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Viva Las Vegas!

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For the period 3/13/13 to 3/16/13, I was in Las Vegas, Nevada, for the 360Vegas Vacation. The notes below serve as my official trip report. 

WEDNESDAY

  • Left at 6:30 and drove to Detroit to catch an 11:20 a.m. flight on Spirit Airlines. Stopped for gas/food/ATM in Gaines Township.
  • At DTW, my checked bag was slightly overweight, but the counter clerk let it go. The TSA doesn’t understand that a Microsoft Surface Pro is NOT a laptop; I was subjected to a secondary screening because I didn’t remove it from my carry-on. The flight attendants were hilarious and highly professional. Uneventful flight.
  • Had a local cab driver ferry me from McCarran. He advised that many unionized cab drivers were on strike. Their “picket line” was a line of cars with roof signs and continuously blaring horns, driving up and down the strip. Annoying.
  • Put my bags in Tony’s room at Harrah’s, then we explored The Quad (looks like Red Rock on the Strip) then enjoyed keno and drinks at Bally’s. The guard there “schooled” Tony on betting based on a frequency card.
  • Stumbled across a Davidoff store at Paris Las Vegas. Bought cigars, then walked through Paris and then off to Planet Hollywood. We enjoyed Davidoff 5000s.
  • I hit $122 on one bonus round on Cash Spin at PH.
  • Jason and Tony ate at PH Spice Market Buffet … good, 4 of 5 stars. Tony made me buy because of my bonus hit. Even though he had a 2-for-1 coupon in his room.
  • Went to KGB Burger for drinks (the White Russian was fabulous).
  • Took the Las Vegas Monorail to LVH and walked thorough. I won $50. LVH looks like a property desperately awaiting its inevitable implosion.
  • I went to get my bags from Tony and check in to the hotel (they were at 99.6 percent occupancy). Didn’t attempt a $20 upgrade. Did some work before retiring. We stayed at Harrah’s for the first time, because everyone else was either at Harrah’s or Monte Carlo. All things being equal, I still prefer Wynn/Encore or Caesar’s Palace, but Harrah’s wasn’t bad. The room was in very good shape, albeit small, and the housekeeping service was efficient and unobtrusive and my housekeeper made a point, when she saw me, of thanking me for the tips I left her.
  • Tony went back to Bally’s and lost $300 in video poker.

Thursday

  • We were propositioned by hookers on the floor of Caesar’s Palace, on our way to breakfast. They were pretty hot, too. Tony’s response to the sultry question, “So what are you guys doing today?” was: “I’m headed to breakfast!” and kept walking without slowing down.
  • Enjoyed breakfast at Bacchanal Buffet at Caesar’s Place. Very well done; definite influence of Wicked Spoon on the serving methodology. Tony loved the Eggs Benedict.
  • Tony won $65 on MooLala and $30 on Cheers, while playing slots at Caesars.
  • Met up with Stephen and his wife (Denton, Dallas & Beyond podcast) for some gambling. We played the Magic Lamp machines at Caesar’s; the three of us, except Tony, kept hitting bonus rounds. Tony got mad — it was funny.
  • The four of us transitioned to Bally’s for video poker at the bar. Jason won a royal flush for $1,000. Stephen and his wife departed after an hour or so. Steve (the bartender) was awesome.
  • Celebrated the royal with a pair of Davidoff Year of the Snake cigars, while Diane the cocktail waitress served us stiff drinks. There are few things as enjoyable as sitting in the Bally’s video poker pit with a fine cigar and prompt cocktail service from Diane.
  • When Diane’s shift ended, we went back to the bar. Jason hit $200 on quad aces. Tony: “You’re the luckiest mother[expletive deleted] I know!”
  • Intended to hit PBR Rockbar for drinks and dinner for the opening of 360Vegas Vacation. Instead of going to the Miracle Mile shops, we went to Monte Carlo. We both knew better but neither of us grasped that went to the wrong casino.
  • Ate dinner at Aria buffet. Nothing special. Reminiscent of the buffet at Mirage.
  • Went to Paris for the 360Vegas bus, but couldn’t find it. Communications snafu. Missed out on Ted. Received hostile tweets from Keren, which is a sign she misses you. (She’s like PPQ, except from Illinois). I was disappointed by this because I really wanted to meet up with Ted of AccessVegas.com; not only has he been a good friend, but there were some ideas I wanted to pitch his way.
  • Retired for the evening after touring Margaritaville. Wholly uninspiring little casino.

Friday

  • Took a cab to El Cortez. Did a little gambling there, then Four Queens. Did breakfast buffet at The Fremont (not bad, but a bit scary — did the breakfast staples well, though). Bought souvenirs at FSE and Mob Museum.
  • Dropped off our stuff at my room, then went to Caesar’s Palace for drinks and cigars with Stephen at Casa Fuente. Jason enjoyed a Fuente Fuente OpusX, plus an Old Cuban and a Casa Mojito. The three of us talked a fair amount of shop, which was fun.
  • Tony went to Serendipity3 for drinks and gambling with the 360Vegas gang; Jason and Stephen gambled at Caesar’s. Went back to the Magic Lamp machines, then to Michael Jackson. I won $280 on a bonus spin at Michael Jackson.
  • Stephen, his wife and I went to Bacchanal Buffet for lunch. Lunch was just as good as breakfast.
  • Tony joined us at Harrah’s after lunch, whereupon we went to my room to record E-110.
  • After the show, we went to Monte Carlo for dinner with the 360Vegas gang at The Pub. Dinner was mediocre and the service was slow, but the beer flights were tasty.
  • Monte Carlo reserved a craps table for 360Vegas. We played $5 craps for several hours with excellent service from the Monte Carlo team. Cashed out, up $85. A good time.
  • Cab ride back to Harrah’s. Packed.

Saturday

  • Took airport shuttle to McCarran.
  • Bag was over-weight; assessed $25 penalty. Screw you, Spirit Airlines. I’ll pay extra for Delta Air Lines from now on.
  • Uneventful flight home.
  • Landed in Detroit around 7 p.m. EDT. Drive back was odd; traffic was both heavy and filled with dangerous drivers from I-275 to I-96 past Lansing. I was tailgated doing 95 on I-275 at one point.
  • Home at 10 p.m. Cats were alive and well and did no damage. Unpacked, then went to bed.

Personal

Recap: Near-Death Experience; NASCAR; Smoking Jacket; Fairness

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Whew. What a week it’s been.

  1. Yesterday provided an object lesson in defensive driving. On my way back from an errand, I was cruising at about 50 mph — same speed as the other road traffic — along Wilson Avenue between Walker and Grandville. That stretch, long and sparse, is notorious for tripping up unwary drivers; people routinely travel 70 or faster but given the icy road conditions, speeds last night were more prudent. Just past O’Brien, a teenage girl lost control of her Jeep Wrangler and started spinning out of control; she was doing 360s and she drifted into the oncoming traffic lane. Which, in this case, was me. Because she was headed toward my side of the road at an angle, I couldn’t aim for my shoulder without risking a head-on collision or at least getting clipped. So I “threaded the needle” — I swerved into her lane and back into mine before the cars behind her caught up to us. My maneuver worked, although the icy roads put me into a spin. I did at least one 360 before settling in the ditch facing the wrong direction. I felt bad for the Wrangler driver: She was clearly a newly licensed operator who had no real clue about winter driving. And to make it worse, a few passersby stopped (three of us were in the ditch) and the poor girl had to deal with three middle-aged men shouting instructions to her about how to rock her Jeep out of the ditch. Which she did. Then she stopped in her lane, oblivious to traffic, and sent one more car into the ditch and nearly made three trucks rear-end each other. By the time everything got straightened out, there were no injuries and no apparent property damage. For my part, I just hit the 4-High button on my 4WD control and drove away as if nothing had happened. A good outcome for a scary incident.
  2. Other driving-related news: While I was at the cigar shop yesterday, the big-screen TVs played the NASCAR race at Daytona. I’ve never really been a huge fan of racing — or any other spectator sport, for that matter — but the last 10 laps took my breath away. With six to go, there was an 13-car crash that caused a red flag. No one was seriously injured, although news reports later indicated that driver Michael Annett went to a local hospital for evaluation. Then, on the final turn of the final lap, there was a massive crash that tore off the entire front end of Kyle Larson’s car and threw wheels, debris and even the car’s engine block into the grandstand. Dozens of fans went to local hospitals and at least two were in critical but stable condition. I must applaud ESPN for not airing endless repeats of the crash while bystander casualties were still unknown, and I really tip my hat to the NASCAR drivers. The race winner, Tony Stewart, delivered perhaps the must humane and moving victory speech I’ve ever seen from a professional athlete — his concern wasn’t for the winning or the race but for the fans, and his team downplayed any celebration of their victory. And that same sentiment, a somber focus on the safety and well-being of the fans, dominated every single interview ESPN conducted with the drivers. If only all pro athletes had their heads screwed on as straight as NASCAR drivers.
  3. Other cigar-shop news: Last week’s cigar and cocktail evening went well. We had me, Tony, Alaric, Rob, Jim and Johnny. Good times. On Friday I picked up a tacky red blazer from Goodwill that now serves as my official smoking jacket at the cigar shop. Several of the regulars have grabbed secondhand jackets and re-purposed them as smoking jackets. It’s more fun than anything, and I’m only out the $5 I paid for the jacket.
  4. I’ve started reading a fascinating new book called Against Fairness by Stephen Asma. I’m not too far into it yet, but the premise is intriguing. He’s trying to articulate a coherent differentiation among fairness, egalitarianism and meritocracy as a critique of both Western and Chinese philosophy. The TL;DR version as I’ve seen it so far? That much of the sloganeering about what’s fair and what’s not fair are off-base, and that accepting that uniformly equal treatment is incoherent (e.g., in light of preferences for family) helps frame a more intelligent discussion about what’s fair.
  5. Speaking of reading, I picked up the final volume of the Wheel of Time series the same week it was released but I haven’t yet cracked the cover. I think I’m resisting the end of a series that I’ve known since Aaron lent me his copy of The Eye of the World in 1994.

All for now. Have a lovely week.

Personal

Psychic Energy Caps

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I snort in disbelief when people talk about aligning their chakras or feeling their chi or whatnot. I don’t believe in “metaphysics” in the sense of The Secret or in mystic fields that your soul can touch to attain inner harmony.

That said, I do think that people do draw off a fixed pool of mental stamina. Each person’s pool fills to a different level and you can only swim in the water you have.

A good metaphor might come from video games — you know the type, the sort that have a “mana” reserve that you draw from to cast spells or use special abilities. When you run out of mana, you are blocked until your pool refills.

As I was gallivanting about town yesterday evening, it occurred to me that one barrier people erect on their road to fulfillment rests in not managing their pool of mental stamina effectively.

Let’s break it down into mathematical terms to illustrate the point. Assume you have 100 energy points. You sit down and arrive at a list of life goals that include a mix of short- and long-term tasks you need to achieve them. How do you balance each task? If all your short-term tasks end up consuming 120 points, and you only have 100, do you wear yourself out? Do you give up? Do you stagger accomplishments? No two people are going to respond the same way. Often, people will not realize that they’re venturing into negative-energy territory and instead get part-way through an initiative and then give up from exhaustion.

Many people survey the book of work they’d have to accomplish to live their ideal life and, adjudging it too difficult a read, set it aside and content themselves with just getting by.

You have to master your own psychology. If you know that you have 50 free points, then spend 40. Spend them on one major project. Take your various projects and attack them in parallel, not in series. Instead of spreading yourself too thin on a bunch of things, take one big thing at a time and break that thing into easily managed parts. Don’t commit all your resources lest you find yourself out of energy at the wrong time and thereby risk failure or loss of motivation.

Many self-help experts suggest that goal-setting is the key to success. Although I agree with this sentiment, I don’t think it goes far enough. Not only must you set goals, but you must set an execution schedule that lives in harmony with the available energy you have at your disposal.

Remember — lots of stuff sips from that pool. Relationship drama? Workplace angst? Family discord? Self-loathing? Too little sleep? Poor nutrition? Life leaches your supply of mental energy, sometimes faster than you can re-fill it.

Thus: Set goals that are achievable not just in an objective sense, but also in light of  your own life situation and your own psychology. Don’t bring yourself to the point of mental exhaustion, when all the efforts you’ve expended crash and you risk backsliding or retreating into despair.

 

Personal

Sundry Tidbits in the Life of Jason

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A handful of updates:

  • The social scene’s been a bit more active lately. On Friday I had drinks with the Irritable Bastard and V-Dub. Last week, drinks with Jared. The weekend before last, dinner in Lansing with Tony and Jen. Last Friday, we had our monthly writer’s meeting at Brittany’s house. And this week we’ve got a Cigar and Cocktail Evening on the books.
  • Stopped into Moby’s Dive Shop yesterday to inquire about additional diving certifications in the SSI world. A very nice young man introduced that shop’s training system to me. Looks interesting, and less expensive than PADI-style certification. Will have to keep advancing as the weather warms this spring.
  • I’m pretty sure that I’ve effectively geared up for the spring/summer/fall outdoor season. I’m ready to kayak and I’ve got everything in order (except for perishables) for hiking trips. Still need a bike, but I’ve got some time. Perhaps Abbi can give me some pointers on what to get.
  • Lent is upon us once again; its arrival — punctuated by the abdication of Pope Benedict XVI — marks a period of introspection and renewal in the life of the Church. I attended an Ash Wednesday prayer service at the hospital with a few of my co-workers. Over the last few days, I’ve read quite a bit about Benedict’s departure. It seems like the devout Catholic journalists (George Weigel, Kathryn Jean Lopez) seem to get it. Others clearly don’t — e.g., the scribe at FireDogLake who announced that it’s time for an LGBT-friendly pontiff. It never ceases to amaze me just how willing some people are to expound at length on subjects far outside their scope of competence.
  • Turns out that the skeleton found under a parking lot in England really is King Richard III. The last Plantagenet monarch — and the last English king to die on the battlefield — Richard’s reign marks a turning point in the life of Western Europe. What if he had beaten the Tudors? We might have been spared the schism under Henry VIII. The what-if scenarios fascinate. Hard to believe just how central a single person can be to the historical arc of a people or even a civilization.
  • More and more people are making comments about the length of my hair. My stock response: Yes, it’s getting longer. Yes, there’s a method to the madness. Yes, I’m going to look like a homeless dude for a while. Deal.
  • I’ve finished transitioning to an all-Windows technology infrastructure. I have a Win8 desktop, a Win8 laptop, a Surface Pro and a Windows Phone 8. Files are consolidated on SkyDrive and music harmonized through Xbox Music and notes standardized in OneNote. So far, so good. It feels like I’m actually part of a coherent tech ecosystem now instead of cobbling things together among different services with spit and twine.
  • I kicked up the temperature in my residence from 62F to 64F. Makes a huge difference — especially in my bedroom. A mere 2 degrees doesn’t sound like much, but means the difference between being cold at night and being deliciously toasty.
  • Obama’s State of the Union speech this week felt more like an extension of the vapid 2012 campaign than a serious statement about public policy. Obama rehashed a laundry list of left-wing talking points, many of which have no real foundation in logic. The idea, for example, that America doesn’t have a spending problem looks like willful blindness. I can only hope the House Republicans hold the line, and that the GOP gets its act together in time for the midterm elections.
  • Over the last few months I’ve felt increasingly tired and unfocused throughout the day. After a considerable amount of research and reflection, I think the problem is easily correctible: I just need to start eating breakfast and stop mainlining coffee after I hit the office. My habit lately has been to skip breakfast, drink a pot of coffee, eat a large lunch then go home to a light dinner. But the food I eat, despite falling below my calorie counts, is more on the sugary side, so I get trapped in a cycle of stimulation and crash. I’m going to try evening things out by eating a reasonable breakfast, reducing my caffeine intake and watching the sugars.
  • Note to Michigan drivers: If you want to drive 20 mph below the speed limit because the roads have a snowflake on them, fine. When you get a caravan of vehicles tailgating you because of your irrationally slow speed, pull the fuck over and let us pass. </rant>
  • On the bright side, the tree in our front yard — a mighty ash that the city forester decided needed to die — ended up chopped into bits and stored in the garage. It’s now seasoned to the point that it makes kick-ass firewood. There’s something satisfying, in a primal sense, in sitting by a roaring wood fire. Good for the soul. Especially when you’ve got some Bach playing and a glass of wine to keep you company.

Ciao.

Personal, Philosophy

Inching Toward Cynicism

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Show me somebody who is always smiling, always cheerful, always optimistic, and I will show you somebody who hasn’t the faintest idea what the heck is really going on.”  — Mike Royko

Cynicism gets a rough knock these days — it seems trendy to dismiss as merely sarcastic world-weariness the disposition to express the truth without varnish. Read up on quotes about cynicism; overwhelmingly, the aphorists seem opposed to it. Apparently everyone wants to seem positive, as if mere positivity were some sort of enlightened state of consciousness that allows its adherents to pierce the dark mist of bad attitude and thereby chart a pothole-free course to happiness, love and success.

Yet dismissing cynicism out-of-hand may be more irony than prudence. Royko probably captured it best: Relentless optimism in the face of experience isn’t virtue, it’s ignorance. Of course, a “been there, done that, doesn’t work” demeanor — the core of caricatured cynicism — may be taken to extremes. To bitterness, even. Such should be avoided. Nevertheless, an authentic cynicism that views the world as it is, without the artificial flavor of either saccharine or bitters, proves more helpful than harmful.

Cynicism, I think, is experience with (and acknowledgement of) the negative. When you’re working on a project that consistently fails, for example, merely being positive isn’t going to fix the problem. When the problem’s roots draw nourishment from politics, or other barriers sourced from human behavior, the temptation to overlook those barriers and instead find some external problem that can be wished away with magically happy thoughts isn’t going to affect the real world.

Cheerleaders for positivity frequently overlook human psychology as a contributor to failure or conflict. The optimist sees nothing but good intentions and assumes that problems relate to poor communication. Never is the possibility acknowledged that the public pronouncements and private motivations of others may not be in sync. Never is the possibility acknowledged that pre-rational conflicts in long-term goals or ethical paradigms affect people’s behavior. Never is the possibility acknowledged that things that are hard may well prove not worth doing.

Instead, we must always smile, be cheerful and remain optimistic. Even when experience screams for an alternate course.

I’m not a negative person by disposition, but when I see the same people making the same mistakes and pretending that happy thoughts will conquer all, then … I’m left to doubt whether they really understand what the heck is really going on.

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The Quantified Self: January’s Results

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Lots of people put their stock in the “quantified self” phenomenon — which, in brief, is the idea that tracking and analyzing various personal measures helps achieve goals.

In late December I developed a template in OneNote that serves as a daily journal. One sheet, one day, no other apps or spreadsheets or tracking tools. The sheet contains a one-sentence, high-level goal for the day, then it includes my unified calendar, a list of tasks, a diet log, an exercise log, a record of financial activity, a “health metrics” section and a place for recording accomplishments or reflections. Each type of information has a specific OneNote tag formatted with a regular comma-delimited pattern; OneNote 2013 lets you pull together a summary page that includes all tags, so I can just cut-and-paste tag sections into Excel for quick-and-easy trend analysis. Pivot tables are your friend.

Upside: Between a Windows 8 desktop, a Windows 8 laptop, a Windows Phone 8, and OneNote for my Android tablet — I can keep the daily list updated from any screen, no problem.

I’ve been supremely diligent throughout January of tracking this information. Some of it will fall into the “interesting but not all that useful” category — e.g., task histories. Others prove much more useful; the appointment section lets me make free-form notes under each tagged calendar item, making it easier to find information later.

The five parts that have proven most illuminating are the daily records for calories, exercise, spending, weight and blood pressure. Here’s what I’ve learned so far:

  • I lost exactly 10 lbs. in the month. Woohoo.
  • I consumed roughly 61,138 calories. Of these, 9.6 percent were enjoyed at breakfast, 41 percent at lunch, 28.4 percent at dinner and 11.8 percent as snacks. Alas, a whopping 9.2 percent of January’s calories came from adult beverages.
  • It appears that 3,100 daily calories marks my “break even” rate — more than that, and I pork up; less than that, and I slim down. This number is consistent with online calculators.
  • My average daily calorie count was 1,972, with a high of 3,215 and a low of 960. Population standard deviation of 609.
  • As I spent more time in the month performing aerobic exercise, my blood pressure — especially the systolic value — improved. I have shifted from consistently measuring as low pre-hypertensive to consistently measuring in the high normal category.
  • Between 12:01 a.m. on January 1 and 11:59 p.m. on January 31, I spent about $80 less than I earned. However, the month was unusual — I had extra income but paid down my credit card and replaced a few big-ticket things, so January’s pattern feels unusual.
  • My spending fell along somewhat surprising categories. I shelled out less on dining out than I would have guessed, but I did incur a whopping $250 just at the gas pump (thank you, GMC Jimmy 4×4). For February, I’m refining my category list, whittling it down to just 12 different buckets of spending.

So. I’m going to keep up with the daily tracking. I’ve found it to be a useful mechanism for keeping front-and-center the stuff I need to do and to prod forethought about my patterns of consumption.

Cuz hey — 10 lbs. in a month isn’t anything to sneeze at.

Personal

The Quantified Self: January's Results

4 Comments

Lots of people put their stock in the “quantified self” phenomenon — which, in brief, is the idea that tracking and analyzing various personal measures helps achieve goals.
In late December I developed a template in OneNote that serves as a daily journal. One sheet, one day, no other apps or spreadsheets or tracking tools. The sheet contains a one-sentence, high-level goal for the day, then it includes my unified calendar, a list of tasks, a diet log, an exercise log, a record of financial activity, a “health metrics” section and a place for recording accomplishments or reflections. Each type of information has a specific OneNote tag formatted with a regular comma-delimited pattern; OneNote 2013 lets you pull together a summary page that includes all tags, so I can just cut-and-paste tag sections into Excel for quick-and-easy trend analysis. Pivot tables are your friend.
Upside: Between a Windows 8 desktop, a Windows 8 laptop, a Windows Phone 8, and OneNote for my Android tablet — I can keep the daily list updated from any screen, no problem.
I’ve been supremely diligent throughout January of tracking this information. Some of it will fall into the “interesting but not all that useful” category — e.g., task histories. Others prove much more useful; the appointment section lets me make free-form notes under each tagged calendar item, making it easier to find information later.
The five parts that have proven most illuminating are the daily records for calories, exercise, spending, weight and blood pressure. Here’s what I’ve learned so far:

  • I lost exactly 10 lbs. in the month. Woohoo.
  • I consumed roughly 61,138 calories. Of these, 9.6 percent were enjoyed at breakfast, 41 percent at lunch, 28.4 percent at dinner and 11.8 percent as snacks. Alas, a whopping 9.2 percent of January’s calories came from adult beverages.
  • It appears that 3,100 daily calories marks my “break even” rate — more than that, and I pork up; less than that, and I slim down. This number is consistent with online calculators.
  • My average daily calorie count was 1,972, with a high of 3,215 and a low of 960. Population standard deviation of 609.
  • As I spent more time in the month performing aerobic exercise, my blood pressure — especially the systolic value — improved. I have shifted from consistently measuring as low pre-hypertensive to consistently measuring in the high normal category.
  • Between 12:01 a.m. on January 1 and 11:59 p.m. on January 31, I spent about $80 less than I earned. However, the month was unusual — I had extra income but paid down my credit card and replaced a few big-ticket things, so January’s pattern feels unusual.
  • My spending fell along somewhat surprising categories. I shelled out less on dining out than I would have guessed, but I did incur a whopping $250 just at the gas pump (thank you, GMC Jimmy 4×4). For February, I’m refining my category list, whittling it down to just 12 different buckets of spending.

So. I’m going to keep up with the daily tracking. I’ve found it to be a useful mechanism for keeping front-and-center the stuff I need to do and to prod forethought about my patterns of consumption.
Cuz hey — 10 lbs. in a month isn’t anything to sneeze at.

Personal

Of Bourbon, Blizzards and the Underwear Gnome

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The howl and rattle of the wind through my dining-room storm window, just moments ago, heralded the return of arctic air to Grand Rapids. The approaching winter storm provides a perfect minor-key counterpoint to my mood of late. Last week, Michigan enjoyed single-digit temps; this week, we pushed into the upper 60s; in the next few days, we’re predicted to sink into the low teens with subzero wind chills. Meanwhile, it seems I’ve been the poster child for whiskey-induced introspection. Fitting, I think. In winter’s heart, both blizzards and brooding go better with bourbon.

It’s been a rough week at the office. Rough enough, that the storm-window barometer jarred me from exploring memories I hadn’t touched in quite some time. Memories of my sophomore year of high school, actually, when it felt like everything sucked and the worst moment of the week was bedtime on Sunday night because I knew I had a full five days of hell ahead and I’d give anything to skip to 2:35 on Friday afternoon. I know — in a mental sense, anyway — that my loathing of West Catholic stems merely from the echo of adolescent angst; I fit in maybe 85 percent of the way with my peers, but that missing 15 percent slices deepest when you’re a teenager with no sense of perspective. I concede that my high-school years weren’t really all that bad. Not really. But much distance lies between today’s considered judgment and yesterday’s painful memories.

I remember laying in bed as a 15-year-old and fantasizing what my life would be like when I was 30. Would I be married? Would I have kids and a nice house? Would I have earned a DVM or Ph.D? Would I be an Army officer or a business tycoon or an elected official? I just assumed, like a protean Underwear Gnome, that something undefined but surely magical would transpire between those lonely teenage nights and my inevitably glorious future — some Happily Ever After that would stitch all the pieces together into an elegant tapestry of contented prosperity.

Didn’t. Happen.

But that’s not to say that as a 36-year-old, I’m full of rage over broken expectations. I’m not. It’s taken a while, but the intimate relationships I enjoyed in my early-to-mid 20s with my dear friends Envy, Sloth, Gluttony, Lust, Greed, Wrath and Pride provided an experiential framework that, recently, has proven astonishingly useful in my everyday life in the fullest Johnny Cash sense of the idea. Plus, I’ve got enough miles under my belt that the inner serenity I fought to cultivate just a few years ago comes easier now — to the point that I chuckle at the irony of fighting for serenity, even though I really did struggle with it. Experience puts meat on the bones of theory. Adversity makes for the richest experience. Thus, self-inflicted adversity in youth yields early-onset wisdom, through which prism one can say, “Been there, done that, it’s going to be OK.”

Still.

My friend Duane used to laugh at me because during our heyday playing World of Warcraft, I’d roll a dozen low-level characters and couldn’t ever commit to leveling one up. I’d travel a certain distance down the character’s path, then select a new one because I thought it might be better in some vague and usually inaccurate way. Years of casual playing, and the highest I ever got was a Level 45 Undead warlock named Elianna.

Duane had a larger point, methinks, expressed in his usual gentle and roundabout way: The only path that really matters is the one you’re on, so quit worrying about the trail over the next ridge. Just keep marching in your own boots.

Which brings me to my current introspection. I suppose it reduces to a single question: Which path provides the surest footing on the journey to my 70th birthday and the ultimate moment of truth, when I look in the mirror on a September morning in 2046 and ask myself if I have any regrets?

I know that having fairly unconstrained options as a 30-something is a luxury few enjoy. Still, as I survey my banquet of existential riches I’m left woefully undecided, paralyzed by choice. I have my bucket list and my annual goals list and whatnot. It’s not the long-term or even medium-term stuff that’s vexing. Its the short-term path. It’s tomorrow and next month, not next year or next decade.

You can fix one big problem in your life at a time, or three little ones. Try more, and you’ll fail; the enormousness of the challenge overwhelms. So you have to decide which problems you’ll tolerate and which you won’t while you rank-order your solution set. It’s like juggling with flaming tennis balls. If you have five balls and one is on fire, you can manage the one. You might even be able to manage two. When all the balls are on fire, though, you’ll end up with singed fingertips.

So which short-term problems to tackle first? Knowing, as it happens, that the decision you make today will shift your path to September 2046 in ways yet to be revealed?

Thank God for bourbon and blizzards.

Personal

Ostriches, Preppers — And Those in the Middle

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A simple Web search yesterday yielded a rabbit-hole diversion that lasted nearly three hours. The subject? Essential hiking gear. The detour? The Prepper subculture.

OK, so right off — I have no problems with Preppers. Although some of them sound like they fear the Black Helicopters, many are simply establishing a Plan B for when the fecal material hits the rotating blades. The latter group seems sensible enough; their concern isn’t an alien invasion or a fascist takeover of “Amerika” but rather medium-term survival in case of a natural disaster. Like, say, the 19th coming of Hurricane Katrina (or Sandy, or Andrew, or …).

The Preppers differ markedly from many of my friends, who may well be considered Ostriches. Not only have they prepared not a whit for a natural disaster, they haven’t even prepared for the inconvenience of getting a flat tire on a rural road in the middle of a Michigan winter. Heaven forfend if they got in trouble in a cellular dead zone; we may not find them until the blowflies lead us to their bloated corpses a few days after the spring thaw.

Interesting ideas, those Preppers advocate.

From the “interesting in academic sense but I’m not going there” file:

  • You should carry a firearm at all times and (importantly) know how to use it. As in aiming, firing with intent and field cleaning. Pistols are OK (and Glocks, FTW) but a shotgun is even better and a semi-auto hunting rifle is best.
  • You should know how to trap animals and field-dress a deer or small woodland creature.
  • You need detailed evacuation plans — preferably to your own camoflaged hideout in the mountains.
  • You should know how to survive a nuclear, chemical or biological attack.

From the “abundance of caution that everyone ought to follow” file:

  • You should know basic bushcraft — how to erect an emergency wilderness shelter, how to purify water in the backcountry, how to start a rescue fire, how to navigate with a map and compass, how to identify safe foods.
  • You should maintain a “bug-out bag” to keep you safe and healthy for a minimum of 72 hours in case disaster strikes and you need to evacuate your home on little or no notice. Disaster in this sense is usually natural — hurricanes, tornadoes, tsunamis — but could include mass civil disobedience (riots) or terrorism. The BOB includes purified water, food, changes of clothes, and essential survival gear like a hunting knife, fire starters, a first-aid kit, a tent or tarp, a water purification system, a cooking system, flashlights, a radio, a signal whistle, etc.
  • You should maintain a “get-home bag” of the stuff you’d need to get back to home base if you run into trouble. Note that trouble could be something as simple as driving off the road along a sparsely traveled highway. If it’s 15 F and blowing hard during January in Michigan — as it happens to be doing as of this writing — then getting caught unprepared could very well result in injury or death. So a basic GHB includes a poncho, emergency blanket (the mylar kind), fire-starting tools, a basic first-aid kit, a flashlight, a Swiss Army knife, etc.
  • Master the mantra: “Two is one and one is none.” Meaning, if you rely on one thing for survival, it’s as if you have nothing at all. That’s why you shouldn’t just carry a lighter, but also matches or a flint-and-tinder for starting a fire; if your lighter breaks or you drop your matches into the river, then without a backup all you have left is hypothermia.

I took stock of my hiking gear and segregated some redundant material to fashion my own GHB. If I need a BOB, I’ll just shove my hiking gear into my backpack and I’m good to go — my hiking hit was developed for week-long backcountry excursions, so it’s more than adequate for a 72-hour emergency.

My GHB, stored in a rugged Marmot waist pack and kept in my Jimmy, includes:

  • A first-aid kit with adhesive bandages, sterile pads, a short roll of gauze, triple-antibiotic ointment, ibuprofen, alcohol wipes and eye drops.
  • A sanitation kit including alchohol-based degermer and a travel pack of tissue.
  • A Swiss Army knife and a small, inexpensive pliers-based multitool.
  • A “tactical flashlight” — LED-based and >50 lumens. With two spare battery changes.
  • A small spiral notepad and mechanical pencil.
  • Eight separate Katadyn Micropur tablets (chlorine dioxide) for purification of up to 8L of additional water.
  • A coil of 30′ of paracord and a 10′ coil of thin-gauge brass wire.
  • A purse-sized emergency sewing kit with thread, needles and pins.
  • Shelter, in the form of a light-duty hooded rain poncho and a 5’x6′ emergency blanket.
  • Firestarting gear including a Bic lighter, waterproofed matches, fluffed cotton for tinder and a tea-lamp candle.
  • A decent hiking compass and field whistle with small signal mirror.
  • A bandana and a pair of padded, fingerless work gloves.
  • Clipped to the pack’s strap, a carabiner with an industrial-grade 1L water bottle attached.
  • Passed through the strap, a 6-inch, fixed-blade Gerber knife with locking sheath.

This kit, with all items, weighs only a few pounds and clips securely around the waist with adjustable webbing for ease of transport. I put it on last night to see how it felt and it seemed just fine — not a problem to carry if I needed to hike 10 miles to civilization.

Besides my GHB, I always have on my person my cell phone and almost always, my 5-Watt handheld ham radio.

I don’t consider myself a Prepper in the lifestyle sense of the term. Nor am I an Ostrich. Rather, I see myself as someone who’s taken basic precaution to minimize my relative risk in case I happen to find myself in a survival situation.

Natural disasters would be less stressful if others took similar steps. Even in Michigan, where hurricanes and earthquakes are non-existent and recovery from tornadoes takes hours, not months, it pays to be ready. An ounce of prevention, and all that.

Personal, Philosophy

Wisdom, Properly Understood

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Someone who’s “book smart” might be able to prattle off many different facts and ideas about, say, theoretical physics — but remain utterly incapable of plugging in his DVR. A person who can single-handedly repair giant marine diesel engines may nevertheless not know the difference between a Republican and a Democrat. And we’ve all met folks who advance because of their charm, not their competence.

Aristotle taught that wisdom falls into two categories — theoretical wisdom and practical wisdom. The former addresses principles and facts and abstract knowledge; the latter real-world techniques for getting things done. Neither is better than the other — the world needs both. A person who excels at one isn’t better or worse than someone who excels at the other.

Modern psychologists suggest another distinction: The idea of emotional intelligence. Someone with a high EI knows how to work with people to achieve a goal even if he lacks both theoretical knowledge and practical good-sense. Which, I guess, explains Congress.

The world’s a funny place. When you take the three three major realms of wisdom — book smarts, street smarts, people smarts — and push them against each other, it’s tempting to rank-order them. Usually, this sequence is self-referential: You tend to either over-value what you have, or over-value what you think you lack and therefore feel bad about your perceived lack of self-worth.

A perfect person might have high scores in all three categories. No one’s perfect, though — not even me. (Hard to believe, I know.) Instead we all have varying skill levels in each category. Each person’s mix tells the story of who he is — and this story is neither good nor bad. Only a jackass thinks himself better than someone else because he’s got more book smarts or better practical skills or is more suave in a social setting.

The world needs a mix of wisdom levels. And people need to be pared with people who fall at different wisdom levels. The whole is stronger than its parts, so a couple or a group that offers different levels of wisdom is stronger than a group that consists of two or more of the same thing.

Wisdom seeks its compliment, not its mirror image.