SALT Paper IIX

An interview with myself re: doing television interviews as someone with social anxiety:

• Best advice: be obvious about it.
• It’s a way of forcing the viewer to exhibit empathy
• It’s a raw and very real exhibition.
• Viewers are forced to confront a part of themselves that they don’t often see on TV, and by extension, are not comfortable with that part of themselves.
• They will, as they say, “feel sorry for you”
• It’s probably best that no one brings up your shaking hands or cracking voice, but inevitable that someone will do so. Do not panic! This is a message from the outside and not something happening only in your head. Appreciate this fact and move along.
• Afterwards, measure time by how many days it’s been since you’ve moved your car. It’s a sentence that conveys a number of messages at once. “My car is parked on the street and I haven’t moved it in a week and I haven’t moved myself from inside my house in the same time.”

We’re ignorant, and we know we’re ignorant, but yet we continue to believe things with certainty. Is that the circularity of intellect? The smarter you are, the more you understand your own intellectual limits. There more ignorant a person is, the less they’re willing to question their own beliefs, and the more strongly and adamantly they believe their own misguided ideas.

• Is there any way to combat this simple fact?
• Maybe through the joy of revelation. The importance of surprise, of shocking people into questioning their own beliefs.
• Once you tear down expectations, anything is possible. People will start to distrust their own ability to accurately predict the future. This can and must happen through art.
• But is it also applicable to other things? Advertising, political messaging, etc.
• Whether or not a person finds this kind of tearing down of expectations as enlightening is of course the basis for curiosity and intellect.

Old folks who go to random public talks by intellectuals are my heroes. That’s what I want to be when I grow old. I want to be the person who nods adamantly in agreement when the speaker makes a smart point.

The brilliance of Sarah Palin was that she made ignorance acceptable” — Mark Lilla

Jamais vu — the sensation that a familiar situation is somehow suddenly unfamiliar.

Presque vu — when you know you know something but can’t think of it at that moment.

Why do celebrities sunbathe topless on boats when they have to know full well they’re going to be photographed? I would venture to guess that most women have never lounged topless on the beach or on a boat, so it’s not exactly common human behavior. But yet famous people, the most photographed race of humans, feel it’s OKto sit full to the world to see.

Counter intuitiveness — the phenomena whereby a human behavior seems obvious and apparent turns out to be the exact opposite, due to the actor’s awareness of the stereotype, and thus they naturally seek to counter that assumption. There might be something to be said for cultures that allow this kind of alteration of behavior. This is the real virtue of liberty and freedom: the ability to self correct.

Once I discovered what I was going to write about, I felt much more handsome. It was certain to be the next big thing in unreadable fiction. Swirling, circling narratives.

The Cold War was a war not of death but of anxiety.

On the rare night we had warmth and rested comfortably. The cots squeaked and occasionally an airplane would fly directly overhead, but only the new soldiers had trouble sleeping.

I wonder if bulldogs in Russia are essentially the same as bulldogs in American and if so, then there might be some kind cultural understanding that could be reached. This might work, at least for bulldog owners, but if you extrapolate it out to all manner of objects and things that are the same here and there then we could make real cross-cultural progress. There are limits to this kind of thinking, obviously, in that if we depend on similarity to understand others then we naturally exclude other people and cultures who differ. In this sense, it’s also extremely important to develop an appreciation for difference, probably even more so than an appreciation for similarity.

Surely Russian manikins are the same as American manikins, or at least mostly so, and this can be another area in which we reach understanding.

We may be stuck in a feedback loop where the antecedent negates the consequence, and the negation of the consequence in turn negates the antecedent and then nothing exists at all except for the chaotic atoms of the destroyed universe.

I’m in a warm room that’s perfectly square shaped. My best friend stands by the fireplace smoking a cigarette, because that’s a convenient place for him and in my mind that’s a convenient place to always have your best friend in case they’re needed. A bank of computer monitors, 8 in all, various sizes, tethering me to the outside world through the communication of raw data. I am inside a computer thousands of miles away. This is the beauty of the internet, the ability to easily be many places at once. Information travels in at a speed well beyond what a human can comprehend and flashes on the screen, the standard white on black background of a DOS terminal.

There are plenty of herbal remedy concoctions ostensibly for anxiety that include alcohol as an active ingredient. I think that’s a perfect excuse for getting drunk in the middle of the day. And of course alcohol “cures” anxiety. They might as well put a shot of Jameson in a bottle and call it magic.

We wake up in the morning to go to work and every time, somewhere in the back of minds we wish this was the last time. Everyone does it. No one desires or looks forward to work. This is the chief contradiction of our lives, those of us who have average office jobs in the most sterile, controlled environments. It’s not a secret either, the sentiment is expressed constantly on social media and through actions and words of those you talk to face to face. Ask just about anyone on a Monday morning how their life is going and you’ll see.

Ultimately, though, we understand that there is no alternative to this life. We’re not happy and we never will be, at least not all the time. The best we can hope for is the occasional glimmer of sunshine. That’s better than the past, when humans toiled day and night on farms just to sustain life. We don’t live that way anymore and we all assume, probably rightly, that things are better now. Our environment might be sterile, but it’s warm and safe and all of that.

However, there’s always a problem with the idea that there is no other way. It shuts off critical thinking and forces us to accept a certain order of things that we might not otherwise be inclined to accept. The problem we have to face is to challenge this as a mode of thinking. We must know not just that there is no alternative but why. If we know why, then we can rest easy in our noncritical viewpoint. Occasionally, we may discover that what was previously accept as inevitable is in fact no such thing, and that can lead to a better world and hopefully a slightly less mundane existence.