This is a sequel of sorts of the previous “happy girl in the snow” post I made (#642).
Medium size after the cut.
Updated mini-version!
Archive for the ‘Thoughts’ Category
Good old platforming games like Super Mario or Banjo-Kazooie focus much more on traps, puzzles, and secrets than on character development. Nevertheless, I’ve come to realize that when you play such a game, you are forced to assume a certain personality – headstrong, risk-taking, meddling, for better or for worse. Without pressing forward, nothing changes. In real-time strategy games, you can play defensively (”turtle”); in RPGs you can endlessly train to become stronger and thus minimize the risk of defeat. But in the platformer, you are left naked, with minimal verbal/written instruction and a usually comparatively small amount of “health.”
When I was younger, it was very easy to play these sorts of games. I would just keep going, and frequently, I would die in the process of figuring out what to do. But having recently picked up Banjo-Tooie (the sequel to Banjo-Kazooie), I’ve realized that I’m a lot more unwilling to just blindly charge forward as I was before. I am more drawn to the “hometown.” It takes a conscious effort to force myself into the crushing machine or to enter a new tunnel while still transformed into a “detonator” (which can only attack by self-destruction which is eventually fatal).</p>
<p>I think the more enmeshed I become in society, the more my aspirations become public, the less I am willing to invest myself in risky propositions. I turn more to the people I know best, rather than counting on strangers; I reveal personal secrets and thoughts to a smaller circle of people rather than using online forums. But in an age where progress in incremental, only people who hop on the risky limbs have a chance of making any sort of splash. Hopefully by continuing through this game, I can regain some of that adventurous spirit I used to have, rather than deferring to someone else to test the waters.</p>
Life is, in simplest terms, a temporal string of choices. At any given moment, the agent may act or not act; or, formulated differently, the agent may act offensively or defensively.
Imagine a game where there is one die, with each face painted a different color from the rainbow (indigo not included). If the green face is up, then you are happy, and otherwise, you are unhappy. A man asks you every hour whether he should roll the die or not, and you can reply “yes” or “no.”
The expected outcome of this simple game is that the idealized agent replies “yes” until the die turns green-side up, then replies “no” thereafter This pattern of behavior not only represents political spectra, where rebellious youths turn into conservative adults, but also romance, economics, academic policy, sports games, and so on.
The nuances to the game enter when there are multiple people playing, who want different colors and who may also influence the man’s eventual action – to roll or not to roll. Human behavior deviates in several cases (e.g. the rural poor, academic elite) because of additional layers of superimposed concepts. For instance, we could imagine that another player convinces you that you desire another color than that which suits you, or that another player believes in a “global happiness” and thus seeks to maximize the happiness of the most people in the group, rather than for him or herself.
There is not much difference between the game that is played by all living creatures and the game played by humans, but humans have simply added so many rules and strategies that they often do not realize that they are still playing the same game. The most intense dualities stem from this ebb and flow: desire and satisfaction, searching and finding, shifting and settling, working and resting. The subtlety is that inaction is not a null in this game but a nearly equal force and choice as action itself. There is an energy behind both action and inaction, and that is what creates the conflicts that characterize life.
People who live with their pasts can write memoirs and autobiographies. I only live with the present and the future, the past lingering as a volume of knowledge in the living moment. That’s why I think my equivalent of a memoir is more like a simple present introspection, although the difference is that the introspection is more ‘closed’ from outside characters. When I hear the wash and noise of silence, or when I am sleeping, that is when this inner world is most apparent, and that is what I’m depicting here. Since I am so young, this short and simple diary-style introspection should suffice.
This five-page illustrated diary entry sums up my life, which is on a cycle of obligation and fulfillment. During the obligation segment, a large clump of things I need to do but that I can’t seem to commit to build up, and during the frenzied fulfillment stage, I finish them one by one (or release the ones that have expired). While the obligation stage is full of stress and a looming shadow, it is also a period during which I flit from one thing to another, learning as much as I can. Fulfillment is made possible by the disjoint skills I hone while distracted by other things. It can take months or years for me to understand how something I’ve learned how to do is relevant to fulfilling my promises. But at some point, everything just comes together. I just have to have faith that my instinctive investments will culminate in a grander art in the end.
Zoomed in all the way, we are in the midst of an economic crisis. But the financial turmoil is only a small part of a much bigger problem that has emerged on the large-scale. That problem is that the world we’ve created has grown complex and potent enough that we cannot properly comprehend it if we continue using small-world thinking to navigate our way. Talk of higher consciousnesses and meta-analyses is usually the esoteric coffee-table talk of intellectuals, but now more than ever, we need to reform our minds as a practical measure if we hope to make any of our stated goals come true.
Mind reform begins with simply recognizing the interconnections of the world, instead of imposing a reductionist map over reality. How can we allow multi-billion dollar gleaming cancer centers to be built by workers breathing noxious dust and lacking the education or resources to quit smoking? Why are people so smugly proud of themselves when they slip onto the T from the back door without paying, and then shouting in indignation when the fares climb yet again? How can environmental campaigns to save energy manically poster large sheets of pristine white paper to advertise energy-saving tips, and campaigns to save trees promote the use of electronics for all transactions? How can health centers, aghast at the obesity epidemic, especially among the less-well-to-do, then run their institutions by employing vast amounts of the lower-middle class to drive buses and sit at security desks all day?
We like to reduce our everyday tasks to two or three variables or considerations. That may have been fine our decisions before impacted at most two or three people or resources, but it can’t work now. Just like the banks and other large financial institutions, we have become invested in a tangle of thousands or millions of corporations and people, just from the things we buy, the way we move around, and the places we work. We are likewise responsible for taking into account the impact of what we do: responsibly doing research is not only about getting grants, budgeting the grants, and then publishing papers – it is about thinking of the people who have paid, through taxes and philanthropy and fundraising and organizing walks, for those grants; and it is about thinking of ways to make the research matter. Being conscious of the world means paying attention to those close to us and those far away from us, the people we work with and the people we work alongside and the people we don’t work with at all.
Like any shift of lifestyle, thinking bigger needs to be trained as a skill. As a first exercise, simply imagine the nearest elevator – what is it doing right now? People are going up and down. Where are they coming from? Where are they going? What are they holding? What are they thinking about? Who do they most want to see right now?
In an era when everyone is rushing to hyper-specialize and fields get sub-divided and sub-divided again, it’s easy to get swallowed in the minutiae of one’s particular field of work. But an architect can’t only think about the building structures and not the ones building it or the ones who will work with it or the ones who will see it from across the street. A grocer can’t only think about local sales but also the conditions of farms and factories of origins and the end-waste that populates the landfills. Leaving everything before and after you as a black box that will operate on its own is like being a pigeon, concerned only with where the next bread crumb will be. For humanity to keep up with the consequences of its institutions and technology, it needs to always maintain responsibility for and vigilance over the machines it sets into play.
Recently, there have been articles lambasting the spending on the Oscars ceremony as being excessive and insensitive. While it is a pity that so much is pouring into the posh of the few who don’t need it, I think that the argument that being frugal will benefit the economy is misguided. The economy thrives on consumer spending, and if everyone in the U.S. now suddenly stopped buying goods, that would for certain spell the doom of the market.
In my view, it makes little sense to throw money into the management and administrative ends of businesses. If you want to revitalize a crippled American car economy, why bleed money when the government could buy off the endless inventoried vehicles and put them to use in one way or another?
While I’m not spending a ton of money, I’m also not spending much less than ever before. Economic plans focus on unemployment and big “key” companies, but there must also be an effort to keep the small owners’ businesses alive, and that is most easily achieved by simply patronizing those businesses. Consumption tends to be a self-sustaining process since quality goods promote further business; the endpoint of tax cuts has to be in this realm, and if people just hoard their money, nothing is going to change.
A related article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/22/business/worldbusiness/22japan.html?_r=1&hp
Today as I was watching “Today in Class 5-2,” I was reminded of all the innocences and complexities and emotions of youth – and its wide-open honesty. Five years ago, on New Year’s Day, before I was in a relationship, before I received notice that MIT would accept me after that heartbreaking deferral, before I had ever considered becoming a doctor . . . even back then, I had already unfurled the full expanse of my dreams and ideals. Those fantasies warmed my heart even as my life leapt and plunged forward through rocky times, and they kept me alive through the imagined interactions that touched my heart in a profound way that maybe only artistic creation can achieve. This particular short story (a diary-like entry which is best imagined as being spun patiently by a voiceover talent as the reel plays back the memory) is one that marked a turning point in my understanding of my heart’s deepest desires. It was a time when I was untamed by the forces of adulthood and unafraid to write about a perfect world and a perfect life. Love has since entered my life (two years and a month), a duration coincidentally approximately the same as the romance below.
You’re already there, a bundle of warmth in the forest glazed in snow and ice. The snowflakes are falling intermittently. I catch one on my tongue, relishing the brief sensation.
In a way, that crazy passion has already worn off, grown into the deeper, more subtle love that could last an eternity. I’m sure you feel the same way. It’s like how the trees seem to greet us now as if we’d been inhabitants here for all our lives – a tree’s romance, a faerie’s tale: a slow dance under many a moon, under the stars as they change like the sand dunes on the beach.
I’m wearing the little ring; I hope you notice! I still remember your cute whispers last year when you gave it to me. You tried to be confident and logical, but alas, even I, watching with my eyes, felt that overwhelming wave as the light leapt off the simple gold band. You were blabbering, and I loved every word of it.
I still remember our meeting two years past, when you had to keep your promise and tell me what you’d done when you slipped away that day we were shopping in our mother land. And oh, how I knew before you even showed it to me that I’d forgive you for keeping a secret! I still finger the necklace every day when I wake up to dawn’s radiant shouts. I can imagine the words of some future construction worker who should dig up my coffin by mistake and find the necklace still there – “Aw, she loved him all her life!” And I should hope that they’d say the same about you!
Oh, you’re already there, a bundle of warmth in the forest glazed in snow and ice. I approach your huddled figure, sitting down on the rock beside you. There isn’t enough room and I have to press against your side lightly to prevent myself from sliding off. I hope you don’t mind.
This year it’s my turn – I got you something special this year. I hope it can be a memento worthy of our four years of friendship. Carefully, I hand it to you; it’s in a wide, flat box to protect it from the snow. Delicately, you open it.
It’s a painting of this very spot, but in our place are two young trees in full bloom. I say that I couldn’t paint you well enough, so I had to think up something else to represent you. You say I’m just being modest. I just blush and remember the other painting I have stashed away in my room; I tried! but sometimes things don’t turn out how you’d like. That’s life, too.
I love the way you squeal in delight like a little child on the swings for the first time. Oh, squeal more; it makes me smile. Gratitude is best expressed in those little cartwheels of the voice.
To protect the painting from the snow, you close the box, getting your fingers caught in between the top and the sides. We both laugh but I don’t let you fix the box because I suddenly have you in a tight embrace, our heads side-by-side so that we can hear each other’s ears doing whatever ears do on cold days. I don’t giggle like this very often, and it feels so good. The wind is blowing against my short hair and my crimson cheeks. Don’t you wish it felt like this every day?
Shyly as always, we move about our faces until our lips brush against each other. The kiss is gentle and pacific like the air around us. ‘I love you,’ I think as I close my eyes. I love you I love you I love you. We don’t have to wish for it to feel like this every day; it already does.
On to another great year of our lives!
Yes, the original creator of some work or technology should be protected from other people trying to profit from non-collaborative, unapproved use of that creator’s work. But that being said, I think that the extremes of so-called “intellectual property” in the modern Western society are bizarre and inappropriate.
Unlike my frying pan, which I rightfully own through the trade of money and which represents a tool and not some link to society or the greater human consciousness, my ideas – my songs, drawings, whatever – are not simply purchased through my earnings in work or service. I would not be much of a composer had I not studied Bach and Brahms and Schoenberg. I would not be much of a cartoonist without being exposed to the work of Kiyohiku Azuma or Rumiko Takahashi.
It is arrogant to think that ideas, which stem from the amalgamation and then fusion and recombination of thought and inspiration from past and present, are so easily demarcated and tangible that they may be analogous to a frying pan. This is as absurd as the idea that a human can “own” a cat. Ideas and living things – and they are largely the same thing – owe their existence to a phenomenal amount of sources. In an ideal situation, they belong to everybody.
It is because there are thieves in this world who seek to counterfeit, people who did not contribute to the idea at all, that we have to have laws about copyright and patents. That is all well and good – I certainly would not want someone selling my music under his or her name for his or her profit. But nothing should be so absolute so as to hamper the progression of knowledge and its applications to human benefit, especially with regards to technology that were not all that innovative in the first place.
As an example of this grotesque culture of greed, in which people who have no intellect to think that there might exist a metaphysical significance to objects attempt to levy ownership over what was never theirs in the first place, I’ll give the example of the Bristol-Myers Squibb taxol fiasco. BMS opposed strongly the entrance of generics into the taxol market. Broadly speaking, taxol was discovered by the US government and belongs to the US people. BMS attempt to patent taxol as delivered with castor oil as an injection. Then, it sued a Canadian generic company (after the 5 year exclusivity period) with a patent it never had and never will have.
All of this for a compound that was never created from human intellect. It is absurd to think of paying the yew trees for it, but if that’s so, then it’s even more absurd to pay humans for the idea (paying for the object is of course reasonable, as it costs money to extract and/or to produce). If anyone owns a patent on taxol, it’s God or Gaia or Mother Earth.
Claiming that taxol is your “intellectual property” is tantamount to the Europeans landing in America and claiming that all the land belonged to them.
Art is the same way, and I intended a long time ago to write about derivative works (fanart, doujinshi, etc.) but I never got around to finishing that entry. An art is generally speaking passed down, directly or indirectly, from some master to some apprentice. There is no artist that I know of who can create works without (a) having things around to look at, (b) training through class or self-teaching, or usually both. Both of these are acts of absorbing outside influence.
Human creation comes from two stages: first, the acquisition of source data, then second, inspiration and transformation of those sources into a final product. No creation and no genius exists without precedent. Here are two cases to underline my point:
1. Takashi Murakami of “superflat” fame created the petal-y design for Louis Vuitton (which I happen to like a lot), but he is hardly the first to use four-petal motifs in art design. Louis Vuitton is foolish to sue artist Nadia Plesner over her not-for-profit fundraising t-shirt logo, which neither promotes counterfeiting (no moreso than Evangelion’s famous “Eila” in place of “Fila”) nor is any more alike to the LV design than Takashi Murakami’s own art draws on Doraemon and Ghibli.
2. Bach was astounding, but he had Palestrina before him, and polyphony dates back centuries farther, back in the days when all harmony was chant in parallel fifths. That Mendelssohn could freely quote Handel and that “a theme by Paganini” became a virtuoso piece for piano, of all ironies – that is a testament to the importance of what amounts to “fanfiction” in the musical world. These days, it is the absurd vogue that you can quote dead people’s music but not live ones’. Quoting anyone straight up is just unintelligent, no matter how you look at it. But the worst is when people claim sole copyright on works that include quotes. The notes belong to no one, and a computer given sufficient time could permute notes to produce the melodies of all songs every written with the twelve Western tones and certainly not own all exclusive rights to their use. Heck, I could do that, too, and technically copyright all non-previously-used melodies. And lawsuits based on copying chord progressions – well, I’m not even going to go there.
All in all, I think that the whole concept of IP and copyright as it stands is outdated and needs to be re-examined. They belong to an era of obsessive possession that runs contrary to the modern themes of inclusivity, cultural awareness, and the trading of ideas. Sites such as Wikipedia have taken an important step by championing the person who contributes work without needing to bask in the glory of one-man/-woman heroism.
The 21st century is about global civilization and the power of multidisciplinary collaboration. It is about time to change our conception of the very nature of ideas to catch up to the post-Imperialist, post-world dominance, post-megacorporation society.
So at a dinner conversation at a med school, I was talking to some people and at some point we ended up on the topic of why I didn’t particularly like drinking heavily. What I said was that getting drunk was never much of a prerequisite for me to enjoy myself – that I am not very inhibited as a person and at some point at night, I act like I’m drunk anyway.
If being drunk means being spontaneous and uninhibited and relaxed and willing to say or try anything with honest intention, then I’m always drunk. I told the girl across from me that I hardly needed to drink to be willing to karaoke, not to mention singing right there in the restaurant … on an improvised tune. She told me promptly to make up a baroque melody, and I did, and I sang it without hesitation.
Alcohol or drug-induced euphoria or transcendentalism is an overarching state-of-being that exists on its own, independent of the specific cause. For people who have forgotten that, when they were kids, they basically acted high all the time (saying stupid things, shouting inappropriately, breaking rules, etc.), I guess they try to reclaim that lost trait through drugs, since drugs are the more mature excuse for acting dumb than just plain acting dumb. Kids don’t know any better; adults need to consume substances to excuse themselves for not knowing any better.
A recent study showed that college students who were given fake-out drinks (dry) still acted drunk and silly after they thought they had consumed enough alcohol to be drunk. That says a lot about societal learned behaviors. The point is, they acted silly ’cause they thought they had an excuse outside of themselves to be silly. But they were already silly deep down.
John Coltrane used to have a heroin habit, among other things. At one point, he gave up drugs altogether, stopped participating in grungy clubs. And then he created some of the most entrancing, hypontizing music I’ve ever heard. I listen to his late creations and I am instantly transported, I am instantly liberated and transfixed, my whole body participating in the intoxicating music.
Transcendentalism and neo-childhood can be accessed through substances, but there are plenty of other ways to reach them without damaging brain cells, getting hangovers, or accidentally procreating. People shouldn’t need an external excuse to experience emotional liberation.
The perfect love is often described, and it seems to encompass a sort of stability and compatibility that could form a bond that could last forever.
But the most ardent of feelings arises not from that stability and regularity but from flashes of fervor that occur unexpectedly or even “against the rules.” That is what makes for interesting love stories, and also what I think is an essential part of any relationship where the participants need some sort of spontaneity to thrive.
Love can be told to exist, and then it will, but it won’t be the same as its fickle, whimsical sibling, the passion that can pop up from just one little glistening facet or a song or a left message. Like an elusive aria, you can hear it, sung far in the distance by a child-like spirit, and you want to pursue it and uncover it. But then it’s gone, too, and you’re not sure what you’re left with but the memory of the chase.
Childhood is the transcendental bliss; a child has wings, a child can love, a child can sing freely.
Adulthood is a muted travesty, clipped wings dripping blood on the floor; attempts at transcendentalism through alcoholism, and wretched shouts of adoration that are only pre-planned attempts at manipulation; and songs that are only for the money.
I can only love a child-like spirit, a natural spirit, a person who hasn’t sold the soul to the devil of adult amorality and greed.