Wednesday, May 1, 2013

Twenty-ten-from-now


Last night, I dreamt about having children. That's misleading. Most of the dream was filled images of dying children.

And I say I don't have nightmares.

Its because usually my bad dreams end on a very positive note. Right before waking up, I dreamt I had just dropped a baby, and it was carried away by a rabid dog. All was lost, but then my compatriot (who happened to be Jenna Fischer from The Office) pulled me aside and told me that my child hadn't died. She plunged her hands into loose soil and pulled up a strange vegetable that looked like a cross between a cabbage and a turnip. It was clearly alive and as the fronds and leaves started to unfold I felt my heart spill open because I knew, in this hoagie sized mass was my actual daughter. Jenna Fischer handed the vegetable to me and I broke down into tears. The vegetable blossomed open and this tiny little cabbage patch child looked up at me with a familiarity I rarely encounter in waking life. It was a blissful reunion with someone I loved dearly, though we had never met.

Recently, I was talking to Tim on the phone. For a while I had been having reservations on whether or not I should have children. I explained to my good friend that if I were to have a child, it would have to be a son. While I would rather have a daughter, I know it would probably not turn out well. Let me explain. I fear passing on my mother's genetics. I know that if I have a son, I will be passing my father's Y chromosome on. If I have a daughter, I know I will be passing my mother's X chromosome on. My mother is insane. Some people, including her sister and my aunt, assert that she suffers from Borderline Personality Disorder. When I was younger, I thought she had something like Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Today, I am more inclined to think she is just a garden variety, watered down psychopath. My change of heart comes from the belief that people with personality disorders (as actual mental illnesses) can be treated and rehabilitated through cognitive therapy. The current thinking on psychopaths, or antisocial personality disorder, is that they cannot really be treated all that well.

I have seen my mother go through various paths of medications, and relationship therapies. They don't really do anything. She wouldn't necessarily score very highly on the Bob Hare test. I put her at about a 25, which isn't low, but most clinicians require a minimum of 30 before they consider locking someone away.

So armed with my checklist and basic knowledge of genetics - which stems mostly from a biology lesson involving pea pods - I had decided that I had to have a son. Tim's response was, "So what you're saying is... You're Chinese. You're a normal person." We laughed about this for a few minutes. It's true, we haven't quite kicked the notion of drowning baby girls from out ancestry, but at least my reasoning was backed by science. I wanted to participate in bettering the gene pool.

You may ask, "well how do you know the psychopathic traits associated with your mom were passed down to you? Maybe you got the other X chromosome?" It's a possibility. I would put myself at about a 14 on the Hare checklist. My father scores a flat zero, so looking at my score it is a bit above the perceived average. My concerns are further when compared to the relative psychopathy of my brother, who I would put in at a soft five. So in that respect, it doesn't look too good for my X chromosome.

Of course, this is all just the numbers. I have yet to factor in the nurture side of things, and lots of recent studies show that nurture plays a role in activating certain expressions of genes during certain periods of life. (My brother would probably have been a straight zero as well had he not been subjected to certain experiences in our childhood) I forget what word they use to describe it, but its a long one. The most common example shown is that if a child (usually a boy) has this gene called "the warrior gene" and at an early age (around 6-12) experiences some kind of violent trauma, there is a high likelihood that he will commit violent crimes when he grows older. Many individuals have this "warrior gene," but never act out because there was that lack of nurture based trauma in their early childhood.

It is interesting to note that in our respective childhoods, I generally spent more time with my mother than my brother did which may help to further explain the discrepancy between our Hare scores.

For the most part, I appreciate, and sometimes even enjoy, my watered-down version of psychopathy. I used to be terrified of it, and try to bury it or push it away. This is a poor approach. It is denying who you are. I spent a lot of my time fighting myself. Its a lot like having an uncontrollable dog. You will never get it to do what you want, but you can love it for what it is and structure your furnishing accordingly.

I used to have a nasty habit of seeking out people's pain and poking it with a stick. It wasn't that I enjoyed bringing up their painful memories, but rather that it was the most interesting part of the person to me. I usually don't stay friends with people who haven't suffered a great deal of emotional trauma or pain. They're usually incredibly boring, superficial people.

In terms of my future-children dilemma, I think I have a work around. Thanks to my dream last night, I realized that if I choose my parter properly, I can continue to dilute the psychopathic traits out of the gene pool. If I partner with someone who scores a flat zero, then have a daughter, they would genetically come to about a 14, like me. However, the difference would be that I was raised by a 0 and a 25, whilst my children would be raised by a 0 and a 14 who was invariable aware of the issue at hand and could strive to make choices minimizing that number through nurture. I think it would be reasonable to assume that with the right parenting techniques, a daughter of mine could be pushed as low as a five or a seven on the Hare checklist.

Another key difference is that my parents were more or less, unprepared for rearing children. My father was in optometry school, and my mother was in medical school. They were doing their own things. My future career path in information science will not be as demanding. If I choose to have children at a time when I can devote time to having and raising children, the result will hopefully be even better.

How Could I Forget?

Do people remember the first dream... they remember? Sometimes when I'm trying to get to know people I ask them what their first memory is. More often than not, they don't want to answer the question because it involves a lot of thinking and they reply, "I don't remember." Unfortunately their whole lack of wanting to think puts me in the wonderful position of being able to ask, "you don't remember your first memory?" They feel stupid, I make a bad first impression and my existence as a reclusive writer type is further cemented. I don't really ask people what the first dream they remember is, because they will always answer "they don't remember." I've lost too many friends over this.

Recalling your first memorable dream can be tricky. Granted, you will probably remember your most traumatic dreams, but I would be very saddened to find that everyone's first dream is a night terror. Personally, I don't recall my parents having to explain to me what a dream was. They seem to be part of the realm of understood phenomena. I never asked why I ate, I only knew what hunger felt like and that eating felt good when I felt hunger. I never asked what the sun was. It was always the thing that meant day, and people called it the sun. I hope, if I have kids, I don't have to explain what a dream is. I hope when they have their first vivid dream, they don't ask me about mine.

The first dream I remember having was when I was three years old. I lived in Orangevalle, California. In the dream, two burglars, who in my mind have been supplanted by the actors from Home Alone, break into my house. The dream starts with me waking up from a nap. I wander into the kitchen and find them cooking my mother's severed head in a skillet of frothing oil. They tell me to eat it.

I didn't wake up screaming or crying as you might expect. I woke up from a nap, and wandered into the kitchen, where my mom was cooking dinner. On the refrigerator hung a paper cutout of Bert and Ernie. My mother was frying something in a pan. Content with seeing her head where it should be, I let it go.

A few days ago, a man on the radio said that people recall relatively few dreams over the course of their lifetimes. The number he said seemed astronomically low. I remember a lot of them. I forget even more. When I was growing up, I would have dream conversations with people, and then forget what I had talked to them about in reality and what had occurred in a dream. Some dreams were completely mundane. Those were some of the worst. Dreams where you just get up, go the school, or go to work, and that's it. You wake up, get up and go to school or work. In many respects those are worst than nightmares. A nightmare is still an escape from taxes and news media.

On the Other Side

Foreword

In my other blog, Morals - By A Twenty-Something Year Old, I try my best to leave myself out of the content. If it is absolutely necessary, I will include a personal story, but I try to avoid it. Because I'm highly insecure, I don't want to seem like my writings on morality are an attempt to place myself above the rest of civilization, and so here I will share my writings which explore my various character flaws. You need a format for this kind of a thing, so I decided to use dreams as a kicking-off point for each flaw I demonstrate. Enjoy.

My Life is Better Than I Think It Is

The worst nightmare I ever had was a tableau involving a mouse chewing on a wrench, a flashing grid of multicolored lights, and my father screaming into the night sky. I would wake up with my hearing intensified. Everything sounded like an airplane engine. My vision was effected as well. Objects greater than one nice in front of my face would appear miles and miles in the distance. My father would walk into my room with me, six years old, staring intensely into my palm. I would run up to him and apologize for whatever had offended him in the dream, and when he tried to comfort me, my hands would slap over my ears and I would crumble to the ground in pain. I thought he had started screaming again. This perceptual distortion, my softball way of saying I hallucinated a lot as a kid, subsided with age.

I enjoy sleep more than almost anything. I'm a nervous person, and its hard to be too nervous when you are nodding off, or just waking up. You can't do your nervous tics when your body is paralyzed and unconscious. All your breaths are long, slow and deep. I'm pretty sure all yoga and meditation practices are aimed at achieving the physiological benefits of being asleep whilst still being awake. A yogi once told me that the confidence yoga can instill in an individual will help that person take control of their life. Turning an alarm clock off and going back to bed -that is you beating the world and every one of her needy requests.

Once upon a time, someone said that happy people with good lives have lots of bad dreams because by relativity, their waking life is much better than their dream life. I look at that scenario a little differently. Dreams are chaotic. They don't involve the rational areas of the brain. Studies suggest that they are a mechanism for resolving inner emotional conflicts - bakers for your gut feeling.This world of dreaming differs slightly from that of the waking life we take part in. In waking society, we are governed by mildly arbitrary rules, simulating chaos. If one's happiness and good life is dependent on the positioning of an arbitrary rule, then their surrender to genuine chaos in their dreams must be unnerving.

I count myself lucky. My dreams are mostly bland. They're even in black and white (which I recently discovered many psychopaths do). My worst nightmare is described in by a French word - hardly terrifying once described.
I find the real world much more terrifying and surreal than what my imagination can conjure, and I once called myself a poet.

For instance, today the last person I saw before retiring to my lodgings was a woman wearing a mini-skirt, a puffy vest, fuzzy boots and a shirt that read, "blah blah blah, I don't care." As I pondered why anyone would wear such a thing, she extinguished her half-smoked cigarette on a part of the sidewalk I happen to know my dog urinates, and then stored the remaining half in a mini M&M's tube. I wanted to say any number of things, but was stopped by the wisdom of the shirt.

At what point does doing hard drugs shrink your teeth and make your lower jaw rise up as if one is perpetually checking the undersize of their face for spots they missed shaving? When does continual heroine use destroy one's reservations for shooting up in a fast food bathroom? Is there a number of highs one has to obtain before they decide to convert a Pakistani family's minivan bumper into a make-shift toilet? All of these questions, I asked myself while eating a chili cheeseburger in San Francisco last weekend. Having just been bailed on by a mutual friend, Tim and I split a pitcher of light beer over burgers, fries and all you can eat pickles; possibly the greatest marketing scheme that has ever been devised in a predominately Asian community.

I love San Francisco because people are more accepting of certain Asian behavioral patterns. I'm not talking about the spitting and snorting into plastic bags - that's gross everywhere. But if I went to certain parts of the East Bay and had a mild physical confrontation with Tim over paying the bill, we might attract some looks.

The attendant at the burger joint was not at all taken aback by our routine quarrel. She in fact had probably handled something like this before. In her infinite wisdom, she put the whole matter to chance; putting each of our cards in a red plastic french fry tray, shaking it up and pulling a card at random. I lost that exchange.

She was overtly pleasant, which one would hardly expect from a minimum-ish wage worker on a Saturday night. Her main concern seemed to be who would be given the bathroom key. It was a legitimate concern.

I wonder if there is any admiration to be had in a person whose complete lack of shame allows her to urinate in public. I remember the first time I watched a man pee on a car. Again, it was a minivan - obviously the most toilet like automobile design available. I was about twelve then, and I remember it feeling like a milestone in my life. I was no longer young enough to have an adult cover my eyes for me, or have an adult say something, or for the urinating man to think, "Oh I better not whip it out here. There are kids." Now that I'm twenty-four and finished with an undergraduate program, I am no stranger to public urination. College is where kids learn that for the most part, public urination is more or less okay. Its the time in your life when you realize that when you walk down the street and you smell hot, evaporating urine that there is a fifty-fifty chance that it is either a homeless person, or someone just like you - a twenty-something year old out for a night on the town.

When I watched this woman pee on the bumper of the minivan, I thought two things. The first thing I thought was how I am always disappointed by onion-rings. They come apart way too easily. The second thing was how relieved she looked just to be sitting down. I moved to San Francisco from Eugene, Oregon. It is another town who sympathetically takes up the homeless plight. There are fantastic food kitchens, that I've actually eaten at with an old friend who wanted to show me what it was like. I did feel bad about eating a free meal I could afford, so I did volunteer at a similar shelter later on. However, despite some of the best programs in the nation, the homeless community were no stranger to the words, "move along."

It is a hard existence being told that no matter where you go, someone will be so utterly offended and frightened by your mere presence that they will summon for armed civil servants. If in the course of one day, a cop told me three or more times that a person, with a home, two blocks down didn't like looking at me sitting on the curb and that I had to move to appease the person who couldn't be bothered to close their blinds, I'd probably want a drink. I'd probably want to pee on their car too.

Yet, even though I can logically think my way into sympathy, it doesn't stop my initial reaction - "Dear God. Your jaw is being eaten by the rest of your face." I'm ashamed to admit it, but when I see those tiny-toothed, coaster-chinned vagabonds, I do cross the street. I give money to homeless people, but I can't say I've ever given to one with a contracted mandible.

Its like they're continually, mentally coordinating the best way to lick their own nose.