We all could've gotten along so splendidly (or: if you could see what I see, you would love what I love).

Exploratory

A trip tonight back into a past I never had, to the coffee shop I was told that everyone in my high school hung out and I never did. Not a totally foreign place, but not a home either. Yet, still, strangely homelike. My people. My things. My music. The way life should be. And I came here because Starbucks was not open and I came here because I missed cities and I missed the pieces of me strewn from sea to shining sea. The pieces of me in midnight walks and bustling cities and endless, endless stories. The newest music in hidden clubs and the aching insecurities of the rich and brilliant and powerful, having and wanting and knowing never enough. At times, better to be stupid and not know that you'll never know what you won't know. I miss the freedom and the hotels and the, just interesting. Pushing, pushing, pushing. But complete relaxation. The ability to exhale because you know the wetness of the streets at midnight and the rush of the subways. You know that the unknown is all around you and always will be and you feel alive, at last. No longer lulled to sleep by a flickering light and laugh-track existence of endless fear and pointless control. The ability to give up in that most positive, most brilliant, most necessary of ways. Give up into life. There was something to say, then. There were experiences to have. I honestly believe that I could spend the rest of my life in a coffee shop somewhere, reading and writing endlessly as I grew old. In one spot with the world swirling around me. I honestly believe that I could spend the rest of my life in once-smoky bar dreaming and scheming of revolution. I honestly believe that I could spend the rest of my life in a club, wading through the crap of "everyone wants to be in a band" to find the truly amazing. I honestly believe I could spend the rest of my life writing this paragraph.

Stream of Consciounsness

Puttin' on the Ritz (from Blue Skies):



I Am The Very Model of Modern Major General (from Pirates of Penzance by Gilbert & Sullivan):



Life Is A Cabaret (from Cabaret)

Mr. Bojangles (from Fosse):



And for something completely different -- Daft Hands:



and

I think a lot about why I am now so happy and why I wasn't in the past. There are many things I've learned, but I just felt a twinge of need to write and I wanted to share a couple of the lessons I feel I've gathered:

1. It's just pain. I learned this stretching my body and doing yoga. It's an interesting thing to be objective about something that is making you feel very bad, but it is possible. In stretching, there is good pain that will eventually release and allow you to stretch even deeper and feel even less pain and there is bad pain, where you are pushing yourself too hard and injuring yourself. The key is to know the difference. Only a few times in my life have I had the discipline to stick with things long enough, but I've reached a point in the past where I no longer feel any pain when I stretch. For me, that's a remarkable statement to make. I've made myself pass out merely by stretching my neck. I carry an enormous amount of stress in my body, as does, I think, everyone. What I've learned is that the only way to stop feeling that stress is to literally get through it, little by little, day after day, until the stress releases and is gone. The only method I've found is to tell myself, convince myself, that the pain is for a reason. That I will get through it and there will be something better on the other side, i.e., less stress. I've never been wrong about these little pep talks. If I just focusing on breathing and not giving up on the stretch - in, out, in, out, in, out - I find that I'm able to overcome the seemingly insurmountable obstacle that I thought was just the natural way my body reacted to things: push it and it hurts. I was wrong. That stress, that pain, is a foreign object. And one that is possible to surmount. It's just pain. I think this is true of many things in life. One can feel what one feels and still understand that there is something deeper, something beyond that feeling. This belief gives enormous and valuable perspective.

2. Human beings can get used to anything. This principle is how it is possible for children to be chained in their basements for years and constantly abused and come out saying that they thought they way they were treated was just normal. In my opinion, it's the same reason I eat the way I do, exercise the way I do, think the way I do, etc. I've been conditioned for a certain behavior. Understanding that these things are not me in any meaningful sense - that they are just behaviors I have learned - means that I can unlearn them. Or rather, I can learn an entirely different set of behaviors. If I want to be the kind of person who writes every day, there is nothing stopping me other than the somewhat painful period of time necessary to instill myself with a new habit. I have to do it every day and convince myself that it is just what I do until it IS just what I do. This can be true of just about anything, I think. If you think life's not good and you say that constantly to yourself, it won't be. You'll find a way to make it terrible. If, on the other hand, you believe that life is good, it will be. As strange and magical as that sounds, I believe it deeply.

For reasons unknown, I've been quietly assembling a list of pop-culture that has shaped my pysche the most or at least meant a lot to me at some point in my life. I won't remember it all, but here's a start:
1. Fight Club
2. On The Road
3. Un Chien Andalou
4. Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness
5. The People's History of the United States of America
6. Recovering The Satellites
7. Mondo Cane
8. Mothlight
9. Into The Wild
10. Ten
11. A book I found, I believe in my dad's parents' house, called something like 1001 Strange Stories and Mysterious Facts
12. A particularly chilling episode of Unsolved Mysteries, which included, I could swear, a clown who killed people when they answered their door and, more disturbing to me, a man who just wandered off one day and parked his car by the side of the road. As they searched the nearby desert, they found little piles of his clothing near little neatly-made piles of rocks. But they never found him.
13. White Squall
14. Swing Kids
15. Office Space
16. Saved By The Bell
17. Wonder Years (I still have a crush on Winnie Cooper)
18. Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots Part 1 (in concert, twice). It's hard to describe how touching nonsense can be sometimes.
19. Moses and Monotheism
20. TED.com
21. The original screenhead
22. PostSecret (I still read it every single week)
23. The Four Agreements
24. Avatar. (no, really. I don't remember the last time I actually witnessed magic. It's an absolutely incredible movie that I hope to see another two dozen times in the theater)
25. The Stars Are Beautiful (1974)
26. The Power of Myth
27. XKCD
28. Jagged Little Pill

That's all for now. Just felt like reminiscing, I guess.

Does anyone honestly disagree with any of this? This is what we need for healthcare in the US:

Health Insurance Consumer Protections

View more documents from White House.

Stories Part 2

4. Training Materials.

When I first became a trainer, we arrived in Sacramento with a whole bunch of printed materials that had been found by digging through the vast and incomprehensible filing system the training department had at that time (luckily, I wasn't the one who did that digging). Little did we know that first day that almost none of it was useful for Sacramento, given that the games were almost entirely different there. This began a long, long quest to give some semblance of order to the labyrinth that was the training department's training materials.

This was the issue: for 15 years files had been created, given the most random names possible ("Billystest"????), thrown in random folders (many of which had been forgotten entirely), recreated with slight changes when the original couldn't be found , lost forever (with only a hard copy left to make copies from), copied and given a new name for the exact same document, copied and given a new name in a completely different folder (for the exact same document). The folders were randomly named too. And though there were multiple games played in multiple locations with multiple rule variations, most of the materials were primarily for either northern or southern California, with nothing for Sacramento and no real idea of which documents were for the southern variations of the games and which were for the northern. And this isn't even mentioning the some dozen previous heads of the training department and their political posturing and various beefs with other parts of the company which prevented them from paying any attention to, say, the needs of northern California to have accurate pai gow poker training manuals. All of which led supervisors in each unique casino to make their own training materials, especially in northern California, none of which was collected into any one location that could be viewed in any semblance of order. I should probably also mention that there were close to a thousand documents in the files at this time.

My approach: constant conversation with supervisors and anyone else who would talk to me whenever I would visit the casinos as to what training materials they had and what actually happened in their casinos. Splitting the folder system (eventually - after much debate with the other trainers) into locations: LA, NOCAL, SAC. And the most mindblowingly tedious part of all - going through each unique document, one by one and 1)trying to remember if I saw something similar anywhere else 2)renaming the document to be something meaningful, including the date of the test creation if I knew it (NoCal PGP Test 1 8.11.05) 3)speaking with whoever I needed to speak with to confirm which of the many versions of a document was accurate and/or useful (this included my bosses, trainers, supervisors, casino managers, etc.). If there was disagreement on whether it was useful or not, I kept both versions until a final decision could be made. 4)making an archive for archaic/obsolete versions so that no institutional information would be lost forever (as it would if the versions were simply deleted) 5)making the pile of actually useful documents smaller and smaller until we had arrived at a body of knowledge for each area that included the useful training materials and ONLY the useful training materials 6)disseminating this information as widely as possible to the areas that would be using it to re-verify accuracy and usefulness and to make them aware that we had now collected all of the useful materials in one place. 7)constantly keeping an ear to the ground about changes to the games which were incredibly common since the casinos enjoyed changing minor rules in almost every casino very frequently.

This took place mostly in my spare time between training classes, nights and weekends, though I could have a lot of the conversations when I was at the casinos to do other stuff. Eventually, though the work never completely ended (because of the frequent changes), we were pretty much organized and had a file system that anyone could look at and understand precisely what we were teaching and how we were teaching it. This came in pretty handy, especially when the senior executives started demanding that exact accountability.



5. Playing the Big Table.

As I worked in the casino, my only real goal was to make more money. And the only way to do that was to prove that I was excellent at my job. I started with blackjack, but I wasn't even making enough to pay my bills and was getting farther and farther into debt. From the onset, my goal was to play the highest action tables in the casino. Within a couple of months, though, I had proved that I was ready to play pai gow poker. I played for several months, having already learned the house way strategy and was pretty fast, but I soon learned that they would be speed testing everyone and if my times weren't up to par, I'd be back to playing blackjack. I went in for the test the first time and nerves got in the way: in order to play the low-action pai gow poker tables, I needed a time of 32 seconds on five tests in a row (one test consisted of setting the bank hand and then reading each hand and whether it won, lost, or pushed in relationship to the bank hand). That first session, I had a few that were under 32, but a few over as well. Fail. So I practiced a bit more and took it again about a week later. The boss of my casino just happened to be at the office the day I took that second test and saw me take the test. This time I was ready (the added pressure actually helped) and this time, I passed the test, not only for the low-stakes games, but for the high-stakes games (5 tests under 27 seconds). And a few of my times were very low, like 22 seconds.

That night opened a door for me. From that moment, I was being groomed to play the big table, where up to $21,600 would change hands on any given hand (also it was the only table to use the Halloween chips - $300 chips that were black with orange bands). I learned chip-cutting and was given a different, much more difficult strategy to learn for two different variations of the game - though most of the VIP tables were a version of the game where the joker was wild, the big table was a version called non-wild where the joker could only be used as an Ace or to complete a straight or a flush. And I had to learn the best possible strategy for playing the games, which was much more complicated than the basic "house way" strategy I already knew.

I kept the strategy manual in my glove box and started getting to work just a few minutes early to study. I increasingly challenged myself to see the hands faster and faster and practiced at home. And I realized at some point that I was having difficulty seeing the hands as quickly as I would like and also that I was getting increasingly stressed-out trying to play the higher-action games, so I started eating healthier meals in the casinos, I worked out more frequently and on my breaks I would stretch for 10 minutes. Soon, nothing got by me. When I finally made it to the point that I would be "second eyes" on the big table (meaning I would stand behind and help the main guy or gal do their job and also carefully watch elements of the table that it was difficult for the primary person to keep complete track of), I practiced counting the exact amount of money on the table, which meant learning to count stacks of up to 36 chips from a distance of about 10-12 feet, keeping a constant tally in my head of the exact amounts, which also meant doing quick addition/subtraction based on the wins/losses/pushes at the table so that when the dealer asked for the payout money, I could tell the main banker exactly how much he or she should give the dealer. I got to the point where I could do this almost perfectly, every single time.

And then one day I sat at the table. And though I was there because I needed the money, I never actually got the raise I had been promised I would get a year-and-a-half before if I ever made it to that table. And it was depressing and exhausting and I lost probably $4-5 Million over the course of a few months. And then I quit. At which point they decided to promote me to a position where I couldn't lose money - supervisor.


6. Learning to Be a Teacher.

The first training class I ever taught was brutal. Not only did I have exactly zero experience as a teacher (except one-on-one tutoring that I had done in high school), but we were also making up the materials and curriculum as we went along, using information that we were gaining on a day-to-day basis (usually with the rest of our days after teaching, mad-cap style with scissors, cutting and pasting and whiting-out and then begging the hotel to make copies for the class and then, often, revising the same document again several times before the end of the first three-week class). Fluid is a nice description of how the class was. Completely ass-backward and disorganized was another way of putting it. And that's not to mention the fact that we were training out of a hotel. In the middle of a parking lot with a lovely view of Best Buy and other chain stores (we didn't realize we'd be there for six months). In what I now lovingly refer to as "hell". Elk Grove is the actual name of the town, but if I die and end up there as some sort of eternal punishment for my actions, I won't be surprised at all. Oh, and no one had any idea how to do this training any better. It had never been done in Sacramento. It's probably also worth mentioning that the reason we were doing this training and the reason we kept it up for six months is because they needed to fire virtually all of the some 50-60 employees who worked in that area due to theft.

But I digress. My first class included a sweet young man and an older (late 40s, as I recall - "older" here means "older than our average employee who was probably 23") lady, among others. I had come from an environment of absolute exactitude (see #6 above) in how everything was done in a casino. After I played the big table, I became a supervisor and (rightly so), the supervisor's job was to make sure no mistakes were made by the bankers (employees who sat at the table and watched the money). Let's just say I was a little enthusiastic about making sure that the people I was training were well informed of what was expected of them and were aware of the pressures of the job. Also, I found that my training style was pretty aggressive - I enjoy pushing people and putting them on the spot and asking them questions. There was just one problem with this training style (which I still think is a valuable way to teach) - I failed to give the trainees the answers to the questions before I asked the questions. So I found myself demanding to know what A-8 would be (the answer: soft 19) from people who I had given no information about soft hands or blackjack for that matter. Needless to say, I made that "older lady" I mentioned earlier cry within a couple of days of my first class.

But that's not to say I was a jerk about it. I knew that I didn't have the first clue what the hell I was doing and this was made worse by the situation with the materials and the fact that no one else really knew what they were doing either. Some of the people became discouraged pretty quickly in the class and knew that they were falling behind. The sweet young man I mentioned, for instance, came to us by the end of the first week and told us he didn't think he would be able to continue. We begged him to stay and told him we were sure he would catch on. So he stayed. But he never made it to the casino.

And, eventually, with a lot of help from Anna (and Brian and Kirk), I learned to teach before I demanded. I learned that if a trainee came to me and felt they weren't picking it up, to trust their opinion and let them leave. And I learned to save the time when I was really pushy until the end of the class and take that first week to just be a nice guy giving information. I learned that things are easier when you let the tests you help create be the real jerk in the class that first week (a "math test" of 300 blackjack hands that they were given 15 minutes to complete - it took me 17 minutes to get through it). And I learned to think completely on my feet, with no idea exactly what I was teaching and to be as exact as I could with limited information, but to realize it didn't matter all that much anyway - my job was more to see potential and nurture it than to impart actual knowledge. And, because I hated looking like a disorganized asshole, I learned to look professional, roll with the punches and to be an absolute expert on the many different games. And, in the end, I learned to be an excellent teacher too.


7. The Blog.

I had moved to LA. With Josh (thank god for that). But moving to a completely new, massive city was very hard for me. I had no job. I was accumulating massive amounts of credit card debt. I didn't feel like I knew how to do anything and I didn't have any experience doing anything. I thought I wanted to be in the movie industry, but I also felt completely unprepared to deal with anyone. I felt like I wasn't savvy and didn't know how to get that way. I had called to get car insurance and was told that it would be $5000 every six months. I lived in a beautiful apartment, that was way too nice and way too expensive for where I was at in my life. I was a child, trying to play a grown-up without really knowing how. And I was afraid of everything. But excited to start a life beyond the world of college, which I had profoundly hated.

So I lived it up. When I wasn't filled with fear and loathing in the apartment playing video games and trying out my career as a pro poker player, I was out spending money on crap I didn't need, mostly. And going to strip clubs on occasion. By the end of the year, though I had a job (that by that time, I hated), I was still hemorrhaging money and needed an outlet. Weblogs (blogs) were a relatively new idea at that point and the idea appealed to me a great deal. It was like an interactive diary. More than anything, I felt alone, like I didn't matter in the world. But I also felt like I wasn't really living, like I wasn't really challenging myself to do or be anything more than just what I was. And though I was learning, I wasn't really learning in a way that was productive. More than anything, though, I wasn't writing. And that's always a big problem for me. I need to write to live. The first thing I need is to learn - the second is to share that. So I started one up.

I called it The Stylite. A stylite is a man who sits on top of a large pole, thinking and praying, totally exposed to the elements, relying on the kindness of others to provide sustenance, typically for a long time. See Simon of the Desert, a film by Luis Bunuel. This was a partially-serious, partially-tongue-in-cheek nod to my delusions of grandeur, my asceticism, and my general tendency toward the extreme. Not to mention the fact that though I am a fool almost all the time, there is some wisdom buried somewhere, I'm certain.

The quote that appears at the bottom of the blog is from Shakespeare (Macbeth, to be exact) and it refers to life: "It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing". Between the title of the blog and this quote, I had a pretty good structure to write between - my competing notions of the seriousness of life coupled with my understanding of its complete absurdity. And so I wrote. And I tried to be as honest as I possibly could be. Often to a fault. But I also pushed myself to write exactly whatever I was thinking or feeling at that moment and to do so without judgment; to do so even if it terrified me to think of what the people reading it might think of me. And I practiced this avidly for probably a couple of years. In retrospect, there are parts of complete honesty all the time that makes it a mistake. But I gained very, very valuable things from the blog. I came to recognize my own voice and to understand that I had things to say, things that no one could or should stop me from saying. I came to realize that being afraid isn't what matters - it's letting fear stop you that's the real problem. And it actually worked like a pshrink, which I often commented that it felt like - I got better. I put my issues out there. I developed plans for dealing with them. I stopped judging everything about myself and learned to just be. Unapologetic for who I am. It was the single most valuable thing I've ever done. Thanks to everyone for sticking around and reading it.

Stories

This is an exercise from a book I'm reading, but I thought I'd share, since I like to do that. This is part one - the first three stories. Part 2 will likely have five more stories.

1. Hockey.

One summer in college I lived in one part of a triplex house with four other guys - my best friends. Around one side of the house and behind the house was an alley way which provided access to garages for the tenants. The alley behind the house was perfect for street hockey - maybe 15-20 feet wide and 30 feet long - so we played all the time. But we soon came to be annoyed almost constantly by the ends of our street hockey alley. Though the sides were made of a six-foot wood fence on one side and garage doors on the other, the ends were far less wall-like - once side had a three-foot chainlink fence, which meant that off-target slapshots frequently ended up in our neighbor's yard, a less-than-friendly elderly woman who had no interest in college kids retrieving their street hockey balls on a regular basis. The other end was even worse - it was the entrance/exit street linking the garages in back to the main street in front of the house. Balls hit in that direction would just keep going for another thirty feet or so before stopping at another fence. So I decided that this problem needed to be solved if we were to have an actual, serious game of street hockey. I called my dad and asked him to donate some heavy-duty sheet plastic materials called Visquine to the cause. Then I drove my Chevy Blazer down to the big mall several miles away and begged them for cardboard boxes that they were going to throw away. I got a big, big pile of largish (4-5 foot wide) boxes together and brought it back home and spent the next several days duct-taping the boxes together in two 20 foot sections, always being extra careful to insure that one side of the boxes lined up evenly to make a straight line. Then, with help, I duct-taped visquine around the boxes. Though they were heavy, we had two walls that were flexible enough to curve between the fence and the garages, tall enough to make decent walls, flat enough on the bottom to stand up without gaps for the ball to roll under and durable enough (even in the rain) to last for several months. As soon as they were made and the alley was swept of rocks and debris, we played hockey and we continued to play until the weather that year made it too cold, wet and uncomfortable to play.

2. The Raven.

In my Honor's English class during my senior year of high school, we were told that we could memorize a poem to recite to the class for extra credit. I believe there were restrictions on how short the poem could be. Most of the class memorized "A Dream Deferred" by Langston Hughes, most likely because of its length:

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

I, on the other hand, wanted a challenge. So I decided to memorize "The Raven" by Edgar Allen Poe. And it was pretty challenging. First, it was long. So long, in fact, that as I was midway through reciting it, one of the guys in the class started clapping at one of the pauses I took, thinking it was the end of the recital. Second, the language is obscure, which makes it even more difficult to memorize. Words I don't know = words that are difficult to remember. Third, the final line of every stanza seems so similar that they could be the same, except they are not. This is in addition to the fact that the narrator of the poem frequently repeats himself using almost exactly the same words. I've always been a stickler for preciseness, especially when talking about art, and it was important for me to get this not just mostly right but exactly right.

On the upside, though, the poem is incredibly dark and describes a man descending into madness, so at least it was interesting (not that "A Dream Deferred" is not, albeit for entirely different reasons). Also, I could be almost completely certain that there was not another person in the class who would even attempt the same poem. And the best part, at least from a memorization standpoint, was that the whole thing has a sing-song quality and tells a narrative story. Stories make a lot of sense to me. Other types of poems do not, at least not from a structural perspective, which would be necessary to memorize a long poem. As an example, there is a 16-word poem that, though I've never forgotten it, has take me more than 15 years to not memorize (I had to google it). This one is by William Carlos Williams:

So much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

Songs also make a lot of sense to me. It was the combination of these two factors that made memorizing it possible. First, I focused on sound. I sang the words to myself and paid attention to where the rhymes were and focused on making the sound of the poem natural. Second I built the song piece by piece by piece and broke the piece up into its stanzas to make it more manageable. I memorized the first line and then added the second line and said them together and then the third line and then said all three together and so on until I reached the end of the stanza. Then I said the whole stanza out loud to myself. Then I moved on to the next stanza. When I had memorized the next one, I said both to myself together. And so on and so forth until the entire thing was in my head. I spent hours and hours over a period of maybe a week pacing my room, lyrically mumbling to myself. And then I performed it for my parents. And then I performed it in class and didn't miss a word. I got my extra credit but, more importantly, I did something very difficult and succeeded.

Here is "The Raven" by Edgar Allen Poe:

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
`'Tis some visitor,' I muttered, `tapping at my chamber door -
Only this, and nothing more.'

Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December,
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow; - vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow - sorrow for the lost Lenore -
For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels named Lenore -
Nameless here for evermore.

And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain
Thrilled me - filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before;
So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating
`'Tis some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door -
Some late visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door; -
This it is, and nothing more,'

Presently my soul grew stronger; hesitating then no longer,
`Sir,' said I, `or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore;
But the fact is I was napping, and so gently you came rapping,
And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door,
That I scarce was sure I heard you' - here I opened wide the door; -
Darkness there, and nothing more.

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before
But the silence was unbroken, and the darkness gave no token,
And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, `Lenore!'
This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, `Lenore!'
Merely this and nothing more.

Back into the chamber turning, all my soul within me burning,
Soon again I heard a tapping somewhat louder than before.
`Surely,' said I, `surely that is something at my window lattice;
Let me see then, what thereat is, and this mystery explore -
Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore; -
'Tis the wind and nothing more!'

Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter,
In there stepped a stately raven of the saintly days of yore.
Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he;
But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door -
Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door -
Perched, and sat, and nothing more.

Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling,
By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore,
`Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou,' I said, `art sure no craven.
Ghastly grim and ancient raven wandering from the nightly shore -
Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore!'
Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.'

Much I marvelled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly,
Though its answer little meaning - little relevancy bore;
For we cannot help agreeing that no living human being
Ever yet was blessed with seeing bird above his chamber door -
Bird or beast above the sculptured bust above his chamber door,
With such name as `Nevermore.'

But the raven, sitting lonely on the placid bust, spoke only,
That one word, as if his soul in that one word he did outpour.
Nothing further then he uttered - not a feather then he fluttered -
Till I scarcely more than muttered `Other friends have flown before -
On the morrow he will leave me, as my hopes have flown before.'
Then the bird said, `Nevermore.'

Startled at the stillness broken by reply so aptly spoken,
`Doubtless,' said I, `what it utters is its only stock and store,
Caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful disaster
Followed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden bore -
Till the dirges of his hope that melancholy burden bore
Of "Never-nevermore."'

But the raven still beguiling all my sad soul into smiling,
Straight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird and bust and door;
Then, upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking
Fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yore -
What this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore
Meant in croaking `Nevermore.'

This I sat engaged in guessing, but no syllable expressing
To the fowl whose fiery eyes now burned into my bosom's core;
This and more I sat divining, with my head at ease reclining
On the cushion's velvet lining that the lamp-light gloated o'er,
But whose velvet violet lining with the lamp-light gloating o'er,
She shall press, ah, nevermore!

Then, methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer
Swung by Seraphim whose foot-falls tinkled on the tufted floor.
`Wretch,' I cried, `thy God hath lent thee - by these angels he has sent thee
Respite - respite and nepenthe from thy memories of Lenore!
Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe, and forget this lost Lenore!'
Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.'

`Prophet!' said I, `thing of evil! - prophet still, if bird or devil! -
Whether tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore,
Desolate yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted -
On this home by horror haunted - tell me truly, I implore -
Is there - is there balm in Gilead? - tell me - tell me, I implore!'
Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.'

`Prophet!' said I, `thing of evil! - prophet still, if bird or devil!
By that Heaven that bends above us - by that God we both adore -
Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,
It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels named Lenore -
Clasp a rare and radiant maiden, whom the angels named Lenore?'
Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.'

`Be that word our sign of parting, bird or fiend!' I shrieked upstarting -
`Get thee back into the tempest and the Night's Plutonian shore!
Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!
Leave my loneliness unbroken! - quit the bust above my door!
Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!'
Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.'

And the raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming,
And the lamp-light o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted - nevermore!

3. The Dean's List.

In stark contrast to the story I just told about what a little suck-up I was in high school, my college career, at least from an academic perspective, is not nearly as stellar. In fact, I would say it had a certain, oh, miserable quality to it. I rarely attended class and would go to many classes just to take the tests. To a large extent, I was right in that attending classes where the professors just said what I had already read for homework was a little stupid. Okay, a lot stupid. But it didn't stop there. I became really bad at attending classes even with brilliant professors and information that I longed to get. Why, exactly this was the case is a rather involved and convoluted story involving a bit of arrogance, fear, and immaturity on my part. Maybe more than a bit of all of those things.

In spite of my motivations or lack thereof, I still made it through the vast majority of my classes due to the fact that I still did all the reading and I still did all the work. My reaction to college classes was not one of hating learning. Quite the contrary. My reaction to class was that I resented someone else telling me where to be and at what time (typically far too early in the day for my taste) just so they could waste my time by repeating what I had just read the night before. And it turns out I was mostly right. A properly motivated person could get the same education with a stack of books, so long as he or she didn't care about the little piece of paper you get at the end saying that your education is certified by people that matter.

But I digress. By senior year of college, I was far enough into a degree that it would have been absolutely idiotic to quit. At the beginning of senior year, I needed 30 credits to graduate, which was pretty normal. "Okay, no problem" I thought to myself. I'll take 15 each semester and be done with it. But there were problems. A couple of weeks into the fall semester, I dropped a class because attendance was required and I really hated the class. Okay, I'll just do 18 next semester. A full course-load, but I can get through it and then I'll be out of college. But then there was another problem. I wrote an admittedly half-assed paper about 2/3 of the way into the semester for a Robert Altman film class (the paper was not only half-assed as far as execution but also had a rather ballsy premise - I argued in a way that was apparently unconvincing that Robert Altman's movies were not only about nothing but that they were specifically supposed to be about nothing). Unfortunately, the teacher who already did not see eye-to-eye with me failed me on the paper. The downside was that the paper was half of my grade for the class, which meant that I also failed the class.

There were other problems as well - money was becoming an issue because I wasn't doing much in the way of being a good son or a good employee, either. I had the best job in the world - I sat in a booth in the middle of campus and allowed/restricted access to the main part of campus by pushing a button. I still managed to call in sick and completely unreasonable number of times during the same fall semester where I was failing papers and dropping classes. One more problem - I knew that if I didn't graduate in four years, I likely never would because I would have to pay for it after that.

So I faced a situation where I needed to make money and to do that would mean keeping my job and I needed to take 21 credit hours in a semester (which is the most they will allow you to take without special dispensation from the dean) if I wanted to graduate on time. I had a serious discussion with my boss and made a commitment to be a better employee and I upheld that commitment, working three mornings a week, starting at 8am. The other two days a week I was up at 8am too, but for class. I had a serious discussion with my adviser, who strongly advised me NOT to take 21 hours, especially since I had just had a semester with only 9 credit hours that counted, which made me less than a full-time student for that semester. I did it anyway. Not only did I make it through that last semester of college, but I made the dean's list for my grades - it was the only semester in college that I managed to do that. And I graduated on time.

I'm trying to work out in my head exactly what I'm best at and exactly what kind of job/company/culture I would work best in. Here are some thoughts I've had so far. Any thoughts about how you perceive me in this context would also be much appreciated.

1. I think I prefer small businesses or businesses making a serious transition. I like for there to be problems that are fixable, even if they seem overwhelming.
2. There are two taglines from television commercials that appeal to how I feel I work best: "The endless pursuit of perfection" and "We don't make things - we make things better"
3. I'm actually thinking of trying to figure out what I need to do to get into business consulting (I really want to be one of the Bobs from Office Space) or Research & Development. Working for a think tank would also be awesome.
4. What makes some of this a little more interesting is that I'd be most interested in working for a place that is concerned with more than making money. I'd like a company with a social agenda.
5. I'm best at thinking, strategy, research, connecting disparate ideas/people, challenging people, redesigning systems so they work better, and taking responsibility. I'm worst at selling, making people like me, and being in a position that is exactly the same day to day. I love dealing with people all day. I hate sitting in front of a computer all day.
6. I have a ridiculous amount of faith that knowing what you want + sharing what you want = getting what you need (whether it's what you want or not). Which is why I'm posting this to my blog.

As I mull things over, this list of random thoughts will grow. Let me know what you think in the meantime.

Here are the questions from a "survey" the Republican National Committee (RNC) recently sent to my parents (survey options were "Yes", "No", and "No opinion"):


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1. Do you agree with Barack Obama's budget plan that will lead to a $23.1 trillion deficit over the next ten years?

2. Do you believe the federal government has gone too far in bailing out failing banks, insurance companies and the auto industry?

3. Do you support amnesty for illegal immigrants?

4. Should English be the official language of the United States?

5. Are you in favor of granting retroactive Social Security eligibility to illegal immigrants who gain U.S. citizenship through an amnesty program?

6. Are you in favor of expanded welfare benefits and unlimited eligibility (no time, education or work requirements) that Democrats in Congress are pushing to pass?

7. Do you believe that Barack Obama's nominess for federal courts should be immediately and unquestionably approved for their lifetime appointments by the U.S. Senate?

8. Do you believe the best way to increase the quality and effectiveness of public education in the U.S. is to rapidly expand federal funding while eliminating performance standards and accountability?

9. Do you support the creation of a national health insurance plan that would be administered by bureaucrats in Washington, D.C.?

10. Do you believe that the quality and availability of healthcare will increase if the federal government dictates pricing to doctors and hospitals?

11. Are you confident that new medicines and medical treatments will continue to be developed if the federal government controls prescription drug prices and sets profit margins for research and pharmaceutical companies?

12. Are you in favor of creating a government-funded "Citizen Volunteer Corps" that would pay young people to do work now done by churches and charities, earning Corps Members the same pay and benefits given to military veterans?

13. Are you in favor of reinstituting the military draft, as Democrats in Congress have proposed?

14. Do you believe that the federal government should allow the unionization of Department of Homeland Security employees who serve in positions critical to the safety and security of our nation?

15. Do you support Democrats' drive to eliminate workers' right to a private ballot when considering unionization of their place of employment?

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Contribution Reply

Dear Chairman Steele,

I believe the principles and policies of the Republican Party are worth fighting for. And I want to help rebuild and refocus our Party all across the country to recruit and elect leaders that will listen to my concerns and fight for my interests. That's why I'm sending the RNC a supporting contribution today. Enclosed please find my gift of:

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Here's a vague idea that came to me today: how about a website that provides life perspective where you enter broad details about your life and the lives of your parents and then the website randomly changes a detail or two here or there and gives you an example story about what your life would be like if those minor details were changed. Let me give you an example: I put in that I'm caucasian, straight, right-handed, and not disabled, born in the suburbs in the United States in the early 1980s to two middle-class parents, both of whom worked their whole lives and were able to afford to send me to college to get a four-year degree, etc. So how different would my life look if I were born in, say, Bangalore, India at the same time and with circumstances as similar as possible (but culturally-adjusted, of course)? Or if the only thing that changed was that my parents and I were African-American? Or if I happened to be gay?

I think this would be relatively impossible, but I like the idea none the less. I think it would be interesting to be able to see what life would be like if it was different in just one way.

Thanks to Brock Sampson for the link.

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