"And all I have failed to do..."

Mathematics and fist-fights are universal languages. This match in the subway station was started by somebody looking for an excuse to fight and somebody who gave him an invitation to act on it.

Cantonese, however, is not a universal language, and I found myself desperately gesturing to the woman behind the counter at the station's 7-eleven trying to get her to use whatever emergency police-summoning buzzer the place was equipped with. I, or the shouting voices and the little slapping dull thuds of hard impacts against human flesh, eventually did manage to get her to follow me over to the scene. She just stood there, wordlessly watching. A small ring formed of other people watching. It felt like ages before somebody stepped in to break it up.

***

I was at my locker taking out books. The place was swarmed with students and I had to crouch very close to my locker to avoid the tides of people running from one class to another.

"Hey Chu!" the voice called, "congrats on making the musical!" There was a pressure on the back of my head, then the front, that there was nothing.

I woke up in the dark, the room spun and I felt a pressure on the sides of my face. I tried to move my head but I found it was wedged, and moving it pressed the doorway of the half-width locker against my temples; a frightening claustrophobic kind of pain that causes you to flinch back into the locker until your forehead presses against the back wall. When I was in 1st grade at Girl Scouts we used vacuums to draw eggs into glass bottles with mouths too small for them mostly intact, and I immediately thought of that image. I breathed out, counted to three, braced my weight so when I let go with my hands I would fall backward, and pulled my head free.

The world went black again. When I came to the hallway was deserted. My own copy of Our American History lay on the floor next to me: I assume that was what had been used to beat me unconscious. I gathered it up with my other books and walked to my classroom, not 20 feet away. The teacher looked surprised to see me late, and it was obvious from his face he did not know what had happened. The other students avoided my gaze in a manner which said they did.

The teachers were mostly in disbelief that one 12 year old girl would do this to another, nobody would come forward and say it was her and I hadn't seen my attacker at the scene of the crime. Because of this, she got a talking to but nothing else really happened to her. I knew it was her though, and she made sure I knew when no teachers were around.

I packed up the books from my locker that day and began carrying them everywhere with me so I would not switch books between classes, and I utterly refused to interact with my locker during highschool. My junior and senior years I didn't even figure out where it was.

The whole mess was all handled so nonchalantly that it was not until years later when I started telling this story to friends that I realized how abnormal it was.

***

There aren't words through the walls of the cheap hotel in Phoenix Arizona that US Airways put me up in when my flight was delayed, but I could hear a woman's screams, a man's shouting and crashes of things being thrown. They were big things too, like lamps and possibly bedside tables. I forced a small smile, telling myself that everybody has their own way of getting their kicks, and tried not to concentrate on it. The woman's screams sounded desperate and terrified, my mind couldn't help but focus on the next room, and slowly I began catching a few of the woman's word's.

"Leave! Stop!"

"Say what, bitch?"

I started fumbling with my cell phone and called the front lobby. "Hey," I asked, "I think there is a disturbance on the 6th floor, can you guys look into it?"

The man on the other end sounded a little distressed, "Yeah, we're having a bit of an issue down here in the lobby as well." He hung up.

"STOP IT," the voice came through the wall, "PLEASE STOP IT!"

The screams continued for what seemed like an eternity. I waited for security or the police or somebody to come, but nobody came. At one point somebody came upstairs and calmed the lady down, but her voice raised shortly after to a new level of terror and the headboard of the bed beats rhythmically against the shared wall. I would like to tell you that I sat there and called the police and the front desk over and over until somebody showed up and made it stop, but instead I curled up under the blankets in horror and told myself it wasn't happening, that none of it was real, that I couldn't possibly be in a place like this, that the woman was just into kinky sex. I might have actually fallen asleep while he was still raping her, and much to my shame I did not sleep very badly either.

I woke the next morning and laughed to myself. Surely it had all been a dream. I enjoyed a nice warm shower and was packing my bags when I found the six identical perfectly round dime-sized holes in my wall that somebody had hastily patched. That was when I realized it had all been real. How could I have convinced myself it was not real when faced with that kind of evidence?

***

I do not remember the priest's name, but I do remember he had a horrible birth mark which turned half his face a permanent sunburn color.

"Have you learned it yet?" he asked me.

"Mostly... yes..."

"What's mostly?" He smiled, "Let's hear it."

"I confess to you almighty God, and to you my brothers and sisters, that I have sinned through my own fault... and...um..."

"In my thoughts and in my actions," he prompted.

"In my thoughts and in my actions," I repeated.

"For all I have done."

"For all I have done."

"And all I have failed to do..."

***

May God help us all, for we surely do not have it in us yet to help each other.

Fuck(, it's) the police!

Three shadows in the rafters dressed in dark clothing fall suddenly silent at the heavy footsteps below. We can see him walking two floors below us, or more we can see his flashlight at the bottom of the drop. A door closes and we hear the footsteps fade into the next room.

"Oink," one of my friends giggles, "oink oink oink!"

"This place is getting busier and busier, we may need to move on."

***

When it drizzled we all piled back into the house and under the makeshift tent, and when the sun returned we piled back out to the grills in the parking lot with fresh beers. Spirits were high; both among the partygoers and in the bottles Hammertime was using to make me another SoCo and lime.

The majority of the party did not need Hammertime's extensive bartending talents to wind up a bit besides themselves and removed from their common sense, and whoever had placed the grill under an open window on the third floor might not have had much common sense to remove. The third floor residents had never been on the best terms with the rest of unit 66 to begin with, and it wasn't too long before rumors of the police having been called on the party were flying thick as underclassmen began slinking away from the scene. I caught out of the corner of my eye Magpie vaulting up onto the railing of the first floor deck and from there onto the garage roof, bottle of whiskey in hand bolting for the pinnacle of the structure roaring "Fuck the police!" the whole way. Reaching the top he stood there, still waving the jar and screaming his head off.

It wasn't actually the police who showed up the first time but the fire department. We got Magpie down from the roof prior to that, and convinced the 20 year old carrying an illegal firearm in one hand and a beer in the other to go back in the house just prior to their arrival. Py was dispatched to greet them, and aside from the fact that he was wearing a shirt which read "Fuck politics, I just want to burn shit down," it all went rather well. He laughed and considered changing shirts after that, but decided it would be useless after the fire department already left, much to our amusement when he later had to entertain a police squad car which had found our party particularly interesting.

***

"And," the officer leans in close to Py, "Do they let you do this at home?"

Its dark outside and we're standing on a rural bystreet not too far from the university. I'm facing one cop car, and I can tell there is another behind me from my shadow. There's a third one on my left and behind the one I am facing I can see two more. Ginger, Gilby and Py aren't doing a whole ton better.

"My dad...we lit these off when I was little...I thought fireworks were a fine-able offense in this state officer...not an arrest-able one..."

The officer leans over close to Py's face and raises his flashlight, "Oh?"

They rattled us for a significant amount of time before letting us go, enough that when I woke up the next morning and put on my black robe I was still thinking a bit of them.

It is tradition that the city police line the top of the crowd the graduation procession walks through, and as I strode to pomp and circumstance I suddenly found a hand on my shoulder and upon turning, a familiar grinning face. It was the same cop from the night before.

"You're being good today, aren't you Pika?"

A flippant giggling boy from my freshman dorm was in line right behind me, "oh HER officer, she's never up to anything good..."

***

"And his hand tightened on my shoulder," I reached out and pinched Brewer's shoulder next to me at the table for effect, "and I honestly stood there and thought 'man, if I don't get my diploma out of this, the scene at my graduation will be the least of my problems' so I bolted for it."

Brewer giggled and so did the rest of his team-mates. "So," he asked, "Did he chase?"

"Nah," I laughed, "I guess he was just taking an opportunity to fuck with me, see if he could scare me. He did a damn good job I'll admit..."

Captain grinned and split his chopsticks to dig into his meal, "That's 90% of a good cop's job you realize... scaring people into behaving."

Brewer giggled a little again, "Well, looks like most of them are only good at about half of it."

Maximum Mileage

I've never actually seen much of Phoenix Arizona aside from the airport and the interiors of the vans which shuttled us to our meetings and hotels, but this time there wasn't even a meeting. There was a slightly rumpled hotel voucher in one of my hands, and every few minutes I would look down to make sure I had not misplaced now-useless the winter coat I had carried from New England.

Three of us sat in the van: a business man in his mid-fourties, a girl who was probably in early college and me: all bumped from the same US Airways flight and all being put up for the evening. The man and I had a full hotel voucher, but the girl had only been given a partial one.

"How did you do it?" She asked us.

"You need to learn to negotiate," he said, a little frustrated, "We're here because it's a slowdown. I got it in writing from them. There is great power in that."

Talk sparked briefly but rapidly petered out into an awkward and exhausted silence.

"You guys at least got your meal vouchers didn't you?"

"They didn't give..." I started.

"You are never given them. You walk up and ask, politely but firmly, where your meal vouchers are. Never if they are available, just act like you're politely looking for directions on where to pick them up."

"Ah."

"They'll treat you as poorly as they think you'll take, but if you act like you know what you deserve you'll normally get it."

The man next to me on the ride into the airport the next morning looked a little twitchy, and the pin on his shirt said "US Airways." We struck up light conversation, and he asked me what I was doing in Phoenix.

"Oh, I got stranded overnight. They said it was the weather but I hear it is a slowdown."

The twitchy man looked a bit upset, "I'm sure if that was the case I would have heard about it."

I was settling into my seat on the plane when the twitchy man was back, dressed as a crew member and grinning from ear to ear, "I heard you had a rough time coming in here," he said and handed me a pile of snacks. A few minutes later he was coming down the isle handing out sodas and selling drinks.

"And for you," the smile he set on me was so wide it my face hurt out of sympathy to look at it, "can I get you a drink for your troubles? On the house of course..."

"Uh no, I have to go to work after this, thank you..."

"A coffee then?"

"That's not necessary..."

"And how do you take your coffee?"

"I don't like coffee, thanks anyway..."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes,"

The man handed me another candy bar and a ginger ale before wandering away. The man in the seat next to me was awestruck.

There was a voice behind me as a face appeared between the seat heads, "Are you famous? Or somebody... or..."

I laughed nervously a little, "Well, everybody is somebody, aren't they?"

I was suddenly aware of many faces craned to see me. Somebody's smartphone camera shutter clicked.

Ginger ale never tasted so good. As I got off the plane people stepped out of my way to let me through.

I suppose the man in the van was right.

Hrair

I was taken aback by this article by the Washington Post. This newspaper arranged to have a very famous classical violinist (Joshua Bell), pretend to be a street performer and play the violin in downtown DC. Bell is absurdly good, and even if you aren't really the type to appreciate violin music you can respect a kid whose parents figured out he needed an instrument to play when he, at the age of four, started playing classical music on his dresser by tensioning and loosening rubber bands. The man is somewhat a legend in his field.

The question posed was by the article essentially boiled down to "would people appreciate great art even out of context?" It referenced the beliefs of Kant, who said that in order to properly appreciate art, the viewing conditions must be optimal. The article agreed with him and surmised that this art, taken out of context, was not as meaningful.

I found something else startling though: the number of persons who watched the performance who were interviewed later and did not remember that a violin player had even been in the station.

And then there was Calvin Myint. Myint works for the General Services Administration. He got to the top of the escalator, turned right and headed out a door to the street. A few hours later, he had no memory that there had been a musician anywhere in sight.

"Where was he, in relation to me?"

"About four feet away."

"Oh."

There's nothing wrong with Myint's hearing. He had buds in his ear. He was listening to his iPod.

For many of us, the explosion in technology has perversely limited, not expanded, our exposure to new experiences. Increasingly, we get our news from sources that think as we already do. And with iPods, we hear what we already know; we program our own playlists.

The song that Calvin Myint was listening to was "Just Like Heaven," by the British rock band The Cure. It's a terrific song, actually. The meaning is a little opaque, and the Web is filled with earnest efforts to deconstruct it. Many are far-fetched, but some are right on point: It's about a tragic emotional disconnect. A man has found the woman of his dreams but can't express the depth of his feeling for her until she's gone. It's about failing to see the beauty of what's plainly in front of your eyes.

There were a large number of other people referenced in that article who seemed to not notice that Bell existed at all, and while technologically provided ideological isolation is a topic that has been beaten to death, I think more interesting than what he was listening to is the fact that he could be listening at all. He could also have been listening to a podcast of a college course, been playing with his smartphone or talking on his cell phone and it wouldn't have mattered a lot. The point is that our connection to technology has enabled us to take in far more information than our physical environment is providing us. The other point is that our mental ability to take in data has not scaled with our capacity to access it, and so in order to pay attention to one thing we lose the chance to use that mental bandwidth elsewhere.

***

"Does anybody know where the word Hrair comes from?" My professor asked.

"Watership Down?"

The professor grinned ear to ear and bounced a little pacing the front of the classroom, "Very good, Watership down! Yes, the rabbits could only count to four, and everything after that was 'hrair.' Humans have the same problem too you know. Systems at some point just reach a complexity where no single human can keep all the information in their head. At that point you must break it down into little building blocks, check each block, check how the blocks work with each other, and hope the whole system works. Often those blocks are written by entirely different people."

It is a true principle in more than software. I feel safe in assuming all my readers use computers, but how many of you can program one? Build one? Fix your car? Build a house?

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

-Robert A. Heinlein

Scott Adams in his book The Dilbert Principle humorously attributes most of the world's problems to sex and paper. The concept being that with so much sex going on every once in a while by sheer chance we get one smart person. This person has ideas, writes them down, and now complete idiots who could never have built such a thing have access to them... that our world is many times more complex than the average person's intelligence can handle.

I am not sure if we ever had the capacity to really process all the data coming at us in our world, but it seems to be harder than ever now.

So when you have a mind-bandwidth shortage, what do we keep? Increasingly it seems to be the familiar, the mindless, and the mundane. We, like all those people in the station that couldn't hear Joshua, are too locked into our own habits and internal thoughts to see the opportunities or problems around us.

I saw a little sobering scrap in this article on this note:

...and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter

I'm not normally that asshole who sits in other people's evolutionary neuroscience lectures to poke holes in their theories. Learn new ways to pick up dudes? Yes, but even I'm not mean enough to be specifically out to rain on anybody's parade.

Sometimes, though, I do take bait.

"Does anybody," the guest lecturer asked, "have any questions about my aforementioned premises before I explain the resulting research and conclusions we made from them?"

"I have a few," I returned, "You said we're trained to think that bad things ruin good things but that good things can not cure bad things... small gross things ruining somebody's appetite for a whole meal, and the phrase 'one bad apple ruins the barrel,' but couldn't these be old bred-in biases which help humans avoid pathogens?"

The man at the podium turned a little red and couldn't answer that. I felt bad after the second question and he muttered something about time, so he continued the lecture.

The grad student who ambushed me with, "I need to talk to you," directly after the lecture nearly scared me enough to duck back into the crowd and swim away.

"Do you work here?"

"Yes."

"What do you do?"

"Uh, well there is an automatic scheduler for outages of..."

"You're an engineer?"

"Yeah..."

"What's your background in neurology?"

"I don't..."

"You're more general biology?"

"Um..."

"Genetics?"

There was an awful silence.

"I program computers," I say, "I use to program robots."

"You have no relevant background at all?"

"No... no formal training."

"Well, your insights were really good. I'm going to give you my email, and I'd like to take yours, and if you have any more ideas I want you to tell us right away. I feel like a lot of your ideas might give us some angles for future research..."

I thought she was kidding at first, and then I realized she wasn't. I managed to keep a straight face through the email exchange and completely missed the fact that I was being invited to lunch. By the time I figured it out and returned to the room it was empty, and I could safely laugh my head off.

Running the conversation over in my head a summary sounded like this: "I, a respectable professional, find the somewhat logically derived and completely uneducated opinions which you have authoritatively announced to be intriguing. Please, if you have any more unproven ideas, do call my attention to them."

Isn't this the dream of everybody on the internet?