Roosevelt illustrates the differences between France and America at the turn of the century

In 1910 Theodore Roosevelt was engaged in a speaking tour of Europe, following his Smithsonian-led, Carnegie-sponsored African safari. Roosevelt was in Berlin, speaking with Kaiser Wilhelm, when he received a telegram. President Taft asked Roosevelt to represent the United States at the funeral of the British King Edward VII. What follows is an excerpt of Roosevelt's interactions with the French minister of foreign affairs, Stephen Pichon. Below, italcized text represent Roosevelt as quoted by Edmund Morris in Colonel Roosevelt; standard text represents Morris' writing.

[At a wake prior to the funeral, Pichon] got me aside and asked me in French, as he did not speak English, what colored coat my coachman had worn that evening. I told him that I did not know; whereupon he answered that his coachman had a black coat. I nodded and said Yes, I thought mine had a black coat also. He responded with much violence that this was an outrage, a slight upon the two great republics, as all the Royalties' coachmen wore red coats, and that he would at once make a protest on behalf of us both. I told him to hold on, that he must not make any protests on my behalf, that I did not care what kind of coat my coachman wore, and would be perfectly willing to see him wear a green coat with yellow splashes--"un plaetot vert avec des tauches jaunes" being my effort at idiomatic rendering of the idea, for I speak French, I am sorry to say, as if it were a non-Aryan tongue, without tense or gender, although with agglutinative vividness and fluency. My incautious incursion into levity in a foreign tongue met appropriate punishment, for I spent the next fifteen minutes in eradicating from Pichon's mind the belief that I was demanding these colors as my livery.

[The next day, at the funeral procession]

Friday, 20 May 1910, was a day so beautiful that all London seemed to want to be outdoors and see the procession scheduled to depart from Buckingham Palace at 9:30 A.M. Hours before the first drumbeat sounded, a mass of humanity blocked every approach to the parade route along the Mall to Westmisnter Hall. There was little noise and less movement as the crowd waited under a cloudless sky. Green Park was at its greenest. The air, washed clean by rain overnight, was sweet and warm, alive with birdsong.

Rosevelt arrived early in the palace yard, where horses and coaches were lining up, and was again accosted by a furious Stephen Pichon. The Duke of Norfolk had decreed that because of their lack of royal uniforms, they could not ride with the mounted mourners. Instead, they were to share a dress landau. Pichon noted, in a voice shaking with rage, that it would be eighth in a sequence of twelve, behind a carriage packed with Chinese imperials of uncertain gender. Not only that, it was a closed conveyance, whereas some royal ladies up front had been assigned "glass coaches."

The landau struck Roosevelt as luxurious all the same, and he admitted afterward, in describing the funeral, that he had never heard of glass coaches "excepting in connection with Cinderella." But Pichon could not be calmed down:

He continued that "ces Chinois" were put ahead of us. To this I answered that any people dressed as gorgeously as "ces Chinois" ought to go ahead of us; but he responded that it was not a laughing matter. Then he hadded that "ce Perse" had been put in with us, pointing out a Persian prince of the blood royal, a deprecatory, inoffensive-looking Levantine of Parisian education, who was obviously ill at ease, but whom Pichon insisted upon regarding as someone who wanted to be offensive. At this moment our coach drove up, and Pichon bounced into it. I suppose he had gotten in to take the right-hand rear seet, to which I was totally indifferent.... But Pichon was scrupulous in giving me precedence, although I had no idea whether I was entitled to it or not. He sat on the left rear seat himself, stretched his arm across the right seat and motioned me to get it so that "ce Perse" should not himself take the place of honor! Accordingly I got in, and the unfortunate Persian followed, looking about as unaggressive as a rabbit in a cage with two boa constrictors.

[...]

Roosevelt sat well back, with the strange reticence that sometimes overcame him on ceremonial occasions, avoiding eye contact with the crowd. There was no indicating that he was being subjected to a further Gallic tirade:

Pichon's feelings overcame him.... He pointed out the fact that we were following "toutes ces petites royautes," even "le roi du Portugal." I then spoke to him seriously, and said that in my judgment France and the United States were so important that it was of no earthly consequence whether their representatives went before or behind the representatives of utterly insignificant little nations like Portgal, and that I thought it was a great mistake to make a fuss about it, because it showed a lack of self-confidence. He shook his head, and said that in Europe they regarded these things as of real importance, and that if I would not join him in a protest he would make one on his own account. I answered that I very earnestly hoped that he would not make a row at a funeral (my French failed me at this point, and I tried alternately "funeraille" and "pompe funebre"), that it would be sure to have a bad effect.

A Franco-American accord (Persia abstaining) was reached before the landau made its first stop at Parliament Square. Pichon agreed to wait and see where he was seated later in the day, at lunch in Windsor Castle, before making his placement a casus belli that might prevent France's attendance at the future coronation of George V.

-Colonel Roosevelt, p. 65-66

SAT Critical Reading Guidelines - in progress

Note: this is a draft, and will be updated. But as I know some people are taking the test in a couple days, this might be a helpful last-minute refresher.


SAT Critical Reading Guidelines
By Ryan Yamada

General Critical Reading test-taking strategies:

1. Take Notes.

You might want to consider taking notes as you read a passage. It might help clarify the main idea, secondary ideas, tone, type of passage, and narrator perspective (omniscient, objective, subjective). In addition to reducing the load on your short-term memory, it may help you think more critically and actively engage with the passage.

2. Use Cross-Consistency (carefully).

Occasionally, you have enough similar questions in a problem that you can check for cross-consistency. As mentioned, this is potentially very dangerous and can backfire. Still, if you're reasonably sure on two questions and struggle with a third, you might be able to help clarify the answer to the third.

3. Use line references.

By identifying the line references before you read, you may improve your focus. Be advised, however, that you should start focusing somewhat before the line reference starts.

4. Depend only upon what is written.

Leave outside knowledge, your emotional response, and your moral judgment at the door. They will not help you with the passage. Everything you need is written, and excessive internal commentary as you read can cloud your judgment and cause you to miss key bits of information/language.

Main Idea Questions:

1. Read the introduction to the passage.

Sometimes this gives a major clue as to the main idea.

2. Read the first paragraph or two carefully.

The main idea will definitely appear in the first 1-2 paragraphs. The first paragraph might be introductory, which can lead to a confusing impression of what the main idea is. It’s better to continue reading carefully through the second, just to be sure.

3. Take notes for each paragraph.

This is a general tool, but it does help with the main idea. As you read the passage, your notes will indicate the content of each paragraph. Find the common thread, and you have the main idea.


Secondary Idea Questions:

1. Use the main idea as a partial guide, but do so carefully.

The secondary idea will be connected with the main idea. But it won’t be the same as the main idea. In fact, the secondary idea might make a point seemingly opposed to the main idea (especially for an informative essay discussing two sides to an issue). Even so, the main idea might give you a clue as to whether or not you’re on the right track.

2. Don’t confuse main idea and secondary idea questions.

Main idea questions cover the entire passage. Secondary ideas cover a specific paragraph or line references (usually a few lines long). The secondary idea has to address the specific reference/paragraph, regardless of what the broader passage is saying.

If this sounds similar to (1), that’s because it is, But it’s doubly important.

3. Pay attention to all the sentences in a paragraph.

Sometimes, you will be given two plausible answers. The better answer will often hinge upon a single sentence or phrase. It helps not to project your own emotion, experiences or motivations into the answer – everything you need will be there, in the paragraph.


Vocabulary or phrase in context:

1. Break apart the sentence.

Pay careful attention to conjunctions and conjunction-like phrases like “…, as is” (which indicates that the information following  is distinct from the material preceding it). This gives you a clue as to the structure of the sentence, and therefore a clue as to whether the word or phrase in context applies to the entire sentence or just a part.

2. The correct answer is usually a secondary definition.

It makes little sense to create a context question for which the correct answer is the obvious definition. Usually, it’s a secondary definition. Occasionally, the word is being used as a metaphor for something else.

3. Read the lines preceding the reference.

Sometimes you will be given the phrase or word in the problem statement, which makes it look like you don’t have to go back and read it in the actual passage. BIG MISTAKE! You need to go back, and read prior to the line reference. Depending on time, start from either the beginning of the paragraph or at least 1-2 sentences before the reference. Sometimes, the definition will be given to you in the preceding lines.

4. Use roots.

Although 1-3 should get you the answer, you can use roots if you have no idea what a word means. As with sentence completion, sometimes roots can help you distill the meaning of a word in context. But this probably won’t help much, as the word is probably being used with a secondary definition in mind.

Inference Questions:

1. Read like a third-grader.

If the inference cites a specific line, then read that line like a third-grader, paying close attention to subtleties of language (usually simple words).

2. Use only what is in the passage.

Make certain that you are not projecting your own feelings/background/knowledge into a passage/inference question. You have everything you need on the page.

3. Distinguish between author’s intent and any characters in the passage.

Similarly, It is particularly important for certain inference problems (and other problem types) to distinguish between what the character is feeling/thinking and what the author is thinking/feeling. Some answers that seem plausible actually confuse the two. 

4. Tone and main idea can help.

If you understand the main idea and tone, then it might help you with an inference question. That’s because main idea and tone give you a sense of the author’s intent, and therefore what devices/points the author might be trying to make, albeit indirectly.


Passage Comparison:

1. Treat this initially as two single passage sections.

Read passage 1, then do passage 1 questions. Do the same for passage 2 and its questions. Then answer the comparison questions. The reasons are obvious: this way, you don’t get the information from one passage confused with the other for questions specific to a single passage.

2. Take notes as you read.

You should be doing this for the longer single passages anyway. But this becomes doubly important for double passage problems. Your notes will help you quickly identify information that you might need, and in the correct passage, that would otherwise take a complete re-reading to discover.

3. Pay careful attention to the degree implied by verbs and adjectives when comparing passages.

Problems that have possible answer choices like “Passage 1… while Passage 2…” are potentially quite challenging. Often, the answer has to do with the degree to which it applies. There’s a difference between “cites” and “focuses”, and so pay careful attention. (In some wrong answers, the threshold is just too high.)

4. The entire answer has to be correct.

This is true for all questions. But it applies in particular to passage comparison. You can eliminate incorrect answers by realizing that they are making an incorrect statement for passage 1. Then eliminate more by eliminating those that incorrectly characterize passage 2. If you’re lucky, you’ll be left with one correct answer. If not, then use what you know about each passage to choose the best answer.

Tone Questions:

1. Tone is generally consistent with passage type and main idea.

Informative = objective, interested, appreciative (neutral to moderately positive/negative)
Argumentative = subjective, passionate, wry (stronger emotions)
Narrative = can be anything, pretty much.

2. Make sure you distinguish between author’s tone and a character’s emotions.

The characters could be undergoing intense emotions. But the author may choose to convey that in a very objective tone. Make certain you don’t conflate the two. Also, obviously, make sure you don’t project your own emotional response into the tone of the article.

Structure Questions:

1. Similarity questions

There are questions that ask for an example that “resembles” or “is most similar to” a cited example. These problems can be tricky, because they require you to (1) understand the reference, (2) understand the key relationships/properties of the reference, and (3) determine the answer choice that possesses all of the key relationships/properties in the original reference. Usually there will be two properties to identify.

Here’s how you solve these.

(a) Break apart the original reference into parts (probably two).

(b) Identify the relationships or key ideas in the parts.

(c) Check each answer choice and see if it conforms to both parts.

In some ways, this is like a double-blank sentence completion problem, except that you’re after the concepts and relationships embedded in the line reference. In some ways, this is the spiritual descendent of the “analogy” questions that plagued SAT students until sometime around 2005.

2. Identifying the purpose of a specific device

You should know about rhetorical devices: comparison, exaggeration, contrast, examples, etc. Each of these can be used to strengthen or develop an argument, analysis, or a narrative.

To solve these, you need to understand the connection between the line reference and the surrounding text (and, sometimes, the overall passage). This means figuring out why the author uses a specific piece of language.

Remember: why, not what. Do not confuse what is literally being said with its purpose.

3. Additional information that would strengthen an argument

To solve these questions, you need to make certain that you understand what the argument is. There should be only one answer choice that works. You can disregard the others because they will not relate to the specific argument being made in a paragraph, or because the form of the evidence is wrong. What do I mean by form? If the article is an informative scientific article, an opinion piece will not effectively support the argument.

How to be a tutor (work in progress - last updated 11/14/2013)

Sorry, J. E. -- this is long overdue. Also sorry, people who yelled at me at the wedding to follow through and post something.

This will be a work in progress. I don't have all the answers -- I'm still struggling to make this close to a full-time position.

I would actually highly discourage this as an option for people looking for more flexibility/pay than their existing jobs. There are many reasons, each of which I could go into at greater length. I'll simply list the ones I can come up with here:

- When factoring in prep time, driving time, correspondence, and billing, per-hour pay isn't great
- Local market may or may not be able to support you
- Cancellations -- lessons will be canceled because just aboute everything else takes priority
- Arguments with clients about rates -- you argue about salary with your boss once a year, but you potentially argue with each client about rates, and possibly multiple times.
- Low status -- this isn't South Korea, and so you might as well say "unemployed" when people ask you what you do for a living.
- Emotionally draining -- especially if you have defiant students, or tutor at homes with family drama
- Prep time ignored -- especially problematic if you're doing test prep, which is a bit more time-intensive with diagnostics
- skill degradation and resume decay -- every year you spend tutoring full-time is a year you're not doing something more closely related with your college training.


Let's say you're not dissuaded. What should you do?

Brian S., a tutor at WyzAnt, wrote a helpful guide about what to do when you get started. He has also penned another excellent guide here, once you're somewhat established and want to maintain or build your client base..

In addition to that, here are some things I've found, many thanks to discussions with David L., a fellow HMC Physics grad. (I use fellow loosely, and perhaps too familiarly -- he's damn good.)

1. Sometimes, the local market for tutoring is simply rough.

One of my undergrad friends is tutoring full time and has tons of students. He charges a pretty high rate (though he is worth every penny). I have a few students, but have struggled a bit more. Granted, he has a PhD in Physics from Princeton, and I "only" have a M.S. in Astrophysics from Cornell. But after some discussion, we concluded that he happens to be in a particularly good area for tutoring. It's a wealthy part of New Jersey with enough population density that he can build a client base.

I'm not as successful for a host of reasons. But one reason is my specific location. I'm in a reasonably well-off portion of Southern California. But it doesn't have quite the level of wealth, nor the high population density, that allows me to pick and choose clients.

2. Consider expanding your driving distance

Despite my friend's advantages, he's willing to commute 40 minutes for a job. This is feasible because he clusters his jobs. One day he might spend around Princeton, meeting three or four clients. Another day, he might head north. 

This only works if you can (1) find sufficient numbers of students in a given area to make it worthwhile to drive out there in the first place, and (2) convince them all to meet in a given place. Otherwise, you'll be eaten alive with fuel and maintenance costs, not to mention the opportunity cost of driving between lessons.

3. Consider picking up subjects that are outside your core, but still within yourcompetence.
In the beginning, I was a bit too cautious about my qualified fields. I thought that, because it had been a couple years since I had a statistics course, I wasn't qualified to tutor statistics. However, I discovered that, with a good textbook and enough clients to make it worthwhile, I was able to retrain myself in beginning statistics. I'm nowhere near my previous level of proficiency, but I'm confident that I can competently tutor any AP Stats or beginning college stats course -- a belief that has been proven correct from experience.

Again, it varies by location, and my experience is limited to math, science, and some of the social sciences. But I would say that physics, chemistry, and calculus are generally in high demand (partly because any out-of-college adult reasonably skilled in this probably could get another job). Econ and stats tend to be sought after, though in raw numbers there may be fewer students taking those courses. Biology has a lot of demand, but also a lot of supply. 

4. Consider tutoring college students.

I don't have a preference one way or another as far as tutoring high school students or college students. (But I generally don't tutor anyone younger.) But if you think about it, tutoring can't come anywhere near to a full-time gig if you're limited to the hours after school gets out (barring crazy hours on weekends). One way to fill that gap is with college students, many of whom have openings in the morning or early afternoon.

Now, not all college students can afford expensive tutoring. So you might opt to charge a reduced rate for starving students. It depends upon your college market, and on whether or not you can tutor an upper-division class. But even for general education classes, there might be some demand. A few students (or their parents) are perceptive enough to realize that a small investment in tutoring might actually be a better deal than paying to take the class again.

Good luck!

Comedy Review: Sunset Room, Oct 22, 2013

It was Ladies' Night: four female comics were booked to perform. It was supposed to start at 10pm, but ended up starting at around 10:30, possibly due to trouble tracking down a DJ. 10pm is already pretty late for a Monday, and the delay pretty much guaranteed that people would leave during the performances.

Whether people left for that reason, or their indifference toward the comedy on display, is uncertain. What is clearer is that the opening and closing of the door rattled some of the comedians. I don't know their history, or how long they've been doing it. And it's tough to shut out at a small venue (there were only about 20-25 people total).

I'm not a comedian, and I'm not a professional critic. I'm just a guy that likes stand up comedy. Even that is limited to a handful of visits to comedy clubs and Youtube browsing. I have a tremendous respect for people who go up in front of a crowd and try to make them laugh. It takes tremendous courage. I think it's also unfair to compare them with the leading comics of our time: Louis CK, Chris Rock, etc. However, there do seem to be certain laws of comedy that are common to effective routines at all levels, and it is fair to see whether or not their comedy works according to these distilled principles.

Here are some principles I think were broken (or in Bernal's case, followed):

Be prepared.

Standup comedy is not improv. Good standup can take advantage of things in the room, and improvise off that. (Things in the room can be funny because they are shared experiences, which reduces the chance of a joke not being understood.) But at some level there still need to be jokes. It can't all be personality, or completely dependent on things happening during the routine.

If a comic is prepared, she can resist the temptation to go off script if jokes fall flat.

If a comic issuper, duper prepared, she can calibrate delivery or material as needed.

If a comic is unprepared, he or she makes a comment like "Let's see... what else do I want to talk about?" At least two comics did this.

Another comic had decent energy and promise, but her routine went a bit off once she started actively using her note sheet.

If you have a note sheet, it indicates a lack of preparation. Worse, if I know you have stuff written in front of you, my expectations for your delivery and material skyrocket, perhaps to impossible standards.

Consider how the material works with the rest of the perforrmance

From what little I know, many comics have a set routine. It's unclear then that adjusting that routine is at all feasible, or makes sense. But I think it does pay to know your audience, and figure out whether a gig is right for you.

There was also a guest male comic, who, based on the intro, has acheived some note at the Laugh Factory. Unfortunately for him, his routine seemed even more misogynistic than it would ordinarily at a Ladies' Night. Some of his jokes were designed more for shock than humor in any case. But they seemed especially mean given the context.

Maybe I'm not a fan of his type of humor. But I think I would've enjoyed it more if it weren't delivered at a Ladies' Night. Some parts were just a bit too jarring given the context.

Things that happen in the room can be funny - but don't use them as a crutch.

The male comic made fun of a guy by calling him "Charlie Brown", playing off a drunken heckle and the fact that his shirt had a horizontal zigzag pattern. It was pretty good. But a couple of the comics came back to the "Charlie Brown" thing when their routines were flagging. For whatever reason, it seemed like they were using it as a life preserver, and it showed.

I know that comedians generally find someone (or a couple someones) they can pick on in a crowd, especially if the person is pretty good natured. ("Charlie Brown" was a good sport.) But there has to be more than pointing to "Charlie Brown!" It gets tired if the person has no connection with the jokes.

Stay with the energy of your bit.

One of the things that I think distinguishes a good comic is that he or she stays in the energy of a bit. They don't break character. They don't (necessarily) depend upon the energy of the room. They bring their own energy. Conversely, weaker or more inexperienced comics do respond, and even take personally, the apathy or non-responsiveness of a crowd.

As the routines went on, many of the comics seemed a bit unnerved at the lack of response. Their tone It's entirely understandable. But it's the kiss of death.

Bernal did this the best of the comics performing tonight. She was greeted with the same sort of apathy that the other comics experienced -- perhaps even more, given the general fatigue everyone was feeling by the last act. But she brought an energy to the stage and maintained it throughout her routine. She didn't depend upon great responses -- though it always helps. She stayed with her high-energy, larger-than-life personality, and it worked. It won us over, such that when she did tell a stinker, we were willing to forgive it as an aberration.

Of note: she faced a drunk female heckler who said, among other things, "You're not latina" and "You're not funny". Bernal seemed pretty unfazed; she initially engaged, and when that didn't work, continued with her routine without skipping a beat.

Performers have to "stay in the bit". This applies to classroom teaching, too. If you let your energy slip, the kids pick up on it, and the lesson suffers.

Try not to insult the entire audience for no good reason.

It's clear that some of the comics were struggling, and got a combination of nervous, pissed off, and frustrated. One in particular got a bit petulant and sarcastic, and basically insulted the crowd at the end of her routine by sarcastically praising us for being a great crowd.

Cleverness that extends for more than five seconds is a breath of fresh air.

Bernal has a great singing voice, and she used it to parody both "Part of Your World" (Little Mermaid) and "If I Only Had A Brain" (Wizard of Oz). They stood out in an environment of one-liners because they were clever all the way through. Instead of the chuckle-silence pattern of one-liners, she got us to laugh for a half-minute, and cheer afterwards.

***

I do think that each of the comics tonight has the potential to be better than some of the opening acts I've seen at The Ice House and Harrah's. (These may not represent the pinnacle of success, but it's a standard that I think means gainful, regular employment as a comic. And the Harrah's folks were godawful - nobody, especially a headliner, should comment during his routine that he can hear the ceiling fans.) I think Nicky Bernal could, with luck and a longer routine, go even farther.

But between here and there are a lot of small clubs with cold crowds. 

How to screw up a speech (CC#2: Organize Your Essay)

I screwed up today's speech. I still won the club award. But that was on my strength of speaking, and not on the quality of speech.

I've been working on a Theodore Roosevelt speech for about a month. I've gone through an estimated four drafts. And none of them sounded right. I ended up delivering a jumble of information today. It was well-received and praised.

My evaluator, a kindly retired lawyer, rightly took me to task on it. He thinks he was too harsh; he was actually just right, and I'm glad the club saw the critiques he made.

Could better preparation helped? Sure. I didn't effectively memorize the speech, or even talking points, because I was struggling until the last minute to get a draft.

Could I have worked on my physical presentation? Yes. I was in a suit. But I tended to pace. I have a way of scanning the room that's reminiscent of an oscillating sprinkler. It's eye contact, but it's not particularly effective (and for the vision impaired toastmaster, damn annoying -- the auditory input of someone pacing while speaking can actually induce nausea).

But those are secondary issues.

The biggest reason it was a bad speech was because the topic was ill-suited to the format.

The Competent Communicator (CC) #2 speech is all about organization. There should be a clear intro, in which you enumerate your three main points. There should be three supporting points. And, finally, there should be a conclusion.

The problem is that I ended up delivering a narrative speech. There's just too much info in any biographical narrative (and most obviously so when discussing a crowded life like T.R.'s.)

A narrative is a terrible approach to a highly structured speech, especially given the time constraints.

The speech would have gone better if I had stuck with draft #2, which organized roughly along certain personality traits.

But it would have still foundered on the fundamental fact that historical narrative is a poor match for this speech.

Most of us are limited by topic. We have to speak about a certain thing in a professional setting. We have to talk about the bride and groom at a wedding. In the vast majority of cases, the topic is fixed. Sometimes even the format is fixed. But even in those cases, what flexibility exists comes from format, not from content.

These Toastmasters speeches are precisely the opposite. For many of these speeches (but not all: CC#1: The Icebreaker is a conspicuous exception), the speaker has freedom -- too much for comfort -- to choose any topic he or she wishes. It's the format, structure, or grading rubric that is fixed. The intent is clear: focus on a single technical aspect of the speech. It doesn't matter if it's about something no one cares about; at this level, the emphasis is on the mechanics.

It's important to double-check that you're doing precisely what you're supposed to be doing. And sometimes, in order to do what you're supposed to do, you have to ditch your preferred topic and go with another one.

This lesson applies to writing as well. Even if you have freedom to include whatever examples or content you wish, your format will often suggest more natural topics, and, contrariwise, will build in natural barriers if you insist on alternative topics.

This might not be helpful for those of you speaking in work settings. But for those of you with some flexibility in content, but not in form, it bears remembering. I'll keep that in mind while I prepare for CC#3: Get to The Point.

Facebook ads as a straight, single woman

In case you're wondering, I'm actually a straight single man. On Facebook, I'm also 106 years old, mostly because of a desire to fabricate a fictional series of life events that just happen to coincide with major events in history (and, if you include H.P. Lovecraft, fiction). Yes, I'm weird.

One of the side effects of being a single, 106-year old male is a lot of senior dating ads. But, surprisingly, or not, there are other, non-senior ads. In fact, Facebook sees it fit to try to entice me with pictures of women who I feel are too young for me at 30, much less 106.

This got me thinking: Facebook ads as I see them are predominately political (liberal) and dating oriented. How would this look for a woman?

So I changed my Facebook gender.

The results weren't apparent, initially. But I can say, after about two weeks as a 106-year old single straight woman on Facebook, I can report the following differences:

1. I still get a lot of dating ads, but they are a bit classier.

No surprise, but the average woman is a bit classier than the average man. As a straight man, I got lots of boob shots. But as a straight woman, I get more tasteful ads. One thing I noticed is an ad that tries really hard to look like a fake inbox. Are women (specifically older women) perceived as more gullible? Or are advertisers in general trying to take greater advantage of confused misclicks?

But at least I'm not getting the "no credit card needed!" ads. (Oh, maybe that's on those other websites I visit.)

2. Some of the ads haven't updated to reflect my straight woman status.

LA Business Bootcamp advertises itself exclusively with pictures of amply endowed young women. This ad persists. Why? Well, maybe the advertiser didn't want to pay for more targeted advertising, and is simply spamming everyone with the same two images. Or maybe they *know* I'm really a straight, single, lonely man who is stupid enough to fall for a business workshop advertised by women in skin-tight T-shirts.

I (sadly) concluded long ago that whatever business I would likely be involved in will probably involve fully clothed people.

3. More phone ads.

This was a bit unexpected. Why would this be? Why didn't I notice cellphone ads as a male?

I have some possible guesses.

1. The US cellphone market is saturated, but women are (slightly) less likely to own an expensive smartphone than men.

According to this 2012 Pew research study, 93% of men and 88% of women own a cellphone. 59% of men own a smartphone, compared with 53% of women.
(There's actually a lot of interesting data. 63% of cellphone users use the phone to go online. Blacks and hispanics are more likely to own a smartphone than whites.)

These numbers don't seem all that different to me, and could be accounted for in many ways (for instance, women living longer than men, and fewer old people owning cellphones). But it might be enough of a difference for targeted advertising to pay off.

2. Women are actually the ones who pay the cellphone bills.

I wasn't able to find this data online. But given that, in families, women are often the ones who are in charge of budgeting, then it wouldn't surprise me to see numbers suggesting that women, not men, pay for cellphone plans. It would make sense for advertisers to target women more than men.

3. Random timing

Maybe I switched over at a time that providers have marked as a key time for switching contracts. Start of school year? Holiday season? Who knows? I sure don't, and I'm not going to look it up right now.

4. More weight loss ads

Sadly, this isn't a surprise. How does Facebook *know* that I need to lose about 25 pounds? It doesn't. But advertisers know that weight loss is a better sell with women than men. Boo to entrenched double standards and artificial constructions of beauty.

Seriously, I do need to lose some weight. Maybe I should click.

5. A few more clothes and furniture ads

This is also not a surprise, though somewhat less offensive than #4. I do miss those Bonobos ads that I used to get until about a year ago.

6. Fewer political ads

Does this reflect a somewhat sexist view that women are somehow less interested in politics than men? Or, does it reflect the probable reality that women are less hysterical* than men when it comes to politics, and therefore less easy to reach through FB ads?

*Yes, yes, I know.

Conclusion:

All in all, the experience has been a lot less exciting than I thought. I expected special insights into FB market segmentation, and the different world women inhabit. But I suppose if I really wanted the difference, I would go on a dating website and create a fake profile with a suitably attractive stock photo. Thankfully, I'm not that masochistic. (Goodness knows what messages I'd get if I advertised my masochism.)

In short, this was a bit of a waste of time -- doing it, thinking about it, and writing it. (Reading about it, too, no doubt.) I didn't gain any great insights. One doesn't expect to, when one limits efforts at understanding to a toe-dip into the digital pond. Looks like I'll have to actually listen and empathize with my friends who happen to be women.

Tutoring advice for parents, students, and tutors

How pretentious: I'm claiming to offer advice to all parties in the tutoring process! But if you bear with me, I hope to actually offer some helpful advice.

Some advice for parents:

It’s easy for a parent to feel guilty. “I have to provide the best educational experience possible for my child. If I don’t, I’m a bad parent and a bad person.” Combine that with a lack of clarity about what “best” is, and it’s not wonder that there’s a lot of insecurity about this. Unscrupulous tutors take advantage of that.

Do yourself a favor: take a breath, and breathe. You are not solely responsible for everything regarding your child. You, of course, have many responsibilities. But your first and most important obligation is to raise your child in a loving, safe environment. Nowhere is it written in the contract you signed when you became a parent that you will be held accountable for how well your child does in precalculus. Remind yourself, explicitly, in writing or audible speech, that you are a good parent regardless of how well or poorly your child does in school. I’ve met parents who are terrible who have straight-A students. (The students are secretly, or not-so-secretly miserable.) And I've met outstanding parents who have C-students.

For the sake of your sanity, and for the sake of better results, ease the pressure off yourself. It spills over on the child and on the tutor, and doesn’t translate into good results.

But if your expectations are reasonable and clearly stated, hold your child and tutor to them. If the tutor understands your expectations and can’t deliver, then you need to find someone else.

Some advice to students:

You are approaching adulthood. The hallmark of an adult versus a child is not age, but the level to which a person accepts responsibility for his or her actions or inaction. It’s hard and challenging, and maybe you’ve been conditioned to believe that it’s the teacher’s responsibility to teach you. That’s bull. You have the most responsibility for that, because you are the one who will have to deal with the consequences of not learning. Your teacher will keep on churning out poorly instructed students, and get a fresh crop next year. But you will live with the results for the rest of your life. A bad class might not ruin your life, but it is a missed opportunity. If you miss too many opportunities in life, well, you miss life.

If you need something, ask for it. Your parents and tutors might say no or be unhelpful. But if you really need something, don’t give up on it. Be your own advocate. It may not always seem fair, but it will give you better results than passively accepting what you’re given. “Character may be manifest in the great moments, but it is built in the small ones.” There’s no time like the present to build, piece by piece, your character.

Some advice for tutors:

Manage those expectations! Not only is it ethical, it is good from a self-interest point of view. A parent might not always hear you when you say that you can’t promise a certain grade in a certain time frame, but it’s on you to explicitly say that. Do your best, of course. But don’t overpromise. Although you can get away in the short term with doing that, in the long run your reputation will be ruined. And it’ll be your own fault.

As you manage their expectations, manage your own. Your student has been shaped by a decade or two of outside forces. You, as a tutor and teacher, are a tiny blip on the great narrative of their life. It doesn’t mean you can’t make a difference – perhaps a life-changing one. But you can’t expect to force it. As with other relationships, problems arise when you don’t respect the personhood of the other, and that includes, at some level, respecting their desire to be idiotic, stubborn, or otherwise foolish for as long as they like. To borrow terminology from leadership theory, ou may want to be a transformative tutor, but you might have to settle for being a transactional one.

And please be organized. You’re a professional, not some student who straggled in off the street to regale the audience with your antics and hopefully sprinkle some knowledge. You’ve got a job to do. Do it. This may seem like a relatively easy job, but if you’re doing it well, it shouldn’t be. Send updates, be punctual, and be prepared going into a lesson – not only in terms of subject matter, but in terms of who your student is (in a substantive sense), and how your student learns.

The nightmare of hiring a tutor

In principle, hiring a tutor is an enterprise that is anticipatory and deliberate.

It involves anticipating what potential problems might crop up, using a student’s history and self-evaluation. Tutoring can also be in response to a desire to advance more quickly; it’s not always used to “fix” a “problem”. A parent might consult with friends, or with the student’s teacher, to obtain personal referrals. After interviewing a number of possible tutors, the parent and child, together, choose the tutor that embodies the combination of empathy, subject knowledge, teaching ability, and cost effectiveness.

If this sounds like you, congratulations. No need to read onward, to find out how the rest of us in the real world live. If this doesn’t sound like you, don’t worry; you’re not alone, and I promise this won’t be a “you should feel guilty about this” post.

Here’s how tutoring often works in practice.

A student starts struggling in a subject, but that isn’t noticed by the parents because of some combination of being busy with work and student denial/subterfuge. The first test reveals that a student is in serious trouble. There might be an exchange in which the parent chastises the student for not letting the parent know about the struggle; the student, in exchange, either blames the parent for being inattentive, or claims that it’s possible to salvage the grade.

Perhaps the parent tries to tutor the student directly. But the parent might not know the subject. Even if the parent knows the subject, the general tension that exists between all parents and children makes it such that the student resents the advice, and the parent is tempted to be overly critical. There’s just too much history and baggage, even in the best families, for it to work. (For this reason, I’m perpetually amazed at the relative success some people have with homeschooling.)

Finally, the parent decides that, even though money is never abundant, it’s time to call in an outside tutor.  But it’s too late to go through a lengthy interview process with several tutors. A parent might turn to their friends for a reference; on the other hand, they might not want it to be known that their child is not great at everything. Invariably, they turn to either a local academy or an online website, where they hire someone who is some combination of appearing to be inexpensive and appearing to be qualified.

The student, by the way, might not think he or she needs tutoring. This attitude can persist throughout the actual tutoring, with predictably bad results.

Thus is the tutoring relationship formed. It involves bringing in a stranger that may or may not be qualified, may or may not be a good instructor, and may or may not have a good rapport with the student. And, given that the arrangement is made under duress, the parent is reluctant to break it because it will take time (and stress) to find another one. Also, if we can be honest, the parent might not know whether this tutor is good or not; a bad tutor can fly under the radar for a depressingly long time.

If this sounds like you, don’t feel badly. This is common, more common than anyone wants to admit. And it’s no one’s fault.

Teachers and schools, for a host of reasons, often don’t have the time or resources to develop a framework to support those who are struggling.

Parents, especially parents who are working, don’t have the time or, quite frankly, emotional energy, to help their kids with some of these subjects.

Students might struggle with incompetent or inattentive teachers (who, as mentioned above, just might not have the resources needed to deliver customized help). Given that looking stupid is about the worst possible sin, in school and in life, the student might do his or her best to conceal poor performance, or mentally code the subject as “something that doesn’t matter, anyway”.

Tutors can be tempted to exploit this insecurity to bill more hours. We may, explicitly or implicitly, overpromise, and temper the anger at underdelivery with vague promises of improvement just around the corner.

Sometimes, the tutor doesn’t actually say anything; the parent and student project expectations, and don’t listen to efforts to manage it. Or, maybe a realistic assessment means not getting the job, forcing the tutor to choose between professional integrity and paying bills.

Everyone’s just too busy. Everyone’s anxious. And it’s really hard to measure educational quality – hence the perennial arguments about education in America and elsewhere.

In the next post, I offer some free advice to parents, students, and tutors. Remember as you read: just like in tutoring, you get what you pay for.

A letter from dad

Son,

I'm dying for real this time. Slowly, but definitively.There are things I need to tell you, things you need to hear.

I'm sorry I was a lousy father. I loved you, and still do. I loved you as much as I could. But I was also a raging maniac other times. I'm sorry for the times I said you were a terrible son. I'm sorry for melting down in front of you, with no one to help you. I'm sorry I made physically threatening movements to you and your mother; I didn't intend to follow through on them, but you, as a child, didn't know that. I'm sorry I asked you for money, and never paid it back. I'm sorry I put myself in the hospital for using meth.

I'm sorry for the smaller, but still hurtful, things too. I'm sorry I broke so many promises to quit smoking, and exposed you to tons of secondhand smoke. I'm sorry I needed you to pay for everything. I'm sorry I paraded you around the halfway houses and institutions, not only because I was proud of you, but because I was using you and your success to legitimize my existence.

I'm sorry I didn't teach you how to be a man.

I'm sorry I use "couldn't" when I should say "wouldn't". Maybe if I had tried harder, some of these things would have happened.

I will go to my end to accept what judgment may come. But I hope, now, I can teach you a few things.

Please learn from my mistakes. I was 63 when my father died. Part of me never felt free from him. I let him, or what I thought of him, hold me back for most of my life. You will be younger when your father dies, but it's still been too damn long to wait. When I'm gone, life won't get better. I'm not saying it will get worse. But you will retain your ambivalence toward me, and by extension, your own identity, even after I'm gone, if you don't work to challenge those beliefs today.

Please find something to do with your life that both gives you pride and makes you a better person every day. My job as an engineer gave me the former, but it didn't always do the latter. I could've made it about patriotism, about the pursuit of excellence, but I ended up making it about myself, and how I was "the best engineer that ever walked through those doors". I clung to those words from my boss, and never questioned whether I really earned them, or if they actually should be meaningful for me.

Please, please, don't wait for someone to fix your life for you. I waited for decades, entertaining dreams of going back to school, going back to work. But to be honest, I was scared. I didn't want to face the reality that maybe I was unhireable, maybe I didn't have my mental illnesses under control. I chose to not try rather than fail, or accept a job with less prestige and pay.

And finally, please, try to love life. I've stayed alive despite everything because I enjoy myself. Too much sometimes, I know. But you're a goddamn party pooper. Go get laid. Try not to take yourself so seriously; you've read enough biographies to know that a good sense of humor and a willingness sometimes to leap before you look are qualities of some of the great men in history. Pull the stick out of your ass and go fight the world with said stinky stick.

Sorry, I tried to inject some humor into a pretty serious letter. Don't think it worked. Know that I love you, but didn't show it well. Decide what you needed from me, and didn't get, and go find it elsewhere. I say this not dismissively, but humbly, knowing that I failed in many ways.

Remember the good times, too. Our lives can and should be judged not by specific moments of pain, but by the sum total of experiences. It's how we learn to forgive ourselves and others. In time, I hope you can forgive me.

Love,

Dad

Great people, including presidents, read in the bathroom

I searched the train for him and finally discovered him in one of the white enameleed lavatories with its door half open.... He was busily engaged in reading, while he braced himself in the angle fo the two walls against the swaying motion of the train, oblivious to time and surroundings. The book in which he was absorbed was Lecky's History of Rationalism in Europe. He had chosen this peculiar reading room both because the white enamel reflected a brilliant light and he was pretty sure of uninterrupted quiet.

-- Lawrence F. Abbott, traveling companion and secretary for Theodore Roosevelt during his European tour, from Colonel Roosevelt by Edmund Morris

A little faith

I think, somewhere over the last few years, many people have concluded that this country isn't worth saving. We haven't always done it publicly, or noisily. But, secretly, a lot of us sort of gave up.

It shows, too. In any relationship, it shows.

Somewhere along the line, we got more scared about our jobs, and felt like we had less time to worry about that of our neighbor.

At some point, we became more calculating and less trusting -- rationalized by the belief that that's what made individuals successful. Maybe it's even true. But it's not how a nation becomes great.

There are those of you who are itching to say that America never was that great -- that the hagiography of decades past is part of the national delusion that got us into this mess. I'm inclined to agree. However, that's not at all inconsistent with the truth that a belief that we are, or can be, the shining city on the hill actually helps us to be better.

Perhaps most telling, we have someone else to blame. What about our contribution to the failure of the relationship? Blame is more important, easier, more comforting, and a hallmark that the relationship is dying.

And yet I'm strangely hopeful.

Maybe it's historical perspective -- as crappy as we are to each other now, we have only to go back a few years, or decades, or centuries, to reveal how truly shitty humans can be to each other.

It's actually better now, on average. It just doesn't feel that way.

I think in some ways, I understand how conservativism increases with age. As we get older, we remember how things were worse at the beginning of our lives. And yet, there is no sense of pride, or satisfaction, or even the barest sense of hope that comes from that knowledge. There's only the gnawing sense that this should've felt better, and that people keep demanding more, that the battles are often the same ones we fought (or were spectators to) when we were young and stupid and had faith.

I'm not sure where this blog post came from. I'm supposed to be thinking about a humorous speech for Toastmasters. But I think it comes from a slow, steady, and hopefully growing sense that I do have faith in this country, in its peoples and The People. Not much. But enough to keep going, and maybe do a bit more. I am too old to put my faith or reasons in broad ideas. It resides in specific people, in moments, in which the unreachable heights of idealism find their best, beautiful, and beautifully flawed expression.

I don't know whether it's better to thank people for loving me, or to thank them for helping me learn to love this country. Fortunately, there is tremendous overlap. It's for you -- and not a piece of paper, or dead Founding Fathers who, through death, are absent fathers -- that I'll try to remember whenever I start to lose faith, or become too complacent.

The picture of Bobby Kennedy is coming down. Or, at the very least, the pictures of people I know personally have to join him. I work for the living, not for the dead. And that's as pure a faith as I care to have.

What's Different With Online Tutoring (My writing sample for tutor.com)

I forget the prompt, but it has to do with three differences between in-person and online tutoring, and what I will modify in my tutoring style to make certain the student learns effectively. Leaving it here, because it seems somewhat important for me to revisit later.

Both online tutoring and in-person tutoring require the tutor to be knowledgeable, empathetic, and perceptive. However, online tutoring has distinctive properties and challenges. A proficient tutor will be aware of these differences and adapt his or her methods in order to rectify these challenges.

Online tutoring that is chat or voice based lacks the visual feedback that would be available if the tutor were in the same room as the student. Behavioral psychology teaches us that over half of the emotional cues and feedback between two individuals in ordinary conversation are visual. Body language, facial expressions, and gestures provide important information. The situation is even worse with text-based tutoring, as over a third of feedback comes from vocal tone, quality, and speed. 

Additionally, online tutoring can be limited by the available software platform used to convey information. Ideally, the platform will provide an opportunity for both the tutor and the student to be able to enter in equations, draw, diagram, and convey other visual information effectively. Even if these requirements are met, this requiers both the tutor and the student to be sufficiently skilled with the interface to be able to communicate effectively.

Finally, online tutoring is potentially vulnerable to a decreased level of commitment for both the tutor and the student. Although we are now more wired than ever, it is still more difficult to establish commitment and emotional connection remotely than with a person that is seen in person. This can make it challenging to initially develop trust. It could even lead to a higher chance that appointments might be missed -- because the other person isn't met directly, they may "feel" less real to the other party, and subconsciously might not be accroded the same level of courtesy and commitment someone in person would experience.

Due to the issues listed above, I am particularly aware of the need to modify my own methods of tutoring. Because I can not depend upon nonverbal clues from my online students, I have to spend a bit more time and effort explicitly asking them for feedback and probing their knowledge with related questions. The innoncent but destructive lie of "I get it" when the student doesn't actually understand is more difficult to detect, meaning that I have to more actively require the student to explain concepts back to me, or demonstrate his or her knowledge by solving additional problems that I might generate on the spot. 

On the software issue, the only solution is to become intimately familiar with the software interface provided by Tutor.com. I also have additional resources online, whther it is the Online Latex Equation Editor, WolframAlpha (for graphs), or another tool that I've discovered in my years of tutoring.

Finally, to address the commitment issue (both for the student and to adjust for any subconscious bias on my part), I make certain to convey my thoughts, expectations, and my empathy through text. Like any writer worth his or her salt, I have developed an ability to convey emotion as effectively as I can through typed words. I'm not a professional writer. However, I am fortunate enough to have plenty of expereince, training, and interest in writing in order to develop some skill in it. My ability to type relatively quickly will also help the sentiments expressed in the tutoring session seem more geninue. (They are, in fact, genuine, but a delay can make it seem a non-technical missive less spontanous and less trustworthy.)

Whose Line Is It Anyway: Aisha Tyler and the Challenge of Women in Comedy

Whose Line is it Anyway I'm reminded of the challenge of women in comedy -- not just the challenge of for woman in comedy, but the challenge faced by their male counterparts.

Like it or not, women are treated differently. I'm not completely sure why, but I can speculate. One reason is that we, the audience, expect women to be treated differently. Though collectively women and men are treated more similarly than in the past, there remains a clear difference in expectations by the audience.

Jokes at women's expense are not considered funny, and are often considered rude. (Wife jokes remain an exception.) When's the last time you've seen a commercial that made fun of the stupidity of a woman, versus a man? I'm not complaining about it -- just observing that, by and large, we feel far more comfortable in making (white) men the buffons now than in ridiculing a woman in an advertisement.

Of course, the expectations for what a woman can do comedically are different from what most think men can do. For whatever reasons, when Louis CK talks about how shitty his daughter is, it works. But if a female comic did the same, it seems... different. Is this my (and our collective) gender double-standard? Do I somehow need or require women to be more nurturing, loving, and less funny? I don't know. But I don't think that's the dominant factor here -- it has to do more with how the cast feels they can treat her, and not about our audience expectations.

I could be wrong -- I haven't checked out her comedy, and maybe she's really vulgar. Joe Rogan is hilariously filthy as a stand-up, but usually plays it straight as a TV host. Perhaps Tyler is getting pretty strict guidance from the producers about what is and is not acceptable.

Carol Burnett somehow managed to be really funny. I remember, as a kid, quite dimly, the Carol Burnett show. But she was perhaps helped by the fact that she was the star. Lucille Ball also was funny, though she did keep within the expectations of her time.

In any event, I'm inclined to think that a lot of the chemistry lacking between Aisha Tyler and the rest of the Whose Line Is It Anyway? cast has to do with uncertainty or discomfort about how much the cast can pick on her. They can't call her fat. They can't pan her for a terrible movie she starred in. She is attractive and bright. These old guys probably, if anything, instictively want to protect her, not put her up for ridicule. And even if they did poke fun at her, would it seem fair? Even if, intellectually, we believed she could take it, would we really, on an emotional level, find humor in older men making a joke at her expense?

I haven't even touched on race yet. Could Colin Mochrie or Ryan Stiles really make a joke about her and feel comfortable about it on a racial level? I've seen enough of the old (American) Whose Line Is It, Anyway? to remember a few moments when Drew made some slightly off-color racial jokes with Wayne Brady. To Brady's credit, he managed to play them off as if they weren't a big deal -- and, I'm assuming, they weren't.

We've seen this evolution in TV commercials. At the moment, it's pretty much a given that, if the commercial involves a couple, it's only safe to make fun of the husband. Better yet, it's only safe to make fun of white guys as a bit buffonish. Maybe it's the legacy of Homer Simpson and Al Bundy, which underlined (but did not incite, for that ship had already sailed) the rise of the father as an object of ridicule and humor.

A decade ago, Drew Carey was the perfect whipping boy of sorts. He was a white male, fat, wealthy, had geeky glasses, a great fake-pissed off look, and an attitude that made it clear he was willing to be ridiculous. He even had the middle name Allison! He didn't take himself too seriously. And although not a gifted improviser, he made his relatively amateurish participation doubly hilarious by being adorably self-conscious about his lack of proficiency. It's fun to laugh at him in the same way that it's fun to laugh at Louis CK -- these are guys that look like the guys we could (and did) make fun of growing up. And yet it's fun to laugh with them because they have an underdog aura that makes us cheer when the boy does good.

I don't know what this means for Aisha Tyler and the Whose Line Is It Anyway? cast. She enjoys the skits and the off-color jokes. But she does seem more like an audience member than a quasi-participant. There's no banter. What could they joke about? Youth? That's perhaps a safer bet than anything remotely touching gender or race, but even that could come across as looking chauvinistic -- the old men telling the young woman how the world really is.

Maybe they just don't know each other well enough. They are different generations. Aisha spent some time hosting, which, while not unrelated to sitcom/improv, is a different world. For similar reasons, maybe this is why Joe Rogan wouldn't be a great host for a comedy show, despite his career as a stand-up -- too much time doing other things in television, and hanging out with a social group far different from the improv/stand-up circuit.

It's also worth noting that the first American Whose Line show did start with a British host, later to be replaced by Drew Carey. Maybe every show needs a season or so to test things out and decide what works, and what doesn't.

Anyway, I will try to catch some more of the newer episodes. If I feel like it, maybe I'll tackle more of the differences between the previous and current incarnation, and speculate as to its success.

Arete

I bake only one thing: pineapple upside-down cake. It's not quite from scratch -- it's based off a yellow cake mix. But by all accounts it's pretty good. (It is sugar and butter.)

I have made this cake over a hundred times. The recipe comes from a kindly churchwoman, Joanne, who once advised me that most cooks find ways to make it easy on themselves. Although accoplished at making things "from scratch", Joanne is a practical person who doesn't value the artificiality inherent in a cultlike worship of authenticity.

Today, after making it successfully and error-free for, say, the last 60 times, I botched it.

While moving the pan onto the oven grate, I accidentally splashed a tiny bit of batter into the bottom of the oven. Perhaps because I'm a somewhat inexperienced cook, I didn't realize how quickly this would turn into a terrible situation. (My mother, who is presumably far more proficient in cooking, saw this and also didn't think anything of it.) I set the timer ( to precisely 34 minutes, as experience suggested), and went to go work on some email.

After about ten minutes, my mother alerted me that smoke was coming out of the oven.

I opened the oven, and was rewarded with a faceful of the worst smoke I had ever experienced in my life. It burned my eyeballs, and reeked like burning plastic. The smoke detector went off, crippling a third sense. After flailing, baking sheet in hand, to shut off the beeping, I fumbled with the vent switch.

The cake was tossed, and now I have to scrub the bottom of the oven. If I'm impatient or inattentive, I can look forward to injuring my sense of touch as well. If that happens, I might say fuck it, and eat some of the nasty half-cooked mess that was going to be my hundred-something pineapple upside-down cake.

I'm not mourning the failure; hell, it's just a cake. The church people will have to put up with a store-bought, substandard substitute.

But it did remind me that, even after a successful track record of doing something incredibly well, it is possible to have a failure. 

This wasn't quite negligence, or overconfidence as my mother so helpfully observed. It was inexperience with this specific type of failure. Maybe a touch of fatigue contributed.

Why does this merit a post? Why does anything? Maybe that cake is life, or work, or anything that we do often enough that we feel like we have this down, and, rightly or wrongly, however insignificantly, becomes a bit of our identity. Even people who enjoy the challenge of pushing their limitations and challenging themselves constantly have things they value and enjoy because they know how to do those things well... special activities that are comforting because they are familiar and mastered. And when those things get screwed up... well, it's unwelcome, and possibly forces us to reexamine the painful, impossibly vast gap between mastery and perfection. If the person is older, maybe it prompts him to think that, just maybe, he is Stevens from Remains of the Day, in denial about the decline of his powers and competence in the twilight years.

Or maybe it's just a damn cake. Mistakes happen, and there may be no more signifcant lesson to take than the vague prescription to "be more careful next time". There is some necessary tension between a pursuit of excellence and a tolerance for human frailty. Jerking back and forth between the two poles is disconcerting; allowing oneself to be pulled in both directions at once is the mental equivalent of drawing and quartering. (Would it be drawing and halving in this case?)

I love how the word arete means both "excellence of any kind" and "a crested mountain ridge formed by glaciers". It's a great metaphor: slow, grinding shaping that, after eons of great force, forms something unnaturally sharp and distinctive. It is natural, but not accidental -- it is slow and deliberate.

I have met no true savants. I have met only people who, gifted, even geniuses, have won their excllence through persistent effort, focus, failure, and, perhaps greatest of all, desire. I'm not sure "hard work" is a useful description, but I suppose it applies, given what most people regard as work. If anything, Edison underestimated the importance of "perspiration" with his famous quote on genius.

If I make this cake well, it's because I have done it over hundred times, sometimes bothering to tweak and adjust, even experiment--yet still retaining the sound foundations of the mechancial processes of melting butter and brown sugar, draining pineapple, measuring (or eyeballing) liquids and solids, mixing to a proper consistency, layering the pineapple, pouring the batter, cooking to a time within the three minutes or so window bracketed by states of undercooked and slightly burnt, cooling an appropriate time (during which it continues to cook) and remembering to flip before  the sugar and butter cool and congeal, causing it becomes irreversibly stuck within the baking pan.

Even with this, I'm not a cooking genius. I just make a damn good cake. People enjoy the end product, and that's fine by me. But most geniuses I know do, at least on occasion, get frustrated with a culture that sees only where they have arrived, not where they've been, a culture that also seems willing to find fault, or celebrate their failings or weaknesses.

I swear, my mother was slightly happy to see this cake fail. "Usually I'm the one who burns things on the stove." For some reason, it reminds me of a time when she expressed joy when I brought home a C on a 6th grade math test -- I think she was relieved that she had some evidence that I wasn't that different from her.

It's just a cake. Except it's not. It's life. I need to do something--anything!--professionally in a way that mirrors the process of proficiency and mastery in making this single cake. It's time to let go of what I think (and what others think) I'm "naturally" good at, and just pick something that I care enough about to tolerate years of slow, unsteady (but hopefully, on average, increasing) improvement.

Of course, maybe the cake is more instructive than I think. Had I set out with the goal of actually improving the cake recipe from the beginning, it would've taken maybe only 10 or so tries before it reached the present state of quality. The process would've been slower and filled with more mistakes, but maybe I would've ended  up with a better cake sooner.

But that wasn't the goal; a hundred-something cakes ago, all I wanted was something that I could do reasonably well. I suppose, in terms of jobs and relationships, that's okay too. At my heart, despite my scientific training, I'm not much of an empiricist. And as I mentioned before, even the most die-hard empiricist needs things that are safe and predictable.

Even then, failure is possible, and should be expected.

I have a better sense of what arete demands at 30 than I did at any point in college or grad school. I just hope I'll be able to work half as hard as I think I did during undergrad, when effort, not brilliance, helped me succeed when other, better prepared and brighter people did not.

A Crisis in Confidence

I'm no longer a scientist.

Oh, I try to be, sometimes, in conversation. I have pretentions toward rationality, and order, and organized thinking.

But let's face it -- I haven't tried to *do* science in years. And that's holding me back whenever I trot out my dilapidated resume, with past glories receding further beyond ken and relevance. I used to joke, "I look great... on paper." I don't joke any more.

Whatever I do -- and who knows? it might be vaguely scientific/engineering related -- I have to retrain. I have to organize my life better. I have to study even when I hate what I'm learning. I suppose this is what "adults" do.

Do adults also live with perpetual senses of inadequacy and anxiety? You know, the sort that isn't easily medicated away? Some of this might be partially treated social anxiety. But some of it is just existential angst, the product of someone who has been comfortable or discomforted enough that he has devoted significant time to thinking about life and significantly less time actually living.

I'm 30 now. That's the boulder now; that's the deadweight. I suppose it replaces other, even more destructive ones. But I'm conscious that I missed some chances -- chances to take intelligent risks, fail, and learn something good from failure. I'm afraid now, not because I've failed -- though I have. But because a part of me feels like I need a success so badly that I can't afford another fuck up.

This Korea trip has exhausted me. I had to deal with a lot of crap, crap that honestly hurt opportunities I had to get to know people better, to enjoy being somewhere new and different, away from the old, bad world that swallowed my child-self quick. (If you think that an allusion to a post-apocalyptic poem is a bit extreme, you might be right, but then again, we also probably haven't spoken much about substantive personal matters.)

Dad will be dead soon -- perhaps this year, perhaps this month. I've been preparing for him to die for as long as I can remember; he's been near-death at least 10 times in the last 15 years. But this one might be real. And so this might be the first time I'm really coming to terms with the fact that I'll be losing an excuse for my own failings. I'm not losing a father -- not in the sense that I like to characterize fathers. But I'll be losing a friend, a sometimes-dependent, sometimes-selfish, sometimes-loving entity that has been the Julius Caesar of my life -- absent, but often playing a larger role in the action and denounement than any of the living characters on the stage.

I've gotten lazy, and soft. I've *been* lazy and soft for as long as I can think. That comes from a belief that I'm more fragile than perhaps I am. Besides, one of the advantages of not having a higher sense of self-worth should be a more cavalier attitude toward personal danger and failure, right? So perhaps the right choice is not to try to restore my self-worth; it is to destroy it completley. Time to go sublimate into some cause or faith or group.

Geez, this is self-indulgent tripe. But writing is better than not writing. I'll delete this soon, probably, but I'll leave it up at least as a testament to the collective anxiety and frustration that many people I know are feeling at this time.

Ghettopoly

At the Summer SAT extension camp (yes, I haven't blogged about the camp proper yet), we have a set time for some recreational activities -- typically fitness and games.

At the moment, I don't have funds to buy some games. So, I did what any enterprising office worker would do, given office access: I printed with extreme prejudice.

Initially, I had the vision of printing a complete set of Monopoly. How grand it would be to play with paper cards, paper property, a large, oversized paper board, and perhaps even paper houses and hotels. Paper money is too 20th century -- a spreadsheet would do.

It took quite a bit of time to track down even a board of decent resolution. And I was unable to track down cards. I ended up printing a list of property card values, and also a list of community chest/chance cards.

So I printed a stack of papers, and headed to the designated room. At some point on that journey, I realized that I didn't have any dice.

The class was divided into two groups -- those who could play games, and those who were serving detention for the first hour. Spying my board, some of the potential players murmured that detention was looking a bit more promising.

I "assembled" the board, placed the pieces (various bits of change from different countries, including a RMB 5 note from a China layover) on it, and proceeded to explain the state of Monopoly.

At this point, I dropped all pretense, and decided to rename the game Ghettopoly.

Fortunately, someone downloaded a dice app. We used that for rolls. Whenever a person landed on chance or community chest, I used a random number generator to pick the appropriate card text from the list.

Initially, Inwook, a student at the camp, offered to help by being a designated banker. I thought he would have the sense to update totals. Instead, he logged every transaction in the excel workbook.

Needless to say, he burned out after a while, and I took over.

The game itself went relatively quickly, though people flitted in and out. At one point, a Korean student studying in Uganda took over a team by default, as the others were enjoying their pillows, food, and generally enjoying life not playing a shitty paper version of an arguably boring game.

There were some highlights. One player-team (Elly and her brother David) ended up in jail at least 7 times. Granted, this was partially a product of the random-number generated chance/community chest cards -- in a real game, they would not have been sent to jail by community chest three times in a game. But it still cracked me up.

After a while, everyone got confused about who owned what. (I had been keeping track of the property ownership on a printout.) So I decided to just write it on the board. When a trade happened, we'd cross it out, and write the new owner. After a while, mortgages were handled this way, too. We solved the housing and hotel problem the same way.

I won (via Baltic and Mediterranean, and eventually a set of trades that left me with St. James/Tennessee/New York)! 

It was the best game ever!