Scientific Progress Goes "Boink"

how i write and record my songs

2012-01-25T01:06:00.000-07:00

i write songs as simply as i can because of three fundamental problems: 1) i can barely remember how to play my own songs 2) i basically know like five chords 3) i can't remember lyrics, my own or anyone else's. this is good because i end up writing the chords and lyrics really fast and then have a lot of time to focus on melody which is the thing i like the most about pop rock music anyway. i think the reason i remember melody is because it is so tied to the tone or feel of a song which is the only thing that really stays with me.

ugh. everything i just said are all half-truths. there are plenty of songs for which the lyrics are everything or the five seconds of gospel organ make the entire song. so melody/tone isn't everything. its hard not to be a revisionist in a post like this because the process itself makes almost zero sense. i've heard a million analogies regarding songwriting by professional songwriters and they are all differently ridiculous. i think johnny reznik from the goo goo dolls once said in an interview that he would write song ideas on post-its and then follow up with them up later. if i did that i would lose the post-its in seconds so i never do that. the most pretentious thing i have ever heard was when i saw billy joel play live once and he described song-writing as being analagous to "giving birth." i've never given birth, but i've seen my daughter being born and i've helped deliver births in school. i don't think he knows what its like to have a human rip out of the vagina he doesn't have. but that's neither here nor there.

back to songwriting: i just think about song ideas, try and remember them, eventually forget them, semi-recover them randomly and if i'm holding a guitar, capture some element. but in the end the product itself is really just whatever i'm able to catch and never the entirety of the initial idea. its like being in one of those old school game shows where they pump dollar bills and wind into a tube and you jump around inside and you get to keep what you catch. whatever i catch ends up in the lyrics and whatever i miss is on the floor and that's basically it.

so i write these chords, hum a melody over them, sing the words that make sense to me at the time or somehow catch my ear (it could just be one part of one verse or a main line of a chorus) and then build the song around that. so as you can imagine, there's a lot of changes from how i initially forecasted the final product. this process reminds me of an interview with rob mcelhenney, lead actor and show runner of the tv show 'it's always sunny in philadelphia' who said that when he wrote the pilot he meant for it to be set in LA as a single camera sitcom about struggling actors. FX picked up the series but said it was now going to be set in a philly bar. and not about struggling actors. and not single camera. He just said, "ok." I don't blame the guy one single bit. He ended up making a good product even though it probably smarted at first to have to kowtow to some know-nothing media flunkie who was thinking about how he could weave a Coors Light sponsorship into the show. he just worked with whatever bizarrely manhandled clay he had in front of him and did great.

ok well that's the songwriting process. now on to the recording. i don't usually use a mic. i turn on garageband, put on headphones, and sing the song really quietly while recording the guitar acoustically straight into the computer. this prevents popping p's which, if you've ever listened to amateur recordings of myself or others, can make you crazy. if i'm feeling really fancy i'll use the panty-hose pop filter i made in school and sing through my pc richards microphone. i do a couple of takes, use the ones where i don't get mad and cuss, fuck up the chords or both. then i do some adjustments with regard to instrumental vs. vocal balance and then put it on this website and that's it.

now, i don't want to give the impression that i think i'm some sort of indie-tastic recording artist. the truth is that i'm lazy with regard to recording and production and am unable to sing while anyone except the cat or my daughter are in the house (which means i have to really rush sometimes which frequently leads to extremely diminished returns). if i had someone produce my music in a way that was disciplined in terms of helping structure arrangement, instrumentation, punch-ins, harmonies, re-writes etc., i'd probably jump at the opportunity. but then i'd have to pay them so that would never happen. however, if you do get this far into this post and like to produce simple songs for free in your limited spare time, send me an email because we might have a low-yield non-profit opportunity on our hands.

Indie film: frequently enjoyable. Indie film industry people: frequently painful.

2012-01-23T16:52:00.000-07:00

I just got back from seeing a movie called Red Hook Summer directed by Spike Lee. The film is showing in Park City, UT at this year's Sundance Film Festival. While I am not a fan of Spike Lee films in general and had low expectations, I was pleasantly surprised. However, despite a good film, I left with a bad taste in my mouth. What irked me wasn't on screen and was completely unanticipated; it was the attitudes of people who participate in the industry of independent film themselves.

I love movies but I am not a huge fan of festivals. The crowds annoy me, the entitlement that people have with regard to attending exclusive screenings or exclusive after-parties or ultra-exclusive after-after-parties make me ill. As a result, I'm in a bind because that's where you have go to see some great new stuff that may never make it even to DVD. While on the bus this morning I was listening to all sorts of independent film-goers in expensive faux winter-wear discussing their relationships to certain studios, actors, and directors in a way that reeked of superiority. While I think this festival was conceived as a way for regular people and interested industry folk to come together and enjoy cutting-edge film, it seems to have transformed into an opportunity to inflate one's ego and/or to see and be seen. For example, while I don't know Snookie's tastes in film, I have a feeling she's not here to take in the next generation of filmmakers when she was spotted stumbling out of a Park City bar last night. Similarly, I think Lil Jon dragging a snowboard on Main Street in Park City is unlikely to be a sign of his burning desire to snowboard while a world famous film festival just happened to be going on. Even more irritating is that I have a feeling that both of these people likely had countless unused tickets to films that many non-celebrity people had to wait overnight in the cold and cross their fingers to get.

However, despite the bureaucracy of ticket-acquisition inherent to film festivals, I was able to get a ticket to one of the more talked-about films of the festival as noted above due to my friends getting up ultra-early and standing in line. In the theater my frustration with the film industry went to a whole new level because while I thought my irritation was only with hangers-on and wanna-be hangers-on, I found myself squarely annoyed by someone who I respect as an artist: Spike Lee. When questioned during the Question-and-Answer portion of Red Hook Summer the man took a tone that was so irritable that if my eyes could roll any further into my skull I would look undead. When asked reasonable questions about writing choices, the NYU Professor gave off a hostility that I found not only confusing and off-putting in light of him being an artist but also an educator. After discussing the issue with friends in attendance, apparently Herr Professor had been harangued for perceived weaknesses in the film during last night's premiere and perhaps was still sore this morning. While I can imagine that experience to be tough to swallow for a novice, I thought that such a veteran cinematic provacateur would have the thick skin to take it with grace. Either way, his responses clearly intimidated the audience into essentially lobbing softball compliments clumsily molded into question-form in order to make him feel better and also to tell their friends that they talked to a famous director.

Despite these frustrations, catching this film was really fun. I think this festival, at least while you are in a theater and everyone is quiet and celluloid is rolling, does great things to bring marginalized art to the public. If we could tone down the celebrity egoism, get the hip film wannabes to chill, and the diva directors to take it down a notch, this festival might achieve what I imagine was its initial intention: providing a venue to present new art to people who like edgy material all set in a beautiful location.

Why are we so desperate for a (seemingly) squeaky-clean President?

2012-01-19T23:19:00.002-07:00

I'll never understand the desperation to elect a squeaky-clean Presidential candidate. I find entirely wholesome people kind of creepy, actually. If someone seems absolutely flawless, I start thinking that they have done something so deeply dark and bizarre (i.e., having a third or fourth secret family, being the recipient of a face transplant, etc.) that they are already so far ahead of the curve in the way of cover-up such that I should be afraid of what must be their incredible skills at deception. So skeptical am I of people that when I hear about Newt Gingrich's confusing marital arrangements or Mitt Romney's massive fortune, I am hardly rattled. These issues seem like small potatoes to me. Also, I don't think those elements of their histories really matter in terms of policy. Consider past presidents with questionable character traits. Both terms of President George W. Bush were dominated by multiple wars. These were disastrous enterprises that were essentially unrelated to his wealth or history of drug and alcohol abuse. President Clinton's second term was marred by sexual improprieties that were completely divorced from his policy and yet he was nearly impeached.

In general I feel sorry for Presidential candidates. It seems like an impossible battle. We want someone who is successful like Romney yet when we find that he has made so much money that he can make ten thousand dollar bets, we are disgusted. He gets guff because the perception is that his wealth precludes him from relating to the middle class. Of course he can't relate to the middle class; he is one of the wealthiest presidential candidates in the history of this country. I am sure he has made plenty of multi-thousand dollar bets. He could probably wipe his ass with ten thousand dollars and not think twice, let alone bet with it. The fact that Gingrich has been divorced should make him more of a regular guy than ever; fifty percent of American marriages end in divorce. In fact, I find his wish for an open marriage that included his mistress so weirdly intriguing that this little peccadillo makes me actually want to know more about him. Otherwise he would just be ringing the real death knell of presidential candidates: being a smart and yet totally uninteresting guy (i.e., a John Kerry or an Al Gore).

As far as my own politics, I have always voted Democrat mainly because of social issues: I'm a pro-choice Indian-American atheist who thinks people should be able to marry whomever they want. Barack Obama's voting record was closely aligned with my positions, so I voted for him. However, I don't think I can relate to the guy. He was born in Hawaii, is multiracial, was Editor of the Harvard Law Review and was a Professor at University of Chicago. Regardless, I don't see how our personal historical differences make any actual differences in how his presidency has played out. Even if some dirt about him comes out, unless its illegal I don't care.

Everyone has had successes and failures. Everyone has peculiarities. Why do we expect anything different from our candidates for Presidency if these qualities don't relate to actual policy? Herein lies the impossibility of being genuine as a candidate; you have to somehow be more successful than your constituents to earn respect and yet also be the same as them to seem "relate-able." The sad truth is that I don't think I could relate to anyone who would want this job in the first place, so their quirky personal histories, while entertaining, are totally irrelevant to me. Except I liked that Clinton played the saxophone and even did so on The Arsenio Hall Show. That was really cool to me and won me over. Then again, I was eleven years old.

How I fell in love with my wife

2012-01-19T00:54:00.000-07:00

I can’t remember when Kira and I metbecause I can’t remember a time when we didn’t know each other. We bothattended the same school since pre-Kindergarten so we officially metat age four or five. However, it wasn't until the tenth grade that I knew therewas a chemistry between us as we would smile wry smiles at each other whenour science teacher would say something unintentionally hilarious. Our sharedsense of humor showed me that we had an unusual bond which eventually led to usdating early in our senior year of high school.

In just that short sliver of time atthe end of high school I knew I was in love with her. I believe that one is inlove when that other person makes you feel comfortable enough with yourself to be exactly who you are. Furthermore, I think that only when we canbehave the way we want to without shame or doubt, we can truly love ourselves.In other words, one is in love with someone when that person allows you tofully love yourself.

Justas I find it difficult to determine when our friendship changed into romance, Istruggle to identify when romance slipped into love. However, there was aclassic high school scenario during which I think that transition took place. In high school I loveddriving by myself in my car because I could sing along to my favorite songs andfantasize about being that performer without having to worry about thejudgments of others. However, whenever I would drive with someone in thepassenger seat I could barely squeak out a note for fear of sounding off-pitchor just plain annoying. For reasons I could never completely understand, Ihave always felt comfortable enough to sing in my full voice loudly around her.Perhaps it’s the honesty and openness with which she approaches the world thatmade me feel this way. Maybe it’s the non-judgmental attitude that she exudes that allowed me to feel free to sing without fear. Whateverthe quality, I knew that Kira allowed me to do and feel and be the person Iwanted to be. I knew I was falling in love.

In the same way that I was able tosing without fear back in high school, today I feel just as empowered to speakmy mind, to hold an unusual opinion, or strive for things just outside my grasp. She remains an inexhaustible source of support and aconstant endorser of even my most ridiculous ambitions.

Some women are kind. Some women are brave. Some womenare intrepid. Kira is all of these things by her very nature. These elements, combined with that impossible-to-define-quality she possesses that brings out the real me, have kept me helplessly and hopelessly in love with her. Every day we spend together, no matter how quiet and small ourexperience may seem to others, I feel like I am singing at the top of my lungs.

#7 - "i won't back down" (tom petty cover) by Arjune Rama

2012-01-17T17:18:00.000-07:00

this is one of the most important songs to me. the original tom petty version gives me strength when i'm at my lowest of lows. i just got through a really tough situation so this is dedicated to my beautiful and patient wife, angelic daughter and the rest of my incredibly patient family who sacrificed so much to help me be successful. I can't say thank you enough. Thank you thank you thank you!!!

#6 - "z" by Arjune Rama

2012-01-16T23:18:00.001-07:00

A song I wrote for my daughter

The other half of war

2012-01-15T15:51:00.000-07:00

Last week a video surfaced showing four Marines urinating on the bodies of dead Taliban fighters. In the immediate aftermath, knee-jerk articles emerged, some defending the actions of these soldiers as an acceptable response to the duress of wartime, or as President hopeful Governor Rick Perry put it, "these kids made a mistake," while others condemned these actions as unbecoming of a Marine and deserving the stiffest military and/or legal repercussions available. Some write-ups included a little bit of both.

Military service is sold to the American public and the young men and women who enlist as an honorable way to serve and defend our country. I agree with this definition of military service. However, there is an element of "military service" that is poorly understood and yet is the most relevant part of what occurs when one enlists during a time of conflict. This element boils down to a single word: war.

While the idea of the word "war" being a poorly understand element of military service might seem laughable, it is a word that is thrown about in casual conversation without a clear and comprehensive definition. Think back to how we were taught about war in school. As children, war was presented in descriptions of George Washington and the American Revolution in which impoverished colonists successfully won freedom from the world's largest empire. In high school we learned about D-Day and how another generation of Americans climbed out of boats and defied the odds by advancing on a beach while running straight into oncoming bullet fire. Both of these events happened in their respective wars as we were taught and yet our lessons omit crucial elements that we only learn via images from incidents like at Abu Ghraib and what occurred last week with our Marines. War is more than service to country. War is more than just fighting. Service and combat only tell half the story. The other half of the story is the part that doesn't come in television recruitment advertisements or a drop-down-box on the GI Bill website.

The other half of war is hell.

In this hell, selfless young men and women have their minds pureed as a result of spending months upon months away from home and family, living under inhumane conditions, courting death on a daily basis to accomplish missions the goals of which are not always clear. Under the compromised functioning of understandably psychologically devastated young people, bizarre and horrific actions are taken such as the rape of Okinawan women by American soldiers during World War II or the decapitation and taking of "trophy skulls" during the Vietnam War. The atrocities unfortunately do not end there. These same individuals frequently come home with diagnoses of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and multiple substance abuse disorders. They sometimes commit violent crime against others but more frequently, against themselves. According to The New York Times, "From 2005 to 2010, service members have killed themselves approximately once every 36 hours. For veterans, the rate is estimated at once every 80 minutes."

I do not mean to justify the crimes our servicemen and women have committed in the past or most recently. Also, I am not attempting to assess their fitness for service or the legal ramifications of their actions; these are the jobs of commanding officers and attorneys. My goal is that by spending more time and energy examining what war actually does to the mind as seen so clearly in the video acquired last week, that we as a citizenry may think harder before we get enthusiastic about the initiation of combat operations. I don't envy the Commander-in-Chief as this decision is likely one the most weighty choices a leader has to make. I just want him or her to realize that for the time during which our sons and daughters are away, and possibly for the rest of their lives should they come home, they are in hell. I don't mean to use the word "hell" lightly, but I can't imagine war being anything less if it takes our brave and patriotic youth and bends their minds to the point where they would rape, decapitate, torture and desecrate the remains of other human beings.

I have known and worked with Marines. Their dedication to this country makes me tear up. If I could make a direct message to our Marine Corps it would be this: I don't know exactly what happens over there but I know it is horrible. I don't know what will happen to your colleagues who committed these crimes. However, I do know that they are not "kids" as Governor Perry would put it. Kids don't live and die by the sword. I am sorry we have to ask so much of you and that we as civilians frequently fail when we try to put you back together. Regardless of what happens in regard to this particular incident, my respect and admiration for the United States Marine Corps remains steadfast.

"Go back to your own country!"

2012-01-14T23:10:00.000-07:00

"Go back to your own country!" shouted my neighbor when I took a shortcut through her yard from the neighborhood soccer field to my house after a pickup game with some friends during the summer between seventh and eighth grade. While one might expect my first response to be stomach-burning anger, my first feelings were of pure surprise. I thought to myself, "But...this is my country..." It wasn't until I did a face plant into my bed that I burst into tears.

If you know me, I don't have an ounce of an Indian accent. I don't say this as a point of pride; its just a fact. I was born in Detroit. I graduated from the same neighborhood school where I went to Kindergarten. Adding to the confusion, the country to which my neighbor referred is a place I have visited exactly twice (once as a baby and once when I was eleven years-old). So in my opinion, I was as Michigan as they get. As a result I would frequently forget that I looked different. After all, human eyes face outwards. Perhaps to her surprise, I wasn't constantly examining the fact that I look different.

Let me provide a little background on my family. My mom and dad were born in Chennai, India. My father came to Detroit to receive training as a General Surgeon and sub-specialty training in Vascular Surgery at St. John Hospital (Mack and 7 Mile in Detroit) and has been treating patients there for over thirty years. My mother earned her MBA from Wayne State University School of Business Administration at night while managing our household which included tutoring me in chemistry between her own rigorous studies (which is fitting because she also used to teach chemistry at Wayne State College of Nursing). Since graduating she has worked in banking all over the metropolitan Detroit area for nearly twenty years. So while my parents were born and raised in India, they have spent the greater part of their lives in Michigan. Their roots are Indian but their hearts, minds, and citizenship are Red-White-and-Blue American.

I'm an American citizen with Indian heritage. I'm married to an American citizen with European heritage. We have a child who is an American citizen with Indian and European heritage; she's a living, breathing symbol of the American "melting pot." I've never felt more like an American than I do now. To the woman who yelled at me as a child, I'd like to say this: Thank you for reminding me that we're such a young country that we don't always know a true American when we see one, especially if their skin looks different. As an aside, if you need some minimally-invasive microvascular surgery by an American who was trained in your neighborhood, has lived in your area longer than you, and loves his country, I know a guy. No need for microscopic surgery? Maybe we can provide some banking assistance from an American who studied locally and understands the economics of the area like the back of her hand. Either way, let us know if we can help you out: it's the American way.

"Now that you live in Utah, have you gotten some extra wives?"

2012-01-13T15:33:00.000-07:00

"So are you converting to Mormonism?" "Are you going to get another wife or two?" "Do people knock on your door every day desperate to convert you?"

These are some of the questions I was asked when I told my friends that my wife and I were moving from New York City to Salt Lake City for work. At first I laughed them off but after hearing the same questions over and over, I asked myself, "What's with all the Mormon-bashing? When did that suddenly become OK?" I imagine that if I was moving to San Francisco no one would ask me if I was coming out of the closet. If I was moving to Detroit no one would dare ask if I was going to buy a gun to carry to work. And yet, when it comes to the LDS church, its open season for jokes that border on ignorance and often cross into outright bigotry.

The most surprising aspect of these barbs is that they often came from people who belong to groups that have been been stereotyped and marginalized into oblivion: Muslims, homosexuals, among others. Frequently the people who made these comments are some of the most tolerant and accepting people I know in almost every other respect.

Well, here's the bottom line. I am about to give you the scoop about my "Mormon" experience in Utah. Here it is...are you ready?

I hardly notice it at all.

I think people have knocked on our door once or twice. I have been solicited a couple times when I've visited the Mormon Temple and when I declined, the young women handing out pamphlets respectfully allowed me to go about my business. In fact, if I went to the very center of any religion and didn't get solicited, I'd be halfway disappointed.

Allow me to explain our particular situation and thereby qualify some of my statements. We live in a house converted into apartments occupied exclusively by graduate students or hospital employees in close proximity to the major non-religiously affiliated university in town such that we are likely getting the least exposure to religious proselytization that one can get in Salt Lake City. I can't speak for those living in different parts of Salt Lake City. I am sure our location contributes at least in part to our not noticing the Mormon influence about which we were constantly warned. That being said, here are the four major differences I have noticed in Salt Lake City which are a function of it being the center of the LDS Church:


An actual micro-brew. Yes, Utahns have a sense of humor

1) Beer on draft at a restaurant/bar must have an alcohol content of 3.2% or less by weight. Bottled beers are unrestricted in alcohol content.
2) All beer purchased at convenience stores like 7-11 must meet the 3.2% rule.
3) All liquor or beer with an alcohol content greater than 3.2% must be purchased at State run liquor stores.
4) These are the nicest, most polite people I have ever met.

As you can see, three out of four differences are related to alcohol and one very important difference is a quality that is undeniably welcome especially to an interracial couple moving from out-of-state. My wife, who is Caucasian, and I walk down the street pushing a stroller carrying our half-Indian half-Caucasian daughter and people coo and speak in high-pitched baby-gibberish as people do in every other family-friendly city when they see a baby.

While I don't mean to sound like I work for the Utah Visitor's Bureau or whatever its called, I can honestly say I have never lived in a more pleasant and simultaneously more misunderstood city than this one.

Pornography, love, and adolescence

2012-01-13T00:58:00.001-07:00

When I was eleven years old our cable company made a simple but influential mistake. They included Cinemax in our television cable package for reasons totally unexplained. It was like Christmas came early. Their mistake was my introduction to sexuality. Cinemax, or "Skinemax" as my friends used to call it, is a premium channel that plays big-budget film productions by day and low-budget soft-core pornography by night. As this was the early 1990's, this cable company error was accompanied by the dawn of internet still-life pornography which served to supplement the eager and uninformed teenaged minds of myself and neighborhood friends. As a result, a multimedia education regarding sexuality emerged.

Even at that age I figured that this was an unrealistic portrayal of sex. Women were presented as objects for the sole purpose of satisfying the sexual urges of men. However, I think that the desperation for interaction with girls was enough to make these scenarios not only appealing but vital. The confusion of male adolescence sets the stage for the hope for female touch, even if this is only via the voyeurism of pornography. Adolescence is a particularly unusual period as it is likely the longest period in a male's life when skin-to-skin interaction is a distant memory or not remembered at all as it was already a decade past. As a result, a vacuum of tactile experience is created for which pornography serves as an indirect and bizarre educator. These films are strange in that love never makes an appearance while lust plays prominently and frequently to the point where the narrative itself is paper-thin. Pornographic films hardly make sense from a story point-of-view. The screenwriters correctly realize that issues of dialogue, plot and character development aren't valuable to their viewership.

I am confident that even the most seemingly tough teenaged male longs for the sensuality of human touch. I don't believe his desire is borne out of the wish to brag to friends regarding sexual conquest, although this likely plays a part. Notches in bedposts aren't the center of this urge. As the childhood body and mind evolve into the teenaged body and mind, a revolt against human touch e.g., the forehead kiss by a parent is accompanied by the desperate wish to be intimate with another. The teenager attempts to reconcile this contradiction via pornography and is often met with punishment by parents despite the adolescent being helpless to his confusion that is only amplified by biological drive.

When I was in high school I felt jarred by the juxtaposition of my desire to be in a romantic relationship with the appeal of what I saw in pornographic film. As I would frequently accompany my family to classic Sandra Bullock/Meg Ryan romantic comedies, I fell in love with love. I could watch While You Were Sleeping or Sleepless in Seattle over and over. Mine was a love that wasn't centered around sex like the pornography I had seen. This was doe-eyed romance. However, this couldn't totally satisfy the powerful hormonal pushes and pullings I felt. I think one of the most difficult things about being a teenager is trying to manage one's own confused lust with the simultaneous hope of curling up in the dimples of 90's-era Meg Ryan. The desire for intense physicality smashes headlong into the childlike wonder of actual romance in a perplexing and unsatisfying way. I felt dirty watching pornography but I also felt pathetic wanting to date Sandra Bullock. A "connection" with a woman seemed either like an exercise in sexual domination as portrayed in pornography or a fantastically impossible experience as seen in the romantic comedies which made me swoon.

It feels trite to say, "hang in there" to all those thirteen to seventeen-year-olds who feel confronted by these seemingly opposite experiences of love and sexuality, but its really true. At some point the two will intersect in a way that's not awkward and horrible. I'd like to suggest to parents to not be disgusted by your adolescent's desire to view pornography. Overall I think many teenagers are just seeking to unify the power of lust that constantly shakes their bodies with the melting desire for romance that seems impossibly far away. At the time, both desires seemed heartbreakingly mutually exclusive to me.

Rick Santorum explains why people die in America! Secrets Revealed! Don't miss it!

2012-01-11T15:39:00.001-07:00

In a December 2011 speech to college students during the Iowa caucases, Presidential hopeful Rick Santorum responded to a question by a student citing a public health study concluding that 50,000 to 100,000 Americans die annually due to lack of health insurance:

“I reject that number completely, that people die in America because of lack of health insurance. People die in America because people die in America. And people make poor decisions with respect to their health and their healthcare. And they don’t go to the emergency room or they don’t go to the doctor when they need to. And it’s not the fault of the government for not providing some sort of universal benefit.

While I can't speak to the validity of the study in question, his response got me thinking about an opposite question: How many Americans are alive because of health insurance? I am not aware of a study on this particular topic or if that is even possible. However, I do know one person who may not be alive were it not for insurance coverage. For you statisticians out there, N=1 is hardly an acceptable sample size for a reliable or valid study but in this case I'm going to say the sample is more than enough because that "1" is me.

I have a disease called Juvenile Myoclonic Epilepsy which started when I was seventeen years old. According to my neurologist my disease will likely continue for the rest of my life. Epilepsy is a neurological condition which causes me to experience tonic-clonic seizures (also known as grand mal seizures) unless I take medication twice daily. During a seizure I lose consciousness (so I have never actually seen myself have one). All of your muscles get super tense (the tonic portion) and then start to contract and relax really fast in an uncoordinated way (the clonic portion). Unmedicated people with this condition have gotten into lethal car accidents hurting themselves and others. As a result of my health insurance coverage, I am able to afford a very expensive medication that helps keep me and everyone around me safe from such accidents whether its while I'm driving a car or riding my bicycle. Due to this medication, adequately subsidized by my excellent insurance, I live seizure-free.

In defense of Mr. Santorum, I don't think he intended to describe people like myself who live with chronic illnesses of unclear etiology that require constant treatment. However, I wonder if he would reexamine this statement in the context of the effect the uninsured population might have on the insured population like himself and his family. In a way I am encouraging him (and others) who don't believe in the value of providing insurance to all Americans to indulge in a bit of narcissism as an indirect road to empathy. People with manageable diseases like epilepsy, preventable diseases like obesity, and infectious diseases like HIV/AIDS don't just affect the uninsured. A pregnant woman with a gold-plated insurance plan (the so-called 'Cadillac' insurance plans) who comes into contact with an uninsured citizen on the subway who happens to have tuberculosis, a well-understood and treatable disease, is going to be in trouble. Her expensive insurance plan may help her out but at best it will be playing a sad game of 'catch-up' for both her and her unborn child due to the transmission of a disease that could have been avoided with earlier management for the person with tuberculosis.

Mr. Santorum's comments speak to the short-sighted "not-in-my-backyard" thinking that has made reasonable healthcare reform difficult if not impossible. Disease is pervasive, a burden both in personal suffering and in national financial cost. While I am a proponent of universal healthcare, I acknowledge that I don't know how it would work. The problems are seemingly innumerous and the solution beyond the scope of this article. My point is that whether or not people die from not having healthcare in America, I am absolutely sure that without health care for all, more people are likely to get sick because disease does not operate in a vacuum. The insured do not walk around in a Good Health Bubble protecting them from disease. Disease slides effortlessly through rich and poor populations and puts its hands into everyone's pocketbooks. Therefore, as a country we could help everyone (including the already insured) by providing baseline insurance for everyone which would 1) put up road blocks to easily transmittable diseases and 2) effectively lessen the burden of suffering and unmanageable cost. If everyone had health coverage providing annual doctor's visits, up-to-date preventative care, comprehensive pre- and post-natal care, frequent follow-up checks and affordable medications, perhaps the Santorum maxim would be true and maybe even indisputable: People die in America because people die in America.

Let's put gender on a continuum

2012-01-10T19:27:00.000-07:00

Transgender Flag

I don't understand the ferver of gender identification and the subsequent lifelong segregation we impose upon children. Gender is a mantle placed on fetuses in utero by way of the pink coloring of a genetically female infant's room to the blue balloons hanging from a mailbox in anticipation of a genetically male infant. So what if it's a boy? So what if it's a girl? Why are these facts so important?

As a scrawny boy in elementary school I envied girls very much mainly because their games usually didn't require physical prowess. Mostly their games appeared to revolve around fantasy, e.g., MASH. MASH is an acronym for Mansion Apartment Shack House. This paper-and-pencil game is based somewhat on a combination of chance and arbitrary questions the specifics of which I now forget but in the end one's future abode was determined. Perhaps my jealousy was misplaced as I later learned that such games had a dark subtext of catty abuse that likely paved the way to junior high eating disorders. Regardless, at the time I would loved to have taken part, avoided being terrible at kickball, and had the chance to actually speak to people. Boys, in my opinion, didn't do enough talking. They were all action, sweat and violence with the occasional merciless taunting.

I think my frustration with hard-and-fast "boy" and "girl" activities stems from growing up in a home in which strict gender identification was not pushed. I don't mean to suggest that I was not raised as a male but rather that my parents allowed me to play as I liked. I gravitated to boys games, no doubt secondary to the influence of television and school, but I don't recall my father or mother saying, "that's a girl's game" and steering me away. Just as importantly, sexual preference was never pushed either. I have always dated girls but I wonder what would have happened if I brought a boy home. We never ran into that situation but I think my parents would be accepting of my choices as they always have.

So what am I like now? I think that I embody a lot of what people consider feminine attributes. I speak with a feminine lilt unless I'm around a bunch of men who don't know me well and then I feel compelled to give off a more "masculine" air. I'm averse to violence. I don't like watching or playing sports. I like things that are delicate and small. I am a good listener and I love stories. My perception of romance, from what I learned in school and on TV, was restricted to the tall-dark-and-handsome-take-charge attitude expected of boys and the damsel-in-distress-waiting-to-be-swept-away attitude expected of girls. The type of romance that actually appeals to me is the intertwining of two people who share elements of both of these types; some days I want to be the one who sweeps away and sometimes I want to be the one who is swept.

I chose to address this topic because I think that if we all took a moment to examine the proportions of masculinity and femininity within us then perhaps certain groups, particularly people who are transgendered, might seem more like points on the same continuum of strictly "boys" and strictly "girls" rather than aberrations that don't have a place in society. Transgender is a term under intense dispute and as I don't purport to be an expert on sexuality I hope people more knowledgeable than I will make some comments on the subject. My basic understanding of the term transgender is that it is an umbrella word for those who fundamentally disagree with the gender dictated to them by virtue of being born genotypically male or female (XY or XX) or phenotypically male or female (possessing a penis or a vagina).

I feel we are making a mistake to so fervently place our children into one category or another. Perhaps we do this to side-step the life stressors currently experienced by those who consider themselves transgendered. While I think we can teach our kids to be more tolerant than that, I can't condemn anyone who wants to protect their children from the pain related to crises of identity.

Perhaps the best way we can instill comfort with regards to gender identification for our children is to start them early with the idea that perhaps gender is an issue of proportion rather than two slots. Maybe in every man there is a proportion of femininity and vice versa. We could describe it like eye color. Some people have blue eyes, some have blue-green eyes, some have green eyes, etc. Of note, I purposely do not address sexuality (homosexuality, heterosexuality, pansexuality, etc.) because as I understand it, sexual preference operates independently of the gender with which someone identifies.

In college I took a class on gender and sexuality in which we read about the Incans placing transsexual people in positions of reverence. Anthropologists hypothesize that the reason behind this placement was that if one person could cross boundaries of sexual identity with ease then perhaps he/she had an uncommon insight into the human condition from which others could learn. I am fascinated by this situation for two reasons, 1) gender identification is hardly a new issue and 2) perhaps American society has it all wrong; maybe we are marginalizing the very people who carry unusual insight into personhood.

I realize I am hardly the first person to propose a proportional view of gender or gender as being on a continuum. My point is that if we elect to accept these hypotheses, we have a lot to gain with respect to the treatment of people who are transgendered. They may seem less different than those who fit into the strictly "boy" and "girl" categories thereby receiving the treatment and respect they deserve. As a result, I think society would collectively take a large step forward in terms of tolerance and understanding.

#5 - "green to seafoam" by Arjune Rama

2012-01-09T21:50:00.003-07:00

This is a song I wrote called "green to seafoam" intended to accompany previous entries "Life Vacation" and "Is there a place in our friendship for my moodiness?"

"green to seafoam"
lyrics and music by Arjune Rama

It all started well
As we stepped on the boat
The waves licked the wood
and as Captain I stood

Singing yo ho ho
we’re ready to go
the wind might not last
“1st mate, hoist the mast”

Wench bring me my glass
and fill it half past
the trip will be long
we might not come home

Yo ho ho
We’re ready to go
Yo ho ho
We’re ready to go

I saw the sea change
Before mine own eyes
From green to seafoam
Color fades before my eyes

1st first mate screams,
"Captain, oh Captain,
Where have you been?
Oh where have you gone?"

The dark of my room
The warmth of my bed
The sway of the boat
My thoughts start to float

The green of the sea is
Nothing to me
The thoughts in my tree
They swim happily

Yo ho ho
Where did we go?
Yo ho ho
Where did we go?

From seafoam to green
Awake from the dream
The salt in my sky
The light in my eyes

Yo ho ho
Where did we go?
Yo ho ho
Where did we go?

Bullet-shaped headphones? No thanks.

2012-01-09T00:44:00.001-07:00

Today Facebook considered me a target market for headphones shaped like 9mm bullets, advertised under the heading "Guy Gear. Dirt Cheap." I guess I fall under this heading because I am 1) registered with Facebook as a male and 2) am interested in inexpensive items. These earbud headphones are produced by a company called Munitio (their logo cleverly places crosshairs in the 'o'). Below is their product:

While I am not opposed to being a target market, especially considering that I have always loved television, I was disappointed to see a life-destroying object molded into an accessory with which I am supposed to listen to music. I really like music. But I like living even more. As a result, mixing weapon imagery with the enjoyment of music just doesn't sit right with me.

This is how Munitio describes their product:

The next evolution of the 9mm earphone takes the rugged, tactical aspects of the original to the next level, while keeping the superior audio elements intact. These MUNITIO Billets™ are machined out of aircraft-grade aluminum with clean, anodized finishes. Best-in-class performance with an in-line mic and lightweight frame. The perfect field device for music, communications and mobile gaming.

These headphones probably sound great. I'm not being sarcastic. Interestingly, they are called "billets" as opposed to bullets. I don't know what a 9mm "billet" is. From that picture, however, I think you'll agree that no one is fooled by what I imagine is an intentional misspelling.

In keeping with Munitio's excellent job describing how their bullet-shaped headphones work, I have prepared a short primer describing how bullet-shaped bullets work. I learn best with pictures so that's how I have chosen to present this topic.

Let's begin:

These are some 9mm bullets:

They are projected at a rate between 300 to 400 meters/second (that's three to four football fields in one second!) out of a 9mm handgun like this one:

Ok, now this is where things literally get messy. As they cross those football fields they must stop somewhere and do something. Below is a description of where they might end up and what might happen.

Some of these links are very graphic so please click with caution.

1. Gunshot wound to the head with partial brain evisceration

2. Another gunshot wound to the head but this time the victim, former White House Press Secretary James Brady survived. He was shot during the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan in 1981. He is now blind, uses a wheelchair and will likely never walk again. He and his wife still crusade for handgun control and have been featured prominently in the light of the 2011 attempted assassination of Representative Gabrielle Giffords.

3. In these photos, Maria Santos Gorrostieta, the Mayor of Tiquicheo, Mexico presents her gunshot wounds and subsequent colostomy placement after surviving two assassination attempts in the last two years.

Having a permanent colostomy means that her colon was so damaged that she must now use an apparatus like the one shown below to safely collect and dispose of her own feces for the rest of her life. Colostomy frequently causes chronic pain and is constantly at risk for infection without vigilant care.

You might be thinking, and understandably so, "Where is he going with this?"

Let me start with where I am NOT going:

1) I am uninterested in initiating a debate regarding our Second Amendment rights as that merits an entire article unto itself.

2) I uninterested in attempting to change the rules governing the demonstration of violent video games, television or film.

3) I am uninterested in starting a campaign against Munitio and their product. I realize that this company is not trying to promote violence. Sometimes good headphones are just good headphones. These headphones sound terrific as far as the reviews I've read.

My problem is that this company is capitalizing on the perceived sexiness of an item that frequently has very unsexy outcomes. As a result, my agenda is simple: I want bullets to seem unsexy. I want them to make you feel ill. Everyone has heard the tired maxim, "Guns Kill." There's something too clean about that phrase. I am more interested in maintaining a grisly mental image of what bullets actually do. A bullet can knock a brain out of a skull. A bullet, as Mr. Brady noted, can end that nasty habit of walking you've perfected. A bullet, as Mayor Gorrostieta demonstrates, may make you eligible for a warm, leaky, aromatic bag of feces placed close to your abdomen for the rest of your life. That's assuming your abdominal wounds aren't fatal, of course.

Munitio has craftily designed bullets that make music. That's within their rights. Let's just not forget what real bullets sound like.

Why have I been writing so much?

2012-01-07T11:39:00.001-07:00

Hey all. I have been writing a lot because I enjoy writing and am trying to get better at it. Practice makes perfect, right?

So, if you see something you like or don't like whether its with respect to content or elements of style, etc. I would appreciate it if you would let me know. You can comment on this blog under your own name or anonymously if you prefer. You can also post on my facebook wall or contact me via twitter (@arjunerama).

As I am really trying to improve I'm not trying to fish for compliments (although they are always welcome :). Also, I have pretty thick skin when it comes to criticism so feel free to say whatever you like as almost all input is helpful. Not only does it help my writing but it creates a fun dialogue.

Anyways, even if you're not interested in commenting, thanks for reading!

yours,

Arjune

Is there a place in our friendship for my moodiness?

2012-01-06T22:04:00.000-07:00

Is there a place in our friendship for my moodiness? I don't get to talk to you very often because let's face it: we're both so busy. I talk to you at most on a monthly basis and see you at most once annually so as you can imagine I want to make it count. I want you to call me for another phone-date or get-together, etc.

What do I mean when I say that I am "moody?" I mean that I feel a distinct ebb and flow to my emotions over the course of the day. The change in tide is subtle but its there. Sometimes the leaves on a tree are less like the bold generic "green" from the smaller Crayola assortment and more like the duller melancholy "seafoam" from the larger boxes that have multiple rows. While the change is subtle, its not simple enough such that I can honestly exculpate myself with a "sorry Broseph, today sucked and I am just not myself." The problem is that this really is myself. Sometimes I don't want to visit with anyone and just want to take a Life Vacation. This is the true "it's not you, it's me" scenario. Promise.

These are short periods of time that come and go. I don't lash out and it doesn't compromise my activities of daily living. I still relate well to people and do my job well. Its not like some wild roller-coaster ride but it is undeniable. If we are caught in one during our short time together I feel terrible because I don't feel 100% present and that feels like I'm lying. Is it better just to pretend that I am having a better time than I am? That sounds like the complete opposite of what good friends do. I feel caught.

I think with age and the time crunch of our complex lives, the stakes in our singular interactions are significantly raised. I used to see you nearly every day. We used to sit in the same room and say nothing at all because we knew this moment or even this entire visit was just one data point in a line of data points such that a single less-than-communicative period of time was without consequence. When did every living moment become so weighty, so imbued with meaning?

the pleasure of watching the same movie repeatedly

2012-01-05T17:01:00.000-07:00

When I lived by myself, just before going to sleep I would put my laptop on my nightstand and play one of the many movies I have seen dozens of times until I drifted into sleep. I love watching and hearing dialogue I have seen so many times pass over me. Seeing a film multiple times is such a different experience than the first time, aside from the obvious element of knowing what is going to happen. As you see the film over and over, sometimes hilarious continuity errors become apparent: a watch on the wrong hand in this scene, hair parted oppositely in that scene, etc. But more than the fun bloopers inevitable in large scale cinematography, I like being so familiar with a particular scene that you can now look past the fundamentals of dialogue and plot progression and get a deeper understanding of why pauses for emphasis were placed where they are, why an actor chose to place her hand on her hip at that particular moment and what effect all of these choices have on the greater context of the film and your experience of the story at large. Over time the costume choices, set design, lighting, and direction become easier to appreciate and their value able to be savored individually as they contribute to the whole.

On a more personal level, the repeated viewing, out of sheer familiarity, becomes an opportunity for one's own singular story to conveniently run parallel with a story that is known and yet from which one can almost always discover new elements of value, particularly as you age and the behavior of characters makes more (and sometimes less) sense. For example, I feel like I understand father characters better now than I did when I saw them earlier in my life. I know its a simple thing but I love that we can see a new dimension in something that itself has sat unchanged in celluloid but appears so different because of our own development.

Repeated fiction, particularly film, has become the pool I feel I can always dive into with eyes closed and know that not only will it be deep enough that I won't hit my head on the bottom but also warm enough that I won't get that awful initial shock of cold of just about every other pool. This pleasure probably sounds too safe to most people but I love it. With so many molecules of water, so many arcs of plot, innumerable aquamarine tiles lining the floor, hands on hips, trees swaying blurrily above the surface, you feel surrounded by familiar friends in all directions that always have some small new thing to reveal unto you.

Why (most) diet and exercise regimens fail

2012-01-04T18:44:00.000-07:00

Every January Americans nationwide start the year off with a new diet and exercise regimen. I am confident that almost all of these will fail. I am loathe to bet against the underdog as I have found myself in that very position multiple times in my life but with this one I can't help myself. This approach to change is simply fundamentally flawed because it does not acknowledge that being overweight is an addiction. Like so many other addictions, being overweight is merely the tip of the iceberg below which myriad other addictions reside. Not only are we addicted to the transient hyperglycemia/caffeine high from our high-sugar cereals and coffees, we are addicted to the speed with which our cars take us to our parking spots as this allows us to sleep in just a bit longer. We are addicted to the convenience of the elevator that whisks us to our comfortable desk where we will work our sedentary jobs that keep us at a comfortable heart rate. We are addicted to the productivity we feel as we motionlessly work while eating our lunches at these desks and eventually reverse the entire trip home all the while jonesing for the largest meal of the day, the calories from which will be transformed directly into fat as we slip slowly into sleep. Then the cycle begins again.

With all of these micro-addictions, it makes sense that wholesale change is Herculean at its best and Sisyphean at its worst. I don't blame people for failing; the entire enterprise is destined for failure. I don't mean to say that change is impossible but I think the only way to approach the kind of change most people seem to want (lower BMI, definition of skeletal musculature, higher exercise tolerance, lower daytime fatigue, improved mood, etc.) is to assess every change you are considering instituting as something you will do for the rest of your life. For example, ask yourself, "Will I wake up every day for the rest of my life and run thirty minutes before work?" or "Is it realistic for me to never eat sugar again?" The answer is most likely no.

Nothing frustrates me more than to see new diet programs advertised on television every year. These programs propose a precisely opposite approach to what has been proven to help people overcome addiction. We don't need more options. We need better ways to utilize the ones we already have. I think we should approach our addiction to food and our sedentary lifestyles from the Alcoholics Anonymous model for change. Alcoholics Anonymous has been demonstrated to work in the long term. In the market of ways to curb alcoholism this program has the largest body evidence for success. A few poorly conceived medications exist such as the comically sadistic Antabuse, a drug that makes you sick if you drink alcohol while using it. As you can imagine, many patients just leave the pills in the cabinet and hit the bar. If you are struggling to stop drinking a substance that is killing you, are you more or less likely to take a medication that you know will make you ill if your willpower slips and you just gotta have a beer?

In AA, successful members of the program acknowledge first that they are powerless to alcohol. I love the seriousness of that word: powerless. I have never heard a dieter say that they are powerless to food. But its true. The truly amazing part of AA is despite the rigor with which they have achieved their long-lasting effects, even the most stalwart participants have relapsed twenty and thirty years after sobriety. This is how devastating addiction really is. I also love that alcoholics consider themselves alcoholics for life as a way to internalize the disease and remain constantly vigilant. To approach such a difficult change with any less intensity is like trying to fight a lion with an overcooked noodle. You might as well put an apple in your maw and lie down on a plate.

So what the hell are we supposed to do? I have an idea. If being overweight is a multifaceted addiction, why not approach each part individually as opposed to some kind of all encompassing diet/exercise regimen. I would employ a multistep method akin to AA. The first step could simply be taking the stairs to your office every single day for a few months. That's it. Eat anything you want day-in and day-out but you no longer use elevators. You don't even remember what that box with sliding doors and buttons does. I know that sounds incredibly slow on the scale of weight loss progress but I guarantee you many would fail. I don't say that to be harsh; the odds are stacked against people as its not easy to even find the stairs in many buildings. Also, you're busy. You are expected to be somewhere quickly all the time. I think if you can do that for a couple months you're ready for the park-your-car-far-away-from-the-office-and-walking routine. That's not easy either. You're going to need a good parka because you will be the only one who parks in the last space and walks through a torrential rain storm while coworkers silently consider the state of your mental health. Now here comes the real challenge. Now you have to take the stairs every day AND walk from the furthest parking lot spot. And remember: this is for the rest of your life. Let's do just that for another few months. Notice that we have not even touched the issue of diet. No gym memberships purchased. No spandex worn. Indeed no money has changed hands and yet you have done an incredible amount of change: you now need leap up stairs to meetings, powerwalk in the parking lot daily, and have replaced that once savory morning sleep time by going to sleep earlier. Forever.

Of course, it stands to reason that at some point in the future when a large number of obesity promoting habits have been stably changed that you could start using the elevator or the closer parking spot. However, at that point you'll likely be making up for those easy yet inconvenient tasks with replacements that are far more rigorous and in a much more compressed time frame such that you might miss the days of a simple walk up the stairs.

Eventually, if one is successful at stacking these tasks I imagine one could tack on a diet change here or there. But just like the stairs and parking lot scenario, this would have to be relatively small and repeated for a rather long time before larger changes are instituted. If all of this seems exhausting, then you're accurately appreciating how incredibly difficult it is to treat an addiction. You need to physically change your brain on a neuron-to-neuron basis. Considering there are billions of neurons in the cerebral cortex alone, this is no simple task.

I think the problem with most people's wish to diet is our underlying desire is not to actually change the way we look but rather to be someone else entirely. We see a picture on a magazine cover or in a film and secretly covet not only the way that person looks but the glamor of their very existence. Being ourselves with an improved physique is nice but far from glamorous. Consider that rarest-of-rare person who is hard-headed enough to start January 1st running thirty minutes daily, consistently eating low-fat, low-carbohydrate, high-protein foods, sleeping eight hours nightly, and drinking copious amounts of water and actually keep it up for, say, six months. The pounds will no doubt come off but that person is the same person with the same hang-ups that made him overweight in the first place. Relapse is almost inevitable. The problem is that no real neuronal change has been effected as this blitzkrieg of reform was enacted out of the excitement of turning over a new leaf rather than a reasoned decision to completely change one's life forever. The discipline that comes out of slow and steady piecemeal segmental modification represents actual character change for which I can't think of any substitution. That level of discipline likely feels superior to any level of glamor and probably leads to a greater likelihood of overcoming the addiction in the long-term. If this seems overwhelming and impossible, consider what they say in AA: you have to take it one day at a time.

The most painful thing ever said to me

2012-01-03T14:05:00.001-07:00

One of the most painful statements anyone has ever made to me is that I have a "desperate need to be liked." I realize this is hardly the nastiest thing someone can say to another person. In fact, if this is the most painful criticism I have ever received, I should probably count myself lucky.

When I heard this, or rather read it in an email, I was taken aback. The pain came from two distinct elements: 1) that being liked was not something that I wanted but needed and 2) that that need was desperate. In general I think I take criticism well, even very personal criticism. But there was something about this particular barb that cut me to the quick. This was a couple years ago now but I have kept that email in my inbox and that particular phrase in my mind ever since. Sometimes I read it and I am amazed that while the pain isn't as acute, I still feel my stomach burn and a warmth in my chest that is only slightly attenuated relative to the first read.

As you can probably imagine, this was the last in a less-than-amicable email conversation that marked the end of a friendship. The real pain of this observation was that up until that point I think it was actually true. I had never had that pointed out to me and it has since shaped a lot of my encounters, in many ways for the better. I do want to be liked. I am willing to grant that much. However, I think there was a desperation such that I was prone to dragging along battered and threadbare relationships that should have just been laid to rest. I would behave unlike myself because the idea of burying that relationship or acknowledging that that person did not really like me enough to fight for its survival was unacceptable and felt like a deeply personal flaw.

I think that the desperation to be liked in the past has at times subverted my ability to be myself around different people simultaneously. I remember in high school and college having different friend groups that I was afraid to have mix because some part of me might be revealed by one party to the other in a way that contradicted somebody's sense of who I really am. The jig would be up, so to speak. The email I received opened my eyes to the idea that I was working really hard to cultivate several personae rather than simply behaving naturally as the person I really am. When I speak to my friends I now employ a relationship litmus test: could I say what I just said to all of my friends or would it sound like it was coming out of someone else's mouth and that I am just trying to fit in with this particular group? Perhaps the very act of putting in effort to ensure personal authenticity is in itself distinctly inauthentic. While I suppose that may be true at first blush, I liken it to the modification of most bad habits in that the actual forward motion is inescapably unnatural until it eventually becomes natural. For a lifelong smoker, its awfully unnatural for him to go to the store and buy gum instead. But no human is born with a cigarette in his mouth so some amount of effort is required to go back to that original state.

Despite the initial sting, I'm really thankful for that email. It reminded me that if I am trying so hard to be liked than I am probably not being the person I really am. As Kurt Cobain wrote, "I'd rather be hated for who I am than loved for who I am not." And if you know me well, there's nothing more authentically Arjune than wedging a Kurt Cobain quotation or reference into just about anything.

me whining about loneliness despite intense personal fortune

2012-01-02T23:16:00.000-07:00

As I have grown older, lived in different parts our country, and made all sorts of great friends in all these varied places I surprise myself by just how profoundly lonely I can feel at times. Think of it like a popular restaurant that elects to expand their dining room in order to accommodate everyone who wants to eat there. Suddenly the place will seem less busy. If that restaurant expanded to six times its original size, then that terrific place, though now able to serve an enormous number of exciting and different people, might suddenly feel uncomfortably huge and isolating to the guy who liked it when it was tiny.

My world used to be the backyard of our house in Michigan where a few friends from my street would come by and play video games and build Legos. That world was so small and cozy it seemed like the crowded restaurant of friends. Since I moved to Boston, then Ann Arbor, then St. Maarten, then New York City, then Salt Lake City this backyard has expanded completely out of proportion to the number and types of relationships I have maintained over time. I have always been someone who has felt most comfortable with a somewhat small set of friends despite the expansion of my own personal world.

Sometimes I wonder if I would feel this way if I had spent the entirety of my life in Michigan. Over my last trip home I reconnected with friends who have never moved out of state or even out of southeastern Michigan. Though I feel really lucky to have had the opportunity to move around the country, I couldn't help but envy the connectedness they have to our home state by the sheer amount of time they have spent allowing their roots to expand into the soil.

I am amazed by how suddenly and unexpectedly I will feel these pangs of loneliness despite being married, having a six-month-old girl, a loving family in Michigan, Texas, London, and Chennai, and a telephone address book full of numbers I can call at any time. Its as if that restaurant will go from a comfortably small size then suddenly expand infinitely without warning. I'll be brushing my teeth and then BAM it hits me: I feel completely alone in this bathroom with this toothbrush and paste and nothing outside the door but a vacuum of space. I am struck so hard in these moments that I have to stop mid-brushstroke and remind myself how preposterous this feeling really is.

Occasionally this lonely, disconnected feeling will hit me in public as well. I will be walking in a store or on the street and will see someone who is so strikingly familiar such that I will feel the urge to run up and tap them on the shoulder. After they turn around not only is it clear that they are not the person I thought they were but that that person lives in a completely different part of the country. The likelihood of them being in this place at this time is infinitesimally small such that it was ridiculous to even consider the possibility. Maybe its the part of me that is desperate to shrink what has become such a huge and unwieldy world. I want to make the restaurant smaller but keep everybody in it even if we can't really sit down comfortably and the service is hopelessly inadequate. The discomfort, the shouting over one another, the bumping and spilling of drinks and food, all of a sudden seems really charming.

Lacrosse, boats, peach schnapps. And me.

2012-01-01T18:25:00.000-07:00

After I placed my order for a calzone at Jet's Pizza on Mack Avenue I walked out the front door onto the sidewalk and walked past the Tae Kwon Do studio towards the parking lot where I figured I'd just wait the fifteen or so minutes it usually took them to make my dinner. This was the summer after tenth grade, I had just gotten my license and basically would drive anywhere for any reason at all.

So there I was, just standing around in the parking lot. Southeastern Michigan isn't a sunny place and the summers are usually a brutal combination of cloudiness and humidity. But around 6pm in the summer things simmer down and then you feel wrapped up in a cool fog of aerosolized water and its really quite nice. While standing in this fog I saw someone I can best describe as Sad Grunge Girl. Hair once blonde now black. Skin once smooth now unmade-up and acne'd. Boy clothes from brothers. Boy boots to kick. She was sitting on one of those three-dimensional cement trapezoids that scrape the bottom of your car after which you yell "fuck!" She even had the white sedan with enough rust that I knew it was a piece.

If you're from where I'm from, this is a very strange sight indeed. The girls with whom I grew up were at that very moment eating dinner with their families at casual-sounding yet pricey Martha's Vineyard-inspired places like Tom's Oyster Bar. In fact, you might say that Grosse Pointe, all the way down to its lacrosse, sailing teams and peach schnapps consumption, wishes it was Greenwich, CT. Hence, I knew this was truly a lost soul as she was not 1) eating an oyster 2) drinking alcoholic syrup or 3) on a boat. As an awkward kid raised in a wealthy white suburb by brown parents from a far away land, I couldn't help but gravitate to someone who also seemed out of her element.

Anyways, playing the part of the openly-sensitive male, something I had cultivated through middle school and gotten just right by the middle of high school, I walked right up and and sat down next to her (without asking, as my impression at the time re: girls was that some rude gestures are welcome signs of confidence while other gestures like staring blankly at a mind-bendingly gorgeous person is unseemly and cross-the-street worthy) while she played guitar terribly. I asked to have a chance at her spanish-style guitar that she no doubt inherited like so many beginners from someone who bought it with ambition only to quickly rethink the whole enterprise. And as you may have already surmised, whatever I did managed to become the agonist to the receptors in the cerebral cortices of so many female humans when it comes to "Boys-Playing-Guitar." I think the neurons associated with that system are closely related to the receptors associated with "Receiving-Flowers-From-Boys." Both systems seem to work just as intensely (regardless of the quality) and make just as little sense. If I sound like I'm generalizing or that I sound chauvinistic, save your critique for February fourteenth and then tell me I'm wrong, especially if your beau belle attempts to go for both (which he should).

Receptors agonized, we exchanged phone numbers and the following week she invited me to her home. Her home is in a shadier area of the metropolitan Detroit area, which is to say lacrosse, boats and oysters do not hold a place of prominence. Our platonic hangout began with the casual offering of a snack/meal while her mother was away at work. She prepared a bratwurst for me which, as an avid consumer of any and all processed meats, was an offer I eagerly accepted. Sadly, she neglected to warn me that this particular sausage was weaponized with molten cheddar which might not have been so terrible if not for the element of sheer surprise. Needless to say, our meal went poorly and my upper GI tract was now seared by cheese lava. The discomfort of this initial interaction set the tone for the rest of our short relationship.

I use the word "relationship" loosely and generally as this wasn't a date or anything even slightly salacious. I just uncomfortably sat in her world and we participated in small talk for a few hours. At some point her brothers and some assorted friends barged in loaded with "Little Caesar's" pizza and breadsticks which I was helpless to decline, lava-throat or not. I wonder if I've ever declined a breadstick in my whole short life.

I could already feel the end approaching. I just sat with her crappy guitar, sank deeper into a couch in the wrong neighborhood with the wrong girl. I had nothing to say. I didn't want to know more. Unlike the time in the parking lot, she seemed very much at home. If she was Sad Grunge Girl in the parking lot, I was Awkward Preppy Boy now. At some point, my tolerance for awkwardness was met and exceeded such that I just had to leave. I made up some excuse and got up and left. With true high school boy cowardice, I subsequently avoided her phone calls and things petered off as I had indirectly hoped.

I thought the whole uncomfortable encounter was behind me when a few months later I found myself buying some books from the local Barnes & Noble where, to my great surprise, she was working. I would really like to know the rate of change of my blood pressure at that moment. I remember the sweat on my hands. She had the guts to address my vanishing act from what seemed like a burgeoning relationship. I have pretty much blocked out whatever sad excuse I stammered to explain my sudden absence.

I didn't give that visit or the poorly managed interaction at the bookstore much thought until recently. I think after having left Grosse Pointe for school and work and returned for short stints to visit family and friends I realize just how much it is a part of me despite my efforts to avoid it. Even though I suck at sports and don't sail, I am lacrosse and boats. Even though I didn't drink in high school, these veins run with peach schnapps. When I look at the situation now, all these supposed "cultural differences" are just safe ways to describe a much more superficial and stupid distinction: money. My family had it and her's did not. The difference in money established a gap between our worlds which I didn't have the courage to bridge. I feel confident that I am mature enough now such that I don't separate myself from others by such ridiculous criteria, but you never really know. How deeply does my own snobbery run? I am confident it hasn't increased but I am curious as to how much it has actually decreased. I know we are all works-in-progress but I wonder if I will look back at my current self in fifteen years and cringe.

What is an o-ring?

2011-12-31T07:00:00.001-07:00

Sympathy for baby shakers

2011-12-30T23:45:00.000-07:00

I have never shaken a baby. I will never shake a baby. Up until we had our own child I considered people who have caused Shaken Baby Syndrome as some the lowest our species has to offer. I would think to myself, "What kind of animal could shake a baby so hard that she starts bleeding into her brain?" However, I am starting to understand why people do it. I don't accept nor endorse it but I think the situation is more complicated than I once thought.

Everyone knows that parenting a newborn is a uniquely stressful experience. The sleepless nights, the daytime fatigue, the piercing crying, the quantity and quality of secretions all feature prominently in everyone's child-raising war stories. However, even after listening to so many of these stories I rarely hear about the genuine anger one can feel towards one's child. Considering that they scream despite having been fed, changed, walked around, bounced, hugged, and kissed, I find it amazing that so rarely do we talk about how mad they can make us. In light of the currently horrific level of global child poverty, the simple fact that this child has been born into a family that desperately loves them and wants to provide everything necessary for their development seems akin to winning the lottery. How dare they treat us this way?

Every parent has been there. It is always that horrible time of the night when you are now confident that the rest of the day will be a fucking waking nightmare. You are in that half-awake/half-asleep state just prior to addressing your screaming offspring when a slow growing animus quietly blooms in the nursery. I'll be completely honest. I have cursed at her. I have even had brief visions of throwing her out the window. In other words, I have felt completely and utterly hopeless. Nothing breeds desperation like hopelessness. And nothing fuels anger like desperation.

The wish to shake is multifaceted. It is the wish to shake sense into your child. It is the wish to shake the senselessness out of your child. It is the wish to allow your rage to vibrate through them such that they know that you too are in pain. While these may seem like simple issues of anger management I think the heart of the matter is that the white hot vitriol that has come to a rolling boil has little to do with what your child is actually doing. Sadly, it is the anger you have at yourself. It is self-directed anger that quickly crosses into self-hatred. You hate yourself for what you perceive as failure at the most important job in your life. You feel like your love is not enough or that if you were stronger or smarter, they would not be crying. Frighteningly, enough self-hatred can bend the mind in horrible ways.

In the current climate of child-rearing wherein whole sections of bookstores are dedicated to the craft and hours of armchair wisdom are seemingly available from every family member, friend, and grocery store clerk, I would like to propose a simple bit of advice that I use before I step into my daughter's room in the middle of the night during a maddening crying jag. I remind myself that I come first. I love myself first. I realize that statement is anathema in a world that screams, "your child comes first!" But if you can't love yourself despite your well-intentioned attempts to satisfy your child's frequently insatiable level of need, then you can't really love them either. It's like being on an airplane. In the event of an emergency landing, please secure your own mask before assisting others. If you try to secure your child's mask first, you might not last long enough to do much of anything on their behalf anyway.

Shaking a baby is child abuse, criminal, and unacceptable under any circumstance. However, I believe that the anger from which it stems is not so inaccessible to even the most loving parent. I hope that those parents who have yet to feel true anger towards their child are aware that they are not so different from the baby-shakers of the world. While such a parent may have better impulse control than most people who end up causing Shaken Baby Syndrome, I think it is essential to take time to appreciate yourself for the hard work you put into caring for your child, regardless of whether they stop crying or not. As a result you are likely to be better prepared to avoid the heavy duty self-deprecation that can lead to the kinds of impulsive actions that can't be taken back.

Sometimes I wish I believed in God

2011-12-29T00:05:00.001-07:00

I stopped believing in God around the time I stopped believing in Santa Claus. I dropped them both when I was about six or seven years of age. The illusion of gifts being brought to me by a jolly obese man in Coca-Cola inspired winter gear was destroyed by the simple fact that we did not have a chimney. Also, the doors/windows were not an option as we had a top-notch house alarm installed ever since we were burgled by our own neighbors. Regardless, Santa's physical dimensions precluded these portals of entry, alarm/chimney situation notwithstanding.

God dropped out of my consciousness around the same time less because of the logistical problems that hampered the believability of Santa and more because early on it was clear that my prayers, despite being in earnest, were not being answered. I don't mean to insult the providing powers of an almighty God; my level of want was insatiable, the types of things I wanted were almost always unnecessary (i.e., superpowers) and always impossible to be provided (i.e., entire legions of action figures coming to life). Please note that as a child I never needed for anything as my tireless parents supplied me with everything a child could need as well as everything this child wanted frequently via great sacrifice of their limited time, money and sleep.

My early prayers were intended to benefit humanity collectively and frequently involved loved ones (please watch over my family, etc) but they quickly devolved into laundry lists of things I just plain wanted, not unlike a Christmas list one might mail to a certain somebody who lives at The North Pole. This presents a very sad point: I think I stopped believing in Santa and God at the same time because to me they amounted to the same entity. Since my prayers and efforts to remain off the "Naughty List" did not seem like they were paying dividends, Santa and God were simultaneously abandoned. Prayer ended abruptly and concerns about "Naughty" or "Nice" lists swiftly evaporated.

I think as a result of the immense amount of effort put forth by my family on my behalf, I never felt that God had a place in my life. God didn't drive me to my expensive and distant guitar teacher and wait in the car during my lessons. My Mom did. God didn't take me to skating lessons at five in the morning and then work thirty-six plus hours straight at a city hospital performing surgery for the uninsured. My Dad did. While I suppose I could have thought, "Gee, God gave me such amazing parents," this seemed at best like a stretch and at worst an insulting cop-out. I really wanted, and still do, to credit them as being regular humans who worked their asses off daily on my behalf without the aid of superpowers and certainly weren't placed here by an unprovable, unseen, yet all-powerful force.

While the dissolution of the Santa fantasy never bothered me, the absence of God in my life has become increasingly difficult. The difficulty has nothing to do with wishing for different circumstances or abilities. The problem lies in the sheer loneliness that arises when trying to summon a level of courage you feel that you don't have when faced with a gigantic adversary. While I have always had my family to ask for assistance which they gladly provide, I am at a point where they truly cannot solve my problems for me. I am an adult. I am the steward of my own ship and my shipmates now include a wife and daughter who frequently look to me for support. It is in these times that I wish I believed there was a higher power that could be called upon to give me a sort of "otherworldly" strength. While I am sure I could get down on my knees and "pray," so microscopic is my faith that I feel it would be an insult to true believers. This idea conjures up the childhood act of doing a "rain dance" in the ham-fisted style taught by television despite the fact that some southwestern Native American tribes have desperately performed them for centuries to avoid the very real horror of death by drought. While I am happy that so many get such strength and solace from their faith, the idea of God seems completely impossible. Honestly, the existence of Santa seems like a more realistic scenario than God to me.

In the end I think it comes down to two options: 1) foster that kernel of faith and subsequently devote myself to Him in an attempt to stave off this loneliness and perhaps receive His strength such that I might achieve my personal goals or 2) continue to deny His existence entirely and depend upon the strength I receive from friends, family and myself. If I was a betting man I'd say that the latter is the more realistic option. I don't think I can genuinely do the rain dance, at least not right now. Even if someone showed me how to do it just right, I don't think I have the faith it takes to actually bring the rain.

Grown ups

2011-12-28T12:03:00.000-07:00

The friends I have from childhood are now grown men and women. We don't ride bicycles together anymore or hassle music store snobs. We don't call each other on the phone and pick up conversations like the last one never ended. Instead we congregate. We sit. We drink dark beers in dark bars and talk about our lives. Our work. Our spouses. Our children. The casualness of yesteryear has been replaced by a sweet and sour formality for which I am both thankful and regretful. To sit across a table at a familiar bar is different than walking wordlessly out of my parents' house, opening the passenger door to an indestructible 1980's sedan and leaving. Not going anywhere in particular, just leaving.

Regardless of the inevitable changes, even if I only see you for a day or a few hours in a dimly lit room this week, know that I love you.

Resting face

2011-12-27T13:24:00.002-07:00

My wife has told me that I perpetually look upset. I've explained to her that what she is seeing is just my "resting face." It is the face I make when I allow the expressive muscles of my face to just relax. Indeed I am not actually "making" a face at all. My face is just sitting there the way the muscles in my hands are just sitting there unless I'm actively holding something. One of the more difficult parts of the holiday season for me is that as we try our best to spend time with our friends and family who we really have one chance to see annually, I feel compelled to leave a positive impression that will last the rest of the year. I want people to know that my face is just in a state of repose rather than anger or fatigue (although I might actually be pretty fatigued). I have to fight the natural inclination towards having a resting face as the last thing I want to do is give the impression that I am upset or do not want to be in the company of people. So if you see me smiling in a strained or otherwise bizarre way its probably because I desperately want you to remember me really enjoying your company. The irony of all of this is that the presence of my resting face suggests I'm really relaxed likely as a result of being around you. I am living the most classic of oxymora: I'm "acting naturally." Admittedly it's kind of a sad gesture but hopefully that makes sense.

Life Vacation

2011-12-24T23:28:00.000-07:00

Since the beginning of college I have tried to spend approximately forty-five to sixty minutes a few times per week laying in bed doing nothing. By myself. With the lights off. I say "approximately" because actually keeping track of time diminishes the experience. And when I say doing "nothing," I really mean nothing. I'm not sleeping, fantasizing, meditating, planning or anything like that. I am taking a vacation from life. A "life vacation." I realize that that might conjure images of a depressed individual but that could not be further from the truth. I choose the word "vacation" with purpose. In these brief stints I am not trying to escape my life. I love life. I love my life in particular. However, one of the biggest problems I have with daily living is the pressure I feel to be doing something every second of the day. Every day. Until I am dead. Work is doing something. Recreation is doing something. Hell, even sleep is doing something. All these activities, as activities are wont to do, have parameters. You work from a certain time to another time. You play a sport with rules or read a book with a plot that is to be followed. You sleep for a set number of hours. While recreation and some elements of work are pleasurable they never truly escape their true nature: different functions on the same treadmill. I require something that is not treadmill applicable and is as close to being without parameters as I can get.

Don't get me wrong, the treadmill is definitely not a bad place to be most of the time. The part of the treadmill I have a problem with is the second half of the word itself. Mill. A treadmill is truly a mill in that mills do not stop functioning whether its turning the flow of air or water into energy or some other product. This mill similarly propels a belt (and indirectly, a person) across rollers ad infinitum to create some sort of product. Sometimes the product is pleasure, sometimes its labor. Either way, something is turning and its doing it constantly. Its the sheer constancy that troubles me.

So everything I have said so far is nice and vague. The real question you might be asking is, "So what exactly is happening as you lay in bed, in the dark, in the middle of a summer day when there is work to be done, people to see, and fun to be had?" Firstly, I am warm. Secondly, I am motionless. Thirdly, and most importantly, my mind swims. Thoughts flow in and out of consciousness like so many rolls of toilet paper hurtled by multiple teenagers at a suburban house on Halloween. The roll initially moves by one's primary intention but then the wind catches it or a branch comes out of nowhere and it unfurls seemingly of its own accord and lands where it will. Simultaneously your friend's roll flies through the air at a different trajectory and with different consequences and then another and another and so on. All commanded by the physics of a cold and windy fall evening. I don't know where the streams of toilet paper come from or where they are going. Similarly, in my mind, playing "house" in kindergarten flows into a math test in third grade. Second year of medical school runs retrograde into the day I got my driver's license. I am not the one throwing the rolls. They are just thrown.

Despite feeling ten years ago that life had hit its saturation point of being an overly-booked sequence of activities, to my great surprise, today things have become much worse. My phone allows me to be reached at every moment of every day via multiple social networks, instant messaging, text messaging, video chat or its least used function, actual speech. Now, I know what you're thinking, "It's your phone, Arjune, just turn it off and move on with your life." While you are definitely correct that I have the power to turn it off if I so choose, I am now in a series of so many social connections that many people within these circles begin dialogues that require a timely response (and reasonably so, considering I always have some device nearby). A missed email might mean that the entire plan for the evening is ruined. A missed text message might send me down the wrong fork in the road in mere minutes. If I was on a treadmill in college, I am on one now that has way more buttons and goes much faster. Yesterday's "fast" setting is the new "medium." Yesterday's "medium" setting is now "slow." Still, I can hear you insisting, "Arjune, these are just excuses! Turn it off! What are you so afraid of?!" And that's the sad truth that underlies the entire issue: fear. To actually disconnect means that something might be missed. If I am in your social web and I clip some of the strings and miss some gem on your newsfeed, after enough 'misses,' I fear that I might not get back into your web. So instead I remain entangled in your web despite the exhaustion. For me the experience of exhaustion is best remedied by some sort of anti-exhaustion anti-experience. Hence the life vacation!

With a level of trepidation, I have actually taken steps to pull the plug on some of the constant connectedness. I disengage social networking and email functions and only allow them during certain times of the day. Despite the cordoning off of a few levels of personal access, nothing replaces my life vacations when it comes to truly stepping off the treadmill. My roommates in college and my wife previously assumed I was either depressed or physically ill. The funny part about those reasonable assumptions is that I think I have actually staved off considerable amounts of anxiety, depression and physical illness with my vacations. To be mentally and physically on the treadmill every minute of every day for an entire lifetime sounds like a recipe for madness. Perhaps I am being overly dramatic; I'm sure many people feel like they have stepped off the treadmill when they are at yoga, or pursuing arts and crafts, etc. Its just that I want the full anti-experience. I encourage you to replace one of your relaxing activities with a life vacation as I have described it above. Watch the arc of the toilet paper rolls thrown by unseen hands. The beauty is in the fact that its not really happening, you did not actually throw the roll and when the cops come to bust you, you are not even there. Indeed you are nowhere. Now that's some real relaxation.

I have always loved television

2011-12-23T01:25:00.000-07:00

I have always loved television. As a kid I came home from school around 3:15pm or so and then started my afternoon by watching "Dennis the Menace" then "Woody Woodpecker and Friends" followed by other assorted cartoons. After dinner, my Mom, Dad and I would watch Three's Company re-runs or Growing Pains, etc. We would lay on the couch together with me in the middle snuggled dreamily between them. That period stands as one of the happiest times of my life. A key element to this schedule was that 1) I loved spending time with my parents, 2) I had few friends to interrupt this routine and 3) All three of us were completely engrossed by "Full House" and "Perfect Strangers," etc.

At some point the volume of homework grew to a level where I wasn't able to dedicate the same amount of time to watching TV alone or with family and yet it has always been in my life. At that time TV provided a cultural touchstone for my parents and me in different, if not completely opposite, ways. My parents attained a level of cultural comfort as they realized that the US was a more manageable and less scary place than it seemed in real life. Conversely, television gave me the hope that this country was potentially more excitingly bizarre and strange than my land-locked neighborhood suggested, i.e. your distant cousin from a fictional island at any moment might move in with you. Most importantly to the three non-Latino, non-African-American brown people on a block in a southeastern Michigan suburb, it promised that if we adopted certain nuances of speech and behavior we could be accepted by everyone else. That all of this was conveniently beamed into our living room was just the icing on the cake.

Ancillary benefits aside from just fitting in soon presented themselves. As a result of consuming vast amounts of programming from the big national networks like NBC, CBS and ABC as well as children's shows on burgeoning cable channels like Nickelodeon, I always felt one step ahead of my fellow Indian-Americans who were relegated to "No Television" policies by their parents or strictly educationally-based shows on PBS. Nothing felt better than not only being able to relate to kids at school who had lived in our neighborhood for generations but also being far more in touch with contemporary cultural references than my Indian-American peers who had just moved in.

Considering that I found television so entertaining, educational and a bonding element for my immediate family, I was surprised and somewhat disappointed to discover over time that television is generally looked down upon as the lowest common denominator of entertainment. As time went on I noticed fewer and fewer of my peers watching television much at all. With the rise of the internet I now have scores of friends who don't own televisions at all. Indeed I think they pride themselves as being non-television owners. At some point subscribing to internet connections and listening to National Public Radio became the only acceptable means of entertainment to people I know, who, like me, have spent most of our lives acquiring degrees and an alphabet soup of letters after our names.

The most common argument against television I have heard is that it is "passive entertainment" designed strictly for the sake of advertising revenue for the unthinking public. I agree that television is frequently a passive form of entertainment. I agree that it is oriented around advertising. But rather than seeing these as points of criticism, these are characteristics that make television, the sitcom in particular, such an amazing medium to me. Imagine writing a book in which every ten minutes the reader has to stop and be subjected to thirty second diatribes about the benefits of one brand of soap over another, and yet the story is compelling enough to successfully pull the viewer back for the remaining precious minutes the writing/production team has until the next break. I am constantly astounded. In a world of diminishing attention spans, I think television has only improved. Trashy shows like "Keeping up with the Kardashians" have had to maintain an incredibly high level of rapid-fire trashiness such that they don't lose viewers to internet videos of cats, etc. Sitcoms for the most part have done away with laugh-tracks and long introductory sequences which has led to sharper and drier writing once reserved only for cinema (consider the "The Larry Sanders Show" which set the scene for the brilliance of "Arrested Development" and "30 Rock" along with so many others).
I am not sure when the word "passive" with respect to its association with entertainment got such a negative connotation but I think there's something lovely about it. Completely active entertainment all the time seems like a thoroughly exhausting experience. If I only drank Franziskaners when I chose to have a beer and dedicated the energy such a fine drink deserves to appreciate its subtleties I think I would be exhausted by that kind of "relaxation." Like taking in the perverse pleasure of watching a Kardashian try to engage in some kind of gainful employment despite being flush for life, many times a Coors Light with a side of Cookies 'n Cream ice cream is the perfect thoughtless, indulgent combination despite its lack of subtlety. I love "This American Life" but if I listened to it or its ilk with all of my free time, my head would explode from too much thinking.

I think we are in a golden age of TV programming if only because the internet has provided a viable alternative for entertainment to conventional television. I too am an admirer of internet based entertainment. That regular people can record home videos, upload them to video sites like YouTube within minutes and then acquire millions of viewers across the world is a technological/entertainment triumph that cannot be denied. However, I think that eschewing television entirely while replacing it solely with internet-based entertainment in conjunction with conventional radio, film and books in an attempt to be a more "active" participant in one's entertainment is to essentially cut out a key facet of Americana.

Love at first sight?

2011-12-17T06:52:00.001-07:00

When our daughter was born I didn't feel the "love at first sight" sensation I was told to expect by friends, film and television. I felt afraid. I had just met this person who I had only seen via grainy 2D ultrasonography and suddenly she was our living, breathing daughter. Consequently, the rest of the human race had put us immediately in charge of the development of every cell in her body. This quick turn of events begged the question, "If we are in charge of her, who then is in charge of us?" The imbalance of our relationship felt cruelly askew.

After the circus of the immediate post-partum period, an even more bizarre sensation took hold: we now had a new housemate. Having lived with housemates of varying quality over the last decade I feel confident when I say she was by far the worst. She pays no rent. She would wake up and the fall asleep with no discernible pattern. She shits her pants on a daily basis. The list goes on. So, needless to say, my enthusiasm for our "bundle of joy" has been lackluster at times. She was a bundle of something but I'm not quite sure what.

As we have just crossed her 5-month birthday I feel that I am only just now getting to know her. I've come to realize that I'm not the only one who has been guarded and afraid throughout this ordeal. She has had a lot to adjust to as well. She was probably not exactly thrilled to be pulled from her warm, all-inclusive uterine spa into a world in which you feel hungry, tired, soiled and bored but have exactly one way to communicate all these distinctly different feelings: wordless, loud vocalizations. In short, this hasn't exactly been a party for her either.

I just finished changing her diaper and feeding her at 3:30am this morning. While it's never easy to pull oneself out of bed, trudge to the kitchen for milk and then change a screaming infant, I can tell something big has changed that has made it much easier. She smiles when she sees me. I smile back. I think I've changed in her eyes from just some brown bald guy who shows up when things go wrong. To me she's changed from a screaming kidney bean who just happens to like to eat at 3 in the morning. Nowadays we give each other a look that says, "obviously we would both rather be asleep right now but if it has to be this way, I'm glad it's with you." In our mutually temperamental, ornery way we've fallen in love with each other. Ours isn't a "delivery suite" kind of love borne out of the excitement of new life and the promise of the future. Ours is a slow growing, meet-you-for-a-middle-of-the-night-snack-and-kiss-on-the-forehead kind of love. It's not the stuff of tear-jerking film and that's just fine by me.

Wow, we expect a lot from our machines!

2011-12-16T10:35:00.002-07:00

The element of the "All-American Muslim" debacle that amazes me the most is that we seem not only angry but genuinely surprised that for-profit groups make advertising spending decisions that are cowardly, unethical or racist. My understanding is that these are money-making machines programmed to sell screwdriver sets or cheap airline tickets. I'm afraid that our outrage reveals a far more dire situation: we may just have become the ultimate consumer. Not only do we use machines; we love machines. And because we love machines, they can break our hearts. That level of attachment makes as much sense as finding a broken parking meter, caressing its dysfunctional glass face, and then leaving it a "get well soon!" card.

Riding the hyphen of being an Indian-American

2011-12-03T19:58:00.000-07:00

The older i've gotten as an Indian-American the hyphen between the two words has become this tight-rope that seems to get longer and longer such that I can't see either side very clearly anymore. Luckily I feel like I'm carrying one of those long circus bars that keep you from falling. Bizarrely, that bar continuous to lengthen such that while I'm less and less likely to fall, in an inverse proportion I'm also less motivated to move to either side. So there I am like so many other Indian-Americans at my age: precariously yet stably suspended in no particular cultural place with little motivation, out of fear or otherwise, to move. And yet, if I paid money to see this circus even I'd want to see a guy fall or get to one side or the other. So I'm starting to better understand the disappointment in people's eyes when they ask where I'm from and I sheepishly say, "Michigan." The real story is more complex but way less exotic.

Everybody wants scientists but no one wants to pay to make them

2011-11-22T20:58:00.000-07:00

While I applaud the enthusiasm with which nearly every Republican candidate supports the idea of offering citizenship to immigrants holding doctorates in the basic sciences like chemistry and physics, I'd like to hear some ideas about how we can better financially support current American citizens to pursue the undergraduate and graduate education necessary to become basic scientists. Many people with whom I went to college shied away from graduate studies in the basic sciences as this path implies constant combat for grants while interest accumulates on monstrous undergraduate debts. I believe that to attempt to earn "immigrant-friendly" political points by eagerly providing citizenship to those for whom their education was subsidized by another nation is a slap in the face to this country's young people for whom the costly pursuit of graduate science education is financially unrealistic. If we are so desperate for basic scientists, let's help our own young people pay for it!

Big Brother, Big Nightmare

2011-11-12T20:35:00.000-07:00

once all the sixth graders piled into the gym the rules were simple: find the name tag of your eighth grade "big brother"/"big sister" for the year. obviously it was pandemonium. who would i get? who did you get? we scurried across the squeaky floor searching for our nametags with the name of our corresponding eighth grader who would steward us through the choppy waters of early junior high. simultaneously, our "big siblings" were on the lookout. their mentees. those to whom they would impart their fourteen years of wisdom. within minutes i saw hugs. i saw pats on the back. but when he pulled me by the shoulder, whipped me around and literally punched my nametag onto my chest i thought i would vomit. the next few months were hell. i got the worst of the worst and he got the feeblest of the feeble. i would take the far stairs to get to science. even then i couldn't hide. at some point it was too much. i walked into my principal's office and tried to explain the situation but couldn't help but to burst into tears mid-sentence. i didn't know how devastated i was until i saw her reaction to my runny face. when things are horrible i think about her consolation and how she completely understood the fear and misery of daily bullying. i'm not sure exactly what happened but i was never harassed again. Lynne Myavec, thank you so much.

Smelling and listening

2011-11-09T23:44:00.000-07:00

The first concert I saw was REM when I was 14 years old at The Palace which remains one of the best sensory intake events of my life as it combined the intoxication of being in physical proximity to girls with the anticipation of seeing a real band make real sound in a gigantic room where, even from high up I could see Michael's setlist taped to the stage and Peter's effects pedals laid out in front him ready to be clicked and adjusted for my benefit and just when i thought i was ready for it i wasn't: it was almost too much to hear Michael say "don't fuck with me" on "what's the frequency Kenneth?" too much to smell the awkward perfume worn by teenage girls in their outfits that were fussed upon for hours to look natural and my own desperate attempts to mechanically construct casual seeming inter-song conversation and sway bonily to non-dance music when all I wanted was to stand like a sensory-intake statue catatonically in place, smelling and listening and only breaking for shallow breaths so I could do more smelling and more listening.

just a rhyme #4

2011-11-04T23:27:00.000-06:00

first things first i thought you knew i need to call Rob Strupp and have an idaho brew but as usual i'm hungry for zingerman's which reminds me: let me congratulate Kelly Brennan and the goliath David Zimmerman can't wait to see you guys just look for me in the red cummerbund walking through the door like a party at Heidee Lund's too bad it'll be a while until i night float with Erin Barneck Carlisle thanks to circumstance "i can't walk and i can't dance" good thing i bought a jazzmaster Fender cause i know my Path like my name was Jackie Pender but even that doesn't always help because the story got sprinkled with wrinkles but whatever i'll stay positive just call me Vicki Winkel dear god please grant me more patience because i'm lost in information so if i'm a criminal let my last phone call and last lament be a desperate shout to my main man Ryan Clement.

just a rhyme #3

2011-11-04T04:46:00.000-06:00

Can't sleep need some medicine want to eat no need for phenergan it's 4:40am time for a snack but then the bread needs kneading cold cuts in the fridge need to call a meat meeting too late Zadie's started screaming seconds later her smile makes me stop breathing already forgot about eating.

just a rhyme #2

2011-10-26T18:32:00.000-06:00

Today was the storm before the calm lips feeling chapped before the balm but even when this tired and overdrawn no excuse for an afternoon "nap" to go so long i can't tell whether its dusk or dawn times like these i ask myself if i'm practicing the art of escape or just escaping into art either way "if the waiting is the hardest part" then the burn in my belly plus the hurt in my heart means its time to start getting ready because I'm ready to start.

just a rhyme #1

2011-10-23T22:44:00.000-06:00

Lately been pathologically worried got bruised up not buried pretty scared but won't scurry just heartburned like tandoori my face flushed yet too brown to blush feel too down to look up yet too proud to frown so when you see me around town even though I'm tired like I can barely crawl wearing three sweaters because I'm frail and small I'm still trying to stand tall.

what is a hipster?

2011-10-18T10:32:00.000-06:00

I don't think I understand what a hipster is. My sense is that a hipster is someone who appropriates fringe cultural elements and switches once this eccentricity enters the mainstream as it is wont to do. This sums up everyone I know who participates in the ebb and flow of contemporary culture (music, fashion, etc.). If you don't believe me, look in the back of your closet or music collection. And yet, I've never met anyone who acknowledges being a hipster. This suggests two scenarios to me: 1) the 'hipster' doesn't exist because by its nature hipness isn't static or 2) you, dear hipster critic and contemporary culture participant, are the very hipster you hate.

#4 - "judge me now" by Arjune Rama

2010-08-30T11:28:00.004-06:00

This is the shortest song I've ever written I think.

#3 - "I will follow you into the dark" (Death Cab for Cutie cover) by Arjune Rama for Kira

2010-07-14T23:57:00.003-06:00

here's a cover of death cab for cutie's "i will follow you into the dark." our small apartment full of furniture feels very large and empty tonight.

Conversation Ruiner

2010-06-04T20:31:00.004-06:00

Sometimes, when you and I are having a great conversation and things are going especially well I get this intense desire to splash you in the face with whatever’s in the glass in front of me. Please keep in mind that I consider you to be a really close friend and that this urge is not in reaction to anything you’re saying. Its just that all of the sudden my mind starts to wander. My hands begin itching to grab a glass. I have to quietly tell myself that that would not be a good idea. Sometimes I have to counsel myself that this plan meets and indeed exceeds all known criteria for a terrible idea.

Here’s how it plays out in mind:

FADE IN:

INT. A MANHATTAN PUB-STYLE BAR ($8 DRAFTS)—EARLY EVENING

Two over-educated underpaid late twenty-somethings sit at a small table drinking Blue Moon in pint classes.

ME
So how’s it going? It’s been forever since we last caught up! I know work has been pretty chaotic for you lately…are you still as excited as when you started? ‘Cause it seemed like such an amazing opportunity then…

YOU
Yeah work has been tough but I think, or at least I’d like to think, its been worthwhile. And I’ve been so tired lately but I think things are actually starting to…starting to click, you know?

ME
Well I’m glad to hear it’s coming together, though! Finally! But yeah, it sucks how you have to keep putting in so much effort before you see any results. It’s not just you though, I feel the same way about school. Even though you have to keep pushing, it’s important to set aside time to take a breather and relax for a sec. I mean, it can’t be all about work.

YOU
Thanks. I think you’re right. Sometimes I feel like maybe I focus so much on the work part of my life that maybe I’m not doing enough to take care of myself? You know how you were talking about going out to the North Fork for wine tastings in the spring? I think that would be the perfect quick getaway. Do you remember which LIRR stop it was…

And then it happens. I watch my by-now crazily itchy right hand grab my frosty glass (and on occasion your frosty glass if I’m feeling like a real Creepy Creepface) and completely empty the vessel across the table the way you might pour out an unwanted cup of water while idly standing on someone’s lawn having a nice little convo. Except it’s not the lawn. It’s not idle. And it’s in your face, guy.

Imagine a smooth sequence of events:
1) A totally intentional quick jerk of my hand,
2) My cup is emptied,
3) I’m doing the wide open-mouthed smile of a proud parent watching his kid take his first few steps,
4) Your face is covered and the relationship is clearly over. Well not just yet. The meeting of your face with my arcing beer projectile marks the beginning of a whole new sequence of events. That is, you’re about to confront the initial shock that you just got splashed in the face, the shock that its me, and then what you’re going to do about it.

As the beer drips out of your hair and begins to run down your face, first there’s the look of, “Oh my God what just happened!” which quickly shifts to “I can’t believe you did that!” which is then replaced by (pay close attention to emphasis) “I can’t believe you did that.” In some incarnations of this scenario I imagine my more confrontational friends will start screaming at me before they stand up and stomp out of the establishment. Either way: game over.

Why, you ask, would I even fantasize about completely shocking, angering and humiliating perfectly nice people who’s trust and respect I have invested so much effort to garner? I think it has a lot to do with my deeply seeded desire to surprise people. Surprising people seems consistently rewarded when it comes to doing well at work, doing a thoughtful favor, etc. In this case its the same urge but just directed completely oppositely. And horribly. Instead of the surprise of seeing your three-year old spontaneously speaking Mandarin, it’s the surprise of waking up after anesthesia only to realize that you don’t recognize your name on your hospital bracelet. Or the hospital name. And your penis is missing. Surprise!

I’m sure this sounds totally pathological and it probably is. I mean, it has to be. The urge is never related to what people are saying and it seemingly pops up most when the conversation is going particularly well and I’m talking to someone who I really like a lot. I hope you’ll take comfort in knowing that in all likelihood, we’re going to have a great conversation wherein neither of us walks home smelling like a frat party. However, if worse comes to worst and urges come to active fluid flinging, please know that this is truly a case of “it’s not you, its me.”

The Changing Face of Terrorism: My Thoughts on the Times Square Bombing Attempt

2010-05-05T14:16:00.008-06:00

New York City is a scary place. I recall stories of people falling through those less-than-stable sidewalk grates whenever I leave the apartment. Bicyclists have nearly collided with me countless times. Even the souvlaki can be suspect. These are fears we accept. We push them out of our minds and just cram ourselves onto an overstuffed subway train and hope for the best. Daily. Until this past weekend, fears worse than toxic street meat and grate paranoia seem to have faded from the minds of Get-Out-Of-My-Fucking-Way-You–Fucking-Fuck New Yorkers.

As I smooshed onto an uptown 6 the Monday morning after the Times Square bombing attempt I couldn’t help but experience the fear that people all over this city must feel. I kept thinking to myself, "Is someone going to kill me today?" As if on cue, my fear antennae perked up as I stood next to a young bearded and turbaned man that I’ve been taught to fear by 24-hour news channels over the last 9 years. What makes today different is that today he could easily be looking at me and feeling his own fear antennae tingling.

Changing Stereotypes

Suspected Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad doesn’t have a long beard. He doesn’t wear a turban. In fact, he’s an American citizen. Suddenly the old stereotypes don’t apply. While I am repulsed at the idea that we have collectively identified this racist image with the face of terrorism, I must admit that it has helped calm my fears that I myself would not be looked at as a suspicious character.

The time immediately after the attacks of September 11th, 2001 allowed unbearded, unturbaned American-accented brown-skinned people like me to think, “Hey, no one is going to randomly take their anti-Islamic revenge on me. I don’t look the part. My voice sounds like I was raised on generous helpings of Cheers and Seinfeld.” I must be honest - before the picture of Faisal Shahzad was released I found myself crossing my fingers and saying to myself, “Please make him look really fundamentalist-y! Come on big long beard! Come on turban! Come on really long name with Mohammed and some “Al-somethings” thrown in!”

Yes, I know I’m a horrible person for hoping that his image would fall neatly into a stereotype that safely excludes me. In the end, nothing like that came true. However, before you stop reading, please allow me to explain:

While there has not been a domestic terrorist attack with the size or scope of 9/11, it hasn’t been for a lack of trying. As a result, just like every other non-brown person in New York City, we are afraid too. We look out through the same panicked eyes. However, for us there is an additional fear of what will happen to us on the street and in the subway as the profile for suspected terrorists continues to become less strictly defined. We are afraid of the potential for thoughtless, irrational revenge against anyone who even remotely looks the part. As we saw this weekend, appearance, facility with language, and citizenship are no longer usable criteria. As in the case of former Army Major Dr. Nidal Hasan in the Fort Hood shootings, education level and societal position are meaningless indices as well. With these events over the last 9 years I have felt my appearance move from the “safe” profile to the “suspicious” profile alarmingly quickly. I’ll never forget when I was 14 years-old and having my next-door neighbor’s mother tell me to go back to my own country after I ran across her lawn to get to the soccer field. That was 1995. Can you imagine where she’d tell me to go now?

A Request

As I suspect that the terrorist stereotype will continue to change to include a wider and wider swath of citizens and non-citizens, I have one request: let’s abandon the terrorist stereotype image entirely. We might as well because soon there won’t even be a shadowy stereotype to which people can cling. Soon there will be no image to shape and reshape because perpetrators will look, sound and could essentially be anyone. After all, this is a war with no uniforms, no skin color, and no flags. While I can’t even begin to present a solution to domestic terrorism, I know that xenophobic/racist fears only serve to divide and weaken us as a city and country in general. These fears do nothing to promote peace and do everything to promote violence and intimidation. I realize this is easier said than done. Even I find myself using it, especially when I’m afraid like I was after this past weekend. In the aftermath of an event like this weekend, history has demonstrated that violent hate crimes tend to climb. If we can work to banish this image as soon as possible, maybe we can avoid some completely senseless violence.

There are a million things to be afraid of in New York. Being afraid of each other should not be one of them.

Shhh! Healing in Progress!

2010-02-28T09:18:00.008-07:00

I'm sitting in a pediatric intensive care unit in a busy New York City hospital. Nearby I hear medical students, residents (physicians-in-training) and attendings (fully-trained physicians) snicker about how one of the teenage patients is behaving like a "big baby" about her pain. This patient over the last week has had a large rubber tube placed into her chest to drain about a mop bucket full of pus from an infected lung. While she has been prescribed some heavy narcotics she notes that she still feels the painful presence of the tube as well as the trauma from the original incision. The area where her chest was punctured remains tender to the touch and she feels pain with every breath. Air in, pain. Air out, pain. This cycle repeats 18 times per minute, 1080 times per hour, 25,920 times per day . As I write this, I hear her crying and moaning beneath posters of cartoon bears and signs that read, "Shhh! Healing in progress!"

Now, I'm no Mother Theresa. I've snickered at patients before. I've even come home and joked with friends and family about unusual cases. But I just can't understand how anyone could laugh or criticize someone who is in pain right before their eyes. As the medical students/residents/attendings write their reports about this patient they have moved on to discussing a list of the best hospitals for post-graduate fellowships, research, and further training in their disciplines of interest. Their patient continues to wail in the not-so-distant background (about 10 yards).

Medicine is a strange field; you dedicate your life to the treatment of strangers and yet there is a mind-boggling amount of narcissism necessary to achieving the lofty position of "Doctor." You spend 12 years at minimum working on yourself. You enroll in college, then medical school, then residency, then fellowship. Essentially every few years I have to decide what I want to do next. Where I want to go. What field I want to enter. For a calling that purports to focus on others there is a tremendous amount of "ME ME ME" going on.

Considering that 1 in 5 Americans will eventually die in an ICU like this one, I have a helpful hint for you, dear Reader. If you are left wondering why your screams of pain go unheeded, it may be that your physicians/physicians-in-training simply cannot hear you over the din of their own conversation regarding the best places for them to train in order to eventually better serve you. In fact, could you quiet down? Like the signs says, "Shhh! Healing in progress!"

things should be more fun.

2010-02-15T08:17:00.005-07:00

Zach thomson (http://www.equalszee.org/) and I are working on a song we did 7 years ago. Wow I feel old. Listening to the original track reminds me of how I should be having more fun and being less concerned with everything being just right. I'm halfway embarrassed when I listen to the lyrics because its the only silly song I've ever written. However, its also the only truly fun song I've ever written. OK maybe I'm fully embarrassed. But that's ridiculous because if music isn't fun then what's the point. Not every line has to be Shakespeare. Not every blog post has to be a publishable essay.

I'm graduating from medical school in 6 weeks and I think that I let too much of that seriousness squeeze out the joy of everyday fun and hilarious things.

The strangest thing about it is that I have to relearn the lyrics because its been so many years since I've played the song. I feel like I'm covering my own song. In reality I'm trying to remember who I actually am as opposed to the moody nervewracked mess I've become.

I'm smiling. And I like and endorse it.

Subscribe to the Scientific Progress Goes "Boink" Podcast!

2010-01-04T18:23:00.003-07:00

After much wrangling and general computer confusion, I created a podcast! Click the button on the left column to subscribe! You'll get the songs and videos from my blog downloaded conveniently to your iTunes.

#2 - "dumb" (Nirvana cover) by Arjune and Kira

2010-01-02T18:18:00.008-07:00

Kira and I went skating, drank great beer, and recorded a song! This is a cover of Nirvana's "Dumb." That's Kira singing harmonies.

#1 - "she said oh" by Arjune Rama

2009-12-28T22:29:00.006-07:00

“she said oh”
words and music by Arjune Rama

Oh oh
I can’t be your friend anymore
You work as a clown
at birthdays in town
And I just can’t live that way

She said oh oh
I can’t be your friend anymore
My boyfriend’s around
Your teeth are all brown
And I just can’t live that way

we are young
we are old
they’re just roles that we play they change every day
its not fun
but we know it will be alright
she opens her eyes and says

Oh oh
Your eyes shine so bright just like Light Brite
But your face is a frown
As I gaze at your gown
And I just can’t look away

She said oh oh
Your ears are so long, is something gone wrong?
cause your sorry mouth moans
Like you passed kidney stones
And I just can’t turn away

we are young
we are old
they’re just roles that we play they change every day
its not fun
but we know it will be alright
she opens her eyes and says
OH

To all current and aspiring physicians: know thyself

2009-12-26T09:26:00.004-07:00

Inspiration for Blog Title

2009-12-25T08:13:00.000-07:00

Calvin and Hobbes were a formative part of my childhood. Similar to the way different scents bring you back to a previous life experience, reading Bill Watterson's comic makes me feel like a kid again.

Welcome!

2009-12-25T08:03:00.000-07:00

I realized that my rantings don't fit within the character limit of twitter or facebook updates so I decided to hang my own shingle in the great Series of Tubes.