travel – Renaissance Guy

Walking Down Main Street, USA

I was at Disney World recently. I’ve been to Disney world many, many times over the last decade and a half. Not that long in the scheme of things, I grant you, but long enough to have an impression and an opinion on how things ought to be. Enough to recognize the difference between when Disney lives up to their advertising, and when it falls short. This last trip, it seemed to fall short.

Unlike other times where some catastrophe has wrecked part of my trip, there wasn’t a singular issue. Rather, it was the collective effect of many little issues. Things like “Bell Services was slow” or “the app was buggy” or “there weren’t enough servers working the kiosks.” Little annoyances that, individually excusable, collectively undermine the experience. For another vacation, I might not even mention them. After all, these things happen. But Disney advertises itself as being a cut above the rest precisely because it supposedly smooths these issues over through its trademark pixie dust and monopolistic panopticon of an area the size of Manhattan.

The blame, according to people who follow Disney religiously, lies with the new executives. In trying to squeeze more profit from the parks, they have stripped things down to the bare bones. Cast members are overworked, overstretched, and underpaid, and the result is burnout and absenteeism. Thus, the usual layer of pixie dust becomes a bit spottier. It’s a compelling story, which is part of why I doubt it. It’s a little too quaint, a little too storybook, with a simple villain making bad choices, to explain systemic breakdowns.

Of course, that doesn’t make the story untrue. Disney has been cutting costs. Like any large institution, there is a measure of redundancy within the organization, at which the new executives seem to be taking aim. The new thinking seems to be that theme parks can still sell merchandise without needing a gift shop at every ride, so a lot of shops are being closed and the workers reassigned. But what happens when you keep cutting? The rides still function, but the lines are longer. The cast members, who are covering more people, are just a little less bubbly. Luggage takes a little longer to arrive. Food is just a little less fresh. The shelves aren’t restocked as quickly.

But if the answer is Disney’s CEOs, why is the same true everywhere across the country? If the reason for so many shops at Disney’s Hollywood Studios being closed is Disney corporate strategy, why are shops closing in my hometown? Why are the ingredients at my local grocery store less fresh, and the mail running late, and the store shelves restocking so slowly? You could say something like “supply chain issues” or “worker shortages” but really this only pushes the problem back a step. Why is the supply chain struggling now? Where have all the workers gone?

What seems more remarkable is that no one wants to mention the obvious answer. We’re in the midst of a pandemic that killed more than a million Americans before many states just stopped counting. Millions more have been sickened, and are unable to work to the same capacity. Others are restricted from working in order to support people in the former group. And this is only the disruption to the United States, not even touching the dislocation caused by disruption to global supply chains and migration.

The idea that society- any society -can shrug off upwards of a million excess deaths and millions more disabled, without any kind of social or economic disruption, is a fantasy far beyond anything at Disney World. The idea that workers will be just as eager to compete for the same wages, despite the increased danger of infectious disease, coupled with the pressure of having to cover for sickened or dead colleagues, likewise ignores the basic tenets of supply and demand. When this happened during the bubonic plague, it was the beginning of the end of feudalism, as high-demand workers gained more leverage and began to upend traditional hierarchies. The decades after the 1918 Influenza Pandemic were a high point of labor unrest and economic turmoil in the United States, which only began to dissipate after the New Deal fundamentally restructured the American economy.

Disney continues, as it long has, to be a microcosm of American society at large. Price hikes, staff shortages, shorter business hours, longer lines, are all making themselves known. And likewise, some of the early attempts to grapple with the issue are on display. In response to a more competitive labor market, in addition to tightening time off policies, Disney has been forced to look to new demographics, expanding and accelerating its college recruitment program. At the same time, since it cannot afford to lose the talent it has, the company has been compelled to become more inclusive in its rhetoric.

Which, if you consider the ongoing spat between the right wing Florida state government and Disney, is hilarious. It is the head-in-the-sand public health policies, coupled with xenophobic protectionist immigration controls that have pushed Disney to embrace a more liberal political stance to attract talent. If this pattern ripples out to the wider American economy, and without aggressive government intervention in the labor market and public health, it almost certainly will, it will be a reversal of fortunes worthy of the Disney storytelling tradition.

Packing Troubles

Sometimes I am left to wonder whether I might not secretly be a closet fashionista, based mostly on how long it takes me to pick outfits for important events and while packing. Well, I say outfits. Mostly I mean t-shirts, since that’s really the only part of my default outfit that changes.

I don’t think this is the case. I think if I secretly cared about fashion, I would be able to read a magazine about the subject without my eyes glazing over, and would put more stock into outfits and appearance instead of just one piece. I also reckon I would feel more compelled to care for my hair and skin beyond the bare minimum of hygiene.

More to the point, I think I would have more of a sense of style. To be fair, I have a decent enough idea of what clothes I personally think look good on others, and I have acquired, through years of art classes and amateur illustration, a sense of composition that can be pressed into service to call together an outfit which I enjoy, but I lack the sort of intuitive sense of capital-F Fashion that naturally occurs to me for things like physics, medicine, or language.

I can mimic and iterate on styles I have seen, and I can cobble together styles through experimentation, but I cannot come up with a design or outfit that is, or better yet will be, trendy any more than I can predict tomorrow’s weather in a random city without consulting meteorological data.

All of this puts me squarely in the middle of the pack, particularly among my male peers, and none of this is news to me. I continue not to care what is hip and happening any further than the broad trends of the decade, which I heed only insofar as they permit me to carry on without confusing passers by. But if I do not care about fashion or style, why do I care about which t-shirts I bring on vacation? Why does the debate between iron man and Loki t-shirts keep me awake while I am trying to sleep the night before my departure?

The reason, I think, is that while I really don’t care very much about fashion itself, I do care somewhat about impressions. I care a great deal about communication. I value my ability to communicate above most else, and I endeavor to make what I am able to communicate count.

Whether fashion is closer to a direct form of communication, like hand gestures or literature, or the kind of cyclical competitive art that is mostly contained to others who practice it, fashion choices can and do serve to communicate. I studied this while in art class. Clothing is one of the best and most enduring examples of color psychology at work. Despite varying by culture and region, everyone knows that a red cocktail dress communicates a very different message than a conservative black dress.

It seems only natural, then, that I incorporate this means into my message. There are just two problems. First, as previously mentioned, I lack the intuitive grasp of fashion that I would require to communicate with the same level of subtlety and finesse with which I endeavor to wield language. To me, perhaps the only fear greater than not being able to communicate is to have my message be misinterpreted against me; to come across as hostile when I mean to be peaceful, or helpless when I seek to project strength. So I keep my arsenal limited- I have fairly normal standards for trousers, footwear, jackets, and so forth, and concentrate on the one or two elements that I am well versed in- t-shirts with strong, simple color schemes and intuitable messages.

Second, and this is where my indecision starts to truly become self-defeating: frequently, I do not know what my message will be. For all my studying of colors and shades, for all my collections of t-shirts with subtle variations on common themes, for all of my trying, I remain unable to predict the future. I can’t predict how I will be feeling, and whether or not I will feel sociable (brighter colors with bold features) or more introverted (muted colors and simpler designs). I can’t know whom I might meet, and what impression I shall want to leave them with.

So this, like so many of my problems, comes back to trying to divine the future. If I meet person C, and become engrossed in subject Y, is it more likely that I shall take position Δ (delta) and need to persuade them by using shirt א (aleph), or the opposite?

The answer, of course, is that I don’t know. I can’t know. I am asked to choose a vocabulary without even knowing with whom I will be speaking, much less what I shall want to say. It’s no wonder this makes me anxious.

The Medevac Threshold

There’s a trope in stories called the Godzilla Threshold. This usually comes up in large-scale stories, the kind where you can expect a scene of leaders pouring over maps or pacing a high-tech command room, and is more common in action, in particular disaster, movies, but it comes up other places as well. The Godzilla Threshold is the point at which all bets are off, and any measure, even releasing Godzilla, in the hopes that he will fight the new monster attacking the city, is justified.

This concept, and variations of it, come up all the time. In military strategy we have tactical nuclear weapons, which are employed when the cost of an enemy victory would be worse than nuclear escalation. In statistics, we routinely put dollar values on human lives and wellbeing to measure against other lives, or more frequently, to determine the point at which the cost of additional safety measures are more trouble to implement than whatever harm they’d prevent.

Are there other ways to stop the raging monster besides releasing Godzilla? Probably. Almost certainly. But all of those plans suffer from some variation of being more expensive, more trouble to implement, or they would’ve had to include long term planning and investment that started long before the monster arrived.

So here’s the thing about traveling with chronic health issues: there’s a very good chance that things will go catastrophically wrong. I never know if or when things will go wrong, only that they might. I have some idea of how they might go wrong, and knowing this, I have some limited idea of what would need to be done in those emergencies. I can’t know if or when, or which way things will go wrong, but I can make some contingency plans for the likeliest scenarios. This is why I always carry a full backpack within arm’s reach, equipped with sufficient variety of contingency supplies that it has been playfully dubbed by friends as “the Mary Poppins Bag”.

But my preparative efforts have to stop somewhere. At some point, trying to pack and plan on the assumption that anything that could go wrong will crosses the thin line from preparedness to paranoia, and more pertinently, becomes logistically impractical. At some point, I run out of space in my suitcase for backup prescriptions and redundant syringes. And long before that point, the extra burden, both literal and idiomatic, of trying to outwit the fates becomes simply too cumbersome to achieve anything of meaning.

After all, if I have more migraines than I packed medication for, then it’s pretty obvious that my day is already ruined, regardless of whether or not I have the medication. Similarly, if my life support device, my backup device, and the failsafe delivery mechanism, all get broken, it’s unlikely having syringes to fall back on are going to let me just go about my business. Far more likely would be a scenario where all of the above are destroyed by the same disaster, and then all I’ve accomplished is wasting the cost of syringes in addition.

There is no fix for fate deciding that today is not my day, and at a certain point, the amount of effort to salvage my plans by myself start to exceed the amount of grief that I would find from simply giving up and seeking outside help. I call this threshold the medevac threshold, because often I have to consider this in the context of packing for a cruise, where the only option for outside help may well be having a helicopter fly out and pick me up off my vacation, at great effort and exorbitant expense. But really this can apply to walking into the ER, or even to a pharmacy to get a refill.

Obviously, where this threshold is depends on the specifics. The namesake example of having a rescue helicopter fly out to intercept my cruise ship, like a scene out of The Hunt for Red October, presumably weaving through gale force winds and dodging lighting strikes, because of course that’s how it happens, is somewhat on the extreme end of possibilities. Even so, though it would certainly be a contender for most action-thriller-esque moment in my life, it wouldn’t be an automatic winner, which is, I think, a good reminder that even the worst case scenario isn’t that bad.

Keeping this in mind is one of the things that keeps me from second guessing my packing ad infinitum. Bearing the medevac threshold in mind is a good way to keep perspective. I am packing this week, and balancing between the need to be prepared and the need to avoid overstuffing the car is as challenging as ever, and so I remind myself that, in fact, failure, though it may not be pleasant or desirable, is an option.

Time Flies

I am presently strapped to a metal cylinder hurtling through the air at a high enough speed that the ground is far below us. This is very fascinating by itself. But what is more remarkable, at least where I’m concerned, is that, owing to my direction of speed relative to the rotation of the earth, I’m going to arrive at my destination having spent less time traveling than I did on the plane.

Some back of the envelope math, and a bit of fiddling around with simulations suggests that it is (barely) within the technical specifications of the aircraft I’m on to fly fast enough to theoretically arrive before I left, but this would require ideal conditions.

So, everyone else would have to get off the plane and take their luggage with them, and the plane would have to be fueled up to maximum capacity to allow it to burn continuously at full throttle. Also, the ballistic trajectory which I calculate would be best for maximizing speed and minimizing air resistance would jeopardize cabin pressure, risk burnout in the engines, and break several laws and treaties. And the fuel usage would mean we’d be gliding in for landing, that is, assuming the aircraft didn’t break up reentering the troposphere. All things considered, it’d probably be simpler and safer just to find a faster plane.

I’m not technically time traveling. Well, technically technically I am, but only in the deeply unsatisfying way that I’m being pushed forward in time at a rate of about one second per second. This is slightly different from on the ground, because of my velocity and distance from the earth’s center of gravity. The difference isn’t really meaningful to humans, and any relative advantage I might gain from moving faster through space, and ever so marginally slower in time (or technically, altering my velocity through spacetime in a way that temporarily favors space over time… you know what, just go get a physics textbook) will be cancelled out by the marginal increased long term risk due to radiation exposure.

Any real time change is because of time zones. Time zones are in a weird place between being arbitrary, since they’re ultimately human drawn lines on a map, and having some higher relevance, since they do, to a degree, reflect the earth’s orbit. One isn’t really time traveling, though they are in a sense switching around the hours of the day.

But even though it all comes out even, it is still meaningful, at least in human terms. Not all hours in the day are equal, and one extra daylight hour might mean as much as two hours asleep. Where those hours fall in the day matters a great deal, as does how they are spent. Indeed, Einstein used this notion to help illustrate the concept of relative time in general, saying “When you sit with a nice girl for two hours you think it’s only a minute, but when you sit on a hot stove for a minute you think it’s two hours. That’s relativity.”

In this instance, as I am flying west in the morning towards a destination I am excited about, the rearranging works in my favor, giving me an extra hour to adjust after landing, and perhaps more relevant to my case, making my late-to-bed, late-to-rise sleep schedule seem more normal in comparison.

There’s another quote along similar lines that I like, usually attributed to Vladimir Lenin: “There are decades when nothing happens. Then there are weeks when decades happen.” I’ve heard this quote thrown around a lot lately to describe the feeling of political and social upheaval, but I have always felt that it applied to me on a deeply personal level. Specifically, how it applies to my patterns of activity.

It is no secret that I tend towards being a homebody. This is not because I spend most of my time at home; this is misleading in two respects. Firstly, because I do in fact leave the house regularly, and secondly because with the modern internet, staying in the same physical vicinity is becoming increasingly common. Rather, I am a homebody because I am not a consistent participant in society, online or off. I do not go on social media, I do not go shopping, I do not discuss current events with my peers or participate in contemporaneity in any meaningful way.

Or at least, I do not do so consistently to be more than a cameo in most other people’s narrative. To explain in detail why this is true would mean repeating the points which I have already expounded upon at length. Suffice it to say that between my disabilities and my disposition, participation is far more difficult than it might appear.

This means that the few occasions when I can participate without hinderance are all the more valuable. An extra hour of time like this is worth a hundred hours sick in bed.

Wanted: Backpack

Job opening: Backpack, medium to large, willing to work long hours in rugged and varied environments to replace aging current backpack. Benefits few, but travel is included, and mandatory. Candidates must include:

Minimum two separate pockets

At least one water bottle pouch capable of holding at least one standard sized 24oz bottle without breaking or losing bottle

At least two comfortable straps, capable of being adjusted to fit other wearers, in line with orthopedic recommendations

Ability to be easily crammed into small spaces without damage to backpack or its contents. Examples of spaces to be crammed into include, but are not limited to: lockers, x-ray bins, underneath airplane seats, underneath tables while fully loaded.

Easily able to be opened and searched by hand, or scanned by x-ray.

Resistance to dirt, dust, pollen, sand, sunlight, and water.

Must conform to FAA, TSA, and airline personal item standards.

Candidates will be tested on a variety of metrics. Preference will be given to brands that carry a long warranty period. Although no specific color is required, the requirement to work in all weather conditions means that backpacks which have a high albedo (i.e. light colors) will be preferred.

Life Changing?

What does it take to change a life? To have such an impact on another person that it changes their default behaviors and life trajectory, even if subtly? Certainly it can be argued that it takes very little, since our behaviors are always being influenced by our surroundings. But what about a long-term difference? What does it take to really change someone?

The year 2007 was perhaps the most important and most impactful of my life. I say that 2007 was the year that my childhood ended. This may be a slight over exaggeration, but not by much. It was a year of drama and trauma, of new highs and extreme lows. In my personal history, the year 2007 stands out like 1914 in European history. It is a date I measure things from, even more so than my birthday.

That year contained both the best and worst days of my life to date. The worst day, July 20th, 2007, and the bad days that followed it, I have already written about. But what about the best day? What happened on that day?

January 5th, 2007 had all the hallmarks of a good day. I was on school holiday- summer holiday, in fact, since the Australian school calendar follows Australian seasons so that our main break comes around Christmas -and I was traveling. Being ever-curious and ever-precocious, I loved traveling, especially by plane.

All the mechanisms of air travel fascinated me: the terminals, with their lights and signs and displays, acting as literal gateways to every far flung exotic locale on the planet. Customs and security, with its fancy DHS eagles, and its sense of officiality, and finality, advertising that it once you cross this line, you have crossed some important threshold from which you could not simply return, as if somewhere, someone reading your story would be holding their breath while turning the page. And of course, the planes themselves, which not only seemed to defy physics in their flight, not only liked the world together, but did so in such comfort and luxury.

That day, we started early from the family farm in Indiana to the Indianapolis Airport, via a road that had enough dips and bumps that we called it affectionately “the rollercoaster road”. We arrived at Indianapolis Airport for our short flight to transfer at my all time favorite airport, Chicago O’hare, which I adore for its dinosaur skeleton, its Vienna beef hot dogs, and its inter-concourse tunnel, where I would stare up in wonder from the moving walkway at the ceiling light display. I was told that the abstract neon colors were meant to represent the aurora, but for my part, having seen both, I have always thought the lights at O’hare to be more impressive than the aurora.

We arrived in Orlando at about 8:00pm, which, to my then childish mind, was a kind of magical hour. Things only happened after 8:00 on special occasions- watching New Year’s fireworks or space shuttle launches on television, calls from relatives in different time zones. After 8:00pm was the time of big and exceptional things, and the fact that we were only now boarding the bus from the airport to Disney World only seemed to vindicate the feeling I had woken up with that morning that it was going to be a great day.

Much of the resort was already closed by the time we arrived. But even then, there was much excitement to be had. We found our rooms, and as we wound our way around the Port Orleans Resort, I remember drinking in every detail of the scenery and design, and thinking to myself about how much attention and intent must have gone onto adding all the little details and embellishments. At this time I used to enjoy drawing, but whenever I did, I would become obsessed with details and embellishments. I would draw an airplane, and become fixated on the precise curvature of the engines, the alignment of the ailerons, the number of windows depending on whether it was a Boeing 747 like the one we took to San Francisco or an Embraer like the one we took…

You get the idea. Details were important to me. For me to see that someone had paid enough attention to the details to add all these little decorative Easter eggs, like hidden Mickeys, or a plastic frog on a Lilly pad in a small pond beside the concrete path. To see these little acknowledgments of my attentiveness told me that other people had been paying at least as much attention as I had, which put me at ease, and made me feel welcome and safe, at a time when I had spent most of my life as a foreigner, and a great deal of my time at school being bullied.

Thus assured that I was in a place that was safe and well designed by people who thought like I did, I let loose, skipping happily along as I never did in school for fear of being mocked, and sang songs I had memorized from the inflight children’s “radio station” (which was actually just a recording loop) about fishing worms, the state of Michigan, and carps in tubs.

The next day, I was reunited with my Best Friend in the Whole Entire World, whom I knew from Australia, but who had recently moved to Denver. It was the first time we had seen each other since he had moved away. I had missed his going away party because, in what now seems like a foreshadowing of what was to come, I had been in the hospital with Acute Pan Sinusitis, and after having my immune system wiped out by the drugs, was stuck in protective quarantine.

Together, we tore up the parks, going on rides and eating Mickey out of house and home. This last point proved to be dire foreshadowing, as looking back I can say it was the first time that the earliest symptoms of the medical calamity that would consume my life just six months later were indisputably noticeable. In fact, the symptoms of hunger and thirst were so bad that they caused problems trying to eat off the Disney meal plan. It was the only bittersweet thing about the trip- that it was the last great experience of my life unmarried by the specter of disability and looming death. But that’s a story for another time.

So, back to the question at hand: what does it take to change a life? Was my trip life-changing? Did it change who I am as a person, or alter my future behavior or trajectory in a meaningful way? Hard to say. Despite picking a solidly philosophical topic I’m not willing to sit down for the requisite hours of navel gazing to try and formulate the probable alternate histories if that trip hadn’t gone just so.

It’s tempting, then, to brush it off and say that even though I definitely see that event as one of the high points of my existence, that it never changed who I am at my core. It certainly didn’t change the course of events that were about to happen, which were in retrospect so obviously already in motion. It would be easy to extrapolate that the whole event had no effect on me, but for the fact that I know of a counterexample.

The day itself, more than a decade in the past, has gotten old enough in my mind that parts of it have started to fade around the edges. I don’t, for example, remember which side of the two connecting rooms my brother and I slept in, and which side my parents slept in. The parts I do remember are as much vaguely connected vignettes as they are a consistent narrative, and correlate more to the things that struck me as important at the time than what might be important to the story now. Hence why I can’t tell you what rides we went on, but I can describe the exact configuration of the twisty straw that I had with my milkshake.

One of the things that I remember clearest about that day, one of the things that to this day will occasionally interrupt my stream of consciousness, was the in flight radio. In particular, I recall there being several songs about environmental themes. And I recall sitting there, consciously rethinking my point of view. My train of thought went something like this: The reason I’m hearing this song, which, though decent, isn’t artistically great, is because it’s about a cause, which is clearly important to whomever is picking songs to play.

The kind of causes that get songs written about them, and, despite artistic shortcomings, played constantly at children, are ones that are important to society at large: learning one’s ABCs, being prepared for emergencies, and national crises like a world war (Over There) or pandemic (there was a song about washing one’s hands that was circulated during the Mad Cow scare). That I am hearing this song indicates that it is viewed not just as something of idle interest, but as a crisis of immediate concern.

It was at that moment that I remember mentally upgrading the issue of environmentalism from something that I was merely passively sympathetic towards, to something which I actively supported where possible. Hearing that song on that trip changed my life. Or if it is melodramatic to say that hearing a song single handed lyrics changed my life trajectory, then at least it is accurate to say that hearing those songs at that time provoked me into a change in attitude and behavior.

Would I still have had such a moment of revelation on a different day? Probably, but I doubt I would have remembered it. But as to the question of what it takes to change a life, we are forced to consider how much effort it took for me to hear those songs. There is no good answer here. On the one hand, it took a massive amount of societal machinery to record, license, and select the song, and then see that it was played on the flight that I happened to be on. To do this purposely would require a massive conspiracy.

On the other hand, it requires no small number of miracles from a huge number of contributors to get me the iPad I’m writing on, and the web server I’m posting to, and massive amounts of effort to maintain the global system of communications that allow you to view my words, and yet I’d hardly argue that my writing here is the pinnacle of all of society thus far. Perhaps so, in a strictly epistemological, navel-gazing sense that is largely meaningless for the purpose of guiding future individual actions. But realistically, my authorial exercise here is only slightly more effort than recording my unpolished stream of consciousness.

The truth is, even when I can identify what it has taken in the past to change my own life, I can’t extrapolate that knowledge into a meaningful rule. It’s clearly not that hard, given that it’s happened so many times before, and on such flimsy pretenses. But it also clearly can’t be that easy, or else everyone would already be their best self.

People have in the past attempted to compliment me by insinuating that my writing, or my speeches at events, or my support, have changed their lives. Despite their intentions at flattery, I have generally been disinclined to believe them, on the grounds that, though I may take pride that my writing is decent, it is certainly not of a caliber great enough to be called life-changing. But upon reflection, perhaps it doesn’t need to be. Perhaps the bar isn’t nearly that high. Perhaps, I venture to hope, one does not need to be perfect to change another’s life for the better.

The Debriefing

Earlier this month was another disability conference. Another exchange of ideas, predictions, tips, tricks, jokes, and commiseration. Another meticulously apportioned, carb-counted buffet of food for thought, and fodder for posts.

As my comrades working on the scientific research tell me, two points of data is still just anecdotal. Even so, this is the second time out of two conferences that I’ve come back with a lot to say. Last time, these mostly revolved around a central theme of sorts, enough so that I could structure them in a sequential series. This time there were still lots of good ideas, but they’re a little more scattershot, and harder to weave into a consistent narrative. So I’m going to try something different, again.

I’m starting a new category of semi-regular posts, called “The Debriefing” (name subject to change), to be denoted with a special title, and possibly fancy graphics. These will focus on topics which were points of discussion or interest at conferences, events, and such, that aren’t part of another series, and which have managed to capture my imagination. Topics which I’m looking forward to (hopefully) exploring include things like:

– The moral hazard of hoping for a cure: how inspiring hope for a cure imminently, or at least in a patient’s lifetime, can have perverse effects on self-care

– Controversy over medical identification: the current advice on the subject, and the legal, political, social, and psychological implications of following it

– Medical disclosure solidarity: suggestions for non-disabled job applicants to help strengthen the practical rights of disabled coworkers

– The stigma of longevity: when and why the chronically ill don’t go to the doctor

– Why I speak: how I learned to stop worrying and love public speaking

At least a couple of these ideas are already in the pipe, and are coming up in the next few days. The rest, I plan to write at some point. I feel reasonably confident listing these topics, despite my mixed record on actually writing the things I say I’m going to write mostly because these are all interesting topics that keep coming up, and given that I plan to attend several more conferences and events in the near future, even if I don’t get them soon, I fully expect they will come up again.

Lost in Times Square

Times Square is a weird place to wind up by accident. You take a single wrong turn, notice that the amount of billboards and lights is much higher than usual, even for New York, and you look up and around you and realize, wait, is that the flatiron building? Like, the actual one that they have Lego sets of and stuff. It’s hard to tell with all the advertising. It’s hard to focus on anything with all the advertising. But that’s part of the aesthetic, right? You can’t tell for sure because it’s late, but the tourists taking pictures makes you pretty sure you’ve just walked into Times Square by accident.

And then suddenly it feels like you’ve stepped onto a stage for a play that you are not in, and the stage freight of being in the middle of the everything unprepared sets in, and you work to make your exit as quickly and nonchalantly as possible, but you snap a few pictures on the way out, because you’re not sure you’ll be here again soon, and it’s one of those places that kind of demands to be photographed. And you manage to escape just before the full scale sensory overload sets in, before your brain can really process what’s happened.

And as you walk away quickly, but not so quickly as to look suspicious to the visible counterterrorism police presence, you start to register a sort of disappointment. It feels as though you have spoiled something that was supposed to come later. You didn’t come mentally prepared to see any landmarks today, and when you did you didn’t have time to really soak it in, and you know you’ll never get a second impression. But you really have to get where you’re going because you’re already on the verge of running late.

Maybe, you reflect, this is appropriate. You are too busy to enjoy the city renowned for its busy-ness (and also its businesses). Perhaps this is fitting. Perhaps. But it still leaves a bittersweet taste in your mouth.

A hasty, blurry panaroma of Times Square

Project Crimson Update

With the end of my four month free trial looming, I am once again returning to reflecting on the successes and failures of Project Crimson, that is, my scheme to phase out buying MP3s in favor of using Google’s paid music subscription service. The rationale behind this was that it costs more to buy a single CD each month than it does to pay for a one month subscription to download however much music I feel like.

I was a bit worried that I wouldn’t actually use this on a day to day basis. I was wrong. I immensely enjoy having music to listen to while going about other tasks, and I especially enjoy having the ability to pull from a vast database in order to create a soundtrack for a specific task, such as being able to create a playlist of running cadences for my exercise routine, or what have you.

I have somewhere in the ballpark of three hundred songs currently compiled in one form or another on my various devices among the various google music applications. To claim that each of these is a song that I would otherwise purchase, and therefore another dollar saved, is slightly duplicitous, as my standards for downloading a song for free are understandably lower than my standards for spending money directly on individual songs.

As I said during the opening of this project, my purchasing of music is heavily biased towards those times when I am about to travel, because that is when I will be unable to access free online streaming, and hence when I will need to have whatever music I want to have be downloaded. At the beginning of summer I was looking at a shortlist that included somewhere in the ballpark of $100 worth of music; hence why I was willing to bend my rules against spending money on “Internet luxuries” like a premium account.

And for the record: Google’s music subscription is undoubtedly a luxury. Despite how much I have come to enjoy it, is not like paying for broadband or a cell phone, which, although strictly speaking, remain optional, are made effectively compulsory because of the way society now organizes itself. It is a luxury, like cable, or Netflix, or a newspaper subscription. All nice things to have, but also things that can, in most circumstances, be axed from a tight budget without life-changing implications.

Perhaps this is why I have such trouble coming to terms with Google’s music subscription service, even though I unreservedly enjoy it and think it improves my day to day life. I have always been taught to be scrupulous about expenses, particularly luxuries. I learnt from a young age that money is a finite and scarce resource, and squandering it is not just irresponsible, but morally repugnant.

On the other hand, I have never hesitated to spend when I felt there was an articulable need, and I have relatively few qualms about spending a little extra for a better product after I have been convinced to buy in the first place. I am content to pay extra, for example, for a better fitting or looking pair of jeans provided that they serve my purpose. At restaurants, once I have decided to eat, I am seldom bothered by the relative costs of menu items unless it comes down to a tie on taste. I am able to accept that life has expenses, and that in these expenses there are inevitable tradeoffs that involve the choice between a better experience and a better price.

Which brings me to the price point. Ten dollars a month is I think an interesting price point. It is just enough that I would consider it non-negligible. Ten dollars a month translates to a coffee every two or three weeks depending on the specifics of the order, which is just often enough that I can see it in concrete terms as a regular habit. It also translates to a hundred and twenty a year, which is just enough that I feel uncomfortable carrying around the cash in person and would probably make an extra trip to the bank, if I didn’t spend it on a nice Lego set as a Christmas gift. So, although the expense certainly doesn’t break the bank, it is just large enough to be awkward.

There is one metric I haven’t mentioned that probably plays a larger role in determining both the price offered, and whether or not individuals choose to purchase Google’s music subscription: the monetary value of my time otherwise lost to advertising. This is supposed to be the core feature of their subscription model, and I’m sure is the thing that most informs their pricing. There is a number somewhere that says how many hours of video I watch or listen (but mostly for my purposes listen), and there is a number that says exactly how many advertisements I would have been subjected to during this time. I don’t know whether it is possible for me as a consumer to find this number, at least in the United States.

In any case, using some very wild ballpark guesses, I come up with somewhere around three hours a month. This does assume that every time I could get an advertisement, I do, and that it’s one of the ones that takes up time when I’m listening rather than merely popping up somewhere on my screen. Then again, Google seems to have gotten it in their server that I’m one of those demographics that advertisers want to target, so there are times when I end up seeing more ads than video. Ten dollars to reclaim three hours of good, usable, first-world time is a shockingly good deal. It’s better than minimum wage anywhere I’ve ever lived.

Except there’s that troublesome word “usable”. The economics of opportunity cost assume that I’d be doing, or want to be doing, something else that’s worth that ten dollars. Comparing the cost per hour to minimum wage only works if I have a job that makes at least minimum wage (I don’t) and that I’d be doing it during the time saved (I wouldn’t). Moreover it assumes that these tasks are mutually exclusive. This is true sometimes, but not always, depending on precisely how annoying and distracting the advertisement is. But for the most part, I am free to work with my hands, eyes, and most of my brain on another tab on my computer while advertisements play in the background. This is, after all, what I already do with music.

Since I have already gone over most of the arguments in favor of Google’s subscription service, I will also mention one more that is somewhat compelling in my case: supporting the creative economy. For the people who make the online content, including both music and videos, that my enjoyment depends on, the new subscription model provides a boost in both income and stability that is, while not massive, certainly noticeable. It adds money to the pot. And while there are far better ways of supporting individual creators (like Patreon, hint hint), knowing that my consumer spending is economically enabling and incentivizing the kind of free, accessible, and diverse content that I most enjoy.

After all of this wavering, my inclination is to probably just keep paying for my subscription. After all, I enjoy it. I enjoy having it. I don’t have a particularly pressing need for those ten dollars a month, and I can always cancel if that changes. I am still on the fence about this conclusion. But for the time being, I have come to the tentative conclusion to keep using it.

Reflections on Contentedness

Contentedness is an underrated emotion. True, it doesn’t have the same electricity as joy, or the righteousness of anger. But it has the capability to be every bit as sublime. As an added bonus, contentedness seems to lean towards a more measured, reflective action as a result, rather than the rash impulsiveness of the ecstatic excitement of unadulterated joy, or the burning rage of properly kindled anger.

One of the most valuable lessons I have learned in the past decade has been how to appreciate being merely content instead of requiring utter and complete bliss. It is enough to sit in the park on a nice and sunny day, without having to frolic and chase the specter of absolute happiness. Because in truth, happiness is seldom something that can be chased.

Of course, contentedness also has its more vicious form if left unmoderated. Just as anger can beget wrath, and joy beget gluttony, greed, and lust, too much contentedness can bring about a state of sloth, or perhaps better put, complacency. Avoiding complacency has been a topic on my mind a great deal of late, as I have suddenly found myself with free time and energy, and wish to avoid squandering it as much as possible.

This last week saw a few different events of note in my life, which I will quickly recount here:

I received the notification of the death of an acquaintance and comrade of mine. While not out of the blue, or even particularly surprising, it did nevertheless catch me off guard. This news shook me, and indeed, if this latest post seems to contain an excess of navel-gazing ponderance, without much actual insight to match, that is why. I do have more thoughts and words on the subject, but am waiting for permission from the family before posting anything further on the subject.

The annual (insofar as having something two years in a row makes an annual tradition) company barbecue hosted at our house by my father took place. Such events are inevitably stressful for me, as they require me to exert myself physically in preparation for houseguests, and then to be present and sociable. Nevertheless, the event went on without major incident, which I suppose is a victory.

After much consternation, I finally picked up my diploma and finalized transcript from the high school, marking an anticlimactic end to the more than half-decade long struggle with my local public school to get me what is mine by legal right. In the end, it wasn’t that the school ever shaped up, decided to start following the law, and started helping me. Instead, I learned how to learn and work around them.

I made a quip or two about how, now that I can no longer be blackmailed with grades, I could publish my tell-all book. In truth, such a book will probably have to wait until after I am accepted into higher education, given that I will still have to work with the school administration through the application process.

In that respect, very little is changed by the receiving of my diploma. There was no great ceremony, nor parade, nor party in my honor. I am assured that I could yet have all such things if I were so motivated, but it seems duplicitous to compel others to celebrate me and my specific struggle, outside of the normal milestones and ceremonies which I have failed to qualify for, under the pretense that it is part of that same framework. Moreover, I hesitate to celebrate at all. This is a bittersweet occasion, and a large part of me wants nothing more than for this period of my life to be forgotten as quickly as possible.

Of course, that is impossible, for a variety of reasons. And even if it were possible, I’m not totally convinced it would be the right choice. It is not that I feel strongly that my unnecessary adversity has made me more resilient, or has become an integral part of my identity. It has, but this is a silver lining at best. Rather, it is because as much as I wish to forget the pains of the past, I wish even more strongly to avoid such pains in future. It is therefore necessary that I remember what happened, and bear it constantly in mind.

The events of this week, and the scattershot mix of implications they have for me, make it impossible for me to be unreservedly happy. Even so, being able to sit on my favorite park bench, loosen my metaphorical belt, and enjoy the nice, if unmemorable, weather, secure in the knowledge that the largest concerns of recent memory and foreseeable future are firmly behind me, does lend itself to a sort of contentedness. Given the turmoil and anguish of the last few weeks of scrambling to get schoolwork done, this is certainly a step up.

In other news, my gallery page is now operational, albeit incomplete, as I have yet to go through the full album of photographs that were taken but not posted, nor have I had the time to properly copy the relevant pages from my sketchbook. The fictional story which I continue to write is close to being available. In fact, it is technically online while I continue to preemptively hunt down bugs, it just doesn’t have anything linking to it. This coming weekend it slated to be quite busy, with me going to a conference in Virginia, followed by the Turtles All the Way Down book release party in New York City.