Storytelling

I just watched a video (I honestly wonder how I stumble across these sometimes - mainly it's just stuff people post on fb..) about storytelling and how everyone is telling a story, whether they realize it or not (well, he might not have said that, but that's what I got out of it).

I realized that my blog posts are very much like that. I only share what I think is interesting (not really to my readers because I think I have, like one reader, if I'm lucky (hi A! *waves*)) but I suppose what is interesting to me.

I feel like my thoughts meander - the way I present my ideas are interrupted by other thoughts but somehow I try to maintain coherency (though I have lost coherency before and had to go back and had to fix some posts - though I think it's been rare that I've had to do any heavy editing, in which case, I note it).

Anyway, going back to what I post, I find that sometimes, I'll post out of boredom to let my reader know that I'm bored, but usually it's just thought projects that I want to write out because more often than not, I write them down, forget them, and then return to them. Sadly, if it was some kind of self-revelation, I return to such epiphany (which feels as such because I've completely forgotten that I've even had any kind of realization to begin with), as a dog returns to its vomit.

"Oh, that's right, I need to change..."
"I wanted to become ... kind of person."
"When these things happen, I should...."

Again, when these things happen, I wonder if I'm just denying my core self but I just think that it is in part laziness.

One thing I thought was interesting was that my brother (now also a dad) mentioned that having children force you to look at yourself and change because children are mirrors - they mimic and you become aware of some things about yourself that you would previously never have been aware of.

I suppose this could have something to do with the whole memory thing and one could probably go into a discussion about cognitive load and psychology and all sorts of fun stuff, but that "one" is not me.

The other thought project that I had today related to storytelling was this:

Stories swim in my head. Before I have a chance to catch them, they disappear, as if they never existed.

I like how it sounds without explaining it so I'm not going to. It's got this weird fluffy romanticism to it and I'd rather not break the spell.

Words written on one's heart

I feel like there are things in everyone's hearts - souls, if you will - that we all want to express. Sometimes there are people who know it and try to express it. Others simply ignore it.

I don't know how to explain it really, but when you meet someone whose heart language is similar to you, there is resonance. I don't mean something as simple or frivolous as love (well, not to minimize love, but sometimes that's the only time people acknowledge such deep connections and this is not the case). I want to call this resonance a connection of sorts.

People often chalked it up to similarities in background, upbringing, worldviews, moral stances, hobbies, etc. I want to disagree because this resonance seems to have depth. It's those moments when you meet someone and you just know you'll get along with them. Or that you'll be friends. Other times, it is through experience that you realize that this was someone you could've been good friends with, had circumstance been different.

There are things that get in the way of this resonance - the very things that people claim it is - upbringing, differences in opinion on the small matters, simply being on opposing sides of an argument, ways of operating, etc. I suppose another way of looking at it is that on a deeper level, people can connect, but other factors get in the way.

Sometimes, I feel like this generation has this desire to write - is it because of the field I'm in or does everyone and their moms want to write a book? Apparently this generation has this false sense that everything creative that comes out of it is made of gold, even if it's shit (so gold shit). I like to think that this means that this generation simply listens to the words written on its heart and tries to express it. It's a flowery way of looking at it, but sometimes there are things going on in the mind, things going on in the heart, feelings swimming around the body that need expression but words fail to be adequate.

People usually associate this kind of thinking and the feelings of limitation with artists but I still don't think myself as an artist. If I am an artist, so is everyone and their moms (again). I like to think that I'm just like everyone else, but I simply choose to think about these things and try to attune myself to the depth that every person is capable of having.

We marvel at certain things past generations were able to do, but to be quite honest, I don't think it's all that spectacular. If a generation is permeated with certain kinds of thinking or certain types of art forms, would not the generation reflect it, and from that, wouldn't certain people emerge as geniuses of that art form? We could have graphic design, computer graphic, gaming geniuses precisely because that is what our generation is surrounded by, could we not?

All this because I wanted to talk about Bentham but it turned into something else. We're so obsessed with loss and waste when sometimes, those very things are necessary for someone, or a generation, to learn. It sucks for the individual, but is not the lot one is given in life just that? A lot in life - some have it better, others do not. From that, isn't what one does with it and how one lives one's life that makes the difference? Basically, why decry something that cannot be changed - rather, take what one has and do what one can with it, right? If society can "equalize" things, great - but talent/energy/resources lost because society has not yet come up with a way to do so is foolish. This is why societies, people, and organizations evolve (well, this is the hope, anyway). Eh. There is background to this but at this point, I don't want to get into it.

Healthy Living

I realize that people in my age group - that is in their 20s and 30s take youth for granted. We are used to being young and we are used to thinking that things will happen easily in terms of recovery and metabolism.

We complain when this does not happen and when things (i.e. our bodies) start breaking down, we cry age! and continue with our unhealthy lifestyles.

Lately, I've been told that I look a lot younger than I am. A lot of people are shocked to find that I am nearly in my 30s and I've come to realize that the "solution" to looking/feeling young is what everyone says one should do but no one actually believes or follows. (Okay, I'm being extreme but I'm guilty of this type of thinking so bear with me)

Eat healthy, sleep well, and exercise.

It's always the same conclusion, but because so many people find it somewhat disagreeable as one must come to terms with the fact that one must change their lifestyle, they try to find another easier solution. It's like that with many things in life, isn't it?

So before I left Korea, I wasn't all that healthy in that I ate okay (it's easier to eat healthy in Korea so I wasn't eating crap as I would be if I got comfortable with my eating habits in the States), I didn't really work out, and I slept more or less okay. Because I wasn't working in an office (the beauties of freelancing allowed this), I was able to control a lot of things that would normally adversely affect my health.

When I moved back to the States, I started eating really healthy (thank you Trader Joe's for affordable, healthy eating :)), I started to exercise regularly, and as a student with an incredibly flexible schedule, I started to sleep more.

Fast forward about 2 years and I'm back in Korea. Everyone here (so I can't call the "Asians-look-young" card) tells me that I look like I'm in my early 20s or even younger (I've gotten as young as high school graduate, but I attribute that to several other factors). Of course it's a compliment and I feel awesome because that means that I'm doing something right in the way I live.

I showed my students a picture of me from a couple years ago and they said that I looked older in the picture and they were pretty much thinking, "What happened?" Being in Korea, I wouldn't be surprised if they thought that there was plastic surgery in the picture but it really goes back to the basics of survival (again it seems extreme to call it that, but I think there's truth to it):

Eat healthy, sleep well, and exercise.

Eating healthy. I mean if you don't eat healthy, you're slowly poisoning your body. I can't say I'm 100% healthy and good at watching what I eat but when you change your perspective, you come to realize that perhaps eating healthy is a better choice. The counterargument may go along the lines of "but it's so good!" or "I'm decreasing the quality of my life" but that argument only works if you're talking about the present. Smoking (for smokers), impulse buys, and anything that give a person that instant gratification has the same kind of reasoning behind it but the regret that comes with it later just doesn't seem worth it. Eh. I'm still guilty of wanting instant gratification and fulfilling such desires so it's something that I understand more in theory than in practice.

Sleeping well. Seriously, this is so underrated because it feels like a waste of time. When I was trying to use a lot more of my brain for doing things I wasn't used to (i.e. trying to get back into studying after working for 5 years), I got sleepier a lot faster. This wasn't because I was bored of the material I was studying. I actually immensely enjoyed it, but I would find myself dozing every 15 minutes or so because there was a lot to process. A quick nap would allow me to feel refreshed and ready to process the new material. As I continued studying, the time I was able to process such things got longer, which means my brain was getting used to studying again.

There was a new study that came out about sleep (I found two articles on the same study that give an interesting slant on them here and here) that show that we get rid of a lot of cognitive waste when we sleep. Apparently it's too early to say that that is the sole function of sleeping but it is at least a part of why we need to sleep. I mean there are a lot of studies out there than prove that sleep is important but we still downplay it because we need to get more things done in a day than we have time for (though, I start to wonder, why is that the case?).

Exercise. Another obvious one. Duh. I'm not even going to bother getting into this one except that everyone (myself included) needs to get off our collective lazy asses and start exercising.

I feel myself deteriorating because I've been eating less  healthy and exercising less. And as an "older" 20-something, I feel myself deteriorating faster because my metabolism is slower and my body doesn't do the same things it did when I was a teenager. Thankfully though, years that I've spent working out and eating healthy (in my own way since I can't say I really eat healthy) as allowed me some leeway and I don't look or feel as old as some people my age.

There are other factors though - I don't dress, act, or live my age. Most people my age are working and I'm still freelancing (yes, it's a form of work, but it's not the norm, at least for now) and they are forced to dress as adults. I can still get away with hoodies and tshirts. I think because I look younger, I tend to act younger without realizing it.

Anyway, these are some factors that contribute to my looking-young thing, I think.

Perhaps this is just a post about how awesome it is because I look younger than my age but I honestly feel like lifestyle is a huge contributing factor to this. I'm just sayin'.

Literature

"universality"

"meaning to the human experience"

I think one question that I wrestle with the most is the point or purpose to literature. This by extension becomes a question of the importance of my own choice to pursue the study of literature as a career.

It's interesting because it seems that those in the field have no problem addressing this question with the implicit "of course this is important" through the very act of publishing papers that are published or through the pouring of hours into the research of various seemingly unimportant topics.

My very language betrays me. "Unimportant."

This is where I worry that what I am doing may not contain enough meaning for me to dive into it. I'm trying to reconcile what I enjoy doing with finding something that has meaning.

Just because you enjoy it doesn't mean it has meaning. I enjoy watching anime, playing Tetris Battle, and cooking. Of the three, two have no meaning - they will not enhance my life in any way, they will not make me a better person, influence my being, or add to my character.

Okay, well I think anime does a little of that because media has its influences but playing Tetris Battle only succeeds in teaching me how to order my life when they are organized by shapes that are a variation of a placement of 4 squares.

"Enjoying something unproductive is useless."

This is the philosophy I've been taught and something that I'm fighting against because unfortunately reading and literature have both fallen into the "useless" category. This is in part familial - my dad's mantra has always been "activity with productivity" because in order to survive, one must be productive. Both reading and writing are not productive in the sense that they do not create money in the immediate sense (there is no career in this - though ironically, my dad as always encouraged the whole family to read). This line of thinking is also societal because of the push towards math and science. The general attitude (from where, I wonder?) is that there is no money to be made in humanities and that they have no value.

And yet.

There's always the "and yet."

When I am doing my readings, I disappear into a different world that I am exploring and time too disappears.

As I explore this field, I see the importance of literature and its effects. The philosophies (literary theories, if you will), filter down from the academics to the students. Students who care to learn and participate in class pick up on such ways of thinking, and then the ideas start to spread. And example is the hyperreal, though rarely called by its name, that is manifested in our lives; we see it, comment on it, and continue with it or fight against it.

Literature can change and has changed the world but perhaps its effects have been too subtle for us to give it any credit.

My World, Our World

Our own culture, or world, in a way, can only exist in the mind.

So I suppose this is some kind of weird fusion of my post about the imagination and culture, but I re-read my post on culture and I realized that the true norm of one's culture to oneself can only exist in one's head because we are constantly affirmed or rejected by those around us in how we do things, how we approach things, and how we think. This means that what seems good and right, or perhaps what would be considered the norm, exists only within the mind and it is only there that the imagination plays a role in creating the "perfect" where we are always right and always good and always normal or accepted by everyone around us.

By stepping out of the mind and interacting with others, this sense of self is re-structured or shifted based on what their own "normal" compass is and again, through an averaging of such "normalizing" behaviors, culture is born.

Though in saying this, I'm repeating what I said in the culture post so I'll stop there.

The mind really is a powerful thing.

And the whole relativity thing I think is incredibly post-structuralist. I really don't like how I fall into that category of literary theory because it makes it harder for me to feel like an individual (though I suppose that's support for another theory (Marxists?) because they don't believe that we have that individuality but are simply created from society - I'm probably oversimplifying it horribly but it's pretty much along those lines).

Emotions

My theory on emotion has been proven!

Actually, I don't think it was my theory - it was probably something I read somewhere or had gotten influenced by and now have been trying (sometimes unsuccessfully) to live out. Anyway, it's from a TED talk by Brene Brown from here.

Or you can watch it here:

So this had other good nuggets and I feel like I could probably relate this to Christianity it some way (apparently doing that has a name - I forget what it is though..) but it resonates pretty strongly with Christian ideology.

Anyway, this is what I got out of the lecture that aligned with what I had been thinking about with emotion/hardship/suffering and the like:

The greater the pain, the greater the joy. The greater the emotion, the more depth you feel in life, the more you realize the humanity in others and the less you can hate, blame, or reject a person (and perhaps yourself as well).

I feel like I still don't have the answers to how exactly to treat people (and I don't think there's a singular answer for dealing with people, though one can try to formulate various techniques and/or approaches based on theory and observation). And I still have issues living it out when hard-to-answer problems occur but it's interesting that one thing the talk said was that - you can't turn off the emotions because those problems exist. You can't just shut out the hurt, pain, anger, etc. because other emotions will go too, such as joy, happiness and the like. I think one thing to keep in mind is that bad things pass and that through such deeply hurtful or painful experiences, one (usually) becomes stronger and has a deeper understanding of what life is about and of others' experiences.

The depth in experience and emotion I think stems from a lot of this kind of thinking because if one just dwells on and remembers the painful, that means that there was no personal growth or learning.

Anyway, the difficulty of saying such seemingly encouraging things is that if someone is going through something incredibly painful or through a lot of suffering, they'll probably want to slap the person saying such things because it minimizes the the depth of hurt/pain/suffering. I mean you can't tell a person that things will get better if they feel like they're surrounded by darkness. And it's a little presumptuous to say because no one can predict the future. It's not only cliche, it shows a lack of understanding of that person's emotions.

This is why I feel like I still have difficulty truly living out a life of vulnerability and by extension, compassion.

I don't want to say that I'm one of those "wholehearted" people because I feel like I'm bragging and I know that I have my own set of personal issues but I like to think that I'm working towards those qualities so that I can have that sense not only of worthiness but by extension a deeper sense of joy and contentment.

I don't know though. I do have this thing with the whole "depth of experience." But what does that mean really?

To experience something and truly be there and be able to feel and absorb the experience for what it is - knowing that something good is happening and being able to appreciate it at the time for what it is, or to relish in the joy of the moment, the sadness of the moment, etc. I suppose it has to do with living in the moment - the ridiculously overused "carpe diem" type thing but would that be depth?

Well, this one needs more chewing, I think. I tried to explain it to my cousin and failed miserably, which means that I don't know what I'm talking about (or thinking about) when it comes to having depth in one's life.

Depth

One of my friends (in Korean, she would be my 동생) told me that I have depth. I suppose there's two ways to take this: one is as a compliment and to be thankful that she thinks this of me. The other way is to say that perhaps it doesn't seem like I have depth but upon hearing my thoughts on some things, I (surprisingly) have depth. The reason she had to articulate the compliment is because either I or she did not seem to perceive it and thus it needed to be actualized into words.

To a certain extent, I think it's a little bit of both. Do we not compliment people when we think they don't know such things about themselves, or because they seemed to have forgotten (or act like they've forgotten and we want to encourage and remind them of such things?)? To want to do something nice for the person or to at least give them some kind of encouragement by saying it - I feel like that is what a compliment is.

I don't know. Somehow this segued into work but perhaps I simply wanted to brag about the fact that someone thought I had depth because it's a pretty awesome compliment, imo.

This is the kind of person I've been striving to become and I'm guessing progress in such things in showing. :)