nerd nerge
During a discussion today with my coworker H., we were discussing how much ire is expressed towards the EPA. EPA’s job is to protect the environment and public health, so why would this make people angry? Politicians claim that it’s because the EPA obstructs business opportunities and therefore jobs. Many of these politicians represent corporate interests, and therefore greed, so it’s obvious that what the EPA is really obstructing is unmitigated greed and profits. Reigning in corporate activity to protect health and the environment completely chap’s the corporate ass, as well as all those with stocks in? up? the corporate ass.
The ire that is expressed has another level to it. The EPA’s job is protection and doing good. They are basically perceived as a bunch of goody-goodies riding high on their moral horse. Since I am a vegetarian, I’ve often felt this kind of ire on a personal level. Which is to say, some meaty people perceive that I am holding myself to a higher moral standard, and they resent this, so they feel a need to insult, mock and belittle my vegetarianism. I mean, why should anyone care what I eat? They care only if they perceive I am judging them. Really, it’s about them judging themselves. Right now there’s an ad by McDonalds appearing on buses that says that their “all-american” food is for everyone except vegetarians. Ha ha ha. Did they forgot about those who keep kosher, or follow halal laws, or who eat healthy? No, they just want to mock vegetarians because everyone knows vegetarians are irritatingly with their damn morals.
In the same way, I think politicians who attack the EPA dislike the idea of a body being protective and kind, especially if they themselves are mean and corrupt, so they attack. All these perceptions and misconceptions are simplified though. EPA isn’t a bunch of saints and don’t always make the mark. This is why non-profits such as the NRDC exist, to keep the EPA to its goal. But no matter. The perception is more real than the reality.
I recently dug my portfolio of my large works out from under my bed. Yes, I store my artwork under my bed. It’s the only place I really have room for it. Over the years a lot of my work has gotten frayed, but I guess I don’t care that much. I figure it’ll all get thrown away after I die anyway. Which sounds grim, but I guess I was planning on being known post-mortem, I would have been showing my art publicly, or had progeny, or something, and I have done none of these things.
In any case, as I looked through several decades of painting and drawings, several things came to mind. I was impressed with the craftmanship of my earlier works. It looked to me like I used to spend hours just working on the eyes on some faces. I don’t feel like my art takes me more or less time than it used to. It’s always taken many hours to complete a piece. I think I used to just work on it more, such as every day, whereas now I work on it only one or two days a week. And what I wanted it to look like has changed over time.
More importantly, since my art comes mostly from my subconscious, I felt that perusing these works was a time machine back through my subconscious mind, back through the thoughts and feelings I have had over the years about myself and my life. Some of these pieces have a lot of emotion behind them, and looking at them, I could feel that emotion come alive in me.
In this way, it is the same if I think about a dream I had that particularly effected me, or about a strong memory. Sometimes I am a very different person than who I was in the memory, or who went to sleep one night and had a profound dream. But thinking about these things still has an emotional effect on me. And when do I think about these things? Well, if you read my last post, you’d know.
It seems that I am simultaneously experiencing life in four different paths, or perhaps parallel worlds. Everyday life, the world I share directly with others, is like the molecular structure holding the atoms in place to create a molecule. The world of my art is influenced by my everyday existence, but in some ways has a life of its own. It has its own developments that reflect daily life but are a unique language all its own. In the same way, my subconscious take my experiences and creates entire new worlds out of them every night, which amazes me constantly. And memories — why do certain ones stick in our minds, and other vanish completely? Some of them don’t seem particularly important yet they remain, year after year. Memories have a life of their own too, and their own priorities. I seem to have varying control over each of these four paths. I have the illusion that I have the most control over my waking life. I make decisions and act on them, and these decisions have ramifications. I seem to have the least control over my dreams, even though I experience lucid dreaming. I have no idea what I will dream every night, which is really part of the fun.
It’s interesting to see where these path converge and diverge. My latest drawing is a convergence of art, memory, and dreams that I have brought into the world at large. My subconscious has been made visible. It moves me in an indescribable way.
I spend a lot of time daydreaming; I always have. I spent a lot more when I was young had the ability to lay on a couch all day starting out the window. I used to say “doing nothing” was my favorite activity, which is far from the case presently. But I still enjoy just thinking for thinking’s sake.
It seems like I used to see other people daydreaming, but I hardly see it anymore. At the bus stop, on the BART, everyone is engaged in some gadget or another. A few are reading books. They seem well absorbed and content. The other day, though, I saw someone on the transbay bus staring out the window. That’s when it dawned on me that I really don’t see this anymore. The scenery from the Bay Bridge is often breathtaking and I’m at at a loss as to what people see on their device that is more stunning. I guess it just must look different to me. But also it’s the thoughts that I have when looking at beautiful things, or even just experiencing the sights and sounds of the world, that are important to me. Yet it seems that these have little value to most people.
In reality, they never did. How many kids are admonished to “stop daydreaming”? It seems that these admonishments haven taken hold and the daydreaming has stopped. It doesn’t seem like a loss. The world has gone on. No one seems to suffer from lack of it. Did daydreaming ever had a purpose?
According to Wikipedia, daydreaming is associated with the creative process. (If you read the entry, there are some good footnotes as well.) Most people in a capitalistic society are not engaged in particularly creative endeavors, so in fact daydreaming could be seem as a waste of time from an individual standpoint. Reading the news and gathering information, communicating with others, etc. would probably be as a more effective use of time if one has no creative outlet. Also, people with dull, rote jobs may spend much time daydreaming at work and would rather use their time for other activities.
Overall, the U.S. has made it clear that creativity and arts has little values. It’s usually the first programs cut from dwindling school budgets. Grants for the arts are also in the first cuts to any municipal budget. Also, careers in the arts are woefully underpaid. For many people, it can only be a hobby.
Conversely, hobbies are often the very activity that give life purpose and meaning.
In any case, my daydreaming may be out of step with the masses, but it is actually very useful for my creative endeavors. Apparently my stubbornness about not adopting the use of personal devices or cell phones is not just obstinacy for its own sake. My resistance is about my art. So let the daydreams continue.
I think I’ve mentioned before that I think Homo sapiens is an evolutionary mistake. There’s a lot about people that doesn’t really make sense. One human characteristic that I’ve been thinking about lately is grief. I’m not saying that no other animals experience grief, but I can only speak about the human experience. It seems to me that this is one of those areas we have evolved too far. As I get older, I find more and more people who are permanently altered by grief, and not for the better. There are deaths that some of us can never get beyond, and it permanently lessens our quality of life. There are even people who die of grief. So, what evolutionary advantage is a mental state that can kill you? No advantage at all.
Another weirdness are dreams. At this point in my life, my dreams have evolved into sequences so detailed, long, and complex that there really isn’t that much difference between them and my waking life. The two main differences seem to be that my dreams have no consistency from day to day, and that my dreams usually don’t have banal activities like brushing my teeth or taking out the trash. Other than that, my subconscious creates people with distinct appearances and personalities — just as in “real life” — and there’s a fairly logical sequence of events. It’s kind of like watching a movie except I’m in it. And, unlike most movies, I have no idea what the end will be.
I do sometimes know I’m dreaming, which adds another level of weirdness. I had a dream last year where I told the people with me that they didn’t really exist, I had created them with my mind. They did not believe me and instead began to argue with me. Their point was that they had gathered before me and I had showed up last; so how could they not exist if I appeared later? I agreed that what they said made sense but that I would wake up soon and they would vanish. Which is what happened. But I ask you, what kind of crazy brain-eating-itself creation is this? Could this not be too much imagination? Could this not be another evolutionary mistake, that ones mind is so convoluted that it creates world and then argues with its own creation?
Lastly, I’d like to present to you the mind’s great attachment to permanence. That is, we tend to see the things around us as permanent. This is especially true of those we love; we can’t imagine them not being there (which leads to problem #1 above). Whatever our present life is, it seems like it will always be that way. I’ve felt this way on the last day of a job — that I can’t imagine I will never again come to work at this place. Even when the change is imminent. Now, Buddhism talks a lot about impermanence, meditating on it and accepting it and what not. But why have our brains evolved to see things as permanent, so much so that it takes a great deal of time and energy *not* to see things that way?
I’m sure there are other examples, but these three human experiences point to a species that it just too evolved.
Today, for the first time ever, I worked at my desk standing up. Although I prefer the idea of a job where I get paid for sitting on my ass all day, the truth of the matter is that I’m much too fidgety to do it for very long. I need frequent breaks (read: excuses) to get up and move around, make some tea, chit-chat, etc. So the reality of sitting all day hasn’t been working for me, but it took this article to make me do something about it.
I had to spend some time scouring the office for articles to prop up my monitor and keyboard. If I had some sort of disability or debilitating issue with sitting down, I’m sure the ergonomics folks at work would buy me an expensive state-of-the-art desk with hydraulics so I could raise it easily. But being that I am healthy *and* a contractor, I am left to my own imagination. Fortunately, there is an abundance of abandoned dictionaries and thesauri around my office that are quite sturdy and useful for this task. So I piled up some books, put the keyboard and monitor and such on them, and stood the fuck up.
The instantaneous and obvious difference was that rather than being in a dark cubicle, I could now see out the window. Yea, verily, if I leaned ever so slightly one way I could actually see the effin’ Bay Bridge. I felt 1000 feet tall. And that is a feeling that rules.
Other discoveries were not so grandiose. My brain seemed a bit slowed down merely because I was in another body position, but I figure it’ll adjust. I did feel more alert in general, but I seemed to be working at a slower speed. The compensation for that is, since my monitor is now more visible, I had less of an urge to hang out on Twit or send email.
The first negative realization I had was that I still find ways to slouch, slump, and hunch over even while standing, and still have to use my Alexander Technique quite a bit. I just seem to have a natural propensity to revert to the fetal position at all time. I would say that if you don’t have good posture and/or don’t have a discipline to help you with your posture, standing while working at a desk will probably be more painful than sitting down.
Lastly, my choosing to wear my only pair of shoes with substantial heels on the day I decided to start working standing up was a very dumb idea. My feet were killing me when I walked to the bus at the end of the day. Especially my left foot, for whatever reasons, felt like it had been pounded with a boulder. However, after a 40-minute bus ride, my feet felt much better. So I guess they are pretty resilient, but I’d rather skip the pain.
That being said, I wrote this sitting down.
A couple years ago, a cousin of mine created a family tree on a free online geneology website. I looked at it a bit back them, but I stopped paying attention to it fairly quickly. I keep receiving occasional emails automatically generated from the site about updates, which I mostly ignore. Recently I received one that said that someone had joined my family’s tree. I was completely unfamiliar with the name, so I decided to glance at the site.
In the time I that had lapsed, my family tree had grown quite a bit. There were many more “second cousins once removed”. I had no idea who these people were. They were just a name. To me, they didn’t really exist.
I realized then that if these people looked at this same family tree and came across my name, they would probably have the same reaction. Something along the lines of “Who the hell is she?” and “Who cares?” To them, I would be a non-entity.
It’s been puzzling me lately why the human brain evolved so that we each see ourselves as the center of our world. It’s natural to see the world as a network with you in the center. It’s next to impossible to not see the world that way. We can try a bit with our imagination, but our natural inclination is to see ourselves first. I don’t mean in a moral or philosophical way, I mean in an experiential way. It seems to me these is why it is next to impossible to envision being dead. How could the world exist without you? You are the center of it.
Yet, to billions of people, you don’t even exist. So… do you even exist? Our lives seem so real and so important, but if you take into account the lifespan of the universe, we are only here for a blink of an eye. And we are important to those who love us, but 100 years from now, most of us will have been completely forgotten.
Still, it’s hard to not take the whole thing — our lives, I mean — so damn seriously.
U2 lyrically addressed this metaphysical problem about 30 years ago with the song, “A Day Without Me.”
I guess this was before Bono stopped pretending he was playing the guitar.
I seriously doubt anyone would look here for dating tips. I know a thing or two about the subject since I dated until I was 41. And it wasn’t like, boo-hoo, I can’t find anyone to settle down with. I had no interest in a permanent relationship, so serial monogamy was the thing for me. Of course, then I met K, and realized that I would never like anyone better than him, so I “settled down”.
I do still dispense my dating advice to anyone who asks, and recently someone asked me to email my tips to them, so I thought I’d reprint them here. This methodology took years to perfect, and saved me a lot of time and heartache. I hope someone somewhere can benefit from it.
The main points are: Be assertive, confident, and clear-headed.
Without further ado:
1. First, and most importantly, trust your intuition. If someone seems like they aren’t suitable for you, they aren’t. Don’t “give them a chance”. You are very probably wasting your time. Remember, these people are going to be on their best behavior, so what you are getting is the tip of the iceberg. If it looks like they have a little problem on the surface, there is usually a big problem under the surface. If something seems odd, move on.
Don’t feel sorry for them. It’s incredibly condescending. If you’re only paying attention to someone out of pity, stop and get out of the way so they can find someone who honestly likes them.
2. Be clear about your priorities. It’s next to impossible to find someone who has everything, so think of what’s most important to you. Good values? Good sense of humor? Good income? Good looking? Good in bed? Yeah, I know, we all want all those things but be clear about what is most important to you.
3. When you first make contact, limit your email exchanges to one or two. It’s easy to get involved in a long, romantic correspondence that is very exciting but has nothing to do with reality. Once you have a photo of them and a basic idea of who they are, if you are interested in them, you should talk to them on the phone as soon as possible. Lots of information gets revealed on the phone that would never come out in email.
4. If you’ve had a one or two of phone conversation and you like the person, arrange to meet them for coffee. Phone conversations, like email, can get very romantic but they are not reality. If you are interested, you should meet in person fairly soon, in a public place, for a short amount of time. Even if things go incredibly well, you should stick to just meeting them briefly and then going home to think about it. This may take a bit of self-control, but it’s definitely worth taking your time rather than rushing into things.
5. If you’ve gotten this far, and you still like the person, you can move on to a real date. If they are not what you are looking for, you’ve only invested a short amount of time and energy and you can move on to someone else.
6. Always let people go in a humane and considerate way. If you have met them in person, even briefly, the kind and brave thing to do is to call them, thank them for meeting you, but tell them firmly that you will not be seeing them again. I’ve met people I thought were really nice, but they just weren’t for me. These are the hardest to let go because I felt guilty.
However, it’s best to keep it short and to the point. You do not have to offer reasons. I prefered to just repeat, “Thank you, but I won’t be seeing you again.” until they got the message. This is because they are often hurt and angry at the rejection, so the more you say, the more upset they get. If they are rude, you can just say, “That’s all I have to say,” say goodbye, and hang up.
If you only got to the phone stage and didn’t meet them, you can just send them a short email saying the same thing.
If you only emailed them, you can just stop emailing or send a brief email. Sometimes they will send back a hostile message. If they do, do not respond, just block them so they can’t email again.
Dating if fun but can get tiring. If you’re not having fun, take a break. Because if it’s not fun, why bother!