Author Archives: Lex

Stairway to Heaven: Forty Years Later

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As most people do, I spend my life in a busy pursuit of this or that goal. I enjoy the hell out of every day. But in the busyness of it all it’s easy to forget that life comes to an end pretty quickly. It’s very human to be consumed with thoughts of own mortality, and it’s also very human to completely ignore such thoughts instead preferring the comfort of an aimless conversation.

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.

Marigold Kitchen: A Re-Introduction to Food

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For my mom’s and dad’s birthday, we went to Marigold Kitchen that Philly mag put at #2 in their list of 50 best restaurants in Philadelphia. In general, I like eating dinner at my parents’ house instead of a restaurant because then we can be more relaxed, stay longer, yell and laugh more obnoxiously, and drink as little or as much as we want, plus the food my mom makes is almost always better. But still, this was an experience that I won’t forget.

marigold-kitchen-sample

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.

 

 

The Silver Lining of Pollen Allergies

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Every year, starting mid-April and ending in early June, I “suffer” along with 20% of Americans the pollen allergy symptoms of runny nose, itchy eyes/throat, cough, trouble breathing, etc.

Silver liningI 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.

 

 

Not Breaking News: Six Thousand Americans Died Yesterday

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6,000 Americans died yesterday. 40 of them were murdered. 100 of them died in a car accident. 84 of them committed suicide (1,000 others tried to commit suicide and failed). Most of the rest died due to a long struggle with heart disease, cancer, stroke, etc.

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.

boston-bombingWith 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.

Take It Easy: Don’t Let the Sound of Your Own Wheels Drive You Crazy

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“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.

self-deprecating-humor-clownI 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”.

Displaying Mastery by Breaking Convention

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There are two types of displays of mastery that I enjoy watching. First, is when a person does something simple better than millions of others that dedicate their life to it. This means they have taken the conventional path, but have taken it to an elite level through a all-encompassing obsessive pursuit of perfection. Many Olympic sports are a good example of this. I don’t know much at all about gymnastics but in 2012, McKayla Maroney (of “not impressed” meme fame) was the perfect example of this:

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.

Our Response to the Next 9/11 Magnitude Terrorist Attack

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911-terrorist-attackFor me, the attack of 9/11, 2001 did not arouse feelings of anger as it did in many of my fellow Americans. I was simply deeply saddened, the same as after the recent shooting in the Sandy Hook elementary school. Perhaps because of this feeling, the military response in the next 12 years (in my view) was at best flawed and at worst irrational. Many of my friends disagree. I think it boils down to how you see the world, the arc of history, and the best way to defend against and deter future violence.

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.

Bach, Religion, and a Story of Betrayal

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BachSt.MatthewI got a chance to listen to J. S. Bach’s St Matthew Passion at the Kimmel Center right here in Philadelphia this weekend. It sets the biblical story of the betrayal, suffering, and death of Jesus to music. The whole performance is over three hours, and was my first experience of its kind.

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.

The Isolating Experience of Reading

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experience-of-finishing-a-bookThe image to the left made me chuckle. I can certainly relate to the experience. As a person who probably reads about 100+ times more words than I speak, I live a lot of my life on the pages of a book.

For example, I recently read a few books related to Nazi Germany and World War II, and had to resist bringing those topics up in conversation with friends and colleagues. I lived in that world (via imagination) for several months, and was profoundly moved by the stories of evil, weakness, heroism, etc.

I think reading is similar to traveling in that, for example, it’s a little douchy to say “When I visited Chichen Itza last year, I was amazed at the depth of civilization that existed in North America over a thousand years ago.” There is a fascinating discussion there, but it might drown in the fact that most people don’t know what or where Chichen Itza is, nor do they need to in order to have an interesting conversation with me about the rise and fall of great societies in history.

The challenge of “traveling” through books is to take from those travels what I can, but return back and live fully in the present day reality.

There is No Medication for Life

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“Psychiatric diagnosis and treatment is particularly subject to fads and undue drug company influence because judgments are still based on subjective data that cannot be confirmed or disproved by laboratory tests.” - Allen Frances, Professor, Duke University

The statistics on people who suffer from depression are staggering. For example, according to the National College Health Assessment of college students (carried out by the ACHA):

  • 86.8% of students felt that they were overwhelmed with what they had to do.
  • 86.1% felt like they were exhausted.
  • 61.0% felt very sad.
  • 57.3% felt very lonely.
  • 46.5% of student felt hopeless.
  • 31.3% felt so depressed that they found it difficult to function.
  • 7.1% seriously thought about committing suicide.
  • 5.5% intentionally bruised, burned, cut or physically hurt themselves.
  • 1.2% attempted suicide.

good-doctor-adviceA significant percentage of people in the above survey undoubtedly suffer from a clear-cut chemical imbalance that can be helped by (and only by) medication. By significant, I don’t mean 61%. I mean fractions of 1%. Everything else is the ups and downs of life. Part of being human is learning to ride through that rollercoaster without falling off.

Unfortunately, it’s very difficult to determine whether a person requires medication, or if a more proactive life-oriented action would be more productive, such as change of diet, lifestyle, career, relationships, etc.

Steven Rinella on Joe Rogan podcast mentioned the counter intuitive notion that when you’re camping and you’re freezing, you don’t want to move, but the right thing to do is to start moving and in so doing you begin to feel great. I think of the state of depression in the same way. It’s a dark place that you get out of by doing stuff you don’t want to do at first.

Some cultures treat people suffering from major depressive disorders as weak whiners that just need to suck it up, while other cultures treat anyone who is sad with a daily dose of medication and multiple therapy sessions a weak. There must be a healthy middle ground erring on the side of prescribing medication only when all else fails.