some thoughts on the girl with the dragon tattoo

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo follows the protagonist, Blumkvist, a journalist and co-owner of a progressive magazine who is facing a lawsuit for libel. He is hired by the elderly CEO of a company to investigate a decades-old family mystery. Along the way, he begins working with a younger women who is a skilled investigator (and has a dragon tattoo) to solve the mystery.

I hardly ever read mysteries, but I thought this book was fun. At no point did I ever feel like I knew the answer to the mystery. Several dynamics made this book interesting. First, the libel scandal and whatever was behind it threatened the financial stability of Blumkvist's magazine and put time pressure on Blumkvist and his colleagues to make some kind of plan to keep the magazine from going under. Blumkvist's relationships become strained as he is forced to made some pragmatic decisions, in conflict with his presumably progressive politics, to save his magazine.

Another theme was trust and the delicate balance between the desire to investigate and respect for privacy. Blukvist and the girl with the dragon tattoo both work as investigators in their own ways, but they also have lives with some unconventional, complex aspects that they are secretive about. Having to work together under time pressure meant that they needed to collaborate effectively, which necessitates trust. Part of the story is about watching them cultivate trust by negotiating between the need to know about and understand each other and the desire to be private, holding certain boundaries and relaxing others along the way.

The most prominent theme in this book was of violence against women. The original Swedish title of the book translates roughly to Men Who Hate Women, and some of the book's focal scenes depict men inflicting sexual violence against women. Their actions and mental states are described in grotesque detail. These men are perverse, and they seem excited, even aroused, by humiliating others and making them feel powerless.

In contrast, Blumkvist was a gentle, thoughtful character. He was kind to the girl with the dragon tattoo, even though she is "different" and anti-social, even unpleasant. She felt safe around him, and other women presumably did too. All the women seem to want to sleep with him (and they do). He's almost too popular with the ladies to be a real person--in a review of the film adaptation, one reviewer critiques that Blumkvist was too much like a Swedish James Bond. In the first film adaptation, he is even played by Daniel Craig.

A potential critique of the book is that it is too heavy handed with its portrayals of good and evil. The perpetrators of violence in the book are almost comically horrible. On the other hand, Blumkvist is gentle and respectful of people's privacy and boundaries. The fact that women are so attracted to Blumkvist, whereas the bad men are "sadistic creeps" (so says the girl with the dragon tattoo) sometimes reads like overt moralizing: If you are nice to women, they will like you. Don't be horrible!

You could also argue that it an overly simplistic view of sexual violence against women. In fact, more violence against women is done by people who likely appear to be relatively "normal" than by crazed, evil strangers with sound-proofed torture chambers. A survey conducted in 2010 in the United States found that 51.1% of women respondents who were victims of rape reported being raped by their intimate partners, and an additional 40.8% by an acquaintance. Those who are seeking a realistic exploration of violence against women will be disappointed by this book.

These critiques are not wrong, but I think they miss some of the point. These might actually be clever techniques for directing the reader's attention.

Another example of this is the notable lack of description about Blumkvist's sexuality in this book. Although he sleeps with many women in the story, his experiences with these women are not described in much detail, in stark contrast with the gory depictions of sexual violence inflicted by other men. This means that we know, based on the book, what evil, debasing of women looks like, but we are left with questions about what wholesome, respectful, non-predatory version of sexuality look like, how a good, respectful heterosexual cis-man experiences sexuality, and how he feels about the women he is with.

I think that this is left out for several reasons. Firstly, these are incredibly difficult questions, and leaving descriptions out allows the author to sidestep them. Second, the author wanted to leave it to our imaginations. We are supposed to fill in these gaps with our own views about what Blumkvist's sexuality is like. This has several benefits. There is a wide variety in opinions about what a wholesome cis-man's sexuality is supposed to be like. By making the reader do this work, the author can ensure that they, regardless of their beliefs about this, come away with the feeling that Blumkvist is a good guy and his sexuality is healthy and wholesome. The other benefit is that, because we filled in the gaps of the story in a way that made us more certain that Blumkvist is a nice guy, and because we provided the evidence for this (not the author), we will not have to interact with the nuances of the difficult questions described above.

These techniques--1) the heavy-handed moral messaging, 2) the simplifying of violence against women, 3) relying on us to fill in the gaps, to make Blumkvist the good guy--frees us from having to grapple with the difficult questions of how sexuality interacts with gender, age, and other systems of power, allowing us to instead become ensnared by the mystery.

Ultimately, this is not a feminist novel--it is a mystery novel in which women's issues is the setting. If you approach it for what it is, these critiques are not so much shortcomings, but maybe techniques that improve the reader experience.

counting

Today I heard from my mother that my father was in the intensive care unit. 

He might be out of the hospital in 3 days.

I sent him 2 texts. 

I attempted 5 crossword puzzles. I almost finished 1. 

2 hours later he sent me 2 texts back. 

He has 1 IV tube in his neck.

I bought 1 bag of Takis and 1 bag of Sour Patch Kids, and I could stomach 7 of each.

I've been alive for 31 years, 3 months, and 6 days.

my plane is a popsicle and my flight attendant is a sphinx

3:30am. My alarm does its job, which is a good thing, and I should not be annoyed with it. I try to wear my pants and trip three times. I’m too tired to be embarrassed.

3:54am. My ride to the airport arrives six minutes early. I take a final desperate swig of coffee. It scalds my mouth and splashes on to my sweater.

4:13am. The path to Airport Security line is bare and the agents are grumpy. I am not reassured that these are the people in charge of ensuring safety of passengers.

4:36am. The display at Gate E2 says the flight is on time to leave at 6:00am. Good. I turn on my heel and search for a shop that might sell me a decent coffee.

4:51am. This coffee is not decent.

5:00am. Gate E2 is bustling with people and antsy energy. Maybe it’s because the gate is too small for the number of people on this flight. Maybe it’s because its occupants are eager to leave Minneapolis for Atlanta. A man in a bright red sweatsuit sits across from me. He is explaining the difference between Minneapolis and Atlanta “ladies” to someone on the phone who inexplicably responds as if they are interested in this information.

5:05am. It took a long time for Red Sweatsuit to get to the point, but his expert opinion is that the difference has something to do with the nature and duration of “the chase.” This coffee is somehow getting worse over time.

5:18am. “Gate E2, we now going to begin boarding the flight to… Atlanta, right on time,” the voice on the intercom says. Actually, we are three minutes late.

5:35am. I sit down and click the seat belt closed. It’s good I didn’t bring luggage because a few customers are grumbling about having to check their bags. From my seat at the window, I can see the plane’s wing and the faint glow on the horizon. Sleep beckons again. Maybe I’ll sleep. I sneeze and the man next to me says, “Bless you,” in a monotone voice, looking dead straight at the plastic back of the seat in front of us.

6:04am. The flight attendants announce that we will be taking off momentarily, on time. We are now actually four minutes late. I turn off my phone. I’m just in a bad mood because I’m sleepy and my breath smells like coffee and for a bad reason because the coffee wasn’t even good. I let my eyes close and lean my head against the window. Maybe I can sleep until we land.

7:10am. The flight attendant’s voice in the intercom jolts me awake. Sunrise must be soon. I can see long shadows on the tarmac.

On the tarmac?

We’re still on the ground?

“Please, we need to deboard the plane from,” the flight attendant’s voice sounded from the speakers, “the front... of the plane.”

7:21am. I guess everyone on my plane decided to go to the ladies room after deboarding. “I heard the cargo door is frozen shut or something,” says a lady a few people down the queue from me. “Total disaster."

7:30am. The deboarded occupants of Gate E2 hover near the gate window, quietly watching the maintenance workers by the plane. “Is that a blowtorch?” a Gate E2 passenger giggles to her mother.

“Sure looks like it,” her mother squints bemusedly. I’m not sure how I would deal with this kind of disaster but a blowtorch isn’t it.

7:59am. The flight attendant says that our plane has been delayed by another hour. No one needed for her to tell us–the maintenance workers have been theatrically taking turns with the blowtorch for thirty minutes now.

9:45am. This shop’s coffee is less burnt but more watery than the other one.

10:11am. Back at E2. “My man out here lookin like he tryna break into the plane,” a man next to me says into the phone. Sure enough, the maintenance worker has taken to yanking on the door. “And this muthafucka seriously coming back again with the hairdryer!” the man laughs and points the phone camera out of the window to show the person on the other side of the phone the scene. The muffled laughter coming from the phone speakers is almost comforting.

11:00am. The flight is delayed by two more hours. The man on the phone isn’t laughing anymore. They might have to cancel their evening plans with friends.

11:20am. The maintenance workers are still at it with the torch. At this point, this is theater, not optimism.

12:30pm. “Hello passengers on our flight from… Minneapolis to,” the flight attendant’s voice said through the intercom, “Atlanta.” I look up from my book, half asleep. “Thank you for your patience. The maintenance workers have been trying their… best to help… our situation. For those of you who are laying over in… Atlanta before… flying to… Florida…” For some reason all of these flight attendants put pauses in syntactically all the wrong places in their sentences when they talk through the intercom. This has got to be some weird thing they learn in flight attendant training to confuse us. “And so, you should speak to a flight attendant not here at… the desk, but someone at Gate… E7 about cancelling your ticket. We can discuss reimbursements.”

Hold on. Is our flight cancelled?

“What she said? The flight’s cancelled?” said friend of Red Sweatsuit.

“No, it’s not.” The woman sitting across from us shook her head, her curls swooshing across her eyes. “That’s only if you’re going to Florida. Then your flight is cancelled and they’ll pay you back for it.” She must speak flight-attend-ese.

“Hold up,” he sat up straight. “This the plane to Atlanta right?”

“Yes, but,” she rolled her eyes. “Some people got flights from Atlanta to Florida, and their flight is cancelled.”

“They cancelled our flight ’cause of them?”

“No! Those people can’t get on the plane at Atlanta to Florida, so they need to cancel their tickets for the flight we tryna get on. That’s what she said, just the Florida people.” She shakes her head again and rolls her eyes, but I can tell she’s trying hard not to smile.

“Ohh…”

“Yeaaaah.”

“I seen you before. I think I seen you on Facebook."

“Attention, passengers on this flight to… Atlanta,” said the voice on the intercom. “Your flight has been delayed by another hour.”

12:56pm. Did you know that the Filet-o-Fish sandwich is supposed to have half a slice of cheese? Apparently, McDonald’s decided that it should be half a slice because a whole slice would overpower the flavor of the fish. Also, the type of fish used in the filet-o-fish depends on what country you are in. In the U.S., we have Alaskan pollock, and in countries like Australia, they use a fish called hoki.

2:00pm. The girl who speaks flight-attend-ese and the boy who doesn’t could have found a more secluded place to make out. I’m just too jealous that they found a way to not be bored.

2:15pm. I can walk from one doughnut shop to to the other doughnut shop in 7 seven minutes.

2:19pm. 4 if I walk fast.

2:30pm. My phone vibrates. The airline sent me a QR code for $7 off a lunch at the airport. Who eats lunch at 2:30pm? Where in the airport can I get food for $7?

2:45pm. A text message from the airline says my flight is now delayed until 2:40pm. They’re just making fun of us at this point.

4:01pm. “Thank you for your patience on… this flight… situation.” The voice of doom sounds on the intercom. “We are talking with our maintenance workers about…”

“Jesus Christ! The door’s still fucking frozen. We can all see it!” One E2 passenger gestures with both hands at the window. A few others are starting to pace around the gate. One girl is crying.

“Please, don’t… please listen to our… announcement.” The voice of doom responds, and I stand up to hear her better. There are four police officers at the gate now. “The flight is delayed.”

“We fucking know!”

“Please…” she sighed. “This flight is delayed until tomorrow morning at… 6:00am. We can also cancel your ticket for a full reimbursement.” Half of the passengers are standing up now, eyeballs swelling out of their sockets. Several started towards the counter. The police officers must be expecting a fight.

“I don’t need a reimbursement. Get us on the flight to Atlanta now.” I don’t have the heart to tell them that arguing with the flight attendants is no use.

4:21pm. I am in line to argue with the flight attendant.

4:40pm. It’s my turn in line. “Hello, I had some questions about this flight.”

“Yes ma’am, our maintenance workers have been trying to help us.” Her voice is shaking.

“Yes, I can see that. The cargo door is frozen shut, which means that people’s luggage is stuck in there, correct?”

“That’s right ma’am. There’s no way to get it out until we un-freeze the door.”

“Thank you. Luckily, I have no luggage, aside from this bag I’m carrying here,” I gesture at my backpack. “So I have no need to wait for this plane. Can you please cancel my ticket for this flight and put me on another flight today for Atlanta?”

“Ma’am, we can’t take off unless we can get the cargo door open. Also, we cannot get any luggage out at this time.”

Her mouth is smiling, but her eyes are devoid of thought. I blink and repeat, “Can you please cancel my ticket and put me on another plane to Atlanta? I have no luggage so I have no reason to wait for this flight.”

“Sure ma’am, if you’d like to cancel your ticket, we can give you a full reimbursement.”

This doesn’t answer my question either. “No, I don’t want to cancel my trip–I want to be put on a different flight.”

“I’m sorry ma’am, we cannot do that because we have delayed our flight until tomorrow at 6:00am.”

“Sorry, I’m confused. How does that prevent you from putting me on a new flight?”

“Yes ma’am, the maintenance workers have been trying to un-freeze the door. They suggested that we delay our flight because we cannot take off. We can put you on a new flight if your flight is canceled. If you want, I can cancel your ticket and give you a full reimbursement.”

My eye is twitching. “I would not like a reimbursement for this flight. Can you reimburse me for the Uber I took today to the airport, the Uber I will take home today, and the Uber I will take to the airport tomorrow?”

“No ma’am, this delay is due to weather conditions outside of our control. And we also cannot pay for any hotel fees you may incur due to this delay.”

I wish I needed to stay at a hotel so I could have a reason to lose my temper. “Okay… But if I show up tomorrow, will we be using the same plane?”

“I believe the maintenance workers will continue working hard to unfreeze the door on this plane overnight, ma’am.”

“The weather is going to get colder this evening, so--sorry--with all due respect, I just don’t see any reason to believe that this plane will be functional tomorrow.”

“Yes ma’am, exactly. These are weather conditions that are outside of our control.” A bead of sweat hesitates for a moment on its way down her temple.

I feel my mouth open, but nothing comes out out. She shifts her weight to her other foot and is shrouded in shadow as the cruel light of the setting sun blasts me in the face. That’s when it dawned on me. This is a riddle. It's got to be. If I just think, I’ll get the answer, and the sphinx that guards the skies will grant me access to the plane. This is the only sensible explanation at this point. I collect my thoughts, take a deep breath, and raise my gaze to meet the empty eyes of the sphinx.

“I do not want to cancel my ticket. The answer is for you to cancel our flight and put me on a different one. The weather will only get worse, and I have no reason to believe it will get better. This means the plane will continue to be frozen, and the flight will likely continue to be delayed. I do not want to sit in the airport all day tomorrow, only for the flight to be delayed continually until the next day again.”

The dark silhouette slowly begins to move. Did I do it? From the shadows, the sphinx emerges and gives me a knowing look. Was that the answer? “Oh ma’am,” she chuckles. “All day? Frozen doors are typically fixed in one to two hours. I can’t imagine anyone would keep you in the airport all day for a broken plane.”

a year in review: 29

A month ago, I turned 29 years old.

Older, wrinklier people have told me that at this age, people begin to feel secure about their roles in the world, settle down, relax into place to prove and expand, and unfurl their roots into the ground. It’s not clear to me why older, wrinklier people like analogies to plants and making bread, but I think they were wrong. First, I don’t really aspire to be a tree or a baguette. Second, I don’t feel whatever level of security about myself or the world that is necessary to seriously think about settling down into a place, career, and a family. It might be the [Rina, insert coronavirus cliche here] or the fact that I have a few more years left of graduate school, but being 29 does not feel at all what I was told.

But I can’t complain. This was a good year. Thanks to the vaccine creators and distributors, I finally got to meet my friends and family safely. I am grateful that my favorite people have been blessed with good health this year. I had many warm meals, quiet moments of commiseration, and laughs with them. Thank you to everyone for being part of my 29th year.

Below is a review of my learning and personal development.

Physical Maintenance

Being sick made me healthier.

I’m proud to say that I took better care of myself this year, and it may be because of my migraines. I continue to take medication for them, but I also started taking notes on them (from my bed, not bothering to fix typos). The "mygrin_noots.txt" revealed that my migraines seem to happen when I am suffering from some combination of being poorly slept, poorly fed, poorly hydrated, and feeling bad generally. That is to say that they're moderately correlated with what I suspect reflect the later stages of burnout.

Thus, this year, I tried to figure out what dynamics seem to cause me to burn out, how to counter them, and how to prioritize my health, especially to reduce migraines. I gathered that one major contributor of burn out for me was the way I navigate social, professional, and academic environments. I love to take on new work if I feel it helps others or helps me to extend my abilities, but sometimes I can’t finish the work unless I decide to sleep less or eat only rice and broccoli. I often choose to do the work instead, but for some reason I am also always surprised that I burn out after only a week or two. When I put it in words like this it seems clearly silly.

However, I do understand that some of the professional and academic demands come from other people. My mentors or supervisors or teachers, the deadline deciders, love ambition, and I’ll be the one to say it: I don’t think they’re very good at knowing how long stuff takes. Either that, or they are expecting me to be late almost every time. In any case, this year, I have asked for extensions when I am burnt out and need to dedicate a few days to re-establish my routines and rest. Each time I ask for extensions, I feel less and less bad about it.

Finally, I have also made more time to celebrate being in this body. When I am burnt out, I feel strange in my own body, despite having inhabited it for 29 years. This year, I took myself out to walk and bike more, even in the winter when I didn't want to. I also started bouldering, which I had never tried before. I sense that I have more command over my limbs, and feel more at home in my meat case.

Psychological Maintenance

Being good at being awful is still being good at something.

A memory that I hope will be funny some day is when my therapist asked me what I thought was good about myself. I’m not sure how long the silence was, but it was long for me to become confused, awkward, embarrassed by my confusion and awkwardness, and then embarrassed at my own embarrassment. And it was long enough for her to say, "Oh? Is my Zoom working?" I told her that I didn't know the answer to the question, and she have me a little smile, “This is a hard one, I guess,” and thankfully moved on.

Finding the good in myself is still hard for me because I have a bully in my head, and she is persistent and nasty.

There was a moment this year that I thought I had destroyed her. I thought I finally had the retort that would make her recoil forever. I yelled it in her face until her voice was drowned out, and I thought I’d finally achieved peace.

Then, from her crumpled shadow, it emerged: a second nasty bully. She was ready to say whatever she needed to say at whatever volume was necessary to put me in my place. I couldn’t win. There was no winning. The emergence of the second bully implied that she could regenerate herself indefinitely. I would spend my lifetime fighting her and it would deplete me every single day until I died. It was bullies all the way down, and I would never see on what ground she stands to say what she does.

Or was it? How does she know all of this? I’ve been a private person my entire life. She knows things I’ve never said or typed, terrible thoughts I’ve entertained only when no one else was around in the private corners of my own mind. She couldn’t know unless she could literally read my mind.

But she can, or rather, I read it to her. 

It’s not that the bully regenerates herself indefinitely–it’s that I regenerate her. Not only does my mind create a nemesis for itself, it regenerates her continuously, sabotaging its efforts at peace existence.

I am frightened at my mind’s infinite capacity for torment. And I am frightened at my mind’s instinct to point it at itself, fully loaded.

How did she get so persistent? How is she so agile and precise? She could choose all the right memories, use them to make all the right inferences, and use these inferences to create the perfect theory as to why I am the most disgusting being in the universe. She brought evidence and solid reasoning. She could even generate multiple good explanations. If I waved one away, she gave another, and another, until I had no choice but to agree that yes, I am disgusting and should be ashamed. Her reasoning and explanation skills were indefeasible.

But, I generate her and she uses my memories as evidence–maybe this means that she uses my reasoning and explanations capacities too. It all makes sense. Theory-building, analyzing concepts, critiquing arguments, generating hypotheses, inferring generalizations: these are exactly the skills that I have been working almost every day to cultivate. I have improved in these areas especially in the past few years. It’s no wonder that I am good at generating imaginative, argumentative bullies.

I see two possible solutions.

1. I could make myself less good at the things I’m good at, so that she becomes weaker. I could stop putting effort into my work, allow myself to lower the quality standards for my thoughts, and avoid diving deeply into any area. This seems pretty obviously the wrong idea.
2. I could identify the reasons my mind generates bullies and address them. This involves retraining my mind to not generate bullies but to react in some less destructive way. This also involves figuring out what combination of situational and mental factors create the need for my mind to generate bullies. This will be a thorny, complicated puzzle. Luckily, it involves explanation building, which, I guess, is something I might be getting good at.

Personal and Professional Enjoyment

I need to think less.

My first goal was to sit at the piano every day. I failed. I hardly sat at the piano at all during the semester.

My second goal was write more, and specifically to publish several times before my next birthday on my blog. This year, I spent more time on this, and my mind is more organized for it. Sometimes I wrote “for an hour”, only to realize that I lost track of time and lunch was now three hours late. While I have written a few things over the course of the year, only one made it on to this blog. And to be honest, I gritted my teeth and pushed to finish it so that I could put it on my blog before my birthday. It went up only two days before the due date. My goal was to publish several times on this blog this year, so I technically failed. But there are worse ways to fail, I suppose.

My work and hobbies tend to be more cerebral, more thinky. My enjoyment of problem solving, sense-making, and learning is real. However, sometimes I need to rest this muscle, and let the other parts out to play and grow. Otherwise, I burn myself out and migraine myself into bed. This year, I did more of this by indulging more in less thinky hobbies, such as cooking and recreational, low-effort reading. This happened only a few times this year, but each time helped me to get unstuck from bed. God, I’ve missed reading fiction.

My third goal was to cultivate experimental skills, specifically in experimental design and method. I was able to do this to some extent, by attending more talks and conferences this year than in the past and by reading methods sections more thoroughly. This year, I got to learn more about the methods underlying memory and cognitive development research.

My final goal was to improve my ability to distinguish meaningful from less meaningful questions. This involved investigation into what kinds of questions ignited my spirits, unified my interests and values, and contributed productively to my field. This process involved consultations with my guts, my mind, and my mentors. This investigation is not finished, and my guts and mind tell me that I need to use trial-and-error to gather more information. However, this did help me identify the more probable and informative directions in the set of possibilities towards which to do trial-and-error. Now, the interests that I thought were disparate seem more clearly part of the same something. There is a thingy, a unifying thingy that is not yet perfectly defined and runs throughout, and I can tap into the unifying thingy to propel myself forward.

Civic Participation and Social Justice

My goal was to find ways to confront prejudice and discrimination and to better understand pain.

This year, I put more effort into mentorship. As a graduate student, I have several opportunities for mentorship, including mentorship of undergraduates with interests in graduate school and undergraduate students I teach. This year, I have had the opportunity to mentor an undergraduate student with high hopes for pursuing graduate work and dazzling potential.

I also leveraged my position as a teaching assistant to better understand and address some of the inequities I noticed in my classroom. In particular, some students have university know-how that others do not–while this is purely anecdotal, the students from historically marginalized backgrounds and who are the first in their families to attend university seem less likely to have this know-how. Know-how includes knowing how to identify and advocate for their needs relating to schooling, including asking for help and deadline extensions. I tried to put in extra effort to approach students delicately about subpar performance on assignments, to offer extensions, and to urge them to ask for help when they need it. While there is no way for me to be sure, my hope is that this treatment has helped to make important know-how more accessible.

This year, I prioritized my civic duties and voted in local elections. While I did follow some of the local issues, I could have put more effort into that this year.

Thirdly, I was able to donate more to causes I care about this year, despite my modest income.

Objectives for the Upcoming Year

Civic Participation

1. Continue mentorship, especially for students who may not have as good access to mentorship, and aim to make knowhow more accessible to those in my classroom.

2. Follow local issues more closely, and advocate for groups in need in my area.

3. Donate.

Physical maintenance + Personal Enjoyment

Make time for less thinky enjoyment

As described above, much of my work and hobbies are cerebral, and a great deal of the reading, writing, meeting, and figuring involved in these happen in a chair and being very solemn. On the other hand, my less thinky hobbies involve standing, walking, biking, tasting, and laughing. Making time for less thinky enjoyment will help me to reacquaint myself with my body and to maintain it. Doing so will necessitate setting boundaries on my time spent on cerebral activity, as well as the time spent on less thinky unenjoyment (e.g. scrolling in intrigue through the stream of materialism and doom online). I hope that this will help me keep healthy, even in the winter when I don’t feel like moving, but also that this reduces the burnout that inevitably overcome me several times a year.

Psychological Maintenance

Console my bully.

I can’t defeat her, so reprimanding her doesn’t work. I can’t make her small without making myself small, and frankly that hasn’t worked for me, even when I wanted it to. The best I can do is figure out why she’s here, and to help her feel better about it. Borne of my mind, she is my mind’s child, and I should take care of her.

Professional Enjoyment

1. Practice choosing meaningful questions. This requires both introspection and action, as well as a sense for when to apply each.

2. Look for professional environments that help me to cultivate the knowledge and skills necessary to answer the questions I want to answer. It’s great to have a job that pays my rent, but it may also be possible to have work that gives me opportunities to grow, specifically in the ways I want to grow. This means I need to be choosy about the opportunities around me.

3. Work hard selectively, and settle for acceptable quality deliberately.

Alright, this is good enough. No more. I’m hungry, and I’d like to go for a walk.

Rina

programming, rude squirrels, and meditations on learning

Programming still makes me feel like a dunce.

I stare at the display of my computer. Its bluish light reflects off my corneas, but I am not seeing the bluish light. The words on the screen denote a script that I have been trying to write for a couple of hours. It should help me organize a data structure with different forms of a survey I am using, along with the questions, answer choices, and correct answers. It also should create unique IDs for the questions and answers. But the code isn’t quite done. My fingers brush circles on the table. Its surface is subtly bumpy. I’m not sure of what the next step is. I draw paths on the surface between the circles according to my planned trip through code-space.

Actually, one more push of work might be enough.

The letters on the screen denote the items and the groups to which they belong. The lines of text are staggered in order to represent this nesting of groups. That is, question represents a question on the developed survey, and question has several properties. question_text denotes the text of the question, question_difficulty denotes the difficulty of the question, choices is a list denoting possible answers, and answer denotes the correct answer. Each question is in a list called question_list, which is in turn a property called form_questions of a larger group called form, which also has a form_number and grade_level. Each form is in a list called all_forms. Each question of course inherits a form number and grade level by virtue of being in the form that it is in.

To create an ID number for each question, we first need to make an ID property for the question which will later be filled in with a value. To generate the right value, we approach this list of forms. As we enter the outer layer of abstraction, there are different properties, one of which is a list. Items in the list cycle past until the correct item is reached and selected. Then, we can enter to a deeper level of abstraction. Namely, that item has more properties, including lists, each with their own items which whizz past until the appropriate item is selected and lights up. This item has yet another set of unique properties. The correct properties are now selected. In the distance through the translucent layers, a faint glow flickers on. The connection appears stable.

A muted, repetitive sound. A sound? The innermost layer of abstraction deflates and recedes into a small speck as my submerged head zooms outwards away from it, passing through the next layer of abstraction. My head passes through the next layer and then the next, back out past the inner workings baked into each level like a synthetic glutinous cake, the pressure around my head reducing with each of the levels, which squelch past until my head finally resurfaces with a final jerk of my neck. The muffled beeps are coming from my alarm. I shake my head, flicking the remnants of colorful abstraction goop out of my ears, which return to full functionality and flinch at the alarm. These are some terrible beeps. I turn off my alarm. In the absence of terrible beeps, my ears pick up the whirring of the computer’s fan hard at work. I blink. I’m at my desk with its barely bumpy surface. The words denote my progress on my script.

I should save my progress. A few more clicks of the keyboard and my script is saved, computer off, and with a bit more stumbling I am at the door, slipping on shoes. It is time for my scheduled walk. I don’t think I’ve forgotten anything. I think I’ve got everything I need.

I forgot: it’s pleasant today. My eyes take a moment to adjust to the sunlight when I step outside and start my usual walking route. The birds greet me as I cross the street toward their tree. The tree beckons the breeze with its branches, and the breeze nuzzles my cheek.

Sure, this was hard work for me because I am still a novice programmer. Honestly, part of me twists itself up knowing that I didn’t have to spend so much time on this. I might have finished more quickly if I did it all manually instead of programming at all. But I want to get good at this. I know that a more experienced programmer could probably finish this script I spent hours on today within around thirty minutes. They have a rich system of concepts and rules crystalized in their minds, ingrained in their fingertips. Those are the same concepts and rules that I still struggle with. Some days, it’s impossible to believe that if I just practice, I could have that system too. I know that the only way to get that expert knowledge is to leap into the depths, gain experience, and then organize it in my mind, reorganize it, and reorganize it again. And yet, as a novice, I often don’t have the knowledge to know if I’m making any progress. Learning deeply is a huge, uncertain investment, and I’ll admit I find it intimidating.

By the same token, the strenuous and unstable nature of learning also makes it totally transformative. When I emerge from doing this type of learning, I feel my life change fundamentally. I can use my new knowledge to reformulate problems that were previously incomprehensible and find solutions to them. I learn a new set of values and develop new habits in accordance with them. It even transforms my basic perceptions. Things have attributes that I didn’t see before, and I become attuned to this additional dimension in my environment. I don’t mean to make this sound mystical. Maybe if I describe the phases of learning I cycle through, it’ll make more sense. Consider the following analogy.

PHASE ONE: DISARRAY AND HYPERFOCUS

Descent

In the first phase of learning deeply, I adjust my goggles, take one last breath, and dive. When I open my eyes, I am in a strange realm, surrounded by strange shapes, textures, and colors. Everything seems at once in organic, dynamic unity and in completely incomprehensible formlessness. This duality becomes increasingly evident as I dive deeper. Everything is new. I cannot tell where one object ends and another begins. I don’t know what I’m looking at, I don’t know where to look, I don’t know how to look. My eyes narrow, focused, to try to find similarities between objects. At some point, they have glazed over in their overwhelm.

Then, I start to recognize objects that I saw before. There are duplicates, quite a few actually. I think I’ve seen most of the objects this place has at this point. Most of them are familiar or at least similar to the objects I’ve already seen, just a different color or size. Now that I have a sense of the variability in color, size, shape, and other attributes, I can imagine what other kinds of objects could be here. Also, it seems like certain types of objects are consistently close to each other down here. I wonder if that’s a coincidence. When I search around for one of the objects, the connected object is always in close proximity. These two objects must be connected in some way. This might be a pattern. The two objects are close together when the arm of the first one is moving in the direction of the other object.

But, when I simulate this potential relation between the two objects, incorporating the variability in object arms and the pattern with arm direction, something feels missing. What makes the object’s arm point in the direction of the other object? Is the second object drawn in some way to the first object’s arm? Or does the first object’s arm detect the second object, and then direct itself towards the second object? Or is there some other outside factor that influences the behavior of these objects and their arms? Wow, there’s a huge cluster of these objects over there! What is happening?

What I’m trying to get at is that, in the first phase of learning deeply, I dive headfirst into a new area and absorb as much information as I can. Then I can group objects based on whether they are similar or different in a particular way. This way of being similar or different between objects can be summarized as an attribute, such as shape or color. An attribute “flattens”, or reduces dimensionality of, the problem space. I can also start to see relations between objects based on their attributes and mentally simulate these relations to generate possible explanations. I can look around and collect information to confirm or disconfirm these patterns. 

 

Patterns allow me to abstract from my experience, that is, to flatten my experience into concepts and rules that I can carry in my pocket back to the surface. When my pockets are full enough, my expedition is complete, and I can start to make my way back to the surface.

Phase One, the descent phase, requires my mental resources to hyperfocus on the objects in the environment: observing, detecting similarities and differences, hypothesizing relations, and testing beliefs. In order for hyperfocus to be possible, another cognitive task needs to occur in the background: suspension of doubt and indirectly related knowledge. My mind is temporarily suppressing my other indirectly related knowledge which could distract me from understanding the information in front of me or induce undue doubt in the patterns that I perceive. This suspension helps me to maximize my focus on the information in front of me, to be open-minded and to give it the best chance possible. As I begin floating back to the surface, the cognitive load of learning reduces, and the mental force suspending my other knowledge and doubt begins to loosen. Memories of previous expeditions flit back into my consciousness.

PHASE TWO: INTEGRATING PREVIOUS EXPEDITIONS

Ascent

A few miles away is the spot where I did another expedition months ago. That time, I was surrounded by strange objects with a completely different shape from the ones from this dive. They were huge. Those objects were covered in little tuber-shaped appendages which were changing color. I thought my eyes were malfunctioning. Actually, I now recall noticing that, as in this trip, the objects sometimes came in pairs. In particular, the appendages of paired objects were a milky blue color, unlike the color-shifting appendages of the other objects. Although the objects seemed different, there are similarities between the previous and current expeditions. Both of these environments are home to objects that seem to be trying to find a partner. And they’re not that far away from each other, just a few miles. Maybe there was something in the environment, some mechanism that could account for this. I wonder why color was relevant in the last expedition, while the arm direction was relevant this time.

In this phase, the new patterns or rules that I learn in one context start to trigger memories of other patterns in other contexts. I can start to integrate the new patterns with the other patterns I learned in the past by finding similarities or differences in the pattern itself or between the contexts in which the patterns emerged. Similarities between patterns or contexts help me to create a general rule that seems to apply in both contexts. This is valuable because I can try to generalize the rule, to start to imagine what kinds of environments I might observe the pattern in, even if I haven’t observed that environment before. On the other hand, noting differences is also useful, because I can question what mechanisms could bring about these differences. This information helps me to identify important distinctions that I might observe in other contexts, which would inform my theory.

This remembering process is integral to consolidating and reorganizing specific knowledge into more general structures that could be used in multiple contexts. Having these more general concept structures, including general rules and relevant distinctions, allows me to think of new questions to ask, which can motivate subsequent expeditions. They can also forge new connections that spark creativity. Successful integration of new information deepens my understanding of phenomena I learned about in the past. The infrastructure between concepts in my mind transforms and sees a boost in connectivity. To the extent that my mental life depends on the infrastructure of concepts, my mental life thereby transforms.

In other words, learning deeply is transformative for me in part because of the nature of the phases in the learning process: hyperfocused sensemaking and comparison-based integration with previous experience. These two phases differ in two key ways. Phase 1 has a narrow scope in my mind and requires utmost focus to make sense of the seeming chaos of information. On the other hand, Phase 2 has a larger scope encompassing the new learning as well as memory of previous learning that might be relevant. Phase 2 also requires a relaxing of focus on internal workings of concepts in order to freely notice new similarities and differences. They each have their benefits, but their benefit together outweighs the sum of the individual benefits.

Inability to move from Phase 1 to Phase 2 results in learning of information that is not integrated with my prior experiences and knowledge. The new information doesn’t feel relevant to anything else that I have learned. It does not spark novel questions, it does not boost connectivity, and it does not induce creativity. Spending time only in Phase 1 is not only unproductive, but also disconcerting. Once the novelty of learning new things ebbs away, I get a nagging sense that the new information is not useful or meaningful to me. It’s important that I spend some time allowing my mind to wander off after Phase 1, for it will come back with memories that are, in some way, relevant to my new knowledge. Making connections to these memories will make this learning meaningful with respect to other concepts and phenomena.

On the other hand, spending time only in Phase 2 and no time in Phase 1 stunts my learning. If all I do is scour for relations between information I already know, then I will eventually reach a point at which I can’t think of any more, and any new relation I can think of will be relatively unimportant and stale. The issue is that I will be out of new material from which to abstract concepts and relations. This can only be by going on new expeditions. Phase 1 expeditions require intense focus, but the return is fertile experience, ripe with potential to enliven my concepts and theories in Phase 2.

This learning process requires that I operate my cognitive faculties at full capacity. I start to lose track of what time it is or how long I have been working. I lose touch even with my bodily sensation and surroundings. The bluish tinge of my computer display, the texture of my desk top, the pain growing in my unwisely angled neck. All is suspended, inhibited so that mental resources can be fully allocated to learning.

Even my sense of self disappears. Although the reality is that I am trying to understand and learn a new thing, I lose awareness of my self as an agent that is trying to understand. There are not two separate entities, a mysterious phenomenon and me (the observer trying to understand it)—rather, there is a continuity between the thing and me, and in light of this continuity, in that moment, me, my body, my passage through time, my agenthood are all unimportant. All there is, is the thing at hand. I “become” it, embody it. As I learn its inclinations, its ambitions, its observations, its limitations, these become, in a sense, my inclinations, my ambitions, my observations, and my limitations. I am lastingly transformed.

Hang on. Did you hear that? What on earth is that sound? The breeze ruffles the leaves. There it is again, that squawking sound! It came from up there above me in the tree by that squirrel! The squirrel looks me dead in the face, opens its mouth, and squawks again. “Excuse me?” I am not one to be condescended to, and I could tell from his eyes that he was sizing me up. He squawks again. The nerve. Does he not realize that before he shouted at me, I had been thinking? Or is it that he doesn’t care? He doesn’t care that I’ve got things to do, thoughts to think, work to complete? He is a rude squirrel. I glare at him. The rude squirrel glares back.

My eyes narrow at the wind. The rude squirrel seems oblivious to it (as well as all of the other important things in the world).

I can see my reflection in his unrepentent eyeballs. My eye is twitching and now I can’t help but admit that my face looks ridiculous.

I’m a moron. Of course this squirrel doesn’t care about interrupting my thoughts. This squirrel doesn’t care about me. To the squirrel, I’m a strange animal, too large an animal to be a friend and too slow to be a foe. With one final squawk, the squirrel turns its puffy tail on me and scurries up the tree.

I’ve even had my earphones in the whole time without playing any music. When I’m in my thoughts like this, it’s easy to put everything else on autopilot, which I guess means talking back to rodents. The wind is picking up. The sky is preparing to change from baby blue to velvet purple. It’s probably time to make my way home. It’ll be dinner time soon.

I don’t even remember what I was–oh right. Yes, OK. So, when I am learning deeply, especially about new topics, I seem to lose myself. While this can be an, exhilarating, transformative experience, it can have negative consequences.

When I embody the phenomenon, connection to myself disappears, and so does my control over myself. This lack of personal awareness and control allows me to plunge into a new territory with an open mind and to absorb as much as I can. But, this also makes me do silly things (like seeing malice in the eyes of innocent squirrels) and worse. If I spend days on learning deeply and nothing else, conceptual goop perpetually in my ears, I lose track of the fact that I’m lacking nutrients, sleep, or exercise. I forget to do leisure reading, socialize, and make and consume art, the things that maintain and delight my being. This doesn’t work because in the long term, my being is all that I am. Sure, I may be transformed in some way by my new knowledge, but the other more foundational facets of my being are being neglected. The weakened foundation renders the other facets of my life, including my thoughts, simulations, and concepts, lifeless. My first-person experience loses continuity and coherence. Unless I can remember who I am and why I am learning in the first place, it all feels meaningless.

PHASE 3: REMEMBERING THE SELF

To shore

In this phase, I come to my senses.

I’ve floated back up, almost to the surface, and realize that work is over for the day. My head emerges from the water and blink the salt water out of my eyes. My arms and legs feel shaky and heavy. Diving is serious business and puts a lot of strain on these muscles. They need time to recuperate. More than anything else though, I’m hungry. Actually, I’m ravenous. Time to go home.

As soon as I get home, I heat up some soup and rice and sit at my table. My arms flop down at my sides. My muscles release and slump. I’m glad that dinner was pre-prepared, and so are my floppy muscles. Eating at the end of a long day always makes me feel better. Today was definitely a long day. I reflect on what I learned. I am feeling content about my work today and proud of my progress. There are times when I am also ashamed of the clumsier moments of my work and try not to think too hard about it. But most days, I feel proud of what I’ve accomplished. A few more expeditions and maybe I’ll have enough information to write up a report about the trends I’ve noticed in my dives. Tomorrow, I can start planning the next expedition, and then maybe by the end of the next month I can start writing. For now, my ears are begging to listen to music. I would also like to call my grandmother. Maybe I can read a short story before bed.

The final phase of learning deeply involves mindful healing and careful introspection. This includes reflecting on the learning process, including successes and mishaps, and how they relate to my ambitions, as well as attending to my more basic physical, emotional, and social needs. In Phase 1, my attention is hyperfocused on a narrow scope, a specific phenomenon. In Phase 2, my attention becomes broader to include a larger scope, such as prior knowledge and experience. In Phase 3, my attention is distributed or diffused across an even broader scope, my entire first-person experience in that moment.

In Phase 3, my mental resources are directed from the outside world back to me. This allows me to become aware of how my body and mind feel. This information is important because it helps me to identify what I need to do next. In the short term, I may need to eat, sleep, call a friend or my family, write a scathing email (and not send it), sit in solitude, reassure myself of my abilities, or devour some celebratory potato chips. I also reflect on decisions or actions that I may need to make in the long term. For example, I might realize that I would like to change my topic of research. Alternatively, I may find that I am captivated by my topic of research and would like to pursue it by taking on new research methods or developing my own. I may find that I want to spend less time on work and more time contributing to social justice causes.

Phase 3 gives me space to perform personal maintenance, but it also helps me to establish or see the coherence in my life’s events. The shift from Phase 1 to Phase 2 helps me to see the coherence or conceptual continuity between the new thing I learned and the old things I learned in the past. That is, these deep diving expeditions in learning aren’t just weird arbitrary tasks; they relate in important ways to other things I have learned and done. In the same way, the shift from these two phases to Phase 3 brings to light the fact that I am not just learning or working hard for no reason, but because learning and working help me to pursue my curiosities and acheive my goals. That is, learning has a context: me, the learner. Contextualizing the act of learning in me specifically creates a continuous, coherent story from the events in the life of an agent with goals moving through time.

If I spend too much time in Phases 1 and 2, I lose my self, I become tired, and my life starts to feel disjointed and incoherent. I don’t remember why I cared to do the things I do in the first place, but I still do them. The seeming lack of reason behind my behavior makes wonder if I am crazy. My physical or emotional needs start to accumulate, and I become perpetually tired. On the other hand, if I spend all of my time in Phase 3, I become very well attuned to any shifts in states in myself, but I cannot transform myself with experiences or learning and cannot gain insight from my knowledge structures. I fall out of the practice of learning deeply or making connections, and I cower at the prospect of learning, analyzing, or deliberating. The best way to facilitate my learning seems to be to cycle naturally through these phases.

Again, consider the acuity or depth of attention on one hand and breadth or size of scope of attention on the other. In Phase 1, my focus is deep and the scope is small. This is a tradeoff needed because attention is a scarce resource. Spending an entire day in Phase 1 would look like a long, skinny cylinder. In Phase 2, focus is less deep, but there is greater breadth, as connections between different concepts are made. Spending an entire day in Phase 2 looks like a shorter, more stout cylinder. In Phase 3, focus is completely diffused, not hyperfocused or fixated, across my personal experience, a large breadth. Spending time here looks like a large flat cylinder, like a coin. The volume represents the amount of learning achieved. If I try to do all three, but without taking breaks in between, my day looks like three cylinders stacked on top of each other. The volume of this is the sum of the three component parts.

Being able to move between these three phases routinely establishes continuity between them, filling in the gaps between cylinders, and this looks more like a cone. This cone has the virtue of capturing differently sized scopes, while also capturing different depths of focus. By virtue of being a more continuous shape, it also has a larger volume.

Of course, in practice, learning doesn’t always happen from Phase 1 to 2 to 3. It can oscillate between them. My goal here is mostly to define three important phases of learning, and to emphasize the need for cohesion in moving between them.

What I am trying to say is that cone-shaped learning allows me to learn deeply, widely, and meaningfully. Cone-shaped learning is more meaningful and more sustainable way to learn and grow and be, because I can move between phases with cohesive transitions. I can’t always seem to get through all of these phases in a day—it usually takes a week or more—but even just nudging myself between them using alarms has helped.

It’s definitely helped today. I think I’ve learned a lot: I finished a new script and practiced moving through levels of abstraction in code. I think I can be proud of my work. I shuffle across the grass to get the mud off my shoes. No mail today. My stomach moans. I guess I’m starving. When I open the door, my nostrils are not met by the smell of freshly cooked rice. Damn it to hell. I forgot to start the rice cooker before my walk. I wish that squirrel yelled at me sooner. I am a dunce indeed.

a year in review: 28

Regarding the 27th year

On my birthday, I take some time to reflect on my year, to thank the people in my life (thank you all), and to highlight new goals for next year.

To say that this year has been eventful would be a monumental understatement. I will skip a description of the year’s events because these essays always tend to be too long. Below, I track my progress on my personal objectives (personal maintenance and growth) and lay out new objectives for my 28th year.

Physical Maintenance

I managed to get more sleep at reasonable hours this year. I don’t know what allowed this to happen, but it did. This improved my life exponentially.

I have started taking migraine medication. That is all.

I exercised and stretched more than I did last year. However, I did so far less frequently during the winter. During the school year, my weekly tasks increase multiply. Whenever I get overwhelmed with work, exercise is the first routine I neglect. My guess is that my tendency to feel fatigued or weak in the winter is partly due to lack of exercise. This year has seen progress, but there is still room to grow.

Psychological Maintenance

Last year, I hoped that I would bully myself less. Unfortunately, I don’t think I managed that this year.

I have a bully inside of my head. Sometimes I just let it bully me. In particular, I can’t seem to stop the bullying on days when I haven’t slept. On those days, I wake up, eat breakfast, and soon after that I notice that the bully’s voice is somehow amplified in my head. I try to take the microphone away from her but I’m too tired and she puts up a pretty good fight. She has a lot of mean things to say. Sometimes it makes me cry. Sometimes I cry all day and I cannot stop until I fall sleep. Sometimes she will stop if I ask, but most of the time she doesn’t, and if she does, it’s not for long. She doesn’t want to stop. But I’ve also learned that if I ask her questions, sometimes she responds with unforeseen honesty.

I’ve actually gotten to know her a little bit. I think she is scared for me. She just doesn’t want me to get my hopes up. The sad thing is that if you listen to her with even a slightly critical eye, you’d see that she says a lot of the same things over and over again without much substantiation. And yet she thinks that it’s all true and that I should know about it. To be frank, I pity her immensely.

I’ve been doing what I can to reassure her that she’s wrong about the world. Thanks to getting better sleep, taking some time to myself, and hearing feedback from the kindly people in my life, I’ve gathered the world is a forgiving place. I have flaws, pardon me, many flaws, as my little bully has pointed out for me, but many times, the world forgives. Somehow, people look past my many imperfections. I’m truly indebted to-

Ah, see? I was about to continue about how I felt that people generally have been forgiving and kind to me, but I could feel the microphone slipping from my grasp and I know this means I need to snatch it back from my little bully. She tugs sometimes. I should correct myself. I shouldn’t say that the world is a forgiving place per se--this would imply that the world percieves my flaws (yes yes, my many flaws, shh my little bully) and goes out of its way to issue me a pardon. I gathered this year that this is not how it works. Many of my supposed flaws are hardly perceived by the world, and if they are, they are perceived more often as neutral properties or quirks or sometimes--to my sincere astonishment--as sweet or charming qualities. I have much to learn about the world, but it is hardly the reproving, zero-sum-game environment that my little bully seems to think. Its people are warm and gentle and generous with their smiles and laughter. This means that I need to think more critically about what my flaws are. Some of my flaws are in fact true flaws. Some of them are not, but are unconventional or are deemed by me to be unpreferable for whatever reason (which may or may not be valid). If I want to grow, I need to deliberate before judging certain qualities about myself to be flaws.

This deliberation happens (would ideally happen) when I’m not tired. I would also ideally try to remind myself when I am not tired about the warmth in the world. Whenever the little bully snatches the microphone, she talks so much, and I am easily persuaded. I try to remind myself of what is true when I’m not tired so that I can withstand her bullying when I am tired. Because it’s true. It really is. The world is warm, and I will generally be treated with kindness, and my dignity will be respected. And on top of that, I deserve basic kindness and dignity. It’s true. It really is.

Civic Participation

In fact, everyone is entitled to the kindness and sincerity that I can have. Sadly, my access to the kindness and sincerity of the world is not always extended to other people. This asymmetry is so stark that access like mine is called a privilege. Entire groups of people are oppressed in my countries because of things that are entirely out of their control: their race, ethnicity, first language, socio-economic status at birth, gender (or lack of gender) identity, sexuality (or lack of sexuality), and more.

The reason that I deserve kindness and dignity is not that I’m special. I am not special--in fact, I am ordinary by all relevant measures. There is no virtue in my mixed race, English-Japanese speaking, middle class background. My background isn’t what justifies my deserving basic kindness. I deserve this because I am a human being. The fact is that the current systems of power deprive people of the kindness and dignity they deserve and thus do violence to their humanity.

Sometimes, people in poverty deliberate whether to stop purchasing life-saving medication so they can have enough money to spend on their childrens’ food (here). Sometimes, people with severe substance use disorders hide in pain (here) for fear of being shamed or being thrown in jail. Some of them die, some, completely alone. Sometimes, people who have finally discovered and accepted identities that make them feel most like themselves are ostracized, pointed at, and jeered at. Some are disowned and lose access to food, shelter, and health insurance. Some face aggression, from snide remarks to physical violence, even murder (here). Sometimes, Black parents in the U.S. try to find the words to explain to their children that the government does not always protect them (here), that the people are protesting because a policeman--yes, the ones hired by the state--took another Black life, that there is still no justice for Breonna Taylor. It’s hardly surprising that so many people feel completely betrayed by government and its institutions, failed by schools, abandoned by the group to which which should be their home.

Some people have spent their entire lives fighting for rights. Some have died before seeing the fruits of their labor or enjoying their due liberties.

What can someone like me do about this? Previously, but more actively this year, I became committed to listening when I can to people who are in pain. This is because the people’s pain is real and it’s important. Pain of being robbed of deserved life, liberty, and dignity is real. No one deserves to feel this pain alone. People in pain deserve to be seen and to have their humanity acknowledged.

One way to do this is to read good journalism, opinion pieces, and life stories. Since becoming engrossed in my own work as I started graduate school, I found I was not reading as much about my community, countries, and world as I did before. This is because my own life changed vastly and I needed to acclimate. However, I have committed more of my time to reading about others’ lives, especially local and regional news and issues this year.

Actively learning more about the people of my community, my countries, and the world is how I learn about their everyday lives, acknowledge their humanity, and find out what I can do to help those without access to the lives they deserve. Committing more time to this has prompted me to do more to support, including giving more donations. It was also the impetus for reconsidering my role in these systems: how I may be contributing to them through the way I speak, the ways I might enable them by not speaking, the way I teach as a teacher’s assistant, the way I think about and conduct research as a research assistant. It has also prompted me to demand efforts toward systemic change of the leaders of the institutions I am a part of, to protest systemic inequity, and to use my civic responsibilities to vote for systemic change.

Personal and Professional Enjoyment

Especially after consecutive days dedicated to completing a lot of assigned work, I submit my work and lie on the floor. A slimy dread seeps into my stomach. I am free, finally free for the day, and yet… I pace around my room, glance through my phone, dust the surfaces… Maybe I should eat something? I’ve lived 28 years now in this body, and I still sometimes lose track of what makes it happy.

This year, I dedicated less of my free time to parttaking in the mindless scroll, and more time to playing the piano, writing, cooking, and learning for fun. In lieu of writing essays about each of these hobbies, I will say that engaging in these activities, honing my skills, and accumulating knowledge about them exhilerates me. There are times that I’ve been shocked to realize that I’ve been practicing the same few measures of a piece on the piano for an hour. And somehow, even after all of that deliberate practice, I feel a surge of bliss rather than internet browsing malaise.

Similarly, doing meaningful work, work that allows me to repurpose my prior knowledge for something new, to learn a useful skill, to add to my knowledge or reorganize it with novel concepts and structures, makes my eyes light up. I can feel it. I can sit for hours to tinker with it. I ponder about it when I take a break to use the bathroom. I sometimes stand up to jump around in glee while reading papers. Obviously not all of my work is like this, but some of it is, and I am trying to keep track of this so that I can return to this work when I have time.

Meaningful work/play, whether it is deliberate practice during my free time or parts of my work as a graduate student, makes me feel grounded in who I am. This year, I identified some hobbies and areas within my professional life that make me feel alive.

Objectives for the New Year

Civic Participation

Next year, I hope to find more ways for me to confront systemic prejudice and discrimination and to understand and address pain. As a graduate student on a modest stipend, I don’t have much power, but there are still things I can do to help. I will find ways to make my everyday life more efficient so that I have more time and resources to give back to the world.

Physical Maintenance

1. This year, I will continue trying to go to bed on time and prioritize sleeping enough.

2. I will also take my migraine medication when I need it.

3. I will celebrate my body by playing in it: dancing, jumping, and wiggling for laughs. I will cultivate my body’s potential by exercising and stretching its muscles in the summer, as I have been doing, but also in the winter.

Psychological Maintenance

1. This year, I will make time to acknowledge the good in the world, its people, and myself. It just does not do to try to tap into this knowledge when I am a curlicue on the floor. Resilience against the little bully’s taunting will be nurtured on the days when I feel well. I hope to make time for undistracted reflection on good a few times a week.

2. I will also continue practicing asking for help.

Personal and Professional Enjoyment

1. This year, I will continue to cultivate my hobbies: music and writing. This means sitting at the piano every day. Even five minutes a day is acceptable. This also means jotting notes and full thoughts. Improvements on my note-taking system should allow easy access to take or edit notes. If I find ideas I want to develop, I will refine the wording and style and try to publish multiple essays this year on this site.

2. I will continue to cultivate my research skills. During my first years of graduate schooling, I have become faster at reading, more proficient at verbal communication and discussion with colleagues, and more knowledgable about empirical methods. This year, I would like to become proficient at designing experiments and stimuli. In order to do so, I will pay closer attention to the method sections when I read scientific papers, particularly to stimuli development. Developing experimental stimuli for homework in my courses is another way to practice this skill in a low stakes environment.

This year, I would also like to learn to better distinguish meaningful from less meaningful research questions. I can do this by identifying which researched constructs in particular captivate me and thinking about how they could be unified. This will involve extensive reading to actually understand the existing theories about these constructs.

Finally: More music, more film, more art.
More walks. More belly laughs.
More reading about animals and plants.
More explicit adoration.
More mischief.
More bicycling.
More phone calls.
More community.

Love and peace,

Rina

a year in review: 26

I started writing this on my birthday. I've found myself really, really bored of introspection lately, and I finished this only through brute force. This is an account of my 26th year, an assessment of personal progress, and a blueprint of new goals.

Last year I focused on developing a plan for action and constructing a solid foundation of habits for the next year. Leaving room for unanticipated happenings, I tried to refine the questions I was interested in answering and the values and objectives that guided them, and then searched for researchers who could help me to approach those questions. It didn’t take much introspection to realize that going through with this plan would be trying, and if I wanted to maintain my health during this turbulence, I needed to be able to better take care of myself even when I was on autopilot. Accordingly, I spent some time paying close attention to myself and my everyday behavior and deliberately started to develop healthier habits.

This year, I started to execute the plan. I applied to schools that seemed to be enriching places to learn and to approach my questions of interest. A few months later, I received notifications of acceptance and began making plans to move.

There were, as I anticipated, some unanticipated happenings. This past year, I had to say farewell forever to some of my closest relatives, two who had lived long lives and one who departed from this world too early. I also got to celebrate their terrific adventures and their beautiful beings in the company of my relatives. I made a quick note to myself that I would like for there to be plenty of food and alcohol at my funeral.

Before I felt ready, I drank my last coffee at my favorite back-alley coffee shop. I watched the sunset one last time at Greenlake. I submitted my letter of resignation to my workplace of almost three and a half years. I waved some teary goodbyes to the people and places that nurtured me from when I was a fearful, hunched-over adolescent of almost 18 until I was a thoroughly bruised (thank you, children I worked with) but hopeful girl of almost 26.

And then, it was time. I uprooted my life and repotted it in Minneapolis. I think a lot of the roots survived and are just now starting to acclimate to the new soil.

Considering the amount of changes, things have gone well so far. This is large part thanks to the kind people around me.Many people have been so generous with their ears and wisdom and so patient with my silliness and clumsiness. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Here, I’ll review some of the progress I have made on some of the goals I set for myself last year. Then, I will unroll some of the objectives for my 27th year.

Physical Maintenance

My schedule was fairly routine for a majority of the past year, and I enjoyed a mostly consistent sleeping schedule. However, when school started in September, my schedule changed completely, and I have been finding it difficult to adjust. In fact, there were weeks this autumn in which I slept for two three-hour periods throughout the day for several days at a time. During this time, I couldn’t think of interesting things to say, I couldn’t focus on readings, and I couldn’t seem to think about anything without fixating on its uglier facets. My sleep routine goal has unfortunately not been met, and it is negatively affecting my life.

This collapse of my routine also affected my exercising. Until I moved in autumn, I was happily doing rigorous exercise for 30 minutes or more about five days a week. In autumn, this routine completely imploded because navigating a novel environment and sleeping poorly depleted me of my energy. For the last two months of this past year, I rode my bicycle or walked to and from school but did hardly any other form of rigorous exercise.

On a more positive note, I have managed to maintain a nutritious, fun diet. Food appreciation has been central to my everyday life ever since I was a child, and I am proud to say that I maintain this even today—I had a flaky, fluffy croissant for breakfast by the way, thank you for asking. I regularly get to munch happily on a well-balanced, exciting array of foods. This has not changed much since last year, but more recently it seems that by the time I know what my body needs, I am already reaching for it, almost instinctively. This habit, which previously required a nontrivial amount of cognitive effort, has become mostly intuitive. I am humbled by my body’s ability to internalize this habit and allow this shift from deliberation to automation.

Psychological Maintenance

Next, I have a slightly more nuanced understanding of my feelings and moods. I have found it less difficult to shift my attention to my feelings and then to sit quietly and observe the tension in my jaw, the tightness of my guts, and the bounciness of my thoughts. The categorization of my feelings based on those observations has been more precise; I have a larger selection of categories than I did last year, and I categorize more accurately. With a more fine-grained set of categories sprouted new combinations of coping skills and expectations.

One such expectation is the understanding that sometimes, feelings cannot be dealt with and squared away completely. Sometimes, I need to expect that all I can do is mitigate the feeling enough, just enough that I can treat others respectfully and perform my duties sufficiently well. This means that when I cannot alleviate emotional pain entirely, I must not put further burden upon myself by being alarmed, and I must not be angry with myself for being unable to accomplish an impossible task.

Rather, the most appropriate course of action is to soberly acknowledge my limitations. Since this acknowledgement simply constitutes learning new facts about myself, I would ideally feel neutral about it, the way I might feel learning a fact about the Andromeda Galaxy or tree frogs or something; however, I think it is also not unreasonable to feel frustrated or even stunned at being hit in the face with my limitations. I should just be careful that I don’t weaponize these negative feelings about my incompetence to bully myself.

My next goal was to probe more into my long-term anxieties and insecurities. I have been doing this by asking myself probing questions and carefully angled follow up questions until the insecurity feels precise, and then trying to untangle memories to pry out the critical ones that formed the insecurity. The hardest part of this procedure is trying to quiet the panicked warnings from my viscera to stop, but this has gotten slightly easier with practice. Performing what felt like surgery on my own emotions has honestly been agonizing, but it helped me to synthesize my thoughts, emotions, and forgotten memories.

Here are three insights that came from this synthesis:

1) Many insecurities start from little moments, but ruminating on them turns them into monstrosities. If I think hard, I can point to certain memories in which someone, whose judgement I trusted or whose approval I wanted, told me something that caused me to fixate on some strange detail, to make bizarre assumptions, or to be unduly self-conscious. I started to obsess over the notion that my values were incorrectly calibrated and that I must be dumb or depraved. Quite a few of these ideas were hurtful and absurd, and adopting them has contorted parts of my worldview.

2) I can counter the effects of rumination by questioning the insecurity and the authority of the person who brought it to my attention. In addition to questioning the veracity of the insecurity, I explored the reasons and contexts that led some people to say things that were so inappropriate. Maybe they needed to vent some unrelated frustration or were trying to impress someone nearby by seeming witty and edgy. This obviously does not absolve them of their rude behavior or justify what they said. It only contextualizes and delegitimizes their comments, which dislodges the insecurities from their nests and allows me to slowly remedy the infected parts of my worldview.

3) A surprising ratio of my thoughts about myself are not actually mine, and taking ownership and maintenance responsibilities of my identity will require hard work. This examination of my insecurities made me realize how much I identify even with off-hand comments and snide remarks by other people. I become careless and indiscriminately accept outside judgement, I am kind of embarrassed to say, with hardly any hesitation. This goal of developing a more accurate self-concept thus proved to be a more sizable undertaking than I anticipated. Still, this year, I made some headway by reevaluating a few of my self-beliefs and starting to write them down: where I came from, what I believe, what I value, and what I want. Most of these things are still vague, but I can fidget with them until things seem right.

Social Skills

I’ve started delving into some heavy territory, so here is an intermission peanut.

This year, one goal was to get used to casual group social situations. This year, I pushed myself into situations where I was one of group. I feel more a tiny bit more comfortable with having fun in public. Through exposure, I am slowly getting used to it. Thank you to the people who are so pleasant and hold my hand in these situations even though I am a silly, nervous girl and have sweaty palms.

Relationships

This year, I acknowledged just how hard it is for me to let people come close to me. I also acknowledged that this is something that I deeply, deeply desire.

I found freedom and empowerment in being a kind of elusive character. Not talking about my inner life to people meant that no one would know what I am doing or even what I am trying to do, and therefore that no one could judge me, and no one could try to get in my way. However, over the past few years and this year especially, I realized that this also meant that I could never truly collaborate with anyone and I could never share the joy of success with anyone. I further realized that I wanted to play with people, grow with people, and adventure the world with people. This means that I need to let people get close enough to see me.

This year, I admitted that I am intensely afraid of being seen.

This year, I also squeezed my eyes shut and dove.

I got water in my eyes, and sometimes it burns. And to be honest, I still feel kind of afraid some of the time. But I got to splash around in the water and explore its depths with some of my favorite people in the world.

Thank you again to the wonderful people around me for your feedback and encouragement.

Objectives for the New Year

Civic Participation

Last year, I identified a problem: I stopped paying attention to the news because I was tired of getting into fruitless, time-consuming arguments. This year, I managed to get back into reading the news, but I’m still not as well informed as I want to be. In particular, I noticed that my main difficulties are: 1) not knowing the names of noteworthy politicians, 2) not paying attention to state-level issues, and 3) reading opinion pieces with a less critical eye when the headline sounds agreeable to me.

Next year, I would like to read the news in a way that addresses those problems:

1) making note of the names, positions, and parties of noteworthy politicians, in addition to their positions

2) learning more about the key issues in Minnesota state

3) being devil’s advocate while I read opinion pieces that sound agreeable to me and reading more opinion pieces with titles that are not as agreeable

Physical Maintenance

1) This year, I would like to figure out how I can go to bed at a reasonable hour. I’m at a complete loss as to how to train myself to do this. My inkling is that one way to start is to set an alarm to go to bed at a certain hour. It’s so easy to get sucked into things or just waste time until the wee hours if I’m uninterrupted by some voice of reason (and sometimes I ignore her—just ask my mom).

2) I would also like to add more rigorous exercise and more stretching to my routines. Even doing five minutes of exercise or stretching at random points throughout the day seems to make me feel better instantaneously and also make my life significantly better overall.

Psychological Maintenance

1) I would like to continue to get a more accurate understanding of who I am, what I want, and what my capabilities are.

2) I would like to bully myself less. This year, I will continue to make the voice of reason in my head louder and more assertive. I am not optimistic that I will ever entirely eliminate the bullying voices, but I know I have the capacity to argue with them. This year, I tried (with some success) to notice the moments when reasonable self-criticism devolved into unreasonable self-torment. There are some notable differences in the tone and language used in each of these categories of thought. I identified some of the functions that the bullying voice may have, and then started developing arguments for why the voice doesn’t perform its function or has a misguided purpose entirely. I made an effort to start engaging in conversation with the bullying voice using these arguments when I could muster the energy. This year, I would like to continue this arguing practice to increase my emotional endurance.

3) Lastly, this year I would like to start asking people for help. As I acknowledged above, there is a limit to the amount of emotional burden I can shoulder at any point in time. I mentioned above that I should not be alarmed if I cannot square away all of my feelings as long as I am able to be respectful to others and function. The truth is that sometimes, there is enough emotional burden that the amount is beyond my threshold, and as a result I am not able to function. In these times, I tend to thrash around, trying to wrestle with a situation that is clearly beyond my limits, until I crumple on to the floor in an exhausted, crying heap. In these times, I should instead ask someone for help. I'm not exactly sure why, but asking for help in emotionally trying circumstances feels really counterintuitive to me. However, I know that thrashing is taking a toll on my everyday life, so I have to grit my teeth and do the counterintuitive thing. I’m glad I have maintained good relationships with kind and generous people who would probably help me if they knew I wanted it.

Fun Things To Do This Year (YAAAAY)

I want to make more music.
I want to have more fun in public with reckless abandon.
I want to point my eyes and ears at more art.
I want to develop more yummy recipes.
I want to laugh loudly and be mischievous with people.
I want to explore on my bicycle.
I want to look for some cool ass bugs.
I want to read everything I can about cool ideas.
I want to talk to people about them.
I am exhilarated to be alive for my 27th year.

Fuck this shit. I’m so, so, so bored of introspection. I’m going outside.


Love and peace,

Rina