Renaissance Guy (Mobile)

The Business Plot

For about a year now I’ve been sitting on a business idea. It’s not, like, the kind of business idea that makes anyone rich. On the sliding scale from lemonade stand to Amazon, this is much closer to the former. I think it will probably turn a profit, but I have no illusions about striking it rich and launching myself onto the pages of Forbes. Looking at the numbers realistically, I will be pleasantly surprised if I can make enough money to keep myself above the poverty line. It’s cliche, but I’m really not in it for the money, I’m in it for the thing.

My idea is for a board game, and it’s a game that I think is interesting to a wide range of people, and also deserves to be made, or at least attempted. I’m not going to share too many details, because if spending high school economics class watching clips of Shark Tank posted to YouTube has taught me anything, it’s that you don’t show your idea off until you have the legal grounds to sue any copycats into oblivion.

The obvious question of why I don’t sign it to a board game publisher has a complicated answer that relies on context that I don’t want to share at this time. But the long and short of it is that, if I’m doing this, it’s a project that I’m pursuing for personal reasons, and based on what I’ve heard from people who have gone through game publishing, they’re reasons I have cause to fear a publisher won’t respect, or might try to renege on. And besides that, there’s a part of me that’s tickled by the idea of being an entrepreneur and not having to answer to anyone (except, you know, manufacturers, contractors, accountants, taxes, regulators, and of course, consumers).

So I have the idea. I have a vague idea of what my end goals and expectations are, and some notion of the path towards them. Whether or not I’m “committed” in the sense that the guides say you need to be to be an entrepreneur, it’s an idea that I’d like to see exist, and I’m willing to throw what money and time I can spare at it. If there was any job that could ever motivate me to wake up early, this project would be one of them. The people I’ve talked to about this privately have told me it’s a good idea, including a business professor who, upon hearing my pitch, immediately endorsed it and tried to convert me to take her class. I think there’s something here.

And that’s about where I got stuck. I managed to make a prototype last summer, shortly after the idea popped into my head, and I’ve been play-testing and reviewing the rules a bit, but this is just circling the problem, and I know it. My next step is that I need to move forward on iterating the prototype towards a sellable product, and on looking into getting some cursory idea of costs. In practice this means getting quotes from manufacturers, which means I need some kind of email account and web presence.

Theoretically, I could throw up a Gmail account and launch that process off today (well, not today; I have homework, but basically any time). But conducting such business under my own name, or even under an arbitrary trade name is both murky for tax purposes, and depending on whom you consult, somewhat legally risky, since it puts all the liability squarely on your head. It’s also less clean than setting up a proper web platform with a fancy custom URL and a logo to handle everything centrally. It’s the same reason I have a patreon already set up for this blog- even if I’m not raking in the big bucks today, I’d rather be prepared for that day with the proper infrastructure than have to scramble if I suddenly go viral.

But setting up a website and branding materials effectively demands that I have, at the very least, an established brand name that can be trademarked. And doing that requires that I have the relevant paperwork filed to incorporate a business. It’s something of a point of no return, or at least a point past which returning becomes increasingly difficult and expensive. To this end I have spent quite a few free hours perusing the available information on starting up a startup and building a business. And let me just say, for as much talk that’s made about making life easy for small businesspeople, and lip service paid encouraging entrepreneurship, I expected it to be a heck of a lot more straightforward. Even the Small Business Administration, whose entire mandate is to make starting new businesses as painless as possible, is a convoluted and self-contradictory mess.

The problem isn’t so much a lack of available information as a lack of concrete information I can act upon. The website can’t seem to decide whether it wants to be written for laypeople or lawyers, and in failing to pick a side is decipherable to both. Most government websites are difficult to navigate, but I would’ve expected an agency whose sole job is to make life easier would be less egregious.

But it’s not that I can’t find a form to fill out. Again, I could always pick a name and a business structure out of a hat and plow forward. The differences between a partnership and an LLC at the size I’m looking at, while not irrelevant, are perhaps less of the deciding factor that they’re made out to be. The problem is figuring out a way to start this project that lets me keep my dependent status and hence my health insurance. Because while I’m willing to throw time and money and endure paperwork for this idea, I’m not willing to go without life support. Or rather, I’m not able to go without life support.

I think there’s a loophole that lets me have my cake, and also not die an agonizing death. But I’m not an expert on this field, and this isn’t a risk I want to take. If it’s a question between starting a business that I earnestly believe will change the world for the better, if only incrementally, and getting my life support, I’m going to pick the latter. This is really frustrating. I mean, I’m still head and shoulders above the people that have to pick between medicine and food, but choosing between medicine and chasing an opportunity is grating.

But what really gets me is the fact that this isn’t a problem in other countries, because other countries have guaranteed healthcare, so that potential entrepreneurs can try their hand without risking their lives. Many of these countries also have free education, transport infrastructure, and in some cases free government advisors for new businesses, all of which lower entry barriers for startups. But in the land of the free markets, we apparently hate entrepreneurs.

I digress. The point is, I’ve hit an entirely political roadblock, and it’s extremely discouraging. I haven’t set this project aside yet, because despite everything I still believe in it. Part of the reason I’m writing this is to remind myself of the excitement I feel to see this through. My hope is that I’ll be able to make some progress on this before summer. But we’ll see what’s possible for an entrepreneur in this allegedly business friendly country.

Millennial Nostalgia

Evidently the major revelation of 2019 is that I am getting old.

When they started having 1990s music as a distinct category, and “90s nostalgia” became an unironic trend in the same vein as people dressing upon the styles of the roaring 20s, or whatever the 50s were, I was able to brush it aside. After all, most of the 90s were safely before I was born. Besides, I told myself, there are clear cultural and historical delineation between the 90s they hearken back to, and my own era. I mean, after all, the 90s started still having the Soviet Union exist, and most of the cadence of them was defined by the vacuum created immediately thereafter.

If this seems like an odd thing to latch onto, perhaps it’s worth spelling out that for me, growing up, the Soviet Union became a sort of benchmark for whether something is better considered news or history. The fall of the Soviet Union was the last thing mentioned on the last page of the first history textbooks I received, and so in my head, if something was older than that, it was history rather than just a thing that happened.

Anyways, I reasoned, the 90s were history. The fact that I recognized most of the songs from my childhood I was able to safely reason away as a consequence of the trans-Pacific culture delay of living in Australia. Since time zones make live broadcasts from the US impractical, and VHS, CDs, and DVDs take time to ship across an ocean, Australia has always been at least a few months behind major cultural shifts. The internet age changed this, but not fundamentally, since media companies have a potential financial benefit if they are able to stagger release dates around the world to spread out hype and profits. So of course I would recognize some of the songs, even perhaps identify with some of them from childhood, that were listed as being from an age I considered mentally closer to antiquity than modernity.

The first references to “2000s” culture I can recall as early as 2012, but most of these struck me as toungue-in-cheek. A witty commentary on our culture’s tendency to group trends into decades, and attribute an overriding zeitgeist upon which we can gaze through rose-tinted retrospect, and from which we can draw caricatural outfits for themed parties. I chuckled along and brushed aside the mild disconcertion. Those few that weren’t obviously tongue in cheek were purely for categorization; grouping songs by the year of release, rather than attempting to bundle together the products of my childhood to put them on the shelf next to every other decade in history, and treat them with about the same regard.

A few stray references to “new millennium” or “millennial” culture I was able to dismiss, either on the grounds that it was relying on the labels provided by generational theory, or because it was referring not to the decade from 2000-2010, but that peculiar moment right around January 1st, 2000, or Y2K if you prefer, between when the euphoria of the end of the Cold War made many proclaim that we had reached the end of history, the the events of September 11th, 2001 made it painfully clear that, no, we hadn’t.

This didn’t bother me, even if the references and music increasingly struck home. It was just the cultural delay, I reasoned. The year 2000 was, in my mind, really just an epilogue to the 1990s, rather than a new chapter. Besides that, I couldn’t remember the year 2000. I mean, I’m sure things that I remember happened in that year, but there aren’t any memories tied to a particular date before 2001.
Unfortunately for me and my pleasant self-delusions, we’ve reached a tipping point. Collections of “2000s songs” are now being manually pulled together by connoisseurs and dilettantes with the intent of capturing a historical moment now passed, without the slightest wink or trace of irony. There are suggestions of how to throw a millennial party in the same way as one might a 20s gala, without any distinction between the two.

Moreover, and most alarming to my pride, there are people reading, commenting, and sharing these playlists and articles saying they weren’t born yet to hear the music when it came out, but wish they had been.
While I’m a bit skeptical that the people leaving these comments are actually so young (I suspect they were already born, but just weren’t old enough to remember or be listening to music), it’s not impossible. For some of the songs I remember watching the premiere of the music video with friends, a person born that year would now be old enough that in many states they could drive themselves to their 2000s themed party. In parts of Europe, they’d be old enough to drink at the party.
We’ve now reached a point where I can no longer have my entire life have happened recently, in the same historical era. Much of the music and culture I recall being new, cutting edge, and relevant, is not only no longer hip and happening, but has come out the other end, and is now vintage and historical. In a single sentence, I am no longer young, or at lest not as young as I would like to think myself.

In a sense, I knew this was coming. But having it illustrated is still a gut punch. It’s not so much that I think of myself as young and with it as a part of my identity, and this shift has shaken part of me. I know I’m not the life fast die young party animal our culture likes to applaud and poke fun at. I never have been, and probably never will be. That ship hasn’t so much sailed, as suffered failure on launch, with the champagne bottle at the ceremony causing a valve to come loose in the reactor room.

I might have held out hope that it could someday be salvaged; that a few years from now when my life support technology is more autonomous, I would have the opportunity to go to parties and get blackout drunk without having to worry that between medication side effects, and the risk of life support shenanigans while blacked out, the affair would probably kill me. But if that goes down as the tradeoff- if I never go to a real five alarm teen party, but instead I live to 100, I could grit my teeth and accept it.

What does bother me is the notion that I am getting properly old. To be more specific, the notion that I’ve stopped growing up and have started aging is alarming, because it suggests that I’ve hit my peak, at least physiologically. It suggests that things aren’t going to get any better than they are now, and are only going to get worse with time.

This is a problem. My back and joints already ache enough on a good day to give me serious pause. My circulation is poor, my heart and lungs struggle to match supply and demand, and my nervous system has a rebellious streak that leads my hands to shake and my knees to buckle. My immune system puts me in the same category as a chemotherapy patient, let alone an elderly person. In short, I don’t have a lot to lose should y faculties start to decline. So long as I’m young, that’s not a problem. There remains the possibility that I might grow out of some of my issues. And if I don’t, there’s a good chance that medical technology will catch up to meet me and solve my problems.

But the medical advances on the table now promise only to halt further degradation. We have some ideas about how to prevent age-related tissue damage, but we still won’t be able to reverse harm that’s already been done. People that are still still young when the technology is discovered might be able to love that way forever, but short of another unseen and unimagined breakthrough, those who are old enough to feel the effects of aging won’t be able to be young again, and might simply be out of luck.

A clever epistemologist might point out here that this problem isn’t actually unique. The speculative technology angle might add a new dimension to the consideration, but the central issue is not a novel dilemma. After all, this existentialist dread at one’s own aging and mortality is perhaps the oldest quandary of the human experience. I may perhaps feel it somewhat more acutely relative to where my chronological age would place me in modern society, but my complaints are still far from original.

Unsurprisingly, the knowledge that my problems are older than dirt, and have been faced by every sapient being, is not comforting. What solidarity I might feel with my predecessors is drastically outweighed by my knowledge that they were right to fear age, since it did get them in the end.

This knowledge does contain one useful and actionable nugget of wisdom- namely, that if the best minds of the last twelve millennia have philosophized inconclusively for countless lifetimes, I am unlikely to reach a satisfactory end on my own. Fighting against the tide of time, railing against 2000s nostalgia, is futile and worthless. Acting indignant and distressed about the whole affair, while apparently natural to every generation and perhaps unavoidable as a matter of psychology, is not a helpful attitude to cultivate. The only thing left, then, is to embrace it.

Half Mast

If my blog had a flag, it would be at half-mast today. For the third time in recent memory, a friend of a friend has been killed in a mass shooting, marking the sixth such event to which I’ve had some kind of personal connection. The victim, in this case, was a father, the sole breadwinner for a family with special needs, who moved in the same communities as I do. There is now an open question as to how the mother, who has so far stayed home to manage the children’s health, will make ends meet with the cost of life support.

This is, of course, only the latest tragedy in a series of horrors, about which I have made my feelings quite clear: this is unacceptable. It is a national disgrace that we allow this level of violence, which would be unacceptable even in a failed state, to continue with only token measures taken against it, in what is allegedly the greatest country on earth. Our continued inability to act decisively is an affront to the victims and survivors.

I believe I have already made my position on guns and regulations about them quite clear: we need to do a lot better in a hurry. There is little more for me to say that isn’t beating a dead horse. But the lives of my comrades demands, at the barest minimum, a societal conversation more in depth than mere thoughts and prayers. And since I have little faith that the powers that be will fulfill this obligation, I suppose it falls on me to add to the conversation.

One of the things I have heard said in recent weeks is that shootings are a meme issue- that is, they generate a disproportionate amount of attention and media compared to the number of actual deaths in context. This is a hard claim to argue against, epistemologically. After all, how do you argue that something isn’t receiving too much attention? Relative to what? Claiming that the news spends not enough time on boring, everyday items seems to misrepresent the function of news- to report things that are newsworthy.

But beyond this, I feel it ignores a larger point. Saying that shootings are a meme issue requires an acknowledgement that it is, at the very least, a thing that happens. It is an issue, not just a one-time tragedy, (or, for that matter, a two, three, or so on -time tragedy). It is arguably not an issue of the same numerical scale as global poverty, or food prices, or nuclear proliferation. But even if shooting deaths are not as numerous as, say, cancer deaths, it is an issue that causes an unacceptably large number of totally unnecessary deaths.

And the deaths are unnecessary. There is no such thing as an unavoidable death by shooting. Mass shootings, terrorism, assassinations, accidents, even ordinary crime where guns are involved, are totally preventable with far more stringent restrictions on civilian weapon ownership, and better training and resources for law enforcement and intelligence services to enforce these measures. Proliferation of weapons is not some unavoidable part of human nature, it is a hallmark of a failed state.

What really bugs me, though, isn’t knowing that we could and must do better, but seeing how we do, for other issues. It’s not that Americans have some deep and inflexible fixation with libertarian ideals, that we are willing to stoically accept that it is ultimately the price we pay for a just and free society, to have some people die from the abuse of freedom rather than engage the slippery slope of restricting it. That would be an argument that I would ultimately disagree with on the basis of moral priorities, but could at least acknowledge for its self-consistency. But it isn’t that. Americans aren’t absolute in their freedom. We set aside our principles all the time, for all different causes, from having working roads and schools, to letting police and intelligence agencies treat our online lives as having none of our rights as citizens, to anything involving any kind of travel.

Air travel is the most obvious example. We, as a society, decided almost twenty years ago that no act of airline terrorism on American soil was an acceptable price to pay for individual liberty. As a result, we took drastic actions to prevent a relatively rare scenario that not only kills fewer than guns, but fewer people than lightning strikes. We didn’t have to declare War on Terror; we could’ve tracked down the individual perpetrators, and then said that trying to prevent every madman from getting onto a plane was an impossible task in a non-totalitarian country. But we decided instead that this was a matter of principle. That we couldn’t afford to do anything less. We decided to treat a meme issue, and we dealt with it.

It would not be beyond our capacity to eliminate gun violence. If we were committed, in the same way we are committed to stamp out terrorism, it would not be difficult. Instead, we are told that scores of schoolchildren, teachers, fathers, mothers, friends, and first responders being killed every year is unavoidable, while those saying so live and work behind checkpoints and soldiers to ensure they will never face the consequences of failing to act.

Operation Endrun

I find myself with very little to say these days. Not because I don’t have anything to say, but because I don’t have the time or energy to put it in order. This is a recurring problem for me, particularly of late. Of course, a lot of it is because I’ve been kept on the back foot for a few weeks in a row now. Over the course of the last three weeks I’ve seemingly fallen prey to Murphy’s Law, with things piling up and compounding. I haven’t slept well, I’ve been having trouble thinking straight, and while I’ve avoided missing any particularly egregious deadlines in my classes, I feel more like I’ve been treading water than swimming forward.

Amid all of this, I missed putting up a post last week without noticing. I was actually pretty sure I had done something. In fact, if you’d asked me at the end of last week whether I posted anything, I would have been fairly sure I had already done that. I probably would have bet money on it. And I would’ve been wrong. This isn’t the first or only thing I’ve lost track of in the last few weeks, but it is arguably the biggest; or perhaps better stated, one of the things more resistant to forgetting that I nevertheless forgot.

This is bad. Distraction and confusion on this level is dangerous. This time around it was a missing a post that didn’t go up. Next time it might be a school assignment, which would be bad. Worst case scenario, I might space out and forget about my life support routine. I don’t think it would kill me, but that’s the kind of risk I try very hard not to take. Whatever is causing this fugue, whether that’s a lack of sleep, too much slacking an procrastinating, or not enough productive projects to focus on, needs to be brought under control. People with my condition don’t have the luxury of being distracted. I know this.

Of course, saying something is bad and doing something to solve it are very different. And it’s difficult to turn my life upside down in order to find and eliminate the source of a problem while also going ahead with schoolwork and other plans. So, what’s the plan?

Well, first I need to get ahead in my schoolwork. The plan here is twofold: first, to make sure I’m covered for traveling next weekend. Second, getting ahead will give me the breathing room I need to begin the next set of endeavors. This kind of planning would’ve been impossible in high school, because my teachers were never so organized as to provide expectation ahead of time of what I needed to do, which I think was partially responsible for the tendency for things to snowball. College, however, has proven far easier to navigate, with important items being listed on syllabi well in advance. Consequently, it is possible for me to make plans that include completing work ahead of time.

Second, I need to get my sleep schedule under control. This is a pain, because the only way I have found to reliably enforce a sleep schedule is to wake up early, and force myself out of bed, so that by the time night falls, I feel exhausted enough to fall asleep. This is always a miserable process, because, as I have mentioned previously, I am not a morning person. Waking up early is physically painful to me. I have designed most of my current life around the premise of never needing to wake up before 11am. This will be a sacrifice. But it is necessary.

Third, I need to get up and around more. Winter often has the effect of causing me to spend most of my days inside and sitting down, since I don’t tolerate the cold well enough to go for walks. This, I suspect, is bad for concentration, and it certainly weakens my stamina over time-something I can scarcely afford to lose.

Will I actually accomplish these things? Dunno. But by writing them down and posting them, I’m more likely to try.

Fully Automated Luxury Disk Jockeys

Here’s an interesting observation with regards to automation- with the exception of purely atmospheric concerns, we have basically automated the disk jockey, that is, the DJ, out of a job. Pandora’s music genome project, Google’s music bots, Apple’s Genius playlists, and whatever system Spotify uses, are close enough for most everyday purposes.

Case in point- my university got it in their heads that students were becoming overwhelmed with finals. This is obviously not a major revelation, but student stress has become something of a moral and political hot issue of late. The purported reason for this is the alarmingly high rate of suicides among college students- something which other universities have started to act on. Canada, for instance, has added more school breaks throughout the year during the weeks when suicide rates peak. Other schools have taken more pragmatic measures, like installing suicide nets under tall bridges.

Of course, the unspoken reason for this sudden focus on mental health is because the national political administration has made school shootings a matter of mental health prevention, rather than, say, making guns harder to get. My university, like my hometown, lies in the shadow of Newtown, and plenty of students here lost people firsthand. Most of us went to schools that went on lockdown that day. The university itself has had two false alarms, and police teams clad in armor and machine guns already patrol the campus regularly. So naturally, the university is throwing money at mental health initiatives.

Rather than do something novel, like staggering exam schedules, routine audits to prevent teachers from creating too much work for students, or even abolishing final exams altogether as has been occasionally proposed, the powers that be settled on the “Stress Free Finals Week” Initiative, whereby the school adds more events to the exam week schedule. I’m not sure how adding more social events to a time when students are already pressed to cram is supposed to help, but it’s what they did.

As a commuter and part time student, most of this happens on the periphery for me. But when, through a series of events, I wound up on campus without anything to do nor a ride home, I decided I may as well drop by. After all, they were allegedly offering free snacks if I could find the location, and being a college student, even though I had just gorged myself on holiday cookies and donuts at the Social Sciences Department Holiday Party, I was already slightly peckish. They were also advertising music.

I got there to find the mid-afternoon equivalent of a continental breakfast- chips, popcorn, donuts, and cookies. Perhaps I had expected, what with all the research on the gut-brain connection, that an event purporting to focus on mental health would have a better selection. But no matter. There was a place to sit away from the sleet outside, and free snacks. The advertised DJ was up front blasting music of questionable taste at a borderline objectionable volume, which is to say, normal for a college campus.

Except the DJ wasn’t actually playing the music. He didn’t interact with any of the equipment on the table during the time I watched, and on several occasions he surrendered any pretense of actually working by leaving the table to raid the snacks, and then sat down at another table to eat while the music handled itself. No one else seemed to think this strange, but it struck me to think that for all I know, he might have just set up a YouTube Music playlist and let the thing run, and earned money for it. Heck, he wouldn’t even have to select the playlist manually- bots can do that part too.

There are two takeaway observations here. The first is that computer automation is happening here and now, and the first wave of that automation is hitting now. I feel it worth noting that this isn’t just manual labor being made obsolete by mechanized muscle. While it might not exactly be white collar, a modern DJ is a thinking job. Sure, it doesn’t take a genius to hit shuffle on iTunes, but actually selecting songs that match a mood and atmosphere for a given event, following up with an appropriate song, and knowing to match the differing volumes on recordings with the desired speaker volume takes at least some level of heuristic thinking. We’ve made it fairly low-hanging fruit for bots in the way we label songs by genre already, but the fact we’re already here should be worrying for people that are worried about automation-driven mass unemployment.

The second takeaway is a sort of caveat to the first, namely; even if this guy’s job was automated, he still got paid. An argument can be made that this is a function of bureaucratic inefficiency and an enterprising fellow playing the system in order to get paid to be lazy. And while this would be a fair observation, there’s another interpretation that I think is yet more interesting. Because the way I see it, it’s not like the university misunderstood what they were buying. They advertised having a DJ. They could have found any idiot to hook up an iPhone speaker and press shuffle, but instead they hired someone.

There was a cartoon a while back that supposed that in the future, rather than automation causing a total revolution in man’s relationship with work, that we would simple start to put more value into more obscure and esoteric commodities. The example provided was a computer running on “artisanal bits” – that is, a Turing-complete setup of humans holding up signs for ones and zeroes. The implication is that increasing wealth inequality will drive more artificial distinctions in patterns of consumption. Rich people become pickier the richer they get, and since they’re rich, they can drive demand for more niche products to provide work for the masses.

This hypothesis would fit with current observations. Not only would it explain why institutions are still willing to hire human DJs in the age of music bots, but it would explain why trends like organic foods, fair trade textiles, and so on seem to be gaining economic ground. It’s an interesting counter argument to the notion that we’re shaping up for mass unemployment.

I still think this is a horribly optimistic outlook. After all, if the owning minority can’t be bothered to pay living wages in the process of making their wealth in the first place, why would they feel a need to employ a substantial number of people after the fact? There’s also a fundamental limit on how much a single person can consume*, and the number of people who can be gainfully employed in service of a single person’s whims has a functional limit, after which employment stops being accurately described as work, and is more like private welfare. Which makes this not so much a repudiation of the problem of the problem of automation induced mass unemployment, as another possible solution. Still, it’s a thing to keep in mind, and for me, a good reminder to pay attention to what’s actually happening around me as well as what models and experts say should happen.

*Technically, this isn’t true. A person with infinite money could easily spend infinite money by purchasing items for which the prices are artificially inflated through imposed scarcity, speculative bubbles, and other economic buzzwords. But these reflect peculiarities in the market, and not the number of people involved in their production, or the quality of their work.

In Accordance With the Shutdown

In accordance with the partial shutdown of the US Federal Government, this blog has activated its contingency protocol to ensure compliance with the Antideficiency Act. Consequently, in order to maximize available resources and meet all of our ongoing mission requirements, the remainder of this post will include only prime-numbered words from a normal post.

Lately there has talk our something “Orwellian”. Accurate, interest public mind, examine original. That, “Theory Collectivism”, purpose writing. Library: Irreconcilable. Remain are. Trade with. Low, abiding intermittently daily, abolish distinctions, shall equal. History, same outlines again. Capacity govern. Overthrown the, enlist liberty. Objective, thrust servitude, cycle.

Low never. Softening revolution equality millimeter. Historic masters. Nineteenth, obvious observers. Cyclical, equality unalterable human. Doctrine adherents, change: hierarchical high. Aristocrats upon, compensation. Fraternity. Tyranny overthrown. […]

Oligarchies, circumstances. Practitioners, cheating. Knowledge delusion; rational. World-conquest fanaticism. Unexampled, the contradictions. Mystique paraphernalia.

Resolutions for 2019

Per tradition, here are the three main items I’ve settled on as my publicly-declared 2019 New Year’s Resolutions.

1. Get a Haircut

Some variation of this has made its way onto my list for the past four years or so, even if I haven’t always included it when I publish my goals. This is partly tongue in cheek- a little joke to remind myself that it’s not life or death if not everything goes to plan. But aside from the fact that I do, in fact, need a haircut in the near future, putting some low-hanging fruit on my list helps remind me that I’m serious about getting these things done. There is also an important theme of self-care here. It’s funny, because you’d think for the inordinate amount of time, thought, and energy I put into my health and keeping me alive, that I’d be better at making sure I shave, brush my teeth, and avoid sitting in the same place and staring at a screen until my eyes burn. But actually, no, I’m pretty bad at that stuff, because next to the things I need to do to stay alive, everything else seems like a very distant second. So I need to remind myself from time to time that there’s more to being healthy than just the things that keep me alive.

2. Find a regular activity, or set of activities

It turns out, having very little experience with actually having free time, I often find myself at a loss when there’s nothin bearing down on me. Consequently, I need to find a better thing to do than just pace around like an idle villager in age of empires when my work is completed. I haven’t decided what exactly that will shape out to be. I have no shortages of projects that I put on pause when I started classes, but I don’t know whether any of them are suited to my purpose. I’d also like to draw up some notion of how much time is an appropriate amount of time to spend on video games, because while I think playing games is a good way to kick back and pass time, without any sort of yardstick, I find myself playing perhaps more than I would think wise if I were actually planning my time. This sounds like a separate resolution, but it’s actually the same thing- I want to come up with a set of activities and a balance that lets me have multiple vectors of outputs without pouring everything I’ve got on a given day into one particular item.

3. Stop procrastinating on correspondence

This has been a vice of mine since basically the first time I got an email. I have a tendency to postpone responding to things, often without a good reason, until the deadline for whatever it was passes. I know I’m sabotaging myself, and I don’t enjoy procrastinating, because some part of me is still agonizing about the thing. What makes this habit slightly more difficult to kick is the fact that there are genuinely circumstances when it’s better that I postpone responding to things. When I’m sick, for instance, I often don’t respond rationally or properly to people, and I’ve gotten myself in trouble this way more than once. So I need to find a balance between jumping the gun and shooting myself in the foot. I’ve gotten better at this, but not good enough yet.

Re-examining my 2018

I find myself these last few days at something of a loss. I am in a situation of being enrolled in classes, but having nothing to do. It’s not that I merely have some leeway before my next deadline, I actually have nothing to do because I am caught up. Unlike the only instances of free time in recent memory, this time it isn’t because I lack direction, or have been compelled to take time off because of health concerns. I am exactly more or less where I am supposed to be, and I have nothing to do. And I’m not sure how to handle it.

This is a good microcosm of a recurring theme of the past year, or at least the past six months. Feelings of being out of place or off balance have mixed in with an occasional dash of pride or accomplishment when it has been clear that I am the only one who knows the answer. I won’t say that college classes have been easy, because there have been challenging moments, and I’ve had to stretch myself to make sure I finish everything that needs to be turned in despite my disabilities. But for as much as I’ve spent the last several months waiting in anticipation for the other shoe to drop, for the sword to fall, and for the administrators and professors to turn out to be as bad as high school, or worse, things have gone better than I might have feared.

I’m hesitant to look a gift horse in the mouth here. But I strive to be above all self aware. And moreover, as I am formulating a new batch of resolution snow for the new year, it is only proper that I conduct an in depth reflection on what has worked, what hasn’t, and how to improve it. So, here goes.

Workload

The fact that I’m in this situation of being finished at the end of the semester, and reasonably confident that my grades will be good without knowing the final calculation, but at the same time have been mostly busy for the semester suggests that my workload is probably in the right ballpark. There were a few times when I was sick or busy, and it was a tossup whether I would make it to class or finish the homework, but I made it through. So this is probably roughly where the balance lies between coasting and jeopardizing my health.

I’m a little frustrated at this, because while the workload was about where I could handle it, intellectually there were times when I felt bored. I don’t know whether that’s a function of the classes being introductory level, or of my classmates being some combination of uninterested, unmotivated, shy, or stupid. But when I’m single-handedly answering a supermajority of questions asked by the professor to the room, because no one else raises their hand, and when called upon can’t give a correct answer even by reading from the book, something isn’t right. I can’t afford to overwork myself, but I would like to be challenged.

This is probably my hamartia; the fatal flaw in my tragic heroism. I have the intellectual capacity to require a high degree of challenge to satisfy me, but my physical handicaps prevent me from successfully executing the challenge to the satisfaction of myself or others. This far, I have been unable to find a balance. I can either be complacent, treating everything like and idle game and phoning it in, or I can seek things that interest me, creating more work for myself than I can handle.

But perhaps I’m overdramatizing. Perhaps too shall pass, and I shall find such a balance, and unleash my full potential. Perhaps it is a simple matter of allowing myself to gain more experience and wisdom.

Activities

I wouldn’t say that my first semester of college has been unstructured, because I have been unusually organized for me. I managed to get all my assignments turned in, after all, which I don’t know has ever happened for an entire semester in my life. So yeah, I’ve been organized. Or at least, organized enough. But in saying that, I realize that my “being organized” has come about, less like a calm, orderly, elegant rule of law, and more like an oppressive, hectic, martial law.

This isn’t really a surprise to me. Since I’ve been chronically ill, which has been a long time, work happens when I’m able, and rest happens when I’m unable, whenever those happen to fall. This sounds like a horrible system for the long run, and believe me it is, but, well… you try explaining to an angry teacher that your paper is going to be a day later, because you haven’t had an hour of free time in months, when they already don’t believe that you were actually sick all of last week, or that you would still be too sick to be allowed in school if you hadn’t been mixing steroids with over the counter fever suppressants.

And I’ve grown okay with that. If I’m excited to tackle a project, in pursuit of a topic I’m interested in, I’m okay making some sacrifices. I can live with martial law if I know and support what I’m fighting for. But I think I can do better than this. I think I can get to something a little less like the academic war footing I’ve been on, and a little more, well, human. I’d like to be able to have a better answer when I’m asked what I do in my free time than “I don’t have free time; or at least, it’s so infrequent that it doesn’t merit a designated activity.” Being a cyborg is fine if it keeps me alive, but I’d rather not be seen as robotic.

I don’t know whether I could really manage to make a splash in a proper club with a regular meeting schedule, as both my parents, and the assortment of professionals the university pays to advise me on how to keep my head, would like. Organized schedules seem to be the antithesis of my health situation, and there were a few weeks last semester where I think having an extracurricular activity to get to in addition would’ve pushed me over the edge, and set back my health enough that I wouldn’t have completed classwork, and we know how that song goes.

Still, I need to find something to do. Because while my workload and commitments are mostly calibrated to be doable on my bad days, which is undoubtedly as they ought, it leaves a lot of free time when I get things done on time. Not enough or so consistently that I can feel comfortable to add more commitments, but enough that I find myself in need of some activities beyond mere distraction. This could be as simple as deciding I’m going to keep up the LEGO City better, or committing to a world conquest campaign on one of my video games.

Social Life

Well, good thing all of the areas of my life are going well. Nothing else to report. Best be wrapping up this post and putting it in the queue.
My social life? What do you mean? That’s not even a real thing. What am I supposed to reflect about it? It’s not like there are any problems there. After all, you can’t have problems in an area of life that doesn’t exist, right? Let’s be real, no one really cares as long as I get good grades.

Fine. But just so you know, it’s your fault this post is going to run long.

Look, I’ve never been popular. I’ve never had many friends (or at least, many close friends that are in my age group and live in the same geographic area). Part of this is that I’m a constantly over analyzing introvert, but a lot of it is because I’m constantly sick. Friendships are simply higher up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs than I usually get, and it’s hard to really stay close when you’re only well enough to be out in society a few times a month. You miss the little jokes and experiences that build and solidify friendships, and when you see people again, there’s an imbalance. You might feel you saw them fairly recently, because you saw them the last time you left the house, but in reality that was three weeks ago, and to them you haven’t been around for a while.

I’ve been told that rebuilding a social life (or depending on how you count, possibly building one for the first time) needs to be a priority in trying to equip myself for college. My inclination is to tell these people to clear off and get a life that doesn’t involve micromanaging mine. Why do you even care? It doesn’t matter. I’m fine. It’s fine. Everything is fine.

In reality, I’m not sure how to parse this problem, let alone solve it. As mentioned previously, I still lack the stamina to do much outside of classes. The notion of making friends with people during class, as has been occasionally suggested, strikes me as paradoxical. After all, how am I supposed to be casual with people when sitting at attention and taking notes? I can’t interrupt class to interact with my classmates, and bothering them in their free time without a pretense seems, at best improper, and a good way to make classes rather awkward.

Trying to puzzle out friendships always gives me the old feeling that I’m missing something- that some fact or piece of social intuition which is critical for being a modern social human has eluded me. When I make friends, it tends to be by accident, and I lack a sense of what is and isn’t proper for a given situation that seems to come intuitively to others. This causes huge uncertainty and anxiety about trying to arrange anything that would allow me to get to know people better. And since my health mean that I pretty much have to arrange social events on my own terms in order to avoid collapsing the house of cards of my health situation, this leaves me in a catch-22.

So my social life isn’t exactly glamorous. I’m not happy with this state of affairs, but I don’t see any ways to remedy it that aren’t going to cost me a great deal in areas that I’m currently aiming to prioritize. If it’s a choice between making friends and getting good grades, getting good grades so I can make progress towards being able to contribute back to society is going to win, hands down. If it’s a choice between making friends, and looking after my health so I can stay alive… well that’s not much of a choice, is it?

But if I can’t say I am happy, I can at least say that I am at peace, which is a marked improvement. I don’t want to jinx anything, but overall things seem to be lining up to work out so far. There are worse problems than getting easy As, and so long as I continue to be healthy and do well, there are plenty of side projects to amuse me.

Reflections on the Revolution

I’m enjoying being on break this week, so I’ve decided instead to post something I wrote but declined to publish roughly 2 years ago

I am presently writing from a well-worn park bench. It is not my favorite of the park benches, as that particular one is at such an angle relative to the setting sun that it is difficult to type. This is not a problem during the warmer months, when the trees’ leaves provide ample shade for work at all hours, but the trees are barren now, and so I am making due with an inferior bench for the purposes of this piece. Though annoying, this is an acceptable price to pay for a change of scenery and a breath of fresh air.

I spend a reasonable amount of time sitting on a bench at our local park. Our town being the stereotypical New England train village that it is, we have a charming little public park with picnic tables, a gazebo, and a small playground off of Main Street, just adjacent to the newly renovated library.

I don’t get out of the house nearly as much as I probably ought, but when I do I am immensely grateful to be able to find a place to sit down with my thoughts. I am particularly fond of our park. Though there are other benches, and indeed, other public spaces; there is, for example, a bench in front of our Town Hall, which has an arguably better view of the goings on of the town, none of these are truly community spaces in the same sense that the park is.

Our town is divided by several different churches and political organizations. Yet we all hold the park in common. It is the default rallying point for after school plans. It is the gathering place after holiday parades.

As far as aesthetics are concerned, there isn’t actually all that much to the park. There is some playground equipment off in one corner. There are some benches along the gravel paths, along with a spattering of rubbish bins and a few lampposts here and there. There is the gazebo, an old fountain that hasn’t worked since I arrived, and a small platform that is occasionally used as a stage. But other than that, it is basically just open space. This may make it sound as though I don’t appreciate the park because there are not activities hard-built into its design. On the contrary; that fact that it is an open possibility space is part of what makes it so vital to community life.

On my way into the park, I passed several banners being flown on Main Street from churches, shops, and houses applauding the pluralism and inclusiveness of our town, and many posters attached to utility poles denouncing the actions of the new political administration. While I have my own thoughts on the nature of inclusiveness in our town which lead me to believe that these people may be overestimating the exact degree of integration in our decidedly upper-crust neighborhood, seeing this display of solidarity and, if nothing else, lip service, to the idea of equality was quite heartening. Seeing these images of resistance to the new political administration being plastered on and around historical landmarks which date back to the founding of this country lead me to reflect, naturally, on the American Revolution.

One of the things which stuck with me having grown up in a formerly British, now commonwealth, country as an American expatriate was that the events which led to the formation of the United States were consistently referred to not as a revolution, but as “the American Independence war”. At the time, I brushed this off as an effect of colonial rule. However, doing a bit of reading, I have discovered that this distinction reflects not political whitewashing (at least not solely), but rather, a new consensus in understanding and interpreting history.

The argument goes that the specific battles which comprised the campaign of independence were neither a new phenomenon, nor particularly unique in history. What made these battles relevant instead of just another backwater tax rebellion, was the organization of the rebel side. What made the American revolution truly revolutionary was not the fighting, but the organization of colonists into self-governing entities. It was not the audacity to take up arms, but rather, the audacity to put mere peasants on equal footing with kings and dukes in terms of the ability to self-govern, that defined the American revolution and its later national identity.

Historians have claimed that this distinction means that the actual revolution started well before the actual fighting, and that, from a historical perspective, the correspondence committees and town meetings of the 1760s and the early 1770s were more critical than the battles of the later 1770s and 1780s [1]. For rebellions and insurrections come and go. But a revolution which has taken root in the hearts and minds of the people is far more difficult to quash.

In light of this interpretation, it is easy to understand how the local park can be such an important institution; is is, after all, the foundation of all other democratic institutions in this country. It also underscores how important the banners and posters which are now appearing on churches, telephone polls, and outside houses could become. They are symptoms of organization. And while it is too early to say whether this wave of revolutionary activity will take root, if current trends continue, it is not unreasonable to expect that this could result in a movement akin to the Tea Party on the right wing.

Personally, I would welcome such change. Since I arrived in this country from having lived overseas, it has struck me that the political climate has been consistently right of center, particularly when compared to other democratic societies [2][3]. The result, naturally, is a narrower selection of possible policy solutions to current ills. Even for those who are ardent supporters of the current political administration, this situation is still undesirable, as this kind of partisan intransigence undercuts the United States’ ability to be innovative in its policy.

As I have previously explained, good-faith opposition is the life blood of a democratic society. So is citizens’ political engagement. The United States has suffered from a lack of both in recent years.

1) Taxes and Smuggling: Prelude to Revolution. Crash Course US History. YouTube, 07 Mar. 2013. Web. 20 Mar. 2017.

2) Gallup, Inc. “Wyoming Residents Most Conservative, D.C. Most Liberal.” Gallup.com. N.p., 31 Jan. 2014. Web. 19 Mar. 2017.

3) “The American-Western European Values Gap.” Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project. N.p., 17 Nov. 2011. Web. 19 Mar. 2017.

Operation Treetopper

The last few weeks have been dominated by Operation Treetopper, my efforts to ensure that I close the year out successfully. Operation Treetopper started basically the moment that Operation Marketplace, my plan to avoid mid-semester complacency and ensure I was squared away when picking classes for next semester, ended. Operation Marketplace, in turn, followed Operation Overture, which covered the first few weeks of college classes. The point is that Treetopper has been a culmination of slightly more than seven months of effort and planning.

The two primary objectives of Operation Treetopper were my German final exam, and my Sociology final paper. The German exam was fairly straightforward. I do my best to avoid serious studying for tests, because at least in my experience, it tends to do me more harm than good. Instead, I focus on learning any material that I haven’t already learned, because even though I miraculously avoiding missing class, there were a handful of occasions when circumstances conspired to prevent me from learning the material, and I had to bluff my way through assignments.

Once that’s done, I make sure I know my German by putting on the top hits list for German speaking countries, and reading Der Spiegel, which translates as The Mirror, and is a major newspaper akin to the Times. I know that I’m making progress when I find the music distracting me from reading. I only ever find the music distracting when the words I’m hearing cross wires with words I’m reading or writing, so when the foreign songs cross that threshold, I know my brain has absorbed enough German that it considers them to be part of a language rather than just words. I don’t know if everyone’s brain works that way, or if it’s just mine, but this is how I pull off learning new languages without studying.
My sociology paper was another story entirely.

With retrospect, I can safely say that I overdid it for my sociology final paper. I mean that in both a positive and negative way. I picked a topic that I was really passionate about, which proved fertile for both research and commentary, and in the process created far more work for myself than was necessary or even prudent.

With the benefit of retrospect, and having gotten a few glimpses of what other classmates eventually settled on, there are things I would’ve done differently. Off the bat, I would’ve started earlier. I wouldn’t say I procrastinated, because I gave myself more time than I thought I’d need. Except, I severely underestimated the amount of time and effort this project would require, and the number of documents, pages, spreadsheets, tables, and graphs it would generate for me to juggle and cull down into a final paper.

Case in point: the assignment was to write four or five pages, and I assumed that I would have to fall back on my old authorial filibustering knack to fill space. In reality, I wound up barely butchering the final product down to five pages of writing, plus an additional eighteen pages of tables, graphs, data, and references that had to be put in an annex because I couldn’t fit them in the main paper, but needed them to make my point succinctly.
Also with the full benefit of hindsight, I would have been well served to take the professor up on his offer to meet and discuss refining and operationalizing topics for my survey. I didn’t do this because I thought my topic was already a sufficiently niche topic that it didn’t need refining. I was wrong about this, partly because, as previously mentioned, I vastly underestimated the length it would take to tackle my topic, but also partially because I expected that I would be working on well-trodden ground, scientifically, when in fact, near as I could tell from the literature review, my investigation proved to be fairly novel.

The other reason I didn’t want to refine my topic was because I was excited about it. I knew that I wanted to tackle medical identification and the factors going into adherence essentially since the moment I read the syllabus, and saw that we could do a survey for our paper. I knew it was topical to the course, and I knew that my background with the topic would enable me to write a paper that would earn me a good grade pretty much regardless of the details, but more than that, I wanted to tackle the topic. I was excited to use my newfound skills to tackle a real problem from my life that profoundly affects people I care about.

This is, at least for me, the point of education. It’s why I go to class, even when I don’t feel well, or have better things to do. I want to learn, so that I can fix the world. And in my experience, when an exciting topic like this appears fully-formed, those are usually the best projects. Because whether or not they wind up getting the best score, they make the work of an assignment fun, and they’re good opportunities to learn something.

Moreover, this enthusiasm shows in the end product. There’s sometimes a trade off if following the thing you’re interested in means bending the criteria of the assignment (see again: twenty-three pages instead of five), but I’ve always found this to be a worthwhile trade off it it means I can give my best effort on something I care about. And I think most teachers feel the same way.

I don’t regret my choice of topic. And understanding that I made them based on what I knew at the time, I don’t regret the decisions I made about my paper. My biggest, and really only, complaint with the end product, is that I overestimated how long five pages was, and had to cut down my writing when I quite would’ve enjoyed expounding further on the results.
Operation Treetopper has accomplished something that I wasn’t sure was possible- I have been able to declare victory for the end of the semester without any lingering make-up assignments, or uncertainty about whether I’m really done. It’s anticlimactic, and a little unreal to me. But it’s the best Christmas gift I could have wished for, and it gives me hope that next year can be even better.