The injury

This weird breakup divorce thing is like a leg injury. At first it really hurt, and I couldn't do a lot of my normal activities. Then my kind of built-in healing processes went to work, it stopped hurting as much, and I started figuring out how to work around the remaining soreness and lack of mobility. I *could* go to work, be a dad, get chores done, so I did.

Many things are the same, but nothing's the same. Everything hurts, takes longer, and reminds me that my injury was never treated. Some day I should get it looked at and figure out what I need to do to really heal. I might need surgery, physical therapy, or a bigger change.

What I feel like I really need to do is to evaluate what actually happened, what state I'm in, what's possible, and what I want. Instead what I think I'm doing is to keep trying to fill the Harvey-shaped hole that would otherwise be left in the world, as seen by Arnica, Amy, my friends and family, my job. 

JAWS

When I was a kid I was really into sharks. Posters, puzzle and game books, bathtub toys.... I was also into dinosaurs, and when I learned that sharks had existed alongside dinosaurs, I thought of the basically as real-life living prehistoric predators. Super cool! So when JAWS was released, I had to see it, even though I was only 7. According to my mom, I bugged her enough that she agreed to drive me 20 miles to the theater to a showing, and after the first ten minutes I was so scared that I wanted to leave, but she refused.

In the years since, I didn't think of the movie too often, but when I did I thought of it basically as a monster movie. A horrible beast terrorizes a community of innocent folks until some hero saves them.

Watching it again, I was struck by how much it is, or tries to be, the story of Martin Brody and his quest/struggle to be accepted as the island's police chief, despite being an off-islander big city cop. In that story, the shark is not so much a horrific monster as it is a conventional villain, thwarting the hero's quest.

In fact, that was one of the more disturbing things about the story: that while the shark preys on oblivious swimmers and boaters, the true victim is Brody. He is the one that we are supposed to care about being affected. The actual victims are not really even characters in the story. They are human only so that their suffering (and that of their loved ones) is significant enough for it to impact Brody's quest for acceptance.

Yes, this is a monster movie, and it's something of a trope that the victims in monster movies serve at least partially to make the monster that much more terrifying. But the choice to center the powerful white man as the "real" victim (especially when the first two victims are a woman and a boy) felt way too close to home these days.

That idea came back to me last week when reading about the September 11, 2001, attacks again. Part of what has been reprehensible about the response of Trump and Republicans and their supporters has been their claim of victimhood in those attacks. People actually died and lost friends and family in those attacks, but we, the "patriots", are the *true* victims! Like the storytellers of JAWS, many people have created their own meaning about the violence that took place -- a meaning that centers themselves.

Of course it's true that significant events have an affect on people only peripherally impacted by them, and every person has their own important and valid story about what 9/11 means to them. But when it comes to establishing *the* story (if that is something one is claiming exists), a choice has to be made about *whose* story it is. Too often that choice goes unmade by the people with the loudest voices, who assume that there really is only one story, so of course their own story serves just as well as anyone else's.

Enfys Nest

Some thoughts about Enfys Nest after seeing Solo again.

[spoiler alert]

Enfys Nest makes me cry and I am attempting to string ideas into something like an explanation why.

I think a lot of it can come together under the idea of identity. I grew up accepting and never questioning my identity as a boy, then as a man. It never felt like a choice, never felt like something I needed to consider. But there were many times when I did not see myself as masculine, as fitting the image of the Ideal Man. I had fears, I left many things unaccomplished, I was physically small and weak (or so I felt). I was offered an alternative identity - the Smart Guy, an alternative to the Ideal Man. Still a man, but less so, with skills in my brain instead of my muscles or heart. In time I even came to think of this as a better identity, that I could rely on logic instead of power, right instead of might, as it were. But in a way I still recognized this as something lesser.

Meanwhile, I had no mooring to think about my racial identity. I was brown, that was for sure. I knew the areas of Western Africa and Mexico were involved, but I had no name for *what* I was in that sense. I knew that discrimination and prejudice existed, but I thought of them as purely based on appearance and color, not on identity and power. In a way similar to my gender identity as a Thoughtful Man, I felt that if anything my racial identity was Don't Mind My Brown Exterior, I'm Just Like You on the Inside, Where It Counts.

But, the reverse side of the above (along with some other factors) was that I adopted continuous voices in my head, reminding me of the compromises and denials I was making. You're not a real man if you can't at least come out even in a fight. The stupidest bully can stop you. You may be smart but you've got all the susceptibilities of men -- unable to handle emotion, creativity, and spatial thinking. Your sexual urge is essentially destructive. Brownface. Mud race. All I had to do was watch movies or TV to see real heroes, then look in the mirror to see the obvious difference.

Despite the enormous plate with a large chunk of the world on it, being held out to me as a young middle-class American man, I felt drawn more to characters who were underdogs, outsiders. People who were judged from the beginning as unworthy of consideration, definitely not up to Doing the Thing. Often that meant, and still means, characters who are women or girls. I identify with them because like me they carry something around with them that others can immediately see, and that they know they are judged for. What feels heroic about these characters to me is that they recognize that judgment that is always there, and they accept it as a fact about the world, but they refuse to believe that it means anything about their own abilities.

So when Enfys Nest removed her helmet, I saw myself: a mixed-race kid, apparently meek and childlike, but surrounded by a persona based on one chosen skill (bad-ass marauder in her case, gifted nerd in mine).

Things 3-8

The remaining things about me that others may not have known.
3. I started meditating a couple weeks ago. I'm also reading a book about it by someone who shares my birthday (Pema Chödrön).
4. I don't think it particularly means anything when people have the same birthday.
5. When grocery shopping I often feel the need to choose between organic food and fair trade or local. I am happy when I can find something that's all of those. But I definitely choose non-corporate over corporate if it comes down to it. I figure the small worker-owned company will go organic when they can.
6. Movies that combine physical pain and suffering with humor make me very uncomfortable.
7. Sometimes I open up mp3s in Audacity, split the stereo tracks, move one of them so they are offset by an exact number of beats, and listen to it for a while. It becomes pretty clear which recordings used click tracks and which did not.
8. The first time I saw Star Wars I thought C-3PO was called "Creepio" and that it didn't really matter if Luke died in the trash compacter.

Eddie Vedder

I like the shirt, too.

I do not know much of Eddie Vedder's music. But twice I have had the experience of his face appearing before me during breathwork, as the epitome of what I can only describe as an expressive male. I am not a strongly expressive man, and I have lacked an expressive male role model for much of my life. In fact, part of how masculinity was modeled for me was distinctly to be inexpressive.

What I see when Vedder sings is the face of a man who is feeling, and who is aware of the complete depth and breadth of what he is feeling. And then what comes out in his voice is shaped and propelled by that entire feeling.

I needed an Eddie Vedder when I was growing up, to show me what it is like for a man to feel all of the emotions I was hearing about; to demonstrate that those are part of being human, our birthright regardless of gender.

Using diversity to choose my playlist

For a while I measured my music-listening diversity using three aspects: diversity of artists, albums, and tracks. For a few reasons, I stopped keeping track of album diversity. So for most of the last year I've been measuring artist and track diversity, both by amount of time (per artist, e.g.) and number of plays. Recently I decided that it makes the most sense to only consider artist diversity by amount of time, and track diversity by number of plays.

For example, if I hear 1 hour of Miles Davis, and to balance it out I want to hear some Bach, then it seems most balanced to hear 1 hour of Bach. That's true even if that means hearing 6 Miles Davis tracks and 15 Bach tracks.

But when it comes to specific tracks, what seems balanced is to hear all the tracks the same number of times.

So, I measure diversity these ways, over multiple periods of time, and then calculate two things: for each artist, how will it affect artist-diversity-by-time if I hear (say) 5 more minutes of this artist? and for each track, how will it affect track-diversity-by-number-of-plays to hear this track once? Whatever tracks result in the greatest improvement of both track diversity and artist diversity are what I listen to next.

Basics about music-listening diversity

I like to have a diverse experience listening to music. Thanks to last.fm (a.k.a. audioscrobbler) and some of my own database programming, I can measure both the actual diversity of what I've heard, and the impact on diversity each new piece of music would have. It's not really as simple as "measuring diversity". What is a diversity measure? Am I looking at the diversity of all the music I've heard, or only in the last week?

I track several different sets of "music I've listened to recently" and measure the diversity of each one. These are the diversity of artists and of tracks; by how many tracks I've heard and by how much time; and by time periods starting with the last week, the last two weeks, etc. up to the last year, and for all time. This gives 216 different snapshots of my recent music listening experience, which I add together to get one big measure of diversity.

For a diversity measure, I use the Shannon index. This takes into account both the richness (number of different artists or tracks) and the evenness (whether all the artists are represented evenly or with some more prevalent than others).