No, really, I promise!

Like many things I write, they’ve come off a bit as “explanation” and/or “justification,” but– also like many things I write– they were meant more as “exploration.” They are a personal exploration, through writing, of my own decisions and motivations. That is what writing is to me. That ability to use it as a forum, not with others, but with myself. It’s as much an internal dialog as an external representation. It is more-so that, actually.

And that’s the point of this post.

Longform writing

I’m going to be honest with myself and not describe the way I like to write as “essay.” It often doesn’t have the deep research and editing that such writing would require. Still, it is longform writing. It’s not sound bites, it’s analysis. It allows me– forces me, really– to dive deeply into myself to ascertain my own thoughts and motivations. Whether I’m writing about myself, or about someone else, or about some arbitrary situation removed from me completely. Writing is analysis.

Facebook is not writing as analysis. Facebook is a focus on the soundbite. Facebook is a headline. Headlines are catchy. They are short and pithy. Headlines grab people’s attention, and Facebook is really good at that. But that was the limit. Longform writing is the actual story, and I truly believe in “story.”

Longform writing is what I want to do, but Facebook writing is what I did.

Strangely, I would find that I was spending almost as much time internally preparing a Facebook post as I would spend preparing a longform blog post such as this. And no, that’s not to say that I spend only a few minutes preparing a blog post. What that means is that a stupid Facebook post would take, quite literally, days to prepare.

Just think for a moment about how incredibly fucking stupid that is.

I mean, seriously, did you read the previous posts where I describe how I don’t take Facebook seriously? Good. So I’m not the other one who realizes that I’m completely full of shit. I take it too fucking seriously!

A day to swim, a week to post about it

Think about this small post:

The Hood River pool, where you learn that no matter how out of shape you thought you were, you’re more out of shape than that.

Which took me almost a week to write. Yes, you read that correctly, almost a week.

I’ve written before about trying to learn how to swim with the masters swimmers. It’s difficult, but it’s also amazing who’s there. There are 60+ year old women who, despite my best efforts at focusing on what I’m doing, I can’t help but notice are really in shape and… well… hot! There are people who are so in shape and so good in the water that it’s difficult to believe that I’ll ever be that good.

So, I’m there watching people who I can’t help but compare myself to– me, this former martial arts loving competitive cyclist who is now little more than an out-of-shape middle-aged oaf. I watch them while meanwhile I can barely make it back and forth across the pool once before I’m out of breath and dizzy enough to pass out.

And there’s this aspect of body preparedness, which I’ve never thought of, but which explains why I can get on a bicycle after two years of doing basically no riding, and still hold my own in the Tour de Hood. It’s the reason I keep thinking of myself as “fairly fit” despite all the evidence to the contrary. It’s not that I’m “fit.” It’s just that my body, after an entire lifetime of doing this sport, is uniquely prepared to, well, do this sport.

But any other sport is up for grabs. I can ride 40 miles at the drop of a hat, but jogging around the block is deadly, and swimming kicks my ass.

That’s a sampling of the analysis I did before writing that Facebook post. It’s a sampling of what I wanted to write about. But, of course, on Facebook, you’re not going to write all of that. So, I took a couple days thinking about that, then a couple more deciding whether I was going to write about 60 year old women who look hot in bathing suits, and how I could do that in a way that was funny, but still appropriate and respectful to them, and then a while deciding whether I was going to mention body preparedness or just feeling out of shape, and a couple days to…

And what do I get out of that? One fucking sentence that doesn’t express any of that.

Don’t give up writing for writing

Here in Hood River, wind sports are big. The windsurfers and kiteboarders here have a saying: “Don’t give up wind for wind.” There’s a lot I learned from that saying.

Say you’re out on the river, and you have wind, and you’re windsurfing, but then you look way up the gorge and it looks windier. You might be tempted to go there, but you shouldn’t. You have wind here, and you don’t know that the wind is better up there. Furthermore, even if it is better up there, by the time you get off the water, break down, get there, rig up, and get back on the water, that wind could be gone. That wind could have left by that time– and the wind you had at the first place could have left too.

Don’t give up wind for wind.

I realized that what I was doing was just that. I was obsessing about posts. Do they capture everything I want them to capture, do they have enough comedy, do they poke at, or not poke at, family members who will be upset, or not upset, at being poked at. I’d spend a week thinking about how I was going to post a short two sentence statement on Facebook, and I found that I had no mental energy for actually writing the longform analysis that I wanted to do, so I didn’t do it. I was doing all the longform analysis for shortform writing.

I gave up writing for writing.

Archery and The Final Twist

But that’s not even the real, really real, reason I gave up Facebook.

I obsessed over Facebook posts. I would literally sit with someone in conversation and think about how I was going to relate that conversation– or maybe even think about how I was going to relate a completely different conversation on Facebook. At the pool, I thought just as much about how I was going to relate my experience at the pool on Facebook as I did about how I was actually experiencing the pool.

I had inklings of this for a while, but it hit home when I was practicing archery one day. Coming from a martial arts background, I have a consciousness of focus and presence. I use that in many things, of course, but I’m more conscious of them when I do martial arts-like things, of which archery is one. So one day, I’m out shooting, and I shoot a really beautiful quiver. I was calm, focused, present, and 5 of 8 arrows are all virtually dead center and spaced about the distance of two quarters. Beautiful.

Now, what I should have done, what I knew I wanted to do, was to ignore those arrows that I’ve already shot. They don’t exist. I needn’t think of the two arrows still in my quiver either, because they don’t exist. The only thing that exists is this arrow I have nocked and the target. There is nothing but this shot. Quiet, peace, breath, and this one shot are all that exist in the world. That is what I should have thought.

But what I did think is this: Wouldn’t it be awesome to post a picture of 8 perfectly shot arrows in the target! I’d love to post that on Facebook.

The next shot I fired was almost a foot off. The shot after that missed the target all together. My final shot even missed my backboard and hit my shed. I realized at that point that I hadn’t given up writing for writing. I’d given up the presence of my life for Facebook.

I unstrung my bow, collected my arrows, came inside, and deleted my account.

A Farewell To Facebook

Me leaving Facebook had nothing to do with the concept of friends, or with the concept of interaction. It had to do with the concept of presence. Specifically, with my inability to have that presence while I was focused on my obsessive, stupid desire to describe that presence to others.

Sure, I think about how I’m going to post something on my blog, but it’s different. I can’t explain how it’s different except to say that when I think about my blog, I don’t actually think about how will I say this on my blog, but rather I think how do I feel about this– and then I write about those feelings on my blog.

Maybe it’s because longform is the process of understanding of how I feel about something, and then the writing of those feelings. It’s focused on the feeling, the understanding. Shortform writing is, for me, often focused on just the writing.

I can’t explain it, really. But I know that when I was standing there with my bow in my hand, looking thirty feet beyond my target at a fletching sticking out of my shed, I wanted to cry. I wanted to cry not because I missed a good shot, or because I missed the opportunity to describe that good shot, but because I was thinking so much about Facebook that I missed the experience of living that shot.

And of so much other living.

It just seems that much of Facebook is not “interaction.” It’s short anecdotes that people comment on. That’s not interaction. Interaction is real conversation with someone, where you learn about what’s going on in their lives, in their head. More importantly, interaction is where you learn what’s going on in your own head.

It’s growing, it’s changing, it’s becoming. It’s not talking about your cat and having someone else comment on it.

But that’s what I kept feeling. I felt as though we’d all sit with our Facebook comments and think that we’d really interacted with someone because we read about them being sick, or read about them mowing the lawn. I’d see people that I hadn’t seen for some time, and they’d start talking about things that happened a couple weeks ago that they’d read about on my Facebook page. Most of the time, this would not be comfortable- not because I was uncomfortable with them knowing details of my life, but because they didn’t know details about my life.

When someone reads a quick Facebook post about something anecdotal that happened in someone’s life, all they have is an anecdote about what happened. They don’t have the story, they have a soundbite. They just have a meaningless quip, because they haven’t actually interacted with the person, with the information.

This is especially true for me and my information. Since I felt that way about Facebook– that it’s not real interaction– I would liberally sprinkle my anecdotes with comedy, or spice them up to make them much more funny than they’d otherwise be.

Rate these two possible Facebook posts for comic value:

1. 1) I didn’t feel too hot this morning, but after I ate breakfast, I felt a little better.
2. 2) While sickness sucks in general, throwing up immediately after breakfast is a surprisingly effective weight loss strategy

See? Number one is boring. I generally shy away from boring– or at least things that make me feel like I’m being boring. So I’d… embellish a bit… and add some comedy… because really, it’s Facebook, no-one’s going to actually take it seriously, right?

Wrong. I’d see someone and they’d start talking about what’s going on in my life as if they know about it, and I would often think “Eh, yeah. Uh, so, that’s not even really close to what’s going on. You take Facebook seriously, don’t you?”

After enough of these interaction, I start thinking that either a) I need to start taking Facebook seriously too, or b) this is not the best place for my type of semi-realistic humor.

The joy of rumor

So, one day, my wife, Jessica, get’s a call from her sister saying that shit has hit the fan and she really needs to call her mom.

So she calls her mother, who starts immediately bitching at Jessica for keeping her in the dark and not telling her what’s going on and why does she have to learn about me getting fired by having Jessica’s aunt call to gloat about how maybe her son-in-law is not so great after all and maybe she’ll know what it’s like to have kids who are unemployed and maybe when one of us gets unemployed Jessica could think to call her mother and tell her her mother instead of giving her aunt a reason to call and gloat!

Now, I’m a contractor. I have a small business– me– that provides services to other companies that they cannot provide for themselves– software development. Most of the time, those services eventually, well, end. Not in a bad way, mind you, because hopefully I’ve actually done my job, which is to do something, afterwhich, since there’s nothing else to do, I leave. So, you could say that I am a complete failure unless I leave a job, because if I don’t leave, it’s probably because I never actually finish what I’m supposed to do.

But sometimes– most of the time really– I really like the people I work with, and grow to think of them as friends, and miss them when I’m gone. Also, quite often, I’m not sure about how my work is going to live in the context of the company. Usually, I build something near completion and then the company has to take it and finish it and/or use it. So, because I care about what I make, I worry that it’s good enough, that it lasts, that it solves the problem I wanted to solve.

So, one day, thinking about all of this, I posted something on Facebook:

“Last day on the job. Always a bittersweet experience. Gonna really miss it here and the people, and worried about what’s going to happen next”

This post is read by my wife’s cousin, who apparently tells his mom that I’m leaving my job. His mom, apparently assuming that I’m only leaving because I’ve been fired– which is good because she’s constantly in competition with her sister– i.e. my wife’s mother– so she calls her sister to gloat. This makes Jessica’s mom freak out because her daughter’s husband has been fired, so she naturally calls Jessica’s sisterto freak out and complain about how she’s been left in the dark about me being fired because her daughter doesn’t care to tell her anything.

Jessica’s response to learning all of this was “Huh, what?”

You could just ask, people

Now, admittedly, this isn’t Facebook’s fault. The family political firestorm that swept through Jessica’s family was entirely fed by the dry tinder that is “Jessica’s family members relationships with Jessica’s other family.” Which is to say that it’s basically the norm if not exactly normal. Facebook was, at worst, a match carelessly thrown from a car into a pile of dry grass.

Still, the family is flammable, and so we need to be exceptionally careful with sparks. We, I, need to be ever conscious of my matches. And it’s not just hers. My own family has mis-read sometime comic, sometimes off-color, posts on my Facebook wall and assumed the worst. The thing about all this is that, if it were honestly interaction, then there would be… well… interaction. Think of the two ways the situation above could have been handled:

1. Freak out and immediately assume the worst. Call all the other members of your family to ensure the firestorm is as big and as violent as possible. Start preparing your daughter’s spare room for her post-divorce life, and prep yourself for your unemployed son-in-law to start borrowing large sums of money and never paying them back
2. Actually talk to your daughter and find out that they are celebrating over a glass of Oregon Pinot Noir.

One of these really stupid and childish, the other is thoughtful and involves interaction. The thing about Facebook is that it encourages us all to take the stupid and childish path. Facebook does this because it tells us that it is providing interaction- and we all, me included, are dumb enough to believe it.

You see, true interaction would be “call your daughter and find out that everything is fine.” That would be interaction. But Facebook has already provided “interaction.” So we assume that the actual interaction has already taken place, so the next logical step is to freak the fuck out, right?

Another twist

Of course it’s an exaggeration. Just as with Facebook, I’m going for comedy as much as anything. Still, the point remaint, and the point is that if Facebook, as a system, honestly was interaction, freakouts probably wouldn’t occur at all. And if Facebook honestly encouraged interaction, then the freakout would be avoided because we would all… well… interact!

Rather, Facebook encourages us to assume we have the whole story. It encourages us to assume that the soundbite is all the information that we need. This is bad enough, but it’s worse when someone like me doesn’t take it seriously at all, and further obscures reality with comedy and embellishment.

But there’s another twist. Similar to the first. This wasn’t the reason I had for leaving. It wasn’t other people freaking out that caused me to have second thoughts, it was my own change.

I found that I had to be really conscious of what I posted. “Can I post this? Will her family freak out?” “If I post this, can I make it comedic without fallout?” It was becoming troublesome to make sure that what I posted was… safe.

And so I actually swung the other way, purposely posting stuff that was unsafe just because I shouldn’t have to worry about it being safe. I’d post about Jessica walking around wearing nothing but cellophane, not because it has (or ever actually would) happen, but because “dammit, if I have to worry about posting something that might upset her mother, that pisses me off, so I’m going to post something that will surely upset her mother.”

So I went from posting whatever I wanted, to posting only what I thought was safe, to posting what I hoped was unsafe. Which means I went from being angry at other people being stupid to actually being more stupid.

No. Stop. Time to leave.

That’s the real reason. Because, apparently, I don’t have the wisdom and self-control to fight stupidity with integrity. Maybe one day I’ll learn, but until then, I just thought it best for me to go away.

Deleted. Completely.¹ When I did this, many friends and family expressed surprise, sometimes outright frustration, that I would leave Facebook. According to them, there were a number of reason I should not have left, but primary among them was that I’d be eliminating that important way to communicate with me and see what I’m doing.²

I’ve been thinking a lot about writing a “why I’ve left Facebook” post and almost didn’t. After all, I dropped off the radar on a random day, at a random time, without any warning. I wanted a clean break, and writing a “why” isn’t really clean. But, I do want to express my reasons for leaving. They amount to three fundamental things

1. Confusion over what it means to be a friend
2. Confusion over what it means to interact.
3. My own personal tendency to obsess.

Because I’m a loquacious SOB, I decided that each of these warrants it’s own post. Here’s the first.

The meaning of “Friend”

One big reason Facebook drove me crazy is that way too many people just got way too caught up pouring as much emotional meaning into friending as they possibly could. I didn’t see Facebook’s use of “Friend” as meaningful as others did. When I started using Facebook, I made a rule for myself that I’d have no more than 100 “friends.” Why? Because I personally couldn’t honor more than that many people with the real, honest communication that I wanted to.

Now, this is a personal decision, I admit. Many people friend everyone on Facebook and don’t feel they have to “honor” them at all. I may seem ridiculous when I say this, but I truly believe that everything we use, we should use in the way that best supports our own personality and personal growth. Everything we do, we should do mindfully and with intention. For some people, that means friending everyone. That’s fine. My mindful– my personal– decision was to friend a small enough number of people that I could truly interact with them all.

I also made a conscious decision to friend only family, and people whom I actually considered friends in person. People whom I saw regularly, or for whom continuous strong communication was important. If I would regularly go out of my way in everyday life to see you, or to be with you, or to contact you (or you, me) then I’d probably friend you. If I didn’t have that opportunity (because, say, you lived far away), but wanted to, I’d probably friend you. If you lived in the same very small town as me, and I only saw you when we bumped into each other accidentally, then no, I probably won’t friend you.

Again, not the way many others use it, and that’s fine, because that’s the way I, mindfully, intentionally decided to use it in a way that best supported my own personal convictions.

What I found, however, was that people were often offended and angry with me because I didn’t not want to friend them.³ So, I would ignore friend requests from people whom I didn’t actually know, or from people whom I didn’t consider an actual friend, or people who I very occasionally saw around town but whom I never really interacted with. This caused a surprising number of “why won’t you friend me?” problems.

I would also un-friend people whom I had been “friends” with, but whom I had not interacted with. Let’s call this “the normal dissolution of a relationship that’s happened quite naturally for at least 1.5 million years before Facebook existed.” I mean, seriously, I don’t read what you post, you don’t read what I post, yet you’re angry when I suddenly disappear from your stream? (A stream that might be active enough that you can’t actually read what I’m posting anyway).

Then there was what I would call “the regular culling.” I would end up with 150 “friends,” and decided to pare it down to my decided maximum 100. And people got surprisingly angry with my decisions, angry with my reasoning for why I would un-friend them vs. someone else. People would ask other people if I dropped them because of something that they posted that I never even read. It was ridiculous.

Facebook as emotional support mechinism

The result of all my mindful decisions on how I wanted to use Facebook was that I found myself needing to justify my decision on how I would use this piece of software strictly so that I could appease other people’s emotional security. If I un-friended someone, I would often get very stern demands for an explanation of why I unfriended them.

Really? I need to justify myself?

I found myself not wanting to explain, but to shout. Look people, it’s fucking software. It’s a goddamned tool. It’s like a wrench. It’s useful for some forms of communication. You don’t get all sobs and whines when I say I don’t have your phone number, do you? No! You don’t get upset and demand an explanation of my reasoning when I say I lost your email address, do you? No! Why? Because it’s not a statement of your worthiness as a human being for fuck’s sake! It’s a fucking tool!

I used Facebook as a tool. As another in a large suite of communication methodologies which I could use to transmit thoughts and information to and from people with whom I wanted to communicate. It’s nothing more than that, to me.⁴ I realized however, that to many other people, it was a statement of whether you cared about them as a person, or whether they were good enough, or whether their emotions could handle the personal decisions of other people– decisions which have nothing whatsoever to do with them.

I realized that it often felt like high school all over again. “You don’t want to take 5th period english?! But you know I’m in 5th period english! Did you drop it because you don’t like me?!”

No, I dropped you because I had 120 “friends” and chose 20 almost at random, and you happened to be one of them. Grow up, put on your big-boy panties, and

Get over it.

The truth of Reason #1

But here’s the plot twist at the end of the movie: That’s all bullshit– well, it’s all true, but it’s not the real reason.

I didn’t leave Facebook because because people were being emotionally childish about my arbitrary decisions at all. I left Facebook because I, myself, was becoming caught up in the personal politics. It wasn’t that people were demanding reasoning for my decisions anymore. It was because I, myself, was making decisions based on whether they might demand my reasoning.

I would look at my friend count and see “150″ and think “there are only about 90 that I’d really like to keep, but the other 60 will get grumpy if I un-friend them.” Even worse, I would friend people just because I knew that if I didn’t, there’d be fallout.

Really?

So, I’m all mad at people for playing stupid, emotionally immature political games because of a piece of software, and how do I fight that? I play stupid, emotionally immature political games!

No. Stop. Time to leave.

So, that’s my real, honest Reason #1 for leaving Facebook. Not that other people were being ridiculous, but be I was being ridiculous. It was affecting not only the decisions I made, but it was affecting why I was making decisions.

And I decided that wasn’t positive.

1. or, as completely as Facebook will delete any account, which is likely not very complete
2. This, I state clearly, is patently ridiculous. Twitter, blog, web, I have a rather active internet profile. Google John Metta to see why anyone can get a hold of me, and know almost everything I’m doing in real-time. I suspect that the real reason for any frustration is more honestly that it won’t be as easy to get a hold of me.
3. It’s an unfortunate reality that many people on Facebook expect you to use Facebook the way they use Facebook, and if you don’t, then you are #doingitwrong.
4. Well, that and a comic platform, but that’s the topic of another post

I just emailed Congress to urge them to oppose the Internet Blacklist Legislation, known as the PROTECT-IP Act in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House. This legislation seeks to give the executive branch power to conduct slash-and-burn campaigns against websites that allegedly host – or even link to – content that infringes on intellectual property rights. That would “disappear” whole domain names, fundamentally undermining Internet security, and/or choke off their financial support. The Internet Blacklist Legislation puts more sites than ever at risk, effectively upending the DMCA safe harbors that have been crucial to the growth of Internet innovation and creativity.

Sadly, these short-sighted and dangerous bills won’t do much to stop online infringement – but they will jeopardize our ability to speak and read online with the kind of freedom we cherish in the offline world. Deep-pocketed Hollywood lobbyists are aggressively pushing to control and censor the open Internet, willing to sacrifice free speech and our Internet culture in hopes of controlling how people view their movies and products.

We need to stop this bill before it goes any further. Will you contact your representatives in Congress and urge them to oppose the Internet Blacklist Legislation? Visit: https://eff.org/r.C8A

She wasn’t always the best role model, my mother, but this decision was superb. It came with intent, a reason: She told us that she couldn’t afford this thing that she didn’t understand, but that she knew that it was the future. She wanted us to have access to this thing called a computer. She hoped that we didn’t get left behind like so many other children of The Projects would.

Over 25 years later, I own two software companies. They are small, barely worthy of the title “company,” but they are extant, and they exist, entirely because a small, poor, geeky kid in the projects had a mom who was smart enough to go out one day and buy a cheap computer she couldn’t afford.

I’ve been a programmer ever since that day.

Today, I bought an iPad.

I already own an iPad, as does my wife. Among other things, I’m an iOS developer. I didn’t buy an iPad for myself. Today, I bought an iPad for my sister, and for my sister’s children.

It wasn’t planned. It was impulse. Strangly, suddenly, I felt strongly compelled to buy it. Compelled to make an impulse purchase in a way that is rare, to say the least. For some reason, I wanted them, I needed them, to own this thing that they should have access to, this thing that defines what we think of when we say “the future.”

Today, I bought an iPad. At almost the same time, a man died.

He was a man who re-wrote our world. A visionary who didn’t wait for the future, but created it. The man who changed the way we think about computers, about music, about information, about movies. The man who changed the way we think about life. At almost the same time as I bought an iPad for the same reasons my mother bought a computer, the greatest visionary and CEO of the modern world passed away.

And so as my sister plays with her new “iFun,” and my niece plays Plants vs. Zombies on mine– as they discuss email settings and games and calendars, I find myself needing to periodically leave the room to hold my head and sob.

It had to happen. I wish it wasn’t so soon, but it had to happen, and he himself said why:

“No one wants to die, even people who want to go to Heaven don’t want to die to get there, and yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It’s life’s change agent; it clears out the old to make way for the new. right now, the new is you. But someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it’s quite true. Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

Steve Jobs, by describing why death is so good, you described what it means to live. You changed entire industries that laughed at you while showing us all what we could achieve. You’ve touched us, you’ve inspired us, you’ve shamed us. For the forth time today I find myself weeping for you, a man I’ve never met. A man who has changed my life.

Today, I bought an iPad. I bought it for my sister, so that she and her family would not be left behind by the technology of the future– the technology you created. The future you created.

Today, I bought an iPad. I bought it for you, Steve, so that my sister’s children can grow to be the new that sweeps away the old that was you, the old that is me.

Thank you, Steve Jobs. You have changed me.

10: The number of lbs that my ludocrously sensitive body has already gained.

45: The number of pushups I just did in a single set, proving that
I retain at least some mediocre level of physical fitness.

9: Since, in all honesty, I’ll likely not be able to adequately control my intake of pizza and wings during my stay (I mean, who am I kidding)… the number of days I’ll do pushups, situps, and- if possible- pullups in an effort to maintain a shape that at least marginally resembles my former self when I return home to the ridiculously sexy hottness that is my lovely young wife.

Everyone thinks that they are smart, that they are witty, that they are generous, kind, good. Everyone thinks that they know the truth about themselves, but how many of us do? How many of us have been tested? How many of us really know, how many of us can really admit the dark secrets about themselves.

The truth is, you can’t. Everyone wants to be the hero who saves the day, but until the earthquake happens, you just don’t know whether you’ll be the sniveling train wreck of a person that people have to carry out because your mind won’t get past “oh my god, what’s happening.” Everyone thinks that they would be the benevolent and generous ruler, but until you are put in the position where you can chop someone’s head off with impunity, you just don’t know how fun chopping off heads will be.

You can’t know the truth about yourself until you are tested.

On Saturday, I was tested. On Saturday, I saw something that the ugly truth. I faced the devil in the mirror. I saw the monster. On Saturday I learned the truth about myself. It wasn’t the truth I knew was right, it wasn’t the truth I argued and fought about. It was the terrible but undeniable reality about the person that I really am.

On Saturday, I played golf for the first time… and I liked it. I mean, I really liked it.

On Saturday, I learned the truth about myself, and it has shaken me to the core. I am — dear God, am I actually writing this?– I am, unwillingly, but undeniably, a guy who likes to… golf.

A short time ago, I saw this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMD3agP5hv0

It’s for a product called SawStop that will actually stop a table saw blade fast enough that it will barely nick you, rather than cut off your arm. It’s pretty amazing to watch, and a damn good idea.

Then, this morning, I heard an interesting story on NPR about the incredible rash of table saws and about how people are lobbying the government to implement this “Break-through new technology”¹

So, My father was a carpenter, I know about table saws- I started using them at about seven years old. I know a lot about them, but that’s not the thing that interested me about this story. One thing interested me: Holy shit, imagine if you could get the federal government to write a law requiring that every table saw in the country had to license your product.

Now, I’m not suggesting anything nefarious. It’s just very interesting that a company comes out with a table saw break and tries to market it, and then shortly after there are meetings in Congress about whether it should be federally required. It’s not nefarious because, quite honestly, our system is set up that way. Insurance companies did it, safety companies do it all the time- gaming the system is what America is all about, man. “I’ve got this great technology that not enough people are buying, and our country loves the shit out of new laws and regulations, so let’s take advantage of that.” That’s the American way. I’m not going to argue against that.

But, isn’t it interesting?

Now, if only I could get the feds to make my company’s software mandatory.

1. Note: This NPR story has aired before: http://www.npr.org/2011/05/25/136617222/advocates-urge-lawmakers-to-make-table-saws-safer and apparently NPR has been following the technology for a while.

But it’s also a noun. A Fast. And when the word is used as a noun, I find that it is surprisingly close to the word slow.

I’ve fasted for pretty much my entire adult life. Periods of as short as one day to as long as a week. There are a lot of reasons people have to fast, from the political, to the religious, to the cultural. Regardless of the reasons, we know that we’ve been fasting for probably as long as we’ve been humans, so regardless of the reason, it seems to be important to us.¹

I fast for what I’d call spiritual reasons, though they are not really religious. I don’t buy the whole “detox diet” concept as it seems like one of many cultural marketing gimmicks. Yet fasting is still a detox of sorts for me. It’s something of a mental detox, though. A spiritual one.

I have to admit that I really love to eat. I mean, I #seriously love food. And I can eat a lot of it. Bread and marinara sauce, pizza, hummus, stuffed grape leaves, tomato sandwiches, chicken wings. Food. It’s something that I’m always conscious of, and sometimes a bit of a slave too. I love to eat. Sometimes, I eat without thinking about it… well, often, I eat without thinking about it.

Fasting changes that. It resets my clock. It forces me to remind myself all day that I’m not eating (it’s easy for me to forget that!). It forces me to be conscious of eating by not eating, and in that consciousness, I find that I’m more conscious about a lot of things. From how much water I drink, to how I place my feet when I walk. From the emotional response I have to a sentence, to how the wind feels as it blows across the hair on my leg.

I don’t know the whys and hows of the experience, actually, only that it exists. Like taking a minute out of your day to sit in a quiet place and relax, fasting, to me, is like taking a minute out of my life to do the same. It feels like it slows things down. It’s contemplative- at least it forces me to be more contemplative.

Christians fast, Buddhists fast, Jews fast, Hindus fast. Many people in many religions fast because their god told them to. I’m not a part of any of those religions, yet god still wants me to fast– only it’s the god in me, my spiritual being, that tells me to fast. And that’s why, for me, fasting is a spiritual experience yet not a religious one. It helps me to re-establish the connection I have with the spiritual part of me. It’s like it re-connects my spiritual self with my physical self.

I’m not an evangelical person, so I can’t actually say why anyone else should fast, or even why anyone would want to fast. Like so many things, that’s a personal decision. I can, however, write about why I choose to fast, and what it means to me. Fasting is a re-evaluation, a confronting of consciousness not only about eating, but about all of life. About my habits, my desires, my thoughts, and my emotions. It’s a time to slow down from my normal, semi-conscious life and take time to contemplate what this life is– to think about what I’m doing, what I want, who I am.

I don’t fast because I think I should, or because a book told me to. I fast because, for me, it’s important to periodically remind myself that fast can mean slow.

1. although, that’s the same argument I use for tattoos, and it doesn’t seem to sway my wife in their favor

Now, as it turns out, proving that Jessica is a woman turns out to be easy. For me, however, the situation is surprisingly difficult. None of the proof that they accept seems to list my race/ethnicity. They request my birth certificate, driver’s license, passport, or military documentation. Amazingly, none of that has anything stating my ethnicity. I’m not sure what I have that states my race or ethnicity. If I give them a photocopy of my passport– which they ask for despite the fact that no passport has race information presented– will they look at my picture and say “Okay, he’s Black enough?”

Why

And then there’s the question of why. Why do I feel it necessary to apply for this designation? I mean, will it really make it easier to get contracts? Even if it does, another question remains: Is it really meaningful? I mean, if I’m honest with myself, I don’t feel like a minority, disabled-veteran in a Historically Underutilized Business Zone.

Well, I do feel like a minority, actually. I’m conscious of that every day from a social perspective. And I’m conscious of being a disabled veteran from a physical perspective, which is regularly uncomfortable, often scary, and sometimes downright painful. And I’m somewhat conscious of living in a HUBZone, if only because Jessica is an economic development coordinator who’s trying to improve the economy of this area.

But the question remains, do any of these three things actually effect my ability to find work?

I mean, isn’t that the entire purpose of MBE and WBE designation? Isn’t the system designed to make it easier for businesses that don’t have the same advantages, perhaps the same networks and connections, to succeed? Isn’t the idea and the spirit of the law to give minority and disadvantaged businesses equality with, I guess, white-male-owned business? Do I not feel I have that business equality? Am I not succeeding? Even taking my “passport picture as the only proof of my minority status” out of the issue, there’s still the question: Why do I feel I need this?

Gaming the System

There is one reason to do it that I can see as an immediate benefit: Governmental entities that hire me, might be able to spend less money– a lot less money.

There are these companies that exist solely for the purposes of gaming the M/WBE system. They are companies that are, in name if not in fact, owned by women and/or minorities. When a governmental entity puts out bids for jobs, they need a certain amount of those bids to go to M/WBE companies. If this governmental entity wants to hire someone with a very specific and desired skillset like myself, they may not be able to do it directly because I’m not an M/WBE company. So, instead, they hire another firm who carries that designation, and I act as an “employee” to that firm. The governmental entity pays that firm, and the firm pays me.

In short, they’re gaming the system. The government fills out their checkbox, and this other firm makes a ton of money for doing a bit of paperwork.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to stand on a soapbox about a company taking advantage of a system that’s stupid– and it is stupid. It’s one of many examples of “Well, it’s too hard to actually make our system better, so we’ll just make a regulation that pretends to make our system better.” These companies found a way to game the system, and the governmental entity itself has found a way to game the system– because, if we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll admit that the governmental entity doesn’t really care whether the contractor is actually an M/WBE, they just care that their ass is covered when the audit comes.

Still, soapbox or no, I’m in a position to do better, because that governmental entity is going to pay often 50-100% of my rate for this middle-man to do that paperwork. Yup, whatever I charge, the company that I “work” for bills me out at a rate that’s significantly (what I would term “ridiculously”) higher. I can cost twice as much to a city as I charge- for no extra work.

In short, by registering as an M/WBE myself, I can go to that governmental entity and say “My rate is $x/hr” and that governmental entity will only pay $x/hr, not half-again that amount, not twice that amount. They pay for the work they get.

Idea and Spirit

In the end, I’m mostly applying for M/WBE status simply because it’s part of a list of “Shit you can take advantage of to help your business.” That’s really all I’m doing: Taking advantage of something, if not just gaming the system in my own way.

Still, I have at least two contracts that are siphoning off a lot more tax payer money from government entities that need to be siphoned off. I work hard for what I bill, and I’m sure the companies that I “work” for, in their way, do as well. Still, it seems stupid and irresponsible to me for a government to pay 150-200% of the price they could pay simply because of a regulation that was designed to aid minorities, when it’s dubiously going to that purpose in the first place. It seems like I should be doing what I can to make my clients pay less, and check that “fiscally responsible” box, rather than filling out only the “minority” boxes and wasting taxpayer money.

I do like the idea and spirit of M/WBE designations, but I wonder if it’s doing what that idea and spirit intended. It seems disingenuous to me to allow, say, a minority as a titular head of a company who’s sole purpose is to “host” consultants so that a governmental entity can check off a box that does little to nothing to help fulfill the spirit or intention of the regulation. It’s disingenuous, but the regulation itself encourages gaming of the system. It’s easier for them to spend extra taxpayer money to hire me through another company. The regulation encourages wasted taxpayer dollars with little to no social benefit.

The more I work with governments, the more it seems that many– maybe most– laws are little more than the easy way out. We don’t want to expend the effort to address the root causes of social inequality, so we’ll make this law that pretends to do something about it.

A law that sounds all great and helpful, but that doesn’t address the underlying issue, is a cheat. I’d really hoped that, by this day and age, we could do better.