Category: Meaning of Life

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Having It All: Magic Mike’s Life Lessons Better Than Brave’s

The sense of entitlement towards “having it all” is perpetuated by modern princess movies. What happened to all the gruesome, German fairy tales when failed seduction meant mermaids disintegrating into sea foam, when beauties sleeping too soundly meant getting raped? Bring back those wholesome tales- that’s what kids should be seeing and that’s what I read about in my Red Fairy Books, not stuff like Brave.

Pixar’s Brave disappointed me by implying you should have it all- shoot arrows, run a kingdom, do princess stuff- Merida shouldn’t have to choose! This is a dangerous message to send to anybody, male or female, because it’s false. Merida has no idea what she wants to do but according to Disney fantasy she can have everything once she figures it out- the mom inexplicably decides to break tradition and delay marriage until… whenever? Does Merida want to marry someone ever? Does she want to shoot arrows all day? Does she want to have a hand in running the kingdom? What is her goal? She’s a foolish child who inexplicably avoids negative consequences of her bad decisions. This is a fantasy and not a lesson I want my kids to learn. You have to choose what you want, you have to use precise word choice when discussing contracts- especially with magical beings- and then you have to bust your butt to achieve your goal.

Don’t get me wrong- I love old Disney princess movies. They have nice love stories and there’s cute animals singing and dancing about youthful yearning, or the origins of their murderous desires. Sadly Brave did not have any of these components. Although I enjoyed the visual beauty, they did not have one singing animal despite various extremely natural moments to throw that in. A magical bear doesn’t break into song even once? Come on.

Despite Pixar’s cliched perspective, the wait for a movie that sets the right tone is over. Hollywood appears to have been making leaps and bounds in terms of sexism, deciding even cutoff shorts are too much clothing for werewolves to suffer and must fly off. Now in Magic Mike we have Matthew McWhatever developing the same allergy to clothing endured by those same Native American werewolf tribes. Regardless of whether objectifying men counts as a win for feminism, I’m all for it (I was so inspired by Channing Tatum’s performance in Magic Mike that I followed him on twitter (he’s seriously probably one of the best dancers I’ve ever seen, makes it look natural and easy)).

Mike’s stripper wisdom is that everyone, even a hot guy, has to choose. If your goal is to make weird furniture but you spend your life having sex and doing drugs, then odds are 10 years will pass and you will be a lonely, aging stripper instead of a successful entrepreneur. When considering resource allocation, I tend to imagine vector arithmetic. If you invest your resources in a direction orthogonal to the direction of your ultimate goal, 5 or 10 years can pass and you won’t have anything to show for it. You want the divergence between the trajectory of your goal and the trajectory of your resource investments to be small.

I feel lucky my parents fought so hard so that I could think about the problems of philosophy instead of war (figuratively). My parents were not home very often. Mom took English classes during the day and worked at night. Dad labored in a lab deep underground with no end in sight. If your parents were immigrants you know no one has time to babysit you. It’s probably more like you babysitting your kid brother or something while they’re at work (luckily I was an only child and only had to be responsible for myself). For years my mom was never home and I was proud of her for it, but there are always costs. It wasn’t until we moved to Mt. Lebanon that I had some inkling that there existed kids whose parents did nothing but chauffeur them everywhere and endured the daily tribulations of middle school with them. If you want to haul your family from the depths of poverty you have to work a lot and sometimes you don’t bond as much with your ungrateful kids. Everyone has to choose.

Once, I was talking with my dad about love. I probably said something like how my vision of love involved trust and loyalty- I don’t remember what idea I had, probably based on princess movies instead of horrific Grimm fairy tales. I do remember my dad told me he thought love was about sacrifice. His perspective surprised me and I chalked it up to yet another example of the idiocy of my pathetic parents. Years later, I’m starting to see what he’s talking about.

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Mom: Just the Happy Stuff

I”ll never forget when I was 8 years old she taught me how to fight.

“What’s wrong?” she said.
“Nothing!”
My mom left the room and came back a little later with some Ovaltine. “Whatever it is, I’m sure it’s all your fault.”
“No it isn’t! Kevin Jameson is just a show off and I only challenged him because I was scared he was going to throw Chen’s book out the bus window.”
“You challenged him to what?”
“I said I knew karate and that I was going to beat him up tomorrow at the bus stop.” At this point, I burst into tears. “I wish I were dead!”
“Don’t say that! This is what you do.”
I’m not going to tell you the rest of this story about how I hilariously defeated a 5th grader because, in retrospect, instead of a triumphant story about a tiny Asian girl standing up to a bully, it sounds a little like me bullying and psychologically destroying a terrified kid. But the point is my mom always had my back.

Losing my mom to lung cancer last fall (she never even smoked!) was like losing a lung myself- I’d never really thought about what it’d be like to lose her but now she’s gone sometimes it can get hard to breathe. After years of doctors and hospitals, sometimes you don’t remember there was anything else, even though there were actually 23 years of being a normal rambunctious mother-daughter duo. So for Mother’s Day, just the happy stuff:

Because I can be really lazy and neglectful in a sleep-on-a-mattress-for-years-without-getting any-furniture kind of way, my mom always worried I wasn’t taking care of myself properly, so she got me different housekeepers and set up every room and apartment I’ve lived in (except she’s never been to my NYC apartment, which is why it’s such a mess and I’m still living out of boxes despite having moved to NYC over a year ago). She talked about me at length to these housekeepers- about how I worked so hard I didn’t have time to do laundry, how much she hoped I’d find a good boyfriend (a nice, steady, mature boyfriend from someplace wholesome like Iowa, who wasn’t too brainy and introverted or our kids would have autism because I was already rather introverted, someone from a good family whose love for his mother was surpassed only by his love of Jesus).

She cooked me so much food, always leaving me with a fully stocked fridge and freezer. My favorite food was food she made me, but I never learned to make it. When she wasn’t cooking, she was traveling. She has been everywhere. New Zealand was one of her favorites while Dubai was one of her least favorites.

My mom’s mom died when my mom was really young, so my mom worried about being a good mother to me, wanting me to avoid her mistakes, therefore I should do everything she said. For example when I told her I was thinking about getting a dog, she manipulated my friends into telling me how great a cat would be, resulting in informative calls from mitri about his cat. Later, when I told my mom I was worried about leaving my cat alone when I went to London, she came to Chicago between rounds of chemo to watch my cat Mimi. This is a photo my mom sent me of Mimi sitting on her lap:

Mom, even when I was mortified by your irrationality and emotions, I was always secretly proud of you. Even when you were being completely crazy, you were caring and charming. Because of you, and because you were never afraid of anything, I don’t fear a single thing. Even though there were times when I really could not stand you and I usually forgot about Mother’s Day and stuff like that, I really miss you.

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Push Past Pain To Pleasure

Although I sometimes make a comment that makes people think I’m hard hearted, like, “Oh, you don’t want kids? Great! More resources for my kids,” in reality I am a big softy. If you tell me an emotional story, I’ll probably cry, especially if your face morphs in a way that suggests pain. This is why 5 years ago when Hulu played some commercial about daily giving to poor kids, instead of muting the ad, I thought, “It’s not the kids’ fault they’re born in countries with no wifi and their parents keep having more and more kids. There but for the grace of God go I.” I looked through the website which showed brief profiles of hundreds of pathetic kids and chose about 10 that looked the most promising- one was deaf and some might have had minor health issues but they seemed like they could all go on to be high functioning members of society. Some even still had parents who were probably simply overwhelmed by an avalanche of random other worries. They varied in age from 4 to 17 and were from South America, Africa, and Asia. For the next few years, I gave about $20 a day to this program, ultimately giving thousands of dollars.

A few times a year, the charity would send me a bundle of handmade cards and photographs of my kids. These cards would say stuff varying from, “My favorite class is gym. I often baby-sit my 6 brothers and sisters,” to “My best class is maths where I got an 85%,” to “I was an orphan living in a police station until you gave me $2 a day. My favorite class is soccer.” As the cards accumulated holiday after holiday, I realized that this was a total waste of my money. There was no discernible progress occurring. I did not feel like I was making an impact. I didn’t feel the kids felt I was making an impact- they probably viewed their dutiful cards to me as some quarterly chore like filling out performance reviews for someone you knew was completely useless but was impossible to fire. Instead of feeling good about giving, I felt like this random cause was a laziness/guilt tax.

Thousands of dollars later, I eventually got around to canceling my sponsorship. Why was it that giving to this charity felt like a tax I was paying rather than a gift I was giving? Why didn’t I feel good about a great cause, a sponsorship I had initiated with only altruistic intentions? For a long time, I wondered if it was because I was just an ungenerous person who would rather spend thousands on the furniture-scratching cat at her side than on deserving human beings across the world. But I’m not ungenerous- I objectively donate a lot of money to various causes. Why was it that this charity made me feel nothing? Now I think I’m beginning to understand the answer.

Part of the answer is that I can’t give what cost me nothing. This money I was sending to these kids was nothing to me. I could easily afford $20 a day- I almost never bought groceries because most of my food came from my company where I spent 90% of my waking hours. The moment I gave them my bank information and this charity stopped being a deliberate decision, it became something that cost me nothing. When you choose which brand to buy at the store, you’re making a deliberate decision that costs you some brain cycles. You choose the organic, all natural cleaner because it’s better for the environment and in case your cat rolls around in it she won’t get poisoned licking herself clean. I feel good about this action, the extra thought and effort I put into it, and this extra cost to my autopilot shopping experience matters more to me than the cost to my wallet. I don’t value something if it costs me nothing, and if I never have to think about it, then it costs me nothing.

The main project that has been costing me time lately has been fund-raising for PGSS, a nerd camp I attended in high school that went defunct in 2008 when Pennsylvania lost all its money due to financial chaos caused by evil high frequency traders.

When Joel first told me about this program, he said, “I LOVED it.”
“Did you have sex?”
“…Everything but.”
“Wow!”
“It’s great for other reasons too- when you drive up to the dorm the TA’s all greet you by name: they’ve memorized all the faces off the face book” (this was a pre-Facebook use of the term face book). Joel went on to describe how the classes were actually really hard, how the team projects were real work, how the other kids were awesome, how you get an Erdos number of 2 (or 3?) if you work on the math team project with that one ancient professor. The best part was this program was totally free! What would normally cost >$4000 per student was all free. My parents couldn’t afford to send me to CTY the summer I’d wanted to go- my dad said he was always sorry about that. I had subsidized meals from school and we were pathetically poor compared to my suburban peers. Most of Pennsylvania is not hugely rich. Outside of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania has lots of rural areas where kids don’t get to take AP classes or spend a few grand on a summer program, which meant we would be behind other kids when it came to applying to colleges, which was the ultimate goal we had been toiling towards for 12 years. PGSS was selective- it took 60-90 kids across the different districts in Pennsylvania, most of them the top kid in their high school, and brought them all together for a great summer.

Part of me had wondered if, when I left Pittsburgh, no one from Pennsylvania would hold a candle to the new people I’d meet at MIT, but that didn’t happen: apparently human intelligence is not distributed like that. The smartest people I know from Pennsylvania are still the smartest people I know, and most of them went to PGSS. Whenever I go to a party with a lot of high powered, super educated people, I run into someone from PGSS. This nerd camp is how I know all the smartest people from Pennsylvania! Well, all the ones who were high school juniors before 2008.

When I first heard about the Pennsylvania Governor’s Schools being shut down, I thought it was such a waste. I donated my $4K, the cost of sending 1 student to PGSS, figured I’d done my part, and then sat back. After not even getting any acknowledgment of my donation, I was mad and wondering how incompetent the people running this revival were. Who doesn’t even send a thank you note? And $4K is nothing to sneeze at! After all, I’m only a few years out of college. There are people who’ve been out of this program for 20 years and are richer than me! Why am I the one donating $4K when some 46 year old should be spearheading the effort with $30K or something? What’s the point of a program where 80% of the kids who go to PGSS go on to MIT, Stanford, CMU, Caltech, and Ivies, where half the people have Ph.D.’s and/or M.D.’s and/or J.D.’s (some of them all 3 degrees), and they can’t even raise enough money to get the program back? I only have 2 B.S.’s and both are completely useless! Are these brain surgeons and rocket scientists and patent lawyers too busy floating on their yachts to cut a check?

I forgot about Save PGSS and went on to donate to MIT and some other charities (a charity event is how I got this photo with Mr. Damon- he begged to be photographed with me, a real MIT Good Will Hunting genius, and I can never reject my fans). Then a few weeks ago when I was in California, there was word of a SF PGSS reunion. I brought tim rogers to pose as a 17 year old math prodigy and intended to shake hands with a few tech founders with one hand while stuffing cherry tomatoes into my mouth with my other hand before zipping away in my rented Nissan GTR, the front of which bottomed out even easier than the Tesla roadster. I couldn’t drive in the city with that thing without repeatedly asking tim if he was sure there weren’t really steep hills en route that would require my swerving into the other lane to avoid scraping the bottom of the car against the road.

At this reunion, I learned that the PGSS revival effort was basically Jeremy, a few alums, and his mom tracking down all the alumni and doing a million annoying tasks. I felt so humbled by how much Jeremy’s mom was doing for this program, a program that I had benefited from. I thought about all the ways PGSS has benefited me. For one thing, it was a great thing to put on my college application. In fact, my team project was mentioned in the application notes (everyone my year got to view their admissions notes).

I made friends that are still my best friends, people whose judgment I trusted. I think it was one of my first real confirmations that me and my dad weren’t the smartest people on Earth (thankfully one of many such confirmations). I mean, I had suspected we weren’t the smartest people who ever existed since we had, like, cars and computers and other technologies that I wouldn’t have come up with, and plus there were all these otherwise inexplicable books. But there was almost no one whose judgment I actually trusted. It was such a relief to make friends who you knew you could rely on, and to realize that you weren’t the smartest person on Earth, otherwise you’d be the one that would have to advance civilization (trust me, you don’t want to rely on me for this).

And everyone was really nice! Sometimes high school kids are mean, but every single person at PGSS was really nice to everyone else. After just one summer together, I became closer to these people than people I’d seen every day for years during high school. mitri has helped me move into every place I’ve lived since college. I’ve spent weeks at Tony’s lake house and he journeyed all the way to the Village from the Upper East Side to cut my cat’s nails. Ray let me drive his Miata even though it became clear that my understanding of manual transmission was more theoretical than practical and more nonexistent than theoretical. It’s not like PGSS happened for a summer and then was over. It touched the rest of my life. I’m still friends with these people and so proud we’re all getting more and more awesome as time passes. Everyone is either in the upper echelons of academia, working at a top company, starting their own companies- is there any other high school summer alumni base that can claim this level of achievement? I feel so proud to number among these illustrious ranks!

After hearing about Jeremy’s experiences, I said I wanted to help and added this page to his PGSS Alumni website to start thanking supporters. I want to donate a lot to the revival of this program.

Because I realized the way giving feels good to me is if I can push through the indifference zone, then through the pain zone, all the way through to the pleasure zone on the other side. After a bunch of charity events and decisions regarding allocating my wealth, I learned this about charity: if I’m in the indifference zone and it costs me nothing to donate, then it’s a waste of my money because it’ll be a laziness/guilt tax rather than a joyful gift. If I’m in the pain zone and regretting having given this much money, then it’s a waste of money because I won’t give again- I just don’t care about the program enough to have it be worth that much money to me. If I can get past the pain zone and still want to donate money, then that’s when I know I really care about the program. That’s when donating feels really good. PGSS allows top students learn and work on science projects together for free, selected on merit, regardless of socioeconomic background. What’s more inspiring than that?

I also realized that if I’m donating money to MIT, which I paid for, then it doesn’t make sense for me not to donate to PGSS, which was absolutely free. PGSS is one of the things that has touched my life in a big way- I can’t imagine life without the friends I made there. And life isn’t about what you get, life is about what you give! What’s the point of anything any of us are doing if we’re not giving back to the world?

I pledge to match up to $20K any pledges that come as a result of people reading this blog. Go here to pledge or email me or leave a comment. Your pledge will not be collected unless we raise enough to restart the program and you can make it conditional on random things like if enough other engineers/CEOs/doctors/people from your city also pledge as much as you pledge. Big donors will have honors showered upon them! For the first person to pledge more than $1K, I will blog about your greatness or topic of your choice, the only topic of censure being something too sensitive to high frequency trading strategies, although I may consider it for outstanding donations. Imagine- you could be getting investment advice from me! That’s easily worth billions.

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Singapore February 2012

That I was ready to leave Singapore after a few days despite it being the most American place in Asia suggests I can’t leave the USA long term. While I still love rice and bean paste as much as the next chio (I learned this term from a Singaporean and do not understand exactly what it means or even what part of speech it occupies but I feel prepared to use it anyway since who cares, it’s not a real word, and since many Asians don’t speak English grammatically I should be cut some slack in speaking Asian slang incorrectly) and while I think chopsticks are simply a superior food (and countless other objects!) handling instrument, I think Asia is crazy. Maybe this is just what happens when you view a society from the outside. Maybe if I objectively walked around the USA I’d notice the things the average American does that I disagree with and therefore would deem crazy if I thought about. In any case, the Singaporeans I talked to agreed that certain things about Singapore were singular.

For example, going into the casino made me feel poor, the opposite of how being in Asia is supposed to make you feel. My Singaporean friends said the Singapore casino made about half as much as all of Las Vegas and that it’s primarily used for money laundering. Although I don’t care for systematically losing money, we decided to check it out because our hotel connected to the casino and there was literally nothing else to do in Singapore at this time. There was a line almost out the door of Singaporeans waiting to pay the $100 entrance fee. As foreigners, we were allowed in for free. At the first table, we learned a game that seemed to have several “decision points” where you are choosing between options of increasingly negative expected value. Although the history of how the dice etc had been rolling was being recorded by a computer and displayed on a confusing screen, people seemed to be diligently making their own records by hand as well.

We were randomly putting down the minimum bet of $50 when Rei said, “Are those $1000 chips?” I looked down and a man had just bet $10K. What was happening? Was this somehow a high roller’s table? My confusion grew as this man proceeded to win like $30K in the next few hands. “We have to just do what he does, he clearly understands something we don’t.” Rei said, “Look, he only bet $4K this time, he’s varying his bet size.” By mimicking the man and betting when he was betting his max size, we won a few hundred bucks. Then he left the table with his entourage of an old, tiny Indian woman and other Indian man, probably annoyed by how we were so obviously watching, imitating, and talking about him. From that point on, I monotonically lost money. Getting to fold a card while slowly lifting it to identify it was about as exciting as it sounds. Casinos suck.

On Orchard Road, there were 6 or 7 Louis Vuittons on the same block. I don’t know how Asians spend so much money on crappy expensive stuff but often seem to lack any sense of taste. The light brown and tan Louis Vuitton bag is objectively ugly, and it’s the one everyone buys. Is its ugliness its appeal, like when people buy those extremely ugly hairless crested dogs with the tongues and eyes lolling out? Or is it a really functional bag, and these women are buying it because it’s really good at organizing your makeup? Or is it like a peacock’s anti-signal, an “I’m so rich and gorgeous that I can buy this expensive, ugly bag and yet still be considered rich and gorgeous?” China was probably worse than Singapore- in China people would be wearing solid gold bling and the pendant would be some Hello Kitty-looking figurine. Maybe New Yorkers have spoiled me with their sophistication and fun, confident stylishness. While in Singapore, I missed NYC. I missed America.

But while I’m in the USA I miss Asian food. In Singapore we ate so much good food. There was a spicy crab that I could probably eat every day for a long time, and for someone who values variety as much as myself, this is high praise. Because I hadn’t gotten the new iPhone yet (I had the same phone for 3 years) and was in one of my phases where I didn’t exist on the Internet, I did not photograph every meal (I have begun photographing my meals on tumblr because what else am I going to put on tumblr, and I want to know what this whole photographing your meals movement is about. Who knows, maybe it’ll pay vast dividends in a few years and then I’ll understand why Asians do this). In fact, the only photograph I took was of Zac and this tea kettle because I had been furnishing my new apartment and this kettle looked unique.

Other than eating, I enjoyed the night safari because I love animals, and I bought some manga with Samir. Asian comics are cool because unlike macho Western comic books they have cool girl characters and even female protagonists. To illustrate another East-West difference, when asked to sort Battle Angel Alita, Ranma 1/2, Sailor Moon, and some female shogun manga in order of maturity rating, Zac got the order exactly wrong.

In Singapore I learned some important things. One of them had to do with Chinese people running successful capitalist economies while executing people (what a great euphemism) (TQ said like 10K people a year in China though the real # is classified), caning people (Alex described them gauging out your flesh, then sending you to the hospital to heal for 3 months before going for another round), and taxing stuff paternalistically (alcohol tax based on % alcohol, 100% car tax).

Another thing I learned had to do with how rich these Asians are. I don’t know how they’re that rich. Aside from investments and entrepreneurship, there are many possibilities. Maybe they had made billions off Chinese versions of Facebook/Amazon/Google and thus got rich off Chinese protectionism (there’s already a Chinese Pinterest, still waiting for them to come up with a censored Chinese Dropbox). Maybe they are real estate moguls. Maybe they are in politics. Maybe they are royalty. In any case, understanding there’s so many billionaires out there made me realize there’s no reason for me to do anything that doesn’t make me happy. After my mom died, I realized I had no more Real Problems. Anything I put my hand to, like teaching my cat to use the toilet or running a company, would not be a Real Problem. Until the next crisis, all the solutions I’d work on would be work of my own creation, lower-case-‘p’ problems (unless I decided to pull an Eliezer by personally internalizing humanity’s struggle and having a showdown with human mortality or something).

Anyway, these rich Asians made me realize if I’m going to be doing something just for the money, I might as well get plastic surgery and marry one of these billionaires. Since I have no desire to do that for billions, being unhappy for anything less than billions is a waste of time. I guess this was my understanding of the adage “you can never make as much money as you can marry.” If you’re not willing to marry a rich guy for billions, then you care about more than money, and if you care about anything other than money and you already have enough money to function, do stuff that makes you happy.