Year: 2015
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Being Special
I’m fascinated by the attitudes of high-level professional fighters. It’s such a strange job. Two people spend months preparing for a fifteen minute event, and one of them must lose. This weekend I’ll be watching Ronda Rousey and Cat Zingano fight, both of whom are undefeated. One of them, probably Cat, will lose that designation.…
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Obligation of Time
The other day I thought about getting a job in the most abstract sense. I thought: what would it be like if I just turned one hundred eighty degrees and got a job. The idea is literally repulsive to me, but I make myself think these things once in a while, just to check in;…
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Relative Value and Bargaining
I got into a tuktuk in Chiang Mai to meet my friends for dinner. A tuktuk is a motorcycle with a built in passenger cart behind the driver, which serves as a taxi, but doesn’t have a meter. You negotiate the price up front to avoid getting hit with a big surprise when you arrive.…
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The First Thing I’d Do Differently
Stepping back from Sett has left a lot of room for me to reflect. What went wrong? Of those things that went wrong, which were avoidable, or will at least be avoidable in the future? Two big things always surface, the first of which I’ll talk about today. When Sett started out, I spent most…
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A Rosy Rear-View Mirror
The boat we keep at the island is named the SS Hassle. The process for buying it involved punching a hole in the side of it, patching that hole, buying a new motor because the first one stopped working, sleeping in the car for two nights because the new motor didn’t work either, and manually…
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Huge Decisions
My cousin is deciding which college to go to. There’s pressure, because this is going to be one of the biggest decisions of her life. I was thinking about that tonight as she and her mother talked about schools all over the US with all sorts of pros and cons. The course of her life…
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Skeptical of Studies
Whenever I see a headline that begins with “New Study Proves…”, I skip over it and move on to the next one. I love science, and I even like studies, but I have a big problem with the way studies are framed today, especially in the media. There are two major things wrong with these…
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Drinking Tea While Traveling
For a while I just accepted that I wouldn’t have good tea when I traveled. I drank good tea in my RV, or at Samovar, but would drink nothing but water when I was on the road. I slowly began to experiment with ways to have tea on the go, and now I really have…
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EV (How to Make All Decisions)
I’ve been wanting to write this post for a long time, because it’s the kind of post that will allow me to write more posts, linking this one as background. Because it’s so important, I’ve been waiting for the right time to write it. Sometime like now, when I’m fed, tea-caffeinated, motivated, and have a…
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Get to the Airport Late But Don’t Miss Your Flight
I travel a lot. Not as much as a lot of business travelers, but maybe in the top 1% for independent travelers. That means that I spend a lot of time on planes, in airports, and experiencing just about every air-travel scenario possible. People get to airports ridiculously early in fear of missing their flights.…