Elsewhere

This is in reference to chlamygirl’s
comments on my “Visualizing Human Networks” post. She pontificates upon
what seems to be an increased difficulty to make close friends as she
gets older.

I’ve experienced the same thing and thought a lot
about it. Nothing seems as sweet or intense as the relationships we
made when we were younger. I have an idea of the reasons behind it,
although I don’t know that it has much to do with the ideas in my
original post. It’s about shared contexts, and lack thereof, because as
we grow older our individual contexts grow increasingly deep and narrow.

—

When
we are children, we are a clean slate. We may have certain genetic or
karmic predispositions, but generally, we are open to being friends
with anything and anyone, because of a wide curiosity and fascination
with the world. If you imagine life as a big system of pathways (vs.
threads), we all start out with an entire horizon of pathways before
us, going in all directions.

As we get older, we learn more, our
experiences shape us, and we develop more narrowly defined
personalities — I am a musician, not a jock; I like math but not
history; I enjoy hip hop but not heavy metal; … etc. With each
passing year, we become less curious about the world, more focused on
the interests and attitudes we have built. We are not as interested in
things outside of our own ideas because we’ve “been there, done that.”
And therefore it becomes harder to find new people with similar
interests and attitudes, because we have all continued down our own
individual paths which are increasingly divergent from other paths.

People
who have known each other for a long time have a history of shared
experience which gives their current relationship a thick context, and
that relationship, if it remains close, can shape them and keep their
paths from diverging too much. It can be difficult for new people to
come into this situation because they don’t share that context and
don’t understand a lot of the ideas or idiosyncronicities that the
others take for granted, and the others can’t make this new person
understand their pre-existing, shared, deep context, which makes the
relationship with the new person not as satisfying as with the existing
people, and not as likely to last; in fact it can be quite awkward.

And
so, in order to make new friends, people will often choose a very
narrow context of a specific interest, such as a favorite author, or
sport, etc. and then bond over that. And since their new relationships
are based on these very narrow commonalities, some people become almost
evangalistic about their chosen specific interest and start to define
themselves solely in relation to it, and end up being pretty boring,
narrow, “I’ll blindly follow and defend that interest because it’s the
basis of my entire life” people. Or, if you don’t want to restrict
yourself to a single category, then you feel kinda lonely and
disconnected because nobody else seems to “get” the same combination of
different things that you are into, at least not at the same level of
commonality as you used to have with others when you were younger.

—

For
a more scientific explanation — I recently saw a show about teenage
brains which said that they look more like child brains than adult
brains, which explains why teenagers are still emotionally unstable and
have trouble making good decisions, even though they physically look
more like adults. And during the teenage years, the brain begins to
hard-wire itself into its adult form, and so whatever you’re doing as a
teenager gets hard-wired into your brain — and anything you’re not
doing, doesn’t. They aren’t called “the formative years” for nothing –
activities you pursued and friends you made during this time will tend
to stick with you more than anything else you do afterward.

—

On
the other hand, you could argue that as we grow older and experience
more things, we can understand more and appreciate more, and perhaps
bond with people over things that we never understood when we were
younger. And that’s true, but at the same time, that bond can almost
never be as strong as those that you formed with people when you were
younger, as those were more natural and immediate bonds.

(But
even the bonds that you formed when you were younger can dissipate if
you don’t maintain a close relationship with those people; you’ll still
end up going in different directions. Years later you’ll meet,
reminisce about “the good old days” for a little while, and suddenly
find you don’t have much else in common to talk about.)

It
sounds depressing. I’m not saying that you *can’t* make new, meaningful
friendships as you grow older, only that it becomes more difficult,
because your paths are divergent. When you are young, friends just
happen, whether you intend them to or not, because your paths start out
so close together; later on in life, you have to more actively work to
create a shared understanding in spite of all your differences. If both
people are doing that, your paths can start to converge, and your
shared context grows. The trick is finding people who are interested
enough in each other to devote that time and effort to forming a
relationship, and it can be difficult to find those people since most
people have so many pre-existing relationships which seem more
immediately satisfying to them.

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So I haven’t posted much in the past week or so because I’ve been preoccupied with music.

Since
I’m about to graduate, I want to whore out my educational discounts as
much as possible, and I’ve been wanting to get into computer music for
some time (partially inspired by my recent cosmic Air encounter). I’ve
got the guitar thing in progress but I also want to play with some
synthetic drums and synthesizers. So I’ve been researching music
software websites, testing demos, reading and posting questions in
forums, reading Computer Music magazine, etc. trying to determine the best suite of discounted software and hardware that will fit in my budget.

A
couple days into my quest, I had downloaded a couple demos and was
messing around with them. I quickly started to feel overwhelmed. Where
do I put in the notes I want to play? How do I select which sound I
want? What’s the difference between a step-editor and a piano roll?
What the hell is an oscillator or an LFO or an envelope? What’s the
difference between VST, VI, VSTi, AU, ReWire, FX and plug-in? What do
all these knobs and buttons mean, and why can’t I produce any sound
other than a whimpering “fizzzzz”? Oh my god, what the hell am I doing,
I have no flippin clue, these techno kids must not have jobs to fiddle
with this stuff all day long, I’ll never be any good at this crazy
stuff, that’s it, I give up!

I give up!

Then I sat down
and picked up my guitar and randomly strummed some chords, then soloed
a little bit. Maybe I’m just more talented at physical instruments, I
thought to myself. Guitar is easy for me, it’s instant gratification,
maybe I should just stick to that.

But then it struck me — I
haven’t always been good at guitar. In fact, just a few short years
ago, I was afraid to even hold a guitar for fear of somehow breaking
it. I remembered that the first 6 months of guitar lessons was a real
struggle, with sore fingers and frustrated nerves. It was a major
accomplishment when I was able to pluck out “Mary Had a Little Lamb”,
and then “Silent Night”. No, oh no, I’m not talented at guitar at all.
I’ve simply tried, and put in the time and effort to develop a skill
that was absolutely absent before. Because I wanted it.

So. Do I want this? Do I want to produce music on the computer? Do I really, really want it?

Yes, I do.

Well
then, it’s not going to be easy. It’s going to be frustrating. It’s
going to be a good long time before you start to get comfortable with
it. But you’ll get there — you always do. And when you do, it will be
worth it, because it’s what you really want. So let’s get started today.

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The Tapestry of Life

You
may have heard of the Fate mythology — three sisters who, together,
perpetually maintain the great Tapestry of Life, in which every person
in the world is represented by a single thread, which enters the
tapestry, is woven among and around other threads, and is finally, at
some point, cut. (As an adolescent, I was introduced to this idea by Piers Anthony in his Incarnations of Immortality series.)

I’ve
often thought of this metaphor in terms of relationships. Someone with
whom I am very close for a long period of time — our
threads are literally wrapping around each other for long stretches.
Then there are people whom I just bump into on the street; our threads
come quite close at one point in the tapestry, but don’t touch, and
then diverge again on their own separate paths. And all the variations
in between.

Factors of Connectedness

Now
let’s expand on this metaphor. A thread in the tapestry effectively has
only one dimension — length, which represents the chronological length
of a person’s life. During their life, the thread moves within a
two-dimensional space. When we bump into someone, we say that the
threads came close to each other within that two-dimensional space,
implying that there is a direct mapping between the physical location
of people within the universe and the physical location of their
threads within the tapestry.

But is that the only thing that
governs our lives — our physical location? I don’t think so. I think
there’s a whole lot more than that going on. It’s why you can sit next
to someone on the bus but never meet them. It’s why you can grow up
across the street from someone yet never really know them. It’s why
people can live within twenty miles of either side of an imaginary
border and yet repeatedly kill each other. On the flip side, it’s also
why you can emotionally bond with someone who lives 3000 miles away.
It’s why some people make great friends, some make great enemies, and
some just don’t have much to do with each other either way.

Things
like your genetic makeup. Your natural personality pre-disposition. The
religious, social, and economic environment into which you are born and
raised and live in now; the internalized values that you inherited from
your parents, developed yourself, and have drawn from other people and
experiences in your life.

Maybe you are the same age as someone
else; you live in the same city, are interested in the same subjects,
are of a compatible socio-religious perspective. That doesn’t mean you
are destined to be friends — there are many other factors involved
which might not be compatible. And that’s completely normal and
natural. In fact it’s very difficult to find true, close
friends in this life; statistically speaking, they’re definitely out
there somewhere, but you may or may not run into many of them.

In
accounting for these myriad factors to visualize ourselves within the
great human space and get some perspective of our lot in life, we could
start adding more attributes to our threads and tapestry, such as
colors, thickness, fuzziness, stiffness, etc. to represent different
factors. But you start running out of ideas pretty quick.

The Multi-Dimensional Life-Space

It’s
either easier — or more difficult, depending on the way you think
about things — to think of it not as a tapestry filled with threads,
but rather as a multi-dimensional space filled with, well, people. Each
dimension represents a different factor that shapes who you are and
where you are in this life-space. The three dimensions of physical
location still apply, of course, and the obvious fourth dimension is
time. That’s why you and Napolean can stand on the exact same
geographical spot yet never touch, because even though you’re in the
same place in the first three dimensions, you’re in different places in
that fourth dimension.

But that’s actually thinking a little
too literally, this is more of a conceptual exercise. In fact I’d like
to remove those first four dimensions entirely from what we’re talking
about; they’re a given, and I’m more interested in talking about human
headspace rather than meatspace.

So let’s start adding on more
dimensions: religion, social status, gender, age, hormonal levels,
personality type . . . pretty much anything you can imagine that shapes
who you are. The more dimensions you add, and there are a lot of them,
the more you start to see people spreading out away from each other
within the life-space, making it pretty damn hard to really spiritually
connect with your fellow human beings. (Some have said it’s miracle we
can understand each other at all.)

Nested Spheres of Connectedness

But
we do, somehow, connect, and here’s where the idea of “nested spheres”
comes into play. Even though you’re not actually in the same exact spot
as anybody else within this life-space, you are surrounded by an area
of influence. I use the term “sphere” because it’s the most
multi-dimensional object that most of us can visualize, but this area
actually extends away from you throughout all of the dimensions, not
just X Y and Z. Any other person who falls within this sphere falls
within your area of influence, so to speak — you have enough in common
with that person that you might have a meaningful exchange with them
(assuming you happen across them in meatspace and have a reason to
interact).

How far your sphere extends around you depends almost
entirely upon how open you are. In fact your sphere probably doesn’t
extend equal distances in all directions; you might be much more open
to people of different ages, for example, but not of different
religions, so your area of influence extends a disproportionate amount
into each of those dimensions.

Now what does “a meaningful
exchange” mean? It could mean anything. Again, it’s really up to you.
We all define sub-areas within our area of influence; we draw invisible
boundaries within our sphere to create nested spheres, each
representing a different level of connectedness to those who fall
within them. People that fall within your innermost sphere are strongly
bonded to you; those in your outermost sphere are merely casual
acquaintances. And you, during the course of your life, have
consciously or unconsciously decided where those boundaries are within
your space, and how far each of them extend into each of the other
directions, thus having a direct affect upon how many people in your
life are closely bonded to you, loosely bonded, or not related at all.

Value Spheres and Summation

All
that niceness is well and good, but how do we explain the people who
try to kill each other? Well, I suppose we also impose value upon each
of the dimensions. Just as you can be open to those who are distant
from you within the religious dimension, you might instead be quite
intolerant of them, to the point that it doesn’t matter to you how
close they are to you in all of the other dimensions — someone who
might otherwise be your friend is now your enemy because you place a
strong emotional weight upon one particular dimension. This brings
forth the idea of not only spheres of connectedness and bonding, which
I had been discussing, but also spheres of distrust, hate, etc. In fact
perhaps we have several, or even many, different spheres extending away
from us, each one representing different a different emotion or value,
and each one extending to different degrees in each of the different
dimensions. How you feel about any one given person depends upon the
sum of the intersection of all of your value spheres at that one point
where that person exists.

And of course, everything’s always
changing. You are constantly re-evaluating and re-drawing your value
spheres, and the nested spheres of weight within them, among all the
different life factor dimensions. And you are moving within each of
those dimensions. Today, you’re a day older — boom, you just moved in
the Age dimension. Today, you are in a better mood than yesterday –
boom, you just moved in the predisposition dimension. And the same goes
for religion (feeling pious today?), economics (just paid rent, damn),
hormonal levels (Mars is in ascension again), etc. etc. And the same
thing is happening to everyone else simultaneously, resulting in this
vast sea of people floating around, in and out of other people’s
spheres, into and out of different levels within those spheres.

Conclusion (Karma)

So,
that’s about it. Just some bullshit abstract ideas that may not have
any practical application at all. Then again, maybe they do, if only to
help you visualize your relationships with other people, and the
reasons behind those relationships — and maybe you want to consider
changing some of your spheres if you want to change your lot in life.
Perhaps there’s some sort of cosmic wind that blows us around according
to the orientation of our spheres. Karma — orient yourself in the way
you want to go, and you’ll get there. But the first step is just being
aware.

Now you see why I’ve never needed drugs.

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(The following rant was inspired by a recent post at Reality Sandwich, found via the Recent Reads list at Starbody. I know I don’t have to post my blog trail, but I find it interesting.)

I
just want to hear the news — good, bad, and ugly, but most
importantly, unbiased and un-sensationalized. Of course there is
inevitably a bias in any reporting, even if unconscious and subtle, but
let’s try our best to be objective, OK? A lot of news reports don’t
even try any more.

Here in Seattle, all the local news stations
have a “Breaking News!” headliner every night of the week, and they’re
always “live on the scene!” to cover it. Even if the story is as inane
as the rising gas prices at the pump, some poor reporter will be
standing in the darkness next to a cheaper gas station somewhere in the
boonies, freezing their butt off in a thick Columbia jacket, talking
about gas prices. That’s not what I call breaking news, and it
certainly doesn’t warrant anyone to be live on the scene. But somebody
out there in the viewing audience must be titillated by that stuff, or
at least somebody in local stations’ news departments thinks there’s a
need for it.

But of course, that’s on a slow news day. Really
violent or negative things get the most press; if there was an
apartment fire, or a shooting, or a car chase/crash, or a robbery, or a
“sexual predator” spotted near a school bus stop. And if it’s only
mildly disturbing, their presentation will creatively amplify its
impact. “Next up: You and everyone close to you could be at risk of
suffering horrible injury, illness, or death at any given moment, and
we’ve got a story only vaguely related to your life that will scare you
into believing it! Stay tuned!” People love to be scared, I guess.
Every single night of the week at 10 and 11pm, just before bed. That’s
nice. No wonder we’re a sleepless nation.

What’s more, after
explaining each story, the newscasters feel the need to add some
witless and unnecessary comments, to make you feel like they’re your
buddies or something. “Gee, Susan, I sure wouldn’t want to be that
guy!” “Ha ha, neither would I, Rob.” It’s ridiculous.

Up here we
get Canadian national news, too, as well as BBC news — both of which
are direct, to-the-point broadcasts that cover a wide spectrum of
issues, from local events, to national, and then world events. And
there’s only one person delivering it, and that person does not make
any comments whatsoever on the reports. The way it should be. I don’t
want a buddy on my TV set; I want the news, I want it delivered
efficiently, and I want it comprehensive.

Local news doesn’t
seem to give a crap if there’s a political uprising in Zimbabwe, or
tension on the India-Pakistan border. And maybe they shouldn’t have to;
after all it is the local news. But come on people, can’t you
raise your head out of the sand once in a while and cover something
that doesn’t have to do with a coffee tax or an orca whale, especially
on those “slow news days” when maybe nothing much is happening locally?
There’s always something happening globally.

So,
suffice it to say, we don’t watch local news whenever we can help it.
Sometimes we watch national news, but shows like 20/20 and 60 minutes
each have their own political agendas. Mostly I get the news from the
web, where I can quickly scan to see what’s generally going on, and
read more if I’m interested. I check a few different news sites in an
attempt to balance biases, but of course, you can never be 100% sure
that any second-hand information you receive is free from bias; it’s
just the nature of human perception and processing.

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