Worse :(

what happened before this: I read a Primo Levi short story in the New Yorker about an exploding star, and I walked up South Dowling Street to get out of the house, get some exercise, and get some lunch.

poem:
Very Sad Poem, Sunday at Berkelouwe

When the sun explodes,
that shop over there, with the picture in the window -
no trace will remain.

Even before that, when the archaeologists dig and find in the dust their first traces of this lost civilization that is my city,
They'll find a pot shard, a motherboard, a foundation stone - no trace of this shop
or this street.

And I will be long over this flu I've had all week and can't seem to shake,
my bones turned to dust
and those of all my friends, loved ones and acquaintances,

And no one will remember that I once had a silver Hyundai and we drove it to Newcastle for footy games and to the grocery store
(the concept of the internal combustion engine will have been long superseded and lost),

And the sound of my broken heart will no longer echo like a giant bass bell through history,
but will be finally quiet.

what happened after this: I had a bad relapse of stomach problems and had to take a very expensive taxi home.

Better!

I've been sick all week, but today I am better. I missed every second day of work - Monday, Wednesday, Friday, also Thursday morning. I missed our work Christmas function last night (much delayed, obviously, they decided to do it for Chinese New Year instead). I have cancelled everything this weekend to make sure I can focus on recuperation. But today I feel better!

It started with overall aches and a sore throat, then Tuesday started a belly instability, and that just got worse and worse until yesterday, when I made it half-way to work and then had to turn back because I was just in too much pain. Belly pain is weird because it can make you feel nervous, some sort of reverse-biofeedback I think. Yesterday I just slept all day like I was in a coma, having very vivid dreams. Last night same. And woke up this morning finally feeling not in pain, and with a bit of oomph and gumption so I can do things like laundry and stuff. Anything like that was beyond me all week, I couldn't stand upright long enough to get any of it done.

Since it was probably viral, it probably just passed its course, and the doctor even told me on Thursday that I'd probably be right by the weekend, but I credit my recovery to putting into practice my favorite gastro cure - bread and water. I should have done it earlier. For three days, eat nothing but bread in various forms - dry toast, rice or pasta with a bit of salt on it. Nothing else. It's very mild for the body to digest, and helps the system rest and heal. I did it yesterday - dry toast, then mega-coma-nap, then a bowl of rice for dinner. And now I feel better! I promise to return to four squares by Monday, I don't think I'll develop an eating disorder out of this. But it did seem to work...

Why I will never work for Google

A couple of weeks ago my Gmail account invited me to apply for a job. There I was just innocently reading my email and Google asked me, "Do you have account management experience? Google Sydney is hiring." Well, yes, yes I do have account management experience, I'm gaining more such experience every day. So I sent in a resume, just to see. Got an automated knock-back a few days later, which is sort of what I expected (and the cover letter definitely wasn't my best work, I noticed about three spelling mistakes in it after I sent it, and I think I might have sent an old resume with a mistake in it that made it look like I was at my current job for four months instead of 16).

I have applied for jobs at Google before, and even once made it to an interview. But really, when I look at the things they have available and what they're looking for in an employee, it's not the right industry for me. They build tools to search web sites, and to advertise them. My expertise is in building web sites. I'm on the supply side, if there weren't people like me there wouldn't be anything for Google to Google. But it puts me outside their corporate structure, really. So I should stop looking for jobs with them, I think. I am already in my niche.

Not quite egoless yet

I haven't quite completely overcome my ego. I was just reading an interview from the weekend's paper about a British novelist, she was shortlisted for the Booker Prize a while ago and was talking about her new novel. The interview included the phrase, "I was born in 1971, so..."

I still had my egoist reaction - she was born in 1971? Eight years after me? And she has two novels out? And I don't even have one? How is that possible? Let's not even talk about the fact that she's eight years younger than me and was short-listed for a Booker Prize.

If I really were going to write a novel, I would be stealing time away from other things and doing it. I would stay up too late in a frenzy of creation, I would not be able to breathe if I didn't write (another interview in the same paper), it would be easy. I should probably come to terms with the fact that I'm not going to ever write a novel. I do really want to write a book, but maybe even that is an artificial bourgeois superimposed expectation on myself and I don't really want to do it inside, just for me.

What do I want to do? Well, I'm home from work sick, with a fever and aches all over and a bad stomach ache. And here I am.

Essential bloggist?

Spontaneously there

When you're working on something, you get messages from the universe delivered in all sorts of ways. This one was in David O. Russell's commentary on the I Heart Huckabees DVD. It's the scene where the Existential Detectives finally break Brad Stand, the corporate sales guy.

"He's going to go from this [confrontation about his family] to listening to his story played innumerable times. Which is a fantasy I've always had to do to people who tell you the same story ten times, and you'll hear the story and you'll think, my God, I've heard this story twenty times already from this person.

"It's like they have this repertoire which is a way of avoiding being spontaneously there with you."

How am I to break the tyranny of story-telling and craving a listener? Stop telling stories, and actually be there in the moment with people. How can I ensure every dialectic is fulsome? How can I become a better philosopher? Actually be there, actively, in the moment with people. Stuff the narrative.

Got it right

I called in sick to work today. I was struggling yesterday already, and then this morning woke up with a sore throat and feeling sort of dizzy. I pondered and considered for about 1/2 hour while watching trivial stories on Sunrise, and then did make the call to say I wouldn't be in.

Now I'm feeling worse and worse. I think I've got a fever. I have so many things I could do around the house, but will probably go back to bed. So it was a line ball decision when I actually called, but I got it right, I am actually sick.

The Listener

Okay, this is big. This is huge. This could mean reconceptualising everything I have thought in my whole life about what it is to be human and what's meaningful and significant and how we are to relate to each other.

One thing I've been excruciatingly missing since The Relationship Apocalypse is someone who's following the story of my life as it unfolds. I have people I see, friends, workmates, co-philosophisers, but no one's actually following the story day to day. I've been excruciatingly missing this and have been feeling really hard-done by that I don't have one.

This connects with the idea that a narrative gives one's life meaning. People are driven to put the events of their life in a narrative structure so that it makes some kind of sense. Let's grant that. BUT, then also, importantly, do you have to tell someone that narrative? Does a narrative have to have a listener in order to exist?

I'm sure I have always thought that it does, and that my key desire is to have one (or many). (Hi people reading the blog, how self-refential can a bloggist get?). Stronger than that - if having a story, or stringing life's events together so that you leave a story behind when you die, is the essense of being human, then for you to exist at all the story needs to be heard by someone. If no one hears the story you are creating as you exist yourself into each new moment, then you don't exist.

This is how I felt when I dropped off the edge of my own life and was in a void of absurd meaningless with no story.

But, BUT, is the desire for a listener an example of bad faith? Should you instead exist yourself into each new moment without any regard to what other people think (sounds obvious, doesn't it, but really think about it) - without regard to whether anyone would ever know it at all?

Well, the thing is, maybe. Maybe that craving, that drive, that essential need for a listener is a bad thing, an example of ego. Weakness, dependency, lack of self. An example of ego that should be got over if one is to live a good life.

I had a moment - well actually several hours - of egolessness on Wednesday night. I was asked to pinch-hit for a speaker who had postponed at the last moment, on that speaker's topic. So, there were no expectations on me at all, whatever I said on the topic as long as it got discussion going would be fine. (A side benefit was that as I did what little research I did, I realised that some things I always found really difficult and confusing back in Philosophy of Language class were really rather straightforward and clear - very handy when you have to explain it to a room full of people the next night.) My presentation was in two parts, and in fact the second part I got really egregiously wrong. The same kind of wrong that spun me out when I made that mistake at Adrian Heathcote's talk last year, that made me go all red in the face and be traumatised for at least a week because I had misspoken (I remember at the time recalling what bullies professional philosophers of language can be). But this time, I received a correction from someone in the crowd, very gently delivered but clear and direct, and as a result I learned something and gained more insight into the topic, but even better I didn't care that I had made a mistake. Not, told myself not to worry about the mistake but still felt bad, but really, honestly, deep in my bones, did not care at all. How on earth did that happen? How did I get that distance from the student, the young professional, even the girl at the Adrian Heathcote talk?

So, I had that moment of complete egolessness and have observed it and also sensed what it felt like. It was a result of having my sense of self destroyed in the apocalypse, I think. I couldn't have got to the egoless state where a philosophical presentation with a bad mistake in it meant absolutely nothing to my self-esteem without that ego-smashing experience previously.

But what else will I be able to achieve? Could I get over my lust for fame - or for grades and evaluation and praise? It's been with me since I can remember - could I actually get over it? And could I even further get over my need for a listener, someone to make my narrative real? I used to contrive to have them - the boys I used to meet for lunch once a week, or write long rambly letters to. I don't have anyone now who's across the whole story, everything I do in my life, everything I do each day. Could I get over it? Could I fell it not as a gap but as natural, or a liberation?

Argh, letting go of ego scares me. What if I let go and there's no me left? -- But didn't you just say that your ego was smashed and eradicated already? -- So you're saying we're already there?
-- Maybe.

Shoe shops and churches

overheard snippet of a conversation between a guy wearing a white shirt printed all over with the outlined patterns of butterflies and the girl whose hand he was holding, walking up Crown Street on a Friday night:

him: ...such proximity to nice things.

her: Yeah, shoe shops, and churches...

An outsider's view of Surry Hills?

Teleportation

There are a couple of restaurants in town that make me feel like I'm in some other city when I eat in them. One is on Pitt Street just this side of the mall, sort of near where Tattersall's is I think. You go down a steep set of stairs that's half-taken up with an exhaust hose, to below street level, to a narrow room that's always full of smoke and grease but has a full bar above the counter. There's a backpacker sort of guy cooking, and two very friendly and capable but also kind of dippy Chinese girls waiting and serving. I ducked in for coffee one morning when I didn't even live here but had a meeting in the city. I went there one night when I was supposed to meet someone for a difficult conversation but completely chickened out, sent a text, and went there for dinner (first course - Scotch on the rocks) by myself instead. It reminds me of a cafe in Boston where I went once for coffee - the Boston place amazed me because it was so diner-ish, completely unreconstructed, and also because the people there spoke with authentic thick Bostonian accents when I'd only ever heard thick fake ones on Cheers. So it was a top touristic experience, and that's probably why the underground Sydney place makes me feel like I'm in another country.

I found another one tonight - the transformation of a place I used to go in the afternoons because it was so casual and unpretentious, on Bourke Street amidst all the trees and gentrification. I headed there tonight because I didn't want to cook, I wanted to eat pasta, and I wanted somewhere you could dine by yourself and wouldn't feel a bit self-conscious or out of place. They used to have folding wood tables out front, but tonight as I approached I saw the tables had white tablecloths and were set with wine glasses. Turns out they have gussied up the place. The name was the same, and maybe some of the people, but the menu was completely different and the service quite a bit more elevated. The building is an old terrace and there's lots of wood around, wrought iron tables, atmosphere, antique-i-ness, and as it happened the white tablecloths and wine glasses set it all off rather elegantly. I of course had the old place in my mind the whole time and was in a sort of tesseract of memory with the new superimposed on the old (and a sense of how long it's been since I lived on Bourke Street - can nearly start rounding up to two years), but then I tried to imagine what it would be like to come there for the first time and not realise it had been something else before, and it reminded me of lovely little family cafes in Italy. I could image getting up from a nap, taking a shower and getting dressed up, walking out from a hotel to explore the neighborhood, coming upon this quaint yet classy little cafe and thinking, "This looks nice, looks like it could be good." And settling in and indulging in one more glass of wine than you planned to have, or maybe splurging on dessert, and having a sense that this elegant, cosy, antique-y family restaurant had been there for generations and truly captured the spirit of the neighborhood.

Do these mental transports mean I should go somewhere to visit soon? Am I bored with my surroundings? Does it mean I'm so bored that I should uproot and find some other city to explore and make unfounded assumptions about? Anyway, I'll enjoy the little mental journeys when they happen.

Conquer the river or contemplate the river?

When I first got to UQ I remember having a conversation with the head of department there about what constituted a "first rate mind". He was an Oxford-trained philosopher in the very traditional mold, including the white beard and everything. He said his idea of someone having a first-rate mind is someone who would sit and wait for ideas to float by, then take them and mull them over and turn them around a bit, and then send them on their way. I was appalled by this. I had just come from a philosophy department, not just in the US but in California, and my model of having a first-rate mind was that you had to have an agenda, a philosophical program. You had to have an area of specialisation and then a particular take on it, and then you had to brand it and market and make sure everyone knew it was yours, and then aggressively defend it against critics and attack all alternatives. Less like sitting beside the river and waiting for interesting things to float by, more like Olympic level white-water kayaking. My department-head's view sounded unforgivably passive in comparison.

However, I realised just the other day that I have now changed to have his view. Because I do philosophy in amateur contexts now, I don't have to specialise. We talk about anything and everything, usually all over one dinner, and then start back over it all again the next time we meet. The talks I've given so far have not at all been about personal marketing, they've just been topics that have come up and I decided to mull them over out loud for people, and get discussion going about it. I don't have to take particular views, much less extreme ones that are distinct from anyone else's working in the field. And it's so much more fun, and we get so much more accomplished, that I'm thinking this is probably a much better way to do philosophy.

Don't get me wrong, I still think there's a place for academia - it's the only venue you can really delve deep into specific technical issues, the only arena where you have time and resources to do that kind of hard and highly technical research and writing. But for the discipline at large, maybe venues like Philorum are more essential for keeping the whole thing alive.

Juggling

My day at work - the background is that all of our clients seem to want things live on the first Monday of the month. We're getting more and more jobs, so more and more meetings and quotes, but lately I've been doing project management, or really more project shepherding - get the stuff to the client to review, get the comments back from the client to the designer, back and forth all day. Really, I should be doing something more strategic, but in a small company you have to help do everything, including answering spam phone calls of people fishing for the MD's name and address.

We had four big projects due to go live on Monday. Then we got two more new little projects to do today (both of them fell through, though, actually). Clients were being very slack about reviewing things and getting comments back, and I'm working with two people who are new so we don't know each other yet and there are lots of changes (I'm learning that multiple design rounds are just part of the learning curve, so projects with new clients always blow way out in designs and concepts, and project management and meeting time, and that's just the investment you have to make - fortunately the learning curve is steep and by project #2 you give them stuff they approve in about ten seconds without changes). I was feeling frustrated at the beginning of the week because I couldn't get anyone to do anything. But mid-week I started just asking people, and it's working.

Today I had about 8 balls up in the air the minute I got in, but then there were two emergency crises from left field, and then three more bugs and difficulties with a big client, and four people in the office were gone all morning to a meeting (so I had to answer the phone - everyone else is either an uncomfortable non-native English speaker or had headphones on), and so by lunchtime - I didn't even take any lunch, just held a sandwich in one hand and scrolled through things with the other - I had at least ten balls in the air at once and three of them were on fire.

But I asked people to do things, and after the team got back from the meeting two of them asked if they could help with anything, and the clients did what they were told, and the bug got fixed, and things were delegated and approved and ticked off, and the balls started to fall, boom, boom, boom, right into place!

This kind of day is always hard - I usually lose my voice about halfway through, from stress, and my neck hurts now from computing rapidly and from holding my muscles tense - and there are some phone calls along the way that make you put down the phone and go, "F* ck!" and put your head in your hands, but by the end of it I felt great, I had a rush, I felt like I'd really accomplished something. And learned something too, I think - you can accomplish just as much by just having the adrenaline but not the negative stress and panic. Our new little designer, who's I think from Thailand, is a great example of this, he's so calm all the time - and so talented and fast and competent - that by late this afternoon I was trying to be more like him.

So, if I can manage the negative emotions, the stress and doubt and feelings of powerlessness, I think I will not just love my job but really really love my job. I already feel kind of important, it's great when I feel accomplished and calm in a crisis, but if things go right I am building to a truly senior managerial job, which feels good, it feels like something that I as a person can aspire to. I like aspiration. I like adrenaline, too, and I guess that's both the fuel to get there and the reward you get as you do.