particular decal for a particular purpose. They sent me a couple extra and suddenly I’m afraid to put one somewhere because I might “waste it”.

It’s funny, because they were free! What does it matter? It’s the same exact thing with a gift card. I agonize over what to spend the funds on, when it really doesn’t matter. Get something that costs $20 if it’s a $20 card. Get something that’s $10! It’s just new money, don’t worry about it!

For example if you had already decided to buy a CD and then discovered you had an extra $20 in your pocket, you’d use it. But as soon as the free thing comes first, such as a gift card that you need to spend, it’s super difficult to decide what to do. I had a hard time even buying this decal in the first place because I was using a surprise gift card. “Is a decal the right thing to spend this on?”

There seem to be two different things at play that cause this. The first is Loss Aversion. You hate to lose things, everyone does. It’s a rare person who really doesn’t care about having something. Money, relationships, things, ideas, attribution — something in that list is important to you. Someone steals your thunder and you feel bad because of Loss Aversion.

The second thing is people love free things. Like, exorbitantly so. In the book Predictably Irrational
Dan Ariely talks about an experiment with expensive chocolates and Hershey’s Kisses highlighting this fact.

He set up a table with quality chocolate and cheap chocolate. The expensive chocolate was heavily discounted, the Kisses were for the same price. People saw the value of the expensive chocolate, so they predominantly preferred the paying a little more for it. However, when he changed the Kisses price to free, no one wanted the better quality chocolate. Everyone went for the Kisses. Same location, same food, the quality chocolate had the same discount. But the valuation of the two items went from quality based to price, simply because one was free.

So this is the problem with free stickers: suddenly you have this thing that you can only use once. You got it for free, so you have a huge valuation on the item. And you don’t want to lose things you value.

It’s both interesting and maddening when your mind runs away with you. I should just stick these on my phone and be done with it.

French is coming along so-so, Je voudrais dire vous que c’est facile, mais non c’est.. Though I did just type that, ad hoc and google translate seems to think it’s right; so I guess that’s progress! My French friends can tell me if it’s correct, I guess.

Since I’m a little buzzed, maybe I’ll just share some photos I’ve collected on m phone. Enjoy!

No, YOU pick them, jerk

Santa's Merkin

I'm not sure who they're targeting with this imagery

NO THANK YOU

Know Where to Run

 

And lastly, some fortunes:

Pithy

This one's kind of meta

Perhaps you've been too passive aggressive

I don't even know

Action with a brain! Happy Friday night!

Part of this is attempting to analyze and deconstruct what I think is happening. Don’t treat this as canon — Your Mileage May Vary.

I guess to hedge my bets I could just say, “Maybe this only happens to me.”

I was thinking about the phrase “man-up” and the corollary phrases, “nut-up”, “grow a pair”, etc. I’ve used them. They’re kind of fun to say. But they really bother me. They bother me because they’re both symptom and cause of a constant scenario I see and also find myself in.

Here’s a typical situation, part of the gestalt of our society: Woman makes self-deprecating statement. Man makes joke in line with woman’s statement. Woman’s feelings are hurt because the self-deprecating statement represents an actual sensitivity. Suddenly someone’s an asshole because they’re making fun of an insecurity or they’re being too sensitive.

Here’s why ‘man-up’ is the problem, and to be clear everyone is guilty of this, it’s cultural.

1. Telling somone to man-up is an admonition that one is not acting like a (grown) man
2. the admonition is frequently applied in situations where one is expressing feelings
3. the implication is that one should act like a man instead of how one is acting right now. That’s how admonitions work
4. the further implication: if you’re not acting like a man, you’re acting like a woman

Whether you’re a man or a woman, when you tell someone else to “grow a pair”, you’re perpetuating the following ideas: men shouldn’t express feelings, women express their feelings too much, and being like a man is the desirable state to be.

That ultimately leads to my scenario described above. If you’re not allowed to express your feelings, the only recourse is depression or laugh about them — that’s how male feelings are supposed to work, according to culture. That also leads to the woman masking her real feelings (because everyone is supposed to man-up), and sending the wrong signals to the man — that this is a joking matter rather than a serious matter, thus a self-deprecating comment.

Basically this ultimately leads to a thing called “gaslighting“, where someone gets defensive and says someone is too sensitive; all because there’s a cycle of poorly sent and poorly understood cues; and all of that is wrapped in a culture of emotional denial so you can’t even identify what the core problem is. It really sucks.

“It’s just joking” is the defense, but that’s what I’m talking about. “It’s just joking” is equivalent to “you’re too sensitive”. I guarantee you that if you are saying that to me then you are in its grip and unaware of your emotional impotence.

Furthermore, jokes are actually the worst form of admonition because they’re so subtle. You don’t realize how they affect you as they’re affecting you. It’s easy to ignore someone who tells you straight up you’re not acting like a man. You can say “Screw ‘em”. However, if someone jokes with you, you take it to heart because it slips under the radar; it’s the same way a backhanded compliment works. You can’t get angry and stubborn when someone isn’t obviously aggressive at you.

Anyway, I don’t really have a good solution for this problem, aside from trying to stop saying things like “grow some balls”. Maybe awareness of the problem is enough.

It’s too bad, though… I really enjoy making statements involving testicles.

Épinard, pronounced "spiznach"

I don’t feel I ever grokked language, though, until I made my realization that words don’t really mean anything. I mean, they mean something, but it’s fiat meaning. Just as a dollar is only worth what it is because everyone agrees you can buy most of a Snickers with it, a particular set of sounds only means something because enough people agree that “dog” means that shaggy thing with the ears and the drool. The sound “dog” for me corresponds to a series of sensations and impressions from every experience I’ve ever had involving dogs.

Once I had that epiphany I was suddenly able to retain more of a language. In my somewhat lackadaisical recent language excursions, my retention and understanding when I see i.e. le épinard and know it means a green, leafy vegetable, is so much greater than I ever had when I was in my younger, more malleable years. I wish they taught languages that way in schools.

They don’t, and Rosetta only sort of mimics what I’m talking about. Rosetta is still a lot of “show some phrases and hope people deduce the rules”. Well, that works fine I suppose. You can build decent vocab and eventually you’ll start to deduce things like sentence structure and conjugation. But I wish there were a more experiential kind of learning, where vocab was presented in context of how you felt when you think about it. Psycholinguistics, if you will.

I find it quite helpful to think about the environment of a language and use that to inform how I understand the language. Coming from English, which by all accounts has an overabundance of words, some phrases in other langues sound banal, trite, or just like caveman speak. Tengo hambre is literally “I have hunger” in Spanish.

But think think about the word “aeropuerto“. Puerto means “door”, aero for “air”. Puerto’s cognate in English is “port” or “portal”. So the feeling I get from that word is more like “portal to the sky”. Imagine how differently you might view air travel if the airport were called the Sky Portal. It sounds fantastic to me. I mean, we’d just take it for granted if that’s how it were — but even so it would color your world.

I happened across a video by Amy Walker, she of the 21 different accents, that was kind of interesting. She implies some of this sense. I particularly like the bit about cheese, because that thought occurred to me when we were in Paris. Americans like “cheese”, the French have a relationship with “frommage“.

Amy also has a series of videos teaching how to perfect your accent. In a couple of them she brings up the point that how you sound and the rhythm and words of your language are how you want to appear to other people, and how you think you are. It’s interesting, and combines with Benny’s suggestion from Fluent in 3 Months, which is to construct an identity for your other language.

Someone who says, “J’ai faim” when they are hungry thinks about their hunger differently from someone who says “I am hungry”. The kind of person who has hunger periodically is different from the kind of person who becomes a hungry person, then becomes a not hungry person later. It extrapolates to the rest of the language.

I’m not sure what I think about constructing an identity. I’d prefer to just have the same identity as I do as an English speaker, but the language may not support it. Or perhaps the language will just let me express myself in different ways more suitable to the mode of speech.

Lastly, and from a more practical standpoint, I really wish that some language teacher would have just sat me down and said, “Look, just try the accent as hard as you can. It’ll only sound weird to English speakers.” What I have been finding is that if I mimic the accent as best as I can, it flows so much better. I tend to follow the philosophy of “laziest way to say it is right.” Following that and attempting the accent as hard as I can makes the phrases flow so much better!

I should stop, this has been longer than I meant it.

Bon soir!

The first thing I did, yesterday, was switch my phone over to Francais mode. It’s a good thing I’m both fairly familiar with the interface and know a lot of cognates in a few languages, so I can guess what things mean.

Versailles ca. '09

One thing I didn’t expect was the modified keyboard. I was trying to respond to a text from my mom and I kept hitting the wrong key. Turns out the French keyboard layout is different. You’d think I would know something like that.

I also didn’t think about the fact that text correction would keep trying to turn my words into the closest French spelling. I had to keep tapping the greyed “this is what you typed” to prevent it from autocorrecting to some random word. Eventually it started asking me to add words like “think” to the French dictionary. Probably not the best.

Fortunately you can set the android keyboard to switch languages. You can set the space bar so that if you swipe it will go to a different language. Really handy!

Aside from that, I listened to a little of Pimsleur Unit 1 and downloaded a free flash card app. Unfortunately the free version gives me lessons 1, 15, and 25 of the paid. So if I go through all of it I’ll start with vocab such as le pomme, and une fille then immediately jump to really complicated phrases like Il y a une chat sur le fille avec deux pommes.

Oh yeah, I just typed that from memory. I think it’s mostly grammatically correct, though somewhat ridiculous.

I’m currently looking for the Berlitz book that we had, but I think it’s buried in one of the several unpacked book boxes in the office. Dreading going through there.

Wish me luck, and if you have language tips send them my way!

I’m proud of several of the entries but I don’t feel the weight of my writing — kind of like someone else wrote them. In retrospect, this seems to follow most of my other creative endeavors.

When it comes down to it, I have a really hard time being creative in a forced nature. Over the past month I’ve really struggled with finding impetus for a post. Despite some of the poorer quality entries, such as the shortish post a few days ago, I truly have endeavored to make something worthwhile each time I sit down to write. I just can’t always summon the muse.

Actually, I’d amend the last line there: It never feels as if there’s a Muse I have to engage. No, the spark of creativity always feels like an Engine of Creation, almost mechanical. I have to kick it over a few times, get it to run. It feels like I’m manually cranking over the engine on a willfully sluggish vehicle — you have to crank and crank and crank and hope the motor catches before your arm tires out. Sometimes it backfires and it breaks your hand.

But when it does catch it’s awesome. It truly feels like it runs away by itself as the ideas flow. Not to mix similes, but at that point the creation transforms into its own entity with its own will. It rushes off, predetermined in its course. That feels amazing. You simply spectate, watching the shape of its passing. The things you write are there because they are inevitable — they necessarily must be there, rather than because you want them to be there.

Too bad it’s so hard to summon the dragon. I’ve long had a strong feeling that I can only be creative in an endeavor if I’m newly excited about it. Once the excitement wears off, I’m finished. After that it’s just listless yanking, producing nothing.

It’s common for me in all endeavors, as a matter of fact. Writing music was similarly frustrating in its way. I had an initial rush of excitement and creativity, and then the shine wore off. I had real momentum and creativity at the start, which subsequently turned into a grind because I didn’t know how to maintain or reignite once the flame died down. That’s ultimately what lead to me stopping Prealpha.

Photography has been similar. I was doing a lot of stuff (at least compared to now) in Goshen. Mostly things for the theater, New World Arts. Photos in the paper, etc. I photographed the crap out my wife. And then I felt like I lost the motivation, or the will to take pictures. It feels like doing a lot of math: find the right aperture, adjust the shutter speed, am I using the right synch speed? It’s all very tiring and I’d rather not deal with it.

You know, I’m suddenly reminded of an observation I made the first time I played poker, and then re-observed the second time I played poker several months later: I’m really good at games when I don’t know what I’m doing. The first games of both sittings I performed really well, but as I learned or remembered the suits and hands and all the rules, my ability tapered off. It’s sort of like I can’t focus on the rules too much, otherwise I’ll suck.

Maybe that wasn’t apropos. Seemed pertinent somehow.

In any event, one thing I have learned is that keeping at it regularly even if it’s kind of a drag can produce some quality. I had the Emotron post which I was pretty happy about, and then there were some sort of lesser entries. Then out of nowhere came the Chantix story. In fact, the two posts I’m happiest about were within the past week.

It is indeed possible to recharge or reinitiate. It’s not all about the excitement and energy of freshly starting an endeavor, as I’d thought. The new energy and honeymoon-glow certainly help, but they’re not required.

I suppose that my main takeaway after a month of writing every day is that I can absolutely be creative when I need or want to. I just need to learn ways of triggering the engine. Which is my next step. It’s not a solved problem so you don’t get a pat answer right now — I’ll let you know when I figure it out.

And now a story
I wasn’t a popular kid in high school, at least I felt like an outsider. I suspect that everyone feels like an outsider in exactly the same way. Let it suffice that I wasn’t a popular kid, necessarily. I had a skater-flop, listened to things like the Cure and Depeche Mode, and wasn’t in any sports. I was a theater, choir, and art guy attending a sports-dominated school in rural Iowa — let that frame the situation.

I used to look up to the cool upperclassmen when I was younger, in particular the clever ones. The ones who had a sense of humor. In particular I remember a few people, such as Jason and this other kid, I think his nickname was “Mongo”. That might have been a different guy, though. They just seemed witty and carefree, generally well-liked. And they were friendly people too.

I used to pass them on the way to chemistry and they’d be hanging out at their end of the hall, sitting on the floor and doing something goofy like singing “Goodbye Cruel World” morosely in harmony. I was in Swing Choir with them where they were kind of Puckish and mischievous and tended to act out during rehearsals. I think they had a crush on Mrs. Gedler the choir director — but then of course we all did.

Swing Choir was more than just singing, it also involved a fair bit of dancing and performing. And while our troupe went to various competitions in the state, I always felt like the main focus of Swing Choir was the Swing Show, a yearly variety show with skits, band and choir music, and various other performances. Popular kids were in Swing Choir. I remember hoping that maybe it would be an avenue to be popular too.

I have a particularly pointed memory of these times, I believe my Sophomore year of High School. For most of my first two years I recall high school being a general downward trend. In junior high I had high hopes for the magic of a new venue, bigger and better things. I thought everything would change and I’d be a new person. But it was more of the same.

I remember feeling as if I was this great person inside, but unable to show it outside. I remember thinking I could just find the right way to act or convey myself, and suddenly everyone would realize how awesome I was. I knew I had these great thoughts and ideas but I had a hell of a time getting people to see or understand them.

I also recall a seminal moment after the Swing Show performance, when I realized that I had the capability of transforming out of the identity of depressive outsider; though it took years to realize what I’d actually discovered. The Swing Choir group had just done the last performance for the night and a good portion of us were hanging out in the band room, located behind the stage. I chose to try joining the group, even though it was mostly upperclassmen. Maybe I got ballsy. Who knows.

There was a double row of metal folding chairs, facing each other. I’m not sure why they were like that, but being teenagers we just sat in them, knees almost touching. People were joking, telling stories and raunchy anecdotes. Who’d slept with whom — they were probably complete lies. At one point they started talking about who’d “done” whom presently in the rows of chairs, one-upping one another

Lou Anne said, “Oh I totally did you, Mongo.”
Mongo said, “Yes and I never thanked you, so thanks.”
Chris so and so said “Wait, I did Mongo too!”
“Who’d you do, Kaiser?”

Jason Kaiser was sitting across the corner from me, he said, “Oh I did Warner”.
Lots of laughs. A little banter about how bad I was in bed.

Then from somewhere I said, “He just said he wanted some sugar!” And everyone there just lost it.

Have you seen that youtube video of the Autistic kid who shot all the three pointers at the end of the basketball game and everyone just goes crazy? This experience sort of had that flavor.

That was a turning point for me. Suddenly I wasn’t just a weird kid at school, I was a potentially-humorous weird kid at school. I didn’t become one of the cool kids, but it opened a door for me and helped me feel confident enough to try similar things again.

Would you like to know the really funny thing? There’s an interesting aside to the bit where I said, “He just said he wanted some sugar”. The joke just popped into my head, and I kind of a vision of Jason coming over to my house, knocking on my door, and asking to borrow a cup of sugar but then there’s some kind of mixup and suddenly we’re making sweet love.

It seemed like a pretty amusing image, but I do recall some hesitation actually saying it. Then I just suddenly did it, surprising myself. I honestly didn’t even think about the double entendre for “sugar”. Which is how the kids there took it — as just a bold statement.

The joke worked despite myself. That sort of thing happens an awful lot to me. But I didn’t realize the real lesson of that experience until much, much later: sometimes you have to stop thinking about it and just do it. Eventually it will work out.

And that’s a long way around to the answer in the first part of this post. This month has been proof that you just need to stop thinking about it and just do it. It doesn’t matter if you don’t have any ideas, just start doing it. It doesn’t matter if it’s clumsy, just start doing it.

Cause you know what? It’s how I found an ending to this post. I didn’t know that story was going to answer my question and give this a theme before I started writing it. I actually wanted to write about creating my first movie, but I just turned off my brain and started writing.

This post worked despite myself. I’m glad that happens.

Thanks for reading!

1829
26,240

After tomorrow I’ll need something to do. This is me musing about next steps. Perhaps you can suggest something!

I have a real issue with too many interests and not enough time. I mean, even before we got the baby it was rough to compartmentalize and find space for anything I wanted to do. For example I wanted to write some Android apps, which blocked me from playing WoW, which blocked me from reading. And of course the blogging, but I think I’ve nicely satisfied that desire at least for a little while.

What I’m thinking is I’ll try to do at least a month of an interest so I can get at least some time out of it. But again, the problem is I have a long list and I don’t know where to start. What would be neat is if I can combine a couple interests.

I’d love to be able to continue learning a foreign language. Currently I know a passable amount of Spanish, a smattering of French, and at one point I’d gotten partway through a Pimsleur Japanese program. So I’d like to continue learning one of those — probably French. One thing I was thinking I might do is record myself learning French. (That’s actually a suggestion from the guy at fluent in three months. Give a tour of your home in your target language, then post the video. Keeps you accountable.) However, a month of that might be particularly boring.

A gratuitous photo of my daughter

I’m not sure how other people do it. Maybe I just have too many interests. I also want to continue with guitar, continue learning how to juggle, maybe learn some card tricks. It’s not that I have all this free time or I’m bored; it’s just that I really want to learn all this stuff but I only have the one brain.

The other thing is, ultimately, I want to learn these things because they’re avenues for sharing and connecting with people. The language thing is kind of obvious, because it’s communication and all. But the other things like photography and music are really gratifying too.

I love that feeling you get when someone else appreciates something you’ve made. It’s so great… it’s like you’ve mind-melded with them and they’ve seen things from your mind’s perspective. For me it’s not just a “yay me, they like me” thing; it’s more a feeling that, for a moment at least, someone else is on the same page as me. It’s a neat sensation, like synergy.

So I have a day to decide what’s next, I suppose. Right now I really am leaning towards the French thing. I’m not sure how much I’ll broadcast, but I will at least set a goal of giving a tour of the house on video. And I may just ease in and do something like a photo a week or something.

But at the very least, I’m going to make an effort to blog once or twice a week. I’ve really enjoyed this, and want to continue. The every day thing is kind of killing me, though.

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I’m not sure why it’s not a consistent ability. I hope someday it will be automatic, all the time. Maybe I just need practice.

Note: I am investigating the slowness issues on this blog. This article took about 3 hours to write, which is way too long for its length. I apologize for any trouble you had reading this.

I ran across and read this article about people living in the place they were born. I was interested mainly because I’m a sucker for maps and data correlation. I like to see trends of data matching to masses of people. I was disappointed by the post, however. The author’s conclusions bothered me enough to post a comment — and then continued to bother me enough to blog about it, too.

I’d like to take this opportunity to practice critical thinking and itemize exactly what’s wrong with the post, in furtherance of being able to do this in the future more readily.

The thrust of the article is of interest to me, having recently moved. As I said, I’m fascinated why some people leave and some people stay. I enjoy wondering at other people’s motivations, and it’s neat to see data that hints at large trends based on masses of individually motivated people.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t quite scratch that itch. The graphic is a map of the US, color-coded by percentage of people who live in the same state they were born. It’s interesting from a certain standpoint, but the article makes a specious tie with mobility, the recession, and being stuck. I say “specious” because there are a *lot* of confounding variables that produced that map.

Starting off, the map is presented with a flavor. He wants us to see it as people who are “stuck” where they were born. Residency in one’s birth-state becomes a proxy for whether someone falls into the “stuck” category; the implication is that everyone’s goal is or should be to move out of state. A mark of success is leaving your home.

Second, it has two pieces of data, total: you were born in a state and do or do not live in that state currently. There aren’t any constraints or mitigating factors, such as “did you move to your current state regardless of your will, i.e. as a child.” Does it include prisoners? Technically they’re stuck, but in a different sense, and regardless of where they were born.

Third, I don’t see a link to the source data. Presumably the author didn’t come up with the graph by himself.

In order to support the “stuck” statement, there needs to be decorating data that describes what “stuck” means. If it means you want to leave but you cannot, then that needs to be represented or the data filtered. Framing it that way illustrates that this doesn’t actually have anything to do with where someone was born. If you are perfectly happy where you grew up, then you aren’t stuck in one place. There’s nothing wrong with staying and being content.

I would love to see the supporting data for the graph and supporting information, because it really is fascinating to see trends. Unfortunately this, albeit short, article doesn’t really do it for me.

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I’m not sure where you fall on the introvert/extrovert spectrum. I tried to determine what the percentages of the population would be for that and there doesn’t seem to be a definite answer. Some sources say a small percentage are introverts, some say it’s half and half. I can’t even know for certain that you understand me when I say “introvert” and “extrovert”, because the terms are so loaded.

Let me just define things as I think of them: in general, if you feel energized after hanging around with friends or going to events, you are an extrovert; if you are energized by alone or quiet time, you are an introvert. That doesn’t mean you are always a partier, and it doesn’t mean you are always a loner — it’s just a loose model for what “does it” for you.

My wife and I are kind of introverts, in this system. Well, I get something out of having big parties and get-togethers, but I can’t just do it at the drop of the hat as some people I know. I have to kind of brace myself. And when I’m at the thing I reach a point where I have to either leave or make a decision to just power through.

Supposedly there are actual chemical differences in the brains of introverted and extroverted people. Introverted people have more blood flow in the frontal cortex areas associated with introspection and self-reflection. Extroverts have less, and are less able to apply self-reflection. Introverts have a low tolerance for “stuff happening”, extroverts have a high tolerance. Supposedly introversion occurs higher with gifted people.

I’d like to believe that all of that, because it boosts my self-image and validates the things I value; but I don’t know the science behind those statements, just circular references to blog posts. Of course, I’m certainly willing to parrot them if they’ll make me look good doing so. *

What I’m mainly concerned about is less about all the definitions I describe above, and more about why does there need to be the description in the first place? If it’s important enough to people to find a label, there must be some underlying need it is trying to meet, or truth it is attempting to describe.

I’d like to borrow from JRR Tolkien to frame my point. Dwarves versus Hobbits, if you will.

You have the dwarves who are doers and goers. They head out and mine for gold, mine for minerals, mine because it’s just what they do. The hobbits, on the other hand, just love to stay in. Write a genealogy, make some supper.

Matching my examples at the start, the dwarves are not above a good beer and a smoke, but what they do is activity. The hobbits aren’t above a party or a gathering now and again, but what they do seems more inward. Writing a genealogy is about the most self-reflective you can get, short of memoirs or a mirror.

My supposition is that there is a real friction between people who like going out and doing stuff and people who like staying in and doing stuff. Furthermore, my experience is that, culturally, it is less acceptable to be a hobbit than it is to be a dwarf. I can’t speak from the experience of an extrovert — who knows, maybe they feel pressured to cool it down a little — but I can tell you that if I wanted to stay inside all the time that would be met with derision and perhaps even a talking-to. I don’t know why that is.

People want the hobbits to be less hobbit-like, go on adventures, have fun and live a little. As if they weren’t already living a fulfilled life. The thing is, who is writing the story of their adventures at the end of the day? It’s the hobbits, isn’t it?

Maybe the dwarves should be a little bit more like the hobbits.

Why can’t we all just get along?

* Blogging is an introverts’ paradise. You can be out in public on a soap box without ever leaving the house.

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P.s. This turned out highly personal, but I consider it a public service for internet searchers so it’s going up.

I was a smoker for around 15 years, had tried quitting a handful of times, but nothing ever took. The longest I ever lasted was 2 weeks in college, until a bad paper gave me the excuse to start up again. I tried gum. I tried the patch. The best I got to was rolling my own, which had the effect of lowering the number of cigarettes I smoked in a day.

It’s hard to quit smoking! I once talked with a guy who had quit cocaine and alcohol, and he said that cigarettes and coffee are the two hardest things to stop using, in his experience. Actually, he said caffeine was the worst of the four, but cocaine was way easier to stop using than quitting smoking. At least that made me feel better about my failures when I heard that. Incidentally, he was the guy who turned me onto rolling cigarettes. Good guy. Don’t remember what his name was.

21st Birthday

There are a lot of things going on with nicotine and cigarettes. For one thing, it hooks into the same neurological system as food rewards. So when you crave a cigarette it literally has the same feeling as if you are starving, at least in terms of need. That means that quitting smoking is akin to deciding to just not eat anymore, forever. Try fasting. That kind of quiet desperation for food is what denying a nicotine addiction feels like.

Another feature of nicotine is its affect changes based on how you dose. Quick bursts have a stimulant effect, slow bursts have a sedative effect. If you see a smoker doing quick pulls on in succession, they are trying to wake up. If you see someone taking leisurely draws, they are relaxing.

It’s kind of fascinating, and that’s the one thing I really miss about smoking: the ability to control my mood dynamically. I would describe it a more acute, pinpointed form of antidepressant. You have an upper when you need one and a downer when you need one. As another aside, I’ve read several places that a lot of therapists don’t actively advise their bipolar patients from quitting smoking, because those patients are effectively self-medicating in real time.

All of this doesn’t even count the social and habitual aspects of smoking. And the self-justifications. To make a long story short, it’s rough. Nothing but respect for people who quit an addiction, nothing but sympathy for anyone who can’t.

So, this is the situation I was in, the year leading up to my wedding. This was the year I decided to quit and to try chemical intervention. I didn’t want to go into my wedding as a smoker. I didn’t want to be skipping out of my honeymoon every several hours to have a cigarette. I wanted to be a person who could do this thing and be in charge of my own destiny; not have addiction in charge of me.

I went to a doctor. I got a prescription for Chantix. I had heard about it from my brother, who once tried it with some success. Prior to starting the treatment, I read the insert and was mildly amused by the list of serious side effects. It sounded like no one should ever take this drug. Not and be happy about it, anyway.

Basically the drug binds to the receptors normally hit by nicotine, but without quite the same effect. What this means is you can smoke, but the nicotine doesn’t do as much because the receptors are already bound. And because Chantix doesn’t have the same effect as nicotine, you end up losing the chemical dependency. That seems to be legit. Smoking just didn’t feel as good anymore. It was kind of a let-down, but I was happy to find something that looked as if it would work.

I was advised by my doctor and also the drug inset to alert my family and some close friends about the treatment, and ask them to be monitors for me. A the time there was a known slight risk of depression with taking the drug. I basically asked my boss and a few people to just touch base with me and ensure I was still feeling pretty good and not about to off myself or anything.

I was on varenicline for maybe 6 weeks before I eventually took myself off because I started feeling really weird. There was a certain unreality over the world. Kind of like everything was a little spacey. I had a hard time thinking. Thank God I never got into a car accident — it’s come about that car accidents and near-misses are a common side-effect. But the problem with Chantix isn’t necessarily getting on, it’s stopping.

To be clear, I didn’t just quit the meds cold-turkey. I slowly reduced the dosage in the same pattern as I increased the dosage when I started (they have you ramp up). Then I was off. I didn’t have quite the same desire for cigarettes anymore. I kind of craved the pills, actually.

However my moods were all jacked up. At the time I associated it with wedding stresses, problems with my family, etc. I had a lot going on and I thought it was just normal life overwhelming me. In retrospect it was chemicals jacked up in my brain. For one thing I developed aphasia, something that’s with me to this day. Aphasia is where you consistently hunt for the right word. I used to be pretty quick at that, but now my brain just locks up hunting for the right term. The unreality I experienced while on Chantix went away, but the hard-to-think stayed with me.

For another I became increasingly depressed. I did, in fact, have suicidal ideation, which is a fancy term for “thinking about throwing yourself in front of a train”. I also experienced a gradual crescendo of panic and anxiety and paranoia. The scariest event was an evening I woke up at about 3 in the morning, scared to death. My mind was racing, I felt like the world was crazy. The darkness seemed to hide a sense of spinning madness outside our apartment.

I remember laying there terrified that I was becoming schizophrenic. I was terrified I was having a psychotic break. I thought I was losing control of the entire world and I couldn’t do anything to save myself. I clutched Nicole lying in bed next to me, and I was terrified she would find out I was crazy and I would lose her.

We were in the midst of planning our September wedding and I had just received the sword I was going to wear at the ceremony — I was so thankful it was down the stairs. At the time I knew if I just kept myself in bed upstairs everything would be fine. I was afraid that if I were near the sword I would pick it up and just run out and start trying to kill people with it.

I clutched Nicole and reassured myself with her wholeness and sanity. She was real and solid. She was asleep even though the world was spinning outside. Eventually I fell back asleep in exhaustion. To this day I think her presence may have prevented me from going insane. I’m so glad she was with me that night — I guess score one for living in sin.

Two days later I stayed home from work and cried the entire day, for no reason at all. Nicole took me to the 4H Fair to cheer me up, but I thought the animals could sense my mental disturbance and that validated my fears. I could tell Nicole was worried, but I didn’t know what to tell her. I was scared of myself and scared of losing her if she knew the truth of my craziness.

It turns out that experience is actually kind of common. Side effects now include “hallucinations”, “psychosis”, and “harm to self and others”. So at least I know I’m not crazy in thinking I was going crazy.

That night was the lowest point of my unexpected chemistry experiment. The night of insanity happened in late July and I hobbled along until mid-August when I started to feel as if things were resolving in the world. I started to gain some perspective and not view everything through depression, hysteria, and panic.

I really don’t know what was going on in my brain, but I’ve hypothesized that either 1) it takes a long time to get Chantix out of your system, so I just had to wait for it to go away, or maybe 2) Chantix just seriously set my chemistry out of whack, and it takes awhile to get it back into shape. I had a happy wedding and enjoyed the honeymoon.

But it was over a year after that before I felt fully normal again.

Epilogue
I think Chantix is still prescribed, but now it has more precautions and notes on it. You should read the Wikipedia section about varenicline’s depression and suicide risks. I didn’t know about all that information when I started, just rumors of it and nothing concrete. The controversy section on that page is interesting, too.

Here’s the funny thing: my brother has been on it twice now and didn’t have any mood-effects. It also didn’t help him quit, so there’s that.

In the end, my feeling about the whole Chantix experience is that it’s as if I took a hardcore psychedelic. My chemistry changed. I feel like a slightly different person. I already mentioned the aphasia. I have a friend who talks to me about schizophrenic people he knows, and I feel like I understand what he’s talking about. I’ve been there, at least for a little while.

This is the positive takeaway: in the darkest points of this tale, during the times of depression, there was one thought that always cropped up. “I bet a cigarette would make me feel better.” But I resisted. I never bought a pack of smokes. I even developed a practice of stopping my breathing when I walked by second-hand smoke, so I wouldn’t inhale it. I powered through the end of my addiction while I was going crazy. Who knows, maybe being crazy is what it took. It was a year of developing a sense of will.

That’s the happy ending to all of this. I still don’t smoke. I still have no desire to smoke. But I can’t thank Chantix for that. I’m claiming it as my own.

1824

But since I didn’t do the obligatory Thanksgiving post and because I still feel a little unwell, I’ll give you something short and sweet: a bulleted list. And then maybe a short pontification because that’s what I seem to do.

• I am thankful for my wife and child.
• I am grateful we have enough food to eat.
• I am glad that I can work from home.
• I am appreciative that I am not deathly allergic to bee-stings.
• I am ecstatic that my genitals are not on fire.
• I am likewise relieved that this cat on my lap is not made of corrosive acid.
• I am happy I have beer.
• I am aware this list has turned from thanks into feelings, and also tongue-in-cheek.

My list is both sincere and humorous. Perhaps it’s just me, but sometimes I get the vibe that it’s inappropriate to be both. You can’t be serious and also find humor in something at the same time. I’m not sure why that is. I find a little levity helps to make the point, and being all serious all the time seems really limiting in terms of looking at situations, pros and cons.

The don’t-mix-humor thing feels the same as the don’t-point-out-flaws thing. You know, if someone you disagree with points out flaws with your philosophy, they must hate your entire philosophy and you. You can totally point out flaws with a system and still appreciate the system. For example, pointing out problems with your family or problems with your relationship.

If it’s interpreted as an attack, that’s a red flag that something actually needs to be fixed with the relationship or the system in question. The first rule of Fight Club is you don’t talk about Fight Club. The first rule of a dysfunctional system is you don’t talk about the dysfunctional system. The corollary (and this is not my own, but via my dad): if you are the one who points out that the system is dysfunctional, you are the asshole.

It’s a kind of rule of thumb I follow. If I feel a system is crazy and when I point out that it’s crazy I am supposed to feel like a heel simply because I pointed it out, that’s actually my validation.

So I am also thankful for that knowledge, and I am a happier man for that. Thanks, Dad.

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But she can’t say the words very well, so as we see her applying labels to things it’s really evident that she’s grasped the concept or idea of a thing. But it also illustrates to me how words largely serve to make us unhappy.

I ran across an article about a year ago about a scientist with an interesting take on lef-brain/right-brain function*. The way he saw it, the left side of the brain is identical to the right side, except it’s brain-damaged. The stuff that the left side does well, analytics, language, etc, can also be done by the right. His contention is that the left side is hyperfocused on analytics and pattern matching, and kind of took over humanity because that turned out to be a pretty useful adaptation.

Furthermore, everything in our culture and society is designed around, because of, and in support of the analytical side of the brain rather than the right — a more holistic and experiential side of the brain. Up to and including the statement I just made. If you’re constructing a story or a narrative out of events, you’re validating the left side.

This guy’s take is that you don’t actually need that hyperfocus, you can actually do it all in a non-linear, creative fashion on the right side; furthermore, you’ll probably be a happier person because you’re seeing reality as it really is and not how the damaged, analytical side sees it. And he has some experimental data that looks as if it backs his claims.

Whether or not there’s a true left/right antagonism, the core concept really resonates with me. Lately I’ve realized that most of the conflicts I have and see are all about narrative. It’s the same raw data, but the story that different people construct around it complicates matters. Everyone sees their own pattern in the same data, but their own pattern is truly their own.

So, for example, it’s not that members of two religions want different things out of life, and it isn’t really about their beliefs even. It’s that their beliefs inform their story about how the world works, but each story is a slap in the face of the other story. The overarching story is that the world is internally self-consistent. I.e. gravity isn’t backwards for you. So if my story doesn’t go with yours, that’s a serious problem.

I think about this as Adelaide develops language, because what she’s doing right now (and this is verifiable with brain imaging) is letting her two hemispheres fight it out. Sooner or later the left will win, cause that’s what happens. But in the meantime, I see her going from an experiential mode of observing and cataloging, to a stage where she’s applying labels to things and categorizing them.

Here’s a thought experiment for you: Think about some animal that doesn’t have language (so far as we know), such as a wolf. You can put an assortment of objects in front of him but he doesn’t have a context or concept of “this is a thing called a book. there are lots of others like it in the same general shape.” My daughter had that a few months ago, but now she knows that this shape is a book, and even this is the book with Elmo in it. This book is like that one because it has a golden spine. She has labels for concepts and so can differentiate them — which opens the door for preference.

I’m minded of a constant trope in fantasy, that “Names Have Power”. If you know the name of something you can control it. There’s also the idea of just knowing the right words and you can do magic. I think this reflects a fundamental assumption about language. You can get more and more specific and as soon as you have the right word to call something, you know what it is and can hold its destiny in your mind.

There’s a Richard Feynman video I watched recently in which he recounted his father’s teaching method. One of the anecdotes boiled down to this: you can know all the names in all the languages for a sparrow, but you won’t know anything at all aside from human language concerning that sparrow. He then went on to use that in support of learning in a more scientific sense, e.g. describing that bird’s properties. My point in all of this is that you’re still using language, and your fundamental assumption is wrong.

Here’s where your left brain is going to disagree with me.

Pointing at a sparrow and describing it is just as flawed, because that entity is unique enough that it should be the only thing to be called sparrow. It is not the same thing as the sparrow sitting next to it. The sparrow sitting next to it is constructed of different atoms, has a different path through ife. Though it looks the same and maybe is a nest-mate, that being should be called sparrow-2. The name is a label, but it isn’t the essence.

I posit that a wolf looks at a sparrow and sees a thing that flies, that it is similar to but a totally different being from another thing that flies. So it couldn’t possibly have the same name. And everything is like that. Each tree, hill, rock, and other wolf. Each thing is a thing unto itself.

Your mind might balk at that idea simply for the sheer number of words one would need, and because you really want to say “look, they’re all birds at least” — but that’s the thing, why do you even need the words? Why do you feel so strongly about it grouping them together? What purpose does categorizing serve you that when I challenge it you have such a strong reaction?

Ultimately, calling something by a name is simply about control. It’s about being able to feel as if you have an understanding or at least knowing of any particular object. Unknown shape on the movie screen is scarier if they don’t tell you it’s a ghost or a man or a dog. Dealing with bad people is more manageable if you can say it’s because of Evil.

Look around the room you’re in. Everything you see and acknowledge is a placeholder. That wall is a fundamentally different object from the one it adjoins. Each individual thread of carpet is its own object in space. You call it carpet or threads, but each one is uniquely constructed of distinct atoms. There’s thread-1, thread-2, thread-3 and so on. I’m not saying it’s alive or has a being, but that you see it as all the same when each is its own object.

Remember what I said about stories? A story is just a huge Name. A story is a placeholder so you can collect other names. This is the one about the guy who is a jerk and loses his girlfriend, then amends his ways and gets her back. This is the one about the prodigal son. This is the one describing how a sparrow works.

So I look at Adelaide learning language and I’m both excited and also a little sad. I’m glad that I’ll be able to communicate with her, but I also regret that she’s losing her experiential wonder at the world. She’s slowly leaving paradise.

It’s like the story of the Garden of Eden, except the conventional telling is wrong. I don’t think they left Eden after eating from the Tree of Knowledge. I think it happened before.

I think they left Eden when they started naming things.

* I’ve looked and cannot find the original article. However there are lots of related posts. He was doing experiments with transcranial magnetic stimulation to disable the left side of the brain. Really cool stuff!

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If you’ve read here before you know that this statement is probably a little disingenuous, or as I like to call it, “funny”. But it’s sort of the truth, as well. My practical knowledge of constructing music is minimal and self-taught, and my practical knowledge of controlling any instrument — such as that Stratocaster sitting in my office right now — is practically nonexistent. I’d like to take this opportunity to lay down a history of my brief musical career.

In high school I was very much on the music track. I was in choir. I went to All-State and sang solos. I was even in a program called Meistersingers. Yes, I was in Swing Choir and danced on stage. I got around the rural Iowa vocal scene.

When I was 15 I begged my mom to buy me an electric guitar — eventually she relented. I got a Squier Stratocaster because I didn’t know anything about guitars, but I recognized the name. It was cream colored, only single pickups so it buzzed around fluorescent lights. And it just felt right in my hands. I loved that thing. Before I got an actual amp I used to run it into the phono jack on the back of my stereo. Probably a bad move.

I had this dream of coming up with a rock arrangement for Ode to Joy and playing it for Swing Show (the school’s variety show) with a bassist and some vocalist friends. There would be lights, there would be awesome rocking. Maybe even a smoke machine! In my head I pictured the audience going nuts over the awesome performance.

But first I had to learn how to rock. Fortunately, I got two free lessons with the purchase of my guitar, so twice I met with a stringy-haired, rocker-looking dude at the music store. I was intimidated by him because he looked pretty metal, and could obviously manipulate the guitar in ways I’d only seen on Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. He also wore Lennon glasses which was seemed a bit incongruous, but only because I was unfamiliar with Ozzie.

So I went to my free lessons. The first one he taught me how to take care of and clean my guitar as well as some finger exercises; the second one he taught me how to do power chords — the musician’s standby. He showed me two methods for that: the right way, and the way that looks like you’re flipping off the audience. I giggled uncomfortably at that because I was a dork and didn’t know what I was doing.

I missed the subsequent lesson. I was late to arrive, and when I got there he’d already left so I couldn’t reschedule. Then on the way home I threw a rod on my Mustang so I had no transportation to get to the music shop. It was just as well, I thought to myself, because I was super self-conscious about my lack of coolness. At the time I thought the stringy-haired rocker was judging me. In retrospect, I really shouldn’t have been intimidated because I think he may also have been the guy who DJ’ed the roller rink we used to visit.

So I contented myself with practicing fifth chords at home, and trying to learn how to finger pick. I could actually muddle through and play a few memorized bits, but to this day I can’t just pick it up and wail as you’d expect from anyone who owns a guitar. It’s a little embarrassing.

That didn’t stop me from starting a “band” with my friend Trevor. We used to hang out at his place, talking about crap, and recording sort of experimental music with my mom’s Singalodeon. We called ourselves the Silent Ventriloquists and didn’t really make music so much as put lots of sounds together. There were two really neat atmospheric things we did that I still wish I had copies of. And there was one where we did kind of taiko drums in the band room. All of that is lost though. Only the name and a fond memory.

My senior year I joined an abortive attempt at a garage band. We came up with 3 or 4 songs, one of which was a cover for Henry the 8th and one of which was a Green Day cover. We were a pretty terrible band — the drummer was passable, the bassist listened to a lot of Rush, the vocalist was okay if the song was only screaming, the lead guitarist pretty much only listened to Metallica, and there was me. My claim to fame was a wah wah pedal. Protip: You can always mask inability by adding effects.

Amazingly, a college station in Lansing played a recording of us on the radio. Also amazingly, someone wanted us to play at their party. I was a little hesitant about that because we didn’t have any equipment really. The vocalist was singing through my amp (a blessing, because when he yelled it would cut out my guitar so you couldn’t hear me sucking). Most of the time you couldn’t hear the bassist. The drummer frequently dropped the beat in inappropriate places.

Still, we had a gig.

Alas, the gig fell through the day before the event when we found out that the bassist, who had been unavailable for a week, had moved to Florida. On a whim. I still don’t know what to make of that. That event marked the end of the band. We never really had a name for ourselves. I still think “Butter” would have been a good one.

College brought me new friends, one of whom had been making music with real instruments and his PC for a little while. He went by the name Cult of Jester and I loved his electronic music. It blew my mind that you could fully produce your own music with just yourself and a computer. I proceded to run a cord directly from my guitar into the soundcard and get to work.

I constructed a bunch of songs under the name Prealpha, almost all of them crap. There were a handful that were enjoyable though. One of them, “Tetris Groove“, was pretty popular in fact. Back when mp3.com was a site for artists, it became so popular I attracted the notice of a UK radio station.

I still remember getting an email one Saturday morning asking for permission and promo photos from some strange UK address. I quickly grabbed some clothes, the webcam, and sent some ridiculous photos their way. Fame! Then the song was taken down for copyright, because really it was just the Tetris music with some drum programming and a bit of production done to it. It was fun while it lasted though!

The face of Prealpha

And that brings me to today. Sometimes I run across the old files from Prealpha, or I think about the bands I was in. I still love music but I haven’t done more than sing in the shower. I’ve got Garage Band here so I could conceivably start producing again. But I’ve got this baby, and I’ve got work, and I’ve got all sorts of writing in the evening.

And I still don’t know how to play guitar.

–

This is the last song I ever made: Still Breathing

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