new site

Hey everyone, this blog has outlived it's usefulness to me (read: I got a better offer).

Please move over to the new location, http://blog.ryanhmarsh.com, which can also be accessed from my website, http://ryanhmarsh.com. For the moment the two take you to the same place, but as I design a website that won't be the case.

Happy... wait, what are we celebrating again?

In what is a microcosm for mankind’s desires surrounding New Year’s Day celebrations, I had intended to get this post up on January 1 at the latest but clearly did not. Though the cynical part of me considers the failure to be the endemic aspect of this post, a more charitable view has merely the setting of goals as the essential part of the new year.

Novelty, newness, is a trait that captivates mankind. In so many areas of our existence man strives for the new. Newness in any form is symbolized by new life, and our reaction toward anything new represents this: our reaction is one of looking forward. Newness represents the promise of the future, the glory of things to come. Newness provides hope.

Unlike new technology or a new toy, however, a new year comes not only with the promise of the future but with the knowledge that that most precious of resources, time, is running out. As we see more and more new years, we think more and more about how many—or few—we have left to see. Much like birthdays, the more we see, the less we feel like celebrating. But with the new year as opposed to birthdays, all of society has the same thoughts at once.

And one of the responses is a combination of an attempt to recapture the promise of newness, of youth, of hope for the future, with a desire to use as best we can the time left: we make resolutions. We find the flaws in our life, the things we or others feel can be improved and decide to improve them. We vow, as mankind has done throughout its existence, that tomorrow will not be like today, that the future will be better, that this time, oh yes, this time it will be different. And while clearly this is an attempt to improve our own existence, it is also a representation of the promises of new life, a parallel of the great commandment of parenting: that we leave to our children better than was left to ourselves.

Sometimes we succeed, our lives improve, and much effort can be spent praising the practice of the resolution based on this, that sometimes we succeed. But as the cynical introduction mentioned, sometimes we fail. And this, too, is a microcosm of our hopes for the future. For our hopes for the future are a hope for perfection, and the promise of the future is a promise of the chance for perfection rather than perfection itself. What the future actually holds is some success and some failure.

So as we come together to celebrate the new year, recalling our past and resolving our future, we are in actuality celebrating a promise for the future—not a promise of perfection, but a promise of the chance for perfection. In celebrating this, we celebrate a microcosm of existence, In celebrating this, we celebrate life.

If life, if existence, is not worth celebrating, then in the patois of the world, you’re probably doing it wrong. Perhaps you should resolve to do it right.

Triumphant Return?

Part of me feels that I should join the ranks of those writers putting forth Christmas pieces. Part of me feels that I should talk about the wonders of the season, the joys of this time of year, and yes, even the pleasure of receiving presents. Part of me feels that I should give in on this.

Fortunately, only part of me feels this way.

On the news front, I passed all of my classes. The scarcity of posts this month is due to finals, which were every bit as tough as advertised. All were passed, though, so on to the next quarter. Now that they are done, posts should pick up again.

I have gone back to my old high school over my vacation and visited an old teacher who has different political feelings than I do, and as always we started talking about history and the economy and politics. After one particularly enjoyable conversation he pointed out that he always thought I was more convincing and believable than many, that I did a good job reconciling opinions from different sides of an issue. Mainly what I think he was noticing is my ability (most of the time, at least) to treat respectfully an opinion that I do not hold and in fact with which I vehemently disagree.

After thinking about why I can do that, especially given the fact that many of his political views are so different from mine that in the abstract I have no respect for them, I have reached the only conclusion possible: that the way to respectfully disagree with another person’s point of view is to disagree with someone but to respect the person. On a similar vein, Chesterton talked of the importance of dividing our reaction to sin from our reaction to a sinner, that one revelation of the new testament was that the sinner we were to forgive “unto seventy times seven” but that the sin we should never forgive. This idea carries over, I suppose, into how to treat those with whom we disagree: we can violently disagree with the idea all we want, but should endeavor not to violently disagree with the person holding it.

All of my thought on this, though, comes back to my ongoing effort to understand the proper way to approach relationships with other people, from the general (fellow person, citizen, member of a city/school, etc.) to the specific (friend, family, etc.). Though every such effort comes with a hope for the one golden revelation that will go down in history, I am learning not to expect such an idea. One such idea already exists, what many refer to as the Golden Rule (and no, Aladdin fans, it isn’t “He who has the gold makes the rules”). But that deals with how to treat other people whereas I want concepts for how to view my relationships with other people.

The closest I have gotten so far is a variation on another piece of biblical wisdom (that book stole every good idea I have ever had), this time the one about removing the plank from one’s own eye before removing the speck of dirt from another’s. The basic thought is that before I can approach friends, family, even new people, with a proper attitude, I must have my own house, my own life, in order. A large part of that for me is knowing that I am on the right path to my own future. For the first time in a while, this isn’t a problem, and already I have seen changes in myself.

Another visit since being home was to an old professor. I mentioned my theory about how everyone has a central theme or concept that underscores everything they do: for one of my sisters, that theme is justice. He seemed intrigued by this and started thinking about what his would be. As I informed him that I thought his theme was the simplest and most powerful of ideas, “Life is fun,” he was in the process of saying “I think mine would be that if it isn’t fun then it isn’t worth doing.” This has been another cause of change in my life.

The right approach to the world and to life is not indifference or tolerance or misery, it is joy. The saddest things I have ever experienced should still have been countered by the fact that I get to experience this wondrous thing, existence. Chesterton talked of this being the right view of the world, but another story shows it as well. Fulghum (another oft-quoted author I like) tells a story in one of his books about a man who ends up with the king’s horse and gets sentenced to death, but manages to stay the execution for a year by promising to teach the horse how to talk. When confronted by friends as to why he would promise this, the man says, (paraphrased quote, too lazy to find the book) “I have a year to sort it out. A lot can happen in a year. The king may die, I may die, the king may forgive or forget, we could move, or any of a number of other things. But maybe, just maybe, the horse will talk.”

I love the story for the optimism about the future but moreso for the unstated preference for being alive to being dead. Any person with that attitude toward life and the future must have the appropriate joy for life in his heart. And with this attitude, life is no longer scary. An introvert like myself can engage strangers at a bar in conversation, and each time I have done so I like to think I impressed them but I know they impressed upon me more strongly lessons about how to live and enjoy life. And this word, enjoy, perfectly sums up the proper approach to life: life itself should engender joy in all who have it.

Give Thanks and Remember

A fellow student made an interesting case today that Thanksgiving was his favorite holiday. His logic was that holidays that involve receiving presents aren’t as fun as they used to be whereas for Thanksgiving he gets to stuff himself full of turkey and fall into a tryptophan-induced coma while watching the Detroit Lions lose another game. After all of that goodness—and let’s be honest, that is a pretty great holiday—there remain leftovers leading to what he terms the greatest of sandwiches, the Thanksgiving leftover sandwich: take two pieces of bread and put as much turkey, stuffing, and random vegetables between them as possible, then enjoy. Depending on circumstances of the attended Thanksgiving dinner, this can last for weeks!

This was a good case for Thanksgiving, but there are others to be made as well. Most people are raised being taught to thank people for gifts, compliments, whatever nice thing was relevant. Religions teach thankfulness to whatever deity for the good things in life. Thanking in general seems to be understood by most people as repayment, compensation, another gift given to the original giver. When people give gifts, they like to think that the gifts are appreciated, and the level and detected sincerity of the thanks provide signals of the appreciation. Giving thanks can reinforce good or courteous behavior, can create and strengthen bonds between people, can brighten someone’s day. If these were the only reasons to give thanks, they would be enough.

Giving thanks is, as mentioned, a sign of appreciation. And we can give such a signal regardless of the appreciation. Where once we heard, “Act as if ye have faith and faith shall be given unto you,” now we might say, “Act as if ye appreciate and appreciation shall be given unto you;” in another common phrase, “Fake it till you make it.” Giving thanks can lay a foundation for us to one day feel genuine appreciation, thus leading to more of the initial reasons for giving thanks. Again, if these were the only reasons for giving thanks, they would be enough.

But giving thanks is also a source and expression of humility. Giving thanks forces us to recognize something outside ourselves and to acknowledge that this thing outside ourselves gives us pleasure. Giving thanks forces us to put ourselves, our pride, behind this foreign source of happiness. Giving thanks forces us to prolong our interactions with this outside world. In being forced to do these things we are freed to better experience the world. In being forced to make smaller ourselves we are freed to make larger our world.

Giving thanks helps not merely the thanked but the one who thanks. Giving thanks forces us to make our world more important; it really forces us to make our world more interesting and more enjoyable. We often think of morality in terms of what is best for other people, and it is easy to make the case that giving thanks is best for others. The more surprising and important point is that morality often is what is best for ourselves, and that applies to giving thanks.

Hectic

Every semester has that few weeks where it seems like everything is happening at once. For me, for this semester, that time is now. Partly this is because finals are just around the corner. Partly this is because Thanksgiving break is next week. Partly this is because my second conference in three weeks has me on the go again, and those vacations make me feel as though the normal routine is overly busy.

But mostly this is because every semester just has that period, and now is that time. I traditionally have been able to keep low stress levels, so in times like this things usually get a little weird for me. I’ve noticed this week, with the busy period beginning, that I’ve been eating a little more than the last few weeks, so that’s something I need to control. However, I’ve decided to try a new approach this year (like always; maybe I should keep track of which ones worked in the past and use them again). This year, the approach is that things that would normally stress me will not be allowed to stress me.

While I’ll be pleased if it does, somehow I think stress-less-ness by fiat might not work.

Although t took four months, the feeling I anticipated finally arrived. I finally had the feeling this week that spending time thinking about new friends here might be unfairly discrediting my old friends back home. I don’t want to use the word “betrayal”, but I did feel a little bad about it. Partly this was from generally thinking about talking to people up here and moving forward with life, but mostly it wasn’t. Mostly, this was from thinking about my upcoming trips home, Thanksgiving and Christmas, and thinking about how I may want to get back north a day early for Thanksgiving and possibly a week early for Christmas to spend time with new friends.

Nothing significant today, try again soon.

The Parts We Play

Here’s a rare second post for the day (couldn’t sleep and wanted this typed).

I always liked acting. Whether it was school plays or musicals, messing around with friends on school projects, even one night when a friend and I were voice-acting the subtitles on a friend’s video game. The video game was a little ridiculous I admit, especially since after about a minute of it he was threatening to strangle us with the controller cord (and we deserved it). I was best and most at home acting around friends, which is probably why of the two plays I did in high school, my performance was better for the one with a small cast of close friends. I suspect that the reason is, for someone who traditionally was an introvert, the energy cost in overcoming my fear of being outcast would exhaust me unless I knew there was no risk of my audience casting me out of the group—friends, for instance. Regardless, I always felt like a more entertaining person when I was pretending to be someone other than myself.

One of my favorite essayists, Robert Fulghum, has an essay in which he talks of the three lives everyone leads. Shakespeare had his “all the world’s a stage” line and the seven ages of man, and Fulghum has the three lives we lead: public, private, and secret. In reverse order of his treatment, secret lives are the ones entirely inside our heads. We not only don’t share these lives with others (even spouses and soulmates), to some extent we can’t. Some of this consists of things like that secret bias we have but try to hide (like mine for women drivers…oops, put this to a lie), but some is like the way we respond to certain powerfully emotionally stimulating things—we can’t share it no matter how we try. Private lives are the ones we share only with certain people. We keep some things secret from most, but share with certain friends. Relationship details, personal thoughts on that coworker/classmate we can’t stand, etc., these things are not meant for public consumption.

The last, which Fulghum rightly considered the broadest, is the public life. This is what everyone else sees when they look at you, though some (the friends) have other information as well. This is how we dress, our favorite conversation topics, how we laugh, and other things of the sort. One definition of introvert is that they spend energy in social situations while extroverts gain energy in them, and if so this is the life that introverts find draining.

I often wished that all social interactions could be scripted. That way, being an extrovert or, more likely and less difficult, being an interesting person (okay, perhaps more difficult) wouldn’t be a function of some things that I couldn’t control but instead would be something I could learn and with my talents, learning was great. But social behavior not only doesn’t work that way, it can’t and shouldn’t.

Chesterton wrote of the two great institutions for preparing one for a social life: the family and the neighborhood (or neighborhood pub, in his case). His logic was that in those settings you have to deal with people who don’t necessarily agree with you on everything (unlike, say, the clubs we voluntarily join), and thus we learn how to get along with other people which is the heart of being a social creature. In both settings, you can’t afford to hold a grudge because of how often you must interact with them: all the time.

Recently I started treating social environments in the same way I used to treat acting. Instead of trying to overcome my fears, I started trying to circumvent them by convincing myself that my public life was just another character to perform. And what I found was that Chesterton, Fulghum, and Shakespeare were right (the first two I suppose were to be expected, but I didn’t think that Shakespeare guy was good for anything). Our secret and even private lives define us. Our public lives are just a shell. As I get more practice with this acting job, I grow more comfortable with it. Though not an extrovert quite yet, I find myself getting excited over the prospect of heading out with new groups of people or starting conversations with people I’ve just met. For the first time in my life, I can see why the extroverts are extroverted. Coincidentally, given my belief that on this planet people are the most important thing, I’ve also had a happier default state (i.e. when not with friends, my happiness level) these past few months, though of course it nothing here has been close to the good times I left behind.

We get told all our lives that we shouldn’t care what other people think. Only recently did I combine that with 2 other bits of advice from television shows: one, from Sports Night, that says we shouldn’t try to get people to like us; and the other, from House, that says indiscriminate niceness is overrated. The combination of the three (though all are obviously too general and thus wrong in some respects) is something that I do believe to be true. There will always be people who like the kind of person you are and people who don’t. I can spend my life trying to trick or convince the latter to like me, or I can just accept that they won’t and not worry about them. That freedom has a lot to do with the aforementioned changes. Perhaps this is a sign of maturity; I fear that I am growing up and will get my “Toys’R’Us Kids” membership card revoked.

Busy times

The last two weeks of my life were spent taking midterms. These are definitely things that I will be glad to never have to take again; first, though, I must get through the next year and a half. To make the story even better, for my first midterm my alarm clock (read: cell phone) turned stopped overnight and so the alarm didn’t sound, and yes, I missed the midterm. Fortunately the teacher allowed me to make it up immediately when I got to campus that day, but then my calculator’s batteries died. The other two midterms weren’t so eventful, but I left them feeling about the same.

After that, though, I got to visit Los Angeles (now the furthest west I’ve been) for a conference and got to see my old coworkers while there. I greatly enjoyed the trip and getting to catch up with them. One of the best parts of my old job was the ability of my coworkers (and me with them) to have interesting discussions about topics that could only be called academic by someone who didn’t know what the word meant, and yet discuss these spurious things in the framework of scholars. We were able to have a few of these conversations again—mostly stuff like analyzing people’s behavior patterns and preferences, things that let us talk about what makes other people attractive and why we like different music and movies, etc.—as well as a few more directly relevant to our work.

On Monday I got to sit down with a professor here who is on the top of the game in the areas in which I have interest. We sat for an hour and talked about things I can be doing now (mostly passing classes and prelims), things I can start doing soon (areas for focus, working along with him), and decisions that, given I will stay in this field (as seems likely at the moment), I will have to make (what specific direction to take research). The meeting went very well and I left with a new group to enter, one focusing on my areas of interest.

Yesterday I went into Chicago to listen to the new chancellor of my old college talk. He answered several questions I had and it seems like he has a good vision for the future of the university. While there I got to meet more people with ties to my old college and it seems like I’m finally close to getting that critical mass of friends in the city necessary to have more of a social life (read: a social life).

So today I finally get to rest. No homework is due tomorrow, no events are this evening, no meetings or conferences are scheduled tonight. Who knows, I might even get some sleep tonight.