Recindivism

Well, that was fun. If I didn't make it clear enough before, my original idea was to reuse this blog for personal posts, with posts pertaining to Fredericton kept to Stranger in Fredericton. With a lot of things that have been going on lately however, I've decided to once again keep things down to one specific blog. Thanks to everyone, past and present, who read and commented on my posts.

Disconnections

I’ve often observed that whenever a significant event occurs in someone’s life, what they expect doesn’t quite live up to what they actually experience. This works both ways of course: I remember that when my friend Shauna got married, the look on her face throughout the whole experience left her feeling like the entire enterprise of marriage was something far beyond what even she - the woman for whom it seemed like marriage was what she was preparing her whole life for - was expecting.

In my case, moving to Fredericton was met by my expectations being succeeded, quite handily, in ways both positive and negative. For the positive side of things, I was expecting, to some extent, the people I’d encounter to be quite friendly, and indeed, some of the most friendliest and open people I’ve ever met in my life have been the friends and acquaintances that I’ve made here. On the other hand, I’ve come across a lot of interpersonal issues that have left me, for lack of a better word, vexed.

When I lived in Toronto, I thought nothing of the relationships I had with people of the opposite sex. I naturally gravitated toward them, towards the fact that I could have actual conversations with the girls in my life, as opposed to many of the guys I’d befriended who seemed to talk about things I’d thought of as puerile and banal. I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t come across as the most “masculine” person around, and I make no pretensions as to what I think of manliness and my own sexuality. Suffice to say, with girls I developed a sense that I didn’t have to go around waving my penis (intellectually or otherwise) around to show that I was someone worth hanging around, and I didn’t have to brag or lie about my said member’s size or length to show that I was someone of value and merit in someone’s life.

I think one of the first things that I came across was an attitude towards relationships between men and women that were a complete 180 to what I was used to. Now, I had to brag. I had to drop the pretensions and act and feel like I was someone which I wasn’t.

A case in point: I learned some time ago that someone I knew was uncertain as to my sexuality. I’ve never had an issue with where my preferences lay (and in fact, one of my great stumbling blocks with respect to sin is that my preferences are too strong for my own good), but between how I displayed that and how some people saw it was a disconnection. Sadly, as what happens all too often, disconnections were followed up not with a desire for dialogue, but a set of assumptions which left me feeling emasculated and divorced from the people around me. I’ve thankfully had the experience to not dwell too deeply on that (er, much), and to at least focus on that separation in a positive way - a way to know what I shouldn’t do as opposed to what I should do when faced with people who defy common expectations. If I may be allowed, I think I should be permitted to feel just a tad incensed that, on top of the emotional work I’ve had to do to try to “fit in” with the lay of local culture and practice, I’ve had to also work to break out of the assumptions and expectations suddenly laid upon me. The shortest path between two places may be a straight line, but sometimes, that line can feel like it’s as long as infinity.

Full Circle

The past is a dangerous thing to think about, especially in times of crisis. While looking to the past is always important for the potential wealth of lessons to be mined, it also tempts the mind to retreat back into an inner shell of deluded visions hazily thought of as "the way things were". But history is only as good as the person reconstructing it.

For example, I can think back to a definite time in my life where I knew there were people in whom I was confident I could trust my life, and my most important thoughts and feelings. In this time, I remember that I was confident in who I was, and what I had accomplished. I could look at the sum total of what I was doing and say, yes, I did this, and I can be proud of that.

And right now, I feel like I haven't any of that at all.

Of course, if you went back in a time machine, you'd notice that things wouldn't be quite so rosy as I'd thought, and if you'd followed me around you would have seen me at some of the worst points in my life - my little disaster with Catherine at VCF for instance, the failed 2nd year Calculus mid-term with my classmate rubbing said failure in my face, my angry blow-ups against Sidrah and Katherine. And yet, all of that gets washed away in the wave of even more times of sadness: the loss of a father, of a lover, and all of the things that come with such loss.

It strikes me that maybe, all of this sadness will get washed away with something even worse in my future, and I'll sit somewhere, thinking, "Wow, I wish I were back in Fredericton again..." when the little joke in all of that is that in the end, my net level of lonliness and isolation won't be any higher than it would have been when I was in Fredericton, which wouldn't have been any higher than it would have been when I was in Toronto. It is all ultimately, up to our perception. So I find myself struggling to find some piece of tangible evidence that yes, things were better in the past, compared to how shitty things seem now. When all you have is the shifting vagrancy of memory though, sorting out the fact from the romanticized myth becomes an order of magnitude more difficult, and any exercise to converge towards the truth becomes an asymptotic curve where you get closer and closer towards fact, but in the end, you never, ever truly attain it. Like the limit of a function.

Limits of functions however, are important components of the equations in which they serve. They contribute to a greater solution. Our exercises in futility, be they material or mnemonic, may immediately lead us nowhere, but for the sake of our sanity we must remember that they are another step towards something better.

Coda

As inquiring individuals may or may not have discovered, I've decided to move on with my blogging - in a metaphorical sense, after a prolonged period of time as a pupa, the larvae has transformed into the moth; and knowing the luck that most Lepidoptera seem to have in my experience, this moth will most likely end up gassed to death in an overly eager Entomology student's Kill Jar. Yes, friends, I have moved on, from my undergraduate degree at the University of Toronto to a Masters program at the University of New Brunswick.

Certain people will no doubt be thrilled to see me flailing about in a wholly new cultural context, far removed from the epicenter of Canada that I usually call "Toronto". Others (and I can actually name names here) will be quite disappointed to know that my posts will be, and have been, just as much focused on relationships, religion, and my nose-diving (yet valiant) attempts to do a good job at both, as they were before...to which I have to respond, in sterotypical, selfish, yet defiant emo-laden fashion, with middle-fingers eagerly flipped and invectives eagerly spewed.

As I've posted to my earlier haunt on LiveJournal, interested parties will know how to find me.

It's the end of the world as we know it.

One of the unexpected benefits of being a youth of the Internet Age is the ability to look at how time and again the corporate suits seem to think that the Internet is something which can be co-opted, controlled, coralled, and otherwise bent to suit their whims. The popular media seems to be replete with examples of how there's this apparent perception that all a company needs to do is to sprout a website with pastel colours and fancy designs to be "cool", or failing that, some cryptic ad campaign with a URL composed of nothing but oddly oblique symbols or sentences or phrases which may or may not have anything to do with the product or service that they're selling. We're jaded to things like that now. We lived through the hype and promise of the Dot-Com Bubble, and we're living right now in the hype and promise of "Web 2.0".

But of course once in a while a company throws us jaded netizens a curveball by doing that is so completely and ludicrously over the top that it's simply hard to believe it's true.

Right now, that company is Wal-Mart.


It's the end of the world as we know it.

Wal-Mart just recently launched a new website known as The HUB, and ostensibly, it's a "social networking" site (which is incidentally light on the "social" and completely non-existant on the "networking"). It's supposed to ape MySpace, apparently.

Take a look at one such user's account and then gauge the reaction by one young girl who was polled about this: "Some of the kids looked like they were trying to be supercool, but they weren't at all, and they were just being kind of weird," she said. "Are these real kids?"

And check out the video of the perky Asian "tween" linked on the front page:

Shopping will be my number ONE hobby this fall. I am going to be the most fashionable teen at school! I'll be on the lookout for the latest fashions. From leggings to layers, to boots and flats, big belts, and headbands! I'll be looking for it all! Layering is SO IN right now. Hobo bags are also in style. OH! And big sunglasses! WHOO!! I don't know where to stop! With all of the new clothes I'll be getting, the kids at school will be begging me for fashion tips!

And I feel fine

At the same time I can't help but wonder if today's marketing wizards and boardroom executives just haven't learned the number one rule of marketing: understand your target market. Understanding your target market isn't about setting up some false veneer of a social blogging website with a me-too façade. It means actually getting involved with them and understanding why they make the choices they make. And all of the hip and trendy websites with blog posts of questionable veracity and obviously scripted "reality videos" isn't going to change that.

But at the same time, I think about what I see in today's youth when I'm out there, and I can't help but wonder if in fact that's what they've done. Are today's kids really that shallow and materialistic? I've seen middle schoolers toting around iPods, PSPs and cell phones. Parents are now buying these kids thousand-dollar laptops for school when I'm sure it should be plain as day that an old fashioned notebook and pencil would do. For every youth I've seen who chooses to fight the establishment there seem to be a veritable legion of them who flee to the comfort of the things they buy. And yet, there they are. And I suspect, there are more of them than there were when I was their age. I can find some comfort in that, that despite all of the noise there are people out there who get the message. I think that as long as at least someone out there recognizes the monumental shame at the heart of marketing campaigns like Wal-Mart's, there is still something left for me to believe in amongst our youth.

Can't Get There From Here

In Evolutionary Biology, distinctions can be made between traits that are plastic (i.e. have the capacity for short-term, reversible change) and traits that are fixed (i.e. do not change, or if they do change, do so in an irreversible fashion). Plants for instance, may be able to change their growth habit in very different ways depending on where and/or when they germinate and grow. And yet, biologically speaking, they may be the same species, or genetically even the same individual. A plant grown in shade may change its growth form to maximize available light absorption (by increasing leaf surface area), and when transplanted into open sun may change in the opposite way, reducing surface area to avoid damage from overexcitation of its photosynthetic machinery.

Some traits however, are not so easily mutable. Take pentadactyly, for example. As long as 360 million years ago, the earliest tetrapods (animals with four limbs) had as many as eight "fingers" (or toes). We now known that the five-finger/toe arrangement we see throughout the animal kingdom first appeared 340 million years ago. For 340 million years we've seen tetrapods with, more or less, five fingers and toes. Some traits are so deeply ingrained into the developmental plan that any evolutionary change which doesn't have an immediate penalty or may have a positive effect is fixed.

I've been there I know the way

When I was young, my dad yelled at my mother and I a great deal. There's a great deal of psychology and history behind it all but to make a long story short, he was frustrated with the turns his life had taken, and that left him with an exceedingly short fuse. He had little time, patience, or tolerance for people or things that didn't agree with him or go his way.

I didn't have any means to fight back - any uprising was seen as an immediate excuse to increase the severity with which my father would try to enforce his will. He demanded that I show only happiness around him - anything less was forbidden. The fact that he used it to feed his Martyrdom Complex was the icing on the cake. So I trained myself to completely internalize all of the hatred, and anger and frustration and animosity I built up for myself over the years. I pushed it down, compacted it, distilled it, poured into a little botttle and left it in a dusty corner of my subconscious where I'd hopefully forget about it. Of course, the bottles would pile up, cracks in the glass from the contents inside would occur and an explosion would result, necessitating a release. But better to do it in all in one shot, I thought, than to continually subject myself and those around me to a continual, prolonged misery.

I don't remember when I started doing this - I must have been maybe 8 or 9 or so, sometime between the point where I vomited all over the dining table when I force fed myself in terror over what my parents would do to me if I didn't finish my supper and when I first started cutting myself (only very occasionally mind you, but it was still nevertheless deliberate). But somewhere long long ago in the past, I adopted this strategy to deal with the times I was sad and angry with my friends. In a way, it wasn't very different. Like my dad, some of my friends had ended up developing an idea that I could only be happy around them and never be anything less. Or, they had an image of who I was and looked down on me for not living up to that ideal. And so I further refused to talk about whatever it was that bothered me about someone or something someone had said or done.

Around 15 years later I still find myself stuck in old habits. The silent building up of an acute sense of rage and anger to the point where I would explode in momentary bursts of omnidirectional vitriol. It isn't a sustainable strategy - some day I'll have to make that evolutionary leap to something that works better. But like many evolutionary changes, that leap is really only a series of very small baby steps aggregated together over a very long period of time. As in biological evolution, in the course of human experience, that kind of change doesn't happen in the blink of an eye. The change is ongoing, unceasing. Like that open source project you may have read about on slashdot, our version numbers seem to be increasing in ever smaller steps - from version 0.98 to 0.98.1, to 0.98.2. Looking at how human personalities grown and change with time, human beings are always perpetually works in progress. And I realize now, I'm no different.

Got to find a reason/A reason things went wrong...

Never start no static/I just get it off my chest

Things are starting to get to a point where the pool of people I know with whom I can spend more than five minutes without getting grossly pissed off by them is growing smaller and smaller by the day; in the meantime, the block function in Adium is getting a serious workout. Unfortunately, Adium doesn't neatly organize all of my contacts who are blocked into a separate list the way Fire does. I've heard that Adium's upcoming 1.0 release is supposed to fix that though.

I've always been a stickler for classification and organization - chalk it up to being indoctrinated trained in the biological sciences. From my training and through my astute observations, I've been able to group the people in my life into various categories. Taxonomically speaking, I've used personality traits as my characters; maybe when I get around to it, I'll draw up a suitable tree.


It all comes back to you you're gonna get what you deserve/Try and test that you're bound to get served

Hence, this little running tally that I've made up in my head, in the hopes that maybe I'll learn from this little Rogue's Gallery I've assembled in my life - maybe I'll learn to avoid more people like these in the future, and keep them from getting their hooks into my life before it's too late. And so, here I present the first edition of the Ctenuchid's Personal Catalogue of Obnoxious People:

1) Arrogantus maximus - yes, dear, you have an opinion, and yes dear, you're entitled to it. But no, you're not entitled to berate and beat down people who disagree with you. And no, you're not entitled to yell and scream at me as if you seem to be right and I seem to be wrong without any regard whatsoever for what I have to say. Believe it or not, you don't know everything about everything, and while I'm sure you enjoy seeing me entertain your endless screeds with the nodding of my head...deep down inside, I'm not laughing with you, I'm laughing at you.

2) Expectus toomuchus - God knows I try to be a good person. I really do. But for some reason which I can't for the life of me ascertain and/or fathom, you seem to hold me to some insanely high standard of perfection to which I can't possibly live up to. And I think you know it. Newsflash: I make mistakes just like everyone else. Just like you. I tried to be patient with you when you did things I didn't like - I think it's only fair I be treated the same way.


3) Hypocritica doublestandardia - "This uniquely pernicious class of individual is usually characterized by a highly defensive reaction which appears to be evolutionarily optimized to deal maximum damage to individuals of the genus Ctenucha. The reason for this is unknown. The defensive reaction is known to be grossly disproportionately large compared to a stimulus which may be relatively benign in nature..."

- of course, you know I saved the best for last. What else can I say about someone who routinely twists my own words against me to mean the exact opposite of what I intended to say in the first place? And this of course, conveniently feeds your Martyrdom Complex which consistently puts you in the position of innocent victim and me in the position of vile evildoer. Go ahead, ask me another question, when you know that whatever I say, it'll be the wrong answer in your book, and I'll be in the wrong for answering it no matter what my answer is. If I give you the answer x you'll chastise me for it not being y. And when I give the answer y you'll say how I'm wrong for it because it's too much like x. Since when is friendship all about being part of an ego-stroking circle-jerk? That's more than just unfair. It's greedy and selfish.


3.1) subspecies Preferentia againstmeitia - this unique beast (the result of a potential hybridization event between the above and E. toomuchus) thinks it's perfectly fine for their friends to behave as badly as they want to, as poorly as they want to, and, yet, when presented with a hint of human imperfection from me, immediately leap down my throat telling me what an awful of horrible person I am, shoving my own mistakes down my throat like so much vomit at the dinner table. Never mind how badly their other friends have treated them. Do I get the benefit of the doubt like they do? How about a "Get Out of Jail Free" pass? Oh no. Naturally no. Of course, no.

And so gentle reader, thus endeth the lesson. Tune in next time when I update the Personal Catalogue to include university administration and faculty...