rowan rabe . ink

Tag: time

  • Scholarly pursuits

    Scholarly pursuits

    Been a bit dead around here of late. I do have a science camp comic on the backburner that involves Labubu(s). I don’t know what the proper plural is and I’m sure if I asked the kids I have this afternoon their opinion they’d go with the English-speaker’s tendency to pluralize with ‘s’ if uncertain.

    “I’m a scholar. I enjoy scholarly pursuits.” –Buster Bluth, emeritus polymath scholar at UC Irvine

    I mentioned this in an earlier post: I’m going back to school! At 30-or-40 years old and already having a doctorate. I need a couple of course credits for a license and one of them is a 101-level class in my Ph.D. subject. Yes, really. The license requirements are pedantic and literal to that point; this has much to do with guild protectionism of a lucrative post and the massive exodus of research scientists into clinical science, given the disemboweling of government/academic research and the dismal state of the biotech industry. But the second class (hematology) is taking more time than I anticipated, given that I insist upon reading the textbook chapters whole and my experience vis-a-vis blood is largely the immune system. Competition for these clinical positions is cutthroat and I’ve got to prove this old dog can still learn new tricks, or, at the very least, indicate that my dismal publication record is not a result of a dismal drive or dismal intellect.

    Perhaps you seek too much

    Bit of my analogue fetishism/return to notebook the past few years–I’m taking notes by hand, and I have to admit retention is far better than when I just download the lecture powerpoint or even type notes. The tenor of the past few years of my life is one of regret, of wishing-to-do-over–so looking back at my undergrad and grad years and wishing I had (a) done the reading more diligently and (b) taken detailed hand notes. I had been hit by a combination of gifted-kid arrogance and depression. I felt in a weird way that reading the text and taking notes would be cheating–that I should be smart enough to remember stuff told to me once, that I should not be that pedantic apple-polishing student who tries very hard but isn’t all that naturally bright. Looking up examples is cheating; I should be bright enough to extrapolate everything I need know from a few basic rules. It’s all bullshit, of course–I maintain the honors students are the students who lie about how much they study by understating, or they were in my day–but my younger self was disgusted by the idea of being too lock-step with the system and, perhaps most damning, was rewarded for this behavior with good grades and scholarships. I wanted to be so damn naturally smart that I could not-try and be valedictorian. I also had a Hesse-esque fixation on being no-one’s acolyte or student but my own that carried over well into adulthood. I wanted to be the Siddhartha who rejected the tutelage of the Buddha to find his own truth, much as he respected the Buddha’s teachings, the Max Demian who kept his own moral council.

    Might I be in a better position now if I had knuckled down that first year of graduate school–sure. I put all my time and reading into my lab rotations and neglected my classes, and that was reflected in my grades, which impacted my lab rotations when it was time to get a permanent lab. I was frequently at one lab until 1 AM. But that lab (that liked me most) had taken me as a rotation student on the understanding that I would have to secure my own funding to stay with them–and I didn’t, not for lack of trying. I am stupefied meditating on how different my career might look how had I gotten that damn NSF grant, or something. I ended up in a solid enough lab but to make a long story short our off-campus collaborators told me two weeks after I defended that the data upon which I had based my dissertation–and two substantial first-author papers I was waiting for other-author comments on–was faulty, in such a way as to invalidate the entire premise. I was allowed to graduate because I had defended correctly what I had been given in good faith. But, those papers never happened–the PI of the other lab was caring for his wife on hospice and the PI of my own lab had his own age-related issues. I should have been more of an asshole and leaned hard on them but I can’t bring myself to do that to kind old men. It is utterly against my nature to impose upon people, because I hate it so much when people impose upon me, and I treat others as I wish to be treated.

    And here I am.

    About what you know

    “Note: “open books/notes” does not mean that you can get other people – whether those people are friends, family or some “tutor” or “freelancer” on a website – or artificial intelligence to answer the exam questions for you. Stay away from sites and tools (e.g. Chegg, Coursehero, ChatGPT, CoPilot) that will do your work for you – such actions will undermine honesty and fairness, violate the trust of me your peers, and result in an academic integrity violation and a report to the Academic Integrity Office. Remember – I care about what you know and can do, if you’re learning; I don’t care what someone else or something knows or can do.”

    I am so glad I got my Ph.D. before ChatGPT and the other generative AI became prevalent. The date lends a credibility to it. I am also glad I am not teaching remotely in this brave new world because this disclaimer–really, this entreaty–bleeds with desperation that comes of only being able to tell people not to cheat in their own best interest because–please. Just please don’t, else the spirit and credibility of academic accreditation is gone. As an somebody who wanted to be an academic or a post-secondary instructor I understand the desperation, the same way I sometimes wonder how set I’d be were reading and writing still marketable, unique Skills.

    I am a scholar – maybe not so far removed from Buster Bluth as I would like to think, the only thing separating us being that I decided upon a concentration and he had the family largess to be an eternal student.* I’m primarily a knowledge-peddler, a thinker, responding to crisis or shock with paralysis and thinking. Perhaps my kind is ultimately of as little usefulness as a farrier in the age of the automobile, where horses are a novelty and one only needs so many farriers, a very rare lucky few to serve what is an elaborate expensive hobby and not a social need. One can argue whether or not this is intrinsically a bad thing or a loss for society but either way I’m kind of fucked, aren’t I.

    You’d be one of the bright ones

    That is the message I got growing up in the 90s – I was so intrinsically bright, so intrinsically chosen, that a good life and a fulfilling career were all but guaranteed, and all I had to do was not fuck it up too badly.

    That’s another thing that’s difficult to come to terms with, the point where all this intellectual pride intersects with a very American-Protestant pride in being The One Who Rises Above, the cream of the crop, the bright ones who earn a degree of comfort and stability in life. There’s something of the Calvinist pride in being “chosen” to be endowed with natural gifts, that pride in what-one-is and not what-one-earned that is an odd and striking counterpoint to the ‘you must earn everything’ ethos that is the face of that Protestant work ethic. I maintain New Calvinism** appeals in this day of the shattered myth of meritocracy (or the ‘fuck you, I got mine’ era) because it gives realization of this painful truth, at the very least, the aura of stoicism, of clear-minded clear-seeing grit. Like Pa Ingalls letting his family starve before he lowers himself to accepting charity, and that being seen as admirable, American. “Play the hand you’re dealt” and don’t complain, but still be proud of being dealt a good hand. Pride in acceptance of one’s lot. “God did not choose me to deserve much in this life.”

    I do not believe you have to be exceptional to have a good quality of life. And yet as the haves and have-nots diverge further, as the middle is hollowed out and the have-nots reach such a majority that the K-shaped wealth curve becomes very bottom-heavy indeed, I still find myself feeling this economic uncertainty and precarity is my fault. I wasn’t one of the Bright Ones after all.

    ——–

    *I also think Lucille is hilarious but I could not actually put up with her in person, let alone live with her, let alone have an incestuous pseudo-marriage with her in which she is in a position of authority over me.

    **Consisting mostly of those “extreme” youth churches with a grunge-by-way-of-industrial aesthetic stuck back in 2002 with the billboards all over I-10 that multiply east of LA proper.

  • Time isn’t after us.

    Time isn’t after us.

    Just like that bluebird

    Ten years and some change ago I was waking up to text messages from my mom and my best friend asking if I “was okay”, which was A Way to start a morning, to be sure. I do not have the texts saved but I can guess with some degree of confidence my response was “????” or thereabouts. Then comes the text reaction you can feel the “o_o” behind – the feeling when one realizes one is not merely a party of comfort, but a messenger of bad news.

    “Lazarus”, from Blackstar, David Bowie

    I did not make this post on the tenth, because–and it pains me to admit this–the tenth of this month did not register to me as meaningful, not the day of. I was up early to work a convention in Long Beach and stayed largely off any internet but the convention staff Discord channel. The fuck of the thing is — Labyrinth was showing across the street at The Pike for its fortieth anniversary run and I was well aware of that, hoping to be able to make it myself, but I did not get off work in time. And still somehow Jareth the Goblin King lurking at the back of my mind was not sufficient to trigger my memory that it was ten years to the day Bowie had died. Indeed, I did not even think on it until yesterday when I saw a memorial retrospective for Alan Rickman, and through that remembered we had lost two giants that week in January of 2016.

    I’ve see “ten year retrospectives”. I do not recall twenty year, or twenty-five year, or further. Perhaps ten years is, in round symbolic numbers, closest to the amount of “organic” or “intrinsic” time it takes for the world to adjust to your absence. Not to forget you by any means, but to accept that you are past tense, outside a posthumous cult that elevates that day into an annual memorial, or one’s direct relations. Ten years to accept the loss of an artist, a legend, as it were. That ten years is a liminal time for the artist wherein the immediacy of their loss fades, and we come to accept them as past/passed.

    Something of an echo

    I live what I feel is a distinct echo, but faint, anaemic, of 2016. Tired, rueful. That year I was preparing for quals, teaching, doing research, doing the various things that make up a graduate student’s life. I was happy. I loved my work. I was proud of it. I still saw some of the freshness of young adult life in the daily, the waking up in my own apartment, making my own way. I was buoyed by that sense I have heard called “romanticizing your own life”–not bogged down by self but still utterly in the moment, thinking on the pleasure that is living a life the way you want to. I cannot tease apart the extent to which 2016 felt hopeful because I was younger or because it was a more hopeful time; it isn’t important anyway. My peers age as we all do, as I did, and that folds into my evaluation of the gestalt. Today I am back in school, sort of, taking online classes this quarter to fill in gaps for a license. We had an ‘introduce yourself’ sort of icebreaker assignment on the class message board and I again see how I am ten to fifteen years older than the rest of the class, how they are at a point in their lives where they are looking forward, while I am trying to salvage a career crashed first by circumstance of nobody’s fault, really, and then by direct, deliberate action with the explicit aim to destroy what was limping back.

    Something of a synchronized timer

    As we all do, age, together–life follows a rhythm. My cohort who came of age twenty years ago followed a common pattern within a few years of moving out. Many of them adopted pets. This past couple years, all those pets passed. The pace of a life cycle synched up. My cats dropped into my life a few years later than my friends’, so they’re still chugging along, but time is ever a gift and tomorrow never promised. An era ends. Nobody has talked (with me, at least) about it in explicit terms, but there is the sense that youth is over, and the future joys of life will be tempered with loss and weariness. We had a first ‘unifying’ epoch, in our early-mid twenties–when all our childhood pets died within a couple of years of one another. It is this uniformity of the life rhythm that hits me, the relentless predictability, a metronomic and inevitable group loss. As sorrowful as that metered death-wave is, it is only all the more sorrowful with outliers, with those who go early. But is there joy or comfort for the outlier who lives longer? In good health, maybe. If that outlier walks with company.

    The older you get, the more the ‘inevitable’ happens to you, and none of it seems so impossible anymore. I do think that is at the root of the cowardice of adults. It is also at the root of wisdom.

    Never tell me the odds.

    There seems to be a general consensus that 2016 is when Things Started to Go Wrong, at least domestically. (Example: I actually thought Bernie Sanders had a chance.) Retrospective pessimism is a balm in the way of sour grapes. But, I cannot but help feel foolish–we see the way things are as the way things would always inevitably have been, because things that are take primacy in our lizard brains. How does one approach the idea “It did not have to be this way”? Can one do the ‘impossible’ with a sober mind that ‘accurately’ evaluates odds? It sometimes feels strategically most sound to just fucking do it.

    It would be lovely to be able to say that pessimism with age is just an affliction, the way that I felt in youth that old people just needed to turn their face to the sun again. I knew the sorrows of life weighed on them in a way it did not on me, but I did not know. Well, I knew the loss; a young child can know loss. What I did not know was the doors slamming, age discrimination, regret, the fact that your own body and the people who guard the gates to opportunity will conspire to drain your life of potential. The former will fail you and the latter will see in you the aging they do not want to contemplate. They will see The Past, the Old Ways, or, at best, the Way Things Are. When the Way Things Are sucks that is not a welcome spectre.

    With time I grow more concerned with whether or not a framing idea is useful than if it is ‘true’.

    My point in all of this, ultimately, is an attempt to grasp what exactly the power of youth is. I do think it exists–even taking into account a deeply pessimistic generation-feeling, as I heard it put, that “none of us actually expects anything good to happen again”, I do think the young have a spark. Easy to be a saint in paradise, easy to be an optimist in the 90’s. Easy to be an optimist when young in the 90’s. The youth of today have only youth.

    Sorrow, guilt, pessimism, those are all stopping-feelings, feelings that make you freeze–long after the need for stillness to heal is gone. If I do not see “as accurately” and yet for that Believing* “get more things done” it is a trade I should be willing to make. What is in the mind is maya and what is done is the ‘stuff’ of one’s life, becomes truth. I’m a creature living too much in the mind** and indeed being so at home in the realm of ‘ideas’ that thinking–and this would include perceiving–feels like to doing.

    *in myself, in the future, in the universe, in ‘God’, in humanity

    **enneagram type 5, if you had that personality testing phase like I did in middle school

  • The unbearable stillness of not-knowing

    There was an odd, very brief window in human history where you could be reasonably sure, on the daily, that your loved ones were safe, but you had no means to rapidly communicate with them/keep tabs on them/etc.

    I don’t have another hand-wringing think piece on how anxious we are in our current, very coddled and safe age, or perception of acceptable risk or or or. But I *am* an anxious person, so I have spent a great deal of time wrestling with the specter of anxiety, how to handle it, how to defang it. I never became less anxious in the sense that I felt safer–I had to make peace with the idea that every day could be your last, or the last for your loved ones, and there’s nothing you can do about it. I had to cultivate a laid-back, it-is-what-it-is, we’re-all-dying attitude to function. It don’t matter. None ‘a this matters. I’m better at it some days than others.

    I was a kid during the time period above indicated, where life was relatively safe but you didn’t have means to keep immediate tabs on everybody. I did a lot of scrambling up and down canyon walls without a cell phone or a tracking advice–that halcyon age people my age and older reminisce about when kids had a radical amount of freedom and it was socially acceptable to let your kids run feral most of the time. It kicked ass. Parents felt safe enough to let you run around without having an immediate means to track you, and this was legally and socially acceptable. Thinkpieces do accurately assume that freedom I was given helped me grow a spine and self-confidence that is lacking in the iPad generation. And God knows I needed some help doing that.

    Few currently alive born into the “first world” middle class or wealthier remember the age before antibiotics, vaccines, abundant food, basic sanitation infrastructure. And I maintain this loss of the “fear of God” (the sense that life can be suddenly, irrevocably upended by a force beyond your comprehension or control) is leading to the weird panicky distaste for vaccines and the lack of urgency regarding funding the discovery of new antimicrobials, but that’s a bit neither here-or-there. I wonder what impact that unique, brief set of coinciding circumstances (safety and the autonomy of not being tracked) had on the zeitgeist. Bad things happened as they do and will but the amount of mental space taken up worrying must have been a lot lower.

    There was more facilitating that general sense of invincibility and well-being than autonomy. The American postwar period was an optimistic time, because for many Americans, it was materially good. The nineties took that to new heights with the “end of history” nonsense, the belief that we had reached the apotheosis of society here in the US and it was just cruising from here while the rest of the world took time to catch up. And while I was not exactly reading Fukuyama as a kid I absorbed that well-being from the adults in my life.

    There’s that saying that to worry is to suffer twice; this is what I am talking about–was our overall aggregate level of needless worry and suffering lower? There is the theory that humans established a ‘baseline’ level of wariness during our days of peril on the Savannah and while it well-served us during that evolutionary period, it has not reset in what is, really, a split second of intense relative safety at the end of an epoch of human existence. But I wonder–it seems a lot of people walk without that burden, kids especially.

    Do they really not carry it? Or are they just all good at hiding it?

    Why I can’t tell you much about that halcyon age (even though I was there).

    It was good for me. I do know that.

    Me-born-thirty-years-later would have had my anxieties and paranoia indulged by society instead of dismissed, and I benefited greatly from the “just get out there and deal with it” attitude.

    I did just say that I grew up during that time period, but I could not tell you what it “was like” because I was a weird fucking kid burdened by too much technical knowledge and zero life perspective. I was terrified all the time. I saw something on the news that featured a drive-by shooting; I was convinced every car that passed me was going to shoot me. (Yes, in podunk nowhere.) I heard that rumor about the HIV-tainted needles left in movie seats; I was afraid to go to the movies. (I did go, but I was scared until I was safely settled in the seat, after gingerly inspecting it by ambient movie-light.) Same rumor with the needles being put into the egress hatch in coin-operated dispensers; I always held my hand well away from the hatch to catch the gumball or whatever it was and lifted the hatch cover very, very delicately with the tippy-tip of my forefinger only on the rim of the hatch I could easily see. I heard the story about gangsters hiding under cars to slash your Achilles tendon to rob you and I never approached a car under which I could not clearly see. (Or, in a more cowardly way, somebody else approaching first and not getting tendon-slashed was a good indicator to me it was safe.) I assumed every day my parents were going to die in a car wreck on the way home, or on the way to work, and I was just waiting to hear about it. (Some really bad days when I just shut down when they were running late without warning, but I hid that shutdown because it wasn’t stoic or indicative of much grit, and I wanted to be a stoic, gritty person.) My point being: I can’t tell you what that time of well-feeling felt like for most people, because I was pathological. But I can tell you what it felt like to be not-normal in that time period, and the zeitgeist ultimately did rub off on me in ways of which I was not aware then or now. I know this.

    I find most horror movies kind of boring, but one conceit that did effect me deeply, that was ‘sticky’ to my thinking, was that of help being turned away by the bad guy aping you or some authority when your loved ones check in on you, speaking for you while you cannot speak, and your loved ones hung up the phone content you were safe while you were being serial-killed. It was an incapacitating idea as a kid and as an adult it still sticks in that poisonous anxious fearful Stygian sludge oozing around the brainpan, somewhere with my reptile brain. The sludge never drained with age or wisdom; I just learned to coexist with it, to nudge it aside, most of the time. And I’ve been doing well enough.

    The existence of rapid communication compels its use.

    Normal becomes expected. When somebody texts you daily and they miss a day, you begin to worry. In the age before texting, the issue never even came up. The existence of the technology to ‘check up’ on people constantly means we must use it. To do otherwise would be choosing ignorance. If we can, why wouldn’t we? The very existence of the technology is the death knell for a more autonomous age; it becomes a choice that is not a choice, and choices are weighted with risk assessment and other mental baggage. This quandary was not present during that high-safety/low-trackability age. It takes psychic energy to refuse to use something that is readily available. If it isn’t available, well, there is no conflict there.

    I sometimes wonder how much mental space we’d clear if we had no choice but to let each other run through the day autonomously.

    As for experiencing the reverse — high-speed communication in a high-danger environment, ask anybody with a loved one in Gaza.

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