Terwilliger

A classic I recently stumbled across again: Theodore Geisel’s (aka Dr. Seuss’) graduation speech to the 1977 class of Lake Forest College, reproduced below in its entirety.

—

My Uncle Terwilliger on the Art of Eating Popovers

My uncle ordered popovers
from the restaurant’s bill of fare.
And, when there were served,
he regarded them
with a penetrating stare.
Then he spoke great Words of Wisdom
as he sat there on that chair:
‘To eat these things,’
said my uncle,
‘you must exercise great care.
You may swallow down what’s solid
BUT
you must spit out the air!’
And
as you partake in the world’s bill of fare,
that’s darned good advice to follow.
Do a lot of spitting out the hot air.
And be careful what you swallow.

 

March 2, 2019

snotty ingrate

For the second time this winter, I have a cold.  Though, sadly, while the first was mild and mercifully brief, this one has me down for the count.  The past two nights, I slept terribly, completely unable to breathe through my stuffed nose.  Today, I’ve moved on to the runny nose stage, flying through tissues at an alarming clip.   But though I seem to have blown out my entire bodyweight in mucous, it appears I’m a surprisingly efficient snot factory; no matter how quickly I clear out my nasal passages, I re-booger just as fast.

Still, in between stretches of complaining and feeling sorry for myself, I’ve been hit by moments of extreme gratitude.  Not for how I feel at the moment, which is miserable indeed, but for how I feel the rest of the time.  The vast majority of the year, I can breathe easily (and through both nostrils!), even if I normally take that delight entirely for granted.

Similarly, until I fractured my wrist at the end of last year, and then limped through months of splinted immobility followed by the ongoing process of wrist rehab, I had sort of overlooked how excellent it is to have two working hands.  (And, in particular, to have my dominant hand working, a distinction whose magnitude I first truly grasped while learning to wipe with the other hand.)

All of which makes me think of the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, and his beautiful writing about ‘non-toothache days.’ As Hanh observes, when you have a toothache, it’s all you can think about; you’d give nearly anything to make that pain stop.  Yet, once it inevitably does, you’re only briefly grateful.  Soon, you’re back to forgetting how wonderful it is just to live in a world of happy teeth.  That said, and despite my daily meditation habit, I’m sure achieving the mindfulness required to constantly appreciate the beauty of non-toothache days (and non-snotty days and two-handed days) is still well beyond me.  Indeed, even by next week, if I’m back to cold-free, I’m sure I’ll again completely overlook the beauty and joy of that simple, healthy baseline.  But, for now, surrounded by my pile of tissues, I’m at least reminding myself to look forward to it.  If I can’t be grateful in that moment, I can at least improve this current moment by trying to be appreciative in advance.

February 27, 2019

Cut

Benjamin Franklin, who helped Thomas Jefferson write the Declaration of Independence, once share this anecdote with Jefferson:

When I was a journeyman printer, one of my companions, an apprentice Hatter, having served out his time, was about to open a shop for himself.  His first concern was to have a handsome signboard, with a proper inscription.  He composed it in these words: “John Thompson, Hatter, makes and sells hats for ready money.” with a figure of a hat subjoined.  But he thought he would submit it to his friends for their amendments.  The first he shewed it to thought the word “hatter” tautologous, because followed by the words “makes hats” which shew he was a hatter.  It was struck out.  The next observed that the word “makes” might as well be omitted, because his customers would not care who made the hats.  If good and to their mind, they would buy, by whomsoever made.  He struck it out.  A third said he thought the words “for ready money” were useless as it was not the custom of the place to sell on credit.  Every one who purchased expected to pay.  They were parted with, and the inscription now stood “John Thompson sells hats.” “Sells hats” says his next friend?  Why nobody will expect you to give them away.  What then is the use of that word?  It was stricken out and “hat” followed it, the rather, as there was one painted on the board.  So his inscription was reduced ultimately “John Thompson” with the figure of a hat subjoined.

 

February 24, 2019

Word Up

My whole life, I’ve loved words.  Enough so that, when I was just four or five, whenever I learned a new one, I’d walk around for the subsequent week trying to wedge it into as many sentences as I possibly could.  A voracious reader from even that age, I stumbled across most of my new words in books.  And, each time I did, I was assiduous about looking it up.

But, over the decades, I ran into fewer and fewer words that I didn’t know.  Until, eventually, I had fallen out of the definition-hunting habit.  When I did find something new, stopping my reading, even just to make note of the word, seemed an undue hassle.  And I could almost always roughly grasp the word from context.  So, instead of pausing to Google, I’d just plow ahead.

Back in November, however, I came across a surprising use of ‘salient’ in an Economist article.  And, as I happened to be sitting next to a physical dictionary, I paused to look the word up, discovering a second definition I had never known: an outwardly projecting part of a fortification or line of defense.

I have a longstanding weakness for secondary meanings – ‘pedestrian,’ in the sense of ‘commonplace,’ being a favorite – so I wrote the new definition of salient down in my journal.  And then, a few weeks later, I stumbled across ‘anatine’ in a short story, looked it up, and wrote that down, too.

From there, a new habit was born – or, more accurately, an old one rebirthed.  In the few months since, I’ve already picked up otiose, rachitic, oneiric, diluents, vitrine.  And I’ve reminded myself of words I knew, but that were parked too far in the recesses of my brain to be called up for conversational use: parvenu, febrile, palimpsest.

Much like my five year old self, I am now truly smitten with those discoveries and re-discoveries.  Though, unlike the words I was excited about 35 years back, these I’m sadly forced to largely keep to myself.  Use ‘anatine’ or ‘oneiric’ in conversation with all but the nerdiest and wordiest of fellow readers, and I’d likely get nothing but a confused stare in response.

Even so, I’ll be back to looking up new words as I discover them, and will continue to expand my list.  If nothing else, it makes me awfully happy just to read them over, to roll them around in my head, to see how they feel coming to life on my tongue.

February 12, 2019

Somnambulant

For most of the last fifteen years, I’ve averaged about six, maybe six and a half hours of sleep a night.  And, honestly, that always seemed like enough.  I woke up before my alarm clock, and felt like I was functioning totally fine.

With each year, I read more and more research about the negative impact of insufficient sleep, the countless adverse consequences that slowly accrue if you don’t hold to seven and a half or eight hours nightly.  But, as I said, I felt okay, so I tended to shrug all that research off.

Then, eventually, I came across a study on the cognitive effects – as well as the perceived cognitive effects – of lack of sleep.  The researchers started out by getting a group of people caught up on sleep/well rested.  Then, for one night, they had the subjects cut back, sleeping six hours rather than eight, and assessed them with a battery of cognitive tests the following day.  Further, they then asked the subjects how they thought they had done on the tests.

After that first night of short sleep, the people reported feeling tired, and assumed they had performed worse on the tests than when they were sharp and rested.  And, indeed, they were correct.

Then, a second night in a row, they slept for just six hours.  Once again, they thought their scores had further declined, and once again, they were right.

Third night, third day, same thing.

But then, the fourth day!  For yet another night, the people slept six hours, and for yet another day, they took a battery of tests.  Except, this time, the people felt totally fine.  As they explained to the researchers, they had finally adjusted to the shorter nights of sleep.  They were back to feeling good, and they knew their scores were back up, too.

Problem was, they were completely wrong.  Just as before, their scores continued to decline with each day of sleep deprivation.  But after the fourth day or so, they simply lost the ability to recognize as much any longer.

That study definitely gave me pause, made me question my own self-assessment of how well I was functioning on my standard six hours and change.  Enough so that, despite a decade and a half of habit to the contrary, I decided it was worth some self-experimentation.  I made some serious lifestyle shifts, and started sleeping a full seven and a half or eight hours every single night.

And, actually, for the most part, I felt pretty much exactly the same as I did before.  But then, every so often, I ended up once again short-sleeping, and I felt terrible enough to realize the necessity of the shift.

I was thinking about that today, because for the past two nights I stayed up way past my bedtime, unable to put down a good book.  And while I don’t really regret that (in the words of Lincoln, “it’s been my experience that those with no vices have very few virtues”), I now definitely feel the effects of those two six-ish hour nights.  I’m sluggish, foggy, cranky, craving sweets, and ready for a nap.  In short, I feel like crap.

And, at the same time, I don’t mind at all.  As ever, it’s a good reminder that those extra hours snoozing aren’t wasted.  Despite years of convincing myself to the contrary, I really do need seven and a half or eight hours of sleep to be at my best.

With that, I’m off to bed.

January 29, 2019

Sorry, Morrie

Yesterday, as I was chatting with a friend, he referenced something in the book Tuesdays with Morrie and I admitted I’d never actually read it.  As I told him, I had no interest in it.  Though, honestly, I couldn’t really tell him why.  Or even precisely what the book was about.  I just knew that it was wildly popular, in an inspirational, Chicken Soup for the Whatever kind of way, and so I disliked it on principal.  Which, once I said it out loud, sounded more than a bit dumb.  So, on his strong urging, I borrowed my friend’s copy, and read through the first half this morning.  And, I am dismayed to admit, it is actually pretty much delightful.

Whether it’s my New Yorker soul, my Silicon Valley roots, or just douchey hipster affectation, I’ve always gravitated towards the new and the cool, the up-and-coming, the overlooked favorites of those in the know.  From spotting talented bands before they go mainstream, to eating at top-notch restaurants when they’re still just in soft opening, it’s satisfying to feel like you’ve found something amazing before the rest of the world has caught on.

Which is fine.  But the problem is, I realize I’ve also generalized that to believe the converse, and to distrust anything that achieves too much popular success – especially when it comes to books.  So, for example, it was only this past year that I finally read All the Light We Cannot See and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius—two genuinely excellent books that I really liked, yet that I had also previously avoided liking (or even reading) because I felt like too many people had liked and read them already.

And, written in black and white, that’s patently ridiculous, the sort of myopic snottiness that would make me roll my eyes if I saw someone else doing it.  Yet, looking back, I can see I’ve done it myself, over and over, whether with The Life of Pi, or The Help, or Water for Elephants, or probably dozens of others, too.

So, it appears, I need to stop judging books by their proverbial covers.  Or, at least, by the ‘#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER’ taglines and ‘Oprah’s Book Club Selection’ stamps running along the cover tops

January 23, 2019

Keep Driving

It’s been a frustrating and impatient few weeks on my end, so I was glad to come across a favorite E.L. Doctorow quote, about driving at night:

“You can see only as far as the headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

Pretty good advice for life.

 

January 16, 2019

Patience, Grasshopper

Right now, I’m about six months short of my 40th birthday – the official shift into middle age.  Though, at this point, I can hardly believe I’m that old.  And I’m not alone; I’ve only recently aged into feeling happy about it, but I’ve long been told I look younger than I am.  In fact, I shaved off my beard completely this past weekend, to start the new year fresh, and have since been getting heckled by friends and colleagues about steering clear of vans with tinted windows and strangers bearing candy.  Still, whether I look the part or not, the big four-oh is nearly upon me.  And, actually, I feel pretty good about that, and about generally hitting a sort of midway point in life.

Looking back at my first 40 years, I’ve done a ton of stuff that I feel proud of, and I’ve done a bunch that I screwed up pretty spectacularly.  Such is life.  Or, such was life 1.0.  These days, I’m trying to think about this birthday as an upgrade to life 2.0, and therefore a fresh start on the second half.  Sort of a do-over, but new and improved, with all the wisdom gleaned the hard way in the prior four decades.

I’ve been thinking a bunch of late about specific lessons, and about what I’m hoping to do differently – better! – in the next chunk.  And while I’m sure I’ll be blogging a ton about that in the months to come, at the moment, there’s one improvement that’s particularly on my mind: this next half, I’m going to make sure I take my time.  Because, looking back, I see I spent so much of my first 40 years racing forward, trying to make everything happen RIGHT NOW.  But, it turns out, there’s way less hurry than I thought.  And, further, I can see that most of my mistakes in life came from trying to get there the fastest way rather than the most strategic one, or from trying to make things happen more quickly than the world seemed to want to unfold on its own.  Conversely, when I look back at the things I feel most proud of, almost all of them were the proverbial ten years to “overnight success.”   Which is to say, sometimes what looks like the slow route actually turns out to be the fast one, paradoxically enough.

At the moment, for example, my wrist is in a splint.  It’s fractured, though only minorly so – a hairline at the end of my right radius bone.  And, in my youth, I might have just tried to power through.  But, now, I’m at least slightly wiser.  I haven’t given up on working out altogether, but I have adjusted to do everything with only my other good hand for the next six to eight weeks.  And though, after making a huge amount of fitness progress over the past year or two, I’m sad for the backslide that will doubtless cause, in the scheme of things, two months is nothing.  I can make back the progress lost a few more months down the road.  And, in the meanwhile, bones heal at the speed they heal.  Bad things happen if you try to push life faster than it will organically go.

Thus, these days, I’m thinking a lot about the classic joke: an old bull and a young bull, standing on top of a hill, looking down into a valley of cows.  The young bull says, “I’m going to run down the hill, and I’m going to fuck one of those cows.”  The old bull replies, “I’m going to walk down the hill, and then I’m going to fuck them all.”

And though I’m happily taken (I was going to say I’m a one-cow bull, but suspect Jess might object to that characterization), I increasingly relate to the joke nonetheless.  Whether it’s something as small as rehabbing a broken wrist, or as big as figuring out the details of Composite and the next decade of my career, I’m taking my time.  I’m thinking like the old bull.  And, going forward, I’ll be strolling down each and every hill.

January 3, 2019

Wave Theory

My father is a lung doctor, but his sub-specialty is diving medicine; if you get the bends while Scuba-diving in much of the Pacific, you’ll get medevaced to Stanford so you can see him.  So, while I was growing up, we spent nearly every summer venturing out to various islands, and I spent a large part of my youth floating and swimming in tropical waters.  (Rough, I know.)  Anyway, one of the main things I learned from that, early on, is that you can’t really fight the surf.  If you want to swim to shore, and there’s a decent swell, it’s nearly pointless to paddle while the water is pulling against you.  Instead, to make it in, you need to calmly tread while a wave draws you towards its face, and then paddle like hell as soon as it reaches you, so you can ride the wave’s momentum toward the shore.

And, in a lot of ways, I’ve found that’s how life works, too.  Sometimes, the waves are pulling against you, and you just need to tread.  But that’s also when you’d best get ready, so you can get as much forward motion as possible out of the paddling once the time is right.  It’s a cycle I’ve lived through countless times.  And yet, even so, each time I’m stuck treading, I feel like maybe I’m stuck for good.

In a lot of ways 2018 has been a treading year.  Or, at least, it has been in terms of external productivity.  From an inside perspective, it’s been perhaps the most meaningful year of my life – a chance to take a hard look at myself, and to really figure out who I am and who I want to be.  But what it hasn’t been is a year of doing, a year of making things, or of making things happen, in the broader world.

In the last few days, however, it feels like all of that self-excavation, and a ton of concurrent plan-laying, is now finally coming to its natural conclusion.  It feels like maybe the wave is just starting to pull me up its face.  It feels like 2019 is going be a big year of forward momentum, a year of happily and productively paddling like hell.

Surf’s up.

December 19, 2018

Steel Trap, Rusted Shut

Recently, Jess has been reading Julia Cameron’s classic The Artist’s Way, and doing the twelve-week program of self-reflection and artistic exploration that it contains.  I had read the book myself, and done the program, back in 2001 or 2002.  But listening to Jess discuss her current experience with it, I realized that I no longer really remembered any of the book, at all.  I knew that I had picked up my longstanding Morning Pages habit from the program – three daily pages of free-write brain-dump journaling (though I’d since given up on the hand-written approach Cameron prescribes, defaulting to 750 typed words daily instead, for the sake of time).  Otherwise, though, not a clue.  So, I started re-reading the book myself.  And, honestly, I haven’t even really felt glimmers of remembrance or recognition; it’s like I’d never even read the book at all.

Recently, I was revising my long-term goals (including creating new 25-year ones that will carry me all the way to 65), and I spent some time thinking about books, along with plays and movies.  I first came up with some ways of trying to keep up with the best of the new releases in the years to come.  But then I decided I should maybe try to pull together a ‘cultural literacy list’ of all the older books and plays and movies that I’d never read but long meant to.  Starting with a slew of critics’ picks, the winners of various awards, and other people’s attempts at the same kind of list-making, I was able to concatenate a list I can then try to chip away at in the years ahead.

The resultant catalog is excellent for soothing the completist, OCD part of my brain: if I can just read and watch my way through, I’ll be ‘done!’  But my experience with The Artist’s Way, and several similar ones of late, has given me pause.  Recent conversations about movies I watched decades back, like Jurassic Park or Indiana Jones, made clear that I now only remember random snippets and iconic scenes, without more than a vague sense of their plots overall.  Or earlier this year, I re-read Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, and though there I did at least have rough memories of most of the anecdotes, it turned out I remembered only the contours (something with a racially-motivated police shooting in the Bronx?) and almost none of the useful detail or lessons Gladwell drew from them.

All of which is to say, even if I do manage to slog my way through my entire cultural literacy list, I’m not sure that will be much of an achievement.  Instead, I’ll just have to head back to the start, and begin going through it all again, as by then I’m sure I’ll have forgotten pretty much everything from my first pass.

December 15, 2018