IN OT Meta-blog 7th day [sunday] wtf

Maybe this is a painfully banal and obvious post topic, but I've been thinking about how the process and value of thinking something is a lot different than saying it out loud. How you can imagine 'conversations' in your head that couldn't possibly pan out in real life, which points to not just a 'disconnect' but more precisely the existence of two distinct separate entities of personality. And if they are maybe 2 separate and distinct entities than maybe its also best for us to name them as such.

labels:
Internal Narrator (IN) and Outgoing Talker (OT).

examples:
1a. The way when you're at home later and replaying a conversation in your head it sometimes sounds horribly stupid.
(IN has different values/ideas from OT)

1b. The way 'conversations in your head' can never be replicated in real life and always sound trite/grandiose/staged when attempted.
(conflict of IN attempting to 'put words into the mouth' of OT.)

2a. The way most communication is focused around one Personality Half sharing the experiences of itself i.e. we talk about conversations we had/things we did (OT on OT) and write about our ideas^[*] (IN on IN) and when we do try to have some sort of cross over and say 'talk about our feelings' (OT on IN) it 'comes out all wrong' or scares someone away or is 'a downer' or 'cliché' or see 1b. (likewise when we try and imagine dialog or write fiction (IN on OT) it similarly sounds trite or contrived because what the hell does the IN know about what the OT would say anyway. see 1b.

3a. The way when you are alone extendedly and interacting rather exclusively with one sided stimuli (like movies/books/music/old diary entries) the character of that stimuli and its effect becomes noticeable to the point where reading can be seen as a dialog-al opportunity for the IN and 'watching' the corresponding opportunity for the OT. So that sometimes when you're alone, reading is counterproductive because it grows the IN making it harder for the OT to function properly if/when it is [will be] used again. So that sometimes watching TV is healthy not because 'it makes you feel less alone' but because it nurtures the OT/shuts up the IN.

3b. The way when you read something profound but also maybe painfully sad/nostalgic it is effecting because the 'reading' has handed it directly to the IN, but if you were actually taking part in same said situation you might write it off as phony or whatever. [This thought experiment might suggest a descriptive labeling of the IN as sappy/emotional with the OT being sociopathic/unreasoned. I dunno.]

4. The way using someone as a 'sounding board' to 'bounce ideas off of' is just a safe way for the IN to communicate or share with the OT.

5. The way you can catch mistakes in writing by reading out loud.
(OT can sometimes serve as copy editor for IN.)

other thoughts:
There has to be communication and balance.
If the IN is given autonomy (either due to circumstance (like living in a country where you can't communicate with almost anyone/ where all background chatter is white noise and therefore completely undistracting) or due to choice (person is a recluse anti-social) ) then the situation snowballs and you can get 'trapped in your head' and then when you do finally get to talk to someone the OT is so starved and pent up that he just spews his [your] fucking guts and won't shut up and talks about himself forever until its boring and you^[†][‡] wish you could stop but really have no say anyway.
Or maybe the dominant IN causes the opposite to happen and you start to live in the IN and see the OT as epiphenominal and become so detached from your experiences that you don't even notice that you're distant or needy or anything, in which case the effect becomes indistinguishable from the reverse situation of dominant OT dormant IN,
which is when if for whatever reason the OT is so strong as to eclipse the IN then you become unhinged and unable(unwilling) to moderate yourself as projected through interactions to the point where you are repetitive and shallow stagnant boring but also possibly more entertaining in small doses.

Thats all for today

^[*]Of course some people use their journals only to record conversations/experiences and not to offer commentary in which case the diary is just a police blotter or archive and no real interaction between OT and IN takes place anyway. And does this mean that people who keep these sorts of journals have dominant OT's since even writing which should be the domain of the IN is instead used as an extension of the OT?

^[†]I (as a Person with an imbalanced heightened IN who can't help but think of Myself as The IN, with the OT being a possibly External Interloper/foreign agent/savior) wonder if someone with a reverse imbalanced heightened OT when they do think worries that it is the 'thinking' that is off kilter and feels more comfortable/'Himself' only when talking.

^[‡]Of course this suggests that there is actually a Third Person hiding out back who chooses to dwell in/watch from the vantage point of one particular location/mode of interacting [these being either the OT or IN] at any given time, or that OT and IN are more like tools that this Third Person uses to communicate with either the Self^[§] or the Outside World, in which case it is not so much a conscious 'choice' but rather a natural unconscious usage of the most apt tool, like how you hear with your ears and see with your eyes, in which case this entire entry is pointless and stupid.

^[§]which means the Self itself has to be split off again to become a 4th part that the Third Person is communicating with vis a vis the process/instrument of the IN.

You've come a long way, baby. (video edition)

This was my job in Egypt...


And this is my job now...


And i'm the asshole who misses Egypt.

our quest is at an end.

enerzen, you harlot.

I know its out there. I just can't find it. yet.

interneting, computing, and the permanence of memory

"The dangers of facebook is that it is a natural archivist. Before the internet, i could have been a king for saving every scrap of paper, but now you actually have to go out of your way to delete a message. Forgetting becomes the challenge, remembering the routine."

Digital ephemera is impossible. Every note, every draft, every email and text and message is saved without me knowing it, waiting to be recalled at the darkest hour.

Even itunes records the last time i listened to a song. One year ago today i was listening to (smog). How is it helpful to know this? How can it do anything but root me in a past that should only be meaningful as a prefixed segment of a narrative called MY LIFE NOW?

What will it mean in 25 years when i can still recall, at the slightest touch, every single word of contact i ever made via the internet? And because this is the norm - because it is erasure instead of saving that requires action - what would it say about me if i 'chose' to forget? The internet has in every way flipped the natural meaning and value of saving.
And i am scared.



Near the Oracle of Ammon at Siwa oasis. (because every post deserves a picture.)

A year of meta-living (not really.)

As long as we're on the subjects of New Years, I should mention that my biggest (and lamest) resolution was to only read books that could be construed as meta-fiction. (non-fiction is exempt, as are short stories. Memoirs are to be decided by committee on a case-by-case basis.)

Although to be fair, my definition of Meta is more aligned with the concept of Matroyoshka doll's than anything else.

And so, without further adieu, i present the worlds first meta-vending machine:



Wait for it...





Hell yes. It's a vending machine that dispenses little toy vending machines. Life is good.

A susan Sontag kind of week (part 1)

I finished reading "Regarding the Pain of Others" yesterday, and it was gooood. And while i agreed with most of it, something strange happens in the last chapter that made me feel uneasy:

Part 1

Towards the end of the book, Sontag gives the strong admonishment that...

"Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood.
No one after a certain age has the right to this kind of innocence, of superficiality, to this degree of ignorance, or amnesia." (p 114)

Is this true? Does being an 'adult' imply an obligation to not only accept, but accept with such detachment, the wickedness of humans? Does holding onto a hope that the worst that humankind has shown is an aberration really imply an 'unacceptable' naivety?
It would seem to me that this position creates a number of moral problems. If one is morally required to not only accept, but accept without flinching, the potential for gruesome depravity, then it complicates our expected response to a situation where such violence is even possible. If we cannot be 'illusioned' that anyone would refrain from the worst, how can we justify preparing for anything less? It would seem obvious that any relationship with another human is founded on a tacit agreement that such depraved acts remain 'off the table.' And if these acts are understood as beyond boundaries, then it would also follow that the necessary reaction to witnessing them is precisely that of disbelief; of disillusionment with the contract of human decency.
But this disillusionment cannot be permanent. The renewal of faith required to go on after the invariable aberration from a Contract of Decency - not just as a functioning society, but as a psychologically sane individual - is predicated not on forgiveness of the individual who errs, but on labeling the act itself as Exceptionalist.

Sontag does go on to acknowledge the incongruence between the value of remembering and the importance of forgetting. "Heartlessness and amnesia seem to go together... [but] to make peace is to forget. To reconcile, it is necessary that memory be faulty and limited." (p 115)

And in a general sense, this also presents a catch-22 of sorts. Because while Sontag admits that remembering in particulars can be counterproductive towards the cause of reconciliation, it is also necessary towards any sort of 'meaningful' remembering. If we only know that genocide is possible in the abstract, it becomes intangible, unreal. But if we remember it in the specifics, it not only prevents forgiving, it also becomes an act tied to the memory. Depravity existed here and here - and we can locate and maybe begin to explain it in 'this' historical context. So we are at an impasse.

So yeah. This is - i am well aware - a completely inappropriate comparison in terms of scale and weight, but it is my life this week:
I quit my job here in Korea on Monday. I knew that even though my contract clearly states that i can give 30 days notice at any point without penalties, my boss would probably screw me. At least, i was aware that in the history of people quiting there jobs in Korea, there are very few cases of happy endings, and quite a few cases of disaster. As a result, most people who choose to leave early turn the tables and preemptively screw their bosses by 'pulling a runner' and simply leaving in the middle of the night right after payday.
This is undoubtedly a vicious cycle. The more people 'pull runners,' the more bosses won't trust foreign teachers, and will try and abuse them, which just makes it more likely that someone will run in the first place.
I knew this before Monday, but i still didn't believe it would happen to me. Or rather, I had to be naive enough to see if it would happen to me. I was curious to see if my boss, who i respect as decent and honest, would try and take advantage of me. And of course she has.

Also, Korean kids love peanut butter sandwiches, but the thought of adding jelly makes them cringe. fyi.

i woke up this morning thinking about this Levi's commercial...


Those must have taken him a very long time to make.

so...
Does reproduction really disqualify meaning?

How important is sacrifice to a gesture like this? How important is authenticity? or Honesty?

And finally, why do i wake up thinking about this stuff anyway?
i think i need a hobby.

Chekhov's Gun

"If a pistol appears in a story, eventually it's got to be fired."
-Colonel Sander's summary of Chekhov's Gun from Murakami's Kafka on the Shore.

It's troubling to me that this idea carries weight.
In a perfect world, it should be nothing more than a wry observation about the formulaic nature of literature; a truism equivalent to "the good guy always gets the girl." - relevant to fiction, irrelevant to reality.

But that's not really how it works. I feel like i spend a good part of my life waiting for Chekhov's Guns - trying to identify and assemble the future meaning of seemingly innocuous events. No object is acceptable as arbitrary - its meaning is only concealed, its purpose yet to be unveiled.

To give a very extreme example, In a strange way i take comfort in the fact that i am starting to bald. it's a Gun that points to continuity - why would i start going bald if its not leading somewhere? The trigger has not been pulled, which means there has to be an act three in the making.

Of course, this isn't foolproof. And when a gun doesn't go off - when a conspicuous prop proves irrelevant - it ruptures the assumed narrative flow of our lives. It forces front and center a feeling of pointlessness usually kept at bay by the 'purposefulness' of coincidence.

It would seem then that a belief in Chekhov's guns is part of the unspoken fate component to Sheilaism.

(Sheilaism is religion without doctrinal authority;it is a patchwork of personal pseudo-religious convictions that make up each of our individual "secular" philosophies. It's religion without orthodoxy - because it is 'ours,' it is without accountability to tradition or a larger body. Hunches and compulsions act as a source of meaning that in a past era would have been explained with reference to the church.)

I'll have to spend some more time thinking about the other components...

um...

i can't decide if this is serious or a very very complicated attempt at humor.
I also can't decide which way makes it better.

Also, i'm bartending tonight.

i played blackjack for about 6 hours with this guy on saturday:



it almost made up for the fact that i had just spent 3 hours on a fruitless quest for redbull through the back streets of nampodong.



If my homesick hankerings had involved Skippy, Tylenol, double mint, old spice, or Campbell's soup, i would have been okay. But no such luck.

So instead i ate odang, which is kind of like hot gafilda fish on a stick.

It's pretty much my favorite food here.

Also, it would be criminal if i spent all this time in korea and never posted a photo like this:

wtf

Have I been away from home too long? Or is this some sort of joke? Seriously, i don't recognize a single word on this list, and only 1 of them (lolcat) even refers to a 'phenomena' that i am aware of. fuck. i better come home.

i'm an artist

day at the races

next time someone wants to complain about the short attention span of children, i'm going to let them listen to "eye of the tiger" on repeat with some korean 5 year olds for 3 hours. thanks.

when did this blog become about bugs?

high on the list of important papers i will never write is the one on the special insanity that only bugs can instigate. At first i thought it was just me, but research has demonstrated that the personification of bugs is a normal reaction.

This is my favorite: (via craig's list)

Open Letter to the Roaches in My Apartment

---

Date: 2007-09-23, 2:08PM EDT


Good afternoon, you scuttling bastards.

I tried to be reasonable with you. At first, we had a stable relationship. I knew you were there, and every now and then I'd see one of you, but in general you kept quiet and had the good sense to scurry for hiding when I turned the lights on. One of you periodically stepped out of line, and had to be squashed, and then everything went back to normal. If you had just continued in that manner, we could have lived this entire year in peaceful coexistence.

But no, you had to get greedy. I began to see you more frequently, and in larger numbers. Your lights-on scurry grew slower and slower and became more of a relaxed trot, then a walk. Eventually, you had the audacity to sit right where you were and shake your head feelers at me. You had gone too far. It was time for war.

I began periodic sweeps of the apartment, armed with paper towels, and squashed anything that moved. I removed every possible food source from anywhere you might be able to reach it, even adding extra layers of wrapping to items in the fridge, just in case one of you somehow managed to make it inside. A couple of times, I even turned the lights off and stood motionless for five minutes, then flicked them back on and rained horrible death upon whichever of you had been lured out. I really thought this would have been enough to make my point.

However, you continued to defy all logic and reasoning, and to multiply and grow bolder. Three of you ran across my foot once; I killed two, but left one alive (but severely maimed) to tell the tale... clearly, you were beginning to affect my sanity, and I needed to up the ante in order to regain the upper hand in the battle for control of my apartment. So, I added the roach spray to my arsenal. This had little effect and made my apartment smell extremely questionable; I guess you vermin won that round.

I notified the management company, who has always been very responsive to any problem I have had with the place. There was some vague talk of fumigating or spraying or some other unspecified pest removal solution; somehow it kept falling through the cracks, and nothing ever happened. Well, I'm not sure who you bribed or threatened for that little stunt, but it was time to show you little 6-legged thugs that I wasn't afraid of you, no matter what kind of "connections" you had.

I had no alternative, I had to buy the roach poison traps. The way these are supposed to work is this - the cockroach smells the tasty poison/food, wanders into the trap, eats, returns to his/her hiding place, and then dies. The practical result is that they should appear to vanish from your home like magic. However, you at my apartment had grown not only bold, but complacent. After eating, you all just kinda decided to hang out for a while, and as a result died in an odd sort of corpse constellation across my kitchen floor.

The destruction was horrific. Some of your dead were being carried off by those who survived, almost like soldiers dragging the wounded into foxholes. Many of you were still twitching, apparently writhing in agony from the effects of the poison. The ravages of war are never pretty, and being a gentle person, part of me felt a little bit of remorse.

But now you know that it is, as they say, "on", and I'll push you fuckers all the way back to apartment 601 if I have to...


Sincerely,
Fellow Apartment Dweller/Agent of your Doom

loss of innocence?

I went to Geoje island this weekend...


um...
I am slightly overwhelmed by just how underwhelmed i am by korea, if that makes any sense at all. Objectively, it is beautiful. And not just run-of-the-mill beautiful, but actually pretty 'stunning.'
But it doesn't do it for me. I love traveling, but what korea has taught me is that i only love traveling under very specific conditions. From what i can gather, i must be either
a) impossibly lonely (oman)
b) impossibly broke (europe)
c) impossibly uncomfortable (egypt)

In Korea, i am none of these things, or at least not realistically any of these things.

So i'm going to quote a book i haven't read since 5th grade, but thanks to amazon, i was able to find instantly... (also, wtf is with having quotes from kids books in my head)

"But this isn't how it works," Brian said. "it isn't this smooth and easy. You don't just fly in and get set on a perfect lake and have all the food you want and have it all come this easy. It isn't real."
Derek leaned back, put his hands in back of his head, and looked at Brian.
"there's not a thing to make it rough... nothing wrong. In a real situation, like when I was here before, there were things wrong - going wrong. The plane didn't land and set me on the shore. It crashed. A man was dead. I was hurt. I didn't know anything. Nothing at all. I was, maybe, close to death an now we're out here going la-de-da, I've got a fish; la-de-da, there are some more berries."
'Tension." Derek said. "It lacks tension."

so this is obviously more dramatic than my situation, but it seems relevant to me...

whatever. here are some more pictures that feel like they were taken by someone else...

(Burj)eois Modernity

I don't know if it counts considering my duress mixed with secular exodus-ism and nostalgia, but flying into Dubai airport was the closest I've ever had to a religious experience.
This was pretty much entirely thanks to seeing the new burj dubai.
(not to be confused with the original burj, which apparently they are now calling the 'mini burj.' - Burj just means tower)



Seriously, it's even more mind boggling in person. I have always had a thing for tall buildings, and i couldn't be happier that they're cool again.

On a related note, could this commercial for the new burj be any more phallic?

oh, darwin

Darwin's first journal entry with a sketch of evolution has the words "i think" sprawled across the top. I have nothing to say except that this makes me happy.