in particular, i want to talk a bit about envy. envy is a weird emotion: we see other people and are jealous or ambitious about how happy they are, even though this is entirely counterproductive; other people's happiness has little to no impact on our own personal happiness, at least in a detached way. chalk it up to the evolutionary vestige, competitive nature, which really doesn't matter in our current world where ambition just means you won't settle for an acceptable life, which ultimately isn't a good thing for reproductive fitness since being choosy about a mate is no longer key.
more to the point, envy is misguided. people aren't as happy as they seem, i think; i say this mainly because i'm not as happy as i every now and then realize i must seem to people around me, or at least casual acquaintances. throughout my life, i think i have been a target of a considerable amount of envy, but what most people don't realize is that the things i'm envied for, by and large, don't bring me happiness.
i'm reminded of this because there's this kid here at the conference, mormon, in a master's program at brigham young. he talks of me (and keep in mind that he's just met me) reverently, because i went to harvard and am now going to berkeley. very often, when i say something, he replies with an awestruck tone.
i guess he's got the worshipful tendencies built into him by now, but he's dead wrong. okay, not dead wrong -- i was happy at harvard, and it definitely did bring me more happiness than going to another university would have (well, not definitely, but i think it did. obviously i have no real comparison.) but where he errs is in assuming that this (intellectually) supposedly privileged background gives me an advantage.
well, maybe it does, but it doesn't help me be happy, which is what's really important. happiness isn't so simple a beast. i look at millionaire athletes and i think i would be happier, but this is just as erroneous as jason's ogling of my academic package; if i had infinite money, i'd still be in this dicey position of trying to figure out things that make me happy.
i conclude that envy is a misplaced beast at best. everyone here seems so outwardly happy, because i don't interact with any of them on a deep level; i bet i seem the same. but they're probably just as miserable as i am.
on a related note, for the first time in my life, i am unquestionably one of the cool kids. this was established in the first couple of days, and i'm not really sure how to deal with it. it's an odd feeling. i don't mention this for show so much as to note that ...
... all of the other cool kids have girlfriends, and all of the girls here have boyfriends. there's this peer pressure to get married as one ages, and i always thought that it was because of generic reasons, but in the case of dating there's another one: the pool thins, apparently dramatically. in math, you don't really have the peer pressure due to the existence of reassuring antisocial folks who won't ever date anyone, but it's still clear that a lot of people are being taken out of the pool.
i haven't talked about the function of this weblog in my life for awhile, and in particular something sinister that i think is happening. whenever i think of something -- like the badly translated thoughts-from-last-night above -- i want to tell it to someone, and the loneliness that i've been feeling over the last month is attributable to the fact that nine times out of ten, i don't have that person nearby. but the weblog is a whole new possibility: i can tell it to everyone, all at once. thus, at least when i'm home, i don't feel the lack of personal contact as much, because this is almost as good and in some ways better. it's troubling in that heads-in-the-sand way, and it took this distance for me to notice it.
i can't do that in vancouver. you see, the reason i don't plan to be writing much while i'm in vancouver is not because i don't have the computer time, really. no, the reason is that i don't have the computer time on demand. when i'm lying in bed thinking, i can't just pop over and write down the spontaneous thoughts. things are planned, measured, the sort of writing that sells and the businesslike presentation that i don't feel at all comfortable in.
i think this is the primary reason why i call myself a romantic idealist, and why finding the perfect person is so important to me -- the idea of having someone there for you to bounce your thoughts off of. obviously not anyone will do, but i feel in a sense that my thoughts are wasted -- and yes, this is evidence of my getting caught up in the new-york-style, efficientist, insecure culture -- because i don't have anyone to synergize them with.
i'm not advertising for a life partner. i don't want just anyone; i want someone who pays attention, someone who will respond in kind, not someone who will take my best thoughts and laugh (not derisively, just amusedly.) in a sense, i need someone so important that it doesn't matter to me that no one else is hearing these thoughts, someone so complete that they encapsulate all the responses i would get from other people. someone so complete that they don't need me.
i don't really mean the last part, of course. but given what i've said, it's strange that i've grown to like and maybe even depend on the weblog, since i very rarely get responses to the material that's printed here. the reason is that i know that you're reading it and thinking about it, and that's enough for me -- that the thoughts get thought, even if it's thousands of miles from me and i get no direct impact from them.