Everyday Junglist
Bio
About me. You know how everyone says to be a successful writer you should focus in one or two areas. I continue to prove them correct.
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Subtle Forms of Discrimination and Prejudice are All Too Real
I need to start by emphasizing that I absolutely love living as an expat in Baja, California, Mexico. I love it so much in fact that I invested a ton of time, energy, and money into becoming an official resident of the country. I feel like it is my second home. The vast majority of the Mexicans I have encountered and continue to encounter on a daily basis are wonderful people and ninety-nine percent of my interactions with them on a daily basis have been positive experiences. They have been nothing but respectful, kind, caring, and helpful, and have treated me exactly as they would a fellow Mexican. Yet, there are absolutely a tiny minority of people that either out of fear, prejudice, plain old hatred, or some combination of all of the above, have not. The types of discrimination and prejudice I have experienced are not overt or easily visible. There are no American flag burnings, or anti-American rallies, or no US citizens allowed zones, or anything that obvious to suggest such sentiment exists anywhere in the region where I live. In actuality, it is generally quite the opposite. Most Mexicans truly, genuinely like US citizens and want them to visit and even live in their country. They recognize our shared borders, shared values, and shared economic interests. The few that do not, practice a form of discrimination that is as subtle as it is pernicious. It is so subtle that it is barely noticeable. So subtle, in fact, that it is easy to question the reality of it, and many do. But I can tell you from personal experience it does exist, and it is real, and it takes many forms. From certain gas stations where paying for 30L never seems to quite fill your 30L tank, to resteraunts that bring tap water to your table when everyone else (Mexican) in the place gets bottled water, to the just barely audible whispers of "stupid gringo" heard after ordering coffee at a local cafe, to the sudden and baffling inability to understand basic Spanish even when you are sure what you said was said quite clearly, etc. and so on.
By Everyday Junglist2 years ago in Wander
The Demonstration
I know this guy, I won’t give his name for the sake of anonymity but suffice to say I know him very well. He has always been a good friend, honest and trustworthy, and lives what appears to be a very normal life. One day we got to talking and for some reason I can’t remember the topic of psychic powers came up. I laughed and dismissed any and all such claims as bogus and assumed my friend would do the same, but he did not. In fact, to my great surprise, he got real still, looked me in the eyes and said, “Dan, I’m a believer, people can and do have psychic abilities, and I happen to be one of them.” Immediately I began to chuckle thinking he was playing some sort of joke on me, but after a few seconds, when he did not join in, I awkwardly coughed, apologized, and asked him to explain. “OK, buddy, I’m intrigued, tell me exactly what this so called psychic power of yours is, and of course I am then going to need to see a demonstration.” He gathered himself for a moment and I could tell he was thinking deeply, trying to determine the best way to explain himself. After a few moments of silence he began.
By Everyday Junglist2 years ago in Fiction
Titanic
It took the passenger ship, RMS Titanic exacly two hours and forty minutes to completely sink beneath the waves. Ironically, two hours and 40 minutes is also exactly how long I spend in hell everytime I hear my heart will go on, Celine Dion's theme song from the movie Titanic.
By Everyday Junglist2 years ago in Critique
Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience — Eighteen Years Later
Authors preface: I first published this review on Vocal two years ago, and before that I had published a version on Medium. With each republication I have updated or revised various sections. Thought it made sense to resurrect it one more time for a Vocal Book Club Challenge to "write about a book that changed you." This particular book, PFoN, I happen to believe, is one of the most important ever written and, it has impacted my own thinking on a huge range of topics very deeply. At the time this was written I was reading tons and tons about neuroscience. Specifically at this time I had recently completed reading a number of works by Patricia Churchland Smith, a neuroscientist/philosopher of great renown. I found her views disturbing and her positions misguided. She is the queen of the mereological fallacy (see below for what this is) often using the brain and the person interchangeably as she views them as one and the same. She also believes that if we fully understood everything about how the brain works, we could recreate particular states of consciousness. She is the ultimate hard core reductionist and views consciousness as nothing more than a particular series of electro-chemical reactions in the brain which, like particular states of consciousness, we could replicate artificially if we fully understood. No body would be required for this miraculous achievement. My guess is the AI crowd is a big fan of her work, myself, not so much. In any event, Dr. Churchland-Smith is a frequent target of Bennet and Hacker's logical breakdowns of various neuroscientific studies and claims about the brain and consciousness, which they dissect and show to be in error point by point.
By Everyday Junglist2 years ago in BookClub
The Voice in My Head When I Write
Recently I have started paying much closer attention to the voice in my head when I write. If you are a writer you probably know what I am talking about, or maybe it’s different for you. For me, the voice is the one that reads the words (‘out loud’) in my head as they move from my fingers, through the keys, to my screen. Depending on the topic of whatever particular writing project I am tackling at the time that voice varies considerably. It moves in tone from haranguing lecturer to sarcastic asshole to gentle comforter, and everything in between. Of course finding the words to match the voice is the real trick, or is it the other way around really? The hard part is finding the voice, the right voice for the right application, and then channeling that voice to the page in a way that conveys what the spoken word can, but in (at least) one less dimension. Without the spoken voice and body language that goes with it communicating what you really want to convey, what you really think, can be what feels like an impossible task. The joy of writing for me comes on those few occasions when that task is managed effortlessly and the words on the page and the voice in my head align just so. When that happens the missing dimension(s) disappears, and it is like I am there in the screen with the words talking directly to the reader. Like I have left a part of myself on the page, an imprint of my actual presence, but without all the messiness that comes with physical interactions between strangers. I get to say my peace, the stranger (reader) can take it or leave it, love it or hate it. In either case I did what I set out to do, and they got stuck with a little taste of my voice in their head if only for a brief moment in time. Imagine living with that voice for your entire life. That would suck now wouldn’t it?
By Everyday Junglist2 years ago in Writers
Why I Stayed In My Run of the Mill Science Job and Wrote This Article
Why I Left My Big Fancy Tech Job and Wrote a Book Several years ago, I was sitting in the audience at a big science conference learning about some new approach for detecting foodborne pathogens. The speaker gave a really nice presentation and I found the entire talk fascinating. The whole conference was filled with wonderful discussions, new technologies, and I had a really great three days.
By Everyday Junglist2 years ago in Writers
Morning People Are Lying to You
Author's preface: I published a verson of this story a while back but it did not get many views or much attention. In that way, it was exactly like every other article I publish here. However, it is different from most of my other stories in two important ways. One, I remembered writing it for some reason, and, two, I decided to reserrect and republish it now for another reason I can't remember. The majority of my works I completely blank on about two seconds after I publish them, and though I do republish things often, I generally remember why I am republishing them, whereas in this case I do not. Thus, I was correct in my initial assertion that this story does differ from most of my other stories in two ways. Hopefully you can see exactly how I came to that conclusion. Just in case not I will walk you through it. So, "remembered writing it" is one way it differs from most of my other stories, since as I described above, I generally do not remember writing them, and that is obvious and clear. However the next sentence actually implies two additional ways this story differs from most of my other stories, the fact that I chose to "republish" it and the fact that I could not remember the reason I chose to republish it now. But, remember I said there were two ways it differed, not three, what gives? Recall that I also mentioned that I do republish things often and thus it could not be considered a way that this story differs from most of my previous stories. Subtract out that one way from the three initially posited ways and you end up with two ways. Case closed. I love it when a plan comes together. And oh yeah, morning people irritate the fire out of me, but guess what, I am one of them. And everyone asks me where all the self loathing comes from. lol!
By Everyday Junglist2 years ago in Humans
When Everyone is a Writer
You are not likely to find many who would disagree with an argument suggesting that the overall quality of writing on this website, and others like it, is as good or better than it has ever been. While the quality of writing may be at or near its peak, the quality of reading seems to be at or near an all time low. By this I do not mean the number of people reading, or the number of page views, or whatever happens to be the stat du jour used by the businesspeople running these sites to measure their popularity and therefore their financial value. Those are quantitative measures, what I am talking about is a purely qualitative one. The quality I am referring to is the quality of reading.
By Everyday Junglist2 years ago in Writers
Writing Excuses: I Suck at Writing
Author's preface: The below article is a satirical take on an article I read many years ago, and which I cannot currently find to link here (sorry). That article was titled Writing Excuses: I'm Too Tired to Write (or something close to that) and was a serious look at one writers struggle to motivate themselves to write. It took aim at one of the more common excuses people use to get out of doing anything, being too tired. I thought it would be funny to turn that idea on its head and into one of my favorite things to write about, how bad I suck at writing. lol!
By Everyday Junglist2 years ago in Writers
Writing from the Original Position Behind the Veil of Ignorance
I have been thinking and writing about writing a lot these days. Mostly it has been in response to other articles I have come across which suggest various ways you can become a more popular or successful writer. As is my usual m.o., I have taken some of these articles to task with satirical replies that attempt to illustrate with humor just how ridiculous such advice typically is. An example of one of the satirical pieces and one with a (slightly) more serious tone are linked below to give you a sense.
By Everyday Junglist2 years ago in Writers
A Personal Opinion on the Power of Redundancy to Lift Up Your Writing and Deliver a Better End Product
Author's preface: A few years back Random House copy chief Benjamin Dreyer published an article in which he suggested a list of redundant words which he said we should "delete" from our writing. I took that as a challenge and prepared a short essay using as many of these words as I could squeeze in. Below is the final result of that effort.
By Everyday Junglist2 years ago in Writers
