We (Molly and some of her friends being part of the we) drove to West Sunshine and went to the community center there. We were some of the only non-Sudanese people there (and we accidentily sat in the men’s section of the audience). It was an interesting experience. We got an impromptu tour of the  exhibits which were things like ceremonial garb for weddings and posters about cotton. Then we got to try some of the food. We had fulle sandwiches which are bean paste based (so delicious), some thick gravy thing covered in sauce that I can’t remember the name of, and a desert that was like a less honey covered thinly rolled piece of baclava. There was dancing (involves a lot of foot stamping and energy) and singing (I would have mistaken the style for middle eastern) and presentation of awards to significant members of hte community.

It was very interesting because as one of Molly’s friends commented, the whole thing ran on African time. So, things took ages to move from one event to the next and kids would run around in front of the podium playing soccer with soda cans while someone was giving a speech and people talked and greeted each other and ignored the speaker at will.

Oh, and we got henna tattoos on our hands. They’re beautiful, but they’re also black. Apparently black henna is generally not real henna and it often has the same chemical in hair dye in it, but more concentrated. This means it’s really not a smart thing to put onto your body. Mine was red and swollen for a bit, but looks perfectly fine now. So, there we go, public service announcement. Henna is beautiful, but avoid the black stuff.

And with that, I am going to run away. Hope you’re all well and there will be more entries soon!

In the meantime, my dear blog readers, have a lovely month filled with assorted festivities.

I wholeheartedly agree with those things, but trying to find myself was still entirely useless because there is a way that worked so much better for me that didn’t involve finding my true self. The key was that the quest to find myself as it was presented to me was always about self-definition. Construct an identity from the evidence, compare myself to other people, evaluate myself to determine categories and labels that I could fit into. What are you? What are you not? How would you describe yourself in ten words?  Who are you really? What is your essence?

The alternative, which will keep all of the benefits that I can see and eliminate all of the negatives that I’ve brought up, is to say the hell with self-definition and the true self and embrace self-reflection and simply… self.

Go ahead and puzzle over your likes and dislikes, your strengths and weaknesses, your life and your self. As a perpetual naval-gazer, I don’t know how I would be aware, engaged, or satisfied if I didn’t think about those things. But it can be done without self-definition and without (as “Someone” astutely tied in with her comment) expectations.  In other words, without my ego invested in the label, there’s no reason that someone’s evaluation of me as a poor thinker should shake me when their evaluation of my coordination is an observation or an annoying curiosity. Without the drive to label myself and find my true self, there’s no need to put myself or other people down and there’s less pressure to ignore the moral distinctions that I make. Trends can be noted, changes can take place, I can be complicated and messy without drama, I can step outside the boxes that I’ve made for my self-image because I know that they were never more than general guidelines and observations, not the boundaries that define my understanding of myself. Should all of my guidelines end up in completely different places, I won’t be any less me.

In other words, when defining could be useful, you can make distinctions without globalizing it or charging it with ego and emotion (You’re probably familiar with these for negative examples, think I struggled with that math class versus I am mathematically retarded. It works the same way for positive examples I’m proud of all of the times that I stood up for myself despite pressure, versus No one can get anything past me because I’m a tough guy).

Really, all I’m saying is that you can reflect and learn about yourself without defining and investing it with a fixed identity. You can be you without building an argument for what that means.

So, there you have it! What do you think?

As if making me insecure and crazy wasn’t helpful enough, the whole quest to find myself also makes me a hypocrite. I know that I can’t be the only one who has listened to other people’s assertions about themselves and thought about all of the counter-evidence that their evaluation is leaving out (and how I must sound exactly the same when I’m doing it…) And given the stuff that I’ve already discussed about the difficulties of living up to an identity claim in all situations, it’s difficult to avoid hypocrisy.

But even with a completely honest appraisal of shockingly consistent behavior, it still can easily lead to a subtle dangerous sort of hypocrisy that sets you unnecessarily against other people. Because we so often use comparisons of ourselves to other people to build our own identity (random trivial example, I grew up thinking of myself as big-boned because many of my friends were little and now I find it bizarre when people call me petite), we naturally tend to create a quiet hypocrisy which subtly demonizes other people’s faults while papering over our own because we’re motivated to see our true selves as decent enough.  (Be patient with my feeble brain here people, I’m struggling to express this one).

Hopefully, this makes sense with an example. A couple of years ago, I spent a good half hour confiding in my mother (*cough* gossiping *cough*) about the people at my college who gossip and the problems that they cause (which had absolutely nothing to do with me) and used that to segue to how I was different from them because I didn’t gossip. I quickly realized the hypocrisy in this and qualified that statement with, whatever, I didn’t gossip like THAT. I didn’t gossip to people who were involved, I didn’t gossip to people who could spread the damage. My gossip was entirely different, it was okay gossip and theirs was terrible gossip.

Now, if this was going to be my perfect example, this should have ended differently. It should have started with me building my identity off other people and engaging in some mild hypocrisy just like it did, but to demonstrate my point, this conversation should have been followed by a slight threat to my identity as a non-gossiper. And then I would have reacted to this threat by becoming more convinced about the walls that I’d put up around my identity to distinguish my not-bad gossip from their failure-as-a-person gossip. The point isn’t that it’s wrong to acknowledge gradations in behavior or that things are equally wrong regardless of the details, but that because so much identity is built off of comparing yourself to other people, it is incredibly easy to slip into quiet hypocrisies that set up the rules of the game to defend the idea that you are an okay person with the consequence that you implicitly conclude that other people who fail to match you are not. By making more of the distinctions, you miss out on the commonality likely to make you more sympathetic. This doesn’t just build hypocrites; in this case, the quest for self is actually attacking compassion.

And then for the last of my major arguments, this quest for the self sucks because it leads to narrow-mindedness about yourself as well as others. Not only do you tend to define yourself to the exclusion of other things, but it’s usually based on what has happened before. If you’ve never danced before a day in your life, you are unlikely to define yourself as a dancer.  If you’ve always thought of yourself as the funny one, you’re less likely to try and step in and be the serious, thoughtful one when the situation needs it. It can easily lead to the automatic rejection of options and possibilities that could have been enriching. Of course, some of the mythos encourages exploration because new situations are often highlighted for their ability to reveal your true self and new aspects of your true self that you weren’t aware of before. But the problem is that this generally requires a crisis, a loss of identity, before you’re supposed to explore these new things. I can’t think of a book or a movie that I’ve read where the protagonist was pretty secure and happy with themselves already, but set off on a quest to find even more about themselves just because. As a more real world example, if you define yourself as being a hardline member of a political party, you are probably going to instinctively agree with that party’s policies and then consider their merits/problems later, because you’ve already invested in that identity. It’s not that change isn’t possible, it’s just less likely.

Next time tune in for the alternative!

If your brain works like mine, it is extremely easy to demonstrate that trying to find your true self will make you insecure. Think about identifying your strengths. I’ll pick even-tempered. I think I’ve got some pretty decent evidence to support that idea. I’ve taken some pretty bad news calmly. I’ve been around some pretty severe irritants without being annoyed. I even have negative examples to support this, so I don’t suspect wishful thinking. I’ve been too even-tempered and missed out on excitement and joy. But what happens when I declare that all this means that I am even tempered, when I identify it as part of my identity and define myself that way?

It means that I invest part of my sense of self in that label and when I fail to live up to it or when someone implies that the label is inaccurate, I feel threatened and inferior and insecure because that’s supposed to be who I am. This might not be such a big deal except that I fail to live up to it constantly, no matter what the other evidence says. What am I supposed to think about myself when I’m acting grumpy, maudlin, moody, depressed, sensitive, immature, hyperactive, testy, angry, or irritable? If I’ve really been attached to that identity then it feels like either I’m failing to live up to myself or it makes me question if I’m right about myself and this leads to insecurity. Here’s a more visible example, have you ever had something about yourself that you were feeling really proud and invested in…and then you failed to live up to it? Let me give a concrete example. I generally identify with having a good sense of humor. The night before, I’d been hanging out with some people and I’d had some good lines and an agreeable audience and I’d made them all laugh so hard some of them were bent over and it was such a boost and I felt like I would have agreed strongly with the statement, “I am a funny person”. That high lasted until lunch the next day when I tried to crack a few jokes and they fell completely flat and I ended up making some attempts that just trailed off into (mildly) pathetic social awkwardness. The immediate reaction was a burst of insecurity, to go as low as I had been high and to question if I was funny at all and feeling threatened and disappointed that I might not be.

It’s just as bad when someone else manages to accidentally (or not) step on the wrong side of one of these identity labels. I don’t think there are many things more likely to inspire me to act unreasonably, irrationally, and unlikably than wounding my ego by denying one of these identity claims. You could tell me until your face turns purply that I am uncoordinated and while I’ll probably get annoyed that you’re judging me and my potential (and that you’re being a jerk for no reason), I’m not likely to get emotional. The only sport that I’ve ever been any good at is swimming and my bruised shins argue that I still haven’t mastered navigating simple environments. I don’t have much of my sense of self at stake with that insult. But god forbid you start making a sharp argument that I am a shallow, uncreative, and derivative thinker. Even if I manage to not lash out at you or make a spectacle of myself, I could very well agonize over that one for days, trying to prove you wrong to myself and neutralize the threat to my sense of my true self.

It doesn’t even have to be that kind of straight forward attack because the true self concept makes insecurity run rampant and encourages acting like a lunatic sometimes just because things didn’t go quite right. Like, have you ever gotten annoyed at someone for giving you a compliment because they gave you entirely the wrong one? I once turned in a piece of writing that I thought was very offbeat and considered a demonstration that I was very original and well thought out. The teacher only complimented me on my organization. Instead of enjoying that compliment, I was irritated and insecure because they had completely ignored that it was unique and different. I wanted that particular comment to validate my identity like I had expected! Or have you ever responded to something completely innocent in an overblown out of proportion way because it tripped into the identity mind field? I want to be, and like to think of myself as, an intelligently adventurous traveler who is willing to take risks, but never recklessly naïve about the world. This is probably one of my identity insecurity hot spots right now. So, when a friend (a Starter Blog reader, wonder if she has any memory of this?) innocently brought up how cool it would be to travel to North Korea and I responded that it was dangerous and she denied this (with appropriate qualifiers of course), I reacted oddly. This should have just been something cool to consider or discuss. Instead, it hit on that insecure identity sore spot and I took this as a prompt to accuse myself of being boring, fearful, and unadventurous. Since that’s not who I want to be, I instantaneously countered by mentally accusing her of being recklessly naïve. Thankfully, even-temperedness partially prevailed and I didn’t start an out of nowhere emotional argument, but I did write a bizarrely long two-paragraph response dithering on about the difficulties of risk assessment. Right. That’s just the type of person I want to be!

As an awkward 12-year-old, I wrote a poem called “Who Am I?”. I can remember sitting against the wall, in the corner of my room, really wishing that I knew who I was. Was I smart? Was I impatient? Was I mature? Was I cold? Was I tough? Was I lazy? Was I interesting? I’d absorbed the idea that figuring out who you were was one of those important lofty tasks in life. I believed that if I knew who my true self was then it would be a constant source of strength, something to draw integrity and certainty from. I was drawn to those people who seemed to have this solid core, and I wanted to have that air about me too. It felt like if I couldn’t tell myself who I really was, then I had to be failing to live up to all that I could be. It’s impossible not to laugh at lines like, “Eyes of blue, who are you?”, but it was pretty distressing. It burned that I couldn’t say what I really was like.

I’m guessing that almost everyone reading this can name at least one time in their life when they felt the same way and there are probably a lot of you who can identify this idea coming up over and over. Who are you? I may be making unwarranted assumptions here, so call me out on it in the comments if that’s the case, but I’m betting that many of you would agree with the idea that defining your true self is an important and good thing. (Portions of US media, especially teen movies, certainly support the idea. Apparently knowing who you truly are not only grants the courage to face down peer pressure and challenges, but wins your crush’s kiss and popularity!)

The entire point of this essay is to disagree with that. You read it here first, don’t go searching for yourself! Don’t find your true self! If you hear them talking about it, stick your finger in your ears and start humming The Battle Hymn of the Republic. (It’s a really good humming song, very all-purpose. It just feels good in your throat). The quest for true self, which I’m going to loosely define as when you try to conclude what you really are and what you are not, is worse than ineffective.

It sounds like a great goal, but in reality, at least for me, it sucks. It sucks a lot. It sucks so much that I’m trying to eliminate it from my life as much as possible. Finding myself makes me insecure. And it makes me a hypocrite. Oh, and it makes me narrow-minded.

So, there you go folks. Don’t find yourself. In the weeks to come, I’m going to lay out a more in-depth argument for why it sucks and offer my alternative. Stick around!

(Useless P.S. all of my spelling errors in this article were failures to add hyphens and I had to correct like… 6 of them. It still looks odd to me.)

(Worthwhile P.S. Please feel free to add some comments! I feel like this essay has a lot of room for improvement, I’m just not sure what to do about it.)

Award-winning photos of pollution in China

Award winning-photos of oceanic pollution (follow the links there to see photo essays on the Chernobyl pollution, uranium mine waste in the southwest US, and penguins because they’re penguins.)

And for an entirely different sort of pollution… light pollution

I know there must be lots more moving pictures out there that I’m missing. Let me know in the comments if you know of any.

But far more fun is this song, a very early rap song by an Italian guy who doesn’t perform it in Italian or English, but in English sounding gibberish. So, have a listen to what English sounds like without the words! (Mental Floss Blog again!)

And then to answer the bonus question that you didn’t ask, what does the english language LOOK like… check this out! I’m not entirely sure I get it… but it is different!

]]> http://quidamtyro.wordpress.com/2009/10/26/links-how-does-english-sound-to-a-non-native-speaker/feed/ 2 quidamtyro http://quidamtyro.wordpress.com/2009/10/23/vaccines-are-good-and-do-not-cause-autism/ http://quidamtyro.wordpress.com/2009/10/23/vaccines-are-good-and-do-not-cause-autism/#comments Fri, 23 Oct 2009 22:37:13 +0000 quidamtyro http://quidamtyro.wordpress.com/?p=512 ]]> So, I was reading my school newspaper several weeks ago and came across an article in the opinion section  that argued that vaccines were dangerous and caused all sorts of health problems (including autism).  It was full of factless emotional appeals, shoddy research, and gaping logical holes. I’d be more willing to say to each his own and ignore that it’s a terrible argument… except that it’s a terrible argument that harms people and actively increases the odds that I’ll get some horrible preventable disease. So, just in case anyone was actually paying attention to the paper (and because I wanted to vent my twitching somewhere either way), I wrote a short opinions piece defending vaccines. So, here it is!

Between recent fears about the H1N1 vaccine and Jenny McCarthy’s autism hysteria, there has been a lot of concern lately about vaccines, but the problem needs to be put in perspective. Vaccines are one of the best tools that modern medicine has to offer. Count the number of times you’ve seen someone with measles, mumps, rubella, pertussis, diphtheria, polio, or tetanus. Before mass vaccinations dropped infections to unprecedented low levels, these diseases were widespread, common, and dangerous. No scientist or medical provider worthy of that title would say that vaccines never cause adverse reactions, because they do, but for almost everyone the risks are quite small compared to the benefit to the individual and the community.

The benefits to the individual are obvious. Vaccination seriously reduces the odds that disease will maim or kill you. But vaccinations are just as important to the community whether it’s the local, national, or global community. When people are vaccinated, it becomes much more difficult for any outbreaks of that disease to spread because vaccination breaks the chain of infection. When enough people are vaccinated, estimated at 75-95% of the population for different diseases, herd immunity kicks in. This means that it becomes so difficult for the disease to spread that it protects the segments of the population who can not be vaccinated, like those allergic to the egg components in many vaccines. The more people that opt out of vaccination, the more vulnerable the entire community is to that disease. And those who are vaccinated aren’t completely safe then either because vaccinations don’t work perfectly 100% of the time.

Compared to these benefits, the risks are small. Of course, every vaccine’s risk/benefit ratio must be evaluated for each person, but the majority of vaccines are quite safe (consider that even Tylenol can have serious adverse reactions). Take the MMR vaccine, which vaccinates against measles, mumps, and rubella. Adverse reactions are possible, for example, 5-15% of people will have a fever for a day or so, 4 per 10,000 people will have a febrile seizure (usually without long term effects), and 1 person in a million will develop encephalitis. Of course, the diseases that MMR prevents don’t just cause unpleasant illnesses. Their complications include: pneumonia, encephalitis, corneal scarring, testical infections (up to 30% males infected with mumps) resulting in testicular atrophy (15% with mumps), encephalitis (2 per 100,000), and spontaneous abortion. Rubella was a leading cause of birth defects like blindness, deafness, and congenital heart disease. And measles remains a leading cause of death for young children in countries with low vaccination rates (even after a 68% global decrease in fatalities thanks to mass vaccination).

I did not mistakenly leave out autism. Vaccines, including MMR, do not cause autism. The study that kickstarted the controversy, Dr. Wakefield’s 1998 Lancet article, found a link, but this shouldn’t be surprising given that it appears he either distorted or falsified his data. Extensive and carefully controlled research has led to no evidence that MMR or other vaccines cause autism and the US’s Center for Disease Control, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the UK National Health Service, and the World Health Organization all agree.

There are some cases when the risk for a particular vaccine outweighs the benefits. For example, the smallpox vaccine has one of the highest rates of serious adverse reactions for any vaccination. At one time it was worth it to ward off a disease that not only blinded and disfigured survivors, but was perhaps responsible for killing more people than any other disease in human history. And why do we have the privilege to avoid the risks associated with small pox vaccination? We can because a mass vaccination campaign eradicated the disease worldwide in 1977.

Vaccinations, folks, it’s where it’s at.

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