Escape From Pianosa

I love this rant. Especially this:

“The thing is, I really like saying yes. I like new things, projects, plans, getting people together and doing something, trying something, even when it’s corny or stupid. I am not good at saying no. And I do not get along with people who say no. When you die, and it really could be this afternoon, under the same bus wheels I’ll stick my head if need be, you will not be happy about having said no. You will be kicking your ass about all the
no’s you’ve said. No to that opportunity, or no to that trip to Nova Scotia or no to that night out, or no to that project or no to that person who wants to be naked with you but you worry about what your friends will say.

No is for wimps. No is for pussies. No is to live small and embittered, cherishing the opportunities you missed because they might have sent the wrong message.”

And this…

“What matters is that you do good work. What matters is that you produce things that are true and will stand. What matters is that the Flaming Lips’s new album is ravishing and I’ve listened to it a thousand times already, sometimes for days on end, and it enriches me and makes me want to save people. What matters is that it will stand forever, long after any narrow-hearted curmudgeons have forgotten their appearance on goddamn 90210. What matters is not the perception, nor the fashion, not who’s up and who’s down, but what someone has done and if they meant it. What matters is that you want to see and make and do, on as grand a scale as you want, regardless of what the tiny voices of tiny people say. Do not be critics, you people, I beg you. I was a critic and I wish I could take it all back because it came from a smelly and ignorant place in me, and spoke with a voice that was all rage and envy. Do not dismiss a book until you have written one, and do not dismiss a movie until you have made one, and do not dismiss a person until you have met them. It is a fuckload of work to be open-minded and generous and understanding and forgiving and accepting, but Christ, that is what matters.”

The Tao. This book kept coming up in my thoughts so I decided to read it. What does it mean? I cannot say for sure, but I’m fascinated with the idea of “wu-wei,” which some translate as unattached action, effortless effort, or action through inaction.

Unattached action is my favorite translation, and I interpret it to mean that you should act purposefully, but without great attachment to the outcomes of your actions, for you can never truly control the consequences of your actions nor can you control (or predict) the future environment in which those consequences will play out. In other words, don’t worry too much about the future because you can’t predict it.

This thought has come up recently for me in improv, when teachers talk about not going into a scene with pre-conceived notions about what that scene will entail. If you try and force your pre-conceived notion of what the scene will be about, then you will be rigid and unable to react and respond appropriately to your partner. Basically, you will suck because you are trying to shape your future in a way that is impossible (unless your partner is a mind-reader).

It came up again when I read Nassim Taleb. The Black Swan has no doubt changed my philosophy of life. He showed me just how damn hard it is to predict the future. Better to live in the moment and not create anxiety for yourself when the things that shape your life will probably be unforeseen and heavily influenced by luck.

Is this all a recipe for complete inaction and resignation? Absolutely not. Your actions today will still shape the future, and not in entirely random ways. Move toward what you want in life, but don’t plan too far ahead, and be flexible for when conditions change. At least that’s my current experiment in life philosophy.

I’ve been perusing RedStateEclectic’s liveblogging of the Republican straw poll in Ames, Iowa. I’m mostly interested to see how Ron Paul fares, but I always enjoy watching presidential candidates trying to impress and pander. Sometimes I wonder if it isn’t a contest to see who can say the most ridiculous thing without anyone noticing.

“As president, I would build a magical fence on the border, that nobody would be able to cross, and I would build it in only 6 months, and it would be amazingly effective. Then I would build a giant laser to protect us from Martians and then I would win the war in Iraq, and save all the babies!”

But Sam Brownback doesn’t stop there. “As president, I will rebuild the modern family” he says. Great. What could that possibly mean?

Tommy Thompson (seriously?) has an even bolder plan:

“Our oil money is going to a Sheik in Saudi Arabia who is giving it to a terrorist. Tommy is going to “break the umbilical cord” to foreign oil. He favors drilling for oil in Alaska.

Tommy, the umbilical cord is attached to the American navel and it’s pumping in delicious life-giving oil. You’re basically proposing an abortion for America. Bad idea Tommy. And abortion is wrong.

Tommy also thinks that people should learn the English language legally. I have to admit, I’m entirely on board with that. Nobody, and I mean nobody, is above the law when it comes to learning a new language. But it’s not just immigrants. Americans also need to learn languages legally. Let’s put a stop to this now before any more walls have to be built.

Ok, I know what you’re thinking. Bashing Tommy Thompson is too easy. But I have to get my shots in because he could be done after tonight, and it gets harder when you’re dealing with the more slippery types.

For example, Mitt Romney, who I believe is actually a robot, although I have no evidence. Yet. The RomneyBot is going to…

Strengthen marriage by helping our kids understand that “before they have kids, they get married.”

I totally know where he’s coming from! When I sold real estate in Baltimore I spent a lot of time in some really bad Wire-esque neighborhoods. And one day I thought, hey, it’s not right that I’m here making money off real estate when there’s all these kids around that need my help.

So I used to give them life advice (free of charge!) like “hey buddy, just say no to drugs” and “hey little guy, better get married before you start making babies.” I think I really made an impact but we won’t know until Freakonomics 2 comes out. In the meantime, I’m with the RomneyBot.

Impro, by Keith Johnstone, is a brilliant book. It’s written for comedic improvisers and teachers of improv but it’s so much more than that. I highly recommend it for anyone interested in creativity or human behavior. It begins with an autobiographical description by Johnstone, of his life at school and how his creativity was stunted and hammered out of him by vicious and probably well-meaning teachers.

So you must work to reclaim your imagination. It’s not so much that you are un-imaginative, rather that you are ashamed of what your imagination spits out, and you have been taught to be this way (and sometimes what your subconscious spits out can be rather gruesome or even fearful). Don’t fear your imagination, it’s a great asset. It’s ok if you have nasty thoughts. You can acknowledge them without acting on them.

How is your creativity stamped out? In school your goal is always to be right and correct and to get an A, and this is a great way to stamp out creativity because it fosters the illusion that there is one-right-answer to questions you will face in life, and it exacts a penalty for being wrong. Of course when you are creating, you cannot be wrong. But the system’s not set up to make you creative.

I blame government schools of course, although your friends and family can be just as repressive, starting from a very early age. The schools are inhumane in many ways and one can see that by visiting even the best of the public schools and seeing how many students are falling asleep, bored to tears, and in revolt. I felt intuitively that there was something wrong with the system when I was in high school, although I could never put my finger on it.

Being relatively intelligent, I figured out that to make people happy I could game the system and get the A’s I needed to keep my teachers and parents happy. I felt the same way years later when I worked for Social Security but by then I couldn’t stomach the game anymore.

First off, my Euro-trip is in a state of perpetual delay. It entered this state only after I told everyone I knew that I was going to Europe, and yes I’m so excited! Predictable. Now I believe that my Euro-trip is waiting for me to make plans for the fall and find a great job here stateside before it becomes a reality, forcing me into a painful dilemma. The Euro trip is my greatest enemy right now.

In other news, I spent nearly all of last week(end) at the Theater Project in Mt. Vernon, working on stuff related to the Baltimore Improv Festival. I was excited and nervous to host opening night, which turned out to be a great success. I had my first performance on Saturday night. People tell me it went well but I don’t really remember; I was so nervous and excited that I basically blacked out and can hardly remember what I said or did on stage. Glad to have my first one out of the way, hopefully with many more shows to come.

The rest of the weekend was spent in workshops or watching shows. I was going to say what my favorites were but there were so many killer performances I can’t even remember them all. Caveat from WIT, Neutrino, Upright Citizens Brigade, Rare Bird Show, and of course the BIG troupes all stand out.

Did an awesome workshop with Neutrino on Saturday. Why is improv so fun? Because you can get together for three hours with random people, screaming at the top of your lungs, crying, laughing, and going crazy. If you do it well enough, people laugh and say you’re really hilarious and that looks so hard how do you do it! And it’s all encouraged and very cathartic of course. I’m hopelessly addicted.

And the last excuse for not blogging is that I’ve been at the beach all week… I apologize to my loyal readers and friends in med school who have nothing better to do when on-call at 2 AM (that’s why we play fantasy baseball..so that these moments of boredom can never occur!). More to come…

Nassim Taleb’s book really got me thinking about luck, and how to incorporate the idea of luck into a philosophy of life. If we are bad at predicting, for instance, what career will make us happy, then we should try as many different careers as possible to see which one we like. We should take lots of small risks, with a chance for a big payoff.

If I try out a career as a real estate agent, and I find that I don’t like it, then I have failed. I’ve made an error. But I’ve lost very little–my risk was small. In fact, the discomfort I experienced in a career I disliked was probably balanced out by the comfort of my newfound knowledge.

I can repeat this process with many careers until I find one that I enjoy immensely–my Black Swan career so to speak–something that I enjoy so much, that all the previous failures and erroneous predictions about what career would make me happy are insignificant.

In attempting this process, I must be wary of the confirmation bias. If, before becoming a real estate agent, I convince myself that real estate will make me happy (as opposed to keeping an open mind about the result), then I will look for confirming evidence of this belief. I will say “see, I do love real estate!” every time something positive happens, and I will tend to ignore the disconfirming evidence until it grows so immense that I am unable to ignore it.

Falling into such a trap will cause me to waste precious time that could be spent looking elsewhere for career satisfaction. And more time wasted means fewer opportunities to find the ideal career.

I just finished reading the most amazing book–The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It’s a real masterpiece of an essay. I learned so much from the book that I can barely begin to describe it all.

The most important ideas I learned are that there are major limits to our knowledge, and that uncertainty plays a large role in our lives. Experts and laymen alike are simply not good at predicting the future–especially “Black Swans,” extremely high-impact events that are unforeseeable. There can be good black swans (your novel becomes a bestseller making your rich) and bad ones (the stock market crashes and your retirement fund is wiped out).

Taleb delves deeply into epistemology–which inspired me to read Karl Popper–and so many other areas like probability, prediction, markets, bell curves vs. power laws; the book is so fascinating, you’ll just have to read it yourself.

The bad news is that my trip to Europe was postponed once again; the good news is that it’s still in the works, and that I’ll be in town to see The Decemberists on Saturday. That show will complete me entirely awesome summer concert series, which has included Manu Chao, Thievery Corp., Rodrigo y Gabriela, and now the Decemberists with the BSO.

At improv rehearsal last night I had this conversation three separate times:

Other person: How was your weekend?

Me: Pretty good, went to the beach.

OP: Oh yeah? What beach.

Me: Rehoboth.

OP: Oh, isn’t that the GAY beach?

Me: Yeah, it’s really really gay. But it’s cool, they let straight people hang out there too. I have a straight visa because I’m a friend of the gay man.

I’m selling my rental property in East Baltimore–great time to sell, right?

So I was showing it last night to another investor and as we were walking to our cars we heard pop pop pop pop pop. Hey were those gunshots? Yeah, I think so. Funny because I hear that all the time in Baltimore, just random popping–I always thought they were fireworks. A woman unrolled a window above us and said “get used to it, mmm hmm.” We didn’t see anyone running, or police sirens or anything. Target practice?