Do not waste the vast majority of your life doing
something you hate so that you can spend the small
remainder sliver of your life in modest comfort. You may
never reach that end anyway.
Resist the temptation to
get a job. Instead, play. Find something you enjoy doing.
Do it. Over and over again. You will become good at it
for two reasons: you like it, and you do it often. Soon,
that will have value in itself.
He’s also the author of The Teenage Textbook, which I can’t find anywhere online, much less in English. Still, I’d like to read it.
Above all, the post-2004 hipster could be identified by
one stylistic marker that transcended fashion to be
something as fundamental as a cultural password: jeans
that were tight to the calves and ankles. As much as I’ve
investigated this, I can’t say I understand the origin of
the skinny jean. Why, of many candidates for fashion
statements, did it become ubiquitous?
And:
The most confounding element of the hipster is that,
because of the geography of the gentrified city and the
demography of youth, this “rebel consumer” hipster culture
shares space and frequently steals motifs from truly
anti-authoritarian youth countercultures. Thus,
baby-boomers and preteens tend to look at everyone between
them and say: Isn’t this hipsterism just youth culture? To
which folks age 19 to 29 protest, No, these people are
worse. But there is something in this confusion that
suggests a window into the hipster’s possible mortality.
The main thing I take from the author is this: hipsters have progressed from awful to not-as-awful, with potential to do something. A bit of a hollow core right now, though.
Mykala: “Is that guy doing Tai Chi?”
Alex: “No, he’s tying his shoe. He’s doing Shoe Chi.”
Mykala: “You mean Tai Shoe.”
Alex: “You always think up the funny ones; I was so close!”
Biking home, as I do everyday, is always more interesting during rush hour. A few days ago, I hopped on my bike, and started passing cars all the way down Washington Avenue. The weather was beautiful, so the ride was quite pleasant. During such unseasonably warm weather, drivers tend to open their windows. So, one driver had their arm dangling out, a lit cigarette held casually in their fingers. For more than a few seconds during my approach of the car, I thought about grabbing that cigarette and throwing it on the ground as I passed by.
I call it an external will helping fight addiction. Perhaps the opportunity will arise again.
I sometimes wonder what it must be like to live a life without the intervention of modern medicine. What must it be like when your teeth fit together just fine without braces, when you can see without corrective lenses, when you’ve required no surgery to remove oversized adenoids, tonsils, or appendices, when your robust joints have required no surgery, when your skin grows no cancers…
Now, to be clear, I haven’t experienced all the surgical procedures and interventions listed above… but enough of them to wonder what life would be like without them. This dream is partly why the story of Harrison Bergeron is so fascinating to me: a man who is simply profoundly smarter and stronger than any of his peers. In fact, I’ve a peer in my dental school class who is simply an extraordinarily gifted individual. Capable of mind-bendingly precise micro surgery and superhuman feats of long term memory—yet he achieves those tasks with no notable effort. He is, simply put, better than the rest. Does he needs glasses? I don’t know. But that brings us to an interesting point.
Tall poppy syndrome is used in parts of Europe to describe the injustices a truly gifted person suffers at the hands of their inferior peers. While I disagree with this idea being used in politics to shore up petulant complains of the wealthy regarding high taxes, I’ve seen tall poppy syndrome first hand in a small group. 100 people in our class, and there’s a solid contingent that simply hate this truly gifted classmate. I don’t understand this. I do, however, think there’s an underlying theme here: jealousy.
Smart people will go to great lengths and employ endless strings of clever ruses to hide their prejudices and knee-jerk reactions. No one wants to be seen as a bigot: smart people just have more cognitive overhead to work on hiding their tendencies. I think we’re seeing that in the interaction between my classmate the dental savant and his peers. Students will make up reasons to hide their jealousy, skim-coating their feelings with plausible critiques: “he’s not dedicated enough”, “he doesn’t take this seriously”… but what they feel is simply ugly jealousy.
In fact, I’ve seen the same thing with greed in my class. How many people said they were applying to dental school for the money? Nobody. So, everyone’s already had practice hiding their base desires. And so, the state of Minnesota is the first in the nation to introduce “Dental Therapists”—a person with qualifications between a dentist and a hygienist. There have been thousands of hours of a debate: will these Dental Therapists be restricted in where they can practice? What supervision will they be required to have? What procedures will they be allowed to do? Will this really achieve the stated goal: “solve the problem of poor people in remote areas who are unable to get to dental care regularly”?
Those questions are valid, because they are calling for a clarification of this Dental Therapist position. However, in asking these questions, most people are just hiding their greed. Some are genuinely engaged and interested. Most are worried that they’ll make less money in the future because of this position. Me? I just want to pay back my loans. After that, even if they come up with a vaccine to eliminate dental decay and thus dentists as we know it forever, I’ll be fine, thanks. In the meantime, it’s hard to watch everyone lie to themselves and others.
I visited my mom at home today. Took a long walk in the unseasonably warm weather. Checked out her bathroom remodelling. Got to talk like we haven’t talked in a long time. It’s a new perspective on time: you value the people in your life when they are taken from you for a while. Suddenly you see that things are always changing, that you must seize and savor the good moments.
Now I’m sitting here on the couch, working on some research for a paper about build-ups and flash cards for my ortho exam. Outside, it’s over 80°F… unexpectedly warm for a fall day in October. Framed by the picture window on our front wall, there’s a glorious diffuse yellow light making the whole street glow like something out of a movie. Leaves gently fall to the ground occasionally, like grains of sand in a slow-motion hourglass. I think the awareness of time ticking by is part of the magic of fall: it’s a reminder that all things are temporary, that summer gives way to winter. Such weather makes me slow down and think about how the preciousness of time and people.
