Okay, I apologize ahead of time and give you fair warning that what you’re about to read is something I feel very strongly about and since I’m extremely emotional, this might be painful to read. It might take me some time to get to my point. It also will probably repeat some issues I mentioned in previous posts.
You’ve been warned.
I’ve never considered myself a web person. I’ve been familiar with the web for a very long time and had a web page back when Mosaic was the cool browser. I even did an art project in college about intermingling art and web technology. But until recently, I used the web mostly as a tool to get information. I read newspapers, I looked up movie locations and reviews, I researched stuff, and that was about it.
I can’t remember the first weblog I read. I can’t remember how I discovered most of the sites that are now part of my daily routine. But, somehow, I found a site and started following the links until I discovered a whole new world.
I’m still not a web person. I guess what I mean when I say “web person” is someone whose primary job/interest is the web. I love the web. I love writing my site. I love reading other people’s sites. But I have a job that doesn’t use any web technology. I volunteer at an organization that doesn’t have computers in each room, let alone dial-up access. Most of my friends don’t know HTML and almost none read my site. A few close ones do but many don’t.
The thing is if the web were like the real world, it would be extremely difficult for me to have my own little corner. Imagine walking into a magazine’s office and asking to have your own section. Or an art gallery to have your work displayed. Most of the world is very structured and segregated. There are committees that decide the value of your work. College admissions offices tell you whether you deserve to get in. Publishers decide the future of your book. It doesn’t matter whether you poured your soul into a piece or not, if the woman at the publishing house had a bad morning, your novel will not see the light of day.
The real world is full of rejection. Full of “you’re not good enough”, “you lack the necessary background”, and many other forms of limitations. There are millions of preconceived notions, prescribed patterns you have to fit, roadmaps you have to follow, asses you must kiss, before you’re even given a chance.
But it takes you ten minutes to setup your own web page. This little corner will let you show off your novel, photographs, artwork, or many other incredible talents. The web allows you to bring people together in the most awe-inspiring ways. It allows you to meet someone halfway around the world who shares the same interests and can broaden your mind instantaneously.
Where else can you do that?
Sure I can write my words in a diary and still get them out, but this way I get to share them with the whole world. I put myself out there and I get rewarded. It’s like getting your work displayed, not just in a small gallery, but to the whole world.
Why are criteria and elitism the only harbingers of success?
And what’s so terrible about trying?
Edison said, “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.” And yet, people get stifled so early on. Your lack of talent is recognized and hammered into you at an early age. “You really can’t draw, honey, why don’t you try being a biology major instead?” I remember an anecdote I read in a novel about the author visiting a kindergarten and asking the students who could draw and all the hands shot up. The author then went to a college classroom and asked the same question and very few hands were raised. Somewhere between childhood and adulthood, we’re taught to stop trying. Since badness is discouraged and we’re bad, we should just give it all up.
And after all this rambling, I’ll come out and say my point. Earlier this week someone made a comment on a metatalk thread that drove me absolutely crazy. It doesn’t matter who as such comments have been made in several places and instances, by many different people. These people think that the web should emulate the elitism of the real world. They feel that your having your own homepage is unacceptable unless it’s perfect. And before you ask, yes, of course, they happen to be the judges of material that qualifies as perfect. They believe letting you have your own web site overpopulates the web with crap.
Aren’t they fucking nice?
The thing is, I totally understand the right to judge something that was submitted to your inspection. If you have a site where you post submissions and someone enters and you don’t like their work, you have every right to turn it down and you don’t even need to give a reason, because it’s your site and you can do whatever you damn please. This is no different than if I were sending my novel to Random House and they refused to publish it. At the end of the day, by accepting your work, they are agreeing to put their name on your work and if they don’t like it, they should have the right not to give you their name. Totally fair.
Not letting people make their own pages, however, is not.
Assuming you should get to choose who’s deserving of having a web page is ridiculous. It’s nothing but pompousness.
The great thing about using the web is that you get to choose the sites you go to. So here’s my little message to the people who feel that the web is getting diluted with crap:
“Surf elsewhere and shut the fuck up.”
Previously? Reflection.
I’ve now been writing this log for over eight months.
To many, that’s not a really long time and to some it’s awfully long. Personally, I’m quite amazed that I’ve been writing consistently for that long. Amazing that I can find something to write about every single day. Maybe that can account for the entries you’ve read that seem to lack in substance. (I’m not going to do my usual self-deprication act here, since I assume you wouldn’t be coming here unless you enjoyed my writings on some level and if you’re a first time reader, well tough crap if you don’t like what you see.)
I’ve also often thought about why I write. I went through many phases and mood changes, especially in the beginning. I started with blogger, so I anxiously awaited for my page to show up in their directory and then I kept checking my hits everyday. I asked my friend Adam, who’s hosting my site, to setup my referrer logs so I could check who was coming from where. I discovered weblog rings and joined a few so I could get more hits. I needed the hits!
And then a while passed and I started reading more and more people’s pages and seeing what they did and tried to figure out what appealed to me most so I could shape my own site. I redesigned a few times, but I am no designer and I realized that most concepts I had in my head weren’t really feasible in my ability range. And then I went through the self-denial phase where I was like, ‘who cares if anyone reads my page, it’s for me anyhow.’ Which I totally believe to be an untruth. If you want to write and don’t care for others to read, it makes no sense to make a web page for your writing. Barnes and Noble and other establishments would be happy to sell you diaries that require no HTML skills.
For days I pondered why I felt the need to have a site and to write, especially since no one read it anyhow. And, of course, that wasn’t the truth. While I might be far from the most popular sites, I had a few consistent readers. Some people even liked to me from their sites. And then a few people started emailing me their thoughts related to some of the posts I made and we started conversing, initially about those issues and then in general. That’s when it hit me.
I’ve always written diaries, so the question of why I wrote wasn’t interesting. The reason I like writing on the web, however, is because it’s like having a multi-way conversation. Not only do I get to put my thoughts out there, but people write back to me and challenge my thoughts and stretch my mind, or they agree with me and make me feel less alone. Both of which I find extremely rewarding.
I don’t really like reading logs that point to many news items. News items are interesting and good information but between the newspapers, metafilter, slashdot and a few similar sites, I can get all the news and links I need and then some. I like the personal side of the pages. I like to see how people think, what kind of lives others have, what struggles they go through. When something great happens to the owner of a page I read regularly, I feel just as happy as if it had happened to someone I know in real life. And when something bad happens, I tend to react just as strongly.
I don’t exactly know who reads my log anymore, and I’ve sort of let go of my obsession with it. Of course I like that people read it and I hope more and more people do, but if they don’t, well it’s really hard to obsess over something I can’t control. I’ve also learned that not every page appeals to everyone. Some of the pages others love, don’t give me the satisfaction that I get from my favorites. And thankfully, we all have the freedom do surf wherever we want.
What I do still wish for, however, is for my readers to make contact. I feel like my thoughts are a good start for me, but when someone else tells me his or her side, it makes me think harder and if there were three of us, the conversation would get even more interesting, and so on. So since I don’t really link to much of anything, except in my tidbits, I wonder why people don’t tell me what they think more regularly.
Oh, well. This is just to give you my thoughts on logging for this long and also to tell you that if you have something to say and even if you don’t, please say it. If you don’t like to say it publicly here, you can always email me.
And if you don’t? Well that’s okay, too, I still hope you enjoy reading this as much as I enjoy writing it.
Ps: Yes, I know eight months is an odd time to be writing a reflective entry, but I felt like it and who says I have to wait anyhow?
Previously? Evil!.
Well, today’s psychology issue is deeper than usual.
As we started studying humanists, our teacher raised the issue of evil versus good. Freud believed that humans, in their core, were evil beings and that they needed to repress their inclinations to live in society. And then came along the behaviorists who thought that humans were neutral and how they turn out is an outcome of their conditioning. Finally we have the humanists who believe that people are good at core.
Humanists say that we are all born with the tendency to grow to actualize our own potential. The teacher made an analogy to a flower seed. Assuming it gets the right light, care and soil, a seed will actualize its inherent potential by becoming a flower. I immediately thought of Fred which proves the humanists must have had some correct ideas.
The question of whether humans are born evil or good is extremely well discussed, controversial, and most likely to stay unproven.
Some very famous people resisted the notion of inherently evil humans even though they had huge hardships.
Most people who believe that humans are good in the core, tend to “blame” parents or upbringing for the seeding of evil. The humanist Carl Rogers said that we establish conditions of worth, which are ways in which we need to act so that our parents will keep loving us.
For example if my mom made me feel like she didn’t like me each time I threw a tamper tantrum, I might take than in as “for my mom to love me, I need to not show my anger.’ And then I grow up never showing my anger, even when I should. So now I’m living with what I think my mother wants me to be. I’m not sure if I made it unclear, but to me it makes perfect sense why this totally screws up a human being.
The more psychology I study, the more scared I get of being a parent. So many possibilities of failure. Of ruining another human’s life.
As I sat in class today, I tried to think about my beliefs. Do I believe in the evil-born human? I’m not sure. My tendency is to go with the humanists and say that I believe all babies are good at heart. Which, then, puts incredible amount of pressure and responsibility on the parents.
Do you think humans are born good or evil?
Previously? Lacking Questions.
As a kid I asked questions incessantly.
My mom tells me that her friends used to tell her to stop constantly answering my inquiries. But she didn’t. She’d take the time to answer no matter what or how much I asked.
Kids tend to ask all sorts of questions. Why is the sky blue? Why does it get dark? They question everything. Even the most fundamental concepts have to be proven from scratch to satisfy a child’s curiosity.
Children also don’t know what’s right and what’s wrong. Through the help of their parents and the society in which they live, they learn not to say certain things, not to act certain ways. They learn the obstacles that others place in our world, and soon enough they learn to create their very own.
As we grow up, we somehow stop asking questions. I’m not entirely sure if it’s because our curiosity is quenched or because we are taught that it’s bad form to ask too much.
At one point, we figure out possible outcomes and condition our lives around them. Instead of pushing the boundaries we learn to live within them. A simple no is enough to stop us from trying. We even makeup excuses to reassure our lack of persistence. ‘I didn’t really want that anyway.’ or ‘Who needs that?’ are statements most commonly used by people who didn’t get what they really wanted but aren’t willing to admit it to themselves.
Remember when you wanted to go away with your friends for the weekend and your parents wouldn’t let you? (or a sleepover, a concert, you can substitute just about anything) Did you give up after asking once? If you’re like most teenagers, I bet you came up with a million creative ways of asking. You tried begging, bartering, pleading, threatening. Some of you might have even sneaked out for the night, although you never got the green light to go. The answer no was simply unacceptable. Where did all that creative energy go?
How does that non-relenting teenager become the adult who can’t overcome a simple obstacle? Since when does a lack of degree stop you from achieving your dream job? Or lack of previous experience from trying something new?
Not only do we not try to overcome obstacles as strongly as we used to, we also stop questioning the fundamentals. When I was interviewing for a job during my senior year, my decision came down to two firms: the firm I work for now and a well-known consulting firm. There were many advantages and disadvantages to either, which I won’t go into here, but my decision was easy once I figured out how the consulting firm worked.
The firm had a few pieces of software that were built in-house. Genuine solutions built from client requirements. Most likely built by good coders/designers, but who knows? Since then, the firm had been tweaking and changing bits and pieces of the original code to make it work with any new client’s requirements. They never really took the time to figure out what the client truly wanted, they just listened with an ear towards how they could tweak the current software. I could never work in that firm.
A common occurrence, especially in the ever-evolving and expansive world of technology, is people trying to fit problems into their pre-prepared set of solutions. This consulting firm had an available set of solutions and somehow no client needed a different something new. Since when did we start fitting the problems into the solutions? Since when did we decide repeating what we knew to make us look good was better than expanding onto the unknown? Since when is taking the opportunity to learn something new and to truly listen to the client’s needs a bad idea? When did we become such copouts?
As adults we reach a state where we’ve done something a certain way for so long, that we never ask the original why again. We never go back to the fundamentals and try to see it from a different perspective. We never see it without all the preconceived notions we hold.
Somewhere between childhood and adulthood, we forget to ask all the important questions.
Previously? Multitasking.
I am the queen of multitasking.
It is completely impossible for me to do only one thing at a time. Even during high school, I couldn’t do my homework unless the TV was on. I can do eleven things simultaneously and all of them successfully.
A few weeks ago, I bought a digital recorder that used IBM’s voice recognition software to take the audio file and create text from it. Since I can’t type as fast as I’d like to, I thought that would be an invaluable gadget for me.
Putting aside the severe issues the digital recorder had, I decided to just use the software with a microphone. Well the way this software works is that you have to turn off all the other noise at home. Even our birdie got in the way of the software doing its job.
To top it off, the output was only 85percent accurate. For the entire weekend, I battled with thoughts of whether I should keep the gadget or return it. I liked the concept so much that I didn’t want to return it. I wanted it to work.
After a few days, it hit me: I wasn’t going to keep it. The software completely rules out any possibilities of multitasking. I have to sit there and read out, including punctuation, every single word and speak slowly and distinctly. Not my forte. I speak too fast.
So the software went back and I had no regrets.
It seems the only time I am only doing a single task is when I read. Even then, I do a lot of thinking but I think the reading should count as a single task. For some reason, I never feel restless when I read.
There are many weekends when I sit in the same chair and read from 9am to 5pm, non-stop. So the good news is that I don’t have ADD.
Still, though, I wonder what it is about reading that doesn’t make me seek eleven other things to be going on simultaneously.
Previously? Work.
I’ve been thinking about work a lot lately.
About why I do what I do that is.
No, I’m not independently wealthy, and yes, I know that I work so I can make money. But I also know that there are a million, billion ways to make money. So I guess I’m not talking about working as a concept as much as my actual job itself.
I graduated college, that’s university for my British readers, almost five years ago. Upon graduation, all too sad to be leaving the breathless beauty that is Pittsburgh, I moved to New York and joined an investment bank, which I still work for, as a programmer.
In my first three years, I worked on multiple projects, all on the UNIX platform with the amazing Motif GUI libraries or the even more fun TK ones, and coded shell scripts, perl scripts, and C code. I traveled to London several times, and even lived there for a few months because of a major project. I learned a tremendous amount in those three years, mostly from the very intelligent people in my surroundings.
My department also had an overwhelming amount of evening and, at times, weekend support work, so I spent what easily qualifies as obscene hours working.
In my forth year, I was asked to go to Tokyo for an extended business trip. Two of the team members there had recently quit, leaving the group in a very difficult situation. Since I’d previously worked for that manager and knew him to be amazing, I seriously considered the offer. Six months without Jake in a country where I didn’t speak the language, and one that was incredibly far away both from New York and Istanbul, seemed a bit insane.
But I decided it was exactly what I needed. I was having problems with some of the people I worked with and there was way too much politics going on in my group in New York so work-wise it was the best alternative at the time. And I figured that if Jake and my relationship couldn’t survive a six-month long distance, it was better to find out now. I also decided I needed to challenge myself. I needed to find out that I could live without Jake, if I had to, and that I could go to a totally foreign country and make it just fine.
So even though just about all of my friends recommended otherwise, I accepted the offer.
And it turned out to be one of the greatest six months of my life. I loved the people I worked for and with, even the work I did was more fun. I got promoted. I learned not only more about coding, but I can also now speak Japanese. I was totally unfamiliar with Japanese culture and had never been to the Far East. I found out that I could do on my own just fine. My relationship with Jake got ten times stronger. And I decided that as soon as I returned back to the States, I would change my job.
I came back to New York on May 19, 2000. The very next day, I flew home to Turkey to celebrate my mother’s fiftieth birthday and my twin nephews’ first one. While there, I decided that what I really wanted to do was work part-time. I wanted the time to do other things. I wanted to go to museums. I wanted to volunteer. I wanted to take more classes. I wanted to enjoy life more. Read more books.
I came back to New York with the intention of looking for a part-time job internally until the end of the summer and if I couldn’t find one by then, I would look elsewhere. People kept insisting that there were no part-time positions in the firm and that I would end up having to quit. And of course that wasn’t the case. I had several options and finally accepted the job that I currently have.
Now I get to write an application from scratch. That’s a dream job. Most people in companies like mine get to fix or enhance other people’s code. My team and I get to decide our database schema, our system flows, our platform, the languages we’ll use, and even the GUI layouts. To top it off, I only work Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays.
Sounds perfect, right?
Well it was. It is. But I still spend many of my days asking myself why I do this. Is this what I really want to do? What do I want to do? And I can’t get the questions out of my mind.
I love coding and I don’t see myself ever giving it up. I write code for myself, for my friends, and for Jake. But I also want to feel like my work helps others or the world in general. I want to make more of a difference. I want to work with people who will challenge me. And I also want to work from home. I want to be able to work in my pajamas. I want to have my own hours.
And, of course, the question that keeps recurring is: Why don’t I?
Why don’t I just do it?
Previously? Criticism.
You’re bad at receiving criticism.
How do you tell someone that? If they’re really bad at receiving criticism, doesn’t that mean they won’t react well to the above sentence?
I don’t like it when people ask my opinion and I have solid reasons for it: I am very opinionated and I think a lot so I’m more likely to have an opinion than not. I am really honest and I suck at sugarcoating.
All of which would have been great if you really wanted to know my opinion.
But you don’t.
What you want is affirmation that whatever you’re showing me or telling me is great. You want to hear “nice job” or “that looks great!” And I’m not your guy. (Well, girl in this case)
I don’t mean that the feedback and its presentation aren’t important. What you say and how you say it are both extremely crucial. When I first stared writing, I’d want to know everyone’s opinion right away. I’d hand my short story over to Jake and watch him like a puppy as he read my words. One negative feedback and I’d blow up immediately.
First of all, I wasn’t really ready for feedback. I was way too emotionally attached to my piece to hear anything negative about it. On top of that Jake wasn’t really my audience since he rarely reads short works of fiction. And mostly because of that, even if he didn’t like parts of my piece, he couldn’t tell me why. Which of course frustrated me even more.
With the possible exception of my writing, I ask for people’s opinion often and I always want to know the truth. I don’t just want to know what you don’t like. I want to know why and I’d even love to hear suggestions on how to fix it. I just think that if you give me some thoughtful feedback, I know you really cared and took the time to look at it.
And it’s certainly true that the best way to give negative feedback is to sandwich it between good ones. But no matter how caring you are, there are no correct words to tell someone who’s not ready to hear feedback.
So next time you want to know someone’s opinion on something, make sure you’re ready to hear the truth.
And if you just want reaffirmation, admit it.
Previously? Lack of Knowledge.
I generally feel pretty excited to be at work on Wednesday mornings. Especially this week, since Friday was a holiday, after the five-day weekend I was totally ready to walk in there and kick some butt.
And I did.
For a while.
I cancelled all my morning meetings and did a huge amount of work. I made decisions, I figured out some of the stuff that had been frustrating me awhile, I called my teammates and organized stuff. By the time I walked into my 1pm meeting, I’d already accomplished more than half the items on my to-do list and I felt good.
I was in the zone.
The 1pm meeting wasn’t even for me. My application is supposed to use this library that’s written by another team and they wanted me to explain some of my object model so they could be sure the library would function properly. As I sat there explaining my system and its parts, they started talking about how I should organize the information so it would work. And I sat there trying to decipher what exactly they meant. I’m not familiar with the library as much as I’d like to be and I kept getting more and more frustrated as they spoke.
By the time I left the meeting, I was kaput for the rest of the day. I sat in my chair, deflated and unwilling to do anything. After a few minutes of trying to listen to my thoughts, I realized that it was my lack of knowledge that made me mad. I hate the idea of being involved with something I don’t fully understand. I’m not just talking about the fear of starting a new project where you’ve never done such a thing and you feel clueless and don’t have any idea where to even begin. This was worse than that. I have to use this library. I have to really understand it or I’m screwed. And right now, I don’t have the time to sit and learn it. I have a million other things I’m supposed to do for this project.
I think this is why I take so many classes, I hate being in an environment where I’m clueless and I have this intense need to learn everything so the two put together make my life all about school.
I guess it could be worse, though I’m not really sure anymore.
Previously? Conditioning.
Tuesday is psychology day here at karenika. Since I have a Theories of Personality class on Tuesday mornings and spend most of the rest of my day pondering about my class, I inevitably write something to do with the class topic.
Today’s class was all about conditioning, so here’s a bit of what I learned (or what I think I learned):
A Russian physiologist named Pavlov did many experiments with his dog. He discovered classical conditioning while studying the digestive system of dogs. He would feed his dog and study how the dog digested the food. One day he walked into the dog’s room, without meat, and saw that his dog was salivating, which is the dog’s reflexive response to seeing meat. He couldn’t understand why the dog would salivate without the presence of meat and decided to do some tests. He showed the dog the image of a circle, which of course didn’t make the dog salivate. He then started to show the dog the image and then gave him meat immediately afterwards. After doing this several times, the dog started salivating to the image of the circle without even getting the meat. This is called classical conditioning and it’s only used for reflexive behavior, such as salivating.
One important thing to note is that if Pavlov kept showing the image without giving the meat, the dog would eventually stop salivating. Which is called extinction.
Now that you know all about conditioning, I want to talk about a study my teacher mentioned. One of B. F. Skinner’s students did an experiment with dogs. He took a room divided into two by a short fence. One side of the room’s floor was white and the other black. He let the dog in on the white side and wanted it to jump the fence, so a few seconds after the dog was let in, he electrocuted the white floor, which naturally made the dog jump to the black side. After a couple of times, the dog would automatically jump to the black side as soon as he was let in. This is called avoidance, as the dog is trying to avoid the electrocution.
The interesting thing about avoidance, however, is that it never extinguishes. So the dog will always want to jump away from the white floor even if it never has electricity ever again.
Here’s how you totally screw up the dog. If you then start electrocuting the black floor, the dog will come in on the white side, immediately jump to the black side, to avoid electrocution, and then jump back when he gets shocked on the black side and since he knows the white side to be bad, he will jump back to black and then jump back to white, so on and so forth. Even if you stop electrocuting both sides, the poor dog will now forever jump back and forth the two sides.
When you know its conditioning history, the dog’s actions make perfect sense. But imagine if you didn’t know it and walked into this room and saw the dog jumping back and forth. What would you think? That the dog is completely out of his mind, right? Well, that’s the point behaviorists try to make. Humans exhibiting neurotic behavior might really be doing it as an outcome of their earlier experiences with conditioning.
Another sad experiment also made me think. A bunch of students took some dogs and put them in a room where they had no escape and electrocuted them pretty badly. And then they took these dogs and put them in to the segmented room mentioned above. When the white floor started electrocuting them, they didn’t even attempt to jump. This phenomenon is called “learned helplessness.”
While I’m sure humans and their problems are not as simple as behaviorists wanted to make them, these studies made me rethink my life and some of my learned behavior. And why sometimes I can’t stop worrying even if I know I should. This is assuming, of course, that you believe there is no difference between humans and animals, which Skinner did.
No matter what your personal beliefs, conditioning has a lot to do with our daily life, with the jobs we choose (or don’t choose), the people we surround ourselves with, and many other life decisions. I spent most of today trying to figure out which one of my actions was related to what past conditioning.
Can you think of a few of yours?
Previously? Interdiciplinary.
One of the biggest drawbacks of my architecture teacher, and believe me she has many, is her lack of knowledge in any areas besides her own.
She spends the entire class reading to us about the lives and works of architects whom she considers most influential in the evolution of modern architecture. She does seem to be knowledgeable in that specific area, but if you dare ask anything about Eastern architecture she’s clueless. Same goes for programs relating to architecture. Not to discredit her completely, she does read and bring to class stories relating to architecture from papers or magazines. But overall, she seems to be totally focused on her own little world.
My Florence teacher, on the other hand, is the total opposite. He teaches us literature, history, arts, music, religion and everything else relating to the subject of the course. You can tell he’s so fascinated by his subject matter that he explores all facets of the field. He knows the symbols in Dante’s work, the inside stories between Dante and some of the mentioned characters, the works of art relating to Dante’s stories, the mythological stories mentioned in the poem, the operas based on those stories and the music people played at the time. Talk about well rounded. He doesn’t just tell you the stories. He tells you the different conflicting stories and gives us his opinion on which one might be true.
Compare that to my architecture teacher who has never heard of some of the most famous Eastern architects. Can you truly say that she’s interested in her subject?
I have the same pleasure with my Human Brain teacher. He is almost equally well versed in physics as he is in biology and psychology and paleontology. His anecdotes add color and dimension to the lectures, making the subject matter so much more fascinating. He also is aware of all recently published information on any of his topics, which for a class on the human brain is crucial.
One of the biggest disadvantages to getting a doctorate is that is makes you concentrate on one teeny tiny issue for several years. It’s about depth, about specializing. I think the future of the world is in interdisciplinary connections.
Learning one field without having any knowledge of the other gives us such a limited and skewed opinion. The world is an amalgamation of all these topics. Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Math, Politics, Law, Literature, Languages, Geography, History, and many others all exist in the world simultaneously. What’s the point of knowing one in a secluded way?
Especially since they’re merged in nature and in society.
Previously? Humility.
Humility is learned.
None of us are born knowing that we’re supposed to hate Milli Vanilli, New Kids on the Block, Britney or Christina. It’s something we pick up from snide comments people utter when we mention them in the list of our favorite singers. (Not to be interpreted literally, as these are not my favorite singers, not that there’s anything wrong with them.)
A friend once told me that she snuck in to Walmart when no one was looking. She said normally she wouldn’t be caught dead in there. I stare at her but spare my words. She’s just the type of person who’d bring a Tiffany’s baby spoon to a baby shower. So Walmart’s not cool, Target’s not cool. K-Mart is definitely out.
Jake and I spent one of our most fun days in a Walmart down in Florida. We walked up and down the aisles, playing with the toys, buying legos, silly putty, soap bubbles and many more fun stuff. God forbid, my friend had seen us there.
Another pattern I see often is people bragging about not reading Bestsellers. I never read anything on the bestseller list, I’m so cool. There’s a long list of unacceptable writers any literary person would be glad to inform you of. (ending your sentences with a preposition? Way uncool.) Same goes for the movies, of course. Good God, I’d never watch a major motion picture, only small artsy movies are good enough for me.
Just like mass audience approval doesn’t make a movie or book amazing, it also doesn’t make it awful.
For me, it’s gotten to a point that saying you wouldn’t be caught dead reading a Grisham novel makes me think less of you than if you claimed you adore Grisham. I hate that people think they are allowed to judge others and saying you wouldn’t be caught dead doing something is totally judging others, even if it’s not explicit.
I wish we lived in a world where others wouldn’t tell you what to do. From the time we go to school we’re taught which writers to read. We’re taught which painters to like. Critics decide which movies we should see and what Broadway shows are the best of the year. And these are just the obvious set. There’s peer pressure, which is the worst. So is parental influence. And the list goes on and on.
I wish we’d never be taught to be embarrassed of who we are. Of having our own taste, whether it be Grisham or Joyce.
I read bestsellers and see blockbuster movies, just the same way I read books that are considered literary works and movies that are artsy. And I’m proud of it!
And I love Walmart.
Previously? Six Degrees.
Three years ago, I walked into my then-boss’ office and we started chit chatting and she showed me pictures from her wedding. As I stared at picture number three, I was blown away? “What’s this girl’s name?” I asked, knowing the answer full well. My boss confirmed my suspicions. The girl who stared at me from the picture was none other than the ex of my ex. Funny enough, she was now dating my boss’s ex.
To make matters even more creepy, we ran into the two of them at a flight to Missouri. They were seated along the aisle from us.
Heh.
When I was in college, the mother of one of the admission counselors had just come back from Turkey. She showed me a photo she’d taken with a guy who shared the same bus with her when she traveled south. The guy was my best friend from home. My first boyfriend.
Heh.
Today I was chatting with someone whose weblog I stumbled upon by chance and I find out that his best friend went to the same school as Jake and me. To add to the absurdity, he and Jake were in the same dormitory for several years. I may have even seen this guy many times.
Heh.
I think Disney might be right; it’s a small world after all.
Previously? Immobile.
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projects for twenty twenty-six
projects for twenty twenty-five
projects for twenty twenty-four
projects for twenty twenty-three
projects for twenty twenty-two
projects for twenty twenty-one
projects for twenty nineteen
projects for twenty eighteen
projects from twenty seventeen
monthly projects from previous years
some of my previous projects
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