The Tao of Sam

Category: Chapters

  • Chapter 101: How to work 15-hour days for a week straight

    Headphones are the lazy man’s light wool hat.

    The security guards had congregated outside of the office building across the campus from mine to smoke cigarettes and talk loudly about pedestrian affairs. I had just spent an ungodly amount of time reading research papers and my mind was operating on a plane of existence incongruous with that of the common folk. The fresh air helped a little.

    It had been easy to put myself in this situation, and increasingly hard to get myself out of it. The sum of our work is due at the end of each quarter, and the quarter was in five days. I had a lot of work to do. Why had I waited until the last minute? First, prepare an office with unrestricted internet access and a door that closes. Second, throw in equal parts of the following two websites and let the pot simmer for three months:

    1. reddit.com
    2. Wikipedia

    The research papers I was working through weren’t saying with what I needed them to say to make the argument I wanted to make. I was looking for a specific idea phrased in a specific way that was published more than a specific number of years ago. The going was tough.

    I wasn’t done by any stretch of the imagination, but I was feeling worn out and intellectually drained. My rationale was that I couldn’t do any more good work if I wasn’t well rested, so I should go home and sleep. It certainly sounded convenient. I was about five minutes away from the office when I finally stopped walking. A thought had started to weasel it’s way into my brain of such a variety that no amount of rationalizing could convince me to continue.

    This wasn’t walking home, this was conceding.

    Games were a major part of my life as a youngster, and all the stupid philosophizing that I do now about random things I also did then. At the time it was about vastly important things like Magic the Gathering. In Magic, at the beginning of your turn you draw a card (the pedant in me just died not qualifying that). You could have a completely hopeless situation on the board, but at the beginning of your turn you still get that one card, that one card that could change everything and turn the game around. This lead to a mantra of mine that I use to this day:

    If the only way to win the game is to draw the card you need next turn, you have to assume that you’ll draw that card.

    Walking home was about getting crappy draws. The situation wasn’t hopeless, I was just frustrated because the cards on the table weren’t the cards I needed and it felt like the clock was running out.

    Turning around, I walked back and worked until dawn. It damn near killed me, but I eventually drew the card I needed.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Chapter 97: Being dysfunctional on Election Day

    America, I’m sorry.

    The following items are incontrovertible facts. No debate, no interpretation, just bare-bone line items of truth.

    1. March 8th: I filled out a form to register as a Virginia voter.
    2. April: I received a letter in the mail from the City of Alexandria that included the word “voter” or “voting” prominently on the first page. I assumed (expecting a repeat of ’04) that it was my voter registration card.
    3. November 8th: I was told I was still registered in Ohio, and as such I was unable to vote in Virginia.

    Accordingly, I did not vote. The election I attempted to vote in ended up being the most hotly contested and tight elections of the year (VA Senate), and unfortunately, my shame does not end there.

    • I received 47 separate e-mails from the MoveOn.org requesting my help. They repeatedly asked for help in telephoning voters to remind them to vote. I made a total of 10 calls and reached a total of 0 working numbers before I gave up.
    • MoveOn.org telephoned me five times asking for my services in calling people so that they themselves could call voters. I participated in 0 meta-voter recruitment calls.
    • MoveOn.org telephoned me three times asking for help on Election Day. I even signed up for a tentative shift at their DC office. I did not go, because it was raining.

    By the end of the day, I was feeling fairly pathetic as a participant in democracy, so when my officemate asked me to drive him to pick up his pre-ordered copy of Guitar Hero 2, I lept at the chance. “Only if you vote first!” I told him. We rushed to my car in a fit of patriotic fervor only to be stopped cold by traffic. When the clock ticked 7pm (close of polling), we reluctantly abandoned democracy and instead went to grab Indian food.

    CNN tells me that America did pretty well today, with Rumsfeld resigning and the Democrats picking up seats everywhere. However, I take none of the credit. I’ve failed in every aspect of democracy, from organizing to participating to voting, and I can take no credit for the success of the people I did not physically support.

    Regardless, because of all those other participants and voters, today was the first day in a while that I felt optimistic about where America was going.

    Thanks.

    God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. … What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance?

    Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

    Thomas Jefferson, Letter to William Stevens Smith (November 13, 1787)