philosophy – Renaissance Guy

Unreachable

I suspect that my friends think that I lie to them about being unreachable as an excuse to simply ignore them. In the modern world there are only a small handful situations in which a person genuinely can’t be expected to be connected and accessible.

Hospitals, which used to be a communications dead zone on account of no cell-phone policies, have largely been assimilated into the civilized world with the introduction of guest WiFi networks. Airplanes are going the same way, although as of yet WiFi is still a paid commodity, and in that is sufficiently expensive as to make it still a reasonable excuse.

International travel used to be a good excuse, but nowadays even countries that don’t offer affordable and consistent cellular data have WiFi hotspots at cafes and hotels. The only travel destinations that are real getaways in this sense- that allow you to get away from the modern life by disconnecting you from the outside world -are developing countries without infrastructure, and the high seas. This is the best and worst part of cruise ships, which charge truly extortionate rates for slow, limited internet access.

The best bet for those who truly don’t want to be reached is still probably the unspoilt wilderness. Any sufficiently rural area will have poor cell reception, but areas which are undeveloped now are still vulnerable to future development. After all, much of the rural farming areas of the Midwest are flat and open. It only takes one cell tower to get decent, if not necessarily fast, service over most of the area.

Contrast this to the geography of the Appalachian or Rocky Mountains, which block even nearby towers from reaching too far, and in many cases are protected by regulations. Better yet, the geography of Alaska combines several of these approaches, being sufficiently distant from the American heartland that many phone companies consider it foreign territory, as well as being physically huge, challenging to develop, and covered in mountains and fjords that block signals.

I enjoy cruises, and my grandparents enjoy inviting us youngsters up into the mountains of the northeast, and so I spend what is probably for someone of my generation, a disproportionate amount of time disconnected from digital life. For most of my life, this was an annoyance, but not a problem, mostly because my parents handled anything important enough to have serious consequences, but partially because, if not before social media, then at least before smartphones, being unreachable was a perfectly acceptable and even expected response to attempts at contact.

Much as I still loath the idea of a phone call, and will in all cases prefer to text someone, the phone call, even unanswered, did provide a level of closure that an unanswered text message simply doesn’t. Even if you got the answering machine, it was clear that you had done your part, and you could rest easy knowing that they would call you back at their leisure; or if it was urgent, you kept calling until you got them, or it became apparent that they were truly unreachable. There was no ambiguity whether you had talked to them or not; whether your message had really reached them and they were acting on it, or you had only spoken to a machine.

Okay, sure, there was some ambiguity. Humans have a way of creating ambiguity and drama through whatever form we use. But these were edge cases, rather than seemingly being a design feature of text messages. But I think this paradigm shift is more than just the technology. Even among asynchronous means, we have seen a shift in expectations.

Take the humble letter, the format that we analogize our modern instant messages (and more directly, e-mail) to most frequently and easily. Back in the day when writing letters was a default means of communication, writing a letter was an action undertaken on the part of the sender, and a thing that happened to the receiver. Responding to a letter by mail was polite where appropriate, but not compulsory. This much he format shares with our modern messages.

But unlike our modern systems, with a letter it was understood that when it arrived, it would be received, opened, read, and replied to all in due course, in the fullness of time, when it was practical for the recipient, and not a moment sooner. To expect a recipient to find a letter, tear it open then and there, and drop everything to write out a full reply at that moment, before rushing it off to the post office was outright silly. If a recipient had company, it would be likely that they would not even open the letter until after their business was concluded, unlike today, where text messages are read and replied to even in the middle of conversation.

Furthermore, it was accepted that a reply, even to a letter of some priority, might take some several days to compose, redraft, and send, and it was considered normal to wait until one had a moment to sit down and write out a proper letter, for which one was always sure to have something meaningful to say. Part of this is an artifact of classic retrospect, thinking that in the olden day’s people knew the art of conversation better, and much of it that isn’t is a consequence of economics. Letters cost postage, while today text messaging is often included in phone plans, and in any case social media offers suitable replacements for free.

Except that, for a while at least, the convention held in online spaces too. Back in the early days of email, back when it was E-mail (note the capitalization and hyphenation), and considered a digital facsimile of postage rather than a slightly more formal text message, the accepted convention was that you would sit down to your email, read it thoroughly, and compose your response carefully and in due course, just as you would on hard copy stationary. Indeed, our online etiquette classes*, we were told as much. Our instructors made clear that it was better to take time in responding to queries with a proper reply than get back with a mere one or two sentences.

*Yes, my primary school had online etiquette classes, officially described as “nettiquete courses”, but no one used that term except ironically. The courses were instituted after a scandal in parliament, first about students’ education being outmoded in the 21st century, and second about innocent children being unprepared for the dangers of the web, where, as we all know, ruffians and thugs lurk behind every URL. The curriculum was outdated the moment it was made, and it was discontinued only a few years after we finished the program, but aside from that, and a level of internet paranoia that made Club Penguin look lassaiz faire, it was helpful and accurately described how things worked.

In retrospect, I think this training helps explain a lot of the anxieties I face with modern social media, and the troubles I have with text messages and email. I am acclaimed by others as an excellent writer and speaker, but brevity is not my strong suit. I can cut a swathe through paragraphs and pages, but I stumble over sentences. When I sit down to write an email, and I do, without fail, actually sit down to do so, I approach the matter with as much gravity as though I were writing with quill and parchment, with all the careful and time-consuming redrafting, and categorical verbosity that the format entails.

But email and especially text messages are not the modern reincarnation of the bygone letter, nor even the postcard, with it’s shorter format and reduced formality. Aside from a short length that is matched in history perhaps only by the telegram, the modern text message has nearly totally forgone not only the trappings of all previous formats, but indeed, has seemed to forgo the trappings of form altogether.

Text messages have seemed to become accepted not as a form of communication so much as an avenue of ordinary conversation. Except this is a modern romanticization of text messages. Because while text messages might well be the closest textual approximation of a face to face conversation that doesn’t involve people actually speaking simultaneously, it is still not a synchronous conversation.

More importantly than the associated pleasantries of the genre, text messages work on an entirely different timescale than letters. Where once, with a letter, it might be entirely reasonable for a reply to take a fortnight, nowadays a delay in responding to a text message between friends beyond a single day is a cause for concern and anxiety.

And if it were really a conversation, if two people were conversing in person, or even over the phone, and one person without apparent reason failed to respond to the other’s prompts for a prolonged period, this would indeed be cause for alarm. But even ignoring the obvious worry that I would feel if my friend walking alongside me in the street suddenly stopped answering me, in an ordinary conversation, the tempo is an important, if underrated, form of communication.

To take an extreme example, suppose one person asks another to marry them. What does it say if the other person pauses? If they wait before answering? How is the first person supposed to feel, as opposed to an immediate and enthusiastic response? We play this game all the time in spoken conversation, drawing out words or spacing out sentences, punctuating paragraphs to illustrate our point in ways that are not easily translated to text, at least, not without the advantage of being able to space out one’s entire narrative in a longform monologue.

We treat text messages less like correspondence, and more like conversation, but have failed to account for the effects of asyncronicity on tempo. It is too easy to infer something that was not meant by gaps in messages; to interpret a failure to respond as a deliberate act, to mistake slow typing for an intentional dramatic pause, and so forth.

I am in the woods this week, which means I am effectively cut off from communication with the outside world. For older forms of communication, this is not very concerning. My mail will still be there when I return, and any calls to the home phone will be logged and recorded to be returned at my leisure. Those who sent letters, or reached an answering machine know, or else can guess, that I am away from home, and can rest easy knowing that their missives will be visible when I return.

My text messages and email inbox, on the other hand, concern me, because of the very real possibility that someone will contact me thinking I am reading messages immediately, since my habit of keeping my phone within arm’s reach at all times is well known, and interpreting my failure to respond as a deliberate snub, when in reality I am out of cell service. Smart phones and text messages have become so ubiquitous and accepted that we seem to have silently arrived at the convention that shooting off a text message to someone is as good as calling them, either on the phone or even in person. Indeed, we say it is better, because text messages give the recipient the option of postponing a reply, even though we all quietly judge those people who take time to respond to messages, and will go ahead and imply all the social signals of a sudden conversational pause in the interim, while decrying those who use text messages to write monologues.

I’ll say it again, because it bears repeating after all the complaints I’ve given: I like text messages, and I even prefer them as a communication format. I even like, or at least tolerate, social media messaging platforms, despite having lost my appreciation for social media as a whole. But I am concerned that we, as a society, and as the first generation to really build the digital world into the foundations of our lives, are setting ourselves up for failure in our collective treatment of our means of communication.

When we fail to appreciate the limits of our technological means, and as a result, fail to create social conventions that are realistic and constructive, we create needless ambiguity and distress. When we assign social signals to pauses in communication that as often as not have more to do with the manner of communication than the participants or their intentions, we do a disservice to ourselves and others. We may not mention it aloud, we may not even consciously consider it, but it lingers in our attitudes and impressions. And I would wager that soon enough we will see a general rise in anxiety and ill will towards others.

Esther Day

About a year ago now, on October 10th to be exact, I received a gift from a mother on behalf of her dead daughter. Perhaps the peculiar power of that sentence explains why this small lime-green wristband, valued by market forces at approximately five dollars, has quickly become one of the most thought-about objects I own.

Calling it a personal gift might be a bit much. I never met the daughter, Esther, in life, and had only had peripheral contact with the mother, Lori, twice before; once seeing her onstage at a conference, and once online, and never properly meeting in a way that we could be called acquainted. I received this gift because I happened to heed a call for a Nerdfighter meetup. Everyone there who didn’t already own a wristband was given one.

Still, I wouldn’t call it a giveaway; not in the sense of the mass, commercial connotations of the word. It was a gift given to me, and the others who received identical gifts, because I was, by virtue of being there at the time and being enthusiastic about it, was part of the Nerdfighter community, which Esther was a part of and had found immense joy in. Because Nerdfighters that show up to gatherings should have Esther’s wristbands as a matter of course. Because I needed one, and it would be rude to make a friend pay for something they needed from you.

Perhaps you can start to grasp why this small action and token have given me so much cause for reflection, especially given that I consider wristbands to have a special meaning to them. Clearly this one is a token of sorts. But of what? I wouldn’t call it a reward; the manner in which they were given doesn’t bespeak a reward, and I certainly haven’t done anything to merit this specific one. As a symbol of fraternity and comradeship? Possibly, but though I may believe that Esther and I would have been friends had I known her, we weren’t, and it’s a stretch to say that I’m friends with someone I never knew existed while they were alive.

I have gotten a few hints. The first comes from John Green’s remarks regarding Esther, both in his videos, and in his speech at Nerdcon: Nerdfighteria. He talks about her, at least partially, in the present tense. This is echoed in the literature of This Star Won’t Go Out, the foundation set up in her honor which manufactures and sells the bracelets in question. Esther may be gone, but the impact she had on their lives during hers continues to reverberate.

This talk is familiar enough to me. It comes up at the conferences I attend; how we have an impact on each other, on others, and in terms of advocacy, on policy and the world. The wristband pulls at those same strings, and so feels sentimental beyond the story behind it. It reminds me of stories I’ve heard a hundred times before, from tearful eulogies to triumphant speeches, in soliloquy, and in song. It reminds me of the stanza from In Flanders Fields that always stops me in my tracks.

Take up your quarrel with the foe

To you from failing hands we throw

The torch: be yours to hold it high

If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

In Flanders’ fields, in Flanders’s fields

I am always drawn to this stanza, particularly the second and third lines. Because yes, it’s a sad song, but those two lines hint at something more. The torch isn’t lost; on the contrary, it continues to be held high. There is tragedy, but there is also a chance for something like redemption. Not revenge; it’s the wrong kind of song to be a proper up and at ‘em fighting song. Rather, a chance at making some good come out of the situation. Yes, this group failed to finish what it started, but all is not lost so long as someone picks up the torch. It’s a sad song, but it also has hope in it.

So the torch, or in this case, the wristband, is mine. Now what? How do I hold it high in this situation? More crucially, how can I make sure I don’t break faith? How do I ensure that this star doesn’t go out? If I had ever met Esther, or even known her online when she was alive, instead of only in past tense, I might know how to do that. And from what I’ve been able to gather, she made it clear that she had no desire to be remembered only in past tense (hence my very careful wording, and focus only on my own perspective).

Luckily for me, I once again have several hints. I know the causes she championed, and those which others close to her have championed by her inspiration. Many of them mirror the same ideals I hold. Indeed, some months after that day in October, I received some feedback on a pitch I had made to This Star Won’t Go Out regarding a Project Lovely idea, essentially telling me that while my idea wasn’t quite what they were looking for at that moment, that my head and heart were in the right place. The message seems to be that I am expected to carry the torch / keep the Star shining simply by continuing to have a positive impact, or in Nerdfighter parlance, by not forgetting to be awesome, and decreasing worldsuck, through whatever means seem best to me, at my own discretion.

The wristband, then, is a symbol of that mission. It is a good mission, and a mission I was probably going to try and accomplish even without a wristband, which is probably why it seemed so natural that I should get one. Perhaps I shan’t accomplish it in my time, in which case it shall be my turn to throw the torch from my failing hands, so that others in turn shall wear wristbands. There is a comforting poetry to this.

All of this has a special relevance today, since, for those who haven’t figured it out, today, August 3rd, is Esther Day. When John proposed to make her birthday a holiday in Nerdfighteria, she responded that she wanted it to be about love and family. This has been interpreted as being a sort of Valentine’s Day for non-romantic love. In particular, the tradition is to tell others in so many words that you love them.

This is difficult for me, for two reasons. First, the obvious: I’m a guy, and an introvert at that. Guys are only ever expected to voice love towards others under a very narrow range of circumstances. So I’m squeamish when it comes to the L word. And secondly, I have an aversion to dealing in absolutes and making commitments I can’t guarantee I’ll be able to keep absolutely. This is learned behavior, ingrained by years of having medical issues wreck plans, and uncompromising administrators hold me to the letter of my commitments despite extenuating circumstances making those promises all but impossible.

Even now, typing words out, I find myself backpedaling, tweaking phrases to avoid putting things plainly and opening myself up. But I’m going to suck it up. Not for Esther, because I never met her, and it isn’t fair for me to do things in her memory since I don’t actually have a memory of her. But for Esther Day. For the things she set in motion. For the trust that the people she trusted put in me.

I love my brother, despite bitter arguments. I love my parents, who enable me to live probably more than my doctors. I love my friends, both old and new. I won’t name them, despite convention, for their own privacy, but you know who you are, and you have open license to confront me and demand to hear the words personally over the coming days. I love the Nerdfighters and Tuatarians I have met, both in real life and online, who proved that whether or not the world at large is cruel, there are pockets of kindness all over. I love my disabled comrades, who give me perspective and inspiration. I love my doctors and nurses, who keep me alive, and indulge me when I value things above following medical advice precisely as given.

I know I’m supposed to say, now that I’ve said it, it wasn’t so hard. But, actually, no, that was terrifying, for all the reasons I outlined above, and it’s still terrifying to know I’ve said it, let alone to leave it up. But I’m going to leave it up. Because it’s the thing to do. Because even if others don’t follow my example as is the tacit understanding, having a world with more love and appreciation in it, even a small amount, is a good thing.

Happy Esther Day.

Life Changing?

What does it take to change a life? To have such an impact on another person that it changes their default behaviors and life trajectory, even if subtly? Certainly it can be argued that it takes very little, since our behaviors are always being influenced by our surroundings. But what about a long-term difference? What does it take to really change someone?

The year 2007 was perhaps the most important and most impactful of my life. I say that 2007 was the year that my childhood ended. This may be a slight over exaggeration, but not by much. It was a year of drama and trauma, of new highs and extreme lows. In my personal history, the year 2007 stands out like 1914 in European history. It is a date I measure things from, even more so than my birthday.

That year contained both the best and worst days of my life to date. The worst day, July 20th, 2007, and the bad days that followed it, I have already written about. But what about the best day? What happened on that day?

January 5th, 2007 had all the hallmarks of a good day. I was on school holiday- summer holiday, in fact, since the Australian school calendar follows Australian seasons so that our main break comes around Christmas -and I was traveling. Being ever-curious and ever-precocious, I loved traveling, especially by plane.

All the mechanisms of air travel fascinated me: the terminals, with their lights and signs and displays, acting as literal gateways to every far flung exotic locale on the planet. Customs and security, with its fancy DHS eagles, and its sense of officiality, and finality, advertising that it once you cross this line, you have crossed some important threshold from which you could not simply return, as if somewhere, someone reading your story would be holding their breath while turning the page. And of course, the planes themselves, which not only seemed to defy physics in their flight, not only liked the world together, but did so in such comfort and luxury.

That day, we started early from the family farm in Indiana to the Indianapolis Airport, via a road that had enough dips and bumps that we called it affectionately “the rollercoaster road”. We arrived at Indianapolis Airport for our short flight to transfer at my all time favorite airport, Chicago O’hare, which I adore for its dinosaur skeleton, its Vienna beef hot dogs, and its inter-concourse tunnel, where I would stare up in wonder from the moving walkway at the ceiling light display. I was told that the abstract neon colors were meant to represent the aurora, but for my part, having seen both, I have always thought the lights at O’hare to be more impressive than the aurora.

We arrived in Orlando at about 8:00pm, which, to my then childish mind, was a kind of magical hour. Things only happened after 8:00 on special occasions- watching New Year’s fireworks or space shuttle launches on television, calls from relatives in different time zones. After 8:00pm was the time of big and exceptional things, and the fact that we were only now boarding the bus from the airport to Disney World only seemed to vindicate the feeling I had woken up with that morning that it was going to be a great day.

Much of the resort was already closed by the time we arrived. But even then, there was much excitement to be had. We found our rooms, and as we wound our way around the Port Orleans Resort, I remember drinking in every detail of the scenery and design, and thinking to myself about how much attention and intent must have gone onto adding all the little details and embellishments. At this time I used to enjoy drawing, but whenever I did, I would become obsessed with details and embellishments. I would draw an airplane, and become fixated on the precise curvature of the engines, the alignment of the ailerons, the number of windows depending on whether it was a Boeing 747 like the one we took to San Francisco or an Embraer like the one we took…

You get the idea. Details were important to me. For me to see that someone had paid enough attention to the details to add all these little decorative Easter eggs, like hidden Mickeys, or a plastic frog on a Lilly pad in a small pond beside the concrete path. To see these little acknowledgments of my attentiveness told me that other people had been paying at least as much attention as I had, which put me at ease, and made me feel welcome and safe, at a time when I had spent most of my life as a foreigner, and a great deal of my time at school being bullied.

Thus assured that I was in a place that was safe and well designed by people who thought like I did, I let loose, skipping happily along as I never did in school for fear of being mocked, and sang songs I had memorized from the inflight children’s “radio station” (which was actually just a recording loop) about fishing worms, the state of Michigan, and carps in tubs.

The next day, I was reunited with my Best Friend in the Whole Entire World, whom I knew from Australia, but who had recently moved to Denver. It was the first time we had seen each other since he had moved away. I had missed his going away party because, in what now seems like a foreshadowing of what was to come, I had been in the hospital with Acute Pan Sinusitis, and after having my immune system wiped out by the drugs, was stuck in protective quarantine.

Together, we tore up the parks, going on rides and eating Mickey out of house and home. This last point proved to be dire foreshadowing, as looking back I can say it was the first time that the earliest symptoms of the medical calamity that would consume my life just six months later were indisputably noticeable. In fact, the symptoms of hunger and thirst were so bad that they caused problems trying to eat off the Disney meal plan. It was the only bittersweet thing about the trip- that it was the last great experience of my life unmarried by the specter of disability and looming death. But that’s a story for another time.

So, back to the question at hand: what does it take to change a life? Was my trip life-changing? Did it change who I am as a person, or alter my future behavior or trajectory in a meaningful way? Hard to say. Despite picking a solidly philosophical topic I’m not willing to sit down for the requisite hours of navel gazing to try and formulate the probable alternate histories if that trip hadn’t gone just so.

It’s tempting, then, to brush it off and say that even though I definitely see that event as one of the high points of my existence, that it never changed who I am at my core. It certainly didn’t change the course of events that were about to happen, which were in retrospect so obviously already in motion. It would be easy to extrapolate that the whole event had no effect on me, but for the fact that I know of a counterexample.

The day itself, more than a decade in the past, has gotten old enough in my mind that parts of it have started to fade around the edges. I don’t, for example, remember which side of the two connecting rooms my brother and I slept in, and which side my parents slept in. The parts I do remember are as much vaguely connected vignettes as they are a consistent narrative, and correlate more to the things that struck me as important at the time than what might be important to the story now. Hence why I can’t tell you what rides we went on, but I can describe the exact configuration of the twisty straw that I had with my milkshake.

One of the things that I remember clearest about that day, one of the things that to this day will occasionally interrupt my stream of consciousness, was the in flight radio. In particular, I recall there being several songs about environmental themes. And I recall sitting there, consciously rethinking my point of view. My train of thought went something like this: The reason I’m hearing this song, which, though decent, isn’t artistically great, is because it’s about a cause, which is clearly important to whomever is picking songs to play.

The kind of causes that get songs written about them, and, despite artistic shortcomings, played constantly at children, are ones that are important to society at large: learning one’s ABCs, being prepared for emergencies, and national crises like a world war (Over There) or pandemic (there was a song about washing one’s hands that was circulated during the Mad Cow scare). That I am hearing this song indicates that it is viewed not just as something of idle interest, but as a crisis of immediate concern.

It was at that moment that I remember mentally upgrading the issue of environmentalism from something that I was merely passively sympathetic towards, to something which I actively supported where possible. Hearing that song on that trip changed my life. Or if it is melodramatic to say that hearing a song single handed lyrics changed my life trajectory, then at least it is accurate to say that hearing those songs at that time provoked me into a change in attitude and behavior.

Would I still have had such a moment of revelation on a different day? Probably, but I doubt I would have remembered it. But as to the question of what it takes to change a life, we are forced to consider how much effort it took for me to hear those songs. There is no good answer here. On the one hand, it took a massive amount of societal machinery to record, license, and select the song, and then see that it was played on the flight that I happened to be on. To do this purposely would require a massive conspiracy.

On the other hand, it requires no small number of miracles from a huge number of contributors to get me the iPad I’m writing on, and the web server I’m posting to, and massive amounts of effort to maintain the global system of communications that allow you to view my words, and yet I’d hardly argue that my writing here is the pinnacle of all of society thus far. Perhaps so, in a strictly epistemological, navel-gazing sense that is largely meaningless for the purpose of guiding future individual actions. But realistically, my authorial exercise here is only slightly more effort than recording my unpolished stream of consciousness.

The truth is, even when I can identify what it has taken in the past to change my own life, I can’t extrapolate that knowledge into a meaningful rule. It’s clearly not that hard, given that it’s happened so many times before, and on such flimsy pretenses. But it also clearly can’t be that easy, or else everyone would already be their best self.

People have in the past attempted to compliment me by insinuating that my writing, or my speeches at events, or my support, have changed their lives. Despite their intentions at flattery, I have generally been disinclined to believe them, on the grounds that, though I may take pride that my writing is decent, it is certainly not of a caliber great enough to be called life-changing. But upon reflection, perhaps it doesn’t need to be. Perhaps the bar isn’t nearly that high. Perhaps, I venture to hope, one does not need to be perfect to change another’s life for the better.

Notes on Descriptivism

There is an xkcd comic which deals with linguistic prescriptivism. For those not invested in the ongoing culture war surrounding grammar and linguistics, prescriptivism is the idea that there is a singular, ideal, correct version of language to which everyone ought adhere. This is distinct from linguistic descriptivism, which maintains that language is better thought of not as a set of rules, but as a set of norms; and that to try and enforce any kind of order on language is doomed to failure. In short, prescriptivism prescribes idealized rules, while descriptivism describes existing norms.

The comic presents a decidedly descriptivist worldview, tapping into the philosophical question of individual perception to make the point that language is inherently up to subjective interpretation, and therefore must vary from individual to individual. The comic also pokes fun at a particular type of behavior which has evolved into an Internet Troll archetype of sorts- the infamous Grammar Nazi. This is mostly an ad hominem, though it hints at another argument frequently used against prescriptivism; that attempts to enforce a universal language generally cause, or at least, often seem to cause, more contention, distress, and alienation than they prevent.

I am sympathetic to both of these arguments. I acknowledge that individual perceptions and biases create significant obstacles to improved communications, and I will agree, albeit with some reluctance and qualifications, that oftentimes, perhaps even in most cases, that the subtle errors and differences in grammar (NB: I use the term “grammar” here in the broad, colloquial sense, to include other similar items such as spelling, syntax, and the like) which one is liable to find among native speakers of a similar background do not cause significant confusion or discord to warrant the often contentious process of correction.

Nevertheless, I cannot accept the conclusion that these minor dissensions must necessarily cause us to abandon the idea of universal understanding. For that is my end goal in my prescriptivist tendencies: to see a language which is consistent and stable enough to be maximally accessible, not only to foreigners, but more importantly, to those who struggle in grappling with language to express themselves. This is where my own personal experience comes into the story. For, despite my reputation for sesquipedalian verbosity, I have often struggled with language, in both acute and chronic terms.

In acute terms, I have struggled with even basic speech during times of medical trauma. To this end, ensuring that communication is precise and unambiguous has proven enormously helpful, as a specific and unambiguous question, such as “On a scale of zero to ten, how much pain would you say you are currently experiencing?” is vastly easier to process and respond to than one that requires me to contextualize an answer, such as “How are you?”.

In chronic terms, the need to describe subjective experiences relies on keen use of precise vocabulary, which, for success, requires a strong command of language on the part of all parties involved. For example, the difference between feeling shaky, dizzy, lightheaded, nauseated, vertigo, and faint, are subtle, but carry vastly different implications in a medical context. Shaky is a buzzword for endocrinology, dizzy is a catch-all, but most readily associated with neurology, lightheadedness is referred to more often for respiratory, nausea has a close connection with gastroenterology, vertigo refers specifically to balance, which may be either an issue for Neurology, Ophthalmology, or an ENT specialist, and faintness is usually tied to circulatory problems.

In such contexts, these subtleties are not only relevant, but critical, and the casual disregard of these distinctions will cause material problems. The precise word choice used may, to use an example from my own experience, determine whether a patient in the ER is triaged as urgent, which in such situations may mean the difference between life and death. This is an extreme, albeit real, example, but the same dynamic can and will play out in other contexts. In order to prevent and mitigate such issues, there must be an accepted standard common to all for the meaning and use of language.

I should perhaps clarify that this is not a manifesto for hardcore prescriptivism. Such a standard is only useful insofar as it is used and accepted, and insofar as it continues to be common and accessible. Just as laws must from time to time be updated to reflect changes in society, and to address new concerns which were not previously foreseen, so too will new words, usages, and grammar inevitably need to be added, and obsolete forms simplified. But this does not negate the need for a standard. Descriptivism, labeling language as inherently chaotic and abandoning attempts to further understanding through improved communication, is a step backwards.

Automatism

I’m not sure what exactly the nightmares was that stuck with me for a solid twenty minutes after I got out of bed and before I woke up. Whatever it was, it had me utterly convinced that I was in mortal peril from my bed linens. And so I spent a solid twenty minutes trying desperately to remove them from me, before the cold woke me up enough to realize what I was doing, and had the presence of mind to stop.

This isn’t the first time I’ve woken up in the middle of doing something in an absentminded panic. Most of those times, however, I was either in a hospital, or would be soon. There have been a handful of isolated incidents in which I have woken up, so to speak, at the tail end of a random black-out. That is, I will suddenly realize that I’m most of the way through the day, without any memory of events for some indeterminate time prior. But this isn’t waking up per se; more like my memory is suddenly snapping back into function, like a recording skipping and resuming at a random point later on.

I suppose it is strictly preferable to learn that my brain has evidently delegated its powers to operate my body such that I need not be conscious to perform tasks, as opposed to being caught unawares by whatever danger my linens posed to me that required me to get up and dismantle them from my bed with such urgency that I could not wake up first. Nevertheless I am forced to question the judgement of whatever fragment of my unconscious mind took it upon its own initiative to operate my body without following the usual channels and getting my conscious consent.

The terminology, I recognize, is somewhat vague and confusing, as I have difficulty summoning words to express what has happened and the state it has left me in.

These episodes, both these more recent ones, and my longer history of breaks in consciousness, are a reminder of a fact that I try to put out of mind on a day to day basis, and yet which I forget at my own peril. Namely, the acuity of my own mortality and fragility of my self.

After all, who, or perhaps what, am I outside of the mind which commands me? What, or who, gives orders in my absence? Are they still orders if given by a what rather than a who, or am I projecting personhood onto a collection of patterns executed by the simple physics of my anatomy? Whatever my (his? Its?) goal was in disassembling my bed, I did a thorough job of it, stripping the bed far more efficiently and thoroughly than I could have by accident.

I might not ever find serious reason to ask these questions, except that every time so far, it has been me that has succeeded it. That is, whatever it does, it is I who has to contend with the results when I come back to full consciousness. I have to re-make the bed so that both of us can sleep. I have to explain why one of us saw fit to make a huge scuffle in the middle of the night, waking others up.

I am lucky that I live with my family, who are willing to tolerate the answer of “actually, I have no idea why I did that, because, in point of fact, it wasn’t me who did that, but rather some other being by whom I was possessed, or possibly I have started to exhibit symptoms of sleepwalking.” Or at least, they accept this answer now, for this situation, and dismiss it as harmless, because it is, at least so far. Yet I am moved to wonder where the line is.

After all, actions will have consequences, even if those actions aren’t mine. Let’s suppose for the sake of simplicity that these latest episodes are sleepwalking. If I sleepwalk, and knock over a lamp, that lamp is no more or less broken than if I’d thrown it to the ground in a rage. Moreover, the lamp has to be dealt with; its shards have to be cleaned up and disposed of, and the lamp will have to be replaced, so someone will have to pay for it. I might get away with saying I was sleepwalking, but more likely I would be compelled to help in the cleanup and replacement of the lamp.

But what if there had been witnesses who had seen me at the time, and said that they saw my eyes were open? It is certainly possible for a sleepwalker to have their eyes open, even to speak. And what if this witness believes that I was in fact awake, and fully conscious when I tipped over the lamp?

There is a relevant legal term and concept here: Automatism. It pertains to a debate surrounding medical conditions and culpability that is still ongoing and is unlikely to end any time soon. Courts and juries go back and forth on what precisely constitutes automatism, and to what degree it constitutes a legal defence, an excuse, or merely an avenue to plead down charges (e.g. manslaughter instead of murder). As near as I can tell, and without delving too deeply into the tangled web of case law, automatism is when a person is not acting as their own person, but rather like an automaton. Or, to quote Arlo Guthrie: “I’m not even here right now, man.”

This is different from insanity, even temporary insanity, or unconsciousness, for reasons that are complex and contested, and have more to do with the minutiae of law than I care to get into. But to summarize: unconsciousness and insanity have to do with denying criminal intent, which is required in most, though not all, crimes. Automatism, by subtle contrast, denies the criminal act itself, by arguing that there is not an actor by whom an act can be committed.

As an illustration, suppose an anvil falls out of the sky, cartoon style, and clobbers innocent bystander George Madison as he is standing on the corner, minding his own business, killing him instantly. Even though something pretty much objectively bad has happened; something which the law would generally seek to prevent, no criminal act per se has occurred. After all, who would be charged? The anvil? Gravity? God?

Now, if there is a human actor somewhere down the chain of causality; if the reason the anvil had been airborne was because village idiot Jay Quincy had pushed a big red button, which happened to be connected to an anvil-railgun being prepared by a group of local high schoolers for the google science fair; then maybe there is a crime. Whether or not Jay Quincy acted with malice aforethought, or was merely negligent, or reckless, or really couldn’t have been expected to know better, would be a matter for a court to decide. But there is an actor, so there is an act, so there might be a crime.

There are many caveats to this defence. The most obvious is that automatism, like (most) insanity is something that has to be proven by the defence, rather than the prosecution. So, to go back to our earlier example of the lamp, I would have to prove that during the episode, that I was sleepwalking. Merely saying that I don’t recall being myself at the time is not enough. For automatism to stick, it has to be proven, with hard evidence. Having a medical diagnosis of somnambulance and a history of sleepwalking episodes might be useful here, although it could also be used as evidence that I should have known better to prevent this in the first place (I’ll get to this point in a minute).

Whether or not this setup is fair, forcing the defence to prove that they weren’t responsible and assuming guilt otherwise, this is the only way that the system can work. The human sense of justice demands that crimes be committed, to some degree or another, voluntarily and of free will. Either there must be an act committed that oughtn’t have been, or something that ought have been prevented that wasn’t. Both of these, however, imply choices, and some degree of conscious free will.

Humans might have a special kind of free will, at least on our good days, that engenders us these rights and responsibilities, but science has yet to prove how this mechanism operates discretely from the physical (automatic) processes that make up our bodies. Without assuming free will, prosecutors would have to contend with proving something that has never even been proven in the abstract for each and every case. So the justice system makes a perhaps unreasonable assumption that people have free will unless there is something really obvious (and easily provable) that impedes it, like a gun to one’s head, or a provable case of sleepwalking.

There is a second caveat here that’s also been hinted at: while a person may not be responsible for their actions while in a state of automatism, they can still be responsible for putting themselves into such a state, either intentionally or negligently, which discounts the defence of automatism. So, while sleeping behind the wheel might happen in an automatic state, the law takes the view that you should have known better than to allow yourself to be behind the wheel if you were at risk of being asleep, and therefore you can still be charged. Sleepwalking does not work if, say, there was an unsecured weapon that one should’ve stowed away while conscious. Intoxication, even involuntary intoxication, whether from alcohol or some other drug, is almost never accepted.

This makes a kind of sense, after all. You don’t want to let people orchestrate crimes beforehand and then disclaim responsibility because they were asleep or what have you when the act occurred. On the other hand, this creates a strange kind of paradox for people with medical conditions that might result in a state of automatism at some point, and who are concerned about being liable for their actions and avoiding harm to others. After all, taking action beforehand shows that you knew something might have happened and should have been prepared for it, and are therefore liable. And not taking action is obviously negligent, and makes it difficult to prove that you weren’t acting under your own volition in the first place.

Incidentally, this notion of being held responsible; in some sense, of being responsible; for actions taken by a force other than my own free will, is one of my greatest fears. The idea that I might hurt someone, not even accidentally, but as an involuntary consequence of my medical situation; that is to say, the condition of the same body that makes me myself; I find absolutely petrifying. This has already happened before, as I have accidentally hurt people while flailing passing in and out of a coma, and there is no reason to believe that the same thing couldn’t happen again.

So, what to do? I was hoping that delving into the law might find me some solace from this fear; that I might encounter some landmark argument that would satisfy not just some legal liability, but which I would be able to use as a means of self-assurance. Instead it has done the opposite, and I am less confident now than when I started.

Television Bubbles

So there’s a new show on Disney that allegedly follows the cast of That’s So Raven some decade after the show itself ended. This isn’t news per se, considering the show launched in July.

This is news to me, however. For some reason, the existence of this show, it’s premiere, any hype and marketing that may have surrounded it, and generally anything about it, managed to come and go completely unnoticed by me. I learned about this by accident; I happened to recognize the characters on a screen in the back of a burrito restaurant. At first I thought I was watching a very old rerun. But I was informed by other members of my party that, no, that’s part of the new show. Didn’t I know about it?

I have been wracking my brain trying to I ever heard anything about this. The closest I can come up with is a very vague recollection of someone making an offhanded remark in passing that such a concept was under consideration. This would have been probably in February or March. Thing is, I don’t actually remember this as a conversation. It’s just as possible that in trying to remember that I must have heard of this at some point, part of my brain has fabricated a vague sense that I must have heard of this at some point.

In retrospect, if I were going to miss something like an entire television series entirely, the chronology makes sense. May through early July, I was buried in schoolwork. I began Project Crimson, which by my count eliminated some half of all advertising that I see at all, in late April. By July, my whirlwind travel schedule had begun. I stayed more or less up to date on the news, because there were plenty of television screens blaring cable news headlines wherever I went, and because when it is likely that I will meet new people, I do make an effort to brush up on current events so as to have all the relevant discussion points of the day, but this really only applies to news headlines.

So it is possible to imagine that this series premiere happened somewhere further down in my news feed, or in a news podcast episode that got downloaded to my phone but never listened to. I find it slightly odd that I was at, of all places, Disney World, and had no exposure whatsoever to the latest Disney show. But then again, their parks tend to focus on the more classic aspects of the Disney culture. And who knows; perhaps they did have posters and adverts up, or were putting them while my back was turned, or whatever. Clearly, it’s possible, because it happened.

Here are my two big problems with this whole fiasco. First, this is something I would have liked to know. I would understand if some story about, say, sports, or celebrity gossip, slipped under my radar in such a way. I don’t watch a whole lot of TV in general, and I don’t really watch anything related to sports of celebrity news. My online news feeds respond to what I engage with, giving me more stories I am likely to digest, and quietly axing pieces that my eyes would otherwise just glide over. Though this makes me uncomfortable, and I have criticized it in the past, I accept this as a price of having my news conveniently aggregated.

Except that here, I honestly would have liked to know that there was a new That’s So Raven series in the pipes. I would wager that I’m actually part of their target audience, which is part of why I’m so surprised that I wasn’t very aware of this. That’s So Raven ran, at least where I lived in Australia, at roughly the opening of when I was old enough to follow and appreciate the slightly more complicated “all ages” programming. And while I wouldn’t rank it as my favorite, its stories did stick with me. Raven’s struggles against racism, sexism, and discrimination, introduced me to these concepts before I had been diagnosed with all of my medical issues and experienced discrimination firsthand. Raven’s father’s quest to build his own small business, and Corey’s dogged, (some might say, relentless) entrepreneurial spirit, inspired me.

Moreover, the spinoff show Corey in the House, while often cringeworthy at the best of times, even more-so than its predecessor, was the first exposure that I had to, if not the structure and dynamics, than at least the imagery and phraseology, of US politics. This, at a time when I was forbidden to watch cable news (all that was on was the war on terror) and many of my schoolmates and their parents would routinely denounce the United States and its President, as the Australian components of coalition forces in the Middle East began to suffer losses. Naturally, as the token American, I was expected to answer for all of my president’s crimes. Having a TV show that gave me a modicum of a clue as to what people were talking about, but that also taught that America and American ideals, while they might not be perfect, were still at least good in an idealistic sense, was immensely comforting.

All of that is to say that I hold some nostalgia for the original series and the stories they told. Now, I have not seen this new show. I don’t know whether how close it is to the original. But I have to imagine that such nostalgia was a factor in the decision to approve this new series, which would suggest that it is aimed at least partly at my demographic. Given that there are trillions of dollars involved in making sure that targeted demographics are aware of the products they ought to consume, and that I haven’t been living particularly under a rock, it seems strange how this passed me by.

Furthermore, if a series of unusual events has caused me to miss this event this time, I am quite sure that I would have picked up on it earlier five years ago. Even three years ago, I would have within a few weeks of launch, seen some advert, or comment, and investigated. In all probability, I would have watched this show from day one, or shortly thereafter. However, the person who I am and my media habits now have diverged so much from the person that I was then that we no longer have this in common. This rattles me. Even though I understand and accept that selves are not so much constant as changing so slowly as to not notice most days, this is still a shock.

Which brings me nicely to my second problem in all of this. This new series, in many respects represents a best case scenario for something that is likely to cross my path. Yes, there are confounding variables at play: I was traveling, I have cut down how much advertising I tolerate, and I had been mostly skimming the headlines. But these aren’t once-in-a blue moon problems. There was a massive, concerted publicity effort, in behalf of one of the largest media and marketing machines on the planet, to promote a story that I would have embraced if it ever came across my radar, while I was at one of their theme parks, and while I was making a conscious effort to pay attention to headlines. And yet I still missed this.

This begs an important, terrifying question: what else have I missed? The fact that I missed this one event, while idly disappointing, will likely not materially impact my life in the foreseeable future. The face that I could have missed it in the first place, on the other hand, shows that there is a very large blind spot in my awareness of current happenings. It is at least large enough to fly an entire TV series through, and probably quite a bit larger.

I am vaguely aware, even as a teenager, that I do not know all things. But I do take some pride in being at least somewhat well informed, and ready to learn. I like to believe that I some grasp on the big picture, and that I have at least some concept of the things that I am not paying attention to; to repeat an earlier example, sports and celebrity news. I can accept that there are plenty of facts and factoids that I do not know, since I am not, despite protestations, a walking encyclopedia, and I recognize that, in our new age of interconnectedness and fractally-nested cultural rabbit holes, that there are plenty of niche interests with which I am not familiar. But this is in my wheelhouse, or at least I would have thought.

It is still possible, and I do still hope, that this is a fluke. But what if it isn’t? What if this is simply one more product of how I currently organize my life, and of how the internet and my means of connectivity fit into that? Suppose this latest scandal is just one more item that I have missed because of the particular filtering strategies I use to avoid being overloaded. If this best-case scenario didn’t get my attention, what are the odds that something without all of these natural advantages will get to me?

How likely is it that I am going to hear about the obscure piece of legislation being voted on today, or the local budget referendum, which both affect me, but not directly or immediately enough that I’m liable to see people marching in the streets or calling me up personally? How often will I hear about the problems facing my old friends in Australia now that I am living on a different continent, in a different time zone, and with a totally different political landscape to contend with.

For all of my fretting, I can’t conceive of a realistic path out of this. The internet is to large and noisy a place to cover all, or even a substantial number of, the bases. More content is uploaded every second than a human could digest in s lifetime. Getting news online requires either committing to one or two sources, or trusting an aggregation service, whether that be a bot like Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and the like, or paying a human somewhere along the line to curate stories.

Going old fashioned, as I have heard proposed in a few different places, and sticking to a handful of old-fashioned print newspapers with paid subscriptions and a set number of pages to contend with, is either too broad, and hence has the same problem of relying on the internet at large, or too specific and cut down. TV news tends to fall somewhere between newspapers and social media. And crucially, none of these old fashioned services are good at giving me the news that I require. I want to hear about the scandal in the White House, and the one in my local Town Hall, and hear about the new series based on the one that aired when I was young, and what the World Health Organization says about the outbreak in Hong Kong, without hearing about sports or celebrity gossip, or that scandal in Belgrade that I don’t know enough about to comment on.

Figuring out how to reconcile this discrepancy in a way that satisfies both consumers, and society’s needs for a well informed populace, may well be one of the key challenges of this time in history, especially for my generation. For my part, the best I can figure is that I’m going to have to try and be a little more cognizant of things that might be happening outside of my bubble. This isn’t really a solution, any more than ‘being aware of other drivers’ is a solution for car accidents. Media bubbles are the price of casual participation in current events, and from where I stand today, non-participation is not an option.

A Book Review: Turtles All The Way Down

Recently I received a free signed copy of Turtles All The Way Down, by John Green. Well, actually, it was two weeks ago. Also actually I got more than one copy, but the second copy, which I received before I got my hands on the first copy because I got it in person on launch day, was part of the goodie bag for the book tour event that I went to. And while the book wasn’t something I purchased per se as a discrete product, I did pay for the ticket to the event. Or rather, my family paid, because this was a family outing, and so everyone came and got signed books.

All that is to say that there is now an appreciable stack of signed Turtles All The Way Down books sitting, conspicuously arranged in a sort of spiral stack (Turtles All The Way Down, all the way down), on our countertop, and that these books were acquired, depending on how you average the cost per book and whether you factor in the intangible value of the book tour event, either for free, at a very inflated price, or somewhere in between.

I was told when I was promised my free copy and asked for a shipping address that this was meant as a token. Not payment, nor tribute to curry favor, but a gift. Because I was part of a community, and had been following and involved in the book’s development, even when neither I nor anyone else knew that John was working on a book, and my participation was worth something, and that this signed copy was a token of that meaning.

Maybe I just have trouble accepting compliments and credit. It wouldn’t be the first time that this has come up. Even so, there is a sort of convention whereby if you are set a free copy of a book by an author or their publishing staff, that you will endeavor to review it (preferably with glowing praise). And while I am generally not a stickler for social convention, this one is close enough to the thing that I was going to do anyways. So here goes.

One more note before I begin: there is also a convention of referring to authors by their last name when reviewing them. I’m not going to do that for a couple of reasons. First, because John Green has a brother, Hank Green, who also writes. Second, because, as noted, receiving this book is a personal token of sorts. And while I may not be strictly on a first name basis with John Green, insofar as I do know him and have had limited contact with him, he has always been John to me. To call him otherwise would feel strange and insincere.

People with only a passing familiarity with John and his work might be surprised that I am such a staunch fan. After all, his works, and especially his previous work, The Fault In Our Stars, are often pigeonholed as stereotypical “teen-girl gushy romance novels”. Like in all stereotypes, there are some elements of truth in this, especially if one is of the inclination to consign anything containing teenage girl protagonists and a romantic arc to a lesser status.

Nevertheless I maintain that TFIOS also manages to effectively introduce several hard-hitting themes and questions. It tackles, among other things, chronic illness in a way that is, if not always perfectly realistic in the strictest academic sense, then at least realistically personal. That is to say, TFIOS tells an accurate first-person story, even if telling the story from the perspective of the protagonist makes it somewhat dubiously personal from other perspectives.

You will notice that while I talk about John’s use of themes and ideas and other English class topics, I have barely mentioned the actual plot, characters, and related. This is, at least in my interpretation, an important distinction and recurring theme. John is decent enough at plot and characters and all those other things. But this is only one element of writing, and in John’s case, I will submit, not the main event. Where John excels is at integrating themes, questions, ideas, and concepts into a digestible and empathetic narrative. And Turtles All The Way Down is John doing this at his best.

In TATWD, John discusses important questions about mental health, chronic pain, the nature of love and friendship, inequality, loss, privilege, and the philosophy of consciousness, all bound up in a nice YA novel.

The parallel I keep coming back to is George Orwell’s work. Most likely, if you’re reading, say, 1984, you’re not doing so to hear about Winston and Julia’s thrilling romantic relationship, nor to see how Winston climbs the workplace ladder at the Ministry of Truth. You’re reading to have the big ideas unpacked for you and presented in a way that you can grapple with. You’re exploring the world, and Winston just happens to be your vessel for doing so.

Sure, you could skip Animal Farm in school, and get everything you’d need to know from skimming a history textbook on the Soviet Union. But reading the story version is probably going to make it easier to understand and digest. Simply hearing that a bunch of people were shot a long time ago in a country far away, doesn’t click in the human mind the same way reading about animals you’ve come to love turn on each other does.

Similarly, you could skip Turtles All The Way Down, and go over the Wikipedia pages for OCD, Anxiety, and the philosophy of consciousness. But in addition to missing the story aspect (which is good, despite my maintaining that it takes a backseat), it’s probably not going to have the same hold on you. Humans are first-person creatures, and having something framed as a first person view is immensely powerful.

In conclusion, I think Turtles All The Way Down is a very good, very powerful book. It’s not perfect by a long shot, and I waver on whether I like it better or worse than TFIOS, which has long contended for my favorite book I have yet read. It isn’t exactly an apples to apples comparison, which will come as good news to those who felt TFIOS struck too close to the teen-girl romance stereotype. Even so, my signed copy of TATWD has earned its place in my collection next to my beloved signed copy of TFIOS, which is among the highest honors I can bestow.

Reflections on Contentedness

Contentedness is an underrated emotion. True, it doesn’t have the same electricity as joy, or the righteousness of anger. But it has the capability to be every bit as sublime. As an added bonus, contentedness seems to lean towards a more measured, reflective action as a result, rather than the rash impulsiveness of the ecstatic excitement of unadulterated joy, or the burning rage of properly kindled anger.

One of the most valuable lessons I have learned in the past decade has been how to appreciate being merely content instead of requiring utter and complete bliss. It is enough to sit in the park on a nice and sunny day, without having to frolic and chase the specter of absolute happiness. Because in truth, happiness is seldom something that can be chased.

Of course, contentedness also has its more vicious form if left unmoderated. Just as anger can beget wrath, and joy beget gluttony, greed, and lust, too much contentedness can bring about a state of sloth, or perhaps better put, complacency. Avoiding complacency has been a topic on my mind a great deal of late, as I have suddenly found myself with free time and energy, and wish to avoid squandering it as much as possible.

This last week saw a few different events of note in my life, which I will quickly recount here:

I received the notification of the death of an acquaintance and comrade of mine. While not out of the blue, or even particularly surprising, it did nevertheless catch me off guard. This news shook me, and indeed, if this latest post seems to contain an excess of navel-gazing ponderance, without much actual insight to match, that is why. I do have more thoughts and words on the subject, but am waiting for permission from the family before posting anything further on the subject.

The annual (insofar as having something two years in a row makes an annual tradition) company barbecue hosted at our house by my father took place. Such events are inevitably stressful for me, as they require me to exert myself physically in preparation for houseguests, and then to be present and sociable. Nevertheless, the event went on without major incident, which I suppose is a victory.

After much consternation, I finally picked up my diploma and finalized transcript from the high school, marking an anticlimactic end to the more than half-decade long struggle with my local public school to get me what is mine by legal right. In the end, it wasn’t that the school ever shaped up, decided to start following the law, and started helping me. Instead, I learned how to learn and work around them.

I made a quip or two about how, now that I can no longer be blackmailed with grades, I could publish my tell-all book. In truth, such a book will probably have to wait until after I am accepted into higher education, given that I will still have to work with the school administration through the application process.

In that respect, very little is changed by the receiving of my diploma. There was no great ceremony, nor parade, nor party in my honor. I am assured that I could yet have all such things if I were so motivated, but it seems duplicitous to compel others to celebrate me and my specific struggle, outside of the normal milestones and ceremonies which I have failed to qualify for, under the pretense that it is part of that same framework. Moreover, I hesitate to celebrate at all. This is a bittersweet occasion, and a large part of me wants nothing more than for this period of my life to be forgotten as quickly as possible.

Of course, that is impossible, for a variety of reasons. And even if it were possible, I’m not totally convinced it would be the right choice. It is not that I feel strongly that my unnecessary adversity has made me more resilient, or has become an integral part of my identity. It has, but this is a silver lining at best. Rather, it is because as much as I wish to forget the pains of the past, I wish even more strongly to avoid such pains in future. It is therefore necessary that I remember what happened, and bear it constantly in mind.

The events of this week, and the scattershot mix of implications they have for me, make it impossible for me to be unreservedly happy. Even so, being able to sit on my favorite park bench, loosen my metaphorical belt, and enjoy the nice, if unmemorable, weather, secure in the knowledge that the largest concerns of recent memory and foreseeable future are firmly behind me, does lend itself to a sort of contentedness. Given the turmoil and anguish of the last few weeks of scrambling to get schoolwork done, this is certainly a step up.

In other news, my gallery page is now operational, albeit incomplete, as I have yet to go through the full album of photographs that were taken but not posted, nor have I had the time to properly copy the relevant pages from my sketchbook. The fictional story which I continue to write is close to being available. In fact, it is technically online while I continue to preemptively hunt down bugs, it just doesn’t have anything linking to it. This coming weekend it slated to be quite busy, with me going to a conference in Virginia, followed by the Turtles All the Way Down book release party in New York City.

The Social Media Embargo

I have previously mentioned that I do not frequently indulge in social media. I thought it might be worthwhile to explore this in a bit more detail.

The Geopolitics of Social Media

Late middle and early high school are a perpetual arms race for popularity and social power. This is a well known and widely accepted thesis, and my experience during adolescence, in addition to my study of the high schools of past ages, and of other countries and cultures, has led me to treat it as a given. Social media hasn’t changed this. It has amplified this effect, however, in the same manner that improved intercontinental rocketry and the invention of nuclear ballistic missile submarines intensified the threat of the Cold War.

To illustrate: In the late 1940s and into the 1950, before ICBMs were accurate or widely deployed enough to make a credible threat of annihilation, the minimum amount of warning of impending doom, and the maximum amount of damage that could be inflicted, were limited by the size and capability of each side’s bomber fleet. Accordingly, a war could only be waged, and hence, could only escalate, as quickly as bombers could reach enemy territory. This both served as an inherent limit on the destructive capability of each side, and acted as a safeguard against accidental escalation by providing a time delay in which snap diplomacy could take place.

The invention of long range ballistic missiles, however, changed this fact by massively decreasing the time from launch order to annihilation, and the ballistic missile submarine carried this further by putting both powers perpetually in range for a decapitation strike – a disabling strike that would wipe out enemy command and launch capability.

This new strategic situation has two primary effects, both of which increase the possibility of accident, and the cost to both players. First, both powers must adopt a policy of “Launch on Warning” – that is, moving immediately to full annihilation based only on early warning, or even acting preemptively when one believes that an attack is or may be imminent. Secondly, both powers must accelerate their own armament programs, both to maintain their own decapitation strike ability, and to ensure that they have sufficient capacity that they will still maintain retaliatory ability after an enemy decapitation strike.

It is a prisoner’s dilemma, plain and simple. And indeed, with each technological iteration, the differences in payoffs and punishments becomes larger and more pronounced. At some point the cost of continuous arms race becomes overwhelming, but whichever player yields first also forfeits their status as a superpower.

The same is, at least in my experience, true of social media use. Regular checking and posting is generally distracting and appears to have serious mental health costs, but so long as the cycle continues, it also serves as the foremost means of social power projection. And indeed, as Mean Girls teaches us, in adolescence as in nuclear politics, the only way to protect against an adversary is to maintain the means to retaliate at the slightest provocation.

This trend is not new. Mean Girls, which codified much of what we think of as modern adolescent politics and social dynamics, was made in 2004. Technology has not changed the underlying nature of adolescence, though it has accelerated and amplified its effects and costs. Nor is it limited to adolescents: the same kind of power structures and popularity contests that dominated high school recur throughout the world, especially as social media and the internet at large play a greater role in organizing our lives.

This is not inherently a bad thing if one is adept at social media. If you have the energy to post, curate, and respond on a continuous schedule, more power to you. I, however, cannot. I blame most of this on my disability, which limits my ability to handle large amounts of stimuli without becoming both physiologically and psychologically overwhelmed. The other part of this I blame on my perfectionist tendencies, which require that I make my responses complete and precise, and that I see through my interactions until I am sure that I have proven my point. While this is a decent enough mindset for academic debate, it is actively counterproductive on the social internet.

Moreover, continuous exposure to the actions of my peers reminded me of a depressing fact that I tried often to forget: that I was not with them. My disability is not so much a handicap in that is prevents me from doing things when I am with my peers in that it prevents me from being present with them in the first place. I become sick, which prevents me from attending school, which keeps me out of conversations, which means I’m not included in plans, which means I can’t attend gatherings, and so forth. Social media reminds me of this by showing me all the exciting things that my friends are doing while I am confined to bed rest.

It is difficult to remedy this kind of depression and anxiety. Stray depressive thoughts that have no basis in reality can, at least sometimes, and for me often, be talked apart when it is proven that they are baseless, and it is relatively simple to dismiss them when they pop up later. But these factual reminders that I am objectively left out; that I am the only person among my peers among these smiling faces; seemingly that my existence is objectively sadder and less interesting; is far harder to argue.

The History of the Embargo

I first got a Facebook account a little less than six years ago, on my fourteenth birthday. This was my first real social media to speak of, and was both the beginning of the end of parental restrictions on my internet consumption, and the beginning of a very specific window of my adolescence that I have since come to particularly loath.

Facebook wasn’t technically new at this point, but it also wasn’t the immutable giant that it is today. It was still viewed as a game of the young, and it was entirely possible to find someone who wasn’t familiar with the concept of social media without being a total Luddite. Perhaps more relevantly, there were then the first wave of people such as myself, who had grown up with the internet as a lower-case entity, who were now of age to join social media. That is, these people had grown up never knowing a world where it was necessary to go to a library for information, or where information was something that was stored physically, or even where past stories were something held in one’s memory rather than on hard drives.

In this respect, I consider myself lucky that the official line of the New South Wales Department of Eduction and Training’s official computer curriculum was, at the time I went through it, almost technophobic by modern standards; vehemently denouncing the evils of “chatrooms” and regarding the use of this newfangled “email” with the darkest suspicion. It didn’t give me real skills to equip me for the revolution that was coming; that I would live through firsthand, but it did, I think, give me a sense of perspective.

Even if that curriculum was already outdated even by the time it got to me, it helped underscore how quickly things had changed in the few years before I had enrolled. This knowledge, even if I didn’t understand it at the time, helped to calibrate a sense of perspective and reasonableness that has been a moderating influence on my technological habits.

During the first two years or so of having a Facebook account, I fell into the rabbit hole of using social media. If I had an announcement, I posted it. If I found a curious photo, I posted it. If I had a funny joke or a stray thought, I posted it. Facebook didn’t take over my life, but it did become a major theatre of it. What was recorded and broadcast there seemed for a time to be equally important as the actual conversations and interactions I had during school.

This same period, perhaps unsurprisingly, also saw a decline in my mental wellbeing. It’s difficult to tease apart a direct cause, as a number of different things all happened at roughly the same time; my physiological health deteriorated, some of my earlier friends began to grow distant from me, and I started attending the school that would continually throw obstacles in my path and refuse to accommodate my disability. But I do think my use of social media amplified the psychological effects of these events, especially inasmuch as it acted a focusing lens on all the things that made me different and apart from my peers.

At the behest of those closest to me, I began to take breaks from social media. These helped, but given that they were always circumstantial or limited in time, their effects were accordingly temporary. Moreover, the fact that these breaks were an exception rather than a standing rule meant that I always returned to social media, and when I did, the chaos of catching up often undid whatever progress I might have made in the interim.

After I finally came to the conclusion that my use of social media was causing me more personal harm than good, I eventually decided that the only way I would be able to remove its influence was total prohibition. Others, perhaps, might find that they have the willpower to deal with shades of gray in their personal policies. And indeed, in my better hours, so do I. The problem is that I have found that social media is most likely to have its negative impacts when I am not in one of my better hours, but rather have been worn down by circumstance. It is therefore not enough for me to resolve that I should endeavor to spend less time on social media, or to log off when I feel it is becoming detrimental. I require strict rules that can only be overridden in the most exceedingly extenuating circumstances.

My solution was to write down the rules which I planned to enact. The idea was that those would be the rules, and if I could justify an exception in writing, I could amend them as necessary. Having this as a step helped to decouple the utilitarian action of checking social media from the compulsive cycle of escalation. If I had a genuine reason to use social media, such as using it to provide announcements to far flung relatives during a crisis, I could write a temporary amendment to my rules. If I merely felt compelled to log on for reasons that I could not express coherently in a written amendment, then that was not a good enough reason.

This decision hasn’t been without its drawbacks. I am, without social media, undoubtedly less connected to my peers as I might otherwise have been, and the trend which already existed of my being the last person to know of anything has continued to intensify, but crucially, I am not so acutely aware of this trend that it has a serious impact one way or another on my day to day psyche. Perhaps some months hence I shall, upon further reflection, come to the conclusion that my current regime is beginning to inflict more damage than that which it originally remedied, and once again amend my embargo.

Arguments Against the Embargo

My reflections on my social media embargo have brought me stumbling upon two relevant moral quandaries. The first is whether ignorance can truly be bliss, and whether there is an appreciable distinction between genuine experience and hedonistic simulation. In walling myself off from the world I have achieved a measure of peace and contentment, at the possible cost of disconnecting myself from my peers, and to a lesser degree from the outside world. In the philosophical terms, I have alienated myself, both from my fellow man, and from my species-essence. Of course, the question of whether social media is a genuine solution to, or a vehicle of, alienation, is a debate unto itself, particularly given my situation.

It is unlikely, if still possible, that my health would have allowed my participation in any kind of physical activity which I could have been foreseeably invited to as a direct result of increased social media presence. Particularly given my deteriorating mental health of the time, it seems far more reasonable to assume that my presence would have been more of a one-sided affair: I would have sat, and scrolled, and become too self conscious and anxious about the things that I saw to contribute in a way that would be noticed by others. With these considerations in mind, the question of authenticity of experience appears to be academic at best, and nothing for me to loose sleep over.

The second question regards the duty of expression. It has oft been posited, particularly with the socio-political turmoils of late, that every citizen has a duty to be informed, and to make their voice heard; and that furthermore in declining to take a position, we are, if not tacitly endorsing the greater evil, then at least tacitly declaring that all positions available are morally equivalent in our apathy. Indeed, I myself have made such arguments on the past as it pertains to voting, and to a lesser extent to advocacy in general.

The argument goes that social media is the modern equivalent of the colonial town square, or the classical forum, and that as the default venue for socio-political discussion, our abstract duty to be informed participants is thus transmogrified into a specific duty to participate on social media. This, combined with the vague Templar-esque compulsion to correct wrongs that also drives me to rearrange objects on the table, acknowledge others’ sneezes, and correct spelling, is not lost on me.

In practice, I have found that these discussions are, at best, pyrrhic, and more often entirely fruitless: they cause opposition to become more and more entrenched, poison relationships, and convert no one, all the while creating a blight in what is supposed to be a shared social space. And as Internet shouting matches tend to be crowned primarily by who blinks first, they create a situation in which any withdrawal, even for perfectly valid reasons such as, say, having more pressing matters than trading insults over tax policy, is viewed as concession.

While this doesn’t directly address the dilemma posited, it does make its proposal untenable. Taking to my social media to agitate is not particularly more effective than conducting a hunger strike against North Korea, and given my health situation, is not really a workable strategy. Given that ought implies can, I feel acceptably satisfied to dismiss any lingering doubts about my present course.

What is a Home?

I know that I’m getting close to where I want to be when the GPS stops naming roads. That’s fine. These roads don’t have names, or even a planned logic to them, so much as they merely exist relative to other things. Out here, the roads are defined by where they go, rather than having places defined by addresses.

After a while I begin to recognize familiar landmarks. Like the roads, these landmarks don’t have names, but rather refer to some event in the past. First we drive through the small hamlet where I was strong armed into my first driving lesson. We pass the spot where my grandmother stopped the golf cart by the side of the road to point out the lavender honeysuckle to far younger versions of myself and my younger brother, and we spent a half hour sampling the taste of the flowers. Next we pass under the tree that my cousin was looking up at nervously when my father grabbed him by the shoulders and screamed that he was under attack by Drop Bears, causing my cousin to quite nearly soil himself.

I have never lived in a single house continuously for more than about eight years. I grew up traveling, an outsider wherever I went, and to me the notion of a single home country, let alone a single house for a home, is as foreign as it is incomprehensible. So is the concept of living within driving distance of most of one’s relatives, for that matter.

To me, home has always been a utilitarian rather than moral designation. Home is where I sleep for free, where my things that don’t fit in my suitcase go, and where the bills get forwarded to. Home is the place where I can take as long as I want in the bathroom, and rearrange the furniture to my arbitrary personal preferences, and invite people over without asking, but that is all. Anywhere these criteria are met can be home to me, with whatever other factors such as ownership, geographic location, and proximity to relatives, or points of personal history, being irrelevant. I can appreciate the logistical value of all of these things, but attaching much more importance to it seems strange.

Yet even as I write this I find myself challenging my points. Walking around my grandfather’s farmhouse, which is the closest thing I have to a consistent home, I am reminded of images of myself from a different time, especially of myself from a time before I was consciously able to make choices about who I am. It’s difficult to think of myself that long ago in terms of me, and my story, and much easier to think of myself in terms of the other objects that were also present.

My grandparents used to run a preschool from their house, and the front room is still stocked with toys and books from that era. Many of the decorations have remained unchanged from when my grandmother ran the place. The doors and cabinets are all painted in bright pastel colors. In my mind, these toys were as much my own as any that stayed at home while we traveled. Each of these toys has wrapped up in it the plot lines from several hundred different games between myself and whoever else I could rope into playing with me.

Against the wall is a height chart listing my, my brother’s, and my cousins’ heights since as early as we could stand. For most of my childhood this was the official scale for determining who was tallest in the ever raging battle for height supremacy, and I remember feeling ready to burst with pride the first time I was verified as tallest. I am tall enough now that I have outgrown the tallest measuring point. I am indisputably the tallest in the family. And yet I still feel some strange compulsion to measure myself there, beyond the mere curiosity that is aroused every time I see a height scale in a doctor’s office.

This place isn’t my home, not by a long shot. In many respects, it meets fewer of my utilitarian criteria than a given hotel. It is the closest I have ever felt to understanding the cultural phenomenon of Home, and yet it is still as foreign as anywhere else. If one’s home is tied to one’s childhood, as both my own observations and those of others I have read seem to indicate, then I will probably never have a home. This might be a sad realization, if I knew any different.

I have often been accused of holding a worldview that does not include room for certain “human” elements. This accusation, as far as I can tell, is probably on point, though somewhat misleading. It is not out of malice nor antipathy towards these elements that I do not place value on concepts such as “home”, “patriotism”, or, for that matter “family”. It is because they are foreign, and because from my viewpoint as an outsider, I genuinely cannot see their value.

I can understand and recognize the utilitarian value; I recognize the importance of having a place to which mail can be delivered and oversized objects can be stored; I can understand the preference for ensuring that one’s country of residence is secure and prosperous; and I can see the value of a close support network, and how one’s close relatives might easily become among one’s closest friends. But inasmuch as these things are said to suppose to have inherent value beyond their utilitarian worth, I cannot see it.

It is probably, I am told, a result of my relatively unusual life trajectory, which has served to isolate me from most cultural touchstones. I never had a home or homeland because we lived abroad and moved around when I was young. I fail to grasp the value of family because I have never lived in close proximity to extended relatives to the point of them becoming friends, and my illness and disability has further limited me from experiencing most of the cultural touchstones with which I might share with family.

It might sound like I am lamenting this fact. Perhaps I would be, if I knew what it was that I am allegedly missing. In reality, I only lament the fact that I cannot understand these things which seem to come naturally to others. That I lack a capital-H Home, or some deeper connection to extended family or country, is neither sad nor happy, but merely a fact of my existence.