Have You Seen My Deranged Millionaire?

I'm a part-time Girl Friday for a deranged millionaire - trademark John Hodgman - a five-foot 90 lb ex CEO, ex ex ballerina from Verona, in art for business, in conversation for sport, she emotes in rollicking bursts, brainstorms between midnight and two am and has made a career trading money, influence and good ideas with business and cultural professionals.

She freezes at room temperature, relishes rejecting social ritual (Christmas and family dinner) as sentimental (va bene, va bene, above it… I get it) and thanks to her shamanism practice accept routine life guidance from her dead father; she's also swayed by scholarly lectures and George Clooney movies. Technically, she’s a millionaire in both dollars and euro. Together we work on culture project with high profile clients around the world. Sometimes I pick up her nutritional supplements and fix her computer.

We live in New York, she in Manhattan and I in Brooklyn. Following Hurricane Sandy’s brutal pass through the region, there's been a puckish reversal of the norm - my neighborhood is comfortable and safe and hers in Lower Manhattan is not.

I haven’t heard from her since the storm. She routinely emails me in excess of ten times a day so it's a fairly noticeable absence. My hope is that she made it from down to up town, to higher ground, above the most affected areas, etc. Maybe she jumped a plane to Italy before the airports closed.  

But with the uncertainty and because my imagination has a dramatic tinge of late - I'm seeing her floating in a landscape of unearthly darkness, isolation and imposed quiet, maybe its outer space, or somehow she caught a flight to Omaha that had to make an emergency landing somewhere in the great plains. This fantasy is much easier than reality because if she didn’t buy her way out of downtown before the surge, odds are she’s dead. I don’t want seem callous. I said it wasn’t easy.

There's solid subjective, unscientific evidence that the cognitive handicaps of the highest classes - different from those of the more modestly born - unless deliberately mitigated are, in general, and specifically in the case of my boss, extremely debilitating in situations of uncontrollable peril, like super hurricanes.

Deranged millionaires can’t live without electricity. They perish like vampires in the sun. I decline to justify this metaphor beyond the recent passing of Halloween... Downtown has been dark for days. From my roof the skyline looks broken and it's stranger on the ground.

I've seen pedestrians directing traffic at Delancey and Bowery, psychotically amicable tourists hailing cabs through thick mist as I weave across empty lanes on Canal for half a mile heading west surveying damage. I saw trees in: cars, store windows and intersections, and water bubbling out of grates and I imagined the vermin beneath in the foul saltwater brine above the flooded subway tracks. For connection, power, wifi or heating, I saw crowds outside hotels, Starbucks and churches everywhere. 

I haven’t seen the fire damage in Queens or been up to the top of darkened high rises. I've only seen videos of the damage to the Jersey Shore and they're heartbreaking. It’s a real place, The Shore, not just reality show. My dad’s family home in PA was flooded when he was a kid. One of the only surviving photos of him is from a summer vacation to the Jersey Shore. 

I've looked, but I still haven’t seen my deranged millionaire.

Whether you’re across the country or in an apartment above 42^nd street, where it’s nearly business as usual, this October surprise has affected physical and digital landscapes, public spaces, and internal landscapes. Kids who've spent this Halloween out of school, trapped indoors without power, will remember this year.

This is complex time of destruction and compassion in its face, both itself and something near its opposite like the way Alien is a perfectly beautiful horror movie or back when Ann Pasternak staged Waiting for Godot in New Orleans after Katrina. 

No one wants to make 9/11 or Katrina comparisons but they should (sensitively). There’s a lot to compare. This region is leaking pain, empathy and strength into the online environment in text, photos, sound and video – as surely as floods washed piers into the sea and fires added heat to the atmosphere. Local public radio has been inundated with stories of compassion, gratitude, fortitude, and resilience – the kind you can hear. 

If you’re reading this, you’re probably doing alright (aces!) but a great many other places and people aren’t, like my boss, who is currently floating in a starry void. This is a joke, obviously, one that isn't so different from the routine minor deflections, obfuscations and avoidances of normal life. I’m practiced at this. Let’s be honest, I work for my millionaire for a reason. My creativity, rationality and demand for efficiency complements her hyper competitive aggression and confidence.

Maybe this isn’t your tragedy. Or perhaps you’re focused on making the 2-3 hour commute to keep your job in a tough economy. Maybe you’re drinking all of the rubbing alcohol in the house or out volunteering at every free moment, donating money and blood and plasma and all of your humanness to make things better.

Or maybe you’re living through this without giving it a thought or a feeling. And that's sad. Because it’s real, physically, in the digital world and the memories and muscles of people struggling.

Devastation is an invitation to think and feel – something, anything – real things. For instance, I’ve used this time not only to consider the social staircase of cognitive handicaps and my enduring love for the X-Files (for measured pacing, respect for people and the paranormal, for asking questions thoughtfully and answering tentatively) but also to acknowledge that this may be the first time in over two years of working together that I’ve seen my boss as a person, vulnerable, in an imagined gravitationally anomalous rift with coruscating light, or trapped without electricity in her apartment.

There are a lot of bizarre hurdles to nontraditional employment, more complicated than tax forms and declaration of income. The whole thing is tedious and unwritten. It's been simpler to discount my boss as untouchable, bizarre, two-dimensional human-like woman but she's a person, whole and complete, whom I've chosen to work with.

It may be selfish but I don't think it's a bad idea to show respect for grave situation through sincere introspection. Wherever you are, I say go at a problem, have a tough conversation, read a book you’re afraid of, do something you’ve wanted to do for a while and write about it, act improper and see how you feel, take pause, because sticking our heads up in the clouds or down in the dirt is darn useful.

And, if while your head is up or down, you happen to see my deranged millionaire, please drop me a line.

fluxcracker

This is a fluxcracker. It is made of the milky, muddy stuff of fantasy. It comes from a store that has everything you want and nothing you don’t.

I imagined the store a long time ago during a [1.] superficial nighttime daydream.

In middle school I didn’t have much of a fantasy life. I still don’t, when I’m not dreaming. One night when I was twelve or thirteen, in bed before falling asleep, somehow free of the scholastic, introspective and hormonal curiosities that accompanied those days, I had a strange, shallow fantasy.

The ordinary nighttime thoughts I allowed myself back then were deeply practical, i.e. planning what level of deviance I could comfortably get away with that week or priming myself to beat the pants off the rest of my soccer team (except for that one girl) in our next long distance run. For whatever reason, that night, I imagined, wished for, a store that was just for me; it would appear behind the wall of my room opposite my bed and would have everything I wanted and nothing I didn’t.

Initially my store was filled with clothes, book bags and wonderful Japanese and Korean-imported mechanical pencils and pens – and I didn’t stop at me – I imagined everyone had his or her own store. The stores were small, one room, because they were person-specific, appearing silently beyond walls stared at from bed in the stretched minutes between day and night.

The idea was immensely practical and absolutely impossible, and lying there I felt flush with the sweetness of vanity and the low, deep pleasure of knowing: were this simple, impossible thing possible, life would be easier and happier for everyone (my age and older too).

Eventually I considered the sci-fi and alternate make-believe means by which this room could be, and more interestingly I imagined how the room would come to know what it knew, how it would know regardless of what I consciously knew, and why it filled itself with what it did – why I wanted what I wanted.

If I could’ve left the room alone, maybe it would’ve wandered itself into my fiction in some way – not that it’s a particularly clever or profound invention but, novel, for me, so I returned to it, asking too many questions and eventually running into the unquantifiable complications of [2.] special, general and human relativity.

The problem with the room is that it’s biased toward a holistic view of people and the world, when in reality nothing is static and everything has moving parts. There is no objective preferential vantage point for measuring and explaining personhood, the mysteries and whys underneath our identities and desires.

Of course, pragmatically, we don’t think like this. We tell our stories. We own our memories and organize them routinely and creatively into shapes that we recognize as ourselves. They’re reconstituted in a thousand dotted lines in a zillion moods for an unknowable number of reasons.

Living for a certain length of time, if one looks closely enough, cognitive dissonance and inexplicable contradictions can be found in our minds and hearts.

Some people feel steadier than others, than I do. Me, different worlds feel one conviction away from where I plant my feet and I often feel capable at any moment of convincing myself of extreme or bizarre truths – but those untroubled by extra-dimensional spaces or time dilation, less incised by gaps between perception and cognition, undismayed by the messy braiding of instinct and free will, still feel an occasional unsteadiness, a shimmer on the hard lines of facts. The room would not be the same for most at 13 and 35, which is at least a glimmer of a shimmer.

I know more now than I did in middle school. We know more than any other human civilization in history but we’re uncertain what this means or what to do with our erratically and rapidly increasing knowledge.

But we choose. As individuals, even if we don’t know what’s in the room, it’s full of our things. Things we like.

[3.] The French: j’ai craqué or j’ai craqué sur means something like: I really liked it! It killed me! I was so into it!

I didn’t hear this expression when I lived in Paris after college, either my French friends were lingua-purists (they’re French) and not fond of the colloquialism or I just wasn’t listening. Now, when I listen to France Culture podcasts, I hear it ten times in twenty minutes.

The verb, craquer, is traditionally used to describe creaking floorboards or snapping tree branches. I like how similar it sounds to crack or cracker, to English-speaking ears, and I like that it means: to like a lot, to an overpowering degree.

I like that however massive our knowledge, whichever direction consensus sways on mind-body-spirit issues, neuroscientists, philosophers, theologians – whoever throws a hat into the ring and emerges fist raised – I like the idea that the ground beneath my feet is unstable, that my room is out there in the land of just-before-dreams continuing to change.

Is there hope we’ll ever figure things out, really, that we’ll quantify our chaotic lives? Answer impartially and undeniably why the store with everything and nothing is filled with what it is? Who knows.

Maybe change (flux) is the only real truth and we should crack on it – continue to crack into it and enjoy what we find.

[4.] A fluxcracker:

is always delicious – whether it tastes like strawberry revenge or if it starts a melody playing in my head.

Amid all of the uncertainty in the world it can be a great pleasure to find what we like, even if it’s in an imagined place. The idea of cracking on a fluxcracker is a comfort to me, even if it’s not real.

What I like most of all is that the longer we live the more opportunities we have to keep cracking, to find real answers to real problems. The fluxcracker is a portable piece of the room I can bring along with me.

A math teacher at my high school had a poster, black on white, which read something like:

[1.] Superficial Understanding

[2.] Confusion

[3.] Deeper Understanding

[4.] Knowledge

Meaning, you learn something, you learn further and get confused, if you stick with it a more meaningful understanding emerges, and then you can say you know a thing.

This story here goes: imagination, complication, decision, tentative understanding - probably to be followed by continued confusion. 

I think, with math maybe the story can stop, but in life you may need a superficial fantasy or two. The end. For now.

Dodging the Craft

This piece was originally published at Thought Catalog, here.  Thanks, Thought Catalog!

Craft Fairs. Artisanal markets. Bazaars. Sometimes they’re distanced, seasonal or annual, but they can be as prevalent as the littered, mossy squares of city-kept greenery standing distinctly brown and leafy in grey sidewalk rivers – every corner or so, several to a block in some neighborhoods.

They have healing, kinetic, grass-roots brands, taunting, tough-yet-inclusive female empowerment slogan-sounding names, or luxuriate smugly in the throwback simplicity of their “flea” or “flea market” identities. Craft[1] is serious in Brooklyn. It’s the craft capital of the state, rivaled in the U.S. by only a small number of DIY crazed cities: Berkeley, CA, Austin, TX, Portland, OR, Portsmouth, RI and a few others.

I’m what would be described as craft-y, in the recreational activity sense and no other. I also prefer to buy my clothing (not undergarments or socks), books, music, furniture, appliances, bikes, etc. second hand, certified pre-owned by a person, the street or a thrift shop clerk. I have an Etsy page. I know from experience that having a constructive practice, building something with your hands and brain, participating in commerce, showcasing a skill you enjoy and have worked hard to acquire, are activities with high feel-good returns. But here in NYC, in 2012, I avoid the borough’s fairs, fleas, holiday marts and warehouse artisan co-ops like they are chasing me with a knife. My spray paint, x-acto and hot glue gun collect dust in the closet.

My thoughts on craft are at best cynical and glum and at worst aggressively depressing to myself and to a flourishing consumer trend with favorable standing in the zeitgeist.

In part, my negative feelings about craft are that it's yuppie and elitist, and sells itself as exactly the opposite to the yuppie and elite (through claims of authenticity, uniqueness or connection to a simpler age lost to the modernized majority) and although I truly believe that specialized, creative products are and will be essential to the US economy, at least domestically – and that the merch hawked in these spaces falls under this heading – the DIY mentality doesn't always, or often, produce better or vital goods and services. It's a supportive, self-congratulatory, free-love market with an assumption of demand that surpasses, or soon will, even the most gratuitous niche luxury product desires of the chronically financially surplus-ed.

The cottage economy can be empowering, which is good.

Democratizing business and entrepreneurship provides open access to learning experiences perhaps inaccessible through alternate means. Self-directed, acute thinking of the kind required to design and sell something is one of many solid ways to add dimensions to our understanding and augment confidence and creativity in practical ways.

What if anything real, novel or significant, is learned in college or university business courses that cannot be learned better, quicker through experience? Art in art classes too. Overwhelmingly I think answers to these questions fall between nothing at all very little – but having also avoided these classrooms like the walls themselves thirsted for my blood and brains, I have to admit this conclusion is anecdotal.

Although I’d rate taking adult ed advanced basket-weaving or selling hemp dream-catchers dyed in the colors of the sunset at a waterfront market far above any business management or communications course (except for the networking benefits) and though I can, if properly prepared, find the good in a superbadass rebel flea organized by a consortium of lesbian blogs or the supergranola green deal sponsored by the five leading donors to MoMA’s PS1, there's a big glass – not glass – brick, a heavy, mortared ceiling on my appreciation for the trend as a whole.

It’s not just the synthetic demand, the nonessential, almost reactionary character of the market sector, or the frequently subpar, overpriced product. Sell! Buy! Enjoy your 10$ home-bottled elderberry and lime soda.

It’s not that the community is hip and preachy. This repulses me, but it’s not that either. Communities are good. In the big bad world, they serve individual members well and, with notable exceptions, have negligible impact on the rest of us; if the community is nonviolent and non-supremacist the potential for negative impact drops to zero. 

It’s not even the insular misperception that these products are healthier, less wasteful, more environmentally and socially responsible than larger-provider alternatives. Sure, they can be, but this artisanal stuff isn’t subject to the same standards of regulated (socially or bureaucratically) industry; however flawed the system, when Apple buys parts from a Chinese factory that employs child laborers it’s a global story. If the woman who sells repurposed Indian sari apparel uses dyes sourced from warlord-controlled territory in Africa, or simply purchases materials from a vendor that over-packages and ships inefficiently, no one, perhaps even the woman, may ever know.

I run from craft like I’d run from the draft[2] because I think it’s a waste – a sad, scary waste.

Here’s my question, craft lovers and leaders:

If we’re spending our time digging through bins of vintage NYC subway maps set in frames of period postage stamps and trading chunks of our disposable cash to take these things home and hang them on our walls… what are we not doing?

Whoever we are, crafters, if we are the yuppie elite, if we’re art-y people or idea men or women, rich or poor, talented or not, if we defy categorization, it appears we can convince society in large numbers, ourselves among them, of the essentiality of craft and can sell it as better, healthier, hipper, smarter, branding it with an identity that calls different types of people to act, spend their money and time. If we can do this, can we get different types of people to not actively hate one another? To combat intransigence, mollify fears that lead to blindness and violence, to be open – eyes, ears and minds – to have faith in ourselves and our future? 

Something less grossly ambitious? If we could get middle school kids acting even slightly more human, that’d be great – make curiosity cool and punditry un-cool, provide safe, public space for balanced discussion of divisive issues – any of that would be great. Personally, I’d really like to see boys and girls trading cards with scientists on them rather than baseball players or Pokemon. Start small.

Craft isn’t a pernicious trend[3] but a reminder of undelivered promise. Not (I don’t think) a first or even a conscious step in the right direction. When I feel heartless, for not practicing my love of making things and forsaking a sincere appreciation for artisanal traditions passed down through generations I remind myself that humanity is creative and productive by nature and that these practices will endure, but we can do better, be better, bestow our cultural benediction on a worthier name.

---

[1] Craft: boutique production, DIY driven, artful artisanship, repurposed, green, for sale by owner, hand drawn, homemade, tie-died, micro-economic, micro-brewed… made by a staff of under three and marketed as such.

[2] The craft/draft comparison isn’t incidental to the rhyme. I think there’s something there. Obviously, the consequences of the former aren’t as severe (wrinkled noses and mocking of your carbon footprint) as imprisonment and related concerns are less grave than life death and the geopolitical fallout of armed conflict but they’re both supposed to be these democratizing things that in reality have murky short and long term material and immaterial consequences.

[3] I’m sure we’d miss it were it to be replaced by something repressive, hateful, exclusionary, etc.

Anything you can do ... I may or may not be able to do better

-->

Abby Wambach, from ESPN The Magazine's 2012 Body Issue.

Just wait. The moralizing character of this introductory note will be succeeded by a serious discussion of the merits of hypothetical men striking hypothetical women.  

Note: it’s never okay to abuse those weaker than you, person-to-person or in groups. Work hard, leverage strength, celebrate genius, never think a charitable thought in your life (which maybe impossible1) but don’t cruelly exploit the disprivileged or disadvantaged: mental, physical or social 2.

Sports and other controlled competitive arenas may be the exceptions. During the Olympics global audiences gather to watch the triumph and complete physical and psychological destruction, objectification and commodification of both men and women of all colors and sizes, who ego bruise and in-play abuse one another and are judged as competitors and as men and women, by separate standards.

Olympic competitors accomplish feats comparable in outlandishness to asking us normal people to liquefy nitrogen from the air to use as fuel for DIY rockets to the moon. Half of these athletes (of all people) are women and in the case of Olympians, women who would kick our normal ass.

It's easy to look to boxing for evidence. These women hit for a living and in 2012, in the games for the first time, are bringing more than everything they have to the fight - but let’s go to the runners first. We’ve all seen Lolo Jones and Jessica Ennis’ stomachs because track outfits seem to be getting smaller and smaller, regardless, you’d break your hand on that iron. If you, Norm or Norma Normal, crossed U.S. goalkeeper and divisive social media figure Hope Solo she’d stare you down, you’d wet yourself and she’d probably tweet photos. The women of the Olympic Gymnastics team may be 90 lb teenagers but they’re lightning-quick and could critically bruise you before you got near their tiny frames. And unless you’re an NFL lineman like lifter Holley Mangold’s brother, she or teammate Sarah Robles would, flatly, pulverize you3. Picking a fight with any of these athletes would be utterly boneheaded masochism once removed but one shouldn’t be prohibited from doing so based on gender, genetic typicality or primary or secondary sexual characteristics.

Fortunately, Olympic athletes (probably) don’t want to fight you. Who knows what they want? Outside of something heavy around their necks. Maybe they want shiny hair? In an ad endorsing Pantene, swimmer Natalie Coughlin attests: “I want to win as an athlete and shine as a woman.” Or, maybe they want to be good parents, get their kids to eat healthy yogurt, like Lashinda Demus. It’s fair to say these folks want to be judged in competition and out without prejudice, based on their personal merits and flaws.

Olympians deserve this, so do normal people.

When we’re able to consider objectifying, idolizing or slugging people without bias, it’ll be a convincing indicator we’ve overcome the sexually and gender motivated prejudices that are among the most widespread and persistent of our species.

Imagine you’re watching a movie…

It’s jazz age America. Three fellas are out for a cruise with one insufferable dame. They’re exasperated. She’s loose, tight (drunk), abrasive and aggressively imbecilic. Her utterances are unbearable to the other characters and viewer alike. The guys clench their jaws, roll their eyes and visibly redden. She exits the car. Grunts and gender-based insults ping through the cab and whip through the air as the men drive away. It’s as painful to listen as the noise from her drunken lips.

Replay the scene with four men, one of them as drunken and repellent as the woman was previously. At the end of this second car ride one of the three sober passengers turns and punches the offending man in the teeth. He sees stars and hears chirping birds. And then, smiles. Laughter. All around. They (and the viewers) are comfortable with it. With this punishment delivered, everybody’s friends again. The punch is the refresh button. Just the possibility of physical release reduces tensions in the car. But with the female passenger that potential is absent. The refresh button is missing from the keyboard. If you haven’t known the cruel injustice of typing with an absent key, you don’t want to.

For the most part in this country we’ve accorded at least nominal mental equality to individuals without reference to biology: sex, race, physical ability/disability, etc. It’s unlikely, illegal and unpopular for an individual to be denied access to a field because of what he or she is perceived to be.

Our physical biases seem to be stickier. For good reasons. But our unequal and sometimes bizarre notions about what men and women can and should physically do - like which skulls can bash which others into walls - are prejudicial and unfair 4. There's a lot of interesting cultural baggage carried in our opinions about who can hit whom. In general, men hitting men is brutish, immature and normal and female on female violence is largely ignored, except in choreographed sexual pantomime on film, to varying effect. Rationally not hitting women because of what they are is as absurd a practice as beating them because they’re women. So why don’t we? Why don’t men hit women?

Because it’s wrong. With innocent, effortless righteousness we feel it to be barbaric and immoral. The problem is that rote convictions like this don't necessarily or often serve our best interests. 

Human culture has done a lot to make things difficult between the sexes but nature has certainly helped. Among the species on this planet that have evolved to reproduce sexually, with few mammalian exceptions, the group we call male is physically more powerful than ditto the female. Explanations for this can be contentious even when narrowed to the phenotypes of our own species. Most research on the subject (sexual dimorphism) features the idea that competition for mates over time has favored bigger, stronger males, with footnotes referring to physical environment and social behavior, namely offspring care.

It’s a fine theory, if incomplete. Actually, it’s closer to what physicists call an effective theory, meaning: experimentally and anecdotally verifiable, within a restricted range of parameters. Adjacent and opposing explanations clutter the field and going over them would be a huge expense of energy. Better to look carefully at the big picture. Here’s what we know:

-        Our planet’s solution for terrestrial vertebrate life is one of infinite possibilities.

-        Having two sexes is advantageous and common because in a dynamic, frequently hostile world, allowing two organisms to combine DNA increases genetic diversity and the speed with which useful traits can proliferate.

-        Perpetuation of the species and the family relies on sexual intercourse.

-        Hormones drive the reproductive instinct; hormones are potent but temperamental and nature doubles up in a variety of complex chemical and physical ways.

-        Sexually reproducing species gestate their young.

-        Depending on environment gestation along with fundamental survival needs results in morphological and behavioral divergence between the sexes.

-        In the case of human beings both sexes have developed consciousness and conscience.

Here’s the point:

As complicated as biological systems are, theoretically, there isn’t anything intrinsic to the struggle to survive and thrive that obliges the group with the testes to be strong, aggressive and dominant and the group with the ovaries to be weaker, protective and submissive. The tendency to see a reality mandate in observed conditions and draw boxes around categories that are exaggerated in common opinions, forms the backdrop for our judgments and biases. Gifted with consciousness, we can either content ourselves with partial truths or attempt to see the boundaries of the beliefs that confine us.

Men run faster, jump higher and punch harder – and it’s a damn shame.

In a sybaritic fantasy, one can imagine the history that led to absurd and repressive gender roles never taking place or fading into the abyss of nonexistence, as inane and unreal to the humans of this fantasy world as another history would be to us. In a world like this there’d be no need for feminism. We wouldn’t be forced to waste time teaching tolerance, litigating sexual harassment lawsuits, campaigning for suffrage, marriage and property rights, or learning to objectify men and women equally – tedious, time consuming activities, the lot. We’d be free to hit (or hopefully not hit) anyone we like!

It would be simple to rest in pieces at the phenotypic differences between men and women, to contend something like: as one group has a physical advantage over the other, there will always be inequality. But that’s hollow and lazy and downright un-American. We don’t rest on assumptions, we challenge, we innovate, we integrate and we try for better futures. Go USA.

It would also be easy – accepting that the range of physiques displayed during the Olympics expose and negate ideas about standard male and female bodies and abilities – to advocate simply for the evaluation of the hitability of a person purely relativistically, on a case-by-case basis.

It’s not enough to rationalize during a hypothetical friendly (or not) bar tussle that it’s okay to hit that particular woman because she’s a professional boxer. We should try to ask ourselves: why, categorically, we didn’t think it was okay to do so in the first place5 and refine our understanding by not relying on received ideas. 

There are some annals of our history we should be proud of, stories we should celebrate often and at top voice, and others we can use as cautionary tales. Part of American culture is an unmitigated respect for individual freedom – even in our combative political present. If we respect this freedom, we have an obligation to evolve our understanding of the beliefs that may limit it.

It's a great challenge living in a time and place with a storied support for personal liberty and responsibility. It’s also great that some of our very different looking men and women kick ass at a lot of sports.

A caption taken from the NBC Olympics home page on August 2^nd read: “Americans reminded the world they were America by being all American.” Translation: individual Americans remind the American people as a group of their shared values by displaying those values fully. No one benefits from the emotional castration of boys and girls who don’t fit into traditional definitions of males and females. It's equally harmful pigeonhole or prejudge professional athletes who look a certain way or play a particular sport.

As a younger, heterogeneous, democratic nation this commitment to allowing individuality to flourish and the shared, hopeful notion that all obstacles are surmountable, that all deleterious beliefs reversible, is something woven into our identity. An awareness of our diverse sameness as a species can be a strength in creating a better environment for individuals and groups of people.

Still of Betty Hutton and Howard Keel singing "Anything You Can Do" from MGM's 1950 film Annie Get Your Gun. For full video, click here.

---

1 Maybe impossible, but where’s the made-for-TV movie? Proposed title: An Uncharitable Mind.

2 Ancillary note: without advocating violence of any kind, if we must aggress, we must be open to expressing equal malice toward all.

3 Weightlifting is actually a great microcosphere this whole phenomenon. A weightlifter can be 5’2” 120lbs or 5’10 300lbs.

4 If you are one who’s fairness assessments are include only relevant body metrics and abilities, bless you – wait, do you exist?

5 Remembering that violence is deplorable. Wink.

killing the infinite: introduction/physical

Yayoi Kusama's: Aftermath of Obliteration of Eternity.

Most of us are looking for truth with a capital T. Scientists, mathematicians, religious scholars and practitioners, philosophers professional and recreational examine the world physically, theoretically, socially and psychically, with at times pathological fervor, on different scales with different tools, adding to the cumulative, imperfect mass of human knowledge.

Our truths[i] define reality, finding them changes our worlds and reaffirming them keeps them in orbit. Truths are the touch points in our personal narratives and support everything we’ve ever been proud of, ever loved or had faith in. Truths help us tell the story of where we’ve been and where we’ll go next, as individuals and a species. Medical truths keep us safe and healthy. With conviction, we look to the heavens and feel heavy with grace, we predict electron orbitals and describe celestial mechanics. Truth can be powerfully seductive and equally repulsive.

It’s impractical to deny truth. Even firm relativists, who refute the existence of all but subjective truth, would be pained to dispute that humans need water to survive and live in groups, and that when you’ve got two apples and another two fall on your head, you have four. A religious fundamentalist may pronounce a lack of faith in certain scientific statutes but it’s likely both he and the relativist go to the hospital when injured, drive in cars over bridges, fly in planes 30,000 ft above the ground and use cell phones that bounce signals off orbiting satellites.1

What objective truth is, whether or not we can know it, and how, is likely an unanswerable epistemological quandary with a phantasmagoria of distracting arguments, distracting, in this case, from the much more exciting premise that we all choose our truth. Selection of truth limits reality. Possibility is superseded by the constraints of a singular life. Although we have great potential for change and growth, we bind ourselves, accept silent impediments and actively self-limit.

David Foster Wallace, in a speech delivered to the 05’ graduating class at Kenyon College, arguably the most self-reflectively didactic of his published works, said:

The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.

Because here's something else that's true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.

It’s a beautiful thing, consistent with his genius, that DFW chose on this panoramic, emotionally illimitable setting to remind these young people, each a distinct patchwork of learning and ignorance and old enough to know it, of the power of choice in prescribing reality and to be aware of the limiting effects of knowing and unconscious decisions.

Foster Wallace’s commencement speech refers mainly to normative social and psychological beliefs, but it seems just, facing the gargantuan range of human behavior: Tibetan contemplatives, Nazis, Gurus and followers, luddites, furries, child geniuses, technophile hackers who consume Mountain Dew in 12oz breaths between screen time, bouts of polyphasic sleep and the practice of Jediism… It seems just, as what can be known, felt and produced by human beings approaches infinity, that we ask questions about limits. How do most of us negotiate lives within a narrow standard deviation of the typical? What limits us?

Our regression to a behavioral mean is a complex interconnected process that involves the physical world, body, brain, mind and groups of minds.

All of the matter and energy we see and measure is subject to physical laws, with solid Wikipedia articles, and (if you’ve got problems with the standard model or want to make arguments involving special relativity or divine providence, please, write) the upshot is that these essential limiting forces act on all of us and everything we know, and, an inert variable is a constant, overlookable in a discussion of the borders of human potential.

Our terrestrial environment, the geological, thermal, chemical, topographical and atmospheric conditions of the planet we live on, presents barriers, dotted lines around our lives. Physical obstructions allowed for phenotypic phylogenesis, the development of different languages and myriad cultural distinctions. But physical limits were more present in the past. It would seem from sustained cross-cultural observation that human history is increasingly a narrative of a species reshaping its environment to suit its needs. Ancient peoples journeyed across vast oceans in wooden canoes, domesticated animals and carved niches in inhospitable places.

Today, telephones, radios, air travel and the internet have mitigated the effects of physical boundaries, but perhaps not as comprehensively as we’d imagine. A research study conducted by Samuel Arbesman for The Atlantic Cities in collaboration with MIT and AT&T suggests (via analysis of multiple points of connectedness: communication, movement, regional lexical and cultural features) that to a noticeable degree our geography continues to restrain us. Arbesman writes: “Despite all the technology at our disposal, in many ways we are still products of place.”

Being a product of place means that where we live, despite superhighways and supersonic jets, puts fairly solid walls around the cultural package that includes our given language, ethics, pastimes, the food we eat, the sights, sounds and smells that remain in our memories and constitute reality.

Language is one of the most significant cultural bequests. Although we think of language, particularly written language, as a uniquely human development, evolutionary biologist Mark Changizi, pulling from evidence presented in his books The Visual Revolution and Harnessed argues that:

Writing was culturally selected to look in fundamental respects like nature, just the look our evolutionarily illiterate visual system is highly competent at processing. Writing doesn't have a brain instinct so much as a nature instinct.

Changizi believes the same is true of music, that both are sourced from the natural world, that by harnessing instinctual responses to sights and sounds found in nature, human culture has, in essence, preempted evolution. We’ve developed tools that exploit our biology, expanding our cognitive abilities, allowing us to reshape our surroundings and forget the source of the written symbols and evocative melodies we fill our days with.

It’s not surprising that we’d forget. The truth is hidden in the past. We remember and study this phenomenon perhaps only because we write – a behavior performed as it is because we inhabit the bodies we do.

* Want to keep reading? Continue with killing the infinite part 2: corporeal.

---

[i] True: in accordance with transcendent or empirical reality.

1 Alternately, a physicist might turn the spiritual for assistance solving an equation.

killing the infinite: corporeal

Yayoi Kusama's: Aftermath of Obliteration of Eternity.

Humans are terrestrial creatures that breathe earth’s atmosphere and eat its flora and fauna, we reproduce sexually, we have forward-facing eyes, heads, shoulders, knees and toes. We’re born into this form and we spend our earthly lives in a single body.

It’s bizarre, if you think about it – the development of our form can be traced through variations and adaptations in living phylogenic neighbors and the fossil record but it’s equally novel for each new soul born into it. Perhaps this is why when we inhale certain naturally occurring chemicals we end up having extended discussions about what we’d do if we had wings or tails, or staring incredulously, and repeating: “Man, my hands are crazy! Look at them. Look at my hands!!” Some of us think this way without chemical assistance.

Our bodies, essentially dictated by our genomic structure, restrict us. For the moment, the trippy, sci fi medical tech that could change this is out of reach for most of us. Here, rhetorically, genes are the laws of physics for the body: constant elements of the algorithm describing human limits. We can augment genetic limits with reductive thinking about anatomy. It’s easy to oversimplify bodies. But we shouldn’t.

Definitions of normality vary across cultures and change over time – a lesser documented, quicker, social analog of anatomical evolution. Most anatomical categories are arbitrary constructions, difficult to quantify when looked at closely. Even designations as seemingly fundamental as male and female become less distinct2 if broken down into measurable parts. Categories are constructed. We are not the Vitruvian Man. Get out of here, Hugh Jackman. You’re messing mup y point.3

Stridency over anatomical divisions is overtly tendentious – and limiting – in the face of two previously mentioned conditions: new technologies and our inclination to reshape our environments and ourselves. We’ve overcome our illiterate visual systems, we live with cerebral shunts and pins in our femurs, and futurists like Ray Kurzweil believe that advanced technologies will soon be integrated so completely with biology that the next stage of human evolution will occur in tandem with machines and machine intelligence. Kurzweil’s beliefs are considered extreme, most colleagues express doubt about his reasoning vectors and/or deterministic conclusions but the man’s an undeniable genius, a sort of prophet, and not entirely unconvincing for those willing to consider the uncomfortable.

Many are unwilling and this is troublesome. Individuals who talk about AI, singularities, nanotechnology and off-planet colonies are called eccentrics and heckled, to their faces sometimes. Environmentalism is easy. Preserve our planet. Sustain human intelligence, as it is, the dominant form of intelligence on our world. Don’t think too closely about the idea that the physical form of our bodies is neither stable nor definitive. Meet speculation with truculence.

Bodies change slowly, technology could accelerate the process, but consciousness (of our bodies and ourselves) can be altered in as quickly as one moment flowing into the next. Through continuous endogenous and exogenous mind-body feedback, consciousness develops in the body, one body, born in one place and time, and nests in the brain. 

*Want to keep reading? Continue with, killing the infinite part 3: neurological

_____

2 Alice Dreger is the preeminent authority here, and very convincing, read this or check out her TED talk.

3 I chose Mr. Jackman because the Vitruvian Man is a man, and in my experience, the Broadway Wolverine seems to appeal (greatly) to most groups physically attracted to men.