The Island of Misfit Toes

So I'm one of those douchebag barefoot runners. To which concept (barefoot runners) I invariably pre-pend the adjective (douchebag). Think of it as a pre-emptive apology.

I can't quite pinpoint the source of my embarrassment over it. I tend to vacillate between thinking it's the nerdiness of it and thinking it's the trendiness of it.

Nerdiness: Barefoot running is the open-source software of armchair athleticism, in the sense that it is fiddly, sometimes painful, and requires you to spend at least as much time thinking about your tools (feet) as using them. Also, Richard Stallman loves his bare feet so much that he eats them.

Trendiness: The toe shoes and the Born to Run and all that. I'm impatient for that part of it to be over, because I don't want to be identified as one of those people who stopped drinking merlot because Paul Giamatti joked about it in a movie.

I have a chrome skull license plate on the front of my minivan. It is there for irony's sake, except that it really isn't. It's a marker commemorating my youth. It's more about hairline than humor, because people call me "sir" now. Old people.

It sounds fairly pathetic to say out loud, but I am still image-conscious. I'm still just barely young enough to wonder if young people find me attractive and old enough to feel creepy about that. But, bottom line, when I first step out shoeless for a run downtown on my lunch break, I feel like I might as well be running in a full spandex body suit with nipple cutouts. Hey, look at that guy.

Why do it, then? Well, because I love it. I love nearly everything about it and hate pretty much nothing that I wouldn't hate if I had shoes on. I love the feel of rough pavement under my feet. I love cool puddles and returning to my footprints on an out-and-back. I love that my calluses aren't quite built up, so sometimes my toes feel tender for a couple of days after a run. I love what it has taught me about my form and my endurance and what I can do. I love how black my soles are after a good one.

But I think I also do it because it is goddamn amazing how many people try to talk me out of it. I get links to articles. I get concerned mom speeches from people who are not in fact my mom. They seem dog-ass determined to get me to stop.

So I push on. And I think I do that because there aren't many things in my life that I dedicate myself to, come what may. My marriage, certainly, and my kids, but of the things that are just me, I tend to flitter and abandon and forget and give in to discouragement.

I ran a marathon four years ago, the St. Jude marathon in Memphis. Mile nine, I started having really bad pain in my right knee. This bad pain was caused by a combination of bad running form and some ill-advised running through other bad pain during training. Point being, I wasn't entirely sure how to make it through the next 17 miles.

I came over a rise and saw a mother standing by an umbrella stroller. Closer I got, the more I wondered about the kid in that stroller, because it looked too big to be a toddler.

It was about fifteen steps away when I realized that this was a school-aged child, bald from chemotherapy and so weak that she was sitting in that stroller and using one hand to hold up the other one so she could wave at us. See, the marathon is to raise money for that hospital, and she and her mother came out there to encourage us, to say thank you for the tiny little bit we were doing.

It was the first time I ever had to pull off part of a distance run while crying. But, for the next two miles, my knee stopped hurting. When it lit back up on mile 11, my mantra was fuck you, she hurts more, now run.

My finishing meant nothing to her, of course, or to any of the others. It wasn't some grandiose moment of swelling music. It was me berating myself, which I excel at.

This time, incredibly, it worked. I could barely walk when it was over, and my time was a pathetic five hours, but I finished, with salt caked on my face and piss-warm beer in a very shaky plastic cup.

I turned to barefoot running out of desperation to fix what was wrong with my gait and get back to marathon form again. That was four years ago, four years of starts and stops, cycles of discouragement followed by months riding the couch followed by running again. And there were the linked articles and helpful frowns, but I pushed on and got better. I think I may actually be back on the road to distance, if humbler and more wary now than I was then.

Barefoot's what I reached for when Frankenstein motion-control shoes and custom orthotics didn't work. And I suppose that's the final reason I stick with it: if I want to be a distance runner again, it may be all I have left.

Yet I feel self-conscious about it, and I don't know what to do other than just wait until either I'm old enough to stop giving a damn or enough people start going bare around here that it becomes passé.

I'm running my first 5k in a long time this month, the Race to Remember. It benefits Mamie's Poppy Plates (bunch of Flash on that site, sorry), a charity some friends of ours set up after their daughter Mamie was stillborn. They give grieving parents something to commemorate the all-too brief lives of their children.

They are amazing. Every bit as amazing as my Internet friends, who turned out around the globe to wish Mamie a happy birthday and send their love to people they've never met. Guys, you don't know what that meant to me.

Anyway, if you're anywhere near Little Rock, come run or come cheer us on. There'll be lots of fun stuff happening. And if you see me, come say hi.

I'll be the douchebag with no shoes on.

Let Your Freak Flag Fly

The more I see of Reggie Watts, the more I feel that — and I say this with an unblemished record of staunch heterosexuality — that I would gladly bottom for the man. If only to experience the gloriously weird shit that would erupt from him before he rolls over and takes a nap.

​

Something Something Meth Joke

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a worker in possession of a cubicle must be in want of some goddamn focus.

Work begets noise, which in turn begets distraction, if you are paid to think. The only noise that isn't distracting is the noise generated by your own work, but of course that afflicts everyone who is not you. And so, the ultimate productivity tool: the office door.

Since I am bereft of office, it's a rare day that I'm not leaning on the next best things: the Ambiance app and ambient music like the wonderful MusicForProgramming() and (oh, the joy of nerd-ass nostalgia) the Myst soundtracks.

I think a lot about noise, because I've only recently become attuned to its effect on me, even though I've been bitching about cube life for years. As often happens with those of us who enjoy having supple hands and whining about George Lucas, for me it began with a podcast.

My head used to be a hive of bees. Angry bees. Angry, armed, socially-marginalized bees who have been sprayed with methamphetamine. Breaking Bees.

Focusing on a task was sometimes like trying to walk chest-deep across a wave pool. Hence the sensitivity to noise and chaos, which only amplified that sensation.

Listening to conversations was often like catching bullets. Parties? Hour tops and the chaos is too much, I want to go home. The racket in my brain could only be quieted down by throwing books or movies or TV or video games or booze at it. Media were a sort of anaesthetic.

Coffee. Loooooooooots of coffee.

My vanity told me that this mental caterwaul and media gluttony were the symptoms of an uncommonly strong and absorbent mind. In retrospect, I see how arrogant and fucking absurd that was. Having an epileptic seizure on top of a drum kit does not make you Neal Peart.

But it was the way it was. I didn't have a baseline for normal. I didn't draw the connections because I couldn't see them from a distance. I saw myself as a man completely lacking in will. And then, last year, I listened to that podcast, Merlin Mann and Dan Benjamin's Back to Work on the excellent 5by5 Network. The episode I linked there is the one that literally changed my life.

In it, Merlin describes his experience of being diagnosed with ADHD as an adult. He describes his symptoms in pretty good detail. And as I listened, I found myself nodding along, thinking that's me, yep, that's me too holy crap MOST OF THIS IS ME.

I spent two days trying to convince myself that it was bullshit, that this is an overdiagnosed "disease", that my failings were those of morality and will, so I didn't talk to anyone about it. Then I had a couple of days at work when I got so mentally overloaded that I had to go into a restroom stall, close the door and breathe deeply. I do not enjoy breathing deeply in public restroom stalls.

So I brought it up with my wife and began the arduous process of making an appointment with a psychiatrist. Roughly two months later, I was finally sitting down with one. (Side note: behold, the greatest healthcare system in the world.)

He asked me questions, I answered them. I may have seen knowing smiles. I suspected there would be a concern that I was a drug seeker. I was extremely uncomfortable, and talking about why I was there made me feel agitated and frankly a little desperate.

Turns out there was no need for the worry. The doctor told me that there were very expensive tests they could run that my insurance likely wouldn't cover, but we could try medications instead and see how I respond to them. Even better news: there are non-narcotic medications that we could try first. Lo and behold, they worked, so I stuck with them.

I had my doubts, of course, as to whether it was all in my head (ignoring the obvious point that mental disorders are indeed in your head), but taking a week off of my medication several months ago mostly put them to rest. The final coffin nail came just a few weeks ago, when I went for a checkup with a new primary care doctor. He noted the ADHD diagnosis in my record and asked me about it, then said: "You know, a lot of people don't get diagnosed until after high school. They're good students who go to college and flunk out."

I graduated high school near the top of my class. It took me eight years to finish my first bachelor's degree. Gaming the system was the only way I didn't flunk out.

The pills aren't a silver bullet, of course. I still get a little overloaded in chaotic situations, which makes parenting interesting. I still have low-focus moments and, occasionally, days. I would prefer a life without daily medication, when I am otherwise in nearly perfect health.

But now the roar has died down to tolerable levels. I often find that I'd rather not dick around but instead find a quiet place and do something productive, which is new. Sometimes it's so quiet in my head that I just sit and listen to it. Every now and then, when I do that, I feel so god damned grateful that my eyes well up.

These periods of quiet and drive have been going on for less than a year, so they're still very much a novelty, and I feel like they're still gaining strength. And there's still so far to go. But so much in me has changed. I feel like I found a part of myself I hadn't known was missing.

Of course I hadn't known. I was too busy berating myself for being weak and lazy. I don't do that as much anymore. Now I am grateful not to know what a life of more of the same would be like. Now I know what it can be.

Thanks, Merlin and Dan. I owe you guys big. I love you.

Okay, So I Lied

So I said I was changing up the site, moving it to a responsive design that's more phone-readable.

Totally lied to you guys there.

Actually, change of heart. What I had intended was to yoink out the CMS and replace it with Marco Arment's excellent Second Crack static blog engine. Markdown-based, works with Dropbox, lean, mean, etc.

But I spent too damn much time tinkering with it. It would have been awesome once I got it set up and running, but my tolerance for pricking about with my tools dies a little more every day.

Also, the new design was indeed responsive, which I'm proud of, because I'm not a web designer. However, it was also complete ass, because I'm not a web designer. I was never going to be happy with it.

So instead I ditched my old host for Squarespace. Easier, prettier, good templates (not responsive until they let me into the new version beta PLEASE JESUS), and fewer headaches.

And here I be, happy as a clam. If anything looks weird, ding me on the Twitter or drop me a line.

Puny Human

So I saw “The Avengers” last Sunday. Hella good fun. As I twooted on the Twatter, it was refreshing to see someone who understood that yes, yes, Bruce Banner’s got a demon in him and it’s all very serious and Freudian….

…and yet there’s a big green monster punching people in the taste hole, and this, like church, is supposed to be a joyous occasion. Let us turn to the book of Concussions, chapter 3, verses 6–9.

There was a nice little relationship build-up between Tony Stark and Bruce Banner that I vaguely got but didn’t consciously behold whose analysis John Hodgman preserved here on his excellent Tumblr, and if you are at all fond of superheroes, you should read it. Spoilers, if you have not seen the movie.

I’ve been mostly a DC Comics man for most of my life, because I have a fondness for the Gods and never quite let go of childhood power fantasies (there’s a post there, I think), but of course the more human heroes are more interesting. As Batman is the anti-Superman (and therefore more popular), so is Tony the anti-Hulk, but far more subtly.

Banner, in turn, is far more interesting than Clark Kent. He has the same near-godlike power and invulnerability, and yet he is so much more damaged, and his writers (unlike most who have handled Superman) understand that he probably should not be allowed to exist. But we can’t kill him.

Maybe Lex Luthor was right.

It’s a curious thing to cheer and laugh as throbbing, green, unbridled id unleashes biblical destruction in front of us. That’s Bruce’s appeal, of course: he, unlike we, can mostly control that raging bile duct of loathing and smallness and hate that we all have. Mostly. And then there is the smashing, which is glorious.

Heads Up

Just a quick heads up for the three of you who actually follow me:

I’m going to be moving this blog over from the CMS it’s currently on to a static blog engine pretty soon. That way there’s no database to hack, very little maintenance, and when I inevitably make the front page of Reddit, they won’t crash the site.

Because word’s gonna get around, man. Word’s gonna get around.

I only bring it up in case you have me in your RSS feeds. There’s a non-trivial chance (which is to say pretty much guaranteed certainty) that this site’s feed is going to go all eeybita eeybita and smoke will pour out of your computer and then Kelly LeBrock will show up in panties and a cropped t-shirt and wreck your house. Or, even worse, you may have to re-subscribe.

So, sorry in advance, is what I’m saying. Because setting up stuff like this pretty much never goes smoothly.

With the new site will come an even simpler stylesheet (begone, sidebar) that’s waaaaaay more mobile-friendly. No more zoom-a-zoom-zoom in your boom boom.

Basically I have to do some IE testing, then some swearing, then some fixes and more testing, then it’ll be up and running. I’m hoping by the end of next week, but who knows.

God Damn

I remember the first time I heard a recording of a young B.B. King wailing and growling his way through a I-IV-V shuffle about some woman what done broke his heart. Something went twang in my chest, then there was a mild adrenaline rush, and I was hooked. As absurd as it sounds, my skinny white suburban middle class self would be inextricably hooked on blues music for the rest of my life. Because I needed that feeling every day.

Hasn’t been often I’ve had that feeling of a tectonic shift when discovering a musician. Clapton. Hendrix. John Lee Hooker. Muddy. Stevie Ray. Public Enemy. Tom Waits, after he chased me around a few times. A few others, not many for 37 years. They only come around once every few seasons for me. My wife and I had just started dating when the last one came around.

Another one just happened today, about ten minutes before I wrote this sentence. I found this MetaFilter post (via dooce, no idea how I missed it when it first went up) about an up-and-coming band called The Alabama Shakes. I watched the first video linked there.

I said god damn.

That thing went twang again, first time in about a decade. Maybe it was partly Levon Helm’s recent passing, maybe it was how long it had been since the last time–shit, maybe it was the Wellbutrin–but I even got a little choked up by the end.

I don’t want to oversell it. I got the album, and it’s damn good. Sources tell me it’s nothing compared to watching them live. My guess is you’ll be hearing a lot from them pretty soon. Because seriously, god damn.

iHate

I guess we can call this a Tool of the $TIMEPERIOD post, as it's about a handly little thing I discovered recently. It's not an object, exactly, more of a process, and I haven't been doing it for very long, but I think it has some serious potential.

I've started keeping an "I Hate" list. Stay with me, it's more positive than it sounds. But I need to back up for a minute.

My job is to provide technical support to people who go into physician offices, look for things that aren't working, and try to root those problems out. It's about increasing efficiency, training doctors to take a broader view of their patient populations, and put in better processes for preventive and chronic disease care.

The process is a pretty straightforward one: First you identify something that's not working the way it should. Once you've done that, you do what's called a "root cause analysis", which is essentially reverse-engineering the problem to figure out why it's happening in the first place. After that, it's a matter of rapid-cycle testing: propose a fix for the problem, test it out immediately on a small scale, and watch what happens. If your change works, great, spread it out across the practice, and if not, analyze why not and work on a better plan. Rinse, repeat.

This is a stunningly simple thing that is often very difficult to do well. When you're new to it, the hardest part of it (for me, anyway) is training your brain to catch the problems in the first place. It's easy to get complacent about things being The Way They Are and acclimate yourself to annoyances and idiocies to the extent that you barely even notice them.

The job's been worming its way into my brain. It's slowly gotten me thinking about the things in my life that could stand an un-sucking. Like buying my iPad, for instance—I was stunned to discover that I usually prefer using it to my laptop, unless I need to do something it flat-out can't handle. Why?

No power cords. Ten-hour battery. Lightweight. Easy to rest on the arm of my chair. It doesn't gently roast my testicles while I use it. It doesn't erect a partial barrier between me and the rest of the room. It's as pleasant and easy to plop in your lap as a book.

In short, it made me aware of a half-dozen or so minor annoyances that come from using even something as portable and convenient as a laptop computer, annoyances I'd gotten so used to that they barely registered with me. Hello iPad, bye-bye frustrations, and my life gets a little more un-sucked.

Enter the "I Hate" list.

It's a simple concept. You write down things that you hate. Not things like racism or Sean Hannity or the New York Yankees (things that are equally horrible), but things that you encounter in your daily life that you find to be at least moderately unpleasant. They may be things, but mostly they'll be tasks you perform.

So, as an example this morning, I noted that I hate tracking email conversations in Outlook, because Outlook does not by default group messages by conversation the way GMail does. I thought on it some, then went looking for a hack.

Turns out I didn't need one. Outlook 2010 allows you to turn this on as a setting. Even better, it gives you some surprisingly awesome tools for managing conversations that even GMail doesn't have. My morning went from dull to nerd-giddy in five minutes, and I spread the word to my teammates about what I'd learned. From "I hate" to improving company efficiency in fifteen minutes or less. And now every day has a tiny little bit less friction.

So I'm applying this life-wide. I keep a little text file called iHate.txt in my Dropbox (that's an affiliate link—if you sign up through it, we both get more storage for free), and any time I hit an annoyance, I whip out my phone and append a new line to it. It's already growing at a good clip, and I'm doing root cause analyses to find what's behind those lifeturds.

Turns out a lot of it has to do with clutter, of both the physical and metaphorical varieties. Which necessitates a plan. Which I am now working on, a tiny bit at a time.

Surprisingly positive experience, thinking about things that you hate. Every splinter identified is a splinter that can be tweezed away. And now is the season of the tweezening.

Fear and Bandages

I’m about to yammer on for a bit. There will be no tl;dr summary. Buckle in:

Speaking my mind, particularly in mixed company, has never been my strong suit. In person, I mean. I can hide behind text and say withering things with the best of them when online, but out there in meatspace, eye-to-eye, my internal censor is one very active little dude. I’m sure that’s a common phenomenon.

I do this sometimes out of concern for others’ feelings, sometimes to avoid conflict, often out of shyness, and often because no matter how hard I try not to, I start advertising myself in the conversation. That last is a part of my personality I’d like to drag into an alleyway and take a hammer to. Call it my inner Shadoe Stevens[1].

Awhile back I wrote a post on the nature of intelligence and the admittedly first-world problem of not being as smart as I used to think I was. I (Neil deGrasse Tyson, actually) contrasted true smarts with mere fact collection and regurgitation, usually done to either impress people or shut them down.

Then I did another one on Tim Kreider’s open letter to the Tea Party, in which he frankly laid out both the similarities between the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street and the nature of their mutual antipathy.

Those things didn’t seem at all connected to me until I came across a MetaFilter post (yes, MeFi again, shaddup) about Charlie Kaufman’s recent lecture at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (PDF link). A touch long, but the first six pages are where the real meat is, and I’ll chunk out some quotes below.

It’s ostensibly a speech about screenwriting, but it really isn’t that at all. It’s a speech about fear and emptiness and uncertainty and selling yourself and being honest and kind. It’s about what separates us and prevents us from opening up to one another. All of which is at the core of good writing, mind, because writing is either about life or else it’s lies and masturbation. Which is to say, advertising.

I’ll try to restrain myself with the quotes, but it won’t be easy:


Here’s a recent quote that I found: ‘We do not talk, we bludgeon one another with facts and theories gleaned from cursory readings of newspapers, magazines and digests.’ That was actually written in 1945 by Henry Miller and I think it’s timely…. People all over the world spend countless hours of their lives every week being fed entertainment in the form of movies, TV shows, newspapers, YouTube videos and the internet. And it’s ludicrous to believe that this stuff doesn’t alter our brains.

It’s also equally ludicrous to believe that – at the very least – this mass distraction and manipulation is not convenient for the people who are in charge. People are starving. They may not know it because they’re being fed mass produced garbage. The packaging is colourful and loud, but it’s produced in the same factories that make Pop Tarts and iPads, by people sitting around thinking, ‘What can we do to get people to buy more of these?’

And they’re very good at their jobs. But that’s what it is you’re getting, because that’s what they’re making. They’re selling you something. And the world is built on this now. Politics and government are built on this, corporations are built on this.

Interpersonal relationships are built on this. And we’re starving, all of us, and we’re killing each other, and we’re hating each other, and we’re calling each other liars and evil because it’s all become marketing and we want to win because we’re lonely and empty and scared and we’re led to believe winning will change all that. But there is no winning.

That’s pretty much the nut of it, and that’s when I made the connection at an embarrassingly late age: Served up at the root of all of this—the self-advertising, the spittle-flecked political division, the moralizing, all of it—is an American-sized portion of fear and emptiness. It’s a costume to conceal weakness: I am brave and I have a sword and you are either a knight or a dragon and I just dare you to be a dragon.

I’m not sneering. I’m as susceptible as the next guy. I embraced political drama too and only abandoned it after cable news turned it into a living reductio ad absurdum (the Latin is to impress you). In my short time among them, I positively goddamn wallowed in the Tim LaHaye-esque demonic conspiracy dramas and revenge porn so adored by the evangelical community. I get it, because it’s my malady too. I must make you love me or else take you to school:


It is an ancient pattern of time usage for me, and I’m trying to move deeper, hoping to be helpful. This pattern of time usage paints over an ancient wound, and paints it with bright colours. It’s a sleight of hand, a distraction, so to attempt to change the pattern let me expose the wound. I now step into this area blindly, I do not know what the wound is, I do know that it is old. I do know that it is a hole in my being. I do know it is tender. I do believe that it is unknowable, or at least unable to be articulable.

I do believe you have a wound too. I do believe it is both specific to you and common to everyone. I do believe it is the thing about you that must be hidden and protected, it is the thing that must be tap danced over five shows a day, it is the thing that won’t be interesting to other people if revealed. It is the thing that makes you weak and pathetic. It is the thing that truly, truly, truly makes loving you impossible. It is your secret, even from yourself. But it is the thing that wants to live.

I’m going to find a way to paraphrase that and turn it into a goddamn tattoo.

I have for years heard an inner voice urging me to open my heart wider[2], and it’s mostly gone unheeded, because of fear and being completely uncertain about how to start. One doesn’t just start a conversation with “I’m absolutely fucking terrified”.

But one can start an essay that way, and so I’m here and I’ll just go ahead and kick it off. Things I’m afraid of, in no particular order:


  • That I am not the good man everyone believes me to be

  • That I will fail my family

  • That I will screw up my kids

  • That I won’t leave a legacy, that I will die with the memories of those who have known me

  • That I will never get good at making things with my hands, or even find an act of creation I can stick with

  • That I will never get out of my own head, or find quiet there

  • Of people, mostly that they will hurt me

  • Of embarrassing myself

  • That I will be found out

  • That I am not much of a man

  • That I will never find a way to set aside my pettiness and judgment

  • That I am weak and will always be thus

  • That I will never do anything worth a damn with myself

Why the list? Because I think I’m finally getting to the point where my exhaustion with painting over that wound is outweighing the fear. At the ripe old age of almost-thirty-seven, I might actually be growing up. And I’d rather we talked about stuff.

Also, five bucks says most of you share in at least one of those, and I’d like to explore that. I’d like you to be able to talk to me, or someone, about it. To wit:


What I’m trying to express – what I’d like to express – is the notion that, by being honest, thoughtful and aware of the existence of other living beings, a change can begin to happen in how we think of ourselves and the world, and ourselves in the world. We are not the passive audience for this big, messed up power play.

We don’t have to be. We can say who we are, we can assert our right to existence, we can say to the bullies and conmen, the people who try to shame us, embarrass us, flatter us, to the people who have no compunction about lying to us to get our money and our allegiance that we are thinking – really thinking – about who we are, and we’ll express ourselves and other people won’t feel so alone.

That’s at least a big chunk of what I want this place to be. Also doo-doo jokes and pictures of Christina Hendricks.

I dunno. I don’t have any more answers than Charlie Kaufman. I have all of his uncertainty. Perhaps counterintuitively, I find that uncertainty encouraging. The road forward is usually rocky, in my experience. Solid, even ground means you’re walking in a circle.

Seriously, go read the first half-dozen pages of that speech, even if you’re not a writer. Then write down your own fears. Then set the paper on fire. Then laugh and make something.




  1. I kid. I love Shadoe Stevens and was delighted to hear his voice once again when Craig Ferguson took over The Late Late Show. Stevens is a hugely underrated comedic talent, and every time I hear his voice it’s suddenly 1987 and I’m home sick from school and watching game shows. Circle gets the square.  ↩


  2. Not the “shoot the president to impress Jodie Foster” kind of voice. This isn’t to be taken literally, kids.  ↩


On Red Meat and Granola

Wanted to share something that I caught linked in this MetaFilter post about Occupy Wall Street a few days ago. Originally I was going to just have this as a quick one-off to pass it along, because it made me re-evaluate a few prejudices of mine and take a second look at some of the cultural and economic issues in my country that tempt me to become one of those guys who walk around with a sandwich board, muttering into a bullhorn.

I’m still going to do this as a short-ish one, but it’s no longer the standalone one-off I first expected it to be. Don’t want to get into it too much yet, but I’d previously written a post about intelligence and then spent a couple of days writing a post about fear that I pretty much figured I’d never publish.

Well, then I read something yesterday that jabbed at my forebrain more than a little. It was a speech, a speech I’ll share with you soon, and it tied together that bumf on intelligence and this splorp on the culture war and that thing about fear that was never going to see the light of day, and my perspective shifted, just a little. Something clicked, there was what I’ll call a brief moment of ohhhhhh, and suddenly I discovered words for a few things that had been rattling around in the back of the cupboard for a while.

So I’m going to rewrite that next one, and while I figure out how to do that, I’ll link you to Tim Kreider’s[1] open letter to the Tea Party, something I found to be one of the few sane and honest appraisals of the Tea Party/Occupy Wall Street divide I’ve come across. A few snippets:

The only consensus in this country, the one thing absolutely no one on any side will dispute, is that things are fucked up, and no one in power seems to be even trying to do anything to fix them. It seems to me the main difference between conservatives and liberals anymore is that you blame The Government and we blame Corporations. It’s past time we noticed that those two antagonists are literally the same people. They’re frat brothers and golf buddies and they go back and forth from corporate boards to government regulatory agencies and back. Wall Street donates money to political campaigns so that the government will use our tax money to bail them out when they cheat and make bad gambles and crash the economy. Meanwhile we’re distracted fighting among ourselves, having the political equivalent of the “Tastes great!/Less filling!” debate.

Look: I’m not pretending to like you, and I don’t expect you to pretend to like me…. We have radically different ideas about the kind of country we want this to be…. But we also have a lot in common, if you think about it; we’re both considered “extremists” for fighting for what seems to us like common sense and decency; and we both care passionately about what kind of country we want to live in….

So you can go on sneering at all those smelly, spoiled little trust-fund hippies whining for a handout, and we can go on shaking our heads at all you obese suburban rednecks who’re too dumb to know when you’ve been swindled, and in a few weeks it’ll get cold and the protests will dwindle or disperse, or the national media will just get distracted by some other, shinier story, and we’ll all forget this ever happened and go back to business as usual. If business as usual is what you want.

Fairly sobering take on things. The whole thing’s worth a full read.

  1. If you are remotely easy to offend or do not like jokes about conservatives, stay out of his comics. You have been warned.

     ↩

Internet Am Hard

I spent several hours trying to write a post about what a disruptive technology simple portability has been to my life. It was going to start with the transition of my adoration from laptop to tablet (particularly when traveling), describe how it brought to my attention a thousand little annoyances in life that I'd gotten far too used to, segue to the deplorable state of my cluttered home, and end with a discussion of my growing resolve to apply what I learned from computing and travel and simplify my life as much as possible. I'd blather on for a bit about some of the ethical implications therein.

Then I realized I was unconsciously attempting to rewrite this excellent post by Ben Hammersley, and immediately felt embarrassed, because his is far better than mine would have been.

So go read that one instead. It's brilliant.

Plain is Sexy

An earlier iteration of my blog featured a “tool of the week” bit that I abandoned after cracking under the pressure of coming up with one every single week. But I loved writing those posts and have never given up my fondness for tools, so I figure I’ll keep doing them sporadically here. If for no other reason than that all posts can’t be as navel-gazey as the last one.

So I’ll lighten the mood a little and bore you instead by talking about writing workflows and software. Six of you will care, but this is where I spend most of my day, and I feel like talking about it.

Still around? Hokay.

I’m rapidly becoming convinced that John Gruber’s excellent Markdown syntax is one of the greatest things that ever happened to writing on computers. He developed it as an easier way of writing and reading HTML documents by stripping out all the tags and extra cruft and replacing them with simple symbols. Write up a simplified plain-text document, run it through a script to convert it to HTML, and blammo, web page made with considerably less work.

John’s a very smart guy, but I’m not sure he realized what he’d done there, not at first. By abstracting the details of writing HTML, he hadn’t just created a shorthand. He’d damn near created a meta-language, something that could be run through any number of different programs to create any number of different types of documents. With the right set of tools, you could easily turn a Markdown document into an RTF document, a PDF, theoretically anything.

Enter Fletcher Penney and MultiMarkdown, which has utterly changed the way I do business. It takes Gruber’s original syntax and adds very little (I believe Penney only added syntax for creating tables and footnotes), but allows you to process it into a number of formats: HTML, LaTeX (and thence to PDF), OPML, and Open Document Format (which from there can be converted to RTF, Word, or Pages formats).

Gruber’s creation kicked off a minor revolution in writing and developing for the web, and it’s now leaking into offices and writer’s workflows as well. An pornographic amount of software has sprung up around it, particularly for OS X, but really everywhere.

Why use it? Well, partly because you hate Microsoft Office. Yes, you do.

I’m what some might term a “power user” of Office, as I’ve gone so far as to create Excel spreadsheets embedded with hand-written VBA code that creates and emails Word documents on the fly. I’ll be the first to praise Office’s power, as it is indeed as powerful as Satan’s own broccoli farts, but actually using it is about as pleasant as inhaling said farts. It’s the word processing equivalent of going to Walmart.

So there’s that. There’s also the question of portability. I’m writing this right now in Markdown on an iPad, but I could open it on any computer from any decade since punch cards went out. You don’t have to worry about what happens if your favorite software dies out or starts sucking. You don’t have to worry about operating systems or versions.

So on. I’d be willing to bet a lot of you are nerdy enough to be familiar, so I won’t go on. But I love it. I take all my meeting and conference notes in Markdown. I write up reports and quality control plans in Markdown. I rub Markdown all over my chest before bedtime every night. It gets out of my way and lets me work.

But the most amusing effect of Markdown’s growing adoption is seeing a surge in popularity of that nerdiest of tools: the humble text editor.

No frills, no buttons (well, hopefully not), no “ribbon”, no bullshit. A window, a blinking cursor, and what you want to write. Like Markdown itself, a good text editor gets out of your way.

Me, I started with Emacs, the (almost literal) 800-pound gorilla of text editors. I got into it partly for efficiency, partly for nerd cred, but also partly for the glorious wonderment that is org-mode. I left org and Emacs only with a great wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Why? Early signs of repetitive strain injury. Emacs relies on key combinations that require a certain amount of manual acrobatics, and they took their toll on my forearms. So I left for the dark side and learned Vim.

I quickly learned that I loved Vim’s commands, but loathed Vim itself. I began to despair. I found a way to use Emacs with vim’s keybindings, but that was starting to feel like a Rube Goldberg contraption, so I reached out to my fellow nerds. They introduced me to Sublime Text.

Hoo boy, is it aptly named. Runs on all three major operating systems, is easily configurable, and it can even be set up to use (some) vim keybindings. For a guy like me, this is like being given a bisexual Christina Hendricks covered in heroin and bearing a large bag of cash. And then learning that the Star Wars prequels never happened. Something something LEGO.

That’s where I’ve been ever since, Markdowning my happy ass away in Sublime (and Nebulous Notes on my iPad). I could probably count how many times I use Word each month without having to take my shoes off. And let me tell you, brethren and sisteren, that is when you can stop farting around and start building giant killer robots.

Is it for everyone? No. Converting to your preferred document format isn’t hard, but it was built for nerds. If you don’t get a product with built-in MultiMarkdown support, you either need to be able to use a command line without panicking or have a nerd on hand to simplify using it. So there’s a learning curve, but it’s worth it. The reward is the sheer simplicity of writing and formatting text.

So to Mr. Gruber and Mr. Penney, you have my eternal gratitude. You’ve made how I work so much better.

Apps with Markdown/MultiMarkdown Support

On the Nature of Intelligence

If you’ve got some spare time, head on over to MetaFilter and check out this link to a video of Stephen Colbert interviewing Neil deGrasse Tyson. It’s an hour and a half long, so make sure you’ve got the time, but it’s amazing stuff.

(Side note for my non-nerd readers: If you’re not familiar with Dr. Tyson, he’s an astrophysicist and a popularizer of science with a podcast and a TV show and another TV show and, well, you can read about him here. I’m more than a little in love with the man.)

I’ve watched it twice now, once while brainstorming ideas for a new application I’ve been kicking around, once just the other day while flying out to a conference. I’ve made a permanent copy on my iPad so I can watch it on the rare occasions that I’m offline. Don’t sue me, anybody.

I did this partly for the entertainment value, but also because it reminds me of how stupid I am.

I am, according to the usually accepted definition, a very smart guy. Been told that ever since I was three years old, when I walked into my preschool and read a book to my class. Ever since then, my life has been one of gifted programs and honors classes and people telling me how smart I am. And I wish they hadn’t done that.

You’ll get about two-thirds of the way through that video before you hear Tyson speak about the nature of intelligence. Absorbing and collecting facts, he says, even having a rare facility for doing so, isn’t intelligence.

Intelligence is about curiosity and searching and asking questions and embracing, indeed loving your ignorance as you find ever more ways to whittle away at it. It’s about puzzling over things and picking them apart to see how they work and, maybe, make them better.

I don’t do that, not much. I’ve mostly been afraid to. Instead, I collect facts like a human vacuum. When I was small, I regurgitated all kinds of data to grownups about weather and the human body and physics and math. It was stuff I devoured from books, mostly because I found it fascinating, but I think also because impressing grownups was a hobby of mine. Is, rather.

When people slap labels like “gifted” on you, now you’ve got a role to play. You’ve got a title to live up to. And that scares you. When things don’t come easily to you, you worry that maybe everyone was wrong. You become terrified of displaying your own ignorance. And you stay in your comfort zone. I absorb facts like crazy, but I don’t do very much with them except talk about them on the internet and at parties. Dr. Tyson is right: I’m not intelligent, I’m a collector.

It appears that science backs me up on some of this. I’ve taken that article to heart, shared it with my wife, and told her my desire that we praise our children for their work, not their smarts. She agrees, so we try like hell to remember not to even utter the word “smart” in their presence. Indeed, it makes me uneasy to think that we should delineate between people who absorb facts and make connections easily and those who do not.

There’s a great quote from the man whose name is a synonym for genius: “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”

I know a man who couldn’t tell you a damn thing about Newtonian physics or poetry, but his skills as a knifemaker are earning him national recognition and may well immortalize him, if he keeps growing. I know another who couldn’t do differential calculus to save his life, but has skill as a pianist that humanity produces only a couple of times a generation. Still one more, this one extremely book-smart and on his way to becoming a university professor, who tossed it aside to pursue his passion of making the music of his home country.

These men found their intelligence and poured their guts into it. They are all driven by a curiosity and a need to create. All of my friends: the glassblower, the jeweler, the woodworker, the singer, the poet, all have a need to channel their genius into making or investigating something every day, and I have never in my life been able to find that. They take their skills and they use them, because of that need.

What I have instead is a sort of meta-need, a need to need to put my hand to something. A hunger to find that passion and pursue it. I’ve been searching for an object of obsession that I can put my alleged smarts to for a long time.

Now, I’ve dabbled, tried music and carpentry and stained glass (I haven’t fully given up on that one) and fiction. The only one that really ever took was cooking, which is about as instant-gratification as it gets—you don’t have to spend three days sanding food, if you’re doing it right. Not to mention that I still don’t have the patience for learning proper presentation or some of the more long-form methods.

So I look around, I surround myself with talented people every chance I get, and I collect more facts.

The Fibonacci sequence tends toward the golden ratio, which is found in innumerable places in nature, even in the standard flour-to-water ratio for making bread.

Electrons behave differently depending on whether their behavior is being directly observed. Because of this, we have quantum mechanics, and so you get to read this on your computer.

Objectivism is generally regarded as a self-defeating philosophy, as its ethical aims are weakened every time another person learns them.

Traditional 12-bar blues music tends to follow a I-IV-V chord progression. The Chinese have a far higher incidence of perfect pitch because they speak a tonal language.

These curiosities aggregate, and I enjoy them, and I enjoy sharing them, and I certainly enjoy looking smart when I share them. But I think I have a sliver of understanding for why most child prodigies never become anything of note. I behold the aggregation of trivia and antiques and God knows what else that is my mind, and I wonder what it is good for, what the hell I can do with it that will hold my anemic focus.

Really, the only project that I haven’t abandoned is myself, my desire to find what is lacking in me and excise it with either scalpel or hammer. It’s my focus on my lack of focus. Masturbatory? Narcissistic? Probably. But it’s something.

I’ll keep looking. I’ll keep surrounding myself with my betters, wherever I can find them. Something’s bound to rub off. I hope I’ll know it when I see it—or rather, that I won’t, that it will become so ingrained in me that I take it for granted. That’s when the good stuff happens. That’s when you’re a smarty-pants.

1001 Proven Methods to Turbo-Hack Your Toddler

Killer iPhone tip for working parents I learned from Merlin awhile back:

  1. Set your lock screen wallpaper to be a picture of your family. Preferably not a portrait.
  2. When you get home at the end of a workday, before you open the door, turn off whatever app is running, lock your phone, then bring up the lock screen again.
  3. Look at it for a full 5–10 seconds and say these words: This is why I’m here.
  4. Make sure your phone is ignored or turned off for at least the next two hours.
  5. You may check it while taking a shit. A real shit.

If you are childless and able-bodied, most of the mundane tasks of the day come as easily as breathing. You don’t trip over six difficulties on your way to the car. You can go to work, bust ass all day, leave all of your energy behind, and check out when you get home. You’re allowed to be grumpy. You’re allowed to eat dinner in front of the Internet or the TV.

With kids, it could be that the hardest part of your day is just starting when you step through your doorway. Even if they’re being well-behaved angels, your kids will want you to play with them. They will want you to be on. And that takes energy, energy you’ll probably have to dig for, as does shepherding them through their nighttime rituals.

My son’s favorite game? Jumping off of things and having me catch him, often without informing me that we have begun a game. I mean, come on. But you don’t have a choice, you are required to show up and dig deep. You have to be positive and constructive and fun. You are emphatically not allowed to lose your shit.

So I’ve spent the day wading through the hundred skeeter bites of being allowed to be only half of a software developer, the endless frustrations of working on government contracts, the drama du jour on my team, whatever—and for my kids, now it must be as if it never happened.

So I kill my podcast. I lock my phone. I hit the lock button again.

My picture is nearly a year old now. It is the picture we used on our Christmas card in 2010. It is a series of eight grainy, black-and-white snapshots of my family, crammed into a photo booth. In them, you can see my daughter looking on with the wide-eyed fascination you expect from a one-year-old. You can see my son trying to hog the whole frame to make faces. You can see me restraining him and, in the last shot, pretending to eat his head. You can see my wife, more smirking and laughing than smiling, as captive to the chaos as I, and you would not know that she was probably thinking about her dying mother. None of us are looking at the camera.

People see this picture and say, “It looks like you have a lot of fun.”

I’ll admit that for about half a second after I hear this, I’m partly surprised. Yes, we have tons of fun, but I have a full-time job and two children under the age of five. A lot of the time, what I am is tired. For my wife? It’s even harder.

So I look at that picture, and I remember. I realize it’s a better summary of What My Family Is than I could ever write. There is mess, there is noise, there is struggling, and we are laughing the whole way. I see that, and most days I can lay my burden down.

This is why you’re here, I think, and it’s just a long enough walk to the back door for me to hope that maybe today I’ll be a better husband and father than I am.

In Which Lemony Snicket Discusses Horrible Truths Yet Again

5. There may not be a reason to share your cake. It is, after all, yours. You probably baked it yourself, in an oven of your own construction with ingredients you harvested yourself. It may be possible to keep your entire cake while explaining to any nearby hungry people just how reasonable you are.
--Thirteen Observations made by Lemony Snicket while watching Occupy Wall Street from a Discreet Distance

Go and Do Likewise

I don’t use them very much anymore, but I used to say a prayer of thanks every time I went through a fast food drive-thru. A literal prayer of gratitude that I was lucky enough to have been born into a life that kept me on the outside of that window.

I don’t scrub toilets for a living. I don’t pick up discarded condoms out of the backs of limousines. I don’t have to resign myself to the possibility of spending the rest of my life smelling the same floor cleaner every day. I don’t have to worry about shelter or fresh water, for that matter. A bad day for me is when my DSL connection goes down.

I feel fortunate because of this. I also feel guilty, sometimes, though I know it’s irrational.

Yet no matter how good the job, my most constant companion during the workday thus far has been a perpetual round-peg-square-hole sensation, that no matter how cohesive the team or stimulating the work, where I am is not for me, not long-term.

It’s not exactly a dissatisfaction, more a sense that it’s not what I was built to do, if you’ll pardon the determinism.

I met a woman in an Auto Zone parking lot once who claimed to be a prophetess. Mary was (and, I assume, still is) a die-hard evangelical Christian. She believed strongly that the Holy Spirit had given her the gift of prophecy. She wasn’t trying to proselytize, wasn’t insane or pushing an agenda on strangers. It only came up then because she felt what she believed to be a sudden stirring of the Spirit and began to use what she believed to be her gift.

I remember her looking me dead in the eye and declaring that I would one day help children. She fanned herself and smiled and shook just a bit and declared that she was feeling it strong that day.

I was in my early 20s, most of a decade away from having my first child. But she was adamant. Wouldn’t necessarily be yours, she said. But children. She was certain. It was strong that day.

Now, I don’t believe in prophecy, not as a magical psychic power. I believe a prophet is no more or less than a person who understands his or her own time and place perfectly, who sees what can and must change. That’s what John the Baptist was. That’s what Martin Luther King was. Hell, I could point to a long line of capitalists that fits the description. Certainly it wasn’t Mary, as she only knew my first name.

But what she said occasionally comes bubbling up from the depths of half-remembrance and I wonder if it will come true. What really pokes my poodle is wondering if it will because she indeed did have a gift, that of planting suggestions in perfect strangers’ respective heads.

My life and the Internet have taught me about one thing over and over again: my own privilege. I am white. I am a man. Damnable cruelty of aging aside, I am not difficult to look at. I am straight, I am thin, my gender matches my genitals, my parents could afford my college education, and I learn things usually much faster than the average person. I even attend a mainstream Protestant church, though my theology and ethics swerve pretty far left of the average Arkansan. Life, in short, is a goddamn golden goose for me.

Life owes me nothing. I owe life a debt of gratitude. Yet I do so little.

And then there are those people I am condescending enough to be grateful not to be. There are Mary’s words. And though I don’t believe in fatalism, there is that lingering question in my head: Is the sense I get with each new job that this will not be where I put down roots caused by this guilt? Can I even claim not to be a fatalist when I catch myself looking around an office where I am happy to work and thinking this is not where I am meant to stay?

To be dissatisfied with so much would be an unforgivable sin, were it not that I know that my real dissatisfaction is with myself, with my laziness and cowardice. I suspect I’d be happier if I did more. For all my liberal pretensions, I simply do not do enough for others, when the God I claim to believe in says it should be my whole life.

Anesthetizing yourself is much easier, of course. You merely start by saying the right sorts of things and getting angry at the right sorts of people. But the attractiveness of that option has faded, and my patience with myself is wearing thin. The trick will be finding something to do that doesn’t detract from my time with my wife and children, as I have so little to give them as it is.

Currently I work for a non-profit, trying to help doctors to provide better care for their patients. I believe it is very important work, good work. I’m going to start graduate school so I can become more of an expert in this field. Perhaps this will be the path to change. I hope it will, as I have no clue what to do otherwise. But more than that, I suspect (and hope) that this is only the beginning.

As for the children I was prophesied to help? Who knows. I adore kids, the smaller the better. I even made two of ’em, and for all my failures as a father, so far they’re all right, beautiful and brilliant little critters. I’d like to claim some responsibility for this. If I can help others as well? Name me something nobler, and I’ll do it.

Thanks, Steve.

The very first computer my parents bought for me was a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A. We really didn't use it much as a computer, as I recall, mostly played games on it. By games, of course, I mean a glorious little piece of intellectual property theft called Munch Man. I got wicked good at that game, better than I ever got at Pac-Man.

But the first computer we got that we actually used as a computer? That was an Apple IIc.

Gorgeous thing. CPU and keyboard in one lightweight, portable unit that even had a carrying handle. It was the MacBook Air of its day, a clever piece of engineering on which I did homework, made Happy Birthday banners on colored accordion-fold printer paper, and enjoyed the closest thing I had to sex in those days: Leisure Suit Larry.

I remember seeing a demo of a IIGS at a local library and nearly soiling myself over how beautiful and fast and immersive the thing was. They let me play Karateka on it, a game I'd beaten a hundred times by then, and damn if the thing wasn't almost too fast to play. To see such a work of art killed by lawyers was and is unforgiveable.

I didn't touch another Apple product until 2008. I didn't get Macintoshes in the early days. Tiny black-and-white screens, what kind of accountant wants that? You can't play King's Quest on that. I needed real estate and at least 16 colors to be immersed. So I stayed out, and I missed the Dark Times.

I moved over to Windows, and I stayed there through 3.1, 95, 98, ME (Motto: "What Is That, Hardware?"), and then XP. The last computer I ever bought was a Windows XP desktop that's still running, the spoils of a bet my wife made with me to get me to quit smoking.

Then 2008 came and I got the first generation unibody MacBook Pro. I had to save up money for a long time, sell off a bunch of my old stuff, and have one of the biggest arguments of my marriage to get it, but it was worth it. I'm typing this on it now, two operating systems later, and the damn thing still runs like new, discounting of course the water damage my daughter wrought upon its undeserving internals.

It is a gorgeous piece of machinery. Solid, sturdy, modern-looking. Vibrant display, backlit keyboard, barely makes a sound. I thought I hated trackpads until I bought this thing, but the modern Apple trackpad makes a mouse seem like the computing equivalent of using Morse code.

I'm not going back. I use a Windows 7 computer for work, and to be fair, it's a really good operating system, the first version of Windows I haven't had to tolerate in over a decade. But it's not the same. OS X manages to get the hell out of my way while still being quite literally delightful to use. It has, with no exaggeration, changed the way I think about and use computers and software. It is a daily reminder of the benefits of paying for quality, a reminder that cheap things are expensive and that science needs art.

Steve Jobs understood those things. His engineers used to sign the insides of the cases of the computers they shipped, as artists do their paintings.

You can duplicate an iPad, but you can't copy that mentality. Not understanding that is why Apple's competitors so often fail, even when following lockstep. We'll see if Apple can maintain it without Jobs.

Steve himself was often regarded as a tyrant and an asshole. There is ample evidence to support this theory. But tyrant or not, he invented personal computing, then returned to push it out of an endless hell of beige boxes. He completely transformed the cell phone market, then created a tablet market that will again change computing forever and that nobody else (except perhaps Amazon) seems to know what the hell to do with. He created Pixar, quite possibly the best movie studio in human history.

Whether you like him or not, he has undeniably touched your life. Whether you've bought his products or not, you've bought his products.

He lived just long enough to see the fulfillment of his vision. Just long enough to cement his change upon the face of the developed world. I hope it was reward enough for him.

Thanks, Steve. Thanks for what you did and will continue to do for generations.

Hi.

Missed you.

No idea if things’ll stick with this reboot, but I couldn’t let things lie how they were, hacked and brought down, that godawful stylesheet I had before, all of it. Managing my Twitter addiction had me reclaiming some of my attention and pining for some longer-form stuff, so here I am.

Stripped-down stylesheet that still sucks because I don’t do web design, comments turned off, down to brass tacks. Clean slate. So.

So?

So I’m not ultimately decided on direction, and I think I’m just going to let things work themselves out there, or not. I’ve got a few things I want to talk about, but I’m not entirely sure I have much to say about them.

See, I’m a husband, a father of two, and I have a job that lately has gotten very busy. Thinking about these things has raised questions that I think are interesting—critical, as far as my identity and self-worth go, and I’m pretty sure I’m not alone here, so I’d like to discuss them. Then again, all of these things leave me with little energy and less time, so who knows if I’ll stick it out. No promises or apologies will be forthcoming.

But I hope I stick it out. I hope I do something worth reading. And I hope you read it.

I want to talk about parenting. I want to talk about work. I want to talk about priorities. I want to talk about doubts and fears. I want to talk about falling short and giving up. I want to talk about things that are awesome. And yeah, I want to talk tools and workflows.

Comments are off because. Because I don’t want to monitor a blog, I just want to write something and move on.You’re welcome to give me one-on-one feedback (in fact, I encourage it), but this is not a community. This is a place for me to write in public and be terrible at it until I get to be less terrible at it. So I’ll stick my fingers in my ears and shout before running back inside.

Soon enough I’ll spin the Wheel of Topics and see what comes up. Probably we’ll start broad.

Stick around, okay?