While I was walking on my way home yesterady, mind somewhat scattered juggling a number of typical concerns: recalling the meeting I just had, thinking they don’t pay me enough to do this shit, wondering if I would be happier in a corporate job, worrying about whether I had time to bake peanut butter rice krispies treats for the Friday pot luck, calculating the time between a late AM yoga class and lunch plans… The usual. As I got to my block, the thought struck me– is this it? Is this adulthood, is this LIFE (so troubled I was that I even tweeted about it)?

Now this happens to me a lot actually, so it’s quite disingenuous of me to make it out like it was a revelation. Call it periodic self-examination, because what kind of a life is one that is unexamined, asked Socrates? But in my case, it’s more of a periodic what-the-fuck, not some profound internal evaluation. And tonight’s, shall we say, salvo of what-the-fuckness had a deeper resonance than before. Because for the first time, I felt like I could say, why yes Gayle, this is life. And for all the anxiety and anticipation of my younger years, life is rather underwhelming.

Let me pause for a second to explain why I feel like I’ve finally begun to live, which if you haven’t guessed already, means being an adult in charge of my own life. Not that life didn’t count before… It just wasn’t mine exactly. Too much familial involvement in early Filipino existence… you never really feel like its life until you strike out on your own, or at least, that’s how it feels like to me. So what were the triggers, the proverbial boxes I had ticked off that moved me from overgrown child held hostage by inability to feed and clothe oneself to a human being that counts? Having a job is one. Even bigger is being married. But the kicker? The one that really pushed me over the edge? The desire and enjoyment of cooking. I shudder.

So the verdict is in. I’m an adult. My life has finally begun.

But it sure didn’t feel like it. The strangest part of it all this is that the milestones I talked about above, I am living through them but the idea of them is so different from the actual experience of living out these milestones that I feel like it doesn’t count.

My brain buzzed around a quadrillion cycles a second upon this seemingly contradictory realization and my conclusion is, I hyped life up so much while I was growing up that it will forever be that piece of meat tied to a string on a stick that’s hanging over my head as I run on the treadmill of existence. I always imagined adulthood in particular as a state that I could differentiate from well, the younger me that was thinking about it. I thought I’d be cooler, sexier, smarter, worldier, more independent etc… And while some of these things are true today (cocky I know. It’s my blog, deal with it), I now realized that I imagined I would feel like someone else. And unfortunately, I feel exactly like…. me. The ship of Theseus eh? I am completely not who I was when I was 14, yet I can still look back and know that was me, which makes me then feel like I will never be the adult I imagined I would be because I am an infant, a teenager and an adult all at the same time all the time. Alright, I’m getting a little kooky with the omnipresence bit and I am treading dangerously close to philosophy so I’m going to go back to that simple vision of clarity that I started this paragraph with. The realization that troubled my in my lonely trudge to my abode was that my life had actually begun. BUT. It wasn’t what I expected. I checked off the boxes, but it’s still not porn (that, ladies and gentlemen is a cleverly provocative reference to US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s threshold for identifying pornography: “I know it when I see it”). In this case, I should know it when I feel it and ah, we’re still G-rated over here.

Why does this trouble me so much? So what if life has begun? Ain’t that a grand thing, unshackled by parental overbearance and the attendant guilts and pressures? Not really. Because I believed that once life is actually started, it means going down and staying in a path. All the hope and potential and possibility of youth? Gone. Isn’t that the challenge and the tragedy of the quarter life crisis? When life begins, it’s over. But now I know that’s not true. And actually, I’m a little hopeful, thanks to the disconnect between my idea of adulthood and the experience of adulthood. Instead of life-path lockdown, I see the free, open ground upon which that path is built. I don’t have to stay between the lines. I can walk on the earth beneath it. My inability to accept my state of adulthood will save me from feeling the despair of the sunk cost fallacy because if I learned anything these past 25 years, it is that all this bullshit is arbitrary. And by bullshit, I mean everything. All barriers and opportunities are only as real as you imagine them. Propriety, destiny, you name it. It’s all made up. Authenticity, officialness, authority, norms, truths, taboos… Powerful as they are in socializing individuals into proper members of society, it’s important to be aware that its power rests on a shared mass delusion, an effective mass delusion that has to be quite honest with myself, done a lot of good, but a delusion none the less. There’s no right way do this. Just because I’m in communications doesn’t mean I have to follow this trajectory to its conclusion, because there is no conclusion. Another painful lesson I’ve learned in my short time here is that ‘doing it right’ doesn’t mean you’ll get what you deserve. What do you deserve anyway? There’s so much injustice in this world, its impossible for me to believe that if I just keep at it, I’ll get my just desserts. I was given every opportunity by my parents and I took them up on it– I worked hard, studied hard, and where am I? Not in the cushy corporate job we all that I was destined for. And you know what? It’s OKAY. In fact, it’s fucking wonderful. I live in New York City (in the East-motherloving-Village yo!), doing a job I love/hate, taking care of my mind and body and have amazing people around me. I honestly think that if my life turned out the way I imagined it, I’d be miserable. Shit, if I married the type of guy everyone thought I should marry, I’d be divorced by now. Or I’d be in jail for mariticide. But!m I didn’t follow the idea, I didn’t follow the path. I ended up with the unexpected.  And I have to say I am in awe everyday. Just. Wow. It’s absolutely disgusting and unjust how happy I am. Ah but I digress.

I said above that I found life underwhelming because it didn’t match my idea of what life is supposed to be. That’s linked to a number of things, media messages about how explosive life stage changes can be and perhaps the lack of ritual between passing through these life stages, a trial by fire type thing where if you pass, you’re welcomed into the society as an adult. But really, I think its the agony and ecstasy of the postmodern deconstruction that lets you see through the made-up arbitrary facades of things like ritual. You see all the lines we draw, even so-called ‘life stages’, humanity just made them up to make sense of the world. There are no lines, there are no stages (market researchers and demographers would beg to differ of course, how else would they sell their wares?). Just one long, continuous process, a gradient so to speak, and we shuffle along getting to the different colors in due time, bu it happens so gradually and slowly that you won’t know you’re coming up to the next one until you’re there. Knowing this is helpful and hurtful at the same time… helpful if you’re so caught up on checking boxes and defining your exact point in the gradient as I seem to be. This knowledge is liberating because you realize, things are just the way they are. They don’t have to fit in preconceived notions. But it’s hurtful when you’re the type of person that needs these lines to organize your world. See, this is why even if I’m agnostic, I still understand and accept religion in the world because there are just different ways of dealing with life and we shouldn’t begrudge the utility of religion in people’s lives. I’m not going to get into the but religion has hurt the world so much argument in here, I’m just saying as a way to have a sense of place within the gradient of life experience, religion seems do to a good job, but it’s only one way. You can be free agent for all I care.

Don’t let ideas of life stop you from living. To quote the great Arthur Conan Doyle (in the words of Sherlock Holmes):

“life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generation, and leading to the most outre results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.” (Source)

Yeah, did I mention that? I had trouble sleeping the past couple of nights, despite hurting and feeling utterly exhausted, and I would wake up in the middle of the night in nervous anticipation of what awaited me at 7am. I’m slightly nuts, and maybe masochistic who knows. But last night was another turning point because a. I slept all the way through and b. I had the weirdest dream I’d love to now write about if I can remember it, which brings me to the second part of the title above.

There was nobody I knew personally in the dream- a bunch of actors surrounded me, but I can’t tell you which ones. All I can remember now is the conclusion, the most vivid being The Tuvok character from Star Trek voyager appearing out of a hole in the ground that somebody had thrown a ball into. He was dressed in a cheesy angel costume reading from a parchment and basically said that we thought we were safe but we weren’t then this devil type thing came out of the hole and engulfed the environment leaving everyone in empty space but these images kept appearing in front of us, scenes of environments which the devil thing eventually devoured, like it’s paper being sucked into a vacuum cleaner until only emptiness is left. The whole thing had a cartoony aspect to it too. Anyway, the moral I got from this dream is that everything we hold dear, no matter what we do (i think the ball thrown into the hole earlier on was some sort of appeasement sacrifice) will ultimately be reduced to nothingness. Kind of an existential dream, if i do say so myself. You’d think i was doing Buddihst meditation. And by the way, the devil thing looked like a chihuahua. I’m not even going to explore what that means.

It was like a splash of cold water. The wall of focus and anxiety that surrounded me in solitude and silence amidst a busy and noisy train platform broke away and I was suddenly present and I heard the drums and you know what? He was pretty good. He had a good beat and it was really something you could dance to. As I entered the train, I wondered: What if I went up to the drummer and started dancing, like a stoned chick at Woodstock? I shook my self. Of course not. I couldn’t.

Could not? Or WOULD not?

The only people that would do that are drunk or high kids or those homeless hipsters without a care in the world, who just let the music flow through them and shut out the rest of the world.

I immediately judged who would actually go and do something like that, and the disdain was palpable in my thoughts. I was not drunk, high or a homeless hipster so I couldn’t. But of course I could! I just won’t because I don’t think I’m the kind of person that does that. Sigh. Mental shackles of my chosen identity.

I WAS going to start this post by telling the reader, if s/he didn’t already know, that I love talking to people about my dreams. You probably know someone like this, whose eyes grow wide upon seeing you and gushes “oh my God you will not believe my dream last night.” Enter a wild inventory of the dreams’ elements: a desert island, being in a baby stroller, and The Go Gos. Yup, just an inventory. Few people can actually narrate the crazy dream they had, which sadly is what people usually expect when you tell them that you will not believe the dream they had last night: a story.

So I wanted to talk about dreams when I first got the idea of writing this post because I did not want to bother my boyfriend, fiancee um, now husband with another one of these non-stories. Worse, I wanted to go all neuroscientist on my dreams last night because the difficulty of falling asleep, the fitfulness of my sleep when I finally got there, and the depth of the dreams (note the pluralizing S) had an oh so obvious reason. He’s heard enough of this stuff to remember my dreams better than I do. Now when I started writing (first on my Blackberry, then switched over to my Air because I use a lot of O’s and the O key on my phone is broken), I of course went all meta on my ass for writing such a dumb post on a medium I usually use to show people how smart I am, hence the apologia. But in the back of my mind, a nagging self-analysis tickled my higher cortical functions: why did you decide to this? To actually make the leap and write about your dumb dreams, and in this highly involved manner?

You know when you’re about to write something and a hundred ideas buzz around in your head, competing for attention like a bunch of little headlines on the cutting room floor screaming to be made the star of Page One (sigh, what an archaic simile that is going to be), you as editor are trying to grasp the days random events and use careful arbitration to curate this chaos for your readers. Well ladies and gentlemen, I had that magical moment where the main headline peeked up from under the pile and I picked it up and lovingly pasted it on the top of Page One. I realized why it was suddenly okay to do blog about my dream interpretations, which interestingly enough will segue perfectly into the dream interpretation bit.

It is because I am reading David Wong’s John Dies at the End. (By the way I recently found out it will be made into a movie and slipped out of this tab to watch the trailer. Oh my God I am so excited to watch it was MADE to be a movie. Oh and that the author’s real name is Jason Pargin but I see why he uses Wong, better ring to it.) If you haven’t read it or heard about it, its basically a modern horror story with non-heroes, a lot of swearing, crazy monsters and… here watch the trailer. Why did reading John Dies at the End making blogging dream interpretation okay? Well, its a simple case of inspiration, permission via example and imitation via flattery. The book is so fucking nuts and has so much fun doing it that I am actually writing with a David Wong inflection. Sigh, perhaps if I want to write like a Nobel Prize winner I should be reading Morrison or Beckett… Ha. I clearly don’t.

So here I am writing about slightly crazy things too (come on, dreams are nothing if not a mental vent for the insanity we all hold in there) in irreverent Wong-esque fashion and now we know why. What made last night’s dreams worthy of using my lazy Saturday morning to write about? Oh, where do I begin?

How about— the night before, Thanksgiving. After consuming copious amounts of mulled spiced wine, regular wine, eggnog, turkey, cran, mashed and sweet potatoes, chicken balls, cornbread, two kinds of salad, and finally apple and pumpkin pie, my stomach was like a solid rock of the first deadly sin. We didn’t get home til 3 or 4 am and while I had no trouble crashing to bed, I had trouble staying crashed. It was Friday the next day after all, still technically a weekday and unfortunately my body has this ultra-responsible lag time between realizing its vacation time and behaving accordingly. That’s the long way of saying I got up way too early afterward and felt, as you can imagine, like shit. So what do I do when I feel like shit? Stay. In. Bed. And watch all the Hulu and Netflix and read books I feel real life has deprived me of during the weekday because I, in ultra-responsible mode, listen to NPR and stare faithfully at a computer all day managing databases and cooking up social media campaigns (I have a multi-faceted job). And because I am who I am, on my vacation my impulse is to consume sci-fi, fantasy and, yeah you guessed it since it was so prominent just a paragraph ago, John Dies at the End.

When I say televisual overstimulation, you must know the context: since moving to New York City, I have not watched TV like West Coasters or Middle Americans. Cable is too expensive and there’s too much cool shit going on outside to stay indoors. Well, except when you have a hangover and/or feel like shit, that’s when you want television. So just to set the scene of my Friday: there I was, with an average diet of 0-30 minutes/day of television, with a constant thrumming headache and a anxious feeling that I allowed myself to cross the line to obesity with last night’s disgusting show of gluttony. I prop the Air on my chest and watch: two episodes of Fox’ Fringe, an episode of Syfy’s Sanctuary, read a bit of John Dies at the End, watch an episode of Syfy’s Alphas, watch From Dusk til Dawn, read a bit of JDATE (omg I just came up with that acronym, HILARIOUS!), watch two episodes of ABC’s Once Upon a Time and finally, read a bit more of JDATE. All of that, by the way, was an effort to put me to sleep. Or at least keep me awake but mentally numb enough that when sleepytime finally came, I’d sink heavily into a much needed slumber.

Backfire! (If I could possibly cue the sound of an old car actually backfiring here, I would)

Did you see that list?! And here’s where I get neuroscientific on you, well, taxonomic first. The day’s media diet was: sci-fi, sci-fi, sci-fi, horror, sci-fi, horror, horror, fantasy, fantasy, horror. Twelve hours of that stuff man. Mental numbing? Yeah, more like stimulation, or should I say with the long-awaited reference to this post’s title, overstimulation. Check it: my brain, which is totally not used to having over half an hour of TV a day is suddenly inundated with over 8 hours of really fantastic, out of this world stuff. And I expect it to sleep quietly into the night. Ha. According to a PBS documentary called Sleep, one of the most popular theories of dreams is (not voices from the ether telling you what lotto numbers to pick) that during the REM cycle of sleep, the brain draws and/or strengthens the connections between the neurons that were formed that day and do some general back-end trimming, cleaning and processing of your brain matter.

Can you imagine what the little creatures in my brain thought when they saw the crap they had to deal with?! They were probably furious at my top-level lack of restraint. So furious that they punished me: instead of a deep, restful sleep, I kept waking up between dreams that switched incoherently among the storylines of the stuff I read/saw last night, tossing and turning, so mentally wound up with images and interpretations flying around in my head, unable to shut anything down. At about 6am though, the little guys were probably tired of doing the double-duty of neuronal maintenance and host torture that they allowed me the type of sleep where I physically drool at the deliciousness of a swallowing sort of emptiness in my head. And then I woke up refreshed.

Hooray! My plan did work! Although for future reference I probably should have just watched documentaries because those are a sure-shot lullaby, a condition which is rather unfortunate given my quest to relentlessly acquire knowledge. Whatever. I get the last laugh after all, little brainmen fuckers.

**That last part there wasn’t very scientifically rigorous, which is probably why I’ve stayed in the humanities.

That was the ever-repeated print function that my freshman year high school computer classes ended up amounting to. After learning how to name the parts of the computer, our crowning achievement would be to show our instructor that we could program the computer to show “Hello world” on the screen. In C++. I guess I should be grateful they actually taught us programming and if-then functions. The later years consisted of lessons in Word and Excel, lessons that were completely unnecessary, any digital utopian would tell you… Because my generation is that generation that straddles between the eras of the digital immigrants and the digital natives, i.e. I had to use a typewriter, when I was like,  7. Then there was no looking back…  to MS DOS, to Word, to Notepad (for the mandatory experimentation with HTML), to the Notes function on my Blackberry.

Hello world.

As I’ve probably mentioned before, I have trouble starting writing any piece, especially after I haven’t written in so long. I get pretty meta. I mean, just the thought of starting something gets me going down a rabbit hole of what beginnings mean, and when is the beginning of a beginning, how do I talk about the moment before beginning because the act of talking about beginning by default puts the beginning in the past… See? It’s paralyzing. So I decided tonight, the night when I finally decided to pick up my laptop and bang something out, that I would go with the slightly clever, insider geeky introduction of “Hello world.” Because typing into the WYSISWG box on WordPress feels to me exactly like saying hello to the world, albeit, again.

And why must I say hello again? Alas, I keep disappearing from this project. If it were a sentient being with feelings, it would have serious on-again-off-again abandonment issues. To be really brief and sound kind of like a dick about it… life. I was hit by a car in June, had a visitor in July, traveled cross-country July-August, apartment hunted and moved in with my boyfriend in August, started physical therapy August-September, job hunted in September and finally, started a job in October. And here we are. Oh yeah, add to that three weddings this month. It’s been a doozy. I don’t know how real adults do it.

In all that time, oh how I have missed writing. I think I miss reading as much but I get to do a bit of that here and there, dangerously walking around Lower Manhattan with my nose in my Blackberry, using the half-hour walk to absorb as much news and answer as many texts, emails, tweets and Facebook notifications as I possibly could before going into work. Unfortunately, I never get around to reading the things that used to spark ideas in my head anymore, ideas so gripping that I had start blogging on the very same walk. But this is the path I chose right? I wanted the grind. Throughout the entire master’s program, all I could think of was, I can’t wait to have the structure and schedule of a working woman, where everything starts on Monday at 9 and ends Friday at 5. Just three weeks into full-time work, I realized how much I thrived and enjoyed the life of a graduate student, keeping my own hours, engaging in inquiry and of course, learning, learning, learning. Now some might read that as my being ready to jump back into school. It’s too early to tell. Although! I do feel compelled to note the differences I’m feeling now, feelings such as, how much more tired I am everyday now, even though in my mind, work is easier. What it is, is more tedious. Grad work is hard, but mentally  orgasmic. Grad work= energizing; work work=enervating. I miss hearing a story on the radio and linking it to another thing I heard about and wondering if capitalism was invented by sick anarchists who wanted to see humanity be destroyed in a manner worse as, or even more than, the miseries of war. And this comment about capitalism is my gesture towards foreshadowing, by the way. Because the thinking behind my one-track mind about getting a job was… that’s right… money. Also independence from the loving beings that have showered me with every need (and wisely deprived me of most wants). Why? Because I’m a big girl now. Living in the big world where I have to think about rent and bills and go to happy hour and turn on the dishwasher and network and stare at my computer all day and bitch about taxes and live for the weekend and be distracted by so many little things I don’t have time to think anymore.

I’m learning that the big world the big girl lives in is not as cool as they make it out in the movies.

It never is. I knew that.

But I still fell for it.

So all these thoughts were percolating in my brain last weekend while I was marching along the newly opened Section 2 of the Highline with a few hundred other people. It’s a converted above ground railroad on the west side of Manhattan that has been transformed into a long, narrow, and extremely lovely park. Every once in awhile, there are these ‘viewing ports’ I guess they’re called, along the park which looks over 10th Avenue I guess it is. The viewing port is composed on a few levels of ampitheater-type seating where a wide rectangular glass window is set in front of and people can sit there and look out into the world of too-west Chelsea. I was struck by how much it resembled a home movie theater and how much the set-up encouraged voyeurism (wait, doesn’t all of New York City invite voyeurism?). It wasn’t until we saw the next viewing port, life streaming across the screen, that inspiration struck.

II. And here, I now lay out my art concept.

Imagine a wide street corner of no particular significance. In the triangular space on the sidewalk where the two streets, imagine either:

1. a movie theater chair set in front of an imitation home theater screen; or
2. a La-Z-Boy set in front a hollow flatscreen TV (or hollow cardboard flatscreen TV); or
3. a computer chair set in front of a computer desk with a hollow laptop (or hollow cardboard laptop).

A sign hung on the back of the chair simply reads “Instant Watch”, in the font and coloring of the famous Netflix viewing feature.

Of course my mind automatically went to Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, especially in the part where he talks about how Canadian hockey players born in the first few months of the year are more successful… But in that case, the infrastructure of kid’s hockey camps had more to do with it than anything, but it does hint at the argument that ‘hey wannabe Wayne Gretzsky, your January birthday might just be your ticket to the NHL’. This link to Outliers is also actually a bit deeper, and a great corrective to the seemingly determinist argument made in the Times piece… Or am I the only one reading determinism in that? Anyway, Gladwell’s point is that success comes with 10,000 of practice, meaning those given the opportunity carpe the diem, or so it goes. And so while I could have been 14 in the ’56, listening to Elvis, the fact that I have no musical bone in my body, okay I have a pseudo-one because I feckin’ rock at karaoke… especially lip-syching, is more predictive of my getting into the Vh1 Hall of Fame… which in this case is less than unlikely.

*If this post ended rather weird and weak, it is because I started it a couple of days ago and dropped it to have a fantabulous weekend in New York City, under the sun with friends doing stuff in the meatspace. I was hoping it would percolate (looooooove that psych term) but alas, all it did was shrivel up and become lost. This was my best attempt to salvage it, an attempt unwisely undertaken for both mind and muscle are, after a whole day of bike riding in Manhattan, are mush.

I’m almost to my job/volunteering spot so I gotta sign off but another thought popped into my head— that article about the psychological burden of being rich? Digital abundance could see us going down that path too..

• digital rent
• virtual rent
• library building/ export
• service super silos [is it their fault that silos have a militaristic connotation?]
• favesies:  the access model

Its interesting that in my paper, I question the notion of property, wait, actually, I don’t know if I question it in the paper but I do bring it up in the presentation, and whether digital media artifacts, which we can only access and not really own in the historical sense, are really ours, and the article says this:

Norway’s Consumer Council is backing Aspiro, saying “collections should be the user’s own property” and “it should be easy to move between digital services”.

Ah. What havoc you wreak of millenia-old naturalized ideas, oh digitization.

-0-

So, yeah, the recommendation engine. What we really went after was the Netflix recommendation engine CineMatch– and my big beef about it was personalization, sharing similar concerns with Cass Sunstein about hypercustomization on the web and the “echo chamber” effect. Anyway, ran into a couple of things online in the past couple of days that made me giddy because, well, its always nice to write academic papers on relevant things. I’m partial to the understanding that relevance is life and obscurity is death… which is why I could never be a hipster. No, it is not cool that you don’t know what I’m talking about. I’m into shared delusions of common humanity. ANYWAY! God! I’ll get onto sharing now. It’s kind of a media blitz by one guy, Eli Pariser, the president of the board of MoveOn.org and the author of “The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You”. First is a TEDTalk and his then his op-ed piece for the NYTimes.

Okay done. Now I can close those damn tabs on m browser which have been up for the past couple of days because I hadn’t had the chance to properly be online because of all the graduation festivities… for which my IQ definitely suffered a substantial hit.

Stay tuned. Come Friday, I might change my mind.