Tag: Life

Brooklyn Communists

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The best part of Brooklyn? It’s near New York City. 

Partner & I trained for 48 minutes each way to an event in Brooklyn. 

The event: four fifteen-minute talks plus Q&A, starting at 5pm since we had to vacate the space ahead of a different event starting at 6:30pm. 

Partner & I arrived at 4:40. One of the organizers said, “You guys are early. Could you come back in 20 minutes?”[1] 

If you’re going to have four fifteen-minute talks, plus Q&A time, you really want to start near 5pm. See, I don’t know what they teach you in Brooklyn. But here in Manhattan, 4 x 15minute = 60 minutes. And 60 minutes = an hour. 

Instead, they didn’t start until 5:20pm because, as they said, “Some people are coming from work.” 

No duh. It’s Thursday. How did you not consider this? 

So the talks got squished to 10mins each. And the Q&A got squished to one chunk of ~8 minutes. 

And only two people put their shoes in the little cabinet despite the cabinet being labeled “put your shoes in this cabinet”. And yes, they were Me & Partner. 

—

The talks were on living in communal spaces. Partner and I are interested in living with friends. We want to raise a family alongside other families, ideally in the same apartment or neighboring. 

But, for us this trait is only one of our interests. For the people at this presentation, co-living is the main part of their identity. 

One of the recommended processes for co-living: have a roommate check-in. Include open dialogue so different housemates can share their problems. 

My problem: a poorly scheduled, structured, and run event. 

[1] Partner says they said, “You guys are incredibly early.” I didn’t hear the incredibly.

Performance-Enhancing Drugs Are Fundamentally Good

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Chemicals don’t care what you call them.

Performance-enhancing drugs are great. They enhance performance, and isn’t enhanced performance good? 

Look: today I felt grumpy. So Partner grabbed me a pearl tea: sugar, plus a substance the Olympics banned until 2004. Twenty minutes later I was up and rolling, knocking out work I’d been avoiding for three weeks. It got me thinking.

The classifications we give – food vs supplement vs medication vs drug vs illegal drug – are not chemically meaningful. If you eat the vitamin C that’s in an orange, that’s called eating an orange. If you take the same amount of vitamin C in pill form, that’s called taking a supplement. Yet we think about these very differently. The exact same chemical process that ten years ago was called doing drugs is now called “doctor-prescribed medication for sleep” (cannabis). 

Why does our society (all societies?) have these classifications? We want to restrict some behaviors: for the safety of others, for the safety of the individual, or for reasons that aren’t about safety at all.

The biggest not-about-safety category is purity: questions of what a human is, and what appropriate human behavior looks like. So what’s with the obsession with purity?

I’m reminded of a lawyer who built a Supreme Court practice by soliciting: He would identify cases the Court might take, contact the potential plaintiffs to inform them of their potential case, and end up arguing before the Justices. Chief Justice John Roberst pooh-poohed this: “If I’m going to have heart-bypass surgery, I wouldn’t go to the surgeon who calls me up.” 

But actually, wouldn’t you? Let’s run the thought experiment. A surgeon approaches you out of nowhere: “Based on the shape of your face, I know that you have obstructive sleep apnea. I’m a medical doctor. I studied at this school. I’m not some quack making things up: here are the rigorous scientific tests you can take to verify what I’m telling you. And get a second opinion, if you like.” I would think: that’s excellent.

In fact, this is roughly what happened to me before my jaw surgery. After six doctors’ worth of searching, I found Dr. Christian Guilleminault – one of the founders of the field of obstructive sleep apnea, since passed. While he hadn’t found me on the street, his diagnosis was as unsolicited as they come. He looked at my face and said: “I can tell by the shape of your face that you were a rambunctious child.”

What a funny thing to say! 

He followed it up with, “We will send you in for the lab tests, of course, but I already know what they will say.” He then predicted the results, which aligned perfectly when the tests came back a few months later. That’s the doctor I want to hire! 

So much of our restriction runs on purity. But purity is not itself good for the individual. Purity puts the individual into a particular game — a game they can win only by behaving in one specific way, and a game they never asked to play.

The purity game is about packaging. Take virginity, the archetype of purity: a woman who is chaste, who follows the virginal pathway, receives adulation for it. There are other pathways to adulation. Purity just happens to be the lowest common denominator (for women in a specific slice of society). 

I drastically prefer informed consent. The biggest danger with performance-enhancing drugs — with drugs, period — is the unknown unknowns. You have to know and understand not only the limitations of the drug itself, but the limitations of our knowledge about the drug. We do this poorly as a society, because much of a doctor’s job is to demonstrate confidence and instill calm. They act, one could fairly say, like a con man. The onus is therefore on you the patient to work out the actual epistemology of your circumstance. It is frequently much less certain than any doctor, drug manufacturer, or therapist would have you believe.

External games like purity are other people’s scoreboard. Informed consent is your own: you, the substance, and an honest approximation of uncertainty. To enhance performance, choose the right substances. To choose the substance, know the limits of what’s known.

Today I consented, informed, to one highly-caffeinated pearl tea. Three weeks of avoidance, cleared. Enhanced performance. Fundamentally good.

Top-Secret Games: The Bathroom Line

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The goal of the game is to pee. You pee by checking the doors.

(An accidental series. Part 1: Trader Joe’s, Part 2: Airports.)

At the World Cup final watch party at the Harlem Tavern, a woman waits in front of five bathroom doors. I ask: “Did you check them all?”

She says no.

I walk down the line, twisting each knob. At the third door, the knob turns. The door opens. I gesture to her to enter. She does.

What is wrong with people?

Hold that question.

On the screen, Argentina was busy demonstrating the opposite mistake. A ref draws a box, and you fill the box you’re given. Players will play as rough as you let them — and they should; that’s the correct way to play a game. Argentina filled its box and kept pushing at the sides: four yellow cards by my count, one of them on the coach, two of them on Enzo Fernández, who was sent off. They played the end of a World Cup final a man down. They did it to themselves. (For more on refs and the dark arts, see Drawing a Foul vs. Flopping.)

A bathroom line has no ref. That’s what makes it the purer game. Field notes:

The early exit. Leave before the hydration break is called, or the instant it’s called. This is playing within the rules. I left immediately and made the front of the line. Plenty of others made the same move; the line stacked up eight deep behind me.

The exit-door gambit. At the halftime of extra time, a man arrived, realized the line was a line, and was very much not into it. I watched him scan for a shortcut. Finding none, he circled around to the bathroom’s exit and went in from there. He checked whether any doors were open. He played off the visit by washing his hands — “I only came here to wash my hands, not to skip the line…” — and then stood inside, watching the doors, waiting for one to open. Cutting the line is breaking the rules, and watching it riled up a rule-enforcing Germanic part of me that wants to destroy him and everything he stands for. The rest of us waited in the line.

The empty stall. The line filed right past the accessible bathroom. On Partner’s previous bathroom visit, a dude next to her tried that door: empty. She immediately stood in front of that door, waiting for him to come out; someone else lined up behind her. Nobody had been using that bathroom, and somebody should be using the bathroom: seems like an efficient use of resources. But the second line forming back there was the wrong shape. It should be one line, feeding every door. (I have preached this queueing theology before, at Trader Joe’s.)

Which returns us to the woman and the five doors. Five doors, five knobs, all that information free for the twisting. She had checked none of them. Behind door number three: an empty room.

Check the doors.

How glorious it is to be a funcle

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To win, keep the game going. To keep the game going, drink what you’re given.

At 11:15am this morning, I asked my brother-in-law to set a 30-minute timer. I then sunscreened the tops of my feet and I entered the kiddie pool. My nephew (just shy of 2 years old) was playing squirt with my father. Squirt is played as follows:

  • One player (the toddler) hangs on the water squirter in the kiddie pool. Sometimes he moves.

That’s it. That’s the game. If you think that’s not a game, you’ve probably never played with a toddler.

Our next game was more active. My nephew rotated the water squirter to hit me. I flapped my arms up in the air and emitted a “wah!” noise reminiscent of Waluigi from the Nintendo games.

After water-squirter-based games, my nephew wrapped his arms around a beach ball, then tried to pelt me with it. He failed. He cackled. He chased it down. He repeated.

It was around this time that my sister (Nephew’s mother) said something to me from outside the pool. I asked her to repeat it. She said, “We’re not watching him”, implying I was in charge of this tiny tot’s life, surrounded by 9 inches of murder-liquid.

Whoa. Big responsibility.

Nephew found a truck. His truck. His dumptruck. He filled it with a green cup. He dumped it out. He repeated the cycle.

Finally, we struck upon the game of the day: Nephew fills the green cup with water, then holds it out for Funcle (me) to drink. Funcle mimes drinking the cup, using only his mouth (no hands!). Nephew cackles. Nephew fills the cup again. This time, Funcle grips the cup using his lips. He drops the cup with a “blah!” sound, imitating the sound of a blub-blub fish.

Repeat this game for 15 minutes.

You might think this game gets boring.

It does not.

At 11:45am, my brother-in-law told me my alarm had gone off, prompting me to check on Partner. I tagged in Oma to ensure the Nephew stayed safe, checked on Partner, and returned to the kiddie pool after learning Partner was on her way down.

The games continued.

Have you ever reminisced about something from a mere 9 hours ago?

How glorious it is to be a funcle.

Hermit Crabs & Kidney Donations

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A spoken-and-transcribed guest-post courtesy of Partner, who caught upwards of seven hermit crabs today: 

Hermit Crab Homes

Hermit crabs grow, but their shells don’t, because hermit crabs don’t grow their shells but find them. When a hermit crab grows too big for a shell, it will find a bigger one. If the bigger one is too big for that hermit crab, it will just hang out near the shell, in the hope that some other hermit crab will come take that bigger shell and leave behind its shell. Because of this, you can get a whole line of hermit crabs: several smaller hermit crabs are waiting to size up their shell. As soon as a bigger hermit crab comes and takes that too-big shell, it will free up a slightly smaller shell, and then another hermit crab could take that slightly smaller shell, etc., trickling down. 

It’s like the kidney donation chain. 

The Kidney Donation Chain

If I wanted to give you my kidney, but you and I are not a match, we’d be out of luck unless there were two other people, one of whom wanted to donate and the other to receive, and we were a reciprocal match so could swap. But generally, there are so many factors required for a kidney to fit that a direct swap is improbable. And they only let something like two or three people form a loop because they want to operate all at once. They’re afraid that, if they do them sequentially, the buddy of the first person to get a kidney will renege on his donation at the end of the loop because his incentive to give is gone. 

Because of this structure, someone donating the kidney without needing a kidney for a friend or family member can change that loop from a loop into a line, which is really mathematically beneficial. And the altruistic donor is just giving away the kidney, no one’s on the hook for getting a kidney back to them, so there’s no risk of someone chickening out. If you choose to donate your kidney, you can kick off a chain that doesn’t just help the one person you are donating your kidney to, but can actually help all the people who exist in that chain, which can be a dozen people or more. 

BBC Earth video on hermit crab shell swaps:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1dnocPQXDQ

Info on starting a kidney donation chain, including a way to get 5 loved ones to the top of the donation line if they ever need a kidney but you already gave yours away: https://www.kidneyregistry.com/for-donors/start-a-chain/

The Coupon Book

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The goal of the game is to make money. You make more money by giving some away, then charging for what stays scarce.

I’m at the second all-inclusive resort of my life. So why do I feel nickel-and-dimed?

(My family comes together for one of these every summer now, which is a lovely experience. I’m having a great time with great people. This feeling is not a particularly negative impact on my experience; I’m simply enjoying the process of analyzing it.) 

It started at check-in, when the concierge handed me a coupon book. He flagged one asterisk: the $50-off coupon for the resort store needs a purchase of at least $100. I laughed and noted I wouldn’t wouldn’t be using that one.

A coupon book. At an all-inclusive. The whole premise of the place is that I already paid, so nothing else carries a price. A coupon is a price dressed up in a faux discount. The coupon book is a store smuggled into a building labeled “no stores allowed”. 

* * *

Once I noticed the first coupon, I couldn’t stop. $50 off a single spa treatment, which made me wonder what a spa treatment costs. I found the menu advertised in the bar and scoffed: treatments start at $229. I can get an excellent massage in the US for half that, and that’s paying US labor prices, not whatever a masseuse earns in central america. 

This is couponing the Bed Bath & Beyond way: float the sticker high, then hand back a slice, so the discount feels like a gift instead of a markup you sidestepped. It’s comparison control, the price game I keep coming back to. Anchor the number at $229 and $50 off reads as generous. Nobody mentions the seller number that should orient their side of the price: their marginal cost of providing the service. 

And the asterisk gives that number away. The same way Chipotle running a 2-for-1 tells you a burrito nets more than 50%, this resort’s $50 off of $100 in the gift shop tells me the same. They’re not discounting into a loss on purpose. If they can afford to give it back, they were charging too much to begin with.

* * *

The second move is the paid upgrade, and it bothers me more, because it breaks the frame on purpose. (At this resort, that’s the “Star Class” upgrade: your room and food become slightly nicer, and you can book Star Class-exclusive dinner tables.) The whole reason to buy an all-inclusive is to delete the transaction. No prices on the menu, no small voice doing math at dinner. If I wanted the experience of paying for something nice, I would have booked a place where I pay for something nice. The upgrade sells me back the exact friction I paid to be rid of.

* * *

So why build it this way? Why sell “everything included,” then spend the week selling more?

My best guess: once everyone holds the same all-inclusive wristband, everyone wants the same scarce things. The 7pm table at the good restaurant. The shaded poolside chairs. Put a few hundred people on identical footing and they start competing, and anywhere people compete over something scarce, there’s money in tilting the field.

So the resort sells you a basic entry ticket. Then it sells weapons to both sides: the upgrade that jumps the dinner queue, the tier that reserves your chair before dawn. What you’re buying, on top of the vacation, is a position in a contest they built.

* * *

I don’t write any of this with a clenched jaw. I came here to stop running the numbers, and on a vacation the only points worth counting are relaxation, enjoyment, and connection. I’m racking those up, surrounded by people I love. I just can’t switch off the part of me that wants to see the machine.

And the machine is simpler than it looks. If something is free, someone finds the version of it that isn’t, and sells you that. If free, then freemium. Even here? Especially here.

You’re Excellent at Friendship

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To learn what you’re good at, ask other people. Even better, see what people pay you for.

Earlier today, I told a friend he’s excellent at friendship. He was surprised. He’d never thought of himself that way. He asked how I knew.

Here’s how: we’d just been talking about his bachelor party, a roomful of strong, eccentric personalities, every one a distinct weirdo, many of whom would never otherwise share a room. He gets along beautifully with all of them. Holding that many particular people close at once takes real skill. That skill is friendship. He has it without knowing.

This not-knowing is common. The people who are good at a thing are often the last to know it, because unmeasured skills are tough to compare. We can check the scored ones, though even there the ego cooks the books: somehow every poker player says they’re at the 75th percentile. The scoreless skills, friendship among them, keep no count we can read. So we stay blind to our placing within them.

Take the word “driven.” I have found the people who call themselves driven to be, more often than not, the lazy ones, using the word as a permit: “I’m usually such a hard worker, so I’ve earned a little time off.” The genuinely hard worker, meanwhile, tends to grind precisely because they’re convinced they’re too lazy. Their self-image points the opposite way from the truth. The person who repeatedly calls themselves happy is trying to convince someone, either themselves or others.

So most of us don’t know what we’re good at. We learn from outside, from what others reflect back, because the trait is relative and others judge it better than we do. The blindness runs deeper than skill: we can’t see our own traits, and those same traits decide both what we’re good at and what’s good for us.

This distinction gets even tougher when adding internal emotions: I’ve been turning this over today because two companies interviewed me. One piqued my interest immediately. The other, once I learned the details, is the better fit. It’s almost exactly what I’ve already done, less of a stretch. (“I’ve done all these pieces, just not in this precise combination”, I told them.) Being more drawn to the first isn’t evidence that it’s the better place for me. Being drawn to something is how marketing wins. My interest is one ingredient. When running the ikigai exercise, “what do I love?” is one question out of four. Love is helpful. It isn’t the whole answer. Yes, everyone needs passion. But passion can’t buy food. 

Here, what I’m good at aligns with what’s good for me, but they’re disconnected from what I’m drawn to. 

The thing you’re drawn to and the label you claim are stories about who you are, and the story is selling something. Identity has a downside we rarely count.

When choosing between passion and survival; when choosing between love or life, it is the martyr who chooses love. We reward the martyr with fame and acclaim. Pity they cannot spend it.

Finding My People

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Most of success is just showing up. But showing up to the right place… 

Before I moved to New York, I told my Partner that merely by living here, I’d find work. There’s so much economic opportunity in this city that I’d harness some.

One month in, I met a former founder who hired me to ghostwrite a blog post.

Three months later (two weeks ago), a random VC firm pinged me on LinkedIn about a private-markets mixer. I signed up. Yesterday, the organizer texted to make sure I was actually coming.

En route to the club, I noticed that I smelled. So I ducked into a CVS for deodorant. Not a good start.

I entered the club at 3:51pm. The doorman made me take off my hat. Getting worse.

At 4pm, the hosts arrived. They’d expected a room more suited to their needs: an open room, not a big table ringed with chairs. Rough continuation.

Upstairs, another host told me to take off my hat again. Ugh, come on. 

For the next 90 minutes, I met mostly people in wealth management and late-stage investing. Not my areas.

But then! Someone walked in with a pep in his step, someone I immediately pegged as Interesting. I snuck my way over. He grows hydroponic ginseng for a healthy soda company. He sold his last startup, a guitar-amplifier company. Now he wants to bring this healthy soda to the world.

And another! A guy doing video-based sabermetrics for sports other than baseball. And he’s complaining about marketing. These are my people. The ones I can help.

We exchanged emails. I’ll message them about coffee.

All in all, a very successful meeting.

If you show up as your specific self, you’ll meet the people you can actually help. 

Also, I ate 4 lamb lollipops, 2 falafel balls, and 1 small slice of fig pizza. I count that as a win.

Games Played

Me at the bathroom supply store: “Are you salaried or paid on commission?” 

Salesperson: “I’m not going to share that information.” 

Me in my mind: <Commission it is.> 

Flogging & Flourishing

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A beautiful experience and the shame that exiles it.

At Burning Man about 10 years ago, two friends asked if I wanted to join them for an intro-to-flogging workshop. I accepted. We trudged across the dusty playa to a tent filled with straps, crosses, benches, and massage tables: the sort of image you’d expect in a BDSM dungeon on TV, except all these were dusty and out in the open, not locked in some basement.

The leader started his talk. He’s a massage therapist, he said, and he thinks of flogging (and BDSM in general) not as an activity about pain, but as a massage with tools. Just as you can create physical experiences of excitement or relaxation or healing in someone’s body using your hands, so too can you create those experiences using tools.

Fair enough.

He asked for a volunteer, asked the volunteer if they had any sensitive areas or pain, and began to demonstrate. His demonstration started slowly: gently bringing blood to the surface, arousing some awareness of the area without any pain. It accelerated: increasing the intensity or the vigor or the speed (sometimes all three at once). He took the volunteer over her edge. She winced. He eased up, comforted her, ensured she felt safe, and continued. The key, he said, was that people have the capacity to go much farther than they believe. Sometimes, we just require a little help.

After the demonstration, an assistant asked us to pair up. The attendees were an odd number, so my group was a group of three: me and my two friends (a man and a woman who were romantically dating and would go on to marry around five years later). First, the man flogged the woman. Then the woman flogged the man. Then I asked the woman if she would like to be my recipient. She agreed. The man interrupted by telling me, “Actually, you’re going to be flogging me.” I did, then we switched, and he flogged me.

I loved it. Adored it. The experience of relaxed sublimity equates only to the perfect calm felt under a heavy blanket or, I presume, a cattle squeeze chute. If you’ve ever loved a hot sauna or a vigorous workout or the endorphins of a long run, you’ll probably like an expert flogging.

Most people don’t talk about this experience. When a BDSM-inspired scene comes on the TV, they avert their eyes or switch channels. We shame kink and the people who like it. No one who has ever been flogged could get elected president.

That makes me sad. Very sad. It was a beautiful experience with wonderful people, the sort of deep and connective touch we share too infrequently.

Thinking about that experience prompts a sad longing in me: the sort one feels when recalling a long-forgotten friend: our life paths diverged and a decade passed, but I would like to snuggle up with them again.

The $20 Locker

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Even when this city smacks me, I still see its beauty. 

I love New York’s reasonableness. 

Today I visited a Yankees game. The metal detector dinged on me when I passed. The bag inspector told me I can’t take a laptop inside. He summoned his teammate. His teammate pointed me to a business across the street. He said, “There’s lockers right across the street. They’re not affiliated with us but people use them all the time. When you come back, tell the security and they’ll let you skip the line.” I asked his name. He said Anthony.

The security guards moved the barriers as I shortcutted back through the zigzagging line. I sped across the street. Inside, the worker charged me $20 and ushered me to the back where the lockers live. I placed my laptop inside, pocketed the key, and told him “okay” when he said the locker rental ends 30 minutes after the game. I asked him his name. His coworker said “Ahmed”. He repeated “Ahmed.”

I spent $25 on the Yankees ticket. On one hand, $20 is expensive. On the other hand, the policies are reasonable at every step of the way. Can policy easily distinguish between a laptop and a recording device? Perhaps not. Is this policy public on their website? Yes. Did I check? No, but I could have and that’s my fault. Is there a reasonable solution to this problem? Yes, and it’s not $100 when it very well could be.

When I returned, I told the security guards that I had visited the lockers and Anthony told me to skip the line. My ticket buzzed in, and I retrieved my limited-edition Yankees soccer jersey. For which I paid an additional $10 over the cost of normal tickets. Not because I care about the jersey, but because my father was in town, and he’s always wanted to visit Yankee Stadium. 

Money can’t buy happiness, but it sure can buy the ingredients.