Will today be any different?

"Curiosity is the very basis of education and if you tell me that curiosity killed the cat, I say only that the cat died nobly" - Arnold Edinborough

I mentioned on Facebook that my primary motivation for trying a second jiu jitsu tournament is curiosity - specifically the question of "Will this time be different?" Even to me this seems like an odd question because I know, as a good proactive kinda gal, that I control what's different - at least a lot of what could be different. That part is boring.

I don't want to spend too much time going into my problem with tournaments because I haven't exactly figured it out yet. I will say that I survive pretty well preparing for a tournament and I seem to do moderately well actually surviving matches, win or lose. It's after the tournament - I just break down. 

I have a theory that my real fear is that I'm really not cut out for BJJ (the first sport that I haven't avoided with religious fervor) and that tournaments serve only to prove that to everyone. Here, let me put it in a way that maximizes it's ridiculousness (complete with highlighting): "My deep dark secret is that I am doomed to suck at jiu jitsu forever and tournaments will expose my secret and lead to me being ostracized". I understand how ridiculous this sounds. I also understand that the only way to guarantee I suck at jiujitsu forever is to quit now, while I suck, duh. Anyway, my point is that I haven't actually figured out ANYTHING. What am I afraid of? Do I have something to prove? Is it to myself? Is it to everyone else? Can I do better? Can it be worse? The more questions I have about something the more I will suffer through to get answers. This is where curiosity comes in.

Curiosity is, essentially, the only reason I get up in the morning. This is not counting the several years in my recent past where I didn't want to get up in the morning at all. That's a whole different problem that I have mostly gotten over. In general, when I am happy and functional and waking up in order to live my life like it matters I wake up in order to satisfy my curiosity. Will today be any different?

Maybe someone reading this will be thinking some cliche bullshit like "You make today what it is" or "Every day is what you make it" but I have lived this life long enough to know that I'm dependent on other people to satisfy my curiosity in a positive way. I may wake up curious to know if I will find a solution for a problem at work on a given day but that question is too boring to hold my interest for long (hence several years of waking up miserable). The real burning curiosity I have is for things like: "Will someone really make me laugh today?", "Will someone say or do something that makes me smile?", "Will someone ask me to do something new and interesting?". I need people. The moments of power that resonate in me require the interaction of two minds (see this post). These moments recharge my emotional reserves.

This next tournament might still be lacking in fun but I don't care. I just want to know if any given day will contain any truly interesting interactions with another mind and I have learned that truly interesting interactions are more likely if I do unusual things like competing even when I hate it.

Philosophical Ramblings: Thoughts on justice, redemption, and defeat

I usually save this kind of rambling until I'm drunk, but I'll make an exception. I'll try not to wander too deeply into metaphysics. Instead, you can expect many references to literature and movies.

Certain moments have power. By power I mean it is more likely in these moments that something fundamental will change. They are forks in fate, maybe not your fate, but someone's. Sometimes that's due to rarity - a solar eclipse or certain weather phenomenon. Sometimes its because of the emotions involved - right before a first kiss or a sporting competition. There are lots of these and some resonate more strongly with certain people. If you read this and think of your own moments, I would love to read about them on other blogs. Seriously. Mercedes Lackey does a great job describing the energy that builds up ahead of these moments in her Tales of the Five Hundred Kingdoms series.

Anyway, I am obsessed with one such type of moment that centers around the idea of justice.

When someone commits a crime, ideally, justice is waiting for them somewhere. The obsession for me is not when justice gets there or even how... My first concern is the mind of the criminal.

Do they realize that they are being punished for their crime?

Do they feel fear? If they fear, is it because they were caught or because they realized the magnitude of what they have done? A really good example of this is the fight between Eragon and Galbatorix at the end of the Inheritance series. Eragon breaks Galbatorix by forcing him to understand.

I spent too many moments of my childhood contemplating how to make people actually FEEL the weight of their crimes. This is unhealthy. Take that scene in Children of the Mind where Jane (in the body of Valentine) literally freaks out over Quera (the little snot - easily my least liked character of any novel anywhere).... it is way too much stress for human circuits. And I used to feel that way ALL THE TIME. Makes my blood boil just to think about that scene.

This is why my favorite books as a kid were by Roald Dahl - that man had an excellent sense of little kid justice. Very satisfying. Another good example is Professor Umbridge in the Harry Potter series. Even though you KNOW Harry made his own situation worse through his own stubbornness, you still wait patiently for Umbridge to get what's coming to her. And it does! Peace at last. I have called this justice-porn. If you think too deeply it has all kinds of problems, but on the surface it provides a few cheap moments of pleasure as Umbridge suffers.

This is bad, of course. There's a word for this: schadenfreude and it has little to do with justice. An eye for an eye is very unenlightened justice. I have moved on. I am now more interested with that one moment when you see how a person reacts. It doesn't matter anyway - justice can happen even if you have no remorse whatsoever. Professor Umbridge remained blissfully unaware of her own sinisterness. That bitch.

My point here is that there is power in that moment when a person is faced with something really horrible and pauses just for a moment to see if they can connect it back to some wrong they've committed. It matters if it's fear or if it is the beginning of redemption. In the Lion King when Simba pins Scar, he never feels remorse, he just tries to get out alive. Redemption is more interesting, more emotionally appealing in literature, and more important to my own sense of justice.

There's a second, related, set of moments. Replace the cut and dry villain of the earlier references with two people who are simply on different sides of an epic struggle. When two warriors on opposite sides of a holy war meet, what happens? If one side vastly overpowers the other how does that translate into a superior moral position?

What will someone do when faced with overwhelming force? That person can choose to fight until completely overwhelmed (in many stories they often die in the process) or they can surrender. Often fighting to the end is considered honorable. See The Last Samurai, or my favorite: Asuka's Last Stand at the end of Evangelion. To confront the inevitable takes grit. However, I believe there is just as much power in the alternative. To acknowledge defeat and submit to it is also interesting. Take this quote from a simple interpretation of the pagan legend of the Holly and Oak Kings.

"I yield. I am defeated. But I ask of you, my brother, that you spare me." The king was defeated with or without the speech, but acknowledging it gives the moment more power. It is difficult to deny a legitimate surrender. Fate forks.

The Thri-kreen race of Dungeons and Dragons is described as being intolerant of untested leaders. They will attempt to establish dominance, but if defeated they are loyal to the victor. If every battle was a fight to the death nothing would get done - surrender is an acknowledgement of standing, a variation of an oath of fealty. Combat -> Defeat -> Submission seems more interesting to me as a source of loyalty than all the ties of honor and fancy words that often serve in the sci-fi/fantasy genre but it requires a bit more honesty than I can usually credit to humanity. If someone recites an oath with malicious intent at least no one loses any eyes.

Are you still reading this or did you just skip to the end to see how long it would take me to stop rambling? Anyway, I don't care if you skipped all the crap in the middle, I just wrote it because it was on my mind all day.

Dealing with frustration

I had so many plans for this blog post and all of them are disappointing me. It's horribly frustrating, so before I go insane I am going to go with the flow and talk about frustration and how I deal with it.

The short answer is I don't. I bottle it up until I'm afraid that if I express even a small sliver of it I'll explode and then I go some place and hide. While hiding I cry and scream and do whatever works until the level of frustration drops below the point where I worry I'll hurt someone.

Adam tried to point out to me that, at least in BJJ, I really ought to try to convert this anger into some kind of energy to apply to my technique. My problem is that when I get frustrated in BJJ, say, for example, because I've escaped from mount just to find myself in side-control (and on and on), my first thought is not "well, I'll just escape from this too, and this time I'll get on top". That might be productive. No... my frustrated thoughts tend to wander towards breaking fingers, biting, and poking eyes. Civilized people just don't do this, ok, maybe in the mythical "street fight" but never to one's training partner. So now I'm in the awkward position of trying to fight against one person to get out of side-control and fighting against myself to get my thoughts back to proper jiujitsu.

On top of this, I really don't think people perceive my reactions to being frustrated correctly. People seem to tell me things like "It's ok, everyone starts out a little claustrophobic." or "You'll figure out how to position yourself so you know you won't get hurt." Maybe I'm wrong; maybe I am dealing with a secret fear of being crushed. I think what actually scares me is how desperate I am in that moment to inflict as much pain as possible. It probably doesn't matter - either way I need to deal with it and get past it. I just feel like the advice for dealing with claustrophobia is "just breathe and realize you're safe" and breathing, though helpful, does not diminish my desire to destroy fragile appendages. 

This is not just feelings either. When I get this frustrated and angry I will self-destruct rather than hurt another person. If my lip is bleeding, odds are its because I bit it until it did.

Don't think I limit my bizarre overreactions to BJJ. Other parts of my life are more frustrating than jiujitsu ever is. I miss my bird. I can't seem to get pregnant. I have motivation problems. Normal jobs bore me to tears. I take my frustrated rage and I hit the gym until I'm too tired to think about it anymore. 

As far as jiujitsu goes, I'm trying two things. First, I need a better handle on what frustrates me. The worst, I think, is being caught in one position too long. Second, I'm starting to deal with frustration by not letting it get to the sadistic stage. Say I am caught in one position too long. I'm trying to count roughly to 10 as I am trying to escape. If I haven't managed to escape and my training partner is, for whatever reason, just not moving, I'll just tap out anyway. I need to protect my mental stability as much as my neck, arms, whatever. 

If anyone has some better ideas, please, let me know.

The soulless intern

I read this article today: 32 Idiotic Mistakes Wall Street Interns Make Every Summer and it bothered me. No, it completely pissed me off and made me so glad I have a finance internship in the laid back city of Denver. The article isn't all of it, there's a forum that started the madness... It's epic. Anyway...

Here's why I'm so GRRR about this:

1. Elitism at its best: It's ridiculous to tell interns that the Rolex watch or [insert fancy suit brand here] makes them look spoiled while also telling them that they can't wear Hermes ties until they are full time employees.
2. Dehumanizing perspective: People are more than just their work. If Wall Street wants faceless drones to produce analyst reports, I hear machine learning is getting very sophisticated. I prefer to work with people and that starts with really seeing them.
3. Conformity rules: Lip service is paid to diversity but the real truth is that no one cares what color your skin is (or if you're male or female) as long as your suit is navy, your shirt is pressed, your shoes are leather, and you work way harder than your internship salary pays you to do. Also true (in my experience) is that the subset of people willing to put up with this shit with smiles on their faces are not a diverse subset of the population - not even of the ones interested in finance.

It's a high stress world and 99.9% of the people who succeed can put up with all this. I wouldn't last a week with my purple suit, cheap shoes and complete lack of regard for all things conformist.

But that's ok. I have my own plan.

My nightmare

I am so grateful to xkcd for showing me I am not the only one with this problem. For me, it's always the same class - Intro to Scientific Computing taught by Professor Ganesh. I took this class my last semester at Mines in order to finish my degree in Computer Science. This class was legendary. The first time Ganesh taught it, he failed all but TWO students. I took the class his third time teaching it. He was clearly learning to reign in his frustration with his students.

While working I would still have this dream and I would have to remind myself that I graduated already. Now I'm a grad student and I can't use that excuse anymore. So when I wake up after dreaming that Ganesh now teaches my Securities Valuation class (which my dream mind thinks I've ditched for 3 weeks straight), the panic does not just go away.

FML. I have this dream twice a week right now. *pulls hair out*

An extraordinary day

I was going to title this blog post "a normal day", but then I realized that I was just so excited to finally have a normal day. What's normal? Who knows.

What I do know is that my appetite is back, I survived drills class without an emotional breakdown, and I am not currently blaming grad school for all my problems. My life isn't perfect but I don't want perfect, I want stuff to work on. I want to be engaged and interested. I fear boredom above all else.

I have a side project related to finance, I don't want to track its progress here because that would make this blog very dry - so I made a new blog: Sentinel Project. It's not very interesting yet, but it will be.

My unified theory of everything

I have been going through life metaphors almost as quickly as I can dream them up. Here is my life, split up by how I perceived the future.

Phase 0: Don't Fuck Up. From as far back as I can remember until about age 18.

I'm sure I had other motivations in those 18 years, but you can summarize most of my actions as trying to minimize failure/embarrassment. I had this idea in my head that nice, happy people did not fuck up things. Every mistake I made as a kid made me feel horrible and I had to add it to a huge list in my head labelled "NEVER DO THAT AGAIN. I felt horrible even if I was completely alone but it was always infinitely worse if I made a mistake and some other kid made fun of me for it or some adult lectured me about it.

A sample of things that have, at some point, been on that list:
Don't make jokes that might hurt people's feelings
Don't play with knives
Don't play basketball/kickball/softball....
Don't ask for food
Don't sing
Don't play with power tools
Don't touch animals

Dangerous! I might get hurt!

Can't hurt me. Any wonder I'm a software engineer?

Sure, some reasonable things made the list. But for the most part I was training myself to avoid taking any kind of risk. Luckily I eventually realized that adults fuck up all the time. And some of them are even still happy, nice people... It was time for a new way of looking at life

Phase 1: Trophy Collecting. From when I graduated high school until about age 25.

During these years I was completely OBSESSED with the idea of reaching certain milestones. I poured my heart and soul into accomplishing certain goals:

Graduating from college
Getting married
Finding a good job
Buying a BMW
Learning to play the guitar

I was getting pretty good at this life thing. I had a super awesome high score and everything... Wait. Right. At some point I realized that my perception of life had more in common with World of Warcraft then it did with reality. I also realized I was miserable. There is no great scoreboard in the afterlife measuring all your achievements. The only reason to live this way is if you're the kind of pathetic person that wants to have more achievements than everyone else. So I moved on.

Phase 2: Cathedral building. From about age 25 until about now.

I wanted to stop defining my life by my position relative to other people. I started looking at what I really wanted. I set goals. I pursued my dreams. I saw myself as the architect of my own future and what I was building would be glorious. I decided that I would only do things that made me happy or that helped me to be happier in the future.

I give up. This theory of life was beautiful. Unfortunately, life just doesn't work this way. My bird died, my interviews went awry, my family planning schedule slipped its deadline, and my life at grad school went from interesting to mind-numbingly boring.

I'm building a cathedral here and the shipment of windows is late, the tools are missing, and the slave labor is revolting! I CAN'T WORK LIKE THIS!

Phase 3: My unified theory of everything.

I don't actually have one. So I'm going to steal one from Kung Fu Panda: "There is no secret ingredient. " I keep looking for something that doesn't even seem to exist. I really want to stop planning how I will live my life and just get on with living it.

Skadoosh.