It was not exactly a banner month for learning.

There were a few interesting items — the NASA movie posters, the Brigham Young University beard policy, some stuff about farts.

There was some stuff I liked, and some stuff I didn’t.

But, looking back at the few meaningful exercises in bluggery, it seemed like if February was about exploring the world around me, March involved a lot of exploration of the world within.

The other night (technically, this was in April, but it’s my blergh, so screw off), I ran into a fellow UPer who’s going to Europe for six weeks. 

I convinced her that blojjering was a worthwhile endeavor — but I found myself thinking about that conversation a lot afterwards.  She writes:

27 was to be THE year!!  The year that everything came together and my life would finally make sense. 

And then, of course, the opposite.

Hey, I thought.  I remember that!  And I remember how great it felt to have the realization that lack of direction is just another word for freedom.  And I remember why it’s important to explore within.

That conversation at Union Pub helped me realize that my friend’s epiphany about how to handle moments of transition is the same one that has guided my (considerably less continental) experiment here.  And while I now want to backpack Europe (or go back to Belize) more than ever, I’ve started to remember that the point of exploring the world is that it helps you learn about yourself.

I spent a lot of this month feeling like I’m in transition — personally, professionally, in whatever spiritual/physical dimension the changing of seasons gets you.  Maybe that’s where my mortality panic came from.

But as April begins, I’m feeling a lot better.  And I think it’s because I learned something after all.

I think I spend way too much time and energy looking outward for cues.  That’s probably why I’m terrible at making decisions.  I don’t just look to the people I’m close to.  I look to casual acquaintances, people I don’t even talk to anymore but who still live in my head, people I’ll never meet but whose reactions I imagine.

But in March, I learned:

The things I learn about myself are really, really important.

That’s where the real stuff is.  Not in the faces of the people I meet or the echo chamber of my mind.  And, while I learned in February that exploration makes me happy, this month I’ve come to realize that exploring within is important to staying happy.

Now, this all sounds like a lot of bullshit, even to me.  But I am applying this learning.  I’m making decisions — some actually big (like what to do with my career) and some only big in my head (like how to rearrange my living room) — based on what I find within myself.  And maybe that’s why I’m way more excited about these decisions — and about my life — than I’ve been in a long time.

Not bad for kind of a squishy moral.

-andy

This happened last Saturday.

Frank and I were going to the Diner to get lunch.  This is the sort of thing I like to do on Saturdays.  Didn’t really have any plans for the day, didn’t really have any concerns, didn’t really have much on my mind.  Sunny day, pleasant.

I walked out of my house with a load of dry cleaning, dropped it off at the place around the corner, and we started walking on Calvert St.  Just a normal, ordinary, carefree Saturday doing the sort of little stuff that makes me feel relaxed and content.

I don’t remember, as hard as I’ve tried, what Frank said that set it off, or even if it was in response to anything at all, but all of a sudden, in a great whooshing tsunami that buckled my knees and made my vision blur, it hit me:

LIFE ENDS.  I AM GOING TO DIE SOMEDAY.  THERE IS NOTHING I CAN DO TO CHANGE THIS.

Now.  I cannot remember an age young enough where I didn’t constantly panic about getting older.  When I turned 26 — the age when, as a kid, I decided one was too old to embark on a career in Major League Baseball — I freaked out about the loss of that dream, despite the fact that, well, I’ll be kind to my athletic abilities and say I’d already chosen a different path.  But I had similar panics about graduating from college, choosing a major, graduating from high school, leaving Little League, graduating from elementary school, etc.  There is nothing new about this panic: “Oh my God, a piece of my life is over, never to be re-lived.”

That’s not what this was.  For the first time, it struck me that, well, there’s only so much music on the tape.  And when the song’s over, you don’t get to play it again.  It’s just…over.  Click.  Silence.

And there’s no use getting upset about it, because it happens to everyone and it’s normal.  Just like freezing rain or biting down on aluminum foil or colonoscopies, it’s one of those things that the human race has inexplicably decided we’re all okay dealing with.

Well — I’m not!  I’m just starting to get the hang of being alive.  The idea that there is such a thing as “not being alive” is incredibly frightening.  And I’d never really thought about it until last Saturday.

So, this hit me in a big wave and I actually needed a few minutes to recover.  Then I went and ate a sandwich.

What did I learn from my first mortality panic attack?  Well, I did eat a bran muffin for breakfast the other day.  But I think the thing it made me regret was spending time like it didn’t belong to me.  Not the days I spent playing video games or organizing baseball cards or staring at the ceiling playing with Rocket — that’s some of the stuff I should be doing while I can!

No, the thing I want to stop doing is losing control of my time.  It’s not the hours spent playing video games, it’s the months spent living inside my head instead of in the real world, the years spent being afraid to take chances or trust people or go for things I really want.

Apparently, my life isn’t going to be eternal.  It might as well be mine.

Also, bran muffins are pretty tasty, it turns out.

-andy

I don’t know if this is necessarily kosher (by the rules that we established and are in charge of enforcing), but I spent a fair amount of time this afternoon thinking about Diggy’s blerng.

I’ve never had a problem with Saturdays — but I’ve never been any good at Sundays.

Part of it, of course, is genetic.  Recently, I was at my parents’ house and noticed my dad sort of staring off into space with a vaguely disquieted expression.

“You okay, Dad?”

“Yeah.  Just thinking about all the stuff I have to do at work.”

“Ah.  Well, but you don’t have to go back to work until tomorrow.”

“Actually, it’s the day after.”

So, dating back to the era when I felt the need to pre-live my days, Sundays were a bunch of dangerous unscheduled time, and I’d revert to minor panic attacks and a lot of staring into space with a vaguely disquieted expression.

When I lived in Minnesota (pre-campaign), I discovered an interesting cure: Sunday day-drinking!  It wasn’t so much the alcohol that helped as it was the institution — a thing to do on Sunday that (unlike volunteer service or church or something actually worthwhile) didn’t require me to un-relax but did provide some kind of structure.

Well.  You know what I learned today?  I’m getting better at Sundays.  Sure, I still don’t have a lot of initiative to follow through on hobbies or anything like that (which means I still spend a fair amount of time staring off into space), but now it’s sort of pleasant to have that mental space.  I’m getting either better at relaxing or worse at planning out my weeks.

Also, on a note only related because my Sunday what-do-I-dos led me into the arms of the DVR, the Gil-moves-in-with-the-Simpsons episode is pretty much the weirdest one ever.

-andy

Originally, the point of this blog was to keep track of all the fascinating little things I learned about the world, the things that make it worthwhile to keep one’s eyes open and sense of wonder sharp: my cat’s heritage, cooking tips, random facts about graphic design and home repair, etc.

The idea was that, by the end of the year, I’d have a huge basket of reminders that the world is an interesting place.  This blog is, in short, an anti-ennui device.

Of course, being an emo kid at heart, and having invited another one to join the show, it was probably inevitable that the blog would start to feature as much internal discovery as it would actual learning.

In terms of this blog, I think the best posts have been the ones where a piece of new information served as a jumping-off point — where internal discovery and actual learning weren’t so much component parts of a while as they were melded together.

So, your humble co-authors decided that these monthly posts should feature a review of the learning done that month, capped with a moral.

What did I learn in January?

I learned that, in fact, my original suspicion was right — it’s easier to enjoy life when you have some kind of formal system for writing down the little things that make your day that you’d otherwise forget about as the days drag by.

I learned, somewhat unexpectedly, that it was a lucky thing that I had started a project of internal discovery, because actual events caused quite a bit of introspection.

A few days ago, I wrote:

And I guess I’ve been feeling out of sorts lately because I’ve somehow landed at one of those moments where I am zooming out rapidly, constantly amazed at how much there is, eating up as many miles of track as I can.

And that leads me nicely into January’s moral:

Don’t be afraid to be happy.

It has been a scary month — trying new things, questioning old tenets, taking chances, and other things I’m usually pretty bad at.  But I am so much happier than I was in 2009 (which, itself, ended pretty well), and I’ve come to realize that the more I scare myself by shaking up the Way I Usually Do Things, the better off I am.

Figuring out what will make me happy — and going after it — has been, and will continue to be, neither easy nor foolproof.  It requires of me things I’m not good at.  But this month, I learned that it’s worth it.

-andy

I guess this was bound to happen: today I learned this.  But that doesn’t really count.

This morning, I checked my mail and found a “Save the Date” for a college friend’s wedding in Spartanburg, South Carolina.  This is exciting, because it means I can take the Crescent.  I love trains.  The idea of eating up all those miles of track, speeding on a special highway to a different part of the world.  I am, as you know, a very cynical guy, but I am a sucker for the mystery and romance that comes with train travel.  I will probably dress up for it.

It all got me thinking, though, about peripheral vision.  We all grow up in bubbles.  Yes, even those of us who grow up in liberal families in big cities.  You can really only look at so many things at once, right?  And even the most open-minded kid with the most open-minded parents only knows a small piece of the world.  A big part of growing up is zooming out, realizing how much…stuff there is to see and know and eat and love and ruin.

I’ve never taken the Crescent to a wedding in South Carolina.  But neither have I worked on a farm, or built a model airplane, or written a romance novel, or run a marathon.  And I guess I’ve been feeling out of sorts lately because I’ve somehow landed at one of those moments where I am zooming out rapidly, constantly amazed at how much there is, eating up as many miles of track as I can.

I’m trying to decide what to do for a living.  But maybe that’s too narrow a question.  Maybe I should be deciding what to do for a life.

-andy

Today I read this article and learned everything that is inside of it. It’s brilliant, it’s about critical analysis of the first Die Hard movie in terms of how it explores the notions of non-linear architecture. I highly recommend reading it.

I’m gonna be honest, there’s some days (I call them Saturdays) when learning things becomes incredibly difficult when all you want to do is sleep in and not have plans for the first time in three weeks and watch the Mighty Boosh with commentary on. And eat really good Thai food. Ya know? I’m not learning about how awesome these things are, I already knew good Thai is awesome. I mean I’m in the middle of beating Chrono Trigger on the DS for a third time! It’s okay to take some solace in comfortable things from time to time, right?

Yeah, well fuck you too. It’s a free blog.

-diego

Today I learned about the Red Oni and the Blue Oni, which are basically the even more Japanese version of the Yin and the Yang as they pertain to people’s personalities. Ya see, it’s like you got these two oni’s (demons or spirits) in you: the red, passionate, emotional, violent one; and the blue, thoughtful, logical, spiritual, disconnected one. Each has their good and bad qualities, and they kinda mutually define each other.

Alright, not too interesting. Red v. Blue have been recurring themes all over the place, I know. It only takes on extra meaning for me because I like Mega Man too much and because I refer to my personal emotional states as “Aoki Hikari” and “Shwein Redline”. And if you get that those are references to They Might Be Giants and Jay-Z respectively, congratulations: you’re nuts.

-diego

I had to do all sorts of research on something called the Wild West Shows, which were like big fake elaborate versions of what life was like during frontier times, 19th century America and all that bit. They were enormous productions which drew massive amounts of money during the early 20th century before hopping over to Europe and being even more popular. They had all the classics: Annie Oakley, Buffallo Bill, fake battles against the Indians, all that. And then the money started to dry up, and this massive production couldn’t sustain itself. There were dozens of them at one point, but they all essentially became extinct within 5 years of each other. So today I learned all that.

That happens all the time of course. A co-worker was lamenting how tough the internet’s been on the porn industry, while another co-worker talked about how small development companies doing tinier games with more online interactivity are killing the big game development and distribution companies. Whenever people talk about the death of industry, the seem to omit the countless others that are springing up all the time. The world’s in a constant turnover, and sometimes things have to end so other things can begin.

I don’t want people, anyone really, losing their jobs and livelihoods, but I also don’t want the policy of the great American Empire being decided by the corn industry. Isn’t it okay for some old things to die off, even if they are as awesome as Cowboys and Knife Tricks?

And that’s when I start watching Dr. Who again…

-diego

While sludging through the internet, coming to the conclusion that I should be reading Kafka (do I even need to read Kafka though? Really? Like I don’t need to read Eco to get the point of his books, there’s a wiki article on it already. Can’t I just glean the major facts and try to come up with the symbolism on my own? Is that cheating? Is this the kind of bourgeoisie education I would have gotten if I had taken college a little more seriously? I bet it is, and I wouldn’t be 5 years back on figuring out about all these really heavy names to drop about during conversations. I suppose that’s why you really go to school, to save you from the embarassment of not understanding a reference; or worse yet, from finding out you share similar taste with your parents, and all the silly ideals they worshipped at your age or beyond, you’re just doing a shallow approximation of. God, how dreadful. Listen, I’m not trying to idealize youth or anything, I just get really bummed out thinking that I’m just trudging through already tilled soil here when it comes to the Great Experience of Self Realization, or whatever you want to call it. There’s nothing quite as bad as reading something completely mind-blowing, ya know shakes you at the essence of how you perceive people and society and love and your involvement with others and what you’re striving to become, and you get all excited about it, and then your mom talks about how she read a book on that when she was your age. Followed up by ten minutes of having you set up her “Tweet-er” account. Oh, oh, oh…that’s just the worst.)

…anyway, while looking up “Kafkaesque”, today I learned there’s a series of lists on wikipedia devoted solely to listing eponyms. Say goodbye to the rest of your afternoon, sucker.

-diego

I’m a notoriously judgemental guy, so it should come as no shock that I tend to determine very quickly the amount of utility I can get out of people I’m meeting for the first time. It’s always a pleasant surprise then to find out that people are capable of more than I may have given them initial credit for: the girl you thought of only sexually turns out to be a brilliant debater; the guy who you only watch football with is always the first one to offer to volunteer to help you move; your mom’s a terrible cook, but knows where all the good Thai restaurants are.

For whatever nerdy reason, this got me thinking about this race of aliens from Star Trek, the Ferengi. The Ferengi were these baddies that showed up on the first season of the Next Generation and were supposed to be the equivalent of the Big Bad Race (like the Klingons), but were so goofy looking, viewers couldn’t take them at all seriously. The producers of the show decided not to shelve them, but to turn them into a race that was driven by pure capitalism and to use them more for comic relief.

I had read that years ago and was thinking how smart it was for the show to not kill off something because it didn’t work, but to try to change it, fix it, justify it. Take from that whatever lesson you want, but while getting nostalgic for Star Trek, I looked up the Ferengi on wiki and today I learned that some brilliant writer had decided they were governed by a set of laws called the Rules of Acquisition. They’re all these short little aphorisms that read like an extremely cynical take on business ethics:

#10 - Greed is eternal.

#239 - Never be afraid to mislabel a product

and my favorite…

#95 - Expand or die.

Be like the Ferengi. Codify rules, and then make the last one be that you can always make up rules. It’s oddly gratifying.

-diego