Half Awake

It seems like June is a bad month for blogging. I’ve been busy with conference travel, and an office move that brought me into this shiny white new building:

(artist’s rendition).

Now that things are settling in, I’m hoping to resume my occasional posting sometime soon.

Things that Do Not Matter:

• Family, if they Control or Demean you
• Calories
• Wasted Time, if you choose to waste it
• Nouns, in the absence of verbs
• Haters (more…)

Things that Matter:

• People
• Friends, especially if they are Family
• Trying
• Coffee
• The People who you Run into after many years, for whom it seems like no Time has passed (more…)

Jessica Valenti opened her talk tonight by asking the feminists in the audience to raise their hands, and I froze.  I take the classes, I read the books, I try to monitor the research, and I obsess over the blogs.  I know what a feminist looks like.  I’m a feminist.

But I didn’t raise my hand. 

Initially I figured that her question had caught me off guard, and I just hadn’t reacted quickly enough.  That seemed like a proper excuse.  But I don’t think Jessica, the Executive Editor of Feministing.com, and author of Full Frontal Feminism, would let me get away with that.  I don’t think I should let myself get away with it. 

I kept my hand down because I was embarassed.  It’s the same reason that I’m careful not to talk about Feminist Studies courses with most people.   I get sick of hearing “Why are you taking that ?”, or of pretending to ignore the wisecracks about how I must be trying to get laid.  When I get that response, my stomach shrinks, my neck goes frigid, and I find myself backpedalling, and explaining why I find value in learning about giving everyone equal rights, opportunities, and control of their bodies.  I’ve conditioned myself into avoiding talking about a large part of my interests, just to avoid the haters and the stereotypes.

FUNK THAT.  I’m sitting at my computer, raising my hand right now.  And I’m not going to back down next time someone asks me if I’m a feminist.

A couple weeks after I wrote a post about my lack of swearing, South Passadena became the first city to sponsor a no-cussing week (no causation implied there). The initiative, conceived by a local 14 y.o. boy, has temporarily derailed my plans to start swearing more. Interestingly, the photo accompanying the story is of someone flipping the reader off.

“… voters are finally focused on who they think will be the best commander-in-chief…

… Now that senator McCain is clearly the nominee, democratic voters are taking their decision very seriously…”

- Hillary Clinton on Today, this morning

It’s a bit tiring to hear everyone (McCain, Clinton, Obama, the media, everyone) constantly explain why people voted for who they voted for. I believe many people have unpredictable reasons for voting the way they do, and to say that they voted for the candidate they did for a particular reason trivializes the complex set of issues underlying these elections. Furthermore, statements like this seem to imply that before, voters were not focused on who will be the best C.I.C., or taking their decision seriously. This isn’t directed in particular at Senator Clinton, rather I’m just bored of seeing this filter constantly applied to election results.

I know that candidates have to do this - it’s to their advantage to interpret their success as a portent of something larger, and then to project that interpretation onto our monitors and our brains.

But the media doesn’t have to do it (do they?). They don’t have to interpret every single voting block’s majority as a swing for a particular reason. When CNN tells me that voters chose experience over change yesterday in Texas and Ohio, I don’t want to believe them. It may be true that Clinton is correlated with experience, and Obama is correlated with change, but that doesn’t mean that votes for one or the other correlate the same way; and if they do correlate that way, there’s no way to deconvolute that from the affect of the media. Does this make sense?

Anyways, I’m often a big fan of controversy, so I’m not unhappy to see the nomination process carry on a bit longer.

The conversation usually goes like this:

Friend: Wow. Did you hear the way so-and-so cursed me out back there? That was pretty bad.

Me: Yeah he sounded pissed.

Friend: Nobody’s ever spoken to me like that in my life, and I think I’m sort of sensitive to it since I don’t like to curse.

Me: I know what you mean - I don’t ever swear.

Friend: Yeah, I never swear either.

Me: No, I mean, I can count the number of swears I’ve said out loud in my entire life on one hand.

Friend: Yeah me… Wait what? Oh… What…? wow.

A post Dan put up about swearing has been on my mind for several months now. I was recently reminded of it when the topic of swearing on blogs came up here. I like learning about why swears are considered swears, because I don’t swear, but I don’t know why.

Huh?

It feels awkward that I know this about myself, or that I have such an internal track record. I recognize that the words I have grown to count as swears are somewhat arbitrary (the ones I can think of start with f, a, s, h, b, and sometimes d). Avoiding these words can be hard; I remember dreading English classes where we read books out loud, because there was always a possibility that I would have to either break my streak or feign a coma. Somehow I manage to avoid typing these words explicitly (though copy/pasting them feels OK), but I admit that it feels strange when I type words like assist, as if I have to type them really quickly without pausing in the middle.

The silly part is that, like the children and teens we’re ostensibly trying to protect by censoring these words, I think swears all the time. Beyond that, I have no problem hearing them! They can often be best way to express yourself, and I sometimes find myself wishing I could use them (I can use them of course, but I’ve built up a mental hurdle about it). In the past few years I’ve resorted to using the cheat-words that often serve as swear replacements (e.g. “That’s freaking awesome”).

I’m not sure when I created this rule for myself. Obviously swearing was always discouraged at home and school. I do have one memory from my childhood of my younger brother telling my mother that I had said a swear (when I had not actually done so) and getting punished for it. The injustice of the situation was so infuriating, because not only had I not committed the crime in question — I had never sworn at all!

Occasionally I think I should just go into a room an swear my lungs out, just to get over the hurdle. I honestly don’t know why I haven’t done that.

[For completeness, most of the situations where I swore came at times when I was inadvertently (as in, without thinking) parroting something that someone near me said.]

Last week I had an eye exam and got my new lens prescription filled. I decided to reuse my old frames to save a bit on the new glasses. The woman who sells the frames and lenses was pushy and irrational as usual. For example, consider this exchange where we discussed the anti-reflective coating for my lenses (the woman’s name is Pat):

Pat: Ok, so you can either get the anti-reflective coat put on my the manufacturer, or you can get ours.

Me: Oh ok. What’s the difference?

Pat: They are totally the same.

Me: I see. Is there a cost difference?

Pat: Oh, well ours is just $8 more.

Me: Well, since they’re the same, I guess I’ll go for the cheaper one from the manufacturer.

Pat: … but the warranty on ours is better.

Me: Huh? Howso?

Pat: Yeah. It’s just better.

Me: That’s alright, I’ll go with the one from the manufacturer.

Pat: ooook. If you say so.

This nonsensical behavior is typical of Pat. The whole procedure of building the new lenses and putting them into the frames takes about a week. When I got a call from Pat this morning, I was expecting to hear that they were ready.

Pat: Hi this is Pat from Dr. Markowitz’s office.

Me: Hey Pat.

Pat: So as we suspected, your frames broke when they tried to put the new lenses in.

Me: I didn’t suspect anything like that, but ok go on.

Pat: So I remember that you had a second pair of the same frames. Would you like to use those or purchase new frames?

Me: Oh… welll, can the price I paid for the new lenses still be applied to the new frames?

Pat: Oh sure no problem!

Me: hmm… And is it possible to get a refund?

Pat: Well, they already made the lenses, and when you were here we discussed that the frames could break, because they are three to four years old, after all.

Me: We discussed no such thing.

Pat: Yes we did, I remember it very clearly.

Me: No, we did not discuss this at all.

Pat: In fact, you signed a release form saying that you understood that the frames might break. It’s right here in your file.

Me: Excuse me? No, I did not sign any release form. Do you have a copy of this form? Did you give me a copy of this form?

Pat: Well I’m looking for it in your file right now.

Me: I did not sign any release form, so you won’t find a release form in my file. I’d like a refund now please.

Pat: We discussed that the frames might break.

Me: ummm… Well, why don’t you give me the phone number of the company that produces the lenses, so that I can call them and get a refund.

Pat: You’d have to do a refund through us. I’ll have to have Dr. Markowitz call you back.

Me: Yes, please do so. *click*

The only paper I signed in their office was the receipt of services. It is possible that their receipt was also a release form in disguise, because they had me sign it while my pupils were dilated and I could not read anything. However, I have a copy of that receipt, and it’s just an itemized bill, so unless they did something unscrupulous to capture my signature onto a hidden second form, then they have no release form, and I want a refund.

The worst part is that I understand that these things happen, and I don’t really blame them (it’s not as if I’m asking them to replace my destroyed frames). If Pat had called and just told me what the deal was, rather than trying to scare me into buying their stuff by lying about a release form and a conversation that never happened, I would have been much more inclined to just give in and buy new frames.

Dr. Markowitz called me back a few minutes later. He gave me the same spiel as Pat, except with much less pressure and much more respect. I told him that I had already decided I want a refund, and he said he’d see what he could do. I also left him a complaint about Pat, and he half apologized and half defended her. I guess that’s the most I can hope for.

I’m watching a live web-cast of one of the Democratic caucuses in Des Moines, Iowa. The sight of real voters in the trenches working this out amongst themselves is heart warming.  It’s almost like they made a massive game of the process.  The caucusers mill around the room, coalesce, repel, and react like tiny interacting agents working to form something much larger than themselves.

At the same time, seeing something so important, with so much weight, executed in such a seemingly haphazard manner, is frightening.  I cannot imagine a more error-prone, arcane way to choose a delegate.  They may as well line up and have a dance off to the tune of “Cool” from West Side Story.  In any other country this process would be tagged as a  gigantic “voting irregularity” and the U.N. would be sending in lawyers with fire hoses to regulate.

 Still, it looks fun, and the Iowans seem to be enjoying it.

Last New Years, I made a resolution that I would stand up to people more consistently, and try to voice my opinion.  I think I’ve been doing a good job with that, but really it’s hard to say for sure.  I certainly tried to meet my resolution, and I guess that counts in this case.

This year’s resolution is going to be more quantitative.  I’m resolving to run 1000 miles in 2008.

This is challenging, and will rely partly on staying injury and illness free (does that mean I’m relying on luck?), but I think it’s achievable given recent statistics from 2007, which was a phenomenal running year for me, at least in terms of consistency.  First, let’s consider my yearly mileage for the last seven years:

I’ve definitely upped my mileage over the years, to a total of 740 miles in 2007.  Seeing how I ran almost twice as much in 2007 as in 2006, it’s possible that I may have hit a plateau, and that I won’t be able to run that much more.  So I took a look at the seasonal pattern over the last seven years:

In this chart, “WS” is the Winter-Spring season (January-April), “S” is the Summer season (May-August), and “F” is the Fall season (September-December). It’s immediately clear that I haven’t been running much in the WS seasons relative to the others. So there is definitely a good potential to increase my mileage by a few hundred in 2008.  Step 1 is just to keep running through the winter.

And so far that’s going well too.  In 2006 my final serious run was at the end of November, and I didn’t pick up running consistently again until April of 2007.  I ended 2007 averaging 25 miles per week, with a recent maximum of 30 miles.  I feel good about my training, and I sort of look forward to the runs even when it’s cold.  I’m not going to do anything crazy this season.  Just consistent, frequent, running to build a base for the Spring, and hopefully a foundation from which I can meet my resolution.

OK, maybe I’ll run a couple indoor track meets, too ;-).

I’m never going home for the holidays again.

Three weeks ago, my mother tells me about this party she’s been invited to the day after I’m coming into town.  It’s a charity event for local orphans or something.  Everyone brings a gift and gets in free.  A lot of cool people will be there.  I should bring something nice to wear.  My ears perk up and I go on the defensive.  “Mom, I’m fine with going to this party, and I can bring something nice to wear (are khakis OK?), but this is my vacation, and I don’t want this to become one of those painful gatherings where you’re constantly telling me to ‘look happy’ (like I know what that means), and that I’m ruining your relationships with your friends, alright?”.  This sets her off.  I should give her an f’ing break.  She’s trying to enjoy her holidays.  She’s a cancer survivor.  She just wants to do something nice for me. Can’t I do this one thing?  I back off.  Maybe I did jump the gun.

A couple weeks later, I’m staying in her new place.  She’s renting out a condo because the mortgage plus condo fees at her old place got too expensive.  But the buyer for her old place backed out at the last minute, and now she has one foot in each pot, an even tougher financial situation.  Things are stressful.  The new building is a quiet place with lots of older residents.  They’re old in the sense that they act old, not just older in the sense of being more than twice as old as I am.  They like their lifestyle, and I guess the landlord left quite an impression on my mom about being quiet in the hallways.  I am to remain absolutely silent within fifty feet of her door.

The party night comes, we get ready and leave her apartment.  I’m wearing my finest khakis.  We get on the elevator, and my mom just can’t resist - “Try to look like you’re having a good time, OK?”, she says.  Part of me wants to hold back, and give her a break, and just say “sure thing, Mom.”  The rest of me is pissed.  This is how I look.  I saw this coming weeks ago, and I don’t want to spend my vacation being told I’m somehow unhappy, you know, on the surface.  I can’t hold it back.  “Mom, I asked you not to do this.  I’m fine, this is how I look.  Please don’t spend all night trying to get me to be something I’m not.” 

She digs deeper.  “Well, you could have at least tried to look nice, combed your hair,”  as if I chose a ratty outfit and messed up my hair just to make her friends say nasty things about her behind her back.  All of a sudden, I’m twelve again, and what my Mom says matters a lot for some reason.  The exchange heats up. Eventually I can’t stand it and get off on the thirteenth floor.  From there I ignore my mother’s pleas to come back and duck into the stairway.  Within three minutes I’ve made my way to the bottom of the stairs and found a rear exit that brings me to the loading dock, which I jump off of before beginning my walk towards the main drag downtown.

My cell phone starts to rumble, and without looking I know it’s her.  I reluctantly answer, and she’s already yelling, something about how she’s going to be kicked out of the building if I’m running around the fire escapes, and that there’s cameras everywhere, and why can’t I just be “man enough” to come with her to the party.  That last one is enough for me to hang up, so I do.  She calls back in a couple minutes.  This time I tell her that I can go to the party if she can hold back on telling me how to act.  She yells something about how she already has a cab waiting and I should just tell her if I’m going to go or not, like I’m the one jerking her around here.  But it’s Christmastime, so I accept her dodge of my terms as an implicit agreement, and make my way to the front of her building, where she is waiting with a cab.  We don’t speak much on the way over.

Later that week, things cool off a bit, and we decide to go check out the indoor pool in Mom’s new building.  As we are waiting for the elevator, she realizes she has a styrofoam box full of leftover deep-dish pizza in her purse, because that’s where the ‘za belongs, in her purse, on the way to the pool.  She asks me to bring it back to the apartment and give it to my brother to put in the fridge - “but don’t knock too loud.”  I carry it back down the hall, and barely tap on the door three times with the big joint of my middle knuckle.  My brother approaches the door from the inside, and plays this game he likes where he asks “who is it?”, and won’t open the door until I answer, even though it’s obvious, and he can see me clearly through the peep-hole.  Since I’m not supposed to make noise, I just knock again, the same barely perceptible one-knuckled knock, three soft taps. 

I turn back down the hall towards the elevator to see my mother, shoulders slanted from the weight of her ridiculous purse, running down the hall with her arms up in the air.  She pushes me out of the way, and my brother is suddenly inclined to open the door once he sees her. As the door opens, she looks at me, and in a voice that’s part whisper, part enraged shout, but all venom, spits out “forget it I won’t go!”.  She tries to close the door on me (slowly, so as to not make a noise when it shuts), and I stop it with my shoe, totally bewildered, but not surprised.  She asks, in the same voice, “why do you try to ruin everything that is important to me?”.   She looks like she might cry, or start throwing things. I ignore her, and tell her that I need her keys to get into the pool.  She shoves them into my hands, the whole network of key-rings and 30-odd keys, and I start to remove the pool key from the tangled web.  The jingle of the keys in the hall re-infuriates her, and she grabs the keys back from me, removing the one I need from the ring and forcing it into my hand.  I move my foot and she (quietly) slams the door in my face.  I go to the pool.

I’ve done this before, just walking away from my family when I can’t take it anymore. My peers usually chastise me for this behavior. ”They’re your family,” they say, “you should go easy on them.” Even as I type this out, I can hear voices saying “was that really so bad?” It’s hard to explain, because there are decades of history that lead to these confrontations, more than I can summarize at a backyard barbecue, or in a single blog post. So I write this story not with the attitude that I did the right thing (I don’t know whether I did), but rather just to say ‘this is what happened’. I suppose it’s hard to stay objective on the one topic that still ticks me off to the point where I feel I’m being irrational. I don’t want to antagonize her.  She is old.  She is a cancer survivor.  She really does have a lot on her plate.  The holidays are probably extra stressful. But why should I be so patient with someone who I only know through the accident of birth? When is our familial debt paid off enough that we can start asking for respect? More importantly, will this behavior repeat itself with me and my children?

We all know that love is a weapon. Accordingly, in the 160th Issue of the Warrior of Light Newsletter, Paulo Cohelo outlines a convention for treating those wounded in love. It’s a short set of rules analogous to the Geneva Conventions, except that it pertains to those wounded by love rather than by weapons.

Most of the “articles” of this convention describe how we should behave when we are hurt in interpersonal relationships, rather than how we should behave if we hurt someone else. For example:

Article 4 – In the case of light wounds, herein classified as small treacheries, fulminating passions that are short-lived, passing sexual disinterest, the medicine called Pardon should be applied generously and quickly. Once this medicine has been applied, one should never reconsider one’s decision, not even once, and the theme must be completely forgotten and never used as an argument in a fight or in a moment of hatred.

The Geneva Conventions primarily govern the humanitarian treatment of non-combatants and prisoners of war (or more broadly, the enemy), so my intuition says that to extend the analogy these conventions of love should govern the treatment of your partner (or ex-partner), and perhaps their friends or family, after you have hurt them. But my intuition assumes that your partner is the one being hurt, that they are the “enemy”, and I don’t think Cohelo makes this assumption.

Rather, he describes how you should behave when you are wounded. The logical conclusion is that the pain you feel when hurt by love is self-inflicted, and a convention for how to cope with and manage such a terrible self-inflicted wound is a brilliant idea.

Neale Donald Walsch put up a nice Thanksgiving post suggesting that we should use this holiday to be thankful for what is going to happen rather than what has happened. I’m a sucker for positive psychology, so I have decided to declare here what I will be thankful for over the next twelve months:

• My mother’s health (a cancer survivor)
• My brother’s recovery (a republican)
• A consistent running schedule over the winter
• Rockband
• The foresight to maintain my health, and the resilience to come back quickly when I am sick
• The Teeth in the Darkness, and the Talons in the Night
• Two publications in scientific journals
• Patience with anger, peace with hostility
• The eloquence to explain my opinions to others, and the self-confidence to agree to disagree
• Sticktoitivness in all my endeavors (particularly in my research, my running, and my XBOX 360 achievements)
• The dark nectar
• A judicious and thoughtful choice of allies
• Refreshing sleep and quick awakenings
• My friends and my fathers

I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving.

Today is the anniversary of my first post at Halfawake, which reminds me that it’s currently Confidence Week. My loudest shirts are all lined up and I’m preparing to tell a bunch of people off (in a kind, well-adjusted way, of course). Should be fun.

I’ve been thinking about why I started this blog, and where it’s going. If I remember, the original motivation was to practice getting my thoughts out. I try to follow the life advice of my friend Bads - “strike while the iron is hot”. If I see something or think about something that’s important to me, I record it here, and that helps me file it away mentally rather than throwing it into my cerebral incinerator. I don’t necessarily expect to get feedback about my posts, but the feedback I have received, both on the blog and in private emails, has been excellent. In the end I guess I’m just trying to engage a different part of my brain… The part that doesn’t constantly think about algorithms for solving non-smooth systems of differential equations.

I’m glad that this hasn’t become another failed project left by the side of the road, and I hope to keep it going for another year.

Last night as I tried to force myself to sleep, I found myself worrying a lot about the daily hustle. My mind jumped randomly around to work, roommate issues, loneliness, my lack of a life-plan, and other personal ‘problems’. I’ve been doing this for a while now, but what started out as an efficient way to plan and prepare for the next day as I went to bed has become a stressful nuisance.

So last night I tried something new. I tried thinking about other people’s problems. Specifically, I thought about the ~1 million people displaced by the San Diego Wildfires. I thought about the horrified families, the danger to the first responders, and the destroyed homes.

… And I couldn’t do it. For every new stream of consciousness I started, my mind quickly drifted back to my own life in less than a minute. I just could not maintain my focus on something foreign.

I would have liked this post to be about the transformative power of selfless prayer, but I seem to have trained myself to reflect only on myself as I fall asleep.