I'm broken.
I don't mean in the sense that my spirit is broken. I mean it in the sense of malfunction, like when the car breaks down. I'm broken, I don't work, I'm screwed-up somehow.
For a full week now I have been trying to work on my research. I work for a few minutes. Then I find myself sitting in front of my computer blankly. I stare off into space and my mind wanders. Psychological pressure builds, and builds. I get a headache. I'm tense.
I haven't gotten anything, and I mean anything, done in a week. A WEEK. It's demoralizing. My supervisor wants progress to accelerate, and I feel as though I'm pushing through thickening molasses. There's no good reason for the retarded progress, no tremendous intellectual hurdle. I just have no focus. I get upset; I should be able to push through on pure disciplined attention. This should be nothing. I'm wasting time; why can't I just do what has to be done. When the supervisor returns from his vacation I'll be forced to tell him that I've accomplished nothing. Having to say that will tear my insides to shreds regardless of his reaction. Disappointment, frustration, whatever. He has nothing on the degree of my self-critique, and increasingly self-contempt.
It is not that I'm incapable of concentrating. Quite often I can concentrate intensely for hours, or even days, on a topic. It's the sort of all-consuming concentration that I recognize might well become dangerous in its own right. So, no, it's not that I can't concentrate. It's that I can't always control when and on what I concentrate. I think it's this concentration that has given me the label of being a little "intense" for some people's taste.
I am prone to extremes (case in point).
As I hang on through the drought, the psychological pressure builds: there is a schedule associated with the Ph.D., there are hoops to jump through at particular times. Regardless of whether I think the hoops and the schedule really mean anything (clearly they don't mean too much, since I took 5 years to get a bachelor's degree, and abandoned one Ph.D. already), my ability to jump through those hoops at will is somehow important to me. So, when the malaise gets to this point where I doubt my ability to perform on (my own) command, it sends shivers of doubt and anxiety through me. The aggressive/competitive side of me (which is well developed) wants desperately to show the melancholy side of me just who has the reins in this relationship. I want to wrangle my intellectual angst with brute psychological force.
At times I've been able to make the slog through to the other side by the very simple attack of taking tiny steps of forward progress, stay focused on focusing on work, no matter how slow the progress, just do something and things will slowly re-align.
The strategy just doesn't seem to be working at the moment.
That's why I say that I'm broken. It's an appropriate phrase. Let me spell out why it's appropriate... Everything in this post as been about overcoming all for an almost mechanical efficiency. Somewhere in my experience I seem to have started evaluating myself in analogy with a piece of software, a computer program, or a machine. The analogy says that I'm broken: with the appropriate inputs, I'm not producing the expected output. It depends the day you ask me as to whether I think it's true.
But really, what other model does society hand you? I'm a part of a nation, an economy, a research institution, and a family. In Aristotelian language each of these carries with it certain responsibilities, a certain role. There are virtues associated with fulfilling those roles, and prudence is the virtue of balancing them. But in our society it seems to be less about relationships and responsibilities, and more about production and performance. In the modern mindset we are agents within dynamic systems. "Agents" have interactions rather than relationships. I find it telling that sociologists model societies using mathematical models derived for modeling the molecules in gases. Molecules don't have relationships, commitments, and responsibilities, they have laws to obey. Our systems are constructed, or at least made intelligible, by the hypothetical existence of underlying laws. The economy is subjected to government control by virtue of conceptualizing it as a dynamical system (and manipulating it accordingly), which implicitly reduces persons to agents - agents obeying laws. So when I fail to obey the laws of productivity, of efficiency, of profit maximization, I am disobeying the laws that make our society intelligible. I am molecule violating electromagnetism, which is to say that I am unintelligible, a puzzle, and probably just a data point that is determined to be an error and thrown out of the pool for analysis. If enough of us deviate together, then maybe the sociologists would update the models to include us as a minority contributing statistically to the dynamics of the whole (a different species of agent obeying slightly different laws).
I am not saying that statistical relationships don't exist between social "observables". I am just saying that describing society and economic engagements as a machine has consequences for the cogs in that machine. If we find economic existence intelligible (that is, we can wrap our heads around it somehow) by thinking of it as a machine, then that metaphor shapes how we see our role in that machine. Wouldn't a carburetor find itself in an odd situation if it failed to perform its proper function without any apparent mechanical malfunction? It's clearly nonsense, any malfunction would just be (by definition) a mechanical malfunction! So, what is the implication? The only malfunction in a component of the economic system (say, someone who cannot keep a job) must be a mechanical problem with the component itself. And sense components are themselves just little machines, we can potentially fix that problem. This is the realm of medicine. Any psychological problem is actually a neuro-physiological (read: mechanical) problem.
You see where all of this goes. If I am failing to fit social expectations, it is because I am broken. And the anxiety it sets up is that I need to get fixed so that I don't fail the system any longer. And what if medicine is not advanced enough to fix me? Or if the cost is greater than my potential economic output?
That's the long way around to explaining my playful expression that I am broken. For me it is both an expression of personal dissatisfaction and a satirical jab. It makes me wonder what a list of modern virtues would look like, and whether/how these would derive from the practices of mechanistic explanation, and how this may or may not deviate from the ancient virtues.
Friday, July 25, 2008
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
A Tough Act to Follow
I offer an excerpt of a letter written by the founding brother of the Missionaries of Charity, Brothers (the male wing of Mother Teresa's order) about his experiences in rich and poor countries:
"Sometimes people wonder why we go to more prosperous places like Los Angeles, Tokyo, Hong Kong, when there is such desperate poverty in India and on such a large scale. I believe that there is much more terrible poverty than that found in India. Hong Kong illustrates this for me. When i was in Calcutta recently during the floods which devastated so much it struck me one day that the people of Calcutta are somehow much more humanly rich than people in Hong Kong. It is a strange paradox that may be saying something to us. It is true of much of the more affluent world. In Hong Kong we have a small home for severely mentally disabled men. We get public funds - and much interference. The men in the home are severely retarded. They have been in various institutions where they did not respond much to training or treatment. They lived with their families in the impossibly small rooms of Hong Kong housing conditions. Since joining us, all have responded well - and the big thing, it seems to me, is that they are happy. But that is not enough, we are told. They must be doing something, they must be programmed. There can be few places as rushed in the world as production-centred [sic] Hong Kong. The stress and pressures here are great. It seems we are not allowed to be satisfied that these disabled men are happy. They have to be got into the rush, into the rat-race that is driving everybody else mad. There are basic questions involved in this about where the dignity and value of a man lies, whether it is in his being or in his performance. And so India, with its greater material poverty, has a quality of life that is often lost when the gods are materialistic and must be got down in a report. It is a question of the human and spiritual enjoyment of life. I feel, in places like Hong Kong, we are meant to be a little witness to this as 'Animal Farm' bears down on all sides."[my emphasis]
-from Mother Teresa: A complete authorized biography, by Kathryn Spink
We would do well to keep this in mind when we decide we're going to "help" people. It is a great challenge to help people become themselves rather than to attempt to make them look more like ourselves.
"Sometimes people wonder why we go to more prosperous places like Los Angeles, Tokyo, Hong Kong, when there is such desperate poverty in India and on such a large scale. I believe that there is much more terrible poverty than that found in India. Hong Kong illustrates this for me. When i was in Calcutta recently during the floods which devastated so much it struck me one day that the people of Calcutta are somehow much more humanly rich than people in Hong Kong. It is a strange paradox that may be saying something to us. It is true of much of the more affluent world. In Hong Kong we have a small home for severely mentally disabled men. We get public funds - and much interference. The men in the home are severely retarded. They have been in various institutions where they did not respond much to training or treatment. They lived with their families in the impossibly small rooms of Hong Kong housing conditions. Since joining us, all have responded well - and the big thing, it seems to me, is that they are happy. But that is not enough, we are told. They must be doing something, they must be programmed. There can be few places as rushed in the world as production-centred [sic] Hong Kong. The stress and pressures here are great. It seems we are not allowed to be satisfied that these disabled men are happy. They have to be got into the rush, into the rat-race that is driving everybody else mad. There are basic questions involved in this about where the dignity and value of a man lies, whether it is in his being or in his performance. And so India, with its greater material poverty, has a quality of life that is often lost when the gods are materialistic and must be got down in a report. It is a question of the human and spiritual enjoyment of life. I feel, in places like Hong Kong, we are meant to be a little witness to this as 'Animal Farm' bears down on all sides."[my emphasis]
-from Mother Teresa: A complete authorized biography, by Kathryn Spink
We would do well to keep this in mind when we decide we're going to "help" people. It is a great challenge to help people become themselves rather than to attempt to make them look more like ourselves.
Monday, July 21, 2008
Cosmic humor
I ask, is God's humor distinct from his justice? I'm guessing not and here's why:
Yesterday I purchased a biography of Mother Teresa because I think she's about the closest thing to the faith of the Patristics and their practice that we've seen in recent times. I read the first 70 pgs yesterday evening. Toward the end of that reading session I found the following passage:
"If an increasing number of occupants of the home for the dying began to recover it was not because Nirmal Hriday [the home] could provide efficient medical care which hospitals could not. There were those trained doctors and nurses who came to work there on a voluntary basis who were horrified at the failure to observe the kind of fundamental rules of hygiene which would protect the Sisters from infection and the 'patients' from contaminating each other. The Missionaries of Charity were not to wear gloves to touch the maggot-ridden bodies of the dying, any more than they were to hold the lepers at arm's length because they were tending the body of Christ. One anecdote which Mother Teresa loved to tell and retell was of a young novice who was sent for the first time to work in Nirmal Hriday, who returned at the end of the day with shining eyes, protesting her joy that she had been touching Christ throughout the day."
This passage falls on the next to last page that I read last night. Then, not twelve hours later, who walks into morning prayer but L, perhaps the most notoriously smelly homeless drunk in our city. We've known L for a while. He shows up for prayer, asks what day it is and if we can buy him a beer, and then disappears for a few weeks. He has in various prior appearances passed out on the church steps, yelled irately at one or other of us, and chugged a glass of raw eggs for breakfast. I once saw him wandering drunk in city traffic three times in one day in substantially different locations of the city. One story circulating among those on the street is that the cops don't hassle L anymore because once when he was picked up in a police cruiser one of the officers proceeded to vomit in his car because of the smell. Maybe it's true, if not in fact at least in spirit. He generally looks as if he has been unconscious in a ditch for a few days. His mood swings from disoriented and inquiring to outright belligerence. Another story has it that he has been banned from all of the local convenience stores because of his propensity to lose his temper and throw things.
Anyway, L walks into our little church and has a seat in one of the rear pews. I find it endearing that he positioned himself so: merciful and endearing. Even from that position his scent quickly diffused around the small sanctuary. After prayer C and I spoke with him over breakfast and I offered to go buy him some new clothes (to replace some utterly soiled garments) if he would come back to evening prayer to pick them up. He agreed, so we collected his sizes from him and proceeded to shop at the thrift store after lunch.
L showed up promptly for evening prayer, while I was speaking to another of our local friends (he told me some of the stories about L). L took his position on the pew, adamant that we have service before he would change clothes. After prayer I walked him around to the parish hall (he had forgotten how to get there since breakfast... it's less than 50 feet and the buildings are attached), and got out the new socks, underwear, shirts, pants, etc. He needed help getting his shoes off. No problem. Unfortunately, he doesn't have a good head for figures, at least as clothing sizes go, so the pants were several sizes too small in the waist. He insisted on trying on all three pair, despite their all being the same size. A particularly comical moment (which failed to strike him) was when he came out of the bathroom asking for help in buttoning the pants, for which the button and button-hole were respectively closer to his hips than to his navel. No chance, buddy. After some convincing he put back on his "ratty ol' britches" and proceeded to dress himself. He couldn't get the new socks on, so I helped. His feet had sores on them, at least patches I assumed were sores because they were an opaque black and looked abraded. The smell was, hmm, memorable. His ankles were swollen, almost too much for me to get the socks over them, and his legs were covered in scars. He said he had a rod in his left shin from some long ago accident. No details.
I asked if we could get him a motel room so he could get a shower and clean up. Maybe we could get a nurse to come have a look at the more troubling wounds. But he wouldn't have it. "No, thank you, sir," he kept saying. C helped him button up the new shirt that we got for him. Unfortunately, he kept his undershirt, a medium-weight long sleeve knit shirt that he had worn for I think probably at least a year underneath his sweater (yes, he's been wearing a sweater in the South all summer... he said it was "kinda warm").
Tomorrow we'll go get him some pants that fit. And I'll try again to convince him to let us take him to clean up some. If only there were a shower at the church.
The point here is not that L stinks, but that L is precisely the guy I need to be alongside while reading Teresa's biography. So, I say that God is humorous because I almost laughed when L walked in this morning precisely because of my choice of reading material the night before. There will be no easy tests today, no charming, well-kept homeless to chat with. And it only seems obvious that the humor of the situation is also its justice.
Yesterday I purchased a biography of Mother Teresa because I think she's about the closest thing to the faith of the Patristics and their practice that we've seen in recent times. I read the first 70 pgs yesterday evening. Toward the end of that reading session I found the following passage:
"If an increasing number of occupants of the home for the dying began to recover it was not because Nirmal Hriday [the home] could provide efficient medical care which hospitals could not. There were those trained doctors and nurses who came to work there on a voluntary basis who were horrified at the failure to observe the kind of fundamental rules of hygiene which would protect the Sisters from infection and the 'patients' from contaminating each other. The Missionaries of Charity were not to wear gloves to touch the maggot-ridden bodies of the dying, any more than they were to hold the lepers at arm's length because they were tending the body of Christ. One anecdote which Mother Teresa loved to tell and retell was of a young novice who was sent for the first time to work in Nirmal Hriday, who returned at the end of the day with shining eyes, protesting her joy that she had been touching Christ throughout the day."
This passage falls on the next to last page that I read last night. Then, not twelve hours later, who walks into morning prayer but L, perhaps the most notoriously smelly homeless drunk in our city. We've known L for a while. He shows up for prayer, asks what day it is and if we can buy him a beer, and then disappears for a few weeks. He has in various prior appearances passed out on the church steps, yelled irately at one or other of us, and chugged a glass of raw eggs for breakfast. I once saw him wandering drunk in city traffic three times in one day in substantially different locations of the city. One story circulating among those on the street is that the cops don't hassle L anymore because once when he was picked up in a police cruiser one of the officers proceeded to vomit in his car because of the smell. Maybe it's true, if not in fact at least in spirit. He generally looks as if he has been unconscious in a ditch for a few days. His mood swings from disoriented and inquiring to outright belligerence. Another story has it that he has been banned from all of the local convenience stores because of his propensity to lose his temper and throw things.
Anyway, L walks into our little church and has a seat in one of the rear pews. I find it endearing that he positioned himself so: merciful and endearing. Even from that position his scent quickly diffused around the small sanctuary. After prayer C and I spoke with him over breakfast and I offered to go buy him some new clothes (to replace some utterly soiled garments) if he would come back to evening prayer to pick them up. He agreed, so we collected his sizes from him and proceeded to shop at the thrift store after lunch.
L showed up promptly for evening prayer, while I was speaking to another of our local friends (he told me some of the stories about L). L took his position on the pew, adamant that we have service before he would change clothes. After prayer I walked him around to the parish hall (he had forgotten how to get there since breakfast... it's less than 50 feet and the buildings are attached), and got out the new socks, underwear, shirts, pants, etc. He needed help getting his shoes off. No problem. Unfortunately, he doesn't have a good head for figures, at least as clothing sizes go, so the pants were several sizes too small in the waist. He insisted on trying on all three pair, despite their all being the same size. A particularly comical moment (which failed to strike him) was when he came out of the bathroom asking for help in buttoning the pants, for which the button and button-hole were respectively closer to his hips than to his navel. No chance, buddy. After some convincing he put back on his "ratty ol' britches" and proceeded to dress himself. He couldn't get the new socks on, so I helped. His feet had sores on them, at least patches I assumed were sores because they were an opaque black and looked abraded. The smell was, hmm, memorable. His ankles were swollen, almost too much for me to get the socks over them, and his legs were covered in scars. He said he had a rod in his left shin from some long ago accident. No details.
I asked if we could get him a motel room so he could get a shower and clean up. Maybe we could get a nurse to come have a look at the more troubling wounds. But he wouldn't have it. "No, thank you, sir," he kept saying. C helped him button up the new shirt that we got for him. Unfortunately, he kept his undershirt, a medium-weight long sleeve knit shirt that he had worn for I think probably at least a year underneath his sweater (yes, he's been wearing a sweater in the South all summer... he said it was "kinda warm").
Tomorrow we'll go get him some pants that fit. And I'll try again to convince him to let us take him to clean up some. If only there were a shower at the church.
The point here is not that L stinks, but that L is precisely the guy I need to be alongside while reading Teresa's biography. So, I say that God is humorous because I almost laughed when L walked in this morning precisely because of my choice of reading material the night before. There will be no easy tests today, no charming, well-kept homeless to chat with. And it only seems obvious that the humor of the situation is also its justice.
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Work keeps me away
Again, it's been a while. I'm starting to feel the crunch of getting a Ph.D. in the next year and work is ramping up. If I could just finish what feels like an almost incessant amount of preparation for the paper that is currently in the works, maybe I'd have some momentum going.
To update you on life here: Jax graduated from puppy class two weeks ago. For the final session we just played games in a semi-competitive atmosphere. Jax took second place in the agility category. If he hadn't been quite so spastic we might have taken first. As it is we got second even though we had to try the L-shaped tunnel about 6 times because he couldn't, as it were, "see the light at the end". So, we just played peek-a-boo with him running in and out of the tunnel. Besides that he has phenomenal speed, and he's plenty smart. We made a short video of him doing obedience exercises the other day. We'll try to post that soon. He now knows: sit, down, stay, wait, shake, roll over and up (which is to get him to step up onto a platform). I've been experimenting with teaching him to discriminate his toys on command. So far it seems that grammatically he's hooked on verbs. Nouns haven't quite clicked. That is, he always seems to equate a command with DOING something. I can tell him to find his squeaky toy, but if I'm holding two toys, he is almost as likely to go for the wrong one. I have theories about how to overcome this. More soon.
Oh, and I've noticed that I'm oddly polite to the dog. When he does something wrong he gets a stern "No, sir!" Don't ask why. I dunno.
To update you on life here: Jax graduated from puppy class two weeks ago. For the final session we just played games in a semi-competitive atmosphere. Jax took second place in the agility category. If he hadn't been quite so spastic we might have taken first. As it is we got second even though we had to try the L-shaped tunnel about 6 times because he couldn't, as it were, "see the light at the end". So, we just played peek-a-boo with him running in and out of the tunnel. Besides that he has phenomenal speed, and he's plenty smart. We made a short video of him doing obedience exercises the other day. We'll try to post that soon. He now knows: sit, down, stay, wait, shake, roll over and up (which is to get him to step up onto a platform). I've been experimenting with teaching him to discriminate his toys on command. So far it seems that grammatically he's hooked on verbs. Nouns haven't quite clicked. That is, he always seems to equate a command with DOING something. I can tell him to find his squeaky toy, but if I'm holding two toys, he is almost as likely to go for the wrong one. I have theories about how to overcome this. More soon.
Oh, and I've noticed that I'm oddly polite to the dog. When he does something wrong he gets a stern "No, sir!" Don't ask why. I dunno.
Friday, July 11, 2008
Been a while
I've been absent from the blogosphere for a while now. Meanwhile, I've had a lot on my plate. My supervisor finally woke up and realized that I'm a lazy bastard when it comes to my Ph.D. and asked ever so gently that I increase productivity. It's only fair. So, I've been very busy with work this week, trying to regain some of the ambition that I had at the beginning of the summer. There is still hope. I should be impressed that the boss was so distracted from my stagnation for so long. It helped that one of my fellow students in the group just got a paper accepted in the journal Science (which is a career maker for young scientists), and because we also got word that my own humble attempts at science had been selected as a highlight in the month's geophysical publications. Should my work make it into any popular news setting, I'll post a link here. Don't hold your breath.
In addition, H and I went a few hours west to meet up with my sister as she spends a summer as a remora to the Equestrian show circuit's shark. She's a helper for photographers who specialize in equestrian events. They happened through our state, so we went out for a short visit. Ironically enough, the grounds for the event have recently been subjected to some stream restoration work conducted by a local engineering firm. Folks were hostile about the result, which significantly reduced the functional area of the site as far as horse showing is concerned. At a glance I suggested that it looked like a Rosgen-ite project (I have done a little work in stream restoration). A little later we actually spotted an engineer doing some monitoring, so I ambled up to speak with her. Turns out that the project was designed using Dave Rosgen's methodology, which is a somewhat simplistic approach to stream restoration, but it packages easily and that's what sells. In that sense "stream restoration" is a lot like "organic": it's becoming more of a marketing label than a philosophy. Everyone wants to restore the environment and eat healthily, but effort is where we get bogged down. So, as long as we can throw money at a product that has the right label (i.e., stream restoration, or organic), then surely we are still engaging in the virtue of those activities. Unfortunately, something is lost and it has something to do with buy-low sell-high.
Anyway, it's back to the world of mathematical models for me. I have to figure out a few things so that I can return to writing this paper. I spent 3 hours yesterday (or maybe more) just deciding what (and then coding) the most efficient and defensible method of binning the data would be so that the estimate of the probablity density would be methodologically sound. It's a really basic operation, but so much depends on the resulting estimate that I was, and am, a little anxious about having it just right.
In addition, H and I went a few hours west to meet up with my sister as she spends a summer as a remora to the Equestrian show circuit's shark. She's a helper for photographers who specialize in equestrian events. They happened through our state, so we went out for a short visit. Ironically enough, the grounds for the event have recently been subjected to some stream restoration work conducted by a local engineering firm. Folks were hostile about the result, which significantly reduced the functional area of the site as far as horse showing is concerned. At a glance I suggested that it looked like a Rosgen-ite project (I have done a little work in stream restoration). A little later we actually spotted an engineer doing some monitoring, so I ambled up to speak with her. Turns out that the project was designed using Dave Rosgen's methodology, which is a somewhat simplistic approach to stream restoration, but it packages easily and that's what sells. In that sense "stream restoration" is a lot like "organic": it's becoming more of a marketing label than a philosophy. Everyone wants to restore the environment and eat healthily, but effort is where we get bogged down. So, as long as we can throw money at a product that has the right label (i.e., stream restoration, or organic), then surely we are still engaging in the virtue of those activities. Unfortunately, something is lost and it has something to do with buy-low sell-high.
Anyway, it's back to the world of mathematical models for me. I have to figure out a few things so that I can return to writing this paper. I spent 3 hours yesterday (or maybe more) just deciding what (and then coding) the most efficient and defensible method of binning the data would be so that the estimate of the probablity density would be methodologically sound. It's a really basic operation, but so much depends on the resulting estimate that I was, and am, a little anxious about having it just right.
Monday, July 7, 2008
License to Evangelize
Been looking for just the right way to share your faith?
Maybe you're not the bumper sticker type.
Maybe you're a compassionate "lead dog" and want to put something meaningful in the line of sight of all those "dogs" on the highway for whom the view never changes... Give them a little piece of eternity to contemplate.
Well, South Carolina's DMV has you in mind (while copying a Florida design that failed to make it to production). Nothing says "I'm not vain" like a Christian vanity plate.
If you ask me, this is just itching for some creatively ironic vanity plates, like say:
"Chch&St?"
or
"Cnstntn?"
or
"in what?"
These are of course only the snide versions. No doubt piety can and will be taken to new heights if the plates go into production.
Maybe you're not the bumper sticker type.
Maybe you're a compassionate "lead dog" and want to put something meaningful in the line of sight of all those "dogs" on the highway for whom the view never changes... Give them a little piece of eternity to contemplate.
Well, South Carolina's DMV has you in mind (while copying a Florida design that failed to make it to production). Nothing says "I'm not vain" like a Christian vanity plate.
If you ask me, this is just itching for some creatively ironic vanity plates, like say:
"Chch&St?"
or
"Cnstntn?"
or
"in what?"
These are of course only the snide versions. No doubt piety can and will be taken to new heights if the plates go into production.
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