reading review: the quarterback whisperer

The Quarterback Whisperer by Bruce Arians (November 2017)

Arians, a longtime coach who currently leads the Arizona Cardinals, wrote this book in collaboration with Lars Anderson. The Quarterback Whisperer details a career notable for the many top quarterbacks Arians has worked with – including Andrew Luck, Ben Roethlisberger, and Carson Palmer – and this book is filled with his knowledge about helmet football’s most important position.

The crucial ingredient for a successful quarterback is character. A great quarterback is a special person. He leads teammates to achieve in ways no one else believes possible. Quarterbacks inspire on the field by playing with heart, grit, and determination. They also do the same off the field by setting a high standard for training and always being perfectly prepared for the next game.

A story about Andrew Luck, one of the sport’s top players, illustrates the idea. Luck, writes Arians, showed up on the first day of practice during his rookie season and confused his entire offense by calling out plays and audibles no one else knew. It didn’t take Arians long to realize that Luck had memorized the entire playbook and was calling out signals no one else had even considered reviewing at the earliest stage of the season.

The NFL quarterback position, though physically demanding, is a test of a player’s mental ability more so than his athletic skill (1). Preparing to quarterback a team for a football game is like studying before an important debate – it is easier to perform well if all the questions are anticipated. The difference between a debate and helmet football, of course, is that there is no separation between asking the question and giving the answer – in a helmet football game, it all pretty much happens at the same time (2). It is up to the quarterback to draw on all the knowledge he has to look at the defense, understand the possibilities, and anticipate the correct play for his team to run.

The challenge for coaches like Arians is to help players transition from the less mentally demanding college game to the professional level. The rise of the no-huddle spread system in the college game is making this a more challenging task, especially if the players in question are young quarterbacks. In the spread system, quarterbacks are not asked to interact in a huddle, change the play, or read the defense. In short, these quarterbacks do not cultivate the leadership skills needed to succeed as professionals and must learn the position's intangible skills on the job before becoming successful NFL players.

One up: Arians makes a couple of comments about standard practice procedure in the NFL that I think would benefit many if applied to their own careers, organizations, or professions.

First, he notes how every NFL team reviews what went well, what went wrong, and what the areas for improvement are after every game. I do not hear about this happening too regularly for the average nine-to-five worker. I’m sure a standardized routine of self-evaluation would lead to a big boost in productivity for most workers, though, and even a brief end-of-week review with a manager or informally comparing notes with colleagues every once in a while would probably have significant rewards for all types of workers.

He also notes how sometimes it is the most gifted players who fail to work on fundamentals. He explains by noting how sports at lower levels of competition sometimes come too easily for gifted young players. This, too, could be a problem for workers in general. People who do not find ways to expand their skill sets risk stagnating in their career development. If they fail to reinforce the basic fundamentals of their jobs, there is the possibility of performance decline. Those who do not work at their craft will get stuck at the career level they once dismissed as being too 'low-level' for their God-given talents.

One down: Arians suggests at one point that because just one discontented coach can infect an entire coaching staff, an incoming head coach will usually prefer to bring in an entirely new group of his or her own hand-picked assistants. Though this was presented as an explanation, I thought it described what more than it explained why.

What does it mean to describe what rather than explain why? It means to settle for observation when understanding is required. To borrow an analogy from Gary Taubes, it’s like saying a space is becoming crowded because more people are entering it than leaving it. This might provide a narrative for the action by telling us how the room is becoming crowded. But it fails to explore why people are choosing to enter the room (or why the people already present are choosing to stay).

A big job for the coach is to hire the best people available and figure out the way to get the most out of them for the sake of the team. A new coach who thinks the way Arians describes is systematically ruling out a group of people for an assistant job. This makes it less likely that the new coach will assemble the best possible coaching staff. It also hints that the coach is perhaps unable or uninterested in working out the sorts of disputes or disagreements sure to arise over helmet football’s intense five month long season.

Just saying: Arians mentions how play callers should believe their job is to win the game with the offense. Broadly speaking, this is a good point. Most helmet football games require the offense to score at least twenty points for the team to have a reasonable chance at winning.

But longtime TOA readers will recognize the following position: great rules are defined by their exceptions. In helmet football, the offense must tailor its play-calling to balance the needs of the team. Sometimes, the goal is not to win the game with the right call but to simply see a situation through. If the defensive unit is exhausted, for example, the offense should try to retain the ball and give the defense a chance to rest instead of scoring right away and forcing their tired teammates back onto the field.

Another good example is when a team is up big late in the game. At some point, the offense must call plays in response to the time and score situation of the game. Otherwise, teams are going to end up replicating Atlanta’s collapse in the most recent Super Bowl.

Footnotes / next time on TOA... / bad puns

1. More on this topic in a future post…

Evaluators often fail to predict which college quarterbacks will become the best professionals. Part of the reason, I suspect, is the ease of measuring a player’s physical skills relative to a player’s mental ability. All a scout needs to figure out speed or strength is the right stopwatch or weight lifting exercise – understanding if a player is smart enough to learn a playbook and apply the knowledge in a game situation is not measurable by any test, drill, or exercise. This is supported by the observation that most top draft picks who fail at quarterback possess superior athletic skills compared to those who beat them out for the job.

The analogy here is to the empty suit. Anyone with no knowledge or understanding can still look good and deliver a message just like anyone with a strong arm can throw the ball fifty yards.

2. What? What? I’m sorry, I couldn’t resist…

The similarity between a debate and helmet football is the possibility of being chased around by a crazed six-foot-four guy.

i read fahrenhite 451 so you don't have to

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (August 2017)

In the introduction to Fahrenheit 451, Neil Gaiman makes a remark along the lines of 'fiction is the lie telling us true things'. After finishing Bradbury's famous 1953 dystopian novel, I reflected on those words and found myself appreciating how perfectly they applied to this story.

Is it possible for future governments to use 'firefighters' as a pseudo secret police force, arriving at homes to burn any books reportedly hidden on the premises? Or how about a nuclear war which starts and ends within seconds as fighters zip around the globe to instantly level cities? I guess these things are possible in the way almost anything is technically possible. But in the context of Gaiman's thought, the elements of plot generally represent the lie of fiction.

The truth is in the speech, thoughts, and motivations of the characters. The denizens of Bradbury's future feared intellectuals because their intelligence made their thinking unpredictable. What thoughts could emerge from the well-read mind? For these people, it was better to keep surprises to a minimum by any means necessary. But we all fear the unknown, whether we support book burning or not, and in this truth is the seed Bradbury nurtures throughout.

Gaiman concluded his introductory thoughts by suggesting books allow knowledge to pass '...from one generation to the next...allowing us to build on a shared humanity'. And yet, we rarely heed the information so readily available to us. Why does society consistently fail in this way?

Perhaps the explanation is provided by one of Bradbury's characters. He suggests there is nothing inherently special about a book. It is merely a receptacle for what the author is afraid to forget. But if we all do indeed fear the unknown, perhaps seriously considering the very understandings an author is afraid to forget is a sure path forward in conquering our own fears through achieving a better comprehension of the world around us.

Footnotes / imagined complaints

0. A mini-update to the 'how I read a book' post...

I first read the novel all the way through before returning with a pen in hand. This approach fit Fahrenheit 451 because in some ways the book was a mini-lecture on the philosophy of literature. I think I will put the approach to the test for a couple of novels I intend to read soon because I suspect understanding the work as a whole will enable me to pick out better ideas on the second sweep which I might have dismissed at first glance.

zen and the art of playing the sims

I’ve mentioned before how much I enjoyed Chuck Klosterman’s 'Billy Sim', an essay from his collection Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs (1). The piece is about The Sims, a computer game where players design characters, drop them into a virtual house, and do everyday things like cook dinner, take out the trash, or pay bills. It is, as he put it, the game you would play if you weren’t playing a computer game, a game designed to help us video gamers 'escape to where you already are'.

One of the strange aspects of this game is the lack of external goals, objectives, or missions. It differs from most games I’ve played where every positive actions seems to unlock a new prize or lead to a shiny reward. In The Sims, you just play, and that’s it, and you can keep playing if you want to. When you no longer wish to play, you stop.

For the past few years, my brother and I have gotten the chance to boot up The Sims on PlayStation2 during our returns home for the holidays. We create our characters, try to draw a virtual line down the middle of the virtual house, and play the game ‘head-to-head’ while finishing the leftover beer and food from the day. Whenever I describe this tradition to someone else, I’m met with the same befuddled question - wait, how do you play The Sims against each other? And my answer is always the same – well, you can’t really play against each other, but we do, and it always ends in a tie (2).

Like all questions, though, I sense this question about how to play The Sims ‘head-to-head’ is asked with one of two responses in mind: a five-second answer or a five-minute answer. Most of the time, when I give my glib response about how 'no one can win, really' before steering the conversation on to talk about families, homes, and all the other holiday stuff, what I'm really doing is assuming my conversation partner wants the shorter answer.

Occasionally, I realize the stage is available for a much longer answer. In these moments, I delightfully rub my palms together with self-important excitement before I launch into what I consider The Real Answer to the question. To summarize quickly, my response works out to something like this: well, the real question here is why people assume a game simulating real-life would have a winning condition.

I was reminded of these exchanges when I was reviewing my notes for Charlotte Joko Beck’s Everyday Zen. A major theme of the work is the importance of discarding all the external goals, ideologies, or belief systems that influence behaviors or cause anxieties. As these concerns slip away, the individual stops worrying about the past or the future and instead becomes ready to serve the needs of the present moment.

I’ve become pretty good at playing The Sims over the years and I note a similar progression in my own playing style. It is entirely possible to play the game with the outside measuring stick in mind. Promotions, for example, have strictly defined skills a character must learn before the virtual boss will consider a raise. These skills are easier to gain if a character is well-rested, well-fed, and etc, all goals reached more swiftly with the purchase of the right mattress, the right stove, and so on. Some careers require a minimum number of friends and these, too, require time and effort (like talking to Mortimer, the local voyeur). But to buy these skill-developing or weirdo-impressing things, a character must earn more money, and so the promotions come into play again, and those require skills...

At some point, it becomes perfectly possible to get stuck in a sort of Sim-rut. The character reaches a certain career level and, needing to make more friends AND develop new skills AND fix the leaky sink AND yell at Mortimer AND wash the dishes AND ten other things just to be considered for a promotion, runs out of time for a basic thing like lunch. Work performance suffers as a result because Hungry Sims apparently suck at admin and the much-needed promotion moves a little further out of reach. So then those post-work hours get devoted to working on things like eating lunch and the character runs out of time to make more friends OR develop new skills OR fix the leaky sink OR yell at Mortimer…if the TV breaks or a burglar shows up or the toilet clogs, look out.

It is at this point where a quote Klosterman includes in his essay comes into play. Materialism, says Will Wright, the creator of The Sims, is 'the red herring in the game'. It seems like the idea of the game is to make a little money and buy a few things and make more money and buy more things and eventually make all the money and buy all the things. But the experienced player learns that all this stuff just adds to the stress of daily living: the stress of repairing the broken electronic, the stress of cleaning the table, the stress of replacing the burnt out bulb, it all just makes the game impossible to play when the goal is to buy a hot tub.

And at the heart of all this stress is the drive to accumulate, manage, and maintain all this stuff. And in The Sims – just like I suspect is the case with real life – there is no actual item available to make anyone happier. So buying the next thing doesn't solve anything. In fact, it just adds to the stress because the new automatic dishwasher is another thing to manage and, if it breaks, another crisis to respond to.

So reader, you may be wondering, if the only actual gameplay option is a 'red herring', then what is there to do in the game? I concede the point – this is a very good question. The first step to the answer is a backward one, away from the incessant questions about daily living, the questions like who is going to fix the TV or when are we going to buy a good shower or can we afford the automatically flushing toilet, because these questions hide an underlying insatiability that makes playing the game so much harder.

Without these questions, The Shiny New Thing loses its magical power. And what is this power?

It's the strange ability to make everyone forget that after a week or so of The New Shiny Thing, life always returns back to normal.

It's the power to make us consumers experience the stress of maintaining and repairing The Next New Shiny Thing, to make us experience this stress until we want The Next Newer Shinier Thing, yet somehow not making this stressful enough to make us conclude that the problem isn't the Shininess, it's the Thing itself.

It's magic, really, perhaps a dark magic, that no one acknowledges how owning all these gizmos and gadgets means borrowing from our budgets or our schedules or our relationships to take care of our possessions.

It just goes around and around and around every time these things act up, break down, or simply fall apart before reaching their final resting places at the local junkyard. I found The Sims became a much easier game to play when I focused on meeting my basic needs, finding time to hang out with friends and family, and using my remaining time and energy to build my skills. These are all means to the same ends described above. A well-fed, highly skilled, and socially supported Sim is often the first in line for a Sim Promotion. But approaching the game in this way does not result in the same striving for goods and services seen when the focus is on optimizing for promotions or saving up funds to buy the next great refrigerator.

It works more like how Beck describes it in Everyday Zen – I look around at the game environment, pay close attention to what is going on, and simply do what needs to be done next. There is no room for a belief system like ‘the kitchen must be clean’. Of course, if cleaning the kitchen serves the needs of the Sim family, it gets cleaned. If cleaning it serves no need, the kitchen doesn’t get cleaned. Reader, in this game, it’s as simple as that.

Footnotes / Google 101 / how to break a tie

1. Four times, technically.

Reader, you can find the results if you follow this link to my google search using the site name and the search term 'the sims'. 

2. Well, except the one time…

One time, my brother became disillusioned with his progress and announced he wished to kill himself (editor’s note: kill himself in the game). We thought about this statement and agreed at the time that I was, somehow, the winner.

A few days later, though, I thought about it again. I didn’t really win, I decided. It was more like he lost. This became the official ruling for a while.

But now, with the wisdom of my limitless hindsight, I am again thinking about the situation differently. My brother was courageous enough to admit he needed help (editor’s note: needed help in the game). In life, this is really akin to winning. So maybe, really, I lost the round in question.

i was wrong about turning thirty

A week ago, I wrote about why I overdress myself to run in cold weather. I was proud of the post, of course, but I recognize how a reader might have reacted skeptically. Do I really require twelve hundred words to explain why I wear a sweatshirt when it is cold? Like for most hot-air explanations, ‘probably not’ is the likely answer.

Here is a far simpler explanation:

People change when they are wrong about something.

In many ways, this explains my running outfit better than anything I posted last week. I used to think that the point of the running outfit was to optimize my running performance. I've learned that I was wrong. Now, I understand that the point is to be able to make it home in case something goes awry. The best lessons are often learned the hard way.

I used to think too much about the front end – the running – and didn’t give much thought at all to the back end – the trip home. Now, I know to think through these decisions a little more, I know it without thinking it, I know to be just a little more careful.

I was wrong and I changed. I express this causal relationship so easily because it has been on my mind a lot of late, almost all the time, and like any idea at the top of the mind, I notice it whenever it pops up elsewhere. When I can relate something to the idea, I do so immediately. The post from a week ago is one example. I was wrong and I changed.

Another example comes from my recent reading. In November, I was working my way through Albert Camus’s Lyrical and Critical Essays when this similar concept came up: 

Most of the time, experience means defeat. Knowledge gained comes only from having lost so much in the process. 

Camus spoke to my thought – change grows out of being wrong. I suppose for most people, it takes a loss to recognize error. It's possible to change and it's possible to help other people change. But for the most part, someone yet to realize the error, yet to experience the loss, isn't ready for a change.

I'm starting to see that the problem with change isn't a lack of knowledge or education. Almost anytime I suspect someone else is wrong, I'm dealing with a person who is perfectly informed. The problem isn't a lack of facts, the problem isn't a blind eye to the truth. The problem is with the contradiction of multiple truths clashing with one another.

The outfit that makes it comfortable to walk makes it too hot to run, the outfit that makes it comfortable to run makes it too cold to walk. There is nothing I can add to these truths. There is no missing fact to resolve the contradiction these truths create. The facts I present in any argument will only be parried by better-entrenched facts supporting better-crafted arguments.

Those caught in the contradiction of truths have one way out – by being wrong. When a truth is lost, the contradiction goes with it. The loss is experience and it's the essence of what’s been on my mind. All I seem to do these days is think to myself – you are going to be different when you realize you are wrong – and hope the hard way doesn't happen as I wait for this lesson to be learned.

The thought always makes me a little older. Is this kind of thinking healthy? As the public service announcement implores, when we see something, we should say something, right? By not speaking up, by not stepping in, I know I risk allowing something irreparable to happen.

But I can't meet the challenge of sharing that I think of turning back only because I once arrived at the wrong destination. I don’t have the conviction to explain why I worry more about getting home than going out, don't have the words to read Albert Camus aloud, don't know which card I need to turn over so someone can see the other side of oh, it’ll be fine.

I was reflecting recently on why I don't speak up as much today, why I’ve changed the way I express myself, why I’m more careful. The obvious explanation was that I was becoming more experienced and, in the process, gaining more knowledge. This is the traditional model of education: learn something new, apply the new thing, and repeat. I've done it for thirty years and I'm looking forward to doing it for thirty years more.

But even as I accepted the explanation, I noticed exceptions. These exceptions were not in outright conflict with the explanation. It wasn’t like I learned something new and did the exact opposite. Maybe exception isn’t the best word here. What I’m describing is more like a time lag between understanding and implementation, maybe, or an incubation period where I sit on an idea before getting around to carrying it out.

One example came to mind on an early morning walk. Why do I always stop at red lights? It wasn’t like I learned about these last week, you know? At some point, I learned how the lights worked and, these days, I stop. I became a little more careful. And in-between?

Well, reader, it was a period of jaywalking and rights on red and, hey, even the occasional straight on red if I saw all the angles. I now see these acts as the bridge of sorts spanning the distant shores of learning and application. I don’t recall building this bridge and I have no clever name for the river running below. All I know is that I spent quite a bit of time on it as I made my way, with increasing caution, from one bank to the next. Whatever I lost on the journey was swept downstream.

As Camus noted decades ago, there is a certain knowledge gained only through loss. I guess once people lose their conviction about being right, they become wrong, and change. Maybe watching my neighbors turn a routine street-crossing into a death-defying adventure made an impact on me. Maybe I saw how we were all headed somewhere, somewhere we didn't understand, somewhere downstream where all the losses accumulate. We were all headed somewhere, for sure, despite not knowing exactly where. Maybe on such trips the question of how to get there deserves an outsize importance.

Or maybe, as I’m so often being reminded, I’m just turning thirty. Young reader, we old folks are naturally more careful. I’m just getting older, really, and in the process applying the lessons of being wrong. It must be true since the experience of being wrong takes time and, the longer I’m around, the more time I use. It’s simple math, I suppose, because it takes almost no time to lose something. After thirty years, I surely must have lost something.

I don’t know for sure exactly what I’ve lost. I’m not sure it even matters. What’s lost is gone and never comes back. Thankfully, it isn’t confidence – though I did suspect it for a while. But I’m more confident today than ever. I write here and express my thoughts or feelings in ways I could not just a couple of years ago. I change my mind. I don’t worry about having nothing in common with other people. I sing and dance, sometimes. I walk into the full force of all my uncertainties and expect to emerge as a better person on the other side. No, reader, it isn’t confidence I’ve lost. Or at least, it doesn’t feel that way. I’m more full of it than ever.

And yet, it must be related, surely, because I’m more careful now than ever before. As I heard Dani Shapiro read aloud from Hourglass, her memoir on aging – be careful. It’s a refrain of sorts in the book, one that becomes more frequent, one that comes through louder each time, as she cautiously guides us through her life – be careful. It was important to hear it, not just read it, because from her voice I understood another layer of its meaning – be careful. I hear it all the time now – be careful. I hear it as I take a day off to rest a sore foot – be careful – or pull the brakes at a yellow light – be careful – or try to decipher the nutrition facts – be careful.

I used to look forward to turning thirty. I talked this over months ago with a friend, a friend yet to turn thirty himself. He pointed out that the thirties would be easier than the twenties. I agreed, almost entirely. But I was wrong about this, too, because I wasn’t looking carefully at the thirties, I was only looking at the front end. I was thinking about my twenties and how its specific difficulties, the setbacks of youth and inexperience, would go away as a matter of definition. My confidence, one that grew by the day, would help me meet the new challenges. And time, the most reliable companion of all, would heal the wounds I carried into the new decade.

But I was wrong, I think. The errors of youth, the convictions of confidence, and the repairs made by time; they all share the common thread of resolving the clash of truths. I'm sure the thirties will see my continued emergence from the uncertain space between competing realities. It might even be a clarifying experience, it might even be fun, but it certainly won't be any easier. The process of being wrong won't get any easier as I get older.

All those people I’ve met over the years, those I never thought would go, now gone. All those hobbies and activities and commitments, the very things I poured myself into, now gone. All those places I called home, all those people I called friends, all those things I called mine, now gone. But to where have these gone?

I don’t know where they’ve gone. I have not even a single clue. I don't need to know because I don't need another thing to be wrong about. But this not knowing will only get harder in my thirties, it will only get harder as I go, because I’m well aware where they've gone. They’ve gone to where I’m going. Eventually, I’ll learn.

And until then, I’ll wait, right here, in the space between those two truths, in the world held in place by all the pairs, above the river defined by its banks. I’ll look back at what I've lost, look forward to what I'll learn, and hope that not every coming lesson will be learned the hard way.

the last gift from my mom

I often joke that my mom got me a lot of 'slow cooking' gifts. I would open it on Christmas, find no use for it whatsoever, and store it away. Then, I would wake up one morning and find myself in sudden need of the exact item I'd been incubating in some drawer since the week after Christmas. The gift would then become a cherished and/or critical item until I broke it, lost it, or used it to the point of disintegration.

The best example is my Patriots sling backpack. I got it one year for Christmas and immediately decided it had no use. I already owned a regular backpack and had several extra gym/duffel bags in my apartment. What a stupid gift!

So the sling backpack sat, unused, in my apartment while my mom's cancer grew worse and worse. A few weeks after she died, I signed up for Hubway, the local bike share, and realized I already had the perfect backpack to use while cycling.

Her last gift to me was a t-shirt. She handed it to me just a week before she passed. On the front of the shirt is a ridiculous cartoon of a sumo wrestler sporting a top knot and wearing a purple uniform (well, 'uniform') (1). When I received it, I thought it was an exception to the usual 'slow cooking' rule because I understood its value right away - it was a funny shirt and might make people laugh.

I've worn this shirt regularly since and always get positive remarks. As an added bonus, since I mostly own dark-colored t-shirts, this sumo shirt is my coolest option for a sunny day. No incubation period needed for this gift!

I noticed one day that the size was 'LL'. That was interesting. The shirt fit me, almost, but my size was usually somewhere between 'M' and 'L'. I guess the logical explanation is that shirt sizes in Japan differ from those in the USA. This is the type of insight that is nice to have, in theory, but difficult to put into practice.

Six months after my mom passed, my cousins from Japan visited. I wondered in the days leading up to the visit if my Japanese speaking skills had rusted away in the preceding half-year. I wondered because you see, reader, I only spoke Japanese with my mom. And without her around, I wouldn't have the only source I'd ever relied on to answer my incessant on-the-spot questions about the right vocabulary to use in those everyday situations - like ordering coffee - that I never seemed to actually encounter.

At one point during the visit, we stopped at my mom's favorite coffee shop. I was having a hard time recalling the Japanese needed to describe the drink sizes to my cousins. As I was searching in the corners of my memory attic for the right words, I suddenly realized I knew the perfect way to describe the options.

"Let me put it this way," I said in my dusty, resurgent mother tongue. "The options are Japan-sized or America-sized."

Footnotes / pointless realizations

1. I guess I wear the same uniform during phone interviews!

Don't go wandering around town looking for this shirt - it came directly from Japan (though I would try Uniqlo if you really wanted to look for it).

I should also note that the t-shirt WAS white. Now, it resembles the sky about an hour before a spring rain - it's getting darker, slowly, but perhaps more importantly, it's obviously going to keep getting dark. I can't own white clothing.

the travel book i'm not working on

Genre: Travel/copycat

Title: No working title

Estimated publication date: This could literally be any date...

I think about this anytime I catch an out-of-context snippet of conversation. It usually happens when I am walking in one direction past a pair (or group, or even one person on a phone) going in the other direction.

The concept for this book would resemble the 'Overheard in...' idea. It might even go 'full ripoff' - overheard in wherever-I-happen-to-be at the moment. There are so many of these websites and books already out there that I think I would spend half my time on this project just making sure I was not committing outright plagiarism.

Despite my concern, though, I think I would plow forward with this. I just enjoy hearing ridiculous snippets of conversation too much to let this idea rest. Some of my more recent winners:

"If you are African, you know how to drum." (NYC, April 2017)

"I can't function on eight hours of sleep." (Brookline, April 2017)

"I smoke a pack a month and I'm like a fucking smoker?!?" (Boston Common, June 2017)

leftovers: but where is the coal?

Just for the record, I think 'just write, baby' is pretty good advice. But even the world's best marathon runner rests before the race.

Here is a link to the Cheryl Strayed article I referenced in both the title and the main post.

Oh, and, uh, Merry Christmas. Hope Santa brought along more than coal...

reading review: threads

Threads by Kate Evans (November 2017)

Threads is a series of comics describing the author’s recent experiences as a relief worker in France’s refugee camps. The comic-journalism style gave the book a documentary feel – I often felt like I was watching a movie while thumbing through Threads.

Perhaps this was due to how I used the images to make free associations. I first had this thought when I noted how Evans made Marine Le Pen look a lot like Donald Trump. With each subtle stroke of the pen, Evans influences the associations a reader will make later.

Threads, though not an outright political book, reminded me of the power of a political cartoon. Is it possible that readers with defined opinions on a foreign leader will look at the cartoon and suddenly realize how the domestic candidate they support is similar to the foreign leader they denounce? I think this must be the goal for any cartoonist who exaggerates a leader’s appearance to take on the blond, blustery, and red-faced expressions seen so commonly on...well, you fill in this blank space, lecteur.

One up: I learned quite a few unexpected things from Threads. For example, reader, did you know only Americans call it duct tape? Elsewhere, apparently, it is known as gaffer tape. Is it worth noting that we don’t even use the word ‘gaffer’ here in the USA unless when on a film set? (1)

Of course, most of what I learned was more directly related to the refugee crisis. I learned that refugees who come from a sandal-wearing culture will step on the backs of their donated shoes to feel more comfortable. This insight illustrated the challenge of relying on donations to help refugees; Evans thought cash was always the most useful donation because it allowed relief workers to adapt to the needs of the day.

I’ll recap some of the other things I learned in an upcoming ‘part two’ post.

One down: Threads reminded me of how those on opposite ends of an issue will re-frame evidence to support their position. This often leaves those in the middle wondering why two seemingly intelligent groups of people look at the same thing yet reach different conclusions.

One example comes from the debate about immigration’s effect on an economy. One side is represented by Theresa May’s insistence that immigration provides no benefit to the British economy. The other side is represented by Germany taking in millions of refugees, a policy partly driven by their belief in the boost immigration will have for their GDP.

Now, these nations do have some differences that, surely, determine the appropriate level of net immigration for their countries. But are they so different that they can represent opposing viewpoints on the policy question? From my limited perspective, I would expect them to occupy points closer together on a continuum rather than sit at opposite ends of the table. Somehow, these countries have looked at the history of immigration, adjusted for any present-day variables, and reached two very different conclusions in how to best move forward.

Of course, framing the issue around just this one lens is not necessarily going to lead to the fullest understanding of the situation. For those worried about their home countries having enough jobs, space, or resources, the idea of refugees migrating freely out of war zones is a non-starter. It doesn’t really matter if higher net immigration in a given year leads to a higher GDP; who is to say the GDP wouldn't have gone up by even more without the newcomers?

Just saying: At one point while reading Threads, I stopped to wonder: what is the point of the poverty line? A naïve observer would come into the country, learn about this mythical ‘poverty line’, and assume it measured some sort of standard for receiving aid. And this is true to a certain extent – I knew what the federal poverty line was during the half-year I volunteered at a food bank and used it to determine just how many mushy rutabagas to give to each client who visited.

The mystery to me is why people still live below the poverty line. In 2015, over 13% of Americans lived in poverty. Whose interest is served when one-eighth of the country lives in poverty? When lifeguards pull drowning swimmers out of the ocean, do they dump them into the deep end of the local swimming pool? Or to put it another way, is there a point to determining whether someone falls below the poverty line if this information isn't immediately used to pull the person above it?

Another angle – I know a ton of useless stats about things like helmet football, the height of mountains, the Apollo space program, and so on. I do not know which president lifted the most people out of poverty during his tenure. The reason I don't know this is because no one touts it as an accomplishment. There is a reality about the things nobody brags about: they aren’t considered accomplishments.

Footnotes / Manchester United potshots

1. In America, the gaffer is a coach...

The only context I’ve ever heard it used up until this note was in world football – in the UK, gaffer is a nickname for a manager. Given the way some managers are tasked with holding together clubs that would otherwise fall apart, perhaps gaffer is a more appropriate word than I realized...

i read transactions in a foreign currency so you don't have to

Transactions in a Foreign Currency by Deborah Eisenberg (August 2017)

I enjoyed each of the seven stories in this collection a great deal. I bet I'll return soon to check out more of her work.

I've recently started going back to re-read any stories I particularly liked from a collection before closing the book for good. For this particular work, I tried "Rafe's Coat" and 'Days'. I found the former was perhaps not as good as I initially thought but was very pleased with my decision to read 'Days' a second time. 'Days' takes an unusual form but I thought it was effective in illustrating the agonizingly slow 'two steps forward, one step backward' pattern personal growth so often takes.

I also liked the first story, 'Flotsam'. A number of passages reminded me of Stephen King's advice in On Writing for crafting good descriptions: fresh images, simple vocabulary. Eisenberg follows this advice throughout her writing, particularly when demonstrating how a character's emotional turmoil contrasts with a passive, fixed, or stuck position in the character's life. (1)

The final story, 'Broken Glass', perhaps had the most immediate effect on me. At the time I read it, I was in the midst of planning a one-day trip to Niagara Falls. The key decision was whether to get my own hotel room or share space in a hostel. After reading this story, I realized I possessed no desire to talk to anyone about my life back home while at the falls. I booked a hotel room the next afternoon.

Footnotes / imagined complaints

1. Probably the cleverest thing I've written today...

Perhaps we can call this the Eisenberg Principle?

peeling back the layers

One way I acknowledge the transition into winter is through my running wardrobe. The basketball jerseys, mesh shorts, and hair elastics that reliably took me through the spring and summer give way to the long sleeves, colorful gloves, and thick headbands required for running through the cold, snowy Boston winter.

I heard once that runners should account for how their body heat rises during a run by dressing as if the temperature were twenty degrees higher. I started using this rule of thumb a few years ago when I was just out of school. Initially, the method worked just fine for me. Most of the time, my summer outfit of shorts and a t-shirt sufficed. If the weather was cool, I would add a sweatshirt. I got a pair of sweatpants involved when the temperature dropped below freezing. The gloves and hats I owned were kept reserved for walking.

Early one fall evening, I went out for a run in a hoodie and shorts. It was unseasonably cold, a notch above freezing - but only just - and I remember pausing briefly to consider going back inside to change into sweatpants. I didn’t bother, though, and headed out into the cold. This was partly because I intended for the run to be short and mostly because I was confident. The week before, I’d done something resembling a personal best – a nine mile run on a hilly course in the Adirondacks, completed in just a minute over an hour – and I figured I could simply outrun my outfit before the effects of the cold could punish me for my mistake.

Ha, ha, ha…

I left my apartment in Southie, made my way to L Street via East Broadway, and turned north. I was cruising and, as us weekend warriors say, working up a real sweat. I didn’t feel the cold anymore, just the elation of skimming over the pavement at top speed, the freedom earned from effort and exertion, the briefest respite from the pressures of errands, emotions, immortality. As I approached the Seaport, I wondered if maybe I could run a little longer than I’d initially planned.

I suddenly felt a sharp pain in my left knee. At first, I thought I’d run into a bench. I slowed to a jog, then walked, then stopped. I looked back and saw only the empty sidewalk. The problem was with my knee, in my knee. I felt around the leg but didn't notice anything unusual. Pressing on the knee did not cause more pain. I walked a short distance and felt a little better. Maybe I could run it off.

I started again, made it a half-block, and almost fell over when the pain returned. This time, I thought someone had hit my knee with a baseball bat. The pain made my entire body unstable. I threw in the towel for the first time ever and walked home.

I learned later that the injury I’d suffered was known as iliotibial band syndrome. Or as we runners casually refer to it, I was ‘having an IT band’. Maybe I’ll go into all the details another day. For now, let’s just say ‘having an IT band’ is what happens when you run too damn much and your hip announces a month-long vacation via the sudden, unnecessarily painful mechanism of making your knee hurt, a lot. It’s one of the most common overuse injuries for runners in my particular subgroup – know-it-all amateurs with a high pain threshold and a stubborn, reckless determination to eliminate our knee cartilage as quickly as possible.

So, lesson learned, right? Why would anyone run again after an experience like that? Why would I want to risk such an injury again? Surely, having placed my knee on the hot stove, I’ll make sure not to repeat the error? Well, life’s not so simple. This lesson, perhaps, is one I will learn in the future.

However, I did learn a different lesson, reader, and it's one I’ll apply every time I run this winter. After I stopped running that day, I walked home. The run had taken me about thirty minute walk away from my apartment but with the injury factored in the trip took me closer to an hour. I was cold the entire time. It didn’t help that I’d worked up a little sweat or that I was only in shorts and a hoodie in the near-freezing temperature.

There is one moment from the walk I’ve yet to forget. I bet I'll never forget it. It was about forty minutes in and I was somewhere on D Street. Back then, there were no buildings or even foundations on this stretch of the road, just ideas for foundations, and the openness allowed the biting October wind to whip back and forth across the no-man’s land between Southie and the Seaport, between the past and the future.

During one especially chilling gust, I had a sudden understanding of what it must be like for those stranded, maybe in a desert or a forest or a mountain range, waiting quietly to learn the consequences for their miscalculation. I felt a new sensation, a feeling much like regret, because I knew I would do it differently next time. But it was a heavier feeling, weighed down by knowing I wouldn’t have that second chance. I heard the echo of nature’s indifferent gavel and understood the judge would rule on my case one day and intuited that my appeal of this verdict would go unheard. I wondered, briefly, if those stranded in their own damaged, disintegrating bodies felt the same way.

As soon as this came, it was gone. I was rushed back into Southie, into myself once more, cold and limping and safe. When I got home soon after I resolved never to feel this way again. I wasn’t thinking about my knee.

When I run in this winter, people will ask me if I’m overdressed, just like they’ve done for years. I’ll tell them I am. I’ll point out the ‘dress for twenty degrees warmer’ rule of thumb but add that I want to dress warmly enough to walk home comfortably, you know, just in case. And this is the fact because I do want to walk home comfortably and this answer is acceptable because everyone knows we run until we cannot.

But this is not the truth. I can stand the cold if I need to. The truth is that I felt something once and I don’t want to feel anything like it again.

toa presents: the live on KEXP awards

Last week, I posted an irrelevant blog referencing The Head and The Heart. When I was getting into the band, I searched all over Youtube for concert footage and discovered many strange setups for live performances. These would generally feature a semi-unknown band playing to a small but earnest audience in places both logical (a room with good acoustics), and, er, less logical (a moving van, sort of).

During this process, I started listening to sessions from a Seattle-based public radio station called KEXP. For some reason, all of their performances were excellent. These days, whenever I look for live performances, I always start by checking if KEXP has anything for my band of interest (1).

Over the past few years, I've listened to a number of great clips from the station. Here is a short, unofficial list of my favorites. Enjoy!

The first good clip I found: 'Lost In My Mind' by The Head and The Heart

This was the first band I saw in a concert. I had heard they were pretty good live but the first half of the performance was a little dull. They played this song about halfway through and the band came completely alive. From there, the rest of the show was superb.

The clip from KEXP is the closest I've found to the concert performance I enjoyed so much.

Most surprising performance: 'Shook Ones (Part II)' by Mobb Deep

It might not be the 'definitive nineties rap song' as they say in the clip but Mobb Deep's 1995 hit has earned each of its many accolades. The most memorable pop culture reference for me is its use in 8 Mile's final freestyle battle; apparently, its lyrics also made it into Hamilton.

When I found this song, I could not believe it made it onto KEXP. The cookie-cutter KEXP performance involves one of the following ingredients: acoustic instruments, little known group, a song unlikely to crack a top-25 list for its decade. And in general, rap is the last genre I thought would find its way here.

I should also add my surprise to learn Mobb Deep was still performing.

Favorite clip: 'Untitled' by Of Monsters And Men

It's a great performance of a favorite song I fear is bound to be forgotten. And for whatever reason, I really like the idea of the band having the song completely figured out before naming it.

Eventually, OMAM would go with 'Sloom', a word meaning a light sleep or slumber. I think this was a good decision.

Footnotes / imagined complaints

1. Well, duh!

By the way, it took me a long time to figure out  the reason the bands sounded so good on KEXP. Most of the time, the shows were recorded while the band was on tour. Since most groups play four to six times a week while touring, it makes sense that these appearances would showcase the artists at their sharpest.

the bland meal

It is peculiar how quickly I forget the taste of a meal. The meal I most commonly forget is one I’ve eaten every other day for almost a decade. It is a combination of uncooked tofu, a handful of fresh spinach, and any leftover vegetables I’ve steamed, baked, or sautéed. Every once in a while I’ll add hummus or salsa to the mix, just for a different flavor. No matter what I add, though, the word to describe the meal is bland and that’s the word that runs through my mind whenever I realize I’m about to go home to eat: bland, bland, bland, it's time for The Bland Meal.

I first ate The Bland Meal when I started working full-time. I would pack it in the morning or, if I were feeling especially efficient, perhaps the night before. I’d go to the office fridge and retrieve The Bland Meal whenever it was time, it could have been anytime, ten-thirty or two-fifteen or dusk, even, on those days I’d forgotten about lunch, and I would bring it to my desk and pick away.

One time, I walked past a colleague’s desk with The Bland Meal in hand. He asked me if I thought his desk was clean, though it was more a passing thought than a question, but he asked me anyway. Maybe he asked because I just happened to be around or maybe he asked because I'd been there before, that is, been there on his first day, and he knew I'd been there long enough to know what would merit passing marks for a 'clean desk' audit and we had one of these 'clean desk' audits coming up and maybe he just wanted to be ready for it. Now, a 'clean desk' audit meant all the desks had to be clean or else or who knows or who cares and I looked at his desk which was covered in shredded lettuce and bread crumbs and paper wrapping from his Not So Bland Meal and I announced that it looked a lot like Revere Beach at low tide.

This announcement was met with far more laughter than I anticipated because I was anticipating no laughter. I’d never been to Revere or its beach. I just wanted to eat The Bland Meal at my desk so I could forget about it and do so without having to talk to anyone. I wasn’t trying to be clever or funny or interesting or anything else which would extend the conversation. But it was work and it was lunchtime and I suspect colleagues pay a little more attention to each other around lunchtime at work, a suspicion based on how some of my colleagues concluded I was a vegetarian, an erroneous point of view, perhaps, or maybe it was just an offhand remark, but either way a conclusion surely developed after a couple years of covertly watching me consume The Bland Meal.

My comment was overheard because everyone pays attention at lunchtime and a few minutes later I was getting emails claiming to have photos of Revere Beach at its lowest possible tide, a tide so low in some cases it resembled more desert than beach. I looked through the pictures and thought they all could have been from the beach. But how could I know, how could I even entertain a sense of resemblance about this place I'd never been before? I started on The Bland Meal and I guess it must have been pretty good. I cannot remember for sure how it tasted, though, because I always forget how The Bland Meal tastes. It is peculiar how I recognize the places I've never been yet forget the taste of a meal I’ve eaten so often before.

Usually, the moment I forget comes right after I remember; I remember what I’m having for lunch, I forget it will be good. I’ve forgotten but I remember to think bland, bland, bland, and consider ways to make the meal a little tastier. I run through options in my head for ways to add just a little extra flavor to the vegetables or consider possible side dishes, nothing too big, but just enough to help me look forward to The Bland Meal a little bit more.

At work, I used to hand someone a bit of cash and I’d have a slice of pizza or a side of fries or half a panini wrap to go with The Bland Meal. These days, jobless, I employ the same trick and I consider where I can exchange a couple of dollars for a bit of anticipation in the form of a small frozen pizza or a fast-food cheeseburger or a couple cups of yogurt. Sometimes, I just pick up a couple slices of bread. I’ll take one slice, put butter on half of it, and fold the bread over to make a pair of small butter sandwiches. At this point, I’ll remember, and think to myself ‘Ah, the traditional butter sandwich,’ or maybe, if it's one of those days, I’ll just say it aloud, quietly, a whisper drawing the thin line between what I'd chosen and what I'd lost.

I get these days from time to time, more so of late because I’m unemployed or it’s Sunday, and I’ll look up sometimes on these days and think wow, I have not said a word today and it’ll be ten-thirty or two-fifteen or dusk, even, on those days I’d forgotten to speak. This didn’t happen when I worked because I thought I needed the money and thus had roommates or maybe because I worked I had colleagues by default and it's hard to keep completely silent when always surrounded by people. I took all these people for granted and didn’t think much of the strange gift it is to have places where it is perfectly OK to articulate the occasional passing thought, perfectly normal to voice the offhand remark, because you never know, really, what it is that will make other people laugh.

When I make my butter sandwiches at home I suppose I could simply put butter on one slice of bread and put the other slice on top. This would achieve roughly the same effect as folding over two single slices. But I remember this isn’t the way it is done, this isn’t the proper method to achieve the right look for the sandwich, because it’s a proper thing, not just any old thing, but The Traditional Butter Sandwich, so named because I said it like that one time. I said it just like this – Ahh, The Traditional Butter Sandwich! – as if I were announcing the arrival of a long-anticipated guest to a crowded and waiting room, and my friends all laughed much louder than I expected because I wasn’t expecting any laughter at all.

My announcement happened at Conrad’s, a restaurant in downtown Norwood. I grew up in Norwood and knew about Conrad’s for a long time. I never suggested going because our family had its dinner-out routines and I preferred Chinese takeout myself and I usually forgot to remember Conrad’s when it came time to remember past meals. But eventually I did remember and now I always remember to go to Conrad’s to share a meal and have a little bit of conversation with the people whose presences I've always taken for granted.

The sandwiches don’t come out of the kitchen in their fully assembled glory. It requires imagination – or perhaps a conversational fluency with paninis – to finish the job. You break the recently thawed dinner roll in two, unwrap a piece of butter, and close the piece of bread around it. Then, you take your palms and you place the bread between them and you press it all together. This was the point I made my famous announcement, as I pressed, and this is the point I repeat it now, just for old times sake. I say it now because I'm pressing. I remember to say it because I didn’t expect any laughter for the first passing comment, it was just a thought out loud, the kind of thought spoken aloud when surrounded by friends or colleagues or family, the kind of passing thought I tend to have all the time when I’m alone, just a passing thought that with context would take its rightful place as an offhand remark.

Sometimes the comment gets a laugh. It is more a knowing laugh these days, though, reminding us all – yep, I remember, I was there – a needless reminder, really, since we are there in the moment and only there because we were there before. The comment confirms a shared history, implies a shared future. It could all be taken for granted, the sandwich and the history and the company, and this is appropriate because Conrad’s is the sort of place I go with those whose presence in Norwood I take for granted. I go with my friends who are around because I know they are in Norwood because they’ve been in Norwood or I’ll go with my dad because I know he’s in Norwood because he’s been in Norwood and we all order the same thing, the steak tip dinner, regardless of whether it is dusk or two-fifteen or ten-thirty, even.

We walk downtown as part of a dinner-out routine and don’t talk about how the steak tip meal is not quite good enough to go for alone. We try to remember to have the traditional sandwich and forget how it sometimes makes the rest of the meal a little difficult to finish. I don't even remember how the meal tastes, I suppose, because I'm always being told when my medium-rare steak was mixed up with another order. It's possible no one remembers how it tastes, exactly, but we take how good it will be for granted and, silently, acknowledge that the taste doesn't matter much at all anymore. The meal could be rare or well-done, it could be tasty or bland, but we would still anticipate the next trip back. It's not such a strange thing, really, to forget the taste of the meals I've eaten so often, not so strange at all when I consider all the people I've eaten these meals with and remember how quickly I've forgotten what so many of them were like.

the dystopian novel i'm not working on

Genre: Dystopian novel

Title: Dead Man Blogging

Estimated publication date: 2040

My idea came when I considered the consequence of my decision to set posts on TOA a month in advance. It occurred to me that were I to (hypothetically) get hit by the Green Line tomorrow, a few posts would still go up over the course of the next couple of weeks. It reminded me of those stories about people who send mail to their loved ones after they die (here is a recent example for you, dry-eyed reader).

In my broken future world, however, the concept has taken on a sickening twist. A blogger much like me dies in a tragic self-driving car accident. It is the first automobile fatality in a century. His posthumous writing, set to publish weeks in advance of his death, somewhat ironically warns about the dangers of the technology-first life everyone takes for granted.

At first, the results appear positive. His writing inspires a small movement of people - 'the simplifiers' - to move into the countryside, remove their iEyes (a government-issued device that replaces retinas with supercomputers), and use antiques like the iPhone 24 (the oldest phone still compatible with Tinder, which is now the world's biggest and most important company).

But soon enough, imitators begin to cause trouble. Bored teens take the wheel and establish the copycat 'Neanderthal Living' fad by refusing to charge their iEyes and crashing their cars into tree museums. Bloggers fake their own deaths and publish sensational 'posthumous' prank posts before 'Tom Sawyering' their own funerals (though this reference would be lost on almost everyone, since it has been two decades since a book existed and the long-dry Mississippi River is the world's longest solar panel). Things are out of control until the authorities step in.

The backlash is swift. The government declares removal of the iEye an act of treason and arrests 'the simplifiers'. The leader briefly writes a blog from prison before hanging himself two days ahead of his trial, the first suicide since the release of the iEye. In a series of posthumous blog posts, he claims responsibility for masterminding the original self-driving car accident and describes how he set up a chain reaction of events to ignite interest in his now-doomed movement. The leader is declared The Anomaly, his followers are pardoned, and order is soon restored.

And yet...

Detective Abacus Finch isn't so sure. Something doesn't quite add up to this junior officer in Tinder's Forged Swipe EyeCrime division. He launches his own private investigation and, alongside his solar-powered robot dog, Snout, discovers a dark underworld of criminal masterminds hell-bent on writing every aspect of the future in the most dangerous way possible: by rewriting the past.

In this dark world, Abacus can only count on himself and his Snout. Along the way, he confronts a series of urgent questions. Does the digital world demand we bring together the past and the future into the vanishing point we know as the present? Is it possible to see the truth with an iEye? If Snout is solar powered, how can he survive so long in the dark?

And, most importantly...

Who is really writing these blogs?

Footnotes / imagined complaints

0. Meta...

I had to stop myself here before I wrote the book by accident.

0a. " 'Sentence fragment' is also a sentence fragment..."

The idea of someone forcing a lowly little blogger to write a dystopian novel sounds like the plot of a dystopian novel.

leftovers: the pittsburgh climate agreement

According to an advertisement I heard while listening to a Reply All podcast episode, the total amount of energy used to keep 'The Internet' running every day is a massive amount. If it were included as a country among the world rankings of energy use, The Good Old Interwebs would rank around fifth or sixth.

It's not the best comparison, I think. Using the internet replaces a lot of energy-consuming tasks. And obviously, in the world rankings of energy use, the others already ranked include internet use in their totals. So I'm sure a more robust calculation of "The Internet's" energy-guzzling accomplishments would see it fall a little lower down on the list.

But still...the total energy used by the 'net is a very big number. Would we stop using 'The Internet' if it meant slowing climate change?

reading review: impro, part two

Hi folks,

My first review of Impro got distracted by into a lot of important topics – status signals, animal cruelty, Jay Leno’s head – and I therefore ran out of time for Matt Damon to talk more about the insights Johnstone had into teaching and education.

I’ll run out a trick I’ve used before in these ‘part twos’ – I’ll present the note as I wrote it down after reading before running the rule over the idea and seeing how it links to my own experiences.

Today’s section is going to focus on teaching.

Thanks for reading.

Tim

*********

Teachers are thought of as supplying a good called education. A top teacher provides more of this good than a bad one. However, teaching is perhaps more accurately a creative process. A bad teacher then destroys the student. If thought of this way, a good and bad teacher are seen as engaging in opposite activities.

TOA: I’m a little unsure how to respond to this one (yes, even though I did write it). I sense its underlying truth but I am struggling to link it to my own experience. It could be true for some subjects more than others.

I’m tempted to make an analogy here to riding a bike. A good teacher may demonstrate the right way to ride a bike and help students work out the flaws in their technique. In the context of teaching being a ‘creative process’, perhaps this teacher will call on many different techniques to get students of varying ability to ride.

On the other hand, a teacher who simply hands everyone a pair of training wheels will get immediate results. This teacher’s students will zip around on their bikes and get around a lot faster than the other teacher’s students, at least at first. But if the training wheels never come off, at some point I suppose the teacher is destroying the student’s capacity to learn how to ride a bike.

A teacher who gets a student to go home and learn to ride a bike on his or her own? Perhaps this would be the accomplishment of a true teacher.

*********

If someone wants to draw a tree, the first step is to send him outside to look at a tree.

TOA: This reminds me of training new hospice volunteers. A lot of them ask if there is a technique or approach to talking with a patient. And I say, well, how do you talk to the people around you? Do you say hello to your neighbors? Have you established personal connections with your colleagues? Do you offer your presence to friends or family who are going through a difficult time? Are you comfortable sitting still for an hour with no promise of outside diversions?

Prospective volunteers who need to learn how to talk to other people aren’t going to learn this from me. They are not going to learn this in training or from anyone else associated with the hospice. They need to do this on their own. They need to go home, talk to the people already in their lives, and willingly be a presence in the lives of those closest to them. They need to go look at trees in their own lives, so to speak, before considering a trip into another forest.

Once this is accomplished, the challenge of entering a hospice environment and interacting with strangers becomes a matter of doing what you know rather than knowing what to do. Be bigger than you feel!

*********

A creative student is more difficult to control. But this is not a sufficient reason for disliking a student.

A community or organization generally rejects people as soon as their behavior becomes unpredictable.

A good teacher should be able to work with any method, a bad teacher should be able to ruin any method.

A skilled teacher guides students to the point where they are bound to succeed. In a way, this method ensures students do not experience failure.

TOA: I thought about sports when I considered these four quotes together. There are some teams who never use a player in a certain position unless he comes straight out of central casting. By this, I refer to how there are general prototypes for most positions based on the characteristics of players who’ve succeeded in the past. A basketball center, for example, is usually at least six feet and ten inches tall while a center fielder in baseball is a fleet-footed athlete with a quick first step toward a hit ball. (1)

The preference for finding the right type, I suppose, comes out of the insight into creativity. Like a student who folds his math test into a paper hat, there is something inherently uncontrollable about a wing player who darts into the center or a quarterback who tucks the ball and runs on every other down. The challenge for these players' coaches is to implement a strategy that allows the player’s unpredictable outbursts of creativity to fit within a detailed plan for winning the game. Fail to do this and the player's improvisations will alienate him or her from teammates because of its corrosive effect on the team's prospects for victory.

*********

Inexperienced teachers often reveal their lack of time in the classroom through their methods for discipline. To avoid becoming a conventional teacher, pay close attention to the methods of discipline.

Teachers who fear doing a specific technique again often reveal their own insecurity or inexperience.

TOA: When I think back on my days in K-12, I remember how the same kids seemed to always get in trouble with the teachers. If I was doing the sort of fancy analysis an academic might do on student behavior, the first thing I would check is whether the best predictor of ending up in detention was whether a student had been in detention in the past.

I think teachers intuitively understood this idea. They would refer to ‘problem kids’ and shake their heads each time someone acted up again. Then they would try the same method of discipline as used in the past - despite its obvious failure!

I’m not sure if inexperience is the world for this. It might be more of a fundamental belief in the unchangeable qualities in a child. If the disciplinary method failed, it was the child’s problem, not the method’s. Discipline was thought of as a litmus test for sorting the good kids from the bad - since the discipline would work on the good kids, the failure of discipline was held up as proof of a bad kid.

It would be unfair of me, though, to not at least mention the possibility that even a teacher with decades of teaching experience might have very little practical experience in working with behavior issues.

On a related note, it would be interesting to see how parents with multiple children change (if they do so at all) their approach to discipline over time. Does experience inform their approach? How many kids does a parent need to raise before it would be fair to describe him or her as ‘experienced’, anyway?

*********

Teachers who know how to give their students the ‘I am playing’ signal will enjoy their work far more.

TOA: In my old job, I was managing a team of around eight people. Anytime someone sneezed, part of my job (seriously) was to say 'God bless you'. If I wanted to play God on a particular day, I might say 'Bless you'. In my early days, I thought this was important because of things like civility and decency and a couple of books I read about what constituted 'management'.

As I picked up experience, I realized two things. One, no one ever cared about what I actually said. Leadership is subtler than phrasing. People remember how leaders made them feel, not the combination of syllables and words they used. The important thing was to pay attention to my team and respond to what they did (2).

Two, I realized that if someone was happy with their job, it wasn’t because I said 'God bless you' (or even 'bless you') when they sneezed. And if someone was disgruntled, my saying 'bless you' (or even 'God bless you') wasn’t going to change the fact. Again, the important thing was to pay attention to my team and respond to what they did.

So, I changed up my approach. For new people and some of the experienced people I understood well, I still said 'bless you'. But for a couple of others, I didn’t bother. With one person, I usually caught his eye after a sneeze and made a mocking expression instead of saying anything polite. Those familiar with some of Robert DeNiro’s recent work might recognize it – bottom lip out, eyebrows raised, a couple of quick nods of the head. He usually responded with the same gesture back at me.

With another, I usually turned to her and said 'shhhh'. Sometimes, I would say 'would you please quiet down?' In rare cases, I might say in an exasperated voice 'WHAT do you WANT!?!' And the response was almost always my comment mirrored back to me – 'you shhh' or 'you quite down'. On really productive days, I would just hear 'SHUT UP!'

I never really understood what I was doing or why it worked until I read this quote. I get it now – I was sending a 'playing' signal. And keeping the mood light is part of the manager’s job. If things were serious or the group needed to focus, I usually resorted to the basic 'bless you'. In this way, perhaps I was sending the reverse - a 'not playing' signal.

Footnotes / imagined complaints

1. TOA Moneyball reference #36

Moneyball, a book I’ve referenced and written about numerous times on TOA, is a good example of how to avoid this ‘prototype trap’. The critical line for me is an insight from author Michael Lewis – ‘if you systematically rule out a certain type of person for a job, you automatically lower your chances of finding the best person for the job.’

2. The TOA Effect?

Responding with the wrong words was often better than not responding at all - if this isn't the Hawthorne Effect, let's agree to call it the TOA Effect, reader, and move on.

i read childhood and other neighborhoods so you don't have to

Childhood and Other Neighborhoods by Stuart Dybek (September 2017)

Stuart Dybek’s 1980 debut collection describes Chicago from his unique, wide-ranging perspective. For me, the overall reading experience was up and down. I enjoyed the writing but at times I thought the stories were just a step beyond my reach. In a couple of cases, I felt I did not understand the story at all.

There were three stories I picked out to read a second time. Of these, I thought ‘Sauerkraut Soup’ stood out. Unusually for me, part of my appreciation was a technical element. The story winds it way back and forth through various points in time without ever losing its voice or its pace (1). I’ve come to learn how difficult this is over time. I also enjoyed the story itself a great deal.

‘The Long Thoughts’ and ‘Charity’ were my other two repeat reads. The former’s title refers to an idea I found very intriguing at first pass. My second read, however, did not add much to my initial impression. I think ‘Charity’ is perhaps the best example of a ‘short story’ (2).

It might also work as the best example of a ‘Chicago’ story Dybek is often noted for. What does it mean to refer to a story as an example of a particular place or time? My guess is as good as yours, reader.

Footnotes / imagined complaints

1. This is what I talk about when I talk about running...

Whenever I end up singing while running, the challenge is the same: how do I maintain both my voice and my pace? I'm not sure if this is a bigger test of the runner or the writer...

2. Dear diary: today, I punched in and punched out...

I admit here I am reaching a little bit in trying to describe a story without resorting to a plot summary. And to think, the post goes downhill from here!

the bb presents: home-field advantage

It is not uncommon in team sports to see a discrepancy in how teams perform when ‘at home’ versus ‘on the road’. Often, the home crowd encourages their team while distracting the visting opponent. A team in an outdoor sport might perform better in the climate of its home city. It could simply be a case of the visiting team being worn out from a long road trip. To list all the reasons explaining this difference is a task for another day.

When I badly injured my ankle in the winter of 2014, I worked from home twice a week to ease the burden on the injury. For the first time as a professional, I had the opportunity to compare how my performance changed when ‘at home’ to how I performed when I was in the office. Since I’d heard so much about the productivity gains many enjoyed while working at home, I anticipated at least a minor increase in my own output.

Boy, was I off. The increase wasn’t minor - I suspect my productivity almost doubled. Being at home meant no more distractions. There were no chatting colleagues, no unannounced interruptions, not even the odd fire alarm. Instead of traveling almost an hour to get to the office, I limped downstairs and sat on the couch. I enjoyed the first couple of weeks ‘from home’ a great deal and thought about how to best make my case for working from home on a more regular basis in the spring.

After about a month, though, I came to a realization. In sports, a team who plays far better at home than on the road is not a great team. Instead of doing the hard work to understand why performance levels drop off in hostile environments, these teams make excuses for their mistakes and fail to learn from setbacks. When the chips are down and the team has no alternative but to perform, these teams cannot be relied on to execute.

I saw the thought pattern in my own situation. Sure, working more from home might see me get more done on a given day. But this was not my job. My job was to find ways to make myself just as productive when in the office. If I wanted to take a step forward in my career, I needed to stop blaming the environment around me and find ways to do the same work no matter where I spent the workday.

When I finally healed, I returned to the office full-time. The changes I made were mostly minor. Instead of worrying about interruptions, I accepted them as part of my job. I made sure to respond to each colleague as the knowledgeable adult I wanted to become rather than the petulant child dictating my inner dialogue at the time. If the noise level became distracting, I took my work to another room or plugged in a pair of headphones.

Does this mean it is never the right move to suggest a work from home arrangement? Of course not. The best sports teams want to play at home because home is where they perform best. The problem isn't being good at home or even preferring to work there. The problem is when poor performances are blamed on the environment. This is not a winner's mentality.

A successful team does their best no matter where the game is played. The same logic applies in any job. Excuses about the environment don't belong in the workplace so leave them where they belong - at home.

Until next time,

The Business Bro

the closest I ever came to joining a favorite band

In the summer of 2016, I spent a lot of time checking out free concerts around town. One of the better venues was in the courtyard at the Copley branch of the Boston Public Library. The most memorable moment came from Dear June, a Boston-based Americana band.

Now, what did I expect going into this show? All I knew about the band was the genre...Americana. Americana! A merry what?

I finally looked up what this meant and found out that Americana is basically folk music influenced by other American genres such as country, R&B, and rock. So in other words, it's folk music, sort of. Here's an analogy that no one asked for: folk music is to Americana what sushi is to the California roll.

Anyway...

I don't usually listen to folk - or Americana - music. But I did know one band who played such music - The Head and The Heart. I liked them a lot at one point and they became the first band I ever saw in concert. I figured this fact plus the likable venue meant I had enough reason to check out the show and so I went.

I got there nice and early for the 6pm show - around 5:58pm - and found myself a seat - which in this venue means somewhere on the cement walkway where no one else is already sitting. My resolve was greater than some of the band members, however. By my recollection, only three of the quintet showed up.

The band apologetically announced that they were playing a 'stripped down' set. Three-fifths of Dear June then proceeded to play a somewhat forgettable show. The performance prompted me to establish a new calculus for my music genre dictionary: folk music = Americana music minus two band members.

When the clock hit 6:55, I was a little relieved. I knew the last song was about to start because the concerts always ended promptly at seven and, in this venue, there were never any encore performances.

However, instead of starting right away, the lead singer chose to address the crowd. Was this going to be a Bruce Springsteen style speech? My mind immediately drifted and I got lost in my mind as I considered what I might do after the show...and started to wonder silly things like whether the bands would be charged an overdue fine if their concert ran past seven...and noticed my butt hurt a little bit, probably from sitting on the concrete for an hour...

Meanwhile, I vaguely heard in the speech something about how the next song was from a band she liked. Super! Maybe the Jackson 3? Then they asked for audience volunteers to join the band and play some basic instruments. A few people came up and they were handed various one-sound instruments like the tambourine, the triangle, and that thing which is filled with little pebbles that you can shake.

When the group was ready, they started to play. As the audience-turned-band members gradually found their rhythm, the scattered sounds came together to become something recognizable. Slowly, gradually, I start to think, do I know this song...no...well...wait...

It was 'Lost In My Mind', one of The Head and The Heart's biggest hits and my personal highlight from their concert! Whoops...it would have been fun to go up there, I suppose, and play the triangle out of tune...

At the very least, the experience would have given me an excuse to write a blog post.

tales of two cities, vol 5: sep '16

09/11/2016
Porter Square Station (4:53 pm)
Somerville City Hall (5:09 pm)

Highland Ave starts from the highest point in Somerville - city hall - and gradually runs downhill into Davis Square. The sidewalks are wide and the drivers turn cautiously. This combination makes the road one of my favorites to run along in the area.

On one of my late evening runs, I noticed how the sun appeared to set in an almost straight line down the middle of Highland Ave. I resolved to come out here on another day and look for a vantage point to watch a sunset. Surely, there was someplace on the hill from where I could get a great view over the top of the city and into Cambridge?

On this day, I return. I explore for about an hour but make no headway. The westward view from ground level is blocked by buildings and most of the higher viewing spots are closed off to the public.

I leave a little disappointed. Surely, the view from the top of the library must be spectacular. 

09/30/2016
Cambridge Main Library at Broadway / Trowbridge St (4:43 pm)
Union Square - Somerville (5:01 pm)

Somerville City Hall (5:44 pm)
Beacon St at Washington / Kirkland (6:12 pm)

I return once more to Somerville on a wet Friday afternoon. It is a little later than usual for a library trip but Somerville makes it work - for some reason, its main library branch is open until 6pm on Fridays. The other main branch libraries in the area - Boston and Cambridge - both close at 5pm.

I bike over to Union Square, summit one of Somerville's seven hills on foot, and enter the library about a half-hour before closing time. I immediately like the building. Low ceilings and narrow hallways distinguish it from the echoing openness of the Boston Main Library. The many little rooms create the seclusion and privacy lost by the Cambridge Main Library's love affair with glass walls. I do not see many books, however, and I inquire. The books are upstairs.

I walk up a short set of stairs and emerge into the main collection space. I like this floor more than the one below it. The main space acknowledges modernity with four short rows of computers but the room is controlled by the decades of books lining the walls on all sides. There is also a partial upper level, accessible by a short set of stairs. Guests can stroll along the rectangular walkway above and browse the bookshelves pushed perpendicularly against the walls.

I ascend to the upper level and slowly work my around the edges. The setup of the room leaves the middle of the second floor open. The older feel of the room, the open space in the middle, and the cold dreariness outside all come together to remind me of the 1995 James Bond movie Goldeneye. In one scene, Bond runs through a Russian government archive room designed just like this one. As he flees, inept henchmen fire away into his footprints.

Nothing new, right, reader? New movie, same story - after a score of movies detailing such adventures, who would blame Bond for being so confident in his safety? I wonder if the James Bond in the books dodged as many bullets as Pierce Brosnan's interpretation in the movies. Did he wear a helmet to protect himself against the remote specter of a well-aimed bullet? Surely, this would be just the type of place to find those books and see for myself...

A couple of times, I pause my rambling thoughts to peek out a window. Is the view from the library any better than it was from the ground? With luck, maybe I'll see Cambridge this time...

It isn't much of a view, though, and not just because of the rainy conditions. The same buildings blocking my view from the ground are still blocking my view from a couple floors up - different story, same story. You get what you pay for at the library, I guess.

I walk back down to the floor and log on to one of the computers. Quite frankly, the computer doesn't move very fast, even by 1995 standards. At the rate it's moving, three minutes becomes six. I estimate I'll be able to delete one or two emails in the fifteen minutes left before closing. I cut my losses and leave.

The ride back takes me along my running route: down the hill, through a few stoplights, and eventually into Davis Square. There is no bike path and the road is, let's say, 'sporadically maintained'. I learn quickly why drivers turn slowly: the parked cars on both sides make turns at driving speed impossible. Add the rainy conditions and my downward progress is, let's say...more interesting than usual. But just like everyone's favorite spy, I keeping moving straight ahead and every empty threat just misses me.

Despite its bluster about upcoming infrastructure projects and its vision of soon becoming Cambridge's little brother, most locals know Somerville is lacking in bike lanes, reliable transportation, and high-speed public computers. The average person can't even see Cambridge from Somerville's highest point!

Is it possible to get somewhere you cannot see? I, like Somerville, hope it is. The rain is coming down harder now. I keep the bike pointed toward Cambridge which is allegedly somewhere straight ahead. But progress is never smooth, is it? Adding bike lanes might be a good place to start but, for now, all I can do is keep the bike somewhere about a car's length to the right of the fading double line and hope for the best.

the oral history i'm not working on

Genre: Oral history

Title: You, too?

Estimated publication date: 2050 (in time for U2's eleventh retirement tour)

I like the potential of this one. The basic idea is I collect stories from music fans about their favorite songs. I'm leaning towards a U2 focus, of course, even if just for the pun, but I'm open to using other reference frameworks for when I don't start working on this.

I first thought about the idea in the summer of 2008. I was on a six week trip to Japan. The first month was an internship with a small English school in Iida, Nagano. What struck me immediately was that many of the streets had no name.

On the same trip, I started running seriously for the first time. And of course, the opening line for 'Where The Streets Have No Name' is I want to run...

A few years later, U2 went on tour for their album, Songs of Innocence. I read an article prior to the tour's start that compared a U2 concert to seeing 'your life flash before your eyes'. It made enough sense at the time for me to remember the article today. I'm a few years older now and thinking about Nagano and I suspect I fully understand the idea.

I imagine many people feel something similar for their favorite songs or bands. Collecting all those stories for a big volume would be pretty neat. Of course, the obstacles for such a project are endless. I would need to actually meet some U2 fans, for starters. I would need to prepare myself to nod soberly each time some seventeen year-old tells me that 'Bullet The Blue Sky' opened his eyes about geopolitics. And I would need to figure out how to download the book onto everyone's iPhones without permission...

Crafting such a book would also present me with a strange kind of dilemma. In an oral history, the writing is taken out of the author's hands. Normally, I would consider this a great idea, a real 'clever like a fox' moment for my bibliography, but in my book (and this would be my book) I suspect I would prefer to do most - if not all - of the writing for my first published work. But who knows how I'll feel about this in 2050, right?

leftovers #3: the final exam series

Sports is a domain for the young. This makes the most sense from a time-commitment perspective. To truly follow team sports in the 21st century, a lot of work is required. The young have relatively more time because, quite frankly, the young don't have many important things to work on yet.

I think working on something important (in the broadest sense of the term) is vital for establishing a sense of purpose in life. Since being devoid of anything actually important to work on is a defining condition for many students, it's not a surprise to see so much time during the school years spent on things creating busyness such as obsessively following sports.

Of course, anything a person spends a lot of time on becomes important. It is a semi-application of Annie Dillard's well-known quote from The Writing Life- 'How we spend our days is of course how we spend our lives.' Days spent following sports become a life spent following sports and, well, all life is sacred, even if a life is spent supporting Manchester United!

reading review: the hard thing about hard things, part three

Good morning,

My apologies, reader(s), for the utter dross posted in this space just a month ago. I do not know what possessed the BB to make him think renaming these lovely ‘reading reviews’ was a good idea! And to a self-congratulatory label like ‘The Business Bro Book Club’! I will speak with him shortly and let him know the next time he renames a long-running feature will be his last!

I do, however, admit I was a little intrigued by some of the content in his post. So, I picked up a copy of The Hard Thing About Hard Things for myself. And as is custom around these parts, the books I read, I review.

One up: I was impressed by how often Horowitz tossed aside irrelevant details, concerns, or narratives to get right to the core of a particular situation. His common sense approach to explaining his rationale underlies much of the advice found in the book. His ability to explain himself so plainly is one reason why the insights in this book resonated immediately with me.

One example comes from when he describes the dynamics involved in hiring a top employee away from a friend’s company. There are many ways to rationalize such a hiring decision and the situation is easy to dismiss as ‘complex’. But the basic message to your soon to be former friend is this: our friendship is not worth more than this employee!

Another example comes from his thoughts about how to change someone’s role without making it seem like a demotion. Instead of hemming and hawing about titles, transitions, or explanations...just offer the person more money! There is no other way to show an employee how you see their value to the organization. And if it isn't possible to reasonably offer the employee more money, well, that's a pretty good indicator about the employee's value, no?

Horowitz points out a general tendency among people to respond to leading indicators of good news while seeking alternative explanations to dismiss bad news. This is especially prominent among people who build things. But when customers are buying a competitor’s product, there is only one explanation: the other product is better. If you want to win in the market, stop explaining why you are losing and go build a better product!

A final insight I thought fit well here was about the relationship between trust and communication. When the demand for communication increases, it is not a sign of ‘the growing pains’ in an expanding organization or a signal of rising complexity in the work. Rather, it almost always means trust is eroding among the teams in the company. Do you demand explanations from people you completely trust? Or to put it another way, would any amount of explanation convince you to believe a wholly untrustworthy person?

One down: It occurred to me while reviewing my notes for this book that most management techniques seem designed for managers who are unable to tell the truth. In some business situations, this reality is perfectly understandable. Those working in healthcare, for example, know not to share a patient’s health information beyond what is required for a colleague to do his or her job well.

But in many other cases, the inability to simply and plainly state the truth reveals a manager’s shortcomings. Just think about all the different ways managers learn to ‘give feedback’. All this training just to state an observation! These managers would be better off just offering to write guests posts for TOA.

Managers who operate as ‘truth machines’ are going to fare far better over the course of their careers than those who cannot.

Just saying: I think it is pretty common to hear people complain about the ‘politics’ making life worse for everyone at their organizations. But it is rare to hear people define or explain exactly what ‘politics’ means in this context. In fact, I cannot recall a single such explanation in my entire life. Most people who bring up their office’s ‘politics’ problem do so with an assumption of being fully understood.

Horowitz takes a stab at defining the word. Politics, he writes, is advancement by means unrelated to merit. If promotions start being doled out based on seniority, nepotism, or even outright discrimination, then the organization is fully committed to office politics.

One thing this definition forced me to consider was the consequences of poor performance measurement. If an organization is unable to assess performance accurately, the logical conclusion is an environment becoming increasingly political. I suppose when someone complains to me in the future about ‘office politics’, what I will probably ask is if the company is capable of accurately measuring employee performance.