misAdventures of Workmonkey 3.0

The Washington Post recently conducted a social experiment that I found supremely insightful. I've always been fascinated with social experiments. The good ones quickly cut through the thick layers of ignorance we wrap around ourselves on a daily basis, revealing just how blindly we live on a day to day routine, and how little we know about ourselves as humans. In this particular experiment, the Washington Post arranged to have Joshua Bell play the violin for forty minutes during the morning commute at a popular subway station in Washington DC. If you are like me, you had no idea that Joshua Bell is the most talented and famous violinist in the world. You'd also have no idea that the four pieces he played are considered the most difficult and complex in classical music. Further, you'd wouldn't have known that a few days earlier, people paid on average of $100 dollars for a chance to hear him play at the Library of Congress. Over 1000 people walked by during the forty minutes he played. Here's hidden camera footage of how many people stopped to listen:

I find this personally troubling primarily because if I had been there that day, I'm certain I would have been one of the people to just walk by (and I believe you would have too). I know this because I walk by people like this pretty much every single day in the New York Subway. Sometimes I give money, sometimes I don't, but I never actually stop to listen, no matter what is being played, because getting to wherever I'm going is more important than paying attention to the world around me. And because i'm too self-conscious to break from the pack and look different, even if I wanted to stop. I've turned into a drone, which I swore I'd never become. The majority of the people who tried to listen? Little kids. The ones who still were curious about the world. The ones still fascinated with the things we are too busy to notice. I can only pay attention to something if I'm told that I should. If someone gave me a ticket to hear Joshua Bell, I'd probably come back and tell you all how awesome he was. This means the only single reason I would have liked him is because everyone around me liked him, not because I was actually capable of appreciating what he played. The rest of the time, I just keep my head down and close out the world around me, overwhelmed by my daily routine. I'm not saying tomorrow I am going to start paying more attention to the garbage I walk by on the way to the subway. But next time I hear someone playing music, no matter what it is, I'll be damned if I don't stop to actually listen.

After a number of months of reading about the causes of the current financial disaster that has brought my 401K down to about a 201k, I finally read an article that simply and concisely explains exactly what the fuck just happened. And it did so by indirectly connecting the current financial collapse to something that I am much more familiar with - the dot-com bust. As a contributer to, and ultimate casualty of, the dot-com, I had first-hand knowledge of why the bubble burst - I simply was too fucking stupid to realize that the factors could be the exact same in both. But, as written by the author of this article, a kid who was in the heart of Wall Street just as I was once in the heart of Silicon Valley, it is clear that the same two things brought both down:

1) People don't know what the fuck they're doing, especially the ones that pretend they do : Sometimes you think someone knows what they are doing because they have a nice title, such as Global Equities Researcher, wear a nice suit, and use phrases like mortgage-backed recapture bond. Unfortunately, as America just found out, these people do not, in fact, have any fucking idea what they are doing, or at least any more than you do. The author of the above-mentioned article paragraph confesses the following:

To this day, the willingness of a Wall Street investment bank to pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars to dispense investment advice to grownups remains a mystery to me. I was 24 years old, with no experience of, or particular interest in, guessing which stocks and bonds would rise and which would fall. The essential function of Wall Street is to allocate capital--to decide who should get it and who should not. Believe me when I tell you that I hadn't the first clue.

I'd never taken an accounting course, never run a business, never even had savings of my own to manage .... the whole thing still strikes me as preposterous .... I figured the situation was unsustainable. Sooner rather than later, someone was going to identify me, along with a lot of people more or less like me, as a fraud.

I couldn't have put it better myself. At the time I was hired as an "Information Technology Manager" in the dot-com, I was a recent college graduate with an English degree who had last owned a computer in the 8th grade, and that was a Tandy. I hadn't even taken a computer class in college. And yet there I was: administering server accounts, backing up data, fixing computer hardware, ordering servers from Sun Microsystems, and meeting clients. In these meetings, I had mastered the use of terms that could blind and dazzle clients away from the fact I actually knew nothing. I threw around SMTP, LDAP, CSS, and Perl enough times that the client was confused, but impressed. And I had zero idea what I had just told him.

Apparently, Wall Street had their own set of terms: Derivatives, Credit Swaps, Futures. And the terms were complex enough to convince us that the people using them knew what they were talking about. Well, they didn't. There were a bunch of guys like me, although instead of blindly ordering SPARC servers, they were blindly ordering the stocks that made up your 401k.

In my case, I thought I was the only one who didn't know what the fuck was going on. But then, by my third year, I slowly began to realize that nobody actually knew anything: They just wore better suits. When I asked these people how, in fact, a company could survive when it made no income of any sort, they didn't actually have an answer. When I asked them who might possibly pay to put their chore list online, they just smiled. When I asked myself how I was getting paid so much when I in fact knew so little, I started to realize the dot-com was fucked: It was all a ruse and operated on a set of rules that were unsustainable. There wasn't some magic world where companies didn't need to make money to succeed, just as there isn't some magic world where strawberry pickers will ever be able to repay an $800,000 loan for a house. People want to believe it, but in truth it is all a con-game. There are basic rules in the world that can never be violated: You cannot spend more money than you make. Houses will not increase in value forever. You cannot double your money overnight. If you work at The Hot Dog Hut, you cannot own two houses. English majors cannot program in C++. If any of these rules are being violated, then you are being conned and will get what's coming to you. Every ten years or so, the country seems to want to believe that these rules no longer exist, and there is some secret and easy way to make a shit ton of cash quickly. There isn't, and there never will be. Give it up.

2) People up top are morally corrupt: The reason you are being conned is because the people up top could give a fuck about you. The people up top know damn well what is going, and will profit from it as long as you let them, as they have no soul. In Wall Street, in particular, the few people who actually did know what was going on hid it from the rest of the world, so that they could continue to rape and pillage as long as possible. And why? Because the people up top enjoy spending lots of money on self-cleaning trash cans, and nannies, and statues of swan-dragons carved from ancient trees, and custom jacuzzi tubs inspired by Bavarian mineral springs, and long driveways paved with the crushed bones of bald eagles, and all of these things cost a lot of money, and the only place to get that money is from you, but they can't come right out and tell you they need your money so they can buy another forty bedroom house shaped like a Phoenix, so instead they tell you they need your money for a Derivative fund that will surely earn you 10% return. So you give them your money, and they get their phoenix-shaped house with French Titanium gutters. And all of this, eventually, will fall apart, because the people up top will continue to want more and more money to buy crazier and crazier things, so they will have to create greater lies, and the greater the lies, the higher the odds someone will finally figure out the con, and once the con is figured out, then the rules mentioned above strike down with a fury and shake everything out, and you lose your money because you paid way too much for your house, and you go into debt, and you stop spending, and the strawberry-picker loses his five-bedroom house, because, you know, he never actually should have had it in the first place. Multiply this process by fifty million and there you go: Why our economy is fucked, and will continue to be fucked until the rules get everything right again. And that's going to take a long time, as there's still a lot of justice to be meted out. And in ten years, when everything is good again, once again someone is going to come along in a nice suit, and throw out a cool set of new words, and tell everyone he knows what he is doing, and this whole thing is going to happen all over again. Fortunately, next time I'll be ready: Next time someone comes along to tell the world he knows what the fuck he is talking about, I'll know it is time to put my money under my mattress.

I've been described as a lot of things: random, loud, Danish, monkey-obsessed, witty, fart-obsessed, selfish, super-fart-obsessed, insightful, warlike. However, there's one word that's never been spoken when words are spoken of me: sexy.

To this day, I watch movies with sexy male actors performing all sexy and analyze exactly what sexy is (thus confirming I am not sexy - sexy people do not analyze sexy). Is it the perfectly-groomed jaw stubble? The exotic Italian skin? The smoldering eyes, window to an ocean of passion? The mysterious, quiet persona which masks a lack of thought? The aggressive physicality, resulting in ripped panties? The aloof stupidity mistaken for intensity? The mechanic overalls? The loft-apartment filled with erotic paintings of hoofed animals?

I think we can all agree the most common attribute among all sexy men is clear: confidence. You cannot be sexy if you are not confident. Unfortunately, my brain was always too active for confidence. I was constantly analyzing every situation, every move, every word. Sexy people tend to be stupid, or at least empty-headed, as they are able to act without thought: Pulling a girl close you just met on the subway and staring in her eyes while saying something sexy but nonsensical like "i'd leave life for you" requires a minimum of thinking (if I were in the situation, as example, my mind would race: this might go badly. the girl doesn't even know me. how's my hair? is that homeless guy in the handicap seat over there masturbating? i think my contact lens just fell out. oh god, where is my contact lens. my lips are chapped.) I suppose it is possible sexy people have mastered the ability of turning off their thought-process while being sexy, though more likely it indicates they never had a thought process to begin with.

The only other path to confidence is practice. When you practice something enough, you become confident in it. This helps explain the intelligent, confident athlete or CEO - But it does not explain the confident sexy person. How can you practice being sexy? In middle school, I was lucky to get to sit next to a girl in class, more or less talk to her. Where was the stable of girls you could rip through one-by-one, fine-tuning your sexy moves? If you actually liked a girl, you didn't want to fuck it up by trying a new sexy move - such as painting a water color of your penis on her back - and having it backfire.

I knew I wasn't sexy from the beginning. Even in fourth-grade, it was easy to tell who had it and who didn't. Mike White walked the halls with confidence, winking at girl after girl, asking "what's up?", causing an epidemic of fluttering hearts in just a few minutes time. I, on the other-hand, was busy tripping over my overly-grown feet, pushing my glasses up on my zit-dusted nose, holding my pants up around my boney waist -- I didn't have the inherited blessings of sexiness: a foreign accent, brown skin, dark eyes, a desire to ride a motor scooter, a love of guitar solos. And I was a late bloomer. In middle school, Gary Thompson would talk about getting a "hummer" and "getting my ballz licked", and I didn't know what the fuck he was talking about, nor did whatever it was sound all that appealing at the time.

In the following years, any attempt to be sexy was thwarted by my respect for females: I feared what girls thought of me. Their thoughts were sharp needles that could poke deeply and permanently into my self-confidence. Sexy men do not fear women, which gives them the courage to do passionate and unexpected things: like grab their breasts when their boyfriend isn't looking. When spontaneously grabbing a girl's breasts when her boyfriend isn't looking, there is a chance she will get really pissed. But there is a chance she will find it exhilarating and enjoy it. The sexy man takes takes that risk, knowing that if she gets pissed, he could care less. There will be another girl with a boyfriend whose breasts you can grab tomorrow (Sexy men don't waste their time on single women. They only deal with the taken, as that is forbidden, and hence, more sexy.) In my case, any time the need for a sexy move was called for, I respected the woman and overthought it, and thus became hesitant - which is the anti-sexy.

It is something i'll have to live with the rest of my life. The next time a sexy move is called for, don't go looking for me. I'll most likely just vomit, shiver, and then run off.

With the strong relationship I've shared over the years with Mr. Murphy S. Law, there was never a doubt in my mind I had to invite him to the wedding. He's been with me since the beginning. Sometimes, he helped me in small ways, like making sure the microwave was broken when seriously craving a bag of popcorn. Other times, he pushed for big changes, such as having my life-long crush finally reciprocate my feelings a mere two days before moving from Chicago to San Diego. He ensured I had a healthy coating of acne months before starting high school, cut me from the JV basketball team, and rejected me from Notre Dame. And this was before I turned eighteen.

With this history, I was glad to see he responded so quickly to my wedding invite. Thank you, Murphy, for your continued service to a lifetime of smooth sailing. Jill wondered why I laughed when I received his letter. It is because I was fully expecting it. As the Huron Reflector newspaper so aptly put in November of 1841:

I never had a slice of bread,
Particularly large and wide,
That did not fall upon the floor,
And always on the buttered side.