TL;DR I've got one, and it increasingly seems like that's just strictly verboten.
I already touched on this general topic some amount of time ago (in 2014, the Year of the Cringe), so there might be some rehashing here. The topic is, however, back with a spicy, fiery vengeance picante, and there's no merciful milk in sight.
Here's a dramatic statement: as I see it, our society is rapidly grinding over the edge of a cliff toward a precipitous backslide into total, abject moral bankruptcy.
I've been taking some anthropology classes up here in the glacial north of Berkeley (I might minor in that subject for kicks), and some phrases that get tossed around a lot is "comparative common sense" and "alternative moralities," and things of that nature. These are what contemporary anthropology is designed to study, the multitude of different possible human experiences in our world, preconditioned but not predetermined by an infinite number of preexisting conditions, yadda yadda.
So, with my brand-new Baby's First Anthropology kit and my biologist's sense of the blatantly obvious, I sat and thought for a while on the subject. My findings are as follows:
"Comparative common sense" is an excellent handle for the topic of how different people in different cultures experience the world, and it's an excellent topic for conversation. That's really all I've got to say about that one, barring an extended conversation in person; I just couldn't do it justice in the format of writing for more than one person. It's "personal," you might say.
For the sake of user-friendliness, here's a quick explanation of "alternative morality:" essentially, people come from all walks of life and all kinds of different places and contexts. As such, we've got some wildly varied ideas about what's "right" and "natural" and the answer to the ethical question "what should be done?" It's a noble bit of theory evoking the loftier parts of anthropology's higher mission of human understanding and unity.
"Alternative morality" the way we Berkeleyites use it and talk about it is, speaking frankly, some bullshit. Not merely ordinary run-of-the-mill bullshit, mind you, but bullshit of a higher order: sneaky, ephemeral, dangerous bullshit.
The implicit assumption you make when siding with advocates of alternative morality theory is that all moralities are, if not acceptable, at least comprehensible to you. For example, I do not subscribe to the strict injunction in the Qur'an against gambling; I think gambling and games of chance can be worthwhile and enjoyable, in moderation. I do, however, understand why such an injunction might exist, if gambling had become in some way damaging to the humans who practiced it.
As another example, I don't particularly drink alcohol or use drugs in general. There are a few different reasons for that, but let's go with "my morality," the set of mental predilections I was conditioned to have and the ethical rules I set for myself, as the homogenized bulk reason.
This is not to suggest that I'm going to sit over here with my eyebrows up and sniff derisively every time you sip your wine. In my understanding, you are fully free to drink and not drink as you choose, because I don't care; my choice is for me, and informed by my personal morality. Your morality is very likely different from mine, and there's no way I can assert that either morality is better, so do y'own thang, as they say.
Both these examples suggest a fairly accepting, progressive mindset on my part, and they should; I do my best to remain open-minded about the differences in how people have lived and become fully-aware humans. I fail a great deal more than I should, but I really do try; let him who is without sin cast the first stone, and so on.
Now, there's a catch to all this: alternative morality theory also implicitly assumes that any person it's applied to has a morality. In the case of some people, I am not convinced we should make that assumption.
A "morality" is a set of "principles concerning the distinction between good and bad or right and wrong behavior." The problem is this: alternative morality theory is an understanding that people have different ideas about what's right and wrong, and people my age are appropriating it to mean that nothing they do is wrong.
This may seem like I'm splitting the proverbial hairs, and I am sitting firmly in a warm puddle of semantics, but hear me out. To accept someone else's different principles is a different thing from excusing a person's total lack of any principles whatsoever.
What I mean is this: alternative morality theory is about accepting everyone's morality. What it is not about is rejecting mine because it makes you feel bad to apply it.
One of the things I catch a lot of flak for here, from my esteemed colleagues in the vaunted halls of anthropology discussion sections, is my outdated and judgmental morality. To avoid glossing, it is very not chic to be Christian in these parts. This is due to a number of assumptions people make when deprived of any actual knowledge of Christian theology and/or blood flow to their brain, but that's another post.
Morality wasn't created to enable me to sit and take judgmental potshots at you, as much as some people might like you to believe so. Not all the constraints of morality are entirely artificial contrivances of human minds to constrain our inherent potential that so terrifies us, as many Intro to Philosophy students might say. In many cases, conventional morality urges you not to do something because it is a bad idea. The best part of a morality is just synthesized human experience, delivered to you in a concise, processed package from previous generations who have already done this whole "living" thing. It can carry some problematic baggage of its context with it, for sure, but old wisdom is still wisdom.
I'm starting to ramble, so let me cut right to the chase here: there are certain things I don't do because I shouldn't, and I'm mature and self-disciplined enough to understand that. I don't go out drinking heavily with any regularity, and I didn't at all before I was 21. It's not because I'm scared; it's because alcohol and being arrested are both statistically extremely bad for you.
Relatedly, I don't go out and have anonymous sex with random strangers. It's not because I'm closeted or afraid of experiencing the fullness of life, believe it or not; it's actually because, barring any moral objection on my part, I don't like the idea of picking up something incurable and either extremely uncomfortable or outright lethal from some idiot who "like uh forgot to mention it i guess my bad #yolo."
I eat a balanced diet, exercise frequently, and do my level best to sleep eight hours a night (ha!). I perform well in school, I maintain healthy friendships to the best of my ability, and I watch out for my own health and safety and that of others. I don't do these things because I've been told to and I fear the authority of those who told me. I do them because I think they're right, and they assist me with my function by easing my conscience. I do what I believe in, and I think many people might want to try doing the same, instead of subscribing to the signature Young Person Amoral Freedom I see circulating so loosely.
And you're damn right I talk to my mom every day. My mom's awesome; get on her level.
That wraps this one up, fellow people. Don't read this in too negative of a tone; it's not meant to be as harsh as it might sound. As always, feel free to show this to people you think would like it, or at least not try to kill me after reading it. Also, provide me with that feedback I do so adore, in the form of a comment or an email to breakingberkeley@gmail.com. Peace an' blessin's C:
Saturday, July 2, 2016
Sunday, June 26, 2016
Gender (The Brainmelter)
TL;DR Nah, there's really no way for me to summarize without sounding like a giant bigot, which I may or may not be depending on a) what time it is and b) who you talk to about it. See below.
I'm gonna start out with one of those famous disclaimers no one will believe: I don't actually have any particular issue with the various denominations in the LGBT(etc.) community, hereafter referred to generally as "queer" people for concision, and there are a lot of reasons for that. Firstly, I'm Christian, so really I'm not supposed to have issues with people in general, and even if I do I'm meant to go "meh!" and accept it. Regardless of that, I also do my best to be a calm and amiable person, and remain open-minded to the unfamiliar. I don't know everything, and it would be a dull life if I did.
Also, if we're being harshly, coldly pragmatic about it... we're just simply not talking about that many people, numerically. Hatred of the queer community is, from my perspective, a lot like racism directed at Inuit people or a modern crusade launched against Tenriism. With all the things in the world there are to be upset about, picking a tiny demographic's preferences/identities to rage over has always been a little mystifying to me.
All that being laid out, let's put on our shoulder-length gloves and plunge right into the sour bit. There are a few different trends circulating, and I want to talk about each of them (that I can remember).
First is my personal one, from day-to-day mundane social interactions, and is more a personal bugaboo than any broader social issue. The pattern goes like this: I meet a person (God spare us all), and introductions happen as normal, and they add "I am of [queer category goes here]." I have some reaction to the effect of "oh! Okay :D" and continue bouncing on through my day, being a dumb bear as I am.
The problem is, my fellow Millennials are usually saying these things to me and expecting a reaction, and my total lack of response is unnerving to them. People my age are, broadly speaking, terrified of meeting people, and so we sally out facts about ourselves trying to seem interesting and exciting. When someone reacts the way I do, taking what they say as a given and exhibiting no real reaction, I think we young people tend to read that as a dismissal, or as a concealed judgment of some kind. I also think that's a damn stupid way to read people, but I'm obviously just a tiny bit biased in favor of my own viewpoint on how I react to things.
That leads me into a question: why the hell am I being told this on an initial meeting, anyway? The standard "name, year, major" introduction is extremely boring, but it's also highly functional and, best of all, concise. Your name is a handle I can refer to you by, your year (and, by inference, your age) and what you elected to focus your education on give me some insight into what stage of life you're in, and what you like, and so on. The category you like to place yourself in with regard to gender identity tells me basically nothing about you specifically, other than that you might be interested in gender politics (which, when you think about it, basically everyone with a gender has an interest in by definition, so... not the most informative). It's a bit like pointing out your hair color; yeah, congratulations, you have a characteristic. Even if you colored it in a specific way to elicit a reaction, I've just really got nothing much to say about it. Nothing negative, nothing positive; that's just the way it is, which I thought was the point of the related rights movement (to be normalized and accepted).
Speaking of the LGBT(etc.) rights movement, that brings me to the next trend I've noticed: a great many people are drawing comparisons between this civil rights movement with THE Civil Rights Movement. I'm not gonna dwell on this long, but I'll leave you with a one-line input (which is a bitter pill, and especially bitter so soon after that horrible bullshit over in Orlando):
Y'all have absolutely experienced repression, violence, anger and discrimination, and a great many tragedies have struck members of the LGBTQ community, but let's not delude ourselves, shall we?
Thirdly, I've also seen a great many posts recently about exclusivity in the LGBTQ community. Titles include quippy one-liners like "8 Reasons We Don't Trust Straight People," "6 Things Straight Allies Need to Understand before Coming to Pride," and lots of other isolationist foolery in that vane. Again, you can see how this is a problem without my belaboring the point, but let me feed you this one: gender's not meant to be a club you're in, and everyone else is excluded from. I'm not going to make a club for cis-gendered white Christian men, partially because one already exists, and it's less a club than a Klub, see?
This is all an extremely long-winded setup for what I think about the issue of gender in our society, especially as it regards young people: it's "cool." Gender politics in general and the specific place and treatment of LGBTQ people in our society are some of the hottest topics in academic discussion at the moment, and it's natural to want a little slice of that social spotlight, I suppose. I just worry that the way we're starting to popularize and sensationalize LGBTQ people is ultimately going to become counterproductive. They're just ghosts driving meat-suits like anybody else, and I think the ultimate goal of the LGBTQ rights movement should be acceptance and normality, a world where one can freely make a statement like "I'm a gay man!" or "I'm a trans woman!" or any other identity and be safe and respected. We shouldn't be pursuing a world where we glorify LGBTQ people, or where we turn them into a sideshow sensation the way we're starting to now.
I apologize for the big blocks of text; my brain is made of molasses today. As always, share this wherever, and with whomever you please. If you liked it, or even if you didn't, leave me a comment or drop me the proverbial note at breakingberkeley@gmail.com. I do love the feedback. C:
P.S. I didn't talk about this up in the post, but a personal note: if your identity can't be explained to me in ten words or less, there's a decent chance it's not a useful way for you to identify yourself. Not that it's invalid, or that you can't identify that way or anything like that, but I would advise you to examine some of the terminology you use to explain "how it be," as they say. I also know that the creation of new vocabulary to adequately describe the range of LGBTQ people is currently underway, but... bear with me. Keep it simple, so we can all talk plainly together.
I'm gonna start out with one of those famous disclaimers no one will believe: I don't actually have any particular issue with the various denominations in the LGBT(etc.) community, hereafter referred to generally as "queer" people for concision, and there are a lot of reasons for that. Firstly, I'm Christian, so really I'm not supposed to have issues with people in general, and even if I do I'm meant to go "meh!" and accept it. Regardless of that, I also do my best to be a calm and amiable person, and remain open-minded to the unfamiliar. I don't know everything, and it would be a dull life if I did.
Also, if we're being harshly, coldly pragmatic about it... we're just simply not talking about that many people, numerically. Hatred of the queer community is, from my perspective, a lot like racism directed at Inuit people or a modern crusade launched against Tenriism. With all the things in the world there are to be upset about, picking a tiny demographic's preferences/identities to rage over has always been a little mystifying to me.
All that being laid out, let's put on our shoulder-length gloves and plunge right into the sour bit. There are a few different trends circulating, and I want to talk about each of them (that I can remember).
First is my personal one, from day-to-day mundane social interactions, and is more a personal bugaboo than any broader social issue. The pattern goes like this: I meet a person (God spare us all), and introductions happen as normal, and they add "I am of [queer category goes here]." I have some reaction to the effect of "oh! Okay :D" and continue bouncing on through my day, being a dumb bear as I am.
The problem is, my fellow Millennials are usually saying these things to me and expecting a reaction, and my total lack of response is unnerving to them. People my age are, broadly speaking, terrified of meeting people, and so we sally out facts about ourselves trying to seem interesting and exciting. When someone reacts the way I do, taking what they say as a given and exhibiting no real reaction, I think we young people tend to read that as a dismissal, or as a concealed judgment of some kind. I also think that's a damn stupid way to read people, but I'm obviously just a tiny bit biased in favor of my own viewpoint on how I react to things.
That leads me into a question: why the hell am I being told this on an initial meeting, anyway? The standard "name, year, major" introduction is extremely boring, but it's also highly functional and, best of all, concise. Your name is a handle I can refer to you by, your year (and, by inference, your age) and what you elected to focus your education on give me some insight into what stage of life you're in, and what you like, and so on. The category you like to place yourself in with regard to gender identity tells me basically nothing about you specifically, other than that you might be interested in gender politics (which, when you think about it, basically everyone with a gender has an interest in by definition, so... not the most informative). It's a bit like pointing out your hair color; yeah, congratulations, you have a characteristic. Even if you colored it in a specific way to elicit a reaction, I've just really got nothing much to say about it. Nothing negative, nothing positive; that's just the way it is, which I thought was the point of the related rights movement (to be normalized and accepted).
Speaking of the LGBT(etc.) rights movement, that brings me to the next trend I've noticed: a great many people are drawing comparisons between this civil rights movement with THE Civil Rights Movement. I'm not gonna dwell on this long, but I'll leave you with a one-line input (which is a bitter pill, and especially bitter so soon after that horrible bullshit over in Orlando):
Y'all have absolutely experienced repression, violence, anger and discrimination, and a great many tragedies have struck members of the LGBTQ community, but let's not delude ourselves, shall we?
Thirdly, I've also seen a great many posts recently about exclusivity in the LGBTQ community. Titles include quippy one-liners like "8 Reasons We Don't Trust Straight People," "6 Things Straight Allies Need to Understand before Coming to Pride," and lots of other isolationist foolery in that vane. Again, you can see how this is a problem without my belaboring the point, but let me feed you this one: gender's not meant to be a club you're in, and everyone else is excluded from. I'm not going to make a club for cis-gendered white Christian men, partially because one already exists, and it's less a club than a Klub, see?
This is all an extremely long-winded setup for what I think about the issue of gender in our society, especially as it regards young people: it's "cool." Gender politics in general and the specific place and treatment of LGBTQ people in our society are some of the hottest topics in academic discussion at the moment, and it's natural to want a little slice of that social spotlight, I suppose. I just worry that the way we're starting to popularize and sensationalize LGBTQ people is ultimately going to become counterproductive. They're just ghosts driving meat-suits like anybody else, and I think the ultimate goal of the LGBTQ rights movement should be acceptance and normality, a world where one can freely make a statement like "I'm a gay man!" or "I'm a trans woman!" or any other identity and be safe and respected. We shouldn't be pursuing a world where we glorify LGBTQ people, or where we turn them into a sideshow sensation the way we're starting to now.
I apologize for the big blocks of text; my brain is made of molasses today. As always, share this wherever, and with whomever you please. If you liked it, or even if you didn't, leave me a comment or drop me the proverbial note at breakingberkeley@gmail.com. I do love the feedback. C:
P.S. I didn't talk about this up in the post, but a personal note: if your identity can't be explained to me in ten words or less, there's a decent chance it's not a useful way for you to identify yourself. Not that it's invalid, or that you can't identify that way or anything like that, but I would advise you to examine some of the terminology you use to explain "how it be," as they say. I also know that the creation of new vocabulary to adequately describe the range of LGBTQ people is currently underway, but... bear with me. Keep it simple, so we can all talk plainly together.
Friday, June 24, 2016
Human Composites
TL;DR I'm awkward, for sure, but there is a reason of sorts.
This one isn't about me tilting out over social interaction, I promise! Also, despite the title, this isn't content you'd find on a site about the Illuminati and everything. It's actually just an insight into the way I think, as far as I'm aware of it. You might equivalently call it "the degenerate ravings of a frothing lunatic," but I don't mind either way.
The basic premise is this: people are divided into discrete, cleanly separable categories in my mind and experience. These little boxes nest together according to type and size. If I can abuse the allegory, there's a big cylinder labeled "Family," inside which are smaller cylinders marked with people's names, and so on. There's also a big rectangle labeled "Friends," inside which nest many different boxes of friends (groups of people, loosely speaking). This is a kindergarten-level way to describe it, but I think you get the gist.
In case I was sounding too sane for you, the patterning of this next part gets a little bit Star Trek: Voyager. The containers for people are separable and fit within one another, but the people themselves are a little complicated. To avoid getting any more ridiculous than I absolutely have to, I'm going to say that people as I think of them are best modeled as functions of position on the axes defined by different categories, and let you figure out what that means.
I'm messin' witcha. The way people work in my mind really is like a position function, but let me explain in a way that makes sense. I just mean people have some properties of mathematical functions, in the sense that they have distinguishable shape, domains over which they're defined, specific amounts of their domains in each of many different categories, and in some cases points where the function goes "we don't play that" and returns an undefined value.
This is all fairly clean and clinical, and makes me sound a little like a machine, but I can verify this is not the case by two statements: a) there's more to it and b) machines work much better than my mind.
The complicating factor is that the functions are defined within the space of the categories I mentioned, but are discontinuous and defined in multiple categories at the same time. Those categories themselves are multidimensional and mobile, and you can easily see how it becomes a damn mess in here in short order.
Let's go through an example to confuse you further, dear reader. I often find myself hanging out with couples (third son, third wheel, as one does), in the specific case where I know both members of the couple.
Now, in this setting, I'm not actually with two people; rather, I'm hanging out with a minimum of three. There's Person A and Person B (the two people who constitute the couple) and a third composite entity representing the couple itself, which is its own different function layered onto the other two. This is really true for any combination of two or more people, but I find the situation of a couple is the most pronounced, easily comprehensible example. Two people they may be, but their individual functions are coupled by a third, higher-order function representing the dynamic between them.
I have a history of visiting with my friends one-on-one or two at a time, and I imagine you can see why. It's not that I don't like going to parties and seeing all my friends, or anything like that, but with how complex the individual function of each person is, and the additional complexity that arises in even a simple situation like the couple, the geometry becomes explosive after about five or so people.
Another example explaining why I occasionally behave so spasmodically, if you please. I made two friends in high school named Laney and Tory respectively, who are in extraordinarily different categories, though they do have their similarities. Laney's a dancer and artistic type where Tory is into chemistry and computers, and they were in disparate friend groups for the most part. Tory, as you might assume, was more in the clique with me and the other disembodied brains, where Laney was friends with a tight-knit group of cool kids (I don't mean that negatively; they were "cool kids" and also actually cool kids). Tory is an ardent socialist, and as far as I know Laney's not much interested in politics. You get the picture; these two functions are totally different shapes, exist in wholly different spaces, and even where they overlap their values are completely different. For the visual people out there, they're colors that don't match at all. (Tory is red, obviously.)
Everything was peachy, then, having figured the two of them out (with some projections and inference on my part, as I do) and sorted them into appropriate separable tubes, until I was made privy to an interesting fact about these two.
Tory and Laney are siblings.
Damn it.
To this day, anytime I see these two together, my mind seizes very briefly and spits out a dial tone while it reboots and corrects for the association. Say you were a neurotically organized cook, keeping everything in exactly the same places for efficiency, to the degree that your organization became autonomic, and then one day all the spices in your rack decided to spontaneously shift one slot over to the right. That sensation, best described as "...uh?," is a fair approximation for what I experience when I see two (or more) people in some unexpected configuration.
Now, it might sound to the reader as if I'm condemning people for being in association with one another, or even for being siblings, but I want to be clear that that specifically isn't what I mean. I love hanging out with couples specifically because of the added layer of complexity; I enjoy being made aware of the architectural silliness of my own mind, and learning to understand how I interact with these big complex composites of people.
Similarly, the momentary disconnection of my logic coils when I see Laney and Tory as a sibling unit is not a particularly unpleasant experience for me. It's like opening the file you keep pictures of bees in and finding a picture of a yellow jacket. (Why I have a mental file of pictures of bees is my own business.) It's not that it's "wrong;" a yellow jacket is just another member of Order Hymenoptera, and in many ways a very similar insect to a bee, it just isn't necessarily what I was expecting based on the file's (incorrect) labeling. Laney and Tory are an extremely cute pair of siblings (IT'S TRUE, TORY, SHUT UP), and are individually dear people; my mechanical mind-graph just didn't project them as a unit at first, if that makes sense.
Anyway, this has been a more personal post, and also a bit more pretentious than normal (if this were an anthropology paper I could title it Autoethnography: A Study of Dissonance between Category and Differential Realities, because ppppbbbbttt). As before, feel free to show people if it's interesting or if you're (God forbid) trying to describe/explain me to someone. I also adore feedback, so leave a comment (or an email to breakingberkeley@gmail.com if you're disinclined to public appearance, which I obviously understand). Ilá al-liqāʾ, everybody C:
This one isn't about me tilting out over social interaction, I promise! Also, despite the title, this isn't content you'd find on a site about the Illuminati and everything. It's actually just an insight into the way I think, as far as I'm aware of it. You might equivalently call it "the degenerate ravings of a frothing lunatic," but I don't mind either way.
The basic premise is this: people are divided into discrete, cleanly separable categories in my mind and experience. These little boxes nest together according to type and size. If I can abuse the allegory, there's a big cylinder labeled "Family," inside which are smaller cylinders marked with people's names, and so on. There's also a big rectangle labeled "Friends," inside which nest many different boxes of friends (groups of people, loosely speaking). This is a kindergarten-level way to describe it, but I think you get the gist.
In case I was sounding too sane for you, the patterning of this next part gets a little bit Star Trek: Voyager. The containers for people are separable and fit within one another, but the people themselves are a little complicated. To avoid getting any more ridiculous than I absolutely have to, I'm going to say that people as I think of them are best modeled as functions of position on the axes defined by different categories, and let you figure out what that means.
I'm messin' witcha. The way people work in my mind really is like a position function, but let me explain in a way that makes sense. I just mean people have some properties of mathematical functions, in the sense that they have distinguishable shape, domains over which they're defined, specific amounts of their domains in each of many different categories, and in some cases points where the function goes "we don't play that" and returns an undefined value.
This is all fairly clean and clinical, and makes me sound a little like a machine, but I can verify this is not the case by two statements: a) there's more to it and b) machines work much better than my mind.
The complicating factor is that the functions are defined within the space of the categories I mentioned, but are discontinuous and defined in multiple categories at the same time. Those categories themselves are multidimensional and mobile, and you can easily see how it becomes a damn mess in here in short order.
Let's go through an example to confuse you further, dear reader. I often find myself hanging out with couples (third son, third wheel, as one does), in the specific case where I know both members of the couple.
Now, in this setting, I'm not actually with two people; rather, I'm hanging out with a minimum of three. There's Person A and Person B (the two people who constitute the couple) and a third composite entity representing the couple itself, which is its own different function layered onto the other two. This is really true for any combination of two or more people, but I find the situation of a couple is the most pronounced, easily comprehensible example. Two people they may be, but their individual functions are coupled by a third, higher-order function representing the dynamic between them.
I have a history of visiting with my friends one-on-one or two at a time, and I imagine you can see why. It's not that I don't like going to parties and seeing all my friends, or anything like that, but with how complex the individual function of each person is, and the additional complexity that arises in even a simple situation like the couple, the geometry becomes explosive after about five or so people.
Another example explaining why I occasionally behave so spasmodically, if you please. I made two friends in high school named Laney and Tory respectively, who are in extraordinarily different categories, though they do have their similarities. Laney's a dancer and artistic type where Tory is into chemistry and computers, and they were in disparate friend groups for the most part. Tory, as you might assume, was more in the clique with me and the other disembodied brains, where Laney was friends with a tight-knit group of cool kids (I don't mean that negatively; they were "cool kids" and also actually cool kids). Tory is an ardent socialist, and as far as I know Laney's not much interested in politics. You get the picture; these two functions are totally different shapes, exist in wholly different spaces, and even where they overlap their values are completely different. For the visual people out there, they're colors that don't match at all. (Tory is red, obviously.)
Everything was peachy, then, having figured the two of them out (with some projections and inference on my part, as I do) and sorted them into appropriate separable tubes, until I was made privy to an interesting fact about these two.
Tory and Laney are siblings.
Damn it.
To this day, anytime I see these two together, my mind seizes very briefly and spits out a dial tone while it reboots and corrects for the association. Say you were a neurotically organized cook, keeping everything in exactly the same places for efficiency, to the degree that your organization became autonomic, and then one day all the spices in your rack decided to spontaneously shift one slot over to the right. That sensation, best described as "...uh?," is a fair approximation for what I experience when I see two (or more) people in some unexpected configuration.
Now, it might sound to the reader as if I'm condemning people for being in association with one another, or even for being siblings, but I want to be clear that that specifically isn't what I mean. I love hanging out with couples specifically because of the added layer of complexity; I enjoy being made aware of the architectural silliness of my own mind, and learning to understand how I interact with these big complex composites of people.
Similarly, the momentary disconnection of my logic coils when I see Laney and Tory as a sibling unit is not a particularly unpleasant experience for me. It's like opening the file you keep pictures of bees in and finding a picture of a yellow jacket. (Why I have a mental file of pictures of bees is my own business.) It's not that it's "wrong;" a yellow jacket is just another member of Order Hymenoptera, and in many ways a very similar insect to a bee, it just isn't necessarily what I was expecting based on the file's (incorrect) labeling. Laney and Tory are an extremely cute pair of siblings (IT'S TRUE, TORY, SHUT UP), and are individually dear people; my mechanical mind-graph just didn't project them as a unit at first, if that makes sense.
Anyway, this has been a more personal post, and also a bit more pretentious than normal (if this were an anthropology paper I could title it Autoethnography: A Study of Dissonance between Category and Differential Realities, because ppppbbbbttt). As before, feel free to show people if it's interesting or if you're (God forbid) trying to describe/explain me to someone. I also adore feedback, so leave a comment (or an email to breakingberkeley@gmail.com if you're disinclined to public appearance, which I obviously understand). Ilá al-liqāʾ, everybody C:
Jellyfish (Young People These Days)
Note: As a biologist, I'm aware about 50% of people insist these are called sea jellies and 50% refuse to call them anything but jellyfish. I admit I don't care, because "jellyfish" is easier to say and sounds better for a title.
TL;DR Too many people are turning into jellyfish, and Iencourage beg you not to be one.
If you either know me personally or read this here blog regularly (especially the most recent batch of posts), you've probably figured out that social interaction isn't exactly my forte. I'm a deeply depressive and highly anxious person, which is admittedly not the optimal set of stats for interacting with something as complicated as people. Having made it clear I'm bad at social interaction, I'm now going to rip into people at large over how bad they are at it. Hypocrisy status: acknowledged.
As a personal aside: given how little I enjoy interacting with the bulk of people, and how much time I spend by myself, if I do become your friend and make an effort to maintain that connection, you should both a) consider yourself one of a special, chosen few (because you are) and b) appreciate it, for lack of better verbiage. It's significant, maaaaan.
Now, all of that out of the way, I'm noticing an increasingly cnidarian pattern in the way people interact with me and with one another. Jellies behave in the following way: they drift indecisively on the current, occasionally powering themselves to approach and aggregate with other similar jellies. They spend the duration of their (sometimes extremely protracted) lifespan doing, basically, as little as possible, as far as real action. They even eat passively, trailing nets of tentacles behind them and waiting for something to stumble into their sticky trap, at which point they reflexively fire venomous stingers into the unfortunate passer-by and very slowly digest it.
Anatomically, it also bears mentioning that jellyfish have no brain, no spine, a single hole used as both mouth and anus, no heart, no well-defined guts, and very little muscle. That being said, guts and muscles have very limited practical applications in a society like ours, so I'll deal with the other things.
Let's deal with "no brain" first, because it's easy. To quote my dear ma: "The problem with you young people is you're always waiting for a better deal." My mother and I disagree on a great many things, but I think on this point she's entirely correct. People my age tend to be pretty spontaneous by nature, and that's fine; not everybody needs to plan everything as exactingly as I do, because God knows I'd live longer if I lightened up a little bit.
That being said, someone ought to have told us all by now that being spontaneous and being flaky are two extremely different phenomena. Spontaneous people text you at 11 P.M. asking if you want to go for a night drive to look at stars. Flaky people agree in advance to go on the aforementioned drive, and then as the time approaches, they become suddenly so busy that they simply can't text you at all. Then the moment is passed, you sit all dressed up with no where to go for a while, and the next afternoon you get a text that says "oh my god sorryyyyy i got so busyyyy :/." If you don't want to do something, you should just tell people explicitly. It's all right to change your mind; believe me, I've just explicitly told people "depression is eating my soul, and I don't want to move" to cancel plans before. It's okay.
Summary: commit, and if you must un-commit, just do it.
"No spine" is a related issue with young people (as it should be, as another part of the central nervous system). In summary, people my age tend to talk a big game and play very little, if at all. The number of people I've had threaten me with physical violence of some kind over the past few years is a) already ridiculous and b) extremely likely to increase as a function of time, but the harassment always stops, instantly, the moment I stop being polite and bring it to an actual moment of confrontation.
It's the same situation as the infamous Political Discussion. Young people in congregation tend to espouse whatever political attitude they have at the moment, but when challenged we rapidly backpedal and adopt a more "reasonable" or "moderate" stance, just for the sake of avoiding confrontation and tension in our group. Similarly, I suppose it's easier to tell someone you're going to beat them up than actually try and do it, especially if that someone turns out to be a over foot taller and eighty or so lean pounds heavier than you are. This sounds fairly horrible, but it's gotten to the point where I want someone to carry through on their threats and actually attack me, solely so I can crush them against the pavement and obtain some form of closure and catharsis, as warped and empty as it might ultimately be.
Summary: do it m8 u wont.
Jellyfish, as mentioned above, use a single orifice as both their in- and out-port. As heavy-handed as the allegory is, I'll discard it for clarity: people my age are talkin' all that good shit. This relates to the issue of spinelessness, but is specifically verbal: young people will expound at great length about a person's less praiseworthy features... but only if said person isn't there to hear them or argue their own case. That feeds back into the confrontation issue, but how about this: we'll just have the confrontation, and argue, and be tense for five seconds, and then be friends after as normal. The gorillas have it figured out, so I think we bipeds can manage it. How is that restraining order coming, anyway? Still fictional? Oh, good, I'd hate to make somebody come serve it to me, in person, as is required. (common_statement.exe is now opening 455 new windows...)
Summary: "You was poppin' all that good shit a second ago!" -Colonel H. Stinkmeaner, The Boondocks.
The "no heart" point is at least a little more positive. To put it succinctly, I've noticed the majority of people my age, overwhelmingly, simply aren't comfortable with displays of emotion, either their own or others. This one is at least partially my fault, in fairness; I maintain a stony, dead mask of a face most times, and I don't particularly say anything deep unless I've gotten to know someone fairly well, so I understand how people might be taken aback. The obvious exception is when they're drunk, at which point all types of things become acceptable, but that's an entirely different problem for another post.
This one's a simple fix, too: tell 'em, as Soulja Boy taught us. Somebody makes you uncomfortable, tell 'em. I'm kind of spamming on about a theme with these last few posts, but in all seriousness, the number of problems in the world that could be solved by clear and honest communication is... I mean, most of them, really.
As an aside, I don't remember when emotion became something to be afraid of. It was sometime recent, for sure, because I was always the sensitive kid, and that was okay at the time. I don't know; lemme know what you think, dear reader.
Summary: don't be an awkward robot.
That's all I've got for you today. Let me know what you think (my email's listed on the profile page, if you can find it), and show this to your friends if you'd like, so they can be upset with me as well. Stinging me isn't entirely a jellyfish-like thing to do, so don't worry. :P
Edit: The email wasn't displaying, because I'm a monkey! It's breakingberkeley@gmail.com. Surprising, I know.
P.S. For that single, solitary, heroic individual who checks this blog without fail on a daily basis, make yourself known. I feel like I ought to get you a mug or something for your commitment.
TL;DR Too many people are turning into jellyfish, and I
If you either know me personally or read this here blog regularly (especially the most recent batch of posts), you've probably figured out that social interaction isn't exactly my forte. I'm a deeply depressive and highly anxious person, which is admittedly not the optimal set of stats for interacting with something as complicated as people. Having made it clear I'm bad at social interaction, I'm now going to rip into people at large over how bad they are at it. Hypocrisy status: acknowledged.
As a personal aside: given how little I enjoy interacting with the bulk of people, and how much time I spend by myself, if I do become your friend and make an effort to maintain that connection, you should both a) consider yourself one of a special, chosen few (because you are) and b) appreciate it, for lack of better verbiage. It's significant, maaaaan.
Now, all of that out of the way, I'm noticing an increasingly cnidarian pattern in the way people interact with me and with one another. Jellies behave in the following way: they drift indecisively on the current, occasionally powering themselves to approach and aggregate with other similar jellies. They spend the duration of their (sometimes extremely protracted) lifespan doing, basically, as little as possible, as far as real action. They even eat passively, trailing nets of tentacles behind them and waiting for something to stumble into their sticky trap, at which point they reflexively fire venomous stingers into the unfortunate passer-by and very slowly digest it.
Anatomically, it also bears mentioning that jellyfish have no brain, no spine, a single hole used as both mouth and anus, no heart, no well-defined guts, and very little muscle. That being said, guts and muscles have very limited practical applications in a society like ours, so I'll deal with the other things.
Let's deal with "no brain" first, because it's easy. To quote my dear ma: "The problem with you young people is you're always waiting for a better deal." My mother and I disagree on a great many things, but I think on this point she's entirely correct. People my age tend to be pretty spontaneous by nature, and that's fine; not everybody needs to plan everything as exactingly as I do, because God knows I'd live longer if I lightened up a little bit.
That being said, someone ought to have told us all by now that being spontaneous and being flaky are two extremely different phenomena. Spontaneous people text you at 11 P.M. asking if you want to go for a night drive to look at stars. Flaky people agree in advance to go on the aforementioned drive, and then as the time approaches, they become suddenly so busy that they simply can't text you at all. Then the moment is passed, you sit all dressed up with no where to go for a while, and the next afternoon you get a text that says "oh my god sorryyyyy i got so busyyyy :/." If you don't want to do something, you should just tell people explicitly. It's all right to change your mind; believe me, I've just explicitly told people "depression is eating my soul, and I don't want to move" to cancel plans before. It's okay.
Summary: commit, and if you must un-commit, just do it.
"No spine" is a related issue with young people (as it should be, as another part of the central nervous system). In summary, people my age tend to talk a big game and play very little, if at all. The number of people I've had threaten me with physical violence of some kind over the past few years is a) already ridiculous and b) extremely likely to increase as a function of time, but the harassment always stops, instantly, the moment I stop being polite and bring it to an actual moment of confrontation.
It's the same situation as the infamous Political Discussion. Young people in congregation tend to espouse whatever political attitude they have at the moment, but when challenged we rapidly backpedal and adopt a more "reasonable" or "moderate" stance, just for the sake of avoiding confrontation and tension in our group. Similarly, I suppose it's easier to tell someone you're going to beat them up than actually try and do it, especially if that someone turns out to be a over foot taller and eighty or so lean pounds heavier than you are. This sounds fairly horrible, but it's gotten to the point where I want someone to carry through on their threats and actually attack me, solely so I can crush them against the pavement and obtain some form of closure and catharsis, as warped and empty as it might ultimately be.
Summary: do it m8 u wont.
Jellyfish, as mentioned above, use a single orifice as both their in- and out-port. As heavy-handed as the allegory is, I'll discard it for clarity: people my age are talkin' all that good shit. This relates to the issue of spinelessness, but is specifically verbal: young people will expound at great length about a person's less praiseworthy features... but only if said person isn't there to hear them or argue their own case. That feeds back into the confrontation issue, but how about this: we'll just have the confrontation, and argue, and be tense for five seconds, and then be friends after as normal. The gorillas have it figured out, so I think we bipeds can manage it. How is that restraining order coming, anyway? Still fictional? Oh, good, I'd hate to make somebody come serve it to me, in person, as is required. (common_statement.exe is now opening 455 new windows...)
Summary: "You was poppin' all that good shit a second ago!" -Colonel H. Stinkmeaner, The Boondocks.
The "no heart" point is at least a little more positive. To put it succinctly, I've noticed the majority of people my age, overwhelmingly, simply aren't comfortable with displays of emotion, either their own or others. This one is at least partially my fault, in fairness; I maintain a stony, dead mask of a face most times, and I don't particularly say anything deep unless I've gotten to know someone fairly well, so I understand how people might be taken aback. The obvious exception is when they're drunk, at which point all types of things become acceptable, but that's an entirely different problem for another post.
This one's a simple fix, too: tell 'em, as Soulja Boy taught us. Somebody makes you uncomfortable, tell 'em. I'm kind of spamming on about a theme with these last few posts, but in all seriousness, the number of problems in the world that could be solved by clear and honest communication is... I mean, most of them, really.
As an aside, I don't remember when emotion became something to be afraid of. It was sometime recent, for sure, because I was always the sensitive kid, and that was okay at the time. I don't know; lemme know what you think, dear reader.
Summary: don't be an awkward robot.
That's all I've got for you today. Let me know what you think (my email's listed on the profile page, if you can find it), and show this to your friends if you'd like, so they can be upset with me as well. Stinging me isn't entirely a jellyfish-like thing to do, so don't worry. :P
Edit: The email wasn't displaying, because I'm a monkey! It's breakingberkeley@gmail.com. Surprising, I know.
P.S. For that single, solitary, heroic individual who checks this blog without fail on a daily basis, make yourself known. I feel like I ought to get you a mug or something for your commitment.
Sunday, June 5, 2016
Class Review: Anthropology 114
TL;DR 10/10 class content taught by a 6/10 professor assisted by 2/10 grad students, with 1/10 organization and clarity.
Hey, it's another class review! It's only been... almost my entire undergraduate career since the last one. Nailin' it, coach.
There are a few things I should clarify about this class before I write anything in particular on the subject: first, I took this class last semester (Spring 2016), so it's a recent event, and I did indeed get an A in it, so my complaints aren't just vinegar poured out because I'm bitter about bad grades. As far as why I'm taking the class in general, I'm a biologist who's considering picking up a minor in anthropology, for reasons that I would tell you if I knew them.
If you don't want to read the whole review, I'm just going to summarize and say that this is a very good class, and one you absolutely shouldn't take if you're anything like me. That probably sounds like a damn fool opinion, but that is indeed the most concise version of my opinion on the matter.
So, diving into the details, this is an upper-division anthropology class called History of Anthropological Thought, the title implying that it's a sort of greatest-hits approach to the history of anthropology. This isn't totally wrong; the stated purpose of the class, once you get into it, is to understand the various key movements and moments in anthropology's development as a discipline, as well as the important reversals and transition in how people thought in terms of theory. We read some of the classic racist armchair anthropologists of the late 1800s, and then went through the Boasian shift to radical empiricism, then through Radcliffe-Brown and the other morphs of structuralism, and into Geertz, and blah, blah, blah.
This sounds, in this cursory sort of summary, like a simple history class when I describe it, designed to orient the contemporary students of anthropology (who are to be discussed further down and later on) so they know where the "classical" ideas came from, who the big figures are, and so on. Anthropology, in one definition, is the science of comparative common sense, so it stands to reason we'd want to figure out where our own current common sense came from, so to speak.
I'm not convinced I have the vocabulary or the time and space to properly articulate how this worked, but that... simply isn't what happened in the class. We said we were doing that a great deal, and I did absorb a vastly greater knowledge of anthropology than I had before, but I can't honestly say that this exercise in historical understanding was the point of the course. I hear your immediate question, and I can only answer you that I don't truly know what the point was.
Lecture for this class was a damn mess, which annoyed the scientist portions of my brain and didn't really bother the part where I actually live. Professor Joyce simply stood and talked about things for the whole 90-minute lecture, which wasn't nearly as bad as it sounded; she is a vastly experienced expert in her specific field and in anthropology in general, and she's really a rather entertaining public speaker. Additionally, she tells good stories, and good stories from anthropology are usually completely ridiculous, so bonus points for that.
The difficulty is that, in an uncomfortably mercenary, cutthroat kind of way, I'm not necessarily around at lecture just to hear someone's interesting, insightful ideas, interesting and insightful though they may be. There is some degree to which I need to hear "know this" and "this was an aside for the interested members of the audience" for the sake of taking an exam and being engaged with course content, and we simply didn't have any of that, which was more than a little nerve-wracking.
"Nerve-wracking" and exam preparation lead nicely to the next point about this class: no one actually appeared to know precisely what was going on in the class at any given moment. I could belabor this point, but I'll try and keep it short. Organizationally, this class had two separate reading lists (one for lecture and one for section) and two separate pages on bCourses (the same deal). This is only slightly confusing, but allow me to elaborate: there were days when my section met (and I needed to present on things I'd read), but neither reading list was actually pertinent to what my GSI meant to talk with us about that day. Also, my GSI just kind of didn't add me to the bCourses page for the section, where I'm meant to be posting short writing assignments about the aforementioned things, and it took us almost a month to get to the point where she realized what had happened. Not knowing what assignments are due on which day: not so solid.
On the note of the organizational ephemerality of this class, we had a term paper for which we needed to analyze the work of a living member of UC Berkeley's anthropology department. I chose "analyze" specifically, because this is what the prompt said: "the final paper should analytically relate the work of the approved subject to the material covered in the course." For those who don't know or don't care, there are supposedly three levels of writing: descriptive, where you simply realize the facts about something; analysis, where you compare two or more things as abstractions, and synthesis, where you produce your own entirely new material. It's a uselessly muddy model because all the categories draw mutually on one another, but whatever.
The point is that we were meant to write at the level of analysis, meaning we take the contemporary anthropologist's work, hold it up against their predecessors, and go "Oh! These two lines of thought are similar (though not necessarily derived from one another)" and "If we use this author to understand it, this means this!" for 6 to 8 pages, which is what I did. I'm good at that, because... it's easy.
The difficulty came when I submitted an early draft of my paper to see if I was exempt from our final (which is a stupid concept and pissed me off for a whole other set of reasons, but steady on), and received the feedback.
Firstly, this was an A- paper, and I needed an A for the exemption. "I'll take that," I thought. "It's an early draft and I rushed a bit, so let's see what was said." The feedback was, summarizing, "you did too much reading of [your subject] through this course rather than answering the question: what does [your subject] think anthropology is and should be?"
So, as it stands at the authorial moment, I'm one point off getting exempted from an exam I no longer feel any sort of inclination to take (the organizational horrors had gotten me quite tilted by this point), and the feedback is, essentially, "revise your paper so as to answer the prompt less and answer this largely unrelated question that we've never mentioned to you, verbally or in a document, and you're off the hook."
I was more confused and vaguely annoyed than anything else, so I quoted the relevant bits of the email and sent another to my GSI, asking for some help interpreting what it was I should actually do. The GSI is a pro at this, after all, and I'm an amateur who wandered in from the bio buildings.
My interactions with the faculty here are usually nothing but pleasant (they like people who turn in their work, as it turns out), or at the very worst cold and polite, so understand what it means when I say boy I dun fucked up now.
The email I got back, while professionally worded (it always is with these people), was the single most scathing piece of communication I've ever gotten from someone who wasn't actively threatening me with violence. "It's not our job to interpret feedback," "it's not our job to ease your anxieties," and various other sentences explaining what an anthropology GSI's job was and was not ensued, informing me in no uncertain terms that I was totally out of line, and also totally out of luck. Apparently my email wasn't professionally worded enough, leading to the famous "I encourage you to use more professional language when addressing your instructors." "We're not doing it, and kindly piss off for asking," in short.
I sat staring at that email for a moment, in the pressure cooker of dead week with all the prior problems of this class stewing around in my head (my poor eyelashes suffered mightily under the fist of nervous trichotillomania this time around), wondering what to do. Having reached a conclusion, I opened Microsoft Word, added a one-sentence disclaimer to my paper that said, basically, "I'm doing analysis," and then went to Asha Tea House (the best) to get something sweet and caffeinated so I wouldn't be quite so inclined to eat the anthropology faculty.
This is, in short, the problem with this course, or at least the version I took. As a student, you have to perform at some unspecified level,understanding and absorbing a large volume of content which may or may not become relevant for the "learning exercise" of the examinations. If you ask Professor Joyce about it, she'll maintain that the exams are for learning, cite some research on learning, and mention a largely unrelated theorist who wrote something interesting on a subject that's entered her mind. If you ask a GSI they'll immediately shit on you, because they did research in South Africa, and they are busy doing important smart people things, which you as a filthy undergrad peasant wouldn't know a thing about. Also, there are three of them, but they don't talk to each other and don't pay attention in lecture, so good luck finding anything out even if they deign to answer you (which they most often didn't).
That having been said, this class wasn't actually difficult, in the end. I got out with an A on my transcript and didn't even have to take that last exam. Was I bewildered by this result? Yes. Was it something I understood how to repeat after I did it? Yes. Did it feel like I'd just been mercy-euthanized when I saw the final email? Also yes, as it turns out.
Humanity at large (and especially members of the more traditional scientific disciplines) look down on anthropology as a field for various reasons, but the main ones I hear are "it's easy because you can just make things up," "it's not quantitative or precise enough to be a real science," "it's pure theory and not materially applicable," and things of that nature. Personality-wise, the most common gripe is, generally, "everyone thinks they're incredibly smart and/or the department is full of snooty academics."
Faculty who taught Anthropology 114 last semester, please stop proving us all so firmly, unpleasantly right.
P.S. Feel free to show this to people as always; it gives me the giggles when people read my blog, and I turn the color of ketchup when they enjoy it. That being said, if you know me personally I would appreciate if you didn't, by some weird mechanism, connect this with me, and then with the faculty members in question. I don't want it to be a strange, tense, or awkward situation, and frankly I don't feel inclined to talk to them any more for the moment, a sentiment which I'm sure they reciprocate.
Hey, it's another class review! It's only been... almost my entire undergraduate career since the last one. Nailin' it, coach.
There are a few things I should clarify about this class before I write anything in particular on the subject: first, I took this class last semester (Spring 2016), so it's a recent event, and I did indeed get an A in it, so my complaints aren't just vinegar poured out because I'm bitter about bad grades. As far as why I'm taking the class in general, I'm a biologist who's considering picking up a minor in anthropology, for reasons that I would tell you if I knew them.
If you don't want to read the whole review, I'm just going to summarize and say that this is a very good class, and one you absolutely shouldn't take if you're anything like me. That probably sounds like a damn fool opinion, but that is indeed the most concise version of my opinion on the matter.
So, diving into the details, this is an upper-division anthropology class called History of Anthropological Thought, the title implying that it's a sort of greatest-hits approach to the history of anthropology. This isn't totally wrong; the stated purpose of the class, once you get into it, is to understand the various key movements and moments in anthropology's development as a discipline, as well as the important reversals and transition in how people thought in terms of theory. We read some of the classic racist armchair anthropologists of the late 1800s, and then went through the Boasian shift to radical empiricism, then through Radcliffe-Brown and the other morphs of structuralism, and into Geertz, and blah, blah, blah.
This sounds, in this cursory sort of summary, like a simple history class when I describe it, designed to orient the contemporary students of anthropology (who are to be discussed further down and later on) so they know where the "classical" ideas came from, who the big figures are, and so on. Anthropology, in one definition, is the science of comparative common sense, so it stands to reason we'd want to figure out where our own current common sense came from, so to speak.
I'm not convinced I have the vocabulary or the time and space to properly articulate how this worked, but that... simply isn't what happened in the class. We said we were doing that a great deal, and I did absorb a vastly greater knowledge of anthropology than I had before, but I can't honestly say that this exercise in historical understanding was the point of the course. I hear your immediate question, and I can only answer you that I don't truly know what the point was.
Lecture for this class was a damn mess, which annoyed the scientist portions of my brain and didn't really bother the part where I actually live. Professor Joyce simply stood and talked about things for the whole 90-minute lecture, which wasn't nearly as bad as it sounded; she is a vastly experienced expert in her specific field and in anthropology in general, and she's really a rather entertaining public speaker. Additionally, she tells good stories, and good stories from anthropology are usually completely ridiculous, so bonus points for that.
The difficulty is that, in an uncomfortably mercenary, cutthroat kind of way, I'm not necessarily around at lecture just to hear someone's interesting, insightful ideas, interesting and insightful though they may be. There is some degree to which I need to hear "know this" and "this was an aside for the interested members of the audience" for the sake of taking an exam and being engaged with course content, and we simply didn't have any of that, which was more than a little nerve-wracking.
"Nerve-wracking" and exam preparation lead nicely to the next point about this class: no one actually appeared to know precisely what was going on in the class at any given moment. I could belabor this point, but I'll try and keep it short. Organizationally, this class had two separate reading lists (one for lecture and one for section) and two separate pages on bCourses (the same deal). This is only slightly confusing, but allow me to elaborate: there were days when my section met (and I needed to present on things I'd read), but neither reading list was actually pertinent to what my GSI meant to talk with us about that day. Also, my GSI just kind of didn't add me to the bCourses page for the section, where I'm meant to be posting short writing assignments about the aforementioned things, and it took us almost a month to get to the point where she realized what had happened. Not knowing what assignments are due on which day: not so solid.
On the note of the organizational ephemerality of this class, we had a term paper for which we needed to analyze the work of a living member of UC Berkeley's anthropology department. I chose "analyze" specifically, because this is what the prompt said: "the final paper should analytically relate the work of the approved subject to the material covered in the course." For those who don't know or don't care, there are supposedly three levels of writing: descriptive, where you simply realize the facts about something; analysis, where you compare two or more things as abstractions, and synthesis, where you produce your own entirely new material. It's a uselessly muddy model because all the categories draw mutually on one another, but whatever.
The point is that we were meant to write at the level of analysis, meaning we take the contemporary anthropologist's work, hold it up against their predecessors, and go "Oh! These two lines of thought are similar (though not necessarily derived from one another)" and "If we use this author to understand it, this means this!" for 6 to 8 pages, which is what I did. I'm good at that, because... it's easy.
The difficulty came when I submitted an early draft of my paper to see if I was exempt from our final (which is a stupid concept and pissed me off for a whole other set of reasons, but steady on), and received the feedback.
Firstly, this was an A- paper, and I needed an A for the exemption. "I'll take that," I thought. "It's an early draft and I rushed a bit, so let's see what was said." The feedback was, summarizing, "you did too much reading of [your subject] through this course rather than answering the question: what does [your subject] think anthropology is and should be?"
So, as it stands at the authorial moment, I'm one point off getting exempted from an exam I no longer feel any sort of inclination to take (the organizational horrors had gotten me quite tilted by this point), and the feedback is, essentially, "revise your paper so as to answer the prompt less and answer this largely unrelated question that we've never mentioned to you, verbally or in a document, and you're off the hook."
I was more confused and vaguely annoyed than anything else, so I quoted the relevant bits of the email and sent another to my GSI, asking for some help interpreting what it was I should actually do. The GSI is a pro at this, after all, and I'm an amateur who wandered in from the bio buildings.
My interactions with the faculty here are usually nothing but pleasant (they like people who turn in their work, as it turns out), or at the very worst cold and polite, so understand what it means when I say boy I dun fucked up now.
The email I got back, while professionally worded (it always is with these people), was the single most scathing piece of communication I've ever gotten from someone who wasn't actively threatening me with violence. "It's not our job to interpret feedback," "it's not our job to ease your anxieties," and various other sentences explaining what an anthropology GSI's job was and was not ensued, informing me in no uncertain terms that I was totally out of line, and also totally out of luck. Apparently my email wasn't professionally worded enough, leading to the famous "I encourage you to use more professional language when addressing your instructors." "We're not doing it, and kindly piss off for asking," in short.
I sat staring at that email for a moment, in the pressure cooker of dead week with all the prior problems of this class stewing around in my head (my poor eyelashes suffered mightily under the fist of nervous trichotillomania this time around), wondering what to do. Having reached a conclusion, I opened Microsoft Word, added a one-sentence disclaimer to my paper that said, basically, "I'm doing analysis," and then went to Asha Tea House (the best) to get something sweet and caffeinated so I wouldn't be quite so inclined to eat the anthropology faculty.
This is, in short, the problem with this course, or at least the version I took. As a student, you have to perform at some unspecified level,understanding and absorbing a large volume of content which may or may not become relevant for the "learning exercise" of the examinations. If you ask Professor Joyce about it, she'll maintain that the exams are for learning, cite some research on learning, and mention a largely unrelated theorist who wrote something interesting on a subject that's entered her mind. If you ask a GSI they'll immediately shit on you, because they did research in South Africa, and they are busy doing important smart people things, which you as a filthy undergrad peasant wouldn't know a thing about. Also, there are three of them, but they don't talk to each other and don't pay attention in lecture, so good luck finding anything out even if they deign to answer you (which they most often didn't).
That having been said, this class wasn't actually difficult, in the end. I got out with an A on my transcript and didn't even have to take that last exam. Was I bewildered by this result? Yes. Was it something I understood how to repeat after I did it? Yes. Did it feel like I'd just been mercy-euthanized when I saw the final email? Also yes, as it turns out.
Humanity at large (and especially members of the more traditional scientific disciplines) look down on anthropology as a field for various reasons, but the main ones I hear are "it's easy because you can just make things up," "it's not quantitative or precise enough to be a real science," "it's pure theory and not materially applicable," and things of that nature. Personality-wise, the most common gripe is, generally, "everyone thinks they're incredibly smart and/or the department is full of snooty academics."
Faculty who taught Anthropology 114 last semester, please stop proving us all so firmly, unpleasantly right.
P.S. Feel free to show this to people as always; it gives me the giggles when people read my blog, and I turn the color of ketchup when they enjoy it. That being said, if you know me personally I would appreciate if you didn't, by some weird mechanism, connect this with me, and then with the faculty members in question. I don't want it to be a strange, tense, or awkward situation, and frankly I don't feel inclined to talk to them any more for the moment, a sentiment which I'm sure they reciprocate.
Saturday, June 4, 2016
Straight Dealin'
TL;DR Don't mess with people. It doesn't help.
Something's been bothering me a great deal recently, by which I mean for roughly the last two years or so. To put it concisely: people are shady as hell, and it's infuriating.
I myself am guilty of this, so let's get that immediately out of the way; I'm not claiming by any means to be the patron saint of social interaction. Those of you who know me personally know that I range between compulsive bluntness and neurotic sarcasm, without a great deal of a middle ground, and clear communication is not necessarily my strong suit most of the time.
That being said, I absolutely cannot stand passive-aggressive non-communication. I don't really know how this got started, but I'm assuming both that it's not a unique feature of privileged white people (because that just isn't that many people, really) and that it has a great deal to do with our progressive dehumanizing detachment in the digital age (yadda yadda, more on that some other time). To be specific, I don't mean the normal vanilla interactions I have with people, because those are lovely. I'm specifically talking about what happens when I've had difficulties with people.
The phenomenon goes like this: I say something, and there is no response. For clarity, I don't necessarily mean nothing is said. If something is said (or more often typed), it usually reads something along the lines of "haha everything is cool!" or something to that effect. Now, this is in a situation where I plainly know that everything is not, in fact, cool, because we've had some sort of a falling out. This is never a declaration that a situation has been resolved.
People say this sort of thing to me to avoid conflict, simply put. In recent years I've improved vastly as a person. I've become more able to express myself, more understanding and patient with others, much stronger and more comfortable with myself, and more honest with people. I'm much more outgoing with regard to strangers than I used to be, and with people I know, I present my case far more plainly recently.
The net effect of all these changes in my personality is that I have a much lower tolerance for limp-wristed spineless bullshit like this than I used to. Interacting with people in my age has become, in many cases, a gigantic slaughter of a guessing game in which I have to try and gauge what reaction a particular statement will elicit, and how to engineer the outcomes I want by fiddling with an endless number of tiny knobs and buttons.
I think this has a great deal to do with how we communicate with one another, or more specifically the means we use to do so. It's extraordinarily easy to shade people in the world of smart phones; if you want to communicate that you're ignoring somebody, all you have to do is poke their message so it shows as read, toss your hair defiantly over your shoulder and say nothing in response. After all, there's always someone else texting you these days, so it's easy to resolve conflicts by just not interacting with them.
If there's some better deal developing for you at the moment, you can ignore me. If I say something you don't like, you can ignore me. If, God forbid, I point out to you that you're doing this, you can... you guessed it, just go ahead and ignore me. This is a very effective strategy young people have developed for both delaying the inevitable and pissing off people who genuinely care the way I do.
I'm going to point out for the benefit of the audience that in face-to-face interaction this is impossible. You just simply can't pull this type of crap when you have a real, in-person conversation with me, not least because all the imponderabilia of true interaction are things I'm exceptionally good at seeing and understanding. (Most people have a truly atrocious poker face, as it turns out, but more on that some other time.) The muscles in your face twitch, and I know I've made a mistake. You shift around in your seat, and I know you're uncomfortable. These are things I can fix. I can't work with the blank nothingness and filtered wording of text-based messages.
I understand, obviously, that honesty can be difficult and nerve-wracking, especially if the truth is something unpleasant to say. I also understand that I'm 6'4" and a genuinely scary individual to many people, and I can be extremely intimidating without meaning to. That being said, I have the heart of a big dumb bear, and I care very sincerely about my friends and affiliates, and I'm not actually going to tear your arms off with my brain or anything like that.
This is getting to be quite a ramble, so I'll wrap up with this: if you don't want to see me, tell me so. If you want to insult me, do it. If you want to fight me, get in my face or sit the hell down. I'm a big guy, and I can take it, and any offense you deal me directly is going to heal in the twenty minutes it takes me to invent some new memory as to what actually happened. Take it from me and my long experience that it's much better to just rip the Band-Aid off and get it over with than to sit around for years on end thinking about this type of social foolery.
Something's been bothering me a great deal recently, by which I mean for roughly the last two years or so. To put it concisely: people are shady as hell, and it's infuriating.
I myself am guilty of this, so let's get that immediately out of the way; I'm not claiming by any means to be the patron saint of social interaction. Those of you who know me personally know that I range between compulsive bluntness and neurotic sarcasm, without a great deal of a middle ground, and clear communication is not necessarily my strong suit most of the time.
That being said, I absolutely cannot stand passive-aggressive non-communication. I don't really know how this got started, but I'm assuming both that it's not a unique feature of privileged white people (because that just isn't that many people, really) and that it has a great deal to do with our progressive dehumanizing detachment in the digital age (yadda yadda, more on that some other time). To be specific, I don't mean the normal vanilla interactions I have with people, because those are lovely. I'm specifically talking about what happens when I've had difficulties with people.
The phenomenon goes like this: I say something, and there is no response. For clarity, I don't necessarily mean nothing is said. If something is said (or more often typed), it usually reads something along the lines of "haha everything is cool!" or something to that effect. Now, this is in a situation where I plainly know that everything is not, in fact, cool, because we've had some sort of a falling out. This is never a declaration that a situation has been resolved.
People say this sort of thing to me to avoid conflict, simply put. In recent years I've improved vastly as a person. I've become more able to express myself, more understanding and patient with others, much stronger and more comfortable with myself, and more honest with people. I'm much more outgoing with regard to strangers than I used to be, and with people I know, I present my case far more plainly recently.
The net effect of all these changes in my personality is that I have a much lower tolerance for limp-wristed spineless bullshit like this than I used to. Interacting with people in my age has become, in many cases, a gigantic slaughter of a guessing game in which I have to try and gauge what reaction a particular statement will elicit, and how to engineer the outcomes I want by fiddling with an endless number of tiny knobs and buttons.
I think this has a great deal to do with how we communicate with one another, or more specifically the means we use to do so. It's extraordinarily easy to shade people in the world of smart phones; if you want to communicate that you're ignoring somebody, all you have to do is poke their message so it shows as read, toss your hair defiantly over your shoulder and say nothing in response. After all, there's always someone else texting you these days, so it's easy to resolve conflicts by just not interacting with them.
If there's some better deal developing for you at the moment, you can ignore me. If I say something you don't like, you can ignore me. If, God forbid, I point out to you that you're doing this, you can... you guessed it, just go ahead and ignore me. This is a very effective strategy young people have developed for both delaying the inevitable and pissing off people who genuinely care the way I do.
I'm going to point out for the benefit of the audience that in face-to-face interaction this is impossible. You just simply can't pull this type of crap when you have a real, in-person conversation with me, not least because all the imponderabilia of true interaction are things I'm exceptionally good at seeing and understanding. (Most people have a truly atrocious poker face, as it turns out, but more on that some other time.) The muscles in your face twitch, and I know I've made a mistake. You shift around in your seat, and I know you're uncomfortable. These are things I can fix. I can't work with the blank nothingness and filtered wording of text-based messages.
I understand, obviously, that honesty can be difficult and nerve-wracking, especially if the truth is something unpleasant to say. I also understand that I'm 6'4" and a genuinely scary individual to many people, and I can be extremely intimidating without meaning to. That being said, I have the heart of a big dumb bear, and I care very sincerely about my friends and affiliates, and I'm not actually going to tear your arms off with my brain or anything like that.
This is getting to be quite a ramble, so I'll wrap up with this: if you don't want to see me, tell me so. If you want to insult me, do it. If you want to fight me, get in my face or sit the hell down. I'm a big guy, and I can take it, and any offense you deal me directly is going to heal in the twenty minutes it takes me to invent some new memory as to what actually happened. Take it from me and my long experience that it's much better to just rip the Band-Aid off and get it over with than to sit around for years on end thinking about this type of social foolery.
Friday, May 20, 2016
Scalia
TL;DR Your reaction was bad, and you ought to feel badly about it, or at least consider what it meant.
As I'm sure we all remember, back in mid-February we lost an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court by the name of Antonin Scalia. For the sake of clarity, he was indeed a Justice of the Supreme Court, and he is indeed still dead (I checked to be sure). I've had this knocking around in the empty caverns of my mind for a while now, but I thought I'd let the furor settle down before I shouted into the vacuum.
Now, Scalia wasn't a popular justice, and for once in my life I actually agree with the overwhelming opinion of my age bracket. There are very few people I politically disagree with more strongly than Justice Scalia; he was a strict Constitutional originalist and a statutory textualist, which I am not. He was staunchly conservative, which I am not, and he was pretty down on affirmative action, which I have a less strictly defined opinion about. (I was going to say "a less black-and-white opinion," and then I realized that had a meaning I didn't want it to.) The fact that Justice Scalia was a devout Roman Catholic and I am a Berkeley Protestant is an irony of which I am aware, but not one that factored greatly into my opinion of him, for the record.
Furthermore, Justice Scalia was simply an unpleasant person, in my opinion. His written dissents are generally opposed to my own views on almost every issue, and they're all about fifteen or so pages too long and impassioned. I don't recall the specific cases because my brain is made of gelatin, but I remember my outrage when Justice Scalia issued statements pertaining to... well, anything, really. Be it women's rights, LGBT rights, detainee rights, or religion, I as a privileged Millennial liberal would find Scalia's dissents and statements uniformly distasteful.
All that established in detail, the obvious question is: how did I feel when I heard that Scalia had died?
For once in my life, I actually remember the situation very clearly. It was a Monday when I heard, and I was home between class and my afternoon lab, in pursuit of lunch, and I flipped through the Facebook to discover: "huh, Scalia's dead. I wonder who the next justice will be; we haven't had to replace him since Reagan." Not exactly an overwhelming response either way, I know, but I'm a pretty cold bastard on Mondays and when I'm hungry, and suffice it to say I was not significantly perturbed by Scalia's demise, as awful as that sounds.
I paid attention for the next few days, however, and something arose from the spark of Scalia's death that did perturb me. As news of Scalia's death spread, more and more people on social media (that invulnerable bastion of truth and wisdom) shared their responses to and opinions on the matter.
To put it succinctly, the wave of expression in response to Scalia's death, specifically from young liberal people like myself, was entirely unacceptable. I hesitate to use the word "barbarism" because I got censured by several anthropologists about it recently, but know that it comes to mind when I read your posts about the matter, young Millennials.
My lab section that afternoon was three hours long, and after that fairly short span of time, I returned home to discover an absolute tidal wave of jubilation breaking over social media. "Scalia is dead! Feminism triumphs!" was one thread of sentiment, and another was "Freedom triumphs!" Within hours of the news, I remember an Onion article satirizing the dead justice, written about a scenario in which American women were allowed to rule about whether the man's last wishes were carried out, because ruling about what people can do with their bodies, har har har.
I'm absolutely the last person to eulogize Scalia, but this is bullshit, and there's simply no other word for it. Whatever you thought about him, Scalia was a high ranker in our judicial system, and an immensely educated and experienced person. Was he an obviously sour individual who wrote dissents using terms like "argle-bargle" and "jiggery-pokery?" Absolutely, but independently of any of his virtues or failings, Scalia was indeed a person, and this sort of rejoicing over the death of a person is wrong.
First of all, simply speaking, the guy is dead, and death is an unfortunate side effect of life. Scalia, like many people, left behind a bereaved wife and nine (nine!) children, who I am certain do not share your jubilant sentiments about his passage from this world. Put yourself in this situation: if you blew a blood vessel in your brain and died suddenly, tonight, would you want the neighbors holding a gala the next day because they'll finally be able to encroach on your parking space without consequence? Or, for me, if everyone's aggressive boyfriend (see previous posts) just suddenly burst into flames, would you see me out blowing a vuvuzela at their funeral while their family grieved? No, I think we'd all agree that either of these is at best a tacky, and at worst an inhumanly cruel thing to do.
Secondly, we as liberals are constantly criticizing more right-wing officials (and people in general) for this sort of merciless nonsense. What's your opinion of the Westboro Baptists who picket soldiers' funerals and shout at the grieving family that the fallen veteran is going to hell, young Millennials? What do you think about the cold indifference we claim conservatives have to the plight of Syrian refugees fleeing the brutality of civil war and discord? Does that ruthless "us against them" attitude seem at all familiar, now that you think about it?
Thirdly, Scalia himself wasn't even the appropriate target for your vitriol, speaking really frankly. The comments he made that elicited all our fury were dissents written on cases he lost, where our more liberal/progressive/Berkeley viewpoints prevailed. Scalia may have been a sore loser, but a sour winner he was not, for the most part. The anger you feel at beliefs like Scalia's, if it belongs anywhere, belongs in letters to your representatives in Congress, or to your Senators, or to any of the other cogs in the great American machine that creates and propagates the problems we have as a society, or in discussion boards and at rallies where we try to change those beliefs for the advancement and betterment of our culture and country, not chorused with manic glee when we hear of the death of a largely unimportant player before his body has even cooled off.
Finally, I'll leave you with this. This sort of gloating at the death of a political opponent, aside from being morally unconscionable, misdirected, and generally repulsive, is a terribly Donald Trump thing to do.
As always, pass this on to people you think might enjoy it or benefit from it, or send me death threats as you think best. I hope you enjoyed the read, even though it's sorta lengthy, and I promise they won't all be this angry. :P
As I'm sure we all remember, back in mid-February we lost an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court by the name of Antonin Scalia. For the sake of clarity, he was indeed a Justice of the Supreme Court, and he is indeed still dead (I checked to be sure). I've had this knocking around in the empty caverns of my mind for a while now, but I thought I'd let the furor settle down before I shouted into the vacuum.
Now, Scalia wasn't a popular justice, and for once in my life I actually agree with the overwhelming opinion of my age bracket. There are very few people I politically disagree with more strongly than Justice Scalia; he was a strict Constitutional originalist and a statutory textualist, which I am not. He was staunchly conservative, which I am not, and he was pretty down on affirmative action, which I have a less strictly defined opinion about. (I was going to say "a less black-and-white opinion," and then I realized that had a meaning I didn't want it to.) The fact that Justice Scalia was a devout Roman Catholic and I am a Berkeley Protestant is an irony of which I am aware, but not one that factored greatly into my opinion of him, for the record.
Furthermore, Justice Scalia was simply an unpleasant person, in my opinion. His written dissents are generally opposed to my own views on almost every issue, and they're all about fifteen or so pages too long and impassioned. I don't recall the specific cases because my brain is made of gelatin, but I remember my outrage when Justice Scalia issued statements pertaining to... well, anything, really. Be it women's rights, LGBT rights, detainee rights, or religion, I as a privileged Millennial liberal would find Scalia's dissents and statements uniformly distasteful.
All that established in detail, the obvious question is: how did I feel when I heard that Scalia had died?
For once in my life, I actually remember the situation very clearly. It was a Monday when I heard, and I was home between class and my afternoon lab, in pursuit of lunch, and I flipped through the Facebook to discover: "huh, Scalia's dead. I wonder who the next justice will be; we haven't had to replace him since Reagan." Not exactly an overwhelming response either way, I know, but I'm a pretty cold bastard on Mondays and when I'm hungry, and suffice it to say I was not significantly perturbed by Scalia's demise, as awful as that sounds.
I paid attention for the next few days, however, and something arose from the spark of Scalia's death that did perturb me. As news of Scalia's death spread, more and more people on social media (that invulnerable bastion of truth and wisdom) shared their responses to and opinions on the matter.
To put it succinctly, the wave of expression in response to Scalia's death, specifically from young liberal people like myself, was entirely unacceptable. I hesitate to use the word "barbarism" because I got censured by several anthropologists about it recently, but know that it comes to mind when I read your posts about the matter, young Millennials.
My lab section that afternoon was three hours long, and after that fairly short span of time, I returned home to discover an absolute tidal wave of jubilation breaking over social media. "Scalia is dead! Feminism triumphs!" was one thread of sentiment, and another was "Freedom triumphs!" Within hours of the news, I remember an Onion article satirizing the dead justice, written about a scenario in which American women were allowed to rule about whether the man's last wishes were carried out, because ruling about what people can do with their bodies, har har har.
I'm absolutely the last person to eulogize Scalia, but this is bullshit, and there's simply no other word for it. Whatever you thought about him, Scalia was a high ranker in our judicial system, and an immensely educated and experienced person. Was he an obviously sour individual who wrote dissents using terms like "argle-bargle" and "jiggery-pokery?" Absolutely, but independently of any of his virtues or failings, Scalia was indeed a person, and this sort of rejoicing over the death of a person is wrong.
First of all, simply speaking, the guy is dead, and death is an unfortunate side effect of life. Scalia, like many people, left behind a bereaved wife and nine (nine!) children, who I am certain do not share your jubilant sentiments about his passage from this world. Put yourself in this situation: if you blew a blood vessel in your brain and died suddenly, tonight, would you want the neighbors holding a gala the next day because they'll finally be able to encroach on your parking space without consequence? Or, for me, if everyone's aggressive boyfriend (see previous posts) just suddenly burst into flames, would you see me out blowing a vuvuzela at their funeral while their family grieved? No, I think we'd all agree that either of these is at best a tacky, and at worst an inhumanly cruel thing to do.
Secondly, we as liberals are constantly criticizing more right-wing officials (and people in general) for this sort of merciless nonsense. What's your opinion of the Westboro Baptists who picket soldiers' funerals and shout at the grieving family that the fallen veteran is going to hell, young Millennials? What do you think about the cold indifference we claim conservatives have to the plight of Syrian refugees fleeing the brutality of civil war and discord? Does that ruthless "us against them" attitude seem at all familiar, now that you think about it?
Thirdly, Scalia himself wasn't even the appropriate target for your vitriol, speaking really frankly. The comments he made that elicited all our fury were dissents written on cases he lost, where our more liberal/progressive/Berkeley viewpoints prevailed. Scalia may have been a sore loser, but a sour winner he was not, for the most part. The anger you feel at beliefs like Scalia's, if it belongs anywhere, belongs in letters to your representatives in Congress, or to your Senators, or to any of the other cogs in the great American machine that creates and propagates the problems we have as a society, or in discussion boards and at rallies where we try to change those beliefs for the advancement and betterment of our culture and country, not chorused with manic glee when we hear of the death of a largely unimportant player before his body has even cooled off.
Finally, I'll leave you with this. This sort of gloating at the death of a political opponent, aside from being morally unconscionable, misdirected, and generally repulsive, is a terribly Donald Trump thing to do.
As always, pass this on to people you think might enjoy it or benefit from it, or send me death threats as you think best. I hope you enjoyed the read, even though it's sorta lengthy, and I promise they won't all be this angry. :P
Wednesday, March 30, 2016
Easy Classes
TL;DR Do work.
Today I'm going to write about a specific pattern of thought and behavior (an ideology or a cultural convention, if I put my Ray-Bans on) I've noticed emergent in my classmates and colleagues at Berkeley. I noticed it when I was a freshman, but it's become more pronounced as I move into upper-division classes with smaller numbers of more specialized people.
The phenomenon, to put it succinctly, is something I've heard called "senioritis," although most of the people who appear to have it are not seniors in academic terms. I've also heard it described as "signature Millennial laziness" by older people who didn't know any better and "that super laid-back Berkeley atmospheeeere," by young people who didn't know anything, but I think you know what I'm referring to.
The way this pattern manifests itself is in how we think about our classes once we've stuck our toes in and seen if they get bitten off or not. Some classes are hard, and demand the fullest extent of our attention, and other classes are "well I'm just taking it for a breadth requirement, and it's super easy, so like, yknow." A big part of the culture at Berkeley, in my experience revolves around the dichotomy of trying extremely hard with extremely visible results or conspicuously not appearing to try at all. What did I get on the midterm? A 97. Did I study? Of course I didn't; I go to Berkeley, and therefore I must appear as though things are easy for me. It exists for the same reason one gym bro pulls the bar off another after a failed rep of bench and then tells the struggling bro "it was all you, dude, you could've gotten it."
I'm going to take up the issue of what "easy" actually means for a moment, in two different ways. First of all, the simple definition of what the word "easy" means on paper, which a quick dictionary inspection reveals as "achieved without great effort; presenting few difficulties" or "free from worries or problems."
I think this definition is sufficient, but the way we use the word (at Berkeley especially) is dangerously far off what "easy" is supposed to mean.
In my opinion, what an easy activity (be it a class, a lift, a puzzle, whatever) connotes is not an activity that explicitly demands less of your effort, but one that yields better results given the same effort. As I see it, there's no good reason to take a class as a GPA booster and then get a B, for example; if the class is truly that easy, the obvious question is why you didn't completely crush it.
The topic is classes, so I'll stick with it. My classes right now are two upper-division biology and two upper-division anthropology classes, which I thought would be a nice mix of scientific snobbery and humanities pretense mixed up together. I will be honest; this semester is not the most difficult academic experience I've ever encountered. I actually did get a 97 on my midterm, and nothing below a 90 on the others so far.
For the sake of clarity, I need to point out that the midterm I got a 97 on had a mean of 76, with a great many scores under 50, and so we see the problem: the class is easy, strictly speaking, as evidenced by all the people who got A's, and yet we have a great many people failing to conquer said easy class. At a place like Berkeley, with all its pomp and circumstance, I simply refuse to believe that I'm 21% above average, and certainly not reliably 20+% above average in multiple disciplines. I'm not being modest here, really; rest assured I think I'm as fan-damn-tastic as the next delusional millennial liberal, but what I'm not is perfect and uniformly superior across all fields. That's for business majors, who are dynamic team players who are thrilled and honored about things. We all know them.
So what's the issue? We have a room full of our generation's "smartest" people approaching the height of their intellectual powers, and well over half of them missed 40% or more of a test that relied essentially on a basic grasp of the course concepts and a bit of information retention (the test consisted of fill-ins, matching, and some essay questions). I mean, honestly speaking, the mean should have been about 80%, assuming everyone had been paying attention in lecture.
Oh. Oh. I see. This lecture room has half the desks empty during lecture, and during the exam we're at capacity.
This just serves to reiterate the point I made earlier; there's no sense asking me what my super-effective study tips and tricks are if you're not accomplishing the bare minimum of what it means to be a student in the first place. It's kind of like asking me for recommendations on hairstyling products when you're bald.
There's an old Family Circus cartoon where Billy is sitting at the table, talking to his parents about school. "My teacher's real tricky," he says. "She makes the quizzes real easy when I study and saves the hard ones for when I haven't studied at all."It's an obviously ludicrous statement, but I can't help it popping up in my mind when the equally ludicrous situation of a student protesting poor results in a class they've only shown up to for the first day.
I could go on with more examples, but I'll cut it off here, with this: Berkeley students are in many ways the cream of the intellectual crop, and we've spent a long time having things be easy for us. In my opinion, one of the most constructive things we could do for ourselves as people is, in addition to applying the basic effort to be in class and the simple intellectual work of understanding course content, to learn how to try again. No one who matters is going to judge you if you appear enthusiastic about learning and applying yourself, and no one who judges you for taking your education seriously matters.
As always, show this to people if you'd like, or tell me if you didn't like, and so on. I like conversation and debate, despite all evidence to the contrary. :)
Today I'm going to write about a specific pattern of thought and behavior (an ideology or a cultural convention, if I put my Ray-Bans on) I've noticed emergent in my classmates and colleagues at Berkeley. I noticed it when I was a freshman, but it's become more pronounced as I move into upper-division classes with smaller numbers of more specialized people.
The phenomenon, to put it succinctly, is something I've heard called "senioritis," although most of the people who appear to have it are not seniors in academic terms. I've also heard it described as "signature Millennial laziness" by older people who didn't know any better and "that super laid-back Berkeley atmospheeeere," by young people who didn't know anything, but I think you know what I'm referring to.
The way this pattern manifests itself is in how we think about our classes once we've stuck our toes in and seen if they get bitten off or not. Some classes are hard, and demand the fullest extent of our attention, and other classes are "well I'm just taking it for a breadth requirement, and it's super easy, so like, yknow." A big part of the culture at Berkeley, in my experience revolves around the dichotomy of trying extremely hard with extremely visible results or conspicuously not appearing to try at all. What did I get on the midterm? A 97. Did I study? Of course I didn't; I go to Berkeley, and therefore I must appear as though things are easy for me. It exists for the same reason one gym bro pulls the bar off another after a failed rep of bench and then tells the struggling bro "it was all you, dude, you could've gotten it."
I'm going to take up the issue of what "easy" actually means for a moment, in two different ways. First of all, the simple definition of what the word "easy" means on paper, which a quick dictionary inspection reveals as "achieved without great effort; presenting few difficulties" or "free from worries or problems."
I think this definition is sufficient, but the way we use the word (at Berkeley especially) is dangerously far off what "easy" is supposed to mean.
In my opinion, what an easy activity (be it a class, a lift, a puzzle, whatever) connotes is not an activity that explicitly demands less of your effort, but one that yields better results given the same effort. As I see it, there's no good reason to take a class as a GPA booster and then get a B, for example; if the class is truly that easy, the obvious question is why you didn't completely crush it.
The topic is classes, so I'll stick with it. My classes right now are two upper-division biology and two upper-division anthropology classes, which I thought would be a nice mix of scientific snobbery and humanities pretense mixed up together. I will be honest; this semester is not the most difficult academic experience I've ever encountered. I actually did get a 97 on my midterm, and nothing below a 90 on the others so far.
For the sake of clarity, I need to point out that the midterm I got a 97 on had a mean of 76, with a great many scores under 50, and so we see the problem: the class is easy, strictly speaking, as evidenced by all the people who got A's, and yet we have a great many people failing to conquer said easy class. At a place like Berkeley, with all its pomp and circumstance, I simply refuse to believe that I'm 21% above average, and certainly not reliably 20+% above average in multiple disciplines. I'm not being modest here, really; rest assured I think I'm as fan-damn-tastic as the next delusional millennial liberal, but what I'm not is perfect and uniformly superior across all fields. That's for business majors, who are dynamic team players who are thrilled and honored about things. We all know them.
So what's the issue? We have a room full of our generation's "smartest" people approaching the height of their intellectual powers, and well over half of them missed 40% or more of a test that relied essentially on a basic grasp of the course concepts and a bit of information retention (the test consisted of fill-ins, matching, and some essay questions). I mean, honestly speaking, the mean should have been about 80%, assuming everyone had been paying attention in lecture.
Oh. Oh. I see. This lecture room has half the desks empty during lecture, and during the exam we're at capacity.
This just serves to reiterate the point I made earlier; there's no sense asking me what my super-effective study tips and tricks are if you're not accomplishing the bare minimum of what it means to be a student in the first place. It's kind of like asking me for recommendations on hairstyling products when you're bald.
There's an old Family Circus cartoon where Billy is sitting at the table, talking to his parents about school. "My teacher's real tricky," he says. "She makes the quizzes real easy when I study and saves the hard ones for when I haven't studied at all."It's an obviously ludicrous statement, but I can't help it popping up in my mind when the equally ludicrous situation of a student protesting poor results in a class they've only shown up to for the first day.
I could go on with more examples, but I'll cut it off here, with this: Berkeley students are in many ways the cream of the intellectual crop, and we've spent a long time having things be easy for us. In my opinion, one of the most constructive things we could do for ourselves as people is, in addition to applying the basic effort to be in class and the simple intellectual work of understanding course content, to learn how to try again. No one who matters is going to judge you if you appear enthusiastic about learning and applying yourself, and no one who judges you for taking your education seriously matters.
As always, show this to people if you'd like, or tell me if you didn't like, and so on. I like conversation and debate, despite all evidence to the contrary. :)
Sunday, March 27, 2016
March of the Hipsters: GMOs
TL;DR: GMOs are your friends. Embrace our new overlords.
First of all, happy Easter, everybody! It's joyous day for everybody, from Christians of all varieties to the pagans we appropriated the festival from to the merry atheists who just wanna eat Peeps.
The post today, however, is about a group of people who are not happy, and about the thing that makes them so. The post today is about Berkeley-ans, and (if we're totally honest about it) other generally upper-middle-class white people who are at war with all things GMO.
For those not in the know (or not in the care), GMO is a handy acronym for Genetically Modified Organism. Note that this acronym is distinct from both NGO, which is an organization created to bother a government, and OMG, which is what people in Berkeley type when they find out their food is genetically modified.
The issue people have with genetically-modified food, to be succinct, is based in a belief that these food items are heavily engineered by spooky scientists (like me) to be larger, easier to grow, sweeter, and generally better food, by whatever other criteria are applicable. To call it a "belief" is a gross inaccuracy on my part, really; it's just a matter of fact that a great many plants these days have been muddled with in some way or another. One of the more common GM corn crops, for example, is engineered to build little crystals of a protein creatively called Bt, from a soil bacterium called Bacillus thuringiensis. These little crystals are in the categories "whatever" if you're a human and "Please God no" if you're an insect, and the theory behind these is to minimize the use of artificial pesticides in the growing of corn. Everybody's pretty happy so far; we're putting less nasty chemicals on our food, and making more of it at that (~10% or so in this case, actually).
The second and more problematic part of the anti-GMO mindset derives from a deep conviction that all things artificial are by their nature unnatural and harmful, and the engineering done by the aforementioned spooky scientists is, indeed, spooky. The resultant belief, obviously, is that we should get rid of all such products, probably through boycotts, litigation, or legislation, whatever works best.
I pride myself on being, wherever I go, one of the goofiest people around, but this, ladies and gentlemen, is dumb.
So first off, as a biologist, I'm going to tell you that the whole premise of a "genetically modified organism" as a modern construction is a farce. The greatest engine of genetic modification in Earth's history is nature itself, which is why Darwin came up with that spiffy idea of natural selection as "descent with modification," to put it in his own words. Beyond a simple quibble of terminology, however, even unmistakably artificial engineering by humans is not an unambiguously bad thing. I can tell you this because corn is now corn, and not a horrible inedible bush called teosinte. Linked is a diagram comparing modern corn and teosinte, which are loosely the same plant and still crossable, but obviously, glaringly different due to humans selecting tasty corn to domesticate. Don't try to eat teosinte. https://www.nsf.gov/news/mmg/media/images/corn-and-teosinte_f.jpg
This frame of mind goes back to the same logic as the anti-vaccine rhetoric, and is in my experience largely parroted by shockingly overlapping groups of people; that is, people who don't do the reading. For example, people who rave about the dangers of vaccination usually posit the claim espoused by mainstream news outlets that vaccines contain "toxins." Again, speaking as a biologist, they do not. What vaccines have in them (in the overwhelming majority of cases) is something called a toxoid, which is a rendered-down, inactivated piece of a toxin chewed up into a form that your immune system can be taught to recognize and react to in the event of a later infection.
For GM foods, the same basic sort of sentence surfaces over and over in the oppositional discourse: "the foods have been TREATED with CHEMICALS for the purpose of GENETIC ENGINEERING, which is HARMFUL to the CHILDREN!" (The Children are always mentioned, for some reason.) Y'know, I've been periodically sprinkling the plants in my garden with a solution that oxidizes in the presence of sunlight to reduce photosystem II, and later reduce plastoquinone and other components of the cascading photosynthetic electron transport chain. That sentence is big and scary and full of lots of words, and the solution to which I refer is a rare and dangerous chemical colloquially referred to as water. The message, in short, is that everything is a "chemical" and can be described in extremely menacing terms if the writer so desires, so do a quick Google search before asking me about THE TOXICITIES IN OUR CHILDREN(???).
Moving off the snobbish issues of science and terminology, the other problem with this belief is a more complicated moral one. First off, the real issue with GMO foods has little to do with the crops themselves and a great deal more to do with the people producing them, which we all like to dress up as a moralistic human crusade on behalf of nature, and whatever. Monsanto is the corporation that springs immediately to mind, being the business that does a great deal of this genetic engineering and so on and so forth. This is not the post wherein I eulogize Monsanto, because God knows they've made enough Agent Orange for quite a few civilizations. What I want to do is point to you, dear reader, out the distinction between what a Monsanto lab technician does with plants and what a Monsanto executive does with business practice. Monsanto's habits of stealing people's land, using patent law on their seeds to screw over smaller farmers, charging exploitative prices for quality seeds, and generally being unpleasant to other people are not in question. I would ask, however, that you express your distaste for these business practices without demonizing the legitimate science behind genetically modified crops and the generally well-intentioned people who enact it.
I would ask that you avoid demonizing this area of science because of the second moral point: as it stands right now, regardless of what you think of them, we absolutely have to have genetically-modified crops. This is because, at the present moment, we have entirely too damn many people, to put it succinctly. More importantly, placing a global ban of some kind on GM crops would be disproportionately bad for a specific subgrouping of those too damn many people, that is, the third world. Africa, for example, is in a bad spot to say the very least; something like half the soil is too heavily degraded to support conventional farming, which I see as a pretty black-and-white signal to employ non-conventional farming.
I could go on at great length about other impoverished areas in similar situations, but I'll summarize for the sake of clarity and concision: an injunction against genetically modified crops would have disproportionate effects on the world's developing and economically disadvantaged nations. Add in the fact that these areas coincidentally happen to be overwhelmingly inhabited by people who are not white, and sprinkle in a dash of "the people advocating such a thing predominantly are," and you have yourself a privilege smoothie with a swirl of colonial ignorance for added flavor.
So, to summarize, I think the anti-GMO movement is slightly more valid in its motivation than the anti-vaccine movement; that is, the anti-GMO movement has a measurable validity that isn't zero. That said, I believe the many anti-GMO advocates could stand to undergo a clarifying contemplation to distinguish the finer fractal points of their issues (science vs. business, for instance) and obtain a little more knowledge of the science behind GMOs and the current state of the globe. I know we live in the United States and have the option to breathe rarified bottled air from Whole Foods if we so choose, but we need to remember that a) any change in a market as vast and diverse as agriculture will take extended periods of time and b) not everyone is so fortunate as to have the option.
Thanks for reading! This is just a big diatribe of my thoughts on the matter. As always, show people if you liked it, or send me an angry letter if you didn't. Bloop!
First of all, happy Easter, everybody! It's joyous day for everybody, from Christians of all varieties to the pagans we appropriated the festival from to the merry atheists who just wanna eat Peeps.
The post today, however, is about a group of people who are not happy, and about the thing that makes them so. The post today is about Berkeley-ans, and (if we're totally honest about it) other generally upper-middle-class white people who are at war with all things GMO.
For those not in the know (or not in the care), GMO is a handy acronym for Genetically Modified Organism. Note that this acronym is distinct from both NGO, which is an organization created to bother a government, and OMG, which is what people in Berkeley type when they find out their food is genetically modified.
The issue people have with genetically-modified food, to be succinct, is based in a belief that these food items are heavily engineered by spooky scientists (like me) to be larger, easier to grow, sweeter, and generally better food, by whatever other criteria are applicable. To call it a "belief" is a gross inaccuracy on my part, really; it's just a matter of fact that a great many plants these days have been muddled with in some way or another. One of the more common GM corn crops, for example, is engineered to build little crystals of a protein creatively called Bt, from a soil bacterium called Bacillus thuringiensis. These little crystals are in the categories "whatever" if you're a human and "Please God no" if you're an insect, and the theory behind these is to minimize the use of artificial pesticides in the growing of corn. Everybody's pretty happy so far; we're putting less nasty chemicals on our food, and making more of it at that (~10% or so in this case, actually).
The second and more problematic part of the anti-GMO mindset derives from a deep conviction that all things artificial are by their nature unnatural and harmful, and the engineering done by the aforementioned spooky scientists is, indeed, spooky. The resultant belief, obviously, is that we should get rid of all such products, probably through boycotts, litigation, or legislation, whatever works best.
I pride myself on being, wherever I go, one of the goofiest people around, but this, ladies and gentlemen, is dumb.
So first off, as a biologist, I'm going to tell you that the whole premise of a "genetically modified organism" as a modern construction is a farce. The greatest engine of genetic modification in Earth's history is nature itself, which is why Darwin came up with that spiffy idea of natural selection as "descent with modification," to put it in his own words. Beyond a simple quibble of terminology, however, even unmistakably artificial engineering by humans is not an unambiguously bad thing. I can tell you this because corn is now corn, and not a horrible inedible bush called teosinte. Linked is a diagram comparing modern corn and teosinte, which are loosely the same plant and still crossable, but obviously, glaringly different due to humans selecting tasty corn to domesticate. Don't try to eat teosinte. https://www.nsf.gov/news/mmg/media/images/corn-and-teosinte_f.jpg
This frame of mind goes back to the same logic as the anti-vaccine rhetoric, and is in my experience largely parroted by shockingly overlapping groups of people; that is, people who don't do the reading. For example, people who rave about the dangers of vaccination usually posit the claim espoused by mainstream news outlets that vaccines contain "toxins." Again, speaking as a biologist, they do not. What vaccines have in them (in the overwhelming majority of cases) is something called a toxoid, which is a rendered-down, inactivated piece of a toxin chewed up into a form that your immune system can be taught to recognize and react to in the event of a later infection.
For GM foods, the same basic sort of sentence surfaces over and over in the oppositional discourse: "the foods have been TREATED with CHEMICALS for the purpose of GENETIC ENGINEERING, which is HARMFUL to the CHILDREN!" (The Children are always mentioned, for some reason.) Y'know, I've been periodically sprinkling the plants in my garden with a solution that oxidizes in the presence of sunlight to reduce photosystem II, and later reduce plastoquinone and other components of the cascading photosynthetic electron transport chain. That sentence is big and scary and full of lots of words, and the solution to which I refer is a rare and dangerous chemical colloquially referred to as water. The message, in short, is that everything is a "chemical" and can be described in extremely menacing terms if the writer so desires, so do a quick Google search before asking me about THE TOXICITIES IN OUR CHILDREN(???).
Moving off the snobbish issues of science and terminology, the other problem with this belief is a more complicated moral one. First off, the real issue with GMO foods has little to do with the crops themselves and a great deal more to do with the people producing them, which we all like to dress up as a moralistic human crusade on behalf of nature, and whatever. Monsanto is the corporation that springs immediately to mind, being the business that does a great deal of this genetic engineering and so on and so forth. This is not the post wherein I eulogize Monsanto, because God knows they've made enough Agent Orange for quite a few civilizations. What I want to do is point to you, dear reader, out the distinction between what a Monsanto lab technician does with plants and what a Monsanto executive does with business practice. Monsanto's habits of stealing people's land, using patent law on their seeds to screw over smaller farmers, charging exploitative prices for quality seeds, and generally being unpleasant to other people are not in question. I would ask, however, that you express your distaste for these business practices without demonizing the legitimate science behind genetically modified crops and the generally well-intentioned people who enact it.
I would ask that you avoid demonizing this area of science because of the second moral point: as it stands right now, regardless of what you think of them, we absolutely have to have genetically-modified crops. This is because, at the present moment, we have entirely too damn many people, to put it succinctly. More importantly, placing a global ban of some kind on GM crops would be disproportionately bad for a specific subgrouping of those too damn many people, that is, the third world. Africa, for example, is in a bad spot to say the very least; something like half the soil is too heavily degraded to support conventional farming, which I see as a pretty black-and-white signal to employ non-conventional farming.
I could go on at great length about other impoverished areas in similar situations, but I'll summarize for the sake of clarity and concision: an injunction against genetically modified crops would have disproportionate effects on the world's developing and economically disadvantaged nations. Add in the fact that these areas coincidentally happen to be overwhelmingly inhabited by people who are not white, and sprinkle in a dash of "the people advocating such a thing predominantly are," and you have yourself a privilege smoothie with a swirl of colonial ignorance for added flavor.
So, to summarize, I think the anti-GMO movement is slightly more valid in its motivation than the anti-vaccine movement; that is, the anti-GMO movement has a measurable validity that isn't zero. That said, I believe the many anti-GMO advocates could stand to undergo a clarifying contemplation to distinguish the finer fractal points of their issues (science vs. business, for instance) and obtain a little more knowledge of the science behind GMOs and the current state of the globe. I know we live in the United States and have the option to breathe rarified bottled air from Whole Foods if we so choose, but we need to remember that a) any change in a market as vast and diverse as agriculture will take extended periods of time and b) not everyone is so fortunate as to have the option.
Thanks for reading! This is just a big diatribe of my thoughts on the matter. As always, show people if you liked it, or send me an angry letter if you didn't. Bloop!
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