Projects – Renaissance Guy

Early to Rise

I am not a morning person. This has been the case for as long as I’ve been old enough to have sleeping patterns to speak of, and unless my metabolism does a total reversal with age, I don’t foresee this changing. I am a person who wakes up late and goes to bed accordingly.

This isn’t because I hate sunrises or morning talk shows; on the contrary, I enjoy both. My problem is that trying to drag myself out of bed in the morning is immensely painful. It often feels like someone is using a metal claw to unceremoniously yank my spinal cord out through a hole in my back, dragging the rest of my body with it by the nerves and sinews. I won’t say it’s the worst pain I’ve every experienced, but it’s up there. I also don’t wake up quickly, either. My brain takes time to boot up in the morning, and during this time I am unable to so much as walk a straight line. The earlier I am woken up, the longer this process takes- if I am dragged out of bed early it can take an hour before I’m conscious enough to make decisions, and leaves me for the rest of the day with an overwhelming exhaustion that borders on clinical narcolepsy.

I am aware that this goes somewhat beyond the normal scope. It’s almost certainly an underlying neurological problem- one of several. Since my brain already has some issues switching gears, it stands to reason that we’re looking at a different symptom of the same cause. But since meds only seem to blunt the symptoms and draw out over a longer period, I am stuck with it. I try to avoid mornings wherever humanly possible, and suck it up when I can’t.

Of course, the problem, as one may suspect, isn’t actually with mornings. The problem is with my brain making the switch from being asleep to fully awake. In particular I have more trouble than most waking up when my brain is at an inopportune point in the sleep cycle.

Theoretically, this could be addressed on the other end- getting to bed earlier in order to make sure I get the right number of hours of sleep to wake up naturally at, say, 8:30 (which I know isn’t early by most definitions, but compared to my current routine, may as well be pre-dawn). Here we run headfirst into my other problem: severe and chronic insomnia, exacerbated by metabolic disorders that make it not only difficult, but actually dangerous to fall asleep at a reasonable hour most nights.

The situation of being a college student doesn’t help. In many ways the stereotype that college students are bad at time management is self reinforcing. Campus events start and run late, and emails containing essential information and even assignments are sent out hours before midnight. Facilities open from 10-1am. The scheduling of exams and final projects mere days after the material is covered makes long term planning impossible, and reinforces crunch time and cramming- even more so since it is all during the same few weeks. Last minute scrambling is not merely routine, it is impossible to avoid.

For as often as Americans ridicule the collectivist workaholism of Japan, China, and Germany, we suffer from the same kind of cultural fetish, or at least our young people do. Hauling oneself up by one’s bootstraps is used to encourage behaviors that are anti-productivity; destroying sleep schedules and health in order to make deadlines so that one can continue to repeat the same cycle next year. I could, and probably will eventually, write a whole post on these attitudes and their fallout, but for the time being, suffice it to say that being a college student makes already difficult problems much harder.

But I digress. The point is, my sleep schedule has become unsustainable, and I need to make some changes. Getting to bed earlier, though a good idea, will not work on its own, since every time I have tried this I have wound up laying in bed awake for hours, making me feel less rested in the morning. What I need to do, and what I’ve dreaded doing, is force myself to get up earlier and get going, so that I will be tired enough to actually fall asleep at a (more) reasonable hour. In essence, I am performing a hard reset on my sleep schedule.

As schemes go, this one is fairly straightforward, but that doesn’t make it any easier. The fact that it is necessary does not make it easier either. But it is necessary. Not only do future plans depend on it, but being able to recognize, plan, and execute these smaller points of self improvement is critical to any future I hope to have. I am rising early to great the dawn not only in a literal sense, but in a metaphorical sense as well.
At least, that is what I shall be telling myself while dragging my sorry behind out of bed.

The Project Problem

You ever find yourself start something on a lark, and then the more you work on it, the bigger it gets, until suddenly it’s this whole big thing that you don’t really know how to work with? And then you’re left with the choice of either taking to your work with a hatchet in order to bring it down to a manageable size, and suturing up the wounds to make a finished, but far less grand final product, or letting it keep growing until eventually it becomes totally unsustainable. I don’t know whether this happens to other people, but it happens to me constantly. Most of my projects die this way, either unable to survive the hatcheting process, or with me not having the heart to put them out of their misery.

This includes everything from weekend activities to final class projects. Reigning in this tendency to overcomplicate has been a serious challenge for me academically. For instance, I will get an idea for a research paper topic, dive into the literature, and come back with a twenty page essay and four pages of citations, when the assignment calls for seven pages maximum, and five cited sources. Or I will be assigned to write something in a foreign language for a class presentation, and will end up writing something which, while perfectly correct, uses vocabulary several semesters beyond the rest of the class.

Arguably this single-mindedness and overachievement is a strength. After all, I’ve never known someone to fail an assignment because they overdid their project. By contrast, I know plenty of people who have failed assignments that weren’t long enough, or where it was clear the student didn’t care. On the other hand, a seeming inability to do the easy thing and go from point A to point B on projects sounds like the kind of lesson that eventually has to be learned through hard failure and bitter tears. Overdoing is not always beneficial, and it is certainly not always efficient.

In any case, I seem to possess, if nothing else, a striking ability to make more work for myself. This is what has prevented me from posting over the past weeks- the projects which I began with good intentions and high ambitions are coming due, and it is crunch time to finish the necessary legwork to meet initial promises. Every moment of available time from now until the end of finals must be put towards these pursuits if I am to clinch the A that I know I deserve. My entire media consumption is being geared towards research and study; each ounce of my wordsmithing retooled towards finishing and refining papers and presentations.

To be fair, I did plan all of this, more or less. I mean, I didn’t plan to put myself up against the wall. I never do. But I did choose ambitious topics. I knew I was signing myself up to do more work than was probably required, because in addition to getting an A, I wanted, and still want, to be working on something that I care about, rather than hammering away at busywork. After the dumpster fire that was my high school experience, I decided I would rather be proud and excited about something than get full marks. But contrary to the popular myth, loving your work does not obviate the work itself. Which leaves me where I am now, frantically scrambling to make good on my projects.

So that’s what’s happened, and why I haven’t posted. I started working on my final projects more than a month ago, and the work got away from me and ate up my time. I’d love to say that I’ll be getting back to posting immediately, but until finals are over and I catch up on rest I’ve been putting off, I’m not going to make any promises. I will be trying to post, though. And I expect that once I am no longer directing every waking moment towards study, that I shall have more to say.

The Business Plot

For about a year now I’ve been sitting on a business idea. It’s not, like, the kind of business idea that makes anyone rich. On the sliding scale from lemonade stand to Amazon, this is much closer to the former. I think it will probably turn a profit, but I have no illusions about striking it rich and launching myself onto the pages of Forbes. Looking at the numbers realistically, I will be pleasantly surprised if I can make enough money to keep myself above the poverty line. It’s cliche, but I’m really not in it for the money, I’m in it for the thing.

My idea is for a board game, and it’s a game that I think is interesting to a wide range of people, and also deserves to be made, or at least attempted. I’m not going to share too many details, because if spending high school economics class watching clips of Shark Tank posted to YouTube has taught me anything, it’s that you don’t show your idea off until you have the legal grounds to sue any copycats into oblivion.

The obvious question of why I don’t sign it to a board game publisher has a complicated answer that relies on context that I don’t want to share at this time. But the long and short of it is that, if I’m doing this, it’s a project that I’m pursuing for personal reasons, and based on what I’ve heard from people who have gone through game publishing, they’re reasons I have cause to fear a publisher won’t respect, or might try to renege on. And besides that, there’s a part of me that’s tickled by the idea of being an entrepreneur and not having to answer to anyone (except, you know, manufacturers, contractors, accountants, taxes, regulators, and of course, consumers).

So I have the idea. I have a vague idea of what my end goals and expectations are, and some notion of the path towards them. Whether or not I’m “committed” in the sense that the guides say you need to be to be an entrepreneur, it’s an idea that I’d like to see exist, and I’m willing to throw what money and time I can spare at it. If there was any job that could ever motivate me to wake up early, this project would be one of them. The people I’ve talked to about this privately have told me it’s a good idea, including a business professor who, upon hearing my pitch, immediately endorsed it and tried to convert me to take her class. I think there’s something here.

And that’s about where I got stuck. I managed to make a prototype last summer, shortly after the idea popped into my head, and I’ve been play-testing and reviewing the rules a bit, but this is just circling the problem, and I know it. My next step is that I need to move forward on iterating the prototype towards a sellable product, and on looking into getting some cursory idea of costs. In practice this means getting quotes from manufacturers, which means I need some kind of email account and web presence.

Theoretically, I could throw up a Gmail account and launch that process off today (well, not today; I have homework, but basically any time). But conducting such business under my own name, or even under an arbitrary trade name is both murky for tax purposes, and depending on whom you consult, somewhat legally risky, since it puts all the liability squarely on your head. It’s also less clean than setting up a proper web platform with a fancy custom URL and a logo to handle everything centrally. It’s the same reason I have a patreon already set up for this blog- even if I’m not raking in the big bucks today, I’d rather be prepared for that day with the proper infrastructure than have to scramble if I suddenly go viral.

But setting up a website and branding materials effectively demands that I have, at the very least, an established brand name that can be trademarked. And doing that requires that I have the relevant paperwork filed to incorporate a business. It’s something of a point of no return, or at least a point past which returning becomes increasingly difficult and expensive. To this end I have spent quite a few free hours perusing the available information on starting up a startup and building a business. And let me just say, for as much talk that’s made about making life easy for small businesspeople, and lip service paid encouraging entrepreneurship, I expected it to be a heck of a lot more straightforward. Even the Small Business Administration, whose entire mandate is to make starting new businesses as painless as possible, is a convoluted and self-contradictory mess.

The problem isn’t so much a lack of available information as a lack of concrete information I can act upon. The website can’t seem to decide whether it wants to be written for laypeople or lawyers, and in failing to pick a side is decipherable to both. Most government websites are difficult to navigate, but I would’ve expected an agency whose sole job is to make life easier would be less egregious.

But it’s not that I can’t find a form to fill out. Again, I could always pick a name and a business structure out of a hat and plow forward. The differences between a partnership and an LLC at the size I’m looking at, while not irrelevant, are perhaps less of the deciding factor that they’re made out to be. The problem is figuring out a way to start this project that lets me keep my dependent status and hence my health insurance. Because while I’m willing to throw time and money and endure paperwork for this idea, I’m not willing to go without life support. Or rather, I’m not able to go without life support.

I think there’s a loophole that lets me have my cake, and also not die an agonizing death. But I’m not an expert on this field, and this isn’t a risk I want to take. If it’s a question between starting a business that I earnestly believe will change the world for the better, if only incrementally, and getting my life support, I’m going to pick the latter. This is really frustrating. I mean, I’m still head and shoulders above the people that have to pick between medicine and food, but choosing between medicine and chasing an opportunity is grating.

But what really gets me is the fact that this isn’t a problem in other countries, because other countries have guaranteed healthcare, so that potential entrepreneurs can try their hand without risking their lives. Many of these countries also have free education, transport infrastructure, and in some cases free government advisors for new businesses, all of which lower entry barriers for startups. But in the land of the free markets, we apparently hate entrepreneurs.

I digress. The point is, I’ve hit an entirely political roadblock, and it’s extremely discouraging. I haven’t set this project aside yet, because despite everything I still believe in it. Part of the reason I’m writing this is to remind myself of the excitement I feel to see this through. My hope is that I’ll be able to make some progress on this before summer. But we’ll see what’s possible for an entrepreneur in this allegedly business friendly country.

Operation Endrun

I find myself with very little to say these days. Not because I don’t have anything to say, but because I don’t have the time or energy to put it in order. This is a recurring problem for me, particularly of late. Of course, a lot of it is because I’ve been kept on the back foot for a few weeks in a row now. Over the course of the last three weeks I’ve seemingly fallen prey to Murphy’s Law, with things piling up and compounding. I haven’t slept well, I’ve been having trouble thinking straight, and while I’ve avoided missing any particularly egregious deadlines in my classes, I feel more like I’ve been treading water than swimming forward.

Amid all of this, I missed putting up a post last week without noticing. I was actually pretty sure I had done something. In fact, if you’d asked me at the end of last week whether I posted anything, I would have been fairly sure I had already done that. I probably would have bet money on it. And I would’ve been wrong. This isn’t the first or only thing I’ve lost track of in the last few weeks, but it is arguably the biggest; or perhaps better stated, one of the things more resistant to forgetting that I nevertheless forgot.

This is bad. Distraction and confusion on this level is dangerous. This time around it was a missing a post that didn’t go up. Next time it might be a school assignment, which would be bad. Worst case scenario, I might space out and forget about my life support routine. I don’t think it would kill me, but that’s the kind of risk I try very hard not to take. Whatever is causing this fugue, whether that’s a lack of sleep, too much slacking an procrastinating, or not enough productive projects to focus on, needs to be brought under control. People with my condition don’t have the luxury of being distracted. I know this.

Of course, saying something is bad and doing something to solve it are very different. And it’s difficult to turn my life upside down in order to find and eliminate the source of a problem while also going ahead with schoolwork and other plans. So, what’s the plan?

Well, first I need to get ahead in my schoolwork. The plan here is twofold: first, to make sure I’m covered for traveling next weekend. Second, getting ahead will give me the breathing room I need to begin the next set of endeavors. This kind of planning would’ve been impossible in high school, because my teachers were never so organized as to provide expectation ahead of time of what I needed to do, which I think was partially responsible for the tendency for things to snowball. College, however, has proven far easier to navigate, with important items being listed on syllabi well in advance. Consequently, it is possible for me to make plans that include completing work ahead of time.

Second, I need to get my sleep schedule under control. This is a pain, because the only way I have found to reliably enforce a sleep schedule is to wake up early, and force myself out of bed, so that by the time night falls, I feel exhausted enough to fall asleep. This is always a miserable process, because, as I have mentioned previously, I am not a morning person. Waking up early is physically painful to me. I have designed most of my current life around the premise of never needing to wake up before 11am. This will be a sacrifice. But it is necessary.

Third, I need to get up and around more. Winter often has the effect of causing me to spend most of my days inside and sitting down, since I don’t tolerate the cold well enough to go for walks. This, I suspect, is bad for concentration, and it certainly weakens my stamina over time-something I can scarcely afford to lose.

Will I actually accomplish these things? Dunno. But by writing them down and posting them, I’m more likely to try.

Operation Treetopper

The last few weeks have been dominated by Operation Treetopper, my efforts to ensure that I close the year out successfully. Operation Treetopper started basically the moment that Operation Marketplace, my plan to avoid mid-semester complacency and ensure I was squared away when picking classes for next semester, ended. Operation Marketplace, in turn, followed Operation Overture, which covered the first few weeks of college classes. The point is that Treetopper has been a culmination of slightly more than seven months of effort and planning.

The two primary objectives of Operation Treetopper were my German final exam, and my Sociology final paper. The German exam was fairly straightforward. I do my best to avoid serious studying for tests, because at least in my experience, it tends to do me more harm than good. Instead, I focus on learning any material that I haven’t already learned, because even though I miraculously avoiding missing class, there were a handful of occasions when circumstances conspired to prevent me from learning the material, and I had to bluff my way through assignments.

Once that’s done, I make sure I know my German by putting on the top hits list for German speaking countries, and reading Der Spiegel, which translates as The Mirror, and is a major newspaper akin to the Times. I know that I’m making progress when I find the music distracting me from reading. I only ever find the music distracting when the words I’m hearing cross wires with words I’m reading or writing, so when the foreign songs cross that threshold, I know my brain has absorbed enough German that it considers them to be part of a language rather than just words. I don’t know if everyone’s brain works that way, or if it’s just mine, but this is how I pull off learning new languages without studying.
My sociology paper was another story entirely.

With retrospect, I can safely say that I overdid it for my sociology final paper. I mean that in both a positive and negative way. I picked a topic that I was really passionate about, which proved fertile for both research and commentary, and in the process created far more work for myself than was necessary or even prudent.

With the benefit of retrospect, and having gotten a few glimpses of what other classmates eventually settled on, there are things I would’ve done differently. Off the bat, I would’ve started earlier. I wouldn’t say I procrastinated, because I gave myself more time than I thought I’d need. Except, I severely underestimated the amount of time and effort this project would require, and the number of documents, pages, spreadsheets, tables, and graphs it would generate for me to juggle and cull down into a final paper.

Case in point: the assignment was to write four or five pages, and I assumed that I would have to fall back on my old authorial filibustering knack to fill space. In reality, I wound up barely butchering the final product down to five pages of writing, plus an additional eighteen pages of tables, graphs, data, and references that had to be put in an annex because I couldn’t fit them in the main paper, but needed them to make my point succinctly.
Also with the full benefit of hindsight, I would have been well served to take the professor up on his offer to meet and discuss refining and operationalizing topics for my survey. I didn’t do this because I thought my topic was already a sufficiently niche topic that it didn’t need refining. I was wrong about this, partly because, as previously mentioned, I vastly underestimated the length it would take to tackle my topic, but also partially because I expected that I would be working on well-trodden ground, scientifically, when in fact, near as I could tell from the literature review, my investigation proved to be fairly novel.

The other reason I didn’t want to refine my topic was because I was excited about it. I knew that I wanted to tackle medical identification and the factors going into adherence essentially since the moment I read the syllabus, and saw that we could do a survey for our paper. I knew it was topical to the course, and I knew that my background with the topic would enable me to write a paper that would earn me a good grade pretty much regardless of the details, but more than that, I wanted to tackle the topic. I was excited to use my newfound skills to tackle a real problem from my life that profoundly affects people I care about.

This is, at least for me, the point of education. It’s why I go to class, even when I don’t feel well, or have better things to do. I want to learn, so that I can fix the world. And in my experience, when an exciting topic like this appears fully-formed, those are usually the best projects. Because whether or not they wind up getting the best score, they make the work of an assignment fun, and they’re good opportunities to learn something.

Moreover, this enthusiasm shows in the end product. There’s sometimes a trade off if following the thing you’re interested in means bending the criteria of the assignment (see again: twenty-three pages instead of five), but I’ve always found this to be a worthwhile trade off it it means I can give my best effort on something I care about. And I think most teachers feel the same way.

I don’t regret my choice of topic. And understanding that I made them based on what I knew at the time, I don’t regret the decisions I made about my paper. My biggest, and really only, complaint with the end product, is that I overestimated how long five pages was, and had to cut down my writing when I quite would’ve enjoyed expounding further on the results.
Operation Treetopper has accomplished something that I wasn’t sure was possible- I have been able to declare victory for the end of the semester without any lingering make-up assignments, or uncertainty about whether I’m really done. It’s anticlimactic, and a little unreal to me. But it’s the best Christmas gift I could have wished for, and it gives me hope that next year can be even better.

Project Clearinghouse

What’s the value of ten dollars? The question seems obvious. Ten dollars is exactly ten dollars, or a thousand cents. The effect would be much the same as asking how long a meter is.

Except that’s a meaningless tautology, and doesn’t address the core problem. Ten dollars is just a collection of symbols on paper, or more frequently today, a series of numbers on digital records. This would still be true if the United States were on the gold standard, or even used gold coinage directly; gold may restrict the supply of money, the scarcity of which safeguards against the most egregious fluctuations in value, but having money made of shiny metal rather than elaborate paper and plastic sheets, or ones and zeroes does not give it inherent value.

But I digress with my monetary musings. My focus is not on the dollar, but on the ten. What is ten dollars, relative to one, five, or a hundred? All of these are, after all, positive amounts of money which on any given day I would be happy to receive. I could easily spend any of these amounts without much planning. And perhaps most crucially, none of these amounts would make the difference in being able to afford my medication, and hence paying my bills, an activity which happens on the scale of tens of thousands of dollars.

This is, of course, uncoupled from the reality, which is that, whether or not any of those amounts would cover my cost of living entirely, all of them certainly add up, and all need to be accounted for. Losing track of that- losing touch with the value of money as one spends it -is a surefire way to fritter away one’s savings and wind up deep in debt. This maxim remains fundamentally true regardless of the size of one’s own net worth and budget.

Just as I link to think myself intelligent, I like to think myself reasonably adept at money management. After all, with only my $5/month allowance, occasional birthday checks, and sporadic income from babysitting, recycling, and other side ventures, I have managed to amass a nest egg which puts me snugly in the top quartile for net worth in my age group. But this paints a very one-sided picture, particularly given that the prevailing financial strategy which got me to where I am today consists principally of never paying for anything myself for which I can have someone else foot the bill.

As I have mentioned before, our household is chiefly a gift economy, where one’s purchasing power is not so much a matter of labor as social credit. If something is needed, it is bought without question or particular regard for the price. If something is merely wanted, it is considered and debated at length, until either it is bought on some special occasion, or it is forgotten about.

It is expected that in due course each person will be given or will be allowed to purchase out of the common household funds, a certain amount of luxury items or other frivolities. Those who exceed their share, or misbehave, are forbidden from making new purchases, or else receive fewer gifts on the relevant occasions. In comparison to the social credit aspect, the actual dollar price is almost trivial.

The actual finances of the house are handled quietly and efficiently without public discussion. For as much as I know my parents pride themselves on having passed on their frugality and money management skills, I know precious little about the actual financial situation of our household. This creates the awkward situation where money seems to just appear, and expenses charged to credit cards handle themselves.

Naturally, despite the insistence of my parents that I needn’t worry about it, I do keep a budget, meticulously tracking dollars spent, correlating receipts, and ensuring that the bank statements I do see- my personal savings account that I’ve kept since before I could sign my own name -match my own records. But with the stakes only ever as high as the occasional extra milkshake, or upgrade to a larger coffee, this is essentially a kind of pantomime game.

There are two things about this situation that scare me. The first is that a lack of exposure to expenses beyond what can be expressed in playground pocket money terms. I know how much a milkshake costs at the place I usually buy milkshakes, but couldn’t tell you the cost of the groceries that go into making it. I am dimly aware in the abstract that shopping at the grocery store is more cost effective than eating out, but I don’t know what would constitute a bargain in either case. This makes me dangerously vulnerable to price gouging.

I am also concerned that the money I do have saved doesn’t feel real. After all, price has almost never been a primary consideration, and my rigid saving has meant that almost every amount over a hundred dollars has gone into the bank. Though this is obviously the superior financial decision, as in a savings account at least my money can generate interest greater than the dust and lint it accumulates sitting in the house, it also means that I can no longer feel the paper currency in my fingers while spending it, but have to construct an abstraction around digits on a page.

Yes, I can imagine money in terms of the things which I may use it to purchase, but in addition to being merely another layer of abstraction, it is difficult to parse this in a meaningful way. At present there are no expenses, or even products that I feel a particularly pressing need to own, on a scale that is helpful. The primary luxuries I buy for myself are all in the $10-$20 dollar range, and many of these are foodstuffs, which I would buy even if I weren’t financially stable because of my medical diet. Even so, imagining an unusably large number of pizzas is not particularly more helpful than imagining ones and zeroes.

Besides which, it ignores the larger point: what stops me from going out and draining my bank account isn’t strictly frugality so much as social pressure. I’m not afraid of starving because I know that for almost any financial trouble I could get into short of setting out to lose money, my parents will bail me out. And if I was suddenly cut off, the meager sum in my account wouldn’t put a dent in my medical expenses for a single month, so I have very little incentive not to squander it before it gets seized by creditors. Rather, what stops me is that household social credit system; I don’t buy more for myself than I do for others because that would unbalance the whole regime.

What scares me isn’t that I can’t handle today’s financial problems. Rather I am afraid that someday off in the future, as I become responsible for handling my own matters more and more, that I will lose my benchmarks for understanding what purchases are necessary and what justifies what amount of spending, and the taboos that keep me in line today will erode and shatter. Then I will find myself with a lot of ones and zeroes, and lots of ways to spend them, and not a whole lot of idea how to manage them.

At some point after that, I fear, with no firm guidelines and only a vague grasp on what things should cost, I will be adrift without a reference point. And if, on that day, I don’t learn up from down and so forth very quickly, I will get a crash course in finance the hard way- by hitting rock bottom. There is then the risk that I will find myself unable to afford my medical regimen, and will either wind up deep in debt which will take an inordinate amount of time to repay, or suffer serious, possibly even fatal, health effects.

This idea of losing everything, despite my starting advantages, because of something that is intrinsic to others, but which I lack, either due to my disabilities or my unusual upbringing, is one of my greatest recurring fears; as is no longer having the resources to pay for my life support. Now, I don’t expect that this scenario is imminent by any stretch of the imagination.but of late it has begun to seem just a little too believable; just slightly too easily imaginable; for comfort. I could perhaps brush these bothersome anxieties off, but for the increase in rhetoric directed at me to the effect that, at my age and stage in life, I ought start making more moves towards future independence.

Being nothing if not prudent, I have already begun implementing measures to hopefully safeguard against the most deleterious effects of this scenario. To start, I have acquired another credit card from my parents, which I intend to use to build up a credit score with which to acquire a credit card under my own name. I have also opened up a checking account under my own name, through which I intend to centralize more of my finances such that I shall be able to more easily review spending habits, and hopefully expand my current budget from a mere exercise to an actual working financial plan.

For the purposes of this particular project, which I have chosen to call Project Clearinghouse for obvious reasons, I am opting to stick with option that are simplified at the possible expense of some small financial benefit. So, for my checking account, I chose a bank that is well known, widespread, and has plenty of online options over one that might possibly give me a better deal in the short term. The reasoning is twofold: first, that I am trying to set up infrastructure that will work for the next several years, and rather than try to divine the future, it is better to stick with options that allow me that strategic flexibility. Secondly, I am attempting to circumvent a scenario in which I become detached from financial reality, and it strikes me as more likely that this will happen if I am made to navigate a byzantine codex of regulations.

There’s a third reason, and that is that over the past few years, I have begun to realize the extent to which I can get in my own way if I am permitted to overthink things, as is my habit. This analysis paralysis is arguably as great a danger as the possibility that I will neglect planning entirely. Even ignoring the long term, if I were to permit myself to agonize over the minute differences in interest or fees for a week, there is a better than even chance that I would defer any decision for another week to think it over, and so forth.

In any case, what’s done is done. The account is set up, the first checks (despite having now spent as long in the United States as I did in Australia, I am still tempted to refer to them as cheques) have cleared and I have managed to, near as I can tell successfully, enable their mobile app and mobile payment system. I’m not entirely sure how the shift towards online payment and electronic checking, which is being openly encouraged by many of the institutions with which I deal, will impact my own designs, but that’s another topic for another time.

Getting my ATM/debit card activated has proven to be quite the ordeal, with the phone tree system not working, and the human operator to whom I was redirected was locked out of making any changes to my account after I gave my phone number, which despite being the very same number at which I have received from them the security codes to log into their app, and which I am quite positive I put down upon opening my account, did not apparently match their records, and therefore my identity was not proven. I was then told that I would have to proceed to activate my card in person.

I am left hoping that I shall one day look back on these present frustrations as worthwhile and helpful. Since I am undertaking this project not to solve a current ill, but to prevent future ones, I can do no more than guess at which is the best course of action. This is particularly troubling to me, as my track record is severely mixed at best. Nevertheless, it seems like the best course at present.

Projects in Progress

So the other day as I was browsing the Internet in typical fashion, when I came across an embedded YouTube video, which I watched. When I clicked play, I saw, for the first time in about six months, an advertisement. This prompted me to ponder about how having YouTube Red has played out over the past few months. After all, six months is long enough to have perspective, but not so long that one is liable to forget the experience of what came before.

I immensely enjoy having the ability to create playlists that I can download to my phone. I enjoy it more than I thought I would. There is a certain joy in having just the perfect soundtrack for an occasion. So I can have a video game stealth mission soundtrack for prowling the aisles at the supermarket and acquiring the targets from my list, a military training cadence for exercising, the Jeopardy theme for waiting in line, etcetera. Having the proper soundtrack for an activity elevates the experience of it in a way that is difficult to describe in the abstract.

The exclusive content, insofar as I have had occasion to peruse it, has not captured and held my attention. The quality is decent enough; the series are TV quality. But this isn’t necessarily a good thing in my book. I already have access to plenty of TV series; more than I could reasonably watch. I don’t particularly need more series to add to my watch list from YouTube, even if I enjoy the creators behind it.

There is a certain utility in not having to contend with advertisements. It is hard to quantify this aspect, particularly because I do not notice the absence of advertising. Certainly I see far less advertising in total than previously, but so long as I am still connected to television, radio, and so forth, advertising still has a notable presence in my life.

Of course, it’s fair to argue that advertisements in the context of YouTube videos are more impactful, because they are presented when one is actively seeking and watching something rather than merely playing in the background during a scheduled break in program (which in most cases I will try to fast-forward through), and because YouTube advertising is targeted. This plays into a larger theme which has come up repeatedly in my life, regarding the value of my time and attention, through which I have sought to reduce my exposure to advertising.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that although I haven’t grown completely comfortable with paying for YouTube Red, I also haven’t come to regret my purchase. This is about as decisive a conclusion I am likely to come to in the near future.

While I’m on the subject of follow up, I may as well append a couple of remarks about the new year’s resolutions I posted earlier this year. The first resolution, to switch to 24-hour time, is going more or less according to plan. Phone and iPad have both been set to 24-hour display, as has my clock radio. My smart watch doesn’t have an option for 24-hour time, at least not on the watch face I use to display my medical data (needless to say, this oughtn’t be messed with). Aside from that, I have been working studiously to try and adopt the system mentally as well, stopping short from trying to convert in my head.

But of course, that resolution was the easy one; the low-hanging fruit to motivate me to get started down the list. The other ones have been more of a mixed bag. Exercising is, of course, difficult in wintertime; nevertheless I have made some progress. I have not made any sort of progress on sorting out my excess clothing, but then again, I expected that this would take some time, and I’ve been preoccupied with other matters.

2018 Resolution #2

2018 Resolution #2: Remove unused clothes

At present, I have an overabundance of clothes. In my case I define overabundance as having reached a point at which some 65% of my clothes have not been worn in six months, and some 35% have not been worn in a year. On the one hand this statistic is slightly misleading, as most of that 35% are clothes have never been properly catalogued and entered into my organizational system in the first place, probably because they were given to me in a large bundle all at once, and I simply never got around to sorting them, because I never found myself wanting for anything from those particular bundles.

Other times it is because The clothes no longer quite fit me comfortably, or I have simply not had occasion to wear them, or that the clothes are not even mine, but merely reside under my jurisdiction because on the day that specific item needed to be stowed away, I had space where others did not. Consequently I have acquired several stacks of clothing and apparel in closets and against walls.

This problem is exacerbated by the nature of our household’s gift economy, which is such that clothes which survive to no longer fit me are given to by brother, who has much the same problem, as he has clothes coming in both from gifts, same as I do, and from me. So in order to clear the backlog in my room, there has to be room in my brother’s room, and so on.

This task does not represent a terribly large physical difficulty, nor a particularly prolonged period of execution that would necessitate a major time commitment. It does however represent a challenge of both logistics and cooperation, in that it requires several parties to work on the same page.

The Lego Census

So the other day I was wondering about the demographics of Lego mini figures. I’m sure we’re all at least vaguely aware of the fact that Lego minifigs tend to be, by default, adult, male, and yellow-skinned. This wasn’t terribly worthy of serious thought back when Lego had only a handful of different minifigure designs existed. Yet nowadays Lego has thousands, if not millions of different minifigure permutations. Moreover, the total number of minifigures in circulation is set to eclipse the number of living humans within a few years.

Obviously, even with a shift towards trying to be more representative, the demographics of Lego minifigures are not an accurate reflection of the demographics of humankind. But just how out of alignment are they? Or, to ask it another way, could the population of a standard Lego city exist in real life without causing an immediate demographic crisis?

This question has bugged me enough that I decided to conduct an informal study based on a portion of my Lego collection, or rather, a portion of it that I reckon is large enough to be vaguely representative of a population. I have chosen to conduct my counts based on the central district of the Lego city that exists in our family basement, on the grounds that it includes a sizable population from across a variety of different sets.

With that background in mind, I have counted roughly 154 minifigures. The area of survey is defined as the city central district, which for our purposes is defined by the largest tables with the greatest number of buildings and skyscrapers, and so presumably the highest population density.

Because Lego minifigures don’t have numerical ages attached to them, I counted ages by dividing minifigures into four categories. The categories are: Children, Young Adults, Middle Aged, and Elderly. Obviously these categories are qualitative and subject to some interpretation. Children are fairly obvious for their different sized minifigures. An example of adult categories follows.

The figure on the left would be a young adult. The one in the middle would be classified as middle aged, and the one on the right, elderly.

Breakdown by age

Children (14)
Lego children are the most distinct category because, in addition to childish facial features and clothes, they are given shorter leg pieces. This is the youngest category, as Lego doesn’t include infant Lego minifigures in their sets. I would guess that this age includes years 5-12.

Young Adults (75)
Young adults encompasses a fairly wide range, from puberty to early middle age. This group is the largest, partially because it includes the large contingent of conscripts serving in the city. An age range would be roughly 12-32.

Middle Aged (52)
Includes visibly older adults that do not meet the criteria for elderly. This group encompasses most of the city’s administration and professionals.

Elderly (13)
The elderly are those that stand out for being old, including those with features such as beards, wrinkled skin, or off-color hair.

Breakdown by industry

Second is occupations. Again, since minifigures cant exactly give their own occupations, and since most jobs happen indoors where I can’t see, I was forced to make some guesses based on outfits and group them into loose collections.

27 Military
15 Government administration
11 Entertainment
9 Law enforcement
9 Transport / Shipping
9 Aerospace industries
8 Heavy industry
6 Retail / services
5 Healthcare
5 Light Industry

An unemployment rate would be hard to gauge, because most of the time the unemployment rate is adjusted to omit those who aren’t actively seeking work, such as students, retired persons, disabled persons, homemakers, and the like. Unfortunately for our purposes, a minifigure who is transitionally unemployed looks pretty much identical to one who has decided to take an early retirement.

What we can take a stab at is a workforce participation rate. This is a measure of what percentage of the total number of people eligible to be working are doing so. So, for our purposes, this means tallying the total number of people assigned jobs and dividing by the total number of people capable of working, which we will assume means everyone except children. This gives us a ballpark of about 74%, decreasing to 68% if we exclude military to look only at the civilian economy. Either of these numbers would be somewhat high, but not unexplainably so.

Breakdown by sex

With no distinction between the physical form of Lego bodies, the differences between sexes in minifigure is based purely on cosmetic details such as hair type, the presence of eyelashes, makeup, or lipstick on a face, and dresses. This is obviously based on stereotypes, and makes it tricky to tease apart edge cases. Is the figure with poorly-detailed facial features male or female? What about that faceless conscript marching in formation with their helmet and combat armor? Does dwelling on this topic at length make me some kind of weirdo?

The fact that Lego seems to embellish characters that are female with stereotypical traits suggests that the default is male. Operating on this assumption gives you somewhere between 50 and 70 minifigures with at least one distinguishing female trait depending on how particular you get with freckles and other minute facial details.

That’s a male to female ratio somewhere between 2.08:1 and 1.2:1. The latter would be barely within the realm of ordinary populations, and even then would be highly suggestive of some kind of artificial pressure such as sex selective abortion, infanticide, widespread gender violence, a lower standard of medical care for girls, or some kind of widespread exposure, whether to pathogens or pollutants, that causes a far higher childhood fatality rate for girls than would be expected. And here you were thinking that a post about Lego minifigures was going to be a light and gentle read.

The former ratio is completely unnatural, though not completely unheard of in real life under certain contrived circumstances: certain South Asian and Middle Eastern countries have at times had male to female ratios of as high as two owing to the presence of large numbers of guest workers. In such societies, female breadwinners, let alone women traveling alone to foreign countries to send money home, is unheard of.

Such an explanation might be conceivable given a look at the lore of the city. The city is indeed a major trade port and center of commerce, with a non-negligible transient population, and also hosts a sizable military presence. By a similar token, I could simply say that there are more people that I’m not counting hiding inside all those skyscrapers that make everything come out even. Except this kind of narrative explanation dodges the question.

The strait answer is that, no, Lego cities are not particularly accurate reflections of our real life cities. This lack of absolute realism does not make Lego bad toys. Nor does it detract from their value as an artistic and storytelling medium; nor either the benefits for play therapy for patients affected with neuro-cognitive symptoms, my original reason for starting my Lego collection.

Too Many Tabs Open

It occurs to me that I don’t really have a quantitative, non-subjective metric for how much stress I’m under these days. I recognize that short of filling out a daily questionnaire, I’m not going to have a truly objective assessment of how I’m doing. Even the most detailed questionnaire is limited. Even so, it would be nice to have a yardstick, so to speak, to judge against.

For most of the people I know who have such a yardstick, it tends to be some kind of addiction or vice which they fall back on in difficult times. With the possible exception of chocolate, which I do occasionally use as a pick me up, but also indulge in semi-regularly because I see no point in denying myself enjoyment in moderation, I don’t believe that I have any such addictions. Nor are any of my vices, or at least the ones that I am consciously aware of, particularly correlated with my mood. I am just as likely to buy an expensive Lego set, over-salt my food, snap at people, and become distracted by side ventures when I am happy as when I am sad.

Previously, my yardstick was how many assignments I am working on. While it was never a perfect correlation, as obviously even before I graduated, there were ample things outside of school which also brought my stress, but it was something that was easy enough to track for a ballpark view. The correlation looked something like this:

Amount of Stress versus Number of assignments.

Now, however, I have no assignments, and hence, no yardstick. This might not be a problem, except that, in my goal of continual self-improvement, it is necessary to have, if not an accurate, than at least a consistent, assessment of how I am doing relative to how I have done in the past. Thus, I have cobbled together an ad-hoc assessment which I am hoping will give me something a little more concrete to work with than my own heuristic guesses. Here’s my formula.

Add 5 points for each app running in the background
Add 5 points for each tab open in safari
Add 1 point for each of note that was edited in the last week
Add 3 additional points if any of those were edited between 1:00am and 11:00am
Add 1 point for each note that’s a blog post, project, checklist, or draft communique
Add 5 additional points for any of those that really should have been done a week ago
Subtract 3 points for each completed checklist
Subtract 3 points for each post that’s in the blog queue
Add 3 points for every post that you’ve promised to write but haven’t gotten around to
Add 1 point for every war song, video game or movie soundtrack you’ve listened to in the last 24 hours. 
Add 10 points if there’s something amiss with the medical devices

Doing this right now nets me around 240 points. I would ballpark an average day at around 120-170 points. Admittedly this isn’t exactly statistically rigorous, but it does give me a vaguely scientific way to measure a vague feeling that has been building, and which I feel has come to a head in the last few days. Not a sense of being overwhelmed per se, but rather a feeling that precedes that. A feeling that I have too many things running in tandem, all occupying mental space and resources. A feeling of having too many unfinished notes, too many works-in-progress, and too many tabs open concurrently.

You see, despite my aversion to busywork, I also enjoy the state of being busy. Having an interesting and engaging project or three to work on gives me a sense of direction and purpose (or more cynically, distracts me from all the parts of my existence that bring me misery). Having things to do, places to go, and people to see is a way for me to feel that I am contributing, that I am playing a role, and that I am important. The fact that I need to rush between places, while physiologically tiring and logistically annoying, is also an indication that my time is sufficiently valued that I need not waste it. This is a feeling that I thrive on, and have since childhood.

I am told from my high school economics class that this kind of mindset and behavior often appears in entrepreneurial figures, which I suppose is a good thing, though if this is true, it also probably increases my risk of bankruptcy and the related risks of entrepreneurship. Nevertheless, my tendency towards always trying to be doing something both productive and interesting does seem to be at least moderately effective at spawning novel ideas, and pushing me to trying them at least far enough to see whether they are workable.

It has also gotten me to a point where I have far too many topics occupying space in my mind to properly focus on any of them. Rather than wait until I am well and truly spread too thin, I have decided to try and nip this problem in the bud.

So here’s the plan:

First, I’m going to put a number of projects in stasis. This isn’t “putting them on the back burner” as in my book that usually means keeping all the files active, which means I still see them and thing about them, and the whole point of this is to make it easier to focus on the projects that I actually want to complete soon. I mean I am going to consign those plans to the archives, indefinitely, with no concrete plan to bring them back out. If they become relevant again, then I might bring them back, or start over from scratch.

Second, I’m going to push in the next few days to knock a bunch of low hanging fruit off my list. These are little things like wrapping up blog posts, finalizing my Halloween costume, and a couple other miscellaneous items. This means that there will be a flurry of posts over the next few days. Possibly even a marathon!

All of this will hopefully serve to get, or rather, to keep, things on track. October is coming to a close, and November, which has always been a historically busy month, promises to be even more exciting.

I will add one final, positive note on this subject. While I may feel somewhat overwhelmed by all of the choices I have found in my new life free of school, I am without a doubt happier, certainly than I was over the last two years, and quite possibly over the last decade. Not everything is sunshine and lollipops, obviously, and my health will fairly well make sure it never is. But I can live with that. I can live with being slightly overwhelmed, so long as the things I’m being overwhelmed with are also making me happy.