I booked a room at a halfway house. How long, they asked, are you checking in for?
18 months, I replied.
Halfway houses are strange. You admit that you have a problem, but you don't give into having the problem completely. You declare yourself halfway cured. I'm halfway on the road to better.
I'm only halfway broken.
(No, I don't really know what the word halfway house means. I assume it means what it says it means.)
Sep 20, 2014
Cry forever. Run until the end of days.
Cry forever. Run until the end of days.
How do you make friends that want to gel in the sunset too? That want to loll in meadows and read and write angry treatises about the sky beyond the horizon? Where the stars come out and we all have so much life to live but I don't know where the pen stops. If I just sit back and let the choir pitch drown me out -- is that living? What is this life? It feels so anchorless, there are to many possibilities and not enough directions that will weigh me down towards the grounding that I feel I need.
Our time is now. This is a part of it. Confusion, pain, scars, anger. This is a part of it. This is all that there is of it. This is all that there will be of it. (So many letters written. So many emails unsent. So many words not spoken because of ... fear? Because of uncertainty? Because I don't trust my own sly, slinking motives that meddle in all things. And a growing uncertainty about the darkness that births itself, each night anew, in the center of my breast.
There is a hole that I've been keeping. Have I wanted to keep it open? That's open for debate, but it's open. It's huge. It's eaten me alive. Like a piercing that took too long to heal, You can see through me there. There's nothing there. Nothing. I don't know what else to fill it with. Maybe nothing. The hole lives on, scarred and pussed, with smooth edges that bely the weight that it has. It pulls down on the corners of my mouth and weights heavily on my chin. There is no lightness in my gaze. Just empty sad. Empty. Sad. Empty.
The sun is setting on today.
I am so afraid that my dreams are but false prophets of an age that will not come.
They are naught but small passing blips on an infinite sea of rudderless, unmanned sailing into the dusk.
(Gazelle on the horizon, slinking lion beneath the ladder that stretches up into the stars wide and high and tall like hope, and forever out of reach).
How do you make friends that want to gel in the sunset too? That want to loll in meadows and read and write angry treatises about the sky beyond the horizon? Where the stars come out and we all have so much life to live but I don't know where the pen stops. If I just sit back and let the choir pitch drown me out -- is that living? What is this life? It feels so anchorless, there are to many possibilities and not enough directions that will weigh me down towards the grounding that I feel I need.
Our time is now. This is a part of it. Confusion, pain, scars, anger. This is a part of it. This is all that there is of it. This is all that there will be of it. (So many letters written. So many emails unsent. So many words not spoken because of ... fear? Because of uncertainty? Because I don't trust my own sly, slinking motives that meddle in all things. And a growing uncertainty about the darkness that births itself, each night anew, in the center of my breast.
There is a hole that I've been keeping. Have I wanted to keep it open? That's open for debate, but it's open. It's huge. It's eaten me alive. Like a piercing that took too long to heal, You can see through me there. There's nothing there. Nothing. I don't know what else to fill it with. Maybe nothing. The hole lives on, scarred and pussed, with smooth edges that bely the weight that it has. It pulls down on the corners of my mouth and weights heavily on my chin. There is no lightness in my gaze. Just empty sad. Empty. Sad. Empty.
The sun is setting on today.
I am so afraid that my dreams are but false prophets of an age that will not come.
They are naught but small passing blips on an infinite sea of rudderless, unmanned sailing into the dusk.
(Gazelle on the horizon, slinking lion beneath the ladder that stretches up into the stars wide and high and tall like hope, and forever out of reach).
Sep 15, 2014
Equality
A: The equation has changed.
B: What do you mean? Equations don't change. They're equilibrated.
B: What do you mean? Equations don't change. They're equilibrated.
A: It is no longer equal.
B: You must be mistaken. Perhaps what you're trying to say is that you've changed the equation that you're using to solve the problem. The problem space changed.
B: You must be mistaken. Perhaps what you're trying to say is that you've changed the equation that you're using to solve the problem. The problem space changed.
A: It's the same equation. But it doesn't equal out any more. I'm putting in the same digits as last week. It's coming out differently.
B: That's impossible.
A: I know.
Sep 5, 2014
Dockumentary moments.
I went to see No No : Dockumentary tonight. Our CEO knew the film-maker, so he bought tickets for everyone that wanted to go. As the director's first feature-length film, he knocked it out of the park.
I had never heard of Dock Ellis before our CEO gave us an opening to watch this film. I was quite struck with how charming and full of life the man was, as a character. Throughout the movie, and the stories that are told about him, we're told who he was, as a man. He's alive, he's irreligious, he's a gifted ball player. He was well loved, and his loss was a great one. Watching Dock, we not only get an into his personal life, but also an rare peephole view to the culture that was the Major Leagues in the 70's. The drugs, the management structure, the racial tensions, the 70's were a time of big changes to a classic American pasttime. Dock Ellis was at the forefront of those changes.
Most of the film was constructed from footage of Dock from games, photos, and a long interview he did with HBO from 2005. We see his life reconstructed through interviews with those closest to him - his ex-wives, his sister, his teammates.
Watching them reminisce I couldn't help but wonder about memories. They're fleeting things. Does pulling them back up into the present, as each interviewer did, re-write them not just as that moment in time that happened, but also forever defining the moment that was spent in remembering? Those few seconds that you spent reliving the past, in a way, redefined the past by bringing it into the future, or your present, with you. How much of future rememberings will, in some way, be influenced by the time that you spent remembering it now? Pieces of experience that get mosaiced one, on top of the other, like tie die washes on the same heavy canvas.
When these people who knew Dock Ellis are gone, what will be left of him?
In a way, memories are temporal. But the outcomes of those memories are what we live with. The trajectory that we find ourselves on is in some way an outcome of the memories that we carry with us -- in a way our day to day is a reflection of the compounding of the moments that we have lived up until this very one.
Dock may be gone, but the lives that he has touched, they go on. Forever with his memory built into the fabric of them.
I had never heard of Dock Ellis before our CEO gave us an opening to watch this film. I was quite struck with how charming and full of life the man was, as a character. Throughout the movie, and the stories that are told about him, we're told who he was, as a man. He's alive, he's irreligious, he's a gifted ball player. He was well loved, and his loss was a great one. Watching Dock, we not only get an into his personal life, but also an rare peephole view to the culture that was the Major Leagues in the 70's. The drugs, the management structure, the racial tensions, the 70's were a time of big changes to a classic American pasttime. Dock Ellis was at the forefront of those changes.
Most of the film was constructed from footage of Dock from games, photos, and a long interview he did with HBO from 2005. We see his life reconstructed through interviews with those closest to him - his ex-wives, his sister, his teammates.
Watching them reminisce I couldn't help but wonder about memories. They're fleeting things. Does pulling them back up into the present, as each interviewer did, re-write them not just as that moment in time that happened, but also forever defining the moment that was spent in remembering? Those few seconds that you spent reliving the past, in a way, redefined the past by bringing it into the future, or your present, with you. How much of future rememberings will, in some way, be influenced by the time that you spent remembering it now? Pieces of experience that get mosaiced one, on top of the other, like tie die washes on the same heavy canvas.
When these people who knew Dock Ellis are gone, what will be left of him?
In a way, memories are temporal. But the outcomes of those memories are what we live with. The trajectory that we find ourselves on is in some way an outcome of the memories that we carry with us -- in a way our day to day is a reflection of the compounding of the moments that we have lived up until this very one.
Dock may be gone, but the lives that he has touched, they go on. Forever with his memory built into the fabric of them.
Jul 24, 2014
Cognitive Fuel is a Myth, or an Alternative Explanation for Corporate Greed
There is a classic psychology experiment that theorizes that humans have 'cognitive' resources and that these resources can be consumed: either by doing mental work or self-restraint. This blog post by Serious Pony sums up the research that has been done in this area very well, but here's my attempt to rehash the idea behind cognitive fuel.
The basic experiment goes as follows: two people come in for a psychology problem. One person is asked to memorize 2 digits. The other person is asked to memorize 7 digits. At the end of the 'task', each subject is offered a treat: either a bowl of fruit, or a piece of chocolate cake. More often than not, the test subject that memorized 2 digits will reach for the fruit. The test subject that memorized 7 digits will reach for the chocolate cake. With this as evidence, the researchers concluded that mental energy is limited, and that doing a more grueling cognitive task eats away at the amount of 'mental energy' you have available to resist temptation.
This conclusion is flawed. There is another explanation.
My objections to this conclusion are rooted in a long running experiment I've been doing on myself. It involves giving up sugar. I've gone off and on of no-sugar diets for almost 3 years now. I always go back to it, and I always go back to it for the same reason.** That reason, I believe, is the same reason that the students tend to pick the sweet treat when they've done more cognitive work.[1]
In the United States[2] (and perhaps other countries), we are taught what is work and we are taught what is reward. As students in school, we learn that memorization is work. We also learn that math is hard. We are taught, culturally by our parents and the implicit attitudes of most of our teachers, that numbers are not easy. Given that these are true, then it follows that memorization of numbers is non-trivial work.
Further, as children, we are taught that sweets are a reward. They are rewards for birthdays, for holidays, for finishing your supper. For being good at the store. For cleaning up your room. We, in the United States, train our children to expect and to look for a reward after they have completed work. It is a cultural norm that any amount of work or hardship will be rewarded. That reward is usually (but not universally) something sweet.
Now to bring this back to the experiment. For the first subject, the task of memorizing two numbers is trivial. This task is so simplistic that the task doesn't qualify as work. Memorizing seven digits, on the other hand, is hard work. In the experiment then, one subject did hard work, the other did not do much work (if any).
After completing the task, the subjects were then promptly presented with a choice of reward. Perhaps it wasn't phrased that way, but that is how the situation is most likely to be interpreted. The subjects were asked to complete a task, and then walk up to a box (which they cannot see into until they have reached it), and are asked to choose one of the snacks. I can practically hear the subconscious of the 7 digit memorizers yelling "I've done work, here is my reward". It's a simple pattern match for your brain: work, reward. The experiment made me do work, here is my reward.
Seeing the experiment from the lens of work equals reward, the interpretation of the results changes. Cognitive load is not a limited resource that gets spent. Rather, our rationalization of what work deserves what reward is piqued. The study participants, most of them, recognized 7 digits as work and the cake as their reward. Even if they were on a diet, it's easy for them to rationalize that they had earned the chocolate cake - brains take energy, you know!
Under this re-interpretation, if you want people to buy your product, make them feel like they've earned it. Or at least, deserve to be rewarded. Give them some trivial task that we culturally have defined to be difficult or at least 'work', and they'll choose the best reward presented.
If we want people to lose weight, we need to either decouple sweets as a reward mechanism or stop telling ourselves that work deserves reward. We need to declassify what work is, and what it means to be rewarded.
As a further corollary: Why is corporate greed in America so bad? Because we all deserve it.
[1] Or a task that, at least culturally, is labeled as being a larger cognitive work load.
[2] Relevant because both of the researchers live and work in the United States*, and that all of the students (or at least a high percentage of them) are US undergrads.
* Baba Shiv [was] an assistant professor at the University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242-1000, and Alexander Fedorikhin [was] an assistant professor at Washington State University, Richland, WA 99352.
** I go back to sweets because without sweets, I never get 'rewarded'. Not eating sugar is hard, not just because it is addictive, but also because it feels like punishment for doing something wrong.
The basic experiment goes as follows: two people come in for a psychology problem. One person is asked to memorize 2 digits. The other person is asked to memorize 7 digits. At the end of the 'task', each subject is offered a treat: either a bowl of fruit, or a piece of chocolate cake. More often than not, the test subject that memorized 2 digits will reach for the fruit. The test subject that memorized 7 digits will reach for the chocolate cake. With this as evidence, the researchers concluded that mental energy is limited, and that doing a more grueling cognitive task eats away at the amount of 'mental energy' you have available to resist temptation.
This conclusion is flawed. There is another explanation.
My objections to this conclusion are rooted in a long running experiment I've been doing on myself. It involves giving up sugar. I've gone off and on of no-sugar diets for almost 3 years now. I always go back to it, and I always go back to it for the same reason.** That reason, I believe, is the same reason that the students tend to pick the sweet treat when they've done more cognitive work.[1]
In the United States[2] (and perhaps other countries), we are taught what is work and we are taught what is reward. As students in school, we learn that memorization is work. We also learn that math is hard. We are taught, culturally by our parents and the implicit attitudes of most of our teachers, that numbers are not easy. Given that these are true, then it follows that memorization of numbers is non-trivial work.
Further, as children, we are taught that sweets are a reward. They are rewards for birthdays, for holidays, for finishing your supper. For being good at the store. For cleaning up your room. We, in the United States, train our children to expect and to look for a reward after they have completed work. It is a cultural norm that any amount of work or hardship will be rewarded. That reward is usually (but not universally) something sweet.
Now to bring this back to the experiment. For the first subject, the task of memorizing two numbers is trivial. This task is so simplistic that the task doesn't qualify as work. Memorizing seven digits, on the other hand, is hard work. In the experiment then, one subject did hard work, the other did not do much work (if any).
After completing the task, the subjects were then promptly presented with a choice of reward. Perhaps it wasn't phrased that way, but that is how the situation is most likely to be interpreted. The subjects were asked to complete a task, and then walk up to a box (which they cannot see into until they have reached it), and are asked to choose one of the snacks. I can practically hear the subconscious of the 7 digit memorizers yelling "I've done work, here is my reward". It's a simple pattern match for your brain: work, reward. The experiment made me do work, here is my reward.
Seeing the experiment from the lens of work equals reward, the interpretation of the results changes. Cognitive load is not a limited resource that gets spent. Rather, our rationalization of what work deserves what reward is piqued. The study participants, most of them, recognized 7 digits as work and the cake as their reward. Even if they were on a diet, it's easy for them to rationalize that they had earned the chocolate cake - brains take energy, you know!
Under this re-interpretation, if you want people to buy your product, make them feel like they've earned it. Or at least, deserve to be rewarded. Give them some trivial task that we culturally have defined to be difficult or at least 'work', and they'll choose the best reward presented.
If we want people to lose weight, we need to either decouple sweets as a reward mechanism or stop telling ourselves that work deserves reward. We need to declassify what work is, and what it means to be rewarded.
As a further corollary: Why is corporate greed in America so bad? Because we all deserve it.
[1] Or a task that, at least culturally, is labeled as being a larger cognitive work load.
[2] Relevant because both of the researchers live and work in the United States*, and that all of the students (or at least a high percentage of them) are US undergrads.
* Baba Shiv [was] an assistant professor at the University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242-1000, and Alexander Fedorikhin [was] an assistant professor at Washington State University, Richland, WA 99352.
** I go back to sweets because without sweets, I never get 'rewarded'. Not eating sugar is hard, not just because it is addictive, but also because it feels like punishment for doing something wrong.
Jul 23, 2014
Why Hiring Women Is Hard
A lot of arguments around hiring and promoting women are based on their inherent value to the company, as an entity. This website, hiremorewomenintech.com, strongly makes that case. As the site points out, women are smart workers, they're competent managers, they are good for the bottom line. I'll go one for further: they're also cheaper than men. You can pay them less, in fact, if you're a company reading this, chances are good that you probably do pay them less. Women will bring much hard, paper and books success to your company, at a fraction of the cost of a man. Why wouldn't you hire them?
This is a hard thing to write about, but it's the truth.
Here's another, harder truth. It's hard to hear because it cuts at everything our neo-capitalist society tells itself about the point of a business or why we go to work every day -- that it's to make more money for our shareholders. The hard honest truth about most day to day business workings (especially start up workings), is that we care about making money, and being profitable, but not if it means hiring a woman to do it. Put in other terms, being profitable and successful in the monetary and business sense is not as important to us as hiring people that we want to be profitable and successful with. Or rather, people that will by extension make us feel also profitable and successful, by the things that they do and just, maybe who they are. Hiring and working with women will cheapen our success. Think about it. They're worth less. If you need proof of this, just look at our pay rolls. We pay them less. We employ them in portions of our company that are not as critical to our success. That's because, as men, if we hire and promote women into positions that are critical to our success, and we are successful, our own success won't be worth as much, because we had to hire women to help us do it.
Men are worth more. So if we hire and pay and promote more men, when we are successful, as a business, it will be because we are company of successful and worthful men. What's the point of making money if you can't belong to this club of worthful, successful men who make successful companies?
This is a hard thing to write about, but it's the truth.
Here's another, harder truth. It's hard to hear because it cuts at everything our neo-capitalist society tells itself about the point of a business or why we go to work every day -- that it's to make more money for our shareholders. The hard honest truth about most day to day business workings (especially start up workings), is that we care about making money, and being profitable, but not if it means hiring a woman to do it. Put in other terms, being profitable and successful in the monetary and business sense is not as important to us as hiring people that we want to be profitable and successful with. Or rather, people that will by extension make us feel also profitable and successful, by the things that they do and just, maybe who they are. Hiring and working with women will cheapen our success. Think about it. They're worth less. If you need proof of this, just look at our pay rolls. We pay them less. We employ them in portions of our company that are not as critical to our success. That's because, as men, if we hire and promote women into positions that are critical to our success, and we are successful, our own success won't be worth as much, because we had to hire women to help us do it.
Men are worth more. So if we hire and pay and promote more men, when we are successful, as a business, it will be because we are company of successful and worthful men. What's the point of making money if you can't belong to this club of worthful, successful men who make successful companies?
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