It's Dai Time

Katie & Scott & Simon & Cecily.

Category: year26 (Page 79 of 92)

I posted an entry each day during my 26th year of life.

Day 53: buy me some peanuts

April 5, 2009 / / 0 Comments

I must admit that being in two fantasy baseball leagues this year has me a bit more excited about baseball season starting than I’ve been in past years.

We’re going with some friends in a couple weeks to see the local Oakland A’s take on the Red Sox, which promises to be a gluttonous all-you-can-eat night of bacchanalian delights.

Let’s take a break in the action to sigh at the fact that one of my pitchers, Atlanta SP1 Brett Myers has already let up three home runs after recording only four outs.  Keep it up!

I also purchase 5 pairs of tickets for Katie and I to go to a bunch of other Oakland A’s games that were on their promotional $2 ticket nights.  Excepting for the fact that the ticket “convenience” and “processing” fees are more than the actual ticket price in those cases, it was a frugal way of promising ourselves five nights at the Oakland ballpark this year.  The decision was partially influenced by the fact that our house is a mere BART stop away from the stadium.

I’m excited because Matt Holliday, who is on both of my fantasy teams, plays for a local team.  Additionally, the A’s rotation – while currently in a bit of disarray – is fielding a few youngsters with huge potential.  I hope that we’ll get to see them pitch at some point this season.

Katie is always excited about going to the ballpark (and rightfully so) because you get to throw peanut shells on the ground, an activity that is not available in most of the United States.

This excitement may fade, but the anticipation of a season of drama and injuries and pennant races is something we should all try to hold on to.  I know it’s hard when you’re from Pittsburgh and the biggest story that might involve your baseball team this year is the fact that they lost a preseason game to Manatee Community College.  NO LIE.

Still, anything could happen.  This is baseball.

Day 52: mad man

April 4, 2009 / / 0 Comments

In another life, I would have liked to be an ad man.

It’s not something that I’d actually want to pursue now (and I can’t imagine I’d want to make such a big career change in the future), but it just seems like such a wonderful combination of frivolity and pressure.

The idea of being able to sit around an office and come up with wild and crazy ways to end people’s minds into buying your products just sounds like a fun time. I’m full of mind-bending ideas. Name a product; I can help sell it.

What’s more, it seems that so many ads that I see are just simply bizarre. I wonder how much artistic license marketing teams get. Is there more room for failure? Less?

I guess, in some ways, it’s a bit like being a game producer or designer; after all, the outsider’s view must be that all we do all day is bounce ideas off each other and play foosball. That’s not entirely untrue, but it doesn’t tell the full story.

I’m sure there are other aspects to being an ad man that aren’t as fun. For example, would I be forced to have an affair with my secretary? And speak in a low monotone all the time? And drink cocktails before noon? None of those sound too appealing.

On the other hand, I would get to wear cool hats without being “that guy that wears hats every day for no reason.” Although I suppose that’s not such a bad thing to be either. I started to kind of be that guy in college, but I never took it all the way.

Day 51: magic

April 3, 2009 / / 0 Comments

Here’s your headline of the day, from the San Jose Mercury News:

Deputies shoot chimp,
then find squalid puppy mill

I leave it up to you to find the actual story on the Internet if you so choose.  Be aware, though, that the real story is not as fantastical as the one you have concocted in your head and it will make you a bit sad to realize that we do not live in a world where our law enforcement teams hunt down evil chimpanzees who run squalid puppy mills.

Speaking of sad, there are a few things that I used to do when I was younger.  I’m since stopped doing them or do them with much less regularity, and several of these make me a bit sad: being able to speak Chinese fluently, being a skilled chess player, being able to throw a frisbee with accuracy.

But of all these things, the thing that I miss in the dopiest, most nostalgic way is magic.  When I was in high school, I taught myself how to juggle and a small assortment of close-up, coin, and card magic.  I learned juggling first, but the two kind of go hand-in-hand; both rely heavily on the ability to manipulate the hands and both, in performance, have an element of theatricality about them.

I’ve forgotten a lot of methods and specific tricks, although I might still be able to do one or two impromptu if necessary.  And despite how utterly nerve-wracking it was (I imagine it’s much like stand-up comedy, where a certain percentage of the audience is just waiting for you to fail), it was a lot of fun.  I wish I had kept at it enough to be able to now pull off a trick at a dinner party.

I’m not terribly good at breaking the ice.  I can talk easily to people I know, and once a conversation gets going, I can do a pretty good job at maintaining it.  But how do you start talking to someone who you know nothing about?

Could there be a better way than with a magic trick?  Sure, it sounds hokey on paper, but as long as it’s something brief and slightly impressive, I think magic just works.  It manages to slide its way past corny and hits the lower edge of cool.  It somehow speaks the child inside all but the most cynical among us.

I guess I’ll add learning magic to my huge backlog of things I want to do.  That, and if I get good enough, I can justify buying a top hat and cape.

Day 50: what to believe

April 2, 2009 / / 0 Comments

How do we decide what to believe?

For example, let’s say I told you that I’m a goat.  You wouldn’t believe that if you’ve ever seen or heard of goats before.  If you hadn’t, you might ask me what a goat was.

If I said that my uncle was Stephen Colbert, you’d be skeptical.  It would seem that I’m trying to label you as gullible, based on his celebrity status and the fact that we are different races.

If I told you that a recent study found that playing video games helped policemen make quicker and smarter decisions, you’d probably believe me.  Factually, it sounds plausible and you’d trust that I’d be more likely to hear or read about video game studies because I work in the industry.

If I said that I was born in Shanghai, you’d almost certainly believe me.  You could tell by looking at me that I was of Asian descent and if you knew me, you’d have heard me state my birthplace before.

Let’s imagine that you were told all of these things by two other sources, though.  One was a New York Times journalist.  The other was a member of a random message board on the Internet.  How does that change the believability of each statement?

I think belief boils down to two simple things: facts we can verify with our senses and the trustworthiness of the source.  That’s it.

As a baby, our only sources are our parents.  There must be an inherent trust built into our minds, because we believe everything they tell us.  Eventually, that trust must deteriorate (I don’t know any adult that trusts his parents as much as he or she must have as a newborn), but it’s a huge factor in the knowledge we acquire as we grow.

The number of sources that we have also grows as we age, including teachers, schoolmates, and eventually co-workers, friends, and spouses.  But all of it is based on the teachings of trust that our parents give us.

The most important things we can be taught is how to create and evaluate trust.  It forms our entire system of beliefs, both of academic knowledge and of things beyond the realm of academia: love, religion, elves.

None of this ground-breaking.  It’s probably nothing that you haven’t thought about before.  But I thought it was an important mental journey to take, if only to file away for when I eventually become a parent myself.

Also, focusing on trust is a integral part of being good at any job.  So, that’s something I can continue to work on right now.  That, and I am actually a goat.

goatme

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