Music post: Get the new Basement Jaxx

After a grueling 3-year wait, the new Basement Jaxx album is out. It's not as amazing as the 2006 one, but it's still solid stuff - and undeniably the sound that these guys are known for. 

It's called Scars - and be sure to let me know if you come across the extra track from the Japanese release. I love these guys, but 1500 yen for one track is a push.

Diet Update: Super Ultra Turbo Challenge Edition

Aroon has dropped in and offered his two cents on my diet experiment. He's modest, but he hit the nail on the head: he gave me the idea to start this challenge, mostly after I observed how easy it was for him to get by this way in SF.

Another present from Aroon way back in the day has stuck with me: a TED lecture from Mark Bittman, the NYTimes' food critic. Basically, our food commerce is completely unsustainable and responsible for our health care expenses, but if we all ate what we were supposed to, we'd be fine.

Unfortunately, my Texan roots are coming through, and I'm finding it hard to stay as disciplined as I should be. This last week was No Sugar Week, and while I had no problem avoiding fruit juice or candy or soda, I totally flew in the face of the rule and got a paper bucket full of sugar at a frozen yogurt place on Thursday night. Boo for me. Last night was a complete Chipotle burrito - at least I had the discipline in Texas to eat half and put the rest in the fridge.

What's more, another potential problem has cropped up: Japan. Ironic, since that's where I ate healthiest and lost tons of weight, but should I pull an Aroon and permanently eliminate something (say, meat), that'll make life hard in Japan. It's totally not a vegetarian-friendly place. I may end up working or residing there. This could be a problem.

Still, that's far from an excuse to be unhealthy in the here and now. Speaking of the here and now, I'm wondering if all the free food I'm scrounging at UCSD events (which is a requirement, if you're a grad student. I've never attended so many night-time lectures) is going to work out with the plan. 

According to the plan, this week is No Complex Carbs Week. I'm forsaking pasta, potatoes, bread and tortillas. I'm left with rice. 

This is unfortunate, since I just bought a half-pound each of ham and turkey. I think I'll let a tortilla slip if the school's buying wraps, though.

I have a feeling this week won't go well.

Diet update!

I thought I'd update everyone on my little diet experiment:

-Week 1 is done, and it went well. I had no cravings for red meat, even though I totally accidentally ate some on Friday night without realizing what I was doing. These things happen when free Mexican food is put before me. Oh well, one unwittingly eaten taco isn't worth beating myself up over.

-Aroon posted some great advice on the old site - one week is too easy, maybe a month would be a better stress test. He's definitely right, so I think once these 5 weeks are up I'll crank the difficulty up a notch. I'm thinking I'll do 3 weeks or so instead of one month just to ensure I don't completely lose it when school gets tough.

-I'm looking forward to no-meat week the most, just to see how it goes. And I'm most scared of 'reduce all portions' week, because I'm Texan like that. I think these two will do me the most good, though. 

-I love avocados. They're great on club sandwiches, by the way.

The School Post

Pretty much everyone now knows I'm in grad school, but there's a lot of confusion about what I'm actually doing. Here's an answer, taken from a message to my brother:

School stuff is pretty cool - basically in this first year I'll be learning things that make me a Certified Hoity-Toity Badass, like the kind of stuff you hear discussed on CNN International or Bloomberg or Fareed Zakaria or in The Economist. I've already had to read up on the German election system. Once I've had all that stuff for a while (namely, a whole year), I'll be pretty well-educated on the things that make the world go round. You know how James Bond always understands the political and economic motives of his villains? That's why this place is jokingly called spy school. Next year I'll focus a bit more on some specific stuff, like mathematical thingies and more Japanese.

I'll be specializing in Management, which sounds gross, but at the grad level it's really not. It's not classes on synergizing this and core competencies that - in my case, it'd be the same math a World Bank-bound Economics specialist might do, but applied to individual companies. Microeconomic instead of macroeconomic. 

And since this is so professionally oriented, I've already had career management training, so I've got a resume and I've even had training in stuff like hobnobbing and phone interviews. That's forced me to declare a direction for myself and my career, so I started saying "video games!" and people seem to be really letting me run away with it.

I'm starting to think Microsoft's games division is my dream gig - the Tokyo Game Show was just last week, and their showing there was big, even though Xbox isn't big at all over there. My Japanese, plus the Microsoft behemoth, all wrapped around games, might be the way for me to go.

I'll have to hobnob with some MS-employed alums from my program. I'll be sure to let you know how that goes.

This (fragile, amazing, scary) American Life

It's been a very, very big-picture kind of 24 hours.

Not only have I attempted to help a friend improve his quality of life (by way of advice on schools and skills and careers) but the TV version of Ira Glass' This American Life has left me wondering about my own.

The finale of Season 2, John Smith, borrows the concept from an old Washington Post piece looking at one complete life by piecing together the lives of seven different men, who don't know one another, but share the name John Smith, the most common name in America.

The baby John Smith was a few weeks old, and lived vicariously through his parents. Their dreams for him were big - maybe President or CEO - but they hoped for the usual things - a happy family, a life as a working man, an education.

The 8-year-old John Smith was a bit like any other kid - he went to school, he played in the yard. Like me, he looked for something to control. At school, he played the policeman whenever he could. At home, he often played by himself.

The 24-year-old John Smith was unlike me - unsure of himself, looking for direction, trying to balance a steady job with drug offenses. I'm lucky to not be in such a situation.

The 40-or-50-something John Smith welcomed his son home from Iraq, and set about repairing a strained relationship. 

A 50-something John Smith visited his father - the 79-year-old John Smith - at the nursing home every day after work. Even when the elder was in a bad mood, the loyal son was there, saying what he could to a man who was confined to a wheelchair, jaw stuck open, and said little in response. But, in the paraphrased words of the infant John Smith's father, he may have sat at the head of the table at Thanksgiving and simply silently admire d this family that he had created.

In order of age, I skipped one, because his story hit home. The 30-something John Smith worked in the Xbox division at Microsoft. He spent his time in meetings or answering emails, was tethered to a Blackberry, and traveled frequently. He had a wife and a beautiful baby girl, but his mother was on the way out the door. And the piece focused on what this did to John. To him, it felt as though everything had been thrown into the air, leaving him unable to focus on everything that he knew he had - the job, the wife, the baby, the house, the car. (The same things that the eldest John Smith had black-and-white photographs of, to illustrate this eponymous American life - one of aspiration, of acquisition, of work and of family.)

It could have been me, 10 or 20 years from now. That was the point - the whole show was essentially telling the stories that we all have to go through, from growing pains to the search for one's own identity to parenthood and grandparenthood. But the 30-something John's story hit home because I know that it's what I'll go through. Many years from now, I'll have the wife and baby. There's not an ounce of doubt in my mind. And I'll lose my mom - that I couldn't possibly doubt. And it's mortifying; it's the only thing that's made my brain grind to a halt more than the thought of my own death.

Remarkably, John's mom was very brave. "I know she's not scared, but I am," John said of his mother's downhill battle with cancer. I think my mom will have the same bravery, the same peace of mind. She's smart and self-aware that way. But like John, it will throw everything I know into relief with that one giant elephant in the room - she's going, or she's gone.

John picks up the phone to call his mom on the way home from work, but then, realizing he can't call her, he just gets stuck in an infinite loop. He can't put the phone back down as easily as he picked it up.

In 10 or 20 years, I'll have the wife, the child, the house, the car, and the job. Of these things, I have no doubt. 

Whether I'll be able to appreciate them, with the distractions of American aspiration and the fear of lost loved ones, is a different story.