Vision

Our life experiences color our perceptions of the world. This is something I harp on consistently as well attempt to be aware of within myself. I work feverishly to notice it, and make a concerted effort to interpret the various messages that scroll across the screen behind my eyes, because it is important to acknowledge where these thoughts come from and choose whether or not to accept them. Our views are valid and true to the best of our knowledge, that is to say “True to us”, and I have no intention of invalidating any personal views, but I do think they very effectively blind us. One of the most important messages I have ever heard a college professor pass along came from the tenured vulgar mouth of my research methods instructor.

Dr. Jake Jac. is a bald man of small stature, while bearing an intimidating demeanor, and a shamelessly self-centered arrogance. He and his loyal entourage of TAs walked into class on the first day of the semester, he placed a notebook down on a small podium, and he said:

“There is no such thing as faith, love, free will, or any of that bullshit, and if you don’t like it get the fuck out now because I don’t want to hear any bitching.”

Not a soul shifted in their seat. How does one respond to such a statement? PSYC 290 was a core requirement. I feel like most stayed right where they were due to an uneasiness as to the consequences of exiting at that moment . . . not me, I wasn’t going anywhere. I loved it, well, I was thoroughly intrigued and in wholehearted agreement. Every student in the college of social and behavioral sciences had to get through that class . . . and get through him. It was kind of an initiation class that I’m surprised to this day I got through, because after the first few lectures, where he spoke for two hours tearing down all of our irrational belief structures, it got excruciatingly tedious and boring. He would speak nonstop and the only other sounds to be heard were the frantic keystrokes of every over-achiever attempting to capture his exact words. The man stated at the beginning, along with his “Reign of terror” statement, that he’d rather we remain engaged and hear what he had to say than miss it all trying to take notes. I don’t often take notes anyway, or read textbooks for that matter; I found his lectures online and listened to them over again before tests.

He was a hard-nosed scientist who was analytical and open-minded enough to even recognize that all of our sciences could be complete garbage as well, even with their methods of checks and balances. I respected him, and even went to a couple of his office hours to ask him questions that I thought might leave him with a new angle to consider. When I asked him for a recommendation for graduate school he scoffed at me, saying that he didn’t write letters for undergrads who hadn’t worked in his lab. Made sense, there were over 200 kids in the class, but I pushed it. I revealed to him that I was a Navy Vet, stated my case that all of my classes were astronomically huge, and that as sad as it was I had had more face time with him as a professor than anyone else. He told me he’d consider it further and thanked me for my service, but I never heard anything else and was too irritated to be persistent. I remember him well though, not only because it was one of the most informative classes I have ever taken, but because he taught an idea, I thought I was one of the only people to grasp, on a large scale.

He said: “It isn’t important whether or not you believe or agree with anything. It might be to us personally, but who the fuck are we? What’s important is that you understand everything for what it is.”

Like I said, I loved it . . . even if love is just some made-up concept to describe an emotion we have no idea why we feel. Mostly because the truth is this, we are all wounded in one way or another. Mental wounds are the signs of a life thoroughly lived, just as lacerations, bumps, bruises, broken bones and all the rest are the physical signs that you are happening.

Mental wounds are no different from the physical; they alter, to whatever degree, the manner in which we interact with the world. When you rip off a scab too many times you get a scar, if you cut the cutaneous tissue deep enough you get a scar . . . well what’s different? We have psychological scars just as we would superficial, and for quite the same reasons. Our triggers get tripped, whether or not it is a good thing we remember certain occurrences is debatable, but we do, and we are constantly ripping our wounds open and creating the blemishes that tattoo our minds. This is where schemas come from, this is why we approach situations as though they are the same as ones we’ve previously engaged in, this is why our relationships tend to look, for better or worse, similar in a lot of ways. We have expectations of our environment based on what has had an impact on us, and it shapes our values and points of view.

Just remember this though, your views are exactly those, “Yours.” They do not reflect an objective view of reality, but one seen through a lens. It’s like looking through a kaleidoscope. If we are conscious of this, then we can learn to accept and understand things for what they are, and operate much more efficiently to address the systems that surround us, and leave this place with some cool looking scars of its own.   

Frustrated: Part III

I like a bar, and old Irish pub type, the likes of which I’ve found in Boston, but these have been altered too. They have to keep up with the times, so they turn into a sick form of night club as well. Music too loud to hold the classic conversation at the bar, very tall people talking amongst themselves because, well, they’re all tall, guys with way too nice shirts that don’t ever seem to fit properly, greased up hair, cologne that makes you wonder: “Man or woman?,” and women who get dressed up for the cruel game of how many men can be rejected before everyone stops asking altogether. We feed into this culture just like we feast upon antidepressants. We drink to forget, we drink to forgive.

If you’re wondering where single people are after 10 o’clock at night, well let me point you to the nearest location serving alcohol. For those that are at home, I’d be willing to bet they’re probably wearing reading glasses, because the glare from these computer monitors we can’t detach ourselves from is killing our eyes. They are no doubt working studiously on some way to make money so that the next time their friends remember they haven’t seen them in a while they can buy more expensive clothes to have drinks unapologetically spilled on and indulge in a higher shelf of liquor. The couples . . . ah yes, couples. There is no one right person for anyone, and judging by the rate at which we seem to multiply, it should be evident that the value of “The One” isn’t anywhere near as delightful as the three or four you could possibly relate to in the time it takes to realize that you’re either ready to settle or not. Those three or four months would be better spent sampling from a variety than deciding whether this could potentially get boring once you’ve exhausted every position and realized the muscles down there aren’t as strong as you might prefer.

I can’t attribute any of these observations to any iota of military experience or any clinical form of psychosis. I’m not an obsessive compulsive maniacally paranoid delusionist. I’ve just spelled out the facts of the case in a three-part series, ladies and gentlemen, and they are undisputed. There are too many people on this planet, too many squirrels fighting over the same nut, like the scene at any night club you’ve ever been in, but magnified to a global scale and mixed with all kinds of people who dress differently than you would expect, eat different amounts of food bearing distinct aromas, and have dissimilar skin pigmentation.

What have we done? What have we come to expect of ourselves as a society? Is it really that cyclical, that we have come back around to a day in age when the huddled masses need to believe there’s a better place to go to after you suffer through this one? No, I’m not depressed, because the endorphins keep me on an even keel, but I can certainly see why people are. I used be under the impression that perhaps human kind had grown weak. That due to our own intellect and ability to alter our environment to suit our needs, we had somehow just become incapable of coping with what is, and forced ourselves into a state of what could be. That ain’t it. My calloused hands are no weaker than those of my forefathers, albeit they weren’t tempered in the same fires, but the problems that we face now are quite possibly worse. Hope and purpose are two intangibles that carry people through, whatever the destination may be, and it seems that civilization has evolved beyond concern for such individual requirements. There are as many philosophies as there are people, which is just downright frightening, so how the hell are we ever supposed to agree on anything? My head hurts.

Frustrated: Part II

I find that I’m up late worrying about finances and my future. Not the things that I should personally value, I worry about the things that society values. I’ve been influenced, they got me, and whatever way we choose to interpret the messages we receive; choice itself affects us. We’re numb, to the extreme point where emotions in a TV show actually shake us up a bit, because we as people don’t readily express emotions to that extent. Not properly at least, we express emotion by giving things. Cards are a good example. The writing on cards is always incredibly touching because some asshole working for Hallmark was able to come up with something so genuinely corny that you feel bad if you read it and can’t think of anyone you know who it might pertain to.

We don’t have feelings really. I am acutely aware of when I’m a little afraid or stressed, I know when I’m in a good mood or a bad one, I can feel the endorphins kick in after a workout when I start telling a few more jokes, or when I’m in a moment and there is truly nowhere else I’d rather be. Happiness, though, seems to have become the absence of misery, like when you’re warm enough that you’re not uncomfortably cold, or cold enough that you’re not sweating profusely. I’m in a state of pure adulation with an AC unit that alleviates some of the humidity that had me sitting in ball soup all last summer. Satisfaction is when the tickle in my throat goes away; it is that there is nothing to be noticed. When the fan blade in the compressor of my off-level refrigerator isn’t clicking loudly and stopping the Tylenol PM I just took from allowing me to get a good night’s rest, that’s contentment.

I know anger, because I’m angry at people on the sidewalk who can’t walk in a straight line. Angry at groups of people who have no regard for fellow pedestrians and spread out so that you either walk begrudgingly behind them at their speed or inelegantly wrap yourself around a sign, squeeze your way through some small person-sized gap, or speed up like the power walkers with those ridiculous ski poles to get around them. Do you really need a couple of poles to balance yourself on the sidewalk? Are you really walking that fast? That’s not the point; the point is that the people suck, and congratulations, there’s no stopping the spread of the human plague.

Am I jaded? Of course I am. Who isn’t? Faced with the constant bombardment of images, meticulously calculated (and even not-so well thought out) placements of products and ideas, it could accurately be claimed that our perceptions of reality are so far from the truth that we set standards no one can ever meet. I want to live in a TV show. Funny, right? No, it’s not a joke; television shows are whimsical and even the dramatic stuff doesn’t last longer than an hour. Families are perfect unless they’re designed not to be, and even then they have such lovable imperfections. People are open and honest most of the time to a startling degree because that’s why we watch, and every beautiful person is fucking every other beautiful person unless they’re hindered by an age differential and even then sometimes it’s fun to just stir the pot a little bit and grandpa might get lucky.

Frustrated: Part I

I have a few educated guesses as to why we’re depressed as a society. On winter break between semesters of graduate school, I went home for a few glorious weeks where I found myself overly frustrated with the lack of positive things to accomplish, not an uncommon situation for me, I like to move at 100mph. An indefinitely suspended license (due to the aforementioned craving), and the absence of a readily available vehicle, would have pushed me into a more dangerous psychological category, except that I didn’t want to tap into my savings account to buy gas anyway. Had I been mobile, I would have been able to pay visits to the few friends of mine who are just too lazy to drive the extra 10 minutes to pick me up for lunch or a drink; or  I could have driven to the malls to spend money I don’t have on things I simply don’t need.

I know there is much beauty to be found in the world, and I generally tend to maintain a state of sanity by focusing on such characteristics, but for a moment let us peer into the dark corners of what our culture has become. Television networks might as well just run commercials for 24 hours a day because we’d be privy to about the same amount of substance . . . in fact most advertisements of late have better production quality than the shows we catch glimmers of between them, and what does this say about our priorities? “Buy the new Toyota Highlander, it’s all the rage, it’s a vehicle that makes my parents look cool and the best part: its got an entertainment center in the back so you flip on some god-awful unrealistic piece of mind-numbing drivel, throw on an oversized pair of headphones and shut your parents the fuck out because they don’t want to hear you any more than you want to be nurtured and properly parented. Who wants to actually interact socially with people of a different generation? What could they possibly teach you?” . . . but I watch this shit too. I lay in bed until the wee hours of the morning because my mind won’t shut off and I can’t seem to get to sleep.

I got sick the Sunday before I left to come back to Boston where I pay an outrageous amount of money for an education I could receive at a community college in a field that I’m not quite sure should exist, but I need the paper and the name to lend credibility to my ramblings. I contracted the flu by way of some jackass who failed to cover his or her mouth when they coughed. I recovered, but my irritation has yet to subside. There is no way of knowing who failed to execute this most routine act of civility because common courtesy is impossible to properly instill on a population our size. Common decency and common sense go out the window when the only objective in life becomes making and spending money. There is precious little time, too few opportunities, everywhere you’re going is the most important place to be, and everyone around you is just slowing you down or in your way. Fuck us all, right? I’m aggravated by the way that we treat each other and the shit that we shovel down the throats of our children, first, because I have no control over the messages we send them, and second, because they’re the next version of us . . . judging by our influence, that’s a terrifying notion.

Friday

I glance quickly at my phone. Hitting the little button at the top with my right index finger to make it come alive, the backlighting of the screen reveals that it is three in the afternoon. Friday seems to have flown by. Ten in the morning found me predictably in the gym, and somehow stumbling through my day with the help of the mass transit system of Boston, I find myself in my favorite Irish Pub. My notebook sits open upon the bar, a blank page glaring at me, daring me to organize my thoughts. A smattering of loose papers swirl around me, all covered in scribbles, my normal obsessive compulsion not applicable to random idiosyncratic annotations. Every corner of the pages covered like someone obsessed with body art, brief statements hurriedly jotted down sideways, diagonally, and upside down. Slowly spinning my glass of Sam Adams lager, I take note of the laser etching on the bottom and ponder for an instant if it actually does help to release more of the flavor. As the minute bubbles ascend to the surface, now markedly at the halfway point, I reflect upon the day.

Perhaps not the most productive of Fridays, but it’s been enjoyable none-the-less. What the hell does “Productive” mean anyway? For that matter, what do half of the words we use on a regular basis really mean? They are all relative to a context and a perception; everything finds itself embedded in the drywall of social circumstance. Maybe to some, a day of work is defined by the amount of actual labor put into it . . . and I’ve been there, where you’re feeling of accomplishment stems from the soreness of muscles, the exhaustion of the brain, and the ache of your back, but anecdotal evidence is not a sound measurement. Productivity has to do with the completion of a task, and the value of that task varies.

The steady progression towards some state of mental peace, a moment of clarity; is the compilation of flashes of insight combined with a calm of self-content not a task that satisfies the parameters of productivity? I digress. Maybe discussing performance enhancement and general observations of life and this world over fish tacos and a Corona in Harvard Square is unprofessional, but I feel it has the same influence as sitting at an awkward table in a chilly training room listening to an unsatisfied stomach subtly complain. Most of the best ideas and strategic plans ever devised were berthed over a beer and good food. We get so hung up on context, but the truth is that all of these contrived definitions we cling to so fervently only exist in that oddly shaped mash-up of chemicals and eerily textured tissue we call the brain. . . and we can always change our minds. I spend much of my time trying to determine which messages to listen to, what is a sensible response and what is not. I etch a quick x through the box on the calendar representing Friday with a dry-erase marker. No telling how many more I will have the pleasure of experiencing, but a day spent on such undertakings is not a day lost, simply a day lived . . . what does that life mean? Well, that’s a topic for another day.