Tag: Relationships

Clown School Break Day 30: Cooperative Games

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In which Our Hero collaborates. 

My family has recently taken to playing cooperative games. Growing up, we played mainly competitive games. Sometimes team games, but more often individual competitive games.

My partner recently posed the question: What if a person grew up playing mainly cooperative games?

An interesting question.

For one, most sports are competitive. (Sure, some are team-based, but those are still generally against other people rather than a challenge against nature or circumstance.)

For two, most contrived games (as distinct from natural games like science or business) are competitive.

For three, most good contrived games are competitive. Taking board games as a field I know quite well: only over the last ~20 years have cooperative board games taken off, and still they are much less popular and less created than competitive ones.

Bad games are generally not worth playing. They’re unfun and teach poor / useless skills.

Good games are, well, good.

I learned to count and perform basic mental math through the card game cribbage. I’m not aware of a cooperative equivalent that’s as engaging and strategic (and building one’s strategic muscle is worthwhile in itself).

Cooperative games teach communication, team coordination, collective strategy, leading and following, ebbs and flows.

I used to ghostwrite for the founder of the video streaming platform Twitch. He and his brother both sold companies for ~$1B, and they credit their parents’ chore system with teaching them to collaborate and strategize. The chores had to be completed, but the how and the who were up to the children’s choices. (For more, search the word “chore” in this article or this article.)

Collaborative games are excellent. And in the grand scheme of things, many competitive games are really about collaboration on the meta level anyway. Tennis is about (i.e. funded by) encouraging people to play tennis, which is generally good for physical health. Individual competitive sports like running are about setting a new record, thereby pushing human physical ability to new heights.

Perhaps it’s true: Even when we’re competing, we’re collaborating.

Clown School Break Day 29: On Moving Holidays

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In which Our Hero experiments with time.

My family moves holidays.

By moving them, we get more time together. And the ability to do more Christmases with others. (This year, I’m doing one Christmas with my family and then three with my partner’s.)

The official Christmas – or “consensus Christmas,” as I call it – is arbitrarily chosen anyway. Orthodox Christmas is in January; Jesus’ actual birthday is unknown; and Dec 25 was chosen in the 4th century. So we slide things around.

Today was family Christmas Day 1. I received two clownish gifts. 

One was from my gluten-free brother-in-law: a large, baguette-shaped pillow.

[In a French accent: “honh honh honh”]

The second was a sign saying “Beware of Clowns.” It’s visually akin to a normal “Beware of Dog” sign.

Teeheehee.

Musing on this relationship with time, I wonder how much it’s shared by clowns. They’re an immediate lot, making plans for now and changing them when the wind blows. The school allows for drop-ins and drop-outs as desired. You can come for a year. Or for one course. Or leave and return next year. Or the year after. And you definitely can’t take the second year clown course until after you’ve taken the foundational Le Jeu course. Or at the same time: that’s fine too. 

This is a game with time and convention. 

Most people have never considered moving a holiday. “Christmas is on December 25th”, they might say. And they’re right. But they’re only right because people decided they’re right. And social constructs are fertile ground for games. 

It’s also an act of engineering. We found a problem: many demands on the same time. So instead of moving our bodies (see the movie “Four Christmases,” where a couple tries to do all four divorced-family Christmases in one day), we move the holiday. 

Clowning and systems engineering are shockingly similar. One is attempting to achieve a system result; the other an emotional one. But the method is the same: find what’s out of balance and adjust it until the whole thing works.

It’s nice to play with social temporal agreements. But it’s nice because the people I care about agree with it, and all play in similar ways. 

There are also times when I think something’s a game and someone else thinks it’s absolutely not a game. Those times are no fun at all. 🤡

Clown School Break Day 28: Statistical Cheese

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In which Our Hero ages in a cave for 24 months.

This has so far been my favorite Christmas season.

Why?

Is it the general chillness?
The presence of a 16-month-old nephew (our activities constrained by nap windows like a benevolent dictator)?
The absence of sprinting – from task to task, from obligation to obligation – so that family time feels calm instead of stolen?

No running and only a little work means I’m easy and jovial. I like this version of myself.

Part of this is the skill clown school taught me: the ability to choose fun instead of waiting for it to arrive accidentally.
And part of it is contrast: the calm after an absurdly intense storm.

January looms.
I’m buying an apartment.
Interviewing for a job.
Considering family visiting me in France.

For now, though, the assignment appears to be: do less. Enjoy more. Taste the cheese. 

—

Tonight we performed a statistical analysis on cheese.

Ten cheeses. France, Spain, the UK.
Who liked what. How much. Whose tastes clustered. Who outlied in what ways? 

My partner started a masters in statistics during her genetics PhD. This is her preferred form of play: turning pleasure into a dataset. Not just “which cheese did everyone enjoy the most” but “what were the standard deviations” and “who had the most similar taste in cheeses? The most divergent?”

It occurred to me that this – thinking carefully about what we like – is a behavior often poo-pooed. 

Anti-intellectualism runs rampant. In part because it’s easier to form a mob than to compete on precision. If you can’t articulate why something is good, it’s comforting to declare articulation itself suspicious. If you can’t relate to someone who knows 1/7th in percentages, it’s comforting to outgroup them as mad scientist-y. 

And yet:
Some of our favorite cheeses were cheap, mass-market cheeses from France and Spain.

Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.
It’s funny how the everyday object in one country becomes a delicacy in another—just by crossing a border and being paid attention to.

Maybe this is also a clown lesson.

Attention is not seriousness.
Analysis is not joy-killing.
And play doesn’t require intensity—sometimes it requires rest.

All in all, a very chill day.

Which is nice.
Especially
Because
I’m not in charge of the toddler napping
🤡

Clown School Break Day 26: Clowning as Emotional Oddity

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In which Our Hero ends on an unusual question. 

Clowning is an odd emotional experience.
Clown school is an odd emotional context.

Where else is one assigned the task: be emotionally open, vulnerable, generous, light, and kind?
Where else is one given an explicit assignment to manipulate their own emotional state in service of others?

One place that comes to mind is politics.

I recently happened upon a (¿state?) senator. I was coming from a friend’s birthday, and the senator commented on the hat I’d given my friend. The senator exhibited genuine-seeming curiosity about what it meant, then delight in the silly inside joke it represented.

And,
like,
he wasn’t being inauthentic.

But,
like,
that is his job.

I don’t believe he was deeply interested in the game itself. I doubt he’d want to watch it or play it unless it came packaged with votes or fundraising. And yet: the delight was real.

I suppose clowns are the same way.

It isn’t inauthentic to change your emotional state and then share that state with others.
But it is contrived.

It’s not inauthentic to manipulate someone at a poker table either.
But it is manipulative.

So what’s the point?

Is this the core function of most people-leadership roles? From CEO to politician to parent to clown: are they all versions of the same act?

If behavior flows from emotion, is a leader’s primary job internal emotional manipulation, followed by broadcasting the result?

I’m reminded of LBJ amping himself up – working himself into a righteous frenzy – before speeches and political events, especially if it felt like he was behaving in ways antithetical to his values. He told himself he was doing it for people he cared about. That the moral sacrifices were worth it.

And then he sent those people to die in Vietnam.

I’ve known a CEO who practiced a similar kind of self-amping. His former employees now, at a remarkable rate, despise him.

So what’s my point? The connection to clowning?

Is it bad to manipulate your own emotional state? Obviously not. But when does it become bad? Under what conditions? In service of what ends?

What’s my point?

I don’t know. I’m musing.

That’s what this blog is. Thinking out loud. Marking where my thinking currently sits and letting it evolve. I don’t endorse everything I’ve ever written. That’s part of being a writer.

But today I’m reminded of how strange an emotional experience clowning is.
And how much people hate politicians.
And I find myself wondering whether – or more precisely, to what degree and in what ways – they should also hate clowns.

🤡

Clown School Break Day 25: Ridicule, Moi?

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In which Our Hero pokes fun at poking fun.

A college friend and I were at dinner with his new girlfriend. We were playing a silly word-association game we’d been playing for years. At some point she said, “Stop making fun of me.”

We weren’t making fun of her. We stopped immediately.

But something interesting happened. By misidentifying play as ridicule, the game collapsed – and a contradiction surfaced on its own. No mockery was applied. None was needed.

Play is fragile. When it is misnamed as ridicule – or when the target of ridicule is misidentified – it stops being play at all. And in trying to prevent harm, one can sometimes create the very harm one fears.

—

I find this behavior socially corrosive. Constraint masquerading as protection should be ridiculed and scorned.

Societally, we accept it. Because its harm is not as apparent. It is stifling, restricting, and just plain un-fun. It is stopping someone else’s kid from climbing up the slide because we don’t want our kid to climb up the slide.

—

I laugh probably 3x more than the average person. I find humor probably 3x more often than the average person does.

Infrequently, it’s for a reason undesirable. (Someone has a name that sounds funny to me, so I’m implicitly outgrouping their culture.)

Generally, it’s because 1) they’re doing something that reveals a contradiction between their goals and their behavior, or 2) they’re doing something “silly” – i.e. something that reveals a comic underpinning to existence.

—

When we let people police down to the lowest common denominator, life is duller and weaker.

And that’s how the terrorists win. 

🤡

Clown School Break Day 24: Clowning is for Babies

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In which Our Hero shares a lack of pain.

My sister’s sixteen-month-old child has not yet learned that life is more pleasant when one defecates intentionally in prescribed locations. Instead, he saves time and effort (and I admire his efficiency) by pooping wherever and whenever inspiration strikes.

After completing this task, he begins to smell.
It is not a pleasant smell.
It gives one the impression that all disgust responses originate here.

To rectify (pun!) the situation, one generally places him on his back and swaps out his undergarments for fresh ones, with some cleansing wiping in the middle (pun!).

He does not enjoy being on his back.

Would you enjoy being held on your back by beings eight-plus times your size?

In response to this dissatisfaction, I’ve learned to change his undergarments while he’s standing. This satisfies the basic needs. But sometimes the environment is not conducive.

Such was the case this afternoon at the park.

We – my father and I – flopped the nugget onto his back.

His face screwed itself into a pre-wail.

I noticed something in myself: calm. Comfortable ease. I found it, then sent it his way. His pre-wail ceased. He looked at my face.

I knelt above the boy-child’s head, my face upside-down over his. He gazed at my scruffy visage; I gazed down at his soft, pudgy one. It didn’t take effort. Just a gentle internal returning-to-the-calm.

He did not find this enchanting. (For roughly four seconds during the change, he looked away.) But it was sufficient.

I am not, perhaps, more entertaining than a stubbed toe is painful.
But I can be more engaging than a sudden flop onto one’s back.

—

At clown school, the second-years play a warm-up game with a baby.

They appear on stage one by one. They make a face or a sound or some small action. The teacher plays either a baby crying or a baby laughing. They continue. The question is simple:

How long can you keep the baby laughing?

I’ve wondered for a while whether that’s the goal of clowning: reach some pre-culture, fundamental-to-all-humans level where your pleasure arrives into any audience, underneath their higher-level reasoning. 

I do not yet have the skills to make this baby laugh on command. (Except via the super-secret hack of foot tickles.)

But I do have the ability to Turn On The Calm.

And that

can be

enough.

Clown School Break Day 17: Do or Do; There Is No Cry

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In which Our Hero discovers discipline. 

One key internalization from this past weekend:
How you feel doesn’t have to dictate how you act.

This is one of clown school’s most important lessons.
You’re tired? Headache? Angry? Upset? Depressed?
Irrelevant. Curtain’s up in five. You perform.

The difference between a good standup and a great standup isn’t the height of their best sets — it’s the quality of their worst ones. The question isn’t “How are you feeling?” but “Can you still deliver?”

Clown school drills this into you.
Every day you step on stage.
Every day you play the game.
Every day you work. Show up. Try. Fail. Try again.
It’s consistency as craft.

A clown has to be able to turn it on — sometimes more than any other performer.

This came up today with a woman I met in the O’Hare waiting area. She’s a professional Twitch streamer trying to stick to a schedule, even on the days she doesn’t want to go live.
But here’s the twist: those reluctant days, she says, are often her best streams.

I don’t know if that’s true for me — whether my best work surfaces when I least want to make it.
But I do know this: I still make it.

Because success, more than anything else, is about behavior, not feelings.

Clown School Break Day 16: Cooperative Games

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In which Our Hero remembers the audience and the performer are on the same team.

Today I didn’t buy a painting.

I could have.
There are worlds in which I walk out of that studio holding a canvas, or at least a print. I like his work. It’s good enough that I’d happily see it on my wall. I also, frankly, think this guy could be very successful. And while I don’t know anything about investing in art, I do know that he does good work. 

Instead of buying, I did something arguably more valuable: I gave him one mental shift that might change the way he sells forever (hard-won after nine years of being a creative freelancer myself). 

The shift was this:

  • You and the buyer are on the same team, trying to get to the sale together.

Most artists don’t think that way. They imagine selling as hoodwinking, convincing, persuading. Commerce as a low-grade con.

But when I exchange $20 for a meal, two true things are happening at once:

  • I am saying, “I’d rather have this meal than this $20.”
  • The seller is saying, “I’d rather have this $20 than this meal.”

We both win. That’s the point.

If someone wanders into your studio already 50% likely to buy your painting, wouldn’t you both be better off if a sale happens?

That’s what my friend was missing. He felt like he was pushing against the customer, trying to “get them” to buy, and he hated it. Instead, he should walk next to them, shoulder to shoulder, helping the buyer cross the line they already half-want to cross.

Sales, at least for an honest artist, is a cooperative game.

Clowning is the same game

This is also the part that many performing artists (including clowns) forget: the audience wants you to succeed.

When we audience members sit down for standup, for a play, for a clown show, we’re not secretly hoping it’s terrible so we can be right about humanity’s decline. We might predict it will be bad, but given the choice between:

  • “I knew it would suck,” and
    “It blew my expectations out of the water,”

almost everyone would rather be wrong and delighted.

Even the pessimists would rather go home saying, “Honestly, it was great.”

So performance is also a cooperative game:

  • As the clown, you are the leader.
  • The audience is your team.
  • The “sale” you’re closing together is shared pleasure.

You’re not dragging them, hostage-style, toward your weird art. You’re inviting them into something – pleasure – they already came to find.

This, unfortunately, is not my default setting.

Competitive games vs cooperative games

I am more experienced with competitive games than cooperative ones. Poker, for instance, is the opposite:

  • There, the goal is to hide.
  • To show nothing.
  • To give away as little information as possible while extracting as much value as possible.

Clowning is about the inverse:

  • Openness instead of secrecy.
  • Generosity instead of extraction.
  • “Let’s enjoy this together” instead of “Let me get the best of you.”

One of the purposes of clown school (for me) is to re-train this reflex. To make cooperation feel as natural as competition.

Right now, the questions I’m wrestling with include:

  1. How do I lead the team gently?
    Guide the audience without shoving, nudge without bullying, care for each teammate without over-focusing on any one.
  2. How do I actually lead, instead of hiding behind stronger personalities?
    Be the tip of the spear, not the person comfortably in the second row.
  3. When I’m with a partner on stage, how do I treat them as a collaborator instead of a combatant?
    Remember that “winning” is making the scene sing, and that often occurs when you’re playing harmoniously. 
  4. How do I remain open when uncomfortable?
    Oftentimes, I’m shutting down. And that… is not… helpful. 😦 

These are not just stage problems. They’re life problems. Which brings us to the cocktail party.

When I forgot we were on the same team

At a cocktail party today, I met a few people I genuinely liked. Smart, funny, curious. The kind of people I’d happily see again.

They asked about my relationship status. I told them a technically-true (and engaging), but far-more-boring version.

Here’s what I told them: 

In college, I was interested in a girl who was dating a woman. A friend told me she only dated women, so I filed that away as “ah well, not for me.”

Ten years later, we reconnected. It turned out my friend had been wrong:

  • She does not, in fact, only date women.

And here’s the part I didn’t share – not because it’s shameful, but because it’s intimate, and intimacy is precisely what I tend to withhold when I get scared: 

  • At the time of meeting her, I was taking exogenous estrogen. I had grown breasts. My emotional life was much closer to that of a woman than a man. 

So even if she had only dated women, I still might have qualified.

That’s the good bit. The twist ending. The painting on the wall I could have offered.

Instead, I hid it. I offered the flat version. And therefore, the next bit that I added – when I later tried to connect – didn’t land. I’d already collapsed into myself, ending the cooperative game. 

I protected information, staying “safe”.
But they weren’t my opponents. They were potential teammates. We were building something delightful together. And that collapse — the retreat instead of the play — is exactly the reflex I’m trying to rewire.

(To be clear, the issue wasn’t that I “should have” told strangers something deeply personal. It’s that I noticed myself collapsing inward even though both they and I wanted to play, to connect, to stay in the cooperative game.)

The update

So: today I didn’t buy a painting.
I also didn’t honestly sell myself.

In both cases, the correction is the same:

  • Be in situations where we’re on the same side. 
  • Remember we’re on the same side.
  • Act like the game is cooperative.
  • Offer the real story, not the safe one.

When I become excellent at those in daily life, I’ll be a better clown.
And when I become a better clown, maybe I’ll finally remember, in the moment, that we all walked into the room wanting the same thing:To leave having created shared pleasure.
And in that pleasure, created Value.

Clown School Break Day 15: The Lightness Advantage

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In which Our Hero learns that ease is its own form of status.

The skills of upper-class social engagement and the skills of clowning: shockingly similar.

Can you keep it light—even when the topic isn’t?
Can you remember the game? That this is a game. That life is a game. And the more you remember it’s a game, the less you’ll feel poked. The less you feel poked, the less likely you’ll commit a faux pas.

When meeting someone new:
Can you stay present? Open? Emotionally available? Can you find pleasure in what they’re saying, find pleasure in yourself, and entertain yourself while entertaining them?
Do you make eye contact instead of studying the floor or the ceiling?

Can you jump to the new game quickly?
Roll with the punches without letting irritation leak? Or if you do get irritated, can you metabolize it quietly so others don’t feel it?

In short: are you easy?

Even shorter: be social soy sauce: enhancing whatever flavor is already present.
Do not be social tofu (merely a warm body), nor wasabi (adding too much kick), and certainly not ginger (an entirely unrelated taste altogether).

Some people don’t need to be easy. They have structural reasons to be included—money, skills, status, connections. Their mere existence provides value.

If you have those advantages, you can afford a little heaviness.

But if you lack them, ease becomes an important asset.

—

I met someone today who was surprised to learn a fairly large fact about her husband.

I get that.
It’s also foreign to me.

When one (A) has enough happening that there’s no need to narrate every detail, and (B) is so deeply present with others when actually together, the result is fewer facts shared and more connection felt. This is an instance of putting the text on the game.

Perhaps these people live such driven, full lives that they don’t need to lean on each other for conversational ballast. They’re satisfied by the things they’re doing. Their overlaps shrink. Their presence expands.

—

Maybe this is why the skills of social ease and clowning feel so linked for me. I had to learn lightness. I had to learn the game. I had to learn to entertain myself, then others, and to orient toward warmth and pleasantness.

Other people don’t always need those skills. They build companies, hire teams, command rooms, confer opportunities. What do I confer? Stories. Emotional resonance. Connection.

I’ve lived as a writer for the last decade. I’ve flown around the world, lived in a van, written books, attended clown school, played competitive pickleball, lived as an œstrogen-powered life form. These things made me interesting, but they did not give me structural advantages to hand out.

What I offer is not leverage. It’s wisdom. Presence. Delight.

So it sure as hell helps if I’m light.

Airy.
Gentle.
Easy.
Fun.
Funny.
Generous.
Kind.

This makes it possible to add me to your car, to your dinner, to your team. It makes me someone who lightens your load, even when you carry me on your shoulders.

But when I’m heavy?

Well.

🎈

Clown School Break Day 13: Revealing my Hand

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In which Our Hero finally plays the writing game, not merely performs the genre.

Yesterday’s post set a record in responses. So I found myself asking:

Why did people like it?

If we assume it wasn’t merely well-written form, it likely was one of these three traits:

  1. I wrote about two games I know extremely well. (I played poker as a method of money-making previously, in the pre-solver Jurassic period.)
  2. I compared two activities everyone recognizes, even if only through cultural osmosis. (Everyone knows what a clown is. Everyone knows what poker looks like.)
  3. I accidentally wandered into a space my sister claims is my superpower: the philosophy of games.

Two months ago she called to tell me I had a gift.

She’d asked for help diagnosing an unspoken social game at her workplace, and when I broke it down for her, she said:

  • “You could be the expert at this. Not ‘an’ expert — the expert.”

For clarity: philosophy of games ≠ game theory.

I’m not a game theorist and have no ambition to become one. (Though one of my closest friends is probably top hundred in the world at the practical application of game theory.)

Instead, I love:

  1. games
  2. what games do to people
  3. how humans use games
  4. the mechanics and sub-mechanics inside games
  5. the social physics that games create
  6. the playing of games
  7. fun

This has always been true. As a kid, I invented strategies in schoolyard games so effective that fellow students rewrote the rules the next day. As an adult, I earned second place in the Hoboken Open pickleball tournament, which is exactly as prestigious as it sounds. In college I studied philosophy to understand the rules of our life’s game (hint: start with Aristotle).

But here’s the truth:

Yesterday’s writing, to me, felt bland.
I haven’t been having many fresh clowning insights.
I’m on break from clown school because of a broken foot.
I haven’t been around many clowns — except myself.

So instead of writing about clowning, I jotted down what I thought were painfully obvious observations.

And two people found them profound.
Compelling.
Insightful.

Why?

Clowning offers two simple rules:

  • give the audience what they want, and
  • follow the fun.

One mistake people make is assuming “what they want” means “repeat the product.”
But that’s not it — at least not entirely.
If I reposted yesterday’s essay verbatim, nobody would care.
This exaggerated example makes the point:

The audience doesn’t want the same product.
They want the same emotional experience.
The same arc.
The same sense of discovery.
The same journey.

Maybe one reader liked my emotional growth.
Maybe another liked the simple clarity around two games they’d only ever observed from the outside.
Maybe someone else just enjoyed seeing me think.

Writers know this:
readers fall in love not with the thing but with the transformation.

Van Gogh didn’t sell paintings until his letters were published.
Until people could see his suffering.
Until his bed wasn’t just a bed but the first possession of a poor, unraveling man.
Stories create meaning.
Meaning creates attachment.

And that’s why
Starting today, I’m going to include writing about hormones.

Yesterday I talked for an hour with my parents about my four-year experience taking œstrogen.
It was medical, emotional, biological, and sociopolitical.
It reshaped my values, which reshaped the games I chose to play.
It rewired my physical and emotional landscape.
It altered my comfort with strangers, my sense of risk, and my appetite for play.

I was on œstrogen when I decided to go to clown school.
I was back on my natural testosterone when I actually started the school year.

That contrast was… intense.

My desire to play poker changed with my hormonal profile.
My social ease changed too.

On œstrogen, my fluency with strangers soared: top decile of my life.
Now that the ease has dropped, I’m having to relearn it.
And with that comes fear.
Not melodramatic fear. More like the fear of an aging driver noticing their reaction time isn’t what it used to be:

  • “I used to be good at this. What if I’m not anymore?”

But here’s the secret about fear:
It’s freezing.
But it’s also your friend.
If you don’t embrace it and step through it,
You’ll always be under its power.

This was as true yesterday — staring down an A6s decision on a 4-6-7-A-K board facing a river jam — as it is about my long hesitation to share my hormonal story.

In that hand, I should have called.
In this life, I should speak.
Not because you’re entitled to know. You’re not.
None of this is “your business.”
But I chose to be a writer.
Which makes it my business.

Said differently:
I chose this writing game.
Time to stop playing it like a wimp.