Pointing at the Moon

There's a lot of ideological fervor flying around in the news these days. I say "ideological" because it isn't just the issue of religion as some people think; while religion has long been a major catalyst for conflict, and is mainly what I'll talk about today, the same sort of fundamentalist zeal ordinarily associated with religious fanaticism is commonplace in the arena of earthly politics as well.

There's an old analogy from the Buddhist tradition regarding religion, although it can be taken to refer to belief in general. In the story, a man is travelling and encounters a wide and rushing river, deep beyond easy reckoning and impossibly dangerous to ford or swim. The man is fairly resourceful, and soon constructs a raft from trees along the river's bank, using the raft to cross in relative safety. Having reached the opposite bank, the man considers his raft and is grateful for it, and then continues his journey, leaving the raft on the bank behind him.

One moral of the story is that, along your path through life, you will occasionally come across significant obstacles that escape your current ability to handle. In your human resourcefulness, you will cast about for a tool or vehicle, find one, and with its assistance overcome the obstacle. I think that in itself is pretty soothing to remember.

A crucial part of the story, however, is that the man leaves the raft behind. He needed it, he built it, and he abandoned it when its purpose was complete. Religions and belief systems work a lot like this; they are healthy things to practice, and fantastic for self-improvement and ethical decision-making and so on, but they are not to be clung to if they become extraneous. You are grateful for your raft, and you do not turn from it with spite, but neither do you break your back carrying over miles of open land out of fear that another identical river may appear.

There's another metaphor, which I think is less old but no less Buddhist (but I'm not sure). The most famous person to have said this is Bruce Lee, in Enter the Dragon. The exercise is this: go out at night and point at the moon with one finger. We're all pointing up at the same moon, but we have lots of different fingers that can come to distract us. I won't belabor the point, because Bruce Lee summed it up nicely: "Don't concentrate on the finger, or you will miss all that heavenly glory."

It is my contention that almost all people involved in politics have gotten caught up in their fingers.

Any ideology or belief system is, ultimately, an instrument, created by and saturated with human data. They are informed by the sociological context at the moment of their creation. Does this invalidate them? Certainly not. The faiths and ideologies have valid advice and guidance for the living of an ethical life, but it is essential to remember that the transcendent is just that. The divine is, to describe it, indescribable. Any religious doctrine is written, and therefore mediated by its human author, even if it does originate in the divine realm. I'll talk about that in a later post, but there's the point.

All the world religions are pointing at the same gorgeous, indescribable moon of divinity. All the political camps are also pointing to the same end, the human good, although that one is indescribable in the sense of being too complicated to describe. No matter how starkly you seem to disagree with someone, there's a very good chance you two have at least some sort of common ground to stand on, and I think that's at least a little reassuring.

TL;DR Don't get zesty about dogma.

Standardization

Standardization is the practice, in short, of making everything the same. We standardize testing for education to ensure everyone is at least on the same page. We standardize machine parts to make the process of maintenance easy and as vulgarity-free as possible. We try to get everything to a uniform baseline for ease and efficiency of function, essentially.

We at Berkeley tend to think this is a Big Damn Problem. A significant subset of students here believe that the idea is to be as classically non-standard as possible. These are the people who represent the Berkeley stereotype, who listen to the most underground music possible and have a high percentage chance of having dreadlocks. You know the ones I mean.

Indeed, we have a more generalized attitude that everyone is unique and has a unique perspective and a unique contribution to make. I think this is the right attitude to have; for better or worse, there is no one quite like you, no matter how "normal" or "weird" you think you are.

It bears repeating, however, that "unique" and "special" are different words with different meanings. The members of that subset of Berkeley students tend to act under the assumption that they are special. Their problems only happen to them and are more severe than those of "ordinary" people. Their opinions are incredibly more enlightened than anyone else's; after all, it would take a true visionary to come up with something as incredibly stupid as anarchism.

Reminding such people that their opinion is just that, an opinion, usually results in indignant outcries about "repression," or, in the truly enlightened groups, about how the "sheeple need to wake up." This group of people, those who assume themselves to be the enlightened intelligentsia privy to the underlying mechanisms of The Man, are a very small group responsible for giving all of us a bad name. Our college was a nexus of activism in the '70's, and these are generational echoes without an actual cause. They are why people raise their eyebrows when you say you go to UC Berkeley.

The point I'm getting at in a very muddled, circuitous way is this: it's perfectly all right to be different from everyone else. As far as I'm concerned, it's impossible not to be. You might espouse doctrine or act a certain way as you put on someone else's coat, but you as a person are unchanged. The underlying you is unique.

However, being unique is not the same as being special or superior. The idea of standardized education, whether it's working or not, is to hold everyone to the same (ideally high) standard. This isn't repression; this is preparation. There are a set of standards the world will hold you to as an adult, and whether you make the choice to fulfill them or strike out against them, you need to at least know they are there.

Humanity is not a homogeneous species. We're comprised of infinitely varying individuals. It's been said that people are like individual, beautiful snowflakes, each with a unique crystal pattern that can never be replicated. I think that's true, but the damn things are still made of snow. The way your pieces are arranged might be different and unique, but we're all made of essentially the same things. Everybody is divine, which means no one is any more divine than anybody else.

The parts of machinery are standardized because the machine will simply be unsustainable otherwise. "Well, a rotating gear gave out and it was entirely unique. Guess we have to open a new steel mill." We're all part of a massive, complex social machine of sorts, but I don't think that's a problem. As long as we all know we're part of the workings and understand how they turn (and are not dominated by them), we're all good.

TL;DR You're unique, exactly like everybody else.

Nerd

This, too, is a word! This one refers, variously, to people who wear thick-framed fake glasses to take selfies, people who get better grades than average, and people who play either ADOM, D&D, both, or some comparable combination. A "nerd" is, in its most common application, anybody who doesn't get their kicks through the ordinary routes of team sports and/or casual promiscuity.

First, we have the self-advertised "neeeerrdddyyyy" people. We're not going to talk extensively about these people, because they're horrible. You know the ones I mean. Yes, you do.

Second are the semi-legitimate nerds. These ones don't necessarily wear fake thick-framed glasses, but neither is it a rule that they don't. These people have about a 50% chance of "liking school" or, at earlier stages of life, "reading books" and such things. You might catch them "studying," even. This classification of nerd as been known, in many cases, to own something called a "MacBook Pro."

The third category of nerd  is deeper and darker. These people might wear thick-framed glasses not because they're just suh cayute, but because they actually require some kind of vision aid. The traditionally-held belief is that this impairment is a result of staring at books/computer screens/tiny jewels/ancient artifacts. These ones traditionally shun sunlight and interpersonal interaction entirely. To give you an idea, they don't play any team sports, at all!

Right, now that I'm done being bitter about all the profiles I fit, let's discuss his word "nerd." I would unquestionably fit into the third category, in no small part because I use words like "unquestionably" instead of "totally (breh)." I have also been known to Dungeon some Dragons from time to time, and I actually go to my classes because I like them.

Now, nerds (especially of the higher orders) are held to be a very small and much-abused minority in our culture. These poor kids get swirlies in high school, don't get dates to prom, and later become the Unabomber. Shucks, this high school movie's rough.

My opinion, however, is that the set "people who are nerds" includes everyone.

No, sorry, just checking to see if you were awake. Let's try that again.

Everyone.

But not everyone is in a board gaming group, or likes computers, or plays with telescopes in their spare time! That's true, but in my estimation that isn't what it means to be a nerd.

A nerd is someone with a deep-seated fascination (some might say fixation) with a particular thing, to the exclusion of other activities. They never go outside because they're tinkering with computers all day. They never play team sports because they're reading books.

Well, I got new for y'all. Everybody has a deep-seated fixation on something, and yours is no more or less valid than mine. They're incompatible, yeah, but they're all valid. Your fixation may well be team sports or hanging out in large crowds of strangers, but that doesn't mean my inclination to read books is wrong. That type of thinking, "I am right; ergo you are wrong," is playground logic, and it doesn't do to have adults thinking that way.

TL;DR We're all nerds, just for different things.

Cheap Difficulty

I'm gonna start out, as I do, with a definition. "Cheap" difficulty is mostly a video game concept. There are different kinds of difficulty to a game; it can be legitimately challenging to your mind/skills/reflexes as a player, or it can be "cheap." Difficulty counts as cheap, generally, if it's unavoidable, totally random, and/or results in an instant loss.

For example, ADOM is a very hard game to beat, because you have only one life, roughly five (complicated) ways to win, and a few hundred ways to die along the way. In this game, one of the bosses is called the Ancient Chaos Wyrm and is very difficult to fight because he shoots you with bolts of great nastiness and confuses you, making you stagger around like an idiot while he bolts or claws you to death. 

The Ancient Chaos Wyrm constitutes legitimate difficulty and can be beaten with sufficient knowledge, preparation, and skill. However, another event in ADOM: any time you walk into a dark area, there is a very small chance you will be "eaten by a grue" and killed instantly, with no recourse to any sort of defense or reaction on your part. The grue event is, in my opinion, extremely cheap difficulty. It can happen at any time, to any character, no matter their power and preparation, and there's no defense against it.

Real life, oddly enough, is even more full of cheap difficulty than most video games. Reality has an incalculable amount of randomness in it, regardless of how reckless or cautious you are. This is not a card game we live in, where you can carefully watch the board and your single opponent and evaluate each play. Life is much more akin to rolling dice every time you take an action. It turns out that, rolling that many dice over the course of a given day, a certain number of them come up with very poor results.

Other times, life isn't just hidden probabilities, discoverable and otherwise, turning over and around. There are times when life is like playing curling in pitch darkness, but that's a different matter.

Emotion is often a major source of life's cheap difficulty; I once heard it said that everything you say would offend at least four people. This person is preposterously oversensitive to blue silk shirts, and so you never even got a fair chance at the job interview. That person is a staunch vegan, and your joke about bacon got about a zero out of ten. Again, sometimes life's variables get into a configuration that just isn't on your side (see the Occam's Razor shenanigans for more about life's configurations), and you would have to get a 12 on a six-sided die to come out ahead.

My point is that people have all sorts of little triggers that set them off, for whatever reason and to whatever extent. I don't intend to blame people for this or make fun of them. One of my triggers personally is the sound of one person (specifically one person) softly clapping their hands. There's no "reason" behind any of it, and there's no way to anticipate or prepare for all the possible mines you may step on while navigating around humans.

Take heart! What I said was that there's no way to anticipate or prepare for all the possible, individual mines, which sounds a little dreary. From my perspective, however, this is actually awesome. Nobody can be ready for all the mines, so what the hell? Stop worrying and trying to plot a safe path, and just get your plow out and run for it! Mines will go off in your face, and some of yours will undoubtedly blow up on some other people, but in the long run it will (not always, but often) be a memory the two of you laugh about someday.

The important thing is not to be worried about which types of mines there are and where they may be. The important thing is to be aware that you are standing in, and a contributor to, a minefield of infinite danger, complexity, and beauty. Some of the mines make beautiful fireworks displays in the distance when you step on them! Others release deadly nerve gas. It's a flexible thing.

My point is this: life's hard, but the thing is to not make it excessively hard. Be polite to people, but don't be a pill-bug. Understand that people are neurotic, compulsive, and insane, just like you. You're going to make some people really angry in life, and some others are going to make you tear all the wiring out of your office in a fit of rage. This is a fact; the important thing is to be aware that your mines are there waiting to be stepped on, and try to control your reaction. Because that's all it is, a reaction, and you want to mount a response.

TL;DR ADOM is fun, if you're a masochist; life's tough, but so are you.

Triad of Expectation

This is something my dad, in his unparalleled wisdom as Bearer of the Sacred 'Stache, passed on to me. I don't know if it's an original or if he got it from somewhere in turn, but here ya go.

The thing was created to apply to purchasing products or services, but I've found it applies more broadly to things in life. It's one of these classic formations in triangle form, where you can select two to emphasize at the cost of the other one.

The triad is composed of Good, Cheap, and Fast. If it's cheap and fast, it likely won't be good, but if you get it good and fast, it certainly won't be cheap.

My dad applies this sort of thinking to airplane parts and other manly workshop-y things like that, and uses it as a sort of risk vs. reward thought. The questions of how badly something is needed vs. the time-frame it's needed in vs. how long it needs to last and so on ad infinitum all stack up against one another as his gears turn and grind, and eventually a decision gets spat out of all the whirling, steaming machinery.

As overly simplistic as the plain triangle figure is (life is complicated), I actually find it's a helpful quick-and-dirty reference for judgment. Knowing that people are limited by the basic constraints of the triangle is very helpful in terms of telling which things are worth a second look and which get immediately filed under "Purge."

For instance, I recently received two offers via email, both related to my grades. The first was an invitation to submit an essay about questions of ethics in the modern world. It featured the prizes prominently (one of which was for $2,000 cash, to give you an idea), of course, because that's how contest entry works. The contest was also free to join. Now, this is Good and Cheap; I didn't need to pay anything, and there was potentially a pretty substantial payoff. Notice, however, that it wasn't Fast (or Easy, maybe); competition was going to be stiff, and writing such an essay would take a lot of thought and effort investment on my part. Ultimately, I realized writing the requisite essay, combined with the rest of the school experience, was so un-Easy that I decided not to do it (I didn't even like the questions, either, the pretentious buggers, but that's separate).

The other offer was to join something called NSCS, the National Society of Collegiate Scholars. For $95, I could join this little organization and network easily with all its other chapters and members, giving me All Types of Things! Career-wise, this was advertised as a major break, because they had people in Positions X and Y in Industries Gamma and Lambda, and working in the offices of Guy 3, and so on. So, let's examine this; $95 is no pocket-change fee, but for the supposed payoff that's pretty Cheap. Speaking of the payoff, that would be insanely Good. Finally, I was supposed to be able to gain employment and benefits and things immediately; it was supposedly Fast in the extreme. With all three points of the triad impossibly present and imbricated with their generally sketchy presentation (the third question on their FAQ was "Is this a legitimate organization? Yes!"), I passed on that with no conflict of conscience.

So keep this lovely little triad in mind in life, not just as applied to finance but more broadly with regard to opportunities and everything. I try to cultivate a degree of optimism here, but always remember: as a general rule, things that seem too good to be true often are. The exceptions to the rule are fabulous, but it is the exceptions that make that particular rule.

There's no such thing as free or infinite profit; if there was someone would have tapped it long ago, rest assured. The same is true of life experiences in general. The costs aren't always apparent until later, but be certain that there is at least some cost associated with everything, whether it's simply the time invested or something more sinister.

As an example of something that seemed to meet all three points on the triad and didn't reveal its consequences until later, let's talk about crack!

Crack is a major issue even today, but it was an absolute epidemic in the mid-80's and early 90's. This was, and is, a hell of a drug. It started flowing in with great exuberance during the Iran-Contra Dealio, and there are lots of allegations about the CIA's (in)direct involvement with the issue. With the greater availability, it became, comparatively, extremely Cheap, to the point that people could feed their addiction off simple petty theft or robbery (hence the massive crime spike at the time). It's one of the Fastest drugs available in terms of its effects, taking effect immediately (hence the movie image of the person doing a line and then, by the time they sit back, already showing the effects). And, most of all, it apparently makes you feel really Good, to the point that it can eliminate other things' ability to make you feel good.

Most people who got hooked on crack weren't aware they were going to get hooked. Their friends, or dealers, or whoever, just told them it made them feel amazing, and that was their immediate perception. Nobody stopped to apply their judgment. Again, the impact of addiction isn't apparent until later; you're fine, doing whatever, and then suddenly you're robbing a corner store at gunpoint with blood running freely out of your nose and neither of those things bothers you.

I don't mean to be negative! Just employ the triad and carefully examine the options.

This is also where I take a second out to say a genuine "thank you" to people reading this, and "sorry" for my absence. I have been, as they say, occupied, but I'm back now! Thanks, everybody, for being patient with my madness, and hello to anybody who's new!

TL;DR You can pick two; I'm back, thanks for reading.

Good Job

Here at Berkeley, I'm doin' pretty well for myself, at least academically. Socially I couldn't interact my way out of a room with no walls, but that's fine.

The instructors at Berkeley, in my experience, are members of the increasingly-widespread social movement that increasingly focuses on providing personal feedback to each student, especially in the more writing-oriented classes. The idea here is that, if each student has feedback specifically targeted (at a fine level of detail) to their individual work, their individual learning and construction process will be more significantly benefited than if a simple percentage score or letter grade was presented.

I really like this idea, especially for classes in the humanities or other disciplines where things can be a little more interpretive or subjective. Seeing the grader's reasoning is, in a very prosaic and materialistic way, very helpful in terms of figuring out how to tailor your assignments to get better grades. Additionally, having their logic laid out at various points means that, should you disagree, the two of you can have a specific point from which to establish a constructive dialogue about how to improve your writing or make your interpretation of the course content more clear to the instructor. That is to say, "if no like grade, can point at spot, say no, talk more."

Now, this is all about improvement, which is lovely. After all, that's a big part of what learning is about. Making mistakes happens to everyone, and the point of a university setting is to make them in a (relatively) safe and (mostly) non-judgmental environment and to learn from them for the future.

The "improvement" focus puts a major positive slant on most of the feedback; criticism is meant to be "constructive," and avoid being harsh to the point that students are afraid to try again. At some point people started to realize that the "rap on the knuckles" approach was giving young people complexes, and so we decided to go about education with a perspective more focused on improvement. In our society that praises virtues like confidence and boldness in adults, it wouldn't do to have sharp censures for mistakes and only the most grudging of praise for successes from an early time in life.

This is all good stuff, in my opinion. People have a right to helpful and honest feedback about their work so that they can improve it, for their own good and the good of others.

Uh-oh, it's that catching point that comes up in all my posts. "Honest." Oh, no.

The problem with the approach I described above is that most instructors are actively trying to be nice to their students. "But that isn't a problem! Being nice is nice." Yeah, it is, until it hinders any sort of progress.

I think this issue only really affects people who reliably score well on things (or maybe just me, because I'm horrible), but it bears consideration. There are those of us who are extremely used to getting good grades and have been jaded by the experience, succumbing to narcissism and coming to believe that they've attained the best level possible and can simply continue the way they are, breezing through things. These are the people who will likely, in later life, "have people to do that." They'll also have destructive cocaine addictions and a home life full of carefully-concealed domestic violence, but that isn't the point!

Those people, however, are considerably in the minority (I might say roughly 1%, if you get my drift) even among people who get the high scores. The rest of such people are still aware of their own human imperfection and, moreover, still definitely concerned with improvement.

So, the issue: our feedback rarely has anything meaningful or useful to say. For example, my anthropology midterm went really well and I wound up with a 99. The test was mostly comprised of essays, so I turned to that section hoping to see some feedback about strengths and weaknesses, and so on.

What I saw, in reality, was a lot of "good" and "good job" with various little bits underlined, with a little "fantastic!" written at the end.

I had rhetoric papers last semester that had the same sort of issue. I put a lot of energy in, and got an A on both of them, but the feedback was comprised entirely of terms like "wonderful!" and "well argued!" Now, I'm obviously happy about my grades, and receiving praise is lovely. I think the problem is that, when I perform well on something, I expect the feedback to slide up to that standard too.

That's vague, so let me explain. If I write a paper with some serious grammatical problems and plainly misinterpreted (or didn't bother to do) the readings for a course, those are problems that can be easily pointed to as things for me to improve and get into a better place with my work. Even if my work is already in a better place, I want feedback that reflects that; sure, point out where I did well, but I absolutely guarantee that there are places I can get better.

Part of being academically "smart" (I already talked about that word in another post), in my opinion, involves being emotionally mature enough to accept your own imperfection. I don't care if you have a higher amount of computational brainpower than most people if you can't descend from your cloud long enough to clearly state your sandwich order in terms we mere humans can comprehend. There's no longer any such thing as an intellectual elite, or at least not one that implies friendship or peership between its members. In a tossup between a snooty brainchild from a certain -County- in California and an honest, down-to-earth person of less "intelligence," I regret to inform one (and, presumably, one's parents) that one's AP test scores and your 2000+ on the SAT just isn't going to cut it for being a human being. Go forth and seek humility, thou baggage!

I am not one of those airy "intellectuals." I know I make mistakes, and I'm at least emotionally developed enough not to come screaming to your office if you disagree with me. Respect me enough to give me feedback that seriously considers what I wrote through the lens of constructive criticism, no matter what "score" I got.

TL;DR It's a "smart" person-rich environment, for God's sake. Give us all some useful feedback.

Having vs. Being

If you read the post where I got needlessly emotionally and philosophically invested in an animated T.V. show, you might remember the concept of Having vs. Being. In that case it was about romantic love, but the concept applies on a much wider view, and I don't think I really did it justice with that little blurb.

It may have become apparent, over all these posts, that I have kind of a touchy-feely idea about the underlying nature of people. I think I used phrases like "manifestation of the universe's underlying creative drive," and I wax constantly about the exalted potential of each individual person, and blah blah. The point is, I think people are inherently possessed of great potential, for better or worse.

Moreover, I think the underlying state of every single person's mind is naturally one of great calmness. The prevailing view is that humanity evolved (entirely or at least chiefly) in Africa. It's a place of great danger, sure. Our body's highly-developed fight-or-flight response is proof enough of that; people in ancient times were under regular threat from deadly disease or predation from creatures who were, as far as a singular purpose is concerned, more highly-evolved than we were (and are). Life was often simple, short, and messy in humanity's early years.

On the other hand, the entire natural world is filled with places of fantastic beauty, and Africa has some of the most beautiful of all. Evolution is a process of trade-offs, gains proportional to sacrifices, and I think one of the greatest losses humanity ever suffered was when we evolved awareness of the brevity of our own lifespan.

All that preface is leading into this: modern culture is obsessed with doing things; we've only got so much time, we need to leave an impression on the world before we go, so let's all gather the maximum number of awards and recognition and possessions. "Goal-oriented" is one way people refer to this focus on recognizable achievement and success of yourself and (importantly) those you associate with. I call it "pathological."

Still, the fact remains that our lives are busy. We do things, we buy groceries, we text people, we do homework. Now, there's something I want you to do, one more thing on the infinite list. What I want you to do is:

Nothing. Just sit, and don't do anything. As much as you can, don't think about anything. If you have to think about something, think about how you're sitting and how you're breathing. If you need a point to focus on, try to just push your sternum out a little bit, and sit a little straighter. Alternatively, just focus on not fidgeting, as you surely are by now. Nothing more.

If you decided to indulge my little exercise, you probably found it surprisingly difficult. We're incredibly used to juggling a huge number of things in our day-to-day life. There's a paper due in two days, and another next week. Work starts in three hours, and we have to get breakfast and go to the gym before that. Before that, we need to call our boss. Before that, we need to be sure we're getting enough sleep. Before that... well hell, now it's yesterday again, and there's a laundry list of things I forgot to do. Those of you who have kids, especially: y'all know.

This is all leading into one somewhat-belabored point. All the things you're juggling, all the feelings (positive or negative) you have at any given moment, all the titles you have, don't have, or want to get- they're all things that you're doing. They're not what you are.

People introduce themselves, most commonly, with their name and subsequently their profession and other basic, general information. The interesting part to me, however, is how they say it. "My name is Jordan, and I'm a doctor." We're all aware that our name is one of our possessions, but our profession has become equated with a part of our identity. It's not that Jordan "practices medicine" or "works at a clinic;" Jordan is a doctor, as if his job (a set of things he does) is the only thing of any interest or value to the other person.

I have a bad headache, and it's putting me in a bad mood. At this point I might be heard to say "I am pissed off at the universe," or something equivalent. Well, that's just simply not true; I'm not always angry or in pain, and there's nothing about me inherently that makes me that way. It's how I feel at the moment.

This is "having vs. being" in life. People in modern culture develop all kinds of physiological ailments from the stress of rushing around and juggling all the plates of our complex life. Humanity claims to have mastered nature, and it's a strange situation. We survived the Black Plague, only to develop compulsions about hand sanitizer and die from hypertension-related heart disease instead.

We (Americans) have a habit of dismissing cultures we deem "primitive." Historically, the obvious example is our treatment of American Indians, but a lot of us apply the same sort of filter to how we see Eastern culture as well. The mention of meditation results in people making an "ooooh" sound and rolling their eyes, for the most part, because we think it's silly. What's the point, we ask? Sitting around in your garden and just doing nothing? Where's the benefit?

That's the benefit; there isn't a benefit. Meditation, whether it takes the form of the American Indian attitude of oneness with nature or the actual practice of "meditation" (sitting and optionally saying "ohm"), is an actiity that inherently has no goal or purpose in mind. I think that is its single greatest advantage. Just taking a little while to abandon the overly complex, hyperactive life we live and just experience the sensation of being alive in one moment might sound ethereal and silly. I think, however, that that's one of the biggest things the West lost and the East got right; everything, including you, is divine and sublime, and there's no need to go chasing after things to validate that.

There's an old expression in Arabic, Farsi, and Hebrew (depending on who you ask): "This, too, shall pass." It's extremely simple, to the point that I think most people overlook it, but think about it for a minute. In two weeks, you won't remember what you were feeling as you read this. Ten years from now, you won't still be worried about college acceptances. Emotions and other occupations, as with our brief mortal lives, are valid but transient. It's not that you are worried about things; you feel that way at the moment.

This may have been something of a blob rather than a blog, but I hope you're able to get through my obscurity to the meaning. I've personally got the jitters right now (waiting to get the last and most worrisome of my tests back), and becoming aware of how frantic and jumpy I felt reminded me of this bit of philosophy.

TL;DR You're still alive, even if you're doing nothing; meditation is the business.

Watch Out; It's the Snake

The serpent, as far as the Western world at large is concerned, has been adopted as the symbol of temptation, or simply of evil itself. Judeo-Christian doctrine leaves it unclear as to whether the Serpent is an emissary of Lucifer or actually the Big Nasty himself, but it makes little difference. In either case, the Serpent was directly responsible for the supposed fall of man from grace. As a result of the Serpent's temptation, Adam and Eve gained knowledge and self-realization, but were forever banished from the paradise in which they lived, separated from their glorious creator.

In Norse mythology, the biggest snake of all is the child of a giantess and the god of evil trickery, and was thrown into the ocean as an abomination. Like any good monster, however, he didn't die, and grew in the depths until he stretched around the world to grasp his own tail. Jörmungandr, as he came to be known, will trigger the apocalyptic battle at the end of the world when he releases his own tail and come up out of the sea to darken the sky with his venom. In the ensuing battle between the "good" pantheon and the various Norse monsters, Jörmungandr will fight the thunder god Thor for the last time (the two are old enemies), ultimately dying under Thor's hammer but poisoning the beloved protector god to death in the process. Painful stories to read, really, both of them.

This distaste for the serpentine shows up all over the place in Western culture. Someone who lies or dissembles is a "snake." The sound of a snake's rattle turns up in our movies any time as a tension-builder. "Snake eyes" is the worst possible result on a pair of dice in most games: double ones, the lowest possible value. Snake Eyes is also the member of the G.I. Joe team, the one who specializes in being a ninja and fighting in ways the other team members find distasteful. He's also a specialist in having an unpleasantly gravelly face and horrible facial disfigurements, further feeding the Unpleasant Snake idea.

So snakes are an embodiment of evil, as far as we Americans and Western Europeans are concerned. They're scaly, they sneak around on the ground loaded with poison, and their eyes are disturbingly configured. What else do we need?

Very strangely, though, the rest of the world holds snakes in no such contempt. Hinduism has a great many deities and spirits who take serpent form, and few are totally malevolent. For this reason, king cobras are held to be sacred animals in many areas, and there are many rituals involving communion with them. One version of asking for nourishing rain, for instance, involves a priestess coaxing a king cobra from his den and talking with him, kissing him on the nose three times over the course of the process. As an aside, Eastern religious practice is intensely more badass than that of the West in general.

For the East, the view of serpents has none of the distaste, fear, or loathing of that in the West. Westerners find the snake's slithering motion and constant tasting of the air repulsive and frightening. Eastern religions, on the other hand, have long held snakes (especially big ones) in a position of wonder and awe, fascinated by the mysterious way of moving and general quietness (believed to indicate great wisdom).

Also, snakes in the West have come to represent treachery, temptation, and especially with deadly venom. In Eastern tradition (and, strangely enough, in the full original context of Judeo-Christian doctrine) snakes are, at worst, representative of duality. The serpent carries deadly venom, but also holds the knowledge of medicine (that funny squiggly symbol on medical equipment is a snake wrapped around a staff, from a story about Moses healing snakebite victims). In other traditions snakes are death and birth; again, the snake carries a payload of fatal venom, but some cultures make a comparison with the umbilical cord as well.

The snake's habit of shedding its skin is one of great importance to mythology and philosophy. The Ourobouros, an ancient symbol of a snake eating its own tail, is a metaphorical representation of this habit. In ancient times, a snake's shed skin was perceived to be a dead version of its old self; having served its purpose, it was left behind with respect before it became mismatched and ineffective with the world around it. This metaphor of death to enable new life is huge in Hinduism and Buddhism especially, but persists in traditions the world over.

I'm not going to make any claims about which visions of snakes are right, but here's this: snakes in any mythological incarnation have always been wielders of great power, for good or ill. They're an awesome, profound, and widespread symbol in all parts of the world, and I thought it would be good to present you with more information about differing views, for your own edification and consideration.

TL;DR Snakes, man.

Addict

"Addict," as I'm sure we're all aware, is a term we use to refer to anyone with a severe drug habit. This doesn't extend to recreational and casual substance users; a true addict is someone who, physically or psychologically, cannot function normally or effectively without using their drug of choice. Another way to say "drug addiction" is "involvement with a substance to the exclusion of other activities."

The most common use of the term "addict" is, as I implied, in relation to drugs, especially "hard" drugs like crystal meth, heroin, and all those other lovely nasties. A noted synonym is "junkie," a still-less-flattering label that conjures images of a decidedly unwashed and ungroomed person who jumps out at you to ask for money when you walk by an alley to ask, twitching, for the change from your meal or whatever.

But we have "adrenaline junkies," don't we? Weird. That hasn't got the same connotation at all; at the very worst, an "adrenaline junkie" is reckless and unhealthily uninvested in their own safety. In America, we actually tend to admire such people for their ability to briefly abandon their fear and "just do it," always seeking the next "crazy" thing to do in the name of fun.

Well, hang on a second. That's exactly the same as what a heroin addict does, abandoning the usual constraints of society in search of the next big chemically-induced rush. The only way for either of these types to be happy at any moment is to have their substance of choice, whether it's synthetically produced in a lab or naturally produced by their body in response to a fear stimulus. As such, these people will pretty well ignore anything that isn't their given stimulus until they receive it. What an unhealthy, unfortunate state to be in!

Everyone's in that state.

"What do you mean, everyone?! I'M certainly not a junkie, thou artless, bandy-legged rapscallion!!" A junkie? No, maybe not, but I can just about guarantee you're an addict. 

An addict, as I mentioned, is someone who has one thing that just absolutely pushes all their buttons. In the normal definition, this is exactly and only one thing, but multiple addictions can exist in one person. The thing(s) to which a person is addicted can exclude other things from the addict's consideration; the addict's certain knowledge of what makes them tick over tends to cheapen other things by comparison.

What I'm going to tell you, for your consideration, is that everyone has a few things like this, things that create just the right fuel-air mixture in the combustion chamber of their brain. With drug addicts, it's very clear; the thing in question is a compound that affects their brain and body chemistry in observably chemical ways. For most people, however, the question is less clear. Your addiction can be something physical like this, or it can be something mental. 

I don't mean to imply all our addictions are unhealthy, either. I personally could be labeled a music addict without much trouble, and I'd accept it. Going through a day without any sort of music is almost unbearable, and I remember songs and play them in my head when I can't listen to the songs themselves. Do you absolutely love reality T.V., even if you objectively know it's not especially edifying? I know someone who finds boxing and fighting sports in general to be morally reprehensible, but still watches MMA more than the news. 

Here's a really common one: terrified of people seeing you "without your coffee?" 

I think a really important step in life is to recognize what your addictions are and try to translate them into something you find useful. The immediately obvious example would be picking a job that relates to your personal addiction, but the examples are too many to discuss with any semblance of brevity here. The idea is to have drive coming from your addictions, but not be driven solely by them, if that makes sense. 

Think about things you do every day, or things you relish every time they happen, and see if you can't figure out what it is you're a junkie for.

TL;DR We've all got somethin'.

The Position of People

Humans occupy a very strange position in the world; we're the only species smart enough to have figured out vaccination, safe food preparation, and space travel (limited for now, but still). We're one of a very small number of species with a complex societal structure, and perhaps the only one with the mental capacity to recognize it as such. On that note, our brainpower as a species has propelled us (arguably) to the highest point on the ladder of nature, colonizing the whole globe and bending the environment to suit us where most creatures make nests and make do.

We're also the only species dumb enough to have truly organized war, and also war for the wrong reasons. Ants fight one another in a way not totally alien to ours, and even practice a form of slavery in some species, but the critical difference is this. Ant colonies fight, ultimately, simply for resources and survival; even enslavement is purely pragmatic to make their nest function more easily and increase their species' reproductive success. Humans, on the other hand, very rarely fight to actually defend themselves. The recorded millennia of human history are littered with examples of wars fought over (or at least justified by) religion and other ideologies. We get into absolute screaming matches and kill each other by the thousands over our differing answers to questions that an octopus, despite its fairly massive brain(s), would never even have bothered to ask.

And that's the problem, really. Humans aren't "smarter" than some species of animals with equivalent amounts of brain matter; our minds are just more highly complicated. Structurally, it's very clear that humans are still firmly rooted in the animal domain. The back-lower parts of our nervous (brain stem, limbic system, spinal column and so on) are the "oldest" in terms of evolution, and also the fastest to act by far. Your reflexes, for example trigger due to communication between muscle and spine, without any input from your brain whatsoever.  Our upper brain function has a longer activation time but is closer to what we'd call "thinking" (remembering a string of numbers, recognizing someone's face, rehearsing a speech in your mind, whatever). 

This puts humanity in an extremely strange place as far as evolution is concerned. Our society developed to its current stage over a long period of time, as far as we're concerned. To evolution's perspective, however, the time in question was the blink of an eye or less. As such, the human species is a lot like a single person during the teenage years, growing exponentially stronger but stumbling over the sudden power of our own faculties. 

For example, say you have to present a speech in front of your class. There are certain people who are fine with this, mind you, but for most of us this represents a source of some nervousness. When the appointed time comes to make your speech, you present physical symptoms; your heart rate rises, your palms may sweat, your pupils dilate. For some people, the knees and legs may quiver despite your most stringent attempts to calm yourself.

Why? The fear related to your speech is purely social in origin; realistically, nothing physically bad will happen to you no matter the result. Your upper brain fears ridicule or ostracization, certainly, but that's the problem. The lower parts of your brain aren't sufficiently developed to grasp the complex nature of a social situation, and are only receiving input that something is wrong, and respond in the only way they're evolved to. Your pupils are trying to let in the most light possible to gather more information, and the shaking in your knees is preparedness to leap quickly backwards. Those two things saved one of your distant ancestors from a poisonous snake, but in the physically safe setting they become annoyances.

So, humans have a bizarre disjuncture between what our survival instincts are prepared for and the actual complicated requirements of social existence. So?

It bears keeping in mind that, indeed, part of our brain is still convinced that we're earlier primates living in a jungle somewhere, seeking mates and avoiding Sudden Onset Panther-Mediated Death Syndrome. For one thing, that's just humbling to remember, and humility can be good for keeping touch with reality. For another, being aware of the physical parts of your reaction to stimuli can lead to awareness of what your immediate reactions are, so that you can be more in control and mount a response rather than a simple reaction.

It's also important to remember that, no matter how badly your day is going or how stupid you feel, you genuinely are one of the most complicated and intelligent life forms in existence as far as we're aware. Regardless of your beliefs about the intelligence of the universe and that whole situation, you're the result of 2.1 billion years of evolutionary experimentation (conservatively; that's when we think cells with a nucleus appeared, to say nothing of the first time life originated here). I'm not trying to swell anybody's ego here, but each individual human possesses a sort of consciousness unlike any other on the planet. There are well over seven billion of us now, and out of all of us there is only one you. You're unique and special... just like everyone else.

A quote comes to mind, originally by Edward Everett Hale: "I am only one, but I am still one."

TL;DR Brains are spooky. Evolution-science; you are only one person but fully one person, with all the privileges and responsibility that implies.

The Haters, Man

Disclaimer: I like Eminem's music too.

People (especially YouTubers) usually have some sort of thing pertaining to their "haters," whether it's a whole vlog about the topic or just a little bit at the end where they proclaim their lack of care regarding them, or something like that. Rappers are also major contributors to this phenomenon; Eminem in particular usually fits a verse in about his various haters and how he's overcome them, or outperformed them, or how they're jealous, and so on ad infinitum.

The policy of "[ignore] hate(rs)" (edited for strong verbiage) is a pretty good one, in my opinion. There are indeed people in the world who will tell you all types of horrible things, simply out of shallow anger or jealousy. YouTube's comment section is full of people who don't understand the notion that, if something isn't to their taste, they can simply click away to something else, and so decide to vent their frustration with poorly-worded and undirected bile.

It bears keeping in mind, however, that those folks represent a very, very slim minority of people as a whole. It's an overwhelmingly loud minority, of course, but a small section of seats nonetheless. Most people, assuming they spectate what you're doing at all, are given to quiet observation or polite applause. The guy at the nightclub who heckles the performers is, after all, just one guy out of the whole audience. The point is that, if you're a person who presents content of any sort to the public, there is a fair chance that you can simply ignore the bile-spewers because they're not very numerous, despite their volume.

Now, knowing that the vast majority people aren't "haters," what does that mean for the people who leave non-garbled, directed negative feedback? It's very possible to criticize things (or people) you genuinely like, because you care about the subject and want to give pathways for it to grow and improve.

Say you run a YouTube channel and have a standard introduction and title screen for your videos. Panning through the comments, about one in every twenty says something really eloquent like "fake n gay" or "ur vids suk." Those you can write off; these are either people attempting to get a reaction out of someone else or are genuinely in elementary school. But what about the five or six or ten others in the twenty who say "Man, the high-pitched whine in the beginning is really killing me" or "The intro's cool, but the volume's balanced waaaaay too high for people with headphones" and things like that?

These are not haters. These, my friends, are critics! Everybody has them, nobody likes them, and they are absolutely your best friends as someone who makes content. When a criticism recurs throughout your feedback over and over, it's actually extremely valuable. These people are the ones vocal enough to raise what's on everyone's mind and give you a 100% direct link to the minds of your audience, eliminating the guesswork as to what works and what doesn't. None of us are perfect, because that would be properly boring. These people keep us aware of that fact and let us know when we can improve.

Now, for those of us (like me) who are playa-hatin' like it's our job. Always remember two things: first, if you don't like something you can usually just not consume it. Don't like One Direction? Don't listen to them. Can't stand dark chocolate? Don't eat it, homie. Secondly, keep in mind that there really is no such thing as bad publicity. If you get caught up bashing something you don't like, you're effectively still doing it a service by giving it your attention. Lady Gaga (classy) and Miley Cyrus (less classy) are perfect examples; each thrives off of people's hatred for her, and intentionally does things people will object to in order to keep herself relevant. The actual way they do it is different in some ways, but the point stands.

TL;DR You may not have haters, but you might have critics.

Star Signs

As always, I'm not hatin' on anybody's beliefs purely because I disagree. Playa-hatin' I may be, but I actually have reasons.

Astrology is a broad sort of umbrella word, like how "Abrahamic" covers and references Christianity, Islam, and Judaism despite those three being pretty clearly distinct from one another. What I'm trying to communicate is that I use the word "astrology" to refer to a very large, fragmented body of disparate beliefs that are certainly distinct and unique, but all share a common thread. Generalizing? Yeah, but I wanted to clarify that a person can't really be labeled an "astrologist" in the same way as other beliefs; astrology is usually a belief held alongside or as an aspect of others. It's a powder-keg. Enough of my prevaricating and trying to be polite.

Astrology, at an elementary level, is essentially the belief that astronomical phenomena (movements of planets, visibility or obfuscation of stars, perceived size and shape of the moon, and so on) have an impact on events in the progression of human life. Moreover, these phenomena are detectable, measurable, and even predictable. This is where the "-ology" part comes from; many believers of astrology have an impressively clear system of prediction and a substantial literature of interpretation. Also, astrologers seek to understand and explain the underlying workings of the world around them. This may sound familiar from descriptions of more traditional fields of empirical study like physics or chemistry, and astrology's proponents often present it as a science.

It is not. A science must have an element of falsifiability, and astrology relies heavily on individual interpretation. As such, there is by definition no way to be demonstrably wrong (or right, for that matter) in the field of astrology. Additionally, the "effects" of astrology are inseparable from other phenomena in the world and also unrepeatable. Perhaps an astrologer does predict an event, sure, but it may have been the result of them closely reading the news, or having a degree in the related field, or some such situation. This is not to say astrologers are all two-faced charlatans trying to dupe people, of course. Many people do genuinely believe in the mechanical power of the heavens' movements.

And there we get into my problems with astrology. Let the playa-hatin' commence!

The core assumption of astrology is that the movement of planetary or other "heavenly" bodies has significant and sometimes predictable effects on human life and experience. My issue is this: put another way, this assumption holds that life is simple. As I've discussed previously (and at belabored length), it is not. Life happens in an uncontrollable chain reaction with a fair amount of random chance involved. In spite of my status as a believer in "God," I most certainly do not believe that the universe turns on a set of wheels according to predetermined patterns. Even if such patterns exist, they are most certainly not comprehensible to any human intellect, but that's another story.

Another key problem with astrology is the extent to which (at least to my perception) it robs the humans in question of control of their own fate. The moon was at a specific phase at your birth, and Jupiter had obscured two of its biggest moons, and so you have a predisposition to become a talented guitarist? On the other side of the coin, astrology (as with any other system) can very readily become a crutch, robbing people of responsibility for what happens. Yeah, you got into a fight with your spouse over something and it escalated into shouting, but I absolutely refuse to believe that it was simply the Fire element of your Sagittarius nature being manifested at a moment of emotional vulnerability. This goes back to over-simplification; people are complicated beings, and the explanations for their actions are correspondingly not so single-step.

On the lighter side, there's a very simple, non-philosophical reason I find astrology interesting to read about but ultimately useless in any practical way. The effective premise of astrology is that the movement of a "celestial" body, like a planet or a star, can affect events on the surface of the Earth. Assuming we treat astrology as science and don't delve into the ideas of a spirit plane, that means it acts with a force. Between planets, that force would be gravity. Fair? (I'm also going to ignore the obvious problem that gravitation is mutual, so Earth would also be affecting events on other bodies in a measurable/predictable way.)

Here's the thing. Gravity obeys the inverse-square law, meaning that the intensity of gravitational force is inversely proportional to the square of the intervening distance. Put another, much better way:



Let's do this for one of the many, many bodies referenced in astrology. I choose Jupiter, because it's pretty. When Jupiter comes the closest to Earth (and the intensity of gravity is at its highest), the two planets are about 598 million kilometers apart.

So, the strength of gravity at that peak point is: 1/357,604 Newtons. Ha! Fooled you, divide that by a million squared.

For reference, a fairly average-sized apple, held out in your flat hand, produces about a newton worth of force as it presses down into your hand. Jupiter, at its closest point, causes an astronomical number of times less force than that.

What this means, then, is that to produce the effects astrology ascribes to cosmic motion (states of mood being the big one), the more reliable way to do it would be to force them to hold a cantaloupe over their head.

TL;DR You make your fate, not the planets.

Prudence, Patience, Providence

I was re-re-re-reading one of my favorite science fiction series re-re-recently, and there were three sisters with these names, so I decided to write a thing about it. Ha.

Prudence is something you exercise, or an attribute of a person. It refers to the status of having clear judgment and a strong impulse of caution. Your friends might tell you a clearly safe investment is the "prudent" thing to do. Your prudence tells you not to reach into the dark crevice in the cliffside, because there might be a bloody great scorpion in there.

Being prudent, however, is different from being a prude. As you might assume, the two words are obviously deeply related. A prude, however, is basically someone of such mighty prudence that it prevents them from doing anything constructive. These are the people who look down their nose at other people's actions and shut themselves away from contact to avoid the risk. These are also people traditionally presented with very austere, wrinkled faces and the dress of Pilgrims. Eh.

Patience, as it's said, is a virtue. This is the ability to sit and be content with doing nothing for a little while, and also the potential to handle the inevitable foolery of other people to a certain degree. Everyone has a different amount of patience, but it's important to note that some of patience is not purely altruistic; tolerance of misbehavior is often undergone with the assumption that the patient person will receive the same leeway in future. 

Patience is very different from impassivity. My sitting contentedly in the repair shop for eight hours after a campout in my youth was me being patient. The amount of time I spend playing video games and finding other ways to distract myself are manifestations of impassivity. Being patient doesn't mean you never do anything, or that your patience doesn't have a limit. Patience is about discretion about the tolerated annoyance vs. its payoff, and also knowing when to stop being patient.

Providence! People take it to mean "good luck," and that's not the worst way to categorize it. In an older definition, however, it's more like "the hand of divinity nudging events your way." Sometimes life just presents you with something for the taking, in a "here's this, just take it" sort of way. Some traditions call this karma, the eventual reward for steadfast goodness. In our lifetime, there are hosts of things that seem too good to be true, and many of them are. However, occasionally the universe does just tick over to everybody's number and "throw them a frickin' bone."

Now, with that in mind, acknowledgment of providence is great, but gullibility isn't. Life presenting you with something too good to be true? There's a significant chance it is, so investigate. This is the synthesis of all these different ideas: be patient enough to wait for opportunity, prudent enough to distinguish the genuine opportunities, and open enough to acknowledge when they actually do come along.

TL;DR Prudence, not paranoia; patience, not impassivity; providence happens, but not everything is providence.

Cal

This, for anybody who's unaware, is the term people who go to UC Berkeley (and the families thereof) frequently use to refer to UC Berkeley. It's on all our logos, all of our slogans, and generally in every place we can think of to put it.

Everything related to Berkeley is going to be four things: blue, gold, marked with a bear, and labeled "Cal" in cursive. It's not Berkeley Rotaract, it's Cal Rotaract. The big-ass fair of vendors and job scouts we have at the gym every year? Calapalooza. We all go downstairs to eat at places run by Cal Dining. Our newspaper is called the Daily Cal.

Which leads me, in a ridiculously smooth transition, to my point. What does "Cal" mean, anyway? It's short for Calorie (with a capital C), for one thing. No, that's not it. Calumny? No, I don't think we'd brand ourselves quite that openly. Calamity? Same problem. Calcification? That's just nasty. California?

Aha.

The "Cal" you see scripted everywhere (as in actually everywhere, on everything owned by everyone) is shorthand for "California" or, in the newspaper's case, "Californian." This is dating back to the early stages of the UC system's beginnings in 1868, at which point Berkeley was the only campus, and therefore the only University of California, and therefore simply called "California" or "Cal" for short. This is all well and good except for one little detail.

It isn't 1868 any longer. Berkeley is one of nine campuses open to undergraduates, and ten UC campuses in total. We were the first, it's true, but to say that makes us by default the best is a gross error of judgment. Keeping in mind how much I hate this type of statement: all the UC campuses are loaded with the mental heavy ordnance of our time. Yes, we're lazy, yes we avoid work like the plague, but when it comes down to it the UC campuses are all breathing rarefied air. Most of them have research of all descriptions going on. The UC system could have started anywhere, and our campus no longer occupies the vaunted position of "first and only."

The word "Cal" is a throwback to a time when our campus in Berkeley was unique and special, and it still is. However, all the other campuses are unique and special too, and we no longer hold the status of privileged primacy. Our campus might be the firstborn, but that does not mean we are recipients of the whole intellectual inheritance.

TL;DR Check ya pre-tenses, we're one of ten.

The Mundane

What's a chimera? A fire-breathing hybridization of goat, snake, and lion, if I'm not mistaken. It used to live in a place called Lycia, apparently, someplace in Anatolia, and it was related to the Hydra and Cerberus and all those fun characters.

The term "chimera" has a lot of meanings, all of which relate to the fusion of disparate things. People are sometimes called social chimeras if they seem to have fragmentary beliefs all over the spectrum (this is different from simply being an inconsistent pushover who changes beliefs with the group). A chimera in fantasy writing is, as the Greeks had it, a fusion of different types of animal, usually with powers beyond the natural. In an old anthropological text I had the displeasure of reading recently, the author referred to people of mixed ethnic heritage. In any case, the word carries with it a connotation of the fantastic, the aberrant, or the downright abhorrent. It's a story, or at most a whispered legend of something far-off.

"Chimera" is also the term used in experimental science to refer to mice (and other animals) with segments of genes from other animals, used in testing and research. The world, at present, is full of chimeras.

Jules Verne published a book in 1870 about a fantastic ship capable of extended voyages beneath the ocean's surface, powered by a set of self-sustaining sodium-based batteries and only surfacing to cycle its air supply. This, in 1870, was the height of madness; submarines existed at the time, but they had very little in common with our thoughts of such things. They tended to be tiny, slow-moving metal tubes with fairly shallow and short jaunts underwater and an inconvenient tendency to kill their entire crew at random.

These days, most of the United States' real naval power is in the form of submerged ships powered by the unmaking of elements, easily capable of circumnavigating the Earth without ever breaking the surface of the ocean.

The word "mundane" derives from a Latin word "mundus," referring to the world. Spanish speakers know the word "mundo," almost a direct copy, and so on and so forth. What Latin-speakers were referring to was the material, known world, the world detached from magic and the gods and monsters, hence the term in English as equated with boring.

The word was also deployed as an adjective, however, in a way that has not survived to our time. In this sense, Latin uses the word to mean clean, neat, or pure; other interpretations hold it to mean "elegant," "decorated," or "adorned." So really, when something is mundane, it's "of the world," and it's "pure, elegant, and beautifully adorned." I don't personally think that's boring at all.

The point is this: the world around us is one we're used to, and it's been this way for our whole personal experience. This is increasingly arguable, with the acceleration of technology and everything (the world even two decades ago was vastly different), but in general, we grow up in a world surrounded by things. Trees, cranes, cars, people, all just things that have always been, as far as our experience goes. And so, these things are "mundane" to us; that's just the world, nothing to be excited about. We become inured to things that would have been miracles in the past. Nuclear submarines are just things in the news, digital clocks are just things that occasionally beep at us to do things, and gasoline just goes in cars to make them roll.

Our culture has an increasing focus on the new and exciting, to the exclusion of all else. The iPhone 4 may be perfectly functional (indeed, someone living in 2000 would be highly impressed), but it isn't the new one. "New, upstart" bands burst suddenly onto the scene, and then fade into obscurity after a few months or a year, simply because they're not novel anymore. It's a highly adrenal, distracting, stimulus-based way to live; yeah, you've had a drinking problem a long time but damn let me tell you about this phone you can use to not think about it!

So my point is this: when you feel drained, or over-excited, or panicked, or whatever, just sit and think about some really mundane things for a while. Trees especially are a great comfort to me (being distant relatives, I suppose), but whatever works for you. The ocean, lava lamps, asphalt, doesn't matter, just pick something and consider it. Discover all the gaps in your knowledge of these things that are absolutely ubiquitous in your life, and contemplate how beautiful all these things really are. I'm not trying to espouse a happy-slappy hippie philosophy of constant happiness and oneness with the world or anything, but it's a nice exercise to unwind and retreat from all the frantic running around for a little while.

The world's full of cool stuff that slips by unnoticed! Look at pictures of geodes, figure out how dice are made, anything. I guarantee it'll do you some good. It's important to remember that not every action you take has to revolutionize business or anything, and you can just take some time to be suffused by the beauty of existing with all these great things. Abandon fantasies about the future and fears from the past and just inhabit the present for a minute. Is good, no?

TL;DR Sic transit gloria mundi is a phrase I found interesting to think about.

Homosocial Tension

No, I'm not talking about the homophobic guy at work. This is a less uncomfortable, and actually more common, topic.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick wrote a book called Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. It's a study of popular Victorian fiction, and it's absolutely fantastic. For those who don't know, Victorian fiction in general went like this: there is a lady, and a man who wants to marry the lady. There is also another man who wants to marry said lady. There are many dinner parties (if the characters are rich) or festivals (if they're the other kind of people). Eventually there is a marriage. Throughout, all parties are very British. Victorian fiction, for the most part, sucks.

Sedgwick's a smart cookie and picked up on something interesting during her readings of such things, however. In these books, the female characters were ideally Victorian indeed; they didn't especially "do" anything, mostly sitting around being terribly prim while the men did things to try and woo their unimpeachable (repressed) Victorian hearts.

In the wealthier demographic of characters, this might amount to competing presents, increasingly flamboyant carriage rides, or even a duel with competitively snazzy pistols, if they got crazy. In the poorer sector, all sorts of things could go wrong, from bouquets of competing size to a proper impromptu boxing match, complete with rolling about on the ground. All the events are catalyzed and participated in by the male characters. All the emotional content is related to the competition between the two men; another common theme involved the two men being friends, and having their friendship strained by the tension of their competition for the same lady. Lots of heavy conversation between these two men, lots of loaded stares at dinner. Lots of tension.

That, Sedgwick claims, is pretty gay!

According to Sedgwick's theory, the reason for the excessive focus on the male characters is not simple male narcissism, but is evidence of repressed "homo-social" desires. Gay was not the best thing to be in Victorian England, as homosexuality was still regarded as abhorrent and unnatural, and something to sweep under the rug. The tension between the two men is a displaced sort of craving; the female character is a shallow excuse for the two men to have intense feeling toward each other. The feelings in question are usually negative, true, but not unambiguously; the two men are often friends, and the competition springs from ostensibly pure motives and faith in their own manly capacity as manly men with manly aspirations.

Now, armed with this knowledge, the subject of the post. It is my contention that this Victorian phenomenon was by no means strictly Victorian. It's distinctly alive and well.

Take, for example, one of the rallying points, no, one of the great classics of our generation, the monolith of our literary achievement. I'm referring, of course, to the Twilight series.

Edward and Jacob are two men, possessed of great (supernatural) power and tremendous good looks, competing to claim the same woo-mon. The young lady in question, in the books, is a little ambiguous. The best analogy I can think of for her is a red 4x2 LEGO brick; she is without features, but ever-present and intentionally ubiquitous. Most opponents of Twilight say this is a psychological manipulation aimed at young girls, allowing them to easily project themselves into the place of the character. Well, I cry nay! 'Tis gay, I say!

In my opinion, the Twilight series is not bad; indeed, it's fantastic. It's just a spectacular anachronism, dislodged from its proper time and place of writing. To karmatically balance the pretense of that sentence, demolition derby, Burger King, "Keeping Up with the Kardashians."

Twilight is a wonderful piece of Victorian fiction, complete with strong, attractive male characters vying for the companionship of a perfectly bland female for absolutely no reason other than the fact that the other wants her. They fight and wrestle passionately, dragging their friends and supernatural family into their conflict to increase the height of their passion to a dizzying apex. Perhaps most importantly of all, Twilight is absolutely. Loaded. With stares.

TL;DR Read Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick; England was a big closet.

Cardboard Christianity

We did Faux Feminism, so I guess I'll just continue with Detestable People Part Two as I mentioned in that post. Thumbs, up. Disclaimer: parts of this are written in what Wikipedia would call "a primarily in-universe style." I'm not trying to convert you. It's just easier than writing "now, a certain belief holds ____" every single time.

In the previous post I mentioned I'm both a feminist and a variety of Christian, and the odd fact that "Christians" and "feminists" were my two of my least favorite types of group on campus at Berkeley. 

First of all, one major issue unrelated to either of these groups but deriving from people in general; my religion in no way diminishes my feminist beliefs, nor do my feminist beliefs make me "less religious." This is a very common misconception, related to the next one.

Christianity is not, as many people (including an alarming number of "Christians") believe, a religion of fiery damnation and annihilation. Having read the Bible, I can tell you two things: 1) The Old Testament is not actually there for the purpose that might seem obvious and 2) A very large number of people are doing the Christianity thing very wrong.

First of all, the Old Testament has been in the news a lot lately, particularly a certain Leviticus 18:22 character who tells everyone he meets "Do not have sexual relations with a man as you would with a woman; that is detestable." One side of that whole marriage issue holds this verse up as law with fiery condemnation, and the other has a variety of (increasingly snarky) retorts; the number of laws in Leviticus and the impossibility of living to all of them, for example, or the age of the document in question.

As a humorous aside, I thought I'd point out that the verse in question has, if you actually read it, nothing at all to do with marriage in particular. It's about sex, which is a related but different issue. I'mma do a marriage post in the future; don't worry, my sass is far from concluded.

Back on topic, it's my contention that both polar sides of that particular issue are wrong; the self-proclaimed "Christian" conservatives are wrong to quote Leviticus (or any part of the Bible, really) with such vehemence, and the fiery liberals on the other side are wrong to, well, be so fiery and retaliatory. Constructive debate, and the progress that tends to follow, happen when both sides come to the table with open minds, not closed fists.

Let's examine the book of Leviticus for a second, from the standpoint of Christianity. If you're not into this particular belief system, bear with me. The English name "Leviticus" is a reference to the Levites (descendants of Levi), the tribe of Israel from whom the priesthood at the time was traditionally drawn. Status as a Levite in the contemporary sense is more one of title and conferred cultural esteem than actual genealogical descent. So, essentially, Leviticus could be taken to be a "book of the priesthood," or something like that.

There's some dispute as to when (and by whom) the book of Leviticus was actually finished. Tradition holds that it was collated by Moses, because we're big fans of Moses. Scholarly research on the book maintains that it had a long incubation period and finished sometime in the Persian period, 538-332 BCE, roughly speaking. Either way, it's certainly a very old document, which provides me with a smoooooth segue into the next thing.

Leviticus is old. So old, in fact, it's actually in a whole testament just for old things, the Old Testament! This is usually pointed out by esteemed commentators, such as Macklemore, to be one of its chief failings; it's just entirely too old to have any bearing on our modern and rapidly accelerating society. This is actually pretty true, but with an important caveat; Leviticus is not irrelevant because it's old, it's reduced in importance because it's been rendered obsolete.

Leviticus is a fairly huge list of rules and edicts. Taken another way, Leviticus is an enumerated list of punishments for those who break them, to be inflicted by our mortal peers. There's the problem with Leviticus; it's about things mortals used to have to do to other mortals. Leviticus is about punishment, in different ways depending on the time-frame you believe it to have been written in. That's an excessive level of detail, but the point is this; Leviticus stands as an enumerated list of things perceived at the time as sins, mostly as a reminder, like an albatross to wear around the collective neck. At one point Yahweh was pretty pissed off with the Israelites, so he imposed an incredibly complex system of severely-enforced laws on them. Many of these probably couldn't even be taken as divinely-delivered statutes of law; people just got their deity really angry and he decided to take away their nice things. Pretty dreary, unless you know this next part.

Literally the whole point of Christianity is that a pretty cool guy named Jesus got up on a cross and talked to his dad about all of humanity's failings. The big guy in the sky was pretty impressed, and he's over being mad at humanity now; it's cool to eat shellfish, and get ice cream with girls when they're on their period, and wear polyester, and stuff. The Old Testament, Leviticus being the prime example, exists for two reasons. Firstly, it and other parts of the Bible are a history, literal or mythological. They're stories, written down as parables with a particular message. Secondly, Leviticus especially is a reminder of what that cool guy named Jesus saved people from, so we can look back at the past and say "Well, that was sure awful" as we move forward. It's like a war memorial. No one builds those as a declaration of their support for war; it's a somber reminder.

So, given that Jesus came along and did some really cool metaphysical wizardry that I won't discuss (there's actually a lot of debate about that even with Christianity) in order to change the Old Testament from absolute law into stark reminder... why are we all so worked up about it?

This is getting rather long in the tooth, and I feel I have to continue it at a later date because there's a huge amount left to say. For now, however, let me say this: Christianity is fundamentally a doctrine of peace, acceptance, and respect for other people. Don't let the very loud, very violent slice of the cheese ruin the whole wheel.

TL;DR People are misrepresenting Christianity; life's good.

Faux Feminism

Gather round, folks! It's time to have an unpopular opinion! Disclaimer: Some information about me is required, unfortunately: I'm a variety of Christian and a feminist. Disclaimer 2: It's sort of a long post.

UC Berkeley has, as I've mentioned several times in the past, a reputation for social progressivism and activism, which isn't entirely undeserved. There certainly are a lot of groups here advocating for all sorts of things, from public awareness of thalessemia to the "cultural crisis" in the Iberian Peninsula. I'm all for people making some noise about what they believe in, because that's how things start to change and improve. I'm particularly sensitive to the issue of gender rights (as in, women and the LGBTQIA community, and so on), partially because my momma dun raised me up right in that regard.

It might surprise you to learn, then, that two of the three types of campus advocacy groups who most reliably piss me off are our "Christian" advocates and our "feminists." The "Christians" on Sproul Plaza tend to be fiery doomsayers and condemners of the damned and everything, which is about 0% what actual Christianity is about, but that's another story.

The issue with our "feminists" here is a simple one; they use a word to describe themselves, and in most cases it just doesn't mean what they think it means. Feminism is "a collection of movements and ideologies aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights for women," according to the almighty Wikipedia. This is a lengthy and detailed definition, so I'mma just draw your attention to a specific point. One word, in fact.

EQUAL.

The idea of feminism, genuine feminism, is to get society to a point where the genders (and not just the two, either; everybody on the gender spectrum, in a broader application) are treated as equal before the law, in the economy, and just in general, everyday interaction. Feminism has a curious quality it shares with medicine; the day its goals are truly achieved, it will render itself obsolete, but that's tangential. The point is that feminism is about eliminating unfair discrimination based on gender in all its forms. Telling girls they should be nurses or housewives when they grow up? Working on getting that gone. Being discussed like a piece of meat? Yeah, that's on the chopping block. Misogyny and "boy's clubs" in the professional work space? Oh, honey, marked for death. 

What feminism is not is the assertion that women are superior to men in any or all capacities. Most of the "feminist" groups I see here are fiery in the extreme, and talk a lot about tearing down the patriarchy and things like that, which is fine. The problem is the (very) thinly-veiled implication that tearing down the patriarchy has the objective of immediately replacing it with the matriarchy. Feminists want to eliminate misogyny in the workplace; "feminists" just want to discriminate against men instead. 

There is a word for the beliefs most of our "feminists" seem to be espousing. It's called "misandry," which interestingly has a red squiggle beneath it because, apparently, it's so little used that word processors don't think it's a word. That's worrisome. Make no mistake; misogyny is a much more prevalent issue in the USA than misandry. I just thought that little detail was interesting.

The problem with our "feminists" here at Berkeley is one of underlying principle; I as a feminist want to eliminate the problems inherent in our social and political systems, and our "feminists" are motivated by a desire to simply turn them on their head and subject men to the same sort of treatment women have suffered under for so long. When I tell them this, of course, their response is that I "don't understand because [I'm] a (stupid) man." Surprise of surprises.

One example that comes immediately to mind is the issue of objectification. While people do inhabit earthly objects, it's wrong to reduce anyone from a complex, damaged, and potential-filled being into an object, of admiration or otherwise. This is a principle that just about everyone will agree with, when presented with it. Berkeley's "feminists," however, are operating under the impression that the word "objectification" carries an extended definition as "objectification of women specifically." These same people spend a good deal of their spare time talking with their friends about the purely physical attractiveness of various men they encountered, in real life or in the media. Confronted about such behavior, they band tightly together to defend one another and, if their accuser is male, will simply counter-accuse him of the same objectification. If, for instance, a male feminist tells them they're wrong, the argument will simply degenerate to an assertion that the man in question is stupid, because he's a man.

This sort of attitude and action will never lead to any meaningful progress of any description, for a variety of reasons. Not least is the old adage that "an eye for an eye leaves everyone blind," courtesy of Martin Luther King Jr. and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, among others. Aside from vengeance being generally ethically indefensible as a motive, the presence of people so focused on revenge only gives ammunition to those opposing feminist movements, and so on. Look at the situation in the Balkan peninsula during the 90's for examples of the various ways in which that shit does not fly.

Roberto Assagioli said that "Without forgiveness, life is governed by an endless cycle of resentment and retaliation." Roberto Assagioli is right.

TL;DR Feminism =/= misandry, vengeance =/= progress. 

Free Will (The two Pre's)

It's another post about a distinction only I bother to think about! And this one can be applied to everything from contemporary LGBT issues to the fundamental nature of life and experiential reality! Wow much Berkeley.

There's a lot of debate about the whole issue of nature vs. nurture, and how much of a person's identity and all is determined as a manifestation of their genes, how much of it is determined from the setting in which they grow up, and how much of it is delivered to them by a spider that wears a Noh mask and lives at the end of a rainbow. I think the debate is interesting, certainly, but ultimately doesn't matter. I believe everybody has potential inherent to them as a result of their status as a manifestation of the universe's creative drive.

To balance how abstract and feely that sentence was, here is the quadratic formula.


What I will definitely say is that such a thing as a "predisposition" does exist. People are predisposed to all types of things. Addictive-compulsive behavior, diseases pathogenic and genetic, whatever. And again there's the issue of what a "family history" really means; drawing a line between something encoded into your genes over time and behavior resulting from interpersonal interaction is difficult at best. Either way, however, the fact remains that people acquire a unique set of traits, strengths, and weaknesses very early in life. You could think of it as a great arc, with each person having different parts brought into focus and others blurred out. Each person has a unique set of things emphasized and downplayed, and to different extents, and so on. It's why you can get into that situation where someone shares all your interests but you just don't like him or her.

What this doesn't mean, importantly, is that you are a big set of manifested predispositions. This is one reason the nature vs. nurture debate as a whole actually bugs me; "nature" and "nurture" are two things responsible for creating you as a person, but that implies that you had nothing to do with it. The idea of it being simply "nature vs. nurture" seems to undermine the idea of agency as I see it. Nature is your genes, and nurture is how you're brought up, but in my estimation the most important part of determining who you are is you. Conscious choices about yourself are the essence of self-improvement, and it makes me uneasy to hear the idea of self-definition broken down to just inherited vs. instilled like that.

Predestination, in short, isn't real. You are you, the result of almost fifteen billion years of collapsing hydrogen and exploding stars, manufactured by the creative current of the entire cosmos. You are whatever you want to be, not a warped echo of your family members' issues nor a bundle of genes piloting a meat construct designed to replicate themselves. The physical vessel of your consciousness, the things that have happened to it, and even the things you feel are what you're doing; they are not what you are.

TL;DR You're a conscious human with the power of choice, not a mixing beaker of DNA and childhood trauma.

Too Tall

I heard some people at the dining hall talking about what physical characteristic of themselves they'd like to change. There were five of them, and four said they'd like to be considerably taller. That's in holding with what I hear most of the time; roughly 80% of people operate under the impression that an increase in height would generally improve their lot in life. 

I think, in this case, that roughly 80% of people are roughly 95% wrong. I know all the statistics about taller people getting paid more and so on, too. I'm just talking about overall quality of life experience. Also, this is from the perspective of a person who's "pretty damn" tall.

What people perceive about being taller: they will be more attractive and successful in all endeavors! Life will become easier! They will be able to reach ALL the shelves!

The actual reality: The first (and often only) thing people will say to you is "You're really tall!" You're significantly more at risk for all sorts of joint and connective tissue problems, and even if you don't have a diagnosed condition they're just going to hurt all the time.  You're gonna trip over everything, and generally not be very coordinated. You also live in a world designed for people four inches shorter than you are, so everything you don't trip over is going to hit you in the face. You stick horribly out in every crowd and experience constant feelings of scrutiny and exposure. They're not unjustified, either; people actually do stare at you like a weird circus animal because, apparently, they've never seen a tall person before. You can, in fact, reach all the shelves. Worth?

TL;DR Careful what you wish for. 

Berkeley Time

For anybody who's unaware of it, there's a tradition here at Berkeley known as Berkeley Time, wherein classes will (conventionally) start ten minutes after the officially listed time. Not every instructor does this, but it's a generally-accepted convention. It's so accepted, in fact, that I recently saw a flyer asking for experiment volunteers; one of the flyer's key points was that experiments did not start on Berkeley Time, to give you an idea.

This little tradition is supposedly a concession to us, the students, and a manifestation of Berkeley's famous "laid-back attitude" (that is: "Look at us! We don't even have to try to be Better than Everyone Else!"). It's also marketed as a general comfort thing; BART is slow, there's a Zion rally blocking a street, or whatever, so you're late. Berkeley Time renders this obsolete. With a mutual understanding that ten minutes late is on time, all these little splinchy glitches are accounted for.

The only problem with Berkeley Time is that it... uh, it doesn't work, sir.

Berkeley Time ought to work, on paper; the theory is to just make it so those people who wander in ten minutes late are on time anyway, and don't miss or disrupt any of the class. It's a good theory. The problem with Berkeley Time is that it's official and universal, rather than an unspoken understanding. Classes start ten minutes late to let you get there, and that's fine. The only issue is that everybody knows that, and that includes the people who come ten minutes late as it is. So, effectively, Berkeley Time just shifts the problem ten minutes forward in time. The people who have to do a trip to Starbucks still have to do it, the people who oversleep still oversleep, and so on and so on.

That brings me to my own personal problem with Berkeley Time, which lies in its underlying causes. I may have misled you above, and I apologize. The institution of Berkeley Time actually has nothing to do with any particular mutually-held attitude, or demographic of students, or anything like that. It only exists because the university, despite all outward impressions, is "just sorta hobblin' by."

Berkeley Time is in effect for the sake of overlapping classes. Some classes go until 5:00, for example, and there might be another class listed as starting at 5:00. To avoid the issue of people going in and out at the same time and there being a tear in space-time, we just agree that the second class starts ten minutes late.

Notice that this convention is published, official, and in effect for virtually every single class, and you might deduce the problem. Our university has (officially) 35,899 students and growing, which sounds grand. The problem is that, as that number grows, our university isn't necessarily growing with it. Classes are getting more and more impacted, buildings are getting busier and busier, and space is getting progressively harder to find. The entirety of the Astronomy department, for example, currently resides in semi-permanent trailers near campus (temporary measure, but the point stands).

"But Berkeley has all sorts of money! Why don't they just build more buildings to put classes in?"

I don't want to be libelous, but there are a fairly small number of people responsible for that strange dichotomy between "money in" and "results out."

TL;DR Classes are ridiculously clogged because: the university has all sorts of money, and the campus isn't seeing any.

First Class Review!

As in, the first review I am doing of a class, not a review of the most superior order.

Class: Rhetoric 10: Introduction to Practical Reasoning and Critical Analysis of Argumentation
Instructor: Amy Jamgochian
Semesters offered: Fall only (tradition is to take this and then Rhetoric 20 in the spring)

Pluses:

• You get to read good authors, by which I mean Those People Referenced in Highbrow Jokes. 
• Prof. Jamgochian is herself really interested in the material, and more importantly, in your interpretations and responses to it. Yes, yours, the student's.
• In my experience, the instructors are all pretty nice people. The professor insists on being called "Professor Amy" to reduce the formality, to give you an idea.
• The content for this class is actually awesome, if you like this type of stuff. Language's interaction with race and class, the evolution of language, and (my personal favorite) theories of self-formation and self-realization are only a few of the topics covered, and it's fantastic. I gush, but the point is made.
• There's no attendance taken at lecture! (technically)
• Amy's a brilliant lecturer, and is actually really funny in addition. One of my favorite parts of this class was listening to her stories from life as connected to the reading (she was semi-friends with David Foster Wallace, for example).
• Only twice a week, plus section. I enjoyed the scheduling, anyway.

Minuses

• You're going to read the aforementioned authors, and you're going to read the crap out of them. The reader for this class looks fat, and it's not an illusion; barring interruptions from silly things like campus wiring exploding, you're reading all of it.
• Furthermore, the reading tends to be "dense" (i.e. phrases like "psychoexistential complex of negative value definition" pop up frequently). Some of the font gets pretty microscopic too, but that's only occasional, and all of it's legible.
• The lecture is traditionally from 9:30-11:00 A.M. At the start of the semester, that's not a huge deal. By halfway through or so, that's basically the crack of dawn.
• They don't take attendance at lecture, but you'd best go if you want to survive. Whether you read or not, Amy's interpretations are complex, deep, salient, and in all capacities worth hearing. Also, she has a scaling willingness to help you based on how often you go to lecture, and her memory is terrifying. 
• The tests in this class are really difficult in terms of time management, especially the midterm. For my class, Amy prefaced our midterm by saying "We are entirely aware that you will not likely finish this." It's a matter of there being a huge amount of content and writing required.

Eh

• There aren't very many assignments in this class. Aside from the forum responses for the reading, there are two papers, a midterm and a final. This is very much an "all in" sort of class; nail the two papers and coast, or fail to submit one and be struck down with giant stones. Depends on how you like to do things.
• The class actually has very little to do with its official title, because Professor Amy "does not teach public speech or ethics." It's actually what she referred to as a "greatest hits introduction to rhetorical thought and theory," which in my opinion is much more helpful and useful than the title would suggest. For my two cents, this was much better than the title, but be advised.

TL;DR Overall rating: 7.5/10. It's hard, and it has horrible times, but you're going to come out a more informed, self-realized, and generally equipped human being.