Drinking leads to Thinking

I was talking with someone today, the casual talk of preferred alcohol and exploits of days past. It seems to be a requisite conversation for any budding friendship and I tend to fall into a particular pattern of stories and preferences I will describe. Both of us having a propensity to have a few glasses there were some decent stories going both ways, however I noticed a pattern in the stories of my partner. There was a recurring theme of acknowledging whether one more drink was appropriate, at which point the story would curve sharply either to the safe and sober(-ish) side or to the fully inebriated and interesting side. The key thing I noticed was the framing of the decision as whether one "should or shouldn't" have one more, whereas I generally frame the question as whether I "feel like unwinding."

It's a subtle distinction and one I didn't really put too much thought into until later in the day, when we spoke again except this time more conspiratorially. This time we were debating the merits of a particular approach to accomplishing the task. This time, however, we were both using the same language of "should or shouldn't." My opinion was generally that we shouldn't, it would make the wrong sort of waves, may lead to angry conversations pointed at me, and could end up being a waste of time. My partner shared a different take. We should do this because it's an interesting approach.

It's such a subtle distinction, the framing of questions. "How do you pronounce the capital of Kentucky? Lou-ee-ville or Lou-iss-ville?" To approach the question simply is to accept the premises on which is is based, which in my example is simple to address. However when they are questions you ask yourself, it takes a disciplined mind to identify and challenge the false premises of your own thinking. So, when I reexamine the question of "Should I or shouldn't I take on this more socially risky approach to accomplish the given task?" I find myself asking a more interesting question "Here is a tough problem. Do I feel like unwinding on it?"

The beautiful thing about this interpretation is that it neatly packages the need to inspect the conditions precedent to a decision with a much healthier sense of self agency. To ask oneself the question of "should vs shouldn't" implies these things about the agency of the asker:

• There exists a set of rules outside the control of the asker which must be abided by
• These rules are uncertain or unclear in this situation
• There is no easy access to additional clarity around the rules
• The asker is not endowed with the right of resolving this uncertainty as she sees fit

So, I will say thank you kind sir. Thank you for the inspiration to reframe and get myself out from under those subconscious barriers. With that, I have one last word: the capital of Kentucky is pronounced "Frankfort".

Production and Introspection

I find myself alone for the next few weeks, alone in a sparsely populated home on a laptop freshly minted in March of 2009. Added to the recipe is a somewhat declining workload, as I am starting new work in mid May and now spend more of my time insuring that I am not the sole possessor of The Secret Knowledge that keeps the business running (spoiler alert: I am not). This has afforded me time to dedicate myself to a combination of old hobbies of mine that has too long been sitting on a dusty shelf in the attic of my life... introspection, miscellaneous reading, and light writing.

The past three years have been a great part of my life. In early 2010 I joined a fledgling "intra-preneurial"  effort and saw it really take flight; literally even when it involved my relocating a few states away. The trade-offs were significant: dedicate as much time and energy (physical, emotional, and mental) as you possibly can and if it works out then Awesome. I have probably never done so much work at such a break-neck pace before in my life and in the beginning that was invigorating. Every single thing I could fix was value added that I could see and be glad for. Every cantankerous problem I whiteboarded into submission improved our bottom line. Somewhere along the line though, things got fuzzy. I could pour hours of blood, sweat, and tears into solutions, but the impact had diminished. Even if the solution was taken up, it became a madcap game of Telephone. And as it passed from one hand to the next through the bureaucracy en route to implementation, the solution grew increasingly disfigured until when returned for rubber-stamp approval it resembled the original request in name only. Then is when it hits you, an overwhelming exhaustion comprised of a few years of lost sleep and long hours.

As I said, the entire experience has been incredible for me. The thing I wish to say here is not some silly plea of "Listen to me! I am important!" or even the (it seems) worldwide refrain of "My boss is a jerk!" No, I only want to lament the lack of introspection, miscellaneous reading, and light writing I have been able to engage in. I can't say I would choose differently given the opportunity to advise another, especially as a long time believer in the importance of experiencing the full range of emotion. No, I only seek to briefly lament... and use that lamentation as an opportunity to engage and share.

In the past three years, I have been directly involved in several hundred million dollars of revenue. I have helped design and build systems to support the sales team. I have lead teams of people, trained them, erected policy, torn down false assumptions, measured productivity, and earned trust. By any capitalist measure of productivity, I've done a fine job. Here is a secret, though: in the quiet of the dark, just before sleep, when I am alone with my demons, I find I am less a capitalist and more a philosopher. A philosopher who secretly wishes he were a poet and perhaps a mystic, to be precise. Therefore when I measure my productivity (capitalist's term) or my sense of worth (philosopher's term), I do it on the sense of synchronicity I experience and the quality of my recent alchemy. Both of which have long been in a season of drought.

A return to alchemical thinking is not an easy process. Right now it feels like my brain is rusted in some places while I stand wondering whether that part needs oil or a swift kick to get it working again. Many of my old sources of Interesting Thoughts are not around or have much reduced frequency or quality of work. So it is with an uncertain hand I attempt to rebuild a mind that thinks the way I'd like it to. Reengaging with synchronicity is no simple task either. By definition it is a subtle thing, seen only in coincidences and chance encounters, and so to start looking is to immediately ignore signs that are the echo of actions from before you  began your search. So it takes time, it takes patience, and it takes a willingness to see the young couple, the old couple, and the painting itself. (Thank you Octavio Ocampo for your wonderful art)

So this is the first step. Perhaps it is not yet a step, but merely the act of rising with intention of walking in the future. Though it is laughably simple and arguably false on its face, I would like to imagine myself, as I have often imagined a movie scene in my mind. A character returns to material he once loved and makes his first attempt in some time. The viewer is shown the uncertainty in his movements and the apparent roughness of his execution. Next is shown the pain, for the character has not forgotten how to judge his material even if his muscles have forgotten how to properly produce it, but somewhere deep in the character's eye there is a glimmer. He has not forgotten everything, above all he has not forgotten why he has returned, and his shaky and broken movements give way to grace and simplicity as he remembers the skills he has lost.

A Parable for the Waiting

I came across thisparable told by Buddha the other day:

A man traveling across a field encountered a tiger. He fled, the tiger after him. Coming to a precipice, he caught hold of the root of a wild vine and swung himself down over the edge. The tiger sniffed at him from above. Trembling, the man looked down to where, far below, another tiger was waiting to eat him. Only the vine sustained him.

Two mice, one white and one black, little by little started to gnaw away the vine. The man saw a luscious strawberry near him. Grasping the vine with one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other. How sweet it tasted!

I have been thinking alot about that parable in the past day or two to help ease some nervousness I’ve got. The nervousness springs from an immensely personal gift I gave to this girl. It’s the sort of thing where if it’s taken well some form of thanks or "how sweet" statement would normally be forthcoming... but it hasn’t. This doesn’t mean it was taken poorly, I hope, she does have a tendency to be distracted in the middle of things. I would say it is more like LIFO consciousness as opposed to ADHD, heh heh.

What I’ve been taking away from this parable is also in the light of my recent thoughts on fate and chance, but specifically in the corollary issue of choice. When confronted with the tiger, the man does what he can... he runs. When confronted with a dire situation he has no control over, the man does what he can... he enjoys what can be enjoyed. So I sit here, trapped between the tigers of unknowing, trying to ignore the mice of worry and self-doubt. I’m going to try, probably with only minimal success, to enjoy the strawberry of the weekend and new fallen snow.

That’s Alot of Dishes

I stayed at a buddy's place this past Saturday night. This weekend I realized how I need more people like him in my life, and in the world in general. He is a very smart guy, but has managed to hide it behind a mild speech impediment and a complete and utter lack of guile. I'd like to relate a story of something that transpired this past Sunday.

He, his fiancee, and I were sitting around in the kitchen when she got up and drew some water in the sink to start doing the dishes. I believe there were approximately 3 clean dishes at the start of the endeavor, most of them having been dirtied when company came over the night before for an impromptu dinner party and drinks. In fact, they had done all the dishes just two days earlier. The only indication of his fiancee's intentions, aside from filling up the sink, was her instruction that "she will need some help drying when she gets to the glasses." And without another word she has begun submerging the first round of a stack of dirty dishes nearly as tall as her. It is about a half hour later and the first thing my friend says once he finds out that it's time grab a towel and help out is, "Wow, Babe. I thought that was going to take you all afternoon."

There are alot of things that one would expect that sentence to mean. It could mean that his opinion of her was low enough that she was able to surprise him with her merely by completing the dishes quickly. It could mean that he was disappointed that his time hanging out with his buddy (me) was cut short by annoying domestic work. It could mean any number of demeaning things... but it didn't. It meant that he was happy she was almost done and happy that he was now able to help get the chore out of the way sooner so they could both go back to doing what they would rather be doing.

It didn't even occur to me until afterwards that what he said could possibly be considered offensive. It is one of the most perfect examples I have encountered of the awesome power of utter guilelessness. The ability dismiss ill will by sheer lack of ill intention is definitely not a skill be underestimated.

Fate and Chance: of Movies and Life

Think about these things as you read this.
1) Fractals
2) Classical vs Quantum Mechanics
3) Psychological Priming

Recently I've been wondering at the subtle beauty of psychological priming and how I have little revelations from having something already on my mind and then exposing myself to some new unknown stimuli. It's the principle of sleeping on it, keep it in the back of your mind and the world around you will give you ways of interacting with other issues that you haven't tried applying to the current issue, often with great success. In retrospect it is an activity I use on alot of my issues. I am a big 'stew'-er in so far as when I am confronted with an important decision, even if I am already mostly sure of my response... I still want a day to stew on it. I want time to leave this framework and allow the universe to engage me in other frameworks that might shed new light on the situation. I prime myself with the issue... in fact I think it would be hard not to be primed when confronted with a big decision, and then just live my life normally and see what comes to me.

This relates to fate in a particular way that occurred to me after watching No Country For Old Men yesterday. Early in the movie one character is trying to describe the captive bolt pistol that the bad guy uses (as shown in the previews), to no avail. Somewhat later, Tommy Lee Jones is talking about something else entirely and comments about how the process of animal slaughter has changed since he was a young man and, in effect, describes how a captive bolt pistol is used to do so. Whether he makes the connection is not revealed. But this is an excellent example of priming, where there is a situational backdrop and the events in the foreground reveal new mysteries, that were before unseen.

There is another part of No Country that ties in and I find very interesting. It is best expressed in a scene where the bad guy tells someone, quite creepily, to call a coin toss. The implication being that if they get it wrong, he will kill them. He is having this scene play out with a man and tells the man the story of the quarter, made 20+ years prior and gone through a thousand hands to come here and decide if he will live or die. The paradox here is that it is the fate of this quarter to decide by chance whether this man shall live or die. That is a very interesting idea. I interpret it much along the lines of fate setting the board and placing the pieces, but still it being chance that determines the outcome. As per my intro thoughts, this reminds me of physics. Everything behaves according to Classical Mechanics, except where all the action is happening. If you throw a ball up, you can know it's path and the time it takes to complete that path... but that is the 10,000 foot view. What is really happening when you look at that ball and the air on an atomic level? Is the air actually going around the ball or through? Is the ball all it's own the whole time or is there some flux born entity made up of air and ball? Fate is the path that cannot be undone, but what the real story is the chance that all lines up to make it happen...or not happen.

"As above, so below" is a paraphrasing of part of the message on The Emerald Tablet", written by Hermes Trismegistus and considered the source of magic and alchemy. But it gets me thinking, and already primed by concepts of fate, lack of a unified physics, and a recent blog entry... just how deep is the rabbit hole? Is it the nature of all things that they can be understood at a macro level but at some point become unknowable? Maybe everyone does meet their soul-mate, and all you can hope to do is not be hung up on your last fling when it happens? Perhaps we have a system where right now there is fate and that is (to some omniscient being) knowable, but when the next fated encounter occurs all is thrown to chance and we zoom in one level on our Mandelbrot Set of Fate, where everything looks basically like it did before, but just so slightly different. Life will go on if you make a bad impression on your soul-mate and never end up dating, just like it has for everyone else that did the same, the only thing that will have changed is that you might not become a believer in soul-mates and the future now has very very slightly more green eyed people and less blue eyed people because of it.

A Pleasant Relief

I went to Cleveland this weekend for my fraternity's reunion celebration. It was a pretty good time, on the whole, but there was one thing that really sticks in my mind. Allow me a little back story before I get into the meat of it.

I consider myself a storyteller, it's how I remember things and how I relate things. Facts, for me, are irrelevant unless they are somehow connected to some plot or some greater whole. It has been like this ever since I can remember. When I was a kid, at dinner, my dad would tell stories and we, the kids, would be encouraged to make one up and tell it to the family as well. It was, and still is, not a problem to hear the same story for the 20th time... it might have some new fact and the act of exchanging the story is often more important than the story itself. My first girl friend in college was quite of the other mind, and had a big effect on my story telling habits... insofar as reminding me early into a story that I'd already told her that one. With the people I work with, I have (as I perceive it) a bad reputation around storytelling. I have a reputation for telling stories that are anticlimactic or end disjointedly. The disjointed ones are a more recent addition, of my own reaction to facial feedback to a story already started. Keeping a story inside me can be really difficult, if it is a story I was in, although if it's a story someone else told me then it's no problem keeping it quiet. It is like there is some weird storyteller's covenant or something.

One other important aspect of background information is that I don't identify myself with very much. For example, I 'went salsa dancing' for over a year before I considered myself 'a salsa dancer.' I was in my fraternity, as opposed to being a member of it. So the list of things that comprise my identity is not as long as one might suspect, which means that when I when I get a continual stream of negative feedback about a part of my identity... I don't have as much to fall back on.

So, I was relaying some story or another to some of my buddies at a bar on friday night and in the middle of it one of them interrupts me to tell me how I am a very "captivating storyteller." Now, it is critical here to understand that the line between deadpan sarcasm and legitimate compliments for this guy is usually distinguishable only by diction. So my first reaction is to be a little stunned, not being used to being insulted so upfront, directly, and personally. My opinion of my storytelling skills already being questionable only made the whole thing worse. So I kind of stammered out, "Are... are you serious?" "Yeah, dude. You're really captivating." It was the word 'captivating' that had triggered the sarcasm-o-meter in the first place and it is registering again. So I re-stammered, "Nah, man. Are you for real?" "Yeah. Take a look at Donkey [the nickname of the guy sitting next to me], here. No one listens when he tries to tell a story, but everyone here is looking at you. You tell good stories." "Oh. ... Oh, Thanks, man."

That's the best compliment I've gotten in a long time, and a much needed one at that. I hadn't realized how weak my opinion of my storytelling had become, but when I was put back in familiar territory with a need for stories of substance and quality I didn't miss a step. And now, as I think of it, someone has got to be emotionally involved in a story in order to be disappointed by the ending. If there is no belief in the rising action, then the falling action, equally, has no meaning. So thanks, Hammad. Thanks for an antidote to a poison that hadn't even registered yet.

On a somewhat related note... I think I've gotten funnier lately or something. Maybe I really did level up in Chicago or something, but I've been told how funny I am in the past week or two. Which is not a comment I'm used to hearing. A friend told me today, "God! Why don't I hang out with you more often? I'm crying here." (Crying out of funniness, mind you). I had a momentary sarcasm meter reaction, before realizing he was serious. Which makes that one the second best compliment I've gotten in a long time.

Begin with the Antithesis

I like words. I like long words, short words, funny words, and hard words. I like the way they feel when I say them. My favorite word to say to myself right now is "smag" ... the name of a dance company in Dayton... it just sounds so dirty and I can 'sit on' the 'A.' The Structuring (my dept) Word of The Day (which we've only ever had one of, as proclaimed by me) a few weeks ago was "pleonasm." That's a fun one, too. I was reading an article about some statements the FERC Chairman, Joseph Kelliher made and I found myself thinking, "Damn, this is a smart man. He really has his stuff together." This is as weird a reaction to a press conference for me as it is for you... so I began to wonder why I thought this dude was so cool, when it hit me. He had used the word "inchoate" in referring to arguments for electric re-regulation. The truth is that I just eat that shit up.

Being a lover of words, it is important that I use them either correctly or wrong on purpose. So, this morning I looked up the definition of "antithetical" to make sure I was using it right. Reading the definitions, I come across the words that will be guiding most of my spare time for the rest of the workday "Hegelian Dialectic." I encourage you to check the Wikipedia article on it, there is alot of good stuff in there. I'm going to move on to my own interpretations and conclusions about it, rather than sum it all up.

The part that got me, the part that really made it all sink in, was the 'criticism of dialectic' section. Specifically Karl Popper's critique that a dialectic will 'put up with contradictions.' Suddenly the spiral, negation of negation, my hang-up on doublethink, my issues with the concepts of good and evil, and my belief that nothing will teach you nothing all came together in a massive mental whirlwind leaving me the storm polished stone that I have a dialectic soul. Anyone that has had much in the way of serious conversations has discovered (often to their vexation) that I will happily stand on both sides of an argument. I also firmly believe that a significant amount of goodness is introduced into the world once a person's truths are in logical alignment. (I thought I had blogged about that recently, but maybe I only got half done and axed it). The most important part about my newfound understanding of a dialectic is that the goal is not to determine who is right... cause we both are and we both aren't. Lets line our truths up and shake out our falsities and make something better than either of us had to begin with.

I think almost all of the women that have danced with me have at one point or another heard my salsa catch-phrase. "No worries. What are we going to do? Win? At salsa?" It is an attitude that, like alot of realizations, has come with me off the dance floor. The shift from right/wrong to better/worse has profound repercussions. Taking a position of firmness and flexibility, as opposed to rigidity, has a tendency to encourage productive discussion... which is always a good thing.

The pursuit of truth, outside of the constructs of right and wrong, is the sole goal of any conversation