THE SOUND OF SILENCE. BAD LIVEJOURNAL.

It appears that the livejournal engine does not do the right thing with entries dated in the future.  If you select "date out of order" then it never shows up on your friends' friends pages and if you don't select "date out of order" it puts them up immediately, ordering it based on the date you posted, not the date you selected.

So my attempt to deal out my pile of entries bit by bit so people have time to read them all has totally backfired. Due to the above issue, no one read any of them except for the few where I forgot to select "date out of order".

SO... I MADE A TON OF POSTS THAT NOBODY SAW! HAVE A LOOK!

06:06 am: Musings on types of art I like to create
08:10 am: [travel] Unintentional elimination diet.
12:18 pm: [travel] Familiar faces and genetic subgroups
04:49 pm: [travel] The Sedlec Ossuary  (awesome pictures!)
10:23 pm: [travel] Paying to remember the dead

04:44 am: [travel] Strange propaganda :-)
05:43 am: [travel] Fake vs real Art Nouveau.
06:23 am: [travel] Leaving Eastern Europe...
12:25 pm: [travel] The Switzerland-Italy phase shift
06:00 pm: [travel] PSA. The world is round. I have verified it.
08:58 pm: Swiss Chocolate vs Mr Snob.

03:01 am: [travel] Lard
03:09 pm: [travel] Milan
04:13 pm: [travel] Couchsurfing Bergamo
06:05 pm: [travel] Gelato pairings 
07:14 pm: [travel] Mom, you literally don't understand!
11:29 pm: [travel] Examining the modern temple and religion of Damanhur
11:41 pm: Sustainable growth spurts in religious organizations

Crazy cooking idea.

After tasting some very dark chocolate and beef jerky in quick succession, I'm convinced that you could indeed do a successful fondue with beef and baking chocolate. Take pure unsweetened chocolate, add a little pepper and spice to bring the mixture closer to mole, and then give people bits of beef, pork, or chicken to dip in the fondue pot. If small bite-size pieces of jerky are used instead, they could be coated with a layer of chocolate and then left to cool and harden. Then they could be eaten later as a snack. I don't have the facilities to try this at the moment, but perhaps someone else does and could work with me when I return.

[travel] Hostel characters.

Staying in hostels and traveling on trains, you meet all kinds of interesting and/or colorful people. Some of it is inspirational. Some of it is pure Jerry Springer.

Here are some highlights, good and bad:
( lots of interesting people )

[personaldev] Trying different, not harder

A lot of things are ruined by trying too hard. Skills that rely heavily on intuition or nondeclarative memory (eg social skills, singing, snowboarding, negotiation etc) are especially vulnerable to this. People generally will try too hard, get frustrated, and then the frustration will completely ruin any chance of succeeding.

This may be the most embarrassing metaphor that I ever commit to writing, so I may regret this later, but it works quite well and is... er... quite memorable. Here goes:

A lot of these intuitive skills are akin to trying to urinate quickly when you don't really have to pee very much. The more you try squeeze it out, the more your other muscles tighten up, preventing any chance of letting it out. Instead you have to relax and let yourself pee. The act of relaxing your pursuit of the goal to succeed is interesting. It's basically the act of wanting without wanting. Buddhism talks about this a lot in the abstract -- desire brings suffering, but by letting go of what you want, you may achieve it,.

AFAIK the most successful strategy to get yourself to pee is to imagine yourself in the act of peeing. In the same way, if you are having trouble with an intuitive skill, imagining yourself doing it well may be the best preparation for doing it. If you can't imagine yourself doing it, imagine someone you know who does this skill well, and then imagine you are playing their role.

This act of channeling a competent person is recommended by NLP and other techniques.

Of course, this doesn't work for declarative skills. For example, pretending you're Obama may make you better at calmly handling a crisis, but pretending you're Einstein won't make you a better physicist.

[travel] Recalculating...

Since I have an unlimited railpass, I have some interesting options. For example, I showed up to the mountain paradise of Interlaken only to discover that most of the extreme activities I wanted to do were unavailable. None of the four bungee jump lines I wanted were operational, and they only had the beginner canyoning route. In addition, my tour at nearby CERN had to be pushed off until next week. The bungee jump was especially important to me because I wanted to use it to tie my current trip to the summer-in-Europe trip from wheni was 18. That trip was important to my life in a lot of ways, and the bungee jump symbolized how I transformed myself that summer.

I had this idea of doing the exact same experience as a different person as a way of seeing what inside me had changed. I would also be able to get the operators to take the same picture in the same place. It's the only picture from that trip that's online, so I'd be able to get the pose just right.

The premade caption: Same bungee different Matt.

However, that bungee line, like the others, was not in operation..

I thought “Hey, I just have to learn to be flexible... there are lots of other fun things to do in Interlaken.” I booked one of the less exciting canyoning trips and a paraglide. My life isn't so bad.

While drifting off to sleep at 1am, I realized, I can be really flexible. I woke up early and caught the first train out of town. I'm going to spend the next four days around the BeNeLux area, visiting a friend in Belgium and my next two Couchsurfing hosts in the Netherlands. Today I got to see Strasbourg, a small French city, and I'm currently catching my first ride on the TGV, the fastest train in Europe. So far I'm not impressed. We've had some sort of “unplanned event” and have been stationary for the last hour. If this were the Japansese Shinkansen, there'd already be a guy in white gloves handing out notes of apology and vouchers for free travel. Instead we're getting content-free updates from the conductor every five minutes.

[travel] Fun with political boundaries

As easwaran  points out, Lugano really does offer a little slice of Italy in Switzerland:

[travel] Lard

The latest in my long list of food discoveries on ths trip is lard. It turns out that gourmet lard is actually quite good and has a texture not too dissimilar from high-end fatty sushi like Toro. The restaurant in Bergamo (Italy) that my couchsurfing host took me to served the lard as a thin slice wrapped around a sprig of rosemary. It was a nice pairing.

The overall feast was sumptuous in an epic sort of way, with many different types of cheeses, cured meats, and baked meats to try. It turns out that Coppa can be quite nice if done right and that baked uncured proscuitto tastes like soft ham.

[travel] Milan

I ended up spending a night in Milan due to a train schedule issue. Lonely Planet goes out of its way to take a dump on Milan as a tourist destination, but I found it quite interesting for the half-day I wandered around. It's a lively city with a good metro system, nice parks and museums, and an environmental consciousness that included hordes of Prius taxis and lots of bike rental stations. Milan was also much more multiracial than I expected – it was interesting to see Vietnamese couples chattering to one another in Italian. People walked around with poise but not the exagerrated swagger like I remember seeing in other parts of the country.

I was however disheartened to discover that the giant bug-eye sunglasses are still very popular there, which means they'll probably be popular in the San Francisco area until at least 2013. The fashions in general were not too shocking or different, though I noticed that a lot of women over 40 tended to have very artificial-looking blond hair and overdone raccoon eye makeup.

Amusingly, I was the only male guest out of 13 or so at the hostel. Guys aren't so interested (generally speaking) in hitting up major fashion centers.

-----

Unrelated:

A note to hostel owners out there. It is not a good idea to let guests use your personal computer to download porn. WinPC Defender does not defend your PC against anything except you.

[travel] Couchsurfing Bergamo

My first couchsurfing.com stay was in Bergamo, a small city a little northeast of Milan. Bergamo isn't even mentioned by Lonely Planet Western Europe, so I was at the mercy of my excellent couchsurfing host. He gave me a thorough tour of the old city on the hill, including a fantastic church that's pure MC Escher on the outside and hardcore Roccoco on the inside. He also took me to a fantastic dinner, which is described in more detail in my lard entry.

Couchsurfing is hard work. You have to send out a lot of well-written and personalized requests to get a single positive response. Many hosts are inundated with several requests a day, so it's kind of like an online dating site – you have to stand out and catch them at the right time. However, when it works well, it's amazing. You're rewarded with the chance to deeply interact with a local and get an inside sense for the city they live in.

Go see Bergamo before too many people like me talk about it. As of now, it's a good place to have a chill and untouristy Italian experience. It isn't about the big monuments, it's about the atmosphere.

[travel] Gelato pairings

On advice of a fellow Milan hostel-goer, I checked out what may be some of the best gelato in Itally. They had a small but excellent range of flavors, including an extra dark chocolate that actually lived up to Matt standards of extra dark. The best part was that the server suggested a pairing – I had three scoops and had chosen the extra dark chocolate and a lemon flavor. Before I could pick a third flavor, he suggested the ginger, and it worked extremely well as a mix. Chocolate-lemon-ginger happiness for the reasonable price of 3 euros.

If any of you find yourselves in Italy soon, the chain is called Grom. They now have locations in several major cities.

For kick-ass gelato back home, there's always Naia.

[travel] Mom, you literally don't understand!

I noticed that teenagers in Eastern Europe often wear T shirts with especially bold or risque slogans on them. I realized that they can get away with it partially because their Soviet-era parents probably never learned English. Sample slogans include:

“Are you man enough to turn me on?”
“Fuck for love not for babies”
“Attention Ladies: I'm the one you've been looking for.”

Since milder forms of these shirts are popular in America, I'm thinking of starting a meta-parody line of them with slogans like

“Arrogant self-assessment”
“Bold statement designed to boost my self confidence”
“Remark designed to filter out timid boys.”
“Ironic claim of unassailability given that I'll do just about anyone after a couple of drinks.”

[travel] Examining the modern temple and religion of Damanhur

Today I checked out a very different, very modern sort of religious monument – Damanhur.

I first read about Damanhur in the New York Times a couple of years back. The basic backstory is that in the late 1970s a spiritually-oriented intentional community formed near Torino, Italy. The community decided to keep a low profile, but they had grand ambitions. The result of this conflicting goal and restraint was a massive and stunning underground temple complex built deep under the house of their leader. It's a maze of hidden passageways and enormous common rooms, and it's over 180 feet deep in parts. They managed to keep it secret for over 20 years in a nosy small town, and it was only discovered by the authorities when a disgruntled member blackmailed them. The authorities, typical incompetent bureaucrats, ordered its immediate destruction due to numerous building code violations and lack of building permits. Eventually, they came to their senses and realized they had a huge tourist windfall on their hands.

I'm less spiritual than most people, but I have enjoyed seeing what the various religions of the world have to offer. My tour guide told me that they don't see Damanhur as a religion – it's a way of life. I'd argue that Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam etc are also ways of life if done properly and not merely as window dressing.

They requested I not take pictures, and for once I was okay with that, given that my tour would have taken twice as long if I were snapping away. Their reason for me not taking pictures was also reasonable -- they wanted me to take in the sight/sound experience deeply on my first visit so that the place would make a deep impression on me..

Here's what I learned about Damanhurians and the values of their way of life / religion:

- Independent thought: Damanhurians are encouraged to think for themselves and make informed decisions about their beliefs.
- The importance of Games. They see the human experience as a nested set of games, and encourage the use of games for teaching purposes and social experimentataion. The children play a game akin to Risk but with far more complicated and changing rules. Other games have involved yearlong epic art battles, survivalist romps in the wilderness, and giving the teenagers a house of their own to run and manage when they were complaining of too much parental conteol. Games are important enough that there's a whole floor of one of the temples devoted to them.
- God is within you and everywhere, and is reached through personal excellence: People are encouraged to develop their talents to their greatest extent as it brings out the divine nature within them. Instead of worshipping a creator, they worship the world, its life forms, and the talent within themselves as human beings. One of the most striking temples depicts masculine and feminine creative energies triumphing over destructive forces.
- Universal participation: In Damanhur, there are no followers. Everyone is a part of forming the belief system and creating the temples. All members create a sculptured clay likeness of themselves to be placed in the temple complex. The styles vary dramatically, as you might imagine, and it humanizes the temple experience.
- Embracing change: Damanhurian philosophy stresses that the world will change, and their belief system must change as well. Not only should they accept change, but actively seek it out. One example the guide gave is how the group has changed from very closed to very open and from a communal economy to a mix of common and private possessions. To me this contrasts strongly with religions that hold on to very old beliefs that seem outdated (at least to me) from a modern perspective, such as seeing menstruating women as unclean or completely avoiding certain kinds of meat.
- Keeping a sense of humor: The temples are filled with in-jokes, puns, and goofy secret passageways. People are encouraged to not take themselves or their work too seriously.
- Tolerance of other religions: One of the shrines depicts and celebrates the variety of the world's religious traditions.
( And what I didn't like... )

Maybe I should design a religion. I've got some ideas.  Most atheists just point out how ridiculous and destructive religions can be, but don't propose alternatives that would serve the spiritual needs that most people satisfy with their religious beliefs.  If you want to successfully convert people, you have to use a carrot, not just a stick.

Sustainable growth spurts in religious organizations

One of the most fascinating aspects of my visit to Damanhur was seeing a religious system in its early growth phase. Many of the founders are still alive, though some have died and been enshrined in the temple. The legends of their works are still known firsthand by some, but the knowledge is being passed on and reformatted for consumption in various forms: storybooks for children, temple paintings, stories told to tour groups etc. The tour guide joked that they were leaving all kinds of curiosities for future historians to study and puzzle over.* I can imagine dropping in on other religions during their early years and seeing many of the same patterns emerge as reality becomes legend and a power structure grows to deal with the complexities of managing the religion.

The Damanhurians are well aware of the dangers of growing too fast and are making efforts to ensure that their growth is sustainable. They want to reach out and help the world but not aggressively proselytize.

I learned a couple of months ago that Islam grew faster than any other world religion during its infancy, with hundreds of thousands of followers during Mohammed's lifetime. This left a massive power vacuum upon Mohammed's death, and the Shiite/Sunni division happened over an argument between various relatives of Mohammed over who would take over as caliph. They've been fighting over it for 1300 years even though differences in belief are minimal. The original populist spirit of Islam – a personal submission to Allah that could be practiced alone – was lost as a massive religious-bureaucratic complex became the middleman between the human and the divine.

*The main founder painted one of the rooms himself and did not (and still does not) bother to explain the significance of it – it's written in a vast array of different languages and is full of cryptic diagrams. It's either the deepest of his esoteric work or a massive prank.