Figures

Talking to A- and subsequently rereading a lot of what I've written on here over the years has made me realize I've gotten complacent with documenting my introspection. I realized I see some of the old stuff I wrote in new light even if I felt like I had a lot of clarity at the time of writing (after all, I had to have some clarity to articulate it in the first place). It's nice to look back on your thoughts once you're removed from the emotions and circumstances that evoked them.

I want to get back into the habit of writing on here. Tonight is not the night to start up again, and to be honest I don't know if I can guarantee consistency and regularity, but I will try.

Since it's the middle of finals, I don't have time to write at length, so I will instead just leave this here. It's a poem I wrote dedicated to my mom that I performed at SWC's (un)filtered, an event with the central theme of gender and sexual violence. I'm still looking for the courage and the method to share it with my mom. (Thanks G- for your support in making this happen)

Figures

Hey there, little boy
I’m worried about you.
I’m worried about you because you have big dreams
Big, like the airplanes you see in the sky,
That someday, you hope to build and to fly
Big, like the bank account you want to have
Six figures a year to buy glamour and pizzazz
But wait
There’s another figure I know you want
A woman’s body, to have and to flaunt
A body with which to make a child
  Or maybe two, at the same time.
A child you can then lift on your broad shoulders
Because I know, little boy, you dream of getting big muscles

Well you’ve made it Daddy.
Those dreams have come true.

But the thing about big dreams is that you forget about the little things
Because you’ve got your head so high in the clouds that it clouds your judgment.

Look Dad,
Can’t you see? Your sea of money
Can’t drown the sound of beer bottles falling by Mom’s bed
Can’t wash away the memory of my twin sister sobbing in my head
And it sure as hell won’t wash away the red
  From your hands or your face
The red of the lipstick that marks your disgrace
So stop trying to buy our favor

And you call yourself a father figure.
Go figure.

Because have you considered
That while you’re out there chasing your dreams
Mom’s at home chasing drink after drink
Have you considered
That while you’re out there pursuing womanly perfection,
Looking for the some action to tame your erection
Because you’ve lost all attraction to my mother
My mother who has never stopped showing you affection,
My mother who’s committed no infraction to deserve your rejection
Because her only flaw is the scar she got when she gave birth to your twin son and daughter by c-section.
Have you considered
That there’s much more to a woman than her bodily complexion?

If you don’t think people can love people who are flawed
What makes you think you deserve to be loved at all?

On Consensus Trance, Essence, and Mislove

This post is just going to be really raw thoughts, haven't had the time to really think about it between staffing, classes, and SBS audition season. There's been a lot on my mind, but I'm kind of delirious, so I'll defer some of it to a later post. Who knows, I might wake up and realize nothing here makes sense.

This quarter, I'm taking a class called Valuescience, and it's been incredible. In particular, one of the readings explored something the author called "consensus trance" and its interplay with "essence." Basically, consensus trance is the form of brainwashing that is more commonly known as enculturation. From a young age, we are conditioned into a particular set of norms by our parents and the rest of the society that surrounds us alike, and most people grow up taking cultural habits for granted when, in reality, there is a huge element of relativity behind most cultural norms. Essence, on the other hand, is the set of values, beliefs, and temperaments inherent to our individual genetic code. To illustrate these distinctions as it pertains to my life, I've drawn up this Venn diagram.

Circle ADEG: Chinese/Taiwanese culture, as exposed to/relevant to me
Circle BDFG: American culture, as exposed to/relevant to me.
Circle CEFG: My essence
Universal region (A-H): All possible values and beliefs in the world

So, some oversimplified examples of things that fall into each region
A: Buddhism, use of physical force for discipline, lack of value in arts or humanities
B: Party culture, masculinity stemming from physical aptitude, "American dream" and individualism
C: Hopeless romanticism, harmony and altruism over economic self-interest
D: Recognition of engineering, medicine, law, etc. as valuable career areas
E: Speaking Chinese, emphasis on academic achievement
F: Recognition of humanities and arts as valuable career areas
G: Compassion, respect towards parents, care for family
H: Cannibalism, belief in Allah

In an ideal world of perfect cultural sensitivity and understanding, all cultures would completely overlap such that regions A, B, E, F are empty for any two cultures (complete circles). There might still be universally agreed upon wrongs (i.e. region H, e.g. unprovoked murder), but anything that one culture deems valuable every other culture would accept (i.e. region D and G is all-encompassing besides H) Within this ideal world, your essence would be a subset of that all-encompassing region (i.e. region C is empty).

Obviously, the world is not ideal. The challenge, therefore, is to find a culture or subculture that has the greatest overlap with your essence, and then move to and live in that culture. Doing so is contingent upon having an understanding of what your essence is, and that is remarkably difficult because of the consensus trance. It is hard to distinguish between what is of your essence, and what has merely been instilled in you and taught to you as valuable.

I think that is the answer to what it means to be emotionally mature, a question I struggled with in my previous post. Being emotionally mature entails consciously knowing what your essence is, and escaping the consensus trance that society sets you up to fall into (and to no fault of society and without malicious intent, because consensus trance is something that propagates through generations). Similarly, building effective relationships with other people is contingent upon understanding their essence, and being able to divorce the influences of their essence and their enculturation when thinking about their behavior and empathizing. And while I don't think it is ever possible to fully get clarity on any one person's essence, including your own, I do believe some people are closer than others.

Unfortunately, in many ways--as a friend or RA, as a once lover, as a son--I am realizing I am perpetually fighting the consensus trance. Mislove occurs when one individual tries to enculturate (used loosely, could be something as innocuous and unintentional as a microexpression frown of disapproval or a slight change in tone of voice) someone else without fully understanding their essence because of prejudices established by the consensus trance. Usually, this happens without bad intention; the individual was only acting on what he or she had in turn been enculturated as "right" or "good." I am guilty of having misloved E-, N-, A-, both of my parents, and I'm sure many others that don't come to mind immediately. Similarly, I've been on the receiving end of mislove as well. It's inevitable.

Some people will never develop a deep enough understanding of their own essence and, more importantly, others' essence to build the relationship that "could have been." The tragedy of this entire thing is that there are potential relationships (between almost lovers, between family members, between nations) that would be downright magical if both sides understood each other's essences, but it never gets to that point, and so that potential relationship never reaches fruition. You can only ever work on escaping the consensus trance and improving your own understanding of your essence and their essence, put that understanding in the open and hope, pray that the other side reaches the same understanding. Sometimes they don't, and what could have been never becomes what is.

Convergence

"College is an opportunity to stand outside the world for a few years, between the orthodoxy of your family and the exigencies of career, and contemplate things from a distance." -William Deresiewicz, in Don't Send Your Kid to the Ivy League

While the merits of the article is a totally different conversation, that line itself is among the most profound framings of what college is for that I've heard. It doesn't excuse irresponsible behavior, but it also doesn't advocate any one course of action as the responsible course of action.

I've been thinking a lot about what it means for behavior to be considered emotionally mature. There are many people I consider emotionally mature, but their behavior vary so widely that it really doesn't narrow anything down. For instance, I have a lot of respect for both A- and R- because they both seem to have a remarkably keen level of self-awareness and it seems so effortless on their part (which I understand it might not actually be). However, what they actually do are so vastly different--how do I reconcile that for some people, [responsibly and intelligently] indulging in parties and hookup culture is very consistent with what emotional maturity is for them, while for others staying in and introspecting or reading or having long, meaningful conversations is their manifestation of emotional maturity? Which is it for me?

On the other hand, there are people whose lives are more or less "figured out" by common standards such as income and job security, but honestly seem so juvenile to me. My dad for instance--I feel decades older and wiser than him. The way he handles conflict and confrontation makes me want to go up to him, shake him, and tell him to grow up. I talked to my sister in a heartfelt way for the first time ever (which was incredible and uplifting). She told me about how her relationships were going, how her work was going, and her aspirations after college, even though it was honestly mostly quite bland and stuff I already knew from observing at a distance. In addition, she said that when my dad took her out to dinner for our birthday, he tried to secretly take pictures to send to our grandparents because he didn't want to ask because he was afraid of being turned down.

That's so painful to hear. Thanks to E-, I've gotten to a point where I can see past what my dad did wrong and realize that he's actually just awful at dealing with and confronting emotions, but as his son I'm in no position to try to initiate corrective action. He'd be too prideful to do anything about it now that he's in so deep (i.e. divorced). I wish I could've empathized with him sooner, and maybe communicate that I (and the rest of my family, at least at the time) cared about him. Now, it might be too late. I look forward to the day where I've accomplished something in my life that gives me credibility in how to live, and I can actually go up to him, shake him, and help him grow up. Until then, each conversation with him is a frustrating conversation in which I see things I don't want to be, and it simultaneously helps me avoid his behavior and scares me to death because I share half my biology with him, all the while feeling powerless to help him.

When I think about what it means to be liberated from the constraints of family and the pragmatics of the real world a la the quote above, it certainly doesn't mean act impulsively with no regard to consequences. Instead, it basically means screw up, but only if with a purpose. This is the time during which all of my relationship and career choices leads to low-inertia trajectories, or as if on ice: even the smallest disruptions/decisions will be amplified into significant motion in that particular direction, but can also be easily shifted by further disruptions.

Unfortunately, when I bring this back to the emotional maturity piece, it is at odds with my goals in that regard. I feel that, as a consequence of various circumstances in my life, I've been privy to variety, both in facets of myself and of other people around me. While I don't claim to even come close to having dealt with some of the shit that some people I know have dealt with (K- from Tetris comes to mind), I feel like I've had a non-negligible exposure to assholes and found qualities in myself that disgust me such that I can start to develop heuristics to help me converge on behavior I want to see in myself and people I want to let into my life permanently.

In this sense, I feel old or adult. I feel like I've already gone through the low-inertia stages, but simply not temporally aligned with my college career. As the quote would suggest, everything about the low-inertia nature of young adult life trajectory leads to oscillation away from convergence. This brings me to the next thing I've been thinking about a lot: where my preferences are on the affective circumplex, and what that means about the kinds of interactions I seek with people that occupy different roles in my life.

The affective circumplex         

Before I actually delve into where I currently lie on the circumplex, I feel like there are two obvious but important things to note based on my observations. First, each axis is different for each individual. For one person, biking without a helmet might be a high arousal activity, while for another anything shy of offroad trick biking is low arousal. Secondly, where you lie on the circumplex is not static--it will change throughout life. In general, as people age they tend towards LAP (low arousal positive) over HAP, consistent with socioemotional selectivity theory (SES theory), which states that as people's perceived time horizon shrinks, they narrow the breadth (oscillation) of their social interactions in favor of depth (convergence). Less variation leads to more arousal habituation. But within age cohorts there are large variations, and decay also differs from person to person. Instead, more immediately, life circumstances can have a large bearing on your preference. If you grow up in a shady neighborhood rampant with crime, you will be conditioned to relatively higher levels of arousal.

What remains consistent across all people though, regardless of relative intensities of each axis, is that HAP, whatever it means for them, is not sustainable. By nature of conditioning, repeated instances of the same intensity of stimuli becomes decreasingly less arousing. Just ask any horror movie director.

So where does that leave me, college students, and people in general?

For one, SES theory can be expanded beyond a lifetime as a frame of reference. I've come to realize that, in a sort of fractal-esque behavior, observing smaller phases of one's life reveals similar trends to general aging. There is general change to greater LAP:HAP ratio relative to the initial ratio at the start of that life phase. This includes well-defined and relatively rigid life intervals such as high school and college, but also more fluid intervals such as relationships, job positions, etc. Just as with old age in a lifetime, within particular frames of reference there is a gradual decay in HAP preference, and in transitory periods there is a renewal of HAP preference.

Honestly, I feel like I'm figuring out the things that people generally figure out during a midlife crisis. In both a career and interpersonal relationships realm, I'm thinking critically about what they want at the endpoint of everything (when everything converges), rather than employing a greedy algorithm as I go through day-to-day life. When it comes to career, I've discovered that I don't need a fast-paced work environment the same way a canonical Millenial does. Similarly, the relationships I've had with people in LAP-oriented stages of their lives have deepened, while I've had a (relative) falling out with people who seem far more HAP-seeking.

Why is that exactly? For me, I think it has something to do with the nature of LAP and HAP activities. LAP activities are inherently unsexy compared to HAP activities. Independently reading books quietly with someone or brushing teeth together (without any I'm-rubbing-toothpaste-playfully-on-your-face shenanigans, ahem romcoms) is far less of a Kodak moment than is a surprise scavenger hunt or a tropical getaway vacation. The number of people I have the desire to (which often translates to patience for, as awful as that sounds) share LAP moments with is far fewer than the number of people I want to engage in HAP activities with. The causes or companies I'm willing to do mundane work for because I so completely believe in the cause or company is fewer than the number of companies who have sexy, exciting new products.

In that sense, convergent routine is incredibly counter-intuitive. What I've come to realize all too late, and what my dad failed to understand, is that the absence of the rainbows-and-butterflies of HAP is not a sign that the magic is gone. A job or a relationship is unhealthy when the only present quadrants are LAN, HAN, and HAP. Contrarily, if you can find LAP, hang on and never let go. The desire and willingness to be together even if it is "only" LAP is the magic! I wish I knew this earlier, but even so I anticipate this being invaluable going forward in my relationship and career endeavors.

To answer a question A- posed to me while in SF this weekend on my birthday, by the end of my college career I want to know the types of work and find the people with whom there's a symbiotic, mutual desire to share LAP, and then make sure they know it. In fact, if I achieve this ever, even if it takes another two decades (or eight more), I'll consider my life well-lived. But apparently from others' perspective, there's an element of the-sooner-the-better; maybe that's where my flavor of emotional maturity is pushing me. I was watching a video from a friend of mine, and in S-'s words as she saw how I was reacting: "There are some people who you see the way they respond to kids and you think 'You need to have children right now.' You're one of them. They'd make you so happy." While I've certainly entertained thoughts like 'what kind of father do I want to be?', a more generalized interpretation of S-'s statement is consistent with something I've realized: that I can comfortably join in on conversations about marriage with my late-20s through mid-30s coworkers and project forward my imagination and empathize with a parent delighting in his toddler to the point that a statement like S-'s would be made means I've been incredibly lucky to have had the people and environments, for better or worse, in my life that's led to the relative clarity I [seem to] have about my life.

The key words of the previous paragraph is, as the boldface suggests, making sure they (people, job) knows that they occupy a place in your life of such depth and importance. Unlike HAP, the inherently mundane, routine, unsexy nature of LAP means that is not a beacon that broadcasts easily detectable emotions. If you look at the circumplex, which emotion is easier to detect, serene or excited? Clearly excited, but serene is more positive! The detectability of positive (and negative) emotions isn't necessarily correlated with their magnitude of positivity (and negativity)!

For two entities to realize their willingness, even eagerness to share LAP activities together, that requires taking a pretty big risk to say so and even more effort to make sure the true weight of it is heard. There certainly isn't a guarantee that the risk and effort will pay off--chances are, it won't. In every realm, be it family, or career, or friendship, or romance, for every person with a wild success story there must be dozens more with only-partial successes, but even then it's a success! Intent matters! When it comes down to it, the risk and effort pales in comparison to guaranteed failure. Don't be left with the pain of thinking it, meaning it with all your heart, and never truly showing it, because you might not get another chance to, and it won't matter how much you continue to mean it with all your heart. That shit hurts.