learn
The skills you need to succeed in this economy you often cannot learn from books.
The two skills I need to be marketable:
- WooCommerce (an e-commerce plugin for WordPress website) product listing and single product page customization.
- Responsive Web Design
There are a few books on the latter but the former can only be learned by googling around and even then the information is very arcane and sparse.
Everyone crows about how “education” will solve our problems. It won’t because a lot of what you learn is obsolete in the span of a year or two. This is more true in programming than other disciplines but as more and more fields gets technologized one’s knowledge becomes more ephemeral.
…envious of people who can play mind games
The difference between a mind that can play mind games and a mind that cannot is as big of a difference between a smartphone and a landline. The former can run all manner of apps while the latter is stuck just being a phone. I’m envious of people who can shift in and out of magical thinking at the snap of a finger. And they can do this with the goal of getting something in the hereafter. Meanwhile I’m here stuck in the mud of logical thinking. Therapy only really works if one can play mind games, tricking yourself into thinking differently about the actors and situations in your life. Change inside of you only happens with a human authority as a proxy (though admitting this weakens the authority figure’s power over you so one must pretend the change is of their own volition). But you have to buy into said authority figure (pastor, therapist, or someone else) and play mind games with their authority stories they tell you.
I look at mind games as the bacteria in one’s gut. We have this knee-jerk response, “oooo bacteria’, but without those bacteria we wouldn’t be able to digest our food properly.
Placebo Response
It is no secret that I have a deep, abiding desire for the placebo response. Currently Ativan is the only thing that give this to me (because it actually does something). I think the comfort one receives from being in a religion comes down largely to the placebo response.. and I can’t get this because I don’t really believe in any of it! Whether or not someone gets the placebo response is a good litmus test of their belief in something.
Relationship Advice
Great Reddit thread on relationship advice for people with Aspergers syndrome.
Ideas for the Church
As you are well aware I am a person of zero power. I like to play those video games where you’re commanding a whole army. To that end I give you suggestions for what I would have being done if I was in a position of power in a church.
Make sure you’re giving out at least two rides a week to carless people (who need transportation to the food pantry, medical appointments, farmer’s markets, or other places). If you aren’t willing to give someone without a car a ride, please stop praying for them.
Give at-risk kids (particularly households with boys) an air conditioner if they don’t have one. This reason is obvious, poor males (including me) are often in a state of perennial anger and heat exacerbates this, causing them to boil over.
Put $30 in commissary accounts of people in jail or prison, starting with people who have some kind of relationship with people in the church.
Stop being siloed. This means reaching out to other churches and organizations and collaborating. To that end I did start a mobile web page of resources in Grand Rapids.
Selfishness and Game Theory
You may be lucky enough to have good parents and caretakers that look out for you.
Unfortunately these people may have instilled in you a sense that everyone else wasn’t
as selfish as they really are. Another factor might be that these people are older and
come from a time when people were somewhat less selfish. What you need to
understand is selflessness has bled out of the culture. There are many reasons for this
but on an individual level game theory may help us to think about it. It is based on a
rough reading of the prisoner’s dilemma.
The chart attempts to show an act and a response. If you act selfishly and the other
party responds selfishly, neither of you loses. I made up the term balanced economy for
this because this is where the concept of paying someone what they’re worth comes
from. You could use the analogy of labor unions and employers, both selfish, pitted
against each other. But out of this arrangement comes fair wages for the employee. If
you act selfishly and the other party responds selflessly, you have effectively exploited
them. An example, if you had a project and your friend did most of the work for it and
he’s sick the day of the presentation. You take all the credit for the work and when the
friend wants to hang out again you don’t return their calls and emails. Similarly when
you act selfless and the other party doesn’t, they exploit you. Lastly when both party’s
are willing to act selfless I call it reciprocity. This is different from balanced economy
because both parties are acting without compulsion.
The game theory aspect comes in when you realize that while acting selflessly is the
ideal, it only has payoff in certain contexts. As the culture moves away from selflessness,
those that still exhibit the trait suffer the most (as they are getting exploited by those
who are selfish). It might be a pragmatic to be selfless when you might be exploited
only a third of the time but once it gets above two thirds it makes less sense. So the
formerly selfless become selfish and a vicious cycle begins as people employ “defensive
selfishness” to keep from being exploited.
Ream
One of my favorite chapel speakers at Wheaton was Tony Campolo. He talked about going to the inner city and providing quality education for at-risk kids… and when he did everyone in the class went to college and one of them went to Harvard. He also talked about how someone he knew said they would be a missionary doctor but when he met them years later they were a plastic surgeon in suburbia. Tony reamed him out. As an aspie I thought that was awesome. But of course most of the people were probably appalled and shocked.
But Tony’s message was the only one that made sense for me, there is so much need just in our own city.
birdsong
A year ago spring I noticed something in myself that gave me more concern than the normal hours of suicidal ideation or murderous rage. I started detesting birdsong.
I always thought the enjoyment of birdsong was ingrained in our evolution, and if anything in any of the religions turns out to be true birdsong would be celebrated (for example it might give you glimpses into your past life or be a long lost echo of Eden).
I thoroughly enjoyed birdsong and the gentle spring wind against my cheek when I was manic. I no longer enjoy it, a seemingly innocuous part of myself lost, but an important one nonetheless.
On Black Males
There is a hot dog stand south of us in a somewhat black neighborhood. It contains a lot of memorabilia like a novelty barrel of moonshine. One thing stuck out at me, a tin can with the confederate flag on it. This made me very angry, not because I give a hoot in hell about political correctness but because I can imagine a poor black male living with his mother trying to turn his life around seeing it when he wants to get some ice cream.
Black males are fighting a war on two fronts. I’m not black but I know what it is like fighting a war on two fronts having both a physical disability and a mental illness. In order for a black male to be successful he has to surmount the barriers of prejudice and thug culture. Anyone who thinks prejudice is a thing of the past obviously isn’t very familiar with our “justice” system. The grandpa on my bipolar side of the family couldn’t take some passive-aggressive bullshit someone he worked with was giving him so he busted this guy’s jaw, sending him to the hospital. If my bipolar grandpa would have been black (especially if the victim had been white) he would have spent years in prison. Then there’s also job discrimination and the fact that blacks hold twelve times less wealth than their white counterparts. These kinds of problems, when commingled, add up to more than the sum of their parts. For example when a black male ends up in jail (often for a victimless drug crime) he can’t find a job or a place when he comes out so he’s as good as locked out of society. He can’t afford to marry so he ends up starting what ends up being another single parent household.
An understandable reaction to all of this is thug culture. I’m not supposed to criticize it because I’m white and race is a singularity. But I’ll just leave you with this Neil Degrasse Tyson video (Neil Degrasse Tyson is a physicist who hosts the new Cosmos show, one of my heroes). I will say that poverty alone kills the equivalent of 13 IQ points. If dealing with prejudice and thug culture were thrown into the mix it might go up to 20.
Weight of history. Identity is something that is formed (like wealth is amassed) over several generations. The fact that you originally came from slaves and your grandparents were subject to lynchings and having their businesses burned leaves a stain on your psyche. I’m no friend of the church but one Sunday night I went to a meeting (consisting of all white people) on the subject of race. The leader said something like we shouldn’t focus on the past at all. I was fuming. When someone who is black can do significantly worse on a test when they are reminded of their race, I think a breadth of the past is being referenced. EDIT: according to this scientific study memories may span multiple generations. This has seismic ramifications for oppressed minorities.
Black males often have no dad. People from single parent homes on average have seven less years of education than those in two-parent ones. I’m not going to be like George Bush and tell broke black males to marry because as a broke white male I realize I’m not marriageable. I will say the ideal is to have a mom and a dad and boys who don’t will have a harder time, particularly in their teens. There are pockets of white culture (like Focus on the Family) that idealize and encourage family building and I don’t see that anywhere in black culture.
No black male press. An intelligent black male growing up often has no desire to learn how to write so he can fill out TPS reports for some rich white CEO. However if there was a prominent website/magazine similar to Indymedia that voiced specifically black male concerns, he would have something to aspire to. I’ve come to the conclusion that education doesn’t elevate you (I’m still broke and I have a Computer Science degree) but it does allow you to express yourself in a manner that allows you to speak truth to power. If more oppressed people thought about education this way they might take it more seriously. Because let’s face it, the deck is stacked, the middle class is dying, and getting a job is just a matter of being known by the right rich white people. But if enough people call society out on its bullshit perhaps we can bring about some change.
online friendship
A prominent Christian anarchist (who was actually at my closest friend from college’s wedding) stated that one cannot be friends with someone with online-only interaction. I believed this until today. Yes online interaction might not be the ideal most incarnational medium to form relationships but for someone like me who was moved to a city five and a half years ago and has not made a single real-life friend here online friends are a godsend… even if I’ll never see them in real life.