I exist solely in meritocracies.

For whatever reason, perhaps due to an inclination toward a quiet personality, I’ve been overlooked my entire life. By early impression, at least. By now I’m used to it. In fact, it has many advantages. During my misassessment I have time to properly gauge everyone around; that whole element of surprise thing; and also the chip on my shoulder the quietly, steadily, obsessively propels me to be the best possible (at anything).

So it is no wonder why I look at everything as a meritocracy, because I’m used to having to earn everything. Respect, admiration, friendship, trust, authority, and so on, by one way or the other, I placed myself in a position where I can distinguish myself.

A haven of merit

Sports are probably the easiest example of a meritocracy (and even that’s not a complete meritocracy). I’d wager that I’ll be fascinated by the phenomenon of pickup basketball for the rest of my life. You step onto that court and you essentially are nobody, except what you can do with 7 to 9 other people, a ball, and a rim.

It’s the consummate example of an arena where I constantly get overlooked.

Hubris doesn’t help, and let me tell you, among team sports, basketball reigns as lord paramount over ego driven pissing contests. I’ve played with more absolute scrub players so far insulated in the bubble of their own ego that 1988-89 Jordan could be on the court and they’d still be totally convinced they were the best player on the court — to the point where they wouldn’t even pass him the ball.

So that’s what you deal with when you’re a barely-six-feet-tall-quiet-skinny-kid-of-vague-ethnicity stepping onto the hardwood. But once the ball is in play, most of that is out the door.

And it’s just as much about proving yourself as it is winning or losing.

Never mind if I never get to touch the ball, I know that I can do a million things to show my worth, and that’s exactly my mentality. And with this I go to work. 95% of the time I can assume that I’ll be the best leaper and fastest man out there, which means the other 5% I’ll at least be on their level. I love defense, and in a world that doesn’t glorify brilliant defenders as much as guys who shoot a lot, that automatically nets me some points. And bit by bit it all piles up. Good/smarter players, especially those who really get the team concept, recognize it first, but over time you are filled with the sense that you are respected by the other players there. Even though the biggest egos would never hand out the credit, they sneak it in by other means, usually by trying to get you on their team, or on the occasion that you push back vocally, by sidestepping and trying to get out the way of your frustration.

In my experience, respect is imperceptible. You either have it or you don’t, but it’s unmistakable to everyone, yourself included, which camp you’re in.

The thing about these natural meritocratic environments is that you can always angle things in a way to increase your chances of distinguishment. I do put a lot of work into making sure I’m the most athletic guy out there, yet not everyone is necessarily as physically gifted, but you can work to become smarter, more skilled, savvy, a better team player, or fill-in those parts of the game that most everyone else doesn’t work on.

That’s the beauty of a meritocracy; you have to earn it.

The antithesis of a meritocracy

I was thinking a lot about the whole bar/club scene. Part of me feels weird spending so much thought and time as an active observer. In the Bible Belt, specifically, you end up with a rift of friends who have this incredibly polarizing black & white view of the world that almost serves as an accidental alienation void. As someone who shares core beliefs, you slide deep into this crevasse, constricted by a conflicting feeling that you’re not living up to someone else’s standards of God instead of a more basic, what I believe to be objective, take on how God sees us and our behavior.

And if any of my decisions let anyone down, it shouldn’t matter, yet I still can’t help but try to preserve that because I grew up so firmly in that mentality that I make the choices I make and live a certain way largely on the fact that it would let certain other people down (or maybe that certain other people would subtly make you feel like you did).

I’m not trying to touch on this right here or now, though (I do want to one day write some on why living in the Bible Belt is so exhausting, but I will probably do that anonymously somewhere because I don’t have the time, energy, or care to deal with the potential flurry of people chiming in with what they think otherwise), so tangent aside — I’ve spent a lot of time my last few years in the whole ‘going out’ scene.

If you asked me why, I don’t think I could give you a definitive why beyond the mere fact that I am young, restless, and have nothing tying me down. It’s an interesting atmosphere regardless, because, for the most part, you can break it down into a 2×2 matrix of people that fall in a range of various facets; horny, lonely, fun-seeking/bored/unwinders, and tag-a-longs.

There are some other major facets that could easily be subbed in there or added into a larger matrix (e.g., the high-functioning alcoholics), but this is the 2×2 matrix I think covers the most ground.

Above all else, I posit that the desire to avoid stagnation is the overall tie-in. Maybe you go out with your friends, but the hope is that in your group, you meet some cool new people that could either become part of that group, or another branch that can fulfill certain social needs that maybe your current ones lack or have lost. Maybe you go out there hoping to take someone home for the night, or to date on a more long-term basis, or maybe you just want to dance with other people who like to dance.

The point is that there is a heightened excitement because there is a largely unknown factor to the whole affair. At most parties, you more-or-less know which faces to expect there. When you tunnel down further, you know even more what to expect when you just limit social affairs to well-known groups of friends; but there is no telling what kind of characters you’ll witness in that smoky dive bar housed in a run down trailer, or some hyped up club with an artificially engineered line and $15 cover (though the answer to that is usually 19 year olds, other obnoxious people, and a lot of remorse on wasting $15).

Granted, 9 out of 10 times it ends up being a bit of a waste; a number that can be whittled down to 4-5 times out of 10 for the most prominent social butterflies, but it is a twinge that I’ve personally answered more often than not lately.

Generally, I just go and enjoy the company of the group of friends I’m with, but I’ve thought a lot about how these atmospheres drive me crazy. A bar or a club is about as antithetical to a meritocracy as possible.

First, let’s remember the assumption that, much like baseball, your ‘fail’ rate is going to be much higher than your success rate. In this case, we’ll assume that success is having an experience that registers on that scale of the idea that you if you go out, you might have a good time in some way that you wouldn’t if you stuck with the status quo. For the most part, the traits that will increase those chances are predispositions more than they are characteristics that you can develop and earn a good standing with.

Let’s start with the first two that are the most predisposed; social proclivity and physical aesthetics.

I think I’d put social proclivity as the least malleable. For instance, some people are just pure extroverts. They feed off of being around other people and interacting with other people. Sometimes I’m a extrovert in introvert’s clothing, but that’s the best I can usually manage unless I am in a big group of people I know very well (it’s probably why I come alive the most at my own birthday parties). For someone like me, I am always aware of the fact that a stranger is likely to annoy me, come off as too much of a fool for me to want to try to converse with, be too different, or a million other things; at the outset. It takes a lot longer to drill to each other’s core. Drilling is work. That’s exhausting.

I look at the pure extrovert as a symbiotic magnet, or a little Ewok that just loves to cuddle everything. They’ll just latch onto nearest person for a while and get their social embraces until someone else walks by, then they’ll leap in the ear, excitedly yodeling and latch onto them; ad infinitum.

When you have no real ways to distinguish yourself, this is the number one trait that stands out; whoever has the easiest time hanging out with absolute strangers.

For people who fall closer to the middle, we might actually love being around new people, but it is much more pleasant for us when the attention is first diverted on us (once again outlining why I’m so comfortable with the idea of meritocracy).

Physical aesthetics is what it is. And is what it always will be, though what is en vogue varies on culture and place in history, so I won’t speak much on it. But, like anywhere else, if you look a certain way, you’ll be predisposed to do better for yourself. Short of Michael Jackson-ing yourself, there isn’t much more you can do other than layer a bunch of subtle things.

Lately I’ve begun to realize that this is another annoying factor of living in the South. I can’t tell you how many times I get asked ‘what I am’ or ‘where I’m from’ — honestly, I’m really laid back, and I usually could give a damn, so I’ve never been offended or annoyed in the moment when someone does, but I’ll admit it is starting to get to the point where, cumulatively, it’s getting annoying.

My mom is what you’d call a Chicana, from a family of Mexicans with a dash of Native American to boot (I forgot which tribe). My dad is an Italian. He was raised by Italians and his mom was Italian, and had less opportunity to get in touch with his other inner white boy, but his dad’s is of English and Scottish ancestry; in effect, I’m as much ‘white’ as I am ‘brown’. Culturally speaking, I’m closer to the middle class American caucasian stereotype than anything else, yet because you can’t really tell where I’m from, I get mistaken for Salvadoran, Iranian, Egyptian, Jewish, Ecuadoran, and the list goes on and on. People in high school legitimately believed I was Ethiopian, in part because I’m a very good liar, but also in part because, in general, people from the South are very culturally ignorant.

This creeps into the entire physical appearance thing. I’ve only started to understand this. Of course, this isn’t the only way physical traits predispose the merit subconsciously awarded to you by others in a bar, but this is a way that is pertinent to me and I can easily illustrate.

I could continue with other traits that have a high predisposition to development ratio, but I think the point is that these environments are constructed in a way that pretty much has no way to reward characteristics that are earned. The best that can be done is to distinguish yourself indirectly, but the problem there is that usually it is a very two dimensional translation and also that those can easily be faked.

Selfishly, I’d love for their to be a social environment that has some of the appeal of the unknown that a bar or club does that has some sort of meritocratic framework, but I’m also not invested in any of those things to care that strongly. Rather, I just wanted to talk about my mainframe existing in the constructs of a meritocracy, and how it’s interest and also uncomfortable to take a person like myself out of that in an environment that’s antithetical to my comfort zone. (Though I do believe that meritocracies are wholly better than the latter).

The beautiful struggle; cycles don’t end

I’d like to return to these people I’ve competed against who are deeply embedded in their own ego bubble. I think that is what happens when you take a person who is already suffocated in their self-cloud; puffing about, blinded by nothing more than the self-dependency they exist in, involuntarily threatening to occlude the lives around them with the dense fog of their ego.

When you connect the two, you realize how many people you know who are like this; or at least I do. I have a lot of friends who are that obnoxious dude obsessed with his own delusional ego that nobody really wants to play with. The moments you can pull them out of their own little cloud, you can enjoy that person, but the instances in which you can are limited. This phenomenon is exacerbated by an opportunity to ‘prove’ oneself of ego; a sport of competition is that gateway.

It makes me sad thinking about the friends I have who would fall into this classification of ‘limited friend’. Not just because how much more enjoyable that friendship would be if it didn’t have to be so limited, or if you didn’t have to get sucked into dealing with their boundless web of self-generated bullshit, but also because of the type of friends it makes the rest of us.

For instance, it is my experience that these friends are so ignorant of their own selfishness that you couldn’t even call them out on it if you wanted to. They won’t hear it. If they heard it, then they wouldn’t listen. And if they listened, they’d only forget it the next day. And even if you go that far, they’d convince themselves otherwise.

I think this is part of why it is so tempting for us to talk about people behind their back. It’s really hard to break through a wall of ignorance otherwise. The moment you say something about someone in confidence to another, it’s exponentially more credible. I’m not trying to condone or glorify bashing people behind their back, but I’m just pointing out a cycle that we slip into and get spat out of our entire lives.

Eventually, the back talk slips out, feelings get hurt, the drama is flung around in one of the few things more disgusting than a food fight, and in the end each party either learns something about themselves and improves — or they stay the same. In that case, at some point the cycle repeats until people either realize the friendship isn’t worth it and it ends.

I don’t think that any of us could say that we haven’t been ever possible piece of that cycle — I’ve played the role of the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, and still am as I speak.

I didn’t really have a purpose other than to write out some of the stuff that brews in my mind. Just some stuff to think on.

Dad and I were texting a few months ago, in fact, it was a conversation prompted after my piece about untwisting psychological knots that have long restricted me, when he told me how reading it resonated with him in a lot of areas that caught him off guard (more or less). We got to talking about his dad; my grandfather. We really don’t talk about him much. I guess there really isn’t much to prompt it, granddad having passed when dad was 5 (in fact, so rarely, so referring to him as granddad feels really odd, but kind of fulfilling in a way, because I’ve never had anyone in my life to call granddad).

Unfortunately, my phone has since died and I lost that conversation, but it helped spark a strand of thought I had been cooking prior. Progressing through my twenties has had me thinking about my dad a lot; thinking about him in the sense of a father and how effective he was as a father. Not in the sense that I am rating how well I think he raised me or anything like that, you can’t rate that kind of thing, and if you tried, he’d be off the charts, but just wondering how terrifying fatherhood has to be for a man who had no father.

As far as I know, he never really had a stable father figure either, some sort of anchor in his life for a long period of life. I’ve read some literature that touches on the social effects of boys growing up without fathers or men in their lives who can fulfill that roles, and the ways it tends to mold them differently. Yet, I’ve never really dug much up on the other side of the fence and how alien parenting must be for someone to take on the parent role having grown up without parents.

So here I am again, writing about parenting. I think about it a lot. I don’t write about it a lot. It’s inconvenient. I’m at an age where most of the people I know are now young parents, and strong opinions toward raising children and what not cement themselves.

Who am I — some punk, irreverent bachelor with no kids on the horizon — to say anything about parenting?

Fair enough, there are certain chasms of knowledge that I’ve yet to experience first hand. One day I’ll fill them. But I still have some ethos to have my own perspective on aspects of parenting.

Why?

I know because I have parents. I know because I know other parents. I know because I am a child of two parents.

I know, I just know in a different way.

So here it is, that thought that I gnawed on like a worn piece of gum:

Why Parenting is Hard

If I were going to sit here and spit off a list of why parenting is hard, or regurgitate the same missive on what is, for many, the greatest calling in life, then I wouldn’t waste my time writing. I’m not here to build a list. I’m not going to regurgitate the same drivel that anyone who can speak at a 6th grade levels knows. I want to hone in on a single element; a single angle that, in my experience, is a unique take on it.

Disregard all those reasons why parenting is hard. We know them. This is not THE reason parenting is hard, but just a reason that frightens the youth out of me.

Let’s trail back to that conversation dad and I had. When I write, I try to bare all. Not that it is my intention to be an introspective exhibitionist, but rather, I don’t want to obscure anything. So if I cover something, I try to make sure I’m not curving my punches, but what is read, is what is.

I’m accustomed to hearing feedback from dad when I drill to the core of my person. More than any other, when I laid out all my personal confidence struggles, devalued view of myself, and struggle to untie personal knots with one hand, he not only found out a lot about himself, but also his son.

If I hadn’t written that, how would he had ever known any of these things? When I was 8 and feeling a complex bevy of synapses, how would he ever had been able to know? I wasn’t old enough to convey or understand. Or when I was 12 or 15 or an adult, emotions and wiring fully baked from all those intricate thoughts that were beyond my young processing abilities.

He never would.

Thus enters the terrifying part of being a parent. You spend a lifetime getting to know these individuals who are more like you than any other person there is, but there is a built in obscurity that, on many levels, will never be lifted.

I think of my niece (12) and nephew (6) often. There’s no way any of us can really know how they feel and think about a lot of things. The foundation, yeah, but there are emotions, fears, anxieties, desires, aspirations, and more that Ben and Anna have experienced, will experience that nobody in my family will know of until well after it has influenced who they are in the long-term.

Let me back track and reiterate the terrifying thought that I am having; the reason why parenting is so hard.

You’re raising complete strangers.

Just like in the extreme cases, for instance, with a homosexual son or daughter who struggles with the entire sexuality thing until, typically after years and years of inner conflict, comes out. It doesn’t change who the son or daughter is at all, and, in pretty much every way possible, they are the same exact kid that they raised and grew up to know, but it is also a huge piece of their individuality that the parent had no clue about.

This is just an extreme and stereotypical example. Now consider that you can fragment this and multiply it many times over. It doesn’t have to be with supposedly monumental things, it could just be some sort of small resentment or regret, but because parent and child grow up with a misconception (or because it develops into one over time), there is an unknown element that develops.

When a child is a baby, a young child, and perhaps a little bit beyond, there is less space for shadowed personality. As a child grows, they grow into more individual space. With space comes more illumination creep. No matter how close you are, how well you communicate, there will always be shrouded passages and hidden corridors of a person that go unnavigated.

There’s a dichotomy. The older parent and child get, the better they should know each other, yet they concurrently know each other less!

The fact that I can have the tightest possible bond with someone possible and they still be a stranger to me is something that scrunches up my mind, sometimes removing my ability to sleep.

I guess when you think about it, this is a more natural role for the child. We get used to the fact that we have these blank, corrupt sectors of knowledge about our parents lives because we weren’t there for the entire thing like they are for us, and that might be one reason why it’s so easy to overlook that it works both ways, just subterraneously with the child.

Why parenting is even harder than just that

Of course, it doesn’t stop there. Taking into account this fact mines greater challenges for any parent and their beloved children. This might slip back into the typical list of never ending challenges of parenthood, but puts it in a more intense light: parenting never stops.

That’s incomplete, sorry. Rather, parenting never stops changing. I see many parents who have the building blocks down; nursing, raising kids to interact with other kids and the world around them, transition into full-fledged people, and then letting go of the recently removed training-wheels bike into adulthood! Transitions also seem like an absolute bear as a parent, perhaps none more so than the adult to adult transitions.

I could touch on any number of reasons why, or you could watch or read any of the never ending supply of dramas and artistic pieces that touch on it, but the obvious connection is one that I sense doesn’t happen as often as it should.

I’m a grown man now. Not only have I been able to convey the intimate, intricately complex architecture of my own soul for years, but I am recently arriving at a point where I am really able to understand just exactly how the labyrinth of my inner workings are laid out.

My mom and dad taught me many things. They taught me how to use a toilet and keep good hygiene, how to properly treat others, how to drive a car, how to make good decisions whether trivial or difficult, and a massive curriculum of life stuff that we all need, but nobody taught me how to revisit my childhood, my teenage years, my young adulthood, my life, and talk to my mom or dad about it, and where I’ve ended up today as a result of a lifetime of layers compounding onto each other.

Nobody was really teaching to that them, either.

Many never get to that point.

Many never fully transition into the adult-adult parent-child relationship, and I think this is a large part why. By the time we grow up, we’re largely strangers because of all that space we filled out on our own. Most of the space that we filled out, was rooted in microscopic interactions, pressures, and switches that traced into larger vectors over years and years.

Parenting is hard because I don’t know if you can teach that to either party. I don’t know if you can prepare for it. I imagine that when you wake up one morning and read shards of your son’s mind that were more non-existent than Area 51, or visit the once lost countryside of your daughter’s heart in words, whether written, spoken, or passed along, you’re taken back to an era of discovery that you haven’t experienced since they were little tikes telling you about their secret night job where they make $1 million dollars sewing capes for Superman so that he can fly (and wondering how on Earth they dream this stuff up). Except, in this case, it isn’t a innocence packaged in childlike innocence, but one usually crumpled in the imperfections and oft-fragile packaging of growth.

I’m thankful that I’ve always had a writing outlet. Sometimes, I have a lot of trouble adequately conveying my web of thoughts unless I can sit down and move everything around like pieces to a puzzle. I’m blessed to have parents who have come to understand that we are strangers in many aspects, simply because we grew into them that way, and that we will always be coming to know each other more deeply in ways that used to elude us. I’m glad we can share that experience in both directions.

I’m honored to be a son to a pair of radical people, but maybe even more honored for them to consider me among their best friends.

Nobody asked them to keep making these transitions, but just like nobody asked them to wipe my butt and feed me when I was crying, they did so lovingly.

Parenting, I know nothing about it first hand, yet I know; it’s hard, but it’s even more fulfilling.

(Happy birthday, dad)

This isn’t the post I was planning on writing next. I told a few people what it was going to be, so sorry to anyone expecting something different (sorry, Dad.)

A few days ago a friend of mine asked me if I was going to stay up to watch the Blood Moon. I had totally forgot about the lunar eclipse, but prompted me, in my excitement, to ask if she was an astronomy nerd. You see, I’ve always been somewhat of an astronomy nerd, myself, even though I hardly am in practice these days. If nothing else, I could fall asleep under the heavens every night and still be doused in an overwhelming feelings of awe by the stars every night. Light pollution might upset me more than environmental pollution.

When I was a kid, my dad got us a telescope. It was probably just a cheap little kid’s telescope, but it might have been the favorite gift I ever received. We didn’t even get to use it a lot, but the times we got to are some of my most fond memories; standing at the top off our street, trying to figure out how to work the lenses and properly fixate on the moon. I’ve always wanted to get another one, in fact, it is on the top of my wish list with a bike.

Then I realized where it had all come full circle this year. Back when we were still running on our first computer, an IBM with a 386 processor, I remember sitting with my dad into the thin trails of the night trying to download a an animated sky map that would show all the stars, constellations, and planets visible in the night sky at that time of year. In retrospect, it was a simple thing, but it was the most exciting thing imaginable at the time. So there we were, father and son, fumbling around on our 14.4kbps connection on CompuServe, wasting an hour or two trying to get these mystical GIF files to work so that we could marvel at the splendor technology had brought us. I should note, this was our first exposure to gif files, which are now of cat and other brainless image fame.

After an exhausting struggle, the boys Curtis conceded. I think this event might have shaped my attitude with technology and computers. If I’ve broken something or not been able to get something to work on a computer, I’ve always tortuously exhausted myself until I figured it out. Might be that the bitter, partially numb sting of coming up short that one time shaped that attitude. My dad and I never got to see that sky map, but we looked at the night sky together plenty more times.

Fast forward 20 years. There I was, standing on the beach next to my dad, looking at a full Hawaiian star scape that not even the imagination could capture. My dad stood next to me, hand over his son’s shoulder, beer in his left hand, raving about the sky, the wonder, creation, how happy he was to be next to me, and the moment. I hate to admit that I was torn in that point at time. In part because everything he said resonated to me. I knew that moment might be understated like punctuation, but that like a good period or well-placed comma, it would make something whole. In my experience, you need that spirit of wholeness for a memory to last. On the other hand, I was markedly upset with the man at the same moment because he had upset my mom, but I couldn’t let him know that because I didn’t want to dampen the moment.

So I tried to go East and West at the same time.

All the while, he had gotten so excited at the planet clearly visible above that he had pulled out Google’s well-known SkyMap app and set out to discover what it was (94% sure it was Venus).

Despite the dichotomy and subtext, I cherish that memory as much as I do the times with the telescope and the GIF failure, but it wasn’t until this week that I realized that it was an aged version of my sitting with him that night on dial-up.

After all these years, we finally had succeeded in viewing our animated sky map. We experienced the horizon in a way we had always wanted.

Thank you.