Coming Out with Hideous Men

If you listen to the waves, you find no pattern, only noise, until you listen for a long time. Then you hear the tides.

In the same way, four data points do not a pattern make.

I have only had relationships of any significance, all with men - four mostly nice men, who vary across axes but were all nerdy, bespectacled, and storytellers.

At the same time, four people do not constitute an identity. I think anyone reading this has probably figured out before I have that I am not entirely straight (few are, if you believe Kinsey), nor am I average on the axis of asexuality. I don’t know exactly where I put myself - demisexual sounds close, as does butch, but bisexual, asexual, queer, pansexual, kinky, dom, sapiosexual, semisexual, caregiver, and plain old weird are not wrong either.

If this was any other time in history, I would have no questions. I would marry the rich middle aged bachelor from a good family that my parents had steered me toward, pump out my kids, and have done with it. Yet I was born in the late twentieth century, a time of new waves of feminism, pride, and openness, which has allowed me to question just who the fuck I am. I want to have a scientific answer, but again, four data points don’t give much to find a trend.

I just started reading David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. If you ask any student of modern English, he’s pretty close to the modern classic author. The stories so far focus on men’s bodies - the way they are used, how they grow and change, how they interact with other bodies, and how they are experienced by the mind inside.

Wallace was an observer of bodies, a gatherer of data points about the human condition. He condensed those observations into short stories and novels, abstracting those data points into Picassan shapes and colors for easier (or, if you’re an English student, more difficult) digestion. As such, the ego is a prominent character in Wallace’s writing - exterior events processed and reprocessed through self-narrative and retelling. The inner voice is forced to the foreground, along with all the insecurities and foibles that people try to obscure.

Which brings me back to me - while I may not be the center of the universe at large, I am still the center of my own universe, my own experience. My inner voice runs in the circles that Wallace’s hideous men run through, constantly trying to pick patterns out of individual waves and coming up with more extreme extremes. If I do things that can’t be explained, if I have traits that can’t be defined, if the wave equation collapses with imaginary components, am I still worthy to be treated as human? Do I make sense? Do I have a valid reason to exist? And as always…

Why me?

Many, including Wallace, have tried to turn to religion to answer the unanswerable, but since religion seems to deliberately preclude uncertainty (the whole basis tends to be “I believe”), it also precludes a lot of what appears to make me who I think I am - the questioner, the cynic, the one about two degrees off center. Religion doesn’t want for answers - it claims to have them.

Answers reduce complexity to something more understandable. If one takes Wallace, or almost any modern or postmodern writer, with any kind of seriousness, he suggests that a reduction of the complexity of person to an attribute, or even a few attributes, leads to absurdity.

At the same time, human minds are predisposed towards pattern-making and compaction of information, which at even a moderate level demand reduction of that information to a label or a number, lest we become overwhelmed by the noise of complexity.

When it comes to my sexuality, I can tell myself I have almost no information (again, four serious relationships), or way too much (most of the world simultaneously screaming about sex and sexuality), opposite problems that lead to the same result - insufficient data to deduce the trend my pattern-loving human mind wants so badly. If I were to find a trend, the right words, a good pattern, I don’t know if I would be mature enough not to make it a center of my identity, like so many of Wallace’s characters do of their sexual tendencies.

At the same time, sexuality is one of the aspects of life that people are not allowed to be agnostic about - everyone has to pick at least one label. Unlike religion, people are not allowed to say that they don’t want to play the game. After all, people are quantized, so love must be quantum.

And of course it matters, because we as a society have declared that it matters. Even though I am biologically female and have a boyfriend, the exact way I identify has an impact on employment, risk of suicide, government census data, friend group, physical health, mental health, relationship with family, and more.

So to complete the process of coming out, without the option of sexual agnosticism, I find myself reaching for a corruption the Catholic apologetic for the question of salvation:

Am I gay? Straight? Bi? Pan? Ace? Something else?

Yes, of course I am.

No, I am continually searching.

I hope so. I really do.

Psychosomatic

One of my favorite words is:

Psychosomatic

It tastes like a sour pop rocks milkshake, all sharp corners meshed with silky fricatives.

“Psychosomatic” literally breaks down to “mind sensation (adjective form)”. In more words, it describes a physical feeling that your brain makes you feel, often in response to stress or habitual triggers.

For example, there’s a big presentation and you really don’t want to do it, so you fantasize about getting sick. Then your stomach actually starts hurting. There’s no physical reason for it, but the pain and discomfort is there nonetheless - that’s a psychosomatic stomachache.

Or if every time you go past a certain corner, you stub your toe - but today you didn’t, and somehow your toe still pangs. That’s a psychosomatic stubbed toe - your brain had all the pain juices ready and by golly all that preparation wasn’t going to go to waste.

The sensation is real, but the stimulus may not be. That doesn’t mean the pain is fake. 

Amanda F'ing Palmer and Neil Gaiman

Amanda Palmer is the indie rocker’s indie rocker - a couch surfing, ninja show performing, almost entirely fan-funded punk with undeniable eye brows and an undefinable musical style that ranges from Radiohead on a ukulele to Muppet tunes over near screamo. She may not be entirely well known, but to those who know her, she is known well. Outside of her rabid fan-base, she’s known best for two things:

1. She had the largest music Kickstarter campaign of all time, and

2. She’s got a theoretically open marriage with author Neil Gaiman.

Neil Gaiman, on the other hand, is an award-winning (mostly) mainstream author with credits across the entire spectrum of written and visual media. While Amanda Palmer is the cocaine, Gaiman is the ecstasy.

I discovered Amanda Palmer through her TED talk “The Art of Asking.” It’s about the shifts taking place in the music industry in the wake of her Kickstarter success and how people in do great things for each other when they connect. The TLDR is that people want to be part of a community, and will do things voluntarily to support their communities if asked - and that means that artists don’t necessarily need record labels and publishing companies to become successful if they can grow and utilize communities around themselves.

Personally, “community” is something I struggle with. Even when I am undeniably at the center of a group of people, I tend to feel like I am on the outside. I am not Palmer’s White Bride, making instant connections with everyone who walks past, nor am I Neil Gaiman, whose work built its own fan community. Even when I am an integral part of some machine, I still feel like some individual spring - full of potential but kind of useless on my own, and unable to find the right nut to connect myself to the larger system.

I recently listened to Amanda Palmer’s audio-book, built off the TED talk and also titled The Art of Asking. It’s one of the best uses of audio-book as a medium, incorporating song fragments and guest voices at thematically appropriate moments. It’s part memoir, part self-help book, tracing Amanda Palmer’s life from when she finished school to her marriage while providing guidance on how to build a community and keep yourself engaged.

Her book led me back to Neil Gaiman, starting with Stories, an anthology he edited which I will forever associate with my cross country trip from Florida to California, and later to his books. Gaiman is an exceptional storyteller, both in the writing and in the actual telling of his stories. Even his nonfiction sounds like some magical romp through worlds similar to, but not quite like our own.

And that lead me to a realization - I have, with few exceptions, stopped reading stories. I made a rule for myself that any book I read electronically had to be non-fiction, and when the whole world is there at my fingertips, there’s not as much motivation to get up and go to the library or the bookstore. I think that has made any mental/emotional health. Gaiman quotes Einstein in one of his lectures: “If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales.” I have been denying myself imagination.

So what do I learn from Amanda Palmer and Neil Gaiman?

1. Build community and ask for help, at the same time if possible.

2. Know where your core community is - the reason why their marriage works is that they know their primary “partner” is their fans.

3. Don’t let people put you in a box. Amanda Palmer is not just extreme cabaret, Gaiman is not just a comic book writer.

4. Read fairy tales and fiction. Allow yourself to escape the confines of your own consciousness every  once in a while.

5. Imagine your partner’s death. If possible, meet that way.

6. Art, in whatever form it takes, is important and it brings people together. 

A Pointless Thing that Matters

If you are in any way connected to Internet culture, you have probably heard of the massive subscriber race for the  number one spot on YouTube between PewDiePie and T-Series that has been going on for the last few months. It's even got its own Wikipedia page and was featured on ESPN at the latest Super Bowl.

If you have no clue what's going on, the short version is this: T-Series, an Indian record company/ media conglomerate, was predicted to pass PewDiePie, a comic Swedish expat named Felix Kjelberg, in subscriber count in the fall of 2018, which spurred a massive call-to-arms to keep PewDiePie the most subscribed channel on YouTube. Since then, there has been a massive push for subscribers from a variety of people on and off YouTube to keep PewDiePie on top, while T-Series' numbers have grown commensurately. At the time of this writing, the official counts put the sub counts of each channel at over 1% of the world's population.

In the grand scheme of things, this is largely pointless. India, where T-series is based, is a BRIC country with an emerging market with more people coming online every day, looking for their favorite music videos. They will eventually surpass PewDiePie, whose  mostly first-world English speaking audience is pretty much saturated, especially after the latest massive subscriber push.

At the same time, it isn't pointless. At the surface, this conflict provides entertainment to millions of people on both sides. Is it manufactured beef? Maybe, but the burger still tastes good.  Also, millions of eyeballs equals big advertising dollars through pop-up ads, merch, and sponsorships.

Going deeper, choosing a side and fighting for it gives some people a much needed sense of belonging. It gives people a common goal to fight for. There have been and will continue to be thousands  of spin-off creations based on this conflict. At r/PewDiePieSubmissions, a common language of memes and quotes has emerged, linking people from all over the world towards the goal of increasing that sub gap. Outside of the main goal, it provides a platform for people to help people.

At its heart, this is a battle for the soul of the Internet. While PewDiePie has been called everything from a Nazi to the Clown Prince of YouTube to Emperor of the Internet, he is the personification of what the human beings on YouTube want YouTube to be - one guy making cool stuff that could never have a chance on network television.* T-Series, on the other hand, is representative of the many corporate entities who use YouTube only to re-upload stuff they already sold somewhere else for a little extra ad revenue.

YouTube is one of the last bastions of the independent creator. Instagram is dominated by models, Twitter and Snapchat by celebrities, Reddit and Facebook by advertisers. The point of this pointless battle is to prove that ordinary people still have agency and power in the Internet sphere, that the Web is still for the people, by the people, and of the people, rather than in service to either our lord and savior Google or the smattering of other massive legacy media companies that continue to encroach on online spaces. These large companies are slowly realizing that billions of eyeballs are interested in short-form multimedia and, like a mold consuming an orange, are visibly encroaching on what most people still want to see as a user-controlled platform.

What PewDiePie represents is an experience minus the levels of abstraction that come from media produced by larger companies**. It's been proven over the years that, while people enjoy highly scripted, choreographed programs, what people really want is reality. What YouTube promises is that a dude with a camera can share his life with millions without passing through the filters of producers, executives, censors, special effects artists, hair and makeup people, a studio audience, and a legal team.

It comes down to this: I want the Internet to be for human beings at both the creator and the consumer end. I'm already being manipulated by thousands of advertisements and hundreds of algorithms every day, and I want to know that at at least one point in the process, a human being did something with an intention that was not to sell me something. 

So join the Nine-year-old Army. Become a Bro. Subscribe to PewDiePie. And push back the tsunami of de facto corporatocracy for a little longer. Because it doesn't really matter - but the principle of the thing does.



*While the channel started as just one guy, at this point, there are at least 5 people that I know of working on the channel on a consistent basis  - Felix, his girlfriend, two editors, and an agent/manager.
**This lack of abstraction is part of what leads to individual creators (on podcasts, Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube) getting some of the highest ad rates per thousand eyeballs (CPM) and some of the highest sale conversion rates as compared to "traditional" media.

A Completely Qualified Opinion on Fyre and Start-ups in General

As a person who has been on the periphery of the start up scene and has read a lot of books on start-ups, the tech bubble and 2008 financial bubble, and actually building stuff, I feel extremely qualified to have my own opinion on the state of the start-up sector of the economy and how massively it is screwed up.

I just watched a documentary on the failed Fyre Festival - a 2017 failed music festival turned Ponzi scheme that serves as an indictment of millennials/start-ups/Instagram culture/gay dudes/(insert your favorite punching bag here). This event is the epitome of everything wrong with the venture/start-up world and shows how badly things can go wrong when passionate people get a lot of money together without a lot of due diligence.

Let's back up a bit: what is a "start-up" and how does it differ from a traditional "small business"?

A traditional small business is generally funded by the founder, loans, or family and friends. They tend to be slow to scale due to price, location, materials, audience, or something other limiting factor. After the loans are paid off, they exist to profit the owner and the community.  

In general, start-ups are small "lean" organizations less than five years old looking to scale massively in a short amount of time. They are generally funded by venture capital and/or angel investors with the goal of either (a) getting bought by a bigger company (e.g. Instagram) or (b) going public by getting an Initial Public Offering of stock (an IPO)  (e.g. Facebook) in a relatively short period of time in order to recoup the initial investments. 

Start-ups are extremely risky investments, but carry the possibility of some of the highest possible return on investment. For every Facebook where the initial stock options turn into millions, there are hundreds of Pets.com's that go completely bust. There's also a sort of panache that comes with being able to say that you were there at the beginning. Because of the massive potential ROI and the chance to be the next Mark Cuban, there is a lot of money flowing into these kind of ventures, which is great because it allows a lot of people to try a lot of crazy things.

From my own experience and not-insubstantial research, the main problem with the current approach to start-up investment is that, despite the experience of the Dot-Com Bubble and thousands of catastrophically failed ventures, the main criterion for what gets funded is how well the founders can pitch. Not money, not the idea, not the actual skills of the people working on it, but how well the person talking can sell the idea.

I participated in a Start-Up Weekend at the U of A, which led to the creation of Athlima, the app that connects you to local pick-up games, with three other people who had no idea what to do at the beginning of the weekend. We had the best pitch that weekend, which led to thousands of dollars of resources being thrown at people with no product and no experience at building a product beyond the thirty minutes it took to build a wire-frame of the app. Some people at that weekend had actual products and services that they were looking to grow. 

But we talked the prettiest and could BS the answers to all the questions we were asked, so we got access to the resources.

We broke up a few months later.

Over the course of that weekend and the accelerator course we went through afterward, we were told explicitly that having a product doesn't matter, to make up the financials, and to fudge our market research to make it look better. This was all from the supposedly experienced start-up owners/sellers and venture capitalists (VCs) that were brought in as guest speakers. If that is the attitude in a backwater like Tucson, then it is just as bad in Silicon Valley, if not worse. (We were also told not to pay attention to anything that got funded in California because the VCs there will fund anything).

 Fyre is an example of what happens when the system inevitably breaks. The founder had already founded one obviously quickly failing business  (a sort of credit card club) and was trying to break into a field that he knew very little about. He was also explicit about being a high roller. This guy was handed millions when the slightest bit of due diligence into what he was trying to do would have shown that he could not follow up on what he promised - you can't turn an island with almost no infrastructure into a glamping resort in three months, let alone have a Coachella-like concert there. 

And yet, because he was a passionate salesman with a fantastic marketing team, people literally threw money at him. 

And because he had no product, Fyre festival turned into the latest iteration of a Ponzi scheme - taking from Peter (festival goers) to pay Paul (loans and investors) -  which, along with the founder's subsequent fraudulent venture, led to lawsuits and jail.

Because of the promise of the "next big thing", there is still a lot of money floating around in the start-up scene. I don't think it's enough to burst another bubble, but the precedent for getting massively rich off just one idea has been set and given everyone permission to dream. Without grounding in the real world, kids will keep getting stupidly rich then stupidly poor when they figure out that actually running a business is a lot different than selling it. 

How does this change? 

Currently, when someone funds a start-up, they often insist on putting themselves or a representative on their board. This is great when the person with the money is funding a limited number of ventures, but falls apart at scale - when someone funds hundreds of start-ups in various stages of development, it is impossible to give the guidance and oversight that each needs. 

Due diligence in determining the background of the founders, their financials, and market demand is essential. Also, some kind of proof of concept should be necessary. VCs should Pawn Star it and call in an expert to verify that the start-up actually knows what they are doing.

Overall, with companies like Google and Facebook, and people like Peter Thiel and Kevin O'Leary looking for somewhere to spend their money, there will still be money available for crazy ideas, even with a little more accountability. That said, all parties would do well to remember that at the end of the line, the consumer is a real person with real problems and real needs who needs more than just a good idea to solve them. 

All the money in the world is not going to change that.

*Some books I've read: Zero to One, Peter Thiel; The Upstarts, Brad Stone; The Four, Scott Galloway; The Circle, Dave Eggers (fiction); Start with Why, Simon Sinek, Too Big to Fail, by Andrew Sorkin; and all the Michael Lewis books  

My Brain is a Computer

My brain is different than most people's brains.

It probably looks like the same double-fist sized lump of energized chemical-filled meat that most humans have. However, there are a few differences between my brain and other people's brains. Some of these differences I consciously induced, while others just kinda happened. I'm not trying to brag, or say that I am better than anyone else, but stating some things that I have observed.

For example, it feels like a lot of the time, my brain is running on a dual processor while other people are running on a single processor. This allows me, for instance, to answer a question in class a split second before everyone else because my brain processes the question and the answer simultaneously, while the rest of the class processes the question and answer sequentially. I think it leads to my wit and quick responses in conversations I am engaged in or have prepared for, and makes me seem a lot smarter.

When not otherwise engaged, running a dual processor brain allows for constant meta-commentary. Processor one runs normal, everyday existence and thought, while processor two runs narration and asks questions. I consciously tried to teach my brain to be Socratic -  ask and answer questions, and puzzle things out* -  which also makes me seem smart. It creates the problem that processor two is constantly throwing ERRs, mostly in the form of "WHY?" That causes processor one, running regular function,  to shut down while it tries to escape the loop that "I don't know" creates.*

The other main problem is that processor two is easily bored. It really likes solving problems and chewing on issues, and when there's nothing to chew on, it chews on me. It finds all the things I'm doing "wrong" and calls them out, along with all the things I "should" be doing or thinking about. At the same time, processor one is trying to reason with it and convince it to step back, relax, just do the things I need to do, while reminding it that I am okay, alive, and breathing.  Therapy has helped redirect these self-sustaining, energy-sucking loops, but not as much as I would have hoped.   

These dual processors, along with a massive and active RAM, allow me to seem smart.

The flip side of seeming smart is clinically diagnosed moderate-to-high anxiety and mild-to-moderate depression.* The only thing that I've found to shut my brain up when it's not in processor power-intensive use is other people's voices, usually telling stories, most often in the form of audiobooks, podcasts, and TV shows. There's a kind of mid-baritone range voice that works extremely well (e.g. CGP Grey, Roman Mars, Cecil Baldwin, James Marsters). I've tried medication - rather than mitigating processor two (the meta-processor), it either slightly slows it down, robbing me of my edge, or slows down processor one (the one that gets things done and talks me off the cliff), when it has any effect at all. My doctors say it helps, so I've reluctantly kept at it.

I'm reluctant to let go because, without my brain, I don't know who I am. I like the weird quirks it has when its not being self destructive. My brain is hungry, curious, sticky, observant, and vastly more complicated than it used to be, which are not all bad things. When the bugs don't crash the system, they're fantastic features that let me solve problems creatively and quickly. 

I still have to find the right user's manual to make it all run nicely together. I doubt I ever will.

How I'm expected to network and interface with other systems when I haven't figured out how to operate my own, I'll never know.



*This was largely inspired by Sherlock Holmes and a Dan Brown book where one of the characters describes a "Buddhist" precept that everyone already knows everything, they just need to ask the right questions. I'm not sure if that's real or not, but it's an interesting idea that's stuck with me way longer than it had any right to.

*Therapy has helped some with breaking these loops.

*Although, if you really want to get into it, I check off a lot of boxes for ADD, OCD, general  paranoia, bipolar disorder, and even (if you stretch the checklists in the DSM5 a little) schizophrenia, psychopathy, and autism. I think I'll stick with my current diagnosis as it's one of a few you can even attempt to do anything about. Psychiatry is still really murky, but we do the best with what we got.

Random Thoughts...

On my current status: I just finished up my internship with Imagineering and have gone strait back to school - I'm now at Northern Arizona  University.

On finishing up at Imagineering: I left roughly six months short of the opening of the project, which is kind of a bummer. People really really like me there - I'm seen as a hard worker who is smart and observant, occasionally acerbic and witty. I was part of a system there, and I think they are going to miss me. While I might not have been 100% "necessary", I  did a lot of cleaning up around the edges and catching little things falling through cracks. I will miss my coworkers, and they will remember me, so... mission accomplished, I guess.

On Flagstaff: The second day I was in Flagstaff, it snowed. People always comment on the weather, and while, yes, mountainous highland is definitely different than southern desert in Tucson, the culture is so much different. The one word that I could use to describe Flagstaff: CRUNCHY. You can pick your definition and it still applies - plenty of hippies of various shades, literal snowpack on the ground, backpacker treehuggers, plenty of granola - it's all here.

On not being in Tucson: One thing I noticed in Flagstaff as opposed to Tucson (other than the lack of dust, the sandstone aesthetic, actual trees, etc.) is that there are way fewer beautiful people here. The University of Arizona prides itself and indirectly markets itself on its hot dudes and coeds - everyone (except for the mandatory diversity "student") has perfect  curls, defined muscles, and a "natural" tan. In reality, there are also an abundance of people who look really good. Tucson is a really self-conscious town that is obsessed with trying to prove that its not just a place with a good looking basketball team - everywhere else the cameras see is overly pretty as well. It's so nice to be in a place where everyone's hair is messed up and lazy hoodies are the norm.

On Construction Management: I lucked into a great program. It's really hands on, and is more concerned with the bigger picture of how things work together than the nitty gritty of whether a one-inch section of a steel beam will fail. (I know it's all important, I just can't bring myself to care). Sustainability and Lean are huge focuses, which is lucky because I'm interested in that too. I'm just surprised at how much I already know. Everyone in the program seems really close knit (which is fine, I'm fine, it's all fine). There's a lot of challenge and a lot of learning opportunity to look forward to.

On snow: As long as it's not precipitating, snow is fun. Every step feels like crunching through some particularly resistant fall leaves. Creating a snowball feels like sculpting beauty from chaos (or at least an ugly sphere from some white stuff). It's cold, but it's not unbearable, and I can't complain too much yet.