Just a Gwai Lo - fun within prescribed limits

Jared Diamond discusses problems and sees four types of reasons, in terms of a sequence, as to why societies make—or don't make—decisions about them : 1) that societies fail to see them coming; 2) that societies see them coming but do nothing to stop them; 3) that a problem has occured and does not know how to solve it; and 4) societies see the problems and try to solve them, but fail to. He writes: “The question that most intrigued my UCLA students was one that hadn't registered on me: how on Earth could a society make such an obviously disastrous decision as to cut down all the trees on which they depended? For example, my students wondered, what did the Easter Islanders say as they were cutting down the last palm tree? Were they saying, think of our jobs as loggers, not these trees? Were they saying, respect my private property rights? Surely the Easter Islanders, of all people, must have realized the consequences to them of destroying their own forest. It wasn't a subtle mistake. One wonders whether — if there are still people left alive a hundred years from now — people in the next century will be equally astonished about our blindness today as we are today about the blindness of the Easter Islanders.”

Sasha Frere-Jones on Timbaland and the Neptunes: “Rather than specializing in any single part of the songwriting process, the Virginians are creating their own idiosyncratic summations of everything that has worked in the last 20 years of pop. They're harvesters, not crop-burners, and their work is the product of lives lived through digital technology. If you can hear any music you want, all the time, chances are good you'll become an astute judge of what works and what doesn't. Digital technology also enables you to turn what you're hearing in your head into great recordings without waiting for humans, or history, to catch up with you.”

cnwb comments: “Interesting to hear that Timbaland was never a musician. As a non-musician myself, I've always been of the opinion that music is a language that can be learnt by rote through immersion in its logic [...] Learning to play music doesn't equate to a privileged listening position - its structures are familiar to us all, its melodies and rhythms and textures.”

In response to the recent controversy, Yule Heibel has a brief history of the breast as propaganda: “In painting after painting, Mary is shown as the life-sustainer of Jesus, via her exposed breast and implied lactation. There were even instances when the lactation was made explicit [...] Bernard had worn himself out practically shouting Monstra te esse Matrem ("Show yourself a mother") at a statue of Mary nursing Jesus, when, lo, the statue came to life and squeezed its breast to squirt a stream of warm milk directly into Bernard's open mouth.”

A few weeks ago, Dean Esmay wrote some advice for men on what to do when women come to men looking for someone to talk to. The juicy portion is worth quoting at some length:

Indeed, I have one recommendation for every male on the planet, one that I think each and every male needs to learn: When a woman is upset about something, and she is telling you why she is upset, do not make any suggestions about what she could do to fix her situation.

I mean it. Don't do it. If she's describing to you why she's upset, about almost anything, never, never, never, never, never, never, NEVER give so much as the hint of a suggestion as to what she could do about it. Just listen, and nod, and tell her how that you can relate to how and why she's upset.

You're not being patronizing if you do this. You're just getting your head into the female psyche. Because if you make so much as one suggestion about what she could do to fix the situation, she will think you are an asshole.

The emphases are his. He says it should be in the Bible, but it's already in my bible, Good Intentions: The Nine Unconscious Mistakes of Nice People by Duke Robinson: “Although we may receive a great deal of affirmation from those who believe rescuing is what nice people ought to do for friends, these efforts are a mistake.” Robinson says this is so because—and I use his headings, so the following words are his—it doesn't work, it prolongs their destructive behaviour, it perpetuates dependence on us, it involves deception, it harms us, and it is another, more subtle form of addiction. (Note that Esmay is giving advice, also a sin in Robinson's book.) Esmay goes on to change the subject and talk about what he likes in women, and the things they are better than men at.

Julia responds by talking about her life with her husband. She cites Fran, who says: “If you ask a guy how something feels emotionally, he typically says, even with the best of intentions, “I don't know. I hadn't thought about it.”” In other words, guys can get emotional, but we hide them "better".

Lisa says she “often percieved my husband's efforts to "fix" my problem as a strategy (however unconscious) of avoiding getting in here with me with my uncomfortable emotions.” "However unconcious"?

All are worth reading and considering on their merits. They all deal with married couples, and not being in a married relationship, but with enough experience "listening" to women, I can say that it's not worth it. It's not listening that's the problem, really, but what many women say to their best guy friends and the expectation that they have to listen to it without consequences, especially without the women considering that what they say might be construed by the men as negative. Many times, these men will judge negatively what the women are telling them, but, wisely, they keep this to themselves. When these men make the mistake of telling women to whom they "listen" about their negative judgment, then they, the men, are castigated for not being "true friend". Honesty, it seems, is not the best policy but rather silence. In other words negatively construing what a woman tells a man is best done not at all.

I got tired of "listening" about a year ago. Before going on, I must, however, make a concession: all relationships require maintenance. Also, everybody needs to air out their grievances once in a while, be it about the person with whom they are having the conversation or somebody else. (Better somebody else, and someone who can keep a secret. In the age of the Internet, that is more and more difficult.) So when female friends came to me about their difficulties with their boyfriends, yes, they just needed someone to talk to and I tried my best to nod my head and ask questions and not propose solutions. Because sometimes proposing solutions means you become part of the problem.

So while proposing a solution is an error to be avoided, it is usually the direct result of a prior error, and that is listening to the complaints in the first place. I stopped doing that about a year ago, when a women—whom I hardly even knew, it should be added—msg'd me saying that she had just broke up with her boyfriend. Instead of being the "nice", "compassionate" "listener" I used to be, I didn't respond, and waited for her to logout. We haven't talked since.

There are relationships I have with women that I don't want to lose, because, put plainly, it's fun having them around. They're interesting people who do interesting things and talk about interesting things. It took me a while to realize that one friend of mine was less intimidating than I led myself to believe, as when I actually listened to what she said, what she had to say was interesting and she was unlike many of my female friends in that she didn't park any of her personal drama in my lap. It took me a while to realize that when she talked, she made me forget about myself. Some of the other women I listened to were because I thought they might one day be my girlfriend. (In the long-run, maybe that works, but I'm no longer willing to stick around to find out.) Other women I "listened" to, but felt no romantic or sexual attraction to—that is not to suggest they are not attractive—just needed someone to be there. Well, I'm done with that.

I won't pretend to know what the alternative is to "listening", nor do I know what options women who expect to find in me someone who will "listen" have. I tried convincing one woman that I was tired of being her "girlfriend". Maybe "big sister", in the sense that Milhouse was Lisa's "big sister"—I loved how Milhouse's brain erroneously told him “When she sees you'll do anything she says, she's bound to respect you”—would have been a better analogy. Regardless, she needed a female friend who better understood what she was going through in whom she could confide than a guy who would never understand. I also can't give much counsel on how to avoid the conversations that lead to "listening". Maybe some kind of protocol or cookie-cutter sentence like "Look, this is really none of my business" is needed for when women bring up the subject of their vaginas or of their asshole boyfriends' capricious temper. To avoid even the mere subject being brought up, what I need to figure out—and what guys who are known for their "listening" skills also need to figure out—is how to be so busy being active members of society that they won't even have time to be a "listener", saving themselves torment while at the same time doing the things that actually get them girlfriends.

Steven Den Beste: “We engineers have a saying: A man whose only tool is a hammer sees the entire world as nails needing to be pounded. I can't say that I'm surprised to see a professor of Political Science making the claim that the decisions of political leaders are exclusively responsible for establishing the course of history, and that nothing else mattered. ¶ I'm deeply bothered by such a claim from a professor of Political Science, but I can't say I'm surprised. After all, the evidence contradicting that claim could only come from a study of History, and History is a different department.”

Yesterday I was reading an article in a magazine about John Kerry and his "surprise" candidacy (a surprise especially to those who read and write weblogs for a living), and had to stop mid-way because it occured to me that I wasn't learning anything. That's not to say there wasn't anything new to learn in the article, but the subject matter, on the more general level—i.e. politics—was something I've been not only reading about for years, but studied as my major in college. It was a subject that I naturally, when reading tables of contents of magazines, look for. This is a problem.

There weren't any magazines on the rack that had a subject matter of anything new to me, except for the fishing magazine. I have no interest in fishing, which is really too bad, because there are many, many people who do it not to catch fish but for the serenity of the outdoors as well as to just pass the time. There are other things that are more important that, while I have no interest in, are things that will probably come in handy somewhere down the line. Like how to fix a flat tire. It's a little funny that I'm learning a lot from weblogs on subjects I know relatively little about (like ancient history and regular expressions), so it's probably time to learn something about something I know nothing about, like car repair or girls. There are enough weblogs about the latter, but that seems to be knowledge where either you got it or you ain't. I've done fairly well for myself in things where I no formal training (e.g. computers), but yeah, that's as if knowlege about computers were marketable these days. The point is that, to strain the analogy, sometimes we need to study in a totally different department from the one we're used to in order to stretch our minds.

Halldór Laxness: “Suddenly the pauper's irresistible flood of talk engulfed the great independent household where everybody stood on his own feet. Talking she came across the marshes with her bundle on her back, and she talked ceaselessly all that day long till naked she climbed talking into bed beside the grandmother and little Nonni. Her talk dripped through the days like a leak that nothing can stop. She talked to herself as she raked the hay together in the meadow, and the boys closed slyly in upon her and listened: she discussed parish affairs, parish affairs, agriculture, and private matters, inquired into paternities and adulteries, flayed even the landed farmers for starving their sheep, branded respectable parishioners as thieves, and attacked the Bailiff, the minister, and even the Sherriff, reviling the authorities where others could see nothing but wet marshes, and always getting the better of the issue because her opponents were many miles awy. She poured out a continual stream of curses, complaining most of all over what she called the scandalous tyranny of mankind. This tyranny of mankind was such a thorn in her flesh that, regardless of whether she was talking to herself, to the others, to the bitch, to the sheep that chanced to cross the mowing, or to the ignorant song-birds of the air, all her discourse, waking and sleeping, revolved about this one hub. She lived in continual and altogether hopeless revolt against this loathsome oppression, and for that reason there was something rash, insolent, and vindictive in her eyes, something reminiscent of the eyes of an evil but indeterminate animal that one had seen in dreams; formless, but terrifying in its proximity.”

Jen: “Lots of people say they hate January with the lack of sunlight etc. January's not so bad. When it's dark almost all the time, I don't feel bad about letting things slide. It's cozy and comforting to snuggle up with myself in the dark infront of the TV. February though, with the winter bulbs starting to bloom and the slowly increasing hours of sunlight, just serves to remind me exactly how lethargic I've become and how much I need to work on to get back into the groove.”

Nikki, after talking to a guy that wished he could spend more time with his girlfriend: “Preferred time left? Do guys really think this way? He told me that she was feeling the same way and didn't know why she hadn't ended things. I started laughing once again. I then continued to tell him how sometimes girls tend to hold on to hope and usually wait for guys to end it. That way they don't have to do the "what if's"”

One of the guys who were discussing what "the American version of The Office" meant, and how the survivors from Lost got to where they were, also said, not necessarily in the context of TV:

Discovery does not equal creation.

I immediately thought of the Web 2.0 equivalent: "sharing does not equal creation". Discuss.

We've bought the tickets, so it's official: Karen and I will be going to Portland for the last week of February, then take a very short side-trip to Seattle on the way back. We're taking the Greyhound bus down from Vancouver, B.C., so we'll get a lot of Interstate 5 goodness. Since we didn't know exactly how we were getting back from Seattle, we decided that at least on the way from PDX to Seatown that we'd take the Amtrak train. A little more expensive, and the Amtrak guy in Vancouver wanted to see our passports. We managed to convince the ticket agent that we didn't know we needed them to buy tickets and that we had just made the decision (both true), so we'll finally be able to do as Djun did in 2005.

We very tentatively decided to neither of us bring our laptops, the idea being that we'll find enough computing power with friends and cafes to check our email as much as we need to and that's it. I'll bring my iPhone, which I'm assured by the fine folks at Fido will cost me an arm and a leg to use the data plan while roaming in the United States. As part of our trip budget, I have an amount of total usage in mind. Again, friends and wifi in the wilds of PDX will get us jacked in when we need to.

To update my thoughts on the PDX Bus iPhone application, the developer today had approved a 2.0 release of the app, which embeds Google Maps inside the application. It also adds a flashing screen to make it easier for TriMet bus drivers to see you. I didn't believe that TriMet actually recommending this, but the transportation agency itself has an explanatory video, including asking for what are called in Vancouver "request stops", i.e. getting dropped off anywhere along the route, not just at designated stops.