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Tal Tales
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It feels good to have finally figured out what I am here for.
I've been trying to find my place in the grand scheme of things for some time. I'm a pretty passive person, and so the advice and recommendations of others have always had a big influence on me, which has been good and bad.
However, I think I have identified what I was born to do, if there is such a thing. I was made to be a teacher.
I just finished teaching genetics for UCLA summer session, and it went very well. The students leared as much as I could have hoped for, and I only made a complete idiot of myself a few times that I know of. More important, though, is that I feel centered, at peace, and in control when I am teaching. I struggled all through graduate school with maintaining focus and energy about my work. I love science, but in addition to being passive, I am LAZY, and it was tough to keep myself on track. When I have a class to teach, though, I have no difficulty spending hours of focused attention on making it come out right. It is rewarding and exhilirating, even when it is exhausting and frustrating.
It was certainly a different experience from the other school where I have taught. The UCLA students are significantly better prepared and motivated. I wouldn't say I like it better; these folks don't really need me, whereas I feel like I'm doing some good for someone at the other school. Still, it was an interesting experience, which I hope to try again sometime soon.
So now I just need to find some school that will hire me full-time. My postdoc will be over next summer, and with some luck I'll actually be an assistant professor somewhere in the fall. Or maybe take two or three part-time positions until that magic tenure-track spot opens up.
Anyway, I feel good, and happier about my future career than I have felt in some time, and I though I'd share my joy.
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WARNING: This is a glimpse into the depths of my geekiness, and some of my childhood. It's not fine writing, and some is (logically enough) quite childish.
Talarohk is the name of my best imaginary friend. Yes, I still have imaginary friends; in high school, I filled a notebook with names, drawings, and descriptions of a whole lot of them. My car (Prometheus) was one, my sweater (Agamemnon) was another. Then there were the Rocketslugs, the Donuts and the Teeth, Marcus, Tranalon Blob (probably the oldest of them), and others who I have temporarily or permanently forgotten. I've known Tranalon Blob as long as I can remember.
In any case, Talarohk is the most recent addition, but probably the most thoroughly realized. She is a Cerebron--one of a race of sentient arthropods. Her particular branch was exiled from their homeworld centuries ago due to religious differences (she and the other exiles are atheists, and the homeworld had been growing more and more aggressively fundamentalist in their religion). In the end, they were forced to adapt themselves to a world, as their colony ship was falling apart and no habitable worlds had presented themselves. Talarohk's group was forced to build robotic bodies, and transfer their central nervous systems into them, in order to survive on the best world they had found. Thus, she's a cyborg, about eight feet tall, six-legged, four-armed, insectoid in appearance. I first met her in the late 80s.
What brought all this up was a snippet of writing I found in my closet. While it's not the first thing in which she makes an appearance, it's one of the ones I like best. It's dated November 20, 1991, so it's almost 14 years old (I was a senior in high school when it was written). I think it was in response to an assignment in which we were to write a very short bit of prose with attention to atmosphere. I don't know how much comes across in the writing, but from the moment we got the assignment, I have been able to see the scene with crystal clarity in my mind. I still can, today. Here it is:
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Talarohk's six feet made their characteristic muted thump on the frozen concrete of the ancient plaza as she walked slowly around the stone. Her legs moved with a fluidity that belied their robotic nature. From the gray-green sky above, tiny flakes of snow fell in a thin veil, undisturbed by any wind. Talarohk's skin sensors told her of the bitter cold of the world around them, but she ignored their protests. Cold it was, but not so cold as to put her durable body and shielded brain in danger. She adjusted her visual receptor to Earth standard and looked up. The stern face of Robert Alan Manfield IV, the last president of the late United States of America, gazed defiantly out into the snowfall. One arm was missing, having been torn away by the shock wave of the first nuclear explosion. His features were blackened and partially melted, but still recognizable as the face of the man who had once been called "Peacemaker".
Talarohk looked away. She had not known the man, but she had been a friend of humanity. Her race had seen the signs of the impending apocalypse, and had warned the humans--but, as usual, the headstrong race had been too convinced of its own infallibility to listen. The war had been sudden and total.
Talarohk's emotionless, angular robotic face looked up into the sky.
The snow of the nuclear winter continued to fall.
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Right now, I’m re-reading Orson Scott Card’s novelization of “The Abyss”—the James Cameron sci-fi movie about aliens living at the bottom of an abyssal ocean trench. I liked the movie a lot (especially the extended version), but this is one of the very few times that I have liked a novelization as much or more than the movie on which it is based.
In general, novelizations of movies are pretty lousy, in my eyes. This one, though, is wonderful. It adds immense depth to the story, letting the reader understand the backstory for each character, their motivations and fears, and showing you where each is brave or cowardly, wise or foolish. The movie is satisfying and entertaining, but the book makes me cry.
Anyway, this reading made me think about the stories I like, and why I like them. The Abyss is, like a lot of Orson Scott Card’s earlier and better works, at least partially about understanding human beings—that everybody has motivations for their actions, and those motivations are important. In Speaker for the Dead (the sequel to Ender’s Game, and one of my all-time Card favorites), Ender Wiggin has become a sort of minister in a secular religion. The Speakers for the Dead research the lives of the recently deceased, and tell the true stories of their lives to those who wish to listen. They try to explain the dead person’s history, why they behaved as they did, what they thought they were doing. It’s not an apologia—the Speakers don’t hide the ugly parts or emphasize the good. They simply tell the truth, in a way which helps the listener to understand who the person was. To me, it sounds like an immensely powerful act. The idea of a person telling the truth of my life to others after I die is appealing and terrifying—all of my secrets, good and bad, laid bare, all of my triumphs and all of the moments of which I am ashamed naked before the world, for judgment.
Sometimes, I wonder if that is something common to many people who have religious faith—if, at some level, we are hungry to be judged, to be told by someone with authority whether we have done well or ill. But that’s a different matter.
Part of the power of both The Abyss and Speaker for the Dead is that we get to see the thought processes that lie behind the behavior of these characters, whether they are heroic or villainous. In The Abyss, we see how it is that Coffey’s childhood leads him to be who he is, and how that person, while heroic under some circumstances, ends up doing the terrible things he does. We also see how Bud Brigman becomes a hero—how an ordinary man finds the courage and decency to face deep fears and overcome them, and do what is necessary and right. And probably most powerful, while we see the reasons for the actions, we also see that the morality of the actions remains in spite of justifications and mitigations. Knowing why Coffey does what he does helps us to understand him—even to sympathize with him—but does not require us to condone his actions or see them as honorable. I end up feeling great sadness that a person with such potential turns down a dark path, but if I were there, I’d try to stop him too. For me, it has been important to realize that we must always try to understand why people do what they do, and that understanding does not necessarily mean that we must accept it. A central theme of Ender’s Game seems to be that, to defeat one’s enemy, one must understand them as well as possible. The paradox is that really understanding someone leads to loving them, even as you use that knowledge—empathy, understanding, identification—to destroy them. Of course, it doesn’t always end in destruction; a parent should always try to understand why it is that her children have done something wrong, even though they must still be disciplined.
The other reason that I love these stories is because they show me what I should try to be. When I understand Andrew Wiggin, or Bud Brigman, or Hiram Coffey, I understand how events lead to behavior, and how choices guide that progression. I learn how these people dealt with events, and what it did to them, and how that affected those around them. The more I learn from these stories, the more I (hopefully) learn about how to understand the people in the world. I want to understand why people do what they do—what motivates them, how they decide, how they justify their decisions. And in the end, I want to understand myself—why I have done what I have done, and how to become who I should be.
In the end, I think I love Card’s stories—and all stories about heroes—because they show me how I can try to be one too. They show me how, if I can understand myself and others, and learn to love as widely as possible, that I might be able to be a hero if one is needed.
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I was thinking the other day about Terry Schiavo, and wondering about ways in which one might be able to communicate with someone in her situation.
Hypothetically, let's say you have a person who is completely paralyzed. She cannot move or speak, or move his or her limbs or eyes intentionally. She is, however, able to think, hear, and see.
One thing we have learned is that, if a person imagines moving his or her hand (for example), we can observe activity in brain areas responsible for planning and executing hand movements using fMRI. Thus, it seems like one might be able to do the following:
Researcher speaks to paralyzed patient: "Do you want to live? Imagine moving your hand when you see the answer you would give."
Researcher then shows the patient the word "Yes" for ten seconds, followed by the word "No" for ten seconds.
If the patient imagines moving his or her hand with some intensity during the "Yes" period, and stops doing so during the "No" period, it should be possible to detect that difference using an fMRI imager. You could do the same with sequentially showing letters of the alphabet, or some such, which would allow such a person to (very slowly) spell out words.
Unfortunately, this would require patients with a very specific set of deficits and capabilites, and would be extremely slow and expensive (fMRI time is generally $400-$600/hour, and to do this well would probably take at least 15 minutes to ask one yes/no question). It's also not guaranteed to work--fMRI can be somewhat unreliable in detecting things like this. Still, if it did work, it wouldn't be hard to detect it. I suppose that, in a very few cases, it would allow us to be sure about a person's wishes.
Just a thought.
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My students are having a hard time in my class, and I'm trying to figure out why and how to help them.
Quick background: I teach anatomy and physiology to undergraduates in an A.A. program at a Catholic women's college in LA.
My students recently took their first physiology midterm exam, and not one of them scored over 50%. Now, usually, when the whole class does that badly on an exam which is not designed to be extremely hard, the cause is one or more of the following:
1. The test was badly written or too difficult
2. The professor failed to get the material across well
3. The students are unmotivated
In this case, there are elements of all three, I think. Some of the questions were poorly designed, I admit, and I tried to cover too much material for one test. However, there is another problem area. These students are way overloaded. Most of them are taking this, microbiology, two other electives, and then work part or full time. They simply don't have enough time to both study and sleep. I know that working one's way through college is a time-honored tradition, but looking at it from the professor's side, I feel sorry for these students.
The other problem they have is thet they really don't know how to study. Most of them are capable of memorizing lists or phrases and regurgitating them on demand, but if asked to actually use the information in the memorized phrase or list, they are frequently helpless. Memorization is helpful in anatomy (name the four muscles which make up the quadriceps), but not so useful for physiology (compare the functioning of nicotinic and muscarinic acetylcholine receptors). Thus, this term is much harder for them. It's not so much that they aren't interested in learning, and they're not stupid--it's more that they don't know how to learn. Or maybe it's that I don't know how to teach.
I don't really know how to help them learn to take sensible notes (rather than just copying everything down verbatim), figure out which information is critical and which is peripheral, and actually understand concepts. They are polite and respectful, for which I am profoundly grateful, but I would trade some of that for some creativity. I need to find a way to reach these folks, or I have failed too.
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Over the weekend, I ran out of patience. I'm not sure what caused it...perhaps a combination of insufficient sleep, trouble relating to a grumpy four-year-old, or something else...but for whatever reason, I bottomed out on Saturday night. Suddenly, I had *had it with everything*, and found myself in a foul mood with a nasty headache.
This is not my natural state, and it's not one I like. I'm used to having a certain ability to deal calmy and cooly with anything irritating which arises. Normally, I can keep my limbic system at bay long enough to defuse any potential explosive response to things which bug me. I've actually found that if I can hold off blowing up, I can see how the person who just annoyed me didn't mean to do so--the misunderstanding or miscommunication becomes clear, and I can deal with that, rather than going on the attack. In the vast majority of cases, conflicts are due to miscommunication and misunderstanding, rather than real meanness and malice.
On Saturday night, though, my capacity to handle things in that way suddenly bottomed out, and I became sulky, sullen, and grumpy. In such cases, my understanding and loving wife (God bless her) takes the kids and encourages me to retreat to the bathroom with the Opinion page of the Times and a novel or game manual and stay there for half an hour, to recharge my coping circuits. True to form, she came through for me on Saturday night, despite having had a not-so-easy day herself. I don't deserve this woman.
This time, though, the recharge didn't last very long. By Sunday afternoon, I was down again, and I am still today. As I said, this is not normal for me, and I don't like it. I don't like what it says about me--that underneath the assumed persona, I'm really a grumpy man who'd rather be sitting by himself on a toilet. It's why I never drink enough to get drunk--who would I be if all my inhibitions were chemically eradicated?
I only have one clue. In sixth grade, I went through a period of a few weeks when I behaved in a truly reprehensible fashion. I harrassed some of my female classmates, making some unbelievably lewd comments, in order to gain the approval of my male classmates. I was truly a jerk. Eventually, a female friend told me that I used to seem like a nice, quiet guy, but not any more. Hearing her say that altered the whole course of my life, and was a big part of what caused me to become determined never to act that way again.
I think that I fear that, if I got drunk, I'd find that under it all, I'm still a vulgar-minded, cruel sixth grader.
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These are not especially profound, I know, but I thought I'd write them down anyway.
I think a lot about God, God's nature, and such. First, I'm mostly sure that I believe in God. It's not 100%, but it's enough that I talk to God regularly, and behave accordingly. I do often start prayers with "God, please forgive me for not being sure I believe in you", and hope that God has a sense of humor.
I don't base this belief in any particular chain of logic, or because of one particular experience. I have had several experiences which I believe to be a somewhat direct experience of God's presence, but I'm all too aware that there are other explanations for those experiences. I have concluded that I believe in God, primarily because I want to, and because God is one possible explanation for many wonderful things in my life.
Then, though, I must consider what sort of God this is, as God has never told me God's name. (I try to avoid using gendered pronounds when talking about God). On many questions regarding God, the only conclusion I can reach is that I have no idea, or that very likely I cannot understand. In general, though, here is what I believe, on most days:
God is, at least in some ways and at some level, psychologically recognizable to a human. That is, God is intelligent and alive, and capable of communicating with us. God is almost certainly not limited to such types of life and consciousness, but I think God is *capable* of them.
I cannot believe in a God who would sentence any person to torment because that person did not believe in one particular God, in the ab sence of any clear proof of that God's validity and the presence of many competing alternatives. That makes no sense to me. I suppose it is possible that such is the case, for reasons beyond my understanding, but then my only option is to pray that God will make the correct choice known to me, and help me find the true path. I have prayed along those lines my whole life. If such a one-path solution is the way things work, God has not yet chosen to show me that, and so I continue to muddle on as best I can, praying that God will not let me go too far wrong.
Note that I don't believe that those who have chosen a particular path are wrong. I strongly suspect that God honors those who choose a particular way to worship God, and who honestly try to live according to those rules. Personally, I don't think that it is the particular rules that God cares about (although see below), but the effort, discipline, and sacrifice of those who follow them. Following a set of commandments/rules/doctrines provides a person with a way of honoring God in their daily lives, and I think that such is good for us, and helps us to keep God in mind. I have not yet found such a path, although I suppose I'm more Christian than anything else. I'm not proud of that ambivalence; it is a weakness and a failing, for me, to be unable to commit to a faith.
I believe God is interested in the welfare of human beings. God wants what is good for us, although what "good for us" entails is probably not what I think it is. That does imply, to me, that God wants me to behave in certain ways which are in line with what God wants for me. For me, then, there are some behaviors that are right, and some that are wrong. That right and wrong may not be constant, and may not be the same for me as for anyone else--what is right for me may have little to do with what is right for you--but I do think that there is a right and wrong for me at any given time. It may also be that there are any number of alternatives, all of which are just fine with God. I guess that means that I am a moral absolutist to some degree, since I believe that there are some actions which are absolutely right and wrong for me right now, but that I do not hold that those absolutes are constant between people and times. Some may be, but not all are.
Given that, it is obviously of critical importance to find a way to determine what the right and wrong for me/now is. That's the hard part. There are some basic rules which seem to apply under most circumstances (in general, I don't kill, steal, or lie, for example). Here, in the absence of any further guidance, I have to rely on God and my own conscience. I have frequently prayed that God would either make the choice clear, or give me the necessary guidance at the right time. In some ways, that philosophy seems to encourage a continuous reliance on and consciousness of God, and continuous communication, which I suppose might be just the way God wants it. So far, what has seemed correct to me is that actions deriving from love, honor, and respect for others are right, and so those are what I try to do, and what I try to honor and encourage in others, whatever their source.
So I pray, and I live, and I try to keep God in mind. I seek God, and want to understand God's mind and plans in as much as God wants me to. I do think, though, that God does not want me as a mindless slave, and so I also try to pursue my own inclinations and interests, while keeping my behavior within the limits I think God has set for me. I o hope that I can someday find a faith, but until then I will continue on as best I can.
May God, in whatever form God takes for you, be with you.
All that comes from love, honor, and respect is of God.
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I have this problem. I've always, always wanted to be and tried to be an ethical person. I've spent a good deal of time and effort figuring out what I felt was the right thing to do in various circumstances, and then doing it. And yet I find myself doing things like this--making blog entries--at work, rather than doing what I'm paid to do.
It's not that I don't like my work. It's interesting and stimulating, and I'm reasonably good at it. I just find that I far too readily slip into a state where I end up doing a lot more web surfing than actual work.
What bothers me about it is that I'm effectively stealing from my employer (UCLA, funded by public research grants, so in some way that would be all y'all who are US taxpayers). It's theft, plain and simple, and it is a gross ethical violation.
And I can't stop doing it. So far I've been lucky enough to have pretty tolerant employers (unless it's not so much that they're tolerant as that this is normal behavior, which is really even more troublesome), and the work does get done. Still, I know I could do it better and faster than this. In those times when I have been able to focus, I've been happier and more productive. So why can't I just stay focused?
My inability to control myself--to be what I want to be, should be, and could be--is extremely frustrating.
It's a matter of choices, I guess. We all make choices, all day, every day. I'm making one right now, and it's the wrong one. The nice thing is that I can do something different.
As to plastic--I just bought a couple of electronic boojamawhatsits, an SD card for my PDA and a USB flash drive, and they came in those immensely annoying heat sealed plastic cases which can oly be opened by hedge clippers. I suppose it's good, in that it prevents people from easily pocketing small, valuable items at Best Buy, but it's annoying when I can't get to my neat new toy until I can lay by hands on surgical instruments.
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