This year, I’m refraining from making any new year’s resolutions, or re-resolutions. David Foster Wallace defines a harmful addiction as one that creates a certain problem and then offers relief from the very problem it creates (alcohol being exhibit a). I think new year’s resolutions is one such addiction.
2013 has been such a year. It was the year of ‘Selfie’, ‘Twerking’, and ‘Cronuts’; the year of the Boston Marathon Bombings, another Bangkok protest, and the Syrian war; the year of Bitcoins, Snapchat, and Big Data; the year of Robert Ebert, Edward Snowden, and Nelson Mandela.
I was in Philadelphia for the NOC program for the most part of 2013 and subsequently returned to NUS for a semester of school. Here are some of the year’s highlights:
The first was a conversation I had in the car on the way from Philadelphia to the Garden Statefor an entrepreneurship project. There was a huge traffic jam on the I-676 and Joe and I were sitting amidst empty red bull cans and cigarette butts in his old Subaru in semi-awkward radio silence (we weren’t close). It was the beginning of the sweltering summer, and suddenly Califone’s Funeral Singers came on the radio.
Simultaneously, Joe reached forward to switch the channel as I yelled, “Oh my god, I LOVEEE this song!!!”
The song reminded me of my summer in New York ’11 – of acoustic guitars, brunches and sitting in line for indie concerts, but to Joe it was a stark cruel reminder of his older brother, who had killed himself when Joe was 13. His brother loved Califone.
“The week after he died, I spent the entire time sitting in the basement playing video games. I became a completely different person after he kille-… died.”
I’m so sorry..”
“He was having some problems with his girlfriend and before died he was visiting his psychiatrist pretty regularly. At that time, I had no idea what was going on. I was really immature. But I guess even if I had known what was going on, I wouldn’t have known what was going on,” Joe said, taking his eyes off the road to look at me. “Am I even making sense?”
“Yeah, sort of…”
“After he died, the priest from the Catholic Church that my family went to came for a visit and he came down to the basement and told me that my brother wasn’t going to hell and all that jazz and I was like, ‘Why are you even telling me this?!’ At that point in time, it didn’t even cross my mind that my brother was even going to hell.”
“Mmhm,” I said, not really knowing what to say.
“I don’t know.. life sucks sometimes but I never understood how he could kill himself just like that. How could someone do that?! In some sense I feel pretty shitty because for my college application essay to Penn, I wrote about how his death changed me profoundly. I was the only one in my high school to get into an Ivy League university. Most of my friends back from home ended up to community colleges. I somehow feel like I profited from his death. He died, and I moved on.”
The traffic slowly cleared, Joe turned to face the road and that was it. By the next intersection we were talking about something else entirely. We didn’t talk about it more after that, and I never brought it up again. But I remember that hot summer afternoon.
It raised a common but interesting contradiction of perception versus reality. From the social media perspective, Joe was a fraternity weekend warrior who most people would say “leads a pretty interesting and fulfilling life”. But I realized that you won’t truly know a person till you step into his skin. Here’s something I’ve always wondered about – why it is that, as much as I find analyzing or valuing things and individuals at surface level to be light-weighted and even toxic to the goal of progress, I find myself consistently practicing it?
The second highlight of 2013 was a short email exchange that had been translated into a digital poem.
A little backdrop of how it came about – I was taking an ‘Uncreative Writing’ class at the University of Pennsylvania. For the entire semester we were banned from creating anything from scratch. Whatever we submitted for class had to be plagiarized or ripped off the internet somewhere, an unconventional approach to what’s traditionally emphasized by school administration.
My professor was Kenneth Goldsmith, an established American poet whose one of many career highlights was a reading he did at President and Mrs. Obama’s “A Celebration of American Poetry” at The White House in 2011.
A strong proponent of the “uncreative writing” methodology, an idea borne from a quote by conceptual artist Douglas Huebler, “the world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more”, Goldsmith wrote a book about creating art out of already existing works, and expectedly titled it ‘Uncreative Writing’, which formed the basis of his class.
Throughout the semester, we were encouraged to vandalize public property, troll online community forums, and plagiarize existing works; all in the name of art. His philosophy closely aligned with the 80/20 principal: Investing minimal effort to achieve maximum results.
For one the assignments, we were to transcribe digital text into HTML form.
Ali translated an old email exchange between her and her ex-boyfriend:
mattp@gmail.com to alik@gmail.com:
my phone died, were done talking about this. you acted in a way that I won’t get over.
move on go back to whoever it was he can comfort you its not my job anymore
i appreciate your honesty but it doesn’t work this way, you made a choice. And now you need to go with it
let me go im done being upset. enjoy your time at penn
alik@gmail.com to mattp@gmail.com
I’m not going to stop fighting for you.
Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T
into HTML form and it created a beautiful poem:
canonical
my phone died
icon
were done talking about this
shortcut
you acted in a way that I won’t get over.
alternate type
move on.
<go back to whoever it was>
NO_COOKIE_
function
null
function
(return)
<he can comfort you now its not my job anymore>
navigator?
navigator.
userAgent
function
String
replace.
split.
String.replace.split
length,length
break.
I appreciate your honesty but
return this Date. Now|
{return+new Date}
it doesn’t work this way and now
you made a choice.
Float String break Validate if
you need to go with it.
#loading position:absolute;width:100%;height:100
let me go I’m done being upset.
position:relative
Enjoy your time at Penn.
transparent,transparent 66%,transparent 66%,transparent transparent 66%,transparent
I’m not going to stop fighting for you.
She read it aloud in class. As disclaimer, it didn’t end with ‘happily ever after’.
I love how the codes interweaved into the original text, paralleling technology infiltrating the nitty-gritty parts of our everyday lives and radically changing the way we communicate with one another. Our messages become more constructed and complicated and ultimately distant and detached. The highly-connected life is a pretty tiring and complex one.
For some of us, even when we have a person to whom we can tell anything and everything, our darkest thoughts and emotions, we still feel totally unable to communicate, no matter how much we say. And I think the lacking communication is just a symptom of not knowing what it is we want to communicate – of only halfway knowing ourselves, and knowing that there is something grave and important lurking within us but being totally unable to identify it.
Or maybe it’s the opposite. Maybe it’s merely the sense that there is something intangible lurking within us, which causes us to feel like we are not communicating. Maybe the sense that I need to dig deeper into myself is an illusion. Maybe I need, instead, to pay more attention to what’s around me, again per David Foster Wallace. As a friend recently told me, ‘my blockage is my entire mentality.’ She’s very astute.
Or maybe I’m obviously over-delving into artsy-fartsy mode. But either ways, technology is increasing the quantity of communication, but not its quality; it’d be nice if once in a while we could snap our fingers and land softly back into the pre-modern tech era where less is more.
The last (or first) memory of 2013 happened at the end of January – one of the rare times I Skyped home on a quiet winter night in Philadelphia and discovered that my younger sister had been writing me letters everyday in for the month, but to a wrong address. You can imagine my The Notebook-style shock.
I never managed to recover those letters – the address she sent the letters to doesn’t exist; those lost letters, expectedly honest and touching, sure to sent me on my knees bawling by the time I get through with it. But I never saw them and I never wrote back. I should have though – regardless.
My sister was 12 when she wrote to me, a year later she doesn’t remember what she wrote in those letters, just remembers crying a lot when she wrote them because she “missed (me) while (I) was away”. We were incredibly close before I left for Philly, then I left and got pre-occupied with new people and places. Now I’m back home, she’s 13 but we aren’t as close as before.
It’s a powerful memory to me and I am sort of at a loss for words; something hurts really badly about it all. That dead winter night, after I ended the Skype call home, with her voice still echoing in my head, I was thinking how perfectly my younger sister and I get along, even though we’re a decade apart and sometimes she never knows what the hell I’m talking about, and vice versa. For all of our differences, in a really abstract way we understand each other perfectly. That is a special thing that is really hard to find even within family. This I have just begun to realize.
Anyway, just some thoughts. Einstein said, “Life is like riding a bicycle, to keep your balance, you must keep moving.”
I going to miss and constantly look back to this year, but I eagerly await 2014.