Month: February 2019

Like I said, it’s a struggle. I’ve fallen back into that habit of downloading information about the world into my brain each night and morning, time that could be spent sorting out what’s already in there. Mind your own business resonates now more than ever, in this age where everyone would be happy to help themselves to your attention. Increasingly, I’m questioning why I could tell you more about social and world issues that have little to do with me than I can about what’s been going on inside my mind and body. Isn’t it interesting??? said the boring human. In the game of evolution, attention must have been spent with more intention, literally in higher concentration. You need that shit to cross a log across a river, or escape a predator chasing you, or to hunt down the next meal. In between, we probably achieved the act of paying attention to nothing at all, a feat reserved these days for monks. Attention, then, must seem like what makes us feel more evolved than our evolutionary ancestors. We imagine them, in leopard skins and dragging clubs, with absolutely nothing going on in their brains. We then marvel at our contemporary minds which can scroll through dozens of stories about world affairs, politics, economies, celebrities, sciences, and listcicles, all while on the subway to work. So much happening in our brains! But all for what?

Evolved attention takes the form of legacy, recognition, reputation, fame, and influence – concepts that “less-evolved” creatures could care less for. We argue that without this kind of multi-generational memory, history is doomed to repeat itself. Let’s not let history repeat itself, said the evolved human, over his paleo meal.

Last night, one of the stories I downloaded into my brain was an analysis of my own generation, known as the millennials. It noted how we have evolved past trivial life goals of corner offices and high positions in arbitrary hierarchies, and instead seek to make impact on the world. Imagine billions of us, each trying to make an impact on the world. How does the planet bear it all? Is it better for me to leave a mark, or to leave no trace? Is it better for the earth for me to leave a mark, or to leave no trace?

Another story I downloaded into my brain last night was how a decades-old interview that John Wayne did with Playboy resurfaced on Twitter. In it, he made loads of racist and homophobic remarks, and while Wayne is no longer alive to reckon with his past, there were plenty of people on the internet to reckon with each other about whether the past was worth reckoning with on his behalf. The next story was about how the sailor soldier guy in that famous Life magazine cover kissing a nurse after WW2 ended was actually a depiction of a creeper who grabbed some random stranger and forced her to kiss him. The guy had just died, so he, too, could no longer reckon with his own past. But there were plenty of people on the internet to reckon with each other over whether it mattered whether what he did was wholesome or not, since the image had been remembered in our collective memory as a wholesome moment. And isn’t that what matters. Some argued that the world has gotten so picky and consumed with identity politics and the dark truth that we can’t even enjoy a myth that we’ve collectively misremembered. And isn’t that what we want to do anyway – live happily in our collective myths, believing that what we’re each doing has the potential to make such a deep impact that we will be remembered fondly for generations. And if the dark truths of our pasts surface, what does it matter as long as it happens after we’re too dead to notice?

Holy shit that ended dark! I’m fine, guys!

Okay, the reflective zen mode that I was in a month ago is definitely fading. Where starting my mornings off with a blank screen once seemed like an endless pasture of creative opportunities now feels like a diving board into a pool of alligators. It doesn’t help that I’ve been allowing the things that feed my reflective state dissipate as well. I’m starting to fill my head with podcasts about things I don’t care about, instead of letting my mind wander, again. I’m putting my phone away later into the night and reaching for it earlier in the mornings. Last night I did that thing where I checked my email before bed as a means to “relax,” got a jarring notification, and ended up in front of my computer for another hour balancing my finances. Mornings like this are what I mean when I talk about sitting in the backseat of my life. My time end up being given to the fastest, earliest, loudest bidder. But this is all completely under my control, which isn’t to say that it’s simple to overcome. Recognizing that things are under your control assume that control is something you’re practiced in wielding. When people say that “it’s all under your control,” I’m sure they imagine you as a Mary Poppins of the situation, where problems and solutions rise with the flick of a finger and neatly situate themselves where appropriate. But the truth is many of us have been raised not to be in control but to be disciplined, amenable, controllable. In many situations, recognizing that everything is “under my control” feels more like a child who was just handed the throne. What is it that I’m supposed to govern? And how? Simply because it’s supposed to be my domain doesn’t mean I know exactly what to do with it. If there’s anything that today’s world tells us, it’s that things being “all under your control” doesn’t mean that it’s best that way. Last month, I did feel a sense of intentful governance in all I did. Things seemed under my control, and my control was under my control. I leave for London tonight, and ironically these moments of jetsetting have become my opportunities to catch up with myself. Something about being forced to sit still for so many hours, with no responsibility aside from letting your chair get you from point A to B. Maybe it’s actually for the better, to let someone else drive for awhile.

Mid-February is the time when most New Year’s resolutions have dissolved. The gusto of the annual fresh start is dampened by the winter cold, and what was once considered a fresh start is now back to the same old grind. I’ve never understood why resolutions are made in the new year instead of with the coming of spring. With the hangover from the holidays, weather that keeps us bundled indoors, and the grumpiness of entire societies deprived of sunlight, the world seems literally against our aspirations to be our best selves.

I’m still hanging on by a thread. I still write here each morning wondering if it will be my final post before I get distracted by everything else in life for a few months. A course I invested in for improving my goal-setting has already been shoved into the corner of my “some other time” list. My vision of being conversational in ASL by the end of February is looking bleak.

But I don’t have to look at this all as failure, or me teetering on the edge of it. Regardless of whether I keep up my daily writing, as of today I have accrued about forty vignettes. Even if I haven’t been as studious with my coursework, the lessons I’ve picked up from it has given me a much healthier insight into the pace I’d like to move in life. And even if I’ll be fumbling with my fingers trying to speak sign language, I’ve become comfortable with the alphabet and about 200 words. Meanwhile, I have good reasons why I haven’t maintained my resolutions at the caliber that I had set for myself – I’m reading more, talking to mom more, and have avoided moving through life in a rush.

One of the books I’m reading is Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, and it has helped make evident how extraordinarily fast we as a species have evolved. But this rapidness is still in the scope of deep time. It simply means that, compared to the movement of rocks and landmasses, the natural diaspora of flora and fauna, and the moods of the climate, humans have grown from apes picking at bone marrow to humans cognizant of ad-based algorithms very very quickly. But that doesn’t mean that who we are as individuals need to follow any of these paces. Maybe a sign of age is my comfort with allowing new technologies and cultural tropes to pass, to see vapidness as something that applies to us all if you zoom out far enough, and to be okay with all that. This perspective makes it okay, then, if I don’t hit every single one of my personal aspirations. I have my entire lifetime for that – an entire lifetime that’s nothing more than a brief moment in time.

As someone who has always been a proponent of the imagination, lately I’ve had to do the work of looking at this celebration more critically. It’s something that I didn’t have to fixate on too much when I was purely focused on iLL-Literacy – at the time, our primary audience was a generation of college students who were so disillusioned by the failing economy that they (and their institutions) found little time for training oneself to be creative. Times have changed since then, and even though the word du jour is innovation – a concept that is vastly distinct from imagination – we are now in an era where, instead of fighting a great resistance to creative thinking, we are in danger of people who wave it cavalierly, not quite understanding how to use it with intention for transformative change. Instead, innovation is targeted – not in the way of an archer who allows herself to sink into a moment, but in the way of a member of an assembly line who is given strict constraints for their job. People are encouraged to “innovate” while nothing in the way of employment structures, work hours, pay and benefits, or scope of their work. What people actually mean by innovation is a mere call to “jazz it up.” Innovation is the ephemeral version of what was depicted in Office Space as “flair.”

Imagination is not that. If imagination emerges during the workday, it’s often in the form of moments that the employee steals without a trace. Imagination is summoned in moments of frustration or fatigue, when the employee starts daydreaming about what they’d rather be doing. It’s in the situations where a conversation actually gets interesting, and an idea is shared only to be paired with the disclaimer, “But we’d never get away with that.” Unlike innovation, imagination isn’t just a new kind of grease for the wheels. It’s what beckons us to wonder why we’re still on this bandwagon instead of soaring above.

I have been nervous about entering my sixth year with the same institution – one that I told myself I’d only stay with for five years – because I know my imagination is valuable and I know I must guard it at all costs. The reason I have stayed is because I have managed to cultivate an environment where I can keep the “innovators” at arm’s length, and surround myself with actual imagineers. They come in the form of artists, thinkers, scientists, and so many other walks of life, and have become my sages when I’m weighed down by the bureaucracy. They are there to remind me that modifying a logo, launching a social media campaign, or replacing a powerpoint presentation with a TED-style talk isn’t imagination at work, even if the powers that be like to describe these tired rituals as innovative. Imagination is much harder work, not only because of how ambitious it is, but because of its audacity. Oftentimes, the most challenging aspect of an imaginative act isn’t the actual accomplishment, but the ability to do it despite the given parameters. At my institution, I have to constantly remind myself that the awe-inspired question, “How did you manage to do that?” is so much more interesting when it’s answered by a creative process as opposed to a bureaucratic one. Unfortunately, people are so familiar with red tape that the question is usually the more sobering version. We may present the most breathtaking art piece ever, but as it gets more complicated, wonder becomes a logistical exercise, and “How did you manage to do that?” actually takes on the meaning of “How did you get them to allow you to do that?”

Here, we find the main difference between innovation and imagination – innovation is held up as a talent that comes with the kind of persistence and directiveness that is often associated with scientific or analytical prowess. But imagination is a magic that we all possess. While the turmoils of life can make it feel dim inside us at times, it is in fact intertwined with our life force. It is ultimately freed upon permission that can only be bestowed by the Self.

So much has been said lately about our generation’s relationship with attention. The notion of being A.D.D. is something that many of us used to joke about having, until it became an epidemic that we had to take seriously en masse. But are we truly have a deficit, or are we just spread thin? The attention deficit that I’m thinking about today isn’t about the attention that we have to offer – the kind that social media corporations and advertisers are bidding top dollar for – but the kind that we’re receiving. It’s connected though – if over the past decades we’ve channeled more and more of our own attention into our devices, avatars, and headlines, who have we been siphoning it from? Whose attention did I used to get that I no longer have because it has been reallocated to other things? It’s all connected – social media addiction is fueled by the need for attention to be paid to us. When we feel lonely, ignored, or need an ego boost, at times it can seem easier and more fulfilling to post something that will immediately incite loads of feedback. But it’s just a quick hit. We all know that likes and comments are forms of drive-by attention, often with the person paying it really focused on themselves or the content (which might not even be about you). The way these platforms are set up, our names and faces take a backseat to the nodes. The attention depletes within moments. We need to re-up. As serious as it is that our own attention spans are shortening and being pulled in countless directions, it’s also worth noting that attention is a transferable energy. If the attention we receive is in short, passive spurts, that’s the kind that we’ll have available to give. It’s contagious – how many times have I been in face-to-face conversations, only to both end up on our phones because one of us felt the urge to address a ping? The desire and need to be addressed as our whole selves is something that has been around since the dawn of ages. It is the kind of attention that is foundation to families and societies, friendships and romances, learners and true influentials. It’s not the kind that can be drawn from “online engagement,” and timelines are not places to cultivate it. When someone gives me their full attention, it is disarming, satiating, spellbinding. It’s a form of magic that we all have the power to give and receive.

The worst part of not being able to sleep is being awake. The wide-eyedness of it. The painstaking sluggishness of the minutes dripping away like an IV. Time moves too slowly, until it doesn’t. As the hours mount and the morning approaches, the frustration of not feeling tired at all melts into the anxiety of knowing that you’ll be drowsy for the rest of the next day. In those moments, nothing seems more desirable than slipping away into slumber, that fast-track where time literally flies by in the blink of an eye.

I know this struggle well. Despite the fact that sleep is one of the few things that all animals do, I can be terrible at it. For one, I can’t do it in vehicles of any kind. A 16 hour flight means I’ll be watching 8 movies. When I land, jetlag will course through my body pretty much until I’m ready to go home. Also, I can’t sleep if there’s any kind of constant or repetitive noise. Or light, at all. I need to be lying horizontally, with comfortable clothes, my face washed and teeth brushed. The pillow also can’t be too hard, or too soft. And the sheets can’t smell funny. “

Adriel, you fucking diva! said Goldilocks.

I envy you who are able to fall asleep anywhere. You who I think I’m having a conversation with while driving, only to learn that you knocked out during the FIVE MINUTE COMMUTE TO TRADER JOES. My neighbors on the plane who are snoring even before takeoff, who are able to somehow turn off their brains and bladders for two continents. Lovely’s entire family has a gene that actually helps them sleep better with all the lights turned on, the TV blasting commercials, all while sitting upright or sprawled over two chairs and a coffee table. These people and their magic baffle me, as do my friends who crash on my couch and when I ask if they need to use the bathroom before going to sleep respond nonchalantly, “Nah I’m good man.” What do you mean you’re good???? Don’t you need to take a hot bath, change into organic cotton pajamas and mist your face with lavender essence??? Or at least pee?

I’ve always been this way. My childhood memories are still filled with the trauma of naptime – the dreaded moment in the middle of the afternoon, when the sun and my adrenaline are at a peak, and my mom forced me to lie on her lap, facing away from the television while she watched A Different World. What could be crueler than being demanded daily to keep my eyes closed while Lisa Bonet cooed in the background? In preschool, naptime was a mass-production, with cots lined across the school floor like a World War I ward. I actually, miraculously managed to fall asleep on my first day of this experience, but was rudely awakened by a classmate shaking me awake, “NAPTIME OVER!!!!” she shrieked, snot oozing out her nostrils. I never napped successfully again. I’d whisper at my friends with the assumed invisibility that all people that age have in moments of amateur secrecy, and when the teachers caught me they dragged me by the arms to room flooded with light, where a lone cot was placed against the wall under the pencil sharpener. That was the year I learned to love the taste of pine and graphite.

Ironically, I got my best sleep when I was living in New York. Without a job to guilt me into waking up before 11, I was able to camouflage my insomnia with Netflix binging until my eyelids became like sandpaper and closing my laptop was like a personal off-switch. There’s something sadistic about relishing in falling asleep to that kind of exhaustion, when sprawling out feels so luxurious and your muscles twitch from fatigue. Maybe that’s why I love sleep so much. It’s a sense of accomplishment that I’ll never be able to explain to those who have the privilege of instant access. It makes each morning that I wake up refreshed feel like a triumph. A celebration worth anticipating every single day.

There’s a difference between procrastinating and taking your Sweet Ass Time. Procrastination is the byproduct of hesitation, insecurity, anxiety, it is a divestment from your future self for the comfort that the present absence of agency provides. But taking your Sweet Ass Time requires patience, calculation, assurance. It is a biding of time, and when that time is measured with intention, it can be a better move than finishing far ahead of schedule.

Not recognizing the difference between procrastinating and taking your Sweet Ass Time is the reason why, when watching that scene on Planet Earth where the cheetah is lingering around a bunch of defenseless wildebeests I want to scream at the screen like “What the fuck are you waiting for????” But it doesn’t take Sigourney Weaver to tell you that the cheetah is just taking his Sweet Ass Time, and actually waiting for the Sweetest Ass Moment. Bum-rushing the herd would result in an intense chase that expends more energy than the prospective meal would provide, and probably a hoof to the face. I always thought that cheetahs were terrible at stealth, because in these nature shows they just sit there until one of the members of the herd notices him, and only when they all start Losing Their Shit does he start dashing ahead.

Knowing how to dash ahead while everyone else is Losing Their Shit has got to be one of the greatest lessons that nature can teach us. First and foremost, it means not being one of the ones Losing Their Shit at that Sweetest Ass Moment. But it also means not being over-prepared, or if you’re a cheetah, not doing “just in case” hunts when you’re not even hungry yet. It’s that growl in the belly that lets you know that the last minute is approaching – the recognition that a failed hunt could mean starvation that compels that extra motivation that evolved you into the fastest mammal on the planet.

But what we can learn from the cheetah isn’t just the moment of the hunt, but also what he’s doing when he’s not hunting. This is the ultimate reward of taking your Sweet Ass Time instead of Losing Your Shit, which is known across the universe as Chilling The Fuck Out. Because cheetahs are not procrastinating, they are not spending every waking moment that they’re not hunting consumed with guilt for not hunting, or wondering if they’re losing their edge and self-apologizing like “I only got that wildebeest because it was a baby.” They’re not strategizing their next hunt or wasting all their time and energy trying to figure out how to “optimize” their hunting methods. Instead, they’re Chilling The Fuck Out, which means literally lying there and doing nothing but being a cheetah and being okay with that.

So the next time someone accuses you of doing something at the very last minute, just remember that you’re a fucking cheetah.

I’m still thinking about human fascination with size – that bigger means better. It’s size that makes us in awe of the ancient civilizations in Egypt and the Americas that built gigantic pyramids. How did they do that? we ask, shouldering aside the fact that these structures were tributes to beliefs and ways of knowing that were the actual shows of advancement. Today, our nations continue to stunt on each other by constructing skyscapers, each tall enough to cast a shadow on the last. The technology may have evolved, but our basic compulsion to wield might with hugeness has not.

“Ten thousand visitors is nice, but why don’t we go for ten million?????” asked a board member about the SmithsonianAPA Culture Labs. I get her sentiment. Scaling up is ingrained in us, perhaps even innate. But to imagine an art show that draws a population greater than New York City is not only unfeasible, I find it ridiculously undesirable. In that moment, I thought about all of the 50 artists involved in our massive productions, and couldn’t think of a single soul who would have been elated by even more visitors to interact with, more hours spent in the venue, more demands that would come with the pressure of the “stakes” beholden to such a spectacle. SCALE UP! the humans said, forgetting that not long ago we were meek creatures in the savanna, waiting behind brush for the hyenas to finish eating so we could pick at their dregs.

Even though it may be unreasonable for me to expect others to reflect on our prehistoric dispositions at board meetings, we don’t have to think that far back to recognize that bigger is usually not better. SCALE UP! said Napoleon and Columbus, as they pillaged continents for the sake of ever-expanding dominion. SCALE UP! said the oil and auto industries, as they drilled pockmarks into the earth and coated the land with tar. SCALE UP! said the tech companies, as they vacuumed our memories into the cloud, paying no mind to all the backdoors left ajar. Size does matter, and it usually matters more than we honestly know what to do with.

But what if we scaled deep? What if, instead of thirsting for bigger and bigger audiences, we ventured to forge more intimate connections with the ones we had? What if, instead of craving more square footage or dollars, we learned to hone our appreciation and thoroughness? What if, instead of amassing knowledge, we aspired to become more attuned and reflective of what we already knew? Maybe our uncivilized ancestors actually had it right. When they emerged from the brushes, approached the skeletons of what had already fed the other creatures higher up in the food chain, and slurped the marrow tucked into the bones. There is always more within, you just have to know to look for it.

PS: After writing this, I did a quick search for “scaling deep” and *of course* someone else has already created an entire thing around it. Oh well, there goes my TED talk.

I’ve been thinking a lot about time lately, especially the big kind. The kind that sets distance that is beyond what makes sense. Like a star, or a planet, you might not see it but at this point your knowing has transformed into trusting. A long time ago, a long time ahead, forever, never. I’m curating two projects this year which each deal with that moment when time becomes abstract, and I’ve realized that in the tug-of-war between space and time for human attention, space is so much more showy. When we think of scale, physical is first and foremost brought to mind. To be big means to overtake the rational senses. Tall, wide, loud. But big time requires imagination. That means its size can be infinite. To scale deep means to challenge the self to go big time, to exist within deep time, to recognize that all time is something that will never be contained within our ability to manifest a notion.

I’m reading Timefulness by the geologist Marcia Bjornerud, who describes the dramatic movement that mountains make, which is forever invisible to us because our lives are too short and our minds are too impatient to see them. But we project sentience onto things based on whether they move when we poke it with a stick, we’ll never recognize how literally everything around us pulses, migrates, matures. Maybe that’s all that truly defines the living. We’re all just out here going through shit, and that’s all it really is.

Depending on how you looked at it, I either stepped into my 30s kicking the door down, or I snuck in through the back. Exactly at the age of 30, I started my first full-time job and moved to Washington D.C. I remember specifically feeling very adult, and doing what I saw as very adult things, like buying button-up shirts at J.Crew and furniture from places that weren’t Ikea. But probably the most adult thing that I incorporated into my life was learning to be on time to shit. It was a concept that never quite took priority. In my life as an artist in the Bay and New York, time was a fluid concept. Every appointment was scheduled with an -ish intrinsically attached. Meeting at 3 really meant 3-ish, which could extend into 4:15 or even beyond, tardiness absolved by the fact that everyone else was going to be late too, or forgotten by a “sooo sorry for being late.” In D.C., people even start early by a minute or two. In D.C., time is valuable and it’s financed by getting people in and out promptly so that they can move on to the next thing that has been manicured into their calendar. Until having a job in D.C., it was never a concern that popping into an engagement 20 minutes late meant that everyone else had already started and that you’d be greeted by harsh glares. Being tardy means that you commit the treason of robbing others of their time, expecting them to stay late because you arrived late – you might as well reach into their pockets and pull cash out of their wallets. In D.C., time is moral, and lateness is a sin.

If this is adulting, I’m so over it. Within five years, I’ve converted from being flexible with myself and others to being a miser of minutes. It’s not that I’m never late, but when I am, I beat myself up over it. I sometimes judge others who show up late in the way that used to be habit for me. Part of being so stringent means that I stuff my days with so much more, appointments stacked like a Jenga tower, ready to topple if things don’t start or end exactly as planned.

This is no way to be the kind of person I actually want to be – who leaves room for daydreams and tangents, sauntering between engagements, reflection before going onto the next thing. It’s true that time is valuable, but I prefer to trade as opposed to spend – when the few minutes I get somewhere late is easily bartered with the next time I’m left waiting. It means that avoiding the feeling of being flustered is accomplished not by being so rigid with the mechanics of the clock that you appear like a regularly scheduled program, but knowing that you are arriving to absolutely no judgement – that your entire interaction won’t be colored by the fact that you showed up at 3:07 instead of 2:54.

Much has been said about the rise of personal property, and how capitalism led to things once communal now becoming intrinsically tied to one’s sense of individualism. The same could be said about time. It never was really mine, or yours. How do we spread the wealth?