“personal”
99 posts under this tag.
I’m sick (and oh-so-very-tired) of this clueless, absent-minded, bumbling persona of mine. I’m sick of knowing nothing about the rw (that’s the real word), of always getting lost, of always forgetting stuff, of never having my cell phone around, of people patronizing me, of stupid little mistakes like today’s. It’s time to start paying attention, to notice my surroundings, to stop forgetting in the shower whether I already shampooed my head or not. I’m becoming (to some degree at least) a worldly person as of this moment. This is my official skin shed of the silly-clumsy-absent-minded-professor-persona. So long.
“Attention,” the articulate oboe was calling. “Attention.”
“Attention to what?” he asked, in the hope of eliciting a more enlightening
answer than the one he had received from Mary Sarojini.
“To attention,” said Dr. MacPhail.
Island, Aldous Huxley
Some more good quotes from the book here
Being childfree myself —well, I’m somewhat young to claim that title for myself but that’s the lifestyle I want to live and I’ve already considered sterilization— it was a nice surprise to find The rise of the ‘childfree’ in Reddit’s1 homepage today. It was interesting to find out about Mariah, a Swedish girl who was sterilized at age 25; to read somewhere mainstream (The BBC) how much of a taboo the subject is; and to discover that there are actually groups lobbying for equality for people without children2 (Kidding Aside is the name of one!). That said, the article itself is quite irregular, too short, and too focused on women (though I may as well be reflecting my own biases).
And I don’t quite agree with most of the reasons put forth in the article (specially not with “I can’t believe the amount of waste that children produce.”). My personal reason for shunning child-rearing is that it is usually a cop-out to the existence question. It’s an usually unthinking way to give meaning to your life, to feel like you’ve “done something”, to achieve transcendence. I respect if you consciously want your children to give meaning to your life and you want them to be your life’s achievement —me, I’d like to explore different answers. (That said, life span is so long these days that one may try to juggle several answers that were of yore mutually exclusive.)
1 It’s interesting how snugly Reddit fits my demographics, some days ago they also had an article I found most interesting: ‘Grups’: Why do so many 40-year-olds still have 22-year-old lifestyles these days?.
2 That’s one group of neurons I never thought would fire…
What would you do if you realized you had become a 21 y.o. petulant, cranky, old fart1?
Golly! That’d be some positively nasty tidings2 —or not. Would you rather not know? There’s nothing left now but pick up the pieces, apologize, and start over.
1 I was on my way to becoming Melvin, from As Good As It Gets, wasn’t I? (Mel, btw, was so obviously a formist.)
2 Specially if you thought of yourself as one happy idiot.
In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head to headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he’s the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.
With the above text, Richard Feynman gave rise in 1974 to the concept of cargo cult science: pseudoscience in which only the trappings of science are cultivated. He makes a beautiful point through it and you should read that speech of his, it’s really good. In today’s yoga class, as my mind strayed during a ridiculously protracted baloney preaching, I chanced upon an interesting twist to it.
First, let me confess that I fell in love with yoga since my first class. I love the elegance, the gracefulness, the relaxation, the concentration, the self-awareness, the girl in green (a classmate), the austerity (only your body and a towel), the small daily improvements, the personal challenge of the perfect asana, the beauty and harmony of many postures, the sensuality of some, the ascetism of others, the breathing, the exhilaration that follows a class. I’m painfully stiff but I know I will get better. I want to. But this love only makes me loathe more the other, dark side of yoga: the mystical b.s., the astrology/chakra/aura/spirit/numerology/energy mumbo-jumbo.
Today I endured a particularly severe sermon (~40 min.) in which almost every esoteric subject save alien abductions was broached. When I decided I had had enough—and, believe me, I can be patient when listening to cranks—I stood up and prepared to leave. The teacher understood, laughed somewhat sarcastically, and wrapped the class with the closing posture. I thanked her for the class and left.
I knew that yoga carried such baloney baggage before I entered, of course, but I enrolled despite it. As much as the pundits (yogis) say they’re an inseparable whole, they aren’t, and I’m only interested in the exercise, the secular part. The funny thought that crossed my mind today was that, in a way, what I want is a cargo cult yoga.
I’ve been walking a lot lately, walking and driving, and I’ve seen more people in the last 2 weeks than in the past 2 months. What never fails to surprise me every time I pay attention is the multiplicity of their circumstances. What troubles that sad woman in the car behind me? That man right there is obviously cheating her wife. The father on the coffetable at my side talks to his daughter and son about graduation trips, money, leisure, the future, whatnot. That well-off lady over there, the one sipping her coffee and chatting with her friends, doesn’t know her two tweens are being stabbed to death right now by the ex-boyfriend of her eldest daughter.
I read somewhere, Savater I guess, about a dying old lady who, confined to bed, comforted herself thinking that, somewhere, someone was making love at that very moment. I couldn’t find that particular quote (there go 3 hours), but my quest wasn’t entirely fruitless. I chanced upon the same thought carried to the extreme: a (looong) list of right-now happenings. It’s often quite tacky (cursi)—Andrea’d love it—but surprisingly original at times (specially at its many gay moments).
- A patternist is someone with an unusual ability to discern, manipulate, and enjoy patterns.
- A form is a linguistic pattern.
- A formist is someone with an unusual ability to discern, manipulate, and enjoy forms.
- Formists are prone to strange and seemingly dumb language misunderstandings. A subtle error in form in a sentence can led a formist completely astray. This is often irritating to non-formists—who, as if they wore cognitive sunglasses that dull them to form, remain undazed by its glaring inconsistencies.
- It is also common for a formist to stop people in mid-sentence only to point out a particularly beautiful (or ugly) form they just noticed in their conversation or the surrounding language. Non-formists find this offensive and obnoxious. They shouldn’t—to continue the sunglass metaphor, where they see drab colors, formists enjoy vivid hues.
- Formists are good at spelling and care about it (even in spite of themselves). They just can’t help noticing it.
- Formists make formidable poets, programmers, writers (of all kinds), philosophers, mathematicians, linguists, and translators.
- Formists excel easily in school and in academia in general, both having a marked bias towards verbal talents.
- Formists learn new languages faster and better than non-formists—to the point that their enthusiasm and natural talent can be seriously annoying and off-putting to non-formists. Even Norbert Wiener, one of the greatest mathematicians of the twentieth century, was overwhelmed by his extremely formist father.
Thus it was a familiar part of our life to hear foreign languages spoken in the household. My father, indeed, could speak some forty of them. He was so proficient in linguistic matters that his insistence as a teacher on accuracy and fluency had the somewhat surprising effect of almost completely inhibiting the efforts of my mother and of us children to speak more than one language.
I Am a Mathematician, Norbert Wiener
- Formists have a natural bias against non-formists (and vice versa); they often think (mistakenly, of course) that theirs is the only kind of intelligence.
- Linguistic pedantry is an occupational hazard of being a formist.
- Eemadges is a website for and by formists. So is the lovingly kept Language Hat.
- Homo Sapiens is the formist ape.
-
We live in the age of the triumph of form. In mathematics, physics, music, the arts, and the social sciences, human knowledge and its progress seem to have been reduced in startling and powerful ways to a matter of essential formal structures and their transformations. The magic of computers is the speedy manipulation of 1s and 0s. If they just get faster at it, we hear, they might replace us… Life in all its richness and complexity is said to be fundamentally explainable as combinations and recombinations of a finite genetic code. The axiomatic method rules, not only in mathematics but also in economics, linguistics, sometimes even music. The heroes of this age have been Gottlob Frege, David Hilbert, Werner Heisenberg, John Von Neumann, Alan Turing, Noam Chomsky, Norbert Wiener, Jacques Monod, Igor Stravinsky, Claude Levi-Strauss, Herbert Simon.
[...]
A college student enrolled in economics, once a branch of ethics, will now spend considerable time manipulating formulas. If she studies language, once firmly the province of humanists and philologists, she will learn formal algorithms. if she hopes to become a psychologist, she must become adept at constructing computational models. The manipulation of form is so powerful and useful that school is now often seen as largely a matter of learning how to do such manipulation.
The Way We Think, Gilles Fauconnier, and Mark Turner (both emphases are mine)
- Much (arguably lame) humor is formist in nature. Puns are the quintessential formist joke.
What did the Buddhist monk say to the hotdog vendor?
“Make me one with everything.”
* * *
When the monk asked for his change, the vendor replied, “Change comes from within.”
Formists just want to have fun.
- A formist compliment: “I’m warm for your form.”
- Formists enjoy proverbs, sayings, slogans, mottoes, aphorisms, and quotes in general. Have you noticed how trivial and pedestrian they sound when rephrased? Much of what we love in them is their form.
- Esperanto is the formist language—a mixed blessing.
- Math is the study of patterns through forms. And thus it was so disappointing to find so surprisingly few formists during the time I pursued a Math major.
- Algebra is the most formist of math theories.
- A classic formist comment: ”X is almost a lump of syntactic sugarWP .”
- It takes a formist to enjoy Toki Pona.
- This list of figures of speech is a formist’s field day. So is this collection of aphorisms.
- All sitcom dialogues are formist but The Simpsons is specially remarkable. Here are two noteworthy compilations of Simpsonian formist candy: Beyond embiggens and cromulent and Subtly Simpsons.
Carl [To the MENSA members]: Let’s make litter of the literati!
Lenny: That was too clever! You’re one of them! [punches him]
Episode: AABF18, They Saved Lisa’s Brain
- Touch, a language of making languages, is a formist wet dream.
Tonight I’m happy—truly, simply.
Things have been slow lately and, as is my nature, I’ve crafted a small weird plan to get things moving once again. This week I’ll…
- publish Erasmo’s novel on Wednesday;
- take Hatha Yoga classes Monday, Wednesday, and Friday;
- get myself a medical certificate saying I can swim and enroll at Acalli;
- swim on Thursday;
- go every morning,
7AM to 1PM, 8AM to 2PM, to Starbucks Mariano Otero Providencia Minerva to read and write;
- read Andrew Hunt and David Thomas’s The Pragmatic Programmer, Erich Fromm’s El Arte de Amar and O. C. Ferrell, Geoffrey A. Hirt, and Linda Ferrell’s Business: (a fascinating textbook from my sister Paulina);
- reread Strunk and White’s Elements of Style;
- finally finish my Notes On WikiCriticism, the exploratory essay I’ve been painting for too long already.
There’s sadly too little programming in here, but I need to find out how good the WikiCriticism idea really is before I can start to move on. Wish me luck!
Time to say goodbye to my incipient vegetarianism. Who am I kidding? I’m a man of the flesh.
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