Sym-pa-thy (n) - The fact or power of sharing the feelings of another

What did you expect?

            It’s not that I don’t want to write about political issues; I can’t write about political issues.  I am too passionate and I have too much respect for the level of discourse political talk actually deserves to throw my anxiety-ridden hat in the ring.  But I do have a million thoughts about how we live together and how we interact with each other socially.  I believe that understanding each other socially, by that I mean our true motivations and feelings, is the best way to iron out the differences that will always be there.

            The girls kidnapped in Nigeria by extremist monster assholes brought me here.  It is not the event itself, but the reaction to it.  There was a conservative backlash, not against the event, but how they perceived the liberal left reacted to this ongoing tragedy.  People like Limbaugh sneered at the left for caring or participating in a Twitter campaign; they believed liberals did this to make themselves feel better. He is so far removed from humanity he doesn’t even understand the concept of sympathy.  They actually discounted the natural human instinct to sympathize, even in a situation where young girls were in serious danger. Then I remembered: sympathy (and empathy) are difficult emotions that are obscured by a lot of other, darker emotions. 

            Sympathy is an expression of an emotion for someone else.  That is the most basic definition I could find.  It is the “someone else” that gets in the way for a lot of people.  Maybe they don’t feel anyone has sympathy for them, maybe they skipped that part of the Bible where Jesus said…everything he said.  My theory is, and it is hardly new, that sympathy actually interferes with the belief system they have constructed around them.  Sympathy interferes with manifest destiny and rugged individualism.  It truly asks a person to step outside of their bubble.  Some people are just too scared to do so.

            I have always tried to be sympathetic, even in the face of resistance and sometimes, poor logic on my part.  I’m not trying to make myself out to be a saint, because my sympathy has limits, but I guess I have been self-aware of this emotion since I was very young.  Here’s an example.  I was about 19 and it was around midnight at my mom’s apartment in a crappy part of town.  I woman knocked on the door; she was in tears.  She said her boyfriend kicked her out of her house and she needed money for a cab ride.  She had a baby with her.  I was leaving for a road trip the next morning with a friend of mine, and I was really fucking poor.  I had a twenty dollar bill.  I gave it to her.

            After this, I didn’t have much money for the trip, which kinda sucked.  I told all my friends about the story; because I’m a talker, and I could not believe how much shit I got for giving that woman some money.  I was a sucker, she was lying, why would I give my only $20 to a stranger.  I never felt bad about it; not for a minute.  Still don’t.  I don’t give a shit about the money, and I don’t care if she ripped me off.  The odds were most likely that she wasn’t lying, and I helped somebody on a shitty night.  Maybe I helped, maybe I didn’t. I tried. What did I lose?  Twenty stupid dollars.

            The point is: I want to engage in sympathy.  I don’t want to second-guess every human being that crosses my path and assume they are up to something.  I don’t want to walk through life like that.  I know that I will be lied to sometimes, but I want to live like this.  It is better.  Those who screw me over have to live tiny, miserable lives.  Let them keep the $20.

            One does not need a stake in the situation to have sympathy.  That is the point.  Have you noticed how many times a conservative figure will change their opinion on an issue as soon as it affects them?  The anti-gay legislator will discover his son is gay and all of a sudden he is accepting of others.  A woman will have a baby and suddenly be in support of healthcare or schools. Why does that happen?  They are emotionally stunted, and cannot extend their feeling beyond their circle.  Someone has to reach in and touch them and show that pain that affects others is still pain.

            Also, this came to me recently.  There is a large chunk of this country that complains about what comes out of Hollywood.  It’s a propaganda machine, they are obviously left-leaning, they do not share tradition values, etc.  What stood out to me is it is a large chunk of this country.  It’s true, we are split pretty much down the middle ideologically, and it seems odd to me that the money grubbing whores of the big movie studios would ignore a market of 150 million people right in their own backyard.  Either half the country is lying and they are just fine with the movies that come out, or there has to be a reason why there just really aren’t any conservative-minded movies.

            I think I know the answer.  You can’t tell stories without sympathy or empathy.  It can’t be done.  The biggest complaint anyone has about a movie, no matter the genre, is that they didn’t give a crap about the characters.  You just can’t connect to a character if the story if sympathy is absent.  You have to care what happens to Harry Potter.  You have to care about the bunch of twenty-somethings in the cabin about to be attacked by a slasher in a dumb mask.  People without sympathy don’t write movies.  Why would they?  It is a sweeping generalization to be sure, and I’m sure I glossed over a few stand-outs, but I bet there is something to it.

            I’ve heard that education is the key to end this volatile, antagonistic streak we have in our culture.  I agree, but I think sympathy might be the way to get us there.  It is okay to care about someone who is not your responsibility.  It is a feeling, it is prayer, it is meditation, it is support.  Maybe you don’t have any skin in the game, and you actually won’t be doing anything to help, but the feeling counts for something.  Those of us with the backbone and strength to actually do something start those journeys with feelings of sympathy.  For those of you who can’t or won’t at least sympathize with your fellow man, I feel really bad for you.  I sympathize.

My Anxiety Files - There's A Reason The Daily Show Is My News Source

The news is crazy.  But I acknowledge it.

I am an adult.  I am married and I have children in high school and beyond.  I am a reader.  I have multiple interests and I usually know what is going on.  I am not afraid to know things; I am not afraid of the world.  But I almost never watch the news.  It has been a theme in the last ten years or so to reject cable news especially, simply under the blanket that it is all “a bummer” or it is commercialized, or sensationalized.  That could all be true.  For some of us, conflict and agitation are difficult to process, even when the subject is far removed from our own scopes of interest.  The news can affect you and bring you down.  The cold, hard facts of a reliable news source can alter your view of the world around you.  That is why I abstain. Or, I just watch The Daily Show.

You will hear that “the news is depressing”.  That is just life.  News reports the tragedies and problems because the make a story.  They make a story because they are unusual.  It is that simple logic problem that most people cannot reconcile.  If the world was as truly as fucked up as you think it is (by watching the news), the news would not air or write about those stories in the first place.  It is the fact that these depressing stories are unusual that makes them newsworthy.  If you understand that, then the world is not as bad off as the narrow window of the news conveys.  But people don’t want to think that.  Thinking the world is a giant toilet being flushed is a great excuse not to do anything about it.

No, my problem with the news is chemical.  I can handle the news of war and train crashes. I know that multiple murders happen every day, not just the ones Nancy Grace talks about.  Intellectually, I have reasoned this through over the years.  There are tragedies out there.  Be thankful.  Just because it happened there does not mean it will happen here.  My brain accepts it.  Well, except the part of my brain that controls my anxiety.  With anxiety, the news can feel real.  I can feel similar feelings as someone being yelled at a roundtable, or someone on the ground in war-torn Somalia. I have an unbridled sense of empathy, which is nice to a friend in need but really sucks during political unrest.  For my anxiety, presidential debates and MSNBC interviews and a kidnapped teenager all hit me the same.  Even medicated, sometimes it is too much to bear.

The nice part is, these things really do not concern me or my life.  I am a person who believes were should stay as informed as possible.  I do.  But most of us have a ton of shit on our respective plates. It is respectful to the rest of the country and the world to know what is happening.  But it is not necessary.  The truth is, we can get caught up with two or three minutes per week on all the pertinent stories.  Analysis, discussion and up to the minute reports are all extraneous.  My brain rejects them.  When it is time to vote, I check in.  When there is an important law on the table, I check in.  The rest is pageantry, and for that I go to Jon Stewart.

Why?  I know it is not serious news.  I know Jon is a comedian on a comedy network.   Here’s why:  The four minutes of solid information on each episode is both the exact amount I want in a sitting, and also it is the truth.  Sorry conservatives, but the truth has a liberal bent.  Without the truth, the jokes would not work.  There has to be truth to make satire work, and that is why the show can be both informative and funny.  I am not ashamed to admit that this is my news source (outside of the internet, of course)  I know there is research that shows Daily Show and Colbert Report audiences are the most knowledgeable.  That does not surprise or concern me.  My anxiety has made a deal with my intellect.  If I want to be informed without panic, I have to get my news with a side of poop jokes.

Luke Skywalker Never Had to Sit Through an HR Orientation

I can’t believe I’ve only accrued 6 vacation days…!

           I have a thesis that started about twenty years ago.  By thesis, I mean an idea in my head that I have used a few times to write stuff, talk about on a podcast, and make comedy bits.  In my quest to observe why people like the things they like, and how communal these disparate entertainment experiences may actually be, I hit upon one common thread that only appeared to me when I became an adult.  To be more specific, it is when I became an adult and had to work at a bunch of crappy jobs.  I don’t want to weigh down this light essay with the details, but to encapsulate in a few words; I was not sufficiently wired to handle the responsibilities of a real career.  However, due to my responsibilities as a husband and father I had to find a way to work and make some money. What does this have to do with TV and movies?  Gimme a damn second.

            If you take a step back and look at the most popular pieces of fiction in the last thirty years or so, what do we have?  Superhero stuff, for sure.  Harry Potter.  Lord of the Rings movies, Star Wars franchise, Avatar, Twilight, Hunger Games, not to mention a pile of kids’ adventure and fantasy stuff I don’t want to list. Most of the intelligent sociologists would say it is a sign that we need an escape.  These are the stories of Luke Skywalker and Katniss Everdeen, etc. We want to feel a sense of drama in out otherwise boring lives.  I buy that.  But I take it a step further.  Think of the characters in most of these stories.  With the exception of cops involved, most of the characters have no jobs.  What does Luke Skywalker do for a living?  Did Katniss ever have to punch a clock?  Bruce Wayne is a billionaire, so he’s got plenty of time on his hands for nighttime hobbies.  What are the occupations of hobbits, and the pretty vampires, and bands of people running from a zombie apocalypse, and a bunch of survivors of Oceanic Flight 815 stuck on a crazy island?  Nothing.  They are free.  They may be in danger, they may be hurt, they may even die, but one thing they will not have to do is fill out a W-9 and take shit from a grumpy boss with bad bagel breath.

            I always believed the obsession with the hilariously non-disastrous Y2K events of 1999 to 2000 were less about computer glitches and more about the opportunity to save canned goods.  People prepared en masse for an apocalypse that never happened, and there seemed to be a little be of a letdown; a collective sigh when it amounted to nothing and January, 1^st 2000 was just a normal day.  I propose that more than a few of us, at least secretly, wanted the modern world to crash.  It would be an extended relief from the grind. Then, we could all go camping and live on the frontier and hunt and fish for our food and ignore everyday chores.  Hell, it’s a dangerous existence, but I don’t have to show up at the office on Monday!  You can shove your quality review paperwork straight up your bunghole, Mark!  But it didn’t happen that way.  All we were left with were Chunky Soups and that same old grind.  At least we still have fiction.

            We don’t just like these stories because we need an escape.  We’ve always needed an escape.  That’s as old as Greek theater.  We like these particular stories because we, for the most part, hate our jobs.  I know I hated all my jobs until about a year ago.  Not many adults would choose to go back to high school and go through that all over again.  But what if it was Hogwarts instead?  You learn how to use a wand and you don’t have to deal with traffic and the power bill.  Yoda had no job.  He was one with the force.  He never needed to endorse a check or go to traffic court.  Ever. 

            Firefly is another great example.  Malcolm and his crew were technically criminals.  They were on the run and on the radar of the space government, or whatever.  They sometimes were low on food and space-credits, but they did not have to answer to HR about the new dress code updates.  It’s not adventure we crave as much as freedom.  We have lost something very dear to us as humans and we have replaced it with piles of stuff we have to pay for. Here is where I could go on a 3,000 word manifesto on deconstructing a consumer society, but that would get even less readers than time travel essays.

            If you ever saw the less-than-par movie Wanted with James McAvoy, you may remember the opening ten minutes.  McAvoy is an office drone who will be plucked from his humdrum life into a world of assassins and Angelina Jolie.  He was a put-upon dork with a frightening hell-beast of a boss and his only work buddy was banging his girlfriend.  I thought that was cartoonishly over the top and completely unnecessary.  It would have been better if he was just a drone like hundreds of thousands of others out there in the real world, reasonably content but bored, detached, a little sad and tired.  That life alone is enough to make an audience sympathetic for a main character; it’s their lives!  There’s no need to sweeten the pain with goofy office caricatures.

You could like your job and like these movies.  Sure.  Also, not all of these movies feature people without jobs.  Soldiers in Avatar, teachers in Harry Potter, Peter Parker is a photographer.  It’s not a perfect theory, but I believe it has some teeth.  Most of these adventures’ goals are outside of the system.  The major events happen above the law or in spite of it.  There are vigilantes or threats to the throne or agitators.  They are either destroying or rising above the system they are in.  Part of that reality is living without the constraints of working at Dunder Mifflin. It is not just the adrenaline rush of the adventure and impending peril that excite us; it is that we get to feel like what it is to live outside of the structure of normal society.   For a lot of us, that means ditching our shitty jobs.

I Will Never Tire Of These Three Things – Part 2

Coffee. I started drinking coffee when I was 23.  My cousin was already an avid drinker, and I first had some to stay awake one night whilst bullshitting.  It was not long before my wife and I had some every morning, and began to get snooty about the type of coffee we bought.  I always say it is like salsa and spicy foods.  Once you go past a threshold, you can’t go back.  If you are used to hot salsa, mild tastes like ketchup.  Once you sip high-end coffee, Folgers and Maxwell house are like drinking dirty dishwater. 

There is no real cache with coffee drinking.  In fact, I had to switch to decaf four years ago and I don’t even get the caffeine buzz anymore.  Coffee is a hot drink.  It is like tea.  You can drink coffee on the go in a metallic cylinder, but it is best when you can take your time and savor it. It is bitter and warm, smooth and comforting.  You have to be patient with it.  It wants you to slow down, even though for a lot of people it does the opposite. It demands a little attention, and I have always liked that.  There is a ritual to making a cup for yourself.  It is not as quick and convenient as a twist-top or cracking open a can.  It also gives you incredibly horrific breath.

My drums. There is something in my blood that draws me to the drums.  There is a strain of that gene that permeates my family; it’s just part of my DNA.  I wanted my own drums since I was 8 years old.  I would not get drums until I was 29.  I had a big check from a new job, and all the bills were paid.  I promised myself I would have them in my garage one day; and I owed it to that little kid who watched everybody else play guitars and saxophones.  Buying them was a little like plowing over my corn to make a baseball field for some people, but the more years that pass, the more I believe it was a damn good move.  These days, I still pretty much suck, but I have them in my garage every time the mood strikes me.  I’ve recorded music, jammed a few times and I am close to understanding my inherent need to capture the almighty groove. The drums are dramatic.  They can also be an action movie. I always feel like I’m working on something special, even if it’s the same beat for the last 10 years. I may not progress past Meg White level of skill, but they still bring me joy like nothing else.

The smell of seasons changing. My mother and I search for this smell every fall.  We were robbed of its awesomeness in 25 years of living in Florida.  Everyone knows that fall colors explode bringing in the coziest and most baked-good infested time of year.  If you haven’t experienced it first hand, you certainly have gazed at the endless available wallpapers for your desktop.  But we want the smell.  That scent of, for lack or a better word, the death of summertime.  The falling leaves mixed with the crisp air create a sweetness that words cannot possible come close to describing.  It is buried in the recesses of our monkey brains that this is a signal that fall is coming, and winter is on its way. This smell, blended with a distant wood fire or the odors of fresh baked bread are the key ingredients to the feeling of home.  Home as a concept; like if comfort itself were an actual, tangible thing. 

In Oregon, we were also reacquainted with the smell of spring.  This is a much different scent and equally opposite reaction. Nature tells the flowers to wake up and the birds and bees to get busy.  To us humans, there is a feeling of taking action.  We want to get out there and get things done.  Even if its cleaning and gardening and trips to the Farmer’s Market, there is a boost of energy that cannot be ignored.  It is a nice bonus and a welcome companion to that golden smell of autumn.

Accounting For Taste, or Searching For Surprise, or Do You Like Stuff?

Nothing implied.  I just miss old Simpsons episodes.

One of the several themes I write about, which has nothing to do with travelling through time, is fandom and why people like what they like.  I have heard “to each his own” and “there is no accounting for taste” my entire life and I understand why these clichés exist.  They are there to keep us from punching each other in the face every other day.  But just like there are patterns to how we engage with each other at age six and the predictable tides of the world’s oceans are synched with the moon’s gravitational pull, I think there are patterns why we like what we like.  In fact, the more we love something, the tighter we adhere to these patterns.

We do love things for different reasons. But the reasons are not infinite.  I think it boils down to intellectual curiosity, nostalgia and tradition, and for lack of a better term, white noise.  White noise is the generic love for an art form or media, just for the sake of it being “on” or near you.  These are people who love “the radio” or play movies while they do the dishes.  They like something about it, but it is more for comfort or companionship.  The nostalgic are people who simply like the familiar.  It’s as easy to predict as tulips blooming in the spring.  There is a memory that is tickled or an underlying feeling that is stirred.  We usually don’t care about the quality of the art or media; we just like how it makes us feel. We feel young again, we feel inspired again. Then, there is intellectual curiosity.  This is the sharpest of all the bonds to the things we love.  It makes us get out there and seek new things.  It’s that sense that makes us compare and contrast and gets us in the most arguments.  It is the seeds of passion and nerdiness of any specific artistic pursuit.  But even this clinical view has an emotional undercurrent. It is the search for the new. It is the search for surprise.

Each one of these levels of commitment can apply to any form of art or media in your life.  You may only care for nostalgic music, but when it comes to books you are searching to be surprised by a plot or a character.  The next great story is around the corner somewhere.  And, maybe you watch TV to have on in the background.  Or you could be strictly a visual person who only aims to be surprised by 2-D art, and everything else is a bunch of white noise. 

Searching for a surprise sharpens as you get older.  You have experienced so much and if you are paying attention, you have seen the patterns and are waiting for something new to charge you. I love comedy.  I sought it out, and I sampled everything.  Some things don’t make me laugh.  They may very well be funny, but I have refined my tastes.  That thing you’re laughing at doesn’t make me laugh like it makes you laugh, because, to you comedy is white noise that is simply there to entertain you, and for me it has been an intellectual curiosity.  The same goes for music.  It’s not shocking that parents crap on their kids’ music.  If the parents merely love music because of a nostalgic connection, nothing their kids download will measure up. If music was an intellectual pursuit, parents have already essentially heard whatever the kids blast from their bedrooms.

This can apply to everything.  Art, music, entertainment, food, sports… scrapbooking.  Many times arguments could be settled by understanding that one person’s passion is another’s nostalgic daydream.  That thing I have sampled 10,000 times tastes a lot differently to me than it does to you. 

For the passionate, the common thread is limitations.  Colors, the canvas, twelve notes. Two hours or so of screen time.  The English language.  Twenty-nine possible plots.  A joke requires exactly one exaggeration.  It is a pursuit because the human mind has a limited set of tools for every pursuit.  You can only eat what’s edible.  There is a ton, but it is finite.  Now what do you do?  The mind and the palate take over and continue to search for a surprise.  For music lovers, the styles must evolve.  You have to add to your warehouse of knowledge because you’ve learned how blues songs follow the same patterns and punk and rap have a small range of beats.  There is classical and jazz and a world of unpredictable styles out there that will surprise you.

Of course there are combinations.  I have mostly an emotion connection to music, so I’m probably nostalgic for certain styles.  But within those styles, I have an intellectual curiosity for what will happen next.  I still want to be surprised.  The narrower the scope, the longer you have to wait between surprises.  (I guess the same could be said about me with time travel movies.)  Even within the white noise of radio, or the drone of network TV, something is bound to make you take notice and turn up the volume.

Point?  I have always had a toe in the pool of sociology.  That doesn’t mean I’ve read as much as I should, but I still have the intellectual curiosity to ponder how people are wired.  Every time you nail down what you think separates us into a chart full of categories, you end up discovering what makes us all the same.

My Anxiety Files - I Don't Want That In My Head

It's gonna get bleaker, Rick.

When you have anxiety, your brain isn’t always your friend.  The fear impulse is out of whack; the mind cannot differentiate between real fears and imagined ones, small irritations or major calamities.  Everything is DefCon 1.   It is also wired to look for impending doom.  It needs to feed itself, so it looks for things to be afraid of.  It is the foundation of worry.  It is also the reason why I have to still abstain from certain movies, TV shows and above all, documentaries.  Even though I have my anxiety mostly under control, there are sights and sounds and thoughts I can’t even let into my brain.  Those who do not relate to things are baffled when anxious people avoid specific media.  They think we are childish or ridiculous.  We are just not engaging; like an alcoholic might stay away from bars. We avoid specific pain.  We avoid the news. We are protecting ourselves.

I say this because I will never watch the movie Se7en again.  Nope.  Saw in the theater with my wife, haven’t seen it since.  I know people love it, and it was well done.  It features actors I enjoy, but the story and imagery are too much for my subconscious to process.  The same goes for the movie Ransom.  Not a great movie, but there are scenes in that film that will absolutely crush you if you are both a parent and have anxiety.  You can’t mess with kids.  You just can’t. Most of my anxieties as an adult revolve around my children, and anything that could happen to them.  I’m not a daily worrier, and I feel bad for those people.  I am one who tries to sidestep nightmare fodder. To hear the stories secondhand isn’t really enough.  But if I see the images I’m screwed. I walked out of Life Is Beautiful when the Nazis rolled in. I will never watch the dark serial killer horror movies and I will never, ever watch Funny Games. I know the entire plot of that movie and I still won’t see it.  Fuck that movie, and fuck the people who made it.

Sometimes, there are just scenes or episodes of an established series that take me by surprise.  I realize The Walking Dead is a superb show.  I’m not really into zombies, but I can tell a well-made show when I see it.  After a season, I had to bail. The darkness and the complete lack of hope just bum me out too much. There is too much senseless death and child endangerment.  I have learned enough to avoid those seeds from being planted.  Cop and detective shows have a lot of those scenes as well to further the plot.  I appreciate when they are constructed with a little class and tact.  The CSI-inspired picking and digging and scraping around human remains is so unbelievably unnecessary.  We get it.  A dead body. I don’t need shots of the entrails and vomit and chunks of brain. Just give us the report already, you disgusting assholes.

Amistad and Schindler’s List are permanent fixtures on the inners walls of my head.  Brutal scenes of inhumanity, etched like cave paintings that I will never be able to forget. They were great pieces of storytelling and deserve to be seen by everyone. Which brings me to 12 Years a Slave.  I am an American history guy.  This is an Oscar-winning film made by talented artists. I may never see it.  It pisses me off sometimes that I am like this.  I wish I had an iron constitution.  I wish I could take the good with the bad and process them for what they are and go about my life.  But it is not that way with anxiety.  I cannot give the bear a big slab of meat.  To see it would flame hatred inside me for racist dickheads and unnerve me to see humans tortured for two hours.  I mean no offense.  I just can’t do it.

I don’t need a life of musicals and Disney movies.  I have enjoyed a lot of dark shit.  I like thrillers and suspenseful movies that other anxiety-prone people can’t handle.  I just know the buttons that get pushed.  It is a bit of a handicap that luckily can be managed.  If I watch something intense, I always make sure I do it during the day.  Nighttime exacerbates the feeling of fear and daylight has a way of taking you out of it.  If I see something late, I always watch something afterward that is light-hearted.  Wartime atrocities are easily swept away with a couple episodes of Archer and Family Guy.

Tolerance In The Time Of Assholery

Just remember: What Would MCA Do?

I almost got into it again with someone on Facebook.  Explaining what that is seems a little unnecessary.  We all know what that means. Facebook is the place for ridiculous diatribes by those with time on their hands or little regard for the feelings of others.  I am guilty.  I have slipped a few times.  We all have let a little slip: even the most politically neutral of us will assume the rest of the internet is on board with an idle thought or observation.  Next thing you know there is a response thread that you never planned all the way down the page.  People are uptight these days.  It is where we are right now.

At least with Facebook there is some attempt at civility because you know the person making the comment.  Out there in the Wild West of the internet, all bets are off.  We have all seen disgusting comment threads.  You bite your tongue and remember that these are angry assholes that cannot and will not be reasoned with.  Oh, but they are so wrong about that thing!  I can set them straight!  No, you can’t.  It is a trap and it is a waste of your time on earth.  You cannot change people.   You cannot change people.  You cannot change people. 

 So what do you do?  We don’t really want to quit the internet.  There is so much out there that is perfectly fine and Facebook is becoming a way for old family and friends to stay connected.  That’s a cool thing.  So, it really is not the technology in this case.  It is the user.  It is them.  It is you and me. 

The golden rule is linked to every major religion and most minor ones, too.  It may be the purpose of religion itself.  Humanists latch onto it as well.  It is a rule because it is sometimes not instinctual to treat those as we would like to be treated.  Instinctually, or socially, we are wired to lash out or defend or object.  Some people more than others.  Whet I think we have to remember is that a portion of these same problems have existed for generations.  Inequality.  Money.  Science.  Years ago, there were plenty of spirited arguments, but life had to still go on.  People have to still interact and see each other and work with each other. We were just tolerant of each other in conversation, although we were much less tolerant in every other way possible.

Maybe it is the lack of connection we have with our neighbors.  Maybe it is less communal experiences; our tastes are now differentiated into interest groups.  We mostly interact with people who reflect our beliefs.  We watch the news that reinforces our opinion.  Even your taste in beer says something about you.  This may be impossible to fix, but none of this in an excuse to be intolerant.

Tolerance for the intolerant is the most difficult.  Some people think if you disagree with them it is being intolerant, so they miss the point entirely.  You can disagree without viciousness, rudeness and insult. 

Maybe it is tact.  We are all missing tact.  There is a lubricant that keeps societies from imploding, and among its ingredients is mutual respect and behavior, or tact.  Has ego overtaken our ability to respect our fellow man?  It is a waste of energy to assume you can truly change someone’s belief system even with facts on your side.  It’s also a waste of time to attempt to make another person believe in something you feel in your heart to be true, when they are completely different people with different backgrounds.  What is left?  Respect.  That is all we have.  When you strip away all of the cable news fluff and blame and ideas of how life should work, there is just us.  People.  Trying to get to the store, take the kids to school and make some money.  Respect and acknowledgement of another’s humanity based of the fact that we are human, too. 

There is always abstinence.  Just don’t engage.  Respectfully decline to ream that bigot a new one because you feel he is spreading hate.  What is more effective, a vicious argument or just ignoring the vitriol?  Do something else.  Read a book.  I try to remember this stuff all the time, but I have my moments.  I just keep in my mind that a dumb opinion doesn’t define me, just like it doesn’t define them.

The Secrets Behind Trivia Games

I'll take "Things I Learned 28 Years Ago" for $400, Alex...

I am better than average at trivia games.  That means I could probably beat you, but there are one or two people you know who could take me to school.  It is not a measurement of smarts; it is 95% memory and the ability to access memory.  The other 5% is a mixture of skills.  Those skills seem to be even rarer than trivia experts.  There are ways to get an edge in these games by analyzing the questions and playing the odds.  It sounds like math, but it really isn’t.  I suck at math.

Trivia has many interpretations. Not all the questions asked are from the same thought process. I would like to split them into three categories. There are general knowledge questions, true trivia, and shit almost no one knows.  General knowledge exists in the realm of Jeopardy! and Trivial Pursuit.  These are mostly questions from a base of knowledge you may have learned in school, or from cultural or newsworthy sources: State capitals, wine, Oscar winners, the human lungs, Ed Wood.  There is some measureable likelihood of you coming across general knowledge at some point in your life.  Whether or not you remember it is the key.  True trivia usually comes in the form of multiple choice questions.  How many pounds of cheese does the average American consume?  What is the average lifespan of a carpenter ant?  These are purely guessing games based on very little prior knowledge.  Only the researchers who discovered the answer are the ones likely to know the answer.

Then there is shit nobody knows.  In episode 2 of season 6, Homer Simpson honks his horn how many times in front of Springfield Elementary?  What was NBA great Charles Barkley’s shoe size? These are questions for extremists and nutballs.  They were never taught in school, and they are not from a framework of comprehension of anything anyone would remember, including Simpsons fans or basketball fans. 

I really only care about general knowledge.  I want to see if I remember or know things.  If I wanted to play a guessing game, I would play Deal or No Deal.

First rule of general knowledge is ‘either you know it, or you don’t’.  That’s the rule I use.  If I am playing a game with someone who obviously does not know the answer but is flummoxed with the possibility of being wrong, I always say:  “You know it or you don’t.  If you don’t, make a guess”.  That is all there truly is to playing trivia games.  However, there is a way to breaking down a question in a way that can either give you more confidence in your guess, or eliminate options that you mistakenly think have potential.

Here are few sample questions:

What is the capital of Canada?

This is a ‘you know it, or you don’t’.  There is no way to reason through it.  There are no tricks.  You could have it on the tip of your tongue, but no deliberation will get you there if you don’t already know it.  If I had no clue, I would pick the biggest city I knew in Canada and move on.  I would be wrong, but it would be an educated guess.  Ottawa is the capital.

What 1994 Oscar-nominated film featured Harvey Keitel as a character called “The Wolf”?

Here is a question with details to consider.  It was a movie in 1994, it was good enough to get nominated for an Oscar, and Harvey Keitel is in it.  But what if you had no idea it was Pulp Fiction?  Maybe you aren’t good with either dates, or names, or a mixture of both? You know some movies, you have a pretty good idea of who Harvey Keitel is, and you can at least place some of this knowledge in 1990’s. What you have to do is dissect the question.  You will now make an educated guess, but you can increase your chances if you guess from the correct pool of contenders.

Some people will immediately try to think of all the Oscar-nominated films they can, especially ones in the 1990’s.  They will narrow it down and try to reason what movie in their brain would have a character called The Wolf .  Waste of time.  There are hundreds of films in that pool.  Forget the detail that the film is Oscar-nominated.  That is only there to let you know that you’ve heard of the movie and it is a valid subject for a trivia question. 

What you want to do is think of movies featuring Harvey Keitel. Smaller pool.  He’s a veteran actor, but not a marquee name, so significant movies are very few.  If you can rattle off any in your head, I think Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, an maybe Bad Lieutenant would pop up.  Now, you guess which one of those films would be Oscar nominated and you have a better shot.  In fact, if you start thinking Keitel, it might bring you to Tarantino and it might jar your memory that he played The Wolf.

What is the largest US city named after a person?

This was an actual Final Jeopardy! question.  It might be the best example of the thought process.  There are two roads to go down:  Largest US cities or cities named after people.  Which one is the smallest pool?  Hell yeah, it’s largest US cities!  Every other city in this country is named after a person!  If you start whittling down the list of large US cities it won’t take long to get to the answer, Houston.  If you are darting around the map in your brain looking for cities named after people, you will run out of time or your head will explode.  Think about this:  They want you to figure out the answer, and they would not write a general knowledge question that is impossible to answer.

How many witches were burned at the Salem Witch Trials?

This as a Trivial Pursuit question from way back, but it also sounds like a classic trick question.  The answer is zero.  Where people will get tripped up is trying to gauge the severity of the Salem Witch Trials and estimate a high number, thinking that is what the question is all about.  This brings up the most important skill.  You have to know why they ask the question.  If the question has no concrete answer, like a state capital or the name of the 39^th president, then there is a reason why the sentence itself was constructed.  The factoid is significant in some way.  It likely has an extreme.  The reason this question was asked was there were no witches as such, so only innocent women were burned.  If the body count was not general knowledge, and it is not, then there is no reason to ask the question.

Keep this in mind: this also helps in sports questions.  The most popular sports figures are still known to non-sports fans.  Michael Jordan, Peyton Manning, Tom Brady, Wayne Gretzky, Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt.  If you know nothing about basketball and the question is “Who is the all-time leader in whatever…”  Jordan is a good guess.  These famous guys are the extremes in their respective sports, so it’s a decent guess.  Gretzky – hockey.  Phelps – swimming.  Bolt – track.  Baseball teams – Yankees.  Hockey Teams – Red Wings.  Football teams – Cowboys and Steelers. The best teams are famous because of their extremes.

This certainly won’t help you if you can’t remember anything, but I have a theory that people remember more than they let on.  My guess is they are just not sure.  It is just a game, and although there is supposed to be one answer, I think taking two seconds to analyze the question itself will help guide the arrow closer to the bullseye.

My Anxiety Files - The Ticking Clock

            To an outsider, observing someone with anxiety must be strange and frustrating.  It is difficult to explain what is happening inside, and since you don’t deal with the biological symptoms, you cannot imagine the explanation behind the behavior.  I guess that is the same with all kinds of conditions.  The truth is, those without the problem, those who can control fear and do not find their bodies when the fear response kicks in, have trouble empathizing.  There is no corresponding experience.

            My wife has watched me for twenty years deal with this crap.  She has no such issues; all of my behaviors are foreign to her.  I remember one day she was telling me about a day at work.  She is a chef, and one day at the restaurant the health inspector came in and was unusually thorough.  The business was always clean and my wife was mostly responsible for that fact.  She knew everything would be fine and they would pass, but she still had an unavoidable queasiness in the pit of her stomach.  This guy was making her nervous for no reason, and she couldn’t shake it until he was gone.  I told her; “That’s how I feel every day of my life.”

            Imagine that horrible feeling you have in traffic where an accident almost happens.  You have to jam on your brakes to keep from hitting someone, or the back of another car.  That jolt of adrenaline zaps you, like an emotional airbag, to keep you alert and ready for danger.  But you brake in time, and everybody goes on with their day.  Most people laugh it off or swear, maybe say “whew!” to themselves.  Just think of what that would be like if that jolt of adrenaline didn’t stop.  You still felt that fear and alertness for hours and hours, maybe even into the next day.  Think of what that would do to you if that happened all the time.  A person with anxiety doesn’t even need that bit of drama to feel panic.  Bills that are due, an interview, a meeting with a friend, an intense movie, waiting in line at the grocery store…almost anything can set someone off.  Even, and I am being completely honest, just writing about this is giving me a low dose of it right now.

It is chemical.  When I finally accepted this about four years ago, I went to a doctor.  I have high blood pressure.  It’s not because of cheeseburgers, it is an inherited trait.  If I went to the doctor when I was twenty I would have received the same diagnosis.  Anxiety, spurned by a rapid heart rate was able to feel upon itself.  No logical reasoning in my brain could get me to ‘calm down’ or ‘take it easy’.  There was a broken switch in my body.  I quit caffeine.  Why stoke the fire?  I paid more attention to exercise and what I was eating.  All of these things would help, but unfortunately I am tied to heart medication for the long haul.

Think of what that does to your heart in forty years’ time.  Anxiety causes all kinds of other maladies, even hair loss.  Also, think of what it can do to relationships and careers.  I got lucky with my wife, but that luck did not extend to any job I’ve ever had.  I never wanted any extra responsibility, even though I was often one of the more promising employees on staff.  I never could ask for more money and I am the worst job interviewer on the face of the earth.  Even though my anxiety is now under control, I spent a lifetime in fear and I have seriously underdeveloped social skills. 

This brings me to the background music of my life.  As it turns out, it is the background music for my family members as well.  My brother and I noted one day that our father is always in a hurry to get home from work.  No matter what was going on, my dad works his ass off as hard as possible but needs to get out that door fast. We suspected that it had something to do with beer, but now I think it is a little more complex.  I call it the ‘ticking clock’.  My parents, my brother and I all have anxiety problems.  There is a feeling inside of us, as integral as our own memories and personality traits, which makes us hurry.  I am constantly in a rush to do everything.  I feel it when I’m driving, I feel it when I’m eating, I feel it when I don’t have to be doing anything at the moment.  I feel it when I wash dishes or make dinner or go online for anything. Yes, I feel it right now.

The actual clock is of no consequence.  I know I have an appointment for my job at 10:00 this morning.  I’ve already figured out how long it will take to get there, and even if I’m a few minutes late (which I never am) it will be okay.  I’ll still get the job done and I will get paid.  It is 8:30 now, and I feel the tension.  There is no need for it, whatsoever.  It will not subside.  I used to think that if I just was busier than I would not have time to get anxious.  That has a little merit, but I usually end up ruining my time off with all the anxiety I didn’t get to during the week.

What are we hurrying for, exactly?  There is no logic tied to this; it is purely a biological impulse. Are we trying to hurry up and get through the day to accomplish something?  Time only goes one speed.  Am I trying to hurry through my life so I can make into my coffin quicker?  What the hell?

            I asked my daughter, who has some of this herself, to keep an eye on me.  If she sees me hurrying when there is no reason to, just tell me to slow down.  That is the only way out of this.  It is one reason I moved to Oregon.  The west coast simply moves at a slower pace.  I have to learn how to breathe and listen to myself when I need to chill out.  Take it easy.  Resist the urge to rush.  Slow the fuck down. I have to learn what calm is.  I have to accept that there are only so many things I can do.  I have to let go of the hurry or I will die early.  It is that simple.

            I learned this phrase while listening to a podcast.  It was a guy with anxiety who had this same issue and he adopted a phrase he learned from drill sergeant, of all people: “slow is smooth and smooth is fast”.  If you actually take your time with your tasks, being careful and avoiding the hurry impulse, you will accomplish them in less time with less mistakes and frustration. I have tried this and it works.  I actually use it as a mantra when I feel the clock ticking in my ears.  I said it aloud: Slow is smooth and smooth is fast. Some people learn this when they are ten years old.  The rest of us have anxiety.