This is the saddest poem I have ever read...

Time for a little perspective...I decided to write about Bukowski tonight. Charles Henry Bukowski's poem Bluebird is the saddest poem I have ever read. It may have a little to do with perspective; Bukowski is one of the most tortured poets of the twenty-first century, having suffered from acne vulgaris, ulcers, and tuberculosis to ultimately die from leukemia. This man faced all of these medical demons and kept on writing, while being inspired by drink and the race track. I recently watched Bukowski: Born into this and was ultimately moved by it, especially when the poem Bluebird was placed in perspective at the end of them movie. I had no idea how so much great art is inspired by so much pain and hatred, such sadness and loneliness.

Honestly, it scares me just a little.

It scares me because Bukowski went through some really bad childhood experiences and some horrible medical conditions to produce some amazing art. And it required the horrible experiences to produce this art. I hate to think about someone who went through so much pain to produce something that enriches society, because deep down, it means that I somehow have to pay this person back, but ultimately there's no way to do such a thing. Maybe this pain and suffering is allay-able; maybe it's something that should be prevented. But, in the prevention of such suffering, it would also prevent the production of such great art.

Seriously, read this poem at least three times. The first time I read it, I wept openly. Does this make me less of a man? Maybe. Does it define me as a human? Maybe more. Does it seriously mean that people must suffer for their art? It could be true. And that saddens me more than anything.

Dudeism?

I listen to "The Big Lebowski" podcast (at www.lebowskipodcast.com) as an entertaining discussion of the philosophy behind this rather creative movie. The most recent podcast as of this writing talks about Dude-ism, and in the process presents a website that details this odd religion (although it is more of a philosophy than a religion, but I like the joke). It really is a thinly-veiled homage to the Dude (semi-title character in the movie), but the site itself really prods some deep questions in me.

Religion for me is a touchy subject, and I don't plan to really expound here on my religious beliefs, other than that I do believe that religion is a very private agreement between you and your metaphysics, and shouldn't be aired, even if it influences your judgment. When a faux-religion pops up I do get concerned though, and maybe it's just a silly thought, but what happens in two centuries when your sarcasm is lost and people take it too seriously? At the same time, this is against the very notion of Dude-ism (from the first Dude-etude):

Confronted with this inflexible and unfeeling existence, the Dude in all of us will acquiesce, slyly scribbling a peace sign where a zero might otherwise suffice. “He who gently yields is the disciple of life,” wrote Lao Tzu. That is to say, he abides.

Let's just say that this is not a religion that encourages evangelical action. I find this encouraging. I agree wholeheartedly with the discussion of philosophy, explanation of theology, and exhibition of faith, but I am aghast towards the amount of religious flaming that is present these days, be it about metaphysics, politics, or programming language.

However, this is also not a religion that spurs action, either. One of the greatest promises of religion is its ability to inspire (literally to breathe life into, interpret the etymology as metaphysically as you wish). Dude-ism is actually void of this inspiration, unless you consider the Buddha (I don't mean the reincarnated one). So it instructs you in posture but not in direction.

When I think of my concept of viviomancy, that is one of the most important parts. I do believe in letting the winds direct me, but I also believe in letting the winds inspire and through serendipity excite me. Not all of that can be undirected and messy; as I discussed in my previous post, some inspired actions do take deliberate steps and discipline in order to accomplish. There must therefore be a balance.

While at first this is just a disagreement between my life-view and Dude-ism, it also for me disqualifies it as a religion, and as a philosophical entity loses its pragmatism. Taoism at least encouraged right action and discipline, even if it was restrained and seemingly lacking in form. Buddhism encourages strict adherence to the Precepts in order to encourage peaceful and harmless action.

Sometimes even action is required to abide.

Change in format and mindset

I have decided to start posting shorter posts, in order to get my writing more spurred. Lately I have lost the reason for the blog in the first place. The purpose is related to the meaning of viviomancy (as I discussed in Housekeeping) as "the act of falling into a vibrant life through serendipity or action through non-traditional reasoning". I haven't appreciated my serendipity recently and I need to recognize that. This is a complicated thought and this may be a longer post than I hinted to in the first sentence, but I need to clarify why I feel the way I do right now.

At first, a lot of my resolutions in my 43 things (look to your left) are the result of mindless desire and direction-less feelings. I don't really know why I wanted to learn Arabic, other than the fact that it looks cool and sounds neat. I really think that I set up my resolutions because I wanted them to come true at the time I made the list and it was more impulsive than it was directed. However, I also have resolutions that are very directed and entirely less impulsive. For example, getting a six-pack is also on the list, and this is entirely less impulsive of a thought. I also have duplicates in this kind of resolution (eat healthier and imporve my diet are the same thing).

In short, I have accomplished more of my impulsive resolutions than I have my directed ones. This is why I feel that I need a new mindset. I now feel that it is possible to "fall into a vibrant life" through disciplined thinking, as contradictory as it sounds. Maybe I'm trying to validate my impulses, but isn't that what life is all about anyway?

I have a big project finishing up pretty soon. I am developing a card game called Zombie which is an unholy mix of bridge, Magic the Gathering, and Trivial Pursuit (in the purpose of getting cogs, not necessarily the trivia). I am actually making it into a Java application, although I tested the game logic in Haskell. Hopefully you'll all get a taste of it soon.

On trivia!

All of those horribly wasted brain cells. Trivia has always seemed to be the "fat" of the brain's knowledge, all those things that are seemingly unnecessary. As Doyle so elegantly states in A Study in Scarlet:

His[Sherlock Holmes's] ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge. Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know next to nothing. Upon my quoting Thomas Carlyle, he inquired in the naivest way who he might be and what he had done. My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to me to be such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.
“You appear to be astonished,” he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. “Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it.”
“To forget it!”
“You see,” he explained, “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”
“But the Solar System!” I protested.
“What the deuce is it to me?” he interrupted impatiently: “you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.”

Trivia as defined in the dictionary, means "something of small importance". I will wax trivial then and tell you the entomology of the word trivia. Trivia comes from the Latin trivium meaning "three roads". What the heck does that have to do with anything? Well, in medieval lore, there were seven "roads" to the liberal arts. These seven roads were called the septrivium (or "seven roads"). The seven roads were divided into 2 sections: the high roads of the quadrivium (arithmetic, astronomy, geometry, and music), and the low roads of the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic). The trivium were considered to be the lesser of the liberal arts and the use of the term stretched towards any fact that was considered unimportant.

When one looks at the quadrivium and sees that two of these arts have been absorbed into math, one is really physics, and the last is really a fine art and not a liberal one, the quadrivium really has no place in modern thinking. But, it is interesting to note the comparison of the natural liberal arts to that of the "man-made" liberal arts, and the relative importance placed on each. Also, logic is also absorbed into math, grammar is really an offshoot of language study that Noam Chomsky has also placed into math and is actually used in computer science, and that rhetoric is really an offshoot of psychology, so the "man-made" trivium is not really liberal arts either.

This all brings me to my point. I see so many of these studies being scientifically analyzed that our concept of "liberal arts" is really becoming the fringe divider between the scientifically quantifiable and the humanly expressible. So, where is the trivia? When I go to trivia on Tuesday nights at Tigin, they ask us questions that range mostly on points of knowledge, facial recognition, and current events. Literally, trivia has changed from the "ability to reason" which is present in grammar, rhetoric, and logic, and permuted into how many 0-dimensional facts that one knows.

All of these can and should be stored on the internet! I would claim that one of the quintessential tasks of the internet is the storage of extreme amounts of minutiae. So what happens when we find a way to link the internet to our minds to look something up at a moment's notice? No more trivia. It's already happening: Tigin puts on strict limits on the usage of cell-phones, laptops, or PDAs. This is because any of these are just appendages that limit the usage of the internet to "cheat" at the trivia competition.

But now is the time to come back to Doyle's passage. He's really and truly onto something: why store any of this useless knowledge in our brains when we should be storing it somewhere as a reference where it can be verified, compactly indexed, and quickly retrievable? Holmes is exactly correct; there is absolutely no reason he needs to know about astrophysics to solve crimes (unless his crimes occur on the moon or on Mars). And if Holmes needed to solve a stellar case, he could just look it up, know it for that case's time period, and then discard it.

Computers do the same thing: this is how cache works. They have a much faster memory on the CPU that they hit again and again when a piece of code is being repeated in a loop, or if a section of memory is being worked upon iteratively. It stores the hit from a previous lookup of something in slower memory (or worse, disk or flash memory) and works upon that, storing the real value on a different cycle later when it's no longer important. To a computer, the memory is filled with trivia, and the disk drive and internet are filled with obscurity. The only part that is truly important is what's currently on the computer's mind, which is in the registers and cache.

I now ponder what that elimination of trivia as a cultural activity will end up doing to society at large. It's an important and ultimately paradigm-changing consideration. People look up places on GPS; they no longer depend on the knowledge of maps, landmarks, and the like. These landmarks were important, but now they are trivia. Almost any programmer 10 years ago could recite you the powers of 2 up to 2^32: now it's not really that important to their tasks, and it falls back to trivia. Is it really that important to mathematicians today that pi is really really close to 22/7? How important is that estimation to carpenters and plumbers? Will the art of estimation be lost when we all have cranial implants that have calculation as a base function? In any event, the art of the bar-born trivia quiz will soon become a faded memory, as more and more people are able to just look up the answers without even blinking their eyes. I don't know what it all means yet, but it is definitely changing the landscape of knowledge, similar to the change in universities when the septrivium was eliminated.

Been a month...

And now I'll be back at the grind. Things have changed in my employment situation, and soon they will have shifted into new work. It should prove to be more enlightening. I also started competing on Topcoder again, and that was awesome. I will definitely continue to do that; it was as cathartic as it was interesting.

It's extremely difficult to motivate when your feeling of self-worth has been diminished by events that are way out of your sphere of influence. I guess my only way out of it was to prove to myself that I still had worth and purpose to the world, and to deny my 100% involvement in that worth and purpose was to deny society the many blessings it has bestowed upon myself.

That's a real roundabout way of also saying thanks to all of my friends and family who have helped me immensely in comradery, advice, and support.

Anyway I have a second post for tonight, and it surrounds one of my favorite topics. People say I'm good at it too. We'll see tomorrow night. :D

Bonus: Did I tell you how much I like music?

I have a new favorite band. Welcome to Yeasayer. Fish down the website to find the music, I would have linked to it directly but I make it a point to never link directly to the canker-sore of the internet that is MySpace. Too bad it's a convenient way for bands to advertise, but fight it anyway and listen to the song 2080. Wow.

In addition, if you're any kind of coder, you'll appreciate a song by Jonathan Coulton called Code Monkey. Oddly enough it was linked to the YouTube video I posted last week. Here's the acoustic performance I found. Seriously this song could be an anthem, and it has instantly entered my iTunes rotation.

On Perfectionism

K likes to remind me of how I love to be a perfectionist at certain actions. It's a valid accusation towards the infrequent updates to this blog, and it's my biggest stumbling block to happiness. For being a habit that's supposedly good to have, it has a lot of drawbacks.

You see, perfectionism is one of those things that make a person function and idiosyncratic and at the same time make them shut down. If you've never had the experience of meeting someone afflicted with this disease, let me elaborate. A perfectionist is someone who labors to remove all imperfections from a particular action before showing that action to all. In some endeavors, it makes sense; when you solder a circuitboard, perfectionism can make the difference between a circuit acting "glitchy" and a circuit working perfectly. Polish is extremely evident in writing, for it separates the haphazard writing of Palahniuk and Keruoac from the sublime of Pynchon and the terseness of Hemingway (sometimes it takes a lot of effort to say so little). These obvious exertions of effort make a perfectionist good inside when someone else picks up on it and compliments.

However, the woe of the perfectionist is multifaceted. For starters, perfectionists are avid procrastinators; they don't like to start because of the imperfection of the plan of action. They usually use excuses related to this lack of planning, situation, or energy to delay really important tasks (even mundane ones) and this leads to dysfunction or even despondency. Second, a perfectionist usually dreams big, because of earlier successes that promote the idea that more effort at perfecting a task produces unbounded quality. These big dreams fly in the face of a currently reasonable and sensible plan. In addition, usually these high expectations usually lead to internal rejection of an outcome that isn't as ideal as mentally pictured. Because of the relatively high frequency of this happening, this leads to depression, especially when the perfectionist broods over what "could have been". Perfectionists tend to dislike probabilistic concepts such as luck, fate, serendipity, and calamity because not only are these imperfect but they can spoil an otherwise perfect plan. Finally, procrastinators don't like to finish, putting in excessive effort beyond the point of diminishing returns, wasting so much quality time.

From start to finish, perfectionists set themselves up to hate the things they do except in that rare time when everything goes right, which they then obsess about and use it as confirmation bias for their admittedly illogical actions.

How does one break the habit? Simple. Do things you're no good at. It turns out that a perfectionist will truly enjoy activities where they believe that they have no vested interest to polish, compete, or succeed. It's the reason I got into karaoke, and why I still enjoy it to this day: my voice is nowhere near perfect, I don't look to perfect my singing (except I do want to increase my range, so there's more music available that I'll be able to hit the high notes on :D), and usually the involvement of a little grog makes me forget that I'm getting good at it. Recently I won this contest at a local bar which gave me a slot for a bigger competition. The night of that competition was the least enjoyable night of karaoke I've ever had. Why? Because my perfectionist side reminded me how imperfect my singing was, and I wasn't able to get "in the mood", even after a couple beers. After that I resolved never to take any singing event seriously, and I've had a good time at karaoke since.

Such as last night, which was at the same bar as that competition. There was no competition, only good time had by all. We all joined in singing along, and had a blast past midnight. I needed sleep that next morning, and wasn't quite the perfectionist at work, but I was also reminded how much more vibrant life can be when you're not so worried about how you can make life more vibrant.

And with that, I'm gonna go work on perfecting my Halloween costume. Er... or maybe not. :D