One-Size-Fits-All New Year's Resolution

NOTE:  This post is rated R for a couple instances of mild strong language.

Introduction

A couple years ago I blogged about new year’s resolutions and the difficulty I had in coming up with them.  That problem perhaps isn’t as common as the main problem these resolutions present:  that is, the difficulty of sticking with them.  In this post I examine this problem and provide my miraculous solution—a one-size-fits-all resolution that anybody can stick to.

The pitfalls of typical resolutions

One problem with so many resolutions is that they emphasize the negative.  Drink less, quit smoking, be more active, eat better, be less stressed—it’s like a laundry list of what’s wrong with you.  It’s no wonder they’re such a downer, even before we fail to achieve them.  What’s less obvious is the myopia of only trying to change only what we already know is wrong.  If we think of our overall life performance the way we’d look at our investment portfolio, we realize that looking only at known bad behaviors is like only watching the stocks we own, without asking a bigger question, “How much am I losing by not seeking out new investments?”  In other words, what opportunities may be lost when we focus only on our current failings?  Couldn’t failure of imagination be a much bigger problem than failing to curb bad habits?

Another problem with new year’s resolutions is that they’re too goal-oriented.  We’re always told that we should set specific, tangible, measurable goals.  I don’t agree.  I could go on about this, but I’ll save that discussion for its own post.  Suffice to say, the problem with really specific goals is that it’s too easy to fall short, and then we just give up.

Here’s an example.  I was at a San Francisco restaurant with a colleague last week.  While waiting a good while for another colleague to show up, we stared down a large drinking glass full of crispy bread sticks.  I wasn’t inclined to eat any—they’re utterly pointless, with a glycemic index of roughly infinity, and the butter you dip them in goes straight to your arteries.  But I started in, if for no other reason than to use up the butter so as to help my colleague, whom I assumed was struggling to resist the unhealthy snack.  (He’s good at sports but knows he’d be better if he lost ten or fifteen pounds.)  Our wait dragged on and soon I’d eaten enough breadsticks to consume most of the ramekin of butter, and I was feeling a bit disgusted with myself.  Suddenly, my colleague grabbed a breadstick and dug in.  “Oh, man, sorry I ate most of the butter,” I said.  “I thought you didn’t want any.”  He replied, “Oh, no, I didn’t, I was trying to skip it, but then I decided … fuck it.”  That one particularly evocative word, “fuck,” was the telltale sound of his resolve snapping like a breadstick.

When we make specific, measurable new year’s resolutions, our behavior becomes a binary condition of being on or off the wagon (to borrow a conceit from Alcoholics Anonymous).  We measure ourselves against whether we’re adhering to our goal, and the minute we’re not, we become fatalistic and decide all is lost.  You know:  “fuck it”—and the effort is abandoned.  (Of course we shouldn’t take this attitude; in equating a behavior change with the realities of substance addiction we commit the logical fallacy of false analogy.)

The problem of time

Resolve isn’t the only obstacle to keeping new year’s resolutions.  There’s also the problem of time.  So often, the resolution is to do something you haven’t been—which means finding the time for something that’s never been part of your routine.  Or it means changing behaviors that, whatever their failings may be, are at least convenient or efficient.  I looked at lists of top-ten new year’s resolutions and found seven that involve time.  Get fit, learn something new, spend more time with family, volunteer:  all these are the kinds of things we hope to get to, eventually (i.e., will never get to).  Eat healthier, drink less, be less stressed:  these also take time, in their way.  Healthy food like salads and vegetables take time to prepare.  Drinking is a really quick way for millions of people to relax, and takes far less time than yoga or meditation.  Stress, meanwhile, is so often caused by not having enough time to accomplish everything.

When other people are counting on you, their deadlines feel very real.  Your pet self-improvement project, which nobody else is monitoring, is an easy target for postponement.  And yet, people do manage to get fit, to volunteer, to learn things, and to spend time with their families.  What’s their secret?  Well, I think part of the problem is that we do have the time for these things, but not always when we’re in a position to do them.  I feel like exercising, but it’s dark and/or raining and/or cold outside.  I’d like to do something with my family, but they’re already doing something.  I’d like to read my book, but it’s at home.  So we spend countless hours filling in the time—browsing the web, checking Facebook, watching TV, etc.  It’s not moving us in a useful direction, and it’s not particularly satisfying.

The foolproof, universal new year’s resolution

So you want to know the solution to all this?  Are you ready?  Here it is:

This year, I resolve to spend more time doing things I would like to be better at.

This isn’t going to solve all our problems—we might still drink too much, weigh too much, and/or be too sedentary—but it’s a legitimate resolution that, if followed, will give us small bursts of satisfaction throughout the year.  And look at all the pitfalls it avoids: 

• It’s not negative.  It doesn’t focus on your vices or human failings, so it doesn’t bum you out.
• It has you checking the “blind spot” of missed opportunities—that is, it doesn’t get you so focused on eschewing bad behaviors that you forget to wonder what cool thing you haven’t thought to do.
• It doesn’t ensnare you in over-specific goals that, when missed, cause you to give up and abandon the resolution altogether.
• Rather than becoming a new activity you’ll get to when you can (i.e., never) it’s a lifestyle approach that runs in the background, giving you a way to catch yourself spending your time the wrong way.
• It’s easier to stick with this resolution because it’s not prescriptive—instead of “I’ve been doing something wrong and that’s got to change,” you can do whatever you want and if it’s something you wish you were better at, you’ll be getting somewhere.

Let’s look at an extreme case to see how this resolution might be best applied.  I’ll choose Jim Anchower,  the fictitious loser featured periodically in “The Onion.”  He never gets anywhere because whenever he’s not working, he’s smoking pot and/or drinking beer.  Imagine him asking himself, “Is smoking pot something I’d like to be better at?”  Probably not.  (I suppose there are über-stoners who actually would like to be better at it—“Dude, I’m gonna take a bigger hit than Phelps, and I’m never gonna exhale!” or those who would like to be better at growing weed—but let’s say they’re the exception that proves the rule.)  If Anchower could figure out just one thing he’d like to be better at, I think he’d be in much better shape.

This isn’t to say that this resolution rules out wasting time.  The young, especially, should defend their right to waste time as they see fit—if “waste time” can mean both “accomplishing nothing of importance” and “doing something I’d like to be better at.”  When my brother Max was a young teen, he decided he was going to teach himself how to do a track stand—that is, to be able to balance in one place on a bicycle indefinitely.  It’s not easy to do.  (Of my bike club, fewer than two-thirds of the guys can do a track stand; only eight of us can do a no-handed track stand; and only two—Max and I—can do a downhill track stand.)  Max spent countless hours learning this, wearing out tires and making strange crescent-shaped black marks on the driveway.  Look, decades later he’s still got it:

As he developed his skill, he inspired my brothers and me as well, and taught us the ropes.  Track-standing is a pretty pointless skill, but in the process of learning and refining it we unknowingly knocked off a few classic new year’s resolution favorites:  learning something new, spending more time with family, and getting fit (at least, in terms of balance).

You never know how these random fancies will play out.  Many years ago I read an article in “The New Yorker” about the downhill skier Bode Miller.  His unconventional style and methods, the article explains, paid dividends when the new style of shorter, carving skis came out: 

For athletes steeped in classic technique, [the new skis] took some getting used to.  Miller, though, had never stopped experimenting.  He was used to leaning back on his skis, he had great footwork thanks to tennis and soccer, and his sense of balance improved year after year.  While other skiers sat on exercise bikes, he learned to ride a unicycle.  While they bulked up with weights, he stretched a rope between two trees in his back yard, and practiced tightrope walking.  Two summers ago, Miller spent six weeks logrolling in Wisconsin.  His girlfriend at the time, Lizzie Hoeschler, has been logrolling since childhood and is ranked fourth in the world in the sport.  “It’s very hard to learn as an adult,” she told me.  “It’s just weird to stand on a log that is floating in the water.  But Bode was rolling before too long.”

I don’t get the sense that Miller had a specific goal in mind when learning to logroll, and wasn’t doing it with an eye to improving his skiing.  He was doing it simply because he enjoyed the challenge.

Does this mean than we should all have free reign to spend as much time as we want at any old thing?  Can we, say, play all the video games as we want?  I suppose I should qualify my resolution a bit more:  we should spend time doing things that, ten or twenty years from now, we’ll still be glad we bothered to get good at.  I’m glad I learned how to track-stand as a kid, because I sure wouldn’t make time to learn it now.  As a teen I did spend a fair amount of time playing video games, and I’m less excited now about the time I spent on that.  But I don’t regret it, either, for a couple of reasons.  One, at least I had to ride my bike across town to the arcade and vie for the game machines with other teens; and two, I recognized the point at which gaming had become a habit, as opposed to something I truly wished to be better at.  Over time the awe I had watching the master gamers turned into something more like pity for the countless hours of fanatical devotion they dedicated to it.  So I gave it up.

Creator, vs. consumer, of entertainment

Another way to look at this is whether, in spending your free time, you are a creator of your own entertainment, or just a consumer of ready-made diversions thought up by someone else.  Doing a crossword puzzle is an example of the latter.  I don’t have anything against crosswords; they’re decent mental exercise, and I can see why somebody would like to get better at them—to a point.  But ultimately, there is exactly one solution to the puzzle, so you’re replicating a standard activity.  (I put reading—that is, of good literature—above this, because every reader brings a different experience to the act of reading, and envisions the characters and scenes according to his own imagination.)

Here’s a cool example of creating entertainment even as you consume it.  My nephew John, in his last summer before going to college, decided to get really good at disc golf.  That’s a fine activity by itself, to my mind.  (Though not as intense as my cycling or John’s baseball, it’s pleasant enough recreation.)  But he and his pals decided to take it up a notch and put their own target basket in various hard-to-reach places, and film themselves making amazing shots.  They put together a pretty incredible YouTube video, “Disc Golf Aces and Trick Shots” (click here to watch it!).  Thus they joined creativity to disc golf mastery, spending countless hours on a project as glorious as it was pointless.  Perhaps decades from now they’ll watch that video again and be glad they made time for such frolics when they had the chance.

My resolutions this year

Okay, enough about athletes and teens.  What about some more practical activities, for busy adults?  Like, what is your blogger hoping to spend more time getting better at in 2013?  This year, it’s running (which I still can’t do very well after breaking my leg in late 2011; last year it was relearning how to walk).  I’ll still make time for cycling, having fun, reading great books, and keeping up this blog.  So I’ve got my work cut out for me, and I hope you do too.

US Pro Cycling Challenge

Introduction

I took a trip to Colorado recently to attend a Red Zinger / Coors Classic reunion and watch a couple of stages of the US Pro Cycling Challenge, originally known as the Quiznos Pro Challenge. For those of you who like pretty pictures and not a lot of text, this is the post for you.

Meet and greet

A big bike race is a great place to run into cycling notables. After a protracted parking effort in Vail, during which my brother Max and I lost, then later recovered, a grapefruit that had rolled off the dashboard and out the window, we finally made it to the start line of the opening Pro Challenge stage, a hill climb time trial. Upon our arrival we spied four important cycling people, without even scanning the crowd or having to turn our heads:

The redhead is Marianne Martin, the winner of the first Tour de France Féminin. She’s talking to John Howard, former Red Zinger winner and holder, for ten years, of the bicycle speed record (152 mph). Zoom in on the photo. In the background you can see, in the black shirt and tan hat, Scott Berryman (former national champion track cyclist) and, on his left wearing a cycling cap, Jonathan Boyer, Zinger/Coors winner and the first American to race in the European pro peloton. Not bad for a random snapshot, eh?

Next, I stumbled upon two very distinguished young athletes: Obed Ruvogera and Jean de Dieu Rafiki Uwimana, who traveled all the way from Rwanda to watch the US Pro Challenge:

These guys are part of a team that Jonathan Boyer is running, which recruits the most promising Rwandan athletes and rescues them from poverty. I’d read about them in a “New Yorker” article six weeks before. What a trip to see them in person! It caused me to reflect on how as a kid I dreamed of having a real racing bike and being good enough to do it justice. This wasn’t such a lavish dream for a kid in my circumstances, with paper route money and top-notch food, shelter, and kid-oriented races. But these Rwandans came from a much more humble background. I can only imagine their excitement to be given an opportunity to be bike racers.

This next photo tells you almost all you need to know about bike racing:

Andy Schleck is smiling because he’s having fun. Cadel Evans is frowning because he always frowns because he always suffers and eventually that constant unsmiling suffering leads to winning the Tour de France, while the likes of Schleck are all smiles and not riding hard enough.

Time trial warm-ups

After watching some of the early racers take their turn against the clock and the mountain, Max and I wandered into the area where team vans were parked and riders were warming up. We immediately spotted a young, up-and-coming American pro, Peter Stetina.

Though we’d never met Peter Stetina, we recognized him right away because he looks a whole lot like his dad, two time Zinger/Coors champ Dale Stetina. Dale coached a number of young riders, including Max and me, in the early ‘80s. Peter’s relatively low saddle height may be a subtle form of rebellion against his old man, who favored a higher saddle.

Next we headed over to the BMC trailer, just in time to see Cadel Evans appear and climb on his bike to warm up. Evans is ranked #1 in the world, having just won his first Tour de France this past July.

I have to wonder how many sports fans can get this close to the top athletes for their sport. I’m guessing it would be next to impossible for a football fan to get this close to the quarterback of the reigning superbowl-winning team. Not because American football is a bigger sport, of course; it isn’t. Cycling is the number two sport in the world (behind soccer), and a far cooler sport than football or any other. You don't have to agree with this statement, of course; you’re entitled to your opinion even if it’s wrong.

Aerodynamics are important, even on a stationary trainer:

Here, Evans gets information about the time trial course from a teammate, fellow Aussie Timothy Roe, who already raced it:

Here is the American champ Christian Vande Velde, who came within half a second of winning the time trial:

Vande Velde probably would have won but I think he was distracted in his warm-up by some damn amateur photographer. It’s a pity; I was really rooting for him. Still, second place among this field is highly impressive.

Howdy folks!

The next race we watched was the final stage, which started in Golden, Colorado, home of Coors beer. Coors is unique among major beer companies in that all of it is brewed in one brewery, rather than being farmed out to independent outfits the way Bud, Miller, etc. are.

Now, you might assume that, me being a Bay Area resident, I’m a snooty microbrew and import-beer guy. Well, look here:

There I’m enjoying an ice-cold Coors with Roy Knickman, a Coors Classic stage winner, at the Zinger/Coors reunion, which took place the evening of the time trial.

Incidentally, Smashburger and Quiznos are owned by the same company, which is why the name of the race was genericized from “Quiznos.”

When my brother Bryan saw the Golden start line photo above, he remarked, “I just love the Howdy Folks! sign. I snickered (while I roasted to death in our pre-AC Saab) during my first time into Golden, and I guess I'm still snickering at it. Must be that snobby Boulder thing.”

Here, being interviewed pre-race, is our local Bay Area hero, Fast Freddie Rodriguez, a Giro d’Italia stage winner:

It’s always fun to see, at a big pro race, a guy you’ve ridden with in recent times. (I actually sprinted against Freddie, as I related in this blog in “Tale #3” here).

Freddie went on to finish a very respectable third in this final US Pro Challenge stage.

Needless to say, Cadel Evans was also interviewed pre-race:

In case you couldn’t hear that clearly, Evans called this “the most fun I’ve had racing for years.” He would go on to finish 7th overall in the US Pro Challenge … not bad for not being adjusted to the altitude.

A rider who may not have had as much fun was Ivan Basso, Giro d’Italia winner and Tour de France runner-up:

Basso finished 35th, over seven minutes down. Another rider who may have been disappointed was Fränk Schleck, who ended up in 13th overall:

Here is the ever-popular Jens Voigt:

My theory about why Voigt is so friendly and good-spirited to the media and his fans ? I think he suffers so badly on the bike that whenever he’s not riding he’s practically euphoric from relief.

Of course my photo essay wouldn’t be complete without a shot of race winner Levi Leipheimer:

I love the star-struck woman in the background. I wonder if she got a photo of me looking similarly star-struck, or at least looking amused (by her, though she wouldn’t know that). Moving on, here’s another amusing photo:

Cadel Evans stays focused, but on his right, a Jelly Belly rider looks at his hands and thinks, “What have I DONE?!”

After the requisite singing of our national anthem, the organizers started the race. On time, I might add.

Before leaving I took a picture of the sign-in sheet. How many names can you make out? (Of course you'll want to zoom in. That’s true for all these photos, of course.)

By my count, twenty riders had dropped out prior to this stage. I can’t blame them; given the heat and altitude of Colorado, I didn’t even have the energy to head to Denver for the stage finish. (Actually, parking was the biggest deterrent. After that brutal parking effort in Vail, Max and I, and our grapefruit, had had enough.)

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From the Archives - When You Are Engulfed in Shame

Introduction

Last May, I took a writing class called “Memoir: Art of the Personal.” The instructor encouraged her students not to shy away from troubling material. Her advice was something like “go where the pain is.” This makes sense. Had Dostoyevsky written a novel called Obedience and Praise rather than Crime and Punishment, he might not be so famous.

More recently, I read a parenting book called Nurture Shock: New Thinking About Children. It has a chapter titled “Why Kids Lie” that offers some, well, shocking statistics. A four-year old, a cited study attests, “will lie about once every two hours, while a six-year-old will lie about once every hour.” The book goes on to describe how “kids who live in threat of consistent punishment don’t lie less. Instead, they become better liars.”

As a kid, I was no exception: I was not above lying. Plus, I stole. If this seems interesting to you, perhaps you will enjoy this story, which I wrote for my class.

When You Are Engulfed in Shame – May 27, 2010

When I was about ten, I stole money from my family. Not just on one occasion, but repeatedly—daily, in fact—for a couple of weeks. I felt no remorse (at least at first), and had no regard for consequences. I was pilfering change from the bus money jar.

Every day, as soon as we got home from school, my brother Max and I would to get a dime from the jar for our bus fare, and walk about half a mile to the bus stop to catch the slow, meandering #5 bus that would take us all the way across Boulder to the YMCA. It was a boring trip made all the more boring by our taking it five days a week for years. At the Y we had swim practice. I hated swimming—still do—and especially hated being bullied in the locker room afterward. Bigger kids would roll towels into a “rat’s tail,” get the end wet, and snap us with it, leaving red marks on our bare skin. Then, my eyes burning from the chlorine in the pool, I’d wait with my brothers for forty-five minutes for our mom to pick us up around 7. Given the time demands of swimming and school, I had no life.

The money I stole was for Zēmis. A Zēmi was a fancy soft drink, prepared to order by a high-tech vending machine in the Y’s lobby. You’d put in your 25 cents, select your flavor (cherry, lime, whatever), and then watch in awe as a tapered plastic cup— ornate as a crystal goblet —dropped onto a little grille and was half-filled with crushed ice. The Technicolor syrup came next, climbing the ice. Then carbonated water fizzed in, right to the top—such precision! I’d treat my friend John to one, too. (He was a year older and really weird—he used to fly his hand along ahead of him as we walked, making it dip and soar, making cool spaceship noises.) My generosity was half the fun of the Zēmis for me: I loved being Big Mr. Moneybucks.

I wasn’t so naïve as to think the stolen bus money wouldn’t be missed. My family had already gone through a bus money embezzlement scandal. That time, my brother Max—the troublesome middle child—had been blamed, and was harassed for days. It finally come out that our dad had needed change and raided the bus money cache, and hadn’t thought to mention it. Though Max was exonerated, the stigma never really went away. So now, when I was stealing bus money for real, I figured I’d have a readymade scapegoat when the theft was discovered.

When Mom noticed the embezzlement, an ad hoc tribunal was formed. Each of the four brothers was both a prosecutor and a defendant. Max was harassed all over again, even while I continued to steal to support my Zēmi habit. I repeatedly accused Max myself, both to make my innocence more realistic and for the sheer joy of it. My brothers and I thrilled to the intrigue of crime and punishment, basked in the righteous indignation of shaking down a suspected wrongdoer and bringing him to justice.

(That it wouldn’t be actual justice didn’t matter a bit: the satisfaction was the same. Once, years before when I was like five, sitting around the house bored, I decided to scrape my leg with a Lego until a large red welt appeared. Then I went crying to my oldest brother, Bryan, telling him Max did it to me. I watched with great satisfaction as Bryan went over and beat on Max, bawling him out the whole time out for hurting his little brother. It made no difference to me that Max was innocent; the spectacle of richly deserved punishment being meted out was really all I needed.)

Perhaps to prevent us from all getting spanked by our dad, my mom actually offered amnesty. “Okay, this is your chance,” she said. “Whoever stole the money, step forward now, and you won’t be punished. Just admit you did it, and all will be forgiven.” I wasn’t even tempted to do this. Maybe Mom wouldn’t punish me, but I’d have to listen to my brothers castigating me not only for my heinous theft, but for having accused Max the whole time. It would also be tough to witness Max himself attaining new heights in righteous indignation.

And, truth be told, I had finally become ashamed of my actions. Funny how that works: if nobody had noticed the missing money, I’d have blissfully gone right on stealing (just like a pro athlete who blithely dopes and will go on doping until he gets caught and then, sobbing, apologizes to his fans and vows to help clean up the sport). I cursed myself, my friend, and those damn Zēmis. I’d never felt so low. It became more important than ever to hide my guilt.

The truth came out soon enough. My brothers, who had long envied my fancy drinks, now questioned whether it was really my friend John paying for them. I insisted that it was. “Well, I’ll just give a call over there and find out,” Geoff announced. I was almost sure he was bluffing—after all, all four of us were deathly afraid of the phone. (Just calling a business to find out its hours, as our mom sometimes made us do, was almost impossible. Whichever kid made the call would be almost unable to talk—his throat would go dry, his vocal chords would contract, and his strangled voice would come out in a thin, reedy squeak. Naturally, his brothers would mock him for this.)

But I couldn’t bring myself to call Geoff’s bluff. There was just that small chance that he would actually go through with the call, and my friend would unknowingly sell me out, and that was just too much to face. So I spilled my guts before Geoff dialed the first digit. I confessed.

Right away my brothers lit into me, cackling like hyenas, thrilling to my shame like rabid journalists. Max was the most triumphant. Over and over he cried out, “I can understand a liar—but a fieth?” He brandished this indignant cry like a Gatling gun, making sure everybody heard and appreciated it. It became the slogan for my defeat. I felt so low I didn’t even have the heart to correct my brother (“It’s not ‘fieth,’ it’s ‘thief,’ you moron!” I’d have said). I let my brothers have their day in the sun, and felt completely deserving of my humiliation. After all, I’d stolen repeatedly, lied, and—worst of all—sold out my own brother, all for a fizzy drink.

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The Bigger Picture

Introduction

The character of Shakespeare’s Hamlet is often held up as the poster child for indecisiveness. However, the literary elite have called him the most intelligent character in all of literature. Indecision can be a sign of intelligence, while at the other end of the spectrum are people who are great at making up their minds and sticking to their guns (often literally), and who keep things simple by refusing to consider, process, or otherwise pay attention to conflicting information.

This post is about the struggle to see the bigger picture—not in books or plays, but the little trials that pepper our lives. I offer three case studies from my life to illustrate the complexities of honing your perspective.

Case study #1 – The Escalator

I was hurrying to Bart, the Bay Area commuter train, heading home from work. As I made my way down the escalator, two steps at a time, my train was rolling into the station below—it looked like I’d just make it. But suddenly, an obstruction: a couple was standing, side by side, instead of walking down the escalator. The young man, eighteen or so, was kind of hanging on his girlfriend. They seemed to be in their own little world, like Tony and Maria when they meet for the first time at the high school dance in “West Side Story”—you know, where the rest of the dancers blur out, the music becomes muted, and the two have tunnel vision (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, click here and watch from a little over 4½ minutes in). Now, I’m all for people getting together and enjoying their romance and everything, but in a crowded train station during the commute hour? I was pretty ticked. I mean, who did they think they were? Were they so busy being in love they didn’t realize they were holding people up?

On top of being about to miss my train, my own annoyance annoyed me. I felt that I ought to be one of those philosophical types who thinks, “Ah, young love!” and sighs with pleasure, maybe winks at the happy couple. But I wasn’t the magnanimous sort—I was a rushed commuter absorbed in his own impatience, barely calm enough to accept the delay, much less think happy thoughts about the young lovers. Was I jealous of these two, of their youth and their fresh romance and carefree attitude? Or was I really just in a hurry? I was on the brink of saying, “Excuse me, coming through!” or perhaps glaring at them. But ultimately I managed to suck it up and simply resign myself to getting the next train.

Good thing. As I followed the pair off the escalator and got a better look, I realized that the guy was blind. He wasn’t hanging on his girlfriend—he was just getting some help on the escalator. I was instantly awash with relief for not having said or done anything. What a jerk I’d have seemed if I’d rushed them along or given them stink-eye. How certain I’d been about my instant assessment of the situation—and how wrong! I think back to this near-miss whenever I’m on the brink of a snap judgment during a social conflict.

Case Study #2 – The Plastic Bag

Recently I was working on something in my home office when I heard my daughter Lindsay bawling. I figured it would be a typically short-lived outburst, but she kept it up for awhile. When it became obvious my wife wasn’t going to do anything about it, I asked her what our daughter was crying about. “A plastic bag,” she replied, a hint of annoyance in her voice.

If you think I’m about to speak ill of my wife, think again. I can relate to her frustration. Lindsay cries a lot. This isn’t uncommon for her age, but that doesn’t make the crying any quieter. And as parents, we’re torn about how to react. If we run over and make a big fuss, we’re kind of indulging our daughter, perhaps even promoting her outsized response to life’s frustrations. And by making a big show of sympathy we may be dragging out her despair, helping her overinflate a minor grievance.

I was the crying kind of kid myself, but by older brothers never let me get away with it. They’d mock me, sarcastically gushing, “Oh, poor little baby!” Of course this made me feel worse, and cry harder, but it made me mad, too, and I credit the frequent repetition of this scenario with helping to make me the scrapper that I am today. Being retroactively grateful for my brothers’ taunts, I cannot default to coddling my own child whenever she cries.

Still, Lindsay was obviously really upset about something, and anyway I felt like taking a break from what I’d been doing, so I sought her out. She tried to run away—being more angry than sad, I realized—but I scooped her up, grabbed a chair, and sat her down on my lap. (Another reason for my intervention: it won’t be long before she’s too big to sit on my lap, so I’m enjoying it while I can.) I asked her to tell me all about it. As she sputtered and sobbed, the full story gradually came out.

Her older sister Alexa had a friend over and they were playing at something that involved large Ziploc bags. Lindsay was tagging along, and the two older girls gave her a bag and asked her to fill it with water and bring it back to them. But it was a trick: the bag had a hole in it! They expected her to carry the thing back leaking water all over the place; if they were lucky, she’d even get in trouble.

This is the kind of thing older siblings are always doing. I remember one time during my pre-teen years when I was at a video arcade with a friend playing Tempest and we got tired of my friend’s little brother hanging around watching us play. So we gave him fifteen cents and told him to head down to Dairy Queen, a couple blocks away, to buy us some whip. (I’d once seen it on the menu under “toppings.”) Happy to be included, even in a servile role, my friend’s brother gamely headed out on the errand. It was a really hot summer day, and this was the most popular Dairy Queen in town, and the poor kid stood in line for at least half an hour before getting to the little window and being told he couldn’t just buy whip by itself. He came back bearing the bad news, and—managing not to laugh—we scolded him: “Doggone it, we told you to get us whip! What do you mean they won’t sell it to you?! It’s right there on the menu! Now you march straight back there and get us our whip!” (We will both go to Hell for this, of course.)

Mostly, though, I was on the other end of these sibling affairs, being brushed off by older brothers who wanted nothing to do with me. I remember once how Max (the next oldest) and I once wanted to play in our bigger brothers’ friend’s clubhouse. They refused to let us in. Max demanded a reason, so they told him it was because his nose was running and he had an ugly bruise on his forehead. They even made a song to taunt him with: “No snotty-pot bruise-heads allowed in the clubhouse!”

Now, Lindsay’s response to her sister’s prank was pretty clever—she was no dupe. She spotted the hole in the bag, and instead of merely pointing out the older girls’ treachery (which would have accomplished nothing), she devised a clever retaliatory plan: she would swap out the defective bag for a perfect one, and casually return with it properly filled, not leaking a drop. She could pretend to be sweetly accommodating, and watch with delight as the other girls, astonished, beheld her achievement. It would be, in the parlance of childhood triumphs, a “burn-royal-fry.” (If this term confuses you, allow me to explain. When I was a kid, getting the better of somebody was called a “burn.” Getting him real good was a “burn-royal.” A true burn-royal-fry, needless to say, was exceedingly rare.)

But (my daughter now sobbed), her plan did not work out. She managed to obtain a good Ziploc bag, but in the process of trying to open it, she ripped it, and it turned out to be the last Ziploc bag in the house, and now everything was ruined. This was the real cause of the outburst: she’d had the perfect plan but she botched it through sheer clumsiness and haplessness. She was furious with herself.

Poor kid. It’s my fault: she’s clearly got the Albert self-flogging gene. Not all of us Alberts have it, but it’s not uncommon in our family. Of course, this excess of self criticism—a refusal to be compassionate with oneself—is not unique to us. I remember a childhood pal who made a mistake during his piano recital and actually stopped playing so he could smack himself in the head and say, “Stupid! Stupid!” I’ve also seen self-flogging behavior on TV when a pro soccer player has screwed up and falls to his knees, tearing at his hair. Etc.

But the self-flogging gene isn’t all bad; it all depends on how it pans out. If it leads you toward sorrow, you can become paralyzed, depressed. But if it leads to toward anger, you might either a) hit yourself in the head and say “Stupid!” or b) take some constructive action. So, hearing Lindsay’s story now, I realized the best thing I could do would be salvage her original scheme. I found some food in a large Ziploc in the fridge, dumped it out, and gave her the bag. Her spirits were instantly restored, and she galloped happily away toward the sink.

My point here is that to fully appreciate Lindsay’s grief, it’s not enough to know about the ripped bag. You also have to have been a younger sibling: it takes an understanding of the casual cruelty with which an older sibling turns the younger into a plaything on the way to rejecting her. Moreover, it takes a kindred pugnacious spirit. And, to truly feel Lindsay’s pain at the ripped bag, you need to share with her the self-flogging gene. Given the full picture of the poor kid’s angst, it’s almost a miracle she found anybody who could truly understand and relate.

Case Study #3 - Mad Max

When I was about twelve, I saw “Mad Max,” an action movie about a renegade cop taking revenge on a gang of psychotic bikers. But I came in late, to a scene where one of the cops, Jim Goose, goes berserk and tries to beat up some guy, and has to be held back by his fellow cops. I was fairly horrified at his behavior.

However, some time later I saw the whole movie from the beginning, and had a totally different reaction. Goose was a hugely likeable character, and the guy he tried to beat up, Johnny the Boy, was a little bastard who liked to terrorize small towns, raping and pillaging just for fun. In the scene where Goose loses his temper, Johnny and various other thugs had just been released from prison because no witnesses showed up for the trial, being too cowed by the gang to testify. In this context, Goose’s outburst seemed completely appropriate, and I was swept right along with the rest of the movie, where Max hunts down the gang members one by one and murders them.

For years I had fond memories of that film, and my brothers and friends and I frequently quoted bits of its dialog, but somewhere along the line it dawned on me that this movie is a guilty pleasure at best. Obviously it’s not a morality tale, and isn’t supposed to be anything but entertainment, but for a mature person to fully buy into the revenge fantasy, as I had as a teenager, would be kind of sick. My malleable teenage mind, I have come to understand, had been manipulated by the filmmakers. Looking back at Goose’s blowup, I realize my reaction has come full circle: I was right to be appalled when I first saw it.

This presents an interesting case in my “big picture” discussion. Sometimes a total lack of context is just fine, because context doesn’t always matter. For example, police brutality is never okay, period. Looking at a somewhat bigger picture—such as the one the filmmakers made—gets you into dangerous territory: you’re lured into an extreme position by a totally one-sided narrative. The real big picture here requires a nuanced appreciation for what a filmmaker may do to titillate a jaded audience, without regard to how his movie, and others like it, may gradually pollute our attitudes.

The upshot of today’s exploration?

• Stop and think, hard, before you accost a complete stranger.
• Appreciate that, though it might take a highly specific perspective to realize it, sometimes a plastic bag is actually worth crying over.
• Try to remember that in the quest for the big picture, sometimes bigger isn’t big enough.

dana albert blog

New Year’s Resolutions

Introduction

While much of America is taking part in the age-old tradition of new year’s resolutions right now, I’m following my own tradition of pondering the matter without actually coming to any conclusions or committing to anything. This post documents that struggle.

Getting started

Part of my issue is that the most obvious resolutions aren’t available to me. Googling top-ten lists of resolutions, I see the same things every time: lose weight, quit smoking, exercise more, drink less alcohol, get out of debt, spend time with family. This low-lying fruit is beyond my reach. My body-mass index is spang in the middle of normal; I exercise like crazy; I’ve never smoked; medical studies suggest I should perhaps drink more alcohol than I do; and so forth.

You might assume that I therefore think I’m just fine as-is. Actually, I don't; rather, my shortcomings simply aren’t the garden-variety ones. While other people are clear and resolute in their desire for self-improvement, I’m just stagnating here, for lack of imagination. Surely there are ways for everybody to improve. So on New Year’s Day I asked my brother Max—an accomplished practitioner of nonstandard thinking—if he had any new year’s resolutions. To my delight, he’d written out a hundred of them the night before, which he read to me over the phone. Here are some highlights:

1. eat right

2. weekly haircut

3. lose 36 pounds by March

10. love 6 things I hate

12. talk to people by creek

24. no more classic rock people

37. Boston kreme doughnut

38. work on golf swing

77. lower temperature for larger roast, and increase cooking time

92. if I get a bloody nose, put a cold towel on the back of my neck and tilt my head back

Several of these, particularly #38, tripped my irony detector. Max has never played golf in his life, and isn’t about to start. I had to ask about #25, “cut off arm.” I said, “Wait … cut off arm?” Max replied, in a tone of pure resignation, “Yeah….” My favorite item on his list was #93, “We don’t want any replays of what happened last year.” He delivered this in the same scolding-woman tone as he used for his follow-up comment: “As long as we’re changing the calendar we might as well make some other changes.” (I know what you’re thinking: he should be the blogger of the family. I agree! Here’s a picture, by the way, of the two of us.)

Good intentions

New year’s resolutions remind me of perennial magazine articles like “Ten easy steps to improving your fitness!” and “Five anti-ageing secrets!” If these easy techniques really worked, they’d have long ago become mainstream and the articles wouldn’t have to be recycled continually. Unsurprisingly, when I looked at online lists of the top ten new year’s resolutions over the last few years, they were all the same.

I got a fortune cookie fortune once that said, “Hell is paved with good intentions.” Not the road to hell, as the saying goes, but Hell itself. I love the image of a flaming underground chamber with the standard rivers of fire and everything, but dotted here and there with exercise bikes, Soloflex machines, and crock pots. Every so often amidst the fire pits you’d see an abandoned home-improvement project. Everyone down there would be a grad student still working on his thesis.

My inner conflict

I can’t help but reflect that the people who have the easiest time coming up with new year’s resolutions are the ones who have allowed their obvious failings to persist and accumulate unmitigated all year long, like dust bunnies under the bed. I mean, if you’re doing something you know you shouldn’t, or are failing to do something you know you should, why ignore it until this arbitrary January timeframe? Why wait to correct your behavior? Why shouldn’t the self-improvement process run all year?

At the same time, I think the earnest, all-together-now spirit of these resolutions is kind of sweet. I went to BoozeMo recently, and couldn’t believe how empty the parking lot once. Normally it’s packed. It was like a ghost town in there, and every single thing I bought was on sale. The cashier said it’s the same every year: slammed on New Year’s Eve and dead after. Similarly, my brother commented on how crowded the gym gets during January. It’s a special time of year when most of the nation unites in a group self-improvement project.

My goodwill toward new year’s resolutionists heightens my own anxiety about not knowing what, in myself, to address. It would be dangerous to decide I’m satisfied. Whatever little satisfactions we have in life would probably end up being sources of actual guilt if we just stepped back and saw the bigger picture. The happy consumer, thrilled with that new iPad, would probably be shocked to know how truly insufferable he or she really is, seen from the eyes of the person on the receiving end of an unsolicited demo. The person who gets great satisfaction from recycling a huge passel of plastic bottles is missing the point—that he or she should be drinking tap water to begin with. Doubtless there are a great many ways in which I could be improving; I just lack the vision to come up with them. Why is it so much easier to come with ways for other people to improve?

My resolution candidates

Having scoured my brain, I’ve come up with some candidates for new year’s resolutions:

1. Be more insightful into my own shortcomings

2. Save money

3. Take a class

4. Eat more pizza and taqueria fare

5. Read more to Lindsay

6. Help others

7. Be less messy

8. Reduce stress / Enjoy life more

9. I will not lose … ever

10. Keep journal about kids

The first item suggests itself to me right away, just as a New Year’s Day hangover suggests “drink less” as a resolution for so many. But I’m not sure “be more insightful” would go the distance as a resolution; it might actually make things worse by leading me into self-absorption or the kind of self-flagellation that would interfere with resolution #8. I’m going to let those two kind of cancel each other out. That’s okay, I still have eight left.

Saving money isn’t a resolution I feel I can truly commit to. First off, I’m not exactly a rabid consumer to begin with. (I almost made a resolution to buy some new socks—I’ve been wearing the same eight pairs of brown socks for the last five or six years—but I felt it too trivial.) Meanwhile, servicing my Bay Area mortgage makes a money-hoarding goal kind of laughable. And then there’s the matter of another resolution I considered, which was to do my part to save our nation’s economy. Finally, saving money conflicts with item #4, eating out (which, meanwhile, clashes with another near-candidate, “spend more time with family,” because my wife hates pizza and my daughter Lindsay dislikes restaurants). I’m going to scratch this one.

Take a class … this could cause stress, but might help me enjoy life more. I’m going to keep it.

Reading more to Lindsay is actually problematic. I enjoy it, and she enjoys it, but I might actually be interfering with her education. She’s just learning how to read, and can handle the simpler Dr. Seuss books and the like. But intellectually she’s much more interested in books like Black Beauty and Clarice Bean Spells Trouble and it’s hard to see how my reading these to her will encourage her to go read basic picture books on her own. This resolution may fail the sustainability test as well—after all, once Lindsay is able to read on her own, my read-aloud tradition will vanish and I’ll have to read to the cat.

Helping others … this I have some experience with. In my high school health class the teacher tasked each student with assigning himself a Health Behavior Change (HBC), and each of us had to report weekly to the teacher on our progress. After I nailed my first HBC, flossing my teeth (a regimen I faithfully continue to this day), I was at loose ends as to my second HBC. I asked the teacher, “Can our HBC be to help a friend with his HBC?” The teacher said, “That’s a great idea. What, do you know someone who’s trying to quit smoking?” I gestured to my friend at the next desk and said, “No, I want to help Sean floss.”

Kidding aside, helping others is really tricky. It takes either money (a conflict with #2) or work (a conflict with #8) and moreover requires, and/or fosters, a certain amount of ego-bloat. Who am I to decide I have what it takes to be somebody’s savior? I once gave a homeless guy some change but he turned out to be a (shabbily-dressed) construction worker on break. He correctly fingered me as a do-gooder college kid and said, “Man, you guys are conditioned.” That doesn’t mean I shouldn’t give change to (suspected) panhandlers; I just have to be more careful. So I’ll do the basic stuff, like giving to charities or guiding a blind Bart passenger to his seat, but I can’t commit to a new better Dana who makes helping others a major life goal. I’m sorry but that’s just the way it is.

Being less messy pertains to how much food I get on my face and clothes when I eat, and to how much I splatter when I pee standing up. There’s much room for improvement here, and I expect that I can actually make some progress. After all, I never used to have to wipe my mouth with a napkin so much, or clean up the toilet seat every time. Either my skills are waning over the years, or I have always been messy and just didn’t realize it until now. So I’ll try to eat more slowly and aim better, but this isn’t destined to be a perfectly satisfying new year’s resolution. I’m still more interested in other bad behaviors I’m ignorant of now but will identify and target in the future.

Item #9, I will not lose … ever, does not refer to an actual goal (after all, I graciously lose all the time), but to my beer-swishing mantra. To properly pour a Belgian-style beer, you gently pour two-thirds into a glass, swish the rest around while reciting your personal mantra, then pour the rest. (A brewery provides these instructions, minus the mantra part. I’m not sure where I got that.) I’ve found through trial and error that “I will not lose … ever” is just the right length for a mantra. So this resolution is about enjoying beer more. I think it holds great promise.

The last resolution, keeping a journal about my kids, fails the new year’s resolution applicability requirements simply because it’s nothing new—I already do this. I just need to be better. You know those baby books, listing height, weight, first words, and so forth? They’re like a poster child for unfulfilled intentions. The harried parents (which would be a good name for a rock band, by the way) usually begin neglecting this project almost instantly, and when the kid comes across the book decades later he’s bound to be disappointed at how little is revealed about his earliest years. So I’m fully on the hook for this resolution.

Conclusion

It looks like in 2011 I’ll be focused on taking a class, aiming better, enjoying my beer more, and writing more in that journal. If I find, three months in, that I’ve mastered each of these projects and am feeling dangerously satisfied about it, I suppose I’ll have to take up smoking, week-long benders, and Boston kreme doughnuts. After all, I have next year to think about.

dana albert blog