Microexpressions

While we were in DC last month, I spotted an interesting book in the gift shop of the US Spy Museum: "I Can Read You Like a Book," by Gregory Hartley and Maryann Karinch.  There were some ideas in this book that were highly amusing:

1) Latent symbols of information processing:

Eye movement signals that you are looking for answers inside your head. The visual cortex is at the back of the brain, so when recalling an image, your eyes will drift upward. The portions of the brain that process sound are located directly over the ears, so when recalling a melody or noise, your eyes will drift toward your ears, usually between the browridge and cheekbone.
Cognitive thought and problem solving occur in the frontal lobe in adults. When calculating or analyzing, you will find your eyes - and perhaps your whole head - moving down left.  A down-right movement corresponds to intense feelings.

I do this a lot. See if you can have a conversation with me (if it's an expository or work-related conversation) without me looking off into the distance at least once.

2) Wrinkling the nose in disgust is almost always a female gesture.

3) Origin of Smiles: In a chimp, a the baring of teeth means fear. It's an expression that communicates, "I'm weaker than you, don't hurt me." Smiles are meant to be disarming. I have no intention of causing harm. Put down your guard and everyone remains alive.

TJ Jagodowski's Seven Hooks for a Scene

Go into the scene…

1. Immediately after a huge event has happened, and be in the middle of reacting to this event.
2. With a mantra or catchphrase.
3. With a secret that directly affects your partner.
4. With a large assumption about your scene partner.
5. With a physicality that has consumed your character.
6. In the middle of solving an obstacle.
7. With a hugely specific want from your scene partner.

Basso Profundo

I just finished reading The Circle by Dave Eggers. Along with Her, Spike Jonze's latest film, and The Fifth Estate, both of which I also watched recently, I've had some reflections about life in the Digital Age.

1) Remember that Social Media is a Consumer Product.

"It's not that I'm not social. I'm social enough. But the tools you guys create actually manufacture unnaturally extreme social needs. No one needs the level of contact you're purveying. It improves nothing. It's not nourishing. It's like snack food. You know how they engineer this food? They scientifically determine precisely how much salt and fat they need to include to keep you eating. You're not hungry, you don't need the food, it does nothing for you, but you keep eating these empty calories. This is what you're pushing. Same thing. Endless empty calories, but the digital-social equivalent. And you calibrate it so it's equally addictive." - Mercer, The Circle

Human beings are at once the producers and consumers of social media. You - your shares, your Likes, your comments on articles, your photos - are the product, and there are companies that are profiting off of you. Exercise moderation and discipline.

2) Talk to a real live human being! Deeply!

3) Does complete transparency make a better society? I haven't formed an opinion on this yet, but am still thinking about it.

I'm trying not to be a curmudgeon like the Dowager Countess Violet in Downton Abbey, who is quite resistant to change.

"I couldn't have electricity in the house, I wouldn't sleep a wink. All those vapors floating about."

Living the Artisanal Life

Try to find a balance between the industrial and the artisanal life, with equal parts Stark and Arcadia.

Some wonderful reads recently:

Chronicles of the minibus service in Syria. I'm wistful because we were supposed to go on our honeymoon here, and have postponed this trip into our unforeseeable future. My middle age, perhaps? 

http://blog.longreads.com/post/the-end-of-the-line-a-microbus-map-of-damascus/

Why everyone should go to graduate school.  At any level - lab assistant, undergraduate, graduate, postdoc - one can make a meaningful contribution to humanity's collective body of knowledge. 

http://www.businessinsider.com.au/the-illustrated-guide-to-a-phd-2012-3

Video Games change the way we dream.  This explains why I frequently dream water levels, nature/mountain levels, and wake up in the morning drenched in sweat, but awaken unable to remember why I broke a sweat. 

http://www.theverge.com/2014/1/21/5330636/video-games-effect-on-dreams?utm_content=buffer8eb4e&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

I've set this photo of a poppy field in Afghanistan as my desktop background across two screens at work, panorama-style, because it inspires me. This picture represents our connection to the ancient past (mountains) and our hope for the future (flowers seeking the sun, looking upward).  

Christmas Cheer

In the darkness of winter, may your days be filled with light and good things.

Inspiration from Cornell Anthropology Faculty

[Our] ability to work between the remote past and the contemporary moment, the local and the global, the specific and the general - [this] is anthropology’s most enduring contribution to human understanding. - Adam Smith

Our uniquely skeptical, critical, and sensitive perspectives on the multiplicity of our humanity is sorely missing from important debates in our government. We need, now more than ever, anthropologically inquisitive minds to execute our government’s policies domestically and abroad. Our intellectual vocations need to be carried out from both the academy as well as within the private and public sector. Only then will our relevance make a difference.  -Saul Mercado

Cognitive Functions and Theatrical Improvisation

Ah, improv. Full engagement of all cognitive functions is always required. Here's how we use each one:

Introverted Functions:
Si - Attention to detail, fun with categories, fun with context switches. Buzzer.
Fi - Values. Character development reflecting certain attitudes and perspectives shaped by Fi.
Ti - Logic, consistency, justifying, explaining. IF/THEN and parallelisms.
Ni - Pattern recognition. Connecting vignettes, those brilliant moments when you resurrect old patterns. Finding the Game is ALL ABOUT Ni.

Extraverted Functions:
Te - Logical speaking, wit, repartee.
Se - Physicality; intent and purpose to movement.
Fe - Emoting, Reflecting your partner's emotions.
Ne - Idea generation.

Here are my Dominant, Auxiliary, Tertiary, and Inferior functions. 5th through 8th functions are Shadow functions and generally unconscious.
ISTJ: SiTeFiNe
      Opposing Senex Trickster Demonic/Devilish
      SeTiFeNi
ENFP: NeFiTeSi / NiFeTiSe

Ugh, I've realized that my Se isn't as honed as I perceive it to be. Also, I find that my ego tends to make me self-aware and censors my gut reactions, leading me to make the more conservative decision, rather than choose the more obvious or interesting one. After we finish a scene, and we get feedback from the rest of the class, I realize that everyone was able to see or sense my gut reaction and wanted me to act in a way that I had considered, but resisted (due to self-censorship). What was visible to me was also visible to everyone else. This is groupmind.

In any case, one's best work is done when one is fully present, in the moment, focused, and unhurried. Fully attune yourself to being present. The hardest part is discarding negativity and the pressure to "perform." Your essence, your true being, is the truth, and you're always ON. As an introvert, I'd like to be "On" only as I choose, but that's not the case. People are always watching you, whether you like it or not.

Triune Comedy is about engaging all levels of our triune brain:
Reptilian: Cerebellum - Slapstick, physical comedy
PaleoMammalian: Midbrain - Emotion, feelings, relationships
Neocortex - wit, repartee, longform vignettes, the Game.

Earworms for October

"Royals" Cover by Mora Mora It's pretty sad that this is the still the style of music I like. Kids today would call it "grunge." To me, it's simply the 90s style of 4-chord song that was popular back then, and what I listened to during those formative adolescent years.

I had a history teacher who told us that what you listened to in your youth would be what you listened to your whole life. It's true, for me.

The deep

Quiet mind, true silence, inner clarity.

2 Sustainable Products that You Didn't Know About

Composting Toilets


I'm not ready to install one in my house yet, but this seems pretty cool. According to today's Times, the Gates Foundation is apparently sponsoring a competition to reinvent the toilet, a 19th-century invention.

Recycled PET fabric clothing and bags


Recycled plastic water bottles are woven into a lightweight nylon-like fabric. I bought a Lily Bloom recycled PET bag awhile ago, and it was great.

Excerpts from The Pale King

On corporations and civic responsibility:

p. 136
We've changed the way we think of ourselves as citizens. We don't think of ourselves as citizens in the old sense of being small parts of something larger and infinitely more important to which we have serious responsibilities. We do still think of ourselves as citizens in the sense of being beneficiaries - we're actually conscious of our rights as American citizens and the nation's responsibilities to us and ensuring we get our share of the American pie. We think of ourselves now as eaters of the pie instead of makers of the pie. So who makes the pie? .... Corporations make the pie. They make it and we eat it.

I don't think of corporations as citizens, though. Corporations are machines for producing profit - that's what they're ingeniously designed to do. It's ridiculous to ascribe civic obligations or moral responsibilities to corporations.

But the whole dark genius of corporations is that they allow for individual reward without individual obligation. The works' obligations are to the executives, and the executives' obligations are to the CEO, and the CEO's obligation is to the Board of Directors, and the Board's obligation is to the stockholders, who are also the same customers the corporation will screw over at the very earliest opportunity in the name of profit, which profits are distributed as dividends to the very stockholders-slash0customers they've been f---ing over in their own name. It;'s alike a fugue of evaded responsibility.

On consumerism:

There'll be this incredible political consensus that we need to escape the confinement and rigidity of conforming, of the dead fluorescent world of the office and the balance sheet, of having to wear a tie and listen to Muzak, but the corporations will be able to represent consumption-patterns as the way to break out- use this type of calculator, listen to this type of music, wear this type of shoe because everyone else is wearing conformist shoes. It'll be this era of incredible prosperity and conformity and mass-demographics in which all the symbols and rhetoric will involve revolution and crisis and bold forward-looking individuals who dare to march to their own drummer by allying themselves with brands that invest heavily in the image of rebellion. This mass PR campaign extolling the individual will solidify enormous markets of people whose innate conviction that they are solitary, peerless non-communal, will be massaged at every turn.

On boredom:

I learned that the world of men as it exists today is a bureaucracy. This is an obvious truth, of course, though it is also one the ignorance of which causes great suffering.

But moreover, I discovered, in the only way that a man ever really learns anything important, the real skill that is required to succeed in a bureaucracy. I mean really succeed: do good, make a difference, serve. I discovered the key. This key is not efficiency, or probity, or insight, or wisdom. It is not political cunning, interpersonal skills, raw IQ, loyalty, vision, or any of the qualities that the bureaucratic world calls virtues, and tests for. The key is a certain capacity that underlies all these qualities, rather the way that an ability to breathe and pump blood underlies all thought and action.

The underlying bureaucratic key is the ability to deal with boredom. To function effectively in an environment that precludes everything vital and human. To breathe, so to speak, without air.

The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable. .... It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.

Enjoy the Silence

Excerpt from David Foster Wallace's The Pale King:

"For me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it's because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that's where phrases like `deadly dull' or `excruciatingly dull' come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that's dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention. Admittedly, the whole thing's pretty confusing, and hard to talk about abstractly . . . but surely something must lie behind not just Muzak in dull or tedious places anymore but now actual TV in waiting rooms, supermarket checkouts, airports' gates, SUV's backseats. Walkmen, iPods. BlackBerries, cell phones that attach to your head. This terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can't think anyone really believes that today's so-called `information society' is just about information. Everyone knows it's about something else, way down.

The memoir-relevant point here is that I learned, in my time with the Service, something about dullness, information, and irrelevant complexity. About negotiating boredom as one would a terrain, its levels and forests and endless wastes. Learned about it extensively, exquisitely, in my interrupted year. And now ever since that time have noticed, at work and in recreation and time with friends and even the intimacies of family life, that living people do not speak much of the dull. Or those parts of life that are and must be dull. Why this silence? Maybe it's because the subject is, in and of itself, dull . . . only then we're again right back where we started, which is tedious and irksome. There may, though, I opine, be more to it . . . as in vastly more, right before us all, hidden by virtue of its size."

''Enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is....'' a character says at one point. ''Routine, repetition, tedium, monotony, ephemeracy, inconsequence, abstraction, disorder, boredom, angst, ennui — these are the true hero's enemies, and make no mistake, they are fearsome indeed. For they are real.''

Chia's Spa experience

Went to a day spa today and it was almost as rejuvenating as a trip to the mountains to see Nature. What is it about spas that is so refreshing? Now I don't mean simply relaxing, because the massage was merely mediocre - my beefy friend usually does a better job. I mean soul-cleansing, escapist, transporting-you-to-faraway places kind of relaxing. I found the serene setting and peace and quiet (evocative of nature) to be the best part. What is it about the slowing of one's breath, the quieting of one's mind, and the connection to one's creator and terra firma that is so calming? Not only are we taken away from the hustle of industrial life, we are reminded of that which nourishes us. We are reminded that we are God's children, that we are loved.

The trick about these places is that they evoke "home," if for a short time, at a premium. Now if I'll just fix up my home the same way - darkness, good lightning, sound of water, flowers, candles, relaxing music, good feng shui - I wouldn't need to visit these fancy places.

July is here

Here are some things that I've found interesting lately:



Solar-powered LED lantern kit.


Despite her reclusivity and elusiveness, Princess Masako of Japan has always been my favorite royal.

Organic Chocolate Milk, and season 1 of The Good Wife.

St. John's Eve

I dreamt of blood that washed ashore, of eyes that spoke of sin
The lake was smooth and deep and black, as was her scented skin.
A mask I wore as I approached, I was what I am not
And though the pattern was unclear, its meaning could be bought.
Drawn to Bacchus's abode, I sought there to conspire.
But it was in the city of the dead that I found my heart's desire....
I spoke to one who smelled of death, he gave to me his ears.
And crosses that were marked were made into a veil of tears...
The road was blocked, the truth was shunned, the white flag had been waved.
Reversal cost me all I had, and everything I'd braved...
And then the night became as day, I glimpsed nature's reddest claw!
The face of fear looked back at me as I gazed into the maw...
My last ally laid to waste, I ran towards the light
I prayed for one to change my path, to give me strength to fight...
Inside a hidden chamber where I had no right to be,
I found the wheel at last, or, could it be, the wheel found me
And then the wheel went round and round, I could not find my way
Twelve and three and turn the key, I heard the madman say
Deep in the earth I faced a fight that I could never win
The blameless and the base destroyed, and all that might have been.
-Gabriel Knight

On Growth & Capitalism

Excerpt from Jonathan Franzen's Freedom (2010):

"Mainstream economic theory, both Marxist and free-market, Walter said, took for granted that economic growth was always a positive thing. A GDP growth rate of one or two percent was considered modest, and a population growth rate of one percent was considered desirable, and yet, he said, if you compounded these rates over a hundred years, the numbers were terrible: a world population of eighteen billion and world energy consumption ten times greater than today's. And if you went another hundred years, well, the numbers were simply impossible. So the Club of Rome was seeking more rational and humane ways of putting the brakes on growth than simply destroying the planet and letting everybody starve to death or kill each other.

[The Club of Rome is] a group of people who are challenging our preoccupation with growth. I mean, everybody is so obsessed with growth, but when you think about it, for a mature organism, a growth is basically a cancer, right? If you have a growth in your moth, or a growth in your colon, it's bad news, right? So there's this small group of intellectuals and philanthropists who are trying to step outside our tunnel vision and influence government policy at the highest levels, both in Europe and the Western Hemisphere."

Walter, not seeing the little neck-slicing gesture that Patty was making, pressed on. "The whole reason we need something like the Club of Rome," he said, "is that a rational conversation about growth is going to have to begin outside of the ordinary political process. Obviously you know this yourself, Joyce. If you're trying to get elected, you can't even talk about slowing the growth rate, let alone reversing it. It's total political poison. But somebody has to talk about it, and try to influence policy, otherwise we're going to kill the planet. We're going to choke on our own multiplication."

....

Capitalism can't handle talking about limits, because the whole point of capitalism is the restless growth of capital. If you want to be heard in the capitalist media, and communicate in a capitalist culture, overpopulation can't make any sense. It's literally nonsense.

"The reason the system can't be overthrown in this country," Walter said, "is all about freedom. The reason the free market in Europe is tempered by socialism is that they're not so hung up on personal liberties there. They also have lower population growth rates, despite comparable income levels. The Europeans are all-around more rational, basically. And the conversation about rights in this country isn't rational. It's taking place on the level of emotion, and class resentments, which is why the right is so good at exploiting it."

--------
America, you do excess like no other. Perhaps you are rivaled only by Saudi princes in your wastefulness.

My Enlightenment Salon

"Reading from Moliere," Jean Francois de Troy c.1728

France, 1793

"But what of social occupations in America?" said Talleyrand. "Do they have salons as in England or France?"
"Once you've left Philadelphia or New York - which are full of Dutch immigrants - you'll find little more than frontier towns. The people sit by the fire at night with a book, or have a game of chess as we're doing now. There isn't much of society outside of the eastern seaboard."
--Katherine Neville, The Eight (1993)

I seem to have forgotten how to write, apart from terse business communications (We'll have that deliverable for you by Monday. Have a great weekend!) and dry, technical sales prose (I'll spare you the torture). On the other hand, I've been doing a lot of reading and thinking. Since moving to the Confederacy and former capital city of the KKK, and a very, very red state, I've been thinking a lot about capitalism, communtarianism and what it means to live life in America. After reading that bit in The Eight, I've realized that we don't have salons anymore. They've been replaced by TV, games, and other cheap entertainment. There must be more than this.

American society has denigrated since the Enlightenment. How did this happen? We developed an irresponsible consumeristic society in tandem with the Industrial Revolution. A responsible consumerism is shaped by the common good, while an irresponsible one is not. We have lost touch with the lessons of the Enlightenment, and failed to allow humanistic morals to shape our practice of capitalism. See Nicholas Kristof's recent article on how Pakistan might be representative of America's ideal model of a government with low taxes, little regulation and traditional family values. Everything is privatized. Our goals no longer line up with those of the common good, but what is best for ourselves.

Mindless consumerism affects every aspect of our life because it is a huge drain on our time. Time spent consuming products means less time spent with our loved ones, less time building relationships, less time participating in our community and serving those in need, and less time for us to become well-rounded people, to better teach us to pass on the torch of our time with the lessons of this age to the next generation. These are the things that truly matter the most.

I propose that we as a society return to a more enlightened age, a more civilized and humane time where citizens respected and valued each other and the common goals of humankind. Share your gifts with the community. Talk to your children and really get to know them, understand their motivations, peer into their souls. We would all fare much better if we had those post-dinner discussions, if we were only able to turn off the television and our manifold electronic devices, quit our addictions to shopping and awaken our minds. Quit reading the internet and read a proper book. Come to my salon.

Some Other odds and ends:
- Southern people say "like I said," Northerners say "as I said."
- Southern people pronounce insurance with the accent on the first syllable ("IN'-surance"), which annoys the bollocks out of me.
- I've gotten heckled here in 6 months more than I was ever heckled in New York City for 15 years. Long stops at red lights, and
- I'm coming to terms with the realization that I am actually enneagram 6w5, not 5w6 as I've believed for over ten years. My obsession with hegemony, hierarchies, and the evolution of state societies probably stems from that motivation. Another post to come about that....

An Enneagram Poem

The Stages of the Work

If we were to really observe ourselves,
we would become aware of our habits.

If we were to become aware of our habits,
we would let go and relax.

If we were to let go and relax,
we would be aware of sensations.

If we were to be aware of sensations,
we would receive impressions.

If we were to receive impressions,
we would awaken to the moment.

If we were to awaken to the moment,
we would experience reality.

If we were to experience reality,
we would see that we are not our personality.

If we were to see that we are not our personality,
we would remember ourselves.

If we were to remember ourselves,
we would let go of our fear and attachments.

If we were to let go of our fear and attachments,
we would be touched by God.

If we were touched by God,
we would seek union with God.

If we were to seek union with God,
we would will what God wills.

If we were to will what God wills,
we would be transformed.

If we were transformed,
the world would be transformed.

If the world were transformed,
all would return to God.

–from The Wisdom of the Enneagram

Don Richard Riso & Russ Hudson

I'm Alive! and May's almost over.

My reason for the lack of updates: Between Twitter, Google Buzz, Facebook, Livejournal, and all the other sites I use, I've been spread thin on the social networking circuit lately. Perhaps the deluge of information I'm exposed to - a speedily flowing volume of bits and bytes of news and info - reduces, or detracts from, deeply-considered thought.

These days, one is more likely to quickly scan a huge deluge of short bursts of ideas, rather than process something substantial and complex for a long time. And so, continuing in the same pattern, my poor audience has only been getting 140-character tweets instead of deeply considered, thoughtful posts. Some sparks:

On why being a person of faith is almost a revolutionary act in these times:
In the greater part of the 20th century, most of the enemies that the Western world fought against were atheists and Communists. Religious orthodoxy was wholesome in comparison at that time. However, the bad guys who want to blow us up now are religious zealots. Devout religious belief is suspicious and anti-democratic (Keller).

May is National Suicide Prevention Month and Asian American Pacific American (AAPA) Heritage Month. My brother sent me this article from KimchiMamas: "Raising Your Asian-American Teen"
A great excerpt:
The model minority myth for Asians states that we are smart, hard-working and overcome the difficulties of acculturation. This stereotype can also promote depression, as it’s difficult to live up to, and can hinder teachers and parents from identifying youth to help. Asian American girls, for example, are positively rewarded for being compliant, persevering without complaint, and putting others’ needs before their own. So parents and teachers may overlook their isolation or withdrawal. This creates a difficult dynamic for the child who has learned to withhold emotions. Shame, a sense of low self-control, and a culture that limits expressing emotions lead to helplessness and isolation.

Reach out to a brother or sister today.

May 29th is World Enneagram Day.
I perceive the world as a Five with a Six wing. Do you know what your number is?

Real Life Bambi and Thumper

Since it's Easter season, and the newborn animals abound. From here