Dynamic Hypocrisy

It’s a strange thing to get what you ask for. I moved to LA because I wanted something bigger than myself. The last few places I lived in were good to me, but I always found myself wanting to find newer and newer things. 

Maybe that’s something to write about another time.

But as of right now, I got it. LA is sprawling with an infinite number of nooks and crannies. There’s always something going on. And while that’s exciting, there’s an undercurrent of tension. Feeling unmoored. 

It took an old friend who made her own journey to NYC to articulate that feeling. The realization that you’re now a small fish in an ocean. There’s seemingly hundreds/thousands of people who found their lane. Found their thing, and is known for that thing. It’s strange to not be that person with that thing. 

Mostly ego, yes. But also identity. Rebuilding requires a patience that uneasiness makes difficult. It takes a lot of energy to overcome that, and to be comfortable with that. And to seek out a home in a place that everyone seems to already have claimed. 

Let’s see how it goes.

A long time ago, my writing buddy and I wrote a webcomic. It was the usual ensemble of characters embarking on adventures. And one of the side characters we created was named “Joel.” The basis of him was “inverse House.” House, being a character from an old Fox show was basically Sherlock as a doctor in modern times. So we wanted a character that was House-like, and would think and ponder, and then momentously announce his solution to the problem.

Except as “inverse House,” he would always ultimately be wrong about his solution. 

It was a lark, and was fun to write for. 

The lurking shadow, however, is that Joel has become an articulation of one of my deepest fears. Spending a lot of time thinking about something, saying it out loud, but only to have everyone tell me I’m completely wrong.

It’s like “Imposter Syndrome” but it’s meaner bullying cousin. It causes you to hesitate, and be nervous about your instincts. It doesn’t let you pounce when you’re pretty sure you should pounce. Pretty deadly. 

I’ve been sorta working on this. When it turns out my instinct was correct, I try really hard to tell myself that, and to remember it. It’s hard to remember. It’s easy to forget. Deep deep fear. Joeling is the worst.

This is a more of flour-water blob of a thought than a well-baked bread loaf. 

So a while back, Chris Rock gave a lovely monologue at the Oscars after the weeks preceding news cycle about how there was not one black nominee in the same show. His monologue flowed, was funny, and did a lot of work as a comedian, a host, and general commentator on the situation.

It marked well the fraught relationship between black actors and the white infrastructure that employs them. 

And that’s great. But I’m an Asian-American. He didn’t mention the also fraught relationship between Asian actors and the white infrastructure that employs them. 

Also, he didn’t mention the Latino community. Or the Native community. 

And ultimately, I think that’s okay. It’s hard, but I think that’s okay. 

I think about chemistry. In chemistry, you’re generally dealing with small things. Like atoms. You can spend your entire career on just a few atoms. Carbon, for example, the foundation of life — you can spend your entire career on what carbon does with other chemicals. And that’s okay. As a fellow scientist, you wouldn’t begrudge your carbon chemist for ignoring argon. You trust that that chemist is pushing as hard as possible to discover everything about carbon. And that someone else will work equally as hard for argon.

Because it takes a lot of work and time to work on either thing. And you lose a lot of time and effort if both chemists are constantly switching between two experiments. So you let them focus on just their thing.

And ultimately, you have to trust that the overall field of chemistry will be advanced as those two chemists work on their particular topics in-depth. 

I think. I hope. 

For about 48 hours, I followed about a dozen Snapchat accounts of porn stars and strippers. I started for the usual reasons of curiosity and titillation. And I stopped after 48 hours because eventually I unfollowed all of them one-by-one. 

Most were straightforward video clips of advertising. They would push their live cam shows, or to alternate pay sites like an explicit version of Snapchat. Usually shot in the car, or their bedroom. So those got deleted fairly quickly. 

The ones that were interesting were the ones that treated Snapchat like my friends. A spontaneous video diary that happened to be disposable. So the next round of deletions were the ones that repeated the tropes of daily life. Coffee runs, photos of meals, and Snapchat filters. It was nice to be reminded that humans are still human even if their job happen to have thousands of people gawking at their naked bodies for pleasure. But repetitive is still repetitive from a consumption point-of-view. 

So after all that, I was left with a few accounts. Some lingered because they hadn’t posted. I waited to see if they dead accounts or not. Either way, I deleted soon enough. 

And the one that lingered was the one that hit on something unique. About 20% of her snaps were promotional like the first batch. But she would use it as an announcement of an incoming live cam show. She would show her setting up the laptop in the hotel. And her travel partner/bodyguard (not sure, hard to tell) would catch her just logging in. 

That was the first fascinating scenario. You would watch her snaps throughout the day. And you would the usual waking up snaps. And then the sing-along-in-the-car snaps. As you would with a prolific-Snapchatting friend. And then an airport snap. Still normal.

And then you’ll get a snap about how she’s going to dance for two nights in a Milwaukee strip club. And you realize, “Oh, this person is traveling to perform as a guest stripper.” So that hotel room is the room she’s staying in Wisconsin. On top of that, she’s still working and hustling on her cam show while waiting to strip that night. It’s something that you just don’t see or hear or talk about unless you’re in that world. 

It changed my view on voyeurism and even stalking. I remember growing up and seeing news reports on stalkers jumping fences and following celebrities. Trying to be close to them, or in their lives. And how terrible of thing that was to force on someone.

Yet now, we have a social platform that is all about voluntary voyeurism. These people are letting anyone into their bedrooms as they’re going to bed, or waking up. Letting them into the daily coffee routine at their local coffee shop. 

I didn’t mention the porn star that was in Milwaukee spent the entire day snapchatting her walk through an art museum. 

It’s a level of intimacy that would have been impossible years ago, and yet it commonplace. And is fundamentally different because of technology. It hasn’t removed agency as with stalking, as it empowered people to choose what they share to the digital public. 

By the end, I was following just one of these porn stars because she offered the most insight into a life I wasn’t a part of. But I had to remind myself to make no illusions of closeness. She was curating and crafting an world as much as the first batch of people who only advertised. And that’s perfectly fine.

I’m dreaming of the next version. 

Currently it tracks steps, and heart rate. 

But I want more. I want recommendations. 

But more than that. Recommendations on the type of body I want in the future. 

But it needs to know that my physique doesn’t keep muscle easily. And that I want leeway to lapse on diet (because scheduled meals make me sad.)

And it should know that. My emotional response to change and regiment and progress. So it should track that too. 

And it should also know my schedule. Mornings are hard, but I know I might have to switch to that. So it should know that too. And it should be forceful about that.

But not when I get the steak on my friend’s birthday dinner. Because you have to get the steak. Because it’s delicious. 

But maybe recommend some weight-lifting the day before. Make use of all that protein. That’d be great. I’d feel good about that. 

It should reinforce exercise too. I don’t enjoy it. I don’t get that endorphin bomb that other people get. But I’d be cool if the fitness tracker tweaked my hormones a bit to up the endorphins while I exercise. Build a good habit through chemicals. I’d like that.

A doctor should monitor that, of course. So it should send reports to my doctor. Automatically. I don’t have time for that. 

Because I’m busy exercising. Because I like it now. Lots of endorphins. Well, not a lot — the upper limits recommended by my doctor. Which is enough. 

Also, steak. I get to keep eating steak. I like that.

On April Fool’s, Hamburger Helper dropped a mixtape on Soundcloud. And it wasn’t terrible. Which is conflicting. Because there’s two scenarios: 1) They released something actually good. 2) My taste stagnated. 

I remember when I was kid in the 90s, and occasionally corporations would try to tap into the cultural zeitgeist. So they would drop commercials with odd tempo rap songs contorting partial rhymes to hit the target slogan and brand keywords. I, as a child-to-teenager, would cringe, and move on with my life. 

So a weird feeling overcame me when I listened the Helper mixtape, and didn’t cringe. It seemed well-produced. The lyrics had rough moments, but more in the realm of song-writing rather than branding platitudes. Which causes me to have a lurking feeling that I’ve become one of those adults that would have green-lit those 90s commercials that young me loathed. 

This is all counter-balanced by the grown-up notion of “Fuck it, I like what I like.” Which is shadowed with “That is what you say when you’re coping with age and falling out of the cultural center.” 

Hamburger Helper is causing a lot of existential angst today.

Hipster is weird word to me. It’s being used in so many different contexts that it seems meaningless to me. 

1. It used to label “young people” who shifted social norms, or haven’t conformed to social norms that older people have created. Gen X’ers did the same thing. Baby boomers did the same thing. It’s a “young people” to negotiate cultural norms, and re-shape them to their sensibilities as they enter society. Everyone does that. 
2. It used to label style of dress. And that’s been a boring statement to make since forever.
3. It used to refer to people creating seemingly niche objects at high prices.

The last one is interesting to me. I was watching a Bloomberg YouTube video on a specialty hat maker in Venice, California. (One, super weird because I live 15 minutes away from there now.) It’s a nine-minute video that’s well shot and edited. And it’s a dude making hats. And he charges upwards of $950. 

And the most comment is “Semi literate hipster makes grossly over priced hats. Bloomberg glamourizes said hipster.” And the reply to that is “Yeah, I’m really questioning why I need to remain subscribed to this channel now.”

So strange. Because I can’t pin down what the criticism would be. 

Price is valid I suppose. But most objects, especially clothing, has always varied greatly. Chinese factories has lowered the baseline expectations of clothing greatly. So I give that generationally we’ve forgotten that clothes used be incredibly labor-intensive and thus expensive. 

I also give the notion that this hat-maker’s customers are being “duped” by it. But it seems like he makes a pretty damn good hat with what I have to trust are quality materials. So it should last given care and attention. 

But was he a hipster for finding something he enjoyed? There’s a moment in the video where the hat-maker goes “I was in Environmental Science, but then … fell in love with making hats.” Was he a hipster for leaving something “noble” for something trivial? The thing is though we’re at seven billion people in the world with the greatest overall prosperity ever.

Because of that, we’re gonna have a lot of people who don’t need spend all day farming. We get to specialize now. We have musicians, artists, race car drivers in-addition to plumbers and scientists and doctors. And yeah, we gonna have a few people who just make hats.

Because there’s a percentage of that seven billion that like hats. 

I don’t know, I’m rambling now. Suffice to say, I don’t understand the usage of “hipster” today. Especially when it comes to people who think other people are useless. 

Because usefulness is a human construct. It’s all made-up by us anyways. The moment we did anything more than fucking and eating–it’s squarely human-made-up activities. I mean we’ve built entire democratic voting systems and sent men to the moon. But to a squirrel that’s seems completely useless and expensive, right? Just get enough nuts to survive the winter, and then fuck in the spring. 

Really, all humans are fucking hipsters. 

Got a friend who’s currently in a creative death spiral. He’s got the lead design gig at a large corporation. Which means he now has designers looking up for direction. And management looking down for progress. 

And it’s that pinch that’s got him making powerpoint presentations at 9pm because the next day already full from meetings. 

It’s a weird position that I was in for only three months because quite frankly it was too much. 

Especially if the two upward and downward forces are too unstable. You end up having to constantly smooth and pivot and change and adjust each time management changes its mind, or panics over the timeline, or adds something, or fires something. Meanwhile, your designers who don’t have the full view of the landscape and politics question you when you have to disrupt them. 

They won’t know that even that bad news has been made better because of you. Because all they know is that the bad news you’re delivering. 

It’s a position of tension, you’re the circuit for all the bad news. Not to mention that often you still have create and design on-top of the management. You can only delegate so much when the CEO wants you to handle something personally. Or when you know that you’re the best person to create the design (whether because of time or skill.) 

But why it’s a death spiral is because it’s often so draining that you don’t have the energy to find a new job. You get home, and don’t want to do anything else. Not even make dinner. Much less check LinkedIn, or update resumes, or write cover letters. You’re exhausted. 

For those who have the temperament, that’s great. That’s an awesome skill. But my perspective of a creative, the tension of knowing things could be better gets to you. That the process feels broken. And that people are so disappointed all the time. And that you feel like you’re not doing enough “real” work in an environment that lets you do “great” work. It eats at you.

So that’s why I had to leave. Every work place has its issues, but whether it’s toxic to you and whether you have the energy or want to solve it — that’s up to you.

As I look back on it, Linguistics 101 might have given me the most life lessons in a semester. I was reminded today of about music. 

It was a simple question during that class, “What is World music?” And the obvious answer popped in your brain. You could of that one tiny aisle in any retail store that read “World,” and had a pastiche of Spanish guitar, some Native albums, lots of instrumentals, maybe some sad French songs, and so on. 

But that isn’t World music. Those cultures made of living breathing people are moving. Changing. At best, those songs in that World aisle are archetypical hits of that culture from a previous decade. At worst, it’s the stereotypical view of that culture. 

The truth of the matter is that the music being listened to in any of those cultures is probably American pop music, or their riff on it. Because that is global now. But no one wants to say that Beyonce is French World music. Or Spanish World music. 

World music is our interpretation of a culture’s ancestry, not necessarily a snapshot of how that culture is in the moment, in of its present time.  

Back in junior high, in gym class, we were learning the mechanics of basketball. This is how you dribble. And this is how you pass. And this is how you do certain shots.

One in particular, the lay-up, stayed in my mind. Because the gym teacher said, “with your main arm, lift it up, and jump. But when jumping, also lift up the knee that’s on the same side as your shooting arm. Pretend it’s connected by a string.”

And that weirded the fuck out of me. 1) That such a simple move that directions to it. 2) That I had to think about it. and 3) That I sucked at it.

It was hard enough to tell my body to do unusual things. But to also have to think about, and coordinate my body to move in a certain way. I couldn’t isolate my body parts, or just move certain muscles. Random things just flailed, or moved to compensate the awkwardness of other parts.

Decades later, I would find the some flailing about with emotions. That random things in my head would twitch and panic as I can try to coordinate and make a coherent move out of it. 

But like physical exercise, it require practice and conscious minding and repetition.

Also like exercise, it required dedication. 

It was easy for me to compare my basketballs to the other kids, or even professional NBA players. And think, “Well I’m not shooting as well as Michael Jordan. Thus, I failed.”

And while it’s obviously silly to benchmark my shooting skills to Michael Jordan, it’s less obvious when you think that everyone else around is dealing so much better with their own emotions. And regard yourself as a failure in that. 

More difficult than seeing them play basketball, it’s impossible to judge how truly well they are at handling emotions. So comparing becomes even more of an fruitless logical jump. 

Even more difficult is when you have to interact with people on an emotional basis. Because you have to negotiate through how practiced each person is before even doing another hard thing of negotiating how both of your emotions will mesh together.

It’s messy and winding. And unlike basketball, the goal is much less clear than a hoop with a net.