Misc 7

Reading
  • Gandhi and the boy who ate too much sugar
    a woman in India was upset that her son was eating too much sugar. No matter how much she chided him, he continued to satisfy his sweet tooth. Totally frustrated, she decided to take her son to see his great hero Mahatma Gandhi.
    She approached the great leader respectfully and said, “Sir, my son eats too much sugar. It is not good for his health. Would you please advise him to stop eating it?” Gandhi listened to the woman carefully, turned and spoke to her son, “Go home and come back in two weeks.” The woman looked perplexed and wondered why he had not asked the boy to stop eating sugar. She took the boy by the hand and went home. 

    Two weeks later she returned, boy in hand. Gandhi motioned for them to come forward. He looked directly at the boy and said, “Boy, you should stop eating sugar. It is not good for your health.” The boy nodded and promised he would not continue this habit any longer.The boy’s mother turned to Gandhi and asked,” Why didn’t you tell him that two weeks ago when I brought him here to see you?” Gandhi smiled, “Mother, two weeks ago I was still eating sugar myself.”
  • Story from Miracle of Mindfulness
    To end, let me retell a short story of Tolstoy’s, the story of the Emperor’s three questions. Tolstoy did not know the emperor’s name . . . One day it occurred to a certain emperor that if he only knew the answers to three questions, he would never stray in any matter. What is the best time to do each thing? Who are the most important people to work with? What is the most important thing to do at all times?

    The emperor issued a decree throughout his kingdom announcing that whoever could answer the questions would receive a great reward. Many who read the decree made their way to the palace at once, each person with a different answer. In reply to the first question, one person advised that the emperor make up a thorough time schedule, consecrating every hour, day, month, and year for certain tasks and then follow the schedule to the letter. Only then could he hope to do every task at the right time. Another person replied that it was impossible to plan in advance and that the emperor should put all vain amusements aside and remain attentive to everything in order to know what to do at what time. Someone else insisted that, by himself, the emperor could never hope to have all the foresight and competence necessary to decide when to do each and every task and what he really needed was to set up a Council of the Wise and then to act according to their advice. Someone else said that certain matters required immediate decision and could not wait for consultation, but if he wanted to know in advance what was going to happen he should consult magicians and soothsayers. The responses to the second question also lacked accord. One person said that the emperor needed to place all his trust in administrators, another urged reliance on priests and monks, while others recommended physicians. Still others put their faith in warriors. The third question drew a similar variety of answers. Some said science was the most important pursuit. Others insisted on religion. Yet others claimed the most important thing was military skill. The emperor was not pleased with any of the answers, and no reward was given.

    After several nights of reflection, the emperor resolved to visit a hermit who lived up on the mountain and was said to be an enlightened man. The emperor wished to find the hermit to ask him the three questions, though he knew the hermit never left the mountains and was known to receive only the poor, refusing to have anything to do with persons of wealth or power. So the emperor disguised himself as a simple peasant and ordered his attendants to wait for him at the foot of the mountain while he climbed the slope alone to seek the hermit. Reaching the holy man’s dwelling place, the emperor found the hermit digging a garden in front of his hut. When the hermit saw the stranger, he nodded his head in greeting and continued to dig. The labor was obviously hard on him. He was an old man, and each time he thrust his spade into the ground to turn the earth, he heaved heavily. The emperor approached him and said, “I have come here to ask your help with three questions: When is the best time to do each thing? Who are the most important people to work with? What is the most important thing to do at all times?” The hermit listened attentively but only patted the emperor on the shoulder and continued digging. The emperor said, “You must me give you a hand with that.” The hermit thanked him, handed the emperor the spade, and then sat down on the ground to rest. After he had dug two rows, the emperor stopped and turned to the hermit and repeated his three questions. The hermit still did not answer, but instead stood up and pointed to the spade and said, “Why don’t you rest now? I can take over again.” But the emperor continued to dig. One hour passed, then two. Finally the sun began to set behind the mountain. The emperor put down the spade and said to the hermit, “I came here to ask if you could answer my three questions. But if you can’t give me any answer, please let me know so that I can get on my way home.” The hermit lifted his head and asked the emperor, “Do you hear someone running over there?” The emperor turned his head. They both saw a man with a long white beard emerge from the woods. He ran wildly, pressing his hands against a bloody wound in his stomach. The man ran toward the emperor before falling unconscious to the ground, where he lay groaning. Opening the man’s clothing, the emperor and hermit saw that the man had received a deep gash. The emperor cleaned the wound thoroughly and then used his own shirt to bandage it, but the blood completely soaked it within minutes. He rinsed the shirt out and bandaged the wound a second time and continued to do so until the flow of blood had stopped. At last the wounded man regained consciousness and asked for a drink of water. The emperor ran down to the stream and brought back a jug of fresh water. Meanwhile, the sun had disappeared and the night air had begun to turn cold. The hermit gave the emperor a hand in carrying the man into the hut where they laid him down on the hermit’s bed. The man closed his eyes and lay quietly. The emperor was worn out from a long day of climbing the mountain and digging the garden. Leaning against the doorway, he fell asleep.

    When he rose, the sun had already risen over the mountain. For a moment he forgot where he was and what he had come here for. He looked over to the bed and saw the wounded man also looking around him in confusion. When he saw the emperor, he stared at him intently and then said in a faint whisper, “Please forgive me.” “But what have you done that I should forgive you?” the emperor asked. “You do not know me, your majesty, but I know you. I was your sworn enemy, and I had vowed to take vengeance on you, for during the last war you killed my brother and seized my property. When I learned that you were coming alone to the mountain to meet the hermit, I resolved to surprise you on your way back and kill you. But after waiting a long time there was still no sign of you, and so I left my ambush in order to seek you out. But instead of finding you, I came across your attendants, who recognized me, giving me this wound. Luckily, I escaped and ran here. If I hadn’t met you I would surely be dead by now. I had intended to kill you, but instead you saved my life! I am ashamed and grateful beyond words. If I live, I vow to be your servant for the rest of my life, and I will bid my children and grandchildren to do the same. Please grant me your forgiveness.” The emperor was overjoyed to see that he was so easily reconciled with a former enemy. He not only forgave the man but promised to return all the man’s property and to send his own physician and servants to wait on the man until he was completely healed.

    After ordering his attendants to take the man home, the emperor returned to see the hermit. Before returning to the palace the emperor wanted to repeat his three questions one last time. He found the hermit sowing seeds in the earth they had dug the day before. The hermit stood up and looked at the emperor. “But your questions have already been answered.” “How’s that?” the emperor asked, puzzled. “Yesterday, if you had not taken pity on my age and given me a hand with digging these beds, you would have been attacked by that man on your way home. Then you would have deeply regretted not staying with me. Therefore the most important time was the time you were digging in the beds, the most important person was myself, and the most important pursuit was to help me. Later, when the wounded man ran up here, the most important time was the time you spent dressing his wound, for if you had not cared for him he would have died and you would have lost the chance to be reconciled with him. Likewise, he was the most important person, and the most important pursuit was taking care of his wound.

    Remember that there is only one important time and that is now. The present moment is the only time over which we have dominion. The most important person is always the person you are with, who is right before you, for who knows if you will have dealings with any other person in the future? The most important pursuit is making the person standing at your side happy, for that alone is the pursuit of life.”
Watching
Listening to

What I eat for lunch everyday

Misc 6

Benin
Watching
  • A friend who works at the Ghanaian embassy in Cotonou brought me along to celebrate Christmas with his family in Accra. I pieced together some footage I took on a Sony handycam.

Links I liked

Misc 5

Benin politics
    • Benin’s presidential election moves to the second round, with Lionel Zinsou winning 28% of the vote and Patrice Talon winning 24% during round one on March 6th. The candidates and the criticism they face loosely parallel the US election. Zinsou is like Clinton – once considered unbeatable; now seeing lead evaporate from a growing anxiety among the electorate that he will maintain the status quo, that he only represents the interests of the powerful (France and the ruling party) and that he is disconnected from the reality of Beninese people. Two funny examples of the latter: he once referred to the current season as “spring” and he has appeared at political events and on billboards wearing a very red shirt. Anyone with basic knowledge of Benin knows there is no such season as spring (only rainy and dry seasons) and red symbolizes danger and evil. Talon is more like Trump – made millions in the cotton industry, accused of numerous economic crimes and is widely considered the richest man in Benin. While he is perhaps completely unqualified to be president, people see him as a political outsider and a needed rupture from the status quo.

Reading

  • Orientalism by Edward Said and The Miracle of Mindfulness by Thich Nhat Hanh, two of Jim Yong Kim’s favorite books.
  • Reddit thread about protests against corruption in Brazil:
    • Top comment: “As someone from a country that has had and still has a big problem with corruption and only recently started to tackle the problem (Romania), I must add that the government is only half of the problem. The other half is the public that participates in corruption. Every time you pay that cop some money so that he pretends that you didn’t cross that red light, you’re just as responsible as a politician taking a bribe for the situation in your country.”
    • Relevant George Carlin bit: “Now, there’s one thing you might have noticed I don’t complain about: politicians. Everybody complains about politicians. Everybody says they suck. Well, where do people think these politicians come from? They don’t fall out of the sky. They don’t pass through a membrane from another reality. They come from American parents and American families, American homes, American schools, American churches, American businesses and American universities, and they are elected by American citizens. This is the best we can do folks. This is what we have to offer. It’s what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out. If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you’re going to get selfish, ignorant leaders. Term limits ain’t going to do any good; you’re just going to end up with a brand new bunch of selfish, ignorant Americans. So, maybe, maybe, maybe, it’s not the politicians who suck. Maybe something else sucks around here… like, the public. Yeah, the public sucks. There’s a nice campaign slogan for somebody: ‘The Public Sucks. F*ck Hope.”
Watching
Links I like

Misc 4

Listening to

  • Siddhartha by Hermann Hess. Relistening actually. Siddhartha was my go-to audio when I did laundry as a volunteer. It was a perfect temptation bundle: I loved listening Siddhartha; I hated doing laundry. Here’s a great passage from Ch. 2 (the bolding is mine. I ponder this particular passage often):

    • “How do you think, Govinda,” Siddhartha spoke one day while begging
    this way, “how do you think did we progress? Did we reach any goals?”Govinda answered: “We have learned, and we’ll continue learning.
    You’ll be a great Samana, Siddhartha. Quickly, you’ve learned every
    exercise, often the old Samanas have admired you. One day, you’ll be
    a holy man, oh Siddhartha.”Quoth Siddhartha: “I can’t help but feel that it is not like this, my
    friend. What I’ve learned, being among the Samanas, up to this day,
    this, oh Govinda, I could have learned more quickly and by simpler
    means. In every tavern of that part of a town where the whorehouses
    are, my friend, among carters and gamblers I could have learned it.”Quoth Govinda: “Siddhartha is putting me on. How could you have
    learned meditation, holding your breath, insensitivity against hunger
    and pain there among these wretched people?”

    And Siddhartha said quietly, as if he was talking to himself: “What is
    meditation? What is leaving one’s body? What is fasting? What is
    holding one’s breath? It is fleeing from the self, it is a short
    escape of the agony of being a self, it is a short numbing of the
    senses against the pain and the pointlessness of life. The same escape,
    the same short numbing is what the driver of an ox-cart finds in the
    inn, drinking a few bowls of rice-wine or fermented coconut-milk. Then
    he won’t feel his self any more, then he won’t feel the pains of life
    any more, then he finds a short numbing of the senses. When he falls
    asleep over his bowl of rice-wine, he’ll find the same what Siddhartha
    and Govinda find when they escape their bodies through long exercises,
    staying in the non-self. This is how it is, oh Govinda.”

    Quoth Govinda: “You say so, oh friend, and yet you know that Siddhartha
    is no driver of an ox-cart and a Samana is no drunkard. It’s true that
    a drinker numbs his senses, it’s true that he briefly escapes and rests,
    but he’ll return from the delusion, finds everything to be unchanged, has
    not become wiser, has gathered no enlightenment,–has not risen several
    steps.”

    And Siddhartha spoke with a smile: “I do not know, I’ve never been a
    drunkard. But that I, Siddhartha, find only a short numbing of the
    senses in my exercises and meditations and that I am just as far removed
    from wisdom, from salvation, as a child in the mother’s womb, this I
    know, oh Govinda, this I know.”

    And once again, another time, when Siddhartha left the forest together
    with Govinda, to beg for some food in the village for their brothers and
    teachers, Siddhartha began to speak and said: “What now, oh Govinda,
    might we be on the right path? Might we get closer to enlightenment?
    Might we get closer to salvation? Or do we perhaps live in a circle–
    we, who have thought we were escaping the cycle?”

    Quoth Govinda: “We have learned a lot, Siddhartha, there is still
    much to learn. We are not going around in circles, we are moving up,
    the circle is a spiral, we have already ascended many a level.”

    Siddhartha answered: “How old, would you think, is our oldest Samana,
    our venerable teacher?”

    Quoth Govinda: “Our oldest one might be about sixty years of age.”

    And Siddhartha: “He has lived for sixty years and has not reached the
    nirvana. He’ll turn seventy and eighty, and you and me, we will grow
    just as old and will do our exercises, and will fast, and will meditate.
    But we will not reach the nirvana, he won’t and we won’t. Oh Govinda,
    I believe out of all the Samanas out there, perhaps not a single one,
    not a single one, will reach the nirvana. We find comfort, we find
    numbness, we learn feats, to deceive others. But the most important
    thing, the path of paths, we will not find.”

    “If you only,” spoke Govinda, “wouldn’t speak such terrible words,
    Siddhartha! How could it be that among so many learned men, among so
    many Brahmans, among so many austere and venerable Samanas, among so
    many who are searching, so many who are eagerly trying, so many holy
    men, no one will find the path of paths?”

    But Siddhartha said in a voice which contained just as much sadness as
    mockery, with a quiet, a slightly sad, a slightly mocking voice: “Soon,
    Govinda, your friend will leave the path of the Samanas, he has walked
    along your side for so long. I’m suffering of thirst, oh Govinda, and
    on this long path of a Samana, my thirst has remained as strong as ever.
    I always thirsted for knowledge, I have always been full of questions.
    I have asked the Brahmans, year after year, and I have asked the holy
    Vedas, year after year, and I have asked the devote Samanas, year after
    year. Perhaps, oh Govinda, it had been just as well, had been just as
    smart and just as profitable, if I had asked the hornbill-bird or the
    chimpanzee. It took me a long time and am not finished learning this
    yet, oh Govinda: that there is nothing to be learned! There is indeed
    no such thing, so I believe, as what we refer to as `learning’. There
    is, oh my friend, just one knowledge, this is everywhere, this is Atman,
    this is within me and within you and within every creature. And so I’m
    starting to believe that this knowledge has no worser enemy than the
    desire to know it, than learning.”

    At this, Govinda stopped on the path, rose his hands, and spoke: “If
    you, Siddhartha, only would not bother your friend with this kind of
    talk! Truly, you words stir up fear in my heart. And just consider:
    what would become of the sanctity of prayer, what of the venerability of
    the Brahmans’ caste, what of the holiness of the Samanas, if it was as
    you say, if there was no learning?! What, oh Siddhartha, what would
    then become of all of this what is holy, what is precious, what is
    venerable on earth?!”

    And Govinda mumbled a verse to himself, a verse from an Upanishad:

    He who ponderingly, of a purified spirit, loses himself in the
    meditation of Atman, unexpressable by words is his blissfulness of his
    heart.

    But Siddhartha remained silent. He thought about the words which
    Govinda had said to him and thought the words through to their end.

    Yes, he thought, standing there with his head low, what would remain of
    all that which seemed to us to be holy? What remains? What can stand
    the test? And he shook his head.

Reading

  • Almost finished with Dune by Frank Herbert. It’s been a nice shift after a tiresome binge on life hacking material, biographies and beginner investing books.I now view reading as most people do physical exercise: indispensable, a habit that can and should be developed over time and an activity that witnesses a lot of fuckarounditis. The ultimate form of the latter is picking up a book, starting from page 1, reading 10 pages, becoming bored, putting the book down, and repeating this every few days until you finish the book 8 months later.  This is like going to the gym and doing one set of bench press. To paraphrase Montaigne, if you’re bored reading something, it’s not your fault! Read something else. Or skip 3 chapters and start reading from there. No one says you have to read every page of a book front to back. Anyway, to keep the kindle in my hands for an hour or two every night, I needed to shake off the creeping boredom of Tim Ferris advice, Lincoln’s letters and index funds with a quest archetype, a crazy plot and giant worms. Dune has delivered.

    • Despite a captivating plot and good sci-fi imagery though, the writing is not as engaging and adventurous as  I hoped. Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts remains the most mesmerizing fiction writing I’ve read.

Watching
Links I like

Misc 3

Listening to
Watching
  • The Act of Killing by Joshua Oppenheimer. This is a good review on amazon:

    “In 1965 the Indonesian military responded to an attempted coup with the massacre of at least 500,000 people. They employed local gangs to help carry out these murders, transforming young idling street toughs into death squads who killed without abandon or regard to the political pretense of eradicating the alleged communist threat.

    Anwar Congo is one of these killers, a flamboyant man with a penchant for the gangster movies he once stood outside scalping tickets to. Anwar has never been charged for his crimes. To the contrary, his atrocities have made him somewhat of a minor celebrity in his hometown of Medan, a large city in Sumatra. He believes he is responsible for murdering about a thousand people; mostly by strangling them with piano wire, the way gangsters did it in the movies.

    Joshua Oppenheimer met Mr. Congo traveling through Indonesia while working on another project. He was struck by Congo’s zeal in recounting his horrific acts like an aged athlete recalling his bygone glory days, acting out his crimes and providing little asides on the most efficient methods of killing a large number of people quickly and cleanly.

    Oppenheimer proposed filming and financing re-enactments of Congo’s crimes starring the murderer himself, his surviving accomplices, and his young lackeys. As inexplicable as Oppenheimer’s proposition to help a mass murderer make a film is, Congo’s decision to recreate his transgressions through an array of genres – horror, musical, war, westerns and, of course, gangster – is even more baffling. Oppenheimer’s documentary, The Act of Killing, is the collision of Congo’s bizarre scenes realized, chilling interviews, and fly on the wall observation.

    The fact Congo maintained final cut gives the documentary its occasional perverse comedy. Laughing at these men’s lack of sophistication is double-edged; it’s this same absence of self-awareness that made them capable of killing thousands of people and recall their actions with little of no sense of remorse. So when one young lackey engages in a quixotic run for public office, explaining how much easier it will make shaking people down for bribes, it feels almost as absurd as something off of NBC’s Parks & Recreations, while providing a prime example of what makes Indonesia so hopelessly corrupt.

    This sort of ironic detachment takes an even darker turn when a man recalls the murder of his father during the ’65 genocide. The man suggests the story would make a good addition to the film. One would think Anwar would recognize this thinly veiled confrontation by a victim, or perhaps feel some tug of guilt for his participation in events that led to the death of this man’s father. But Congo is unable to see past his film, and dismisses the idea, characteristically, without thought.

    And yet, The Act of Killing does catch glimpses of some semblance of remorse in Anwar Congo. On several occasions, local citizens are solicited to act the part of Communist dissidents. Most decline, visibly terrified of being mistaken for Communists. Yet a few do concede (likely for what is to them a great deal of money), and as they are mock beaten and murdered their children fall into hysterics, not understanding what is going on. One woman appears to slip into shock from the experience.

    It’s at moments like these that something like regret appears in Congo’s face. There are also admissions of terrible nightmares that have plagued him for years, quieter conversations with accomplices about coping with memories, and a final fifteen minutes which are almost unbearable to watch.

    But while watching all of this, I couldn’t help wonder if Oppenheimer had discovered and crossed some line of ethics with his film. Yes, we sit in judgment of Congo, but he himself is blissfully unaware of this. All he sees is the medium provided to glorify his actions. Even since The Act of Killing was released, Congo’s complaints are detached from the crimes, instead focusing on his feeling of being misled in terms of the type of film he was making.

    But most troubling, is it ethically sound to make a movie that causes participants trauma or puts lives in danger? My knee jerk reaction is to say such a film should not be produced. But this feeling is countered by the powerful visceral reaction viewing this film stirred in me.

    The Act of Killing, is many things: sober documentary, meta-film within a film; exploitative, surrealist, funny and always deeply uncomfortable. I can safely say I have never seen a movie like it, and that my thoughts returned to its characters and images in a way only a few documentary films have. It is a unique and troubling masterpiece.”
 
Links I liked
  • When I went to Accra for Christmas, policemen and women were peppered across city corners, waving down cars, asking for “Christmas gifts”.  People often say that higher pay would cut corruption. Apparently, it doesn’t. 

Africa in the news

I deactivated my Facebook account two months ago because of a certain hypersensitivity and social media activism that I don’t fully understand, but appears healthy to opt out of. Another way of putting it, Facebook became the internet and knowledge equivalent of this exercise.

Now, I call people if I want to connect. I email my friends when I want to see pictures of their babies. And I read the New York Times to feel hypersensitive.

There are multiple presidential elections going on in Africa. How does this story make the front page of the New York Times?

Below are pictures from one of many voodoo ceremonies I sat in on. They are way more pleasant than going to mass and achieve the same objectives: a special time to pray for the health of your family and loved ones and to make gestures to keep the God(s) happy. I never heard an outlandish claim about tax cuts.

Benin’s presidential elections

Benin’s electoral campaign kicked off yesterday. The actual presidential election is March 6th. There are three candidates that have a shot, but the front-runner is the current Prime Minister, Lionel Zinsou. Zinsou is a massively polarizing figure because he was born and raised in France. In fact, he only came to Benin last June to become the Prime Minister.

I’ve heard the same question over and over: who would vote for a chef d’etat of their country who never actually lived there? When the perceived level of public sector corruption is as high as it is in Benin (tied with China and Colombia for 83rd out of 167 countries in the 2015 Corruption Perception Index), the answer appears to be: most people.

My favorite snippet related to yesterday’s electoral campaign kick off:

“Announcing the beginning of the electoral campaign ahead of the March 6 presidential election, La Nation noted that most candidates did not wait for the official campaign to begin before holding meetings and distributing gifts.”

Misc Stuff 2

Reading
I finished Ta-nehisi Coat’s Between the World and Me in a few days. It brought me back to late night conversations outside Butler library and Hartley lounge with black friends who were articulating a reality I didn’t understand at the time and still don’t. Lines I liked:
  • There were little white boys with complete collections of football cards, and their only want was a popular girlfriend and their only worry was poison oak.
  • I felt, but did not yet understand, the relation between that other world and me.
  • I don’t know that I have ever found any satisfactory answers of my own. But every time I ask it, the question is refined.
  • My working theory then held all black people as kings in exile, a nation of original men severed from our original names and our majestic Nubian culture. Surely this was the message I took from gazing out on the Yard. Had any people, anywhere, ever been as sprawling and beautiful as us?
  • I shared with him a healthy skepticism and a deep belief that we could somehow read our way out
  • There was no nobility in falling, in being bound, in living oppressed, and there was no inherent meaning in black blood. Black blood wasn’t black; black skin wasn’t even black.
  • My great error was not that I had accepted someone else’s dream but that I had accepted the fact of dreams, the need for escape, and the invention of racecraft.
  • I am black, and have been plundered and have lost my body. But perhaps I too had the capacity for plunder, maybe I would take another human’s body to confirm myself in a community.
  • Hate gives identity.
  • So much of my life was defined by not knowing.
  • And so there was, all about her, a knowledge of cosmic injustices, the same knowledge I’d glimpsed all those years ago watching my father reach for his belt, watching the suburban dispatches in my living room, watching the golden-haired boys with their toy trucks and football cards, and dimly perceiving the great barrier between the world and me.
  • Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free. Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains—whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains.
  • Think of all the love poured into him. Think of the tuitions for Montessori and music lessons. Think of the gasoline expended, the treads worn carting him to football games, basketball tournaments, and Little League. Think of the time spent regulating sleepovers. Think of the surprise birthday parties, the daycare, and the reference checks on babysitters. Think of World Book and Childcraft. Think of checks written for family photos. Think of credit cards charged for vacations. Think of soccer balls, science kits, chemistry sets, racetracks, and model trains. Think of all the embraces, all the private jokes, customs, greetings, names, dreams, all the shared knowledge and capacity of a black family injected into that vessel of flesh and bone. And think of how that vessel was taken, shattered on the concrete, and all its holy contents, all that had gone into him, sent flowing back to the earth.
  • History is not solely in our hands. And still you are called to struggle, not because it assures you victory but because it assures you an honorable and sane life.
  • To yell “black-on-black crime” is to shoot a man and then shame him for bleeding.
  • And godless though I am, the fact of being human, the fact of possessing the gift of study, and thus being remarkable among all the matter floating through the cosmos, still awes me.
  • When I was a boy, no portion of my body suffered more than my eyes.
  • In America I was part of an equation—even if it wasn’t a part I relished.
  • And watching him walk away, I felt that I had missed part of the experience because of my eyes, because my eyes were made in Baltimore, because my eyes were blindfolded by fear.
  • She could not acknowledge any discomfort, and she did not speak of herself as remarkable, because it conceded too much, because it sanctified tribal expectations when the only expectation that mattered should be rooted in an assessment of Mable Jones.
  • The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves, to understand that the field for their Dream, the stage where they have painted themselves white, is the deathbed of us all.
Listening to
Links I liked

Misc Stuff

Film making – I started learning Final Cut Pro a few months ago through Lynda.com. Here is a short film I made this week:
Story of the Mexican Fisherman 

An American investment banker was at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large yellowfin tuna. The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them. The Mexican replied, “only a little while. The American then asked why didn’t he stay out longer and catch more fish? The Mexican said he had enough to support his family’s immediate needs. The American then asked, “but what do you do with the rest of your time?”

The Mexican fisherman said, “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siestas with my wife, Maria, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine, and play guitar with my amigos. I have a full and busy life.” The American scoffed, “I am a Harvard MBA and could help you. You should spend more time fishing and with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat. With the proceeds from the bigger boat, you could buy several boats, eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman you would sell directly to the processor, eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing, and distribution. You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City, then LA and eventually New York City, where you will run your expanding enterprise.”

The Mexican fisherman asked, “But, how long will this all take?”

To which the American replied, “15 – 20 years.”

“But what then?” Asked the Mexican.

The American laughed and said, “That’s the best part. When the time is right you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich, you would make millions!”

“Millions – then what?”

The American said, “Then you would retire. Move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siestas with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos.”

Per diem
A newsletter I get from ICT works featured a write-up about ways to stop paying per diem.

I never heard of a per diem before coming to Benin. In short time I learned that if you want to organize a training or hold a meeting with adults, you were expected to dish out per diems (normally $2 to $10 per person/day). People typically expect that their is some behind-the-scenes budget that had a line for these per diems. In their defense, this is often the case. In my case though, almost never. Just me trying to exchange and share some knowledge. Not respecting the per diem expectation can create suspicious feelings. People attending the training/meeting may think you stole all their per diem or that the training isn’t “serious”. With government workers and the NGO types, people may be offended or mad because they consider per diems legitimate allowances. You on the other hand suspect that everyone came just to pocket the per diem and they could care less what you’re talking about.

It’s interesting to see other people reflecting on ways to stop paying per diem, particularly now that I’m on the other side and get giant per diem when I travel. Perhaps US government employees should take the lead and stop paying themselves per diem?

Listening to:
  1. Dan Carlin – Death Throes of the Republic Series
  2. Chris Sacca on Shark Tank, Building Your Business, and Startup Mistakes 
    I liked his thoughts on myopia and empathy at around 30 min
  3. Jay Larson – Wrong Number
  4. Intelligence Squared – The US should let in 100,000 Syrian Refugees

Links I liked: