Tuesday, April 3, 2018
Tradeoff
The present author gave up the privilege of college education - thousands of dollars a year many are told from a young age, cruelly but realistically, are unobtainable to have - in order to enjoy the privilege of travel. Of seeing more countries in one's 20s than most see in a lifetime. Of course, the present author now can both no longer travel, nor afford a 4 year degree - much less achieve comfortably, either - so the tradeoff, in retrospect, was more of a loan against the future, in desperation, to try to create any semblance of enjoying the present. The memories of the unique and wonderful experiences are there, but they've been replaced by rust spots on an old Camry, the knowledge that a 2 year degree is meaningless (so say the stats, the data, the present author's father, friends, and more), and realization that if it was supposed to be fun while it lasted - said economic fortune and geographical privilege - and it wasn't, really, then what does that leave the rest of life, when even said luxuries are gone, replaced by the mundanity of a 100+ year old house, a breaking down car, a breaking down body, a passion (writing) whose ability to conjure up worlds and characters has disappeared, possibly forever, storytelling fun enough until everything needed to be said had been said (poorly), and what was left was staring, like we all do, at an LED screen, cursing the blank space, the social media, the newscaster, the world.
Monday, April 2, 2018
cut off at the knees
'Family obligations' as a term feels apt, insomuch as so much of what we do for family is out of a sense of obligation. One wonders where this obligation comes from; the financial stressors of raising a kid that as one gets older one recognizes and seek to pay back? Who knows. Is enjoyment something that should be a primary goal? Is knowledge? My teen self would have said the latter at all costs, but as years of self-harm and depression and anxiety took its toll, my cursory answer began to morph.
I'm a shithead. I don't really deny that, and I have made mistakes that a lot of people have and haven't made, and have committed a lot of fuckups, even ones I am sure I am not aware of. So it behooves me to question if obligations - to friends and family - are worthy endeavors. Life is not full of doing only what we enjoy, but the balance has never been, perhaps, what we most want, what Keynes and others envisioned 100s of years ago as efficiency skyrocketed and technology flourished. We commit ourselves to displeasure to try to wring pleasure from what we can, in ways that are inefficient and temporary (large TVs? Backlogs of video games to never play?).
In the last few months the present author has fraternized with people whose values are, to say the least, consistently inconsistent with said author. While in some cases these values are superficial and manageable, in other ways they represent deep-seeded values, how one sees other people, women, PoC, trans individuals, and more. In many cases, these people are family, in others, they were attempted friends. We all grapple with when we draw the line, and life is full of compromises and the like. Peter Jackson in his movie directing history with LotR and the Hobbit was not terribly kind to animals in the filming process, and the movies, much like the books, are replete with racism and sexism. But I do enjoy them I suppose, as my partner pointed out to me, so there is value to be gained.
Is there value to be gained in these other social events where discomfort reigned? But perhaps more fundamentally; is the discomfort a result of a toxic combination of social anxiety, introversion, and perfectionist standards? Many of my closest friends have, unintentionally, misgendred other close friends of mine, and while I correct them, it seems to only fix itself temporarily, before resorting back to he/she in inaccurate ways. But I accept them given our relationship and their other values. Or perhaps accept is too strong a word, because even now we talk less and I cringe at their statements at times and their pushback to things I value, denigration of PC culture and the like that escapes their lips.
So I wonder; do I like LotR because it is easy, but not the family and social fraternations because it isn't, and with effort I could not only address the poor jokes and environment but also derive value? Do I shortchange myself and others the chance to grow? Or if I don't, do I indirectly or directly harm others by condoning their behavior? The internet is littered with articles and op-eds as Thanksgiving approaches about how abandoning and at least countering the bigoted uncle is not just Good, but Required.
As I sat at a kava bar with anxiety increasing, wishing for a hit of Xanax or something, I wondered the same. As I sat with family members who joked about black people or women I wondered the same. Do I compromise on what is easy and not what is hard? Do I owe a family who loves me more leeway or time? Do I cutoff too many people out of a perfectionist demand I never even meet? Am I a hypocrite for doing so? Do we all, in the end, reveal ourselves to be nothing more than contradictory trash heaps of hate and flaws and insecurity and bigotry so much so that selectivity is flawed and overdone? Find out more next time, on a blog in an empty corner of the web.
I'm a shithead. I don't really deny that, and I have made mistakes that a lot of people have and haven't made, and have committed a lot of fuckups, even ones I am sure I am not aware of. So it behooves me to question if obligations - to friends and family - are worthy endeavors. Life is not full of doing only what we enjoy, but the balance has never been, perhaps, what we most want, what Keynes and others envisioned 100s of years ago as efficiency skyrocketed and technology flourished. We commit ourselves to displeasure to try to wring pleasure from what we can, in ways that are inefficient and temporary (large TVs? Backlogs of video games to never play?).
In the last few months the present author has fraternized with people whose values are, to say the least, consistently inconsistent with said author. While in some cases these values are superficial and manageable, in other ways they represent deep-seeded values, how one sees other people, women, PoC, trans individuals, and more. In many cases, these people are family, in others, they were attempted friends. We all grapple with when we draw the line, and life is full of compromises and the like. Peter Jackson in his movie directing history with LotR and the Hobbit was not terribly kind to animals in the filming process, and the movies, much like the books, are replete with racism and sexism. But I do enjoy them I suppose, as my partner pointed out to me, so there is value to be gained.
Is there value to be gained in these other social events where discomfort reigned? But perhaps more fundamentally; is the discomfort a result of a toxic combination of social anxiety, introversion, and perfectionist standards? Many of my closest friends have, unintentionally, misgendred other close friends of mine, and while I correct them, it seems to only fix itself temporarily, before resorting back to he/she in inaccurate ways. But I accept them given our relationship and their other values. Or perhaps accept is too strong a word, because even now we talk less and I cringe at their statements at times and their pushback to things I value, denigration of PC culture and the like that escapes their lips.
So I wonder; do I like LotR because it is easy, but not the family and social fraternations because it isn't, and with effort I could not only address the poor jokes and environment but also derive value? Do I shortchange myself and others the chance to grow? Or if I don't, do I indirectly or directly harm others by condoning their behavior? The internet is littered with articles and op-eds as Thanksgiving approaches about how abandoning and at least countering the bigoted uncle is not just Good, but Required.
As I sat at a kava bar with anxiety increasing, wishing for a hit of Xanax or something, I wondered the same. As I sat with family members who joked about black people or women I wondered the same. Do I compromise on what is easy and not what is hard? Do I owe a family who loves me more leeway or time? Do I cutoff too many people out of a perfectionist demand I never even meet? Am I a hypocrite for doing so? Do we all, in the end, reveal ourselves to be nothing more than contradictory trash heaps of hate and flaws and insecurity and bigotry so much so that selectivity is flawed and overdone? Find out more next time, on a blog in an empty corner of the web.
Revisiting Desire
Revisiting desire, one finds that, perhaps the most pertinent desire that many of us maintain is the desire to be better. Lebron James desires, nay, endeavors, to be a better basketball player at all times. And yet, a perfunctory glance at efficiency numbers, real plus minus, and more, shows he has mostly been playing at his otherworldly peak for over a decade now. While he has, say, improved at his 3 point shooting, his defense and stamina has taken a step back with age.
I use this example because nobody would criticize a world class athlete, surgeon, writer, etc., for desiring to be better. Without denigrating the work, effort and drive to be better, and the fact that, for many, this journey is a worthwhile endeavor in and of itself, one must wonder, then, if the desire to be better is reinforcing. That is, we desire to be better in a way that is hard to achieve. Given that practice accounts for something like 15% of success, and given that success often only creates a desire for more success, one finds that the apathetic shrug of a black sheep family member, who, say, never got married, or never 'achieved' what others did, might be the most enlightened amongst us. A conversation with my mother many months ago, for instance, in which she spoke of how she worked 70+ hours a week to go from lower-middle class to middle to upper-middle, was used as an argument for work being the great equalizer. A probing question - what if there had been an injury, or sickness, or natural disaster, relegated her to the admission that her success probably would not have been achieved. This is uncomfortable to admit, because it gives a preponderance of significance to luck in terms of what drives our success. Bill Gates was not at all the first to invent a GUI, and Apple probably to this day has older former workers who curse his name in vain, but through a series of coincidences, breaks, talent, and yes, some hard work, he became the wealthiest person on earth for a two decade period.
To bring this back to the point, while also staying within the realm of sports and tech, people like Lebron, or Jeff Bezos, and others, appear to be attempting to achieve constant, continual improvement. They desire to be the best, have the most wealth, and then when they achieve that, only want more. Given that this overwhelming desire can affect even the very top 0.001% of athletic human beings and the world's wealthiest, one does wonder if desiring to be better is a cycle that will never resolve itself. We desire to be better, in order to accrue more of what we desire, which will never meet our desire, so we desire to continue to be better. Lebron James once dropped his warmup clothes at the feet of a kid whose job was to collect them from teammates and offered to grab them for him, Jeff Bezos built a company in which thousands of workers require food stamps, pass out in overheated warehouses, pee in bags in their delivery vehicles to save time, and are denied breaks of any kind. Their desire gave them the ability not just to suffer, but to bring suffering to those around them.
The 'lazy' family member (and the present author is increasingly convinced laziness is a coping mechanism, or survival mechanism, and not an innate trait or learned trait or any trait at all) may be chided by family members and friend for their lack of achievement. But as they sit at home happy, content, absolved from employing people who shit in bags in cars and have heat stroke in warehouses where they work 12 hour shifts, perhaps there is something to be learned.
The lazy family member desires a nice meal, and goes out to eat a place they can barely afford. They stress over bills and employment in ways that Bezos or Lebron never will. Perhaps that's the lesson. No matter what we do or don't do, the fact that safety and comfort is a desire guaranteed by no social order or government and that we fail to free ourselves from it in any way leads us to put ourselves in positions where we can self-sabotage, perhaps the only innate trait we most commonly share.
That the present author writes this and continues to wish to be a better writer, friend, person, singer, etc., and more, in ways entirely unachievable, is not an irony lost amongst anyone.
I use this example because nobody would criticize a world class athlete, surgeon, writer, etc., for desiring to be better. Without denigrating the work, effort and drive to be better, and the fact that, for many, this journey is a worthwhile endeavor in and of itself, one must wonder, then, if the desire to be better is reinforcing. That is, we desire to be better in a way that is hard to achieve. Given that practice accounts for something like 15% of success, and given that success often only creates a desire for more success, one finds that the apathetic shrug of a black sheep family member, who, say, never got married, or never 'achieved' what others did, might be the most enlightened amongst us. A conversation with my mother many months ago, for instance, in which she spoke of how she worked 70+ hours a week to go from lower-middle class to middle to upper-middle, was used as an argument for work being the great equalizer. A probing question - what if there had been an injury, or sickness, or natural disaster, relegated her to the admission that her success probably would not have been achieved. This is uncomfortable to admit, because it gives a preponderance of significance to luck in terms of what drives our success. Bill Gates was not at all the first to invent a GUI, and Apple probably to this day has older former workers who curse his name in vain, but through a series of coincidences, breaks, talent, and yes, some hard work, he became the wealthiest person on earth for a two decade period.
To bring this back to the point, while also staying within the realm of sports and tech, people like Lebron, or Jeff Bezos, and others, appear to be attempting to achieve constant, continual improvement. They desire to be the best, have the most wealth, and then when they achieve that, only want more. Given that this overwhelming desire can affect even the very top 0.001% of athletic human beings and the world's wealthiest, one does wonder if desiring to be better is a cycle that will never resolve itself. We desire to be better, in order to accrue more of what we desire, which will never meet our desire, so we desire to continue to be better. Lebron James once dropped his warmup clothes at the feet of a kid whose job was to collect them from teammates and offered to grab them for him, Jeff Bezos built a company in which thousands of workers require food stamps, pass out in overheated warehouses, pee in bags in their delivery vehicles to save time, and are denied breaks of any kind. Their desire gave them the ability not just to suffer, but to bring suffering to those around them.
The 'lazy' family member (and the present author is increasingly convinced laziness is a coping mechanism, or survival mechanism, and not an innate trait or learned trait or any trait at all) may be chided by family members and friend for their lack of achievement. But as they sit at home happy, content, absolved from employing people who shit in bags in cars and have heat stroke in warehouses where they work 12 hour shifts, perhaps there is something to be learned.
The lazy family member desires a nice meal, and goes out to eat a place they can barely afford. They stress over bills and employment in ways that Bezos or Lebron never will. Perhaps that's the lesson. No matter what we do or don't do, the fact that safety and comfort is a desire guaranteed by no social order or government and that we fail to free ourselves from it in any way leads us to put ourselves in positions where we can self-sabotage, perhaps the only innate trait we most commonly share.
That the present author writes this and continues to wish to be a better writer, friend, person, singer, etc., and more, in ways entirely unachievable, is not an irony lost amongst anyone.
Friday, March 30, 2018
Assert
Albert Camus, a writer who has, for some time, entertained the minds of many a 16-18 year old white male, quiet, introverted high school type, once said "to know yourself is to assert yourself." Given, however, that, in order to assert oneself, one must generally know what one wants to assert, many find themselves unable to assert themselves for not knowing themselves, at which point, given they are not known, themselves, are clearly not, in turn, asserting.
Thursday, March 29, 2018
Fun While it Lasted
Stare at a screen and wonder why you can't write any fiction anymore. Haven't finished a story in 18 months. Started many, worked on them, hit a wall. Then wonder why it matters. It's therapeutic? It's a thought organizer? Sure. So is pacing and talking to yourself. So are video games, you used to play them more and look forward to them but other than Overwatch twice or so a week the enveloping open worlds and RPGs and exploration and losing yourself for hours at a time is over, somewhere between the bald marine dudes and the shitty storytelling of Final Fantasy XV and the time commitment of Monster Hunter: World you just gave up. And you have before but this time it's permanent, months on end of it that lasted longer than the college depression that scared them away, for instance. Used to enjoy listening to 200+ albums a year, inundated with music at all times. Listened to about 25 this year so far. Saving money. Music is lessened. Writing struggles. What's the point, right? Nobody reads this blog, it's all you've written in 2017 and 2018. 100k words spread out over pithy, self-deprecatory posts, auto-biographies you swore you'd never write. Deep, dark secrets and rambling, incoherent prose. It takes 40-50 job applications to make progress, right? You've done 8 now in the last month. No dice. This isn't OkCupid where for some reason it doesn't take messaging 40 people to get a response like most men, it takes 8-12 for you, I guess constructing sentences is a big leg-up, but it didn't help you get the job and you still have no degree. Two year degrees are pointless too, right? Like the writing. Browse Indeed website and feel depressed. Would like a pay raise, $12 an hour is too low for the car and health expenses that pile up, half the people in your life make more than you and half the people you know are working two jobs or are on Medicaid or rooming with 4 other people to save money, so maybe you can't complain, you're like the mediocre, unknowable middle-ish. Then again you applied for second jobs too and got no call back, and you joked about being the end of things with your partner because where is the time when you're at a job 60+ hours a week.
Good enough to write a polite email or a high school essay that you'd look back on and hate but not good enough for anything else. Every time someone corrects you, you feel stupid, and you know you are, no specialization, no experience really, just the knowledge accumulated from thousands of books and articles and journals and stats and trivia, barely enough to get by, if at all, people compliment you on your intelligence but it's easy to sound smart citing facts like Peru has the highest percentage of Chinese population outside of Asia and Australia of any country, whoopdee fucking do, learned that stat one day when Fifa 14 generated a Peruvian-Chinese player to sign for your team and you got curious, I guess that's all you have, curiosity. Curiosity doesn't win Jeopardy, or impress people with knowledge, but then what's the point of impressing? Jane Eyre feels eons ago in 6th grade. Stereotypes. White school, Charlotte Bronte, Shakespeare in 5th grade, none of it matters, Shakespeare simultaneously funny and trite and horribly outdated, like all things, gender a punchline, it's funny looking back realizing he was considered crass pop art at the time, now he is a legend. The Beatles were generic pop at the time, rock-and-roll invented by black musicians and co-opted by white people before it could get popular. Who knows why things last. Blade Runner has more going on than most movies, but it's not rocket science and it bombed at first and there's a very 80s scene of sexual assault. Gao Ming wrote a century before Shakespeare, condemned to the circumstance of Chinese language, even though the country's GDP would dwarf almost all others, much like nearby India did, for centuries still. Imperialism robbed him of anything more than a Broadway adaptation in the 1980s. Water Margins, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Journey to the West all written before Don Quixote, the latter is the most important novel of all time, you know, that's what they all say, they being the product of growing up in the west, it's ok but Journey to the West is way better, its wit puts the already silly chivalry of Don Quixote to shame, religious allegory wraps its tendrils through rollicking action and an overwhelming scale. Condemned to Chinese language and Buddhism again. There are no women in either story. There are almost no women in Blade Runner 2049, the theatre attendance was 4:1 in favor of dudes, data split in pairs as if genderqueer isn't a thing, expectations are wild but maybe just not being killed as a trans person would be a fair one. Guess you should tell the British in perpetuity to fuck off, but it's not like we're much better. Where were we? Oh yeah. One more application, one more blog entry, one more hit to the bank account to pay for a class that will bore your mind. An application for academic forgiveness that $2.5k dollars and a year's worth of time are riding on. No pressure. A rejection condemns you to so much more school and money spent you don't have. The bank account is lower than it has been in forever. You keep siphoning money from it and it dropped again to a new low just this week. Even if you wanted to, Europe is impossible right now, Japan or Korea are too, stuck in a cheaper part of the world like SE Asia or the Caribbean or the Midwest, and even then the time is limited and the aggressiveness and savings would be substantial, the flight alone would blow through most of it, and it would be the last hurrah. That's it. The former location is rad, the middle is ok, the latter is the same place you've always been so fuck it, why bother? I guess that's true of anything. You thought you'd get two more trips in before you turned 30 and end it then and there way back in the day. You're not going to end it but the two trips aren't happening, no more trips are happening, that's that and it's over, resigned to slowly spending all your money until probably around 2019 you are completely out and have to tell everyone it's over, essentially, any socialization or fun, no savings to fall back on, left living paycheck to paycheck. That's if the car gets through 2018, if not, well, then it'll be over by summer, and it will have been fun while it lasted. You guess that was true of life for awhile, maybe through grade 4 or so, fun while it lasted. Same with the music you no longer listen to, the video games you no longer play, the writing you no longer finish. The pizza you ate last night was fun while it lasted. Waking up at 4am to heartburn, not so much.
Good enough to write a polite email or a high school essay that you'd look back on and hate but not good enough for anything else. Every time someone corrects you, you feel stupid, and you know you are, no specialization, no experience really, just the knowledge accumulated from thousands of books and articles and journals and stats and trivia, barely enough to get by, if at all, people compliment you on your intelligence but it's easy to sound smart citing facts like Peru has the highest percentage of Chinese population outside of Asia and Australia of any country, whoopdee fucking do, learned that stat one day when Fifa 14 generated a Peruvian-Chinese player to sign for your team and you got curious, I guess that's all you have, curiosity. Curiosity doesn't win Jeopardy, or impress people with knowledge, but then what's the point of impressing? Jane Eyre feels eons ago in 6th grade. Stereotypes. White school, Charlotte Bronte, Shakespeare in 5th grade, none of it matters, Shakespeare simultaneously funny and trite and horribly outdated, like all things, gender a punchline, it's funny looking back realizing he was considered crass pop art at the time, now he is a legend. The Beatles were generic pop at the time, rock-and-roll invented by black musicians and co-opted by white people before it could get popular. Who knows why things last. Blade Runner has more going on than most movies, but it's not rocket science and it bombed at first and there's a very 80s scene of sexual assault. Gao Ming wrote a century before Shakespeare, condemned to the circumstance of Chinese language, even though the country's GDP would dwarf almost all others, much like nearby India did, for centuries still. Imperialism robbed him of anything more than a Broadway adaptation in the 1980s. Water Margins, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Journey to the West all written before Don Quixote, the latter is the most important novel of all time, you know, that's what they all say, they being the product of growing up in the west, it's ok but Journey to the West is way better, its wit puts the already silly chivalry of Don Quixote to shame, religious allegory wraps its tendrils through rollicking action and an overwhelming scale. Condemned to Chinese language and Buddhism again. There are no women in either story. There are almost no women in Blade Runner 2049, the theatre attendance was 4:1 in favor of dudes, data split in pairs as if genderqueer isn't a thing, expectations are wild but maybe just not being killed as a trans person would be a fair one. Guess you should tell the British in perpetuity to fuck off, but it's not like we're much better. Where were we? Oh yeah. One more application, one more blog entry, one more hit to the bank account to pay for a class that will bore your mind. An application for academic forgiveness that $2.5k dollars and a year's worth of time are riding on. No pressure. A rejection condemns you to so much more school and money spent you don't have. The bank account is lower than it has been in forever. You keep siphoning money from it and it dropped again to a new low just this week. Even if you wanted to, Europe is impossible right now, Japan or Korea are too, stuck in a cheaper part of the world like SE Asia or the Caribbean or the Midwest, and even then the time is limited and the aggressiveness and savings would be substantial, the flight alone would blow through most of it, and it would be the last hurrah. That's it. The former location is rad, the middle is ok, the latter is the same place you've always been so fuck it, why bother? I guess that's true of anything. You thought you'd get two more trips in before you turned 30 and end it then and there way back in the day. You're not going to end it but the two trips aren't happening, no more trips are happening, that's that and it's over, resigned to slowly spending all your money until probably around 2019 you are completely out and have to tell everyone it's over, essentially, any socialization or fun, no savings to fall back on, left living paycheck to paycheck. That's if the car gets through 2018, if not, well, then it'll be over by summer, and it will have been fun while it lasted. You guess that was true of life for awhile, maybe through grade 4 or so, fun while it lasted. Same with the music you no longer listen to, the video games you no longer play, the writing you no longer finish. The pizza you ate last night was fun while it lasted. Waking up at 4am to heartburn, not so much.
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