The Web Log of a Nobody

[bothsandneithers]

Day 5188

At the coffee shop, a customer spills a cup of water. Before anyone even looks in her direction she says, I’m sorry, and the barista responds, It’s okay, and she replies, I’m sorry, and again he says, It's okay, and again she says, I’m sorry, and he shrugs: it’s basically dry now.

The air has been so dry. When it's windy, they preemptively shut off the power to entire cities, because nobody wants another thousand homes burning down. The days are warm, even though the sun stays on the horizon. It's always in my eyes. It has likely always been at this angle, but I'm outside more this year. I notice buds on the trees, and they are on the brink of sprouting brand-new leaves. I'm not a tree expert, but I feel like the trees need more time to rest, more water to drink.

The tiny aches I feel for the budding trees and the irises that are prematurely excited for their momentary debut are accompanied by many other pangs for things I can't control.

It worries me how little people seem to be concerned about surveillance.

For example, the new traffic cameras. They track the movements of everyone, and these movements are stored in a federal database, and that database is combined with the database of footage from the cameras that people put in front of their houses, usually after they’ve accumulated too many things. A sheriff in Texas entered his reason for searching this database, and it was “had an abortion, search for female.” Searches also reveal how ICE relies on the database to track people.

I read that the most helpful thing I can do if I see someone getting taken away is to ask the person for their family's phone number, so that I can explain to them why their loved one suddenly disappeared. Of course, during this process, it's entirely possible that ICE takes a photo of me, and I am henceforth a domestic terrorist. How might this impact my life, and what cross-platform surveillance technology will enable the consequences of my actions?

When the woman spilled the water in the coffee shop, and she started apologizing and couldn't stop, I think a part of her knew that she wasn't going to be in trouble—but another part of her may have believed that she was, and has always been, the trouble. From Andrea Gibson’s poem, Hurt the Fly:

It’s kind of sweet actually, what you’ve given to believe in the goodness of the world—your own good name, your own good light, Your own wise and grown life, all traded for a galaxy that wouldn’t hurt a fly.

It's odd—these are things that are actually happening in this world: The kidnapping of another country’s leader (my first draft of writing this), the execution of Renée Good (my second draft), the execution of Alex Pretti (my third draft), and the evil directive to not believe our own eyes.

Yet, when my anxiety wakes me up in the middle of the night, for one of 10,000 reasons, my mind tries to figure out what wrong I have done to cause these bad feelings. It engages in a violent inquiry; crafting endless rebuttals to try and force the thoughts and feelings go away.

But recently, in the middle of the night, I've started to do something different, and it might actually be profound. I don't engage in the rhetoric of self-blame. Instead, I search out the bad feeling in my body. I ask: what does it look like and what does it feel like? What are its colors and where is the pain? I try and learn its shape. With tenderness and curiosity, I observe the feeling until, sometimes, like magic, the bad feeling slowly and truly dissolves. I may not fall back asleep, but, god, I am so proud of myself—for not attempting to reason out how I can fix myself.

Because I'm realizing that am not the problem.

Amy

[bothsandneithers]

Day 4985

Towards the end of dinner on the final day of thirty-nine, over a bowl of melting ice and oyster shells on the north shore of Prince Edward Island, four of us muse about the advantages of disappearing into the margins: cutting in line, shoplifting. It’s weird and it’s not weird to turn forty. Weird, because it sounds so old. Not weird, because it really doesn’t feel so old.

Someone said that reframing one’s life as a narrative in a story makes a person happier, and so I tried it. I listed out the major events of my life, henceforth: plot points. Naturally, these plot points end abruptly in the present moment. This is because I don’t know what I am in the middle of. It’s okay, though, because unlike a novel, the pages of this story keep turning, with or without the presence of tension on the pages.

Don listens to a philosophy podcast, and it recently described life as a series of two things. First, tension, and then, resolution. I joked, the way those of us with anxiety tend to, that those of us with generalized anxiety disorder “get to” live out multiple lifetimes, as we experience these tension-resolution couplets in double time, (or triple time, or maybe even more frequently): Something is at stake, and then it is resolved just in time before the next issue to surface.

Every story can benefit from more tension. Funny, though, that in a recent writing workshop, I quickly realized that not everyone shares the same expectations for what qualifies as stakes in a story. Some people need something really big to be at stake to find a story compelling; others, like me, need very little. Regardless, manufacturing stakes for the sake of a more compelling life story, oftentimes in the form of drama it seems, is tiring. Perhaps this is why, even with my predisposition to anxiety, I am beginning to prefer the opposite of tension, even if it is not an effective story telling device.

In yoga, holding poses longer is becoming less arduous. Perhaps this comes with finding space in the poses. It seems, at least, that the muscle fibers stretch to make space as I breathe. Finding this space feels indulgent.

Off the mat, as they say, I indulge in losing interest in things that were once interesting to me. I Indulge in near/far focusing fatigue and the eyeglasses accompany it. I Indulge in seeing the peonies’ bulbs slowly transform, taking note daily, and thinking, “ah, these feelings must occur in the same part of the brain as the good parts of motherhood.” Or, also maybe the hard parts, because as Mary Oliver put it, “This morning the green fists of the peonies are getting ready to break my heart.” I Indulge in the recent technological breakthroughs that make me unsure how to proceed with my career. I Indulge in observing the rise and fall of social media, and how odd, spectacular, and sad, its downfall is (“the AI bot sexually harasses its CEO and then the CEO resigns,” is basically a recent headline).

An alternative conceptualization for the thing that keeps a person turning the pages of the book, is less about stakes, and more about those little “positional shifts” in a character. These shifts may not be aligned to the major plot points. They may be subtle, but they keep the character changing, and that’s what makes a story interesting.

In Elizabeth Strout’s recent book, there is a murder. But, whenever anyone says they have read it, I like to talk to them about the part when the main character recounts that she is convinced that once she and a stranger fell in love, during a brief train ride where they barely talked, from DC to Baltimore.

No matter how delightful positional shifts without any proof points may be, the activist and scholar, bell hooks, counters the romance storyline by saying something that unfortunately sounds trite when I repeat it aloud: “I think the truth is that finding ourselves brings more excitement and well-being than anything romance has to offer, and somewhere we know that.”

Why or when do we lose ourselves?

Again, bell hooks: “Young girls often feel strong, courageous, highly creative, and powerful until they begin to receive undermining sexist messages that encourage them to conform to conventional notions of femininity. To conform they have to give up power.”

Still on Prince Edward Island, and at the bookstore of the author L.M. Montgomery who arguably crafted one of the strongest, courageous and most highly creative girls in fiction (Anne of Green Gables). The bookstore is on the outskirts of a large property, beyond trails and most people don’t know it is there, to the boredom or delight of two employees, an older woman and a college student. The college student is passing the time by recounting her summer international travels. The older woman, I think from Ireland, is delighted by the stories, but interrupts, “--when you traveled, did you feel safe?” Before there was time for an answer, now with a sense of urgency, “--did you feel safe?”

In the forest outside of the bookstore, my friends’ bird app identifies a single bird through its chirp, even though two birds are on the same branch. “They look so different,” one of my friends says, pointing to the female hiding in plain sight. Somewhere, I know that dissolving into the margin offers the opportunity for actual excitement in finding oneself. And, one can hope, that reclaiming power may sometimes take the form of pretending that the line starts here, instead of there.

Amy

[bothsandneithers]

Day 4774

Maybe if we buy croutons then we will eat more salads, she said to him as they walked through the salad and sides aisle. We smile at each other as they pass, because we remember posing the same theory of action, but the oversized bag of stale bread chunks in our pantry tells us our lives stayed the same. 

This place has most things. 

A handheld percussive device of rapid and repetitive pulses to relieve sore muscles. This, for a fraction of the price of a year of massages. It is helpful, but not the same. 

A pair of sweatpants from the clothes section in the middle of the store. They were intended for inside, but I wear them outside now, too. 

The wine is actually good here, but we stopped drinking because it only made it feel like more people were in the house during the pandemic.

A faux rug that is white and outrageously soft. It may not stay that way but it was cheap. 

A rejection of the large container of chocolate covered almonds because I recently watched a video that told me that you can gain twenty pounds in a year by a seemingly negligible uptake in daily calories. 

It’s the same algorithm that makes me think about everything else that could also be wrong with me, and my face. I look at my friends' faces and I look at my own to understand what may be different from five or ten years ago: the emergence of forehead wrinkles, frown lines, excessive eyelid skin, under eye hollowness, facial wrinkles, jowls, loose skin of the neck, nasolabial folds. The face creams near the bread section probably don’t do anything, but I think that the large bottle of magnesium glycinate does help me sleep better. 

A place to develop film. This actually might not be here anymore, but a friend who works at a library was reviewing the belongings of a senator who recently died, and the senator had film processed from this store, and it was just a lot of blurry photos of the back of a former president’s head during inauguration, and for some reason that story makes everything in life feel more accessible. 

The checkout, and the steady stream of carts, of keeping the large items and placing the others on the conveyor belt. The rapid rhythm of this work makes those who love money want to find a way to capture the productivity in a bottle and impart it on their own workers. 

A guy from work told me he saw another guy from work just eating a piece of pizza in the food court. “He was just standing there with headphones on, looking really happy. He just came here for dinner,” which makes me wonder how he got to that section without buying anything. A lot of people look like they just come here for dinner. One dollar and fifty cents for a hotdog and a beverage. A very long hotdog. A feeling of relief from everything that is pressing up against us. The place is at capacity and we share a table, and experience the pleasure of our heart not skipping a beat when we look at the receipt. For a moment we feel like we are actually supported. But, really, I think most people are rather alone, and without much meaning, because the meaning has been taken from us. But, we have our things, and for the duration of a very long hotdog, we also have other people. 

[bothsandneithers]

Day 4612

On a snowy morning, Boulder’s flatirons looked as if they were dusted with powdered sugar, and fifteen kids gathered in the library basement to play a game where they generated Dr. Seuss-like sentences.

The game went like this: A small cabinet with little drawers sat atop a table. Each drawer was labeled with one of the unique fifty words from Green Eggs and Ham. Inside were little slips of paper, each bearing a word and the word that followed it in the book – its friend. The drawer for 'Sam' contained seventeen slips, as the word appeared that many times, its friend most often being 'I'. In contrast, the 'I' drawer held 83 slips, reflecting many different companions – sometimes 'am', but also 'would', 'do', and others.

The process for generating new sentences was straightforward. We'd start by selecting a word from the cabinet -- say, "Here." Then we'd open that word's drawer and pick out one of the slips, reading the word pair inscribed on it – "Here or."

Next, we'd move to the drawer labeled "or" and choose another slip to continue the chain, perhaps "or there." Continuing this way, drawing one slip after the next, a sequence unfolds:

"Here or" “or there” "there I" "I will" "will not" "not like" "like them" "them on" "on a" “

By stringing together these word pairs from Green Eggs and Ham, we created new sentences in the spirit of Dr. Seuss, such as:  "Here or there, I will not like them on a boat!” The little library patrons then illustrated each sentence as they crafted their own Green Eggs and Ham fan fiction book. 

My goal of this AI literacy program, that was originally created for kids, but has since been adopted for some adult programs, was simple: to demonstrate that language models are not magic, nor are they new.  

By the end of the activity, the kids understood why the sentences sounded as if Dr. Seuss himself had written them - because all the words came from the same book. (They responded with a knowing tone, as if they didn't appreciate having their intelligence questioned.)

This led them to consider whether their newly illustrated books meant they were essentially "stealing" from Dr. Seuss. To this, they collectively and emphatically responded "No!"  They then imagined how the sentences would become even more varied and unexpected if all the words from every book in the entire library were included in the cabinet's drawers. 

Of course, large language models differ from this tiny cabinet model. The large language models contain so many more words, and those words have far more complicated relationships with many other friends. The words are transformed into lists of numbers, and the numbers represent different locations in space, and the lists of numbers that are similar to one another in meaning are closer together; the lists of numbers less similar in meaning are further apart. The model learns how to do better, based on feedback from humans. The model, its input and output, all probably undergo other undisclosed processing. 

Taken together, these models seem greater than their parts; many times the text generated feels disturbingly close to something a human would write. Of course, the model can be wrong, but In my opinion, that is its saving grace. 

Prior to 2022's release of ChatGPT, earlier language models were far less capable, but could still interact with human users in strange ways. 

In 2021, while on a cross-country flight from San Francisco to Charlotte -- in that rarefied space where the norms around crying in public are suspended -- I read an article about someone who prompted an earlier model by feeding it “example utterances” from his fiancée who had suddenly passed away. In doing he was able to have new and continued conversations with her. 

Even though I don’t think I could collect examples of the syntax and semantics of the perfect utterances of my dear friends who are no longer here, I do get it – why not leverage this technology to at least somewhat attend to an ache for which there is no real solution?

Yet, for now at least, I instead rely on the non-linear nature of time and existence to bring comfort; as Vonnegut said, “when a person dies, they only appear to die. They are still very much alive in the past … All moments past, present and future have always existed, always will exist.”  The actions, words, and essence of those who have passed away are accessible not through models, but simply through that feeling that they are still here. 

But at the same time, it is interesting how state-of-the-art language models, trained on seemingly all available data, are at least somewhat reminiscent of Vonnegut's musings on the simultaneous existence of all moments, in that, sometimes it seems like every permutation of text already exists. 

It's as if by ingesting enough written works, these models, to some extent, have rendered the "Library of Babel'' of all possible word combinations. This idea is easier to buy into if one finds unimaginative yet coherent text satisfactory. Sometimes when we watch movies on Netflix, or we read a document, we suspect that it was written by chatGPT, and for no other reason than it seems uninspired. (This is why Resident Alien stands out as a shining show in these strange times: there’s no chance a model could predict the next word that comes out of that alien’s mouth.)

We are still exploring the possible uses of these models. I employ them when I need to write something that I don’t feel like writing, or when I want to explore technical concepts that would otherwise be met with condescension by male coworkers. Of course, there are so many other uses that are nefarious, but I don’t really think about those. 

The movie Oppenheimer reminds me of historical conversations that resonate with both the current discourse and the discussions I heard growing up. Both of my grandfathers were physicists at the Los Alamos Laboratory. At home, one had enough spare parts to probably build a hundred ham radios. The other had a chalkboard with mathematical proofs as the focal point of the kitchen table. Both activities seem like unusual ways to unwind after work—habits that didn’t carry on with me. (In my free time, I watch Resident Alien or recommend it to others.)

Being born into the conversations of the atomic bomb, I was often exposed to unprompted rebuttals to counter-arguments I never heard; rebuttals which included how the bomb saved lives, and how someone with more nefarious intent would have built it first if we didn’t. 

Similar arguments are recurring now; again largely in the hands of men, and again in secrecy. The head of OpenAI recently resigned with the following parting words: “Building smarter-than-human machines is an inherently dangerous endeavor. OpenAI is shouldering an enormous responsibility on behalf of all of humanity,” which is a line that sounds like it will be in a movie someday. Other leaders in the field bemoan this dramatic take: We have yet to achieve the intelligence of a cat.

I’m not really invested in either side of this argument right now.  I don’t know how important it is to debate how close or far away we are from “artificial general intelligence,” because the people who are in love with money are poking around at the models. They aren’t curious about how they work, but rather, they are trying to estimate an acceptable level of degradation in service and quality that would be tolerated by stakeholders. Then, whether or not the technology is up for the task, they begin to replace people. But they don’t replace people in a manner that releases them from their record high household debt.

In some ways, this all feels familiar; it's reminiscent of how social media was introduced to us. Most of us never understood what was happening and certainly never considered that we were, in fact, the product. Once again, technology is being pressed upon us. If all the text has already been written, then maybe we could know how this ends. However, I worry that the same technology that is getting us into unknown territory doesn't have the right pattern of words to guide us through it. 

At the end of the library session, a young patron approached me to further clarify the suggestion that we may be stealing the works of Dr. Suess, as it seemed to weigh on his conscience. “I don’t think we are stealing,” he said. “I think that we are just paraphrasing,” he countered, as he grappled to understand this phenomenon of predicting the next word in a sentence, based on some context of what comes before, and why it may be bad and why it may be fun. I hope he continues to think about it. 

What worries me most right now is that the voices of those who could make sense of what is happening—those who can understand how these models might impact their experiences of love, work, and oppression—are being excluded. Regardless of if the technology is more akin to parroting Dr. Suess, or something possessing more emergent intelligence, most people are being left out of the conversation,  even though they have every right to be part of it. 

[bothsandneithers]

Day 4293

It feels weird to be these three things at the same time: childfree, a remote worker, and priced out of the housing market. The first is a choice, the second is happenstance, and the third is an artifact of late-stage capitalism. Yet, taken all together, they impact my sense of belongingness. In other words, they make me feel like I don’t know where I should be.

Of course, also taken together, they have their own set of affordances: an abundance of time to be spent awake, to be spent asleep, to be whoever I want to be, to do whatever I want to do, and to live wherever I want to live. This last one is tricky because it is hard to know where to live without some type of purpose or sense of belonging (most traditionally induced by children, a job, or a mortgage). In these circumstances, one has to think differently about what it means to belong. But, that is difficult, and so – at least right now – we return home to Colorado.

Here, I can save money because it feels problematic to be almost forty with no tangible assets, or, admittedly, no prospect of tangible assets. At this point in the conversation, somebody will interject, but Don owns a house! Surprisingly, my first wave of indignation triggered by this comment isn’t a feminist rage: of the assumption that I somehow subsume my partner’s wealth. But, rather of workers’ rage: of the acceptance that it is no longer feasible for a single person to own a piece of property, and of the quiet acquiescence that it only makes sense to share this investment with at least one other person.

Per the recommendations, the downpayment should now match my childhood home’s cost. This, then, allows me to pay a monthly payment that would make me “mortgage burdened” for almost the remainder of my life. I’m not going to do that. Nonetheless, I do save. Right now, I save to at least be able to eat food and rent shelter when I am old. But the goalposts have shifted so much for those without inherited wealth that trying to secure the future feels silly.

But, to disrupt these spiraling thoughts, I will say that home, no matter who owns it, is a privilege, and saving for the future, no matter how bleak, is also a privilege.

This sounds dramatic, but I miss California the way I grieve for those who are still alive, but are no longer in my life. The air that is not too hot and full of oxygen. The plum trees, the lemon trees, the lime trees, the orange trees, the bay leaf trees, the redwood trees. The soft ferns and the soft moss. The lightness of both the low altitude and of moving through a space where nothing sad has ever happened to you. The short drive to the coast, where as soon as you emerge from the forest and you turn left, the sun glistens off the ocean, and especially at the tallest points of the emerging waves, and causes you to utter, “we are so lucky.” If you go down the coast, you think that this is the most beautiful place in the world, and you stop for coffee and artichokes and beach walks and cafes overlooking cliffs. If you go up the coast, you think that this is the most beautiful place in the world, and the redwoods become wider and the air becomes cooler and the people become more sparse. You pick up soft, round glass at the beach and you stop for coffee in the forest where you immediately note that the vibe has shifted and you are now in another county. You go all the way up to the lost coast where the salt air, loud waves, and empty beaches make it feel prehistoric.

I don’t think that Colorado feels soft nor light, but I still appreciate its madness. The mountains are tall, and they are almost all bald because living things like trees can’t survive at their height. They aren’t even bald at the tippy-top, but rather, like, two-thirds of the way up, which infers a towering height that you become used to if you were born here. Summer activities always involve poor sleep. They sometimes involve hiking over the saddle, or the point where the one tall, bald mountain intersects with another tall, bald mountain, and you then continue down a ravine. If there is a trail, it doesn’t show, because there is still a lot of snow and you never know if you will step into an inch of it or three feet of it. The payoff is when you find yourself making morning coffee under the reflection of peaks on a high altitude lake, or accidentally falling asleep in the middle of the day because the mountain breeze rustles the tall pine trees in a way that makes your brain feel like nothing else exists, or making a short visit from your dispersed campsite to hot springs where you watch the trillion stars emerge faintly, and when you blink, they boldly reclaim their space in the sky.

Even in the shadow of the madness of the very tall mountains, there is a good quietness right now, and a space to attend to things that I know would make me happy but I didn’t have the time, money, or willingness before. This includes physical therapy to finally be able to run without pain. And also writing classes. As it turns out, an upside of years of navigating various flavors of criticism during PhD school, makes learning to craft and share fiction feel like a delightful undertaking (at least at this point).

Even as I indulge in the world of characters, perspectives, suspense and tension, mathematical frameworks still help me make sense of at least my human condition. Not having children, not having anywhere to be, and not having any security in my future shapes the vector space that I think that I occupy: (1, 1, 1). I use this to compare my location to others, which is either (0, 0, 0) or some combination of 1s and 0s. This makes me feel far away from most people and places. Of course, there are more dimensions, and the features aren’t always binary. It will just take some time to figure out – and, lucky for me, time is an asset I can stake claim to.

[bothsandneithers]

Day 4062

The first thing that I do on New Year’s Day in 2023 is I accidentally send a photograph of a small dinner gathering to the wrong group chat – in particular, to those mutual friends not invited. I recognize my mistake immediately, and shame is there to remind me that wherever I go, and wherever the years go, there I am. I look to Don to help me understand the collateral damage of my mistake. He says that it will probably be interpreted as a celebratory greeting, and nothing more. I have come to terms with knowing that I will never actually understand how the things I say or do will land on others (no matter how hard I try to understand, and I actually do try). This is why it is so important to have at least a few people in my life who have opted to hold me in unconditional positive regard, so that when I say and do things, I can then turn to them and they can tell me if it was great, neutral, or bad. For months, I am confused by the very strong men who watch me ride my bike through the rich neighborhood on my way to work at Stanford. Then, one day, it makes sense. They are the bodyguards of Facebook’s COO. “I just realized I ride by Sheryl Sandburg’s house every day!” I announce to my younger friends. “Who?” They ask, earnestly. I drop the subject, but I still wonder if the invitation to “lean in” from someone who didn’t understand anything about the lives of her audience has made life easier for my younger friends. I honestly think, maybe, a little. My peers, or something close to that (in my mind, they all have more credibility than I do), and I eat dinner often, and often at restaurants serving food that reminds them of their home countries. A dinner is never complete until I steer us away from topics such as things Chomsky says at seminars at MIT, and onto the topic that I, for the life of me, cannot get over: How can an institution with so much money pay so little? “I’m here because my mom has money,” one friend quips and oddly brings me a little comfort that I’m not crazy. After I quit, I have coffee with my former boss in downtown Palo Alto. “You have to start speaking truth to power,” I say, speaking truth to power. Except, I don’t even know who the power is for someone in his standing, and I tell him as much. Nearby, Sam Bankman-Fried is being placed under house arrest at his parents’ house. Surprisingly unrelated to ongoing judgment days of silicon valley’s brightest, I find myself becoming disinterested in technology; more specifically, in the internet. This is a harbinger of terrible things to come to corporations built upon selling our data, because I am one of the faithful who, up until now, turned a blind eye to its problems. I am losing interest because the ratio of advertisements to actual content is insulting. Because the strategies to draw us in are, at its best, blatant and pathetic, and at its worst, unforgivingly nefarious. Because the pictures of my friends’ families are cute but do not invoke the dopamine hit that makes me come back wanting more. Because, after years of technology filling the void of the absolute bizarre fallout from the pandemic that we are just now coming to terms with, I am finding myself repeating over and over again: I just want my life back. The pandemic feels over most days, largely due to vaccines. I am grateful for them. But, from what I have read, women’s health wasn’t something heavily considered in the initial trials. I think these vaccines are a scientific milestone that should be celebrated, and I also worry that women still don’t really matter. I heavily limit my food intake for a little while, and I become smaller. But, the preoccupation that comes with avoiding food scares me, and so I stop. Generally, I’m not interested in restricting what I do in 2023, but rather, I am becoming increasingly curious as to why I do the things I do.

Amy

[bothsandneithers]

Day 3866

Maybe you first fell in love with nature when you tried to summit a small boulder, and you noticed that as you placed your palm on the rock, it was prickly, sticky -- like velcro -- and this friction assisted your assent. You learned what it means to be grounded and supported by the earth, and attempts to invoke this sensation in yoga class later in life always fall short.  Or maybe you snuck away from your family while camping, and found yourself in the middle of a small meadow and their voices faded comfortably out of reach. This is where you learned what stillness feels like. Your life, to this point, had only been good. In some ways, you didn't even know it was good, because you didn't know what bad felt like. Even still, you knew nature was good. Or maybe you only knew bad, and so this was your first introduction to good. Or, maybe your brief life had been some combination of good and bad, which led you to know this was what you wanted. 

This is how I imagine it: 

Maybe your love of nature motivated you to have children. Experiencing nature is greater than experiencing nothingness, and this gives you the courage to conjure into existence human life. Even though systems, structures, and schedules prevent you from spending all of your time in nature, you try and find yourself there with your children as often as possible.

For instance, this summer, when you take a road trip to Yosemite. 

Maybe the first thing you do is go on a hike, because you want your children to fall in love with nature. This is miscalculated, because hikes, while occurring in nature, also consist of an absolute loss of control for small humans who don't yet possess long legs to step over rocks, nor the literacy to read a map, nor the authority to determine that it is time to turn around. Suddenly, you find yourself with children who don’t want to be in nature. They have tired eyes and restless spirits. You do too, but you can’t tell them.  You start to negotiate, and the the toy car is now accompanying the family on the trail, even though it only serves as a distraction. This is not what you imagined.

Or maybe reality is aligned with your expectations, and your child’s longing to see over the next ridge pushes you to move forward, not the other way around.

In the evening, the summer air is still warm, and the water from the slow moving river is also still warm.  The surrounding granite cliffs and waterfalls make the valley feel protected. If your children weren’t happy on the trail, they are now as they play in the water. Even to their magical, fantastical minds, they know this is otherwordly.

Your heart explodes because this is what you always wanted. You thought that life had beauty in it, and these little ones are confirming it by their sweet indulgence in something that hasn’t been manufactured by humans to catch their attention, draw them in, and leave them wanting more. Maybe you push aside the intrusive thoughts that, on average, the water levels are lower; on average, the days are hotter. Or maybe you convince yourself, in this moment, that these problems have solutions.

At dinner, maybe your kids are polite and quiet. They know how much this vacation means to you. Or maybe they are restless and tired and the food isn't great, and the restaurant that looked enviable in pictures actually just preys on hungry, tired families. The meal you envisioned isn’t happening, and your heart breaks a little. 

Or maybe, as you wait for your food, your child is still basking in the awe of the cliffs, and asks you how they were formed. Together, and with the help of a pamphlet, you learn about the creation of the rocks. There is something about the little synapses making connections between the glaciers and the volcanoes and the rock formations that overwhelm you. Maybe those little synapses were formed in your body. Then, your child says something that is genuinely funny. They tell a joke that is objectively smart, calculated, clever. This precious unit that you created just expressed in the most gentle way that they are going to develop into someone who is entirely their own. This makes your heart break again, but this time along different dimensions of the human condition, along the axes of pride and loneliness. 

Your friends ask about your family vacation to Yosemite. Maybe you organize your experience in a spreadsheet, with each row containing a key moment, accompanied by a rating, quantifying your feelings towards the event. Maybe you take the average across all the ratings, of the heart bursting moments, emotional breakdowns, and mind numbing negotiations, and you arrive at your answer: It was fine. But, "it was fine" is a rare answer for a family vacation. Such experiences can’t just be fine -- not with these gas prices. Maybe, instead, you omit the rows of events that are associated with the cost of making memories: food, money, and stress. When you do this, you are able to hedge an answer of “it was good!*” with a little footnote explaining your calculation. Or maybe, the vacation was simply good. Maybe the sum was greater than its parts, and it is hard to explain, but really, requires no explanation. 

This requires little imagination: 

Instead, maybe you are alone, or you are with one or two others. As you hike down the trail that you hiked up of your own volition, you pass one child beaming because she knows it is good, one child placated by a stuffed animal, and one child who closes their eyes as they slowly take steps up the mountain because their eyelids are one aspect of their life they can control. You note that you need to stop by the store for cheese and strawberries before heading back to camp. 

As soon as you make it back to your remote camp site, you start digging under the soil by your tent to retrieve the nice bottle of wine that you recently bought in Napa Valley. This was your juvenile version of a little wine cellar, and you hoped that the animals and weather would respect it. 

You gently pad around in your tent looking for the delicate, wine glasses that don’t belong outside, but are here because you negotiated with yourself that they are needed.

The strawberries are just as red on the insides. You learned, not so long along, that cheese is paired with wine for a reason – that the oil of the cheese can coat your mouth and then a chemical reaction occurs when you drink the wine that makes everything more delicious. The sun begins to set without hurry in the wide, unobstructed sky. You find a game to play. You sit and talk, but only by using dependent clauses because independent clauses are for topics and interlocutors that require context. 

The sun continues to set, taking up so much time and so much space. The wheat field and the vineyard are soaked by the long rays. Where you sit, the air is still and perfect and quiet.

You watch a hawk for about thirty minutes floating above you where the air is less still. Eventually, you come to the conclusion that the hawk isn’t hunting. Rather than doing what it is supposed to do, it is simply enjoying riding the waves of the high altitude currents that keep him gliding over miles of small bushes and wildlife that typically don't make the brochures. 

The sun finally dips below the horizon. But the residual sunset – of its refracted light absorbing the dirt and fire and dust particles -- remains for hours. 

And you know that this, too – at the very least – is also just fine.

Amy

[bothsandneithers]

Day 3849

In the town that is home to Facebook -- now, Meta -- there is a blood lab located in the back of a suburban grocery store. In the small office, I sit under fluorescent lights, wait for the phlebotomist, and chat with a senior couple – the wife, objectively, faring much better than her counterpart. She warns me to be careful so that my purse isn’t stolen at Trader Joes, and I make plans to avoid getting old. 

Eight vials of blood later, the schemes continue out into the sunshine of the peninsula. “There has to be a way,” I ponder, “to process just as many tests, but with less blood,” and I don’t immediately realize that this is the beginning of Elizabeth Holmes. 

It doesn’t bode well for Holmes that perhaps her best defense, or at least most effective whataboutism, comes from the fake German Heiress, who defended her own failure by saying,  “So many businesses are just a house of cards. You just don’t know about it.”  At the risk of being derisive, I have thought this same thing. I also wonder, in such cases, the extent to which misogyny is being obscured by a moral argument of protecting good and ethical business practices.  

I won’t dwell on the comparisons between Elizabeth Holmes and Anna Sorokin nor will I spend time defending them, but I will note that they both possessed something that I want. Arguably not brilliance, influence or power (at least not anymore), but they both spoke as if others would listen – and others not only listened, but they believed what was said.

It's not surprising that these women don't have many peers, and by the end of her trial, Elizabeth Holmes had three fewer. 

One woman was removed from the jury for playing sudoku. What pains me is how she created little sudoku games in her jury notebook. I can imagine doing something similar: each night, engaging in the soothing activity of drawing out a grid and a game template. In doing so, meditating on the day's arguments, and balancing this uncertainty by engaging in something for which there is a right answer.  When the judge asked if she was distracted from listening, she said no. When asked if she has been able to retain everything going on, she said, “oh yeah, definitely.” The judge didn’t believe her; he didn’t believe that she could both listen and add numbers together. 

A second woman was removed after she declared that it would weigh too heavily on her conscience if her verdict sent Elizabeth Holmes to prison. She said she was willing to sit through the deliberations, as long as she didn't have to vote. She could have simply voted not-guilty, even if guilty. Jury nullification isn’t illegal, but it requires a lack of transparency, and disregard for the rules that are needed to make the system work.

A third woman couldn’t afford to stay on the jury, and she had to return to work. I don't know her circumstances, but in this area of the country, low income is anything above something like $102,000.  They arrive at this number by ordering all the salaries of all the people from smallest to largest. They find the middle salary, and then they take 80% of that salary. Although it’s only slightly more likely to fall on the wrong side of that line, it feels impossible to land on the other side. Furthermore, at least in tech, some data makes me wonder if the pay gap in this region manifests itself in such a way that women may be more likely on average to fall below this line, while men, on average, remain above it. Regardless, women in the area experience poverty at a higher rate than men.

These are the stories of the Elizabeth Holmes trial that interest me. 

It seems that these former jurors have experienced some key variables that may explain why some women fade into the background of silicon valley: an underestimation of intellect, a propensity to punish transparency, and an exacerbation of the pre-existing pay gap. It is striking to me that, even though these women were honest, even though they were transparent, even though they were hardworking, and even though they probably spoke with the knowledge that they would be ignored, they still had to face a judge and say: 

Who I am, and who I am supposed to be, are two very different people. 

Amy 

[bothsandneithers]

Day 3595

I have been reading poetry. I never did that before; I used to find the ratio of words to em dashes disruptive to the coherence of ideas. I even read nature poems, and I think they make me feel more connected to the earth. Maybe this connection explains why I placidly stumbled upon six baby deer eating dinner in the hills near my neighborhood. Or why an adolescent one indiscreetly approached me on the trail, before making the wise decision that the trees down below were more deserving of inquiry.

Every tree is full of life in its own way (fruits, leaves, flowers). Every tree smells good in its own way.

In the evenings, we go for hikes. On the weekends, we sometimes visit the ocean, and on the way home, we stop and buy strawberries that taste the way strawberries are supposed to taste. Other times, we visit friends in San Francisco, and on the walk home, we convince ourselves that it can't be the suburbs if one can make that journey by foot and train.

I ride my bike to work, and much of the route takes me through the richest town in the country. The tree-lined roads make for a pleasant commute. For the most part, I feel safe: The signs instruct cars not to pass a bicyclist unless they have at least three feet to do so. This is necessary, because their Teslas are dangerously quiet.

We don't know many people here, so everywhere feels a little lonely. Even still, the streets of the billionaires' homes feel extra lonely. In contrast, the park by my house, always full of languages, soccer games, and friends and families who communally indulge in the perfect cool evening breeze, makes me feel a little less alone.

amy

[bothsandneithers]

Day 3494

Spring visited for a weekend in Colorado, and then it turned into summer without the consent of its inhabitants. The little air conditioner in the bedroom has to do more than what should be expected of it. It has to generate enough cold air for there to be a little extra, so that a fan in the doorway can then take what is left and try to disperse it through the rest of the little house. This little house.

A brief history of the year 2021, to-date: Both nothing has happened, and everything has happened.

The couch saw yet another five years of use in five months. I think I finally reached the bottom of the Netflix barrel. I read a few books. The fig tree grew two feet. In regular times, this would have occurred seemingly overnight. But, during these days, I cheered on each new leaf and each stem’s growth spurt, because there was little else to pay attention to.

Yet, in this little house, so many things happened. Sometimes, these things were just news stories that surfaced through a screen, and the actual origin was far away.

In January, an insurrection unfolded in the capital. Depending who you talk to, either the vice president was almost assassinated, or the whole ordeal was more of a low key and orderly march through a public building. The dichotomy of realities expressed in this moment was far too familiar for many of us, and fatigue forced us to place the event in the “to be processed later” tray of our unconscious minds.

Other things surfaced through the screen in the home, but they were nearby.

In February, one of the engines fell off as the airplane flew over Broomfield. Nobody was hurt, and everybody now has a better appreciation for the engines on a triple seven, because one of them landed in the yard of a medium-sized house, and it was just as tall, and maybe half as wide.

In March, there was a shooting at the beloved grocery store in Boulder (active voice just doesn’t sound right here). A shooting has never made me feel like this before. The “this” of the sentence is still largely unknown to me. I think that it has something to do with the magnitude of the violent act that reverberated through the community in a way that, probably on some primal level, was perceived as a threat to disrupt the fabric from which my own identity was formed.

A complicated fabric, Boulder is, but my heart ached, nonetheless. At its core, Boulder is rich and it lacks diversity. Yet, in my version of this town, I ate lunch for free, and received medical treatment at the people’s clinic on a sliding pay scale. My closest friends didn’t speak English in their homes. In my orbit of the town, the rich people never really bothered me. Only during this first half of 2021 did I realize that maybe this is because they are just trying to leverage their money into chasing after something that I was born into: An abundance of third spaces, and an adoration for nature.

Still, other events surfaced through the screen that would not make even the local news.

At the beginning of the pandemic, I read a headline about people being laid off from their jobs through the cruel replacement for human connection: Zoom. I shuddered at the thought of this inhumane act (I still do). Surely, we could find a way to avoid further disrupting lives during the pandemic. Surely, the composers of this questionable melody of eternal growth could pause their orchestra for a moment, at least for the duration of this particular crisis.

In April, those feelings of disbelief re-emerged as I sat on a video call, with fifteen other intelligent heads and their little artifacts of their lives behind them that I have affectionately grown to recognize as small indicators that they had worlds outside of these calls. Together, we learned the news that all of our jobs have been eliminated, and that human resources would schedule an online meeting with each of us to read us our rights.

In May, I was offered a job, south of San Francisco. It was a confusing decision to make for a number of reasons. One of the louder reasons: Did I want to leave my home?

In this little house, the antibodies from the vaccine have grown to be full defenders in my body. Protected and ready to go, I have found there is little more to do in this safe little harbor. There is little to do, but to identify the few belongings that have proved themselves to be useful enough to be transported across the country. With this move, hopefully one era – abundantly full of both nothingness and far too many things – is coming to an end, and another story is beginning.

Amy

[bothsandneithers]

Day 3327

I need to hurry up and write this, because I am forgetting how miserable I was. This is not part of an effort to ensure that I don't repeat this process over again (perhaps as some may be tempted to do after childbirth). Instead, this exercise is consistent with my tendency to ask my friends to describe the most uncomfortable and unfortunate parts of their vacations. Who wants to hear a story that could more succinctly be conveyed within the narrow pages of a travel brochure? To adapt this question to the present situation: Who wants to hear a series of events that could be more adequately summarized by a few pages in a student handbook?

I’m sure that someone could have a field day by drawing parallels between giving birth to a child and writing a dissertation. While this is not my story to tell, I have described my experience by drawing upon the image of a mother who harnesses supernatural strength to lift a car off of her child. The listener is then immediately confused, and I then have to clarify that, in this metaphor, I am both the mother and the child, and that the dangerous, debilitating, threat of the car, is my dissertation.

It may be more effective if I am more direct: I want everyone to know that I (as the small child) was quite miserable, and I (as the mother) accomplished something that I thought was more than I could handle.

I imagine that if a car did end up on a small child, then the entire situation would invoke so much stress on the mother that she may not ever be able to recount exactly what happened during those subsequent moments. In a different way, of course, and for reasons I am still trying to understand, I too remember very little from the summer and early fall leading up to my defense.

In the place of memories, I find myself relying on artifacts to represent months and events that I cannot recall. One such set of artifacts are the six or so issues of The Atlantic magazine that have been set aside into a small pile; each one received a small verbal promise that I would open the pages after my defense. Now, as I review the covers, I imagine that they may never be read. Below are some of the stress-inducing cover stories of these abandoned issues:

How to destroy a government: The president is winning his war on American institutions.

How QAnon is warping reality and discrediting science.

The election that could break American.

How did it come to this? Why the virus won.

In the early days of lockdown, when the virus was beginning to take hold of its victory, I read this explanation for why most of us are not thriving right now: In order to flourish, one must be able to play several different human roles over the course of the day -- something that is arguably impossible when we rarely leave our dwellings.1

After reading this explanation, I starting clinging to the argument that the overwhelming reason why completing my dissertation had become so difficult was because of an absence of variability in my human roles. Even though none of my other typically played human roles were terribly interesting (commuter, friend, peer, coffee shop customer, gym patron), each one offered me respite from the singular human role that I was stuck with: The neurotic graduate student.

The neurotic graduate student human role was difficult to be around, because she was always worried about so many things: that her arguments weren't good enough, that there were errors in her code, that she should be able to understand certain concepts that were still evading her, that more time-intensive analyses were still required, and that overturning new stones would reveal that previous analyses or assumptions were wrong or incomplete. More simply, the neurotic graduate student human role was always worried that she was not good enough.

This persona can be debilitating, and I found that the act of writing a dissertation included a lot of time not actually writing, but rather, a substantial amount of time was devoted to sitting in paralyzing anxiety, not able to do anything.

Even though many of the weeks leading up to my due date were a blur, I do recall choosing this time to watch One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Perhaps I did this because misery loves company. I decided to view this odd movie choice in a particular odd format, whereby I watched the movie in 15 minute intervals, across several nights, as if savoring a segmented Toblerone.

I watched the first few segments in stoic sympathy with the characters, but I eventually found myself amused when Jack Nicholson realizes that almost all the residents are “voluntary”:

You can go home any time you want? You're bullshittin' me. He's bullshittin' me right? Cheswick, you're voluntary? Scanlon? Billy, for chrissakes you must be committed, right? I mean, you're just a young kid, what're you doin' here? … I mean, you guys do nothing but complain about how you can't stand it in this place here and then you haven't got the guts just to walk out?

I remember smiling for a few moments at this scene; it was a gentle reminder that I invited this stress into my life, and that I could, indeed, bring it all to an end if I really wanted to. The smile was fleeting, and felt similar to when you are crying, and your friend says something that is true and funny to try and make you feel better, and you laugh and it feels really good but it also reminds you of how bad you feel, and how far away you are from feeling like yourself.

Yet again, someone else might have a field day drawing parallels between today’s academic environment and a fictional mental institution from the 1970s. I can't do this, in part because, aside from that one scene, I don’t actually remember what happens in the movie.

I did, however, voluntarily lock myself in a hotel room to write, because the suffocating familiarity of my home was preventing me from generating any new sentences. A sticker had been placed between the room's door and its frame, denoting that the room had been thoroughly cleaned. Surely this was only intended to be a symbolic seal to provide some peace of mind that it was safe and acceptable to be outside of one's house.

Once inside the room (that seemed no cleaner than in the absence of a pandemic), I did not immediately initalize my plan to write incessantly. Instead, I desultorily found myself on a support group on reddit that was dedicated to "PhD stress." Feeling compelled to write anything that was not my dissertation, I made a post targeted at those who were also writing their dissertations during a pandemic:

What you are doing right now is really, really hard.

Under "normal" conditions, you would be facing a sheer amount of uncertainty with your work (e.g., not knowing how analyses will turn out, not knowing what your advisor will think of your progress, etc). Under these new conditions, you are dealing with the uncertainty of the state of the world (pandemic), the government (upcoming election -- if in the US), as well as your dissertation! These are absurd conditions, whereby any one of these things would undoubtedly have negative impacts on your well being.

For many, you went from having an entire support group of peers, to sitting in your bedroom, day in and day out, trying to come up with novel ideas and effective ways to communicate these ideas.

As such, I urge you to take care of yourself. I urge you to give yourself permission to ignore unwanted criticism that, while in other circumstances you may work hard to address. Now, in this current context, just don't. Give yourself permission to stop perpetuating the idea that your work and your psyche should not be impacted by the fact that nothing is the same right now.

Defend your ideas, yes. And do good work (-- nah, do good enough work). But know that you are defending your work under surreal circumstances. Account for this when you wake up tomorrow, move four feet from your bed to your desk, and try to do the same thing over again.

Overnight, this became the most popular post in the subreddit’s history. Admittedly, there aren’t a lot of members in this particular community (it should also be noted that this post was recently surpassed in popularity by a post entitled, “PhD has destroyed my mental health”). Still, several users responded with something along the lines of, “Thank you. I needed to hear this.”

I needed to hear those words too -- that is one reason why I wrote them. But I was also desperate to play another human role; one who ambiguously could have already made it to the other side of the dissertation defense, and was able to offer encouragement to those close to the finish line.

Soon after my hotel stay, where I eventually did find motivation to write, I was set to defend my dissertation. This was met with the opportunity to transform into another human role: someone who was nearing the end of her graduate student career, and had no choice but believe that her work was good enough.

The dissertation defense took place via video conferencing. I sat at my desk in my make-shift office in my bedroom.

Five kind and smart professors asked me kind questions that made me feel smart.

And that was it.

After the defense, the stress began to fade away. I recalled the wise words that my therapist once said, “It’s remarkable how, after the defense, people just won’t need anything from you anymore.” I made edits to my dissertation and submitted my final version. I dismantled my “home office” and replaced it with a reading chair and a plant. A new issue of The Atlantic arrived in the mail, and now with time, cognitive space, and optimism that this issue would not be as depressing as the others, I started to read.

I opened to an article about a historian who predicts that the United States is about to experience a terrible decade. He blames this on the overproduction of elites. ("There are still only 100 Senate seats, but more people than ever have enough money or degrees to think they should be running the country.") These elites find alternative ways to disrupt the status quo to influence people; the elite overproduction "creates counter-elites, and counter-elites look for allies among the commoners.”2

Although the article was compelling, it did not feel like appropriate material, as one does not work tirelessly through graduate school to then be compared to Steve Bannon.

I continued to the next article which was about young adults (or old children) who post things to a social media platform I’ve never used (TikTok). Not only do they create short videos that are viewed by millions of viewers, but there is an entire industry of these individuals, and they curate their content together in the mansions that they cohabitate (I am yet to grasp the monetization of this endeavor).3

I settled into my chair. Finding myself enjoying my new human role as a casual observer to an unknown world, I thought: What an absolutely absurd life pursuit.

xx,

Amy, PhD

https://nplusonemag.com/issue-37/the-intellectual-situation/epilogue-for-a-way-of-life/ ↩︎

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/12/can-history-predict-future/616993/ ↩︎

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/12/charli-damelio-tiktok-teens/616929/ ↩︎

[bothsandneithers]

Day 3158

Everything is the same – until it’s not.

I use this phrase in response to all types of breaking news: a company acquisition, a divorce, a medical diagnosis, a new haircut.

It’s not an inherently comforting aphorism, unless stoic observations are calming to you under the duress of change. It hasn’t been of comfort to me lately.

In the first month of quarantine, there was a book series that did give me comfort. (Upon its completion, the the loss of that world exacerbated all of my feelings of loss within my world.) In the last book, there is this quote that seems to be a more sophisticated take on a similar idea:

There are moments when what exists on the edges of our lives, and which, it seems will be in the background forever – an empire, a political party, a faith, a monument, but also simply the people who are part of our daily existence – collapses in an utterly unexpected way, and right when countless other things are pressing upon us.1

I miss the people who were part of my daily routine, even if I am left guessing their names.

I miss Hannah from the bus. We used to be on the same commuting schedule to Boulder, and we got to talking around this time last year, when eroding soil split the highway wide open. We shared concerns about not knowing how long our commute would be disrupted, or if the crack would ever be repaired.

For a few months, traffic was diverted to a single lane. On average, the commute time was about 10 minutes longer. At the time, it was a notable disruption in routine. What if I told you that eight months later, this bus service would be suspended, and instead of going to an office, spring turns into summer (which will turn into fall) as you sit in a makeshift office that was created by partitioning off five feet of your bedroom?

After that brief moment of uncertainty that solidified our bond as commuters, every time she would see me, she would greet me with, “Hi, Amy!” Out of fear of saying the wrong name, I would respond, “Hello!” Sometimes we would talk, and other times she would get distracted by her co-worker who also rode the bus, and for whom she was always really happy to see.

I bet she misses him. Zoom happy hours might just make her feel even more alone.

I miss Sherri from barre class. I think she was somewhat new to Denver, but she was right at home in that building. I never spoke to her, but she somehow managed to be the social architect of the class, and she engineered a space that put everyone at ease. She always asked about people’s vacations when they returned from international travel. What if I told you that most countries would soon close their borders to us because we don’t have enough self-control to control a virus?

I wonder if she is risking air particle transmission to be in her church. Maybe she doesn’t actually think of isometric exercise as her form of worship. Maybe her name isn’t even Sherri.

Our Daily Existence

About one-hundred and fifteen days have evaporated into thin air, and I have very little to show for myself. Days bleed into nights that bleed into days that bleed into nights.

Nine pm is when it is cool outside. Yoga now takes place on a tiny piece of concrete in the backyard. I used to go to a studio in Boulder, but that place permanently closed. I used to go to a studio in Denver, but that place also permanently closed. Now I rotate through a set of twenty-five free guided sessions on my phone.

I’m in the final resting pose of savasana. The instructor says something along the lines of: you have been spending so much time focusing on your breath, now just let your breath return to you naturally. I look up at the overhanging power cords that stretch from all of our houses to to the main set of wires in the alley. From there, the wires continue onward to an unspecified location that I never wondered about until now.

My breath returns to me, and I notice how the cords partition the sky into a number of different arbitrary geometric shapes. Right above me is a tiny little sliver, containing just a few stars that are bright enough to be seen through the air pollution. Perhaps they were a bit brighter a couple months ago, before everything started opening up again.

Countless other things are pressing upon us

Somewhere to the right of me is a large rhombus-shaped cord design, aggregating the city east of my house. This includes Capitol Hill, where the streets were recently filled with protesters and tear gas, when the lock-down turned to curfew.

It’s true – I have been spending so much time focusing on my breath. When I breathe now, I run the risk of expelling droplets of a pernicious virus that can do something terrible to somebody else’s lungs. I’m also focused on the discourse that is not new, but is trending: that by breathing, by merely being, I act as a minimizing force on somebody else’s existence.

Some of us sit with these realities of privilege, and we don’t know what to do.We stay inside and become increasingly weird and neurotic. But, we are also economically privileged, and so we have therapists, and our therapists remind us that we can have all the privilege in the world, but that doesn’t mean that we aren’t depressed.

The protests have drifted to the south of Denver, to a police department where each day they find new ways to exemplify brutality.

Hopefully things are changing.

The proportion of positive test results are increasing everywhere.

Things are definitely changing.

I know a woman on Facebook who believes that masks are a form of tyranny.

Things will never change. Alternatively, this will accelerate the aforementioned change.

Thirty-percent of people missed their housing payment in July.

What is about to happen?

I think that my aphoristic insight is inaccurate. Rather, everything has some rate of change. But it is oftentimes slow enough that, due to a combination of ignorance, indifference, and distraction, we just don’t pay attention until it becomes very apparent that things aren’t the same anymore.

xx,

Amy

ps - it’s my birthday!!

The Story of the Lost Child, Elena Ferrante ↩︎

[bothsandneithers]

Day 3047

The three reasons why this essay may not interest you: (1) I reference not one, not two, but three books, (2) I provide a non-normative, self-indulgent, and tortured perspective of not knowing whether or not I want children, and (3) I summarize and apply Buddhists teachings through a Western lens, in which I undoubtedly get things wrong.

Aside from this introduction, I cannot think of a more effective way to quickly discourage the interest of readers than by first stating the name of an author. For example, if I started with: Jorge Luis Borges once wrote a short story called the Library of Babel, then you would probably stop reading.

And, to be clear, I almost stopped reading, because I found the story to be incredibly difficult to understand. But, the ideas that I did understand, I really liked: Everything that will ever exist in the universe is contained in a vast library of books that are each about 400 pages in length. That is, all the possible permutations of character sequences that have ever been, and ever will be written, already exist. As such, Anna Karenina may be located on a library shelf next to thousands of volumes of books that contain complete gibberish, and it just so happens that the sequences of letters that comprise Anna Karenina actually makes sense.  [1]

Within this Library of Babel, then, we can find stories that have already been written, and solutions to problems that have not yet been realized. (Someone joked that my dissertation was already written, and that I just have to find it.)

I think the entire internet serves as its own Library of Babel, because you can search for ideas that you want validated, and someone, undoubtedly, would have experienced those exact thoughts before: not + having + children + is + not + selfish.

Even though there are twice as many search results for, “not having children is selfish,” the internet acts in a way to make it feel like someone else is experiencing my experience. This feeling recently accompanied me into a physical library, when I noticed a book that had recently been returned. If I’m not mistaken, I had checked out and returned the exact book.

This shared experience of reading the same book as someone initiates feelings of camaraderie; there is -- at best -- an unassuming intimacy that comes with reading the same book as someone else (at worst, an assuming intimacy). But, the way the book had fallen into the deposit shelf, among all of the others, made it feel like a particularly vulnerable moment. The book, lain flat yet elevated by all of the other previously returned and disheveled books, couldn’t hide its title: Motherhood.

Motherhood is cast as a thirty-six year old woman’s meandering thoughts on whether or not she should have a child and, in effect, become a mother. As I looked at the cover, and recalled the cathartic experience of reading through the pages of someone else’s tortured pain of trying to figure what to do, my feelings of camaraderie with the unknown library member were quickly promoted to a feelings of empathy.

I was probably projecting, but at that moment, my heart hurt for the previous reader. In my mind, a thirty-something year old woman had returned the book, after exploring her doubts of trusting her intuition, and her fears of making the wrong decision. She recalled every envious moment she experienced when looking at a mother who had decided to become one. She felt every pang of guilt for not being a normal daughter or sister, and every brief moment of terror that accompanied liberated moments, because what if this freedom is short-sighted? She recounted how she feels as if she disappearing into the shadows of society, where each silver hair and unfertilized egg makes us one day closer to becoming completely ignorable.

Acknowledging the pain in other people’s lives is one way to become a more loving and kind person. To know that my suffering isn’t unique to me is a way to overcome suffering. It’s difficult to practice this, because pain tends to feel unlike anything else. But, acknowledging that life is painful for other people actually makes it less painful. This is what I have come to understand it from the interpretations of Buddhist teachings I have read.

I have also read of another way to reduce suffering, which is is to acknowledge both the good moments and the bad moments, but to not assign meaning or worth to either of these experiences. Instead, try to be in the moment with these situations as they arise, and then just let them pass. In doing so, we stop craving certain thoughts and experiences while rejecting others (such behavior causes suffering).

These practices seem to work. I have noticed that when I am around children, I can soak up their joy, brilliance, and curiosity, while not perseverating on whether or not I should have one.

While these interactions used to introduce a mudslide of thoughts -- This is wonderful, I need a baby in my life! Do I need a baby in my life? What is wrong with me if I don’t want a baby in my life? I thought I always wanted baby in my life  -- recently, they haven’t. Instead, I don’t assign any meaning to these interactions, and as the moment passes, I quickly forget about it, and I am not left stinging.

I should be honest. It’s not only meditation that has removed my suffering surrounding the choice of having children. A series of recent circumstances has made me completely uninterested in having children: (1) A pandemic, (2) self-quarantine, and (3) a very small house.

In other words, my current source of suffering isn’t related to future decisions. Right now, it is difficult to ignore the present moment. The present moment contains, if we are lucky, at least four walls, and if we are luckier, a laptop from which our keystrokes and ideas are -- for reasons I don’t quite understand -- performed in exchange for currency.

Sometimes, during the endless hours inside, we sit and we panic as we read about Europe, and the impending tidal wave that will hit us, probably in about three days. We look at charts and graphs, and explore what the denominator of a mortality rate really should be, and weigh the importance of interpreting the numbers in either relative or absolute terms. We are also bored, isolated, tired, and missing other people and our morning routines.

And it feels like nobody is feeling these feelings. But literally, everyone, except those who thrive in self-isolation, are feeling these feelings.

It might be too much to heed the instructions of not assigning value to our thoughts, and it might feel like an unproductive activity to acknowledge how much everyone else is suffering right now.

But, if we can’t do those things, then one thing that we can do is look into our refrigerators, and see what food we have. Then, we can go online and combine these foods to form a search: kale + spaghetti

When the search results are returned, perhaps we can take comfort in finding that not only has it been done before, but it has been done with garlic and parmesan.

xx,

Amy

Somebody took the time to make this idea more concrete, and created a virtual representation of the library. You can browse the library, or search for particular strings of text, and it shows you where that string is located in both the page of the book, and where the book is located in the library: https://libraryofbabel.info/

[bothsandneithers]

Day 3021

As a summer intern in Washington DC, I was intent on leaving the city on the weekends, because: “Everything is so squished together here that you can be anywhere in like two hours.” If the truth is generous towards imprecise language, then this statement does hold some merit, given the close proximity of neighboring states and geographic boundaries of the east coast. The statement, however, does not hold when accounting for traffic.

While en route to Chesapeake Bay for a weekend of swimming in questionably clean water, being engrossed at the sight of slithering water snakes, and eating crab sandwiches, a rule of the natural world was broken: As we inched towards the Chesapeake Bay bridge, the estimated time of arrival increased. This phenomenon, of becoming further away from something the closer you get, has occurred in two contexts in my life: first, while sitting in DC traffic, and second, while writing a dissertation.

My dissertation is creeping along because academic writing is hard (and perhaps in accordance with the laws of dissertating, is becoming increasingly more difficult over time), and I tend to go off-topic. What I should do in a manuscript is make an argument: explain the importance of my work, maybe even introduce counter points to quiet the critical reader, precisely document methods, and finally do some legwork to demonstrate why my findings are a contribution to the field. It is important that the whole thing is coherent, and, well, oftentimes it is not.

We crept to the toll at the foot of the bridge, and at this point, everything changed. It’s as if we had moved into a different dimension, away from the time vortex nightmare of the last four hours, and into somewhere else where everything started moving really quickly.

We were suspended high above the ground, and the water was shimmering in the summer evening light, and all the cars ahead of us had dissipated in the way that traffic unexplainably sometimes does. As I looked to my right, I saw a strange, almost anachronistic event. But, instead of a mismatch of an object and time period, it was a mismatch of an object and space.

That is, rather than a small sea plane passing by the bridge, it was instead something akin to a raft. The raft must’ve had wings, but I don’t remember. At first, I thought that it was a mattress, but that would be even more absurd.

Another thing that I have learned from academic writing is that I’m not supposed to use colloquial phrases, even though I really like to. If I were describing this boat-plane using my academic words, then I would not describe the captain-pilot as an individual who was just fucking standing there. And I don’t use the word as an intensifier for disdain or vulgarity, but rather as an intensifier for the word “standing” -- like, he could not have been more just standing around on the disheveled, imbalanced boat. A boat whose fate seemed equal parts likely to be determined by either the hill it was barreling towards, or the unsustainable angle at which it was positioned. The captain-pilot’s disposition was so lackadaisical, and so contrary to both his present danger and to the uptight-caravan of east coast drivers from which I had emerged.

Every so often I think about that event and ask Don, “Do you remember that one time we saw that boat in the air, and not in the water?”

“Yeah!” He scoffs, recalling the inanity of the moment. “What was that even?!”

“I don’t know!”

I don’t know, because I don’t want to know. I don’t want the scientific argument. I just want to be reminded about those few moments when I was suspended in time and space, and to think that at some point, I will exit this dissertation time warp, pay my dues and pass that toll. Only then I will have time to utterly and completely just stand around, knowing full well that it might be an equally incoherent and nonsensical scenario, but with some luck, at least it may be a bit more whimsical.

xx, 

Amy 

[bothsandneithers]

Day 2823

It’s my birthday! 

After this year, I will be labeled as “geriatric,” in the event that I ever become pregnant. This isn’t insight into my family planning; I’m just taking notice of that line in the sand that seems to be moving towards me. 

And, it’s not an entirely arbitrary line, according to science, which makes this particular phrase one of those cruel instances where nature is complicit in patriarchy’s semantics that, at best, can be interpreted as: let’s be gentle with her, and at worst: she is irresponsible, susceptible, and feeble. 

Anyway, in the same manner that parents sometimes update the world on their child’s development, this is where I am at: 

Likes (Amusements)

- last minute dinner plans

- shouting at cars while biking in the bike lane

- running far, not fast; uphill, not downhill

Dislikes (Disillusionments)

- The seemingly willful underestimation of both the difficulty and value of gathering high quality human intelligence in the endeavor of improving artificial intelligence.

- Every overarching power system that has managed to seep down into our psyches, and, with words, we either make others feel invisible or are made to feel invisible.

Recent Milestones

- Managed to spend the equivalent of a used, but reliable, Toyota Corolla on a single tooth in dental work.

- Was told by an editor of a journal that my writing style is too “loose and ad hoc” for his readership. The upshot of this is that it is my new favorite phrase, and it can be used to describe almost anything, from soup to yesterday’s bus driver. 

- Shows curiosity, and tries to get things out of reach. 

(That last one is actually a milestone for a six-month-old baby; which I guess could be interpreted as an instance of arrested development, depending on your world view)

[bothsandneithers]

Day 2775

To arrive at this particular gas station: Take i-25 past Ikea, through Castle Rock, Colorado Springs and Pueblo, and then turn right onto the old i-25 to Walsenburg. Here, like in most other gas stations and grocery stores in Colorado, you can now purchase full-strength beer -- as opposed to the prohibition era “three-two beer” (3.2% alcohol by weight), which used to be the only permissible beer sold outside of liquor stores. But, while the change in legislation was state-wide, not all gas stations carry a particular Apricot Ale beer that I like.

The guy behind the cash register reacted similarly when he saw it, “I love this stuff! I used to buy it in Denver!”

“Yeah! That’s where I’m coming from!” I said, with enthusiasm that surprised me. Though this trip wasn’t motivated by a recent fallout with the city of Denver, a planned three days of solitude happened to dovetail nicely with mounting disappointment of the recent election.

A few years before state lawmakers updated the alcohol laws in Colorado, Denver implemented an “urban camping ban” that prohibits tarps, sleeping bags and tents in public -- in effect, criminalizing someone who puts a blanket over themselves trying to stay warm, and in turn, making it illegal to experience homelessness.

That sounds cruel. I want to think that most people I know would agree.

However, most residents didn’t vote to repeal the ordinance when they had the opportunity to do so this month. Instead, only 19% of us did, making me wonder: Do a small number of us just conceptualize human rights differently than the rest?

It is also worth noting that the mayor that signed the ordinance into law has credible accusations of sexual harassment against him, but still managed to receive more votes than any other candidate in this present election.

It seems, then, that the voters of Denver, though critical towards the national political landscape, recalibrated their moral code for which they hold laws and politicians to at a local level. And, I’m not shy to decry this hypocrisy in public places.

One such locale in which I rebuked the “classist rhetoric” of supporting the urban camping ban was while standing in the vestibule of the Whole Foods, a place that has its own classist implications, ranging from the upscale prices (preventing many from being able to afford its food) to the powerful, seemingly above-the-law conglomerate owning it (which paid no federal income taxes in 2018, for example). This juxtaposition of not affording food and being too big to fail nicely signifies late stage capitalism, where people have too little and corporations have too much. Yet, I still choose to spend my money there, in turn doing my part in sustaining the mechanisms that spur on inequality.

Even though my friend graciously did not call me out on my unfortunate setting for my diatribe, the discomfort felt in our silence would have been eased by someone coming onto the intercom and saying, “HEY! You’re part of it!” Overturning money tables while simultaneously making a Venmo request for Matthew to pay you back for lunch dampens the cause: Let’s fix you, as long as the solution ensures that I still have mine.

And with that, I shirked out of town with my frustration and complicitness in tow.

After you stop at the gas station in Walsenburg, you drive for a little while and you get to the vistas of the Spanish Peaks, which takes you over a friendly mountain pass, and on the descent you turn left instead of going straight. As you continue on the narrow and hilly road, the mountains are mostly in the rear view mirror, with some smaller hills in the periphery. Silhouettes of canyons and the desert are in the foreground, but it’s still green near the Rio Grande, and its affiliate rivers and streams.

And that’s where I stayed, to inhale fiction and sleep without listening to the sounds of ongoing traffic or thinking about bizarre moral arguments for how those without homes should live, and how much harassment is a negligible amount.

What I didn’t expect, but what always ends up being a terrifying treat, was a pack, or packs, of yelping coyotes.

If you are anything like me, this is how you might interpret the event: It is always disorienting when you first hear these cries, as they jolt you out of sleep. It sounds like a middle school slumber party gone wrong -- as if twelve children are screaming as they are running out of a house on fire. But then there is a shift in perception, and these panicked screams no longer seem to be coming from humans, but retain a fuller, non-human quality, which has been described as all of the following: “a bark, flat howl, yip, yipe, short howl, warble, laugh, irregular howl, scream, and gargle.” And, whatever the creatures may be, they are no longer a herd of victims, but rather a gang of perpetrators.

Finally, things begin to make sense, and you realize that these sounds are probably coming from coyotes. Now, they are no longer villains, but merely communicating in a way that is unusual but admittedly very effective. Unwittingly, you are brought into a moment of nature, in which you feel small and vulnerable, and part of some larger ecosystem that you are otherwise and unfortunately, completely out of tune with.

If someone asked you if there were three coyotes or fifteen, you might not be able to accurately discern the count. And there’s research to back it up: There tends to be a misperception that coyotes are more abundant than they actually are [1].

I actually didn’t drink any of the beer that I bought. Instead, it was a strange, affectatious burden that I carried around with me, keeping it in a cooler with a bag of ice that was slowly melting. But I wished that the ice would melt a lot faster, when I returned to my car, waterless, from a desert trail run.

I poked a tiny hole in the bag of ice, and tried to center it into my empty water bottle to collect what pooled water there was. When a handful of droplets were successfully transferred out of the bag, I would then smash the plastic bottle into my dust soaked face and then repeated the process. I imagined that I looked desperate, and a couple in a passing car confirmed it. They gently pulled up next to me. “Um, can we offer you some water?” The woman asked, as she grabbed a half-empty gallon of water from her back seat. “I think your water will be much colder, but you can have this water right now.”

Without first checking with the social conventions, I took her water and poured it into my smashed bottle. “Thank you so much!” I quipped, “I feel as if I am in one of those comics -- with the guy who is always stranded on the island -- and all he has is an ice block that won’t melt!”

What?

The car of kind strangers generously smiled, but my imagined scenario is not cartoon material, even if a stranded man on an island is a common backdrop in The New Yorker. It is not funny. Ice melts.

It's okay that I'm not always funny. For the most part, I have actually grown comfortable with some amount of distance between between my perceptions and reality: my jokes aren’t always good and the number of coyotes are difficult to estimate when you can’t see them. But, every once in a while, I am still stunned -- floored, really -- when my reality clashes with those around me, especially when we are used to being floored together, in unison against whatever state, group or movement that is collectively disappointing us.

I don’t know what to do about this. But I do know that I should have offered the kind strangers beer as a token of gratitude; it’s no secret that I had more than I needed. But I didn’t. I was too busy drinking down what was now mine.

https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1411&context=hwi ↩

Amy

[bothsandneithers]

Day 2410

All happy trees are alike; each unhappy tree is probably unhappy for one of two reasons: mountain pine beetle kill or a lightening strike. Because of this, they are nice to be around; you don’t have to suss out what is so distressing to them. Instead you have room to think about other things -- like how perfect nature is, and the adoration that high-altitude towns have for soft serve ice cream.