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face mesh – rant about facebook

good morning. you have found me, Kameron Cole, at my most vulnerable. I have made the choice to expose my thoughts and opinions to the public, and here they are – my ideas, my babies, my frustrations, my creations?

now, who are you? friend or foe? this is not for me to choose, per our agreement – the agreement mentioned above, that you are the public, and I have chosen to expose. I here now extend our agreement: I choose to share my ideas and my thoughts. sharing is tacit caring. it means I have something of value – of course, I have made the valuation: you may not like my lutefisk – but I open my container, and make a gesture of offering.

I’m getting at the nature of my view on putting it out there: I think that unwittingly applying the rules (or absolute lack thereof) of consumerism to the presentation of one’s own ideas has devalued the quality of contemplation: think before you respond. maybe, don’t respond, at least outwardly! when you view a painting of Van Gogh, do you call him? do you write your immediate impressions on the surface of his painting? or, do you write your impressions in a song? or, do you carry your impressions with, as part of a newly painted visual template, which you apply the next time you see something, anything, when in your mind you say, “that reminds me of that Van Gogh painting.”

because I am exposed. because I am sharing. these set the stage for your decorum. I am not Van Gogh. perhaps there is a cut off point, based on your valuation of a person’s level of artistry, and hence, worth, that gives you the right to use this as a forum, instead of a chapel.

remember that social networking is actually a scheme, a marketing ploy, to drive visitors to pages, and get them to link to those pages! because more links makes better analytics (usage trending), and better analytics, presented to advertisers, cuts bigger checks. don’t be a consumer index!

because you do want to give your opinion. you want to be heard. your voice rise above the madding crowd. of course you do. everyone does. why do you see the destitute people on the street talking out loud? sometimes yelling! yelling at you, or shking their fists to the heavens?!?! because no one will listen.

this is a powerful marketing tool. goes beyond Mark Zuckerberg’s original intention of getting people to publicly rate girls’ pictures against each other, thereby publicly ridiculing them (Face Mesh: watch the movie!), or his later idea of webifying the college social scene. but, not much farther.

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Help

there’s so much to do.  I don’t understand how anyone gets it all done.  I might have ADHD, I don’t know.  My job is intense.  Requires a kind of weirdly sustained focus – ok, it’s computational linguistics.  you can’t look up from your computational linguistics desk. and when you do, you get lights shooting out of your optic nerve.

and then comes the Alltag (day-to-day). sure, everyone has the picture of the housewife, who goes to the grocery store 30 times a day, in a van filled with three kids, all of whom have appointments for their futures in different parts of Miami.  and this is no myth.  these are the women (and men, to some extent…not as much as NPR would have us believe) who fund NPR (because they are in the car driving 6 hours per day, and so they have to listen to something…).  it fuels an economy based upon gas consumption, and consumer spending.  truly, I am baffled – I make a great salary, but there is not way I could afford those trips to the grocery store, or the car maintenance.

add to that the garbage, the recycling, the constant pick up – I’m just re-iterating the 50’s housewife blues, which was only first alleviated by “mother’s little helper” (I am referring to the Rolling Stones version, here: barbiturates!)

I guess that brings me back to Do (pronounced “doe”).  I mean,

There’s where it falls apart, though.  Barbie was a depressant, to be mixed with gin at 5 o’clock.

This made us all chilled, not stirred.  And you know what?  We just didn’t really get everything done!  Like parenting!  Or home made dinner! Ritalin is a stimulant: you get everything done, and more.  Overclock. Uber-parenting. Uber-dinner.

I just noticed that the real tension comes from expectations, mostly the tacit ones – from someone.  I mean, the essence of all of this is the need to be loved, or considered worthy of love, in a society whose only notion of love is based on tangible exchange:  barter, reciprocity.  Perhaps the one who takes the Ritalin is the one who feels in debt.

Who is the “someone else”? Who is the debtor?

forgiveusourdebtsasweforgiveourdebtors.

The domestic partner is an obvious object of the (index) finger; but, obvious is generally misleading.  Certainly in my case, there is no such expectation from my domestic partner. In fact, I generally do not find among my friends or lovers people who “deal love”. But the fear of not completing my task for my taskmaster is great in me. So, whence comes?

Our world is full of agents of operant conditioning (B.F Skinner) – too numerous to count.  Most are unwitting, having neither the predilection nor ability in many cases to read Skinnerian soul-thievery. And there’s more to the picture: at some point, people like me get set up.  This is the key, the set up.  You must feel the pain of the” guy who goes home without the girl.” (cf. Vanilla Sky).  you must feel rejection, and be fully cognizant that it is rejection. At that point, you gain an Achilles heel for life.  You must please.  You must get affection.

That’s when you link affection with completion; that’s when love becomes a commodity.

The bad news is that there is no operant de-conditioning, at least nothing as clean and efficient at un-training the dog to de-salivate.  I mean, that’s the point: it’s conditioning, not just training. In the end, I believe, you will never know how to just take love for free, when you’ve been conditioned to pay for it with your very worth. You can learn compensatory behavior – you can learn to respond correctly, to pat yourself on the back, and, presumably hug yourself and kiss yourself.  You can repeat, “I know you love me and that your love is not bound to an expectation that I please you by quietly removing all barriers to your happiness and assuming that everything that needs to be done is on my list.” yes, say that. but the truth must be felt, else it is not the truth.

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This isn’t me

I Am You

It’s just someone who woke up for the first time in their lives.  It’s someone who needed a place in their world view to put the homeless. It’s a story of an “incident” that happened to a mother and daughter on their way to the next thing.  They experienced a bump in the road, but they will not go back and repave the road.

When I was 25, I was homeless.  I had not money, no income.  I went to many, many of my friends and asked them if I could stay with them temporarily.  They all said “no”.  Some went on to list all the times they had needed help from me, but I had been unavailable to them.  They listed other reasons.  It kind of brought me down.  Still brings me down. Like the blues song, “nobody knows you when you’re down and out.”

it’s not about being homeless.  it’s about conscious versus unconscious.  It’s simple, but not easy.  Without years and years of discipline, one can not empathize with people who are suffering.  One can understand them.  One can pity them.  But, one is missing that sudden, uninvited pang of sorrow at the state of Man.  We don’t cry enough for others.  It seems like we’re crying for no reason, because we are used to only crying for ourselves, or, for our internal turmoil as witnessing the injustice that our very existence implies.  It’s true of everyone, all of us.  This is no judgement on my part.  I am far from any such lofty state. But I thank God every day that at least I have seen the error of my ways, and have dedicated myself to walking the Straight Street..  And I cling to a belief that has both suffering and redemption at its core, because only this kind of faith makes sense to me.  Philosophies, theories, agnostics, atheists – all these ball up into a giant “brood ball” for me. But a daily devotion to witnessing the suffering, combined with the ability to forgive everyone, including myself, for just being human, fallible – that’s my faith.

Live long and prosper.

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sheep, seen differently

Sheep, seen differently.
by Robert Musil
translated from the German by Kameron Cole

Concerning the history of the sheep: Today humans find the sheep dumb. But God loved it. He repeatedly compared humans to sheep. Is it possible for God to be completely wrong?

Concerning the psychology of the sheep: the visage of higher consciousness is not dissimilar to that of stupidity.

In the heaths of Rome: They had the long faces and dainty skulls of martyrs. Their black socks and hoods, against their white fleece were reminiscent of grim reapers and religious fanatics.

Their lips, when they searched the short, sparse grass, quivered nervously and dusted the earth with the tone of a vibrating metal string. If they joined their voices in chorus, it would sound like the plaintive prayer of the prelates in cathedral. If however they sang in multitudes, they would form men’s, women’s and children’s choirs. In soft undulations, their voices rose and sank – like a caravan in the dark, it was, that the light struck every other second, and then you could see the voices of the children standing on an ever-returning hill, while the men traversed the valley. A thousand times faster rolled the night and the day through their voices, and drove the earth towards its end. Sometimes a single voice would hurl itself upward, or plunge from on high, into the trepidation of damnation. In the white ringlets of their hair they would recapitulate the clouds in the heavens. These are age-old Catholic animals, religious escorts of humankind.

Once more, in the South: Amongst them, the human is twice as large as otherwise and looms like a church spire against the sky. Under our feet the earth was brown, and the grass scratched in with graygreen strokes. The sun gleamed heavily on the sea, as on a mirror of lead. Boats were at their fish-catching, as in the time of St. Peter. The headlands swung our vision to heaven like a gang-plank, and were flung, wheat-yellow and barley-white, as in the time of the lost Odysseus, into the sea*.

Everywhere: Sheep are timid and stupid when around Man: they have come to know the blows and stone throws of arrogance. But when he stands still, peacefully, and stares into the distance, they forget him. Then, they put their heads together and form, ten or fifteen of them, an aura, with the large, weighted middle-point comprised of their heads, and the multicolored radiating beams their backs. Their skullcaps press fast against one another. So they stand. And the wheel which they form, does not stir, for hours. They seem not to feel anything, save the wind, the sun, and between their foreheads, the stroke of the second hand of eternity, which pulses in their blood, and is shared, from one head to the next, like the tapping of prisoners on prison walls.

* Odyssey BkIV:1-58 (http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Greek/Odyssey4.htm)