25 things

[nickjong]

I mostly got out of the meme game a couple years ago, but this weekend I am feeling munificent. I'll cross-post my response to a Facebook meme here, but I won't "tag" anybody else. They don't call me Base Case for nothing. Here are 25 things about me.

1. I dislike the flavor of mint, but I enjoy all other flavors commonly enjoyed by humankind. (This category does not include natto, since refuse to acknowledge the existence of people who enjoy it.)
2. I am almost always almost vegetarian, for ecological and health reasons. I eat seafood at will, but I only eat my fellow land dwellers in the absence of reasonable alternatives. (For example, a "garden salad" is not a reasonable meal.) Last non-fish meat: October 11, brisket while watching the Texas-Oklahoma game.
3. I have followed NFL football since playing fantasy football a couple of years ago. Aside from a budding interest in actual football, I've learned not to draft from the Seattle Seahawks.
4. I have been a Mets fan ever since my parents took me to the only baseball game I attended as a kid-in Philadelphia.
5. Growing up, I always wanted to be a pitcher for the Mets or alternatively a writer. The latter aspiration led me work on the literary magazine in high school. In hindsight, this extracurricular activity was the only one I didn't share with my archnemesis, Betty Hong.
6. In high school I had an archnemesis, Betty Hong. She was the only member of my graduating class with a higher GPA: a perfect 4.0.
7. By my college years, I had given up on being a major-league pitcher, but my minor in creative writing was the only reason I didn't earn a 4.0 at Carnegie Mellon.
8. I still feel horrible about blowing off a midterm paper for my Psychology of Gender course to work on my Advanced Ficiton Workshop novel. Professor Vicki Helgeson sent me a worried e-mail, wondering if she had misplaced it.
9. I still think about the people I've wronged in my life, from a former roommate to the other applicant at the interview for the Governor's School for Creative Writing about whose poem I couldn't find anything positive to say. (My application wasn't accepted.)
10. I'm something of a hermit, but I'm not a misanthrope. In fact, I love people, being around people, being in cities. I think it's important to remember that even when individual people annoy you, people in general are good at heart.
11. As a rule, I try to see the good in people. I find that life just works better that way. However, I used to be quite vindictive. Over time, my creed has changed from "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" to "Forgive but never forget" to "To understand all is to forgive all."
12. I have an utterly abysmal memory for details. No, seriously.
13. My research is about abstraction: how artificial intelligence might distill certain kinds of structure and knowledge from raw experience. Sometimes I wonder if I just want the robots of the future to be more like me: focusing on general knowledge instead of specific details.
14. For most of my life, I wavered between atheism and agnosticism. I sometimes reach out in earnest to whomever might be up there, especially during Mets games. Most of the time I prefer to rely on myself, and it helps that I believe in humanity in general.
15. I know very, very little about music. I never paid attention to music until I was 15, with Joan Osborne's "One of Us" in 1995, and even then I went through a phase of several years listening mostly to musicians for whom Sarah stills makes fun of me.
16. I can rarely understand the lyrics in popular music, possible because of a high-frequency hearing loss with which I was diagnosed as a child. This hearing loss frustrates Sarah to no end, since she has exceptional hearing.
17. My hearing loss may or may not be related to my speech impediment, known as cluttering, which seems to result when my brain outputs words faster than my mouth can utter them.
18. I still dislike talking to strangers on the phone, when I feel particularly verbally clumsy, but teaching undergraduate classes has helped my public speaking immensely.
19. The most important thing I've learned about myself is that I'm better at analyzing and synthesizing existing ideas-finding connections-than devising "entirely new" ideas. And there's nothing wrong with that.
20. The last interesting thing I learned is that all games teach their players something. This point is actually deeply related to my research into reinforcement learning: intelligent beings can learn to achieve arbitrary victory conditions in arbitrary environments.
21. Games of all kinds engross me. I still enjoy board games, video games, card games, role-playing games, etc.
22. These days, role-playing games, such as Dungeons & Dragons, absorb most of my time, energy, and money. I'm still trying to articulate what precisely they teach. Unlike most activities labeled as games, they don't specify precisely what it means to win. But what other games encourage unstructured play, cooperation, and storytelling?
23. I have always felt a strong affinity for the genres of fantasy and science fiction. The only thing that fascinates me more than imagined futures or other worlds is the history of our own. If I could go back in time, I'd trade my creative writing minor and psychology major for a history major.
24. One of the best things about my first trip overseas was stumbling upon an exhibit on Nicholas II, the last tsar of Russia, at a museum in Edinburgh. I have always had a soft spot in my heart for the history's losers and underdogs.
25. The best thing about my first trip overseas was learning that you don't have to visit another reality or another time to see people who are unmistakeably foreign yet unmistakeably human. Until that trip, I had never felt an urge to travel. Now, I'm looking forward to catching up!