No paper should never stop doodling.

90% of arguments couples have are about objects.

Thanks to David and Chava for joking around with me about initial idea, DPR for helping edit.

A bit of art inspired by a bonfire on the beach. There were tons of awesome bonfire things: roasted food on sticks, the sound of ocean waves in the background, super bright stars, harmonica playing, singing and…cell phones. Ahh, the modern age we live in.

Me: What kind of cell phones taste better roasted? Androids or iPhones?

Shevy: Androids.

Me: You’re right. They’re meatier.

Shevy’s monsters were the inspiration for these fire monsters. I’ll post her drawings soon.

Some exciting news: I’ll be updating this blog every Sunday (or at least trying to).

Sunday is the perfect day for blog updating. It comes right after Shabbat, a slow day of reflection when you are not supposed to be creative, so I’ll let the creativity out on Sunday.

I might alienate 90% of readers with this, but here is a Sunday-themed song featuring Macaulay Culkin:

I had some time to kill before going to a concert and thought: I’m going to go to Café Taza, my favorite coffee shop and I’ll sit there, sipping coffee and absorbing all the fun side banter. As I walked down the street towards the cafe, I came across a sign for a meditation class. “What the hell,” I thought, “Let’s do this.”

In the class, the teacher made us visualize walking into a forest. She had us look at the ground and see mushrooms and smell their earthy smell. She was triggering a state of mind without any physical objects. It was getting late and I realized I probably wouldn’t get to have my coffee. Then I realized that if this class could trigger the experience of going to a forest without actually going to a forest, maybe I didn’t need the coffee shop after all. Maybe the idea of coffee was enough.

Later that night, when I was at the concert, I got thirsty. I fantasized about going to the bar and getting a San Pellegrino. I thought of the cold fizzy water being poured from the green bottle, how refreshing it would be. The San Pellegrino company successfully made me want this specific type of water, just like the Café Taza coffee shop made me want the specific experience of having a cup of coffee there.

When I buy something from the internet, there is often an ecstatic feeling of anticipation before the thing comes to my house. I sometimes even visualize a cardboard box at my door and then get disappointed when it isn’t there. Then, after the thing comes, I get tired of it pretty quickly. The anticipation, the idea, is more exciting than the thing itself.

Alfred Hitchcock had a phrase: “The MacGuffin.” A MacGuffin was the thing that the actors wanted in a scene. It didn’t matter what the MacGuffin was, what mattered was that the actors wanted it. We go around life, chasing MacGuffins, chasing the ideas that we’ve built up in our heads. When we buy something, a lot of the time, we are buying an idea.

I think I’m going to open a bar called Storybar, to remind people of this. This bar won’t serve actual drinks, but for different amounts of money, the bartender will tell you stories which trigger states of minds similar to actually having that particular drink.

Timothy Leary believed that most of the time, people were trapped in games, which he defined as:

Behavioral sequences defined by roles, rules, rituals, goals, strategies, values, language, characteristic space-time locations and characteristic patterns of movement. Any behavior not having these nine features is non- game: this includes physiological reflexes, spontaneous play, and transcendent awareness.

I would add to this quote that actions that physically matter to other people (like surgery) or to the environment (like logging) are not games. But a lot of day-to-day human movements are just MacGuffin chases, games. So come to Storybar, order a drink, kick up your feet, and remember that a lot of life is just a game.

Look into his eyes and you can see / Why all the little kids are dressed in dreams – Sonic Youth, Diamond Sea

I was sick with a cold, and at a residency interview, trying to be nonchalant about my sickness. The residents took us to a bar, which was really tacky — waitresses all wearing tight striped referee tops and tight pants as the required outfit. Kind of objectification of women, but I guess this is a mainstream kind of bar that I just have never been to before…

Because I was sick, I had no energy to interact with the interviewees or residents, so I watched the goings on from atop my stool.

Guy 1: Where have you lived?
Guy 2: Mostly in Ohio, except for 3 months in Australia, 3 months in South Africa.
Guy 1: Oh, cool, Australia, I’ve been there…

It was cool watching these two struggle to make conversation. If I wasn’t sick, I’d have been in the trenches, trying to make conversation too. But from atop my bar stool, I could watch, and realize: these people are no different from me. Now I am sitting at Ashker’s juice bar in Buffalo. A waitress just came up to me and asked me to participate in her focus group about how they could improve the place. Her voice wavered. She was nervous. All these people, scared, nervous, awkward, just like me.

This cold has given me a little taste of what it would be like to be chronically ill: never feeling 100%. People living with real chronic diseases have my utmost respect. But even when the body is working right, a lot of adults (me included) have a chronic mental disease: not having real dreams. Instead, there are these faded fantasies of sex and money, work and life optimizations.

A doctor who interviewed me this weekend asked: what was the most difficult part of med school for you?

I said: not treating patients as people, forgetting that they are people.

Is there room in the hospital, with its uniforms, electronic medical records, machinery, this and that, to treat patients like people? Hell yes! I see it done all the time. But it takes a constant self-reminder. It takes a certain kind of dream of what medicine is.

When we look at kids, we are benevolent and warm towards them. We think: they are seeing life for the first time, they have dreams. But why just kids? We all need to dress in dreams, now more than ever.

My crack at song interpretation:

Look into his eyes and you can see 
Why all the little kids are dressed in dreams  

becomes, towards the end of the song:

Look into his eyes and you shall see 
Why everything is quiet and nothing’s free 

The guy grows up, sees there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Maybe that’s the difference between kids and adults: kids really dream. Right now, I’ve had just about enough of these weak adult fantasies. I want to dream once again.

I’m shifting in my thinking from looking at a girl across the coffee shop, and thinking, “Oh my, she’s hot!” to thinking, “She’s hot, but I wonder what her brain is like?” I think that’s where I was going with this personal ad: Single white male seeking female with ability to contribute a smart, kind half-of-a-brain to making a baby!

My dad can spend his whole day in the basement tinkering under fluorescent lights, even when it is bright and sunny outside. How does he do it? I guess he likes tinkering.

When I first started working in a lab, I was really into it. I remember saying to a friend: “The lab has no windows and I’m here under fluorescent lights, but I like it, I’m into what I’m doing.” If a job passes the fluorescent light test, it means you can get into the mental work to a very high degree.

Over the next few years, working as a medical resident, I will miss the sun. Let’s hope my job passes the fluorescent light test.

A comma!

(Pun credit goes to Bill)

Is it a party? No. Is it a potluck? No. Is it a model airplane building session? No.

It’s just a hang out!

These are getting increasingly rare as I am becoming older. Let’s just hang out sometime.

Population growth is exponential. When each individual in a population is replaced in every succeeding generation by more than one—even by a very slight fraction more, say 1.01—the population grows faster and faster, in the manner of a savings account or debt. – E.O. Wilson

Back in the day when there were monsters eating us up all the time, I think it was perfectly acceptable to “be fruitful and multiply.” But in this day and age, we need some quorum sensing.

Quorum sensing is the ability of bacteria to stop reproducing if resources are scarce. More humans means less nature, and I think it’s time that we stopped having more than 2 kids. Even 3 kids per generation means humanity will grow exponentially, which is unsustainable.

I did a little pen-and-paper experiment (first picture above). I started off with one female (pink circle) and made her have either 2 or 3 kids for 5 generations. I flipped coins to determine the sex of her offspring. If the offspring was a male, I did not make it have offspring since men don’t have babies. If it was a female, I made either 2 or 3 offspring. The difference between 2 kids / generation and 3 kids / generation is huge. 3 kids puts us into exponential growth and 2 kids does not. Exponential growth means that we crowd out all the grass :(.

So yes, big families are nice but if we keep up this charade were just yeast in the beer bottle. Zero population growth, it’s a sexy thing!

—

Ben: Do you think you’ll have kids?
Me: I probably will. But really, the world doesn’t need more people, what it needs is more good ideas.

—

Some photos of buildings in Hong Kong (courtesy of Michael Wolf). People aren’t bees and shouldn’t live like them.

And finally, a song on the theme:

For my birthday, my rabbi told me to think about something I want to change in my life. I thought that I live in a world with lots of freedom. I can do this or that at any moment. Too much freedom, I’d say. Choice overload creates a lot of anxiety.

Orthodox Jews have less freedom. There are specific things to do at specific times. Specific holidays with specific rituals. Shabbat means no cars, no stores, no work — a real day of rest. And it happens every week. Something is nice about that even rhythm of life. As my rabbi said: within rules, you find your freedom. It seems like an oxymoron but I think that it’s right. The rules create an identity, a morality. “I follow these rules, these rules are me.” They also create a predictability. You know what’s coming and you can be fully present and enjoy Shabbat when it comes. Something is nice about having many things decided.

Theoretically, it should be possible to summarize a book in terms of the physical effects it has on the brain. Grapes of wrath? Great book. It made the following changes to my brain:

• Neuron 3.42q23432432.9329, dendrite 4224 moved to position 34223 on neuron 324.qer.243234.
• Neuron 3qb.242342.3242327 grew six more folds to its golgi apparatus.
• And so on…

It’s trippy to think about putting a camera on the brain as it is fed sensory experiences and watching the neurons grow and rearrange themselves through life. A bunch of living brains on display in the brain museum. Brain reality TV. This one’s a doctor, this one’s a lawyer, this one’s a scientist, this one’s a priest. Different neurons moving in different ways in different brains based on different experiences.

A bunch of arrows and X’s in the brain somehow catch all that we experience. As you read this, your neurons are slithering and sliding over each other. What a trip!

I think I’m officially a dude. I looked at myself in the mirror last night at a bar bathroom. One beer in me and wearing a shirt and a tie, I thought: “I’m no longer a kid. This isn’t how kids look. I think I’m a dude now.”

A few years ago, I checked out about 200 library books, thinking I’d have time to read them. I have slowly been returning them. I realize now that I’ll never have time for them all.

Kids and adults learn differently. Kids plunge full force into learning whatever is interesting. They are curious about everything. Adults mostly stick to learning about their area of expertise. Like the wiley old frisbee player, they conserve their limited energy.

I always loved Richard Feynman because he seemed to follow his curiosity. In one story, he talks about how his Nobel prize was in part thanks to him getting curious about how a frisbee flies and trying to work out the equations for its motion. My uncle said, “Nothing I ever learned was extra or unnecessary. Everything comes back, in some way.” I suppose that’s true, but still, I need to focus.

I talked to a professor about how I am indecisive about what to do with my life. He said, “It’s natural to like everything, but life is short. You have to hurry up and do something.”

I’m a dude, I’ll be an old dude before I know it. It’s time to get to work.

One night my brother and I hiked through the gorges in Ithaca, NY. We got to a waterfall.

“Want to go in?” said my brother. I was scared. I didn’t want to get wet and cold. But we took the plunge and it was great.

It struck me that 5 years ago I wouldn’t have been as hesitant. Maybe in 5 more years I won’t even go under the waterfall. I think I’m becoming less adventurous.

Adults are less adventurous, I think. Adults are creative and adventurous in specific areas where they feel safe, but aren’t adventurous in general. They are more fragile and like comfort more. Maybe they understand that you can get hurt and maybe they’ve been there and done that and they can relive their waterfall memories without needing to get cold tonight.

But kids are more alive. The adventure button is this big red button which delivers a drop of surprise. It’s good to keep hitting it, well into old age.

I went to see my brother and hung out with his friend, an architecture major, from Dubai, who worries about how she can be creative in a career in architecture which is dominated by big companies which hire architects to do little parts of many projects, and so the architects don’t have ownership over the big picture.

She is currently designing a building modeled on a creature that lives deep underwater. She thinks and worries about things totally different from the things I think and worry about, but there are commonalities for sure.

It’s nice to get a dollop of newness into my life sometimes. I guess that’s why I like travelling.

Prestigious dude

Prestigious dude

If the banana’s got no sticker

It’s not food

Isn’t it weird that we put stickers on fruit? A banana is the baby of a banana tree. It is not a brand.

Isn’t it weird that we put stickers on people? This one went to college X, OOOOHHHHH, AAAAAAHHHH. It’s a trick! Don’t fall for it! The prestigious college degree means this person is good at jumping through hoops. If that is what you are looking for, then by all means, pay attention to the degree. But don’t delude yourself into thinking it means more than that.

Fruits don’t need stickers and people don’t either. If the banana’s got no sticker, I’m still interested.

Me: Who invented ambient music?
Foster: The rainforest at night.

Humans evolved in the wild, and now we spend our days in boxes under florescent lights. Is it any wonder we go crazy?

Try Outside Radio, available anytime in the summer when you turn off the radio and go outside. No offense musicians, but nature is better than you. Same goes for writers, artists, movie makers and all the other creators of stuff you consume through computers and TVs. So please, stop reading my bullshit and go outside.

—

P.S. I want to learn bird language.

Sometimes I find it hard to look people in the eyes. Like right into their pupils. It takes a lot of focus and courage.

The picture on the bottom is a sketch of optic disks and maculas (the part of the retina with the best vision). It’s an intimate thing, projecting the image of another person’s eyeball onto your macula. If eye contact is good, I imagine the retinal vessels shaking hands.

With frat parties and the like, college taught me the wrong way to drink beer. I think all college students should be required to take Zen Beer Drinking 101.

It’s scary to be open and share this and share that and share ugly demons and weird visions. And a lot of the time it’s not possible, especially if you think you will be judged. But it’s good to find some way to share and share and share.

Imagine a fiberoptic cable connecting two brains. What’s the bandwidth? How many bits of information can be shared between friends? How strong is the connection? How thick is the cable?

Louis CK had a nice tribute to George Carlin, where he’s talking along these lines:

*Except food, of course

3rd year of med school was a whirlwind tour through lots of different lands. Now I’m in a quiet time. I’m giving myself time for processing all these experiences.

I don’t know what I’ll be when I grow up. Why can’t someone decide for me? Why do I have to mull things over? Why can’t it all be easy and painless? I just want to do handstands and watch the birds.

But this is me. I don’t make decisions easily. I suppose I’ll feel good at the end. I’ll feel like I made a choice, even if I end up wanting to change it. It’s nice talking to people like me, people who need processing time.

Just a little note to self as I go through my career-life.

I got to meet a lot of pretty miserable rock stars…Because a lot of them maybe set out on a certain trajectory. When they were 17 they had a dream that they wanted to be a rock star on stage and by 25 they did it and they were a rock star and they got famous and at 35 they’re still doing it, because that’s just all they knew or they were on a certain trajectory but it didn’t actually suit them anymore. Or maybe when they got there they realized that this isn’t what they really wanted. Maybe they just wanted fame but they didn’t want to have a boss and they sign a major record label deal and they realize they’ve got a boss.

You need to know why you’re doing what you’re doing otherwise you’re going to go in circles for so long. You don’t want this deathbed regret where you’ve pursued something that someone convinced you that you should want instead of what really works for you and you’re left with this horrible feeling of “What did I spend my life doing?” 

Well, you should have asked that earlier.

What do you want? Money, Prestige, Fame, Leaving a legacy, Freedom. Whatever one or two appeals to you most, go for it.

Just know what it is, and don’t diffuse.

I lived in NYC for 10 years, and if you go around you see the word Trump everywhere…I thought: what’s with this guy? Why does he have such a need to put his name on everything? But then I realized that OK, at a certain point, he must have decided that it’s important for him to put his name on things, which means he decided to make less money by doing so, because if he let somebody else put their logo on the building then he could have just been the owner and made more money. But no, he decided to make less money and more legacy.

On the other hand, you can optimize your life for freedom. I really like setting up my life so that I could just disappear or be antisocial and go read books for a month. So I had to set up my life to make myself unnecessary so I was free to go do other things. 

Whatever you choose, this is your compass. You need to optimize your activities based on what is important to you.

–Derek Sivers

My brother currently lives in a closet in New York City. It’s a nice closet, with a window. The only thing it lacks in the way of amenities is air conditioning. This is actually significant because New York City in the summer gets very hot. But as far as I can tell, my brother’s overall happiness isn’t affected that much by his simple living arrangement.

I visited my brother and slept on the couch in the common room. My brother gave me his fan, which helped me make it through the hot night. My brother’s closet was significantly hotter than where I slept. But he was able to sleep without a fan.

It’s easy to get used to modern life. Sleeping outside or on the floor or in a super hot room seems impossible to me, since I’ve gotten used to my comfortable bed over the past few years. It’s scary to think about living without modern amenities. But it is possible. People are animals and people are adaptable. I think it’s healthy to shed the trappings of modern life from time to time and test the limits of what you need to live. It creates gratitude, and makes you realize what you need and what you don’t and what is nice to have. I haven’t gone camping in a while, but would like to soon.

“One of the misconceptions about life is that you’re supposed to be out of pain. And we can’t be out pain all the time…Meditation taught me that if I look at the pain and be still with it, the pain lessens…Pain that comes and goes is different from pain that indicates that you’re harming yourself.” – Susan O’Connell

I remember getting dizzy going blockbuster video from looking at all the options. I’d look at one video and the next and the next. A lot of stores are disorienting because they have too many options.

I’ve decided to start a store called Dan’s Creative Chocolate. It will feature just one chocolate. When the chocolate is sold, the store will close. If this store is a success, I will reinvest my profits into starting Dan’s Creative Outlet mall. It which will be full of stores that sell just one thing, and they will all close when the thing is sold. The mall will last about a month.

Looking for a man with a focus and a temper / Who can open up a map and see between one and two – Sonic Youth, Teenage Riot

ADD is watching many things, lighting a match, saying: cool little fire but I’m bored, and lighting the next match. Focus is building one big fire.

Drishti = eye gaze. I just did some ashtanga yoga where there’s a flow and you have to synchronize your breath from one pose to the next. You have to look at your thumbs as the world is moving around. Focus is watching your thumbs with the gaze.

Computers promote ADD because you can see 100 different pretty things, click on one, get bored, click on the next, get bored, and click on the next and the next and the next. Match 1, match 2, match 3, match 4 but there’s no fire at the end of the day and we are out here cold in the woods. To do anything you need to focus. I’m looking for a man with a focus and a temper, who can open up a map and see between one and two.

In 1971, the psychologist Herbert A. Simon emphasized that a wealth of information means a dearth of something else: attention.

Nir Eyal

I’ve done 100 posts on this blog! Whooohoooo!

This is a page out of my 10th grade notebook where I celebrate finishing 100 pages (as signified by the stitched cloth line found at the center of marble notebooks).

Here’s to 100 more!

Just spent 4 days in New York City and went to exactly zero shows, concerts, parties, or museums. What we did do was walk around and sit in parks a lot. It was uncomfortable in the beginning. I felt myself getting bored and restless.

But after a while, I got better at getting entertainment from noticing new things. For example, in big cities every building has its own water tower on the roof. This is because the water needs to be stored above the level of the building to provide pressure for the faucets, and traditional water towers are shorter than skyscrapers. This is the kind of thing you only get to see when you give yourself time to notice things. Doing nothing is an investment in yourself.

Why do I blog?

Every artist is a bit of an egotist and wants their stuff seen by other people. I’m no exception. I dream of scanning my stuff in and having a portal to a million eyeballs and becoming an internet sensation. Maybe even I’ll be able to make money off this blog…and so go the dreams. Fame and fortune, blah, blah, blah.

These dreams are stupid and contagious. I have been addicted to looking at my blog stats, trying to increase my twitter followers. It’s time to stop. The point of this blog is not money and it isn’t fame. The point is sharing my soul with other people, and helping me figure out myself. My goals with this blog are to:

1. Share my writing with friends.

2. Meet new people who like my stuff.

I’m not interested in having a billion anonymous readers that I can somehow serve and make money off of. That might be one way to make a living, but it’s not for me. So this blog will remain a little mom-and-pop operation, where you can come in and have a cup of tea and a chat. Really, this blog is just an excuse to have a chat about stuff that matters to me.

“And I thanked God that my blog introduces me to people who can change my life.” – Penelope Trunk

I have realized that I’m fairly contemplative and like to sit down and think about medical cases, but the busy medical system doesn’t allow for that much contemplation. There are too many patients, too little time. One of the nurses I worked with commented on a resident: “He’s great but he takes too long. He gets fascinated with the cases. He needs to learn to churn ’em and burn ’em.”

I spent 7 weeks in Ghana and got sick and got to experience being a patient over there. It was even worse – the doctor saw about 200 patients/day. There was no extensive history and physical. Just, “What are your symptoms?” and next thing I knew I was getting a malaria shot and pills to take with no explanation of my diagnosis (and I probably didn’t have malaria).

Sometimes in clinic I feel like this Ross Noble skit, only instead of “Next Muffin,” it’s “Next Patient:”

I was in the grocery store the other day and we were prancing around being silly. Suddenly I got off on the wrong humor-path and made jokes about dark material. It could have been funny ha ha and onto the next joke, but my friend had some traumatic experiences related to what I was joking about and said not to make jokes about that stuff.

Comedians make dark jokes all the time, and I often think they are funny. If someone else does it, I don’t have to be as actively involved. I can turn off the set if South Park gets a little too mean. But I don’t  want to go there with my humor anymore. Every time I do lately it seems to backfire and I feel bad. And even if I get away with a dark joke, what’s the point? I’m too sensitive for that kind of humor, and it doesn’t uplift me. As far as I’m concerned, a good rule will be to joke about what I know. If I have a particular traumatic experience and want to joke about it, that’s fine, but I shouldn’t be making jokes about other people’s trauma.

It ended up being fine, and we found one of those mini peppers on the ground on the way out of the grocery store. I put the pepper into a bouquet of tulips. It blended in just perfect. We made jokes about replacing tulips with peppers. When boyfriends bought these bouquets for their girlfriends they’d have some explaining to do. Silly humor is the humor for me.

A concept for a new type of massage where you have babies crawl on your back. Pretty soon day care centers will put the babies to work!

I spent my whole life studying to get good grades, but getting good grades these days seems kind of silly to me. Spending all my time learning stack of books number 1 means I am not learning stack of books number 2. And stack of books number 2 might provide me with intellectual growth, self-insight, and fascination.

So getting super good grades right now doesn’t seem like a marker that I am smart, it seems like a marker that I’m missing out. I guess from now on I’ll be mediocre, as measured by tests. Maybe this means I’ll be a waste. But after a while I hope I’ll at least feel more like an individual. Time spent looking at the sky is time when I can puzzle over the world, myself, and get new ideas.