Friday, September 30, 2011
Change of Address
When you move it's only polite to inform people, so here is where I've gone: www.rewordingotherpeoplesdiscoveries.blogspot.com. I'll keep this one around for reference and maybe throw something up every now and again but you can expect most of my communications to be beamed onto the new one. I plan, ambitiously perhaps, to post two to three times a week thoughts on good books and science related stuff. To pilfer and reconstruct a phrase from Sam Harris, my brain has been in a state of constant firmware renewal over the past few months, and I'd like to see what it'll spit out if I turn it on. Who knows if it will come out intelligible, but I'll do my best anyway. Rock on.
Saturday, September 24, 2011
Enlightenment, You Say?
I've been reading a fair amount about Buddhism recently, because as a white dude living in Japan and trying to feel out various cross-cultural ways of conceiving things, reading a fair amount about Buddhism is sort of an inevitability.
I confess to having grown up with a keen interest in the supernatural. Not really the sort of interest you'd get from reading some manifestation of scripture or sitting in some kind of pew, however. No, my fascination with the supernatural was largely informed by the vast stretches of time I spent playing video games, especially fantasy role playing games. Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy, The Legend of Zelda, Lufia II Rise of the Sinistrals, Golden Sun, Tales of Symphonia, Ogre Battle 64, Fire Emblem, the list goes on, composing a library of other titles that I can't remember yet still exist in my memory as flashing images of pixellated mages and dark-matter spewing dragons on the black screen of my mind. Like a lot of kids I was easily captivated by tales of magic, spirit realms, and sword-wielding, prophecy-confirming young heroes rising from obscurity to save the world from misguided middle aged dudes drawn in by the dark side. That's pretty much how they all go, because whatever the twists and turns the stories take, deep down their appeal is simple and the same: what budding young nerd wouldn't like to experience military triumph on the tip of the Flaming Sword of Argorath alongside a party of hot anime babes? If Nietzsche is right and one of the primary sources of human motivation is the will to power, there is no better (quicker, safer, more reliable) way to step into the shoes of the ubermensch than to turn on your PS3.
Of course, after you reach a certain point, you step out of your own adolescence and into an awareness of the outside world that poses an existential question: will you continue to seek moral perfection (for being unshakably and unquestionably right is a baseline function of many, though not all, RPGs) and self-actualization in the determinist matrix of medieval-themed computer programming, or will you look to level up in the infinitely more complicated and less-likely to bend-to-your-summoner-skills external world? I'm still nostalgic for video games, and every once in a while I pop one into my Nintendo DS, but I generally end up turning it off after fifteen or twenty minutes; I find myself increasingly unable to marshal my attention for something that just isn't real.
Which doesn't mean that the desire for vitality and electric transcendentalism video games used to satisfy in me has died. Like most people lucky enough to have been born into a culture that services your essential needs more-or-less with a smile, I've always been on the lookout for colorful lights to string in the sky and pulses of plasma to pump through my veins. For a long time, plugging into a world of digital angels and mythical weaponry was enough, but it's not anymore.
So where do you turn? I listen to a lot of Dragonforce, but that's pretty much like video games on tape, palatable because you can do something else at the same time and a song lasts six minutes instead of 60 hours. I tried painting but I sucked at it. I tried Japanese calligraphy but I didn't have the patience. I tried guitar theory but the best I could ever get was competence, which is cool but nobody ever beat the Final Boss with competency. You need your ultimate spell, the enchanted sword of a dead legend (who you may or may not be the reincarnation of), and probably some kick-ass magic resistant armor. A working knowledge of the pentatonic scale just doesn't cut it.
So where do you turn? Do you turn to God? Part of the reason that video games are fun is that they simulate a world in which god can actually exist, and you get all of the badass stuff without having to worry about the stuff that doesn't make any sense. I looked for God, but the only place in which He seems to fit is on a laser-disc. And yet, and yet, what about the Buddha? Eastern religion is pretty hip these days, and from what you hear the Buddha isn't quite like every other deity on the block. Turns out he's not really even a deity. What about Enlightenment? What the hell is that, exactly? From a boy who was always fascinated with the possibility of revelation, of spiritual sustenance, of being whisked off into a fantasy world where magic is real and legends tell the truth I have grown into something close to a man who sees through the improbability of such things. Nevertheless, I wanted to leave no legitimate stone unturned, so I started studying about Buddhism, and what I found, while not evidence for a spirit realm, was still pretty interesting. More to follow.
I confess to having grown up with a keen interest in the supernatural. Not really the sort of interest you'd get from reading some manifestation of scripture or sitting in some kind of pew, however. No, my fascination with the supernatural was largely informed by the vast stretches of time I spent playing video games, especially fantasy role playing games. Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy, The Legend of Zelda, Lufia II Rise of the Sinistrals, Golden Sun, Tales of Symphonia, Ogre Battle 64, Fire Emblem, the list goes on, composing a library of other titles that I can't remember yet still exist in my memory as flashing images of pixellated mages and dark-matter spewing dragons on the black screen of my mind. Like a lot of kids I was easily captivated by tales of magic, spirit realms, and sword-wielding, prophecy-confirming young heroes rising from obscurity to save the world from misguided middle aged dudes drawn in by the dark side. That's pretty much how they all go, because whatever the twists and turns the stories take, deep down their appeal is simple and the same: what budding young nerd wouldn't like to experience military triumph on the tip of the Flaming Sword of Argorath alongside a party of hot anime babes? If Nietzsche is right and one of the primary sources of human motivation is the will to power, there is no better (quicker, safer, more reliable) way to step into the shoes of the ubermensch than to turn on your PS3.
Of course, after you reach a certain point, you step out of your own adolescence and into an awareness of the outside world that poses an existential question: will you continue to seek moral perfection (for being unshakably and unquestionably right is a baseline function of many, though not all, RPGs) and self-actualization in the determinist matrix of medieval-themed computer programming, or will you look to level up in the infinitely more complicated and less-likely to bend-to-your-summoner-skills external world? I'm still nostalgic for video games, and every once in a while I pop one into my Nintendo DS, but I generally end up turning it off after fifteen or twenty minutes; I find myself increasingly unable to marshal my attention for something that just isn't real.
Which doesn't mean that the desire for vitality and electric transcendentalism video games used to satisfy in me has died. Like most people lucky enough to have been born into a culture that services your essential needs more-or-less with a smile, I've always been on the lookout for colorful lights to string in the sky and pulses of plasma to pump through my veins. For a long time, plugging into a world of digital angels and mythical weaponry was enough, but it's not anymore.
So where do you turn? I listen to a lot of Dragonforce, but that's pretty much like video games on tape, palatable because you can do something else at the same time and a song lasts six minutes instead of 60 hours. I tried painting but I sucked at it. I tried Japanese calligraphy but I didn't have the patience. I tried guitar theory but the best I could ever get was competence, which is cool but nobody ever beat the Final Boss with competency. You need your ultimate spell, the enchanted sword of a dead legend (who you may or may not be the reincarnation of), and probably some kick-ass magic resistant armor. A working knowledge of the pentatonic scale just doesn't cut it.
So where do you turn? Do you turn to God? Part of the reason that video games are fun is that they simulate a world in which god can actually exist, and you get all of the badass stuff without having to worry about the stuff that doesn't make any sense. I looked for God, but the only place in which He seems to fit is on a laser-disc. And yet, and yet, what about the Buddha? Eastern religion is pretty hip these days, and from what you hear the Buddha isn't quite like every other deity on the block. Turns out he's not really even a deity. What about Enlightenment? What the hell is that, exactly? From a boy who was always fascinated with the possibility of revelation, of spiritual sustenance, of being whisked off into a fantasy world where magic is real and legends tell the truth I have grown into something close to a man who sees through the improbability of such things. Nevertheless, I wanted to leave no legitimate stone unturned, so I started studying about Buddhism, and what I found, while not evidence for a spirit realm, was still pretty interesting. More to follow.
What are books for?
Sometimes you read a book and it pisses you off. I read Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth when I was a Junior in college and threw it against the wall of my living room because it seemed to me like a four hundred page waste of my time. No doubt there was something in there of worth, but I read books hoping for a punch in the face and all I got from that one was a spiny powder-puff. Not to say that it was actually worthless; I'm sure from the right angle it was revolutionary, but I wasn't at that angle. A classic it's not you, it's my twenty-first century white male perspective sort of thing. At any rate it sucked.
Sometimes you read a book and it melts your face. I read John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse and almost threw up at times, partly out of sheer unfamiliarity but partly because I just didn't know what the hell was going on and the last resort of incomprehension seems to be ameliorative vomiting. "Nothing lasts longer than a mood," one of Barth's broken-down, unidentifiable narrators once said, and if I've written it before I would write it again: no line I've ever read has stuck with me like that one. For whatever reason it got below my skin and said something my bones could get down to. Bummer that the rest of the book was deconstructionist bullshit.
Sometimes you read a book that changes your life. Sometimes you read a series of books that change your life, and you find yourself in a slipstream that leads logically and inexorably from one thing to the next like falling out of an airplane. You're in free-fall and download one title after the next like flailing your arms at a rapidly diminishing Cessna. Is that a parachute on your back? Are you eventually going to go smack on the ground? Or do you just fall forever, pulling volume after volume from the ether in an attempt to know everything you need to know to qualify for a safe landing.
It is in just such a free-fall that I find myself at the moment, having discovered a trail into terminal velocity that starts at the physical sciences and ends in a graveyard of dead gods. Passes through the graveyard, I should more properly say, because the point of the whole thing is to find out what lies beyond the demon haunted cemetery, to makes one's peace with the universe so that one might better utilize the rapidly dwindling time in it which one has left. As I fall through degrees of things taken for granted, what are the names cut into the plastic straps of my potential parachute? They are many and perhaps they are well-known to most smart people, but for me they are new. Though others who have fallen from similar heights might put the names in different order, for me the most recent come first: Dawkins, Harris, Dennett, Hitchens, followed by their predecessors who I have since started to dig up. Spinoza, Hume, Bertrand Russel, Einstein, Hobbes, Mill, etc etc, the list goes on but ultimately the point is the same. What are books for ? They should be for helping you think better, and if over the past four or five months the only thing I've done is read, well, I hope that my brain is the better for it. Only time and continued writings will tell.
Sometimes you read a book and it melts your face. I read John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse and almost threw up at times, partly out of sheer unfamiliarity but partly because I just didn't know what the hell was going on and the last resort of incomprehension seems to be ameliorative vomiting. "Nothing lasts longer than a mood," one of Barth's broken-down, unidentifiable narrators once said, and if I've written it before I would write it again: no line I've ever read has stuck with me like that one. For whatever reason it got below my skin and said something my bones could get down to. Bummer that the rest of the book was deconstructionist bullshit.
Sometimes you read a book that changes your life. Sometimes you read a series of books that change your life, and you find yourself in a slipstream that leads logically and inexorably from one thing to the next like falling out of an airplane. You're in free-fall and download one title after the next like flailing your arms at a rapidly diminishing Cessna. Is that a parachute on your back? Are you eventually going to go smack on the ground? Or do you just fall forever, pulling volume after volume from the ether in an attempt to know everything you need to know to qualify for a safe landing.
It is in just such a free-fall that I find myself at the moment, having discovered a trail into terminal velocity that starts at the physical sciences and ends in a graveyard of dead gods. Passes through the graveyard, I should more properly say, because the point of the whole thing is to find out what lies beyond the demon haunted cemetery, to makes one's peace with the universe so that one might better utilize the rapidly dwindling time in it which one has left. As I fall through degrees of things taken for granted, what are the names cut into the plastic straps of my potential parachute? They are many and perhaps they are well-known to most smart people, but for me they are new. Though others who have fallen from similar heights might put the names in different order, for me the most recent come first: Dawkins, Harris, Dennett, Hitchens, followed by their predecessors who I have since started to dig up. Spinoza, Hume, Bertrand Russel, Einstein, Hobbes, Mill, etc etc, the list goes on but ultimately the point is the same. What are books for ? They should be for helping you think better, and if over the past four or five months the only thing I've done is read, well, I hope that my brain is the better for it. Only time and continued writings will tell.
Friday, May 27, 2011
他不是吾
他不是吾。 Ta wa kore ware ni arazu. Simply stated, people do different things.
There are impulses that ought to be ignored, let's call these your automatics, and then there are others that are generated in a different place and should be heeded. "Ah, that hamburger looks delicious, I want it!" "I'm tired of these shoes, I want new ones!" "I need an iPhone." These are your automatics, unintentional, conditioned responses to an environment for which they weren't forged. They're just your body engaging evolutionary survival instincts or reacting to culturally implanted social norms.
Then there are the other ones that surface in your mind from time to time. "Ah, I have to mail that letter." "I haven't spoken with him in a long time, I should write him an email." "this bathroom is pretty dirty, I should clean it." These are impulses that push you towards the things you know deep down you have to do, and if yhou jump on them you will feel great. If you push them away because someone else tells you to do them later, or because you think right now isn't the appropriate time, or just because you're lazy, you will create gap between what your subconscious mind knows you have to do and what your conscious mind will let you do. In those gaps there is a lot of pain and stress. Follow those little blips of inspiration wherever you can, though, and you'll find yourself falling into fewer ravines.
There are impulses that ought to be ignored, let's call these your automatics, and then there are others that are generated in a different place and should be heeded. "Ah, that hamburger looks delicious, I want it!" "I'm tired of these shoes, I want new ones!" "I need an iPhone." These are your automatics, unintentional, conditioned responses to an environment for which they weren't forged. They're just your body engaging evolutionary survival instincts or reacting to culturally implanted social norms.
Then there are the other ones that surface in your mind from time to time. "Ah, I have to mail that letter." "I haven't spoken with him in a long time, I should write him an email." "this bathroom is pretty dirty, I should clean it." These are impulses that push you towards the things you know deep down you have to do, and if yhou jump on them you will feel great. If you push them away because someone else tells you to do them later, or because you think right now isn't the appropriate time, or just because you're lazy, you will create gap between what your subconscious mind knows you have to do and what your conscious mind will let you do. In those gaps there is a lot of pain and stress. Follow those little blips of inspiration wherever you can, though, and you'll find yourself falling into fewer ravines.
Thursday, May 26, 2011
人人悉道器
Nin-nin kotogotoku, doki-nari. Everyone has a soul to forge, so forge it.
I've been really into some Japanese proverbs recently so I thought I would introduce a few that I found in a book.
Everyone has within them the innate capacity to turn themselves into something amazing. ”人人悉” "Nin-nin kotogotoku," all people with no exceptions. Regardless of who you think you are, where you're from, whatever limitations or disadvantages you think you have, these words are for you because when you clear away all the webs we have culturally, socially, or intellectually strung ourselves up in you find that underneath it all you're still fresh and clean and capable of nearly anything.
”道器” "doki-nari." This is both the thing you can become and the way in which you become it. 道. "Do." this is the way. Everyday we're walking a path towards something, but if you don't know where you're headed you're bound to end up somewhere you don't want to be. If you are aware of the stones beneath your feet and you continue to put one foot in front of the other, no matter how difficult it may seem, slowly, painfully, in fits and starts but eventually you will find yourself somewhere, holding a cup filled to the brim with all of your labor. 器. "Ki." You find yourself at the end of all the steps you've taken, and the form of your vessel is the result of the work you have put into shaping it, nothing more, nothing less.
I've been really into some Japanese proverbs recently so I thought I would introduce a few that I found in a book.
Everyone has within them the innate capacity to turn themselves into something amazing. ”人人悉” "Nin-nin kotogotoku," all people with no exceptions. Regardless of who you think you are, where you're from, whatever limitations or disadvantages you think you have, these words are for you because when you clear away all the webs we have culturally, socially, or intellectually strung ourselves up in you find that underneath it all you're still fresh and clean and capable of nearly anything.
”道器” "doki-nari." This is both the thing you can become and the way in which you become it. 道. "Do." this is the way. Everyday we're walking a path towards something, but if you don't know where you're headed you're bound to end up somewhere you don't want to be. If you are aware of the stones beneath your feet and you continue to put one foot in front of the other, no matter how difficult it may seem, slowly, painfully, in fits and starts but eventually you will find yourself somewhere, holding a cup filled to the brim with all of your labor. 器. "Ki." You find yourself at the end of all the steps you've taken, and the form of your vessel is the result of the work you have put into shaping it, nothing more, nothing less.
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
本来無一物; a Proverb
Honrai Mu-Ichi Motsu
Deep down, you are nothing.
It's all in your head.
Everything you know, everything someone's told you, is telling you, all of your evaluations, all of the expectations of and rules you have for your everyday life are learned scaffolding built up over whatever it is deep down that you started with. Those parts are all interchangable; none of them are essential to your existence, no matter how much you've convinced yourself otherwise.
As such, whenever you feel yourself suffocating under the weight of various stresses, if you just remember that it is all removable and what's underneath is still clean and fresh, can't really ever be dirtied, actually, then you can just tear it all down and go back to where you started; having nothing and needing nothing.
Deep down, you are nothing.
It's all in your head.
Everything you know, everything someone's told you, is telling you, all of your evaluations, all of the expectations of and rules you have for your everyday life are learned scaffolding built up over whatever it is deep down that you started with. Those parts are all interchangable; none of them are essential to your existence, no matter how much you've convinced yourself otherwise.
As such, whenever you feel yourself suffocating under the weight of various stresses, if you just remember that it is all removable and what's underneath is still clean and fresh, can't really ever be dirtied, actually, then you can just tear it all down and go back to where you started; having nothing and needing nothing.
Friday, March 25, 2011
After the Earthquake
There are many things I could say, some that I might, others that I probably won't, but for the moment here is something I penned out at my desk in one of the days following the big Tohoku earthquake when it seemed that the world was coming apart, the plates were quivering in the anticipation of another big one, radiation was in the air, the waves were crashing down and carrying people out to sea and in general things seemed pretty fragile. Life seems real precious when it's fragile, and that was a feeling that I didn't want to lose even after things went back to normal.
So, what am I going to take from this? If this isn't a life-changing event then what is?
We love people whose lives are in danger, we care for people who have lost big, our hearts go out to those in crisis, and we should, right? We rise above everything when we do, but if we had seen those same people a day earlier, of course, we wouldn't have felt a thing. Just, you know... people you don't know.
Why?
We think we've got issues, go problems, go all sorts of challenges we've got to face but when a massive earthquake hits and a tidal wave washes our homes away we realize that all the other stuff was real little after all.
Why?
When we rebuild our homes will our insignificant problems crop back up? When things go back to normal will we go back to passing those people up North as if they're just random people on the street? Sure, they probably will, and we probably will. It's the way we're are.
But does it have to be?
Tragedies can bring out the absolute best in humans beings, if human beings caring and selflessly helping other human beings is the best they can do. I just wish it didn't have to take a tragedy. When some natural disaster levels cities our boundaries go down with them and we feel free to love and give and fear and worry and pray and care and express the simple, natural, in-born compassion of one person to another person at full blast. In these scenarios, you can't help it. Because someone else has a real need, then I feel it's ok for me to get down to them on the realest of levels.
When someone is stripped of all the labels of everyday society they go back to just being a simple, human being like you, like me, and that fundamentally exposed identity is one we can interact with on such a meaningful level. Just that simple connection is enough to make you feel so good, to give without wanting something back, to be an agent of positivity in the world. To be real.
Why can't we strip away all the bullshit by ourselves? This earthquake has shown me that it's there, so why can't I strip it away by myself? I want to create a world where you can get down on somebody's level just like that, stay there, and make something special happen? How? Where there's a will, there's a way. It's time to lose the bullshit and keep it off.
So, what am I going to take from this? If this isn't a life-changing event then what is?
We love people whose lives are in danger, we care for people who have lost big, our hearts go out to those in crisis, and we should, right? We rise above everything when we do, but if we had seen those same people a day earlier, of course, we wouldn't have felt a thing. Just, you know... people you don't know.
Why?
We think we've got issues, go problems, go all sorts of challenges we've got to face but when a massive earthquake hits and a tidal wave washes our homes away we realize that all the other stuff was real little after all.
Why?
When we rebuild our homes will our insignificant problems crop back up? When things go back to normal will we go back to passing those people up North as if they're just random people on the street? Sure, they probably will, and we probably will. It's the way we're are.
But does it have to be?
Tragedies can bring out the absolute best in humans beings, if human beings caring and selflessly helping other human beings is the best they can do. I just wish it didn't have to take a tragedy. When some natural disaster levels cities our boundaries go down with them and we feel free to love and give and fear and worry and pray and care and express the simple, natural, in-born compassion of one person to another person at full blast. In these scenarios, you can't help it. Because someone else has a real need, then I feel it's ok for me to get down to them on the realest of levels.
When someone is stripped of all the labels of everyday society they go back to just being a simple, human being like you, like me, and that fundamentally exposed identity is one we can interact with on such a meaningful level. Just that simple connection is enough to make you feel so good, to give without wanting something back, to be an agent of positivity in the world. To be real.
Why can't we strip away all the bullshit by ourselves? This earthquake has shown me that it's there, so why can't I strip it away by myself? I want to create a world where you can get down on somebody's level just like that, stay there, and make something special happen? How? Where there's a will, there's a way. It's time to lose the bullshit and keep it off.
Monday, March 7, 2011
Thoughts on Daniel Bachuber's Thoughts on TKE Initiation at Whitman
The other day an expose-esque article on TKE initiation ran in the Whitman newspaper and it got me thinking about my fraternity experience. Then a familiar name from my past, Daniel Bachuber, posted his own article about Initiation and I got to thinking and to talking and then eventually to writing. I don't really feel it necessary to address any of his specific points, some of his facts are correct, some of them are not, others are partially correct but significantly incorrect. Doesn't matter. There was a point in time when I would have agreed with a lot of the stuff he wrote. That time is in the past however. I wrote a comment on his blog and he posted it, to his credit. Still, this was something that I had to work out for myself and so I've reprinted my conclusions below.
Hi Daniel, my name is Chad Frisk and having also participated in TKE initiation at Whitman and felt many of the same things you did I thought I would reply and offer my take on the process.
As I'm sure most Whitman students can identify with, I came into the school with a very negative view of fraternity life formed out of the nebulous haze of popular opinion, rumor, and the topic's depiction in the social media. As you might expect becoming a frat boy and pinning upon myself all of the accompanying labels was pretty unappealing for me. However, I did the rush stuff and for the most part what I actually saw of the fraternities at Whitman bore surprisingly little resemblance to the arrogant asshole image I had built up in my mind and was so resistant towards.
I was still pretty troubled about joining a fraternity but when the time came I made a snap decision to participate in Initiation, even though I hadn't committed myself enough to the house to feel like I belonged there or to get a clear enough image of what the people there were really about. I went, and I really really really hated it. At the time it might have been the worst few days of my life. I had spent a semester battling violently with my preconceptions of what a fraternity was, and having made a very tenuous peace with that decided to dive in only to have that equilibrium immediately shattered as you do experience things that SEEM to be motivated by all the senseless disrespect and meaningless hazing you hear about from fraternities at big schools.
I finished Initiation because I viewed it as a battle of will-power that I would not lose, but I did nothing to see the value behind the stress itself or to admit the really objectively positive moments embedded throughout the whole thing. My fragile trust had been broken and from that moment forth I refused to see the process for what was actually going on, and instead, in a self-righteous, never-been-through-an-actually-tough-time-in-my-life sort of way, I chose to fit it to the negative narratives I had devised in my own head.
Years have passed and having been through it multiples times on each side, I have slowly, slowly, every so grudgingly slowly revised my opinion of the process itself and what I was once convinced was a meaningless charade of wanton disrespect and degradation now shines out as an undeniably positive moment where I overcame a challenge the likes of which I had never seen, the intensity of which I have never seen since. I'm really grateful for the guys who put me through that and gave me those references. I now believe there is no thing as an intrinsically bad experience, only intrinsically neutral ones that we paint with our own values and opinions.
If I had never been through Initiation at the TKE house at Whitman College I would be an appreciably weaker and less complete person that I am today. I'm sorry that it hasn't meant the same thing for you, it's certainly not for everyone and I identify with where you're coming from. If you'd like to talk more about I would love to share. Thank you for putting my post up and keeping the dialog open and honest.
Hi Daniel, my name is Chad Frisk and having also participated in TKE initiation at Whitman and felt many of the same things you did I thought I would reply and offer my take on the process.
As I'm sure most Whitman students can identify with, I came into the school with a very negative view of fraternity life formed out of the nebulous haze of popular opinion, rumor, and the topic's depiction in the social media. As you might expect becoming a frat boy and pinning upon myself all of the accompanying labels was pretty unappealing for me. However, I did the rush stuff and for the most part what I actually saw of the fraternities at Whitman bore surprisingly little resemblance to the arrogant asshole image I had built up in my mind and was so resistant towards.
I was still pretty troubled about joining a fraternity but when the time came I made a snap decision to participate in Initiation, even though I hadn't committed myself enough to the house to feel like I belonged there or to get a clear enough image of what the people there were really about. I went, and I really really really hated it. At the time it might have been the worst few days of my life. I had spent a semester battling violently with my preconceptions of what a fraternity was, and having made a very tenuous peace with that decided to dive in only to have that equilibrium immediately shattered as you do experience things that SEEM to be motivated by all the senseless disrespect and meaningless hazing you hear about from fraternities at big schools.
I finished Initiation because I viewed it as a battle of will-power that I would not lose, but I did nothing to see the value behind the stress itself or to admit the really objectively positive moments embedded throughout the whole thing. My fragile trust had been broken and from that moment forth I refused to see the process for what was actually going on, and instead, in a self-righteous, never-been-through-an-actually-tough-time-in-my-life sort of way, I chose to fit it to the negative narratives I had devised in my own head.
Years have passed and having been through it multiples times on each side, I have slowly, slowly, every so grudgingly slowly revised my opinion of the process itself and what I was once convinced was a meaningless charade of wanton disrespect and degradation now shines out as an undeniably positive moment where I overcame a challenge the likes of which I had never seen, the intensity of which I have never seen since. I'm really grateful for the guys who put me through that and gave me those references. I now believe there is no thing as an intrinsically bad experience, only intrinsically neutral ones that we paint with our own values and opinions.
If I had never been through Initiation at the TKE house at Whitman College I would be an appreciably weaker and less complete person that I am today. I'm sorry that it hasn't meant the same thing for you, it's certainly not for everyone and I identify with where you're coming from. If you'd like to talk more about I would love to share. Thank you for putting my post up and keeping the dialog open and honest.
Monday, February 21, 2011
Thoughts On Teaching
It's nearing the end of the school year here in Japan and as such the teacher's meeting season is in full swing and my school has been gracious enough to offer me the chance to sit in on the meetings and so of late I've been doing a bit of thinking about exactly what you have to do to be the kind of teacher who really moves lives. There are a ton of teachers out there, we've all had a few of them, I suppose, and I think we could all probably agree that while there's nothing worse than a bad teacher, there's nothing better than a great one. What does it take to be a great one? What do you have to do?
There's different ways to be a great teacher, but lately I've been thinking about what to do with the kids who just don't really give a shit. In every class there are a few kids who are all-stars, a lot of kids who are doing alright, a handful of kids who are floundering a little, and then a few kids who either have no chance or prefer to be a wrecking ball. As a teacher, those last one's are the most frustrating because they are not only bringing themselves down but it seems like they're on a mission to tear down the whole production. All people are pretty much consistently engaged in ranking themselves (unconsciously, most often) upon various social totem-poles, but no humans are more attune than middle school aged kids, and so if the big dogs on the top of the pole are out there ready to take a bite of your hide if you step up then you're far more likely to sit quietly, take your notes, keep your nose clean and get out of there. Which isn't the way to greatness.
Oftentimes it seems like there's nothing you can really do about this, but I'm not satisfied with that answer. There is something you can do about this, there has to be, and first you have to start with trying to understand why class clowns and bullies and dropouts to be act the way they do.
I believe that all behavior can be understood. With the exception of people who have serious cognitive disorders I think there is reason why people do the things they do and if you look hard enough you should be able to figure it out. Why is it that some students don’t do their homework, don’t care about their grades, and in general do far more to disrupt the learning environment than to contribute to it? There are many factors, of course, but I think it all boils down to this: they don’t consider themselves the type of person who is a good student. In every class there are some kids who will succeed regardless of the task placed in front of them.. Regardless of the teacher, regardless of their classmates, regardless of all external factors they will turn in their homework on time, perform on tests, and be generally positive forces in the classroom. Why? Because, consciously or not, they base their identity upon it. When I was in school, especially high school, my identity was probably too powerfully linked to my image as a good student; the thought of not doing homework or performing poorly on a test or paper would make me sick because it was not who I was. I considered myself a perfect student and getting less than a perfect grade would have been an assault to my identity. As a result, I did the things necessary to get the grades I considered acceptable.
Where did that identity come from? By the time I was 15 it was firmly in place and nobody had to tell me that I had to do my homework because I was incapable of doing anything else, but why? That sense of self had to come from somewhere. I guess there are a lot of places such a thing could come from, but in my case it was pretty simple. From as long as I can remember my mom wouldn’t accept anything less than the highest results. At first I was motivated almost assuredly (at least partially) out of fear that my mom would yell at me if I got less than the best, but what I didn’t realize was going was that my little mind was being programed to believe that it was capable of the best. For that I can only be eternally grateful because that pressure, that expectation to perform at the highest level was slowly ingrained into me until it became natural and unquestionable. While I could come up with some counter examples (once I got into college my expectations and standards dropped some, I didn’t believe myself capable of science so those grades weren’t so good, etc) for the most part, least as far as school and studying was concerned I never went into any endeavor expecting or even accepting less than the best.
The problem for me now is expanding those expectations to all aspects of my life, a process which is fully in process.
But how about those kids don’t give a shit about school? It’s likely that they either a) were never really pushed to think that school was important, or b) were never really told that they were capable of exceeding at it. What’s going to result in that? A kid who either sees no value in the stuff presented in school (and therefore only hassle and pain), or a kid who doesn’t think he or she is smart enough to get anything out of the stuff presented in school. Either way, that student is not going to view him or herself as an “A student” and so, or course, will not exhibit any “A student” behavior. None of this stuff is relevant to my everyday life, why should I care about it? I can’t do it anyway, so what’s the point of frustrating myself and making myself feel stupid and worthless by trying? My parents and friends don’t care anyways so why put in the effort for no reward? These are the kinds of excuses for not studying that teachers hear on a daily basis, and while they are frustrating, in order to move past them I think it is vital to realize that they are also very defensible and rational from such a student`s perspective. If in fact those are the beliefs towards school that a kid brings into the classroom, you will have no success getting him or her to learn unless you FIRST CHANGE THOSE BELIEFS. It’s that simple. You can keep kids after school and punish them for not working and yell at them all you want but if none of these things change the way the kid thinks about school (and in fact it seems like few of these methods ever do) then you won’t get the results you want. You might get the kid to turn in his homework, though it’s likely to either have been copied from a friend or done sloppily, neither of which is a good way to get to actual understanding, or you might just make a kid hate school more, reinforcing her image of it as a place of tormentors and bullies to be rebelled against at all cost. I think for a lot of kids school seems like just such a place, but it’s not because teachers like to be mean to kids. They’re not being mean and in the vast majority of circumstances they have no malicious intent; the reason they are harsh is because they think that is the best way to make their students better. Don’t get more wrong, I’m not saying that there is never a time for a harsh word; sometimes there most certainly is. However, and from working at a school for a few years I am convinced that all of the teachers at my school believe this, a teacher’s job is to get the most they can out of their students, to help them see their weaknesses and get past them, to be a bigger and better person when they leave the school then they were when they came in. It’s that simple. Sometimes, though, the prescribed method for changing a student is far from the most effective one. All teachers want to help.
Kids have to know that school is a place for them to grow, not a place for them to be yelled at by an annoying adult. Sometimes it turns into a place to be yelled at by an annoying adult, however, and once you get into that frame learning sort of stops and resistance takes over.
One last thought. Everybody is pretty much looking for how they can get the least pain and the most pleasure out of any given environment they are in. Humans are complicated but I think it’s a highly defensible claim that all human behavior stems from this dynamic. Why then, do some kids play dumb in class, or in some cases even take pride out of being dumb? In some classes I go to it’s a recurring theme that some kids will puff up over getting single digits on their test scores, or in not understanding vocabulary words, or in making the topic and the teacher presenting it seem weird and/or stupid. Why? First off, think about what they get out of that. Mocking the subject matter or the teacher, feigning stupidity. In some ways, not being emotionally affected by things makes someone seem cool. If a kid doesn’t know the answer to a question and breaks down and cries because of that he’s not going to be labeled as a cool kid for obvious reasons. However, if he doesn’t know and clearly doesn’t give a shit that can be seen as kind of cool because it conveys the image that he is above English or above the teacher’s demands. A free spirit. A freedom fighter standing up to the Man. He (this character is usually a he) also gets laugh. His peers think he’s funny, and in the short run he gets a lot of value out of refusing to study. If, on the other hand, he tries seriously to study, because he’s not smart, he goes from being the funny rebel to being just a failure. If you’re that kid and you don’t think you have a chance in hell to actually be successful, which option are you going to choose?
If your options are to evaluate your sense of self by standards that will make you small, or by standards that will validate you, most people are going to go with the latter. Of course, in the long run choosing ignorance is the worst choice you could ever make; however, the problem is getting kids (and people in general, myself included) to think in the long run.
There's different ways to be a great teacher, but lately I've been thinking about what to do with the kids who just don't really give a shit. In every class there are a few kids who are all-stars, a lot of kids who are doing alright, a handful of kids who are floundering a little, and then a few kids who either have no chance or prefer to be a wrecking ball. As a teacher, those last one's are the most frustrating because they are not only bringing themselves down but it seems like they're on a mission to tear down the whole production. All people are pretty much consistently engaged in ranking themselves (unconsciously, most often) upon various social totem-poles, but no humans are more attune than middle school aged kids, and so if the big dogs on the top of the pole are out there ready to take a bite of your hide if you step up then you're far more likely to sit quietly, take your notes, keep your nose clean and get out of there. Which isn't the way to greatness.
Oftentimes it seems like there's nothing you can really do about this, but I'm not satisfied with that answer. There is something you can do about this, there has to be, and first you have to start with trying to understand why class clowns and bullies and dropouts to be act the way they do.
I believe that all behavior can be understood. With the exception of people who have serious cognitive disorders I think there is reason why people do the things they do and if you look hard enough you should be able to figure it out. Why is it that some students don’t do their homework, don’t care about their grades, and in general do far more to disrupt the learning environment than to contribute to it? There are many factors, of course, but I think it all boils down to this: they don’t consider themselves the type of person who is a good student. In every class there are some kids who will succeed regardless of the task placed in front of them.. Regardless of the teacher, regardless of their classmates, regardless of all external factors they will turn in their homework on time, perform on tests, and be generally positive forces in the classroom. Why? Because, consciously or not, they base their identity upon it. When I was in school, especially high school, my identity was probably too powerfully linked to my image as a good student; the thought of not doing homework or performing poorly on a test or paper would make me sick because it was not who I was. I considered myself a perfect student and getting less than a perfect grade would have been an assault to my identity. As a result, I did the things necessary to get the grades I considered acceptable.
Where did that identity come from? By the time I was 15 it was firmly in place and nobody had to tell me that I had to do my homework because I was incapable of doing anything else, but why? That sense of self had to come from somewhere. I guess there are a lot of places such a thing could come from, but in my case it was pretty simple. From as long as I can remember my mom wouldn’t accept anything less than the highest results. At first I was motivated almost assuredly (at least partially) out of fear that my mom would yell at me if I got less than the best, but what I didn’t realize was going was that my little mind was being programed to believe that it was capable of the best. For that I can only be eternally grateful because that pressure, that expectation to perform at the highest level was slowly ingrained into me until it became natural and unquestionable. While I could come up with some counter examples (once I got into college my expectations and standards dropped some, I didn’t believe myself capable of science so those grades weren’t so good, etc) for the most part, least as far as school and studying was concerned I never went into any endeavor expecting or even accepting less than the best.
The problem for me now is expanding those expectations to all aspects of my life, a process which is fully in process.
But how about those kids don’t give a shit about school? It’s likely that they either a) were never really pushed to think that school was important, or b) were never really told that they were capable of exceeding at it. What’s going to result in that? A kid who either sees no value in the stuff presented in school (and therefore only hassle and pain), or a kid who doesn’t think he or she is smart enough to get anything out of the stuff presented in school. Either way, that student is not going to view him or herself as an “A student” and so, or course, will not exhibit any “A student” behavior. None of this stuff is relevant to my everyday life, why should I care about it? I can’t do it anyway, so what’s the point of frustrating myself and making myself feel stupid and worthless by trying? My parents and friends don’t care anyways so why put in the effort for no reward? These are the kinds of excuses for not studying that teachers hear on a daily basis, and while they are frustrating, in order to move past them I think it is vital to realize that they are also very defensible and rational from such a student`s perspective. If in fact those are the beliefs towards school that a kid brings into the classroom, you will have no success getting him or her to learn unless you FIRST CHANGE THOSE BELIEFS. It’s that simple. You can keep kids after school and punish them for not working and yell at them all you want but if none of these things change the way the kid thinks about school (and in fact it seems like few of these methods ever do) then you won’t get the results you want. You might get the kid to turn in his homework, though it’s likely to either have been copied from a friend or done sloppily, neither of which is a good way to get to actual understanding, or you might just make a kid hate school more, reinforcing her image of it as a place of tormentors and bullies to be rebelled against at all cost. I think for a lot of kids school seems like just such a place, but it’s not because teachers like to be mean to kids. They’re not being mean and in the vast majority of circumstances they have no malicious intent; the reason they are harsh is because they think that is the best way to make their students better. Don’t get more wrong, I’m not saying that there is never a time for a harsh word; sometimes there most certainly is. However, and from working at a school for a few years I am convinced that all of the teachers at my school believe this, a teacher’s job is to get the most they can out of their students, to help them see their weaknesses and get past them, to be a bigger and better person when they leave the school then they were when they came in. It’s that simple. Sometimes, though, the prescribed method for changing a student is far from the most effective one. All teachers want to help.
Kids have to know that school is a place for them to grow, not a place for them to be yelled at by an annoying adult. Sometimes it turns into a place to be yelled at by an annoying adult, however, and once you get into that frame learning sort of stops and resistance takes over.
One last thought. Everybody is pretty much looking for how they can get the least pain and the most pleasure out of any given environment they are in. Humans are complicated but I think it’s a highly defensible claim that all human behavior stems from this dynamic. Why then, do some kids play dumb in class, or in some cases even take pride out of being dumb? In some classes I go to it’s a recurring theme that some kids will puff up over getting single digits on their test scores, or in not understanding vocabulary words, or in making the topic and the teacher presenting it seem weird and/or stupid. Why? First off, think about what they get out of that. Mocking the subject matter or the teacher, feigning stupidity. In some ways, not being emotionally affected by things makes someone seem cool. If a kid doesn’t know the answer to a question and breaks down and cries because of that he’s not going to be labeled as a cool kid for obvious reasons. However, if he doesn’t know and clearly doesn’t give a shit that can be seen as kind of cool because it conveys the image that he is above English or above the teacher’s demands. A free spirit. A freedom fighter standing up to the Man. He (this character is usually a he) also gets laugh. His peers think he’s funny, and in the short run he gets a lot of value out of refusing to study. If, on the other hand, he tries seriously to study, because he’s not smart, he goes from being the funny rebel to being just a failure. If you’re that kid and you don’t think you have a chance in hell to actually be successful, which option are you going to choose?
If your options are to evaluate your sense of self by standards that will make you small, or by standards that will validate you, most people are going to go with the latter. Of course, in the long run choosing ignorance is the worst choice you could ever make; however, the problem is getting kids (and people in general, myself included) to think in the long run.
Bringing Down the House
The Whitman Experience. How many pages could I write about the Whitman Experience. Going to Whitman College was and continues to be an extraordinary learning experience for me, but not, perhaps, as you might find it described in the pages of a visitor’s pamphlet. I have learned and grown as much, in fact vastly more, moving beyond Whitman than I ever did working within Whitman, but for that very reason it has become an incredibly valuable reference point in my life. It’s a complicated thing, and by no means do I wish to throw mud on the college because my time there was amazing and many of the TOOLS I acquired there have proven invaluable in carrying me to this point in my life and will continue to carry me forward ever forward into the future; however, many of the VIEWS I picked up at Whitman were less than empowering, and far from serving as the bastions and pillars of a dynamic and prosperous worldview were in fact roadblocks to the development of any such thing.
‘Tis a complicated web composed of many threads. Let me first start by saying that in no way is Whitman at fault for the shortcomings I took away from it; the fault rests solely with me. The way I interacted with certain aspects of the small liberal arts college environment brought out not the worst in me but but certainly weaknesses and warped them in such a way that I perceived them as strengths. Warped them in such a way that I perceived them as strengths, let me repeat that one more time because it is very important. My perception of the Whitman experience amplified my weaknesses and made me think of them as strengths.
Whitman is something you take with you and move beyond.
Whitman is small. Whitman is insular. Whitman is about being as smart as you can, as critical as you can, as insightful and academic as you can. At least that’s how I saw it. They say that Whitman is a bubble and it is. They say that Whitman is a fantasy land and it is. They say that Whitman and the Real World have little more than a tangential relationship and if they do then you have to remember that what seems to be true is only true on a single solitary point on the endlessly streaking line that is larger life.
Allow me to explicate.
Or forgive me for failing to, whichever the case may be.
How about I spell it out straight. I began to judge value based purely on perceived level of academia. So-called stupid people I shunned, anything that I could understand was too simple and therefore slightly contemptuous, all pop-culture was shallow and meaningless, all big business (perhaps even all business in general) was trying to sell me my soul pinned to a price tag, people with money into money who thought about money were also shallow and meaningless, people who used anything but the most esoteric of writing styles were below me, Republicans were shallow and meaningless, people who believed in things were trying too hard because, well, to put it simply, I knew everything and in the end everything boiled down to being pretty much shallow and meaningless.
Is this the natural outcome of the liberal arts education? No, but it’s where I left it, with a sharp brain that was focused with laser precision on the holes, the cracks, the flaws, the problems with things, and furthermore, with inventing the ways in which those holes cracks flaws and problems rendered the remaining whole unfit for much but the discard pile. I had a discard pile miles high and not much left that I could call a treasure.
This, luckily, is who I used to be, because Whitman is something I used to get past myself.
Whitman took those elements of my personality that I brought with me to Anderson Hall in 2004, insecurity, uncertainty, negativity, fear, and turned up the volume on them. That’s not to say that I brought only negative things with me to Whitman, or that during my time there only the negative parts of my personality grew; I’ve got plenty of good points that received a similar boost. However too many key pieces of my reality were put together of negative components and the truth is I DIDN’T EVEN REALIZE IT. I thought I was just being real. All of the aforementioned thought patterns seemed to me inevitable objective conclusions to be drawn from the things I was studying. That’s the way the world actually was and a faint sense of futility was the only thing you could logically or perhaps even responsibly take from it all.
Those were my conclusions, but it turns out that they were neither impartial nor by any means inevitable. I learned a lot at Whitman, but I never really learned about the weaknesses that riddled the foundation of my being. If you don't fight those kind of things face to face they’re never going to go away; in fact, they are far more likely to just pilot you from the shadows. I got a lot of good things from Whitman. I got a lot of great friends, I got a lot of great experiences, I learned how to begin to think, I grew a lot, I challenged myself a lot, I had a lot of fun, I got a lot of dicking around out of my system; however, my failure to really address my own limitations kept all of those things from being as meaningful as they could have been.
And yet, paradoxically, because an inability to really get down to business at the time has led me to the greater understanding I have of my own fallicies today, everything about those four years, everything good and bad satisfactory unsatisfactory fulfilling unfulfilling easy challenging happy or sad can only be viewed as vital contributions to an incredibly positive experience. There are no bad experiences because anything that didn’t go as you planned is only great feedback for getting it right the next time. Or the next time, or the next time. Or maybe the next time. Doesn’t matter as long as you’re moving in the right direction.
‘Tis a complicated web composed of many threads. Let me first start by saying that in no way is Whitman at fault for the shortcomings I took away from it; the fault rests solely with me. The way I interacted with certain aspects of the small liberal arts college environment brought out not the worst in me but but certainly weaknesses and warped them in such a way that I perceived them as strengths. Warped them in such a way that I perceived them as strengths, let me repeat that one more time because it is very important. My perception of the Whitman experience amplified my weaknesses and made me think of them as strengths.
Whitman is something you take with you and move beyond.
Whitman is small. Whitman is insular. Whitman is about being as smart as you can, as critical as you can, as insightful and academic as you can. At least that’s how I saw it. They say that Whitman is a bubble and it is. They say that Whitman is a fantasy land and it is. They say that Whitman and the Real World have little more than a tangential relationship and if they do then you have to remember that what seems to be true is only true on a single solitary point on the endlessly streaking line that is larger life.
Allow me to explicate.
Or forgive me for failing to, whichever the case may be.
How about I spell it out straight. I began to judge value based purely on perceived level of academia. So-called stupid people I shunned, anything that I could understand was too simple and therefore slightly contemptuous, all pop-culture was shallow and meaningless, all big business (perhaps even all business in general) was trying to sell me my soul pinned to a price tag, people with money into money who thought about money were also shallow and meaningless, people who used anything but the most esoteric of writing styles were below me, Republicans were shallow and meaningless, people who believed in things were trying too hard because, well, to put it simply, I knew everything and in the end everything boiled down to being pretty much shallow and meaningless.
Is this the natural outcome of the liberal arts education? No, but it’s where I left it, with a sharp brain that was focused with laser precision on the holes, the cracks, the flaws, the problems with things, and furthermore, with inventing the ways in which those holes cracks flaws and problems rendered the remaining whole unfit for much but the discard pile. I had a discard pile miles high and not much left that I could call a treasure.
This, luckily, is who I used to be, because Whitman is something I used to get past myself.
Whitman took those elements of my personality that I brought with me to Anderson Hall in 2004, insecurity, uncertainty, negativity, fear, and turned up the volume on them. That’s not to say that I brought only negative things with me to Whitman, or that during my time there only the negative parts of my personality grew; I’ve got plenty of good points that received a similar boost. However too many key pieces of my reality were put together of negative components and the truth is I DIDN’T EVEN REALIZE IT. I thought I was just being real. All of the aforementioned thought patterns seemed to me inevitable objective conclusions to be drawn from the things I was studying. That’s the way the world actually was and a faint sense of futility was the only thing you could logically or perhaps even responsibly take from it all.
Those were my conclusions, but it turns out that they were neither impartial nor by any means inevitable. I learned a lot at Whitman, but I never really learned about the weaknesses that riddled the foundation of my being. If you don't fight those kind of things face to face they’re never going to go away; in fact, they are far more likely to just pilot you from the shadows. I got a lot of good things from Whitman. I got a lot of great friends, I got a lot of great experiences, I learned how to begin to think, I grew a lot, I challenged myself a lot, I had a lot of fun, I got a lot of dicking around out of my system; however, my failure to really address my own limitations kept all of those things from being as meaningful as they could have been.
And yet, paradoxically, because an inability to really get down to business at the time has led me to the greater understanding I have of my own fallicies today, everything about those four years, everything good and bad satisfactory unsatisfactory fulfilling unfulfilling easy challenging happy or sad can only be viewed as vital contributions to an incredibly positive experience. There are no bad experiences because anything that didn’t go as you planned is only great feedback for getting it right the next time. Or the next time, or the next time. Or maybe the next time. Doesn’t matter as long as you’re moving in the right direction.
Saturday, February 19, 2011
Ruby Red White Gold
Let's run with the metaphor from last time because it's high time to brush aside the dust covering up the things in my life that should be giving off the most light.
When I was contemplating the events that had the biggest impact on my life my relationship with Japan popped into my head immediately, as one might expect. It's difficult to imagine where I would be had I never gotten into Japan, both geographically and emotionally. Japan is an amazing place and has been an incredible source of personal growth for me. Even as I write that sentence, however, I sense a familiar flicker of uncertainty in the corner of my mind's eye and I know that it's time I finally confront the vampire that's lurking there.
Sometimes we think we've grown up and outgrown things only to realize that if we don't confront them head-on they only give the impression of having disappeared and instead persist on the periphery, potent as ever, perhaps even more so. I don't really believe in Satan, but that does nothing to the fact that the greatest trick the devil ever performed was convincing the world he doesn't exist.
When you're a nerdy kid and you spend a few formative years of social ineptitude as a result of it, after you pull out of that nosedive and start making friends you find that you'll do almost whatever it takes to keep that old label from reattaching itself to you. It's all in your head, but when I was a middle school student coming out of homeschooling and was super socially incompetent I was also a huge nerd. Homeschooling was the best thing that ever happened to me in some ways, but amongst other things it also left me with a lot of free time that I dedicated almost solely to the delights of various fantasy lands. When you're a twelve year old kid with very minimal human contact and almost none with kids your own age on a day to day basis you'll do whatever you can to find something to immerse yourself in and for me it was Star Wars, Role Playing Video Games, fantasy novels with dragons and wizards, and a wide host of the usual nerd paraphenalia. For two years that was pretty much all that went in, and so that's what I was into as a little guy, which, I want to mention is totally fine, great, cool, no big deal, fundamentally irrelevant to anything and everything, but when I went back into school, man was I terrible at all forms of interaction. Why? Because I liked Star Wars? No, I just didn't know how to interact with people. All I knew was Star Wars. So, I'd talk about goblins or something in a not-cool I just spent two years with my mom kind of way, get weird look, feels shitty, and link that shittiness to NERDINESS, not to what it actually was which is merely an inevitable lack of social ability.
Fast-forward to when I got older, got more experience, got at socially tolerable, got kind of cool. Did I want to give that up and go back to being that hopeless little guy again? No I did not. What was it that made me that hopeless little guy? Being a nerd. Did I want to be looked at as a nerd? No I did not. As a result did I stop liking nerdy stuff? No I most certainly did not. I still loved video games, I spent the majority of two summer vacations doing nothing but read the Wheel of Time, I memorized the entire three hours of the Fellowship of the Ring. THREE FUCKING HOURS! I could do every line. I was a nerd. Which is totally cool, but I still linked nerdiness to uncoolness so what happened to my nerdy pleasures? They becames sins. They became secret things that I wouldn't admit freely to people, or things that I felt shame about if I did admit them. If somebody made fun of the nerdy things I liked, maybe I didn't show it but inside I took a blow. I took a blow.
In addition to loving video games and Jar Jar Binks I also happened to love Japan, and oh boy was that ever an exercise in cognitive dissonance because if you were to ask the average American to draw a circle around the nerdiest region of the Earth it would go around Asia, and then if you gave them a push-pin and asked for the epicenter they would probably plop it right down on Tokyo. Just as like will gravitate to like, nerd will find nerdtopia.
So what did I do? I drew distinctions between the people who liked Japan for it's cultural heritage (temples, tea ceremony, art, re: cool) and people who liked Japan for it's anime and manga (nerd; uncool). I went for years like this, and even as I got more interested in Japan, went there, enjoyed the culture, the people, et. al, there was still a significant section of my brain that refused to legitimize my interest in Japan. It developed further into a guilty pleasure to the point where I felt like I couldn't really take anything of value from Japan into my everyday life because it was somehow too tainted by the quote-un-quote nerdy aspects of its culture.
So I write above that coming to Japan was one of the most influential events in my life. And it has been. I've grown in so many ways since I've been here and learned so many things about myself, people, life, evolution, guitar scales, the one-handed backhand, throwing a bowling ball, how to handle kids and people and far beyond that, but even up until today there was a little niggling in my head, a little unspoken niggling in my head that because I learned all that in Japan it somehow.... doesn't apply. I don't know why, but I do know that it's time that I recognized that out-dated remnant of my insecure past for what it is; an out-dated remnant of my insecure past. I like anime. I dedicated at least 6 months of my life to One Piece and maintain that it's one of the unqualified best things I've ever seen. Manga is good. People read it, they aren't all hopelessly awkward. Japan is a real country like any other, with real people doing real things. It's not an alternate reality, it's my second home and the things I've learned here are every bit as valuable as they would have been had I learned them on the streets of New York.
When I was contemplating the events that had the biggest impact on my life my relationship with Japan popped into my head immediately, as one might expect. It's difficult to imagine where I would be had I never gotten into Japan, both geographically and emotionally. Japan is an amazing place and has been an incredible source of personal growth for me. Even as I write that sentence, however, I sense a familiar flicker of uncertainty in the corner of my mind's eye and I know that it's time I finally confront the vampire that's lurking there.
Sometimes we think we've grown up and outgrown things only to realize that if we don't confront them head-on they only give the impression of having disappeared and instead persist on the periphery, potent as ever, perhaps even more so. I don't really believe in Satan, but that does nothing to the fact that the greatest trick the devil ever performed was convincing the world he doesn't exist.
When you're a nerdy kid and you spend a few formative years of social ineptitude as a result of it, after you pull out of that nosedive and start making friends you find that you'll do almost whatever it takes to keep that old label from reattaching itself to you. It's all in your head, but when I was a middle school student coming out of homeschooling and was super socially incompetent I was also a huge nerd. Homeschooling was the best thing that ever happened to me in some ways, but amongst other things it also left me with a lot of free time that I dedicated almost solely to the delights of various fantasy lands. When you're a twelve year old kid with very minimal human contact and almost none with kids your own age on a day to day basis you'll do whatever you can to find something to immerse yourself in and for me it was Star Wars, Role Playing Video Games, fantasy novels with dragons and wizards, and a wide host of the usual nerd paraphenalia. For two years that was pretty much all that went in, and so that's what I was into as a little guy, which, I want to mention is totally fine, great, cool, no big deal, fundamentally irrelevant to anything and everything, but when I went back into school, man was I terrible at all forms of interaction. Why? Because I liked Star Wars? No, I just didn't know how to interact with people. All I knew was Star Wars. So, I'd talk about goblins or something in a not-cool I just spent two years with my mom kind of way, get weird look, feels shitty, and link that shittiness to NERDINESS, not to what it actually was which is merely an inevitable lack of social ability.
Fast-forward to when I got older, got more experience, got at socially tolerable, got kind of cool. Did I want to give that up and go back to being that hopeless little guy again? No I did not. What was it that made me that hopeless little guy? Being a nerd. Did I want to be looked at as a nerd? No I did not. As a result did I stop liking nerdy stuff? No I most certainly did not. I still loved video games, I spent the majority of two summer vacations doing nothing but read the Wheel of Time, I memorized the entire three hours of the Fellowship of the Ring. THREE FUCKING HOURS! I could do every line. I was a nerd. Which is totally cool, but I still linked nerdiness to uncoolness so what happened to my nerdy pleasures? They becames sins. They became secret things that I wouldn't admit freely to people, or things that I felt shame about if I did admit them. If somebody made fun of the nerdy things I liked, maybe I didn't show it but inside I took a blow. I took a blow.
In addition to loving video games and Jar Jar Binks I also happened to love Japan, and oh boy was that ever an exercise in cognitive dissonance because if you were to ask the average American to draw a circle around the nerdiest region of the Earth it would go around Asia, and then if you gave them a push-pin and asked for the epicenter they would probably plop it right down on Tokyo. Just as like will gravitate to like, nerd will find nerdtopia.
So what did I do? I drew distinctions between the people who liked Japan for it's cultural heritage (temples, tea ceremony, art, re: cool) and people who liked Japan for it's anime and manga (nerd; uncool). I went for years like this, and even as I got more interested in Japan, went there, enjoyed the culture, the people, et. al, there was still a significant section of my brain that refused to legitimize my interest in Japan. It developed further into a guilty pleasure to the point where I felt like I couldn't really take anything of value from Japan into my everyday life because it was somehow too tainted by the quote-un-quote nerdy aspects of its culture.
So I write above that coming to Japan was one of the most influential events in my life. And it has been. I've grown in so many ways since I've been here and learned so many things about myself, people, life, evolution, guitar scales, the one-handed backhand, throwing a bowling ball, how to handle kids and people and far beyond that, but even up until today there was a little niggling in my head, a little unspoken niggling in my head that because I learned all that in Japan it somehow.... doesn't apply. I don't know why, but I do know that it's time that I recognized that out-dated remnant of my insecure past for what it is; an out-dated remnant of my insecure past. I like anime. I dedicated at least 6 months of my life to One Piece and maintain that it's one of the unqualified best things I've ever seen. Manga is good. People read it, they aren't all hopelessly awkward. Japan is a real country like any other, with real people doing real things. It's not an alternate reality, it's my second home and the things I've learned here are every bit as valuable as they would have been had I learned them on the streets of New York.
Get Out Your Scrap Metal
If you ever want to read a book that will change your life I can recommend one. It's called Awaken the Giant Within, by Tony Robbins, it's unabashed self-help, and it is the single most influential book I have ever read. I highly recommend it to anyone and everyone, because if you read it with an open-mind and make a genuine effort to think it through the rewards could be boundless.
Get out your scrap metal and bring it on down to the foundry because it's time to make some amazing shit out of it. I don't know about everybody else but I know I have carried around the stuff of my life in a dirty sack, unrefined, unappreciated, largely unacknowledged but undeniably heavy and undoubtedly an unnecessary burden. We've all lived for however long we've lived and everyday we've picked up stuff along the way, sights sounds tastes smells successes failures moments of pride moments of shame moments that seemed like nothing at all and in truth most of it goes in the sack. Some of it, however, goes on a shelf and we look at it all the time. We look at it all the time, and the thing is, it's not all treasure that we often end up displaying. Of all that raw material we spend everyday knowingly or unknowingly collecting the stuff we look at isn't always the stuff that looking at would make us feel good. I don't know about you, but for far too long I've littered the shelves of my consciousness with symbols of defeat, of inferiority, of hopelessness and helplessness, all the while thinking I was doing myself and the universe a justice. That to see the world as it is is the only way to live, and that an uphill trudge through dross was the world as it is.
To see the world for what it is is in fact the only way to live; thing is, what I thought was reality couldn't have been more distorted.
Let's get back to the sack for a minute though. The matter of the mundane, the scattered scraps of the everyday, little bits and pieces of getting from here to there and back again unscathed went in as junk, not necessarily as things bad but certainly as things unusable. Truth is, though, that there's no such thing and diamonds in the rough are everywhere you look. This is the Foundry, this is the place where we take your tired, your weak, your hungry, your poor, your dented, your flawed, your scratched and beat up and remake them. This is the home of the Alchemist, where we take your lead and transform it into gold because while it's beyond us at the moment to realistically rearrange molecular structures words my friends bend to our wills and the gold that blooms in your brain is worth far more than any hunk of metal.
Turn to your sacks, take out the trash within and transform it into the treasure it could be. Turn to your shelves and let not the wicked idols enshrined there any longer have any power of you. Realize that they, too, perhaps they especially, the remains of failures of embarrassments of shames of guilts of insufficiences long past are in fact objects of the highest power shrouded only in cursed clothes cast like shadows from you own mind. Clear the shadows away and see what's been hidden within all these years.
Get out your scrap metal and bring it on down to the foundry because it's time to make some amazing shit out of it. I don't know about everybody else but I know I have carried around the stuff of my life in a dirty sack, unrefined, unappreciated, largely unacknowledged but undeniably heavy and undoubtedly an unnecessary burden. We've all lived for however long we've lived and everyday we've picked up stuff along the way, sights sounds tastes smells successes failures moments of pride moments of shame moments that seemed like nothing at all and in truth most of it goes in the sack. Some of it, however, goes on a shelf and we look at it all the time. We look at it all the time, and the thing is, it's not all treasure that we often end up displaying. Of all that raw material we spend everyday knowingly or unknowingly collecting the stuff we look at isn't always the stuff that looking at would make us feel good. I don't know about you, but for far too long I've littered the shelves of my consciousness with symbols of defeat, of inferiority, of hopelessness and helplessness, all the while thinking I was doing myself and the universe a justice. That to see the world as it is is the only way to live, and that an uphill trudge through dross was the world as it is.
To see the world for what it is is in fact the only way to live; thing is, what I thought was reality couldn't have been more distorted.
Let's get back to the sack for a minute though. The matter of the mundane, the scattered scraps of the everyday, little bits and pieces of getting from here to there and back again unscathed went in as junk, not necessarily as things bad but certainly as things unusable. Truth is, though, that there's no such thing and diamonds in the rough are everywhere you look. This is the Foundry, this is the place where we take your tired, your weak, your hungry, your poor, your dented, your flawed, your scratched and beat up and remake them. This is the home of the Alchemist, where we take your lead and transform it into gold because while it's beyond us at the moment to realistically rearrange molecular structures words my friends bend to our wills and the gold that blooms in your brain is worth far more than any hunk of metal.
Turn to your sacks, take out the trash within and transform it into the treasure it could be. Turn to your shelves and let not the wicked idols enshrined there any longer have any power of you. Realize that they, too, perhaps they especially, the remains of failures of embarrassments of shames of guilts of insufficiences long past are in fact objects of the highest power shrouded only in cursed clothes cast like shadows from you own mind. Clear the shadows away and see what's been hidden within all these years.
Friday, January 14, 2011
A Wave of Reason ... with a splash of irrationality
This is the soundtrack for my life these days: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PT90dAA49Q&NR=1. Watch it. That's all I can say about it. It will change your life if you let it. I mean, it will work in concert with a bunch of other things to produce an actual change in your life if you are willing to put in the necessary commitment. That's actually my favorite thing about my current life in Japan. I love my job. I love my students and I love the growing and blossoming daily interactions that I am able to have with them. I love my friends, I love bowling, I love playing tennis on Thursday evenings. I love onsens. I love a bunch of stuff about life right now, but more than anything I love the opportunity that Japan has provided me to re-write myself as I would like to see myself re-written.
What exactly does that mean? When you find yourself in a place you've always known, it is very easy, extraordinarily easy, to surrender to what you've always been; however, when you find yourself in a place that's almost entirely new, then you notice that the cords that bind you to your past suddenly have acquired a new sense of slack. In that wiggle-room between who you think you are and who you think you can be there is plenty of space to make moves that need making.
And yet that's neither here, nor there, even as it just so happens to be everywhere. For a long time I've been looking for something. I remember sitting in Dick Mastellar's office, trying to discuss a Hemingway novel with him. He wanted me to look at just how artfully Hemingway had constructed a world or despair and defeat, and I wanted my reading material to provide me with a world of hope and victory, regardless of how crudely it happened to be rendered. I'm sure he was very frustrated with me, because anyone who has actually studied English Literature knows that such a world is really nowhere to be found.
Which doesn't mean that such a world doesn't exist.
For the longest time I thought I wanted to be a writer. Then I gave it up. Now the sinusoidal phases of the universe are on the upswing and I wonder again if I don't have something worth writing locked up in this brain of mine. In truth, it's beyond wondering, because I think I may have found that thing I was looking for and slowly in the deep, milky recesses of my brain coalesces a something that is not the icy shore of a lake in war-torn Europe. I'm not entirely sure what it is yet, but it might just be a bottle and it might just bear flame.
What exactly does that mean? When you find yourself in a place you've always known, it is very easy, extraordinarily easy, to surrender to what you've always been; however, when you find yourself in a place that's almost entirely new, then you notice that the cords that bind you to your past suddenly have acquired a new sense of slack. In that wiggle-room between who you think you are and who you think you can be there is plenty of space to make moves that need making.
And yet that's neither here, nor there, even as it just so happens to be everywhere. For a long time I've been looking for something. I remember sitting in Dick Mastellar's office, trying to discuss a Hemingway novel with him. He wanted me to look at just how artfully Hemingway had constructed a world or despair and defeat, and I wanted my reading material to provide me with a world of hope and victory, regardless of how crudely it happened to be rendered. I'm sure he was very frustrated with me, because anyone who has actually studied English Literature knows that such a world is really nowhere to be found.
Which doesn't mean that such a world doesn't exist.
For the longest time I thought I wanted to be a writer. Then I gave it up. Now the sinusoidal phases of the universe are on the upswing and I wonder again if I don't have something worth writing locked up in this brain of mine. In truth, it's beyond wondering, because I think I may have found that thing I was looking for and slowly in the deep, milky recesses of my brain coalesces a something that is not the icy shore of a lake in war-torn Europe. I'm not entirely sure what it is yet, but it might just be a bottle and it might just bear flame.
Friday, January 7, 2011
A Wordsmith is Reborn
It's a new year which strikes me as a convenient time to make this a new blog. No mission statements but I've rediscovered something I lost and I feel the need to wave it across the sky like a flag of flame because if that's what I want it to be then that's what it is.
If that's what I want it to be then that's what it is. Background? Just what you need. In high school I had a really great teacher, maybe my favorite ever, and on his wall he had a quote from some old dude which essentially made the claim that in poetry there was beauty, and in science there was death. This was something I identified with for a long time. Words, my friends, are the substance of life, the primary means of transmission of love of strength of courage of fear of hope of dreams of death of despair of the whole far-flung spectrum of the human experience whereas science, science is numbers on a black-board. My whole being boils down to some random gravitational constant, you say? I am nothing but polypeptide bonds nd nucleotides scribbled on cell walls, is it? POPPYCOCK!! Give me the Word and I will write you a Hero. Give me nucleotides and I will flush them down the toilet.
I have come a long way since then. Words would be tough without nucleotides, for one, and there is a vast and iridescent gallery of worlds which you cannot access with words alone. It turns out that the poem is not the final authority on what is, and Science is far from the outstretched sterile arm of death. We are products of a natural world that is far more than human, yet armed with Science we can be more than what we always have been and diligently chart our location in a universe that expands far beyond the limits of the mind. It is, of course, with the mind that we comprehend the universe, but only if it is turned out into it.
But where does that leave words? For a while in the dust. For a while in the dust, but in my quest to figure out what exactly it is we are and what exactly it is this is they have risen again like an endless spectral host, shimmering in the sunlight and shapeless against the stars motionless yet poised to move at... a word. Science has taught me that reality is fixed, that it moves according to patterns, rules, laws of nature, and IT DOES! It does those things and moves as it does, IT'S REAL! But reality is also a great and barely bound swirl of potentiality waiting for a wordsmith to come along and command it to move. Nature has laid the groundwork and the backdrop over billions of years of slow, measured churning, combining and recombining, trial, error, the slow, gradual accretion of complexity where it is warranted, and it continues to. It will continue to somewhere perhaps endlessly into the farthest reaches of time. But here, in this moment, in my very human life, WORDS CONSTRUCT REALITY and what I say goes if I say it loudly enough. Remember that for that is now what this blog is about.
If that's what I want it to be then that's what it is. Background? Just what you need. In high school I had a really great teacher, maybe my favorite ever, and on his wall he had a quote from some old dude which essentially made the claim that in poetry there was beauty, and in science there was death. This was something I identified with for a long time. Words, my friends, are the substance of life, the primary means of transmission of love of strength of courage of fear of hope of dreams of death of despair of the whole far-flung spectrum of the human experience whereas science, science is numbers on a black-board. My whole being boils down to some random gravitational constant, you say? I am nothing but polypeptide bonds nd nucleotides scribbled on cell walls, is it? POPPYCOCK!! Give me the Word and I will write you a Hero. Give me nucleotides and I will flush them down the toilet.
I have come a long way since then. Words would be tough without nucleotides, for one, and there is a vast and iridescent gallery of worlds which you cannot access with words alone. It turns out that the poem is not the final authority on what is, and Science is far from the outstretched sterile arm of death. We are products of a natural world that is far more than human, yet armed with Science we can be more than what we always have been and diligently chart our location in a universe that expands far beyond the limits of the mind. It is, of course, with the mind that we comprehend the universe, but only if it is turned out into it.
But where does that leave words? For a while in the dust. For a while in the dust, but in my quest to figure out what exactly it is we are and what exactly it is this is they have risen again like an endless spectral host, shimmering in the sunlight and shapeless against the stars motionless yet poised to move at... a word. Science has taught me that reality is fixed, that it moves according to patterns, rules, laws of nature, and IT DOES! It does those things and moves as it does, IT'S REAL! But reality is also a great and barely bound swirl of potentiality waiting for a wordsmith to come along and command it to move. Nature has laid the groundwork and the backdrop over billions of years of slow, measured churning, combining and recombining, trial, error, the slow, gradual accretion of complexity where it is warranted, and it continues to. It will continue to somewhere perhaps endlessly into the farthest reaches of time. But here, in this moment, in my very human life, WORDS CONSTRUCT REALITY and what I say goes if I say it loudly enough. Remember that for that is now what this blog is about.
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