Dressing up our perspectives on the world

“The debate about #TheDress is simply a question of color and light. It turns out that perfectly sane humans disagree on this point. Now imagine that the question is about something more factually complex, like, oh, I don’t know, whether Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapon or not.” - Dr. Daniel Drezner

I had fun with The Dress yesterday. Every now and then the internet can be a fun place, and sometimes we just need a day of stupid. First it was the llamas, which were funny in their own right, but the dress? Now that was fascinating.

Three-fourths of people saw the dress as white and gold. I saw five types of people on the net yesterday – blue and black, white and gold, blue and gold, no comment, and those who proclaimed that they were too good to partake in such an idiotic debate. The last are the worst. Definition of buzzkill, unwilling to have fun because they think they’re too cool for fun or too smart for such frivolities. I feel sorry for them.

It turns out that the dress is actually blue and black. Buzzfeed found another picture of the dress, one in which the white balance isn’t skewed to screw with our minds. The dress comes in four color schemes, actually, and none of them are white and gold – although there is a white and black one.

I tried to see the black and blue, but I could not. I put the picture into Photoshop and found that the color in the photo was indeed gold and not black, but it turns out that simply had to do with the white balance in the picture. The woman who took the photo (for a wedding, nonetheless), did not do a good job of capturing the image. The lighting was bad. I thought the dress could be blue and gold, or that maybe the blue only looked blue because of shadows, but I never could and still can’t see the black until the white balance is adjusted.

I trusted Photoshop in the absence of another picture of the dress and was surprised one didn’t pop up sooner. I tried looking for one, but having no information about the dress or the store, I failed in my Google search. So I went with the information I had after my Photoshop “research.” But I was never certain, because with a white balance adjustment, that dress looked blue and black. I was hoping some other “researchers” would come up with another picture, more evidence that the dress was indeed one or the other, and found the Buzzfeed article this morning.

Daniel Drezner, a professor of international politics at Tufts University and a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, looked at the macro level, applying The Dress debate to the bigger picture of how we perceive and debate more important issues. I was thinking about this same thing when I went to bed last night, confused as to why people saw the dress as black and blue and wondering why I didn’t see it that way no matter how much I tried. I wanted more information, needed more sources, before I could come to a conclusion about the reality of the dress.

Most people did not. They saw it one way or the other and that was that. Moreover, they considered the other side as wrong. There is no better example to explain politics than The Dress debate.

Arguing with Americans about Israel-Palestine or Islam in general is like this. I have stood in the store and have held the blue and black dress in my hands and have seen it with my own eyes, but there are those who have only seen the skewed picture and swear it is white and gold despite never having seen it in person. They view the dress only through the media and swear they are right even though I tell them that I’ve held the dress and I know it is blue and black.

That’s how the “I Stand with Israel” or the anti-Muslim crowd is. They’ve never been to the Middle East, but they’ve seen it on TV so they think they know it. Those who have been there are wrong because the pictures say otherwise. They may have read a book (like my Photoshop example) and so they think they have the answer, but they don’t pursue other sources that may give a different view of things. Mostly they rely on propaganda – their friends say it’s white and gold, so they think it’s white and gold, too.

I’ve lived in the Middle East. I know that most Muslims are no different than you or I as Americans or Westerners or whatever label you want to give to distinguish “us” from “them.” Most people in the Middle East, even those who live under oppression, want the same things as we do – steady jobs, good schools for their children, good health care, safe environments for their families…In the US, all we see of the Muslim world is death and destruction. That’s a skewed white balance thanks to the media. That’s not reality. Islam is not inherently more violent than Christianity, as anyone who has actually read and understood the Bible knows. Socioeconomic conditions have given rise to fundamentalism, conditions brought about by accidents of history, the results of our world wars, imperialism, the discovery of oil, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and a host of other occurrences that can probably be explained more by chaos theory than anything else. Islam is just a convenient ideological banner under which these maniacs operate, and there’d be far fewer maniacs if socioeconomic conditions were better.

Regarding The Dress, I used the Photoshop, too, but I also did some other experiments, adjusting the white balance and finding that I could see how it could be blue and black.  I never picked one side when I was learning about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, either, always seeking more information from more sources, reading a lot of books from all perspectives, traveling to the Mideast, talking to real people whose lives are actually affected by the conflict, visiting refugee camps, and learning what color the conflict really is. I know that one side or the other isn’t right, that both sides have good and bad arguments, and that the only way to fix the problem is to get both sides to actually listen to the other’s perspective for once and take a look at all the evidence. It’s not “Team White and Gold” and “Team Black and Blue.” Look at all the evidence, and you’ll find out that both sides are right and both sides are wrong, too. The picture really is white and gold because of the white balance, but the dress really is black and blue in the store.

Unfortunately, as the simple example of The Dress shows, most people aren’t willing to consider alternatives to their own perspectives. This is why we can’t solve our problems. We choose conflict, because it’s the lazy thing to do. We choose sides based on a lack of or unwillingness to learn from all the sources available to us. We choose labels, and for the life of me I can’t figure out why that is, though I suspect it has to do with our insecurities and feelings of vulnerability. These choices make life so much harder than it has to be and create so much unnecessary suffering in this world. Why do people always need an enemy?

10 ways to write better travel blogs: a critique of the travel blog industry

There is nothing I love in the world more than traveling. I love it even more than baseball. The area of my travels has not been extensive - I've never been further east than Jordan, nor further south on Africa than Egypt, and I've never set foot on the South American continent. Still, I consider myself well-traveled, having not only visited 24 countries (many multiple times), but having lived in four countries outside of the United States. Yet, I've missed a great deal of places I'd love to see, including Machu Picchu in Peru, Angkor Wat in Cambodia, and Zanzibar in Tanzania. The problem is that with so many places to go and so few vacation days to do so, I have to make tough decisions on where to visit. My last trip, which sadly was two years ago, was to show Chris the city that possesses my heart, Beirut, and to visit the Amalfi Coast and see one of the sites I've always dreamed of visiting: Pompeii. In April we are going to the city that was tops on my list to visit - Barcelona - as well as southern Spain, where periods of history that fascinate me took place, that being Moorish rule and the Spanish Inquisition, as both have a profound effect on our world today.

I've often envied those who make their living as travel writers and who get to travel the world while working. For some reason, I've never figured out how to make that happen. I mean, I've been able to travel for work, but with the very notable exception of living in Lebanon, it was never enough. In my first job in DC, I was denied the promotion that would have given me more travel, and the program that I had developed and specifically picked Tunis to hold it in was given to the new program officer. It wasn't because I had done anything wrong; it was because I had three bosses in four years and the one who passed on me didn't know how much I had held our department together. I'm still bitter about it, because I really liked working there. I'd go back, too.

But working in development isn't travel. It's working. It's meetings, reports, and deadlines. It's bureaucracy and management. Travel bloggers write for a living, and though they have some deadlines and obligations to meet, they are pretty much on their own. To write for a living while traveling, well, I can't think of anything better. Increasingly, though, I've started to look at many of these blogs as lacking something. When they write about their travels, they write about what they ate and how they got there, but too often they miss the people. Then the reason I've never been able to make it work dawned on me. It's about substance.

See, even though I've never published a book, I still consider myself a writer. I still wish to persuade, still wish to teach, to help people look at the world outside their bubbles, to make them feel and to arouse empathy within them. When I write something about traveling, I want to show people what these places are like, and more importantly, what the people are like who live there. I want to relate my experiences and my own growth as a human being, and I want to build bridges to worlds that most people will never see. While I don't see anything wrong with marketing your blog, far too many today forget that the whole purpose of blogging is content. You wouldn't write a book without substance; why are you maintaining a blog without it?

A lot of travel bloggers get paid by companies to take trips to certain destinations and then write about those destinations. Some of them disclose this information. Others do not. While the latter are probably bad people in real life, the former can push a certain hotel or tour company to the point where the entire trip seems inauthentic. Still others are paid to market travel gear or guidebooks or tickets of some sort. That's fine, unless it's coming at the expense of content. That's what I couldn't do. It takes me long enough to write a post - spending several hours a day selling products is, well, selling out.  Some travel bloggers spend most of their time trying to sell their ebooks. Those are the worst.

Even the content itself is often junk. Look, for example, at the Matador Network, a major travel website. Go there and you'll be advised on what social media not to use if you're having an affair in Italy, or you'll learn how to drink like you're in the Outback. There are sections for family and kids, luxury travel, sports and adventure, trip planning, language and study abroad, and only one section dedicated to culture and religion, but that culture section isn't about the people in the places you go. It's about you, the traveler, and the section is full of listicles. Nomadic Matt is another big travel blog, but it suffers from the same "12 things not to do when you travel" posts. You can go through pages and pages of blog posts and not find one about the people who live in the places traveled to.

I know that travel bloggers make money from their blogs and that these kind of posts earn traffic. Maintaining a blog is a lot of work, and these days you have to pay attention to search engine optimization, social media, affiliate marketing accounts, and analytics in addition to actually providing content. It's tough to write every day, especially if you aren't traveling. But if you are traveling, there's no reason you can't provide some good stories on a weekly basis, even if it's only a reflection on why there aren't more cows in Bulgaria. And no, it's not "10 reasons why there aren't more cows in Bulgaria."

I went through dozens of the top travel blogs, and few of them focused on the travelers' interactions with the people of the places they visited. Few spoke much on their histories or the socio-political climates or even what matters to the people who live in those places. I mean, what is your point in traveling if you aren't experiencing the people? What does it matter if you see the Brandenburg Gate if you don't care what it represents or how it has affected those who lived behind the Iron Curtain? Why would you travel to Egypt to look at ancient wonders without concerning yourself with the instability there now? If you don't understand the country's history or the current political climate, you don't get the country.

Don't get me wrong - there are PLENTY of great travel blogs out there that tell of their experiences. They are hard to find because they focus on telling their stories rather than SEO and marketing. I know a thing or two about this area since it is my profession now, having moved away from development and into digital media while working in Beirut. Despite knowing what I should be doing to attract more readers (and more clicks to ads), I don't do it, because it detracts from the writing. It detracts from the story and the people.

Exile Lifestyle avoids all the bad habits and writes for writing's sake. He focuses on experience. There are no ads, no annoying listicles, and no photos - you can see his photos on his Instagram account. The minimalism of it all is refreshing.

Velvet Escape has a whole section on people, although the length of time between these types of posts is weeks to months.

Here's a bit on the Sami people in Finland, which is better than "12 facts about reindeer," but it isn't told from a traveler's perspective. Of course, on the same site is "10 reasons why you shouldn't date a Mexican man."

Here is a good post about a visit to the slums of Manila. Slum tourism is a disturbing trend among travelers, but this woman didn't write the typical "it was inspiring" kind of post. She is genuinely explaining what she felt and learned. I learned a thing or two while reading it.

Some of my favorite travel memories are the time I spent in a small Lebanese village with some older Lebanese men while they distilled arak or the evenings we had in Veliko Tarnovo with a group of Bulgarian friends or the tiny church we climbed to on a hillside outside Amalfi, Italy where the priest invited us to have limoncello. These people, not monuments, are the reason travel is worthwhile. To know them is to know something of their history and culture. To know them is to humanize parts of the world that seem so distant when you're not there. Why do Americans think the entire Middle East consists of evil people who want to kill us? Because they've never been there and make entire judgements based on what they see in the media. That's no different than what Arabs do when they see a story on their news about Ferguson, Missouri, and assume we're all in the KKK. 

So we're going to Spain, where I will meet up with a Barcelona native whom I've never met to watch a baseball game. Chris and I will head down to Andalusia after a few days, not only to visit the "monuments," where a clash between Christian and Muslim civilizations took place more than 500 years ago, but also to meet people we don't yet know exist and find some out-of-the-way local bars to chat with strangers, all of which I'll write about here. If I mention the hotels we stay in, it will be because of the hospitality or because we had an interesting experience in them. When I mention the things we say, it will give historical context in more than two or three sentences, and I won't neglect to wax upon the implications on our conflicts and events of today. I won't be giving tips on how to save a buck or writing "10 tricks to smarter packing" or use the word "quaint" to describe every nook and cranny of the trip. If we miss seeing a tourist site, so be it, because it's about the experience.

The New York Times published an article a couple of years ago about how much travel blogging has changed. Change doesn't have to be bad. Twitter and other social media can make our lives better, but we just can't forget the substance. Otherwise, what's the point?

Tropical Capricorn

Once upon a time I left winter in Washington for winter in Beirut. Ok, well, twice upon a time, but once was entirely my own choice. Sure, it gets "cold" there - fifties on the bad days - but it rarely is uncomfortably cold, and you can choose winter by going to the mountains, where snow is plentiful.

In the northern half of the United States, and increasingly so in the southern half, you can't choose winter. It exacts its wrath upon us regardless of our preferences, rendering us completely helpless to control our lives as we think we control them. Snow days, traffic delays, filthy cars, hibernian temperatures that make you forget what it feels like to be warm...the weather dictates what we can and cannot do.

Perhaps it is that feeling of helplessness that causes so many people to fall into the abject abyss we call depression. Call it cabin fever, call it seasonal affective disorder, call it melancholy as they did in Shakespeare's time. Winter stinks.

Usually it's the light that gets to me most, but it when February rolls around and the days seem like an eternity longer than they were in December, that's not the issue. No, with February it's the fed up kind of feeling. We've already been suffering for a few months and we know spring is right around the corner but the waiting continues and there's nothing we can do about it. Usually Washington is better around mid-February and you're getting fifty degree days regularly, but now we're struggling to even get above thirty and today we're not even reaching twenty. It isn't right.

Spring Training started yesterday and temperatures are in the forties in Florida, so there's not even refuge there. I suppose Miami is still warm and sunny - I still have no desire to go there except to check another ballpark off my list. I would, however, consider the Keys, which have been romanticized in my mind by Hemingway. Images of that long bridge frighten me, however. It wouldn't prevent me from going there. If I weren't going to Spain in April I'd definitely get on a plane
to what might be the most insane state in the US, where "Florida Man" does something stupid every hour and Skittles are considered deadly weapons, all to get away from the frozen tundra that has come over our nation's capital.

What I don't understand about all of this cold weather is how many people in this country are completely clueless about climate change. It's second grade science. That thing you stand on called the Earth is what is warming up, not the temperatures. A warmer earth means the oceans warm up. In second grade you learn about water and air currents. Warmer oceans shift air currents, which are part of what gives us our climates. Very simple stuff, yet some people can't grasp it. At least most people finally get that it is happening, but years of propaganda by those wealthy narcissists who know they'll be dead by the time the situation is bad enough has already taken their toll on the health and security of our nation and the world.

I am perfectly fine with living in a shack on a tropical island to live out my life. I wish I had grown up near the ocean so I had at least some idea of the skills one needs to eke out a living on the beach. Right now even working on fishing boats seems appealing to me. I'm sure there will be some affordable property available in Havana in my lifetime, a nice little fixer upper that I can renovate and open as a B&B, which will be adorned with photos of Hemingway and Omar Linares and whatever memorabilia I can find of the Havana Sugar Kings, the Cincinnati Reds AAA affiliate in the fifties before the revolution. I can drink at  La Floridita and La Bodeguita del Medio, two of Papa's favorite watering holes, and never, ever have to worry about snow. As long as they put a minor league baseball team back in the city - or move the Marlins 90 miles south - I can be completely happy. At least until a Category 6 hurricane blows my house down.

New laptop, maybe I'll write more now.

Last year at some point, my house was robbed. There were no signs of forced entry, so I'm assuming that a particular roommate left the door unlocked as she was wont to do. They took my bike and two others, a glass of change (the glass had been dear to me as I got it from a pub in Dublin on a trip with some community leaders from both sides of the Irish conflict), and my laptop, a refurbished Dell that I had struggled to have delivered after buying it on ebay. Since I had bought the laptop as a replacement for my old one that died, there wasn't too much saved on it that was lost; most of my files are saved on an external hard drive. (I have yet to become a cloudhopper; I'm still creeped out by the fact that someone could get to my half-finished novels and whatever else because that stuff is stored on servers located elsewhere.)

We have an outdated old laptop of Chris's brothers that we can't update because no one knows the administrative password and because it runs on XP, which is no longer updated by Microsoft, so I needed a replacement. Given my struggles with ebay, I wanted a brand new one. Soon after I got a new job and was issued a Macbook Pro, which I don't like and which has confirmed my suspicions that Apple fans are tools who have been fooled into thinking they're using a superior product by the emphasis on style and the fact that initially they didn't get viruses (because not enough people were using them to make it worthwhile for people to develop viruses for them.) If I needed something from the web that I couldn't do on my phone, I could use the Mac. I wanted my own but couldn't decide what to buy.

Last month I read a review on Gizmodo about the Dell XPS 13 and I finally knew what I wanted, so I bought it right away. I just received it yesterday and already know it is the right choice. I needed a laptop for our trip to Spain in April and this is the ideal machine for travel, as it is smaller, but not so small that I can't type on it, as so many of the new ones are. The 13 inch screen is a good size, too - you wouldn't feel squinty trying to watch a movie on it. What's more, it features the kind of mousepad that Mac has - one of the redeeming qualities of the Mac - on which you can scroll with two fingers and the right and left click are not separate buttons. I bet I'm one of the first non-techy people to own one. It's going to sell well.