In 1987 I was a senior in high school and my mother was in the hospital with leukemia; a long, very painful experimental treatment would either cure her (but leave her changed for life) or she would die.
With the profits I'd made from my summer job, I had bought a $400 Technics portable CD player, one of the very first ones ever made. It was solid metal and heavy as hell, and the rechargeable battery pack was as big as the CD player itself and weighed twice again as much. It still plays perfectly to this day.
I was left with her lame car and a giant house to myself and not much supervision. It would have been many a teen's dream, but not mine, since I was truly alone; after I moved back to the States for the eleventh and twelfth grades I never once had a friend over after school, or went over to a friend's house, or went to a party, or a dance; I worked in my little computer lab from when I got home to when I went to sleep. I graduated with honors but didn't show up. I was programming at the time.
Some nights I would take my mom's (new-model) Chevy Nova out and just drive around the waterfront, listening to my little CD player. There were two discs in particular for when I felt most alone: Steve Winwood's "Back in the High Life" and Peter Gabriel's "So". Both artists were consummate musicians, at the height of their craft -- neither would ever make another album as successful. Both created incredibly rich soundscapes, and both talked about loss, and longing.
I don't share either album with people very often, these days, because I've discovered I am incredibly upset if my guests are anything below astounded by them. I require rapt attention, possibly sighs, if you hear the Blessed Two. I feel as if I am physically cutting away my skin and pulling it aside with tongs to show my viscera, the actual core of my being, and if my listeners are all, "Can we put on some GOOD music after this?" I just want to smite them.
To this day if I hear "Don't Give Up" I will cry. I may not bawl, but you can see little tears in my eyes. I can see the park on Lake Washington I would drive to. I can feel the slight cold of the wind through my not-at-all-fashionable windbreaker. I can see the giant CD player on its huge strap around my neck. And I feel the hurting, of wanting to not be alone. Of waiting it to be over.
--
The happiest and saddest part, I think, of liking someone of the opposite sex... really liking, as in, really admiring the person, thinking that she is, in fact, a really good person, a decent person, a person whose morals and smarts and sense of humor and accomplishments you actually think are amazing -- not just, like, "Damn, she got pretty tummy," which latter sentiment I have also fallen prey to -- the happiest and saddest part is that you become someone different when you feel this way.
I don't want to, and won't, use the stupid cliché from the stupid movie. But it's true. You make yourself into a better person, not to trick them into liking you, but because _they deserve it_, and _you want to be a person that deserves them_. The difference is everything.
It's the saddest part because when you lose the hope, the dream, the focus -- well, you want to hold on to that you, that better you, that you that you liked so much, the you that you were with her. It's inside you. Were you faking? No. You have it. Just continue being it. Just don't stop. Be more patient with people you see. Smile at them. Let tiny things go, ignore any little slight, be generous with praise. Be that person. You can still do it. Hold on to him.
--
An interesting, if bizarre, factoid about me is that I cry if I see kids under the age of 10. I also cry if I see child's toy aimed at under-10-year-olds. And, finally, I can remember only two or three scenes from my life from before I was 10: My dad reading "One Fish, Two Fish" to me to teach me what words looked like. (Read to your kids! It's more important than you think.) My parents in bed on a lazy Sunday and the kids coming in and hassling them. Running to get one of the Big Wheels in recess in kindergarden, because there were only a couple and if you didn't get one recess was lame. The other kids wanting to build a boat out of toy cardboard bricks, and me, the quiet kid who never spoke up, finally saying something: I have a plan. I can build a boat. Show us, show us, and I did, and for that one day, for that afternoon, I was the hero.
The rest of my childhood is gone. I don't know where that person is. He's very sad, though.
Yes, I'm in therapy, thanks for checking.
--
I listen to Steve Winwood again, on my expensive studio monitor speakers, the likes of which I couldn't dream of when I was 18. His album still sounds great to me, after all these years.There's a part of me that's conscious of all the time that's passed: that the rich, full sound I loved is now considered cheesy and overproduced, that nobody has heard of Steve Winwood in twenty years, Peter Gabriel is just another dude at TED, and that schmaltzy emotions are for angsty teenagers with zits and five-year-long erections.
But there is a little kid who has felt alone all his life, and he wants it to end. When will it be over? Will I die first? Why are you so old? What have we done with our life? Why are we alone? How did you manage to fail in this, the one thing that mattered.
There is a moment when you are touching a woman, innocently, you say, innocently, she says, but you are massaging her back, stroking her hair, running your fingers lightly over her face.
There is a moment when you think to yourself, "I want to kiss her, I should kiss, I am going to kiss her."
And you know that if you are wrong, you will feel stupid. And she will leave. And you will apologize. And everything will be spoiled.
But the kiss is still hanging there. Evolution is stronger than you. It doesn't care if you feel stupid. Kiss the neck, it says. She smells wonderful, and you should kiss. Necks were created to be kissed. They crave it. They are empty without it.
There is only one thing worse than her rejecting you, and that is if you do NOT kiss her neck, in this moment, right now. You have lived your whole life for this. You dream of this moment every day.
There is a moment when you kiss her, lightly, on the neck, and instead of leaving, instead of being outraged, she breathes. You hear her breath, you feel her breath. And you have lived your whole life for that moment.
I am back, after a fashion. The night before TED, my new MacBook Air was stolen out of the lobby of the Portola Plaza hotel, leaving me in the dark for days, feeling incredibly violated.
My old, now kind of stinky-seeming MacBook Pro has been shipped to me, so at least I can connect to the sweet mother intertron, whose warm nectar I crave daily. Also, I can now track down the frakker who took my Air, so you better hope you wipe that disk good and don't ever connect to the net again. Or sell it to anyone who, like, has heard of me.
[My MacBook Air serial number was W880311W12G and the "MAC" or Airport ID was "001EC2B605B9". If you see this machine it is stolen and you should call the Monterey police at 831.646.3830 and reference case number 08-1077. Intertron powers activate!]
--
I should start with a story which sounds like bragging, but you will quickly discover, is actually me fulfilling my duties as a gentleman.
Last night at Crown and Pig and Whistle and Anchor bar I was talking with an attractive you woman TEDster, who, after I convinced her I was not gay (there had been a HI-larious Three's Company style mixup that's not actually particularly funny so I won't recount it here) she proceeded to lean over and whisper in my ear for five minutes about who she actually WAS attracted to (said list not including me, if that needs to be made explicit).
After a few moments of this, I pointed out the irony that everyone else at the table, including my new rival Jonathan Hodgman, thought that she was leaning over and whispering to me because she was into me, not because I had become her new eunuch confidant. (Speaking of Hodgman, who KNEW he was such a ladies' man? He was surrounded by pretty girls the whole time. Of course, being the perfect family man, he acted the gracious gentleman -- you thought I was going to get him in trouble with his wife, didn't you? That's not how I roll. I've never even posted my really juicy ultimate cock-block story about LP from a few years ago, and he wasn't married then.)
So, being informed that it looked as though we were flirting, and her being a game sort with a wicked streak, she was all, "oooooh!" and turned fully towards me and put her hand on my shoulder and leaned in close to my ear, so her lips just brushed its tiny hairs with every word as she spoke, sending a little involuntary tingle up my spine with every warm, wet breath as she seductively whispered, "So, should I pretend I like you, like this?"
Then she bit my ear.
No, no, sorry, I'm lying: the hairs on my ears aren't "tiny" any more. They are stark white and surprisingly sturdy and grow to be, like, four feet long. I'm like fucking Yoda. I've gotten to the point where I don't even bother clipping them; I see my body as some kind of bizarre science experiment as it deteriorates and I'm actually curious to see how long any given hair in any given spot will get. A week ago I had an eyebrow hair that was, no shit, two inches long -- Mike tried to pluck it for me and I got protective of it, like it was my tomagotchi. Sometimes I have races between the hairs on my left ear and the ones on the right.
Anyhow, the point is, for anyone in the bar that night, I shall protect the young lady's honor by giving up the game -- she was, in fact, just making a scandal for scandal's sake; trying to help my pimp cred... an act of charity from a kind stranger. I'm not not not saying I didn't not not enjoy it -- any bone looks like top sirloin to a hobo, and it's been a too long since I've been thrown a bone.
First off, Lucas Newman is leaving Delicious Monster -- as of January 1 he will be an iPhone engineer. This is an amazing opportunity for him, one I would never ask a friend to pass up. We remain buddies, although I'm running around Zoka these last couple weeks telling every girl I see that Lucas was secretly super-hot for her and is leaving now, which I think is starting to annoy him. Although, honestly, they'll probably all end up throwing themselves at him and he'll end up on top, again.
For those keeping score at home, this makes Mike Matas, Scott Maier, Tim Omernick, Drew Hamlin, and Lucas Newman that Apple has hired out of my employ. Yes, in fact, 100% of Delicious Monster's ex-employees are now working for Apple! You'd almost think Apple would start to pay me to train people for them. Oh, well. It's every kid's dream to work there, I can't say I blame them. Heck, I might work for Apple myself if they ever asked. And, like, wanted to give me EIGHTY ZILLION DOLLARS.
Also, seriously, if you want to work for Apple, you MIGHT want to, you know... GET TO KNOW ME.
--
Mike Lee is staying at Delicious Monster -- for now... DUM DUM DUM! You have to figure he's playing the various Apple teams off each other -- when you work at Delicious Monster, you don't jump for the girl that asks you to dance. Mike's all: "CoreAudio? Don't waste my time, sweetheart." "OS X Server? I'm sorry, you're not even getting an interview." "Ali Ozer and Scott Forstall got into a fistfight over me at lunch today? Now, see, these guys understand what kind of ball we are playing."
--
I realized tonight that I had yet another problem with CoreData, and it was a doozy, and not something where I could just put a hack on it. In fact, it was indicative of a fundamental architecture mismatch that I've been struggling with since I started this project.
So, this is a little vague, but I thought it might be important to document the process. Basically, when I bang up against a wall, I start looking bigger and bigger and bigger. Like, imagine I'm having trouble with a crumbling wall in an aqueduct -- my programmers brain does this: "Ok, why did I build this wall?" To keep the water in. "Why do I have water?" Because you need that to turn the water-wheel. "Is there some other way to turn it?" Not easily. "Why must it turn?" To power the grinder. "What needs grinding?" Corn. "Is there some other way to grind it?"
I'll get to truly huge things, where I start asking if the world even needs an app that catalogs books and DVDs and now boardgames when we could all be under five feet of water in a few years. Then it's time to take a nap and wake up and start again.
But my point is, you HAVE to question all the basic assumptions that led you to where you are, or you end up spending all your time writing the wrong code. I have always said that if you give me a perfectly spec'ed out program (one with a spec that can actually work, that I'm not going to have to modify as I go along), I can write that program for you in days. Always. The problem with coding is (a) fighting with frameworks, and (b) trying to figure out how the program should look, work, and interact even as we code it.
So we end up spending a lot of times fixing bugs in code that we really shouldn't have written in the first place -- code that doesn't really help the user, that just makes the app more complex, that is for a feature that never should have been put in, or is interacting with the user incorrectly and we're just putting spackle on a wall that's crumbling.
So here I am, tonight, running into my 1,000th bug with the fundamental mis-architecture in CoreData, which is that interacts with the UI layer and the disk layer / undo layer all using the same mechanism. They all rely on -didChangeValueForKey:, which is a huge mistake, because it means that, as a programmer, I can't sneak any data in -- I can't change a value without it creating an undo event.
Consider if, for example, I had a clock and its hands were CoreData objects. As they move forward through time, their position updates, so I'd tell them to update. And each time I did, an undo event would get pushed -- so the user actually could undo time.
This is obviously a contrived example, but it also points to the fundamental problem -- CoreData objects can't mix undoable and non-undoable changes.
So I've been struggling for three years now, trying to bend and hack and cajole CoreData's undo architecture into allowing me to do some actions synchronously and some asynchronously. (For instance, obviously, once the program has downloaded a cover from Amazon in a background thread, you don't want to UNDO the download -- it's not actually a state change, it's just a cache change -- yet, by default we end up with an undo event on the stack, in the MIDDLE of whatever the user is actually doing in the foreground.)
Fight fight gnash gnash complain complain. Tonight I hit on it. I needed to step back. Why isn't this working? Because undo wasn't designed this way in CoreData.
Well, I have undo in Delicious Library 1. It's not "magic" like with CoreData, but it works. In fact, now that I am thinking about it -- I've spent months and hundreds of lines of code trying to get CoreData's "magic" undo to work, when, in fact, there are really only FOUR actions that are ever undone:
1) Add a book -- undo to delete it 2) Delete a book -- undo to add it back 3) Change a property on a book, like its title or author -- undo to change it back 4) Make a loan -- undo to return the book 5) Return a book -- undo to re-make the loan
That's... about it. SO WHY HAVE I SPENT ALL THIS TIME TRYING TO GET COREDATA'S MAGIC SYSTEM TO WORK?
There's only five damn methods, at the top level, that need to participate in undo. It's pretty obvious I should be managing my OWN undoManager, turn off the one in CoreData, and just use CoreData for what it is EXTREMELY good at, which is minimal change tracking and fetching and storing data VERY VERY quickly.
Suddenly all these issues I've been having disappear. I don't have strange extra undo events on my stack when I fault in an object, because although CoreData might think my object changed, it's not driving the undo manager any more -- and when it goes to save, it's going to quickly discover there's no real substantive changes and just discard the whole event.
I don't have to try to work around some undo events by turning undo on and off, which required me to flush CoreData's transactions queue by hand, which was extremely sketchy because if you do it in some circumstances (eg, the middle of inserting a new object) the object will be corrupted.
--
I haven't started this yet -- I'll try it tomorrow. It's nice -- it'll pick up a bunch of the remaining issues I'm having in DL2, and should give us a good solid beta. The important thing here is, I was just too married to part of the code. I was so into using CoreData's magic undo that I kept going farther and farther to make it work, when I really needed to say, "Ok, this doesn't work in this situation, I'm doing my own undo in 40 lines of code."
F.P. Murray Fuzzcat was a pure-bred Persian born to champions, bred by my sister (a veterinarian in California) to show or sell. His nose was deemed "too large" at birth, so she gave him to me, for mere room and board. Later in life, my sister would inspect him and reverse her decision -- he had "grown into" his nose and could have been a champion, had I not already taken his manhood. (Thom-hood?) I didn't have any interest in going to cat-shows with my little guy, but it made me feel good to know that the blood of champions throbbed through his veins.
When a cat dies you understand that most people, while being able to empathize with your pain, won't actually give a crap themselves. Murray didn't work for world peace. He built no homes for orphans, and his response to the Hurricane Katrina was indifference. He was a cat.
But, still. There are lives he touched, especially mine. My only memory of Murray is purring. He was the purriest cat I have ever known. Years ago I would take business conference calls in bed when major clients wanted to chat at 7AM and I wanted to sleep until noon -- I would lie there with my cell phone talking with captains of industry while Murray sat on my chest and purred at me. One time a vice-president for McGraw-Hill interrupted the conference call and interjected, "Wil, are you on a motorboat?" I shit you not.
When I was sad, Murray would lick my ears. When I was saddest, I would wake up and he'd be stretched out beside me, and his little paw would be resting in mine. When I'd wake up he'd sit up and purr at me, from just out of reach. I used to play chicken with him, and sit there staring at him and see how long he'd continue purring before I had to pet him. I'd always give up and give him a scratch before he stopped purring.
Murray had great taste in women, and I trusted his judgment on which ones to date. Upon first meeting Murray, one of my favorite lovers remarked, "You are just a little lover, aren't you?" She honestly loved Murray more than me, I think, and I honestly understand why.
Murray was a gentle soul. If I threw him in the bath for poopy-butt he'd just meow forlornly and try to leave -- I never got scratched by him so that it bled. He was so gentle with his claws that I would frequently forget he had them at all, and not clip them for years at a time, and then one day I'd notice they'd grown inches long and curved all the way around like the stereotypical wizened asian wizard.
Murray was 18 years old, and his kidneys were in advanced failure. There is no cure except an experimental surgery which transplants kidneys from a young, healthy cat into my ancient one. I could not justify that in my head. Over the last two days he suddenly got much sicker, and I finally realized he was done.
As I held him in the vet's office, they gave him a sedative and then the poison. I put my ear up to his nose so I could hear his breathing, and so he could smell earwax, which he really did love. I stroked his throat and with each little exhale I could feel the tiny rattle of a faint purr -- the last purrs he had in him had to come out.
My last words to him were, "Thank you, little guy."
There are so many clichés that, as I grow up, I find are really true. And with every one, I go through the same process:
"Gee, I've discovered this amazing and unique thing about humanity that no one has ever discovered before, but how can I express it in words... Hmm, well, in this case, I want to convey the idea that sometimes you want to express a sexual attraction to a person and have them confirm a reciprocal attraction, but you don't feel a level of attraction where you'd want to start anything long-term -- you just want an innocent exchange of physical compliments... If only there were some succinct way to say it, like, uh...
"Oh, I know: A kiss is just a kiss.
"Oh, wait."
[It's another cliché that every generation thinks they're the first ones to feel every emotion, and have every idea.]
--
"Youth is wasted on the young," my mom used to always say to me, which made me want to smack her, because *I* was young, and I was hearing her basically saying that she wanted to suck the life-force out of me and horde it for herself. That ship has sailed, mom! (I already did the opposite to you.)
Now I'm reasonably old, and I find myself thinking, "Damn, I wish I had all the time ahead of me that I had when I was 20, because I think I've finally started to figure out what life is about, and I was so miserable then, but now I'm worried that by the time I really get it down, I'm going to be enfeebled and not able to enjoy it... if only there were some succinct way to say this... some kind of saying... oh, wait."
Damn you, mom!
But the cruel irony of clichés is we're doomed to not understand them until the moment we re-coin them for ourselves. Just as you can't explain to someone why it's bad to stick their hand in a flame until they've actually felt pain, you can't explain love and loss and happiness and inner peace to someone who hasn't experienced those things, first-hand. And, by that time, their response will just be, "Duh, I know that now, you should have told me a long time ago."
--
Recently I've been thinking about nature of loss, and how we all want to deny to ourselves that it will ever happen to us. We want to believe that every love is our last love, that our cat will outlive us, that our job will continue to be a perfect fit forever, that our health will continue until we drop dead, which we won't ever do anyway, and that our friends will never move away or betray us or simply grow more distant over the years.
And, yes, all evidence points to the contrary. Most people think I'm morbid when I say, "You know, this relationship *will* end badly," and they won't discuss it further with me. But, honestly -- the very best we can hope for is that our relationship will end with one of us dying. And, seriously, that's going to suck for both the dead guy and the person left behind. Or we could hope to both die simultaneously, but, I dunno, that doesn't seem entirely awesome either. ("Hope you die when I do, honey! Good night!")
--
We are denial machines. This is what I've learned going to TED these last couple years -- there are several amazing talks on this, I'll point to this one by Michael Shermer on "Why people believe strange things":
And this one by Dan Gilbert on "Why are we happy? Why aren't we happy?"
There are others which I can't find at the moment -- I encourage you to look around. And maybe I'm doing a disrespect to the incredibly intelligent people who've written these talks by restating them in my own words, but, hey, that's how I do.
So, the gestalt I got from TED was: we are "designed," as beings, to be unreasonably optimistic. That is, we have evolved an unrealistic optimism as a defense to the fact that everything good ends, and in fact ends badly. (By definition -- if we're enjoying something, we don't want it to end, but everything ends, and if we're not enjoying something, the good part has already ended, so QED.)
As we stood erect and grasped things and used tools and grew our brains, we became self-aware, and then aware of the finite span of our happiness, and our genes faced a dilemma (evolutionarily speaking): our race could either be hopelessly discouraged by the tragedy of life, or we could be kept a little bit stupid so we wouldn't think about it. But this is a logical fallacy: a false dilemma -- there's a third route, which I believe evolution took: she gave us with a blind spot. We are, fundamentally, illogical when it comes to our expectations of happiness.
There is another cliché of sorts, or perhaps more of an aphorism: "In 100 years everyone you love will be dust." This is simply a truth. But it's depressing. Right now your mind is busily throwing away that sentence. You are reacting to it as you would a bad smell. You might even be angry that I mentioned it. "Why are you burdening me with this? What the hell good did you just do me?"
But I'm not burdening you, not really. You're not going to be thinking about that sentence tomorrow. It's your defense mechanism -- well, it is if you're a lucky, normal person. There are lots of depressed people out there, and they have trouble ever moving away from those thoughts, so, sorry to you guys, but I bet you've already thought of that one anyway.
Let's consider depression, and also consider that the geniuses we revere today were generally very disturbed, unhappy people. Are we, in fact, evolved not to be too smart, because at some point when you crank up intelligence, you can't help but see past your blind spot, and start to notice that life is, in the end, futile? That no matter how much we struggle, we WILL lose everything; we will die. We will be alone when that happens.
So what, you say? Why not just enjoy the here and now? But I say this is a sham. You're lying to yourself. Because if I told you, with certainty, that you were going to die in 10 minutes, you wouldn't try to enjoy the here and now. You'd be crushed. Paralyzed. You wouldn't say, "Oh, boy, I need to make sure I really enjoy those 10 minutes! I'm going to eat an entire cake, screw the calories! Then have sex without a condom!"
--
I want to note I'm using a generic "you" here, in part to represent myself. Please don't take offense. I'm not trying to pick on YOU you, in particular. Nor am I scorning humanity from some mighty perch. I'm part of this sham. I get up every day and struggle to convince myself that, for some reason, things are going to get better for me, when, by definition, all the available evidence (eg, my life so far) suggests that things will be as good for me as they have been, and no better.
--
Imagine a society of rational beings (without our blind spot for how bad life can be) came to Earth to observe us -- ignore that this race wouldn't have developed space travel because they'd all be too busy staying up until 4am taking bong hits and watching "Chuck" on NBC.com trying to forget how miserable they are.
Now, imagine what they would think of our lottery. This alone pretty much demonstrates that we are unreasonable optimists. We know, KNOW, that the average person who buys lottery tickets will not hit the jackpot. That, in fact, they won't break even. Not "average" as in 51% of people -- we know the vast majority of people lose. We KNOW, and in fact are explicitly told at the point of sale that the odds are amazingly stacked against us, and we are pissing our money down a hole.
And, in fact, even if we were to win, most of us understand the cliché that "money doesn't buy happiness." We've seen the human-interest stories on lottery winners and cluck-clucked over the statistic that most of them report being less happy after winning the lottery, and a large number go bankrupt within a few years.
"But that won't be me!" we say. We are promised, guaranteed by the seller and by every mathematician that our odds are exactly the same as everyone else's, yet we make up new rules for ourselves, in defiance of all logic, that say we're going to win, and moreover enjoy it when we do. Dammit.
Because we need something to look forward to. We need the dream. Once, long long ago, there were two types of people: those who could fool themselves into thinking life was worth living, and those who couldn't. Needless to say, the second group died out really quickly. And the first group has had millions of years to perfect its technique for overlooking the bad in life.
--
Again, I'd like to interrupt myself and say, hey, unreasonable optimism is a really good thing for most of us, most of the time. I mean, I have nothing against being happy, whether it's reasonable or not. If you want to sing in the rain, well, it's a bit of a cliché, but I obviously have nothing against those. I will join you whenever I can.
--
But maybe -- and this is what I've been thinking about -- just maybe, we should be AWARE that we're fooling ourselves. Maybe we need to occasionally pull our heads out and do check on the actual position in the world, and say, "Yes, we need to believe in order to get out of bed in the morning, but we also need to sometimes consider reality from a very rational standpoint, and make sure we're merely singing in the rain, and not singing in a monsoon that is the precursor to a giant flood that's going to kill us unless we climb that hill over there right now."
I feel that way about things I blog about, like global warming or war or politics, obviously. In general, we want to trust our politicians to take care of us -- we need to -- but it is also our duty to examine the world closely every once in a while, and not be surprised if it's screwed up and needs another course correction before we get back to our comfortable denial. It's been needed many times in the past (this isn't even our first energy crisis this half-century), and we shouldn't feign surprise when it happens again.
--
So, yes, when I start a relationship, I tell the woman, hey, you know, in all likelihood this will end in tears. (You're sorry you're not going out with a prize like me, right? Mayhap you're surprised I'm still single at 38?)
But, wait... in my defense (possibly weakly) I'll point out: ending in tears is not necessarily bad. I mean, it's just there. It's a fact that we will end, it's simple probability that we'll end unhappily, unless you want to redefine happiness. So, let's spend a little time planning for it. Thinking about the possible endings. So we can mitigate the bad things that are fungible and probable, and go back to ignoring the rest.
Let's spend some time getting me life insurance, so if I do die, you can continue to live in my house. Let's think about what we'd do if we simply grow out of each other, so we can be civil if it happens.
And most importantly, let me say this to you -- my friend, my lover, my family -- in advance: if it does end, I want you to know I won't regret it. Because everything ends. We spend all our time denying it, and when it finally happens we think it's the biggest tragedy in the world. I know this -- I've lost or given up the most important people in my life several times now. Sometimes I lose sight of the fact that it was inevitable. And if we only let ourselves think about loss when it strikes, we're going to be overwhelmed.
How many relationships end where one person says, "I'm sorry I ever met you?" I've never felt that way. I'm never sorry, because you obviously brought something into my life; that's why I invited you in, in the first place. I'm often sorry that it ended (and sometimes not), but I always knew the end was there. I don't like loss, but an ending doesn't negate all that was good.
--
"Goodbye is hard to say." You knew I was going to end with a cliché, didn't you? I think the person who coined that one was thinking the same things as I am now, and came to the same conclusions, maybe. And that person said, damn, blogs haven't been invented yet -- is there some snappy saying I can come up with that will be remembered by the next generation, so they can avoid all the heartache I had?
Well, no. You can't avoid heartache. But you can understand that it's inevitable. And, sometimes, maybe that's what you need to hear. Yes, you're going to hurt. I'm sorry. Don't let it spoil everything good.
I haven't spoken about the sessions at TED, and I'm worried that newcomers may think that TED is just a circle-jerk of stars and hangers-on drinking themselves into oblivion. In fact, the majority of TED is the three, five, and eighteen minute talks given by people from all walks of life.
Imagine what university would be like for the smartest, busiest people in the world. You'd invite the brightest minds in every field, and add in some of the keenest voices for change and revolution, and then mix in some of the best entertainers to remind us that the goal, after all, is the pursuit of happiness.
These talks have literally changed my life. That's a cliché, I apologize and will try to expound: they have changed the way I live every day. They changed the way I think about the world. They have changed where I spend my money. They have changed how I interact with people.
Primarily, as a writer, I'm a satirist -- but if I were to write about the talks, basically what I'd be saying is, "Wow, this one was good. Wow, this one too. Wow, also this one." That's pretty boring, and there are a lot of people out there who actually can write about the content without it being boring, so I'm leaving it to them.
I'm also leaving it to you: for the first time, this past year TED has started making every talk they can available online. I urge, nay beg, you to download a couple to your iPod or computer and watch them. I've tried watching them on a TV and it kind of doesn't work, but as soon as I had a bunch on my iPod I found them incredibly engrossing. On the flight down I watched five talks from the year before I first went to TED (2004), and I was literally gasping and laughing right there in my seat, with everyone around me thinking I was a crazy person.
If you would like a safe starting point (and let me emphasize I'm not saying these are the best talks, they are just the ones I really enjoyed most recently) check out Malcom Gladwell talking about spaghetti sauce; this is one of those mythical talks where he manages to weave a compelling story that is actually teaching an incredibly important lesson, and then check out Steven Levitt, the whitest gangsta in America, with his talk "Is Thug Life a Happy Life?" about the real economics of actually being in a crack-slinging gang; if nothing else, you will learn the important business concepts of "we be all fucked" and "weak and shit" (I kid you not).
Look, I'll be honest, some of these talks are extremely technical, and some are kind of hokey, and some are downright boring. Whenever you try something new, you fail some of the time; it's the definition of learning, and TED is a conference trying to teach itself how to change the world. Don't let the bad ones discourage you, just skip to another -- there's no test. If everyone in the world watched just one of these talks to the end, I think we'd have a much, much better chance at making it to 2100. For realz.
--
I had a complete blast at the "TEDGrand Party" on the final night (at TED everything starts "TED...", Lest We Forget). I know I keep mentioning Matt Groening, and probably a lot of you are thinking, "Geez, give it up, we know, you got to talk to him, that's great, you're special, now shut up." But, seriously, I basically adopted him as my new father (note to real dad: sorry about that, I'll always remember you fondly, it's me, not you), so when I mention him it's no longer to show off, it's because I basically followed him around like a baby duckling (is there any other kind?) and so most of my stories involve him in one way or another, whether it's introducing me to fascinating people, gently correcting me when I say something really offensive, or regurgitating partially-digested fish down my throat when I was hungry. Also, occasionally exclaiming, "Seriously, Wil, I'm dropping a deuce here, can I get some privacy?"
I talked with Jeff Bezos and Matt and David Pogue (separately) a bit about blogging vs. journalism and the right to report my life vs. invading the private lives of public figures, and I'm trying really hard to edit my stories so that nobody is embarrassed by them. I mean, I think pretty much everything I say reflects well on the people involved, but if you're famous or you're a famous person's PR person, and I've told a story that you would rather not have associated with you (or your client), please write me and I'll delete it. And if you're reading this, I apologize, but there are stories and details that are missing.
--
That said, I totally boned Cameron Diaz at the... no, no, sorry, that's a lie. I never got closer than five feet from her. In all this meeting of celebrities and famous people, I think I've learned some interesting rules, which I will pass on to you for absolutely free.
The problem with meeting celebrities is that a few bad apples spoil it for everyone -- it only takes one or two guys (out of a crowd of several hundred) to go up to a famous gal and start monopolizing her time and/or saying inappropriate things, and then that celebrity just naturally becomes gun-shy of meeting any new people.
The other thing celebrities deal with is feeling alone in a crowd -- lots of people will never approach celebrities but are curious about them, so wherever the celebrity goes there will be a ring of ten to twenty people standing twenty feet away from her, who are not looking directly at her but are just kind of glancing and then looking away and then smiling at each other. Subtle! The problem is, when you have a forty-foot-diameter ring of people around you at all times, you kind of figure out what they're getting at, even if they don't stare directly at you (imagine Saturn going "Oh, are those rings orbiting me?"). So, you feel like the center attraction at the zoo ("Wait, wait, I think I just saw her sneeze! Oh, look! She's wiping her little nose!"), and simultaneously feel incredibly alone. (I'm projecting my feelings onto the people I saw, here, but I think I'm right.)
I am, in this regard, REALLY glad I'm not that famous.
Now it would be incredibly pompous of me to tell you what all celebrities want... I mean, even more pompous than I actually am. But, here's what I think is best, based on my interactions with my (self-described) "fans" and based on my interactions with real celebrities.
- Don't come up to the famous person only to say, "I love you" unless you're going to disappear immediately after that. There's really nothing worse than having somebody walk up to you and say, "OMG YOU ARE SO GREAT" and then just sit there, staring at you, waiting for you to do something great. Simultaneously, you feel like (a) how boring this must be for the fan, and (b) that the fan is expecting you to put on a little show just for them, and you kind of resent them for that -- as Jon Stewart said, "I'm not your trained monkey."
- DO look directly at them when you see them naturally, but don't stare or keep glancing at them every minute or so. If you meet their eyes, smile! That's really nice. Everyone likes being smiled at. Give them a mini-head-nod if you like, or throw in a wink if you're feeling naughty. They'll get the message: "Hi, I recognize you, and I like your work, thank you." All without you saying anything or interrupting them. (I've never had someone pass me in the hall at WWDC and smile at me and thought, "DAMN YOU! DAMN YOU TO HELL! STOP WITH YOUR INFERNAL SMILING!" But I admit I'm weird.)
- Don't interrupt celebrities who are clearly with a group of people who are all close to them, and they're just trying to have a conversation with their friends / family / business associates without being interrupted.
- If you have a specific thing you'd like to discuss with the celebrity, it's OK if they are in a general group (like, standing around at a party, chatting) to come up and politely stand close enough to talk to them and SMILE at the group while you listen to whatever is currently being said. Obviously, if it turns out this is some business discussion or they are talking about personal shit, bail. When you get a chance to talk, you can be all, "Hi, Mr. Ford -- I heard you don't like to be a judged by your charisma instead of your acting, and I was wondering..." This gives them a topic, so they're not expected just to perform for you. If they answer your question and don't engage you more after that, smile and listen to the general conversation for a while, then nod at everyone in the group and wander off.
- Most importantly, BE INTERESTING ON YOUR OWN. The best interactions I've had with celebrities is when I've been with a group of my peeps and we've been telling jokes and stories and we're all having a great old time. Then the celebrity thinks, "Wow, I want to join in with them!" instead of the other way around, and you don't have the extreme power imbalance of the other situations. We already know the celebrity is interesting, the question is, are you? Do you have something cool to say? If not, work on this before you, like, talk to anyone, celebrity or not.
--
Having written those rules out, I now realize they are exactly my approach for hitting on women, which, while admittedly far from perfect, have been FAR more successful than my previous rules, which were "Go directly up to the woman and say, 'Oh my god you are so hot I'd give anything to feel your soft warm flesh against mine,'" and then just stare at her, agape, waiting for her response.
--
Tesla Motors was showing off their electric car this year in the Simulcast Lounge, which I also call the "Loser Lounge" although it's luck of the draw who gets the main theatre passes and who gets the simulcast passes (and if there's room in the main theatre, we losers can get in there as well, so we're not always stuck).
It's pretty gorgeous. I talked to Tesla CEO Martin Eberhard and was amazed that he knew every bolt of the car inside and out. Every single part had a story. "This is straight from the Lotus -- this is all-new. There's carbon in there but we're changing it. That back glass is moving out, this will be another color, these lights are actually the second-to-last prototypes, etc, etc, etc. Seriously, this man has a complete blueprint of this whole car in his head. I dare you to ask the CEO of any other car company some technical question about one of his cars.
Mike Matas was with me and started asking questions about how cars are designed, because Mike wants to know how everything works. The CEO started talking about all the crazy B.S. involved in getting a car to market -- like, for instance, when they changed the paint color of the logo on the airbag in the center of the steering wheel from the "Lotus" insignia to the "Tesla" insignia, he had the exact figures on how much it cost him to get the government to re-certify the entire airbag system. (The factory was all, "Hey, if you want, we can just give 'em to you saying "Lotus" for no extra money. Oh, hey, THANKS! That'll be great!)
I asked one of the people on the board how I might actually purchase a car. "Oh, it's easy, just go to our website, there's an on-line form." Yes, but, how do I send you the money? "Oh, there's just a space for your credit card."
Wait, let's review this. Most people have put up $100,000 to reserve a car. $100,000. On a single credit card.
"Uh, listen, I think I do pretty OK, but, uh, this is embarrassing, but I don't actually have a personal credit card with a $100,000 limit." (Or $50,000, or $40,000, or 30, or 20...) Turns out you can also send them a wire transfer if you want to do it the loser way.
On the final day I told Eberhard that he'd sold at least one unit, as I'd decided to finally put down my deposit, based on what I'd seen and the projected date of getting a service center in Seattle, and he smiled, and reached into his pocket and gave me a tiny Tesla pin. I guess you expect a joke here, but, seriously, I love that fucking pin.
--
So Matt knows how cool I think it is to "roll", as it were, and he gets a certain kick out of frontin' like he "rolls heavy" when, actually, he's pretty happy just hanging out with folks and drinking beer.
At the TEDGrand TEDParty, Daryl Hannah walked in and asked Matt if he could maybe keep an eye on her and make sure she didn't get cornered by anyone, kind of like Lloyd Dobbler. Daryl has a reputation for being a pretty smart cookie, and I think this helped prove it -- she didn't want to hold herself above everyone at the party and not talk to anyone, so she just bought some insurance against the inevitable 1% bad-apple-factor. She had a certain signal she'd give Matt if she needed him to come along and gently pull her away from someone who was being obnoxious -- and, NO, before you ask, she didn't use that signal on me. Well, as far as I know. Now that I think about it, she may have had a SEPARATE signal for Matt in case she got cornered by someone who knew the first signal. Look, this thing goes a lot deeper than any of us thought, ok?
-- Now, I'm TEDAvoiding Matt at the TEDGrand TEDParty, because he's rolling with Daryl and her leggy friend, and, frankly, I knew if I went up to that group it'd just seem as if I were trying to get an introduction to Daryl, even though really it'd be because I needed a refill of mashed mackerel.
My friend Greg and I are roaming around, and we decide to grab drinks at one of the many TEDBars that have set up in the hangar. (Oddly, the party was sponsored by Grey Goose, again, so I would have thought they'd throw the party at, like, a pond, not a hangar.) So we're in line, and Matt and Darryl and Legs are all being chatted up by a big group right by the bar.
Suddenly Matt sees me, and, much like the other night, he kind of cocks an eyebrow and does the come-here finger motion -- the expression on his face is basically the "Oh, you are in trouble young man" kind of thing, which was really funny in context but for the life of me I can't explain why. So I creep over, and Matt extends his hand way out, like we were meeting for the first time at the conference (and UNLIKE we'd just spoken an hour or so ago), and he yells, "Wil Shipley! How the heck are you!" And I'm all, "Matt! Great to see you!"
Matt says, in a total theatre voice, "WIL! I want YOU to meet MY FRIEND, [Legs]!" (I'm not using her name not because of my rampant sexism, but because it seems like a privacy invasion. Again, I'm walking a fine line here.) And I'm all, in my best leading-up-to-the-punchline-voice, "So Nice To Meet You, Legs!" And then Matt lets out, "And, this is my friend, DARRYL HANNAH!" and he looks so extremely pleased with himself, that, honestly, the point of this story is just how pleased Matt was to be able to pull that off, and not that I got to meet Darryl Hannah for thirty seconds (although she is extremely engaging and extremely tall).
So I said to Darryl, "Oh, are you standing by the bar because you want a drink with a splash of lemon in it?" and she honestly says, "GrrrrrrrrrRRrrrr..." And I'm all, "Look, I'm sorry, I've had 15 seconds here to think of a joke... I can do better." I pull back and look her up and down. "Ok, uh, I like what you've done with your hair... did you get those red highlights by using henna?"
She literally grabbed my badge and choked me with the badge-strings -- shaking it for emphasis. Look, if you come up with better jokes when you meet Darryl Hannah, you can mock me, but until then...
Greg and I wandered off, and did other party things. I'd like to note that I spend the vast majority of my time NOT around stars, but the star stories seem less invasive -- in the sense that pretty much everyone was watching the stars when these stories happened, so they are already "on the record." I could sit here and repeat what Greg and I talked about for a couple hours the night before at the bar, as we exchanged stories on how messed-up we are (ADD vs. OCD) and our other deep thoughts on life, but those were private conversations, and, also, mostly consisted of us grunting and saying, "Bitches!" anyways, and how interesting is that?
--
I've known Jeff Bezos since the first TED, where we demoed Delicious Library for him. Mike was doing it, and he was really impressed with how quickly Jeff takes in information. He'd show a feature and Jeff would nod, and then quickly say, "What else?" Not rudely, you understand, but just indicating that he now understood the entirety of what was explained to him and all of its implications, and he required more data. It was like, "So you scan in the book with the camera..." nod-what-else "And then you can loan this way..." nod-what-else "And it gets the recommendations..." nod-what-else... and so on. At the end Mike wanted to start making stuff up just because his whole demo was over in like 20 seconds -- "Uh, sorry, uh, I guess that's all it does?"
Nod-ok.
So Jeff's sharp as hell, but he's also just really, really funny. I mean, he's the center of every party. This year he brought his blood family, and it turns out they are ALL a complete riot (well, I didn't meet his mom; maybe she stands around with her hands on her hips frowning at her men disapprovingly while they bring down the house). At the end of the party his family had a very large entourage of people all standing around and making jokes with them.
I walked by Jeff and he was with his brother, which violated my rule of approach (eg, with family, probably having a private conversation) but he saw me and stuck his hand way out: "Wil Shipley!" Unlike Matt, he wasn't frontin'; we actually hadn't said hi this year, since he'd been at private parties with Clinton and shit on previous nights.
So I said hello and he introduced me to his brother, who, it turns out, runs one of the most amazing charities in New York -- but I didn't know this at the time, so I just saw a guy who looked almost exactly like Jeremy Piven; he was even wearing a baseball cap. I said, "Hey, are you as funny as your brother?" and Jeff interrupted, "FUNNIER!" I doubted that, but it turned out to be true.
Since the brother is taller and more rugged-looking, I leaned over and said to him, "So you got the humor AND the looks in the family?..." and he interrupted, "...AND JEFF GOT THE ENTIRE REST OF THE UNIVERSE!" It was sweet because it wasn't jealousy that made him say it -- it was more like wanting to tease his brother, who I think still thinks of himself as a high-school geek, about just how much power he has now. Again, I'm projecting, here -- I wasn't inside their heads at the time, so who knows.
Then the elder Bezos wanders over -- he is a sharply handsome man who pretty much defines "distinguished." He's in great shape and very clean-cut, although he was also rocking kind of a cowboy aesthetic. The brother says, "Oh, this is my dad!" and I look over and exclaim, possibly a bit-too-loudly, "Hey, are you ALSO FUNNY?"
And the dad just looks at me with his steely eyes, his face not moving. He squints the tiniest bit, like Clint Eastwood in a Segio Leone movie.
"Ooor... are you not... funny?"
Squint.
"Ooor... maybe... you don't like questions about humor?"
Finally he speaks. Softly, but still everyone could hear him clearly over the din of the party around us. "Four of the last five men I've killed asked me that question."
--
As you can imagine, he and I got on like a house afire.
--
There was a really nice tequila being served at the bar behind us, and senior Bezos started telling us about how when he was young, tequila was considered a really crap liquor, that you drank if nothing else was available to get you drunk, and now they were charging fortune for all these fancy ones. I hiked up my pants a bit and went into my grumpy-old-man act ("You know, when I was a boy, we didn't have these fancy-schmancy TEQUILAS!").
Brother Bezos said, "But Dad, this is free! It's an open bar! It costs nothing!"
The dad is the funniest because he's the best at being deadpan: "What? Are you kidding? I've been paying all night! In fact, that guy still has my credit card!"
"Oh man," I said, "he's probably buying a Tesla right now."
--
I asked the bartender (the one who may or may not have a really nice credit card), who I correctly guessed spoke Spanish, if he could help us with the traditional toast for tequila, which goes, like, "Arriba... avajo... al centro... something else" (not correct spelling). He led us through it, and the tequila was really good. I shot mine, and later begged the bartender for the final drops as he closed down the bar, which might have been a mistake, as afterwards Brother Bezos told a joke that had me gasping for air so much that I lost my balance and fell down in a crumple. The wait staff all looked at me and smiled hugely, and yelled over, "No mas tequila!"
I believe becoming silly from tequila is something that cuts across all artificial racial and class boundaries.
--
When I first encountered the Bezos clan I half-bragged/half-joked that I could introduce them to Matt Groening if they wanted, and Jeff was all yawn I met him last night. I'm like, well, uh, I might be able to produce Darryl Hannah with some work. Ok, they said, but I looked around and couldn't find her.
A half hour later or so Jeff was all, "Wil, dude, where's Darryl? I thought you were bringing her over." I demurred that she didn't seem to be around. Jeff was all, sure, whatever, I bet you can't get her over here. I was all, you're on, five minutes, it's 9:53 PM, let's go.
I ran around the room asking everyone "Have you seen Darryl Hannah?" which is a funny question to ask about a six-foot blonde movie star in a crowd of geeks. It's like, "Hey, did you see T-Rex here at the party? No? How about that volcano in the middle of the room? See that?"
So I ran up to where Darryl was, wearing my leather-soled shoes. This is relevant because there's a particular comedy move you can do in leather shoes that's been lost with sneakers -- the early stop. You stop dead a couple feet short of your target, and then slide up to them, ending up all up in their bidness.
I breathlessly apologized to the guy(s) who were currently flirting with Darryl, then was all, "Hey! Hey! Jeff Bezos just bet me that I couldn't get you to come say hi to him."
"Oh yah?" Darryl said, skeptically. "How much?"
"Uh, well... I mean, it's a gentleman's bet."
Darry: "WHAT? You tell Mr. Bezos I am NOT going over there unless there's money on the line."
So I run back to my group and SLIIIIIide up to them, breathlessly (remember we're in a damn hangar), and spout, "Darryl -pant- says she won't -pant- do it for no money."
Bezos: "Ok, fine, I'll bet you a dollar."
Run back, slide, interrupt the guys hitting on Darryl again, who are starting to hate me.
Me: "He says he'll go to a dollar!"
Darryl: "WHAT?! That's an insult. I am not going over there unless it's at least $10."
Run, slide, pant.
Me: "$10 minimum."
Bezos: "Look, I'm willing to go $5."
Runslide.
Me: "He'll go up to $5."
Darryl looks at me like I was a production assistant and I'd just brought her decaf when she'd asked for regular. Remember, besides being an incredibly leggy blonde bombshell, she's also an actress, so when she looks at you like you're a worm, you actually start actively craving the taste of dirt. Remember that character she played in Kill Bill? I want you to imagine some guy just said he'd give her $5 if she'd meet his friend, and how that character would look at him.
She spoke to me in a complete uninflected tone of voice, as if she was worried that if she indicated any emotion should would just completely lose it. All she said was, "I am positive that I said $10."
R/S.
Me: "Dude, she's insisting on $10."
Bezos: "Ok, but she has to sign the $10... and I get to keep it."
Me: "What kind of bet is that?"
Bezos: "Take it or leave it."
-rs-
Darryl: "Fine!" She steps over the guys around her as if they were toadstools and heads over. (Note to guys around her: sorry you're the butt of my jokes, please don't hate me.)
When she finally confronts Bezos, she bellows at him: "$10! That's what I'm worth to you!?"
Bezos came over and hugged her, and we all laughed our asses off, and then everyone agreed to pose for pictures together. I was on Darryl's left, and Father Bezos was on the right. Jeff was all, "Hey, I want to be in the picture," and his dad was just quietly, "Well, tough, because I'm here." Dad was like: look, you may be a billionaire to everyone else, but you're still my boy: I wiped your butt when you were a baby, and I'm hogging all the Darryl Hannah love if I want to.
Jeff ended up crouching down in front of Darryl, and she put her fingers behind his head giving him rabbit ears. Jeff's father did the same, and then so did I, so in the picture Jeff has a virtual halo of rabbit ears. Sadly, I was too drunk to remember who took this picture, but I hope whoever has it will send me a copy, because I know that at this point nobody believes this story, least of all me.
A few minutes later Jeff showed his brother the $10 with Darryl's signature on it, "How cool is this?"
"Hey," I said, "Isn't that mine?"
"Nope. A bet's a bet," and he tucked it in his pocket. True dat.
--
Ten minutes later, Jeff was was all, "Hey, Wil, I'll bet you a dollar you can't get Cameron Diaz over here," and off I went. Sadly Cameron was not In Da House.
As I rejoined the group everyone was staring at me. "What happened?"
"She's just not here!"
Jeff did his imitation of a stern executive: "Look, I didn't ask for excuses! I asked for Cameron -snort-." The funny thing about Jeff is when he tells a joke he usually can't get more than halfway into the sentence before he's already laughing at it himself. I guess that's the curse of a fast mind.
--
The last day of TED, Saturday, is a half-day, followed by a beach party. When I woke up I took inventory of myself and found my legs covered in giant purple and yellow mystery bruises. Apparently this might be a sign of drinking too much, but actually the one on my right leg I'm pretty sure is from my motorcycle scar from a couple years back getting torn open again internally from all the walking and standing and running around fetching movie stars for billionaires.
Hey, kids! "Bleedy," the still-painful knee scar, sez: Don't pop wheelies on your motorcycles! When you're 35! Without protective equipment!
--
As we were running upstairs to disassemble one of his robot sculptures before the final party, Greg and I ran into Tracy Chapman as she was leaving, surrounded by a group of admirers. She had composed a song for TED (a TEDSong!) and I felt bad that I hadn't gotten her anything.
"Hey, *I* have a fast car, so, you know... if you still need it... No?" I also complimented her performance, so I wouldn't seem entirely strange.
I was carrying the robot's arms to Greg's truck when we passed Tracy and company again outside; I said, "Hey, everyone, let's have a big hand for Tracy Chapman!" and then waved the Terminator-like hands around. Sight gags -- is there any lower form of humor? I think they're even below puns, judging from the fact that sight gag comedians (Gallagher, Carrot Top, me) are pretty much universally loathed.
--
At the party, after I'd said goodbye to Mari Chocolady and her husband NY Mac Guy, I went and said bye to Matt. He was with a little gang, and I said I was taking off, and we said bye, then he said something funny about me, and we all started talking, then I felt stupid because I'd already said goodbye but you don't want to just wander off when you're leaving for good, so I said goodbye again, which got us to all talking again, and the cycle repeated a few times.
There were four or five instances during TED this year that I'd seen Matt do something quite extraordinary, which was to detect when a situation was possibly going to lead to a conflict, and then gently say or do something so that instead everyone ended up happy, without anyone actually knowing what had just happened. This is something I really want to learn from him; this level of sensitivity to the people around me.
He did this trick one final time, on me.
We were talking about Matt's early work, and although I'm a huge fan of it in general, I'm not wild about Akbar and Jeff. Matt said, "Well, that's OK." And I agreed, because I appreciate it when people take risks with humor, and if you don't tell some jokes that aren't funny, occasionally, then you're not trying very hard to tell jokes that are funny. Humor is, by definition, edgy and new, and anything that pushes the edge forward sometimes falls off it.
So, I started teasing Matt. I think it came off like I was the young upstart and I was kind of trying to challenge him, although really I meant it completely ironically, because I didn't believe anything I said -- the most difficult kind of humor to pull off is to repeat bad things other people have said about someone that you do not yourself believe, and say them in such a tone that it's clear that you are making fun of the people who say them, not the person you're actually insulting.
"Well, Matt's not edgy any more! He doesn't take risks! No longer challenges authority! Not willing to fail!" and so on.
And Matt just looks at me and smiles and says, "Wil, you're great."
Which made me feel horrible, because that would be the perfect response if I were feeling insecure and were trying to puff myself up by putting him down. But I was really just trying to tell him I thought he was all these things. I wanted to say, you know, I still love your show. I think you still push the boundaries with every episode. I am amazed at the subversive ideas you manage to propagate on the most politically conservative network on television, and grateful that we have your voice in our new culture of hate and fear.
I should have just said this, rather than hiding my compliments behind irony.
--
The problem Matt faces is one every content-producer faces -- everyone faces -- whether we create software or television shows or a little vanity blog. It's that, as soon as our work comes into contact with the audience, it starts to change. We change. Because the audience reacts to us, and we can't help but react to them.
First off, every audience eventually rebels against what they love. Anything that was once cool HAS to then become uncool. I honestly liked the first several seasons of Friends, but it's hard to admit that now, because the whole show is considered so white-bread. Let me tell you, children, once Friends was edgy and fun.
Second, audiences tend to romanticize older works. If you're old enough, do you remember how funny SNL was in the 70s? Well, that's because you had ALL OF THE 70s to select from. You can remember just the Bad News Buzzing Bees sketch with Walter Matthau, and Samurai Barber, and forget Nose Wrestling and the billion other clunkers. Go ahead and re-watch the Simpsons shorts from the Tracy Ullman show, and tell me they are funnier than the show today.
Third, if you create anything that is really successful, by definition it becomes part of our culture, and then by definition it's no longer edgy. There was a time before David Letterman where, if, say, a talk show host said to a guest, "So, you're bigger than Jesus," it would be a HUGE scandal, because we hadn't invented post-irony, which is where you say something that's a quote of something else because you sort of mean it but you are also making fun of the people who actually might feel that way at the same time that you're saying it. Now, David Letterman's style is no longer that risky -- everyone I know uses this form of humor every day, saying the exact opposite of what they mean. Some days I don't say a single true statement. "Wow, you're a surprisingly unattractive girl!" "I sure wouldn't want another drink!"
Fourth, as the audience for something broadens, the audience starts to include people who basically don't like the thing in question, they're just there because it seems like the thing to do. So they complain about the very content they are consuming, basically asking the creator to be what he is not, ignoring that creation is a very personal act, and you can't change the very person.
This is a long-winded way of saying, this will be my last post with comments enabled. Not because I don't value other people's opinions, but because I need a place to write whatever I feel, and I created this blog to solve that need. But recently I find myself wondering, with every post, whether I'll please my "audience." And I find myself being dulled by this. There are lots of strange things I want to post, but I hear the voices in my head that chastise me for speaking about the possible end of the human race, and I think, "Boy, they REALLY aren't going to want to hear my ideas for a new water purifier."
So, if you liked this blog because it has a forum for discussions, well, I thank you for being with me, and wish you well on your journey. If you wanted me to talk on just one topic, I invite you to use the categories I've set up (I'll try to set up feeds for each one, too, but I haven't fully figured out the NEW Blogger.com yet).
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After several cycles of talking to the group and saying goodbye to Matt and then all of us talking some more, I finally felt like an idiot during one of the "conversation" parts of the cycle, and wandered off over the sand to my hotel.
After I got thirty feet, Matt looked up and noticed I was gone, and turned and yelled "Hey, Wil... Goodbye!"
Thanks Matt. I'm wjs at mac.com, if you want to write. Either way, I'll see you next year.
More stars: Forest Whitaker is here this year, as is Cameron Diaz. I haven't talked to Cameron at all, once again going on the assumption that it's probably rude to just get all up in her face just because she's famous when I really don't have anything particular to say to her except, "Gorsh, you sure be pretty."
I've seen her around a bit, but all I know is that she's pretty nice looking in person. I haven't even been close enough to hear her voice. Today she was crossing the street wearing Ugg boots and I thought I'd grab a picture, but the sun was really bright and I couldn't really see so this is what I got. Sorry if it's a bit of a disappointment.
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I did walk by Forest as some guy called out, "Hey, congrats on the Oscar," (to him, not me) which I guess he's getting a lot of this week. He seems like a really, sincerely nice guy -- I mean, sure, he's an actor, so maybe he's just really good at faking it, but it seemed like he was actually touched.
I asked him, "Hey, does anyone every say NOT congrats on the Oscar? You know, like, 'Damn, you really didn't deserve that.'" Forest actually thought about it, and his face furrowed up in a way that you can probably kind of see in your head if you've watched his movies. "No, but that would really suck, huh?"
Some friends and I were later talking about Forest's Oscar, and we agreed we were pretty happy about it because he's actually an actor, not a caricature. We're not paying to see Forest The Legend get up on screen and be himself, we're paying because we know that he's going to actually be the character he plays. Frankly, I'm sick of Cruise and Schwarzenegger showing up and smiling and being smarmy and calling it a day.
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I should mention at this point I am actually kidding about being engaged to Jehane. I know humor isn't always clear in blogs-- I really do understand we're not really engaged, ok? She seems like a nice gal and everything, and it's fun to flirt, of course. But please don't worry about me having totally lost touch with reality. I mean, not in that one specific way. Other ways, sure.
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When you get to TED you get a couple gift bags -- this year it's a shopping bag full of loot plus a bright red suitcase full of more loot. Plus, you get to keep the suitcase, which seems like a deleted scene from Austin Powers. ("It's a really nice suitcase." "That's not the point, the point is might not have wanted to spend the money on a suitcase...")
One of the coolest things we got this year was a copy of Aperture, which would be awesome except I just bought it, so I feel stupid. I was sitting at the bar tonight with Richard Kerris (now from Apple, once from Maya, and a really good guy) and, in my fashion, I started yelling really loudly, "DAMN YOU FOR GIVING THIS AWAY JUST AFTER I BOUGHT IT!" Completely deadpan, Richard didn't even pause before he shrugged ever-so-slightly and said, "mehyoucanaffordit," like it was all one word, which everyone thought was pretty awesome. I mean, companies need employees who tell it like it is.
I've gotten extra bonus swag just by talking to other TEDsters. I met a guy from Netflix and told him I owned stock and loved them and wanted him to destroy Blockbuster, and he basically confirmed my basic faith in his company. He was really nice and said he'd send me a free one-year subscription when I got home. Sweet.
I also met a man who is a VP at Chik-Fil-A, which is a chicken sandwich chain (mostly in the Southeast) which makes the best chicken sandwiches ever. I told him how I grew up in Georgia loving those sandwiches to death, but I couldn't get them in Seattle, and twice I'd actually had friends who were traveling bring me back five or six of sandwiches in their suitcases.
He was really happy to hear this, and he said, "You know what I'm going to do for you?..." and pulled a little card out of his pocket, good for one free sandwich. "Now, if you're ever in a state where they have a Chik-Fil-A, you can get a free one. Note that there's an expiration date, but you can just ignore that and point out my name, and they'll honor it."
Sure enough, it actually had the name of the VP on the little free sandwich card. For some reason this struck me as really, really strange.
I contemplated for a moment the economics of taking a plane trip to a state where they have Chik-Fil-As in order to cash in on a single free sandwich, and then further the idea of telling the employees, "Look, I know this has expired, but I've flown across the fucking country and check it: this is signed by a damn V.P."
But, honestly, he was being really sincere and I accepted his offer graciously, in the spirit in which it was given. Also, I seriously fucking love those sandwiches.
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I met a dude here who's got some gorgeous sculptures on display, and we've been drinking together the past two nights, bonding over how nuts we both are. He's got me somewhat beat in the first part of his life, having A.D.D. so bad he dropped out of high school to become a ne'er-do-well before he discovered prescription drugs at the same age I did. Now he works as a 3D animator for movie trailers (seriously!) and welds sculptures at night. His work is moving and incredible -- frankly, I'm considering buying one of the pieces here at TED.
Last night he and I were at the "Crown & Anchor" (WTF does that name even mean? What has both a crown and an anchor? Am I on the king of all boats? Or some floating sovereign?) where all the TEDsters go after the parties, and across the bar I saw Matt Groening again.
I said to my new friend, "Hey, there's Matt, I should go do some starfucking!" He was curious about Matt, too, and honestly asked, with wide-eyed sincerity, "Is it cool if I starfuck too?"
I'm a magnanimous man: "Of course! Starfucking is for everyone!" (Note: I don't actually know if it is, but it sounded good.)
I ran across the pub in slow motion with my arms open yelling "Matt! Matt!" like that guy in Wuthering Heights. Sadly, pretty much nobody saw this, so I felt like a giant idiot after doing it.
Matt was surrounded by what can only be described as a bevy of bodacious babes. I'd like to take this opportunity to state, clearly and for the record, and especially for his girlfriend who apparently sometimes does searches for his name: Matt did nothing with these admirers that would give any rational partner cause for jealousy. (Also, if you are reading: Hi, Matt's a really nice guy, hope you like my little blog, please realize I'm going for humor here.)
One of the girls was actually the bartender from a previous party, but she had recognized Matt and apparently asked to come along. The other I think had already been in the pub when he got there, and had glommed on to him in the way that some people (-cough-) do. Today at TED Matt told me that he had been hoping I would come into the bar last night, so he could show off his little mini-posse and pretend that he really rolls that way when in fact, I guess, he doesn't. Well, not EVERY night.
Now, here's the thing about Matt: he's so nice to everyone around him that I honestly have no idea if he was just messing with me or not. I mean, maybe he was just saying that because he thought it'd make me feel special, and he's the kind of guy who likes to make people feel special? I'm not sure.
So, let me shift gears to seriousness for a second, because I noticed something interesting. All night he was surrounded by people who simply loved him and his work. And he constantly shifted the attention back on them. And it wasn't just because he was shy: he actually paid attention to the people around him. Someone would start talking about how great he is, and he'd say, "Hey, so this is Anita, and she's speaking tomorrow... I want to hear about that..." and he'd really listen to her. He knew the names and professions of every person around him, all night, and he'd introduce everyone to everyone else as if he were hosting a little pub-based dinner party. "Wil, I want you to meet Sally, she's a student here in town..."
And, unlike my assumptions of how famous people act, Matt doesn't prefer to be around other famous people. The whole conference I've seen him pretty much hanging out in the common areas and talking to people from every walk of life. He's doesn't seem to need to feed his ego by talking to other people of high status. He just wants people around him to be happy, whoever they are.
In light of how cool this is, I guess my starfucking seems, well, kind of shallow. But let me offer this defense: I don't talk to Matt because I want people to see me with him. If I were trying for that crap, I'd be following around Cameron Diaz, anyways.
I talk to him because I used to read his comics when I was a kid, and they spoke to something deep inside me ("at night, the ice weasels come"), and then I watched The Simpsons on the Tracy Ullman show, and then on Fox, and then I watched Futurama, and I loved them all and they made me laugh and they challenged society and they sometimes really touched me as well.
And I just really, really want to get to know this person who can do this. I am just intensely curious about someone who can touch not only me, but every single person I know. Who can do that? What kind of man is this?
So there.
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Yesterday I said hi to Peter Gabriel again briefly and told him that Delicious Library 2 was in the swag bag, and I hoped he'd enjoy it. He introduced me to his unbearably lovely wife, who was so pretty she made my toes ache. I knew he was shy and didn't want to hassle him so I was all, "Well, anyways, now you've saved $60 in upgrade fees, and I know that's probably pretty damn important to someone in your position."
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Part 2: In Which I Show Meg Ryan What A Really Big Penis Looks Like
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Tonight a group of us were watching the TED prize winners in the simulcast lounge, including Matt and one of his genius writers (I don't know if he wants his name used or not) and his writer girlfriend. Interestingly, I met her first -- it turns out she worked on Arrested Development, the Best Show Ever.
Someone commented, "Wow, you guys must have some AWESOMELY funny pillow talk," but, you know, lives are never as glamorous as we imagine. She said, "Honestly, most nights we're so exhausted it's just like, 'Your turn to go take care of the fussy baby.'"
Ha ha! And the larfs don't stop!
An odd thing is I kept seeing the writer (before I knew who he was) around TED, and he looks so much like a younger, taller version of Matt that I'd think it WAS Matt for a split second. I've never seen anyone with Matt's haircut, so the idea that two people in the same office have that haircut was mind-boggling. Maybe it's an LA thing?
I asked Matt if he or the writer was funnier, just to see if I could stir up trouble, but he basically just kind of growled at me to not be bad, the way the dad lion gently swats his cubs when they try to bite his ears too many times. I guess I'd forgotten he has a 14-year-old -- I'm seriously outgunned in the goat-getting department.
While we were watching Meg Ryan came in to our little area, and she wasn't wearing her glasses, which I guess was her signal that she was in the mood to be more social. She smiled nicely at us as she sat down. I wasn't sure if she was just saying hi to Matt (the famous one) or all of us, and since I'd already twice today done that thing where someone smiles at me and I smile back really big and then realize they are totally looking at someone behind me and I feel like a total asshat, I didn't really smile at her, but tried to, you know, keep my eyes bright.
She's really pretty close up -- very slender and small. Our group (Matt and the two comedy writes and a couple of drinking buds) were all joking around a bit, especially after a waiter came by with some champagne, and although Meg and her friend were sitting a bit apart from us she kept looking over and laughing with us.
When there was a pause in the on-screen action, Meg and Matt talked and Matt announced she had a part in an upcoming show, and Meg said excitedly she has room to come back, too. This brought our two groups together, and we all started making jokes. At one point someone made a reference to an amazing picture we'd all seen that afternoon, of a whale mating ritual, which featured an ENORMOUS RED WHALE PENIS. So I rolled my sleeve up and held my arm up high with a fist at the end, imitating almost exactly what we had seen jutting out of the water earlier, except less red and slightly less filled with sperm (although I admit it's been a little while).
Somehow the topic of conversation turned to my butt, as it always does, and I mentioned how rock-hard my butt is to all and sundry. I asked my welder-artist cohort loudly if he had, indeed, touched my butt the night before when I'd been showing it off, and he denied it. Those new to my butt expressed disbelief that I would brag thusly, but I expounded on it with such force that they were eventually converted: my butt is a force to be reckoned with; forged of the strongest steel. I don't remember the exact words, but I remember looking Meg in the eye and saying with an almost straight face, "Look, I know it seems weird to tell people to feel my butt. But it's not squishy like you might think. It's just like touching a stone."
Then she demonstrated some game to Matt called "Magic Touch" whose rules I did not catch (apparently it involved walking by someone and bumping elbows?), and said the group should play it later. But then she lamented, "I'm probably going to end up touching Wil's ass."
I feel like that would be a fine thing for my tombstone. Although, by that time I guess it will have happened or not.
I told other jokes, as well; I don't remember what. Maybe some were actually funny. Finally Meg rolled her chair over next to mine and asked to see my badge, "Are you a comedian or what?" I told her I was just a software developer, but I was actually thinking of doing a little stand-up as a hobby. She said I should, since I had a certain presence.
HAH HAH SUCK ON THAT TOM HANKS I BET SHE NEVER SAID THAT TO YOU MISTER EIGHTY BILLION OSCARS! YOU GOT MAIL, SUCKER, AND IT SAYS THERE'S A NEW STUD IN TOWN.
No, I'm not serious, I love Tom Hanks and I know she was just being nice. But, still, that was a really flattering compliment from a very charismatic lady. And you know what? I'm going to go ahead and feel good about it. Yah, that's right, I'm going to sit here enjoying it. I'm going to roll my ego in it and let it soak into all the places with the little dings and scratches from 37 years of occasional rejections or insults or slights.
First the funniest man in the world says I'm funny, then America's sweetheart says I have presence. Who knew stars were so full of compliments? At this point I really wouldn't be shocked if I met Carrie Fisher and she was all, "You know what? Actually YOU are my only hope."
Anyways, Meg and I talked seriously for a little while about life and stuff; I spoke about my big breakup and putting myself back together afterwards -- it would be an invasion to repeat her part of the conversation, but I was really struck by two things: One was that she kept turning the spotlight back to me, and I kept feeling incredibly embarrassed to be telling Meg Ryan stupid stories from my life, but she kept asking questions about me every time I'd turn it around.
The other was that she was, in fact, a real human being, who had the same dreams and fears and insecurities that we all do. Because we are all really pretty much the same. There is just so much more that we have in common than we have that is different. I keep re-learning this.
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Remember this, if you ever meet me. I'm afraid of you. I'm afraid I won't live up to your expectations, I'm afraid you'll think I'm ugly, I'm afraid I'll look like a nerd or do something inappropriate and you'll disapprove of me. If I act aloof it's because I don't have the inner strength to risk being rejected that day, not because I don't care about you as a human being.
On the flight down I saw NY Mac guy and his wife Lucy Liu during my layover at the San Fran airport, waiting for the puddlehopper to Monterey, jack. I never get tired of that joke.
I can now reveal Lucy's real identity, because she's in Vogue this month, and damn that's pretty cool. Since last TED she started a brownie business and, from my vantage point, it seems to be doing pretty well. Again, from nothing to Vogue in one year. Besides being really amazing brownies (and I don't usually eat sweets -- I find them cloying), with just the right combination of fudginess and cakiness (these are actual industry terms I just made up), she independently hit on the clever idea of having the actual brownies be really tiny, so you could eat one without getting a billion-zillion calories.
The funny part was her entire carry-on appeared to be filled with brownies, like some kind of crazy person, who understands people might have luggage but doesn't understand what normal people do with it. So, at the airport, she was all, "try a brownie!" and I'm thinking, sure, when I get back to Seattle maybe you can send... oh you have a suitcase full of them. That is a perfectly rational thing. For example, my suitcase is entirely full of software.
No, not really, it's mostly underwear. I don't know why, but underwear is the most massive thing in my suitcase. This is just a comment on my packing, really, not my package. I seriously thought, "Boy, I hope I don't open this in front of people, because pretty much it's gonna look like I'm an underwear gnome."
Look, I like to feel fresh, ok? Stop hassling me.
Anyways, Mari (it can be revealed as her real name) had a suitcase full of brownies, which suddenly seemed incredibly clever to me, because if you're going to a party what better way to be the most popular person than to bring a hojillion bite-sized treats?
Apparently going through security was interesting, because Mari had placed the stacks and stacks of brownies in a matrix and wrapped the whole thing in layers of plastic wrap, and this sort of configuration of confection and cling wrap looks exactly like a bunch of C4. But after she calmly explained to the TSA lady that it was just brownies, they swabbed her bag and let her through. (I feel like there's an Arrested Development joke in here somewhere, but I'm too tired to go for it.)
Now, I'd like to point out that for some fucking reason the TSA makes us place all our cosmetics (no more than 3 oz, otherwise lip gloss can kill!) inside of a single ziploc baggy or throw them out, because, you know, of all the times planes have been taken down by terrorists wearing too damn much mascara and lip-liner, but if you go through with an entire suitcase full of what appears to be one of the most explosive substances civilians could reasonably get ahold of, THEN they just swab the outside of your damn suitcase and you're done. It's like the famous Ernie and Burt sketch where Ernie has a banana in his ear to keep away alligators: they can't use the swab test to detect explosives in cosmetics, because the swab test has never worked before detecting explosives in cosmetics, because NOBODY ACTUALLY PUTS FUCKING EXPLOSIVES IN THEIR COSMETICS. WE ARE NOT LIVING IN A STATE OF SIEGE. WE JUST INVENTED IT.
The real explanation must be 9/11 9/11 9/11, like the answer to most crap these days.
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I decided that the only fair way for Mari to give out her brownies was for us to sidle up to people at the conference and say, conspiratorially, "Psst... Mari has brownies. Today's password is Maverick. Pass it on." And then, those who approach her each day with the correct password get a brownie, subject, of course, to her daily limit of a third of a hojillion, because her luggage is finite. (Note to people at TED: today's password really is Maverick.)
The problem with this idea, I realize in the cold, headachy light of the morning after drinking too damn many Grey Goose (an official sponsor of Not Learning Anything At TED) cocktails, is that this is going to be like the world's largest game of "telephone," and eventually it's going to get back to me when someone sidles up and whispers, "Mary is frowny today, the last word is cadaver, bless zion."
And I'm going to be all, "Gimme the blue pill. Seriously. Blue one. Don't fuck around."
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At the hotel Meg Ryan and Daphne Zuniga were checking in together. Both were at TED last year, but I hadn't spoken to Meg because she seemed like she didn't want to be bothered, and, you know, I don't want to be That Guy. She was again In Disguise today, meaning she was wearing dark John Lennon glasses, which I thought was funny, because it's like, "Hey, who's that blonde everyone is staring at in the Lennon glasses? I can't quite make out... if only I could see her eyes... there's nothing distinctive about her face or hair or body to indicate it's Meg Fucking Ryan, America's Sweetheart... Hmm, oh well, probably nobody, move along."
Anyways, I did briefly walk up to Daphne and try to continue my joke from last year: I was all, "Hey, Ione Skye! I'm so glad you came back!"
Seriously, her response could not have been any more polite and/or flattening: "Oh, I'm so sorry, I don't remember you... did you make that joke last year?"
I was all, uh, kind of, I mean, uh, I have to go now bye.
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Teach me to be a smart-ass.
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It probably won't help my reputation as an alcoholic to admit that last night, after not eating much all day, I went to the "TED Virgins" party (sponsored by Gray Goose!) and had too many gray geese concoctions (DAMN YOU GEESES... TO PIECES!) and got seriously LOUD. No, I know, you're shocked, but I did.
Normally the wall-flower, I think I started yelling at the new attendees about matters sexual. I might have tried to take my shirt off. Then, Matt Groening showed up.
Ok, look, this next part, I'm not going to try to make into a story, because I just have to write it down as quickly as I can: Matt remembered me from last year ("the guy who was yelling about killing the dog in Futurama!") and it turns out he'd Googled himself after TED and read my blog. And he was all, "hey, your blog is really funny."
Now, I'd like to repeat this, MATT FUCKING Groening THOUGHT MY BLOG WAS FUNNY! The Simpsons guy! The Futurama guy! The funniest man who ever lived, or ever will live, and I'm not just saying this in case he googles his name again and comes across this blog again and is reading it right now so I can totally suck up to him. I'm better than that. I'm ashamed of you for even thinking it. (But if you are reading, Matt Groening, I'd like a pony. Matt Groening Matt Groening Matt Groening c'mon Google give me some love.)
I'd love to sit here and tell you that I finally had a rational, sober conversation with Matt, but, again, by the time he showed up I'd been goosed to the point of incoherence. I don't actually remember a lot, except damn Matt's a handsome, handsome man, with great taste in blogs. I'm really hoping I didn't start screaming jokes about butt-sex, as I'm wont to do when sloshed.
For months I've been thinking, "Oh, man, next time I see Matt I'm going to ask him all these really insightful questions about his career a
Delicious Monster
The last day of TED, Saturday, is a half-day, followed by a beach party. When I woke up I took inventory of myself and found my legs covered in giant purple and yellow mystery bruises. Apparently this might be a sign of drinking too much, but actually the one on my right leg I'm pretty sure is from my motorcycle scar from a couple years back getting torn open again internally from all the walking and standing and running around fetching movie stars for billionaires.
There were four or five instances during TED this year that I'd seen Matt do something quite extraordinary, which was to detect when a situation was possibly going to lead to a conflict, and then gently say or do something so that instead everyone ended up happy, without anyone actually knowing what had just happened. This is something I really want to learn from him; this level of sensitivity to the people around me.
I've seen her around a bit, but all I know is that she's pretty nice looking in person. I haven't even been close enough to hear her voice. Today she was crossing the street wearing Ugg boots and I thought I'd grab a picture, but the sun was really bright and I couldn't really see so this is what I got. Sorry if it's a bit of a disappointment.
Tonight a group of us were watching the TED prize winners in the simulcast lounge, including Matt and one of his genius writers (I don't know if he wants his name used or not) and his writer girlfriend. Interestingly, I met her first -- it turns out she worked on Arrested Development, the Best Show Ever.