Category: ruminations

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One billion of your closest friends

(Yes, this post takes inspiration from an Abba song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BshxCIjNEjY)

It’s hard to put into words how insanely awesome and crazy the past couple of weeks have been. That confluence of rehearsals plus performances with the busiest of workweeks sure makes life interesting. Throw in conference calls and holiday parties — sheer insanity. I’m physically and mentally exhausted and might be getting sick, but it’s been a lot of fun with ups and downs.

The Nutcracker this year was more special because I felt much less of an outsider. Maybe it’s that the kids were much friendlier and the adults also a more cohesive group, or maybe it’s that doing an actual variation (Russian) — even if poorly — made me feel slightly more legitimate this time around. I know for sure that it’s not the closing of the technique gap: everyone else still dances circles around me (pun intended). In any case, the crazy tech week rehearsal schedule was tolerable even though they punctuated the 10 to 11 hour workdays during the earlier part of the week.

The performance weekend was simply magical. I don’t know how we get through five performances over three days, but that mix of adrenaline and mutual support somehow got everyone through the rather brutal schedule. It’s a rather nice break to drop everything else in life and just focus so deeply on something in which you have not aptitude that it feels really real for a few days. When I get to perform with people who truly believe in what they are doing, it seems so incredibly beautiful that I feel this glimmer of pride and emotion(?).

Some shoutouts: my Clara this year is quite good and is a very promising dancer. I look forward to watching her grow and mature as a dancer — one day, I’m sure she’ll do SPF. Mad props to “Rubies” for nailing SPF on such short notice; she has improved so much over the past couple years, it’s amazing and inspirational. And to KD and YP for dancing beautifully in their roles; they make me believe that this is not a completely foolish errand. And of course “Beauty” is always mesmerizing on stage regardless of her role. And to DC for being a great Mouse King foil and making rehearsals a lot of fun.

I still think those mirliton costumes are kind of cute.

And despite my attempts at dissuading everyone from attending, I really am very grateful for all those friends who showed up and watched the performances. It really means a lot to have you in the audience. One of these years, I will be confident enough to actually invite people to attend.

Also, I really need to learn how to smile onstage. Worst fake smile ever. I guess I can’t jettison all that inner irony/sarcasm in just a few years, but I’m really trying very hard.

Also also, my party scene wife gave me a nutcracker, so now I have one of those.

Finally was able to procure tickets to see Yo Yo Ma! A decade of waiting is about to end early next year. I am uncomfortably excited.

The title of this post is regarding to what I was trying to explain to my friends on our monthly(ish) conference call regarding question #4: life philosophy, and a similar line of thought I had at the theater. Which is that, in the theater, we performed for only a few hundred people at a time. The show itself is probably not life-changing to anyone in any way, yet it feels real and worthwhile. Live performances, though, are always under economic pressure because they just don’t scale well.

On the other hand, the products that I work on at work literally affect a billion people, albeit in generally minuscule ways. Maybe it’s true that by surfacing relevant information to people, we do save lives and improve the wellbeing of humanity as a whole. The reach is surely there. But, saving ten seconds for a billion people isn’t the same as saving one individual’s life. More and more, I wonder if I should be taking a more personal approach towards work, and life in general. The hordes of data do mask the underlying people — entire lives and beings — to some extent, and maybe I have become numb to some aspects of that. When a 1% change means millions of people… it’s hard to even comprehend that sense of perspective. There are all sorts of people out there, both good and bad, that use search.

But it’s also a personal issue, too. How to live my life and imbue it with some semblance of meaning. Isn’t it the personal connections, which are necessarily few, the ones that truly matter? And if so, am I being untrue to myself by not spending time working on establishing and nurturing those? That is, finding a job that cares for individuals as such. But another part of me says that I’m doing a job that I’m relatively good at doing, and that I am probably contributing to society as best as I can, so who cares if it feels a little off. And I still love my job, despite these philosophical tensions, so who knows.

Went to the company holiday party last night. The De Young Museum is actually surprisingly large and quite a swanky venue for the holiday party. It was quite nice that the exhibits and galleries were open; wandering around the museum was fun, and I hope to visit again in a non-holiday-party setting. It’s always fun to see a bunch of engineer coworkers get all dressed up. And omg, “IJ” was even more stunningly beautiful than usual. I do wish that I were a little hungrier, because all the food looked delicious but I hadn’t the appetite. Chocolate-dipped bacon was the highlight of the desserts. Pretty damn good.

And then went to a white elephant party this afternoon with some friends I haven’t seen in far too long (recurring theme of my life). I really should be much less lazy about visiting people in sf, although I feel like maybe they should come down here sometimes, too. It was actually a nice gift exchange, and I’m glad that someone seemed to enjoy the Boyz II Men Christmas album, which I’d hoped would be hilarious. All the gifts were actually pretty good.

This late-night blog post writing caps quite the interesting two weeks. I’m really tired, but in a good way. I suppose we all taste the bittersweet and either learn to love it or hate it.

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Some Simple Strands

I was going to spend the weekend writing *the* post, but then I took a nap and oh look how time flies. I do feel a little bad about missing out on hardly strictly, but maybe spending the Sunday afternoon collecting my thoughts after the rather rough two weeks I’ve had at work was the right thing to do, even if the voices inside my head will drive me crazy at some point.

As unpleasant as it is trying to sustain 14-hour workdays for around 10 days straight, I still feel like complete shit when projects get completed. It’s like I have all this momentum and adrenaline piled up, and now there’s nowhere to divert this energy. Sometimes, it’s stressful to not be stressed out. The good news, I guess, is that work never ends and will pick up shortly.

Life has been so incredibly frustrating on so many fronts this year. This despite it being a year with many memorable moments as well.

Point one: I’ve been absolutely stymied by the books I’ve been trying to read the past half year or so. I’m beginning to doubt I will ever be able to get through Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, to say nothing of the Rabbit tetralogy (halfway through Rabbit is Rich, averaging under a page a day). And why did I use my airline miles on subscriptions to Time and Scientific American when I just don’t have the time or desire to read them? I’ve tossed the last few months’ issues away.

Point two: work. I don’t really know what I’m doing wrong, but I feel like I’m stagnating at work. It’s not so much that I’m not learning anymore because I still am, but there’s just this nagging philosophical doubt that I can’t quite shake loose. Also, knowing that there are all these cool and interesting projects that other people are working on and that I seem to never have the time to contribute to just makes me a little sad.

Point three: that will be in the aforementioned post, if it ever sees the light of day.

Point four: the maddening love-hate relationship I have with ballet. I’m not even sure I can explain the level of cognitive dissonance this surfaces. If a real relationship is this hard, maybe it’s better to be unattached. But at least I’ve stuck with it, right? Please don’t ever leave me.

So I went to the Florence and the Machine concert on Friday night because my friend had an extra ticket, and we all left after 3 songs. Not so much because it wasn’t a good performance (it was), but maybe more because the experience was so detached (at least in my mind; the others might have just wanted to skip traffic). It’s weird when you can appreciate a show for what it is, yet not feel attached to it at all — I think this is kind of the tragedy about going to a concert where you’re unfamiliar with the music. When everyone else in the crowd seems so really into it, and in the back of your mind you’re kind of wondering why. I think a lot of people were high, which might have enhanced the experience.

I saw some post that lead me to this Richard Dawkins piece about the stupefying odds of just being alive.
http://old.richarddawkins.net/articles/91-to-live-at-all-is-miracle-enough

A small musical strand: there’s probably more music out there right now than anyone can listen to in a lifetime. And if humanity is lucky, there will be so much new music created, that at some point in the distant future, so many seminal artists will be forgotten due to the sheer weight of good music in the future. That there will be a day when people won’t remember hip hop anymore, or the Beatles, or maybe even Bach. And that maybe that future wouldn’t necessarily be some dystopia, but one where everything is so much more amazing than we can imagine today.

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Process

If there’s one thing I learned from poker, it’s that it will break your heart. The other thing is that you have to trust the process, not the outcome. There are very few times when you’re guaranteed to win, and there’s always someone there ready to catch some lucky draw. You have to trust that, using the correct system, you will win in the long run, even amidst very long bouts of losses. Going on tilt — that is, playing more loosely than normal — for even a session can undo days to weeks of expected value. So at least in limit hold’em, if you play correctly, despite the heartbreak being inevitable, if you can stomach the variance, then so is success. Patience is a virtue, or so they say.

The recent DNC speeches have also surfaced in my mind what the American Dream means — an equal opportunity for everyone to succeed, not an equal outcome of success. A level playing field does not mean that everyone will win, but just that everyone has a chance at winning if they try hard and catch few lucky breaks.

The funny thing about life, though, is that it isn’t fair. There has never been, and will never be, a level playing field. Even without a rigid caste system, there’s little denying that the socioeconomic status from where you were born has an outsized effect on the chances that you will succeed socioeconomically in life. And unlike in poker, where you can play through hundreds of thousands of hands per year, those seminal moments in one’s life that shape and elucidate who are you are much rarer.

These past few weeks, I’ve been slowly slogging through Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, which despite being a book of roughly 80 pages, has been incredibly difficult and slow for me to read. One thing that I find fascinating is the similarity between Stoics and Daoists in terms of containing an undercurrent of fatalism and how one deals with it. We all live in a world where we are buffeted by randomness, and we all die. All that we do, and all that we are, is impermanent. Yet, there is some (universal?) notion that there is a right way to live that is independent of how it affects our present conditions — that is, a manner of living that is not selfish and is good. The Golden Rule without any expectation of reciprocation.

It used to seem so _obvious_ that if I adhered to living a “good and just” life, that love and everything else in my life would just work out for me. That karma would enforce just deserts. I guess maybe it just feels like a failure and I feel so unhappy because I’m so close to getting everything I would desire. But I guess maybe I shouldn’t be unhappy: if I’ve lived my life the way I should have, if I’ve followed The Way and settled my debts and obligations — if I have followed the process, then why should I be dissatisfied with the outcome? If the cards I’ve been dealt mean that I will live alone, then what right have I to complain? What use is there in begrudging that which is out of my control?

My biggest fear in life is that maybe I’m wrong, and that I’m not doing the right thing. That maybe hedonism and Epicureanism is more correct. But if I still truly believe that I am living my life in a good manner (which I’m pretty sure, or at least I’m trying), then these everyday outcomes and setbacks shouldn’t concern me; my life just might be a “bad beat.” That shouldn’t prevent my tasking myself with making the world a better place despite any sadness I incur. I should just focus on the long run even if, as Keynes noted, we are all dead by then.