Sorry, Morrie

Yesterday, as I was chatting with a friend, he referenced something in the book Tuesdays with Morrie and I admitted I’d never actually read it.  As I told him, I had no interest in it.  Though, honestly, I couldn’t really tell him why.  Or even precisely what the book was about.  I just knew that it was wildly popular, in an inspirational, Chicken Soup for the Whatever kind of way, and so I disliked it on principal.  Which, once I said it out loud, sounded more than a bit dumb.  So, on his strong urging, I borrowed my friend’s copy, and read through the first half this morning.  And, I am dismayed to admit, it is actually pretty much delightful.

Whether it’s my New Yorker soul, my Silicon Valley roots, or just douchey hipster affectation, I’ve always gravitated towards the new and the cool, the up-and-coming, the overlooked favorites of those in the know.  From spotting talented bands before they go mainstream, to eating at top-notch restaurants when they’re still just in soft opening, it’s satisfying to feel like you’ve found something amazing before the rest of the world has caught on.

Which is fine.  But the problem is, I realize I’ve also generalized that to believe the converse, and to distrust anything that achieves too much popular success – especially when it comes to books.  So, for example, it was only this past year that I finally read All the Light We Cannot See and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius—two genuinely excellent books that I really liked, yet that I had also previously avoided liking (or even reading) because I felt like too many people had liked and read them already.

And, written in black and white, that’s patently ridiculous, the sort of myopic snottiness that would make me roll my eyes if I saw someone else doing it.  Yet, looking back, I can see I’ve done it myself, over and over, whether with The Life of Pi, or The Help, or Water for Elephants, or probably dozens of others, too.

So, it appears, I need to stop judging books by their proverbial covers.  Or, at least, by the ‘#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER’ taglines and ‘Oprah’s Book Club Selection’ stamps running along the cover tops

January 23, 2019

Keep Driving

It’s been a frustrating and impatient few weeks on my end, so I was glad to come across a favorite E.L. Doctorow quote, about driving at night:

“You can see only as far as the headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

Pretty good advice for life.

 

January 16, 2019

Patience, Grasshopper

Right now, I’m about six months short of my 40th birthday – the official shift into middle age.  Though, at this point, I can hardly believe I’m that old.  And I’m not alone; I’ve only recently aged into feeling happy about it, but I’ve long been told I look younger than I am.  In fact, I shaved off my beard completely this past weekend, to start the new year fresh, and have since been getting heckled by friends and colleagues about steering clear of vans with tinted windows and strangers bearing candy.  Still, whether I look the part or not, the big four-oh is nearly upon me.  And, actually, I feel pretty good about that, and about generally hitting a sort of midway point in life.

Looking back at my first 40 years, I’ve done a ton of stuff that I feel proud of, and I’ve done a bunch that I screwed up pretty spectacularly.  Such is life.  Or, such was life 1.0.  These days, I’m trying to think about this birthday as an upgrade to life 2.0, and therefore a fresh start on the second half.  Sort of a do-over, but new and improved, with all the wisdom gleaned the hard way in the prior four decades.

I’ve been thinking a bunch of late about specific lessons, and about what I’m hoping to do differently – better! – in the next chunk.  And while I’m sure I’ll be blogging a ton about that in the months to come, at the moment, there’s one improvement that’s particularly on my mind: this next half, I’m going to make sure I take my time.  Because, looking back, I see I spent so much of my first 40 years racing forward, trying to make everything happen RIGHT NOW.  But, it turns out, there’s way less hurry than I thought.  And, further, I can see that most of my mistakes in life came from trying to get there the fastest way rather than the most strategic one, or from trying to make things happen more quickly than the world seemed to want to unfold on its own.  Conversely, when I look back at the things I feel most proud of, almost all of them were the proverbial ten years to “overnight success.”   Which is to say, sometimes what looks like the slow route actually turns out to be the fast one, paradoxically enough.

At the moment, for example, my wrist is in a splint.  It’s fractured, though only minorly so – a hairline at the end of my right radius bone.  And, in my youth, I might have just tried to power through.  But, now, I’m at least slightly wiser.  I haven’t given up on working out altogether, but I have adjusted to do everything with only my other good hand for the next six to eight weeks.  And though, after making a huge amount of fitness progress over the past year or two, I’m sad for the backslide that will doubtless cause, in the scheme of things, two months is nothing.  I can make back the progress lost a few more months down the road.  And, in the meanwhile, bones heal at the speed they heal.  Bad things happen if you try to push life faster than it will organically go.

Thus, these days, I’m thinking a lot about the classic joke: an old bull and a young bull, standing on top of a hill, looking down into a valley of cows.  The young bull says, “I’m going to run down the hill, and I’m going to fuck one of those cows.”  The old bull replies, “I’m going to walk down the hill, and then I’m going to fuck them all.”

And though I’m happily taken (I was going to say I’m a one-cow bull, but suspect Jess might object to that characterization), I increasingly relate to the joke nonetheless.  Whether it’s something as small as rehabbing a broken wrist, or as big as figuring out the details of Composite and the next decade of my career, I’m taking my time.  I’m thinking like the old bull.  And, going forward, I’ll be strolling down each and every hill.

January 3, 2019

Wave Theory

My father is a lung doctor, but his sub-specialty is diving medicine; if you get the bends while Scuba-diving in much of the Pacific, you’ll get medevaced to Stanford so you can see him.  So, while I was growing up, we spent nearly every summer venturing out to various islands, and I spent a large part of my youth floating and swimming in tropical waters.  (Rough, I know.)  Anyway, one of the main things I learned from that, early on, is that you can’t really fight the surf.  If you want to swim to shore, and there’s a decent swell, it’s nearly pointless to paddle while the water is pulling against you.  Instead, to make it in, you need to calmly tread while a wave draws you towards its face, and then paddle like hell as soon as it reaches you, so you can ride the wave’s momentum toward the shore.

And, in a lot of ways, I’ve found that’s how life works, too.  Sometimes, the waves are pulling against you, and you just need to tread.  But that’s also when you’d best get ready, so you can get as much forward motion as possible out of the paddling once the time is right.  It’s a cycle I’ve lived through countless times.  And yet, even so, each time I’m stuck treading, I feel like maybe I’m stuck for good.

In a lot of ways 2018 has been a treading year.  Or, at least, it has been in terms of external productivity.  From an inside perspective, it’s been perhaps the most meaningful year of my life – a chance to take a hard look at myself, and to really figure out who I am and who I want to be.  But what it hasn’t been is a year of doing, a year of making things, or of making things happen, in the broader world.

In the last few days, however, it feels like all of that self-excavation, and a ton of concurrent plan-laying, is now finally coming to its natural conclusion.  It feels like maybe the wave is just starting to pull me up its face.  It feels like 2019 is going be a big year of forward momentum, a year of happily and productively paddling like hell.

Surf’s up.

December 19, 2018

Steel Trap, Rusted Shut

Recently, Jess has been reading Julia Cameron’s classic The Artist’s Way, and doing the twelve-week program of self-reflection and artistic exploration that it contains.  I had read the book myself, and done the program, back in 2001 or 2002.  But listening to Jess discuss her current experience with it, I realized that I no longer really remembered any of the book, at all.  I knew that I had picked up my longstanding Morning Pages habit from the program – three daily pages of free-write brain-dump journaling (though I’d since given up on the hand-written approach Cameron prescribes, defaulting to 750 typed words daily instead, for the sake of time).  Otherwise, though, not a clue.  So, I started re-reading the book myself.  And, honestly, I haven’t even really felt glimmers of remembrance or recognition; it’s like I’d never even read the book at all.

Recently, I was revising my long-term goals (including creating new 25-year ones that will carry me all the way to 65), and I spent some time thinking about books, along with plays and movies.  I first came up with some ways of trying to keep up with the best of the new releases in the years to come.  But then I decided I should maybe try to pull together a ‘cultural literacy list’ of all the older books and plays and movies that I’d never read but long meant to.  Starting with a slew of critics’ picks, the winners of various awards, and other people’s attempts at the same kind of list-making, I was able to concatenate a list I can then try to chip away at in the years ahead.

The resultant catalog is excellent for soothing the completist, OCD part of my brain: if I can just read and watch my way through, I’ll be ‘done!’  But my experience with The Artist’s Way, and several similar ones of late, has given me pause.  Recent conversations about movies I watched decades back, like Jurassic Park or Indiana Jones, made clear that I now only remember random snippets and iconic scenes, without more than a vague sense of their plots overall.  Or earlier this year, I re-read Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, and though there I did at least have rough memories of most of the anecdotes, it turned out I remembered only the contours (something with a racially-motivated police shooting in the Bronx?) and almost none of the useful detail or lessons Gladwell drew from them.

All of which is to say, even if I do manage to slog my way through my entire cultural literacy list, I’m not sure that will be much of an achievement.  Instead, I’ll just have to head back to the start, and begin going through it all again, as by then I’m sure I’ll have forgotten pretty much everything from my first pass.

December 15, 2018

Chestnuts Roasting

When I was in seventh grade, playing in the Jordan Middle School jazz band’s winter concert, I had my very first trumpet solo: eight bars, in the middle of “(Have Yourself a) Merry Little Christmas.”

Last year, a few months into learning to play the piano, December rolled around.  And though I was only about a third of the way through my method book, I paged to the back, and discovered an arrangement of the same song.  It was still well above my level, but, for a week or two, I puzzled it out, one bar at a time.  After which, though still a bit halting and uneven, I could actually play a version roughly good enough to serve as background holiday music in a restaurant or bar.

So, at least for that song, I have a reasonable basis for attachment.  But, despite being Jewish, it turns out I just really love Christmas music in general.  Admittedly, I don’t really have much choice when it comes to holiday listening – the limited array of Chanukah tunes doesn’t really measure up.  And I take some solace in the fact that the large majority of Christmas hits were actually penned by Jewish songwriters.

But, even so, it’s not really my music.  And yet, each year, I feel like it is.  By now, much as twinkle lights (which I also kind of love) feel to me far divorced from any religious origins or undertones, most Christmas music seems to me just sort of free-standing, end-of-year, dark-days-of-winter music.  Which, Jewish or not, seems perfectly fine for me to enjoy.  Or maybe that’s just a rationalization I’m selling myself.  Still, I’m selling it to myself either way.  Because, as I do every December, I’ll be spending the next month playing the grooves off of the Charlie Brown Christmas Album, any number of Canadian Brass albums of carols, and pretty much every cheesy pop Christmas playlist I can find.

Have yourself a merry little Christmas, indeed.

December 11, 2018

KISS Weight Loss – Habit 3

Okay!  So, previously, we looked at two super easy, yet surprisingly effective weight loss hacks: drinking 16oz of water a half-hour before meals, and downsizing your plates.  Either of which, extrapolating from published research, could help you drop 10 pounds over the course of the year.

Fair enough.  Still, while both are effective, they’re also pretty finite in scope.  So, today, I’m sharing a hack with much broader implications, something you can use at pretty much every meal for the rest of your life.

When people get serious about nutrition, they’ll often set out counting calories – both to clock an overall number, and to perfectly balance the macronutrients (the protein, fats, and carbs) in their meals.  And, indeed, that’s an effective approach.  For the very short term.  However, in practice, it turns out to be wildly unsustainable; pretty much everybody quits doing it entirely, reverting to their old ways whether after two days, two weeks, or (if they’re particularly gung-ho) two months.

Fortunately, however, you can get 90%+ of the results, much more sustainably, by using a simpler approach instead: measuring things with your hand.  With a handful (pun intended) of rules, you can figure out the size and composition of optimally healthful meals.  Which has a few big advantages.  First, you take your hands with you most places you go.  And, second, they come already scaled relative to your overall size, which makes them perfectly customized to your specific nutritional needs.

Here’s how it works:

– Your palm (the size and thickness) is a serving of protein.

– Your first (balled up) is a serving of non-starchy vegetables.

– Your cupped hand (or, rather, what you can hold in it) is a serving of starchy carbs.

– Your thumb (length, width) is a serving of healthy fats.

Women need one of each of those to make a meal – one palm of protein, one fist of veggies, one cupful of starches, and a thumb of fat.  Men need two of each.

So, Abigail might eat a palm-sized piece of salmon, a fist-sized serving of broccoli, a cupped hand’s worth of rice, with a thumb of olive oil drizzled on the broccoli and salmon.

Or Bob might have a piece of steak the size of two palms, two fists of sauteed spinach, and two cupped hands of mashed potatoes, mixed with a thumb’s worth of butter.

And maybe they have brunch together, with one or two servings respectively of scrambled eggs (palm), a green salad (fist), a sweet potato hash (cupped hand) and some avocado (thumb).

The possibilities are endless.  And the process is as easy – and handy – as it gets.

November 25, 2018

About Time

As I’ve mentioned previously, I’ve been trying to take a hard look at myself of late. And though that’s mostly been diving into some of the bigger issues that I’ve identified in myself, I also keep stumbling across small, strange weaknesses that I’ve never really considered before. For example, it turns out I’m absolutely crap at remembering exactly when in the past things happened in my life.

Here’s a good, recent illustration: when designing workouts, it’s usually wise to do a ‘deload’ every four to six weeks – essentially, after beating yourself down with increasingly heavy weights and increasing intensity, week after week, for a subsequent week you step the intensity way back, often literally halving the weights used, to give your body a chance to recover. Recently, I’ve been playing around with daily and weekly workout structures in my own workouts, but I haven’t been paying close attention to the multi-week cycles that would include a deload. But, this week, feeling pretty run down, I commented to a friend at the gym that I thought I could probably use one. I just felt like I needed a break. Which was weird, I told him, as I’d just taken time off, during a week when the gym happened to be closed. My friend looked at me funny, and then reminded me that the gym was actually closed at the end of August, almost three months back.

Similarly, if you asked me in what year I did certain things – when I moved to a given apartment, started a company, worked on some project, headed off on a big trip—I’d have pretty much zero idea. Which is weird, because I actually tend to have very vivid and detailed memories of all of the individual episodes; I just can’t really order them, or place them specifically in time.

Fortunately, unlike any number of other things I’m working through, this one doesn’t seem to cause problems in my life, at least so far as I can tell. But, it’s an interesting quirk of my brain to consider going forward. And I suspect ‘consider’ is about the best I can do. Because, though I’m finding ways to work through and resolve a bunch of my other stuff, this is one I’m not even vaguely sure how to debug.

November 15, 2018

Picture This

As I’ve mentioned previously, for the past year or two, I’ve been trying to learn the very basics of a new skill each quarter – stuff like playing the piano, or chess, or pool.  Three months of chipping away daily seems to be enough to get off to a pretty good start on most skills.  And for some (like with pool, where I went from horrific to merely pretty bad), a good start turns out be all I really want.  Whereas others (like with playing the piano, which I realized I actually love), I end up keeping as a permanent part of my routine.

One reason I started doing these quarterly projects was that I had a laundry list of random skills I’d always wanted to at least try to acquire.  But another reason, one that I think has actually become the primary driver as I’ve continued to do this, is that I wanted to regularly suck at something.

Looking back on my younger self, I see that I was lucky to excel quickly at a bunch of things, and that I wisely and diligently invested a bunch of time and effort on developing those areas over the years.  But, conversely, I also see that I was probably far too quick to jettison anything I didn’t crush right away.  I’d just assume that, if I didn’t stand out immediately, I probably never would, so what was even the use of trying?  And, as a result, I never really spent as much time as I should have in the hard and embarrassing and frustrating early stages of being terrible at something new.

So, I guess, I’m making up for lost time, and trying to find things now where I can practice sucking, day in and day out.  Which makes this quarter’s project—drawing—particularly good.  Because I really, really can’t draw.  Like, you know how, when you’re six, you draw stick figures, and then you move on?  Well, I never moved on.

Still, at the start of October, I set to work.  Per the instructions in one of my drawing books, I memorialized my starting point with three pictures: one of my hand, another a self-portrait drawn from mirror reflection, the third a portrait drawn from memory.  For that third, I drew Jess.  Or rather, I tried to draw Jess.  I really did.  I spent a good thirty minutes drawing an eyebrow, and then erasing it because it wasn’t quite right, and then trying again.  And, at the end of a half hour, I had a cartoonish face that looked nothing even vaguely like Jess.  Though it did sort of look like a picture a kindergartener would draw of their kindergarten teacher and then bring home for their parents to post on the fridge.

Yet from that rough start, I’ve been putting in the work.  And though I’m still pretty terrible, every so often, I’m starting to surprise myself.  This evening, I drew another attempt at a hand – this one with the palm up, and the fingers curled in, a position that required foreshortening the fingers to make them appear correct in perspective.  And, holy crap, my picture came out kind of looking like my hand!

At this point, I’m still a good ways off from becoming the next Van Gogh.  Though, fortuitously, I also recently discovered, and was heartened and fascinated by, the story of how Van Gogh himself became Van Gogh.  Apparently, Vincent had never even really tried drawing for most of his life.  And then, when he was 27 years old, his brother Theo talked him into it.

As Vincent later wrote to Theo:

“At the time you spoke of my becoming a painter, I thought it very impractical, and would not hear of it.  What made me stop doubting was reading a clear book on perspective, Cassange’s Guide to the ABC of Drawing, and a week later I drew the interior of a kitchen with stove, chair, table and window – in their places and on their legs – whereas before it had seemed to me that getting depth and the right perspective into a drawing was witchcraft or pure chance.”

Vincent Van Gogh, who sadly died young at 37, spent the last ten years of his life, 1880-1890, becoming an artist.  The first two years of which he spent just teaching himself how to draw.  Drawings from the start of that stretch, like his 1880 Carpenter, are plagued with proportion problems, and a slew of other issues.  But by two years in, he’s making drawings like his 1882 Old Man Reading, has figured out how to make pictures at least technically work.  Five years of practice, and he’s drawing stuff like the 1885 Digger, is painting in earnest, and has really become Van Gogh, is putting out the masterpieces we all know and love.

Which is pretty inspiring.  And I was further encouraged in my hand attempts by Van Gogh’s own working and re-working of that same challenge.  In 1885, when he had already hit his stride, he was still doing sketches like Three Hands, Two Holding Forks, trying to figure out how to make hands look just right.  Even at the very end of his short life, as he was sketching drafts of some of his most famous works, like his 1890 Sower, his sketches for the painting are surrounded with a slew of carefully drawn hands in all kinds of positions.

So perhaps I shouldn’t completely write myself off, despite the slow and late start.  And even if drawing turns out to be one of those quarterly projects that largely ends once the quarter does, too, it has already given me a much greater appreciation of real artist’s work, and is (at least slightly) changing the way I look at the world around me.  But, most of all, it’s reminded me that, even for something that really, really isn’t in my wheelhouse, diligent practice actually can make a difference.  It’s been truly excellent practice at sucking at something, bad, yet sticking with it nonetheless.

October 30, 2018

Everything is Scoliosis

As is inevitable over the years of athletic life, I’ve had my share of back, or hip, or even knee, shoulder, and ankle tweaks.  And, if I were looking at myself from a rational, outside perspective, I would probably think that the unaddressed scoliosis might at least conceivably be part of the underlying cause of any of those.  But, as ever, I simply ignored the possibility, working on all kinds of other stretches and mobility drills and pre-hab exercises, skipping anything that dealt specifically with the slight spinal curve.

In the last month or two, however, I finally realized that’s kind of ridiculous.  So I started thinking and researching and self-programming to address the scoliosis head on.  It’s early, still, but even in that short amount of time, I’ve made a real impact.  Which leads to a reasonable question: why hadn’t I done this before?

I’ve thought about that a bunch, and I think the answer is simple: I just didn’t like the idea that I had an inherent structural flaw.  So, instead of facing up to the problem and trying to solve it, it was psychologically easier to ignore it and to route around it and just to try to power ahead.

Maybe it’s age or wisdom, or a year-early onset of a 40-year-old midlife crisis.  But, for the past few months, I seem to be having a ton of similarly obvious ‘revelations.’  Because it turns out there are all kinds of things I do, all kinds of behaviors and beliefs and patterns and habits that haven’t served me particularly well, that I’ve similarly spent decades studiously ignoring.  Most, similarly, aren’t even that big.  But by not addressing them, by trying to just plow past them, I’ve tripped over them repeatedly, in ways big and small over the course of my life.  And it’s only in the last little bit that I’ve been willing to say: if I have flaws or shortcomings, certainly it’s better for me to own them and try to face them head on, rather than pushing them into the back of my mental closet, shutting the door, and trying to pretend that not seeing them means they don’t exist.

Anyway, I realize this sounds so patently obvious when I put it down in words.  Which makes me further wonder how I managed to make myself willfully blind to so many issues for so long, rather than simply sucking it up and trying to solve them.  I definitely feel like the guy who’s walked for miles with rocks in his shoe, ignoring the pain, taking aspirin, coming up with different ways to walk that don’t hurt.  When, instead, it would be so much more effective to just stop for a minute, to take off the shoe, and to dump out the rocks.

October 19, 2018