Month: October 2023

Compromised Menus.

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One of the things I always liked doing when moving to a new place or just visiting is go to a locally owned restaurant that is at least a decade old. That restaurant has survived and perhaps even thrived in that area, and the menu tells you about the people who frequent it.

That, in turn, tells you about the area.

In a way, we’re all kind of some version of restaurant.

We start off with the dreams of our owners. Maybe they want to sell oodles of their hamburgers, maybe they want to make clowns more popular, or maybe they want to make money.

Nobody ever really wants to start a crappy restaurant. Some restaurants end up being crappy, but nobody wants it to start that way. They always envision that they make something well.

We all sort of start off that way, with different advantages and disadvantages, be it financial, or actually knowing how to make a good hamburger, or having a clown suit in our closet. Whatever the advantages are, we tend to lean on them.

Over time, though, our customers – the people we interact with – cause changes to the menu. Maybe they don’t like the idea of an ‘Unhappy Meal’ and market research shows they prefer ‘Trending Meal’, so the name changes. The guys all want the burgers, but the women want salads and so to get the women there, you add salads to the menu. Some people don’t like the fries, so the fries change.

The restaraunt is a bit of a democracy in that it reflects what people want. At least that’s if it’s in a neighborhood with disposable income.

Now, if customers don’t come because the price is too high, you lower the prices once you can be profitable. You compromise in quality of the ingredients, which of course you purchase, and the quality goes down from what you originally wanted to produce.

The more disposable income your customers have, the less you have to compromise on quality. The more quality ingredients you can get, the less you have to compromise on quality.

In the end, though, what do we compromise?

It’s the same thing with identity. You start off one way, and in a few decade long blinks, you may not know yourself in the mirror because of compromises. Life sculpts us this way.

Tolkien and Identity.

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Identity is a peculiar thing. I’ll demonstrate. Read the following paragraph.

A woman walks down the street and enters a coffee shop where she meets a man, and they order coffee from the barista as they stand there chatting.

Let’s hit pause. Can you describe the woman you saw? The man? Are they of the same color? Many readers will see the people of their own color, and may even imagine the conversation in different ways based on gender, culture, etc. That, in it’s own way, is a super power of writing. The reader gets to visualize things from their own memory. Video, on the other hand, does not, and wherever you stand on Rings of Power, that’s an interesting thing to consider when, as a timely example, we look at Tolkien vs. Rings of Power.

It’s apparently a ‘issue’ now. I didn’t know it was, but it leans toward some of the stuff I’m writing about, so I’ll tackle it.

When I read Tolkien the first time as a teenager, I didn’t think about the colors of the humans around me. This was fiction, and Tolkien’s work was derivative of a lot of myths and legends and sprouted from his linguistic prowess. Tolkien was, as many would say, ‘white’, but calling someone ‘white’ hardly describes where they came from as much as how they reflect visible spectrum. His birth, an accident of geography like everyone else, made him British.

Born in England, his family actually came from East Prussia, and even that hardly defines him as we think of him now. He was well acquainted with literature and even translated Beowulf. He may have been European, he may have been paler than the majority of people on the planet, but to label him white seems diminutive and petty.

While Sophia Nomvete may have been the first female dwarf seen on screen, she lacked the beard that Tolkien’s female dwarves were known for. I don’t agree with the conclusions of the video, but it does show a popular view on the topic.

In much the same way, his imagery in his works came at a time when he would not have been around that many people who did not share his paler color. Hobbits, as an example, were not specified as pale skinned. According to The Complete Guide to Middle-earth, the most common hobbits (Harfoot) were “browner” than other types. Therefore, one could argue that Peter Jackson’s interpretations in his movies were simply based on how he viewed hobbits.

Of course, there were some issues with Peter Jackson’s casting of hobbits that caused some outcry.

It’s really about how people want to see themselves in the mirror. Speaking for myself, I viewed them a lot like myself – which I expect everyone did to some extent, and that’s why some things are better left as books because the commonality of the characters can then be shared between readers. It’s not about what ‘color’ they are as much as the characters themselves.

You and I, being of different backgrounds, can read the books and see ourselves in the characters and yet not get caught up in the whole ‘color’ thing unless someone wants to pick a fight. When I played D&D many years ago, there were no fights about what color a character should be. Be whatever color you want – except dark elves who, in defying physics in that world, became completely black while the elves in sunlight somehow evolved to get skin cancer.

When I watched ‘Rings of Power’, I wasn’t dismayed by any of the colors of… anyone. Elendil should have been 8 feet tall, which would be a neat trick on camera, but what dismayed me was that the dwarven women lacked beards because I always thought that aspect of female dwarves intriguing.

Clearly the dwarves could tell each other apart, but it was a common thing for elves and humans to mix them up. I also have to question, as above, how you get melatonin underground. It seems a bit strange. If anyone was going to be pale, I would have expected the dwarves to be pale, humans representative of humans, and elves would have likely been more likely to be of darker complexion if we follow commonly understood physiology.

But it’s fiction. Somewhere along the way we forgot that, and we find people arguing with each other about the colors of different characters only because of how they see themselves.

Me? Rings of Power only really failed me in not continuing and in not having the female dwarves bearded.

The Identity Mirror.

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I have a shower mirror, for the days when I notice the stubble on my cheeks as I run my hands across my wet face. It’s a strange thing for me. I have not really enjoyed mirrors because they have a tendency to show me as I believe others see me instead of who I am.

This particular mirror was advertised as fog free, which is true when I’m not using it. It’s got water stains on it, a battle I gave up some time ago since the water I get is stored in an unsealed concrete tank with the lime leaching into the water on the hot days in Trinidad – and lately they have all been hot days.

I used to spray the shower with a weak vinegar solution daily to combat the buildup from the hard water, and give the mirror a quick wipe, a constant battle against something I could not win against for a prize I don’t care much about – a clear view of myself.

On days when I shave, I simply rub a soapy hand across the mirror. It appears more clear because of a scientific explanation I won’t bore you with, and I can look if I choose to. Mainly I don’t even use it to shave, instead simply going by feel. Yet it is there.

There are 4 mirrors in my home. One in each bathroom out of some reflex, the one in the shower, and the dressing mirror so that should I care how I look, it’s there. Generally, the dressing mirror has a towel over it since the air conditioner blows right on it, something that did not happen by conscious design.

It wasn’t always this way. There was a time when I thought mirrors were much more important. There was a time when I worried more about how I was perceived. There was a time when the reflection was less branded by time.

I bring this up because of the last post where I touched on the tip of the iceberg.

How we see ourselves, who we see ourselves as, and even who we assume we are seen as is how we’re defined by others, not ourselves.

This is an important thing to understand for some other posts that are coming (and will link below).

Shades of Grey’s Anatomy

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There’s been a lot of talk of diversity that I’ve experienced since the 1990s, and what is accused of being diversity is just an addition of more labels and managing interactions.

I can say that from where I sit that it’s all been pretty stupid.

I like medical dramas, and when I get an opportunity, I watch them because there are quite a few things I miss from my days of being a Navy Corpsman. ‘House‘ remains my all time favorite, followed by ‘ER‘. ‘Greys Anatomy‘ has managed longevity and has some interesting stuff in there too – and as it happens, it’s what prompted this post.

In speaking with someone here in Trinidad, I brought up a surgery enacted in Grey’s Anatomy. I don’t recall the details, but the person I was speaking with is an East Indian1 doctor. That doctor told me he was disgusted with Grey’s Anatomy because they don’t represent Indians often and when they do they go to the less preferred stereotypes.

Being half East Indian myself, I was curious. I don’t really identify as East Indian or any other race since I am mixed, but I acknowledge that a lot of people had sex that lead to me and they were pretty diverse. Still, particularly in Trinidad and Tobago, because of my name, in some circles I’m seen as East Indian and all the stereotypes that come with it. It’s good to be aware of how one is perceived.

What’s funnier is that Indians, particularly those in the United States, generally have had a snobbish attitude with me, which is particularly amusing because they’re upset that some of my ancestors left India before their ancestors did. Worse, being of mixed descent, I’m not of any particular ‘race’, so I’ve found some of the sneering Indian ‘would not wipe my feet on your back’ sort of rhetoric almost normal and comical from that section of society. When someone tells you who they are by how they behave, don’t ignore them.

So I watched Greys Anatomy a while, and I saw what was meant. There was a glaring lack of East Indian representation and, when when they did show up, they were fired. Meanwhile, LGBQT is trendy on the show, mixed marriages, empowered Americans of African descent are sharing power with their former masters, Asians get a little better than token representation (Dr. Christina Yang left after some seasons as I understand it), the little Mexican representation was a single bisexual character and the Mexican Day of the Dead and… having seen the last season’s episodes, everyone is getting represented except Indians.

I don’t care, really. It’s not as if Indians have been particularly nice to me – quite the opposite. However, I do also know that not all Indians are like that, my experiences notwithstanding. Across the Internet, I’ve interacted with many from India who just view me as ‘another human being’, which is all I have ever expected of anyone, and all I try to offer.

It bugged me and so I did a search on it to find that I was not the only person to look at this, and that I was also quite late in looking into it. One of the better articles I found was from May 2020: ‘Grey’s Anatomy is failing its audience in a significant way‘.

It’s the United States, where 8.5% of physicians are of Indian descent – so if there are 10 doctors on the show, almost 1 of them should be of Indian descent to be representative. They even have an association – the American Association of Physicians of Indian Origin, founded in 1982. Nevermind the nurses.

Now, there is a culture of East Indians. Famously, Richard Feynman (Nobel Laureate) was passing through Trinidad and Tobago and had a taxi driver take him around Port of Spain. The taxi driver, according to Feynman, observed that the East Indian parents would lose their teeth to send their children to get an education. This, however, is not a stereotype of Indians as much as a stereotype of immigrants.

People who leave one bad place to get to another generally appreciate that they have it better and they generally want better for their children, enough so that they make sacrifices like that mainly because they’re starting at zero – or even below zero. Despite stereotypes of crime, partially earned I expect, there are immigrants I have seen who just work hard.

In Costa Rica, I saw it in Nicaraguans who were disliked in Costa Rica. In the United States, I saw the Mexicans, and later more Puerto Ricans and later still those from Republica Dominicana. I saw it in the 1970s with East Indians from Trinidad of my father’s generation and earlier in the United States. It’s not about race, or any culture other than immigrant culture. These are people who wanted a better life for themselves and their children and showed how much they wanted it.

So, Grey’s Anatomy is pretty annoying in this regard for people I expect are East Indian, and judging from what has happened in the show since 2020, Shonda Rhimes doesn’t seem to care much about it.

What’s most interesting to me is that there has been a lot of focus on ‘non-binary’ gender, but not enough about ‘non-binary’ race. In the United States, you’re pretty much white or a shade of brown that is still treated as black.

…Diversity has been at the forefront of the Hollywood discourse in the last few years, but it shouldn’t be confined to black and white. When certain minorities are excluded from the conversation, it is the same problem.

Meehika Barua, ‘Grey’s Anatomy is failing its audience in a significant way‘, DigitalSpy, 18 May 2020

There’s a lot more to black and white in these conversations that should be outdated, and I’ll get into that with the next post.

1 In the Caribbean, particularly in Guyana and in Trinidad and Tobago, ‘East Indian’ is used to distinguish from ‘West Indian’, and in acknowledges the orphaning of the Indian diaspora who left India during it’s period of British Rule to attempt a better life somewhere else as indentured laborers.

Subjectivity.

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In 2017, “Hyper Brain, Hyper Body: The Trouble With High IQ” was written, referring to the study, “High intelligence: A risk factor for psychological and physiological overexcitabilities“.

Those titles lend themselves to disregarding people with high IQs. It’s an interesting paper nonetheless, but the conclusion seems to have been glossed over in the articles that covered it.

Conclusion:

Tsien (2016) defines intelligence as, “the ability to self-discover knowledge and patterns from a world full of uncertainties and infinite possibilities,” whose mission it is to “solve various problems in their natural and social environments in order to survive and thrive” (p. 2). The highly intelligent individual has a remarkable capacity for seeing and internalizing these vast uncertainties, possibilities, and problems. This gift can either be a catalyst for empowerment and self-actualization or it can be a predictor of dysregulation and debilitation as the present results suggest. If these individuals take in their world in such an overexcitable manner intellectually (hyper brain), then the potential exists for an intense level of physiological processing as well (hyper body).

The hyper brain/hyper body theory is new and as such a number of studies will need to be carried out to better understand its strengths and limitations. Understanding the relationship between high intelligence and illness could have a significant personal and societal impact. In this study, we have presented a plausible, highly testable, theoretical framework that hopes to serve as a springboard for future experimental designs across disciplines. We have provided evidence to demonstrate that those with high intelligence are at significantly greater risk for the examined psychological disorders and physiological diseases; however, more work needs to be done to demonstrate causation. With the recent advancement of the study of intelligence using neuroimaging techniques and full-scale attempts to map the genome combined with the newer research being conducted to better understand psychoneuroimmunological processes, it is possible that we will continue to see vital growth of our understanding in this understudied area. Intelligence research most often focuses on the flashes of lightning seen in this rare population, however in order to serve this group of individuals fully, we must not neglect to acknowledge the rumbles of thunder that follow in the wake of their brilliance.

“High intelligence: A risk factor for psychological and physiological overexcitabilities“, Intelligence, Volume 66, January–February 2018, Pages 8-23, Ruth I. Karpinski, Audrey M.Kinase Kolb, Nicole A.Tetreault, Thomas B. Borowski,

Now, here’s the rub. We’re talking about people with high IQs, which isn’t necessarily the best measure of intelligence in the first place.

…IQ tests are valid measures of the kind of intelligence necessary to do well in academic work. But if the purpose is to assess intelligence in a broader sense, the validity of IQ tests is questionable...

“Psychology: Themes and Variations“, 2021, Wayne Weiten

Let’s assume that the paper then deals with academic ability, even though IQ remains disputed as a measure of intelligence. Having taken tests, I’m somewhere between doornail and genius, just like many doornails and geniuses.

The real issue is that a society that is designed for average people only measures people based on that average and how far away they are from it – deviants. And they are comparing that deviancy from average intelligence and comparing it to a deviancy from ideal health based on statistical averages of people.

In essence, if you’re weird one way, you’re weird in another way. Surprised? Probably not.

More topically, in the context of the mental health aspects of the study:

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Aristotle.

Madness we call insanity and vice versa, and look how we continue to get ‘as mad as a Hatter’ so wrong.

The root issue here is the subjectivity of what we consider intelligence and what we consider sanity.

It is a little bit insane to try to find a correlation between the two moving targets.

Escalations

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Image above found online and reduced in size. Tracked down to the artists patreon page, image links to it. 🙂

I’ve been thinking about the statistics related to mental health as far as what we consider ‘normal’. There’s a bit of that in ‘Deviants‘ – there’s a range of what we consider normal, where we don’t consider people to have issues. It’s ambiguous and vague and makes the assumption that society is sane.

Having spent over half a century around humans, and having tried to make sense of society, I have to question that assumption. It’s all relative, yes, but relative to what?

This is not to say mental health professionals have no use. We all know they do, or should. Yet when life is crappy, we are supposed to feel a bit crappy. When life is good, we’re supposed to feel good. At least that’s the basic framework we work from.

It can all escalate quickly. A small tweak of a machine can have consequences, like the Butterfly Effect. We see it every day when something that we don’t know about is bothering someone and they react in big ways.

If they follow the path of a pendulum… if we react in that way… we oscillate, and we do that throughout our lives.

Who we connect with depends a lot on those oscillations, their frequency, and how fast we collide through others like us.

The Grouch’s Chimicanga.

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I don’t know how I came across this image on social media, but I snagged it and found the source: BerkleyMews.com. The image links there too, particularly because they do really nice stuff. I also added the circle around Oscar in the lower frame.

It’s funny to me in a lot of ways. The first thing that came to mind was the Allegory of the Cave, but also how I have felt at times in my life. There’s a trust issue.

I sometimes trust what’s inside the can more than what is outside of the can. I am Oscar. It’s funnier too because as a child my favorite was Ernie. My mother loved Grover, that weirdo, and Kermit was the glue for the rest of them. Oscar was… the guy with a really cool trash can.

As I grew older, I understood Oscar more and more and wasn’t sure exactly why. In neighborhood terms, Oscar was the old guy in the neighborhood who lived alone, had a low opinion of everyone else, and collected what everyone thought was junk, but was a treasure to himself.

Oscar’s the guy who would get a lawn just to put up a “Get off my lawn!” sign. Suddenly, I feel a bit like Oscar because I think that would be a pretty fun thing to do. That’s what fences really are anyway, right?

All of this came to mind as I found myself in the kitchen looking for a steak that I thought I bought and didn’t… but seeing the frozen chimichangas, found myself chanting…

I have chimi-chang-as, I have chimi-chang-as, I have chimi-chang-as…

And I want to tell you, things are going quite well in the trash can.

We have chimichangas.

Watching Moss Grow.

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One of my more recent interests has been moss. Yes, I know it just lays there, and yes, I know you probably have moss growing in inconvenient places around you, like steps and walkways that aren’t used that much1.

For bonsai, though, it definitely adds a nice touch.

Presently, it’s also been hard for me to find in Trinidad and Tobago. I’m sure that there’s moss somewhere, though the heat and lack of rain haven’t had any I could find near me, or so I thought.

I spoke with the guy who cuts the grass in the compound – he’s pretty passionate about growing things himself, so we share knowledge. I asked him about it, and it happened he knew 2 spots on the compound where I could find moss, so I went and seemingly rescued some dried moss. There wasn’t much of it.

It made sense that I might have to grow my own moss. It shouldn’t be hard, it always seemed to be present to be removed in my teenage years. In searching the Internet I found there’s an annoying amount of marketing content in the search results with little to no actual scientific stuff2. I did glean some anecdotal information here and there and have a few moss propagation projects underway, which I hope will show progress in 30 days.

In researching all of that, though, I found that moss gets it’s nutrients through the air and produces quite a bit of oxygen. As it happens, it seems to be a pretty important part of our ecosystem that people overlook. I wondered about it filtering air, and I found that there are projects already underway testing that very thing – though moss doesn’t appear in NASA’s list of air cleaning plants.

It slows erosion. And, honestly, I have never personally found it disturbing to look at.

Take a look at this project in London – they say that the moss in the city bench absorbs as much carbon as 275 trees in 1% of the space. That’s impressive.

Yet in Trinidad, it’s supposed to be wet season and it hasn’t been very wet at all. The weather pattern here no longer seems to have as much of a wet and dry season as it does a less dry and dry season alternating randomly with a less wet and flash flooded season.

Suddenly, my moss project became an indicator of weather patterns and climate change that is hotly shouted down by some and resolutely upheld by science. Largely it’s the same battle that Claire Patterson fought regarding lead poisoning, where public opinion is swayed by marketing and lobbying rather than science.

How does a decrease in moss during drought conditions in the tropics impact global air quality?

I have no idea. I couldn’t find papers on it. Seems like something someone should be checking out.

And that’s why I haven’t been writing. Moss ended up being very interesting.

1Incidentally, I always suggest taking the mossy walkways and steps. At some point something was important enough for people to go there that went away, and it’s a fun mystery to solve.

2Maybe that’s the reason people are becoming gibbering idiots who can’t make rational decisions.

Less Than Netflix.

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I sat outside a while this evening, my back to my apartment, facing the darkened hill face, the landslide leaving a lighter area on the face.

Over my left shoulder, I can see a stab at humanity. The electric lights, cycling at different hertz you can see over the distance, visually humming in different tones.

To my right, and below, some of my ongoing bonsai related projects lost in the dark.

I can’t tell you how long I sat there. I’ve thought about that hill in so many ways that now when I look at it, my mind relaxes – as if working it into a tizzy is the only way I can get it to get rest. I bat that around in my head a bit, bouncing it around, still looking at that hillside, darkened further.

Last night the moon hit it just so, where it reflected it’s topography back to me with reflections and shadows.

It was darker tonight. Thoughtful, I might say, if I pushed my perspective onto it.

Then a flash on the rock face.
A small smile crooks the left side of my lips, I feel it and am surprised by it. Why did I do that?

I like nature’s light shows and it looks like it might be a good night.

All in all, the subscription costs less money than Netflix.