For Those Who Drink Egg Nog

Nina loved egg nog, but her stomach worked in a peculiar way. She could only drink four ounces of egg not, and four ounces exactly. If she drank even a drop more than four ounces, she would get a stomach ache. If she drank even a drop less than four ounces, she would get a stomach ache. The only amount she was capable of drinking is four ounces exactly.

One day, she reached into her refrigerator and pulls out an already-open carton of egg nog. In fact, the carton was almost empty, and Nina guessed that it had only four ounces of egg nog left in it. Egg nog comes in one-quart cartons, and Nina reasoned that if she had been measuring correctly all along, she should have never ended up with less than four ounces in the carton, unless the carton was empty. “Uh oh,” she thought, “the stores are closed today, so I had better remember to pick up more egg nog from the market tomorrow.”

So, Nina dumped the entire contents of the carton into her glass. To her dismay, however, there was slightly more than four ounces in the glass. Nina reached for her special egg nog measuring cup: it was precisely four ounces in volume. She poured the egg nog into her measuring cup, but some of it spilled on the counter top, leaving her with something less than four ounces of egg nog.

In a last-ditch effort to salvage her cup of egg nog, Nina sopped up some of the spilled egg nog with a paper towel, and squeezed it into the measuring cup. The good news was that she managed to get her four ounces of egg nog. The bad news was that the egg nog was now dirty with crumbs and grease from the counter top.

She didn’t get a stomach ache, but her egg nog was ruined.

*        *        *

Tina and Simon both love egg nog. One day, Simon brought a carton of egg nog home with him after work, as a surprise for Tina. Over the next few days, Tina had a few cups of egg nog and reveled in its creamy and delicious taste. When Simon came home one day and tried to pour himself a cup of egg nog, he found that the carton was empty.

“You didn’t save me any egg nog?” he asked Tina.

Tina shot smirked at him and said, “I thought you bought it as a gift for me…”

She was right, Simon thought, but it would have been nice if Tina had left him some egg nog. “I did,” he said, “but I was hoping you would save me some.”

“You should have told me you wanted some when you brought it home,” Tina said, her eyes wide. “I would have saved you some, had I only known you wanted it.”

“You already know that I love egg nog,” said Simon.

“But you said you bought it for me. Here, would you like me to drive to the store and buy you some egg nog?”

“No, that’s okay,” Simon said, “I’ll just have tea instead. I’ll pick up some more egg nog tomorrow.”

The next day, he did indeed come home with more egg nog. Tina was quick to pour a cup for Simon. She gave it to him with a smile and a kiss.

A few minutes later, the phone rang. Tina answered, and Simon heard her laugh and talk excitedly with the person on the other end of the line. When she got off the phone, Tina announced, “My friend Mary is having an impromptu baby shower at her apartment in 15 minutes. I can’t go empty-handed. I’m going to take the carton of egg nog with me so that everyone has something to drink at the party.”

Simon frowned into his cup. “Well,” he said glumly, “at least I got to have one cup of egg nog this time.”

“Oh, don’t be like that,” said Tina. “I will buy you another carton of egg nog on my way home.” That made Simon feel better.

The next day, Simon came home from work and poured a cup of egg nog. Just then, Tina walked in, saw what Simon was doing, and said excitedly, “Egg nog! Can I have a cup, too?”

“Of course,” said Simon. He handed her the cup he had just poured, got another cup from the cupboard, and started pouring another cup for himself. Unfortunately, there was only half a cup of egg nog left in the carton. Simon was confused. “Didn’t you just buy this carton of egg nog after your party?”

“Not exactly,” said Tina. “We ran out of egg nog at the party, so I had to go to the store and get more. We didn’t finish that second carton, so I brought it home with me to give to you.” She smiled and winked.

“So… you didn’t actually buy me a carton of egg nog,” Simon said slowly.

Tina was surprised. “I brought some egg nog home for you, just like I said I would. Why does it have to be a special carton purchased only for you?”

“Oh, it isn’t that,” said Simon. “It’s just that I never seem to get any of the egg nog.”

Tina shot him a glare. “Would you like to have my cup of egg nog? Here.”

“I just thought you’d think of me, that’s all,” said Simon, realizing that the conversation had soured.

“I brought you home more egg nog,” said Tina, “what more do you want?”

“Well, I only have half a cup here—”

“I offered you my cup!” Tina interjected.

“But you wouldn’t have to do that if you had just bought a carton for me like you said you would,” said Simon.

“I brought home some egg nog!”

“I know, I know,” Simon said uneasily, “but that was egg nog you bought for your party. What you brought home wasn’t even enough for both of us.”

“I offered you my cup!”

“After I had given it to you,” said Simon a little louder. “I was thinking of you. I just wanted you to think of me, too.”

Tina pushed her cup of egg nog across the coffee table and went out to walk the dog. She called out through the closing door, “You only think about yourself!”

Simon didn’t feel like drinking egg nog anymore.

*        *        *

Mina walked through the front door after work and collapsed on the sofa.

Linus could see that she had had a bad day. “You look like you’ve had a rough day,” he said. “Shall I pour you a cup of egg nog?”

“Ugh!” grunted Nina. “I’m so sick of egg nog that I never want to think about it again!”

Simon put the carton back in the refrigerator, saying, “But we love egg nog! It’s our thing.”

Mina held out her hand. “Sorry,” she said. “Too much egg nog at all these office holiday parties, I guess.” Behind her, Linus shrugged as he sipped some egg nog from his own cup.

He didn't offer Mina any egg nog for several weeks, and she didn't seem to miss it. One night, they both had some spare time and Mina asked Linus what he wanted to do. "I think we should pour each other a cup of egg nog, just like old times, and reminisce about that trip we took to the East Coast!" He grinned at her conspiratorially.

She smiled. "That sounds nice."

Linus put on some candles and they got cozy on the couch with their cups. In between sips, he recounted some of the adventures they'd had: Did she remember how hard it was to get hot water to come out of the shower at the hotel? Did she remember that little gazebo they found while taking a shortcut through a little neighborhood park on their way to the pier? Who could forget the old man in the restaurant who tried to challenge Simon to a Scotch-drinking contest! They laughed and laughed.

As Linus finished off his second cup of egg nog, he glanced at Mina's cup. She had hardly touched it in the hours they'd been talking. "You still don't want to think much about egg nog, I see," he said.

Mina smiled and shook her head. "I tried some, but I guess I just don't like it anymore." She waited a beat before reassuring him, "This was nice, though!"

Linus smiled, too. "It was nice, wasn't it."

"I think I'd better get to bed," Mina told him then. "I have to get to work early tomorrow." She kissed him good night, stood up, and caused the candles to flicker as she swooped her scarf around on her way upstairs to bed.

Linus watched the flickering flames settle back down to their resting position: A perfect teardrop shape perched atop a long, white rod. A drop of melted wax rolled down the side of the candle as Linus reached over to finish Mina's cup of egg nog.

"Next time," he thought, "I'll buy scented candles. The smoke from these burns my eyes."

A Blue Valentine To Technology

Many years ago, I spent much of my time vying for the attention of a very lovely young woman. I showered her with gifts. I floated gently behind her on a cloud of euphoria the likes of which I had never experienced before. Willingly and ambitiously, I committed to remolding my weaknesses until I had transformed into a better version of myself in a daring plan to win her heart and build a perfect life together, filled with the promise of limitless possibilities. 

Young love is a language all its own, and we both proved to be multilingual. But it wasn’t just romance. I mean, she and I really were multilingual! I spoke English and Spanish, and dabbled in French. She spoke English and Bangla, and dabbled in many others. Our overlap was English, it was the language we shared, and thus became the language that defined our love affair. This didn’t seem right to me, though. In a truly epic love affair, I thought to myself, I’d speak her native tongue, too. Thus it happened that I started teaching myself Bangla.

The passion of youth is filled with optimism and hope, for despite there being no useful book or class for learning Bangla, I was certain it would be possible to master it. I searched the web deeply and uncovered a few important links. Then, with the help of my sweet paramour, I built my knowledge of Bangla from the ground up, one word at a time.

I leveraged Google’s technology for this. With their transliteration tool and their documents platform, I was able to achieve significant success in my undertaking, building language skills that would prove to be useful for a lifetime, a genuine lifetime. My heart swelled and the love between the young woman and I grew ever deeper. So, too, grew my love for the technology that made this possible.

Inevitably, however, the passion of young love fades. No, don’t worry: the young lady stuck with me. It’s my love affair with technology that soured over the years. Technology is the one that got away. She broke my heart. It’s a terrible tale.

Google swept me off my feet back then. It gave me the tools – free tools – with which to build a blossoming love affair into a lifelong romance; it helped me learn something that no teacher was available to teach me: a rare-to-North-America language that almost no one learns if they are not raised in Bangladesh. In Blogger, it gave me a platform with which to share my knowledge and perhaps acquire more through social networking. My use of Blogger soon opened doors to new opportunities in the form of occasional articles written for other websites. The future was unfolding her wings and flying me into the heart of the sun.

Then one day technology flew me to an entirely new high. My cell phone buzzed while I was driving. I glanced at the screen and saw a notification. I was headed straight for a traffic jam. That’s a useful alert, but Google took this even a step further: it automatically offered an alternative route, even though I wasn’t using the GPS system. That’s the power of technology working for me.

By god, it didn’t stop there! Soon all sorts of interesting and useful predictive technology was being used to improve my life. Google offered me reminders of things I had never expressly asked to be reminded of – and those reminders were just what I needed. I was getting updates on my package shipments. I was getting updates on, not only my own personal air flights, but also those of my friends and family members. This information was being funneled to me through my smart phone. I didn’t have to go searching for it, it was right there on my home screen.

Once I finally warmed up to this, I started taking it as far as it would go. I reveled in the sweet possibilities of what I had been offered. I voice-controlled Google into setting reminders for myself, which would translate into alarms on my phone. I created shopping lists, shared them with friends. I created a fillable online form that could track and predict my blood glucose levels. Everything was moving in the same wonderful direction. With a simple digital assistant, an artificial intelligence tucked into my smart phone, provided to me as a free feature on top of all the other things a smart phone “really” does, I was expanding my ability to live the good life. Technology and I really could build a future together.

It was beautiful.

And then it was gone.

As is so often the case for these relationships, I’m not exactly sure when it happened. The love faded gradually as all of that wonderful functionality disappeared, replaced with news stories and monetization. And boredom.

The truth is, I hadn’t really even noticed what I’d been missing until today, when I read an article about it at Computer World. “Google Now” fluttered away lethargically, like a lover who simply loses interest and grows cold. The passion of our earlier relationship had disappeared. Eventually I forgot that Google Now was even around. It took a wake-up call in the form of that Computer World article to remind me what I had lost, and what I had lost was truly wonderful.

Shuffling past the Amazon devices that now control my light bulbs, I felt a pang. Years ago, what Google and other technology firms were building was something that could have made for a genuinely epic marriage of human needs and algorithmic supplementation. Our mere acquainting ourselves with one another was enough to inspire a relationship between us that soon became something new unto itself. My relationship to technology wasn’t just that of a man and a computer in his pocket. I learned languages, improved my health, shortened my daily commute, made new friends. Every marriage should be what this was.

And now? Sure enough, I can voice-control my lightbulbs. I can set reminders and access my calendar. I can read a curated list of recent headlines. I do all this through sundry apps, none of which are powerful to offer me the future I had imagined, all of which are trying to monetize my interaction with it.

But what really hurts is the lost sense of limitless possibilities that I once had. If I had met my wife last year, I doubt I would ever have thought to leverage Google’s applications to teach myself a new language. I certainly wouldn’t have created my own blood glucose predictive analysis. Granted, I can hack together a lot of what I want to do with a combination of clunky apps. If I keep one eye occasionally dialed into my GPS system, I can watch for bad traffic; but I don’t get automatic notifications about it anymore, for example. And while I enjoy what Alexa can do for me, her user interface is slow and complicated compared to the old “Google Cards” interface.

In short, the romance is gone. I now look at the so-called Internet of Things and think to myself, why on earth do I need my refrigerator to me “smart?” A few years ago, I would have guessed that I’d one day live in a world in which a smart refrigerator could assemble my favorite ingredients before I even wake up. That really would be something. But algorithmic temperature control is definitely not worth dinner and movie, much less the hundreds of dollars extra I’d have to spend to buy the algorithm. My smart watch, a beautiful thing, has all the sensors required to predict my VO2 max. It doesn’t do it, though. Garmin reserves that particular algorithm for customers who buy one of their more expensive watches, despite the fact that this is a simple software operation. They’re withholding smart services from me that they could offer me, but don’t.

So this is the crushing weight of the end of a love affair. This is the moment, years after that sweet initial romance period, where I have discovered that my beloved was tantalizing me with gifts I would have to beg for – or pay for – later on; that every new desire in my affair with technology has become quid-pro-quo. I see in others pale and partial glimpses of the fire that engulfed me during the early years, whether it’s Alexa’s shopping lists or Android Auto’s voice-texting service; but these are only bits and pieces of what I thought I was getting. All these years later, we’re both tired of trying so damn hard. The future isn’t possibilities, it’s a few fond tools that can be called upon when we’re both willing to think about it at the same time. The eagerness to please, the dream we both once shared, is like a miasma that hangs in the periphery behind me.

Gradually and silently, I’ve admitted that, when it comes to technology, I hoped for more than I ended up with, and I dream that someone out there might come along with, if not the same functionality technology used to promise us all, at least that same sense of hope.

Creatures Of Habit

Imagine that you’re an infant. In the main, you get what you want by crying. If you’re hungry, you cry, and then someone arrives to hold you, comfort you and give you food. If you’re tired, you cry, and then someone comes along and holds you close, rocks you back and forth, and helps you to sleep.  A dirty diaper yields more of the same: you cry, someone solves your problem. You’re not quite fully comfortable in your crib: you cry, someone walks in and fixes your problem.

Pretty much every problem you have can be solved primarily by crying. You reach this conclusion because the first thing you do in any bad situation is cry. All else follows that.

It takes you several months to learn that the people who walk in and solve your problems for you are dealing directly with those problems. It’s not your crying that’s responsible for your relief, it’s the actions of a third party, tackling those problems head-on.

Once you learn this, you continue to cry when bad things happen because, although you may understand that your real problem is, say, hunger, you’re not capable of solving that problem yourself. The crying becomes a signal to others that you want them to come and help. When you need them, they’re there for you.

However, in some situations, you eventually learn that you don’t need them. You don’t need them because your problem doesn’t involve physical needs. Sometimes you’re just cranky. Babies get cranky just like everyone else.

Okay, stop imagining. Now go back to being an adult. As an adult, you get cranky and, no matter how much you cry, no one comes around to magically fix your mood. So you figure out other ways to address your crankiness: You exercise, or you listen to music, or you read a book, or you go find a happy place, or whatever it is.

You self-soothe.

We’re babies again. We know we’re cranky and that nothing will fix it. We learn that what we need is self-soothing. Some of us learn that we just need to suck on something - it’s not that we’re hungry, we just need to mimic the scenario that is naturally most relaxing to us, which is suckling. We don’t have a breast or a bottle or a binky, so we use our thumb instead.

It works. We self-soothe. Our caretakers get a good night’s rest. Everybody’s happy. This becomes a habit, and for a long period of time, it seems to be a good habit. We get what we need, and our caretakers seem less cranky when we really do need something.

Eventually, though, this good habit becomes a bad one. We suck our thumbs too long. We’re no longer babies, now we’re toddlers, and some of us are still sucking our thumbs. We look ridiculous, we’re spreading disease, we’re making our teeth crooked, and our caretakers are no longer so thrilled about this thumb-sucking situation. What was once good is now bad. Everything goes haywire.

Okay, back to adulthood. Some of us learn to self-soothe with alcohol. Others learn to self-soothe by controlling how we eat. Others learn to self-soothe by cutting. Others act out. It’s clear that we’re aiming for a productive goal, but it’s also clear that our methods undermine our needs, just like thumb-sucking.

Like thumb-sucking, we developed some bad habits by engaging in behavior that was initially good. Perhaps the cutter started out by screaming into a pillow or punching a cushion, then gravitated toward more painful processes to achieve self-soothing more immediately. Perhaps the anorexic gained a sense of control initially by focusing on a very productive act of self-healing: eating; but this  got all tied-up with body image and took a turn for the worse. Perhaps the alcoholic got into drinking by talking about his problems with his friends over a beer, and gradually built that ritual into his reflective process.

Whatever the details, the story is roughly the same: What starts out as a genuinely good idea becomes a habit, and then the habit takes over and a genuinely good example of self-soothing becomes an act of self-destruction.

There is no threshold. It’s not as if punching a pillow twelve times is perfectly safe, but that thirteenth time results in a rug-burn on your knuckles and now you’ve achieved self-harm. It’s not as if sticking to twelve punches is all you need to keep things under control. Twelve becomes thirteen because you needed an extra punch one day. And then one day you needed another. And then another. And then another. And then one day you punched the table instead of the pillow and your knuckles bled, and that was when you felt better. So the next time you needed to feel better, you just went to the table the first time, to cut straight to the chase.

Babies don’t set out to suck their thumbs. It’s behavior that proves useful in a particular situation. It doesn’t start out as a habit, it merely becomes one because it proves so useful.

Similarly, as adults, our self-soothing choices may have started out perfectly reasonable. But if you find yourself locked into a bad habit, you have to recognize: it’s not the “thing” that you’re looking for. It’s not the alcohol, or the cutting, or the starving. It’s not the rage. These habits just grew out of what you were really looking for: relief.

Of course, it’s easier said than done to replace your bad habits with more constructive actions that address your relief more directly. If it were easy, no one would ever have any kind bad habit at all. Still, what other choice do you have?

Moby Ryan

I need to write more.

I need to write more because I want to be a writer. I met a role model of mine recently, and he suggested that I consider writing. It was an inspirational suggestion, but I hasten to add that I have long wanted to be a writer. Indeed, I've been writing this blog and contributing contributions here and there for a long time. But I've never been a writer.

When people think about becoming writers, I think their minds subconsciously vector toward that image of a bearded, greying alcoholic with a brown sport coat and crippling depression. Also, someone who is poor and hard-lived. I don't want to be that kind of writer.

I also don't want to be a professional writer. I already make money doing something well enough that I can pay my bills doing it. I don't need a new job. That's not why I want to be a writer.

I also don't want to be a writer to turn myself into the next J.K. Rowling, nor even into the next Kurt Vonnegut, or the next whoever-is-supposed-to-be-the-writer-we-all-aspire-to-be. I don't want to write the Great American Anything.

I started re-reading Moby Dick. I'm reading it with my daughter at night, before she goes to sleep. She's too young to understand it, but where else is she going to hear that kind of prose? She shouldn't have to wait until her teens to hear beautiful language like that. Anyway, she sometimes resists her bedtime, and so long as I'm coaxing her back into bed, I may as well get something out of it myself. I want to read Moby Dick. It's a wonderful book.

I read on Wikipedia that Herman Melville made practically no money from writing, and that he eventually retired from it once someone had secured for him a good, steady job doing something else. I don't want to overly romanticize it, but I find it encouraging that such a brilliant writer could create his masterpiece mostly for the love of it. It must have hurt that nobody loved it while he was still alive, but it's still a masterpiece.

I want to be that kind of writer. I want to be the kind of writer who produces a masterpiece, whether anyone reads it or not. I want to write for me.

So I'll start by writing some more blog posts. I'll practice. I'll practice covering economic topics, like I used to. I'll practice my prose. I'll practice my story-telling. And I'll keep writing my book outlines, which currently number in the dozen or so and are stowed safely in a private place.

One day, with practice, I might actually succeed in becoming a writer, and that will be an accomplishment.

Books That Influenced Me

Tyler Cowen reminds us of a blog post he wrote seven years ago, “Books which have influenced me the most.” At the end of this earlier post, Cowen writes, “I would encourage other bloggers to offer similar lists.” It sounds like fun, and I’d like to do just that.

First, though, I need to add a caveat. Cowen’s book lists are interesting predominantly because Tyler Cowen is very secure in who he is. He clearly understands his role as a blogger. He’s a cultural critic as much as an economist, if not primarily a cultural critic. Every day we learn a little bit more about his personal tastes in books, music, food, and ideas. On his blog, he presents himself as the kind of person who can add interesting commentary to virtually any topic, the kind of person who functions as the most important guest at a party, even if not the life of the party. He’s the sort of man who can keep conversation headed down interesting and elucidating pathways, mostly by knowing how to ask the right questions. But if no one’s asking the right questions, he’ll gladly answer them himself, and then put the question back to everyone else when he’s finished.

In short, we’re interested in what books influence a man like that because a man like that is very interesting and has diverse tastes and thoughtful observations.

By contrast, who am I? I don’t mean to say that I’m unimportant or a nobody or that people shouldn’t care much about me – that’s not for me to say, anyway. I just mean to ask the question, if you happen to come across my blog for some reason, why should you care which books influenced me the most? It’s unlikely that you’re curious about that because you’re curious about how I think. I’m not the life of the party and I’m only recently learning how to ask the right questions. My observations can be controversial, but they’re unlikely to cause anyone to think and ponder for a long time.

No, you’d more likely be interested in a list like this to either get some random ideas for book suggestions, or to compare my list to the list of books you like best.

I’ll present my list in that light. This changes the contents of the list a bit, but don’t worry about that.

So here they are, in no particular order:

I. The Castle by Franz Kafka. I was already a Kafka fan when I found my copy of this book – a 2^nd English language edition – in the back of a moldy used book store somewhere in California. The thing I love most about this book is that, at the time I read it, I didn’t have a lot of experience with bureaucracy and didn’t fully understand what the book was about; yet as my life unfolded, my thoughts would return again and again to this book each time I encountered a relevant experience in my life. So the book and its themes and messages stuck with me even though I didn’t come to understand them until later.

II. Epistemological Problems of Economics by Ludwig von Mises. After Human Action, I think this is Mises’ most important work. Because of my personal interests, I learned far more from the former than I did from the latter. It is a wonderful book for learning “the economic way of thinking.” It’s also quite a bit lighter reading than Human Action, which helps its contents stick to your grey matter a little better. I think this should be required reading for undergraduate economics students.

III. The Island of the Day Before by Umberto Eco. It’s not his most popular book, but this one was seemingly written just for guys like me. It’s a book about a young man who commits himself to loving from afar. He never endeavors to win the heart of his love so that he can continue cherishing her from afar. This decision serves to influence everything else that happens in his life. In true Eco fashion, the various events in the story all come together in a superb metaphor unlike anything I’ve ever read before. And the ending is open-ended, left up to the reader on purpose. I won’t spoil the ending for you, but Eco allows us to finish it as we please, which is of course the whole point of the story.

IV. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. Screw the haters. Much has been written about what a terrible book this is. I always found the book to be a wonderful character sketch, probably because I actually knew people in real-life who had parallel characters in the story. The ideas in that book won me over from the more left-leaning political traditions, kindled my interest in economics, and served as a source of inspiration for many, many years. I’ve read this book several times and, sadly, I now feel a pang of shame whenever I pick it up, not because of what I think, but because of how badly people are excoriated for enjoying it. That’s not fair. This is a good book. It’s made big waves for valid reasons. No book is perfect. This is a good book.

V. Moby Dick by Herman Melville. This one just might get my vote for the greatest novel in the history of mankind. Surely it is the greatest novel in American history. I first read this book in junior high school, heavily abridged. We’d skip whole chapters and focus entirely on the action in the story. As a result, much of the meaning in the story was lost on me at the time. I still enjoyed the book, but not like I do when I read it now. To be honest, I am surprised the modern school systems allow this book to be taught as standard curriculum. It’s boldness in challenging sacrosanct American virtues like Christianity and Existentialism make it the kind of book that would likely be banned if more people understood what it was really about. But that’s the beauty of it, really. There are easter eggs in every paragraph of this book. The prose is directly allusive to specific works of Shakespeare, and to the Bible. Yet all the same, Melville manages to tell the tale in a merry, witty way, in a voice all his own, and to teach us something about “chasing the dragon” along the way. It’s a masterpiece.

VI. A Profile of Mathematical Logic by Howard DeLong. This is essentially a textbook of mathematical logic. As such, there is not a lot I can say about it that will interest blog readers, except to say that it is perhaps the clearest and most elucidating book on mathematical reasoning I’ve ever read. I’ve always been “just okay” at math. Reading this book helped me become “a math guy.” I’m still not a great mathematician, but at least now I can engage in mathematical thinking without fear. If you have the prerequisite math background, I can confidently say that this book can do the same for you.

VII. The Illuminatus! Trilogy, by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. I thank my sister for introducing me to this book. It is full of sex, drug use, and fowl language, but it is one of the best books a well-read person could possibly read. Almost every major book is referenced somewhere in this novel, and usually lampooned. The story is confusing and psychedelic. It’s reflective of the hippy culture that influenced. It’s a great book for all the wrong reasons, but it still somehow manages to present a wonderful vision of libertarian possibilities and radical freedom. I don’t recommend it for kids, but I do recommend it.

VIII. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. This classic and cautionary tale about vengeance and obsession is the kind of book that every youth reads about ten years earlier than they really should. While it’s certainly accessible to the more youthful reader, the situations it describes simply don’t mean as much until after one has a few more years under his belt. Unlike Dumas’ more popular The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo’s primary source of action is its nail-biting dialogues. I think it’s superb how, over the course of the book, we gradually go from cheering for the hero to… possibly cheering against him? Hoping that someone stops him and that he learns his lesson? Again, younger readers will be dissatisfied by the fact that the hero doesn’t remain a hero all the way through, and that we’re left with a deeply flawed human being who could have been a hero. By adulthood, we can better appreciate ideas as heroes, rather than people.

IX. Better Training for Distance Runners by David Martin and Peter Coe. This is another textbook, one on exercise physiology. The technical sections can be a little dense, but if you don’t mind learning the basics, then the rest of the book will reward you with an excellent primer on how to train, really train, as a distance runner. I think a revised version of this book, with more simplified physiology sections and more compelling prose, would make an excellent book for high school coaches and athletes, and would make a lot people healthier and happier with their running.

X. Son of the Revolution by Liang Heng. This book is a personal account of what it was like to live through the Cultural Revolution in Communist China. It is important as a documented account of communist life, but it is perhaps even more important as a lesson in the universality of human reactions. The Cultural Revolution produced nation-wide witch hunts that evoke the mob mentality that envelopes any country when a mass delusion takes hold, whether it come in the form of “terrorists” or “drug lords” or “racists” or anything else. Liang Heng is a wise man who lived through a terrible set of circumstances, came out on top, and was willing to pass along his life lessons for the rest of us.

Bike Review: Windsor Clockwork Plus (Part 3)

Well, today’s post ought to take you back a few years. Four and a half years back, in fact. It was March 2013 when last I blogged about my Windsor Clockwork Plus bike. (Read Part 1 here.) Back then, I promised a subsequent review once I’d had enough time to ride the bike seriously. One would hope that in four years I’ve had enough time to do just that.

And I have. I’ve ridden hundreds of miles on my Windsor bike, most recently putting in about 60 miles on it every weekend, and more during the week if I find myself working from home. (My commute is too far to take my bike to work with me for workouts.) Each week, I seem to get a little faster. Keep in mind that I am quite a novice when it comes to cycling. I have the physical ability to cycle well, but I have very little experience. More on that in a moment.

How has the bike held up over the years? Let me say a few words about the bike’s components. Piece-for-piece, you’d have to spend about $800 to get a similarly-equipped Bianchi track bike. I spent $300 on mine, and they are still being sold for about that price. Meanwhile, the only thing I’ve had to replace so far is the rear inner tube. Once. That means that after four and a half years and hundreds of cycling miles, everything has held up superbly. Even that one inner tube I had to replace only wore out this year. Everything else is fine, beautiful even.

What are the weak links? Well, the reflectors never really tighten up. They don’t need to be rock-solid, of course, but you can move them around with your hand, if you want to. Big deal. They’re reflectors.

The other thing is the brakes. Now, look, I’m not an expert cyclist, so who knows what a real biking god would tell you? These brakes work just fine, even now. I’ve had to come to some sudden stops, and these brakes have worked perfectly. But they don’t feel great. They feel a little... I’m not sure. Cheap maybe. It’s hard to call them cheap brakes if they’ve held up for this long and this many miles, especially since they continue to work great. But they don’t have a very luxurious feeling to them.

Consequently, I think perhaps if and when I start making upgrades to my Windsor Clockwork Plus, the first thing I’ll do is upgrade the brakes and put on a fancy new grip.

But now I’m talking upgrades, future upgrades at that. What about the stock components? The seat is comfortable. I bought some biking shorts and now I can ride 30-40 miles in the stock saddle with comfort and ease. I’m utterly certain I could go twice that far without really hurting in the saddle region. The wheels are still beautiful. The tires might be wearing down a little, but still seem fine to me.

Long story short, this has become one of the best $300 purchases I’ve ever made. Who could have imagined that I’d have so much fun and bike so far in a $300 internet track bike? Amazing. You must buy one of these things.

Wait a minute: What about curb appeal? I mean, what do people say when they see my bike? To be honest, the other cyclists out there are pretty skeptical. They often want to know why I’m riding a “fixie.” (Note: The Windsor Clockwork Plus comes with both a fixed cog and a normal cog, which means that it can be both a fixie and a standard single-speed bike.) On the downhills, they leave me in the dust. It’s so easy to bike fast when you’ve got a few extra heavy gears on tap. Pedaling as fast as I can, I can get up to about 25 miles per hour. It’s fast enough for me, but the other cyclists out there can get going much faster without any effort at all. As I gain more experience, I’m learning how to keep up with them. A lot of this is about confidence. When you’re not used to biking at car speeds, it can be a little unnervering to ride that fast on a single-speed bike with your pedals flailing. But I’m getting there.

The real fun begins on the uphills. Okay, pumping hard up long hills isn’t for everyone, but all those fast downhill bikers eat my dust when I’m climbing hills. When you get accustomed to a single-speed bike, you become a master of hill work. This is great.

Have I said enough? This bike is so much fun. I recommend oneto everyone. Buy! Buy! Buy!

Don't Try To Teach Bears Japanese

Maybe there are people out there who are so in-tune with themselves from the time they are born that they never have to wind through the same kind of endless journey of self-discovery that I have. If you're one of those people, I have two things to say to you.

1. I really, really admire you. Please don't stop being who you are.
2. This blog post is probably not for you.

Embracing my inner weirdo has been something of a calling card of mine. From an early age, I figured out that I am not one of the usual suspects. When you read things about "the average person," or "most people," or "a reasonable person," you are reading about people who are very different from me. I used to jokingly put it this way: I'm the exception to every rule, including this one. 

Thus, I found it rather surprising when I was talking to someone recently, and she suggested that much of my motivation involved conformity. Who, me? Conform? Never! I'm the exception to every rule, including this one! I'm a rugged individualist, a man committed to being exactly who I am, to hell with what peer pressure I might face or what influence other people might seek to have over me.

The (possibly inevitable) catch-22 escaped me for years: Even he who seeks only to be himself craves acceptance on that level. That is, just because a person wants to be individualistic doesn't mean the person has no desire for social acceptance. In the extreme case, such a person could really make himself miserable by always impressing upon people how different he is, and always facing the disappointment of social stigma or rejection. In the milder case, they're simply two separate concepts, being oneself on the one hand, and being socially accepted on the other.

Some people seek social acceptance by changing themselves. That kind of person always played the villain or the victim in the stories I've told myself. How could anyone sell themselves so short with such scant compensation? All the while, the more interesting concept was flying right under my radar. Some people, present company included, seek social acceptance despite refusing on principle to change themselves in order to attain it.

Of the two kinds of people, which do you think is the bigger sucker? Maybe I'm just self-flagellating here, but I'm inclined to think it's the second fellow.

Oh, don't worry. I haven't disavowed my individualism. In fact, I'm more individualistic now than ever before. As I said above, self-discovery (and therefore also self expression) is an endless journey. I'm always growing toward a marginally better individualism. Part of what I needed to learn, and what I did learn recently, was that the need for social acceptance operates on a different axis than the need to express individuality. Two people with equal levels of individuality might have widely different levels of social acceptance. We can all have David Bowie levels of individuality, but you have to actually be David Bowie in order to enjoy that level of social acceptance. C'est la vie.

I obviously possess no greater insight as to gaining social acceptance. Sometimes I think I have it, and sometimes I think I don't. My guess is that most people feel more or less the same. But I do seem to have a greater motivation for it. I have to admit, I don't just want to be me, I want people to be at ease with the fact that I am me. Maybe this is because a lot of people I've known in the past haven't been at ease with my being me. Or maybe it's only because a lot of people I've known in the past haven't been at ease, and I internalized their dissatisfaction all by myself.

Well, that one's my albatross to carry around. What I wanted to share with my readers, and what I believe is far more universal, is this: Some people won't accept you, no matter who you are or what you do. There are people who hate David Bowie, even though he's David-freaking-Bowie. They can't be appeased. You can't be a better version of David Bowie in hopes of making them happy about it. They'll never be happy about it. It's not a problem with you, it's a problem with them. Perhaps it's just a different set of values.

You might instead be able to practice recognizing these people, or these situations, early. Take notice of the ones who won't be happy with you as you are or as you might be. When you find them, just let it go. Let the whole thing go.

You can't teach a bear to speak Japanese. Convincing some people to be happy about who you are is like that. You won't convince them because not only is it a foreign language, it's a foreign language in a different species' vocal cords, owned by someone whose motivations are nowhere in the same neighborhood as yours.

Walk away, go somewhere else, do your thing. Focus on the people who like who you are, and the situations in which you are allowed to be you. 

Every Food Is A Dead End

Most of us, when we imagine a very unhealthy person's diet, imagine that it consists of fast food, empty calories, excessive alcohol, excessive fat, chips, candy, and so on.

At the other end of the spectrum is the model of a healthy eater, but this is much more difficult to imagine. One reason is because there are competing theories as to what constitutes a healthy diet. Another, perhaps more important, reason is being "healthy" is a continuum, not a binary condition. Two men who eat lots of broccoli might be healthy, but the one who washes his broccoli three times is healthier than the one who washes hers only twice. The one who runs 5 miles a day before eating broccoli is healthier than the one who runs only 4.7 miles. One who neither runs nor eats broccoli would simply call them both healthy.

Recent reports indicate that drinking diet soda increases all sorts of health risks. While no one thinks diet soda is a health food, and while there have been previous warning about the impact of artificial sweeteners on health, I don't think anyone expected that drinking a can of Diet Coke for lunch every day could actually triple your chance of having a stroke. The punchline of the study seems to be, not to eliminate diet soda from your diet, but to simply consume less of it. But again, he who cuts down from 5 to 3 cans per week is less healthy than he who cuts down from 3 to 1.

Seafood, of course, is loaded with lean protein and healthy fats, but also brain-killing mercury and cholesterol. We're urged by our doctors to eat seafood over hamburger, but eating a tuna fish sandwich every day may actually harm you worse than eating ground beef for lunch every day. If so, what sense are we to make of healthy recommendations? Tuna is healthier than hamburger the first two times you eat it in a week, but after that, you're better off with hamburger.

Even if you're a vegetarian - indeed, even if you're a vegan - you're not out of the woods. Eating a green pepper is healthy, except for all the pesticides it carries. Eating an organic green pepper won't save you, either, since the pesticides are in the water supply and floating through the air.

And if you ever drink water, well, you're unfortunately consuming all the impurities in our water supplies, including pharmaceuticals and hormones ingested by people who have legitimate reasons to ingest them, but whose medicines may cause unpredictable negative consequences to you.

In a world like this, it's easy to grow cynical and to say, moments before biting deep into your bacon-topped pizza slice, "Well, everything is going to kill me, so I might as well eat whatever I want to!" But this, too, is the wrong conclusion, since eating without a care in the world will surely kill you more swiftly than meticulously managing your diet.

But seriously: How are we supposed to manage our diets? The question is especially tough for us diabetics: Too much meat will kill me with cancer, but too many carbs will kill me with organ failure. Do I have a preference? Should I have a preference? While the whole world treats themselves to an evening snack, the only thing I can reach for is a low-carb drink: spirits or light beer. This is a healthier option, really? It won't raise my blood sugar, but it will slowly chip away at my liver, or maybe just give me stomach cancer.

"Just eat the snack, but cover it with more insulin," says the diabetic who takes one trip per year to the emergency room for an insulin overdose.

What's a guy to do? I'm not sure it's possible to live on water, 30g of carbs per meal, and organic chicken breast. But I'm all out of ideas.

What You Control And What You Do Not

I was discussing an issue over social media the other day. Someone had provided a quotation arguing for X. I said that I disagreed with X, and gave my reasons. My interlocutor accused me of arguing for Y. I stated that I was not arguing for Y, but he insisted that I was. It was at that point that my expectations for the conversation started to diverge with reality.

What I expect when I tell someone that they have misunderstood or misinterpreted my statements is that the person will ask new questions to find out what I really meant instead. In practice, I am starting to notice that people rarely do this. More often than not, they ask me to defend myself against their charge (“Show me how you’re not arguing Y!”) rather than seek clarification around my true, intended meaning.

I have the power to clarify my own position. I have the power to rephrase and revise my statements until we all feel confident that my intended meaning is the one that others have understood. I do not, however, have the power to convince someone to interpret my statements charitably. That is, if someone is just committed to believing that I’m arguing for Y, no matter how many times I expressly state otherwise, I have no real power to change that person’s mind about my intended meaning.

Recently I read a blog post by Abigail Brenner, who said something nice: “Never waste time explaining yourself to someone committed to misunderstanding you.” In Brenner’s context, this was intended to be advice against manipulative people. But it’s good advice outside of that context, too. It’s easy to believe that, if we were just better communicators, another person would always see our point of view and consider it seriously. Unfortunately, the way people respond to what we say is not within our control. We can try to improve outcomes by meticulously implementing good communication techniques, but that’s as far as we can take it. The rest depends on the disposition and willingness of the other person to give you a fair hearing. If they won’t, there’s nothing else you can do about it.

So, I choose to let it go. If I have something worthwhile to say, it is the other person’s loss if they aren’t willing to hear me out, and if I don’t have anything worthwhile to say then no one is harmed by disregarding me in the first place.