Ignorant Addicts

I was having lunch with a friend recently, and the subject turned to sleep apnea. He'd been diagnosed some time back and was treated with corrective positive air pressure. “It changed my life! I didn't even realize I had a problem until I started treatments.”

That statement resonated with me. In response to elevated blood pressure and my doctor's strong suggestion that I cut back on caffeine, I started drinking a lot more water about 6 months ago. I replaced the 5-6 (or more!) cups of coffee I drank each day with water. My blood pressure hasn't changed much, but I've gotten sick way less often: zero times of any note since I started this experiment, unless you count some sniffles that went away after a night's sleep. I'd heard all the stuff about drinking water, but I figured that I had enough (brown) liquids going through my system on a daily basis to wash out whatever viral/bacterial yuckiness was accumulating. Oh, how wrong I was!

The only thing that makes me sick now are insipid children's books

The thing is, things were so bad that I even thought I had a serious immune system deficiency. I'd been getting sick every 3-4 weeks for years, maybe even decades. Sometime in my 20s, I learned that I could mask the symptoms with nasal sprays and Sudafeds, and I always powered through the bouts one way or another (usually with even more caffeine). A few people noticed, including my wife; but I could always attribute my sniffles to some sort of temporary life circumstance. Stress. A trip to take care of my parents. Dissertation lack-of-sleep. Whenever I've looked for excuses for getting sick, I've usually found ones that sound compelling. Two things started freaking me out in recent years, though.

The first was how readily my son caught my colds. Unlike me, he couldn't just hide the symptoms with a few squirts of Afrin. He got sick a lot his first year. So often, in fact, that the doctors talked about putting tubes into his ears. I don't know if anyone suspected, but it wasn't bad luck. It was bad parenting, and I knew it.

The second was an encounter with my current boss. I met with him to discuss something, and he remarked, “Man, you're always sick!” He didn't mean much by it, but I felt like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar; and given that I didn't plan to quit or get fired anytime soon, I worried that this stereotype could turn into something awful. It's ok to have issues for a week or even a month. My dad had passed away not long before, so I had yet another excuse for “I'm sick because I'm not sleeping” at the ready. But everyone gets sick of excuses after a while. At some point, life either gets better or you adjust. Either way, the statue of limitations expires after something like two months. After that, you're the guy with the limp, and the ace on the team is never the guy with the limp.

Fortunately, my little water thing solved a decade's-old problem, and it's made me wonder what other modifications would make my life a lot better. This isn't even a new thought for me. I didn't realize I had chronic sinus infections throughout middle school and high school until I was a junior in college. My feet were so painful at times between 1992 and 2000 that I couldn't walk, a problem that disappeared after spending $10 on orthotic inserts. What other problems do I have that I don't even realize? The aforementioned problems really shouldn't have lingered for more than a week or so in retrospect, but one has to realize he has a problem in the first place before looking for solutions. Do I require an intervention? For what? Help!... maybe?

Grumpy, Honest Old Men

I've been following the Donald Sterling bruhaha with a modicum of interest. Here's the story: an ex-lawyer who owns the LA Clippers told his mixed-race mistress to stop cavorting with minorities in public. One way or another, TMZ got a hold of the recording and put it on air. Now, most people want blood, while others argue that what's said behind closed doors isn't of any business to others. I generally agree with the latter opinion, for what it's worth.

The story didn't surprise me as much as the fervor of the response. Sterling has a long and well-documented history of being a bigoted asshole. Why this particular situation stoked people's passions rather than all the discrimination lawsuits that preceded it is a mystery to me, but better late than never. The NBA's response was swift: banned for life from games and the maximum allowable fine, pressure to sell the team. I'm sure the story will continue to drag on, but I've heard all I really care to hear about the subject.

The spectacle has made me think again about filters and when they seem to disappear, though. There are three times in life when people are remarkably honest and open. The first: childhood, of course. My kid wants what he wants, when he wants it, and is more than happy to let you know who's fun, who's fat, and who makes him “furious” (he especially loves this last one). The second: the drunken periods. No need to explain that one.

The third is old age. My dad was the king of impolitic one- to two-liners when he hit his 70s, like “You're my family, not my friends,” and “A lot of people were sad when JFK was killed. Me? I'm glad the %@!#er got shot.” But he's hardly alone. A lot of my friends spend a lot of their time now smoothing over nerves after their dads told their neighbors that they're boring, or after their mom went off on another cashier. “Old age honesty” doesn't get a lot of attention, which is too bad, because it's probably the funniest given that it's peppered with a lifetime of observations and given how we expect seniors to be dignified.

 

For what it's worth, DAC was probably fishing when JFK was shot

And in the end, that's what I think happened to old Donny S. He doesn't like black people, immigrants, poor people... the list could go on and on, given what you've heard about the guy, and he has to let someone know in some way. He'll play the game PR game for as long as he can, but this won't be the last time he says something dumb because the filters get weaker and weaker. The question I wonder about is what kind of stupid stuff will come out of my mouth as I get older.

Somewhere In-Between

Identities. Generally speaking, I don't like them. I don't feel any particular racial, religious, or class affiliation. I've enjoyed living in an apartment complex that's 95% Indian and sending my kid to a synagogue for daycare. I'll write quite a bit more about this in the future, but the short of it is that I am uncomfortable when people identify strongly with dimensions I have dismissed.

The recent shootings in Kansas have made me rethink my attitude, though. Some Grand Wizard decided he'd head to a local synagogue and shoot some Jews. He ended up shooting a bunch of Christians instead, but it's the intent that I'm addressing here. My first reaction was, “Ho hum - just another nut lob.” My second reaction was, “Jeez, have I put my son in harm's way by putting him in daycare at a synagogue?”

Please don't share this photo with Frazier Miller

It's that bit of hesitation that makes me feel sheepish about my distaste towards 'identities.' I know fear on a personal level. My brother was a very scary guy to share a house with growing up. I double-locked my bedroom door at night, and if we entered a room together, I would silently scan it for defense options – a chair, other people, maybe some stairs. It's not that my brother was frequently violent. It was that you couldn't predict when he would explode, and when he did, things could get really bad. I often feel like a survivor, and I'm grateful we live on separate coasts today.

And I imagine that's how many Jews and other marginalized groups feel. That vague feeling that people hate you to the point of doing real harm for no other reason than you belong to some group. It can be like the music that filters from downstairs into your dorm room in college: you learn to live with it, but you feel liberated once it's gone. And you want to be with people who know. People who you don't even have to explain things to because they understand implicitly.

In the end, I would prefer a world where we identify more strongly with our communities and less strongly with our tribes, if that makes sense. I would prefer a world where allegiances to certain 'isms' are weak enough to accommodate me and my kids because we're caught on the outside otherwise. But I suppose I have a better appreciation now why people cluster the way they do. 

Nobody said life was easy! Check out the rest of my website when you get a chance!

Thunderdomes and Transitioning to the High Life

I just got back from Nashville, where I attended the 2014 American College of Medical Genetics Annual Meeting. ACMG is always my favorite conference. The presentations are almost always relevant and meaningful to my work; the people who go are generally fun, smart, and social; and the organizers do a good job making the conference fun with stuff like great refreshments (think wedding hors devours) and spur-of-the-moment polling. In addition, this wintertime conference is usually at a warm-weather location about 4 months before/after other major conferences I hit, making it easy and desirable to fit into my schedule. The ACMG meeting is usually awesome, and this year didn’t disappoint.

One thing that made my ACMG experience a bit unsavory, though, was my accommodations. I tried to book a room late for dopey reasons, and the only place that was less that $375/night and less than 3.5 miles from the conference center was the Knights Inn. For a place that is only a mile away from the heart of downtown Nashville, the Knights Inn was remarkably underwhelming. There was a gas station next door where you could get a bag of chips or some soda. To get to it at night, though, you had to walk three blocks around an enormous wall that opens only to a side street (I assume the owners consider zombies coming down the interstate to be a bigger threat than the rapists and muggers in the back alley). I got a non-smoking room, which doesn’t really matter if a place let its guests chain smoke in the 70s and kept the original furniture. There was no clock, no ironing board, and the wireless didn’t work. A mini-fridge was useful for storing the 2-liter of Sprite I bought after evading the Mongol hoard on my way to the gas station, but the microwave was not (the gas station did not stock microwavable foods. Or maybe the Thunderdome gangs had looted it all...).

The Knights Inn Nashville wasn't a 5-star hotel...

I survived, though, and it made me think a lot about my personality. See, when I told my buddy James about the place, he joked, “You’re always staying in places like that. You’re a real cheapskate.” When I retorted that it wasn’t a money thing since my travel costs were being reimbursed, he just laughed.

The thing is, he’s more right than wrong. The truth is that nice hotels often make me feel like a chump. I may have spent a lot of time worrying about bedbugs at the Knights Inn Nashville, but I slept just as well there as I would have at a $350/night place. I know this because I spent my early 20s ‘living it up’ a lot more. Maybe I didn’t have a nice apartment or new car, but I’ve eaten at most of the best restaurants in NYC (at least as they were in the early 2000s), and I’ve stayed in my share of luxury hotels/suites, whether in NYC, Cape Cod or Vegas. My job may have been to market ridiculous products, but it paid ***well***, and I loosened up the purse strings quite a bit. I was a little like those NBA kids who grow up with nothing and suddenly make millions. The majority blow through their wealth remarkably quickly in ways that scream both, “So this is the good life!” and “I need to get back to my roots.” See, when you come from having very little, you’re uncomfortable with having a lot. My mom worked two or three jobs at a time, and my dad, well, he lost his way for a while. We made ends meet by being frugal, and we had a good life. And it all became familiar. This is what people of means often don’t understand when they wonder why all these athletes and pop stars go bankrupt so quickly when fame fades. You can’t spend 20 years pinching pennies and running with like-minded people and suddenly morph into the guy who eats out 4 nights a week and sips Chardonnay with the book club. It’s disorienting and uncomfortable. It doesn’t feel right, because people you’re close to have to get by with so much less and you know you can get by without it all. To this day, the feeling that I remember most when I think about eating sushi at Nobu is guilt. $200+ on little bits of raw fish while mom’s making due with Salisbury steak. Really?

Lest you misunderstand, I don’t have anything against nice things, and I’m certainly not against having a lot of money. I’d just rather have comfortable things that can do a lot. My Geo Prizm was the perfect car for me: broken speedometer, broken odometer, blinker controls you had to push up-and-down if you were turning right and that flashed at hyperspeed if you were turning left... but it looked ‘clean’ and it ran *great.* Never had to get serviced, always got good mileage, but more importantly, I never worried about it getting dinged or someone spilling their soda. My car was a vehicle, not a status symbol, and it got me from point A to point B for 8 years (and could have been much longer). I’d rather have a $300 Toshiba laptop I can turn into a Linux box than an $1500 iBook that only runs a Mac stuff (yes yes yes, I understand you can dual boot on iMacs and such, but my experience setting Ubuntu up on my work iMac was very, very frustrating). For better or worse, shownership isn’t just lost on me. It makes me think less of those who buy into the concept. You can make fun of my 10-year-old laptop, but only if you know how to set your laptop to be a server or to process huge data sets. Give me *some* reason to tout your computer other than “it never crashes” (weirdly, ‘it never crashes’ is by far the #1 reason people tell me I should get a laptop like theirs. I guess it’s a more prevalent problem than I imagined).

Rest in peace, Gizm!

I also have learned to be patient with who I am, and who I am is careful with my moolah. Too careful, a lot of times: it took me a long time to realize, “jeez, spending $10 to have my shirts pressed is way better financially than spending $30 in time washing and ironing them myself. Maybe I’ll live in high style some day, but don’t expect it to happen quickly!

I Respect Awful Jokes

A buddy of mine is receiving a presidential award as an outstanding early-career scientists. You know what else he's outstanding at? Coming up with jokes about dead babies.

On a separate note, I had a horrible, prolonged period early in my career in program management where I was miserably understaffed. The company was working to hire an assistant or two for me, but the process was dragging on. At some point in a fit of desperation, I stopped looking for the perfect candidate and told personnel that I was changing my hiring criteria to "warm and breathing." I was starting to lose a lot of revenue due to the lack of help, and I figured just about anyone could be trained to do the work I needed done (creating package inserts and marketing materials, overseeing product orders and quality control). Soon after I lowered my standards, TF came into my office for an interview. She had a reasonable resume, but more notably, she was *boring.* She dressed well and liked movies... and nothing else. I was excited. I figured I had a drone who didn't have much going for her but a job, which I figured would give her a second thing to talk about in the future.

TF lasted about three exciting weeks. Things I taught her in that time include:
- "You're going to have to learn that 'cert' means 'certificate,' and 'bro' means 'brochure.'"
- "If you don't know if the printer's done with the job, please call him."
- "Um, 'cert' means 'certificate.'"

The point of this posting is that I've noticed a strong correlation between capability and crassness. Among the ten smartest people I've known, probably nine fall into the category of, "I better make sure my kid's asleep before we start talking." And of the ten dumbest people I've known, probably nine fall into the category of, "We'll, he's polite." I suppose you can be smart and polite, but the combination's rare, and for better or worse, I've developed a rule of thumb that might boil down to crass=smart. Sorry, polite people!

Not sure why, but offense taken!

Long ago, I recognized the importance of forgiveness, to others and to myself. It’s enervating to be angry, and I’ve screwed up as much as the next person. God knows I’d have few friends today if people didn’t look past my foibles (I probably scored a 6 out of 10 on the ‘jerk’ scale in high school).

So why do I find it so hard to forgive people sometimes?

I spend a lot of time thinking about this. The issue is not that I get offended often (I’m hard to offend), but when I do, I can hold onto the anger longer than seems reasonable. Let’s use my dad as an example. My dad was a rough guy, and he often called me to tell me how much he hated me. Frequently, vociferously, and viciously, especially over the last few years of his life. I hated him for it, and I would refuse to call him for months as a result. Sounds like a reasonable response on my part, right?...

Except I knew he didn’t mean any of it. He was old, losing his sight, and living alone. It was clear that he cared about me and my family (particularly his grandson); and that he really meant no harm by his yelling. In fact, it surprised him to find out his yelling bothered me. I remember one occasion where I thought he had liver cancer, and I was literally dragging him kicking and screaming to his appointments. After one particularly hairy appointment, I grabbed his walker in a fit of frustration and threw it across the yard. The action took him aback. He gave me a quizzical look and asked, “What are you so worked up about?” He knew he was a jerk, but he meant no offense, and I knew that. So why did I get offended at all? Why was I so hesitant to visit him afterwards?

There are times when I feel like I developed a PTSD response. There were a lot of difficult moments over the years, and maybe I just snapped in a way that creeps into my relationships with others. There are also times when I think I inherited a predisposition to be snarky, and it manifests as a propensity to carry a grudge. I fall to this explanation frequently, especially when I think about my brother who can make my dad look like a pussycat. And then there’s a more interesting possibility, one that was suggested by Jeffrey Eugenides in Middlesex: that we sour as we age so we’re more able to let go of life and accept our own deaths. There’s a certain appeal to this theory, that holding onto the negative (like a grudge) is a natural consequence of getting older.

Whatever the reason, my inability to be forgiving at times reminds me that I, like most people, am often not a rational person. I’m trying, though!

So what happens if Emmett doesn't forgive me for dressing him up like this?

Pictures of the Once and Future Kurt

I am nearing the end of the “Great Photo Scanning Adventure.” When my father passed away last May, one of my tasks was to split up the family photos with my brother. I opted to digitize everything so we could both have copies. It has taken an incredible amount of time. After my wife or I removed the photos from an album, I sent them to a vendor for scanning (which is expensive and requires a lot of cataloging and prep work) or I scanned them myself. The hardest part was tagging whatever text was written on the back of the photo to the file somehow. I usually did it by writing incredibly long file names. I’ll spare you the gory details on each step and simply say that the whole process will have taken a year of dedicated work to complete. The only project or hobby I’ve ever approached with as much dedication has been my dissertation.

It is invigorating to review the end product, though. The pictures start with black and white photos of my dad in his youth and span to around 2005, before my parents really lost their health. I have to admit that the photos I think are the most intriguing are from the late 70’s and early 80’s, to compare the memories I had as a kid to the visual evidence. One of the things that’s surprising to me is how happy I look as a kid. Always a big, genuine smile on my face every day, all the time. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. Pooping on the toilet can throw Emmett into a tailspin, but he’s otherwise an infectiously happy kid. He’s full of joy, and he wants everyone around him to be happy, too. He makes me glad to be alive, and I reflect on it often.

If this picture were taken today, I'd be worrying about my fashion sense!

Which made me wonder: why did that joy fade? I know we can’t pretend we’re firefighters all our lives, but why have there been long periods where I was miserable? There are a lot more responsibilities, and a lot of awful, sad things have happened; but why does the bad stuff feel like it “sticks” more than the good stuff? I spend a lot more time thinking about why my car is burning oil than thinking about how many years I’ve gotten out of my jacket (15 and counting!). Why?

Yes, I know the psychological arguments, the evidence on “loss aversion” and that we may be hardwired to be more sensitive to the negative than to the positive. If you eat a phenomenal pie, it’s nice; but if you eat a rotten one, it can kill you. And I’ve seen the evidence that happiness may be genetic in some way, that something like 50% of your happiness is attributable to heredity, as summarized in a New York Times article (of note, heritability estimates are frequently overestimated and even more frequently misunderstood). I can’t shake the feeling that we’re trained to be miserable in some way, though; that there’s an expectation that if you aren’t unhappy, you’re not trying hard enough. It manifests in how often we complain about bosses or work or how busy we are. There’s social status to be gained by being besieged (side note: I’ve rarely seen this approach among people at the top of the food chain, and I definitely don’t think they’re less besieged. Tip to those of you who aspire to be more than middle management).

I’m going to fight it. I have renewed a commitment to be a happy person and to enjoy my life. It doesn’t mean I can’t get upset, or that I won’t have to suck up inconvenient, chronically annoying aspects to everyday life like commuting. I spend a lot more time now looking at videos of my kid playing, though, or of my wife and I putzing around at Greenfield Village. I’m committed to spending at least as much time reviewing the good times and my achievements as I do with the bad times and my failures. I know it sounds ridiculous and Stewart Smalley-ish, but I think I’m already sleeping better, and I feel optimistic about the future. The goal: to look as genuinely happy in the photos of me in old age as when I was young.