I know this, but what good does it do me to know?

I realized that this post needed a picture so I took a picture of a book in protest

[assay!]

Now that I am teaching again, I find that I have the most trouble answering questions related to motivation, usually some variation of “Why do we need to study this?” And as awful as this might sound, I truly don’t know how to satisfy that question. I do try — depending on the student, so far I’ve replied:

• “Maybe if you study it more, you will learn that you do like it. I used to hate algebra but look!, I’m teaching it to you now. 
• “Oh, you want to make video games? Well, you’ll need this math when you start programming classes…”
• “Yeah, I don’t know why the Ottoman Empire is a state standard either, but you need to study a wide breadth of subjects because you never know where those connections will come in handy.”

Of course, every discipline will have their own specific answers. A US Government teacher will discuss the importance of civic education for a functioning democracy. Or a geologist might just say “‘cause rocks are cool” and that’s a fine and dandy reason. At the very least, I hope I’ve done better than a coworker who told a student that if he hated social studies, “Just wait ‘till you’ll have to take economics. Economics is the worst.” Yeah, sure, that’s a great way to prime students with a good attitude for their required courses in an already maligned field…

I think though, I struggle to answer because I never considered the question important. When I went to school, I studied because I felt that I had no other choice. Then, by the time I reached college, I had developed strong enough interests that I no longer needed to put effort into the choice anyway — I would have pursued the topics that I enjoyed regardless of the opportunity to do so at a university (and as I continue to do now in a hobbyist capacity here).

So, with the students, I’m dodging the question. I give two vague hypotheticals (“Maybe…” “You never know…”) and a cutesy if cynical appeal to self-interest (“You want to make video games?”) but ignore the more fundamental problem of education:

What good does knowledge do me?

Removing ads and changing names

I caved and bought one of those WordPress.com plans. I’ve wanted to move away from the free system for a while now but kept putting it off out of sheer laziness. I would have preferred to use a self-hosting option but, eh, I’m starting a new job soon and don’t want to deal with any of the technical headaches that might come with managing my own site. And plus, I hardly care about extensive features or design anyway; for this silly notebook, I don’t need the greater freedom afforded by a more open system. At just a few dollars a month, whatever, I’ll take the convenience.

Most of all, I’m sick of the ads. My friends have started making a joke of sending me screenshots of the outlandish clickbait garbage WordPress hoists on my site — despite my youth-skewed content, I get so many manipulative pieces trying to trick the elderly into buying god knows what with their meager Social Security checks (or worse yet, a reverse mortgage). I just lost a grandfather to mild dementia among other accumulated diseases and don’t want any association with the advertisers that would have tried to take advantage of him.

Anyway, I’m also taking the opportunity to make a name change. The moment after I created it, I never liked the name for this site… “Marshmellow Pastel” Bleh. It feels too sappy and self-important, which was exactly the opposite of my intention when I mixed soft things and soft colors (and that stupid misspelling!). But lazy inertia preserved it so I’m finally taking my last few free days ahead of re-entering the workforce to eliminate it before busyness steals the chance. With that Real Neat Blog Award I received last week (thanks again!), I can even pretend to retire it on a high note.

For a name, I always wanted something stupid and meaningless, something that reduces everything I do here to the vain frivolity that it is. My old title was, I think, just vain.

So, taking inspiration from the Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi* and an old inside joke, I’m going to re-title this place “Everything is Marshmallows!” — a name too broad to mean anything and too long to ever successfully brand which, I hope, will also gently mock my own worst impulses and keep me from the despairing excesses of the pessimistic writers that I otherwise admire (like Leopardi himself). Maybe if I keep myself in good humor, I can achieve a style closer to Girls’ Last Tour than On the Heights of Despair.

And finally, with that new job, I might need to abide by a less rigorous schedule and decrease my output — expect more of the short-form content I’ve fallen back on in the past couple months while I traveled and fewer long researched pieces. I don’t know how this site will change, but I doubt the new school will tolerate the amount of writing-desk-warming time I had at the old one. Unsettlingly, I also have a small audience now – I hope I do not disappoint.

* [From Leopardi’s own notebook, the Zibaldone: “Everything is evil. I mean, everything that is, is wicked; every existing thing is an evil; everything exists for a wicked end. Existence is a wickedness and is ordained for wickedness. Evil is the end, the final purpose, of the universe… The only good is nonbeing; the only really good thing is the thing that is not, things that are not things; all things are bad.”

Hey, cheer up Jimmy! I’d offer you some candy, if you weren’t dead.]

Mummies, Dutchmen, and Death, oh my! Leopardi on dying

One of the displays of the Dutch anatomist Frederik Ruysch (1638-1731), U.S. National Library of Medicine

[“Verily I am in a cold sweat!” …or in modern English, aghhh, sick again! And for what? The fourth time this year already? I’d grumble if it didn’t make my throat vibrate… a hazard of working with children, I suppose. So I’ll try something low effort this week: an annotated chapter summary. I feel like death, so let’s write about it.]

So, I finally sat down to read the 19th century Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi after spending too long picking out translations. For now, I’ve settled on the 1882 Edwardes English edition of the Operette Morali (Moral Essays) from Project Gutenberg because it’s free and online and I’m cheap and I’m lazy. They’re excellent! Despite the heavy subject matter in Leopardi’s pessimistic philosophy, the short dialogues in the Operette Morali make for some great light office reading since none of them go much beyond a couple thousand words each. But beyond the philosophy, they have some great gallows humor too, none more so than the dialogue between the Dutch anatomist Frederik Ruysch and his “mummies” on the nature of death (of course, not like… literal mummies from Egypt or wherever, but preserved cadavers used in Ruysch’s anatomical investigations!).

How to read Leopardi? No, seriously, I’m asking! The paradox of choice in translation

Who’s that clever boy?
Image source: Wikipedia

[I am not a scholar or anything close… instead just a confused consumer trying to read the 19th century Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi in English and finding that it is much harder to choose a translation than I ever expected. But, I hope this post can maybe function as an un-academic bibliography of Leopardi translations, and for my own purposes, a purchase guide for leisure reading.]

Have you heard of the paradox of choice? The concept comes from the 2004 book The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less by psychologist Barry Schwartz, who popularized the idea among casual audiences with this 2005 TED Talk. It proposes the counter-intuitive behavioral economics hypothesis that consumer welfare might decrease when the market presents them with too many similar products because the costs of choosing the utility-maximizing option between those products will increase.

…or to eliminate the economics jargon and talk like a normal person, trying to pick the perfect product out of dozens can become stressful, especially for anxious people with what Schwartz calls “maximizer” personalities who fixate on ideals and feel prone to regretting their choices.

Of course, the concept has faced some substantial criticism by economists and the early experimental results have failed to replicate like so many other psychological studies popularized by TED (and then even if it did replicate, I’m not sure how much choosing between 6 jams or 24 can tell us about more serious decisions like purchasing a car or health insurance plan).

However, despite the weakness of the empirical results, I think Schwartz does propose a subtle insight that can apply to our most complex, difficult choices: in economics jargon, taking the time to consider the opportunity costs of a complex decision itself carries an opportunity cost. And in ordinary language again… instead of agonizing over a tough choice by trying to find the best one, you could just make a quick pick and go on to enjoy your day (the easy-going “satisfier” personality type identified by Schwartz).

Simple everyday experience can probably provide better examples of the idea than any experiment every could. Most grocery shoppers won’t worry much about grabbing one of the 175 varieties of salad dressing mentioned in Schwartz’s TED Talk, but they might have trouble choosing which of the 80 Vanguard ETFs they should invest in when planning for their retirement (if they’ve even settled on Vanguard out of dozens of investment companies!). Or to use an example from my own life abroad in Japan, I spent hours researching different remittance options to send money back home to America. But when I finally committed to one, I regretted my choice within a few weeks after I discovered that I could have saved money with a different company. It was the paradox of choice in action: the large number of complex options confused me, and when that confusion produced a suboptimal decision, my nagging “maximizer” personality dragged on my guilty conscience.

For the purposes of this post though, I have a much more trivial example of the paradox: which of the 40-some editions of Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi’s translated works should I read in the office between class periods? The question sounds simple, but then my “maximizer” personality strikes again; I’ve spent the last week reading about how to read Leopardi …instead of, you know, actually reading him. And then as I re-read this post before I hit “publish,” I can’t help but wonder if all of that choice hasn’t driven me insane…