How Noah Messed Up

Like every massive global technology since the propagation of the spoken word, from simple tools to the printing press to the innovations which helped land humans on the moon, the internet has changed the way humanity understands and interacts with itself.

In Erich R. Merkle and Rhonda A. Richardson’s “Digital Dating and Virtual Relating: Conceptualizing Computer Mediated Romantic Relationships,” the authors describe the phenomena of CMRs, or computer mediated relationships, and how interpersonal relationships are being forged via and affected by computer technology. While the article was published almost fourteen years ago, many of the points that the authors make are still valid today. For example, they discuss how tricky online interpersonal relationships are because in order to forge these relationships, extreme self-disclosure is necessary because “unlike face-to-face relating, the importance of physical attractiveness in CMR, as a relationship determinant, is minimized by the ability to know someone through intense mutual self-disclosure and intimate sharing of private worldviews (189).” This becomes a challenge, however, because all of the things that you learn about another person come from self-disclosure, meaning that it could be either in part or entirely fabricated. Therefore, forging CMRs is much more about faith than it is about one’s own human intuition about a person, which is an impression difficult to gauge in a virtual setting.

Even this point though, say Merkle and Richardson, is challenging because a user is always subject to the possibility of their partner disengaging at will. Having an attachment broken suddenly and seemingly without the ability to challenge or intuit said action can be devastating because it allows the imagination to assume all the reasons why the relationship failed and the user was rejected. This can affect self-esteem, and with a large pool of other potential relationships to form, can be dangerous. For example, the rejected partner can assume, since the relationship was not primarily based on looks or physical intimacy, that their self-disclosure and therefore presented personality was somehow “not enough” for their partner. In their next relationship, the user may then attempt to better sell or promote themselves in order to maintain a lasting CMR. If that is the case, what does that do to the perceived emotional intimacy of the CMR or to the user’s ability to understand and synthesize their “online” self and their “in real life” self into one “authentic” person?

One of the most salient points that the authors make concerns conflict mediation or the lack thereof involved in CMRs. It is this point that best helps us understand the going-ons in the short film Noah (2013). Briefly, Noah is a film that takes place completely on the screen of a young man after whom the film is named. Noah suspects his girlfriend of cheating on him, hacks into her Facebook account to find “proof” of his suspicions, and breaks up with himself while he’s at it. Noah is obviously paranoid, has low self-esteem, and engages in exactly the behavior that Merkle and Richardson emphasize when he ignores his ex-girlfriend’s emails, messages, and texts when she realizes what he has done. Through his insecurity and inability to successfully manage the conflict he finds himself in with his girlfriend (his unfounded suspicions of her infidelity), Noah systematically impedes his own life and happiness.

Not all cases of CMR are like Noah’s, thankfully, as there are people who have had enough face-to-face experience in their lives to develop the problem-solving and conflict management skills that Noah seems to lack. Personally, I believe that it is wholly possible for people to find fulfilling sexual and emotional CMRs, although instances of such are uncommon. People are complicated. Some people are fine with the relationships they build and maintain via the internet. Some people need more than a CMR, and will probably be the ones who take the steps necessary to mediate those relationships into face-to-face ones. Most people, whether it be in a face-to-face setting or in a CMR, always seem to be looking for reasons to distrust others, whether those reasons be conscious or largely unconscious behavior.

Merkle and Richardson outline the four C’s of peacemaking as “contact, cooperation, communication, and conciliation (190)”. Peacemaking and peacekeeping, I believe, are among the key principles of a durable and healthy CMR and/or face-to-face interpersonal relationship. Ironically, it is the abundant accessibility of these sorts of relationships (whether CMR via Facebook or face-to-face via mutual friends or internet dating site) that will limit the current and the forthcoming generations’ ability to manage and resolve their conflicts in a healthy way.

Healthy resolution is challenging; communication is hard and conciliation is not easy, nor is it supposed to be. It is precisely this challenging aspect of peacemaking that makes it all the more worthwhile and important for maturity and growth. The concept of minimax, which is when we seek the most satisfying situations out of the least amount of investment or effort, is a human behavior that drives individuals from engaging in the hard work it takes to confront themselves and grow as people and it will ultimately play a large role in this generation’s and subsequent generations’ inability to understand and create healthy dynamics of intimacy.

Frank Ocean’s Bad Religion

“Bad Religion” is a track from Frank Ocean’s July 2012 album, Channel Orange. The song is framed as a conversation between the singer and a taxi driver, to whom he is confessing his bitterness and hopelessness towards an unrequited love. Like most of Frank Ocean’s lyrical mastery, there are many angles through which this track can be understand, each revealing a bit more insight into the song and its singer.

The song title and the first verses are a bit misleading at first. The song opens with the singer getting into a taxi, asking the driver to simply listen to him and “be his shrink for the hour.” A taxi is necessarily a private and generally uninterrupted space, which is why the singer can make this allusion to the taxi driver being his therapist. When considering the arrangement of a taxi, however, it is important to remember that one of the key features of a taxi is the partition, a barrier between the driver and the rider. The driver and rider never need to face one another, rendering the driver anonymous. This anonymity is key to the song, as it allows the singer to speak freely and without judgement; for the listener, we are invited to become the driver and to listen while the singer confesses to us. The driver tries to bless his passenger, who has asked him to “outrun the demons,” if he could. This leads the singer to plead, “don’t curse me,” although he eventually concludes that a prayer probably wouldn’t hurt him.

This, and the confessional imagery created by the anonymity of the situation, inspires a religious air of this being an actual confession of the singer’s sin. The sin here is his unrequited love, which is he sees as a “one man cult.” To him, he is not a victim, but a perpetrator of unrequited love. He compares the feeling to “cyanide in [his] styrofoam cup,” meaning that the emotion is unwelcome not only by his unrequited love but by the singer himself. This is a song that is just as much about self-loathing as it is unrequited love, and about the perspective of unrequited love from both the lover and the unwilling beloved.

Another layer is revealed in the chorus, as it becomes apparent that the singer’s unrequited love is for another man. “This unrequited love/ To me it’s nothing but/ A one-man cult/ And cyanide in my styrofoam cup/ I could never make him love me/ Never make him love me/ No, no,” he despairs.

On July 4, 2012, just six days before the release of Channel Orange, Frank Ocean created a post on his tumblr page describing his first experiences with loving another man as a teenager, and how he dealt with the aftermath of that realization. This subtle announcement was necessary to contextualize songs such as “Bad Religion” and “Forrest Gump,” which implicate Ocean’s non-heterosexuality. By coming out as having non-heterosexual desire on July 4th, Independence Day, Ocean made a symbolic statement equating his declaration with an expression of freedom and independence from the cultural and societal oppression regarding sexuality in America’s contemporary R&B scene and overall.

The song further critiques these forces by having the cab driver pray in Arabic, implying that he is a Muslim. In a post-9/11 world, American society has become infamous, in part, due to its Islamophobia. By releasing a track implying that judgement over sexuality is more of a “bad religion” than Islam, Ocean is criticizing the foundation of all these prejudices, which one can understand to be essentially the same.

I feel like I could go on and on about this song and this album in general. I’d strongly recommend listening to the entire album, which poetically addresses big topics such as race, sexuality, class, drugs, and community. The music is beautifully composed and no two songs are similar to the point that one would find them too repetitive. The album is complex and multifaceted. Like most people, I like to think of myself as also complex and multifaceted. This makes it difficult for me to express how exactly I can relate to Channel Orange or even “Bad Religion” in general. Suffice to say, it is to a large extent.

A Daily Commute

The journey begins just before sunrise. This is the brightest thing in the room, and nothing else is visible in the dim remnants of the streetlights.

The sun has risen and the complex array of metal, wire, and electric currents that will carry me off is fast approaching. There are a crowd of us folded into ourselves on the platform, hiding from a biting cold wind. Although we are an “us” and are bound together by our relationship to the mode by which we travel, we have never spoken to one another.

Some days , the industrial beast is the car and not the train, and I am the singular passenger. It’s just me, the car, and the road. The thousands of commuters I pass on my 20+ miles drive only matter to me insomuch as our cars do not touch. The only thing that would make these fellow travelers significant to me is in the event of disaster. As long as this does not come to pass, we mean nothing to each other.

Mass transit does not entail such anonymity. On the train, we are still nameless and silent but now, we are not faceless. We are strangers dozing together, awake but just barely so as we hurl forward towards the rest of our day.

We pass open plots of land on the way. This land holds history. The history of this space is that this used to be a grassy field, with smatters of trees and the occasional wildlife sighting. In a few months, it’ll be the far end of the a Costco.

Each station we pass brings a greater mass of sleepy bodies into our metal cars, where we sway together, refusing to acknowledge one another. The platform is placid and empty. It’s too cold to appreciate dead trees.

This path has a history. Slithered through the snowy visage of Old Queens campus, Very Important People wear down this pavement every day. I don’t know any of them.

The trees in Voorhees Mall are beautiful in the summer. They span up and over the surrounding buildings. One of my favorite things to do is to look straight up on the path below in order to trace the upward reach of the old branches. I never see anyone else looking up.

However, some things are better observed from tall heights. The sunset is just such a thing, even if it’s seen over an empty parking lot and is facing the local mecca of capitalist strength.

Even in evening traffic, caged or framed by nets of metal and currents, the evening sky is lovely.

In the car, one is not confronted by the dangers of the city. Dark streets are foreboding and vehicular gridlock is comforting to a commuter on foot.

It’s hard to forget that New Brunswick can look evil at night, and maybe our own light pollution has cheated us out of a chance of a redemptive starscape. Then, at least, we could call ourselves gothic.

People hate on the suburbs but leaving the city can be relieving.

Despite the silence and the darkness and the isolation of it all though, this city still has its moments.

An Otherwise Seasonless Plant

In a sunless cubicle, it had thrived as verdant as summertime.
Three years in this house do their worst as the long winter takes its toll.
Autumn seems to have finally arrived.

The End Goal is the Unbox

I’m going to be honest here – I’ve had a hard time writing this post. Every time over the past week that I have sat down to put emotions and personal comprehension into words, all of those things that I feel about race and racism well up in my brain and leave me unwittingly mute on the subect. For the sake of this assignment, however, I’ll try to get over it.

Culture is an imagined thing. If you put a child in a room with no stimuli and raised it there for its entire life without external influences to affect its behavior, culture would not magically appear (although DYFS hopefully will, because that’s a horrible thing to do). Race, like culture, is something that cannot exist in a vacuum. It takes two to tango, or so they say. In terms of race and racism, it takes two people of unequal power, the oppressed and the oppressor, to create a distressing mess of systematic and structural prejudice. It is a system of violence that is tempered with the fact that cohabitation happens and that standards of public morality are constantly shifting and being challenged.

In Touré’s “Forty Million Ways to be Black,” the author describes “post-racial” as making race invisible and not addressing it. In his rejection, the author instead employs the use of the word “post-Black,” largely because the term is more suited to his discussion and because a reframing of the word “post-racial” is a mammoth mission that may be impossible to achieve. Touré explains the potential of the term “post-Black”, saying that “Most terms have a confining aspect to them but post-Black is not a box, it’s an unbox. It opens the door to everything. It’s open-ended and open-sourced and endlessly customizable. It’s whatever you want it to be” (Touré 12).

The unbox.

Given that America has been built and is continuing to flourish on systems that exploit the unequal relationships between people to produce profit, and given that greed is not a negligible aspect of human behavior, I believe that becoming a post-Black (or post-racial, for our purposes) country is a goal that will take a lot of long, hard-fought progress.

Touré quoted Dr. Michael Eric Dyson in saying, “The moment we shatter those artificial encumberances of race – a stereotype from without or a rigid archetype from within – and feel no need to respond to either is the moment we are vastly improved, profoundly human, and therefore become the best Black people we can become. And we maximize our humanity. I mean, the irony is, the greater we maximize our humanity the greater our Blackness becomes” (5).

If this is our goal, then American culture and society has a long way to go before achieving it (which is good, because if I said that this were something we’re close to achieving, we’d really be half-assing it). Fear not though, because hope is on the horizon. As technology connects previously unconnected voices of hate (Trigger Warning for this link: leads to a horribly offensive, racist, infuriating song which is a favorite of Rush Limbaugh’s featuring the POTUS), it also creates a global network of people willing to call out racism, or other modes of oppression, when they see it and begin honest discussions about things that matter. For example, last August’s Twitter trend of #solidarityisforwhitewomen quickly went viral and began conversations on gender, race, sexuality, and intersectional identities that might never have started without its presence and inspiring and meaningful messages for social justice like those found in this TED Talk reach far and wide.

The Yellow Brick Road Probably Had Potholes

My life, sometimes, basically.

I first saw The Wizard of Oz while reclining on an emerald couch in my father’s best friend’s house. My veritable aunt was watching over me for the evening and while we were never very close and I could not yet understand why, I was grateful for the maternal presence she represented. I was glad she existed. Of course, I was young enough that my memory of that time is mostly a haze composed of one part memory, one part loneliness, and two parts imagination, so please bear with me.

I sat there watching with rapt attention as Dorothy, the kindly Scarecrow, the reliable Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion went off to find the wonderful Wizard of Oz, who they had been promised would grant their every wish. The Scarecrow wanted a brain, the Tin Man wanted a heart, and the Cowardly Lion wished to be brave. Dorothy just wanted to go home.

I didn’t realize then that this was a film was largely about gratitude and accepting what you had, appreciating the intangible moral values that can turn even animals and inanimate objects into men of honor, or trusting only your own hard work to take you where you want to go in life (and not strange magicians who made big promises). Themes, at that age, were only an abstraction that served to make for better stories, not to be thought of as having any deeper meaning. It was a film that was very well-suited for its time. Originally written as “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” by children’s author L. Frank Baum in 1900, a time brimming with exciting technological leaps, marvelous industrial feats, and pre-WWI idealism, the 1939 film adaptation was released in the midst of the Great Depression and at the offset of the Second World War.

It was only long after this viewing experience that it occurred to me that such a message of hope was coming at a remarkably grim time in the world. So what motivated people out of their funk to create this message of personal perseverance and hope? My guess: because they knew that the world just needed to hear it.

There are a lot of takeaways to The Wizard of Oz that I feel help me articulate some parts of myself that I value and find defining. While I understand that having a strong understanding of your own morals makes you feel more human, that strange men behind curtains should not be trusted to do anything but provide the desperate with impractical yet mollifying gestures (granted Oz eventually turned out to be sort of useful), and that your very best tools in this wide ol’ world are yourself and the persistence to keep moving down that yellow brick road, I also understand that unexpected friends will find you when you need them, and that good witches really do exist. There’s a strange optimism and comfort to Dorothy’s bildungsroman that, if we are to enjoy Israel Kamakawiwe’ole’s cover of that oh so famous song, one needs to appreciate has been valuable to scores of people through time.

Maybe I’m just the sort of person that appreciates collective optimism but life has taught me, as I’m sure it has or soon will teach you too, that sometimes things get scary. Occasionally, flying monkeys sent by evil witches will come swooping down at you. But you know what? That’s no reason to stop trying; on the contrary, one should never stop trying. That’s the only way to wake up one day and find that the clouds have been left far behind.