pantsfarm

In the process of reading a few blogs of people I don’t know, I’ve come across more than one instance of people writing friend inventories. A couple things I noticed in the course of all this reading about other people’s lives:

1. The kind of person who does this sort of thing seems to usually be a person with few friends.
2. Definitions of what a “friend” is vary a lot.

Depending a lot on how I decide to answer #2 I either fall into our out of the category of people with few friends and presumably having that as a reason to be bummed.

When I drop the phrase “friend inventory” into Google, the first result I get is some career-oriented blog which puts forward the following conditions for close friends:

• You have been friends with the person when you were not professionally involved with the person.
• The person knows the part of yourself you dislike the most.
• The person returns your calls in 48 hours.

Other conditions for friendship that get tossed around things like

1. somebody I’d tell my secrets to (and vice versa)
2. somebody who I could count on to get my back
3. somebody I’d be comfortable calling up and asking for them to float me a grand
4. somebody I’d call if I needed a lift to the hospital
5. somebody I talk to frequently and regularly for hours
6. somebody who’s wedding I’d attend or would invite to my own
7. somebody who I would ask if I needed a place to crash

I’m not sure what metric I will use when considering who I consider my friends these days though. I do however automatically exclude family from this list. Certainly there’s a bunch of family members who would pass easily these various arbitrary requirements

Starting with the 3 given conditions for “close” friends, I don’t think I would fare so well. I’m not sure what anybody would say if I asked them what they thought I most disliked about myself but I’m pretty sure that if anybody could get it right, it’d be be a lucky guess. I’m not even sure how I would answer that about myself and I’m not the kind of person who has really talked so much about my insecurities to anybody. I’m sure I’ll have slipped some small comment in while talking to many different friends but probably not the same tidbit to everybody. It’s good to tell people things, I just spread it out over lots of different people.

On the other hand, a great many of the people I know will get back to me in under 48 hours and I’ve never been very good at making friends through work. I think the latter part has a lot to do with the fact that all my real jobs have been in foreign countries where I am in the tiny minority of foreigner, native English speakers.

As for the other conditions, some of them seem much more applicable to me than others. The first, for example, doesn’t seem as relevant because I don’t feel as though I share that many secrets. That’s not to say there aren’t thing I share with some people and not with others, but… well, maybe I do have secrets. I feel like the secrets I do share are in some sense governed by which sphere of my life I know a person from. It’s not that it’s a secret that I try to keep, so much as it is some shared knowledge that I share only because of how or when I met that person and so it rarely if ever comes out anywhere else.

Enough consideration of conditions of friendship, I want to get to inventorying. I’m going to go through this from memory and chronologically. [Read more →]

These days I feel like I could easily sit down every day for a week or two and write 500 words about things I don’t like or that make me angry. Sometimes I do. Maybe I should try and channel that into something productive like NaNoWriMo.

I’ve just now finished reading Michael Pollan’s recently published piece in the New York Times Magazine titled Farmer in Chief.

While I was reading it, I had a brief moment where I was gripped with a visceral fear. I do not often find myself dreading the future as I did just now. I’m not really sure what caused it, maybe it was just a vague and unspecified fear of change, fear of an unknown future in which maybe I’m going to live through food riots in my time.

I don’t know, I’m overreacting and now that I’m considering it in retrospect I feel like instead of dread I kind of want to figure out how to get some land to my name in the middle of America and then how to make it productive.

I was talking to one of my roommates earlier this week and she was saying how she had such a terrible day or something. I don’t remember the exact details however at the time I thought she was maybe complaining a lot and somehow I ended up making the statement “but you have so much to be grateful for!”

After that, the tone of the conversation shifted a bit as I tried to explain what I meant, and I remembered how a while ago, in some book I was reading, I read about the idea of a gratitude journal. The basic idea is every day, you write down three or five or however many things (pretty much totally arbitrary) that you are grateful for. This could be something like “nice weather today” or it could be “the test came back clean!” or whatever. Big or small, it doesn’t matter, it’s just to get into the habit of thinking about and writing down the good things that are going on.

The search results linked above do give me the impression that the entire idea has taken much stronger root among a more new-agey crowd with whom I do not really identify so well. However, back when I first moved to China, I did keep one for a while (checking the dates, it appears to be from November 06 through the middle of January 07). I can’t say for sure if it did have a profound effect on my sense of well being but I do think it was a positive exercise.

I think the main thing about the idea that resonates for me is the notion that I don’t usually stop to notice when things go well, only when they are going crappy. By stopping and actually identifying things that are good, it fosters this much stronger sense of awareness of the things that are not bad which in turns leads to a different, more positive, perspective on things.

Anyhow, at the end of the whole conversation and explaining this, I suggested she give it a try for a couple weeks, so when that’s done, I’ll ask her what she thought.

Cavendish Banana

Australia - The Cavendish Banana, 57, Australia, died October 12, 2011. The last commercially viable Cavendish plantation succumbed to Panama disease race 4, surrounded by its offspring, after a valiant many-years and global struggle with the disease. Services will not be held worldwide at 10:30 AM GMT October 15 with representatives from United Fruit and Standard Fruit (Chiquita and Dole respectively) presiding.

The Cavendish was born in the early 1950s after the Cavendish’s predecessor, the Gros Michel, succumbed to Panama disease race 1. It was chosen as the successor to Gros Michel due to good performance in transportability, shelf life, ability to grow in Gros Michel’s old plantations, and a variety of other factors. Guided by the strong hands of Chiquita and Dole, the Cavendish ascended to global acceptance and the throne passed easily to this young, supposedly disease-proof strain.

Originally hailing from South-East Asia in regions of China and Vietnam, the Cavendish has been successfully raised in tropical locales all around the world. Bananas remain a popular choice for subsistence farmers due to the lack of need for replanting coupled with consistent fruit yields through many seasons.

The Cavendish was preceded in commercial death by the Gros Michel, and is survived by a number of new hybrid and more-resistant cultivars, such as the Goldfinger.

I was reading about bananas, in the assorted links below and I thought it might be interesting if there were an obituary for the Cavendish, which is evidently in some danger of not being so cheaply available the world over. Of course, an obituary for the world’s favorite fruit would probably need to be taken on by a better writer than myself, as this would be entirely too little to do it justice. I’d nominate Dan Koeppel, author of Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World.

1. Yes, We Will Have No Bananas - Op-Ed - NYTimes
2. Can This Fruit Be Saved? - Popular Science
3. Cavendish banana - Wikipedia
4. Gros Michel banana - Wikipedia
5. Banana - Wikipedia

Last week I went to the US and spent a week running around frantically meeting with friends for meals, drinks, coffee, shopping and pretty much whatever other occasion could be made up for the purpose of catching up with friends.

Shortly before departing, I wrote a post pondering changes in people. Then, during one of the lunches last week, I found myself enjoying a burger in some nice place in Boston talking about all of our mutual friends from back in elementary school and which one’s we’d kept up with and where everybody was so many years later. One friend in particular, he’d gotten married and at the same time, largely cut himself off from the people he knew in high school. Sitting there at lunch, we thought it was kind of weird and unfortunate, that he’d gone off and basically separated his old life from his current one.

While running around the rest of the week, I noticed that depending on the crowd I was with, I behaved a little bit differently. When I got together with the guys I’ve known since I was 12, I regressed a little more towards the kid I used to be then. Not dramatically so, but looking back, I feel like I was acting differently with them than I did with other people, the friends I made years later, or different still from how I was when with cousins I’ve known basically since infancy.

In all situations, I assume there is some core person who I am, but I feel like there are subtle, if not necessarily externally perceptible, changes in how I behave. Even if unnoticed by those people I’m with, it’s not something that escapes my own introverted self-scrutiny. I felt different, even if I wasn’t acting it. The core person changes over time, this being the subject of the earlier post, and when I get together with these friends I shift back in different ways, perhaps closer to the person I think they will remember as me.

Sitting on the plane back to Beijing, I thought of a new explanation for the friend who cut himself off: what if I didn’t like the person who I was at some earlier stage, or as an extension, the person who I became when I spent time with people from that time in my life? If that were the case, maybe I too would just let the old friends go. This doesn’t sit well with me, maybe because I don’t like the idea of disliking any episode of my life prior to now so much that I’d try and force it to completely disappear from my memory.

Of course, examining closer, I realize that my memory as always has been working to make me think better of myself than I perhaps really am. Not even a year out from leaving Shanghai, I’ve almost completely lost touch with the people I knew there, and I’m not even trying to ignore them, it’s just neglect. Maybe I’ll stop blathering here and write all those Shanghai friends and acquaintances to see what they’re up to now.

Of course people do change, in what I can only assume is a great many senses. Physically through the course of our lives we grow and or bodies show signs of this continued wear. This is superficial, perhaps, as after all, the code governing just how that person continues to grow remains, while not necessarily immutable, for the most part the same.

But what then is the… “essence” of a person? While we are of course rooted in the physical world, these days I feel like there are people I know, or at least knew for a while, relying primarily on a memory of their form and continued contact from afar. These people, then, may change enormously in appearance but remain the same to me.

Well, that is, except for the fact that they do change. Maybe they don’t, and instead it is me who is changing, or simply the nature of our friendship that is shifting with the passage of time.

What is the nature of a friendship? What is it that I do, or did, that lets some friendships persist this prolonged distance while others have suffered? Will all past friendships fade if neglected long enough and which of those will I be able to resume with proximity? Or will I even be able to, being now the changed person that I am, and they the changed person they are?

I want to be able to better describe what it is that happens when people “drift apart” because I have this hope that if I understood it I could, would, do more to stop it. Though even saying that makes me think that maybe I wouldn’t. Things change, and who am I to stop that?

All right, I’m tired and if I don’t post this now I suspect I’ll reread it later only to realize how ridiculous all this sounds so whatever. Another day of work, most of a day of travel, and then I’m stateside and catching up on the facetime I’ve been missing out on.

I’m going to fly into NYC the afternoon of February 4th and then I’m going to fly out the afternoon of the 11th.

Let’s get together or something.

Details available as soon as I make detailed plans.

A while ago I read the book Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. One of the things I remember from it was about this guy who could predict very well very quickly whether or not a married couple would stay married in the long term, by listening to them interact. I forget if he was an academic researcher or a counselor or what. What I do remember was that when he saw people talking, he looked for a very small number of things that were especially revealing about the long term prospects for the relationship.

If I’m remembering correctly, the one thing this guy would look for before anything else was contempt. If he found that there was a pattern of contempt in the interaction he’d expect the marriage to fail. From that alone, he’d be able to predict with impressive accuracy whether or not a marriage would stick together some decade or more later.

The reason I remembered this recently was because I was thinking about what makes a person act or react with contempt? The whole focus of Blink was about the power of the unconscious, both in how much it can deduce but also how much it reveals (there was a section on Ekman’s Facial Action Coding System too I think).

So if I’m talking with somebody and I think that maybe I said something contemptuously, it’s a pretty strong sign things aren’t going to well. But the question then is, what can I do about that? If I find myself reacting in such a way how much can I do to consciously change that? Do I expect to fall away from people I interact with in that way? I don’t like the idea of being so resigned to my unconscious actions.

Update: I did find what I believe is an excerpt about the contempt stuff, here.