The Compass.

I'm a big fan of "Thanks."

I believe gratitude is the fine line between good karma and bad karma, the difference between being an adult and being a child, and the only reprieve from the mindless pursuit of "more."

It's the great leveller of egos and bridger of gulfs, and it defines whether or not you're a parasite—no matter how much you actually give or take. Gratitude is such the natural product of reflection and introspection that it's the reason an unexamined life isn't worth living.

The giving of thanks is deserving of its own holiday, then, but why it's just another in the parade of family-friendly-face-stuffers is beyond me.

Today is Thanksgiving, which means that, notwithstanding venues who broke out the holly before the jack-o-lanterns had even wilted, Christmas basically starts tomorrow.

Black Friday, the sacramental tragedy of disordered priorities, is enough proof on its own that a focus on gratitude is more sorely needed during Christmastime than any other season.

Too conveniently to ignore, I think, Christmas also happens to include a natural vehicle for that gratitude, whereas the turkey is the only witness to much of the thanks given in November. A lot has changed, and this year some of my Christmas cards will be goodbyes, but by and large, they'll be thank-you cards, as always.

Some years, I've enumerated the things I'm thankful for to try to counteract a deep depression, or just as a ritual to maintain perspective, but this year I have to wax a little more philosophical.

The events of this year have made me re-evaluate my ideas about what's possible, and not just in the context of my own life. I've learned that sometimes art is imitating life when improbable good fortune visits movie protagonists, and not vice versa, which has turned my instinctive cynicism upside-down.

"Good fortune" hardly does justice to my good fortune, but my inability to qualify what I've experienced this year befits the awe that I feel.

I'm sure that, to any outsider, it doesn't appear that anything extraordinary happened to me. I'm still fundamentally the same person, which is to say I still have the same flaws and many of the same struggles. But something is suddenly gone—something small and bothersome and persistently discontent in the back of my mind, or maybe the pit of my stomach, that's been with me my whole adult life.

The quieting of that voice is priceless to me, and it's all I need to know about whether I'm headed in the right direction.

Until earlier this year, I would have felt foolish had I thought I could ever find myself where I am now. Sometimes it seems more surreal than others, but whether I can ever really get a grip on it or not, the worst thing I could ever do with it is take it for granted.

Moreso than love, even, gratitude sustains, tempers, motivates, and acts as an internal compass. Having both on my side is the most I could hope for.

Thank you.

---

Beastie Boys - "Gratitude"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DowgvtLwIy0&feature=youtube_gdata_player

You've come a long way.

Back to Moms

A couple of years ago, I wrote a very short post about being thankful for moms. That post originated from a partially abstract sense of gratitude and guilt, during a period of depression and loss where I became acutely aware of what and who I could still count on.

That gratitude was far from completely abstract—I very certainly could have put a finger on what I owed to my mom. But it was mostly an intellectual sense of gratitude, and over time I'm gaining a more visceral hold on the roots of it. When* I have kids of my own, I imagine it evolving into a thoroughly emotional and empathetic gratitude, but that's an aside for now.

This year, I'm the age my mom was when she had me. It's disorienting to try to picture myself in her shoes—I look around myself an am astonished at how few parallels there are between her life and mine at this age.

When I was a kid, I thought this sounded old. I thought it sounded like right around when people were supposed to be getting married and having their first kids. Which is to say, being grown-ups. But now, I can't reconcile that notion with my pervasive inability to accept and respect myself as an adult—someone worthy of the respect of other adults, a reputation as a professional, or a partner's lifelong commitment, let alone the charge of trying to create a better life for a little one who thinks I'm way better than I really am.

I can get a grip by thinking about exactly how things would change if I were to have a child right now. I get a pretty clear sense for what I would be unable to do, or more to the point, what I would have to do.

I'd like to think I wouldn't resent a minute of it, and I believe my mom didn't, but I often wonder what she felt, or still feels, when reflecting on what she gave up in order to devote herself to me.

The point is that no matter what she felt when facing the burden of being a mom at my age, and what's more, a single mom for the majority of her adult life, she never wavered. If she mourned any of her youth, regretted anything she missed out on, or was just plain exhausted, she never let on. And given my own lingering teenage selfishness, inability to contain my frustrations, and unwarranted fatigue, she seems nothing less than heroic.

My new-found appreciation stems from an inversion in outlook. Whereas I once understood my mom's commitment to me in terms of what I gained from it, I now understand it in terms of what she sacrificed for it.

It's hard for me to imagine myself in the shoes of someone who didn't grow up with a mom, hard to imagine not knowing what I was missing. But someone with a close relationship to their father would probably look at me and think the same thing about my total inability to grasp what I might have missed out on in that regard.

What's relevant is that any person's value is measured not in what they give to you, but what they give for you.

While I'm still grappling with the idea that, no matter how much I do, I will never be able to repay my mom in this lifetime, appreciating the depth and breadth of her commitment to me is perhaps the most worthwhile step I can make in that direction.

The irony of course is that anyone who's committed enough to you to give themselves continually is someone who will do so without expectation of reciprocation and regardless of any recognition. Given that, real devotion can become easy to overlook.

So, try to remember that the people who need your appreciation the least probably deserve it the most, and that taking them for granted is a far greater disservice than being unable to return the favor.

Why Eccentricity? Part 1. The Short Question with an Unnecessarily Long-Winded Answer… and Blog Title.

Or, Another American speaking in biased generalities about complex topics for which he or she does not possess a related college degree. 

Rick Weber's Why? got me thinking.


Why eccentricity?

Because normal and natural are not the same thing.

What's natural is actually somewhere between what we think of as chaos and what we think of as the norm (order). Some tendency toward order is of course innate. Plants, animals, the earth and the endless cosmos always have and do and will behave in ordered fashions, with or without man—what humans did is name, measure and learn to predict that ordered phenomena with math.

All that natural cosmic order is good—it creates a working physical universe, and in animals, the patterns it creates allow the strategic pursuit of comfort and safety—prolonging life and enhancing wellbeing. But, precariously, man also learned to orchestrate that order artificially, extrapolating it to high heaven.

Now, we're taught to behave, and try to behave, for good reason. Civilization cannot be founded or endure without some semblance of that deliberate order, which has to be actively imbued by the individual. But man has taken it a step further than necessary.

We do track and perpetuate patterns in the name of survival—we put our babies in car seats, build tornado shelters in Kansas, and no longer fill our dirigibles with pure hydrogen. But we've normatized every other imaginable pattern of appearance and behavior too. For example, there's no survival benefit to be had by discouraging a man from wearing a skirt (the unlikely and unfortunate testicular mishap notwithstanding), but by god do we judge any man who decides to wear a skirt, simply because most other men don't¹.

What is the presumed power of the norm? And conversely, the presumed liability of the unusual?

We forget that what has become common, socialized behavior is not actually born of our natural tendencies. It's not natural for animal organisms to be monogamous², or eat more than they need to for the fun of it, or retreat behind closed doors to mate, or to save the life of a severely disabled pack member at all costs. It's not even natural for the females of a species to be the prettier, more colorfully decorated ones³.

But no, in the name of ease and comfort and predictability reaching well beyond our basic survival needs, we adhere vigilantly to our norms and expect the same of others. Go to the store in your underwear? No. Get your nose pierced and apply for a job at an investment banking firm? No. Paint a giant phallus on the side of your house? No. Bad nonconformist, bad!

Believe me, I'm sympathetic to the magnetism of the norm—it's comfortable, and thus perilously alluring. I have become less wont to express my "individuality" as I've grown older, have felt less and less need to prove that I'm unique. I could call it laziness, complacency or fatigue, but what the me of ten years ago really never saw coming was that I'm totally okay with the idea that I appear to be boring. I don't know if the joke is on me or society. I don't just settle for the prosaic—I actually love NPR, I actually want to be law-abiding, and I don't feel lame when I get up early and fall asleep early, or that I do paperwork for a living.

But in fairness, I'm weird. I only like green bananas. I didn't wear blue for nearly a decade. I lose sleep over poor grammar and spelling errors. I have seen some episodes of the Simpsons hundreds of times. In my mind, numbers have certain colors and letters are "odd" or "even." Encountering a bird bigger than a parakeet makes me go numb with fear. Meeting me on the street, you'd never know. They're utterly harmless, but weird and all of its synonyms bear a negative connotation, including the e-word. Those things are natural to me, but if I let them shine, they're suddenly eccentricities.

And this is where normal fails us. I'm normal because I appear to be normal, and that's all there is to it. I can hear Mrs.Gump saying something along the lines of "Normal is as normal does." I win.

But here's the real trouble with it—everyone's eccentric in some ways. Yet we've allowed ourselves to develop a distaste for those who can't or won't keep it under wraps. And further talked each other into believing that those who can keep their eccentricities under wraps aren't hiding anything after all. In a society which purports to prize individuality, confidence, braveness and unflinching adherence to one's tenets, we snicker both to ourselves and very much out loud at benign deviations from what we're used to.

I don't know if it's instinct or conscious judgement that leads us to respond unfavorably, even if we don't admit it aloud, to eccentricities.

We covet our stability and order so, and perhaps our sense that eccentricity could actually be any sort of threat to the norm stems from giving ourselves too much credit as custodians of order. Order is a natural, self-preserving state, and all we've done is fenced in a corner of it, pruned the bushes, and called it Normalville.

Weirdness doesn't jeopardize the norm—it validates it. Indeed, the norm needs its eccentric foil. Without the weirdos, what would normal even mean?

I suspect that our jealousy over our normality also stems from every individual's sense that he or she is unusual and that the Norms are somehow The Others—despite the logical and statistical impossibility of everyone being atypical. I can only speculate based on my life experience because of the impossibility of ever knowing someone else's mind—no matter how close you are to someone, you can never be certain what you don't know about their inner workings. But take a second to think about some unusual (and likely benign) desire, fear, fixation, hang-up or habit that you've never told anyone about, even a doctor, and I think you begin to get a sense for just how little we truly know about other people.

If I'm right, we're all suffering alienation at the hands of our own illusion, and willfully imposing it on others, what's more. Cruel.

If I'm wrong, then there really are mysterious creatures out there who are so satisfied of their own normality that they never feel alienated or unusual. But deliciously, we still couldn't eliminate the possibility that those who feel thoroughly normal were actually the atypical minority, technically rendering them weird.

I'm a proponent of behaving well, at least most of the time, and at least in public, because it has utility. But we live in a society that derides, prohibits and even criminalizes (ostensibly) atypical behaviors that don't harm others and aren't even seen by others. Speaking in very imprecise terms, it's soul-crushing. Sodomizing someone at your local grocery store in the middle of the day? Okay, regulate that. But between (or among) consenting adults, in their private lives? Who gives a fuck? Go nuts!

Given, killing people, eating their flesh and praying to their skulls for power feels natural to some people, but far and away, most eccentricities are just that by definition—not normal only in that they happen to not be shared by 68%, or 95%, or however you measure it, of the population, and nothing more.

Order will persist whether we cultivate it or not, eccentricity will persist whether we discourage it or honor it, and some norm, whatever it happens to be, will always exist. What determines the character of our culture is whether we worship the norm at face value, or evaluate it on its merits.

~~~

¹ I have to cop to my Western bias in analyzing and bitching about the idea of "normal" and other things that I think deserve a second look. And to the fact that plenty of my convictions get derailed when I try to take the broadview. In this case, I acknowledge among other things that men wear skirts in plenty of cultures, but I'm hoping you'll entertain my biased examples, knowing that the mechanics of what I'm grumbling about remain the same no matter what form eccentricity and the norm may take.

² Fun sidenote. It's actually not even normal for human cultures to practice monogamy as the norm. Researchers estimate the proportion of human cultures which prefer monogamy at around 20%.

³ Indeed, throughout the animal kingdom, and in plenty of human eras, the males have been the painted ones.
There will always be fewer males than females, partly because it's easier for human embryos to default to a female karyotype if not given the active cue to become male, and partly because women tend to outlive men. I'll resist further remarks about stereotypical male occupations, aggressions, competitiveness and the like also being more risk-prone, which would sound sexist whether said with tongue in cheek or not. In humans, the male, who is the majority in all senses except in sheer population size, will almost always be vying for the female's attention, so it's a wonder that human females are the ones bothering to put on a show, and not the other way around.

"Fax me some halibut." Is that funny? Is that a joke?

Or, "On the Difference Between Smart People and Dumb People."

Like many, I do my best thinking in the shower, in the car, and while trying to fall asleep, three of the conditions least conducive to any kind of writing. And so, many of my substantial and worthwhile thoughts, the ones that might actually lend me some life insight, or actionable creative inspiration, are buried as my mind moves on or clicks off.

I think the latter is useful for a lot of creative people who can jump out of bed and hit the computer or the notepad (Flaming globes of Sigmund!), but by the time my mind is quiet enough at night to do any structured thinking, it's because I'm so close to sleep that the chatter of my parietal lobe has switched off, and the rest of my forebrain's daytime concerns are slipping away. This cuddly little focused, insulated, coherent, linear stream of thought is so blissful for someone who lives the daytime life of distraction, dissatisfaction, fatigue, irritation, and untied ends that belongs naturally to the cerebral, introverted ADD-er trying to m(f)ake it in the external world, and I'm loath to interrupt it.

So, in a state where I'm so relaxed that it feels like paralysis, I'm hardly going to do anything other than follow that train of thought right into a deep sleep. As if it weren't hard enough already for me to remember my occasional daytime a-ha! thoughts without writing them down to revisit later, it's a true phenomenon that we experience a brief amnesia for the last few minutes preceding sleep. This sieve effect explains why I sometimes wake with a start to my second alarm, with barely enough time to get ready for work, and no recollection at all of my first, more prudently-timed (read: wishful) alarm. I also read myself to sleep fairly often, and wake with a total blank on the last few developments of the story—I already had to read most parts of Moby Dick twice, so why not backtrack and make it three just for fun?

So that makes bedtime inspiration just about as bad as a dream in terms of remembering it long enough or well enough to record it before it disappears. It's like a quantum particle (or a shy kitty cat)—the more closely you attempt to examine and document it, the less likely you are to be able to observe its natural state.

But something did stick the other night, during my routine deliberation on the ambiguity of my place in the spectrum of human intelligence. Of course human intelligence is a continuous gamut, with only artificial, statistically-contrived class markers and (I suppose) no naturally defined upper or lower limit. But everyone knows we look at the world in convenient terms of smart people and dumb people—the Brits would call this "bright" and "dull," an appealingly tangible analogy.

The question of whether I'm the dumbest smart kid, or just the smartest dumb kid, has plagued me ever since I was made aware of my own supposedly-above-average intellect in grammar school, and then had that notion raked over the coals continually, and with mixed results, ever since.

In any case, I know I'm far from truly dumb (be I foolish, careless, nearsighted, idealistic, hypocritical or impractical, which I often am), and I often wonder what life is like when you're dumb—not an average joe, but really dull. Darwin Awards dumb, Is this chicken or tuna? dumb, Mission Accomplished dumb, refudiate, misunderestimate, and wee-wee'd up dumb, "I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family" dumb. "I'm so smart" dumb. You know, Spencer Pratt dumb.

I'll give it a rest. I can't figure out whether you really know it or not when you're dumb. Surely you notice things not working out the way you planned, but what point of reference for success or competence do you have? The Dunning-Kruger effect holds that the more ignorant you are, the more confident you are in your own intelligence, and vice versa, and I think it holds true, but maybe only within two standard deviations of average. Surely there's no true genius out there who doesn't realize he's smart, and no true bumbling dolt who looks around himself, satisfied that he's gained masterful control of everything. It's anyone who's within arm's reach of average who's in trouble here—i.e. just about everyone¹.

I suppose I need to insert an asterisk here—the Dunning-Kruger Effect deals in "competence," which is not the same as intelligence. It's a close cousin of the semantic relationship between skill and talent—one can be acquired; the other must be innate; they can both lead to mastery. A great intellect can still be terribly incompetent—a poor cook, a poor mechanic, a poor leader—and vice versa. The Effect is still popularly reduced to "the dumber you are, the smarter you think you are," and I will allow myself sort of the same bastardization because the underlying mechanics are the same. The less you know about any one thing (in this case, you necessarily lack competence regarding intelligence, because you have none), the less you're able to gauge how you stack up. See Unskilled and Unaware of It for a better-worded version.

The world of the smart person and the world of the dumb person are two vastly different life experiences, of course, arguably accounting for most of the bemusement, head-shaking, derision and typecasting flung at unfamiliars from both sides of the [statistically contrived] fence. It's been difficult for me to articulate the bottom line of this inevitable lack of sympathy between otherwise ostensibly kindred men, and the too-succinct conclusion I came to a few nights ago was that smart people spend their lives trying to do smart things, whereas dumb people just spend their lives trying not to do dumb things.

Now, that sounds about right, and it's so temptingly concise that I'd like to hang my hat on it and call it a day. For a few liminal moments, that conclusion seemed to be everything there was to know about the vast and perplexing gulf which sometimes separates men from other men. The trouble is, it implies that dumb people are aware of their dumbidity² to the extent that they're actively trying to avoid its pitfalls, which, as we've established, is usually not the case. "Stupid is as stupid does" is a phrase I still don't think I fully understand—scary in the context of a quote about stupidity—but indeed, somewhere along the right lines, one can't be deemed to be stupid if they avoid the commission of acts which themselves can be deemed stupid.

Instead, it's smart people who spend time avoiding being dumb (how hard they have to try varies, but it's the fair success there that counts). So what do dumb people do? If they lack the self-assessment necessary to compel them to avoid their own stupidity, then the commission of stupidity becomes a given, and what follows is that they spend their time dealing with the consequences.

I really liked when I hit on the notion that smart people spend their lives trying to do smart things, because it betrays the "smart" individual's sense of self-consciousness about their own intelligence and its accompanying pressures. But it's also fundamentally flawed—it implies that having to avoid doing dumb things is a non-issue for smart people, who are thusly freed to focus only on higher pursuits (wrong), and I think it hints that dumb people aren't also consciously trying to do smart things, unaware of their lack of potential (wrong again).

So there you have it: Smart people spend their lives trying not to do dumb things, and dumb people spend their lives dealing with the consequences of doing dumb things. Not very uplifting, but perhaps more realistic. Everyone tries to do smart things; everyone fails at that with varying frequency. Everyone does dumb things; everyone just spends varying amounts of time cleaning off their shoes.

So, my best thinking might be a little overrated in terms of game-changing revelations that can be aired out and left to stand on their own. But then again, most any idea can look like total shit if torn to shreds and illuminated from the right angle (most, I said). Best thinking is still probably good enough to deserve one of the those German loanwords that goes just beyond the sum of its English counterparts (Schadenfreude; perfectenschlag), especially since I had to give up on its awkward Newspeak construction, goodestthink. And my best thinking is still an oasis of focused rumination in the sea of my otherwise intemperate brain. So I should probably keep trying to reel it in, to stuff and mount and admire.

In the car, I guess I could get used to the better-than-nothing utility, and awkward talk-to-yourselfing, of my phone's speech-to-text feature, and as for thinking in the shower... I think I've just been inspired to buy more of those bath crayons I had when I was a kid. That's going to be awesome... if I can get that daytime a-ha to stick for more than a few minutes.



1 I think this, the tendency of smart people to doubt themselves, and inept people to overestimate themselves, coupled with everyone's innate tendency to mistake confidence for competence, indirectly explains most of the world's problems. But I'll spare that tangent for now.
2 Just call me Shakespeare. 

The Heat.

Google is not a babysitter.

Evgeny Morozov is right that the internet has a dark side, but when he says that Google should take even a tiny bit of responsibility for the reliability of the websites that turn up in its search results, he's endorsing censorship, undermining the individual's right to intellectual autonomy (i.e. one's right to make their own mistakes), and utterly betraying the spirit of the internet.

The internet is not a predominantly dangerous place. It does have dangerous elements and potential downfalls, like anything in the world that also offers vast benefits. If you're indiscriminate about who you interact with, or who you give your money to, you might get burned.

But how is that any different from the world at large that we wake up to every day? Free-minded adults choose where to place their trust, make their own decisions, and deal with the consequences.

That's life.

Nobody ever designed the internet to be a safe haven. Google says, "Here's what's out there. You decide." If you find that to be a scary proposition, then get out of the kitchen.

The Parsee

"My line! my line? Gone?―gone? What means that little word?"

Ahab