Jue's Blog (tag:rambling)

In Boston again, for the second time in a month. Feeling the winter here cut through my coat collar reminds me of places even further north. Incidentally, I just came across this rambling bit, from a nondescript text file I left on my own desktop in November 2006.

There are not enough stars in Boston. Stars, which depending on your vantage point could resemble the icy tips of invisible stalactites or mutilated balls of burning gas floating impossibly through the black. Fortunately, we are very, very far, and the air outside is — without fail in this neck of Maine — very, very cold. So cold it feels like a different shade of cold every time I step outside, the combination of the stars and wisps of clouds and the dry, clear night eliciting a sensory amnesia, a short term memory loss brought on by feelings of metaphysical insignificance before the looming face of infinity above.

I want to record every drop of sensation in words, in calculable thought, in action. But what performance of a verb could possibly capture frost? Or the cruel bent of a tree branch? I can tell you it’s hardly cruel at all in the daylight, and that bodily ache of mine for a word or a sentence, a tome, a treatise on my right to be here, all but disappears after I’ve digested breakfast. (more…)

It’s 9pm in San Francisco–12am the next day for my East-coast internal clock, but feels like it could be the year 2100 for my frayed nerves I’ve been waiting in this damn line for so long.

The United customer service agent at the counter in front of me is expounding on his life experiences. “Let me tell you,” he tells you, you being the tired, irate traveler in front of me, “I’ve worked with this airline for 15 years, and whenever I go on standby for a flight blah blah blah blah…”

I don’t need to finish listening to know that he didn’t even come close to answering the man’s question. And watching the questioner’s eyes gradually open wide, his arms throw up in exasperation, and his feet stomp off in the middle of the service rep’s sentence, I nod ruefully. The line is 10 people long, and this jabbering penguin has spent 5 minutes giving off-topic life-ruminations to each person. I’ve been waiting for over half an hour.

Thank god, another service rep walks up to the counter with a grumpy swagger. He looks taciturn. Efficient. Motions for me to come over. Everything is a blur. I don’t hear what’s going on around me, only the sound of Shostakovich’s 7th string quartet. It’s going into that furious part in the third movement after the adagio for his dead first wife and starts to become dissonant, angry, sublime. How I feel while traveling.

I turn off my Ipod and go up to the counter.

“Hi, I lost my wallet on flight 975 from Dulles. Can you help me find it?”

He can’t, apparently. The plane’s left the gate, I can only file a claim with baggage services. That was efficient. 1 minute response, after a 36 minute wait.

I walk what seems like half a mile to baggage claim, on the way stopping at a diner to order a bacon cheeseburger, fries, and a milkshake.

“Will you be paying with cash or card?” asks the helpful cashier. (more…)

Sand Dollars

“What’s effective is not the placebo, but the meaning of the treatment,” writes the doctor Harriet Hall in Skeptic Magazine. “We enter into a human relationship with a caring person who offers to help us.”

Hall is talking about placebos, those pills used by doctors and scientists that don’t contain any medicine, but often seem to help patients get better anyway. I say “seem” because the exact nature of the improvement, and the way that placebos effect it, is one of the most famously controversial topics in 20th-century medicine.

The article mentions that patients who know they’ve been given a placebo (commonly a sugar pill or just water) often request to continue the treatment. If you’re the type doctor who only believes in a physically measurable improvement — and most doctors are — then this request seems hardly justified. On the other hand, even if the patient is “imagining” their improvement, it seems presumptuous to claim that they are also “imagining” the sense of subjective comfort they are obviously getting.

The answer, says Hall, is to widen the medical definition of “betterment” beyond the rigid and often unsympathetic limits imposed on it by the tradition of empirical science. (Personally, I think mind-body duality is also to blame…)

It is not lust that disunites, dissolves and annihilates. It is rather the mesmerizing complications of sentimentality, artificial jealousies, words that inebriate and deceive, the rhetoric of parting and eternal fidelities, literary nostalgia—all the histrionics of love.

From the Futurist Manifesto of Lust, a polemic against the “false hypocritical modesty” of romantic love, written by an Italian fascist.

By yearend, investors of all stripes were bloodied and confused, much as if they were small birds that had strayed into a badminton game.

From Warren Buffett’s 2008 letter to the investors (pdf) at Berkshire Hathaway.

To smart people, the world can often times seem like a production of No Exit. That is, where hell becomes defined as being endlessly surrounded by cretins prattling on about topics of no import whatsoever.

My own away message, from a reader comment on this article about Ivy League dating (or lack thereof).

Ever have a friend ask you to see a movie you’ve never heard of? They hear it’s good. You hesitate, wondering if you should read a review or watch the trailer.

Next time, don’t think twice. Just say yes and watch it.

I saw three recent films on a suggestion and a whim: Synecdoche, New York (my thoughts), Slumdog Millionaire, and Gran Torino. With no clue as to the theme or plot, I simply followed a friend to the theater, purged of expectations. Who cares if they would be memorable movie experiences?

But memorable they were. With no trailers or reviews to inform me, I had to pay attention to every second of every scene. Every word of dialog would color my first impressions, every gesture meaningful. I was in a state of puzzlement, a state of heightened sensory perception, that made each shot more rich, more full of aesthetic pleasure and philosophical insight.

On reflection, none of these three were really great films. The experience of watching them, on the other hand, was unsurpassable. Synecdoche, New York was ponderous and overwrought, but sparkled with visual wit and existential complexity. Slumdog Millionaire was unoriginal and repetitive, but also gorgeous and emotionally involving. Gran Torino was incoherent, but unabashedly, self-indulgently hilarious.

To think and criticize is to appreciate subtlety, to unravel complexity. But criticism also destroys freshness and sullies the purity of aesthetic experience. With conscious thought we lose serendipity, that feeling of chance, of wonder, at the improbability and effortlessness of beauty.

So maybe it’s better to not try so hard. Recreate serendipity. Avoid trailers, don’t check IMDB, and never read reviews. Fall out of touch with the movie scene. Find a friend. Go to a theater. Avert your gaze from the posters. Pick a movie based on the title alone, and watch it.