Unfortunately, in this day and age, a “facebook like” often incentivizes not the exchange of valuable information but the exchange of entertaining information. While truly informative, useful, or insightful content will sometimes gather a lot of “likes”, most of the time the popular stuff is just witty silliness or something with shock-value. News networks and newspapers suffer from the same problem. Most of the time, good old-fashioned investigative journalism just doesn’t sell.

Wikipedia and StackExchange are two sites that give me hope that a crowd-driven reputation system can grow a solid knowledge repository. The incentives on those sites are centered around the quality of information. Anyone interested in having a trollin’-good-time is somehow naturally driven away from those sites. In a way, it’s the very kind of “democracy” that we have in America. We elect a group of “elites” that in theory are supposed to be the most capable in representing our needs as a society. In that same way, StackExchange elects moderators that in theory represent the interests of the community and the knowledge that community is seeking to gather.

YouTube, in particular, has some of the most educational and fascinating content (lectures, documentaries, tutorials, etc), but at the same time it welcomes the random, the offensive, and the absurd. To me nothing represents that better than the #1 video on YouTube is 1.6 BILLION views:

We play various sports all day, talk shit, and eat burgers (and in my case: a veggie medley that naturally accompanies a last minute weight cut for some upcoming grappling tournament). I get a lot of crap for this. They are jealous of the fact that I belong to the elite club of people who have ever ordered a salad at a diner.

Tackle Football

For many years, the highlight of the day has been a game of tackle football. Naturally, this was the time and place for many of us to prove for recorded history that we can still hit hard and get hit no problem. This year we all collectively retired from this violent ritual and instead opted for the game of TOUCH football. This was also the first year a few of us actually stretched a little, trying to justify it as a sign of wisdom, not a sign of old age.

Pictured right are my other two buddies Pete and Allen. I put this picture up because most of the competitive spirit that was usually reserved for tackle football was channeled into the game of bags. We did a 16+ man tournament that Pete and I won. Every team pretty much had a good person and a shitty person. I was the shitty person on my team, Pete doing the bulk of the actual winning. But because no one expected anything from me, the rare times I scored were a much celebrated event.

At the Dog Park

The other thing I noticed is that everyone (single or married) now had kids or dogs or both. Rex (pictured left) is Matt’s 16 month old fierce animal. He was probably 5 times smaller than any of the other dogs in the dog park, but in his mind he was the alpha. This is inspirational to me on many levels, in life and in sport. Off the battlefield, he is a sweet guy and fun to play with. Also, has a one track mind when it comes to food: he likes it all. My dog, Homer (at 200+ lbs), was very picky about the kind of things he liked to eat. Him and Rex would make a good eating couple.

Epic Ping Pong Battle

Continuing with the theme of unmanly sports, I got to video the end of a ridiculously competitive (and somehow fun) game of run-around-the-ping-pong-table. Allen and Pete were the last two remaining “competitors”. Both of them took off one of their shirts, which for old people is a big deal:

It was good to see everyone. I love these folks. I’ve known most of them for 17+ years, and they really haven’t changed a bit.

Anyway, the following performance of Stairway to Heaven by Heart in front of the band that wrote it, 40 years earlier reminded me of just how quick life goes by. There’s something very relatable about the image of Robert Plant looking over the greatest creation of his life with a mix of pride and sadness…

By the way, I don’t know if there is anything harder than performing the greatest rock song of all time in front of the people who wrote it. Ann Wilson did it perfectly.

I can honestly say (as far as I remember) that this was the best restaurant food experience of my life. That sounds dramatic, but I just can’t remember a better one. It was basically 15-20 meals of various (all very small) sizes. I felt like the chef literally introduced me to the different possible tastes that food can have: from sweet to bitter, from fatty to dry, from crunchy to liquidy, from spicy to bland, from cold to hot, etc. I am insufficiently sophisticated in my vocabulary to describe the various characteristic of the things we ate. But I would summarize it this way: When an alien species visits Earth and asks how we (hairless apes) fuel our bodies, I suggest we take them to Marigold Kitchen. They will be thoroughly confused but may decide that human civilization is curious enough to be studied instead of completely annihilated.

Also, on a side note, I enjoyed the awkwardness of the hipsterish waiters and waitresses that have lived in this Alice in Wonderland of food for way too long and thus has completely lost any grounding in reality.

My Favorite Food

The experience of writing this blog has made me reflect on my relationship with food. I have had bad metabolism early on (meaning: I get fat easily). So, I was forced to learn and experiment with nutrition from an early age (wrestling didn’t help much with that either). The result is that I’ve developed an appreciation and taste for simple plain foods like steamed veggies, grilled chicken, plain oatmeal, etc. Believe it or not, I actually really enjoy eating those “tasteless” foods. To me they have a ton of taste. And when I do get a chance to experience something more complex and rich, it blows my mind.

In particular, more than any restaurant, my favorite food, throughout my life, has always been my mom’s cooking. In fact, every time I visit my parents for dinner, I’m nervous about the onslaught of the deliciousness. Unlike Marigold Kitchen, where the tiny portions are decided for you, in my mom’s kitchen the portions are up to me. My willpower often fails under such strenuous demands.

I like this kind of “suffering” in that it’s not at all “suffering” but rather just annoying discomfort. Over the years of trying to learn and get good at stuff, I’ve figured out a simple fact that improvement requires you to be always choosing the less “comfortable” option. In other words, as many people have said, you have to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. That might seem ridiculous or even masochistic, but I think it’s just practical. Every day I step outside my comfort zone in a bunch of ways in work, in sport, in conversation, in thinking, etc.

Feeling like crap for a couple months due to an allergic reaction is yet another chance to deal with discomfort. No big deal.

There is no mystery in those statistics. It’s just a mass outpouring of simple tragedies of life. There is no narrative we can tell about these six thousand. There is no one culprit on whom we can focus our attention and in so doing attempt to find some kind of closure.

With these six thousand shadows in the background, the horrific bombing in Boston almost seems faint, like another ripple in an ocean of human suffering. I am overwhelmed by the immensity of it. My inclination has been to put the dramatic megaphone of the news on mute, and try to be a helpful hand in whatever small way I can in my little corner of the world.

“One hearty laugh together will bring enemies into a closer communion of heart than hours spent on both sides in inward wrestling with the mental demon of uncharitable feeling.” - William James

The above quote gets at something very practical in life. It’s remarkable how many conflicts start (and go on for years) over minor tensions or even complete misunderstandings.

I guess it’s some kind of arbitrary conception of pride and self-importance that keeps people from stepping into an obvious tension and easying it by a bit of self-deprecating joking around.

I interact with several very different groups of people (academics, fighters, computer nerds, musicians, etc) and the funny thing is that the people who are most willing to swallow pride and make fun of themselves when tension builds for whatever reason are the fighters. I think that stubborn pride derives from insecurity and fear, and a person who’s been through many battles of being punched in the face over and over has conquered that fear.

Take it easy, as the Eagles say, “don’t let the sound of your own wheels drive you crazy”.

The second display of master I enjoy watching is when the person takes a different approach, breaks convention, and perfects it such that it no longer looks so foreign and “wrong”. This is the more interesting one to me but it first requires understanding of what is conventional in order to appreciate the breaking of such convention. One example of this that comes to mind is postmodern piano. Here’s an accessible piece by Carl Vine. It embraces “dissonance” and chaos: the very thing that music so desperately ran away from for most of its recorded history.

These days, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan seem to have lost any semblance of support among the majority of the American public. But I believe that support can be reignited in a single day of another tragedy. In the rare times when I tune into a video of a MSNBC/Fox/CNN take on a particular subject, I worry that the mechanism of popular media is equipped to stir and ride waves of hysteria. In a perfect world, the media would provide a calm voice of reason: the facts, the context, the several distinct ways to interpret the current events. But in this aspect, we do not live in a perfect world. I fear that any tragedy of the magnitude of 9/11 terrorist attacks will create another state of temporary insanity among the masses. I include myself in that obviously. Anger, sadness, fear can all be exploited intentionally or unintentionally (through institutionalized momentum).

It’s been said by many people in the last 10 years, but our government on many levels is lacking the mechanism to protect us against ourselves when we are in such states of “temporary insanity”. If another big terrorist attack happens on U.S. soil there should be a set of laws that tie the hands of Congress and the president to slow any drastic action and allow a cooling-off period allowing at least a brief chance for rationality and long-term interest of the public to prevail.

As a secular person, having just enjoyed a Seder dinner with my mom, dad, and brother an hour before, I was going to this performance with some skepticism, of the kind I feel when a Jehovah’s witness comes to my door with promises of salvation and spiritual liberation. Plus, coming from a classical piano background, I always thought of Bach as a cold calculating composer devoid of passionate melody, for no good reason I should add. I was more into Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, Brahms, Rachmaninoff, etc.

This was probably the first time at a classical performance that I was moved on an emotional level. To me, this story had nothing to with religion. It was a story of love, hate, and most of all (for me) betrayal. Bach brought the intensity of it out, and made me forget my original skepticism.

The thing that particularly stuck with me for days after was the “God why have you forsaken me” that Jesus exclaims. The feeling of being abandoned by everyone, including your father, touched something with me. I know this story (and the resurrection after) has been at the core of millions of people’s faith in the supernatural, but to me it was a story of simple human suffering of the kind that many of us have or will have to experience in life. Bach may not write a big choral composition for my version of it but it will go on anyway in silence or with a far less beautiful soundtrack.

I am thankful for this experience as it showed to me another way that music can bring out the simple drama of life.

Side note: One very important lesson I learned, is that I will enjoy and understand a performance like this a lot more than I otherwise would if I do research on the story behind it ahead of time. With understanding comes appreciation. I spent a few hours reading about its composition, about the biblical story, and actually reading the relevant chapters from the Gospel of Matthew several times. I’m glad I did.