Month: November 2012

Fiona Apple’s Poignant Letter about Her Dying Dog

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Last week, singer/song-writer Fiona Apple posted a handwritten letter addressed to “a few thousand friends I have not met yet.” In the letter, Fiona Apple announced that she is postponing the South American leg of her tour because of the ill health of her beloved dog, a pit bull named Janet. Janet is a 13-year-old rescue dog suffering from Addison’s disease (as well as a tumor on her chest), and Fiona Apple, acknowledging the inevitable, wants to be there for Janet’s final breath.

Fiona Apple’s heartbreaking letter to her fans.

The letter is one of the best things I’ve read ever read on the love humans have for dogs. A must-read in its entirety, presented below:

It’s 6pm on Friday, and I’m writing to a few thousand friends I have not met yet. I’m writing to ask them to change our plans and meet a little while later.

Here’s the thing.

I have a dog, Janet, and she’s been ill for about 2 years now, as a tumor has been idling in her chest, growing ever so slowly. She’s almost 14 years old now. I got her when she was 4 months old. I was 21 then — an adult, officially — and she was my kid.

She is a pitbull, and was found in Echo Park, with a rope around her neck, and bites all over her ears and face.

She was the one the dogfighters use to puff up the confidence of the contenders.

She’s almost 14 and I’ve never seen her start a fight, or bite, or even growl, so I can understand why they chose her for that awful role. She’s a pacifist.

Janet has been the most consistent relationship of my adult life, and that is just a fact. We’ve lived in numerous houses, and joined a few makeshift families, but it’s always really been just the two of us.

She slept in bed with me, her head on the pillow, and she accepted my hysterical, tearful face into her chest, with her paws around me, every time I was heartbroken, or spirit-broken, or just lost, and as years went by, she let me take the role of her child, as I fell asleep, with her chin resting above my head.

She was under the piano when I wrote songs, barked any time I tried to record anything, and she was in the studio with me, all the time we recorded the last album.

The last time I came back from tour, she was spry as ever, and she’s used to me being gone for a few weeks, every 6 or 7 years.

She has Addison’s Disease, which makes it more dangerous for her to travel, since she needs regular injections of Cortisol, because she reacts to stress and excitement without the physiological tools which keep most of us from literally panicking to death.

Despite all this, she’s effortlessly joyful & playful, and only stopped acting like a puppy about 3 years ago. She is my best friend, and my mother, and my daughter, my benefactor, and she’s the one who taught me what love is.

I can’t come to South America. Not now. When I got back from the last leg of the US tour, there was a big, big difference.

She doesn’t even want to go for walks anymore.

I know that she’s not sad about aging or dying. Animals have a survival instinct, but a sense of mortality and vanity, they do not. That’s why they are so much more present than people.

But I know she is coming close to the time where she will stop being a dog, and start instead to be part of everything. She’ll be in the wind, and in the soil, and the snow, and in me, wherever I go.

I just can’t leave her now, please understand. If I go away again, I’m afraid she’ll die and I won’t have the honor of singing her to sleep, of escorting her out.

Sometimes it takes me 20 minutes just to decide what socks to wear to bed.

But this decision is instant.

These are the choices we make, which define us. I will not be the woman who puts her career ahead of love & friendship.

I am the woman who stays home, baking Tilapia for my dearest, oldest friend. And helps her be comfortable & comforted & safe & important.

Many of us these days, we dread the death of a loved one. It is the ugly truth of Life that keeps us feeling terrified & alone. I wish we could also appreciate the time that lies right beside the end of time. I know that I will feel the most overwhelming knowledge of her, and of her life and of my love for her, in the last moments.

I need to do my damnedest, to be there for that.

Because it will be the most beautiful, the most intense, the most enriching experience of life I’ve ever known.

When she dies.

So I am staying home, and I am listening to her snore and wheeze, and I am revelling in the swampiest, most awful breath that ever emanated from an angel. And I’m asking for your blessing.

I’ll be seeing you.

Love, 

Fiona

What a testament to Fiona Apple’s character. These are words to live by: “I will not be the woman who puts her career ahead of love & friendship.”

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(via Letters of Note)

The Hard Life of an NFL Long Shot

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Charles Siebert profiles the story of Pat Schiller, a Northern Illinois football player who is trying to make the NFL. The story gives an inside look of what it takes to make the NFL if your chances are low. Charles is Pat’s uncle, but don’t let that detail get in the way of superb reporting:

Being an undrafted free agent in the N.F.L. is an extended exercise in ego abnegation. You’re not only stripped of your college number; you’re exiled from the N.F.L.’s mandated numerical bracket for your given position. Linebackers on all final team rosters must bear a number in either the 50s or 90s. Pat, for now, was given 45. As for his fellow undrafted competitors, Max Gruder, a linebacker from the University of Pittsburgh, wore 46; Rico Council, a middle linebacker from Tennessee State, 43; and Jerrell Harris, an outside linebacker for last year’s champions, Alabama, 49. Some days in practice, Pat wore 40 and then was switched back to 45. Coaches and fellow players, meanwhile, were constantly confusing Pat with a third-year safety, Shann Schillinger, whose seniority naturally merited his getting dibs on the nickname “Schill,” thus saddling my nephew with — for obscure reasons — “Patty Melt.”

This story was, perhaps, more interesting to me because Pat Schiller was drafted by the Atlanta Falcons, my hometown football team. I think it’s worth the read.

The Internet: A Connector

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Sarah Pavis is guest-editing Kottke.org this week and asked the following question in a blog post: Do you have any cool stories about how the internet has been a people connector for you? Turns out, the answer is yes for a lot of people. Today, she published a post highlighting some of the best and most memorable responses.

Heather Armstrong:

Jason’s blog was the first I ever read and what inspired me to start my own in February 2001. I was really stupid back then (as opposed to now? SHUSH) and wrote a lot of what I thought were funny stories about my family that were in fact kind of horrific. A few months into it I wrote Jason an email asking for advice and he responded! He was like, “Hi. You’re kind of funny. But your family is totally going to find your website, you know this, right?” My mom didn’t know how to turn on a computer at the time, so I just laughed and laughed, and then they all found my website the day after I wrote a scathing diatribe against the religion my parents had raised me in. The whole family exploded.

Jason, he is wise.

Then he linked to my site. My traffic tripled. That was the first bump in visitors I ever saw. Now my website supports my family and two employees.

When I visit New York I try to stop in and say hi to Jason and Meg and their two beautiful kids.

 M. Lederman:

Around twenty years ago, I was sitting at my home desk looking at my first ever personal computer. This was a particularly sad time in my life and the thoughts running through my head were leaning towards the end of things rather than beginnings. I happened to click on a story about web communication and one click led to another and I ended up at a telnet chat site called, “Spacebar”. There were but a few people there as it was after midnight here in Texas, and one with a name of, “shena” happened to be in the same chat room as I was. I sent shena a chat request which was ignored and thought I was doing something wrong, then I sent the message, “do you want to chat or are you just lurking” and shena began a conversation with me that lasted a few hours. We made plans to chat the next day and then the day after.

Shena turned out to be a lovely girl living in Australia who chatted with me for about two years on a daily basis before one Christmas holiday when I called her to wish her a happy holiday. Now twenty years have gone by and we have grown to know each other very well, chatting nearly daily sometimes for many hours and sharing each others very different lives. I consider her my closest friend and confidant and now cannot imagine a life without her in it. We’ve shared so many important moments in each of our lives growing closer with each new communication invention from telnet chat and email, to ICQ then AIM, VOIP phone calls to Skype where we can talk and see each others reactions to our statements. If technology had given me just this without all the rest I would have been satisfied so without the Internet I would not have this lovely lady in my life.

 Atanas Entchev:

I remember exactly how and when I found kottke.org. It was Saturday, February 12, 2005. I had a Flickr meetup with several Flickr friends for the opening of The Gates in NYC’s Central Park. My Flickr friend Gene Han (whom I had known from Flickr for a while, but never met in person until then) told me about kottke.org. The rest is history.

Last week Jason wrote a post about My American Lemonade — my book about my family’s 18-year (and counting) US immigration ordeal. I am looking for a publisher, and Jason’s post has already resulted in several inquiries. Connecting people.

 Tony Williams:

My tale of people connecting starts many years ago in the nineties.

There is a six year age difference between my brother and I and I was 12 when he went away to University, first in Canberra (I was living in Sydney) and then overseas in Rochester, New York before he finally settled in Boston. We had never been close but when we both had access to email in 1991 we started a correspondence that created a real relationship that we had never had before. It got to the point where we would correspond at least once a week or so.

 On top of this I have the usual tale of finding long lost friends via social media. One friend I hadn’t seen since we both lived in Newcastle, NSW when I was 12 who now lives in Los Angeles, we hadn’t been in contact in almost forty years until I found him on LinkedIn.

I recently had coffee with a bloke I hadn’t seen in thirty nine years who found me on Facebook.

 Tracie Lee:

I read your post and i was like, OMG kottke.org was my people connector and led to my work life for the past five years. I’ve been following kottke.org since 2003, maybe? at least. I’m definitely more of a lurker. In 2007 Jason posted about a job at Serious Eats and I applied. I didn’t get the job, but through Alaina (the general manager) I was introduced to David Jacobs and John Emerson. Long story short, I started working at their company (Apperceptive) and then Six Apart, and consequently met everyone IRL (Jason, Meg, David, Adriana, Alaina, Anil) and became friends with them. All because I answered a job posting on Jason’s site! And to come full circle I’ve been working on Serious Eats for the past two years as their designer.

The internet is an amazing place for sure.

A lot more of these connecting stories here. The internet is an amazing place indeed.

On Hearing vs. Listening

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Seth Horowitz, an auditory neuroscientist and author of The Universal Sense: How Hearing Shapes the Mind, explains the difference between hearing something and actively listening:

But when you actually pay attention to something you’re listening to, whether it is your favorite song or the cat meowing at dinnertime, a separate “top-down” pathway comes into play. Here, the signals are conveyed through a dorsal pathway in your cortex, part of the brain that does more computation, which lets you actively focus on what you’re hearing and tune out sights and sounds that aren’t as immediately important.

In this case, your brain works like a set of noise-suppressing headphones, with the bottom-up pathways acting as a switch to interrupt if something more urgent — say, an airplane engine dropping through your bathroom ceiling — grabs your attention.

Hearing, in short, is easy. You and every other vertebrate that hasn’t suffered some genetic, developmental or environmental accident have been doing it for hundreds of millions of years. It’s your life line, your alarm system, your way to escape danger and pass on your genes. But listening, really listening, is hard when potential distractions are leaping into your ears every fifty-thousandth of a second — and pathways in your brain are just waiting to interrupt your focus to warn you of any potential dangers.

Listening is a skill that we’re in danger of losing in a world of digital distraction and information overload.

Are you listening?

Paul Graham on Good vs. Bad Start-up Ideas

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This is a wise essay from Paul Graham on why many start-ups fail while others succeed. The difference is that the founders who build a start-up to solve their own problems versus what they think people need:

Why do so many founders build things no one wants? Because they begin by trying to think of startup ideas. That m.o. is doubly dangerous: it doesn’t merely yield few good ideas; it yields bad ideas that sound plausible enough to fool you into working on them.

At YC we call these “made-up” or “sitcom” startup ideas. Imagine one of the characters on a TV show was starting a startup. The writers would have to invent something for it to do. But coming up with good startup ideas is hard. It’s not something you can do for the asking. So (unless they got amazingly lucky) the writers would come up with an idea that sounded plausible, but was actually bad.

For example, a social network for pet owners. It doesn’t sound obviously mistaken. Millions of people have pets. Often they care a lot about their pets and spend a lot of money on them. Surely many of these people would like a site where they could talk to other pet owners. Not all of them perhaps, but if just 2 or 3 percent were regular visitors, you could have millions of users. You could serve them targeted offers, and maybe charge for premium features.

The danger of an idea like this is that when you run it by your friends with pets, they don’t say “I would never use this.” They say “Yeah, maybe I could see using something like that.” Even when the startup launches, it will sound plausible to a lot of people. They don’t want to use it themselves, at least not right now, but they could imagine other people wanting it. Sum that reaction across the entire population, and you have zero users.

You should read the whole post here.

Jack Taylor Scores 138 Points in a Division III Basketball Game for Grinnell

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Last night, Jack Taylor, a player on the Division III basketball team for Grinnell, set an all-time NCAA scoring record with 138 points in a single game (!). Insane. How did he do it? ESPN takes a look:

For the past two decades, Grinnell coach David Arseneault has been running his system(“The System”), based on his formula (“The Formula”), which explicitly requires his team to shoot at least 94 field goals per game, 47 of which should be 3-pointers. Arseneault recruits almost exclusively sharpshooting guards, so that his players can be interchangeable when he runs them in quickfire all-five line changes every other minute. It’s a totally insane, totally thrilling way to play basketball, and it’s also an elephant and a tiger and a creepy clown shy of a straight-up circus freakshow.

So when you ask yourself, “How in the name of everything holy did some D-III kid just score 138 points?,” Arseneault’s crazy system is a good place to start. 

But alas, it’s not the whole answer. Typically, Grinnell’s offense is designed to be balanced. In Tuesday night’s 179-104 victory over Faith Baptist Bible, however, Taylor shot 108 field goals (he made 52), 71 of which were 3s (he made 27). He recorded three rebounds and zero assists, and he didn’t even shoot 50 percent from the field. The rest of his teammates combined for a grand total of 28 field goals. So not only was Grinnell running its inherently insane team system, it was obviously running it with the expressed purpose of getting Taylor enough shots to score an utterly mind-blowing number of points. 

A more cynical person would say that it’s pretty clear what Grinnell was trying to do here. It wasn’t merely trying to win a game. It was trying to set a record and get on “SportsCenter” and reap the benefits of copious Internet coverage. And guess what: It worked.

More about Jack Taylor’s accomplishment here and here.

Does Being Bored Have an Evolutionary Advantage?

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From Smithsonian Magazine, a not-so-boring piece on boredom:

There has to be a reason for boredom and why people suffer it; one theory is that boredom is the evolutionary cousin to disgust.

In Toohey’s Boredom: A Living History, the author notes that when writers as far back as Seneca talk about boredom, they often describe it was a kind of nausea or sickness. The title of famous 20th century existentialist writer Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel about existential boredom was, after all, Nausea. Even now, if someone is bored of something, they’re “sick of it” or “fed up”. So if disgust is a mechanism by which humans avoid harmful things, then boredom is an evolutionary response to harmful social situations or even their own descent into depression.

“Emotions are there to help us react to, register and regulate our response to stimulus from our environment,” he says. Boredom, therefore, can be a kind of early warning system. “We don’t usually take it as a warning – but children do, they badger you to get you out of the situation.”

And though getting out of boredom can lead to extreme measures to alleviate it, such as drug taking or an extramarital affair, it can also lead to positive change. Boredom has found champions in those who see it as a necessary element in creativity. In 2011, Manohla Dargis, New York Times film critic, offered up a defense of “boring” films, declaring that they offer the viewer the opportunity to mentally wander: “In wandering there can be revelation as you meditate, trance out, bliss out, luxuriate in your thoughts, think.”

But how humans respond to boredom may have changed dramatically in the last century. In Eastwood’s opinion, humans have become used to doing less to get more, achieving intense stimulation at the click of a mouse or touch of a screen.

The piece was published in advance of the now-annual Boring Conference, held this Sunday, November 25, 2012.

Radio Colifata, a Radio Show Run by Psychiatric Patients

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Amelia Rachel Hokule’a Borofsky writes about her visit to Radio Colifata, a radio show run by psychiatric patients in Buenos Aires. She mentions falling down a rabbit hole:

I get out of the taxi and see the paint-peeling walls of a hospital with black graffiti that reads “Don’t shut us down.” Founded in 1863 and spread out on 49 acres, the hospital stands as a testament to an older model of institutionalized psychiatric treatment. In the United States, in part due to socio-political changes and the availability of psychiatric medications, most long-term hospitals closed in the 1970s, the patients moved into underfunded community healthcare networks. El Borda reflects the old institutional model, but Buenos Aires style. Psychoanalysis, magical realism, circus, tango, and pirate radio all thrive here.

A security guard smiles and says, “Are you here for Radio Colifata?” I nod and look for an ID. He shakes his head and, without unlocking any doors, points me to the courtyard. Big leafy shade trees cover a tiny yellow building with a mosaic of colorful people. Above their heads reads: “Radio Colifata,” which means “crazy lady” in the lunfardo prison slang developed in the late 19th century so guards would not understand the prisoners. The motto of Radio Colifata, the founder Dr. Alfredo Olivera explains, is “To create bridges where there are walls.”

And an interesting note that this venture isn’t unique, but would be so in the United States:

Inspired by Radio Colifata, I looked again into the possibility of a radio station broadcasting from an inpatient psychiatric facility. I found around fifty such stations based on the Radio Colifata model in Latin America and Europe, including Nikosia in Barcelona, Spain, Les Z’entonnoirs in Roubaix, France, and Radio Rete in Italy. I asked a few directors of facilities here in the United States, but they all reiterated that funding, confidentiality, and legality would make it virtually impossible.

Fascinating.

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(hat tip: Kottke)

Alex Payne: Alone, Together, Technology

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This is a must-read personal post by Alex Payne, in which he reflects the influence of technology in his life following a divorce with his wife:

I owe my life to technology.

I first realized it in my early twenties. Everything important around me at the time, I’d found on Craigslist: my girlfriend, my job, my apartment. It was a powerful realization: I could sit down with my laptop and, in a matter of hours or days, change my world in both superficial and fundamental ways.

That was years ago. Technology specializes over time. The life I just finished packing up wasn’t courtesy of Craigslist. It wouldn’t be, now. The modern web has six sites for everything, branded and polished and localized and full of options. House from Redfin. Cars negotiated online before ever walking into a dealership. Wife from OkCupid. Wedding invitations by email. Date-night dinners booked on OpenTable. Fast and friction-free.

I spent four years telling anyone who asked how we met that OkCupid’s matching algorithms must have been off. “We were only a seventysomething percent match, with like a twelve percent chance of being enemies. Guess they need to work some bugs out!” The joke’s on me, of course. I emailed the right person at OkCupid to apologize for the years of disparagement.

I could blame technology. Maybe stitching together a durable life takes physical work, needle callouses.

I think this was the second best line in the piece:

Maybe technology made it all too easy to slide into a life I wasn’t meant to have.

And the best:

I will owe the next part of my life to technology, but I will owe it more to experience.

Amen.

Again, a must-read in its entirety.

Do People Secretly Love Black Friday?

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Why will millions of people brave long lines this Friday (Thursday evening if you’re shopping at Wal-Mart) in order to score some Black Friday deals? Do people secretly love Black Friday? I am not buying this research, summarized in The Atlantic Wire:

For all the stress of the waiting, the Black Friday deals have a physical—and positive—effect on our brain. In the age of the smartphone, retailers lure customers with mobile coupons to get cell-phone shoppers to buy at the store, rather than online. And so even if discounts will get deeper in-store or on Cyber Monday, Black Friday-specific coupons can offer an immediate sense of relaxation. All of which makes consumers happier, found a recent Claremont University study.

Measuring the oxytocin levels of a group of female shoppers after giving them a coupon,  neurologist Dr. Paul Zak found that the deal increased this hormone’s levels in some shoppers. As this hormone (not to be confused with Oxycontin) has been linked to feelings of love and trust, Dr. Zak concluded that the positive mental reaction to it has become one of the reasons we love coupons so much. We view it as a social gesture, he says. “We’re so engrained to being social creatures that even receiving a coupon online is viewed by the brain as a social experience,” Zak says. “We’re building a relationship with an online shopping site like it’s a personal relationship.” The same study also found the coupon reduced stress and increased happiness in some participants. Ergo, on Black Friday, the biggest coupon day of the year must make this hormone go wild in some shoppers’ brains, making it a very relaxing and lovely experience.

…

At certain levels, consumers enjoy arousal and challenges during the shopping process,” researcher Sang-Eun Byun told The Washington Post’s Olga Khazan. “They enjoy something that’s harder to get, and it makes them feel playful and excited.” Given that bit of science, it’s no wonder that shoppers have acted quite aggressive in recent years, as this Christian Science Monitor article notes. 

The people who choose to partake in Black Friday, will likely associate many of its aspects with positive feelings. In fact, the day doesn’t evoke angry or related emotions for many of its participants, found an study from Eastern Illinois University. The researchers observed consumer behaviors and emotions on that day and… calmness, happiness, and courteousness ranked higher than anger and anxiety. 

As for me? I am staying on the sidelines and not stepping a foot within brick-and-mortar stores.