7 Things I Lost Escaping My Uncertain Fate (of '07 or '08)*

Editor's Note: I've never wanted this blog to be a LiveJournal, and this post comes dangerously close to reading like a diary entry. Forgive me. I'm thinking about publishing another e-book, something like "Eleven Sevens," that's a collection of unrelated essays structured as lists of seven. It's the hot way that all the kids write like now, and what I did with my Christmas List in July. Consider this a more formal screen test.

Settling into a new place requires some dredging up of the past: whether it's relating your medical or academic history to some doctor, binging on TV shows from the Dubya administration, or relating to new friends by sharing your story. I have a palsied grasp of my personal history, but my hand has been forced to close in on it. So, as a great professor and horrid administrator from Pepperdine once said of technology, "New and exciting things are redefining the way we live every day, but in going forward we rarely consider what we've lost."

I'm told I've grown and matured since junior year of high school, and I have. I know some of those ways, so please don't feel you should respond to this piece by building me back up or anything like that. Seriously, don't. I'm merely considering what I've lost.

1. Prioritized public speaking and presentation
I haven't had to seriously wear a suit in about five years. Yeah, weddings and funerals. I wore out a cheap tux singing with the Glen Ellyn-Wheaton Chorale. But I haven't had to coordinate my suit and tie, belt and shoes, or folio and biro for any of that. Was it California? Getting on a writing/academic track? I'm not sure, but solo performance-oriented situations have dropped off, and so have my performance skills.

2. Putzing around with Photoshop n' piracy
I was really into computers. Not so much programming or hardware—though I knew enough to get by—but manipulating photos, music and videos into any format for presentation or recreation. I didn't clock Gladwell's 10,000 hours, but I was in the thousands. "If you don't believe me, just ask my satisfied customers!" Teachers I'd never had and tenuous acquaintances would ask for my help with their presentations. In the Excel spreadsheet I made to compare prospective colleges, Graphic Design was one of the dozen "Major" columns.

3. Respect for achievement
I was still more skeptical than cynical, so my first reaction to someone's laurels was not eye-rolling and immediate explanation of their actual mediocrity. I actually admired certain "successful" people in many fields. A variety of figures from Conan O'Brien and Michael Crichton to Alan Greenspan all deserved to be where they were and had earned their social influence. They were models of who I could be one day. In fact, I was ambitious to this end, I would be like them one day.

4. A fortified social circle
I was in a... VERY tight-knit speech-choir-theater clique. We Heren Zeventien ran together and were together ALL the time. From that hub I was connected to other social nodes, some of which have survived far better than le troupeau. I have a few closer friends now, even some of the former pack, but I haven't had a Gang since high school. And I do still miss it.

5. Unshadowed jest
Within the Gang's fast-paced language of in-jokes, bewildering and barring to outsiders, or even the later Racist Basement, my sense of humor was never eggshell white. My "jokes" were sprinkled with dark irony, but they were not marinated in it. My humor then and now is the difference between sugar on a grapefruit and overripe Christmas fruitcake. Today even I struggle to know when I'm being serious. Whether that's good or bad, and it's probably bad, it's nonetheless bewildering and barring to outsiders. Except now I'm the only one in on it.

6. Habitual self-discipline
This is akin to One and Three. Homework assigned first period? That's completed in the back of the room during second period. AP English essay deadline approaching? Outlined that nonsense during rehearsal for "It's A Wonderful Life." The theater and speech season are over? Great, I can go back to work at Cedarstone. Doing the song PowerPoints and sermon podcasts for church? There's my Key Club volunteer hours checked off. Even on a basic level, I was up, showered, and dressed every day no later than 8:30 am during the school year. In summer I'd sometimes go 40 hours before sleeping. I'm well aware all this was not the healthiest lifestyle, that I was sometimes flagellate and eventually exhausted. But I was terribly productive in all senses of those words.

7. Trust in the love of others
This last one isn't a Mitch Albom thang. Promise. It's abstract, but I list it because it was already slipping away while all this other stuff was peaking. If you're performance-oriented and prone to over commit yourself, you've got some self-image issues. I was already having a hard time believing that the people around me actually cared about me apart from everything I was doing, and doing so well. My teachers didn't speak highly of me just because I got A's. My friends didn't hang out with me because I made lasting contributions to the group patois. As a matter of fact, my family and church had been cheering for me since before I could speak. I still struggle to accept that I'm loved by so many, all around me, without having earned it. And I'll accept all these other losses just to work on accepting that.

*This is a riff on the title of a book Stewart Lee wrote. If you haven't gleaned that he's my favorite stand-up comic from previous posts or my Facebook and Twitter activity, I've now told you directly. I'm seeing him live on 11 November. YouTube him already.

Coddle that song text!: The analogous as magnanimous

Analogies are the most direct communication, and this piece is a sacrifice fly. I realize by using direct explanation to argue the supremacy of indirect communication that I am weakening my own claim — hitting a long fly out. But, as I hope the net result is a better understanding of the indirect if not greater use of it (if only on my end), this is a sacrifice fly. And just to show even the most routine out can also be an RBI — Analogies are the most direct communication for three key reasons.

But I count five...

1. The novelty of an analogy hooks people, and an idea conveyed analogously is more likely to stick.

A Technical Tony is wont to bear down on any given situation with more and more details. In this way, there are no forests but only many trees with even more branches and innumerable leaves. And it's not really helpful to label a national park on a map as "542,600 trees; 3.7 million branches; 189 million leaves."

Just an ink drawing of my ally I scribbled. It took me, like, thirty seconds.

Straw men aside, Kierkegaard is on my side. He argued that as a mind is not an undisturbed evaluator assessing information from inside a vacuum, it's necessary to, borrowing language from V, use lies to tell the truth. Just as good sentences tell the truth by referencing the latter part of the previous sentence, and then introduce a new thought at the end, Kierkegaard argued communicating indirectly "does not begin directly with the matter one wants to communicate, but begins by accepting the other man's illusion as good money."

This almost works as a sort of open sandwich method whereby the listener is greeted where he already stands then turned around to view matters from a different angle. He listens to the welcome and then just might understand the second part more as he has to process it himself.

2. Analogies don't merely scale with degree, but morph.

Whereas details are Fatburgers, available in various sizes but compositionally identical, analogies are from Jack in the Box. I could order two tacos if I were a little hungry, a sourdough breakfast sandwich if I were a little hungrier, or a Jumbo Jack with Cheese if I were famished. Each level is unique even as they differ in magnitude.

Simple conceits tend to convey more than basic facts. English comic Stewart Lee is highly metaphorical, and he explained the current coalition government as a relationship between two dogs. Whereas David Cameron was bred for power as a bloodhound for hunting foxes, his having to ally with Nick Clegg to wield that power is as if that blood hound could only catch foxes with the help of a small chihuahua. And if British politics don't do it for you, singer-songwriter Cass McCombs is indeed a lionkiller, and I would maintain that Nicki Minaj is a successful reliever who has outgrown the bullpen but doesn't yet know how to pitch for six or seven innings.

Still better than 2010 Jenks. 

Unlike clichés, parables and fables might actually incite thought. Jesus taught in parables about sowing seeds and preparing for wedding feasts to much acclaim. On the fable side, Aesop’s tortoise and the hare have been codified in cliché: "Slow and steady wins the race." If the fable itself is too weathered to be useful, here's a fable update: At rush hour in West LA, it's faster to drive from Santa Monica to LAX on Lincoln than taking the 10 to the 405.

And, of course, there are allegories which can vivify seemingly dead weight. Whether it's spiritual works like The Pilgrim’s Progress or Flatland, a Cold War allegory like Dr. Seuss's Butter Battle Book, or the solid account of a Muslim’s relationship with America post-9/11 in The Reluctant Fundamentalist, allegories make the abstract much more perspicuous. I wonder if someone could explain modern East Asian history as a conversation between three students at a UC Irvine library....

Metaphors and conceits, parables and fables, and allegories should not be confused for each other. Just as you should not expect a breakfast sandwich to suffice for supper as a cheeseburger would, it’s not helpful to think Nicki Minaj chews tobacco or Nick Clegg is used in Taco Bell advertisements.

Actually, I think this works.

3. Analogies require more thought all around.

An analogy is harder to conceive than a simple fact because it requires sufficient understanding of at least two ideas rather than one or, more likely, half of one. The string theorist who can explain the theory as the music of the universe is, by my estimation, a better scientist than his colleague who can only write in obscure and technical language.

But analogies are not received at face value. If they were, they would be reductive at best and misrepresentative at worst. The third-grader who listens to a lecture on string theory will probably absorb nothing, but if he understood strings as playing the music that generates the universe, he would actually begin to think about string theory. This would probably get the young student discussing strings beyond the lecture, clearly a much better outcome than napping through a presentation.

That all having been said, you all need to read The Little Prince and watch Pink Floyd's The Wall if you haven't already.