Layers of Reality

One of my favorite movies of all time is Reservoir Dogs, and one of my favorite scenes is this one:

Why do I love it? I am not a huge fan of any particular element, but of the way that layers exist within the storytelling. The video clip, by the way, of the scene is a flashback from the main story timeline to a point where the Tim Roth character is telling how he told the story.

When the cop starts telling his story in the scene, it becomes nearly farcical. Awesome, in my opinion, but nearly farcical. To trace the layers within the movie, we have:

The main timeline, where we are transported back to
A scene in a coffee shop, where Tim Roth is relaying a story of
A scene in a bar, where Time Roth is telling a story of
The commode, where he "listened" to
A barking dog and a cop tell a story about a "stupid fucking citizen".

It's great.

I was reading Frankenstein (actually, I am still reading it (not as I type this (that would be difficult))) and read something similar.

The narrative convention for the Mary Shelley classic is through letters, which makes sense. Characters had limited ways to relay experiences to other characters with no telephones or chat clients.

At one point, the storytelling/letter-writing layers become almost too much to follow. I was struck that the layers looked something like this:

The main timeline, which is a letter written by a man to his sister, where he relates
A conversation with a man, Dr. Frankenstein, who is
Telling a story to the brother, and that story includes
A conversation with the doctor's best friend, who gives him
A letter from the doctor's childhood sweetheart, which relates
A story about a woman who lived in her household (and the woman's deceased parents).

Be careful. Please.

So many layers. Add in that the book was written by a woman. And that I am telling you about it.

If you were to tell someone about me telling you about a woman's book that contained a letter from a man who spoke to a doctor about a letter he'd received from his sweetheart that told of a woman's parents who died... why, if you did that then your head might explode.

So be careful.

Music and Me

(Yes. I know that I didn't get back on the horse very quickly. I've thought about getting back to writing blogs, though. Which is a step in the right direction. Unless you don't want me to start writing blog entries again. Then it's a step in the wrong direction. I've got a few partially-written entries that I might finish up this week. I hope. In the mean time, please enjoy this moment of me writing about how old I feel.)

Politica is managing a campaign this spring/summer. She's done this sort of thing before, but she and I weren't together when she managed the campaign process previously... and that's resulted in an interesting experience for me.

This entry, though, isn't about politics or the political process. It's about music.

I am not a politically active person by any stretch of the imagination, but I want to do what I can to help make her job easier, and yesterday I volunteered to help her shoot a video for her candidate.

So. Music.

We gave another volunteer a ride to the shoot location and conversation turned to upcoming activities, specifically the shows that the volunteer was planning on attending in the next few months. And the bands that would be performing. The conversation went something like this:

Politica: So you're going to Sasquatch, right?
Volunteer: Yes.
Politica: Who's performing this year?
Volunteer: Tenactious D. Jack White.
Me: Ah! Jack Black and Jack White, huh?
Politica and Volunteer: [polite chuckling]

As someone who likes to think he knows a little something about most things, part of me was thinking, "Yeah. Sweet. I know what Sasquatch is. I know who those musical artists are. I still got it." Unfortunately, I was cast adrift quickly.

Volunteer: But I'm really looking forward to the other acts.
Politica: Oh, yeah? Who are they?
Volunteer: Blahblahblah, Yadda Yadda Yadda, Somethingsomethingsomething.
Politica: Mmm hmm.
Volunteer: Somethingsomethingsomething. Yadda Yadda Yadda...
Politica: Oh, nice!
Volunteer: Yadda Yadda Yadda. Starfucker. Somethingsomethingsomething.
(etc.)

Whether Politica really knew the bands or not, she at least seemed to. I had no clue what was going on. As Volunteer rattled off the bands, I was thinking one of three things:

1. Who?
2. That would be a great name for a band!
3. Ah, I know Starfucker!

It was perhaps even more demoralizing to my "I've still got it" internal checker that I don't know Starfucker. I knew they existed, but I didn't know what kind of music they played, let alone a song of theirs. I didn't even know whether it was one word or two. (For the record, it's one word. Or STRFKR. At least according to Wikipedia, which once told me that hornets were the spawn of Satan, so I always take it with a small grain of salt.)

It might be a slight overstatement to say that I was humbled, but I definitely felt out of touch with the music scene. I will have to take solace that I can still do well on the Mosquito tone test.

Back on the Horse

Do you know how it feels when you tell a little lie, and if you just came clean immediately it wouldn't be a big deal? Like, it's not an important topic and the listener may be a bit confused by the dishonesty, but wouldn't really care?

Do you know how, if you don't come clean, it grows into something more substantial? Because, on the one hand, the listener might be aggravated that you didn't tell them before, and on the other hand the listener might be confused why you're telling them at that point. It is an insignificant lie, after all. Maybe you should just let it go.

But if you let it go it gets harder to bring it up. Harder to tell the truth.

I, personally, don't know the feeling of telling lies (I am far too perfect as a person to tell falsehoods) but I have a similar feeling with this blog.

I used to write all the time. Some of it was pretty good, I think, and some of it was crap. But I enjoyed writing and I enjoyed getting feedback from friends and strangers about my adventures and musings and poor grammar fueled by haste and/or rum.

It's been over six months now since I've done a new post. I have started at least two entries since then (not including this one) but I didn't complete them and didn't push "Publish Post" because I felt it had been too long. I felt pressure to write something great.

The reality is that, just as the little lie grows into something bigger in your head, the absence of writing blog entries grew into something bigger in mine.

So. Enough.

With this blog entry, I am relieving myself--even if just temporarily--of self-imposed non-blog-writing stress. I don't know when my next entry will be, but if and when it happens it will be rooted in fun and not in fear of not writing.

750Words.com

First of all: Happy birthday to me.

Secondly: the actual blog entry.

Part of the reason that I write this blog is to document. Part of the reason I write is for chicks (clearly!). Part of the reason I write this blog is to ... ponder.

I don't fool myself into thinking that the couple hundred of people who "like" my blog read it regularly, and I'm pretty sure that not many others even know it exists, but pondering on this blog can be challenging because I know I do have an audience.

Which, of course, is part of the thrill.

Even if it's just a few people, though, I have a tendency to censor myself lately in this space in a way I never did back when it was, like, four people that were reading my MySpace blog.

I'm not complaining. I'm just saying.

I found a site, though, that gives me a private area to muse. One that uses a game layer to encourage me to participate daily.

And one that generates lots of stats. Which. I. Love.

The idea is that many of us like the concept of writing, but we don't do it as much as we'd like. We get distracted and/or intimidated on what people might think. 750words.com gives a canvas to write about three pages (750 words) a day, in a totally private environment. Just to get writing and to encourage thinking.

There might be other sites like this, but I don't know them and don't care about them (they're not in my Monkeysphere). I do know this one, and I do like it. I've only made a single entry, and we'll see how long I can keep with it, but... so far, so good.

Here are a couple of screen grabs of the stats for my first entry. (Yes, I wrote for 20 minutes at work, and I feel bad about it, but it's my birthday so cut me some slack!)

I feel like I might be cheating a bit with my writing. I knew what I wanted to explore and what I, basically, want to write about--I've even mentioned it a few times on my blog--while perhaps a more "pure" experience would be writing whatever popped into my head on any given day.

But that's what this place is for. Hah.

So, I hope to explore and develop that idea on 750words.com, and, at some point, come to some kind of resolution about the issue. I might pull entries over to this blog or I might just recap them... or they might end up in a different medium altogether.

Language

I am sure that someone more wise and pithy than I am has come up with a saying along the lines of "A problem is an opportunity for a solution" or "Turn lemons into lemonaide". Someone more enterprising has even probably made posters with these sayings on them. Something like:

or

(I don't know what that second one means, but I see a "hand jobs in the future" joke there somewhere...)


My point is that there is almost always a silver lining to something bad, and/or that something bad can sometimes be spun into something good.

My last blog entry was about ambiguity. It talked about how it sucks not to know what we can know and what we can't... and/or that it sucks to not understand whether it's something that should suck or not.

One area where ambiguity (lemons) has provided me lots and lots of fun (lemonaid) is language. I only speak English at any level worth mentioning (I studied Spanish for years and years, but I can barely read it at a functional level; nuanced conversation and intricacies of the language are well over my head, and I can barely remember any of the Japanese I took oh, so long ago) but even given this limitation I have learned to love the lack of clarity that exists there.

Obviously, I want to have clarity sometimes. Maybe even most of the time. If I want to bake a cake, I don't want to have the directions to be "Cook the cake for a while". I will need to know that I need to preheat the oven, the temperature, and the length of time that it should be in there.

In the absence of purely functional needs, though, ambiguities can be quite entertaining. I love puns and other plays on words. ("I wondered why the baseball was getting bigger. Then it hit me." ... how can someone not appreciate that?)

While I think my vocabulary is pretty good (in English, at least) I still find myself glossing over what words really mean. I remember words and phrases at a molecular level, if you will, rather than at an atomic one. I remember phrases and context but not always what the words themselves mean and can mean. (Like I might remember what what is, but not oxygen and hydrogen.)

By examining words at that atomic level (or even sub-atomic, if one wants to get into etymology) is great fun. Homophones and homonyms and homographs, oh, my!

I'd be her beau if she'd bow after I made her a bow from a bough and put a red bow on it.

Language is a beautiful thing.

In addition to the words that exist, it amazes me to think of the words that do not exist (at least in English). Agnostic and altruism are words that are fewer than 200 years old, even though the concepts far predated the creation of them. English lacks the hundreds of words for snow that the Sami (not the Eskimos, for the record) have. Thinking about the words that English does not possess--especially for one who does not speak any other languages well--is daunting. I just do not know what I do not know.

I am not a massive appreciator of art. I think that, quite often, "art" is just a word applied to otherwise useless stuff that people make and/or consume. I know that I am a bit of a philistine, though, and I appreciate some of that "useless stuff", so... I don't know where that gets me.


Poets seem, to me, capable of filling gaps in language. They take words that we know (or at least words that exist) and stretch them and make us look at them in different ways so that we feel differently about those words than we did before they were used by the poet.

That, in my opinion, is art worth appreciating.

Recently I have been thinking about the phrase, "I am sorry". It's not an uncommon phrase, for sure, and one that polite children had drilled into our heads at a young age. It's a phrase that too many of us use too frequently even as too many of us use it too infrequently.

Maybe it's just me, but I hadn't really thought about what it means. Or what it can mean.

"I am sorry" is, essentially, the same as "I apologize". When one does something wrong, it is polite to apologize. To acknowledge to the wronged party that it was something that should not have been done.

"I am sorry" also can speak less to the act than the effect:

"I am sorry [that you are unhappy]."
"I am sorry [that I hurt you]."
"I am sorry [that you feel that way]."

It doesn't offer an apology--it doesn't necessarily even claim any culpability.

A third, I think less common, meaning for "I am sorry" is "I regret". Even "I regret" can mean "I apologize"... but I mean it in a different way. I mean it in the "I don't like how this turned out for me" kind of way:

"I am sorry [that I didn't buy gold at $300/oz]."
"I am sorry [that I didn't get that mole checked out]."
"I am sorry [that I ever talked to that chick]."

The ambiguity of language can defeat the purpose of using it. Even a simple phrase like "I am sorry" can carry so much nuance and meaning (that is capable of being interdependent or independent) that it gets to the point where I despair to ever being able to truly communicate anything. (And, given my difficulty on deciding on what I want to communicate, it's particularly frustrating to not be able to do so when I actually get there...)

I am not a poet, but I will have to do my best to make "I am sorry" mean what I want it to.

Ambiguity

I am not a religious person. I am not a spiritual-but-not-religious person. I'm not eager to die, but (as long as it's not too painful) I am resigned to the extremely high likelihood that I will experience it at some point or another.

At a really high level, then, I think I deal with ambiguity pretty well. Sort of by ignoring it.

In my job, I take things that different people (clients, coworkers, users, et al) express and I mash it up and I form specifications or personas or other documentation that, hopefully, encapsulates and clarifies.

At a micro level, then, I think I deal with ambiguity pretty well. By trying to get rid of it.

In addition to existence- and minutiae-based life, there's a lot of middle ground... some of which (health, relationships) are pretty important and some of which (politics, ice cream) are less so.

It's this cast middle ground where ambiguity is much more difficult for me. (I don't think I'm alone, and I don't think I'm particularly special or remarkable for this weakness, but it's my blog so I'm gonna write about me, dammit!) Economic policies seem to be easier to address than a question like "Why does anything exist?", even if they're more difficult than putting together a set of wireframes for a website. Friendships--even in all their complexities that make setting up a meeting agenda look like child's play--must be more understandable than free will, right?

When I was growing up, my parents had a poster or a picture of something with the Serenity Prayer on the wall. To remind everyone, it goes something like this:

"God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference."

Perhaps because I really took the gist of the saying to heart, I ignored that it was a prayer and that the capital G word was used.

I don't recite that prayer to myself on a regular basis, but I take solace in knowing that other individuals have the same challenges I do... I guess misery loves company, right?

Applying it to the big stuff? Easy. I cannot know which definition of agnostic is correct (whether we cannot know God, or whether we do not know of God's existence). I cannot understand why string theory exists, even if I ever end up wrapping my head around what it is.

Applying it to the little stuff? Sure thing. Even when complex, the little stuff just takes clear thinking and creativity and (if it can't be avoided) hard work. I don't want to have to buy a new car, but I can make a decision I can live with if I put my head to it.

The middle ground, though... that's the rub. When must I accept I cannot change something? When should I accept that? When does the serenity I feel by letting go merely provide a nice cover for an absence of courage?

Are these questions big stuff? Or are they little stuff that I'm not willing to (*gasp*) work on?

What is my personal record for number of questions asked to end a blog?

Social Convexity

Do you know what I think is cool?

(If you guessed "pizza", "porn", or the "Portland Trail Blazers": you get partial credit. It's not what I had in mind here, though, and please remember I do like some things that don't start with "p".)

I think gravity is cool.

More specifically--or more relevantly for this blog--I think that gravity wells are cool.

Gravity wells are (as far as my undereducated-in-hard-sciences monkey brain can understand them) representations of the effect that matter has on everything around it.

Space with no significant mass can be represented as a flat sheet, and when you add an object (a moon, or a planet, or a star, or a black hole, or the million backwards-baseball-cap-wearing dudes I want to shoot out into space) to that plane, you get a bend. A more massive object creates a deeper indentation, with a black hole (which has a singularity of density) creating an infinitely deep well.

I think that's about right.

In any case, the universe interacts with these indentations. They can influence how other objects move and can even bend light.

What if people are ... social wells? They influence people and institutions and events to varying degrees. Some people do a great job of building relationships (of whatever kind) because of their social concavity breadth and depth.

While a concavity can be an indentation on the surface, a convexity is something that pops up OUT of that surface. A bulge, if you will.

I don't know that are gravity bulges, but if we extend the notion of social concavities to include social convexities, I think it gets a bit more interesting.

How might a social convexity manifest itself? A cold demeanor. A distance from other people. An unwillingness to go out of one's way to help others. A physical deformity, perhaps. All things that can help push people away.

Would these rippled in the social plane be absolute or relative? Part of the beauty of gravity wells (it seems to me) is that they are pretty universally applicable (although I'm sure at the quantum level things break down; they always seem to). But for a person: wouldn't one person find a racist dude to be a convexity while another (fellow racist) would find him to be a concavity?

Perhaps. I don't have all the answers (for once).

I just think about my bulge. Or, rather, my social convexity (or, indeed, maybe I have increased social convexity because I think about my bulge) and I wonder if I should be trying harder to have more friends or trying harder to build stronger ties to existing friends.

Or maybe I shouldn't worry about it, because some fellas are convex and some ain't.