Why do I keep playing these apps?

I have spent far too much time in recent days playing pointless, mindless apps that I've found on Facebook and in other places, most notably Candystand. I usually play them while I'm doing something else, like waiting for another program to finish running at work or talking on the phone. But once in awhile, most often very late at night when I should be sleeping, I find myself going back for just one more game. And then I'm on for another half hour.

The behavior is entirely non-goal-oriented. I get no thrill from beating a previous high score or besting friends. To be honest, I really don't know why I keep playing these things. They aren't really doing anything except wasting brain capacity on something with no redeeming value. I try to make excuses. I mean, I mostly play puzzle games, so they've got to be sharpening my mind in some way, right? But I know that's not why I'm playing them.

So what is it about these little flash apps that keeps me coming back? Is it that I need my brain to be stimulated in some way other than watching the status bar on a program? No. I mean yes, I do, but that's not the reason. Is it that I'm trying to stay up too late yet again? Certainly not.

I suppose it's really the total pointlessness itself that draws me. There is no pressure involved. There is no goal to achieve. There is only the game, and the outcome matters little. The game eases my mind. It forces me to take a bit of focus off the mundane existence into which I've fallen. There are no consequences for poor performance.

I suppose it comes down to my personality type.

Psychologists classify personalities into one of four broad categories, and the one into which you fall is mostly determined by genetics and is etched into the biology of your brain (according to a recent study). The four types:

• Harm avoidance
• Reward dependence
• Novelty seeking
• Persistence

I fall squarely into the harm avoidance category, which is characterized by "pessimism and shyness". One of my primary motivators, I've found, is the avoidance of negative things. I get this from my mother, who is much more extreme than I am. I annoy myself with it sometimes. I don't take risks for fear of failure. I am hesitant to speak up when I know an answer. I am made to feel foolish very easily. My choices are often determined by how much harm they could potentially bring rather than how much benefit they could bring. I look for comfort zones, and when I find them, I like to stay there. I underestimate myself and other people constantly.

Now, these traits have kept me out of trouble in some ways. I don't drink or use drugs, for instance, and I am usually prepared in some way for worst case scenarios. But they've also hindered me quite a bit in life. My ex-wife is a pure novelty seeker, and novelty seekers really do not mix well at all with harm avoiders. I wanted to pursue a career in music, but I could not stomach the uncertainty. I miss out on opportunities because I don't even see them in front of me.

I know these things about myself, yet I find it incredibly difficult to change them. Do I accept that I am like this and live my life as I am comfortable, or do I continue to try to change myself to become what I perceive as better? Is the latter simply a futile effort that will only leave me frustrated or disappointed, or is that very view a product of my personality?

I do know that I gave it my best shot while I was married. I really did try hard to change. Ultimately, I always fell back into my natural behavior. Can I accept myself as being less than my ideal self? Should I?

I really don't know the answers.

Our chemical selves

Sometimes I find myself quite fascinated by the chemical forces at work behind all that we do and all that we think. For every twitch and every passing thought, neurons are firing off neurotransmitters. We are but the sum of these chemical reactions.

Zoloft, which I have written about, is a selective seratonin reuptake inhibitor. Effectively, it causes more seratonin to get passed around inside the body, which in turn makes you feel subtly better about things. It also makes you a bit friendlier, and it seems to suppress sociophobic tendencies, at least for me. It can make you slightly more reckless than you would normally be, which can turn out to be a good thing when you're the kind of person, as I am much of the time, who exhibits high levels of risk avoidance behavior.

We are all under the illusion that we make choices, and that for each choice we make, there is some alternative that we could have willed into being. It certainly feels that way. But really, it seems to me that what we experience as choice is the natural outcome of a series of chemical reactions in our bodies. Just as water flows according to the physical laws governing nature, our thoughts progress in serial fashion. The choices we experience ourselves making are simply the natural chemical outcomes subject to physical laws, even if we lack the capacity to truly observe it all.

All you need to do is stimulate the brain in just the right way, with drugs or with electricity or even (creepily) by touching it, and you can alter a person's thoughts and behavior. You can change who they are. Science is only beginning to unlock some of these secrets.

Cause and effect are illusory. More accurately, they are simplifications, since everything causes everything else on some level. Ultimately, whatever started things in motion with the Big Bang (which, in itself, has a lot of unknowns and may not represent a beginning so much as a transformation) set in motion the universe as it is now and will be in the future.

People like to point to quantum physics as a signifier that there really is choice, that outcomes are affected by observation and that conscious action impacts reality. However, it is my belief that science will eventually discover a deterministic reality underlying this apparently non-deterministic quantum one.

My view is far less romantic than the idea of making a personal choice that affects outcomes. It reduces us to little more than observers of our own actions. In fact, I contend that that is precisely what consciousness is: passive observation. I also believe that consciousness is not binary; you are not either conscious or unconscious. Rather, consciousness is a sort of trait inherent in all things, but some simply lack the chemistry to process information or, beyond that, achieve self-awareness (which, I contend, is based on the illusion of disparate selves).

There are many consequences that arise from this view of reality. However, I am on the train and about to arrive at my station, so I won't get into them now. Maybe some other time when I'm in the mood.

Fear, the oldest emotion

This weekend, the United States government declared a state of emergency because twenty people spread across different parts of the country have contracted swine flu. Swine flu is much like the normal flu, but it has not normally spread from human to human, as it appears to be doing now. It also carries the risk of serious respiratory illness, and it may be responsible for some deaths in Mexico.

So now everyone is on edge, talking about making sure they wash their hands, scared that they will come down with this haneous disease. After all, the government called it an emergency. It must be something to panic about, right?

Funny, though, how some of the same people who are anxious about getting the swine flu are driving and talking on their cell phones, smoking, or participating in some other activity that has a mcuh greater chance of causing them grievous harm than the swine flu. I always find it curious, this ease with which people are sent into a panic by the latest news story while disregarding warnings about more dangerous things. At least partially, it is because of the unknown nature of the new danger. It is exotic. It is outside the normal flow of events.when it comes to cigarettes and cell phones, we know the dangers. Cancer and car crashes are scary, but not as scary as the unknown.

This is not to say that one should disregard warnings about the swine flu. But our response should not be pervasive fear. It should be in proportion to the threat, which at this time appears quite low. Do wash your hands a lot. You should be doing that anyway. But let healthcare professionals worry about the flu. They are the only ones who can affect it anyway. If you have symptoms, see the doctor, but if not, don't become preoccupied with the idea of getting them.

We have seen what fear turns us into. When we were afraid after 9/11, we dropped all moral high ground and lined up behind a corrupt man who used our fear to forward his own agenda. Look where that got us.

Never let fear become so powerful a motivator that you begin to disregard your own values. This is how monsters are made. It is how people come to do reprehensible things.

In my own life, fear has played too large a role. While married, I was so scared of losing my wife that I would not disagree with her, even when I thought she was dead wrong. In the end, that did not work. Not only did my marriage end, but I came out of it with mounds of debt that I had agreed to take on against my better judgement.

Fear can do just about anything to a person. It can twist and contort them into something they had once hated.Fear is good; it is a useful tool. But it is easily manipulated and must not be allowed to become dominant in one's nature.

A beautiful day

I am sitting at the South Street Seaport, typing this on my Blackberry. About 70 feet or so in front of me is the place where I first kissed my ex-wife, the same place where I proposed to her. It has been nearly 8 years since that first kiss, and 7 1/2 since the proposal.

Today is a beautiful day. I walked here from the West Side, taking a leisurely stroll around the southern tip of Manhattan. I needed to get out. Moving the body clears the mind.

I came here not because of its significance to my failed marriage, but because I like it here. There aren't many places in Manhattan where you can sit back and let your eyes focus on the horizon, or at least on something more distant than the next corner.

I need to rebuild now. The house burned down, the fires are all out, and the rubble is getting cleared away. I need to lay a new foundation. Make new friends and meet new people. Not to replace old ones, but to start the process of reinventing myself.

Eventually I'll be ready to date again. My experiences have not made me cynical about love or relationships. On the contrary, having tasted true love, I now understand its importance for me.

But there is still work to do. There is still a life to rebuild. I am looking forward to getting underway with the reconstruction.

Inner Conflict

It's funny yet frustrating. An inner sort of conflict has been rearing up from the recesses of my mind lately, built of two opposing desires, which in turn are rooted in my own insecurities.

On one hand... I have always sought some level of anonymity. Never comfortable in the spotlight, I have done all I can to make myself invisible, an unnoticed shadow floating through the world. I have willfully constructed a bland and quiet appearance for myself in service of that end.

On the other hand... In the wake of my divorce, I am having some big self-image issues. I have only recently realized this, I guess since the initial shock of the whole thing has died away now. I feel sort of frumpy and ugly. I feel unwanted and unattractive. It's not the sort of thing that has a quick fix, and I know that time will likely heal this wound, but until then, I have it.

I am not depressed. I am not particularly anxious either. More like frustrated and annoyed than anything. I am mostly craving some sort of evidence that chips away at my current negative self image - a "hey you look good today" from an attractive woman or even just a lingering glance.

But I've been too successful in anonymizing myself. I stood in the concourse of Penn Station today, looking for some sign that anyone noticed me standing there. No one even glanced. I almost got bowled over a couple of times by people who apparently didn't notice me until I was right in front of me. I really do have no aura it seems.

I am apparently neither strikingly attractive enough nor strikingly ugly enough for casual passers by to take note of my existence. Nor do I have any standout quirks about me that draw attention. While married, this didn't bother me. I liked it. I tried to make myself that way. I was secure and happy with these sorts of things. Now, it's a pain.

I realize that my level of self-absorption is unhealthfully high right now. It doesn't help that I'm running on minimal human contact these days (unless you count Facebook, which I don't). I work, I go home, go on the computer a bit, and sleep. That's it, aside from visiting my kids when I can. I desperately need to get back into the city and start living life again, start interacting and not feeling bad about freeloading off my parents.

Unfortunately, my funds are a bit short for that right now, though that should get worked out over the next couple of months or so. I wish I could get out immediately, but I need to be patient.

Since it's supposed to be nice tomorrow, I think I'll head into the city and just find something to do. Anything beats hanging around this little suburb (which is, to me, a depressing place - it has no charms to soothe me).

More of that gay stuff

I'm not all that familiar with Roland Martin, the CNN talking head guy who is apparently filling in for Campbell Brown (with whom I am also not very familiar), or so they tell me. But I have seen him a few times, most notably around the election, and he struck me as an intelligent, well-spoken guy who is pretty good at what he does.

However, I recently came across this opinion piece by him and was pretty surprised by the lameness of his argument. Now, I am no Perez Hilton fan. In fact, I only have a vague sense of who that is. And it does seem like Hilton was being overblown a bit. But Martin is arguing that we should applaud Prejean for being honest rather than attack her for her views. I think this is a false dichotomy.

Sure, it's great that Prejean didn't spew some noncommittal line and sidestep the question. That doesn't make her answer more acceptable, though. If he'd asked for her opinion on, say, whether there is a conspiracy among the Jews to take over America, or whether we should reinstitute racial segregation in schools, and she'd said yes, I can't see Martin making the same arguments.

The other part of his argument is equally ridiculous to me. He says that her view is a mainstream view, that most Americans agree with her, including Obama and Hillary Clinton. But so what? Even if Obama and Clinton do hold such views (which, actually, I doubt - but they're required to say they do in order to get votes), it doesn't make the view less bigoted. There was a time when most people viewed segregation as acceptable as well, and it is very good that people stood up and argued vehemently against such views.

I say: Slam away at her. Well, not so much her, but her viewpoint. Make it the sort of thing people are ashamed to say in public. That is how you stop memes - with other memes. You get it out there that intolerance will not be tolerated, that it is an outdated and backwards thing. You equate being anti-gay with being anti-integration. After all, gay rights as an issue is just the latest civil rights issue to come up.

I can only applaud her courage to speak out as much as I can applaud the courage of a racist who speaks out. Sure, it's great that they say what they believe, but what they believe is really unfortunate.

A down day

Today is a down day for me. The lawyer sent me her latest draft of the divorce papers, and going through them, seeing the deeply loving relationship I shared with my ex-wife reduced to legal paperwork, is saddening.

Being single again has brought back many of the insecurities I had before I was married. I have always felt a disconnection between myself and the world. I haven't ever been a self-loathing sort of person; I like who I am. But I have so little faith in the ability of other people to see the value in me. I feel lonely and isolated.

When I was married, I had a bit of a chip on my shoulder. I was so glad to be done with the whole idea of dating (not that I did much of that). I saw people going through the whole does-she-like-me, how-serious-is-he thing and felt true relief at being past all that. Marriage suited me well. I like being with one person and feeling secure in that relationship. Now I'm thrust back into singlehood, and it feels a little like one of those bad dreams where I'm back in high school.

On the other hand, of course, I feel like I have a second chance at making a better life for myself. It didn't work out the first time. Maybe there's someone else out there in the world who is actually a good match for me. If only I weren't such a weirdo, it would be easier to find her. But I like being a weirdo, and I'm not going to change that just to find someone. I'm done trying to change basic things about myself to suit the person I'm with.

So today, I feel that self-absorbed sort of sadness, that woe-is-me feeling that comes when I'm forced into a big life change. I feel a bit self-critical and unattractive. It will pass; it always does. But I have to go through it first.

I just faxed some minor changes back to the lawyer, and hopefully she'll soon send me a final draft. I can then get my ex-wife to sign off, and after however long it takes, this thing will finally be official. Maybe I'll feel a bit better about the whole thing then.

My Introversion

I am a lifelong introvert. In school, I almost never raised my hand, whether I knew the answer or not. I've never had a huge social circle, and I generally try to stay unnoticed by the general population. I have been told by more than one person that I have "no aura", and I've been known to accidentally sneak up on people without them realizing I'm there and scare them. That's how low-key I am.

An introvert is not necessarily shy or unfriendly. He or she simply has what I'll call inwardly directed energy. That is, introverts generally prefer activities that are focused on the internal, like reading or solving puzzles or just thinking, rather than the external, such as dancing or mingling at parties or speaking publicly.

I'm actually a very friendly person. I enjoy talking with people in intimate, one-on-one settings, and I'm very open and attentive with others. I rarely initiate conversations, but once drawn in, I can become quite engaged. Generally, there is an inverse relationship between the number of people involved in a conversation and how talkative I am. It takes effort for me to inject myself, mostly because I become caught up in listening to and observing others.

In American society, introversion is generally considered to be a negative trait. Introverts are considered to be less fun. We are considered unfriendly. People assume that if you are quiet, you are maladjusted in some way. We introverts get a bad rap.

But it's perfectly natural. We just don't fit the American mold as well. For instance, I can feel at ease walking with someone without saying a word. However, there is a definite societal pressure to speak constantly. People feel uncomfortable if you just say nothing.

Whenever I take one of those Myers-Briggs personality tests, I always come up as an extreme introvert. And it's true. I am one of the most introverted people I know. And I am somewhat shy around new people. I like to know something about a person before I open up to them. Very rarely do I meet someone with whom I simply feel comfortable right away. I tend to observe first, and then speak. Once I do speak, however, I'm not an awkward, stumbling talker (as many expect quiet people to be). I talk pretty freely and openly.

I will admit that I can become overwhelmed by excessive social interaction. It is draining to deal with a lot of people I don't know, and I become very self-critical when I make social blunders around strangers. I accept and like myself, but I often assume that others think less of me than they do.

I do sometimes envy extroverts' ability to just open up and be so immediately friendly; however, I've come to accept myself for the quiet person that I am. I like the things I like, I act the way I act, and that's just how it is. Pressure to conform doesn't have the grip on me that it had when I was a kid.

Scientism

Science does not lead us to conclusions. There is no true such thing as "conclusive evidence" in science, a fact exploited by pseudoscientific groups like creationists as a way of shaking people's trust in its findings. What science does, essentially, is rearrange our level of confidence in each of the limitless potential truths that exist.

The old Cartesian argument that the only truth one can know is that one exists still stands (although, really, even the knowledge of one's own existence is questionable, since it requires definitions that are hard to agree upon, but that is not where I'm headed here). Nothing is undoubtable. Any proposed truth can be called into question in a very real and fundamental way.

What does this mean? If nothing is certain, how can we hope to make choices in life or acquire anything like knowledge? If we accept the lack of fundamental truths, do we become indecisive, caught up in abstract philosophical puzzles that paralyze us?

I suppose one could. But that doesn't sound like a particularly good use of the apparently limited time one has, at least not to me. And not to most people, I would think.

So we develop thresholds for ourselves. These are, for the most part and in most people, both unconscious and objectively inconsistent. They have a huge experiential bias at the expense of rationality. Science is simply a means of introducing a rational element into the quest for truth. It is not a true belief system with doctrines and dogma. It is, rather, a method for creating a belief system, or at least for altering one.

A scientific question begins with a confession of ignorance. I do not know why x happens. We then come up with one or more experientially based hypotheses for why x happens. X happens due to y. In truth, this is where it ends most of the time. Not with a full scientific pursuit, but with an intuitive acceptance of an experientially based hypothesis. This is probably for the best, lest we spend our time questioning everything and, indeed, becoming paralyzed. We accept a hypothesis as true we determine intuitively that it surpasses a particular level of confidence in it as truth. I do not question, for instance, whether my mother is truly my mother, because I have determined intuitively that it surpasses a high enough level of confidence that I think of it as knowledge.

The scientific method, for most of us, is usually reserved for questions whose answers do not intuitively surpass our accepted level of confidence in order to be considered true.

Science has us apply a rational, objective method for testing a given hypothesis in an unbiased way. It returns results with a particular level of confidence - never 100% - and we decide to accept or reject a hypothesis based on whether or not a particular degree of confidence is met. Statisticians have even created a tool for mathematically determining what level of confidence we should have in a particular hypothesis. We can set our accepted level of confidence, called a confidence interval, at whatever point we want. Most scientific studies use 95% or 99%.

If you read a science article in a mainstream publication that discusses a particular study, it will often say something like: "Scientists find that y causes x" or "Scientists prove link between x and y". This is usually highly misleading, but the general public does not want to hear about things that might be true. They want to know what is true. So we are fed likely conclusions as truths.

If you look at a scientific journal, on the other hand, you will find "conclusions", but they will not normally contain assertions of absolute fact. Rather, they will be discussions of some of the possible conclusions that are perceived as more likely, along with discussions of the limitations of the study and possibilities for further research.

Because there is no way to achieve 100% confidence about any given idea, there will always be naysayers in the scientific community who latch onto the 1% or .01% chance that a conclusion is false. This is actually great for science. Nothing is better for the advancement of knowledge than challenges to accepted conclusions. Occasionally, the naysayers turn out to be right, and whole paradigm shifts can occur as a result. However, it leads to huge misunderstandings on the part of the general public, who are often exposed to the ideas of the naysayers at a level that is disproportional to the level of objective confidence associated with their ideas.

This is why you can always find scientists to support any claim. These challengers of the status quo and accepted truth are essential to science, but they can cause a lot of trouble for the relationship between science and the general public. Their support for extreme minority views is often latched onto by the media, either because of how bizarre their views are or out of a misguided need to provide some sort of balance (usually presented as "no bias") to a story. That is, the media figures that by presenting a dissenting view, it is doing a great service by showing all sides of a story. Much of the time, however, it succeeds only in undermining science as a whole, by shaking the confidence of the audience in a very widely accepted idea and giving fuel to those who present absurd or even dangerous ideas as truth simply because the possibility of truth exists (e.g. Yes, it is possible that nearly all of science's evidence has been misinterpreted and that the planet is around 6000 years old. Sure. Maybe we've been duped by some demon or other. Possibility does not equal probability, and it certainly does not equal truth.).

Given all this, I'll get to my point...

I am very bothered by scientists who claim knowledge of fact. A good scientist knows that there is no such thing as a fact. There are only reasonable conclusions based on available evidence acquired with available tools. I do not mind it when scientists have a passionate belief in a particular potential truth. We need that. But I do mind it when they present that belief as fact and fail to acknowledge on any level that they may be wrong about the whole thing. This is scientism, and it does reduce science to a belief system. Science is tricky. It doesn't give you the truth, and you shouldn't assume that the conclusion of an experiment is truth. However, you should also avoid clinging to ideas that you feel are true simply because you want them to be or feel like they should be when mountains of evidence exist that go against those ideas. Science presents our best attempt at removing various kinds of bias from our view of reality and creating objectively measurable means of identifying likely truths. It does no more and no less. I wish people would accept that and not try to make it into something more or less.

Technology!

I recall watching the movie 2010 when I was a kid - the much less surreal follow-up to Kubrick's classic - and wondering if we'd really have any chance of doing the things shown in the movie by the year 2010. At that time, 2010 was 25 years in the future. Anything could happen in that time, right?

In the movie's timeline, humans made the first manned trip to Jupiter space in the year 2001 and were returning in 2010. There was cryogenic freezing and, infamously, working artificial intelligence. Funny, though, there didn't seem to be anything like an Internet.

I always find it fascinating to read predictions of the future from times past. It seems that even the brightest people among us are usually unable to see more than one or two steps ahead before it just gets too cloudy. Predictions of the year 2000 - a popular year chosen for its roundedness - are often hilarious, given what we know now. Flying cars, matter replicatiors, colonies on the moon... I've even read a prediction from the 19th century that had us driving the Earth around space like a vehicle!

Oddly, though, there is rarely anything like the Internet predicted. Despite the fact that its seeds were planted quite some time before it sprouted into what it became in the 1990s, it seems to have taken most of humanity by surprise. Even just a few years before, in the late 1980s, there was very little in the mainstream consciousness that pointed toward what was coming or the impact it would have.

One thing that the movie 2010 showed that we did actually manage to get was a video phone. Granted, we aren't placing calls from Jupiter space; however, like the main character in the movie, I now use a video phone of sorts - Skype - to communicate with my two young sons who live in Rhode Island. It is so much more gratifying to be able to both see and hear them. It feels almost like I'm actually there.

That said, I don't think anyone foresaw that such a thing would be the result of a global information network; rather, they saw it as an enhancement of the existing phone system. When we think of the future, we are always biased towards the present. When we try to predict the technology that will arise, we can usually come up with enhanced versions of things that already exist, but we rarely come up with much beyond that. This is mostly because we cannot predict the paradigm shifts brought on by new technologies. We can think of what is about to happen, but we are not good at predicting what new needs, problems, or issues will arise as a result of our more immediate future.

A small update

I am moving my timetable up a bit.

I'd originally planned on getting out of my parents' place in August. But really, I can't take it anymore. I need to get back out on my own. It's very demoralizing to live here. With that in mind, I'm going to start looking for a small studio apartment with an eye toward moving in around June, or somewhere around there. Getting a smaller place will allow me to save a bit of cash and will make it so that I don't have to save up as much and can therefore go earlier. I was originally going to go for a one-bedroom, with the idea that when the kids visit they could have their own area, but really, they're going to want to be with me the whole time anyway.

I can't wait to get back into the city! I'll be looking in Brooklyn and Queens. Not sure exactly where yet.

And with that, I'm off to bed.

Gay Rights = Civil Rights

Back in 2001, a friend and co-worker of mine who was gay told me something that, for some reason, greatly affected me. I had just begun dating the woman who would become my wife (and, of course, ex-wife) and mother of my children. She was black, and I was white. This got us a few glances here and there, and maybe an occasional dumb rude remark, but nothing serious, and certainly nothing like what it would have been forty years before.

What the co-worker said was, "I long for a day when I can walk hand in hand with my boyfriend through Times Square and not have people shouting nasty things at me from car windows and buses, the way you can now with your girlfriend."

What he had effectively done in my mind was link gay rights to the civil rights movement. While I had been supportive of gay rights for as long as I knew of such a movement, I had never had a real personal connection to gay rights as an issue. I considered it important, but saw it as something distant from me. I knew plenty of gay people and sympathized, but I didn't feel personally affected by the issue. His simple statement changed that. It equated gay rights with previous struggles that had resulted in changes with a direct impact on me. It helped me to see that the struggle for gay rights is a struggle for human rights.

There aren't many things that can make my blood boil. I'm a pretty mellow guy, and I try to be accepting of all kinds of views. But I was watching TV the other day (which is an incredibly rare event in itself), and this ad came on - I've blocked most of it out, I think, but it actually got me mad. It was people complaining about their kids' schools telling the kids that gay marriage is okay and what not, and in the end it said that "a rainbow coalition" of people of all races and colors is coming together to stop that sort of thing.

Here are these intolerant people promoting their intolerant views and trying to use the language of tolerance to do it. Man, that really got to me. For one, no one is stopping any churches from saying what they want about gays. They're constitutionally protected, just like the KKK is constitutionally protected and can spew its own idiotic hate all it wants, as long as it doesn't hurt or incite violence. The most that will happen is that tax-supported groups won't be able to be intolerant towards gays the way they've been able to in the past, just like they can't be intolerant towards people due to ethnicity or gender like they were in the past. They won't be able to support that stuff with tax money.

People need to learn to understand that human beings don't really fit into the neat little categories they've had assigned to them. There are not simply "men" and "women". There are all kinds of people who possess all kinds of traits that can fall anywhere along the gender continuum. Some people feel that they were born with the incorrect sex organs, and they try their best to correct that by dressing and behaving as they see those of the gender they believe themselves to be do. People laugh, but do you know how terrifying it can be for those people? How difficult it can be?

So some will say that the solution is for such transgendered individuals to get counseling to learn to accept themselves as they are. But, to my mind, it would be much better if society changed its way of thinking so that it accepted them as they are, which is as transgendered people.

Of course, I started writing about gay rights and now I'm talking about transgendered people. That's what happens when you're prone to thinking divergently, I guess. But the issues are related, if not quite the same. Not all transgendered people are gay, and certainly most gay people are not transgendered. But both bring to the forefront the discomfort we as a society have with the idea of sexual identity and attraction. On a societal level, we have a hard time with these things because our social mentality is not wired to deal with them.

Acceptance of other people is a wonderful feeling. Standing next to others and realizing that you have far more in common with them than you may have thought is great. When you cut through the fear and the discomfort, you find that people are just people, and all should be treated with respect for what they are.

Recovery

Recovery is an interesting process. In some cases, it is a long, gradual one, while in others, there is a single moment in which the recoverer suddenly feels okay. We almost always expect the former, but the latter happens quite a bit as well.

I consider the post-divorce healing process to be a form of recovery. One has to go through a detox period during which one washes out all those toxic habits and emotions that come with the divorce itself and relearn how to be whole again. Many people have tried to create rules regarding how long recovery should take a person whose relationship has ended. I've heard things as simple as "recovery takes about one month for each year you were together" or as complex as, well, that with a whole lot of stipulations thrown in. Really, I think that the length of time is dictated by the circumstances, the nature of the relationship and how it deteriorated, and the constitution of the recoverer.

In my case, it started out very gradually. I was crestfallen and heartbroken. I was utterly miserable. I had planned on spending the rest of my life with one person, and that person had rejected that. Over time, I went through a number of emotions: sorrow, anger, frustration, longing, regret, etc. If you can think of a name for a negative emotion, I probably experienced it. Well, maybe not the "murderous" variety, but most others.

It seemed to be taking forever. As the New Year hit, I was still in the throes of negativity, albeit with some glimmer of hope on the horizon.

In the past couple of months, though, possibly fueled by the fact that my ex-wife and I have gotten along much better recently and are learning to be friends, I have been able to think of myself as having recovered from the relationship itself. It has happened relatively rapidly, and I can honestly say that I am over it. I feel a distance now when I look back on the good times she and I had together. I accept them as good times that were worth having without feeling that longing sorrow to have them back that I was feeling some months ago. I feel much better. I feel single again.

This is why, as I posted the other day, I am anxious to get on with my life now. I am really itching to get out of my parents' extra room and back into the city. I'd like to get an apartment of my own and start carving out a new life. My boys will always be foremost in my mind, of course, so there will never be a clean break from the past, nor do I want there to be. A person needs his past if he is to be whole moving into the future. However, I need to establish new patterns and routines and be me again. Date again (not that I really dated much before), have a place of my own, learn to be myself once more.

I am going to view this as a second chance at life for me. I would like to actually find the right person this time around. I would like to do the things I think are right for me.

While the paperwork may not have been completely worked out yet and the divorce is not yet official, my marriage ended nearly a year ago. As far as I am concerned, I am single now. I know without doubt that I will not go back to her, and I am okay with that (and I think she is too). I am ready to move on.

The plan

I had the discussion with my ex-wife last night that I'd been wanting to have for quite a while but have been trepidatious about starting. We have finally begun to work on the specifics of how we will proceed from here.

She had previously said that I should take the kids because she wouldn't have a way to support them. However, during the course of our conversation, she backed away from this. The plan now is that I will work on getting my own place and will save up by incrementally scaling back my payments to her, starting in May. I don't know how she will afford this, but she is a resourceful woman for sure. I'm probably more nervous about it than she is.

Some months back, when she and I were not on good terms, I was not particularly comfortable with the idea of the kids staying with her. Now, she is in much better shape and we have been getting along for quite a stretch. The boys are doing well. I miss them terribly, but I am no longer afraid.

So, finally, there is a plan, or the start of one, in place, and it has been hammered out the way I like: peacefully and without deception.

Artistic integrity and balance

When you hear the name "Nicholas Cage" what do you think of?

If you're like me, you think of an incessant stream of very bad high concept Hollywood wannabe blockbusters that are mostly just terrible. When I see the name Nicholas Cage attached to a movie these days, I take it as a sign that I should steer clear.

But it wasn't always like that. Back in the day, he was known for doing quirky roles in quirky movies like Raising Arizona and Wild at Heart. Then he won an Oscar, and ever since then, he's been shamelessly whoring out his talents for money. Outside of an occasional nod to his older ways, like Adaptation, it has been a string of mindless popcorn movie junk - not the good kind of popcorn movie junk that sweeps you in and gives you a good ride, but the kind that tries to make you think it will but ends up being a waste of time.

Okay, he's not the most talented actor in the biz, but he's not a bad one either. When matched to the right role (as in Raising Arizona, above), he can be perfect. When not matched well, he seems like Nicholas Cage trying to be something else. But the point is that he doesn't have to keep doing this. He can do what many actors in his position do: blockbuster movies to pay the bills, little indies to satisfy their urge to challenge themselves, expand their horizons, and actually act.

There's a noticeable dearth of little indies on Cage's recent slate of movies, though. Why? Does he really just care about the money? It seems at odds with his quirky beginnings. Does he or his agent just choose really poorly, thinking they're getting into one kind of movie but getting into another?

I don't know, but it makes me think about artistic integrity. We who create art are always going to feel some urge to get what we create out into the world and see it do well. It's an ego boost and it can be motivating to think that you've had a wide effect with your work. Beyond a paycheck, that's a good reason for wanting to shoot for broad appeal and wide audiences. But at some point, when one tastes that success, it seems that there is an almost irresistible temptation to just go ahead and do it for the money or the fame or the lifestyle rather than the art.

It happens to lots of people in lots of artforms. Not having had any big success, I can only watch from the sidelines and theorize about how it feels to be tempted by that. But I'd like to think I'd take the more balanced approach that someone like Brad Pitt or Johnny Depp has taken. They do their blockbusters for sure, but they also challenge themselves and mix in a good amount of quirkiness and oddity to keep things fresh. They are capable of reinvention when necessary.

If art every became simply a paycheck for me, it would surely not be worth doing anymore.

Doing the Limbo

So I am feeling stuck in limbo now. My divorce stuff is taking forever, I guess since I am a very low priority for the lawyer (I am basically a pro bono case for her). I just want to get this whole thing over with as soon as possible. My marriage didn't work out - okay, let me move on then. Divorce is a terrible thing, very painful and drawn out, but it doesn't kill you. It's like torture in that way.

All the while, I am effectively homeless, living in my parents' computer room, sleeping on an inflatable mattress, spending my days working and coming home for a brief respite each night before heading back to work. The commute is 90 minutes each way, so 11 hours of my day are essentially consumed by work. Every other weekend (or thereabouts) I visit my kids (Aidan, 6, and Jalen, 3). It's the biweekly highlight of my life. I stay in a hotel and they stay with me. We hang out and have fun. Sometimes we go out to eat, and my ex-wife (I'm just going to start calling her that, I think, even if it's not official just yet) often comes along.

She and I are getting along okay now, making the awkward transition from marriage to friendship. I suppose it can never simply be friendship. We've shared too much and continue to share the responsibility of the children. But it is no longer a marriage, no longer a romantic relationship. Do I still care about her? Yes. Do I still enjoy time spent with her? These days, most of the time, yes. Do I still think she's attractive? Yes. Do I want to be with her anymore? No. I do not.

I am almost ashamed to type that. My parents have been together for nearly forty years. I always thought of marriage as permanent. You get married and you stay with that person. But my ex-wife comes from a much different background. Her parents were young and unmarried, and both of them abandoned her. She was raised by her grandmother, who had two failed marriages. I should have seen it coming, I guess.

It seemed to me, throughout the marriage, that whenever the going got rough and we were at odds on something (as all couples occasionally are), she would think about leaving. In 2005 it came to a head and she told me she didn't want to be with me anymore. We reconciled over a period of months, and even had another child. I thought things were better. But when we moved back to New York after five years in Providence, it came again. And again. And again. She would bring up the idea of leaving me time and time again. I would fight as hard as I could, trying to be things I could never be and do things I could never do in order to keep her with me. Finally, she wore me down. The anguish of constant and repeated rejection was too much for me. When she asked for a divorce, I said okay.

The basics of it, from my end: we simply didn't match up in some key areas, and I don't think we realized it early on. Where we were different, we figured it would be complementary.

Really, I could spend pages and pages of a book writing about our differences, to the point where one might ask what in the world we saw in each other to begin with. My love of dark humor vs. her love of sappy romantic comedies. Her spirituality vs. my rationality. Her outgoing, extroverted personality vs. my shy, reserved introversion. And many more. We were the very definition of "irreconcilable differences".

But, somehow, through all those differences, there was love. Maybe it was doomed to fail right from the start, but I have no regrets about having been married. I regret only that we could not resolve our differences for the sake of the children, who stand as the happiest, brightest results of our time together. I cannot imagine life without my sons in it, and it was the love my ex-wife and I shared that made their very existence possible.

Even now, I wish her the best. I don't like to see her sad. I want her to succeed and do well. Not just for the children, but for her. While we may have been incompatible as husband and wife, I care deeply about her as a friend.

That said, I'm still stuck in limbo with this whole thing. Just the other day, for the first time in a very long time, I met a woman and thought, "I'd like to go out with her". She was attractive and smart and seemed very cool, with a good sense of humor. It's funny; I'd met her once before, in similar circumstances, while married, and did not experience the same thing, at least not consciously. I'm an unusually monogamous guy who is not tempted much by the idea of cheating or even of dating multiple people at the same time.

But what can I do with such feelings now? What do I have to offer, a guy going through a divorce who sleeps on the floor in his parents' house, that wouldn't scare women away? I mean, I do have a lot to offer, but I know that anyone looking rationally at my situation would certainly see red warning signs telling them to stay away.

Often in life, we find ourselves in situations in which our emotions have not caught up to our situation. A relationship ends, and we need time to adjust before dating again. A loved one dies, we need to adjust to not having them around.

I have the opposite problem: I need my situation to catch up to my emotions. My marriage ended nearly a year ago now. It took a lot, but I am over it. I feel single - not single in the same way I was before being married, but single. I am finding myself interested in other women again.

I need to move on. I need to get my own place, find someone more suited to me, and continue living. Being with in my parents' house makes me feel like a kid, and I know it's a strain on them to have me there. But I can't. Too much of my money is going to my ex-wife while she tries to find herself a job in a terrible economy. I'm giving her more than double what I'm obligated to give so that they will be okay. Until she can stand on her own two feet and, to a lesser degree, until the marriage is officially dissolved, I will continue to linger in limbo.

Northeast Corridor

I am riding along the Northwest Corridor on Amtrak, a ride to which I am getting accustomed, and to which I will become increasingly accustomed in the foreseeable future. I am off to see my kids, who now live in Providence, RI, with my wife, or ex-wife - I don't even know what to call her; we are still working out the details of the divorce, so it isn't finalized, but I can't really call her my wife anymore.

Along the way, I am taking photos. There are many beautiful views along the Northeast Corridor, which is the most traveled stretch for Amtrak (it runs from Boston to Washington, going through New York). Unfortunately, it's a bit overcast today, and the season isn't quite right yet. In a couple of months, when the trees are in bloom, it will be really nice. I'm sure I'll have more picture-taking opportunities again then.

I figure I can type up one or two blog posts on the way as well.

But for the moment, I must eat my muffin!

The Nature of Creativity

Something I've been thinking about lately: Does creativity precede a passion toward creating a particular artform or artforms, or is the urge toward particular artforms an independent drive of its own? Is a composer a composer, or is he a creative person who has channeled that creativity into composition?

I am thinking of this independently of talent. Obviously some people are more talented at particular art forms than others. There are tone deaf painters, illiterate musicians, and so on. This would naturally narrow the options for a creative person to express him- or herself. But does the drive to create something supersede the drive to create a particular thing?

In my opinion, at least for most creative people (though probably not all), it does. While they may not be as skilled at one craft as they are at others, it seems to me that the need to create needs some outlet. Take away a musician's instruments and he might start painting or writing.

I've found this to be the case with myself. There was a period of time for me in my mid-twenties where my passion for creating music dwindled. I was beginning to understand that as much as I loved making music, having a career in it entailed more than just making it. I would have to be a self-promoter and a businessman as well, and that soured me on the whole thing so much that I just kind of stopped making music. But the urge to create remained. I diverted those energies into other areas, mostly involving the creation of imaginary worlds and ideas for fiction.

The thing about art is that, while it encompasses many forms of expression, there are fundamental elements at its core that unite these forms. There is a great deal of universality to the process of creation that is present across all forms. It is not at all uncommon for a person to be able to apply the creative process he or she uses in one artform to another artform.

So I'll say that creative people are creative people first, followed by being composers are painters or writers or whatever else they may be.

Zoloft Dreaming

I began taking Zoloft again last fall to help me deal with the extreme angst of my ongoing divorce. I needed to be able to continue functioning at work and in other areas of my life, and I was finding that difficult. I had previously taken it some years back to help me with anxiety and depression issues that had plagued me since adolescence.

The drug does the job. This time around, it kicked in pretty fast, too. However, it does have a number of potential side effects, a number of which I experience when taking it.

The strangest of these side effects is what I call Zoloft dreaming. Way back when I first took the drug in the nineties, it wasn't listed as a side effect, so it caught me off guard. Nowadays it is pretty well documented as one.

It is very difficult to accurately describe Zoloft dreaming. Words don't seem adequate to describe the experience. Essentially, your dreams become incredibly vivid and realistic. They have a more logical sequence of events, and it actually becomes difficult to distinguish them from your waking life. You remember the details more upon waking, and they seem to blend in with reality. Not everyone experiences Zoloft dreaming when they take Zoloft, but many do, in some form or other.

I have had the somewhat embarrassing experience of trying to continue a conversation with someone that began in a dream, only to get a baffled look in return. I find myself constantly questioning whether I am awake or asleep. A few nights ago, I even did so in a dream and determined that I was awake, only to wake up after that.

The experience, both now and in my earlier experiences with the drug, has made me question the objectivity of reality itself. The truth is that I don't even know if I am typing this now or just dreaming about typing it. I cannot confidently differentiate between my experiences and my thoughts at all times.

This time around, it is compounded by the surreality of my existence over the past year. I went from being a husband and father who sang his kids to sleep every night, living in a thriving New York with a good economy, to seeing my wife leave to another state with the kids, moving into my parents' extra room to sleep on a blow-up bed, and seeing the world economy crash and burn as it hasn't in the lifetimes of most people alive today. The United States even elected a black president, something I doubted I'd see for at least another 25 years or so. My world has never changed so much in one year.

So I have this thought in the back of my mind that maybe all of this isn't real. Maybe I'm dreaming the whole thing. Maybe I'll wake up and it will be 2001 and the World Trade Center will still be there and I'll still be working in it, and all of this will turn out to have been some Jacob's Ladder-like fantasy of my own future.

More basically, I question what reality actually is. Is there really any objective, shared existence in which individuals interact, or is everything entirely a subjective experience? What constitutes reality? Is it a consensus agreement, or does each individual exist in his or her own independent reality? Are there even other individuals?

That all leads back to that classic Cartesian idea that the only thing we can know is that we exist, and all else is conjecture. Even that can be questioned, of course, as the concept of existence itself can be called into question.

But let me not go off in that direction, at least not for now. It would balloon this post into a book-length monstrosity. Instead I'll just leave it at that.