Wednesday, January 23, 2019

Chicago this weekend?

Anyone in Chicago or southern Wisconsin this weekend (1/26-1/27) and want to meet up?

Thanks!

Sunday, January 13, 2019

Italy in 10 efficient days -- Padua/Venice (2 days)

Day 8: Arya and I took the fast train from Florence to Padua, but I'm sure there's a train from Cinqueterre or from Pisa too. We booked our tickets for the Scrovegni Chapel (otherwise known as Giotto wonderland!) like a week ahead, which is pretty much the minimum to book any of the places that require tickets. It's walkable to the chapel from the train station, but a good thing I kept losing clothes everywhere because after a week of extensive walking with Daniel and continuing to walk with Arya, this time I maybe had low grade plantar fasciitis. Arya and I just had backpacks, so that was easy, but also the chapel has a coat check that can handle even bigger luggage, so it is a very easy detour to/from Venice and one I absolutely recommend as the whole detour took just a few hours including lunch.

The Scrovegni Chapel is essentially like the pre-Renaissance (and my favorite artist's) Italian master Giotto's version of the Sistine Chapel. It's a miracle that it was preserved. Giotto pieces are super rare. Before this I had only seen two in the Louvre and two in the Uffizi. Now imagine an entire interior of Giotto. Wow. This was for sure the highlight of the trip for me and one of the main reasons I had wanted to go to Italy.



I wept in there. I wept before we even got in there from the video that we watched while we were getting dehumidified (overly moist air is a big problem in there because they're all frescoes and the land has underground water too). In the video (not the one above, I can't find it online) it talks about how the two layers of paintings are about Mary and Jesus's lives respectively and how underneath the main paintings are paintings of the 7 virtues on one side and vices on the other side.

Here are my notes from the video:

Each of us is called to choose between good and evil. This is the message of free will. 
He appeals to our sense of responsibility. He points us to the healing process that can make us better people. 

I think there are other things in Padua worth checking out, but we didn't. Also, it's expensive to stay there. For some reason I thought it would have been cheaper to stay in Padua than Florence, so my initial plan (before we got night tickets to see the David) was to train it up to Padua in the evening and stay there, but we ended up one more evening in Florence.

Weird side note about the coat check, after we were done we grabbed out back packs again, ate a snack, but wanted to check out the multimedia section (not that great, but it did have a video and dress up). BUT the crazy lady in there gave us such a hard time about having a backpack, even though we were the only ones in there, and insisted that we couldn't even be in the room with a backpack. Rather than re check the bags in the free coat check, we just walked back to the train station. That's a potential "gray rage" scenario (more on that later?), but luckily we had just been through the chapel so I was on a spiritual high!


That afternoon we took the train the final 20-40 minutes to Venice. There are two Venice train stations -- the one on the mainland and the island ones, make sure you're getting the right one. We stayed in some sketchy dive a short walk from the train station that nonetheless had the most beautiful grand canal view. We kept that window open the whole time, just listening to the boats and people outside. Gondola rides were 200 euros at night in cash. What?! But still, it's like pony up the cash because it's such a singular experience. Other than that and St. Mark's square, I don't think there are any things that you have to do. The churches are ok, but there's nothing unmissable, which is nice because you don't want to spend your time inside museums here, you want to spend it out on the streets and on the water.

Definitely get a little ferry pass (their version of a bus) for however long you're going to be there, otherwise there are certain places you simply can't get to. We went on the ferry to the little island and accompanying church of San Giorgio Maggiorre, which has a tower that you can get up to for cheap that is a very nice alternative to the St. Mark's one, which can often have a line. See below and above photo for the view from this tower. We also went to the Doge's Palace with the audio tour, which had entertaining amounts of blood and intrigue and prisons. Word on the street is that the Secret's of the Doge is a fun tour, but has to be booked so far ahead of time that we were not even close to being able to do that. 

We spent about 36 hours there, which I thought was great -- enough to see Venice in all sorts of light. If you are short on time, I think you can get the gist in even shorter amount of time. But do go! Because it keeps getting more crowded and flooded by the minute and it is such a different city, very singular and unmissable, I think. And because we went at the very end of summer, we didn't have any flooding or any similar issues.

We left that night by taking an overnight bus to Munich (Flix). Either Venice or the bus exposed me to a new bug that gave me bullseye bug bites that itched like crazy for 2-3 days and then disappeared. I don't think bed bugs, and I had it confirmed that it wasn't tick bites by my doctor when I got home. Other than that who knows. Maybe wear bug repellent. 

Sunday, January 6, 2019

Texas and Louisiana in February?

I'm thinking about hitting up some of my Central and East Texas and Louisiana people who have reached out to me before I go to Mardi Gras. Email me if you would like to meet up. 


Wednesday, January 2, 2019

Narcissists, Psychopaths, and Sociopaths

Here's another video that one of my family members sent:

I just ran into this video on youtube and I was wondering what your opinion on it is, based on the research that you have done into these kinds of distinctions.  To be honest, I had a hard time even comprehending some of the things she was talking about and I think that it might have something to do with the nature of empathy.  Like it seems like people who are empathetic are naturally so (and this is what makes it so hard for empaths to even understand what it would be like to be a sociopath/psychopath) but the stuff she said about psychopaths being born and sociopaths being made made me wonder if empathy is an acquired skill.  Have you seen other people citing this same distinction between psychopaths and sociopaths (i.e. that the causes are nature and nurture, respectively)?  If you haven't seen this video before, it might be interesting to show to your blog and see how people react to it there. 

See below my response to the distinction between psychopaths and sociopaths. But I think the issue of empathy being an acquired skill is sort of a separate question, in a way. From my own experience, I think that anyone can learn to do better perspective taking -- or cognitive empathy. But I've had brain scans that show low low levels of function in the typical empathy brain areas. And after so many years of therapy, I still don't really have the sensation of feeling affective empathy. I don't feel like I will ever get to where I am feeling affective empathy normally. But I also don't feel like I need affective empathy for a normal, happy, fulfilling life. In fact I think the overreliance on empathy in our society has led to a great many ills.



I like her explanation of guilt and shame. I think along with the previous video about regret, these people are accurately describing what negative emotions sociopaths may or may not experience.

I don't necessarily agree that a psychopath is born and a sociopath is made. I have heard this before, but I don't know that this is a consistently held belief or that there has been a good deal of research to justify this distinction. I do think that there probably is a different between people that I would consider sort of a genetically driven sociopath and those that may have been culturized or socialized that way. For instance, I have heard from several people that a high degree of the population of Romania seems sociopathic. That seems like more of a cultural response. Whether that means we call them sociopaths and other people psychopaths, I don't know. I'd like to see the academic empirical research on this.

One story I did like is the girl who broke up with a dude who  tries to win her back, successfully. They date for a solid year and he is the perfect boyfriend. On the one year anniversary of getting back together, the boyfriend tells her that he had been playing her this whole time to break her heart. Wow, cold. But I could see sociopaths (especially young ones with a lot of time on their hands) do something like this. 

Wednesday, December 26, 2018

Sociopathy as adaptation instead of disorder

This Bret Weinstein (evolutionary theorist) video was sent to me by a reader and I actually thought it accurately described a lot of my own experience and conception of sociopathy. He talks about how sociopathy is listed as a disorder, but for a lot of sociopaths their sociopathic traits end up being the thing that enable the sociopath to achieve high levels of success, so it is more like a superpower than a disorder. In fact, he suggests that sociopathy is just one end of a spectrum that contains all normal people.

I don't 100% track his definitions of empathy and sympathy. I think I still prefer cognitive vs. affective empathy.

His thoughts on why we think of sociopathy as a disorder, because their traits are turned inward into their own groups (as opposed to be used against opposing groups, etc.) are pretty interesting.

His solution is, instead of killing sociopaths or neutralizing them or imprisoning them or whatever, that society look to eliminate situations or societal systems that are vulnerable to exploitation -- not just from sociopaths from anyone. He suggests that the example of individuals glutting themselves on world resources to the detriment of future generations would be an example of the sorts of societal systems that allow people to profit off something that produces harm to others that needs to be rectified, primarily I believe based on his arguments by requiring people to internalize all of the benefits and harm of their actions.

Wednesday, December 19, 2018

Italy in 10 efficient days -- Cinqueterre/Pisa (1.5 days)

Day 6: Cinqueterre! One of my lawyer friends has talked this up quite a bit, and I think it may have to do with the fact that she went a decade or so ago when it was a little less crowded. The crowds and the mudslides have maybe dulled this gem of the Mediterranean just a little bit from what it perhaps once was. But I actually think it was perfect for Daniel and I because you either hike or take the train to the difference towns, and we did a ton of hiking, which was a perfect overlap of our interests and beautiful weather for hiking in mid September. 

We actually got to Riomaggiore, the first city from the South, the evening before and did some swimming, although we probably didn't read the instructions about safe places for swimming correctly and ended up with some blood lost. 

In the morning we checked our bags with some checked luggage lady for something ridiculous like 10 euros each. Wow, highway robbery. Remember that if you're spending just a day here (totally doable if you're mostly here to see the coastline and do some hiking). Maybe it's worth it to stay at an actual hotel that can keep your luggage for the day instead of the sideways place we stayed at. Also, heads up, it was mosquito city there in certain places, so bring repellent. 

Between Riomaggiore and the next city there is a path (Via Dell'Amore) that's been closed for like 5 years because of potential structural issues. We just scaled the cliff a little to get around the barrier, and it was a nice walk (Daniel slept there on his last day, when I took the train to stay the night in Pisa). If you don't want to scale the barrier, you can take the train there or maybe do some other longer hike. 

There's a similar story with the next city Manarola. I actually think this may have been a better place for swimming, if we had brought swimming gear. But we didn't really have time that day either because there's sort of a full day of hiking just to get from place 1 to place 4 (we never did get to number 5 although we could have grabbed a ferry or train to finish the journey). 

Daniel again wanted to take the path that goes along the coast that got cut away by a mudslide (visible from the water or from the former starting place of that path) but to me it looked a little too destroyed. I'm actually glad we ended up taking the hill path instead because we got some great views of both Manarola and number three city Corniglia and the hike was pretty fun after the first half mile or so which was basically like walking up stairs for forty five minutes. The path is a little hard to see, but we asked some people by some pay restrooms (Daniel is very good at asking for directions) and there was a little water station halfway up the stairs with some good views for resting. By this time, I don't know what was wrong with me, but I was not at my peak performance. Something I ate or the heat or something? The first couple hours of the hike Daniel was waiting for me to rest a lot. Things turned around in the afternoon, but even so I was wishing I had brought true athletic shoes with me instead of the very thin soled sneakers I had brought.  

You don't need a pass to go to Cogniglia, but to get to the fourth city Vernazza, yes. You can pay at the beginning of the trail to Vernazza. Vernazza was maybe the liveliest of the places? He is the top photo of this blog. Pretty cool how he juts out like that. We could sort of see the fifth city way far away and it didn't look as charming, so we called it quits at Vernazza and went back on the ferry, which was a nice maritime and relatively cheap way to see the cities. Ferry tickets are sold down at the ferry line. The ferry holds a lot of people so don't be too nervous you won't get on, but do stand in line and not wait until the last minute. 

If you wanted to skip a trail for time savings and less intense, probably take the train or ferry from 2 to 3. The trail from 2 to 3 was pretty long and intense with good views. The trail from 3 to 4 was a little less jungly and less up and down. 

I'm sure there's shopping and there definitely was a drinking culture from the tourists that were there at night. Mostly it's just pretty beautiful. 

Day 7: I stopped in Pisa on the way back to Rome to meet Arya. Pisa seems like the major hub city that you pass through to and from Florence? It's not probably worth more than a couple hours of wondering and seeing the tower, but is a cheaper place to stay before or after your day hiking in Cinqueterre. 

Friday, December 7, 2018

Time Paradox -- Please do this Quiz!

One thing that Daniel and I talked about in our hitchhiking and other Italian adventures was the different ways that people perceive time and how we thought sociopaths tended to experience time.

I learned that Philip Zimbardo (of Stanford Prison Experiment fame) had a book out in the last decade talking about the different ways that people can and do perceive time.

I wonder if y'all wouldn't mind completing this short test Zimbardo uses to suss out who perceives time in what ways: http://www.thetimeparadox.com/zimbardo-time-perspective-inventory/

And then if you could report what you got in the comments with a rough score on what you are 1-10 in terms of sociopathic traits (bell-curve style, like I was probably an 8 at my peak, now a 7.5 and 10 is basically not functional in modern society without a ton of special accommodations), I'm interested to see if Daniel's observations are correct. Maybe even tell me what type of sociopath you consider yourself, male/female, low or high functioning, successful or struggles, that sort of thing.

Thanks friends!

Wednesday, December 5, 2018

Italy in 10 efficient days -- Florence/Siena (2 days)

Ok, just a reminder that I was a little back and forth myself meeting people in different places, but this is what I would recommend for an efficient traveler.

Day 4: If you leave early enough in the morning from Rome, you can get a train or bus to Siena, which is on the way and has a charming medieval city center that is a Unesco World Heritage and a beautiful Cathedral with a museum about medieval music which was interesting to see in person for the first time.

You could probably wander around the city for a lot of time, but I think you'll get the point after 2-3 hours, and then on to Florence. In the alternative, certain parts of Florence, particularly right across the river in between the Boboli Garden (not really worth seeing unless you crazy love gardens our outdoor statutes or weird manmade grottos to house statutes) and the river.

.
So if you don't feel like taking the slow trains to Siena (it's either fast train straight to Florence or spending more than twice the time on the slow trains to detour to Siena).

The lowdown with Florence is that everything is pretty walkable, much more than Rome (even though people might tell you that's a good way to see it). But there are also bikes everywhere! And I had so much fun biking around Florence. I think OBikes were the most popular, so maybe download the app ahead of time. I also did some longer term rentals another time I was there at Alinari Bikes. I did basically a circle loop, going across the river to the Michelangelo statute on the hill that has a great view, back towards the Boboli Gardens, and across the picturesque bridge with all of the shops. I was there not even at the peak of tourist season, but some Florence streets are not bikeable only because there are so many pedestrians, but the rest is pretty flat and easy. 

Daniel had a rule about only going to one church or one museum each day, so we did more outside exploration. With friend sociopath friend Arya, who met me after Daniel left, and friend Stuart who met us we went to the Uffizi Gallery, which may be the biggest, most consolidated art museum in Italy? At least that I had seen or heard about, with several famous masterpieces and plenty of selfie taking. Again, the key here is to make your reservations as early as you can swing it.



We also did the Duomo dome walk, which you can book as part of your Cathedral all in one ticket but again you need to reserve a time. Heads up, for all of the Cathedral stuff, there are a bunch of lines so make sure you know what line you're getting in before you get in line. The line to actually get into the Cathedral seemed not worth it, particularly if you do the dome and can kind of get the gist of it without needing another line. We also did the Giotto tower, which maybe has better views, as people say, because the dome is in the view. Also I have a major thing for Giotto. I licked the tower.

Finally, we went to see the David. It really is crazy. In fact, Arya said that it was maybe once of her favorite parts of the whole trip. We got reservations for the evening, which was nice to just sit and chill and look at him for an hour or so. The rest of the museum really is sort of an also run (not that great), unless you like looking at the Giotto school and comparing how the whole second floor was painted after Giotto, but still painted mostly flat with little of Giotto's perspective.

You can get a Florence pass. Same with Rome but I don't know, unless you're planning on being there for an inefficient stay, like more like 4 days, it's probably easier to just book your tickets separately. This is especially true because you often have to reserve a time to go to these places, and I couldn't figure out how to do the reservation with the Florence card. The expenses don't see like the big deal in Florence, it's the crowds and the lines, so I'd choose whatever is most convenient here. 

Sunday, December 2, 2018

Los Angeles 12/10/18

I think I have to be in Los Angeles on Monday December 10th, if people want to meet up?

Wednesday, November 28, 2018

Tokyo, Seoul, and Taipei -- Meet up?

I'm still trying to make South Africa work, but it may get delayed.

Instead, I think I'll end up going to Tokyo, Seoul, and Taipei this winter (no earlier than the middle of January).

Again, please let me know if you'd like to meet up in one of those places.

Thanks!

Photo is from my Estonia trip that I still need to write about.

Monday, November 19, 2018

Italy in 10 Days -- Hitchhiking

After we leave Rome, Daniel and I start hitchhiking. His theory:

It's a complex game.

First – logistics. You have to choose the road (motorway is faster, but more problematic; on local road it's easier to catch a ride, but it won't be that far) and place (you need to be visible, it's better if there is space to stop a car, and if cars don't go too fast in this particular place; bus stop after curve is great, but not too close to the curve).

Second – good first impression. The driver will see you for several seconds and you want to convince him you're a good person he wants to take. It doesn't matter how long you wait, if you're stressed or tired, you put it all aside and play a nice, chilled, positive person (which you immediately become right after someone stops).

Third thing – someone took you for a ride, then what? I treat it like an exchange – driver offers me transportation from A to B, plus I watch him and wonder what kind of person he is, how to talk to him, how to act (“be who they want you to be”, a game I play often, and for being a good player I get rewards in many places). What I give him is positive feelings, a smile, sometimes a story or an interesting thought. And company, of course.

All of this is especially interesting because in everyday life you don't meet real strangers. You meet your friends, their friends, but they aren't random, because you choose your friends and they choose theirs, so in fact people you meet come to you through a kind of a filter (hope you understand what I mean). And now you not only meet a stranger, you also sit in his car and try to follow his rules. I guess it helps to develop empathy / emotional intelligence / intuition.

Fourth thing – I say it's easy to tell everything about yourself to a person you just met and will probably never see again. You meet this kind of people not only in bars, but also during hitchhiking. One thing is you rather want to be subtle, because you don’t know the guy, but if it's this kind of person, when you feel kind of a connection, you can tell them anything you want and he will not call you three years later saying what he thinks about you. It's like talking with yourself in my opinion.

And the last thing is where they leave you. Sometimes you're left on the crossing in the middle of nowhere, with nobody in sight, and when the car goes his way it's only you and silence, and I feel absolutely free in those situations. I really like this feeling, being on the road, you know.

So I think that's it.

And when I talk to Daniel most of the time that we are together, it feels a little this way -- like I am talking to a stranger, but in a lot of ways much more than talking to a random stranger like with the hitchhiking, I feel like I am talking to myself. 

Because I'm interested in really understanding the people I meet, as much as they want to be understood, I was interested to try out hitchhiking with him. We ended up choosing to go north instead because he had to make an international flight leaving out of France in about 6 days. Without really having planned it beforehand, we ended up traveling together for a week. First the hitchhiking, not very far just from Rome to Civitavecchia (if you want to look it up on a map. Worth seeing maybe, and apparently a frequent cruise stop or origin. We then, at the advice of the last person we met with, took a train up to Follonica, which is a nice beach resort town with only Italian tourists and pretty cheap. Worth a visit too if you're spending like a month in Italy. 

I've written a ton more about Daniel and his life philosophies and how I was surprised by some of his observations to realize the extent of my irrational thinking on certain topics. But maybe better to get it from the source, his new blog. Also, I'll probably get deeper into it in the second book. It's just hard to explain part of it without explaining all of it, but a quick thing to think about is his observation -- most people try to buy their life with money. But the best things in life you don’t get like chocolate from the box that you buy. You get them like chasing after the puffy seed of the dandelion and you never have a guarantee that you’ll get it. You don’t buy your life. 

In hitchhiking (in which you you're not trying to travel by buying the comfort and illusion of independence from other people) and in so many ways in which we interacted with others and made our way in the world, I kept thinking about how much I try to buy my life and otherwise try to shield myself from dealing with or relying on other people in ways that are obvious, like the same way that it is obvious that you rely on people when you're asking them for a ride. I became aware of this and at least a half dozen other little self deceptions by hanging out with him. 

Wednesday, October 31, 2018

Mardi Gras, South Africa in January? and Coachella 1st weekend

Just for people's planning purposes, I'm pretty sure I'll be at Mardi Gras in New Orleans this year, if you've ever wanted to go and wanted an excuse.

Also, I already have tix for Coachella's first weekend. Again, if you're going to be there anyway, I'd love to meet up, or maybe you've been interested in checking it out before but this might help you plan.

I'm also in the early stages of thinking about going to South Africa in late January and early February.

By the way, everyone that I have met, thank you so much for your hospitality and your friendship. I've loved meeting every single one of you and count you all my friends. Truly, let me know if there is ever anything I can do for you. And I hope to meet many more of you. Again, even if you have emailed me before, if you'd like me to try to swing to your area of the world, let me know.

Thanks all!


Sunday, October 21, 2018

Italy in 10 efficient days -- Rome (2-3 days)

True to my travelogue style, I'm going to give advice about what to do while you're in Italy, but I myself didn't follow this plan.

So I'll also tell you what actually happened.

Day 1: The first day I was in Italy I had no plans, so I just went to the National Roman Museum, which is right next to the Rome Termini station. It has a ton of ancient Roman artifacts, perhaps most famously the discus thrower. Otherwise, if you're planning on visiting the Vatican museums even a little bit and you're a little on a tight schedule, this museum is an easy miss. You can also get entry into the related museum (you can buy entry to one for 10 Euro and both for 12) to the old Roman bath ruins that are also right there by the train station. But you can also see basically some Roman bath ruins by going into the Basilica S.Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri, which is a part of the Roman bath building converted to a church by Mihelangelo. I checked into my hotel at around 3:00 pm and thought about just staying there (long flight and not a lot of sleep), but because I'm so hardcore about sleep schedules when traveling, 

I forced myself to uber over to some other second tier place. Ubers are good if you can't find a taxi stand (you don't really hail taxies, you have to find a taxi stand), although they are all black car so more expensive than American uber. Second tier activities, because I was going to be in Rome again in a week with another sociopath friend and I knew she would want to do all the first tier stuff with me. So I went to something that seemed safely second tier (although I ended up going again with socio friend just for a quick look), El Palazzo Doria Pamphilj. This one has a couple Berninis and a few Carravagios and it is a nice look into a Palazzo while also combining some important pieces of art. Heads up, there aren't really any big state run museums that have all the good art, but rather they all come from private collections and mostly have stayed in those collections, even if they're available for viewing by the general public, so don't expect something like the Louvre with a consolidated collection in Rome. But maybe the best thing about this Doria Pamphilij place is that the audio guide is narrated by one of the heirs to this family fortune/collection, and his little remembrances of his family are often hilarious glimpses into wealthy old money Italian families. I also saw the Palazzo Venezia, which is very missable unless you're into Mussolini locations, bu it was a good example of what the audio guide narrator at Doria Pamphilij said -- that in Rennaissance onward Roman society, it wasn't enough for a family to have money -- it had to have things. And that's what the Palazzo Venezia looks like, just room upon room of very precious (I'm sure), uninteresting things. I also took the elevator to the top of the Altare della Patria, which people say is the best view of Rome because you can't see the Altare della Patria in the horizon. ;) 

Day 2: I meet new friend Daniel who is maybe 7-ish on socio scale? He says he is on the more hyper rational side of things. We had emailed about hitchhiking down to Naples (he has a whole theory behind it, maybe he'll let me publish it) and had talked about leaving that day, but he said he'd rather spend one more day in Rome, so we just hung out. We met at the Colosseum, he looked at my shoes and was like, looks like you can walk around for 10 or 11 hours. Not quite, but a lot that way. We walked all over the place. They say walking is the best way to see Rome, and it is probably true, but also heads up that you need some good shoes for the rough cobblestone streets, sidewalks, and just all of the very hard surfaces you'll be on. We walked first to a park on the other side of the river that is high and has a good view and then on to St. Peter's, which is a masterpiece of architecture and the cleanest older church I have seen. It really looked like it could have been built in the last decade, it was so clean. Of course Michelangelo's Pieta is there in bulletproof glass, as well as a bunch of dead popes. No cost to go in, but a long wait for security with a lot of people from cultures who are not used to queuing. You can climb to the top of the sexy ass Michelangelo dome and should because it's sexy as hell. After, we hung out in the Vatican-y sort of area around the river and just wandering until I took a cab back to my hotel, which luckily had vacancy. I lost the first of my personal items there -- a jacket. I had packed light because of the hitchhiking plans, just a normal sized backpack, and I ended up losing basically half of my clothes on this trip. Tsk tsk.

Day 3: Things I did later in Rome and that are worthwhile is a tour of the Sistine Chapel and Vatican. I did the Pristine Sistine, because I had such a good experience seeing Stonehenge early, but even before it allegedly opened it was packed. Maybe still a good idea if it's high season? And the Vatican museums seemed complicated to me, so it was nice to just burn there through with a guide explaining things. I also did a Colosseum and Roman Forum tour because I figured otherwise I wouldn't know what was going on in there. That was also probably a good idea because the ruins are so partial it's not clear what is what.

Finally, I went to the Borghese Gallery. Heads up, the way they do it is let a group in for two hour slots. Two hours is more than enough time to see everything, so no stress, even if I could have stayed longer. But! As is the case at a lot of places, what ends up happening is that middlemen buy up all the availability and so reservations have to be made at least a week in advance for your time slot or you can try to buy from these third party resellers. I ended up staying a day longer than I had planned. Because I stayed longer, I also did a Walks of Rome tour of the catacombs, which was also interesting, especially sort of piecing together the history of Rome with the history and spread of Christianity. If you're short on time and/or money but want a flavor of old Christianity and bones, another good option is just to see the Capuchin Crypt yourself, which is easily accessible within the city limit. It was very not crowded when I went and also has its own Caravaggio.

Also sort of must see is Bellini's Ecstasy of St. Theresa, which is just in a small church and is free to see but the hours are sort of particular. I went at least once when it was closed and then again when it was closing and sort of sketchy to see it after a Missa.




Thursday, October 11, 2018

Holiday Midwest, Chicago, Milwaukee, maybe Michigan and Ohio

Hey friends, I think I'm going to try to be in Milwaukee, Chicago, and maybe other places in Michigan and Ohio during the holiday week between Christmas and New Years and in the first week of January. Let me know if you would like to meet up.


Tuesday, October 2, 2018

Dachau and the problem of "evil"

I've spent a total of like 14 hours in the Copenhagen airport in the last 24 hours with delayed and then cancelled flights, but I wanted to write some quick thoughts about Dachau and evil while I wait for yet another European connecting flight before going home. I'll write more about the trip later.

Dachau is an interesting example of what people would call "evil". Dachau is a city in Bavaria and Dachau the prison and then concentration camp was the first of its kind and often used as a model for the construction of others. It began in the 1930s to house primarily all of the political prisoners that were occurring as Nazism had gained control over the German government and had gotten permission to protect the fatherland by eliminating or isolating potential threats. Interestingly, when they first obtained this permission through what was mostly still a legit democratically elected government, the pretense they gave for the need for such power was to protect their political rivals from the harm that might happen to the political rivals. In other words, they argued that their political rivals were so endangered by the political fury the Nazis themselves had worked so hard to foment via well placed propaganda preying upon the banal fears to which empaths in particular are susceptible. I sort of vaguely remember this being one of the given purposes for the establishment of Jewish ghettos as well -- that they were so hated that they needed to be separated for their own protection.

I went there with my German friend, which was interesting for me not so much because of who she is (sociopathic identifying, although that was also a little hilarious to sort of see the different ways she approached things than a more neurotypical person might), but because of how I reacted to her presence. I still have very low maybe non-existent affective empathy even post therapy, but one thing that I have always done particularly at the height of my manipulative ways is to be very aware of my audience and adjust my conversation and behavior to please. I still do this. I don't think it's bad, it's just being responsive to the context in which you find yourself, and the people around you are also part of that context. What I mean is that because she was German, I thought much more of the German perspective of what it would be like to live in Dachau -- a city that is still thriving but probably for a lot of the world will always be associated with the camp. Or what it might be like to just generally be German, especially a young German and be both so far removed from any connection to these events, but still inextricably entangled in them. And she had some very interesting thoughts about how the connection continues to affect the German sense of their national identity, like maybe they are less likely to be waving German flags in foreign places or making other overt shows of national pride, particularly while abroad.

So I found myself chatting with her about how the Germans have done a good job accepting responsibility for the things that their nation had done. They do and continue to do reparations, they have all of these memorial sites that are well attended and well maintained, and my German friend told me that the vast majority of her history lessons focused on WWII and with this idea of trying not to repeat past mistakes.

I also found myself saying things like despite the sheer magnitude of this particular path of human cruelty, the German example is not so singular. I had just been to Russia and seen a gulag, spoke at length with a local whose grandfather disappeared into a gulag long ago for the smallest of jokes about Stalin, and saw the affect that such a repressive regime still had. I had just spoken with new polish friend about some of the Russian slaughters of polish political prisoners. I also mentioned to new German friend that when I was in Russia and told people that I was visiting gulags that the U.S. has its own gulags -- the private prisons and terrible legal system that imprisons such a large proportion of its population, particularly its traditionally disadvantaged classes of people. I told her about how there has long been a Russian tu quoque response to American complaints about Russian civil rights violations -- "And you are lynching Negroes".

It was so easy to come up with examples of evil, not just of other nations both historical and contemporary, but personal examples and examples of very common brands of human cruelty -- the failure of common people to understand their fellows as being dynamic and capable of redemption, no matter what past misdeeds, the modern day stoning of public shaming done mostly via social media, the tribalism that has led to polarization and justification for violence and other "ends justify the minds" reasoning among such a broad swath of the population to a level I wouldn't have thought possible ten years ago.


The Germans have done a good job acknowledging the problem of evil, the fact that they as a nation fell susceptible to it generations ago, and trying to learn what this means for not just their own humanity and the dual good/bad that we all share, but for what it means when people do "bad" things to them. Do we judge as hypocrites? Do we falsely set ourselves up as being  beyond reproach?

Evil is not just banal, as Hannah Arendt famously argued, it is ubiquitous and we participate in it in ways small and big every day. When we can do as good of a job as the Germans do about acknowledging this and trying to learn from it and do better, I think the world would be such a better place.

Pictured, gate with the famous motto and lie that work will make free, crematorium, room marked showers that leads to a functioning gas chamber (although apparently never used), and "shower" head designed to dispense zylkon b for the efficient murder of people that were considered by their murders to themselves be "evil" and as such worth of such treatment.

Ok, my plane is boarding! Please forgive any typos or convoluted writing.

Wednesday, September 26, 2018

How to Process Your Emotions

I thought this was a good, short video about how everyone has emotions that they don't process and how that is both influenced by societal expectations and has an ultimate affect on society:



It doesn't say anything terribly new, but this concept of having emotions that you don't even acknowledge as being emotions because they're happening at a level that you're not aware of is very much my traditional way of experiencing emotions.

It's not as if I was ever an emotionless void. But to the extent I did experience emotions, it's was if they were a conversation being had in another room -- or gossip about you that you're not aware of. I had physical or other symptoms (grouchiness). Like I would know that I felt tired or disinterested, but my awareness was more of my physical symptoms than being able to identify a specific source.

But even if I did have a greater awareness, I traditionally have not had the skills to process the emotion.

Through therapy I became more aware of and better at identifying my emotions, which solved the first problem. But then I had to (like everyone else) learn what to do with that knowledge. So I ended up with the same problem as everyone else in which I was experiencing general malaise, some generalized anxiety, and bad sleep because I had unacknowledged and unprocessed worries. Luckily once stuff starts affecting my sleep, I'm generally willing to do whatever it takes to figure out how to fix what's fixable. And in a way, as the video sort of alludes to at the end, although the way I lived my life was already following the philosophy of stoicism quite a bit, I became even more (via what I learned in therapy) an unintentional stoic. The key is this willingness to accept reality for what it is. Once that happens, I think most people are able to figure things out with just a little help maybe from a therapist or friend who sees things for how they truly are.  

Thursday, August 16, 2018

Italy and Munich in September

Hey friends, I’ll be in Italy in the second week of September, starting in Rome, Naples, Florence, and a couple other Northern Italy destinations before ending up in Munich around the last weekend in September. Hit me up if you want to meet up. 

Sunday, July 15, 2018

Paris in an efficient week

This travel time is cheating a little bit because I met a friend in Paris and his friend had been living in Paris for the past few months studying cooking, so I kind of coasted.

Things that I did and found worthwhile were the Louvre. I went through the newer area up the stairs from the boat sculpture, the Winged Victory of Samothrace, first, which I think was a good idea because there's less pizzazz that route, and then when I was tired after lunch is when I hit up the crazy Italian wing. The French revolution wing was closed, which was a little disappointing because I'm a fan of Géricault and Delacroix, but ok.

Musée d'Orsay is not as massive as the Louvre, but is also very interesting and important more modern pieces and a beautiful building in its own right.

I really liked dining at the Jules Verne in the Eiffel Tower. It as a Michelin star and was of course pricey, but seemed like exactly the sort of thing you would want to spend money on. Make a reservation for sure, and as early as you can. I think they assume you want a good window seat and seating is based on how early you make reservations. Even locals believe Jules Verne to be "classique".

For other restaurants in Paris, the Fork App is apparently good. As one local put it, it's like Groupon for Paris restaurants, but good. You make discounted reservations when restaurants think they'll have extra capacity. There's also Yelp, but apparently the reviews in French can be quite different from the reviews in English. For instance, one restaurant within a short walk of the Eiffel Tower had things like "Good standard fare" while the French reviews called it a "National scandal!"

Pigeon is delicious. Heads up! Also of course escargot. My chef friend really recommends Grand CÅ“ur as one of her favorite restaurants.

Also, my friend had been taking private French tutoring with a Paris local, and I think he enjoyed getting the inside scoop on local trends before he went. The Google Translate app is a must for weak French. Be sure to download the French dictionary ahead of time and get used to the app if it's your first time.

Apparently Parisian French is particularly hard to learn and understand. I had heard that from many sources, but it wasn't until I was dining with a new friend who was French herself, but who had been away for a decade or two, struggling to communicate with a server at a restaurant that I realized how serious that admonition was. She said that when she comes back, she often ends up speaking to her friends in English, so they can practice and because it just ends up being easier.

Notre Dame was beautiful, although an interesting trend is that Cathedrals or other older buildings in big old cities that have turned into sprawling modern metropolises is that there is just a lot more updating and other changes that happen to the buildings over centuries, for better or for worse. I did meet a cheese chef outside named Remy and kissed in the rain near the bridge to the other little island behind Notre Dame and he invited me to come visit him in Monaco. That seemed very Paris, but I also think I viewed the interaction in a more casual way than he did. Be sure to check out that view of the Seine and Notre Dame, I think it looks its best that way.

Versailles was great, but I definitely got lost going out there, had to ask people what train was the right one (which I should have done in the first place) and it's true that the line is pretty long to get in. It was what I thought it would be, which is a testament to its fame and current status.

A cheaper and dirtier version of French opulence was the Paris opera house, which was wonderfully more than I thought it was going to be. Also, for Phantom of the Opera fans, you can see the Phantom's box -- Box 5. While we were there, the inside (Chagall ceiling!) was closed for a ballet rehearsal. That was also beautiful to watch.

The catacombs were awesome! Again, because they are so small and down so far, only so many people can go in at a time so be sure to book well ahead, print out your tickets, etc. so you don't end up having to stand in the very long line and instead can stand in the shorter.

You can climb up to the Sacré-Cœur Basilica and check out Montmarte, in fact one of my new friends suggest I wake up early and climb up those steps to see the sunrise, but I was exhausted by this time.

I took a quick day trip outside the city to meet a new sociopath friend. More on her later, probably, but her story for me was perhaps one of the most compelling because she had just discovered her identity by chance a few months before, so I was seeing her discover herself and come to terms with it in almost real time. And she's such a classic example of what you would expect a very smart, beautiful, successful sociopath to be. Really you would all love to meet her, as well as the rest of the new friends I met on this trip and I hope to be able to write more about them in the next book.

I never feel sorry for the people I meet, but sometimes their circumstances are so poignant to me. A lot of them just want to live an authentic life of pleasure, but also some sort of substance or meaning. And it's not so much their unique mental processes that often keep them from it, but rather the reactions and misunderstandings of the people around them. I hope that we can do better as a society in this regard. I hope that we can come to understand each other better and allow each other to freely live genuine lives. 

Saturday, July 7, 2018

New York this week

Just a reminder that I'm in New York this week. If you want to meet up, email me: me @ sociopathworld .com


Friday, June 29, 2018

London in an efficient week

I met so many people in London, it was my busiest time traveling. So I'll give you a brief rundown:

First day back in London I meet up with M to attend Evensong at Westminster Abbey. Worth going! Also worth it to get in line early to get better seats (see photo from my very fancy seat). Afterwards we walk north to Trafalgar Square and eat in the crypt of St. Martin in the Fields. He is a therapist and practices meditation. He taught mea simple breath focus meditation, which was actually very nice to do and even though I have since been bad at practicing it, I do sometimes try to do a form of it when I have a gap of time or want to collect my thoughts. M was an interesting non sociopath guy to talk to because he had this sort of past history of not choosing right things and not loving people the right way. But he learned that being a channel of peace augments him and he becomes more peaceful more grounded. Evil depletes him and gives him pain, as well as other people. It's purely self interested to choose peace because you like the results. Altruism is just selfishness.

I liked this attitude. It reminded me of my own belief that it seems like we are all cells of the
multicellular organism of humanity and to oppose another person is really to oppose yourself.

The next day I went to the Harry Potter Exhibit at the National Library (the magna carta!) and met another new friend (he identifies a little aspie) at the Natural History Museum and walked around a bit. Natural History Museum had some of his favorite architecture, and it was really beautiful inside, particularly the huge whale skeleton. This is by a bunch of other museums you could check out, but we went to South Kensington (I think!) for tapas. Lovely neighborhood, good food and good company. We hang out talking about the writer's life visiting several pubs (diet coke!), ending up at a Covent Garden pub.

The following day I walk around Parliament area (spent 10 minutes seeing a ceiling full of Titians in the Whitehall Banqueting House, which was beautiful, but I did it for the toilet and because free with London Pass -- really exquisite toilets) the river cruise to the Tower, all London Pass items, and meet a new friend H. H relates with some aspects of sociopathy but not all. She tells me about how her work involves monitoring other employees at the same office. There's one person in particular that people love to hate at her office. She targets him as well in her professional capacity, but she is careful to never target him for the same behavior twice. Why? because then he would get fired and she would no longer have anyone to play with at work. She can't pick on just anyone, for instance not the older lady who brings baked goods for everyone after long weekends. That would make her a monster in the eyes of her co-workers. So she keeps this guy around, like a cat playing with a mouse. We got on a Jack the Ripper tour with a walking tour company that was excellent and does a lot of other walking tours around London. I think the London Pass offered some discount or something free, but still paid 10 pounds or something.

The next day I do the hop on hop off bus tour, but it is Lent so St. Paul's is only open for worshippers. I worship! In the afternoon I meet up with my new friend M, who is a full dandy and one of these charming sociopaths that can (and possibly has) conned a lot of people out of their money. He meets me in the National Gallery (after I think I mistakenly told him the National Portrait Gallery) and takes me on an impromptu tour of all his favorites, because like all good seducers, he knows enough about everything to make him seem like an indispensable dinner companion. How is Caravaggio so sensual! (Pictured) After, he gets wine and I get tea but we sit (allegedly) in the wrong place. How do others react to this, I wondered, as I watched him charmingly sidestep the server's rudeness while also placating her by asking for a menu. We sat there for hours while he tried (pretty successfully!) to convince me that conspiracy theories often have truth to them. I know from experience how easy it can be to manipulate people, particularly into believing things that they would rather believe than what may be an unpalatable truth. That's how he acted, but the things that I found most compelling (and probably most honest) were his struggles to find meaning after his father's death. We spoke about theodicy and how in his mind the "moral lesson you get from studying the world is whoever created it is morall horrible because every situation ends in the death of the person who is playing." He also has an Ann in his life, a person who is a guide to the world of people that he doesn't understand and explains he funny feelings that he provokes in others either on purpose or on accident that can either help or hurt him -- explain to him the assumptions that people make about him and helps make him more aware of what aspects of him provoke these reactions. He told me "I'm just interested in brilliance," and only as I write this now do I see how this sort of attitude could provoke the ire of people around him that are perhaps less secure in their own luster. I understand a little better now the reaction that many people had when reading about me, that I came off as being intolerably narcissistic. He even shared with me some reactions from friends who had grown increasingly intolerant of him. But I did not experience him that way, and I was sad to think about the people who (I believed) had mischaracterized and misunderstood him.

The next day I do a bunch of other London things on the London Pass, like the Shard viewpoint, the Tower Bridge, the London Bridge Experience (they pointed me out as the witch and were going to burn me?) and then meet up with my new friend V at the Barbican because he finds brutalist architecture to be soothing. Also close to the Roman wall. V says something that I have repeated a lot before, that one of the first ways he looks to identify sociopaths is that they struggle to find meaning. If the hollowness is unbearable to the person, that's likely just depression or something else. If there's no real emotional value placed on the lack of meaning, if there's just a straight acknowledgment that it's there, that person is more likely a sociopath. He has sociopathic traits himself. He needs a lot of novelty. Every place he has quit from is because he "ran out of dragons, after that it was just the grind." He has a friend that is probably more sociopathic than he is. She has a similar love hate relationship with work. She uses it to to give her less of a sense of emptiness, but when she is worn out she dreams of being the CEO of her own company. He thinks the only reason she hasn't don't it yet is because she's very half-hearted about things. She says things like "will I ever feel anything again?" His friends say he's manipulative. His mom says he just wants ohter people to be his puppet. He admits he likes to mess with other people. "I'm the main hero in my own work of art." "I am the work of art." This is the sort of statement you'd expect to hear from a total blowhard, but he isn't at all. He's soft spoken, unassuming. Compared to the dandy, he is much more likely to just blend in. If I met him outside of this context (in real life), I would never suspect him of having sociopathic tendencies. But when you talk to him, it's clear that a lot of his choices are motivated by sociopathic thinking. For instance, he says he doesn't do revenge, he does payback. He also has characteristics that sociopathic minded people who are higher on the trait of conscientiousness have, e.g. his therapist says that he struggles with perfectionism. He is very principled.

He thinks we can think nicely about stuff but we first need to get real about what we do. He believes that it is best to harshly acknowledge your own thoughts. For example, if I got annoyed at the person on the escalator (story from the book) because I am annoyable and I acknowledge that about myself, I have a greater opportunity to control my behavior that stems from my annoyance. He believes that the purpose of life is the Project of Being -- that existence in itself is a force and a project. H believes we're not living for ourselves, we're just a part of being and we need to not be petty and dwell on our sufferings. So he sounds a little almost Buddhist influenced, and cites Socrates as an influence. But also his favorite column is Modern Love in the New York Times. He avoids lying because at some point there will be some resolution between the lie and the truth. He thinks of love as a choice, as a project that he has decided to take on. But in general he tries not to pretend to be anything he's not, even though people think that though "sociopath" is seen as a disorder and it puts people off. But his mom taught him to never pretend to be something he's not. And he believes that ultimately the cost benefit doesn't make pretending worth it. "never being something you're not makes you invulnerable." "If you never pretend, it teaches you fearlessness." This absolutely resonates with me.

My last day in London was spent doing some clean up for the London Pass activities and meeting up with a young man at the Tate Modern, a man who had a high school classmate who was sociopath and one who had asperger's and we chatted about how those two interacted. Heads up! Don't eat mushy peas by themselves, just with the fish and chips. 

Taking the underground was really easy and efficient for me. They have an Oyster card you can get and just get a week pass. Look into this, but there's something more efficient about getting the Oyster card in London, rather than getting a traveller version. If you have touchless credit cards, you can also just use those? Or Apply Pay. I would suggest going that route. 


Join Amazon Prime - Watch Over 40,000 Movies

.

Comments are unmoderated. Blog owner is not responsible for third party content. By leaving comments on the blog, commenters give license to the blog owner to reprint attributed comments in any form.