I'm stupid.

My stupidity and general mental ineptitude are too vast and all-encompassing to write a brief blog post about. I am incapable of not only abstract thought but also the basic requirements of life. I consider myself lucky that my brain hasn't yet forgotten how to operate my vital functions.

In short, Harvard may have finally destroyed my mind and turned me into this:

Thanks to the economy, I have no future

My last post was a bit abstract, so here is a very real speculation on the state of my life after graduation.


After four years of learning, privilege, toil (however you choose to describe my college education), I am finally ready to enter society as a theoretically functional individual. In June 2009, I graduate. In my Panglossian fantasy, my parents and I celebrate, I receive a fellowship to study in China for a year, and then I move onto law school.


Given near-paralysis of the credit market, however, many of my fellow graduating students that would have entered the investment banking industry are now considering other options, like graduate school or fellowships. All of a sudden, my idyllic little pasture is overcrowded with starving sheep, as it were. Competition drives evolution; it drives the market. What emerges is a more efficient equilibrium. Competition is, essentially, a "good" thing.


But competition also causes profound instability and dislocation. And my lizard brain is intensely insecure about my survival. What is the back-up to my flimsy plans? The prospect of going home to live with my parents is frightening: disappointment and shame within an enclosed space would invariably lead to madness. I could find odd jobs here and there (assuming that Barnes and Noble would even hire a simultaneously overqualified and inexperienced college graduate), apply to law school, and wait out the year. I could pack up, move to Shanghai, and eke out a living tutoring English in China's new Gotham. Or simply live overseas as one of those disaffected young expatriates that populate Hemingway's novels.


Clearly, my speculation has reached the realm of fantasy. It got so bad that, while trying to have the same conversation with Rachel a few days ago, we ended up talking about launching crime syndicates -- planting poppies in the power-vacuum of post-war Afghanistan and the kind -- in lieu of legitimate post-graduation plans. We kid, of course, but it's a rather dark sort of humor.


And alright, I acknowledge that ultimately I am speaking from a privileged position, and that this rant veers on the melodramatic. My problem is not at all unique; it's one that all college graduates face. After investing so much (of my parents' money) into my (questionably productive) education, what do I do with my life that will validate my parents' sacrifice and my self-worth?

Dream lives

I would be a private detective, with a partner.
We'd have awesome chemistry but never actually get together.
We'd have this tiny business in a seedy alley.
I wouldn't have money, just enough to get by.
I'd drink, I'd have a high alcohol tolerance.
I'd be so tough.
I'd have a kitty.
--Nancy

Failure (aka Tacoma Narrows Bridge)

One of the great comforts of being a child is the lack of consequence. Mistakes were made all the time: I routinely fell victim to my cousin's lies, and after each revelation of his duplicity, I would experience an inexplicable renewal of faith, thus allowing for his next great coup. My repeated victimization (of myself, one could argue) led to minor scrapes and bruises, bafflement, and fleeting embarrassment, none of which outlasted the day.

Were that still the case today! Adulthood (I always imagine myself as approaching adulthood, though I am already legally independent in a vast majority of societies) is frightening in part because consequences seem to multiply and outgrow our competence. Professionally, we are held accountable by virtue of the fact that we take salaried jobs. Emotionally, we and everyone we interact with have lost the golden amnesia of childhood: sadness is no longer a moment but an interminable state. Family is less a haven and more a responsibility. Social propriety? No longer optional.

I worry about these demands and expectations sometimes. And I doubt I am alone in doing so. But I am taking this opportunity today to reassure myself that no matter how great my failures, they can hardly rival that of the engineers responsible for designing the original Tacoma Narrows Bridge, which collapsed in 1940, only four months after it was erected. I should add, before I mock, that no life was actually lost in the collapse of the bridge

To the architects and civil engineers behind this remarkable phenomenon:
SUCKS TO BE YOU! (:<

Flux

In electromagnetism, we talk about flux as the rate at which electromagnetic energy flows through a finite surface. In this usage, flux is the integral of a surface vector, which produces a scalar quantity (the distinction is important because flux in the study of transport refers to the amount that flows through a surface area per unit time, a vector quantity). In the equation above, electric flux (Φ_f) is the integral of the electric vector field E over the vector area (dA), directed as the surface normal...

O__o

No, I kid. I use the word here to refer to change. And what I have in mind is the most unpredictable and the most constant of changes: what happens when people change?

In every kind of relationships, that other (friend, parent, colleague,lover) plays a specific role, and we understand both the individual and the relationship with respect to that role. And I don't even mean seismic changes -- affairs, abuse -- I mean mundane ones. When the friend that we go to for comfort runs into emotional turmoil of his own, and needs to be the cared-for, rather than the caretaker; the first violinist -- a good friend and mentor -- falters and makes a series of thoughtless mistakes, and suddenly we are elevated, over him, to the position of concert master; or perhaps even more trivial, when our casual movie theater buddy takes a class in French auteur cinema, "discovers himself", and watches nothing but art house drivel. I mean, productions.

How does the relationship recover? Does it also change in order to adapt, and if so, how? If it becomes qualitatively different, then are we looking at an entirely new relationship? There seems to be a normative bias against severing the relationship entirely, but to what end do we preserve relationships?

People change all the time; we become ever more similar, more different, more incomprehensible. What obligations do we have to each other and to ourselves?

Appreciating Art

I began this as a comment to Rachel's last post, but what began as a comment grew long and unwieldy, and I decided to post it as an independent entry instead.

I wish I were more sensitive to music. Despite spending about half of my life playing one instrument or another (four years on the accordion; seven on the violin), I have only the faintest notion of pitch and rhythm, and my version of reading music mostly involves breaking concertos down to mathematical patterns.

For that matter, are we capable of appreciating more than one artistic endeavor with equal passion? Or is the very phrase "equal passion" a paradox that undermines the commitment implied by the word "passion"? I, myself, prize the visual far above the aural. I like the petulant whine and the joyful staccato of the violin, and I like the sounds of well-written prose rolling off my tongue, but neither can compete with the orgasmic pleasure of clean lines and bold colors.

I have never come across a more powerful commentary than Pablo Picasso's Guernica. As for functional art, Louis I. Khan's Jatiyo Sangsad Bhaban (Dhaka, 1982), which houses the Bangladesh Parliament, is astounding in its geometry. Commercial art? The silhouettes of Chanel and Lamborghini inspire lust.

Guernica
Picasso, 1937

Jatiyo Sangsad Bhaban
Khan, 1982

For several years when I was younger, my hopes and ambitions were all wrapped up into one: I wanted, desperately, to go to the Rhode Island School of Design after high school. I even began preparing a portfolio. In the years since, I gradually became convinced that being an artist was a marginal occupation that would allow me to make only limited contributions to society, that I would spend the rest of my life in a French atelier, impoverished and neurotic, and most devastating of all, that I lacked sufficient talent. I sold my paintings and gave most of my drawings away. (Friends asked for them thoughtlessly; I don't think they realized how hard it is to part with a work. Time spent aside, it was like giving away pieces of myself, intimate and irretrievable.)

I don't paint anymore. It is too expansive an undertaking to do for a hobby. And while I still have my Prismacolor sets with me, I don't draw much either. Being a spectator, however, revives the joy of performing -- art reminds me of possibilities.

Letter Never Mailed

I was flipping through my notebook, looking for my notes on Professor Gordon and Professor Mitani's joint conference, when I came across this instead. It was written, as far as I could tell, on June 18th. It is addressed to you, which is extraordinary because this intimate letter was written before our friendship became cemented by JASC. As it was intended for you, I share it here.

Dear Rachel,

I am writing this on an American Airlines flight to Tokyo Narita Airport. Four and a half hours into the flight. I'm watching a bad romantic comedy about, well, romance. But it's so bad that I neither want to fall in love nor have children.

Oh Rachel. I feel so young and so confused, only pretending to know what I'm doing. Like laughing at jokes I don't understand. I'm waiting for the moment when my deep intellectual paralysis and dysfunction could give way to something a little more presentable to the world.

And it's frightening because there is but one chance to do everything we ever want to do. Ever. And I'm terrified of failing -- how could I not be after growing up with only the knowledge of one lucky success after another. But, to spend a lifetime waiting for the extraordinary that never comes... well, I couldn't shed enough tears.

I am so afraid of being hurt. The human heart and the human ego are the two most fragile things I know. I wouldn't be able to get over a failure on this scale and still be the same person...




It's unfinished. Which is just as well. I fear I need more time to be able to write an optimistic conclusion to this sad, sad pile of fear and insecurities.