Contentment

Contentment is lovely, is a lovely word, is a choice that's at once easy and hard to make

Words spill out, circle around, stake out positions around the drain but
When finally the water clears and the suspended junk settles at the bottom then there's a decision to...decision to...

Worst thing is that we get taught about contentment in exactly the wrong way, right? Eat your veggies, there's kids starving in Africa. Quit being ungrateful. True, but the means undo the end. If all it does is make the recipient of this wagon-fixing lecture feel like a lout, then the message has failed. Because if you're told over and over that you're a lout and come to believe you're a lout even though you try to be good, how can you be content? (Sociopaths excluded) That's backward. You're not happy because you're comfortable or successful or virtuous or have less external suffering than some people halfway around the world you'll never meet. You're happy because you see the world and yourself that way. If you are conditionally content, you are not content.

Content doesn't mean sitting on your ass and turning away from the good fight, either. Of course we want things to be better, ourselves, others, the world as we can make it out - but if we can't ever appreciate what we have, then hello treadmill. No amount of goodies or ego affirmation will ever be enough

How to spin the code so the young ones have it tattooed?
Youth is dissatisfaction and hope mixed in confusion
Adulthood is the habits of youth blown up to battlecruiser size
More weapons for the light side, more weapons for the dark side, higher stakes
Therefore contentment cannot be a flag to plant; the ground
is shifting
constantly

so if ego is the enemy they say then do good works and self-sacrifice to the utmost
nothing bad to say about that of course
but we all know it's quite possible to be a compulsive do-gooder and a judgmental egomaniac at once
(and yes martyrdom is egomania, perhaps the ultimate egomania)
while those with much more modest contributions to the fund can have it sussed
nope, not that simple
why would it be?

This is the part where you illustrate some platitudes by weaving a tale about some farmer and his three-legged cow and the sun, writing with nouns and verbs in an established folk-narrative style. I say you'll have to do it, because I'm not into it at the moment

or crack a sunny joke, which I do a lot but mostly to myself and not always sunnily

Contentment, then, is not an objective but a practice; 

Twelve

I recently read some letters written by adults to their young selves. The first thing that struck me about the exercise (which I toyed with a while; might publish it, might not) is how difficult it is, assuming you don't let yourself give spoilers and you consider carefully how your 12-year-old self might have interpreted what you say. A 12-year-old is already well into a period of drastic, rapid change in life, with little or no experience. Nothing I could tell my 12-year-old self that he could have understood or known how to apply would have been anywhere near adequate preparation for what he would be going through. Just gotta live through it, kiddo, stormy as it often is, but while I'm here I can tell you some general things that might comfort and encourage you while you do.

And if we can't even do that very well for ourselves in hindsight...theoretically, we ought to be the ideal parents for our past selves. You know your 12-year-old self hundreds of times better than your parents ever could, and even the parents who are best at communicating with their kids still have to deal with having busy lives of their own. And I doubt any parent and child can ever really see the other outside of their roles. Parents love, manage and protect their children, but it doesn't follow from this that they know their children all that well, especially by the time the child gets to middle school. But in this hypothetical exercise, we have none of those barriers. It's not absolutely transparent, since our memories are distorted in various ways, but no parent or friend or spouse can ever know you anything remotely like you yourself do.

So we ought to pay attention to what grownups would tell their tweenage selves, because they above all would know. What do they tend to say? Most of the essays I read included one particular theme: you're a good kid, believe in yourself, don't let the nastiness of the world you're becoming aware of beat you down, hang in there, it's going to get better. No surprise there. I wrote those things when I tried the exercise, too. Being twelve is just hard.

I do think that our society gets so focused on preparing kids for the prosaic real world we know that we fail to prepare them to be happy or fulfilled. We prepare them to compete by teaching them to judge their worth wholly by comparison with others, to never give themselves credit merely for trying their best or being a good person. Because we have to have STANDARDS, you know. You can't just be happy, peaceful, content. You have to aspire to be someone richer, smarter, prettier, more athletic, more virtuous (by someone else's definition, invariably), more lovable. It's all a game that you either win or lose. You know who thinks that way? 12-year-olds. There's no age at which people are more jealous or insecure or competitive or desperate to be seen well than middle school. Those kids are learning the lessons of the society we brought them into, all right - in fact, they're learning them too well.

Project: Orlando

As longtime readers here know, my initial plan for 2012 was to (mostly) take the year off of Scrabble tournaments. Not from burnout or lack of enjoyment - just wanted to focus on some other things this year. Like music, which I've done a lot of lately.

But this year the Nationals, the annual premier tournament in North America, has added for the first time a division using the larger international word list (CSW - the smaller North American list is usually called OWL or TWL), and I decided last weekend that I really didn't want to miss that, so I signed up. I haven't been practicing the words much this year, so from here until a few days before the tournament will be a cram session. Can already tell I need the refresher - too many words and hooks and anagrams have slipped beyond my easy reach. But I'll be ready enough by August 11, when the tournament starts.

I'm not studying with any particular focus on the CSW-only words - by this point, CSW *is* my native book. I keep the # symbols on, doesn't seem to hurt anything and I do still play some OWL, but I don't pay much attention to them anymore. I usually know whether a word is in the smaller book or not, but it's nice to play CSW and not have to care. Outside of Austin/San Antonio one-days, I can't imagine when I would play another OWL tournament, though if it's just a club or friendly game I don't mind. (And as always, any tournament I direct will have a CSW division if four or more players sign up for it.)

The words are only part of what I'll need. There are the other parts of the game, the strategic elements, though my abilities there haven't really changed in the past few years and won't in the next few weeks. The biggest thing in an event where you compete all day for 4 1/2 days is staying relaxed, focused and confident so your mind can do what you've trained it to do. But trying to force yourself into some heavy-duty mind and body regimen, if you're not already living that way, to accomplish this doesn't make sense to me. I'm not the type to go to these things and ingest nothing but bean sprouts and mineral water and be in bed by 8:30 every night, then wake up and do calisthenics for an hour at 5 every morning. More power to you if you can do that, but it's not me. I do plan to try to go a little more lightly on the heavy meals (especially lunches) and beer, try to get more sleep (hard to do at tournaments, though), get a swim or two in, maybe try doing some studying during the tournament and see if it keeps my neurons better greased. I'm plenty Zen enough at tournaments even as is, so I'm not worried about that. I'll enjoy seeing everybody, as always.

Depression

You know, wishing won't make it so
Hoping won't do it, praying won't do it
Religion won't do it, philosophy won't do it
The supreme court won't do it
The president and the congress won't do it
The UN won't do it, the H-bomb won't do it
The sun and the moon won't do it
And God won't do it, and I certainly won't do it
That leaves you
You'll have to do it

- Todd Rundgren, intro to "Fair Warning"


Depression is an all too common topic these days in any number of forums, but despite all our musing about it, the condition remains dimly understood by most. Without going into too much detail about my life, I've had reason to consider the various aspects of depression thoroughly and carefully, and I thought I'd try to convey some of what I have learned. It doesn't scare me to talk about, and maybe someone might read this and be helped by some perspective they didn't have before.

First, I'll discuss the current model of depression as a neurological disease. This is often correct, and it's a far, far better and more humane explanation than the prior models of depression as resulting from some sort of moral failing. We all have moral failings, depressed people included, but depression is not in any sense a moral choice in itself. But a more useful description of depression and other mental conditions is that they are the mind's ineffective attempt to adapt itself to the stresses of everyday living. This can be caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain, and in such cases antidepressants can give remarkable relief. But from what I know and have read, it appears that most people with depression are helped only subtly by drugs, if at all. One researcher estimated, for example, that about 70% of the effect of antidepressants on most people who take them can be explained by the placebo effect. This does not surprise me. A pill can only address chemical problems - no pill can undo thought patterns or change the environments that create and reinforce them.

If these ways of thinking are so poorly adapted to life, then why do millions of people develop them? The best explanation I know of is that the very same patterns which lead to despair today once led to happiness or safety or fulfillment instead and did so often enough to create a system of rigid, automatic responses to the world. For example, a child might misjudge that if conditions X, Y and Z are true, he will be safe; if they are not, he is in danger - which in turn engages the primitive fight-or-flight response we all have and creates anxiety. If over time the anxiety (misplaced fear) comes to be seen as unavoidable, a form of learned helplessness can become part of the family of automatic responses. You remember the not very nice experiment from years ago that showed that if a dog is subjected to unavoidable electric shocks enough times, the dog will stop trying to avoid the shocks and just lie down and take them. That learned helplessness in conscious humans often shows up as depression: an overwhelming, total sense of futility. What kept us safe as children might well be the very thing that holds us back as adults, if we are rigidly tied to it.

Perhaps the scariest aspect of the above is that these automatic systems of response can develop without our conscious minds being aware of them. The depression (and usually some form of anxiety along with it) becomes the new normal. That so much of that conditioned response happens unconsciously is why depressed people can't just "snap out of it". You cannot simply choose to override a decision-making mechanism built and reinforced for many years, much of which you're not even conscious of now; it was built little by little and must be disassembled the same patient way. There are no shortcuts. If it takes a good while to de-condition learned helplessness in a dog, how much longer would it take to do so for an adult human with a conscious mind and decades of life experiences?

In the meantime, can people live with and fight through depression to accomplish the goals of their lives? Yes, to varying degrees, depending on the severity of the condition and the circumstances; millions of people do it every day, in a struggle mostly unseen by others. Humans can gut through a hell of a lot when we have to. The device we use to gut through tough things is called willpower. Research into human motivation tells us that willpower takes the form of short, intense bursts. We developed the capacity for willpower so we could have the strength to do things like run away from predators - the caveman runs from the hungry man-eating tiger like a man possessed for as long as humanly possible until he is safe, and then collapses in a heap: all out of willpower now. Willpower works great if you use it only when you really need it, but as a day-to-day coping device, it's like a baseball team trying to put its ace starting pitcher out there for every game. They'll win a whole lot at first, but then he'll get tired, and then more tired, and eventually he'll get injured and won't be able to pitch at all.

The more well-adapted our coping mechanisms are, the less we have to rely on sheer willpower to gut through stressful or unpleasant things. So how do we adapt? We all would love to have an answer for this, but because each person's mind and environments are so different from one another, every depressed person is working on different and largely incomparable problems. In this sense depression isn't a singular disease or condition - it's more like a frame surrounding the whole big picture than some ugly defect in a part of that picture. Everyone's picture and frame are their own. I admit it does bug me when I've been struggling and people presume to advise me based on their own experiences, and I hope I'm not doing that here myself. (I've made the ignorant mistake of making judgments on other depressed people that way before, and I truly regret not being more compassionate there and resolve not to do so in the future.)

Everyone's depression is unique, which means, as the Rundgren lyrics said up top, "That leaves you/You'll have to do it". It's a fair question, though too often not a kind one, how much responsibility depressed people have. To say they have less responsibility than non-depressed people do for their lives is to demean them. But on the other hand, depressed people operate under a different set of working assumptions, and it's unrealistic to always expect them to act as if they don't. Most generic depression advice, as sick of hearing it as I'm sure most chronically depressed people are, is true as far as it goes. But part of the condition is an overwhelming internal resistance, both conscious and unconscious, to taking positive action in and of itself. Sometimes the depressed person can get through the resistance, and sometimes they won't be able to manage it. There is no cure - the faulty automatic responses can be weakened over time with new understanding and commitment, but it's a slow, slow process with many backward steps. To say it requires patience is an absurd understatement. Support and non-judgmental listening from those close to the depressed person is crucial to that process, but the battle, just like everyone else's, is ultimately a solitary one.

Insomnia Theater

2:35 am, can't sleep at all. Wouldn't be a problem except that I've got to get up early to go run (and maybe play in) a one-day Scrabble tournament. Not that that's a difficult thing to do, I could do it almost in my sleep - er, at this rate, I guess we might find out if that's true or not.

I can take this. Sleep trouble doesn't happen often these days, for which I'm extremely grateful, because I went through a long stretch where I had immense trouble with it. Either too little sleep or too much, really hard to regulate, tough to stay out of these non-self-correcting cycles for any good length of time. I had some schedule and lifestyle issues that surely didn't help, and I suppose I should have sought some sort of treatment for the problem, though without health insurance what would I have done. But the strange thing was that the problem disappeared almost all at once, after many years, without my trying anything to address it. Happened when I moved to Austin in 2003. All better, pretty much. The only time I have much trouble now is at Scrabble tournaments out of town, but most of that's just excitement from competing.

Not nervous or upset about anything at the moment, but my heart races anyway and I'm feeling kinda rough. Yeah, my health's probably not so good, the need is getting more urgent to start handling that better than I usually do. Brain won't shut down, because it about never does. Noise is what I know. Exhilarating when it accidentally forms a symphony, but more often it's just the sound of your own wheels.

Untitled

Your intrepid hiker
Got to the pointy top of a mountain last year in summer
Thought he saw snow and cushions of clouds around him
Planted his tattered weary tricolor flag and

Didn't notice that his footing was uneven and his treads were
Dangerously carelessly worn
Fell asleep and was shaken awake only by an earthquake

From turtle-flipped over on his back at first he didn't see it
But then, oh god, the unnameable panicked scream went up to no god in the eternally godless sky
to be heard by no one

What he thought was the peak was...well, a peak. He had had the right idea.
But it wasn't THE peak. Oh no. When he turned to his left and right and especially when
he craned his neck upward he saw it
Sheer icy windy cliffs extending jaggedly upward beyond sight
Sixty degrees? Sixty-five? Seventy?
I have fooled myself all this time
I have fooled myself all this time
I am a fool
He rooted out his triumphant flag and cast it on the ground

And when he looked down the hill,
Fire was swallowing the town below

All there was left to do
Was make camp, count and sharpen his instruments
Check his rations, revise his maps
And come to the understanding that
The flag-planting is only temporary
It's all the world knows to talk about, but it changes nothing
What endures all is the realization
That the hiker and his mountain and his pain and his sun are coauthors

Friday!

Woke up with "At Last I Am Free" by Chic running through my head. Gorgeous song. Bet you don't know it!

Also was remembering something I learned from being a baseball fan, or at least I think that's where I grasped this concept first: most successful managers weren't Hall of Fame caliber players themselves. Far from it, usually. The example I heard growing up was Ted Williams, who managed the Senators/Rangers for a few years (the team moved during his tenure). One of the best hitters ever, but people said that he couldn't teach the craft well because he was so good at it that he couldn't relate to the struggles of ordinary hitters. True in music, too: virtuosos often don't make good teachers. You've probably heard all this before. I think it does point to the broader observation that we can't know how difficult a particular challenge is for someone else. We think we know - however hard it was for us, that's how hard the thing is. People who do X more naturally than we do are gifted or lucky, while people who do X less naturally than we do are dumb or lazy. This conveniently excuses us from the burden of being patient with them: the high performers don't need our compassion or assistance, and the low performers don't deserve it. Human nature is amazing, huh?

This isn't saying that because something is difficult, you're excused from having to wrestle with it. For example, let's say it's harder for you to keep your weight down than it is for most people, and you're a hundred pounds or more too heavy now. Your choice is still the same - lose the weight or face the consequences of not losing it. Your way up will be rocky and steep, and enabling you isn't going to help. But a thin person sure as hell does not derive from this a right to look down on you, because we all have things that don't come easy for us. Or if we don't, we're not challenging ourselves enough.

Well, it was on my mind this morning. Not sure why.

***

I'd pick the Stanley Cup playoffs, but I haven't followed the NHL closely enough in recent years for the picks to be much more than guesses.

***

Update on an old subject: When I said I'd quit drinking, I did so - for about two months. So that was pretty good. It's crept back in again. Don't know how I feel about it. To the extent drinking is ever an issue - I suppose this is true for most people - it's a symptom of other things. Things I'm not going to tell you about today, as blah blah who cares. Maybe I'll drink tonight, and maybe I won't, and maybe the sunset will be pinkish and maybe it will be grayish, and tomorrow three outs will still constitute an inning.

***

Dawns on me that I've lived alone for the past five years. Hmm, let's see...I lived at home until I was 21. In the 21 years since then, I've lived alone for 15 of them...oh, cool, the Who's "Armenia City In The Sky" just came on, haven't heard that in a while...followed by the Utopia rarity "Monument". You know what's hard to do? Walk around for 15 or 20 minutes outside somewhere and do nothing but observe the trees and shrubs and plant life. Don't classify, describe, memorize, evaluate or judge, there will not be a quiz later, just keep your mind doing nothing but observing the green things. Every time your mind wanders, lead it gently back to the task at hand. If you've a noisy mind, as I chronically do, this will be a rewarding and peaceful but VERY difficult exercise...now up: Level 42's "Love Games"...I have a friend who thought (thinks? haven't hung out with him in a while) that all blogs and similar expressive avenues are self-important narcissistic endeavors, why do people think their every thought and utterance is super-important, yadda yadda. He has Asperger's, though that's neither here nor there I guess. I dunno, how about "because I like to write", that seems like enough reason to me. Yes, I know the old saw about removing all doubt, and I know I should be stoic and windweathered and drive a pickup truck with a medium-large dog in the back with big yearning eyes and know how to field-dress a buffalo and order French suits and jog five miles uphill at 5 am every day and have a spotless bathroom and be up on the latest TV shows and be seen petting a ferret to sleep in the study and whatnot. I'm 42, dammit, I don't have time to worry anymore, I just do whatever. Glad you're reading.

Foreigner, "At War with the World" now. Bill Bruford with "Fainting In Coils" after that. Then Chris Squire's "Lucky Seven".

***

Yes, raising children is real work, I trust we all agree. But let's see, attractive white woman marries rich white man and has some kids, money is no object, chauffeurs, maids, nannies, elite private schools, luxurious family vacations to rejuvenate, superduper medical care, elite teams of ninja psychotherapists flown in straight from Vienna if needed - lots of mother's little helpers to call on, to say the least. But if you said her parenting itself is still honest work worthy of respect, I would wholly agree with you. And Ann Romney's unusually good fortune is not something she needs to apologize for. I trust, then, we can also say that the poor inner-city black woman struggling to raise five kids and scraping by with the help of some piddly sum from the government, which isn't half of 1% of the help Ann Romney receives for doing the same thing under much easier circumstances, is equally engaged in honest work and is entitled to the same respect. Right? Yes, that means not calling her a welfare queen or yelling at her to get a "real" job.

***

How about...some Deep Purple...okay, Stormbringer, that'll work. I like old music, deal. Not because I think it's somehow objectively "better" music, though. I just respond to those sounds and styles more for whatever clutch of reasons. There's plenty of excellent music being made now, and there was plenty of crap being made back then. I've probably said that here before.

***

Write anything:

Shutout
Rock'n'roll through the lens
This is no time to try
This is no time to die


White winter burn sun on sand
Down the peak one painted head
The song is over but the peaks remain
Stripped and wasted, underbelly dusted

Taking grounders

As is probably true in any other game, the plays you hear talked about most in Scrabble are the unusual ones. Maybe a flashy obscure word, or an intricate fit on the board, or an uncommon strategic insight. But as any tournament player knows, the majority of Scrabble turns don't offer such opportunities. It's like being a shortstop in baseball - most of the plays a shortstop makes during a season are routine (at least for major leaguers they are). But they're very important: winnable games are lost every year because someone made an error on a routine grounder.

This position - click through the annotated game at the link below until turn 7, when I have DDEGIOP on my rack, and stop there if you want to try to solve it yourself - strikes me as the routine sort of position that comes up in many games. (This game is using the North American (TWL) word list.) The degree of difficulty is, I would say, moderate by tournament game standards. The best play available does not involve knowing any uncommon words, though you'll need to look carefully at the board. There is not much in the way of strategic nuance to consider - the best play is best for straightforward reasons.

http://www.cross-tables.com/annotated.php?u=10799

This position may turn out to be crucial. I have a solid lead to this point in the game, thanks to fortunately picking a blank and bingoing on each of my first two turns, but there are plenty of tiles left in the bag and I'm nowhere near being out of the woods yet. I have lost games from stronger positions than this before. If I make a lesser play here, I'm either leaving points on the table, keeping a weaker group of tiles for next turn, or both. The miss probably wouldn't be catastrophic, but depending on what I draw from then on, it absolutely could turn out to be the difference between winning and losing. These ordinary positions decide more games and tournaments than the occasional highlight-reel plays everyone remembers. I made the right play in this instance, though I certainly don't always. I'm relatively good at scooping these up, but not to the level of the very best, who almost never miss such plays. Consistency with the routine plays isn't near as routine as it might seem.

Extinguishing a Fear

Happy Friday, y'all...so anyway, I don't consider myself a fearful person in general. Cockroaches, rats, snakes, spiders, flying, heights, public speaking, intimacy...all fine by me. But today I'll talk about one I do have. The earliest time I can remember being underwater was when I was four. I somehow, I forget how, got into a part of a pool that was deeper than I was tall, and so under the surface I went all of a sudden. Tremendous fright ensued for the seconds until an adult helped me out. I can still visualize the scene even now.

I took a few swimming lessons later, but they didn't take, and I never learned as a kid to conquer my fear of going underwater. Whenever I tried to, my respiratory system would get weird and chlorinated water would shoot up my nose and I'd start panicking. Even when my mind wasn't afraid, my muscle memory would be and the whole experience was really uncomfortable. So I'd almost never try. Wasn't the end of the world, but it was embarrassing to not be able to do what others were doing. I've never jumped off a diving board in my entire life, for example. As an adult, swimming occasions are rare unless you seek them out, but this issue has gotten no better - I still can't go underwater comfortably. My working assumption (excuse?) for a long time is that it's been an involuntary physical reaction. Which it is, but the physical dimension of it shouldn't close the door. It's irritating, but not catastrophic, and if I can learn to breathe and not tense up at the wrong time, well, maybe I can overcome this. And it would mean a lot to me to do so - I think anytime you beat a fear, you're bound to feel empowered. So I say I've had enough of this crap.

Some fears are complexes that require a more nuanced approach, but this one's simple - just practice sticking my face underwater in a controlled environment until I get a handle on the breathing and the psychological component of the reaction is weakened. Tonight after work, I put my face underwater in the bathtub ten times, for ten seconds at a time, opening my eyes, doing it at different points in the breath cycle, etc. A few misfires, wasn't comfy by any means, but I got through all ten times and feel uplifted now. Do it every day, a little more each time, and I expect I'll have it sussed eventually. That'll be cool.