Treading Water in the Cesspool

This really should be a long post week, but I’ve had a shit weekend.  Somtimes you just have to give yourself permission to take it easy, and not stress about arbitrary deadlines that you’ve set for yourself.  So I’m doing that thing I just said.

I can’t currently foresee any reason why there won’t be a longer post next week, but then again I’m kind of shit at predicting the future, so take that as you will.

Breezin' on through ...

Made some good progress on the $work project this week, so I’m going to take advantage of the short week this week to just blow you off entirely, dear reader.  Sorry about that!  Still, next week is only a week away, as per usual.  So, you got that going for you.

Dreamsea Lucidity I

"But You Dream About Islands and You Go to Them"

[This is one post in a series about my music mixes.  The series list has links to all posts in the series and also definitions of many of the terms I use.  You may wish to read the introduction for more background.

Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

Like nearly all new(ish)—or newly popular—subgenres, “lofi” means different things to different people.  In point of fact, lofi is neither new, nor limited to only what you can hear on YouTube if you do a search for it.  Wikipedia tells us that it’s just “a music or production quality in which elements usually regarded as imperfections in the context of a recording or performance are present, sometimes as a deliberate choice.” And that’s why you usually hear static or “scratchy record” sounds in lofi music videos.  But, if you think about it, that tells us nothing about the music itself: theoretically, one could just put some imperfections into any song and call it lofi.  So what type of music is what you will inevitably find tons of if you search YouTube for “lofi”?  Well, it’s a form of chill (a.k.a. “downtempo”) that is sometimes called chillwave or chillhop.¹  It’s basically trip-hop crossed with chill, mostly instrumental, and set to anime loops and labeled “music to study by.”

Now, a lot of what you can find on YouTube as “lofi” these days is pretty formulaic: one gets the sense that there’s just a generic lofi factory somewhere, churning these out over and over.  But there are standouts.  I discovered Finland’s Kupla because I kept listening to those 2-hour-long mixes of various lofi songs, and it seemed like every single time I would actually stop and say “oh, I like this one; wonder who that is?” it was them.  I discovered New Jersey’s Autumn Orange because they share with me a love of Critical Role, and they make lofi mixes for CR characters.  In fact, it’s the one he did for Caduceus Clay, Destiny and Dead People Tea that gives us our mix starter, “Islands (You Dream Of).” (And it’s the volume namer, too.)  Once I heard that, I was so intrigued by AO’s weaving in of quotes from the Critical Role crew and recontextualizing them to music, and giving them perhaps a heft I hadn’t originally ascribed to them ... well, I started to wonder if I could put together a mix that was a little bit dreamy, a little bit psychedlic, and maybe just a little bit deep.  Music that’s perhaps not trippy enough for Smokelit Flashback nor poppy enough for Candy Apple Shimmer.  In naming it, I went back to Clive Barker’s notion of the “dream-sea”: a place of dreams that is more real than dreams (a characteristic it shares with Robert Jordan’s Tel’aran’rhiod), which he names Quiddity.  This is music that sails along the dreamsea, but perhaps it also provides some moments of clarity ...

Of course, I don’t like to restrict my mixes too much in terms of musical subgenres and styles, so we’re going to broaden our scope out beyond lofi chillhop ... but let’s start there.  Besides the aforementiond Autumn Orange track, which really is the core that this volume is built around, I of course had to throw in some Kupla.  While almost all lofi these days is set to Miyazaki-style animation, Kupla really does seem to capture the feeling of background music from a Studio Ghibli film.  I love many of their pieces, but “Lavender” is one of my faves.  I had to restrain myself from using multiple tracks of theirs, but I figured I’d save something for future volumes.  So I went to Sweden for a track from Theo Aabel—I guess these Scandinavians are pretty good at this whole chillhop thing.²  Unlike Kupla, I don’t necessarily like everything Aabel does, but “Constellation” is pretty awesome.

From there, I started by branching out into general trip-hop and the more psychedelic forms of dreampop.  Old favorites Naomi³ are of course a good pick: “Heavy Little Lights” is possibly too long, but a real classic of this type of music.  And of course former Enigma producer Jens Gad⁴ can provide a perfect fit in his more upbeat moments, such as “Navajo.” British DJ Jakatta’s track “It Will Be” is a lovely piece of upbeat trip-hop⁵ that manages to make a voice delivering the time over and over interesting.  Finally, Morcheeba is a British trip-hop artist built around the smoky vocals of Skye Edwards; while I don’t dig all their tracks, some of them are just transcendant, and I think “Slow Down” is one of the best.  Here, it signals the winding down of the volume, where everything—from the title itself to the synth noises that sound like lonely winds—does that job perfectly.

To keep going even further afield, we can bring in a little electroworld with Carmen Rizzo;⁶ “Through the Sunlight” is an almost ambient piece that works nicely to bring the mood to a more mellow point after the first third.  We can drift through ambient with tracks from Keven Keller and Amethystium: the former, so far featured only on Shadowfall Equinox,⁷ provides a contemplative piano piece called “Hawi Moon”; the latter, so far only seen on Incanto Liturgica, gives us “Avalon,” which has a more mystical feeling.  And that brings us right to dreampop, where of course we first must sample the masters: the Cocteau Twins, whose “Fluffy Tufts”⁸ is a multi-layered track that provides just the right amount of dreaminess.  The next most logical choice is probably This Mortal Coil: “D.D. and E.” is a short bridge that takes us from the proper trip-hop of Naomi to the much lighter touch of Anugama, but it’s an excellent 48 seconds that just felt perfect for this mix.  And Kendra Smith, who was Hope Sandoval before Mazzy Star,⁹ has a number of psychedelic-adjacent albums, including the one I draw from here, Five Ways of Disappearing.  The real draw is “Drunken Boat,” which is both dreamy and evocative, both lyrically and musically, but her little bridge “Dirigible” serves as the perfect bridge from the trippy Jakatta track to the more buzzy Tashaki Miyaki selection.

And, if you drive through dreampop long enough—especially if you cross back and forth into ambient a few times—you’ll eventually hit Enigma, and that’s the last stop before you’re truly into New Age.  I thought I’d give Enigma the last word on this volume: “The Dream of the Dolphin” is a short track from their sophomore album Cross of Changes, featuring Sandra Cretu’s breathy talksinging saying just a couple of lines, and it’s the perfect closer.  As for New Age, the vast majority of it is going to be way too mellow and downbeat for this mix, but I thought that Anugama’s “Tropical Morning” was an exception to that.  It’s entirely too long, really, but, as 8½ minute songs go, this one is pretty solid for not wearing out its welcome, so I basically made it the volume’s centerpiece.

Dreamsea Lucidity I
[ But You Dream About Islands and You Go to Them ]

“Serial Angels” by Miranda Sex Garden, off Fairytales of Slavery
“Ilomilo” by Billie Eilish, off When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?
“Islands (You Dream Of)” by Autumn Orange, off Destiny and Dead People Tea
“Navajo” by Jens Gad, off Le Spa Sonique
“Constellation” by Theo Aabel, off Endless Memories
“Lavender” by Kupla, off Melody Mountain
“It Will Be” by Jakatta, off Visions
“Interlude: Dirigible” by Kendra Smith, off Five Ways of Disappearing
“Keep Me in Mind” by Tashaki Miyaki, off Tashaki Miyaki [EP]
“Outside” by the Primitives, off Pure
“Through the Sunlight” by Carmen Rizzo, off Ornament of an Imposter
“Heavy Little Lights” by Naomi, off Everyone Loves You
“D.D. and E.” by This Mortal Coil, off Blood
“Tropical Morning” by Anugama, off Jungle of Joy
“Hawi Moon” by Kevin Keller, off Nocturnes
“Almanac” by Widowspeak, off Almanac
“Fluffy Tufts” by Cocteau Twins, off Victorialand
“Drunken Boat” by Kendra Smith, off Five Ways of Disappearing
“Avalon” by Amethystium, off Odonata
“Slow Down” by Morcheeba, off Charango
“Everything Is On” by Asobi Seksu, off Citrus
“The Beautiful” by P.M. Dawn, off Of the Heart, of the Soul and of the Cross: The Utopian Experience
“The Dream of the Dolphin” by Enigma, off The Cross of Changes

Total:  23 tracks,  82:32

With all this chillhop and dreampop and ambient and even New Age, you might think there’s no room for anything a bit harder ... but you’d be wrong.  I’ve often said that Mazzy Star should be its own genre—or at least that we should have a name for what you get when you take shoegaze (arguably derived from dreampop in the first place) and feed it back into dreampop and get something really interesting.  I didn’t pick any actual Mazzy Star here, but I found a couple of artists that I think are Mazzy-Star-adjacent.  First and foremost, the most amazing Tashaki Miyaki, who I discovered via LittleBigPlanet and therefore have featured mostly on Paradoxically Sized World.¹⁰  “Keep Me in Mind” is one of those tracks that seems deceptively like just a pop song with some buzzy guitars, but it really grows into something bigger and more expansive the more you listen to it.  I think TM is probably the best of the Mazzy-Star-adjacent bands, although I know many have a fondness for Beach House.  Honestly, though, my second choice isn’t them: it’s Widowspeak, whose excellent “In the Pines” I used on Smokelit Flashback V.¹¹  For a long time I tried to transition directly from Keller to the Cocteaus, but it just didn’t work.  Finally I remembered that Widowspeak has a brilliant little bridge called “Almanac” that has the perfect dreamlike quality to make the connection.  Finally, Asobi Seksu (which is apparently Japanese for “sportfuck,” which was the band’s original name before they wokred out that no one was ever going to give them airplay with that moniker) is a bit more experimental in this space, which means that I often don’t care for the results.  Still, they have a good one every now and again, and I really thought that their bridge “Everything Is On” made the perfect step-down from Morcheeba to P.M. Dawn.

And that brings us to the first of the really unlikely candidates.  P.M. Dawn was a band that I always thought of as merging rap and New Age, which is as unlikely a combination as you’re going to run across, and yet they not only make it work, they consistently make it work.  As I’ve noted with other such weird combinations (such as Dread Zeppelin or the Diablo Swing Orchestra), a lot of times such artists produce the occasional gem, but their output is very inconsistent.  Not so P.M. Dawn though: every song on their debut Of the Heart, Of the Soul and of the Cross: The Utopian Experience is a winner, and I fell in love with the album after receiving it as a Christmas gift from my brother.  I’m surprised it’s taken me this long to work it into a mix, frankly, but then P.M. Dawn is one of those bands that has a unique sound that often doesn’t really fit it with anything other than itself.  But as soon as I started this mix, I knew that they deserved a place here, and I went with “The Beautiful,” which works perfectly as the penultimate song on the volume.

For pure alternapop, though, I didn’t think there was much that would work here.  Still, I thought there might be a Primitives track that might work, and “Outside” proved me right.  It’s slinky (which is why I used them on Slithy Toves), but also shimmery (which is why I used them on Candy Apple Shimmer), and overall fits the mood here perfectly.  I was perhaps stretching a bit further by including a Billie Eilish track, but I think once you hear “Ilomilo” (especially in context) you may understand why I chose this tune, which is both atypical of her music and yet quintessentially Eilish.  Finally, our opener is Miranda Sex Garden, who has been called everything from neoclassical to folk to goth, which only goes to demonstrate how hard they are to pigeonhole.  This is another band I’ve not yet used, primarily because there are only a few tracks of theirs I really like, and also the whole “hard to slot in” factor.  But “Serial Angels” is an excellent example of their dynamic, starting with gentle, almost inaudible notes that have a toy piano feel, which then build, and build some more, and then burst into drums and guitars and wordless vocal screams, and then drop back down to fade into Billie Eilish.  I think it works pretty well.

Next time, let’s drift away again.

__________

1 Apparently there’s some sort of subtle distinction between what counts as chillwave and what counts as chillhop; inasmuch as I understand the difference—which ain’t much inasmuch—I would say that what this mix features is more chillhop than chillwave.

2 And, don’t forget: some of the best trip-hop acts are from there as well, like Ugress and Röyksopp (both from Norway), and Trentemøller (from Denmark).

3 Seen primarily on Smokelit Flashback (volumes I and II), but also a couple of tracks on Cantosphere Eversion I and Bleeding Salvador I, one on Shadowfall Equinox V, and even one each on Rose-Coloured Brainpan I and Wisty Mysteria II.

4 Seen previously only on Shadowfall Equinox (volumes V and VI).

5 For a more downtempo track, see Shadowfall Equinox IV.

6 Seen on Smokelit Flashback IV and Shadowfall Equinox IV, as well as Rose-Coloured Brainpan II and Moonside by Riverlight II.

7 Specifically, volumes II, III, IV, V, and VI.

8 From my all-time favorite album of theirs, Victorialand.  For more on that, see Smokelit Flashback II.

9 By which I mean that she recorded with Dave Roback as Opal, which then morphed into Mazzy Star when she departed.

10 Specifically, volumes III and IV, but also once on Darkling Embrace I.

11 As well as another track on Dreamscape Perturbation I.

A productive week

This week I’ve made some serious progress on my $work project, so I’m pretty happy about that.  And I also completed my company performance evaluation, and that went pretty well too.  So, work-wise, I’m pretty set.  And the kids and I have gotten back to playing D&D on a semi-regular basis, so that’s nice too.  Overall, things are progressing fairly well.

Longer post next week.

Isn't It Ironic? Why, yes: yes it is.

I’m not as big a fan of Seth Meyers as I am of Stephen Colbert, but I occasionally watch snippets of his monologues on YouTube.  And another thing that Late Night puts up on the web (as a web exclusive, actually) is “Corrections.” This is an absolutely hilarious segment where Seth reads YouTube comments in which people correct him—sometimes reasonably, sometimes pointlessly, sometimes even incorrectly ... but it’s always funny.  Seth has a pet name for people like this: he calls them “jackals.”

Now, here’s the thing: I empathize with the jackals.  Well, mostly: as I say, sometimes they’re are actually wrong in their corrections, and there ain’t no empathy for that bullshit.  But I understand the urge to correct people, because I have it too.  When I’m watching a show, or a video, or a movie, or a streamed D&D game (or listening to a podcast), and they say something totally wrong, I will definitely yell at the screen.  What I won’t do, however, is then post about it on the Internet.  Because then you’re just being a jackass.  Or, as Seth puts it, a jackal.

This post is, somewhat ironically, me posting on the Internet about things that people in streaming shows get wrong.  I’m justifying this to myself by pointing out that what I’m not doing is posting this anywhere where the poeple I’m correcting might read it—for that matter, I’m not even going to call out anyone by name.  These are things that I’ve seen lots of people get wrong, so I think they’re more general corrections.  Hopefully that makes me less of a jackal, though I can understand if you disagree.

Note that I use the word “ironically” somewhat cautiously, because the Alanis Morissette song taught me that people—meaning the jackals—can get pretty touchy about whether you’re using that word properly or not.  Oh, they eviscerated Alanis—positively crucified her.  And she let them beat her down: rather than stand up to them and tell them to go look at a fucking dictionary instead of being all superior, she “admitted” they were right.  Except, you know, they weren’t.

See, the thing about jackals is, they’re in such a hurry to prove their superiority by correcting you that they often get it wrong and “correct” something that was right in the first place.  People wrote articles and comedy sketches and even comic strips without, apparently, even bothering to check the dictionary.  (Well, some people did, obviously, but those were the pieces about how everyone else was wrong about Alanis being wrong.)  Merriam-Webster, for instance, defines “ironic” as “relating to, containing, or constituting irony” or “given to irony.” Fine, then: what’s irony?  Well, M-W offers a whopping 7 definitions for that, but we can throw a few out: both “an ironic expression or utterance” and “a usually humorous or sardonic literary style or form characterized by irony” are pretty useless due to circularity, while defining irony as either dramatic irony or Socratic irony is obviously just a case of people trying to make the whole concept mean just one specific type.  Thus leaving us with:

• the use of words to express something other than and especially the opposite of the literal meaning
• incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result
• an event or result marked by such incongruity

You know, like rain on your wedding day.  It’s a happy occasion, but rain is sad, thus: incongruity.  Now, granted, rain on your wedding day isn’t particularly ironic ... just a little bit.  10,000 spoons when all you need is a knife, though: that’s pretty ironic.  Finding out that the ride that you just paid for was supposed to be free: also a bit ironic.  And a person who spends their whole life afraid to fly, then finally convinces themself to try it out, and the first flight they get on crashes?  That’s some big, fat, juicy irony to the max right there.  Yeah, the ones in the chorus aren’t as much, but it’s a fucking chorus.  Songwriters take shortcuts to make shit fit: don’t act like Alanis was the first person to ever do that.

So I know perfectly well that I’m opening up myself both to being judged as a jackal and to being judged by the jackals.  So trust me when I tell you: these are things that I just can’t hold inside any longer.  Some of them are things I know because I’m a technogeek.  Some of them are things I know because I’m a D&D nerd.  Some of them I just know because I’m a would-be writer and I’ve studied a lot of grammar, and I even wrote a blog post once on it that was, in hindsight, taking a stand against the jackals before I’d ever even heard that term.  But all of them are things that I assure you are correct, and I invite you—nay, entreat you—to research them for yourself to verify that I’m right.  Just make sure you check multiple sources: it’s easy to find another jackal on the Internet to tell you’re right, no matter which side of any given debate you’re on.

Without further ado, then, here are the ...

Corrections

The word “dais” is pronounced “DAY-iss.” If you have a dictionary that tells you that “DIE-iss” is a valid alternative pronunciation, get a new dictionary.  (However, special dispensation for you if you’re from Australia: that’s just your accent.)

URLs never have backslashes in them.  Never.  They’re always forward slashes—also known as just plain slashes.  Especially if you have your own web site, you should probably know better than to use the word “backslash” in conjunction with its address.

You cannot “run the gambit.” Perhaps you were trying to “run the gamut”?

The singular of “dice” is “die.” There is no such thing as “one dice.” Especially if you roll dice for a living, you should probably know this.

The word “ogle,” meaning basically “to leer at,” rhymes with “mogul.” It does not rhyme with “Google,” because it only has one “o.” It also does not rhyme with “boggle,” beacuse it only has one “g.” Check your dictionary if you don’t believe me.

When speaking of computers, “memory” and “storage” are two different things.  When you’re out of space on your hard drive, you did not “run out of memory.” Because of things like swap space (which is a way to pretend that storage is memory), modern computers hardly ever run out of memory.  But you can run out of storage space (or just say you ran out of space: that should be sufficient).

The reason people fight over how to pronounce “GIF” is because of English’s dual nature.  While English is technically a Germanic language, it received a very strong Romance influence via French when the Normans conquered the Anglo-Saxons in 1066.  This is why we have two English words for many concepts, and one of them people may think of as “fancier” than the other: “work” is a good, solid Germanic word, while “labour” is a Romance word; “gift” is Germanic, while “present” is Romance.  And the rules for Gs are different in the Germanic vs the Romance.  In Germanic words, a “G” is always pronounced as the “hard” G: get, gift, gird, begin, lager, burger, target.  In Romance words, a “G” is pronounced hard before “A,” “O”, or “U,” but “soft” (that is, like “J”) before “E” or “I”: gem, giant, giraffe, genius, gesture, germ, ginger, angel, emergency, fugitive.  (Note that this also applies before “Y,” as in gymnastic or energy.)  But of course “GIF” isn’t either a Germanic word or a Romance word ... it isn’t even a word at all, properly speaking.  It’s an acronym, and a pretty new one, as such things go.  So we lack any concept of what the “right” way to pronounce that initial G is, so everyone makes up their own.  Some people claim to believe that it should be a hard G because the G in this case stands for “graphics,” which uses a hard G, but this is nonsense.  Would you pronounce ICE as “eye-kee” because the “C” stands for “customs”? or ACID as “a-kid” because the “C” stands for consistency?  Obviously when the letters become a new word, the old pronounciation is left behind.  So what you’re really left with is, how fancy a word do you think it is?  If you believe it’s a solid working-class word, then you likely think it should be a hard G.  If you think it’s a fancier, technical term, then you probably think it should be a soft G.  But, in the end, the whole debate is silly: stop using GIFs.  Use JPGs (pronounced “jay-pegs”), or PNGs (“pee-en-geez”): they’re better formats, with fewer moronic legal restrictions, and they don’t have this whole stupid pronounciation problem.  And, if you just call any computer image a GIF, then seek professional help.

If you are playing with D&D-style polyhedral dice, and you can’t read the number, just flip it over and read the number on the other side.  The opposite sides of a polyhedral die always add up to the number of sides plus one.  So, on a 20-sided die, the 1 and the 20 are opposite each other, as are the 2 and the 19, the 3 and the 18, and so forth.  They always sum to 21.  So, if you can’t read one side, just flip it over, subtract it from 21, and Bob’s yer uncle.  Also works with 12-sided (subtract from 13), 10-sided (subtract from 11), and so on ... well, okay, not with 4-sided’s (because they’re shaped like pyramids, so they don’t really have an “opposite side”), but with everything else.  Unless your dice are manufactured by people who don’t do things the standard way, at which point I’m not sure I’d trust that die anyhow.  I’m constantly amazed at how often people who throw dice for a living don’t understand this very basic principle.

I am sick and tired of people claiming that “people can’t multitask.” Because, you know, you can’t literally do multiple things at once: what you’re really doing is switching back and forth between them.  Exactly.  That’s what multitasking means.  People (mostly jackals) seem to think that computers are literally doing multiple things at once.  With a few exceptions, that’s not what they do at all.  In fact, when multitasking was first invented, it wasn’t even an option: multi-processor machines doing distrubuted computing would have been decades away.  Wikipedia even explicitly states that “a computer executes segments of multiple tasks in an interleaved manner, while the tasks share common processing resources” (in the case of a person who’s multitasking, that “common processing resource” is their brain, and “interleaved” is just a fancy way to say “switching back and forth”).  Now, I’m not saying that multitasking is a good thing to do—many studies have shown that you’re typically more efficient if you just do things one at a time vs trying to do several things at once.  But that also doesn’t take into account that sometimes a thing won’t get done faster whether or not you devote your full attention to it: that hour-long TV show is going to take you an hour to finish, whether you’re multitasking or not.  But, again, I’m not trying to say whether it’s good, bad, or indifferent.  I’m just telling you to stop claiming it’s not possible.

That’s enough corrections for today.  I hope the jackals are suitably chastened.  Probably not, but one can dream.

I’ll probably think of more corrections later.  Perhaps this can become a recurring series.  Certainly Seth manages to do around 20 minutes every single week, so I don’t see why I couldn’t manage 1500 words every six months or so.  But we’ll just have to see which egregious mistakes start irking me next.  Until then, don’t let the jackals get you down.

Cursed of the Gods

This week was another of those “the computer gods hate me” weeks.  I found a corrupted file, so I went to look at my backups, only to find that things aren’t really set up the way I thought they were.  So I have three recent versions (all of which were corrupted), and a version from January, and another from March.  So I restored it as best I could, sort of merging the newer parts that weren’t corrupted with the older parts that were outdated, but at least it gave me a full set of data.  Then I went trolling through scrollback buffers looking for any bits that I could use to update the old data to get it as close to what I had before as possible.

And, of course, after all that, I’m still going to have to fix my backups so they make this easier next time it happens.  I’m still not entirely sure how I’m going to do that, but I can’t even deal with it right now.  You ever have one of those weeks where everything you try to do just leads you to another thing you have to do first?  Yeah, that.

Anyway, enough bitching.  Next week there should be a longer post.  Tune in then!

To Know Them Is to Distrust Them

Recently I was listening to Mayim Bialiks’ Breakdown and I had a thought.  Now, if you’re not familiar with the podcast (also available in video form on YouTube), it’s generally speaking a mental health podcast, but it ranges around from interviews with celebrities about their mental health struggles, to very hard science guests to talk about it from a neurological or psychological perspective, to talking to people who approach it from a more spiritual or even New Age perspective.  The interesting thing about that is that Mayim, known originally for Blossom and more recently for The Big Bang Theory, is often criticized for “pushing pseudoscience” and for being a “vaccine denier,” and yet, if you actually listen to the podcast, it’s her partner Jonathan Cohen who most embraces the New-Age-y stuff, while Mayim demands more rigorous evidence.  (I actually find it fascinating how Mayim’s statement that she chose not to vaccinate her children as babies gets twisted into her not believing in vaccines—she’s actually gone on record saying that she and her children got vaccinated for COVID as soon as possible, which absolutely makes sense, because they’re not babies any more.  But it just goes to show you that pigeonholing someone’s beliefs is so much easier—and gets more clicks, I suppose—than taking a nuanced view of them.  Or maybe it just goes to do show that people require absolute statements to live by ... I’ve often said that “vaccines are good” is just as idiotic a statement as “drugs are bad,” and for exactly the same reasons.^*)

In any event, that’s a bit of a tangent.  The point that struck me was while listening to Mayim and Jonathan’s interview with Michael Singer.  Now, you may not know who Singer is (I certainly didn’t, before listening to the show), and really you don’t need to for this discussion.  Suffice it to say that he had a spiritual awakening and then wrote a bunch of books about it and many folks consider him to be a sort of guru.  Personally, I felt the same way about his thoughts that I do about nearly all New-Age-y type folks: some of what he had to say was interesting, and actually made sense if you can reframe it from the touchy-feely / airy-fairy language that these types of folks tend to use;^** and a lot of what he had to say was just crap.  I do think it’s important to note that it’s perfectly fine to believe some of the things people have to say, even when other things they say are ridiculous.  But, again, that isn’t the interesting part.

Jonathan, of course, was a big fan of Singer: at several points, he jumped in and said the exact same things that Singer was saying, using slightly different words, and Singer would give him some approval in that “yeah, you get it” sort of way.  It was obvious that Jonathan was a student of Singer’s philosophy and really did get it.  It was even more obvious, from the back-and-forth between Jonathan and Mayim, that he had been trying to convince her of all these things for a while now—maybe even for years.  And she wasn’t having it.  From him.

But—and this is the fascinating part—she was convinced by Singer.  At the end of the interview, she said this:

There’s so many things about the way—not just that you think and the things you’ve experienced—but, again, the way that you communicate them, that just really ... it pierced something, it really broke something open for me ...

Now, should she have been so receptive?  I don’t know, maybe not—I did feel that she wasn’t as critical as she often is, and I think that Singer may have used some language that really snuck past her skeptic’s defenses—but that’s not the point.  It wasn’t fascinating at all that Singer convinced her of something ... what was fascinating, truly thought-provoking to me, was that Singer only said the exact same things as Jonathan—who is, remember, not just her podcast hosting partner, but her life partner—things that this man who she loves has been saying to hear for years.  When he said it, nothing.  Some “expert” comes along, and bam! enlightenment.  And, again, I really want to stress that Singer absolutely did not, in my opinion, say it better.  I honestly thought Jonathan stated it more clearly and logically, although I do give Singer the edge in having a lot of real-life stories that illuminated the philosophy.  So this is the part that caught my attention: why do we discount the words of the people we love the most, and then happily accept those same words when they come from strangers?

Now, I am not a psychologist, so I don’t know for sure, but I found it a very interesting thought experiment to ponder, and I eventually came up with a theory.  Bear with me as I follow this thread logically and try to bring you along.

We are all human ... I think we can agree on that.  And no human is perfect: again, hopefully not too controversial.  Sometimes we have moments of brilliance, but we also all have moments of sheer stupidity.  And who is around to see all the dumb things we do?  Well, us, first and foremost, which is why so many of us struggle with self-esteem—it’s a bit hard to think of yourself as smart and good when you know perfectly well how dumb and bad you can be sometimes.  But hopefully we struggle through that.

But you know who else is there to see all our dumbest moments?  Our family.  Our partner.  Our best friends.  And I think they may also have a bit of trouble seeing us for the intelligent, articulate people that we are (or want to be, at any rate), when they know perfectly well that we’re too forgetful to remember where we left our keys, or that we make the worst puns, or that we’ve proven that we can’t understand what’s going on half the times by asking them really moronic questions that demonstrate our complete lack of understanding.  And, sadly, we think the same things about them.  It is perhaps inevitable—some fundamental trait of humanity—but I think we would all benefit from recognizing it, and maybe even working towards overcoming it.

Because, to circle back to something I said earlier, a person can say a dumb thing without being incapable of saying a smart thing.  This Michael Singer fellow said some things that absolutely made me roll my eyes and say to myself, oh, come on.  But that doesn’t mean that everything he says is silly.  It’s possible for him to say some things which are profound and to say some things which are just pretentious twaddle.  Likewise, it’s possible for Jonathan to say some stupid things, and for Mayim to recognize that and know that he’s not as smart as he likes to think he is, and yet still be right sometimes.  And Mayim probably ought to think about that whenever she’s dismissing what he says out of hand.

And your partner, or your parent, or your child, or your BFF, they ought to think about that when they’re dismissing what you have to say out of hand.  But you can’t really control that.  What you can control, though, is that you need to think about it when you’re dismissing what your loved ones are saying.  Sure, your immediate reaction may be to snort and say “dude, you’re not even smart enough to remember to zip up your pants before you leave the house!” But, if you consider it logically, this is a form of ad hominem fallacy: you can’t prove someone’s statement is false by proving that they’re a horrible person, and you can’t prove that someone’s current statement is not smart just because you know they’ve said dumb things in the past.  Statements have to be evaluated on their own merits, and our emotional reaction to the people we love mustn’t lead us to discount what they have to say.

Of course, the opposite is true as well: we can’t let our love for someone blind us to the fact that they might be saying something spectacularly stupid right now.  But I think that becomes less and less likely the more maturity we achieve.  I think we’re more likely to be critical than to blindly trust.  Which is kind of depressing, if you think about it.  Think of how you feel when your partner or friend dismisses what you have to say on the grounds that “that’s just so you!” or “you’re just being you again.” I’m sure you find it frustrating.  Now, if you can manage to remember that when they’re saying something that is just so them ... then maybe we’re making progress.

__________

* This also ties in to my discussion of grammar proscriptions; while the topic is different, the principles are the same.

** And which is the actual cause of many people’s dismissal, I think.  I have a blog post brewing about how often we as humans just reject ideas which actually have a lot of merit strictly based on the words used to present them.  Hopefully I’ll post that soon.

Home Alone (except not)

This week The Mother is off in Colorado along with our youngest, so I’m home alone with our middle child.  And the dogs.  And the cats.  And the plants, and the fish, and ... it’s a lot.  I won’t even get into the dogs’ recent digestive issues: trust me, you don’t want to know.  Suffice it to say it’s been a lot of work.  Hopefully I survive until we’re all back together again.

Next week ... actually, I’ll still be in the same situation, so I can’t guarantee you’ll get anything more then either.  We’ll just have to see how it goes.