Buster McLeod

practicality, new brain module, change yourself by taking something away

I can't tell if practicality is a good or bad thing. On the one hand, it keeps our heads out of the clouds. Sure, we all want to say that we'd be willing to run 1,000 miles to save a child drowning in a lake, but, it's not practical. The cost is somehow higher than the value. There are at least two levels of deception between our ideas and what we actually do. One is in the value... the value of saving a child's life is not the value of the life, but the value of us saving it. Because otherwise it would be difficult to ever say that a child's life was not worth a tremendous effort on our part... perhaps even dying for the child in order to save it would be in order. But the value is not that, at least, not to our decision-making processes. Sadly. The second deception is the cost. We value our luxury at an extraordinary markup.

These two deceptions are only obscured further by the fact that we tend to worship practicality. We love that we have ideals, ideas about a perfect world, etc, but we love even more the fact that we find ways to get things done given what little we have, and how valuable our resources are, and how expensive everything is. It's sometimes more than we even contemplate possible to stay out an extra hour past what our usual routine calls for. We make lemonade out of lemons on a daily basis.

But being practical is also a curse. First of all, it forces you to throw out ideas, and ideas about a perfect world. We put those under laminate and adore them on holidays, but bring them out during the everyday and you will be scorned and mocked as someone who hasn't yet learned that life doesn't work that way, that it isn't fair, that it will continue to turn with or without thee. That it waits for no man, woman, or child. This is fun.

We have a wobbly totem pole of misconceptions that allow us to continue to make the same mistakes over and over again even though we strive at every node to correct the mistakes. There are forces that keep our forces from forcing themselves properly on the targets we set them on, and they also trick us into forgetting what we were trying to do, if there ever was something there to begin. Have we not as a human race figured these things out yet in a non-cryptic and cheesy fashion?

Strangely, in some ways I think I have figured it out. There is this little module in my brain that I toss things into and out come answers. It's not a normal module--which I understand to be rather flighty (there one day, gone the next) and inconsistent (your mileage may vary), but it has been fairly consistent at receiving and processing questions that I have in a unique and surprising way. Maybe not everyone thinks of their brain as a workshop with various tools that each have varying degrees of usefulness, fragility, but it doesn't seem far off from the truth. It sounds a bit cheesy though, so humanity has not yet fashioned me the perfect brain module. Anyway, I have the answers. But the answers are not like what I had expected them to be. For example, the answers don't necessarily make me any happier... happiness is like the taste of mackerel. You taste it most right when you put it in your mouth, and you panic by chewing the taste and ultimately the happiness is gone and you have only one other piece of mackerel (unless you place another order). But in order to appreciate the last piece, you take a piece of ginger (perhaps a metaphor for calm, or perhaps a metaphor for drunkenness), and then take the piece. What the answers doo-doo is let you know how to order more happiness when you want it. I think. You don't always want it, really. Sometimes you want to get angry because the damn world is just so infuriating... and the kaleidoscope of emotions metaphor makes an appearance (it always does in these cheesy passages).

Blah blah blah. Here's a question for you:

Do you have a system for changing yourself when you decide you want to change?

It's very difficult to change yourself... sometimes almost impossible. The first step is making a concerted effort, though. Most people try to change themselves with an air of defeat already circling in their breath. Most people latch on to the first sign of change rather than ensure that that change is for the best. Most people act practically, and find hacks that create illusions of change without gaining the benefit from it. Or something. I've started spending my mornings before work thinking about the things I'd like to change about myself. Eat less meat. Exercise more. Learn more about whales. Etc. Usually, to think about something for 5 minutes can get an incredible amount accomplished. The only reason we do so many things is because we didn't think about what else to do, even for a second. It's so easy to walk to work, all I have to do is wear a jacket, or wake up 15 minutes earlier the next day.

A last couple words until I hit save and don't write anything for another couple weeks.

Fixing problems has been a topic at work. Sometimes people fix problems that don't exist because solutions are addictive. They make you feel productive. But we have poor tools for figuring out whether or not solutions are actually effective. But, given a solution, we are tempted to exaggerate its effectiveness not only to other people but also to ourselves because 1) we usually can't tell what has improved or not and 2) we like feeling productive. Just look at the government to see how sometimes people fix problems that don't exist in order to get re-elected. And sometimes people pretend to fix problems without actually fixing them. And almost always, solutions to problems involve additive behavior... adding something to the existing state of affairs. Here's something I'm doing more and more and which I think might be a hidden gold mine for actually changing yourself: solve things by taking things away.

keys on a keychain

I have too many keys that look alike on my keychain. In particular, the key that opens my front door and the key that opens my building's front door. When I got the keys, there was a little sticker on one and I used this to distinguish the two keys from each other. Inevitably, though, I would spend perhaps half a second each time using the key trying to figure out which was which.

This last weekend I went and got some extra keys made. The key maker, in the process, took the sticker off the building key, thus rendering both keys identical. Damn! Now it would take even longer to figure out which key was which, and I would have to resort to getting another sticker, or painting the key, or something like that.

But, I'm lazy. I didn't do it for a few days. The first time I arrived home, I tried both keys... taking maybe 10 seconds instead of half a second. The second time, furious, I examined the keys for any trace of a sticker, and found I could do that but that it made me upset. The last two times, however, I realized that the door that opens my front door is next to the green key. Finding the green key is really easy. Therefore, finding my front door key is really easy plus a millisecond. And now I'm able to find the key even faster than when I looked for the sticker... even though it had always been next to the green key! It made me realize, in my own dumb way, how sometimes removing useful things leads to discovering even more useful things that had also been there all along.

Just like buying soup at QFC, even though it doesn't have a place to sit, leads me to finding a nice public chair outside, that's conveniently close to the weekly stand so I can have something to read and eat soup to. And a billion other things.

Erik Satie, my Google name friend

Nothing better than that feeling of anticipation of bouncing back from a depression. I can feel it, everything begins to glow with an inner brilliance, and all ideas have long threads holding them together and you can follow one and get to the next and the paths between them are surprising and wonderful.

Josh mentioned Erik Satie at lunch today. Erik Satie's my Google name friend... he always comes up first when I search, and I do, for erik. Immediately, I feel the bond between us. We share a google results page. We spell our names the same. And then for the first time I actually click on the link and find out who he is. He talks like this:

From the very beginning of my career I class myself a phonometrographer. My work is completely phonometrical. Take my Fils des Étoiles, or my Morceaux en forme de Poire, my En habit de Cheval or my Sarabandes - it is evident that musical ideas played no part whatsoever in their composition. Science is the dominating factor.

Besides, I enjoy measuring a sound much more than hearing it. With my phonometer in my hand, I work happily and with confidence.

What haven't I weighed or measured? I've done all Beethoven, all Verdi, etc. It's fascinating.

The first time I used a phonoscope, I examined a B flat of medium size. I can assure you that I have never seen anything so revolting. I called in my man to show it to him.

On my phono-scales a common or garden F sharp registered 93 kilos. It came out of a fat tenor whom I also weighed.

Do you know how to clean sounds? It's a filthy business. Stretching them out is cleaner; indexing them is a meticulous task and needs good eyesight. Here, we are in the realm of pyrophony.

To write my Pièces Froides, I used a caleidophone recorder. It took seven minutes. I called in my man to let him hear them.

I think I can say that phonology is superior to music. There's more variety in it. The financial return is greater, too. I owe my fortune to it.

At all events, with a motodynamophone, even a rather inexperienced phonometrologist can easily note down more sounds that the most skilled musician in the same time, using the same amount of effort. This is how I have been able to write so much.

And so the future lies with philophony.

Can this be true? He enjoys measuring a sound more than hearing it? And did he say, "And so the future lies with philophony"? We are brothers! Josh also mentioned something about him (or maybe his friends) creating plans to build a cork bridge between Paris and New York, but I couldn't find anything about that. And he also started a church? Lovely! I just bought a few of his albums of the Internet.

Who are your Google name friends?

simple versus surprising

Everyone's arguing for simple these days, including myself, but I find myself thinking more about surprising things, which are in some ways directly opposed to simple things. At least, at first glance. If you walk into a room, and know that rooms usually have a hard wood or carpet floor, but instead find that this room is covered in grass and only has one chair made out of kitten hair, would it be appropriate to say that the room was simple? It's not the first adjective that crosses the mind. But maybe that room would be more preferable to sit in if you were given the choice between it and a blank room with a single standard chair. Out of surprising things come games, delight, and change. And I guess also fear, pain, and confusion, which should be avoided if possible. It's tough to build simple things, and it's probably even tougher to build surprising things.

happy projects of the moment

I'm having a wonderful time with things at the moment. Building a happy way of living is probably one of the most mysterious and rewarding things that you can attempt to build. The materials are everything from furniture, to literature, to friendships, to food and drink, to trips, to philosophies and personality traits. It has taken me a couple years to even realize that I was trying to build it, in fact... or at least to articulate it in this way. This most recent couple year stint has probably simply been the most productive of many attempts, and I think is still far from being declared successful. I guess it's what everyone is indirectly working on, but there are times when the task of it becomes clear in itself, and it seems to be improved by making sure that the brain lets through any new ideas by the homunculi project managers in my head as they strive to try new experiments, remove failed plans, and invent new ones. Huh?

A couple currently running projects:

Wednesday Office Hours: Just started it last week but the idea is to let people know of a time and place every week that people can come and hang out. The false premise is that I will help answer life's questions, solve troubling problems, and assist in difficult tasks as well as I can. The true premise is that I get to buy my friends drinks.

Reading: I have a love/hate relationship with books. For a long time I've found myself unable to read texts that were longer than 3 paragraphs. Occasionally menus proved too prolific for my attention span. Just last month though a switch flipped and I'm able to read more than one book a month again. This is a huge victory on the part of the happiness builders.

Art Club: A few of us are forming a new club around the appreciation of art. It will involve borrowing, lending, buying, and giving art, as well as interacting with artists, commissioning work, and possibly helping them take advantage of all the cool tools that the interweb has invented that are specifically designed to help people who produce things. Another part (which is perhaps most interesting about it) is about simply lowering expectations about the appreciation and acquisition of art.

Fame, Power, Wealth: A running theme. In that order.

Enjoying My City: Going to a new restaurant every week and a new show every week, while I am not always successful at the particulars, has led to me enjoying a lot more in my city than I had been. It's more of an anti-rut medicine than anything else... and this mild but constant dosage goes a long way to appreciating more often just how varied the place you're living in actually is.

The Robot Co-op: We just passed our first year anniversary, and it's still an amazingly productive, inspiring, and changing environment that continues to delight. When work delights, the whole world is turned upside-down.

There are more but it's never necessary to list everything. Or to explain anything fully. The gist is what's important, I think. If you can get the gist, or the spirit of the project, then the project will continue even after the pieces are removed or exchanged.

the Kubo-Schwinger-Martin condition

My mind is a jumble lately, a lawn mower that keeps stalling before it can get to the other side. Here are a few things that I don't have the words to fully explain.

The six categories of quark are: up, down, strange, charm, top, and bottom. Those are referred to as flavors, and they're divided again into red, green, and blue. That is science. The more I learn about science, the more I realize that I'll never be able to dismiss an argument simply because it is too absurd.

Work is fun. Contact me if you want to help beta test a new (very unfinished) site.

I am having trouble "experiencing" Katrina. When I think about disaster, and meaningless death, and "who to blame", I wonder if we're using the government as a bit of a scapegoat... we can't blame God for this because we don't believe in Him and we can't blame sinners because we don't believe in them and we can't blame the victims because we can't relate to them and we can't blame ourselves because we're still dry (AND we donated to Red Cross), but just like you can blame the doctor for not curing the cancer in your loved ones why not blame the government for the people that died meaninglessly in the streets, and the people who were raped meaninglessly in the shelters, and the people who died simply because nobody helped them... some things people have said that I've been reading almost seem to WANT the horrors to occur simply so that we can be more justified in our hatred of the government. It's almost an anger contest, and a sadness contest, and I'm a bastard for even mentioning this.

I have a new million dollar idea. Do you know how there are hot dog stands sometimes outside of clubs? You emerge from a hot, noisy club dehydrated, impaired, and hungry, and nothing would top the night better than a polish dog with sauerkraut and mustard, and you'll even pay $5 to get it? What if there was a confession booth attached, or on the side, or merely partnering, and you could confess your night's sins for an additional $5? To atone, instead of doing Hail Marys, do a shot of tequila. Is that not the best idea ever? Hot Dog Confessions. Know what would be even better? A way to secretly divulge all the things your friends did too! Buy your own transcript back for an additional $1, and we'll email it to you or post it to your blog! This idea just gets better and better.

Everything in this world is a club. The church, companies, sports teams, scientific societies, the family, the mafia, friends, etc. There is a science to clubs that I'm not sure has been explored. Does anyone know if this has been studied? For example, which clubs lend the most advantage to their members?

I'm getting used to my not-so-new single life. Do you know what the problem with dating is (online and off)? Hey, there is no problem!

Our lives are messy. Lederman, talking about something completely different, said, "There is a deep feeling that the picture is not beautiful." Maybe the picture is crazy and fun instead?

Things I like that are related but not in obvious ways: maps, collaborations, "The World" project in the UAE, Josh Harris's 1999 millennium party in NYC, CERT's campus.

September is going to adopt the tagline of "Road to Health". I've been drinking too much, eating too much, and just generally being too gluttonous and unhealthy... and this month will be my token "1 step forward" before I return to the regularly scheduled "2 steps back".

Benjamin Franklin: really boring, but really smart.