First New Year's Resolution ever, 1 month in.

I'm not a big fan of New Year's resolutions. I feel like if at any point I find something I want to change about myself, I don't want to wait until New Year's to make it happen. As such, I haven't made many New Year's resolutions to date.

However, I did make one resolution this year.

Resolution 2015: Get my shit together.

Quality resolution, isn't it?

My goal by the end of college was to figure out what I want to do with my life (career-wise, personal life, etc.). I didn't expect to have made progress towards whatever that ends up looking like, but I at least wanted to know what direction I was going in.

I realized just before winter break that I'm lucky enough to be in a place where I have a strong sense of purpose in my life, and that's something many people of my age cannot say for themselves. In particular, I want to spend my life making people happy and improving their quality of life, but in a very surefire way. I don't mean some wishy-washy social committee-type thing. I mean scientifically rigorously looking at ways that people can attain greater fulfillment and satisfaction. I want to engineer happiness.

Even though that's still very big picture and doesn't offer much granularity, it serves as a pretty good guide for my decision-making. In fact, in the long run, it is much better to have this top piece (the why) and be able to go top-down in figuring out what I want to do rather than having a sense of what I like to do/am good at/am competent at without knowing why I continue to do it.

So why do I feel like I'm stuck and moving so slowly? Why do I feel like I'm wasting a lot of time? Why do I not feel like I have my shit together?

I spent winter break trying to figure out why this is, and I identified a couple of general things I need to do.

1) Know when to fold.

I am incredibly susceptible to the sunk cost fallacy. I place weight on past effort expended or invested in a particular activity, class, or person, but that's a naive basis to make future decisions. I get deeply attached to a lot of things. In C-'s words: just like a poker player doesn't expect to win every hand and instead must choose to commit to hands wisely, so must we be cognizant of when certain decisions didn't play out like anticipated and be willing to cut losses and prepare for other decisions we make going forward.

More concretely, this has led me to readily drop classes I attended for two and a half weeks before realizing it's not for me. I've started putting distance between me and the Stanford Robotics Club because it simply wasn't making me happy, despite what I've dedicated to founding the club and keeping it running smoothly. I've stopped watching TV shows that I no longer enoyed in later seasons. I've stopped investing time in people I don't believe care about me in the same way. I've halted job interview processes when it becomes clear that I don't want to work there, even if I was never rejected as a candidate.

This doesn't mean truths in the past were any less true. I am not any less authentic because what motivates me now differs from what once did. The past can (and should) still shape me. Past values matter insofar as how they inform or influence my current beliefs and values.

2) Commit wholeheartedly when you commit.

This is sort of the opposite of knowing when to fold. For the vast majority of choices I make, I will not have absolute certainty about at the time that I make the decision nor ever. If I wanted to wait until I had certainty on anything, I'd be completely paralyzed. Waiting for certainty is precisely that: a wait. It's passive, and relinquishes control to forces beyond our control.

That complacency leads to inaction and general sluggishness. When you have an array of good choices in front of you, and you (and the people who know and care about you) cannot determine which is the correct or best choice, chances are there isn't a best choice. Have some confidence that you'd be able to identify an obvious best choice. Instead, it's all about picking one and making it great.

(Caveat: in poker, bets are rarely just a matter of going all-in and not at all. Similarly, committing wholeheartedly doesn't necessarily mean rule everything else out, but it does mean taking ownership of whatever extent of commitment you make in any given distribution of commitment of resources. I feel like blogging has that effect for me, where by having them written down somewhere it gives my thoughts much more substance, and helps me commit and take ownership of change I want to see in myself.)

3) Do not let myself slip into negative self-fulfilling prophecies and exacerbation cycles.

Over break I noticed that 1/13 marked the day that I've been out of my relationship with E- longer than I had been in it (barring some technicalities in counting). I think I've figured out what was holding me back from moving on: I have this flawed model of how what is meaningful or important to me is allowed to change over time. If you imagine a graph of time vs. importance, I've only allowed myself to say that how important any given thing is always monotonically increasing or decreasing.

This model is problematic in three ways. One, it assumes my assessment is perfect, which it is not. It doesn't not allow me the opportunity to revise first impressions once they're on track to be monotonically increasing or decreasing. Secondly, my assessment has nothing to do with a reciprocal such assessment, and reciprocity (as my own psychology research has shown, hah.) plays a huge role in determining socializing or altruistic behavior. Thirdly, it means that anything that grows in importance to me can never be less important ever. In particular, this third piece has left me feeling suffocated by guilt, unable to accept that someone I have cared for deeply in the past can acceptably be cared for less, and unable to bear the pain of being less important than I once was to someone.

Borrowing from romcoms, I've realized why it is so important to commit wholeheartedly to something. Romcom protagonists often seem absurd because they go to ridiculous lengths in their unconditional love. Sure, it's not a guarantee that all of your wholehearted commitments will pay off the way every single romcom protagonists' seem to. But the reality is that you cannot have those romcom moments if you don't try. If you fail, then you are just someone whose grandiose whathaveyou did not bear fruit, as everyone would expect; if you succeed, then you do become the stuff of legends/Hollywood. Seems like a reasonably good risk-reward to take to me.

Aside: To some extent, being able to take that stance comes from a place of privilege in more ways than one. I can't deny that. I was raised by a mother who has left me with a secure enough (though not 100% secure) attachment style that I can withstand potential emotional setbacks if putting myself out there and making myself vulnerable leads to hurt. I happen to have skill sets that employers are willing to pay good money for, and that gives me the financial means to be fairly liberal in the capacity in which I commit to things wholeheartedly. It is a privilege I have, and, equal or not across everyone, I should use this to the best of my ability.

Romcom protagonists--at least in their moments of emotional triumph, anyway--tend to have very short-term memory for the setbacks they encounter while maintaining saliency in memories of elation or happiness. For the same magnitude of positive and negative emotions, the positive emotions always last much longer while negative emotions become transformative forces from which they draw strength and courage and spunk. This kind of mindset keeps them optimistic and protects them from negative self-fulfilling prophecies. The best way to make your life a real romcom, it seems, is to believe and live as if it already is. If you feel like the world is falling apart around you, just think to yourself that romcoms virtually all have happy endings, so you can't be at the end. Keep looking for the next thread of storyline to chase.

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What am I trying to do more to be consistent with those 3 things above, aka getting my shit together?

1. Read more, especially stuff that makes me think. The more thoughtfully I can think about my own actions and the people and world around me, the better I can fold or commit appropriately.
2. Be open about myself. I've been trying to make myself vulnerable to people again, mainly in the form of demonstrating how much I care about them even if I feel silly or uneasy or unsure how they'll receive my expression. In professional contexts, I've made a personal website that attempts to inject my character and personality into what otherwise would be just a distilled professional profile (i.e. resume) (I say "attempts" because it's a work in progress, and would love to hear your thoughts on the website).
3. Disregarding norms or rules when I see fit. I've always trusted my judgment, but I've often acted against my best judgment to be consistent with norms or rules. I've been trying to be very clear to myself what it is that I actually want, as opposed to stuff I want to want only because there is some level of external social, financial, or whatever prestige associated with getting that.
4a. Stand up for myself. Give myself space and alone time when I need it. Act on what is important to me, rather than what will maintain peace and harmony among the people around me. Be able to recognize when I have every right to believe that I am right.
4b. Be humble. Confidence and self-assurance is good, but over-confidence is not. Being mindful of when what I have once stood up for is flawed, and graciously and openmindedly reconciling the differences when appropriate.

Thoughts on Performing and Value (What We Want)

I've been thinking a lot about performing after taking Liquid Flow, doing Gaieties, and going to Spoken Word shows. In the Liquid Flow, the instructor emphasized heavily how we should "dance through life" starting from the first day. At first, I had an eyeroll reaction to that sentiment because of how cliche'd it was. However, it became rather clear that her idea of what dance entails is far broader than what I had previously associated with the word dance.

To me, dancing meant intentional physical movement for the purpose of exhibition. It's what people do on on stages when you go see a dance show. To dance through life, then, would be to constantly be putting on an exhibition for people, and that sounds absolutely exhausting. It sounds exhausting and scary because, like all live entertainment (from dance to music to figure skating and ski jumps and whatnot), your final delivery is under complete scrutiny of the audience, and in that final delivery, and all of your hard work could pay off or all go to waste in the blink of an eye. In fact, when I found out that N- and K- were ESFPs, often called "The Performers," I felt a combination of pity and utmost respect that they lived for that kind of pressure.

Okay sure. Maybe the way I've engaged in performing arts in the years leading up to college, that's been the case. Between grade school orchestra classes and private cello or piano competitions, that has been precisely the nature of the performances I've been a part of. I've been assigned grades or scores or the like. There's been winners and losers, first stands and second stands and then everyone else.

It's funny how nicely that analogizes to how many people think about value, where value is defined as what they want. For both value and performance, we construct some system to quantify it that is misaligned with how we should think about them.

For value, we've constructed the system of currency. We quantify value in these monetary ways, and we are encultured to associate economic value with what we want when in fact, what we want is happiness and fulfillment. That's not to say that we should be naive and think that you can be supremely happy having no economic wealth; on the contrary, you'd probably starve to death. But it is to say that, past some threshold, that system falls apart. There is plenty of research that shows that happiness does not continue to grow with income past some threshold. I'd say this actually is consistent across all layers of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs in that, once you're x% satisfied with your security at a particular level, you get diminishing returns in subjective well-being within that category.

I think what's hard to grasp is that layers in Maslow's Hierarchy can actually be contradictory to each other. An obvious example is charity. Charity is often consistent with morality (self-actualization needs) and leads to getting respect by others (esteem needs), yet is inherently detrimental to security of resources (safety needs). You're spending money on something else, how could you!

The problem is that we are taught to address (and, at a neurobiological level, can only comprehend or grapple with) the needs in the bottom-up order in Maslow's Hierarchy. By the time we have the cognitive functions to do abstract thinking (starts at 11-12 years old or so, and finishes developing at 25 or so), we're already so ingrained into thinking about the world with preference on a particular layer. By the time I am old enough to think about my esteem and self-actualization needs, I probably have been taught for 20 years to strive for a high-paying job. If I get a $60000/yr job, aim for an $80000/yr promotion. If I get that, then go for the $100000. At no point am I helped to the realization that continuing to pursue my safety needs are going to get me diminishing returns, and actually inhibit me meeting my higher needs! True value is not actually zero-sum, whereas the metric of economic value is! When you help out at a food kitchen, you could be satisfying your esteem and self-actualization needs while satisfying someone else's physiological needs, for instance.

For performances, we've similarly constructed the system of objective assessment, or at least that's how I had been taught to think about performance. When there are winners and losers, performance becomes just as zero-sum, and the currency is the mechanics or technical prowess. I hated that. I quit cello because I was so frustrated by my orchestra class. In fact, I did this against the advice I was given by counselors and my parents: one of the oft-cited reasons for doing music through middle school and high school seems to be that it helps get into college. How dry is that? It totally sucks away all of the best parts of performance.

Through Liquid Flow, pretty much any way in which we moved our bodies with conviction the instructor considered dance. On the day of our final performance, she gave us all a pep talk before we began the show, and she told us that she loves to perform because it is one of the selfless things. It is not selfish, like trying to make more money, or being the center of attention. To her, it involved inspiring the audience, and whether that was an actual formal audience at a show or a classroom of ragtag students from various walks of their student careers just trying to dabble in dance it didn't matter.

I didn't get it at the time, but I think I finally know what she means. Dance, and performance in general, is an invitation. It is something you extend to an audience, and they can choose to accept or ignore. If they accept, you as a performer and them as the audience form a team in an effort to create an extraordinary experience. As a performer, it's all about what you can do for the audience, how to touch their lives for those short minutes (or hours if you're lucky), and how you can move them emotionally or physically or spiritually.

When it comes to formal shows, the actual "performance" mindset starts well before the actual show; it involves countless hours carefully crafting an experience with the audience in mind, much of which goes unnoticed, culminating in one short-lived but spectacular exhibition. No need to worry about how technically sound your performance is; for them to show up to the show, they've already accepted your invitation, and they're there to help. Case in point: the snapping at Spoken Word when people forget their lines.

To dance through life, therefore, is to constantly live and behave openly in a way where the invitation  to create something that defies zero-sumness is always there for someone to take. I think that's exactly how people like N-, K-, people in SBS, Spoken Word, and many people in Gaieties regard performance, whether consciously or not. And when that's what performance is, I love it. I always want to be extending that invitation, and I always want to be around people who will extend that invitation to me, and when I am I always want to accept it.

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Just a housekeeping note. I might have to get surgery in my eye. There's something wrong with the meibomian glands in my right eye that led to the eye infection from a few months ago and the inflammation from late last winter/early spring quarter.

Thanksgiving

I haven't had a chance to do much introspection recently between classes, SBS, RAing, and Gaieties, so a more comprehensive post will probably come after finals are over.

With that said, I have thanks to give!

I am thankful for my friends. For this past quarter, I've felt like I'm in my own world. I don't have the people who I feel closest to and who know me the best around me on a day-to-day basis the way I've had in the past, so I've been more alone than I would like. But despite this aloneness, I don't feel too lonely. There are people to catch me if I fall. I hope they also know that I am here to catch them as well, even if I'm not physically around them.

I am thankful for my family. I'm not in the business of convincing myself that my family is perfect, but in spite of all of the strife and all of the rifts between my family, I have people in my life who value (in some way, anyway) my being part of their family. If nothing else, it means there are always people from whom I can learn and grow from, even if I don't feel like I'll ever become emotionally close with them. And of course, my mom has been among my biggest supporters since forever ago, even from hundreds of miles away.

I am thankful for my health. Many of the goals I have would be unattainable or much more difficult if I weren't as physically healthy. Sure, I'm not the pinnacle of good health. Between eye infections and fevers and just the common colds, there are days, maybe a few weeks at worse, that just downright suck. But I'm lucky that the word I had to use there was "days" and not something longer.

I am thankful for the countless of unsung individuals in my life who I take for granted. There are a lot of nameless faces who somehow improve my life, from custodial and kitchen staff in the dorms and dining halls, to the emergency medical personnel I've been able to rely on during on-call crises, to the classmates in section who reached to help me pick up a pen I dropped without hesitation. It turns out there are a lot of people who want the best for you, just in very little, less visible ways. I need to remember that when I'm going through personal struggles.

I am thankful for coming out of difficult times still with the capacity for love and trust and optimism. I don't think I'm wearing rose-colored glasses the same way I was in the past in that I don't try to coerce my perception of any given moment into something splendid. However, I am comfortable facing the reality that things might not be going well and still believe that they can and will get better, particularly if I do something about it. That's something I hope I don't ever lose, because I've seen what not having that looks like. There are people I know personally who, in the aftermath of particularly frustrating or upsetting experiences, adopt a mindset characterized by insatiable cynicism and general jadedness. It's downright paralyzing, and not how I want to live.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

The skies are crying in solidarity with my heart.

Again... maybe I can single-handedly end the drought, in the most Omelas of fashions.
(As it turns out, that apparently is not too deviant from my personality anyway.)

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.

Still have work to do on empathy

Disclaimer: I took a couple shots so I'm a little past tipsy. Didn't really help me not feel terrible.

Last night there was a huge wasp flying around the house, and after a while, my housemates and I got fed up with it and they told me I should go handle it. I took a paper cup and caught it against the floor, and intended to bring it outside without killing it (the usual procedure for spiders, other pests, etcetc). However, I was exhausted and ended up going to bed and forgetting to bring it outside, and so it stayed there under the cup.

When I got up this morning, I saw the cup a couple of times passing by, but had various other things on my mind (how desperately I needed to use the restroom, going out for a run, laundry) and I didn't get around to taking care of the bug situation and bringing it outside. As I was getting ready for bed (now 22 or so hours after I first caught it in the cup) I realized it was still there and went to go bring it outside. By this time, it was already dead.

I feel like shit. Of all of the ways I could handle the bug, mine was the most cruel. I subjected it to the bug equivalent of death by starvation or something. Just killing it flat out, which I try not to do on moral grounds, would've been more humane. How can I claim to excel at empathy when my brain lets by acts of cruelty like this without thinking twice (albeit for a bug)? It makes me wonder to what extent what I've considered a high level of empathy is actually true empathy, or just a better, cognitive and conscious understanding of which emotions are evoked given certain stimuli. I hope it's true empathy. I feel like shit.