Category: General Gabbing

A variety of delighting sights; a smattering of happenings; a compendium of concepts…

A Bounty Hunter

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~Four months ago, a friend set some bounties. A professional forecaster, he defined areas of his life he wanted to achieve, along with the probabilities of successful achievement. These categories ranged from personal (get married) to professional (raise $X for a fund) to admin (complete his taxes). I accepted 7 of the 8 bounties.

Four months in, we’re doing well. I don’t know exactly where our numbers are. I won’t likely know until December. I do know that, for one area, he referred me to a friend. He referred to me as his [area] coach. I chuckled; I’m definitely not a general [area] coach. I just happen to coach him well.

Nine years ago, I wrote a ten-year-from-then plan. One of those traits: I get paid on commission. I have always found direct, clearly-aligned incentives to motivate me better than wishy-washy hourly nonsense.

If referrals are the highest form of flattery, bounties are what feeds my family. It activates my interest, so I become an expert in the area.

Delightful. Tasty. Fun.

Falling into Perfection

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Two years ago, I ran away to join the circus. The circus broke my foot and laughed me out of France.

Today, I have found my circus. These are my monkeys.

Twelve writers on a train from San Francisco to Chicago. All met through twitter. All different sorts of writer, from ghostwriter to anthropoligist to sci-fi nerd.

I’m now – at 3:35am – leaving this perfect context. The last time I recall feeling like I was exactly perfectly in the right place was arriving to Chicago to interview at art school seven years ago. I would not attend that school, but I would meet one of my dearest friends.

Out of 173 applicants, we 12 formed the perfect crew. If this is my community, I’m happy as I am. If we convene on twitter, I need to be there.

I met a woman: we began falling in love. She might come live with Nikki and me. I befriended a man who will join us at easter services.

Of the 13 on the train, a shockingly high percentage are those with whom I would delight at further connection.

I slept only 3-4 hours per night. Last night, I slept 11:30pm to 3:15am. Somehow, I have been following my Path.

I wasn’t looking for a helicopter to save me from the rising floodwaters. But I sure adore soaring.

Amtrak Halloween

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The funniest part of dressing like a train conductor on an Amtrak train on October 31st isn’t that people laugh at your contextually-appropriate costume. It isn’t that they ask you to blow the apt-for-circumstance whistle. It’s that NONE OF THEM RECOGNIZE THAT IT’S A HALLOWEEN COSTUME.

Even though it’s October 31st, if you wear a train conductor outfit on Amtrak, people will assume you’re a train enthusiast! Including the friends you’ve made during your three-day-long writing workshop! Instead of thinking, “It’s that one day of the year when people dress up”, they think “Wow, Julian really likes trains”.

On Amtrak, even on Halloween, the base assumption is “train enthusiast”.

Wild.

San Francisco: Birthstones & Fentanyl Folds

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“His birthstone is the second most expensive behind the diamond and the sapphire: the emerald.” – overheard in San Francisco’s Mission District

I didn’t realize that diamond-sapphire stones existed. I can see why that’d be expensive.

You’d think the hardest part is combining the stones. The actual hardest part? The diamond.

–

Walking through the Mission District, I’m struck by the homeless people and the drugs. I used to live in this city – within a one-minute walk of what I referred to as “San Francisco Public Library and Homeless Shelter” and “Bill Graham Civic Auditorium and Homeless Awning” (because homeless people would huddle underneath) – and still I’m surprised. I’m mostly surprised by how everywhere they are. I must’ve walked by 20 people in three blocks.

I moved to NYC recently. I left San Francisco when the people playing $1k buy-in poker were talking about tech moguls the way that I imagine people in L.A. talk about the Kardashians. The city appeared to me no longer filled with the original innovators (nerds who love tech), nor the assemblers (executives to organize the nerds), but the suckers? The moochers? The spectating hangers-on?

I didn’t remember SF’s pervasive decrepitude. I had heard SF homelessness became less ubiquitous after the Grants Pass Supreme Court case. If this is less ubiquitous, it doesn’t feel like it. (Turns out there are 4% fewer homeless people but 85% fewer homeless tents. Somehow these people have become more homeless.)

Living in SF just out of college, I watched someone inject themselves in broad daylight on Market Street. I watched someone else defecate into a bucket outside my office. I knew someone who strolled to work daily shirtless.

I remember when San Francisco outlawed nudity. It felt to me like a cultural loss. Lewd behavior was already illegal, so the ban only targeted nudity. But what’s the problem with someone being naked?

Today, I feel sad at the hunched-over druggies, wobbling in their fentanyl folds. I wish they had somewhere else to go.

Santa Cruz?

Joyful job offers

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(Written a month ago. Published only after their negotiations ended with a successful and satisfied signing.)

Today I helped someone with a job offer negotiation. I awoke this morning thinking about the elements I’d include. I wrote them down. Then I asked Claude for tips. It shifted the sequencing slightly and reframed two pieces of content. Performing skillfully in this negotiation could be worth 10% in annual pay. That’s huge! A few thoughts:

  1. Most people dislike negotiations, so they end them early. If one more back-and-forth is worth $5k in annual pay, isn’t it worth doing the additional back-and-forth? What’s your hourly work rate? Even at $200/hr, that $5k pay bump is worth 25 hours of work. There’s no way the single additional back and forth is bad.
  2. Ignore everything that isn’t a number. Sure, their internal process matters: when you hear facts about how that works, file them away. But most of the conversation is just bullshit fluff. Ignore their attempts to move you emotionally: numbers and actual contractual terms are the only relevant part.
  3. Use both logos and pathos. Just because the only thing that matters from them is the numbers doesn’t mean the only thing that matters from you is numbers. If you can move a number through fluff, that’s valuable fluff!
  4. Walk through the pathways. It’s like a chess move: follow each action down to the end of its pathway as far as you can see. (“If I do X, they might do A, B, or C. If they do A… If they do B… If they do C…”). You won’t know all the details. That’s okay. You can ballpark them. (“If I accept the offer as-is, we have a deal. If I ask for infinity dollars, they’ll either tell me no or rescind the offer. But in the middle, where do I think their lines are?”)
  5. Be positive, affable, and friendly. Everyone wants to work with someone friendly.
  6. Signal flexibility on things that don’t matter. If you’re proposing a $150k salary, offer to take it as $140k salary plus a $10k guaranteed annual bonus if it’s easier for their books. (This is an actual scenario I’ve run into: in some organizations, bonuses come from a different pool from salaries, and you don’t care where it comes from.)

Three additional rules:

  1. Know what you want.
  2. Get what you want.
  3. (Therefore, generally) ask for what you want.

The Return of Funcle Gumbo

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Last time I visited these kids, I was less fun. It was pre-clown school, and I did not know how to play. I thought play was heavy and selfish. Play is generous and light.

This time, I found the fun.

The boys were skeptical on my arrival. I am big and foreign. They clung to their parents, fair self-preservation.

Immediately, my friend tasked me with doing a silly dance. A great way to break the ice.

Upstairs five minutes later, I pretended to be a train conductor, them my passengers.

Our next game: while they scoot by me, they give me a high five.

The scooting and high five game is peak game. It fits what they’re already doing, just adding a little connection and flair. We played that one for fifteen minutes. It set us up well for our penultimate game, go run away and then run back for a high five. It’s played as it sounds.

Our final game, Francis summoned me to the bath to play. This game involved him throwing foam letters out of the bath and me throwing them back in. A good time was had by all. They don’t know that I’ve been up before 6am each day these past 5. They don’t know I drove for four hours today. They don’t know I’ve got a lot on my mind. They just know Uncle Gumbo is fun.

Quotent Quotables:

  • “Uncle Bummo’s got a poo.” – Francis, age 2, about me, when I did not in fact have a poo.

Sidewalk Self-Sacrifice

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“If you’re walking on a sidewalk with a man, and you’re standing here [the left side, beside the cars], and he’s standing here [on the right side, farthest from the cars], get rid of him. Because he cares more about himself than he cares about you.” —a Reno mother teaching her Reno daughter.

This may come as a surprise to my readers, but I mostly agree with the mother. Not on the substance of the matter, nor on the mode of teaching, nor on the values being instilled. But on the fact that you should pass down to your children values that you believe to be important, and apparently this one is important to the mother.

The main thing I find missing from the mother’s description: learning. If the guy is unaware that this particular specific brand of physical comfort is significant to you, have you considered calling it out? I, for one, have learned that some women whom I like to date enjoy when I put my hands over their ears like little makeshift earmuffs whenever an ambulance drives by. I have also learned that some other women dislike this. I do *not* believe that it is an innate, values-correlated thing. I think it’s a choice that I can do, and that I could sufficiently increase my doing-of-this or not-doing-of-this to satisfy either the woman who likes it or the woman who does not.

The number of guys who are taught that sort of physical protection these days is low. The frequency with which a guy *starts out* protecting the woman that way is also low. Often, it builds over time. This mother is going to teach her daughter to select only high-machismo, high-protector men. That may be too much. The right level of protector is more likely to be someone who is decent-protector but still needs to learn the ways that you want or need protection.

It’s shit like this that is pushing back dating and marriage and slowing down natalism.

Apparently, I don’t agree with the mother.

Partner thinks my analysis of this whole experience is wrong. Partner thinks this mother-daughter dynamic is more of a teaching-one’s-daughter-to-pick-a-partner-who-is-a-member-of-a-specific-ingroup than it is teaching one’s daughter a specific set of values to find in a mate. She may be right.

She also mixes up her rights and her lefts.

If so, I *certainly* don’t agree with the mother.

Your analysis?

Fun experiences from underground poker

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An assortment of actual happenings from tonight’s poker game:

  • One guy deals the flop in the middle, then the turn on one side and the river on the other side. If you don’t remember the sequence of cards, you’re sure not going to be able to derive them.
  • We have chip denominations 50, 100, 500, 1000, and 5000. The only blind that uses a 50 is the first one: blinds start 50/100, then go 100/200, 200/400, 300/600, etc. We therefore have one denomination of chip for exactly one blind level! That’s comedy!
  • All-in AKs vs AQo preflop. Board runs out 86648 and we chop 😦
  • Ran AK into 99 on Q94A6. Lost 20k. Down to 6100 on a 20k starting stack. Next hand shipped A5o, called by QQ, spiked an A and we have a serviceable stack
  • Tables combine and we draw the ace for first dealer. We’ll take it!

After I bust in tenth place in the tournament (preflop 33 vs 8Q vs AJ, flop QJ4), I suggested a cash game to the other eliminated player. The host suggests we play 50cent / 1dollar blinds. She asks how much we want to buy in for: ten bucks? Twenty? I say “I’ll do fifty”. The other guy does too.

We set the blinds at $1/$2. They don’t organize the blinds in the generally accepted way, but it’s consistent so I accept it. Twice, the dealer (our host) deals the flop before giving us hole cards. She’s clearly very high. On one of these occasions, we just continue from the flop. The other player and I laugh very much. At the end of twenty minutes, I have all the chips. On our last hand, he doesn’t look at his cards til the turn. I flop two pair. He turns a pair of kings. We put in all our money. I win.

Down $60 in the tournament; up $50 in the cash game.

Walking Manhattan from Top to Tip

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I walked today from the top of manhattan to the tip of manhattan. From 225th st to South Ferry, a total of 13.7 miles. A few lessons:

  1. Breaks are bad.
    1. Don’t sit down. Sitting makes your legs more tired than continuing.
    2. Breaks kill your psychological momentum. Our team completed our 13.7mile task in 8 hours. Many people circumnavigate the island (32 miles) in 12 hours.
  2. Company matters.
    1. Our crew chatted, joked, and sang. The good vibe helps the miles melt. We started with four people, but an additional 6 joined us for various segments. Their novel energy kickstarted our enthusiasm.
  3. Travel light.
    1. Of our party of four, two carried only the clothes on our back and the items in our pockets. One had a small backpack. One had a large backpack. At least three quarters of the large backpack (by volume) went unused. This person may be the least athletic of our crew, so overpacked due to fears of being unprepared. Ironically, their fear of being unprepared made their backpack the heaviest.
  4. Choose your path wisely.
    1. We walked down broadway the entire way. A perfectly pleasant path. For my next trek, I’ll walk along the water: more beautiful scenery, and less chaos of other people.
  5. Keep your eyes open.
    1. At the end of the journey, when a man bikes by balancing a car tire on his head, make sure you see him and smile.

The Surgeon Paradox, a.k.a. Don’t Choose The Owner

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If two people perform at the same level in a work function and one of them fits the archetype, the other is generally better at the actual work. This heuristic is called the surgeon paradox.

Similarly, if someone is the owner of the weightlifting gym and they run some of the intro-to-barbell classes while another coach runs the other classes, the non-owner coach is likely better. This fact comes form the question, “How did they get there?” If that question offers a reason they don’t have to be good at their job – nepotism, eg – then they’re the wrong person.

On Tuesday, I took part one of an intro-to-barbell class. We learned squat and overhead press. The instructor was a dedicated weightlifter named Christian who had been teaching for 10 years.

Today, I took part two of the class. The gym’s owner led this class, and he spent more time socializing than I would like. When we started 10 minutes late, he promised that he would push longer. Then, he ended 5 minutes early and pitched the gym: they offered open gym and classes, didn’t I know?

I first learned this heuristic when backpacking around Asia. Thailand offered (at that time) 90-minute massages for $6. The worst massages, I quickly learned, were given by attractive young women. The best massages came from older women or men, presumably because the clientele (overwhelmingly young men) would often choose the young women for reasons other than the massage quality. (I’m talking about normal thai massages: get your mind out of the gutter.)

Sometimes the owner is the most knowledgable or most helpful. They commonly have the most skin in the game (eg because the business is their reputation on the line). When incentives are aligned and you want to be sold something, they might be your best fit.

On the other hand, they probably invested time and attention in an area that’s not “be the best lifting coach”.

When I send Partner, I’ll send her to go on sequential Tuesdays so she doesn’t have to experience the owner. We already have a gym membership. We aren’t looking to fill out new membership forms; we just want someone to critique our lifting form.