A day jammed

Today has been a remarkable day, for it has not only been long, but also wildly spontaneous and surprisingly productive. The one principle that made everything possible was this: “Leaders take initiative”. I caught this little gem as I was waiting in line at the airport, and it has defined the quality of my entire day, whether that may be through social encounters and chance discoveries. Taking the initiative meant being active in pursuit, and not reactive in being pursued, and I believe that I have struck something worth investigating.

In spite of the great bouts of joy, however, I was also just given a dose of reality in the form of human fragility. A friend dropped by suddenly a few minutes ago, delivering some bad news about his father who has recently been diagnosed with Liver Cancer in the form of multiple tumors. The way my friend came into my room and plopped down on the sofa struck me as haggardly, and his recently kept bang that hangs from behind his hat trails behind his head like the tail of a beaten horse. His eyes are still filled with life, but his facial features don’t comply–his body doesn’t comply, his carriage doesn’t comply. The whole of his being is filled with the feeling of a wrinsed towel–torqued, pressured, and squeezed.

I’ve had a long day, and long productive day. My friend’s also had a long day, a long-winded day. I seek comfort in the tranquilizor that is sleep, and he will find his dose of barbiturates in the form of “chill time” with some other friends. This is the point we diverge, and we diverge for different reasons.

It’s time for me to sleep.

Balance

Today, I attended a benefit concert for life straws in Africa. Like always, I found myself in a dilemma between decisions: should I stay for the four hours of the concert and enjoy the music, or should I go home early to work on an essay I had been working for four days on? The impetus for staying for the whole duration is to thaw my brain freeze (I haven’t left the house for like 4 days and brain is fried from trying to be productive), and the counter-argument is that I have work to do, so I should go home and work on it. I find myself in these kinds of decisions many times throughout the year, and it has become a repeating pattern.

I remembered that in my past blog posts when I explored this dilemma that my conclusion was to base my decision on my goal: if I have a clearly defined intent for myself, I will naturally select the option that is best suited for my goal. For instance, if my goal is to hope to become a smart planner and better leader through taking action based on foresight, I will opt for going home to work. However, the problem I have found with this option (I’ve chosen this option many times now) is that it doesn’t work out well. Theoretically, choosing the option of going home to work is supposed to make me a better planner since I’m taking action to prepare for events that I foresee to be upcoming; realistically though, I don’t follow through with smooth execution, and this entire endeavor becomes a big flop that always seems to end with nothing but grief.

Because of this, I have come to modify my original conclusion of simply “identifying your goal” as a way of choosing between two options. In addition to setting a goal in mind, I would also say to know thyself and thy state of being. If I have just spent 10 hours semi-burned out on work, maybe a few hours of watching a concert wouldn’t be too bad a way to let loose. This sounds like common sense, but it actually illustrates an important principle of balance that maintains efficiency. Only a person who has balanced work and play will be able to run at full speed when the time demands work. It took me an entire week of low efficiency work at home during Spring Break to realize the importance of balance.

Lame.

Am I becoming a coffee addict?

For the last four days, I have been eyeing a small bottle of canned coffee sitting near the top of my table. It had a matte white coating with regal gold and oakwood patterns running around the middle, making it look not only ‘haute couture’, but also potent and filled with a heavy shot of caffeine.  I was convinced that I had wasted my last few days of Spring Break, as not only was I not able to get half of what I wanted done, I also had to sacrifice play time with friends for the wide swaths of inefficient work. Could it be because I wasn’t having my coffee?

I remembered the day before my Spring Break when I first consumed my first “middle sized” cup of coffee. I’ve always only had a small, and I remembered vividly that after my first “medium”, I was jittery for a good amount of the day and stayed in a hyper-focused state that helped me get tons of reading done. Since that experience, I had planned to drink a cup of medium sized coffee every day to jump start my focus and concentration. However, my mother, for some reason or another is convinced that coffee isn’t good for you because it can make you reliant on its proerties. There is some truth to her words, as after my coffee-shock, I desperately eyed that little canned beverage before my table with full intent of consuming it lusciously one afternoon when my mom has left the house.It took me a while, but I finally was able to drink that coffee today–the same day in which I finished an essay I had been thinking about for the last few days. Coincidence? I don’t think so.

This brings me to a question: how often should I rely on coffee to get my work done, given that it is essentially the most pervasive drug used in America by many highly driven people? Coffee has strong physical effects in the mind–that is without a doubt. But is my own ability inadequate or not enough to keep up with all those who are running on caffeine? Most of the highly productive and driven people I know have coffee floating around them in one form or another, so am I losing out on a lot of productive work by not joining this culture of drug enhanced workers? To be honest, I notice a lot of times that I have trouble focusing on the task at hand. After a cup of joe, however, I am able to control my attention much better. This inability to focus my mind at beck and call has brought me to think that perhaps coffee can help me get more done by allowing me to work with higher rates of attention. Like all man-made materials, coffee is a form of “technology”. Just as the car is a technology for transportation and the internaet  a technology for communication, coffee is a technology for increased energy, metabolism, attention, and memory. Does having it affect my biological state change the fact that it is a technology created and harnessed by humans being to be put to use?

For sanity’s sake, how much of my “nature” should I retain without the aid of technology such as coffee?

Searching for the Elusive Efficiency

Efficiency. Industrial-grade efficiency. Capitalist driven, market efficiency. I’ve sought efficiency in the things I do for a long time, and for some reason, it has evaded me well and kept me at bay. I literally am crawling from the things I’ve been working with, and yet I know there is still so much room for improvement. Which brings me to the question: How valuable is efficiency, and at what cost?

It’s ironic that efficiency should have its costs, as part of what it means to be efficient is to maximize the benefits of one thing while limiting its detriments. Essentially, the cost of efficiency is inefficiency and everything associated with it: spontaneity, creativity, flexibility, easy-goingness, randomness, etc. Is it possible to be “spontaneous”, but be efficiently so? But doesn’t that take the fluidity, joy, and random fun out of the process? When is play necessary for efficiency? Should play be ‘efficient’?

With so much to do, and so little time, being efficient is a prerequisite in order to have the cake and eat it too. Unfortunately, as we all know, it is impossible to have a pro without a con, and with efficiency, there is naturally a con as well. Sometimes, being spontaneous is more efficient than deliberately trying to be efficient.

Gah!

Subprime Mortgage Crisis

So I just heard this awesome episode from the Public Radio International and NPR explaining the Subprime Mortgage Crisis. Highly recommended: ( http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=355) In order to see if I understand it now, I’m going to try to explain it:

In the beginning of time, there is this great behemonth of called the “Global pool of money” that is the money in savings owned by every entity in the world. This great amorphous force used to be 36 trillion, but found itself at about 70 trillion in the 2000s due to increased global trade and investment. This big expansion in money needed a place to be invested, and initially, the default location would be in U.S. Treasuries. However, because Greenspan had kept the rates of the Treasuries at a measly 1%, this global pool of money sought better investment alternatives. It found US Residential Mortgages.

US Residential Mortgages were good investment options because they yield good returns (5-7% from borrowers), and they are also considered very safe (triple A ratings). However, the global pool of money couldn’t directly invest in residential mortages due to all the intricacies involved. As a result, a whole industry grew and formed around making the US mortages more accessible to the global pool of money. At the base of the chain is the actual mortgage, which is made based on loans from brokers (mortgage–>brokers). The Brokers would take these mortages and sell them to banks (brokers–>banks), who would in turn bundles the mortgages and sell them as bonds to investment firms on Wall street (banks–>wall street). Wall street then takes these mortgage bundles and sells shares of these morgage bonds as “Mortgaged backed securities” to the global pool of money (wall street–>global pool). To sum it up: mortgage–>broker–>banks–>wall street–>global pool.

So what went wrong? Because this is good business (very lucrative), brokers found that all the good mortages that could be made were already made by 2003. (A good mortgage is one that is supported with the assets and income of the borrower that guarantees payment). In order to continue making big bucks to satisfy the insatible appetitite of the Global pool of money, the rules on mortgages were loosened in order to lend to more people. In other words, more and more badly qualified people (people who have lesser means of repaying loans) were given mortgages to buy houses. The policy for mortgage went from “Stated income varified asset” (your asset is varified) to “stated income stated asset” (both are only stated), to “no income varified asset” (doesn’t matter how much you make), and finally to “no income no asset” (so long as you have a good rating…).

Basically, by the end of this process, lots and lots of bad mortgages were given to people who should have never gotten them. Because lots of houses were being sold, housing prices rose fast, and banks felt more confidant in loaning since they assumed the property value of seized houses would be enough to cover (when in fact the housing prices were fueed by this kind of reckless lending). Brokers, Banks, and Wall Street were all making money through making bad loans to poor people. The Credit Ratings played a hand in perpetrating this cycle as well, as it rated the poorly bundled mortgages (Collatoralized Debt Obligations, or “toxic assets” for the lower quality ones) triple A security ratings without recognizing all the bad loans being made.

By the end of this madness (by 2006), the housing bubble popped, and as property value dropped, more and more people defaulted on their loans and mortgages. This troubled a lot of smaller banks, because many small banks used leverage to borrow lots of money to buy these mortgages to sell to Wall Street (eg. small bank with 5 million leverages 100 million to buy mortgages). Wall Street no longer wants to buy these mortgages, and the small banks are stuck with these toxic assets that are declining in value. Because the Global pool of money sees that much of its money has gone to ashes, it stops pooling money into these mortgage backed securities and channels them back into treasuries. Credit freezes up, and the banks are now paranoid about lending money, and not enough money is flowing around.

Whew. That about all exhausts what I learned from the audio.

Time is Slipping

Time is slipping away,

slitering from my fingertips

as fast as toilet paper,

towards an unfortunate sunset

where it will lie,

under a nice cold rock,

and die.

“Just” vs “Justified” in a Symbolic society

I was watching a Chinese Soap Opera today for dinner, and thereupon came a scene in which the “bad guys” were using Rhetoric to argue the rule of law. This kind of brought me to think about how limited and fragile language can be when it is removed from a social situation that values it.  For instance, lets say I am in a jungle in Africa and am surrounded by a gang of mobsters–there is no way I can exert language dominance over these folks because they hold physical violence over my head. In other words, the force of language can be exercised only within a given order in which laws are followed and people are playing the game. Sounds pretty basic and elementary.

Taken to a broader level, we can see how things play out in society. Society is a realm in which norms and laws are set by the members in order to maintain peace and order without having to resort to violence. Each members is bound by these rules, and as uncomfortable as it may be to have to follow the society’s expectations, it is the price to pay for safety and stability. People that don’t play by these rules (eg people who steal, commit rape, fraudulence, etc) face the wrath that is the social establishment, and “the system” will exert a kind of  ‘objective violence’ that punishes the outlier in order to maintain functionality within a society. A nation or community that is well developed will guarantee a level of protection for its members, given that all members operate within the bounds of the system.

When a community is structurally stable, Language and symbolic meaning will thrive and prevail, mainly because symbols become the new way to set rules without having to resort to violence. Contracts, Letters, Waivers, etc, all of these become the legal instruments that govern the rules to ‘the system’. As a result of this greater reliance on symbolic figures, the ability to use language and information becomes the new ‘competitive edge’. Since people cannot trespass the rules and norms of a society, those that can effectively maneuver around within it without triggering its backlash can gain advantages over others. Hence, those who are deft with language and can manipulate symbolic information skillfully will be valued and will tend to be well off manipulating symbols in one field or another (lawyers, politicians, analysts, managers, etc).

On the other hand, a society without an established order will find itself weak in symbolic instruments. I can sign a contract saying that I will pay someone money, but without the legal force, the systemic ‘ethos’ behind the contract, this symbolic document is worth nothing. In other words, in a well structured society, symbols are bound more closely to what they symbolize because there is an universal expectation amongst members of the society that such contracts will be followed or punishment will result (legally, socially, etc). In a less ‘modern’ society, on the other hand, symbols are more tenuously connected to what they symbolize because the system is not enforcing the connection. In both cases, violence compels action, but in former, the violence is through law and social punishment while in the latter, through raw, visceral acts of violence.

As a result of this relationship between the effectiveness of symbols and the cohesiveness of a society, many things can be concluded. For one, symbols become the battleground for most systemic processes. Law, Economic Policy, Social policy, politics, Business, etc, everything that deals with the system will involve language and symbols. This means that those who understand these symbols can manipulate them against the will of those who don’t understand these symbols but still be ‘justified’ in their act of injustice. (eg. Loopholes in the Patriot Act, the Genetic Information Non-discrimination Act, “trickle down” Reaganomics, etc). Essentially, by being the ones who are writing the rules to society, people who manipulate systemic symbols are much better able to protect themselves from systemic punishment as well.

However, what underlies all this is the premise that symbolic control is running at full steam for a ‘functional society’. Once a society begins to sense that the symbolic bounds that has held it together for so long and so effectively is no longer fair and protecting the interests of all, the symbolic bonds will slowly become less meaningful. A perfect example of this in current news is the case of AIG arguing that its bonuses are “contractually bound” and that it must pay them. In this situation, people don’t care whether or not AIG is “contractually bound” to paying huge bonuses and recongize the underlying injustice that is being “justified” under rule of law. Martin Luther King also knew this, and he walked a fine line between respecting the symbolic structure while pushing its limits through acts of civil disobedience.

Ultimately,  the symbolic structure that governs society is only as good as the people who create these rules, and many times, these rules have been wielded in a manner that may be legally ‘justified’ but morally ‘unjust’ (O.J. Simpson trial). It is much easier to see and condemn when these instances are brought to light (AIG), but often times  it may take acts that overstep the existing symbolic limitations to reveal the inherent injustice (Martin Luther King).

Do it to appreciate it

I recently started appreciating what it means to “do it to appreciate it”. For instance, I had never, ever, answered online surveys because I knew I was never going to win the Jamba juice certificate that is promised to the lucky few who actually bother to fill out the survey. However, just recently, after running a program, I also issued out a survey of my own and tried to get people to fill it. I got a 50% return rate in a group of 16. It was then I realized just how anxious and needy it feels to have to wait on the feedback and surveys of others, only to be disappointed miserably with half-assed, half-baked, half-returned responses. From then on, I tried to fill out the surveys that others I know have issued for me, if not for the sake of the experiment, then for the sake of our invisible bond of shared misery.

But survey filling is just one example. Another more ‘dramatic’ experience I’ve had was with fundraising. Being at an ’socially active’ college such as Berkeley means that there are always friends or acquaintences participating in some walk-a-thon, dance-a-thon, or some other form of endurance-for-charity type of fundraising effort. Again, speaking from experience, I’ve never donated to such a cause. But once again, I was given a lesson on this issue as most recently, I’ve had to solicit funding from others for a project I’m working on. Unfortunately, I’ve gotten nothing except for the 100 dollars I donated to my own project. Pathetic, yes, but it was a lesson for helping me understand what other projects face, and since then, I’ve donated to other peoples’ causes as often as my wallet allows.

It’s crazy how different it feels to approach things coming from the end, and it is certainly a paradigm shift. When you’ve passed out fliers in school before, you know how it feels to be rejected by passerby, and you feel different when you reject fliers as you walk by people offering fliers. When you’ve had your wisdom teeth pulled, you cringe when others talk abou the experience much more so than people who haven’t. Expanding from this set of examples, it could be imagined how different it must feel then to see the homeless if you’ve once been homeless; to drive by gang neighborhoods if you actually lived in one; to talk about children in Africa if you’ve actually seen some die before your eyes.

These visceral experiences and connections with certain people or causes are what make up the spaces between thinking and feeling. In fact, experience is a powerful antidote to breaking down ignorance. Ignorance is essentially defined as having a lack of understanding, and how can one understand another if one doesn’t share the experiences as others?  Yet, even thought it is impossible to fully understand another’s experiences, recognizing that this ‘experience gap’ exists on a visceral level creates space to sympathize or relate to another’s experience. In the globalized world today, it seems these kinds of connections are becoming increasingly important in breaking down the ignorance that comes with interacting across different cultures.

Sitting

The cold wind is blowing, and the rain is slowly falling. Cars swish and slosh the wet asphalt, making long trailing noises. The sky is blanketed in mist; clouds, thick with dew, filter a fluorescent white hue upon the stuff around the table–papers, envelopes, books, computers, etc. I sit in the house, legs curled upward and looking out against the white, the chill, the rain, the wind, like a stray barn-cat staring from underneath a pile of rustic rubble at the cold, cold world.

Tickled by a fellow Rhetor

I found this very interesting post in another blog from a Rhetoric student in Dale Carrico’s Rhetoric 10 class. Very unique, and I loved it:

Lo, there was once a young man of great rhetorical aspirations.
At the age of twenty two, in the heart of autumn, he descended from a large metallic bird into the lower portion of the land known as California.
Now this young man was in training; he had spent nearly two months under a great master, a Doctor, of the rhetorical arts, who –with the assistance of a pair of Graduate Student Instructors, the likes of which had never before been seen– was in the process of molding a most formidable brigade of rhetors (all of whom were –quite frankly– brilliant, charming, stunningly attractive, and without a doubt destined for greatness).
Separated from his place of pedagogical instruction, on the most magnificent of Thursdays, this young man was prevented from receiving the knowledge of the Master, and even from collecting the most sacred of items, designated only for those worthy enough to be under the Master’s teaching: the Study Guide.
Now this young man strove to be a resourceful fellow. He knew of magicks that allowed those inclined to communicate across great distances. Wielding such wizardry, the message put forth was this:

“heyyy guys i missed lecture on thursday. is there anyone who could meet up with me on monday so i could make a copy of the study guide? ooorrr if you happened to be the chillest of the chill, type it up? either way, i’ll….be forever grateful/owe you big time/buy you karma points/a cup of coffee/a beer (or some good sarsaparilla if you’re under 21)/offer you lavish compliments, etc.? my email’s matthewsmith@berkeley.edu. thank you sirs and madames)”

And thusly the young man called for knights to aid him on his quest. For truly, the Study Guide was only the beginning. Only after the young man had it in his hands could he be prepared to train for the true challenge: the long foretold battle with the legendary dragon known to man only under the moniker “Midterm”.