Pig Zen

Amongst the recent uploads on Flickr, I (not surprisingly) found some guy’s vacation pictures.  He and his companion were touring the Swiss Alps.  While I liked the images, they weren’t all that inspired, just snapshots.  Mostly they made me homesick for the thin air and rocky horizons of my former home. I wish I could include one of the images here but he didn’t mark them as being available under Creative Commons.  So, let that be a lesson to you: if you want random bloggers that are perhaps overly IP sensitive to be able to effectively comment on your work, don’t check the “all rights reserved” box.

What was more interesting was that the guy listed his home as being Tokyo.  He was definitely of northern European, i.e. white, descent.  I would imagine that’s a pretty big change from where most northern Europeans usually hang out.  While the guy’s parents could have moved to Japan before he was born and the pachinko parlors and tea rooms of Tokyo could be all he’s ever known, that’s not what first popped into my head.  Is he there temporarily as a student or for work?  Or is he a full-fledged ex-pat?  I’d kind of love to know.

What makes someone eschew their homeland?  Persecution, famine, and pestilence are perfectly sensible things to run from, but most of Europe doesn’t really suffer from those anymore.  My boss is English and California is remarkably less gray and damp than England, so that makes sense to me.  Well, that, and what we do at my job they don’t do on quite the same scale back in his Old Country.  I guess Europeans don’t have the luxury of expansive geography that Americans have, although EU denizens have more options now.

It’s one thing for me to pick up and move within the U.S. since there’s much less hardship and risk involved — I don’t have to apply for difficult papers to get a job in California, and I can always go back.  While I’d love to make an extended visit, semi-permanently crossing an ocean, being forever immersed in a different language, dealing with a different tax system, and doing without shnitzel or pickled herring or proper lunch meat seems like more than a bridge too far.

Still dependent on the writing prompts:

If you woke up ten years younger tomorrow, what would be the first thing you would do?

So this can be read a couple of different ways. I guess I’m thinking about waking up tomorrow and it’s ten years ago. The alternate interpretation, a sort of Big in reverse, would be way too weird. Herself would be scared shitless to wake up next to the 20-year-old me, and she’d die laughing at my hair. My boss would want a scientific explanation for what happened. At least I wouldn’t have to steal any clothes and stay in an by-the-hour motel.

It’s actually a disturbing coincidence, because 10 years ago, I was down in Los Angeles, working a contract job. It was my first time away from home on my own. That was a definite learning experience for me; yes, that’s code for “it didn’t turn out how I thought.” That adventure gave me some confidence in my grown-up skills, my abilities to handle the unexpected. Of course, that ability mostly consists of the same thing they teach little kids in Finding Nemo: “just keep swimming.”

These last ten years have been… well, what most people’s twenties are: learning how to been an independent adult. I can pay my own rent, I still have use of all my body parts, and I don’t have a serious criminal record; so I guess I was pretty successful in learning those lessons. I developed a reasonably useful professional skill set and had more of those learning experiences. I’ve met some wonderful people and been some fun places. I fell in love.

I’ve always said that I don’t regret the choices I’ve made over the years; I wouldn’t be who I am today without everything that came before it. All of the angst I have lately shows I no longer value this version of me as much as I used to, though.

Would I trade what I have now for the promise of something different? I’m glad I don’t have to decide because even with ten extra years under my belt, I still don’t have the tools to choose and believe I chose wisely. I do wish I could tell myself to put a few bucks into some well-placed stocks and to not make that illegal turn, though.

So, I did it.  I wrote something almost every day for a month.  Go me. To do a proper post-mortem, I’d need to re-read everything and see if there’s anything I really like.  In thinking back about it, I’m not sure I’ll find anything I think is great or even good.  I’m not going to lie, it was a quantity and consistency over quality exercise.

In my early days of writing online, I really did turn out more of a diary/journal sort of thing; I wrote about what I did and thought over the day.  When I re-read it those words now, I actually enjoy parts of it and find it worthwhile, but I don’t think I could write that way again. That was six, seven, eight years ago.  A good writer should be able to take any topic and make it worth reading and I don’t think I can do that with my life now.  Sadly, I barely have the will to trudge through the day, let alone having to re-live it, punch it up, and regurgitate it in an engaging fashion at night.  That sounds horrible and soul-sucking.  I imagine it’s true for most people, too.

Losing interest in the everyday is what drove me to the essay format I stick with now.  I’m proud of myself that I was able to stick with it for a whole month.  While there’s some truth in what I write, some real feeling, I suppose a lot of this comes across as forced and overwrought.  Maybe that’s the truest part of it.

The pictures were so much harder.  I was okay with writing whatever, proofing it a little, and publishing it, but I have a hell of a time picking out what photo to resize and post.  Herself often had to tell me, “yes, that picture’s fine, just put it up, geesh.”  I look at so many of the pictures I find on Flickr and it breaks my heart that I can’t figure out how to take them myself.

I desperately want to be a better photographer and I’m not sure why I hold my images to so much of a higher standard than my words, especially when there’s luck involved with photography: right place, right time, right light.  A writer is in complete control.  Maybe photography appeals to a different part of my brain than writing does.  Words have to be mapped into images and action but nothing gets lost in translation with a good photograph.

I think it’s important to keep going, although I won’t continue writing on a daily basis.  While the deadline is the only thing that got me writing again, the pressure makes me into a mass-producer rather than a craftsman.  Far more robots than humans ever see these words anyway.

So when it first came out, I was a big fan of Stuff White People Like. It made me laugh and cringe because it poked fun at a demographic truly deserving of it, i.e., mine, and the author’s. And then I read some comments posted on one of the entries, and I haven’t been back since.

While the most referenced social theory on the internet explains what elements are required for this bizarre behavior, I still don’t understand what people get out of swooping in and shitting on others. I think this is more proof that adults are constantly seeking some excuse to act like kids and the internet provides the perfect outlet for all the juvenile vitriol that didn’t manage to escape in those pre-teen years.

I understand that a big part of it, especially on the snarky blogs, is that too many people just don’t know where to draw the line. If saying the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes is funny, making fun of his genitals and his parentage is hi-larious.

Spirited discourse has been around on the net since the beginning. Everything that happens now in web discussion sites happened on Usenet 20 years ago. Except back then, people could actually spell and knew proper sentence structure. The people calling you out regularly knew more than you. Also, it took at least a couple of volleys back and forth before someone claimed to be oppressed and someone else brought up Hitler. Now we just cut to the chase.

On the Stuff White People Like blog, there was a smackdown over something really stupid, and two factions developed: the geeky, obsessive-compulsive faction; and the … well, the “get over it” faction. One of the commenters on the latter side looked at the others and said something like, “see, the regular folks have invaded the Web now, once again reminding you geeks that you’re still second class citizens, forced once again do our homework and watch as we steal your girlfriends”. And that person was right.

Now, most of the people that support you often shout their loud “me, too’s” because they’re members of your cult of personality rather than because they’ve actually thought about what you’ve said and can articulate why they agree with it. They’re only mildly annoying, of course, until their defending you to the hilt starts driving people that have something meaningful to say away. Your choir can be a great ego boost at times but they don’t add much to the all-important signal-to-noise ratio we obsess about.

We want to be surrounded by like-minded folks with a couple eloquent and intelligent members of the loyal opposition thrown in to mix things up and keep us on our toes. That really is what it was like in the early days, and still is when you find a site in its infancy.  Instead, most of the big blogs have turned into the textual equivalent of talk radio: the host might have something interesting to say even if you disagree with it, but it’s not worth wading through all the ditto heads and tangential name-callers.

I have a theory: things are more bearable if one is not trapped into doing them. I’m willing to put up with a lot more if I know I can do just a little bit extra to get out of it. When I’m stuck in a bad situation, I have to deal with both the badness and the fact that I can’t escape. I guess it’s a form of claustrophobia. Just knowing there’s a way out takes some pressure off, even if that way out isn’t feasible.

Lately that way out isn’t quite as obvious to me. I feel stuck in many different ways and I’m tired of it — I’m not used to feeling powerless. I guess I’m a spoiled brat: woe is me, too many things are outside of my control and I don’t like it!

Feeling trapped and powerless is a sort of definition of being in danger, and Psych 101 taught me that triggers the fight-or-flight response. It makes humans act like animals and animals act irrationally. I don’t want to do that; I can hardly rationalize most of what I do when I have a clear head.

I’ve been trying to make rational changes to free myself from this trapped feeling, and to little avail. My patience is wearing thin. Often when people feel trapped, their irrational response puts them in a worse situation than they were in before. That’s the stuff cliches are made of. Nobody wants to be cliche.