The Bartleby Project

People take me way to seriously. That I can pass off my bullshit and sarcasm as intelligence and honesty (ultimately, power), is sickening. Georgio Agamben was right; Bartleby the Scrivener wins by putting himself just beyond understanding (via classification).

I hate to say things like “my life is a sham” because they sound so sad, and they’re so simplistic. Nevertheless, I get responses all the time that I didn’t actually merit. Some time last week a friend touched my laptop behind my back and I caught him. A simple look and he was apologizing, nearly groveling. A slight change in that look plus the invocation of his name had him hurrying back to his room. Over the next hour or so I managed to have him fearfully apologizing and ultimately confined to his own bed without any physical restraint. I had nothing to hold over him. I wasn’t even upset. It was humorous. In less than a minute he gave me his password, even though I didn’t have any cracking software with me. He still thinks I did something significant to sabotage his computer. (I didn’t.)

Perhaps that’s a rather cruel example, though. It is well known that I had a four-point at the last midterm. People think I’m genius. It is true, I like big words and know enough unique shit to seem brilliant. Someone nearly took a tally of the number of times I said binary or dichotomy in philosophy. Academically, I’ve been turning in papers on things I skimmed for as long as I can remember. In the group response portion of a social experiment meant to draw out discussion of male and female roles I commented that the whole thing marginalized the disabled, infertile, and LGBTQ individuals. And for all the complements I received later, conversation quickly returned to womyn being equal with men. I had had the first and final word on the issue, partly because I appeared authoritative by simple virtue of being articulate, and partially because no one had anything they were willing to contribute about that.

Further, I don’t broadcast what I don’t know; I stay quiet and soak in information. People usually take my silence to mean I know or understand, and they are often mistaken. I was accused of knowing an anonymous vandal’s identity for nearly a week simply because I said nothing when someone asked if I knew. I didn’t. The charade was humorous, but even my explicit denial did not put the issue to rest. Telling people the truth about my limitations seems to endow me with the ‘virtue’ of humility and add to my awesome power in that I can pull it off anyway.

The root, it seems, is that I’m just beyond comprehension. I’m a well-known coffee addict, which is somehow uncommon and reserved for comments like “my parents always drank a lot of coffee….” I’m gay, but people don’t usually have any idea until they’re told (making me frequently “the straightest gay guy I know.”) I keep an intensely limited and irregular sleep schedule, adding apparent super-human powers to my repertoire. I’m better than average with the mysterious fields of technology and postmodern philosophy (which, in turn, has me saying things like “justice is bad.”) I’m physically odd (from punctured lungs to a Body Mass Index of less than 16). My political views meld anarchy and socialism (anarcho-syndicalism). There is a giant flaccid blue penis duct taped to my wall above a sign that reads “you say I’m a prick like it’s a bad thing.” I dance silly jigs to my own music in public. I shaved my entire body bald, only to grow out my hair for what’s a few days shy of a year now.

I am the unknown. The things I do surprise and confuse, even after explanation.  Ultimately, that unpredictability gives me power. I do these things because I enjoy them, because I am not afraid to, and the result is my de facto elation (defined as both personal joy and external increase in valuation). What people don’t know, they generally assume. In my case, they assume favorably and ‘give the benefit of the doubt’ an overwhelming portion of the time. Yet even as they do, they are sufficiently unsure that they often do not presume to know any more than the specific thing in question.

In the end, it’s not surprising that when I make comments like those at the social experiment above, people complement my ‘obvious’ intelligence and insight, but won’t actually have a conversation about them. It’s a damn good thing I know a few people who see through me. They make great friends.

~ J. William Lockhart

Wrong Forum Again

I really don’t know what happened in some twisted time past that caused people to call a computer a ‘modem,’ but I wish it hadn’t.  Modems turn cable, phone, DSL, or other connections into internet connections computers can understand. They are little boxes that sit next to people’s computers. When you have a virus, please, for the love of the Queen, do not tell me you are taking your modem in to be looked at.  I don’t mind so much when people confuse their CPU, a chip in the computer, with the whole computer, but seriously. Then the story becomes “yeah, whatever, it’s all the same.” Fine then, if it’s all the same I’ll just look at the modem and hand it back virus free while they continue to suffer the same problem.

Sorry, just needed to rant.

~ J. William Lockhart

6th Grade Level

It seems common knowledge (whether correct or not) that most newspapers are written at a 6th grade reading level. I always thought that was a little depressing.

I’ve always ignored it, but this time I thought to post my distaste with the spelling and grammar checker I use (and desperately need for the spelling- ha!) It has a function called “complex expression” that gives me squiggly lines for single words and short phrases it thinks readers might have difficulty with. For instance, in my previous post, it suggested that I change “previous” to “earlier” and “accurate” to “correct” or “right.” I shuddered. How can it be that those types of suggestions come up in a program designed to improve one’s English? Don’t get me wrong, I know exactly how, but if I mock disbelief then I can pretend to stave off the cynicism.

~ J. William Lockhart.

Mystery Crates

This is largely a follow-up to a previous post, So Many Crates.

The grad student teaching my philosophy course has turned out to be a pretty decent replica of one one my old debate coaches. Not only do they have the same balding pattern and body type, but they share vocal patterns and mannerisms (albeit now without tics and a stutter). Best of all, there have been several very promising glimmers of brilliance from him in class. At one point in the sluggish trudge through one of Plato’s Dialogues, he was able to draw in an explanation of the ‘Womyn’s Studies” perspective on the issue that was both brief and accurate, and he did it all without prompting. There aren’t many who can do that; usually discussions of that field carry inaccurate assumptions and fail to grasp the depth of critique, and of those that do justice to the subject, few are brief, articulate, and simple enough for the lay public. I only wish more of the class was like this.

It did happen again a few days ago. I prefaced a comment with the words “perhaps I’ve read too much Nietzsche….” He seemed skeptical, and his response, though gentle, amounted to “I doubt that you’re comment will really be Nietzschian.”  As we were discussing Thrasymachus’ definition of Justice as the will of the strong and his further proposition that one should act unjustly in order that they become strong, my job wasn’t very difficult. By the time I had finished a few sentences suggesting that the definition was not only right but a good way to live, He chimed in and ranted a bit about how great a connection it really was, all the while demonstrating a solid enthusiasm for the argument. Indeed, it was an enthusiasm I haven’t seen from him in any of our discussions of Greek work. Then it dawned on me that the reason the more postmodern comments a friend and I routinely make weren’t answered well (or directly) was because he probably believed that they were ultimately right. This guy, working on his second Ph.D., could be leading a really great class with serious depth and energy. It seems like a waste, but at the same time it gives me confidence that my papers will be received by friendly ears.

~ J. William Lockhart

Misappropriation of a Letter

How did math and science departments manage to steal the letter ‘X’ away from the language departments?

Long long ago I had a teacher who replaced variables in algebra with smiley faces and puppy dogs.  Students were baffled and seemed to lose their understanding of the math almost entirely. Things they could do with ‘X’ they couldn’t with other symbols.

Today we had a variable scope review in class, where the professor purposefully named every variable ‘X’ in order to enhance confusion and force more serious consideration of which ‘X’ was the right one to change. I can’t help but think that it would have been more difficult for people to understand scope if the variables all shared a real name.

I once knew a student who named every program file the same thing (“hello.cpp”) because he didn’t know that he could do otherwise. The result was him overwriting everything he ever did the moment he went on to a new project. Humorous, but sad.

The whole point of nomenclature in math and science is to arbitrarily represent something known or unknown in a meaningful way. It seems lost on many students (likely because of the way things are taught) that they aren’t actually doing anything to ‘X’, but rather to the thing it represents.

I think I’ve always been fairly decent with this because I’m very conceptual and would rather understand something than memorize how to do it, but it seems that mentality is in the minority.

~ J. William Lockhart

Misappropriation of a letter

Of All Things

I am now officially a member of an R&D project in our CS department. Of all things for the paranoid security freak like me to be working on, the project’s goal is to [develop biometric applications for] Google’s android. That is, gathering intense amounts of personal data about people’s daily activities and storing it on a server in real time.

It is a really exciting project, though, and there are non-stalker, non-big-brother applications for it also. Most importantly, it is a surprisingly welcoming environment. I’ve never worked on a project of this scale before, or even much in this language, but I’ve come to see that it is all well within my reach. That’s a great feeling. Perhaps the most important aspect of the environment, though, is the other members of the group. Almost all of them are significantly more qualified and experienced than I am, but they’ve all been friendly. I don’t mean cordial or ‘nice’ or dismissive or patronizing. They all have genuinely and repeatedly engaged with me both on topic and off as a friend, from hour one. I don’t know why I should expect different, but I am still a little surprised. I never did anything to earn their respect or friendship, though I have it. It is a good place for me.

~ J. William Lockhart

Rights

If I were instructing an intro CS course, and feeling like my usual bitterly sarcastic self, I might start with the following declaration:

You have the right to remain codeless.
Anything you code can and will produce errors in compile time.
You have the right to a constructor.
If you cannot write a constructor, one will be provided for you.
Do you understand these rights as they have been read to you?

~ J. William Lockhart

Administrations

In addition to providing IT support, my job entails writing newsletter articles for users who are not usually the most savvy with computers. They aren’t dumb, they’re just inexperienced. Anyway, the higher-ups balked at one of my articles and ended up redacting it fairly severely in this part:

“Fourth, unlike [the old system], [the new system] supports continuous monitoring. By inspecting a device’s behavior, it can enforce … IT and wireless policies much more effectively…. Continuous monitoring does not mean that someone is sitting in a dark room watching everything each user does, or making records of it. Continuous monitoring means the network access control device inspects the types of connections made to prevent insecure protocols and activities without ‘spying’ on users.”

The man-in-a-dark-room-watching-everything-I-do myth is natural to anyone who has seen TV and Hollywood ‘hackers,’ and I have fielded dozens of questions and objections from terrified and outraged users about it, so I felt it was necessary in an article about this to assure them that their privacy was still fairly intact assuming they followed the rules. Apparently that offended the administration, and was removed along with considerable rephrasing. The disconnect between administration and users is funny, sure, (for instance, they still can’t understand that users get lost in the interface’s clutter, instead adding more clutter (“features”) in order to draw more usage) but I know that when it is published I’m going to field the same outrage and paranoia that I dealt with before.

~ J. William Lockhart

Stayin’ Alive

I’ve been swamped since I arrived back  at school, and simply haven’t had time to post. Rest assured, though, that posts are forthcoming for next week and I am still alive and well (though one of my professors seems to think I’m too well and disbelieve my explanation for missing the start of class. It’s somewhat difficult to fake fresh scars…).

~J. William Lockhart

Tell Me…

“Tell me what you want me to do to you.”

I’ve seen this line more than a few times. Today it was a TV show. I started to think, and was disheartened. In this side-plot, the lead roll’s 16-year-old son found himself speechless at the sound of those words from his girlfriend. They kissed (that’s all). She was a little forward and pushy, some may say, or even ’slutty,’ though I don’t think she is really seen as any of those. Why? It’s the classic male fantasy. Of course he wanted to kiss her, and he probably could have been persuaded to more with little effort, right? She’s attractive, so is he. And as a teenager, he’s the perfect symbol of male lust (in a positive light). It’s also classic that he was hesitant to push their relationship to that or any new level, because ‘men always have a hard time communicating.’ Plus, traditionally, it is the male that asks the female, to a dance, to a date, to whatever, and hopes not to be rejected. When a girl approaches a boy (abnormal), then all of his worries are gone, and he gets the satisfaction he seeks. So sure, she might be more forward than usual, but it’s also exactly what we fantasize about. Anyone whose ever had even a crush knows that they wished the other person would approach them first (and one can’t deny that quote and its fantasy is prevalent in erotic dancing, pornography, prostitution, and BDSM). The scene was cute and innocent, and viewers are happy for his triumph.

So where’s my beef? Gender. If he propositioned her like that, “tell me what you want me to do to you,” and then pulled her in for the kiss without getting a response first, people would be screaming ‘RAPE.’ Plus, she likely would storm out calling him a creep as the door slammed. It was only okay because our culture trains us that the boy always wants it, and the girl is rarely a predator (contrary to the man). This isn’t a standalone instance- I’ve seen it too many times to count, both ways.

Really, he shouldn’t be told that he always wants it, and she shouldn’t be told she can lead him by the penis (sex should not be used to manipulate). There are plenty of girls and womyn that wish their boyfriends would push for more, would take a little control like that (which is perfectly okay and often fantasized about when they both truly like each other). Additionally, boys and men should get the message that they don’t have to if they don’t want to (though instances of this are rising in the sleep-around dramas making prime time these days).

~ J. William Lockhart