tumbledry

Vacationing

Ok, have a seat. This is going to take a little longer than my heavily-edited moderately-stilted prose attempts at wit, wisdom, and condensed life experience. That stuff falls flat more often than not, anyway.

Some things have happened over the past few days that knit themselves into a little ball that I feel the need to tug the strings of. You know that part in a TV show where you know it’s the season finale because you can just feel the writers pulling hard at these strings they’ve strung between characters? I always imagine a sweater, and you have a hold of a few of the pieces and you keep pulling and the fabric is bunching and warping in places. You really see how it is all connected. Ok, this is possibly not edited enough. Starting again…

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Unknowable

There is a strong tendency, and I think it is a universal one, to want to say the right thing so that we may give solace in the form of a wise statement to a fellow suffering human. I find this compulsion to be particularly strong when confronting death; I always assumed that this was because death was this common endpoint we all share. This is of course true, but I don’t think that’s why we try for these wise phrases. I think, instead, it is the unknowable nature of death that makes us attempt to say something profound. You want to be that person who sighs, swirls their drink, and says the perfect thing. You want to be that for the sufferer, for yourself, but most importantly, for this reason: to be capable of making a wise statement about death would mean you have somehow put a logic fence around it. That you have it surrounded, reined-in, controlled. That you have somehow made the unknowable into something manageable. That the scintillating spotlight of your human brilliance illuminated the blackness, however briefly.

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Blue Pearl

Inside David Foster Wallace’s Private Self-Help Library:

We’re suspended for a moment on this spinning blue pearl, here together and alive right now, conscious, though no one knows why. It is a question of caring. When one of us considers the experiences of another, all the failings and the achievements in someone else’s life, we are seeing from this common place, knowing that it’s all taking place in doubt and the absolute solitude and terror of being human, and knowing that it’s all temporary.

Tree of Life

I’ve been thinking about the movie Tree of Life, and I haven’t really gotten anywhere. A nice, attempted partial explication of the themes was written by Matt Zoller Seitz, but take a look at this quote:

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A Girl A Boy and A Graveyard

Jeremy Messersmith - A Girl A Boy and A Graveyard:

She says, “Life’s a game we’re meant to lose.
But stick by me, and I will stick by you.”

Milton Quote

“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”
John Milton
(Paradise Lost)

Learning

Are you more interested in being right, or understanding?

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Graphing Your Emotional Life

I was listening to This American Life’s most recent show “Family Physics”, about the application of physical laws to relationships. I didn’t hear much of the actual episode, but it caused my mind to wander off on a tangent beginning this way: your emotional range increases as you become older, more mature, more experienced. But, earlier in your life, you can not comprehend the depth of pain and joy you’ll experience in the future. So, at any point in your life, you think that your extremes of happiness or sadness are the limits of your emotional capacity. In fact, you think you are plumbing the depths of despair or scraping the ceiling of joy at a variety of discrete points in your life. What is actually happening is an increase in your emotional distance between happiness and sadness. Instead of representing this with physics, why not use math (specifically, y=0.5(x)*sin(x) )? Indeed, in mathematical terms these emotional points are signified by local minima or maxima of your emotional capacities. This idea can’t be new, but I was so excited about it I made a diagram explaining it.

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Leaders and Solitude

I don’t really have the time to fully parse out “Solitude and Leadership” by William Deresiewicz at The American Scholar, but holy cow are there some good quotes in there. I’ll follow one of his trains of thought:

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Examining life

Accelerating hard up the dark streets from the Ford Parkway Lifetime toward my apartment near I94, life felt perfect. I had just wrapped up another hard workout, and I was headed home to spend a lovely summer evening with my fiancée. It was late July, 2008. I remember the song I was listening to as the cool air whipped through the car: Cellophane Girl, by Graham Colton.

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Lightweight Lifestyle

Lightweight lifestyle, or, what hiking teaches you about life:

This principle is not easy to see in our modern culture, where success is generally viewed as proportional to the value and quantity of one’s possessions. Society percieves the owner of a big house which can hold more possessions as more successful, when in fact he may be held in bondage by high house payments, taxes, utilities, repair costs, and a general lack of freedom. In an ever-increasing need for protection he acquires security lights, burglar alarms, double locks, fences, and moves into a subdivision with a locked gate. He pays large insurance premiums so he can afford to replace everything in case all his protection doesn’t work.

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Reaching higher

Dustin Curtis writes about improvement:

When I first started designing as a hobby, I hated everything I made. I knew it was terrible, and no matter how hard I tried, I could never make it good enough for myself. But I didn’t give up, and after a while something clicked. I started to sort of like my work. But I am still not satisfied; every day I reach higher, trying to grasp the level of awesomeness that I can feel but can’t recreate.

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Fish on the humanities

I enjoyed reading Stanley Fish’s argument against attempts to justify studies of the humanities. Fish respectfully points to Anthony Kronman’s idealistic viewpoint that the humanities teach people compassion and give them examples of the different paths a life can take. He acknowledges that this argument makes sense, but ultimately seems to think it’s dishonest. Which is to say: can you stand up in front of a bunch of people and say the humanities make better people when the professors who study them everyday are clearly no better as people than the rest of us? Similarly, a “careerism” argument for the humanities is just as flimsy as it is depressing.

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Platitude

Some days you happen to the world. Other days, you let the world happen to you.

Aristotelianism

Is it infinitely cruel or impossibly beautiful that we can conceive perfection, but can not attain it?

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Neuroscience and Beauty

Between my finals in neuroscience, physiology, and prosthodontics, my brain has been working on an interesting, rather troubling exercise: understanding beauty. Lord knows why my mind gets preoccupied with the ideas it does. Nonetheless, here I am: I can’t wrap my head around the concept. I am, in many ways, a prototypical nerd; as such, an unknowable system or domain irks me. Cf. the aforelinked article:

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On Scope

I took a nap on the couch in the bright afternoon sunlight today, which really distills my spring break down to its essential components: sleep, relaxation, warm sun. Troubled dreams still seem to haunt my sleep, a carryover from the stresses of last week.

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The Greatest and Most Natural Movement

Though he didn’t sing a single melody, the driver on the 16 this morning had a truly operatic voice — he sounded not like an aspiring amateur, but a world-famous singer. “On top of that, he could easily sit in for James Earl Jones” I thought, as we bumped down University Avenue. Now, perhaps the driver leads a church choir during his evenings and weekends, but I couldn’t help but wonder how many gifts we possess of which we are not aware.

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Perl Philosophy

A lovely little Wikipedia stub teaches us, as in programming, as in life:

There is more than one way to do it (TIMTOWTDI, usually pronounced “Tim Toady”) is a Perl motto. The language was designed with this idea in mind, so that it “doesn’t try to tell the programmer how to program.”

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Sets of 3

Skills I would like to learn:

  1. Sailing
  2. Calligraphy
  3. Violin

Things I vehemently oppose:

  1. Xenophobia
  2. Ethanol as a fuel source
  3. Indoctrination

Role models:

  1. Mister Rogers. Tom Junod, in Esquire:

    Mister Rogers went onstage to accept the award — and there, in front of all the soap opera stars and talk show sinceratrons, in front of all the jutting man-tanned jaws and jutting saltwater bosoms, he made his small bow and said into the microphone, “All of us have special ones who have loved us into being. Would you just take, along with me, ten seconds to think of the people who have helped you become who you are. Ten seconds of silence.

    And then he lifted his wrist, looked at the audience, looked at his watch, and said, ‘I’ll watch the time.” There was, at first, a small whoop from the crowd, a giddy, strangled hiccup of laughter, as people realized that he wasn’t kidding, that Mister Rogers was not some convenient eunuch, but rather a man, an authority figure who actually expected them to do what he asked. And so they did. One second, two seconds, seven seconds — and now the jaws clenched, and the bosoms heaved, and the mascara ran, and the tears fell upon the beglittered gathering like rain leaking down a crystal chandelier. And Mister Rogers finally looked up from his watch and said softly, “May God be with you,” to all his vanquished children.

  2. Su Song. From Wikipedia:

    Su Song was most famous for his hydraulic-powered astronomical clock tower, crowned with a mechanically-driven armillary sphere, which was erected in the capital city of Kaifeng in the year 1088. His clock tower employed the escapement mechanism two centuries before it was applied in clocks of Europe; the tower also featured the earliest known endless power-transmitting chain drive in the world, as outlined in his horological treatise of 1092.

  3. Gottfried Leibniz. Paul du Bois-Reymond, in a biography about Leibniz:

    As is well known, the theory of the maxima and minima of functions was indebted to [Leibniz] for the greatest progress through the discovery of the method of tangents. Well, he conceives God in the creation of the world like a mathematician who is solving a minimum problem, or rather, in our modern phraseology, a problem in the calculus of variations — the question being to determine among an infinite number of possible worlds, that for which the sum of necessary evil is a minimum.

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