Bored on the F train

I'm breaking up with you.

I've realized that I don't want to be in this dalmatianship. I know, I know, you've taken a lot of my shih tzu. But you've ripped tears in my heart, and if we stayed together my heart would only get terrier. And let's be honest -- you've gotten a bit husky. Worried I'll feel your loss, ah? Apsolutely not.

I mean, where was my emotional support this whole time? Since I run a chocolate factory, I make chocolate laboriously for 18 hours a day, but you never even offered a massage. We work in a stinky basement, not some golden lab in a new building, so you could be more sympathetic rather than continue to beagleagure me and lob collieflower at my head at dinner.

And you're always so pugnacious. I got so sick of your constant "shave your armpit" bullshit -- you know I prefer to only have one bald armpit at a time so the other one can keep me warm.

Not to mention that yesterday you got blood on my houndstooth coat. Which was from Prada.

So yeah, we're done. It's dober, man, so please don't text me anymore even if it's just to be corgial.

On the nobility of reading (or lack thereof)

I love to read -- I always have. It's my preferred brand of escapism. I'm able to get lost in fiction for hours at a time and live vicariously through the stories in a way that can't be matched through any other medium.

That said, the perception that reading is a step above all other forms of entertainment is hogwash. It's outdated and at odds with reality. Reading is not inherently educational in itself for the most part. And however much I tend to connect intellectually with other book nerds, I've come to terms with the fact that we are no smarter or better than anyone else (although I still suspect we are sexier).

For centuries, we've refused to let go of the idea that owning and reading books is a status symbol.

Back before the printing press was invented, even the middle class could barely write their own names, and so literacy was considered a badge of status. An ability to read, let alone a collection of books, was a sign of wealth and social standing, and, as is the nature of many status symbols, it was used to disenfranchise the lower classes. This persisted through emancipation and beyond. But for whatever reason, even after all these centuries have passed, all our free libraries have opened, and our current literacy rate hovers in the single digits, we still exalt reading as this noble, high-class activity. This can be seen by people attracted to pretention and grandiosity (you know the type) who pick up reading because it feels obligatory in order to be able to go to dinner parties and talk at you incessantly about Joyce and Dostoyevsky while downing red wine.

People who play video games are, in certain ways, learning more than people who prefer to read.

The key phrase here is "in certain ways" -- I'm not in any way discounting the knowledge one can gain from reading. I don't "get" video games nor have I ever had any desire to, so if anything I should be biased against them. However, I'm thinking about reflex times, strategic thinking, attention, and fine motor skills, all of which are heavily practiced by your average gamer. For example, I've noticed that people who've played a lot of first-person shooters tend to have lightning-fast reflexes, whether they're driving, playing foosball, or catching every wine glass I knock over. I know, I know -- correlation doesn't imply causality -- but I would guess that you don't get good at Counterstrike without spending hours upon hours (or years upon years) improving your reaction times.

Another example is RPGs in the context of strategic thinking. Yes, I've read The Prince and some WWII books, so I can spout off anecdotes about why certain military strategies worked or didn't, but they mainly just take up space in my head as static information. From what I know of RPGs, though, it's like playing chess: players spend hours trying out various strategies and refining them through trial and error, and by being active participants, their brains are constantly practicing foresight, tactical planning, logical inferences, etc.

All that said, there are still some pretty sweet perks to being a reader, especially as a kid. For better and worst:

Children who like to read can get away with murder.

This was never so much of a problem as it was the joy of my existence.

Background: I come from an overprotective family. How overprotective? I couldn't watch Rated R movies until I was 15. But when I stepped into a bookstore, there was no one to stop me. How many parents read the back of their kids' book covers to make sure their kid didn't stumble upon post-apocalyptic gay erotica? (And I totally did -- in my middle school library, believe it or not.) The library was the wild wild west, a land where all-seeing Mom did not roam (because she chose to assume that all reading is good reading).

When I was 9, I found a book called Go Ask Alice. I don't remember the exact plot, but I'm pretty sure it was about a homeless 13-year old girl that traded blowjobs for coke, prostituted herself for heroin money, and then committed suicide. In summary: quite the role model. 

And the best part -- I'd read Go Ask Alice and other such books right under my mother's nose. She was probably sitting five feet from me on an armchair during the pivotal chapters where Alice is snorting lines off her dealer's butt or getting a coat hanger abortion or whatnot. Which made me feel like a huge badass at the time.

Modern Anxiety

If the human body ever had an instruction manual, it certainly did not anticipate the modern New Yorker. Working 60-hour weeks, being bombarded with information overload on steroids, and generally living an overwhelming, expensive, fast-paced life where they're always running late. No pressure. Naturally, these people befriend each other, date each other, and take out their ever-mounting stress on one another. So I'm not surprised that most people I know have an unnaturally high amount of anxiety.

When natural selection was still relevant, our fight-or-flight response evolved so that in the rare case that you were faced with a threat to your life, such as a bear, your adrenaline would kick in and hopefully preclude you from doing something terribly dumb, like getting yourself killed. However, you did not spend the majority of your time fighting for your life; rather, you spent most of your waking hours picking berries, seeking out rodents for dinner, sitting around fires, and chillin' in a cave with nothing to do. Rinse and repeat.

Now I don't know about you, but I find that when work is extraordinarily stressful -- which is most days -- the prospect of being mauled by a grizzly seems rather comforting in comparison. When the subway is delayed, my panic is akin to that of a caveman running from hyenas. Every time I look at my unread email count, it's like a dingo ate my baby.

Just like overdosing on Advil screws up your intestines, overdosing on adrenaline (which is released by stress and anxiety) screws up our nerves, but taking on this much stress is such an ingrained part of our lives, and frankly, many of us are addicted to it. Guilty as charged. Even though these lifestyles are increasingly becoming the norm -- if they aren't already -- this doesn't mean they are sustainable for most people. After all, as many as 18% of Americans suffer from some form of clinical (read: SERIOUS) anxiety disorder. Assuming that New Yorkers don't skew higher than the average Joe when it comes to anxiety -- which I highly doubt -- that's 1 out of 5 people that you know and I know. 

But I understand why people are embarrassed to talk about it. The people who are most affected are often ambitious, perfectionistic, proud, Type A. The kind of people who choose to take on more stress than their nervous system is biologically wired to handle. The type of people who would never talk about it, because we're neurotic about everything including our pride, our egos, and the standards we set for ourselves.

Anyway, the entire reason I started writing this post is to debunk a damaging myth about stress and anxiety that makes people ashamed to talk about it, or address it in their own lives: the perception that "it's all in your head." That you should be able to just snap out of it, that it won't get worse over time if you feel that you have control over your thoughts. That anxiety is just a temporary inability to get your head straight or to keep your emotions in check.

Here's what you should know: unchecked anxiety causes damage to your parasympathetic nervous system, and a damaged parasympathetic nervous system only leads to increased anxiety (and in extreme cases, panic attacks and the like).

Even though clinical anxiety is classified as "mental illnesses," the term is misleading, as the true culprit of severe anxiety is often your nervous system. People with slight-to-moderate anxiety can cope or make lifestyle changes that may help -- as your brain can certainly affect your nervous system's behavior to an extent -- but in moderate-to-severe anxiety, what we perceive as cowardice, mental weakness, etc. is actually malfunction on the part of your nervous system that your brain no longer has control over, often because there's been permanent damage or because it was just genetically coded that way. Oftentimes, panic attacks happen because your autonomic nervous system's baseline level of anxiety gets higher and higher until your parasympathetic nervous system, which is supposed to calm you down, simply can't handle the load anymore and goes haywire. (I guess that makes anxiety meds the biological equivalent of load balancers). Yes, the actual root of the cause might be years of anxious thinking, which is indeed "in your head" -- but the same way anxiety can give someone an ulcer or aggravate heart disease, it can also just mess up your nervous system, which is unlike an appendix in that it happens to be one of the organs you need to survive.

I'm not saying that everyone should get all hippie-dippie and share their stress levels with each other. But as people living these lifestyles, we should be more aware of the unnatural stress we put on our bodies and make sure none of our friends, loved ones, or ourselves reach the point of no return. Several years ago, I almost did.

And, um, apologies in advance for any increased anxiety that anxious people might experience after reading this blog post because they've become more anxious about their anxiety. 

EDIT: Found a book that speaks to all this and far more: http://www.amazon.com/My-Age-Anxiety-Dread-Search/dp/0307269876

Crime and Punishment

I read a headline the other day about a drunk driver being convicted for murder and it got me thinking about the underlying factors prosecutors use in charging and sentencing criminals.

One thing that's strange about the justice system in general is that you're punished for results, not actions. You can beat someone on the head with a baseball bat and leave them for dead, but whether they happen to survive or not decides whether you serve a longer or shorter sentence (e.g. x years for murder vs. y years for attempted murder). If there is sufficient evidence of one's intention, shouldn't they be convicted based on the physical actions they took and what their goal was? It seems so arbitrary to say "Okay, Person A shot this guy in the head but they survived so s/he'll serve 10 years, but Person B shot someone in the head and killed them so s/he'll serve 30 years." At that point, we're tacking on years to a sentence just because Person B happened to have better aim. In such a case, I think that they both should serve time for murder because that's what they intended.

That being said, sentencing based on intention is by no means the right way to do things universally. For example, say Person A and Person B both got into their respective vehicles when they were totally shitfaced and each of them hit another car driving equally fast. When Person A hit the car, which was a big SUV, it flipped over but only caused minor injuries. When Person B hit the car, which was a convertible, it flipped over and killed four people. Although both of them acted equally irresponsibly, there was no intention to kill by either party -- Person B gets hit with a murder charge pretty much due to the make and model of the car they hit. From here you could form one of two opinions if you were working with the principle of equal actions leading to equal punishments: They should both receive a heavy punishment, since they placed themselves in situations that have a relatively high probability of resulting in someone's death, or they should both receive light sentences since neither of them intended to kill. Neither of those two options sound quite right, do they?

Now, most people would immediately say that if they were a family member of one of the people who were killed, they would want "justice." And understandably so! But is that a good enough reason to put someone away for 20 years because they made a dumb decision without bad intentions, or a good enough reason to not charge someone with murder because their aim was a little off? Maybe it is good enough reason. Maybe our justice system is in fact fair because even though it's not always based off the actions involved in any particular crime, it is based proportionally on the estimated amount of suffering the crime inflicts on the victim's loved ones? Although that seems to be only a single factor, it does make sense as a way to gauge severity of violent crimes, for example murder vs. attempted murder. I'm not saying I necessarily agree it's the right way or the best way to sentence people, but it's the only way for me to make sense of our justice system as it is currently.

Addendum: What about cases in which people who were killed broke the law too by behaving recklessly? For example, if no one was wearing seatbelts in the car Person B hit when s/he was drunk, and experts can prove they would
 have likely only had minor injuries otherwise, is it right to still sentence Person B the same way? I'm not sure myself.

Hello World!

I caved in. I created a blog just so talflanchraych.com would finally have something pretty to redirect to. However, when you blow $50 on a premium tumblr theme, you want to make sure that everything you write about is life changing, overly verbose, and -- if you're in my industry -- includes some profound quote from Paul Graham or Guy Kawasaki. Until I can master that, I will post according to whimsy.

I went through a blog I wrote in college earlier today to remember what used to inspire me to write, only to find that my muses at the time were mainly craigslist, dirty wars, dirty hippies, and dirty laundry. Here is one excerpt:

There are a few other gems from ye olde college blog that are appropriate enough to post -- and a few others which will need to be censored beforehand. I'll put them up another time.