Month 17.1. Empty words.

1.

Wait a second, have I really been here seventeen months? Holy smoking cow. Don’t really know how that happened.

2.

Cool words in English:

· Jowly. (Means something like “having a lot of cheek area.”)

· Anticipatory.

· Ecumenical. Ranks along with “ecclesiastic” and “Episcopalian.” I don’t really understand any of them, but they have to do with churches.

· Whiz. But only when you aspirate the “w.” (Means “to pee,” or is an adjective describing smart kids.)

· Australopithecus. (The name of an early type of human.)

· Parallelogram. Ranks with “parallelepiped.”

· Agrarian. Ranks along with “bucolic,” since they have similar semantic and oxymoronic qualities. (Both words evoke images of peaceful farming, which inspires reactions contrary to “grrrrrrr,” trying to rear your horse, puking, and colic illness.)

Uncool words in English:

· Dribble.

· Dollop.

· Dabble.

· Clad.

· Germane. (Means “relevant.”)

· Gregarious. (Means “having a tendency not to go solo.”) It’s just too close to so many other words. “Hi, I’m Greg, I’m gregarious.” “Hi Greg, I’m Gary. I’m also gregarious.” “You sure you’re not egregious?” “Uh, well I thought you were egregious.” “Well for sure I’m gregarious, but that doesn’t make me Gregorian.” “Are you being garrulous?” “No, Gary, that’s you.” “Oh, I thought I was garish.” “Dammit, Gary.”

· Prod.

· Prong. Ewwww. Worst word ever, second only to “dollop.”

3.

Cool words in Croatian:

· Prtljaga. (Luggage)

· Razlog. (reason)

· Vrh. (peak)

· Češće. (more often)

· Devedesetogodišnjakinja (girl in her twenties)

· Mogućnost (possibility)

· Otok (island). Ranks with “otoci” (islands) and “otocima” (in the islands).

· Najjednostavniji. This one really deserves a drum-roll. Its meaning is… “simplest.”

4.

Betcha don’t know anything about Zulu.

Zulu is spoken by nearly ten million people, mostly in South Africa. It’s the language of Johnny Clegg, Lucky Dube and Desmond Tutu. Zulu has one of the richest phonemic inventories of any language in the world. Of interest is one sound, written hl, that only exists in Welsh. It’s like saying “sh” with a lisp. Even more interesting are the clicks. There are three basic types: the letter x is the sound you make to make a horse come to you. The letter q is like a bottle popping, and c is like tsk-tsk.

I’ve read arguments that the diversity of sounds in southern African languages supports the hypothesis that they are the oldest languages on earth. There is an analogous argument in genetics - there is higher genetic diversity in regions that have been inhabited longest. So, if the arguments are correct, Africa is the land of both our genetic and linguistic origins.

Wanna know how to make a sentence in Zulu? I knew you did. First, we take a verbal root. Let’s take –qond- which means “to understand.” Second, we take a subject. Let’s take –u- which means “he” or “she.” We’re going to put the subject and the verb together, and there are different possible ways to do this.

We must choose the verb tense. The verb tense will give us the format for how the subject and the verb are put together. Let’s take the present, to mean “he understands.” The format is [subject]+ya+[verb]+a. “ya” and “a” don’t mean anything, they’re just part of the format. So we get uyaqonda which means “he understands.”

If we want to stick in an object, it comes after ya. The first person “I” or “me” is –ngi-. So, “he helps me” is uyangiqonda, which breaks down to u + ya + ngi + qond + a.

If we want to say a negative sentence, we use a different format: a+[subject]+[verb]+i. Here, “a” and “i” are meaningless, just part of the negated sentence format. So, “I don’t understand” is angiqondi, which breaks down to a + ngi + qond + i.

And that’s all you’ll ever need to know of Zulu!

Month 16.1. Open-mindedness and other cheesy things.

In college, Cheesy had an 8 a.m. English class. It was part of a liberal arts program in which the teachers were all wry, aging cynics who’d never quite escaped the hippy culture enough to make it as university professors. Her English teacher was the prototype. Under his sarcasm and witticisms lurked a simple love of humanity, which came out only when he taught Shakespeare. One morning, he walked into class and put his books down on his desk. He folded his hands together. He looked at the students seriously. He said, “Class, today we’re going to talk about… our feelings.” Cheesy burst out laughing. The rest of the class was silent. The teacher looked at her with fake shock on his face; Cheesy knew his dramatic entry had been just another joke. “Cheesy!” he smirked. “You’re so cynical!”

Students learn early on that, if you’re going to be a serious academic, you don’t talk about emotions. Ever. You don’t even talk about sentimentality (except maybe if you’re a sociology student, which is not real academia anyway). Cheesy knew that the moment she began to talk about… well - cheesy things, she would be alienating any of her listeners who considered themselves true academics.

But Cheesy’s gonna do it anyway. She would like to show you that traditionally cheesy subjects can be talked about in a professional, and even pleasant, way.

And since all cheesy things start with a story, we’ll begin with a story about Cheesy’s weekend. It was pretty outstanding. She hopped across an ocean for a surprise birthday visit, went to the concert of a South African peace hero, partied with friends and family from across the globe, and even got serenaded by mariachis.

But of all the outings and celebrations, there was one simple moment that kept resurfacing in Cheesy’s mind (like the English teacher’s entrance, but cheesier). Most of the birthday girl’s friends were staying overnight as guests in her house. One afternoon, a neighbour came by to introduce herself. One of the guests said hello back. This is the moment Cheesy remembers: the simple sweetness of the friend saying hello. The neighbour could have been anyone – an astronaut, an axe-murderer, an abortionist. What amazed Cheesy was how her friend immediately and unconsciously treated the neighbour as a sweet person, without knowing a thing about her.

Cheesy had always considered herself a more or less tolerant person. She had friends of all kinds of ethnicities, religious beliefs, and professions (although she’d never knowingly met an axe-murderer) (which one of “axe-murderer” or “axe murderer” means “person who murders with an axe” versus “person who murders axes”? Place your vote now). But until that simple, sweet hello, Cheesy had never realized that tolerance involves way more than race or religion. It means approaching every person as an individual, thinking of everyone you don’t know as a blank slate.

It’s surprisingly difficult to give people the benefit of the doubt. Prejudice pops up everywhere. We approach tall people with the assumption they’re more confident. We approach Asian people with the assumption they’re shier. We approach smiling people with the assumption they’re generally happy. We make assumptions based on makeup, gap teeth, gait, vocal pitch, and facial hair. One time Cheesy even assumed a guy was a dunce because he wore a track suit into a restaurant. Such stupid, meaningless things lead us to judge.

And we don’t just prejudge strangers. We do it even with the people closest to us. We assume that if a person liked Tom Petty ten years ago, he still does. We assume habits persist. We assume values persist. We assume beliefs persist. But all of these things change. It’s the hardest thing to approach someone you’ve loved for ages as a blank slate.

But it’s freeing. The best friends are ones you can continue to learn from. And it’s so cool to meet someone thinking, “Dude this person could be a leader in Scientology.” What fun conversations that would make. And it’s so cool to see someone and think, “Dude I’ve known this person for years, and I’m still learning about them.” Every person out there knows something you don’t. You can learn something from everyone. The track-suit boy indeed turned out to be a bit of a dunce, but a sweet one, who inspired Cheesy in many ways (and who she’d happily meet again, anywhere in the world, wearing any kind of track suit he pleased).

A blank canvas can be approached a million different ways. Some artists attack it. Some artists fear it. Some artists flirt with it, very gingerly, for a very long time, until they jump in. But the best artists retain that initial childlike enthusiasm with which they started off. And as many great artists have said, the artist’s job is to discover and reveal the beauty that is already there. It’s an attitude that can be applied to people just as well as art.

Cheesy’s English prof had taught Shakespeare for years and years. But you could still see the pleasure he took from it. He was still learning from Shakespeare, after four hundred years, after four thousand readings of the same forty texts. He was childlike about it. He was excited to discover and share interpretations. Cheesy does not want to moralize, because that isn’t professional. She only wishes to suggest that a particular approach to people leads to a particular state of mind which yields particular results and gives rise to particular emotions– respectively: blank slates, inspiration, education, and happiness.

There, was that so painful? If you said yes, then you’ve engaged in a conversation about pain, which is an emotion, which means you have no choice but to face the pain of talking about emotions. But don’t worry, we’re starting slow – open-mindedness isn’t really an emotion anyway.

Month 15.2. The Real Split.

Split people are proud, stubborn, and cynical. They sip their espressos, eyes twinkling through cigarette smoke. They smile when they think you're wrong. They talk, and talk, and talk; their voices get louder, and louder, and louder.

Their talk seldom turns into action. Splićani are energetic – by 9 a.m., the boardwalk is full with people strutting along the seaside. But they have an overarching laziness, which they call fiaka. Good idea, they say, we'll do it next week. Next week comes and goes. You insist, and they insist that you shouldn't worry. They talk some more, have another espresso, smoke another cigarette, tell another joke, and before you know it a month has passed without anything happening.

Splićani women are beautiful and deep-voiced. The men are strong and careless. Everyone has presence. They are tall, loud, and charming. They dress up to go to the market. Where does their confidence come from? In a big city, you can at least hope to be "seen" when you strut your stuff. In Split, everyone knows each other. They know that the rest of the world probably couldn't find them on a map. Their local ties are strong - most women are sporting wedding rings and pushing baby carriages before they're even 30. So why all the pomp and attitude?

I think Splićani's self-confidence is actually a product of their closed culture. Splićani don't travel much. What they see of the rest of the world comes from tourists. When you live in a bubble, it's easy to be confident. You're the most important thing in your world, because you're the only thing. I live in a city of kings and queens. I am somewhere between a curiosity and a guest.

Even within Split, the culture is divided into impenetrable spheres. Everyone has their "place." The gorgeous women go to the boardwalk. The smart kids go to the math school. The dumb, rich kids go to cooking school. The rebels go to Pancho's bar. If you roll your own cigarettes, you're a hobo. If you wear red shoes, you're gay. It's this reliance on categorization that allows Splićani to be so smug. The rich kids know they're rich, the gorgeous ladies know they're gorgeous, the smart kids know they're smart. Everyone criticizes each other, but everyone is proud of his own position.

I guess it follows naturally to ask whether or not a self-contained culture is a good thing. Turkish/French/American author Elif Shafak makes an interesting case that "if you want to destroy something in this life, be it acne, a blemish, or the human soul, all you need to do is surround it with thick walls. It will dry up inside." She claims that cultural cocoons are one of the greatest dangers in a globalized society. Stereotypes arise, compassion is weakened, and imagination is stifled.

Croatians scorn their corrupt government (the mayor of Split owns a major grocery store chain and gives all the top political jobs to his family members). They resent the lack of jobs. They scoff at the poor infrastructure in the country. They complain about the high cost of living. But they remain fiercely confident. They are happy. Maybe it's because they've set themselves low standards. Maybe it's because they prefer to laugh at their problems than struggle to change them. Maybe it's because they don't know any alternatives, except for the handful of people who still talk about the communist era with stars in their eyes. At least everyone had a job and a place to live, they say.

I'm a foreigner in Split. I agree with Shafak – it would be nice for the Split culture to be a bit more dynamic. But it's actually a selfish wish. I'm used to having more options – things like bowling alleys, live-model drawing groups, good cheap restaurants, and choirs. But who am I to say Split is "missing out"? Model drawing is not part of Split culture. If I made it available, they probably wouldn't use it. I have no right to burst their cultural bubble, especially if they're happy in it. The best I can do is make myself useful by catering to their needs. I'm also proud to have burst many stereotypes about Canadians and Americans. Do you know how many times I've been asked – seriously – whether Canadians are afraid of the dark?

I'm wary of volunteers with a holier-than-thou attitude. It's a mistake to believe that a good volunteer must have something "better" they think they can offer to a community. I think a good volunteer is more of a caterer than a revolutionary. Just go in with the best of what you've got, whether it be knowledge, a skill, or simply a good heart. Help someone, learn something, give something. Volunteering is a lesson in service and humility. Only once we've learned the lesson in humility can we break the barriers separating us from other individuals. And only once we've connected to other individuals can we connect to other cultures.

That was pretty cheesy, wasn't it. And kind of preachy. Sorry, still learning.

 

Month 15.1. Cheesy’s Reawakening, Part II.

Cheesy had lived in four places in her life: Montreal, Quebec City, Istanbul, and Split. She was beginning to have a picture of the phases one goes through when one relocates:

1 – 3 weeks: The Boo-yah phase. Enchantment, thrill, anticipation. You feel awed by the locals, but connected to them in some special way because you think that now you know what they've always known. You're "in." Boo-yah!

3 – 6 weeks: The Groovin' phase. The sparkles fall away and a sense of normalcy emerges. You have a routine and a comfort zone, which makes you feel special because now you're "really" a local.

After 6 weeks: The Dark Side. You begin to the downfalls of where you live: things aren't there that you wish were, and things are there that you wish weren't. Your routine has become tedious. You realize you're pretty different from the locals. You feel nostalgic for the Boo-yah phase.

6-8 months: The Reawakening. Cheesy was pleased to discover the existence of this phase. The Dark Side builds and builds until it breaks into an explosion of tears and snot. Then the seas become calm and your vision crystallizes. The sparkles and shadows have lifted and you begin to see the place for what it really is. You revise what you thought you knew and realize what you don't know.

1-23 years: The Maze Phase. After you see a place for what it is, you lose sight of its context in the greater world, just like after living with yourself your whole life it becomes hard to grasp who you "really" are. So, you go away to another place to try to put things into context. (a) You've relocated. Go back to Phase 1. (b) Dally for a while in a new place or two. Get a fresh perspective of what the old place is "really" like, and return to it boo-yah-style!

That's the beauty of traveling: you're constantly gaining and changing perspectives. It's too bad we can't step out of our own skin sometimes to get a new perspective on ourselves. Or maybe we can.

Enough with the psychological breakdown and philosophizing. What was Split like without the sparkles and shadows? After eight months, what did Cheesy reawaken to see? (a) Go back to Blog 14.5. (b) Go forward to Blog 15.2.

(Hint: Beware of (a) – Cheesy saw more than horses with long faces walking into bars. Although that was pretty cool, too.)

Month 14.6. Banana Cheese-shake.

Hi! She's Cheesy. She's happy to meet you. Cheesy just woke up. Cheesy was hibernating. Here are some good-morning greetings that Cheesy would like to share with you.

1. Wiki-wa, wiki-wa, wiki-wiki-wa-wa wess, Jim Wess, desperado. Rough rider? No, you don't want nada.

2. What sound do the heebie-geebies make?

a) meeeeeoooooooow

b) ooga-chaka, ooga-chaka

c) Ska-bo-beh, babadaba ba-bo-beh, I'm the Scatman!

d) None of the above

e) All of the above

 

Answer: (e). Which by process of elimination means (d).

 

3. Shizzle on my hizzle, what the fizzle? Let it drizzle.

4. Row, row, row your boat gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily. Life is not a dream.

5. If you split a banana, you get a banana split. So to get a split banana, do you have to banana a split?

6. With a knick-knack patty-whack, give the dog a bone: this old cheese came rolling home!

7. Horse walks into bar. Barman says, "Why the long face?"

8. And now you better be ready, Betty, cause spring is a-comin in, and Cheesy is spreading the fevah! Fever in the morning, fever in the evening, fever at suppertime. With fever on a bagel, you can have fever any time!

Month 14.5. No more string Cheesy.

Cheesy once had a roommate who broke up with his girlfriend of six years. The girl had had a fit. Cheesy could hear her calling every night. One evening, Cheesy asked her roommate, “Is your ex okay?” And the roommate said, “Ah she’ll be fine, she just needs to go away for a while and find herself.” The roommate had said this as if “finding oneself” was the most obvious, self-explanatory course of action anyone could take.

But years later, the only thing Cheesy had found was how hard it was to find oneself. You can’t just pack your bags and say, “See ya folks, I’m going to find myself,” then come back a few months later and say, “Hey folks, I found myself. I was hiding in a cave in southern France. Now where were we?”

Something strange had happened, though. After a full fourteen months on the road, Cheesy’s mind had sort of caved in (pun intended). Previously, she had envisioned her life as a linear progression. One thing happens, then another. Past events were points on the line that could not be retraced. Every moment extended the line a bit further into the future.

But all of a sudden, Cheesy’s line had warped. It had split in two and bulged out, like an aneurysm. The bulge was overtaking the whole line. It was growing and stretching. Cheesy’s line was turning into a sphere.

Cheesy couldn’t be sure if the sphere was a sign of sickness or of health. Unrelated events in her life were becoming connected. Events from the past suddenly mattered in the present again. Everything was becoming unified – not coherent yet, but unified.

What’s more is that Cheesy was beginning to see that other people were spheres, too. People were not sequences of actions and attitudes. People did not consist of Side A and Side B, which could be flipped over like a cassette tape. People had infinite sides, kind of like a sphere. But to describe a sphere as having “sides” is misleading. It’s just a big blob where everything is interconnected. And people are like that. Cheesy realized you can’t selectively speak to one “side” of a person, which is what she had been doing all along. If you say something to a person, your voice reverberates throughout their whole sphere.

As a sphere, and not as a line, Cheesy realized she had always been just “one” person bouncing through the world. There was no divide between who she was ten years ago and who she would be in another ten. Actions, emotions, and thoughts were inextricably connected. You can change the course of your sphere’s roll, you can change the rhythm of its bounce. But the substance of the sphere comes from years of acting, emoting, and thinking. You can’t just toss your sphere away for a new one. Cheesy was essentially abandoning an existentialist view of human nature, in which we have no essence and are redefined continuously by the flow of our actions.

Now Cheesy was a bit behind. While everyone else had had plenty of time to get to know their spheres, Cheesy had only just discovered hers. In fact it had pretty much exploded in her face. She realized she could no longer “write off” events from other parts of her life. She couldn’t ignore things she’d said or opinions she’d had. She realized that the linear/existentialist view of life is a self-protection mechanism. If you say or do something that you’re not happy with, you can just write it off as a point on the line that you’ve already passed. You can’t change it, so forget it and move on. When you live in a sphere, everything you’ve done rolls back into your face at some point. There is no choice but to see and embrace everything. To Cheesy it was overwhelming.

Cheesy believed that many women live in a line, because they think it’s the only way to be strong and independent. Society says, “Strong women move on. Strong women push forward.” Every time a woman admits she’s hurt, she admits her weakness. She reveals herself as a sensitive, driveling stereotype who can’t accept that what’s done is done. The modern “strong woman” sees re-encounters with the past as a sign that she isn’t doing her job well. She opts for a linear life, where she able to run away from her demons instead of with them. Sure, she moves forward. But she doesn’t always move on.

Linear living perpetuates shame. Suppose Lady gets hurt. (Duh. Even REM knows that everybody hurts sometimes.) A strong woman is supposed to “cope.” So Lady feels ashamed at her pain. She also feels ashamed at the continuity of her pain, since a strong woman “moves on.” She hides the pain to maintain the strong-woman image. But then Lady feels ashamed that she’s lying to herself. And she’s ashamed that she’s ashamed, because a strong woman is “confident.” She can’t go back and deal with things, since she is now “moving forward.” Indeed Lady has moved forward straight into the jaws of self-loathing.

Cheesy’s friend once worked in a women’s shelter. There she’d learned what strength and independence are really about: overcoming shame by becoming genuine. Cheesy realized that linear living was not the way to go. Only in a sphere can one connect with oneself and confront oneself. Only spheres can bounce back. Cheesy admired the incredible bravery of men and women who lived in spheres. In the end, seeing spheres was probably a sign of health.

………………………………

Cheesy feels uncomfortable writing acknowledgements, first because each person who inspires her deserves an homage and not just a crappy list-mention, second because she fears accusations of favouritism, and third because it’s totally pretentious to write acknowledgements for our blog. But to honour a special request, our friend Emma got the ball rolling by introducing us to the following lecture about vulnerability: www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_on_vulnerability.html. By the way, whoever TED is, Cheesy and I are love-stricken. Though we intend to guard him jealously until our dying day, you can get to know him better through the link at the top of this blog page.

Month 14.4. Do you know the muffin man?

Let N be North American, let K be the desire to acquire knowledge. Let N and K be properties of individuals x, y, …. Then,

∀x[(N(x) →K(x)) ∧ ∃x(∼N(x) ∧∼K(x))]

∀x [(∼K(x) →∼N(x)) ∧ ∃x(∼N(x) ∧∼K(x))] By contrapositivity

∀x [(∼K(x) →∼N(x)) ∧ ∃x(∼(N(x) ∨K(x)))] By De Morgan’s law

Wait, you mean you’re not following? Didn’t you read the post-scriptum on my last blog entry?

Ahahahaha fooled you!

Ok I’ll proceed in a non-logical way. No wait, that’s not what I meant. Damn, now do you see? Normal language just isn’t mathematical enough. (I’ll also use the inadequacy of language as an excuse for my blurring the lines between the terms “American” and “North American” in the following paragraphs. I don’t mean to include Mexicans though.)

To the point. I’m discovering that the U.S. is way more knowledge-based than Europe. Knowledge is of fundamental value to North Americans. I’d go so far as to say that knowledge is the fundamental value of North Americans.

Americans are attached to the media like no other society. Books, magazines, newspapers, radio, internet, television… we gobble up whatever will give us a tidbit more of knowledge. We even use Facebook as a source of information.

Americans spend millions on education, which is seen as the main producer of knowledge. Not only do we want schooling, we want the best schooling. We each want to be the best and brightest students. We want to flaunt our good grades and scholarships. We feel genuine shame when our classmates beat us. We see a direct link between how knowledgeable we are and how valuable we are to society.

Knowledge is treated as a product within the education system – we pay a pretty penny for it, and the competition to get it is tough. But our quest for knowledge takes place outside of school, too. People hang out in libraries and museums. Public lectures, like TED or the MIT open courses, are becoming popular. The news is broadcast on screens in metro stations. Wifi is available almost everywhere. (I commented on that in an earlier blog, and it still amazes me. Wifi – on a bus. I mean, wow.) We spend a huge portion of our day just getting updated.

The economy thrives on our thirst for knowledge. Millions of jobs have the sole purpose of acquiring and spreading knowledge. We have information technology specialists. Academic researchers. Market analysts. Even the call center guy who phones you in the middle of dinner to take a survey – he just wants a bit more knowledge about you.

The importance of knowledge reveals itself on even more intimate levels. Your friends are determined by how much you know, how well, and about what. Sometimes it doesn’t even matter whether two personalities click. If you have discussions in which you share information that you both value, then you’re friends.

Europeans aren’t quite so hungry for knowledge. Compared to Americans, Europeans have a higher proportion of time spent talking about issues to time spent learning about issues. Shared activities and personality traits determine friendships more than shared knowledge. Europeans define themselves less by what they know than Americans do. Europe has fewer research jobs. There’s definitely less Wifi access.

I guess I’m making yet another unsubstantiated generalization about Europe vs. North America. But honestly, I’m getting a bit tired of the North American tenet that you can’t say anything unless you have the numbers, facts, and citations to back it up. This blog entry is an example of what’s called an opinion. Amazingly, opinions are things you can have without any mathematical justification.

*

The next question is why Americans are so concerned with being knowledgeable. My hunch is that something even bigger underlies our quest for knowledge: self-improvement. Given that we value knowledge, it’s natural that we try to get it. To acquire knowledge is to better yourself as a human being. So really, knowledge is just a tool for improving ourselves, which is our real desire. I’m even going to say that Europeans are less focused on self-betterment than Americans. That could explain why Europeans are also less focused on knowledge acquisition.

The final question: is it a good thing to want to improve ourselves so badly? I know many of you will outright say, “Of course.” But tying back to what I’ve said in earlier blog entries, obsession with self-improvement is an indication of dissatisfaction with oneself. You only achieve inner peace once you learn to love and accept yourself for who you are. Maybe our value of knowledge is taking away from our ability to value ourselves independently of our knowledge. Maybe that’s why North America is becoming so religious – God offers assurance that we are valuable even if we got rejected from grad school, even if we’ve never read Dante, even if we don’t understand what’s going on in the Middle East.

North Americans are way harder on themselves than Europeans. It would be interesting to see if there’s a correlation between how driven one is to improve oneself and one’s belief in God. Germany, taken to be one of the most driven societies in Europe, is also one of the most religious. What we make in being so driven, we lose in self-esteem, and what we lose in self-esteem, we make up in God.

Just a thought.

No wait, I got more. Our concern for self-improvement shows that happiness is not a priority value in North America – it’s valuable only in so far as it results from self-improvement. Consider a guy who says, “I ought to lose weight.” His goal is self-improvement through weight loss. He could have opted for a different goal: happiness through self-acceptance and eating whatever the hell he wants. The fact that he sticks to his original goal – even after years of never achieving it – shows that he has prioritized self-improvement above happiness. Or, he values the happiness gained through self-improvement above than the happiness gained through self-acceptance. Maybe Americans and Europeans have the same values, e.g. self-improvement and happiness – they just prioritize their values differently.

(For the phonologists amongst you – it’s optimization in ethics!)

Wait there’s still more. If the dude still doesn’t lose weight after many years, doesn’t that show that he’s valuing happiness through self-acceptance above self-improvement? Well, now it’s a question of whether our values are revealed by our intentions or by our actions. Kant says our intentions. Cheesy says this is exactly why I nixed the B.A. in Philosophy. One question just leads to another, and another, and another….

Wait I got more! Haha fooled you again.

Month 14.3. Math = God.

Has anyone ever noticed the uncanny similarity between God and mathematics?

As physicist David Deutsch puts it, humans explain the seen with the unseen. We posit unobservable explanations for things that we observe but do not understand. The logic is simple: if something happens, but we cannot see why, then the reason it happens must be something unseen.

Two comments. First, the logic depends on the assumption that events have explanations. There is no proof of such an assumption. Why should there be a reason for the change of seasons? Why did people ever even ask themselves why things fall down instead of up? The fact that humans have always assumed a reason for things shows our fundamental attachment to determinism. We demand explanations. (My next blog will give the scoop on our hunger for knowledge).

Second, it’s amazing how much power we assign to the unseen causes of things. God is huge. He doesn’t just explain why there is day and night. He explains why we wear clothes, why we speak different languages and why we have a sense of morality. God is an efficient concoction/entity (depending on your beliefs) – we get the answers to everything all in one. Bada-bing, bada-boom.

For non-believers, it’s easy to laugh and say, “God’s ability to explain everything is just further proof that he can’t possibly exist.” But hold on a sec. Non-believers have their own powerful, unseen explanations for things. Nowadays the most popular replacement for God is mathematics.

Mathematics is huge, maybe as huge as God. Mathematics is used everywhere to account for everything. Math is taken as the reason why one theory is right and another is wrong. And yet no one “observes” math. We observe only what we interpret as outcomes of the math – just like religious people interpret phenomena as being the works of God.

Math is a powerful authority despite its mysteriousness. Much of our scientific knowledge was accepted only because the math works. Einstein’s relativity is like that. Relativity has observable effects, but nobody’s ever observed it in action. Relativity is accepted because the numbers crunch correctly. If the math works, then of course relativity has to be true. Voila! A few equations explain a whole slew of phenomena, from GPS technology to electromagnetism.

Even psychology is bending knee to mathematics. Human behaviour is explained away by statistics and probability. Psychologists don’t discuss what thought processes are like. They conduct experiments, trace neural connections, plot correlations, and measure doses. As in physics, math has the final say. If the numbers show it, the theory is true.

Mathematics is becoming the modern God. It’s creeping in everywhere. It’s used blindly as a justification for why things are the way they are. If two theories are batting heads, we turn to math to determine which is right. You argue, “Well yeah, but that’s because mathematics is true, it’s universal. Math is never wrong – if there’s a problem, it’s because people are following the wrong steps or applying a principle incorrectly.” And the response? That’s exactly what people have been saying for millennia, if you just replace the word “math” with “God.”

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P.S. For other nerds of logic and language: ever notice how when you say “A is B” you’re not really asserting equality? When we say ‘A is B,’ we usually mean “A doesn’t really exist on its own, it’s just another way of saying B.” Like when I say, “Math is God,” I’m making an assertion about math, not God. If I’d said, “God is math” then I’d be making an assertion about God – namely, that he isn’t really anything other than math. Our language thus fails to replicate mathematics. The verb “is” is not equivalent to equality, as the semanticists will tell us. That’s why logic is cool – it’s the smooth union of language and math. So from now on, all my blog entries will be written in the format of logic.

QED

Month 14.2. Through Thick and Through Thin: An Ode to Yogurt.

This blog entry is written for you. Yes, you. It dawned on me that people really like to read about food. (I know I'm basically the last person on earth to realize this. Personally, when I read about food it makes me want to eat, so I stop reading to go eat. Therefore I concluded that writing about food is self-defeating if you want people to actually read what you're writing.) To keep my readers interested, I'll write about food today. I guess that makes this blog entry ultimately for me, since it's in my interest to keep you interested. Oh well, Kant sue me.

But this entry is not just about any old kind of food! Heavens no! It's about practically the best food ever invented. I say "invented" because there are arguably better non-man-made foods, like mangoes. I say "practically" because there are close runners-up, like muffins. When I was in high school I joked that if I ever wrote an autobiography, I'd call it "Mangoes and Muffins." Now that I'm older, I'm wiser by exactly one word: yogurt.

During my travels, I've come across all kinds of yogurt. But to this day, the most exquisite yogurt I've tasted was right at home in Montreal. I worked in a little café run by a Romanian couple. They bought this enormous tub of 10% yogurt to make parfaits with. I made the parfaits and decided to try one for myself. I nearly fainted. My boss was looking at me, and he asked, "…Are you ok?" And now I have secret altars throughout the house where I can worship yogurt whenever a burst of faith graces me.

Yogurt has been around for about 2000 years. One of the earliest documentations is from the middle ages. The author reports it as a popular food amongst Turkish nomads. Yogurt gradually made its way from the Middle East into Europe. In the 1800's, it was used as a cleaning agent (and is still used today as a hair conditioner in India). But it was only well into the 20^th-century that yogurt entered the diets of westerners. The typical yogurt cups now found in North American grocery stores go back 60 years to a Czech guy who combined yogurt with jam.

True to the history, I ate lots of yogurt in Turkey. In Istanbul, they like their yogurt really thick. I spread it like butter over my toast. With Nutella or hazelnut butter, yogurt toast is heaven. But the Turks do all kinds of things with yogurt. They blob it over their salads or eat it as a side-order with a sprinkle of dried parsley and chili. The most popular yogurt concoction is ayran. Fill a cup half-way with yogurt, top it off with water, add a generous sprinkle of salt, shake or stir, and enjoy. Best to drink it with kebab; goes well with burgers too.

The Balkans are also yogurt-friendly, owing to centuries of Ottoman rule. The first researcher of the chemistry of yogurt was indeed Bulgarian. But thick yogurt isn't easy to find in Eastern Europe. To Croatians, yogurt is something like milk. They share the same thinness and are served in the same plastic bottles. You can pour it over your cereal. In Serbia yogurt is a drink too – usually paired with burek, a stuffed pastry also originating in Turkey.

The default yogurt in Turkey and the Balkans is plain. In Turkey, the selection of sweetened yogurts is very limited. The whole notion of sugary, dessert-like yogurt seems to be North American. I got some strange looks in Macedonia when I combined yogurt and jam (I mean, right? If a Czech guy can do it, so can I. That's all fruit-on-the-bottom is, anyway). I remember seeing coffee and chocolate yogurt in Montreal, with about 6% fat, under the label "Mediterranean tradition." Well I may not have seen the whole Mediterranean, but I have yet to see 6% yogurt, and yet to see yogurt combined with anything more exotic than peaches. It turns out that high-fat yogurt was developed in North America. (It also turns out that the jelliness of North American yogurt comes from the addition of pectin, which explains why Balkan yogurt is so much thinner.)

The whole idea that yogurt is a "perfect" food also seems restricted to North America. Nobody tries to sell you on probiotics or bacteria over here. It's true that yogurt was supposedly used to cure the French King Francis I of diarrhea, way back in the day. The Bulgarian researcher mentioned above speculated that yogurt was responsible for the longevity of Bulgarians. Europeans accept the healthiness of yogurt, but without dwelling on it or advertising it. So it's ironic that the regions that most promote yogurt as a health food are the ones that add the most sugar and fat to it.

I miss being able to spread yogurt over toast, but it's also nice to pour yogurt over my cereal like milk. Yogurt is versatile, delicious, healthy, cheap, cultural, and attractive. Whatever its form and wherever its origins, yogurt is yo-great.

Month 14.1. Cheesy dreams of Africa.

Cheesy's new year's resolution was to try something different: hibernation. In January, she vanished from the waking world. With every slow breath, she lulled the sun back a little closer. By February she had entered an REM phase. Cheesy slept…

…and dreamed of Africa. She dreamed of a village near Kampala, the capital of Uganda. She dreamed she was her friend Dew, who in real life had visited Uganda during the holidays. In the dream, Dew/Cheesy went to Uganda to visit her European friend Birth. Birth was living with a family in the village. Dew stayed with them for one month.

Dew's experiences nearly shook Cheesy out of hibernation back into the real world. But sometimes we need dreams to crystallize our experiences. So Cheesy dreamed, and Dew lived.

Dew first arrived in Kampala, a chaotic city in which cars drove on whatever side of the street they fancied. Birth was waiting for her there. Together they went to the village where Birth was living. Dew was greeted by flocks of children screaming, "Musunu how are you!" "Musunu" was the Lugandan word for "white person," and "How are you" was the only English phrase the kids knew. They reached out at her, yelling and trying to grab her blue eyes. This greeting would happen to Dew every day for an entire month.

Dew explained she was from Portugal. But to the villagers, anything outside of Africa was America. They showed a tremendous amount of concern for Dew the American. They were always asking about her about her family, always wanting to know that everyone was healthy and happy. Dew was struck by how much the villagers smiled.

The villagers had almost nothing. Each person had one shirt and one skirt. No shoes. They ate one meal per day: boiled water mixed with flavouring. The water was boiled over a bonfire outside. The water had to be carried to the village from a well a fifty-minute walk away. The well was also the only spot villagers could clean themselves. Cleaning consisted of splashing some water over one's body.

A full eighty percent of the population had AIDS. Children would use knives to carve out parasites living under their nails, then hand the knife over for the next child to use. Dew was horrified. She tried to explain that sharing blood this way could spread disease. But the villagers were not afraid of AIDS. To them, it was a part of life, just some thing that most people had, some basic and unchangeable condition. The concept of prevention was not in their minds.

One child had a birthday during Dew's stay. Dew and Birth went to Kampala to buy the child a birthday cake. When they returned to the village and presented the cake, the child panicked. She had never seen a cake. None of the children had ever eaten any kind of sweet. The child trembled and stuttered. When the other children tried the sweets, they simply erupted with excitement. But they never fought over the sweets, never got greedy for more. They just screamed, laughed, and shook.

The villagers lived fully in the present. The future was not on their minds. They worshipped God and family. Dew believed it was faith keeping them alive – flavoured water and shared knives certainly weren't doing it. Maybe more concern for the future would lead to a reduction of AIDS in Uganda. But it might also lead to the disintegration of the family and of the perfect happiness they shared. The future was full of personal ambition, greener grass, and greed.

Not to say the Africans knew no greed. While the villagers lived and shared, like a massive creature more than a group of individuals, others took everything they could get. Such greed might also have been a symptom of living in the present: if one believed that one's community could grow stronger and better in the future, one would try to help. If everyone was dying under 50, one would take the cake and eat it too.

The case in point was Birth's supervisor. He was receiving money from the EU. The money was intended to support Birth during her volunteer stay. Birth never saw the money. She was living off her own savings. The supervisor kept the money for himself. He lived in his own apartment in Kampala. He dressed in pants like a white person. When he came to the village to visit his family, everyone would eat on the floor with their hands while he sat in a chair eating with a fork. Instead of asking him for money, his family treated him with reverence.

By western standards, Uganda was dirt cheap. For Christmas, Birth and Dew made food baskets for each family in the village. The baskets contained basics like rice and sugar. The baskets were worth a small fortune to each family, but they cost Birth and Dew only 5€. One girl had a tumour near her collarbone that had swollen to the size of a cantaloupe. When Dew asked her why she didn't go see a doctor, the girl answered that she didn't have the one euro necessary to take a taxi to the city. Dew gave her the euro, and later the 30€ necessary to have the tumour removed.

Dew's month was fantastic and, well, dream-like. Africa was like a giant canvas full of bright colours splashed randomly about. But eventually the dream faded. The black and white seeped back in, the splotches and streaks reorganized themselves into recognizable shapes. Dew returned to the airport and Cheesy shifted in her bed. They cried and cried. It had been the happiest, most beautiful month of their lives.