What is Love?

I got to watch the last half of Interstellar again the other day, and this time what stuck with me was the film's conception of love.

One thing that Scientists do better than almost anyone else is assume that they are qualified in realms that they are not. That sounds harsh but think about it: A scientist is bound to an empirical method and most of them don't bother to do much more than dabble in philosophical pursuits, the same way that most philosophers never do much serious study of the natural sciences. A philosopher, however, is never going to assume he's a qualified physicist, but the reverse is quite false. 

So we need to approach their presentation of love with some degree of skepticism. That said, their discussion is rather scientific. Why do we love? How did our capacity for love evolve? What selective advantage does love provide? 

Mathew Mcconaughey starts off the conversation saying it provides "social utility," preserves bonds and such, but is forced to concede that there is no social utility in loving people who have died. 

The conversation picks up again when Matt Damon's character says that our children are the last thing we see before we die. Why? Because that gives us a reason to stay alive. Up until this point, love is accepted to be more or less a sensible phenomenon in terms of natural selection. It provides incentives to stay alive and helps preserve a strong social structure. 

At this point it's only fair to object that science has overstepped its bounds. It's describing a feeling any mammal can have and equating that feeling with what a father feels for his lost children or a lover for her dead partner. 

But this is where Interstellar comes through: it acknowledges that love is altogether excessive, overstepping the bounds of any rational species bent on its own survival. 

What does it conclude? In as many words Interstellar makes the case that love is an artifact from a higher dimension. There is no explaining the existence of love as it is, and here I think we see a guess ventured by the screenwriters, many of whom were accomplished scientists. If it sounds like the typical cop out that ____ is simply something we can't yet understand with science that's because it is. But Interstellar presents love alongside the discovery of the nature of gravitational singularities and space-time travel, using the context of the film to demonstrate their point as best they can. 

At the end of the movie, Mcconaughey's character asks his daughter how she knew he would come back. She tells him, "Because my daddy promised me." This isn't meant to be a sentimental moment so much as a fact. Love in their vision provides an irrational yet accurate communication of nature in a way our lower dimensional species cannot understand. Love is a tool as far as the writer is concerned, but it is the most powerful tool we have as humans, transcending our own nature and the laws of natural selection. 

I'll get back to Tolkien in another day or two, but Christopher Nolan's films are always a good break, and worth an excessive number of re-watches. 

One Ring to Rule Them All

So as you no doubt noticed, after much deliberation, I changed the title of my blog. It's more in keeping with the material I like to cover. Future updates may be pending.

In light of this update let's return to Tolkien.

For those of you new to his work, he has a trilogy about a ring. Also Gandalf is a wizard, Elrond and Galdriel are elves, Boromir, Faramir and Aragorn are men of the line of Numenor, and Frodo is a Hobbit.

So the most crucial question the book presents is this: why does no-one listed above take the ring?

Boromir is the easiest place to start. He only needed the chance and he would have taken it.

What would he have done with it? He would have defeated Sauron. That much is certain.

And then what? Destroying the ring destroys Sauron, but destroying Sauron doesn't destroy the ring. From this fact we deduce that the ring is greater than Sauron.

How? Sauron made it. He gave it its power right? Well, no, not really. He had to learn the craft of ring making, and each of the great rings bestow power on a person that is not their own. All the other rings were forged by someone other than their bearers and given as gifts. These gifts then gave great power to the bearers. Galadriel, for example, preserves the immortality and mystery of Lothlorien, as Elrond does Rivendell.

So the One Ring is a perversion in that it was not made as a gift. It was designed for its maker, to make its maker all powerful.

Here arises a great Tolkienesque theme: power ruins stuff. If you want the power, the power has power over you. If you give into the desire for power, the power rules you.

Sauron has no control; the ring is in control of him. it is his master. Frodo doesn't want the power and what does Gollum (river person, possessed by ring, not too important here) call Frodo? The master of the precious.

This fact is part of Tolkein's motif of weak heroes. Hobbits don't want power. Men do. Dwarves want wealth but lust for power and avarice invariably tie themselves together; the dwarves are no exception. Elves and Wizards are a plane above such base desires, unless you're name is Sauruman, in which case you get to show everyone that wisdom doesn't immunize you to temptation.

So do Gandalf, Aragorn, Faramir and Galadriel want the ring? Yes, all of them want it, but they recognize the power that the ring of power has over them, and it terrifies them. They do their best to avoid thinking how quickly they could end the evil in the East because they know it is just a whisper from the ring justifying them in taking control. They recognize what Boromir doesn't until it's almost too late. The evil in the book is not Sauron. The ring would far rather have a powerful wizard or elf-queen or Numenorian King as its plaything instead of a broken disembodied sorcerer. Sauron isn't the lord of the rings. Recall the line: "One ring to rule them all." The trilogy's title is about the ruling ring, not Sauron.

So it is foolish to risk losing the ring by sending it into Mordor, when the council has within it wise and powerful leaders capable of wielding the ring and restoring peace to the world. But the council in The Fellowship has no such leaders there. They have three types of people: those who know they cannot wield the ring, those who do not want the ring and know they must wield it, and those who think they can wield the ring. The decision they make hinges on this fact: it would be better for the ring to go to Sauron than it would be for Gandalf or Elrond to take it.

Last thought, what if the ring was given as a gift? It's offered to Galadriel, much as the ring she bears was given. She knows that if she doesn't take it, either the ring will be destroyed and her ring will lose its lord and its power and her kingdom will fade, or else the ring will empower a master opposed to her and she will be destroyed. She knows that of all living beings she above all others, even Elrond or Saruman or Gandalf after his return, has the best claim on the ring and the best chance of resisting its power.

But she doesn't take it.

If you made it to the end I hope you enjoyed that as much as I did. I'm going to go start reading the Return of the King, and I'm sure something new will come up for tomorrow. Farewell, until our next meeting!

The more you know

It's amazing how much we think we know.

I was just thinking about the Malaysian Airline Plane that went missing some months ago now. It is such a strange idea to us that we can't find a crashed plane that CNN actually had people come in explaining the plausibility of Extraterrestrials and spontaneous black holes.

Seriously people? We couldn't even predict the winner of our own election. Many well educated people still don't believe we're primates, or that climate change exists, and I'm guessing over half the world thinks the planet is flat. This isn't to shame anyone or claim any superiority for knowing or not knowing something, it's just so say that everyone, myself obviously included, has huge knowledge gaps that will never be filled while we walk this planet.

The Malaysian Airlines story reminds me of Life of Pi. The verifiable facts of the story are that a ship went down and a teenage boy washed up on the coast of mexico around a year later. The ship had meerkat bones in it as well.

Pi also explained how every year zoo animals are lost and never found again. All this goes to show that there are so many things we will never learn even if we look, and far more that we will never think to look for, be they tigers smart enough to not want to be recaptured from a north-american wood or planes wrecked and sunk too quickly for radar to locate.

The sad part is we will never know how arrogant we sound talking about we think we know or what we ought to know until we actually know it, but until then, the least we can do is attribute the disappearance of a small airliner in the middle of the ocean to something other than a cosmic anomaly that in most circumstances would collapse the whole solar system along with the airplane.

We are beings that can't function well without some degree of certainty, but that doesn't mean our senses or our brains have earned that certainty. It's healthy to have some deep doubts about your world driven into your brain, whether you get those doubts there by re watching the Matrix, looking at an optical illusion, or taking a Quantum Mechanics class.

In the meantime may your brain keep seeing as pleasant a world as it can manage to see.

Catch 22

Do they train Special Forces in CPR?

Stupid question; of course they train special forces in CPR.

The Government spends a large amount of money training special forces to kill people, and they also train them in detail how to save someone's life when they are legally dead.

It's generally accepted that when you're dealing with war, the understanding of people has to change. This is why it's so important to have an absolute need for war.

Some people think these conditions can never be met, and even without having been traumatized by violence, I can see the sense in such a belief.

For this discussion, lets assume the conditions have been met. What changes?

Humans in war are no longer moral agents. They can and must be treated as means to an end.

But what about the spec operator who just shot five hostiles and dragged his buddy into the back of building? He's going to try to save his life.

Situations like that are why I don't feel comfortable with even a base treatment of utilitarianism in war. It seems necessary, but it feels impossible. That is not how humans are. You can think for a dozen lifetimes about the morality of a situation and forget it all the instant you're there.

I'll admit when I started this post with the question I had no idea how stuck I'd get in so little time. Fact is I rightly feel out of my depth. It's tempting to try and run a different angle with the post, but I think no matter where the discussion goes, if I'm being honest with myself, I get stuck.

War makes no sense.

2016 Election

I'm not about to get political, but it would be a missed opportunity to not write about the election at some point.

Don't think so? Yeah I don't really believe it's an important opportunity either. Sometimes a situation is so ridiculous it doesn't even count as comedic anymore.

That said, I read a comment that rubbed me wrong today:

"If this election hasn't made you deeply and profusely ashamed to be an American, you might be part of the problem that got us here."

For now let's forget that the quote has an author and tear the idea to shreds!

First off, 'profusely' should have been 'profoundly.' Second, too many adverbs.

More importantly, the quote is forgetting our nation. The primary system was designed without today's massive amounts of participation in mind, and thus we still see primaries held by caucus, closed primaries and the like.

It's easy to forget that we barely even have a 200 year history. The amount of progress we've seen in that time period is astronomical to most people with some sense of historical perspective. But we shouldn't be surprised that the process by which we elect our highest officials is slow to evolve. Quick and easy change is a formula for radicalization and disaster, two things to keep away from the process by which we choose the most powerful people in the modern world. It is not safe to have an easy means to reform the election process.

The primaries don't hold up to the pressures of modern voting, as is also the case for the electoral college. We the people are ready for a less restrained system, but the process of implementing that system is not easy. Should we be surprised by that? of course not. Should we be disappointed? Perhaps. Ashamed? No.

If you look at the election process we did not select these people as a nation, and given the system we are not altogether accountable for not selecting someone else. The above quote is trying to express frustration at the idea of having to vote for one of two terrible options. But it is irresponsible and uninformed. We were victims of a system that let them be elected with less than a tenth of the nation's approval, and that tenth only picked a candidate from a short list of options. That may not sound like a great system, and it is not, but a government forever stands at the brink of chaos and tyranny; an electoral system well behind the times is a small price to pay for staying steady on that balance.

Moreover, we have a government designed to limit the power of any fool that happens to be elected into office. That is the true genius of American politics we all seem to be forgetting. Trump or Clinton would in reality be very hard pressed to do even a quarter of the damage that even a half-hearted nay sayer would predict. Granted we've spent an unfortunate amount of tax dollars on over a years worth of campaigning, but that in itself constitutes only a small flaw in the system.

There are a million and one reforms that need to be implemented in the election process from limiting corporations' power in candidates policies to having open primaries to abolishing the electoral college, but the fact that such changes take decades to implement is no reason to be ashamed of America, let alone to be ashamed to be American.

We are human, and anything we build will be flawed, and more often than not all the way to the core. The fact that America still stands today on much the same ideals it was founded on is, as I've said before, amazing. The fact that two tyrannical narcissistic prigs will have no chance at destroying it, no matter how big the media makes them look, is amazing.

Here's the fun bit:

Profusely ashamed to be American? the nerve! Part of the problem that got us here? I sure am! I'm American. I'll be profusely ashamed to be American when we make Eugenics a national program. I'll be profusely ashamed to be American when we're sending dissidents to Siberia. I'll be profusely ashamed to be American when I'm not allowed to say that I'm profusely ashamed to be American.

This election doesn't change the principles America stands for. Do we think the UK has a different set of core principles just because they have a new prime minister or because the queen makes a grumpy face? No! America is more than its leaders, in fact it will only have the person elected today in office for the next four years! The fact that someone could be ashamed of their whole national identity for the sake of those four years is embarrassing.

Let's wrap this up with some adjectives. Thinking that this election should make you regret being American is melodramatic, shameful, and shortsighted. It's buying into all the hype you're criticizing. It is sad, and I can only hope that tomorrow morning you can find American pride in your heart.

Also it'll be fun when this is over. Hope your candidate won! (unless I didn't vote for them ;)

Happy poll watching!

Your Future Sucks: a brief overview of everything

So today I got to attend a talk by one Dr. Mark Regenerus titled the Economics of dating. 

I don't imagine sociologists agree on much but I think they can agree that the environment for romantic relationships has changed drastically since the origin of effective contraception, and that the emphases in romantic relationships have changed as a result. 

The most telling point he made wasn't that marriage wasn't seen as inevitable and necessary anymore. That's obvious and rather uninteresting. It was that we don't see our long term romantic relationships as opportunities to improve ourselves through the suffering such a relationship will invariably cause. 

Today we see most forms of discomfort in a relationship as unnatural and unhealthy. If things aren't going smoothly it's quite possibly time to move on. Most people don't have such an extreme outlook, particularly towards the person we plan on settling down with, but I doubt any of us really have the traditional outlook towards long term commitment. 

That is to say that most of us are failing deep down to acknowledge the other person is a dysfunctional and broken human being just like we are. 

Up until recently marriage was something necessary for both parties to function. A man needed children and a woman needed a stable home. This is a bit of an over generalization, but  there was a consistent theme in all past marriages: you either ignored or looked past or suffered through or, when possible, confronted eachother's shortcomings, simply because you had to. 

Today we don't have to. Whether that's progress or regress is your decision to make, but whatever the case is, it never helps in the long run to forget how human you and the person you love are. 

It's also worth noting that the foundations for all of these thought processes come from a 50-something decades married sociology professor, not from the not-quite-even-adult who's writing the post. I have justification for sounding far more qualified than I am in reality. 

So my key takeaway: marriage has always been about suffering and making it through. That hasn't changed today, it's just a hell of a lot easier to get out when things start looking like hell. 

And I never did discover why the talk was called "Economics of Dating."

A Crash Course in Diving Bells!

Someone tells you to dive down 50 feet underwater, grab a breath of air from a diving bell and then come back to the surface, exhaling constantly and never moving faster upwards than the bubbles leaving your body.

Sounds difficult right? It is, but it's not impossible.

In fact, with a few days of training its quite doable.

Diving 50 feet only takes a couple of seconds. Take one deep breath, exhale, take another deeper breath and then leap in. Open your eyes after the initial impact with the water and stay relaxed. Your face mask covers your nose so you haven't accidentally inhaled any water. The dive tank you're in has even lighting so you have no trouble seeing the bottom, or the fresh air pocket under the clear dome of the diving bell. You can see the air filtration system driving clean oxygen into the diving bell.

You've already started kicking, calm but powerful, and you're at the bottom before you know it. You may feel an onset of panic from the excess CO2 in your blood telling your body to breathe, and you might also forget yourself and glance upwards, and suddenly realize how narrow the tank is and how far underwater you are.

But even if you mess up and do this, you will still have enough presence of mind to get yourself under the diving bell; besides there's an instructor drifting beside the bell ready to grab you and guide you to the bell if your panic gets the better of you.

Once you're inside you take several deep breaths. You probably aren't even gasping for air, given how shallow the dive was. You're dry from the shoulders up, and before you can think how claustrophobic the bell is you catch the instructor's signal that it's time to go back up.

The bell is deep underwater, under a significant amount of pressure. In fact, the air in the bell is three times as dense as the air you filled your lungs with earlier. As you leave the bell you have over twice the amount of breathable air in your lungs as a the most fit endurance runner would have in his own while sprinting at sea level.

I didn't mention the mask at first, but I also neglected to mention the slender stainless steel pole running down the tank. You grab onto it now, and start letting out your breath steadily. dragging your body upwards along it you can keep pace with the bubbles you let out. This time when you reach the surface you are still exhaling rather than trying to drag air into your starving lungs.

The point of all this is that we love to make skill sets seem unattainable. This is often true for when we obtain a new skill and want to make our hard work appear even more rigorous, but more often, we make challenges insurmountable in our own mind.

This is basic psychology. All animals try to minimize effort just to survive, and there's nothing wrong with that, unless we want to try something new. Then our brain shoots a dozen reasons at us explaining why we shouldn't bother. This is true for everyone, not just the unmotivated.

When I described the challenge at first I didn't even include that you would get a face mask to cover your nose and let you see underwater, nor did I include that this was in a well staffed and climate controlled professional dive tank.

Between over reporting the difficulty of a task, failing to note the details that make the task feasible, and our tendency to make new endevours more difficult in our own mind, it is so easy to fall into the trap of doing nothing.

None of this means the task isn't challenging. It's just not challenging in the way it appears. Remember how you never moved upwards faster than your bubbles. Think about it. You have about three times as much air in your lungs as you could hold at the surface. If you swam straight up, your lungs would rupture. Of course your instructors would have explained all the risks in detail, demonstrating why you need to follow the procedure outlined above. Additionally, if you ever start moving upwards too fast they are trained to forcibly drag you back down into the bell to keep you from damaging yourself.

The point of trying something new isn't just to show that you can do it. It's so that you can learn, add new skills to your repertoire, and gain confidence.

Before you started you just saw one more challenge; someone out there could do but you would never be able to try. Now you know you can do it, you know how to do it, and you understand the real risks and benefits in a way you never would have otherwise.

Dr. Strange

I had a Chance to see Dr. Strange in theaters today!

Since you made it this far just to read a movie review I'll give you everything you want to know right here.

It was awesome and critics agree. It got a 72 on Meta critic and a 90% on rotten tomatoes. It definitely earned the 90%.

So there's the generic bit. It also had the climax scene that was unlike anything from the avengers or guardians of the galaxy blah blah. It was original if I say nothing else for it.

And I won't give much else. I'm one of those people that loves the idea of reading reviews but hates myself for doing it before I see the movie, so I'll spare you what I can.

That said, here are some thoughts on the movie:

First, there is some unusual Catholic symbolism.

Hang with me this isn't as out of the blue as it seems. From what little I understand, Satanists base their "black masses" almost entirely off a perversion of the Catholic liturgy.

Sorcery also is historically linked to the demonic.

This would all seem a stretch except that the scene in which the villains summon the dark force in the film takes place in a church that is clearly in the grandiose and even Gothic style preferred by Catholics. A church is uprooted to bring the beginning of the end of the world; it is hard to make the case that is not a conscious decision on the screenwriter's part.

Then there is the climactic scene. I will say little of specifics but when you see the movie you will take my meaning here.

Our sorcerer in chief, Dr. Strange, creates something infinite to make the dark force fail, but it is only when the infinite becomes finite that the world is saved (spoiler alert I guess...). That last sentence was one of my friend's key takeaways from the film. Anyway, in the context of sorcery and clear hints at demonic influence, this was an innovative and subtle twist on the Christ figure.

Those are my thoughts. With or without them you will enjoy the film!

In the meantime I look forward to seeing what comes next from a studio that has failed to disappoint an impressive variety of viewers.

What is Epic Fantasy?

There are a lot of topics that people shouldn't try and write a blog post on.

Here is my most recent contribution:

Why does Tolkien get to be classified as higher fantasy?

Disclaimer: if you are not into either Tolkien or the general concept of fandom then you probably won't enjoy this as much as you should. Just find the happiest part of yourself and power through.

I am of the mind that Tolkien is more or less alone in that genre. Why?

He was a linguist. So many people strive to create a world in a book without having a command of the tools that they do it with. His command of language comes through in the way he never once picks a word that makes the reader feel out of place. He is neither to pretentious nor civil. He also invented a framework for four different languages simply so he could create a poetry foreign enough to strike any reader as he intended it to.

Most importantly, no matter how much Tolkien you read you feel as if you are just getting a sliver of Middle Earth. You don't need to be reminded that the Shire is simple but mystical, or that the glory of the high elves is only a remnant of what it was on Earth two ages ago. Every setting gives the reader hints of what the Tolkien universe is, but never so explicitly as to destroy its mystery.

You never have the feeling of linearity, that you just go from place to place in a closed system with a determined ending and beginning. You never see the beginning or the end, and at every turn the characters may be anything they wish.

Also the original trilogy films are done so well half the time I'm reading the books I have little work imagining something that Tolkien would be proud of.

Getting more specific: we see archetypes of thoughts and beings that recur throughout all of human history and mythology.

Go back to the Fellowship and the description of Lorien. Saying that Tolkien there describes what Plato meant by the forms does Tolkien a great injustice and flatters Plato.

Look at the scene where only Legolas and Aragorn can hold the eyes of the lady Galadriel. Gimli is also blameless but he is of a fallen race, just as Tolkein would have seen all men to be as he wrought Catholic tradition into his masterwork.

Or see how all throughout the book, evil seems all powerful and yet the whole time does not even know its own heart; at the same time the forces of good seem helpless but behold the heart and seat of evil's strength. Tolkien would have believed the world to be under the dominion of the Devil in much the same way.

Finally, all the traditional heroes: Legolas, and Gimli, but especially Aragorn, play only a small part in the most crucial aspects of the trilogy. This is a work so great that the hero Middle earth has waited over two ages for only acts as an enabler of true sacrifice and heroism.

Anyway, I don't think anyone including myself was prepared for that discussion, and hopefully I haven't driven any would be Tolkien fans away. Hamlet says about the world: "There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

I suppose the easiest way to define Tolkien's genre is to say that his reader believes that same statement to be true in the exact same sense Hamlet intended to Horatio, only about Tolkien's middle earth, not about Hamlet's poor world.

How to Talk to Anyone

Shout out to all the obsessive people out there.

Any good English or history teacher and any philosophy teacher is going to teach you some form of analysis. This is to say that they will teach you to have a dialogue with inanimate objects, be it a book, a movie, a letter, or a persona you construct to argue with.

This is great for a lot of reasons. You can write better essays, enjoy almost any literature or artwork, think tangentially, improve your creativity and write posts on a subject you find rather boring at first glance.

What I'm going to say next applies only to the practice of implementing in depth analysis, not to the ability to do so. Most people assume that if they can analyze something they should, and get into the habit of reading into everything.

This devastates actual human interaction simply because we cannot imagine what it is really like to be that person. We don't know their life story, family history, biases, or even what they often say or do in situations they get themselves in. We cannot analyze people we don't know, and when we try to, we only hurt ourselves when we interact with others.

Most things in life aren't meant to be overthought or broken down beyond the simplest level. Most situations can be taken at face value. Most people are not that interesting, particularly to us, and even people we want to find interesting, like a lover or a brilliant professor, disappoint more often than not. We aren't meant to work off the assumption that someone is like us or conversation would be even duller than it often is.

Point being this: thinking about people you don't really understand and trying to fill in their humanity based off your own inferences creates a person that doesn't exist. Overestimating the conversation you can have with a person leaves you looking like a fool. Read between every line of Shakespeare's Hamlet and it won't hurt you a bit, but read an inch into the life of a person you just met and you're halfway to inventing a new universe.

If you haven't given into even a bit of your curiosity about who another person is, you will be all the more free to find out who they are when you talk to them, and nearly impossible to disappoint.

How to Talk to Anyone!

Shout out to all the obsessive people out there.

Any good English or history teacher and any philosophy teacher is going to teach you some form of analysis. This is to say that they will teach you to have a dialogue with inanimate objects, be it a book, a movie, a letter, or a persona you construct to argue with.

This is great for a lot of reasons. You can write better essays, enjoy almost any literature or artwork, think tangentially, improve your creativity and write posts on a subject you find rather boring at first glance.

What I'm going to say next applies only to the practice of implementing in depth analysis, not to the ability to do so. Most people assume that if they can analyze something they should, and get into the habit of reading into everything.

This devastates actual human interaction simply because we cannot imagine what it is really like to be that person. We don't know their life story, family history, biases, or even what they often say or do in situations they get themselves in. We cannot analyze people we don't know, and when we try to, we only hurt ourselves when we interact with others.

Most things in life aren't meant to be overthought or broken down beyond the simplest level. Most situations can be taken at face value. Most people are not that interesting, particularly to us, and even people we want to find interesting, like a lover or a brilliant professor, disappoint more often than not. We aren't meant to work off the assumption that someone is like us or conversation would be even duller than it often is.

Point being this: thinking about people you don't really understand and trying to fill in their humanity based off your own inferences creates a person that doesn't exist. Overestimating the conversation you can have with a person leaves you looking like a fool. Read between every line of Shakespeare's Hamlet and it won't hurt you a bit, but read an inch into the life of a person you just met and you're halfway to inventing a new universe.

If you haven't given into even a bit of your curiosity about who another person is, you will be all the more free to find out who they are when you talk to them, and nearly impossible to disappoint.

Skydiving 101

Everyone has heard that the things we want are often precisely the things we shouldn't have.

It's still interesting to listen to because no-one believes it. Take your dream job, dream home, dream car, and tell yourself that obtaining it will be bad for you. 

Don't think so? Me neither. That's why I'm still chasing a philosophy degree and a career in the navy. 

Why don't I think that's a bad idea? 

Because sticking with a plan is the only surefire way to really understand the magnitude of that plan's stupidity. 

Besides, in most cases your dream turns out more disappointing than harmful. 

In other words, it's not always such a bad thing that what you want is bad for you, as long as it doesn't take your whole life to figure out you were chasing the wrong dream. If it only takes a decade or so all the better. 

The only real problem with being a human is knowing that something is bad for you and wanting it anyway. Convincing ourselves to want a person or a thing even after it breaks down most of who we are is a talent unique to our species. We don't just follow a passion instinctively, we can dedicate a good deal of higher cognitive processes to explaining away a bad relationship or addiction. 

And every single person has plenty of desires they know not to follow and follow anyway. That's the failing of humanity at its most simple. In the end I don't imagine its half as much a problem to end up chasing the wrong dream than it is to know you're chasing the wrong dream and to stick with it because it's too late to change anything. 

When you go skydiving you only allow yourself two tries if something goes wrong. If you can't cut a tangled chute in you move on. You force yourself to get a new plan because you don't have time to try something that's failed already. If your dreams are on the timescale of 20 or 30 years, your life is at least as short as a skydiving jump relatively speaking. So the way I figure, you can have big dreams, but you need to know when they're not going to help you hit the ground softly. 

In the meantime I'm keeping my plans big and short term. 

Happy landings to all of you!

When in Rome

Due Santi is just outside Rome near the Pope's summer residence. People in the right circles all across America know the area well, despite its relative obscurity even in Italy.

Almost all of my classmates get the opportunity to spend a semester there, studying.

Most students who come to UD chose it in no small part for the chance to go to Rome. When I came I didn't understand the draw.

I very much like where I live, and I never really imagined wanting to leave. I thought going to Rome would be a strange chance to broaden my understanding of the world.

I hate that phrase now; it implies that the only way your worldview can change is by expanding, as if you could have a firm foundation for grasping things you've never thought to try to understand. Most life changing experiences don't expand your horizons; they show you that you've been looking in the wrong direction your whole life.

It's common for writers to say that they couldn't do a topic justice in so short a space, and that certainly applies to everything I'm about to say.

The idea of studying abroad seems very entitled, like someone's lifestyle is just another culture you go into debt to immerse yourself in. There's really no avoiding that point, but then again, just going to college implies a degree of privilege most of the world would envy.

But despite its elitism, or perhaps even, because of it, studying in Rome is trans-formative.

When you go to a place like Rome, you don't see the architecture or the paintings or the language. they become a fact of life, something that you miss when you get back stateside.

This argument, perhaps is the strangest way to think about studying abroad. You don't do it to learn while you're there, you do it to see what you were never learning when you come back home. Your mind is pivoted and you spend the rest of your time studying trying to fill the empty space.

One of the things you want to be able to say after spending an excessive amount of time, energy, and money on college is that it affected you in a way you could not have foreseen when you started; it wouldn't even have been possible for you to formulate the thoughts you now use on a day to day basis.

If that transition seems unrealistic then you're probably just as excited as I am to leave the states for a month or two.

Why Art isn't Terrible

Modern Art!

If you've lived a life anything like mine, I'm sure you've found plenty of artwork that most people don't appreciate.

As a kid I saw a Jackson Pollock painting for the first time and decided I was doing everything wrong. If he could make millions on such paintings what was I doing in school?

I still haven't answered that question but I have several points that make me appreciate the artwork of the last 2 centuries.

First, I've realized how much work people still put into learning styles they never practice. This is kind of a given point, but needs to be stated for those out there who think artists don't study to produce an original work.

More importantly I've learned that artwork isn't supposed to transport you away from your reality.

Looking at a great landscape is a great place to start illustrating this point. When we look at many paintings of classical scenes or the natural world we often feel like we are brought out of our day to day life and into something new, only to return when we move on.

With this attitude its easy to be dismissive of the realism of more recent artists. Who can feel transported away by a haphazard painting of homeless workers put together without any traditional perspective or by the cubist figures of guernica?

The problem isn't the painting its our attitude. Art doesn't have to be trans-formative; it can be informative as well. Most often the painter intends his work to be both. Take guernica, for example. A horrific event is captured there in a style that is not at all intended to draw us out into some transcendent reality. It's meant to inform our reality with a snapshot of a catastrophe.

My favorite example illustrating this point is Catch 22, by Joseph Heller. At no point while reading the book is the reader drawn into some fantastic world that transforms the one he lives in, but all throughout the work we see the nonsense of war portrayed nonsensically, as it should be.

All this is to serve as a warning: there is plenty of bad artwork, but few eyes keen enough to judge artwork fairly.

Why the Dude doesn't surf

So Halloween costume story time!

I decided to wear a beach bum costume because I have the hair and the shirts and the trunks. One of my first conversations someone told me, "Just tell people you're the Dude" (Big Lebowski).

No this is not about my life, it's an awkward segue into talking about El Duderino, since brevity is not my thing.

So when I first watched the Big Lebowski, I couldn't help but wonder, why does he not surf? He is within reach of living the California dream life, with a little apartment and no real need or motivation for income.

Full confession, the movie really went over my head. I have no idea why anything that happened happened and I also haven't seen it in a long time.

But still, over half the people I talked to today knew who the dude was. What can I say?

As long as we're over analyzing I daresay there is plenty of attraction to the possibility that we can just live. We don't need to work or worry about tomorrow.

Most of us find that possibility repulsive, not without reason. Most of us have plans for our lives that we would rightly feel ashamed to let slip away without a thought.

But the dude doesn't have that problem. He doesn't worry about plans for his life; he reacts. He is as simple a human being as one could imagine.

So I think that's why the movie stuck with bowling. Bowling is frowned upon by most people I know as anything other than an odd night out. Surfing is easy to romanticize, and easy to connect with the beauty of nature and humanity as that goes.

To be able to live like the dude, you have to let go of any thought about yourself, whether it's one that you have or one that you think someone else has about you, or one that someone else gives you about yourself. It's more than just not giving a Damn, it's leaving yourself out of your conception of the world.

Whether that thought process is healthy for most people, or anyone for that matter, is not a case I care to make at this point. All I can say for sure is that it's more fun to be the dude for Halloween than it is to be a beach bum.

What should I do with my Life?

So it can be hard not to think about the future.

I don't know how age changes this fact, but I do know that being young makes it easy to live your life with long term goals as pretty much the only thing you have in sight.

The main downside of that is that people have no idea what they should be planning on doing with their lives when they are making the plans about what they want to do with their lives.

Listen to the people that love their jobs. My dad is a great example. He works as a teacher at a local school, and loves the job most of the time, but my dad graduated as an Econ Major, got his masters and went into business.

He left that job after less than a year to raise our family, and I will always give my dad a lot of credit for being able to give up on his plans to do what was really important.

Nowadays we spend all of our childhood, adolescence, and most of our early adult life preparing for a job. Some of us may find ourselves where we want to be but most of us just have to make do with where we end up, and spending so many years working for a goal, whether it's to be a doctor or a PT or a lawyer, makes it so hard to give up and acknowledge that we may have wasted our time.

This is coming from a college student who is wasting his time, and none of this is to say that we shouldn't have plans. We just shouldn't overvalue them or build up our goal to where it will stop us from living a meaningful life outside our career.

A great irony of college life is that we're supposed to make plans for our career when we have the least possible idea of what we ought to do. Some of us realize that we made a gut decision and stuck with it and that's the only reason we're studying what we're studying or working where we're working, but few realize just how dangerous it is to overvalue your own ideas and dreams.

This reality check shouldn't destroy or even make us doubt our dreams; it should just remind us to keep our minds open to opportunities for relationships or experiences outside the course we've marked.

Goals of the Squadless

Hey everyone. Laptop broke but everything has been put back together.

In the meantime there's a post I've been meaning to write for a while and didn't get around to before I went offline. 

But I'm going to write that post some other time. 

In the spirit of Walden I'd like to submit my thoughts on living without technology for several weeks.

First off, I didn't. I had my phone and access to public computers. The big difference was that I didn't sit down with the sole intention of writing something.

So much of technology today is used to give us an audience. Many people you meet today are performers, people who choose to live their lives while being observed by other people.

We post small life events and take photographs of scenes we barely even thought to be a part of. We are never not aware of what someone else is thinking of us.

Is this bad? not necessarily, but this awareness puts undue pressure on our day to day existence.

Writing of the kind that I'm doing now is fun for many reasons, but one of the biggest motivations is that you are as much your own audience as your readers. You aren't presenting your life; you're expressing your mind. I find that to be a far more liberating enterprise, and while it's not as much fun to look at as pictures of a vacation to St. Petersburg, it's at least as enjoyable as looking at a picture of your friends at Starbucks.

In other words I'm glad my laptop is charging again.

Happy reading!

How James Bond Takes a Beating

Today I realized that over the next week I have three tests, a fair amount of grading, and a midterm project.

This is not a rant. 

My first reaction was, as you would expect, to think about how bad this week was going to be, how much work I was going to do and how uncertain the results would be. 

This is not a chin up motivational speech proposing optimism in the face of a dreary future. 

The second reaction I had to my realization surprised me. My brain relaxed and in as many words I thought, "This is going to hurt." 

Nothing mind blowing yet, but the more I thought about it, the more useful I realized an attitude of resignation to pain, whatever that pain may be, could be. 

First, it doesn't call for a denial of what is necessary. A positive attitude can keep you saying, "I think I can I think I can" right up past the moment you fail your midterm or lose your race or whatever. 

Second, an attitude of resignation doesn't require that one braces or over anticipates or overestimates a challenge. When we psych ourselves out or get pumped up we often pump up to the challenge and make it big enough to be worthy of our state. Then when the challenge hits we either shut down if it's bigger than expected or breeze through with all the energy we saved for it. 

Imagine you're on a long distance run. It starts to burn and you've spent the last thirty minutes mentally preparing yourself to beat the pain. But the pain is worse than you remember and it's augmented by the stress you have about it so you shut down and miss the time you were shooting for. 

If you got on your shoes and thought, "Whelp, this is going to suck," and went for your run, you aren't wasting energy stressing over the pain. You're just going with what you can. Then when the pain hits it doesn't surprise you and it's not blown out of proportion. At best you don't think at all, at worst you think, "Here goes nothing" and dig in with the mental energy you haven't expended denying or beating the challenge in your mind. 

If any of you have seen Casino Royale, there's one scene that illustrates the advantages of resignation to suffering quite well. LeChiffre walks in and sets the rope on Bond's shoulder. Bond knows his future is bleak but I could easily imagine a few thoughts going through his mind. He's not thinking about how he can't let LeChiffre get the password. That's his goal and if he realizes that's all he has to give up when he's in a ton of pain, odds are good he caves. But if he just thinks, "Holy S*** this is going suck" then he can start laughing and deal with what comes as best as he can. 

Resignation towards suffering looks like an ironic attitude: we're supposed to fight through the pain, not accept it. But if we look at incoming pain and think, "Here we go," were meeting suffering on its own terms. Irony takes energy away from pain and gives it back to us. Fighting through pain acknowledges its power and takes away our mental strength. 

And in the scene I mentioned before, irony gives Bond the upper hand. LeChiffre is supposed to be in charge; he's supposed to be beating bond to death, but with the right attitude Bond can just keep saying "Ouch" and laugh, while LeChiffre goes mad. 

Granted all this is coming from someone who's idea of pain is a long distance run or several hours of homework, not from someone dealing with a true loss. It's also coming from someone who is writing a blog post instead of dealing with the pressing issues causing the mental stress prompting the post. I won't delve into dealing with real suffering beyond the physical, but in my own life at least, an ironic attitude towards pain is the most reflective of reality. 

A good portion of our lives is spent in pain, and in the end we will never understand why we suffer or how best to suffer, and the worse the suffering the less we understand it. When pain is framed that way, there's no rational option but to resign ourselves to it. 

The Worst Type of Violence

A morbid thought occurred to me today: every act of cruelty we read about has at some point happened to someone.

There have existed humans capable of doing things to other people that we can't even imagine.

This isn't going to be a macabre expose on the nature of human cruelty, so stick with me.

You and I, the average person in the respect we're discussing, are not psychologically capable of most forms of violence towards another person. At the very least we would not be capable of being methodical about it.

So where does that leave the people that are? So often we simply designate people capable of horrific or intricate violence against another human being as a monster, someone we are incapable of understanding.

I'm not talking about the kind of person like Stalin or Mao or Hitler who orders mass genocide. It's chilling how easy it is to distance yourself from people to the point that mass murder can become easy. People like them aren't dealing with other people, they're dealing with numbers. I'm talking about the executioners.

Saying that such people are monsters is letting ourselves off the hook. Put one way, if we see a person who is good at something, like running, we let ourselves off easy if we just claim that that person is superhuman. Going the opposite direction, we let ourselves off easy if we simply call the executioner subhuman; we deny that we could ever become capable of what they do.

I know I started out saying that you and I are incapable of most forms of violence, and we are, right now. But we have to acknowledge the possibility that given terrible circumstances, we could degenerate into people we would barely recognize. Failure to do so leaves us unprepared in case disaster strikes.

The two following examples illustrate the point. The Stanford prison experiment took a group of college students, and using nothing more than a stimulated prison environment, they turned a group of boys into "wardens" who inflicted a tangible amount of psychological violence on the "inmates." I'm not going into details here but the premise still holds: it doesn't take much pressure to turn us into the people we fear.

The second example is another controlled experiment. In it a subject was introduced to a "participant" who was actually an actor, and told that the actor was going to answer questions. Wrong answers would be punished by a shock that went from harmless to fatal. Nearly every participant "killed" the actor with limited resistance to verbal coercion.

There are countless of more extreme examples from this century alone: the Holocaust, the Khmer Rouge, the list doesn't end. If people capable of brutality inflicted on other humans in these conflicts were rare, violence would not happen on the scale it does. Every one of us risks being beaten into a weapon simply because we exist; we may rightly believe that we are at no risk of being tested in an extreme way, but if everyone did their best to understand their own limits as human beings, the world would be a much safer place.

Mass Misrepresentation

There's plenty of reasons to be terrified while watching the news. I lost focus months ago like an ostrich diving into the sand, but I still hear plenty. 

Serious world issues aside, one of the ideas that kept coming back to me is that today, we are accountable for everything we say. It doesn't matter how big your audience is or how important you are. If you ever become relevant, every piece of information about you is fair game. 

The internet is a dangerous place, especially for someone who records random thoughts on a daily basis. 

Does having this information help us? We can now see pieces of anyone's life from ten years ago. We can learn an incredible amount about people without ever knowing them. 

In many ways, we have access to people's lives that we have no right to. We see the most glamorous bits and pieces of people we will never know or care deeply about. This goes for politicians we claim to hate and celebrities we claim to love; it also holds whether or not they are presenting an image of themselves or whether someone else is spinning an image of them. 

We don't know the people we watch or read about. We can't love them or understand them as a person beyond a superficial level. We don't get to see their strengths and weaknesses in person. 

There are obvious objections. We may have a legitimate interest in a person's success or failure if that person is running for some sort of office. We may claim that how someone present themselves in public should give us an idea of who they are as a person. We may have followed someone's story for so long that we feel invested in their lives. 

We should absolutely be able to judge someone for a position based off their track record, but emphasizing who our celebrities or politicians are as people is a far more slippery slope. There is no way to unravel lifetime's worth of context less quotes and inappropriate statements from years or even weeks in the past to cut to the heart of who a person is. We have to get to know someone through human interaction to pass a true character judgement at a given moment. 

There are an impossible number of variables to quantify when it comes to understanding a human being. Even when we know someone for years they can still surprise or shock or disappoint us. Taking what we see presented to us about a person, even if what is presented is a person's own damning testimony or filthy slurs, and cutting a person to fit the description we design based off that presentation is dehumanizing. 

So what is the point of all this? We need information about our potential leaders, and a lack of media coverage, however convoluted the coverage may be, would be a recipe for disaster. I am not arguing that we should suspend our best judgement about who is fit for a job. I am making the case that the media makes its profits by framing and even tearing people's lives apart.

Our brains are designed to understand nuance and ambiguity in ourselves and others, and we can judge many aspects of a person without letting sensationalism and scandal drive us to deterministic conclusions about that person's character. 

Things Only People Who Brush Their Teeth Understand

Hey Everyone!

I made the most of my unintended one day hiatus, but I'm back at it again. 

So an idea that's been bouncing around my head for a while now is how little credit the survival mentality is given. Everyone wants to be excellent, but no-one wants to train unless they're in the right state of mind, or run unless they have the perfect workout; they don't want to take a class or try an activity or make a commitment until they're sure they can handle it. "They" includes me. 

But no-one starts out being good at an activity. They might have some talent, but that doesn't make anyone great at anything. This semester, for example, I haven't had any English classes or any courses at all that make me write regularly. I put this page together to force myself to keep writing every day, and every day I pick the best thing I can think to write about and run with it. 

We all want to produce great work every time we try something, but we can't be great at something without doing it day in and day out. Everyone has uninspired days where they don't have the energy to apply themselves to a task. 

In the end, being passionate about something is not a surefire way to become great. As soon as the excited state and eagerness goes, its easy to forget why you cared in the first place. 

I've heard a great analogy for maintaining a skill set: it's like brushing your teeth. You don't base your decision to brush your teeth on how you feel about brushing your teeth. You do it with a survival mentality, keeping the long term in mind; you are going to make it through the day with healthy teeth and make it through the year without a cavity. You don't even have short term goals; you just think about how little fun getting a tooth filled is and brush your teeth more carefully. 

The same thing goes for running or lifting or reading or whatever. Throw the best you can come up with together and get after it. Most of the time hard work beats meticulous planning, and when you're exhausted and out of ideas instinct is much more useful than deep thought. 

Thanks for reading and as always please share this blog. The posts will keep on coming. 

The Blue Bookmark

How do you view the Bible?

I'm kidding. Keep reading. That's just a really dangerous attention grabber. 

A bit over a week ago I was at the train station reading a book. A man carrying blue pamphlets came over and said, "Here, long as you're reading take a look at this." 

That's about as smooth as you can get when you're trying to talk to someone about Jesus. I've never met someone who felt comfortable talking about Jesus to strangers, and I've got to hand it to Jehovah's witness for sticking with such a thankless profession. 

I mean it; they must have some faith to get them through the day. Not enough faith to make me want to try their walk of life by any means, but enough to inspire me to write a blog post at midnight. 

That said, yesterday I posted a piece longer than many essays I've submitted, so Jehovah's witness isn't going to get too much out of me. 

There are two things to be said for them just based off of the pamphlet they gave me. First they didn't include a phone number. Second, the whole pamphlet was a list of reasons to read the Bible. So kudos for sticking with the program. All in all, it was one of the best put together opportunities for conversion I've been offered. 

The pamphlet is also a well sized bookmark once folded in half, although I've yet to use it in a Bible. I'm not exactly sure what the logistics of using a Jehovah's witness pamphlet to mark out scripture would be anyway. 

So thank you to the brave man walking the city with pamphlets of Biblical truth. I pray that you find the strength each day to keep on bearing the good news, or that you find a better job. Know that your work has ended my search for the place where I stopped reading when I closed my book. 

America's Challenge

Explaining the origins of this post boils down to the following: it's always a good thing to talk about America. Here we go!

You can't change anything without understanding what you are trying to change.

The founders of America knew they were trying to create something that was in many ways antithetical to traditional monarchies of the old world. And they did.

America is set to change by design. But now instead of understanding other governments to create a new one, we need to understand our own. Our government wasn't just designed to oppose monarchies, it was designed to oppose instability. Our government rose the same time half of Europe decided to lose its mind.

The constitution did not design a government with quick progress in mind, nor did it even intend for much direct input from the masses. It was designed at a time when the masses were the ones screaming for and often obtaining monarch's heads.

The design stuck. America has had one constitution for it's entire history, which is barely short of a miracle. England may brag about having the Magna Carta for three times as long but their common law has accrued into something two steps short of gibberish so don't let that get you down. The key point is that American government is a balance of progress and stability, with an emphasis on stability.

This discussion brings the hammer down on uninformed criticism of American government. For instance, there are often complaints that congress has too much power and Senators in particular need term limits. This criticism is valid but far too weak to accomplish anything. Congress was designed to be elitist, to keep the masses in check just as surely as it keeps the executive branch in check. It was designed to be out of executive and even public scrutiny to a large degree. Is this right for today? No. But it is how America is, and without understanding that we can't begin to change that.

Moving to less friendly territory, America is often shamed for having high violent crime rates. The first challenge issued regarding this problem is an attack on the second amendment, and that is a difficult position for anyone to assault. The second amendment is in the bill of rights, which is second in importance only to the constitution and the declaration of independence.

Moreover having a gun in your home has been a part of American culture from the start. At the time the bill of rights was published people had just come out of a war and had reasons to fear another. Americans had an insecure frontier and plenty of reasons to doubt their own safety even in rising cities across the east coast. The second amendment was entirely intended to preserve the right to bear whatever arms civilians could get their hands on to challenge the dangers of the frontier and enemies from overseas, regardless if those arms were smooth bore rifles or muzzle loading pea shooters.

To reiterate, this is not taking sides on an issue, just pointing out what people are trying to change. For decades so many people have underestimated the unambiguous strength of the second amendment, and forgotten that it was written in a time when citizens would have taken its protection for granted. I see so much legitimate frustration from people who rightly claim that we are getting nowhere on the issue. This is because the right to bear arms isn't just a detail in American Law. It is American.

I'd love to go on another tangent about socialism in America, but the last 8 years and even the last two months have given far more material than I can feel justified glossing over in a few sentences. For now suffice to say that just because we have a problem that another country has solved doesn't mean we have to or even that we can solve the problem the same way. We are limited and defined by our government, but we are also unique in our individualism in a way that the rest of the world has envied since our founding. Simple solutions to complex problems have a decent chance at failing period, but failing to acknowledge that a problem is complex will not make the solution any more probable to succeed.

And America isn't perfect. Being able to say that makes America great, and being able to change that makes America great. Most importantly, refusing to be beaten when we fail as a nation to resolve a problem like gun violence or unreasonable health care or systemic racism makes us great. And we make America.

I can't wait to write posts like this for a larger audience and spark some discussion, but for now, if you enjoyed any of the posts on this page please share this blog with anyone you care to. Thanks for reading!

Setting Dreams Down Gently

Going to college today you meet a ton of people who are studying what they're studying primarily to make money in the long run. I'm not writing to knock that; that said I'm sure I'll end up criticizing making education a means to money implicitly throughout this whole post.

Up until this semester I was a physics major. Then classes rolled around after summer and I realized just how much I didn't enjoy most things related to the subject. I'm good enough at this point in time to see the major through, but I have no wish to inflict that pain on my psyche.

More to the point I'm writing this post to avoid writing a lab formal. Either way, I have no regrets about dropping physics.

It's true that having a degree in physics impresses employers in some of the fastest growing and best paying fields around. But all that translates to for me is spending more time doing something I don't enjoy, after graduating with a degree in something I have only a superficial interest in.

Also, while it's possible to be bad at something you enjoy, it's very hard to be good at something you don't enjoy. Sticking with physics would limit my contribution to society because I would be looking to avoid work, not to do it.

Rumor has it that there are people that enjoy physics. Maybe I've even met a few, but it's clear that I'm not one of them.

I know I said I wasn't going to straight out attack doing a major for money, but some Majors are hard to defend. Has anyone really felt passionate about Sociology? And what even is Business?

Understand that this is now a philosophy major speaking, which is right up there with a classics degree in terms of practicality, even with my physics concentration tacked on. I've heard some people say it makes you look "unique, cultured, blah." The great thing about being a philosophy major is that the practicality doesn't matter. All that matters is that you're paying 10 grand a semester to ask hard questions and get few answers.

It's not improving my argumentation skills either.

But seriously, I've enjoyed philosophy from day 1. Breaking that down is more room than I care to take up, particularly towards the end of this post, but suffice to say that I want to spend time understanding how to live as opposed to being forced to live a certain way to make a passing grade.

In my case, sticking with physics could very well have decreased my value to myself and society in the long run, and while I can't speak for anyone else, there is a good deal of risk inherent in dedicating any part of your life to something you don't care about.

Poor Acting and Long Distance Running

Yesterday I watched a terrible movie. Two of my friends had been planning on watching a movie starring Nicholas Cage for some time, and I managed to get myself invited.

The  irony of watching Snake Eyes, which was the show we settled on, on the heels of writing a piece about how much I love movies and how good I am at enjoying them did little to balance out the loss of one hour of my Saturday evening. 

Beyond that irony, my friends managed to enjoy the show much more than I did, if only because their sole endeavor for the night was to poke fun at every possible aspect of the movie.  

This incident was more of a side note which, rather like Cage's performance, doesn't really match with anything that follows. 

So I'll just jump right in. This weekend I went for a run on my own for the first time in maybe a year. I bring this up to point out a skill set I take for granted. It's easy to assume that something we had mastered at one point will always be with us. In this case I've assumed ever since my senior year that I had better aerobic endurance than most athletes just because I was a solid cross country runner my junior and senior years of high school. 

I've done next to nothing to maintain my ability, but this lack of effort only shows when I run. Since I have avoided running since the end of my senior year of high school, the problem was solved, so to speak. 

It's so easy to fall into the trap of believing that you're good at something just because you remember a time when you had a certain skill set nailed, but in the end giving ourselves extra credit for effort we haven't expended in months or years only builds unrealistic expectations. 

Today I put on a pair of worn out sneakers and went for a run. My stride rate was down, my shoulders didn't stay in a line, and most importantly, my lungs burned before I got to even three quarters of a pace I used to keep up for miles. But the feeling was amazing. Often when we abandon a skill set we don't just forget the details, we forget the whole reason we enjoyed doing a thing in the first place. 

I can only imagine that's how some people end up making the same facial expression into a camera for an hour at a time and get credited with acting. 

Directing Inattention

Hey Everyone!

A few days ago I watched Star Trek Into Darkness with several of my friends. Up until it came out some years back I had not seen a single star trek movie, but since then I've grown to enjoy the series and most things science fiction.

I saw the movie in theaters with my dad, who is a lifelong star trek fan, and his excitement for the show turned out to be justified. Between the actors I recognized from my favorite movies, the saga my dad had told me led up to this film, and the wholesome mental exhaustion that follows after running one's eyes around a 15 foot screen, the piece stuck in my mind as one of the hallmarks of great action movies.

There is no stretch of the imagination that lets me call myself a film critic, but I found myself very resistant to some of the stabs people threw at the screen. Notes about lens flare and camera angles went over my head, as did much of the criticism of the dialogue and plot.

My first reaction was that I was simply unsophisticated, which is true, but more to the point, in many movies I watch I find myself drawn in in such a way that I ignore details that remove me from the experience the director intends the viewer to have. I'm worse at finding any technical aspect of a film than most of my friends, but I am a champion at suspending disbelief.

That phrase shouldn't suggest that poor dialogue or choppy camera work won't rub me wrong; the opposite is the case. Anything that forces me out of the scene in front of me sticks in my mind, often becoming a key takeaway from a movie, but building a tolerance or even a directed lack of focus, so to speak, and training the mind to accept the world a director or a writer creates gives me a leg up when it comes to enjoying movies or books or any creative work for that matter.

It's not hard to believe that our brains are hardwired to experience life with this disposition. If we don't over analyze a situation we can dive straight in to an imagined environment, and see our surroundings and even ourselves as whatever we want to envision for a situation. It's not until our English professors tell us to be sure to omit adverbs that our brain starts seizing up in the middle of a gloriously crafted scene an author proudly pieced together.

This is written with the understanding that if no-one was paying attention to the details no-one could sit through any movie or read any book. That said, it's far more fun to be the friend who's excited to see the movie for the sixth time than to be the friend who's uncertain about watching the movie once.

Family is for First Aid

Hey everyone!

So one opportunity of being a college student is returning from across the country as a guest in your own home.  I felt out of place after spending so many months on my own schedule apart from the people who have made my life up to a year ago possible.

We went on two road trips this summer and I sat in the back of the car between my little brothers Mike and Pete. An hour or so into each trip I would stop thinking about how odd we must have looked to our parents. Mike and I top 6 feet each, and though I'm four years older, he has about 20 pounds on me. Pete is tiny, with a shock of golden blond curls; the whole time he was in the car with us he was smashed against the left door.

My brothers can make just about anyone feel at home. Pete and my youngest brother C.J. get in fights at least as often as one would expect for two brothers born a year apart. Pete wins almost every time in spite of his size, mostly because of years of experience tackling Mike and I.

Anyway, one day in June I was sitting in our dining room when I heard my brothers having a go at one another. My dad had left the house an hour before and was in the process of redoing the living room, where my brothers usually fought, leaving me in charge of keeping the house in one piece.

Normally, I let them be, but given the fresh paint on the walls I decided today that plan wouldn't work. I stood and walked into the living room just in time to catch the highlight of the summer.

Pete let CJ get back up and CJ walked to the far side of the living room. It was the third time in a row he'd been thrown to the ground and he was looking for any options he had to get an advantage. He spotted a small black handkerchief and had an idea no-one in our family has had the ingenuity or courage to imitate since. Before either Pete or I could object he blindfolded himself tightly, doing the opposite of kid trying to cheat swinging at a pinata, and then dropped to a crouch and charged at Pete.

Just before they collided CJ shouted out, "No-one can beat me I'm Daredevil." Peter got over his surprise and dove out of the way as CJ collided with the wall.

One thing I've learned growing up with brothers is that some of the people who love you the most will let you try stupid ideas, not because they don't care, but because they're curious what could be running through your head at the moment you go for a strategy no-one else was dumb enough to try.

Post the first:

Hello to my one reader from Saturday, December 13 2014!

I have no idea if that was a Saturday and this is my first time throwing my thoughts on to a webpage, but this is fun! 

It's 1 in the morning, so this post will be brief. I'm not sure where the blog description shows up, but in case it's not available, this blog is a daily database of intriguing  thoughts.

And the thought that someone else would be interested in what goes on in my head is a bit pretentious.

Happy reading!