Starting Monday: I'm an Improv Comedian in Training

As a part of my class in life coaching at San Francisco State University, I was encouraged to focus on one of my strengths, and do something new with it.  The strength I always keep handy is humor and playfulness. I use it readily to meet new people, to diffuse tense situations, and to get a warm feeling inside by making others smile. Starting Monday, I'll be starting down a path to become an improv comedian.

Classes are being held by the San Francisco Comedy College. The improv troupe is called "Frisco" poking fun at all the people who say "Don't call it 'Frisco'". Yeah they're talking about you. Monday nights for 5 weeks. I think this is right up my alley for tons of reasons, but some of the key points are:

1. Gets me on stage. I like being a point of attention


2. I won't be the only one on stage, I don't like being the center of attention


3. Conversational humor! I never thought I'd be good at stand up and essentially talking alone, I always wanted a routine where I had someone to talk to and play off of. This is exactly that.


4. Nothing like having an audience and being a pseudo-celebrity to get you meeting new people.

So 'Frisco it is. http://www.sfcomedycollege.com/ Mark your calendars for Monday March 8th at 6:30pm where I'll be performing!

Next Up

Just canceled my membership to Mission Cliffs. Lara has been going to school and it's been hard for us to hit the gym. I have met other people who climb, but they go way the hell out to Planet Granite. So I'm redirecting the funds and will begin taking classes and making stuff at Tech Shop in the near future: http://techshop.ws/index.html. For bonus points, they're opening a new Tech Shop just 3 blocks from Pivotal Labs this summer. Yahtzee!

Get Your Freak On

I'm in the middle of "reading" Freakonomics. I say "reading" because I'm actually listening to it on my iPhone. Anyway, the thing is interesting because it kind of gets your brain going in new ways. I find it mildly unsettling in the way the author speaks with such authority about statistics that few others have read the same way. What I do like about it most is that it gives me insight to my fellow man, and reaffirms my pre-existing belief that people are capable of being understood.

Today's social experiment stems from a norm I've long been aware of: People [in the US] walk on the right side of the path. It must stem from the driving laws. I notice that foreigners tend to break this mold more frequently than non-foreigners. What I observed today was this: Coming out of the Powell Street station there are two escalators and a stair case that link to street level. walking from the station, you would first encounter the up escalator, then the down escalator, then the stairs. Today, the up escalator was barricaded off for maintenance, leaving only the down escalator and the stairs for use. The down escalator was also stopped in this case.

To me, the up escalator, the one on the right, is out of service, so I would expect to have to walk farther and use the stairs. But since the scenario had reduced the layout to essentially two stair cases, people were using them just so, as if the up escalator didn't exist. People were walking down the stairs (on the right to them) and people were walking up the now stopped down escalator (on the right to those people).

I want to know how we learned to walk on the right and why that lesson is so strongly carried out. I also want to know why my gut instinct differed from the masses, and why I caved in and reluctantly walked up the down escalator like everyone else.

Blog Challenge

Dickerson says I need to blog. I told him I'd blog this week if he blogged this week. Tit for tat.

Update: It's working! Check out Matt's blog http://mcd1901.blogspot.com/

Egypt: Being a Man

Yep, it's mostly Muslim country in Egypt. This means that most of the women are covered up, some where you can only see their eyes, most with head coverings that let her face be seen and little else. Right away I picked up that all the questions were directed at me, and not Lara. I also noticed that a lot of the time when she would ask a question, the answer was replied back to me. Here in the States, I'm accustomed to hanging out with some assertive women, and I'm usually happy to go along with their plans. Suddenly, in Egypt, I was the decision maker, I was in control and expected to lead.

I don't think either of us was fully prepared for what that meant.

Mid-week, Lara pointed out that I was coming into my own, that my backbone had doubled in size from what she normally knew me to be. Meanwhile she was grappling with "keeping a lid on it". I think the culture ate away at her identity - it's hard to be an alpha anything when people don't even address you. The role reversal was liberating for me. I suspect that if I can hold on to that, I'll be a much more effective pair at work. I expect that my life may take a significant course change. Lara, may come back broken, or she may overcompensate when she returns two weeks from now.

Having been "the man" for a week, I feel like I have a lot more confidence in myself. I greet people and look them in the eye. I am not afraid to be decisive, or to ask questions, or state my opinion as I once was. I'm a whole new Will in some ways. Something to look forward to in 2010.

Egypt: Physical Manifestation of Faith

In Egypt (and I assume all Muslim cultures) you pray five times a day, starting with sun up (around 5am while we were there) and ending at sun down. I knew about the 5am call to prayer because it woke Lara and I up every morning we stayed in Cairo. During those first few days I started to notice that some of the men had dark spots on their foreheads, like it was Ash Wednesday every day of the week. I didn't really put the two together until Lara finally asked someone. Apparently the amount of kneeling and praying by putting one's head to the ground causes quite the callous on dudes with no hair on their head. I thought it was of note that to body was creating a physical representation of how much a person prayed.

I know there's a gap between quantity and quality of faith, but set that aside and think about what this really means. Imagine if you will that you could tell who was a law abiding citizen and who wasn't because criminals always had a sixth finger. And think of the self-reminder that must be to have the mark of prayer. To wake up every morning and look in the mirror and know that you are honoring your God and He wants you to do. You know it because it is written right there on your forehead. Right now, I'm not sure there's an afterlife, let alone how well I'm doing at becoming worthy of being sent there. It'd be nice to have a litmus test of how my spiritual pH is behaving.

Egypt: Obama for the win!!!

Maybe it was surprising how much Egyptian knew about the states, or maybe it was just an amassing of tidbits.

"Hello! Where are you from?"
"United States, California"
"Oh! Schwarzenegger!"

Or maybe the exchange ended in a sarcastic "Welcome to Alaska!"But what most people said was, "United States? Obama!!!! He's good president" and then give the thumbs up sign. Egyptians love Obama. It probably helped that he was there not five months before visiting the pyramids, and he noted similar facial features between his face and the face of a particular ancient statue. Clearly he and his administration have done some good PR for us because the common man in a Muslim country seemed quite pleased with the steps our country has been taking with foreign policy. Thanks President Obama for making my trip to Egypt more warm and welcoming!

Egypt: Taxis

First, a few words about general road conditions in Cairo. The roads themselves seem well maintained, and have many of the usual markings one might be accustomed to, such as lane lines. The signage is a little helter skelter, some traffic lights have a countdown till the light turns green, one no parking sign may or may not look the same as the next. It's like they're still trying to figure out which one is best instead of just picking a standard and running with it. And those lane lines don't mean much and traffic lights have to be enforced by police on the street with whistles. For the most part, traffic never stops flowing and if you want to cross the street you have to just go and pause between streams of cars waiting for the next hole.

The taxis are a whole new ball of wax. First off, most aren't metered. You have to make sure you negotiate the price up front otherwise you'll end up getting reamed when you get out like I did at the airport when I was too lazy to barter up front because it was 7am. And you really can haggle here. Many comedians will quickly point out that there's never enough cabs in any big city. Not so in Cairo. Twenty-four seven you can find tons of fareless cabs on the streets.I think this is a great way to incentivize the taxi driver. You pay what you want, he gets what he wants, and you don't have to worry that he's taking the long way around to drive up his tip.

In the states however, you can be pretty sure that your cab driver knows the major landmarks and neighborhoods. Language barrier aside, many cab drivers in Cairo don't even know how to get to the Pyramids at Giza. Basically you put any Ahmed who can drive and maybe has never left his neighborhood behind the wheel and call it done. We found ourselves parked by the side of the road lots of times as our cab driver asked a shop owner for directions.

Driving too is a Zen-like affair. It's hard to explain, other than to say "traffic just flows". No one has right of way, no one owns the space he's in, let alone the space ahead of or around his car. If you need to come into my lane, I need to move in to the next lane, and maybe the car on the end has to slow down or speed up. Those who get how to drive in Cairo all talk with their horns and through an understanding that everyone just wants to make it work. People  who don't get it just end up angry and pissed off about "being cut off" or that they can't go any faster. The one's that don't get it make for scary drivers. The one's that do have narrow misses all the time, but you never really feel frightened.

Riding in taxis is cheap, and certainly a good way to get around the city. It is a new experience and you can even talk to your driver who will be happy to teach you a few Arabic words. Your taxi experience will vary widely and will present you with new challenges, but in the end, it's all a part of Egyptian culture.

Egypt: Executive Sumary

Day 0

Got in around dinner time, checked in to the Juliana Hotel (a hostel) and got some fod at a nearby Lebanese place. Walked along the Nile a bit, then crashed out around 11:30pm missing all the NYE celebrations outside.

Day 1

Somewhat recovered from sleep deprivation, we got up super early to go to the camel market. For clarity, this is where one would go to buy a camel or six. This was the best adventure to start off the trip. For starters, we got in a cab to Imbaba, just outside the city. Then from Imbaba, we took a microbus for E£5 (roughly a buck). The bus had eight Egyptian guys in it, none of whom spoke a lick of English. At several points I was unsure we were heading in the direction we wanted, until we passed a truck with three camel heads sticking out of the back.

Camels go for about $1,000, and these guys have been herded from all corners of the desert. I was there to trade Lara away, Lara was there because she thought it would be interesting. My initial estimate had me trading Lara for fifty camels, then Facebook told her she was worth 500 camels, and her dad insisted I get 600. Later I came to find out she was worth more than 1million camels*. They did not have 1 million camels at the market. They "hobble" the camels by tying up one leg, this is done to kep them from running away, but it doesn't really accomplish the job. You've got ten camels out of the pen you want to sell, you line them up, and start showing of number one, then two gets bored and breaks formation, three more go ten feet in the other direction, and next thing you know you've got a hobbling mess. So the men and boys grab their sticks/clubs and beat the camels back in to a line. You have to be super alert because you could get run over (by car or camel) spit on, or kicked if you're not careful. We saw one guy take a camel foot square in the chest, knocked on his ass, then get up and carry on with his business.

Then we got back in a microbus, and manged to get back to Cairo without a hitch, increasing our travel-savvy confidence level greatly. We had the cab drop us off at the Cairo Museum which houses all kinds of ancient Egyptian artifacts, including a fistful of mummies and the remainder of the Tutankhamen exhibit that we didn't see here in San Francisco.

Day 2

Horses! Pyramids! Tea & Shisha! Sphinx! Koshari! We rented the horses and a guide from F.B. Stables and I'd highly recommend them to any English speaking person. Kat invited us to the roof top to take in the view of the pyramids and to smoke shisha aka. hookah or water pipe (tobacco only please). She also pointed us at a Koshari place up the road. Koshari is a pasta, bean, salsa, onion mix that's really filling, and pretty tasty.

Day 3

Cairo Tower

More sleeping.

Camel Ride at night

Day 4

Shisha @ Fishawy's in Khan al Khalili + Shopping

Day 5

Dashur, Memphis Museum, Step Pyramid, Red Pyramid (Sakara), Bent Pyramid (kinda).

Day 6

Slept in, breakfast/lunch at Aribica. Shisha and tea/cheese wave @ Tornado's, Dinner on Maxim by Marriott with belly dancing.

Day 7

Lara got some mummy tummy - I'm guessing it was all the chopped ice in her "Strawberry Granite" at Tornado's the night before. After a lunch at Pizza Hut (it's the same as here in the US, except no pork peperoni), I went back to Khan el Khalili and got some more shopping in. I also picked up some medicine for Lara and replaced her SD card. In the afternoon she was feeling better so we went back to the cheap shisha place, then finished up with a pigeon dinner at a nearby restaurant.

Day 8

Get on the plane. Wait for plane to take off. Wait for other people who had a late connecting flight. Miss my connection to JFK in New York. Get hotel voucher to stay in Frankfurt, Germany. Have a very expensive beer in the red light district. Have a normal glass of rose wine, not in the red light district.

Day 9

Fly straight from Frankfurt to San Francisco. Sorry New York, better luck next time.

Opinionated About Web Usability

I walked out of work forty minutes early today. I was beaten, and shaky, and out of my element.

Just earlier, I had decided that I am not confrontational enough. That I don't know how to argue, stand up for anything, or be passionate. Today was designed to reinforce that realization. The background is that we've built a mostly stand-alone app that will serve up tasks for people to do on Amazon's Mechanical Turk. It was supposed to be a [Ruby on] Rails application, as opposed to the core of Remix, which is really just a Ruby application and only kind of takes advantage of the Rails part.And there's no UI, just XML and JSON is all we expose to the rest of the world.

I love Mechanical Turk. I love the things that Rails supplies. So I love what this app could be. Today, block by block, all that got torn down. With each assault on the app, I was there, defending, but it didn't matter. It isn't that I wasn't heard, it was that it didn't matter. First, it was a dumbing down of the search engine, to the point where it borders on hard to use. That resulted in going from a one-click task to a multiple click-copy-paste task. The last conversation was in the context of removing all JavaScript - further reducing the ease of use.

I think part of it is that I empathize with Turkers somehow. Like they really are my employees, that we need to treat them well. I'm also the only guy on the team who has done more than a few minutes of turking. When Steve decided that last time that we needed to do something else, and Mike backed him up, and Glenn and Colin sat silent, I was alone. I was fighting a fight that may have been totally crazy, and I knew that. I am not yet the guy who fights for the crazy thing. Or rather, I'm no longer the man who fights for crazy things. Arguably, I was that man back in high school. Arguably, it caused me a lot more trouble at work than it was worth.

Now, I'm the guy who runs away with tears in his eyes because he doesn't want to produce crap.

If You're Reading This, This isn't About You

This is about some mythical girl, the impossible woman, the one who doesn't exist. I like to tease the women I know who are looking for datable guys. "I want a fireman", but then he has to be tall. "OK, this one is tall and firemany, but he doesn't do X", or Y, or Z. You could put a dozen good looking millionaires who are down to earth and friends with your friends, but they'd never fit the bill.

That's one kind of problem. My kind of problem is that I want something that doesn't exist. A person who, if she existed, would instantly implode upon herself.

I want the girl who has blond hair, but wants to let her brown hair grow out. The kind of woman who looks great in an evening gown, but likes to wear jeans with holes in them. She wants to enjoy the life in the city, but wants a small house in the suburbs. She's athletic and competitive, but needs to feel protected just as much as I do. She's the kind of girl who loves to cook and loves to go out. The kind of woman who always wants to snuggle and is just as happy on her side of the bed. She has the alpha persona that drives her forward, but she spends more of her time outside of work than in it. Nor is she religious, but she knows she needs some sort of spiritual component to her life. She is happy and sad, proud and humble, courageous and weak all at once and not at all. Most importantly, she loves me for being all of those things too.

Visionary, or Facist?

1847-1931: Thomas Edison
1901-1966: Walt Disney
1955-Present: Steve Jobs

These men in my mind were all the same. Men who had a great idea, which they implemented on their own steam. That idea then gave them the financial resources to hire nameless practitioners to implement every far-reaching idea they had.

Edison makes the light bulb, a tedious process of trail and error. He then created a research lab, where thousands of patents were filed in his name. Disney brought sound to cartoons, and soon found himself with Imagineers, people who would help him later build Disney Land and Disney World, creating animated masterpieces previously thought to be unprofitable. Then we have Steve Jobs, visionary of Apple, who brought us crazy things like a home computer and a mouse in the face of "the public has no use for computers and who needs anything besides a keyboard anyway?" I hear talk of the "wrath" of Jobs and how easily one can find himself fired at Apple.

I am not agreeing, or disagreeing with the methods of these men. What is interesting to me is the pattern. I also submit that the world only has room for one of these such men at a time. Men who braved a gamble because they knew in their gut the world wanted what they could pluck from dreams and turn into reality. Men who then took that reality, and made a factory out of ideas. Men who created an industry that wasn't there before.

At times, I want to be one of those men. A man who knows what it is that the world lacks so desperately. But I do not think I have the constitution it takes to know in my gut that I should press on with a thing that sounds ridiculous until it becomes common place.

Dear Morgan Freeman,

You once were part of fantastic movies (Robin Hood, Shawshank Redemption, etc). Now it seems like everything you're part of is crap (list omitted for  brevity).

Sincerely,
Will

P.S. Maybe the facial hair makes you weak?

"The Right Thing"

I want to see a satire movie made called "The Right Thing" where it is a seriesof short segments in which people do the right thing, instead of the dumb thing that puts them into ridiculous movie situations.

Scenario A: Friend shows signs of turning  into a zombie.
Kill the friend.
Done.

Scenario B: Dude wrecks a car.
Dude fesses up, works hard to pay for repairs.
Done.

Scenario C: Dude's girlfriend goes away on a family vacation to Europe, meanwhile sexy-hot slutty McNeighbor girl offers dude her "services".
Dude turns her down, buys some dirty magazines, waits till the end of the week.
Done.

Scenario D: A prison-convict has intel needed to evade terrorist attack.
Do not move, or set said inmate free to "help" the SWAT team out.
Done.

Scenario E: Dude works for a bad boss
Dude quits job gets better job
Done.

Scenario F: Dude works for a corrupt company
Dude shows evidence to company, company changes poilcy, pays for the damage they've caused.
Done.

Done.

Things that smell like other things

To me, burritos and body odor smell very much the same. Sometimes I find myself wondering why it smells like meat, then I realize there's a sweaty guy next to me.

Being an Adult

When I was 18 and legally became an "adult" I wondered when I would really be an adult. Would it be when I had a job that I could live on? Would it be when I bought a house? Would it be when I got married? Had a kid?

This week I was reminded that I decided long before I was 18 that [male] adults are adults because they get lint stuck in their belly button. This something that didn't happen to me as a kid because I had no hair to trap the lint, but it was something that happened to my dad on a near daily basis.

This week I discovered lint in my belly button... I felt like celebrating just a little.

Family Expansion

I think what was most... "jarring" last time I went home was that everyone had new names. Mom was suddenly Grandma, Dad was now Grandpa, Jon became Dad, and I had a new name thrust upon me, Uncle Will. It's like when you have a friend who changed what people called him in college, and you find yourself hanging out with his friends from high school, and they call him something totally alien and you can't quite reconcile it in your brain fast enough to keep up on the conversation.

After my brother's wedding to Vanessa this weekend, I now suddenly have a sister[in-law] too. I think for the first time, I felt what it means to be 2,000 miles away from my family. The relationship I have with my niece is very different than the one my parents have with  her, having seen her so much more than I have.

I think they are both pleased with how the wedding went. It was very much their wedding. They both had on casual foot wear for the ceremony and they had all the people there that they needed to be there for them. Standing at Jon's side during the wedding, seeing Vanessa's face as they spoke their vows, I feel confident in saying that this is a good marriage, one that I was proud to be a part of.

Political Brain Stew

Someone close to me insinuated that the American people are getting what they wanted, and that what they want is socialism, and that the Presidential Office is going to do its best to deliver.

I am not a socialist.

My thought is along the lines of, "So what if we become a socialist country?" Let's change that statement to, "So what if we become a series of nomadic tribes?". My feeling is that if the people want it, then why not let them have it? If the majority votes for laws that require us all to wear purple bow ties on Tuesdays, then that's what the people want.

Secondly, look at the crap that's been carried out in the name of "preserving our way of life". We can't be bothered to pay higher prices for renewable sources of energy. We can't be asked to carpool. We can't be asked to lay aside our differences and stop a 2,000 year old holy war. We can't stop watering our lawns. Our way of life is destructive to individuals, to countries, to culture, and to the planet we live on. We suck. Our "way of life" is short sighted.

Yes. Many good things have been done to preserve our "way of life".  Fighting for freedom, for the right to be represented. These things are paid for in the blood of Americans. But the things that aren't on the ladder of things we need, maybe it is time we stopped fighting over those things and explored a way to compromise.

Sad Face

I've been waiting 10 years for my high school reunion. But the RSVPs on Facebook only have Jenny and Sarah on the "Yes" list. I was hoping to catch up with everyone all in one spot. So to all you FHSers out there who haven't said "Yes", get you stuff in gear.

Pants Stance

Will: tomorrow, drunk bus
Will: bring your game face
Lara: I plan to
Will: should I wear pants? or no pants?
Lara: start the night with pants
Lara: and see how it goes

For clarity, Lara has no interest in seeing me sans-pants.