I sit here alone looking through the glass from one of Northwest Portland’s trendiest new watering fountains, “North 45” -- which by the way, MUST be uber-trendy-cool because the name has numbers in it (just like Blink 182 and 3 Doors Down!), and the name means absolutely nothing in a totally nuevo post-post-post modern existential way (the address of North 45 is 517 Northwest 21st street). Places like these are forgivable though because, well, these places define Northwest Portland’s persona: the Hippster Mecca for the (often) over-educated, possibly bored, caffeinated, alcohol-soaked twentysomethings of America...well, at least the caucasian over-educated, possibly bored, caffeinated, alcohol-soaked twentysomethings of America. Not that we’re a segregative bunch by any means, but for whatever reason(s), Portland in general and Northwest Portland in specific, is largely a homogenous off-white hue, much like hockey. Right. Anyway, my cozy cell within this buzzing hive is uniquely positioned between the solid pearly whites of the Pearl District and the solid surly nights of the pub-laden 21st and 23rd streets. A vague memory of a childhood tennis lesson comes to mind about the necessity of avoiding “No Man’s Land” -- I was never any good an tennis, so naturally, this is precisely the locale I did not avoid when looking for an apartment. It is as though I’ve sequestered myself into an identity crisis, wanting both nothing to do with and everything to do with the “Uberness” of Portland’s ever-buzzing Northwest quadrant. Like Grandma’s beautiful-strange casserole, Northwest Portland is somehow better to poke from a distance than to actually consume.
And so is the case for so many things in my life. I dabble in music, art, outdoor adventure, and, yes, even science, my chosen career path that deserves more than just “dabbling”. Or does it? Ambivalence, if used adroitly (and not to suggest that I do so), can be an excellent vehicle for objectivity. In the case of Grandma’s casserole, do I poke to avoid consuming or being consumed? Our private and public relationships can become voracious monsters, devouring our objectivity with a heavy garnish of human frailty, that is, the frailty of feeling alone. It seems as though we easily surrender our individuality, and therefore our objective, impressionable Tabula Rasa, to the hunger of our gregarious, albeit human subjectivity. We are indeed social beings, but rightfully so as this trait has paid dividends to our evolutionary success. But even evolution is at the reigns of input-output thermodynamics in that every process, including the molecular collisions orchestrating our emotionally dynamic brains, must in the end demand as much input (“cost”) as is expected for the output (“reward”). Throw in some inevitable heat loss dictated by entropic thermodynamics, and a physicist could argue that we inevitably lose more to social subjectivity than we can possibly expect to gain from individual objectivity. But physicists aren’t real humans anyway, so what do they know?
The rain has picked up again outside and a small group of smokers has moved under a nearby awning, gravitating together like weak magnets -- products of their environments in so many ways. As am I as I pay North 45 $3 (which includes the minimum $1 Portland-mandated tip, of course) for an espresso that caters to a snobby, refined taste, perfect for someone sporting Diesel shoes, Urban Outfitters’s dark-washed jeans, an Express felt jacket, typing with “it’s soooooo not your Dad’s operating system” OS X Tiger-powered computer, and listening to “it’s soooooo underground, it’s above ground on the other side” The Album Leaf -- yes, a product of my environment in so many ways.
The challenge is to recognize that we are largely our own consumer, continuously in danger of autophagy among artificial, subjective facades that designate supposedly important social cliques. Is it possible that we are so easily consumed by our social networks that the "I"ndividual within us becomes the scariest person we could ever encounter: a raw, unadulterated, yet beautiful fingerprint chiseled into our consciousness by the Universe’s Architect? What social sutures have sewn us down and stymied our curious peregrinations toward enlightenment? Diesel shoes and rain drops? Possibly. But The Architect was forgiving, as he chose malleable materials to build our fleshly machines. The environment that surrounds us is the same environment that composes our cells, our proteins, our atoms -- our consciousness. Therefore, we are at liberty to change our environment as much as our social rain drops are at liberty to change us. Injecting individuality into social networks may be the best recipe to satisfy both the hunger of our social appetite and the hunger of our largely undiscovered "I"ndividual appetite. So, to completely exhaust all analogies to Grandma’s beloved casserole, "we are what we eat" as much as we “eat what we are”.
