Contacts

In about a month many of my friends will be graduating. It's a bittersweet thing. On one hand, they now get to enter real life. On the other hand, they now have to face real life. Of course, I don't give a damn about their trials and tribulations. Doing that would make me a Real Person, and as a UChicagoan I traded all of my empathy for the ability to rant about comedy theory for 24 hours straight. Their graduation affects me in the regard that I'll never talk to them again.

It's a simple problem. People only talk if they're in contact. Tautological. But contact is hard to maintain. People use facebook, but it's hard to make that meaningful. Calling and email is better, but nobody uses that. I should, because it forges powerful connections, but GUESS WHAT: unless I have a responsibility to email, I won't email!

Oh wait.

What if I made it a responsibility to email? Not that emailing becomes a chore, but that I have to do something I want to. Not tricking myself, but building additional structure into my life to make something I want to be important more important. So I'm going to slowly over time build an emailing list, where I must email certain people on certain days. I can email other days, but I must email those days too. Going to start tomorrow with a couple of names, then add from there.

Backwards Ideas

Most people get ideas first as ideas, and then they refine them, and then they title them. Last week I noticed something odd. I first come up with titles, and then try to fit ideas to them. I'm wondering if this leads to different types of ideas, or at least different modes of realizing them.

Giving Stuff

Normally I try to keep the snarking out of this blog because it's tricky to make it sound funny, and because it's too easy to mistake amused hatred for poisonous hatred. But I want to talk about something similar, so I guess I'll push the rant through, too.

We've got this thing called Dream, Believe, Smile, a club that tries to make campus a happier place. They do this by putting inspirational posters up everywhere.

I hate them so much.

Slacktivists, the lot of them. Seeing a poster doesn't make me think "I'm happy!" It makes me think "They're too lazy to actually bother." Making a person feel better involves making a small connection, like a conversation, a compliment, even a smile. The important thing is that you have to show you care. A DBS poster does not do that. It's too sterile.

Now I'd think that with this logic I'd be okay with Free Hugs Day. But for some reason I hate that too. I Think it's because offering free hugs to passerbies looks less like "I want to brighten your day by hugging you" and more like "I want to validate myself by hugging you." Hugging literally takes like two seconds of your time and doesn't show a connection if there's nothing else setting it up. It's just a cheap way of getting other people to hug you.

But I still like the idea behind DBS: we have the ability to make other people happier and we should put that power to good use. I just think that DBS and FHD are terrible ways to do that. Instead, I like to give out free food.

This has a couple of advantages over the hug method. First of all, I make my own candy. There's the whole "Have some of my time and energy" deal. And it's pretty novel to have homemade candy. Second, it's a lot more unusual to get free candy than to get a free hug, which makes it stick more. Finally, food is delicious.

Of course these can't be the main reasons, because I've had equal success giving away storebought candy and fruit and stresses balls. It's something intrinsic to giving, and even more specifically to giving stuff. Unlike hugging, giving stuff is a zero sum game. Not only do you gain, I lose. I think this is why giving is so powerful. I want to make your day better so much that I'm willing to sacrifice a tiny part of myself in the process. Sure, I can make like 400 candies in less than an hour, but the sentiment is still there. By consciously losing out in the exchange, I've imbued the giving with a lot more meaning.

Anyway, that's how I resolve the cognitive dissonance between my all-consuming hatred for DBS and FHD and my fondness for giving stuff away. We have roughly the same idea, just different implementations. And I think my implementation goes way further.

Word Puzzles

I love word games. Not all of them, though; things like scrabble and bananagrams never held much appeal to me. Mostly I like the ones that focus on properties of words. Word puzzles are even better. I find it incredibly fun to search for words with a given property, whether etymological, definitional, or even just structurally. Plus you can play them in your head anytime, anywhere. Here are some of my favorites. My best answers are linked.

Shortest word with all five vowels: http://tinyurl.com/7s5cpnu

Longest word without any vowels: http://tinyurl.com/88vadcg

Longest word with only one vowel: http://tinyurl.com/6upsokt

Longest word with only one type of vowel: http://tinyurl.com/6wfbmb (yeah, I'm kinda fixated on vowels)
 
Longest word with alternating vowels and consonants: http://tinyurl.com/894pped (if we can count y as a vowel)

Longest word with only one consonant: http://tinyurl.com/6pafg2o

I need to find some new ones. Any ideas?

Soulstrip Poker

Last summer a friend and I were doing research in Chile. There were a bunch of other interns and none of us knew each other very well. To facilitate socialization we invented a game called 'Soulstrip Poker'. It's a lot like regular poker, except instead of gambling with money you gamble with secrets. 'Truth or dare' for manly men.

The first game went pretty well, with people asking small superficial questions ('What's your favorite type of music?'). The second game was much nastier, with people drilling into each other's insecurities and character flaws. After the third game we unanimously agreed to never play it again and then called an ambulance. I don't know why I'm putting the rules online. But I am. This is the third and final draft. 'Enjoy.'

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YOU NEED

1 Deck of Cards
Coins: chips, in values of 1, 3, 5
Paper

SETUP

Everybody takes a piece of paper and writes everyone's names. This is their mat. Agree on how many points everybody starts with. Distribute that many points evenly among all of the names. Make a final piece of paper and put it in the center.

RULES

Play like normal poker. Choose poker rules.

All chips are 'tagged' with the person who owns them. When put into the pot, take them from one section of the paper and put them on the appropriate names. If you win the pot, put each set of chips over the appropriate name.

Example: A, B, and C are playing. A raises with two points. He puts one B chip and one A chip onto the appropriate places. B folds and C calls with two C chips. C wins, moving the C chips onto the C section (eww), the B chip onto the B section, etc.

After rounds everybody has a chance to ask one question. They take the appropriate chips from another person's section and give it back to them. Then they ask the appropriate person a question. The question must be answered truthfully. What kind of question you can ask depends on how many you spend.

1 point: a question that can be answered in yes/no
2 points: a question that can be answered in one word
4 points: a question that can be answered in a sentence
8 points: no limit

If the player has a number of your point equal to the number you spent on him, he can "pass" by giving them to you. You lose your question but do not lose the coins. Nobody else may ask him that question, or any question designed to draw similar info for the rest of the game. You may bump a question to a higher category to make it harder to pass, but may not go beyond 8 points.

Players may trade points with each other at any point. Players may ask questions about other people, but the target may pass for free.

A player may "bow out". Everybody gets an opportunity to ask as many questions as they can with their coins. After that they are out of the game. A player may also force quit, but then they're a wuss.

Play ends when everybody mutually agrees, everybody bows out or quits, or a fight breaks out.

Crowd Running

I'm an aggressive walker.

It's kinda like being an aggressive driver. If something is in my way, I try to get around it without slowing down. I can't call it parkour or anything, because it's less about gymnastics and more contortions. If somebody walks into my way, I twist around them. If a crowd of people are milling about, I move through the tiny spaces between them. I win if I don't touch anybody or anything before I finish. The challenge comes from the fact I have to slow down as little as possible. That's what makes it harder than it sounds.

The more I do it, the more automatic it becomes. It's reached the point where I no longer even think about slowing down or walking around people. My body habitually warps around the obstacles. Kinda cool in most situations, but definitely not when the crowd running would be embarrassing or dangerous. My new challenge is to not crowd run. I think it's gonna be a lot harder.

Exploration

There are secrete places all over the university. Most aren't so much hidden as unnoticed For example, you can get from Gordon to Cummings without going outside. There's a tiny garden outside the Reg that only Max P's seem to know about. Five blocks from the edge of campus is the oldest sculpture in the city. The list goes on.

I've always been fascinated by this stuff. It's like we live in an art gallery. My first year I tried to find all of these places. There are a few common ones I haven't been in yet- like the Harper basement- and I've only recently been in the OI library. Still, I like to think I know more about these places than the average student. Fun fact: Our IDs get us into Rosenwald and Stuart. At night, the emptiness lends a surreal atmosphere. Sometimes I go in to run around and write papers.

Rockefeller has tours of the bell tower every Sunday. I really should go.