On Being Reflective - Day 31

Not what you think! Today I wanted to talk briefly about an interesting rabbit hole I went down. I’ve been working on improving my ability to make and produce YouTube content, which I practice daily over on my YouTube channel, Giant Orange Beanbag (named for, you know, my giant orange beanbag). Anyway, in watching one of the videos I made recently I realized that the reflection of the monitor in my eyeglasses was incredibly bad and distracting, so I started googling how to get rid of that. There were the standard suggestions of turning down the monitor, adding lights off to the side, changing the camera angle, etc., but one of the things I didn’t know about was anti-reflective coating on glasses. So long story short I ended up ordering a pair, but along the way I read some fascinating science articles about how the whole thing worked. I thought maybe it would have to do with scattering the light to break up the patterns, but actually it’s cooler than that. Through a combination of a material with a very specific index of refraction and a very small layer of coating which is actually one-quarter of the wavelength of light, and some awesome math that reminded me of my days in Computer Graphics graduate school, they’re able to make the light interfere with itself, not unlike the way noise canceling headphones work. Isn’t that cool?

https://science.howstuffworks.com/innovation/science-questions/question615.htm

On Andy Rooney - Day 30

I miss Andy Rooney. For those of you who aren’t old, Andy was a “reporter”/reoccurring character on a show called 60 Minutes. 60 Minutes - which I just, remarkably, found out is still actually on TV - was a show that myself and my parents watched when I was a kid. It was a sort of poor man’s NewsHour; an hour long news show that would do long form news articles about topics which were topical but not immediate. If it was on now - and I guess it is! - it would probably cover the opioid epidemic a lot. Anyway, as a sort of comic relief, they had this guy Andy Rooney. He looked and acted like a cartoon character; kind of like the Grandpa on the Simpsons; slightly befuddled by life, a little bit anachronistic and mildly sarcastic but loving and gentle. He was what we are were inside; occasionally confused by life but desirous of being kind towards it. He was grumpy, but not overly grumps. He liked people a lot, although he often didn’t like what they did. I’ll see if I can link some video clips or at least a picture of him here. I used to do a pretty good Andy Rooney imitation; his worldview aligns well with mind which made it easy. He would often get on a good rant and then pause and then say “and another thing,” and often behind the “other thing” was a deep philosophical nugget that would leave you thinking for days.

He died a while back, and I miss him. The world needs Andy Rooney right now. RIP.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Rooney

On Juneau - Day 29

I’ve always wanted to go to Juneau, Alaska. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s my fascination with the idea of a city that you can’t drive into or out of. There’s something weirdly anachronistic about that idea, like it’s somehow separate from modern society. Add to that the fact that it’s the capital of the state and it’s just kind of an interesting mix. Plus I hear it’s really beautiful up there, and the people are very genuine. I wouldn’t want to live someplace that remote, but I’d love to visit. Not now; not in the winter. In the summer. Maybe take a train up north as well; I hear you can do that. I’ve never had any reason to go there, and likely I never will, so if I want to do it, it’s going to have to be like my trip to Denver; I’m just going to have to do it on a whim.

If anybody has any suggestions about how to get there or what to do if I went for a long weekend, drop me a line, I’d love to hear about it!

On Owning Better Things - Day 28

A while back, I was in a store buying something (and yes I recognize the irony here) and they wrapped it in a bag which had their slogan on the front: Own fewer, better things. I’d heard this before of course but this time I was in a receptive mood to really confront that idea. It’s never been something I’ve been good at; I definitely have a bit of hoarder in me (reference my earlier post about cables).

Fast forward a few months and I’m in Denver at the art museum, looking through the gift shop, when I come across this exquisite ceramic coffee mug with a bronze bottom. Immediately I loved it. I’d been drinking coffee out of whatever I could find laying around; usually a Bob’s Donuts coffee mug (which, to be clear, is an amazing donut store but not really a great coffee mug supplier). But it was $37, which is a totally outrageous amount of money to pay for a coffee mug. I’m still not sure why I bought it. I think it’s because I was on vacation. Anyway, I’ve been using it for a month or so now and, while it certainly hasn’t turned my life around, it’s amazing how interacting with one small but really well made object every day can make a nice little bump in your happiness. It’s really a tiny piece of art. Every time I touch it and pick it up, the weight and balance of it and the way it keeps my hand safe from the hot coffee just gives me a little happy wiggle.

I know I’m privileged to be able to even think about spending $37 on a coffee mug. I’m aware of that. But what I’m really saying is that all of us could invest in fewer, nicer things. Now it’s time to see if I can bring myself to throw away some of my older, crappier mugs.

On Panicking, Or Lack Thereof - Day 27

Today I want to write about one of my favorite authors, Douglas Adams. I’ve been doing some filming at home at my desk, and I noticed in the background I had a collectors edition of his most well-known book, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy, up on the shelf behind me. It’s emblazoned with a huge copy of his most famous saying, “Don’t Panic”. I love Douglas Adams. It’s one of the few things from my childhood (art appreciation-wise) that has stuck with me into adulthood. Billy Joel? Sure, he’s OK. Baseball cards? Yeah, best left behind. But I found Adams when I was very young and I’ve been entranced ever since. I loved the movie, I love the radio scripts, but mostly I love the books. My favorites of his are actually some of his less-well-known works such as Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, and his nonfiction environmental book, Last Chance To See. I can’t say exactly why I like him so much. I enjoy the absurdity of british humor, such as Monty Python, but ultimately Python didn’t really teach me much about life (not that it was trying to). Adams teaches me something, a sort of resilience to absurdity. There is a depth of sincerity and profundity to even his most silly writing that touches me. The humor is sort of a sugarcoating around the pill of some hard lessons about life and how we respond to it. My favorite story is him writing about sharing a trailway station with another man and a packet of cookies, and watching him and the other man (a stranger) slowly and maddeningly take turns eating what he assumed to be his own cookies, only to later discover his cookies still in his pocket (and thus that he had been eating a stranger’s cookies). The story is simple, to the point, and left a deep impression: we think that the world has it out for us, but the truth is never that simple.

Anyway, R.I.P. Douglas. You were one of the greats.

On Electric Cars - Day 26

Today I went looking at an electric car. It was a BMW i3 Range Extender edition. I liked it. My current car is on the way out. It’s a Subaru Outback and it has 210k miles on it, and recently it flunked the smog test and it would take a lot more than I want to spend to bring it back into the good graces of California. I can’t bear the thought of investing in an ICE car because I feel like it’s so backward and plus Greta says not to. On the other hand, where I live isn’t quite ready for the Electric Car Revolution. I can’t charge at my apartment complex; they installed the requisite devices but for reasons I cannot fathom won’t turn them on. And Oakland is kind of a dead zone for EV charging stations. So, I’m looking at cars which are primarily electric, but have a safety valve. And really there’s only 2 or 3 - the Chevy Volt, the Honda Clarity and the BMW i3 rEX. I like the i3 because it’s clever; it uses an emergency motorcycle engine to charge the battery when you really can’t find a place to charge. But it’s primarily electric and goes over 100 miles on a charge, unlike the Volt which is rated at about 50. It’s a cute little thing, I liked it. I think I may buy it. There are downsides; the gas tank is absurdly small which makes long trips kind of a bummer. Plus, when it runs off the gas engine it’s seriously underpowered, which means that going to Tahoe might be interesting. But hey, you have to make tradeoffs when you invest in the future, right?

On Liking Terrible Things - Day 25

Last night, as I was having trouble falling asleep, I started watching videos by one of my favorite YouTube comedy duos, the Game Grumps. Among other things, the Game Grumps are a Let’s Play channel, which just means that they play video games on the video and talk about them. As is often the case, I found myself gravitating towards a subset of their videos put together by a fan, loosely entitled “Game Grumps Play Bad Games”. These are videos where the video game they play turns out to be - intentionally or otherwise - terrible. Poorly programmed, poorly spelled, weirdly drawn, whatever it might be or all of the above. And I found myself wondering, not for the first time, why it was that I like this genre of entertainment, what I will call Other People Noticing That Things Suck. One of my favorite shows, both when I was a kid and now, is Mystery Science Theater, which is sort of the “Tonight Show” of Watching Things That Suck; the big daddy, the one that started the modern era of this sort of entertainment. And I love it.

But it’s not mean spirited. That’s important. I’ve watched people who try to emulate MST, but do it too aggressively. Game Grumps, MST, VideoGameDunkey - what they share in common is that you know that deep down, they are actually big fans of the genre of work they are skewering. They make fun out of a gentle sense of love and affection. At some level, I think I have a Kantian fear that what I’m doing here isn’t really very nice; that I’m having fun at other people’s expense. So being kind about it is important, to make sure it isn’t mean spirited. The point isn’t to make the creators of these things feel bad; I think the point is to make us feel better by reminding us that other people - sometimes even people who are supposed to know what they’re doing - mess up too.

On Human Technology - Day 24

For someone who spends their life dealing with technology, it may surprise you to learn that I can’t stand 99% of it. Most technology is clumsy; overly complicated, poorly designed for human factors, not thought through. It’s surprisingly hard - as somebody who’s been involved with this - to build technology and stay focused on the fact that it’s designed to solve a human problem. Which is why I love my AirPods. Now, they certainly aren’t perfect. It sucks that the battery can’t be replaced which makes them essentially eventual eco-trash. They don’t work as well with non-Apple products. They’re in-ear headphones, which means that if not treated carefully they can cause hearing loss. But for what they are, they are the best. I’ve bought other in-ear bluetooth wireless headphones, and they all “work”. But AirPods just work. Like, every time. Pull them out, put them in, listen to music. Put them away. Music turns off when they come out of your ears. Music starts again when you put them back. Every time.

Seems simple, right? But apparently it isn’t. Behind the scenes, a ton of people work on making that magic happen so that I don’t have to care, and can just throw them in my ears and expect them to work. Not 99% of the time; 100% of the time. And what I’ve noticed is that my behavior patterns - and my stress level - change significantly when I use technology that I trust, that I know will work. When I expect things to work, I move smoothly through experiences and my day. When I have to deal with things I don’t trust, then - even when they do end up working - I have to focus so much more of my attention on them.

Not every product Apple makes is great. But AirPods are, and Apple, I salute you for them.

On Kondo And Cords - Day 23

My closet is my own personal nightmare. I call it Closet II: The Closeting: When Things Own You. It’s just a giant pile of misshapen cords and hot nonsense. The tipping point for me came a few weeks back when I actually needed one of these cords somewhere in that giant pile and I could not find it for the life of me and had to go buy another one. “Oh,” I thought to myself, “there is only one reason I keep these things around and that’s because I might need one of them in the future, but here it is, the future, and I had to go buy one anyway because I have so many that I couldn’t f***ing find one.” So, yeah: Marie Kondo up in this piece.

Anybody need a bunch of cords?

Adam over and out.

On Equanimity And Politics - Day 22

The topic for this blog occurred to me as I was listening to NPR’s news this morning about the President taking a surprise trip to Afghanistan to basically support the troops. Personally, I firmly believe that one of the biggest - if not the biggest - problems this country, and even the world faces is the fact that we are finding it harder and harder to agree with each other. Some call this the balkanization of politics and ideas; we no longer have any common ground. So, if I feel that way, I should start with myself. So, at great personal psychic expense, and after taking a long hot shower, here follows a list of the

Top Ten Things I Agree With Donald Trump About, Despite The Fact That It Makes Me Ill To Think About (*)

1. I think it’s great that he went and supported the troops on Thanksgiving, and he seems to have genuinely done a good job of doing that.

2. As a general rule, I agree that it would be good for America to send less troops abroad and be in fewer wars and international entanglements. (Of course, the way he goes about it sucks, but in principle I agree).

3. As a general rule, I agree that China has been unfair in its trade practices, and I am glad someone is at least attempting to narrow our trade deficit with them. (Again, he isn’t great at it, but I do agree with the basic principle).

4. He did sign the proclamation supporting the pro democracy movement in Hong Kong. (Granted, he had little choice, but hey).

5. He did sign the act making animal abuse a federal offense nationwide.

6. As a general rule, I do agree that rural folks in this country got the short end of the stick in the last few decades, and I do feel bad for people whose career depended on old ways of doing things and couldn’t reeducate themselves for the new market. (Again: he’s done nothing for them, in the end. But in theory I agree.)

7. I don’t completely disagree with him when he says that there a lot of career government people who are very biased and would like to see him fail. I suspect that’s probably true. He’s been incredibly disruptive (mostly in a bad way, admittedly) and people don’t like change. I mean, let’s be honest: if I worked for the government, I would be one of them.

8. I don’t necessarily think buying Greenland is a totally stupid idea. Maybe a weird idea, and certainly not our highest priority at the moment, but, you know, it’s not the dumbest thing he’s ever said. We’ve bought territory before, after all.

9. (Side note: at this point I had to Google “Good things Donald Trump has done”. I actually found a few surprising ones including this one, which I guess is the whole point of this). Last year he signed a law allowing people who are already dying access to experimental treatments that aren’t yet approved. This is a good idea and I support it.

10. Whatever you want to say about the guy, I have to admit that he’s been exactly what he said he would be, pretty much. I don’t think you can say he represented himself dishonestly. He said he was going to be an authoritarian jerk who reminded you of your weird bigoted uncle, and then he followed through.

(*) To be clear: I think Trump is a terrible president and not a terribly good human being. That’s actually kind of the point of this exercise.

On Vests - Day 21

Today I want to write about something a little random that I happen to be thankful for - my vests! Many years ago, I stumbled into some clothing shop over in the East Bay - I couldn’t tell you where anymore - and saw this awesome vest. It was, for me, crazy expensive and more than I’d ever spent on something like that at the time, but I was trying to broaden my horizons and for some reason this vest spoke to me and I bought it, right off the rack. Ever since then, I’ve worn that vest in so many situations, and every time, it just makes me feel a little more fun and playful and just a bit more grounded. I’ve tracked down the manufacturer and it turns out to be this woman who used to live in the Bay Area and now lives in Hawaii. She makes every vest and piece of clothing by hand; she starts with off-the-shelf used clothes, like American Eagle vests, and then modifies them extensively to create something very different. I love them, and I now own 2 vests and a full jacket. Her business name is Ghetto Goldilocks, and if you ever see her stuff, consider buying it because it’s really hard to find these days!

On Credit For Patience - Day 20

As some of you may know, over the last 3-4 years I have fought an uphill battle to repair my credit. Now, my credit was never that bad - somewhere down in the mid 600s. But it annoyed me on an emotional level, and was potentially an issue on a logistical level as well. Annoying, because I didn’t feel like it reflected any kind of reality, and an issue if I ever wanted to buy a car or a house (which I do, someday) because it was going to cost me a lot of money in extra interest. When I embarked on that journey years back, it felt insurmountably bureaucratic - and that’s because it (almost) was. But it turns out it can be done - you just have to be incredibly patient. Today, FICO informed me that one of the last hurdles was crossed: my TransUnion score went up by 101 points, because a collection came off my record. This collection was for $293. When I left Portland, I tried to return my cable modem. Through a series of shenanigans and goings on fit for an 80s movie, I failed to do so, and despite my best efforts, also could not get them to take my money or let me send them the modem from San Diego. I, quite frankly, eventually forgot about it - but apparently the cable company didn’t. And that transgression was apparently so heinous that it was worth 101 points on my credit. To be clear, I paid them the money as soon as I figured out how, but I guess that wasn’t good enough.

Anyway, finding this out today made me really really happy so I just wanted to share with all y’all. Patience and persistence work! Go on about your day. Adam over and out.

On The Progress Of Ideas - Day 19

Yesterday I was jogging at the gym on the treadmill. My gym has TVs right in front of the treadmill - you really can’t help but watch - usually on a sports channel. I’m not really watching usually, it just images in front of me, and it’s notable because I never watch TV anymore so it’s the only time I really connect with that part of the media. The show that was on yesterday was a sort of NFL recap show going over the weekend’s games - pretty standard stuff. They cut to commercial and my subconscious was only half paying attention. I couldn’t even tell you what ads came on. In the course of this there was a totally unremarkable ad for TGI Friday’s. I want to stress that this ad was really average. It was a totally boring ad about some food special they were running. I can’t remember it at all. Again: very boring ad in the middle of a very boring show. Then, my subconscious did a double-take. “Hey”, it said, “pay attention”. I was like “what, subconscious? This ad is pointless.” But then I looked again. Right in the middle of the ad, they showed a couple kissing over a shared meal. Then, they showed another couple. But this couple was two men. A quick, romantic kiss over the table, over top of their nachos.

The moment flowed by. They moved on to talking about the special itself. A totally predictable ending with some sort of call to action (“$5 fajita shooters!”). Then they went back to the show.

As ideas flow through a society, they go through a progression. At first they are forbidden. Then they are controversial. Then, it’s like they were never not normal to begin with. Gandhi said it best of course: “"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win”.

I am not so foolish as to think that we’ve reached a point of total acceptance for gay rights in this country. That would be naive. But it seems remarkable how unremarkable the moment was. This wasn’t a video that was made to showcase or support gay rights. They were just selling crappy diner food. The gay couple kissing wasn’t a centerpiece of the ad; it just flowed past. It seemed, well…normal. Pedestrian. Everyday.

On Why I Kan't Watch - Day 18

Concussions have been on my mind because of my little adventure a couple of days ago. Juxtaposed with that, I’ve been reading a book - Everything’s Fucked - by Mark Manson - where he espouses, among other things, adherence to a Kantian philosophy. Now, I’ve never read Kant firsthand, but my understanding is that among other things he champions the idea of doing the “right thing”, without regard to consequence or gain. Which is why it seems like a good idea to talk about my love of college football.

I loved college football. I loved football because I grew up with it. Growing up in Buffalo, everyone was a Bills fan. It was just something you did on the weekend; turn your garage over to help park cars for the stadium, dress in red, white and blue, argue about Jim Kelly or Thurman Thomas like they were your best friends. So went I went to college, I got involved with the band and the football team. I loved being in the band; I never played an instrument but helped with the theater performances (that’s a post for another day!). Even after college ended, I stayed a fan. I remember sitting in my office at Johns Hopkins looking for pirated copies of audio broadcasts of the games. One of my favorite stories is finding a broadcast stream where the announcers didn’t realize they weren’t cutting the mikes during the commercial breaks but also weren’t broadcasting the commercials so I just got to hear two guys shooting the shit about their weekend and their wives while waiting for the game to restart.

Anyway. I don’t watch anymore. Which sucks. I miss it. But knowing what we know now about CTE - Chronic Traumatic Encephelopathy - something feels deeply wrong about watching. I don’t watch much pro football either for a number of reasons, but at least there I feel like those are adults getting paid to do something self-harming and stupid. Sort of like mining; not a job I would want, but at least I don’t feel ethically queasy about it. But college kids is another thing entirely. There’s the youth factor; they have their whole lives ahead of them. There’s the education irony; college is supposed to teach you to be smarter, not destroy your brain. But there’s also the ethical dilemma that they are supposed to be amateurs. They’re not even getting paid.

I sincerely hope someday science figures this out so I can go back to watching. But in the meantime, it just isn’t fun for me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_traumatic_encephalopathy

On Real Life - Day 17

Two days ago I bought a pull-up bar because I wanted to start doing pull-ups at home instead of at the gym. You know, one of these kinds that you can put on a door jamb temporarily. Yesterday it showed up and I put it together and tried to use it. The first time it tore a hole in my door jamb. Then, I read the instructions (correctly this time) and installed it properly. I did one full pull up, correctly, and then the second time I put weight on it, it immediately fell apart and I fell to the ground, bruising my tailbone and then whipping my head into the ground, which was really scary and also hurt like the devil and gave me a whopping headache.

I tell this story for one simple reason. Everyone complains, and quite rightly so, that social media is conditioning us to only talk about things which either make us look good, make us look smart, make us look humble, etc. etc. This story is none of those things. Essentially: I cheaped out on an Amazon pull up bar, installed it wrong, it felt apart and I fell down and it hurt a lot but I’ll be OK in a couple of days. There’s really nothing to learn here except A) life sucks in small ways sometimes, and B) don’t buy a cheap pull up bar.

Continue on with your day. Adam over and out.

On Silicon and Graphics - Day 16

I did my masters work in Computer Graphics, around the year 1999-2000. At that time, the king of the graphics scene was a company called Silicon Graphics, or SGI. SGI was not a household name. It was a company, and a set of products, that you used if you were a professional; someone serious about Computer Graphics. CG was still a field that existed largely in the future for most folks, the realm of Lawnmower Man and the demo DVD they used at Radio Shack. For me, though, it was a very real thing, brought to me on a $300,000 Onyx machine so heavy it had castors, and a virtual reality headset that had to be attached to the ceiling with a 2 inch diameter pack of cables and could only be used for about 15 minutes before it gave you a whopping headache. Still, I built a working tennis game in VR on a terminal hooked to an SGI down in the basement VR lab. They were still so rare and expensive that despite being a CG graduate student I wasn’t allowed to have one in my office; I had to go down to the basement. There was something glorious about those days; it still felt like the world was ahead of me - ahead of us, really - and despite the fact that I was pretty miserable in Baltimore - or maybe because of that fact - I threw myself into triangles and textures and glBegin()/glEnd().

Now, I own an SGI desktop system, an O2. In the modern world it’s a serious pain to try to keep one of these things running. I don’t even know why I own it except that it makes me feel good to boot it up and hear that distinctive SGI startup noise and the weird way it makes a metallic ding and turns an icon yellow when you double click on it. Something about the potential of that time, and the nostalgia for that dingy basement, keeps me coming back to it.

On Being Ten Percent Happier - Day 15

Years ago, I bought and read a book called Ten Percent Happier on the recommendation of a friend. I found it to be a good book and persuasive, but it was written for people who weren’t meditators yet and weren’t sold on the benefits of meditation, and so at the time, as someone who taught meditation, it wasn’t a great fit. But I still have the book and recommend it to people who aren’t into meditation. Recently, though, Apple started a program at work, a sort of meditation contest where if you meditated consistently you got some cool small prizes and I figured, what the heck. It turns out they are using the Ten Percent Happier app and as part of doing well in the contest I got to keep a premium version of the app for a full year. It’s been really great; I use it every morning just after breakfast. It’s filled with a lot of really good content; different videos about meditation and then a ton of guided meditations. You can do a different one every day and not run out for a looong time. I think it’s kind of expensive for a full premium version but the free version is already a really great start and has - if I remember right - over two weeks of daily meditation content that you can of course go back and reuse. I really like the layout; it’s clean and simple and doesn’t have any “gamification elements”; it doesn’t look like a game app or a 90s web app. Nothing is blinking. And the attitude of the guy who started it - Dan Harris - is really approachable. I recommend checking it out.

On Running Consistently - Day 14

Continuing on the theme of yesterday, I’ve been running consistently a 5k every day. Always on the treadmill, generally I try to get the same treadmill just to be super sure. Every day I bump up the speed by 0.05 miles/hour. I started out at 5.8 miles/hour about a month ago; that’s a 32:10 5k pace and about 10:30/mile. I knew I could go faster than that, but that was the point; I wanted headroom to improve everyday. I’m honestly curious how fast I can get up to. I’m at 27:01 today, or a 8:41 pace. That’s nowhere near the fastest I’ve ever gone, which is down around 6:30 if I remember correctly. Every day I lose about 10-12 seconds off my pace, so that means that by New Years I would be down around my PR (If I ran every day). What’s important here though is just the consistency; so far in 26 days I’ve run 23 of them (I missed one day because I was just exhausted, and I missed 2 days because I was traveling and couldn’t find a gym easily).

Around about Christmas I’ll come back with an update.

On Consistency - Day 13

You may have noticed that I’m posting on the blog every day, and counting the days. This is a trick I learned from being on my long bike rides, and I’m coming back around to it. But this time it’s not just about doing the blog - I’m discovering (rediscovering?) the joys of consistency, of sticking to something and being yourself and doing things consistently. They say 99% of success is showing up and I’m testing out the benefits of that, and so far it’s going great. There’s a certain freedom and joy in just submitting to a process and having the patience to let it unspool at its own pace. Get rid of all my old things? I don’t have to do it today all at once, I can just do 30 minutes a day. Fill up a journal? One half page at a time. Write a piece of software? 45 minutes a day. Think about it: if you did something 15 minutes a day, every day, a year from now you’d have done over 90 hours of work on that thing. You could probably do something pretty amazing in that amount of time, and all it took was your leftover time and focus. I can get to where I want to go, one day at a time.

On Dharma - Day 12

Back in 2014, when I was an active member of SF Insight (a meditation group in SF), I wrote the following article for their in-house print journal. I’m not sure if they even do a journal anymore like this, but at the time it was quite an honor to be in it. Recently I ran across a physical copy among my things and I’d like to reproduce it here, both for posterity and because I think everything in here is still true and relevant. Some of this still feels fresh.

Downloadable Life: How Can We Cultivate Patience in a Time Of Instant Gratification?

The human mind is like a car; aim it, crank up the engine, and it gladly moves. But once you gas up the engine, it keeps moving in the same direction, speeding up until you put on the brakes or turn the wheel. When ewe engage the pace of life in a modern city, we “push the pedal” on our mental energy. Then, when it’s time to slow down, to sleep or just to have a moment’s rest, we’re often surprised by our mental momentum. So what can we do to “downshift” our mind’s pace? Here are some concrete tips for practicing with life in a modern city.

Cover the Basics. No practice could allow you to self-regulate if you were tired, wired, or feeling ill. So take care of the basics first: get plenty of sleep, lay off the caffeine, and get some exercise. These habits will cultivate the “gas in your tank” your “car” needs to run.

Check Your Speed. Pay attention to the pace of life you choose. Much like we glance down occasionally at the speedometer to verify our own assumptions about our speed when driving, we need to glance at the speed of our minds to make sure they haven’t raced out of control.

Practice Patient Consumption. If you want to watch an episode of 30 Rock and iTunes can give it to you in five seconds, then why not watch? Only, try to watch util you’re satiated and then stop. If you can put the fork down halfway through a piece of cake, perhaps you can stop short of consuming a whole season in one sitting.

Micro-Meditate. Find opportunities to pause and take a deep breath. Wherever you happen to be - in line at the store, driving, surfing the web. With your mind’s eye, take a “snapshot” of where you are. Imagine what this moment might feel like if you remembered it five or ten years from now.

Remember Your Animal Side. No matter how much we may want to deny it, we’re animals. Social animals at that. It’s in our nature to interact with others. Do you want to call a friend and have lunch? Go for it! Remind your monkey mind that you belong to a community of warm human beings who care about you.

Live The Examined Life. The internet is a tool, and as with any tool, what matters most is how we use it. If your intention is to have fun, great! Just make sure you actually are having fun. When you find yourself clicking on a site you’re not sure you even want to read, put the mouse down and take a break. Your great-grandparents probably once felt overwhelmed by radio, television, cars and highways. Have faith in the resilience of the human spirit, find the smile on your face, and take a deep breath.