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My high school’s class of 2012 just graduated today. Damn, I feel old.

My friend Michael Jarmer, who teaches English at my high school, wrote this impressive imaginary commencement address to the seniors. It’s full of great advice derived from his experiences teaching and learning literature with his students, and reflects a healthy humanist appreciation for each other and for our lives that I always find so refreshing to read:

And once we’re in college or unemployed we wait for a job, a family, a kid, and then we wait for the kid to go through grade school, middle school, high school, college, job, marriage, grandkids, and…  Good grief. Stop waiting for life to begin. Your life has already begun. You’re in it. Live it. Be here now. Tomorrow will come, I guarantee it.

It’ll only take a few minutes of your time, and the inspiration you’ll get from it is totally worth it. Go read it.

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Have you ever seen your blind spot?

There’s a fantastically interesting demonstration over on Serendip, a science hub supported by Bryn Mawr College. Check it out.

Diagrams of a vertebrate eye and a cephalopod eye
Vertebrate eye (left) and cephalopod eye (right)

The gist of it is that vertebrate eyes, due to the way they evolved, are naturally set up in a way that leaves a hole in the vision. The retina, which senses light, is behind the nerve fibers that transfer the signals to the brain. In order to get those nerve fibers out of the eye, they bundle up near the back and go back into the skull– but since the retina is normally behind the fibers, there’s nothing to sense light in that spot. (Check out the image to the right in case that description’s not clear.)

The interesting thing, however, is that this doesn’t result in a gaping hole in your vision. Make no mistake, there’s absolutely no way, given the anatomy, that that portion of your eye detects light. Then why is your vision whole?

Enter the brain. Your brain, as the Serendip demonstrations show, is remarkably adept at filling in holes. In the demonstration, you adjust your vision while focusing on a single point, until a large black dot elsewhere on the page disappears. If you do this on a white background, then what you see is an unblemished field of white. But more remarkably, if there is a line running through the blind spot, your brain fills in that line, even though it’s getting no information for that spot. If the blind spot occurs in a field filled with a regular pattern, then your brain fills in the pattern appropriately.

I’m constantly amazed by this for a couple of reasons. First, it’s downright incredible. That our brains are sophisticated enough to patch up the image we’re seeing based on what’s around our blind spot– that’s just cool. And we don’t even notice it. Before I experienced the Serendip demonstration, I had no idea that my brain was doing all this work behind the scenes. Clearly, it’s doing its job, and it’s doing it well.

But the second thing that hits me about this is what it implies about our knowledge. The blind spot demonstration shows the power of our brains, which is incredible, but it’s also a reminder about the limitations of what we can know through perception. My brain is working hard and doing a great job at patching up that image and drawing the line right through the blind spot when that dot disappears, but it doesn’t change the fact that the dot disappears. True, if I stayed in that particular arrangement forever, never moving my eyes, I’d never realize that what I was seeing was not the whole picture. The whole thing seems accurate and truthful– but it’s not. The brain may continue the patterns, but it fails to perceive the big honking black dot in front of it. What we see is not always how it is. Continue reading →

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Well, I’ve officially entered the realm of Buffy studies. For my most recent paper in my Encounters class, I decided to study doubt in the Japanese film Rashomon (1950). To do so, however, I got to do something incredibly fun: I brought in an episode of Buffy, entitled “Normal Again,” and used the two texts together to illuminate the use of doubt in both. The essay, in fact, was so fun to write that it was a massive challenge to keep it under the word limit.

Since I didn’t really want to lose all the thought I put into this, here’s the full version of the essay for your perusal. It’s a really interesting topic, and if I didn’t have other things to do in my studious life, I might write even more about it, exploring other episodes such as “Restless.”

A note on citations: At certain points, I cite clips from Rashomon in the following format: (1.1:15-30). This citation refers to the clips of Rashomon on YouTube, as noted in the Works Cited page. The citation given would mean Part 1, from timestamp 1:15 to timestamp 1:30. Hopefully, this clears up any confusion.

The full essay is available after the break.

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Stale Content Alert!

This post was written a long time ago, and my views have almost certainly evolved since then. Please keep that in mind while reading, commenting, or sharing.

You see, the funny thing about other people is that they’re human.

Everyone messes up. Everyone has faults; everyone makes mistakes. And when they do, they often inadvertently end up causing someone else grief. It will be you at some point in your life. It may be you often in your life, if that way land the dice.

We get frustrated with the things other people do. We look at them and say “Oh my God, why can’t you just X?” or “Jeez, why do you Y?” But how many times have you been on the other side? How many times have you used the defense, in your own head or out loud, that you’re only human, or something to that extent? The fact of the matter is that sometimes people mess up. Continue reading →

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Got this from my friend Billy, who got it from Dumb Little Man, where it was written by Leo Babauta. Please, I implore of you, take a moment to read and consider this. I think it’s really, really important.

“The proper function of man is to live – not to exist.”— Jack London

Too often we go through life on autopilot, going through the motions and having each day pass like the one before it.That’s fine, and comfortable, until you have gone through another year without having done anything, without having really lived life.That’s fine, until you have reached old age and look back on life with regrets.

That’s fine, until you see your kids go off to college and realize that you missed their childhoods.

It’s not fine. If you want to truly live life, to really experience it, to enjoy it to the fullest, instead of barely scraping by and only living a life of existence, then you need to find ways to break free from the mold and drink from life.

What follows is just a list of ideas, obvious ones mostly that you could have thought of yourself, but that I hope are useful reminders. We all need reminders sometimes. If you find this useful, print it out, and start using it. Today.

1. Love. Perhaps the most important. Fall in love, if you aren’t already. If you have, fall in love with your partner all over again. Abandon caution and let your heart be broken. Or love family members, friends, anyone — it doesn’t have to be romantic love. Love all of humanity, one person at a time.

2. Get outside. Don’t let yourself be shut indoors. Go out when it’s raining. Walk on the beach. Hike through the woods. Swim in a freezing lake. Bask in the sun. Play sports, or walk barefoot through grass. Pay close attention to nature.

3. Savor food. Don’t just eat your food, but really enjoy it. Feel the texture, the bursts of flavors. Savor every bite. If you limit your intake of sweets, it will make the small treats you give yourself (berries or dark chocolate are my favorites) even more enjoyable. And when you do have them, really, really savor them. Slowly.

4. Create a morning ritual. Wake early and greet the day. Watch the sun rise. Out loud, tell yourself that you will not waste this day, which is a gift. You will be compassionate to your fellow human beings, and live every moment to its fullest. Stretch or meditate or exercise as part of your ritual. Enjoy some coffee.

5. Take chances. We often live our lives too cautiously, worried about what might go wrong. Be bold, risk it all. Quit your job and go to business for yourself (plan it out first!), or go up to that girl you’ve liked for a long time and ask her out. What do you have to lose?

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