So in continuing with my new “phase” of interviewing my own friends about their experiences with mental health/ self-improvement/ coping mechanisms, today’s subject is a man by the name of Mike.
And here he is:
1.In all these years I’ve known you, I notice that you tend to speak in metaphors/ analogies quite a bit. Would you say that doing so allows you to “process” your thoughts better? Or have you never just thought much about it?
It's difficult to make a sentence that doesn't express a relationship between two things. I mean, at its essence, it's kinda true - how does a subject relate to an object? The dog barks. The cat jumped, afraid. The server is offline because the disk is full. These relationships always seem to reduce, but as they reduce, they start to share and overlap. A server with a full disk is a pigeon that can't fly because it ate all the rice; the sysadmin didn't account for the files expanding and the pigeon never thought the rice would either. Growing up, that TNG episode, Darmok, may have really struck me just how little actual language we need, to communicate an idea. I've had conversations with gestures with people who spoke no English, and I've always felt an idea more fully communicated when the relationship inside the analogy 'clicks' - so many more 'aha' moments where these technical ideas are distilled until they are simple. I believe there are very few complicated ideas; only complicated relationships, each one a complex of simpler ones. Although I really do rather prefer to speak without analogy - each word we have is a tool that applies a specific function. And although we can apply a great many solutions with a hammer, those words end up as banged and marred as the hammered bolt. But no, I don't think of it as a way to process my thoughts, so much as a way to amplify my signal. If I say something technical and follow up with an analogy, to me it's like speaking a passage with an American Sign Language speaker standing next to me.
2.Another thing I know about you is that you like to “get your hands dirty” with arts & crafts type hobbies/ projects (mainly woodshop stuff). Do you find those activities to be “therapeutic” in some way? Or do you just do them for the sake of doing them?
Oh, hmm. I think there's a hunger I feed with it - not being wealthy, owning a home almost demands a collection of new skills a mile wide and an inch deep. So I'd say the home itself is the hobby project. And yes, I get to 'tinker' with a great many things - a wood shop, a welder, and many gardening tools. But I know there's no purpose for it - if I don't do those activities there will be little effect, short of patching a hole in the roof or caulking a hole bugs can ingress. So then, why? And the answer, to me, is that we can speak through our hands. Our hands can listen. They experience the world very differently than the eyes and ears. And many of us have these IT jobs, where our hands are hostage to a keyboard, a type of hamster wheel. When I give myself a need to dig a hole, or lift a woodstove off a trailer, I get to experience a different world through my hands. Parts of my brain get to grow. I try. I fail. I get angry. Eventually I might succeed. The reward feels just as good as writing a working program. The other thing of interest to me, is I get to observe how patterns from working with computer code will show up when I do a home project. The way in which I sort plywood is a type of literal analogy, if you can forgive the oxymoron, that I realized when writing a computer program that stacks two dimensional arrays of numbers. And now I can cut so many pieces of wood with barely any effort, because I had to think about this thing that exists as a fiction written in electrons. I get a lot of pleasure when I see those connections form. Everything is a relationship between two things.
3.I recall the other day you were reading my journaling tips and noted how you would like to try writing in cursive, if you ever try journaling. Have you ever attempted journaling in the past? Has it helped you at all if so?
You know we have been watching these Marvel movies, and lately, each universe has a 'nexus' character that binds everyone together. My friends have called me that, and I have 25 years of gmail on the same account, corralling friends into conversations, events, gossip, talking about people, things, ideas. And in there, a very, very healthy portion of emails from me, to myself. Ideas, venting, forced stream of consciousness brain dumps, and contemporaneous notes for me to rediscover some day. I don't really go through the past - it's all in there, but nostalgia is one of the worst drugs. I don't think I can take the mantle of journaling officially; but I have scents of it, heavy some years, light the others. As for cursive, I was quite bad at writing cursive in grade school. In college, I invented my own 'fonts', somewhere between print and script, but it was truly my elective year of Russian my junior year of college that undid any desire to ever write it myself ever again. So if I said I wanted to try writing in cursive, I'm sure I was inveigling you to encourage you! I can't stand it, too many loop de loops!
4.Another thing we both have in common is a love for “geeky pop culture” of the likes of superheroes and whatnot. Do you consider that stuff to be a form of “escapism” for any particular aspects of your life? Or do you just watch that stuff for the sake of watching it?
Superheroes. The McDonald's slop dinner of cinema. We all love it. Like a greasy burger. They invented a genre, or maybe just promoted one, but it became the eminent movie theme a quarter of a century ago. Whether it keeps plugging along for another 10 is anyone's guess - I think generative AI, even with the scaling limitations we're starting to see, is still 'good enough' to completely disrupt how storytelling is experienced. Someone on Reddit this very night quipped, "DVDs killed VHS; Streaming killed DVDs; what kills streaming?" Some answers were, "streaming kills streaming - have you seen how much it costs lately?" But I think individualized storytelling, with another 10 years of hardware improvements, will see us experiencing stories where we are part of the movie. It doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be entertaining. My money is that it will satisfy most people, most of the time, to fundamentally change how we experience entertainment. With that picture in mind, I would say, that's the kind of escapism that could unravel us. What kind of scares me, what brings out my own brand of paranoia, is waiting for the day a phone app can real time speak to you in your ear bud, see your world enough to react to it - and feed you ideas on how to interact with it. If there were to be software out there that could suggest how to escape reality, using reality as the backdrop, a shared reality at that - would that not concern you, too? Escapism scares me, full stop. And superhero movies bore me. At this point I watch it cause it's there, just like I'd eat a big mac if it was going to the trash ... but I wouldn't go buy one!
5.Anything else you’d like to say as we wrap up here?
Well, thanks for having me on. I've been a fan of your blog for a while and I've been enjoying you try different angles, calibrate, and just grow as a writer. So it's a real honor - I wasn't ever expecting to get an invite like this so I'm honored, truly!
Peace!
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