Notes v. photos

While I was in San Francisco last week, I flipped through the small memo notebook I take to every conference I work at. I use the thing to jot down the important stuff that gets said in my meetings with conference chairs. Toward the end of my old notes was this:

Silver van

30923

5:00 am

The note confused me for a moment. Why would I have written down vehicle information like that, including the license plate number? Then it dawned on me that this was the van that picked me up from my hotel in Shanghai early last November to take me to the airport to fly to Korea. The co-organizers of the conference had offered to arrange my transportation, and this was the info they gave me the night before I left. 

Seeing this note brought a warm smile to my face. It recalled the memory so vividly. I remembered Chaoyang calling his driver to arrange it, I remembered scribbling the note, I remembered the anxiety I felt that something would go wrong and I’d miss my flight.

Of all the photos I took on that trip, I don’t think a single one is as evocative as this note was. The thing about photos is that they take you out of the moment. They have to be contemplated, composed, posed, and shot. You’re thinking ahead of time that this will be a keepsake you will use to remember the moment. I find that when I look at my old photos, I remember very little of what it actually felt like to be there. They don’t put me back in my own skin. What was I doing when that photo was taken? Well, I was either clicking the button or I was looking at the lens and trying to smile. There’s not much in that (I don’t think) to attach a memory to.  

A little note like the one I found, though, is all about the moment. I intended it only for immediately practical purposes. It was filling a need I had right then and there. And it also involved some actual doing on my part. So when I stumbled upon it last week, it took me right back to that moment. It did this more effectively than a photo would have, because the note actually had a place in the sequence of events that day. It had relevance for my actions.

A photo is a moment taken out of context. I enjoy looking at them—they can be intriguing—but they give no sense of what came before or next. My stupid little van note’s entire reason for existence was to give a sense of what was coming next. That added context lets me slip back into the thoughts and feelings I had when I was there. 

My note might also be so evocative partly because I never intended to remember it. Last week was the first I had seen it in two and a half months. My photos from that trip, on the other hand, I looked at right after I took. I sorted through them on my computer, shared them with friends and family, gave them captions on Picasa. I was so consumed in them so soon after the fact that when I look at them now I’m not sure if I’m remembering the events themselves or if I’m remembering telling people about them. Maybe I would enjoy my photos more if I left them unviewed for three months after taking them. Remembering is more fun when you’ve given yourself a little time to forget. 

Inconveniently disposable

I just spent a week working at a conference and trade show put on by my company in San Francisco. The week included lots of paper cups and plastic cutlery. In airports, on airplanes, in hotels, in convention centers—everything is used once and tossed. Most people seem not to notice it. If you go to enough of these things, it just becomes routine.

I was thinking about it when I first arrived in my hotel room, though. I decided I wanted a cup of coffee. All Marriott hotel rooms now have one of those coffee makers that brews one cup at a time using a pre-filled coffee sachet in a disposable plastic tray. Each tray-n-sachet is individually wrapped in plastic. So I tore open a packet, placed it in the machine, and placed a paper cup (also individually wrapped in plastic) under the drip spout. 

Next to the coffee machine are a few more plastic packets labeled “Coffee Valet” in neat curlicue script. Inside each one is a packet of sugar, a packet of artificial sweetener, a packet of non-dairy creamer, and a plastic stirring straw. I only wanted the sugar and the stirring straw, so I left the other contents in the basket next to the machine, hoping they might be picked up by the maid and sent back to the factory to be resealed in a new Coffee Valet, but knowing they’d most likely be tossed.

Since the coffee isn’t that great, I decided I actually needed two packets of sugar. This required tearing open another Coffee Valet and leaving the non-sugar contents sitting sadly in the basket. At this point I was thoroughly shocked at the waste incurred in making a simple cup of coffee. I had a pile of plastic sitting next to me as I sipped from a paper cup that would be added to the pile momentarily. This was my third stay in a Marriott in the past nine months, though, so it wasn’t exactly a new shock. It’s a recurring shock I get every time I travel for work (Although the Coffee Valet is a recent development. They used to have sugar and creamer packets loose in the basket.). 

But I did notice something new this time around. What I noticed is that all this individually wrapped, disposable, single-serving nonsense—besides begin wasteful—isn’t even more convenient. I had to open up six (six!) different plastic or paper packets to make my one cup of joe. I had to sort through what I wanted and didn’t want, and I had to gather up all the spent packets to throw in the trash. Imagine if they had just had a regular coffee machine, regular mugs, and the coffee and accoutrements in jars with scoops. It probably would have taken less time to get my coffee going. There would have been a little cleanup afterward, but how long does that take?

What Marriott is really going for here is not convenience so much as it is the clinical sterility of their facilities. I suppose this is what Americans want. If we had unsealed jars of coffee in our hotel rooms, there would be no telling how the previous guest might have tampered with it. Maybe he rubbed it all over his naked body and then swept it up off the bathroom floor and put it back in the jar. Maybe he ejaculated in it or laced it with strychnine. 

These suspicions may not be totally unfounded, but what does that say about us as a culture and about how we view each other? I remember having coffee at a small guesthouse in Bogor, Indonesia. They had a common area with a hot water thermos, ground coffee in a tub, sugar in a dish, and honest-to-god porcelain mugs. I had plenty of opportunity to do something disgusting like replace the coffee with dehydrated, ground-up deer poop, but I didn’t, and no one seemed to suspect that I would. We all just drank the coffee, and no one got sick. 

I guess a giant chain like Marriott has the money to insulate itself from even the remote chance that someone might get hurt from drinking tampered-with coffee. So why risk it? But there’s still one thing I have to ask about: the Coffee Valet. What the hell is that extra packet for? It makes no sense, Marriott. It makes no fucking sense. 

Where learning takes place

I was fortunate during my first two summers of college to find full-time work at a steel shop in my hometown. It was a big place, full of dangerous machines I had never heard of. I helped out in the weld bay with a bunch of rough but good-natured guys. The hours were long and the workload intense. We made grain silos.

My second summer there actually turned into 7 months, since I was taking a year off from school and saving up money to do some traveling. So I worked in the shop for a total of 10 months, and in those 10 months I learned more than I did in the first two years of college (and maybe all four). I was lucky to work with a few guys who wanted to put me to the test, teach me things, and give me challenging things to do. The job was more like an apprenticeship.

I know I learned more in the shop than I did in college, because I can tell you the things I learned in the shop. I learned how to drive a forklift, how to operate a bridge crane, how to manage steel stock, how to  read engineering drawings and mark hole layouts, how to weld, how to cut, how to punch, how to shear, and how to build things from scratch. What did I learn in Political Science 101 or Anthropology 102? I’m not sure I could name a single thing.

Defenders of higher education would argue that I was learning things in college without realizing it. I was absorbing great ideas in those classrooms, they might say, like an unwitting sponge. This claim is bogus. People know when they’re learning.

It’s not only in retrospect that I see the disparity in my college education and my work education. I saw it at the time, too. The main difference was that the things I learned in the shop had an actual purpose. People will pay money for well-fabricated steel. It adds value to the world. Learning how to make it, then, is probably worth doing.

What value did my time in classes add to the world? Most classes seemed not to have—and didn’t even purport to have—any purpose beyond the circular one of learning the material to pass the final to prove you learned the material. No wonder college students feel uninspired.

Well, learning to work with your hands is all well and good, college apologists might counter, but you also need to be learning larger concepts. Manual labor isn’t enough. Here again, the shop trumped college. There were many concepts to learn, if you were only so receptive. Like I said, I learned what it means to add value and create wealth. I also learned how things work. I learned that everything is part of a system, that everything we have is a product of human ingenuity. I also learned (significantly, considering the prevailing attitudes in universities) that business isn’t bad. Surely these concepts are more important than those taught in Introduction to Psychology.

Ah, but we need cultural enrichment, too. Few jobs can provide that. True, but college doesn’t provide much of it either. Throughout my time in school, I learned more about culture, history, science, and philosophy from the things I chose to read on my own than from what I was assigned in class. Most of what you read in college is either a creative work chosen according to someone else’s tastes or a textbook written by a committee of bored academics. Most students could do a better job of picking their own educational materials. And independent reading was a habit I continued during my time working with steel. I wasn’t missing anything.

University advocates might try to say—as a last resort—my dissatisfaction with school was my own fault. I wasn’t applying myself, or I wasn’t taking the right classes. This wasn’t the case. I really tried.

After my year off, I came back to school (with considerable reluctance) and enrolled in the engineering program. I had learned in the shop how much I enjoyed working with machines, so engineering seemed like a natural fit. What a sad disappointment that was. In my job, I had been designing and building equipment for use around the shop, and I had been processing thousands of pounds of steel a day for multimillion-dollar grain systems. In my Introduction to Design class, I was building a mousetrap car and racing it down the hall with a bunch of 18 year olds. I left the engineering program after one quarter.

The problem with universities is that even when they have students working hands-on, they have them solving contrived problems rather than real ones. How could anyone care about a mousetrap car? Who needs it? The official idea behind projects like mousetrap cars is that students learn principles of design and teamwork in an environment where error will have few consequences.

This thinking is off base. Consequences are essential to learning. Consequences are what drive us. When I started at the shop, I didn’t know how to fabricate steel plates (one of the very basic duties of my new job), but I made sure I learned as quickly as possible, because I knew that failing to do so would have real consequences—possibly for the company and certainly for me personally. 

One of the best learning experiences I had there was when I started independently building equipment and reorganizing parts of the shop to make it more efficient. Talk about learning principles of design! If I didn’t get it right, I would create more problems than I had solved. But I did get it right, and there’s no way I would have bothered doing that work if it hadn’t had the consequence of making job processes smoother and—more to the point—my own job easier.

The benefit of giving young people real problems to work on is twofold: it inspires the capable and weeds out the incapable. With a project as arbitrary as a mousetrap car (or some of the other things I saw higher-level engineering students designing), it’s impossible to tell who’s got what it takes to do the work profitably. In the real world, making something that works well is only part of the process. More important is making something that people want. The test of customer satisfaction quickly reveals who excels and who doesn’t. And those who don’t excel in solving certain problems can begin looking for other ones to solve.

We should worry less about preparing kids for work before letting them do the real thing. Most teenagers could do a useful job reasonably well with only a few hours’ instruction. As they mastered menial tasks, they could be moved up to more responsible positions until they knew the work inside and out. 

The work given to college students is generally infantilizing. It might be unwise to suggest to all kids, “Go out and find a job—any job—rather than going to college.” I was lucky to work in a place where I was treated as an adult and expected to deliver adult results. Many businesses, influenced by the state-mandated structure of young people’s lives, still see an 18 year old as a child. It would be great to see businesses change this thinking—to begin offering interesting apprenticeships and putting young people to real work. If they did it right, they would probably receive a great return on their investment. And there would probably be more learning taking place. 

Stuff, desks, fear, success

I have cleared my desk of every last fucking thing I don’t need. I did it about a year ago. And it is awesome.

Not mine, but close

When I started at my job, I inherited a desk filled with probably seven years’ worth of office detritus accumulated by previous occupants. The work station had been cleaned, in a manner of speaking, but the “bare essentials” left behind were in fact voluminous and unnecessary. 

I inherited piles of straight pins, push pins, pens, pencils, post-its, paper clips, binder clips, rubber bands, staples, adhesive tapes, and assorted fasteners, joiners, splicers, and sealers (I made up those last four, but the rest is true.). There was also a white-out tape dispenser thing, one or two compartmentalized plastic tray dealies, and a weird, big metal shelf thing with dividers in it where I guess I was supposed to want to put papers or files.

All of these things were left behind in the name of helping me “keep organized.” You never know when you might need to rubber-band 83 different things without any time to walk 30 feet to the supply area! You’ll want to have at least three red pencils handy, because sometimes you’ll get so busy correcting publications that you’ll need to use all three hands at the same time! Be sure to keep a tangled ball of paper clips of varying shapes and sizes in your desk, because we may someday have an emergency situation  in which numerous piles of paper of varying thicknesses must all be clipped together at your desk and your desk only!

One day I finally realized what a pain in the ass it was to see, think about, and smell all that clutter every day (Smelling clutter is hereditary, there was a study). So I got rid of it all. I sort of made it a competition with myself to see how much I could remove, and the answer was a lot. I kept only what I truly used, and of that only very small quantities. Now the insides of my desk contain just a few paper clips, a post-it pad, some files, etc., and the top of my desk has literally nothing but a small pen holder, a water bottle, a tea cup and a drinking glass, my computer, my phone, and a little wireframe organizer that holds folders for the conferences I’m currently working on.

Keeping such a fastidiously spartan workspace has several benefits, the first being that it freaks people out. Most people keep their desktops liberally sprinkled with food scraps from several days ago, unfinished projects from several weeks ago, and sticky notes from several years ago. Seeing a desk so very different from their own unsettles them. This is good. You should always be freaking people out, at least in some small way. If you’re not, you must be doing something wrong.

Another benefit of an empty desk is that it becomes a clean and convenient place to recline (if large enough, which most office desks are). Today I took my shoes off and sat on my desk with my legs all nice and stretched out, and I watched the snow falling outside. It was delightful. I’m thinking sometime I might use the area for a quick nap.

An empty desk also gives you space to work on big projects you’re not supposed to. Yesterday I brought an enormous National Geographic atlas of the world over to my desk and pored over the map of India for a good while. I couldn’t have done that if my desk was as cluttered as most people’s, and I wouldn’t have learned that Assam is in the northeast of the country, near Burma. I had always thought it was in the center, stupid me!

See the incredible rewards of a clear desk? I can only wonder what future successes it will bring.  

  

Was it worth it?

Earlier today I took a walk through my neighborhood, and I thought about the houses I passed. My apartment building is situated among some very nice homes. They’re old (by West Coast standards) and well-kept. 

I was thinking about whether I wanted one of those houses. As an American, I’m supposed to want a nice house in order to live the American dream. And as a young, employed American, I’m supposed to be seriously thinking about buying one. 

The houses I passed on my walk are truly lovely. They’re tasteful, elegant, diverse in character, and nicely located. They’re places I’m sure I would be pleased to come home to every day. They seem to be filled with classy furniture and fine appliances.

I doubt any of the houses I passed today would sell for less than $300,000, and some of them would go for much more. Throw in all the stuff inside, and you’ve probably got an additional $50,000. Numbers like this are basically unfathomable for me. Even with my pretty decent salary and pretty simple lifestyle, it would take me over 16 years of aggressive penny-pinching to put together that kind of money. And that doesn’t even take into account maintenance costs or interest.

 When I started thinking about the financial side of it, the nice homes seemed much less appealing. I thought about the people inside the homes. 

I’d like to go door to door and ask the homeowners one question: was it worth the price? Most of the people living in those houses probably had to do one of two things to afford them: go into severe debt or slave away at a high-paying job they didn’t like. Many of them probably did both. There might be a guy here or there who managed to become wealthy doing work he loved, and hats off to him. But I’m sure he’s the exception rather than the rule.

So was it worth it? Was everything you put toward the house (or are still putting toward it) money well spent? Was there nothing you would have rather done with that money—or with the time spent making it?

Some would say no to the last question—a house is what they wanted and they’re happy they spent the money on one. But I’ll bet plenty of others—if you really probed into their honest feelings—would admit serious regrets in making such a commitment. Some might wish they’d just saved like crazy and taken time to go traveling. Some might wish they’d have been willing to live in a crappier place so they could have pursued their dream of playing music. Some might wish they’d have just rented a small place and had more time to spend with their kids.

If I were to scrounge together the cash for a down payment on a nice home and move into one in, say, a year, I’m sure it would at first be utterly delightful. No upstairs neighbors, my own washer and dryer, a yard, a place to call my own. Coming home after work would make my day. But it would only be a matter of time before the initial blush wore off and I started thinking over what I had to spend my days doing to afford the place. I would realize that buying a house had done nothing to move me forward in figuring out the life I want. 

Even if my salary were to double—or triple—or quadruple—I still wouldn’t want to buy a house. A five-figure monthly paycheck wouldn’t have me thinking about home ownership. It would have me thinking about all the plane tickets I could buy when I quit in six months. 

I wouldn’t buy a house because it’s not what I truly value. I’m sure plenty of homeowners don’t truly value them, either. They buy them to keep up with the Joneses, or to please a partner, or because they think it’s the best thing to give their kids. And when they realize this, they find themselves ensconced in self-made gilded cages.

Greetings and salutations!

Email has forever changed the way we address one another in professional correspondence. It used to be (I’m guessing, and I don’t have the time to research it) that all written correspondence was addressed with a simple “Dear John” or “Dear Mr. Doe.” That’s what they taught us in school. Now there’s an anarchic profusion of email salutations, and I don’t think there’s a single one I actually like. I’ll get to the reasons in a moment, but first here’s a sampling of some of the salutations I get on a daily basis (both from customers and coworkers):

Hi Dan,

Hello Dan,

Hey Dan,

Hi, Dan,

Greetings Dan,

Dan,

Hello Mr. Hauer,

Dear Mr. Hauer,

Dear Mr. Daniel,

Dear Mr. Daniel Hauer,

Dear Dr. Daniel Hauer, (usually comes from Chinese people who assume anyone      working for a scientific society must be a PhD)

Sir,

Dear Sir,

Dear Sir/Madam,

Dear Respected Sir,

And so forth. Some of the funnier ones come from the fact that my company is international and has customers from basically every corner of the globe other than the DPRK. But even within the US—and even within just my own little organization—you still see a good dozen ways to address an email.

The top two in my list are the only ones that don’t really grate on me in some way. I typically address my emails with a “Hi” or a “Hello.” It always feels kind of strange to me to write these verbal greetings, but it at least strikes a balance of being neither too familiar nor too formal.

A “Hey Dan” is too familiar. Or something. Anyway, I feel that only my friends should be allowed to “Hey” me in writing. 

A “Hi, Dan,” makes me think the person writing to me is an English major who’s trying too hard. That extra little comma is technically correct. Grammarians will tell you that any address should be set off by a comma from the person being addressed. (“How are you, Dan?” “Shut up, Dan.” “I don’t know why I bother talking to you, Dan.” etc.) But in an email, a “Hi” is less an address than it is an arbitrary signifier of geniality. And so that little comma is just offensively pedantic.

A “Greetings” isn’t so bad—almost a bit jovial, actually. But it only works with that limited number of people with whom you’re fairly familiar, but with whom you communicate irregularly. If you used “Greetings” with someone you email four or five times a week, it would seem affected and gimmicky, like wearing a bowler hat and horn-rimmed glasses.

A plain old “Dan”—with no salutational sauce on it at all—is too brusque. I feel like I’m about to be ordered to do something.

The use of “Dear” and honorifics doesn’t bother me so much (especially when it comes from foreign folks who try so damn hard, god bless ‘em), but it does make me feel like I’ve been transported back to the 1950s. I’ll respond to a “Dear” with a “Dear,” since I think it’s typically best to reciprocate in these things, and I’ll use a “Dear” when addressing a large group of people I don’t know (“Dear 2012 conference chairs”) or delivering bad news, but otherwise it’s just too formal. Emails aren’t the same as letters, and pretending they are looks silly and outdated. And as far as honorifics go, the only time I really like being called “Mr. Hauer” is when I’m checking into a hotel.

And last of all, the “Dear Sir” emails piss me off because they’re just lazy. I mean, come on man, you must have seen my name on the website in order to get my email address. You should at least take a crack at using my name, even if it ends up being “Dear Mrs. Hauer.”

The point of all this is that you absolutely cannot win when sending work emails. Even though we typically just breeze through the salutation without actually thinking about it, it still affects the tone of the message. You might try to tailor your salutations to the recipient, but from time to time you’re going to flub it and use something that makes you look foolish. And you especially have to worry if you’re sending it to someone like me who overanalyzes everything.

Living in bad design

The building I work in consists of four two-story blocks (each about 100 feet long by 20 feet wide) arranged in a square around a central courtyard. It’s sort of like The Pentagon. But if you made the pentagon a square. 

Someone in HR told me the design of the place had won awards. It’s easy to see why—at first. The building is well-sited on park-like grounds, its interior layout is unlike that of any other building I know, it offers nice views of the area, and it lets in tons of natural light through large windows and skylights. And the geometrically segmented structure of it provides a convenient way to divide up departments (also like The Pentagon).  

It’s only after working in it for a while that I’ve noticed serious design flaws. All of the hallways are built for precisely one person. They’re way too narrow—42.5 inches wide, to be exact (I came in before anyone else this morning and measured.). In America, we generally like to have about two-and-a-half to three feet of personal space. So when two Americans pass in a hall four feet wide, they both have to get really close to the wall and turn slightly sideways. And we sort of squeeze in our arms and avoid eye contact like we’re apologizing for our bodies. It’s awkward, and it happens to all of us multiple times a day.

I have to imagine it’s even worse for the seriously overweight people. Sometimes they have to step into the closest cubicle alcove to let someone pass. Probably doesn’t help their self-consciousness any. Thanks, Mr. Architect, you’ve put the Fat Acceptance movement back 10 years.

There’s one stairway in a high-traffic area that is truly so narrow that only one person at a time can use it (like a ladder). If you spot someone coming down while you need to go up, you have to wait your turn. I hate to imagine what would happen on that staircase in the event of an emergency like an earthquake or a fire. Human stampede!

In another part of the building, the narrow hallway makes a 90-degree right turn followed  immediately by a 90-degree left turn in small area that—with the combination of stairways, bathrooms, conference rooms, and side hallways—has six points of access. You frequently almost run headlong into other people. And this area is right next to the staff lounge. And what is one of the main things people come to the lounge for? Piping hot cups of coffee! Disaster waiting to happen. I’ve yet to hear of someone getting a scalding beverage splashed in their face, but it’s a possibility (Startled coffee drinkers sometimes splash it on the floor and walls, anyway.). 

At what point does bad design become criminal? If I get a coffee or tea burn on my beautiful puss, do I get to sue the architect?

The point is that the building won awards, but it’s actually a bit uncomfortable (and maybe slightly dangerous) to work in. It just shows the difficulty of judging good design. The problems I’ve pointed out probably didn’t occur to the architect, because he was just imagining himself walking through the place. And those problems wouldn’t be apparent when taking a tour of the building, either, which is probably how the award-givers saw it. Only the users, who live in the place, can see what’s really right and wrong. 

People designing software have an easier time meeting users’ needs. They just release a beta version, see what users think, then modify their original code to meet demands. This is a bit harder to do when designing something physical, and especially when designing something that’s a one-time shot—like a a building. I guess architects need to practice empathetic thinking to the point that it’s just second nature.

Why didn’t anyone ask me about this?

My wish to live the sweet life

I wish I were a 35-year-old woman with a baby. That’s right: female, 44% of the way through my life, and with an infant in my care. I’ll explain why.

35-year-old women with babies have the easiest lives in the world. A 35-year-old woman with a baby can spend hours on end at work talking with other 35-year-old women with babies about what it’s like to be a 35-year-old woman with a baby. As long as there are enough managers in the company who were once themselves 35-year-old women with babies, nobody minds that she’s wasting company time. In fact, it’s almost encouraged. But if a childless 25-year-old guy like me spends hours on end innocently drinking tea while staring out the window, he gets in trouble.

Being a 35-year-old woman with a baby is a Get-Out-of-Any-Situation-Free card. Feel like leaving work early? Just say the baby has a “doctor’s appointment” (wink, wink). Show up late or forget an appointment entirely? Blame it on the forgetfulness that plagues all 35-year-old women with babies. Finding yourself bored at a party? Just pretend the babysitter is calling your cell phone, and say there’s a problem with the baby. Pulled over for speeding? “Sorry, officer, I was just rushing home to be with my baby. And as you can see, I’m a 35-year-old woman.” Bam, no ticket. 

Being a 35-year-old woman with a baby would make it easier to write this blog, too. I could just write about whatever the hell was going on with the baby, and there would be a ready-made market of other 35-year-old women with babies ready to make my blog the next hot thing. What I fed the baby today—blog post. How to deal with spit-up stains—blog post. What kind of pants I’m trying to find for my one-year-old—1000 words in a cinch. The damn thing would write itself. And they would love it. I could call it Tammy’s Supermom Blog.

Instead I have to try to pull ideas out of thin air like a schmuck. Society is unfair.

A one-year free trial

Last spring the English department at my alma mater invited me to come talk with students at a couple of events about finding work after graduation. I’m not sure I had much help to offer. Describing job search strategies is hard: “Uh, look in the classifieds and be persistent?” That’s about the greatest wisdom I can offer.

The event I’d rather speak at (if they ever had it) would be one about how to live after getting a job. There’s a lot more to say about that. When you’re looking for work, it seems like having a job will solve everything. What a relief it would be! But getting a job is actually the easier part. It’s once you’ve been hired that you have to start making difficult decisions.

If I could give one piece of advice to grads just entering the adult workforce, it would be this: don’t buy anything for the first year. That doesn’t mean they should deprive themselves of things they truly need. It just means they shouldn’t go spending fun money or trading up for a drastically more expensive lifestyle. This should go without saying for those who have serious debt, but it’s true even for those graduating debt-free.  Spending money is a seductive trap that a lot of newly employed people fall into. 

The reason I would say not to buy anything for the first year is because the first year in a job (especially when it’s your first real job out of college) should be a trial period. One year is about how long it takes to see what the job is really like. If it starts out good, it might get bad. If it starts out bad, it might get good. The point is that it will probably take about a year to decide whether to stick with the job or dump it. 

I’ll generalize my own experience to say that most college kids entering their first professional jobs don’t give much serious thought to how long they actually want to be there. Once they have the job, they aren’t thinking about what they truly want or what it will take to find what they want. They’re just looking at a job that’s “good enough” and that enables them to begin living a bit better.

And that’s where the mistakes start. A recent grad who’s been living in penury for four years can hardly resist the temptation to go out and spend. I remember in my last few weeks of school running into an acquaintance as she was on her way to the Career Services Center. She was getting some help on preparing a resume. She asked me what I was doing after graduation, and I said I had already been hired for a “real job.” With a sort of sad, envious expression, she said, “You’ll be able to buy anything you want.” 

That probably sums up the feelings of a lot of recent grads and grads-to-be. Finally having a job with a decent paycheck is exciting. But every non-essential purchase amounts to committing to the job for just a little longer. For those who’ve found a job they love, this isn’t a problem. But most new workers probably don’t really know how they feel about a job until after 12 months or so. Some might find themselves desperately wanting to quit after a year, but afraid to do so because they have no savings—and an apartment full of stuff they bought without considering the consequences.

Most people would probably want to have a little cash saved up before quitting a job—either as a safety net or as a fund to go traveling, start a business, sit around and think, etc. So even if buying stuff doesn’t mean going into financial debt, it still means going into freedom debt. You have to work off the frivolous material purchases before you can move on with your life. 

This is all stuff I thought I knew before graduating. Somehow I didn’t remember it well enough. I’m fortunate at least that I didn’t go totally overboard and buy something like a new car or a fancy motorcycle or (god forbid) real estate. But still, I wasted a good three or four grand that I’d be glad to have back in my savings account to help pay for—I don’t know—a round-the-world plane ticket. Now if I want to quit and travel, I’ll have to work considerably longer than if I had been wise from the start.  

If I ever get the chance, I’ll give some college seniors a right old lecture on all this.

Cold War geography

In my seventh grade geography class, we had a lengthy unit on Western Europe. I remember really enjoying it. We learned about the customs and achievements of many countries, and it was some of the first exposure I’d had to the serious study of foreign places. One thing always puzzled me, though: aside from Scandinavia and Greece, we didn’t study any countries east of Germany and Austria. In our textbook political maps, the western countries would be filled in with their own colors, while Poland, the Czech Republic, Croatia, and all the other eastern countries would be in the same shade of gray. Often they wouldn’t even be labeled. 

We were learning about Western Europe and Western Europe only. It seemed odd to some of us. Why would Greece make it into our curriculum, but not any of those funny-named countries just north of it? The answer we got was that Greece was more a part of Western culture, and that we were only going to look at countries with this cultural link. We got the impression that somehow everybody east of Germany had just been left out of the party.

It may sound funny, but these implicit lessons colored my thinking for years afterward. I thought all of Central and Eastern Europe must be hopelessly backward and impoverished. I figured they lived in wooden villages and powered their economies with horses. I was shocked when I started learning that these places were actual civilizations—with history, art, cities, and everything. 

A friend of mine made a trip with his dad to Poland when he and I were about 15. It surprised me—to begin with—that anyone would go there voluntarily, and it surprised me even more when they showed me photos of cities as modern as anything I’d seen in the States. When I first heard people talking about Prague as a desirable place to visit (around age 15 or 16), I thought they must be joking. I mean, it was right next to Germany. If it was such hot shit, why had it never even been mentioned in our study of the greatness of Western culture?

In retrospect, it’s obvious why so many European countries weren’t introduced to us in seventh grade: it was 1999, and these countries had only recently ceased to be our enemies. Our study of Europe ended geographically where the Warsaw Pact began. The curriculum hadn’t fully caught up with the end of the Cold War. 

As far as politically influenced miseducation goes, this was pretty effective. For a long time it was hard for me not to picture some imaginary line east of Germany past which everything was qualitatively different—like a European Mason-Dixon Line. In the ‘70s and ‘80s, this line was sort of real. But it existed only because of political ideologies that had taken root relatively recently. I was made to not fully trust Eastern Europe as if Communism was the only thing that had ever defined it.

In that seventh grade class, we were never indoctrinated against any other country. Our teacher never said, “Poland is bad because they were communist only 10 years ago.” But the omission of so many historically important countries definitely influenced my understanding of my supposed cultural heritage. Had the Cold War still been on, it would have been in the government’s interest to have people like me seeing themselves as distinctly apart from Eastern Europeans. 

Why we were still learning Cold War geography almost ten years after it ended can be explained, I guess, party by educational inefficiency and partly by lingering chauvinism. I think a lot of Americans in the late ‘90s were still a bit skeptical about the newly free Eastern Europe.

It’s not news that state education distorts truth to suit political motives. But it’s the little omissions like the ones I’ve just described that are probably the toughest distortions to spot. Bald lies are easy to pick out. As soon as you find a contradiction, the lie is exposed. When something is just ignored, though, there’s nothing to contradict.   There may be other things happily left out of my schoolbooks that still color my thinking today.

   

Monsters in three dimensions

I just finished reading a biography of Stalin’s early years—from his birth through the October Revolution, when he became People’s Commissar of Nationalities. It was an enlightening account of an enigmatic man.

Few people would disagree with labeling Stalin one of history’s greatest monsters. He killed millions directly by dictatorial order, and he killed millions more indirectly by policy. He repressed speech, thought, and art. He didn’t care for human life or human dignity if they hindered his political ends. 

This is the sketch we get in school or on Wikipedia, and it’s not untrue. He was indeed terrible—so terrible that it’s hard to imagine how someone like him could come into existence. Reading a more thorough portrait of him only complicates the puzzle. You see that he existed in three dimensions like the rest of us.

That’s not to say the details of his personal life reveal him to have been a good man. Aside from being a political mass murderer, he was also a womanizer, a thief, a cold son, and a negligent husband and father. But there are also details that reveal an incongruously human side. He loved nature. He was a talented and avid poet. Throughout his life he was acclaimed as a beautiful singer by everyone who knew him. What struck me most of all was that, as the author put it, Stalin became later in his life “a keen gardener, growing lemons, tomatoes, and, above all, roses and mimosas.”

It’s strange to think of the supreme Soviet dictator placidly clipping his rose bushes while one of his deputies summarily executes a suspected conspirator in the basement of the Lubyanka. How do you reconcile those things? Shouldn’t Stalin have spent all his time brooding in the Kremlin while he looked out the window at a gray and rain-dampened Moscow? That would certainly give us a more consistent picture of the man. 

One of the hardest things to remember when reading history is that every name you read once belonged to a human being. History often makes people like Stalin seem more like characters—larger than life and and on a different plane of existence. It’s startling to see them humanized and exhibiting qualities that might—god forbid—connect them to regular folk like us. 

Those tender human qualities actually make the Stalin’s and Hitler’s of history more frightening rather than less. They make it harder to call them evil. They blur what we might think of as warning signs of future tyrants. Stalin’s family and childhood friends identified him as a uniquely charismatic leader with some kind of destiny in store for him, but no one predicted he would unleash more violence on his own people than anyone before him. He wasn’t torturing cats or anything. 

A young Stalin is impossible to pick out of a crowd. Who knows when there might be another like him?

Life on the map

I didn’t have much work to do today, so I spent a lot of time daydreaming about airline miles I’m going to accrue on business trips over the next few months and how I’m going to use them. I’ll have a free round-trip ticket to a fairly distant destination. 

My daydreaming included a lot of poring over airline route maps, seeing where I could go and for how much. Map-gazing is an intoxicating activity, one I could do for hours on end. I was almost salivating today while doing it.

I know I’m not the only one who loves maps like this. In his early teens, my brother would nearly memorize the map of every backpacking trip we took. Elevation gain and loss, river crossings, campsites—he knew it all. He knew the name of the rock you just took a piss off of.

It’s funny maps should draw anyone in like this, because they’re manifestly unromantic. At least in contemporary atlases (not so a few hundred years ago), maps are more documentation than artwork. They’re meant to get the job done—to represent the data accurately.

The fascination comes from the way they allow you to so easily imagine yourself moving through them. Photos of a place are exciting, too, but a map provides an idea of continuity. On a map you get to envision a journey, whereas with photos you only envision a destination. 

I look at maps of places I want to go, and I see a red dotted line marking my movement, just like in a movie from the ‘40s or ‘50s. It all seems impossibly easy. Getting from Istanbul to Rajasthan? All you have to do is wiggle your way down a few train tracks, maybe stopping for tea in Tehran and making a side trip for caviar in Baku. The OneWorld Alliance maps I was looking at are even more enticing. Vancouver and Hong Kong are connected by a straight line! How hard is it to travel down a straight line? You could do it this weekend.

Once I make definite plans to go somewhere, the map becomes my idea of the place. This always leads to surprises. I imagine that when I arrive, the experience of standing on the ground will be qualitatively different. I imagine the nature of the geography will be somehow more evident. I thought that on Sumatra I would sense I was on an island. I thought that in Thailand I would know I was in a really oddly shaped country. I thought that in Seoul I would feel the presence of the dark, backward state just north of me.

So I’m surprised whenever I arrive somewhere and realize it’s an actual place. It has the same gravity, the same distances, and the same curvature of the Earth as back home. The horizon is no closer. Having daydreamed so much over the map, I had gotten the impression I would be spending the trip observing myself from above. It’s a nice surprise, of course, since a map can’t be as interesting as the details on the ground. But it shocks me into remembering how big a place the world actually is.    

No, really, how is it going?

I am an abject failure at the “How’s it goin’?” game. It’s a standard feature of most offices. You pass someone in the hall (maybe someone you know, maybe someone you don’t), you give a perfunctory smile and a slight arch of the eyebrows and say, “How’s it goin’?” It’s actually said more like one word, and more like a statement than a question: howzitgoin. 

Maybe it’s only a standard feature in casual West Coast offices. I imagine that in East Coast offices they either grimace at each other or undress one another with their eyes as they pass. That’s the impression I’ve gotten from film and television, anyway. And my understanding is that between the coasts they all grow corn for a living, so they don’t have to worry about it.

I’m not cut out to play the Howzitgoin game. I don’t think I’m designed for it. When I’m walking through the halls at work, I’m typically lost in some thought about what I’m going to eat for dinner that night or what I’d like to look up next on Wikipedia. I’m not ready for quick-start socializing. If someone’s going to talk to me, I prefer to have a few hours’ warning.

So I never say the right thing. Sometimes a guy will give me a howzitgoin and I just say, “Hey man.” Oh shit, I think immediately after, maybe he was expecting a real answer and a return howzitgoin. Ah, but he only mumbled his howzitgoin anyway, so I’m sure he wasn’t. But wait, maybe he was!

Of course, there are variations on the theme of the Howzitgoin game. There’s the howeryou, the whatsappenin, and the howyadoin. The last of these I’m totally unprepared for. I didn’t grow up with howyadoin. It sounds sort of New York-ish to me. So when I’m blindsided by a howyadoin, my response is a garbled mishmash of all the possible responses one could give to the various themes of the Howzitgoin game: “Good! How’s—your . . . uh . . . doing?” Fuck, I hope she thinks I’m boring and was only asking that to be nice and wouldn’t waste her time listening to my idiotic answer.

I can’t decide how I feel about getting a howzitgoin without my name included. On the one hand, getting a bare “Howzitgoin” seems callously impersonal. It only underscores how routine the exchange is. But on the other hand, getting a “Howzitgoin, Dan” makes me feel obligated to respond with the other person’s name.  And I can’t think that fast. In the fight-or-flight state induced by receiving a howzitgoin, my mind turns Jack’s into John’s and Andy’s into Amy’s. So I mumble something like, “Good, Perdle, how’s are you?” getting maybe the first letter and the number of syllables correct. Fuck, I hope that guy doesn’t remember what his name is. 

Even worse are the fake-out howzitgoins. Sometimes I’ll be walking toward someone who’s otherwise occupied (maybe sending a text message or reading a sheet of paper). He looks up just at the last moment we could possibly make eye contact, and I give a brief smile and nod, thinking I’m going to get away with only that. But then, after our shoulders have already passed, I hear a howzitgoin. At this point I’m already celebrating having avoided a howzitgoin, so my mind has to switch gears rapidly. I have to think up a response, while walking and doing a little half-turn, then project my voice since this guy is now 10 feet past me, and all I can get out is a low, feral sound like “Eghhhhhh.” You just made me do an off-balance howzitgoin, asshole. Rude.

But worst of all are the change-ups. There are some people who howzitgoin me all the time, so I know to expect it from them. I’ll see someone come around the corner of the hall fifty feet ahead of me. Okay, I think, here it comes. I’m ready to respond. I can smell the howzitgoin before it’s uttered. We keep walking toward each other. Finally we make eye contact. But she changes up on me and says, “Hi, Dan.” I’m so keyed up at this point, though, that I just blurt out, like a fucking automaton: “PRETTY GOOD, HOW ARE YOU?!”

Swing and a miss. Shit.

Learning to write, the college way

University English programs claim to teach students how to write. I think they do a pretty bad job of it. I just read through some of my old college essays, and they are an utter embarrassment. It’s not so much that they’re poorly written as it is that they’re full of absurdly contrived subject matter. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s representation of Puritanism in “Young Goodman Brown?” My God, why would anyone want to write or read about that?

Reading one of my blog writings next to one of my college essays, you might think they were written by different people. The whole tone of the college essays is wrong. They’re pedantic and overstated. They’re vague and indirect. They’re banal.

The reason these essays are so bad is simple: I didn’t believe in what I was writing. I doubt many English students do. We wrote those essays for a select and peculiar audience: career academics. Our instructors often told us to “add to the conversation” around a particular novel. Well, those academic conversations around novels were conversations most of us would never have in our regular lives, even with intellectual friends who liked literature. So we faked it.

This is terrible training if they want us to actually become writers, because the only writing that ordinary people will spend their precious free time reading is writing that comes from the heart. Insincerity comes through in print as strongly as it does in speech. People want to read honest voices. And our voices in college essays were rarely that. Could you write 1300 honest words about the symbolism and imagery of the first two minutes of Blade Runner? Well, neither could I, but I wrote those 1300 words anyway, and the result is something I now wouldn’t read unless you paid me. 

The most striking thing about my old essays is how overloaded with words they are. They’re bursting with needless adjectives and adverbs. Again, the reason is simple: I had to meet the page count. Most of the ideas in those essays were pretty small, so I had to create an illusion of size.

The mandatory page count (or word count) is one of the big mistakes college instructors make in teaching us to write. It makes students dependent in their thinking and inept in judging the quality of their ideas. There’s no reason that an essay should be a particular length. Some important ideas can be explained in 300 words. Some require 3000. Students should be allowed to judge for themselves when they’ve said something worthwhile. They’ll be mistaken sometimes, but they’ll learn from it.

If you think English students aren’t dependent on page count requirements, imagine giving them an assignment without any. You tell the class, “Give me an essay with one or more interesting ideas in it, explained in depth, and connected to other topics you think are relevant.” If you left it at that, you’d have a room full of panicked kids. But how long is it supposed to be? How will I know when I’ve written enough? How much of our grade is it worth? 

The sad truth is that students use the minimum page count as a baseline for ensuring a passing grade. If you write in complete sentences and meet the minimum page count, you can usually rest easy that you’ll at least get a C. English students don’t get too bent out of shape about bullshitting flimsy ideas in the interest of padding a paper. They know it almost always flies. The minimum page count provides security.

Some English majors outgrow this dependency and learn to be their own judges, but I still think paper padding is a bad habit to instill in them. People like concise language. We might as well get young writers writing that way as early as possible.

So what’s the solution? Basically, to completely restructure college writing instruction. Literary criticism is mostly a farce. It’s written by academics for academics. It’s inbred, and irrelevant to people outside that cloistered sphere. So why are we teaching college kids to write it? Writing instruction should allow students to write about the ideas that interest them. Those ideas could come from anywhere.

There’s no point in graduating a class of students who are well-trained in writing half-heartedly. Allowing students more freedom in choosing their subjects would make their work more difficult to judge. Doing away with page minimums would make it even harder. But I think college English departments either need to do those things or drop the pretense that they’re really teaching anyone to write.