encoded notions

Today I decided to swing by the little bazaar that the town of Hanover hosts every year called “Dutch Days”. There were so many people all milling around through the streets, buying crap. It was all crap. Lawn ornaments, personalized wooden thingies, seashell paperweights, pinwheels, rugs, wall hangings, picture frames, etc. It amazes me what some people purchase with their hard-earned money.

I went mainly to feel the pulse of a moving crowd. In college, going from the dorms to class takes around 7 minutes (at RIT) through a constant stream of warm bodies. Students headed to class, professors on lunch break, administrators going to a meeting. I like the feeling of coursing down the Quarter Mile like a blood cell in an artery. I like analyzing the local traffic patterns and weaving my way through bits of a slow moving clump.

I felt roughly the same feelings of immersion at the bazaar. Hundreds of bodies around me moving around, buying food, laughing, talking, enjoying life.

I suppose I’ve been reading too many books at once this summer. Fortunately enough, the books are so different that none conflict with the others and I’m safe with my concurrent readings.

Finished

• Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk [rereading]
• Myst: The Book of Ti’ana by Rand Miller & David Wingrove [rereading]
• Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams

Currently

• Myst: The Book of Atrus by Rand Miller & David Wingrove [rereading]
• Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson
• Metamagical Themas by Douglas R. Hofstadter
• The Muse in the Machine by David Gelernter
• A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram
• The Future of Ideas by Lawrence Lessig
• Emergence: The connected lives of ants, brains, cities, and software by Steven Johnson

Plan to start

• Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life by Albert-László Barabási

After finishing the final (?) expansion pack for Uru I felt like I needed to reread the Myst novels. Being able to actually visit D’ni in Uru has changed a few of my concepts of the cavern, and several of the plot elements from Uru have changed my perspective of the D’ni people.

Most of the books above are concerned with complexity theory and emergence—topics that I hope to further explore as I work on Violet.

At the start of June, I had decided to devote a large chunk of my time to working on one of my current projects. I started reading some source materials, and briefly looked at some of my earlier work. When I look at the calendar, I’m saddened to think about all the time that I’ve wasted since then. Whenever I try to concentrate on the problems I have yet to tackle I feel bored, and I can sense that I don’t have the answers yet.

It’s like trying to play Monopoly without knowing anything about it, nor being able to read the information on the instructions, cards, and board. I need to learn the language so that I can read the rules, but I still have to figure out what that language is.

Worse yet, I feel so apathetic in this environment. I sit in front of the computer and feel like just going to bed. I go for a bike ride for 90 minutes, I come back and still feel the same. There’s no drive or energy. I have notes over half of a whiteboard. I nearly have a functional data model. I have months of ideas, concepts, directions—all scattered. Nothing concrete.

Worse yet, when I do feel like I have energy but am not interested in working on this project, I can’t find something else to do. I can’t think of some other programming project that I could be spending my time on, I’m already slugging through several books, I’ve played Uru to death, and I can’t think of any other strange Network protocol or system that I can learn (I’ve already learned bind, procmail, courier-imap, postfix, fetchmail, and mutt this summer).

If nothing changes, I’ll just be treading water until classes resume, and then the project has to go on the back burner again—right where I didn’t want it to be anymore.

Fight Club mantras come to my mind often.

The things you own end up owning you.

Reject the basic assumptions of civilization, especially the importance of material possessions.

In the face of consumerist decisions, this line floats the forefront of my consciousness.

Whenever I go shopping I think about it. When I ponder how I’ll furnish my apartment in the fall I think about it.

Living in a dorm situation for three years helps enhance the words. When packing for move in, there’s always a little demon sitting on your shoulder whispering don’t take that, it’s not important to you or if that were to burn in a fire tomorrow, would you be sad?. It’s about minimalization. Finding out those things that you need to feel comfortable and functional in life. I don’t feel the need to go overboard like Jack & Tyler do in the movie & book, but there is a fair amount that I do not need. The difficulty arises in drawing the line between utility and junk.

Hitting bottom isn’t a weekend retreat. It’s not a goddamn seminar. Stop trying to control everything and just let go! LET GO!

When I was taking my CORE at the end of my second year, I thought about letting go. Surrendering to the flow of events has a calming effect. I went into the exam thinking “I studied my best for this. I’m fairly well-prepared, and whatever grade I receive is one that I deserve.” I was only trying to impress myself with my performance.

One minute was enough, Tyler said, a person had to work hard for it, but a minute of perfection was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection.

Being somewhat of a perfectionist will eventually drive you mad. If you approach every problem, try to solve it perfectly, and keep it like that you will seriously go bonkers. A prime example of this is someone with OCD; some will get very upset with you if you happen to disturb the finely vacuumed and arranged fibers in their carpeting. If you realign your concepts of perfection so that transience is acceptable, you’ll be happier and have less stress in your life.

It’s only after you’ve lost everything that you’re free to do anything.

If you lost all of your possessions, money, friends, and family members what would you have? Goals, concepts, and ideas. At that point, the sky’s the limit for turning your dreams into reality simply because you’d have little to no consequences barring your way.

Parallel streams of data. Constantly changing. Everything processed all at once. Another moment passes. Repeat.

Our sensations are infinitely parallel. When I wake up in the morning, I can feel the texture of the sheets in a million different places on my skin. The room smells chilly from the filtered air coming from the window air conditioner. I can taste the fact that I am thirsty. All this, and I haven’t even opened my eyes. But if I were to casually recall the day’s events, I wouldn’t relate each and every sensory impulse that happened. For one, I don’t remember every tiny thing that I felt. Secondly, I wouldn’t want to take the time to write it all down. There’s just too much data.

We experience every moment, but only keep the ones that matter the most. Erik Benson writes more about this in his article on paraphrasing the feeling:

Sometimes it is so clear to me that there are two enemies in our imaginations. The secondary one is the tendency to flatten memories and thoughts for storage (the next time you feel like you have to wait until you fully understand what just happened, realize that you already know what happened and you’re just waiting for your mind to forget the inconsistent parts until it only has one dimension).

If your life is water, then memories rapidly freeze into the mould of an ice-cube tray. The liquid fills up each block in turn. Day after day. The memories are static and perfect.

To live life is not to remember it. The memory is not the event.

…we as a human race cannot remember history. We remember snippets, simplifications, and then when it comes time to compare them to current situations we always see current things as infinitely more complicated. It’s the difference between looking at a lake and jumping into it.

It’s a tragic and sad realization that our minds are so incapable of keeping a complicated, inconsistent, multi-faceted object in its original shape for long.

Each collection of sensations, or slice, befriends us once. It lingers and then flees. No matter how many trinkets you collect, pictures you take, or journal entries you write nothing will ever capture that slice completely. In spite of this, everywhere people go you see them trying to grab ahold of the present and pack it into that little ice cube tray and label it a memory. Vacations, graduations, weddings, birthdays, speeches, hikes, sunsets, pets, loved ones, friends, and the self. There is always the omnipresent camera, documenting it all. Watching life trickle away from behind a viewfinder or lens.

I leave for Slovakia on Monday. I may come back at the beginning of August, at least that’s the plan. Hopefully a different or at least a better person in some small and unmeasurable way. I will try to come back with less than I went there with. I plan on trying each moment to get back to the feel part of the cycle. Starting now. Starting right now. Resist the articulation and the simplification and disintegration that inevitably ensues. No pictures, no stories, no lessons, maybe just a t-shirt. Throw away the model, and walk into it. And trip on the first step.

I like Erik’s idea to resist the urge to remember everything, and instead enjoy life as it flows through us. Slice after slice. Repeat.