No Name Necessary

Last Post

2009-01-23T03:43:00.000-08:00

I no longer feel the urge to maintain this blog. The reason? It isn't popular enough to actually get me anywhere, but too many people (that I know) know about it to continue to write honestly. There are two reasons why I want to write a blog. The first is because I have a wide reader base who cares about what I have to say and who regularly views my blog. The other (in complete contradiction) is that I want to be able to write about what really matters to me, without having to worry about what future employers, my parents and my friends who do not agree with my life choices will think.

With this blog neither is the case.

I'm considering starting again in complete anonymity. A blog that really is written from the hearth, where I dare write those things that I never have the balls to put up here. A place where I can let out the inner daemons.

It is ironic that in this time of real inner struggle this blog - formerly my place to vent - no longer really feels available to me.

But anyway, so I do believe that this is my last post here. My apologies to those of you who have followed all these years and now feel abandoned. What can I do? If I no longer enjoy this then what is the point?

Be good and if you can't manage that, be happy.

2009

2009-01-04T12:10:00.001-08:00

I might have celebrated the ending of 2008 a few days ago, but it is only really tomorrow that 2009 begins for me. That is when I go back to school, begin my new job and start acting responsible again. In a number of ways it’s about bloody time. My irresponsible behaviour cost me a phone, a book, a great deal of cash, a community card and quite a few brain cells.

But I’m going to try and not be quite as responsible as I was being last year. There being responsible was leaking over into being unhappy. It wasn’t good for me. I am – truth be told – playful and if I don’t play, I can’t be happy. Apparently it shows. In the last two weeks I’ve met a lot of people who’ve told me, ‘You were so reserved before. I like you better this way.’ And well they should. Happy people are likable people.

The trick is to strike a balance. I have to find a way to not play too much and not work too much. The result is that both will be better. I will not play with guilt and I will not work with a heavy heart.

But then I’ve always known I tend to go overboard. I go for it hard, because I know that ultimately it’s easier to take your foot of the throttle later, than to give it more gas. After all, the first impression is ultimately the anchorage point from which all further personality shifts are made. Better to be known for being too serious than not being serious enough, right?

Once a goof, always a goof.

But doesn’t that then beg the statement, once a bore, always a bore?

After all, you can never prove that you’re a great worker if nobody invites you to work and you can never prove that you’re a great partier if nobody invites you to parties.

I mean, truth be told the only reason that I ended up partying with a great crew was because I had my history of partying behind me. Through that a friend came down from to party new-years here and I met a girl who had been informed that I was a good one to party with (I think before these two weeks came along she might have been wondering if she’d been lied to). Without those folks I suspect my holidays would have been a great deal lamer.

And a lame party is like a dead-end job – you do it only because you’ve got no alternative.

End of year mutters

2008-12-31T08:49:00.000-08:00

The end approaches; another year, another memory. A year of memories. It was most certainly an event filled year. Let’s recap. It started in Goa, where we celebrated in true style. We partied hard and solidly. We tore up the town, slept little and generally misbehaved. I first went to as many parties as I could and then ended up organizing the buggers. I spent months living on the beach, wondering where the hell I was trying to take my life. I spent a great deal of time thinking about whether I could be happy – what I had to do to have the feeling I was at least a little close to fulfilling my destiny.

Then I came to Europe, after a seven year leave of absence; got myself into a relationship; tried to get used to life on the old continent (what a fitting name). Ended up working in a café as manager for all of the summer. Found out that even I could end up hating beautiful days, for after all – a beautiful day meant a hard day of work. I learned more than I thought I needed to. Trained my memory, drank copious amounts of alcohol. Thought about whether I could be happy – how much I would have to do before I felt that I was living up to at least part of my potential.

Worked at getting my ass into university. Somehow did exactly that, despite setback after setback. They were always the sneaky kind of setbacks that you didn’t see coming. I guess that’s the way of the game. If you knew what was coming, well then obviously you’d be better prepared for it. A lot of people helped me and somehow I got through, got accepted and got started.

At university I learned to think about whether any of us could ever really be happy. Whether any of us actually had any destiny. Of course, I’d spent a huge amount of time thinking about it before, but now I was asked to think about it using the scientific method. Can we discover, by way of experiment, whether we are innately screwed? What does evolutionary theory have to say about our innate character and what that that means for our future? Do we all have the same potential? What does it mean if we don’t?

I learned to accept that our happiness was – as far as we can tell – pretty much fixed. You will be as happy as you are and you were as happy as you will be. Happiness is a chemical formula, a compound that just happens to trigger a feeling of wellbeing. It makes no sense for us always to be happy. From an evolutionary perspective a baseline of slight unhappiness was far more advantageous for our survival. I wondered if we could beat the rap and ever really be happy.

And then the semester ended and I was given two weeks off. Two weeks to dwell once again on the spirit and the mind. I decided to return to my roots and party like a mad man.

I finally realised that the more time you spend thinking about happiness, the less happy you’ll tend to be. And will I take that lesson into next year? Hardly! Realising that to be happy you have to spend as little time thinking about it as possible is a great deal easier to say than to implement.

Some of us are trained to think. I imagine that means some of us are trained not to be happy.

In between

2008-12-28T03:15:00.000-08:00

On Friday night I called up a friend and she told me she was going to Antwerp for a night on the town. I said that was a nice idea. She asked if I wanted to come. I told her I thought that was a nice idea as well. An hour later I there were five of us and a bottle of vodka speeding along the railroad tracks.

We went bar hopping, clubbing, and ever so slightly crazy. We danced the night away took /got our pictures/ taken (again and again and again. They are their own paparazzi) and ended up getting very friendly with some of the locals. Had racist slurs thrown at us (That really amazed me. Apparently Asian people constantly get abused in both the Netherlands and Belgium) and got ourselves quite properly lost.

In other words, we had ourselves a great time until about seven in the morning, when we crashed out on our first train back to Amsterdam. I would, of course, suffer for it later. These things always come back to bite you in the ass. It bit me about seven hours later, for then I had to start being nice to people and making coffee for the very last time. Of course, after a full night of behaving badly the four hours of sleep I did manage to get only really served to sleep of the alcohol; the real sleeping still had to be done.

I fought my way through it. Quite well, I might say. Customers were happy, satisfied and tipped well. I still managed to not make any mistakes. I think that really, only in my head, it was the work day from hell. That is, if hell has great coffee and apple pie.

Afterwards a whole bunch of people that I had worked with came into the café and tried to build a small party. They gave me gifts and farewell speeches. It was quite moving. Of course, I was still completely drained of good will and energy. We sat around and chatted for a while, but truth be told it didn’t get anywhere near lively. I guess everybody had had more than enough of these kinds of nights in recent memory.

I was touched by their efforts, though. The gifts were a little silly and kooky, but it was definitely the thought that counted. I had only worked there for a little more than six months, which many people before me had done as well. Not many of them got gifts, or a real farewell party for that matter. It made me feel like I had made a difference in their lives.

I will miss the place. It was always a good escape from my studies. There I could do something with my hands; something that was quick, exact and had a clear and obvious goal – the well-being of my guests. My new job will be nothing like that. It will require me working towards goals far into the future, with delayed gratification and no real opportunity to do something else (I will probably have trouble figuring out where my job ends and my degree starts!).

On the other hand, I will like the fact with my new job that I can actually make a difference. My work will stay out there for people to see. What I do will not be largely forgotten the next day. I’m moving away from feelings to facts. That is the problem with F&B, your never sure if you are actually making a difference; if you are actually making the world a better place. With Academia it is a little easier to fool yourself into believing that. We’ve all got to have a purpose.

Another mark

2008-12-24T07:28:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I got into the first fight of my life. I won. Now that all the suspension has been drained of the situation let me give you a short account to the circumstances that led up to this life marking confrontation.

It all started at 7 am in the morning, when I picked up my mate from singers at the airport and we had our first beer. Things pretty much went down hill (sideways?) from there. After a bit of light grocery shopping to allow that merry Christmas feeling (and the fact that the shops were supposed to be closed) we wandered into, drinking, smoking and enjoying the occasional cup of phenomenal coffees. We proceeded through the day, touring the city and enjoying it from the insides to the outsides. As you might well imagine things went slightly pear shaped, though in a good, positive and above all happy manner.

You can only get a few friends in your life that you can spend literally hours rambling on about nothing in any way important and still think that your time is being terrifically spent. After a while it blurred together a bit, into a rich tapestry of colours, sounds and feelings of contentment.

Others got to (and seemed to) share in our enjoyment. Good moods are contagious and we had numerous little interactions with bar people, tourists and locals. All very positive, but they were what set me in the mood for intervening in a matter I had nothing to do with at about four in the morning (yes, we had almost gone full circle).

What happened was that this bloke started harassing these two young girls at the bus stand while we were on our way home. He tried chatting one up, she told him she was lesbian. Then he tried to force her to kiss her friend. My gregarious mood had me up and saying that that was enough before I was fully aware of it.

He said I shouldn’t touch him. I told him that was great and that if he wouldn’t touch the girls I would have no need to touch him.

He walked away, turned around and spat a huge gob on me.

I was – to put it mildly – enraged. I don’t know what he was expecting but when I went for him he certainly wasn’t expecting that. His friends actually laughed as pummelled him and brought him to the ground, where others had to pull me off him.

I guess he thought his friends would help. They didn’t. I guess he thought his image as a member of a troubled minority would protect him. It didn’t.

I’m not sure why I stepped up, but I don’t regret it. Hopefully he will think twice before he does it again. I imagine if people – all together – stood up to this kind of nonsense more often, it wouldn’t be half as common.

So I can cross ‘fight for the right reasons’ off of my ‘to do’ list. What’s next?

Misbehavin'

2008-12-20T05:19:00.000-08:00

For the next two weeks I’m going to behave badly. This I have decided. For eight months now I’ve been behaving like a good little boy, doing my homework, always going to work on time, attending all classes and keeping myself rigidly under control, but as of yesterday I’ve finished this year’s classes and feel that I can now behave badly for a few days.

I’ve stocked up on good cheer and craziness. I’ve allayed all feelings of guilt. The only two things I still need to suppress are my social conscience (that really does get in the way with behaving badly) and my concern about how others see me. I was planning to use copious amounts of alcohol to achieve those last two aims.

Yes, of course there are still things to do. There are still obligations to meet. But I’m sure I can still do those last few little things – even while misbehaving. It seems to be within the power of so many others, maybe for two weeks it can be within my power as well!

There are my last two days of work, today and next week Saturday. But I believe they can be a great moment of enjoyment as well as requirement. For those of you in the Amsterdam area next week Saturday, by the way, I will be having my farewell drinks at Villa Zeezicht in the Torensteeg that night. The boss has agreed. It is official. You’re all invited. Even the people I don’t know.

Then there are articles to write for the school magazine. I set the deadline for everybody else to meet, so it would be damned irresponsible of me not to meet those deadlines myself. In between tequilas, that’s my motto. Salt, shoot, wield pen while chewing on lemon rind.

In a few days time a friend from Singers is arriving in the city of sin. He came and met me (along with other company) last year in Goa. We misbehaved then as well. I’m going to assume that he’s expecting a similar type of occasion on this trip out. Who am I to disappoint him?

An Ode to the Orphans:

Yea of little faith, lift your glasses high.
Drink to the morrow’s sun
Cheer to the brightening sky.
Another year has come and gone
It ‘twas within a blink of an eye

Hear yea, hear yea, cries the new years day
I am well within reach
If they be asking you to start new things cry ‘nay’
For those are things for the new year to teach

Now it be time for merry and cheer
At the bottom of yet another glass
Drink yea gin, champagne, wine or beer
Don’t let this end of year quietly pass!

Side tracked

2008-12-16T08:19:00.001-08:00

My assignment is finally getting somewhere where I’m not too embarrassed about it (Still a little embarrassed, but it’s getting there). It has, so far, taken me a solid five days of sitting on the couch, leafing back and forth between different articles, writing, editing, drinking coffee and listening to weird ass music on a set of head phones.

Is it good? Good is relative. Is it good enough? Compared to what? I’d like to get a nine for it. That’s the approximate equivalent of a solid A in the states. Maybe even an A+ (they don’t give 10s in Holland. It’s odd, they do have them in the grading system, but they are a true rarity).

I’m not sure if a nine is really within reach. I really like the professor who will be doing the grading, but unfortunately I can’t quite understand what she wants from me. Assignments that I imagine are fantastically don’t even qualify for an eight, while those that I rattle off with a headache end up getting nines.

I’ve invested a huge amount of effort into this paper, but unfortunately that doesn’t mean terribly much. Grading in psychology is ultimately rather arbitrary. Research isn’t, of course (that’s where the science part enters the psychology), but it is ultimately a matter of liking and not liking.

Most of university seems to be.

Actually most of life seems to be. It’s the human curse. We claim objectivity, while missing it by a mile. When we first meet a new person within seconds we’ve decided whether we like them or not and then spend the rest of the encounter trying to justify our initial impression.

And we might only dislike somebody because their faces remind us of our first teacher, who made us cry.

I’m sorry, but you aren’t the person we’re looking for, you just don’t fit in our company. Good luck with your job hunt, though!

I feel sorry for those people that believe that objectivity will get them there, in the end. I mean, don’t get me wrong, good work is important. If the inside is empty eventually people will notice. But if you don’t wrap it in a nice box, with a bow tie and pretty paper, you’re not going to get terribly far.

Research has shown that if you put ice cream in a round container rather than a square one, people will think it tastes better.

Can happiness be genuine when the source of the happiness isn’t genuine?

2008-12-14T03:11:00.001-08:00

The first thing that jumped to mind when I was confronted with the above question was, ‘and what is genuine?’ (Well, it was really the second question, but the first question wasn’t really related to the above question and instead was more in the domain of chocolate cookies and wondering if any were still left. There weren’t). More specifically, what is a genuine source of happiness and what is genuine happiness? What is the difference between non-genuine happiness and genuine happiness? How do we tell the difference?

Does genuine happiness come from inside and non-genuine happiness from beyond the flesh? That can’t be right. People are at their happiest when with family and loved ones and who would argue that that isn’t genuine? Is genuine happiness natural and non-genuine happiness chemical? Well, then a great meal is obviously not genuine happiness, or the happiness induced by a phenomenal bottle of wine.

And what is fake happiness? Is that the kind of happiness that we know isn’t real? Like he happiness induced by watching a great movie or reading a great book? Since those sources are make-belief would you argue that the happiness isn’t genuine? Isn’t as good as the happiness brought on reaching climax? Sometimes it’s a real toss up whether I would rather cuddle a good book or a good body (though admittedly it has to be a really good book).

But let’s leave that aside for the moment, let’s talk about a happiness that most would agree as fake, namely drugs. How does the happiness induced by drug use compare to the happiness of time well spent, a project completed well, or company enjoyed? Is there a difference? Most would argue drugs are a short cut; that they aren’t the real deal, but rather happiness imposed from outside. A decree from above, ‘thou shalt be happy’. They might well be.

And is there then a qualitative difference between the happiness you’re experiencing? Well, not according to your brain. The right drugs will trigger the right chemicals and will deliver the right result. Anti-depressants give the depressed normality back. It gives them the opportunity to feel happiness again. Admittedly many depressed people argue that the drugs cut out not just their dales, but also their peaks. I wouldn’t know about that. I find my depressions an important facet of my existence and would rather keep them; stay who I am.

Happiness is essentially your subconscious telling the rest of you, ‘things are going well’ and ‘we’re ahead of schedule’. Happiness is a motivator. That’s why it feels great (how many people do things because they want to be happy? Well, there you go – nothing more motivational than happiness). Happiness gives you purpose.

And I think that’s what the above question is really asking, is there such a thing as happiness without having achieved your purpose, even if only for a moment? Isn’t that cheating the system?

Well yes, no doubt it is. But then the system cheats you (phobias, allergic reactions, cancer, schizophrenia, decrepitude and Alzheimer’s to name a few) and who ever said you had to fight fair? Isn’t modern society all about throwing sand in nature’s eyes?

Personally I prefer genuine happiness, brought on by real achievement; but then that’s just me. I feel I’d rather leave something for others to enjoy, instead of just enjoying myself. That’s because I’m arrogant enough to believe I can.

But then I just have to ask back, does the fact that your asking the question not imply that you aren’t genuinely happy?

Trip

2008-12-12T02:18:00.001-08:00

A few hours on a train later and I’m in Frankfurt, Germany, at my parents house. It’s been a bit less than eight months since I’ve last been here and it was about bloody time that I came by for a visit.

Away from my tiny little room cluttered with furniture, clothes and scientific articles. Away from the life I’ve been (trying) to build for myself. It’s a shot break from the to and fro of what constitutes my existence.

Not, of course, that my university work has stopped. There are still assignments to hand in, articles to read and things to learn, but it is somehow different. Your environment seems to influence how you think (I have no evidence for that, just a theory).

This is a good thing, because I have a great deal of thinking to do in the next few days. Tonight – before twelve o’clock – I have to hand in one assignment which really only should take a few more hours and then I start in on a research proposal, which I mentioned earlier.

My research proposal is going to investigate the idea that when we feel included in a group we become less conscious of ourselves – while when we’re excluded we become more self-aware. Many of you will probably now be doing the regular social psychology reply by non-social psychologists, which I call the ‘but of course’ response.

But is it so of course? Research by Roy Baumeister and associates (1998) has demonstrated that when we are excluded from a group our higher reasoning functions actually decrease. He believes this is because of ego depletion, something that more commonly is referred to as ‘willpower’. Baumeister et al. suggested that we have a limited resource, a kind of mental fuel that is used up when ever we apply our conscious will. Since ostracism is actually emotionally and even physically painful we have to use part of our will to suppress this pain, leaving us less for other things.

This might well be true (it sounds plausible) but is self-awareness part of this construct? That is what my research will be examining in a roundabout way (a very roundabout way, I might add).

So let’s see if physical space leads to mental brilliance. I’ll keep you all posted.

Theft

2008-12-10T01:43:00.000-08:00

Yesterday my bag was stolen out of my gym locker with in it my phone, my keys, my clothes and my wallet. They simply broke open the lock and took out everything, in plain sight; yet nobody saw anything and nothing was caught on camera.

I was left standing at the gym, without my street clothes, without money for the tram home, without a tram card, without a way to contact anybody to get them to help me, without keys to get into my house once I got there and without very much of an idea how to continue from there.

For a while there I felt really pretty down and desperate. The people at the gym were kind enough to lend me some money to get my ass home with public transport. I jumped on in the good hope that somebody was hope and started thinking on the tram. I thought for a while and then realised that I wasn’t quite as unlucky as I had thought.

You see a bad thing had happened to me, but it couldn’t have happened at a better time. Yes, there are inconveniences, but it could have been so much more inconvenient. Let me explain, the morning before my bag was stolen I just got around to handing in a receipt for 50 euros that had been in my wallet for weeks. That money will now be wired to my account. A few days earlier I got paid at my work. It was a huge wad of cold hard cash. I’ve been known to just carry that around in my wallet and slowly (well, not so slowly I have to admit) spend it. This time around I took it out and left it at home.

I sometimes take my laptop to school and leave it in my gym locker (something that I will obviously never do again), but this time I didn’t. I had almost no cash in my wallet for them to rejoice over. I didn’t even take my book in the morning, something I normally always do but decided against for some odd reason on this day. What was more, I had just bought a new jacket a few days ago and for some reason they left that. I think it was too big for them to take. That was the most expensive item in that locker. They took my worthless shoes, but left the jacket.

What was more, when I got home my housemate was still there. Even luckier, she had been planning to leave but had been held up. Both she and my other house mate were planning to be out till late at night, which would have left me stuck without cover from the cold and without money to hide inside somewhere. Again, luck was on my side.

So, all in all I was incredibly fortunate in my misfortune. Yes they got my bag and yes it’s going to cost me money to get my bank card back, a new phone, a new driver’s licence and those kinds of things, but things could have been so much worse. Plus I get the satisfaction that for all the risk they went through they got about 10 euros, which really does make my day a bit better.

The only thing I really regret is that the phone wasn’t mine. It belonged to a friend who had a lot of text messages she wanted to keep on there. I haven’t told her yet (I don’t have her number), but I’m not looking forward to that.

Age

2008-12-07T09:41:00.001-08:00

Last Friday I went to a party at the Paradiso here in Amsterdam on the invitation of the son of the boss. I arrived there appropriately inebriated (okay, too inebriated, have it your way) and after a full cavity search (every crevice of my wallet was fully examined) I was allowed into the club.

The thing that struck me very quickly was the following fact, the average age in the place was somewhere between a half and a whole decade below my own. I felt, for lack of a better word, old.

I ended up dancing a bit, talking a bit and eventually getting accused by one of the friends of the son of the boss (who had a dog, who had a former owner, whose baby sister’s husband was related to the Grim Reaper) that I was talking way too much about our age difference. I think she was on the prowl and my talking up of our age difference sent her the obvious signal that I felt there might be a problem there (she would have been nine when I finished high school), but it set me a thinking.

Have I been complaining about my age a lot? Have I been remarking that I’m old? And the truth of the matter is, yes I have. The fact that I’m nearly thirty has indeed cropped up in conversation after conversation (especially after beer after beer). Apparently I am starting to feel like an old bastard.

And that’s absolutely ridiculous, of course. I’m not even thirty yet (less than half a year to go, but still) and they always say that the thirties are the besties (okay, they don’t, I just made it up and it doesn’t sound very good, but I’m just typing this off the cuff). I think the problem is more that I feel like I’m in a place of my life where I should have been at a much younger age. Most people do get their masters degree before they hit the third decade. Heck, there is a girl (woman?) in my class who’s already busy with her second masters and she’s still got another half decade before she hits her third decade (okay, she’s 25, that was rather roundabout I admit.)

So I’m not old (even though I feel I am) I’m just in a life situation where everybody else is a great deal younger. So maybe I shouldn’t accuse myself of being old, maybe I should tell everybody they’d better hurry up and catch up.

Have an official decree written up that I’m slowing down my aging, in order to reduce my advantage.

The advantage being, of course, that; sorry, what? Yes, yes, of course. Sorry guys, I’ve got to go.

Social Psychology

2008-12-05T00:58:00.000-08:00

When I first started studying social psychology I was actually massively disappointed. I think it was well summed up by something a student of neuroscience told me, ‘Every time you social psychologists talk about something ‘new’ all I can think of is something ‘knew’.’ And it seemed that she was right, so many of the ideas that social psychology had discovered were intuitively predictable. The social psychologist says ‘look, I found this effect!’ and the layperson says ‘of course’.

But now that I’ve been doing it for a while I actually find this to be one of social psychology’s strengths. You see, social psychology doesn’t make any assumptions about human interactions, feelings and internal workings. Sure, social psychologists have their predictions and their expectations – they are human, after all – but the whole point is that they then test these assumptions.

The reason they do this is because all social psychologists know that those assumptions, pre-conceptions and hunches come from them being human and are therefore automatically biased. To pull that big word out of the cupboard once again, all of our pre-conceptions have an element of anthromorphism in them. Every one of these beliefs about people was originally conceived of by people. And as every social psychologist also knows, people are wrong a lot more often than they care to realise.

We all believe we’re objective. In fact we all believe we’re far more objective than the rest of the people around us. Of course it can’t be true, it’s another one of those paradoxes (like we all think we’re smarter than average, we can’t all be more objective than average). This belief is called ‘naïve realism’ and most of us aren’t even aware of it occurring. It’s another one of those things that colours our perspective of the world and makes our hunches, assumptions and pre-conceptions a little harder to just accept at face-value. Forget about us being able to strip our thoughts of our own humanity (something that is essential if you’re trying to study humanity), we can’t even strip our thoughts of ourselves!

So social psychology tests, tries and experiments even the stuff that seems obvious. And yes, that means that often we find out that our assumptions are correct; but at least they then aren’t assumptions anymore. The result is that we slowly build up a scientific foundation, rather than building castles in the clouds. And you'd be surprised how many of those basic assumptions end up being inaccurate, or just plain wrong.

This year and next

2008-12-03T07:11:00.001-08:00

I just offered my resignation at Villa Zee Zicht. I will not be going into the new year with them. This is not through any fault of theirs, of course, but because I was offered a position today for two days a week at the university. Yes, I will not just be a student, but also an employee of the university.

It won’t be fun to leave the cafe behind. I’ve spent pretty much the whole of my first half year in the Netherlands there. During the summer I was working there regularly 50 hours a week, which might not sound like much for those of you in other industries but it’s a crazy amount to be working in F&B. Lately, of course, the amount of work I’ve been doing there has dropped steadily; from five days to three and then from three to two. Now, of course, it will go down to zero. One more month of café work.

So what will I be doing at the university? Well, one of my days will be dedicated to helping a team of researchers develop applications for emotion recognition software. Software has already partially been developed to allow a computer to use a webcam to identify the emotional state of a user. Now two PhD students will be exploring the application of this further and they apparently need a social psychologist. So what that means for me is that I’ll be spending a whole lot of time investigating emotions, especially as displayed on the face (there’s a whole group of researchers in Social Psychology busy with exactly that).

The other day I’ll be working as a managerial assistant. In that task my experience as a writer will again become important, as I’ll be assisting the head of the social science department specifically in the task of editing, reviewing, writing and summarizing. She just doesn’t have the time to do all the work that’s in her lap, so hey, presto! There’s me.

One of the coolest things I will get to do is write a chapter for a book about emotions in the media. Of course afterwards she’ll have to proof read it, edit it and eventually put her name on it (I’m writing it in her name), but hey, it’s a little more prestigious than making people coffee! (in that case I’m talking about making people black coffee, cappuccinos are another matter entirely.)

But first there is this month to survive. I’ve got an exam on the ninth (for which I will have to re-read approximately 15 articles), I’ve got a research article due on the 12th (for which I will need to read approximately 15 articles and which is between 2.5k and 3k words) and on the 17th I’ve got a research proposal due (for which I will have to read another 15 articles and which is between 2k and 4k words). That means I’ll be reading about three articles a day and writing a grand total of somewhere between 4.5k and 7k words.

I hadn’t looked at it that way yet. Uh, I’ll talk to you later.

The Dimensions Above

2008-12-01T10:00:00.001-08:00

We can’t see the fourth dimension. Or rather, we can only ever see really thin cross sections of it, as if some evil genius has dissected time and is showing us one little bit after the next. It’s a bit like a picture show (aka a movie) in which the pictures themselves aren’t really changing, but we perceive change because what is changing is which picture we see. If we could see all of time, we would realise that everything is completely static.

But wait, let me explain by way of an analogy. Imagine that we live in a two dimensional world. There is width and there is depth, but there’s no (real) height. It’s the world of a piece of paper. Just like our three dimensional world things can exist there. We can have squares, circles and even triangles (yey).

But now imagine a stack of papers and we cut a cone shape out of the middle of them. For those of you who can’t quite remember what a cone looks like, it’s like a tube with a point at one end, which slowly expands to a wide base at the other. So, we’ve got our pile of papers with a three dimensional shape cut into it. Now let’s imagine that the point starts at the top of the pile and the base of the cone is at the bottom. Then imagine that you start to pull a sheet at a time away. As you pull each sheet away the circle will appear to grow. Of course the circle isn’t growing, you’re just moving through the pile of sheets.

The fourth dimension is pretty much exactly the same, except (of course) that there happens to be another dimension below. If you could actually see it, things might be slightly odd. You wouldn’t just see your current self, but you’d also see your future and past self. I think Rob Bryanton said it best when he said,

“If you could see yourself in the fourth dimension you'd be like a long undulating snake, with your embryonic self on one end and your deceased self at the other”

The problem, of course, is that suddenly reality would become static again. You see, we’d be stuck on a line, with nowhere to go. Time, in and of it self, is linear. That’s quite understandable, really, just as width is one dimension, so time is only one dimensional. That means that you can’t go left, or right, up or down. You can only go forward (and possibly not even backwards, but that’s part of another story). What is ahead of you on that road will remain in front of you on the road.

Except, of course, if there’s a fifth dimension. Call it time squared, if you will, or time². Suddenly there is again space for movement left and right. Situations can be avoided and, what is more, there is suddenly a way to avoid those frustrating paradoxes that always confound time travel discussions. ‘What if you go back and kill your father’. Well, then you’re just moving the time line that you’re in off to the left a bit and you end up moving in a different direction.

Another great thing, of course, is that with the fifth dimension those that could see the fourth dimension in its entirety would not be seeing stasis. After all, the fifth dimension could then introduce the change required.

The question then becomes, of course, but what if you can fully see the fifth dimension?

Research Proposal

2008-11-30T00:53:00.000-08:00

The end of the semester approaches and slowly things are coming to a head. Assignments are due, exams are looming and decisions need to be made. I wisely decided to invest my last three days in going out, getting back late and sleeping too little. I truly am the epitome of self-control and restraint.

Actually, I’m not being very fair to myself. I was able to go out these last three days because I’m well on target and going strong. I’ve been (scarily enough) working ahead these last few weeks and though there is certainly work left to be done, the three days of misbehaviour won’t hurt too much.

But today I’d better get back to it – specifically by working on one assignment. I have to create a research proposal for one of my classes. In order to create that I need to first think of something to research, so that I can write a research proposal about it and that’s the clinch. There is so much out there that I want to look into, that I really don’t know where to begin.

Do I want to investigate our inability to read other people? Do I want to explore how bad we are at understanding what other people mean? This field has certainly been sparking my interest in these last few months – mostly by filling me with self-doubt and uncertainty.

Do I want to look into the Halo effect, the effect whereby everybody thinks they are better than the average? Do I want to explore the realisation that the normal people see the world incorrectly and have things by the wrong end, while depressed people seem to be more accurate in their predictions of the future?

Or would I rather continue my investigation into whether I can dismantle ‘Terror Management Theory’ a grand or encompassing Social Psychology theory that I don’t place a great deal of stock in (and have already spent a great deal of time working on in the last block)?

Then there is consciousness, which sparked my interest through a discussion I had in my café on Thursday (and one thing everybody has been saying to me is to use things from daily life. This discussion certainly qualified, though admittedly it wouldn’t have belonged in most people’s daily life debates).

And what about our understanding of beauty? That’s pretty fascinating as well, especially since there seem to be some rules there that decide who’s beautiful – but we’re not yet sure what they are.

So many ideas! Now I just need to whittle it down and start thinking of something original to do with what’s left.

Monday Mornings

2008-11-24T00:31:00.000-08:00

It’s probably massively strange to most of you but I really like Monday mornings. It’s probably because I really enjoy going to the university. For me it’s actually the Sundays that are the toughest and that’s because on Sunday I don’t really get to go anywhere, or meet anybody; plus it’s hardly a day of rest for me, seeing as uni brings a whole host of homework requirements with it.

No, Mondays are where it’s at - classes, classmates, topics, discussions, research, people and something to look forward to. That is, of course, the opposite of everybody else who’s life can be wisely summed up with the Garfield quote “Mondays are a horrible way to spend one seventh of your life”.

I have trouble remembering that life. More than a year ago I remember the working life, where I was teaching English back in Singers and Mondays were filled with somewhere in the neighbourhood of eight to ten hours of work. Back when I was still earning mucho money and hitting the bars, clubs and women (or should I say seducing with that last one? Maybe ‘hitting on’ would have been good enough already...)

Money is – of course – a largely absent resource in my life, right now. As, for that matter, are the clubs and the women. In the bars I spend a great deal of time standing on the wrong side of the fence – as in that side where the drinks get poured into glasses rather than into mouths.

My life has certainly twisted and turned. In fact I’d say that if my life were a square of paper than somebody could have probably folded a lotus by now.

In the red corner – I’m cold, poor, sober and lonely. In the blue corner – I’m learning, growing, working towards something and intellectually challenged.

Ring a ding ding. Of course the red corner is all about the now, while the blue corner is all about delayed satisfaction. That’s what you get for growing older. Responsibility, discipline, standing up to your fears; all things I still haven’t learned.

I have, however, learned how to hide all my uncertainties behind layers of jargon and black-white speak. A skill that certainly should not be sneezed at.

Research

2008-11-20T12:26:00.001-08:00

This was a week of research. We had to do our first little research project, just to get into the swing of things. It had to include an element called ‘Action and State Orientation’, which is the idea that people are either one or the other; where the first is an orientation towards doing things and the second is more an orientation to your surroundings and dwelling on things (suffice it to say that the first is far more advantageous than the second).

We decided to investigate how something called stereotype threat (the anxiety associated with belonging to a discriminated group makes a person perform badly on tests) might be influenced by one’s action/ state orientation. (The prediction being that people that suffer from a stereotype threat will do more poorly when they are state oriented). The way we did that was through a questionnaire that we spent literally hours collecting all around the campus.

It was an interesting experience.

Just how people behaved towards the questionnaire in different areas of the campus was already quite revealing. Obviously the fellow psychology students were very helpful (reciprocal altruism, or ‘you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours’), but the problem with them was that they could probably figure out what we were doing (which might mitigate the effect) so we didn’t want too many of them. The consequence was that we had to go hunting around for other participants.

We tried the main building, which has the largest student population, but found that for some reason the people there were far more blasé about the whole thing. This building is filled with a large number of social science students and humanity students. They didn’t seem to like taking part in experiments. I kind of have the feeling it’s the ‘cool building’ to hang out, for those students that are more motivated by everything around class than what goes on in class.

The group that we found out was the most helpful ended up being the medical students. Maybe they feel some kind of kin ship with psychology students? (Psychology is being accepted more and more as a science and we do study a part of the body, even if it’s only a very small part of it. Maybe you could consider us like orthodontists, except we focus on the soft tissue and they focus on the hard stuff).

Or maybe it was that they liked answering our IQ questions, seeing as med students are generally some of the most motivated and hard working students in the Netherlands (it’s very hard to get in).

Except for learning that med students are great students (hurrah for med students) we spent most of the rest of our time finding out how we should make our test better next time. Fundamentally it meant spending more time prepping and doing more pre-tests before you start the main experiment.

Nonetheless, it was interesting enough that I’d like to do it again.

A dark mirror

2008-11-16T13:42:00.001-08:00

Did you know that every time I go to my blog I check my site meter? If you click on it you can find out from where people are visiting, how many and what link they followed to get here. I click on it and I try to imagine who these people might be that come here to read what I’ve got to say. I wonder if I know them; if they know me.

Some people I recognise. Friends that I know read what’s going on. They generally access from the same server and follow the same links. There’s a couple of links from Singapore, the States and Indonesia now. Then there’s a few visits per week from Britain, Germany and Portugal. Friends and family keeping tabs on me (and me keeping tabs on them in turn). Some of the addresses I can’t place and I can’t help but wonder ‘who are you? Do I know you? And if I don’t, what are you like? Why do you choose to follow my life?’

And I’m mystified. What is it about what I write here that keeps people coming back? What is it in my life that makes people want to keep up to speed with what’s going on in my life? And why does it always seem to hover around about seven people a day? Do these people read everything that I write? Or do they just skim? Do they like what I like? When I’m proud of an entry, does it move them too, or is it something else? Do they like the soul searching, or the philosophy, or the science, or the honesty?

Do I intrigue them? Make them laugh? Cry? Worry? Do they think I’m arrogant, smart, or bitter?

Who are you? And why do you care about me?

It’s one of those mysteries in my life. And I realise it will probably have to stay that way. In the past I’ve tried getting people to comment, speak and reveal themselves. Almost nobody ever does. They say that for every person that speaks on the internet, ten listen quietly. That’s always amazed me; but then I’ve never been terribly good at being quiet. I’m always out there sharing my opinion, whether you want it or not.

Do I mind it, that I don’t know who you are? Well, it keeps things interesting. I can imagine that you’re all beautiful, intelligent and important. That my words make a difference. Or I can imagine that my words help people that need a bit of support. That somebody might find solace here. That somebody might occasionally go, ‘it’s hard for him too.’

And what am I going to do about it if I do mind? When I throw my thoughts out there into cyberspace, it becomes a common good. To be consumed and considered at everybody and anybody’s leisure, in the open or in obscurity.

And even though they (you) stay in anonymity, they (you) are still there. They (you) still care. It does help, you know, that little extra tick added to the counter of ‘how many have been here before’.

My words matter to somebody. In fact, they matter to at least seven people a day.

Anthropomorphism

2008-11-14T03:13:00.000-08:00

And then suddenly my mood improves. A few small things on the outside certainly helped (e.g. I got back my grades for my first two courses at uni and both are markedly better than expected, with both being above the cum laude threshold), but they can only be seen as catalysts. All in all, it is the inside that has changed; as it always seems to be. My downward moods (I hesitate to use the word depression) seem to truly be chemical imbalances. Often only the smallest things have turned against me when suddenly I end up feeling truly despondent.

That’s the thing I’m discovering more and more as I get into the Social Psychology literature, despite our beliefs that we are logical, rational, straight thinking, internally consistent and honest with ourselves the truth of the matter is that we’re none of those things. In fact, it is quite spectacular that we manage to function as we do at all. The more I learn, the more amazed I am that society actually works and stunned that we’re not more surprised (or interested) at how it actually does just seem to tick along.

But that’s the anthropomorphism in us; our inability to see beyond our own humanity and our belief that since we work this way, well obviously everything must work this way. Of course this is just an absolutely huge (and incorrect) assumption, but since 99.9% of us engage in it, we’re never really confronted with this assumption. In fact, it is incredibly difficult for us not to engage in this activity. It’s a bit like trying to imagining the world in five dimensions. We’re so used to four that we just can’t seem to shift our perception and that while M theory (one of the more promising theories of ‘everything’ in physics; a derivative of string theory) doesn’t just require five dimensions but somewhere in the order of 13.

But let’s get a bit closer to earth. What the hell am I talking about? Well, let me give you an example. In 1990 a Psychologist called Elizabeth Newton did an interesting experiment in which she got two people together and asked one to tap (on a table top) a popular song to the other person; but first she asked the tapper to predict how likely it was that the other person would guess the song the tapper was going to tap. The tapper’s, on average, thought it was about 50% likely that the other person would get the song they were going to tap out. In truth, the chance turned out to be around 3%. Yes, that’s right, not 30%, but 3%. One in 30 songs was correctly recognised, when the tapper believed about one in two songs would be correctly recognised. It gets even worse, when the listener was made aware of what song the other person was going to tap out and then was asked, afterwards, how much chance an uninformed listener would have of correctly guessing the song they also thought it would be about 50%

In other words, we are completely inept at ignoring what we already know. We reason from our own perspective and find it neigh on impossible to do otherwise. We are human and it colours our perspective, reasoning and belief system in every possible way.

And most of us don’t even know it.

Letter from the editor

2008-11-11T09:49:00.000-08:00

I might not have mentioned this, but i recently became the chief editor of a magazine at my University. It doesn't pay and it's only two issues per year, but it's something. I decided to write a letter to the rest of the team (who are also new, the whole old team graduated and moved on, so we're all fresh) and since I spent enough time working on that I thought I'd use it for here as well. So, without further ado, my letter:

I realise it's strange that I'm writing an editor's letter when we don't yet have a magazine, but I felt we had to start somewhere and since this is the start of our joint effort to produce a magazine it seemed somehow fitting. To me it seemed rich in some sort of symbolism, though admittedly not the sort of symbolism that provoke poetry, inspire artists or generates paradigm shifts; but more the type of symbolism that crops up after a heavy night of drinking, the type of symbolism that seems oh so potent when the drinks have hit the double digits, but is fortunately forgotten the next day.

The reason I'm writing this letter is to get the ball rolling or rather, to sharpen the incline, seeing as all of us started it moving already. I want to tell you what I know, what I think and what I hope; so that you can tell me the same, or something similar, or something totally different.

So first what I know: What I know is that I'm happy to be working with each and every one of you. I've said this before and I'll say it again, I'm very impressed with the calibre of my class mates, as well as their enthusiasm and dispositions. That goes twice for all of you, because you've decided to not only take the responsibility of this degree on your shoulders, but also the publishing of a magazine, which is not something to be sneezed at (something that applies equally to publishing the magazine as you taking up this responsibility).

What I also know is that if we all put our minds to it, we'll produce something that we can be proud of; something that when people ask to see it you don't feel the urge to tell them that you've lost your copy but instead you want to tell them over and over again that you were a part of making what they're holding.

What I think: if we manage to do this, if we manage to pull this off then it will create bonds that will serve all of us well over the years to come. Call it friendship, call it mutual respect, call it an understanding of strengths and weaknesses, call it pizza, for all I care, but over the years what I have come to appreciate most are the handful of people who have helped me or I have helped do great things. And if things go well I'd soon like to add all of you to that list.

I will be honest, I am very demanding – but that is because in the past those people who have placed high demands on me and then helped me reach them have made my life so much richer and have brought me so much closer to my potential. So yes, I am very demanding and I expect (demand?) that you are the same way towards me. After all, why be good when you can be great?

What I hope: I hope this letter inspires you, that it provokes you, that it fills you with thoughts, ideas and criticisms. I also hope we'll all be honest with each other and stay true to what we signed up for. I hope that you'll be honest with me. I know I can be loud, obnoxious, autocratic and intimidating. Don't let it scare you. It's probably just me hung over.

What I also hope is that in two years time we'll all be happy with the decisions we made in terms of this magazine. That we all feel we learned something and that we moved ourselves and the magazine forward. What I hope is that this is the beginning of a great working relationship. And I hope that all of you want that too.

Your reality

2008-11-09T07:55:00.000-08:00

Interestingly, when you’re depressed your image of reality is actually closer to the truth than when you are – what they call – normal. It used to be believed that people that are sane have the most objective view of reality and that it was the abnormal who’s vision of reality was further away from what was really out there. In the case of depression this has been shown not to be the case.

There are a whole lot of reasons for this. The most important one being that if we didn’t have an incredibly rosy picture of ourselves, our friends, our past and our future in our minds, none of us would ever get out of bed. (Though that then begs the question, who exactly would be building those beds?) In order to maintain our sanity we actually can’t be – as we traditionally described it – completely sane.

For example, we believe we are move clever than we are (almost everybody thinks they are above average in intelligence, which obviously is impossible), have more control than we do (everybody seems to believe that they have a below average chance of getting into an accident, getting sick, or getting in trouble), are friendlier than we are (if everybody was as friendly as they thought they were, there wouldn’t be any more wars, I’m sure!) and have a brighter future than we do (everybody that’s young is certain they’ll be rich and famous when they’re older!)

The question researchers asked, when they saw all this data, was, why – exactly – do we have such a rosy picture of ourselves, our future and our surroundings? Isn’t it true that having an incorrect view of reality means that we’re all the more likely to get ourselves into trouble? (by way of comparison, if we thought a car was approaching differently from how it was, we’d be far more likely to step in front of it.) And no doubt it is.

The thing is, we’re not just observers, we’re also actors. We don’t just see ourselves as being better than we are, we also then proceed to act that way and that is the crux of the matter. We act like we are going to succeed at tasks we really only have a very slim chance of succeeding at and as a result sometimes succeed at them! This is commonly referred to as a ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’. If you believe you can do something, chances are better that you’ll actually manage to do it then if you don’t believe you can do it.

And then there are always two final protective mechanisms to guard us when we do fail. The first is that we attribute success to our own skill and failure to circumstance. While the second is that we forget when we fail and remember when we succeed (thereby also establish a more rosy picture of our past, as well as the present and the future).

Depressed people disengage most of these defensive mechanisms and end up with an unfiltered view of the world around them. They see the brutality of the world around them and their insignificance within it. Their depression functions a great deal like the Ultimate Perspective Machine dreamed up by Douglas Adams in his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

We need to be convinced of our own importance. Otherwise, why bother? Therefore, we witness reality through numerous filters and interpretation devices – just to avoid being termed insane.

Gordian Knot

2008-11-06T11:44:00.001-08:00

There’s a great Dutch saying that roughly translates as ‘being knotted up into your self’. The meaning is that you’re making things harder for yourself than they need to be, or that you’re getting in your own way. Actually, it’s more a bit of both.

I’ve constituted that that’s my problem right now. I think I’m moving forward, but my break lights are on (that’s not mine, it’s Jack Johnson’s, but then things are very rarely mine, even if I’m not aware of it. The subconscious is the biggest plagiarists of them all). Every night I sit in my room, studying, working, watching movies, reading and generally trying to entertain myself – when in truth I want to be out meeting people, seeing places and doing things.

Yet during the day, when I could be doing something about it, I’m not. I could be setting things up so that I’d have things to do in the evenings, but instead buy a pre-packaged meal, go home and eat alone.

People have tried to help me. They’ve invited me out. They’ve offered advice. I haven’t taken any of it. And I don’t know why. Well, I do. It’s because I’m ‘knotted up into my self’.

Or maybe it’s because I’m so used to it being so easy for me to find nice people, do nice things and see nice places that now that I can’t seem to understand that over here it takes effort, time and patience. Over here I’m not special anymore. I’m just another Dutch guy, wandering the streets of Amsterdam with a pre-packaged meal under his arm.

And yet I find it incredibly hard to do anything about it. I think that’s what happens when you’ve managed to get yourself stuck in a rut; the longer you’re in there, the harder it gets to get out.

I think it would be fair to say that I’ve been pretty unhappy with my situation for quite a while now. I hide it from myself, from others; but when I’m going home alone again in the evening I know it’s true. When I’m sitting on the bus, aware that soon I’ll be in my room and my fellow passengers will be the last people I will see till the next morning, sometimes this desperate loneliness tries to overwhelm me.

Of course it’s gone in the morning. Then there’s a whole day of meeting, talking, discussing, sharing, complaining, ridiculing, chatting and interacting. Then I’m okay. I forget about it, even.

It’s just the evenings.

And what to do?

You see, the thing is that what I miss is kindred spirits. People like me. People that used to be easy to find when I was younger but have been getting progressively harder to encounter as the years have passed me by.

I don’t know if that’s because I’m getting more unique, more choosy, or just less social. I do know that recently I find it easy to make acquaintances, but neigh on impossible to make any friends.

It’s your friends that you hang out with in the evening.

So I go home alone.

My Choice

2008-11-04T12:27:00.001-08:00

Even though it doesn’t matter, seeing as I’m not American, (and there are no doubt literally thousands of people doing the same thing at this very moment) I’m going to tell you who I would have voted for and (to make matters worse) why.

If I would have been allowed to vote, I would have voted for Obama. The reason why can largely be summarized in one word and that word is Palin.

But let me explain myself, seeing as one word hardly qualifies as an explanation. Before this election and before the primaries and before all of that jazz, I actually already knew about McCain. That, I realise, isn’t a great accomplishment, but it is probably more than a great deal of Americans themselves can say. I can go even further, I actually liked him.

That’s not hard. He is (used to be?) honest, a free trader, confrontational, clear and in a league all his own. He – in many ways – embodied many of the values that I believe once made the Republican party one of the greatest parties that helped govern America, before all that bible bashing, ultra-conservative empire building, war mongering lot somehow took the reigns.

The problem is that Palin represents the very wing of the Republican party that we really don’t need another four years of. The wing that thinks only in black and white, has no clue about how the rest of the world works and doesn’t really want to find out (after all, everybody outside of America must really be an American in waiting who just hasn’t quite seen the light, right?), believes the bible should decide matters of the state and believes their values should be everybody else’s values too.

By choosing her as his running mate McCain is creating the possibility, however slight, that if something were to happen to him we would end up with somebody who – in all likelihood – is even nuttier than Bush. At least I can understand what Bush was trying to do (though it was often misguided and ill conceived) but I’m not really sure I would be able to understand where the hell Palin would be coming from.

And the fact that McCain chose her says something as well. He’s willing to take somebody under his wing that he obviously doesn’t really like, who’s values he doesn’t really respect (McCain isn’t big friends with the fundamental Christians) and who he won’t be able to agree with on many points, just to get the extremes of the Republican Party to back him. What’s so honest about that?

Is Obama the best choice? Well, it is true he’s inexperienced (though it’s so strange that I can argue that when I’m only two thirds his age), but that’s something that can easily be rectified with a good team behind him. What he does have is charisma and the ability to show the world that America is not the bigoted, discriminating place that most America haters think it is.

And that is really horrible, that race needs to play a role, but unfortunately it does. Race is still a very hot topic in (and outside) America and by showing that a black man can become president the minorities will be energised, invigorated and made aware that they no longer have an excuse. Furthermore, it will prove America’s enemies wrong. America is not a country where the white man oppresses, but instead a country where everybody can live the American dream, not matter what the colour of his skin is – a dream that is still a beautiful notion.

And for the rest? Well, all we’ve seen is Obama the campaigner, with his lines scripted and his performances rehearsed. To judge his ability to lead a country by his campaigning is like judging your surgeon’s ability to operate, by how well he or she can play piano. He’s got pizzazz. He’s got character. And hopefully he’s got the vote on his side.

Lost Days

2008-11-02T04:13:00.000-08:00

I lost yesterday completely, as well as last week Friday and some odd day the week before that. The reason? Hangovers. Terrible, day consuming hangovers that make any action besides lying in bed and groaning incredibly unappealing (and even the groaning has to be done in a soft tone, so as to avoid adding to my pain).

The thing is, I’ve drunk so much more at other times and other places that I can’t understand why the hell I’m getting such horrible hangovers now. There is no rhyme or reason to it, no justice and no fairness (and if you’re going to say, ‘well the world isn’t fair’ then I’ll be forced to answer, ‘compared to what?’). When I was in Goa, for example, I can honestly say there were times when we were abusing alcohol, drinking and partying day after day with no respite and no time for recovery; yet, though I didn’t always feel honky dory, I can’t remember even one hangover that compared to the bastards that are costing me days now.

Now I really only drink one day a week, the day – and you guessed it – before the hangovers hit. For the rest of the week it might be a beer with dinner once or twice, but no more.

My father, who is a skilled drinker by all accounts, suggests it might be because I’m lacking the necessary vitamins and that I should maybe try taking vitamin pills. This could be the case, as it is true that I’m not really eating my vegetables (They are actually really hard to get, if you try to avoid cooking like I do. I though Europe as well about healthy eating, but I might have been eating healthier in Asia than I am here).

Another theory I’ve heard is that the hangovers are hitting me exactly because I’m drinking so much less. My body is no longer used to significant amounts of alcohol, while my mind is still used to consuming like I did previously, so when I do go drinking ‘properly’ I end up drinking too much for my current tolerance level.

This would seem to fit with my memory of falling of my bicycle on Friday night (I also have physical proof, as in a hurt hand that I obviously acquired during the fall). The reason I fell off, if I’m not mistaken, is because a curb aggressively attacked me on my way home. So, either the curbs are slowly awakening and planning to take over the world, or I really shouldn’t have done those two shots right at the end there.

So what is the solution? Take vitamin pills and drink less. The first step is easy, the second one, as anybody that drinks regularly well knows, is a lot tougher. There is, to paraphrase Yoda, ‘only drink and no drink, there is no try’. So I guess that means I’ll have to do the no-drink thing. The trick there is to get my ass out of a steady drinking environment, where the beer flows freely (in both senses of the word), and into a more sober setting; yet another reason that it would be nice if I could get the research assistant job.

Breaking habits is all about removing the habit cues from your environment and since I do not drink at home the only real habit cue I’ve got is my place of employment. Well, that and weekends, but it might be a little harder to get rid of those.

Six cups

2008-10-30T14:45:00.000-07:00

Today I drank way too much coffee; six cups, or something there about. The reason was that I was distracted. The first two were drunk during my first Motivations meeting (it sounds like a self-help group, but it’s actually a social psychology concerned with understanding human motivation, why it happens and when it doesn’t.)

The second two I drank as the result of an impromptu job interview. Last night when I got home from work there was an e-mail from the secretary of the research masters course saying that somebody was looking for a teaching assistant and where I should send an e-mail to if I was interested. I decided to respond, but because I was tired (and had had a tequila shot – a drink that apparently doesn’t agree with me terribly much I’ve discovered) I decided to keep it brief. I said something along the lines of:

I might be interested in the position, could you tell me more and what would you like to know about me?

That was sent around one o’clock in the morning. I didn’t get a reply this morning, but instead found out one of my class mates (who had responded earlier) had been invited in for a talk. I and another class mate decided to tag along. I can’t tell you why, it seemed like a good idea at the time. They ended up telling the two of us that weren’t invited that they had probably already found somebody for the teaching position, but that they did have two other openings that they were just starting the search for. Were we interested? I barely noticed the third and fourth cup going down, seeing as the potential position that was being offered was quite definitely quite interesting. The woman asked when I could start and that she would look into it. She didn’t even ask to see my CV.

The last two cups happened after the job interview, a few beers and dinner (we had to celebrate our possibly good fortune). The reason I didn’t notice those two going down was A) a few beers and B) a good conversation.

Now I feel a bit ill in my stomach and woozy in the head, despite it already being two hours ago that I had my last cup. Still, that fails to distract from possibly a very good day. The motivations class was very promising (possibly the most interesting class to date), the job possibility is exciting and the dinner (well, the conversation, the dinner itself was a bit of a disappointment) was a nice way to finish it off.

Besides, the slight sick feeling gives me a perfect excuse not to study tonight, so I might just curl up with a good book, some odd music and wait till the caffeine wears off enough that I can get some sleep.

For today I feel I’ve already done enough. Tomorrow is another day.

The Fundamental Attribution Error Post Rationalised

2008-10-28T11:56:00.000-07:00

The Fundamental Attribution Error: The error of attributing to other people’s character what we would attribute to circumstance it we did it ourselves. Apparently we do it a lot. I don’t actually have any trouble believing that. I do believe that since I’ve learned of the concept, however, I’ve tried to do it less. I try to take into consideration more often that people might be tired, hungry, upset, drunk or yet something else. There’s only one problem with that, of course, in that it introduces even more uncertainty into every action. Not only do I have to keep track of people’s character, I have to keep track of what might be influencing their character as well!

That’s probably why the F.A.E. occurs in the first place, because it’s just too demanding for us to be able to keep track of everything; or maybe it would be better to say that there’s no need to. Yes, we might be making an error but is the correction of that mistake worth the amount of brain matter we would need to devote to correcting it?

That is an evolutionary question. What is more valuable, the brain space or the absence of this error? And of course that question has already been answered. We have the error, so it would seem that our brain space is more important. Or could we say that we’re still evolving towards a state where we will no longer have the error? That the error was much larger before, but has been shrinking as we’ve been evolving into ever more social beings?

“And now for something completely different” – Monty Python

I’ve bought a new notebook today. It’s thick, has a hard cover and is unlined. I decided that I needed to start writing by hand again. Some time ago I had a notebook full of my own poetry that I had spent literally hundreds of hours on. Then I lost it. I left it on a train. Since then I haven’t written any poetry.

This book won’t exactly be a book of poetry. I decided to call it a book of beginnings. The reason being that since I seem to have trouble writing anything to completion, it might at least be a good idea to keep a lot of those brain farts in one place. Then, if I do want to finish something I’ll know where to look for something to write on.

At least, that’s what I say now. It was such a spur of the moment thing and it happened such a short time ago that I haven’t yet post rationalised it into something potent with symbolic meaning.

In a few weeks you’ll probably hear me proclaim that I bought it because otherwise the world would have ended.

It will probably be just as true as what I wrote above. That’s the great thing about spur of the moment things. They aren’t really rational. The rationality comes later, when we try to understand ourselves.

Susan Blackmore said something along the lines of: We don’t actually actively think in the moment, we only think about the moment afterwards. You could imagine it as if your conscience was running after you shouting, “of course it’s obvious why I did that!”

The Theory of Cognitive Dissonance

2008-10-26T04:36:00.000-07:00

In 1959 two experimenters, L. Festinger and J. Carlsmith did a very interesting experiment that you’ve probably already heard about. They took a group of students and made them do an incredibly tedious, useless and uninteresting task. Then they asked those students to tell other people how the task was so much fun, so that those people would also participate. They offered to pay them a reasonable sum for the lie (20 US) or a paltry sum. Then they asked if the participants enjoyed doing the task. The researchers found that those who were offered a reasonable sum to lie still said they didn’t enjoy the task. Those people who had been offered the paltry amount, however, suddenly said they enjoyed the task a great deal more than other groups.

The reasoning for this shift went as followed: when a person has two conflicting views or positions (they have internal dissonance) they will try to resolve that conflict by moving those views closer to each other. The people that were well paid for their lie didn’t have this dissonance, as they believed they were well rewarded for their deception. For those paid near to nothing, however, no such excuse would hold. They couldn’t tell themselves they had lied for the money and they couldn’t unsay the things that they had said, so instead they had only one option left and that was to move their viewpoint and decide that obviously they weren’t lying and the task was actually enjoyable.

It’s a bit like when you try to get something, can’t get it and then talk yourself into believing you didn’t really want it anyway.

I wonder if I’m now doing the same thing with my solitude? I have always hated being alone and yet lately I’ve been shouting ‘I like being by myself. I like having my own time. I like my time to myself.’ Is this not a classic example of me trying to reduce my internal dissonance? Since I’m having trouble finding people I really want to hang out with, am I not perhaps trying to convince myself that I’m not really interested in hanging out with people? And then, once my internal views have shifted I start to avoid people (believing that that is what I really want – which it is, of course, it’s just not what I used to want) so as to continue my supposed solitude.

I wonder if my studies of social psychology will actually help me gain a better insight into my own behaviour, or will just lead to me second guessing my intuition and ending up with a worse understanding of how I fit together.

There’s research out there that claims that psychologist are no better than other people at figuring out what makes other people tick.

But then there has already been research that counters that research.

Round and round she goes, where she stops nobody knows.

Exams, funerals and economics

2008-10-24T05:10:00.001-07:00

And suddenly I’m hearing from all sides (well, two sides, so at least it’s in stereo) that I’m not just mumbling to myself, that people are actually listening and that people are actually out there paying attention. To what, I’m not exactly sure, but they are. Maybe it’s because of what Pyrrhus said, it’s because this is the only way they can keep up with what’s going on in my life. I’m not exactly sure what’s so interesting about my life that people want to know about it, but who am I to judge (after all, I wouldn’t want to switch my life for anybody else’s right now. Hell, I have enough trouble keeping track of what’s going on in my life, imagine having to figure out how somebody else’s fits together as well! Too much work, I’ll just be content with what I have.)

Yesterday I had my first exam. It went alright, I think. Not terrific, but then it’s been a very long time indeed since I’ve had to sit and write. Annoyingly part of this exam was knowledge based as in ‘does X mean A, B, C, D or E?’ (yes, a five pronged multiple choice question, so that guessing was even less effective). I not only dislike stamping facts into my brain most of which I’m going to have forgotten the day after the exam, I also severely dislike wasting space in my internal memory, when I’ve got an external memory out there to define these terms for me exactly. If I’m not sure what X means, I’ll look it up!

That’s what the internet is for, and libraries and tutors and notes. They are my external hard drives where I keep extra information that isn’t directly essential. My brain is where I store the overarching ideas, the concepts and the information that is directly relevant to what I’m doing at that moment in time. These kinds of tests are from before the era of mass communication and easy information, when it still took a great deal of time to find these exact definitions. As you might have guessed, my professor is trailing behind the modern times a bit.

As they say, “Science advances from funeral to funeral.” (which is probably paraphrased from Max Planck, whose original quote went something like this, “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”)

I guess that holds true for technology as well. People cling to what they are used to. That’s why the paperless office is only now slowly becoming a reality (as the generation of people that grew up reading from screens starts taking a solid stake in the working world). Even when technology allows for things to happen easier, people find it mentally easier to do things the way they’ve always done.

I think economists are correct to an extent when they say we are rational beings, but they forget to calculate the mental costs of every action. Often we don’t do things differently because we already know the method we’re using. Better the devil you know, you know. Yes, blind typing is a great deal quicker than ramming away at the keyboard with two fingers, but do you know how much anguish and mental trauma switching over would cause? (well, neither does the person who’s ramming away with his or her two fingers, but they can obviously well imagine).

I quite enjoyed that

2008-10-22T13:35:00.000-07:00

I haven’t written a blog entry in a while. I just haven’t felt like it, to be honest about it. Still, I really shouldn’t let that affect me. I should think about what it will be like in a years time, when I look back at this big hole in my blogging during what will have been an important part of my life. So without further ado, I hereby am starting the blogging process again. Hopefully I’ll even enjoy it. It used to be about sharing my experiences with all of the people out there, but after my sporadic blogging of late I doubt that many people will have stuck around. So instead I should just accept I’m writing mainly for myself and the few die hard readers that have chosen to stuck around.

Thanks die hard readers.

So what has been going on? As you know from my last few posts I’m back in university. This was something I spent about a year building up to (mentally probably more than physically, I left everything to the last minute, as usual physically). The first group of courses are just about ending. I somehow managed to survive and even do well. (I hesitated to use the word excel, but I don’t think I can really say I’ve been excelling. Maybe that will happen later, but for now I will stick with ‘do well’.)

I got an eight for the presenting part of a course (a 15 minute presentation got me part of the way there, a few questions did the rest). An eight is equivalent to an 80%, which is pretty crap by American standards, but then they grade more harshly in the Dutch system so if I manage to keep an eight average I will graduate cum laude. That is the goal I’ve set myself, by the way, to graduate cum laude. Since I worked so hard to get into this program, I thought I should at least try my utmost to finish it at that level.

For the rest I’ve largely been keeping to myself. I’m down to only two days a week at the café. When I first started at uni I was doing three days a week, but that was destroying me. I just had no time for anything but working and studying. Now that I think about it, I probably already discussed that before. I always type these posts in a word document off line. I somehow feel I can be more honest that way. It’s an extra level of abstraction, thereby creating a bigger distance between myself and the text that I make available for general consumption. Of course it’s the same text, but it doesn’t feel the same. Maybe it’s because Word somehow feels more like a letter, or an essay, and typing something into a web page more like a chat, or a forum post.

Anywho, I’m rather enjoying a lot of time on my own. It’s quite different to all the socialising I used to do, but it somehow seems to be part of the Holland experience, this solitary thing. It’s probably also part of the reason I haven’t blogged a great deal, I guess I’m just not in a terribly sharing kind of mood.

I imagine it’s just a stage.

And maybe one that is just starting to pass, as this blog entry could possibly attest to.

Did I ever mention that I always write my titles at the end?

Mob Moods

2008-09-26T04:47:00.000-07:00

I’ve been really interested recently in the herd mentality of people. It’s been impressing me how herd driven we are; how we so easily pick up on signals from our environment and let them influence us; most of the time without us even knowing. It isn’t really surprising once you think about, seeing as we’re social creatures, which move in flocks very similar to other herd animals, but I don’t think many people actually sit down and think about it. Which is a shame, because it means that you’re even less in control of your actions than you think you are.

To give you a couple of examples. In the café I work in you can really see the herd mentality of people – you can sense the energy changing around the room as different things happen and different moods grip the crowd. For example, people never leave one table at a time. It is almost always several tables that leave at once. The more tables that leave, the more other tables that suddenly decide to leave as well. Sometimes the whole café will empty in the space of a few minutes. All of these people believe, of course, that they are independent and exercising free will. In many ways they are. It just happens to be the case that their free will is heavily influenced by the will of the people around them.

The same thing can be said for drinks and food and such. Often there will be waves of specific drinks being ordered. We’ll have cappuccino rounds, for example, or suddenly everybody starts ordering orange juice (which is really annoying, because you only have so much fresh orange juice at any one time).

Tipping is another one of these wave things. When one or two tables walk away without tipping, suddenly others seem to tip less or not at all. If a group of people walk up to pay, however, and the first person obviously gives a tip then suddenly you’ll find the whole group doing it. And if the first person is so nice as to say that your service was spectacular and fantastic (you might be surprised, but it does happen!) then suddenly everybody’s tip goes up! That person’s experience is completely different from everybody else’s, after all they were at a different table, but nonetheless their opinion influences the opinions of others.

Mood is another one of those amazingly contagious things. Sometimes I have to take over the terrace from somebody who isn’t really all that ‘on the ball’ or service oriented. Often, when that happens, there’s a negative energy over all the tables. The thing is, this negative energy infects newcomers – even though they don’t realise it. They directly act more critical, tip less and generally hang around for shorter. It normally takes me about an hour or even an hour and a half to change that mood around; then, when that mood is changed, suddenly everybody that arrives new takes on the mood of the rest of the terrace and is far more accepting, generous and friendly. I’m not making this up. Admittedly it’s anecdotal evidence, but it something I have experienced time and again.

The people subconsciously take in the mood cues of others and seriously let them influence their own. The thing is, they aren’t even aware of it happening. In my opinion, this gives their environment an immense amount of power over them. Or, to put it another way, it gives the people an immense amount of power over you. You can’t change it, but you can certainly try to be aware of it happening.

The first step towards being honest and objective is to be aware of your own self-deceit and subjectivity.

Power or the lack of it

2008-09-22T15:20:00.000-07:00

Let’s talk about some research they’ve done in social psychology, so that you can get an idea what I’ve been learning. It turns out that the amount of power we have directly influences our mental capacities. People with power and people without power think differently. With that I don’t mean that they think about different things, we all already knew that, but rather that they way their brains work actually changes as their levels of power change.

Research has revealed that when people do not have power, their ability to plan is affected. They find it harder to make long term plans and to keep their minds concentrated on the task at hand. Instead, it seems, that a great deal of their mental activity is occupied with taking in their surroundings and observing what is happening around them. This actually manifests as the same person doing markedly worse on an IQ test when they feel they have little power, then when they feel the have a great deal.

There’s more.

Powerful people are less able to take on other’s perspective and instead they are much more likely to think from their own. This extends to being able to take into consideration other people’s emotions and their ways of thinking. People with little power, on the other hand, are much better at putting themselves in somebody else’s shoes. In other words, empathy goes down as power goes up.

The reasoning for all this is that more powerful people need to be able to plan better, seeing as probably others depend on them and they can’t depend on others. On the other hand, they do not need to worry about their surroundings as much as people without power, after all, the powerless are the most likely to be the first to fall prey if the group is attacked.

The empathy too is relatively easy to explain. After all, the powerful really don’t need to care as much about other people’s feelings. Instead it is the people without power who take care that others like them, since they can’t use their power to get what they want.

The interesting thing is, that this both fits our stereotypes (the uncaring boss, the less bright worker) and shows that it isn’t really that person’s fault. His or her mind is actually being effected by the world around them. It also means that something can be done about these things. People are much more a product of their environment than we realise.

What’s more, it can be used to make our lives better. You want your kid to learn better and plan more for the future? Give him more of say. Do you want to be more empathic to the people around you? Let go of the reigns a bit and let other people take charge.

And that’s just ideas off the top of my head. No doubt there’s a whole bunch of other applications for this research.

Man/ Machine interface

2008-09-16T04:21:00.000-07:00

Sunday was the end of my grandfather’s birthday party and the town he’s from made quite a feast of it. He’s quite the celebrity there, you see. His music (he’s a composer) is actually performed in quite a few countries, it seems, especially out in the former East Bloc. My mother, my sister and I decided to go for a few hours (my studies didn’t permit me to go longer). Because we were so late in making that decision, there really weren’t any tickets left, not even for family. Still, we ended up sitting outside of a large tent where inside they were playing one of his earlier works, quite beautifully.

I fell asleep lying in the grass. I guess I really was completely exhausted. So I didn’t catch much of the concert at all. Still, the little bits I did hear were quite nice. I’m not sure if it was worth driving an hour there and an hour back, but hey – there were other reasons to go.

Like seeing my mother, who I really don’t get to see very much of. She came down last Wednesday and left yesterday. In total I only managed to spend about four hours with her. That’s about how long she needs to drive one way to get here. Of course I’m not the only reason she comes down. She’s got quite an active social life (more active then mine, at the moment) and I’m sure she wasn’t bored for a moment. It’s just another symptom of the underlying problem of too much to do and to few hours to do it in.

I still try to motivate myself to put in all the hours by saying ‘yeah, but I just spent eight months doing nothing in India’. Of course it wasn’t ‘just’. It was six months ago. I wonder how much longer I’ll be able to use that, before I’ll start telling myself ‘that no longer counts, that’s ancient history’.

Fortunately, yesterday there was suddenly some time left over and today class got cancelled, which gives me a short reprieve. In true me fashion, I directly started wasting time. Buy furniture for my room, read ahead for class, or get new sport shoes that actually fit in my bag? Why? Let’s instead download a really old game and spend the next hour and a half playing it.

What to do? What else is there to do but try and work harder and hope that I can survive these moments of wasted time. Truth be told, where formerly it used to be easy for me to waste days and even weeks doing what was entertaining but ultimately useless, now it has been restricted to a few hours at most. Maybe one day I’ll be able to avoid wasting time. Maybe that’s when I’ve finally rejected all of my humanity.

I wonder what I would look like in chrome steel.

No, I don’t really know what I’m talking about either.

The plot

2008-09-14T01:46:00.000-07:00

I guess I’m starting to show the strain. Yesterday I wasn’t the nicest of people to work with. I was in a foul mood, snappy and generally hard to be around. The causes were numerous. First and foremost, I felt that it wasn’t going well. I was standing at the bar, which is definitely the hardest working position, but – according to me – not the most essential position. It’s basically all about producing the drinks; which yesterday meant producing cappuccinos (for those of you unaware, cappuccinos require just a bit more precision and work than other coffees, making them fun to make when it’s not pounding, but a pain when the shit hits the fan.)

The problem is, from there you don’t have any oversight. You’re tucked away in a little corner, with barely any idea what is going on outside. All you see is the tickets coming out of the machine and the other staff coming back to pick up the drinks. You can try to infer how busy it is from there – but generally you’ll be wrong. Often, the bartender will be slamming drinks out and the waiters will think it’s relatively quiet.

I’m better in service, because I know I’m good at keeping the people happy. After doing this for five months nearly continuously I can feel what’s going on on the terrace. I have the oversight to know which tables are new, which are content and which are ready for another drink, often without them even needing to signal. It’s all about reading their moods.

Recently we got a whole host of new employees who don’t have this ability to sense the mood yet. They are where I was, down in the nitty-gritty trying to cope with the information overload that initially comes your way. They are still reactive (rather than proactive, obviously). The problem is, I can’t put them behind the bar either, because the drinks were coming way too hard and fast. I couldn’t do it all and I felt the service was suffering as a result.

And that pissed me off; especially since I worked so hard over the summer to improve our service.

Normally I can put myself past that. I can get positive, happy and content relatively quickly and this is where the other things are paying a factor. I’m once again learning to cope with a new environment and a way of thinking that I haven’t employed in a long time, indeed. My brain once again has to be re-tooled and that always takes energy, concentration and time. In a few weeks time I’ll be able to take the strain of working and studying at the same time, but right now I’m mentally strained and it seems that then I can’t completely control my anger nor my annoyance.

What can I say? I am human. I have my limits and I will continue to try to transcend them. Since I can’t get out my own way, hopefully people will be smart enough to get out of the way when I fail to be more than I am.

Arcane Mutterings

2008-09-08T14:25:00.000-07:00

A few hours ago I sent in my first assignment for my master’s program. It was a short essay. In fact, it could be compared in length to one of my blog entries. In many ways that’s where the comparison ends; for the simple reason that the university essay is a completely different animal from the blog entry.

Psychology claims to be a science (is it? I’m not sure) and therefore requires a great deal of precision. The problem with precision, however, is that it means that terms and expressions should vary as little as possible. This can make the average university essay a rather dull affair.

This point is being rather admirably driven home by the reading I’m being asked to do. I will immediately say, in the readings defence, that the more recent articles seem much more interesting; though whether this is because they actually are more interesting, or because I’m getting used to the format is not clear.

The danger I see now is that my writing here will be influenced by my reading there. I’m hoping I can separate the two; because quite frankly I abhor the tendency to try to write so cleverly that your writing becomes almost unintelligible and this is something that I’ve long accused scientists of. Of course, there are a number of reasons why they might do this. The first is that they aren’t very good writers (which is very possible, since writing is only one of the skills that a scientists should possess and not one of the most vital ones at that). The second is that they write the way they do because they think it is actually perfectly clear. A third reason I have only just discovered is that they do it because they don’t see writing like I do. Perhaps they see it more as mathematical prose.

I’ve realised (largely through an article that I just read) that I’m going to have to learn an entirely new set of skills and – possibly more importantly – a new set of values. Entertainment, for example, is not very high at all on the list of important things to consider when writing scientifically.

I think that’s a shame, but I can understand why. If you want to be entertained, you don’t read science, you read science when you want to be enlightened.

So once I’ve learned to write to enlighten (or maybe just convince) can I still write to entertain? Well, the thing is – I think that a piece of writing is far more enlightening (or should I say convincing?) when it is also entertaining. For one thing, you manage to keep your audience far more present and attentive. After all, you need your audience to be attentive in order for them to be convinced of anything you propose.

So in my quest to learn how to write enlighteningly (oooh… five syllables – university’s working!) I should never lose sight of my attempts to entertain. Losing the latter will negatively affect my ability to do the former.

Or, in plain English, if nobody’s going to read what I write, who cares what I’ve got to say?

What I want

2008-09-03T06:12:00.000-07:00

I’m in the middle of my first week of university. So far I’ve been assigned about 15 articles and two essays to write, all to be finished either during this week or by Monday or Tuesday next week. It’s obviously going to be a piece of cake.

The first thing I’m going to have to get used to is being forced to read. I mean, the reading that I’ve been assigned (and the essay writing as well) is not something I haven’t done in my own time before. I’ve easily consumed as many pages in written text and filled as many empty pages as they’re asking from me now. The only difference between then and now is ‘want to’ and ‘have to’.

My first lesson in psychology is the fact that ‘have to’ and ‘want to’ are often inversely correlated (or, in layman’s English, when one goes up the other goes down). I’ve now got the material, I’ve got the reason, all that is partially missing is the desire. I have to finish this article because I still have to read three others before tomorrow. I have to write this essay because tomorrow I’ll have to be working on the other one. I have to understand what I’m reading because tomorrow I might have to answer questions about it.

I have to learn to want to.

And I will, I’m sure. It will all become easier. After all, I haven’t worked like this in a long time (well, for ever. I never did all my assigned reading when I was last in uni.) so I’m sure that in a few weeks time I’ll adjust. After all, I adjusted to my job managing a café. In the beginning I nearly approached a burn out and now I can manage it quite easily. I’m sure the same will happen with this new stage.

Still, it’s quite a system shock. I hope I can live up to my own demands. I’ll have to. After all, I worked way to bloody hard to get into this damned program to now fail while I’m in there. Besides, the professors pretty much already admitted that I’d already completed the hardest part; namely actually getting into the program.

Of course, the hardest part for me isn’t that I want to finish the program, its that I want to finish the program with the highest honours. I’m making rather high demands of myself. But, as they say, if you don’t aim for the stars you’ll never reach very high.

I don’t just want to get very high (I’ve done that often enough in my life) I actually want to get to the burning bastards in the sky. I want to etch my name across the sky and burn my initials into the moon.

Originally I wanted to be God, but then I realised I should aim for something slightly more attainable; so I’ve set my sights on complete world domination.

Completing my Research Masters Cum Laude will be a good start.

Stage(d)

2008-08-26T08:21:00.001-07:00

My summer of work is over. The Dutch summer has been over for quite a while, of course; but that’s secondary. For me it’s all done, I just did my last shift of my last full week at the place I work. From here on in I’ll be down to three and I’ll somehow have to make ends meet that way. Hopefully I can quickly find some extra freelance work. Let’s see what happens.

Still, I’m very happy that the next stage is about to start. My ‘getting my life sorted out in Holland’ stage took all of four months. Of course, it’s not completely sorted, some of the tail end of this stage might have to be dealt with in the next stage, but the line is definitely five days away; for then the stage ‘What the hell am I doing at university again’ will begin.

Hopefully that stage will quickly be followed by the ‘ah, so that’s what I’m doing at university’ stage, but nothing is certain. Well, that’s not true, one thing is certain, the Dutch are very good at pulling cash out of you any way they can.

I experienced that again today when I called about getting insured. You see, in the Netherlands you have to be insured. It’s THE LAW (did I mention that already?). So I called them up (because I have to get insured within four months) and asked about how much it would all cost, what the benefits would be and so forth.

They told me that they would love to insure me and they would need my bank details so that they could take the cash for this month, oh yes, and the cash for the last four months as well (seeing as you need to be insured, as that’s THE LAW (did I mention that already?) and therefore they would kindly insure you retroactively for the last four months. Somehow if I’d got into an accident in the last four months I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t be so keen to insure retroactively).

So that is yet another attempt to extract cash from one of my bodily cavities. There’s a saying in Dutch that I rather liked when I first came back (I hadn’t heard it previously) and it roughly translates to ‘you can’t pull feathers of a naked chicken’. They might have the saying, but unfortunately they don’t pay it much heed. They’ve definitely managed to pull feathers from under my armpits and other ‘a’ areas (now my cheeks chaff).

I know this sounds very feathery (no pun intended) but it would be nice if they would sometimes let some of the down grow into full fledged plumage.

Of course, that’s not their primary ambition. They are probably also getting plucked by yet other organisations and their primary ambition is therefore to survive. And as we all know, to survive you need money. I just wish they wouldn’t need my money!

On loneliness

2008-08-22T02:51:00.000-07:00

Last night – for a moment there – I was overwhelmed by that bitter sweet feeling of loneliness. Sweet because it’s such a strong emotion, such a physical emotion; bitter, well I guess it’s pretty obvious. After all it isn’t the nicest of emotions.

I haven’t felt lonely for quite a while there. I’ve been quite happy living a half-cloistered existence. I’ve purposefully been keeping to myself because a) it’s cheap b) I’ve really been enjoying doing my own thing and c) I see quite enough people at my work every day, thank you very much.

But yesterday was different. My boss’ son turned 20 and had a party in the café I was working in. That meant I was pouring drinks and making small talk with a big group of boisterous, loud and (after I’d poured a bit too much alcohol into them) quite drunk early 20 somethings.

Then – when I closed shop – they all left to do their own thing.

I was left behind and that warm social feeling just dropped away. Suddenly it was just me left to lock the door bike home alone, return to my (quite literally) empty room and my crumpled bed.

I think the thing was that I had no control over when the social thing ended. Or maybe I did (after all, it was my choice when to close the shop); but my responsibilities today played through my mind yesterday and forced me to hold back – forced me to act responsible.

Generally I dig that entire acting responsible thing. I enjoy having the feeling that I’m not wasting my life away. That I’ve got a purpose and a reason for doing things. That I’m building towards something. Still, it’s hard to let go of all those irresponsible thoughts and deeds that clouded my past. Being irresponsible is so much fun!

Have I finally truly grown up?

That’s a scary thought, isn’t it? Maturity even for the likes of me. Not to worry, though. It can never truly claim me. I sometimes forget that I have to be able to laugh at myself, but when that happens, life always conspires to teach me that lesson again – possibly even more roughly than last time. For he who can’t laugh at himself is in for a world of sorrow. I think all true humour comes from being able to take yourself with a grain of salt. I hope I never become so old that I forget that.

I also hope I never get so old that I become truly lonely. It’s a great emotion to feel every so often, just for the strength of it; but it could destroy you if you felt it every day, waking and sleeping.

I think loneliness is worse than depression. If you’re depressed you can share it with other depressed people and gain some traction. If you’re lonely; well, you’ve obviously only got yourself.

Help(ed)

2008-08-19T06:53:00.000-07:00

I’ve been thinking about it and I have realised that I’ve been living an incredibly blessed existence since I’ve come back to Holland. Yes, things have been tough; but that’s largely been because of my own mistakes, loose ends and carelessness. Everything that’s come my way seems to have come from others.

People have been truly kind to me. My parents, my sister, her boyfriend, my ex(?), my colleagues, even the people at the university (who would have ever thought that?). The people on this blog, on face book and on e-mail have also been supportive and kind – it doesn’t matter that it was only in words, all that matters is that it was there.

Why am I this lucky?

If the Luck Factor is to be believed (a book that I read quite a while ago, now – but that I still refer to often, as you’ve probably noticed) luck is of our own making and in four specific regards 1. Maximise your Chance Opportunities 2. Listen to your Lucky Hunches 3. Expect Good Fortune 4. Turn your Bad Luck into Good Luck.

I’ve definitely been trying to do more of the first and the third has come by itself (I expect things to work out for the best and for some reason that actually seems to work!) But I can hardly say that I’ve changed my life around so much in the last year and a half that I deserve everything that has come my way.

Of course you can never say you deserve anything somebody else gives you of their own free will. I think that’s one of the big dangers. When you start expecting things, you become ungrateful; when you become ungrateful people don’t enjoy giving you those things anymore; and when they don’t enjoy giving you those things anymore, there’s a great likelihood that they will stop giving.

So I will not expect and I will truly appreciate. In a way this entry is an attempt to show that appreciation. It is an attempt to let those people who’ve helped me know that I am grateful for what they have done and that they can always come to me to ask something back. I know not all the people that have helped me read this blog (though quite a few do) and I will make certain that I tell every person again in person how I appreciate what they’ve done for me.

What’s more, I will gladly help anybody else that needs it. I believe that you don’t always need to give help back specifically to the person that’s helped you. I feel that it is okay to help others instead, if the first person doesn’t need it. After all, if everybody followed that rule then the person that helped you would end up getting helped by somebody else when they needed it as well, though long loops of helpfulness.

Of course, not everybody follows that rule; but it’s a start if I do and we’ll have gone a long way if you do too.

See Saw

2008-08-14T02:36:00.001-07:00

A few days ago I tried to find the website that I originally used to sign up for my university degree, as I wanted to know the exact amount that I would have to pay. I remembered that it was somewhere around 3000,- Euroes for two years, but I wanted to be sure. I entered a number of searches and couldn’t find the website. Then I checked through my bookmarks and my e-mail and found the link. I clicked on it. It led nowhere.

The link was dead.

Alarmed I started searching for other websites about the research master I had just subscribed to. I soon found one, but there was one significant difference. The cost was 5000,- Euroes per year.

There was, of course, no way that I could possibly pay that amount. With my heart hammering in my chest I contacted the university and asked how much I would have to pay. ‘5000,-’ they informed me. I explained what had happened and the lady at the other end of the phone said, ‘well, the best thing you can do is write to the head of the department. There’s no guarantee, but he’s in charge of scholarships and finances.’

I wrote the man a letter in which I explained my predicament. I wrote emotionally, honestly, and frankly. I admitted my mistakes (it was quite a list) and then admitted that if I didn’t get any help, all my hard work would be undone.

I didn’t snivel; but it did come quite close to begging (in a face-saving manner, mind you).

Then I left for the city and wandered around in a daze. I pretty much admitted defeat. I said, ‘if they can’t help me. Well, then obviously it wasn’t meant to be. I will accept my fate and postpone my studies by a year.’

That night I came back (I watched ‘The Dark Knight’ to console myself) and I checked my e-mail. I’d already received a response and the response amounted to a 2500,- Euro scholarship.

I literally punched the air (something I thought was only a literary device, until then) and did a little jig. They’d kindly placed the study within reach again.

When I told a friend what had happened she said, ‘well, they must be really desperate for students’. I retorted, ‘maybe they’re just really desperate for me!’

‘Maybe,’ my sister said later, ‘it’s a little bit of both. Maybe they’re desperate for high quality students, which means they’re desperate for you.’

I liked that interpretation.

Trees and Forests

2008-08-10T02:58:00.001-07:00

University starts in about 20 days and I’m in no way ready. I just got my first e-mail about what books to buy, with the helpful hint that I might want to think about pre-buying and pre-reading.

The book I’m supposed to be pre-reading is a book about methods and statistics. Right now I can’t even generate the energy to read about stuff I /want/ to read about; how the hell do they expect me to find the drive to read about methods and statistics?

The first and foremost problem ghosting through my mind right now is still very much ‘how am I ever going to pay for all of this?’. I’ve told the people at work that I’ll have to go back to three days of work a week. My study will take four days. That leaves me zero days to raise extra money, and as things stand right now I will only be making just enough to cover my base expenses. No fat, except for the little bit of extra money I’m raising this month.

How can I be thinking about methods and statistics when that’s all hanging above my head?

What I really need is some kind of fund or scholarship to help me out, but those don’t come knocking on my door either. I have to go out and look for them myself. The people at the government department that help most students with funding (Except for me, of course) helpfully compared finding a scholarship like that to ‘finding a needle in a haystack’. Oh boy, oh boy, I’m really looking forward to that.

Am I whinging? Yeah, I’m pretty sure what I’m currently doing is whinging; but then I’m terrified. I’m scared of the years ahead, I’m frightened of the poverty, I’m worried about whether I can do the degree and I’m deeply concerned about what further snakes are creeping through the savannah.

I must say, the people around me have been really supportive and I’m incredibly grateful for that. As always, I wouldn’t have been able to make it without those people. They feed my soul, they nourish my willpower. They take my annoyance, my frustration, my fear and let it wash over them without a sound, without a complaint. I owe them big time.

Maybe one day soon I’ll be able to repay them. When that light’s there at the end of the tunnel I might have a chance to do something back that will make their lives better. Till then it’s just a matter of looking at my own two feet and willing them forward a step at a time.

Don’t look too far ahead, because you’ll lose heart. A book has chapters so that we have a feeling of progress, a journey has steps so that we feel we’re getting somewhere. Just like a piece of text without chapters, pages, paragraphs, lines or breaks we’d rather not begin, in the same way will power is all about looking at the trees and not the forest. Just doing that little step now and worrying about the rest of those steps only when this little one is done.

And of course wisdom is keeping track of the entire forest. The big picture. That’s why they call people with too much of the first ‘stubborn’ and too much of the second ‘hesitant’.

So what if you’ve got both? Are you then ‘stubbornly hesitant’?

Films

2008-08-07T01:45:00.000-07:00

Over the last few months I’ve watched some fantastic films and I’d thought I’d share a few with you here, in no particular order.

Air Guitar Nation
Yes, it’s a docu, but you have to watch it. This has been one of the most entertaining, uplifting and just plain weird films I’ve seen in years. It’s all about the Air guitar world championships and the people involved. Air guitar is where you act like your playing guitar, while you’re not holding anything. Kooky, strange, bizarre and ultimately fantastic.

Lola Rennt
A German flick that retells the same story a number of times through the application of chaos theory. You know the one ‘if a butterfly flaps its wings…’ Lola does run a lot – which might irritate some people – but she’s got fabulously red hair, which makes up for a lot. It’s good and I advise it to anybody looking for something different.

Stardust
There’s been a lot of children/ adult fantasy movies in the last year or so, but Stardust has been head and shoulders above the rest. I admit I might be biased, as I rather like Neil Gaiman’s work, but then everybody around me loved the film as well (and they don’t know Neil Gaiman). Plus Robert De Niro puts down a fantastic atypical performance.

Das leben der Anderen
Another German film about East Germany before the fall of the Iron curtain. Great colours, original story and deeply moving. This is one of those films that proves that there are other styles except for the ones done in Hollywood and they can work at least as well.

Paris je t’aime
A French film about love in Paris, told through rather a lot of short stories. The great thing is that each short story has been done by a different director and as a result affects a completely different style. Of course the individual quality of the short stories does vary (different directors and all) but overall the quality is very high.

Miller’s Crossing
I’ve watched a lot of Coen Brothers lately and I think that Miller’s Crossing (along with the Big Lebowski and Fargo) has to be one of my favourites. Great characters, good storyline and deeply engaging.

The Darjeeling Limited
Odd. Beautifully shot and entertaining. It gives an idea of what India might be like and the types that get lost there. The stylised, colour saturated shots make the film a visual feast, while the flawed characters are a great glimpse into your own family’s screwed up relationships.

Screaming

2008-08-03T03:59:00.000-07:00

Apologies ahead of time, but I need to vent for a bit. A great deal isn’t really going my way right now and screaming it out into the cyber world might be better than screaming it at some random passer by on the street.

A lot of stuff isn’t going my way right now. You know, the usual; bills to pay when you really don’t even have enough money to eat; a mounting wave of incoming financial obligations with no real idea of how you’re going to deal with them; exhaustion and a complete lack of interest in reading, writing and other intellectual pursuits; a university education that’s going to take a huge amount of time that I don’t really have; a job that’s so tiring that I don’t have the energy to search for another one and to top it all off a place where I’m starting to enjoy working less and less.

It’s that last one that I’m going to talk about. More specifically it’s the last one yesterday that I’m going to talk about. Yesterday was probably the worst day that I’ve had at my job.

It was gay parade in Amsterdam. That meant that the city was flooded – not just with gays, but also with tourists who wanted to go and see the gays break loose. Of course, this meant that it was incredibly busy. That’s nothing new, though. Busy we can deal with. Unfortunately not just was it busy, but nothing seemed to work.

It started with the computer system. We use these mobiles to take orders on the terrace. Unfortunately, we’ve only got one left (after two died horrible deaths in the last couple of days). This means the main responsibility for taking the orders falls on one person. The first person to take this role was lax. When the second person took over and walked out onto the terrace they were basically attacked by mobs of coffee desiring, apple pie demanding and hot-chocolate craving customers.

I was standing bar and trying to give these people what they wanted, but there were no coffee cups (the washer didn’t think it was necessary to pick up his pace). Then there was no apple pie because the kitchen didn’t think it was necessary to listen to my insistent beeping on the intercom. Then I had apple pie, but no whipped cream (because the canisters hadn’t been sent down to be refilled) and of course everybody wanted whipped cream.

Apparently the customers all took it in good stride – but I certainly didn’t.

And then there was dinner. Already frazzled from the afternoon of madness we went into dinner hoping that things would be better. We got to close the terrace because of rain (bad for business but good for overworked staff) and run the insides as a restaurant. All was going well until suddenly food stopped coming up. Thirty minutes passed and customers started looking at us expectantly. Suddenly I remembered the pink stripes that had come up on the food order tickets that had last been sent up.

They weren’t that stupid, were they? Downstairs I went to ask if they had replaced the paper roll in the printer, seeing as those pink stripes meant the paper was nearly out. ‘You need to replace the paper rolls?’

Fucking idiots.

It’s a Saturday night, prime time, during a festival and they don’t even think ‘hey, we haven’t had orders for quite a while, maybe something is wrong’.

We rewrite out the tickets, by hand and get them back to work – then we go out to the floor and offer all the affected tables drinks on the house. The peace is restored. New tables walk in and take orders.

These new orders come up before some of the old hand written orders are finished! These people get their food in ten minutes, while the table next to them has been waiting for an hour. How, pray tell, do you explain that?

I told the rest of the staff that if something like this happens again I’m running away screaming. I’m not sure if I was serious.

Friend Wheel

2008-08-02T03:07:00.000-07:00

There’s this application on facebook that’s called the ‘Friend Wheel’. It’s an interesting little app, in that it shows how all your friends are connected. Who knows who among your friends. The important thing being the ‘among your friends’ part, as it doesn’t show anything more than that.

This screwed me up, originally. You see, quite a lot of my friends don’t know each other. There are quite distinct groups, where every friend might have met within that clique, but the only connection between the individual groups was – obviously – me.

This meant that I had lots of white space in my friend wheel. The connectivity simply wasn’t that great. I saw this as a bad thing. I looked at other people’s friends circles and everybody seemed to know each other. I thought ‘am I doing something wrong?’

But I’m not. You could say they are.

Let me explain that. The fact that their circles are incredibly interconnected means that all their friends know each other; which basically means that they are all the same group. The group may be very large – but the person with the very interconnected friends wheel is basically not very good at meeting new people by themselves. They are reclusive and depend on others to meet new people.

The less connected your friends circle, the more you are the one to go out and meet new people (and the less these new people you meet meet your former friends, of course, but I’ll get back to that). The outgoing extrovert with the large social network that can get them things done, because they always know somebody who can help them is the facebook persona who knows a lot of people, while these people barely know each other; the friend circle with lots of entries, but few spokes.

Of course there is another good reason that the people I know don’t really know each other (there’s always as second explanation) and that’s distance. I move around so much that the people I know will have trouble knowing each other. So that deflates my extroverted outgoing bubble a bit.

Still, it just shows that our instinctive desire (many lines between all the people) is not necessarily the right one. Ultimately the network with fewer spokes will be more useful (as there will be far more people from different walks of life in it – giving you both more fulfilment and more resources).

Yes, I’ve just spent an entire entry on a facebook application.

Homeless

2008-07-29T04:01:00.000-07:00

I’ve got two Hungarian ‘kids’ sleeping on my couches. A boy and a girl. It’s funny how you start seeing everybody that’s a bit younger than yourself as kids. These two are around the 20s and they’ve just become homeless.

That’s not the smelly, begging for money kind of homeless; nor the drug fucked sleeping in your own vomit kind of homeless either. It’s the kind where even though you’re working you can’t pay the rent and your land lord kicks you out – then you end up squatting in some cellar (with no running water and no electricity) to be chased out in the middle of the night by a man and his madly barking dog kind of homeless.

I’ve never had it that bad. I’ve never had to squat in a place with no running water and no beds before. I’ve had it in a bad way, but I’ve never let it get that bad. Maybe it’s because I’m more careful, or maybe I just have more of a safety net (that I call in earlier).

The quote that comes up in me is, ‘an intelligent man can get himself out of problems that a wise man would never have let himself get into.’

Or is that just being arrogant?

Maybe it’s because I’m a little older. When I was in my twenties I was safely tucked away in university. I had food every day, I had a roof over my head and I had classes to attend. I still made some big mistakes (the debts of which I’m in the process of paying off now), but I never really had a chance to fuck it up badly.

Of course that isn’t exactly true, as the overdose of one of my fellow students testifies to (Heroine, for the interested ones among you), but still the scope for mistakes was relatively limited.

These guys left their country to try and find work here. It’s pretty admirable. I don’t think they’ll be able to stick around much longer, though. Not having a home (or a shower, or clothes) makes life a bit of a challenge. Possibly more of a challenge than it really needs to be.

If you’ve got people back home that are willing to pick you up, get you going again and give you a fresh start, maybe you should take it.

But then, maybe I’m not as brave (reckless?) as them.

Sleeping Out

2008-07-23T05:58:00.000-07:00

A couple of days ago I was forced to sleep at my work. The reason? The keys to lock up with had been lost. You see, there’s only two sets of keys. One is always with the owner and the other set is passed to the opener in the morning and thrown into the mailbox at night – when everybody’s out. This second set of keys was somehow split and the most important keys lost (they ended up being behind some beer kegs in the owner’s hallway).

So we tried to find the owner and, by extension, the first set of keys. It was, however, a Saturday night – her kids weren’t home and she’s smart enough not to give us her mobile number (then she’d never be left alone!) So the result was that the first set was also not to be found. There was two choices. 1. Close the door, but not lock it and hope for the best. 2. Stay till the cleaners show up.

The problem was, option one, if it would have gone wrong, would have cost the owner a fortune. Imagine the damage that a couple of drunken louts could do to a café that they found open and unwatched? Especially one stocked with a wide variety of liquor bottles and a number of beer kegs? And that’s just assuming the people that found it open were drunken Brits (mind you, I have nothing against the English, but in Amsterdam they do seem to form the vast majority of the drunken tourists).

So I ended up drinking a few at the neighbours (who stay open much later) and then passing out on the couch, till the cleaners woke me up with rather surprised looks on their faces. I assume they thought I was a drunken tourist that had wandered into the open café (We never meet the cleaners, they start after we finish and finish before we start). I mumbled some explanation to them (I doubt they got it, their Dutch wasn’t very good and my explanatory ability at 4:30 in the morning isn’t very good either), got my stuff and left.

But not before writing in till when I had been forced to stay as hours; l though that was only fair. After all, it wasn’t me who had lost the keys and yet it had been me who had suffered the consequences. A couple of extra hours of pay seemed a fair exchange for my discomfort. Besides, I can now say that I was once paid for sleeping. That is most certainly another item off my ‘Bucket List’.

So how do I feel about the experience? Ambivalent, I guess. Which means that no doubt in a few months it will be a very positive experience. It was no fun waking up in the middle of my sleep cycle to bike home (which took longer than necessary because I lost my way), but on the other hand I did meet the neighbours – who seem young but cool (but? Am I getting that old that I need to use the word but there?!) and I did get paid for sleeping.

And, most importantly, it will make a decent story. ‘You know, I once had to sleep at my work’. Okay, maybe I need to work on my opening sentence a bit, but it’s a story and, as all of you know, I do love to tell a good story!

Lying in the rain

2008-07-22T07:01:00.001-07:00

It was only when it was too hot today to wear my sweater that I realised ‘You know what? I’m wearing an awful lot of sweaters lately.’ Which isn’t really saying much, seeing as I hadn’t worn a sweater for about seven years, minus a short (or should I say skinny) interlude in Australia.

And this is the middle of the Dutch summer. Hurrah, I get to take off my sweater for one day, while I was forced to wear it on and off for months now. I didn’t even have sweaters a few months ago!

People always ask me, ‘so why did you leave?’ and I have always answered ‘the weather’ and then they laugh and I laugh and the question is generally over and done with (unless you’ve got somebody really persistent, or really bad at the social thing – which is often the same thing). It was an easy way out. It was a quick, off the cuff answer that didn’t take a great deal of thinking, or explaining. After such a long time away, though, I wasn’t certain if it was true.

Well, I’m starting to suspect that it was really a vital part of my departure. I have this memory of standing in front of this big window in my room at university (I lived on campus) staring out at the drizzle which hadn’t stopped for weeks and saying ‘that’s it, I’m leaving’. The memory continues with me then boarding a plane a few months later and heading out to warm, warm Thailand. Of course, it’s not a very accurate memory because I had already been out of university for six months when I did leave, plus that room (which was my nicest room in university) was a room I occupied in my second year and my entire university education took three years.

Still, sometimes it’s okay to stuff the truth in the broom closet for a while (just as long as you feed it the occasional crust and bit of water) and let aesthetics take the reigns. For example, when you get yourself a daughter and she says she wants to be a princess, you don’t really want to sit down and explain to her that princesses can only really become princesses in two ways, one of which is obviously closed to her in all our cases (unless royalty has started reading my blog, which seems unlikely because then directly afterwards there would have been a jump in other people reading my blog, as the paparazzi try to figure out why royalty is reading my blog) and the other which isn’t really inviting, as she’d have to marry a pompous ass – which is not all that unusual in all countries where women have to marry men, but royalty does have the added disadvantage that the royalty's pompous assishness is thrown all over the front of the tabloids.

Another good example of where the truth should be embroidered is taxes.

No, that’s it, no witty remark, no clever jokes about taxes. Taxes are boring and I’m not going to waste anymore time on them here.

So where does that leave us? I have no idea really. I think I can sum it up as: when the weather sucks, lie like hell to get somewhere where the weather is better.

New Couch

2008-07-19T02:07:00.000-07:00

I’m sitting on the couch in my new home. The entire place is empty, seeing as the owner (who I’m renting from) left on holiday yesterday morning for three weeks. It’s certainly quite a turn around from living with all my stuff in one corner to spreading it all over a house. It’s also quite a difference from being in the centre of it all. Now I’m about five kilometres from the heart of things. I feel like I’m living among the tribes.

Quite fitting really, seeing as most of the people out here are of definitely quite non-Caucasian skin tone. Does that sound racist? It’s most definitely not PC, but then I have no problem with being un PC. Fortunately fewer and fewer people enforce PC. The majority has long since accepted that PC talk taken too far actually becomes an attack on freedom of speech.

I rather like freedom of speech.

On the other hand, I also fully accept that some things should not be said. There is a balance that has to be struck between being able to say what you want and not provoking hardship, violence and hatred by saying those things. It is, of course, a very difficult balance to strike. Who gets to decide what is necessary and what is inflammatory? It would be great if the individual could monitor him or herself. Unfortunately each individual’s judgement differs about what belongs to the first and what belongs to the latter.

So that creates the necessity for an overarching organisation to administer a general standard. The problem is then; how is this general standard arrived at? The obvious answer would be to take an average of the people at large. What the people at large find acceptable or not should be taken as a standard for what the overarching organisation would find acceptable or not. The only problem with that is that people are rather fickle. That is why the PC rage first took off, for example. That was also why if you look at movies from the sixties and the seventies you could see naked women and sex – in the eighties and nineties that suddenly disappeared (thought the violence heavily increased) – and now it’s back again.

What’s really necessary is an objective measurement – applied by people trained in applying such a standard. The big problem with that is that the people as a whole will feel disenchanted and ignored. They will say, as they always do when the academics disagree with the common man, ‘what special powers do these people have that I don’t personally possess? Why should I believe these people and not my gut instinct?’

And in many cases they’d be right. After all, the trained people are still people – liable to be biased, corruptible and easy to trick. They will make mistakes and they will be influenced by trends. You’d hope their standards would be slightly more objective, but that too is created by man and therefore not completely safe from subjectivity and bias. These people might exhibit less extreme fluctuations of applied standards – but they would still fluctuate.

And then, what is so bad about that fluctuation? Yes, on occasion it might draw people to an extreme, but if these standards do not fluctuate, then before you know it what is being said and what is allowed to be said will be in different eras. Then people will get hassled by the organisation – while the people at large have no qualms with what is being said.

I really don’t actually have an answer. These were just my musings while sitting on my new couch in my new home. All I do know is that it’s better to err on the side of caution and give too much freedom rather than too little. After all, it seems to be much easier to take freedom away than to give it back.

Fragments

2008-07-15T09:38:00.000-07:00

For the final papers to get into my new university I needed a certified copy of my university degree. I tried showing them my actual degree, but they said that that wouldn’t do; as they wouldn’t accept that as it could get them into trouble if they lost it. So I said, well I’ve shown you my original copy, can I just let you photocopy it and then you have a copy? No, it needed to be certified. Okay, I asked, so how do I certify it? Well, only the university can certify it.

So I contacted my old university. They said they would send me a copy. Then they told me they couldn’t two days later. They apparently didn’t have a copy of my degree on file. I had graduated too long ago. So how do I get a certified copy from you when I have the only real copy? Well, you need to come here. I wish I could at this point admit that I lambasted them with a clever retort and they visibly cringed, but I did it over e-mail, so I couldn’t see them, besides I’m not all that brave (After all I still needed that certified copy). Instead the strongest word I used was ‘inconvenient’.

It took all of five minutes, once I was there. Getting there and back cost me a grand total of three hours. Three hours and five minutes for a stamp and a signature, not bad for a bureaucratic process – but still pissingly annoying on a personal scale. No wonder people can only work such short weeks here, they need the rest of the time to deal with the red tape and the paper pushers!

Tomorrow I’m definitely moving into my new house (I hope) the greatest obstacle currently in my way is not having a bicycle. In the centre of Amsterdam you don’t need a bicycle (it’s handy, but it’s not necessary). So far I’ve survived without a bicycle for two reasons. Walking worked and I already had my feet and hadn’t yet bought a bicycle. Now one of those reasons falls away. Walking will no longer work, as the bicycle ride to and from the ferry will already take 10 minutes, so the walk would be at least twice as long. I’m not that rich in time.

I might have lost my poetry book. I possibly left it on the train. The idea of thousands of good ideas disappear into the world of the lost and found is quite agonising. I do have a lot of final or near final copies of the poems on my laptop, but it wasn’t just the end results that were in that poetry book, it was the actual process. How I got there.

Hopefully the book will shop up somewhere during the move tomorrow. Otherwise I’ll have to contact the central NS office in Utrecht. Fortunately the title of the book is unusual (brutally honest, might be a better way to describe it). What’s more, I doubt anybody else will really be interested in what the book contains. It’s a treasure for me, but nothing more than an oddity for another.

Let’s hope it comes back because it’s probably one of my most treasured possessions.

Dance Valley

2008-07-13T14:32:00.001-07:00

I’m not allowed to say ‘Sorry for not writing for so long’. It has been forbidden. So I won’t say it. Instead I’m going to say ‘It seems that my life has got a bit too busy for me to post every other day, but I’ll try to post when I can’. So here goes, it seems that my life has got a bit too busy for me to post every other day, but I’ll try to post when I can.

Yesterday I went to Dance Valley. It was my first electro festival ever. You see, as far as I know they don’t really do these kinds of festivals in Asia. Not on this scale, anyway. There was something like 40,000 people there. About 39,999 were drug fucked. Okay, that’s a slight exaggeration; I think there were two other people in our group who didn’t participate in that aspect of the party.

It was all sunglasses, rectus smiles, huge pupils and endorphins. There was also a great deal of vomiting, nonsensical mumbling and people who no longer knew their heads from their asses. Yes, even if you didn’t like the music you could still have a great deal of fun just people watching. In my case I consumed a huge amount of beer. I like beer. Have I mentioned that before? Well, if I haven’t, I like beer. Hmmm…. Beer…

Right, where was I?

Anyways, we decided that the weather was as shite as it was because otherwise the first festival I went to would have been too good and it would have made all the following festivals have to try to live up to too high a standard. It was better this way as then the next time I went to something like this I could look forward to a festival in the sun and out of the mud. Small consolation.

It was the worst just when we arrived. The sky opened up and drizzled us (it never really drenches outside the tropics – what ever the Dutch might think) just as we walked into the ticketing office. Then we walked onto the terrain and were made aware of one of the biggest problems with valleys, namely that water collects in them.

It was disgusting. There was only one entrance that everybody had to use. The result was 80k feet crunching up the sparse grass and the soggy ground underneath. It wasn’t even good enough for pigs.

Fortunately, we soon found a dance hill that was slightly more to our liking and stayed there for the rest of the festival. The sun only broke through once, but nonetheless it was spectacular seeing about 20 thousand people (there were several stages) enjoying computer generated sound. It made the parties we organised in Goa (which were quite big already) look like dinner parties.

Will I go again? I’m not exactly sure. The getting to and from the party was absolutely terribly organised. We ended up spending seven hours to get there and away again – while we were only at the party for a total of nine hours. Was the fun worth the price in travel time and ticket costs? Apparently for 40,000 people it was.; but then I’ve never really been one for going with the majority.

Sunlight and Frostbite

2008-07-08T16:13:00.000-07:00

It’s such a cliché, he remarks, as overdone as a sailor in deep space. Find something different, find something worthy. Leave this to the creatively underdeveloped, the cranially restricted, the emotionally retarded.

He sneers

Hunched up, my voice conveys pain by tone alone. I scream as I do battle – a civil war between north and south.

Shall I remain a prisoner in this gilded cage? Shall I seek freedom in the desert of the lone? Lune, Lunar, Luna – goddess of the temptation – your servant seeks absolution from your sins.

Thought plays chess while Feeling dances. They compete with each other according to different rules. They both believe they are winning – they both believe they are in control.

Trembling skeletal branches reach towards the writhing sky. For a moment sunlight spills through the cracks; then the clouds close rank. It ought to be a paradise – it remains a waste land.

Cocooned in razor wire.

As soon as the stirring stops oil and vinegar separate. These feelings will slip away. Dead leaves on the autumn wind. Then what? Why try to change each other, when we know we can’t even change ourselves? Sacrifice today to tomorrow.

His footsteps fade. Her mascara runs.

Home

2008-07-07T03:31:00.000-07:00

I’ve started to explore Amsterdam proper. Friday night I went out with a colleague from work to this weird ass club for an hour – where I proceeded to drink too much (that seems to be my specialty) and meet the brother of one of the few friends I actually do have in Amsterdam, which is quite amusing. After all, it was the second time I went out in this town and I really do know only a handful of people, yet right there, into my path, stumbles one of them. I’m pretty sure that if I wasn’t hung over today I could say that in a much more flowery way, but I’m hung over today as well.

But first Saturday.

Saturday I was going to go home early (as it’s not a lot of fun working on a hangover) but then this dude suddenly stopped outside of my café just as I was closing shop and yelled my name. I didn’t recognise him, but I assumed (fairly I believe) that if he knows my name I might well know him as well. I did. It turned out to be my cousin, who I hadn’t seen in seven years. They were going out. It was rather hard for me to say ‘naw, I gotta work tomorrow in the afternoon, so thanks but no thanks’. So I went out again. Again came back at some unspeakable hour, again drank too much.

Then Yesterday was supposed to be the day where I got to go home early. I had all my work done at a quarter past twelve and was really looking forward to hitting the sack. I go down into the kitchen and ask ‘how much time do you guys still need?’ the answer was ‘another hour and a half’

Apparently the look of defeat on my face was quite comical, I was told later. You see, I can’t leave until everybody is finished. As the guy in charge I’m the last out of the shop. So I had to hang around and wait. Fortunately, some of my serving colleagues decided to wait with me (with friends) and we sat around and talked shop. I didn’t drink too much – but with the exhaustion from the other two days added up (and the problem with still sleeping in other people’s living room) I am as good as hung over today.

It is nice though that I’m slowly, but certainly meeting more and more people. I hadn’t really had the time for that when I first arrived and now I can finally start to build up a proper life here. After all, a house, a job and an education are nice – but they don’t make a town your home. It’s the people that you know that make it your home. If you don’t know good people, then you won’t really have a good time. It’s also ultimately the people that get you where you want to go.

Right now I’d really like to go back to sleep. I go snooze on the couch.

Boundaries

2008-07-03T05:22:00.001-07:00

Does anybody else ever have the feeling that their lives are divided into chapters? That you could really sit down with a pen and your timeline and draw lines where you can say ‘there is a boundary here, this is where things change’? Obviously I do – otherwise I wouldn’t be writing about it.

And obviously I’ve just passed such a line. Of course, it might be easier for me to have these lines since moving from country to country is a very good way to close one chapter and open another. Still, the line was there and I passed over it – pretty specifically when I crossed the border from India into Holland (yes, Germany is getting ignored in this case, but I invoke poetic licence plus – obviously – that it’s Germany and they can be safely ignored as Mr. Chamberlain proved so aptly just before the second world war).

This line has made my life a great deal more serious. Suddenly it’s all about money management, people management, debt management and career management (and I’m not even really in management!) You could say I managed to pass a management line. (I obviously didn’t pass any humour line, but thanks for pointing that out Bradley).

I have to say, I actually enjoy it. Slowly I’m getting into the swing of actually doing my ability some justice. Or rather – I think I’ve always done my ability justice, but now I’m slowly starting to get other people to sit up and take notice. I’m starting to learn how to sell myself.

People are actually starting to listen to me.

Scary, isn’t it? Well don’t worry yourself too much, though some people might be listening to me now – most still laugh sardonically directly afterwards. So the big question now becomes, will this trend continue? Will I someday in the future actually have an audience when (if) I have something important to say?

Secretly I always hoped that this blog would be a place where slowly but certainly more people would accumulate and read my ideas. That didn’t happen. My audience has stopped growing and hovers now continuously just below the 10 hits per day. No complaints, of course. I’m happy that it’s above zero. At least my ideas and adventures have always been at least interesting to some.

Still, as I reiterated a few days ago once again (not here, mind you, but I did reiterate it) my ambition is to make a difference in this world and the only way that I can ever make a difference is to have people listen to me. I realise now that the best way to accomplish that is to not just be good at what I do, but excellent. It is that drive towards excellence that has been sharpened by my journey back ‘home’.

That breakthrough I’ve been waiting for might happen in a moment, but it takes decades of work. I started late – so I have to work twice as hard to catch up. I’m willing to put in the hours every day, let’s hope that therefore people will someday soon give me the time of day.

Accepted

2008-07-01T00:48:00.001-07:00

I have been accepted into university. As you can probably guess I'm quite thrilled. I said a few weeks ago that if I got in I'd post my motivation letter, so here it is, the motivation letter that got into the VU Social Psychology program: (Maybe you can find the two grammar mistakes in there?)

Re: What motivates me?

The first time I was asked to write a motivational letter for university I never even mentioned what motivated me, not once; yet the letter, according to the selection board, was essential in getting me accepted.

Now, eleven years later, I’m being asked to do it again. The assignment is the same, the purpose is the same, shouldn’t I therefore behave the same? Pavlov and his behavioural psychologist would answer ‘yes’. For me the answer is ‘no’. It’s therefore a good thing that behaviourism is no longer a mainstream psychological philosophy – something that the request of a letter of motivation by a psychology department testifies to.

The big disparity between then and now is indeed internal; then I didn’t care that much about whether I would get in or not, this time around I came back to the Netherlands – after seven years of absence – to get into the VU Social Psychology program. So the difference between the letter now and the letter eleven years ago is encompassed in one word: motivation.

I’ve become fascinated by people. This wasn’t always the case. For the longest time I was far more interested in thoughts than in the people that had them. That changed when I read about Antonio Damásio’s research in which he suggests that emotions are a fundamental part of every decision. Suddenly my entire world image flip – I realised that thoughts can’t be considered separately from the people that have them.

For that reason I want to learn about us and add to our understanding of ourselves. Though I’m constantly reading about and observing the human condition, there are limits to how much you can do with just books and anecdotal evidence. That’s why I want to join the Social Psychology Research Masters program at the Vrije Universiteit; where I believe I’ll be able to both take from and add to the field of Social Psychology.

There is a big difference between wanting to contribute and being able to contribute, however; so how do I think I can contribute? There are a myriad of ways, but I will only discuss a few here.

Since very young I’ve lived all over the world, which makes me the quintessential outsider. The constant exposure to other cultures has forced me to re-evaluate my assumptions over and over again. I believe – an assumption, of course – that this has forced me to always be objective and open minded.

While my time as a writer and a teacher has given me an analytical and critical mind. The reason for that is that any serious student or editor will not let you get away with mistakes or omissions. You must learn to explain things both clearly and succinctly. The best in both professions can make complex things appear simple; since the beginning this is the skill I’ve strived to learn.

These skills and more I want to bring to the field of Social Psychology; initially in the capacity of a student and eventually in the capacity of an educator. And that brings me to the end of my answer – which is a question of my own: will you have me?

Best Regards,

Jelte ten Holt

And then you find something like this

2008-06-29T09:50:00.001-07:00

And it makes your whole day a bit better. Because ultimately it's about people doing original and inventive things.

Fizzle

2008-06-28T10:02:00.001-07:00

I haven’t written for a long time. The reason is, quite simply, that I didn’t want to. The reason for that (there’s always a reason for everything) was that I was simply too exhausted. Correction, I just am too exhausted. Well, not at this exact moment in time. I just slept for two hours on the couch and I think I can summon the energy to write a post. I guess some people might be getting worried about me; after all, this is the only way that some people can still check up on me. Is he posting? Good, he must still be alive.

My job has been demanding all my energy. First it was physical energy and now it has turned into mental energy. My body has been trained now, it can take running around for ten hours, five days in a row. The muscle aches are gone. The problem is that the job is becoming more and more mentally demanding.

And my brain is suffering. It isn’t used to getting hundreds of things stamped into it every day – at least not in the way that is required here. It isn’t used to the stress anymore. After all, from nine months of no full-time job I was thrown into something quite intense. It is adapting. New connections are being made and such; soon I’ll be able to do all that is required from me and still have energy afterwards, but I haven’t quite got there yet.

This is showing up in a couple of places. Firstly my memory has been shot to hell. Things slip out of it constantly. I lose pieces of paper, phone chargers and keys; I forget important days, other people’s business and what I’m doing. It is actually accompanied by a feeling. It feels like my brain is fizzing.

Secondly I’ve lost motivation. I’ve stopped reading anything mildly challenging, as it’s pretty much pointless; it won’t stick anyway. I’ve stopped posting here, as it won’t be worth reading anyway (my brain is generally far too scattered.) I’m way less positive than a few weeks ago; in fact I might be slipping into one of my regular depressions. Hopefully realising it might mean I can do something about it.

Don’t worry, it will all pass. In fact, that fact that I’m posting here might mean I’m starting to come out the other end. Or it might be that two hours of sleep I just had. Maybe it’s both. Besides, I know I’m learning. My brain is being rewired to deal with this line of work, which will no doubt be very useful somewhere in the near future. It’s important to be able to remember dozens of things at the same time. You never know when that will be useful.

I’m looking forward to the rewiring being done, because it’s so frustrating when things slip from your mind that you really should remember. I’ve made a lot of stupid mistakes over the last few weeks and I hate making any kind of mistake, especially stupid ones. The brain is immensely adaptive and changeable. So hurry up and fucking well adapt. I’m getting sick of functioning below par.

Mass Hysteria

2008-06-19T04:25:00.001-07:00

My three months in Goa still seem to be having their effect. I feel no desire to go out and party, dance or stay out all night. For the time being I’m content reading, working and learning. The only real excitement that I’m permitting myself is the football – and with good reason, for this is the one European Cup where the Dutch actually have a chance to win.

Truth be told, that isn’t the only reasons. I must say that I find the up welling of nationalistic quite entertaining. Over the years I’ve been in many countries and I’ve seen the different ways that people celebrate their country’s victories in different competitions and I have to give that to the Dutch, they certainly celebrate in more style than most. When I was in India, for example, and they were playing their world cup cricket matches the resulting exuberance was frightening at times. It was a type of mass hysteria that threatened to get violent on occasion. I haven’t had that feeling over here.

What is funny though is what my girlfriend mentioned two days ago. She said that in anthropology they talked about an observed phenomenon during mass rituals where people can do things that they normally wouldn’t be permitted to do. When you look at the orange mob on the TV screens they are engaged in behaviour that in normal circumstances would be odd at best, but is now considered acceptable and actually encouraged.

I had never considered that that is what festivals allows us to do (and that I had actually engaged in a similar type of behaviour) and that festivals are a sort of venting mechanism where we get to give in to a kind of hysteria and have it not be frowned upon by the people around us. And that, in turn, explains the attraction of festivals. It is where you can safely go nuts or watch other people go nuts.

Which, in turn, shows us the attraction of all going to Switzerland and Austria (places that aren’t really that far away) without stadium tickets and just go along with the insanity. It’s a lot like Halloween – except then for grown ups.

The implications of this thought haven’t completely registered on me, but I almost directly see parallels in other areas in life. For instance one thing that has always struck me as funny, but that fits perfectly with this kind of exuberance is what I call ‘the bikini phenomenon’, whereby it is perfectly acceptable to walk around with only a little bit of fabric covering your ‘private bits’ (i.e. on the beach or at the swimming pool) while in other places it would draw some completely shocked reactions (i.e. on a busy shopping street or on a terrace). The amount of clothing doesn’t change, how hot it is doesn’t change, but somehow the social acceptability changes completely.

And don’t even think about arguing that it’s acceptable in the former because we go swimming there while it isn’t acceptable in the latter because there’s no water nearby. Lots and lots of people go to the swimming pool to sunbathe without even going into the water once! And only two days ago I went to a fake beach (where I discussed the mass hysteria mentioned above) in the middle of a city, without anywhere to swim or get wet (no dirty thoughts here please) and it was still perfectly acceptable for everybody to wear bikinis and swimming shorts.

Sorry about the long pauses

2008-06-17T12:48:00.000-07:00

Sunday I sent out my research article. I’m quite happy with it, actually. It was the best I could do with the time available and – unless they wanted me to analyse the numbers – it should be more than good enough to get me in. I wouldn’t have been able to write that kind of an article at the end of my time in university and then I wrote essays that generally got me A grades if I knew what I was talking about, so hey.

For the rest I’ve been working my ass off. I’m not exactly how many hours I worked in the last five days, but it was certainly over the legal limit. That doesn’t really bother me (I think that the rules which officially restrict you to like 38 hours are ridiculous) but what does bother me is the muscle aches I’ve been left with. My body really isn’t yet used to the kind of abuse that running around like a mad monkey of on steroids requires.

And that’s what my job requires. I realised a few days ago that since I started working at my job I hadn’t gone to the toilet even once during a shift. I simply ran all the liquid out of my body that I drank (which has led to the occasional headache, I admit).

It kind of feels like when I first started training my body. Everything hurt for weeks. Then I just kept going and after a while the pain went away. I’m hoping the same will happen here, because that’s the only option I’ve got (I can’t work slower, as then everything would fall apart. Nor do I want to work slower. Working fast is what makes this job survivable.)

So how long will I do this job? I imagine I’ll stop after the summer. It is fun, but I’d rather use my brain a bit more and my body a little less. It’s great to learn more control over my hands, feet and body in general (which is what jobs in bars, pubs and café teach you. After all, you can’t drop too many glasses in a day without losing your job!) but you should do what you’re really good at. I’m good at words, thoughts and ideas – not so much coffee, carrying plates and cleaning ashtrays.

Still, there’s still a great deal to learn here and while there’s something to learn (and money to be made) there’s a reason for me to be there.

Let’s hope there’s still something to learn till the end of the summer.

The Cafe Job

2008-06-13T14:53:00.000-07:00

Isn’t it funny that the only time I’ve spent talking about my job has been when I just got it? Especially considering that I really do spend quite a lot of time there. Last week I worked four days (at an average of more than eight hours a day) and this week I’ll be spending five days there. I think that the reason is, quite simply, that it is just a job. It’s a way to make money so that I can continue doing the other things in my life that I need to do.

Not that I don’t like my job; it’s actually quite entertaining! Nor is it that I’m not learning anything; I’m learning a great deal about people management and other things involved in small businesses. It’s just that I know that ultimately I can do better than this. I’m not ashamed of the job, there is nothing wrong with giving good service to customers, I just want to do things that make more of a difference than serving individuals (exceedingly good) pieces of pie.

Still, when I’m at my workplace I give myself completely. There’s something I’ve realised: when you’re working in a service industry (like bartending, banking or sales) if you give you, you get so much back! If you smile, work hard and try your best – people will appreciate it and send back energy that will keep you going and going and going, till long after ordinary batteries have run out of steam.

What I’ve noticed, though, is that it doesn’t just work with customers, it also works with other staff members. I’ve got numerous complements; either directly or through management. People just like working with me. They haven’t told me exactly why they like working with me, but they do.

My personal hypothesis is that they like working with me for a number of reasons. I work hard, I have fun, I don’t complain and I lead by example. Another thing is that I have a much more nuanced understanding of people’s moods and attitudes. This was forced into me through my years in Asia and my time spent learning how to read people. I now often know how people feel about me (and when they are unhappy) when they think those feelings are perfectly hidden. You can’t believe how great of an advantage that is - when you can start altering your behavior, before people have even started complaining and when you already have an answer to a person’s question before they’ve asked it (because you knew it was coming).

Of course I might be completely wrong. It has happened before and it will no doubt happen again. Still, I don’t think so. I think I’ve got a pretty good grasp on what’s going on and I think I’m going to do alright.

The question is more, how long will I keep working there? Well, I don’t really know. Probably till I start my university (They pay isn’t the best in the world, but it’s a good environment and I feel I can actually make a difference here. This is the kind of place that I can actually make better).

Plus, of course, I’m learning and that is ultimately a vital key to every job. Well, at least for me.

Ugly Duckling

2008-06-11T12:24:00.001-07:00

Why do I want to study psychology? Because I believe that one of the most important understandings you can have is an understanding of self. Each of us is different and a unique set of strengths and weaknesses; but each of us is also part of the human race and that gives us all a set of collective strengths and weaknesses. Do you know what those are? I’m discovering more every day now, because of my reading and I’ve come to realise that I truly don’t understand myself; but I can.

Psychologist in the last couple of decades have been researching amazing subjects, from how words influence behaviour subconsciously (which is called priming) to our inability to actually recall emotion associated with an experience; with the current emotional state instead making you reinterpret the past experience. Then there’s the studies that have looked into how our visual picture is formed and how many assumptions we must make just to be able to see (it’s by manipulating those assumptions that we can see optical illusions). And the research that discovered that emotions are not just mental, but also physical (as in the way you carry your body influences your mood and not just the other way around).

And you know what the cool thing is? If I get in to the Social Psychology Research Masters I’ll get to add to all that great stuff out there. I’ll get to find out how we’re put together.

From my letter of motivation:
“I’ve become fascinated by people. This wasn’t always the case. For the longest time I was far more interested in thoughts than in the people that had them. That changed when I read about Antonio Damásio’s research in which he suggests that emotions are a fundamental part of every decision. Suddenly my entire world image flip[ed] – I realised that thoughts can’t be considered separately from the people that have them.”

(Notice the square brackets above. I added this just now because I made a mistake in the original letter and sent it with without the ‘ed’. I’m kicking myself)

I’ve always felt that I had to add something to the world. It’s been a driving force inside me for as long as I can remember. I think that over the next two years I can add something. That fills me with a warm feeling inside.

I better get back to my paper. I still have to make sure they take me.

Is this one of those ‘don’t count your chickens before they hatch’ moments?

Response

2008-06-10T02:59:00.000-07:00

I unfortunately feel the need to write this post in response to Pyrrhus’ tirade on my last post several days ago. I really have no desire to write it, but I feel it is necessary.

Pyrrhus: The last entry was provoked by your comment, but it was not an attack. It was simply something I believed and continue to believe strongly. If you feel personally attacked I am sorry. It wasn’t my intention. As for all you said; well I can’t really respond to it. It’s impassioned and eloquent. It is also clearly what you believe. You see, a lot of the basic premises that you hold up as absolute truths I just don’t agree with. You seem to believe the state is evil and wicked – I don’t. You seem to believe that an open market will resolve all ills – I don’t.

Though I do believe an open market with few restrictions is better than a controlled market and I am against a lot of the trappings of socialism – I don’t believe that you can trust the market mechanism completely. This is my personal belief and can’t be argued for the simple reason that no country has ever let its market be completely free and therefore any argument is mere speculation.

What I do want to talk about is your form of argumentation. If you want to convince me you’ve got to argue from my perspective. You argue (and I see this a lot) from a completely different base. It’s a lot like how the religious argue against the non-religious. This has actually happened to me on a number of occasions where a person says ‘this is so because it says it in the bible’. Then I try to explain to them that I don’t consider the bible an authorative source, but they don’t understand that. We but heads, we cool down, we try again. I try to explain something from a scientific perspective and they look at me like I was born on another planet. For them putting science on par with the bible is impossible; the latter is obviously – quite literally – the more authorative source.

The same thing is happening here. You argue from how you beliefs about how the world should be which obviously clash with mine. You want a state as free as possible from government intervention, because you believe that every man, woman and child should be free to lead their own lives as they want. I have no problem with that belief and agree with it to a large extent. I just don’t see it as the end all. I ultimately am more interested in the future of our species and our evolution into something more than we are today.

For that we need education for all that want it, as cheaply as possible. Yes you’ve got your sales men, your Bill Gates types and your Enron scandals (all of which are big news, of course, because they go against the grain, but never mind) but that doesn’t change the fact that people’s average chances improve with education and that the more each individual can do, the better off we are all together (you can’t get more capitalist than that).

Oh and lastly, simply because I argue against an idea doesn’t mean I automatically embrace the available alternative. If I argue against capitalism that doesn’t mean I’m promoting socialism. There is always a third, possible alternative, which might still need to be discovered. Just like if somebody manages to poke a hole in evolution theory that doesn’t necessarily mean god exists (there might be a third alternative) me saying that capitalism doesn’t have all the answers doesn’t mean I’m embracing socialism or communism.

Education for Free

2008-06-06T04:45:00.001-07:00

Education and information is one of the great equalising forces of our society and should therefore be available to all who desire it. To limit education is to limit opportunities. Not all people are born equal, that’s a fact; but we should still strive to give everybody equal opportunities as long as the costs do not outweigh the benefits.

To restrict education is to restrict those of great potential but little wealth from adding their full value to society, as a result society is poorer and – in effect – we are all hurt.

To believe that capitalism is the cure all and end all is silly, it is not perfect, nor is it ever going to be. We should never put our full faith in any one system but should always by looking for alternatives. To modify a famous quote by Winston Churchill, Capitalism is the worst system except for every other system we’ve ever tried. (For those of you unfamiliar with the quote, the original quote was about democracy, not capitalism).

I’m not saying that the socialist model used in Europe is necessarily better. Obviously the investment in education and research is greater if the returns are greater and this is one of the reasons why in many ways the top educational facilities in America are envied the world over. On the other hand, I refuse to believe that a system that restricts access to research to the rich and those that are members of established institutions is the right way to approach education and the spread of information.

Though admittedly there seems to be a correlation between intelligence and wealth, this is a weak correlation at best and even if the correlation was strong then that would still not prove anything, as it might be that wealth allows people more access to learning, thereby raising average intelligence (besides, there are as yet no intelligent measurement systems that can truly be trusted).

In purely capitalist societies, such as the United States, social mobility is actually lower than in socialist states (in other words, if you want to live the American dream it is better to go socialist states like Sweden, Denmark and, yes, the Netherlands). I believe, though this is conjecture, that the reason for this is largely in the accessibility and differences in quality of educational institutes.

Ultimately, dollar for dollar, education is one of the best ways to raise people’s chances to take care of themselves. It is better than social welfare, it is better than charities and it is better than armed intervention. It is also one of the best ways to reduce crime rates, raise social awareness and improve people’s understanding of government policies.

This does not mean I’m advocating that every person should be educated. That is ultimately a choice that every person should make for themselves. What it does mean is that I believe every person should have the opportunity to receive a good education and any system that does not allow this – like a purely capitalist system – is ultimately sabotaging itself.

Even one of the most purely capitalist systems I have encountered, namely the system in Singapore, realises this and heavily subsidises education. Singapore does not need to spend a great deal of cash on social welfare, law enforcement or other systems to aid its population. What is more, they don’t feel the need to use protectionist measures to safe guard their people. Instead, they retrain the people to fill a needed niche – thereby keeping their people working and their country relevant.

We all know the adage by now, ‘give a man a fish and feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and feed him for a lifetime.’ The best way to teach a man is to give him access to places where he can learn.

Science Journals

2008-06-04T11:32:00.003-07:00

I’m sitting on the internet right now trying to do research on my article. More specifically, I’m trying to get access to a number of journal articles written by the same people who did the research I’m supposed to write about, but then after they completed the one I’m supposed to be discussing.

The conclusion I’ve come to, so far, is that I’m going to have to pay about 30 US per article to get the articles. It might be possible to get them cheaper, but I don’t know how and I don’t have a great deal of time to find out either.

Of course, if I was a student right now I wouldn’t have to pay a dime, because both of the universities in Amsterdam will no doubt have the journals in their database. I’d have free access to the journals to do my research and write a more in depth report about the article I’m supposed to be discussing.

But I’m not a student, nor am I rich enough to really go around splashing cash on research articles that might very well not be terribly useful to me in the long run. So what’s left for me to do? Find illicit copies, of course. Hopefully some anarchist somewhere decided that it was horrible that journals dare charge us poor sods that much for access to a single article and therefore put the entire journal I’m trying to find online for free. So far I’ve found a couple of psychology journals online (and I’m downloading them as we speak. You never know when they might be useful!), but not the one I’m looking for.

Not too surprising really, as those people that are interested in the type of reading I’m interested in are generally not of the anarchistic persuasion. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that people don’t really think they are helping the anarchistic movement (an oxymoron to begin with) by putting psychology journals online for free. They’d be right, as me reading these articles will not help anybody but me (and I’m certainly no anarchist), but nonetheless you’d think they’d be a bit more empathic towards struggling individuals like myself.

Why are these journals so bloody expensive anyway? How can researchers look the common people in the eye when they charge prohibitively large sums for their journals? I thought science was all about helping everybody, but instead it seems to be very much a matter of helping only those in the ivory tower – or those rich enough to pay the entry fee.

The only open source journal I found charged the authors instead of the readers; which is also ridiculous. Why can’t it just be free? Why does anybody need to be charged for making research available? Who the hell decided that discovery had to be so damned expensive?

Research Article

2008-06-02T05:17:00.001-07:00

After I handed in my application they sent me my research assignment from the university. If I finish that satisfactorily then I should be accepted. The research assignment is based on an article called ‘Visceral Drives in Retrospect’ by Loran F. Nordgren, Joop van der Pligt, and Frenk van Hurreveld. It’s actually a really interesting article that I – funnily enough – already read about six months ago.

The research shows that our memories are mood dependent. If we feel different from the time when a memory was stored then we attribute our actions to different things. So, for example, if we were really angry when we hit somebody but now we’re much calmer while we remember we’re bound to think that we hit that person for a very logical reason, rather than an emotional one.

This fits right in with research that has been done into memory storage and memory recall, wherein it was discovered that our memories are often false and change over time. I’ve spoken about that very frequently over the last year or so, with very good reason. After all, if we believe that our memories are trustworthy when they are not, then that is bound to lead to a great deal of conflict, while if we’re all aware that we can’t trust our own memories very far, then we should be able to avoid confrontations with our loved ones.

I know I avoid quite a bit of conflict by saying ‘I’m not quite sure how it went, maybe it went like you said’. Of course, I have my own version of events in my own head, but who is to say whose memories are to be trusted? Maybe he’s right, maybe I’m right, maybe neither of us are; what’s the use in getting into a fight over it? After all, nearly ever conversation that is longer than five minutes has at least one false memory in it (yes, even for you. I’ve found I’ve got much further in life since I’ve started accepting my own limitations. If I understand what I – and others – can and cannot do, then I can play on my strengths and cover for my weaknesses.)

Anyway, back to the essay. So I have two weeks to finish writing a two page response (well four double spaced, but whatever) and it should all go well except for one little problem, they want me to discuss the methodology – which is academic speak for the mathematics used to analyse the statistics. The problem is I’ve well and truly lost all my statistical analysis skills. I’ve got a book on statistical analysis that I’ve nicked from my girlfriend and hopefully that will be some use, but that does worry me.

But then I always seem to be worried about something and it generally seems to end up going alright, so I’ll just do my best and hope that that is good enough.

Work in Progress

2008-05-31T03:31:00.000-07:00

I have a job. I’m working as a floor manager in this tiny little café near to the tourist hub of the city of Amsterdam. It’s actually really close to the Ann Frank house, so we get lots of tourists running through – with many of them stopping to make use of our premises. The main reason for that is that the café has a bridge right in front of it and on that bridge we have a terrace. That terrace sits in the sun (when it’s sunny) and is therefore a real trekpleister (That's dutch. The literal translation would be pulling band aid – but if you want to get at the meaning, you’d have to go with ‘attraction’).

As floor manager I basically manage the bar area, which is where everything gets done, except for the bits where the orders get taken, the money gets collected, the food and drinks get brought and the goods get consumed. In other words, I’m working the production side of things. Not a great deal of customer contact – which is a bit of shame (I like talking to people) but I do get to tell other people what to do and I like telling other people what to do.

Well, I will get to tell other people what to do. Right now people still think they need to tell me what to do. It’s quite alright, really. At least I get all the information that I need to run a smooth bar, whether I want it or not. I’ve decided I’m going to hold back on giving too many instructions until I’m certain that I’ve got my skill set well under control. I’ve always found it’s hard to take orders from somebody who isn’t doing their job well themselves.

Truth be told, I don’t think the majority of the people realise yet that I’m going to be in charge. I don’t know who they think is going to be in charge, though. Or maybe they think we’re working in a communist bar, where everybody’s equal. Most of the staff there aren’t very experienced in bar work – so maybe they don’t realise that somebody needs to be in charge.

How wrong they are.

At least everybody is nice and everybody seems well impressed with how quick I’m picking everything up (yesterday, my first day, was quite busy and I was running the bar alone – yet still there were no complaints, I even got compliments!)

How long can I do the job? I don’t know. It’s hard work and it isn’t exceptionally well paid, but it might be fun for a few months. Besides, the owner of the place (she hired me) has already asked if I want to help organise a party on the bridge at the end of the summer. If I get to do things like that, I might be able to hold on a bit longer.

In the end, it’s basically like everything else in my life; we’ll have to wait and see. After all, ‘life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans’ (-John Lennon).

I do wonder though, does that mean that if I don't plan for things, I don't have a life?

Final Cut

2008-05-27T15:32:00.000-07:00

The (near?) final version of my film arrived in the post today. My wonderful producer sent it to me from Ireland and I got to watch it for the first time in its (near?) final form. My sister and my mother both also got to see it and they seemed impressed (of course, they have to be impressed, but it’s a matter of how they say it – not what they say).

It’s come a damned long way from the first draft that I saw somewhere in January. That one made me cry. This one I’m actually not ashamed to show to people. No, that’s not doing it enough justice; I’m actually proud of this one.

It’s amazing how much can be done in post. We cut it, twisted it, turned it inside out, added sound, took away scenes, warped the colours, adjusted the shots and generally turned it into a completely different animal. I think it was a street dog before and now it’s a zebra (no, don’t read deeper into that one, there’s nothing there. I just felt like somehow including a zebra).

The last time I saw it was in India somewhere at the end of January. That’s when I returned to Bangalore to edit the film again. At that time we managed to get the story to finally work, but the sound was still lacking, this time around that had been included. My producer (this is the Italian lady I spoke about often while I was in Bangalore, for those of you who’ve been reading for that long) really managed to bring out the moods in the piece.

You don’t realise how important music and sound are to make a movie work. From a shrug it turned the film into a thumbs up. You know what? I think everybody should have their own theme music for a day, just so that they can realise the importance of sound. I’d like to have my own theme music, I’d imagine it would include a lot of crazy violin playing and cellos; lot’s of string instruments.

I’m sorry, where was I? Oh yes! So when will you get to see it? Ah. That one I don’t know. Ultimately I really want to put it online, but I don’t know how that’s going to work. The problem is that the piece is very sound and visual dependent. It wouldn’t work terribly well at a low resolution and with the metallic sound of PC speakers.

On the other hand, this was ultimately always meant to be an advertisement of our talents and advertisements really work best when they are seen by lots of people. The solution is not immediately obvious to me, but as soon as it is I’ll be sure to inform all of you. First let’s try to make sure it gets into a bunch of film festivals. I certainly think it will get into a few, though I don’t know if it will win.

But then I really don’t know anything anymore, because I really can’t see it like a normal person anymore. I can’t detach and watch it like the audience would, so ultimately if I want to know how good it is I’ll have to listen to what the audience thinks.

Always a dangerous proposition, listing to the masses.

To Be Expected

2008-05-26T04:58:00.000-07:00

I was sitting in the tram earlier and I suddenly started thinking about expectations. It was triggered by a story I remembered, of a man who went clubbing frequently and made it a habit to tip extraordinary amounts to the bouncers, as well as give away expensive bottles of champagne to people he hadn’t even spoken to.

As you can understand, this all made him very popular initially; but soon it was expected. The bouncers got angry if he didn’t tip well and strangers wanted to talk to him for the free booze he might give. He was still considered a little special, but it was far out of proportion to the amount of money he was spending.

When people expect something they no longer see the behaviour as special. This goes from the small to the big. For example, not long ago wars were common and people were very happy when there was a period of peace. Now, however, we are used to peace and grumble about conflicts in far away countries that take very few lives, compared to what went before. Initially we were very happy when our loved ones gave us a lot of attention, but now we expect it and barely bat an eyelid. This behaviour can be seen back in children quite quickly, as they haven’t yet mastered subtlety; children will often run to daddy when he comes back from his business trip and shout ‘did you get me anything?’; then they get upset when this isn’t the case.

It can go the other way too. Teachers will snap at children that aren’t doing anything wrong, for example, because they expect them to behave badly. Discrimination is another form of expectation. We expect the minority to act badly, therefore give them fewer chances and treat them with hostility (which in turn might lead a perfectly good person from this minority to fall into bad behaviour). This also why it is so hard to get rid of corruption in many countries; the expectation that everybody is corrupt means that those people that aren’t can’t actually get their work done.

Expectation isn’t all bad, of course. It protects us from being cheated several times by the same person or people; it means we don’t worry about such things as whether the sun will rise tomorrow; and it means we trust others to do their jobs. We expect the police officer to do his job, we expect the trains to drive on time and we expect the traffic lights not to jump to green in both directions.

The problem is just that when we don’t think about expectations we end up taking things for granted that are actually very special – the kindness of a loved one, another day in good health, a job that pays on time and pays well – I am guilty of it myself, I will immediately admit. That’s why, from here on in, I’m going to try and take more time each day to think about the expectations that I’ve got and whether they are beneficial or restrictive.

My life is special and it would be nice if I could spend more time remembering that.

Hay Fever

2008-05-24T07:06:00.001-07:00

Yesterday I must have sneezed over two hundred times. I’m not exaggerating, at one point I didn’t stop sneezing for about ten minutes. Afterwards my mother asked me why I was so snappy and easily angered. I snapped at her.

I don’t think anybody that doesn't have allergies can understand how frustrating it is to have allergies. They think ‘what are you complaining about, sneezing isn’t that bad!’ no it isn’t, when you only do it twice, but I can promise you that it becomes an absolute living nightmare when you do it quite a bit more. It’s exhausting. You can compare it to having a niggling cold that won’t go away for a whole season (three to four months, for those uninitiated in the season thing).

And the thing is, I haven’t had any allergies for seven years. Seven years! I thought ‘I’ll probably have outgrown it by now’ and how wrong I was. I just wish that I’d picked up some anti-histamine when I left India. There it was cheap, you didn’t need a prescription and it was available everywhere. Here I basically need to first get insured (which is expensive) then go to a doctor (which is expensive) who will then forward me to an allergy doctor (which is expensive) after which I can finally go to the pharmacy to get my drugs (which is expensive). Yes, I get the last three back, but only in a few months time. My money problems aren’t in three month’s time, they are right now.

And spring is my favourite season! It’s the season I missed most when I was away (If I had a choice, I’d live in a place where the weather constantly fluctuates between spring and summer).

To add insult to injury, all the people around me seem to be completely allergy free. They don’t even know what anti-histamine is. All, except my girlfriend, but she was an hour and a half away by train yesterday, which isn’t really a distance you can just go and travel to stop sneezing.

I just know it’s one bleedin’ plant that grows just here in Holland that I can’t stand; one plant which is trying to kill me. I’m convinced that as soon as I hit anywhere else it won’t be a problem anymore – it just grows in Holland.

Another argument against the Netherland. That makes four; the language, the assumption that all Dutch people make that they know everything better, the weather and that one plant that gives me allergies. Let’s hope it stays at four, because otherwise I might start doubting my decision to come here.

Dutch as a Second Language

2008-05-22T03:04:00.001-07:00

You cannot imagine how frustrating it is to have to speak Dutch again. Let me try to find an apt metaphor; maybe you could describe it being a young child and suddenly hitting puberty. Your body changes and grows awkward, your voice doesn’t respond properly and you suddenly lose all that grace that you’ve gained over the last ten years. Suddenly you have no confidence, no faith and feel clumsy. That’s a pretty apt metaphor.

The problem is that people expect me to speak Dutch because I am Dutch originally (actually, I kind of expect it from myself as well, so it’s double up) it doesn’t matter that I’ve lived outside for 2/3rds of my life; I am Dutch, so I shall speak Dutch. I’m actually in a worse position than people that come here speaking no Dutch, at least they can get away for a long time with speaking English and nobody will hold it against them.

Gone is my quick wit, gone is my confidence, gone is my ability to argue anybody under the table, gone is my faultless language control. Instead I now know how people that aren’t good with words feel every day. That’s probably a good thing, now I understand how others feel when I drill them into the ground with my words and my scorn; but that doesn’t help me find a job!

Long term good, short term bad. If I can survive the short term (which might be a bit of a challenge, as my money is certainly not increasing) then ultimately I’ll gain a great deal from this. I’ve got to keep that in mind every time I bumble with the language to keep my spirit up, ‘one day soon I’ll be able to speak two languages at near perfect level. If I survive now then later I have yet another skill.’ It’s like a mantra that I repeat before I go to sleep. Some people meditate, I promise myself I can speak Dutch soon. No, not really, but it would make for a good story!

Memories

2008-05-19T04:23:00.001-07:00

The party sucked. I was the only person there from my year and I only slightly recognised one other person. All in all there was maybe a grand total of 50 people there, which is pretty pathetic if you consider that 200 students have graduated every year since 2001 and there’s 600 people at the school right now. In other words, less than 2% of the people showed up.

Being back in Utrecht was fun, though. I had an hour before the party started, so I drifted through a couple of streets and sat at a couple of bars. I visited the place where I had my first job after college and had two beers there (one on the house), I also saw my favourite donor Kebab place was still there – unfortunately I was still full from dinner so I had to forgo feasting there, but it was nice to know it still existed.

They layout of the town is still imprinted on my memory. I still knew where streets led and where turnoffs went. As I wandered around memories kept popping to the surface, stirred loose by buildings and sights I didn’t even remember I knew and now suddenly had whole histories associated with them again. The Thai restaurant where I learned to eat spicy food; the place I discussed throwing bricks in glass houses; the shop I bought all my books; the hot chocolate place where we discussed all our plans, none of which seem to have come to fruition.

The funny thing is, when I walked through Frankfurt it wasn’t the same. I didn’t have all these memories resurface. Is it because it was too long ago, or was my time in Utrecht just more intense? Utrecht is certainly a great deal prettier than Frankfurt. I’d forgotten how pretty Dutch cities could be. I’m surprised no more non-pot smoking tourists come to the Netherlands. You’d think more people would be fascinated by the visible history in places like Amsterdam and Utrecht. There you can see what a few hundred more years of history and a good preservation policy can mean for a place.

I think it’s probably the weather. The prettiness in Holland is so dependent on the weather and the weather is, unfortunately enough, so undependable that a whole holiday can be largely ruined because the weather gods temperamental tantrums.

It’s the same for people that live here, as well. I continue to believe that one of the primary reasons I ran away all those years ago is the weather – while I pray I was wrong.

Networking

2008-05-17T02:36:00.001-07:00

Tonight I’m going to Utrecht for the first time since I’ve been back. There’s a party there for the University College Utrecht, which I attended oh so many years ago and I think that it’s a good idea for me to attend. The annoying thing is that the party only starts at 23:00 at night, which means I won’t be making it home till very early in the morning. I’m not really looking forward to that part. Actually, to be completely honest, I’m not looking forward to the entire party.

Still, I’m going. Why am I going to a party that I don’t really want to go to and that I’ll have trouble getting back from? As the title suggests, because of networking. I need to spread my tendrils through Dutch soil; as even out here it is all about who you know.

Some would call that a very bleak world view; with me being amongst them. Going to a party simply for the people you might meet there and the help they might offer you is a rather un Kantian (I think it’s Kant) view of the world around us. Some would argue that it’s the height of not seeing a person as an end, but rather as a means to an end, which is – as Kant tells us – immoral.

So why do I engage in an activity that could be seen as immoral? Well, first of all very few people still really follow the Kantian model of ethics. In fact, very few people even know about the Kantian model of ethics, which isn’t really any sort of argument against the model (It’s probably even fallacious!) nonetheless, it seems a bit pointless to follow an ethical model that is largely unknown and ignored.

What is more, as most realists understand, you can’t always do good if you want to get anywhere in life. When I went to university I was an idealist and boy, did that ever get in the way! Sure, it’s important to have ideals, but that’s quite different from being an idealist. Being idealistic is, in many ways, being naïve. The world doesn’t work as it should, it works as it does.

And networking is a part of that. We must somehow lay the connections throughout the fabric of the society we live in to get the things done that we want to. We can’t see every person we meet as an end in and of themselves because we simply do not have the time. We can’t consider the shopkeeper as a person, or the garbage man (person?). Hell, the police officer doesn’t even want to be seen as a person, as that undermines his or her role as arm of the law (I’m not quite sure why I suddenly went all PC either).

Networking is, in that case, not as bad. At least you try to make a connection with a person, even if the reason for that connection is simply that it makes it more likely that you’ll help each other later, when help is needed. That basically raises another one of those ethical conundrums, should we consider the action or the thought behind the action?

No, I really can’t think about another fundamental philosophical concept today, so I’ll just leave it at where it is. Kantian ethics is nice and good and it can be considered deeply while we’re practicing our armchair philosophy, but can't really be lived.

Cultures

2008-05-14T13:43:00.001-07:00

I’m doing alright, thanks for asking. Things are moving along. I don’t yet have work, I don’t yet have my own house and I haven’t yet handed in application for university, but all three are progressing. I was offered one house (I turned it down, it wouldn’t have worked out), updated my CV, sent it out, put it online, got registered in Amsterdam, got a bank account and got in contact with the department in the university that I want to attend (they responded very positively when I told them my situation).

Is it enough? No, not really. I really should be doing a great deal more; but I’m having a bit of trouble getting back into the swing of things. Why? (and this an explanation, not an excuse) I think it’s partially down to getting settled back into ‘normal’ life and partially Culture Shock.

Seven years is a long time. I really have been Asianised in the time I was gone. It’s so strange, when I went out to Asia there were a lot of occasions where people tried to explain to me that how I was behaving was, I'm not exactly sure how to put it, out of sync. I argued at length with them about the why and the what, trying to find out why they thought their way was better. Now I come here and I’m on the other side of the equation. I suddenly understand what those people were telling me when I came out to Asia.

But I’m speaking too abstractly, let me give an example. When I first went out to Asia I was all about honesty, straightforwardness, telling it as it was and speaking my mind (yes, they’re pretty much all the same thing, but it looks much more impressive this way) I was, at that time, confronted with an attitude of lies, half-truths and cowardice.

Now I come back with an attitude of live and let live, avoiding judgement, leaving people in their values and avoiding negative emotions. I am now confronted with an attitude of rudeness, intrustiveness, asocial behavior and holier than thou attitudes.

Two different ways of viewing the same thing; neither of them wrong, but both of them together can cause a lot of problems. Ultimately, of course, this will make me even better at interacting with different nationalities, cultures and peoples. It will give me the ability to manage situations that others can't even understand. For now, though, I'm left with a culture shock and having to adapt once again.

The Basics of Evolution

2008-05-12T12:23:00.000-07:00

I met one of those people who doesn’t believe in evolution again. I was a bit stunned, as for me not believing in evolution is like not believing in gravity. I’ve kind of taken to not even trying to explain it anymore, because there are only two reasons why people don’t believe in evolution and those are religion and ignorance (often both at the same time). Arguing with the first is pointless (as they can’t accept evolution since it is at complete odds with their faith) while argueing with the second is a waste of time, as anybody that says they don’t believe when really they don’t understand is really somebody I’d be better off avoiding.

Still, as you might well know I have a tendency to break my own rules (after all, everything I believe will probably be proven wrong at some point in the future) so here I’ll again try to explain the basics of evolution.

First off, evolution is something that works over a very, very, very, very long time. It does not happen in one life time, it doesn’t happen in ten life times, in fact it only happens in thousands of life times. That’s the point. Only when you have that kind of time can evolution take place. The reason for this is that evolution is all about miniscule changes that you barely perceive per generation. It was not that one generation there were monkeys and the next there were people. We are very, very distant relatives of monkeys (for one thing, they didn’t stop evolving either).

Consider a photocopying machine. Every time you make a copy, it is a little bit different from the generation before; a slightly different angle, a slightly different colour, etc. We are copies of our parents (a little bit from one, a little bit from the other) with a very, very small chance of mutations (no copy is ever perfect). The amount of mutations is really, really tiny – so tiny that none of our own copying mechanism compare. Still, it happens. These mutations are generally harmful and the unfortunate child doesn’t replicate, or replicates a great deal less than its generation mates; but on occasion there’s a helpful mutation (a little faster, a little stronger, a little smarter, a little bigger, you get the idea).

These mutations make the fortunate receiver a little fitter (remember that expression, survival of the fittest?) and as a result they get more than their generation mates and therefore are able to have more children than their generation mates. Those children that also get this mutation (not all them will, a little from the mother, a little from the father) will also be a little better than their fellows. As a result the mutation spreads, at the expense of the original, un-mutated version of the species.

Of course, the advantage is very small and therefore can take many thousands of generations to spread through the whole population. That’s why there’s different versions of the same species – especially if the two versions of the species were separated.

Which brings us to the next part of evolution – a new species is formed when two originally same species populations are somehow split (mountains, distance, rivers, what ever) and evolution is allowed to work on both independently. First off, not the same mutations will happen (mutations are random) and secondly, their environment might be different, which would mean different mutations would deliver different advantages (for instance, seeing far would be much more useful on the savannah than in the forest). Slowly these mutations accumulate, until the two original groups have changed so much they can't even mate with each other anymore.

So why can’t we find some in between monkey man? Well, in all probability because we’re an incredibly aggressive species and have long since eliminated the competition. Monkeys have evolved into their own niche, where we don’t feel greatly challenged, but any species that tries to occupy the same niche as we occupy (ground dwelling omnivores with a preference for the savannahs) will have to compete with us - Winner takes all. Apparently it was us that won.

Also, if we would have come into existence slowly all over the world, then there would probably be more versions of intelligent, upright walking creatures; but we only came out of one place, Africa. So there was really only space for once species, us. Of course, there was another species much like us, the Cro Magnon – but they all seem to have kicked the bucket as well.

Another mistakes is to think that evolution has stopped. It hasn’t. We are not the peak of evolution, we are not the end result that evolution was aiming for. All species that exist on this world today are equally as evolved as we are. Evolution has spent just as much time on them as it has on us. They just have different tools than us.

And don’t think that we’ve got the best tools, either. There might be a lot of us, but ultimately it isn’t about how many are around now, but about who sticks around the longest. We’ve been around for a very short time and at the rate we’re going, we won’t be around much longer. In fact, if you really want to know what is possibly the most ‘advanced’ on the planet (as in, it would survive the best what ever happens and is therefore the fittest) it would be the humble (and hated) cockroach.

Now I can tell you more, but I’ve already well overshot my normal length. Instead I advise you to read Richard Dawkins’ book ‘The Selfish Gene’ and if you’ve read that, that and still aren’t convinced by evolution, then we’ll talk.

PS: Please don’t let the fact that Richard Dawkins wrote the book ‘The God Delusion’ influence your decision to read ‘The Selfish Gene’. First off all, that book was written now and the Selfish Gene nearly twenty years ago; secondly it’s the message that matters, not the messenger.

PPS: 'The Selfish Gene' is possibly one of the best written books I've ever read, in case you're worried about that. I thoroughly enjoyed it and it really taught me a great deal. If I could write like Richard Dawkins, I'd be happy as a writer.

People programming

2008-05-10T03:25:00.001-07:00

I’m currently reading the book ‘Critical Mass’ by Philip Ball (yes, the philosophical musing is back. And you thought it had gone for good!) which is all about how physics can be applied to human society. Brilliant idea and very well written – though I do put that up with a warning, the first 100 pages or so are all about statistics which many people might find a bit of a drag.

Today I’m going to talk about one element of what he’s spoken about so far. A group of scientists, under the direction of Helbing and Molnár, created a very simple computer program in which simple simulations (called peploids by the author) follow a set of simple rules. These are such rules as ‘don’t get too close to other people’ and ‘move from A to B’ (or B to C and so forth) then these peploids are released in an environment and watched.

The interesting thing is that despite the fact that these things have a great deal fewer ideas running through their simple little programming, the way they move through their environment is very similar to how we ourselves move. For example, if a simulation is made of a corridor with a doorway, the peploids seem to follow a similar burst like pattern as we ourselves do (first a group from this side, then a group from the other side).

This set me thinking about how complex our personal movement actually is. We might think we apply a great deal of consideration and ethical reasoning (letting other people go first, not pushing, etc.) to how we move around, but if such a simple simulation can mimic us so exactly, then do we really do all that we believe we do?

In other words, this helped me once again call into question our supposed sophistication. We believe we’re terribly sophisticated (we have to, as we need to sustain our exaggerated self importance) but are we really? Isn’t it perfectly believable that some of our genetic ‘programming’ is in fact incredibly simple, for the obvious reason that there just never was any need for it to become more complex? We follow this programming blindly and it serves us perfectly well, yet in our minds we’re tempted to add all this non-existent complexity so as to maintain the illusion of our own supposed superiority.

Where else can we see this sort of behaviour? I’m actually asking that, because I haven’t given that part a great deal of thought yet. It might be seriously worth giving some thought, though; as finding other areas were we operate far simpler than we believe would possibly offer some immense opportunities. What kind of opportunities? Well, obviously in terms of sales it would be very interesting. By designing an environment to take advantage of people’s inherent programming we could increase sales and profit. It might also be very interesting in terms of politics and social cohesion (though, obviously, that would be something for the government to look at – I very much doubt they’re going to listen to me.)

And what about the ethics? Some people might object that it is unethical to use people’s inherent programming to ‘manipulate’ them into behaving contrary to what they might naturally be inclined to do. Obviously, I don’t agree. It is a person’s responsibility to be as well informed as possible and avoid allowing others to have an advantage of them by ways of their physiology and psychology. If they let themselves be manipulated, then I believe responsibility lies largely with them. A good analogy would be the law: Ignorance of the Law does not protect you from the law. Ignorance of your inner workings does not mean others shouldn’t use it against you. It is your job to know your own mind; conscious and unconscious.

Face 2 Face

2008-05-08T15:55:00.000-07:00

I just found out about this project that's going on in Israel and Palestine. It's caled 'Face 2 Face'and it's a sequence of pictures put up on walls showing Palistinians and Isrealies pulling funny faces. Their idea is that humour will help the two sides find peace.

Not only is it a good idea, but the pictures are also beautiful. Check it out.

What Motivates Me?

2008-05-08T08:25:00.000-07:00

The last few weeks have been spent thinking deeply about what motivates me for the obvious reason that I needed to tell the people at the university exactly that and if I have to tell them, well then obviously I have to know.

The problem is that I’m pretty sure that the answer I came up with, self improvement, will not go down too well with the board; for the simple reason that they’ve probably heard it a hundred times before and didn’t believe it the first time they heard it, either.

Which is bloody annoying, because in my case I actually realy do mean it. My life ambition has become self-improvement, with the underlying ambition of being recognised for my accomplishments. Of course, that you really, totaly and absolutely can’t write in your letter of motivation. It’s a bit like them asking ‘why do you want to work for our company?’ and you answering ‘because I want money, your money specifically.’ I can think of worse things to say (e.g. I want to get close to you so that I can sleep with your daughter, wife and/or dead grandmother) but not many.

So why does it matter that I don’t want to tell them something they’ve heard a hundred times before? Isn’t it a good idea to go with the tried and proven? Well, no. I can’t play it safe as I don’t actually qualify for their study. If I play it safe they’ll pick somjebody else who played it safe who does actually qualify.

So I have to hit them with a whopper of a letter that makes them think, ‘hey, maybe we should invite this guy in for a talk’. Once I’ve accomplished that, I’ll be that step closer. From there it will be just a matter of talking my way inside (yes, just. It might not be just, but I’d rather worry about one thing at a time (well, twenty things, I’m also worried about not having a job, not having a bank account, not having a house, not being registered in Holland, not having a great deal of money and what I’m eating for dinner; but that’s not what I’m writing about in this post – stop distracting me!))

And now you’re expecting me to tell you how I’m going to do that. I would tell you, but unfortunately I don’t know yet. I wrote one recomendation letter, but it was turned down by two ‘editors’ so I’ve been forced to do it again. Once I’ve got a result, I’ll be sure to share it with you all (once it’s got me inside, that is).

Good weather, good mood

2008-05-04T04:47:00.000-07:00

I’ve moved house. Originally I was staying at my mother’s friend’s house (with my mother, who was here for a few days; it was very nice) now I’m staying with my sister. Here too I can’t stay too long and after that I’ve only got one willing family member left (my aunt). I better hurry up with finding myself a place to stay.

The weather is beautiful and this is a good thing. For the rest, things could be progressing a little faster but I’m relatively positive about my future. Amsterdam is a fantastic city, with friendly people who are always willing to have a chat and those chats will very frequently lead to good advice, help or at least a better mood.

There’s one thing that’s a bit of a drag. A few weeks ago I spoke about somebody that was occupying a great deal of my thinking time. I’ve since met her in Rotterdam (where she lives) and we’ve fallen for each other even more. That is, of course, a good thing. Her living in Rotterdam, on the other hand, is a bad thing. So close, yet still too far!

I’m sure later on it will be easier to live apart, but right when you just start a relationship having to be apart isn’t very much fun at all. Yes, it’s a lot easier to get my work done, but no I don’t really want to be doing my work. I just want to go to Rotterdam!

Can’t have everything. Actually, can’t have a lot of things. I’ve got somebody that I care about and she cares about me; that really should be enough.

Of course, nothing is ever enough. That’s the nature of man.

I imagine some of you are still a bit stunned about the word ‘relationship’ that suddenly just popped into my text above. Even more so, i imagine, for my regular readers seeing as only a few weeks ago I wrote an entry about how I wasn’t in anyway ready.

I wasn’t.

Unfortunately matters of the heart don’t let your head decide them (I’ve discussed that often enough already). No, you still can’t trust emotions, yes I’m still of the opinion that they are geared towards a life style that is completely different from ours, but damn it certainly feels good to feel good.
That is, of course, why we get into so much trouble with our emotions. That sounds rather pesimistic, doesn’t it? And that on such a beautiful day when I’m so positive.

Happy-go-lucky is going to be my motto for the next few weeks. As that’s most certainly the best way to get what you want. I need people to help me and people most certainly help those people more whose energy they like. Stay positive and everything will work itself out.

Yes, I’ve been to the gym two times in the last two days. Can you tell?

Bumpy

2008-05-02T08:12:00.001-07:00

And then things start going wrong. They have to, of course. Things always go wrong when you just arrive in a new place. Yet it still remains frustrating when it happens. This one’s an interesting one.

I can’t get a bank account until I have a house where I’m registered; I can’t get a phone until I have a bank account and it’s rather hard to get a home (or a job) without a place for people to call. I can’t register a new phone on my mother’s or my sister’s account, because neither of them have bank cards (weird, but true) and I can’t get a pre-paid because me phone is completely flat and my charger is lying in Germany.

Hmmm…

Of course my mother didn’t tell me she didn’t have a Dutch bank card. I assumed she had one and she assumed that because we’re all part of the EU a German card would do. Both reasonable assumptions, but both wrong. We spent an hour and a half deciding on what deal would suit me best, before we discovered the error of our ways. The lady in the shop tried to do it with the German card, but alas, no bananas.

I also discovered that the course I want to get into in university requires a GPA 0.3 higher than I had first thought, which puts me firmly out of reach. Of course, the that doesn’t mean I can’t attend (seeing as it’s seven years ago that I did attend, so hopefully there’s some scope for extenuating circumstances), but that didn’t help terribly much either.

My mood, as you might suspect, is a bit down once again. Hopefully that will all resolve itself this evening as one thing I did discover is an affordable gym (I’ve really noticed I crash damned hard if I don’t go to the gym regularly anymore – which basically means I’m now addicted to exercise. Well, I guess there are worse things to be addicted to).

Fight the dip is what I keep telling myself. There’s no time for self-pity or depression now. I have no job, nor much else to fall back on. Keep on going and find solutions. After all, all the problems so far are not that difficult to solve.

I’m just worried that with so many problems already looming, what more is going to come along? These are all problems that I could see coming and there’s always at least one major problem that you don’t see coming. What, I wonder, will that be? I guess we’ll see.

Fight the dip – find the strength. Hopefully if I can just keep telling myself that, the next time I look up I’ll be out the other end.

Somehow I doubt it.

Queens Day

2008-04-30T15:10:00.001-07:00

Queens day, or ‘Koninginnendag’ in Dutch, has to be one of the best festivals to be found around the world; though, admittedly, a bit of nationalistic pride might play a factor in that. Anyways, I got to celebrate it once again and had a blast. The city of Amsterdam flooded with an extra 500,000 people (which isn’t bad, considering that the city has only just over a million people itself). That isn’t as many as the last time I was here, eight years ago, but then it didn’t go half as wrong this time as it did that time.

The last time I was here the MA (military police) got pulled out because the trains were no longer driving and the people were pissed and charged the stations. Of course at that time there were only fifty cops to stop about 50,000 protesters – so they pulled out the tear gas. I somehow got stuck in the middle of that (and tear gas really sucks, I can tell you that!). No, I didn’t get out of the city that night, instead I had to crash at a friendly professor’s house. Nice guy, by the way.

This time around nothing like that happened – though admittedly it did rain a bit – and instead we just walked around, watched thousands of people (most of them drunk, stoned, off their heads or all three) drank beers, walked, met friends, met family and generally had a great time (except for the bit where I was scared my fingers were getting frost bite.)

Queens day is brilliant, as it’s basically is a free festival where the best Dutch musicians (and a few foreign ones) play everywhere around the city. There’s DJs, Dutch folk singers, internationally renown (Dutch) bands and even the occasional foreign talent (yes, even outside of Holland the Dutch Queens day is semi-famous).

And you know what? Quite a number of people started speaking to me in English asking if I was a tourist. At least they asked – that means they weren’t quite certain if I was Dutch or not. It could have been worse, but the general take on my nationality seems to be Italian or Spanish. I don’t have any Italian or Spanish in me and, unless I need some transplant, I hope never to have any either (straight, I’m sorry).

And that was Queens day. Brilliant. Already looking forward to the next one. Hopefully some of you can join me for that one. You’re more than welcome to!

What to do

2008-04-26T10:27:00.000-07:00

So of course, you’re all expecting me to tell you what I think of Holland. Well, tough. I’m going to wait a little bit longer and make up my mind good and proper. There are two reasons for this: One, I don’t feel it’s fair to make a judgement yet, considering I’m in a city where I haven’t been before and Two: I don’t feel like talking about it yet.

So instead I’m going to talk about my poetry and what I’m trying to do with it. Over the last week and a bit I’ve edited through about ten of my poems. I like them rather a lot. Most people think I’m terribly odd and move away from me a little bit after reading one. Fortunately, not everybody; a sculpture friend of mine was so inspired by one of the poems I sent him that he made a sculpture and entered it into a gallery. Interestingly enough, it has my name on it and I haven’t even seen it yet. Odd. But my name will be in the paper.

Now I’m trying to figure out what to do next with my stuff. It’s damned unfortunate that there is no way to make money from just poetry. It would be a great deal less unfortunate it I didn’t need money right now (then I could just do it for fun), but since that is my most pressing concern, I really shouldn’t be spending as much time as I am working on it. Still, I can’t help myself, I’m currently driven in that direction and where my drive goes, I have to follow.

So what that means is that I have to figure out some way to potentially actually make some money out of my weird as poetry. I’ve thought about publishing a collection, but that really isn’t going to go somewhere. The answer, I believe, is making a compilation that is more than just my weird ass poetry. I need to create something that is poetry and more.

So I want to see if I can find artists that want to help me create something more than just poetry. Maybe a coffee table book of imagery associated with my poetry - or a short, very abstract film that is based upon my poetry.

Yes, you’re right; I don’t really have an idea yet. I do have a course of action planned out, however. I’m going to immerse myself in other people’s are (i.e. visit modern art museums, watch plays, read books, etc.) and see what ideas they’ve come up with and, when I chance upon a good one, steal it!

That would be the easy route, the slightly harder (and far more likely) route will be that I will find a number of ideas and fuse them together into something; hopefully something new.

Here’s one out to all of you that actually read this blog: If you know anybody that’s interesting in working together on something with me, I’d be very happy if you could alert me. I think the more artists I can find to work with, the more likely something good will actually come out of what I’m doing.

I need to give something back and the best thing I can give back is my thoughts.

Last Thoughts

2008-04-23T03:10:00.001-07:00

If everything goes according to plan (and hopefully it should) I’ll be hitting Holland tomorrow evening. So, here go my last thoughts for my seven year sabbatical from my country of origin.

The first question: Am I ready to go back?

Yes. I think it will be good for me to see the country that helped form me – as well as trying to relearn the language. Now that I’ve been hanging out with Dutch people for nearly two weeks continuously I’ve started thinking in Dutch again. The annoying thing is, thinking in Dutch is a lot harder than thinking in English and I actually feel stupid. There’s only two solutions for that. One: Make certain I don’t speak any Dutch, so that I think in English. Two: Improve my Dutch. I think I’ll bite the bullet and go for option two.

Second Question: Was it a good idea to go away?

Absolutely! It was a brilliant seven years and I think all in all I’ve grown immensely over these years. I feel comfortable in my own skin, happy with whom I am and pleased with my abilities. I think that my seven years of travelling has given me a lifetime of experience that I would otherwise not have. I understand foreign values, appreciate the differences in cultures and appreciate what different places have to offer. What is more, I’ve realised that what I’ve been looking for can be found nearly everywhere, as long as I look in the right places.

Third Question: Will I stay in Holland?

I doubt it. I might be able to find what I’m looking for where ever I am, but that doesn’t mean I’m done looking at new things. This world is amazing and, as the famous quote goes: the world’s a book and if you don’t travel, you only get to see one page (that’s not an exact quote, mind you). The best way to learn is to move outside your comfort zone and the easiest way (though hardly the only way) to move out of you comfort zone is to leave the place you’re in.

Fourth Question: What do you hope to get out of Holland?

I have given up completely on trying to get something from somewhere. I went to India with absolutely no idea of what I was going to get and as a result I got more than I ever imagined. One of the principles that I was introduced to in the Luck Factor (brilliant book) was that one of the most basic principles to luck is being open to it. The more focused you are, the less chance you give the world to give you new opportunities, so I refuse to say what I’m going to get; instead I’m just going to take what’s given.

This time about Portugal itself

2008-04-21T06:31:00.000-07:00

So, apparently I didn’t answer the more important questions about Portugal, forget about me, what about the country? Fair enough. I spend far too much time thinking, writing and talking about myself anyway. People no doubt think I’m self-obsessed (which wouldn’t be very far from the truth, but fortunately we’re all self obsessed!)

I actually quite like Portugal. It’s a bit cheaper than the rest of Europe, a bit more backwards and a lot sunnier (I’m told. It’s been raining pretty steadily the last week). I like the nice white houses that you find everywhere – and the people are really nice. The only bad thing being that though they are nice they aren’t very pretty. The men are short and the women are, well, homely. I’ve been told it’s different in Lisbon; but then I’m not in Lisbon so I really can’t tell you that.

Last night we went out for a beer somewhere. Played pool against my brother in law, which he won – which puts us one-one on games with me having killed him in Jenga, that means chess will be the deciding game (yes, we really have nothing to do). Unfortunately the night life left something to be desired (can you say Neon?). I think that shouldn’t be blamed on the Portuguese, however, but on the British.

This has to be said – and I’m sorry if I offend any Brits with this – but when the British are uncouth they really are pond scum; white, pasty, loud, topless drunkards that prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that budget airliners are a really bad idea. Some people shouldn’t travel and most of them are British.

So I really should go explore Lisbon and see what I think of life there. Maybe work there for a bit during the summer months. I imagine working in Holliday resorts will make me more money than sticking around in Holland. Of course, there’s a few reasons why I might want to stick around in Holland (well, really one reason), so we’ll have to wait and see.

So, should you come to Portugal? Yes, I think you should. It seems nice, though I’d like to explore it properly with some friends rather than the family, to get a better idea. So, so far the verdict is still out, but it looks like all but one of the 12 has been convinced. Of course, we’ve all seen ‘twelve angry men’ so we all know what one opposing jury member can do, but hey, I’m blabbering again (maybe I shouldn’t write blog entries right after I’ve finished at the gym. I think the testosterone interferes with my thought process).

Baby toys

2008-04-19T09:14:00.000-07:00

I really don’t have anything out of the ordinary to talk about today (or rather, I’ve already spent enough words on the things I want to talk about and I’m not really reading anything interesting.) so I’m going to do what I always do when that’s the case: Blabber.

It’s just a matter of letting the words roll out and hope something at least mildly interesting rolls out along the way (a million monkeys with a millions typewriters).

This is probably nothing new to all of you out there, but I think I might have become terribly vain. (yes, you’re allowed to kick me if you already knew this. You can either virtually kick me in the comments, or keep it till you see me again; that’s up to you). I’ve turned into a gym junky (monkey?) and do care about how I look. No, I haven’t yet turned into one of those creatures who has to look into every shiny surface – but my looks have certainly become important to me.

Or maybe it’s not that I’ve turned vain, but I just didn’t care about it /at all/ previously. Which ever is the case, I’ve certainly started to care about it a great deal more than in years of yore. Is that a good thing?

Well, I suspect that ultimately you can make a much better impression if you look better and if you’re at least a little bit vain, then you’re going to care about whether you look better, but that’s a trade off with how much time you actually spend on looking good. So far it’s basically not that much more than going to the gym and that (with travel time) takes about 10 hours a week – but that fortunately has extra benefits.

Maybe I’m not vain but just arrogant? Am I arrogant or just self confident? (I warned you I really didn’t have anything to talk about – add to that that I’ve just finished at the gym and therefore drugged up on endorphins and you get a pretty good idea why I’m rattling on like a oil barrel full of angry cats). The difference between self-confidence and arrogance is that arrogant people have no basis to feel the way they do, while the self-confident do. So do I have a basis?

I think I do, but then I assume that most arrogant people do as well. Maybe the difference between self-confidence and arrogance is just a matter of perspective? It always makes me wonder how I’m perceived.

That reminds me: Wouldn’t it be great if after you leave a place you could get the honest opinion of the people that knew you there? Like a little book where people get to say what they really feel.

That would have been the perfect farewell present for Palolem for me. Till this day I wonder if people were only nice to me to my face or were also nice to me when I had my back turned.

Unfortunately nobody made a book like that for me and I guess they never will. In the end your view of how others see you will always be affected by the subjectivity of your own view.

Hopefully next post I’ll actually have something to talk about.

Portugal

2008-04-18T04:15:00.001-07:00

I’m in Portugal, with my family and I’m broke. It’s quite depressing, to be honest about it. It makes me feel like a child again. I can’t pay for my own food, I can’t pay for transportation, I can’t go away on my own to have a beer and I can’t go and meet people. All of that costs money and I’ve got about 7 US left in my pocket.

I’m very tempted to start smoking again. Oh yeah, I might not have mentioned that. I haven’t smoked a cigarette since I’ve left India. Till now it hasn’t been too much of a problem, but now I’ve got no money and I’m surrounded by smokers again (my sister and her boyfriend both smoke) and my mettle is being tested. Please don’t put any comments on here about that I shouldn’t smoke. I know I shouldn’t smoke, it isn’t a matter of what I should and shouldn’t do. It’s a matter of what’s stronger: willpower or desire.

I’m starting to regret coming to Portugal. I know it’s good for me to be here with my family, but I feel I’m losing time that I should be investing in getting my life together. It’s like I’m taking a week long holiday after an eight month break. It’s overkill.

Life is calling me and it’s incredibly frustrating not being able to answer. A ringing phone in a locked room.

As promised, I have started working on my poetry. At least something good is coming out of this time. I’ve already edited through about four or five of my poems in the last two days. I’m not yet sure if I’m going to put them up here yet. Hopefully I’ll actually be publishing them in some form or another. It would be nice if I finally managed to get something published in some way. It’s unfortunate that poetry can’t make you any money.

It still strikes me as strange that different types of art get paid so differently. You’re a successful musician, so you get paid billions. You’re a successful poet, so how are you going to pay your electricity bill? It is, of course, the matter of mass appeal and poetry is not massively appealing.

So I’m going to have to find a job and if I want to find a job, I better get my head (and my mood) up. I know myself and I can’t get anything done with people when I’m the way I am. So I guess now I know what I’ve got to do for the next five days, namely get myself in a more positive mood so that I can hit the ground running when I hit Holland. That and somehow get together enough money to survive to my first pay check.

I knew the next few months were going to be difficult. I guess I just wasn’t expecting to have a great deal of time to sit around and think about it.

Next time I go on holiday with my family, I’m going to make sure that I have enough time to get away and do my own thing (keep myself busy). If I don’t have that, I’m not going to come.

Live and learn. Hell, that seems to be my life’s refrain.

They’ve gone too far!

2008-04-15T03:28:00.000-07:00

Damn it! That’s now the second time that they’ve searched my bag and my person, the second time that I’ve had to take off my bloody shoes and the second time I’ve got really annoyed with the security people at the airport.

What are they afraid of? ‘Terrorist strikes’ I hear you cry, but no, that’s not really what they’re afraid of. After all, the chance that a terrorist strike actually occurs is very, very small. I wouldn’t be surprised that the chance that you die in a terrorist strike every time you fly is about the same as your chance that you die from a lightning strike, every time you experience a storm. I don’t actually have the figures on that, but it can be worked out pretty easily.

I mean, let’s look at the world in the last ten years; from 1997 to 2007 (before these ridiculous new safety measures) and let’s look at the number of airplanes that were actually destroyed by terrorist strikes. I don’t know the actual number (and I don’t have internet access) but let’s be very liberal and say they managed to destroy and/ or nearly destroy 30 planes in the last 10 years. Let’s also assume that every plane was fully Boeing 747 and was fully loaded (again, being very liberal on my part); that’s about 500 people. So that’s a grand total of 15,000 people that did or could have died. Sounds like a lot, right?

Well, now let’s do the other side of the calculation. Let’s say there are 2000 flights a day (a very conservative number, considering that Frankfurt airport itself probably already operates 500 a day). Let’s be nice and say they’re only half-full; so that’s 250 people per flight. That means that everyday 500,000 people travel. That means that per year (365 days, ignoring leap years) a 182.5 million journeys are made. Multiply that by ten years and you get nearly two billion people travelling.

So what is your chance of dying if you flew in those ten years? 0.008% times the number of times you’ve flown. So, in my case, I think I flew about 20 times in that time, which is quite a lot, so the chance that I would have died in a terrorist strike would have been 0.16% chance. And that’s using numbers madly skewed in favour of the strikes. The word ‘negligible’ jumps to mind.

So why do they do it? Quite simply because of the PR backlash if they don’t do it and a plane goes down. You see, people don’t get statistics. They don’t make these types of calculations, they never had to. They hear of one successful terrorist strike in five years and automatically assume the risk is great (the amount of attention paid to a way of dying is the assumed chance of it happening X the perceived horror of dying in that way).

So I have to suffer through half an hour of indignities every single damned time I fly because of the potential PR backlash that will be directed at airports if they don’t implement these ridiculous safety measures, because people are statistical morons! The airports know the safety measures aren’t essential and probably don’t reduce the chance of a terrorist strikes, but they have to do it because otherwise the unwashed masses will have their heads if something does go wrong (and probably even if it doesn’t).

So there we go, the proletariat have once again shafted everybody up the heiny by leaping before they look. Thank you everybody, for once again ruining my mood.

Well, at least I got a blog post out of it.

10 years from now

2008-04-13T07:17:00.000-07:00

I just wrote my future self a letter again. I try to do that every year around my birthday. The idea is that I write a letter every year and I start opening them then years from now, one at time. It means an investment of a few hours once a year, for a very long delayed reward that should be well worth it.

That’s the idea, but I’ve discovered today (and probably last year as well, if I go look back through my blog) that I get an almost immediate reward from it. First off all, of course, I get to pause and reflect. That, in and of itself, isn’t that special though (nearly every third entry on this blog requires that I pause and reflect. Hell, with the amount of pausing and reflecting I’m doing I can’t help but wonder how I get anything done!)

The thing that got me going today (and to a less extent last year) was this thought: is the future me really me? It’s not a new thought. It’s been had by people for years, centuries, possibly even millennia; but right now the thought is mine and it goes something like this.

The way we establish that you are you and I am I (is that the right grammar? Bradley, tell me if that’s the right grammar!) is through an analysis of dimensions (or, in plain English, by seeing if we occupy the same spot or not). You might say that we establish it by our history and our memories, but that’s not true. If I happen to have two histories stored in my brain I would still think of myself as the same person; just a very, very confused person who’s somehow picked up an extra set of memories. What is more, we can’t really trust memory; so, in other words, it’s a bad idea to establish yourself as in independent person from the bum rolling in his own faeces on the corner by comparing memory, it’s a much better idea to just think ‘he’s on the corner, I’m here reading this wierdo’s blog, therefore we are not the same person’ (you could of course check if smelled of faeces, but that’s cheating).

Time is, of course, a dimension.

So doesn’t this therefore mean that you are not the same person that you will be tomorrow? Or, if we imagine a day as a very small increment in distance (a tenth of a millimetre?) then you over the next few days, weeks or months might just be a blurring of the same person (as if you and the bum almost occupied the same space), but the you ten years from now must most certainly be a different person, right? Hell, you’d be 36.5 centimetres apart! True, only people close to you get to be that close (unless you’re on a Japanese commuter train) but you’d still be fundamentally different.

So am I writing to myself when I write to myself ten years in the future? Well, maybe I am; because there’s another thought that just occurred to me. There is an actual physical gap between you and that bum. In case of time you occupy the point now and the point 10 years from now, but also every single point in between those two yous. It’s as if you’ve been stretched over the entire 36.5 centimetres and if we did that to you, though it would hurt, we would still see all of that as being a (miss formed) you.

Is your head hurting yet? Don’t worry, you’ll probably have forgotten all of this by tomorrow. That is, if that’s still you.

First Impressions (economic)

2008-04-11T10:13:00.000-07:00

So I’ve got back into Europe a couple of days ago and I’ve had a look around. I’ve formed an opinion, of course (me without an opinion is like a dog without legs, pretty damned rare and pretty damned odd when it does happen!) but I’ll immediately admit that so far I’m forming my opinion based on a place of little dotted villages, which is probably about ten years behind the rest of Germany (which, in turn, is about ten years behind the rest of Europe, which in turn is about ten years behind the rest of the world. So, basically, I’ve gone back in time thirty years. That feels about right.)

First, I’m going to talk about the economic situation, my next post will be about other things. So here goes: How the hell does Europe ever expect to survive the 21st century? They’re stuck in a mindset that is (quite accurately) 30 years out dated. The shops close at six, (12 on a Saturday, don’t open on a Sunday) they won’t let you recycle glass at certain times (as if they’re doing you service by letting you recycle glass) everybody goes for a three hour lunch and everywhere is understaffed because the businesses can’t afford the wages that the unions demand.

Prices are skyrocketing (my mother went for dinner at a normal restaurant with two other people and ended up paying over 200 US for a meal, two cocktails and a glass of wine) even as the Euro continues to rise. How do they ever expect the tourists to continue coming if those tourists can go on five holidays elsewhere for one holiday here?

The Europeans are complacent, decadent and arrogant. They believe they’ve got all the answers and they feel that the rest of the world should really change to suit their agenda. Socialism, they believe, is the answer. Socialism, I believe, is the way to make certain that any economic growth doesn’t ever trickle through to the common man. How’s that? Well, I’m much less likely to hire somebody during an economic upturn when I can’t fire them during an economic downturn, due to the unions. So, even when the economy is doing well, businesses still don’t hire.

What is more, socialism also guarantees minimum wage, which guarantees that poor people have to pay more for the stuff they really need (minimum wage pushes up the prices of goods at the bottom of the economy much more than at the top of economy, as basic necessities, like food, gas, power and water, employ way more minimum wage people).

But then, the common man doesn’t really get economics, do they? They believe that tariffs on foreign goods protects their businesses, while in truth all it does is push up prices for consumers in the tariff protected area (since the tariffs push up the prices of foreign bought products, the consumer ends up having to pay more for those products). The problem is that businesses work together to protect their interests, while consumers are rarely motivated en masse to protect theirs, so businesses get away with it.

All the shit I had already suspected from a distance has proven to be true up close. I seriously hope that Holland turns out to be a bit better, because so far I’m not terribly impressed. Sure, they’ve got culture, sure they’ve got style; but that won’t matter when their economy crashes and burns because they’ve lost all their ability to compete with the rest of the world. But then, they won’t crash and burn, will they? They’ll just use some underhand tactic make other places crash and burn. That’s usually what the first world does.

Thoughts During Nothing

2008-04-10T02:09:00.000-07:00

I arrived in Frankfurt last night, after my entire grueling journey, and now I’m already bored. Not too surprising, seeing as my parents live – as the Germans call it – Am Arsh der Welt; which translates to ‘the ass of the world’. No, that’s not the real name, but it sure fits the place. It’s a little, tiny village somewhere a kilometer or more outside Frankfurt (which is a boring as fuck city) where there is nothing to do and nowhere to go.

Actually, that isn’t really the problem. Normally that wouldn’t bother me one bit. It would be great to go nowhere and do nothing, except for my university application of course, but right now I’ve got other things on my mind: Woman. Yes, in the singular; for once.

One girl keeps constantly slipping back into my conscious, no matter what I’m doing or where I’m going. One name constantly gets whispered through my mind, stopping me in my tracks. That’s taking all the potential enjoyment out of the situation and making days that could blissfully slip by drag like fingernails along a two-week chalk board.

It’s been going on for a bit over a week now – and it’s quite frustrating. I’m not used to this. It hasn’t happened in a long time. My last relationship was different. That was a more gradual escalation until I, at one point, realised I was in love. That worked beautifully, by the way. It resulted in an amazing relationship that lasted for four years. This is different; this is a great deal more like torture.

I shouldn’t use the word love, to be honest about it; I think ‘infatuation’ is far more suitable word, especially since I haven’t known the girl for very long at all. As a matter of fact, we’ve only physically hung out for a little over two days. Yes, that’s right, two days and no I am not 14 years old, but thank you for asking.

For the last seven months so many people I met ended up harbouring feelings for me. I was flabbergasted (and secretly quite pleased with myself, admittedly), as I didn’t get the entire falling for somebody, thing. It hadn’t happened, that way, to me since the last year of uni. Now that it happened to me just before I buggered off from India, I realise that I might have been quite cruel to those people. A bit of poetic justice, anybody? A side helping of irony, perhaps?

Hold on, before you think that she doesn’t return any feelings. She does. She’s already admitted that she can’t get me out of her head, either. You’d think that would be enough for me. Of course it isn’t. Emotions have the annoying habit of not giving a shit about what your intellect tells them (I’ve talked about that often enough, up here). We’ve spoken every day since we’ve parted ways.

But then that fear starts to play through my mind ‘what if it was just a holiday thing for her, what if she’s starting to forget?’ And you’re all thinking ‘ah, but that won’t happen!’ but it does, you see. It’s happened to me a half a dozen times alone this trip. You meet somebody, you get along real well, you think there might be something happening there and three days after they’re gone (or even before) you’ve already moved on.

This time it might not have happened to me, but that in no way assures me that it isn’t happening with her; that she isn’t feeling as strongly now as originally, but doesn’t have the heart to tell me. Thoughts like these are continuously playing through my mind.

So, as you can see, sitting around here doing nothing is an almost sublime form of Chinese water torture. Psychologists have found that love (or infatuation) is actually a physical addiction and that being separated from the person of your affection can actually cause physical pain. I know exactly what they mean.

AAAAAAHRG!!!!!!

2008-04-08T10:13:00.000-07:00

I normally make it a rule not to post twice a day, but I can’t help it today; I have to vent.

Let me start at the beginning.

It all started in December. I was here in Bangalore, under the impression that I could get everything done. That included doing the supposed impossible, namely extending an unextendable visa (many a traveller have been amazed at my gal that I though I could get away with that, for that matter even a lot of long-stayers were shocked). The reason I thought I could do it was because somebody here said they could do it. You know the ones, the ‘don’t worry, it’s no problem’ kind. I should have known right there that it wouldn’t be that easy. There almost as bad as the one’s that say ‘trust me’ and you immediately know you shouldn’t.

I should have flown to Sri Lanka and got a normal extension, but that’s 20/20 hindsight, isn’t it? At the time it seemed like a great idea, what with my short film taking up most of my time and my over inflated ego. So I agreed to it. It cost me a fair bundle; but hey, it should have been brilliant. More time in India and my problems sorted.

They weren’t, of course. The time I would have lost in Sri Lanka, sitting on a beach and sipping cocktails, I instead lost sitting in Indian bureaucracies, watching inefficiency in action. I only finally got my exit permit sorted at five o’clock this afternoon; that’s right, after my gruelling bus journey where I slept on a bunch of bags (see the last entry), I spent a full day in another office (when it was only supposed to take 30 minutes).

Then, when they finally okayed my exit permit I read over me ticket and made a shocking realisation. If you use somebody else’s credit card to buy a ticket, you need a copy of an ID and the credit card, otherwise they can turn you down and refuse you entry to the plane. I was in Bangalore, the person who’s credit card I had used was in Goa, (yes, I’m that broke that I need to borrow money from somebody else to get home; any change for the get me home safely fund? No, I’m not really that broke, I just didn't have enough cash in one place to pay for a ticket.)

Desperately I tried to call my friends down in Goa, but the normally always reachable were suddenly completely out of reach. I nearly lost it. I think it takes quite a bit for me to nearly lose it, but little sleep, stifling heat and bureaucrats more interested in the interior of their nose than in the document you’re just getting them to sign will make any sane man snap and I never claimed to be sane to begin with.

So, since four this afternoon I’ve been texting like mad, calling everybody I still knew on the beach and just generally tearing my hair out (which is a great deal easier when it’s nice and long, much more to grab). When I finally reached somebody, she wasn’t even in Goa anymore, she’d moved on to Hampy (it’s supposed to be very pretty, but that wasn’t really what interested me at that moment in time).

Luckily, she did get in touch with people down on the beach and luckily they finally managed to get me a soft copy of the needed documents; so yes, I can leave. I desperately want to as well. Every traveller goes through intense India hating periods. Unfortunately, mine came right at the end, just as I was trying to leave. Will it colour my perceptions of my time in India? Probably not. Will I be coming back to India anywhere soon? Probably not.

There, vent done. You can go back to your normal lives now.

Tick Tock

2008-04-08T05:54:00.000-07:00

If everything goes well I’ll be flying to Frankfurt tomorrow morning. I’ve got a ticket and I’ve been told my exit permit is lying here in Bangalore waiting for me. Yes, that’s right, I’m back in Bangalore. Yesterday I left Goa again (for the second time) and took the night bus down to Bangalore. I was looking forward to a nice night’s sleep; but unfortunately I hadn’t realised booking a bus ticket last minute might mean there are no bus tickets.

I told them I was desperate, that it was essential that I get down to Bangalore. They offered me a seat next to the bus driver, without a bed, for nearly twice the price. I had no choice; I had to take it. I got crammed into the bus driver’s carriage, along with about eight other Indian guys and not much else.

In the end I manage to fall asleep on top of some bags, with my legs folded up under me. Thank providence that I’m such a good sleeper, because at least that way I got to pass out for most of the trip from hell. My gyming is having unexpected side-benefits. Though I was sore from the unusual bodily position, I walked the kinks out pretty quickly once I’d got off the bus.

When I first reached Goa again I was worried whether I had made the right decision. I think, now that I’ve left it again, I have. For a small week four of us occupied my house and just enjoyed each other’s company; hanging out, cooking, chatting, drinking and just generally having a great week.

I also might have met somebody; but I won’t tell you anymore about that until I’ve figured it out myself (yes, I realise that those are exactly the types of things you can’t figure out, but that has never stopped me from trying before!). Her I wouldn’t have met if I wouldn’t have gone back, so that is most certainly a bonus to my bonus round.

I am very much ready to go, now. Play time is over. Reality beckons with a crooked finger.

I’ve decided that when I go to Portugal with my family I’m going to edit my weird ass poetry (I should probably think up a better name). I have about twenty of them now. I’m going to try and publish them in a bundle. Of course, in that case, twenty won’t be enough; but at least it’s a start.

It won’t make me any money either; poetry never does. Seeing as I’m completely broke, I’ll have to start pursuing some avenue of income. I hate looking for work. In fact, I hate looking for work more than I hate working.

I had all these grand plans of leaving India with some money in my pocket. My father told, right at the start, that there was no way I’d be coming home with money. I thought, ‘I’ll show him!’, but I guess he showed me.

Hopefully this trip has taught me a little more self-awareness, because it seems I could use it.

After Math

2008-04-06T05:03:00.001-07:00

If I start talking about how I’m leaving Palolem tomorrow evening, I’m pretty sure I’ll start sounding like a broken record. I think I’ve pretty much been obsessed with my leaving pretty much since I got here three months ago. You’d think I’d have learned by now to live a little bit more in the present.

Last night was my birthday party (I turned 29 on the fourth) and my last headphone party as well; it might possibly be the last headphone party over all. As you might have expected, it all went a little bit insane. Dancing, shouting, stumbling, drinking, climbing, abusing, laughing, talking, gibbering, jumping; and that was before we’d even hit the party.

We found a huge boulder to perch on and watch the festivities (when we weren’t in the middle of it). From there we surveyed the mayhem. Since the party hadn’t been held for two weeks previous, we weren’t certain if it was absolutely going to pack out or fail miserably. Luckily, it did the first. I think I eventually got to sleep somewhere in the late, late morning and I was certainly not the last person to turn in.

The reason I’m not sure what time I turned in is because I’ve got a new little tactic that I use now if it gets too late. I don’t look at the clock, so that I don’t know how late it actually is. That way, when I do turn in I can’t afterwards complain ‘oh, I only slept three hours’. I might have, but on the other hand, it might have been seven, for all I know. Rest through self-deception.

It’s time for me to write my letter to me. I’ve been doing this for two or three years now (I think it’s two), where I write myself a letter ten years in the future. It’s definitely a long term project, but I think when I’m older it will be great looking back at all the nonsense I got up to. If I live long enough I might have well over sixty letters. I imagine you could do some interesting self analysis based on sixty years of birthday thoughts.

Interestingly, my birthday letters to myself are pretty much the only things I still hand write. There’s a good reason for that, namely that my handwriting is pretty atrocious. I’ve been wondering if, when I open my first letter, I’ll even be able to understand what it I’ve written. It would be terribly ironic if I spend so much time sending myself letters ten years in the future and then, when they finally arrive, I can’t even read them. A bit of an anti-climax; though I guess not being able to read them already says a great deal.

No, I’m not exactly sure what I’m talking about and why I’m still talking. I need coffee.

Believing is Seeing

2008-04-04T01:37:00.000-07:00

You know that old quote, ‘seeing is believing’? Well, it isn’t. A far more accurate saying would be ‘believing is seeing’. The thing about seeing is that it isn’t half as straight forward as we’d like to believe. In order to see anything, we have to make so many assumptions and take so many short cuts that really we shouldn’t trust our eyes very far at all.

The problem with seeing is, quite simply, that we have to ascertain a three dimensional world from a two dimensional image (the image thrown on your retina is, of course, only two dimensional, seeing as the back of the eyeball – though curved – is basically still 2D).

So, in order to form a picture, our brain has to make a huge number of assumptions, such as straight lines are edges, colours are normally uniform (meaning that if colour changes it must be shading and therefore the object must be curved) and objects remain the same colour, even if they may appear a different colour in a different lighting; to give you an example, if you take a piece of coal in sunlight and you take a snowball at night time they actually radiate off the same amount of light; the only reason that you see the snow ball as white and the piece of coal as black is because your mind makes an assumption based on the available light (see this example).

Another good example is that we have just as big a space in our mind reserved for face recognition as for every other object in the physical world. Faces immediately draw our eyes, are immediately analysed and have layers of meaning automatically associated with them that no other object will ever have. Faces are, in terms of data collection, like lighthouses burning in the night. The only reason we don’t realise how much more attention we pay to them (and how much extra processing goes on) is because we’ve always been doing it! We just don’t know any different.

If you don’t believe me, just look at many autistic people. They have the problem that they see faces the same as every other object; and as a result find it very difficult to glean the amount of meaning from them as ‘normal’ people do. The result is that they can’t understand nuances that the rest of us get, based on body language analysis; which in turn means that they seem to waltz across social graces without nary a backwards glance, unaware of the insult they cause.

We have shape recognition ‘software’ in built, especially towards human shapes (as humans were the most dangerous creatures around for our ancestors, even 100,000 years ago). This might well be the reason that often you think you see a person out of the corner of your eye and when you turn to look more carefully you realise it’s just a bunch of clothes. It’s better to have a false positive (as in see a shape where there is none) then to not see an approaching enemy; erring on the side of caution, if you will.

The thing is that we do this with every single one of our senses, interpreting through unconscious assumptions, as we would never be able to understand the raw data. For example, when somebody speaks, we hear individual words, when in truth there’s a continuous stream of sounds (with no breaks).

So, just because you think you saw something, heard something or realised something, doesn’t mean it’s true. It might well be your overactive interpretation mechanisms making you think something happened, when in truth it was just a misinterpretation of a natural event.

Yes, that does mean that not even your senses can be trusted. Bugger, aye?

Third Time Lucky

2008-03-31T07:10:00.002-07:00

“The end is Neigh!” the little girl shouted, on her corner, where she’d been for twenty years, “the end is Neigh! Don’t forget to pack.” The people passed her by, throwing small change. What she was going to do with it after lunch time – when the world was set to implode – nobody knew.

Everything was dirty, everything had turned to filth; a war of colours. Laughing desperately, they fought on; wounded and beleaguered, surrounded and encircled by beasts of their own design. Nobody even understood the point, anymore. Nobody could grasp how something so beautiful had turned so ugly. They’d laugh about it in times to come, history having scrubbed clean the memories; but the villagers would never forget.

It began with a simple gesture, so childish and yet so out of place in this refuge from maturity. It began with a single little thing. It always does, it always will. The little things provoke change. Chance and Providence do the rest, playing with the strings of reality till the least likely becomes a near certainty. That’s the way reality plays out, with little Gods cackling behind the sc(re)en[e].

The vortex dances ballet along the edge of our free will. Will we be absolved of all when the void pulls us in? Will we be forgiven our sins when nothing remains? Sketches of an artist plying her trade; infinite recession as she draws ever smaller pictures of herself. The frame changes, the point of view swivels and the drawings spiral out of control.

How can we portray ourselves?

The Vortex

2008-03-31T07:10:00.001-07:00

I’m back in Palolem. I’ve always seen other people get sucked back, but I never thought I would be back here. The exit permit is going to take till Friday and flying on the weekend is expensive, so I decided to fly next Monday. I had a week to go and didn’t want to spend it in Bangalore. We (as in the person I came to Bangalore with) decided to go back to Palolem. We grabbed the night bus, which cost us 13 US. 13 hours later (nice coincidence) we were back in Palolem. Sunday evening I’ll do the same thing back to Bangalore, pick up my exit permit and fly to Frankfurt.

Was it a good idea? We’ll see.

My first aim is to stay away from everybody else. That might be a bit of a challenge, seeing as news about who leaves and comes back travels fast on this beach; but I’m still going to give it a try. I am really going to try to take it easy and write the things that still need writing. Fortunately, that will be a little easier than last time as the beach has really nearly completely emptied. There’s not a lot of temptation when there’s nobody left to tempt.

Plus I picked up a whole bunch of books that I really want to read, so hopefully they’ll keep me out of trouble. A couple more days no the beach, while I wait for my exit permit to be processed and then back home with everything ready and done.

Today I spent most of my time trying to fix the pump to my old house. Other people have moved in, but I’ve convinced them that it’s a good idea to let me share the house with them; much cheaper and a great deal of fun. We had to make a whole bunch of trips to Chowdy to get everything together (Chowdy being the nearest town) and still we couldn’t do it, but fortunately the villagers took pity on us and decided to help out. Now, with a few extra parts, we’ll have water again. Then we can cook, live cheaply and banter endlessly.

Slowly my letter of motivation is gelling together in my head. I’ve already got a whopper of a first paragraph. When I finish it I’ll be sure to throw it up here. The only condition being that you only use it after I’ve been accepted into Uni. After that it’s free game, ladies and gentlemen.

Today I left my book lying around somewhere and somebody asked ‘who’s reading physics for fun?’ It was a book about why, for scientific reasons, computers can never become sentient like we are. I guess my reading of that book just reaffirms my status as geek. The great thing is, I get to hide it and people think I’m actually cool (and ultimately, being ‘cool’ is just a subjective matter anyway, so I don’t even have to discuss whether I’m cool or not; the fact that they think it makes me so.)

And that’s it for the disjointed thoughts spewing forth from my head today. Oh yes, my leg is much better, thank you.

City Talk

2008-03-29T00:16:00.000-07:00

This city is driving me absolutely up the wall. Fortunately I’m here in the company of a girl who also needed to get her visa sorted, so I still have somebody with me whom remembers the Palolem spirit. Of course, this being India, getting the visa sorted is taking much longer than it should and we’re being forced to wait around. We’re now considering disappearing off, out of Bangalore for a couple of days while things get processed. Our idea is to go to the airport and just buy a cheap ticket to somewhere less city like. Possibly back to Palolem.

That might mean I can’t celebrate my birthday with my parents, as I might come back only the day after or the day after that. Roll with the punches, as they say. No, don’t worry, this won’t impact my university application. I’ll still be annoying the piss out of those people even from the other end of the world (There is one thing that India has certainly taught me and that’s tenacity. If you’re not tenacious in this country, you can forget getting anything done.)

I used to be a city person until a few months ago, but living on the beach in Palolem I’ve really got a taste for smaller, more tighter communities, a calmer life and the ability to actually walk everywhere. Cities (especially Indian cities) are dirty, crowded, smelly, crazy, hectic, anonymous and oversized; Until recently that was exactly what I liked about them, but now I’m not so sure anymore.

Truth be told, that might just be a phase. As you all well know by now, I continuously and constantly go through different phases (almost all tainted with negativity). I wonder if that’s the same for everybody. I don’t really know, to be honest, but that might well be because I don’t really have (take?) the time to read other people’s blogs. For somebody that claims to be a people person I realise I’m very self-absorbed.

Just look at these last couple of entries on this blog. All they’ve been about is me; which isn’t that unusual, but normally I like to throw a little bit more philosophy, psychology and general thought-analysis in there. Oh well, when this hectic time is over (and I’ve finished Pinker’s book) I’ll have more time to talk about those types of things. If I get into university, I’m pretty sure I’ll drive everybody absolutely insane with my philosophical ramblings.

So don’t give up on me! I promise I’ll post more regularly and more interestingly in the future. I’ll get back to my old self. Actually, you never stop being yourself, really; who you are just changes (day by day, if modern psychology has anything to say about it).

So be good, be patient and be happy with who you are; after all, you don't get to be anybody else. God, that sounded like it came straight out of a fortune cookie.

Bangalore the Third

2008-03-26T23:08:00.000-07:00

I’m back in Bangalore again. I’ve been back since Monday. The only reason I’m here this time is purely to sort out my overstayed visa and make sure I don’t get arrested when I leave the country. A girl got tossed in prison for trying to leave the country with an expired visa a couple of months ago. Fortunately, since I’ve got a few connections over here in the ‘Garden City’, that won’t be happening to me. I’ll get out alright, but until I do I’m forced to stay here in Bangalore; waiting for them to approve my leaving.

I don’t get to spend more time in Palolem and I don’t yet get to see my family, who I haven’t seen for seven months; instead I get to hang around in a city that I’ve seen and I don’t really want to be in. I’m not in a city mood, you see. I really would like to just sit somewhere – quite-like – and just read. I didn’t really do that at the end of my Palolem trip.

Fortunately there is a lot of good book shops here, so I’ve managed to pick up a couple of interesting books; unfortunately, I’m being forced to run around and go see many Indian officials (who all want Baksheesh) to convince them that it is alright for them to let me leave.

It is so annoying that they can keep me in their country against my will. I guess I did technically commit something akin to a crime, so they have the right to; nonetheless, I’m wasting time and money, while losing my patience and my calm.

It looks like I’ll get to leave early next week. One more weekend here. Hopefully I’ll get back before my birthday. It would be nice to spend it with my parents, eating nice food and being well behaved, for once.

Even here I’m being surprisingly well behaved - less than five cigarettes in a day, only one beer since I’ve arrived and no night past midnight. That’s probably pretty normal for most people, but for me that’s quite an achievement.

There’s some bad news, I don’t know if I’ll be able to get into university. I’ve been getting back a lot of feedback that suggests that getting into a Social Psychology Masters degree in Holland is a very difficult thing. You basically need to have focussed very much on getting into Social Psychology in your pre-graduate days. I didn’t know that I wanted to do anything in the field of psychology when I was in Uni. Hell, I was just focused on getting through the damned thing in one way or another and little else. The fact that now I’m fascinated in the field and very driven apparently doesn’t make any difference; instead, all that matters is what I did seven years ago. Not surprising, really. It is a bureaucracy, after all.

I have no idea what I’ll do if I don’t get in; for the last six months I’ve been gearing up to getting in. I better start thinking about it though (even as I send in all my applications and hope for the best), because it’s a real possibility.

If I had similar connections in Holland as I had here, I imagine I could get in. Maybe I should look into building those up; though rumour has it Europe doesn’t work the same way.

The End

2008-03-25T05:39:00.000-07:00

The last week in Palolem has been an insane rollercoaster of bickering, altered perceptions, body painting, rainy days, sleep deprivation, cancellations, good food, booze, hammock wars and that’s just telling you about the stuff I can feel I can write about here.

In three word, it was nuts. The group I was hanging with was basically cobbled together only in the last week of my stay in Palolem, so we had to condense all the fun we wanted to have into the time that was available. As usual, one of the first things to go was sleep.

It was amazing how well we got along, considering that we were about as dissimilar as possible. I think the thing that made our group work was that we were all up for everything; which included the Holly festival that happened last week, despite the fact that it was raining buckets. We didn’t actually know what the Holly festival celebrated, but what we did know was that it was celebrated by throwing huge amounts of paint at each other.

We stocked up on a couple of kilos of the stuff and attacked the town, coming out of the night as bandits and fighting skirmishes with the local village boys (who were damned good shots), we ran the gauntlet of the village’s main street (where the rain ran purple, yellow and red) and then we fought it out on the beach with other willing – and other not so willing – foreigners. Suffice it to say that my backpack is now not quite as heavy as when we first arrived, but a great deal more colourful.

There was also my farewell party which was originally meant to be a pre-party for my last Silent Noise, but turned into the main party for a great deal of people when the Silent Noise party got cancelled (officially because of the rain). Of course, it still being Holly as well, my living room got painted in many livid colours. I had to pay the maid double just to get her to clean up the aftermath.

Then there was the dinner. One of our group was a passionate cook who hadn’t had a kitchen in months; my place had a kitchen; I imagine you can see the reasoning. The food was lovely and it was here also that a great deal of the hammock wars took place (that is, until somebody was smart enough to go and buy more hammocks). The cook is now living in my place, having taken it over with a friend now that I’ve moved out. It feels good to leave the place in the hands of people who will utilise it well.

All in all a very good last week, though I’ll probably need to sleep for days just to recover from it. Hopefully I’ll manage to snatch some more moments of writing between moments of sleep. As you might have guessed, my work did suffer under the pressure of the fun.

Still, there is enough time to write in the weeks ahead. There won’t be a great deal of time to spend at the beach. Well, except for in Portugal, but that will be an entirely different experience. It will be brilliant to get to hang out with the whole family again. It must have been more than a few years ago since I saw my sister.

But first, university applications.

Next Year?

2008-03-19T01:37:00.000-07:00

I just paid my landlady the last of the rent I owed her. She asked me if I would like to rent the house again next year. She said I was a quiet tenant and a clean tenant; much better than the run of the mill (aka British) tourists that normally come through here. I said I’d probably not be coming back next year.

Then I got to thinking, why am I not coming back? The obvious answer is, of course, that I’m going to university. It’s damned hard to be in two places at once and in this case university takes precedence.

But that’s not all. I don’t feel I should come back. Though I loved my time here, I don’t feel it is the right course of action to return. The Palolem chapter is finished and I don’t think that a repetition of the place will in anyway create a repetition of the time. What’s more, I don’t believe the time should be repeated. This experience should be unique; individual and un-diluted. I believe I’ll be doing all I’ve learned here a disservice if I return.

That doesn’t mean I’m done moving around, it just means that I will have to move somewhere else next; somewhere new, somewhere undiscovered (by me, anyway). I think the next trip (which will probably be two years away at least) will either take me to South America or to Africa.

I think right now I’d prefer South America. I’ve met a lot of South Americans over the last few years and I have to say, they are absolutely fabulous people; insane, dangerous, disturbed, loud lunatics with a propensity for the dramatic and a nose for trouble, in other words brilliant.

Maybe when I move next I’ll be going somewhere where I will be working, rather than only hanging. Then I’d move from the category of traveller to expat. A little worrying, as most of the expats meet are wankers who can only ever bitch, while they get opportunities thrown in their laps abroad that they could have only dreamed about at home. Sometimes we become what we despise; but I hope all of you will be kind enough to execute me in some absolutely dreadful way if I do turn into one of those unappreciative, overweight, sweaty, beer guzzling monsters. I’m rather particular to putting me on top of a bus, with only a length of barbwire to hang onto and then going down some really windy mountain road at high speed. That will teach me.

So, to return to the topic at hand, I don’t think I’ll be back in Palolem next year, but I’ll directly admit that this is probably the worst time for me to decide anything like that, seeing as I’m just at the end of this stay. Seven and a half years ago I thought I was done with school, this year I’m going back. Now I think I’m done with Palolem.

I’m sure you get the picture.

Imperfections

2008-03-17T01:19:00.000-07:00

I’ve got a hole in my leg. It’s about as big as your average coin. I managed to get this addition (subtraction?) to my anatomy on Sunday morning. I was still up from Saturday night and my reflexes were dulled from too much drink and too little sleep. I made a joke at a girl’s expense and in retaliation she flipped my sun bed. I hit the table on the other side and got cut in several places. Most of the injuries weren’t in any way significant, except for the chunk of flesh gouged out of my leg. The girl was suitably contrite and very apologetic. She was only trying to tilt it, she promised. I guess she didn’t know her own strength.

Funnily enough, it has only affected me a little. Though it still bleeds occasionally when I walk around, showering is difficult and it will doubtlessly scar, my mood has barely changed. Yes, I have to walk very slowly now, yes my life essence is staining my clothes and yes I can’t go swimming in the last few days I have here; but somehow I’m managing to take it all in stride (no pun intended).

The scar will be a permanent reminder of this journey. It’s quite suitable that it happened right at the end. It’s almost like a mark of a right of passage I’ve completed; which is quite fitting, seeing as I have certainly learned (evolved?) a lot since I’ve come to this country. I might as well see it as a mark for the entire time I spent in Asia. Seven and a half years of travelling, living, experiencing and moving. It was a time of a great deal of movement, which makes a scar on my leg quite symbolic, really.

Still, I think I’d prefer it as a reminder of Palolem, with all its trails and tribulations. This place – which looks like paradise but was in so many ways the hardest part of my journey – has left its mark on me.

Maybe I’ll also finally slow down a bit. Not only physically (which is inevitable as I have to limp to not put any strain on the injured leg) but mentally. In many ways I think that’s already happening, but maybe this will be a catalyst for further slowing down. Maybe once I’ve slowed down enough I’ll be able to find the time to actually get things done. It’s funny, but it really feels like the more frantically you try to do things, the fewer things you ultimately get done. The little things swallow up your time, so that there’s nothing left for the big things.

Eight days left. Eight days to limp around this place of bright sun and deep shadow. Eight days in this tainted paradise. Maybe that isn’t fair, maybe it isn’t the place that is tainted but us; maybe we carry it within us and bring it here. We are, after all, only human; we thrive on creating drama and conflict where before there was none.

I imagine that it only becomes starker because it seems so out of place. We’re the same, but we somehow assume that we should be different. We ask ourselves ‘how can things go so wrong when we’re in such a beautiful place?’ when a better question would be, ‘why do we expect our location to influence our nature?’

We are subtly changed by where we are, but we remain fundamentally the same. There is no perfect place, because we are not perfect. It took me nearly eight years of travel to realise that. And with that realisation I'm now finally ready to go 'home'.

Assumptions

2008-03-15T00:17:00.000-07:00

I had an interesting train of thought earlier today. It went something like this:

Logic is faulty. We know this through such logical paradoxes as Zeno’s Paradox, in which Achilles races against a tortoise. The tortoise gets a head start of say, 100 meters. Achilles is twice as fast as the tortoise, however, so it shouldn’t take him long to catch up. Achilles starts to run and covers the 100 meters to where the tortoise used to be, in this time the tortoise has moved on 50 meters. Achilles then covers those 50 meters, in which time the tortoise has moved on another 25 meters. Every time Achilles catches up to where the tortoise used to be the tortoise has moved on further again. Using this logic, Achilles can never catch up; with the two instead stuck in an infinite loop.

Of course, in the real world one object can pass another moving in the same direction, like you in your convertible past that lumbering truck on a mountain road, preferably with your top lowered and your middle finger raised (fucking truck drivers). So if we have a choice between the real world and our logical model, most people would say ‘let’s go with the real world’.

What’s more, logic is based on a number of assumptions. For example, we have to implicitly accept that 2 + 2 = 4. Yes, so far that has always been the case, but we can’t be certain. We assume it’s true because it has been true so far, but we also used to believe the world was flat, that gods lived on Olympus and that Father Christmas was more than just a hobo on minimum pay, with a red suit and a toilet paper beard.

We assume these rules hold true – even if they might well be proven wrong or only rough approximations – and we apply them in almost every facet of our lives.

That train of thought wasn’t exactly new to me (I’d followed a similar path before), but the next part was: What if faith in God was such a similar assumption? Similarly implicit as such assumptions as those that logisticians make in regards to logic?

The interesting thing about the assumptions the logisticians make is that they will find as much evidence as possible to support their position, while trying to ignore anything that might prove them wrong (like Zeno’s paradox). I think we do that with everything that we strongly believe in. It takes a very strong person to take to heart counter evidence to something they truly believe in.

That suddenly gave me an insight into why you can never debate faith. For those of you who have never tried (and I imagine you’re few in number) the problem with debating faith is that the people that have faith sooner or later use the fallacy of the impenetrable castle. This fallacy states that somebody accepts a belief based on arguments that are outside the realm of logic (i.e. they accept something as true without having any logical arguments to back it up).

I always thought of that as a weak argument, but now I realise that logic is in some ways just as much based on assumptions as faith is. To try to understand faith through logic is like trying to understand gravity through biology; it doesn’t work, for the simple reason that we are using the wrong tools.

Does that mean I’ve suddenly found faith? No, I remain an Atheist, as secure in my assumptions as the religious are in theirs. It just means that I have slightly more respect for the religious. That’s not a bad start, right?

Days end

2008-03-14T05:27:00.000-07:00

Today I’m going to buy my tickets. I need two more to connect everything together, one to Bangalore where I need to sort out last visa things (India really needs to work on its approach to Visas. It’s like they don’t actually want people to come to their country) and then another ticket from Dubai back to Frankfurt.

Things are moving steadily, with university matters slowly sorting themselves out. I’m pretty confident I’ll manage to get into a Uni somewhere in the Netherlands. That’s a good thing, because I’d have no idea what I would do if that plan goes awry.

For the rest I’m just enjoying my last days on the beach. It’s much better, now that I know what’s going to happen afterwards and I only have a little time left. I don’t have as much guilt or angst, so in a way I’m actually enjoying myself more than previously. There’s this thought process that goes ‘yeah, I really should be or shouldn’t be doing blah, but it’s only for a few more days’.

Yes, that does mean that my time of reflection and research isn’t quite as quiet as I would have liked. Still, there will be enough time for reflection and research when I hit Uni again. I’d hate to spend my time here reflecting and then end up wishing I’d spent more time partying when I’m in Uni. I guess what I’m trying to say is that we should really use a place in the way it’s meant to be used. Palolem happens to be a place for socialising, partying and drinking. Hurrah to that.

I talk about the fact that I’m leaving, but I really wonder how I will feel when that day finally arrives. It is unstoppable now; I have to go back. My visa can’t be extended any further, my ticket can’t be moved, my parents can’t be convinced and my money can’t be made to last any longer.

Well, actually that last one isn’t exactly true. I’ve still got some money due to me, but unfortunately, though I’ve been trying to collect for a few months now, I haven’t had a great deal of success. That is – as I told a friend – probably a good thing, because while my friend owes me the cash it is still owed to me and if I would have had it, it would probably be long gone by now.

Hopefully I’ll get the cash when I hit Europe, so that I can use that as my seed money to get myself set up. Otherwise it will have to be a matter of tightening the belt and living like a pauper for a while. Well, actually it will more likely be a matter of living like a pauper for about the next two years.

Poverty with purpose does have its uses though. It makes one far more aware of the value of money and how to get cheap deals. I was really good at that when I left Australia, but these last couple of years I’ve let my penny pinching slide a bit. A penny saved is a penny earned, right? On the other hand, a penny spent is a penny enjoyed. The latter is currently my philosophy, but somehow I suspect I’ll have to slide over to the former in the foreseeable future.

Oh well, Ce La Vie.