The Tao of Sam

  • Chapter 100: A year distilled into just 10 short words

    The first chapter of the new year just happens to coincide with being the 100th chapter I’ve ever written. It could be coincidence, but I could just be a bastard.

    Ta-oof-Sam dot com

    It’s been a year since I started writing again. I wrote religiously my first year of college, however at some point I petered out and stopped posting anything at all. I’d continue to write the occasional story or rant and save them to a dark and mysterious corner of My Documents, only to read over them again and again; but that’s why I write.

    My posting frequency is roughly correlated with how much free time I have to dwell on things. My thought process is sort of like making a pot of homemade stew. If you just look at the ingredients it’s all rubbish, sort of junk floating around without any sort of consistent culinary theme. However, when you put it all together and let it sit and combine so that the flavors sort of blend together, it can turn into quite the tasty dinner. I need time to let the thoughts coalesce into something that’s worth putting in notepad, partially explaining the three year gap in the written record.

    It wasn’t that nothing interesting happened during my sophomore through senior year; quite the contrary. I was just too busy living it to dwell on it. I try not to run through the events of my week or to give summaries of my weekends, instead I always aim to tell a story. Sometimes, however, it’s useful to take a step back and think about what it all means.

    OPI: Old People Introspection

    I have a philosophy about being self-contemplative that I like to call “grandfather introspection”. A grandfather has a number of sons, and each of his sons has a number of sons as well. Likewise, a year has so many months, and each of those months has so many weeks, etc. Each son takes care of himself, the fathers take care of all of their sons, and the grandfather gets to look after the lot of them.

    At the end of every day you summarize your experiance in your mind. Was it a good day? What can this day teach you about future days? At the end of the week, summarize the week. At the end of the month, think about the month. Finally, when you get to the end of the year, you get to the grandfather summary.

    A kids job is easy; he just looks after himself and can worry about the consequences later. The father has a harder job keeping the kids in line, but the grandfather has the ultimate role. His job is to provide wisdom and insight to everyone, to be the keeper of Common Sense and the provider of Perspective. That’s why the yearly summary is so hard. Each day can be summed up simply: “Made it to work on time, cute girl smiled at me, skipped the gym, Colbert was awesome”. Weeks into months into the year and suddenly you’re combining long running undercurrents and summarizing major lasting relationships into a sentence.

    Get with the Grandfather Summary

    I’m kind of a Buddhist in how I approach the good and bad in the day to day. The ‘bad’s I marginalize, the ‘good’s I italicize and underline. Subsequently it makes being honest with myself occasionally quite hard, especially when the subject of my self-honesty isn’t as good as I’d like to pretend it is. My self-summary of how the year went is quite aptly described by, you guessed it, an analogy.

    My family sends out a yearly Christmas Card in newsletter format, with each major trip or move having a subsection. Each family member also has a summary of the major happenings during the last twelve months, along with a quick recap of where they are and what they’re doing. This presented me with two problems.

    The first problem concerned a certain girl that I’ve been known to spend a lot of time with. She was featured in our last Christmas Card (she even had a picture) and my parents included her in the first draft of this one. There isn’t a simple way to explain the complexity of our relationship in the couple lines I had to work with, and nothing I wrote seemed to do it justice. The world seems averse to the idea of taking a break from dating but still remaining best friends. What are the requirements for someone’s inclusion in a Christmas Card? I don’t list my other friends, should she get her own category? Girlfriend-turned-bestfriend-but-not-out-for-the-count?

    It turns out my powers of reason and rationality aren’t all they’re cracked up to be; I wasn’t happy with any of the options and in the end I just left her out. I had the same problems writing about her there as I do writing about her here. All of these words are a form of public announcement, and at the time I didn’t feel comfortable making one.

    The other problem related to my brothers. Both my brothers have been quite active; my brother Ed took a semester abroad in Athens and is involved in a lot of travel and activities in Boston, and my brother Monty does multiple sports, wins awards at various activities and is applying to college. I work at the Patent Office, go on the occasional weekend adventure and enjoy long walks through Wikipedia. In strictly number-of-line terms, my section was the shortest of the Christmas Card. While this number might be meaningless, it spoke a lot to me. I always have and always will measure myself by my stories.

    There you have it. Not enough stories and no girl in the Christmas Card.

    I don’t know a better summary than that.

  • Atmosphere – Trying to find a Balance

    If I can put it on repeat on my iPod or blast the bassline on my MacBook, then I certainly can link it Web2.0 style on my blog.

  • Chapter 99: In defense of Awkward

    Everybody can be smooth, given the right training.

    For three years in college I had a radio show where I played the role of someone knowledgeable about Techno and Hip Hop. Though mine was a music show, there was still a good amount of song listings you had to read, public service announcements and station promotions to stutter through. All of those little speaking roles had to be strung together with that most wonderful of little daily deaths: DJ banter.

    At first I sounded ill-at-ease on the microphone. I talked too slow, said “um” a lot, wasn’t good with the volume of my voice, perpetually raced to get off the air and back to the music. After a while all those things got easier, and by the time they finally kicked me out of the station I could talk for an hour straight about nothing at all.

    It got easier because it stopped being unfamiliar. I knew the mic, I know how loud to talk, I had in my head lots of stupid transitions and words I could say while I was coming up with the next sentence. At no point did I magically become a different person, I just got comfortable with what I was doing.

    Considering the analog in conversation, I once was talking to some random guy in a crowded setting about skiing. He was all smiles, wearing a sports jacket and jeans in a way that has always been intrinsically linked in my head to being an MBA student. He was saying something about his favorite places to ski out west when a major realization hit me.

    He’s had this conversation before.

    I started noticing that impression all the time. Smooth people sound like they’re repeating conversations. They’re familiar with talking, with banter, and familiarity is the breeding ground of smoothness. More importantly, the contra-positive is also true: awkwardness is generally the result of unfamiliarity.

    Put someone in a situation outside of their realm of comfort and bam, you’ve got awkward. This person is making up words and phrases that they’ve never said before and you’re living at the absolute cutting edge of this person’s social landscape. It might sometimes be bumpy, but it’s worth it.

    An analogy. Awkward people are raw, live performances, and smooth people are studio cut mixes. The studio cuts have better production, are easier on the ears and are generally perceived to be higher “quality”, but the live performances are the ones where you feel actual emotion. It’s only when you’re seeing it live do you really hear the musician behind the production. The broken strings, the improvised mess-ups, the accidental falsetto on the high note, all of it.

    I support awkwardness, because the mistakes remind you that it’s happening live.

  • My proudest moment

    Well, that’s it. I don’t need to try anymore. Something has happened to me that really can’t be topped. Wesley Crusher has commented on a post I made on the internet. I’m done.

    http://reddit.com/info/vnz8/comments/cvq41

  • Chapter 98: Hot Indian Avatar reminds me of My Good Habits

    This is a tricky piece to write, because I have to walk a fine line between being “enlightening” and “down right pathetic”. Wish me luck.

    I read a lot of technology websites, and one of them recently had a discussion about a new search tool from Microsoft. As a search site it’s essentially useless, being at least three of a) laggy b) cluttered and c) hard to use. The discussion focused on its most notable and memorable feature: the attractive Indian woman that makes comments on your searches while you use the site. Try it out here: msdewey.com.

    To understand my reaction to the website, first you have to understand my experience with my current job.

    Every two weeks is a reporting period where I work. On the first Monday of the biweek, your productivity (in terms of deliverables turned in the last two weeks) is tabulated, counted and recorded in a database. This record can then be used as a basis for a promotion, for added privileges or (and here’s the catch) as grounds to get you in trouble. One biweek won’t make or break you, but sometimes it’s important to keep up appearances.

    Every two weeks I get stressed about making the number. When I get stressed I have no desire to do something that isn’t related to fixing it. My automatic response is to buckle down and concentrate. I’m not always productive at fixing the problem, but I certainly don’t have any fun doing something else.

    When I went to msdewey.com, I got subconsciously stressed. My reaction was to close the site after 5 minutes and take a walk outside, chide myself for not getting a gym membership and think longingly of activities that (in retrospect and my personal estimation) make me a more interesting human being.

    Here was an attractive female whose antics made me laugh, but she existed as an avatar on a search website. NOT as a real, physical person who happened to be sitting on the edge of my bed eating stale cheerios. Obviously I was failing at some sort of life criteria, and the only way to deal with that fact was to reevaluate my current activities and choose a new course of action.

    There are a lot of ways you can approach being stressed or realizing you’re not where you want to be. One of the better ones is to turn towards and deal with it head on, and don’t try to hide until it goes away.

    Thanks Ms. Dewey.