Hyperbolistic Depression

Hyperbole and a Half ran a come-back post recently on depression. It might say something about my current peer group, or perhaps society in general, that I saw it referenced by at least a dozen friends and acquaintances on various social media sites.
It’s a profound illustration of what some people have to deal with, and I’m glad she wrote it. I feel bad for her, and, more importantly, I feel like I understand her perspective, one that I’m sure would ordinarily be alien to me.
I have two notable points to make:
1) In reading the post, it was easy to identify who I am in this story (pictured above). I have a savior complex. That is, I’m a privileged, empowered white hetero boy who grew up upper middle class, who has always been able to make a difference in his surroundings and make himself be heard. When a person comes to me with a problem, especially if they’re posing as a helpless attractive female, I don the cape and pick up the sword and fire my problem-solving death rays at them. I may not be qualified, I may not understand their problem, it may not even be the actual problem that’s bothering them, I just do it instinctively. People complain, I want to fix complaints. I have to actively police myself to not do this, ordinarily. It’s revealing of my own discomfort with being useless. I don’t actually know how to just sit there and be a passive listener. I don’t think I will ever say something like “boy those fish are super dead” in response to this question. I can’t generally be depressed and defeated along with the person complaining in this context – I don’t want to, but I also just don’t think I actually know how to. SO, this means I’m not the right person for ultra-depressed people to open up to. Check.
2) While that’s all fine and dandy, what I’ve found is that very few people are consummately/comprehensively depressed like this. A lot of the time only a part of them is dead. For instance, I’ve had some of my heterosexual male friends (around my age) who have never really dated express that they think romantic desire has died in them. I think people can be contextually or partially depressed. Generally with my friends who tell me this I haven’t had a lot of luck helping them to solve their problem – US society isn’t well-structured for people who don’t follow the standard steps in the sprint to the white picket fence (dating in college, job plus marriage after). I think their solution often requires single assertive women, and it seems like often those women are often paying more attention to the loud, confident men in front, not the depressed, inexperienced guys in back. Or at least, that’s what often happens when I try to set them up. Anyway so my actual response is exactly what is criticized by Allie’s blog post – I try to help them work with other problems. It’s not formulaic, exactly, but I think one of the root issues is confidence and people skills, so if I can get the romantically deceased dudes out with a gang of friends and doing things those other issues get better, usually. I don’t think it’s a direct solution, but I have faith that it’s worth doing.

Revisiting the Passive

Most people that know me well have at one point or another heard me complain about people (often women) who are ‘passive’ in damaging ways. And I still think this can happen (one of my present roommates provides a powerful example but I don’t want to waste space criticizing him), but as I’ve spent a lot of time in GSLIS, a place where extroversion is about as rare as men, social conservatives and people of color, I’ve started to gain a little perspective.
Here, for the literature review, some terrrible reading that I dragged out of the archives that will make you hate me:

So the metric I generally operate under, when thinking about passiveness and assertiveness is a spectrum based on initiation and response. People who initiate, lead, speak up, negotiate and otherwise make themselves known through action would be assertive, people who are responsive, reactive and compromise fall in the middle as reciprocative, and people who follow and don’t alter their thoughts or activities noticeably based on social stimuli and communication are passive.
Very few people really fall into that last category, and most of those that do are probably those with more severe social disorders or conditions. Hating on shy or introverted people is stupid. I think what I’ve really been struggling with over the years has been in part people who are passive aggressive, and whether or not people are confident or positive, and these intersecting threads that are hard to tease out at times (because they’re so contextual).
Anyway this post is not about this, really.
It’s that my narrative that I clung to so desperately when I was younger, that girls are (were) passive and cause hurt because of this, is only 50% right, at best. The reason so many people have avoided me, not answered my messages, talked bad about me behind my back (I was once lucky enough to be cyberbullied at age 26 – real-time tracking making fun of my soul-crushing break up via multiple Twitter accounts established by GSLIS students) or otherwise reacted to me in passive (evasive) ways is because of who and how I am.
At best it’s that I’m weird, at worst I think it’s that I’m downright undesirable. I’m pretty convinced that if I were more attractive than I am I wouldn’t have problems with this – the handsome surprise contact is a flattering secret admirer, the ugly one is a creep, so to say. But, generally, I think people find me annoying. Since I’m so frequently an initiator people probably assume that I’ll just be fine if they forget about me – afterall, they likely assume they’re probably just one minimal contact amongst hundreds (I’m 1400 Facebook friends cool, right?). And that’s shit, really, because I took the time to make the effort to do reach out to them, which shouldn’t be dismissed, but it is, all the freaking time.
I sent out gifts in the mail to approximately 50 friends this past Christmas, a spread of variety of folk of different genders. About 25% responded or acknowledged in some way or another and there was no discernible difference between men and women. Keep in mind, I’m not bitter about this, I didn’t expect responses, and I encouraged people to continue the positive event chain in their own lives. In fact I still owe responses to some of them (sorry Alicia and Matt!). What I want to emphasize is that it’s not so much that girls are passive, it’s that people don’t have time for this shit. I have to come to grips with not being worth their time.
If I think back over people that I’ve found annoying in my life, I think the only one I’ve gone to lengths to avoid or not react to is my mother. I’m terrified of becoming her – so very out of touch and untold levels of obnoxious. Now, in my world of self-imposed isolation as a miserable attempt to finish a dissertation, the second a friend reaches out to me they’re greeted with overwhelming verbal vomit, like this blog post. And no one wants that. If Tom Fairbank, my sister and a few others weren’t immune to me I’d probably have given up long ago.
Anyway I don’t know if I have that much of a point to saying all of this, other than acknowledging to the world that, yes, I get it, I’m annoying as hell and while you feel bad for me occasionally, you don’t really want to hang out with me. That’s why it was always essential that I had groups of friends over. The question is how much I want to bottle myself. I can be subdued, ask the right questions, douse the intensity, play the ‘be mysterious’ game, all pretty unhappily. It was pointed out to me recently how easy it is for me to slip in and out of making arguments and discussions simultaneously personal or theoretical/hypothetical. Now that’s yet another flaw I get to police, along with the savior complex, pigeon holing, inability to be apathetic, duty for social good and more I’m forgetting at the moment.
I think my sister captured the meditations on this better than I could:
I actually thought it was really interesting to hear your concerns about how you interact with other people, and talk about how to choose or not choose whether to continue acting in a way they might find annoying. It’s so hard to balance being yourself and conforming to or reflecting the situation you’re in. And I think it takes a good amount of self awareness to get to where you are. I also think it’s shitty that some of these groups have made you feel shitty, though. I realized another factor in your situation might be getting older; energetic positivity is much more widely embraced and followed in idealistic college years, but in masters years it wanes, and in phd programs it dies and becomes reviled. That’s the academic course; I think in so-called RL, it follows a similar trajectory but for different reasons. People get out into the working world, or don’t, and realizes how much it can suck to have and to not have a job. They have to do taxes, sign leases, worry about carpet stains, try to make friends without the support structures they’re used to, etc. And so energy saps away–or is redirected into sterile, accepted gym environments, rather than games and adventures–and world outlooks shift to become cynical and jaded. People begin to compromise on every front, including romantic ones. I think there might be an upswing when they start to have kids and have to get excited about things like Blues Clues and delude themselves into believing their progeny will inherit a world worth inhabiting, and they become interested in making it a world worth their children living in. Maybe that will be your moment again. Who knows.

Storyography for Lincoln Hall

To be part of this – http://www.lincolnhall.illinois.edu/storyography. Overdone. Intentionally.

Back during my time as an undergraduate I belonged a registered student organization known at Positive Event Chain. The goal of the group, loosely defined, was to take part in events that would spread good Karma, the notion that doing something nice for someone else would prompt them to help other strangers and so on. Functionally this resulted in our group running activities like giving out free hugs on the quad (before this was cool to do) or delivering people hand-written comments like handing out fliers.One such event was our yearly Secret Santa Spoof. We would always meet in Lincoln Hall (because it was almost always open and I later had a key as a sociology graduate student) and over the years observed that one of the girls Acappella groups would have a gift exchange leaving nice wrapping paper in the trash bins. So our event became a deviant re-use activity, of an odd kind. Each person would pull a name out of a hat and that person would become their giftee. They would then venture out into the depths and nooks of the building in search of odd gifts found in corners and beneath piles. We could go out for an hour and gather derelicts like old tires, trophies belonging to clubs from the 1970’s, theater props or costumes, misshapen hunks of wood, ancient cassette tapes and any other strange relics of the past we could find in the basement, attic or wherever else in the building. We’d then wrap the gift, invent a story, and give them to each other in the room as jokes. Nobody ever actually wanted these gifts, of course, so they’d end up back where they were found, but we had the understanding that they wouldn’t be given again the next year. This event went on for about three years and brought some good laughs until the lot of us graduated.
I snuck in to Lincoln while the construction was nearing completion and revisited some of the depths of the basement that we were never able to get into. I never realized just how large it was! It was a little sad, however, seeing how the spaces that once could have worked as exemplar horror movie sets (my friend even made a flash video using them) had been painted white, freshly lit and replaced with pristine, sparkling parts. No more piles of random junk, low-hanging pipes, graffiti and dangerous jagged metal.
So instead I think I’ll stick with my memory – an echo of a Secret Santa parody that encouraged people to do good deeds and relinquish the beauty held in moments.

Questioning Equality

You’ll notice the red equal signs all over Facebook today. An example of resistance (as opposed to reform):
http://www.againstequality.org/
“Against Equality is an online archive, publishing, and arts collective focused on critiquing mainstream gay and lesbian politics. As queer thinkers, writers and artists, we are committed to dislodging the centrality of equality rhetoric and challenging the demand for inclusion in the institution of marriage, the US military, and the prison industrial complex via hate crimes legislation.”
I’m somewhat with it because I’m really pretty ‘meh’ about the necessity and value of marriage. But on the other hand I do think that if we’re going to have the idea/institution we ought to present it with at least a semblance of equality of opportunity. The other two issues seem similar – yes, we should reduce (or in some views eliminate) the military and drastically alter the prison system – but if we do not have the power to take these actions (because we must compromise in a democracy that includes the radical right) we ought at least strive for equality of opportunity. Maybe it’s just the name I have a problem with – against equality – instead of considering, questioning, critiquing and understanding society in our efforts to achieve equality of opportunity.

A more sexy approach

I watched this TED talk the other day:

Generally I thought this talk was good. She gives easily-identifiable examples and lands on next steps at the end, something many cultural studies people don’t do so well. I thought one of her suggestions was unreasonable, but we’ll come back to this. What inspired this post is that I made the mistake of looking at the comments below the video. One user, likely a young man, had been going back and forth with the other contributors. I’ll examine one comment of his:
“I agree somewhat – at least in the importance of being direct. It’s such a shame, then, that people like this C. Heldman would tell men that such behavior is ‘objectifying women’. She instead denies male sexuality and pushes this ‘nice guy’ attitude which doesn’t do anyone any good.
Men judge women on appearance, then we look at other things. That’s? not bad, it’s just the way we were built. Men should not be shamed into acting unnaturally just because it makes some women uncomfortable. IMO”
I’m not really clear what he’s talking about in the first part of the statement, but I think the second part is worth unpacking a bit. My first reaction is to disagree with him – not all men judge all women based on their appearance, but certainly many people get first impressions of one another. I’ve sometimes felt a little shameful in how I’ll spot physically attractive women out of the corner of my eye in a crowd and won’t pay the slightest bit of attention to others. I know this is primarily a socialized recognition but at times it feels almost instinctual – how fast and with how little information my mind manages to make these evaluations. It’s perhaps well-practiced. I can’t say I can subscribe to any notion of human nature (if anything it’s our “nature” to create our own ways of being to shape the world around us) but it’s not surprising he chooses to rely on this false discourse – “it’s just the way we were built” – by who? What evidence do we have that all men are ‘built’ in a way that makes them “judge women on appearance” ? I do assume he’s referring to primordial or carnal instincts and urges, not the assemblage of experiences and learned behaviors from which our identities are built. Suggesting that some biology controls us mostly or entirely alleviates any responsibility he might have for his own actions.
I was ready to dismiss his comment entirely until the very last sentence. “Men should not be shamed into acting unnaturally just because it makes women uncomfortable.” Again I’m not sure that there is such a thing as ‘naturally’ in this case, but let me put my own twist on this. I deal with some measure of guilt in my pursuit of romantic partners. No amount of feminist idealism is going to dramatically alter the hormonal component of attraction. I’ve certainly had the kinds of people I’m attracted to change over the years of my life, but this process has been gradual and not actively guided. The TED speaker may not be asking men to simply switch off the way they’re attracted to women like a light-switch (10:15 mark, her next steps) but I can certainly understand why this (presumably) young man might feel like that’s what she’s asking.
Try as I might I will likely never be attracted to overweight women. I could choose to date one, but I wouldn’t be able to successfully or responsibly have sex with a person who’s overweight (stated crudely, “I couldn’t get it up”). I know this preference is probably hurtful, on some level. But ultimately our social control can only go so far. Trying to rearrange what body types “society” reveres as attractive is just plain difficult – and it’s a process. Pointing out objectification and encouraging women to give up makeup and high heels and the like is absolutely necessary (and I actively push for these kinds of changes), but I’m not convinced it will change what body types most currently existing heterosexual men are attracted to. My children will grow up being encouraged to find women or men of many healthy body appearances attractive but this doesn’t solve the issue for myself or the guy who made this comment. This reality makes the speaker’s pitch feel considerably less satisfying or actionable – and can almost come off as the notion that in order to be feminist and stamp out objectification (hetero) men must stop being attracted to female bodies. Or, alternatively, that they must completely suppress or ignore their hormonal urges and first impressions and determine their attraction based purely on other things, like confidence or talents or power.
These days I’ve reached a sort of compromise – I police myself, trying to give equitable attention to women (and men) of many appearances and clearly never find myself in a relationship with women who don’t have real character and integrity. I’m not ready to advocate that we give up on finding bodies attractive. I think bodies are great, and while I don’t want to constantly objectify them I’m alright with people finding certain forms of them desirable. I doubt very much the speaker would object to suggesting healthy bodies should be recognized and valued. What’s more is that the strict cultural studies approach often grounds us too deeply in the negative. While we do need to point out the negative influences objectification of the female form has I think it’s worth taking other positive actions – complimenting women who don’t bother with high heels or encouraging women to look for and expect value on the basis of their opinions and assertions in the world around them.
In other words, let’s go with more positivity. Don’t tell (hetero) boys not to be attracted hot chicks (or to ignore that they’re hot), tell them to look for and encourage depth in women.

I am an explorer!

So I spent 30 minutes collecting outstanding screen shots in Far Cry 3, including a really cool lost abandoned hotel section that you aren’t supposed to interact with… and then I alt-tabbed and figured out I was doing it wrong and it only saved the first capture. SADFACE. I could write on how this is an interface fail… or install Camtasia… or be a productive citizen/PhD student and not play more computer games.
Anyway I was going to explain how it’s a really amazing looking game and how I wonder if money could be made just creating really impressive-looking fantasy landscapes, minus the violence (Tom Fairbanksonian). This abandoned hotel I found was probably for a level or section that they removed or never finished, but you can wing-suit (yes, you get one of those!) or hang-glide on top of it and find yourself floating in mid-air on top of holes in the roof or balconies. It’s just a glitch, but I found it refreshing to be able to discover something I wasn’t supposed to in a game – often these days they’re so scripted and controlled that sort of thing is really hard to do, usually the kind of activity saved for people who do nothing but mess around in games all day.
SO since I don’t have my own pictures for you I’ve just included some taken by others below. Cheers!

PS – this game teaches you to do a lot of drugs, but if you have sex with the lady who wants you to cheat on/kill your GF you die, so… MORALZ!!
PPS – I played a lot of this game as my dad built furniture watching the Rambo trilogy, and, I must say, this game is much better than those movies in all ways

Strange social norms

This post was a while back, but I juts now have gotten to it. A fellow PhD student, in an attempt to help us brainstorm more creative ways to recruit new information science students, sent us the following advertisement for reference:

As he explained, it’s a puzzle meant to draw you in:
In this poster, everything is hidden in the binary code (please ignore the girl at the background).
The decipher process can be found at http://xrl.us/bnx5jc (in Chinese). Here are the steps to get the material in natural language (I skip some trial and reasoning steps):

OCR the binary code from the image.
Save it as a binary file and name it bin.gz (you can get the name of the file by interpreting the binary code).
Unzip the file and get a file called bin. This is a java class (again, tell from the binary code).
Save the file as a java class and run it. You can get the correct name of the class (i.class) from the java error message.
Run the class again and finally you will get an url: www.i.u-tokyo.ac.jp/fun/hikari-loveletter

What puzzles me about it is not actually the number cipher, which I imagine is pretty neato, but the the relevance of the woman in the background. Is she supposed to be just a pretty background, like a flower pattern? Are they assuming only heterosexual men apply and that this woman will get their attention? Is this like insurance companies that put naked ladies on billboards, but a subdued version? I’m not yet ready to label it sexist, simply because I don’t understand Japanese culture enough to comprehend the context. Right now I can’t help but see it as comically non-sequitur!

Agency and Appearance

I am an assertive, friendly and extroverted male of average to slightly below-average appearance. In most contexts in life this works out to be a solid advantage but there are many times that my personality traits can’t make up for how I look. I can work out, which is good, but ultimately that does nothing to change my asymmetric face. My half-wavy hair that only grows sideways doesn’t allow for alternative looks other than short and shorter and my deep eye sockets and honking nose don’t combine well with a withdrawn chin that is almost double. I almost wish I could put on makeup. I know it would be a lie, and ultimately taxing both economically and socially (not to mention it doesn’t change head structure), but it would feel nice to have some (perceived) semblance of control.
Honestly I don’t know which is worse -> to ask people out a lot and get rejected or (worse yet intentionally ignored) OR to simply feel like you don’t have the power or worth to ask others out… left stuck in the position of not getting noticed or scaring off people by being assertive.
I stand facing an odd double-standard. If people don’t want to date me because of the kind of personality I have I’m just fine with that. If they don’t want to date me because of how I look I feel bad. I think learning to accept how I look might actually present a real honest-to-god challenge. If only I could learn to find less attractive people more attractive – hormones just don’t work that way do they.
At the end of the day I spose I should probably just feel lucky. Regardless of any number of romantic advance failures, I have a million good friends and a lion’s share of opportunity in front of me, backed by relative privilege and comfort. Yes, let’s go with that.

Bing It On

I took a stab at the Bing It On search engine comparison that MS has been pushing lately. I think I’m probably more niche than the average searcher. Here’s what I did:

Jeff Ginger – which search engine better presents me? – Google, lower rank of that stupid “Jeff and Ginger” page
Pouperi – this word is very difficult to spell (correct version is potpourri, apparently), which search engine gets it right? -Bing
How much cafeine is in Mountain Dew – purposefully misspelled caffeine, could either give a number or ratio? -Tie, both could not
Kayle LOL guide – how to play a character for a game I play – Google, provided a video guide in the results in addition to text guides
This is not a movie torrent – in case I wanted to illegally download this movie 🙂 – Google, gave actual useful torrents, not stupid torrent nexus ad-pits

Sorry Bing, I was willing to consider you, but you don’t work for my advanced needs 🙂

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