communication

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Salutations on a Friday

I don’t have much to say, today‒or much to write, I guess, if you want to be precise.  Honestly, I don’t think I have much to say in the literal sense, either, but it’s harder to tell since I don’t tend to talk to anyone at all before nine or so in the morning.  Often, I would prefer not to say anything even then, but people will insist on saying things to me, like “Good morning,” and so on.

I guess I don’t really mind the “Hi” and “Good morning” type greetings*, though it is often irritating that one is expected to return them in some ritual fashion, for no particular purpose that I can discern‒other than, I suppose, that of primate hierarchical, dominance, and coalitional signaling between members of the same flange of naked house apes.  I doubt most people think much about it.  Still, a “Hi” is okay.  I can return it with a word and a nod, though often my voice is apparently too quiet for other people to hear when I reply.  I also will often give a Vulcan salute, which is good because it is silent and distinctive.

I gave one of those to a young man on the train who had asked me which stop was next because he needed to get off at a particular one.  I gave him useful information, he got off at his desired stop, and as he left, he thanked me.  I said a somewhat befuddled “you’re welcome” and without thinking did a low-key Vulcan salute.  I’m not sure he noticed it.

It can be amusing to greet or say goodbye to people using the American Sign language “love” gesture, with the index and pinky fingers and thumbs out but the middle two fingers down, as if you were Spider-Man shooting webs straight up into the air.  It’s not that I particularly like telling people that I “love” them‒generally, I don’t (love them or want to tell them), and I think the whole “I love you, man” kind of thing is very much overused, and bastardizes and cheapens the word and the very concept of love.

On the other hand, if you fold your thumb in, the “love” sign turns into the heavy metal sign of the devil (supposedly), so for people toward whom you have the least affection, it can be a good way to slag them off without them even realizing you’re doing it.  I know, it’s petty and rather unsatisfying, but it’s not as though you can act on your real impulses.  If you set them on fire with a homemade flame-thrower or beat them to death with a baseball bat, you’re liable to get arrested, even‒and this is the galling point‒if everyone else in the office agrees that the person is annoying.

This is all hypothetical, of course.

Anyway, I will be working tomorrow, so I suspect that I’ll be writing another blog post in the morning.  Yippee.  I don’t know why, but I have not yet been able to break that habit.

I am tempted just to sleep in the office tonight rather than go back to the house.  It’s a bit pointless, all the going back and forth.  There’s no one and nothing waiting at the house for me.  Even the neighborhood cats are coming around less often; someone else must be putting out better food than I do.

This is probably just as well.  I only started feeding the cats because my housemate used to do it, and he said he was going to come pick up the really skittish one.  He has not yet done so, and it’s been a few years now‒I don’t recall how long‒and I’ve been spending money on cat food that I could…I don’t know, that I could use as washrags to wipe the bathroom sink, something like that?  Nothing that I spend money on is really beneficial, other than books, perhaps, but I have oodles of those, and I still haven’t read much of Quantum Field Theory, As Simply as Possible, or Spacetime and Geometry, or Classical Electrodynamics or any of those books that I keep meaning to read.

It’s all very boring, but at least I have chronic pain and depression and insomnia to keep things from being too peaceful.  It’s too bad I don’t have drug or alcohol problems‒at least those keep life from being predictable.

I was being tongue-in-cheek with that last sentence.  I don’t want to have drug or alcohol problems, though they are enticing routes to self-destruction.  It was bad enough when I had to take prescription pain meds for so long.  And my favorite alcoholic beverages are the ones I imagine drinking; the real ones are always a disappointment, and they leave me feeling unpleasant.

I mean I feel unpleasant internally in that situation, meaning that I feel uncomfortable physically, that I feel unwell.  I know that I’m always relatively unpleasant to other people.

However, although my mind is not my friend, there are and have always been aspects of it that are the most treasured things about reality for me, and I don’t want to endanger those.  My love of learning and understanding, of reading, of horror and science fiction and fantasy, of music, all those things are treasures, even when my depression makes them inaccessible to me.  I don’t want them to go away permanently, at least not while I’m alive.  I guess that means that, if I were to get cancer, I wouldn’t want a brain tumor.

Of course, that would mean that I would be most likely to get a brain tumor, if the universe dealt in irony, which as far as I can tell it does not.  As far as I can tell, all instances of seeming “karmic” irony are cases of selection bias or recall bias.  We remember the time the guy who refused to fly died in a train derailment, or when the exercise guru died young of a heart attack, not realizing that we remember them precisely because they are unusual and atypical.  They are cases of “man bites dog”, which is news, according to the cliché, while “dog bites man” is not.

Talk to you tomorrow.

*On the other hand, I have great trouble with “How are you doing?” and related greetings.  I almost always freeze up for at least a moment when met with such inquiries.  I don’t know what to say.  Most days I feel that I am not doing well at all, but I don’t necessarily want to say that to others, nor are they likely to want to hear it, and I feel irritated at being put on the spot, especially when people don’t seem really to care much how well or poorly I’m faring.

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A post triggered by an ongoing problem with WordPress comments

I’m writing this on Monday morning, on my smartphone, on the heels of an issue relating to WordPress*.  Apparently, there are people trying to leave comments on this blog on WordPress, and many of those comments are not actually appearing, which I know from experience can be very frustrating‒especially if it was a comment behind which there was any care and thought‒and which can lead commenters to wonder if they are being blocked.

Just to address that last point, I want to assure all you readers that I am not blocking comments.  I don’t know if I have ever blocked any comment on this blog.  If I have, it was quite a long time ago, and I don’t remember it.

The problem seems to be some manner of ongoing glitch in WordPress, one of which I think I too have been a victim on other sites.  You’d think they’d try to do a bit better for long-term, paying customers, but they appear to be too busy trying to add flashy, unwanted new things to keep up with the various brain-dead social media out there, but not paying enough attention just to keeping their basic functions running as smoothly as possible.

They call their workers “happiness engineers”, which is a cheesy enough title, but at least they could take that job title seriously and try to do what they can to engineer, effectively, the happiness of their customers.

If a bridge over a gorge had been built by civil engineers as reliable as these happiness engineers (to be fair, perhaps it’s really more of a management problem), I think I would be inclined to rappel down, then swim across, and then climb up to get to the other side, rather than driving or walking.  The Tay Bridge itself, subject of one of the worst disasters (and reputedly one of the worst poems) in early rail history, was not much more poorly engineered.

Or perhaps I should say “poorly executed”; again, I cannot be sure that it’s actually a problem with the happiness engineers so much as with the people making decisions at “higher” levels.  All the engineers I’ve known‒and all but one of my roommates at college and many of my other friends at the time were engineers or were at least in the engineering school at Cornell‒have been people who did not like solving a problem poorly if it could be avoided.

Of course, I don’t know how many of the people at WordPress have actual engineering degrees.  Presumably, there are at least some people with degrees in computer science and engineering at the company.  Then again, perhaps I shouldn’t so presume.  After all, “when you presume, you make a pres out of u and me”.

Anyway, I will at least put an inquiry in to WordPress about what might be happening, and it would be good if any of you who are account holders might inquire as well.

I hope you all had a decent (or better than decent) weekend.  Mine was not great; I’m still not feeling too well physically, and mentally I almost never feel very well for very long at a time.  I had a rather minor but personally large disappointment brought about by circumstance that I won’t get into specifically, but it reinforces the notion, which I make in my story “I for one welcome our new computer overlords”, that hope is dangerous, particularly to a person who has tried to become used to and to embrace despair.

I am trying to do otherwise.  I dwell on the negative a lot, here, but I do try to do otherwise.  I’m damned if I know why I try; it’s probably just those stupid, mindless, biological drives and nothing more.  I wish I could rewrite my base code to blunt or eliminate those urges.

But then again, if I could rewrite my base code that way, I might as well rewrite myself to be happy and healthy, right?  Also, I could rewrite myself to be motivated and ambitious and charismatic, so I could become rich and powerful and immortal and eventually take over the world and even the universe!  I would make everything better than it is now, I can say that with little fear of contradiction.  Also, I want a unicorn pony with dragon wings that gets its sustenance by absorbing all the excess calories that I eat, so I never become overweight.

Anyway, my train will be coming soon, and I want to keep this relatively short.  I just want to apologize to the people who have tried to comment but have had difficulty doing so.  I hope you didn’t think I was ignoring you or that I had blocked you; I was not and had not.  I couldn’t honestly say that discourtesy is unspeakably ugly to me**, but it is unpleasant, and I try to avoid it.  I don’t know if I’ll be writing or doing audio the rest of this week, but I will probably make my latest audio into a “video” at least.  In the meantime, try to keep your spirits up.

*Isn’t it interesting how the same preposition‒“on”‒can be used with reference to time, to things being used, and to metaphorical situations?  It’s interesting to me anyway.  Also, of course, it can literally be used to refer to placement, as in “I’m sitting on a bench.”  It could also be used for metaphorical placement, as in “I’m on top of the world”, but I have only rarely been in that state, and it’s been a very long time since the last occurrence‒the last time was 22 years ago, I think, though there were other good times somewhat more recently, at least up until about eleven years ago.  After that, pretty much everything has been shit.

**For one thing, that very phrase contradicts itself, since it’s speaking about how ugly one finds discourtesy.

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I once did hold it, as our statists do, a baseness to blog fair

gibbon

Hello, good morning, and welcome to another Thursday.  As is often the case when I start writing a blog entry, I really don’t know what I’m going to “talk” about.  Fortunately (or not, depending on your point of view) that rarely stops me from putting a great many words down in short order.

This seems a common tendency in both writing and speaking.  In fact, it seems to be more common in speaking than in writing, though I myself (you know:  me…the guy writing this blog) tend to be a bit reticent in social settings, unless ethanol-containing beverages have been consumed.  I was raised on the aphorism, attributed to Mark Twain, that it’s better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.  I’m sure that there are many who would wish that I had followed this idea more assiduously.

The fear of being thought a fool does bring one to an interesting converse, or corollary, to the above-noted garrulousness of those who have nothing of substance to convey, and that is the human tendency to find it difficult to speak (or to write) when it’s important.  This isn’t universal, perhaps, but who among you cannot recall a time when you really liked some member of the appropriate gender and wanted to express that feeling (and perhaps ask said person out on a date) but found it impossible to say anything that was discernible from the babbling of an epileptic gibbon?  Many a comedy, both real and fictional, has highlighted such situations; alas, so have quite a few tragedies.

I suspect that this is born of the inherent perfectionism we all tend to embrace when trying to communicate something that’s important to us.  When what we say really matters, when we feel that it is crucial, we want our communication to be absolutely perfect…or we feel that it ought to be, anyway.  Those of you who have ever written term papers in school or university can surely appreciate that horrible sense that if it’s not perfect, or nearly so, then it’s simply horrible.

But of course, such perfection seems impossible to define, let alone to achieve, even by the greatest among us.  Upon occasion—Blasphemy Alert!—I’ve even read Shakespeare and had the sneaking thought that he could have written some particular line better than he did.  I might even, when feeling particularly cheeky, imagine that I’ve seen such a better way.  I hastily defend my humility in such instances by declaring that the line’s imperfection must have been the fault of the transcribing player who recorded it, not Shakespeare himself, hallowed be his name.

Actually, I don’t do that.  Nor do I imagine that everyone would agree with my suggested improvement, nor on which lines could be improved.  It’s simply the case that even Shakespeare was not perfect—whatever that means.

There are even people—yes, people of intelligence and good taste—who don’t much like Shakespeare.  Really.  It’s true.  I’ve met them.  They’re not monsters, nor are they insane (if you can believe it).  They’re ordinary, decent people.

My point is, perfection in communication isn’t even definable let alone achievable, so it’s curious that we get so hung up on stumbling over our words when we try to convey something important.  When we’re less wound up about it, we seem instinctively to recognize that conversation is like a sketch.  It doesn’t matter if a particular stroke of the pencil isn’t exactly right, because you’re just going to modify it with the next stroke anyway, and gradually you’re going to add and adjust until you get your point across…or until you fail to do so.  Even the overuse of metaphor and simile can still achieve some kind of communication.

That’s why I don’t subscribe to the nonsensical goal of sitting down and writing the “best sentence,” the “truest sentence”* you can write.  When I’m writing (be it a blog post, or a short story, or a novel, or a poem, or a song), I take the approach just to fucking write something.  Get something out onto the page, or the LCD screen.  It doesn’t have to be perfect.  It won’t be perfect.  In fact, no matter how much you edit it or improve it, it won’t ever be perfect…but it can get better.  You’re not stuck with what you first get out, you can fix and tweak and adjust it as often as you want…sometimes until you’re so bored with it that you don’t give a shit whether it’s good, let alone whether it’s perfect or not.

I sometimes think that this is the ultimate state of most shared works of art.  The artists finally get sick of working on them and just throw up their hands and say, “Okay, fine, that’s good enough.  Or not.  I don’t care, I’m done with it.  Get it out of my sight!”

Perhaps I exaggerate a bit, but I think that’s a good attitude to cultivate, at least if you’re a member of the legion of creative people with performance anxiety born of an innate (or learned) perfectionism.  Nothing is going to be expressed perfectly.

When you go up and talk to the girl (for instance) that you like, you may stumble over your words—indeed, you may literally stumble—your voice may crack, and you may say something utterly inane.  You probably will.  But that’s okay.  That’s just the first stroke of the pencil; the full work of art is just getting started.  The target of your affection might even find your incoherence charming**.  She might even like the way you mix and overuse metaphors!  But if you don’t say anything, then nothing at all will happen (except personal regret and self-loathing, which are overrated).

I don’t know where to go next with this, and I suspect that I’ve said all that’s useful to say about it for now…except, perhaps, to add my own correction to the irritating, related notion that “practice makes perfect.”  It doesn’t.  But it does make you better.  Indeed, the very fact that improvement is open-ended, with no practical limits, is more exciting than the notion of becoming perfect at something.  If perfection were attainable, there would be nowhere to go but down from there.  But as it stands, we can always get better and better, without limit, for as long as we’re able to do anything at all, if we keep trying.  But we do have to try; we have to say or do something.  And we’re not going to do that if we wait until we have something “perfect” to say.

TTFN

*I don’t even remember who said or wrote words to that effect.  That’s how anti-important I found the idea.

**And she might not.  This is the real world, after all, and sometimes the person you like just doesn’t reciprocate.  Likewise, not everyone will like every story, or article, or painting, or song, or sculpture, or whatever.  Universal popularity is at least as great a phantasm as perfection.