There are many beautiful parts of Wyoming--Jackson Hole, Yellowstone, Star Valley--none of which are near the I-80. Along those barren stretches, lined by ominous snow-drift barricades, with more roaming-cell-signals than roaming-buffalo, it's little wonder that Wyoming has the highest rate of outward-migration in the Union.
Continuing East: there's a reason Bruce Springsteen named his most depressing album Nebraska. When my Iowan Uncle later joked, "Did you see the giant sign reading 'Monotonous' across the state?", all I could think was, "Man, if even Iowans mock Nebraska..."
Which brings us to Iowa, a state that lives up to its reputation of corn, empty, then more corn. But don't be fooled by that supposedly inoffensive, "wholesome-heartland" exterior! There's something sinister about those endless cornfields, and not just from the Beckettian-buzzing emanating from the locusts and cicadas.
For because the Presidential primaries are held first here, no ambitious congressman dares disrupts the Iowa corn subsidies (the Spice must flow!); consequently corn-syrup and corn-starch makes its way into increasingly-unhealthy amounts of all we eat and drink; that same corn gets pumped into our gas-tanks in an ethanol-process that takes more oil to produce than it replaces; and consequently the price of food in general is rising.
In wealthy America, this means we pay pennies more for our bread; but in poorer countries, the result is a doubling and tripling of prices, resulting in violent unrest like the Arab Spring (sky-rocketing food prices sparked the French Revolution, too). "Every nation is only 9 meals away from revolution" indeed. And the collapse of human civilization all starts with innocuous, empty Iowa--no one ever suspects the Iowa!
To conclude: if it can at all be helped, when driving east across America, try and take the I-70 instead. It may add hours and money to your journey, but the drive through southern Utah and Colorado is a little more...inspiring.
Monday, August 26, 2013
Sunday, August 18, 2013
On American Soccer Fans
Back when I interned in Guadalajara, I used my Press Credentials to score free tickets to a Chivas match. The jumping, singing, instruments, chanting, etc, of the fans, all felt very natural, homegrown, an organic outgrowth of the local culture. Same when I saw the same at a Real Salt Lake game; the fanbase there is primarily Latino-immigrants, so it simply felt like they'd brought their home culture with them.
But then I attended an MLS match in Portland recently, and it felt...off, for some reason. Not the match itself, I enjoyed the match, but the fans. The scarves, the chants, the long songs...it didn't feel like an organic outgrowth of a local culture, no--it felt like an elaborate affectation, an appropriation, a performance. It felt less like American Soccer fans behaving like Soccer fans, than like Americans trying to act like Europeans.
Simply put, this style of fandom is not how American sport fans naturally behave--Europeans, and Latin-Americans maybe, yes, but not North Americans. Americans shout their own individual slogans, wave their own individual signs, show off their own individual dance-moves, and aside from the occasional breakout of "the wave," this tribal unity of long-chants and colorful-scarves simply isn't out style. We join our voices together in our cheers, yes, but each in his/her own way. Americans cheer distinctly different from Europeans. (And give American sport fans credit where credit's due--however obnoxious and meat-headed we may be, Americans rarely start riots or murder someone over a game.)
(Also, it has been my experience that some of the most nuanced, in-depth, numbers-driven, rationale discourse I've ever encountered in America have not been about politics, but about sports; intellectualism didn't disappear from America, it just moved to sports...probably because rationale thought is better contained and neutralized in the sports ghetto, but that's a topic for another day).
In other words, American Soccer still feels by and large like sports for people who don't usually like sports; it's sports for people who prefer the posturing "civilization" of the "classy" Europeans across the pond, who are no more trying to be civilized than we are. European culture simply informs their fandom differently than ours does. Soccer fandom in America comes off not as some spontaneous outpouring of excitement, but as a form of privilege and pretension.
I'm reminded of a student essay I graded once, which argued the reason America always sucks in the World Cup is because all of American's Soccer stars are products of elite, expensive Soccer Academies, making Soccer a Class issue here. Prestigious academies are simply not how star athletes are produced--not in the NBA, not in the NFL, not in MLB, and certainly not in other Soccer playing countries! Over in Europe (which all these American Soccer fans are clearly aping), star players are produced on the streets, in the fields, among the lower-classes. It is not an elitist sport, but the game of the common man.
This may be the single greatest hurdle Soccer must overcome if it is ever to enjoy mainstream success in America: it cannot just be the game of the rich, the privileged, the elite, the European-affectionate, no; we must understand what the Latin-Americans, Africans, and working-class Europeans already instinctively understand, that it must be the sport of the masses. It must be enjoyed by Americans acting like Americans, and not just by the privileged striking a pose.
But then I attended an MLS match in Portland recently, and it felt...off, for some reason. Not the match itself, I enjoyed the match, but the fans. The scarves, the chants, the long songs...it didn't feel like an organic outgrowth of a local culture, no--it felt like an elaborate affectation, an appropriation, a performance. It felt less like American Soccer fans behaving like Soccer fans, than like Americans trying to act like Europeans.
Simply put, this style of fandom is not how American sport fans naturally behave--Europeans, and Latin-Americans maybe, yes, but not North Americans. Americans shout their own individual slogans, wave their own individual signs, show off their own individual dance-moves, and aside from the occasional breakout of "the wave," this tribal unity of long-chants and colorful-scarves simply isn't out style. We join our voices together in our cheers, yes, but each in his/her own way. Americans cheer distinctly different from Europeans. (And give American sport fans credit where credit's due--however obnoxious and meat-headed we may be, Americans rarely start riots or murder someone over a game.)
(Also, it has been my experience that some of the most nuanced, in-depth, numbers-driven, rationale discourse I've ever encountered in America have not been about politics, but about sports; intellectualism didn't disappear from America, it just moved to sports...probably because rationale thought is better contained and neutralized in the sports ghetto, but that's a topic for another day).
In other words, American Soccer still feels by and large like sports for people who don't usually like sports; it's sports for people who prefer the posturing "civilization" of the "classy" Europeans across the pond, who are no more trying to be civilized than we are. European culture simply informs their fandom differently than ours does. Soccer fandom in America comes off not as some spontaneous outpouring of excitement, but as a form of privilege and pretension.
I'm reminded of a student essay I graded once, which argued the reason America always sucks in the World Cup is because all of American's Soccer stars are products of elite, expensive Soccer Academies, making Soccer a Class issue here. Prestigious academies are simply not how star athletes are produced--not in the NBA, not in the NFL, not in MLB, and certainly not in other Soccer playing countries! Over in Europe (which all these American Soccer fans are clearly aping), star players are produced on the streets, in the fields, among the lower-classes. It is not an elitist sport, but the game of the common man.
This may be the single greatest hurdle Soccer must overcome if it is ever to enjoy mainstream success in America: it cannot just be the game of the rich, the privileged, the elite, the European-affectionate, no; we must understand what the Latin-Americans, Africans, and working-class Europeans already instinctively understand, that it must be the sport of the masses. It must be enjoyed by Americans acting like Americans, and not just by the privileged striking a pose.
Friday, August 16, 2013
Salt Lake/Salt Creek
Couple weeks ago, my girlfriend and I went floating in the Great Salt Lake. The experience is uncanny: there are no tides, no currents, no waves, only dead stillness. You lower your ears underwater and you hear nothing--no fish, no plants, nada. You try to sink, but only float; as one fellow bather exclaimed, "This violates everything I know
about water and swimming!" The road-sign declares "America's Dead Sea!" and it's accurate: the Great Salt Lake is dead. No living thing may enter this realm of death--even the act of floating is like the Lake pushing you back out of it. Here, all entropy has ceased.
Entropy gets a bad-rap, you see; as a physicist friend of mine explained, entropy doesn't signify the relentless march of disorganization, decay, and death, no--entropy only means there are multiple possibilities for organization. E.g. a room may have a couch and bookshelf neatly organized...or instead, the couch could be overturned with the bookcase stacked on top of it, or the books piled on the floor, or scattered across the room a hundred which ways, or ad infinitum. Just because only one or two of these arrangements qualifies to you as "organized" doesn't mean that other, "messier" arrangements aren't possible. Entropy explores all other possibilities of arrangement, and of life.
It's not entropy you need fear, my friend explained, but lack of entropy. A room with zero entropy is, in effect, an empty room. A Universe without entropy would be an empty Universe--that is, nothingness. Entropy is what the Universe was before its creation, not at its end. Entropy isn't what will destroy the Universe, but rather what energizes it, gives it life! I was reminded of this explanation at the Great Salt Lake, with its utter absence of life, tides, currents--the Lake has zero entropy, and thus is dead still.
By contrast, this past week my family and I camped at Salt Creek, near my birthplace of Port Angeles, WA; Salt Creek is this gem of a campground that sits on some stone bluffs overlooking the Strait of Juan de Fuca. (In your tent at night, you are lullabied asleep by the waves and the foghorns.) I awoke early one morning to walk across a barnacle-covered rock-formation exposed by the low tide; I stood at the tip like some German Romantic, among the seagulls and bull-kelp and anemones and oysters and clams and crabs and shattered shells and shed-feathers and sea-weed and cold rolling waves, and asked myself why I felt such fulfilling peace here.
And the answer was immediate: because Salt Creek is alive! And I don't just mean filled with life, no, Salt Creek is alive! The tides, waves, currents, counter-currents, the wind and rocks and ever-shifting sands, the over-flowing life both above and below the surface, all form one massive, organic whole! It is messy and disorganized and overwhelmingly large and doesn't push you out but envelopes you in and is just full of entropy!
There are endless possibilities within the ocean, and there are endless possibilities for life--so many, in fact, that you can become frightened that life will destroy you. And it will! The Ocean has swallowed whole many a human, and life is saturated with death. But it's a different kind of death, a living death, paradoxically--it's a death that renews, rejuvenates, revives. In the ocean, death is but another possibility for arrangement, one of endless many. Here, death is not the end.
But many still fear the overwhelming, soul-shattering possibilities of life, and thus try to minimize life's messiness as much as possible. They fuss over small things and enclose themselves in tiny, carefully-controlled comfort zones. They want the zero-entropy of the Great Salt Lake, that keeps you carefully buoyed up and unable to sink.
But the Salt Lake is also a living death of the worse kind--you float, yes, but there is nothing else. Embrace the ocean, embrace the entropy, embrace life and all the death it has to offer...the Great Salt Lake is a wonderful experience yes but you can't stay long. Don't just bob along the surface of the shallows that can't harm you (or do much else for that matter); no, no, no, for all your salt water needs, embrace the Ocean!
The D&C says that the Celestialized Earth is a "sea of fire and glass," whatever that means. I don't believe that is a static sea; I believe it is like the ocean--unfathomable, endless diversity, endless variety, ever-changing, ever-moving, alive.
Entropy gets a bad-rap, you see; as a physicist friend of mine explained, entropy doesn't signify the relentless march of disorganization, decay, and death, no--entropy only means there are multiple possibilities for organization. E.g. a room may have a couch and bookshelf neatly organized...or instead, the couch could be overturned with the bookcase stacked on top of it, or the books piled on the floor, or scattered across the room a hundred which ways, or ad infinitum. Just because only one or two of these arrangements qualifies to you as "organized" doesn't mean that other, "messier" arrangements aren't possible. Entropy explores all other possibilities of arrangement, and of life.
It's not entropy you need fear, my friend explained, but lack of entropy. A room with zero entropy is, in effect, an empty room. A Universe without entropy would be an empty Universe--that is, nothingness. Entropy is what the Universe was before its creation, not at its end. Entropy isn't what will destroy the Universe, but rather what energizes it, gives it life! I was reminded of this explanation at the Great Salt Lake, with its utter absence of life, tides, currents--the Lake has zero entropy, and thus is dead still.
By contrast, this past week my family and I camped at Salt Creek, near my birthplace of Port Angeles, WA; Salt Creek is this gem of a campground that sits on some stone bluffs overlooking the Strait of Juan de Fuca. (In your tent at night, you are lullabied asleep by the waves and the foghorns.) I awoke early one morning to walk across a barnacle-covered rock-formation exposed by the low tide; I stood at the tip like some German Romantic, among the seagulls and bull-kelp and anemones and oysters and clams and crabs and shattered shells and shed-feathers and sea-weed and cold rolling waves, and asked myself why I felt such fulfilling peace here.
And the answer was immediate: because Salt Creek is alive! And I don't just mean filled with life, no, Salt Creek is alive! The tides, waves, currents, counter-currents, the wind and rocks and ever-shifting sands, the over-flowing life both above and below the surface, all form one massive, organic whole! It is messy and disorganized and overwhelmingly large and doesn't push you out but envelopes you in and is just full of entropy!
There are endless possibilities within the ocean, and there are endless possibilities for life--so many, in fact, that you can become frightened that life will destroy you. And it will! The Ocean has swallowed whole many a human, and life is saturated with death. But it's a different kind of death, a living death, paradoxically--it's a death that renews, rejuvenates, revives. In the ocean, death is but another possibility for arrangement, one of endless many. Here, death is not the end.
But many still fear the overwhelming, soul-shattering possibilities of life, and thus try to minimize life's messiness as much as possible. They fuss over small things and enclose themselves in tiny, carefully-controlled comfort zones. They want the zero-entropy of the Great Salt Lake, that keeps you carefully buoyed up and unable to sink.
But the Salt Lake is also a living death of the worse kind--you float, yes, but there is nothing else. Embrace the ocean, embrace the entropy, embrace life and all the death it has to offer...the Great Salt Lake is a wonderful experience yes but you can't stay long. Don't just bob along the surface of the shallows that can't harm you (or do much else for that matter); no, no, no, for all your salt water needs, embrace the Ocean!
The D&C says that the Celestialized Earth is a "sea of fire and glass," whatever that means. I don't believe that is a static sea; I believe it is like the ocean--unfathomable, endless diversity, endless variety, ever-changing, ever-moving, alive.
Saturday, August 10, 2013
On Returning to a PhD
Once I was white-water rafting in Colorado; our river guide was this portly, jovial fellow with a magnificent, mountain-man beard. When we passed a small cave, he joked, "And that's where river guides sleep in the off-season!"
That's when it hit me: this man will win every single High School Reunion. Serious, think about it, how do you top white-water-rafting-guide in Colorado?! Imagine the exchange:
Reunion Attendee #1: "Ah, so what have you been up to since graduation? I'm already a highly-paid lawyer/doctor/entrepreneur/executive!"
Reunion Attendee #2: "Oh, really? That's cool man, congrats! I'm a white-water-rafting-guide in Colorado."
Reunion Attendee #1 (wincing): "Son of a..."
I had a classmate in grad school who worked at REI, who told me once that REI is constantly flooded with resumes from lawyers, accountants, ad-execs, etc, that is, unambiguously "successful" people willing to take the cut in hours, pay, prestige and upward mobility, all in order to live life not for the future but for the present, to approach this wondrous world not for what it can do for them, but for what it is.
More seriously, I had a buddy in High School whom I sadly lost touch with, who after college went straight-up Into the Wild up in Alaska, and at 26 they found his canoe but not his body. Among his closer friends, there was sadness, yes, but also rejoicing, for they'd known someone who hadn't constantly deferred his life, who hadn't submitted to an empty existence of hoop-jumping, but had lived it in the now, more fully in his brief life than many do in a long one.
And now, on the eve of my return to Grad School, I ask myself: am I living my life in the present? Am I not following into the endless rut of hoop-jumping? Am I not just deferring my life? What are my motivations for getting a PhD: for what it'll get me, or for the life I'll encounter?
In the mean time, I keep that Colorado white-water-rafting-guide front and center in my mind.
That's when it hit me: this man will win every single High School Reunion. Serious, think about it, how do you top white-water-rafting-guide in Colorado?! Imagine the exchange:
Reunion Attendee #1: "Ah, so what have you been up to since graduation? I'm already a highly-paid lawyer/doctor/entrepreneur/executive!"
Reunion Attendee #2: "Oh, really? That's cool man, congrats! I'm a white-water-rafting-guide in Colorado."
Reunion Attendee #1 (wincing): "Son of a..."
I had a classmate in grad school who worked at REI, who told me once that REI is constantly flooded with resumes from lawyers, accountants, ad-execs, etc, that is, unambiguously "successful" people willing to take the cut in hours, pay, prestige and upward mobility, all in order to live life not for the future but for the present, to approach this wondrous world not for what it can do for them, but for what it is.
More seriously, I had a buddy in High School whom I sadly lost touch with, who after college went straight-up Into the Wild up in Alaska, and at 26 they found his canoe but not his body. Among his closer friends, there was sadness, yes, but also rejoicing, for they'd known someone who hadn't constantly deferred his life, who hadn't submitted to an empty existence of hoop-jumping, but had lived it in the now, more fully in his brief life than many do in a long one.
And now, on the eve of my return to Grad School, I ask myself: am I living my life in the present? Am I not following into the endless rut of hoop-jumping? Am I not just deferring my life? What are my motivations for getting a PhD: for what it'll get me, or for the life I'll encounter?
In the mean time, I keep that Colorado white-water-rafting-guide front and center in my mind.
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