touchmonkey

Dangit.

I just broke an eight-year-long-no-puking-streak. If we eliminate vomiting for… uh… collegiate indiscretions the streak would stand at ten years. That’s right, it’s been ten years since I’ve had the puking flu, and I got it BAD this week. We’re talking gut-wrenching, dry-heaving, Exorcist-like Retching. My son, who isn’t scared of ANYTHING ran away and hid under a chair when he heard me hurking up in the bathroom.

The manner in which I broke my streak… repeatedly… was so violent that I burst the blood vessels around my eyes, leaving me with puffy red eye sockets that looked as if I had just lost a boxing match and a completely bloodshot right eye. I’m not talking about a few red veiny areas on the eyeball — I’m talking about the entire white of my eye turning deep red… it’s actually kind of cool looking in a Death Rock Metal Band kind of way.

Anyway, I’m better now, though significantly weaker and lighter. Hmm.. now I don’t need to diet after the holidays! I’ll just pig out at Christmas and break even due to the week of the flu!

Jon Wood’s Gaming for Grades in the latest edition of The Escapist sounds exactly like the self-deluded rationalizations I would use to convince myself it was ok to postpone writing that term paper in order to play one more round of Marathon back in my college days.

Don’t get me wrong, his arguments are tantalizing for a teacher like me who’s also something of a closet gaming geek. How cool would it be to play video games in class? That’s about all it would be though: cool… as in nifty rather than useful. Make a case for the actual educational benefits of games in school and I’ll be the first in line to champion the cause. But just because some games might possess narrative elements does not make them stories worth studying. Heck, there are countless stories in print form that would be a waste of class time to discuss… and they’re better written than 99% of the dreck that passes for narrative in today’s video games.

What the heck — why not replace literature with video games? We’ve already replaced math with graphing calculators. I guess I better make sure my kids learn how to speak Punjabi so they can have a shot at a McJob in twenty years.

According to Henry David Thoreau, The most distinct and beautiful statement of any truth must take at last the mathematical form. So here goes:

.5+.5!=1

Confused? Maybe our old pencil-making friend didn’t have it entirely right. Or maybe it’s me that has it wrong. After all, good old Henry David did, in fact say at last rather than at first. The formula above is Computergeekese for one half plus one half does not equal one.

Actually I find it quite interesting that Thoreau, a noted transcendentalist, would be caught advocating cold hard mathematical reason as the pinnacle of expression. You see, it’s actually mathematical thinking that gives rise to the problem at hand.

My teenage years were spent obsessing over the singular goal of meeting and wooing the girl of my dreams. I suspect there’s nothing terribly unique about this, as it seems to be the driving force behind just about every decision most adolescents (the chronological as well as the emotional) make. There’s nothing wrong with this innate urge but I believe we embark on nothing more than a fool’s errand when we pursue this goal with the wrong purpose in mind, which brings us back to the little formula up top.

Between the ages of twelve and twenty-one I composed (and promptly destroyed lest they be discovered) countless anguished love poems about the great yearning in my heart for the affection of (insert girl’s name here) and how (insert girl’s name here)’s love would complete me. Imagine my horror when Tom Cruise came along and stole my line in Jerry McGuire. That’s right, I said it first. Which is to say, I was wrong first. Jerry McGuire just made women across America swoon while being wrong.

The problem, you see, lies in seeking completion in another person who is seeking the same thing. I don’t want to quibble about actual fractions here, because it works out the same regardless of whether we think of ourselves as halves or thirds or whatever. The fact of the matter is - human relationships are multiplicative rather than additive. I spent my formative years feeling like half a person (.5) who could only be completed by the addition of my ‘other half’ (.5). Were relationships additive, this would work great: a half plus a half equals…. a whole! Unfortunately, and apologies for the bad pun, even when I found another human fraction to add to my own, rather than feeling whole I couldn’t escape the hole in my heart. In fact, I inevitably wound up feeling lesser than I had solo. I’d been run over by relational multiplication:

.5*.5=.25

But wait you say, what if a whole and complete human being who has achieved the ultimate in personal enlightenment should take it upon themselves to rescue somebody who doesn’t quite have all the answers yet! The multiplication problem still remains:

1*.5=.5

Well I’ve strung you along far enough now and the conclusion should loom large in the realm of the obvious. If my basic contention is that human relationships are multiplicative rather than additive, the only possibility for a healthy relationship is when two complete people find one another mutually irresistible.

1*1=1

There is, of course, the question of what it takes to be a complete person and how one determines if the object of their affections is as well. That, I’m afraid, is another topic for another post but I’ll leave you to consider this: Henry David Thoreau appears to have had it right after all, for the mathematical form of this relational truth carries a certain elegance even my verbosity cannot tarnish. Unfortunately, I believe G.K. Chesterton said it best when he claimed that You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.