Thoughtfully inked up

I feel I may be one of the last people of my generation who doesn’t like tattoos (or wild piercings). I got one of each when I was 18, but I started disliking both after only three years. The piercing came out and closed up, and thankfully the tattoo is small and in a place people rarely see.

I have two reasons for disliking tattoos—one aesthetic and the other intellectual. I can explain the aesthetic reason pretty simply: I don’t like the way tattoos look. I think the human body looks pretty nice the way it is, and tattoos just muck it up. Small body modifications like the standard earlobe piercing don’t bother me, because they just frame the face, which the eye is drawn to anyway. But a tattoo on the arm, leg, chest, or wherever else draws the eye in the same way a scar does. It just makes for inelegant design, like slapping stickers on a Ferrari.

My intellectual reason for disliking tattoos is more complex, probably because people come up with complex ways of intellectualizing their tattoos. Once in a while you might find someone who admits their tattoos are purely for aesthetics, saying something like “They just look cool.” I would disagree, but the discussion would end there. 

Hardly anyone says this, though. Most people say their tattoos represent something. I’ve heard girls say, “I got a bird because it represents freedom to me,” or “I got a butterfly because it symbolizes change.” Not everyone has explanations this trite, but the explanations still follow the same template: “I got x because it means y.”

When I was 18 I would have agreed with this thinking. Sure, if something means something to you, why not get it stamped on your body? Now that thinking seems bafflingly odd. If some object or image carries meaning for you, wouldn’t it be far more powerful to create something based around that object or image? If birds represent freedom to you, why not paint one, sculpt one, photograph one, or write a poem about one? Having done one of those things, you probably will have expressed your feelings about birds more clearly, and you will have done it in a way that can be shared with more people.

Many would protest that a tattoo is art. That may be true, but it’s the art of the tattoo artist, not the person wearing it. Few people have any hand in the design of their tattoos, and even those who do are still leaving the final creation of it to someone else. If a tattoo is art, it’s art commissioned to a stranger. Surely the image has lost some of its meaning by the wearer being so far removed from it.

But there’s nothing wrong with decoration, right? A painting by someone else can be meaningful enough to you that you choose to hang it in your living room. But there’s something different going on with tattoos. The painting in the living room is pretty easy to look away from. Tattoos—even artistic ones, even small ones—are conspicuous, mainly because of our innate visual interest in other human beings. Having an artistic tattoo is sort of like walking around with the Mona Lisa screen-printed on a t-shirt. It looks like an advertisement for one’s taste in art.

I think that’s basically what tattoos are—advertisements. They’re more about vanity and group acceptance than they are about self expression. The hope is that someone will see it and think the wearer cool, smart, sophisticated, deep, passionate, etc. Even those  who get tattoos in very private places are still hoping some special boy or girl will see it one day and think those things. 

Creative works (including blogs, heh heh) definitely have an element of vanity to them as well, but their is far more effort involved in making them than their is in getting a tattoo. Also, significantly, a blog or a painting typically isn’t thrust in the faces of friends, lovers, and random people on the street. If I wore a t-shirt that said “thepresenthistory.blogspot.com,” people would think me a pompous ass, full of pretentious notions of myself as “a writer.” But if I got a quill and inkpot tattooed on the inside of my forearm, then I would be an intellectual.

  

Demographically uncooperative

As I grabbed some groceries at my local food co-op this evening, I was struck by something printed on the side of the paper bag I was carrying. It was a quote from Peter Shumlin, who evidently is the Governor of Vermont and also a member of a food co-op in that state. Here’s what he said:

“The great thing about the co-op is that you see people from all walks of life coming together. It’s really a community center. It’s a community resource.”

It’s a nice sentiment that’s probably shared by many co-op shoppers and administrators, but I doubt there’s much truth in it. My guess is that the average food co-op draws from a significantly narrower demographic than the average supermarket.

Here’s a profile of the average co-op shopper: middle-class white with some college education. It only took seven words. There are exceptions to the profile, sure, but step into any co-op in the country and you probably have a pretty good idea of who you’re going to see. You might see a private divorce attorney standing in line behind a suburban hippie, but the real outsiders in our culture (the natives on the reservation, for instance) would see in these two people more similarities than differences. 

One thing that’s certain is that co-ops do not bring in people from all (or even most) walks of life. This isn’t because of a discriminatory mandate they’ve made. It’s just inherent in their business. Co-ops sell healthy, sustainable foods (or at least foods that are marketed as such), and they slap a higher price tag on them. Co-op shoppers pay the higher price because the foods appeal to one of three senses: their sense of taste, their sense of health, or their sense of piety. In many shoppers it’s probably a mixture of all three.

So a co-op shopper is someone who (a) believes tasty/healthy/sustainable food to be important and (b) has the money to pay for it. These criteria eliminate a huge proportion of the population. Only a handful of people care about preparing healthy and delicious foods from scratch. Supermarkets offer low prices. Everyone likes those. 

Stroll through a large supermarket and you’re likely to find a much more diverse collection of people than at a co-op. You might see the attorney and the hippie again, but you’ll also see more students, more minorities, more families, and more old people. You might also see people from the margins who’ve just scrounged up enough money to grab a beer. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that at the co-op.

Try to explain to a supermarket shopper the appeal of a co-op, and you’ll probably draw a blank stare. They’ve already found what they want. The supermarket meets their needs and wants (ill-considered though the latter may sometimes be), and in that sense it’s as much a community resource as any other place. 

I read something recently in my co-op newsletter about the Board of Directors being very keen on finding ways to “reach out to minorities.” I found the statement embarrassing in its condescension (vestiges of college diversity programs) and laughable in its business sense. If, statistically speaking, minorities have below the average income, then the best way to “reach out” to them is to give them what they want: inexpensive goods. Of course, doing that would require a co-op to change its business model to be more like that of—well, a supermarket. 

Co-ops exploit a niche of educated, health-conscious, halfway-affluent people. They shouldn’t feel the need to lie about it or make guilty announcements of their efforts to change it. Co-ops serve their customers admirably, and most of those who don’t shop at the co-op are unlikely ever to be convinced. For a certain part of the community, nutritious and environmentally friendly food has a strong appeal. But for a much larger part of the community, money appeals more. 

Unlocking history

History ranks right up there with economics on the list of subjects most people are happiest to have permanently dispensed with upon graduating college. History classes seem like nothing more than a dismal cataloguing. I sure felt that way in school. Santayana’s maxim was a bad joke. What historical mistakes were there to learn from? All we had were names and dates.

It’s a shame so many people believe history ends with what gets taught in school. Students aren’t exactly wrong for thinking history boring. School history is boring. I doubt there’s any way they can make it interesting.

I became enthusiastic about history accidentally. My dad knew I like Russian novels, so he suggested I read Robert Massie’s biography of Peter the Great. When I finally picked it up, it fascinated me and led to all sorts of questions. The books I picked up to answer those questions led to other questions. And so forth.

Now the school subject that bored me more than any other is all I want to read about. I’ve been at it for a while, and there’s no end in sight. My reading list is long, and I can’t imagine ever being without new questions that I need answered.

So how is it that my interests should change so dramatically in so little time? If history went from a pain to a passion in only five months after graduation, that suggests the fault lay with the school rather than the student.

The problem is that schools take history and try to enforce too much of a structure on it. You sign up for a class that’s going to cover European history from 1750 to 1900. They cut the subject into discrete (and arbitrary) units, then give them to you piece by piece. I doubt this is the best way to learn anything, and I’m certain it’s not the best way to learn history.

Proper history isn’t a cataloguing of events, but rather a pulling of threads. Interesting details are tugged at until some relevant truth is discovered. To do this, you need time and freedom—two things school rarely allows you. 

You need time to find interesting details and the freedom to follow them wherever you see them leading. The broad scope of events is usually too abstract to be of much interest. In school you learn that Peter the Great founded St. Petersburg and began modernizing Russia. Big deal. But did you know that after the Streltsy revolt he personally oversaw the torture and execution of thousands of men formerly loyal to the tsar and even got up in their faces screaming “Confess!” ?

Suddenly 17th-century Russia seems like a place worth reading about. The details bring it to life. But schools can’t allow the time for learning details about one ruler in one country. In the interest of being balanced and unbiased, they try to present everything. The result is that they teach almost nothing. Piquant details are what excite us and stick with us, and we get very few of them in classrooms.

The freedom to follow your own interests is an even more important part of learning history. In a history class, the instructor has already decided what will be taught—has decided, in short, what you need to know. But in most cases it’s the curious student who knows best what he needs next.

The Russian Revolution and the Weimar Republic may have followed World War I, but that doesn’t mean you necessarily need to read about those things directly following your study of the War. Maybe what you really need to read is a biography of Jack Fisher. Or maybe what would really strike your fancy is learning about Japan’s post-war acquisitions in the Central Pacific. It may well be that something totally outside the scope of your class is what would best help you personally understand the things you just studied.

Trying to conform historical study to linear structures of geography and chronology is silly and unnatural. No one sits around remembering things in chronological order. I think about the trip I made to DC when I was 13, then I remember my high-school friend’s story about riding the DC subway when he was five, then I remember my first plane ride when I was six. Memory isn’t a line, but a web.

So too is a web the only sensible model for learning history. Say you just finished reading something interesting about the Russian Revolution. Maybe you’re less interested in learning what happens next in Russia than you are in learning about revolutions in general. You now read about the French Revolution, the American Revolution, the Revolutions of 1848, the Indian independence movement. By not following a carefully prescribed chronological path, you’re certainly skipping over things. But by following your genuine enthusiasm, you’re going to retain more of what you read and be the wiser for it.

I can’t imagine any school that would allow such truly independent study. In fact, with study that independent, the need for the school would cease to exist. A library would be better. If instead of saying to kids, “Here’s what happened in 1776,” we said to them, “Find one history or biography that sounds interesting and then follow up on the questions it raises,” we’d probably end up with far more historically literate people. And that literacy would give us more perspective as a society. 

People learn the most when they teach themselves. I think all we need to do to get kids interested in history is help them find one historical work (from any time and any place) that truly excites them. If they have any intellectual curiosity, they’re bound to seek other good books to put the first one in context. Eventually the past will fall into place. The route they take may be circuitous, but the web they build should in the end be tight enough to catch the important stuff.

Sinfully uncreative

Now that I’ve had this stupid little blog going for a whole month and written something for it more days than I haven’t, I wonder why I didn’t start it earlier. It’s fun, and it’s easy. All I have to do is write down the things I talk to myself about all day anyway. And as anyone who writes already knows, the process itself produces more ideas. Every one of my posts so far has come out longer than I initially imagined it would be. Once I begin saying things, I find I have more to say. 

In the past thirty days I’ve done more creating than I had done in the previous three years. That’s not so much a statement of the achievement of the past month as it is a statement of the tragedy of the time preceding it. 

Most of us spend hardly any time being independently creative. The things we create for school typically consist of phony ideas crammed into structures determined by others. The things we create for work (if anything) typically reflect no ideas at all and adhere to structures even more rigid and imposed. And in both cases, it’s someone else (the prof or the boss) initiating the project.

I now feel mildly ashamed for having spent so much time creating nothing of lasting and unique value. Sure, I’ve spent plenty of time creating valuable things like good meals or my physical fitness (exercise is a type of creativity), but these things are transitory and difficult to share with many people. There are few tangible items from my first 25 years that I can point to as my own.

For a long time I thought about doing more writing, starting a blog, doing something other than just going to work everyday and fulfilling the few personal responsibilities necessary to maintain my self-respect. But I always made some kind of excuse. I would say I had no time (untrue), that I had no ideas (How could I know that until I tried playing with them?), or that I would have a tiny or nonexistent audience (Maybe so at first, but who cares?).

Now I think there’s no excuse for any self-proclaimed intellectual not to have a blog. You’re a thoughtful and articulate person, right? Then why aren’t you writing and sharing it?

The internet would be a dream come true for any struggling writers of previous centuries. It’s an instantaneous and free vanity press. At the click of a button, your ideas are available to an audience of—potentially—the entire world. It’s a way to practice your craft at almost no risk. Anyone with a genuine love of writing would take advantage of that in a heartbeat.

Lest I sound grandiose, I should point out there are only about four people who currently read this blog of mine. I lack either the confidence or the shamelessness (sometimes the same thing) to promote myself very heavily, so my audience remains small. But still, the opportunity for me to reach more readers is available should I choose to take it. 

In university English programs, you hear a lot of talk about being a writer. Kids say they want to write novels or that they want to enroll in an MFA program and “learn to be a writer.” I was always skeptical of these kids, and now even more so. The first question I would ask any undergrad who says he wants to write is “Do you have a blog that you post on regularly and at length?” If not, why not? Blogging is writing. If you’re not willing to write about difficult questions you haven’t totally answered, for no pay, for no real recognition, and on a consistent basis, writing probably isn’t your thing.

Most of the college kids with authorial ambitions just like the idea of proudly holding up a well-received hardcover book with their name on it. But to succeed at it, I think you have to like the mundane and unglamorous part of just putting words on a page. I’m not saying I will succeed at it. I’m only saying that great novelists and essayists have probably all started small, written what came to them naturally, and taken whatever audiences and publishing opportunities they could get. 

Seizing opportunities and practicing are usually the only ways to get good at something.  Excluding a few extreme outliers, no one begins any career as a titan. Creating daily is how they get there.

Images of forgotten selves

My mother gave my family a very thoughtful and loving Christmas gift this year. She took our old home movies on Betamax tapes and had them transferred to DVD. It ain’t cheap. She and my dad started recording these movies on Christmas Eve 1986 (the night they were given the camera), only five weeks into my life. Most of these old movies hadn’t been watched by anyone in probably over 10 years, when we finally got rid of our Beta player.

We spent some time as a family watching these DVDs over the past few days. They were amusing but sort of baffling. My brother is barely talking, and I’m incapable of holding up my own head. At one point while watching this, my dad sort of shook his head in wonder and said to my brother and me, “It must be amazing to see this kind of footage and know that it’s you.”

The old man was born in 1946, so of course he’s never had that experience. The only records of his infancy are some fairly grainy black and white prints. I understood what he was getting at, but in truth I was ambivalent about the amazingness of seeing the infant Dan being bathed, being fed, etc. It was amazing to see my parents 25 years younger and to see what they had to do to raise their children, but I never had any strong feeling that I was looking at me. 

The thing about infants is that they’re essentially the same. One may be fussier than another and one may be smilier, but they haven’t developed clearly identifiable personalities. They have no mannerisms, their faces are less distinct than adults’, they communicate only the most basic needs through the most basic means. Imagine I had never seen a baby photo or baby video of myself. If you showed me at age 25 a video of me at age five weeks, would I be able—independently—to identify the baby as myself? Of course not. 

I feel no connection at all to that helpless little larva with squinty eyes. Why would I? Some hyper-geniuses claim to remember parts of infancy, but I sure don’t. I doubt that I would be able to identify myself at age one, either—presuming, again, I had no prior knowledge of my childhood appearance nor any prompting from family. And I might not be able to do it even at age two—or later. When you think about it, it’s really hard to say. If I sat down and watched home movies of myself from birth to age five—and we’ll just imagine they’re some kind of clinical home movies in which my family members don’t appear and my name isn’t said—I would probably come across something that I remembered independent of the movie. At that point I would be able to connect the image with the past experience and realize who I was looking at.

Until that point, though, the kid in the pictures would be a stranger. How could it be otherwise? Do you remember what your hair looked like when you were three or what your voice sounded like when you were four? You might tell yourself you do, but that’s only because you’ve been regularly looking at photos and watching videos of yourself for years. 

I have few distinct memories from the first five years of my life. I think this is probably true for most people. I have many strong impressions—remnants of emotions—from that time, but only a handful of memories of specific incidents. That makes it pretty tough to match up a photo or a video of early childhood with a genuine memory. Very rarely am I able to look at an old photo and say, “Yes, I remember this exact moment.” I can say things like, “Oh, this is from our trip to the Oregon Coast when I was six,” but again, I can only say this because I’ve been looking at those photos forever. 

People born in the second half of the twentieth century and later remember their lives in a way profoundly different from that of any human beings previously. We are inundated with images of ourselves. Every time I visit my folks, I walk through the hall where we have the portrait of me at three months, the family portrait where I’m one, the snapshot of me at age six holding my pet rat, and many others. I’ve seen all of these literally thousands of times, and I’d guess my experience is typical. The result of seeing these pictures over and over is that we have mental images of our past with no actual memories underneath to them. I have a picture of my family’s life in 1988. But do I remember it? No.

The conventional wisdom is that photos evoke memories. I don’t think that’s true. I think people use photos to build memories. The photo of me standing next to Yaquina Head Lighthouse doesn’t evoke a memory. It is the memory. I tell myself I remember it, because I’m holding incontrovertible proof that it took place. Clearly the photo knows more than I do.

I’m not sure it’s necessarily a bad thing that we’ve fabricated memories this way. But it does probably mean we don’t know ourselves quite as well as we think we do. 

Hello to a now-distant friend

Visiting my parents for the holidays means being reintroduced to something I’ve been without for a long time: TV. It’s always a bit of a rude shock—similar, I imagine, to the way it would feel riding a crowded subway after several months living in a quiet lake cabin. Every time I get a fresh dose of TV, it seems louder, brighter, faster, more crass than it did the last time.

Getting off TV happened more or less accidentally for me. I brought an old TV with me to my dorm room when I first moved away in 2005. In the first month of college, I wasn’t watching much of it, because I was busy meeting people and getting to know my new town. Then the old TV up and broke around the end of October, so I wasn’t watching any of it. I couldn’t justify the expense of a new TV then or for the remainder of my time in college. By the time I was in a financial position to do a little spending, I had long beforehand realized how much better my life was without a TV in it. 

Now when I happen to be around it, I find it extremely disruptive. I can’t think, I feel agitated, my sense of the progression of the day gets turned on its head. Funny that I should be so disturbed by something that 10 years ago felt as natural as breathing.

The other day I read that for a few years now, the average American home has had more TVs in it than people. We have 2.86 television sets to 2.5 people. My parents contribute to that absurd statistic. Back in the day, we had four TVs (five if you count the old one in a box that I took to college) and four people. I don’t think anyone ever planned to have enough TVs for each of us to sit in blissful solitude while watching our own preferred programming, but it just kind of happened that way over the years. In 2005 and 2006, my folks got rid of two people—but none of the TVs. Now in this house cable boxes outnumber human beings two to one. 

I’m fortunate at least that my parents are not the type who turn the TV on first thing in the morning and leave it blaring until bedtime. They read, work on projects around the house and in the yard, go on walks, and participate in plenty of creative and thoughtful activities. But from late afternoon through evening, you can bet there will be at least one TV going, and sometimes without anyone even really watching it. It’s at that point that I begin thinking about where in the house I might find some refuge.

Even though I seriously dislike the way TV makes me feel, there’s no denying its magnetism. Last night I was washing the dishes while my dad watched football on his monstrous big screen in the room adjoining the kitchen. I don’t care for football in general, and I especially don’t care for watching it on TV, but I still found myself pausing in my work with soapy hands at my side to gawk at the Colts making a comeback in the last two minutes. When it’s right there in front of me, I can’t help getting sucked in.

It’s almost impossible to keep your eyes off a lit-up TV screen. That’s where the movement and the voice of the room are. The screen seems like the place to be. 

I don’t miss it at all when I’m in my own place, but when it’s in my face and instantly available, I have to make conscious efforts to get the hell away from it and do the things that matter to me. If it hadn’t been for the TV noise filling the house last night, I probably would have written something for this blog. As it happened, I felt intellectually distracted all night, even when I retreated to a quiet room. The TV  had blasted the ideas right out of me. Only now—after a good night’s sleep and in the morning before the TVs come on—do I have the right flow to express myself. 

I can’t really fault people like my parents who retain the habit I kicked so long ago. They live fine lives, and I know it’s hard to see how you might get more out of life by getting rid of something. But I’m grateful that old TV of mine broke so I could learn a bit about living without.

Pack your bags, prepare for departure

Tomorrow morning I’m heading across the state to my parents’ house for five nights. The process of packing this evening took a grand total of about 30 minutes. That’s not a newsworthy item in itself, but it’s funny considering what a big deal capital-p Packing was throughout my childhood. Before any trip, my mother would hound my brother and me about packing up, getting packed, making sure we packed everything. I doubt she was atypical among mothers in this regard.

When I was really little, I basically fell into thinking that way, imagining that packing was a critical and time-consuming chore. But as I got older, and especially after I started backpacking frequently in my pre- and early teens, I realized how little time it actually took. All you had to do was know what you need, not need much, and focus briefly on cramming it into a bag. My brother and I would rarely even think about packing—no matter how long the trip—until about 8:00 the night before we left. We’d each knock it out in about an hour, and I can’t recall any time our procrastination or haste created any serious problems.

Some people never really learn this. They imagine travel, especially foreign travel, requires complex preparations and checklists. It’s sad, because it frequently limits people in where they go and what they do. I know some older people—my parents spring immediately to mind—who say they really want to travel abroad, but who constantly shy away from it because it seems like such a project just to put the stuff together. It’s easier to simply defer it until later.

The truth is you need almost nothing to travel. After clothes and a handful of hygiene items, what is there? Unless you’re going to the Amazon, Himalaya, or Sahara, the less planning you do is probably the better. Just grab what you would for a weekend trip to a friend’s house two hours away, then multiply that by about three.

You’re never going to do much interesting travel if you’re not low-maintenance. Sometimes the must-pack-everything people actually end up making trips happen, but that can be sadder than when they talk themselves into staying at home. In backpacker ghettos the world over, you often see people carrying not only an enormous overnight backpack stuffed to bursting, but also on their chests an equally stuffed daypack. I call these people sandwich-packers, and I have to think theirs is one of the most miserable plights on Earth.

Hanging out in the living room of a hostel in Sydney, I listened to two Canadian girls chat with some other travelers about how they wanted to spend a few nights in Bondi before leaving the Sydney area. I had seen these girls arrive, and they had brought mountains of stuff. Getting out to Bondi meant either taking a cab (unthinkable with Sydney’s prices) or taking public transportation, which would involve a couple train transfers and a fair amount of walking. “It would be nice to go out there,” one of the girls said, “but, I mean, we can’t take all our shit out there for just a few nights.”

What a tragedy, I thought. They had come to the other side of the planet, and they were going to spend their months-long trip only going to places that had the utmost in convenient travel infrastructure. And they weren’t just being wimps. I wouldn’t have wanted to haul all their shit out to Bondi either. I don’t know how their travels ended up, but I do know that only about a week later I hopped on a plane to Kuala Lumpur and spent four months getting around on motorbike taxis and tin-can provincial buses where you store your luggage between your knees and schoolchildren ride on the roof. I felt justified in having only my tiny little 10 kg bag.

If you travel minimally, you’re probably not going to look or smell very glamorous at any point in your trip. But there’s plenty of time for that when you get back home. You defeat the purpose of travel if you don’t have the freedom to move. Packing carelessly is one of the best things you can do for yourself.