Dave Barry's Year In Review

Long, but his summary of 2007 has some funny moments, like December:

On the Republican side, Mitt Romney seeks to defuse the religion issue by making a major speech in which -- echoing the words of John F. Kennedy -- he declares that he is a Catholic.

The Secret of My Failure

Wanting to write the next great American novel is terribly cliché—so it should come as no surprise that I would like to. Well more of an essay than a novel and it doesn't have to be great, preferably just good enough. In the throes of writing my grad school applications, I feel inept, unexpressive, and just plain boring as I try to turn the humdrum disappointments of my life into stunning accomplishments. And if I can’t convince them that I am accomplished, then at least I can write about my mediocrity cogently and thoughtfully enough that they will be impressed. I have to—it is my last bastion of potential excellence. My recommendations will likely be laudatory, but not gushing. My grades are adequate, but not outstanding. My resume is serviceable, but not exceptional. My test scores are above average, but in the Lake Wobegone sense of the expression.

My essays have to take this proletarian record and in true propaganda fashion convince the politburos of America’s venerable institutions of higher learning that I am party material. With so much depending on these essays, I am finding them incredibly difficult to write. Acerbic wit and dripping sarcasm are great blog-fodder, but less impressive in a personal statement. Unfortunately, besides punchy business writing, the occasional rant about airlines or earthquakes on my blog is the only writing I have done since leaving college. And sadly, my go-to format when I can’t think of something to write, a link-fest, is also discouraged in these supposedly reflective essays. “I don’t know how an MBA would help my career at this time, but I just found an article on the 50 Most Loathesome People in America in 2007 that is my kind of mean-spirited vitriol. Oh yeah, and Buzzfeed has some mouths-for-eyes pictures that are creepy.”

So with excellence almost within my grasp and with mediocrity waiting to catch me, I will probably continue to fret about writing and continue to write about writing and in so doing avoid any actual writing until the last minute. But while this period of self-reflection runs amok, I will continue to parse stylistic elements or thematic devices from examples of writing that I hope to emulate.

These examples come from the most surprising places. Who would have thought that one of the more poignant essays I have read this year would hide itself in GQ? More importantly, who knew that I would ever admit to reading such trash aimed at the aspiring-but-not-yet-nouveau-riche? (Though I will freely admit to thumbing through Vogue—I happen to like non-silicone enhanced women in fashionable clothes—having another GQ columnist rehash the brown shoes with blue suit question bores me. As an aside, I should get 1000 points for implying that emaciated coke-snorting Vogue models better represent the female form than the silicone stuffing meth-addicted starlets on GQ’s pages. Also 1000 points for despising the nouveau riche despite my own negative financial net worth.) That gem, which I tore from the hundreds of other useless GQ pages on a NYC-LA flight, is below and my thoughts while reading it are in brackets. I think it is worth your attention--it had mine and instilled an unshakable sense of pending doom.

* * *

The Secret of My Failure

The secret of my failure was that I thought success was permanent. Like a lot of men, I had reached a sweet-scented peak [nice phrase] that I thought was mine for life. Then one foul day I fell into the pit of failure. And then come, oh, ten years when the postman became the most important person in my diminished life, because his footsteps outside our shabby little flat brought the possibility of some paltry cheque. [I apparently picked up the British edition of GQ—those turds, invading my airport news kiosks with their filth.]

Ten years of fretting about money. Ten years of waking up in the middle of the night, wondering where the next mortgage payment was coming from. Ten years to contemplate where it had all gone wrong. And ten years dreading that inevitable moment at a party when someone asked, “And what are you doing these days?”

The funny thing is, I was working like a dog, taking any job that came my way, because failures can’t be choosers. [That is a GREAT line. I really like this guy.] But it didn’t make any difference. All successful men work hard, but so do the vast majority of failures. [Crap, is that me?]

I had left my first job in journalism, as a staff writer on NME, with great expectations. I was 25 years old and for the previous three years I had been writing cover stories for the biggest music weekly in the world. I was quite popular—but it was only when I left NME that I discovered I was only popular with spotty, high-IQ misfits who were saving up for their first pair of bondage trousers. [Lol both at that sentence and the fact that he uses “trousers.”] Nobody else had heard of me. Nobody else wanted to know.

In rapid succession I was married, a father, divorced, and a single father. There had never been much money—Julie Burchill and I used to take bottles back to get the tube fare to work—but now there was none. For a single man, failure is hard to take. For a family man, especially a broken family man, it is poison.

Here is how failure finds you. First there is a creeping sense of dread and then suddenly the sky falls down.

“How did you go bankrupt?” asks a character in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises.

“Two ways,” comes the reply. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

That is how your failure hits you. Gradually and then suddenly. Slowly, almost imperceptibly at first—the increasing struggles with money, the nagging sense of things not going how you had expected, how you like, and then the terrible realization that the world can get along very well without you—and finally disaster. The bills that can’t be paid. The career in the ditch. The relationship in ruins. Your health shot.

Jay McInerney uses that quote from Hemingway’s novel at the start of his own masterpiece, Bright Lights, Big City. Widely considered to be—with Bonfire of The Vanities—one of the ultimate zeitgeist Eighties books, Bright Lights, Big City is really the story of a young man failing: chemically, professionally, economically, personally, socially. All the ways we can fail. [Those books are going on the reading list.]

For all its references to Bolivian marching powder and clubs and girls with shaven heads, Bright Lights, Big City is really the best novel ever written about coping with failure, and taking the first steps to recovery.

The book ends with the protagonist trading his sunglasses for some freshly baked bread, down on his knees, stuffing it into his mouth and trying to keep it down. That’s what fighting failure feels like. It feels like it might just be beyond you. It turns your stomach.

I felt that way for ten years. From the middle of my twenties until the middle of my thirties, I was that man on his knees, struggling to keep the fresh bread in his stomach. My problem was that the only formal training I had ever received was how to take drugs with rock stars. [Hmm, much like the training of a consulting analyst!]

And there was no great shining moment when I felt failure was behind me. After ten years of slog, things started to turn the corner. There was money, there was opportunity, there was the ebbing away of anxiety. [Nice last phrase.] But when you have known failure—real, kick-in-the-bollocks failure [bollocks!? I hate this brit]—it never really leaves you, and you take nothing for granted again.

Things change. The new boss doesn’t like you as much as the old boss. There are tensions in the office. You are overlooked for a promotion / raise / blowjob at the office party [this is a family blog! but I included it because of artistic integrity]. You get sacked. Or you feel hemmed in, unfulfilled, and frustrated. You move on. And stumble. And fall. And fall.

Every heroic myth has failure built in to the narrative. We think of Ali with his jaw broken in the first fight against Joe Frazier, Sinatra in the dog days with no recording contract, Christ on the cross in his moment of doubt and pain. [Hmm, no recording contract vs suffering sins of all mankind….ok, yeah, sure, I get that parallel.] But we all know how the story ends—that Ali will me Frazier again in Manila, that Sinatra has Capitol Records and From Here to Eternity around the corner, and on the third day the stone will roll back, and eternal life awaits. [After all, eternal life would be more like eternal damnation without New York, New York—Sinatra’s most popular song according to Itunes. Yes I had to look it up. I actually hate Sinatra.]

Great men overcome failure and it makes them greater than ever. But when you can’t pay your gas bill you don’t feel like Muhammad Ali or Frank Sinatra or Jesus Christ. You feel more like Mr Bean. [Nice!]

They say that failure isn’t fatal. But it doesn’t feel that way when you are in the middle of it. Failure feels like it will kill you. Failure is the dirty bomb in the life of the modern male, as undeniable as serious illness, a condition it closely resembles.

Looking on the bright side, my ten long years of failure didn’t kill me. Somehow the bills got paid. I never went bankrupt. Although what happened to me was personally devastating, and not what I would have wanted, some people might even consider it a kind of measly, modest success. I never had a boss, or had to go to an office, or had to wear a suit and tie when I didn’t want to. I kept working at the job I love. One man’s abject failure is another man’s bad decade at the office. Failure is relative.

There are a thousand ways for a man to feel like a failure, but nothing cuts to the bone quite as acutely as professional failure, because so much of our self-esteem is derived from what we do for a living. So how to fight failure? Stay fit. Work hard. Then work harder. Then work better. No drinking to excess over the age of 30. No drugs at all over the age of 25. Never let your vices become your day job. Never get lazy. Never get fat. [btw, the Economist has a piece on beautiful people getting paid more.] And never ever bet against yourself.

There is no shame in failing. Great men have spent a lifetime on their knees. In his mid-twenties, Orson Welles was cinema’s favourite son. Then came decades of development hell. “Something always turns up when you are down and out,” said Wells. “Usually the noses of your friends.”

By the end, the man who made Citizen Kane was making sherry commercials. But a failure? I don’t think so.

“A man can be destroyed but not defeated,” said Hemingway, who changed American literature but ended up one sunny Sunday morning, aged 61, with a double-barreled 12-bore shotgun pressed against the roof of his mouth. They say his wife Mary was woken by two shots that were almost, but not quite, simultaneous. But a failure? As time goes by, Hemingway’s life seems more like a triumph, even though the colossus was torn down at the end by the nightmare-ticket failure of body and mind.

Hemingway believed any story followed to the very end would be a story of failure, and perhaps that is how we need to think of it. Failure—financial, professional, personal—is not a cruel act of God, but an inevitable fluctuation in life’s fortunes. You will get sacked. [close, sometimes] You will get sick. [not so much] You will run out of money [check] and luck [check]. You will get your heart pulped by your true love. [check, but hopefully she wasn’t my true love.] Failure in one shape or another will get you, because it gets all of us sooner or later.

Failure hardens you. This is a good thing. You get sacked and you find out who your friends are. You get your heart broken and you learn that you give it away too easily. You get sick and you realize that you took your flesh and blood for granted in your carefree, drug sozzled youth. [Brings back memories of my Dr. Pepper induced teenage haze.]

The big problem with failure is that it is so time-consuming. When you are worried about money your mind has no room for anything else. When the red bills are on your doormat you find it hard to lift your eyes to the stars. But failure is the best education money can’t buy. [lame line, for sure]. It will ultimately do you a lot more good than going to “uni” for three years. [At least, uni in Britain, which clearly sucks.]

Perhaps real and lasting success is impossible without the experience of real, grown-up failure. Until you have lost that job and lost that women and watched your self-esteem running down the drain you will never truly have lift-off.

In the school of hard knocks [yawn at that phrase], genuine grinding failure—the kind where people wonder what happened to you, and so do you—is like a double first from Oxford. Surviving failure makes you a man. It makes you run twice as fast as the competition, it makes you twice as hungry, it makes you twice as hard. Once you had your nose rubbed in dirt—when you have spent hours beyond counting waiting for the postman to bring some pathetic little check—then the competition has no chance. The safe little flight plans of your rival’s life—from school to university to office—are no match for what you have endured.

When it is happening to you, failure feels like a beating. It literally feels like you are on the sharp end of a kicking. And as anyone who has taken a good hiding will tell you, it is not the pain that hurts. It is the humiliation. Failure is like that. You taste it

But it leaves some steel in your spine. It leaves a chip of ice in your heart. [nice phrase] It makes you ready for anything. You always remember what failure felt like. And you remember it every day of your working life.

How dumb was I in my twenties? This dumb: when failure came looking for me, I was shocked. When I lost the job; when the money ran out; when serious illness found my family; when I was wearing my Harrington jacket to divorce court—I was stunned that any of this could possibly happen to me. “Nothing bad ever happened to me before,” I said to my mother, as though that meant I truly believed nothing bad could ever happen to me. That’s why it took me ten long years to climb back. I didn’t see failure coming. And I honestly thought it never would.

Don’t be like me. Bounce back fast. Expect failure to hit you hard somewhere along the line. But I promise you this—if you lose the job then you will find a better job. If you lose the girl then you will find a better girl. And if you lose your health then you might learn to stop putting rubbish into your system. [Unless you really are a failure, in which case none of this applies.]

Embrace failure. Make it your greatest ally. Because at the very moment they all think you are finished, your success is assured. [GREAT clencher!]

Time Out from Grad School Apps...

...to post a few cool links.

Apparently playing with blocks counts as (computer) science these days. Seriously, this was always my favorite thing to do with blocks.

I am all about sites that do one thing and one thing well, particularly around this holiday season.

Does anyone else think that Apple stores are becoming religious sites? I mean, look at the glass staircase--it makes me believe.

Just so everyone is aware, in the most recent Terrill Scrabble game I was the highest scoring individual player. And I didn't even use this, but now that I found it, I will use it on my phone constantly.

The world in oil.

Nothing says responsible father like a pet hyena.

Lesser Known Slogans of Political Moderations

Via the always delicious McSweeney's:

Live free or give me a reasonable alternative!

Peace through pragmatism.

Let's all keep our opinions to ourselves for a while!

It's noontime in America.

Some taxation, some representation.

What do we want? Rational discussion? When do we want it? ... What works for you?

Hooray for prudence!

We request change in a reasonable amount of time after comprehensive discussion of the options!

Who wants peanuts?

I can't decide my favorite, maybe noontime in America.

Snappy Titles

So I am writing some grad school essays and need a snappy title for one. I tried googling "snappy titles" but all I got were blog posts from losers who could (similarly) not come up with a snappy title. So I searched for "best title ever" to be sure and weed out those proles. The result was not quite what I wanted, but educational nonetheless. I had the vague idea of buying the Pooh book for Christmas for someone, but the only copy I found (it is out of print) was $150. (Un)fortunately (depending on your perspective), I don't love anyone that much to blow that on a classy gag gift.

Also, I think the first step to beating the blues is to not buy a book that says you are a complete idiot.

Amazon Board Meeting Two Weeks Ago

Jeff Bezos: "Guys, we are missing out on the lucrative online carcass market..."

Presto Chango--they are in that market, and customers love it.

Alonergy Defined

Loyal reader Hayna has recently benefited from Alonergetic practices and dutifully sang praise to this phenomenon on her blog, with sundry friends and family chiming in via the comments section. In above posting, she decries the lack of a formal definition for the movement. Rightly so. While I did my best to help her understand the nuances of Alonergy by responding in the comments section (reproduced below), I was unsatisfied with the strictures of that form and with my hastily written reply. I consulted the only man I know whose Alonergy Star Efficiency Rating (similar to the Energy Star Rating used by the EPA and DOE) approaches 100%--in other words, the man who captures nearly all of his Alonergy potential. His name is Feed. My comments and his response below.

A note of caution: stop talking, blogging, or emailing about Alonergy or, in the words of one wise adherent, "Before you know it, we are all alone together and Alonergy as we know it disappears."

My original reponse:

My dear young practitioners/followers/believers:

I need to clarify several points.

1. Alonergy is not a theory, not an element of life, it is life.

2. I did not invent Alonergy as a theory, for it is universal and eternal. Nor was I the first to promulgate its principles, that was Feed

3. The opposite of Alonergy is not Togethergy, it is Synergy. Alonergy (1=3) was coined to express the opposite of Synergy (1+1=3).

4. You can't enjoy both Alonergy and Synergy any more than you can serve God and mammon or be both an extrovert and an introvert. If you think you enjoy both, then you are really a follower of Synergy who needs some time to recharge. If you are truly uncomfortable--always --when around other people, then Alonergy is, by definition, what keeps you going.

5. Quick Test: If you surf the web for pictures of Siberia or the Northwest Territories while at work so that you can fantasize about being in a place where you know there is not another living soul around for hundreds of miles, then you are a true believer. And if so, may I recommend www.trekearth.com.

Feed's response:

I do approve. Be mindful, though, that in communicating Alonergy to the community you do not become tempted by community, and give in to the sickly sweet seduction of synergy.

The basic, newly updated, definition of Alonergy, as I indicated on my blog, is: The non-interaction of agents or forces such that their effect is greater than if they had interacted. A heightened state of awareness, happiness, or effectiveness achieved by being or acting alone.

Alonergy is not a religion or a way of life. It is an observable phenomenon. Nonetheless, it is best discussed as a religion or a way of life.

The persistent (but never taxingly so) Alonergist will begin to see signs of encouragement and recognition from unlikely sources. For example, googling "Alonergy" brings up your blog, jenni's blog, and this kin of yours, but not myself as the real source. As an advanced Alonergist I am respected and left in peace by Technology, for we have much in common. I would hope that some day Technology will accord you similar respect.

A true Alonergist can be deeply, profoundly alone not only in a crowd, but with an intimate group of friends, or even a pet.

Never forget that Alonergy is a source of energy -- that invigorating breeze from a closing door as people vacate a room, the restorative sigh as one realizes one is at last truly free -- but the amounts of energy involved are normally very small. It is only the relative change for the better when one is alone that matters. Some of the greatest Alonergists are those with the least overall energy.

Damage of a Week in Philippines. Yikes.