How to Wash Your Hands

You’ve probably been washing your hands obsessively recently.  But unless you’ve worked in the medical field or a research lab setting, and therefore learned surgical hand-washing technique, odds are good you’ve been missing a ton of (virus-harboring) spots.

This simple, brilliant demo drives that point home.  Watch it, practice washing correctly a few times, then watch it again to make sure the details all sunk in:

 

[And, as a few people have asked of late, some of the other things I’ve been doing to stay (overly) safe:

  • Staying inside completely, aside from a daily walk with Jess during a quiet time of day, along relatively deserted routes, and giving people 20+ feet of leeway along the way.
  • Skipping delivery, and cooking our own food instead.
  • Buying groceries, toiletries, and everything else online only.
  • On the rare occasion I do need to head out for errands / to do laundry in our building  / etc., wearing a disposable latex glove on my right hand. I use that hand to touch anything other people have touched (laundry machine, credit card pin pad, etc.), and use the other to touch anything of my own (the clean laundry, my phone, etc.)
  • Showering as soon as I get back home, along with wiping down my phone, and washing my glasses.
  • Letting all packages, and non-perishable groceries, sit for at least 48 hours in a staging area by our door before bringing them into the rest of our apartment.
  • For perishable groceries, Lysol-wiping packages thoroughly before putting them in the freezer or refrigerator.  
  • For unpackaged produce, putting it in the sink, squirting in some dish soap, and then filling up the sink and agitating in the suds.  Then draining, and refilling and draining twice more with clean water to rinse.
  • Buying a pulse oximeter on Amazon, in case we do get sick.  (On the idea that the only two reasons to head to ER would be a substantially spiked fever [>103°] or a drop in O2Sat (<88%); self-testing would let us know if it was no longer wise to just quarantine, hydrate, and wait it out.)
  • Similarly, practicing listening to each other’s chests when we breathe, to get a baseline for normal lung function to compare against when listening for crackling / bubbling / rumbling during breathing, the symptoms of pneumonia.
  • Stocking some hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin, in case trials pan out, but inventory doesn’t keep pace with demand.

I’ll add to the list as more of my OCD virus-phobic practices come come to mind.  Though, if you have similarly nuts ones you’re engaging in, I’d love hear about them.]

March 22, 2020

Pand(emic)emonium

I’ve been worrying about the novel coronavirus for nearly a month, for most of which time people seemed to think I was kind of nuts and overblowing the situation.  Obviously, the tide has turned on that in the last few days, with government-mandated shutdowns, and people buying out entire supermarkets as they prepare to hunker down in social distancing mode.

Still, I don’t think measures have gone nearly far enough.  And, given how spectacularly we’ve also dropped the ball on testing, I don’t think people really understand how bad things are about to get, nor for how long.

Part of that is a limitation of human brains: we’re terrible at emotionally understanding math, especially when it involves exponential growth.

Take the famous birthday paradox: how many people do you need to have in a room before there’s a better than 50% chance that two of them have the same birthday?  Most people guess about 180 people – about half the number of days in the year.  In fact, the answer is 23.  In a room of 23 people, there’s a 50-50 chance that two of them have the same birthday.  And in a room of 75 people, the odds are 99.9%.  Which, even after you’ve learned the underlying math, just doesn’t seem to make any intuitive sense.

So, in talking with people about this pandemic, I’ve often fallen back on the metaphor of lilypads in a pond: imagine that you have a big pond, with a single lilypad in it on the first day.  On the second day, it doubles to two lilypads.  Then to four lilypads the day after.  On the 100th day, the pond is entirely covered with lilypads.  When is the pod 50% covered?  Despite the simplicity of the math, surprisingly few people seem to realize it’s the 99th day.  And almost all are shocked to learn that, on the 95th day, the pond is only about 3% covered.

All of which is to say, when things are growing exponentially, they get bigger much faster than we expect.  So, even having thought a bunch about this all, and even understanding in the mathematic abstract what’s likely coming our way, I was still more than a bit shaken by this chart I recently stumbled across:

Screen Shot 2020-03-16 at 11.12.47 AM.png

Pair that with a recent video showing what those numbers mean in terms of newspaper obituaries:

Between the two, I’m definitely not feeling great about the next few weeks.

March 16, 2020

Animal Style

Here’s an interesting thought experiment I kick around a bunch:

When we look back 100 years, we’re inevitably shocked by some of the moral positions that much of society at the time took for granted. (Cf., regarding women, Blacks, Jews, etc.)

And, at the same time, we’re certain to have just as many blind spots ourselves. So, a hundred years from now, why will people of the future be appalled about us?

Though I have a slew of contenders (our handling of global warming, the ways we blithely give up our privacy for scarce little in return), high on my list is the way that we raise animals industrially for food.

And, at the same time, I also strongly believe the healthiest human diet involves eating animals (or, at least, animal-derived foods, like dairy and eggs).

So, as we push into 2020, I’m trying to figure out how to square that circle. I’m thinking carefully about where and how I’m willing to eat animal products, about how I can do so while still feeling good about the food systems I’m supporting in the process.

It’s definitely still a work in progress, and I suspect whatever I come up with will add some amount of inconvenience and expense to my life. But, as I’d really like to be on the right side of history here, I’m not sure I have much choice.

January 3, 2020

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

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

Picture This

As I’ve mentioned previously, for the past year or two, I’ve been trying to learn the very basics of a new skill each quarter – stuff like playing the piano, or chess, or pool.  Three months of chipping away daily seems to be enough to get off to a pretty good start on most skills.  And for some (like with pool, where I went from horrific to merely pretty bad), a good start turns out be all I really want.  Whereas others (like with playing the piano, which I realized I actually love), I end up keeping as a permanent part of my routine.

One reason I started doing these quarterly projects was that I had a laundry list of random skills I’d always wanted to at least try to acquire.  But another reason, one that I think has actually become the primary driver as I’ve continued to do this, is that I wanted to regularly suck at something.

Looking back on my younger self, I see that I was lucky to excel quickly at a bunch of things, and that I wisely and diligently invested a bunch of time and effort on developing those areas over the years.  But, conversely, I also see that I was probably far too quick to jettison anything I didn’t crush right away.  I’d just assume that, if I didn’t stand out immediately, I probably never would, so what was even the use of trying?  And, as a result, I never really spent as much time as I should have in the hard and embarrassing and frustrating early stages of being terrible at something new.

So, I guess, I’m making up for lost time, and trying to find things now where I can practice sucking, day in and day out.  Which makes this quarter’s project—drawing—particularly good.  Because I really, really can’t draw.  Like, you know how, when you’re six, you draw stick figures, and then you move on?  Well, I never moved on.

Still, at the start of October, I set to work.  Per the instructions in one of my drawing books, I memorialized my starting point with three pictures: one of my hand, another a self-portrait drawn from mirror reflection, the third a portrait drawn from memory.  For that third, I drew Jess.  Or rather, I tried to draw Jess.  I really did.  I spent a good thirty minutes drawing an eyebrow, and then erasing it because it wasn’t quite right, and then trying again.  And, at the end of a half hour, I had a cartoonish face that looked nothing even vaguely like Jess.  Though it did sort of look like a picture a kindergartener would draw of their kindergarten teacher and then bring home for their parents to post on the fridge.

Yet from that rough start, I’ve been putting in the work.  And though I’m still pretty terrible, every so often, I’m starting to surprise myself.  This evening, I drew another attempt at a hand – this one with the palm up, and the fingers curled in, a position that required foreshortening the fingers to make them appear correct in perspective.  And, holy crap, my picture came out kind of looking like my hand!

At this point, I’m still a good ways off from becoming the next Van Gogh.  Though, fortuitously, I also recently discovered, and was heartened and fascinated by, the story of how Van Gogh himself became Van Gogh.  Apparently, Vincent had never even really tried drawing for most of his life.  And then, when he was 27 years old, his brother Theo talked him into it.

As Vincent later wrote to Theo:

“At the time you spoke of my becoming a painter, I thought it very impractical, and would not hear of it.  What made me stop doubting was reading a clear book on perspective, Cassange’s Guide to the ABC of Drawing, and a week later I drew the interior of a kitchen with stove, chair, table and window – in their places and on their legs – whereas before it had seemed to me that getting depth and the right perspective into a drawing was witchcraft or pure chance.”

Vincent Van Gogh, who sadly died young at 37, spent the last ten years of his life, 1880-1890, becoming an artist.  The first two years of which he spent just teaching himself how to draw.  Drawings from the start of that stretch, like his 1880 Carpenter, are plagued with proportion problems, and a slew of other issues.  But by two years in, he’s making drawings like his 1882 Old Man Reading, has figured out how to make pictures at least technically work.  Five years of practice, and he’s drawing stuff like the 1885 Digger, is painting in earnest, and has really become Van Gogh, is putting out the masterpieces we all know and love.

Which is pretty inspiring.  And I was further encouraged in my hand attempts by Van Gogh’s own working and re-working of that same challenge.  In 1885, when he had already hit his stride, he was still doing sketches like Three Hands, Two Holding Forks, trying to figure out how to make hands look just right.  Even at the very end of his short life, as he was sketching drafts of some of his most famous works, like his 1890 Sower, his sketches for the painting are surrounded with a slew of carefully drawn hands in all kinds of positions.

So perhaps I shouldn’t completely write myself off, despite the slow and late start.  And even if drawing turns out to be one of those quarterly projects that largely ends once the quarter does, too, it has already given me a much greater appreciation of real artist’s work, and is (at least slightly) changing the way I look at the world around me.  But, most of all, it’s reminded me that, even for something that really, really isn’t in my wheelhouse, diligent practice actually can make a difference.  It’s been truly excellent practice at sucking at something, bad, yet sticking with it nonetheless.

October 30, 2018

Everything is Scoliosis

As is inevitable over the years of athletic life, I’ve had my share of back, or hip, or even knee, shoulder, and ankle tweaks.  And, if I were looking at myself from a rational, outside perspective, I would probably think that the unaddressed scoliosis might at least conceivably be part of the underlying cause of any of those.  But, as ever, I simply ignored the possibility, working on all kinds of other stretches and mobility drills and pre-hab exercises, skipping anything that dealt specifically with the slight spinal curve.

In the last month or two, however, I finally realized that’s kind of ridiculous.  So I started thinking and researching and self-programming to address the scoliosis head on.  It’s early, still, but even in that short amount of time, I’ve made a real impact.  Which leads to a reasonable question: why hadn’t I done this before?

I’ve thought about that a bunch, and I think the answer is simple: I just didn’t like the idea that I had an inherent structural flaw.  So, instead of facing up to the problem and trying to solve it, it was psychologically easier to ignore it and to route around it and just to try to power ahead.

Maybe it’s age or wisdom, or a year-early onset of a 40-year-old midlife crisis.  But, for the past few months, I seem to be having a ton of similarly obvious ‘revelations.’  Because it turns out there are all kinds of things I do, all kinds of behaviors and beliefs and patterns and habits that haven’t served me particularly well, that I’ve similarly spent decades studiously ignoring.  Most, similarly, aren’t even that big.  But by not addressing them, by trying to just plow past them, I’ve tripped over them repeatedly, in ways big and small over the course of my life.  And it’s only in the last little bit that I’ve been willing to say: if I have flaws or shortcomings, certainly it’s better for me to own them and try to face them head on, rather than pushing them into the back of my mental closet, shutting the door, and trying to pretend that not seeing them means they don’t exist.

Anyway, I realize this sounds so patently obvious when I put it down in words.  Which makes me further wonder how I managed to make myself willfully blind to so many issues for so long, rather than simply sucking it up and trying to solve them.  I definitely feel like the guy who’s walked for miles with rocks in his shoe, ignoring the pain, taking aspirin, coming up with different ways to walk that don’t hurt.  When, instead, it would be so much more effective to just stop for a minute, to take off the shoe, and to dump out the rocks.

October 19, 2018

Wu Wei

There’s an old joke in the meditation world: don’t just do something, sit there!  And, for me, I think that’s the crux of why meditation has been helpful.  By my nature, I bias towards action – I’m constantly in motion, trying to push life forward, trying to make things happen.  And, often, that’s great.  But there are also a slew of times when not doing, when stopping and pausing and listening and waiting are actually a far better idea.

In Taoist philosophy, it’s called ‘wu wei’ – doing by not doing.  And though I learned about it some twenty years ago, I feel like I’m only just now really starting to get the hang of it.

For example, last week, Jess shared some of her current life frustrations with me.  And, in standard boy-mode style, I immediately set out to try and find solutions.  After all, if she was telling me about things, it must be because she wanted me to fix them.  Or maybe she was blaming me!  So I leapt into frenetic and defensive action, feeling like I needed to figure things out, stat.

Then, after a day or two, the wiser part of my brain finally clicked in.  And it reminded me that she wasn’t sharing frustrations because she thought I would make them disappear – she was sharing them because she wanted me to listen and care and understand.  And in my solution searching, I had actually done a pretty mediocre job of those far more important things.  So, better late than never, I apologized to her for not getting it at first.  And then I told her that I really did understand how she felt and that if I were in her shoes I’d feel the same way and that I thought it sucked and that I loved her and was there for her and on her team.  Which, not surprisingly, made her much happier than what I was doing before.

Similarly, over the past couple of years, I’ve had the usual array of athletic tweaks and injuries – most recently, left knee; before that, right hip.  In the past, I was quick to start puzzling through causes and solutions, would head to physical therapists or doctors, and would generally make myself crazy trying to deal with the situation.  But the past few times, I’ve been more measured.  Time may not heal all wounds, but it sure seems to heal a lot of them. For the vast majority of non-catastrophic athletic injuries, just stopping doing stuff that hurts, and then waiting it out, is actually wildly effective, so long as you’re willing to be patient, and give it the weeks or months required.

So, wu wei: definitely something I’m working on.  As the world throws things at me, these days I’m trying to give myself at least a moment to pause before I react.  And, increasingly, I’m finding that the best reaction is more or less no reaction at all.

October 3, 2018

25

Since my freshman year in college, I’ve been using more-or-less the same approach to setting goals: I start from 25-year big-picture ones, and then trace backwards from those to 10-year, 5-year, 1-year, 1-quarter, and 1-month goals in turn.  Then, each Friday, I chart out the following week, figuring out what I need to accomplish over the next seven days to stay on track towards the 1-month goals, knowing that in turn keeps me aligned all the way back up.

Through the years since college, I’ve started companies and worked in jobs across three or four different industries, garnered a ton of life experience, and weathered ups and downs of all sorts; that, in turn, has often shifted my shorter-term goals.  But the longer-term ones—the 25-year goals in particular—have stayed remarkably stable.  So much so, in fact, that the last time I really re-thought them from scratch was when I was about 25 years old.

A month back, I turned 39.  In my usual style, I spent a bunch of my birthday thinking about the year behind and the year ahead.  And it suddenly dawned on me that, when my next birthday rolled around, the putative date for those old 25-year goals would then be just 10 years off, becoming my new de facto 10-year goals.  Which meant, in turn, that I needed a new 25-year set.

Starting from 40, those 25-year goals would take me all the way to 65.  And though I suspect I’d likely be one of those guys who never retires, I would hope by then to be at least well on my way towards leaving whatever legacy or positive impact I can on this world.  So, I’ve been spending a little bit of each day thinking through exactly what I hope that legacy or impact might be, what goals I’d like to set that make me push and stretch for the 25 years that (hopefully) lie ahead.  Much like the effective corporate BHAGs – big, hairy, audacious goals – described in the classic study Good to Great, I’ve been looking for goals that both excite me and slightly scare me.  And I have some, by now, just starting to take shape.

Still, I’m giving myself all the way until the end of this birthday year before I call them final.  If I’m hoping this set holds equally steady for the next 25 years, that probably requires at least a full year’s consideration up front.

August 23, 2018