The Good Doctor

 I don't watch much TV, but the quarantine resulting from the pandemic prompted me to start binging series that had received reviews that intrigued me. Most of the series have been developed by cable TV, but there are a couple of network series that I will continue to follow even when all requirements for quarantine have been lifted. 

One of the shows is the series "Blue Bloods" starring Tom Selleck, whose character is the patriarch (despite having a father he lives with) of a family clan who are active in various areas of law enforcement. One series review described how the show is distinguished by the interaction that goes on at the weekly family dinners. For most part, no subject is taboo, and all family members are required to answer honestly when a controversial question is posed. Despite the verbal skirmishes that occur, they're all still family first. This appeals to me as I now realize this is a goal of the weekly dinners I've been doing for over a decade; to get people to come, break bread together and experience the equivalent of a (relatively functional) family meal together. I now realize that this subtopic deserves its own post, and I need to move back to the originally intended topic of this post.

The other network show I've now adopted into my list of TV series that I follow is "The Good Doctor" which is actually an adaption of a South Korean TV show with the same name about a doctor who is a high functioning autistic with savant syndrome as well. Even though the main character's mix of autism and savant syndrome does not necessarily represent the range of behaviors and symptoms of high functioning autists, the depiction of the character has influenced how I interact with my autistic students and has helped me connect with them effectively; last month the center director told me relayed to me comments from the mother of one of my autistic students about he apparently talks about me all the time at home. That same student gave me Chick-Fil-A gift card for Xmas. In the interests of full disclosure, that same student began to initiate physical contact by reaching out and poking me and touching my arm, etc. and I had to set some boundaries about what constituted appropriate behavior and it seems like he's interpreted that as a rebuff of sorts, so I'm still learning and negotiating connecting appropriately and I clearly have a ways to go.

I'm also enjoying how the main character has explored his emotional side and his struggles putting rational expectations on emotional responses only to discover that those expectations turn out to be unrealistic, and despite his intellect, his major decisions are driven by emotional responses. I suspect that the mixed reviews of the series are a response from who rationalize their emotions, particularly those who want to impose their emotionally driven world views onto others (which seems to be a primary motivation for those in that media). Interestingly, I find myself in agreement with some reviews which suggest that the show is advancing the idea that autists have value only when they are savants which would be an injustice, even though these same reviewers would see no cognitive disconnect in using quality/value of life arguments to justify abortion. But I would be derelict if I didn't acknowledge how observing some of his struggles have helped me look back at some of my own struggles with a more appropriate perspective. 

I would also be remiss if I didn't acknowledge that some of the attraction for the show involves the number of asian characters that have been on the show (though many have been written out), and a asian male character who begins a 'friends with benefits' relationship with a caucasian co-worker. That ends when the male's desire for a romantic relationship is not reciprocated. In time, it's the caucasian female who realizes that she's also drawn to him romantically as well and the relationship resumes but at a romantic level. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised about the inclusion of this story line since Daniel Dae Kim is an executive producer who actually purchased the rights to the show.

There are more thoughts on this, but I've save those for another post. 

Empathy vs. Sympathy vs. Compassion

I've chosen to make working with the homeless an essential part of my life, and I imagine that people who know this make basic assumptions about me and my motivations, and people might use terms such as compassion, sympathy or empathy. And those terms would be apt, but those terms should not be used interchangeably. I will summarize/plagiarize the differences as they've been explained to me as follows:

Sympathy are the feelings one has in response to someone else's situation. And you see it commonly expressed as follows: "I'm sorry for your loss." The thing is that it's about one's own response and otherwise does little to alleviate another person's suffering..

Empathy is feeling what another person is feeling. And some people who are suffering can benefit more from empathy than sympathy, but it's been suggested that empathy can be taken too far such that it can lead to tribalism among those with shared experiences, which can involve "good" feelings such as joy. I confess that I might have reacted this way in how I appreciate certain interests. 

Compassion drives a desire to help people who are suffering in some way. Some would claim that compassion take sympathy/empathy up a notch, but I'm not yet convinced that this is so, perhaps because I've observed some who've perhaps only wanted to appear compassionate. But to be fair, compassion does seem to play a factor in avoiding the development of tribalism out of empathy. 

The overall point is that it's my take that anyone who seeks to help other people should be influenced by a combination of all three of these motives, and my life experiences have enabled me to do that when it comes to wanting to help the homeless..

Comfort III: Tutoring

At this point in my life I am, among other things, a tutor, and I find this extremely rewarding in ways I hadn't anticipated. Truth be told, I pursued this mainly because I had the expectation of leveraging my intelligence and ability to do well on standardized tests into a vocation where I could make good money tutoring aspiring college students from the comfort of my home and continue the type of lifestyle I sought when I pseudo-retired almost twenty years ago. 

Even though I was hired by a local tutoring firm for the purpose of doing ACT/SAT test prep, I wasn't assigned any students and it wasn't discovered until after some turnover in the office staff a few years later that someone in the office had marked my file as not being eligible to do test prep and as a consequence I had been assigned to work with younger students. Apparently, I did some good, recently a student I worked with four years ago (who I did not remember) requested me specifically when he returned for the purpose of test preparation, and again, truth be told, that was during my first year there and I was just going through the motions, thinking I was just putting in time until I could claim at least three years experience doing test prep and start making double to triple what I was making then. 

My perspective began to change when I was assigned to work with a ten year old who was mainly interested in playing Fortnite all day and believed he could eventually make a living monetizing videos he posted on Youtube because that was what his eighteen year old brother was doing (and still living at home) and he wouldn't even have to move out of the house. His approach to the center assignments was lackadaisical until I was able to determine that his goal was to complete assignments as quickly as possible to have tangible proof that he was making progress to appease his mother, who, according to the child, was subjecting him to f-bomb laced tirades about improving his studies. Once I learned this, I sat him down privately and told him that it was a hard way to live doing something just to please someone else, and that he needed to figure out a reason for himself to do good work. The next time he showed up at the learning center, he walked all around the center and told anyone who would listen to him about how wise I was. Apparently his schoolwork improved immediately, and he stopped coming to the center shortly after that. It was at that point I began to embrace the idea that I could be as much a mentor as a tutor.   

I confess that there have been sessions with students that seemed to drag on forever, though this happens only infrequently nowadays. This is due in large part to a change of perspective on my part, which came about as a consequence of being assigned to work with a number of high functioning autistic students. I'd found this to be rather tedious, even as I began to understand how to make my students feel comfortable and to help them be productive.  Then late last year the owner of the firm told me he'd just had a conversion with the mother of a particular autistic student who apparently talks about me all the time at home. This student also gave me a $20 gift card for Christmas. Until then, I had no clue I'd made that kind of connection. Ultimately, I've begun to understand that it's not just about abandoning the idea of minimizing conflict/inconvenience but it's also about instilling comfort into others - so they can go forward with strength. 

Ozark

is a cable series currently in its fourth and final season.. I discovered the series during the pandemic; I'd seen initial reviews for the series before the inception of the pandemic, and the premise of a financial planner in Chicago being prompted to move his family to the Ozarks to launder money for a Mexican drug cartel just didn't really appeal to me, but the reviews after a couple of seasons prompted me to give it a try, and I ended up binge watching seasons 1-3 and waiting for season four to come out.

There are few, if any, good guys in this series, although one might start out rooting for Justin Bateman's character as he's drawn in mainly because he had a corrupt partner and he's been trying to protect his family. And now that I've watched the first half of season four, which has gone at a breakneck pace, what I've found fascinating is the depiction of family dynamics and how each major character views the concept of familial love. And regardless of warped that view may be, the common motif is that family is important, yet being mistreated/betrayed by family violates the contract and empowers one to exercise their own individual agendas. I haven't assimilated fully my take on this, but I found it provocative enough to put this out there before I get sidetracked.

Maybe this has resonance as I've had to deal with abandonment issues. Then there's community world view that's part of my Chinese heritage where the family is everything. 

Virginia Tech and the Bowl Haircut

Today marks the 10th anniversary of a shooting on the campus of Virginia Tech. The thing is, it was the second incident within five years, and the first incident was at that time most prolific shooting spree on a school campus resulting in the deaths of thirty-two (32) people and the wounding of seventeen others. (Note: there was another shooting near the VT campus involving someone who had escaped police custody, which resulting in VT suspending classes, etc. but the shootings did not occur on the VT campus.)

Facebook shows a history of posts made on that particular day in previous years, and it turned out that because the shooter in the first incident was of Korean descent, I posted a statement to the effect that when news broke out concerning the second shooting, Asian Americans were all sharing the same thought: "Please don't let me be another Asian (shooter)". 

I no longer remembered the context of my post, so I did a little research. This ends the prologue.

The shooter in the VT massacre was named Seung-Hui Cho, who was of South Korean descent. According various accounts, he was diagnosed with depressive disorder, anxiety disorder along with a team I didn't recognize: "selective mutism". Wikipedia defines the term this way:

Selective mutism (SM) is an anxiety disorder in which a person who is otherwise capable of speech becomes unable to speak when exposed to specific situations, specific places, or to specific people, one or multiple of which serving as triggers. This is caused by the freeze response. Selective mutism usually co-exists with social anxiety disorder.^[1] People with selective mutism stay silent even when the consequences of their silence include shame, social ostracism, or punishment.

I broached the idea of having the inability to speak up for one's self taken away and its impact on one's psyche in a blog post: https://samstabbed.blogspot.com/2016/08/a-minority-experience-bowl-haircuts.html  and I contemplate how this might have been magnified by the Korean concept of "Han": https://toisanboy.blogspot.com/2021/07/han.html  and I find myself  feeling sadness imagining how lonely and alone he must have felt while also recalling my own level of unhappiness during my high school and college years. I referenced that in a comment I made to that post ten years ago:

"the thing is, four years ago, i found myself thinking that my circumstances during college weren't all that different in terms of how estranged i felt from everything else at the time - except i preferred to make cutting remarks that left emotional scars. "

I still had my voice as an outlet to express my anger and frustration. Seung-Hui Cho with his selective mutism didn't even have that. And even though he received "treatment" for his diagnosed condition until his junior year of high school, it clearly wasn't enough.

The Good Doctor

is a television series (on ABC, to my great surprise, since they really haven't much of a track record recently for developing drama series) currently in their fifth season where the protagonist is a surgeon who happens who's been diagnosed with high functioning autism which has resulted in him having superior medical technical and diagnostic skills but limits his ability to relate to others in various situations. While the show is well written, I admit that the show generated an even higher level of affinity for me due to the unusually high percentage of asians in the cast and the show even features which might be the first ongoing interracial relationship in mainstream  network media featuring an asian male and a caucasian female. But the show is centered around the challenges encountered by the protagonist in navigating through his relationships professionally as well as romantically.

In the current season, the main story arc involves the hospital being bought by someone who places a high priority on patient/customer satisfaction, which includes ratings on doctor/patient interaction. Of course, the protagonist receives a number of poor ratings from treated patients despite the medical outcome, which results in the protagonist making efforts to improve his interpersonal skills, which have predictable results. Even so, despite his abrupt manner of delivery, the protagonist manages to communicate something that prompts someone else to alter their viewpoint (ostensibly for the better). It turns out that the protagonist's fiancee works in the IT department and has access to the patient feedback files, and she deletes a number of negative reviews, which results in an apparent improvement in ratings of patient feedback for the protagonist. In the closing scene, the protagonist concludes to his fiancee that the steps he's taken to improve his interpersonal skills have had a positive result and the scene ends with a shot of a neutral expression on the fiancee's face.

The scene clearly resonates with me on some level, though I can't tell you exactly why at the moment.

Roadrunner

is the title of the CNN movie/documentary about Anthony Bourdain. Bourdain committed suicide in 2018 and I was one of many Bourdain fans who grieved his passing. Actually, Bourdain was a hero to me, though I couldn't articulate why if you'd asked me. I suppose that if you had asked, I would have said that despite his being an atheist, his world view was in many ways similar to mine, food was a major constellation in his universe, we also share a certain degree of irreverence, but now as I look back, I can see that I also admired his search for truth. As I watched Roadrunner. it became apparent to me that, for all his success and accomplishments, Bourdain carried a sadness and void inside him that prompted his search for that truth. There were hints of that in some of his essays.

Bourdain lived a life most of us would love to be able to emulate: travel the world, try all those different and exotic cuisines, and uncover truths none of us would have known otherwise. But that success came with a cost. Being on the road 250 days out of the year cost him his marriage and contributed to his sense of inadequacy about being a good father. And when he *was* home, his celebrity prevented him from doing a lot of the things he wanted to do without being approached by fans/strangers anywhere he went.

I won't go into the details, but Roadrunner provides some insights that suggest Bourdain's suicide was motivated by an apparent romantic betrayal. To be fair, I got the sense that the other person had some avoidant attachment issues and Bourdain's behavior could be classified by some as a bit clingy motivated by being head over heels about this woman. The bottom line is that it recalls a quote from someone who I really respect, who observed that the loneliest moment in life occurs when you've given your all to something - and it lets you down.  I perceive that Bourdain spent his life looking for something he could believe in and give his life to - and when he thought he'd found it, it let him down.