I swear, this time it’s different (or, this time I mean it)

‘That’s only part 1: stay tuned for part 2 once I’ve settled into my new flat.’

That was how I signed off on my last post, four months ago to the very day. I never got round to writing ‘autumnal reflections, part II’ as I had envisioned in my head. Most of those reflections have dissipated and my notes from the time are an incoherent mess. They can’t have been very profound reflections.

I’ve got various lists I’ve made this year, the first dating back to 14 January 2013. I've updated them at various points, but I never really got round to checking off ‘emails’. Subsequent lists that appeared throughout the year – in March, June, August, November – all had the same ‘email’ bullet-point with the same names after it. If you’ve heard from me since 14 January 2013, consider yourself lucky. If you’ve heard from me since 1 September and you’re not a member of my family, you’re even luckier. I do hope, however, to dash off a few emails in the upcoming days.

‘English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache…let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.’

Virginia Woolf ‘On Being Ill’

‘Pain is greedy, boorish, meanly debilitating. It is cruel and calamitous and often constant, and, as its Latin root poena implies, it is the corporeal punishment each of us ultimately suffers for being alive.’

Russell Martin, Matters Gray and White (qtd in A Natural History of the Senses, D Ackerman)  

I’ve been a bit of a recluse lately, and regular readers and friends will know that I love nothing more than making excuses: about my computer, my desk, my chair, my health, my sanity…I don’t want or intend to revisit too many of these things – I ranted and raved enough about all this in my June post, so go back and read that one for a summary of my physical and mental impediments.

But because I originally set up this blog back in early 2009 as a sort of replacement for email, I have to at least briefly say that minor aches and pains in my head, neck and arm make writing awfully difficult. There are days where I barely have feeling in my right arm and my muscles are stiff and cramped and I can’t sit still, and I can’t sit and look at a computer screen for more than a few minutes without my head pounding, my eyes burning and my sinuses throbbing. These days occur more often than not, meaning my writing has suffered. I’m not so sure when or if this will improve, so my blog-writing, email-writing days may be numbered and severely limited. Forgive me in advance, but I will do my best. That’s the extent of my groveling and apologizing, and I will do no more begging for forgiveness. Live with it. I have to. (!)

Over the past few months, there have been a number of things I’ve wanted to share, but I will instead limit them to just a few of the more salient ones. As with so much these days, much of what we seek and read is self-perpetuating. Those of a certain political slant slavishly devote their attention to whatever media outlet shares their views. I moan about the state of the modern world and the rise of technology – don’t worry, I’m not going there today – and seek solace in articles that affirm my view. But what good does this do? Oh great, someone else feels the same, let’s celebrate and grumble about it together, now I feel better. There’s so much shit being written and said these days that even some of the more respectable outlets are producing endless drivel, whatever will catch the eye and sell advertising dollars. I’m not saying I’m fed up, but with the seemingly limitless array of options in the world, the infinite choices of what to do, what to read, what to see, what to hear, it can be pretty overwhelming and mind-numbing.

I don’t read as much as I used to, for various reasons – I devote more time to language study, I spend way too much time preparing lessons, I work out fairly regularly, I have a new home routine thanks to Olya and our monster of a little cat, I watch too much sport, and in general, I’m constantly overwhelmed by the possibilities of what to read. Every now and then I hear someone asking what they should read – how can anyone not know what to read? I suppose asking for a recommendation is fine, but when people haven’t got any ideas as to what to read…honestly, how is this possible?

I’m going to quote a bit from some of the more interesting articles I’ve come across these past few months. (and when I say I haven’t been reading much, in all objectivity, I’d still say that I read quite a lot – just not as much as I’d like to; I can be very demanding)

1.    ‘Writers should take a year off, and give us all a break’ The Guardian, 16 August 2013

What a splendid idea! The title practically says it all: I could catch up on all my reading without the guilt or insecurity of missing out on anything important. Why not go a full step further and stop all news, current events and illuminating Facebook status updates?

A few choice excerpts:

Let's divide the world into two groups: those who write and those who read. Readers set out wanting to experience, or learn, something new. They share the attributes of intellectual curiosity, of modesty, of a capaciousness that seeks fulfilment through the ideas of others…

Writers are people who, by and large, have made up their minds and seek to deliver the resulting verdict to what they imagine is a waiting world…

Paradoxically, the deluge of writing itself contributes to declining readership. It's not just that if you're writing then you can't be reading. It's also that the sheer volume of what is now available acts as a disincentive to settle down with a single text…books, the longest form that writing takes, are suffering disproportionately in the reduced attention spans of readers…

I would like to propose a writers' moratorium. What if everyone could be persuaded to stop scribbling for a period of, say, 12 months? Of course we would lose some marvellous work during The Year of Not Writing, and that's not to be taken lightly. But look at the compensations: we could all kick back, take stock, and get off the spinning carousel of keeping up with the latest offerings. Just think what could be done with the free time: books we've loved could be revisited; philosophy or poetry could be afforded the time they demand; tomes of previously forbidding length could be tackled with languorous leisure.

I suppose by this rationale, I should throw in the towel on this blog. For a year, anyway.

2.    ‘The Death of Letter Writing’ New York Times, 9 November 2013

This goes some way to capturing my feelings on writing emails, although it’s largely about great writers’ published letters collections and the pressure of maintaining correspondence with fellow writers and readers. But then there’s email, and the way it affects us these days.

This is not to say that all writers found dealing with their correspondence pleasant. H. L. Mencken replied to every letter he received on the same day that it arrived — out of politeness, he said, and also for more selfish reasons. “I answer letters promptly as a matter of self-defense,” Mencken once explained. “My mail is so large that if I let it accumulate for even a few days, it would swamp me.”

Charles Darwin was similarly compulsive. He made a point of replying to every letter he received, even those from obvious cranks. If he failed to do so, it weighed on his conscience and could even keep him up at night.

This is how I feel, more often than not: the swampy feeling, and the pressures of writing back. Though don’t we have to be selective in who we correspond with? Who has time to email everyone back? (I used to sign off many of my emails with ‘if you’ve got the time and inclination, I’d love to hear from you…’. These days, on my part it’s more about the lack of inclination!)

Is email really such a different beast? I would argue that it is…the novelist Nicholson Baker, for instance, told me that he tries to avoid checking email too early in the day because “it just does change everything. As soon as you have a couple of emails pending, the day has a different flavor.”

They can weigh on your mind.

It is this constant background awareness of email that can cause real problems. Unlike traditional mail, email is always active. You can’t fire off an email and then put it completely out of mind; there is at least some slight awareness of the message’s continuing life, the possibility of a reply, the need to keep refreshing the stream of digital correspondence. And that’s the best-case scenario — more often, it is the nagging collection of unanswered emails that weighs on one’s mind.

Let’s whinge about this all day. But what about solutions?

One possible tactic is to set aside a portion of each day for email and deal with it only at that time — to process email in batches, treating it like a daily delivery from the postman rather than a constant slow drip of communication…

This is what I [attempt to] do, writing in batches, when my arm and mind allow it. It isn’t often.

An alternative is to adopt a habit that I have noticed in several especially busy editors and journalists, and it is simply this: Spend as little time as possible reading and replying to emails, and dash them off with as much haste, and as little care to spelling and punctuation, as you can bear. In other words, don’t think of them as letters at all — think of them as telegrams, and remember that you are paying for every word.

I like that idea, and I’m going to [attempt to] adopt it. Be warned, friends – you’re going to start getting sloppy, ill-thought out emails. I’ll try to keep this blog going if you’re in need of some more stimulating, grammatically thought-out prose.

3.    ‘In praise of laziness’, The Economist, 17 August 2013

In summary, we spend too much time on emails in the business world, most of which are pointless, time-consuming and done ‘for the sake of form’ and ‘busy-ness’. We also have too many meetings, and constantly worry about management breathing down our necks. I focus on the email side of things.

Creative people’s most important resource is their time — particularly big chunks of uninterrupted time — and their biggest enemies are those who try to nibble away at it with e-mails or meetings. Indeed, creative people may be at their most productive when, to the manager’s untutored eye, they appear to be doing nothing.

This is constantly my tactic: putting things off because I need these ‘big chunks of uninterrupted time’.

This is my first Christmas away from my parents since 2007. I love going home for the holidays, though in can be a tad stressful with the parties my mother loves planning and the state she gets herself in preparing for them (in reality, she plans to have them, then leaves the actual planning and preparation to me, my father and sister). At this time of year, I like to quietly reflect, read and prepare financially for the upcoming year, meaning my investments and all that crap. I can’t always get that done at home – too many distractions (cats, football, the general hecticness of the holidays) and difficulty in finding a quiet place to concentrate. Now that I’ve finally written this piece, I hope I can find the inspiration (and inclination) to write a few emails and get everything in order. As my list from 14 January 2013 shows, this ain’t easy. I will make some valiant efforts to write more, but…one never knows. To be honest, my arm is killing me, so if/when it recovers, we shall see.

But wait, before I go – a brief diatribe about investing, monkeys, American football, gambling and my cat

I’ve already mentioned how at this time of year I look at my investments and decide on my game plan for the upcoming year, what to sell and buy, how risky or cautious to be, etc. I spend way too much time on this throughout the year, so I want to get to the point where I can resist the urge to day-trade risky Chinese pharmaceuticals, and just plonk my money into things that won’t cause me to lose sleep. But these days, investing feels almost like gambling, and one never knows what the right approach is, despite all the research.

This reminds me of all those studies done where they put the top active money managers up against market indexes…and a monkey. First, 90% of the time you’re better off with a market index, since only about 10% of all people beat the market. But it turns out that monkey do even better than these so-called experts.

4.    ‘Any Monkey Can Beat the Market’, Forbes, Dec 2012

Give a monkey enough darts and they’ll beat the market. So says a draft article by Research Affiliates highlighting the simulated results of 100 monkeys throwing darts at the stock pages in a newspaper. The average monkey outperformed the index by an average of 1.7 percent per year since 1964. That’s a lot of bananas!

What is all this monkey business? It started in 1973 when Princeton University professor Burton Malkiel claimed in his bestselling book, A Random Walk Down Wall Street, that “A blindfolded monkey throwing darts at a newspaper’s financial pages could select a portfolio that would do just as well as one carefully selected by experts.”

“Malkiel was wrong,” stated Rob Arnott, CEO of Research Affiliates, while speaking at the IMN Global Indexing and ETFs conference earlier this month. “The monkeys have done a much better job than both the experts and the stock market.”

You see? I’m wasting my time. I ought to just let my cat pick.

Another area in which I waste my time, at least from September-January, is American football. I watch way too much of it, and poor Olya has to suffer through this every Sunday night. She feigns an interest in it, but she’s more enamored with the cute animal mascots, with the Bengals, Cardinals (or ‘Angry Birds’ to her) and especially the Rams being her favourites. To get her more interested, I suggested we have an informal gambling competition each week to see who could do better, a bit like the monkey experiment, except she wouldn’t be picking completely randomly, but based on which mascots she liked. Sounds fun, right? To her it was.

Before I go any further, I should point out that many years ago, just after university in the late 90s, I routinely bet on American football games, winning roughly 70% of the time. I used to wager on meaningless college football games (Utah State v San Diego State, for example), just to make them more exciting. I should also add that this was far from random: I carefully researched matchups, trends, etc, mainly without the internet. 

I was actually considering getting back into real gambling for this American football season. But since I hadn’t done it in so long, I wanted to give myself 5-6 ‘trial’ weeks to see whether I still had it in me. If I was around the 65-70% mark at that point, I would strongly consider staking real money.

But then we thought, let’s get the cat involved! Each week we would pick 6 games – they didn’t have to be the same ones, but I would choose mine first, keep them a secret so as not to influence Olya, then she would choose, and then the cat would choose some of our games, or any games involving members of her ‘family’; in other words, the Lions, Bengals, Panthers or Jaguars. You figure she’d pick fellow cats, right?

(for those not in the know about American football gambling – you don’t choose a team to win outright, but you bet against the spread. For example, the Bengals could be playing the Dolphins, with the Dolphins ‘favoured’, or expected to win, by 5.5 points. If you pick the Dolphins, they have to win by more than 5.5; if they win by less, or lose outright, the Bengals ‘cover’ the spread, and win the bet. If a team is favoured by 3 and they win by 3, then it’s a ‘push’, or a tie, you neither win nor lose – easy, right?)

For the cat to choose, we would put two treats close to each other from a safe distance, clearly explaining to her which team was which. For consistency, we always put the team favoured on one side, and the underdog (the one expected to lose) on the other. The most unbelievable thing was that she sometimes went straight for one treat, and sometimes she seemed to be carefully mulling over her choice. She’s been great at picking ‘her’ teams – I haven’t kept a specific record, but she must be close to 100% when it comes to the Bengals and Lions.

Anyway, cutting to the chase – here we are, with 16 of the 17 weeks of the season finished. And here are the records so far:

Me: 26 wins, 26 losses, 3 ties

Olya: 27 wins, 25 losses, 3 ties

The cat: 32 wins, 21 losses, 2 ties

Are you kidding me? The damn cat is kicking our ass! It will take a miracle to beat that little shit now (we could keep wagering in the playoffs). I swear, she looks at us so smugly every Sunday night, thinking ‘you idiots don’t know what you’re doing.’

My good pal Dr Wasabi Islam came to visit in mid-October. He was dubious about this cat. So that week we got him involved and here were the results:

Me: 3 wins, 3 losses

Dr Wasabi Islam: 2 wins, 4 losses

The cat: 5 wins, 1 loss

He was convinced after that.

I never did opt to put real money on these games. I suppose the fair thing would be to let the cat decide, but I’d like to think that I’m not completely nuts just yet. Maybe next season.

In the meantime, Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays – I hope 2013 has been a good one .

Postscript: only because some of you have asked, here’s a small selection of my 2013 reading lowlights and highlights: (this doesn’t, mercifully, include everything I’ve read)

Great:

A Natural History of Love, Diane Ackerman

The Siege of Krishnapur, JG Farrell

Arguably, Christopher Hitchens (a Christmas present for myself last Christmas, I finally finished it – earlier today)

Good:

A Natural History of the Senses, Diane Ackerman

Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie

How to Tell if Your Cat is Plotting to Kill You, The Oatmeal

The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France (doping, etc): Tyler Hamilton

Ryszard Kapuscinski: A Life, Artur Domoslawski

Skip:

A Hundred Years of Solitude (couldn’t finish it)

The Letter Killers Club, Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

Furthermore:

From Arguably, there was this quote from Sir Martin Rees, the professor of cosmology and astrophysicist at Cambridge University. Ponder this during your next moment of existential doubt – I certainly do:

Most educated people are aware that we are the outcome of nearly 4 billion years of Darwinian selection, but many tend to think that humans are somehow the culmination. Our sun, however, is less than halfway through its lifespan. It will not be humans who watch the sun’s demise, 6 billion years from now. Any creatures that then exist will be as different from us as we are from bacteria or amoebae.

 Here's the little shit looking smug about her picks

In one of her cuter moments, with friends

 She didn't really like her Christmas collar for some reason