5/23/14
Aboard ANA 1009, En route JFK-NRT
“There was an accident on the LIE.
What would you have liked him to do?”
That was the question I asked of the two obnoxious women sitting behind
me on the bus to the airport as we finally arrived at Kennedy. I did not say it because I felt a need to
defend the bus driver. I did not say
because they were slowly driving me insane, though they were. No, Reader, I simply said it because I
usually keep my mouth shut. Since the
beginning of the year, I have been taking an active effort to alter the way I
behave in social situation, forcing myself into awkard situations, making
myself do and say things that make me feel uncomfortable. That was my New Year’s resolution, and I
believe that I have been succeeding in fulfilling it. Actually, I know I have. I will further explore this concept in my
Fujisan WIJG reflection, but I wanted to bring it up here, since it is a theme
that has defined this year for me.
In this
entry, rather than just including Day 0 as I typically do, I will implement the
CA-4 protocol and lead up with the events of the past few weeks, my quest for
NHL plaques. It stared a while ago when
I finally found the one at Grand Central, but it was not until that fateful night I asked out Emily and later found myself sitting next to the NHL plaque at Rock
Center that I began my quest in earnest.
The next day, I learned that there were 86 National Historic Landmarks
in Manhattan, a bunch downtown, but most of them within a 15-20 minute bike
ride from the office. With the weather
getting nice and an hour for lunch, I realized that not only would this be a
great summer challenge, but that I could also make it the culmination of the
uniform challenge. I would be posting 86
pictures of myself looking almost identical in each picture, wearing the same
shirt, holding the same water bottle.
People looking at the photos would assume they were all taken in the
same day. Slightly less than half of the
NHLs had plaques, and each one provided a small value of fulfillment to
me. I had said that any one of those
plaques, anywhere else in the country, would be an instant photo opportunity,
yet I never made an effort to seek them out.
That changed this month. I believe
that I have now collected almost half of the sites, including 14 plaques, and I
know where 3 more are.
During that time,
I became more and more convinced of the philosophy of love I formalized en
route to ORD. If I ever choose to pursue
philosophy as anything more than just a casual hobby, I intend to focus
primarily on my philosophy of love.
There were two major holes in my theory that I could not yet resolve,
the first was resolved through personal exploration and reflection, and I
intend to resolve the second in the same way.
The first hole was, if you believe as I do that love (and, by extension,
sex) is purely an emotional desire, then why does sexuality exist in people who
believe the way I do? It clearly does,
and I resolved it in WIJG with some very real examples of the way I felt about
certain people of both sexes that met varying ends of the emotional and
physical attractiveness scale. The
resolution was quite simple. I did not
allow that physical attraction was necessary to romantically love someone, but
I instead realized that physical repulsion would preclude any kind of romantic
desire, no matter the emotional attraction.
Last night, I argued, something that I had always believed but had never
quite articulated, that the purpose of love is happiness. If you are not happy in a relationship, you
should leave it, something I know at that age of 26 but did not know at the age
of 13, much to my detriment. The
argument offered was that you don’t have to be happy with someone to love them. I rejected that out of hand.
Happiness is the Final Cause of our
existence, so why should love not be an Efficient Cause of Happiness? Our emotions should be slaves to us, not us
slaves to our emotions. Love is blind
they say? Only if we refuse to see the
truth. There can be no causeless love or
any other causeless emotion. I have held
the latter as an absolute truth for almost my entire life, but love, the
strongest of all emotions, was not as clear.
It was only recently that I accepted that love, just as all of the other
emotions, should be purely rational.
However, what Ryan said about happiness last night got stuck in my head
in a completely different way. I spoke
previously about Amelia, my drunk crush, as I think of her. I get toasted, convince myself that I might
feel something towards, my drunk self even calling it love.
No matter how utterly and royally toasted I
get, I never lose my ability to do two things: calculate math problems and
defend my Objectivist values. I suppose
that the fact I am constantly defending said values, especially in regards to
how it applies to love and sex, which I believe are one in the same, despite
what others might argue, prevents me from losing sight of those values. If I am drunkenly arguing about the Objectivist
view of love and sex, how could I ever act otherwise? Would that not be the ultimate act of
hypocrisy?
The reason I bring this up is
not to try and paint myself in any kind of moral light. No, the reason I bring it up is because I was
happy sitting next to her. By the time I
got home, hours after she left, it finally hit me, a thought that I had not
quite been able to answer. If
something makes you happy, but it makes you happy for an irrational reason, why
should you not pursue it? Happiness, not
rationality, is the Final Cause of our existence. Is it possible to have irrational happiness,
or is that a contradiction? It is such a
simple question on the surface, but it is probably the deepest question I have
ever asked.
It only works from a
rationalist perspective. Someone who
does not demand the highest rational thought of themselves will quickly answer
that love or happiness or emotions cannot always be explained. I reject that answer, and I could only accept
an answer that was based purely on the position that all emotions can be
rationally explained, except for happiness, since happiness is a result of said
emotions. Is it as simple as “Alcohol
makes me happy by altering my brain chemistry, but my brain applies filters
between the alcohol and the achievement of happiness, and sitting next to
Amelia removes those filters?” I would
accept that as an answer, but I would prefer to approach it from a
philosophical, not a physiological, vantage.
It’s not a question that I can resolve on this flight, and the evidence
and arguments I would need to resolve it would more properly belong in the
scope of WIJG, not this Travelogue.
I
believe that is was with that in mind that I fell asleep last night. When I woke up, Day 0 began. Andrew had told me that I could leave two
hours early because of the inspection I had done on Sunday, but HR said
that the office was closing at 3:30 PM.
I was not sure if Andrew meant by that that I could leave at
1:30 PM, but I knew that if I walked
into his office at 1:30 PM with my bag slung over my shoulder and could
honestly tell him that I had caught up with all of my work, promising to work
on his special projects on the plane, he would not object. I say “bag slung over my shoulder” and not
“suitcase in hand” since I did not pack a suitcase. I put a few changes of clothes in my computer
bag, and that was all I brought. I
pre-packed last night, since the cigar took longer than the WIJG entry, and I
knew I would forget something. I had to
pick up my laundry before I could even get dressed or finish packing, so that
cost me about 15 precious minutes of sleep, but I still managed to get 6 hours,
so that was good.
I was at the office by
the time I realized that I had only packed one extra uniform shirt, forgetting
to pack my homecoming shirt for the last day.
If I left the office at 1:30 PM, I would have plenty of time to have
lunch and a cigar before catching my bus to the airport. I knew that the cigar would outlast whatever
time it took me to bike home and back to get the shirt. A little after 9AM, I met Sokol in the lobby,
and we headed to Lunchbox to grab a quick breakfast, since we felt bad that we
kept missing each other this week when he was in the city. By 1:20 PM, I was caught up with my work and
had everything I needed ready to get on the plane, except that shirt. However, Young was not there, so I could not
review the two proposals.
I realized two
things. First, the proposals could wait
until Tuesday morning. Second, I could grab
my lunch, eat at my desk, and then leave the office at 2PM. It would look better to do that than leave at
1:30 PM and get lunch and then leave, even if the total work hours were the
same. It also gave me more of a chance
for Young to get back. I got my usual
pre-departure meal at Hop Won: shrimp with lobster sauce and boneless spare
ribs, no rice. After lunch, I went into Andrew’s office as
planned, and he was quite pleased to hear that I was all caught up. We looked at a map of Tokyo so that he could
tell me all the places he enjoyed visiting while he was there. I also knew that places where he spent a day
would take me less than an hour, but I took the advice to heart, especially
since it was compatible with my current agenda.
That was that, I headed downstairs to have my Cohiba, get my shirt, and
take the bus to the airport. I bumped
into Young in the lobby, and we said our goodbyes, not that I would be seeing
him any less than if I had just been going to Scarsdale at 2PM. It’s a funny thing. It seemed as if for every person that said
goodbye to me, it was not simply as if I was just going to Scarsdale for the
weekend, even though they would not have seen me over the weekend anyway and
that they would see me on Tuesday morning at the same time either way. What difference does it make if I am half a
world away or half a mile away? The
answer is none, which is why the one person whom I know thinks entirely
rationally did not give me a big goodbye.
I lit up the Cohiba, grabbed the bike, quickly made it to my apartment,
got the shirt, grabbed the same bike, and headed back. I had about 30 minutes before I needed to
catch the bus, so I headed back to the cigar store. I traded with Hasan a Cuban for a Davidoff
Nic Toro and purchased an Ashton ESG. I
said my goodbyes and went to get the bus.
The bus was at 3PM, and my flight was at 6:05 PM, meaning the check-in
closed at 5:05 PM. I was not too
worried. That all changed very
shortly. I knew there would be traffic,
but I did not imagine how bad it would be.
I posted my NHL photos to Facebook, and then we hit the traffic, the bad
traffic. I will not go into the
play-by-play details, but I knew I was in serious danger of missing my
flight. The whole bus was complaining,
but, what really bothered me was that the two woman behind me, talking on end
for the entire ride, were blaming the bus driver. I think it bothered me more that they did not
stop talking than the fact that they were blaming the bus driver, but I was not
usually the kind of person to tell someone to shut up. Usually.
It was 4:30 PM by the time we arrived at JFK, and I was nowhere near out
of the woods, figuring it could very well take 30 minutes for him to go through
all the terminals to get to mine.
One of
the women made another wisecrack, and that was when I finally decided to turn around
and say something, demanding, “There was an accident on the LIE. What would you have liked him to do?” They were taken aback. How do you respond to something like
that? “We’re just talking.” It was too perfect of a set up. I could not resist. I said to myself but loud enough so that I
knew they would hear, “Yeah, you haven’t stopped talking the entire bus
ride.” That shocked them. They did not expect someone to say that to
them. “We haven’t stopped talking for 5
days.” I could hear them laughing at me,
calling me a dick, trying to figure out how to respond. I didn’t care. I had done something that was hard for me,
and nothing bad happened.
It was 4:45 PM
when we got to my terminal, so I was looking pretty good. My food is here, so I will have to wrap
up. By the time I checked in and got
through security, it was 5:10 PM, and we did not start boarding for another
hour, but I was too stressed to do anything productive. I bought some Opus X from the duty free, got
a burger from McDonald’s, took a much needed U, refilled my water bottle, and
headed to the gate. I had an aisle seat
in a four-seater with the two middle seats empty. There was a guy on the other end, and he
moved to the seat in front of us, which was also empty. That meant I had the whole four-seater to
myself, a huge boon, especially on such a long haul. I realized that I had forgotten my eye mask,
but the stewardess was able to provide me with another. As soon as we were airborne, I proceeded to
write this entry, which I will now close so that I can have my dinner and get
some sleep.
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