Firewall for the Mind

Introduction

I recently read a compelling New York Times opinion piece by David Brooks called “The Self-Destructive Effects of Progressive Sadness.” It discusses the growing darkness of the national mood, which Brooks terms “maladaptive sadness,” and which he attributes to three trends: a catastrophizing mentality; extreme sensitivity to harm; and a culture of denunciation. The result, the author contends, is a decrease in one’s sense of agency, which causes emotional duress that can eventually lead to sadness and anxiety.

I was hoping the article would suggests ways we can work to mitigate this problem, but it didn’t get into it—that’s a whole other article. This post is me taking a swing at that other article.

Pay attention … or not

I believe the solution to this maladaptive sadness begins with deciding where and how—and, crucially, if—to focus our attention.

Let’s start with the catastrophizing mentality. Humans do have a talent for focusing on the negative. The late Hans Rosling, a Swedish physician and statistician, examined this in his excellent book Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think. This book explains why the vast majority of people—including scientists, executives of multinational companies, journalists, medical researchers, attendees of the Davos World Economic Forum, and others—have historically done really poorly on a multiple-choice test about the state of the world. In fact, people do worse than if they guessed at random; as Rosling explains, they’re “systematically wrong.” Out of nearly 12,000 people tested in 14 countries in 2017, “every group of people … thinks the world is more frightening, more violent, and more hopeless—in short, more dramatic—than it really is.” Rosling identified ten key reasons people err, and one of them is “the negativity instinct.” To some degree, we’re hardwired for pessimism, which is exacerbated, Rosling explains, by “selective reporting by journalists and activists”—which accentuates the negative to create a sense of urgency. (Read this, quick! Donate now!) Meanwhile, he points out, people may feel that it’s heartless to acknowledge that the world is improving when there is still so much wrong with it. But then, naysaying doesn’t help, particularly when it depresses us.

I’m not suggesting that the solution to a widespread emotional health problem is simply to decide to be more positive. I acknowledge that a lot of our vulnerability is more psychological than logical. I can remember being a little kid and only just having learned to swim, and how I would be afraid to venture toward the deep end of the pool. Of course it’s no more dangerous over there; a person can drown in six inches of water. It just seemed more dangerous. As much as I reassured myself that the deep end was no big deal, the sight of that chasm opening up below me freaked me out every time. I finally got over this fear by simply closing my eyes when I got to the deep end. Without the visual stimulus, I could swim all the way across. The point is, “eyes wide open” doesn’t always reduce risk, and can introduce nonproductive anxiety.

Fast-forward a few years to when I’d moved on to bike racing. The Junior field (ages 16-17) in those days was pretty big—50 to 60 riders, typically—and fast. I remember the first road race of the season on a cold day with a strong crosswind, which meant lots of jostling around in the pack. I was feeling really intimidated, especially when I looked back at the large swarm of riders behind me, all of whom it seemed were saving their energy (in my draft) and could come flying past me at any moment. This was a major burden, psychologically, until I decided only to look at the riders ahead of me, and never allow myself to fall back very far. Each time I finished taking a turn at the front, I would only drop back a bit, and then get back into the line at fifth or sixth position. (To worm your way in, you look only forward, at the wheel you want to take.) This way, I was able to pretend I was already in a small breakaway with no swarming peloton to worry about. I did this for about fifty miles until I realized it was always the same riders ahead of me. Finally I sneaked a look back. The pack was gone—we’d dropped them! It wasn’t the size of the pack that mattered, but the quality of the riders near the front.

Far higher achievers than I have employed similar mind tricks. In this great interview, the cycling champion Andy Hampsten talks about the psychological rigor of beginning a pro career in Europe. So often, he was tempted to quit. He describes one such occasion, racing on a terribly cold, snowy spring day in Spain. He was shivering so badly he feared he might crash, and seriously considered abandoning. But then he found a way to deal with his fear: “a silly book called The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy that I thought of … where when the hero was in danger he had special glasses that would turn pitch black so he couldn’t see how dangerous things were. It’s best not to know … so I tried to apply that.” Instead of focusing on how frigid and dangerous this downhill was, he tried to look forward to the climb ahead, where he could warm up and the speed would be lower. His crisis of confidence hadn’t been driven by a fully reasoned assessment of the conditions; it was just negative self-talk. By choosing not to dwell on that negativity, Hampsten not only finished the race, finished the season, and made the transition to a world class professional, but grew his confidence and famously won the 1988 Giro d’Italia stage race by dominating a legendary mountain stage in a snowstorm.

Two circles

So, am I just suggesting we put our heads in the sand? That’s the whole trick, just ignore apparent threats? No, of course it’s more complicated than that. In his editorial, Brooks goes on to say, “People who provide therapy to depressive people try to break the cycle of catastrophic thinking so they can more calmly locate and deal with the problems they actually have control over” (italics mine). Societal catastrophes like climate change, systemic racism, and the vanishing middle class are all real problems, of course, but they have something in common: they are beyond the ability of most individuals to combat. They’re bigger than us, which is why we feel so powerless.

This brings me to a useful concept (which I’ve mentioned in these pages before, so bear with me if this is review): the distinction, as described in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, between the “circle of influence” and the “circle of concern.” Below is the author’s schematic. The idea is that we should spend most of our mental energy on what we can influence; for example, learning to manage our own stress. We should avoid spending too much energy on the circle of concern, such as the future of democracy, because that’s where most of us are largely helpless.

Did Hampsten’s team management emphasize to him how dangerous the race over the snow-covered Gavia Pass would be? Did they remind him that that no American had ever even finished on the podium of the Giro, which he now stood to do but only if he didn’t crash out in this dangerous stage? Did they show him a highlights reel of riders crashing on descents in bad weather? No, that would be pointless, and worse—and that would all be in the circle of concern. Instead, the team focused on what aspects of the race they could influence. They went around to all the sporting goods stores in the area and bought up all the cold weather gear they could find to equip their riders. They prepared Hampsten for success, and—since literally no other team had thought of this—in doing so they gave him an edge over his competition. (That stage of the Giro has become legendary; the tifosi (Italian fans) call it “the day the big men cried.”)

Why now?

Okay, so it’s best to separate what information is actionable, and what isn’t. But the Seven Habits book was published in 1989; if the matter is this simple, why is everyone’s emotional duress seeming to increase so much, and so fast, now? As reported by the National Institute of Mental Health, “more than one in five U.S. adults live with a mental illness (57.8 million in 2021).” If a growing sense of powerlessness can be linked to people spending more mental energy in the circle-of-concern space, what is causing that increase?

The Internet and social media are obviously implicated and I’m clearly not the first person to assert that. Even if we set people’s habits aside for the moment, the pace of bad news has accelerated, and it can feel like our reaction time has to be faster. Consider the meltdown of the Silicon Valley Bank: as described in this Charles Schwab article, “With the effects of rapid news flows, especially via social media, and banking that can be done quickly and via mobile devices, the bank’s collapse happened with lightning speed.” Much of the ripple effect across the economy has been due to sudden and unwarranted loss of confidence in the banking industry as a whole; as Schwab put it, “The main channel of contagion so far is more psychological than systemic.”

But where the mental health crisis is concerned, it’s not just the speed of the Internet at work; it’s how we choose to use it. Brooks cites a culture of denunciation. Sure, you can denounce others without the Internet but it’s a lot harder. I mean, unless you’re a professional whose work can get printed on paper, what are you going to do—pass out leaflets? Stand on a street corner braying? Collar your colleagues at the water cooler? No, when people are feeling fed up about vaccines, politics, or any other battle in the culture wars, they go post vitriolic comments beneath articles, or send tweets, or otherwise leverage the computer network that connects five billion people.

With all this bold negativity on display, it’s no wonder, as Brooks points out, so many people have developed extreme sensitivity to harm. In the parlance of the schoolyard bullying culture I grew up in, “they can dish it out but they can’t take it.” Well, maybe that’s not totally fair, but I think there’s something complicated going on around being a bully in one moment, and wanting to appear sensitive the next. The thickness of people’s skin, so to speak, is selective. For example, progressives criticize Jane Eyre because one of its protagonists participates (albeit “off screen”) in colonialism without the author denouncing him for it, so anybody who has experienced systematic oppression might find this triggering somehow. They say it’s best, therefore, to write the book off as “problematic” and not use it in schools. But then they go off and watch “Breaking Bad,” a show about a guy who cooks meth, or “Real Detective,” which repeatedly shows graphic footage of a young woman’s naked corpse. If challenged on whether this could possibly be healthy to take in, they’ll say, “Oh, it’s just, you know, edgy.”

I have a scheme to help you navigate these waters and fight the tide of these increasingly anxious times. But before I begin: what follows isn’t for everybody. If you feel a strong need to grow your knowledge of the precise cause and extent of the world’s problems, and feel that proper virtue signaling can’t be achieved without sharing what you’ve learned, and that your personal identity depends on upholding a culture of personal punditry, you should just stop now. Go read something else.

What? You are still with me? You want to continue? Great! Let’s get started.

Opt out of the culture war

The first thing I’d like to establish is that in the culture war that’s raging, we should all be conscientious objectors. Why? Because this is a war that can’t be won. Our strong opinions are being weaponized, but we aren’t actual soldiers and we’re not being deployed with any battlefield tactic that can actually prevail over a known enemy. Political extremists and Internet algorithms are drawing out our built-in impulse to find someone to blame for the world’s problems, just to foment our opposition and thereby increase our loyalty. (The “blame instinct” is another of the ten reasons Rosling cites for people misunderstanding the world.) Unless we’re politicians or policymakers, we aren’t changing the world when we rail against it; we’re just collateral damage in a war that will never end.

I’m not saying we have no role in the world’s problems. Of course if we’re concerned about climate change we should try to walk, bike, take mass transit, etc., and vote for programs that address the problem. And those of us who are parents have a duty to educate our children and help them become responsible adults. But when somebody who isn’t a parent and hasn’t been a student in forty years wants to collar me and go on a tirade about the “crap” that “they” are teaching in “our” schools, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to run for the hills.

Take ownership of your attention

If a chain smoker complained to you that he was chronically short of breath, or a fast food junkie groused about how hard it is to lose weight, you’d probably be biting your tongue. Where our physical health is concerned, it’s easy to tie the willing consumption of a dangerous substance to the natural consequences it produces. Some of us are outspoken about this; consider the age-old cliché, “My body is a temple.” Fair enough, but what about our minds? We’re less likely to question the growing tendency we have to be glued to our screens, scrolling through our feeds. I do hear people confessing that they probably waste too much time on social media, but this is given with the half-serious, hangdog air of somebody acknowledging something fairly harmless, like a caffeine addiction. Nobody treats overconsumption of polemic Internet content as a big problem. But I believe this content is a pollutant, and possibly as dangerous to our mental health as tobacco or junk food are to our physical health.

I think it’d be easier to get people to agree with this concept if I took the partisan angle and said either that Fox News is toxic to the brain, or that NPR is, depending on my audience. But it isn’t so much the position itself that’s the issue; as Brooks, and the Seven Habits book, point out, the despair comes from railing against what we can’t solve (and guess what: blaming one party or another doesn’t actually help). So when we use platforms that track our interests, and that have learned how to push our buttons, we’re signing up for a steady diet of emotional unease. What’s needed is the wisdom to understand the threat here, and the discipline to shelter our minds from constant provocation. It’s realizing we can choose whether or not to peer into the chasm at the deep end of the pool.

Firewall for the Mind

In the realm of computer networks, a firewall is a device (or software function) that enforces rules about what communication, or “traffic,” is permitted. It filters out threats based on where content is coming from, what type it is, and so forth. Early firewalls had an access control list with simple rules like “allow [or deny] any traffic from [source] to [destination].” Modern ones are very sophisticated; for example, the one governing my home WiFi blocks all gaming, social media, and pornography, as well as any traffic from China, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Russia, or Syria.

I’m not suggesting you focus on creating a technical impediment to this or that Internet content. A firewall for the mind isn’t something you’d configure on any device, but rather a more general rule base you create and adhere to around how you’re going to use your brain and what you’re willing to focus it on. It’s about what information, news, entertainment, etc. you’re going to allow in, what you’re going to ration, and what you’re going to reject, whether it’s online, printed, broadcast, or spoken. I propose that instead of passively receiving what’s pushed toward us, we should each start with a general rule—“deny all”—and then make specific exceptions based on what will educate, entertain, or enlighten us without any side effects like frustration, existential angst, anxiety, or a feeling of doom and gloom. This should be highly personalized—never mind what everyone around you is focusing on. After all, that’s not working out so well lately.

As an adult I’ve never had cable TV; I was a late adopter of cell phones and smartphones; I eschew all social media. I also refuse to talk about politics with just about anybody. Those are aspects of my personal firewall, and my rule base has adapted according to what’s going on in my life. For example, when my wife was pregnant, I blacklisted the book What to Expect When You’re Expecting, which is a terrorist tract designed to terrify new parents. As I headed in to my third decade in corporate America I stopped looking at “Dilbert” because it was just too cynical. In the years following the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, with political polarization at a fever pitch, I stopped reading the political articles in The New Yorker precisely because they took me deep into circle-of-concern territory where, like all kinds of people across the political spectrum, I felt aggrieved but helpless.

Of course your own rule base can be whatever you decide, but you might start with a few general questions:

• Is this content making me happy?
• Is it making me money?
• Is it making me laugh?
• Is it edifying or entertaining?
• Is it satisfying my curiosity?
• If it concerns a problem or an issue, is there some specific action I can take that will actually help?
• Does this content dwell on bad news that occupies only my circle of concern?

Existing mental firewalls

It would be naïve for me to pretend this concept is entirely new, and in fact people have been building their own mental firewalls since the dawn of human existence. The problem is, the rules are often set up not around protecting our brains from sadness and anxiety, but around tuning out what doesn’t match up with our tastes and/or belief systems. Choosing between Fox News and NPR is part of a rule base, after all. Where things are going particularly awry is that cable TV programming, much modern print journalism, and in particular the myriad content providers on the Internet are tailoring their product to us. This seems like a favor except that the end goal is always to maximize our outrage and hang on to our attention for as long as possible. The circle of concern is their happy stomping ground—not yours. Good mental firewalls thwart these mechanisms.

In general, I go after content that primarily exists to entertain or enlighten me, not persuade me. Most fiction, for example, is free of any specific agenda (and when a work’s social conscience seems too prominent, to the point it’s just depressing, I reserve the right to withdraw). Where nonfiction is concerned I particularly enjoy topics that aren’t in the news, and which nobody is bickering about, such as (to cite a convenient example) this article on caterpillars in which I encountered all kinds of delightful, non-pressing information. For example, the “caterpillar of the silver-spotted skipper … uses an air-gun-like appendage in its anus to send its [feces] pellets soaring. This practice, known as ‘fecal firing,’ discombobulates parasitic wasps.” Stuff like this argues for a more nuanced model of attention involving a Circle of Delight.

This isn’t to say the caterpillar article was all rosy; it did explain how scientists are now seeing significant declines in insect diversity and population that could become an ecological crisis, based on how many plants depend on insects for pollination. So did I start combing the Internet for more information on this problem? Did I try to make it part of my feed? No. I don’t have a feed, I’m not a scientist, and this simply isn’t my problem to solve. That’s the kind of line that I have to draw … which I think you should draw, too.

[Speaking of drawing, the art at the top of this post is by my younger daughter.]

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Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Never Discuss Politics

Introduction

The frank discussion of politics among a governed people is absolutely crucial to preserving democracy.

Bullshit. I didn’t mean a word of that … I think it’s a grand sentiment but essentially untrue. In this post I explain why nobody should discuss politics with friends, family, or other lay people.

Why do people talk about politics?

I’d guess most people who talk about politics are doing so for one of two reasons. The first reason is a simple one: to showcase their deep knowledge to others, so as to gain admiration and respect. These are, I believe, the people who advance positions their audience shares—that is, they pontificate to those who already agree with them. Sure, you might say they’re looking for a real dialogue so they can learn more and have a deeper understanding, but I doubt it. Public policy just isn’t that interesting.

A second group comprises highly opinionated people who seem to want to rile others up, and be contrarian, and dramatic, and surprising. I suppose the goal in this case is also to increase one’s influence or stature (though more through bullying than persuasion). Perhaps some of these instigators simply find this kind of discord stimulating. I can only guess.

Recently I’m getting to understand why the outcomes of polarized political dialogue are so overwhelmingly bad. Simply put, when people challenge others about politics, they tend to break all the rules of effective communication. I took a Rhetoric class in college and we studied the three main tools for advancing an argument: logos (logic); ethos (authority); and pathos (feeling). As I shall explain, discussions of politics often fall down on all three legs.

The logos (logic) problem

In courses I’ve taken on management and leadership, the most interesting thing I’ve learned is how brain chemistry affects human behavior as we react to conflict. Managers are discouraged from criticizing employees, especially in a brusque fashion. The reason, we’re advised, is that humans evolved to constantly be on the lookout for threats, and “several domains of social experience draw upon the same brain networks to maximize reward and minimize threat as the brain networks use for primary survival needs” (as explained here). Thus, we have a limbic system (i.e., lizard brain) response to being challenged, a fight-or-flight reaction, which interferes with our ability to reason: when we’re challenged like this, the “resources available for overall executive functions in the prefrontal cortex decrease.” Studies have shown that criticizing an employee lowers his or her productivity for a significant period, and that’s one reason companies want to discourage it.

Talking about politics is similar in the sense of challenging someone in a negative way. By asserting something you know a person doesn’t agree with, especially if you’re emphatic about it, you’re essentially attacking him. You can’t expect a person to react calmly and rationally to that. It is pointless to put someone on the spot and expect him to suddenly reconsider his long-held opinions or values.

My political positions are decades old, built upon a fairly basic and predictable foundation, and I am not up for debating them. If my beliefs change at all it is due to the gradual influence of a collection of professional journalistic sources that I trust, not any individual person trying to ram ideas down my throat. I am perfectly capable of evaluating a good article in terms of its rational merit—when nobody is up in my face. That’s a lot different, though, from easily engaging when somebody is sputtering doctrine. Then I would rather just roll over and disengage. This isn’t because I’m lame. It’s because I’m human and my brain chemistry is subject to the same limbic override as everyone else’s.

The ethos (authority) problem

Okay, so where challenging political discussions are concerned, rational thought is vanquished. But the problem gets worse. Much of the time, the person who wants to discuss politics has very strong opinions. These can eventually become part of a person’s self-identity, to where pursuing a political credo can become kind of a hobby. The person may seek out openly biased blogs, radio shows, or podcasts or whatever, having decided that mainstream news is “fake” in the sense of slyly pretending to be non-partisan. The problem with these non-mainstream media is that they target, select, and nurture those loyal readers, viewers, and/or listeners whose natural skepticism can be made to decrease over time until it all but vanishes. The student pundits, having decided they’ve found the only trustworthy authorities, practically decide in advance to believe whatever they’re told by these sources.

This in turn changes their media consumption experience such that they’re not looking to actually tease apart complexity and appreciate nuance … they’re just looking for the punch lines, the basic talking points, the gist. This further undermines the role logic could have played in conveying their messages—that is, because these people weren’t themselves convinced through reason, reason doesn’t form the foundation of their arguments. Thus, when they set out to challenge those who don’t share their beliefs, they subconsciously encounter an obstacle: they themselves accepted their doctrine based on the (presumed) authority of their favored pundit, but the person they’re talking to won’t acknowledge this authority. A liberal blathering to a conservative won’t get anywhere saying, “According to this thing I heard on NPR,” any more than a conservative blathering to a liberal could gain traction by quoting Fox News. And yet, ethos is the basis of the arguer’s position, so they can’t just abandon it. So they cite sources very vaguely, talking about “top scientists” or “the guys who really get it,” or simply “the experts.” Of course, citing an unnamed authority is rhetorically useless.

The pathos problem

So when logos is obliterated and ethos falls down, what does the political crusader do? Well, for one thing, he or she gets frustrated, and thus his or her temper heats up. Meanwhile, stirred up humans have the tendency to use volume, emphasis, and repetition to get their points across, particularly when this is the literary or oratorical style their highly opinionated sources are constantly modeling. This style of persuasion can occasionally be powerful, like in the hands of a master orator (think MLK). But this only works when the audience already agrees with the speaker. Pathos (and its cousin, the one-sided argument) is useful when you’re trying to whip a crowd into a lather, to galvanize them into action, but it’s not very helpful when you’re trying to change somebody’s mind about something.

Meanwhile, most people simply aren’t master orators, and their pathos is a blunt, ineffective tool. Too much of the time such talk comes across as harsh, unwelcome braying. The listener feels attacked and may wonder where this aggression is even coming from. This of course compounds the lizard brain response: the unwelcome pathos obliterates our ability to rationally weigh our opponent’s words.

The result

What does this scenario feel like for me? It’s a sense of horror at the conversational morass I’ve suddenly stepped in, and dread at how long I might be stuck there. And this scenario isn’t limited to traditional party politics. Due to the bizarre politicalization of the COVID-19 pandemic, most discussion of vaccination, masking, and other realms of public health policy becomes as annoying and unwelcome as an election year partisan diatribe.

You might reasonably wonder why I’m blogging about this instead of just telling certain people to bug off when they try to involve me in a political discussion. After all, most of my readers will never have the opportunity to talk to me about politics (or anything else). The reason is, I want everybody possible to understand how this kind of talk can damage their relationships with friends and/or family.

How? Well, I’ve already mentioned how frustrating and pointless it is to argue about this crap with someone whose prefrontal cortex has been temporarily crippled (i.e., anyone who doesn’t agree with you). Either this person takes the bait and gets into an acrimonious debate with you, or they sort of go limp, and make little noises like “hmmm,” and “oh,” or whatever, hoping they can minimize the duration of the dialogue and somehow guide the conversation back to safe ground. Out of tact, they sort of humor the antagonist. This might be the saddest scenario of all, because having to humor someone is the opposite of enjoying and preserving closeness.

What makes our friends our friends, and what determines whether we’re close to this or that family member? It’s rapport. This is why close friends and family have great conversations: they get each other and there is a huge reservoir of goodwill built up. Trust tends to grow as well, which is what makes our friends and family so valuable when we do reach out for help or advice.

This foundation of goodwill can see a relationship through difficult times, which is a godsend, because sometimes it’s appropriate to challenge those close to us. For example, if I were to worry that a good friend of mine were drinking too much, I might take it as my responsibility to try to intervene somehow. Of course I would have to proceed carefully, knowing that this would be a very delicate matter. It might take all the built-up trust and rapport we have for the friendship to withstand such an intervention, but I would have reason to hope that friend would respect my intentions (perhaps upon reflection, when the grip of his amygdala had relaxed). But why burn up rapport frivolously, just wasting it, by throwing a political harangue in someone’s face? If you have fifty topics you could bring up to your friend or family member—most of which celebrate what the two of you have in common—why on earth would you choose politics, a topic that is either boring or divisive?

Why even indulge strong opinions?

This brings me to my final point, which is that I cannot see why anyone should be immersing him/herself in highly opinionated political news to begin with. What is the point? What actions would any of us ever take based on all this information? I suppose there’s some attraction in the idea that once you’re versed in these ideas you can share them with others, and thus bring those people out of darkness … but as I’ve tried to make clear, I think the chances of this playing out successfully are pretty remote.

There’s this widespread idea that to be good citizens we need to be well informed. Well, perhaps that’s true, but there’s probably a such thing as being too informed, and there’s certainly a such thing as being too polarized, and too stirred up, and too influenced—or harassed—by those with an axe to grind. I saw this bumper sticker that said, “IF YOU’RE NOT ANGRY, YOU’RE NOT PAYING ATTENTION!” I hate that. It’s ungrateful. It’s suggesting that the person lucky enough to live in a rich country and own a car and have the right to free speech is a bad citizen if he doesn’t go around in a constant state of anger. I think if the bumper sticker has to exist, it should say, “IF YOU ARE ANGRY, YOU’RE NOT PAYING ATTENTION!” That is, if you’re angry in some general way, you’re not grateful for how good we really have it. Think of the asshole responsible for this graffiti:

Too much news

How much news is enough? Well, I think we should be sufficiently aware of the goings on in the world to be able to react when necessary. This means using less water during a drought, not traveling during a blizzard, and having enough information to participate in democracy every two years. It means satisfying our curiosity about things. I don’t think news should be a hobby, and it shouldn’t be a way to become a mouthpiece. If somebody wants the news, I let him get it himself. I don’t rebroadcast anything unless I’m recommending an article to somebody because I think he’ll appreciate and enjoy it.

I really believe that too much news, and the wrong kind of news (i.e., that which is infused with opinion and especially that which is soaked in vitriol) is bad for one’s health. When we are made aware of a terrible situation (e.g., the end of democracy, the world being doomed, the bad guys winning), and we have no means to change the situation, we feel helpless and hopeless. This is no way to live.

The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People differentiates between our “circle of influence” vs. our “circle of concern.”  Below is their schematic. The idea is that we should spend most of our mental energy on what we can influence; for example, the rapport we have with others. We should avoid spending too much energy on the circle of concern, because that’s where we’re largely helpless.

It’s possible to expand one’s circle of influence slightly, but that’s a lot of work. I mean, honestly, if you hate this or that politician, what can you really do about it, beyond the one vote you can cast against him? And when you wield that one vote, couldn’t you have decided on it without spending umpteen hours fanning the flames of your discontent? And what good is complaining about this stuff to family and friends? What do we expect them to do about it? Drop everything and join a campaign? (This isn’t a bad idea, of course, but if your friend were to decide to commit to this, it surely wouldn’t be because of anything you said.) So why immerse ourselves in this crap? There’s no good reason. Ignore the highly opinionated columnists, radio hosts, and podcasters. Don’t let them have their way with you.

I don’t read much news, and to the extent that my favorite magazine has become more political in the last couple of decades, I spend less time with it—not because I disagree with its writers’ views, but because I just don’t care. There is a world of better reading out there: novels, short stories, memoirs, general interest nonfiction, humor writing, all kinds of good stuff. It does not make me an irresponsible citizen to read all that instead of the news. It makes me a happier, more interesting person, and it mitigates the stress in my life. And when I talk to somebody, I want more of the same: curiosity, fascination, wonder, humor. I don’t want discord, and I don’t want to have to humor anybody.

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2014 - The Year in Review

Introduction

It is of course only in retrospect that we can decide what were the most important news stories of the year.  Isn’t it therefore somewhat uncanny how, if we look back now, we can see that albertnet covered all the most newsworthy happenings, even though I only blog four times a month?  How is it that my posts line up so perfectly with everybody’s “biggest news of 2014” lists?  Man.

Of course it’s not enough just to digest the news—we also need to learn some lesson from it, and take some action in our own lives.  Exactly what this lesson and these actions should be aren’t always easy to determine, so I’ve distilled them into handy slogans for you, one per month.  So, read on to distill all of 2014 into twelve easy steps to improving yourself and the world.

Note:  this will probably be my last-ever “year in review” post because this is a royal pain in the ass and I’ve finally had it.  Dang.  At least my youngest daughter supplied this groovy poster:

January:  Just lie

I know, “just lie” seems like an improbable slogan for how to be better in 2015.  But if you just take a moment to recall the big news from January—I’m talking of course about the Great Velveeta Shortage that was predicted (by Kraft) but that never actually came to pass.  In case you don’t remember this one, Kraft warned consumers that demand for Velveeta could exceed supply during the NFL playoffs.  And just in case consumers suspected this was just an attempt to drum up sales (e.g., “while supplies last!”), a Kraft spokeswoman explicitly said, “This is not a marketing/advertising campaign.”

No, albertnet didn’t report directly on the make-believe Velveeta shortage, preferring to tackle the larger issue of lying in general.  With my post Santa Denial, & How Lance Armstrong Taught Me to Lie, I described how my own ability to lie improved over the years as I watched one of dishonesty’s master craftsmen, Lance Armstrong, steadfastly deny his doping.  Kraft should really hire Lance as a consultant before their next big hoax.

Wait, you might be thinking.  Should I really take away the lesson “just lie” from these stories?  Well, yes, if you’re trying to sell food that isn’t really food, or victory that isn’t really victory.  Just make sure you come clean later, like Lance did, to teach everybody to be more skeptical.  Velveeta shortage, indeed!

February:   Learn from your mistakes!

In February, I posted a decidedly didactic essay, in which I urged my fellow cyclists not to ride in the rain and cold.  I decried the notion that riding in the rain makes you a badass, by contrasting the petty suffering  of cyclists to that of 19th-century sailors who manned the deck in all kinds of rain and snow, beating their hands against the frozen sails to ward off frostbite.

I was alluding, of course, to another badass sailor, that being Jorge Salvador Alvarenga, the fisherman from El Salvador who spent over a year adrift in the ocean catching birds and drinking turtle blood.   Alvarenga has since vowed to stay away from the ocean, which makes all kinds of sense.  You, too, should learn a lesson.  Not to stay away from the sea, necessarily, but to learn from your mistakes, or—better yet—learn things the easy way.  (Hint:  you can do this by continuing to read about my hard-learned lessons via this blog.)

March:  Bitcoin – The Emperor’s New Money!

In March, I took a moment to explain bitcoin to the masses, which essentially meant explaining why it’s such an absurd, doomed financial instrument.  Not surprisingly, my perspective was immediately validated when, days later, it was reported that the bankrupt bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox found 200,000 bitcoins, which had previously gone missing, in an old wallet.  (“Old wallet” in this context means an old digital wallet that was thought to be empty.)  What does it mean to find an electronic representation of a made-up currency lying around in an electronic representation of a wallet?  It means you’re living in a fantasy world.

Incidentally, the value of those 200,000 bitcoins was reported as being worth $116 million at the time.  Well, that was back in March.  Those same 200,000 bitcoins are now worth only $63.6 million.  (And if you’re reading this long after December 31, 2014, I predict you’ll find it’s dropped even more.)

April:  Don’t fluff that aptitude test!

Normally, when I use the phrase “sample intelligence test” or “genius quiz,” I’m referring not to an actual written exam but to an opportunity life presents to test our mental mettle.  (And if I’m honest, I usually use these phrases to mock one of my children—for example, when one of them is struggling to operate a can opener and I say, “Don’t think of it as a can opener, but as a sample intelligence test”—just to keep the pressure on and take her down a notch.)

As you will recall, not one but two pressing news stories involved such life tests, and how a person dramatically failed.  First, of course, was the airline passenger who mistook the cockpit for the lavatory, terrifying the pilots and getting himself arrested.  And then there was the homeless guy who broke into a motel room to spend the night, not noticing that it was actually a museum exhibit:  the room where Martin Luther King was assassinated. 

Earlier that very month, I blogged about one of those rare non-life-initiated, written aptitude tests, which began with a questionnaire about my race that sent my mind reeling, and a Scantron form with unnumbered boxes snaking in every direction across the page, putting me almost into a panic even before I read the first question.  What does this have to do, exactly, with the airline passenger and the homeless guy?  I’ll let you figure that out.  Think of it as a little genius quiz.

May:  The umpire strikes back!

Microsoft Word’s imbecilic grammar checker has flagged “umpire” above and suggests I “correct” it to “empire.”  I guess they assume their software is a tool for merely regurgitating other people’s content.  Sweet.

I didn’t mean “empire.”  I meant “umpire,” dammit.  I’m talking about umpires striking back after being attacked.  I’m sure I don’t need to remind you of the big news in May, about the unruly baseball fan in South Korea climbing a fence and putting the umpire in a headlock.  Well, they sure showed him … dude got a lifetime ban from that stadium and narrowly avoided a $48 fine!

I got my own comeuppance in May after attacking a group of self-appointed arbiters of cycling culture, the so-called Velominati.  Of all my 283 posts to date, none has received so many negative comments.  The Velominati also trashed me in their own pages.  (Do I mind?  Actually, no.  In keeping with the old adage “there’s no such thing as bad publicity,” my blog has enjoyed increased traffic ever since that fracas.  And, I hasten to add, I stand by all my criticism of those silly Velominati rules.)

June:  Dads are people too!

June brought the earth-shattering news of a study finding men are actually more sensitive than women.  (I’m not, of course; I’m often called a “heartless, unfeeling iceberg,” though mostly by myself.) 

As if in response to the aforementioned article, a day later I posted an essay, What Are Fathers For?, that showcases the sensitivity of the modern man—not just to things like Father’s Day cards, but to touchy issues, like whether fathers serve any real purpose, and to what extent our helpfulness and solicitousness actually cause us to lose our children’s respect.  Colud it be, I wondered, that we should just get out of the way?  I guess I could handle that, and just hang out at the Hotsy-Totsy Club with my degenerate friends.

[Okay, we’re halfway home.  Yeah, I know this post is long, but chances are good that, like me, you neglected the 24-hour news cycle all year, so you’re really getting off easy.  (I hope you know I’m missing out on watching “Dr. Who” with my teenager right now.)]

July:   Spelling counts!

Once again, my blog and the greater news media converged this month.  Almost the same day I blogged about how nobody in Hawaii seems able to spell, back on the mainland a baseball team committed a serious spelling error itself, dishonoring its star player 15,000 times in one fell swoop.  I’m referring, of course, to the Colorado Rockies celebrating their shortstop, Troy Tulowitzki, and specifically his league-topping batting average, by making a whole slew of commemorative t-shirts with “Tulowizki” printed on them.  (In case you missed it, they spelled his name wrong.)

There’s nothing very funny about that, which makes it even worse than some of the Hawaiian spellings.  Our favorites were “Bubba’s Buger” and the salubrious “Acai Bowel” (both of which were items on menus). 

August:  Talk to the hand (not the handheld)

In August I decided to review a taqueria in Hawaii, but didn’t have a laptop on me.  No problem, since I had a smartphone … right?  Well, I never got very good at typing on the touch-screen (maybe my fingers are too stubby), so I used the voice recognition feature.  This yielded some amusing errors and a couple of new turns of phrase I rather liked (e.g., “when it folded in 2007 it was a great opera”).  Of course, this is all harmless fun when you’re just talking about burritos.  When the same technology is applied to a ton and a half of steel that can do 80 mph, that’s another matter, and here my blog prefigured the really big news in August, which was the scathing report J.D. Power gave of the current state of the art in automotive voice recognition.  For example, you might clearly ask your car to turn on the AC, only to have it search for nearby pizza places.

September:  Rats are people, too!

It’s funny how we think of rodents.  Mice are cute and all, but rats—with their big fat hairless tails—are almost universally reviled.  Birds, meanwhile, poop on us and get away scot-free.  (Who hasn’t been pooped on by a bird?  And who has been pooped on by a rat?)  In fact, many of us—such as my own daughter—make a special effort to feed birds in our own backyards.  I’m not aware of any castigation of birders, until their actions breed rats, as was famously described here in the sordid tale of a crazy bird lady attracting rats to a community garden.

Of course my finger was right on the pulse of this growing societal ill, as I demonstrated with my September post  I Don’t Smell a Rat which chronicled the shockingly bold rat who took up residence in my backyard, shamelessly stuffing himself on the expensive seeds we’d earmarked for local birds.  This rat caused family strife by seeming to ignore my cat, who in turn seemed to ignore the rat.  What was I to do, other than berate the cat?  Poison seemed too harsh (for either of the little mammals).  So I did nothing, which worked out fine because opportunity ushered in Misha’s finest hour—her apotheosis from old, lazy layabout to fierce, fearless, brilliant slayer of vermin!  Yeah, that’s right, she got medieval on that rat’s heinie, despite it being just about the hugest rat I’ve ever seen!  Go Misha!

October:  Subject sweets to serious science studies!

For decades I’ve subscribed to the “glycogen window” idea, that being that simple carbs consumed right after intense exercise will greatly enhance recovery.  I only ever had empirical evidence of this principle, until my daughter stepped up and tested it, rigorously, for her school science project.  If you somehow missed this post, click here and see if you don’t find her methodology, execution, and conclusion to be utterly compelling.

Ah, if only the professionals were so thorough!  This same month, a study by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) rebuffed the long-held and universally accepted premise (far more mainstream than the glycogen window theory) that consuming carbs is beneficial during endurance exercise.  That’s right, they denied the benefit of taking in calories during hours-long efforts.  Critics proposed that the EFSA’s finding was due to evidence not being presented properly or some such nonsense.  The more accurate conclusion, obviously, is that all the funding for that study should rightfully go to my daughter.  Sheesh.

November:   If you can understand it, it ain’t “Andrei Rublev”

I’ve long believed that the acid test for intellectual cred is being able to watch, and understand, the Russian movie “Andrei Rublev,” and until last month, I didn’t think I could actually do it.  After all, I’d tried before, but crashed and burned.  What a triumph, then, to actually prevail, and glean enough to blog about it (here).  It’s a good thing this viewing triumph bolstered my confidence, because as all educated people know, the biggest news worldwide in November somehow never got translated into English.  

If you’re one of those who missed out, don’t worry … it’s not your fault.  I’m referring of course to the business with the Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius, “Russia piece of evidence awakening spirituality,” which was covered only in Indonesian.  I wouldn’t have bothered painstakingly translating the article, except that it mentioned that the works of Andrei Rublev adorn the walls of this cathedral.  I guess once you’ve made it through the movie, your intellect is forever improved, to the point that an article in English hardly seems challenging enough to bother with.

December:  Just say “no” to shopping

I will confess that my blog lagged behind world news a bit in December.  I was so busy celebrating the lack of public interest in Black Friday, and the suggestion that Americans are actually finding better things to do than shop, that I missed the bigger story about retailers wanting to open on Thanksgiving Day itself, just to extend the consumer frenzy even further.  Fortunately, there’s a backlash to this development.  In a perfect world, we wouldn’t need a backlash, and wouldn’t need consumers to pledge not to shop on this holiday, but of course a perfect world wouldn’t give bloggers like me as much to make fun of.

In closing

At a loss for new year’s resolutions?  Well, you could do worse than to turn my 12 month-by-month slogans into action next year.  And if that seems like too much work, resolve to get all your news from albertnet next year.  That’ll save you a lot of effort, since world news and this blog are pretty much saying the same thing anyway…

Happy new year!

2010 - The Year in Review

Introduction

Last year I did a “Year in Review” blog post in which I made the claim that “throughout the year I’ve based my blog posts on the most important current events” and that blog topics “that must have seemed completely random to you will now, with the benefit of perspective, prove to be the most timely and pressing issues of the day.” I set about backing up those unlikely claims, in the rhetorical-joy-ride spirit of making my outlandish and patently false statement seem reasonable. I figured I’d make a tradition of that format, and set out this year to do exactly the same thing.

Alas, either I got lucky last year, or my mental faculties have severely declined during 2010, because I can’t manage to tie in my last 48 blog posts with the big news events of the year. Thus I find myself with about 150 minutes left (before I leave for a New Year’s party) to create my end-of-year blog post. So, inspired by an episode of “Magnum, P.I.” in which the writers had completely run out of ideas and/or budget and resorted to loosely tying a together bunch of old footage with Magnum and his buds sitting around reminiscing, I’ll give you a “blog post highlights” ensemble. If you enjoy it, great; if not, you can enjoy making fun of me behind my back.

January

I started off the year by racing my bike up Mt. San Bruno on January 1. At the summit, as I caught my breath after 18 minutes of terrible suffering, I witnessed the grotesque spectacle of a racer who had not only ridden too hard in the race, but had clearly partied too hard the night before. As I wrote, “He’d climbed off his bike and was sitting on a low stone guardrail, staring blankly into middle distance. To say he was frowning doesn’t cover it. Every part of him was frowning. His mouth had an exaggerated closed-lip crease of a frown, extending down so far it almost reached the edge of his chin. His eyes were frowning as though tugged downward at the outer edges. The bags under his eyes were frowning, his eyebrows were frowning, and the creases in his forehead were frowning. Moreover, as he hunched over even his shoulders were frowning. He reminded me of one of those Greek theatre tragedy masks.” I gaped for several long moments before realizing it was the friend I’d driven to the race, and was in fact looking for at that very moment. I literally hadn’t recognized him.

The race had perhaps been a test of my manhood, but a greater test awaited me in January: could I install a new dishwasher by myself, instead of hiring some handyman? I had serious misgivings, so as a twisted method of steeling my resolve I chatted with my brother online about it, and told him I was on the fence about taking on the task. I admitted, in fact, that I was feeling like a wuss. He replied, “Like a wuss—because you're sick, or scared, or what?” He sent me a link to a 28-page online installation guide, and said, “Man, with instructions like those, you can’t go wrong! Just don't let the wife see them, or she’ll figure she can do it!” (His mention of my wife was masterful; he was tacitly pointing out that my reputation as a man was on the line.) I mentioned that I didn’t have the soldering iron mentioned in the instructions, and he retorted, “You don’t have to solder! You’d use a torch, anyway. Now there’s a man’s tool.” And so on, until there was no question but that I had to try it. The post documents my trial. I’m happy to report that almost a year later, the dishwasher still working like a champ.

As a companion piece to the dishwasher installation tale, I posted an essay, from my vast personal archives, that is an extended lament on the following topic: “Men have come a long way toward contributing equally to the ongoing housekeeping and child-rearing duties; have developed impressive cooking and diaper-changing and even ironing skills; have sincerely adopted the principles of gender equality; have even learned how to be emotionally sensitive in a manly, non-effete way—and yet both women and men alike are still immersed in the timeless conviction that all men should have the robust, uncomplaining, tireless physical strength and invulnerable armored flesh of the day laborer.”

I rounded out January with an examination of how modern cyclists use electronic data-gathering devices, based on a survey of fifty-two of my cycling pals. Remarkably, though only 17% of these riders still race regularly (and 60% don’t race at all), fully three quarters of them use these sophisticated training devices, and a quarter of them use highly expensive power meters.

February

Finally, some real action hit albertnet: the story of a friend crashing on a bike ride. The crash itself, eerily, was prefigured by our chitchat earlier in the ride: “All this crash talk … could we sense fate lurking in the background? It wasn’t a day for the Grim Reaper to come looking for a soul, but perhaps we had a collective hunch that the Grim Weed-Whacker might be seeking a flesh offering.…” If you have a taste for schadenfreude, or even for a side discussion of economics or some “Star Trek” references, check it out!

I also posted an archival story of the sad demise of my old (360,000-mile veteran) ’84 Volvo; a discussion of the bedtime story ritual I have with my kids; and an impassioned plea for Gmail users to use my special high-tech Adsense blocker to foil the insidious ads that Google places alongside the e-mail. These ads are based on text within your messages and those of your friends and family, but nobody seems to care. Alas, I fear that this post, just like my 2009 essay about keyboard layout and repetitive stress injuries, was a mere tilting at windmills—that is, pissing into the wind. But hey, I tried.

March

I started the month with a long complaint titled “I’m Not Complaining.” If you don’t find the post funny, you can laugh at the accompanying doctored photo; I don’t have Photoshop so I did some actual cutting and pasting (and ended up with a paper doll of myself my kids had some fun with).

Following that, I posted an essay comparing the relative merits of highbrow and lowbrow entertainment, focusing on a comparison of the King Tut exhibit at San Francisco’s de Young museum to the movie “Avatar.” Really, it was no contest: high ambition aside, the de Young exhibit was a joke, and should have been called, “Some Stuff We Found in Tut’s Cousin’s Car.”

I filled out the month with a stab at fiction, and then posted a study, from my archives, about the strange new sports-medicine science of rinsing. Rinsing means tasting—without ingesting—energy drink. That’s right, a serious study that involves spitting out tasty beverages onto the road.

April

A pleasant surprise for the albertnet reader: a post that actually ties in nicely with current events. In May, a kid named Jordan Romero became the youngest person ever to climb Mt. Everest. The month before, I blogged about his plans to attempt this feat, comparing it to a foolhardy (but much less dangerous) exploit from my own youth: riding my bike over the highest pass in North America with almost no food, no money, and no cold-weather gear.

I also blogged about staying in a motel. Could this possibly be interesting? Well, here’s an excerpt, from a bit about the breakfast bar: “There are Plexiglas domes, with hinged doors, over trays of innocuous items like English muffins, biscuits, and bagels; what’s unsettling here are amateurish labels stuck on each saying ‘Please use tongs.’ Somebody at this motel, or from the home office, had to go buy a label-maker and make all these labels because something was happening in these breakfast rooms the dome manufacturer never anticipated. Had there been complaints of people fondling the pastries? Poking and prodding them like produce? Or something even worse?” If that grabs you, check out the full post!

April also features a story about an underground bike tour I did in and around a major western city. This story has been called “the most fascinating and thought-provoking of its kind ever published in English,” if only by me, and just now, and for self-promotional purposes. I also posted an archived story about the Markleeville Death Ride. In this post I offered a prize to the first reader to point out its sneaky literary gimmick. So far, the prize is unclaimed. It’s possible that nobody ever read the story. Your chances here are far better than with any lottery or raffle!

May

Anybody familiar with sibling rivalry will be happy to know that my brother Bryan took me to task for the article on sports-drink rinsing I posted in March. So this month I wrote a follow-up essay defending myself while also going on the offensive. If albertnet were a tacky reality-TV show, the promo for this episode would have one of us saying, “It is on. It is so on.”

If you like bicycles, and want to see a photo of a very strange beach cruiser with 36-inch wheels, and want to saturate yourself in a lively discussion of the ins and outs of bike mechanics, you’ll have to check out “Big Red – Letters to a Young Gearhead.” If this sounds appalling, turn instead to its polar opposite, art criticism. See? Albertnet has it all! And if that’s not enough, you can enjoy a photo-rich account of a couple of guys standing around in poison oak in the cold rain freezing their butts off for a couple of hours, just to spend two minutes watching the best bike racers in the world go by during the Tour of California.

June

If you’ve ever wanted to write a sonnet, but didn’t know how, I wrote a guide providing detailed instructions for the intrepid budding poet. I’m not going to say that writing a full iambic pentameter Shakespearean sonnet is child’s play, but I should point out that, having read my instructions and passed the short sample test provided, my nine-year-old child wrote two beautiful sonnets, which she gave to my wife and me for Christmas. (I’ll post one of them, at the end of the original sonnet post, shortly.)

Following that is a wild post about a very strange encounter I had with a crazy guy while chaperoning a bunch of third-graders on a field trip to San Francisco. As I wrote therein, “I actually have a track record of being singled out by crazy people. I don’t know why. I mean, we all encounter the occasional nutjob—the woman standing on a street corner holding a coffee can at her chest, pointing it at cars and shouting profanities; the dude on the department store bike zigzagging wildly down Wildcat Canyon Road yelling at my bike club, ‘You’re all dog crap!’; the woman angrily ripping leaves off a tree and stuffing them in a trash can—but crazy people seem drawn to me and often engage me in one way or another. I suppose if I’d thought to mention this to the school, they’d have found somebody to replace me as chaperone.” Read all about it here.

“The Phantom Solace,” a short story I posted in June, has been called “a refreshingly off-the-wall and entirely entertaining literary lark in the tradition of Alice in Wonderland” by all zero of the people who read it. If fiction isn’t your bag, but you think you might instead like a ripping yarn about a new parent boiling over in the face of a botched diaper change, check out this post, taken from my archives.

July

Everybody loves the thrill of victory, and in July, as I drooled in anticipation of the Tour de France, I did a post cataloguing the various forms of bike race victory salutes. I used my two daughters as models for photos and movies illustrating this most beautiful of human gestures. Following that (perhaps drunk on my own bathwater), I foolishly dared to criticize soccer, “the beautiful game,” in commemoration of the single World Cup game that I’d seen on TV and was still sore from wincing my way through.

As my “from the archives” post for July I put forth an essay I wrote while a college student at UCSB, about a kid struggling to fit in in a new place while dreaming of becoming a writer. Speaking of vocations, I finished July off with an essay about the seemingly innocuous conversation opener “What do you do?”, exploring its hidden pitfalls: “The person who gets asked this question may naturally assume you’re attempting to place him in some sort of social hierarchy; if he’s insecure, the question may strike him as a euphemistic version of ‘What the hell good are you, anyway?’ Meanwhile, with our ongoing economic meltdown, the person you ask may well be unemployed, which would start the conversation off on an awkward foot indeed… This blog post is about the problems inherent in this question; the duty incumbent upon all of us to quash it; and some handy how-to suggestions.”

August

By August, I was tired of writing, and my audience (i.e., my mom) was tired of reading, so a vacation was just the thing for all (i.e., both) of us. My family and I took a long train trip, and I submitted three travelogue posts with lots of photos. A certain amount of text was inevitable—I can’t help it—but you’ll be delighted to know that the “situation room” sequences concern train car restroom disasters. Just try ignoring those! Here are the links: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

I finished up the month with a from-the-archives essay about the 7,500-mile cross-country bike tour my wife and I did in 1994. The essay is the final from-the-road dispatch that I sent around, via CompuServe e-mail, from the laptop—equipped with 2400-baud modem—that I brought along on the tour. Many more photos here.

September

The kids went back to school, and I blogged about it, recalling that awful, magical annual childhood ritual. Then it was time for new cycling shoes, and I managed to wring some crushing pathos from the topic. Okay, it was nothing like crushing pathos, but I did find myself caring more about shoes than I thought a man capable of being. I included photos of very early cycling shoes, unaware that the discovery of the oldest shoes on record, magically preserved in sheep dung, had stolen my thunder three months before.

Another post from September might have embroiled me in a seditious libel lawsuit, had the injured party not been (evidently) too stoned to Google herself and notice my story. Speaking of the munchies, I also posted the tale of how I ate my way through another leg-crushing edition of the Everest Challenge bike race.

October

Every now and then I put a whole lot of work into a blog post, and in October I researched and wrote an essay about something that had been on my mind for years: the uncanny similarity between Lance Armstrong and Eminem. This essay ponders the strange question of why cyclists suspected of doping are fair game for all manner of witch hunters, while other entertainers freely abuse drugs, setting a terrible example for our kids, while going scot-free. The conclusion I reach in my analysis may surprise you. If you’re at all interested in the topic of doping in sport, don’t miss this one.

After this heavy topic I drifted into the merely caloric: a post about making pasta by hand, including guidelines, instructions, and loads of photos. Then I blogged about the Great California ShakeOut, which was the largest earthquake drill in the history of the United States. (If this seems like a pedantic subject, just think back to January and the terrible earthquake in Haiti, or February and the terrible earthquake in Chile, and if you live in an earthquake zone, ask yourself how prepared you really are.) I wrapped up October with a humor piece, from my archives, about business travel.

November

My nine-year-old struggled to learn the parts of speech by memorizing a rap song about them … and a blog post was born. It goes without saying that, having read the very tame rap she’d been given by her teacher, I had to create my own. Along the way I reflected on the strange ease with which kids memorize songs … as long as the lyrics are naughty.

Following that self-assigned writing project, I finally got around to replacing the frame of my commuter bike, documenting the difficult process (with description and photos) along the way. This is definitely one for the gearheads. For everybody else, there is a post giving poignant tales of Thanksgiving meals gone awry, and a pre-turkey bike ride that almost went really well.

I wrapped up the month with another fictional piece, this time in the guise of a scientific study of how rejection affects health. This post has been compared to the groundbreaking work of … nobody!

December

Truth can be not only stranger than fiction, but more harrowing. So it was when I was blindsided by the Lotion Sniper this year. Happily, I lived to tell the tale. Thus, I was able to continue my fond tradition of writing a whimsical Holiday Newsletter, which I’ve posted to albertnet. For once, I have actual quote-worthy praise, from my brother Max: “I laughed so hard I pissed myself!” (I’m sure he was exaggerating, but at least he didn’t damn me with faint praise.) The rest of the month, until now, was dominated by bad weather and indoor workouts, which almost killed me. Excerpts from my December '10 Trainer Diaries give a dark glimpse into this hideous realm.

Thank you

Thank you for visiting albertnet, and for following this blog (if not all year, at least for this post).

Actually, wait a second … shouldn’t you be thanking me? No, of course not. As all content creators will tell you (be it a creators of a book, play, movie, or album), I couldn’t do it without you. Except that I could. And probably do.

Anyway, happy new year!

dana albert blog