Monday, December 31, 2012

The Moods Of 2012: We Need A Time Out







Mood 2:  I need some stuff.




Here's to snapping out of it in 2013!

Monday, December 24, 2012


What's on the mind of the Googling Public?














Monday, December 17, 2012


The Roman Coliseum













Monday, December 10, 2012


















Monday, December 3, 2012

Inequality: It's Not Just For Income Anymore








What is the deal? 








Monday, November 26, 2012

Denial Of Death: I Can Haz Manual Plz?

















Monday, November 19, 2012


I've always had a complicated reader relationship with Haruki Murakami. 











Sure.  Of course.  That idea is intellectually unimpeachable. 













Monday, November 12, 2012

Human Nature Is Addictive Nature














Monday, November 5, 2012

The New York Times Covers Dramatic Events Of The Past

Roman Empire: Citizens Concerned About Violence, Looting, Barbarians

By Thomasius Friedmanius







Barbarians could not be reached for comment.

Monday, October 29, 2012

Newsflash: People Like To Fight With Other People

My whole life I've been confused about the whole thing that goes down when guys fight with one another.  You know, like when they fight in a bar, or when they fight because one guy feels insulted by another, or whatever.   

I mean, I get that someone could make you so angry you'd feel you have to hurt them.  And I get that you could be so angry that you would temporarily lose the moral sense, and thus lapse into barbarism and murderous rage. 

But the typical guy's bar fight does not seem to include a lapse into barbarism and murderous rage.  In fact, the participants often do not seem intent on annihilating one another, and they do not seem to have lost the moral sense.  On the contrary, there's a notion of fair play, of honor, of not going too far.

And that's what I could never understand.  Because if you're still operating within the idea of fairness and honor, if you haven't lost the moral sense, then aren't you able to think to yourself, "surely there's a better way to resolve this than hitting another person?" 

And if you aren't operating within the idea of fairness and honor, if you have lost the moral sense, why aren't you going all out?  Why not, for example, kick a guy in the balls, which is what guys tell women to do if they're being attacked?  But your typical guy's fight never includes that. 

It doesn't make any sense.  I don't know if you've read The Mayor of Casterbridge, by Thomas Hardy.  Though brilliant, this is a book filled with grim events and sad surroundings.  You'll have some insight into the character of the main guy Henchard when I tell you that he makes the story happen when, in the first few pages of the book, he auctions off his wife and child while drunk.  

Over the course of the book, Henchard comes to regard as his archenemy a Scottish guy named Farfrae who is a kindly cheerful type, and at a climactic moment, Henchard arranges for them to fight -- to the death, it seems, at least from Henchard's own point of view. 

But guess what he does, this Henchard.  He ties one arm behind his back.  To make it a fairer fight.

When I got to that part I was seriously like "seriously, WTF?"  I mean, if you're thinking fairness, if you're thinking within the moral point of view, why aren't you just calling off the fight in the first place?  Somehow killing Farfrae with both hands is one thing, while killing Farfrae with one hand tied behind your back is another thing entirely?  It's bizarre. 

As time has gone on I've formed a few hypotheses about what is going on with this whole thing.  I'd say the most plausible one is that some people -- of both sexes -- like to fight, and want to hurt one another, but recognize subconsciously that certain things will make fights so unseemly that they won't be allowed to get away with it.  If a fight involves a guy being kicked in the balls, if a fight involves any dramatic mismatch of talents, that's unseemly.  If you're in a friendly environment, you can't fight to kill the other person:  no one will let you get away with that. 

The nod to fairness and honor is there to make sure fights get to happen.  That's what makes it all possible. 

Maybe I'm the only one shocked or surprised by the idea that people actually want to fight and to hurt one another, not only when they're in a murderous rage, and not only as part of some screwy sport, but just as a part of like fun stuff to do. 

Or maybe I'm not.  The great eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume thought that people were naturally inclined to want the best for one another.  "Would any man willingly step on another man's gouty toe?" he asked, to which the obvious answer is "yes, they do it all the time."

But Hume saw in us a wonderful warmth of human nature, in which we desire to see one another prosper.  For all my other faults, I'm basically part of this Humean Kingdom of Friends:  I smile at the smiles of others, and do not like to see other humans sad and suffering. 

The more times goes on, though, the more I realize a lot of people aren't with me here. 

Monday, October 22, 2012

Am I The Problem Of Expensive Tastes? Or, Maybe We're Not Materalisitic Enough

Marie de' Medici, who probably had her own problem of expensive tastes.  By Peter Paul Rubens [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

When I first heard that there was such a thing as "the problem of expensive tastes," my first thought was "Uh oh, that must be me."

I've always had desires for nice things that seemed to know no bounds.  As a child, I was keenly aware of the difference between Sears and Bloomingdales, and could easily distinguish the goods that came from each.  Now, when I go to the mall, I often have a shopping paralysis:  inevitably, when I look at reasonably priced stuff, I'm like "but that is crappy/ugly," and when I find a coat/bag/shoes/whatever that's acceptable, it's hundreds of dollars more than I have to spend. 

I remember when I was a kid, sometimes well-meaning adults would ask, in a make-drive-time-quality-time sort of way, how much money I thought I'd want in order to be "satisfied."  And I would think to myself, "Is this person stupid?"  Even then I thought the question made no sense.  No matter what you had, wouldn't always want more?  I mean, even if you were just going to give it away, wouldn't more always be better? 

Then I got older and learned that most people do not regard the question as nonsensical at all.  Not only do they distinguish an amount of money they'd need to be satisfied, often, that amount was not all that much more than the money they had. 

This was, and is, mystifying to me.  I can't get inside the minds of people who answer this way.  Don't they want beautiful expensive clothes, fancy cars, amazing homes, travel?  Don't they want the nicest antique self-winding watch hand ever made?  Don't they want a pied à terre in New York, another in Paris, a resort home in Italy and a ranch for occasional horse riding out in some other random lovely place?

That shit isn't cheap, you know.  That's not an extra few thousand bucks a year we're talking about.

So what is up with that?  Do people have no imagination -- they just can't think of good expensive stuff?  Or do they think of these things and really not want them?  I don't know, of course.  But I'm guessing for a lot of people it's neither of these, and that what's really going on is that people don't want to seem greedy.

They picture "having a lot" as "having a lot more than other people," and -- correctly, I think -- intuit that there is something distressing about wanting to outstrip your fellows by stratospheric distances. 

But having a lot is different form having more.  The matter hinges on whether luxury, and thus luxury desires, are relative or absolute.  I had to do a certain amount of soul-searching to determine for myself whether my own luxury desires were primarily relative -- as in, I wanted nicer things than other people -- or absolute -- as in, I want nice things. 

I may be deluding myself, but I'm pretty sure I just want nice things.  My needs are absolute, not relative.  There are a few bits of evidence.  I always enjoy being around other people who have beautiful clothes, bags, shows, cars, etc etc etc., and my enjoyment of the nice things I have seems to increase, rather than decrease, when more people have similar, or similarly nice, nice things.

My iPhone is a perfect example.  I love my iPhone.  In terms of being a nice things, it's one of the nicest.  I love the exquisitely lovely green battery icon that pops up when the phone is charging.  I love the little raindrops on the home screen.  I love the fonts.  And I can honestly say that my love for my iPhone is increased, rather than decreased, by the iPhone's omnipresence.  This is an absolute, not a relative.

The classic "problem of expensive tastes" in philosophy has to do with the idea of fairness and equality in measuring well-being.  If you think fairness and equality should measure how well a person is doing, rather than, say goods and resources, you run into the obvious problem:  if X can't be happy without a Birkin bag and Y sets her sights on a more affordable (but still pricey!) Roots bag, then equality of well-being seems to mean things are fair and equal when X gets the Birkin.  But that doesn't seem quite right.

Understood this way, "the problem of expensive tastes" is a problem that arises within a scheme in which the resources are fixed, or at least limited, and the question is the distribution.  And it seems likely that all those people who mystified me by answering that to be "satisfied" they only needed a bit more in the way of worldly goods:  if there's only a certain amount, perhaps it would be unseemly to want not only nice things but things much much much nicer than anyone else. 

My interpretation would then be the unusual one, imagining as it does that I can have the nicest things, and everyone else can have the nicest things, all at the same time.

But though my interpretation may be unusual, I think it is apt, because there's an important moral difference between absolute luxury and relative luxury.  There's nothing inherently wrong or creepy about desires for absolute luxury:  these desires are completely compatible with real equality, even with everyone having the same.  If you want absolute luxury, you want to have your fancy car and vacation home and horse ranch, but you also want everyone to have those things.  If you want relative luxury, that's more morally complicated, because you want to have what others do not have.  You want, in a sense, to make other people feel bad.

I wonder if an increase in relative luxury desires is something we are, depressingly, moving toward.  I tried to confirm, by Googling, my memory of studies showing people really only wanted a bit more, and it wasn't easy.  Because every study I found attempted to answer the completely different question of how much a person "really" needs to be happy (answer:  about 75,000, in the US in 2012).  The implication, I suppose, being that people think they need much much more. 

Anyway, as a person who cares about absolute, not relative, luxury, I can tell you one important thing:  desires for absolute luxury have to be desires for material qualities in and of themselves, and not desires for material qualities as symbols of something else.  To want absolute luxury, you have to care about this bag, that scarf, this car, that home, and so on and so forth, to care about the particular qualities of the things you want and sometimes have, and not about what they represent.    You can't want nice things as symbols of something else, like status.

And even though we're supposed to be so "materialistic" in this culture, I think we're not always so good at that.  We buy symbols, not things; we buy as means not as ends; we buy for novelty and not for the long haul.  Being truly materialistic would mean amassing things you love, and loving them for a good long time.  Loving them not because they stand for or represent something else, but because they're beautiful in and of themselves.

That kind of materialism never begrudges the luxury items of one's fellows.  It allows a love of luxury to be compatible with egalitarianism. 

So am I the problem of expensive tastes?  In an immediate sense, clearly yes: in a scheme of equality of happiness and well-being, I would cost more than my fellows.  In another sense, though, no: I'd like everyone to have expensive tastes.  And if they did, the problem would just go away.

Birkin bags for everyone, please!

Monday, October 15, 2012

How The Eternal Children Of Generation X Finally Became Old

Sean Penn as Jeff Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982).
I used to really wonder how it could happen that people of my generation could become dated. 

I mean, I was a teenager in the 80s, which means I grew up during what turned out to be the end phase of a pretty steady march from quiet traditionalism to noisy chaos.  When we looked at our parents, we figured we knew what it meant to become old and dated:  you said things like "Turn that thing down!" "Just say No!" and "That TV show/rock music/MTV is going to rot your brain and you'll be a moron forever."

In that context, what it meant to be young and current was obvious:  a taste for noisy loud music, drugs, and general irreverence.

If that was youth, I wondered, how was our generation ever going to age out?  How could we become old and dated?  I mean, weren't we taking noise, drugs, and general irreverence pretty much as high as they could go?  Were the kids going to take these things further?  HOW?

Noise was already peaking.  The classic 1984 mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap boasted of the band as "one of England's loudest," and noted that their instruments' volume "went up to 11."  If you look up "loudest band in the world" in Wikipedia, the latest chronological entry is for 2009, where we learn that "in Ottawa, Canada, the band Kiss achieved a SPL of 136 dB measured during their live performance. After noise complaints from neighbors in the area, the band was forced to turn the volume down."    

So:  2009, and the band making the noise is a band from the 80s.

Obviously we in the 80s took drugs to some kind of logical conclusion.  It was the era of coke at every party, crack babies, the introduction of MDMA -- or, as the kids call it, "ecstasy." 

As to general irreverence. can I just point out that there was a band in the 80s called "Scraping Feotus Off The Wheel"? 

I asked myself, Where could it go from here that we can't handle?  I fount it hard to picture telling the next generation "turn it down!" "stay sober!" or "that's offensive!"  We were already loud and obnoxious.  Weren't we?

Well.  As is the nature of these things, time or culture or whatever did me a really elegant fake out by switching gears entirely.  Because we didn't have the internet in the 80s.  Or cell phones.  Or anything remotely like that.

As a measure of the technological distance we've come, can I just tell you that when I was in college, there was one pay phone per dorm hall?  If you wanted to talk to someone, you'd call their hall, and ask whoever happened to answer to go knock on the person's door.  Almost always, they were not there.  So much for that.

If you wanted to see people, you basically had to show up places and hope they'd be there.  I know it sounds ridiculous, but trust me, it had a charm of its own.

So now the answer has become crystally and painfully clear.  We became dated not through a distaste for noise and music and drugs, but through our inability to live life on and through the internet.  When it comes to the internet, I sometimes feel like one of those early amphibians who lived in water but worked up their courage to climb onto land occasionally.   When they got to the land, they were like "Holy shit, this is great! Check out the sunshine! And you can walk around!" Nonetheless, when they wanted to breathe, or spawn, or whatever it is early amphibians did, they had to get back in the water.

That's how I feel about the internet.  When I get on it, I'm like, "Oh My God, This Is The Best!"  Saturday night my friend and I went to see a production of Verdi's Il Trovatore (whoa, what an opera -- that nineteenth century, they really had things going on) -- and when we got home my friend said wasn't there something about the use of bel canto that was different from how it had been used before, and didn't that mean it was one of Verdi's later operas? 

We googled.  And we found riches and riches, and learned things about Il Trovatore we never would have known, and I felt fleetingly connected to the other people in the world who care about stuff like this and think about it and take it seriously, which can be in itself a very heady feeling.  And I thought, as I so often do, that we need some gesture, word, or sign that means "God Bless The Internet."  Everyone bow your heads together.

But living on the internet?  Social networking?  Commenting on things?  Reading comments?  Responding to stuff, interacting constantly, dealing with other people and their ridiculous opinions and things they're upset about and turf they need to defend and all that?  Seeing their photos and boasts and politics and complaints?  Dealing with the constant interactive negativity stream

It seriously makes me want to crawl back into my ocean home. Gotta go.  Bye.

So when young people say to me things like "Pinterest!"-- I feel my age.  I shake my cane, and tell them about the good old days, when you could run into people at parties by surprise, and get drunk without your asshole friends posting pictures to Facebook, and generally act like a doofus without fearing that your every move is being recorded, commented on, filed away, preserved forever like a book of rotten memories.

It was a golden era, even if it was a little noisy and stupid.

Monday, October 8, 2012

The Good Things, They Do Not Always Fit Together

Lia Lee
Recently, Lia Lee died.  In her youth, Lia was a child with severe epilepsy in a family of Hmong refugees, who clashed with the medical professionals assigned to her care.  Her case spawned the book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures.

At 4, Lia had a grand-mal seizure, got an infection, and went into septic shock.  She lost all higher brain function.  She lived the rest of her life -- she died at age 30 -- unable to speak or move around or do much of anything, really.

When I read the notice of Lia's death in The Times, I thought to myself, "Wow, I have to read that book."  The book is, in fact, truly brilliant.  The author, Anne Fadiman, spent a huge amount of time getting to know the Lees and becoming their friend and also getting to know the doctors and reading Lia's vast transcribed medical history and so on. 

The story is heartbreaking along several dimensions, the most obvious of which has to do with the early failed efforts to bring Lia's epilepsy under control.  The doctors wrote out prescriptions and gave complex orders, inattentive to the fact that the cultural communication problems went way beyond the translation of words. 

The drugs sometimes seemed to make Lia worse in the short run.  The family not only couldn't read or use a thermometer or anything, they had no experience with Western style medicine at all.  They had their own way of dealing with epilepsy -- the disease whose name in Hmong means something like "the spirit catches you and you fall down."  In their minds, epilepsy was a mixed thing:  bad, because dangerous, but also in some ways good, because you were in touch with the spiritual realm and could, yourself, become a healer.  They didn't always give Lia the drugs. 

The result:  Lia often didn't get what the doctors were prescribing, and relations between the parents and the medical team predictably deteriorated.  When you look at it from the Lee's point of view, it's terrifying the way the doctors have the power of the state behind them to force the family into doing whatever they said.  At one point, even though Lia's parents are about the most loving and attentive parents you can possibly imagine, Lia was forcibly taken from their home and placed in foster care.  On the other hand, when you look at it from the doctors' point of view, Lia deserved the best medical care possible; her parents wishes aren't the only thing that matters.  It is a difficult situation. 

In later years, there was a rapprochement between Lia's mother Foua and her early doctors.  Here is Foua together with Dr. Peggy Philp, at a panel discussion of Fadiman's book in 2002.
One of the themes of the book and the Times notice is the way the Lee family dealt with having Lia in their lives.  She not only lived at home her whole life, she was the center of family life.  Later Fadiman said, "She was never shunted to the periphery ... I remember her most in her mother’s arms. Family life went on around her and in some ways revolved around her."

Lia's parents -- and especially her mother -- never left her side.  They fed her, and bathed her, and talked to her, and listened to her, and watched her, and soothed her skin, and moved her limbs.  Most people in Lia's mental condition live 3 to 5 years.  Lia lived for 26 years.  When the doctors sent Lia home, they told the family that she'd be dead within the week.  Boy did they prove that wrong.

The Times says of this, "The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down is also the story of the immense benefits of tradition, which can furnish, Ms. Fadiman makes clear, a level of familial devotion less often seen among modern Americans."

Which really got me thinking about Lia's parents and their way of life, and especially about Lia's mom, who had virtually no outside life.  In the book it's not presented as a sacrifice.  According to Fadiman, in Hmong culture it's common to marry young and have lots of children, and life often revolves happily around their care.

And first I thought, "Wow, I am really immersed in the Modern/Western/Cosmopolitan/Whatever way of life."  I mean, on some level I always know that I'm immersed in that way of life.  But it's the kind of thing you don't always stop and think about. 

Because I found the idea of living the way Lia's parents lived almost unbearable to contemplate.  I mean, if you think of one day, it might seem nice:  you wake up, you attend to the children, you play with Lia for a while, you feed everybody lunch, etc etc etc. and sometimes family and friends come by.  But every day?  No going out to the coffee shop, no cocktails, no going to work even?  Wow.

 And for all that Lia's familial care is a beautiful and moving thing, I think it's important not to lose sight of the fact that the things in our society that make it impossible, or at least extremely difficult, for most of us to imagine living this way -- those are great things in their own way, too. 

For instance, I'm addicted to getting out and seeing the faces of people I don't know, to doing things that connect me to people beyond my family and friends, to being part of a large world.  And I think of those as basically good qualities to have:  they're part of feeling like a member of the human race, loving diversity and difference, and enjoying the fact that people live in all kinds of different ways.

I'm the first to admit that this way of life we have here -- it really does make us less able to care for the Lias of the world -- I mean, people like Lia as she was after her traumatic brain injury at age 4.  If you're unwell, there really is no replacement for having someone who loves you tend to your needs 24 hours a day.   

To me the moral of that story is just that you can't have all the good things in life all at the same time.  Yes, complete immersion in family life and care for others can be wonderful.  Yes, the world we live in makes this immersion almost impossible for many people.  But that doesn't mean there's something bad about our way of life.  It just means there can be wonderful things that do not all fit together.

There's a contingent out there, I think, that wants to deny this -- perhaps because it can seem like a dark, daunting, or depressing idea.  That contingent tells us:  you can have all the good things.  It just takes compromise.  A little work, a little taking care of Lia, you're good to go.  Then the moral would be: we modern western cosmopolitans need to change, not be so extreme. 

 I have no doubt that compromise among good things can be a good way to live.  But it doesn't remove the conceptual problem.  The whole point about Lia's parents is that they weren't just there for her from 5 to 10 pm.  They were there for her 24 hours a day.  I live, to some extent, on the other extreme.  Even making healthy dinners and brushing my own teeth feel like endless chores.  Again?  But I just made dinner yesterday!

If I'm right that the good things in life don't fit together, that compromise doesn't solve the conceptual problems, that shows that living in the extremes can all be good ways to live.  It can be wonderful to be there for Lia for 26 years of breakfasts and bathing and the moving of the limbs.  It can also be wonderful to be the cosmopolitan who needs the faces of strangers, a day of work outside the home every day, a fast internet connection, and cocktails promptly at seven.

Sure, if you live a monochromatic life, you're missing something.  But my idea is that however you set it up, you're missing something.  So if you want to live monochromatically, knock yourself out.

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Programming Note

There won't be a new post on Monday October 1, because I'll be on a trip.  See you back here on the 8th.

Monday, September 24, 2012

Automotive Omnipresence Sucks

A Porsche Spyder?  Yes, please.
I've never owned a car of my own.  OK, asterisk:  I believe there was once a car registered in my name.  Ages ago, my then-boyfriend and I bought his mother's stick shift Ford something or other, and I was, of course, driven around in that car.  But since I don't drive stick, I believe I can go honestly into the record books with "I've never owned a car of my own."

It's been my experience that the more you take public transportation and the less you drive, the more vividly you experience both the peace of public transportation and the hell of driving.  I know the bus is unpredictable, and the ride can be long.  But I've got my book; I've got my headphones; I've gotten into a quiet mental space; I'm generally good to go.

Conversely, daily taking on the the responsibility of maneuvering a deadly 2-ton piece of machinery on crowded streets?  Is that not insane?  Did you know over 32,000 people people died in the US in car accidents in 2010?  And that was down from previous years.  If that were the death rate from any other activity like sex, drugs, or rock-and-roll people would be going out of their minds.  OMG! Don't drive! Won't somebody please think of the children?!

Anyway, all this just to say:  I have no real intention of buying a car.


It's also been my experience that unless you live in a monastery, you are in the overlap zone between "car culture" and "consumer culture."  It's impossible not to occasionally day dream about car ownership.  And I do.

And when I daydream about car ownership, my thoughts always run smack into the Great Car Dilemma, which goes something like this:

I cannot own a sensible car.  I know this is ridiculous.  But there's something about cars -- there's something about them that is just so fucking depressing to me.  When I think of cars, I think of long quiet nights in quiet suburban towns, cut off from life; I think of endless driving around to find a parking place; and I think of that feeling of being in that little box, cut off from everyone else in their little boxes.  I remember the cold dark winter mornings of my youth, de-icing a windshield, which at the time seemed to me about the most depressing activity in the world.  When I was really young, I thought "I'll live in the woods, and get around by horse!"  It was only when I got a little older that I realized the bus, train, and occasional taxi could be my salvation.

There's only one thing that can undo and erase the depressingness of cars for me, and that's thinking of a car as an amazing toy, a beautiful object, rather than a way of getting from place to place.  Some cars really are lovely and exciting.  They're sexy to look at, awesome to ride in, and a thrill to drive.  They have extraordinary shapes, like the Ferrari, and extraordinary paint quality, like the new Audis.  To me, a true sports car or luxury car is not a depressing symbol of car culture.  It's a symbol of fun, pleasure, and the life force

So then I think, OK, I don't have a lot of money, but perhaps I could afford a really old version of a really beautiful car.  Like, a thirty year old Jaguar, or one of those refurbished "pre-owned" BMWs.  When I was a kid, my father was obsessed with cars.  His love was the kind of obsessive, inclusive love that embraced the Dodge Dart and the VW Rabbit as well as the Audi he never did buy and the Porsche 914 that he did and that was our family car for about six months.  Perhaps I could buy an old, beat-up Porsche, which would be a kind of homage to my father.  That would lend respectability and intelligibility to an otherwise completely irrational choice, wouldn't it?

You can see where this is going.  What could be more ridiculous for a person who doesn't need a car and doesn't like to drive than the purchase of an old, temperamental car that would suck in the winter and would surely be expensive to maintain?  Old cars aren't even safe.  It's completely crazy. 

So.  Can't have a sensible car.  Can't have a beautiful snazzy car.  No car for Patricia.

Sometimes I worry about what would happen if I absolutely had to move to a place where I could not get around without a car.  I did survive seven years in California with no car.  But there were extenuating circumstances, and I was able to cobble a life together -- even though that life did include walking across overpasses to get from my apartment to stores and restaurants, getting my high heels stuck the grass when (as frequently) there were no sidewalks and I had to walk on the side of the road, getting drenched with sprinklers set to water lawns but really showering down on walking paths that no one ever used, and, of course, often just not going anywhere interesting.  I don't know what I'd do.  I try not to think about it. 

The Great Car Dilemma makes me even more alienated from the automobile way of life than I would be if I were just, you know, a non-driver.  Because not only don't I have a car in the real world, I don't even have a car in any nearby possible world.

 And indeed, as time goes on, the more strident and angry I am about the whole automotive omnipresence business.  On top of everything else -- on top of the obvious and enormous cost to the environment and all that insanity -- car culture is like an exponential magnifier for inequality and other social problems.  Car ownership is expensive and if you're poor you can't afford it.  If you're old or have certain disabilities you can't drive.  If you screw up, you can get your license taken away.  Car culture means that the initial difficulties, which might otherwise be manageable, become huge, life-destroying problems for many people.

For most people, there is no option of treating a car as fun or a toy, because a car is an absolute necessity for the basics of life -- which is a ridiculous state of affairs. 

It's one of those many domains in which individualism, which is great when leavened with a cup of collective care, becomes intolerable when pursued alone.

Monday, September 17, 2012

Constructive Anger: Maybe An Oxymoron, Maybe Stupid

Jacob Van Loo, Melancholy.  Via Wikimedia Commons.
They say depression is anger turned inward.  Do you think this is true?  a) Always b) Sometimes c) Never d) All of the above.

Sometimes I feel bad:  melancholic, blue, sad, weighed down.  Sometimes it feels like being depressed, but not always.  Mostly it's like "the world is so fucked up," "what is the point of this exactly?" and "couldn't this whole human experience thing be better arranged?"

Of course, the world really is so fucked up, and life really doesn't have a point, so it's not like having these thoughts is evidence of some kind of problem.  Frustration with the paleness and stupidity of the human experience isn't really depression.  It's more like discontent -- something you don't hear a lot about in the modern pscyho-counseling establishment.  If you're just discontented, I guess you're supposed to just suck it up.

But I got thinking about the whole anger-depression thing after I read this book Monkey Mind, which is a funny memoir about a guy's experience with anxiety.  (Sample situation:  at 16, guy has sex with woman he doesn't really like and isn't really attracted to -- then becomes VERY ANXIOUS about it for A LONG TIME.)

Reading the book, I realized that my bad feelings are really not typically anxiety.  It's not like I'm a worrier.  I'm not worried about the future.  I'm depressed and discontented NOW.  I remembered the whole anger->depression idea, and I asked myself, Do I do that?  Do I turn anger inward?  

The objective facts suggest maybe Yes.  I have a hard time staying angry at individual people, even when anger is justified and appropriate.  I get angry for like one second, and then somehow my mind always flashes to thinking about how the whole situation is going to seem ten years from now, at which point it will seem ridiculous and far away.  When you've lost your cool, haven't you always felt stupid later?  I've always thought my approach a pretty rational one, actually.  But maybe it's "turning anger inward."  Who knows? 

Following this line of thought, I asked the next question a philosopher would ask, which is "Well, what is a constructive way to express anger?"  I mean, clearly no one is better off becoming more the kind of person who shouts and throws things and makes mean cutting remarks.  Duh.  So what are you supposed to do exactly?

The google tells me the following things.  When expressing anger, talk directly to the person you're angry with.  Speak in a calm and caring way, and make eye contact.  Use "I" language:  instead of saying "Hey, you almost ran me over you stupid inattentive piece of shit!" say, "I know you mean well but I really feel nervous and vulnerable when you run the yellow light and almost kill me with your car."

As I thought about putting this into practice, I noticed a huge obstacle.  The vast majority of what I'm angry about has nothing to do with the people around me, and has everything to do with the state of the world, with money, with war, with politics, with environmental degradation.  Who am I supposed to look in the eye while I deliver my "I" statements if I'm mad about impending war in Iran? 

What do to?  Maybe I should write a letter?  Let's give it a shot, shall we?

Dear USA,
The absurd and immoral wars and other violence you are initiating and perpetuating around the world are an outrage to decency, you self-important ignorant bully...

Oops, scratch that!  Let's start over:

Dear USA,
I think you mean well, but maybe you didn't realize well over 100,000 civilians have died as a result of the Iraq war.  Have you considered -- wait, scratch that! I often think about them and their families and ... let's just say it makes me feel upset and sad, OK?  I just wanted to let you know.

Dear People of Banking and Finance,
You guys are completely beyond the pale with your lying, fraud, gambling, foreclosure misbehavior and other shenanigans.  Who the fuck do you think you are? 


Dear People of Banking and Finance,
I know you're doing your best, but I think you've developed a few regrettable habits lately, and I was hoping you'd take a moment to consider things from our point of view.  I felt really sad and upset when I read about Wells Fargo destroying the home of these people who didn't even have a mortgage.  The effects of the economic collapse of 2008 mean some people are unemployed and I think that makes them unhappy, which makes me unhappy.  If you ever need to talk, I'm here, OK?

Dear Forces that Control the Universe,
WTF is wrong with you?  Disease, hunger, death -- and for what?  Do you just like to see us suffer?  I think you suck.


Dear Forces that Control the Universe,
I've heard it said that you have ways that are beyond my understanding and my paltry powers of reasons.  I don't know.  I just wanted to make sure you knew that things are difficult.  We humans need love, food, warmth, companionship, and when we don't get those things - it's like really hard on us OK?  

Conclusion:  I don't think this constructive anger thing is going to work for me.

Monday, September 10, 2012

Back To School, Or, How I Gave Up A Life Of Chaos And Became A Prof

When I was a kid, I thought being a prof was the kind of job that fell outside the acceptable range for glamour, excitement, and coolness.  My dad was a prof -- and later, a university administrator (chemical engineering) -- and while I thought it an excellent career for a person of his sensibility and talents, I thought "No, that is not for me."

I was an eye-rolly type of kid, at least on the inside, and every time some well-meaning person said "Oh, you're good at math! You could become an engineer!" I imagined rolling those eyes right back into my head. 

I didn't really think in a coherent way about what I was going to do with my life during school.  I double-majored in math and dance, the two things that interested me most.  OK, I virtually double-majored.  As the distracted youth that I was, I didn't finish the final project for the dance BA.  If you know me as a prof now, you might be surprised to learn how deep and vast was my disaffection, disorganization, and general living in chaos when I was a Young Person.

I guess in the back of my mind, I thought I'd get plucked from obscurity to do something interesting, or I'd meet some other person who'd show me something fascinating that I was good at and enjoyed.  But boy oh boy was that wrong.  If there's one thing I've learned in life, it's that doing interesting things requires working really hard at Doing Interesting Things, and isn't the sort of thing where the opportunities fall from the sky just because you happen to be an Interesting Person.

The first glimmer of interest I had in a life in academia was the September after I'd finished my four years.  I stuck around the town (Middletown) my school (Wesleyan University) was in, and got a job working at the campus bookstore and an apartment in someone's attic.  And what gave me that glimmer of interest wasn't anything really substantive or intellectual.  It was really just the mood of back to school.

Working at the bookstore, I spent the start of school helping all these new hopeful and nervous kids and occasionally their hopeful and nervous parents.  I saw, from a different point of view, the returning students greet one another with whoops and hugs and questions about the summer.  It seemed so nice:  so optimistic, so full of life.  I thought, "Well, being part of this could be an OK thing."

But I wasn't quite ready to give up my dreams of being the next Edie Sedgwick. Where was my Andy Warhol, who would think me fascinating and feed me drugs?  For the next while, I lived in different places -- including New Orleans -- doing different waitressing jobs -- including one at a tourist trap cocktail bar on Bourbon Street and another at an all-night diner attached to a fleabag hotel.  The customers at that diner on the midnight to 8am shift at the diner were one third junkies who lived upstairs, one third drunk and laughing tourists who wanted eggs and cheeseburgers at 4:00 am, and one-third Danish/Swedish/European travelers who read in some book that the hotel was perfect for local color.  It was, of course, well before the internet, so people never knew what was going on 'til they were in the middle of things.  A lost world, that world.

I sort of didn't know what the hell I was going to do.  My dad had died when I was fifteen, and since he was the breadwinner, there wasn't any financial cushion.  After about two years, the Great American Problem of Living in Poverty hit me like a ton of bricks:  I had no health insurance.  I'd managed to stay pretty healthy.  But then I caught something, and had some problems, and I realized, fuck, I have to go to an emergency room and hope they forgive the charges.

What to do about this state of affairs?  The only skill I had that I could imagine applying in a way that would get me health insurance was my intellectual skills, and I figured I'd go back to graduate school.  Because it was the stone age, when school info came and went on paper, and because I didn't have a phone of my own, I had to borrow someone's for the long-distance calls and request written information packets.

Thank heaven, despite the rough lifestyle of my youth, I was still pretty good at math, and I got in.  There's a long rest of the story about how I decided to give up math and study philosophy and all that, but we'll talk about that some other time, because the essential die was cast:  I was in graduate school and I became a professor. 

Intellectual life suited me, even more than I expected.  I worked like a dog to accustom myself to long hours spent alone, doing proofs -- and later, writing papers.  Now my favorite moments of my work life are when I walk into the library, and it's still morning so it's quiet and empty, and alongside my interest in what I'll do that day, I have a sense of belonging somewhere.  I feel at home.

If you know about profs you know our jobs are often part research, part teaching, and part service, which means being on committees and going to meetings and stuff like that.  Today is the first day of school which means back to teaching.  Like a little kid, I often think about what to wear to the first day of school.  When I was a child, my father -- from whom I inherited my material objects obsessions -- always liked to put nice things away 'til a special day, and back-to-school clothes were always in a closet until the actual first day of school.

I love my scholarship and I love my hours alone in the library, but I have to say I'm ambivalent about actual teaching.  Teaching is very difficult, and requires thinking about difficult things and interacting with large groups of people all at the same time.  As an introvert, I find it overwhelming.

Though I'm ambivalent about teaching itself, I love my students, and I love being around 18-22 year-olds all the time.  Talk about the life force.  Whether they're studying for a test, updating Facebook, stressing about romance, or just getting some coffee, they do everything with energy and aplomb.  I often think how weird and maybe sad it would be to have a job where you just see other middle-aged people all the time, and you never hear the particular squeals of pleasure or indignation so characteristic of people just past high-school.

So I have to say:  that glimmer of interest I had from the Big Return in September, when I was just 21 years old myself -- it was a trustworthy emotion, in the sense that the same things -- the hopeful and nervous new students and parents, the whoops of reconnection with summer friends all give me a feeling of happiness and connection to life every year.