Apologies for the extended silence. It will probably continue. I'd love to explain what happened, but it would be imprudent to go into specifics. Furthermore, I'm apparently not imaginative enough to phrase the matter in vague enough terms to satisfy my safety needs without sounding like I'm making shit up, I've gone unhinged, or I'm participating in something completely nefarious (and, uh... none of that is true, of course). Believe me, I have tried. The drafts made me laugh but they were not fit for posting.
(I like to think I'm not half bad at pouring my heart out, sparing no detail. And I'm decent at being blandly pleasant while revealing little to nothing of myself. But the happy medium eludes me....)
Not looking very happy.
Anyhow. Be assured that all is well with my family and I don't need any help or advice. My biggest immediate problem is simply that I have to keep my yap shut about precisely the things I'm most inspired to write on, which feels depressing and stifling. Angering, even. I have notes for nearly one hundred original posts that I'm not sure will ever see the light of day. On the bright side, I'm learning to garden. And maybe I can channel my thwarted blogging urges into my novel.
I'll post a bit on relatively harmless subjects as they occur to me. Along with links, quotes, and such. I've made some rather serious playlists on Youtube lately as well.
One night in his apartment, with the lights of San Francisco twinkling for miles outside his windows, I warned Blow that I was about to do something that might aggravate him: I was going to tell him what I thought Braid was about, and he could do with that whatever he wanted.
“Okay,” he replied with a half smirk, leaning back in his chair.
“So obviously there’s the theme of the creation of the atomic bomb,” I began.
“I think you can make a very strong case that that is an unambiguous reference,” he replied, which I interpreted as the Blovian equivalent of Yes.
“But I think what has frustrated you about people’s interpretations of Braid is that the atom bomb itself is a metaphor for a certain kind of knowledge,” I continued. “You’ve been chasing some deep form of understanding all your life, and what I think you’ve found is that questing after that knowledge brings alienation with it. The further you’ve gone down that road, the further it’s taken you from other people. So the knowledge is ultimately destructive to your life, just like the atom bomb was—it’s a kind of truth that has a cataclysmic impact. You thought chasing that knowledge would make you happy, but like Tim, part of you eventually wished you could turn back time and do things over again.”
Blow remained silent.
“Does that make sense?,” I asked.
“Yep, yep.”
“So?”
He smiled.
“Well, I would say that I would not be frustrated at all with that interpretation.”
[T]he White House organized a conference call with two senior administration officials to preview an announcement by President Barack Obama about an important China trade issue but told reporters that no one could be quoted by name. The officials were U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk and the deputy national security adviser for international economic affairs, Michael Froman.
I'll be interested to see whether the mention of Manning's name skyrockets the views on this post. Lately my other post with his name in it has consistently garnered over twice as many views as the next runner up (the post in second place contains the word "sex", of course), in spite of having very little unique content. One calling card in particular made me raise a brow*. Hopefully the numbers are just an indication of growing popular interest in the subject at hand.
I don't want to be paranoid, but--given the long list of keywords flagged and monitored by one arm of the Department of Homeland Security in 2011--I have to wonder if I might have been paid a few visits. By those bizarre standards, I've been seriously cranking out the IOIs since my parents got a modem in '95. More or less like everybody else.
*I gather I'm supposed to have seen it, since it would have been really, really easy to avoid leaving that trace. The implications of that drive-by greeting are kind of disquieting to me. Which may very well be the idea. So let's pretend it was just someone from this particular agency on their lunch break browsing the internet and happening to take an intense non-work-related interest in digging around on my wee little blog, shall we?
There are three camps, as we know. Which are you? Like, dislike, or don't give a rip? We're talking about Valentine's Day, not STDs now.
As for me... gosh darn it, I like it. I've always liked it. Even on years when I haven't had a particular someone, I still liked exchanging token gifts with friends and seeing happy couples around (PDA rocks, I don't care what people say. MOAR MAKING OUT PLEASE.). And I think it's important for people's mental health that we have a few shared cultural traditions. It's not a bad idea to put on a smile and celebrate a little, now and then--even when things mostly suck, even if at first it feels forced.
I don't believe in love.
I mean, I do and I don't. As The Vile Scribbler wrote earlier today, "Step back far enough, and absolutely nothing matters because it's all just supernovas and black holes."
Interiorly, I am often way out there with the black holes, as you may have noticed. Not necessarily feeling nihilistic per se... just observing, holding within me knowledge that isn't quite compatible with full immersion in the day-to-day goings on of my animal half nor with the fairy tales of our milieu. Yet, other than those fairy tales--by that I mean our morals, our values, our sense of wonder and inspiration, our decisions, our idealistic visions, our connections with other people and the sometimes-not-precisely-accurate constructs we create to describe various types of interpersonal phenomena, and possibly the so-called user illusion itself--what else is there to make life meaningful? God is dead and we are meat.
(God is dead, I know... but I am not.)
So we're big on "I love you" around here, in spite of being a family headed by a pair of brooding-eyed unbelievers. All of us are forever gazing at each other adoringly and saying those words. Not really forever. But 20 times a day. We smile and laugh a lot, and we play. Some would find us nauseating.
And I cannot guess what we'll discover When we turn the dirt with our palms cupped like shovels But I know our filthy hands can wash one another’s And not one speck will remain
Optimistic and realistic at once. This was our song for a while. I still like it.
Pairing off long-term is hard work. Or it was for us. Especially the first couple of years. In the beginning (I mean after the pure magic bit) it was difficult to parse everything. My inner noise and someone else's, mixed together, and so much stimulation to muddy the signals. Perhaps it isn't this way for everybody, but for me it was a puzzle figuring out where it all originated--what is going on here? who is bringing which aspects of it? and does it even matter? Am I ill at ease because of the other, or because of what's inside of me already? (Spoiler: it's always the way your edges and the other person's meet, never just one or the other.) Will I ever feel comfortable bringing my other foot inside the door or will I always need to be crouched down and ready to bolt?
I love where we're at now but I don't think either one of us misses the journey.
I think we all wonder sometimes if the pain of coming together with jagged edges is even worth enduring. I won't say that it is. It turned out to be worthwhile for me in this particular time and space, with this particular person. So what? Sometimes it isn't.
Something about this last NaNoWriMo update twists my stomach. I've always found it hard to talk about work in progress. Do I tell you about the plot? No... I hate summaries. Do I tell you my objectives? How gauche. Do I tell you how pretty I think my book will turn out? My arrogance will jinx me; I'll burn the cake for sure.
I didn't win. There's that. That's easy to say.
But what from there? I wrote this entry twice already and didn't like it the first time or the second. Both attempts were dull and analytical. And defensive. And I kept talking up my work up and then catching myself talking it up and not wanting to, and doing it again. I erased them. Truthfully, I can't care right now about NaNoWriMo 2012 or what I could do better the next hypothetical time I attempt the contest. I can't make myself care even a tiny bit. And I want to keep my half-done project clutched close to my chest. So I will ramble rather than deconstruct my experience in any methodical way.
At one point, early in November, I read an article by a famous author who says that he just sits down and writes manuscripts from beginning to end, without visualizing or writing down any ideas, outlines, or characters beforehand. He just goes. Like a rabbit down a race track. Straight as an arrow, all in chronological order. That killed me.
Wouldn't I like to be the kind of genius who just wakes up one day, walks the dogs (I have no dogs), and sits down to write a completely coherent novel?
I thought so. I spent the first week and a half of November finding out that I am not that guy.
Naw, I lied again. I probably kind of knew already. But I was not okay with it. Maybe still not. It's inconvenient.
How it works for me is this: I imagine up some people, one by one. I study them until I know them better than I know anybody. I set them a stage and invite them on board. Then I draw back the curtain and wait to hear the whispers of their goings on. If what happens doesn't move me, I fiddle with some elements and let it go again. I write nothing. I dream, think, play, work with my hands, listen to music, live life with my family, wait for the fire. And then I record whatever demands to be recorded.
It's not something I ever want to try to squeeze into a month's time again. Or any timeline at all. It cost me a lot to do so.
But... it was good for me. I cannot touch it again yet, but I have a strong feeling that I will finish this novel in the not-too-distant future and that I will be sickeningly proud of it when I am done.
Around the end of the month I was reading some Philip K. Dick:
I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind. Not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards. Okay, so I should revise my standards; I'm out of step. I should yield to reality. I have never yielded to reality.
I think I'll yield to reality a little more than he did. But, still. Yes. I want to write about people I love. Hopefully people you love, too. There is too damn much in this world of everything else.
I've been gone so long, I had time to break my toe, heal it up, and get back to daily running again. Guess who pranced--most dorkfully and barefooted and completely oblivious--straight into a 20 lb kettlebell left lying around in the hallway? Oh, guess...
Let's talk some more about this boring subject for a moment. It was my first genuine broken bone, after all. At first I felt really stupid. Then I felt like a badass muthafucka because I got to tape myself up. I don't know. I get a kick out of this stuff. I mean, I now know the nauseating pain of bone breakage and I got to fix it all by myself. And, as a further boon, I will probably never be kidnapped by foot fetishists. I would rate the experience a 7 on a scale of 1-10.
Ok. Thank you for indulging me. Now I can depart Planet Alienfjords-is-having-a-vainglorious-butch-fantasy and get back to Earth.
First thing, I owe a past-due NaNoWriMo update. I'm not too keen on writing it because I burnt myself out on the whole business. But I'll do it, just because 1) I don't like letting loose ends hang out forever and 2) I already broke my word on the timeline and would prefer not to be even more undependable than I already have been. So that will be upcoming.
Secondly, I have only checked emails and PMs so far and have a lot of catching up to do with blog reading. And I'm looking forward to it. =)
Third, as you've likely noticed, we are rapidly entering into now clearly living in a dystopiansurveillance state that is analogous to many evil empires (fictional and otherwise) that I could name and--aside from a few incoherent and/or violent outbursts on the part of people who did not fill their Haldol prescriptions on time--we appear to be mostly taking it like good Germans. (With an extra helping of circus to replace that serving of bread that went missing in 2008.)
The general situation has been going on for a long time, but the urgency of the problem seems to have been kicked up quite a lot in recent months. Perhaps it's due to the bewildering speed with which the last few vestiges of our privacy are departing. Or the rate at which we are making advances in the field of flying killer robots. Or the fact that the people foisting these changes on us seem drunker than ever on power and advancement. Or maybe it's just me, still tumbling down the rabbit hole after three years, having lost my very last scant pocketful of naivete.
This is a matter that rarely leaves my mind. I'd like to write more on it. I'd also like not to be escorted away to the little white room for further questioning before my next plane flight. But we cannot have everything we want, can we?
I don't think I'm going to win NaNoWriMo this year, but I'm still going to give it my best shot with a feverish procrastinator mega-sprint over the next four and a half days.
I'll be almost totally offline until December 1. In the meanwhile, I won't be checking email, comments, or feeds. (Please, o brutal daemons of the deepwebs, do not slashdot and flame me to pieces in my absence.)
The project has been fun and instructive, no matter how it ends. I would definitely give it another go. Next update, I'll talk about how the last phase went, what I took away from it, and what I'd do differently next time around.
Just because. Give the source if you know it, because I do not.
We finally had our first "Whoops! Nobody checked the bird last night to see if it was properly thawed" Thanksgiving at chateau Fjords. There was also exploding bread and broken sauce. Somehow all of our improvisational quick fixes worked out beautifully and everything was fine in the end. The broken sauce went back together. The giant bread was airy and golden. The turkey was dead and did not care. There was family and fun and a walk in the rain. Huzzah!
I had a great day. I even briefly entertained the idea of thinking up things I am thankful for.
But, no. I will spare you. I did take a look around to see everyone else's lists, though. Apparently lots of people are thankful for:
1) Luck, God, nature, and other real or imaginary forces of apparent ambivalence.
2) Not being terminally ill or dead.
3) Not being a starving African child or a victim of white colonialism (uh... maybe rethink that last one, really--I'm pretty sure we all bit it regarding this part, in one way or another).
4) People who have formed positive relationships with them.
5) People/forces who have abused or mistreated them. "They made me so much stronger!"
6) Stuff.
7) AMURRICA. (see numbers 3, 5, 6)
8) Sports teams.
9) Personal accomplishments or talents. (???)
I don't know.... Aside from #4 and possibly #5, it all seems a bit contrived to me. Does randomly not dying this year actually make most Americans feel fuzzy waves of gratefulness? Together? On schedule? Somehow I doubt it. And who are you feeling thankful toward for your having taught yourself to paint better?
Maybe most of us just take "thankfulness" to mean "happiness". Or "preference" or "relief". Or maybe even just "being aware of a benefit," as one newer online dictionary limply proffers as an alternative meaning for "thankful". As in, I would prefer to be alive instead of obliterated at the moment and Grunt McMustache is happy the Piggers are winning. We are relieved our would-be murderers did not crush our resolve or our capacity for growth. We prefer not to have leukemia (k thx) and we are aware it is a benefit to feast and not starve.
I feel a bit too grinchy deconstructing people's Thanksgiving lists. It's probably not a bad thing for us to reflect on what we've got, even if we don't always describe it well or understand the full significance of it. I'd rather see proof that people are interested in getting our asses in gear to rectify a lot of our joint problems.... but... maybe I am actually seeing a bit of that, too. I'm still being sarcastic in this post title, though. Take that, Pollyanna.
Anyhow, I love my family. I kind of liked reading people's lists after all, even though at first I mind-gagged. I'm warm and full and probably safe for the moment.
Also, spotted on the news today: an Immortal Technique The Martyr poster in a tent at Occupy DC. :-)
Good, impotent wishes to all! And a merry Buy Nothing Day! Let's expand on the notion and crash this burning dirigible, eh?
About a week ago UC Berkeley issued a press release or some such about new research on a certain SNP on the OXTR gene. The study, first published in October, was billed in the news as showing that strangers can spot in seconds whether or not you have the "empathy gene".
That isn't quite true, of course (as you probably guessed). There is no single gene that accounts for all the various empathetic phenotypes you'll observe around you. Furthermore, the study examined one possible effect of one variable base pair, not an entire gene. The OXTR gene alone consists of 19,221 bases. Only 372 of those are considered SNPs*, according to the NIH GeneCard, but that's still a pretty big number to explore.
I have to feel sorry for the plight of mainstream media science writers, who are constantly tasked with the impossible. They are supposed to report accurately on scientific findings while describing matters in terms that people with a sixth grade education can easily comprehend. And no doubt there is also pressure from above to phrase things in the most titillating and click-inducing way possible. The boss doesn't care if millions of people are running around parroting bad information, so long as those millions provide ad revenue and the news corporation isn't sued.
Personally, I would prefer precision over general accessibility if one of the two must be sacrificed, so this science news situation strikes me as a grand fuck up. But that's a topic for another day. In the meanwhile, fortunately, there are scientist-bloggers and science-writer-bloggers out there who often do a much better job of synopsizing this type of news in their own space (Ed Yong, Emily Willingham, Carl Zimmer, Scicurious, etc).
Back to the study now. I want to yak about it.
Some background:
Firstly, I am not an expert, just a flaming wannabe.... so keep your BS goggles on. I will not shit you on purpose but I might make some mistakes in terminology or interpretation.
The SNP in question is rs53576, possible genotypes being GG, AG, or AA. There has already been a lot of investigation into the effects of this particular area. It's not the be-all-end-all of empathy because nothing is, but it does appear to be significant. Among other things, those with the GG genotype are thought to either be more in tune with social affect expectations or simply more likely to display positive affect. GGs are not exempt from autism and don't necessarily have great social skills across the board, but they seem to be more sensitive to some select aspects of social interaction. In the United States, GGs tend to reach out more to other people in times of acute crisis than their AA and AG counterparts. In Korea, where reservation and self-control are more valued, GGs are more likely to keep their feelings to themselves and not ask others for help.
According to various studies, GGs tend to be better than non-GGs at non-verbal interior reasoning and visual pattern recognition, as well as recognition of the emotions of other people. GGs tend to empathize more easily with children and have a more attuned parenting style. They display more gullibility, warmth, and willingness to trust in general, but not if repeatedly abused, badly parented, or otherwise traumatized during formative years, in which case they rate as less trusting and (by some measures but not others) evince more emotional dysregulation as compared with AAs or heterozygotes. Under those same pressures they have a higher suicide rate than non-GGs as well.
In short, the pattern seems to suggest that that GGs are in general more responsive to the emotional temperature of their environment. If stuff is good, they do really good. If stuff is bad, they have a harder time dealing with that.
The Berkeley Study:
Basically, a bunch of romantic couples were rounded up. In each couple, one person was told to relate a story about a time when he or she had suffered a lot, and the other person was genotyped and told to sit opposite their partner and listen to the sad tale of woe. Then the listeners were filmed.
Later on, other people who did not personally know these couples were asked to view the films (which are silent) and rate how the listeners came across in terms of trustworthiness, kindness, and compassion. Surprise! GGs were rated the highest.
The above video is a sample of five of these clips. You can guess for yourself who is or is not a GG. I will spoil this shortly, so don't scroll down yet if you want your views untainted.
The study results have been criticized as being statistically insignificant, due to the small sample size (23 couples). But the observer group was significantly larger (100 people) and I wonder if some critics are overlooking that fact. The researchers themselves state that they believe further inquiry is warranted. I respect that and (speaking as a layperson) I do think that the results are interesting and worth having published.
Personal Reaction:
Well, first off, when I heard about this study, I looked up my own genotype at this locus (I got a DTC SNP analysis last year for Christmas). I am a GG, of course.
(Yessssss. I knew it. I was a magical sparklevamp the entire time!)
Only... wrong, because it's actually more common to have the G allele than the A.
(Awww...)
You can look up the allele frequency for rs53576 in several different places. My favorite is Yale's ALele FRequency Database (aka ALFRED), which will give you charts and graphs showing rates of heterozygosity and frequency for over 50 population samples. ALFRED shows that in almost every part of the world, G is the most common allele at this locus. There were no A alleles at all in the Oceana population sample nor in two of the African samples. The highest rate of all for A was in native Siberians at 68%, but this looked exceptional and far beyond any other group.
According to other sources, around 50% of white USians are GG. Rates of AA are around 8-15% and the rest are GA. Good to know.
My thoughts on the video, along with the real answers:
Person 1: Within a couple seconds I felt strongly that this guy was a GG. I kept wanting to go back and see him listening to his partner again because it was so sweet the way he was looking at her. At one point he appears to have a very organic urge to reach out and touch her with his right hand and he automatically starts in that direction, but he realizes the clipboard will fall if he does, so he puts his hand back down. I found this very moving and honestly probably would have teared up if the clip had been longer. He was indeed a GG.
Person 2: Gut reaction says very strongly: this guy is super bad news. Do not like. At all. (sorry dude) Not a GG.
Person 3: Seemed nice and good-intentioned but lacked a certain something that the first person had (such as the ability to judge that this wasn't a good moment to fidget a lot), and just didn't seem so attuned to his mate, not even as he verbally reacted to the story. I know a couple people who have the uncontrollable urge to jiggle their legs the way this guy is doing, and I really like those people... they're good people... but this still didn't feel quite right. Passable behavior, but not warm. I couldn't decide what he was, though. Turns out he was not a GG.
Person 4: She seems nervous and self-conscious, but she's also paying good attention and at the end seems almost apologetic for her nervousness as she laughs. She doesn't scream "GG" to me the way the first guy did, but she seems caring and likable. She was GG.
Person 5: Uh, no. Just no. Immediate no. And she wasn't.
I only got three right, since I waffled on numbers 3 and 4. I would really have liked to see all 23 video clips.
Also, as others have mentioned, I would love to know whether GGs and non-GGs read these people differently. Aside from issues of statistical significance (which I don't well understand), I am curious if any positive results could just be a matter of "like prefers like" rather than real detection of empathetic traits. I saw one confirmed non-GG online say that persons 1 and 4 came across as impatient to him, which surprised me.
ABRUPT ENDING! ...for I am le tired.
---
*If I understand correctly, in order to be considered a SNP, the less common allele at a given base pair position has to be present in no less than 1% of the members of a reference population. I am guessing that there must be some exceptions to that rule in cases of very rare disease mutations, but I don't know for sure.
