Tag: personal

Introverts Defeat Geography

There is a tension that exists between introverts and the extroverts who love them. Extroverts feed off live, in-person human interaction — it refuels them and provides a spark that drives them. For introverts like myself, that spark is a rare, not-looked-for thing. Socializing exhausts us, drains us of energy, of emotion. It’s a necessary evil.

But we do find a version of that spark in social media. I have frequently said that I find the friendships I have made online to be just as meaningful as those that have been made face to face. But it’s not merely because it’s technical and remote, but because the quality of the interactions is much more under one’s own control. I can have a conversation or chit chat or what have you with an online friend on my time and my terms, and it need not be facilitated by, say, a long night out or an hours-long phone call. It’s substantive without being all-encompassing.

At the Atlantic, Zeynep Tufekci gets it. She writes:

If anything, social media is a counterweight to the ongoing devaluation of human lives. Social media’s rapid rise is a loud, desperate, emerging attempt by people everywhere to connect with *each other* in the face of all the obstacles that modernity imposes on our lives: suburbanization that isolates us from each other, long working-hours and commutes that are required to make ends meet, the global migration that scatters families across the globe, the military-industrial-consumption machine that drives so many key decisions, and, last but not least, the television — the ultimate alienation machine — which remains the dominant form of media. (For most people, the choice is not leisurely walks on Cape Cod versus social media. It’s television versus social media).

I may have at one time been relegated to the TV, or family alone, but now an awkwardsaurus like myself can have genuine connections with people I choose to interact with because of our interests and thoughts, not just proximity.

April 27, 2012

Internet, personal, social media, technology
Serenaded for My 34th

For my 34th birthday (December 1), my lovely wife commissioned a song about me from our friend Joe Langham. Just…just…don’t even ask me to express how many emotions this song evokes. It’s a beautiful thing.

Even the blog got a shout-out. Wondrous. Thanks, Joe.

(And you too, honey.)

December 7, 2011

personal, video
On Violence: Accepting What I Could (and Couldn’t) Have Done

As the tens of readers of this blog are no doubt sick of being reminded, I was the victim of a violent assault about a year ago in Washington, DC. It’s impossible for me to give you any meaningful explanation of the psychological aftermath of such an event in any brief form. But one particular mental scar that I presume is common among victims of violence is the nagging question of what I could have done differently. Could I have avoided it? Did I bring it upon myself?

Perhaps most resonating and sensitive to me as a male is whether I could have fought back.

Somewhere down this way, the scene of the crime.

It’s an absurd question, really, because I know that I could not have. I was snuck up on from behind and hit extremely hard on the back of my head, which knocked me straight to the ground, after which I was pummeled mercilessly by two assailants whose faces I never saw. My neocortex knows there was nothing to be done but survive. My lizard brain, and a small handful of males in my life who I presume are well-meaning, tell me otherwise.

Hero-of-the-blog Sam Harris recently wrote an incredible essay on our responses to and preparations for violence, and as he does in all other subjects which he tackles, he offers stark, clear warnings and advice. The theme? “True self-defense is based not on techniques but on principles.”

Harris mainly focuses on preventable violence, or situations in which there are options (whether to follow the instructions to get in one’s car from a parking lot mugger, for example). But in a paragraph relevant to my own story, he reminds me to shut out the voices of macho egotism espoused by my self-critical R-complex and some “traditional” males in my life, some of whom have suggested that had I only been trained in martial arts, I could have neutralized the attack (with my own emphasis):

Herein lies a crucial distinction between traditional martial arts and realistic self-defense: Most martial artists train for a “fight.” Opponents assume ready stances, just out of each other’s range, and then practice various techniques or spar (engage in controlled fighting). This does not simulate real violence. It doesn’t prepare you to respond effectively to a sudden attack, in which you have been hit before you even knew you were threatened, and it doesn’t teach you to strike preemptively,without telegraphing your moves, once you have determined that an attack is imminent.

No one has spelled this out for me so clearly as Harris has, and I must say, it gives me some comfort, though I imagine many men would dismiss this in a huff.

I was also glad to read some of what Harris had to say about not allowing yourself to be placed in a vulnerable position in the first place:

You are under no obligation, for instance, to give a stranger who has rung your doorbell, or decided to stand unusually close to you on the street, the benefit of the doubt. If a man who makes you uncomfortable steps onto an elevator with you, step off. If a man approaches you while you are sitting in your car and something about him doesn’t seem right, you don’t need to roll down your window and have a conversation. Victims of crime often sense that something is wrong in the first moments of encountering their attackers but feel too socially inhibited to create the necessary distance and escape.

At my current retail workplace, I have begun to practice this with less and less feeling of apology. When a person enters the store and immediately approaches me too closely, I make a broad step back to create distance and frankly also to communicate that this degree of physical nearness is unnecessary (we can talk about what they need without being close enough to hug) and simply not going to be an option. In other words, in case their intentions are not benign, I’m not going to give them the advantage of proximity.

I may be behaving in a paranoid manner, and I accept that. But after what I’ve gone through, I just don’t see a reason to give everyone, as Harris says, the benefit if the doubt. I’m not a dick about it (I hope), but I’m not willing any longer to be a patsy either.

November 25, 2011

attack, personal, sam harris, violence
You’re So Smart! No I’m Not!

I tell my almost-two-year-old son Toby how smart he is all the time. It was said to me over and over when I was a kid.

Decades later, I know in hindsight that I believed my “smartness” to be innate and unrelated to effort or discipline. I therefore, in turn, also believed that when I felt challenged, that it was because I lacked a sufficient amount of “smartness” — that I was inherently flawed and unable to achieve a goal, rather than because of a lack of sufficient effort. I won’t go into it here, but I’ll just say that it’s perhaps the biggest psychological challenge I now face in the wake of all the other traumas with which I’ve had to cope of late. It’s a discovery I’ve only recently made, and it’s of enormous significance for me.

And then, as though the folks at Bloomberg News have been listening in on my therapy sessions, my too-smart-for-whatever-room-he’s-in pal Skylar linked to this piece in Businessweek:

People with above-average aptitudes — the ones we recognize as being especially clever, creative, insightful, or otherwise accomplished — often judge their abilities not only more harshly, but fundamentally differently, than others do (particularly in Western cultures). Gifted children grow up to be more vulnerable, and less confident, even when they should be the most confident people in the room.

The piece then cites a study on how well-meaning, shorthanded evaluation of children effects their performance.

Dweck and Mueller found that children who were praised for their “smartness” did roughly 25% worse on the final set of problems compared to the first. They were more likely to blame their poor performance on the difficult problems to a lack of ability, and consequently they enjoyed working on the problems less and gave up on them sooner.

Children praised for the effort, on the other hand, performed roughly 25% better on the final set of problems compared to the first. They blamed their difficulty on not having tried hard enough, persisted longer on the final set of problems, and enjoyed the experience more.

The conclusion, with emphasis from the original:

The kind of feedback we get from parents and teachers as young children has a major impact on the implicit beliefs we develop about our abilities — including whether we see them as innate and unchangeable, or as capable of developing through effort and practice.

Let me tell you from first hand experience, this mountain feels utterly unscalable. Only a lot of time and, well, effort, will tell whether I can traverse it. I’m somewhat gladdened, perhaps a bit validated at least, to see it acknowledged in this form.

November 22, 2011

culture, parenting, personal
It’s Not Meningitis!

So, I thought that getting through the anniversary of my violent encounter on the streets of DC would be something of a relief, a release of some psychological pressure that’d been building up for some weeks. As I noted, the event itself passed almost unnoticed by me when it actually came, so there was some feeling that the “curse” of the date in question was without any potency. And of course I don’t believe in that stuff anyway.
And then last Sunday night, going into Monday morning, I got slammed with what seemed like a flu: a tremendous headache and unbearable body aches and a high fever that floored me for the day. Nothing abnormal about that, really. I can’t get the flu vaccine because of a presumed allergy to what it’s cultured in, so it’s no shock that I’d, you know, get the flu. Life was marching on as this inconvenient virus did battle with my white blood cells, and so as I started to feel a bit better the next day, Tuesday, I skipped out on resting and wrangled my energetic, touchy, and destructive toddler for the day — my usual day off from work and time to spend with His Grouchiness.

But it was rough — rougher than I expected, even. I’d be easily winded, and I’d lurch back and forth to feeling absurdly cold to a sweat-drenchingly overheated. Just getting over the flu, I supposed. Though I never had the cold-like symptoms that often come with a flu, but whatever, it must have been the flu.

Back to work on Wednesday and Thursday. Both days were very rough, though, and I knew I wasn’t fully recovered. I was tired, a little hazy, and not capable of concentrating on a meaningful level. Oh, I was also extremely unpleasant, short-tempered, and overly dramatic about my slightest emotional sensations. So I was a lot of fun for everyone around me. I’d never had so many people ask me “are you okay?” and not already be hospitalized. But stay tuned!!!

Thursday’s work day was the worst, as my headache reasserted itself. But it wasn’t just a regular oh-I’m-sick headache. It was the Headache to End All Headaches. A headache that will live in infamy. A noun and a verb and this headache. More precisely, it felt as though two mean-looking guys were squeezing my eyeballs with rusty pliers.

So I called out of work for the next day. I just can’t power through this, I thought, I need another day to rest. Jess was concerned enough to call our doctor to be on the safe side, and they thought it prudent to bring me in for a look-see. Great! Nothing I’d like more than to drive into Portland to be asked a bunch of questions about my headache so they can tell me what I already know. Great!

But I go. And it’s unbearable. The sunlight, the office lights, moving my eyes, all of it is excruciating and increasingly so. I find myself apologizing to nurses and staff every few sentences or so because I know I’m sounding brusque and foul-tempered.

They discover I’m still sporting a fever, which concerns them, and then I see the available general practitioner in the office (my usual guy wasn’t there that day). I get what feels like an interrogation at a CIA rendition site as she pummels me with questions about my liquid intake and exactly how much does your head hurt, Mr. Fidalgo, if that is your real name?!?!?

At one point, she asks me what seems like a throwaway question about neck stiffness. Meh, I say, everything is stiff, I have the god damn flu, so sure. Neck stiffness.

Bad move.

After “consulting with her colleagues” (quick check at WebMD is my guess) I am told that my wife must leave work to pick me up and get me to the emergency room. Yes, Paul, you may be the lucky winner of a brand…new…lumbar puncture!!!!

Listen. I’m not good with anything-punctures. When I have blood drawn, I pass out, but not until after having convulsions and writhing in agony. Yes, I’m that way with needles and things. Now this woman is telling me she “would not be a good doc” unless she sent me over the hospital to have my spine stabbed and sucked of fluid to see if I have meningitis. GREAT.

Not bacterial, she notes, “the bad one.” Much more likely that it’s viral, which means, essentially, that I’d just have to suck it up and get over it. So in case you’re wondering, whether or not the stabbing of my spine yielded a positive result for meningitis, the treatment would be exactly the same.

Anyway, back to my reaction when she said I’d need the puncture:

“No. No. No.”

Didn’t seem to land with her. So Jess left work, picked me up, and brought my wrenched-with-both-pain-and-fear self to the hospital.

And then things get really absurd. First, I wait an abysmally long time — in an uncomfortable chair — to be seen. Then a nurse interviews me, asks me about my symptoms, and takes my vitals. In this room, I wait an abysmally long time in an uncomfortable chair. (Remember, I’m still in agony and gripped with paralyzing fear.) I am still cycling through feeling ultra-cold and ultra-hot. Finally, I’m brought to an actual exam room. After waiting an abysmally long time in an uncomfortable chair, cycling through extreme body temperatures and gripped by pain and fear (and a wife getting plum sick of it all, thank you very much) another nurse comes in and — can you guess? — interviews me about my symptoms, as though this was all brand new and I had had no contact with anyone else in the hospital, and takes my vitals.

I take to the stretcher in the room, because I can’t bear being seated anymore in the uncomfortable chair. What feels like hours later, all the while my headache and fear are worsening, yet another nurse asks me about my symptoms and takes my vitals. Finally I’m given an IV of fluids and painkillers to deal with what’s ailing me (dehydration is one of the concerns). Remember what I said about needles? It applies to IVs too. When the needle was inserted, I writhed and wriggled and cursed and whined like a puppy being tortured with surgical tools. Even after the actual puncturing was over, I was still aching and complaining of the pain in my arm.

Oh, and the medicine wasn’t working. My headache was not being mitigated one iota. But one drug they decided to inject me with was having an effect: Benadryl.

Now let me tell you something about Benadryl. I’m a pretty allergic guy, so I know my antihistamines. Benadryl, as opposed to say Claritin or Zyrtec, is a last resort drug. If nothing else is remedying an allergy or cold symptom, one resorts to Benadryl. Why last resort? Because it may as well be the off switch for my consciousness. I would say it turns me into a zombie, but even zombies have the wherewithal to go after brains. On Benadryl, I am a corpse.

But they injected me with Benadryl for reasons never explained. But while on this Benadryl, I get a new parade of people coming once every (what feels like) few hours to — bonus if you can guess again — ask me what my symptoms are and check my vitals. No fewer than three more nurse visits plus three separate doctors come in to pepper me with nuanced questions about my status, all while I can barely — barely — even make out what they’re saying to me, let alone answer coherently (and definitely not politely).

Three doctors!!!

And the headache is still not improving. I would have contemplated suicide if I’d had the energy to think so creatively.

Finally, they dose me with some morphine which begins to take the edge off the headache, only very slightly. In the midst of my interviews, the three doctors all seem pretty confident that I mean it when I say that my neck is not the center of my agony. If my neck had been seizing up when I moved my limbs, that’d have been a cause for concern, but being that it was, as it were, all in my head, meningitis no longer seemed to be a viable diagnosis.

(In the midst of all this interrogation, no fewer than three medical professionals prodded with their thumbs in the very spot my orbital bone was fractured in my assault last year, because god forbid any of them first look at any medical records that say, “Try not to poke Paul in the right cheek, since a couple of thugs turned it into gravel a year ago.”)

So no lumbar puncture. If there is a silver lining to this misadventure, it is that, but it is tempered by the fact that had my general practitioner not overhyped my throwaway answer to what sounded like a merely incidental question about my neck, I’d never had to go through any of this. Everyone was well-meaning, many even downright sweet (one particular nurse was downright plucky in her attempts to both do her job and keep me from flying off the handle), but the confluence of circumstances made this something out of a satire.

My wife remains my hero, and she deserves the longest and most peaceful of vacations.

The next day I mainly slept and drank water, and only today am I able to keep my eyes open long enough, and hold my attention anywhere long enough, to type out this anecdote. I hope I hope I hope I’m through the worst of it, though today I still feel pretty awful. Either way, I managed to get through the anniversary of my attack without a psychological crisis. But my body and a few absurdities in our health care system made sure I didn’t get off without a physical crisis.

I can’t wait to see what happens next year.

November 6, 2011

attack, health care, personal
The Attack, Ctd.

This past Wednesday marked one year since I was assaulted by two thugs outside a DC Metro station, and everything changed. What’s odd is that I had been kind of bracing for the first anniversary of the event, as though there was a sort of rent in the universe where it happened in time, and when the Earth passed through that space once more, as it will with every year’s revolution around the Sun, I would somehow feel it; almost as though it would happen all over again.

Of course it didn’t, but even more surprising to me is that on the actual day, it barely registered. Life got in the way. Work, parenthood, new projects, etc. All of these demanded my attention, leaving no room for re-experiencing the attack.

Don’t misunderstand me. I live with it every day. The fear, the guilt, the worry — it’s all still there, and I keep feeling it in new and unexpected ways. In fact, in my ongoing therapy sessions, part of the treatment is to experience the assault over and over again in my own mind, until it almost becomes boring.

I also live with the physical damage to this day. Where my orbital bone was fractured, just below my right eye, the nerve damage has yet to heal at all — my teeth just below the fracture are still numb, and sinuses on the entire right side of my head continue to feel as though they are clogged with rusty lug nuts. My wrists will probably never get any better either — already problematic before the attack with pain and weakness, they took several impacts from my being knocked to the ground several times, and they continue to hurt, they continue to bear weight poorly, and the old problems once-unrelated to the attack have come back with a vengeance, and seem to be worsening.

In the broader picture, the attack spurred enormous changes in my family’s lives. We decided to move from DC to Maine, we got new jobs, and we struggle with finances and with questions about where we belong.

But I guess the most important thing is that we’re okay. Toby thrives (though he likes TV way too much), Jess’s job is a good one, if not the epitome of creative fulfillment, and I’m just starting to find my feet at work and with other potential projects — but just barely. All in all, though, “just barely” is not so bad, particularly considering the state of the economy.

There are a lot of challenges we still need to meet as a result of all these changes. We are extremely fortunate in the family support network we have here in Maine and elsewhere; we know that none of them would ever let us fall on our faces. I’m continuing to work very hard in therapy to address all that the attack caused and all that it dredged up. I’ve learned that so much of that damage is bigger than the attack itself, so the work is more overwhelming than I ever could have guessed.

But had this not all happened, I may not have started that work. We wouldn’t have come to this wonderful place. I don’t at all mean to imply that it was “good” that the attack happened. It was the worst thing that’s ever happened to me. But at the very least, it’s spurred a series of events that, in the end, may prove to be a net positive.

November 1, 2011

attack, personal
Listening to 9/11: My Experience of the Attacks from Brooklyn

In September of 2001, I had just decided not to go back to school. I had been agonizing over whether to return to the Actors Studio Drama School (then at the New School University) for my second year of training toward a master’s degree in acting. I had just moved from Edgewater, NJ to Brighton Beach in Brooklyn (about 45 minutes by subway from Midtown), and for a couple of weeks since this fateful decision, I had been hitting the pavement, searching for jobs — both relevant to my career and not — and learning what it meant to be a working (read: starving) actor in New York City, really for the first time. Looking back on it, I am sometimes surprised at the initiative I showed and the effort I put forth. I don’t know that I’ve matched it since.

I had interviews and auditions every day, sometimes several in one day. I would traverse the island of Manhattan, dressed for interviews, clutching a binder and notebook with my resumes (both theatrical and “professional”), making use of my new device, this cellular phone thing that all the kids were talking about, setting up new appointments. I was determined not to be a disappointment after having made this huge decision not to continue at the Actors Studio.

In the middle of the next month, on a Tuesday, I for once had nothing yet lined up. I had fully intended to make my way back into the city to resume my hunt for employment, but as of Monday night, I didn’t have any appointments. And as They Might Be Giants have said, “If I didn’t have disappointments, I wouldn’t have any appointments.” I could afford to sleep in on Tuesday, September 11.

I was 23 years old. In some ways, I was older than my years, but in so many more I was so much younger.

The next morning, no one woke me up. I’d straggled out of bed at about 9 AM and crept into the living room to find one of my four roommates (all female then) looking somewhat agog with the radio playing.

“An airplane just flew into the World Trade Center!”

What an awful accident. How could something like that have happened? It must have been some kind of terrible mechanical problem for something so destructive and tragic. The collision had disrupted the broadcasts coming through the towers, and we had no cable, so we could get no television coverage of the event. Phone lines were tied up, including our dial-up connection to the Internet. All of our information was coming over the radio. We were closer than almost anyone to the event, but we could see none of it. So we listened.

Then another plane hit, and it obviously wasn’t an accident anymore. Then one tower came down. Then the other. We never saw any of it. We could only listen as the terrible news was spoken over the radio. Like Pearl Harbor or the Hindenburg disaster. The madness, the death, the devastation had to be conjured in our imaginations.

Perhaps not surprisingly, when I would eventually see the images and footage, it was worse than I had imagined. Reality had outdone me.

I remember sitting on our couch, listening to the news as it unfolded, my brain went to the more abstract, and I found myself trying to think of what could possibly be a more important human event after this. A handful of Bronze Age religious zealots had forcibly knocked down the Twin Towers, and killed hundreds others almost slamming a plane into either the White House or U.S. Capitol; the fortress of mainland America had not only been invaded, but brought to its knees. What could ever occur to overshadow this event? Aliens was the only thing I could come up with. It would have to be humanity’s first encounter with aliens from another planet. That’d be it.

Later that day, another of my roommates and her boyfriend had made their way back to our apartment. It had taken her hours, as the entirety of the city was in the throes of panic and gridlock. All of us mired in a kind of morose shock, the boyfriend and I decided to make our way to the local hospital and give some blood. It would almost certainly be needed. This was a bigger deal than most for me, as even when I am simply having blood drawn in a doctor’s office, I always have a severe reaction in which I seize up, go into a kind of unstoppable panic, and then usually lose consciousness. I know, I’m a mess. But anyway, it seemed like something I could deal with given the circumstances. But much to our surprise, the hospital was full. Not with victims, but with people with the same idea, to give their blood. We waited for quite some time, and were eventually sent away. They had more donors than they could handle.

I never turned the radio off. That night, when everyone else was in bed, I was still sitting and listening to the news station, taking in every drop of information, every press statement, every ounce of the tragedy. Eventually, the news subsided, and stations changed from talk to emotion. One station out of nowhere played a gorgeously sung rendition of “America the Beautiful,” and of course it brought tears.

I was not in Manhattan at the time of the attack, so I was in no immediate danger, and I didn’t know anyone who was killed for injured, not that any of this was clear at the time. My mother, who lives in South Jersey, was in Ohio on business at the time. When the news came down, and she was unable to reach me, she simply rented a car and drove back toward New Jersey. Over the course of the next couple of days, as lines of communication were restored, a flurry of “are you alright” messages would be sent to and fro — after all, how could anyone be sure?

Days later, President Bush would address Congress. We would eventually get broadcast television reception on at least one network, and we gathered to listen to our new untested president. I don’t recall being impressed, but feeling like we had to trust him as something of a father figure for the time being, whether he was up to it or not. He wasn’t, of course, but he was all we had at the time. And it was something of a pity, looking back on it, that at such a momentous and heart-rending period, we did not have a leader who seemed to match the times.

I knew life had to proceed. I still had not seen any pictures, witnessed no footage. I didn’t know whether one could go into the city at all, or if so, where one could go. I had interviews still lined up for jobs, and even a major audition coming up for what would become my home for five years, Shenandoah Shakespeare. On Wednesday morning, September 12, I was scheduled to interview for an office job in Midtown, so I called the company’s number to see if the interview was still on, or whether it might be best to postpone.

“Thank you for calling,” the prerecorded message said. “Our offices are located at One World Trade Center…”

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September 11, 2011

9/11, personal, terrorism
Bloggy Relevance: Thoughts on What This Blog Is and Ought to Be

As long-time readers of this blog probably already know, I have at various times struggled over the identity of this blog, and my identity as a blogger or, really, as an “Internet personality.” I first began blogging in 2004 just to try and promote my first (and so far only) CD, Paul is Making Me Nervous. That didn’t last too long, and it wasn’t terribly interesting.

And you know the old saw: If you want to build an online audience, you need to find your niche and stick to it. I had not found mine yet.

In 2006, I realized I wanted to blog on politics more specifically, so I started a site called FifteenNineteen. By this point in Web history, of course, everyone and their mother already had a political blog, but I intended my blog to distinguish itself as being a kind of educational chronicle: I was about to start graduate school for political management, and I was going to blog on politics from that vantage point: what am I learning, and how does it apply to current events? It will not surprise you to know that I did not follow this tack at all, and simply defaulted to fairly typical punditry, peppered with some Onion-esque fake news articles (some of which I think were pretty damned funny).

I was still nominally maintaining the old self-promotion blog, and I didn’t like the idea of juggling both, so I merged the two into the first incarnation of Near Earth Object. I still focused mainly on politics, with occasional notes on things like my acting career, music, etc. I puttered along.

At the height of the 2008 campaign, a fire was lit under my hindquarters on the subject of atheists’ treatment in American politics, and after a few posts in the old Near Earth on that topic, I realized that I had found a niche I was really quite passionate about. So I more or less left Near Earth Object derelict, save for occasional generally-political posts, and started Bloc Raisonneur, a blog specifically focused on atheists’ place in the culture. I had a lot of fun working on it, learning from it, and I built a tiny following and a modicum of relevance in the atheist online community, which was solidified when I began blogging as a columnist for Examiner.com as the National Secularism Examiner.

Eventually, though, I began to work in the atheist movement itself professionally, and so opining on the topic no longer reflected only on myself — I now also represented a major secularist organization, whether I intended to or not. So both Bloc and my Examiner column atrophied.

But I didn’t feel through with blogging, so I backtracked somewhat, abandoned the idea of a specifically-atheist blog, and resurrected Near Earth Object, the blog you’re reading right now. After my assault in October and the subsequent major changes in my life since, for a while I was very sparse in my blogging.

But as you may have noticed, I’m picking it back up. It means something to me, and I care about making a strong blog product that I can be proud of.

And here’s the thing: my relevance has all but totally dissipated. My posts are read (when they are read) pretty much exclusively by friends on Facebook, and a few from Twitter. One friend only today remarked that due to my refusal to blog within one specific niche, I am not “seriously blogging” anymore.

But the fact is that I think my writing is stronger than it’s ever been. I cover a wide variety of subjects that includes politics, atheism, religion, book reviews, technology, as well as the personal. I write long essays and post brief, Tumblr-like one-off posts or images. I think as an Internet publication, Near Earth Object is strong.

My sense of a job well done is mitigated by the failure of the blog to validate itself through pageviews. My ego wants recognition, for my opinions to resonate beyond the confines of my social network.

I could easily jump back into atheist-only blogging, but why? There are countless other blogs of that nature, and the well-established, well-read among them are fairly entrenched at this point. If I felt that I had something crucially unique to add to the discussion — on a regular basis — that might change things, but it seems to me the grander debate within the atheist blogosphere is on something of a loop: we shouldn’t be aggressive, oh wait yes we should, repeat. (I should note I have an idea for an atheist-centric blog, one that specifically tracks the portrayal and treatment of atheists in the media, a kind of Media Matters for heathens, which I might one day pursue.) Beyond these common discussions, we all essentially agree with each other, and I feel that I can do more good for my blasphemous brethren by highlighting our movement within the context of a publication that is broader in scope.

So this is where we are. I have no plans to change the format of Near Earth Object. My only recourse to relevance, I think, is to write even better posts, as often as I can; to offer unique perspectives (both my own and those of others) on a wide array of subjects that stir readers to think in ways they may not have thought before (or, even, just to provoke a cheap laugh). I’ll make my non-specific blog the best non-specific blog it can be, and that, I suppose, will have to do. I hope more people come by to see it take shape.

June 30, 2011

blogging, personal, writing
What’s in a Domain?

Just to alleviate any confusion among my tens of readers, I wanted to let you all know that I recently changed the official domain for this blog. Once it was near-earth.com, but now more. The blog’s new domain is nearearthobject.net, but the good part is that near-earth.com will still redirect to here, and I suppose probably will in perpetuity as I remain tethered to the GoDaddy pseudo-bureaucracy.

Why the change? First, I didn’t like having a hyphen in the domain. Imagine:

Potential Reader: Where’s your blog?

Me: Oh, it’s at near-dash-earth-dot-com.

Potential Reader: So, like, all as one word?

Me: What?

Potential Reader: So, you spell out near-dash-earth…um…

Me: No, it’s a hyphen.

Potential Reader: Okay, so, near, then H-Y-P…how do you spell hyphen?

Me: Actually, just go to the Huffington Post.

You see? With nearearthobject-dot-net, I just say it, and it makes sense.

And then there’s the whole Internet exchange thing. I couldn’t get (never could get) nearearthobject-dot-com, but I decided that it made more sense to go with dot-net, since this blog is many things, but one thing it is not is profitable. It is not commercial, the origin of the “com” in dot-com. So dot-net it is.

And as a side note, the old blog’s shortcut domain, BlocRaison.com, also points here, but I don’t know for how long. Also, since Apple is killing iWeb, my personal website, PaulFidalgo.com, will need to find a new host, which may mean, for a time at least, that this domain also points here.

All roads lead to this little blog. As it should be.

My apologies, by the way, for the sparse posting. Things are hectic, and I’m working on acquiring a new computing rig, which ought to inspire even more bloggery. Stay tuned.

June 27, 2011

blogging, personal
Facing Irrelevance

How many readers does it take to make a blog worthwhile? What constitutes a sufficient number of pageviews for a given post? The most obvious answer is that there is no line of demarcation; the act of writing is an end in itself. If I were to have a meaningful conversation with a single person, or even just have something good and substantive to say to an audience of one, would that not be enough?

And yet when it comes to writing for the Internet, those numbers feel like they matter. Outside the context of the Web, it would be unlikely that anything I wrote, for any reason, would ever be read by more than a handful of people. Today, even my least-read postings still garner 20 to 30 views or so. I don’t know how many of those folks are actually reading the content, of course. But often, I have posts that take in 100 views or more. But that doesn’t feel like enough. (Once, I was fortunate enough to compose a piece for Examiner that won over 70,000 views. I’ve never come anywhere close to that since, either in raw numbers or even in the amount of zeroes.)

I think it’s because the standard in my mind is that of the well-known blogger, the Web-based influencer who is asked to join panels at conferences, who is cited by the likes of Andrew Sullivan or John Gruber, whose posts seem to matter to the wider Internet culture at least to some degree.

But I know this is not the usual way of things. Most blogs — as with he vast majority of all other online content — are read by staggeringly few souls. In which case, the notion that even a smattering of people would take the time to consider one’s writings should be humbling, should be sufficient for all but the most insatiable of egos.

Well, I have to do some careful reading of my own ego-meter. I am trying to find value primarily in the creation of the work. But its lack of larger relevance is proving to be something of a weight on my will to produce it. Looking back, I think I may have put too much energy, too much thought, into my online identity, on creating a brand that might one day grow into something that had resonance beyond immediate friends and the occasional passerby. Perhaps that energy would have been better spent on producing more meaningful — and better — material.

March 9, 2011

blogging, personal, writing
Fumes

There’s been a lot of upheaval in Fidalgo Land since my violent encounter in October of last year. As my tens of regular readers already know, not only have we left behind a city, I’ve left behind not just a job, but perhaps a career. My master’s degree is specifically for professional politics, and while I did not anticipate abandoning that particular industry permanently before October — I only meant to put it aside for a while as I focused on my kid — events and my own attitude is making it all feel very, very distant.
Pre-DC, I had put something else aside: theatre, and along with it but less intentionally, music. So over the course of about five years, I’ve managed to skirt away from at least three professional outlets for my passions and creativity: acting, songwriting, and politics. Now as my family and I struggle to resettle ourselves in an entirely new environment, a new outlet proves elusive.

As I’d recently written here, I intellectually understand that meaning can be found well outside of one’s day job. The challenge, I wrote, is first to recognize this fact — that one is responsible for eking out that time and effort between all the necessaries of grownup life — and second, to accept that regardless of whether one is employed in one’s creative field or whether one’s job takes one light years away from that field, either way, at best we can expect to find fulfillment in a tiny percentage of that time and work. Pulling a number out of my ass, I estimated that percentage at 10%.

Well, that 10% is looking pretty unachievable these days. I have a good job now, but it’s not what one would call creative in the sense of being of the humanities. But even as I know that the onus is on me to find the time and inspiration to use what free time I have to make something of some abstract, creative value, I seem to lack the energy and the will. The desire is there, but once the day job is done, once my family has been cared for, once my sundry other obligations have been met, what dregs of psychological fuel I have remaining are usually mere fumes.

I have had designs on writing a book of essays, and had even begun the work of building an outline, assembling notes, and even writing 2000 or so words of content. But the last time I touched this project was weeks ago. Last night, I mustered the will to experiment with some sounds in Garageband in the hopes of laying foundations for new songs. But I know those foundations, as promising as they are, will sit untended-to, for who knows how long.

My fear is that creativity itself is seeping out of me. My job no longer requires the exercise of what I once thought of as my strongest creative muscles, and I am taxed by day to day life. I write less often. I am apathetic about causes about which I once felt downright evangelical. I don’t even read very much anymore — something I was already hung up about — and instead have begun to default to Netflix viewing every evening, something to which I would have been haughtily dismissive only a few short months ago.

Am I becoming a drone? Am I now only capable of getting through the business of the day, and nothing else? Am I now a mere passive consumer of creative content, rather than an active producer?

I hope not, but I think I might be too worn out, or too lazy, to explore the question.

March 9, 2011

attack, personal
Yesterday

Yesterday was kind of an important day for me.
As many of you know, I was brutally attacked by two thugs on the street outside my Metro stop in DC a few months ago. I was transitioning to a new part-time retail gig in order to reclaim some sanity in my life, and to be able to care for my boy during the weekdays.

So: As I came home from my second day of training at my then-new part-time retail job in DC on October 26, 2010, I was attacked and everything changed.

Yesterday, I finished my second day of training at my new new part-time retail job here in Maine on February 1, 2011. I came home, saw my family, and all was well.

I know it seems silly. I’m about the least superstitious guy you’ll ever meet, but the symbolism of the fact that I made it home safely this time was very meaningful.

February 3, 2011

attack, personal
Cultivating a Good Depression

I like to cultivate a good depression.

Well, I suppose “like” is a poor choice of words when discussing uncontrolled despondency. Perhaps it’s better to say that apparently I tend to cultivate a depression — or perhaps my depression is something that induces me to cultivate it.

In any case, when depression comes on — and the difference between depression and just feeling bummed is quite palpable to me these days — it isn’t enough just to feel bad. I need to sit in it, to wriggle around until I’ve found a cozy spot. I savor my melancholy to experience all of its emotional nuance, its flavors. I sample varying degrees of moroseness and experiment with different combinations of ingredients; add a touch of anxiety, a hint of anger, a dash of humiliation, or a good pang of regret. What varieties of despair can I concoct?

I also test these various combinations on my physiology; if I have a particular kind of depression swimming through my system (for example, three parts sadness, two parts fear, one part boredom), what does it do to the feeling in my stomach? Does it produce a sickly simmering sensation, or will it add an acidic burn to the lining? Check in with my lungs, and see how deep or shallow, rushed or sedate, easy or labored is my breathing. My head might feel heavy, as though balancing a thick goo in my skull, or it might feel dense, overly packed, the molecules shoved together creating an almost inaudible hum of pressure. My limbs and overall musculature may give in to the depression, becoming flaccid and weighty, or they may find new levels of tension, the fibers of the tissue twisting in on one another, reaching a feeling of imminent implosion. There are so many possibilities.

And for whatever reason, I seem inclined to explore them all. Simply assuming a gloomy attitude won’t do. For my depression, I need to feel every aspect of the woe, and invent new misery cocktails once my senses have been fully saturated by the latest offering.

One could say that it is making the best of a bad situation. No one wants just one brand and flavor of ice cream all the time, or only one varietal of wine from a single vineyard. For something I experience so often for such considerable stretches of time, I demand nuance, diversity, dynamics.

Actually, I don’t demand it. It happens that way without my even trying.

[Note: I wrote this as a kind of writing experiment a year and a half ago, recently rediscovered it, and thought I’d post it here, not knowing what else to do with it.]

January 29, 2011

depression, personal
On Fulfillment: The Noble Pursuit of 10 Percent

The wife and I are in something of an existential pickle. Here we are, resettling ourselves (ever-so-slowly and awkwardly) in small town southern Maine, trying to make a good long-term home for our family. At the same time, Jess and I are artists, we’re performers, and recent years have proven to be lean ones in terms of flexing those particular muscles.

Here’s the big problem: we both suffer from the illusion that it is our day job that defines us as people. When we were doing Shakespeare for a living, that defined us. We were Shakespearean actors. When I moved on to politics, I presumed that that would define me as well. (“I’m a professional progressive/reformist/secularist activist!”) But it didn’t feel like it was sticking. I wasn’t really being fulfilled as I expected when I shifted careers. Likewise, Jess muddles through a 9-to-5 admin job which, while being for an extremely noble cause, does not lend fulfillment, and does not provide identity.

Well, something I’ve learned, and that Jessica is learning, is that very few people get to have their rent-paying job be the thing that makes their life worth living. But, as she put it, we were “sold a bill of goods” when we were young and idealistic, thinking that we would find that perfect artsy career, and live lives of constant inspiration.

We know that it doesn’t quite work that way now. But here is where the wife and I are differing in our attitudes. I’ve come to accept — by working several jobs in recent years that have utterly failed to move me — that one’s Reason for Being is not necessarily to be found at work. Particularly with the birth of our son Toby, it is all the clearer to me that there is Reason for Being to be found in many corners of our lives.

Here’s where Jess needs some help. Now, don’t get me wrong, she is the best wife and mother to my son that I could ever hope for. But she feels a gaping hole in her life that acting used to fill.

But then I thought back. Even when we were professional actors, doing the best material in the world and doing it in the best theater in the country, how much of that time was actually — genuinely — fulfilling? Of course it was wonderful to perform in all those fantastic roles, to speak those words, to move those audiences. But what percentage of our daily work actually consisted of all that Elizabethan sublimity?

Think about it. There are the weeks of rehearsal, which have their own magic, but are also mostly made up of drudgery. There is the line memorization. Lots and lots of it. There is the business of getting set up for shows: fight calls, music calls, costumes, makeup. If there were school performances, it meant doing shows at 9:30 am. If you were doing a Christmas show, forget it, you’d be conscripted to 30 days of mind-numbing jolly repetition. If you were on tour, as I was twice, there are the endless van rides, the crummy hotels, the setting up and breaking down, etc., etc.

The good stuff was actually squeezed very tightly in between all that less-than-good stuff. It was completely worth it most of the time, but it was, still, a small percentage of what we actually did. How small? For the sake of this discussion, let’s guess 10 percent. That’s probably generous. As much as I loved shows likeMuch Ado About Nothing, The Tempest, and Love’s Labour’s Lost, much of my memory of those productions were not necessarily of the performances, but ofrushed costume changes. Indeed, the longer a show was in production, the more it felt like an exercise in changing awkward clothes in the dark as quickly as possible without hurting oneself or others. Or the costumes.

10 percent. Again, presuming for now that this number is correct, that reminds us that the rest, the 90 percent, was just work. Regular, unpleasant, boring, stressful, work — like everyone else has to do. The 10 percent made it worthwhile, but it was just that.

To the point of this shoddy attempt at fulfillment quantification. You see, the 10 percent number, while seemingly small, is a huge advantage. Why? Because it means it’s not out of anyone’s grasp, no matter what they do in their day-to-day lives. Think about it: as actors, we happily carried that 90 percent burden so we could have a taste of that 10 percent, and it was worth it. Now, if you work 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, is it really so hard to imagine where one might fit one’s own 10 percent somewhere else in your life? Must it absolutely manifest itself during one’s office hours? Of course not.

The task, then, is to find where we can fit our own, self-made 10 percent, no matter what our “day jobs” happen to be. If we work 40 hours a week, it’s not such a leap to imagine how I, for example, might find 4 hours within that week to work on composing and recording new music. And for Jess, there’s nothing stopping her from finding her own 10 percent, her own 4 hours (if it must be strictly quantified by time) to write a book of essays, to write a hilarious television pilot, to do more stand-up comedy, to find an outlet for her acting and theatre talents. That 10 percent can happen just as easily after the baby goes to bed as at any other time.

The point is that it’s completely doable. If 10 percent is enough for the super-fulfilled working actor, it’s enough for us as former-super-fulfilled working actors. I’m trying to carve out my 10 percent, and I hope Jess will begin to scratch out hers. Yes, working plus parenting is rough stuff. But we’re smart enough and creative enough to grab that 10 percent, to really milk those 4 hours.

Presuming we’re not too lazy, of course. Perhaps this new realization will help give us the kick in the creative butt we’ve been needing.

January 25, 2011

careers, creativity, personal, theatre
Facebook Probation

I am flattered that over 850 people have considered me a “friend” on Facebook. The thing is, I don’t actually know the vast majority of them.

There’s nothing wrong with this. Often, I’ve heard those who are more dubious of online social networks complain that the “friendship” connections made in these environments are shallow and primarily for show. But while there is truth to this sentiment, it is equally true that I have developed some meaningful and very real friendships with people I’ve never met in real life, but have “friended” me through Facebook or Twitter or what have you.

Usually this connection is made because one of us appreciated something the other did in a blog post or tweet, and decided to formalize the association with one of the social networks. Sometimes people are just casting about for folks who share their interests or points of view. Let there be no doubt, folks like Brent, Kenzoid, and my Bespectacled Blog Twin Miranda, among many others, are my friends in the fullest sense of the word, though I’ve never met any of them. (Indeed, I first connected with Brent in the early 90s as were among those playing Ren-and-Stimpy-Star-Trek on the message boards of Prodigy. Long story.)

But there are also many more folks in my Facebook friend list with whom I have no meaningful interaction. There’s no enmity or anything, but at one time a connection was made but not tended to, and so these folks wound up as mere numbers on my friend count. While Facebook allows the option to hide the posts of folks you lose interest in or who pollute the news stream with Farmville accomplishments, they leave open all sorts of possibilities for unwanted solicitations, invitations, “suggestions”, and other online effluvia. Well-intentioned as it all may be, these folks only artificially inflate a friend count that, let’s face it, impresses no one anymore.

I think you see where I’m going; while Facebook is a more meaningful destination and experience if it is populated exclusively by people with whom you have a genuine and meaningful connection, it would be a shame to miss out on new friendships because of some arbitrary blockade against those folks you’ve simply never before encountered. I know I spend a lot of time on Facebook, so it makes sense to find a way to optimize its most crucial aspect: the personal connections.

So here’s what I’m thinking: The institution of Facebook Probation in which new friendships are, on the whole (and assuming they are not spam) accepted with no questions, and a period of time is allowed for this new connection to interact, comment, post, etc. This gives a new friend a fair chance to add value to one’s Facebook experience, and if they turn out not to do so — either by neglect, tediousness, or outright offensiveness — one should feel free to cut the connection and unfriend.

I think I’m going to try this out. All I have to lose, really, is an puffed-up friend count that really tells you nothing about the quality of my online and offline connections. I suppose I could also potentially lose eyeballs — most of the traffic to this blog comes from Facebook postings, but I can also give fair warning for folks to “like” the Near Earth Object Facebook page so they can always keep the Object in their, if you will, orbit.

And of course there’s always Twitter, which I see as more of a cacophonous stream than a comfortable hangout. Anyone is pretty much free to follow anyone there, and so it should be.

I’ll think this over first, but it might be a good way to civilize and bring order to at least one aspect of my life. And considering who we’re talking about, it’s a pretty big aspect.

December 20, 2010

personal, social media