Tiger Style

I'm guessing you don't- I didn't, but I suppose you might- know that one of the strangest ads to grace our eyeballs was released about a week ago. It involves three things: 1) Tiger Woods staring straight into a camera, expressionless (now that I mention it, I can't say with any authority that I've ever seen Tiger Woods ever make an expression). 2) A disembodied voice. If you are in the know (I was not) you would know that the voice belongs to Earl Woods, Tiger's father who passed away some years ago. That is the entire ad except for 3) the last few seconds which is occupied by a simple Nike swoosh against a black background.

I'm trying to find the right word, "bizarre" "peculiar" etc, but what keeps coming to mind is a very missable moment from The Muppets Take Manhattan when Fozzie is trying to jog Kermit's memory and we come in in the middle of a really long joke Fozzie is telling to hear him say "and then the koala bear says, 'well this is odd.'" This ad makes me feel like I've walked into the middle of something that I don't- can't- fully understand, and all I can say is "Well this is odd."

And I believe that is the point.

The Tiger Woods narrative, more than anything, has been depressingly simple. Before his rambunctious sex life became public knowledge, Tiger was mostly a black box. Not just unknown, but unknowable. A mystery that provided a mystique to cloak the best golfer ever.

Then, crash boom bam, he's just a guy who can and does sleep with a lot of women. The black box is blown open, and he's human all too human, and a sleazy one at that. His depth became shallow.

I remember a conversation I had years ago with someone who had just found out that Lance Armstrong had had a divorce. This ran contrary to her whole idea of Lance Armstrong. I was more of the "lots of people get divorced," attitude. I'm not sure whose divorce would shock me. The Obamas' perhaps. That's all I can think of. Tiger managed to hold that reputation of being above and beyond in body, mind and soul. I remember a day in the summer of 2002 when a housemate was watching replays of Tiger having a very bad day. "You're human!" he exclaimed, totally shocked. For most of the world, this is not news. Again, Obama comes to mind, and I feel his loss of approval ratings post-election is mostly from a general transition of people's mindsets of Obama as a concept to Obama as a human.

But back to the ad. I saw Doug Rushkoff (his book Life Inc., though cynical, is worth your time) speak once in high school. It was a good speech, I still remember it a decade later. He talked about how he had helped Diesel, the jeans company, come up with their ad campaign. Here's one. Apparently they make watches now:



The main point is to not make sense. Your conscious mind probably just says "weird" and moves on, but some part of you assumes that Diesel gets something that you don't. You try to piece together rational reasons for the timing of the laugh track, the woman's style, the choice of strange looking old men instead of the standard cool hunks. You don't know why (because there is no why), but you assume on some level that Diesel knows why. That's the idea anyway.

The idea behind the Tiger ad is that he is still deeper than you. There is something that Tiger gets that... well, you might get it but probably not. Nike gets it. Do you get it? Tiger is lusty but introspective, driven but distracted, focused but... oh he's focused. He's not looking away from the camera, but not giving you anything. Unless he did. Unless you get it. Do you get it? Nike gets it.

This ad will be 90% forgotten in a month, but cleverly and carefully, Nike-Tiger layers the mystique back on. If this works, maybe he should be paying them.

Good news from the previous century

I just got some good news. The conflict between quantum physics and relativity over who rules the world is that relativity supposedly doesn't allow for quantum entanglement. Maybe this is a problem for relativity, but it's not a problem for me. For starters, quantum entanglement happens, whether or not relativity allows it. For twosies, I wonder if this problem is a result of perhaps the greatest feat of human imagination suddenly becoming too rigid once it had some rules in place.

Okay, now I'll back up (I didn't want to keep you waiting for the good news). Quantum entanglement, as you may know, is the name for the connection between two subatomic particles that causes them to instantly react to changes in the other. By changes, I mean a change in their spin. I always took this to mean no more or less than the direction in which they are spinning, but in the book I'm reading A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson- very much up to the Bryson standard- he refers to it as a "property called spin" which made me think that perhaps there is more to it. Anyway, the more important word in that sentence for our purposes is instantly. Changes of subatomic particles in response to their partners (electrons are most commonly cited, but I think the same holds true for positrons and other little guys that they don't bother with in high school chemistry) may be the only thing in the universe that is truly instant.

A website might advertise that it responds instantly to changes in the weather, the score, the world, whatever, but what it means is that when a relevant piece of information changes, a person or a computer inputs the change, and then some more computer things happen, and pretty soon, the website reflects the change. Sometimes people say that a person reacted instantly, but what they mean is that a thing happened, and the person's senses processed it, and very soon after, for a human anyway, the person did something in response. A wrecking ball hitting a building damages it just as soon as the force transfers over to the building, which takes such a short amount of time, that you probably don't notice it, but time passes nonetheless.

Change the spin of an electron though, its quantum entangled sibling changes INSTANTLY. This ruffled more than a few feathers of the birds examining the world of the smallest (most notably that Einstein guy). The reason for the trouble is due to two- maybe three, but we'll get to that- assumptions. The first is that nothing no way no how can go faster than the speed of light. It's not just that our rockets aren't awesome enough yet, it's that our universe apparently has a speed limit. The second assumption is that the particles must be passing a message between them, but if that were true, the message can go faster than the speed of light (people did eventually get around to proving this with entangled particles that were miles apart).

Like I said, this is a problem for relativity, but not for me. Relativity is concerned with mechanics- what makes particles bounce and spin in just the way that they do- I am concerned with ideas. From what I understand, entanglement has not been explained so much as accepted. My feeling is that 1) you eventually have to get to that point when you are trying to explain the universe. It might even be a goal. 2) This one may be beyond our ability to explain mechanically, at least for now. Perhaps there are strings that connect the particles that are undetectable to us, or, and here's where my allegiances lie most comfortably, maybe we just need to get our heads around the idea that the two particles are better described as one thing.

Science is better built for reductionism than holism, even when it's just a tiny iota of holism. It's not a molecule, it's a bunch of atoms! It's not an atom, it's a nucleus with an electron cloud! It's not a nucleus, it's protons and neutrons, and it's not those either, it's a bunch of quarks! The word "molecule" is often more efficient than useful than something like "a set of atoms that are stuck together," but it wouldn't be considered more accurate. Describing things by group saves time, not precision.

In the case of entangled particles, perhaps "one entanglement" is more precise than "two electrons." Maybe there doesn't have to be a signal between the two electrons because you are not just changing one electron, you are changing one entanglement. You could argue that this is avoiding the problem by redrawing the lines so you can't see it, but I would counter that it's the previous set of lines that cause it. Finding new lines and improving on the old ones is pretty much what science is all about.

So why was it good news that the incompatibility between quantum mechanics and relativity is essentially the entanglement problem? Well, I'd heard a while ago that these two systems were incompatible, and that made me sad. I wanted everything with quantum mechanics to be okay, and if it conflicted with relativity, than it didn't mean it was wrong, it just meant that something was wrong. But like I may have mentioned, the entanglement problem is no problem of mine.

That meant I was free to love quantum mechanics without reservation, and I do really love quantum mechanics. My attitude toward the world has always been absurdist. This is a style, but it's also a position. Absurdity touches my soul more than rationality does. Rationality is about rules and decisions, and these give the world some structure, both in our minds and out of them, but on some level I always understood them to be arbitrary. Useful, functional, purposeful, helpful, whatever else-ful, but not capital-r Right.

Absurdity touched deeper for me, but rationality always seemed to win. In the end I just seemed to be discarding reality for Hamlet's nutshell, and I would often dead-end there not entirely sure how it happened.

So imagine my delight, when these headlines made it into my sphere of academia:
Science fact! Electrons can blip out of space in one place and back in somewhere else without occupying the space in between! Science fact! It is completely impossible to know both an electron's trajectory and location! You can only know one or the other, almost as if, they don't exist at the same time! Science fact! Measuring a particle can change it! Not the mechanics of the measurement, the fact that it was measured! THE FACT THAT IT WAS MEASURED!!! WHAT KIND OF UNIVERSE IS THIS!?!?!?!

I'm not going to try to unpack all of that right now, but learning it caused a delightful explosion of many of my fundamental assumptions about the world. It's one of science's greatest triumphs, and to me, it was a reminder that somehow absurdity always gets the last laugh.

Three stories involving hitch-hiking in faraway places.

In Ecuador, I had my first and so far only experience hitch-hiking. The first time I stuck out my thumb I tried to get a look at the driver first. Rookie mistake. Even a car bumping down a dirt road can't notice you and react fast enough to let you in. Also, the driver tends to want to get a look at you first. With hitch-hiking, they get to check you out, but all you know about the person you get is that they are willing to pick up a hitch-hiker. In our case, they weren't just willing, they were thrilled.

We were on our way back from a bird-of-prey reserve when it started raining. We had walked there, which had taken at least half an hour, and now it was getting a little chilly and wet. Why not, we thought. After my first abortive I summoned up the courage to try this without any idea who was going to stop. The first car did. It was a mini truck with an open back, which we were told to hop in. We couldn't really see our driver and his passenger, but we could see the people who trailed us the whole way and were tremendously amused by the whole thing.

After a bumpy and entertaining ride back to town, our driver pulled over to let us out, but actually they were on their way to a famous waterfall, and would we like to join them? Sure. Off we went. It turned out our car was part of a three car caravan, including the grinners behind us. They had an American exchange student behind us. It's kind of sad, all I really remember about him is that he was a Republican. I think he was from Indiana, and an Engineering/Spanish student, but that part I'm less sure of.

The waterfall was great. Later we mentioned that to our Amazonian guide and he asked us if we could feel the energy of the waterfall. I had. It was lovely and powerful. Afterward we were asked if we had time for lunch. We did. They took us to some restaurant that had fast-food decor (plastic trays and tables, you order at the counter, there were overly-colorful pictures of the food), but also had a little of that TGIFriday's thing of "This is a special place. Orange you lucky to be here."

The family was kind, spoke good English, were good conversationalists, had political opinions, and would not let us pay a dime for lunch. They made fun of us for trying.


I had a student in Japan who I didn't really like for at least my first few months of teaching him. He seemed too corporate, too salary-man. I was also a nervous teacher when I started, and he did not seem to appreciate this. He was my student for my entire year there, and eventually I got to know him. Over time, he became more interesting to me, more human. I remember his face, and one or two things he said and the general sound of his voice- little else. One time, toward the end of my stay there, he told me about hitch-hiking to Hokkaido after he graduated. It sounded amazing. It implied a freedom of spirit that I didn't much associate with him or Japan. That night, I was walking home from Ragbag, a trek of a little over an hour that I made every week, and I casually stuck my thumb out as cars passed me. I didn't make a real effort, I wasn't quite brave enough, but it was a long walk, and... his name escapes me, but he made me want to try.

Ragbag nights became the anchor of my week in Japan. Every Thursday I would stay on the Keikyu line one extra stop and go meet my buddies there. We would order pitchers, exchange books and CDs, get drunk enough to wipe away the week up to that point and provide a partial midweek reset. At some point, Carl would say, "Anyone feeling peckish?" and we would order the special pizza. The special pizza had a collection of toppings that freak out people with normal pizza sensibilities. Corn, shrimp, and more that I can't remember. Later I found out that the special pizza was not on the menu, and we were the only people that ordered it. It started half as a joke one night, when they were out of a lot of menu items, but Ryo, our friendly bartender, told the crew he'd whip up a "special pizza."

If it was someone's last Ragbag night we would do shots. On mine, I went to the bar to order them and Ryo asked if someone was leaving. I told him I was, and asked if he'd like to join us. He did. He sat next to me and said, "I'm going to tell you the most beautiful word in the Japanese language. It is 'Sayonara.' It means 'goodbye,' 'so long,' 'farewell,' 'good luck,' 'see you later...' all of these in one word."


In Hawaii, I was in a two car caravan. We spotted a mother and daughter hitch-hiking. Our car was in front, and was the more likely of the two to pick up hitch-hikers. It was also full, so we couldn't. Our driver, however, made the either bold or presumptuous decision to stop a little ways past the hitch-hikers, effectively forcing the car behind us to pick them up. I didn't interact with the hitch-hikers, but I heard from the other car that they claimed to be aliens who liked Earth best out of all the planets, and also apparently needed a ride to the beach.

Thoughts from five minutes of the Olympic opening ceremony from a bar with no sound

I saw five minutes of the opening ceremony for the Vancouver Olympics with no sound at a bar last night. I thought about how it is a performance that is not really supposed to be good. It's not supposed to be bad either, but goodness is not the measure that they are going for. It's supposed to be good in the way that it's supposed to be wintery and expensive. These are all boxes that must be checked, but they are not the ultimate goal. The goal is for the ceremony to defy explanation. It wants to be visually spectacular and register a "DOES NOT COMPUTE" across your system.

I find this sort of thing stratifies the available reactions for someone watching it. There is accepting, impressed and disgusted. I found myself mostly towards the first. It is what it is. They are supposed to do something so over the top, that you lose your feel for where the top even was. That's their job. I had some impressed too. Skiers air-slaloming vertically from the ceiling of a huge arena? Pretty cool. That and Peter Pan were all I saw. From what I understand it was too long to actually enjoy it all, but again, the point is not to enjoy all of it. Short things can be more easily explained than long things. One of the ways to hit the DOES NOT COMPUTE button is to make it long enough so that you have multiple moments of "Wait, there's more?"

Disgusted, accepting and impressed are three points on a continuum that reflect where you stand on the Olympics in general. If you see it as a massive waste of money and resources, then there is no better example than the opening ceremony. If it's just something that is, then it is, and if you get a shiver of "Oh boy! Here come the Olympics!" that will last you through most of the ceremony, which gets its significance from that feeling.

As for me, it's all those things. It's cool, it's a waste, it is what it is, and it's partially redeemed by my love of hockey. That sentence describes my basic attitude toward the Winter Olympics, which will come and go with only a few scattered blips across my mind, but it also describes a chunk of my adolescence: Cool, a waste, is what it is, partially redeemed by my love of hockey. I remember back in the day I would freak out for the Olympics. I bought every moment of its self-inflated meaning. Now I'm more jaded, pragmatic, less patriotic. I wouldn't mind seeing the Americans win the hockey tournament, especially because it is one where they are solidly underdogs, but my favorite player is Canadian, and I have an odd affection for the Swedes. None of it is likely to strike a chord deep within me, the way it all used to, or even the way the White Album did this morning. The Olympics is a circus. It could be more- a cultural celebration, a moment of diplomacy- but it doesn't seem to want this.

I guess it's all about what you believe in. I used to believe that sports mattered more than anything. I don't think that any more, but I still hold on to my arbitrary partisanship toward the Mets and Devils. It gives the stories meaning, the way gambling does. Most likely the Olympics will be gone in two weeks and I will barely notice, but if I happen to catch them at the right moment, if one of the unfolding narratives captures a greater meaning for me, if somehow it all takes on a much greater significance than a few people, miles a way, doing one very specific thing that they have made themselves very good at, then I'll get to enjoy a few moments of that cosmic power that instilled so much of my youth.

Dreamy

So I wanted to write something this in this space, because it's been a while, and if I don't tap on the keys with my fingers, they get restless and start doing the New Jersey Devils' work. Problem was, nothing was coming to me to write, so I'll start with the dream I had last night and go from there.

Weird one. Good weird though. My dreams lately had been weird and a little uncomfortable, like a movie more concerned with being personal than good. This one was fun though. It took place variously in Japan and my homes in New York and Berkeley. It involved Buddha, some sort of nature spirit, some sort of emperor, flying cartoon bunnies, and a visiting friend from New Zealand.

The main part I remember is a Japanese coworker (not one I had in real life) having me help him carry a table over near a stove. Behind the stove was the Buddha, or perhaps just a concentration of Buddhaness, or Buddha, but not the only Buddha. The table, which had to be rectangular and wooden, was an offering to Buddha. Not that Buddha actually took the table in any way. For starters we couldn't even get it behind the stove. It was just a way of showing him that we were putting in effort around being in his presence. Something like that. I told my Japanese friend that you can send Buddha good vibes, and that's sort of like a present too, just in case there's no one around to carry the table with him.

We both went back there and got a good Buddha high. Later I went back again and the stove was much more similar to the one in my home in Brooklyn. I still got the Buddha high, but things felt straighter and flatter. The Japanese guy said he can get a similar thing when he goes to Madras, India, and I thought about highs can be triggered by all sorts of things.

There was a bunch of stuff with the nature spirit and the emperor that I barely remember. The emperor wanted to turn invisible, but it was pointed out to him, perhaps by me, that between Buddha and the nature spirit, someone was going to be able to see him. Let's be reasonable here. There was also a moment where something or someone was ascending toward the ceiling because of something the emperor was doing, and a cartoon bunny jumped up and knocked it out of the beam it was ascending in. That was good, and someone needed to do it, but I don't remember why.

The rest was mostly mundane, involving things like assembling a bunk bed and getting ready to go outside.

I don't know if I'll ever hear a satisfactory explanation for why I get to experience things like this several times a week consciously and probably every night unconsciously. Obviously elements of processing recent events and various emotions and feelings is a big part of it. I've heard that if your relationship between body-mind and mind-mind gets more consciously communicative, that your dreams will become more obvious in what they mean. I'm loosely familiar with the idea of astral travel and similar concepts of some part of you literally wandering around (expanding? airing out?).

Those explanations, and plenty more, make enough sense. I just don't know if any explanation that was explained to me without some sort of seminal experience could make me say, "So that's why I thought Buddha was behind my stove when really I was just passed out in bed." Maybe if the explanation could be predictive or testable in some way. But no, that seems unreasonable, given the subject. I think if I'm ever going to really understand dreams it will probably be through them.

There is a sort of "loophole" that might provide for something that I can work with. As some of you know, I'm pretty into the Hawaiian system of thought known as Huna. The central principle of Huna is ike (ee-kay). Ike refers to the senses of sight, hearing and touch (possibly the other ones) and also means experience. On the esoteric level, it refers to the idea that your experience is all you have and all you know. A lot of people know this as the "your blue might be my pink" idea, but really it's "your walking in the park might be my battling space lizards," and "my whatever could be your anything." Um, got that?

A corollary of all that, and one of the main ideas contained in the word "ike" is that experience is not passively absorbed by your senses, but actively created by your being (I'm saying "being" because I don't want to get into a whole body-mind rigmarole). Our hardware is all very similar because we are all the same species, and our categories are somewhat similar, so can we agree on a lot, and we spend more time on what we can all agree on (I don't mean political issues, I mean that I am a human, and that is a computer, and these are words and they mean stuff, and we can mostly agree on what that stuff is). The experiences that are completely personal- the ones that only you have and only you CAN have- those we don't talk about as much, tend to forget, and tend to write off. The only catch is that anything you call a distinct entity has a distinct experience. What I'm saying is that qualitatively, dream experiences and "real" experiences are the same, but the real ones don't reveal as easily how they are created by you, and how personal they are. Fortunately, our completely personal experiences can also be largely shared, which I'm tempted to call a miracle, but what I really mean is that experience, both shared and personal, is a mystery on the level of why anything exists at all. If you say you know the answer, I probably won't believe you.