ponderings of the pococurante

What is this thing they call sinking your roots into a place?
DO you really notice when it’s happening? If you do, are you pleased to discover it?
There is or should be a sense of foreboding as well: it will make it harder for you to leave.
It’s like that U2 album title: all that you can’t leave behind.
There are times when you have to take stock of what you can’t leave behind.
It’s a frightening thing, how many things have anchored me here.
And yet if at some point being anchored becomes counterproductive, if these
bonds become shackles, then what?

YOu can’t help but sometimes fantasize about what it would like to be free–
of course, most people would find that terribly lonely–no life at all.
And yet there is something about the idea that is appealing. Of course,
there is no reason to be free, unless you know the opposite. Therefore the only
way to appreciate freedom is to have experienced the most

Dealing with ex-lovers throws this problem into sharp relief.
There are ones still here. You feel tied to them, you feel unable to leave them
behind–some combination of guilt and the residue of former feelings.
And then there are the ones that have left. And you want to escape the memories
that you share with them and this place. Yet you cannot extricate the one from the other.
The attempt is folly. Does time heal? Or can a powerful enough analgesic approximate
whatever we mean by ‘healing’. In fact, healing is not even a good metaphor, is it?

Shanghai is full of beautiful women of every race. Of every nationality. Of every shape and size.
That’s the libidinal subtext, isn’t it. An open secret that’s so obvious that we don’t really
need to talk about and rehash it. Your eyes are always scoping things out.
And yet there is a conflict between the most elemental of desires and the more prudent voice in your head
saying “don’t bother. it’s not worth it.” What is you are looking for in other people, anyhow?
That is, when you think beyond the one night stand motivations–what is there, again. The need
to settle, the need to be rooted. The need to stem the alienation and loneliness that besieges you.
That you can’t understand. The battle seems endless. The dialectic–alienation/disalienation–interminable.
The Buddhists tell you not to forgo these emotions–don’t fight them. You let them in. Your let them
pass through like passengers at a train station. You watch them. You don’t live less–but you learn to
build a critical distance. And you thereby mitigate their destructive potential.

And yet somewhere in the heart, there is also the need to love and to root oneself. You can, I believe,
root yourself in the face and body of another human being. I gather, from all that’s been said and done
over the course of civilization, that this is the way that it’s supposed to be. Home is where he/she is.
And yet you can sometimes end up in the throbbing crowd of beautiful and mysterious people, and instead of
getting drunk and throwing yourself around and hoping you, the errant dart, find your mark–it’s as if everyone is
behind a veil and you feel that this state of being thrown into the world, a world of desiring daseins like yourself is not
enough–they will always be objectified. They will always be separate and apart. And you were preordained to be lonely
and that it will, like some congenital disease that you never chose and can’t really blame yourself for, follow you to the grave.

If you still love her, ask her if she’ll have you back and beg forgiveness.
If you still love her, throw caution to the wind, go to her and leave this behind.
If you cannot love anyone, if you are afraid, if you are paralyzed by real injuries and imagined slights,
then hell is all the attractive and single tipsy people dancing at a swank club.
We know that dancing is a kind of foreplay. We know that the music is designed to get the hormones going.
If it weren’t we could listen to choral music and Bach at clubs.
But you cannot be part of this game. You cannot be part of any game.

YOu want to go somewhere where life is more real. Where relationships and social structures–and therefore
the structure of the self, the experience of self–is conditioned differently. You want to choose
another way of being. YOu want to pick and choose among the best of civilizational values and create
some kind of individual and idiosyncratic utopia.

Pie in the sky, sure. But say what you will, the human being desires its wholeness. The drive is elemental.
It *is* the elan vital. There your vital impulses will be not be blocked. You will have overcome your neuroses.
The wellspring flows; you are able to love again. And love in a way that you could not even imagine now, because
that kind of love would be all the more pure for having been spared from the pollution of the current civilization.
Love is the thing that cleanses, right? That is what Jesus meant, isn’t it?

And yet you’ve had your heart cleaved in two. And have done the same to another. Tonight, you scan through your memory logs
for sign of a prelapsarian moment–unsullied by anything–and to your dismay, you cannot find it. The inescapable conclusion: it never existed.
What love of yours has never been marred? And what of it? All love is and must be marred. Love is only made real by its imperfection. Perfect love–well
we all know that only possible form of perfect love would be that which came from the perfect Being.

So you learn to live with yourself. Accept yourself as fallen. Can you find love again?
Can you stop fooling people? Can you stop using people? Is your loneliness no longer a fact but a crutch
that you use to help justify your fears? If life is too short then one must drink deeply of it–but more than this–one has
to know where and how–the manner in which one is best suited to drink. This place, this moment in history–was not of my choosing.
But one must believe there is a place where one belongs better. Where things fall into place. Where love and work and friendship and family fall into place.
Where one lives instead of merely staving off the fear of death like a pathetic, cowering and cornered animal in a cage.
There is some place where you fit in. You imagine a short, fitful period of adjusting. But it comes with a certain existential alacrity, because
you know this is where you belong, and this is where you were meant to be. And at least that part of your journey is over and settled.

But whatever can be said about social structure, etc. they are not that important. These are superstructures after all, and love is the core.
You will no longer have you emotions wasted and your words flung back at you by someone who cannot understand your love.
“She is not ready for you”–that’s hardly a conjecture. It’s a self-consolation. She does not want it. Commitment antibodies are rejecting your
entreaties. Implore her no more.
The other her–you look at her face and feel love surging inside you. But it’s not quite strong enough. It’s like a wave that never quite gathered
much momentum. She desires nothing more than your love, and you are too selfish to give it. Is it because you are afraid? Or are you so selfish
that you could never give of yourself in the most fulsome sense of ‘giving’–what if, in other words,
you are too far gone, hopelessly corrupted, cynical, rotten–selfish–to the core?
Is there anywhere left to go? Is there anything left to do?

Glamour Bar is a lovely place, but when it’s packed and you can’t get your overpriced drink unless you want to wait like by the bar for half an hour like you’re waiting for food rationing, it’s not really my cuppatea. I can’t hear people talk. I can’t get drunk enough to lose inhibitions and dance. I don’t want to talk to the women, even the attractive ones, because i can’t hear anything and in that kind of situation, conversation becomes strained. Since that’s about my only forte, if you can call it that, having that nullified by the loud club music means game over for me.

I had street food again at the corner of Changde and Kangding. Same meal–the chow mein and some chicken kebabs. There’s something satisfying about this cheap and dirty type meal. It appeals to the cheapskate in me–and makes me believe, to a certain degree, that this quasi-bohemian lifestyle is tenable. That you don’t have to make a ton of money and be part of the rat race to enjoy the essentials of life.

As I walked home with some grapefruit juice and coffee, I thought, this isn’t half bad. Simple and cheap pleasures–if I could somehow do this more often, life my life in this mode, then perhaps I would be happy. The grass would be greenest on my side of this fence. THen I think, that perhaps in order to do this I need to withdraw more from the activities of this world. That i am not in a place that’s conducive to this way of life–of course, I could firewall my mind so that I don’t get unduly influenced by what other people in this town are doing. But there are so many friends and they like this kind of thing, and that makes this kind of thing inescapable, doesn’t it.

My thoughts turned to Hangzhou, to moving somewhere where I could have nice living quarters and somehow be far from the madding crowd. But would it be too lonely, without the comfort of friends? Without my cats? With less “temptation” would I be able to live my life more purely? Would I be able to concentrate on studying mathematics, what with a study and ample table space for books and calculations, the likes of which i lack in my apartment here?

Would I be more able to live more impulsively and spontaneously, what with less costs and with less temptation to stay here in Shanghai?

This is my very own China-centric shanzhai method of integrating my social media life:

This is a work in progress, so everyone feel free to comment:

This might not work for you, because it depends on what services you use and how heavily each one.
But for those with similar social media usage profile as me, this might be useful.

Here’s what I use:
Photos: Flickr and Picasa
Microblogging: Twitter, Friend Feed, Fanfou, Jiwai, ZUosa, etc.
Social: Linked In, Facebook
Blogging: personal blog

Tools: Google Reader, FriendFeed, Facebook, iPhoto 09, FLickr and picasa uploader, Twitter clients, Twitter addons for Firefox, Feedburner and Twitterfeed.com/Feedlr.com

So here’s your problem: you have to connect the inputs and the outputs. The inputs are the vast sources of information out there on the web: RSS feeds
from your favorite websites, as well as your social media sites. Therefore the best place to manage them is somewhere where you can aggregate them together
and therefore see all or most of them at once, in some kind of neat, efficient form.
FriendFeed, Facebook, and Google Reader are all good ways of aggregating information from various sources.

I decided that Google REader, which i have used the longest, is the best candidate for me.

What is your output: for me, it’s mostly where my “audience” lies. Most them are seeing my pictures on Flickr, or reading what i have to say
on Facebook and Twitter, as well as my blog. However, I would say that Facebook and Twitter are the big ones here, since I doubt that
that many people are going to check out my flickr or my blog, since they tend to be more personal and those who don’t know me well are not going to even know about those. That’s why Facebook and Twitter are impt–they are wider audiences and can therefore be used to introduce people to your more specific content, such as
whatever niche subject you are writing on your blog.

So that’s your major output: Twitter and Facebook.

Now you have to hook them all up.

In my Google Reader, there are the following feeds:
My Flickr photostream
My Flickr Recent activity stream
Facebook friend updates
Facebook posted notes (Friendfeed handles this too)
Facebook status updates=Twitter so no need for separate feed
Picasa Web ALbums (can be done in FriendFeed)
FriendFeed itself
Fanfou feed

All of this depends on one trick: that is, hooking Google Reader up to Twitter and Twitter up to Facebook.
The latter is easy, when you set up the Facebook Twitter app you should be able to sync (but just one way, i think there is two way but it doesnt matter that much to me)
To sync Google Reader and Twitter, you use Feedlr.com or Twitterfeed, which pumps an RSS feed into your twitter stream.
TO do this you just have to sign up for Twitterfeed, give them your Twitter info, and then find your shared items RSS feed from Google.
I won’t tell you how to do that here, suffice it to say you can google it and find it real fast. Or just go to your public shared items page.

WHen this is done what you have is this functionality: anything you share in Google–>Twitter.
Of course, you could always just add your FLickr or other RSS into Twitterfeed/Feedlr and get the same result:
however, it’s harder to make a choice about things that way. That is, unless you go through the bother of
filtering that feed, EVERYTHING in your eg Flickr feed is going straight to Twitter. That means, for example,
that every pic you upload will be sent as a Twitter update. That might get annoying.

However, with Google Reader, you just press “share” if you want to share a particular picture in your Flickr or Picasa stream.
Similarly, if you saw a nice posted item from your Facebook friend, you could share it and therefore get it onto Twitter, though perhaps
that item might not be publicly available if Twitter friend A cannot access Facebook friend B’s posted notes. However, at least the information
and the link will be on your Twitter. Twitter friend A can therefore go look for it if it’s really that interesting to them.

For Twitter: there are tons of good clients, and the ones such as Twitkit in Firefox are great since you can just see it in the sidebar of your browser.
This is good since you can therefore cut and paste URLs real fast. However, no Twitter client is that perfect, and right now, since I am
running Snow Leopard 10.6 build 10A222, and there are bugs, I can’t get Adobe AIR apps such as Twhirl and Tweetdeck to even work…
and so Google Reader to the rescue: I have my Peijin+Friends timeline as a feed, as well as my Replies (@peijinc) as as feed. Don’t have
DM’s just yet but that should be easy.

The hard part is that Twitter isn’t good about RSS:
so you have to use this form: http://username:password@twitter.com/statuses/user_timelines/123455555.rss
or something like that. THere are several types of feeds:
1. YOU
2. YOU+friends (which is what you normally see)
3. Replies
4. DM

Of course, most of the time you see these all together, I guess there might be one uber-feed you can use, or else even use Yahoo Pipes to
combine them all…but the problem is that you HAVE TO USE FEEDBURNER to make these feeds functional. Of course, you have to know your number,
which you can see when you just press the RSS button on Twitter, you will see your number pop up at the end of the URL in the address bar.

Therefore, get the feeds you want, sign up for Feedburner, and burn those feeds. Then take the resulting URLs and pop them into
Google Reader.

Now, sign up for Friend Feed, and try to avoid some redundant things like Facebook and Twitter. I activated the FF app in Facebook
which means that everyone in Facebook got a shitload of redundant things from my blog and Flickr and Twitter. Perhaps, for the sake of simplicity
one ought to stick with YOuTube, Amazon wishlists, Picasa and/or some other feeds that you don’t normally see. Put those in your FriendFeed, and then stick the
FriendFeed RSS into Google Reader. FriendFeed is nice because you can see Flickr photos or Amazon wishlist books from your contacts, which is stuff you don’t normally
find in their Twitter or Facebook streams. You can also see stuff from their blogs, which they might not post onto their Twitter and which you might
not know about otherwise if you weren’t a huge fan of their blogs in the first place.

So now, I’ve got plenty of ways and workarounds for everything.

My blog posts can be written in ScribeFire/Firefox, and then posted to my blog. The RSS feed of my blog can appear in FriendFeed or Twitter directly (the latter using Twitterfeed.com).
Or I can use the RSS of my own blog in Google Reader and just share the items that i think are worthy, so that they end up in twitter and therefore Facebook.
With my Flickr. I can use the Blog APIs (i host my own blog using WordPress) and therefore blog a picture right away, and that blog entry can be shared on Facebook using “Share on Facebook” bookmarklet or sharing chiclet, and therefore end up in Facebook Posted Items page rather than just status updates, maybe because pictures in Facebook posted items often capture more attention than do just text status updates with TinyURLS.

Having FriendFeed is nice, again, if for example you want to find out something on FF Friend D’s Amazon wishlist, and then share that with others: simply press share in Google Reader, and then it will appear on Twitter and then Facebook.

***

Uploading pictures–
iPhoto 09 has built in Facebook and Flickr functionality. I recommend using this to upload to both sites without having to switch programs and reload the pictures you wanted each time. Just select all and then either press Facebook or press Flickr and then wait for them to upload.

***

SMS (for China users):

in China use zuosa or jiwai to sync with your Twitter. Then use their SMS numbers to update your Twitter.
Fanfou: use Feedlr or FriendFeed or Twitterfeed to get Fanfou updates into your Twitter stream. Alternatively, you can find your
Fanfou RSS and put that into Google Reader, and then share selected items, which then go to your Twitter, and from there to Facebook or FriendFeed.

***

IM clients

Zuosa, Jiwai, and Fanfou offer MSN and Gtalk clients, so that means you can always update without a special Twitter client.
This might be good when you are doing a bunch of IMing anyway and don’t know where that Twitter client is located or because it’s not open
and you don’t want to open it. If you use Adium, Pidgin, or Digsby this is nice because you can move from one to the other quite fast.

*****

Some other advantages of this method

Having it all in Google Reader is nice if you have Gmail or otherwise use GOogle services frequently. You could embed Reader into your Gmail, and of course you can email
Reader items right away. Google Reader is just a tab or window in your browser, or you could use Prism on windows and Fluid on mac to create a dedicated “Google Reader” app.
I find that though everything has become bland and texty, that Google Reader is still a better way to get it all and get it all fast. Honestly, the Facebook posted items are too tiring to read most of the time, especially since i waste enough time with status updates. THis way you can have them all there and “scan” down the screen a bit faster, winnowing out the excess
and reading the articles that you like–and then posting them to your twitter or perhaps emailing them to other people who are not on any of your social networks. Also, you might have a Google Reader friend who isn’t on the social networks but has great reading tastes…well you can Share their items and put them on to your streams.

Also, Google Reader finds and stores feeds fast and easy, and FriendFeed can take any ATOM or RSS feed but takes a bit longer. It’s nicer to have a shitload of feeds in Google Reader, where you know that no one can see what you are reading UNTIL you decide that you want to share with the world.

Disadvantages:

well, you can’t comment or reply to Facebook or Twitter messages. YOu need at least a Twitter client or IM client for that. IF you are reading Google Reader
in Firefox that’s great since you can just install Twitkit. With FriendFeed you can comment on FB status, but not from within Google Reader, so again you have to step out of Google Reader.
But you don’t have to step out of your browser, link will open a tab and you can open FB as the need arises and then close all those tabs and get back to work.
So you could just open FF in a tab next to Google Reader. Then you’d have all the bases covered.

Sometimes you have to believe that peaceful co-existence is possible.

• Manic Spending Puts Bipolar Patients at Risk for Financial Woes
  

  Many bipolar people already live in a boom-or-bust financial cycle, independent of the current economy. Spending sprees, after all, are common during manic periods. However, mania can be triggered by stress, which is naturally higher during an economic crisis like the one Americans are facing now.

• Why do the mentally ill die younger?
  

  One of the most common contributors to early death among mentally ill patients, for instance, is smoking. While about 22% of the general population smokes, more than 75% of people with severe mental illness are tobacco-dependent. According to Glover, a study conducted by NASMHPD after the publication of its mortality study found that 44% of all cigarettes in the United States are consumed by people with psychiatric histories. “I used to run state hospitals, and we’d use cigarettes as reinforcement — ‘You did good; you get a cigarette,’” he says. “When people didn’t do well, we took away their tobacco privileges. We were part of the problem.” The agency is now working to make state mental hospitals smoke-free by 2011.

• Is our happiness preordained
  

  Bates and his Edinburgh colleagues drew their conclusions after looking at survey data of 973 pairs of adult twins. They found that, on average, a pair of identical twins shared more personality traits than a pair of non-identical twins. And when asked how happy they were, the identical twin pairs responded much more similarly than other twins, suggesting that both happiness and personality have a strong genetic component. The study, published in Psychological Science, went one step further: it suggested that personality and happiness do not merely coexist, but that in fact innate personality traits cause happiness. Twins who had similar scores in key traits — extroversion, calmness and conscientiousness, for example — had similar happiness scores; once those traits were accounted for, however, the similarity in twins’ happiness scores disappeared.

• Laugh and the World Laughs with You: Happy’s Contagion
  

  The merriment of one person, the researchers found, can ripple out and cause happiness in people up to three degrees away. So if you’re happy, you increase the chance of joy in your close friend by 25%; a friend of that friend enjoys a 10% increased chance. And that friend’s friend has a 5.6% higher chance

• How Depression Harms Your Heart
  

  the findings suggest that depression contributes to heart disease indirectly — by fostering unhealthy behaviors like smoking — rather than directly. Certain biological factors linked with depression, such as inflammation and the levels of brain chemicals like serotonin, may play some role in heart health, researchers say, but the new study found that the factors that most increased heart disease risk in depressed people were the ones you might expect: lack of exercise and smoking.

With my own sanity and mental health at greater peril than ever before, i start reading, for some inexplicable reason, about Bertrand Russell’s personal life. I have read some of his books before, on happiness, marriage, etc. and of course the classic “On the History of Western Philosophy”–but I find that while i am obviously not of the same level, there are various personal similarities which i can’t help but noticing. If you go to the Amazon page for Ray Monk’s biography of Russell’s early middle-age years you find the following blurb from Publishers Weekly:

At age 30, philosopher and philanderer Russell (1872-1970) wrote, “Abstract work must be allowed to destroy one’s humanity.” His life into his 50th year is the subject of Monk’s first volume of a two-part biography. As previous biographers have found, his competition is Russell’s own mesmerizing yet unreliable memoirs. Monk (Wittgenstein) quotes extensively from Russell’s correspondence and autobiographical writings, but always with a gloss on the facts. Russell’s compulsive womanizing kept at bay loneliness, and worse. His mother and father died when he was a boy, and he saw insanity in his aristocratic lineage. Mathematics, his first love, lay on the edge of philosophy, and he feared that inquiring too deeply into the wellsprings of the self would lead to madness. The loss, also, of Victorian certainties intensified his sense of solitude, and his compensatory quests into logic, politics and sex left him questioning (as Monk puts it) “whether it was better to be sane with lies or mad with truth.” When the biography breaks off, he has married for a second time, been to jail, been expelled from his Cambridge professorship and written landmark books on mathematics, politics and philosophy. By then D.H. Lawrence has wounded Russell by accusing him of a paradox: that while Russell loves women sexually and loves logic professionally, “It is not the hatred of falsity which inspires you. It is the hatred of people, of flesh and blood.

This revisits a theme that i;’ve thought about continuously for much of my adult life: which is what you want out of people in your personal life and what you hope for for humanity at large–and if there is any sort of psychological connection between the two. People–biographers, or just people who have had substantial contact with the man, have said that his love of humanity was abstract–that he was afraid of flesh and blood, that he had problems dealing with real people. And then there is talk of the compensatory nature of logic, and i find that *compensatory* to be quite illuminating. Why? Because logic and the disinterested pursuit of truth in science and mathematics allows one to dwell in rarefied world, away from the messiness and inconstancy of human life. There is a real sense in which someone with an IQ as high as Russell’s is also just not going to be able to “get” other people. sure he will need other people–I was reading about Conrad’s wife and Joyce Carol Oates described her as offering “maternal solicitude”–and I’ll be damned if there aren’t a bunch of male intellectuals who go for women like that…in any case, these uber-intellectuals and writers need regular people sometimes–they project their own fantasies and needs on them. I bet that the reason that Russell was a pacifist was because he believed that the nuclear arms race was a form of irrational madness based on lies that the government tells the people to get them into acquiesce–and this offended his deepest intellectual instincts. Human beings are mad, they are stupid. And yet you must love them so you try to steer them in what you consider the right way.

And what about Russell’s personal life, his compulsive womanizing? Again, echoes of my own life, except that I am not that compulsive and not that much of a womanizer–but again, the vector points in the same direction, just with lesser magnitude. The need to stave off madness and loneliness–i know that all too well.
I would go as far as to say that a man’s deepest redemption from loneliness–the loneliness brought about, in part, by his intellectual and existential instincts. Therefore, there is always this balancing act going, because the intellectual and artistic pursuits drive you in one direction, drive you in a direction that could conceivably lead to madness, or at least, shall we say suboptimal mental health. And that is why you need a woman, to assuage and ameliorate the pain that is brought on by that very pursuit.

somewhere else i read about Russell’s “unyielding” type of personality–another word which sent the flashbulbs off in my mind, because I believe that is why I have such problems following careers such as journalism and filmmaking, things that I ostensibly am in love with and respect–because I have something in me that predisposes me towards logic and mathematics, same as Russell (though obviously not on the same level). But the same proclivities are there, and the same political leanings–which means that whatever “advice” I could glean from his writings or writings about him could really be quite useful and therapeutic for me. And that’s perhaps, why, in times of extreme, duress, articles such as this and the thoughts they contain “find” me.

I am beginning to wonder if I like cats because they are needy the same way that i am or if I have begun to assimilate or emulate their psychology instead. The constant need for contact and affection: I wonder if, behind it all, that’s really what my ego is. If you pare everything down, if you strip out the unessentials, what is left, at the core? I remember the attention I would get from my parents after spending an afternoon drawing pictures. There are times when I feel like I have transferred that whole project onto society and photography:i take pictures or create art, and expect society to shower me with accolades. And then I will feel wanted. I will feel there is some place for me in this world. My role becomes clear.

I think, in some way, I was harmed by having too good of a childhood: I was–or rather, am–a spoiled only child. There was constant attention and affection from my mother. She was doting in a way, but not just by pampering me with food, though there was that. I think it was the feeling of absolute security–the absolute security of knowing that you were wanted, and that you belonged–that has now, ironically, created an absence that cannot be filled.

When I see my needy and clingy cats calling for attention, I never hesitate to give them what they want–I “parent” them much the way that my parents cared for me. I spoil them with food, let them sleep under woolen blankets, and will scratch and pet them whenever they want me to. I suppose that this is, in some fashion, a surrogate family for me: a way of continuing or resuscitating the emotional economy that I am used to, a way of reviving the emotional autarky of the nuclear family.

Of course, we all have that need, but to different extents: and in that regard, we are all cats. There is no point in pining for the prelapsarian: on a regular day, that is, a day in the course of which I will feel completely lost and abandoned, I will at least have the company of my two cats, who will, without asking, jump on my lap or cuddle next to me in bed. They say that cats are only loyal to their food bowls, but I think they’ve gotten a bad rap. Anyone who lives with cats can at least fool themselves into thinking that some of this love is unconditional. It is not like how it is with us humans: tremulous requests that form in our minds but that never make it past our lips. The cats are quite comfortable in asking and demanding for this kind of attention. They give less than they receive, true, but they speak to that part of the psyche that, when in pain,
calls out in the very same way.

In the course of these one-way transactions you find that giving isn’t so bad, and that giving is a way of ameliorating your own need to receive or get something in return. Nothing ever is,
in the end, one-way.

Will I ever get what I want from this world? Will I ever be recognized for whatever talents God, my parents, and my UC Berkeley (go Bears!)/Stanford education has bestowed on upon me? Or will I, like most other people, get swallowed by the huge anonymity machine that eats through most of humanity and human history? At this moment, I don’t know the answer to that. But I feel that rather than waiting for the answer, I am actually, even through this non-action, making an answer. This veers dangerously close cliches like John Lennon’s about life being what happens while you’re making other plans.

SOme of these conclusions came about in a weird way, having to do with the differences in the various women that I have dated and loved over the years: some, like my parents, are quite doting, quite “ti tie” as we say in Chinese, whereas others are more independent, and cater less to the man’s whims and needs. I hope that none of this strikes you too much as sexist. I don’t feel entitled to anything because I am a man. I feel entitled to things–love, attention–because that is what I am used to, from growing up, not to mention a huge innate need which might involve scouring my genome for clues more than psychoanalyzing my youth. In any case, I have dated quite a heterogenous group of ladies and each has delivered their love and affection in various different forms of packaging. Sometimes you like the one more than the other…years later you change your mind. There is something maddeningly mercurial about this, and stripped down to its essentials, you feel like you are watching the seemingly chaotic evolution of you yourself…and at the risk of sounding hopelessly narcissistic the evolution of the personality, the dynamics of the ego–IS something interesting. That is whole point of introspection, is it not?

Cats allow themselves to be petted. They hardly ever reject you, if you are persistent enough. And they are always pleased by the attention. So it’s true that what I am describing here is a refraction of human nature: but its also a distortion. If we were all like this, all the time–nothing would ever get accomplished. But for what it’s worth, these cats allow me to regress to this more primitive state–one that we cannot stay in, but without which we would most likely go mad.

By accident I discovered a book, “The Left Bank: Writers, Artists, and Politics from the Popular Front to the Cold War”, by Herbert R. Lottman in my living room, piled among the many books that I have not yet read or not yet gotten to. I have the Chinese translation of the book, and I remember buying it a couple of months ago but I never got around to reading it. Strange that I should find it now, when I have spent the last few weeks reading about the history of Paris. A strange confluence, though not really considering the events in my life in the last few years have, in a strange way, activated a somewhat latent francophilic aspect of my personality.

Whether its this book or the Paris book, I find myself inevitably drawn to the same conclusion: where is the St. German-des-Pres in my life? Where is cultural capital of the world? Of Asia? Of Europe? Of North America? And even if I knew the answer to those questions would I move there, moth drawn to the flame, and become some hipster wanker wannabe? Or would I perhaps find myself part of something greater than me, something that might actually inspire me and take me on paths that would lead towards some kind of commitment or engagement, political or otherwise, that lead beyond a career of calculated self-aggrandizement? Might there not be the possibility that somewhere I might be to finally attach myself to something interesting.

In the Chinese translation of the Left Bank book., there are descriptions of the Left Bank, roughly, as “the place to be”, a place where people felt like they were really living, they were at the epicenter of something important, even world-historical. On a deeper level, I bet that some of them felt that this was some kind of approximation, or perhaps even the ideal, of what life ought to be. Some people must have felt that only in Paris could people fulfill what Nietzsche called the metaphysical function of man: to create art. To make their lives into art, as well. No matter how vague and ill-defined such things are, Paris is a place where you can be forgiven for such naivete. I bet that everyone was like that—idiosyncratic monads, floating around, relieved that they were among kindred spirits while nevertheless insisting on their own artistic or existential uniqueness.

There are times when I think that wherever this exists in 2008 is where I belong. And that when I find this, part of what I am searching for will be found, and I will have finished one of the great puzzles in my life. This salmon will have swum upstream to the source and from there on, it’ s just a matter of refinements and upgrades. Better apartments, higher income, more friends, a more successful career. But that will come in good time, and that will come as a consequence of choosing the right place to live. The environment will nurture me. The environment will provide the foundation. I will find a place where I fit in. I will find a place where I no longer feel alienated. And I will remain there, ensconced in the warm womb of kindred spirits. We will always preach to the choir. We will always decry the idiots living in the world outside. We will always have this refuge from the rest of the world.

I have to wonder about this whole impulse. It seems to me rather particular and I cannot help but conjecture that this fantasy milieu is some kind of surrogate family for me. Some kind of place where I am guaranteed a place at the table. The place you go where everyone knows your name and they’re all glad you came. In that sense it seems rather naive and infantile. I hate to place such a faux-Freudian emphasis on this point, but the more I introspect on this matter, the more this credible this conjecture seems.

I sit at Exit Bar in Shanghai, writing this. Everyone else is part of a group. Everyone is there with their friends. Speaking in their own languages. Loud blues music playing in the background. Everyone is having a good time. I hear the slap of high fives, the clink of glasses. I have friends too, and I was with them earlier. At that time, I too, was part of a group. I was an insider. Now I am an outsider again. I don’t know why this distinction matters to me. Like I said, it’s some weird emotional tic. This dichotomy reigns supreme in my mind; everything is filtered through it. And what of it? It seems that I am condemned to consider the world in this way. That is why it is interesting to read about mysticism in various religious and spiritual traditions—because the thing they have in common is the sense of unity, the inseparability. The oceanic feeling, as Freud called it. The oneneess. The illusion of subject and object, gone. The ego jettisoned, abandoned.

Most of us can’t achieve this state, at least not for a long time. However, it seems that its difficulty only make it that much more valuable a goal. Contemporary society, on the other hand, really doesn’t value this kind of thing, this way of being, and certainly does little encourage it. There is a real spirituality deficiency built-in to modern society, isn’t there? There is really quite little believing in, isn’t there? The affluence and consumerist ethos you see in Shanghai’s shopping centers—they are seductive, aren’t they. I want to have money. I want a high paying job where the income is high enough that I feel I am part of some elect. I am part of the haves, therefore I exist. I can shop, I can afford these things.

Of course, in another nanosecond these seductions lose their luster, the effect wears off.
All these ads, all these movies, all these shopping malls, all these Bund clubs are filling the mind with so much nonsense, garbage. How can we ever get our minds back. How do you recover that deeper sense of who you are and where you blong this world? Do you just unplug? Detox? Drop out? Marcuse’s Great Refusal? The anarchist gives the finger, the hippie lights a joint, lies on his back and stares at the sky. These are all metaphors. But how can we know what works and what doesn’t? How can we design our lifestyles in a way that makes sense. I think—I think—that I would be happier in Europe, on an island in a small city. A city of 200,000 people, perhaps enough that there is a diverse pool of interesting people to interact with in an urban environment—with culture—but not so much that you can’t escape to the bucolic surrounding areas. Villages, the seaside. A place to get lost. Human society—well let’s face it, most of it’s garbage right? Most of its nonsense. Most of its bullshit. None of it will save you soul. It will just make you a faster hamster running on the wheel. It will detract from your quality of life over the long term. You just don’t know it, because you’ve bought it hook line and sinker.

But when you get away from human civilization, when you are looking at the ocean and the hills, you fill your mind with the right things. You understand the transience. It becomes an indubitable fact. You no longer lie to yourself. Don’t waster your time staring at skinny models—spend time staring at the night sky. When I am in southern California and watch the Pacific Ocean, this becomes quite obvious: there is more truth in that ocean than anything human beings can muster. And I mean all of us, I mean our entire civilization and the values undergirding it. Lies, lies, lies. But I am not a modern day mystic. I am a failure, in that regard (among others)—my intellect has taken me as far as it can take me. The rest, I’m afraid, is going to require a courage that comes from a different place altogether. Whether I can muster it is an open question. But I have my doubts.

You know, what I just wrote above is, on the whole, quite truthful. It’s how I think. It’s who I am. And yet it leaves so many questions unanswered, the most pressing being—how do people like manage psychic survival in the world such as it is? What kind of jobs can we get that won’t completely depress us? Are we always going to be stuck in less than ideal places, such as overcrowded and populated places, just so that we can make a living. That is what would please our families and our partners. That is one way to earn the respect of our friends and peers. At what price though. That’s what I want to know. I have friends, I have some kind of job, sure. I have some semblance of a normal life. But what if this is all wrong, what if there is a far greater price being exacted from me because of the choices that I’ve made thus far. How far does one have to go to lead an authentic life. There are no doubt painful sacrifices to make in order to attain this greater happiness…and again I ask, will I be willing to pay the price and make the sacrifice. Perhaps to even think about it this way is wrong. This is the way that homo economicus thinks, isn’t it? This utilitarianism, this rationality, this incessant calculation of gain and loss.

there is an insidious loneliness
that razes
things
it goes about its business
with a grin
like someone that knows
that everything can be swept–perfectly–under the carpet.

i cannot stay at gigs too long.
because their creativity unnerves me
makes me wonder where mine goes .
Surely no need for insecurity–we all have our own voices.
we all speak to different needs.
we all cater to different markets.
I long to be able to sweat under the irrationality of the spotlight.

There are some people that can plummet headlong into the days
whereas those like me
are always trying to slam on the brakes.
I imagine a life like that. I imagine a mode of life like that.
And after all these years, after the whole of my adult life so far.
I might be willing, after all, to admit that it was a mistake.
It’s not amazing that illusions exist, when reality is so patently obvious.
What is amazing is how far illusions can take you.

You can give up the love of the best of women
for that illusion.
Even as the antinomies take you to your grave
you believe in that illusion. You maximize.
You console yourself. You cajole yourself.
There is, after all, something better. Someone better.
Just wait and see. There is no greater faith, not even the faith
in God.

“It gets cold here in late September”—I dont remember the rest of the song anymore. It was the autumn of 1999, probably around late September or early October. The place: the main cafeteria at the University of Washington, Seattle. I had just moved there to start graduate school in applied mathematics. I was quite happy to be in the coffee capital of the US, where everyday was a battle to see if you could restrain yourself from spending too much on coffee. The cafeteria had musicians come in and play. I remember this woman’s voice, though I have long forgotten her face. “It gets cold here in late September” was the refrain, and for a reason unknown to me it has stuck in my mind for the last nine years. It’s the way that it was sung–the fragility of a girl folkie’s voice–that somehow mesmerizes you. Obviously there was more than just metereological iufnromation being conveyed: it is the sense of passing, the sense of the seasons changing. The poignancy is in the way that it’s stated, so simply, almost obliquely, like a passing remark, said by a woman standing by an open window, pulling a sweater out of her closet and onto her body. That summer, I had taken an extension class in songwriting. From then until now, I’ve written many songs, but none of have been like that song. They are sometimes plaintive, but much more heart on your sleeve. “It gets cold here in late September”, on the other hand, is so much more rich than the lyrics that I have written. Somehow, for me at least, it just captures and explains much more about life than anything that I’ve ever written. Read the rest of this entry »