Don't drive angry.

In anticipation of another rodent inspired winter weather watch, I took a portion of last evening, and fired up my copy of Groundhog Day, starring Bill Murray, et al. I’m not sure what it is about this film that has me watching it over and over again, but this ironic example of life imitating art is not lost on me. Still, as much as I have enjoyed this film (time, after time, after time…), I have always had the subtle sense that there was something not quite right about the storyline.

Sure, it follows that same classic Hollywood RomCom formula:

Boy meets girl.
Boy likes girl.
Girl dislikes boy, because boy is a jerk.
Boy sees error of his ways — goes from resentful dismissiveness to humble aspiration.
Girl still thinks boy is a jerk.
Boy proves his worth in dramatic fashion.
Girl returns boy’s affections.
They live happily ever after together.
Roll credits.

Very nice? Yes. Original? No. Think As Good As It Gets, When Harry Met Sally, Romancing the Stone, African Queen, Pride and Prejudice… Heck, think Star Wars, for Yoda’s sake. Admit it, at the outset, Han Solo really was kind of a stuck-up, half-witted, scruffy-looking nerf herder, even if he could make the Kessel Run in under 12 parsecs. So why does this old reliable formula not work for me in the context of Groundhog Day? Because the main character cheats.

I don’t mean that Phil Connors (Bill Murray’s character) intentionally cheats to get what he wants. He does the best he can, trapped in a situation not of his choosing. I simply mean that the character’s storyline violates a basic tenet of the fall and redemption narrative. For the audience to identify closely enough with a character to celebrate the successful conclusion of his quest, his story must adhere to three basic criteria:

1. He must face serious obstacles to his personal happiness and emotional well-being.
2. He must confront those obstacles in a manner we perceive as noble and admirable.
3. He must overcome the challenges confronting him, without extraordinary assistance from any outside agency or circumstance.

It is this last criterion the screenwriters have thrown completely to the wind. What more extraordinary circumstance can one imagine than living the same day, over and over, for months or years on end? Who wouldn’t achieve ultimate victory over life’s challenges if offered the latitude to make the same mistakes again, and again, and again, without consequence?

When boy finally does win girl’s heart, he does so, in part, by wowing her with a host of ill-gotten abilities and virtues — reciting French poetry from memory, playing piano with mastery, saving choking public officials and falling children like a superhero, carving museum quality ice sculptures, demonstrating an amazing sensitivity to the desires and sensibilities of others, etc, etc, etc. I refer to all of these attributes as ill-gotten, not because they are in any way undesirable, but because much of the value they represent to those who possess them derives from the effort and risk required to attain them. It’s the risk that matters here.

Those of us operating on a linear timeline lack the comfort of knowing that our mistakes cannot possibly harm us, because only we will remember them. All kinds of people are sure to remember our mistakes. I have previously opined that success hinges on the courage to risk failure. The risk of failure requires courage, precisely because a) failure has consequences and b) people remember when you fail. This is what makes victory over personal hardship heroic. It is not the victory itself, but the courage to dare the attempt in the face of lasting public scrutiny that makes victors heroes.

Alright, so the film does not aspire to teach deep life lessons with resounding moral authority. It does not grip the human spirit with the full pathos of the agony and the ecstacy. It is, however, a charming and amusing film, which I will continue to enjoy on many occasions to come. Perhaps I should get off m soapbox now. Let’s face it, I should just drink more.

I ask this question, not because I expect to win the lottery tomorrow (I don’t), but because I think the answer to this question provides useful insight into what I am doing with my life today. Take a few minutes to explore your wildest imaginings about how your life would be, if only you won the lottery tomorrow. Document for yourself all of those things you imagine. Seriously. Write them down. Take your time with this. Enjoy it. Dream big. Be sure to focus, not only on the things you would want to have, but think about the things you would want to do. Go ahead. I’ll wait.

Question: If you suddenly found yourself never needing another paycheck, would you continue working at the job you have right now?

Now, there are a lot of us who would hear that question, and consider it ridiculous. If you didn’t need the money, why would you get out of bed, and go to work? You may be someone who thinks this way. But, on reflection, this response says more about your situation than it does about the question itself.

There are people in the world who already have more money than they will be able to spend in the course of one lifetime, yet they continue to get up every day, go out into the world, and do those things they believe they are called to do. You can rail about the excesses of the 1%, but not all of them are living the life of leisure we imagine. Some of them are working harder today than they did when they had nothing. Why? If it isn’t because they need the money, then it must be because they are busy doing the one thing they believe they need to do in this life. So ask yourself, are you busy doing the one thing you believe you need to do in this life? If not, does that really have anything to do with money?

Question: Staying with the assumption that if you won the lottery tomorrow, you would quit your job on Monday, what would you do then?

Have you thought about that? Because “Nothing” is not a legitimate answer, at least not long term. How many times have we heard about studies that point to retirement as a terminal condition? The traditional goal of retiring, playing golf, walking on the beach and doing not much of anything else sounded lovely, once upon a time, but it turns out it was killing people. Whether you assume they died of boredom or just general purposelessness, people need to feel as though their presence in the world, from one day to the next, matters to someone other than themselves. If you took the exercise at the opening of this discussion seriously, you wrote down any number of things you would do, if only you won the lottery, could quit your job, and could spend your time doing them. Now, this next question is the one that really matters.

Question: Are you absolutely certain that the things you would do, if you won the lottery, are things you really cannot do, until you win the lottery?

You see, I think that when most people refuse to imagine what life would be like if they won the lottery, they believe it is because they are mature and pragmatic — that it is silly and irresponsible to daydream about something so very unlikely to happen. The truth, though, is that their refusal to daydream this way, may be a bit more self-serving than they care to admit. If you go too far in imagining what you would do with your energy and your talents, in the event that you had unlimited money and time to do it, you then have to confront the question of whether your current funds and time really are limiting your ability to do those things. And the more you dwell on that question, the more you risk discovering that you have fewer excuses for abandoning your dreams than you thought you had.

My only point is that if you pour every ounce of creativity you have into imagining your life after winning the lottery, you may discover the focus and motivation you need to live the life you really want, even though you end up holding a losing ticket after all. That’s all I’m saying.

I reached out, and your hip, soft and warm…
Was not there.
I told myself it would be okay.
I tell myself it will be okay.

But I still don’t remember the dream.

Lately, I have been very annoyed by the fact that my iPad has decided to stop talking to my home wifi network. Any other network continues to work perfectly well with the iPad, but only if I sit within 8-10 feet of the base station will it acknowledge that a network exists in my home. This has been a source of great frustration, and has frankly made the device far less useful to me. While fuming over the issue again this morning, for about the zillionth time, it occurred to me that my level of angst on this point may be as much psychological as technological.

Yes, I can still recall a time, when I had no access to the internet, once I had shut down my computer and closed my office door at the end of the workday. If I knock the rust off the old synapses and think even harder, I recall perfectly a time, when even work provided no access to the world wide web. Sinking even further into a state of self-hypnotic memory regression, I can even recall a time when there was no such thing as the internet (I suppose Al Gore was still busy inventing tube socks and aluminum foil). So, okay, I get it. It is alarmingly easy to convince ourselves how desperately we need the things we were fine without, before they even existed.

But internet separation anxiety (ISA) goes even deeper than mere annoyance over an interrupted convenience. Occasionally disconnecting from the grid is both healthy and necessary, and we feel fine about it, so long as it is something we have intentionally chosen to do. But being denied connectivity when we want it feels like forcibly surrendering a portion of our own consciousness. Let’s face it, folks, we are Borg. We desperately fear the empty spaces in between the other voices in our heads. The voices of the others. Sirius XM Radio, Pandora, Spotify, iTunes, NPR… please… anything…. Don’t leave me alone with myself! I don’t know this person, and I have no idea what we have to talk about. Or maybe I do know what we have to talk about, and I just don’t want to have the conversation.

New Year’s resolution for 2012: Stop running away from yourself.

How bad could it be? You’ll find something to talk about. You might even make a friend. If you were considering a resolution to make more friends in 2012, the best place to start is with yourself.

“But you are Borg!”

No. I am Hugh.

UPDATE: The moment I published this post, and went to share it on Twitter, I learned that Twitter was down for maintenance. Ahhhh…. It’s like the hand drawing itself!

It seems like forever since I had a decent night’s sleep. Until very recently, that is. I have always slept very fitfully, even at home in my own bed. When traveling for work, and trying to sleep in a strange bed, the challenge is even worse. For as long as I can remember, I have been lucky to get five or six hours of decent sleep per night.

When I first started traveling for work, back in 1999, the problem became so acute, that I purchased a white noise machine from Brookstone to try and help. It was a little blue plastic affair, which came with five or six built in sounds (ocean waves, wind storm, jungle birds, etc.), and had a slot for these little proprietary plastic cartridges, each containing an additional five or six sounds. As I recall, each of the cartridges cost about half as much as the machine itself, so it seemed like kind of a scam. Still, it helped a little, so I used it for a while.

More recently, I have applied current-state technology to the issue. I purchased an iOS software application called Sleep Pillow, and installed it on both my iPhone and my iPad. Like Brookstone’s little blue plastic box, this app came with sound loops of noises like wind and waves, automobile and airplane interiors, etc. With a price tag of only $1.99, it is well worth a try, before looking for further alternatives. For me, however, like the little blue box, the app helped a bit, but consistent, sound, restful sleep has remained elusive. And then I discovered Nirvana (no, not the band, you dope).

While shopping for Christmas gifts last week, I came across something I had seen in businesses and in other people’s homes, but never in any store. It’s called the Dohm Sound Conditioner, and it’s made in North Carolina by a company called Marpac. What is different about this device is that it doesn’t use recorded sound loops, but actually generates the sound of rushing air, by blowing air through a series of openings on the top and sides of the device. The user can adjust the pitch and volume of the sound by adjusting the fan speed and twisting the outer housing to allow the air to pass through a greater or lesser number of openings. It is such a simple thing, but the effects have been profound.

Saying that I have been sleeping better, since I started using this device, is like saying that it got a bit quieter in Dresden, when they stopped bombing. I haven’t just been sleeping, I’ve been sleeping eight to nine hours, without waking. It’s a bit scary, actually. Sometimes, I’m not sure if I’m experiencing sleep or an opium haze, but it is fantastic! (so shut up, and pass the hookah). Aside from just the sleeping, I have discovered that having this noise in the background makes it easier to focus on writing, reading or meditation. So, if you ever have an interest in sleeping, writing, reading or meditating better, You might want to check this thing out.

We all brought cupcakes and snacks, and we got to sit around reading “The Odyssey” out loud to each other.  All the girls wore braids, because, in “The Odyssey”, every time they describe a really pretty girl, she always has braids.

Oh, Sweetie, I see ten-sided dice in your future.

I have have to wonder if the entry for the word nerd in the dictionary has a picture of my child.  If so, I am okay with that.  I hope she is too, because I could not love her more.

In the interests of full disclosure, I must begin by stating that I “read” this book by listening to the unabridged audio version, which I purchased from audible.com. I make this point, not because I see a critical distinction between reading and listening to a book, but because I have at least one acquaintance who has waxed eloquent about the profound difference between the two. [This concludes this disclosure.  We now return you to regular programming]

First, let me say that I enjoyed listening to the biography immensely. I have little or no grounding to confirm the historical accuracy of events described in the book, but the narrative paints a compelling portrait of a life, driven by a complex personality, exhibiting a variety of character traits, both good and bad. Since I have heard no public refutation of the facts as Isaacson cites them, I presume he has either landed close to the truth, or at least close to the recollections of those in position to know the truth. In any event, I found this biography not only compelling enough to hear, but also well worth “reading” again [in print] sometime in the future.

I would like to take this opportunity to respond to two specific comments I have heard on the book. The first, that Walter Isaacson was a poor choice to write a biography of Steve Jobs, because he lacks sufficient grasp of the technologies with which Jobs surrounded himself. The second, that this biography, coming as it does in the last few days of Jobs’ life, lacks the perspective of time to manifest the historical significance of his life.

The fact that Walter Isaacson was either unable or unwilling to delve more deeply into the technological and engineering intricacies of products and inventions at Apple, NeXT and Pixar, is something for which I am supremely grateful. Such technical minutia are rarely, if ever, the primary purpose of reading or writing a biography. They are much more properly the stuff of technical manuals or historical monographs. Like most people, I read biographies to get a sense of who a person was. Ironically, Isaacson’s choice to focus less on the technological specifics of inventions and products, and focus instead on how Steve Jobs felt about them, or what things he said about them, seems a much more fitting accounting of the man’s life. Indeed, one of Bill Gates’ biggest criticisms of Steve Jobs, was that he wasn’t a real coder. Jobs was not a technologist. He was someone who believed in using technology to create beautiful things, which had the ability to change people’s lives. Had Isaacson written a more technical biography, he would have done a disservice to the reality of the life he was commissioned to chronicle. To suggest that the biography Isaacson wrote should have been more technical says more about the parochial interests of the critic than it does about the quality of Isaacson’s effort to understand the person of Steve Jobs.

On the matter of biography as a means of placing an individual figure in his proper historical context, I am somewhat more sympathetic to the criticism. Indeed, as time passes, and we gain a clearer perspective on the fuller impact of someone’s life, such elements of biography become essential. Suggesting, however, that any biographical account which lacks this perspective is somehow flawed or substandard undervalues the contribution Isaacson has made. In truth, historical context is only one element of a sound biography, albeit an important one. Other critical elements include individual personality and point of view. While these biographical elements may share equal importance, they require mutually exclusive circumstances to produce. The passing of time, so necessary to gaining an historical perspective, destroys any chance of gaining an unvarnished glimpse of the historical figure himself. While some eyewitness accounts will be lost altogether, even those that remain will change substantially.  The cognitive sciences are replete with evidence of how memories of events and individuals change over time, in response to new information. As a species, we ultimately tend to remember things the way we think they were supposed to be, however they might actually have been in the moment. A biographer who waits to set down witnesses’ impressions of an individual or event, until a fuller understanding of historical context has evolved, risks producing something more akin to hagiography than biography. Besides, even universally acclaimed historical figures don’t live their lives in consciously historical context. They live them day to day. Having as complete as possible an accounting of how they acted and felt, without the benefit of historical context, is the first step toward understanding them as fully as we can.

Walter Isaacson’s is not the last biography of Steve Jobs that will be written, nor should it be. It does lack reference to the historical perspective that will take some years yet to evolve. However, it is a reasonably comprehensive, seemingly candid accounting of how Steve Jobs is understood here and now. As such, it should prove to be an invaluable asset to future Jobs biographers, as they undertake to weave the fabric of these contemporaneous accounts with broader perspectives we have yet to attain.

And I think it’s a pretty engaging read, as well.

When I woke up this morning, my Nike+ GPS SportWatch refused to tell me the time.  Instead, it was displaying a message…

Run with me later?

The only option available to me was to push the lone active button to respond, “Ok”.  To which the watch replied…

Looking forward to it.

Only then would she give me the time of day (literally).  Now I’m certain I’ll feel guilty if I leave her hanging later, and that’s just what she wants, I’ll bet.

I should definitely look more closely at the packaging on my next consumer electronics purchase. I had no idea I had selected the Nike+ Codependency SportWatch.