This video makes me want to get an EEG machine. It’s of Ken Wilber narrating footage of himself moving through a few different meditative states while hooked up to an EEG machine. (EEG machines show you a picture of the electrical activity from your brain from electrodes on your scalp.) He says what each state feels like, too. Pretty neat.
(Minor correction: He makes it sound like dreaming sleep is mostly associated with theta waves, which is not quite true. Dreaming sleep does have some theta activity, but it’s mostly beta or “beta-like” waves. Theta is strongly associated with stage 1 sleep, that 5 or 10 minute transition between waking and sleep. It’s a minor point, but I so rarely find corrections to make in his work, I thought I’d take this chance.)
I was just on Skype with my friend Jonathan, who is also in a long-distance relationship. His is between Vancouver, BC and Germany. Mine is between Eugene, OR, and Vancouver, BC. We started coming up with a scheme for measuring the difficulty of a long distance relationship. Here are the major factors we came up with:
1) Financial impact of making the trip
2) Number of travel hours separating the couple
3) Amount of time difference between locations
To that I’m going to add,
4) The availability of high-quality video chat.
5) Number of days left before final reunification.
Obviously, any such attempt will result in a major oversimplification, but I’m thinking we should stick with easily measurable factors. For example, the communication ability of each partner plays a huge part in the success of a LDR, but is difficult to measure, so I’m leaving it out. If the couple prefers not to fly for ethical or other reasons, it will factor in, too, but I’m leaving that out as well. And so on.
So, how do we calculate this index? Generate numbers for each factor:
1) Cost of a round trip, divided by the combined income of couple.
2) Number of hours travel, round trip, by that mode of transportation.
3) Number of hours difference between locations, plus 1. So if you’re in the same time zone, you get a 1 here, and if you’re eight time zones off, you get a 9. The plus 1 is just to make a no-time-zone-difference a nonzero number, for calculating the index.
4) I’m going to estimate that having good video chat makes LDRs ten times easier, so if you have it, you get a 1 and if you don’t, you get a 10.
5) The number of days left before final reunification.
Let’s try those elements in the following equation:
difficulty of long distance relationship = (cost of trip/combined income) x number of hours travel x number of hours difference x number of days left x video chat
It’s a start. Let’s see what kinds of numbers it gives us, using about what Reanna and I have left to go–a little over a year: For Bill Gates, the index would range between about .01 to maybe 30, depending on the difficulty of the trip, or between .1 and 300, without video chat. For someone poor, with a long, difficult trip that costs their yearly salary and no video chat, the index would be about 600,000. If this very unfortunate couple had 10 years to go instead of a year, they get 6,000,000. I know, that doesn’t sound like much of a relationship, but I’m looking for the upper end of the scale.
Reanna and I get about a 30. Not too bad, I guess, though it goes up to 300 when I’m at Not Back to School Camp, which is way out on the information-dirt-road. So we get a range of 30-300, which is the same range as Bill Gates’ worst-case scenario–if he had to take his private Lear jet to the central Asian steppe every time he wanted to see Melinda.
OK, here’s where you can help me out, if you want. There are certainly several problems with this scale. Here are two, off the top of my head: First, the range of .01 to 6,000,000 is too big to think very clearly about. How hard is my 30 compared to Bill’s .01, or Mr. Unfortunate’s 6,000,000? Other than “somewhere inbetween,” it’s difficult to say. The equation needs some kind of transformation to produce easier numbers, say between 1 and 100. Second, some things aren’t working out with the math. As it is, if a couple is very poor, even a 10-day LDR with an easy trip comes out harder than Bill’s 10-year LDR with a very difficult trip, as long as Mr. Unfortunate doesn’t have Skype. That can’t be right. If any of you are math people, what do you think? Third, there are other factors that should be included but are difficult to operationalize, like communication skills and depth of commitment. Any ideas, conceptual people?
Many years ago, my friend Chad told me if he could make even a very modest living fighting racism, that is what he would do with his life. The idea had never occurred to me before. In that conversation we also talked about how it was really only people who were on the fence about race that were good targets for intervention; good luck changing the mind of an entrenched racist! So where do you find these on-the-fence-folks, and how do you make a living working with them? We made no more progress on the question.
Lee Mun Wah does just what we imagined. He is a “diversity and communication trainer” and the founder of Stirfry Seminars & Consulting. The population of Whites he works with are a lot more egalitarian-minded than I had imagined necessary, back in those relatively naive days–they are Whites who consider racism appalling but don’t see their own part in perpetuating it.
I watched these clips from Lee Mun Wah’s documentary of one of his groups, called The Color of Fear. It was some of the most moving footage I’ve seen this year. If you watch it, watch both clips to the end, and be prepared for some members to express anger. (Keep in mind that (according to my teachers) both David and Victor became diversity and communication trainers after this film was made.) This is incredible work. I hope I get the opportunity to lead groups like this in my career.
A couple days ago I posted a great clip from Jay Smooth, called “How to Tell People They Sound Racist.” I’ve looked over his websites, illdoctrine.com and nildoctrine.com and his you tube channel and have decided to officially endorse him. He’s very smart, very hip, and I just like him. He’s a feminist hero, too in an often mysogynous hip hop culture. About half of his posts are political and about half are about hip hop. All of them seem insightful and funny, though keep in mind that I am no judge of hip hop or hip hop commentary.
Here are three clips I liked a lot. The first reminds me of Potter & Heath’s Rebel Sell: It’s a critique (and possibly a mocking) of the idea that you can simultaneously (and self-righteously) know nothing about politics and somehow “know” that politics is not worth paying attention to. It’s great. The second is about homosexuality in hip hop (this is him being a hero). The third is about hipsterism. They are all short and good.
This clip was part of a lecture in my Group Therapy class. It’s from video blogger Jay Smooth. I haven’t seen many of his clips but so far they are insightful and entertaining. The clip on top of his blog is about Rand Paul and called “Atlas Ducked.” It’s worth watching just for that hilarious title.
Nathen's Miraculous Escape 