Confronting Truth

When you are presented with a truth or fact that contradicts what you believe to be true, you have three choices. Accept it and change what you believe, deny it and claim it isn't true, or ignore it and refuse to acknowledge that you ever encountered the truth. This last option is really just another form of denial. Rarely we will even encounter something so counter to what we know or believe that our mind rejects it outright, our mind literally can't believe that it is true.

But what happens when we are faced with a choice that requires action? What then? What happens when we are faced with a moral choice, one that has to do with what we believe to be true? If you believe that taking a human life is wrong, would you kill in self defense? To defend another? What happens if you do kill someone? Again you have two basic choices, accept it or deny it. Denying an action is much harder than denying a thought or idea. You have taken action and hard as you might try you can never take that choice back. You might be able to deny and ignore it for a short while, but the longer you do the more it festers unresolved.

You can try to rationalize it. "I killed that person because I had too", "I stole the food because I was starving". Humans are masters of rationalization, many could rationalize any action if the need arose. But rationalization is like painting over rot, the rot remains, even if you can no longer see it. Perhaps you don't feel as bad about it because it's out of sight, but your house is still structurally unsound.

Alternately you can accept what you did, accept the choice you made and deal with the consequences. What ever choice you make, you must decide what you believe about the moral or truth involved. Is it still true? To decide to change your beliefs may ease your guilt or shame over the action you took, but denying a wrong choice to save yourself guild does so at the cost of your morality and truth.

If you believe there is no absolute truth or morality, this isn't much of a problem. But then if truth is relative, why did you hold to the initial moral standard you believed. If truth is relative why have standards, why draw a line at all.

If truth and morality are absolute and you decide to change what you believe, you sacrifice your moral character and fiber. You might be able to live with this at first but each time you give ground on your beliefs, your morality erodes away. Till finally after time you look at where you are and where you came from and you have a crisis of faith or belief. You must now face the shame of your actions and what you have become, or decide that your morals don't matter to you as much as you say or think they do. Each choice makes the next that much easier. It may not be that your choices run directly counter to your beliefs either, they may be only slight compromises. But it's just as easy to find yourself going the wrong way as a result of a chain of small compromises as it is from one big one.

What ever the cause you have to deal with the result of your actions, whether, sooner or later. Accept, rationalize or deny, your choices will catch up with you eventually, and when they do you have to face the emotional and mental conflict and strife they bring. Without forgiveness there is no way to escape it.

The Zone

No I’m not talking about the twilight zone. One of my friends calls it the “coder’s trance”, most people refer to it as being in the zone. The zone, is a trance like state where all distractions and external input fall away and you are able to focus with single mindedness on the task in front of you. As an artist and writer, I am intimately familiar with this phenomenon and it is an interesting occurrence. When I’m there, I lose all track of time, tune out all sound and noise, and devote 100% of my attention and focus to the task at hand. This allows me to work with an incredible level of detail, and not get bored, as many people might. Each person has their own way of getting into this state, I tend to prefer to work late at night when the world is quiet and peaceful and there are few distractions. There isn’t even the sun to tell you the passage of time. I will often listen to techno, both because I like it and because I think the repeated rhythmic nature of the music helps with the focus, as well as it drowns out any remaining distractions. Though once I am in the zone, I often no longer consciously hear the music anymore.

There is something simple and beautiful about being in that state. It’s restful, and pleasant. It can even make mind numbingly dull repetitive tasks tolerable. How you ask? Well once you know how to get into the zone, it can be used on just about anything. I have worked as a stock person, and there really is nothing more mind numbing then organizing an entire stockroom worth of product, by size, style and color. But if you get into the zone, shut all distractions out and focus, you lose track of how long it’s taking you and you just do it. Typically when I do this it’s a bit different than when I’m working on art, though. When I am in an art trance, I’m 100% focused on the art, while when I am in a work zone, I will often put my body on autopilot and let my mind wander. Partitioning off a small portion of my brain to work on the easy task at hand, while devoting the remainder of my mind to thinking about other things. Weather that be analyzing my life, planning my novel, or just pondering random things, like those posted here on this blog, but sometimes, the brain just shuts off all together and I just work. I don’t think, I just do.

I’ve found in my personal experience that most activities, even complex ones, once learned take a small portion of the brain to repeat. The trick is to then learn how to divide your focus, allowing the part of your brain that needs to focus on the task at hand to do so, while allowing the rest of your mind to do whatever it wants.

I’m curious if other peoples experience of being in the zone are similar or if it’s different for each person. Please I’d like to hear from readers about this one.

Skin

Random thought for the day, Have you ever just stopped and marveled at the miracle that is your skin? Think about it for a second. Your skin is your largest organ. It can be as soft and supple as your lips, or as callous, thick and unfeeling as the soles of your feet. It's elastic, yet rigid at the same time. It moderates your body temperature, reacts to the sun to protect you, and synthesizes vitamin D from sunlight. If you get an injury as small as a paper cut or even as large as a burn, it will scab over and knit itself back together. And lets not forget that it provides you with your sense of touch, without which we would all be in a world of pain, or more precisely, not be. Simply amazing! :D

What defines us?

What defines us, what makes us who and what we are? What makes us good or bad? Is it our actions, our thoughts? Is someone who kills others better or worse than someone who only thinks about it? The courts make a distinction between premeditated murder and homicide. It’s somehow worse if you thought about it before hand. What if you plan it out but never follow through? In the eyes of the law you are a better person if you don’t take action, but do you feel better? What about say pornography and fantasizing? In most places that’s either frowned upon or a crime, and it most definitely is if it involves children. But it’s more of a thought crime than one of action. The person isn’t committing the act’s they fantasize. Is that any better?

We all wish someone would die from time to time, usually as a fleeting thought. I feel safe in saying few people would condemn you for that, so where is the line in our minds that once crossed moves you into the territory of being a “Bad Person”?

We consider soldiers to be good people, yet they kill people. What makes them different than a murderer? Is it because it’s for a cause, or because they don’t like doing it? Are you a bad person if you do “Bad things” but don’t want to, or don’t like it? Are you a good person if you do good things but think, “Bad thoughts”? What is the line, the convergence of thought and action that defines who we are? If you can do all the right things for all the wrong reasons, can you also do all the wrong things, for all the right reasons, and if so where would that leave you?

Extended cost

Extended cost or cumulative cost, how much do we spend on small things over a month or year? How much are you really spending on coffee at starbucks, drinks at the bar, or cigarettes. How much are we spending on our habits?

Let’s start with coffee drinkers. According to http://www.e-importz.com/Support/specialty_coffee.htm “Over 50% of Americans over 18 years of age drink coffee every day. This represents over 150 million daily drinkers. 30 million American adults drink specialty coffee beverages daily; which include a mocha, latte, espresso, café mocha, cappuccino, frozen/iced coffee beverages, etc.” Let’s say you’re one of those 30 million, and you buy a grande mocha from starbucks every day. In Seattle that will now run you a whopping $3.91. After buying one every day for a week, you’re looking at a cost of $27.37. By the end of the month you would have spent $109.48 and by the end of the year your total would have risen to $1313.76. That’s a lot of money.

Ok then how about smokers. In a 2003 survey smokers age 12 and up smoked an average of 13 cigarettes a day on the days they smoked and the same age range of smokers, smoked an average of 23 out of the last 30 days. 13 cigarettes every day for 23 days is 299 cigarettes. In the US, a pack of cigarettes has to be at least 20. So at 20 per pack, the average smoker will smoke about 20 packs in a month. Tobacco Free Kids.org lists the average pack price at $5.26. Multiplied by 20 packs a month and you find you will be spending $105.2 per month and by extension $1262.4 every year on your habit.

God forbid you smoke and drink coffee daily, at which point you would be spending about $2500 annually on your habits.

Next, going to the bar? Let’s assume you go out on the town on Friday nights and drink moderately, having only 2 to 3 drinks. If you like mixed drinks you’re paying at least $4 and probably closer to $6 for a drink, so one night on the town will run you $12-18. Though I expect that’s probably on the low end. If you go out every Friday for a month, you’ve now spent $48-72 and if you go every Friday all year long, $624-936. Not as bad as coffee either but this is assuming you drink moderately.

How about other monthly expenditures, like cable tv, or Netflix? Comcast’s digital preferred service is $39.99 for the first 6 months, after which it jumps to $56 a month, so a year of cable TV costs $576. Netflix basic subscription of 3 movies at a time runs $16.99 a month or $203.88 a year. A movie once a month at $7 a ticket, $84 a year.

Fast food lunch every day, at minimum $5 a meal each day of a 5 day work week, $25 a week, $100 a month, $1300 a year. Gym membership at 24 hour fitness to work off the weight you put on by eating fast food every day, $30 a month, $360 a year.

So what you say? Everything you choose to do, eat or drink costs money. Not exactly a new idea, but each of those expenses means you have to make more money to support your lifestyle. This may mean working more hours or working harder, which in turn means you are tired when you get home. If you’re working hard to pay for entertainment, but are too tired to enjoy that same entertainment is it worth the cost? How much do you value your free time, time with family and friends? What is time worth to you? Is it worth a cup of coffee or, your cigarette? And this analysis isn’t even considering the physical effects that some of these habits have on your body. Time has value and is becoming a commodity in our increasingly busy lives. Take some time to think about the choices you are making and the extended costs of things in your life.

Cost of Entertainment

Ack, it’s been way too long since my last post. So this one’s probably going to be short but it’s an interesting idea, the cost of entertainment and what we are willing to pay. With the cost of movie tickets slowly rising, I’ve started to limit the number of movies I go to. Tickets are just about $10 non matinee where I live and I’ve heard they’re up to about $20 in big cities like LA and NYC. So a dinner and movie, for two would run 40 for the movie, and as little as $10 if you went to fast food. Assuming your date would let you get away with that, so about $50, for a cheap date. That’s getting a bit nuts, and makes me glad I don’t live in a big city.

I am willing to pay $10 for about 2 hours of entertainment. This has kind of become my base line. Video games at $40-$60 are a bargain when you consider I’ll likely get 60 to 100 hours from a game, if not more and a subscription game like World of Warcraft isn’t a bad investment at $14 a month for the nearly unlimited amount of entertainment one could get if that was all you did in your free time. But that’s measuring quantity of entertainment by the dollar. What about quality of entertainment. Going to a concert, or a play, will get you about the same length of entertainment as a movie, but will hopefully be better entertainment. Cheap tickets to see U2 in concert are $64. Assuming about an hour and a half to two hour show, that’s over three times the cost of a movie in LA and six times as much as one at my local theater. But there is an experience to be had there that you can’t get from listening to CD’s. Cheap tickets to see Wicked in San Francisco are $142, over twice the cost of seeing U2. You pay more for these kinds of entertainment because they are “Art”. You are paying for the talent of the performers and for the ability to see it live.

Can we expect to see the cost of movies continue to climb? I think so, will it get as high as a concert? Perhaps. Considering the ballooning cost of making movies in the US, I could see ticket costs continuing to rise. The trick is that movies were supposed to be a cheap form of mass entertainment. The first movies were in machines called Nickelodeon’s. They were short, a few min at best, videos that you hand cranked and they cost 5 cents, thus how they got their name. In 1932 the first real theater charged 3 cents per person. By 1967 the average ticket price was up to $1.22, 1977 it was $2.23, only a dollar more in 10 years, where as by 1987 it was up to $3.91, $1.72 more. In 2000, the price was an average of $5.39 and has risen to an average of $7.50 as of 2009. For a further break down go here. The average cost includes all ticket sales together, whether they be matinee, children’s, discount or normal.

I don’t know what prices are going to do in the future, but if they continue to rise at the rate they are, I’m not sure how much longer I will be willing to see a movie. For comparison the UN World Food Programme, estimates it costs about 25 cents a day to feed a child, or 50 dollars a year. That means if I see 5 fewer movies a year I could feed a child for the same amount of time. So then, what is the value of our entertainment?

Silicon World

Click for full size.

Attractive isn’t she, It’s a shame she’s not real. What you see above is the result of about 10 hours of work in Photoshop. The whole piece is a composite or collage if you will. The face alone is made of 7 different pieces.

We are living in a world where it’s becoming harder and harder to tell the difference between what’s real and imaginary. As Eiffel 65 put it, we're living in a Silicon World. While their song might not have been about digital falsehoods, I like the mental image and I think the analogy applies. The chorus says “I want a girl with silicon lips and silicon hair” and now, every day when you look at print ads, whether that be magazines, billboards, or banners, it’s all silicon. Nothing makes it to print without first being digitally touched up, or re-mastered.

We are being presented with a false ideal of what beauty is. Don’t believe me? Go watch the Dove, Evolution add. Don’t worry we’ll wait while you do. That and more, goes into what you see every day.

But it’s not just our advertising, it’s our entertainment too. I will assume most people have seen Avatar. I spend a good majority of my time dealing with this kind of thing and even I had to stop at times, during the movie and remind myself that what I was looking at was 100% fake, created from someone’s imagination. We herald it as innovative and groundbreaking when it’s in our entertainment but for the most part, we don’t notice when it’s in our every day life.

Personally I like the fact that technology is catching up to our imaginations. It is now possible, with enough money, to make just about anything come to life on the silver screen and the kid/ artist inside me, loves it.

Up until recently we were limited in our representations of human beings. We just couldn’t make them look real enough. I know that sounds kind of silly but here’s the thing. The closer something resembles a human the more we identify with it. This is called personification. The problem is, at a certain point it looks enough like a human that the brain starts to try and identify it, as an actual person and that’s where we hit the sticking point. If it’s real enough but not perfect, the attraction becomes revulsion, as it ends up looking like a zombie, or a distorted monster. It looks human but something isn’t quite right. You get this nagging feeling in the back of your mind that something is off. Sometimes you can’t quite put your finger on it, but you know something is wrong. That’s your brain telling you it’s not real. Your subconscious looks at reality everyday, and then when it encounters something that’s off, it bugs you. This is called the Uncanny Veil. It’s the reason that for a long time computer animation steered clear of attempting realistic representations of humans. Because we couldn’t cross the veil and so as a result companies like Pixar created stylized version of humans. But now with avatar and other recent films like Benjamin button we have been able to push through and create false realities that are good enough to trick the mind, at least for a little while.

Now there is talk of resurrecting dead actors to make new movies. Bringing back Bruce Lee to make more martial arts films, but now the actor is digital and can do all their own stunts, work any hours you want, and do just about anything you want them to. All you have to do is hire a voice impersonator to do their lines and you’re good to go. Personally I think we’re still a ways off from this technology, but think about what that will do to Hollywood. As much as I love technology, I personally think we will never fully replace real actors. Actors who spend their whole lives learning to most minute control of their emotions and muscles to be able to evoke anything they need on film. I just don’t think we’re going to reach that level of control, at least not in our lifetime.

But where does it stop? With the advancement of technology progressing at the rate it is. Will we soon be seeing videogames that look like movies? We are already close. But will we see the return of Virtual Reality and actually live the games? What will that do to us? If people spend more time playing games then going outside where will the line between self and avatar begin and end? If we can create a digital person who looks real, what’s to stop advertising companies from using computer models instead of real ones? No longer would they have to worry about aging or weight gain.

Are we as a world culture going to continue to accept the advancement of technology or will there be a point where we say no, and draw a line at the level of involvement we allow technology to have in our lives.

Already we have begun to see a back lash against the digital altering of images for advertisements. Will we have a “Bra Burning” of the 21st century, where we reject the standards that media is trying to sell us, the ultra thin, ultra low-rise jeans? Or will we go blindly on into one of Hollywood’s cyberpunk futures, like Surrogates, where we live our lives vicariously through technology, never leaving our homes?

Already we live lives connected to the global community, via the internet, through the umbilical’s of our computers and cell phones. We pour our lives into ones and zeroes, into face book and myspace. People have been known to lose friends, jobs, even marriages to games like World of Warcraft.

Truly we live in a silicon world, but where does it end?