Month: November 2023

The Mall

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In going around and talking to people – I was curious about something – I visited a local mall. As it happened, it gave me a chance to get ahead of a mobile phone bill. I chatted with a few people I knew who were intent in telling me everything but what I had asked them about.

People are strange that way sometimes, avoiding something they don’t want to talk about which makes it harder to figure out why they don’t want to talk about it. Suddenly, I appreciated psychologists a bit more since that’s a fair way to look at their job sometimes.

Journalists have it rough too in this regard. People were sticking to their talking points, things that they had stored up for however long to unload on someone who asked them a question that they didn’t want to answer. I got updates on people’s credit card problems, a few questions about how some companies still could afford to rent mall spots, and even one irate woman asking me what is wrong with me after what appears to be a near break up.

Well, maybe I can tell you what’s wrong with a particular guy, but men in general? I’ve spent absolutely no time considering what’s wrong with men. There’s an angry feminist out there who will probably shout at me about that, but I’m not going to make sweeping generalities about a gender based on the behaviors of a few regardless of how angry people get about it. I don’t go around spouting out things that are wrong with women either. Or anyone else for that matter, and I did encounter what appeared to be a trans pair wandering around.

I boggled momentarily. There was something I thought was odd about the person in a halter top and skirt, so I paid attention rather than ignored and when I realized it was someone somewhere on the gender scale that wasn’t routine in a mall in Trinidad and Tobago. It didn’t bother me until we met eyes, and those were angry eyes. Those were scared eyes, defiant eyes, but not threatening eyes. The eyes of someone who was just trying to be themselves, whoever that may be.

I moved on from that, but it stuck with me a bit because of that look of scared defiance, not knowing how people might react. That person had more backbone than just about everyone I chatted with today. In fact, it could be said it’s the very definition of courage, to do something despite being afraid. It’s natural there be some defiance.

I suppose that’s what’s bothering me these days. I don’t see defiance as much anymore. I’m not saying defiance is always a good thing – it has it’s dark side like everything else – but in certain circumstances, it’s the right response and can only be graded at that point about whether it’s self-destructive or not. That gets us into whether a lack of defiance is self-destructive.

I suppose you’re screwed if you can’t tell the difference, which I imagine is paralyzing.

Maybe I had my answer after all.

Guanxi.

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For someone with so little linguistic ability – I have references – I am a bit of a language nerd. Every now and then I come across words of different languages that I understand completely.

It’s nice to be able to throw out a word that has a built in concept, like guanxi.

Guanxi in modern practice seems a little bit nosey, but in the definition itself resides the balances. ‘Mutual trust’. ‘balancing of debts by returning of favors’, ‘relationship’s benefits are shared by all’.

Our social networks should all be closer to the theoretical guanxi, in my opinion.

Rewriting Stories of Movie Titles.

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This meme popped up for me today in Facebook, so I decided to do it here. Here are a few selections based on some of my favorite movies.

Contact: The trials and tribulations of attempting to find a lost contact on a moving New York subway.

The Missionary: A Spaniard in 1500s South America is trying to make the sexual position popular.

Good Will Hunting: A documentary on shopping the Goodwill thrift stores in the United States, with hidden treasures and junk mixed randomly together.

I could go on, but… give it a shot yourself, either in the comments, or on your own blog. 🙂

Through Broken Dreams, Again. And Again.

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In the background, my music shifted to an old and familiar song that I hadn’t listened to in some time.

It hit different this time. I hadn’t heard it in years. Maybe even decades. The lyrics are one thing, the delivery is… well… Ruffin. Joe Cocker couldn’t pull it off, and I like Joe Cocker.

As I walk this land of broken dreams
I have visions of many things
But happiness is just an illusion
Filled with sadness and confusion…

“What Becomes of the Broken Hearted”, 1966, Performed by Jimmy Ruffin, written by William Weatherspoon, Paul Riser, and James Dean.

And just like that, I wasn’t working on the novel anymore but suddenly remembering from that lyric Green Day’s “Boulevard of Broken Dreams“:

I walk this empty street
On the Boulevard of Broken Dreams
Where the city sleeps
And I’m the only one, and I walk alone…

“Boulevard of Broken Dreams”, American Idiot (2004), Green Day.

I looked into it. No direct connection whatsoever. Yet it’s a common theme in literature and lyrics, walking through broken dreams, and it gets recycled quite a bit. The theme goes back to the earliest parts of literature, but the text referring to walking through broken dreams in any way probably doesn’t go back as far.

Richard Feynman once spoke about ‘good ideas keep coming back’, an idea of ideas being refined through time, and this is a sexy way to look at things as good ideas keep coming back. Lyrics about walking through broken dreams, however, doesn’t seem like something we would want to repeat – but we do.

Regardless of what the dreams are about in any instance, there’s enough people that can related to walking through broken dreams enough that this is a theme that if we observe outside of time and watch move around us… it’s cyclic.

Why? I’m sure nobody can give an answer to that for everyone.

Is it that we sell children on the notions of things that they cannot achieve in the world we created?

Is it that the carrot is so much more distant than the stick?

I think it’s just that we’re constantly recalibrating our expectations against our reality, however we got them, and that we’re finding somewhere along the way, somehow, we got bullshitted.

And it sucks.

We consistently recognize it.

As a species, we just keep stumbling through boulevards of broken dreams.

The Gravity Well.

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There’s a scene in Oppenheimer where Robert Oppenheimer is askedby Katherine Puening to explain quantum physics.

He responds about our bodies being mostly space, which is true. Over 99% of our bodies are empty space, the rest being the bits of the world we call atoms.

He then goes on to explain that we have just enough matter to allow us to not push through each other. In other words, when we push against each other, our atoms push back on the other person’s atoms enough and our atoms bind to each other enough that we don’t merge into a goopy mass.

It’s true. That same thing happens when you walk on something, the cohesion of our bodies and the cohesion of the objects around us keep us from just becoming goo. This also means that what is below us has to stick together strongly enough that gravity doesn’t allow us in: Concrete, yes, water, no.

Quantum everything has come much further than that, but it gives an idea of the shift in perspective in Physics at that time better than everything else.

Oh, yes. I saw Oppenheimer. It might be also a bit telling that I was thinking about that during what some called a romance scene.

Nonsense.

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I have been busy with nonsense.

When I write that, I’m not saying that what I was doing was unimportant. Other people certainly believed it was important, but to me it was nonsense. Getting stuck in traffic is nonsense. Dealing with bills is nonsense. All of that stuff is pretty much nonsense. It’s the drudgery of life, not too different than our ancestors and even genetic cousins such as the chimpanzee.

They wake up in the morning and it’s all about the fruit. They have to maintain a claim on a tree. Maybe they want a new tree and have to go after some other chimpanzees. Maybe they found the fermented fruit tree and are calling it a weekend. All of that doesn’t just happen, though. The chimpanzees have their own drama to deal with. Some other creatures want to eat them. Sometimes it’s hot and they get itchy nethers. The drudgery of life, the nonsense we put up with so that we can do the things we want to do.

We do what we have to do and through our actions be who we have to be just so we can get to the real business of life. The fun stuff. There’s just no point to drudgery otherwise.

I didn’t always think this way. Growing up, the fun stuff evaporated around age nine and didn’t show back up until about age 17, only to go away again at age 20. Work. Work. Learn about stuff related to work. Work. Work.

There were parts that were fun, but they were few and far between. There were the practical jokes, such as that one time I relocated the stuffed penguins the division had given out. People left them in their offices over the Christmas Break, and I happily relocated them to the cubicle of a retiring engineer who was on a very long vacation.

It took people a few days to meet up with each other and someone to mention that their penguin was missing. People looked, saw their penguin was missing, and it snowballed. Things were getting frantic about stuffed penguins, and I had hidden all of them in that cubicle.

The engineer came back from vacation, and every box he looked in, every drawer – penguins.

Oh, that was great. I’m sure I was suspected, but no one ever accused me because the Great Penguin Kidnapping had no ransom note. It was in fact the Super Secret Temporary Penguin Relocation Program, and it was a stunning success.

That’s life. Working through the Christmas holidays because marketing had sold stuff they hadn’t actually asked a software engineer about was… drudgery. It wasn’t fun. Sure, I liked getting things to work, but it wasn’t fun. It was nights by the old CRT monitor, working on code with a 32 oz cup of coffee next to me.

There were times the drudgery was surprisingly fun, where someone asked you to solve a problem and carte blanche. That could be fun, full of eureka moments, but for the most part…

Drudgery.

For a long time that was what I thought life was. That’s not life. That’s just the crap you have to get through to do the fun stuff.

Suffer the nonsense you must, but don’t forget to live.

Restaurant Types

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The beauty of the restaurant metaphor for how we become who we are is that it has some built-in biases.

Every culture, every geography, comes with it’s own sort of restaurant. There’s the ubiquitous Chinese, Japanese, Italian, Thai and Indian restaurants, to name only a few. There are even American restaurants, with their various shades of American ranging from steakhouses to Vegan spots. You’re unlikely to find avocado toast in a steakhouse, but it’s possible.

Go anywhere on the planet, the food is different. Why? Well, there are different ingredients, different seasonings, and differing people.

Tourism of the palate isn’t for everyone, though. We gravitate to the restaurants we like, and we avoid those we don’t.

What it doesn’t cover – what isn’t covered – are the increasing number of people who don’t fit. Sushi tacos are (hopefully) not a thing. You’d be hard pressed to find a pork biryani in the Middle East. You’d probably be hard pressed to find a beef biryani in India. That’s just ingredients, not their balance and how they are prepared.

There are fusion restaurants – I’m not sure if they’re still trendy or not – and there are changes that happen to foods in different countries.

You might hear about the best ‘Chinese food’ in an area, but is it really Chinese? Probably not. The same holds true of every type of restaurant, and this is an important thing to consider when we reverse that metaphor back to people.

Inelastic Restaurants

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So, like restaurants, our identities evolve through compromise or lack of it. In the end who we are is not defined by our adversities but by how we overcome them.

That’s actually at the very core of evolution.

After all, not all restaurants make it. Not all restaurants last. Not all restaurants are even remembered. Some go extinct, only to be dug up much later if they left some bones in convenient spots.

We all want, at some level, to be remembered. It’s a matter of meaning, that our lives have meaning. And yet, most of us won’t be remembered by anyone other than those we encountered in our short lives, and even then, we are remembered in snapshots of who we were perceived as in the moment.

That snapshot, in turn, helps make them who they are. There are no elastic collisions between humans.