My Lover

I think I used to write poetry in metaphor,
Because I did not know how to say what I meant.
It’s easy to hide your feelings
Behind roses and storms,
Underneath hyperboles and references.

Now, I look at my lover and I see her eyes,
Just her eyes, and that word is enough.
I brush my hands through her hair,
I smell her smell, and the perfumes of Arabia
Pale before the simple reality of my sensual experience.

I will strive to write more plainly, now,
And maybe it will be better,
And maybe it will be worse;
But it will certainly be more honest, good and bad,
And less afraid of how I feel.

Writing for Pleasure

I’ve been writing slowly, but consistently, over the last year. I don’t manage to write every night, and too often a whole week goes by when I haven’t sat down with Scrivener and put fingers to keyboard for pleasure. And yet, it has become a good habit. I sit down, I write words. I close the app and go to bed knowing that I have made some infinitesimal progress on the novel.

It started out as work. My good friend Max gave me one piece of advice when I started on my novel – write every day. Like I’ve said, I don’t exactly write every day, and yet, over the many days I have written, I think I am beginning to understand the spirit of Max’s advice. Make writing a habit.

It wasn’t pleasant at first. I would sit down, and no words would come out. I started forcing words to come out, and they were bad. I wrote things like “And then he did this and it was awesome” just as shorthand to fill in with actual prose, later. Some nights, I spent my half hour / hour deleting what I’d written the previous night. Some nights I would be tired and write complete gibberish, little bits of my subconscious brain on the edge of sleep.

It got better. I am still surprised by how, writing at the smallest scale possible, one character, one word, one sentence, one scene at a time, I started seeing bigger patterns in my novel. Plot threads that I had agonized over resolving fell into place naturally. Now, when I sit down to write, I know that I am going to make progress, even if the total word count goes down (or, alternatively, even if what I add ends up being unusable at the end of the day). Writing in pieces has led to an emergent process of understanding my novel as a whole, of seeing the world that I am building – a world not altogether different from ours, and yet fundamentally new (again, I have to cf a great post by Max, on world-building).

Today something great happened – I am sitting on a train, kinda bored, and I realize I want to write. Writing is a fun thing that I want to do, right now. I am not struck by inspiration, I am not going to madly pen down the idea for some new project – I just want to get some words on screen. I realize, now, that secretly I’ve been a little scared of writing, because I’ve been scared of failing. What if I open up Scrivener, and then I have no idea what to do? What if I look at the page and all my ideas are terrible? Well, I think I’ve come to peace with that. I will write lots of terrible things down. I will write some good things down. And then I will rewrite the terrible ones to make them better, and so on, until I have a novel-sized chunk of pieces that I am satisfied with. And then comes the next step, which is still far away, but not quite so impossible-seeming anymore

A Brief Note on Laziness

This is less of a fully-articulated post and more a note.

I am pretty sure everybody has problems with laziness. We all know the days that get “wasted” browsing random things on the Internet, wandering aimlessly around our workplace (for me, my home office), playing video games instead of eating dinner. I’ve spent my share of time a) having these days, then b) blaming myself for having these days, wasting even more time on guilt. In graduate school, this used to be a real problem. I’m happy to say I’ve gotten over it, though, with the help of three key principles:

1. Forgive. Forgive myself for having a lazy day. Know that they are normal, and happen to everyone.

2. Check in. Lazy days can happen for many reasons. Sometimes, my body (including my brain!) just needs to recharge. This happens pretty regularly for me, and I know it’s not a problem. Sometimes I’m actually sick, but don’t know it yet. In that case, it’s very important have lots of fluids, rest, eat well. A day I spend in recuperation can often ward off a much longer illness. Other times yet, I’re depressed or upset about something, and it’s eating away at me and making me not want to do anything. In that case, I try to reach out to my loved ones and ask for help.

3. Get up. Of course, one lazy day can lead to another and start a bad cycle. The best way to prevent that is to break the cycle. I dig out an old project. I do an errand. I go outside. I change my work environment. All these things help in the gray areas between Something Wrong and Just Resting.

Right now, I am getting over my lazy day by writing a blog post about not being lazy. Kind of meta, I guess Ah well. Time to go work!

Re: O’Reilly’s Solving the Wanamaker Problem for Health Care

The O’reilly Radar has recently come out with an excellent article about big data and healthcare. The central point of the article is, simply, that we would benefit from a vastly improved health care system if we leverage big data and big data analytics developed over the last decade by large IT companies like Google.

I applaud the Radar for writing a comprehensive article that looks at many aspects of our health care system today, and the many ways that big data can help. However, the scientist in me wishes to point out a number of major inaccuracies in this article, dangerous, as most inaccuracies are, not for the specifics they get wrong, but for the larger, erroneous picture they paint.

First of all, the authors are simply wrong to say “Eventually, we’ll be able to treat 100% of the patients 100% of the time, precisely because we realize that each patient presents a unique problem.” Each patient does present a unique problem, but we do not necessarily know its solution. The compatibility between patient and treatment is determined by an immense number of variables, everything from their gene sequence to what they had for lunch today. At best, we can make probabilistic statements that treatment T will work on patient N with probability P, where P is always < 100%. I will agree that P should go up over time as we learn to profile patients more accurately, but one of the central maxims of machine learning, which the authors invoke several times in the article, is (roughly) that it is impossible to predict a system's behavior with complete certainty without describing it in its entirety. For as long as we cannot do the latter (impossible not only computationally, but also for a host of social and psychological reasons), we cannot hope to do the former.

Secondly, the authors' statement that "with enough data, we can get from correlation to causation" is a manifestation of a dangerous misunderstanding of big data. Data can never explain causation without theory. We can have excellent data about the relationship between a particular set of inputs (genotype, phenotype, environment) and a particular set of outcomes (longevity, treatment effectiveness), but that relationship always remains at the level of correlation or variance-explanation, not causation. For example, let's say we found out that all people over 5'7" benefit from a certain cancer treatment, while all those with a height of 5'7" or less do not benefit from it. An excellent statistical relationship – but it doesn't answer the fundamental question: what is it about height that is conducive to treatment effectiveness in this context? Without theory, we cannot answer that question and risk making erroneous conclusions (often based on incomplete or corrupted data). For example, it might turn out that in our dataset, height correlates perfectly with some gene that we forgot to include in our model – but that in the wider population, the correlation is far below 1.0. We release the treatment to tall people, and find out that it's only effective in 80% of patients. With theory, we can look for more likely explanations of the statistical relationship, and build models that actually explain the underlying cause of effective treatment.

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly to me as a sociologist, the authors mention the word "privacy" only once in this article, all the while talking about breaking down silos and combining records. Privacy is not just about preventing scandals or avoiding horrible worst-case scenarios like misuse of information. It is about respecting all parties involved, and is a necessary human component of any good health care system. There is again a wide misconception in the world of big data analytics that privacy is just about satisfying some abstract set of requirements, a set of cryptographic algorithms and best practices that ensure The Bad People don't get access to some subset of data. Privacy is far more than that – it is about treating the patient, the doctor, the insurance agent as people with rights and agencies, not as machines or variables. My colleague Stephen Purpura and his coauthors wrote a brilliant satire of the way we easily forget about privacy in the name of abstraction when designing precisely the kinds of systems O’Reilly et al. discuss. System designers so often blissfully assume that “patients are willing” to endure living in a nightmarish big-brother-like system in the name of a 5% increase in treatment effectiveness, all the while forgetting to ask the patients themselves.

To give an illustration of the kind of world Tim O’Reilly and the other article writers push for, I would like to borrow a thought exercise from another colleague of mine, Marc Smith: imagine you’re at a cocktail party. Somebody offers you a glass of wine. You’re about to pick it up, when your phone buzzes.

“Dear patient,” it informs you in a dry text message, “the optical sensor on your glasses has just relayed information that you are 95% likely to drink another glass of wine tonight. This will be your third glass of wine this evening. We predict that the lasting damage to your liver will decrease life expectancy by 1.2 years. If you do drink this wine, we will be forced to notify your insurance company, which will raise your monthly payment by $33.56 to reflect the long-term cost of treatment for your cirrhosis five years down the road.”

Is it a more efficient world, with fewer deaths and sickness? Absolutely. Is it terrifying? I think so. To close, while I again applaud Tim O’Reilly and his colleagues for writing their piece, I urge the writers (and their readers) to consider the implications of a big-data vision for health care. Without a careful and humanist approach to the overall system of patients, physicians, and providers we risk to trade cost effectiveness and quality of care for the human element of Do No Harm.

I Get Knocked Down

(preface – this is a pretty abstract post. If I have time, I will follow on with a more specific one about sexism, which is an issue I’ve had to struggle with as I’ve learned about privilege.)

It’s been about a year and a half since I’ve started to learn about gender, sexuality, and the intersections of privilege. It has not been an easy trip. I would have never made it this far without my friends. Even with their help, I’ve stopped and stumbled many times. The hard part was getting up every single time, not sinking back down, not just giving up and letting the world go on as it is.

It is hard to be aware of your privilege. It is impossible to go through life without ever saying or doing anything racist, sexist, ableist, etc. When you do, it’s sometimes hard to realize you did anything wrong. The problem with a lot of prejudiced messages is that they’re so deeply ingrained in us, we simply aren’t aware of their meaning. Worse, they’re a part of our personal safety net, the little web of tacit assumptions and convenient shortcuts we weave to make sense of the world. Start tugging at one part of that web, and the whole thing shakes, makes us uneasy, unhappy.

Even when you realize you did something wrong, it can be difficult to figure out what to do next. In some cases, you say sorry and move on. In other cases, you correct yourself. In almost all cases, it’s nice to apologize, listen to the offended party, and try to change your behavior. And yet, people rush around and forget and don’t take the time to learn from their mistakes – I still do, at any rate.

Hardest of all may be cases where there’s nobody there to apologize to. You can think racist thoughts all you want, right? You can make that anonymous comment on the Internet, or watch that slightly sketchy porn film by yourself, and you’re not really hurting anyone, so how can it be bad? Changing my own thoughts, my own perceptions of the world with nobody telling me, This is Wrong, This is Right, not even implicitly, has been one of the hardest lessons to learn in the past year.

And yet, it’s all worth it. I’m not writing this post to talk about how hard my life is (that would be, in fact, precisely the wrong thing to write) – I’m writing to say why I have consistently not picked the path of least resistance. It’s not about being able to Do Good things (though that’s definitely a bonus), it’s not about being self-righteous or Earning More Points than the next person. It just feels good to be aware, to be mindful, to be a little humble for a change. In this world where we spend so much time chasing after abstract goals that have nothing to do with people – the paycheck, the diploma, the stock option – the feeling of actually relating to other living, breathing human beings, with their awesome differences and their awesome similarities, is enough to put a smile on my face. Enough to write about and share with the world and maybe encourage someone else to do the same.

What Motivates Me

For one reason or another, these past few weeks have been difficult for me; there’s been a lot of work, some personal stress, and just a lot of late nights, including this one. It’s winter, now, and that doesn’t help my mood either. When I get really down, I start thinking about the deep, core things that make me put one foot in front of the other, as it were.

My core motivation used to be personal achievement. It’s funny how much of my life I spent thinking, I need to do X to get Y. I need to get good grades to get into a good school. I need to get into a good school so I can get into a good grad school. I need to get into a good grad school so I can become a big time academic. Personal achievement is not such a deep motivation any more. I may or may not become a big time academic, but that is my choice to make, not a choice forced on me from outside.

For some time, my core motivation were attachment and belonging. I do like people, I like friends, I like being in a relationship. For the five years I spent in grad school, I used to get very hung up over being alone. Now, I still get lonely sometimes, but I am blessed to have lovely friends nearby, and I no longer chase after company, no matter how much I think I might enjoy it. Not-chasing has been a big change for me, but that’s for another post.

What remains in absence of these motivations? Plenty, of course: wanting to do well at work; scientific discovery; getting better at aikido. These are smaller motivations. There is a big motivation still around, and it’s helping people. Not just specific, individual people; helping ALL the people (like cleaning ALL the things). Helping us be healthier, and happier. Helping us reach for the stars, and not kill ourselves in our folly. Helping us take the next step.

I think that we, the entire human race, are doing some great things. We’ve defeated diseases; split the atom; gone to space; we’ve fought for, and in some cases, got the basic rights of humanity – liberty, happiness. The future’s pretty sunny seen from the perspective of a privileged white male in a Western economy.

But there’s a lot more work to be done. We often let ignorance, and fear, get the best of us. We overlook the needs of the whole – the human race, Earth – to cater to the needs of an infinitesimal few. We’ve created horrible weapons that can destroy us at any moment. We can’t just magic our way out of these problems. There’s no super pill, no perfect religion, no Infinity Engine that will take care of them. It will take us all – scientists, writers, construction workers, secretaries, football players, people of every gender, age, and race – to walk the narrow path to becoming a solar, or galactic, civilization without exploding. I would like to help the human race walk that path.

I don’t claim to have any special skills to do so. I think I can help with games and writing and social media just as well as the next person can with her set of skills. It’s just what motivates me, what keeps me working the long hours and not getting depressed on cold wintry days. Maybe, something good will come of this motivation one day

Birthday Post

It is my birthday for about 10 more minutes. I had a good day. I am tired, so this should be a nice short post.

Friends and loved ones are important. They make birthdays better because they care. They care with gifts, and good food, and kind words. They care just by being there, and sometimes, that’s all you need.

Relaxing is important. Doing things and accomplishing things and being high-powered is great, but taking a Day Off every once in a while is just great. It helps reset and relax the mind, and prepares you for hard days to come. Also, it’s a great way to celebrate!

And to cap it all off with a Zen statement, the only way to become truly at peace with yourself is to become truly attuned to what others are saying about you.

Tom Harper’s Book of Secrets, a Review (Part Two)

(This post contains spoilers for Tom Harper’s Book of Secrets an for Holy Blood, Holy Grail. You have been warned!)

I just finished Tom Harper’s Book of Secrets, which I enjoyed a good amount. I highly recommend the book to any printing / bookmaking geeks, it features an interesting (though mostly fictional) account of Gutenberg’s life and cross-cuts it with a modern-day mystery adventure through Europe. In this post, however, I’d like to talk about two aspects of the book that irked me, and that strike me as part of a larger pattern of contemporary historical mysteries. These are, the gender roles in the book and the persistence of a Da-Vinci-Code-esque imagery of Dark Secrets Held By The Church. I talked about gender roles in my last post, so this one is going to be about the Da Vinci Code imagery.

To put it simply – Book of Secrets is an interesting historical fiction about Gutenberg, coupled with an exciting journey of historical reconstruction through Western Europe, on top of which is grafted a mostly unnecessary historical mystery plot. By unnecessary here, I mean that the plot has little value or consequence for the book as a whole. In the end, the Devil’s Library has burned to the ground, its secrets gone forever. The budding relationship between Nick and Emily is based on the hardships they endured together, and on a common enjoyment of reconstruction and old things, not on some Secret they share. The secret bestiary is also gone, and ultimately much more important as a symbol of the hurt, complicated relationship between Kaspar, Johann, Aeneas and their world, than as some dark secret the Church wants to keep. No one in the contemporary plotline seems to recognize the true significance of the diary, nor could they – the characters simply don’t have the relevant context. So why is it in there?

In the years since the publication of Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln’s Holy Blood, Holy Grail, and (more recently) Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code, there has been a plethora of historical mystery novels with this same general theme. The Church has Some Terrible Secret they wish to keep so. Plucky young heroes are, through happenstance, thrust into the middle of a plot to uncover this secret. In the climactic resolution of said novels, however, we often find the secret is either inconsequential or not a secret at all. This let-down is rooted, in my opinion, in the simplicity of Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln’s original mystery… (SPOILERS) Christ was human, possibly married and had kids, and descendants of those kids survive to this day. This may be a very controversial statement to some Christians, but there’s nothing more there. All subsequent attempts to harp on the same theme either end up repeating it, coming up with some secret that has nothing to do with Christianity, or (as is the case with Book of Secrets) never revealing the secret in the end.

The Ultimate Answer that all these books try to circle around was penned by Umberto Eco, in Foucault’s Pendulum. Towards the end of the book, as the main character gets more and more bogged down in the world of mysteries, his wife tells him, his secrets lie in the human body and in the world around us. Our bodies have two legs and two arms, so we assign significance to the number two; we love and hate and hurt and rejoice and so we wrap those feelings up in fancy packaging and spend years looking for the answers that are right in front of our noses. Our body, our human experience, is the true book of secrets. We may enjoy trying on all the fancy symbolic wrappers, but in the end, I would guess, we’ll come back to the naked form and enjoy it all the more.

Tom Harper’s Book of Secrets, a Review (Part One)

(This post contains spoilers for Tom Harper’s Book of Secrets. You have been warned!)

I just finished Tom Harper’s Book of Secrets, which I enjoyed a good amount. I highly recommend the book to any printing / bookmaking geeks, it features an interesting (though mostly fictional) account of Gutenberg’s life and cross-cuts it with a modern-day mystery adventure through Europe. In this post, however, I’d like to talk about two aspects of the book that irked me, and that strike me as part of a larger pattern of contemporary historical mysteries. These are, the gender roles in the book and the persistence of a Da-Vinci-Code-esque imagery of Dark Secrets Held By The Church.

First, the gender roles. The protagonist is male, which remains the norm in the genre, a norm I dislike and do what I can to change. It’s not just the gender of the protagonist: the gender roles are pretty traditional, in a way that grates on me. There are two major characters in the contemporary plotline of the book who are women. Emily is the “positive” character who helps the protagonist. She is frequently passive (though occasionally awesome and competent) and gets sidelined towards the end of the book, even though, in some ways, her story is the more interesting one. Gillian is the “negative” character. She is an independent, strong woman who goes where she wants and does what she wants, but through the lens of the author and of the main character she appears “the wild woman, untamed and unknowable” – and her actions ultimately put her at odds with the party and the law. At the end of the book, she simply disappears, no longer a lover or a friend, but still an unsolved mystery.

The 15th century plotline in Secrets is even worse with respect to gender roles. Gutenberg himself is a major character, and homosexual; his homosexuality, however, is never anything more than a torment or a jealously guarded secret. I appreciate the fact that a gay man might find himself very much an outcast in 15th century Europe, but the Gutenberg sexuality arc features no progress until the resolution when Gutenberg claims he is cured of his “demon” by God after a particularly stressful night when he (temporarily) loses his friend Kaspar. This sort of statement makes me extremely uncomfortable. On its own, it is certainly possible for a person’s sexuality to change drastically after particularly stressful episodes. However, the way Harper chooses to portray Gutenberg’s sexuality has a very unpleasant “casting out the demon feel” that suggests (homo)sexuality is something that is at worst hidden deep and at best cured like a disease. Again, the social norms of Gutenberg’s time and place may have suggested a similar portrayal, but it is my experience that sexuality is an intensely personal matter. A character’s perception of their own sexuality may be tinged by the messages they get from social context, but it grows and changes as the character grows and changes, and (I would argue) never does it conform to any socially held view of sexuality.

This post has gotten a bit too long, so I will leave things here and talk about the Da Vinci Code and related matters in the next post!

Beautiful

Recently, I’ve started contributing to the awesome site Genderfork, which tries to be a safe, welcoming space for genderqueer, transgender and genderfluid folks, among others. I’m a Genderfork volunteer, and part of my volunteering is finding photos of genderqueer / transsexual people and reblogging them (with permission) . These photos are part celebrating gender diversity, part helping make Genderfork a welcoming place for anyone who doesn’t want to be binned into maleness / femaleness as a discrete, binary category.

Quick aside: I am going to be talking about gender in a non-binary way in this post, and for me that includes using gender-neutral pronouns. I realize that folks have differing opinions on these pronouns, and some people don’t like them at all. I totally respect that. These pronouns are how I choose to talk about non-binary genders now, and they may not fit for other people, or even for me in the future.

Putting up these photos is a) extremely rewarding, and feels very good, and also b) highly thought-provoking. When I search for photos to reblog online, I find myself thinking about gender, expression, and beauty. Beauty is such a loaded word that I don’t explicitly look for “beautiful” photos to post. However, more often than not, one of the criteria that will make me submit a photo for review is “this person is beautiful.” So of necessity I’ve been thinking about beauty and gender-fluidity a lot.

There is a social standard of beauty, especially female beauty, that other people have written volumes about so I won’t mention it much here. I only want to say that this standard is both highly unrealistic, in the sense that few, if any, actual people match it; and annoyingly persistent, in the sense that I find it burrowing into my head when I look at people. There’s an easy trap I sometimes fall into: when looking at gender-queer and gender-fluid and transsexual people, I catch myself judging them by socially normative, cis-sexual standards. I can look at a picture and say, “oh, ze is beautiful because there is this maleness that’s rugged and strong but also this femaleness that’s soft and curvy and they’re sort of together here.” But when I do that, it feels wrong.

What feels right, then? Well, it feels right when I don’t try to break down and analyze beauty in terms of gender and norm. The way ze wears stripy socks is beautiful. The way ze sticks hir hands awkwardly in hir pockets is beautiful. The way hir hair falls all over hir face is amazing, and so is the light in this picture. The smile, the skin, the pose, the eyes, all those things that people of any and all gender have and express themselves with, those make some inner beauty shine through. The sum result may be a fierce rejection of gender norms, or a fierce expression of the same, or anywhere in between.

I want to emphasize that I’m talking about a continuum here, not a binary acceptance/rejection of cis-sexual presentations, or even of what I internalize as cis-sexual ideas about beauty. To put it simply, some folk like to be cis-sexual. Some folk are trans-sexual, but like to present as cis-sexual. Some folk have trans days and cis days and days when they don’t want to present in any particular way, and all of that is totally cool. Also, I want to say that I’m talking primarily about visual stimuli, which offer only a narrow window into someone’s identity. I can’t *for sure* tell if a person is trans or cis or *anything* from looking at one photo; thinking that I can is equivalent to stereotyping. So, really, I’m sharing my impressions and ideas, but I’m aware that those impressions and ideas can be, and often are, wrong.

Still, I feel that even if I stumble on particulars, my general point is worth expressing: Genderqueer folk come through as genderqueer without having to build themselves out of normative-gender Lego bricks. They can throw out the whole set, or keep any part of it they want, and be beautiful all the same.