Time tracking v. 0.9 (beta)

So, in line with the adage 'what gets measured, gets managed', I've resolved to rein in the sheer amount of time I spend uselessly fucking around, and squeeze as much quality time out of each day by tracking my time.  This is just a beta, by the way: I want to see how it works out in practice, and I'll post the aggregated weekly numbers up on this blog to keep a measure of public accountability.

I hope this will be of some use and value to anyone who wants to better manage their time, particularly for anyone who wants to maximize their productivity while reserving enough time to do other things with their lives, like have friends and hobbies, without unfairly prioritizing one over the others.

Here's an example of what my time tracking template looks like:

Today was a bad day. Normally I spend much less time fucking around, but today I was in kind of a weird mood and didn't need to urgently get anything done. My goal is to get that number in the middle, the 'Fucking-around-to-getting-shit-done' ratio, as low as possible. Today it was 2.1 --- two hours and twenty minutes of fucking around for every one hour spent productively. Yesterday wasn't so bad; that number was more like 1.8. The day before was good until I got derailed: that number was 1.1. Tomorrow, I'll see if I can't at least achieve at least parity.

Ikigai

Ikigai (生き甲斐) is a Japanese word that basically means 'why you get out of bed in the morning'. I've been searching for mine ever since that word became a part of my lexicon, because without ikigai, life becomes a series of disconnected moments that don't make much sense, except in distantly removed hindsight, and usually then with some considerable regret.

I'm turning 27 soon: three times three. Three is a very significant number to me, because it reminds me of the uselessness of dichotomous thinking. Good and evil, love and hate, black and white --- these categories almost never apply in the real world. There's always a third option.

So, I submit to you, dear reader, my ikigai, a couple of years in the making: I want to map foodsheds. I want to be a net benefit to everyone around me. I want to love without expectation, care without judgment, give wisely but freely of myself in the service of those who come after me. All of this is linked, because all of this is my life.

Source: Columbia University

So back to mapping foodsheds: the reason I think this is a worthy reason to get out of bed in the morning is because we've always lived in a world of limited resources. I'm getting rather tired of hearing people talk about relocalization and alternative economies as though they were unmitigated goods for everyone. They won't be. The future will suck for almost everyone, but it'll be worth the fuss, because the alternative is Malthusian misery for all but a very vicious and lucky few --- and that's not the kind of world I want to see for those who come after me.

Peak oil and climate change have gone from warnings to realities. If you're under the age of 27 (and most of my readership is), you've never experienced a year that wasn't abnormally hot compared to the last hundred-fifty or so years since climate records started to be consistently kept. That's sobering.

These are realities, people, and this is what I'm going to do about it: I'm going to contribute to projects already underway to assess the agricultural capacity of arable land in the United States, and I'm going to come up with a figure, even a rough estimate, of what kind of life we can expect on what amount of arable land we have left. I can tell you right out: it's not going to be a pretty number. The seven billion humans on this planet only exist because we're afloat on a bubble of cheap energy, and we're coming to the end of that cheap energy. If others want to talk about relocalizing, then the least I can do is give them solid facts and figures to substantiate their discussions.

My work in food waste? Connected --- we want to minimize waste and maximize our use of what we discard, in order to support more localized and less energy-intensive food systems. Motorcycles? It's an unfortunate reality of American existence that unless you happen to live in New York or San Francisco or Boston, your life without motor transportation will be considerably limited, and I choose the less-expensive and riskier option. Growth and destiny in interpersonal relationships? In a resource-limited world, all we truly have is each other. No thought, word, or deed is isolated from context, and nothing is every truly futile. Good night.

Using Evernote like a BAWSS: What is Evernote?

What is Evernote?

Evernote is a software suite compatible with Windows, Mac, and Android that is primarily used for note-taking and photo/audio/document archiving. But it's so so so much more than that, and this is the first in a series of posts explaining how you can use Evernote in not only its venerable note-taking functions (which I actually don't think are its strong suits), but also as a project/task manager, web clipper, scratchpad, and basic image editor.

Evernote versus pen-and-paper notes

I actually don't take notes that often into Evernote. Once in a blue moon, I'll use it in that function, but more often, I'm taking notes by hand on paper, photographing said notes, and archiving them into Evernote. This can be accomplished in just one click of your camera phone if you have the Android widget installed, and plays into the best virtues of both dead-tree and whirling-electrons note-taking. I take notes by hand because I'm easily distracted by the Internet, and I like to mind-map. I archive the photos of the notes into Evernote so I can date, tag, organize, and share those notes. Also, the Premium version of Evernote can recognize text in photos (including handwriting!), allowing you to use Evernote's search function (another one of Evernote's best features).

Things that Evernote does really really well:

1. Sync across multiple platforms and devices. I have Evernote loaded onto all my devices (cellphone, tablet, netbook, and lab desktop --- a motley pastiche of Windows and Android).
2. Speed and ease of use. Its text editing capabilities are refreshingly basic. You can bold/italic/underline/strikeout text, change font/font size, adjust indent, and center text, and that's it. It uses remarkably few processor resources, particularly on my underpowered netbook. Its hotkeys are easy to learn and really speed things up once you burn them into muscle memory.
3. Web clipping. The newest version of Evernote Web Clipper for Chrome is nothing short of amazing. You can clip images, text, entire websites with images, .pdfs --- just about anything!
4. Email and sharing. A lot of my work is done over email, so it's really handy that I can email my emails to my Evernote account and archive email threads that way, so I don't have to fire up my browser and dig through gigabytes of archived emails. What's more, Evernote preserves attachments and embedded images in emails, so if someone emails me a document, I can just forward it to Evernote and turn that email into a note. I can also email people my notes in Evernote, and it preserves embedded images and attachments. Fuck. Yeah.
5. Tagging and searching. One of the key signs you've mastered Evernote is when you're able to find anything you have archived in only three or four clicks. A combination of notebooks, tags, and saved searches makes that possible, and that'll be a subject for a future post, but suffice it to say, this is one of Evernote's most powerful features, and it beats the hell out of a maze of folders in Dropbox.

Things I wish Evernote did better:

1. Linking to other notes within notes. I like to assemble 'kits' for things like classes and meetings, and unfortunately, I can't easily do something like create a master list with links to other notes. You can link to other notes within Evernote, but unfortunately, those links force you to use the browser-based Web version of Evernote, which is unnecessarily clunky. I wish I could link to notes within the offline platform and have it stay within the offline platform, instead of having to wait for my browser to load.
2. Tables. Evernote's native table function is really basic, like HTML 4.0 basic. It won't let you drag to adjust cell dimensions or merge cells. You can cut-and-paste tables from Word and OpenOffice, and it'll keep the formatting of said tables really well, but you can't create tables in Evernote with merged cells or anything like that, nor can you easily edit tables already cut-and-pasted into Evernote from Word or OpenOffice.
3. Updating attachments and syncing with Dropbox. You can use Evernote's 'import folder' feature (under 'Tools') to automatically upload files stored in Dropbox, but it's a little bit less easy to have it work the other way. This is probably not all that fixable, since you have to use outside programs like Word or Adobe Reader to open attachments in Evernote, and if you save documents edited in those programs, they don't automatically update in Dropbox. You have to manually save them into your destination Dropbox folder, which is sometimes a hassle unless your Dropbox folder is immaculately organized. This is a relatively minor issue, but one that if solved, would turn an excellent software suite into a Kurtzweillean singularity of badassery.

In short, Evernote's not a mere note-taking platform. If that's what you're after, then stick with Notepad and Dropbox. Evernote is more accurately an external brain, and I want to write a whole series of posts on how I use Evernote to keep my life from degenerating into barbarism and chaos. So stay tuned!

Ghetto exhaust gas analysis.

I bought the Noble Savage in February of last year, so I never had a chance to see how she performs in cold weather. So lately, I've been noticing massive clouds of white smoke from the exhaust when I start her up on cold mornings, particularly when I pull the choke. This, of course, worries me, but I figure it's just condensation from the exhaust baffles, since it starts emitting about thirty seconds after the engine starts up, and stops about a minute later, presumably when all the water vapor has been expelled from the exhaust system.

Ghetto exhaust gas analysis

Still, never can be too careful. I don't have an exhaust gas analyzer handy, but there's a quick, cheap, and easy way to rule out most major culprits of visibly large volumes of exhaust smoke. This also applies to cars and anything that has both an internal combustion engine and an exhaust pipe.

The only material you'll need other than that is a clean glass or Pyrex jar...

...and that's it. Collect the exhaust gases in the jar and see what condenses on the jar walls. In particular, you're looking for blue-ish oil droplets or black soot.

Blue droplets and burnt wire smell: motor oil in exhaust (not good)

Run a finger along the walls to make sure, and sniff the jar, too! Combusted motor oil has a distinctive smell, almost like burning wires. If the droplets have a slight blue-ish tinge to them, and you collect an oily film on your finger, then you probably have oil in the exhaust, which means you might have worn piston rings or valve guides. Those both are fairly expensive fixes, in that you probably don't want to do them yourself unless you really know what you're doing and are willing to undertake a full engine tear-down, but it won't fuck your engine if you wait a little bit. That's about the worst that can show up from this test.

Black soot and 'gas station' smell: partially-combusted fuel in exhaust (not so bad)

If there's black soot (particularly if your bike backfires a lot), that's probably partially uncombusted fuel, and you might want to jiggle with your air-fuel mixture. On most bikes, you can do that by adjusting a screw on the carburetor. That's not a big deal; you're just getting worse gas mileage and might be fouling up the spark plug(s), just as you would if you're getting oil in the combustion chamber, as would be so in the above case.

Water droplets andexhaust smell: water vapor in exhaust (just fine)

If all you have is droplets of water and the smell of fully-combusted exhaust, then breathe easy. It just means you live in Florida, and the temperature of the inside of a cold exhaust pipe is below the dew point.

By the way, bonus tip: always track your mileage. I use an app on my phone called (simply enough) 'Mileage', and the free version allows you to not only track average mileage, but amount of money spent on gas, best and worst mileage, number of miles between fill-ups, and tons of other nifty statistics that will be useful to you over time. Mileage is a fairly good indicator of engine health, as decreasing mileage could be a symptom of any number of things, most commonly loose valves.

Destiny versus growth: objectifying men

There's a new Pandora ad that's pissing me off big-time. It's basically telling me that the most important social skill for men is to know how to talk to women and make them want to be slain by your little Mjölnir, and then promises you can learn the art of seduction by purchasing their product. So: objectify men by reducing them to a single dimension, make them feel inadequate along that single dimension, and then promise them a way to improve along that single dimension in exchange for money. Capitalism: it's bad for lovers!

Here's a secret: quality men have better things to do than worry about their ability to seduce. Ironically, having better things to do is way way more effective than active seduction, which more often than not makes you look like a dweeb and doesn't get you any more laid. The most successful men (the way I define it) I've known were dorks with some awesome shit going on in their lives: businesses to run, social movements to organize, research to conduct. In short, they had better things to do. Having nothing better to do is liquid sex repellent.

By the way, how I define success with women has changed considerably over the years. At first, it was just unlocking that ever-elusive achievement of losing my virginity. After successes, I realize that there are better things than sex. It's awesome, but it's not worth going out of my way for. In many ways, it's actually a little disappointing. Now motorcycling, on the other hand...

I also realized that it's kind of silly to deify love (hearken back to my post on destiny/growth orientation), and particularly, to deify attractive women, particularly when society tells attractive women that theirs is a seller's market and that no man will refuse them. I tend to ignore conventionally beautiful women, simply because they tend to be either too laden with expectations, or are carrying the emotional baggage of trying to be a complex soul cursed with a beautiful body. It's not as simple as the classic 'personality versus looks' dichotomy, of course, and I've been lucky enough to spend parts of my life with a few women who had ample quantities of both going for them.

I'm at a point now when I'm not particularly interested in getting laid, or finding love: I'm just looking to grow. If that means sitting at home alone with my cat, stacks of books, and Pandora stations, then I'll rock that shit. If it means getting rejected dozens of times, feeling the sting each time, and then moving on, then bring it. If it means that one or more of the signals I throw out to the handful of women I'm actively attracted to these days actually succeeds, and my little commando goes on a mission, then semper fi. But I've never profited from listening to mainstream discourses, and so I'm more inclined these days to treat my sexuality and gender identity as an act of subversion, even if it means not getting laid when society tells me I should be. Because like women, men are more than their sex.

Destiny versus growth: loneliness

You are never more complete than when you're laying awake in bed, cocooned in blankets and still cold, with only the sound of your own heartbeat to keep you company. People run from loneliness as though it were some kind of affliction, when it is, in fact, an opportunity. No friend, no lover, no confidante can ever compete with learning to live quietly within your own heart. Our society rightly does everything in its power to keep us from getting to that point, distracting us with an endless series of empty promises and gaudy distractions. If fewer of us felt incomplete and broken, then we wouldn't need to consume an endless series of companions in our quest to avoid facing our lonelinesses.

It's strange how we fear loneliness more than almost any other kind of suffering. In fact, people will often trade their loneliness for even greater suffering. But some of us are fortunate to be so lonely that our only choice is to deal with our loneliness, to befriend it, to understand it and hear its side of the story. Make peace with it. When we're that kind of lonely, it's glorious --- it's God sharing with us a piece of his life. Because if there is a God, he must be profoundly lonely.

Desmodromic

I ask the world:

Why did you send me?
She answers:
If you lay aside all your fears
And cut you own cords,
Then fighting will be like dancing!

My vision goes red.
My fists clench and I tremble.

She is beautiful.
She is. Beautiful!

I ask the world
Atop fire and steel,
Perched uneasy, hanging free.
She whispers:
If you went this moment
Beyond fate and fear,
Where would you go?

My heart skips.

I feel faint.

Where would I go?

Where would I go?

Oh shit moment

There are two kinds of 'oh shit' moments when it comes to motorcycles: the best are the kinds you get when the bike is in motion, and you almost die. My first such 'oh shit' moment was when I was taking my first curve at 60mph; I felt my bike creeping across the centerline of the road, and I thought I could do nothing about it but high-side into a ditch and die. Instead, my training took over, sharply relieved of its duties the part of my brain that feels fear, and ordered me to shove down on the right handlebar. I complied and got back into my lane, trembling, but alive as fuck!

Then there's the 'oh shit' moment you get when the bike's stationary, and you're wrenching. Zen riding only comes through Zen wrenching, but sometimes you do stupid shit when wrenching and you wonder if the bike will ever run under its own power again. It's like when you know you're on the out with your significant other, because she won't return your phone calls: is she just busy? Is she sleeping with another man? Is she dead? That uncertainty --- it's a killer.

Today was the latter. I was fiddling around with the Noble Savage. Objectives: check valve clearances, replace breather tube, put vacuum cap on vacuum port, check for leaks in fuel line after having installed the new manual petcock, and clean her up a bit. Easy peasy, and nothing I haven't done before.

So when you're doing valve clearance checks, you have to rotate the engine to top dead center on the compression stroke (hereinafter TDCC). This is so that both valve rocker arms have free play, which you need in order to slip a feeler gauge in between the tappets and valve seats. It's easier to rotate the engine if you take out the spark plug and put a straw in the spark plug port, so you can watch the cylinder rise and fall as you rotate it.

I didn't have a straw long enough, but I did have an ivory chopstick!

So I stuck the chopstick in the spark plug port, and started rotating the engine, when I heard the butthole-clenching sound of the chopstick snapping off inside the fucking cylinder. Foreign objects inside cylinder are bad bad news. They can clog oil passages, score cylinder walls, break valves, and really fuck your day up.

So after profanity, I remembered my breathing and thought of solutions. I wanted a cigarette, but it's been day six, and I'm not about to let a mere chopstick cause me to relapse into smoking. The only way out was through! So I tried the following: (1) compressed air to blow the pieces out (nope, didn't work), (2) coat-hanger-and-chewing-gum trick (only picked up carbon, no chopsticks), and (3) picking up the bike and shaking it upside down (I wish).

I even thought about ghetto-rigging a vacuum cleaner up to the spark plug port and sucking it out, but realized our vacuum sucks at sucking, and we didn't have an extension cord long enough to make it work. We'll pause here for a second and talk about risk-taking, but first, these words:

DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME

Over here at Sven Williams, we're not about avoiding risks; we're more about assessing the probability and potential for catastrophic damage from risks, and going ahead anyways knowing full well that what we're doing is a bad idea. It's better to take a foolish risk and be fully aware of the consequences, than it is to avoid a risk that you know little to nothing about. This is typical Sven reasoning, and it's most of the reason why I'm constantly slipping on snail trails.

So here's what I was thinking: A cylinder is made of steel and is subject to enormous thermal and physical stresses. That chopstick is made of ivory, a keratinous substance not unlike fingernails and hair, and is subject only to tons of sriracha sauce. Bitch-ass chopstick ain't got shit on a 652cc motorcycle engine!

Weighing the risks, I tightened everything up, put the gas tank back on, pulled the choke, and fired up the engine. Starter whirred and whined futilely, and the piece of chopstick clattered around inside, taunting me with visions of ruined valves and cylinder head scoring. I hit the starter button again, this time longer. You don't want to do that too much, or else you'll melt the starter, but dammit, I'm Sven and I live fast and die young! YOLO baby!

Ultimately, it took more than a couple of tries with the starter to get the engine running, and with every clattering sound made by the chopstick piece inside the combustion chamber, my butthole clenched until it was tight enough to fuse hydrogen into helium. Helium into carbon. Carbon into iron. Because of the fact that iron has the high binding energy of any element, it can't undergo nuclear fusion any further, so after the fifth or sixth time with the starter, my butthole was about to go supernova.

I am a Knight of Svendinavia, and will not be bested by a mere eating utensil! If I tank that engine, I'm taking the entire solar system out with it! I am Sven and I feast upon the corpses of the gods slain dead at my feet!

Finally, the engine turned over and started idling. My butthole relaxed, and the solar system was safe another day. There was a burnt hair smell wafting from the exhaust pipe, and it was overpowering, but if something catastrophic were to happen to the engine, it would happen in pretty quickly. I decided to let the bike idle high for about ten minutes to cook anything out, periodically going over and holding the throttle wide open for a few minutes, potentially pissing off some neighbors, but fuck 'em; the Noble Savage must live! I have never known love until I found motorcycles! Live dammit, LIVE!

She's fine now. I'll keep listening to the engine to make sure it doesn't crap out on me, but I'm putting at least a hundred miles on her this weekend with all the running around I'll be doing, so if something goes wrong, I'll find out fairly soon. Stay tuned for future episodes of Sven and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, in which I talk about how a tin can makes a good seal between the exhaust header and muffler, and other ghetto fixes!

Peace!

Now I'm the One That's Cool

I'm watching a music video right now making the rounds in various blogs (e.g. the Irritable Vowel, Hank Green's video blogs) called "Now I'm the One That's Cool". It's a song about how awesome it is to be a huge fucking geek, once you move past the marginalization that many juvenile geeklings experience growing up.

Not because society necessarily rewards us for intrinsically being obsessed with things (particularly if you use a very limited metric, like money), but rather because we know something that a lot of people don't: that one of the most effective tricks to stop feeling lonely and sorry for yourself is to get the fuck over yourself and think about something that's way bigger or stranger than your limited experience of being human and become all about doing that.

So: being a huge fucking geek is its own reward. And here's the fun part: your personal satisfaction, once you move beyond the personal insecurities bred by living in a world of social superficialities, you will probably attract others to you, because they're looking for the same thing and don't know how to get it. In certain limited contexts, that's called 'game'. You not only have a surprising control over how you turn out over time --- you can even control how other people see you.

And that's fucking cool.

Destiny versus growth: why capitalism is bad for lovers.

So I've been looking for love all my life, and have always been bitterly envious of those people who can seemingly find it effortlessly and hold onto it. I always thought it was because something was wrong with me, but it was more likely because of my delayed social development and poor partner-matching. We privilege the destiny-oriented notion of love, because frankly, it's a rush. Entire industries are built on the instant gratification of infatuation and the subsequent crashes it yields.

I'm of the opinion that we growth-oriented types should get burned once or twice to get it out of our system, and then take a good long break, and learn to grow with ourselves and our (non-romantic) loved ones. It'll make you less demanding, needy, and envious, all of which are good qualities to strive for.

It'll also be the ultimate fuck-you to these social discourses that imply we're somehow incomplete or deficient because we're un-partnered. No need to shave your head and put on a robe, but there's a lot to be said for shuffling yourself loose from the game for a while, because frankly, it's a vicious game in which virtually everyone loses far more than they win.

The heart is a muscle the size and shape of a fist. Keep on loving, keep on fighting, and don't be afraid to leave what's comfortable. Dare to learn something about yourself, because we live in an economy which strongly disincentivizes self-awareness in favor of unreflective consumption (up to and including romantic partners). You're better than that. Never forget.

A gratuitous picture of Orange Cat.

Destiny/growth: the odds are good, but the goods are odd

So here's an interesting perspective from social psychology on the differences in motivations, goals, and beliefs in relationships: people orient themselves on a continuum between destiny and growth. In brief, destiny-oriented people concern themselves with determining the status and potential of nascent relationships from the beginning, while growth-oriented people emphasize the process, and place more energy into maintaining and growing the relationship over time, despite setbacks and challenges.

Growth and destiny: differences and definitions

Destiny-oriented people believe that relationships are 'meant to be', and move on very quickly when it their partners deviate from their ideals. They tend to develop feelings of love very quickly, but also move on quickly when their partners deviate from their ideals. They also believe that their personal qualities (intelligence, attractiveness, character) are relatively fixed. The sea being as full of potential fish as it is, they feel it's more worthwhile to abandon an unsatisfying relationship to risk the same with a new relationship.

Growth-oriented people believe that initial compatibility is not as important and focus instead on overcoming mutual challenges. For them, relationships are strengthened by challenges, and so they tend to delay their assessments of the viability of their relationships until they realize that no further growth between the two partners is possible. They are less likely to end a relationship of their own initiative, and are less likely to engage in casual (i.e. non-committed) romantic relationships than destiny-oriented individuals.

I'm taking these definitions, by the way, from this paper on the subject. It's a good starting point for anyone wanting to know more about how growth and destiny are interwoven with other personality traits, including locus of control over personal qualities.

The good, bad, and beautiful

But here's the catch: neither orientation is inherently good or bad. Putting on my anthropologist's hat for a second, it rarely pays to describe what people do as 'good' or 'bad'. It's far more useful and satisfying to understand the motivations and beliefs underlying people's actions and interactions.

So, destiny-oriented people can get caught up in an endless cycle of serial monogamy, moving from partner to partner in an endless quest to find 'The One', but people who lean more toward this orientation are also more willing to take risks, and sometimes, it works out. Case-in-point: my first serious girlfriend was a strongly destiny-oriented person. We saw some lovely qualities in each other, fell in love quickly, and were talking about possibly marrying each other when we graduated college. But when I deviated from her ideal, she left me and moved onto someone else later that week, someone far closer to what she was looking for. She's now happily married to that person.

Growth-oriented people run the risk of staying in unhealthy relationships well past the point when they should have moved on. My mother is a strongly growth-oriented person; her first husband (my biological father) was an abusive alcoholic, but she stuck with him right up to the point when he became a threat to our lives, and in subsequent relationships, she wound up with some pretty dubious men, put enormous amounts of effort in keeping those relationships going, and only moved on when those efforts jeopardized my sister's and my well-being. She acknowledges the imperfections in my current step-father, but they both have made it work for more than seven years, and there's something to be said for that.

Growth, destiny, and society

Both destiny and growth orientations are traits that are viewed positively in our society --- consider the connotations of the expressions 'love at first sight' and 'love will find a way'. Best is to find a balance between the two extremes. I, like my mother, am a strongly growth-oriented person. But I honestly can't think of any one of the relatively few people I've dated who I'd consider to be a growth-oriented individual. This is at least partly because my delayed social development means I have a relatively small sample size relative to my peers, which confounds analysis, and so I'm curious to see what would happen if I wound up with someone who's more into the 'love will find a way' side of things, rather than the 'love at first sight' trope.

Problem is, I'm drawn to destiny-oriented people. They tend to have qualities I find attractive --- optimism, initiative, transparent motivations, clear goals. If you and I have been between the sheets together, it's probably because I saw these things in you and wanted to learn something of these qualities for myself. Because it's all a wonderful learning experience for me, and I always come out a little wiser.

But I think about my close friends, and that's where my growth orientation is really obvious. If you and I are really close, it's extremely likely that when I first met you, I disliked you. In fact, I can't think of any one of my good friends that I initially liked. But you and I stuck it out, and I'm at a point now where I've put enough effort into enough such friendships that if I were to try and count the number of people I genuinely love and am loved by, I'd run out of fingers. There's something to be said for that, but I'm not sure I can figure it out tonight.

I'm gonna be in my bunk...

So you're thinking about getting a motorcycle

I've never owned a car, partly because I have very strong feelings about the degree to which American society has become dependent on the automobile, and partly because owning a car is expensive. So last Christmas, I took a Motorcycle Safety Foundation course, got a motorcycle endorsement, and purchased a 2002 Suzuki LS650 'Savage' from a friend. Since then, people have asked me lots of questions about the practicality, safety, and costs of owning a motorcycle, and so I write this as a response for anyone considering getting a motorcycle intending to use it as a form of transportation.

First off, most people buy motorcycles primarily for recreation, and most motorcycle shops cater to the weekend warriors and not the everyday commuters. This is relatively unusual globally, because at least in the United States, the downsides of commuting by motorcycle are perceived outweigh the advantages, while in most of the world, a significantly higher proportion personal motor transportation is by motorcycle (including scooters and mopeds). Before you make your decision to commute routinely by motorcycle, consider the following:

pro	con
initial purchase, titling, registration, fuel, maintenance, repair, tolls, and parking permits are almost always thousands of dollars a year less expensive	requires significant investment in protective gear to ride safely: ideally: full-face helmet, armored gloves, armored jacket, long pants, and boots, in a pinch: helmet and eye protection, full-finger gloves, long pants, closed shoes, minimum legal: sunglasses and a deathwish
able to out-accelerate and out-maneuver most non-motorcycle road traffic, making passing, merging, stopping, and lane-changing easier	smaller visual profile and relative rarity relative to cars makes it more difficult to be seen by other traffic
vastly better sensory awareness of surroundings, affording the rider a unique and visceral experience of the roads and enabling the rider to better avoid potentially dangerous situations	physically and mentally more demanding than driving, unsafe to ride in inclement weather (heavy rain, snow, high winds), and uncomfortable to ride in extreme heat or cold
most maintenance and repairs can (and should) be done yourself with a minimal mechanical aptitude and tools	requires more maintenance per passenger mile (especially oil and fluid changes), parts may be difficult to source, and requires special tools for some procedures
subjectively more fun than driving, and likely to improve your perceived attractiveness to your preferred sex/gender	significantly higher risk of severe injury and/or fatality through rider error or interaction with traffic; cannot legally or safely use a cellphone, eat, drink, shave, apply make-up, or receive sexual favors while riding
children wave at you and smile with beaming joy when you rev your engine for them, middle-aged suburbanites in land yachts eye you with blood-curdling envy, and Jawas point and say 'OOTINI' when you pass	minimal or non-existent provision for carrying cargo without backpacks or saddlebags, and difficult to carry passengers

I'm about done for today, but future installments of Sven and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance will include topics such as:

1. how to choose, assess, and purchase your first motorcycle, including recommendations for specific types and models
2. how to commute by motorcycle and deal with inclement road and weather conditions without getting your ass killed
3. how to perform basic maintenance and repairs, and why you should do most of it yourself instead of handing it off to a mechanic
4. anthropological observations of motorcycle culture and interactions between motorcyclists and other traffic

Phatic communication: how to get laid and influence people.

Phatic communication is a fancy term coined by the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski that means basically the same thing as 'small talk': communicative acts whose functions are primarily social, and not necessarily meant to convey information. It's easy to dismiss small talk as just so much useless blather, but we live in a world run by people, and so mastering the art of bullshitting is just as important as actually having something substantive to talk about!

Silence serves a complementary function to small talk in social settings. It can signal comfort or confidence, particularly in social settings where participants are close friends or intimates. On the other hand, silence induces anxiety in human beings, because it's often associated with danger and uncertainty; an example of this is classic film trope of someone walking in the woods, and all of a sudden, the birds stop singing. Silence and small talk are construed differently among cultures, but in general, small talk serves to lessen social distance, while silence tends to reinforce or increase it. Communication among people of different levels of social status tend to include less small talk, while communication among equals tend to include far more.

Small talk and social anxiety

Small talk is risky for those with social anxieties. It forces you to self-disclose, and that makes you vulnerable to being judged, but in reality, it's far worse to wall yourself up, because you relinquish control of how you're perceived by others. There's this binary trap that a lot of people with delayed social development fall into, which basically pigeonholes people into 'smart' and 'stupid', and falsely equates silence with profundity, but that oversimplifies the idea of intelligence.

In other words, most people are smart, but in very different ways, and just because you got a 340 on the GRE doesn't mean you're necessarily 'smarter' than someone who waits tables for a living, or panhandles, or sells used cars. All three roles take a keen ability to evoke certain emotional responses in people, and that takes practice. And so a large part of why this topic fascinates me is because the late development of my social skills relative to my other intelligences allowed me to consciously guide and reflect on the process of acquiring social skills.

How to get laid and influence people

One of the most important things I learned was that social skills aren't inherent or innate. They are learned skills. Anthropologists have a fancy word for that: enculturation. There exist very few things that are truly universal in human social life. Almost all human cultures consider incest, murder, and theft to be transgressions. Almost all human cultures grieve for the dead and use food as a nucleus for social activity. That's really about it. Ritual exchanges devoid of informational content along the lines of the classic 'how are you / I'm fine (even when you're not)' exist not only in mainstream North American cultures, but also world-wide, and can even can be observed in non-human animals, such as the contact calls of birds or the mutual butt-sniffing of dogs.

What this means is that while blooming late is not without consequence, it also doesn't mean you're doomed to a life of cringing awkwardness. I never went on a date until I was in my early twenties. Now I do all right. I used to freeze when I was expected to talk to strangers. Now I'm cracking jokes at conferences and happily bullshitting around in front of roomfuls of very smart people. I still have my moments, of course, when I feel like an utter social reject, but they're fewer and further between these days. So I empathize with the socially-awkward. I want to help.

Source: http://xkcd.com/222/

Why I do this to myself.

So I just got out of my first meeting with my thesis committee and it went wel---OH SWEET MERCIFUL BUDDHA WHY DO I DO THESE THINGS TO MYSELF?!? Why couldn't I get a job or a debilitating drug addiction or a couple of illegitimate kids or whatever normal people do? Because I don't know what normal people do! That's why I'm an anthropologist's apprentice: to find out.

So that still leaves the question: why do I do these things to myself? I'll tell you why: because I love knowledge am embroiled in a torrid affair with knowledge, one in which there are no safe words, and one in which I have abandoned all sense of reason, balance, and moderation. I am the sub, and Mistress Sophia is flicking my switch, and you know what --- that's knee-tremblingly hot.

Much in the same way that Hannibal Lecter could appreciate a fine Mozart sonata with his liver-and-fava-beans casserole (editor's note: please find better analogy next time), I find an inherent beauty to parsimonious explanations to complex and often incoherent realities regarding humankind.

That's why I'm in anthropology. It's not the dubious joy of explaining to people that I don't dig up dinosaur bones or hunt for treasure, and it's not the extra initials I get to put after my name after I've gone through the rites of passage, and it's not the ability to use polysyllabic words when I'm Boris Yeltsin drunk --- it's the scaffolding upon which I can hang my understanding of human beings, answer my questions, and use said understandings and knowledge to save the world.

I am an anthropologist. I am both an instrument to gather data, and a part of the sample from which I derive my data. I am human. I study humans. I'm studying you right now, in a totally ethical and non-creepy way. So open up, baby bird, because I'm about to show you the LIFE OF THE MIND!

So stay tuned.

Holding grudges.

It was the mud-splattered peak of the rainy season, and two monks, a master and his student, were on pilgrimage. They came upon a creek, and a woman standing alone on the banks. Despite the prohibition of their order against touching women, the master offered to carry the woman across the stream. When the three made it to the other side, the master bade the woman farewell, and the two monks continued on their way.

Finally, the student broke the silence, and asked the master: "Why did you so knowingly violate the rules of our order and carry that woman across?"

The master stopped and looked back over the road. He turned back to his student, cleared his throat, and replied: "I left her there at the river. Why do you still carry her?"