Darker Motivations

Hello, good evening, everybody! I gotta warn you, today’s post is gonna be a lil dark. Not piss-about “ugh I feel like the states of the self are temporary” dark, either; actually dark, like, break-out-your-torches, Joseph Conrad, stygian fuckin’ darkness.

There will also be swearing, probably. I can’t help it; I’m discussing one of the darkest (yet most effective!) thought patterns I possess. It does relate to suicide, so if you're not set up to interact with that topic at the moment (which I understand entirely; it's a tough one), do feel free to step over to some other content, and I'll see you on the next one. :)

You are advised; now, on to trigger me timbers!

Super brief backstory, which many will know but I’m authorially obliged to repeat: I’m crazy as hell. I think that’s always been the case, although it took most other people a little while to catch on. I couldn’t figure out arithmetic for the longest time (it probably wasn’t insane and arbitrary enough), despite the use of a bunch of different teaching methods, including touch math (which was too insane and arbitrary by half). Young Peter spent about four times as much time wandering the school grounds and talking to himself as he did running around things, climbing atop things, and falling off things as larval humans are generally supposed to do.

This isn’t a pity party, so I don't say that as a “woe is me” diatribe. I’m just pointing out that I was a weird-ass kid from day one, and it came as no real surprise when I started collecting labels. I paid attention some small but non-zero percentage of the time, so I was “possibly” attention-deficit. I took some satisfaction in pulling out my hair and peeling off loose bits of skin (ew, sorry), so I had OCD. Your typical eight-year-old doesn’t lie awake all night, consumed with thoughts of distant impending existential annihilation, so I had depression.

Again, not a pity party. I’ve had a very nice life, really, looking at it objectively. There’s just this little thing in my head that pops up every so often, telling me I really ought to end same. Bloody nuisance, that.

I wanna take a sidebar out here and point out that it’s an irrational impulse. Clearly. I live a life of inordinate privilege by the global standard, and even by more local metrics I’m not too hard up at all. A common question I get on this topic is: given this life, why would I throw it away?

I wouldn’t. When that evil voice bubbles up, it’s not me talking. That’s why we call it a mental illness; I wouldn’t ask you to reason away your sinus infection. That question up there is an easy, common mistake to make, but I would encourage those who have never had suicidal ideation to consider exactly how few of their other thoughts are “rational” or “deliberate.” We’re all big chaotic thought-blobs; mine’s just got a weird recurring wavelength in it.

Anyway, enough of that. The point is, 70% of suicides in 2015 were white men (like me!), and I have a ton of other little factors increasing the odds I’d be one of those 13.26 individuals in 100,000.

So, knowing all that, an awful question arises: why am I not? Despite what Effie Trinket might have told you, the odds are not, in fact, in my favor.

There are a lot of reasons, and I’ll start with the simplest one: I was told not to. Western culture takes a rather dim view of killing oneself, and I was told fairly early that it was a wrong thing to do. The Bible’s view of suicide is less than explicit, but most of the figures who do end their own lives are singularly wicked people (like, y’know, Judas). That works to a degree; I am nothing if not an obedient eggplant.

Another, simpler reason: death (being dead) doesn’t scare me too much, but dying is a fuckin’ awful process. No matter how you go about it, I’m told. I research things neurotically before I take action, and it turns out dying has very poor reviews indeed. So, to paraphrase great old Sartre, there’s a degree to which I preserve myself out of weakness.

Those two alone don’t cover it, I don’t think. Between how horrid the world actually is (can be) and the wicked creature in my brain, my dogmatism and (giving myself some credit here) weakness aren’t of sufficient magnitude to hold the horror at bay, as it were. I’d love to slather you with a vague motivational speech about my growing optimism, but let’s be honest, optimism is a pale and fragile flower in the face of the world’s hurricanes. So what else is goin’ here?

I do have several things backing my corner, as it were. I came from a fairly stable family as they go (and thank God for that; that’s a whole other blog post in itself). My friends are all humans (which I mean as a high compliment), and in my view their strengths greatly outweigh their little foibles. Still, others have been here, and the attrition of this awful disease still got them.

The answer might surprise you, and I’m afraid it’s not as light-hearted and springy as I’d like.

The answer is spite.

As I mentioned, there are lots and lots of factors predisposing me to suicide; indeed, given the fairly safe life I live, it turns out the most likely thing to kill me… is me. That’s a bleak sort of thing to be aware of, and that knowledge used to give me all sorts of trouble when I was younger. The dread of enacting the self-fulfilling prophecy, and all that.

Nowadays, that knowledge doesn’t generally make me sad. It makes me angry. I have goals and objectives, things I’m aiming at and people I care about, and this callous little brain-thing dares suggest I jump willingly off this mortal coil? Nah, brain-thing, piss up a rope. I’m busy.

Better still, and this is the real kicker, my premature death by suicide is not just expected in the abiotic, statistical sense.

There are people waiting on me to kill myself. Not that they “want” me to, or at least they’d never admit such a heinous thing. But if it came to that, there are a few people I know whose responses would go something like this.

They’d be shocked and horrified as necessary, and pretend they didn’t know it was coming.

They’d be unhappy and aggrieved, for however long was expected of them.

And then, after a while, some crooked circuit at the back of their mind would log me as another tragic statistic, but one that validated their world-view. A wicked little part of them would be smirking and nodding. They called it, they knew, and that would be proof of their narcissistic grandeur. Their model worked on this one thing, which would mean I was wrong and they were right, about everything.

I consider myself a fairly articulate person, but I have no words for exactly how much that idea pisses me off. Oh, y’wanna be right, do ya? NOT ON MY WATCH, FUCKER.

As established, I have my many, many flaws, but I don’t think a lack of willpower is among them. In my really bad moments, when all the other things keeping me afloat fail, I just recall the image of a select group of people, then have them all give a smug, knowing little nod and woo lads. Nope, not killin’ ourselves today, because fuck you that’s why!

So I guess, in short, one major thing that keeps me going is an insane, bloody-minded determination to piss certain people off. That fits with my character, I think.

I wanna end on something approaching a positive note, so here’s two. Firstly: I’m fine! I realize this reads kind of like somebody losing their marbles completely, but I’m actually quite all right; I always sound like that, so don’t worry.

Secondly: you, dear reader, are yet another reason Peter endures! Many of you are good friends of mine, points of light in the sky, vital strands and junctions in the web supporting the cracked, damaged egg that is me. So thank you! For reading, and for being. I do appreciate it.

I’d love to know what y’all are thinking about this post. Positive, negative, brownie recipes: whatever you’re thinking, let me know in a comment, an email, or via carrier pigeon, whatever y’got. And as always, you and I make a dialog, but you, a friend and I are an alliance, so push the appropriate buttons to show a friend. Everybody have a nice evening, now. C:

Would You Rather Not Hurt?

Hi there! Long time no see, again. I find myself apologizing for that every time I make a post, so I’ve decided I’ll stop it (apologizing, not posting). Always assume, dear reader, that I’m sorry to someone about something, and I’ll stick to my usual state of scatterbrained contrition, and we’ll average out all right.

The question up there occurred to me as I was waking up; I don’t generally mind getting up, but I’m sure you can relate to this experience:

The Self: “Wake up.”

The Body: “NEIN.”

The Self: “It is time for us to all wake up and work together in harmony, that we might accomplish tasks and utilize our capabilities to the mutual good.”

The Body: “DIE WELT IST KALT UND BRUTAL, UND ICH BEGEHRE NUR DEN TOD.”

Yes, today was one of those days, and it got me thinking: when you get to feeling awful, wouldn’t it be better to just… not? Wouldn’t it be nicer if my back/neck/legs/existence was less uncomfortable? Wouldn’t I feel better if I couldn’t remember the suffering in the world (the tiny fragment of it that I’m momentarily aware of, anyway; I don’t think a human exists who can feel the whole world’s pain and survive)?

I thought about it for a while, and I came to a surprising realization: no, no I would not.

Aside: this post will not degenerate into either of the tropes “the pain makes y’feel ALIVE” or “Oh my Gwaaaad, I am so LUCKY!” Both of these things are in the unique position of being both completely true and completely useless to talk about.

Anyway, if pain both physical and spiritual ceased, I don’t think I would feel better, and here is why.

Physical pain is essential; evolution is a highly conservative process, and as odd as it may sound, there is nothing whatsoever in your body that doesn’t serve some specific purpose. Yes, that includes your appendix; ours seems to have functions in immunity and the maintenance of gut flora, and marsupials evolved theirs independently, so it’s important.

I’m not saying physical pain is a good thing. Pain sucks. It’s not like I had an epiphany or saw the face of God when I was chopping salad and decided to chop my hand too (I did say something involving God, though; sorry, God). It would indicate a very severe problem indeed with my mental state if I banged my head on a doorway and announced “Ah! A gift of understanding, from the Universe!”

But I need it. Physical pain’s an investment, to put it simply. My body maintains this preposterously expensive network of neurons so I can feel it (without instruction from my conscious self), and the pain of an injury persists long after it’s “needed;” we get the message, and then our ankle keeps hurting anyway.

I said this was an investment, and here’s the payoff: I’m 99%  percent less likely to cut myself chopping a salad, at least in that same way. After about the third session, I don’t think about keeping my fingers clear, but some reptilian part of my brain is aware that a failure to do so will hurt us. I duck reflexively when I go through a low doorway, my ankle was really just trying to tell me: “squat better (dumbass).”

To cut a long story short, it’s a good thing that knives hurt, because I don’t fancy finger salad.

“Aha, Peter!” I hear you cry. “Physical pain is a cautionary investment, but we knew that, and you didn’t explain emotional pain, you absolute cuck!”

You’re half right, so let’s think about that. A friend of yours is suffering under some emotional burden, and assuming you’re not too preoccupied with your own desperate existential struggle, you’ll automatically ask why.

Okay, stop, back up. Your friend was suffering, and you knew. You didn’t ask them if they were suffering, and you skipped right to what the cause was. That sense for the pain of others might be automatic, or even unconscious, but I don’t think it’s trivial that you can infer someone’s emotional state from tiny details that are otherwise irrelevant. With people you know very well, the signs become obvious: Person A only bites her nails at times of heightened anxiety, Person B always plays a certain song on good days.

But try this sometime, dear reader. Go to a public place, a coffee shop or a supermarket or what have you, and try to assess people at a glance, listen to overheard conversations, and so on. I think it will surprise you how appallingly easy it is to “feel” other people, even total strangers.

So, at least part of the utility of emotional pain is the establishment and maintenance of relationships with other people, people who also suffer. It sounds rather like the lyrics to an emo song to say we’re all bound together by pain, but I think it’s also true. We’re social animals, and we notice when other members of the pack are in distress; even reduced to the cold level of self-interest and threat identification, that’s still a pretty heartening message.

Picture somebody who doesn’t hurt, and doesn’t hurt along with others either. I don’t know about you, but most of the people who come to mind are either fictional supervillains or real supervillains of the very worst sort. Such people are at best nihilists, simply indifferent to the pain around them because they don’t feel it matters, and at worst they’re Carl Panzram; my advice is to stay away from them.

So, this sense is useful with regard to other people, but why do we need to feel our own problems so acutely? Physical pain is one thing, but emotional pain can be so, so much worse, and where’s the utility in all this awful torment people go through?

I think it works out like this: when someone else suffers, you ask what the cause is. This might be fairly silly if you’re the one doing the suffering; you probably know what happened.

What you can then ask yourself is why. There are two main things that can happen here: one of them is wicked bad, and the other one can be wicked good.

Bad news first: when you ask yourself why you’re suffering, you might come up with a couple of terrible answers. Bad Answer One is that everyone suffers, all the time, and any joy you experience is illusory. Bad Answer Two is that you, in particular, are suffering while others revel in the good life.

Bad Answer Three is both the best and worst of the bad lot: that you’re suffering, and it’s your fault.

Depending on your mindset, Bad Answer Three means different things. If you run high in the negative end of things like I do, you might just conclude that you’re trapped in an endless cycle of self-inflicted damage. You might infer you should just go ahead and step off this here mortal coil, because it sucks, and people cause themselves constant pain.

You might even think, because people are so blinkered and cause themselves such pain, that the best plan is to take as many people with you as possible.

But here’s the upside of Bad Answer Three, the answer a more positive person might encounter: if it’s your fault, it means you can fix it. That’s a bitter pill for sure, but it reveals a dim little glimmer of light in the bleak little tunnel of nihilism we’ve dug here.

Speaking of that tunnel, here’s that other good result of suffering I mentioned: we now have something that we distinctly want to move straight away from. This isn’t some magic cure-all realization, mind you; we’re still in the tunnel, and we’re still suffering, but we’ve at least become aware that this is, indeed, a tunnel.

Tunnels are structures, and they have endpoints. There was some part of this tunnel where we entered. We’re sitting in the darkest part, the part that smells like cigarettes and human waste and always seems to be squishy somehow. But because it hurts, we know we’re in a structure, and we’ve arrived at a split in the tunnel; one fork has a poorly-resolved, nebulous light of hope flickering at the end, and the other goes all the way down.

Not as easy a choice as you might be led to believe, but there’s an answer when it comes to that. A good answer, even, a morally right answer.

So, cutting a very long story short, I think that’s why we feel emotional pain so acutely. Physical pain tells you things about the physical world: “knives are sharp, stoves are hot, cactuses give us the needles in our nose.” Pain and injury provide simple, direct guidance for your navigation of the mundane world. Step here, not here; eat this, not that.

Emotional anguish, I think, works the same way but on a higher, much more consequential level. Burning myself on the stove is a pretty bad result, but if I let nihilism and resentment consume me the results can be horrific. Cactus spines hurt, and we steer away from the cactus; when we discover someone’s been lying to us, automatic systems kick in and get us variously disappointed, critical, and right pissed off. None of these are comfortable sensations (very few people really like to be angry), and if we’re healthy and capable we leave the situations that cause them, seeking something better.

That has a downside, obviously; pain avoidance can turn into a pathology all on its own. Anybody who’s a little too into alcohol or opioids can tell you that. Similarly, the bereavement you feel at a funeral might make you want to avoid forming any relationships at all, for fear of loss, and that’s clearly no good. But that’s a topic for another time. The point here is that the pain you feel, physical and emotional both, has a purpose: it wakes you up, tells you something’s wrong, and then shows you, maybe, in about 240-pixel resolution, what might be better.

To put it in a vignette, the process goes (or generally ought to go) like this:

“Ow! Shit! What’s happened? I have identified what happened. That’s no good, doesn’t work for me, bub. We’re goin’ over here to try somethin’ else.”

I think I’m off topic and starting to sound a little schizophrenic, so I’m gonna cut it there for today. I hope you can see what I’m getting at, though; it’s not for nothing that we suffer, and pain’s not just a trivial, fleeting trick of brain chemistry like some of the more nihilist parts of society might tell you. It exists, really, and it’s for something.

This may sound strange, but I don’t hope you encounter zero suffering; I hope you find suffering that’s minor, and that ends up pointing you in the right direction.

These are all my thoughts, dear reader, and I’d love to hear any and all of your thoughts about them. Comments are always welcome, private messages are always encouraged and both are always appreciated. Enjoy the rest of your day, night, wherever you find yourself in the flow of time. C:

TL;DR Pain can (should) lead to progress. Maybe not directly, one-to-one, right away, but ultimately it should be a catalyst for change.

In the Name of Cake (The Great Christian Baker Debacle)

Hey, everybody! Even-longer-than-usual time no see. I blame… I dunno, the NRA; that seems like a safe bet in recent times.

As the title suggests, I want to talk a little bit about this Supreme Court decision on 4 June of this year, because I think it deals (and intentionally does not deal) with some crucially important issues, and I’ve seen an amount of misunderstanding about it that is equal parts appalling and impressive. I should follow that inordinately pretentious statement with a disclaimer that I’m a) not a lawyer b) not a Constitutional lawyer and c) kind of an idiot in general, so fair warning, this post, as all my posts, are opinionated and unobjective hot garbage of the highest order.

With that said, I want to hear your more salient opinions on the subject, dear reader; leave me a comment with what you think, or message me privately, whatever. The idea here is a dialogue. C:

Now, for those with absolutely no clue what I’m talking about, on 4 June the Supreme Court finally ruled on a case argued back in December of 2017, known to me and no one else as the Colossal Cake Kerfuffle of 2017. The scene: in 2012, a gay couple from Colorado, married in Massachusetts (same-sex marriage had yet to be legalized in Colorado until two years later), returns home to celebrate their union and goes to Masterpiece Cakeshop in Lakewood in search of a tasty baked confection.

What a lovely story! Sweet, like cake.

Jack Phillips, the shop’s owner, refuses to bake the couple a custom cake on two grounds.

Huh. Not so sweet. But remember that, because it’s important: he refuses to bake them a cake.

Now, the grounds Phillips cited: Masterpiece doesn’t bake cakes for same-sex weddings because he’s a Christian (more on that in a second), and Colorado doesn’t (didn’t, at the time) recognize same-sex unions.

There’s a refined point here that I don’t think gets covered enough: Phillips refused to bake them a custom cake, while representing that they were free to purchase any other baked goods from the store. This may seem like a weird technicality, but I can see a sort of logic to it; if I had a client (ha!) who wanted me to write a post extolling the virtues of communism (or fascism, or whatever) I would refuse categorically, on the classic and well-articulated grounds of “shit’s one-sided, yo.” I’m not going to ban the person from my blog outright, but I wouldn’t take creative action on behalf of an ideology with which I disagree.

I want to take a sidebar out here and declare that I think Phillips is wrong. Theologically, Scripturally, Biblically speaking, he just isn’t correct on this particular point. I also think I have the right to tell him so, but furthermore that he has, in a weird turn of grammar, a basic and unalienable right to be wrong.

The couple in question seemed to think he was wrong too, so much so that they lodged a complaint with their local civil rights commission. This case is moving into the heady and the surreal, so here’s a grounding thought: cake is a protected human right by this point, isn’t it? And if it isn’t, why not? Cake for all, God dammit.

The rights commission, armed with these allegations and a thorough knowledge of Colorado’s anti-discrimination law, goes “daaaaaaaamn” and orders Phillips to "change its company policies, provide 'comprehensive staff training' regarding public accommodations discrimination, and provide quarterly reports for the next two years regarding steps it has taken to come into compliance and whether it has turned away any prospective customers." (Quoted from the ACLU site).

Because I’m still blathering on about the backstory, you may safely conclude that Phillips did not comply with the state’s orders. He removed his business from the wedding cake market altogether and kept appealing the case, with the gathering crap-storm of media attention these things usually gather, until it wound up dropped at the doorstep of the United States Supreme Court.

Thank God, Peter’s arrived at the point!

The Supreme Court ruling demanded that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission reverse the decision it had made. Now, depending on where you sit on the spasming bronco of American politics, you may be thinking anything from “Yeehaw, the Supreme Court doesn’t like the gays!” to “I thought we’d already had the Supreme Court rule the opposite way” to just simple, unadulterated “WAT.” I can’t say as I blame you, in any case; most of the news articles I’ve read on the subject have been… misleading, let’s say for the sake of diplomacy.

So what did the Supreme Court actually say, or more importantly what did it not say?

What it didn’t say is quite a laundry list, but here are some claims I’ve seen made and I want to refute.

I’ve seen it said that they were ruling in favor of Phillips and Masterpiece Cakeshop, which is not… exactly correct. The Supreme Court examines the Constitutionality of the laws and rulings passed by lower courts; when a case comes before the Supreme Court it’s no longer a simple civil matter of “person A has placed their fence too far into person B’s property and person B is Quite Put Out.” Supreme Court decisions run more on the scale of “person A’s fence represented a manifest threat to person B’s rights under the Constitution, and so all fences, forever and in perpetuity, must not be placed thusly, or the entire towering legal edifice of the United States of America will be Quite Put Out.”

And that may be why the Supreme Court’s ruling was so mercifully, irritatingly narrow. I’ve seen it said that this ruling was an attack on gay marriage, which I think constitutes either a horrendous misunderstanding or an intentional representation of the case. Indeed, the ruling specifically, deliberately doesn’t address that topic at all; I encourage you to read the Court’s full opinions, because they’re all interesting, but they’re very careful to avoid discussing the intersection of free speech, free exercise and anti-discrimination law entirely.

This is kind of the crux of the issue for me, and the case title says it all: Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission.

Wait, I thought this was a case about a baker refusing service to a gay couple.

Well, it was, and I think that’s why there’s been so much confusion on this topic of late. Phillips’ decision was the catalyst, let’s say, that set off some tremendous, bubbling and appallingly smelly reactions in the journalistic and legal spheres, but it wasn’t the final issue on which the Supreme Court ruled.

The final contest was between Phillips, in his guise as the business Masterpiece Cakeshop, against the Colorado Civil Rights Commission. The Civil Rights Commission was rather harshly smacked down, but the Court’s decision wasn’t an attack on civil rights, or an endorsement of any particular religious denomination, or any of the myriad things I’ve heard people claim.

The Court’s decision was that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission, when presented with the opportunity to rule on the issue between Mr. Phillips and the couple, absolutely bungled it.

From that sentence you might infer that I mean “bungled” as in the Civil Rights Commission lost the paperwork, their dog ate the paperwork, or they themselves ate the paperwork. I do not. I mean “bungled” in the sense that the Supreme Court found the Commission’s handling of the case evinced overt hostility to Phillips’ religious beliefs, namely by comparing them to defenses of American slavery and the Holocaust.

Putting it less diplomatically, the commissioner in question went so far as to claim that Phillips, bowing out of a making a cake on religious grounds (admittedly questionable grounds at that, but certainly within his right to free exercise), was on an equal moral footing with the Fire-Eaters of the Antebellum South and the degenerates who frequent places like The Daily Stormer.

So that, in short, is the much-under-reported reason the Supreme Court ruled the way they did. It wasn’t an espousal of anti-gay hatred (although God knows there’s enough of that going around from other sources), and it wasn’t a tacit or explicit endorsement of Phillips’ religious views; rather, it was a declaration of Phillips’ right to a fair trial, which the Commission signally failed to provide, unburdened by institutional hostility to his beliefs. On a subtler level, I think the ruling was an acknowledgment of Phillips’ right to even have such beliefs in the first place.

Put another way, the Supreme Court in this case wasn’t agreeing or disagreeing with either Phillips the Commission at all; they ruled instead that the Commission, by virtue of its hostility toward religion in general and most especially Phillips’ religion, had (as they say in the French) fucked it all up.

But maybe I’m wrong; it certainly wouldn’t be the first time, and I’m equally as certain it won’t be the last. This is a complicated, sticky topic, and I’d love to know your thoughts, dear reader, on any aspect of it. Some things to consider: is it relevant in your view that the baker in question was Christian, specifically? If so, why or why not, and would the picture be different if it were, say, a Muslim or Jewish baker? On that note, do you see this as strictly an issue of religious freedom vs. the law, or is there more at play here?

I see this as an issue of a) people resorting to the big blunt hammer of the state as a solution in a situation that might merit a more sociable scalpel and b) the people who compose said institution failing to carry out their role as neutral adjudicators, in a spectacular and corrupt fashion. I may be wrong about that; I have a natural distrust of institutions in general, and perhaps that’s skewing my thinking.

In any case, let me know what you think about this topic in a comment or a message at your leisure; it’s an absolute mess, this case, and I’d love to hear your opinion about any angle or aspect of it. Furthermore, if there are topics you’d like to see me write about (God forbid), let me know that as well; I’m quite thoroughly mad, but my hope is that my madness might be edifying, educational or even merely interesting to someone.

Thank you for your time and attention, and have a lovely rest of your Sunday (or whatever day it is, when you read this). Anything you’re thinking, let me think about it too. C:

Betrayal

TL;DR Don't betray people who put their trust in you, because that's really, really, really bad.

Well HELLO there, everybody! It's been quite a long time again, and yet again I must apologize. There are a lot of reasons I've been away, one of which is that I'm lazy and disorganized, another of which is that I was doing other things, and yet another of which is that I moved to Oregon in the time between this post and the last one. For those curious about my opinion of this place, I can tell you definitively that the average temperature here is lower than in the parts of California in which I lived, and I think that's a pretty good thing.

Now, the title of the post probably concerns you a little, and I want to clarify that it shouldn't, necessarily. The events I'm discussing have happened varying numbers of years ago, and clearly I'm still here and as intact as I've ever been, so the events aren't necessarily the biggest deal. What they are, however, is interesting, and the way I've thought and felt about them is more so, in my estimation. This is going to be pretty heavily psychological, so fair warning for those who don't care for insights into someone else's psyche (which I don't mean to sound so negative; it's pretty scary to get to know someone, really).

One interesting aside I thought I'd mention is the internal response I have when I hear or read the post's title. When someone says "grief," I know what they mean, "suffering" I understand in a general empathic way, and more positive things like "joy" and "drive" I have the same sort of conceptual understanding of. I know what these things are, clearly, and I've felt them all at various points in life. If you asked me, I could take a minute and make a list of experiences associated with them.

Not so betrayal. With betrayal I don't even have to take the time; immediately I have a perfectly clear mental image of situations involving betrayal, and not just one, but all of them. When I say "perfectly clear" I'm not being figurative, either; my full set of circumstances at the time is engraved in my memory. In the case of a truly monstrous betrayal within my family, I can tell you what the weather outside was like when I found out, what was on the sandwich I went and got afterwards, and what shirt I was wearing (for God's sake).

In my presumptuous moments, I think to myself that everyone has such an experience of clarity when betrayal is brought up, but that's clearly overly general, so I wanted to ask you, dear reader. When I say "betrayal," what goes through your mind? Are you put in mind of a specific person/event/situation in the way I am, or do you have a more general understanding of it?

Well, okay, now the obvious question: why? These aren't pleasant memories, in the case of the betrayals themselves, and in the case of the peripheral details I mentioned they're simply totally useless to me. There's no utility to the knowledge that the sandwich had the wrong God damn sort of lettuce on it; indeed, I think that memory space might be better used for the current location of one's keys, or something like that, and yet here I am with the full set of useless details.

Putting it simply, I think it's because betrayal is the single greatest existential threat your mind can experience. I specify "your mind" deliberately; clearly someone throwing an ICBM at your home has more dire immediate consequences. Consider, though, mentally: is it worse for a soldier to shoot and kill an enemy combatant or a member of his/her own regiment? Both are acts of equal violence, but in my mind at least the latter carries with it a more grievous moral element. Again, I'd love to hear your thoughts on that little scenario, because it's more complicated than I make it out to sound, so let me know in a message or a comment if you'd like.

So, in the purely mental realm, given situations of equal scale, I think betrayal is the single worst thing. If I'm out for a walk somebody hits me with a bat, that's clearly going to ruin my morning and maybe my day, but if they're a teammate of mine and have explicitly promised not to do so it might ruin my year. The death of a family friend of ours wrecked me totally for several months, but a betrayal within my family corrupted every element of my perception and hung the proverbial black cloud over me for a much greater period of time. It's still not gone, even; in my weaker moments I'm near-Stalin levels of paranoid.

So, returning to the question, why? It's not an intentional decision on my part to dwell on these unpleasant situations (given the option, I don't think most people would actively increase the misery in their lives, or at least they wouldn't admit it), yet here I am.

I'd like to hear what you think on this, but my opinion is that it has to do with frames of reference. In the case of a bereavement, the present is pretty miserable, and that makes the future seem bleak as well; as I've observed it, most people's grieving process involves a period where they can't find the motivation to do much of anything. The way we deal with it, generally, is by focusing on things we've already experienced; in the situation I mentioned earlier, my family friend's death was premature, awful and senseless, but it didn't change the extant fact of all the fun trips I'd taken to their house, the hours I'd spent playing with their dog (a GOOD DOG), or how the sunset on the lake near their house looked.

To put it in a platitude, I didn't know where I was, and the situation skewed my mindset to make it unclear where I would go from there. I did, however, know where I'd been, and I dealt with the situation by concluding that where I'd previously been was pretty good.

Betrayal's not like that in my view, and I think that's where it gets its greater psychological impact from, the reason we remember it so clearly. Losing a limb is traumatic enough, but I imagine it would be worse if one of your own limbs tore itself off, tried to kill you, then informed you the entire process was your own fault for being weak and complacent enough to trust it.

I think that's because betrayal doesn't just ruin the present and future the same way other horrible events do. It does, of course; after a betrayal like the one in my family, the present is clearly shot to shit, and moving into the future has a great deal of nerve-wracking uncertainty (well, if they lied, why wouldn't everyone else be lying?). But betrayal, in my experience, is worse because it fucks with your past.

When you've known someone a long time and integrated them into your life, they're built into the frame of reference with which you understand just about everything. This frame tells you where you are in the world, in time, and so on; the culture in which you live does that at some high and abstract level, and really the people with whom you interact do so at a more personal, instrumental scale. When you make a decision, most people don't just blindly fumble into it; you review your memory for relevant information and experience, and when you ask a trusted friend for advice, you're implicitly asking for their present thoughts conditioned on past experience. That's wordy, so here's this: becoming lost in a new place is predicated on having known where you were at some point.

Not so betrayal. When someone betrays the trust you've put in them, it's only an attack on you in the most superficial sense; yes, clearly, they doubled back on their word, they've lied to you for years, they're working actively against your best interest, and they're disgracing you to mutual friends, and that's bad enough. But what that represents, more deeply, is an attack on your entire existence and the frame of reference you use to understand the world. Under attack, you might ordinarily fall back on the positive memories, focus on the good stuff and survive the present hardship that way.

When someone betrays you, you can't. The black stain of treachery taints everything you know and understand about the world by association. A family especially is a foundational frame of reference, and the positive memories of my childhood that might be useful in coping with adversity are, in a sense, predicated on a potentially endless series of lies. I'll spare you the gory details, but suffice it to say that at the moment of revelation, I had reason to retroactively question everything that happened in the previous twenty-one years of my life.

I'm a cold, hard bastard, but there's not a person alive who that wouldn't mess with. Say what you like about the rest of Christian doctrine, but I don't think it's accidental or insignificant that Satan, prince of darkness, lord of hell, archenemy of humankind, and general director of all the bad shit in the universe, is in his position by virtue of a betrayal driven by narcissism. The Bible clarifies that murder, theft, and all that are repugnant and not to be done, but the fundamental struggle story in the Bible is order and loyalty against the agents of chaos and betrayal. Cain is the first murderer, and he's a pretty bad guy in the Bible's narrative view, but he as a mortal pales in comparison to Judas Iscariot, to say nothing of Judas's inspiration, the Big Bad himself.

Also, notice that Satan took a third of the angels with him when he fell; one person's betrayal is bad enough, but then that person starts turning your friends against you. And that, I think, is why betrayal is the ultimate social poison; like any other tragedy it wrecks the present and renders the future bleak and uncertain, and it retroactively corrupts your past as well. As concerns the betrayer, not only have you lost that one element of the frame of reference that lets you interact with the world, but that one part actively conspires to strip other elements off the frame and turn them against you in a spreading cascade. To betray someone is to reveal the very worst part of any person, the hungry and amoral monster that sits in everyone's head but most of us choose to repress and ignore. When someone turns on you and stabs you in the back, it gives you a direct insight into what Jung called the shadow, and I think that's why it's so profoundly hurtful and also so memorable.

Not good, I think is the appropriate label for it.

Anyway, this was just something I've been thinking about lately, so I wanted to write it out and think about it some more, clearly. I'm gonna cut the post off there before I get any more excessively wordy and off-topic than I already am, and I'll end with a question to all of you, dear readers mine. Do you agree with this interpretation of betrayal, or am I totally off-base here? Do you remember betrayal rearing its ugly head in your life, and if so, how did you deal with it? On those or any related topics, really, I'd be thrilled to hear your thoughts, in a public comment if you'd care to jump into the dialogue, or in a private message/email if you'd rather talk to just me.

Okay, as always, thank you for reading! And have a lovely rest of your day, night, and life as applicable C:

Extremists

Hello! It's been a little while since I posted, so I say a) sorry 'bout that and b) welcome back, dear readers! C:

I've been thinking about politics a great deal recently (mostly when I'm in the shower and no one can easily challenge me), and I've come to the conclusion that a political "spectrum" is a dangerously misleading model for people's alignments and ideologies. It's not bad, it's just insufficiently refined, as I might say commenting on someone's grant proposal.

There are two ways I see politics most commonly schematized: the line and the Cartesian graph. The line is so simple it's actually disgusting; we draw a line segment labeled "far left" on one end and "far right" on the other, then plunk down little markers denoting where various people and movements fall. If that sounds vaguely like something you did in first grade, it's because it is. Drawing the number line and placing evenly-spaced markers on it to learn the integers is, in essence, the same exercise. Personally, I find that I get taken less seriously in a political discussion if I open it by scratching out a little line plot on the table in crayon, but that's neither here nor there.

Soon enough, someone realized this left-right binary was grossly insufficient to encompass the whole range of human ideology. "Aha!" the fictional They proclaimed, "I have met people on the political left who do NOT believe in a strongly centralized government, preferring instead the independent small-commune lifestyle ideal usually advocated for by the political right! Thus, there must now be TWO axes: left-right and authoritarian-libertarian!" Thus the Cartesian two-axis graph was born, and we applauded mightily our ability to accurately write down that there were both communists and anarcho-capitalists in the world at the same time. 

Now, graphing is something we generally learn to do in middle school, or so it was when I was young (sometime around the birth of land plants, for perspective). This two-axis model is strictly more detailed and advanced than the simple line. As a scientist I appreciate refinement and resolution of detail, so it may surprise you to learn that, of the two, this model is actually the more dangerously wrong one. 

What the Cartesian model suggests with its even, geometric perfection, is that moving toward the political extremes is accomplished by taking measured, symmetrical steps away from the political center. It suggests that, as one grows and solidifies one's beliefs more and more ardently, one will naturally "progress" toward the ends of whichever axes you fall on.

In my opinion, that is a dangerously teleological way to think, and furthermore it is wrong. The scientist part of me thinks it's wrong as in "factually incorrect," and the more emotional part of me feels it's wrong as in "morally indefensible."

Additionally, this two-dimensional sort of graph suggests that the political extremes are radically different from one another. According to the model, for instance, a far-left authoritarian communist and an extreme right-wing fascist ought to have nothing whatsoever in common, politically speaking. They are, after all, at polar opposites of our graph. 

Well, wait a minute now. I seem to recall a great many people being lined up against a wall and shot, on the orders of people who fit both those descriptions, in fairly recent history. So, the far left and far right appear to agree on something, which is inconsistent with the assumptions we made up there. 

Straying away from the extremes, let's pick someone like me, a young person who's somewhat left of center, and examine what I think. To oversimplify and turn myself into a cliché, I think basically in the lines of "live and let live." I don't smoke weed, but I don't see a compelling reason to make it illegal for any given person to do so. Guns aren't necessarily my thing, but I've had a great time borrowing rifles and plunking a few rounds at cans and whatnot. Similarly, I'm not inclined to marry another man, but I also know there are people who wish to enter same-sex marriages, so in the words of a great philosopher, "fuck it, dude, let's [all] go bowling." I could drone on and on, but you get the idea; the state has no real business interfering with the fussy little minutiae of life, but I don't mind paying taxes for such amenities as roads and all. 

Now, somebody on the other side of the axis, a moderate center-right person. They're on the other side, and as such they ought to disagree with me, wholly!

My brother is what I would describe as center-right, on most topics, actually. And in his own words, he wants to... have the right to smoke weed and own guns. 

Well that's fucking interesting, man. 

You can probably see what I'm driving at here; my belief in summary is that extremists of any description are vastly more similar to one another than their more moderate counterparts are different. For example, there is substantial doubt in my mind that a Hamas suicide bomber might go around to each of his potential targets and ascertain whether each one was actually a member of the IDF. No, he'd shout something like "Death to Israel!" and deliver death and heinous injury to a group likely consisting of Israelis, Arabs, and probably a few tourists or consultants from some other part of the world altogether. 

Another, maybe less polarizing example: that asshole who clubbed several people in the head with a U-lock during a rally and counterprotest in Berkeley, the now-infamous Bike Lock Bandito (as I prefer to call him). If I recall he blindsided at least seven people, and seriously injured three of those. These are all head-shots, mind you, aimed right at the ol' center of consciousness.

Footage of people being blindsided by a bludgeon to the head is disturbing to say the least, but I noticed something it distinctly lacked. Eric Clanton, that warped bastard, never issued any sort of challenge to his victims. There was no "You there! Procliam whether thou be a Trumpist or a Trump-Dumper, that I may target mine cudgel appropriately!" No, he just picked people who happened to be standing on the other side of an arbitrary line on the sidewalk and clubbed them, with intent to wound and possibly kill, and then scuttled off into the shadows to wait for another opportunity. 

Extreme political groups always have another group that they declare to be their sworn enemy, but for a true extremist, it doesn't matter if you're "officially" the target or not. If you're not an extremist, you are the target by definition. 

All I had to do to convince myself of this was pick up a history book, about any given era, really. Who did Nazis kill? Well, officially, they were after Jewish people and others they regarded to be racially inferior (which is a whole separate fuckin' mess, but that's what they said). Off the record, it turns out disagreeing with any given Nazi was grounds for execution, or at least harsh, harsh censure. 

On the other end of our supposed spectrum, the horrifically violent Stalin regime illustrates the point a little more clearly. Stalin, after a certain stage, didn't even bother pretending that it was the Jews, or the capitalists, or the bourgeoisie he was after. Speaking out against Stalin's state was alone sufficient to make you an executable enemy of said state. 

This pattern goes back a long, long way. Any time one political party, ideology, or even a single person becomes monodominant over all others, the society in question goes down an exceedingly dark, turbulent trajectory. How did one survive the much-studied, widely-feared Roman Empire? Well, you became a Roman citizen, or you hid as far away as possible and waited for corruption and stagnation to burn it out. 

I hate to reduce politics to this level, but there's a card in Hearthstone called Cult Master. When played, it issues a pronouncement: "Join, or die! ...or both." The player controlling Cult Master gets to draw cards any time one of its allies dies, or, to generalize, the Cult Master works most effectively by throwing its allies into the grinder and consuming everything around it. 

It's a bit like political extremism, really. Extremism 101 is only a three-week special seminar. Week 1: expose an impressionable person (read: any person) to your ideology, Week 2: convince them that your ideology is the only one that exists or has merit. Bonus points if you establish yourself in their eyes as a deity, or at least the avatar of one. Week 3: hand them a rifle or strap a bomb to them and send them off to glory. 

This is all rather negative, a laundry list of problems, and rather a depressing post. I like complaining as much as the next person, but I prefer to end on a positive note, so now the question arises: so how do we resolve any of this? If these models are so vastly inadequate, Fool Peter, what shall we draw instead? As the philosophers and ethicists often cry: BRO WHAT DO I DOOOO?

As far as the model goes, I think either of the conventional models you care to draw will do, as long as you realize what you're doing, and I might recommend one major modification. Get some paper and draw this out with me, if you please. We can draw the usual line of the political spectrum, but I suggest we make it three-dimensional instead. Imagine the line is in the foreground, and draw a further pair of lines off it. Pretend you're drawing a road that abruptly starts someplace and extends off toward the distant horizon. 

There's the usual spectrum in the foreground; you know better than I do what goes on that first axis. The other, extending into the paper, denotes how ardent or, put another way, extreme, a given belief is. We can also build this model off the usual two-axis Cartesian dealio, making a sort of 3-D converging pyramid. 

This model is heavy-handed enough, but let me point out explicitly: notice, if you will, that increasingly extreme beliefs become more and more similar, converging to the point where true die-hard extremists are essentially indistinguishable. "Agree with us or face destruction" is the uniting theme of every extreme movement I've been able to find, at least. 

Now, as far as what should be done: look at these movements, study their history (which ranges from troubled to downright hideous), and learn from them. There is no doubt in my mind that Adolf Hitler and the retinue that was his High Command were, and remain, some of the most purely evil motherfuckers ever to walk the earth in human bodies. If I were placed in a room with Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot and given a gun with two bullets, I would honestly be hard pressed to avoid shooting someone twice out of simple gut fury, logic be damned. 

That said, the cold, logical part of my brain studies the facts of fascist societies and sees: political extremism leading to unconscionable violence. They are also, however, immensely organized and responsive bureaucracies; at least at their beginnings, they are devoid of the obstructionist clutter that plagues modern republics. The means by which this concerted mode of action was attained are absolutely indefensible, but we can look at a fascist government and say "damn, that is an efficient system" without condoning or excusing the hideous things they've done politically. 

At the other end, look at the idea of a communist society. Everyone is equal and equitable, in the purest sense of the word; the uniting axiom "from each according to their ability and to each according to their needs" is implemented with the support of every person. The society in question is harmonious, equitable, and fair. 

Communist societies in real life have long been led by politically extreme people who execute the ideal of equality by a) rendering (nearly) everyone equal by subjecting them to crushing, abject poverty and b) executing anyone who opposes the idea of crushing, abject poverty. Megalomania abounds; go and read a book about Stalin or the other leaders of the USSR for a true-to-life account of what happens when you take nightmare-level narcissism and give it an unlimited reach and bottomless budget. 

I'm starting to ramble, but bear with me for one more example: capitalism! Good ol' free-market bootstrap-heavy capitalism, near and dear to our hearts as Americans. Theory: everyone is free to enter contracts and consume products as their desire dictates. The idea is for all contracts to satisfy both parties, and the laws of supply and demand to drive the motion of a free market. If you think a product sucks, buy its competition! Better still, start making that product yourself, in accordance with your own entrepreneurial vision. Innovation flourishes, and anyone with a vision and steel in their spine can make it work for them. 

Reality: multinational, globalist mega-corporations are converging toward monopoly, or at the very least hegemony. Collusion between partnered corporations has created a situation where consumer choice is increasingly illusory: choose Comcast or AT&T, and both services will suck for the price, for example. These same corporations pursue cheaper production and higher retail in their blind worship of the bottom line, heedlessly crushing up natural resources and people (often people in less financially solvent nations) into a paste to lubricate the gears of a great machine producing profit purely for profit's sake. 

Well, needless to say, I don't think that's quite ideal, as far as capitalism goes. 

So what we ought to do, in my profoundly non-expert opinion, is take the best parts of each ideology and try to average them out into something better. Fascism's unity of purpose, dedication to efficient operation and pride in one's government are admirable, deprived of the context of its uglier practitioners. Communism brings the noble ideals of fairness, egalitarianism, and altruism (sacrificing your able labor for the benefit of someone less able, for instance), despite the gulags and Party purges that plague its history. Capitalism's focus on individual freedoms and the pursuit of personal objectives are equally laudable, in spite of the way that global corporations have begun to sully that respectable dream. 

I learned this through Christian doctrine, though the idea of moderation is far, far older than the Bible (word to the homie Siddartha et al.). Isaiah 1:18 remains one of my favorite phrases: "Come now, and let us reason together... though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow." The exact meaning is essentially "become Christian for redemption," but I'm appropriating the phrase for political application; you may advocate an ideology to which I am wholly opposed, but I strive to understand why. No matter what -ism you choose, I maintain that we could hash out a discussion and find something redeemable we could learn from it as we march into the future. Stooping into violence and "us-and-them"-style thinking has a long, bloody history of not working, and I don't think it's crazy to posit that the world would benefit mightily should every person make a conscious effort to think logically and critically about any given topic in politics. 

Okay! I'm gonna cut it off there, as long in the tooth as it is. I can only hope you enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it; if you did, feel free to press whatever combination of buttons you deem appropriate to express same. The best combinations of buttons, in my opinion, are those required to leave me a comment, or show someone else this post and start a conversation! Tell me what you think, challenge me, call a tenth Crusade against me for supreme blasphemy, whatever you feel is best; as much as I enjoy rambling endlessly as a talking head, I do mightily prefer when there's feedback and engagement. "Discourse," one might say. Anyway! Have a lovely rest of your day/night cycle, and try to elevate your thinking before raising your voice, so to speak. Send me an email, drop my dumb ass a Facebook message, whateva. 

TL;DR It really is too long this time, isn't it? In my view, the people on the other side of a given aisle are not the enemy; we all have shared enemies in the people who didn't show up to Parliament because they're busy making bombs. 

The Test

TL;DR I've devised a series of simple tests to see if what someone says is garbage!

Hello, everybody! Welcome to Peter's Thoughts from the Shower, Episode God Only Knows What Number.

In conversation and politics these days, I've noticed a few things: a general lack of critical thinking, refusal to do research, and general reactionary venomousness. This isn't an indictment of any particular group, to be clear; people on all sides (and especially ends) of the political spectrum are slinging some pretty overcooked spaghetti in recent years. As such, I, a perfectly ineffective emissary of the political center, have devised a few simple steps to help you tell if something you're reading, watching, hearing, or otherwise consuming is bullshit.

The trick I use is to pull the rug out from under the situation context-wise and just examine what it is that's being said. This is not to say all things should be deprived of their appropriate context, but hear me out for a second here.

We'll start fairly innocent. Consider the Nicholas Sparks novel The Lucky One's film adaptation, a movie that had commendable financial success and remarkably lukewarm reviews, considering the amount of OH YEAH I heard on its release. To be clear, I'm not after this movie or the people who produced it, I just kinda... picked. There are many.

But here's the premise: astonishingly handsome Marine Zac Efron gets ambushed, blown up, and otherwise kicked to shit, surviving by repeated turns of slim probability in his favor. Through all this he's carrying the picture of a young woman he found on the ground, the running joke becoming that she's his "guardian angel."

Returning to the United States, Marine Zac proceeds to find said young woman through more remarkable feats of unlikelihood, but can't explain why he's arrived, and signs on at the farm she works at. There are then some old Nicholas Sparks mainstays, including a treehouse, abusive ex-husbands, and severe weather, ultimately ending up with Marine Zac Efron and the pretty blonde female lead together. No surprises, just a slightly cheesy but also vaguely heartwarming romance story.

Now, pretend Marine Zac Efron is instead played by Steve Buscemi or Christopher Walken or someone to that effect. This movie is now about a traumatized combat veteran who, having difficulty readjusting to civilian life, takes his dog (for some reason?) and stalks a pretty blonde female lead across several different states, cohabitates with her family under false pretenses, and maybe-kinda-arguably murders her ex-husband, and we no longer have the warm sunset lens flares and piercing good looks of Marine Zac Efron to nurse us off that fact. Well, shit. It seems I don't approve of this movie anymore, when you take it down to its core features.

I promised up there that this was about politics, so... smooth transition.

Let's pick alt-right firebrand Milo Yiannopolous, since he's in the news again recently. Big, big catalyst for controversy: due to various matters of who he is and what he says, nobody seems quite able to agree on what to think of him. So, let's pretend for a second that Milo isn't Milo. Take the exact words out of his mouth and pretend for a moment that they came out of someone else's.

"Muslims are allowed to get away with almost anything. They can shut down and intimidate prominent ex-Muslims. They’re allowed to engage in the most brazen anti-semitism, even as they run for office in European left-wing political parties. And, of course, politicians and the media routinely turn a blind eye to the kind of sexism and homophobia that would instantly end the career of a non-Muslim conservative — and perhaps get the latter arrested for hate speech when he dared to object."

From the article The Left chose Islam over Gays, 12 June 2016 A.D., in Breitbart.

Okay, so, probably certainly offensive if you're on the leftish side, and maybe if you're right-leaning you see a kernel of truth behind the blatant over-generalization. He did say this intentionally to be provocative, in fairness. That is his function; he is an offense machine, a generator of ferment and heated Facebook comment wars. 

Now let's take that quote, and just pretend that someone ordinary said it. It's not Milo Yiannopoulos, with his classical good looks and immaculately curated hair (not to mention his gorgeous accent) saying this thing; rather, it's an uncle at a family barbecue who you only kind of know, or better still, someone who just walked up to you and struck up a conversation on the subway. 

Re-imagined this way, this is no longer political commentary; it's the ravings of a fucking madman. There's no facts cited to establish a topic, no framing of a narrative or preface of "the way I see it," or anything to that effect. It starts as a generalization that one group of people are vaguely absolved of wrongdoing, with no example cited, then ends up fumbling into a critique of the laws governing hate speech(?). It's not even about anything; no issue prompted this comment, and I very much doubt anybody asked specifically for it. 

I could labor on about this on and on, but I think you get the idea. If you can take something and alter it very slightly, whether by replacing a key actor or imagining the words from a different speaker or whatever else, and have the thing in question end up sounding like a fuckin' lunatic produced it, there's a very high chance you ought to avoid consuming that particular content. 

Trust me on this one. I'm a fuckin' lunatic. 

Okay, that's all the time I've got for today. As always, if you enjoyed the read, the second-best thing to do is show people (a joy shared is... doubled[?!]). The very best thing to do is to share said joy with me; leave me a comment of what you think of my tests. Does this lead too sharply into extreme skepticism and cynicism? Does the mental move of altering the content in this way violate the agency of its author, or something to that effect? Let me know; I love reading any and all comments, and I hope you all have a lovely afternoon C:

What I Didn't Get at Berkeley

TL;DR There are some gaps in my education I wish were filled in, and they're not the ones you might expect.

Shameless Plug: I'm elsewhere on the Internet as well! I stream at this channel and upload shitty content at this channel. Okay, plug over.

So, I graduated in June of this year (GO BURRS), signalling the end of this stage of my education. I am now the proud owner of a degree in Integrative Biology (meaning... whatever you want, maaaan), with special and unofficial emphasis placed on community ecology and mycology. Obligatory joke about mushrooms, ha ha.

In the process of undergrad, I was exposed to a huge volume of information, and I haven't even forgotten all of it.; not immediately, anyway. I learned sterile technique, in spite of some of my lab partners' best efforts, and also how to do fun things like separate the various pigments from an organism once I've completely destroyed it and pretend I'm a forensics agent on CSI while running DNA (without the benefit of time-lapse cuts). "Volunteering" at Cal Day one day, I also got an exceptional introduction to the delicate art of handling crabs and anemones and such things (everybody else wanted to "have hands" that "worked" after volunteering and didn't want to get "cut up" or some goofy juvenile babble like that).

I could go on listing, but I think the idea is clear: while I've been at school, I've learned a surprising variety of skills in several different arenas, most of them in some way STEM-related. Another fairly shameless plug has to be inserted here: I can't imagine getting a scientific education of this caliber anywhere but at Berkeley. I'm sure the admissions department can give you a brochure with far better graphic design than I can lay out here, but in all seriousness, I can't imagine en environment for academia better than this one. The anecdote about walking accidentally into Nobel Laureates is mostly false, but I can tell you truly that moving around campus it's almost impossible to avoid running into the office of someone exceptionally competent in their field.

Regardless, I've received a complete and highly edifying education here, and I'm deeply grateful for it. During undergrad, I remember wondering what the purpose of the whole venture was, and I managed to convince myself a few times that I didn't have any useful skills. Now, in hindsight, I can clearly see that wasn't true; I was just surrounded by people with an equal number of skills and got adjusted to a new norm. Having graduated, I'm no longer plagued by a lack of confidence in my scientific abilities or anything like that. I've always loved science, and thought essentially that biology was a no-brainer field for me. I love thinking logically (caveat here, for obvious reasons) about problems and then solving them, and especially building a narrative framework about how the natural world works (more on that in future posts, probably).

My scientific education is of sterling caliber, although those who know me personally will know it doesn't matter (I'm still an idiot). Living in the STEM world all those four years, it rarely occurred to me to do anything else; I had a brief dalliance with anthropology, which ended in a great deal of rage and frustration on my part due to mostly clerical issues, but that was it. Biology was entirely sufficient to occupy my imagination and so on, and God knows I never suffered for a lack of things to read.

Having graduated now, what surprises me is how badly I miss the skills I don't have. Video editing, for instance, was never something I pursued, both because the technical know-how involved intimidated me and because I was never placed in the "artistic" box (more on that later, also), but now that I've tried it it's something I wish fervently I was better at. The same goes for drawing; again, something I was frankly instructed not to do, and when I started doodling between classes I discovered it's really fun. I suck, mind you, but that doesn't stop me from having a good time. In these arenas, I can't help wondering how much even a single class would have helped; I hear other people talk about the very basics, things that "everybody knows how to do," and have to Google the vocabulary used. Watching a favorite podcast of mine, for instance, I was astonished at my own lack of competence regarding film; it's not that I don't know anything, but there are tons and tons of little logical frameworks that it simply never occurred to me to think in until I heard someone else discussing them.

Movies are one of my favorite things to talk about (and during, I'm afraid; sorry, Rosa). And yet, here I am, not even considering the film as a piece of logic and trying to understand its theme, or puzzling out its plot holes, or considering the way it was shot, and on and on. A personal quest of mine is to be able to talk at least engage competently in the conversation about any subject that comes up (the phrase "Renaissance person" is so unbelievably far up its own ass at this point that I hesitate to use it, but that is an ideal of mine I try to at least pursue), and I would be a poor scientist indeed if I had to present my findings on film.

Programming was also never something I pursued, and I admit I'm kicking myself a little for it. I've always been good with languages, and it wasn't made clear to me that programming was essentially the science of talking to computers. I think it would have been a fascinating nexus of my interests to explore, where language and logical structure intersect, and I'm sure I don't need to tell you that programming is a marketable skill these days. Again, I was partly intimidated by the risk of failure, partly deterred by what I thought my "gifts" were, and partly cowed by my peers' horror stories about "fucking 61A," but I have to wonder. That's a strange motif of my life so far: I receive a perception from people I talk to, a cultural deterrent of some kind, regarding an activity, and I noodle myself out of ever trying it.

Years and years later, I will rediscover the subject by chance, and timidly extend a single fingertip into the pool, only to discover that the proverbial water is fine, and I really do love swimming after all. It calls to mind an anecdote from the distant past. I, or one of my brothers, was in a crib waiting through the day, as one does at the low single-digit ages. Growing bored, the small boy in question proceeded to use his tiny, cushy, hot-dog-like limbs to make the perilous vertical ascent and rappel down the crib to escape. Having done this, he then wandered into another room to greet my astonished and perhaps horrified mother with his mighty battlecry: "That wasn't so bad!"

Even in my short time here on Earth so far, I've encountered many, many situations that merited a "That wasn't so bad!"

Anyway, it's getting on toward dinnertime, and this post is long in the tooth, so I'll close with a few (hopefully) concise thoughts.

1. Despite how much I've learned, I want to learn more, and teach myself to do more new things. Maybe this is just how it is to be a person, and I'll always have this feeling of missing a skill, but I can't say for sure after so few years.

2. Berkeley's science programs are fantastic, but I would urge the undergrad in STEM to at least venture a little outside the safe, cushy, entirely-not-sterile-enough laboratory environment and indulge your creative side. Take a class in film, or literature, or whatever floats your boat, and I doubt you'll regret it.

3. We need more people in the humanities and the arts and so on. As a person who has experienced the "STEM ÜBER ALLES" culture firsthand (I even talked to a few computer science people and survived, would you believe), ignore that heap of shit. There's nothing less valid, or challenging, or worthwhile about the arts when compared to STEM. To bring it right down to the most mercenary level, I can also confirm for you that it is totally possible to do art as a job; it may be in the digital arts, as a video editor or graphic designer or whatever, but for God's sake stop telling people they have to do STEM to make money.

Okay, I think that's all my thoughts for now. I'd love to hear yours; are there any skills you wish you'd developed further, any sleeper talents you wish you'd explored, anything like that? Leave me a comment, or a message, or whatever. Have a wonderful rest of your day or night, as applicable C: