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Touching

The skin, especially the face, recording the trials and triumphs of a lifetime, carries it's own memory of experience. On our skin, as on a screen, the gamut of life's experiences is projected: emotions surge, sorrows penetrate, and beauty finds it's depth. Soft, smooth source of youths vanity, skin later bears wrinkled witness to the toll of years. Radiant in health, it tingles to the affectionate touch. The skins growth and development proceed throughout the life, and the development of it's sensitivities depends largely upon the kind of environmental stimulation it recieves.

Write a new Yorker length piece (5 pages) on your embarrassing skin care purchase as a rumination of the realization that your skin, your health, your youth, your life are a decaying privilege

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From Touching, Ashley Montagu

"Because of our untouchableness, we have failed to create a society in which people touch each other in more senses than physical. "

> As a result our eyes are saturated by our screens (TVs, computers, smartphones) with glaring amounts of skin and graphic displays of violence, providing escapism from all- consuming work, that is increasingly, elaborately dissemininatiny what's in our heads into a product appropriate for sale.

> With greater access to education and technology across sectors, employment has become more mentally taxing than physically demanding for the average American. Our self-worth and Identity, often bound in our economic worth, become grounded in our ability to communitcate or compute what's bound in our head rather than using our hands and bodies to do work. Increasingly, work that required careful attention to detail or verbal expression has become outsourced to algorothims, which decompose the complex into binary. The physical functions of bodies become stigmatized yet exalted; our public personas become scrubbed of sweat, stink and filth, unless on display for others to gawk at or verbalized for 'dirty' humor. Private time becomes less mysterious, less personal, more uncomfortable as we spend more time at the office. To increase our comfort with the jarring discomfort of ceding more of our lives to market worth (aka work) in our increasingly competitive world, tech companies let their employees wear sweatpants to work and nap in pods at the office. These same companies encourage us to decompose the little private time into a product appropriate for public consumption by sharing it with others on social media. Robotic bodies devoid of skin and fluid - sometimes devoid of any physical instaniation at all, with software humming away on our screens - do the work human bodies used to toil at. The clean, minimalist design of Apple products helps ease our discomfort with the offloading of human labor to machines, and the uncomfortable (brutal?) labor conditions of the humans who toil to build the pieces of your iPhone - at least by both name and design, Android reminds us that we're interacting with an entity composed of bits, circuits, and wires.

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bodily & self awareness

Our society has become more and more abstract, with greater access to education and widespread literacy facilitating semantic representations (i.e. verbal concepts, known as simply ‘words’ from here on out) of  (formerly) non-verbal inclinations and implicit phenomena. For context, examples new to Meriam Webster’s dictionary in 2018 include microaggressions as a behaviors motivated by underlying prejudices (i.e. implicit bias), misinformation as a means of misleading private decision-making and steering public opinion, and marg as shorthand for salty-sweet Mexican dranks, which are now popular among a class of young folk inclined to expressing themselves in emoji rather than clunky words. The rise in ‘self-care’ as an umbrella term for health and wellness products is another example, which makes explicit how various products work to reinvigorate our bodies and daily routines. Innovations in internet access and products (particularly social media) work hand and hand with education to allow communal sharing of these internal sentiments, using verbal and visual abstractions to facilitate self-expression. 

Our inner narratives, full of personal history (self-awareness) and bodily sensations (bodily awareness) have become increasingly explicit, partially because access to the internet and a means of using it to express ones’ whims and motives (social media) have increased our collective vocabulary, so we now have words to describe the feelings, experiences and thoughts that were quite literally ‘unremarkable’ in that no words properly communicated them. Indeed, it’s been comforting to learn that these once unremarkable experiences are indeed ‘ordinary’ - they are shared by others who also did not have the words or tools or means to communicate them. Internet access and social media have opened our minds, and our minds are more open and ‘remarkable’ for being able to identify our sensations, thoughts and emotions with a single (buzz)word. 

That said, there is danger is making explicit the implicit, particularly in realizing that dark motives are particularly easy and effective at mobilizing collective action. The most troubling, recent example which comes to mind is the 2016 election, in which a common, universal, banal vocabulary was exploited by only one candidate to articulate malicious policies rooted in cynicism, tribalism and self-interest, and his message resonated widely with (a minority of!) the public, partially because his language was so easy to understand. Dark motives could stay ‘crimes of the mind’ that individuals (myself included) decide to override in deference to the ‘Golden Rule’, the notion that our actions and words impact others, so it’s probably best to be concerned for their consequences instead of dwelling on fleeting, nasty first impressions or interpreting events only as they effect our immediate welfare. Verbalizing the implicit should thus be done with some degree of caution, which in fairness, can lead to censorship; but absence of caution is what manifested in 4Chan, the election of leader whose policies enact Nietzsche and Nazism (which were never intended to be paired by the philosopher himself) unbeknownst to him, and the snowballing effect in other nations electing officials who make explicit their own equally nefarious, yet culturally-specific versions of Nationalism. So let’s use our words, our social media, our privilege in the modern age of broader access to shelter, food and meaningful work to express ourselves via generative, original thought, while also finding common ground with our fellow humans (which is entirely possible without succumbing to our most base instincts and malicious, self-interested sentiments). Let’s continue to use our words to communicate our inner narratives, histories and sensations and find stories within ourselves and others we did not previously have words to describe. In 2019, I’ll strive for  self-awareness in balance with other-awareness, the foundation of empathy, perspective-taking and social bonding.

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what would I be without the internet?

not a PhD student. for all its distractions it facilitates my productivity more than my procrastinating. I just wouldn’t have the rapid, free, limitless access to information that has supported my intellectual development, from wikipedia binges at 6 making me a curious rat to google scholar making me a doctor(8) to the New Yorker making me a cosmopolitan yet ever-complaining citizen. 

yet I think it’s pernicious somehow. it isolates me away from others - absolutely necessary for my work, but not at all for my play. it embeds constant, burning want (envy?) within me - absolutely motivating my ambitions, but not at all my self-image. it keeps me company when I am lonely, draining my desire for social contact with its myriad of entertain options and substituting the unexpected surprises generated from spontaneous interactions from the predictable, reliable stream of machine-generated content, instantly yet emptily gratifying my every query. 

I sleep curled around my laptop every night, my peaceful features illuminated by its harsh blue glare until I wake up startled, face to face screen with my partner, time lost, more hours than I slept lost, with a sad netflilx notification asking if I’m alive, because it cares…right?

[stayandsea-blog]

my work is made entirely possible by my fluid connection to the internet, dynamic access to work which isn’t original to me but can be accessed more quickly than I can generate an original thought. when properly leveraged, int-wining ones mind with the internet is as revolutionary to patterns of thought as developing fluency in language, written or read; it opens new possibilities, which provoke new, previously-unthinkable or unable repertoire of actions… I’m so grateful I guess but there’s something unnerving - unnatural - about a central repository of knowledge changing what I am a capable of. reading changes people’s will, its introduction changed many individuals and society at large, opening their souls to religion and changing the tenets of their daily life, their social hierarchies, their assumptions about themselves. the internet has the same function, but it’s the closeness of machine and mass influence that hits my uncanny valley. that’s why paper books are vogue with hipsters. 

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allostatic

i oriented into graduate school, into philadelphia, into adulthood with my eyes sewn shut, knowing nothing but feeling - the earthiest sense - my way into these choices that shape my present. temple, my lab, my work, has provided me so much more substance than I ever could have predicted; my city has generously provided some joy, some convenience, some filth to keep me humble; yet adulthood provides old, new, evolving growing pains, with my mind and body turning against me and decaying even as I try to nurture them, with gentleness, with love, with light. 

Somehow, I anticipated my life here, lucking into much good without knowing or deserving it; anticipating everything has been the substance of my joy. living it has been...less fulfilling :( why can’t I enjoy the fruits of my labor and present moment? 

Because I am an allostatic system, ever-adjusting - bracing - for what’s to come next; in a constant state of flux, hypothesizing the future while wincing at the limits of my priors and models; the slightest error wounds my model fit, my likelihood estimates and my sense of self, which hinges on being an accurate, accountable predictor of upcoming events. this consuming craving for certainty gnaws at me, consuming the free, fluid bits of me energy and diverting them to predict and regulate against some dreaded outcome which will likely never manifest; my childhood of uncertainty trained me to prepare my ‘mileau’, the internal, private self embedded within my skin, for pain as a default sensation. I am constantly acting - regulating - in anticipation and in response to an environment, which with its barrage of ceaseless changes, events, and stimuli, is a rival force to my will - my autonomy as system, as a body, as a living substance.

all my priors dictate that acting in expectation of pain is the only thing I know that has successfully prevented from experiencing it; to not regulate, to not anticipate, to live in the present is to invite noxious foes into my most private space, and let them violate it as they see fit. if I stop regulating my system, controling my self and others and my environment, I will wither?

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when unhappy, throw self into work

it genuinely helps keep the gnawing, without-specific-cause self-doubt from eating your mind into pebbles of self-pity; whining about nonsense is replaced my ‘genuine’ grievances about egregious hours, imagined slights from supervisors and the absurdity of the demands imposed by ‘academia’ (you). it helps so much to attribute all that same negative affect (that’s been swirling about nothing tangible for months) to sources of stimulation in the environment, rather than intrinsic qualities of your self…ugh. depressing. but sweet, sweet relief from the ceaseless self-imposed pressure, the stress headaches that pinch your neck, and looking like a haggard, exhausted, frizzy-haired monster will be here. and it will be warm, and the humidity and the rain will have all been gotten out of the way, giving way to a gloriously decent summer. you’ll enjoy your free time, spending it reading and exploring and doing drugs instead of hating yourself. you’ll fill you body and your time and your mind with friends and substance and sunshine, and it’ll go away and you’ll come out on the other side magically okay again. 

dissertation/paper: you start out feeling too stupid to get your head around it, and that shame motivates you to dig in, and in doing so, you do the work: the hours of reading, turning that into writing, turning that into paper with nuggets of genuinely original thought and unlocked understanding of the literature. you’ll feel proud and like you’ve contributed to greater body of knowledge and more importantly, like you’ve shaken the dense cobwebs out of your empty head, shaking ‘em like a snowglobe until they reconfigure into new discoveries. you’ll have created substance from neurons and demonstrated to yourself and in a tangible document what your beautiful, unique, complexly-layered mind is capable of. 

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The Promise of a PhD: Bewitched, Beguiled, Betrayed

The illusion of autonomy coupled with support, the allure of rigorous, intellectual work, the promise of potential job market - all these holy claims, built on generations of an archaic academy,  are about as tangible as the spirits themselves.

We seethe with rage upon discovering the falsehood, the darkness, the emptiness of the path to the doctorate. The pursuit of cognitive revolution and evolution leaves us scarred, marked by pain we’ve largely inflicted on ourselves from the lingering, deep-seated doubt about our competency and value as humans, as women, as a fleshy, throbbing, visceral lifeforms. We lose track of ourselves and replace our form with a CV. We pray our lord and savior, the existing Preisthood of PhDs, the few on earth educated and motivated enough to read the virtual pages of journals  (which rarely even take paper form anymore) will pity us or skewer us for minor misinterpretation of their jargon, while they fail to correct for multiple comparisons and chase replication of minute effects. We wonder without a Timeturner how to juggle teaching, recruiting & running participants, writing for journals and for our program obligations, keeping up with the latest analyses yet running things according to tradition, getting grants, networking, all while projecting complete ease, peace and gratitude for our meager stipends.

We PhD witches enjoy an enviable lifestyle, full of potions and charms galore to lull us into justifying the misery of it. So much better than a 9-5, this 10-8 and most weekends. There is free food, if you spare an hour for a symposium and stay late to make us the missed time. The unrelenting cycle of pressure to read, to embellish, to publish, to analyze, which starts anew the moment you finish. Science only has one direction: progress, even as we publish heaps of studies based on unreliable correlations and specious behavior-genetics. Our advisers, serving as a priests and championing our ceaseless self-improvement,  provide an earthly form to this noble, divine path to righteousness and glory, otherwise known as tenure, which is promised in the afterlife if you sacrifice enough. Also, for this privilege, we get paid to be eternal students, but alas, dash your hopes for eternal youth, because for your pitiful salary, you have no hours yet also no time that is not beholden to the glorious pursuit of knowledge (Praised be the Academy!).

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4/24/18 drunk woke work

So all the above is still true. Kids – kids are amazing because they are so willfull, dynamic, and unpredictable on contrast to adults. Adults, more like robots (which is how they view us) predictable and following prescripted courses of action. I do find something about that very confining and I want to break free from it occasionally, while that said, I obviously get a rush out of being highly controlled and smoothly completing actions too.

I’m so lucky I can bike and that my job has so much flexibility and thought to it. Shit I am lucky if I get to make this my career – even if I don’t, I’m lucky to have had 5 years of my 20s be like this. So yes, I should be happy, out of sheer appreciation for how much freedom I presently have. I’ll try to actively say I’m happy until I…am?

While I was biking a cute chick holla’d at me to say I looked good pushing hard and fast. Yaknowit homegirl

I also guess it’s cool (guess because I didn’t choose it) that I got to fully develop my self. All this – the drugs, the drinking, the intellectual development in this trippy, weird, loopy way – would probably not have happened if I had someone by my side because I gravitate towards others so much, adopt their values and mirroring them so much it unquestionably inhibits my self-development. I should try to avoid doing those things with the person I choose as a partner, because I think I will contribute uniquely to society and mindfuckery if I stay true to my own developmental trajectory.

I like the way my adviser doesn’t write our papers for us until he has, he guides us to our own development and nudges us with prompts to get us to write what he’s thinking. It’s true Vgotsky scaffolding – like teachers suggesting and encouraging but not showing/doing for kids. I suspect I won’t be good at this – in my eagerness to be useful and helpful I typically just do it myself, out of pursuit of the worst, lowest, ickiest value – to do things right.

Righteousness is truly an awful value. I cant get behind it much at all honestly. If truth is relative = and the last few years of political upheaval have certainly shown as that it is – then how the fawk can someone so strongly, fully believe they are right? I mean, yes, there are things we as a public and esp. using science/math can concur are true to most peoples experience, would be good for most people’s experience, etc. – I am no believer in moral relativism in its extremes, that’s just giving up on actualizing ideals – but to let your own personal sense of right be your ultimate moral obligation? That’s fucking bonkers and bankrupt.

That said…I would be kidding myself if I didn’t acknowledge how good it feels to be right. But chasing that feeling, esp. it in the presence of other’s wrongness…that’s unkind, it’s selfish and it’s self-fulfillment above all else. Ick. Of course I am unlikely to actually implement this by backing down, being less intense, pursuing peace instead of making arguments I don’t care about. As a jew, I’m on the defensive all the time –we’ve got it bred in us that someone’s always after us, so we use our words as our fists, fighting using mental hijinx & jedi mind tricks to persuade and crumble facades. That’s pretty cool actually, now that I think of it. AND THAT’S WHY JEWS MAKE GOOD LAWYAS.

NEW YORK - CONCRETE JUNGLE THERE’S NOTHIN’ YOU CAN DO

 the world is truly callous nowadays, enforced by the tightly-margined, profit-driven, soul-sucking values/whims of the market economy. Poor keith. Poor me. Poor, pitiful all of us and most especially the New Yorkers who have convinced themselves – or been brainwashed – that their shitty quality of life is worth it for the glamour, glory & daily indignity of living in new York. They make compromises they are not even aware of in order to assure themselves they’ve made it in an the elite, hypercompetitive city, making them truly ‘one of the best’ – isn’t that an onamonapea? No I think it’s a big shrimp. You shouldn’t have to be the best or prove your limitless potential every day just to survive with a bit of dignity and acknowledgement but for too many people (not all) in New York, that is their jobs. Employment is so tenuous, employers so fickle, you are always at risk of being disposed if you don’t remind them constantly how indispensable you are to the company, the bottom line, the customers, the clients. How to make yourself indispensable? Sell your soul, your self, make it mirror their empty corporate values.

So what if you live in 300 square feet. So what if just to make enough $ to afford your 300 square feet you commute 40-60 minutes each way. So what if the soundtrack to your commute is honking horns and shrieking steel snakes and singing homeless people, all that beauty and humanity you share intimate space with is drowned out by your Spotify daily mix, made just for you by a robot. So what if your fancy cocktail has a smoky aftertaste from the sheer volume of pollution and waste resulting from mass

human cohabitation on an island. Look I get that this is where the work is, that this is the way the modern world works for many many people, that it’s normalized and you’re probably desensitized. But that doesn’t mean it’s fucking necessary or the only way to live or that its good for you personally. And of course, it’s bigger than you – you perpetuate what we see on TV, and thus the whole damn world buys into it, and is that best for most of the world’s people? It almost certainly is not, given that a decade ago your neighbors got caught gathering (everyone not living in NY’s) mortgages in the hopes that no one would pay them. Fucking cynical, sinister, motherfuckers - the consequences of their actions are still spinning out and effecting people’s daily lives.

Moral of my current altered mental state: There's nothing you can do about it but life in New York is so so hard, I would not make it there, I'm proud of you for trying, and I'm sorry but that goshforsaken city owes you nothing and you need to work yourself into the ground until they bury you there to make it.

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Intruding thoughts under the influence at an otherwise ordinary day of work

 Perception is the study of molecules which move in the outside world as opposed to the inside world you generate, ‘percieve’ – it is visceral, life-like without being entirely faithful to sensation, sensations filtered

It is informed by priors, cognitive goal states

It responds to sensory environment while being apart from it

 Prespective taking – a literal consideration of the cognitions, perceptions and vivid visceral feelings of another person. A remarkable and rare act. To truly embody the living nature of another in your headspace.

Headspace conjures imaginary things and perceptions, which are interesting, unique qualia. We tune them out too often. Acknowledge with interest and respect but then compare them to sensation to evaluate how they find in with priors

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wobble

as an adult who (professionally? academically? personally? all-encompassingly?) studies perception from the lens of psychology, psychophysics, and neuroscience, I’m very interested in observing and analyzing how drug use alters sensory perception. There seems to be a lot of variance with and between participants; I (obviously) find edibles in particular ground, wobble and distort my perception, for hours, rather than the hour-long relaxed or sleepy or numb feeling I experience from other modes of consumption. 

let’s define the key terms, sequentially in order of their departure from typical sensory perception:

distort: small but disturbing errors in perception, which are overly ‘sticky’ - they get and keep my attention - and can easily be recalled after they disappear. easy to communicate with others (I thought I saw…) and easy to explain, thus leave you feeling amused, even if they bother you during the experience.

ground: flooding of perception with the existing details of the immediate environment; really nifty at the time, seems kind of common in myself and other, but hard to communicate and recall vividly. 

wobble: woah. the thing that happens that makes you realize perception is such an illusion, is extremely vulnerable to priors and biases and is half in your head rather than in the environment. you perceive the world as kind of tilted on its side ‘hence wobble’ or upside down or just really realize that how you view the environment and perceive its features is all extremely relative to your position (posture? perspective? predictions?) in it. difficult to communicate, but recall - and the enduring, disturbing feeling - is vivid

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purpose of experiment

so the ultimate goal of the edibles experience, experiment and production is to get a little bit of each of those three sensory distortions; mostly distortions, a lot of grounding, and just a hint of wobble. too much wobble seems like it could break minds as fragile as mine, and its effect endures (clearly, as I sit typing manically about it three days later). While the lingering is currently pleasant and thought-provoking, it’s also intrusive and I see how it could persist - badly. > schizophrenia? Grounding is my personal favorite because it encourages introspection, quiet giggle fits, and lets us erase my pet, ‘anticipation’ and override seemingly built-in priors to glimpse ‘truth’, what is truly universal and elemental to the universe - the matter of matter, pieces of fact, and common source of stimulation that we build our personal in-head fanciful castles out of. to see things as they actually are, minimal qualia or attributions or interpretations, its unifying and beautiful and visceral. viscereal, I should say. Distortions are not real, but are fun for adventures, socializing, and laughing at nothingness.

you also have to be careful bc I think some people just sleep if given too much of a dose or if their tolerance is low or if the environment is too conducive to sleep, and then you miss much of the trip, basically ‘wasted’. better to underestimate than overestimate, methinks, so maximum insight into the self, perception and environment. 

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metacognition: thinking about thinking, consciously since 2010 & mental narratives at age 7

I feel my own mind making a slow but interesting transition to tolerating more information, building in length and complexity the mental maps (visual) and checklists (verbal) that dictate how I think and operate. I remember vaguely experiencing something similar at age 18 after one semester of college, feeling the growth spurt of my reasoning - maybe there’s something to be said here about rare moments of megacognitive clarity, on the hinge on these transitions. I’ll try to document it. This is interesting and promising, and a small miracle considering 2 years ago when I started grad school, I remember distinctly feeling like I was in possession of the foggy, risk-inclined, sex-and-salient image saturated mind of an adolescent, with little filter or impulse control with exerting effort. Since New Year’s, I’ve been acutely aware that my thinking and self-control, topics I fucking study for my PhD and extol as virtues children should (?) develop for enhanced free will (?), are not refined enough for me to preach about. I’ve made efforts to read nightly, to find peace through meditation, and to cut back on social media and news addiction - utterly dismal efforts which have failed. I constantly remember my restraint as an adolescent, oddly enough - reading dense textbooks and pleasantly dull literature, soldiering through difficult math equations with great pain - I hope to channel this, be inspired by the miserable but wildly productive kid I was, and to recapitalize on the depth of emotional and intellectual maturity I had then to steer my self now. 

I want to keep more in my mind, or more relevant information in my mind, so as to lower boundaries to access relevant information. I feel dexterous about this with regards to topics I read daily; politics, Harvey Weinstein, urban ecology, socioeconomic inequality, all things Philadelphia. I wish I could tailor that fluidity of thought to topics that are richer, more important for my career or at least elegant. I’ve been harboring a desire to be more elegant in my thinking, and eloquent in my expression for months. As I said before, I’ve made pathetic progress - but going to England shook something loose inside me, in an almost disconcerting, visceral jolt. I felt the pleasant darkness and a return of willful control of my mental narrative for the first time in so very long. I had glimpses of it in college, but largely these were intrusive episodes or enforced by the weather or season, rather than self-discipline or will. For the first time in years, I take pleasure in the company of myself and my thoughts. Let’s see where it can take me. 

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embodiment and ability

I’m drinking in an extended moment of gratitude for how fluidly my body works, at present - my appreciation grows from knowing how fleeting this state is. I am now 24 years old and taking care of my mom after a knee replacement. Her pain in wake of the procedure was devastating to watch - her recovery may take weeks, if not months. She has to retrain her brain to use a leg that she effectively uses only to support the other ‘good leg’, meaning she is dealing with intense, stabbing pain with every step, for years now. We believe this procedure may make a major difference in lessening her pain and preserving her mobility, which is heavily compromised by bone-on-bone pain, where the cartilage that should cushion the joint has worn off.

My mom has developed an array of strategies to cope with her pain, twisting her body to lean on objects which can support the weight her knee cannot tolerate. She employs these maneuvers deftly and automatically - though they look unnatural and inefficient to an outsider, her body is familiar with implementing them to avoid pain. This ‘learned familiarity’ reminds me of the importance of routine in bodily actions and ‘cognitive’ skills, how intense exposure to complicated actions involved in activities like reading, writing, driving and biking become ‘basic’ over time and even vital.

At my first job at Cafe Au Bon Pain at 14, I can recall relishing the novelty of my first day and realizing that the newness would be temporary. I now try (or will try, now that I’m collecting my thoughts about it actively) to approach new environments with a bit more ease, knowing the barrage of sensory information and response demands will eventually give way to a dulled, expectation-informed ‘impression’ of the environment. This relieves the load on the brain, allowing for more advanced cognitive or manual labor to performed without interference from highly-sensitive perception of stimuli.