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.

Good cultures are all about permission. Cultures can be improved by giving people permission to do things that make sense. Not giving permission to do good things creates fear and destructive habits. Below is a list of things I need to remind myself I have permission to do. In parentheses I have put the initials of the people who have said these things to me.

Dear self, you have permission to:

1. Ask questions, even to your superiors (RF)
2. Have long hair at work (JW)
3. After doing activity x, do something neutral to reflect before transitioning to activity y (JJ)
4. Come home after a long day of work and do nothing (AC)
5. Ride your bike and think and process the world (DV)
6. Say no when you don’t feel safe in an acrobatic or dance move (SS)

One reason I like self-help books and advice speeches is they give me permission to not feel bad about doing things that go against the grain. Right now, I’m taking a long time contemplating my medical career decision, and everyone is saying: “Go, go, go. Decide, decide, decide.” But John Cleese says that it’s good to take the maximum amount of time to contemplate, because that leads to a better solution. He even gives a comeback to say to people who pressure me: “Look Babycakes, I don’t HAVE to decide until Tuesday, and I’m not chickening out of my creative discomfort by taking a snap decision before then, that’s too easy!”

When two friends stop in the street to talk about the weather, they don’t actually care about the weather. They have stopped to say to each other, “I enjoy your company. We are still friends.” – David Mamet

One of the most meaningful letter exchanges I have ever had was between an ex-girlfriend and me that took place after we had been broken up for several years. In this exchange, I told her how I felt, and she told me how she felt. Though we wouldn’t pursue being together, we both said, “I love you” in our own little ways.

There’s a simple tactic used by therapists in family therapy. They have kids draw out the members of their family as circles. They then have them put a straight line between individuals if they have a good relationship, and a jagged line if they have a relationship filled with conflict. The kids draw it like they see it.

I like this simple way of looking at things. In some cultures, words don’t matter that much. What matters is who is talking to whom, and how they are talking. What mattered in my letter exchange with my ex-girlfriend was not what the letters said, but that the letters existed in the first place. If the letters got lost, it wouldn’t matter because they were just expressions of underlying good vibes.

I’ve been lately shutting off my phone, not writing many messages to people, and instead focusing on thinking good things to people in my life. Content doesn’t matter that much. Context is much more important. You can say whatever blah blah blah you want. Kids will always know if the lines are jagged or smooth.

On one level or another, everyone is vain.

Whether it’s making blogs, making children, making a career, or posting selfies online, everyone likes to see their ego shine.

Everyone has an ego. You can’t say “I like this tomato soup” without having an ego. – Joni Mitchell

Josh: I went to this mermaid festival on Coney Island yesterday.

Me: What’s that?

Josh: It’s a bunch of wierdos celebrating summer.

Me: Are they dressed like mermaids?

Josh: Some are. Some just aren’t wearing a lot of clothes.

Lately I’ve been hanging out with jugglers, hoola hoopers, fire spinners, slackliners, acrobats, drummers and the like. Passers by might think, “What a bunch of wierdos.” But I think that wierdos have more fun.

I do like humble normal people who can eat a nice meal at Applebees and not have to prove anything to anyone. But at heart I’m a wierdo. For the most part, I’ll skip out on the Applebees to do some cartwheels in the park.

But I get judgmental too. Comic convention people? Super wierd! I have to remind myself that it’s not my place to judge.

“A song is just something to waste your time. I’ll listen to yours if you listen to mine. A song is just something to waste your time. But so is everything else, so do whatever makes you feel fine.” – Jeffrey Lewis.

“We just came back from Japan but maybe I feel more at home here. Freak like…freak like me.” – Kazu Makino, Blonde Redhead

“Want a bit of unsolicited advice?” my cousin said to me. “Take a nap. If you push yourself and don’t sleep your work won’t be very good. You look tired. You have bags under your eyes.”

Relaxing is a skill. The other day I was at a coffee shop doing work and stressing out. After a few hours of this, I zoned out. I looked at the house across the street as the sun was setting. The textures and colors were so pretty. Time didn’t exist.

Zoning out rocks. When the world is a slow moving soup, ideas can solidify and float slowly past each other. Since they are moving slow, they can click together and make big idea islands. That’s how PCR was invented: on a zoned out car ride in California.

Zoning out is when you really appreciate the incoming sensory streams. Yesterday, I took a walk and  looked up and zoned out. Flies were swarming like schools of fish, bats flew overhead eating them, all with the backdrop of cotton candy-pink clouds. On a daily basis, I miss so much of the world that’s right in front of my eyes.

It’s these pesky adrenal glands. They are the Piglet of the endocrine glands, always stressing out. I’m going to get a surgeon to install tiny inflatable pillows behind my adrenals. When I want to relax, I’ll just push a button and inflate these pillows. My adrenals will then be able to get comfortable, switch off the lights, and take a nap.

When people as me how I lived so long, I tell them that when I was told to stand, I sat. And when I was told to sit, I lied down. – Winston Churchill (I think!)

I feel this way about writing too. I often don’t know I have certain ideas in me until I get the pen in motion. It’s funny how what we do can surprise us.

(The squiggly quotes signify a loose quotation, like squiggly equal signs.)

I don’t know the road I should take. It’s ok, I’ll take a guess and move and shake and see where it leads!

Just spent 6 bucks on this domain name…Exciting.

It’s the little things that make you happy in life. Like owning a string of internet characters. Somehow it feels like buying a distant star from a mail order catalog (I think you can still do that). Ownership is so weird.

Anyways, enjoy the new URL :).

To make a business decision, you don’t need much philosophy; all you need is greed, and maybe a little knowledge of how the game works. – Bill Watterson

I crossed paths with a lot of people talking about money today. One man bragged about how much he makes per hour. Another was focused on making extra money here and there by moonlighting. Then I talked to a guy who didn’t have enough money for food. “I’d love to eat asparagus and vegetables,” he said as he salivated, “But you know what I had today before I came here? White rice.”

Capitalism is a money game which plays by its own arbitrary rules. It makes sense to learn them so that you can eat asparagus, but you’ve got to have a soul too.

Have a soul = be interested in the actual work you are doing, not just the paycheck.

—

Distraught at the thought of losing everything again

They say it’s not how you play the game but if you win

— Jeffrey Lewis, Don’t let the record label take you out to lunch

—

Cool video on the subject:

At the end of my brother’s graduation we walked into the natural history museum at Cornell. There I learned that there have been 5 mass extinctions each of which killed over 70% of species on this planet. Wikipedia confirms this.

So I shouldn’t get depressed about plastic and pollution. Life is brittle, but it can bounce back. Even if everything died off and there was just one tree left, with just a single leaf, that’d still be amazing.

Whenever I go to unpleasant places, I’ll make a habit of taking a leaf in my pocket. When I need some reassurance, I’ll hold the leaf and it will stream its energy into my palm. If there’s a leaf in the world, that means there’s a tree, and that means something’s still ticking on this planet.

A relevant song: Krongu Green Slime, by Jeffrey Lewis

This is what I gots to do for the next 4 weeks. The teeter totter has gone to the side of the cerebellum the past few weeks (lots of practicing acroyoga and such) and now the thinking brain has to regain my attention (big test coming up!!!).

I won’t hit the books though. I’ll hug the books! Learning will be fun and explorational if I give the books some time for nice long hugs.

The brain on top is a gymnast with big cerebellums. The brain on bottom is smart but less coordinated. They are discussing physics or something like that.

My boss (a professor who studies the retina) was playing basketball with a colleague who studies the kidney. As of late, this colleague started getting interested in studying the tongue. My boss said to his colleague, “Finally, you’re getting into sensory neuroscience.”

What a cool area! It’s super interesting to know how the world gets coded into neural signals by our sensory organs.

Incidentally, computers have cameras, microphones, speakers, and now, touchscreens. These are gadget-counterparts to our sensory organs. Computers don’t have noses or tongues yet. When these gadgets come out I’ll have to redraw this picture.

Machine sensors are better than human sensors in many departments. They can sense parts per million of gas, tiny amounts of light, etc. In medicine, the doctor used to taste urine to diagnose diabetes. Now we have sensors for that which give exact numbers. It’s a changin’ world.

I heard somewhere that a good Jew doesn’t gossip, doesn’t talk about other people. That’s a hard thing to do, because gossip is so darn fun.

Let’s say someone is mean or inconsiderate towards me. I might think I was in the wrong, but if I discussed the situation with a friend who had the same opinion, I’d feel validated for feeling the way I do.

Gossiping/complaining about people or situations with friends is very satisfying. It’s a way of saying: both of our brains have this little bump that has this little cute hair growing out of it. You see things the way I do. We’re not crazy!

P.S. This is also why I’m so into checking who “likes” these blog posts I write – it’s cool to see people agree with my little brain bumps.

People always say: go with your gut. The problem is, with social pressures and practical concerns, I sometimes don’t know what my gut is saying anymore. It takes a lot of discipline to blow off the societal dusts to the point where I can actually hear what my gut is saying. I am working on being quiet and listening to these instincts. Letting my brain explode out onto the world instead of letting the world give me a recipe for how to live.

I once wrote this fairly depressing poem:

All the things that I am supposed to write

Are moving my fingers

Are pressing my fingers

Down into the keys

And after a while

After I have succeeded

And the world has given me

Respect and a paycheck

I will be used to

Having the world

Move my fingers for me

An uplifting counter-point by the Flaming Lips:

She’s starting to live her life from the inside out

The sound of failure calls her name

She’s decided to hear it out

-Flaming Lips, The Sound of Failure

My classmate said: “At this point, if I don’t feel like doing something, screw it. It’s not worth forcing yourself.” Don’t force yourself. A lady I work with said: “I spend most of my time at work, so I better like it.” Do exactly what you want to do, be who you want to be! There was a commercial when I was a kid for some cereal that had the tagline: “We’re kids, we do what we like.” I think adults would be better people if they did what they liked. Not what they liked in a short-term pleasure sugar-buzz way, but in a deep spiritual way. If you’re not hungry, don’t force yourself to eat. If you’re not greedy, don’t accumulate money just because other people are.

Here are some related posts: Big A, Little a, Youthful Idealism.

It’s not that I’m so busy doing stuff to be able to go to things, it’s just I like my free time free. I might be busy doing nothing in particular.

Run around town, go to work. Gotta come home and clean, clean, clean.

Stay at home and read. Stay at home and read. Hang out. Draw and work.

And go out again!

Staying at home is nice, going out is nice. The brain wants a little of this and a little of that.

“Any meditation position that you stick with for a length of time will become unattractive.” – Susan O’Connell, Zen Teacher

Apparently at least 4 people are reading this blog! My friend said I should start making money off it. That’s a great idea!

4 people * 25 cents = a cup of coffee. I promise to drink this cup of coffee slowly and with great love and think grateful thoughts to the people who read this blog.

Today I snapped a picture of a friend dozing off in class. Problem was, my camera flashed and I got a lot of weird looks. I felt bad for a while…

As I recovered from this incident on the car ride home, I did a little self-psychoanalysis. Here’s my theory  about why I’m over-sensitive:

Growing up, I was always the kid that got made fun of. During my lowest point, I had a bully sit next to me every day on the bus and tell me I didn’t have any friends. “Name one person who is your friend…” he’d say, and I’d cry because I couldn’t name anyone. So after a decade of not fitting in despite trying, maybe I got wired to think I was no good. Also, genetics probably plays a role since a lot of my family members are sensitive too.

Right now, I have friends and family who treat me like super yummy soup, so I’ve got no license to complain. But all it takes is a minor slip-up and I start thinking I am gross-crap soup. Usually I recover fast enough and it’s no biggie.

I want to stop thinking  things are my fault by default. If I don’t catch a frisbee in a game or bump into someone in the hallway, I’d like to move on to the next play or help pick up the person’s stuff without saying “sorry” obsequiously. Maybe it wasn’t my fault and even if it was what matters is improvement.

I’m not saying it’s good to never feel bad. This is how we social creatures learn to not snap pictures in class and behave. But I’d like to shake myself off quicker. I’d like to be more content just sitting quietly and listening, and not needing to always be smart and funny and proving that I’m this super yummy soup. I’d like a warm inner glow, where I can just relax and be secure with myself. Is there any store where I can get that?

The next time I get yelled at, I’ll try reminding myself that I’m just a bit player in the lives of most people around me. I’ll try visualizing myself as a big shiny metal can without a label. I’ll say to myself: “Most people don’t think I’m gross crap soup, they have no judgments towards me at all.”

I think this mental pattern will be a tough one to change (though it might slowly get better). But maybe that’s ok. If you too are super sensitive and have the “gross crap soup” syndrome, you are not alone! Gross Crap Soupers, let’s stick together!

This is the front cover of the as-yet-unwritten picture book, “How to pick up chix,” which I am co-writing with Jeanna, and Apple. Reserve your copy now!