Unpacking the Overnight Bag

I’m flying out to LA tomorrow evening for work. A quick training session at our corporate headquarters Wednesday morning, some networking time in the afternoon, and back home Wednesday evening.

I haven’t traveled for work before. It should be fun, even though the training is for something I’ve already been trained on at least three times by my previous employers. Never hurts to get a refresher, I guess. And it’s an opportunity to meet some of my colleagues.

I’m planning an overnight trip this weekend with a friend. So there’s another hotel stay in the future. Ivan and Dmitri may well forget who I am.

I like staying in hotels. We rarely did when I was growing up – we had a camper that we took most of our family vacations in, and it got increasingly cramped and unpleasant as my brother and I grew up. It was especially obnoxious when we went out into the woods: if you’re going to camp, bust out the tents and do it right. Anyway, I think of even non-luxurious hotels as something of a luxury.

I remember sitting with my feet up and a volume of Wodehouse at a cheap motel the night before my brother’s wedding in West Virginia, thinking it was all very decadent. I remember the valet, the porter, and the desk clerk at the Melrose in Dallas all greeting me like an old friend long missed – even though I’d never been there before. I remember the Southwest Inn in Sedona – best bed ever – with its cozy fireplace, perfect to cuddle up in front of with someone special. I remember a cheap room at the Sandpiper in Santa Barbara where I could watch Buffy reruns on a Sunday morning as I got ready to meet my friends for brunch.

I’ve stayed in some nicer places, and some cheaper places, and I still think there’s something to be said for a nice quiet room to yourself that has almost nothing of yourself in it. There’s something a little soothing about that mix of generic sterility and artificial home-feeling for me. I don’t want it in large doses, nor frequent ones. But now and then it hits the spot.

Sated

I had a delicious chicken Caesar salad for dinner. Dessert was some fruit – pineapple chunks, sliced apples, and strawberries. Washed it all down with some green tea. I’ve been trying to eat healthier lately: more fruits and vegetables, less junk food, less red meat.

My shoulders are a little sore from sleeping on a too-firm mattress. I’m not bothered by that right now.

I have to fly out to California for work next week. Just the one night, so probably no chance to see the ocean. And it’s for training on something I’ve already been trained on at least three times at previous jobs. Still, it’s kind of fun to be taking my first business trip. I had to let someone go today, which was not fun. But my team seems to be coming together and performing better.

I have a three-day weekend coming up. A friend and I are planning an overnight trip, probably to Sedona. We could use some time away to destress and clear our heads.

I’ve been doing a lot more writing lately. A friend at work thinks he may be able to fix my laptop, which would be awesome. That would allow me to convert the “saving for a new computer” fund into a “saving for an iPad” fund. (I really want one of those things, but without a computer capable of running iTunes it’s kind of pointless.)

I have two very amusing and very cute cats. Tonight I watched part of “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”, and Ivan and Dmitri at play were even more fast, graceful, and lethal than Chow Yun-Fat and Michelle Yeoh.  I love it when they jump up on my bed to greet me in the morning. (The cats, that is. Although Michelle Yeoh is certainly welcome . . .) I love it when there’s one of them under each nightstand, like bookends. I love it when they take turns playing with the same toy, even though I know there are at least three identical toys around the house.

Life is good.

Hidden Agendas

Cards on the table: I used to be a CT believer.

I was in college. It was right around the same time I went through my Objectivist phase. There was something about voting machines, and the CFR, and the Federal Reserve, and black helicopters, and I don’t even remember what else. It was all a web of “could be” and “might be” spun into “is” and “will be” – Rumpelstiltskin would have been proud. My friends put up with it, tried to talk me out of my crazy tree, and were eventually much relieved when I left that phase behind.

I’m seeing a lot of conspiracy theories tossed around lately at that Other Place: 9/11 was an inside job, the Rothschilds secretly rule the world, blah blah blah. I used to try and debate them. But the circular logic, the cicada-like drone of “cui bono“, the “post hoc ergo propter hoc“, the inability to distinguish valid from invalid questions, and the incessant demands for proof of negatives made that a windmill the size of Wyoming. I could have kept tilting but it would have required a lot more time, patience, and research than I wanted to put in.

One of my favorite books on the topic (or any topic) is Foucault’s Pendulum. Three underemployed editors take all the crackpot stuff that gets submitted to them and synthesize it into one big world-wide conspiracy throughout history. Not because they believe, but because they don’t – it’s all a joke to them, and the joke takes on a life of its own. The true believers get wind of the joke and take it seriously because it fits their prejudices. And things quickly spiral out of control.

A person who believes in conspiracy theories is a person who wants to believe. They anthropomorphize political, cultural, and historical forces the way our ancestors used to deify wind, sun, and rain. There are neither accidents nor single actors in this view – just shadowy forces manipulating events for their own agendas.

More than that, the conspiracy theorist needs to be right. They make allowances for variations on their pet themes – like who did it, how they did it, or why – but there’s no room to consider the mainstream alternatives.

Lastly, and to me most interestingly, the conspiracy theorist has to be right where the rest of us are wrong. They have the secret knowledge, the True Truth. The rest of us are poor deluded “sheeples”. We’re still plugged into the Matrix, and they’ve got their kung-fu powers and decoder rings. They have pierced the veil and stepped through the looking-glass into the real world, which (oddly enough) is exactly like they expected it would be.

And that’s why it’s so hard to convince them they’re wrong. You could take away all the logical fallacies and bad evidence and lack of critical thinking, and you’d still have a conspiracy theorist. You’d still have someone who needs to be more right than you, someone who thinks wisdom starts with wholesale rejection of every received truth.

I don’t know what to to do about them. I’m curious, and I’m toying with doing some serious research on the subject.

Apocalypse How?

I’ve seen too much arguing at That Other Place lately. It bothers me – there are Tea Partiers and knee-jerk Obamacrats and Holocaust deniers and who knows how many others slugging it out over there 24-7. I don’t mind a good discussion. A little debate can be fun, and I’ve had my mind changed by others’ arguments plenty of times.

But then someone takes it a little farther. Someone gets scornful and says “if you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen”. (News flash: the oven has many settings. Also it’s not the only tool in the kitchen.) Someone gets bent out of shape because the stakes are too high – we can’t afford to worry about the thoughts and feelings of those on the other side of the aisle. Niceties like courtesy and respect are time-wasters, right?

It’s the end of the world as we know it, every day, all day. And the only people who feel fine are the adrenalin junkies who live for the black-and-white absolutism of the apocalypse.

Let’s be crystal clear on something: not one thing you do matters. You and I and everyone else are completely meaningless and irrelevant in the cosmic sense. You can’t so much as erase a single atom, so where do you get off thinking that the universe will be the least bit changed by what you do? If the world really is on the brink of destruction, are you really so arrogant as to think that you can stop it all on your own? If you really have that kind of impact, aren’t you more than a little culpable for letting things slide this far?

Good or bad, weak or strong, noble or base, you and everything you’ve done will be forgotten in a thousand years. And that’s the very least twitch toward the blink of an eye in cosmic terms. You can’t stop the sunrise. Your words won’t add one bit of warmth to the entropic cold. Your will hasn’t the strength to stay the fall of a leaf on the breeze.

Nothing you do is going to change one single thing about the universe.

And none of that matters. Irrelevance is irrelevant. In a cosmic sense, the stakes are so low that the very idea of risk is ridiculous. Your life and death will do nothing for or against the universe.

So if nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do. Choice defines us, not chance – not even the random fact of our own existence. Whatever happens, the stakes are no higher or lower than we make them. Set the bar where it suits you and stop blaming circumstance.

So suck it up and be civil. Mean-spirited “red meat” snark isn’t funny. It’s pathetic. It’s childish. It’s simple-minded schoolyard bullying. Angry comics with nothing to say but “fuck you, you look ridiculous ” stop being funny once you grow up.  I don’t care what high motives you claim to justify your desire to swing that sword, you still have a weapon in your hand. Try putting it down – and that doesn’t mean pick up a megaphone instead. Two ears, one mouth – “let him who has ears listen”, not “let him who has a yap keep flapping it”.

And for frak’s sake stop carrying that ideological torch. Yes, it’s throwing off heat and shining light. That’s mostly from all the bridges you’ve burned. Liberty carries a torch to illuminate, not to incinerate. Imagine someone who insists that the world is all red and violet. No orange, no yellow, no green, blue, or indigo. Now tell me how that’s not just as ridiculous as insisting on a black and white view. Wake up and smell the high-def, friends.

Everybody seriously needs to dial it back a notch.

Something Like a Madeleine

I like the skin – the taught, almost waxy orangey-brown surface of the pudding. I remember Mom would heat the milk and stir in the mix, and then we’d wait for it to cool down. She served it in these little clear plastic Tupperware bowls, like a champagne coupe with an abbreviated stem. (The first person to go Freudian and start referencing Marie Antoinette will get a very stern look.) They had snap-on plastic covers to protect them in the fridge.

Sometimes it was chocolate, or vanilla. Occasionally there was tapioca. And once in a great while it was banana with Nilla wafers. But my favorite was always butterscotch. Butterscotch was my first fetish, long before pens. I used to affect those hard butterscotch disk candies, too. Not that I didn’t enjoy the taste, but really it was about establishing an identity: I was a guy who liked butterscotch. Not chocolate, not vanilla, butterscotch.

I was the guy who liked cobalt blue. I have a cupboard full of glassware (including champagne flutes) that I haven’t touched in ages to prove it.

I was the guy who liked white chocolate. Still do, but mostly just in cookies with macadamia nuts. Someone once made a special batch of them from scratch for me – invented the recipe just for me, in fact. I wasn’t anywhere near appreciative enough. One of many regrets I have in that direction, unfortunately.

I was the kid who taught himself not to laugh at his own jokes because Bob Hope never laughed at his own jokes, and neither did Col. Hogan, and I wanted to be witty and clever like Bob Hope and Col. Hogan. I was the guy who wore a blazer to a business-casual office. I was the guy who tried to teach himself yoga and a regimen of exercises designed for ballet dancers. I was the guy who took up sumi-e and went through a Japanese literature phase.

I’ve spent a lot of my life setting up all these markers of identity. I’ve probably put more effort into playing myself than any ten actors portraying Hamlet or Willy Loman. I’ve tried to define myself by all this external stuff. And while a lot of it is really genuinely me, and I’m happy with it, some of it is really just affectation.

This isn’t one of those “woe is me” posts.  I’m happy. I have two gorgeous cats that keep me entertained. I have a decent job. I’m writing more, eating better, and thinking more productively. I can manage my stress better. There’s a lot to be grateful for and happy about.

Still, I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t think about being me and how to be a better me. I picked up some instant pudding on a whim the other day – it’s made with cold milk now, and it’s just as delicious as I remember. I’m looking forward to trying the pistachio flavor soon. I picked it up because I wanted to try it, and because the picture is such a lovely pale green.

And I want to be the guy that enjoys pistachio.