How we live and die...

So, another quote from where I can't find (even with Google's help) the sayer (not verbatim but I'll put quotes anyways):

"As a Christian, the way we live is important. Also important, even more so, is the way we die" - Probably a saint)

This weekend's Memorial Day weekend. A chance to honor those who sacrificed their life for our country. A noble thing we did, to have the day off, to remember, to give thanks.

You see the thing is, back in day (like, prehistoric times), people were only concerned (probably) with the basic necessities of life. Being able to just stay alive, to see tomorrow alive, that was their goal. Now, I'll argue its a bit more complicated. Sure basic needs must be met, duh. But there's layers and layers beyond that of things we may not even be aware of (ended with a preposition, whatever). For example, see Maslow's hierarchy. What I'm trying to say is, there are a lot more things now that we have to worry about than just physically dying -- perhaps the most important thing to realize is that death itself isn't even strictly physical anymore.

For the longest time, I have always known that death is more of a continuum than an either/or state. Just like life and living is a continuum (popularized in the famous Nicki Minaj song ft. Drake "Cause everybody dies but not everybody lives). You can sort of die and not really die. Far end: physical death. In the middle, a person can die a more nuanced death... internal death, emotional death, character death. There's incremental stages to death.

Problems fall under this category. Thing like drug addiction, gambling addiction, sexual addiction, etc. These are things that actually hurt you on the inside. You're changed (or, at least, a part of you is changed -- see previous blog on "fractured selves").

Here comes the kicker: how you face these problems is not only a statement on how you handle the way you live -- it's also a statement on how you handle the way you die. And, as said in the aforementioned quote, it's important how you die. Why? Because, just as how people can imitate (out of inspiration, etc) the way you live, one could also look up to how the way you die.

PS: I'm tempted to consider the continuum of life/death as one scale on which one side is more alive and the other is more dead rather than two dimensions. But the idea that we can have fractured selves opens the door to the idea that one can have some selves more alive/dead than the other selves.

Summary: basically, now, staying alive is more than just an eat, breathe, and exercise thing.

Two blogs in one day?

Why not? I haven't written two blogs in one day in a long time.... perhaps never. But hey, I got a lot of free time today, so why not? It's enjoyable on a day off  (yeah I work on Saturdays).

Social media, data, and modeling (kind of essay-ish):
So we have 140 characters in Twitter. A status update on Facebook. A picture on Instagram. I write blogs on Blogspot. Here's the thing, I remember starting my blogspot as a way of chronicling my life as a cohesive unit. Kind of like a real journal. But I never realized this. Looking back on all of my blogs, sure, sometimes there was some semblance of a narrative. But for the most part, it's severely fractured. Which, if you didn't already know, is a very real modern thing. Disjointed events. Vignettes of lives. Our brains naturally try to configure a story that makes sense from all of our "updates". I have reason to think these conjectures aren't very accurate. Consider this: I can post a relatively happy tweet, but can actually be having the worst day of my life. You would never know. It's the stories we sell that create an artificial self. The real kicker is that it may not even be an artificial self that I'm creating by posting a happy tweet in a sad state;  I could still very well be happy that moment and still be living the worst day of my life. What I do is create a second-self. Not a lie, just not the whole truth. A disjointed, second self.

What's more, social media doesn't help that much, either. I'm forced to be brief -- it induces the fractures. It feeds into this modern, fractured way of living. Sure you can try to be cohesive. But it's so much easier to be brief (disguised as "simple"?). Oh I can post this now and explain later. I have to be real-time. Says the pressure to stay up to date. Says the pressure to boast, to show everyone I'm okay right now. Sooner or later, we start liking the convenience of not being a whole. Of course, people should be free to sell whatever self they want on social media. The irony is that sometimes we can't even recognize the self we sell. Until we have to pick up the pieces of ourselves and try to make sense of them. Realizing we can't make any sense of such a fractured mess. We're disjointed wholes, a lot of us are. I've become one, too. The trappings of modern life.

Again, not that any or all of this is bad, per-se. But it sure is confusing sometimes. And whatever story you feed yourself  about yourselves, that's the story that keeps you going. Again though, however, sooner or later, we all have to face ourselves.

In the moment

I heard it said once that "...in the moment, we have all we need to be happy...". It was a saint who said this, I believe. I can't remember who said it exactly and I wish I knew. It's an amazing thought, to think that in every moment, we have all we need to be happy. 

I'm going to try that thought out.
--- ---
I wonder what was happening when van Gogh painted The Starry Night. What made him go to that vista? Was he alone? Was he lonely? Was he thinking "Oh I have nothing to do today, thinking about another landscape painting". Did he think it'd be worth so much money in the future? Did it make him happy?  (All this assuming it took him one shot to paint it, which I don't think it did).

--- ---
So this one time at the tables, I was UTG with pocket aces. I had about 45 BB behind. I raised four times the big blind. Probably the best scenario for a short stack. Action folded to the button, who called. Villain in the SB reraised to 8 times the big blind. Hell. Yes. I 4-bet all in. Button, after thinking for like a minute throws his cards into the muck. SB, thinks... calls. He had me covered. We show our hands and go to the flop.

AA vs 99
Flop: 3 7 T rainbow
... okay, not bad.
Turn: Kh
... YES, now just had to fade the river.
...
...
River: 9


.... Wow. That's some Aristotelian catharsis for you.

And hilarity ensues

Lol, for some reason it seems like my blogs have been a lot on the downer side these days. Or at least for the last year. I'm not sure if I can extrapolate for its entirety, but I'm sure there's some discernible weaved thread that agrees.

"Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important". - C. S. Lewis

Often times I get bogged down in the details, sometimes the whole. A lot of emphasis these days is based in subtle things, for example: microaggressions. Well, if C.S. Lewis is right, which I think he is, and if Christianity is true, then it follows that every little thing that happens matters: microdecisions and microevents.

The Creator of the universe, then, His will unravels in everything, every little thing, that happens. And in the long run, it's for our good.

A couple of weeks ago, my laptop was stolen from me. It's made me really sad. A lot of poems in there, a lot of things really. I've had it for about two years....

Holding on for better times. Turning 25 in about two weeks!

Stewing in the Chaos

A big portion of scientific research depends on modeling.  Working on the periphery of academia, that's more than clear. The irony is that while much of my time has been filled with scientific quantitative modeling (I'm currently reading two texts on statistics and practicing a lot of Matlab programming) and financial modeling (modeling my own finances; I need more practice with this), I've neglected something which has always, up until this point, was the foundation, and often times was more important than, both my career and finances: spiritual and psychological modeling -- modeling my personal well-being.

Oftentimes it's easy for me to analyze someone else's life and find recurring "themes" (as I like to call them). Themes being his or her own loop of behavior in times of certain circumstances. It's a meta-analysis that's extremely interesting to me. It's essentially modeling.

A lot of people don't learn from their mistakes. A lot of people make the same mistakes over and over. Conversely, a lot of people consistently make good choices. 

I often wonder why a lot of people don't learn from their mistakes. For the most part, I think the root cause is lack of awareness of their repeated decisions. And that's why self-awareness is so important. That's why reflection is so important, in my opinion -- the ability to "deconstruct" oneself.  I admit, it's kind of scary to do. Most people don't like to think of themselves as in the wrong, so attempting to reconsider oneself is de-facto thinking something is wrong with oneself. Our natural tendency, our interior pride, is both our strength and our downfall.

Of course, I'm also stuck in my own sinister loops as well. They're hard to break. And for me, it's mostly always when I'm in neck deep in trouble is when I realize "Oh shit, I've done it again".  And the steeping process begins -- again.

However, there's a silver lining (I personally like to think there's always is a silver lining). In my own life, I've noticed that instances such as these, when I'm stewing in the chaos I've created (or that I'm afflicted with -- hey, I'm not always my own executioner), is when I'm most capable of realizing my situation and breaking free from these vicious cycles. It's like an anti-second-chance. Think of receiving a big break. This is the opposite of that, but still an opportunity to do better.

A part of me wants to react in this situation. To simply do whatever I can to get out of the stew as fast as possible. That means making less than sound decisions and taking desperate measures. Sure, these work out sometimes. But desperate measures, by definition, have a negative-expected value (I haven't done the math but experiences prove quite certain -- I'm realizing).

Rather, I'm forgetting that boiling in this mess is itself a good thing. I realize that last sentence sounds kind of morbid. Oh well, the situation is what it is, might as well call it what it is. The big question: why not let the consequences happen? Instead of running from them, reacting to them in nonsensical ways, embrace the consequences. Embrace the tragedy. Embrace the situation. Boil in your own stew of chaos. Let it transform you. Let it embed itself in your head and heart. It will eventually pass. Let it do what its supposed to do until then, which is to remind you that you never want to be put in this situation again. Lest to sound unfeeling, let me make clear that I do realize that not everyone puts themselves willingly into awful situations; this paragraph is explicitly only for those who sincerely, after deep reflection, acknowledge that mostly everything that happens to us is the result of one's actions in some way, shape, or form -- even if just a little detail is one's own fault, that's the action that's due for critique in proportion to the situation. Or, for the more radical existentialist take, even if it was never your fault at all, still, simmer in the mess. It happened for a reason (or, for the existentialists, make a reason and choice for never letting it happen again).

*I notice I interject a lot within my own train of thought. I try to keep interjections to a minimum, only using them to add some "umph" to the tone and readability. I'm aware seemingly off-tangent interjections are more the style of nihilists. I don't consider myself nihilist at all, or at least not in the traditional nihilist sense (lol at the oxymoron: traditional nihilist).*