I played Your Only Move Is HUSTLE

Two stickmen exchange fast-paced blows on the ground and in mid-air.

Haven’t had much visual media lately so, here ya go.

This is Your Only Move Is HUSTLE. (Affectionately “Yomi Hustle,” but developer Ivy Sly changed it due to a copyright conflict with another fighting game just called Yomi.) It’s really visually confusing, and I’ll get to that, but this is one of those newer games so I want to explain it a little before getting into why I’ve played SO MUCH of it lately.

Yomi Hustle is a fighting game obvi, but it’s turn-based rather than real time. So after every couple milliseconds it pauses and gives both players their options. Other than that it’s standard, two stick people reducing each other’s health bars to 0.

That wasn’t as confusing as I thought. Let’s get into it!

  1. I’ve played some fighting games — enough to know the lingo, but not enough to use it correctly. Not enough to Google things like “frame data” and “Sol Badguy true combo.” But enough that I can parse the frankly ACADEMIC quantity of data Yomi Hustle presents you with. For everything about the genre this game simplifies, it doesn’t mince a lot of the complexities that make fighting game players some of the most fearsome folk in the biz. But what it does give you is time between each move to figure things out.
  2. That also means it emphasizes some of the more cerebral aspects of the genre — reading and prediction, pushing your luck versus playing for tempo — rather than response time and dexterity. Some players who have developed those skills will probably be turned off by this, and that’s okay! I don’t think Yomi Hustle’s spice blend is superior or anything. But it separates out what I like most about fighting games, and in that way it’s been way more accessible to me than something like Guilty Gear.
  3. Okayokayokay, so the best part, and what explains the gif you see before you: the true genius of Yomi Hustle is that, after each match, you get a replay in real time. That is, you can see how the fight plays out without all the pauses to figure out what it is you want to do. And it makes you look… well, see the gif. It makes you look really cool. A game might take 20 minutes, but that all gets condensed into a 15 second, frenetic brawl. I got ample time to consider each move, but when it’s all strung together I still feel like I’m good at fighting games.
  4. This feature has a roundabout positive effect on the community from what little I’ve seen. No one seems too put out by losing, because win or lose what results is visually graceful. You get rewarded for winning or losing with a sick, choreographed anime battle. I played with someone online. After a tense match, I launched myself into the air to try and build space and plan my final strike. Using the Cowboy’s teleport ability, they zipped up alongside me and unceremoniously sliced me out of the sky. We both immediately went into the chat like “YOOOO.” Like, how can you be mad?

I ended up in the Wikipedia references for “Fun” today (because I am a weekend warrior) and found a bizarre computer science (?) panel discussion on the systemitization of fun. Probably will talk about that soon. But one of the really fascinating points it makes is that, when trying to translate an irl experience into a virtual experience — in their case a Christmas cracker — it’s ineffective to just, for example, play a video of someone popping a Christmas cracker. You have to deconstruct the real thing into what makes it fun, then reconstruct it in the new medium. E.g., a Christmas cracker is “cheap and cheerful,” so the digital version should have a “simple page/graphics.”

Did I just trick myself into calling Yomi Hustle a “deconstruction of the fighting game genre”? Whatever, I’ll hard commit. It deconstructs fighting games, strips away what about them is manual, and synthesizes what’s strategic and — this is key — visually cool as hell. Looking competent is one of the great modes of fun, in my opinion. This game makes it really easy to look super duper competent, win or lose. It reminds me of another game I haven’t gotten to play, Hi-Fi Rush, which I’ve heard uses a very forgiving rhythm system to makes you feel on-beat even if you’re way off.

Will I ever get good at fighting games playing Yomi Hustle? No. But unless I want to rewrite sections of my brain, it’ll let me feel cool. Which is good enough for me.

Big talk, small talk, and spontaneous freedom

Pretty much every academic field I know of is fractal. It’s never just “I’m a scientist” — like, what would that even mean? You’re a biologist, a molecular biologist, a genomicist, a comparative genomicist. Or something. I’m not a comparative genomicist.

Linguistics is like this! One huge subfield of linguistics is called speech act theory. Speech act theory describes how words accomplish real actions in the world, rather than just describing states and objects in the world. A bet is a speech act. When you say you bet somebody $20, it’s the saying of it that makes it happen. Promises and apologies, also speech acts. In fact, there’s a twist ending in speech act theory that all words perform actions. One of the more salient takeaways of linguistics is that “actions speak louder than words” is total horseshit. Words are actions.

Conventional wisdom, and conventional corporate wisdom in particular, doesn’t want you to acknowledge this, probably because those engaged at the corporate level would rather be culpable for less than more. But I’m just spitballing here. In any case I think consumerism strongly encourages us to narrow the scope of “appropriate actions”: you are what you buy, you are your beauty or fitness routine, you are what you eat, you are the movies you see. You are not who you love. You are not what you feel. You are not what you say.

But who’s that on the top rope? It’s Roman Jakobson’s functions of language! These are the things that language can do — in a much more general way than “bet” and “promise.” Functions, not specific actions. For example, the referential action refers typical declarative sentences. “You are reading my blog.” “I’m wearing a gray hoodie.” “It did not rain today.” The metalingual function allows us to discuss language with language, like asking someone how to pronounce something.

Okay okay, let me get to what I actually came here to think about: the phatic function. It is speech for the sake of speech. To be more precise, it’s speech for the sake of speaking to somebody. “Hello” means nothing, describes nothing. All it does is open a channel of communication. “Goodbye” closes that channel. Public speakers deride the use of “um,” but it serves as an important placeholder in face-to-face conversation: um tells your partner that you still need the floor, it’ll just take you a minute to get your thoughts together.

Hello, goodbye, and ummmm are all phatic in a very narrow interpretation. They affect the pacing of a conversation. But unlike genomics, linguistic objects are open to many different kinds of interpretation. “lady through whose profound and fragile lips/the sweet small clumsy feet of April came” both refers to something — a quality of a person — and serves the poetic function — to convey the message in a beautiful way. Depending on context it could serve the metalinguistic function, too, if you’re repeating for someone who missed it the first time. Nothing is ever cut and dry.

When I talk to you, my words are also performing an action. I am saying whatever it is I’m saying, and I’m also saying “I want to be here, with you, talking to you.” Sometimes that message is very quiet. We can talk about what we want for dinner, and at the end we will have dinner. Other times, the phatic message is very loud. We are talking about the worst shaped video game console, we’re telling stories we know we’ve told before. Our words are a long umm to hold our place in conversation with each other.

This is sometimes called “grooming talk,” which I super hate. I think “small talk” works better. Calling talk small is the same dismissal as calling a novel a cell phone novel — but rather than fixating on smallness as the counterpoint to bigness, I like small talk as a counterpoint to “the conversation,” the giant ongoing discussion of trends, of who bought who and for how much, of what someone said and what none of us should ever say. A smaller world isn’t a bad one.

As Twitter continues to undergo disassembly at the whim of someone who has likely never held a meaningful conversation, big or small, I’ve been thinking of how the app served to gamify conversation. It invited everyone to the widest stage. It encouraged particular behaviors, meaning it discouraged other ones. Twitter, and all social media platforms, ask you for a part of yourself, not all of yourself. Quote Kate Lindsay, “Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and Substack will forever own the parts of my personality that I’ve handed over to them, as do the platforms from my past: Facebook still claims the extroverted college student; Tumblr, the angsty, artsy teen; MySpace, the confused and flailing twelve year old who shouldn’t have been there in the first place.”

Online talk provides a whole new set of strategies for disengaging with small talk: the Leave On Read, the “Forget” To Respond, the Like React, the Lurk. You never have to speak online if you don’t want to. And you may have plenty of reasons to not want to — believe me, I understand. At the same time, it means that our ability to phatically communicate hangs more in the balance than ever. Spend any amount of time in a Twitch chat and I think you’ll find people desperately wrenching to open a channel of conversation that can’t exist.

Jonathan Gingerich writes about the experience of “spontaneous freedom,” a feeling of unplannedness he describes at length, but which I think is depicted really well in a passage from Mrs. Dalloway, which Gingerich takes as the object example: a character arrives in London by boat and realizes that nobody knows he’s there. He has no plans or obligations.

All spontaneously free talk is small talk. You’re not trying to accomplish anything, and there’s no “right way” unless you start speaking total gibberish. But online, there is very much a right way. Not just in the literal technical constraints required by certain platforms — you cannot post to Instagram without visual media, you cannot post to TikTok without videos of a certain length — but in the limitations placed on you by the architects of the platform. It wasn’t long ago that users who dutifully posted aesthetic photos to Instagram saw their engagement tank because, somewhere in Menlo Park, a group of people decided on the competetive advantage of Instagram Reels.

The difference between conversational rules placed on you by tech CEOs (rules like “Reels succeed” and “verified users are boosted) and the rules of small talk (“be kind” and “use correct pronouns”) are this: one is natural, one is artifical. A tweet I think about a lot came in response to Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri discussing why photos from your friends don’t show up on your main feed.

Adam Mosseri, a paid Twitter subscriber, discusses how Instagram sees more growth in stories and DMS rather than in content in Feed. Jacob Shamsian replies, "What if I don't care if you have growth?"

Instagram will always construct its rules based on growth, based on market forces. No one unaffiliated with the company will share its loyalties.

Rules in small talk, on the other hand, already line up with our sensibility and empathy. You follow the rules because you want to be understood, and because you don’t want to harm your conversation partner. In that way, according to Gingerich, you can still experience the unburdened openness of conversation without the alien constraints of social media platforms.

In short, nothing online replaces small talk. The Internet has no third places, physical locations centered on human connection. For what it’s worth, scholars have been lamenting the disappearance of third places since at least 2000 and the publication of Bowling Alone. Car-dependent city design has done at least as much as the iPhone to destroy our sense of social space. Social media simply accelerated things, as it accelerates everything.

Now that Twitter has brought the ego of the platform into the neon limelight, I think we should all be seeking out ways to rebel. A great place to start: go talk about the weather.

TikTok is the street performance and the concert

A street performer playing the accordion, except the performer's head is hidden in their suit. A hat is propped up above where the head should be.

I’ve started thinking of a TikTok a lot like a street performance. Like, when I find a good singer performing on TikTok it feels less like going onto Spotify or YouTube, or playing a CD, or going to a little mini-concert, and it feels way more like stumbling onto the performance on my walk to work. I’ve actually saved certain performances, then looked for them on Spotify, and bounced off because it didn’t sound the same as when I wasn’t looking for it. The app lets people busk for music, but also recipes and comedy and DIY projects. Everything comes with an unexpected thrill of discovery.

But there are some other, important ways in which TikTok is like a concert. Or, TikTok fall on some spectrum between street performance and concert. I’ve been trying to find what are the relevant factors.

For example, a street performer is an unplanned encounter while a concert is a planned encounter. When you go onto the feed, you’re definitely aware you’re going to be served some kind of entertainment. But the nature of that entertainment is potential, not kinetic. The next TikTok could be anything. Since that lotto aspect is part of what makes the app so addictive, I’d say that’s a point to street performance.

There’s a humanness to TikToks. They feel like something unproduced — or at least, an overproduced TikTok sort of gets written off. Trying too hard is a cardinal internet crime. Only when the illusion breaks do you realize lots of creators are in fact adopting an affect. It’s like comedians or streamers, where the character wants you to believe that it’s the performer. When really, if you ran into the performer at Costco, they’d probably be very different from who they are on stage. Concerts, on the other hand, feature people who are very obviously performers. They’re idolized. Everyone is facing the performer’s direction. In the app I think someone can choose where they land, either obscuring the line between character and performer or making it obvious. I don’t know that it’s possible to not perform, though.

A concert has a venue, but a street performance appears somewhere you were already going. Phones present a kind of supernormal access to entertainment at all times. In that way, it’s always one step in front of you. But there’s one extremely important way the two are different: concerts silo attention. They take place in a venue built around the musician. You can meet people at a concert or whatever, but they’re not mingling events. The music would be quieter if they were. TikTok SUUUPER siloes attention. You are drip fed each video. Everything about TikTok is designed to keep you where you are.

On the other hand, I went for a walk and found a little performance I wasn’t expecting. There was a food truck, folks had their dogs. I sat down to take some notes and, lo and behold, some friends walking by noticed me. I spent the rest of my time with them. Not with the performance.

Where it all went wrong

I went ahead and took an impromptu break from the blog. Not that I have to explain myself, but I think it’d be useful to talk a little about my creative life lately and why the blog ended up getting cut. And what I plan for it in the future!

  1. As proud as I was of my streak with daily posting, back in March I took a trip to St. Louis and missed a day. I’d already prepared to forgive myself — it seemed unlikely I’d post every day till I died. But that permission made me way more willing to leave the blog this week.
  2. Recently I’ve been trying to make some lifestyle changes. What’s weird about changing your sleep schedule, for example, is that it feels like a whole day’s work. So I’ve been feeling busy, plus trying to manage two writing projects at once for the Substack. It’s been really hard, and I’m still putting way too much into each piece. Learning a lot! But I’ve been super stressed about the platform lately.
  3. That stress makes it really hard to do explorative writing. I actually got to knuckle down on my Substack essay by falling back on the process, but I’m not getting excited about a lot of new ideas. Plus, since Substack feels like where my writing can have a life outside of myself, if I have an hour to sit down then I’ll be writing essays, not blog posts.
  4. Explorative writing is what this blog is about. Since I’m overwhelmed by two ideas right now, I guess I’m not eager to add more. But the blog is also a lot of what helps me feel like a writer.

I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’m glad that my self-esteem isn’t so tied up in routine, and I’m willing to set aside a project if it feels unhappy.

Last point: I’m a big proponent of building systems rather than forcing behavior, and if the blog doesn’t fit into my natural creative life then I need to address that. But the blog has also done a lot for me, and may be worth the extra effort.

For now I’m gonna get this essay going so I can bask in the glow of my achievement, then I’ll figure out where it all went wrong.

Things I like seeing

@nisipisa

things i like seeing

♬ Claire de Lune – Ave Maria

Working on another Supernormal post while I keep chunking through TikToks. Juggling two or more projects is something I’ve never been good at, but always known I need to practice, and right now it feels really good! I have a clear vision and it takes the stress off of being barely halfway through my liked feed (!).

I’ve been running into some good ones, though! Like the above, by nisapisa! It’s weird, I’m starting to draw a lot of connections between TikToks, and I’m remembeirng one where a woman is talking about how misanthropic it is to hate on things that most people do. Or like, we want to mythologize certain things because few people are capable of them, rather than cherishing everyday activities. This is a good counterpoint to that: the things nisapisa describes are very human.

In honor of that, here are things I like seeing:

  1. Anyone dining on a restaurant patio. Double if it’s a nice restaurant and they have a nice bottle of wine or something. You know they’re having a moment.
  2. Older men dancing. Too many men are made to feel unattractive or uncomfortable in their bodies as they age, but nothing in the rulebook says you can’t still do TikTok dances!
  3. Women building anything, especially those videos where they open with “I wanted a greenhouse but I have zero carpentry experience” before building a whole greenhouse. Scientists were all like “hOw DiD rOmAnS bUiLd ThE pAnThEoN,” dude just give any woman a long enough Spotify playlist and they’ll figure it out.
  4. Couples on electric scooters. I knooow they’re like a blight on urban transit or whatever. But I never don’t smile when I see people zoom by on those goofy lil scooters — I was a scooter kid growing up, so it feels really whimsical to me.
  5. Related, but anyone just getting from A to B on a skateboard or roller blades, or any non-car non-bike vehicle. Hell yeah, zoom!
  6. People when they notice a photographer is around. Like you just keep doing you dude, but everyone suddenly becomes an actor portraying themselves and I think that’s really charming.

I want to like AI, stop making me hate it

It’s a tremendously rainy day, I’m still hours of TikToks away from completing my next Supernormal post — programming note, until I’m confident I have the time to juggle multiple projects simultaneously, posts will continue to be done when they’re done — and I have the day off work. Still, despite the threat of boredom, I initially refused to mess around with GPT.

My dislike of the technology has been misplaced by tech futurists and mercenary bloggers who, lacking loyalty to creative work on some fundamental level, focused the conversation on how we can replace pesky artists.

Pesky artist here: not cool. Also, good luck.

Nothing I’ve seen has inspired an iota of confidence that AI can replace creativity. In fact, the more I’ve learned the less confident I’ve become. Replacing artists is a whole other matter, an outright contradiction for what art means.

Still, I have a crypto-borne hunch that enough wealthy people believing art is mechanizable, optimizable, could make it so. The Tinkerbell effect: the creative power of collective belief.

Gather the real world manifestations of this hustledrone corpo-shitpost mania — the blessedly short hiatus of Clarkesworld resulting from an influx of AI submissions, from which other smaller literary publications have not been spared; the disgusting “future of animation” era courtesy of Corridor Crew — well, I’m not too sorry for my suspicion around generative AI.

BUT, I also don’t want to dismiss people’s real excitement about the real capabilities of this technology. It’s cool! It should be cool! I don’t want wealthy people to ruin that.

The key is that AI is productivity software, not creative software. Excellent writeup on this subject by Ryan Broderick. He also points out that, despite focus placed on creative industries by — I’m quoting here — “lightly bearded men who pay for Twitter,” the thing this new technology is best at is coding, not creative writing.

Broderick also writes about using ChatGPT to code without experience, but honestly the first thing that’s gotten me excited about this stuff maybe ever is a video by (checks notes) Wyatt Cheng… oh dear. Ahem, a video by Wyatt Cheng in which he recreates Flappy Bird with entirely AI written code.

Cheng’s ignominious position as an Activision Blizzard director aside, I think this video demonstrates something truly cool about generative AI: it lays lots of groundwork, but requires someone with actual skills and ideas to make anything approaching elegant or useful. Cheng regularly identifies problems in the code, things that would improve gamefeel, or just points where his vision didn’t line up with what GPT produced. He could tweak the program in real time because of his technical creative experience.

No architect ever found creative fulfilment in the pouring of concrete. It’s a necessary prerequisite for their creative work.

There’s a nuance here I worry I’m not capturing, because so far what I’ve written sounds like a billion think pieces already written. What I’m saying is, I think the common refrain that AI can be a device for inspiration is a little chickenshit. At the risk of sounding elitist, I don’t support the idea that creating a plot outline, or generating dummy paragraphs, or automatically generating character names is writing busywork. Every step of the writing process should be personal, from inspiration to blank page to revision.

Writers might use ChatGPT to organize their drafts into folders or, I don’t know, set a schedule with word count goals. Painters could identify which blends of paint will create a particular color — although maybe I’m showing my ignorance, and even the process of mixing paints is a source of inspiration. No one should be asking GPT for what to write about or what to paint.

Point is, art isn’t code. I’d rather encourage creative people to take the leap into self-reliance rather than assuage thorny parts of creative work with soulless, VC-funded robotherapy.

Hm. So far this post goes “I don’t like AI, but, I don’t like AI.” Let me share what it is I got up to today, my first time actually noodling with ChatGPT and having a good time.

Tabletop game design is my hobby. It doesn’t live anywhere online right now, but I like messing around with it. I use a website called Homebrewery to make my stuff look like official, publishable design. It occured to me that I could use GPT to translate my work — in this case a character class — from Google Docs, my native design environment, to Markdown, the code used by Homebrewery.

It worked okay for that. Seeing my work externalized was cool. Moreover, though, I started asking the machine for roll tables and additional class features. It produced templates in a format I was familiar with, and design language I was familiar with.

What excited me most was how useless everything was. GPT misunderstood my vision. Its range increments were all over the place — cantrips that incapacitated each creature in a 50-foot radius. The flavor text was sometimes neat, but wholly uninspired.

You know what it felt like? It felt like when you drag out a few boxes in Excel to autocomplete the spreadsheet. Nothing created by the machine felt like mine, nothing felt finished. Just a very organized blank space for me to apply my own ideas.

And, though I am very loathe to admit it, a few ideas made me go “oo!” but I mean, hell, artists can be inspired by a walk in the park. Maybe it’s naive of me to ignore the notion that a word association box like GPT could spark something.

ChatGPT thrived as a tidy, intelligent design environement. Like a smartphone-esque upgrade to Docs or Excel. I get to bring the ideas, I get to bring anything that makes the system playable or fun or beautiful, because I have spent a long time developing my own ideas about what’s playable and fun and beautiful.

I’m still waaaaays away from ever using this stuff in my writing. I suspect I never will. But in a high-overhead creative project like game design, GPT isn’t the villain it appears to be.

Love unironically, or not at all

A child's T-shirt reading "Top reasons I didn't do my homework!" It's filled with cartoons and text, like a picture of a T. rex that says "A dinosaur busted into our house & ATE IT!"
If I didn’t have this exact shirt, I had a one that said exactly the same thing.

I don’t actually know what irony means, but as a child of the ironic T-shirt generation — both the sO rAnDoM cartoon trend in elementary schoolwear (I mean, we were kids) and the gross Jam Rags era (not kids, no relation, good riddance) —  I guess I’m as equipped as anyone to investigate the affliction.

For one, even googling “ironic T-shirts” produces a strange variety of results centered on diarrhea. After like, a thousand “irony (adj): the opposite of wrinkly” garments. Irony can be taken to mean funny-but-for-clothes. Only, with the caveat that they’re not funny, there has never been a funny shirt, wearing a joke on your body is never optimal.

(I’m bitter. You don’t know how many graphic tees I had to throw away, and how late.)

But in every non-textile arena, irony becomes harder to pin down. Pretty much no one but lit crit people uses it in the lit crit sense of “dramatic knowledge beyond the ken of characters in-fiction.” Subverison of expectation plays some kind of role: fully three quarters of the ironic T-shirts of yesterdecade feature some rejoinder about sarcasm.

Alex King wrote a truly incredible introduction to aesthetic irony in “Taco Bell and the Paradox of Ironic Appreciation.” She points out that irony does center on expectation, and namely it centers on our expectations about others based on “cultural class.” You might expect that, because someone wears cardigans and wire-frame glasses and brews coffee from a moka pot, they’d also enjoy small plate fare and black-and-white films about sad clowns. If they express a love of Butterfingers and Die Hard — or Taco Bell — you would be surprised.

No one wants to be surprising. Irony helps you cope with the question mark of how you come across to the world. What do they think of me? What do they expect of me? Am I lowering my social capital by liking something so… simple? Ironic appreciation allows someone to express love, while acknowledging that they are in fact above whatever it is they love. This is why you don’t hear of many people ironically liking The Turn of the Screw.

Lots about that bothers me. I’d link back to my argument against this kind of irony, but honestly just scroll through the blog. My whole genre is unironic appreciation — including Supernormal, which I will link. Let me draw just one gripe from my bag of gripes.

Do you think Taco Bell is simple food? Not that it’s gourmet, that’s different. I mean, can anyone imagine in good faith that Taco Bell is the ground floor of complexity in tacospace?

Your dream car, your dream house, your dream island — none of these come close to the price tag that Taco Bell has pinned on curating the experience of eating their product. Every element has been fine tuned by probably very well-paid food testers. Ditto soda. I’m remembering Malcolm Gladwell’s ketchup essay, a quote from sensory consulting bigwig Judy Heylmun: “The thing about Coke and Pepsi is that they are absolutely gorgeous.”

Of course they are! The engine of scientific achievement has locomoted ceaselessly towards Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Taco Bell crunchy tacos! Everything led us to this moment!

What I’m not saying is that these things are culinarily good, or even complex in the sense of tasting notes. But they are extremely sophisticated and, in my opinion, elegant. They capture one thing extremely well.

Completely unironically loving corporate saltlicks and cookie jars, admittedly, takes this kind of appreciation too far. They buy your tastebuds. They know what substances, down to the molecule, pilot your brain through their grocery aisles. They know how addictive something can be before it gets regulated.

Love unironically, or not at all. Don’t dismiss simple things — it may even be wise to fear them.

Going flat

Rebekah McKendry on spacing out jump scares:

If you’re just up here the whole time, you go flat. There’s nowhere else to go.

Infinity and oblivion

Watching so many TikToks has got me thinking about my phone. Bo Burnham said,

Every night we have to chose between all the information in the world and the back of our eyelids. Between infinity and oblivion.

Or maybe more humbly, Ernie Smith:

It’s way too easy to get distracted by a device that can do literally everything.

Ernie also called it a “slab of glass,” which is weirdly what I’m finding most salient about this whole experience. It’s just so light.

Personal mythology

Most of why I hate audiobooks — despite enjoying them moderately often, since they fill a really particular function my driving life — is that I can’t then go reference anything in them. My comprehension is poor. I flip through Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence often because it’s full of really great insights, but it’s written with the transparency of a brick wall. By the time I understood anything being said, my brain lacks the macronutrients to encode anything. That’s why keeping a reading journal or Google doc matters to me.

So like, there’s this section of Colson Whitehead’s The Noble Hustle, which I was reading in January and resulted in a blog post I’m still very happy with, but also I haven’t finished it because it’s a damn audiobook and I can’t leave it out on my desk to remind me I’m reading it. Anyway. There’s this section. Whitehead describes his tendency wait out a few bad hands, to “bide” as he calls it, rather than get jumpy and bet big on nothing. He also describes himself describing that tendency to his poker tutor. “The biding thing” becomes an important part of his “personal mythology.”

I think a lot now about personal mythology. It’s an identity tool, it’s a navigation tool. It helps us make sense of why we’re good at some things and bad at other things.

I excelled at competetive trivia in high school because, if I read a poem, I could remember most of the lines. Not off the top of my head. But if someone said “jocund company,” I’d be like “oh, that’s the daffodil one.” Once the very first word of a question was “felicity,” and I buzzed because I remembered something I had read about Jeremy Bentham’s theory of felicitous calculus. This made some Catholic schoolkids from the opposing team very mad at me.

Anyway, that memory thing became core to my personal mythology.

On the other hand, I’ve always been sorrowfully dismal at remembering personal details. I can get names alright with a little bit of effort. But if you told me your job, or your plans this weekend, or god forbid your birthday, I really don’t know what to tell you. I probably don’t remember.

So there’s a really nice storyline: my verbal memory is very good, but my personal memory is awful. I bet if I hit the books I could learn some tricks to improve that deficiency. It’s easier, though, to just accept it into the legend I tell myself about myself. Just like I accepted dark undereye circles.

Where it gets messy is when, for example, I accept sleeplessness into my mythology and then cease to be sleepless. I’ve suffered from insomnia on and off for a long time. In the off periods, I get actually stressed that a part of my identity — even an unhealthy one — is gone. Or something like clumsiness, which I think is true about me but which I refuse to accept.

All in all though, I think personal mythologies are necessary and, maybe more important, inevitable. If only to decide how we get to present ourselves to the world.