Batfort

Style reveals substance

Month: June 2018 (page 2 of 3)

When you want to decorate your room like a Red Velvet promo photo

2018-06-20 / / 0 Comments

Aesthetics, people.

The way things look matters, especially the way that the spaces around you inspire you and urge you on (or don’t) to living your best life. Go into a gothic cathedral and tell me that it doesn’t make you feel different from going into a cinderblock church.

I used to think that “good design” was mostly the bones of the design, the way that a system or document hierarchy functioned. But I’m coming around to the idea that the actual aesthetics of the things, the “finishing touches,” matter a great deal too.

Design resonates differently with different people, and I’ve been thinking lately about what types of design stick with different type of people.

I, for one, wouldn’t mind if my living room looked something like this:

Red Velvet / SM Entertainment

Surrealist neo-victorian with a liberal dose of naturalism. I can get behind that.

The question is: how can I get the moon to park so close to my window, and what’s the best cleaning method for tree-rugs?

I always forget how much I hate writing

2018-06-19 / / 0 Comments

I’m immersed in the last-gasp push of a Top Secret writing project. (Hint.)

I haven’t written this much on a self-imposed deadline since I was in graduate school.

Somehow, even though I remember feeling like a squeeze-out tube of toothpaste at the end, I forgot how much I hate writing.

That feeling never came through on this blog. Insecurity, feeling like I made a fool out of myself, sure. Even disappointment, knowing full well that any night’s post wasn’t everything it could be, taken to its extremes.

But writing like tonight’s, even when I deviated from the plan and added some extra magic to the plot, is Not Fun.

I have this problem, see. When an idea is in my head, it’s great. It can morph around to become the best version of itself, it can breathe and live, and nothing real is pinned on it. The minute you get that idea in to the real world, though, my brain loses interest. Now it’s a real thing, and it’s less than the shining ideal that it can pretend to be inside my head.

Now I know the quality.

And the quality is Not Good. Or rather, Not Good Enough. Never Good Enough.

I’ve never understood why people hang their own art on their walls, and my writing is no exception. Why would you want something on your wall that you could so clearly compare to the perfect ideal in your head, all of the time?

To me, that’s a recipe for self-critical behavior, something I don’t want to fall into any more than I already have.

I don’t want to read my own writing. I don’t particularly even like writing my own writing.

Yet, in some weird way, I still enjoy writing.

Crazy.

The Money Pit Appreciation Post

2018-06-18 / / 0 Comments

There are some people in this world that I vehemently disagree with on the answers to our problems, but who articulate the problems of modern life so acutely and truthfully that I can’t help but love them.

Bobby Darling and Nic Newsham are two of those people. Formerly of Gatsby’s American Dream (Volcano is hands down one of my favorite albums of all time), they teamed back up a few years ago to spit out some new music as The Money Pit.

And of course it’s beautiful.

One of my greatest musical regrets is not seeing their live show because I had a job interview the next day. I really wanted to hear the intro to “Lawrence, Kansas” in person.

(Made doubly difficult by the truths uttered in “Killing Time in Hawaii.”)

The same malaise that drives much of the alt-right is reflected in these lyrics. So many of us, especially us old millennials, know that there is so much fundamentally wrong with the way that our society has grown. We can feel the impending collapse, but still get on Twitter and feed the perpetual outrage machine. We hasten our own dooms.

The music on this album is deceptively cheerful, which is one of my favorite conceits. Cheerful music with depressing lyrics. All the energy we need to face the end of the world.

Forget the politicians. The politicians are what really give you the illusion that you have freedom of choice.

You don’t.

What is “Creative Achievement” anyway?

2018-06-17 / / 0 Comments

I’m curious about two things.

  1. My post on the Creative Achievement Questionnaire gets a lot of hits, probably from people wanting to know what’s on the questionnaire, and yet
  2. Google Trends doesn’t have enough data to make a chart for “creative achievement.”

I get why people search for it–Jordan B Peterson talks about it and naturally people get curious. That’s why I found it myself. Then, I was enthusiastic about it. Now, I am much less enthusiastic about JBP and about the questionnaire.

Much of the questionnaire is based on social acceptability of the creative work. Publishing, reviews in national publications, that sort of thing. As a proxy for popularity, it makes sense. The question we’re answering is “to what degree is this person creative within this social epoch.”

But is that an objective scale? No. That would put many artists, such as Vincent van Gogh, who were not popular during their lifetimes, much further down the scale than they merit.

This scale does not take into account social norms or taboos (and the fact that truly creative work often violates these). It does not take into account the Lindy effect, or the timelessness of a creative act. And it does not take into account originality or mimicry. Only acceptability.

It also does not take into account the political and very flawed nature of peer review, but asking that of peer-reviewed “science” may be too much. (Understatement.)

What I’m getting at here is that this Questionnaire sets the boundaries of creativity to what is socially acceptable. Boundaries are intrinsically antithetical to true creative achievement.

One of the commenters on the forum from which I cribbed the Questionnaire echoes this same sort of sentiment:

For me my zero score has a lot do with my very strong distaste for formal schooling, both the social aspects and the book work aspects. I’m usually only interested in things that invigorate me through combat/action (virtual and real life) or that involve learning about the extraordinary. I suppose technically I could score 1 or 2 points for humor and thinking about science related things but that would be lenient.

The people who are most likely to be the creativist achievers are also the least likely to accept the rules of society. See also Elon Musk’s current 1v1million battle against the media and Peter Thiel’s status as Permanent Outsider.

I see this online a lot as well, where the originators of tremendously influential memes are completely anonymous, and the ones that we do know (like Comrade Stump) are highly obscure.

This world has an interesting way of obscuring the true origins of things.

Anyway, I did some additional research into the phrase “creative achievement,” and as Google Trends suggests, there isn’t all that much. (Especially if you’re not particularly interested in psychology.)

From the Oxford English Dictionary, we have a few out-of-context quotes:

1927   Lima (Ohio) News 25 Jan. 7/2   It releases the worker from the old body-killing exertion and frees him for creative achievement and recreation outside his job.

2012   N. Dykstra Clover Adams ii. 23   How she grew had been shaped by being at the center of a city during extraordinary years of go-getting, reform, and creative achievement.

These uses certainly position creative achievement among the day-to-day things that we do, such as cooking dinner (Culinary arts?) and doodling in the margins of our notes.

Some psychologists say there are eight domains of creativity, such as Culinary Arts and Creative Writing, but others bump that up to 10 by adding Inventions and Scientific Discovery to the mix.

I investigated ten different domains of creativity: Visual Arts, Music, Dance, Architectural design, Creative writing, Humor, Inventions, Scientific Discovery, Theater and film, and Culinary Arts.

The two main factors most strongly associated with Intellect— Intellectual Engagement and Explicit Cognitive Ability– were more relevant to creative achievement in the sciences than the arts, whereas the two main factors most strongly associated with Openness— Affective Engagement and Aesthetic Engagement– were more relevant to creative achievement in the arts than the sciences. What’s more, these results suggest that Affective Engagement may be detrimental to creative achievement in the sciences.

Interestingly, when I considered all four factors at the same time, I found that Intellectual Engagement was a better predictor of scientific creative achievement than Explicit Cognitive Ability.

If I were to roughly match up these cognitive labels with MBTI points, I would guess:
  • Intellectual Engagement = Intuition
  • Explicit Cognitive Ability = Thinking
  • Affective Engagement = Feeling
  • Aesthetic Engagement = Sensing (although this might be a little bit shaky).

It would make sense to me that Intuition would be the best predictor of creative achievement (intuition includes the ability to make leaps between seemingly disparate subjects). It would also make sense to me that N and T skew to science-related creativity while S and F skew to the arts.

(Once you understand that science is mostly made up of NF types, the personalities make much more sense. Most of the NTs are in engineering, not science research.)

Mensa, on the other hand, deliberately eliminates any artistic achievement at all from their Copper Black award:

What is considered to be a “creative achievement”?

 A novel idea that has proven to be of practical value to others, such as a solution to a particular problem.
Are artistic works such as paintings, music, choreography or fiction eligible?
No.
This is basically the “congratulations, you did something” award. Past award winners include things like
  • classroom integration of Sudoku for learning
  • anti-bullying app
  • teaching strategy to narrow, close, and even reverse historically pervasive achievement gaps among students from diverse backgrounds
  • research and development of a motion sensor capable of discriminating between a home intruder and a wandering pet
  • developing and implementing an intervention for those with children suffering from Reading Comprehension Deficit

I once was mildly curious about Mensa. Can’t say that I am anymore.

The question remains: what can we get out of all these differing perspectives on creative achievement? From the looks of things, not much.

If we wish to rise above the confines of our times and truly get a handle on what achievements were worthwhile, original, contributions to the world…we’d have to be God.

Same with scouring the earth for the hidden creative forces that are far more influential than seems allowable. Like Susan Boyle, for instance, an incredible voice in a person who was not seeking fame or achievement.

Perhaps what we can see is “creative ambition,” not true creativity.

I’m intrigued by this now, and will have to investigate and ponder it further.

What is creative achievement, and does writing about it matter?

 

I hate Crohn’s Disease

2018-06-16 / / 0 Comments

It’s not the having of the disease.

I’ve mostly made my peace with the fact that my immune system is at war with myself, manifested in the sleeping monster that lies in my gut, and that my life will never be “normal.” The physical stuff, that’s fine. I can deal.

It’s all the stuff surrounding this disease. The culture. The way people talk about it. Even the stupid name is awful.

Unlike “ulcerative colitis,” which basically describes what’s going on, Crohn’s disease is the most undescriptive name ever. Even something like “Hashimoto’s thyroiditis” has a clue in its name. “Hydentritis supportiva” sounds intimidating and mysterious, and “lupus” has such a reputation. Even “Rheumatoid arthritis” sounds more interesting than regular arthritis.

But no. Crohn’s disease is named after the dude who “discovered” it. I thought “Crohn’s colitis” was a weird name for a while, but at least that gives people a fighting chance of guessing what it’s about. The word “disease” is so generic.

Let’s not forget the fact that nobody (including myself half the time) can spell “Crohn’s”. So we get Chrohn’s and Chron’s and maybe sometimes Crone’s.

Another thing I hate about this disease: poop jokes sound so funny when you make them self-deprecatingly about yourself, but so awful and crass and unimaginative when you read them on the internet or in a book. If there’s one upside to this disease, it’s the fact that I can make unlimited poop jokes–and that’s not much of an upside.

(There are other upsides, but they are all indirect.)

Nobody really wants to talk about poop, ever, so I can’t even be completely forthright about what my disease is about. With other problems, you can explain symptoms in full with no social repercussions. Not so much with Crohn’s. Nobody likes to talk about diarrhea. I’m convinced that the thought gives some people cognitive dissonance.

When you have cognitive dissonance, that’s when you get the worst of the platitudes and the pat little answers.

Nobody really knows what’s going on, but everybody’s going to be super nice about it.

That’s where you get this victim-culture surrounding Crohn’s (and likely other diseases as well, although I haven’t researched them). Lots of writing in the style of “woe is me” or–better yet–from a third party, “woe are ye.”

There’s this attitude of “aren’t we courageous for living with this disease” and “here are some ways to make your life suck less but you should just resign yourself now because it’ll be less painful for you.”

The aesthetic is bright white and sterile, just like the doctors office. The empty words of encouragement are sterile, just like the doctor’s office. Everything takes a cue from the modern medical system, which is broken and inefficient and is what got most of us to this spot in the first place.

It’s like Stockholm Syndrome, but in the medical community. People cease to be “a woman who has a disease called Crohn’s” and start to become “a Crohn’s patient.” Whole identities are built around this medical construct. It’s sick.

I reject that. I refuse to let my life and my identity be defined by an illness that I did not choose. I refuse to stay tethered to conventional insurance exorbitant medical bills and drugs that are so expensive they give me anxiety. I refuse to fall into the victim mindset. I refuse to let the medical establishment dictate my future.

That is why I’ve gone off-road with my health, why I went full carnivore, and why I’ve learned a lot about nutrition and inflammation and alternative lifestyles.

The paleo-for-good-health crowd comes at things from a place of relative health, and has very little to offer in terms of support and ideas for those of us who have had to dig ourselves out of very deep holes.

The autoimmune-disease-is-my-homie crowd refuses to look beyond the bounds of peer-reviewed evidence and thus traps itself in its own modern ignorance.

I choose a third path. I would like to help more people find this path. It is very difficult to get to, but once you’re on it the view is spectacular.

Image of the Week: Showdown

2018-06-15 / / 0 Comments

It’s obvious, right? More like image of the year.


Perfectly poised, yet crackling with energy.

Full of personality, yet timeless.

It looks art directed. Maybe it was.

Regardless, this photo speaks.

I have a bullshit job

2018-06-14 / / 0 Comments

In fact, my job pulls from both BS job #1 (Compliance) and BS job #7 (Academic Administration).

Over the last several decades, university administration has ballooned insanely — even while the number of teachers and students remain pretty much the same. There are hosts of new provosts, vice chancellors, deans and deanlets and even more, who all now have to be provided with tiny armies of assistants to make them feel important. First they hire them, then they decide what they’re going to do — which is mostly, make up new paperwork to give to teachers and students. As one complained: “Every dean needs his vice dean and sub-dean, and each of them needs a management team, secretaries, admin staff; all of them only there to make it harder for us to teach, to research, to carry out the most basic functions of our jobs.”

I like this article because it’s such a ballooning caricature of these jobs–each blown out to the utmost limits of its BS capacity.

Rather, it’s a series of articles that I’ve watched make the rounds on higher ed sites and now mainstream sites to promote the author’s new book. Academics don’t take kindly to the fact that many of their jobs are BS, especially when they themselves take their jobs so very seriously.

I work in an area that deals with a lot of compliance, that comes wrapped in the clothing of improvement. Statements like this

“It was not enough for the compliance office to submit bulls–t work, attested to by bulls–t third parties, to bulls–t quality-control people. We had to develop ways to measure this maelstrom of bulls–t.”

are something I can relate with. In fact, I think some of the people that I deal with every day have said that exact thing to a significant other over a large glass of alcohol at night.

When you have to spend just as much – or more – time convincing people that your job is legitimate as you do actually doing your job, your job is probably BS. Your job (my job) probably doesn’t need to be done at all, and is likely tethered to a number of positions, systems, regulations, and policies that also do not need to exist.

While it’s funny from a zoomed-out perspective, having someone else confirm that my job does not need to exist is kind of depressing. From the inside, I know this. I even tell certain people that I don’t understand why my position exists or why I make so much money (relatively speaking, I don’t make that much) doing not much.

But there’s a difference between knowing something yourself and having someone tell you, harshly. And that sucks. It sucks knowing that my day-to-day is pretty much useless, that every bit of effort and energy I put forth isn’t really worthwhile.

And that goes double with my desire to completely dismantle the education system, which I believe has failed.

So I’m doing useless work for a useless entity, spending my life energy and my creativity and time on essentially nothing. Throwing it into the void. Boy, that’s depressing.

What’s more, I’m the sucker that took this job in the first place.

Now it’s my second job to get myself out of it.

The Letdown

2018-06-13 / / 0 Comments

I knew it was coming, and still let it happen.

This happened to me after grad school, too: you have this big goal that you’re working towards. It fixes this big date in your mind, the date when it will be FULFILLED and you win, because you reached your goal.

Kind of like Christmas, only you’re Santa and you’re giving the gifts to yourself. Less of a surprise, but still fun.

But then Christmas is over and you have to clean up all the wrapping paper and wash all the dishes and then it’s a long time until something cool happens.

All that anticipation is expended. Hopefully it was expended into something that was worth it, like the time my brother and I thought Christmas was over but it turned out that ‘Santa’ had left us cross-country skis in the hall closet. That was pretty epic, ngl.

After all that excitement comes the doldrums. It’s natural and necessary (I believe that Newton’s third law of motion applies to most things in life), especially for introverts.

What goes up must come down, and all that.

And then you think, “Now what.”

The ideal plan was to sit down in the month of June and do an inventory of all the Batfort posts I’ve done so far, what they’re about and whether I like them, and then use that knowledge to shape future posts. What I didn’t anticipate was how much dang time that would take, and I stalled out around the December posts.

I still have a rough idea of where I want to take Batfort, and have the rest of the online business course I’m doing to help figure out exactly how I’m going to chisel the health stuff off from everything else, but I’m still floundering a lil’ bit.

My brain says “it’s over you can take a break now you’ve achieved your goal,” while my common sense says “Don’t let up now, you’ve only just started.”

In this case, I can see why some people advocate systems over goals. None of that pesky completion for your brain to get distracted by.

Regardless, I’m doing better than I was when I got my degree and had no idea what I wanted to do with it.

It’s like to succeed, you need an immediate goal but also a bigger goal that kicks into gear immediately after the initial goal is finished.

Staggered goals, maybe?

The Princess and the Soy

2018-06-12 / / 0 Comments

ONCE UPON A TIME there was a prince who wanted to marry a princess; but she would have to be a real princess. He travelled all over the world to find one, but nowhere could he get what he wanted. There were princesses enough, but it was difficult to find out which ones had autoimmune issues for real and not just for show. There was always something about them that was not as it should be. So he came home again and was sad, for he would have liked very much to have a real princess.

One evening a terrible storm came on; there was thunder and lightning, and the rain poured down in torrents. Suddenly a knocking was heard at the city gate, and the old king went to open it.

It was a princess standing out there in front of the gate. But, good gracious! what a sight the rain and the wind had made her look. The water ran down from her hair and clothes; it ran down into the toes of her shoes and out again at the heels. And yet she said that she was a real princess.

“Well, we’ll soon find that out,” thought the old queen. But she said nothing, went into the kitchen and put some soybean oil in the salad dressing; then she took twenty strips of bacon and laid them on top, and then twenty hard-boiled eggs on top of the bacon.

This salad was all the princess had to eat that night. In the morning she was asked how she had digested.

“Oh, very badly!” said she. “I have had a histamine reaction all night. Heaven only knows what was in the salad dressing, but my eyes puffed up, so that I scarcely look like a human being. It’s horrible!”

Now they knew that she was a real princess because she had reacted to the soy right through the twenty strips of bacon and the twenty hard-boiled eggs.

Nobody but a real princess could be as sensitive as that.

So the prince took her for his wife, for now he knew that he had a real princess; and the soy was outlawed from the kingdom forever.

There, that is a true story.

 

 

With apologies to Hans Christian Anderson.

Permission

2018-06-11 / / 0 Comments

It’s interesting that during my 365-day mission, when I did not have permission to cheat, my mindset was usually “How can I get this done?”

Now that I’m “allowed” to not post every day, the mindset has immediately shifted to “I guess I don’t have to.”

Nope. Not the mindset I want.

Permission, or lack thereof, is an insidious thing. I find that I constantly wait for permission (from whom?) before doing something. Permission that will never come, because life doesn’t grant permission.

In life, you go and do.

 

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