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| Thursday, August 14, 2008 |
| Listening to God |
The school I work for has an ad up for Ode Magazine, which I'd never heard of before now. I knew I would probably like it because of its tagline: "for intelligent optimists." But a good tagline does not a good magazine make, and I started reading.
I was hooked by the first article: "Because God Whispers." It's about people who try to get a little bit (or a lot) of silence into their days in busy Western life and in particular the author's experiences with silence in Bali (if only we could all rely on our Balinese meditative experiences). But I like what I read here because this article can apply as well to a Buddhist as it could to me (a Catholic). It is a part of what I consider to be prayer. Key point in the article:
"Of course it's scary to be confronted with all those voices in your head. It's unpleasant to hear voices of pain, despair or depression. But the point is it's far scarier not to hear these voices. Silence may be scary, but a lack of silence is much scarier. Those who don't seek occasional silence to make contact with their deeper core, higher self, pure soul, Buddha nature or whatever you want to call it, become detached from God.
As a yogi friend said, "To hear the voice of God, you must be silent." I asked why. He looked at me as if the answer were obvious. "Because God whispers." Labels: life, peace, people, religion |
posted by Steve @ 4:56 AM  |
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| Wednesday, April 30, 2008 |
| A Relationship Complicated by Heartbreak |
The Phoenix Suns have become one of the best first-round exit playoff teams in NBA history, and notched yet another 'great' series (along with many others that were usually lost), and afterwards my wife and I sat down and had a talk about the Suns. In particular, she pointed out that during the playoffs she would constantly ask her co-workers how the Suns were doing on a game day - not because she especially cared about the Suns (she likes 'em fine but not the way we do), but because she knew that when the Suns lost big games, she had to go home after work and do some psychological damage control on her pissed/frustrated husband.
Put it this way: I have drunk alcohol to comfort myself exactly twice: once because I was wrongly fired from a good teaching job out of malice, and once just after Game 1 of this playoff series, which was a thriller, but ultimately was a loss.
This is no way to treat your wife, or yourself, and it needed to change.
I've determined that in order to be a Suns fan, you have to have a bit of emotional distance from this. This is true of anything that one can be emotionally invested in, but can't do much if anything to actually control: politics, pro sports (i.e., not ones that you're actually playing in), the accomplishments of others, etc.
Games can be exciting, but I have to learn to let it just wash away, after every disappointment. I'm 27 and I've been following this franchise since I was seven or so (1987) - and at this pace I'll have ulcers by the time I'm 30.
The truly maddening thing about the Phoenix Suns are always an A-minus team. They're consistently an exciting, playoff-bound team with realistic hopes for a title. In fact, the Suns have the 4th-best all-time winning percentage of all active teams:
- Los Angeles Lakers (.618)
- San Antonio Spurs (.595)
- Boston Celtics (.587)
- Phoenix Suns (.556)
Of course, there are 34 championships between those four teams in 62 years - a little over half - and none of them belong to the Suns. I suspect that the Spurs very recently overtook the Celtics because the Celtics just plain sucked for about the last 10 years until Kevin Garnett's arrival this year. The Suns hold the record for most playoff appearances without a championship (26 of 40 seasons). In fact, they're in the sixth place (of 30+ teams) for how often they're in the playoffs, and the newest team on the list:
- Lakers 54/60 (90%)
- Sixers 44/59 (75%)
- Celtics 45/62 (72%)
- Spurs 28/41 (68%)
- Pistons 40/60 (66%)
- Suns 26/40 (65%)
The lack of an NBA salary cap for a long time is a big reason that the teams from L.A., Philadelphia, Boston, and Detroit have such high percentages. San Antonio and Phoenix were born within a year of each other and went through similar growing pains to post very similar winning records, except of course that San Antonio is a bunch of assholes. (I'm bitter, but I'm not alone.)
Although my wife doesn't agree, I argue that the "A-minus" syndrome is actually much worse than being a Chicago Cubs or Arizona Cardinals fan. With those teams, any foray into the playoffs (if they make it into the playoffs at all) is a huge and great thing. Hope rises for a championship, certainly, but to an extent you can be happy just knowing they got as far as they did. Suns fans can't take much satisfaction in being a playoff team because they're always a playoff team. They've missed the playoffs twice in the last twenty years. Even the years they they were out, they weren't terrible (36-46 and 29-53, the former record being good enough for this year's Eastern playoffs). For fans of perenially mediocre teams, there's also the added bonus of having a community of loser-lovers that has grown up around the team. With the Suns, every year has high expectations. It's emotionally untenable.
That's not to say the Suns haven't done me some good, in the NBA, in the Phoenix community, for basketball in general, and even for me personally.
- I have learned to evaluate my own likes and dislikes through this team. In the mid-nineties, I had a huge falling-out with someone who was a Bulls fan. He liked Chicago because he was from Chicago. I decided that was a stupid reason to like a team: what if everyone on that team was a jerk? I thought about this for years; pondered the nature of how where you were born can influence your behavior and how stupid that is. I decided I like the Suns because they're a class act. Not only the current team, but historically the Suns have valued good people, who care about their communities, and even the rebels - Barkley, Shaq - were only bad boys because of their passion and the game. Barkley was acutely aware of it: "I am not a role model." You'll never find a Dumas or a Bowen on the Suns for long, if at all.
- The Suns inspired me to play basketball once during high school, and now again in my adult life. Steve Nash in particular has inspired my current run, knowing that he has roughly the same body type as I do, but has worked on his body and his skills with maniacal intensity. His work ethic inspires me, in practicing my free throws, and also in my music and work.
- I suspect Suns' Charities is one of the reasons the NBA Cares came about in 2005. I don't know if the Suns organization was the first NBA franchise to make charity an integral part of its existence, but I do know it was a good model for the rest of the league to follow when it wanted to clean up its image. Kevin Johnson and A.C. Green, in particular, come to mind as extraordinarily community-minded people. Both are still doing community work and I heard Johnson is even running for mayor in his hometown.
- The Suns have been a point-guard franchise for about twenty years, now. We've had roughly half of the truly great point guards in the last twenty years on our team at some point or another: Kevin Johnson, Jason Kidd, Stephon Marbury (in his prime), Steve Nash, Joe Johnson, Dennis Johnson, and Sam Cassell have all been Suns. I'm a big believer that the game of basketball is best when it is about movement and flow. I believe in my core that things like hack-a-Shaq, intentional fouls, dominant centers, and 70-point games are antithetical to what Naismith wanted: an athletic, skill-based game.
- As a web guru, I appreciate the absolutely ludicrous amount of work that the Suns put into their media. They post thousands of hours of video on their site, have players and staff blog occasionally, and even created a MySpace-like fan community site called Planet Orange. That willingness to explore technology - and spend money on it - in the name of the fan community is impressive.
Ultimately, I'm glad to be a Suns fan. It's a relationship complicated by heartbreak and disappointment but made healthy by the sense that the organization keeps its head up. It continues to have faith in a pure vision of what basketball is and should be; it has faith in its community and despite the escalating cost of games and inaccessibility of the players, makes real efforts to connect to its community.
They have strength of conviction in their work and in what is right; in small ways, through that, so do I.Labels: basketball, community, heroes, Internet, life, sports, Suns, zen |
| posted by Steve @ 4:09 PM |
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| Saturday, February 02, 2008 |
| Hive Mind vs. Groupthink |
In general, I like Microsoft Vista. They made a lot of changes that obviously needed to happen, added a bit of chrome, and generally it works for me. Now, I realize this is because my computer kicks ass: two dual-core 3GHz 64-bit processors, 4GB RAM, two RAID arrays totaling 1TB, and a pair of 512MB video cards connected to a pair of flat monitors.
Yeah, I know.
The trouble with Vista, though, is often that it's new: compatibility and configuration are a bit harder. I had this problem when I couldn't figure out why my video card wouldn't display higher than 1024x768 (I prefer 1280x1024). Thankfully, there was this little article on softpedia, describing the symptoms exactly and how to get around it.
Apart from the incredible convenience of the article, it's remarkable how specific the article is. This is an example of how the Internet allows for group thinking that isn't hampered by "groupthink." The first time I saw this potential was way back in 2001 when the movie A.I. had the first really successful alternate reality game (later named by its participants The Beast). The game was impossibly difficult for any one person - it required people to work together. Unfortunately for the developers, their own puzzles (which required knowledge of dozens of languages, expertise in chemistry, physics, philosophy, programming, and other sciences) would be solved within minutes by the thousands of people who worked on the solutions. Inevitably, someone in the Cloudmakers (as the participants named themselves; the website is down but the link goes to the Wayback Machine cache from 2002) knew how to solve the problem.
I love this concept: the Internet allows communication between people. People are generally inherently capable. MIT created "Fab Labs" that were able to create most anything (3-d printer, circuitboard printers, etc.). 3 students at MIT are doing their theses on the work of six year old villagers in Africa, who had better basic designs than the engineers in the U.S. Harnessing the total knowledge of a huge group of people is something that, if it can be done efficiently (i.e., with a minimum of groupthink), would be as massive a step forward as the Industrial Revolution.
I'm pretty glad to be alive sometimes.
This dissemination of information isn't limited to merely solving technical problems or riddles. It has also been suggested by Scott Adams (who writes Dilbert) that if a massive e-mail pen pal initiative among all nations would make it vastly more difficult to go to war:
"You might support your government in a war against a country full of people you don’t know. But would you support a war that has a good chance of killing your e-mail friend Phlubanakawahaha and his entire family?" Also, if that family helped design your super-cool phone/lamp/radiator, you might think twice if you wanted to upgrade anytime soon.Labels: blog, cartoons, computers, government, idiots, information, Internet, life, people, politics, power, random, reason, technology, war |
| posted by Steve @ 5:46 AM |
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| Monday, December 03, 2007 |
| Things that really are awesome |
Most third graders are familiar with what I'll call shopper's ennui: the sense that what you bought can't possibly live up to the fantastic ideal that it's been built up to.
I realized this when as a twelve-year-old boy, I convinced my Dad to buy a $60 (that's six-zero point zero zero dollars, people) remote control car. It was fast, had a pair of tracks instead of wheels, and lasted for exactly fifteen minutes per five-hour charge.
Trouble with that being, of course, that I could use it at most twice a day, since I couldn't see it at night.
I did enjoy that little remote control car enough to remember it a decade and a half later. I also remember that it took me about three weeks to get sick of waiting for the damn thing to charge. It was effectively destroyed within a few months from pretty reckless (though awesome) driving, most of which involved making ramps and launching it in ways that one day, God willing, I'll do with my Volkswagen.
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Anyway, the reason I bring up the remote control car is that it was, for about a year, the Thing I Coveted Most. A few years later, it relinquished that title to kissing and/or sex with girls, but at the time I recognized the feeling and the risk: few things are as good as you think they'll be. I figured kissing and sex would be an exception, but even then I correctly came to the conclusion that buyer's ennui was a real thing.
So in light of the holiday season ramping up its machine, here's a list of things that I bought that were every last bit as awesome as I had hoped they might be:
1. Dating and marrying Rachel. We have our dumb moments, usually caused by myopia or general illness, but I really can't imagine being really happy with anyone else because there is literally nothing I would really want to change. Not even the things that irritate me; those are usually the only things that keep me improving as a person.
2. My VW Beetle. Sure, it has had more repair problems than Chernobyl, but it's every last bit as rewarding as I think having a car can be. I suppose you can say that how awesome something is has little to do with how perfect, practical, or popular it is.
3. The Ampeg 8x10" bass amp I bought. I can feel my brain vibrating uncomfortably when I turn the Gallien-Krueger head past the "5" on the volume dial. It is wonderful being able to play a note that is remorsefully gentle and understated ...and still be 110 dB.
4. My Black & Decker power drill. An odd thing for this list, but it was so amazingly useful when we were pretty much building everything in our apartment, had ridiculously-long battery life and just did things it shouldn't have been able to for longer than I had a right to ask of it.
5. Radiohead's OK Computer, which I bought when it came out without knowing anything about the band, at all. I just liked the cover art a lot. Few things in the history of mankind have exceeded expectations like that purchase. U2's Achtung Baby also ended up being my favorite album, but the magnitude of the difference between expectation and reality were what set OK Computer apart.
6. My trip to Tokyo in 2001 with my family. It went about as well as any family trip can possibly go. We had fun, I slept very little, had about fifteen million great memories, and took some amazing pictures to help reminisce, which in turn really got me into becoming a photographer.
7. The book U2 at the End of the World, which I read at the height of my U2philism, was about as good a rock bio as has ever been written. I remember finding it in the Phoenix Main Library, and thinking, "there's no way this is going to be better than I hope it's going to be" -- but it was. You should read it. There's a part about a giant snake and hookers in Tokyo.Labels: holidays, life, money, photography, sex, shopping, Tokyo |
| posted by Steve @ 9:56 PM |
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| Sunday, December 02, 2007 |
| Island living |
Apparently, buying your own private island is cheaper than I thought. According to Private Islands Online, you can have one for as little as $200k (less, actually, but not for decent-sized ones not in Northern Canada). OK, $200,000 is a lot of money, and the ones I really liked were more in the $600k range. But it's a lot cheaper than I had pictured in my head.
So Rachel and I, if Rudy Giuliani gets elected, are going to leave the country to live on an island. Right on. And actually, we will probably be able to save up for it by the time his first term is up!
Note: This is probably all a pipe dream.
Check this out. Rachel and I want to build a sustainable island community. Each person (assuming 15-20 wage-earners) would need to contribute somewhere between $75k and $200k. That's a lot of money, sure, but it's about as much as mediocre-to-crap house in Tucson. If, as a community, we make money, then we can pay it off like any other loan (I'll get to how we'd make money in a bit).
The goal is a happy life, I guess. Eat well, raise awesome children, enjoy friends and family, improve yourself, waste nothing, and be happy. What else could anyone want?
We'll get 20 adults together. Mostly they'll be people like this guy and others that are interested in the no-impact good life ideal, except without insufferably pretentious people. We'd take certain roles. I would help teach the kids, and keep all the electronics going, and probably do some of the maintenance of machinery. My load would be relatively light because I'd also keep my day job - web design - because I can do that from anywhere on the planet.
Others without the traditional white-collar do-anywhere jobs would be helping grow food, build and maintain stuff, cook, and so on.
We'd need some things:
- A good island. At least of the ones I've seen, most of the affordable ones are in the Philippines. A good island will be well above the sea (typhoons aren't fun to watch from underwater), ideally with some cliffs for climbing, diving, and windmills. It should have a decently protected moor for a boat, a place for a small ambphibious plane to be stored in case of a storm. A beach would be nice. Vegetation is also a must. Must also be at least 20 acres.
- Transportation. Gotta have at a good-sized boat, probably one capable of Atlantic travel. Also, a small amphibious plane. It wouldn't be hard to make the boat self-sufficient with today's power generation (solar, wind generators), and desalinization processes. A 60' ketch should be capable of sailing most anywhere, including crossing the Pacific, but I am waiting on an expert to be sure of that. Making a 'green' aircraft presents a more formidable challenge: you can mix the fuel (20 bio/80 regular), and lower emissions by 50%, in order to use a typical amphibious like a Cessna 208, or hope that the DA42 Twin Star gets a water-landing version with more cargo room. You'd have to get the plane from Japan or the Philippines if you wanted to have an island in the Pacific, though. It's a ridiculous notion, but I'd also want to turn my Baja bug into a biodiesel schwimwagen for diving trips and cruising around the island.
- Food. If you've got a couple of garden-loving hippies on your crew who want nothing to do with a 'real' job and want to grow stuff for the rest of their lives (and we do), this is mostly taken care of, and they don't mind farming a little extra in exchange for living in paradise. Apparently, most of the vegans we know would be fine owning (and eating) various animals if they did the job themselves. Currently it looks like we'll have a cats (as pets) and chickens and a few cows (as food).
- Water. Desalinization has come a long, long way. For about $10-20k you can get a salt-water purifier that's about the size of a dorm refrigerator, and it will give you 1,000 gallons of potable water per day. All you'd need is a clean reservoir, a means of getting the ocean to the filter, and a pump. Rainwater collecting has also worked well for humanity for... ever.
- Fellow colonists. While you don't want to pigeonhole people into jobs that can't be replaced (in case they want to leave), you'd want to be sure to bring people you want to live with. Of course, people will have their own homes and all, but community meals are going to be a big thing here (since it's shared food), so picking your friends will be important. Also, divvying up expenses will be a good thing since maintaining the boat and plane won't be free.
- Utilities. Power's the easiest thing on the list: solar and wind power is quite effective nowdays, and you'll have lots of both on an island. Use LED lighting, and highly efficient insulation (etc.), and you've got low-enough power usage (even with computers), for solar and wind. You can compost most any waste, and we'd avoid plastics like they were diseased. The only thing that won't be obviously not biodegradable is most of our...
- Other niceties, like Internet access (now available via satellite), plumbing, stereo systems, computers, swings, scuba gear, a library, a medical room, a distillery (booze!),
It's all doable, though, and there's already a market for pre-made hippies-in-trees commune housing. That helps construction quite a bit (and makes it a lot cheaper as well).
We'd have to get homeowner-type loans to pay for it all, most likely. So how would we pay that off? And what about the cost of upkeep for the vehicles, and occasional supplies?
Well, I work at home anyway. So I can make some money that way. We can also rent out a little vacation spot for rich tourists. $5,000 a week is the usual run, but with a nice place with maids, you can charge $10,000. So I figure we can hire a few local people for $200 a week to live there and keep up the guest place. Usual pay in the Philippines is $200 a month for that work, so we can get some good work for that. Figuring maintenance costs, that leaves about $8,000 a week in profit, and if we keep it occupied half the time, our island makes us $200k per year. That will pay off a $1.5M loan in 10 years, just by itself, and theoretically people should be going into this with cash deposits anyway.
Add in regular income from people like me. Rachel also suggested having a little cottage industry, perhaps selling fruit to nearby islands. Plus, if 20 people are determined, a lot can be done.
Figuring a 10-year, $2M loan and 6.5% interest, monthly payments would be $17,032.20. That's a lot of money - but divide it between ten families, who don't have to pay for electricity, a car payment, food, or a load of other usual expenses. Then you're talking $1,703.22. That's about normal for a mortgage. Just maintain the stuff, and occasionally fly to visit family. So in order to make all this work, each family has to average an annual income of about ... $25k, about $5k above the U.S. poverty line.
Of course, not everyone is going to have a prototypical 'job,' so some of the money has to come from the island or islanders. But between a rental villa and some work-at-home types (web design, graphic design, writers, perhaps musicians, online librarians, etc.), it can be done.
Now the biggest three questions:
1. Can we find fifteen to twenty other people (or ten couples) to go into this?
2. Can we work up the nerve to do it?
3. Can we put together enough cash to get to critical mass?
We'll see, I guess.Labels: ambition, life, pipe dreams, Rachel, To-Do, travel, vacation, work |
| posted by Steve @ 10:38 PM |
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| Wednesday, August 15, 2007 |
| I am not a star |
When I was in high school, I had a few adults rhapsodize about how awesome that time of their lives was, going so far to say that it was pretty much the best times of their lives.
Of course, given that my first two years of high school were horrible, I thought that if that were the peak, I was going to jump straight into the nearest traffic.
I didn't, obviously, and now I think I understand why they were getting all misty-eyed about it, and it had nothing to do with how wonderful their time was. I'm fairly certain that, while they might've had more fun in high school than I did, their time still must've had all of the normal triumphs and failures that everybody goes through: puberty, awkwardness, parents, and so on.
The reason they get that way was because when you're 16, you still have potential. No matter how messed up your life is, there's always the chance that you'll figure out something you're very good at and go on to great things.
I'm 27 now, and while my life's far, far, far from over, I can honestly say that there's no chance at all that I'm going to play for the NBA. Zero. When I was in 7th grade and played decently on a winning team, with some practice - OK, a lot of practice - I could eventually reach that level.
I'm fine with that. But even with my relatively open-ended life at 27, the best I can be is probably a good or very good local-league baller. I recognize that the possibilities decrease exponentially from the moment you're born, and looking at it ten, twenty, or fifty years later, it must be easy to wonder what you can do with the time you've got left.
Rachel was a bit aghast that, as a matter of habit, I have an extremely hard time focusing on things one at a time - and considering the whole of any big project is quite overwhelming and taxing. That goes for my album(s), cleaning the house, doing my homepage, whatever. Sardonic, my wife asked if I sat and thought about where I'll be when I'm 75 while I'm trying to figure out where to start decorating my house, and honestly, I do. Obviously, it's not always at the front of my mind but it's there.
Anyway, I am hoping that I'll maintain some realism when I have a kid in high school about how life is as a teen. Just because your life is more defined as you live doesn't mean you should artificially give the memories a rosy hue; conversely you can't look at your present, more limited options as being crap just because they're more limited than when you were 17.Labels: high, life, philosophy, school |
| posted by Steve @ 1:13 AM |
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| Friday, August 10, 2007 |
| No, really, next week. I swear. |
This week's been pretty productive on the settling-in front, so maybe, just maybe, next week I can settle into the 'routine' Rachel and I agreed on - not to bore with the details, but it allows time for me to work on regular work, freelance work, working out, and working on my album. A lot of work, but it's all gotta get done.
So far, it has been foiled by school, summer school, the truck, and moving - formidable forces, really.
Of course, now we have the party (parties) we're planning, and the place isn't really finished - it's just inhabitable. But it's now or never, really...
I've also just about finished consolidating all of my old MySpace blogs onto here. Once they've been reformatted and updated, I'll link to my old Okinawa journals on my homepage as well. Most of my 'let's update the homepage' boredom/energy has been directed towards back-filling this blog, so hopefully I'll make my photo gallery on the homepage nextLabels: basketball, house, Ignition, life, party, photography |
| posted by Steve @ 1:30 AM |
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| Sunday, August 05, 2007 |
| Music & Life |
While it's easy to become obsessed with goals, I'm trying really hard to avoid getting so mixed up in them that I forget to enjoy all the goals I've met. Especially, I have a few friends here that are going and living life on little money, whereas Rachel and I seem to dip further into 'boring married couple' by the day.
Soon, hopefully, I'll be camping with Nyssa and Rachel and AZ. The whole philosophy is wrapped up in this YouTube video, a pairing of unlikely forces: Alan Watts and Parker & Stone, who animate South Park.Labels: AZ, camping, life, Nyssa, philosophy, Rachel |
| posted by Steve @ 11:50 PM |
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| Tuesday, July 24, 2007 |
| Faraway Graffiti |
I've been considering my usage of the words 'visited' and 'been to.' It seems to me that I have visited Chicago, when I was young, in that I've walked around the place, but gained no true understanding of the place.
On the other hand, I've definitely 'been in' Tokyo and Okinawa; my visits there over the course of four and three years, spanning several months and a few weeks each time (respectively), I have a certain understanding of the way the places work.
This came up while I was considering exactly how much and what kind of national and international travel I aspire to go and do. I'd rather not bunny-hop from city to city for a day or two. You don't get a good understanding of a place in a day; all you get is souvenirs. But obviously there's a limit to how many places you can live in a lifetime. I haven't solved the problem, yet.
 I've also found a fascinating graffiti artist in the UK (via the Daily Dish): Banksy. His work very much reminds me of a bit of graffiti art I found in Okinawa, on the seawall. It was painted over by Summer '03.Labels: art, language, life, Okinawa, Tokyo, travel |
| posted by Steve @ 6:47 PM |
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Name: Steve
Home: Tucson, Arizona, United States
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