On my long solo drives from NJ to MA, I sometimes get tired and drowsy. This can be very dangerous! Between 2011 and 2015, some 2.5% of driving fatalities are due to drowsy driving. I recognize this and plan accordingly, and mostly that involves coffee and sugar. I'll get a cup of strong coffee and a bag of M & Ms or some bite-sized candy. The drowsiness for me lasts about 20-30 minutes, and at highway speeds, it can be harrowing.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says the late afternoon is problematic since most people experience a dip in circadian rhythm, the internal clock that regulates sleep. This is about the time I experience drowsiness. It's interesting to me that this dip in energy doesn't occur when I'm working in front of the computer, but clearly I can't use my computer while driving. (At least not until the robot cars arrive!)
Another thing that helps is singing. I put on some music that I know and I sing along. Rolling the windows down helps as well. Pulling into a rest stop helps also. Taking a quick nap (after setting an alarm) is recommended, but I have not done this in the interest of keeping on schedule. However, napping can become a necessity if I realize I'm losing my drowsiness battle.
On my last trip, I decided to try a 5-hour energy drink. These are those shot bottles (two ounces) with mildly garish colors that show a silhouette of a man running, presumably thanks to all the energy from this drink. It advertised 200mg of caffeine. I try to avoid caffeine after 1 PM, to avoid problems falling asleep later at night. Because of this I had only half of the energy shot.
With this one experiment, I report that this little boost allowed me to drive through the drowsy time more easily. I was energized enough to feel more alert and safer. I was glad to try out this drink, and I think I'll use it again on my next long drive.
I started a new job recently. This is my eighth job since finishing college in 1990. And if I count my computer-related jobs from when I was still in school, that tally goes to eleven. That's probably a reasonable number given my age and the churn that is typical of the computer industry.
Sometimes I feel self-conscious about all these job changes. At many points throughout my roundabout career, I wish I had found that 'forever company', that one place that I could stay for life, that could provide me a measure of security and stability on top of engaging work. Perhaps these are the real unicorns.
One 'forever company' candidate would have been Endeca, a place I stayed at for almost eight years. However, when it was acquired by Oracle, I was among the many that had become redundant. Some managers reached out and asked me to consider finding a role at the acquiring company. I often think about what my life would have looked like if I had.
Someone once remarked to me: "You're doing something right if companies keep hiring you." Possibly! But every job change reminds me that I'm on the edge of capitalism's brutal knife. I have to constantly prove myself and provide value because any workplace can cut me without warning or penalty. Thankfully this works both ways! I can work elsewhere if the situation warrants it.
My hope is that this is the last job change until I retire. We'll see if this comes to pass. I can't predict the future, but I can work hard. My enthusiasm and capacity for my kind of work has not diminished after all these years. I'm counting on it because I have another decade of work before I reach the finish line.
I consider myself an experienced airline traveler. Years of flying around the country for work back in the early 2000s made air travel routine and commonplace. On my way back from a trip last month, however, I had a new experience which greatly surprised me.
The plane was approaching Boston Logan Airport. I was in the middle seat, more concerned about finishing the movie I had started a little over two hours ago: Dune Part Two. I had ignored the warning from the entertainment system that said I might not have enough time to finish such a long movie.
I saw through the window that we were descending normally. A cold gray early evening. Boston low in the windows. Suddenly, without warning, the engines made a loud rumble and I could feel myself getting pressed back into my seat. We were ascending again, and quickly!
The ground vanished as we gained altitude. Soon we were back in the clouds, leveling off. A murmur from the passengers. The plane eventually began another approach and after a short period, we were on the ground. As we were taxiing, the captain announced "We were asked to do a go-around, as the plane ahead of us wasn't completely off the runway." Wow!
It turns out that a go-around is a well practiced maneuvers by airline pilots. Clearly our pilots put this practice to good use. And with the extra time (and judicious use of the fast-forward button), I didn't miss the end of my movie!
My favorite book: The Human Stain (Philip Roth). I loved the sinister ending of this book, and the constant deception of the main character hiding his dreaded secret. The book's imagery was potent to me, its characters alluringly abhorrent. I have read Roth's "American Pastoral", so I only need to read "I Marred a Communist" to complete his so-called American Trilogy. I sense a reading goal forming! Other remarkable books I read last year: "Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands" (Kate Beaton), "The Stranger in the Woods" (Michael Finkel).
My favorite movie: "Chinatown". This is a no-nonsense noir with a chilling finale. Jack Nicholson was savvy as the hard-boiled detective. This movie was released in 1974 and I wonder how this might work today. I hope some screenwriter is trying hard to adapt it for our modern times. I want to see a modern audience truly sickened! Other incredible movies I watched last year: "Past Lives", and "Phantom Thread".
In the Summer of 1987, I worked in New York City, doing data entry for a printing company (Automatech Graphics Corporation). This was the Summer after my freshman year in college. I took the PATH train from Journal Square into New York City. I then got off at the 9th Street PATH station and walked to the company's office on 770 Broadway.
At that PATH stop on 9th street, if you looked South down Avenue of the Americas you could see the World Trade Center. Heading East on 9th to the office, the walk was only a half mile. On Broadway, there was a corner store that made breakfast sandwiches. I sometimes treated myself to a bagel and an orange soda. I ate it outside if I was early, then walked into the office where I stayed until lunch.
Lunch is hazy in my memories. I do not think I brought lunch. More likely, I would have walked outside and grabbed a pizza or a hot dog. There may have been a vending machine in the office, but I no longer remember. Later that Summer I found a nearby diner called Silver Spurs, and they had delicious cheeseburgers for super cheap. I went there a lot.
I became comfortable walking around the area. Even though lunch was a strict 45 minutes, I remember walking a few blocks to the Strand Bookstore, and visiting record stores on St Marks Place. I could have even walked to Washington Square Park. Sometimes my friends would meet me in New York after work. It was the Big Apple after all.
I walked this commute using Google Maps' Street Views recently. New York City has changed so much since 1987, but this virtual walk looked roughly the same. The trees on 9th Street, the fancy-looking apartments, the large brownstones, the car garages, 5th Avenue. In Street Views, you can select older images, and by going to 2013 I could see Silver Spurs. (It's now a coffee place.)
The last time I was in Jersey City, I walked from the PATH station in Journal Square to our old house. Maybe the next time I visit I'll take it to 9th Street and take a walk around!
I am a right-handed person. My wife is a left-handed person.
Because of this, I have become a little more sensitive to the nature of being left-handed. When you're left-handed, you angle for the left side of the dinner table. There is also the need to have appropriate scissors. You also must think about how to arrange the buttons on your computer mouse. Lots of small things to consider.
One of my favorite books is Joe Perry's biography "Rocks", about his life as Aerosmith's lead guitarist. He plays right handed, but one of the things he reveals in the book is that he is left-handed, so learning the guitar was an exercise in flying upside-down for him. I wonder how his learning would have changed if he started with a left-handed guitar?
I also remember a golf tournament many years ago. Tiger Woods was in jail, his ball against some brush. He wasn't able to take a normal stance, but to the announcers' amazement, Tiger turned the club upside down and took a left-handed shot. It made sense that he would know how to do this as there are some professional baseball players that can bat from either side of the plate.
As for me, I make an effort to use my left hand when I think I have a choice. For example, I will try to open a bottle of pills or reach into a cupboard for a mug with my left hand. It's a small thing, but I feel some solidarity with left-handed people. Both sides of my brain gets some usage when I spread the work like this, and that's got to be a good thing.
The Bruce Springsteen movie is in theaters and it prompted me to listen to my favorite Bruce Springsteen song: "Thunder Road", from his majestic 1975 "Born to Run" album. The song is a timeless beauty to me, and I can remember when I first heard it (circa 1982-1986).
In high school, I attended retreats led by the priests at my all-boys Catholic school. These retreats were held in a large house in Sea Bright, New Jersey, on the Jersey Shore. My memories of the retreats are mostly dim except for that one morning someone put on this album (vinyl).
A fellow student flipped through the albums at that retreat house and announced "Bruce!" He cued up the first song and Thunder Road began, filling me instantly with its lyrical imagery. Mary's dress swaying, skeleton graves burning, and the exhortation to let the wind blow back your hair.
I've loved that song ever since. Recently I've come to enjoy the version he did with Melissa Etheridge. In that rehearsal he said "there's no chorus" (presumably to arrange the duet). There's just a bunch of lyrics was his lament, and she said "But they're really good lyrics!" Absolutely.
Earlier in the year, I experienced a remarkable moment. I was in the library, browsing computer books when to my great delight I saw the book I wrote on the shelf! It was a momentous occasion for me.Ten years ago to the month my book was published and sent out into the world. It's okay if you missed it. It is a technical book, and it's for a technical audience. Still, I'm proud of it, and back then I thought the publisher would distribute the book to every bookstore and library.I spent several months of 2015 and 2016 looking for my book among the new computer books in every random bookstore and library. I never spotted it. I knew people were buying it, because after a few months I began to receive very modest royalty checks. But I longed to see it on the shelves.Eventually I stopped looking for it. The royalty checks were enough evidence, I suppose. And I am grateful for the money from the book (though it's only a fraction of my current salary). An author I know told me that the secret to making real money with books is to write more than one!At the library, I pulled down my book and leafed through it. The technology in the book is something I use every day, and I know it much better now than ten years ago. The book is aimed for beginners, and I wonder if I could write for them now like I did back then.I didn't spend much time with the book. There's only one section I reread, and that's the acknowledgements. I go right to the last paragraph where I thank my wife and daughter for their patience and love during the year I spent working on it. I would certainly write them in now like I did in 2015.
I played a real round of golf last week, after a long hiatus. It was just nine holes, but it counts! The last time I played any real golf was 2009. Somehow, since then, I drifted away from this sport. People have asked over the past years if I played, and I joked that I had retired from golf. But had I?A few years ago, maybe even pre-COVID, the office landlord installed a golf simulator. This is where you hit a golf ball on a mat into a screen. A machine detects your club head speed and angle, and then projects the ball's flight path on the screen. It can simulate good shots as well as bad shots. After a few good hits I began to think I could still play this game.Last year I went to a corporate event at a golf simulator last year. I had more fun than I expected. I had a few decent hits, and despite my horrible score, it really whet my appetite for playing again. Nothing beats seeing a well-struck golf ball in flight. The organizer said he'd try to do an outing at a real course and encouraged me to sign up. I said I'd think about it.Last month that same person reminded me about the upcoming golf outing. We'd be outside, playing on a real course, using the low-pressure scramble format. I asked him if I could rent clubs at the course, and he said he had some random clubs I could borrow. I then jumped on Facebook Marketplace to find some golf shoes. For good measure, I went to a driving range to see if I could still hit.My round last week was about what you'd expect after not playing several years. I lost probably four balls (three into the water), duffed several, and had precious few decent hits. But I wasn't discouraged. I relished being on a course again, playing this fine game. On the last hole, a par three, I hit a gorgeous tee-shot with a pitching wedge that landed just off the green. I think I'm back!
I live right next to an H-Mart, an Asian food supermarket. I could walk there, I live so close. I have ordered boba tea from this place with co-workers, but for the longest time I have not set foot inside, until this past weekend.
H-Mart is wild inside. Maybe it was all the labels with Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters. Maybe it was the distinctive odor of live seafood inside of display aquariums. I saw strange fruit and produce. I saw immense bags of uncooked rice (brown, white, jasmine, medium grain). These last items transported me to a scene growing up: emptying out a large bag of rice into an even larger container, the rice making a distinctive sound as it poured out of the bag.
As expected, I saw plenty of Asians walking around, their faces familiar to me, yet also unfamiliar. I thought about my own identity a bit. I am Asian, but that always felt too broad to me. I remember a co-worker telling me that India is a part of Asia (the Indian subcontinent), and I remember being surprised. I should have known this, and felt chagrined that I didn't.
I saw random Caucasians during my visit. Most looked completely
at ease with all the options. A few looked like me: dazed with wonder. I thought about my own upbringing, and my own assimilation. Born in the Philippines, but raised entirely in the United States from the age of three. For my parents, their old home is an island nation in Southeast Asia. For me, my old home is Jersey City, New Jersey.
Walking around the H-Mart reminded me of this bit: if you're American, you cannot go to China and become Chinese, but if you're Chinese, you can come to America and become an American. I know this is true.
Around the circumference of H-Mart were food stalls. I commit to revisiting these more closely, as there could be takeout options here. After all, I live so close!
A year ago I started doing planks. This is a back exercise in which you position yourself face-forward on the floor, lifting your entire body by your toes and elbows. When done right your back and legs are as straight as a plank. After a minute or two your abdomen and back will feel the strain from holding this pose.
Various people have talked to me about this exercise when I mention my occasional back spasms. Planks are easy to perform, but it took a long time to build up endurance. At first I could only hold the pose for 20 or 30 seconds. I eventually reached a minute. Today, I can hold the pose for a minute and a half. I try to plank at least once in the morning and once in the evening.
About six or seven months into this new routine I realized that my back spasms stopped happening. My spasms tend to be a sharp pain that immediately subsides into a tightened back. I have exercises that reduce the tightness, but my back is wrenched for days at a time. Sitting or getting up with a wrenched back can be painful. However, since planking, these have stopped.
I can only conclude that planking has been the difference in my back and core health. The core of your body governs the back but also your torso (abdominal muscles) and your hips. In other words: posture and mobility. I've stopped regularly doing push ups because I'd rather be rid of my back aches than to have well-defined triceps. I suppose I could do both. Maybe I will.
Bottom line: I recommend a planking routine for those with back aches.
I saw the Stephen Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People in a used bookstore, and it made me smile. I read this book in the mid-90s and it certainly influenced how I thought about life and work. As time progressed, I have forgotten the seven habits but the one that stuck with me: "Put first things first."
In the chapter on this habit, he buckets all the things we have to do into four quadrants: 1) Urgent and important, 2) Not urgent but important, 3) Urgent but not important, and 4) Not urgent and not important. In the book he shows these quadrants on a square which has importance on the Y-axis and urgency on the X-axis.
I have always loved this idea. So much of our day feels driven by the urgent, and you have to decide what is important and what can wait. So much of our off-time is made up of unurgent and unimportant things. What gets left behind is Quadrant II: not urgent but important.
Quadrant II is the sweet spot of long-term development. This category of work is hardly urgent, but applied to your life's goals, it is often terribly important. It's usually a preparatory step. You are acquiring some building block to help you get just a little further towards that big outcome.
The habit is titled "Put first things first", and this emphasizes prioritization. What is the first thing? If you want to reach big but distant goal, you have to do "the first thing." And yet it's often the easiest thing to set aside for something urgent in your face. By prioritizing an important but unurgent task, you prioritize your goal.
This is why I'll always applaud people who run marathons, finish their thesis, produce a work of art, give a performance, or achieve some meaningful long-term goal. These are outcomes that do not come from out of nowhere. These outcomes require sustained time and effort in Quadrant II, and everyone recognizes the satisfaction that comes from that.
I digitized a box of old photographs a few years ago. There is one set of photos of me attending my wife Jenn's graduation from a masters program. She was my girlfriend in those 1993 pictures. I have a shock of dark hair and we look so young. We'd be engaged a year later.
I showed these digitized photos to Jenn. Her mother was in a few of the pictures, and Jenn said "She's probably the same age we are now." That statement really struck me. All of a sudden, I felt like I could see the cycle of life, the edges of the wheel of time.
Jenn's statement changed my frame of reference. Those old pictures now present another kind of understanding for me. Our parents were "old" in these pictures, but we are now their age. It's an insight that should not have surprised me. Relative time goes in both directions, and it makes me grateful to properly see that now.
The cold weather and heavy snow made a slippery obstacle course in our parking lot earlier this month. On my way to the car in the morning, I saw a patch of snow that looked walkable. I stepped on it and my foot instantly slipped and I began falling backwards.
It felt like slow motion. I wore a book bag, but it started moving off my shoulders as I fell backwards. "That was really ice," I remember thinking. My right foot was up in the air, and my left foot soon followed it. My arms and hands started reaching behind me, ready to brace for the fall when I realized: "I'm not wearing my gloves!"
My hands hit the ground first. I was on my back, my book bag next to me. I rolled to my left, slowly stood up and gingerly stepped off the snow/ice. As I brushed away the dirt and snow on my coat and pants, I felt a sharpness in my hands. I looked and my right hand had several small cuts! It hurt a bit too.
I decided to go back inside and get my hand properly treated. Jenn patched up my hand, applying some expired bacitracin and covering my two larger cuts with bandages. Three weeks later, my hand is all healed up. I'm lucky the fall didn't cause any more damage. I think my heavy winter coat helped with that.
From that day though, I made sure to wear my gloves on the way to the car. I also avoided cutting across those snow patches. Taking a fall when you're older can be a big deal so I will be watching my step a little better!
My favorite book: The Age of Innocence. I still have not rewatched the movie, which my memory holds in high esteem, but the book is so evocative of the time (the gilded age of the 1870s) and the feelings. The Countess Elena Olenska and gentleman lawyer Newland Archer are such memorable characters. The book also includes a brief stop in Jersey City, which amazed me to see. Other favorites from last year: The Tetris Effect and American Prometheus.
My favorite movie: Mars Express. Sci-fi animation from France. Robots. Mars. And a hard-nosed detective. It's emotional, complex, and dense. Everything I like in a movie. Highly recommend this beauty. Other notable watches from last year: Flow and All That Jazz.
The apartment complex we live in has large dumpster bins that are emptied out by garbage trucks every three or four days. The garbage trucks are the front-loading kind, with large hydraulic hooks in the front that extend and attach to the dumpster. The hydraulics then lift the dumpster over the front cab and deposits the garbage into the large refuse container. The workers rarely get out of their trucks!
The operation does make a lot of noise however. I don't know if this is on purpose, but sometimes the dumpster is repeatedly slammed into the ground, like a toddler banging a toy. The sound reverberates throughout the buildings, and I'm sure it's audible to the other buildings near us. I think they bang the dumpsters to dislodge garbage so that it falls into the truck better. Or maybe they just like making noise.
One morning, probably while taking a walk, I saw the garbage truck entering our street. I watched as it slowed down, then it came to a stop. I stopped also. The garbage truck worker opened his door, and then hopped out. He had a large iced coffee cup in his hand. He walked towards the back and then casually flipped this container over the high wall of the truck into the open garbage bin! I was dazzled.
I still think about that moment. Did that worker see someone do this before? I appreciated his cleanliness. I can imagine his thought process: "Well... I have this empty container which I should throw away. But wait! I'm driving a garbage truck!" The whole moment put a smile on my face. I may have even waved as he drove past, on the way to our dumpster.
One evening after work this month I came home and immediately took two Tylenol. I had a sharp headache, the kind that made me wince every time I moved my head. Jenn asked if I had my coffee in the afternoon, and incredibly, I had not! I got distracted from having my usual coffee after lunch.
As an antidote, on top of the Tylenol, she suggested I have a soda. To my surprise, I learned that Diet Pepsi has caffeine in it. It says so right on the can: 35mg! In contrast, a cup of coffee contains 100mg of caffeine. Somehow, my afternoon coffees were enough to keep the headaches away.
Later on, I learned (or relearned) that caffeine is an addictive substance. When you stop taking caffeine, your body produces withdrawal symptoms: headache, irritability, fatigue, low energy, depressed mood, and others along these lines. I had never correlated headaches with lack of coffee.
I don't intend to give up coffee any time soon. It's too delicious! But my body has developed a sensitivity and expectation for my two cups a day: once in the morning and once after lunch. It's rare for me to forget my post-lunch coffee, but the next time I have an evening headache, I'll at least know one thing to check!
Like so much of the Internet, I reacted with some glee at the pictures from Dwayne Wade's statue ceremony in front of the Kaseya Center in Miami, FL this past week. Dwayne Wade is a well-decorated former basketball superstar, a three-time NBA champion. He played thirteen seasons for the Miami Heat, and the organization decided to make a bronze statue in his likeness to honor him.
Unfortunately, the face on the statue did not resemble Dwayne Wade. The Internet was abuzz in mockery, and I was laughing at all of it. How could the artists of this statue, Omri Amrany and Oscar León, get his facial features so wrong? The face is mildly contorted and you have to work really hard to see the resemblance.
The next day I read a piece on The Athletic following up with Wade on the reaction. He was not defensive about the statue's initial impression. "I don't know know a lot of people with a statue. Do you?" I admired the defiance in this statement. In an interview on the Miami Heat's YouTube channel, he seemed completely humbled. He recognized he was being immortalized.
I am on an email list from artist Danny Gregory. In one of his essays ("The art spirit"), he reminds us that artistry exists in everyone, and that every artist sees the world differently. It took Omri and Oscar ten months to create this statue, and even though everyone can like or tweet a criticism, none of it can diminish the meaning of this statue to its creators and its subject.
It's pretty fun to joke, to mock, to pile on. But after reading and listening to how much the statue means for Dwayne, after learning about its many personal details, I think I'll stop laughing as hard. Years from now, people will look at this in wonder. They will look up his records, watch his plays, and learn what he meant to his team. They'll look at this statue in awe.
One of my favorite albums is "Julio" (1983) by Julio Iglesias. On a long family vacation, this was one of the albums we played, and we played it constantly. It was filled with non-English songs. He sung in German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French and a bit of English. The songs became ingrained into my musical memory, and made me open to hearing non-English music.
Here are five foreign songs which I've heard recently and highly recommend. Check it out on my Spotify playlist.
Back in February 2020, I paid for the second Tyson Fury / Deontay Wilder heavyweight fight. In one of the early fights leading up to this main event, a boxer walked out to "Feuer Frei", a menacing piece of metal. When I caught the lyrics, I guessed it was in German, and confirmed it when I looked it up later. Metal doesn't have to be in English for me to enjoy it!
While watching the movie Gomorrah, about the Camorrah mafia, there's a scene in which two kids were celebrating a recent heist. This pop song was playing on their boom box and one of them was dancing and gesticulating in elation. It's a catchy and fun song. I spent some time trying to determine if it was sung in Italian or Neapolitan. I leave it to any Italians out there to tell me!
I loved Solito, the memoir by Javier Zamora about his immigration. In it he talks about the music that he and his family and neighbors loved to listen to. Grupo Limite was mentioned, and I put on a playlist of their songs. Te Aprovechas caught me with its playful accordion and Alicia Villareal's unique voice. The song and her delivery becomes more forceful as the song plays and it's irresistible.
The line I like: "y te odio y te amo, muy a pesar de mi." Google Translate gives me "And I hate you and I love you, despite myself."
I happened to catch WMBR's "The Hot Rat Sessions" and DJ Abby Lyda ended her set with Dois Animais by Erasmo Carlos. The song has a driving beat, a swelling chorus, wailing guitars and a fantastic scat. The live version of this song that I found was sung by Erasmo Carlos in his 70s. The scat wasn't there but the guitar in its place worked for me.
The line I liked: "Eu não nasci pra viver mentindo" which Translate says "I wasn't born to live lying". Strong!
The 2024 Olympics in Paris introduced me to this beautiful love song. Even without knowing the words, the emotion of the song was immediate thanks to its arrangement and Celine Dion's commanding voice. Later, watching it alone, I felt the familiar lump in my throat and the tears forming in my eyes. Google Translate told me why. This: "Si tu meurs, que tu sois loin de moi... Car moi je mourrais aussi." translates to: "If you die, may you be far from me... Because I would die too."
This song is an Edith Piaf love song from the 1950s, and it has a tragic history. This, paired with Celine Dion's own return to the stage, underlines the song's theme about the endurance of love, and the possibility of love reunited. It aches, but for me the French language makes it a beautiful ache. (The Spotify playlist is Edith Piaf's version, but I am partial to Celine's version.)
I now use a pill box (aka pill organizer). You may have seen these devices in drugstores: a long thin plastic box with seven small compartments. Each compartment has a lid with a label for each day of the week. If you're taking maintenance medication on a daily basis, the pill box keeps you organized. You always know if you've taken your pills just by looking at the box!
I started my regimen of daily medication back in 2010 for cholesterol. Another pill was added to this one in 2016. I take these pills in the evening. Amazingly, without fail, I've always remembered to take this medicine. But in the last several months, I'd be in front of my pill bottles in the evening, wondering if I had taken them already.
Nothing bad happens if you forget to take them, or if you take them twice. I'd get mildly annoyed by my forgetfulness, but around the fourth or fifth time of me being confused, I realized a pill box would help. I've seen my parents use these pill boxes. It's a definite solution to a definite problem.
I've since learned that you can buy fancy ones: steel-finished with
sliding containers and even detachable ones. There are even boxes that
accommodate day and night dosages. I hope the number of pills I take won't change, but if it does the pill box will help me remember!
I run my iPhone with nearly all sound and lock screen notifications turned off.
That's right. For every app I go into the appropriate settings and turn off anything that produces a notification. I have enabled a handful of apps to display items in my lock screen. I even go so far as to disable the "badges", the little red number that appears at the corner of an icon indicating there's stuff to look at. This has greatly quieted my phone.
Also, unless you are my wife or daughter, your text won't alert me. I turned off all text notifications, so I'll only notice your message when I look at the phone. (I do look at it regularly enough.) If you really needed to convey an important message to me, you can call me.
Of course the one thing I can't turn off are work notifications, but I try to set limits there too. For Slack messages, my phone makes a noise, but I have disabled nearly all the social channels and some of the direct messages as well. I also make use of the "active hours" feature. After a certain hour, I'm not reachable via Slack. If you really needed to reach me, you can raise a PagerDuty incident to my cell.
I try to remind myself that before smart phones and flip phones, we were pretty much not reachable unless you were near a phone, and it had to be a landline phone at that. Instead of attending to every beep and buzz of our smart phones, we used to have to walk with our head forward, looking in front of us and around us.
All this is in-line with my low-information diet, but it's also a way to control distractions. Turning off the notifications helps me remain somewhat present. I have noticed people making good use of the iPhone's "Focus" mode. This is probably something I should explore but my current system works for me.
Since moving to Boston in 1991, I've experienced championships in the four major professional sports leagues. Boston is a modern Title Town, a Championship City. In the middle of this month, the Boston Celtics won the top trophy and I attended their parade. It was a bright sunny day. The crowd was lively and the members of the team (in individual Boston Duck Tour boats) looked happy and delirious.
On social media, Boston was beating its chest:
13 Titles Since 2001! 6 Super Bowls.
4 World Series.
2 NBA Championships.
1 Stanley Cup. It's a remarkable run. Here are my favorite four championships ranked from these 13 titles:
#4: 2014 New England Patriots - The Patriots have played in ten Super Bowls, and won it six times since I've moved here. Going into Super Bowl XLIX, the Pats had lost their two prior Super Bowls, both against the NY Giants. I'm not sure I'm really past the loss from 2008, so when I saw that circus catch by Jermaine Kearse, I was ready to turn off the TV. Instead, very shortly after the Kearse catch was the greatest interception I've ever watched. Chills!
#3: 2024 Boston Celtics - I was dazzled by the 2008 Big Three: Paul Pierce, Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen. But the last few years of watching Jaylen Brown and Jayson Tatum develop and grow in front of my eyes since Brown's draft (2016) and Tatum's draft (2017) has been amazing. They are an incredible pairing! With their latest team the Celtics have become elite again!
#2: 2011 Boston Bruins - When Patrice Bergeron scored the third goal short-handed in Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Final, it looked like he pushed the puck into the goal with his hand. I remember going into my kitchen to lie face down on the tile, hoping for a favorable non-call. After a moment, Boston got their call and it was 3-0 Bruins. I fully embraced hockey when I moved to Boston. It's my favorite sport to watch, live or on TV. This was the only other championship parade I attended!
#1: 2004 Boston Red Sox - The most pure moment I ever felt as a sports fan. I cried. "Don't let us win today," said Kevin Millar in the epic Game 4 of their ALCS against the great New York Yankees. That comeback wiped away the terrible memories from that Aaron Boone homerun in 2003. The Red Sox sweep of the St Louis Cardinals was almost just icing! The Red Sox have won the World Series three more times since then, but their championship in 2004 is my favorite Boston championship!
From March to September 1991, I lived at 80 Gordon Street, in Brighton, Massachusetts. This was my first time paying rent for my own place. (I moved to Boston in January 1991, stayed one night with family, then was conveniently invited into house sitting at a co-worker's friend's place.) Gordon Street reminds me of the simpler though lonelier lifestyle I had back then.
The apartment was simply a place to sleep, nothing more. Despite that, I didn't have a bed. It never occurred to me to buy one. I had a sleeping bag, and I slept directly on the floor. Word got around the office and a few months later a co-worker offered me a mattress he was getting rid of. I remember driving that used mattress in my tiny car from some North Shore town and being genuinely glad for it.
My apartment had two rooms, but because I didn't buy furniture one could be confused by their function. In the one room was the sleeping bag/mattress. In the other room was a folding table that had some books and an old computer. I rarely used that computer though. Instead, as a young workaholic in high-tech, I spent most of my waking hours at the office where there were far more interesting computers. Someone joked "Rick has more rooms than furniture." I laughed at the absurdity.
There was a small kitchen in that apartment. However, the one time I thought to cook something on the stove I was met with the reality that you have to call the utility company to turn on the gas. I had not done this. My diet in 1991 was served by national fast food chains and local fast food chains. And sometimes, a high-end restaurant. That's right: if co-workers were headed to nearby Michela's, a gorgeous and fancy destination restaurant, I'd sometimes tag along, somewhat out of place in casual clothes but solvent enough to mostly not care.
The mattress on the floor was soon accompanied by a beach chair I had bought. I'd sit in that chair to read or to write in a paper diary. There was a door that led to a tiny balcony. It overlooked a parking lot which I didn't have a permit for. In the kitchen the window overlooked the air well between the surrounding apartment buildings. Sometimes, if I saw someone across the way, I wondered if they were as lonely as I was.
When one of my co-workers asked if I wanted to join up with two other people in a larger apartment in downtown Boston, I leapt at the chance. I needed this invitation at that exact moment in my life. I must have broken my lease with the landlord immediately, but left all my moving plans for the absolute last minute. The morning of August 31, a loud knocking at my door woke me. When I opened it, I saw two parents and some children. They were the new tenants, and they were here to move in.
I hurriedly gathered my mattress and folded up my table and chair. I marveled at their furniture and their unpacking of kitchen implements. I stuffed my car with my meager belongings. I must have given this new tenant my key, though I don't remember. I then drove a few miles to the Back Bay. In that new apartment I had the smallest of the four rooms. My mattress and beach chair fit perfectly.
Earlier in the month, I went to see "Children of Men" at the Brattle Theater in Harvard Square. I love this movie and in preparation for the rewatch, I listened to its sound track. One of the songs is "In the Court of the Crimson King" by the band King Crimson. This song got me listening to some of the band's other songs. I eventually stumbled on "Starless."
This song is so incredible, so good. It's a track that is a bit over 12 minutes, so give yourself time to enjoy its epicness. The song features a build up of tension that is exquisitely released in the song's closing seconds. The foreboding bass, the funky mellotron, and the dark lyrics ("Starless and bible black!") make the song mysterious yet alluring.
When I like a song like this, I'll often go to YouTube to find covers. My favorite one is a music school's production from 2018. It was for their "Prog Rock" show. Prog rock does away with verse-chorus-verse and instead embraces complexity and multiple sections. Kind of like metal, I think.
I was happy to learn of this song, and amazed that it's been around since 1974. I like to think this song would have captured my attention when I was younger. Who knows? All I know is that old music can be new music if you are willing to open your ears.
