This one is actually going “under the cut” because it’s even more NSFW than usual for around here.

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Twenty eleven. Here we are in the future. With our future communicators and our try-better-the-second-time marriages. My telephone tells me where bars are and when the bus is coming. It tells me when I should be guilty that I forgot someone’s birthday, and when a girl from Ohio is getting her period. But what it doesn’t do is tell you what you want to hear. That’s the dream, isn’t it? The Star Trek:TNG dream. Unisex rompers and consequence-free adventures to the edge of clean, inhuman technology. But nobody ever accidentally sent Picard a link to some porn and had to pussyfoot around him for a few days at work afraid he was gonna get hit with an HR beef. Counselor Troi never avoided getting on the turbolift because Geordi got drunk and tried to push up on her a little too hard at a party. Humanity, it turns out, is a real dirty messy business with lots of agendas and not a lot of transparency.

Every new social tech increases exposure well before it finally creates etiquette (which is frequently ignored). And with that increased exposure, no matter how honest or dishonest, deep or shallow, it is easy to over estimate the true intimacy of relationships. It’s natural, people are machines of want, and want is about possessive desire — we are _all_ natural stalkers of the subjects, objects, and people that stoke our passion. But sometimes, somewhere between the facebook and twitter and buzz and bloggytextfoursquares, the _person_ starts to lose out to the preconceptions you are bringing with you. And when it’s someone you’re romantically interested in, it is easy to wish that every line was meant for you, to wish that they hang on your every response and think about you constantly. To scheme for attention, to scrutinize for meaning, to overthink and maneuver and extort. It’s an insane, singular psychological investment called “emotional frontloading”. This is the insanity that makes you wonder if a girl you’ve never exchanged twelve words loves you. It’s what makes you resent people you like because they don’t understand you instantly, or more specifically because they don’t embrace you unconditionally simply based on the (objectively completely invisible and meaningless) work you’ve already put into caring about them.

It’s unfair. It’s a unidirectional type of affection which is more closely related to ownership than romance. It’s branding, not in the marketing sense but in the cattle sense. LOVE as a leash, a label, and a lash. Again, something that denies the essential humanity of others, attempts to simplify them so they fit into your preconceived emotional/interpersonal destination. Maneuver, maneuver, maneuver. A childlike idea of conquest, that people, like games, can be won completely with sufficient strength and sneakiness.

My only hard-set goal in 2011 is to – recognize when I am; accept the truth of; and finally _stop_ – emotionally frontloading. Treat people like people. Make fewer assumptions. And continue to build my life of purpose and honesty as best I can.

I did not give 2010 a send off. There’s really no way to summarize the year, it was indescribable. No one word can tie it up, no phrase, no length would do it justice. There was an overwhelming, almost global sense of hopelessness that dug in as the economy in my country continued to implode. A small scale morass of betrayals and upsets, arguments and disagreements. There was also immense peace. Moments of real, incomprehensible joy. Moments of utter suffering, moments of clarity. Moments of shame. But what I want to talk about today is moments of realization.

I thought a lot last year. A lot. But instead of thinking about work or math or history or cars, I thought about myself. I thought about what I’m doing, what I need. What I want. Mortality, career, romance, all of the big ones. But that’s all internal. There’s no sounding board to reality on any of that, you just build it into your own little dorodango, a ball of your own mud that you think is perfect.

And then in just two little blips it was shattered. Turns out my mudball was just another mudball. That thought of internal perfection, the building of a logic ladder inside your own head without the challenging ideas of others? It’s lazy. A selfish ownership of reason that denies the essential humanity of others in your relationships. I spent six months mourning my imperfect mudball, trying to figure out how all my focus could have gone wrong. How could all that hard work I put into _believing_ in my righteousness and then be wrong? Because faith without honesty is worthless, and honesty is something that must be both internal and external. You can think you’re being fully honest with yourself all the way until you are forced to think about something you have no context for.

Six months, mourning my broken mudball. Alone. By choice. Hiding behind the hurt, too lazy to work at healing, too cautious to make progress any other way. I hid, from the responsibility of my humanity, behind the things which have damaged me, instead of trying to truly put them behind me. And all it took was two little blips.

These are the lessons that 2011 started me off with. Interaction with other people is both necessary and terrifying. There is no shame in needing others. There is no shame in being hurt but nobody should love you for failing to heal. Pay attention to what is being said but also pay attention to what is not being said. And then, Bridget Pilloud, who is responsible for a startling number of palm-smacking-forehead moments? She set me up for a doozy: Think about others more, think about their problems less. And realize that nobody cares about your bus crash. You should care less about your bus crash too.

I hate it when another one of those old lines comes up, something you’ve heard a thousand times and not ever listened to. And this is what it all comes down to. A song lyric from a cassette tape I played until it was ruined, almost fifteen years ago. A song which gets stuck in my head from time to time even now. Echoing through my personal history, telling me to pay more fucking attention.

I was having this discussion in a taxi heading down-town.
Rearranging my position on this friend of mine who had a little bit of a breakdown.
I said, “Hey, you know, breakdowns come and breakdowns go.
So what are you going to do about it – that’s what _I’d_ like to know.”
- Paul Simon – Gumboots

Pain doesn’t earn you shit, turns out. It’s what you do with it.

I am not a great chef. I’m not even a mediocre chef: I am a passable home cook in my best days, and a roach-palleted philistine on most of the rest. For all my twittertalk of gourmet home cooked meals, in reality it’s mostly me making a meal wildly out of order (dessert salads!) and in bulk so I can freeze it for lunch. But when I have a nice piece of nature’s handiwork that I’m getting ready to cook; a sirloin, a fillet of fish, a portobello — there is only one commandment.

Do.
Not.
Fuck.
It.
Up.

See, food? It’s amazing. Real food is sweet and complex and wonderful, even raw — especially raw. We have so much variety available now, and it’s easy to want to over-do it with wildly overthought culinary craziness. Wrap it in bacon, stuff it with bacon, truffle oil it and sous-vide in early harvest Malbec with creme anglaise and Krispy Kreme reduction. But when you have a line caught grouper steak on the griddle, what you should really be doing is trying not to ruin it, instead of trying to remember where your black volcanic finishing salt is for the chipotle-mole foie whip. Everything you add TO the fish cannot fix overcooked, ruined fish. So you must concentrate not on the darkest corners of your spice rack but on the basics of cookery. The temperature of the pan, the quality of the ingredients, alternating patience and measured attention until you have delivered on your promise to the beast that it did not die to become a Filet-o-Fish. Each thing you do to the meal beyond that is adding complexity and risk, and once you reach the end of your capabilities as a chef? You are just sabotaging the dish, then the meal, then sabotaging yourself. Because NOTHING is less satisfying than working for six hours to make the perfect chive and anchovy sauce to put on some cheese souffle best described as “malted chalk-glue”.

Consciously or unconsciously, these effort- and time-intensive failures predispose us against cooking at all, because if I just want a plain BURGER I can get it at BURGER TOWN, right? And this realization, the simple act of noticing that I fucked up a project because I spent too much time making the pointless gestures and belaboring decisions that make no difference? It has freed me from many failures. Simplicity is Clarity. It’s at the top of this page and at the heart of every blog I have had for twelve years. And every year, I discover in some fresh new way that I have been Doing It Stupid and I should be Doing It Simpler. That applies to everything in my life. From friendships to projects, from food to money, my entire goal is to not fuck things up by making them complicated. Automate it, maintain it, nip it in the bud, do not put off until tomorrow what should be done today, take whatever steps you must to do it right, but do NOT make it complicated.