Spilled Milk

Try not to cry over it.

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  • the invisible shackle

    Every weekday, from 8AM-5PM, I sit in my apartment, and I work.

    I am the remote worker.

    I can go for a walk.

    But what if my boss messages me?

    I can take a shower.

    But what if my Teams status goes on yellow too long?

    I am the multitasker.

    I watch TV in the background while I do my work.

    Sometimes the TV takes over.

    Sometimes the work fights back.

    I write this blog.

    Every few lines I reach over to my work computer.

    I click around on Teams, and my status is preserved.

    I’m anxious about using tools to keep my status active.

    I feel like I can’t leave my computer.

    But I can write this blog.

    I can listen to music and sing and dance.

    But only for a few minutes.

    Then it’s check status, return to activity.

    I’m ready for action.

    If someone asks me for something, I do it.

    I perform my tasks and I perform them well.

    I am an active participant in meetings.

    But when no one asks for anything.

    And there are no tasks.

    And I don’t have a meeting.

    What is there to do?

    Aside from being the multitasker.

    The multitasker, my mind runs wild.

    Yet my feet stay still.

    I could take a thirty minute nap.

    I could take a walk.

    I could buy groceries.

    I could go to the laundromat.

    I could go get a nice meal.

    I could go work out.

    I could meet up with a friend.

    But then my status goes dark.

    I could do all of these things.

    If I weren’t worried about my status.

    If the company weren’t worried about my status.

    Status, status, status.

    The invisible shackle.

  • lift the fog

    I have a friend, her name is Mary Jane.

    We were introduced to each other in high school but never had much of a connection. We had a handful of fun nights together but didn’t get to see each other very often. I wondered if I’d see her again.

    Mary and I reconnected in college, it turns out that we had a great number of mutual friends. My friends liked to hang out with Mary, and so did I. During freshman year, we spent a lot of time getting to know each other. We never hung out alone, but as the months went by I was spending more days of my week with her.

    During sophomore year, my friends and I all lived together under one roof. We had our separate bedrooms, with shared bathrooms and kitchens, but it was very communal. Even Mary lived with us! It was 2020, so our classes were 100% online during this year and the school still hadn’t yet perfected the art of virtual learning. So school was easy, and it gave us a lot more time to hang out with Mary Jane. I’d see her every day and night, saying hello to her in the mornings and goodnight to her in the evenings. She was good to me, I liked her a lot.

    A year later, I was back in school, and back to hanging out with Mary. Since I had to actually go to class, I wasn’t able to see her as much as I would have liked during the daytime. Mary and I’s relationship peaked during the previous year. But we still hung out a lot. In fact, I lost a different friend that year, and instead of finding more serious help, I saw Mary when I needed to escape.

    Halfway through my junior year, I participated in my school’s study abroad program. I was headed to Milan, Italy. I didn’t have any friends going there with me, and I was nervous to be all alone. Luckily, I met a group of friends pretty early on, and travelled the world with them. We were busy, and though Mary was abroad too, I didn’t get to see her much. I saw her a couple of times in Italy, I saw her once in Barcelona and I also saw her in Amsterdam. When I was with her, I liked her. But I didn’t see her very often. I wasn’t sad about it or happy about it. It just was what it was.

    Senior year and we were back to seeing each other every day. I had a job lined up for post-grad, so school wasn’t a large priority for me. I was relatively content with skating by until it was time to collect my degree. So most nights ended with Mary, and some weekend mornings started with Mary. Sometimes we’d spend the whole day together.

    A year after graduation, and I was still seeing Mary. At this point I was living in my childhood home, so I wasn’t able to hang out with Mary as much. I had to do chores and Mary wasn’t exactly welcomed by my parents. In fact, they’d say she’s a bad influence on me. But I’d sneak her in at night and hope that any signs of her were gone by morning.

    A year after that, and I had just moved to New York City. The big apple. A place of endless possibilities, and limitless opportunity. Mary was still in my life, and now that I wasn’t living at home, I was able to see her more often. I was working remotely, so I had a lot of time on my hands to see her. If you asked me, I’d tell you that I hung out with her too much. That she made my other relationships worse and harmed my ability to branch out. I got comfortable with her and was uncomfortable without her. I was stumbling through every interaction, anxious and foggy. I had trouble remembering what I did on some days, and felt like I had to lie to my friends and family about seeing her. But I still went back. She was a drug, and I was an addict. She encapsulated me in a way I never knew was possible. She was a drug, and I was weak.

    Today, it’s another year later, and I’ve been distancing myself from her. I love her, but even I know that she is not good for me. It has been nice to see her here and there, but I could not continue to see her so often. I’ll miss her, and never forget the times we shared together. I know that I’m stronger without her. Each day becomes easier than the last. One foot in front of the other.

    I love you Mary Jane, but it’s time to release the shackles. It’s time to lift the fog.

  • the next marathon

    I have a friend who runs marathons. He started his journey years ago and fell in love with the grind of it. He’s recruited people to run with him, he’s worked hard to achieve fast times, and now he’s training for an ultra-super-mega marathon. That’s not actually what it’s called, it’s just a longer version of a marathon – I forget the real name.

    The question he faces now is: “when does it end?” With each marathon completed, each one feels less special. After a super-ultra-mega, why does the normal 26.2 feel so empty?

    Well, if you ask him why he runs marathons, he’ll tell you that it gives him a sense of personal achievement. He feels proud of himself for taking on these challenges, especially when looking at where he started versus where he is now.

    But it’s not enough. There’s still this feeling of existential dread involved. He thinks to himself: Why am I still doing this? Why did I spend all that time training? I’m doing the right thing. I’m bettering myself.

    To be frank, I’m not sure I have an answer for him. This life is very cloudy. It can be hard to judge whether we’re doing the right thing.

    Furthermore, who says what the right thing to do is? I like playing video games with my friends. It gives me a social connection to my friends who live in other parts of the country. We share lots of laughs and enjoy each other’s company. Similarly, on the weekends, I go out with my friends. We drink too much and dance and smoke weed and chase after women. Some would say: “Instead of playing Xbox and poisoning your body, you could be going to the gym! You need to better yourself!” True, but would I enjoy it? And would my relationships with my friends suffer? I love these guys, man. Who knows!

    I sure as heck don’t know. I try to follow my heart and my head, and make decisions based on what’s important to me. There’s really only three important things to me in my life right now: being a good friend, being a good brother, and being a good son.

    If I feel like I’m doing those well, I feel proud of myself. I hope to eventually expand this criteria to include: being a good father, a good husband, a good uncle, a good grandfather. Ultimately, my relationships with the people I love are what defines me.

    And I think I’m okay with that. I think.

    And for my friend – what makes him happy is what makes him happy. Maybe it’s running marathons, maybe it’s not. Soon I think he’ll enter a period of reflection and decide for himself. I hope he knows that we’re proud of him for even doing it once. And if he never did another one, we’d still be proud, he’d still be our friend, and we’d still love him.

  • ewwww murder

    When I was a senior in high school, I was required to take a philosophy course. Naturally, as a second semester senior heading off to college, I wasn’t exactly the best student. Well, I did okay on the coursework, but I wasn’t the best behaved. None of us were. To be frank, none of us really cared about philosophy.

    Here I am, seven years later, finding a new interest in a topic that wasn’t interesting to me in the past. I’ve been watching YouTube videos on philosophy recently, and I find myself continuously coming back. I’ve encountered all kinds of philosophical concepts in the last week but one I find incredibly interesting is one called ethical emotivism.

    The argument is essentially that no moral judgement can be factual. Our moral judgements can ultimately be reduced to just how we feel about the situation.

    For example, we say that “murder is bad”. Well, why is that true? And before you go there – I’m unwilling to accept any biblical references. Nothing against it, in fact I’m from a Catholic family and think the Bible has many great lessons. I just think it has too many contradictions to be a true guide for morality.

    Anyways, why is murder bad? Well, it takes away a life, and any potential acts that the life could have engaged in. It likely violates the victim’s rights and great harm can be caused to the family. Well, why is life good? And why is causing harm bad? Who says so?

    Well, we say so. In fact, we feel so. We feel positively about life. We say: “Yay, life!”. On the other hand, we feel negatively about violating other’s rights, causing great emotional harm to others. We say: “Ewwwww, murder!”.

    Of course, this is a very surface level representation of the belief. ‘m certain that I’ll come across a rebuttal that’s compelling and I’m unable to refute. I just think it’s an interesting belief, which holds stronger than many of the other philosophies I’ve encountered (i.e. utilitarianism, deontology).

    Yay life! Ew murder! Stealing is yucky! Hooray for kindness!

  • rat race

    I’ve always wondered why we ask people about how their job is going. The sad reality is that it’s how we spend most of our time in America. If a full-time employee works from nine to five (eight hours) and sleeps for another eight hours, only eight hours remain. Consider that most folks will require time to get ready for work and to/from work. If we made a pie chart with a full-time worker’s time, the largest slice would likely be work for most people. Regardless of how true my assumptions are, the typical American spends a relatively large percentage of their day at work.

    So maybe it makes sense that we ask “how’s work?” or “what do you do?”. What’s interesting though, is how much I hate getting questions like that. Since the honest truth is angry and saddening, I answer with bullshit one-liners like “work is work” or “hey, it pays the bills”. Now as much as I dislike talking about my job, what I like even less is hearing about your job.

    Maybe it’s a narrow view, but if you’re not after a goal or working a job you truly love, I seriously do not care about what you do. Maybe I’m just tired of hearing everyone in New York tell me that they’re in finance, or marketing, or private equity or some other corporation. And that they “love what they do”. Part of me is convinced that virtually none of them truly enjoy what they do, but they enjoy the by-products – reputation and money being the most important. The ends justify the means, and the means become enjoyable or admirable because the ends have this quality.

    Everyone wants to feel like they are smart and capable. Your job is the best indicator of this now that you’re out of school. College reputation is replaced by company reputation and test scores replaced by salaries. If you have a high paying job at a great company, you must be smart. Similar to how if you get good grades at a top school, you must be smart! And if you’re not smart, then you’re stupid! Right?

    It’s an unfortunate trap that we seem to find ourselves in. Not that I have a better solution but it seems that we are suffering at the hands of our economic system. Again, I don’t yet have strong opinions on what would be better or best – but I can’t help but observe the negative consequences.

    “How ironic that we join the rat race with one goal: to leave it“

  • The Library of Babel

    I’m not sure when I first stumbled across the Library of Babel (the website, not the book), but it has fascinated me since I was introduced. The library contains every possible combination of letters, spaces, and commas/periods under 3200 total characters. So anything you think is an original sentence or thought, is already on the internet, existing as a record in the Library of Babel. In fact, this entire paragraph is in the Library (missing a few characters, given the library character-set). Check it out here, amongst the scrambled letters and spaces.

    It’s a pretty fascinating idea – that any seemingly original thought, idea, song, etc. in fact already exists! It’s the same theory that tells us if you gave a monkey a typewriter, and allowed him to type forever, he would eventually write Shakespeare’s sonnets. Pretty neat.

    What I stumbled across today was potentially more interesting, and potentially even disturbing. The library has expanded to now permeate every possible combination of 4096 different colors, across a 416×640 pixel grid. What this means is that every photo in your camera roll also exists on this website. There may be small variations and the quality isn’t the highest, but I performed a handful of reverse image searches against the database, and to be frank, its a bit unsettling.

    Not only was I able to find multiple images of myself, varying slightly in how accurate they were, it also begs the question of: what other not-real photos are there of me? If there’s a photo of me sitting on a plane (which exists), that means there’s also a photo of me on the same plane, only butt-ass naked! This photo isn’t real in the sense that I never took it, but it is real in the sense that it does exist. By generating every single possible combination of colored pixels, there’s no limit to what these pictures could theoretically hold.

    One small reassurance I’ll offer is that although this concept seems scary, it’s virtually impossible to find any image by simply browsing. There are 10961755 unique images generated by this process. An overwhelming, overwhelming, overwhelming majority of these look like television static. After all, its just random colors at every pixel. I browsed through some images for 5-10 minutes and didn’t find a single one that resembled anything natural or worldly.

    So even though it exists, we may not need be scared of it.

  • thanks steve

    I recently started reading Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, and it is incredibly interesting. Hawking tells the story of general relativity, quantum mechanics, black holes, and all that jazz. Though the book is praised generally for its ability to make these crazy concepts easy to understand, it still is a pretty difficult read – at least for me.

    However, it’s less important that you understand everything that Hawking is saying, and more important that you know the end result. You don’t need to be able to describe the photon double slit experiment to know that light can behave as both a particle and a wave.

    I’m starting to become better versed in these concepts, and surprisingly it evokes a lot of thoughts about religion. Creationism and the big bang, the existence of a divine tinkerer of goldilocks constants, and other seemingly unexplainable concepts find me turning to theology and apologetics.

    I have always considered myself to be agnostic when it comes to religion, and ultimately a lot of this is making me even less convinced of either side, but it’s interesting to see what logical arguments come about.

  • failure!

    It’s becoming quite clear that I won’t reach 30 blogs in 30 days. That’s okay, it was starting to feel like work, constantly nagging my brain if I hadn’t posted anything that day.

    This was started as a way for me to practice my writing and give myself a journal to look back upon. It’s probably time to develop a healthier relationship with it.

    failure!

  • ARC Raiders and the Nature of Man

    I recently started playing a game with my friends called ARC Raiders. For those unfamiliar, the concept of the game is simple: enter the battlegrounds, and return safely with as much loot as possible. While you are there, you’ll come across automated enemies and other players/squads. If you die, you’ll lose any loot you found and any loot you brought into the arena with you. One distinct feature of this game is that it features proximity chat, which allows players to communicate directly with the teams/players surrounding them.

    So if you come across a fellow raider, you have a couple options. You could fight, which could result in one or both players losing all their loot. Or you could talk, which doesn’t allow you to take any loot from your fellow raider, but the chances of you both extracting safely increases.

    Some raiders are friendly. Some are not. Some raiders will befriend you, only to shoot you in the back when your guard goes down. Personally, I was expecting the game to be quite toxic. Trust would be broken, backs would be stabbed. Slurs would rain down from the mic and the rust belt would be a land of ravagers. Maybe I’m swayed by games of the past, but I was wrong here.

    I have found my fellow raiders to be incredibly friendly. The ultimate goal of the game is to loot, and people seem to be ready to support that cause. In fact, I’ve seen multiple occasions where friendly raiders will hear an unfriendly raider, and swarm to the defense of the friendly who needs their help. Those who kill are untrustworthy and are to be excommunicated from the lobby. You can hear the collective hoots and hollers on the proximity chat after an unfriendly raider is handled, and it truly is beautiful.

    Additionally, some of the automated enemies are incredibly strong, and take at least a few well-equipped raiders to destroy. With this in mind, players are almost forced to work together against a common enemy and share the resources. If one raider were to attempt to betray his comrades and steal all of the enemy’s loot, the hand of justice would be brought down collectively and swiftly.

    It’s nice to see this community allowing each other to flourish. As long as you’re okay with sharing the wealth, you’ll likely go unbothered and get yourself further along in the game.

    Each of these micro-interactions with the community will shape how we view our fellow raiders. Slowly, we build ideas around what’s safe, and who we can trust. It would be silly to say that ARC Raiders can give us every answer regarding the nature of man, but it’s an interesting glimpse into Thomas Hobbes’ proposed “nature state”, and I think it can help formulate interesting ideas. Hobbes argues that in a state of survival, man is brutish and nasty. I can’t help but disagree.

    In my experience in this video game, people typically don’t want to kill. They don’t want to steal, or backstab either. I’m trying to imagine if the stakes were higher, what the case would be. If the thought of losing my loot is enough to deter me from this bad behavior, surely in a real-world, “nature state” scenario, the thought of losing my life would be enough to deter me even stronger.

    A strong counter-argument to this point would be that the risk of trusting another seems to increase in this hypothetical, as you’d better be certain that the “friendly” you’ve encountered is indeed friendly. Instead of losing your gun in the case of a backstab, you’ll lose your life.

    Maybe the most reliable truth uncovered and a rebuttal to the counter-argument is that: there is strength in numbers. Sure, one raider is easy enough to backstab. But two? Three? That will be a bit trickier. And if a raider party catches you searching a dead body for loot, you’d better run. Did they recognize you? What if you run into them again?

    Maybe it’s this system of social accountability that would keep man in line, and though his true desires are to backstab – it’s just not possible. Maybe. Or, maybe our true nature is this shared community. Maybe man does truly want to see others flourish, and this communal bond and shared existence is enough to deter us from what we’d consider bad behavior. I choose the latter.

    Regardless of the philosophical and anthropological questions dancing in my head, I’m having fun. I’m enjoying my time playing with my friends and the community. Last night there were a few raids where I was genuinely crying tears from my eyes because I was laughing so hard.

    To my fellow raiders: May the goop be ever in your favor. See you topside.

  • gather ye rosebuds

    One of my favorite films of all time, Dead Poets Society follows the journey of a group of boys at their elite, private high school. Inspired by one of their teachers, the boys find themselves encapsulated by poetry and the arts.

    In the film, the teacher reads to them an excerpt from Robert Herrick’s To the Virgins, Make Much of Time:

    Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
    Old Time is still a-flying;
    And this same flower that smiles today
    Tomorrow will be dying

    Herrick’s call to action and his allusion to the certainty of death spark readers to seize the day, as the lives we live are ultimately short. The finality of death should be enough to convince us to live a bountiful life.

    Having recently completed Mark Manson’s The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, this poem and movie all came rushing back to me. Like Herrick, Manson makes a point of demonstrating the one certainty in life: death. In the spirit of carpe diem, Manson urges each reader to live with death in mind, not holding back because of what others may think.

    So recently a word I say to myself a lot is rosebuds. Gather ye rosebuds. I will die one day, but before then, I’ll have sucked this life dry of its pain, pleasures, and beauties. Drinking the blood of life until my teeth are stained red and there is life no more.