How Long it Actually Takes (HliAT), #1

This is the first entry in what will be a sporadic and poorly maintained ongoing series. I welcome submissions from my thousands of readers in the comments below. HliAT is pronounced "hell-ee-aht".

This series derives from a simple premise:

None of us knows what the f**k we are talking about when we say how long it will take us to do something. 

We say "I'll be back in a minute" when we mean 15 minutes; we say "it'll take 2 minutes, literally" about things that literally take 11-25 minutes. We are morons about time, and it's not just a matter of usage ("I'll be back in a minute", yes, I know, carries a different meaning than the literal single "a minute"). We really don't know how long it takes to do things, make terrible estimates, and force ourselves and others to suffer.

I've been on the giving and receiving end of this nonsense for my entire life. It's time to take a stand.

This series is going to change the whole world.

A few years ago, in Chicago, I started tracking how long it took me to do certain everyday things; things which are no longer relevant even to my life, so I can't imagine how spectacularly irrelevant they will seem to yours. HOWEVER, the principal stands, and many of these things are like other things that I still do, or perhaps that you do. So I shall post them here, now, and when it occurs to me to time how long it takes me to "pop into this store for a minute" in future, I shall post that as well.

So here we go, let's change the world.

How Long it Actually Takes to...

take the Orange Line from Madison/Washburn in the city of Chicago to Midway Airport at around 2pm on a Tuesday afternoon: 24 minutes, 30 seconds

take the 151 bus to the Metra in the city of Chicago from the South Water Street stop (taking the bus to the Millenium Station stop getting caught at 1 red light, and then walking to and taking your seat on the Metra): 3 minutes, 55.9 seconds

take the 151 bus to the Metra in the city of Chicago from the South Water Street stop (getting off the 151 at South Water Street and walking into Millennium Station through the South Water Street entrance all the way up to taking your seat on the Metra): 3 minutes, 14.2 seconds
important note: This was catching the 7:48am Metra to South Chicago; catching the 7:35am Metra would be even faster (probably 30 - 40s) because they open the train doors further down the platform on that one

walk from the 151 stop at the corner of Stockton/La Salle in the city of Chicago to the door of apartment #2503 in Eugenie Terrace, a nice place to live:
2 minutes, 5.07 seconds to the elevators at Eugenie
the wait for the elevator varies significantly, from 0 to 60s
in the instance I timed it was 1 minute, 57.1 seconds from arriving at the elevators downstairs to opening the door to my flat

walk from the Metra station at 55-56-57th street, taking the 57th street exit, to the U. Chicago Cummings Life Sciences Building: 15 minutes, 23.9 seconds
note: walkways clear of snow/ice

And more to come. This is only the beginning, my friends. Only the beginning.

Rebuilding, Part 1

My life is out of sequence on this blog. I got a reasonably serious leg injury about 5 weeks ago. There is a hella long post coming about it. These briefer posts will be about the recovery.

I got the clearance this morning from physical therapy that I can do anything except take blunt force trauma to the leg (i.e., no taking low kicks for awhile). But I can run, etc.

goodbye.

So this is the significance of the stirring image above. That's a little volume extension cable for my headphones. I started using it because it is useful, while one is on an elliptical or a stationary bike, as a convenient way to change the volume while one watches whatever movie or TV show one is watching to make those boring, lifeless activities pass. I'd never used it before. The reason I'd never used it is that what my headphones are generally connected to is not my phone, but my tiny little iPod shuffle, and I am not on a stationary bike or an elliptical, but a real bike or my own two feet, running hard outside, and the joggling and bobbing of the volume control is annoying. So I'd never put it on before, but I put it on a few weeks ago when it became clear that this hit I'd taken in the leg was serious and that for a few weeks I wouldn't be doing those outside things.

I took it off today.

First run outside: 4.05 miles, 7:03/mile. That's 10 seconds off my target split for that length, which I was running before the injury (actually, I was running a little better than the target). But I'll get back there. I'll get back there and better. It felt SO GOOD to be outside again, running, moving through space and over earth.

I need to learn to block those low-kicks. It's hard work staying healthy when you're not young and do lots of stuff. I need to be as dedicated to that as I am to the just pushing myself, I think. That's fine. Let's go. Gosh, it was good to run again.

"The Cats Want Milk"

Here's a song I wrote about that, one evening when I came home and the cats wanted milk.

Cover Letter Template

In April 2011, I moved to California. I had to spend much of that June back East, so I usually tell people that I moved here in July 2011 because that's when, in my recollection, I was settled in, comfortable.

The letter below undercuts that.

I still suffer from acute and fundamental confusion about who I am and what exactly I should be doing with my time besides writing. But even in that context, the letter below seems a little extreme. In that spirit, I submit it for your mockery and review.

I was going to humorously annotate it, but I think this lily is better ungilded.

It is a letter answering a job opening to be an assistant to the person to whom it is addressed, at a big arboretum out here in L.A.

I cannot freaking believe myself sometimes.

June 28, 2011

Dear Arborist:

It’s a real pleasure to be writing. I may be an atypical applicant for this position, but I hope you will read this later through and decide that I’m at least worth meeting, in person or over the phone.

My situation is that I recently finished graduate school and moved out to Los Angeles. I am an extremely hard-working, reliable, and stable young man (with valid SS #, et cetera). I moved to Los Angeles because the graduate school I finished was a joint MBA/MA (the latter in International Relations) at the University of Chicago, but I very quickly realized that the roles these degrees prepare a person for are not the roles I’d like to do. I would like to work outside, and I would like to develop concrete schools managing people and ecology.

At this point you might be understandably concerned that I’m writing this as part of a romantic digression and you’ll be getting someone flakey. I can’t reassure you fully of that until we meet, but I believe there are a few good reasons that you should consider hiring me.

I have a very clean cut appearance, and to the extent that any part of this job is making a good impression on customers in my person, I can do that very well.

I am 6’2”, very healthy and strong, and eager to work hard.

While I don’t want to be misleading with respect to my arboreal or gardening experience, I have spent much of my recreational life focused on the woods, the shores, and the outdoors. I’ve worked repeatedly as a camp counselor, hike trip leader, et cetera. I believe I would very quickly pick up the skills required in this job, and I’d be enthusiastic about learning them.

I have attached my resume, which may appear – once again – a little mismatched to the position. I believe my value proposition is that I am able bodied, enthusiastic, and a very quick learner. I hope you’ll consider me, and to hear from you soon.

Best,
J---- C---------

A Meta Moment in Gaming You Should Know About

I bought a Nintendo 3DS last December. I love it.

One of last year's best reviewed games for the 3DS was Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon. It's a terrific game -- a relatively easy platformer with fun puzzle elements. What really sets it apart is the wit and storytelling, however. And I noticed one thing early on that made me laugh out loud, and delighted me throughout.

The game has a soundtrack. Good video gaming scary mansion music going plonkity plink plonk as you wander through the haunting, doing the things you have to do to set the world right.

And at a certain point I noticed that Luigi, occasionally and mutteringly, hums along to the soundtrack. To be clear the music is not diegetic: there is no sound source on the screen or in the story. It's purely soundtrack: what you, the player, hear as you sit there playing. But there's Luigi, humming along with you, breaking down the 4th wall much more awesomely than I've ever felt it broken down in a video game, and as effectively as I've ever experienced its being broken down, in any medium.

Play video games, people. Not like, all the time. But stay on top of video games, even in just the broadest way. There's a lot going on.

Two Notes on Music

As discussed in a forthcoming post (which will probably be way too long), I've hurt my leg and have a little more time at the moment while it heals up. It's also left me feeling somewhat expansive. That gets us posts like this. No one's forcing you to be here.

TWO QUICK THOUGHTS ON MUSIC!!

(1) The Tug
I think it's compelling, catchy, and both very happy and very sad when songs have an element -- for me it is sense in the melody, but that's probably because I listen so predominantly to pop (broadly defined) -- that is always just out of reach. That tugs you along. It's not quite as simple as an unresolved progression or harmonic; it's a little more squishily defined than that in my mind. It's something that the song establishes and implies, generally musically or rhythmically, but never quite lands on; something that has but is absent -- that is almost clear from the way the song curves around it but never gives it to you.

For me, the tug is extremely strong on the title track, track 7, of the 1998 album Maybe You've Been Brainwashed, Too by New Radicals. I'll try to minimize the thing of describing music in writing. But what happens to me in this song is this: a spare guitar line, a chopped up melody line, and a driving simple rock beat combine to create a train that has great forward momentum but also holes in it. It feels to me like the verse melody line is always waiting to land somewhere it never quite reaches; it just keeps pulsing towards it in Gregg Alexander's tight sung melody line. The melody "lands" somewhere in the chorus, and that place is fine -- I like the song, it's a good song -- but what I love about this song is the implication of this thing during the verse, the promise that it never realizes; how there is a shadow of musical ascent traced out by what is there, and it's never ruined by actually trying to realize it.

Somewhere with more musical sophistication than me (you, probably) could easily read all this and say: "He just likes kind of tight melody lines." That might be it.

Another good example is "I'm Goin' Down" by Bruce Springsteen, which has the added awesome-song-thing of being a musically "happy"/upbeat song about a sad/downbeat topic. That is an awesome way for a song to be. But with respect to the tug, this one's a little different: it in fact almost does give the listener that vague thing it strives for, that landing implied by the rest of the song. The tightness of the verse melody line and (again) a simple guitar figure land perfectly, for me, in a chorus that is not just good but fantastic; fantastic for this song, for this melody. So, this may be a case where the tug proves itself in the exception: proves that exists not only because it does not exist, but because there are actual musical elements towards which songs that have it are "tugging" you, and they can sometimes land on it, it's just hard because those elements have to be just right so perhaps it's just as well if songs with the tug don't even try.

The last example is asinine, but I'm serious about it. It's lyrical rather than musical, and different from the other two examples also in that it wound up being the artifact of an error in hearing: it does not exist. But if it had existed, it would have been great.

For the first few weeks of the radio success of "I Get Knocked Down" (yes) by Chumbawumba, I did not think the chorus, these are the actual lyrics, went:

I get knocked down
but I get up again
&c.

I heard the chorus as this:

I get no-
but I get up again

and the "no-" was a clear cutoff, an expression of such ambivalent frustration the singer could not even complete it, allowing me, allowing anyone listening to put their own thing in the song, or more likely not put one specific thing -- not put "money" or "sex" into that gap -- but leave it wide open with their own unsayable inchoate longings, the things they aren't getting that are out of their reach and too frustrating to speak. I thought it was so great; so electrifying and great. I did not feel the same rush once I discovered what the real lyrics were.

(2) Josh Ritter's "The Temptation of Adam" and the evolution of understanding a song
To  fully appreciate this, I suppose you should go listen to this wonderful song. My general point here is simple: a rich narrative song allows for our understanding of it to deepen and unfurl over time.

(I'm also probably bad at listening comprehension. I'll point out that I was never studying the song for its meaning; that said, the "many many listens" noted below were frequently attentive listens, during which I was listening to the song with nothing else going on.)

I think, as a writer, I find this interesting: how totally clear something can be -- once you know whats going on in "The Temptation of Adam" it's not complicated at all, and there's nothing cutesy or guarded holding the listener back from getting the song -- and yet how it can still take awhile for a reasonably intelligent, reasonably attentive reader/listener to get it.

From here on, if you don't know the song, you'll be checked out.

My understanding of Josh Ritter's "The Temptation of Adam" followed this progression:

Years 1 and 2: many many listens
It's a cool, offbeat song about people relaxing together and then falling into and out of love, or in love but then she somehow has to go away, at a country house or some secluded retreat, the kind of place where wealthy and upper-middle-class people spend a few weeks over their summers.

Years 3, 4, 5: many many listens
Wow, I missed the point of this song! They're in a bunker! He's remembering the woman he loved, because they both were in some kind of bunker because there was like World War III, and then he lost her in what sounds like an explosion or maybe she decided to leave the bunker after the war I don't quite know... he "thinks about her leaving in the avalanche cascades," which sounds like an awful thing that happens when lots of bombs go off. It's sad and he's alone, and he's remembering the improbable romance of these 2 people brought together in a nuclear weapons facility by a catastrophe that annihilated mankind. And... I guess he's Adam, now, because he's the only one left? Hunh.

Years 5 - present: many listens
In Years 3 -5, there was a lot I shrugged off. I had never really understood the lines at the end; about how he "think[s] about that great big button, and [he's] tempted." And I'd never really understood the lines before that, about how something tells him that things "just won't work out above, that [their] love will live a half-life on the surface." I sort of wrote this all off on the grounds that, in the song, bombs had been dropped and so if they went up top they'd die, obviously, everything would die, but...

and then I got it, finally, and it's completely straightforward! I mean, there's nothing I need to explain. If you listen to the words of the song, all of which are clearly sung by Ritter with just a simple guitar accompaniment, it tells the story of a guy who's in a nuclear facility where he has his finger on one of the "great big buttons" that would set whatever incipient nuclear holocaust has brought him there in motion, and there is a woman "Marie" who is a technician or something in this same facility, and they fall in love, and he thinks the circumstances of their falling in love (trapped in nuclear bunker, waiting to see if all the bombs will fly and the world will end) are particular enough that their relationship would not last in the regular world, so he's "tempted" (IT'S IN THE TITLE OF THE SONG!) to press the button, to set off the bombs, so that he and Marie can have their own forever down in this bunker.

It's great; it's a terrific feat of storytelling, and I'm so baffled as to why it took me so freaking long to get it. 

Pictures on My Phone, 8/19/2013 - 8/29/2013

Here's how it is: sometimes, you move to a mid-tier city of a nation very far from your own for school, walk around and see the sights and make some friends and go bowling, but then it's time to dig and prepare for the semester because you came here to go to school, after all, not just bowl and take pictures of intersections, and once school starts you don't have that much time to gad about.

This is how it was for our hero for in this 10-day period.

8/19: A single image. It's sort of an odd one. I think it's of a building housing a religious organization of some kind, but I'm not sure why I think that. The shot is from the street, of an unremarkable tan concrete-block building that is clearly a "facility" of some kind. We are also clearly no longer in the city proper -- a street winds up to the right to a stand-alone house, and the facility is on a spacious lot with no buildings around. It looks suburban. There are doors into a glass-halled walkway leading off to the left, and a turret that is kind of hard to describe reaches up from the center of the structure -- this turret is why I think "religious"; this plus the fact that our hero bothered to photograph it at all. The turret has rounded lines, and echoes itself 3 times: a largest turret with a similar smaller one etched within it, then a similar smaller one etched within that. It has a sculpture that I can't identify and google isn't helping me with on top: a golden orb, with either a flame or a leaf of greenery lifting off from its northern pole. It is a bright, sunny day in Cleveland or this suburb of Cleveland on 8/19/2013. It was a Monday.

8/25: This is the nadir point of our hero's photographic exploits so far. A disgusting picture of food. The food might have been good; I'm pretty sure it is sevai kheer, which is really tasty I could go for some right now. But the picture is geee-ross. Our hero manages to accentuate everything that is yucky about food, while missing all the good points of food. The noodles look wormlike and gelatinous. The pudding around them looks even more gelatinous, and possibly infected: everything white has a greenish sickish glow from bad lighting. The bits of deliciousness in the kheer -- cashews, dried fruit -- look like growths or the accidental droppings an animal that got into this grotesquery when it was left out too long. The whole thing is presented from a bird's-eye view in a black cooking pot on a stovetop: the bird's-eye view of a sick, sad bird trapped in some bird hellhole with only this vista to look down on. 

However, I am being negative. It is great that our hero, or someone, made homemade sevai kheer because sevai kheer is delicious and I hope all of its eaters enjoyed it. And it is a nice impulse to want to snap a shot of that home cooking -- I imagine him sending this to his parents back home, showing that he's doing fine and living well and making familiar yummy things. Though it is a shame, for our purposes (which admittedly are rather far from our hero's intended purposes (whatever they were (seriously, this picture is gross))), that the execution of that impulse is so revolting.

8/26: I hope I'm nice enough about the loveliness of the cool things our hero does that my negativity about some of these pics is not too relentless or mean. Because this photo -- maybe the lesson here, actually definitely the lesson here, is that we all take a lot of dumb dumb pictures on our phones -- this photo is also not good. It is a shot of the cover of Introduction to Data Mining by Pang-Nin Tan et al. It is sideways in native orientation, so you can crane your neck or flip it and get a narrow, small photo. The book is set on a tabletop, and a pair of black-trousered legs and the white loop of shoelaces are visible at the bottom of the frame. It was taken during another one of the earthquakes that ravaged Cleveland occasionally while our hero took pictures; having taken pictures with this exact same (exact same, remember) camera, I feel on firm ground giving him a hard time about this. It's not that hard to get this phone to take well-focused shots of stationary objects in good lighting. Like, for example, a book on a table.

That aside, again, it's easy and kind of nice to imagine the circumstances of this shot. He needed to know what book to buy, and his friend had it. His friend needed to know what book to buy, and he had it, etc. Semester starting -- good times. Onward, friend.

8/28: This one is cool. A white tile column on a platform in the Tower City Rapid Transit Station in Cleveland. A linear map is on the column: white text on industrial blue. Tower City is blocked in white, indicating where we are. An old white man in a blue shirt and chinos is walking down the platform, disappearing behind the column. A young guy with short-cropped hair is seated on a public-facility metal wire "bench," back to us, reading. Our hero went somewhere on August 8th, 2013. Good for him. I'll pretend this is just like me, standing on the platform in Chicago or Boston or London or any other city where I've been new, and know exactly how he feels unless I've got the circumstances all wrong, which hey I probably do.

8/29: This one is lovely too, because it's that same building that our hero and his friends took pictures in front of on August 18th, before bowling. A different angle, but again the picture gives a lot of its real estate over to a big intersection in front of the building, which is now lit red white and blue. It's night - the sky is black and city lights are on. The photo is out of focus. Interestingly, the shot is taken through the windshield of a car: the dashboard is visible at the bottom, and the streetlamps are all splayed diffractionary through the glass. There's a white sedan in front, its rear over-illuminated by the headlights of our hero's car.

I like the idea that he liked this building so much that he took shots of it kind of whenever the opportunity presented itself. Maybe he thought it looked particularly nice at that moment, being driven back (he's not in the driver's seat, you can tell from the angles) from something, seeing it there illuminated -- perhaps for Labor Day, which was coming up that weekend.

To figure out the Labor Day thing, I just looked at my own calendar. On this same day, I was pretty stressed and unhappy. It's nice to think that our hero was doing better, and somehow it draws a straight unifying line from me not-happy then, through him hopefully-happy then, to me much happier now.

What's that, reader? You want a road trip? Well brace yourself, because next up in "Pictures on My Phone": motherf***ing ROAD TRIP.