mwotw

I just realized the reason doodling is so important is because it is so telling of us. We doodle only when we are so very distracted by something else, that a part of our bodies (and with it a part of our minds) has felt free enough to produce without effort. That’s kinda wow. You might call it Art of the Subconscious, but since there’s already so much “Subconscious Art” (and people would surely miss the enormous novelty of this new term), we better call it something else. Upon reflection, “doodling” is perfect.

It is generally accepted that we are all responsible for our actions.

Except for when we’re kids, that is.

When you are a minor, you are absolved of at least partial responsibility for what you do. The young get breaks, lighter sentences, second chances and are afforded a number of clemencies they won’t get when they’re grown up. It feels instinctively correct that children should bear less responsibility than adults. Our common sense confirms it, too. They are less capable than adults. Even the law upholds a difference in its different treatment of the two.

But if responsibility is something you can arbitrarily reduce, perhaps it is an important quantity we should take greater pains to measure and account for, especially since we are indulging to adjust its value as often as we do.

From the perspective of a child, we know only that some responsibility has been lifted from us. We may measure it as lesser punishment. But as an amount of responsibility taken from our shoulders, we have no clue where it has gone.

From the perspective of the parent, we may know how to reduce the responsibility of the child (again, as lesser punishment), but we may not know how to increase it upon ourselves. As parents, we may not even be aware that there is an inescapable connection between reducing responsibility in one person and increasing it in another.

Let us pretend that there is a fixed amount of responsibility — for clarity’s sake, let’s call it blame hereforward — and that you cannot decrease blame here without increasing blame there. Blame is unpleasant, as we all know. It makes sense that we would try to take advantage of as many opportunities to shed blame as we possibly could. It also makes sense that we would do all we could to avoid taking blame. In a society like ours, where we have many kinds of personal and legal circumstances where the blame of a person is diminished, you can expect that some significant amount of blame is sitting unclaimed in a pile on the floor.

Now I’ll go back to calling blame responsibility. (more…)

The writer guy wakes up one morning miraculously inspired to work again. Mind you, he has had no contact with anyone from the outside in decades, except for the troll-like personage who brings him food twice per day through a little slot in the door, but with whom writer guy never exchanges anything but the most insubstantial dialogue (in the form of low harrumphs and taps of the foot). So writer guy has completely forgotten how to have a conversation with a normal human being… He has lost the capacity for live give-and-take. The idea that’s in his head for his next book is, therefore and accordingly, more than a little bit fukhakhde.

The gist of the plot of the book is this: