I love finding exactly what I'm looking for.

You know that feeling you get when you're searching for something specific, have trouble locating it for a while, and never end up finding what you're looking for? Or maybe, just by chance, random luck, or persistence and devotion, you manage to discover whatever it is that you're so earnestly seeking?

Maybe you only like one obscure flavor of energy drink, and you drive to multiple grocery stores and gas stations, getting ready to give up after seeing that the third gas station is sold out. But then you spot a single glowing can hidden within a row of other lesser energy drinks.

Maybe you're traveling to Europe for the first time, and are trying to meet up with your friends who've already been in Paris for a couple of days. You get lost in the wrong lines at airports, train and subway stations, try to use the wrong forms of currency, lose all of the phone numbers and addresses that you wrote down on a sheet of paper, get hassled by customs security, get randomly delayed, and wander around the city for hours. 12+ hours of travel, confusion, frustration, and anger later, you find yourself sitting hopelessly conquered on the steps outside of a hostel. But then you catch sight of your friends walking down the street towards you, waving and shouting.

You know that feeling?

I'm moving to Chicago soon, and I'm going on a trip to the city next week. I've planned meetings with employers and subletters to see if I can get established before I just get up and go. I am unfamiliar with the town, so I decided to do some extra research beforehand to make sure that I can get everywhere on time. I used Google maps to find addresses, and tried to use the Chicago Transit Authority's subway maps to figure out how I'm going to get everywhere. It was difficult to see how the subways related to the city streets, and I could not, for the longest time, find anything that could help compare the separate maps. But then I found this:

http://www.tastypopsicle.com/maps/cta.asp

Man, I love finding exactly what I'm looking for.

Good Reading Material?

I've been looking for better ways to spend my random blocks of freetime lately, and I think reading might be a good place to start. I've never been much of a reader, and I could probably name every book that I've ever read in under a minute. With the exception of all of those childhood novels, comics, cartoons, and all of that stuff, of course.

Do you have any general suggestions? I'm interested in anything that's good reading, on any topic whatsoever. Philosophy, psychology, religion, drama, romance, action, mystery, fantasy, anything. Let's try to compile a good list here and the next time we're at the library or book store or browsing Amazon.com we might have some specific ideas.

Following each book with a short blip of what it's about would be nice.

How much have you changed?

Little or big. Share an account of something that has changed in you, or that you changed in yourself.

Maybe when you were a child you hated asparagus and loved chocolate, and now the opposite is true. Maybe you used to be conservative and now you're liberal. Maybe you used to be shy and now you're outgoing. Maybe you used to believe that Jesus was your savior and now you don't. Maybe you used to feel that life was meaningless and now you find it very fulfilling. What changed? How did it happen?

You in a Nutshell

Earlier today I wrote some emails to Craigslist posters for sublets in Chicago. Many subletters ask for brief bios, so I tried to write candid 2-paragraph descriptions of myself. While writing those emails, I started thinking, "how would this self-description be different if I wrote it in a different mood? Or if I weren't trying to tactfully sell myself? Or if I knew different details about the recipient?"

There are so many different ways to summarize yourself in just a couple hundred words. And nobody is always only one person, with one set of interests, and one explicit history. How would you describe yourself in a nutshell? What aspects of that description would be false? How might it change from day to day, second to second?

Why do some people in negative moods isolate themselves?

(And please don't just say "it's human nature, it just happens, it's unanalyzable," and etc. I'm not a big fan of that whole irrationally untouchable inpenetrable mysterious sacred black box of secret human nature that governs everyone at all times but is inconceivable and unthinkable.)

This question arose at the end of a series of considerations that followed a brief conversation I had with someone that was just rejected from a medical program. He was in a depressed mood. The conversation went something like this:

Him: Man, now I know why medical students have such high suicide rates. It's just so stressful, and can be so depressing.

Me: It shouldn't be too big a deal, right? I mean, you can retry at a future time. And it's not like any time is lost, you can learn and intern and develop all the while.

Him: Yeah but it's such a hassle, and costs a lot, and there's so much pressure.

Me: I don't doubt it, but that's just life, ya know? That's what you wanna do, so you gotta go through the required processes.

Him: That's easy for you to say. You haven't gone through what I have.

Me: Maybe not exactly, but I've experienced many similar things in life. Like rejection from college, rejection from jobs after extensive interviews, rejection from women even. It's all a part of life, and your values determine how you deal with it.

Him: I dunno man, you just don't understand.

And that's where the conversation ended. It seemed like the guy's basic attitude was: I'm feeling bad. Why are you speaking about my hardships so lightly? Why do you pretend like you understand what I'm going through, and would be dealing with these problems more positively, when you aren't experiencing exactly what I am?

Why do people in negative moods rarely think that their situations are understandable by others? Are they so extremely affected that they feel their condition is beyond anything someone else has ever experienced? Or so uniquely different that no experience could ever compare? Or do they not want others to be able to understand? For if their suffering is unique to themselves, whatever they are feeling cannot be compared to anything else, and they can rationally continue to feel however they wish, regardless of what anyone could think or say. In the end, why is the automatic common response, "you just don't understand?"

Evolutionary non-human expressions of emotion have been observed to be largely for the purpose of seeking attention and care. But for humans, many people that feel strong negative emotions prefer to isolate themselves from human contact. For whatever reason, they do not wish to be in the company of others, or be seen by others in their condition, or be falsely misunderstood by others, or be judged by others. But self-coping mechanisms are rarely as effective as group-coping mechanisms. Human contact is key to many components of mental health and well-being.

Something is wrong there. It's as if fear of judgment (or misunderstanding or being seen, or something) overrides the desire to resolve issues, or to overcome hardships. Are the current ways that humans are treating each other, and thinking about each other, shaped in such a way that is promoting that kind of behavior? What can be done?

How much do you think nowadays?

Remember the days when you had millions of questions, curiosities, and bewilderments, and only a handful of them were within your grasp? Has that level of wonder decreased for you over time? What do you think about nowadays? How much have you resolved and concluded? How much stuff is left to think about?

Analysis of Laughter

What do you guys think about this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/13/science/13tier.html

Basically:
"Occasionally we’re surprised into laughing at something funny, but most laughter has little to do with humor. It’s an instinctual survival tool for social animals, not an intellectual response to wit. It’s not about getting the joke. It’s about getting along."

Mindlessness and Communication

I've noticed that this kind of thing happens frequently, even with people close to us:

Situational contexts vary greatly. We could be planning a joke on a friend with another friend. We could be sitting in a car with a family member. We could be asking a friend for a favor. The basic premise could involve the need for a task to be completed, explicitly or ambiguously. Or a random analysis of a seemingly complex object. Someone ends up making an assumption about the incompetency of another, and notably expresses their concern, or gives an unnecessary reminder. The issue is usually trivial, but I am curious as to its foundations.

For example, one time I was planning a small practical joke on the roommate of a friend. The idea was simple: this roommate is a mess with toothpaste tubes, and after a few weeks of use, the lid of the tube becomes encased with gobs of dried toothpaste. Even though the old messy tube wasn't even half-used, the roommate bought a new tube of toothpaste to forget about the mess. We were going to carefully recreate the dried toothpaste mess in the new tube, and reseal it back into the original package, awaiting the roommate's use.

Midway through the careful oozing and drying process of achieving the desired level of dried toothpaste mess, my friend told me, "don't forget to prop up the lid of the tube so that it doesn't stick to the carpet in my room." Trivial. Absolutely harmless and irrelevant. But so obvious. Why did he remind me to do something that I couldn't have possibly screwed up? I didn't think that he was concerned that I would be careless. I doubt it was something that he himself would've accidentally done, resulting in his decision to remind me. But then why?

People are just really mindless nowadays; they speak before they think. Without cause or reason. People complain and grumble and chatter mindlessly at length all of the time. In some cases it may correlate with genuine concerns, and lack of trust in competency or dependability of others. Anxieties, worries, and whatnot. But how much of the time is it just mindlessness, immediately forgettable material? I think that if people were more mindful when appropriate, they may have the potential of more advanced communication and greater relationships. And productivity, efficiency, happiness, and all of that other stuff.

The Greatness of Complete Mastery

You know what I really want? To develop complete mastery, total proficiency, expert, and adept command of something valuable, something awesome and useful. I've touched that level of skill and understanding with a few useless things like games, but I would really like to develop those abilities in something more widely-applicable and more worthwhile in life. I just have to find something that I have enough passion for, to invest the time and effort.

What is the deal with illegal marijuana?

Is this: http://www.tanyahoughton.com/kris/norml/ true? How many situations out there have comparable histories?

Free Online Learning Resource

If you like learning and teaching yourself stuff, I hope you know about MIT OpenCourseWare.

Readings, assignments, exams- they even have some lecture videos up there. Yeah this spearheads a new educational era, the onset of the web making more things possible for more people in more places, and all that stuff. Check it out.

How's Your Lame Detector?

We've all experienced this many times during the courses of our lives, and depending on our social circles, possibly on a daily basis:

You get caught into a random conversation with someone, like a friend's friend, an acquaintance, a clear-skies friend, or even a close friend, and he starts droning on about something neither you nor anyone else within earshot cares about in the least. The lameness of what he is saying is blatantly obvious to everyone in the group, except him. Sometimes you manage to change the subject, or divert the conversation in another direction, but sometimes you get stuck listening to him go on and on, uncomfortable with revealing to him how lame he's being.

It's easier to deal with that kind of situation when in a group, but this may happen when you're the only person listening. That's right, let the various memories of boring time wasted flow back to you. It sucks to get stuck in that situation.

How can this person not realize how uninteresting he's being? How could he have no ability to detect my level of boredom, if not his own lameness? Could he be you?

I'm Back!

Over the last few months I've been busy with getting out of college, figuring post-college stuff out, and applying to jobs. During that time this blog slipped off the radar of priorities, but it has now returned. Look for new, random, and hopefully interesting thoughts and web scrapings that will resume population on this blog.