Link

http://sixwingedseraph.wordpress.com/2010/09/28/knowledge-is-a-presheaf/

This is beautiful and what I want this blog to become.

To Win a Hundred Battles...

The title is a reference to Sun Tzu's "Art of War"--"if you know your enemies and know yourself, you can win a hundred battles without a single loss."

I have been experiencing an emotional time in my life recently. On one recent occasion, my emotions took from me a deep friendship, and assaulted me with it as though it were a sword. In an instant I was defeated. The sublime power which I had heard that my emotions carried was equal to that of any samurai. And in an instant, they turned, left me for dead, their victory assured and complete.

But I am not dead. The power of my emotions' sword was softened by the friends' unwillingness to drive me to death. And now I have seen my emotions in battle.

When I knew not the power of my emotions, I was defeated by them.

When I knew the extent of their power, but not their nature, I was defeated by them.

Now, when I have seen how they draw their sword, how they aim their cuts, how easily they slice through a man, do I have hope? Can I find a weakness in their stance, can I find a power in myself?

Do I know my enemy well enough to win a hundred battles?

"Therefore one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the most skillful. Seizing the enemy without fighting is the most skillful."

Foundations of Friendship

My friend recently told me that "time move much faster than [he] give[s] it credit for." Specifically, that "all the stories that are actually being told to one another are being created so fast."

My instant reaction was to construct an analogy! But rather than build one from scratch, I remembered the adage that one should build relationships on firm foundations or some such.

So let's take this "foundations" analogy a little further, and say that as we live our lives, we build tall buildings up into the sky, one floor at a time. Then the "foundations" for our relationships are the most recent floors we've built. If we create even one floor poorly, our structure is unsound and our past may always come back to haunt us. I think of the stories we tell each other as being floor plans, maybe architectural standards. We build our floor, and extract the ideas that we've had in building it into plans, the stories we tell others. The hope being that others will incorporate our ideas into their lives and buildings.

Perhaps we do this because we wish to be remembered, or to create legacies which will outlive us. Perhaps we want others' buildings to be strong, so they will not crumble as ours have in the past. Perhaps we want others' buildings to be familiar, to work together on pursuing zoning ordinances (the struggle against nature), or to connect up our phone lines.

When we have similar foundations (i.e. the past few floors) then our shared floor plans make sense. Staircases are in the right place, the water pipes hook up, we don't put game rooms right above or below bedrooms. Some of our connections may bypass floors; perhaps a cups-and-string phone line or a more sophisticated PA system. Maybe shared wiring so that TVs from different floors can observe what the others are watching. But these connections are less common. Having a single shared floor plan makes it much easier to share further floor plans. Having multiple shared floors makes it seamless.

My friend claimed that it takes about three years to get to know someone very well. So we could say that 3 years is maybe three floors? I can't imagine building connections further than that. Or perhaps it is more like 36 floors, and due to a fluke of the human condition buildings taller than 36 floors tend to fall over and need to be rebuilt. Being rebuilt doesn't really feel continuous, and though the flow of time isn't always continuous it's not discontinuous in nice 3-year-long chunks (though high school and college are nice 4-year-long chunks! If you're lucky). Perhaps part of the building process is remodeling, condensing the functions of lower floors and then adding new floors at the top.

The lowest floors are the hardest to remodel, because the whole structure relies on them. They are the most powerful factors in the building's stability, and they are the most likely to be out of tune with how we want to build in the future. Similarly, our early childhood is built mostly by others, and the issues we develop there continue to plague us for ages on.
Though our highest floors are always shared with our recent friends, we seek to build more similar foundations. But we cannot change the deepest foundations, which makes it easier to often seek out people similar to us.
Some people have a powerful desire to understand their own foundations, and with good reason. The mysterious basements of our lives have a grand effect on our overall structure. We shove all kinds of crap into our basement, and try to forget about it. These things often get moldy, or attract ants, and we eventually need to deal with them or the whole foundation will be a rotting mess.

But of course the original motivation for this metaphor was the speed with which friendships seem to fall apart.
As it seems to me, if the depth of a friendship is the number of floors down you can rely on the architecture, the solidity of the foundation, then it only takes one floor out of place for the whole thing to be lost. And the remodeling process works more intently on the lower floors, so it may take some time before the dissonance can be repaired.

It is easier by far to destroy than to create.

Date With Destiny

On my way to the bathroom the phrase "I've got a date with destiny" popped into my head, along with the stern look often given by rugged badasses delivering the line. The look I imagined didn't really fit with my conception of a date. Is destiny a girl that they don't really like? Well, let's find out!

What happens on dates, especially first dates, since second dates with destiny are pretty uncommon. Well, fortunately instead of wild speculation I can quote Blink 182.
-Indecisiveness (in the car)
-Impatience (I just can't wait)
-Chivalry (to pick you up)
-Seek more intimacy (is it cool if I hold your hand?)
-Seek approval (is it okay)
-Communicate values (if I think it's lame to dance)
-Fuss over appearance (stupid hair/didn't know what to wear)
-Nervousness (you make me nervous)
-Excitement, happiness (let's make this night last forever)
-Time seems to fly (this night's almost over)
-First kiss

Of course those are mostly features of good dates. Let's check out a couple features that a bad date might have:
-Guilty feelings
-Letdown at the end

Either way, the plans will be
-Very high priority/high obligation


Alright. So now we have our Clint Eastwood cowboy facing down his rival, the voodoo assassin who killed his father and kidnapped his mother and left a mysterious note saying they should meet in the abandoned haunted warehouse in post-apocalyptic New York.

-Our hero is NOT indecisive.
-Our hero has been patient all movie, now he's rushing in.
-Our hero leaves behind his friends in old-fashioned chivalrous style.
-Our hero listens patiently to the entire evil plot, getting to know his enemy.
-Our hero doesn't really want approval from the villain.
-Our hero expresses his values clearly, hopefully in an epic speech.
-Our hero doesn't mind looking rugged, but all his stubble is badass stubble.
-Our hero has a steel resolve which may or may not hide nervousness
-Our hero is not excited and happy.
-Time probably slows down rather than speeding up. A huge amount of action takes place over a short period.
-No kissing.
-Our hero might feel bad that he has to kill someone, or he might not. Pensive at least.
-Sometimes the season finale is disappointing *coughheroesseasonone* but hopefully it isn't a letdown! It sure is a letdown for the enemy's evil plans though!
-It's definitely high priority, and the hero is obligated to be there.

So there are a lot of similarities between a date with destiny and a first date. However, a lot of the positive things I'd associate with being excited about a first date are missing, and most things I'd associate with being exasperated about a guilt-trip date are also missing. There's definitely room for a new analogy to take the place of "date," but what it is and whether it will have that delicious alliteration escapes me. A final presentation seems like it might be more similar, but it's far less poetic.

Born Again

There is a history of referring to people who have made major changes in their lives as "born-again;" the usage afaik (without looking it up or anything so this is pretty apocryphal) came mostly from "born-again Christians," mostly evangelicals.

This seemed like a weird metaphor to me last night, so I thought I might consider how well-rounded it is.

Okay so let's take a look at some features that babies have.

-helpless
-stupid
-believe anything you tell them
-need their diapers changed
-can't speak any language
-don't know how to get to sleep
-ready to grow
-adorable until they start pooping
-not much hair
-it's VERY bad to have a romantic attachment to them
-you can steal candy from them easily
-they have a long life in front of them and lots of potential
-innocent

okay that should be enough for now. Now let's see how a "born-again" person compares!

-someone born-again has just made major changes in their own life, which they are happy with. This isn't very helpless.
-I'll try not to tackle the issue of whether "born-agains" are stupid directly.
-"born-agains" may have just been converted to a religion, so perhaps they are overly credulous
-as recent converts, "born-agains" may have memetic immune system weaknesses, and need to be told which parts of a religion to pay attention to (thou shalt not kill) and which not to (stone adulterers)
-I'd think that after undergoing an enlightenment-style revelation you would have an easy time sleeping, not a hard time
-I would think that a "rebirth" would come after a period of growth, but entering a new community gives you new opportunities to get ahead.
-older members of the religion may be happy about new converts, until the memetic immune weaknesses require "diaper changes"
-okay putting "not much hair" or "really small" would be silly nitpicking, I admit it.
-it may be hard for people from the "born-agains'" "past life" to maintain their romantic attachment, or they may need to find a new partner who subscribes to the same religion. But I hardly think that's a vicious social stigma. This may also be nitpicking
-when Jehovah's Witnesses (I think?) go door to door, they always go in pairs with one less-experienced partner to make the pitch and a more-experienced partner to catch them if they get a vicious militant atheist or something. So there are practices in place to prevent recent converts from having candy stolen from them, this makes it seem likely that they're vulnerable to it
-I can't really speak to the "long life ahead of them bit" since I'm not particularly familiar with the demographics. Of course that hasn't stopped my wild speculation so far, so I suppose that if you start believing in an afterlife that's the real for realzies one this time that you're totally getting into with all the cool kids that's kind of like having a long life ahead of you
-I don't know that there's any sense in which "born-agains" are innocent, although perhaps naive I could get behind.

Well I originally thought that this would be a terrible metaphor that fell apart easily. But going through my lists it seems like there are a lot of similarities between "born-agains" and "born-for-the-first-times." I don't know that they're terribly flattering, and I will continue to snidely giggle at and steal candy from anyone I meet who claims be be born-again, but I won't object to their comparison of themselves with a helpless, pathetic pile of poopy diapers and whining.

Bottling Things Up

I was having a conversation with my most recent ex (do I use more metaphors with exes or just remember them better?) where I was talking about my feelings being bottled up, and at one point in our relationship there was a release, but I had an extra bottle inside my first bottle. So here it goes on that analogy.

Everyone knows the analogy of bottling up your feelings. When you bottle up soda, and you shake it up with life, then eventually you take the cap off and it explodes out (especially if you add mentos, the freshmaker!) which is why you shouldn't bottle up your feelings you should let them out and find outlets.

The thing is, I had a couple of layers of bottled up. So at one point, when we both found an outlet, it was much more of an outlet for her than me, so I added a second bottle. Now imagine if you have a large water bottle with a smaller one inside. Now it's going to be hard to get the smaller bottle open; you have to reach it through the mouth of the larger bottle. And that means you definitely need to have the larger bottle open; you have to deal with some feelings before you can deal with all of them. And of course if it's filled with water that'll be hard, but if you're dumping water out it's upside down and hard to reach in. So you need to have dealt with the first layer of feelings before you can really reach the second layer (and by induction...). Of course, imagine trying to pour water out of a bottle with a bottle inside of it. The smaller bottle would clog up the first! So it would be extra hard to even clear the first layer of feelings and take multiple attempts.

Now hopefully now that I've developed this strong set of tools for reaching into partially filled bottles of feelings and uncapping further bottles of feelings like nested Russian dolls that will make it easier for me to let my feelings out in the future. Of course, only time will tell.

Relationships and Cheese Samplers

I once got into a fight with an ex-girlfriend because I loved this analogy she made so much that I forgot to respond to what she was saying.

She said that she felt like an apple slice on a cheese sampler--rather than one of the cheeses.

I do think that cheese samplers are a very nice metaphor for relationships. There is a sense in which you want to taste several before settling on a favorite. There is a definite need to have time between relationships, sort of apple slices, to clear your head and remember who you are that is liking this cheese and not just compare the cheeses to each other but to your own tastes. Just like many people settle down early and haven't confirmed how well they get along with their spouse, many people settle for cheeses like Parmesan and cheddar when they could have Romano and Colby jack. A cheese's taste isn't the only important factor; different cheeses go well with different wines and meats and crackers, and some may be unreasonably expensive. Similarly a person may be a good partner in some ways, but not others. Sexual compatibility, being supportive of your current life decisions, or even financial support for someone returning to school may be powerful influences of whether a relationship works. Some cheeses, like Gouda, are acquired tastes; just as are some people. It may feel like you need to be on the right cracker or paired with the right wine if you get along with someone in one context but not others.

And of course, as my ex was trying to tell me at the time, you can also feel like an apple. Like you aren't part of the purpose, like you're a generic stopping point, not one of the flavors to be tasted.

Apple slices are important. Many people like apples more than cheese! But in the context of this metaphor it's a sad place to be. And as much as I love this metaphor it's a bittersweet memory because of how poorly I handled it at the time.