ethnodat, Author at The Cracked Door

Staring Back (A Short Story)

He had a long day at work, and he drove home exhausted, finally free to let his mind unwind. He looked out into the suburban expanse before him, full of businesses, parks with kids playing, and a few uncultivated fields. That’s where he first saw it. It was a skinny, pale figure, maybe six and a half feet tall, in a field about 50 yards away. It seemed to just stand there looking towards him. What a strange scarecrow he thought? He felt momentarily gripped by its wilting look making him think about how life slowly erodes us like the slow erosion of hillsides over centuries. Then his mind moved on to other things.

He felt weird when he saw it again during his drive a few days later. This time it was in the small woods next to someone’s suburban property, only 20 yards away. At this distance, he could get a better look at it. Like before, it was skinny, and pale, and he could not tell its gender. It just stared at him. Its expression was like that of curiosity that had slowly wilted away into a tired indifference. How did it get here? This was easily a fifteen minute drive from the last place.

He would frequently see it on his drives home from work, sometimes multiple times. He sensed that it was always there, but he only really noticed it when his mind was tired, bored, or otherwise wandering. He wasn’t sure why his mind would drift towards the figure. All he knew was that when he was busy, he didn’t think about or see it. But when he took a break, out there in the grass or by a tree somewhere, it was, staring right back at him with its expressionless face. Just thinking about it made him feel exhausted.

He didn’t tell his friends or family about it for fear that they would think he was crazy. Deep down, he couldn’t shake this fear that he was going crazy himself, and he assumed if he told others, they would write him off as such. He even felt too ashamed to think about it and would do all he could to remove it from his mind.

One Saturday, he saw it all the time. He tried to fill his day with activities like chores, striking conversations with random strangers he met, all in the hope that he could distract himself from knowing that the figure was there with him.

That night, when he went to bed, he couldn’t stop thinking about it. He glanced out the window and saw it there in the backyard staring up at him, a stone’s throw away. He slammed the curtains shut, and all the other curtains in his house. But that didn’t matter. He couldn’t sleep, knowing it was out there. He finally decided to open his bedroom window and confront it.

“What do you want?” he shouted. No response. He desperately continued, his demands transitioning into begging, “What are you, and what do you want with me? Why do you keep following me?” But it said nothing. It just stared back at him with the same indifferent, lethargic expression it always has.

Furious, he finally decided enough is enough. He went outside to attack it. He rushed right up to it, but each step he took towards it, it seemed to move away. Floating above the ground, it slid backwards maintaining the same distance of maybe 20 feet (or 6 meters) from him. He chased it down the street in the middle of the night. It could not go through objects, opting to go around cars, poles, and other obstructions with ease, as it continued to stare at him. Finally, he had it trapped in a street with a deadend, but it somehow disappeared behind the fence of a house, where he was unable to follow. He could seem to find it again, forcing him to come back home.

He was never able to elude the figure. As he tried to live his life, some days he saw it only once; others multiple times. He couldn’t avoid thinking about it, whenever he went outside, he wondered whether he would see it in the background somewhere, and whenever he was indoors, he wondered whether it was watching him. Slowly, he became too exhausted to handle many of his daily activities. He stopped wanting to see friends and family, only doing the bare minimum at work. Others told him he looked tired and indifferent, and one day he looked in the mirror only to realize that other than several wrinkles from the stress, his exhausted face looked just like that of the figure.

Navigating the Afterlife’s Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Empathy, and Organization Change in “The Good Place”

Part Two of my Good Place Series. Click here for Part One and for all my other reflections on the Good Place.

Organizational change is a quiet yet constant theme in “The Good Place”. Its explicit discussion of philosophy, ethics, justice, and the afterlife get more attention, but at the end of the day, the series’ plot mostly revolves around a series of organizational changes within the complex and traditionalist afterlife bureaucracy.

Through all of this, the characters’ primary conflict is convincing the established bureaucracy to refine the system. In this quest, Michael is the primary protagonist. He consistently advocates for organizational change throughout the series, starting as an innovative form of torture and morphing into a reform of the entire afterlife system.

Often the show creates one specific “leader” character to personify the system itself. Being in charge, this is the sole character they must convince, a move which not only gives a tangible strategy to enact their goals (they must convince this stubborn leader) but also a symbolic representation of the system itself. These leaders start complacent in the system unwilling to listen to its problems, very realistic for anyone who has tried to enact organizational change. Four such leader characters represent the types of complacency in the system:

1) “Not my problem” with the Head Accountant: The head of the cosmos’s accounting department (primarily tasked with creating the supposedly objective points system that damns all modern humans. When confronted with the problem, he responds that the system is objective and cannot be wrong. When pushed on that, his basic response is, “It’s not my problem.” He and the accounting department have a job/role, and such a change goes beyond their directives. Thus, it is the problem of whoever else is in charge of that.

2) Slow, ineffective action by the Head “Angel” of the Good Place: This character is in charge of the Good Place, along with a team of angelic beings. He listens to the team’s concerns and believes them unequivocally. He raises the alarm bells to do something, but his (and his angelic team’s) plans are too slow to be of much use. Developing a committee (including developing a committee to develop the committee), then more time to develop the name of the committee, and then after an even longer to research the matter before in effect writing a strongly worded memo to the powers-that-be to look into this.

3) Anger towards Change by the Head Demon: The Head Demon of the Bad Place, who serves as the primary antagonist for most of the show, represents the visceral anger towards institutional change and the desire to continue doing things as they always have. He tortures other characters for fun (including abusing his power as head demon to torture his own demon minions after they are done helping him). His anger manifests as visceral anger to those around him, personifying the often angry pushback for things to remain the same (which just so happens to be violent torture in this context) that occurs during attempts to make organizational change. At the end of the show, he finally concludes that torturing is boring, unfulfilling, and that he is unhappy, the only reason he is willing to agree to the change.

4) The Judge’s lack of empathy: When confronting the problem with the judge, she responds with a basic response of “Well, that’s just how it is.” This embodies the empathetic response one also finds when trying to advocate for change. She is not the only one; multiple supernatural beings fundamentally do not understand human existence, existing in their eternal state unaware of experientially what life is like on planet earth. Because of this, they cannot understand the difficulty of what life is like in the “real world” (aka human world) and the system developed did not take into consideration the complexities of life on earth. Embodying a perspective removed from the ground, bureaucracies and other organizations often oversimplify complex phenomena from their vantage point into easy to quantify metrics in a way that filters out the nuance and humanity of the individuals involved.

The cure for this lack of empathy is to inhabit the human world and experience what it is like to be a human. Even though most of the supernatural being’s exhibit this lack of empathy (with the potential exception being the angels discussed in 2, who are empathetic and willing to make a change, just ineffective), the Judge actually becomes empathetic, by going to Earth and living there for a time. This causes her to realize how complex life is and how unfair the afterlife system is. The show portrays walking in another’s shoes as the best way to cultivate empathy, and such empathy as being necessary to understand the faults inherent in the bureaucratic machine.

All of this demonstrates the complexities of organizational change. Modern sitcoms do not usually handle the intricate themes of organizational change within bureaucratic structures, and I am glad that the Good Place does. Though the show often lessens the intricacies of organizational change by narrowing them into a conversation with a few head leaders. The characters egregiously break the rules of the system until the leader of the system comes to accept such actions as necessary, rule-breaking common in Hollywood that would probably not fly in the real world. The sitcom format may be difficult to portray the slow minutiae and give-and-take that real-life organizational change often requires, so to me, that is forgivable.

Its take on the forces that oppose organizational change is accurate and compelling even if how they overcome them was unrealistic. I found it refreshing that a show decided to discuss these forces in the first place.

Unlocking the World: Balancing Exploration and Reflection While Traveling

One lesson I have learned while traveling is that in order to learn from the world around you, you must first be open to listen, and to be open to listen, you must be comfortable with yourself.

You no matter where you are in the world, you are always yourself. People often think that when they travel, they will magically become a completely different person with a completely different set of interests, but that is never the case. You are who you are, no matter what continent you are on, and when traveling, you will have to face the same inner demons and flaws you already struggle with.

At the same time, the ability to learn from the world around you opens up new possibilities; the trick is to use them wisely. By learning about the world and engaging with others, you both encounter new rhythms that can get you out of your cycles, try on different identities that may offer innovative ways to resolve some of your inner issues, and can learn from other lifestyles and ways of thinking.

But how to best leverage these gains is easier said than done. I find the trick is to balance extrovertedly exploring and learning about wherever I am and introvertedly reflecting and processing.

The more I explore and learn, the more I get my own internal juices going. Learning and creatively are multiplicative: innovation connections produce even more innovative connections, cascading out overtime, and new thinking from the culture I am currently in will naturally spill over into innovative thinking in my personal life.

An S-Curve: Ramping up suddenly and then slowing

But such innovation grows exponentially and can thus become overwhelming. I need alone time to rest and process all of it. Like the s-curve models of the spread of diseases in populations (common on the news during the Covid pandemic), my learning at first shoots up rapidly but then slows down significantly as my brain becomes too filled with new ideas to handle new ones. That’s when I need to rest and process what I have learned so far. If I don’t, I will become tired and often cranky. After taking the time to process it all, I can go back out and learn some more.

That is how I navigate between both personal growth and learning while traveling the world. How you do it may be different based on your different personality, but I hope this provides good food for thought. When doing something as long-term intense as traveling the world, intentionally strategizing how you meet your mental needs and work on yourself while experiencing a literal world of things is important.

Revolutionizing Sitcoms: “The Good Place’s” Unique Window into Making Television

Michael from “The Good Place” looking smug

I recently rewatched “The Good Place” (spoiler warning), one of my favorite shows from the last ten years, and I noticed so much more about the show the second time around. I decided to write a miniseries analyzing different facets of the show – some complimentary, some critical – as a tribute to one of the most thoughtful and interesting sitcoms on mainstream US television. I hope you enjoy:

In this first reflection of The Good Place, I will describe how the sitcom covertly portrays slides in a discussion of the process of making a sitcom itself. Metatextual commentary and humor is “in” right now in popular US media, or at least during the years the show came out. This includes fourth wall breaks, discussions of the tropes of a show’s/movie’s genre within the work itself, shows about making shows, etc., but the Good Place had a clever way to embed some of the central tensions in writing a show into the story itself, allowing characters to reflect and confront them directly.

To understand how, we first must discuss how mainstream TV sitcoms get made. Usually, the writers have one or a small group of main characters. Each has a lovable or entertaining flaw that limits them in engaging and interesting ways. For example, Homer Simpson is an idiot; Michael Scott in The Office wants love and adoration, and George Costanza in Seinfeld worries about trivial matters. Out of this fundamental flaw emerge both endearing traits and other sub-flaws that produce a more fleshed out character (more details on this process here).

The show writers then create a world that constantly rubs up against this fundamental flaw that brings it out in dramatic and hilarious ways. The writers develop the conflict in each episode and the other cast of characters who inhabit the world (both major and minor) in ways that maximize that conflict with the main casts’ fundamental flaw (e.g. Michael’s family in Arrested Development seem almost hand-picked to bring out his judgmental yet enabling nature). This forms the show’s backbone, the basic structure that each episode replicates. Structurally, all other phenomena in the show (like witty one-liners) generally flow out of this premise.

The Good Place crafts this very structure into the premise of the story world itself. In the first season, the show takes a more conventional sitcom approach. The characters are in a world with tension that demonstrates their fundamental flaw:

1) Eleanor is in an afterlife she does not deserve, which inadvertently harms everyone else there. This high stakes environment highlights her fundamental flaw of self-centeredness.

2) Chidi becomes embroiled in helping her, forcing him to make complex philosophical decisions, which highlights his fundamental flaw of indecisiveness

3) Tahini is given an elite role in the Good Place but frequently has to push to demonstrate and maintain that role, which highlights her fundamental flaws of insecurity and elitism

4) Jason is given the role of a silent monk, conflicting with and thus highlighting his natural fundamental flaw of impulsiveness.

From the perspective of these characters and first-time viewers, these conflicts over how to stay in the Good Place (or at least avoid the Bad Place) while fixing the issues their presence produces are “real,” but by the end of the first season, that turns out to be a ruse. Instead, their flaws have caused them to be condemned in the Bad Place where demons have intentionally constructed this universe antagonize each character’s flaw and torture them for their entertainment.

One interpretation I have is that these demons embody the sitcom developers. The writers are the ones who take advantage of the characters’ flaws, constructing artificial scenarios that directly pull at those flaws, for the sake of entertainment. This becomes most explicit in the first part of the second season where Michael and his demons intentionally design each detail of their world to exploit their flaws. That is the process of writing a sitcom in a nutshell. The torturous world they build can be seen as a type of “live-in” TV set, composed of various sets (such as yoghurt cafes and a clown-based home decor) to annoy the characters and then create conflicts to antagonize these personality weaknesses.

Only, the characters eventually realize the artificiality of their world, concluding that this must actually be The Bad Place. This forces the demons to reset each’s memories and start over. This parallels sitcoms, especially episodic sitcoms where each episode is a stand-alone entity. Sitcoms, especially classic sitcoms from the era before streaming services of regular television networks, tend to involve no or little character change. Within each episode, the characters may or may not go through a series of character developments, making them a different person at the end of it, but between episodes, they are usually right back to who they started with the same flaws as before. This way the same types of conflicts can unfold in each new episode with different specific details.

In the Good Place, this becomes tedious overtime and ultimately fails. The demons become increasingly exasperated at the constant repetition of enacting the same type of story over and over. And the human characters eventually realize how this world is an artificial facade. This represents how nauseatingly repetitive sitcoms can feel overtime. Even though I did not watch enough media at the time to analyze this in-depth, but I tended to see a pattern in the 2010s of shows reflecting on the constant churn of repetitive content, and I think as streaming services enabled TV shows to become more serialized, encouraging greater degrees of character growth, several media explored the repetitiveness of classic sitcoms in particular. The Good Place seems to be an example of this.

As the “producer” of these hell episodes, the head demon Michael seems to represent the show’s progression the most. In a way, he is the main protagonist of the story, since he progresses the most throughout the show and does the most to shape the cosmos around him. Over the course of the show, he grows from a demon exploiting their weaknesses for torture to working with them to avoid his own “damnation” to genuinely caring about their wellbeing and ability to get into the Good Place to fighting to reshape the entire afterlife to be more fair and lifegiving for all humanity. Throughout the show, he is a visionary whose vision shapes the world of the show, whether envisioning a new way to torture humans or trying to change the entire afterlife.

All of this gave a platform for the characters to explicitly discuss the characters main flaws in the universe. In the beginning of the show, they did this by torturing them in hell, and as the show progresses and the plot centers on the characters getting into the Good Place, this shifts to them explicitly working through their flaws to become good. This happens in multiple cycles, ranging from the Judge’s tests to being sent back to earth to see whether they are different (a reuse of magical forgetting to make the characters go back to square one and have us see them work through their flaws again). Their character growth and reshaping of their afterlife world go hand-in-hand, paralleling them working through their flaws with changing their sitcom world and premise. Through these cyclic fits, relapses, and restarts, the main cast still make slow progress not only of their own characters but also of the very foundations of their world they inhabit.

How to Prepare Yourself When What You Want to Do with Your Life Keeps Changing

In life, if I have learned anything over the course of my life, it is that I cannot predict the person I will be in a few years. We all change overtime, often in unpredictable ways, and even though a core of me remains the same, my specific goals, passions, and interests always seem to redefine themselves over the years.

For example, I have held a career for over seven years that I didn’t even know existed a year or two before starting. Then, after thinking I would do that into the foreseeable future, I ended up pursuing a very different dream of traveling the world.

The same thing happens when you look back at your past. In the moment, you may experience a major life event one way – whether horrifying, frustrating, saddening, joyous – but years or decades later, when you look back at it, you will likely feel very differently about it.

That is one thing that gives me pause when considering quickly rushing into permanent actions that will lock me in for many years or decades. I don’t really know what my future self will think of it years down the line. So then, how can I be certain that I still desire what I am seeking at that moment?

So, how should someone respond to this uncertainty? I can think of three basic approaches: 1) maximizing one’s ability to act now, 2) planning long-term projects for future gain, or 3) preparing oneself to become as perfect as possible before venturing out into the world. I tend to choose the former: positioning myself so that my future self is best able to make a decision when he is ready to.

Thus, I have tended to choose careers, living options, financial decisions, etc. that combine benefiting my current short-term interests while increasing the options that my future self will have down the line. For example, I tend to pick the job that best pads my resume to increase my options later while giving me intellectual satisfaction and financial security in the immediate future.

If a person is a car, you could say I spend my effort optimizing the vehicle. Building myself up to the best of my abilities, in terms of personal fulfillment, skill-development, professional development, etc. This way, I am as souped up as best I can be so that I can later choose the route I want to go in, whatever it is that I will want to choose at that time.

To me, others who try to produce a certain route for their lives – like those with a five year plan – are like those who spend most of their time building a specific road in front of them. This can work well if that road ends up being the route they want to take, but to me, what route I think I will want to take rarely ends up being the one I actually want to take when I am older. Thus, if I focus on building a certain route, I end up getting stuck on that route in the future, or having all that work go to waste when I inevitably choose a different path later.

It may seem counterintuitive to constantly work on yourself like this, but my strategy is not to keep the car in the garage rather than taking it onto the road (that would be the third strategy above). That is not how short-term optimization for me works. I am already on the road, focusing on how to improve myself to be able to get to more places more efficiently as I travel. I know people who think they must stay in the garage until they are ready. Taking some time by yourself to prepare is helpful, but I have also seen many languish their entire lives in the garage, unwilling to venture out because they do not match their perfect image of how they should be. I am one at least who best prepares himself through trying things out in the real world.

This is how I handle it, and why I find it works better than the other approaches. You may have a different personality with different inclinations, but it can be helpful to think through what approach would work best for you.

A Year Traveling the World: A Reflection on 2024 and What to Expect in 2025

I hope for three things in 2025 as I travel around the world:

1) Find balance

This past year, I ended up discovering how I want to live my life (or this current chapter of my life at least), and this year, I need to learn how to live that life in a balanced, sustainable fashion. In 2024, my girlfriend and I decided to start to travel the world. 2024 served as its childhood to develop, refine, and mature how to travel the world.

Now, I suspect 2025 will see an adolescence and introduction to adulthood. During the “childhood” of 2024, I determined whether I enjoyed this life, which I do, but then also encountered practical problems in how to bring it about. Like, how should I balance adventuring and seeing new places with the desire to do creative projects and other things like keeping up with friends, daily chores, etc.? What kind of stuff am I most interested in creating or doing? How do my girlfriend and I juggle our respective needs and paces when traveling together?

In childhood (in Western beliefs around psychological development at least), one also focuses on general skill exploration and development. You explore the world and attend school where you are supposed to learn the most basic foundational skills for your society. Likewise, in 2024, I have been similarly focusing a lot of my time on my own general skill development without knowing it.

Then in Western psychology, adolescence is the time when individuals most wrestle with their identities and emotionally how they will resolve the issues that come their way. One reason teenagers have so many mood swings is because they are encountering adult stressors for the first time and are initially developing their emotional techniques for how to respond. As they get older, these emotional techniques become ingrained as the patterns for how they will react when they encounter similar stressors, and thus they do not need to adjudicate between as many potential emotional responses as when they were a teenager.

Similarly, by the end of 2024, I seem to have encountered some of the big issues I will face traveling the world while also trying to do creative work), and I suspect I will use the beginning of 2025 to wrestle with how to best juggle all my priorities and how to overcome these potential problems. For example, I felt like I was not sufficiently in the moment and did not ingratiate form as much cross-cultural connections as I would have liked. Instead, I got too caught up and stressed out by the many many items I put on my to do list. I will likely test out different approaches, some of which will help and some won’t, determining over time what works best for me.This I consider my adolescent period for traveling the world.

As I finalize figuring that out, I predict my lifestyle will eventually transition sometime later in 2025 into a “young adult period” where I start to find my groove. How long will the adolescent period take? I predict I will be done and have a sense of balance by the first half of the year, with a decent likelihood I will be done by March or April, but I really don’t know. That may be way too optimistic, like maybe this adolescence will take the whole year, and if I read this in the future, I may chuckle at my own naivety. But I am still going to tentatively go with it.

2) Create something I am proud of

I would like to develop something insightful and useful for the world in 2025. In 2024, I focused on my own exploring, learning, and experience: being able to see interesting and great places in the world, having my own adventures, and learning about the world. But as I work through my adolescent stage and hit my stride, I would like to take those skills to good use and produce something interesting, insightful, and potentially useful to others.

I will still explore new parts of the world (don’t get me wrong), but I would like to spend more energy trying to produce something as well. Right now, my thoughts are writing a book or starting a podcast series, but I have a nearly endless list of other minor or less thought out ideas. I predict I will set my ambitions too high like I always do at first, but I will ultimately produce something that I am proud of.

Life amidst the Cosmic Clash between Chaos and Tyranny

(This is a second version of this original short story, with a different emphasis.)

When the world was formed, there were two evil forces. One was Chaos who represented destruction and anarchy, and the other Tyranny who wanted order and control.

They clashed. Tyranny had the entire universe confined into a small, dense point, but Chaos pushed the particles of the universe apart, causing everything to explode in a hot, fast bang. Tyranny tried to bring everything back together into an order or system, through forces like gravity, electromagnetism, and so on. She would design intricate formations ranging from small atoms to big galaxies, but Chaos would cause them slowly to rip apart.

Their fight raged for billions of years. Tyranny started to learn that every structure she built, no matter how strong, seemed to eventually fall apart. She realized two things that human scientists would discover far into the future: Entropy (or Chaos) always increases in the universe and that any structured, dynamic system no matter how perfectly built can easily splinter into chaos overtime given very small aspects of how they were initially built that she could not control. In enough time, Chaos always seemed destined to win in the end.

She had an idea. What if she could build structures that would continue to reproduce themselves overtime? When she tried to build a single system, it would never last forever. Something would always make it fall apart eventually. But, she decided to build structures that could replicate themselves but with slight modifications each time in response to mild intrusions of Chaos (which she called “circumstances”)? Even if the original version disintegrated a long time ago, the newest lifeforms would have adapted and survived. This seemed like the best strategy to build order that can survive the coming chaos and slowly take over the universe. She called these replicating entities Life.

Starting on a planet, these got better and better at replicating, becoming a network with other life that expanded across the whole planet. In time, maybe it could expand across the entire universe. As her life started competing more intensely in this environment, some started developing the ability to understand some of the plays in her playbook and write their own. They also started creating information and other systems that seemed to exhibit a type of life of its own.

As this is happening, she saw one fundamental weakness: these things are reliant on matter, and eventually even their matter might descend into Chaos. She struggles to think. Will life be able to transcend even the matter of the universe, or will Chaos eventually still have her way in the end?

What Are Emotions, and What Do They Tell Us About Ourselves?

Many are critical of emotions, seeing feelings as something that stifles them, as something they must overcome with reason and rationality, but that is foolish in the long run. We should be aware of our emotions because they teach us crucial lessons about ourselves and our needs.

Emotions are one of our internal mechanisms to orient us towards what we need. Thus, they are crucial. Even though sometimes emotions can be overwhelming or lead people to make decisions in the moment that turn out to be poor ones, we should not ignore or suppress our emotions.

Instead, we should seek to understand what they are telling us about what we need. Anxiety is a sign that we consider whatever we are anticipating as important. Worry and fear area signs that we are concerned about our wellbeing. Anger is a sign that we feel an injustice has threatened ourselves or others we care about.

At the end of the day, they are signals. Signals that can turn out to be correct or incorrect. Sometimes we are angry at something that we discover is not a real injustice, and sometimes, what we fear turns out not to be much of a concern. But often they are not wrong: our minds can be very good at assessing what is important.

Either way, it’s important to process the emotion, understand why you feel it, and then determine the best response to having the emotion. Through this, we can synchronize our emotions with our rational thinking. Using our reason to think about whether our emotion’s assessments are missing important information, and in turn, determining whether our rational self is ignoring something our emotions are picking up on.

A successful marriage between the two is a healthier way to respond to our emotions than suppression and a better way to use the tools in our psychological toolset to engage the world and live a good life.

The Dance of Water: Finding Beauty in the Tumult

The first time I whitewater-rafted was in a park called Ohiopyle at around 12 years old. Located in southwestern Pennsylvania we rafted along a famous stretch of the Youghiogheny River. My mother, father, brother, and I all shared a raft.

When the first rapids we had no clue what we were doing. Our boat rammed right into something. It knocked my father straight off the raft. I went flying out too, but before I could fall out of the boat, my mom’s body slammed into my legs on the boat, pinning them. Instead, I dangled over the edge, with my legs trapped on the boat and my chest and head hanging over the edge.

This was one of the most interesting experiences of my entire life. I hung there passively with no control over where I went or what I did as the boat careened down the water.

Waves would form around my face, in a circular vortex starting up from my chest and curving my face. They would form a cylindrical corridor like science fiction depictions of the inside of a wormhole. Within, I would marvel at the crystalline-like structures of water all around me.

Then suddenly the wave would collapse. My head hopelessly dunked in the water. My existence precariously converted into a blinding stream of bubbles and gagging as the water pummeled my face, and I thrashed amidst the current.

Then just as suddenly as it ended, another crystalline wave would form. This would go in cycles: the beautiful moments of respite to catch my breath while I marveled at the unique formations around me followed by periods of chaotic pummeling in the water.

It lasted for several minutes until the boat finally concluded its rapids. Then, my mother finally moved from her perch against the edge of the boat, releasing me to drop fully into the now calm water.

When I came back on board, she was not aware that she was pinning my legs against the side of the boat as she had entirely focused on how to navigate the coming waves. My father returned from his swim, and my older brother stayed perfectly safe in the back of the boat the whole time, steering it through the rapids, wondering why everyone else on the boat couldn’t keep their seats. It goes to show you how different people given their personalities and initial positions in life have very different experiences with the same phenomena.

Watching the waves crash above me reminded me how I really have very little control over my life. I am really being taken along for a ride by bigger forces around me outside of my control. At the same time, I still get to see wondrous sites as these entities form and break around me. The glory of life lies in these moments of surrender towards the unique dances the world creates.

At the same time, at least for now, I have been given enough of a break from the chaos of life to catch my breath and survive, to have my needs met in between the moments of serenity and chaos. That has been enough.

The Meaningless Film (A Short Story)

A group of film writers were brainstorming new movie ideas. They were tired and burnt out from churning out the usual cliche crap that regular people enjoyed, so they settled on a completely different concept: a meaningless film. It would have no meaning or significance whatsoever.

They cobbled together an assortment of scenes. No plot really, but random dialogue from conversations they had been in throughout the week. Each contributed a scene or two, and it produced a mess without a coherent story, not even stable characters. One scene one “character” was bursting with rage, the next she was timid and docile.

They showed the script to the owners of their production company, and the owners found it amazing. How did they manage to come up with such a creative yet authentic portrayal of life? Each conversation demonstrated the ambiguities and contradictions latent in the contemporary world.

The filmmakers bit their lip in frustration. How could these producers find so much meaning in such dribble? The producers were excited to make the movie, but the filmmakers abandoned the concept and went back to the drawing board. Even a film without plot or character development could have meaning.

So, they stripped all characters and plot and displayed a randomly generated series of images. But this too piqued the interest of the avant-garde film connoisseurs within their company. What an interesting statement of what art has turned into nowadays?

So, they scrapped that meaningful dribble and opted for complete silence: an hour and a half of a blank screen instead of a feature film. This stoked interest among the public, though. Would they dare make such a radical film, and what kind of statement were they trying to make?

They realized that people give meaning to the things around them, so the only way to have the film be meaningless is to have it not exist at all. Thus, they never made the film. Social media still repeated the rumor of a blank film, but it was never publicized.

The filmmakers settled. They told themselves that because no such film existed, the film itself was meaningless, although the concept and potential title of the film seemed meaningful to whatever journalists were required to opine about their supposed vision for making such a thing. That, to them, was enough.

Their producer bosses chastised them for wasting so much time and failing to make a single one of their films, so they decided upon a more productive way to take a break and heal from this burnout. They would go on strike for having to churn so much cliche content.