Craft By Zen by Jeremy Wong

I’ve been fascinated by cryptography ever since I was a kid. I remember briefly when my parents got a free subscription to the SF Chronicle and skipping straight to the comics and puzzles. One puzzle in particular, the cryptogram puzzles, got me to take my pen out and try to decode the message. It’s a simple monoalphabetic cipher where one letter maps to another letter, but the letter can never map to itself.

The simplest monoalphabetic cipher is called a Caesar Cipher, where you simply shift the alphabet by a certain amount. If you and the key party you are trying to encrypt the message to knows the shift amount, you can easily decode the message. So if we shifted the alphabet by 10 letters, letting “K” represent “A”, we could decode the word “JUMP” as “TEWZ”. The limitation of the Caesar shift is that there are only 26 configurations, so one could easily go through each letter until they figure out what the encoded message says.

Message Alphabet: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
Encoded Alphabet: KLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZABCDEFGHIJ

A slightly strong encryption is one where each letter maps to another letter in a random order. For example, if you had the word “JEAR BEAR”, it could be substituted as “FIPH DIPH” given the following key map.

Key Map:

F -> J
I -> E
P -> A
H -> R
D -> B

Both parties would have to agree to a certain key map. The biggest flaw of this monoalphabetic cipher is the frequency to which we use the letters. For example, the letter “E” is the most common letter found in writing versus the letter “Q”. The Arabs back in the 9th century were the first to figure this out and developed this practice we know now as frequency analysis. For the Chronicle’s puzzles, you could tell there were going to to be certain repeated words, like single letter words like “a” and “I” are bound to be in the puzzle, so you can fill those out first. Also, “the” and “and” are two most frequently used three-letter words, so you can start filling those out too, and figure out the message by trial and error. Of course, you could just send the text in one long string, like this, “Afellowofficerlosthislifeinthelineofduty”.

Frequency analysis allows us to break down how often each letter is used and map it to a known frequency index, like looking at all english words and breaking down how often each letter is used, and figure out with high accuracy which letters map to which encrypted letter. Frequency analysis gets stronger the longer the message is. If it helps, you can think of the ratios for frequency analysis with Scrabble letter points. The lower the score, the higher the frequency.

In looking for a stronger encryption, polyalphabetic ciphers were created to make sure letters would be encoded with different letters each time. One form, called the Vigenère cipher, utilizes different monoalphabetic ciphers to encode a message. Each letter would map to a different shifted alphabet based on a key, and the key itself would map to different shifted alphabets. Let’s give an example. If we used the word “KING” as a key, and we wanted to decode the message, “A little boy and his fox,” we would first go to the letter “A” and map it to where “A” is in the shifted alphabet where “K”, from the key “KING”, is the first letter of the alphabet. In this case, it is easy. “A” maps to “K”.

Message Alphabet: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
Encoded Alphabet: KLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZABCDEFGHIJ

The next letter from the text, “L”, would map to the shifted alphabet where “I” is the first letter, where “I” is the next letter in the key, “KING”. In this case, we would encode “L” with “S”.

Message Alphabet: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
Encoded Alphabet: IJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZABCDEFGH

We continue to encode the next letter with the shifted alphabet starting with “N”, and then the next letter after that with the shifted alphabet starting with “G”, and then we repeat the key and start again with the shifted alphabet starting with “K” for the next letter of the text, and repeat for the entire sequence until the entire message is encoded. In its entirety, the message reads “KTVZDTRHYGNTNPVYPWK”. You will notice that the fourth and fifth letter from the text are the same, “TT”, but in the encoded text, they are different letters, “ZD”. Now each letter does not necessarily map to each letter. For hundreds of years, it appeared that this encryption was impossible to break and was known as “Le Chiffre Indèchiffrable”, French for the indecipherable cipher.

In the mid-1800’s, Charles Babbage was the first person to figure out how to decipher the Vigenère cipher decryption technique without prior knowledge of the key. There had been others who deciphered messages before, but Babbage’s technique ensured repeatability. Babbage never went public with this discovery, and for quite some time, the discovery went to a French codebreaker Friedrich Kasiski, who published a paper on breaking the cipher. What they found was a flaw in the cipher. The flaw in this case is the repeatability of the key. If the shared key is short enough, like “KING”, and if the text is long enough, you’ll start to see repeated patterns. For example, the word “and” could appear in 4 different ways using “KING” as a key. You could look for those exact phrases to piece together where you see repeated instances of the word. By process of elimination, you could look through the text and start to piece together what the key might be. Like in the cryptogram puzzles, you start figuring out what the message of the text. With these and possibly other letters decoded, you can work backwards and figure out what the shifted alphabet was that was used, grab the first letter in that alphabet, and determine what the key could be.

This was a huge blow to people creating encryptions. Suddenly, Le Chiffre Indèchiffrable became vulnerable. Cryptographers up to the early 1920’s were creating encryptions in the variation of the Vigenère cipher. In WWI, the British intercepted German messages and decrypted them with relative “ease”. This was a heavy advantage for the British and Allied forces, and was a major factor in helping them win the war. Come WWII, the Germans had a much more powerful encryption machine that helped power an effort to decrypt its messages.

I watched “The Imitation Game” a few weeks ago, and was fascinated to known how they would depict the Enigma machine, the German encryption machine. The Enigma machine is a mechanized way of encoding and decoding messages utilizing polyalphabetic ciphers. I won’t go over the intricacy of the machine as you could read many articles about it on Wikipedia, watch the film, or read “The Code Book,” where I gathered most of the information about mono- and polyalphabetic ciphers. The British set up grounds at Bletchley Park dedicated to decoding German messages during WWII. I want to shift focus of this essay to explore the differences between the movie and reality.

First, I really wanted to know what Alan Turing’s role was in creating “Christopher”. In the film, “Christopher” was the codename for the machine Turing built in order to decode Enigma’s messages. But I couldn’t find out if Turing ever called it “Christopher. In reality, the machines were called bombes, machines that would loop through every combination that would short circuit if the right combination was found. Understanding from some decoded messages that there were common words in almost every message, like “weather” in the first message at 6 in the morning, or “hail hitler” at the end of the message, cryptographers would try to find a chain of encrypted letters that would loop back to itself. The German word for “weather”, “witter”, would be mapped to the first 6 letters of the message. With those letters, and perhaps other common German words known to exist in the text, the cryptographers would try to find specific patterns, or instructions, to give the bombe. There was a great amount of human error that could have happened before telling the bombe what to look for in order to short circuit the machine. Multiple bombes were used in order to test all of their theories. 19 were used in its first year of development.

The bombe itself was a Polish creation when Poland was trying to decipher the Enigma machine during the 1930’s. There’s an entire neglected story there that is understandable the film glossed over. The Polish, paranoid of the growing power of Germany, obtained one of these Enigma machines. It was later smuggled to Bletchley Park, mentioned briefly in the movie’s beginning when Commander Denniston shows Turing the Enigma machine for the first time. Also untold is the story of the Polish mathematician Marian Rejewski and his decade of work trying to find weaknesses within Enigma. The Polish, knowing that their research might help the Allies in breaking Enigma, gave the intelligence to the British. Turing built on top of Rejewski’s work when he started building the bombes. The film poorly looks at the past achievements and puts Turing on a pedestal of being the radical of making a machine that could decode the key. In the film, almost everyone he’s working with doesn’t take his idea serious enough and Turing goes out of his way to convince Churchill to put him in charge. It is true the British funded around £100,000 to help build the bombes, but the drama surrounding the shutdown of these machines were not really mentioned in any literature I could find.

The Germans upgraded the number of combinations possible for their Enigma machine later in the war. More bombes were created in order to cut down the time to find the combinations. Plus, Enigma was not the only machine used to encrypt messages. For example, between Hitler and his main generals, they used an even larger encoding device with much more complexity. The film failed to mention Colossus, the machine that tried to decrypt this machine, that built off of the mechanisms in Turing’s bombes. Some proclaim Colossus was the first programmable computer even though it had to be dismantled after the war.

The film disturbed me in how easily it looked for Turing’s machine to decode the key. Knowing what I know now of what Turing’s machines actually did, the whole plot after of trying to determine what was statistically significant in delivering information after it was obtained did not seem to solely rest upon the cryptographers, in my opinion. It was the film’s opportunity to utilize a Machiavellian perspective of warfare, of which we saw very little of.

All that I’ve said though doesn’t mean I didn’t like the film. I actually thought it was an enjoyable movie with questionable drama, like the marriage subplot between Turing and Kiera Knightley’s character. I really liked how the film portrayed Turing’s eventual downfall after the war and the injustice brought to him because he was gay. But at the same time, I write this because I have a love for cryptography, and I needed to scratch this itchy spot of curiosity.

We shouldn’t be using weight as a metric for healthiness. Weight measures primarily subcutaneous fat, visceral fat, water and muscle weight (yes, we’re composed of more things). The weight value can not tell the composition make-up of that person. For example, someone could have a large build, but sound overweight according to their BMI, yet just have most of their weight in muscle. Or, someone could be petite, yet have a lot of visceral fat. There’s no inherent evil in any single factor. You need each of these things to survive, and there are trade-offs to having too little or too much of any single thing.

Working Out

If you start working out for the first time in a long time, you’ll see a net gain in weight because you’ll start gaining muscle before you see an equal loss in fat. That’s why some people get discouraged from working out for the first week because they think it’s not working.

My roommate’s friend was aiming for a target weight to fit her wedding gown and set out a weekly target weight to aim for. She decided to start working out everyday. To her dismay, she gained 3 lbs (or 1.4 kg) after the first week. When she told me about this, I gave her a quick primer about weight. The change in fat loss is much smaller than the change in muscle gain. For her overall health, this was a great with long-term benefits like increased cardiac output (CO). I also told her the biggest changes you can make for immediate effect of weight is change in eating habits.

Looks Naked

I don’t use the weight metric for myself. I believe the underlying desire we want from the weight is the indication that we look good. Because I understand this superficial ideal, I’ve adopted a concept from Darya Pino Rose’s book, “Foodist.” “Do I look good naked?” If the answer is yes, I’ll continue to maintain my lifestyle. If not, I’ll have to make some intervening habits. When we find ourselves in vain about our looks, it’s almost always the subcutaneous, or visible, fat.

Target Weight

With the same explanation of what weight is, target weight is a complete farce. The true answer to the question, “What is my target weight” should really be rephrased as “What is the most impactful thing I can do for my health?” Because weight tells nothing about composition, we’re terrible at guessing the best target weight for being healthiest. The truth is, there is no target weight we know of that is healthiest. Mrs. Rose talks in “Foodist” that she had a target weight to aim for, but when she took her focus away from the scale and onto food, she found out she felt better 20 lbs heavier than her target weight.

Be wary of your individual BMI score. BMI data is great for population statistics, but terrible for an individual. BMI is equal to your height squared divided by weight (h^2 / w). The score is basically meaningless because it scores the large-build, muscular person as overweight weight, or a skinny-fat sedentary person as underweight. Neither are good indications, as an individual, that they are leading healthy lifestyles. And on top of that, doctors and nurses use BMI to rank us with our peers if we should gain or lose weight. My most recent trip to the doctors alarmed me when they told me they used BMI. Even though they told me I’m at prime weight and I shouldn’t lose or gain weight, I was befuddled they would use such an archaic scale.

Obesity

Yes, if you’re morbidly obese crowd, or the high percentile of the population in terms of weight, weight will indicate with higher accuracy the longevity of your life. Sorry.

Other Points of Interest

I’ve mentioned the naked thing, but I know that’s not the best strategy for everyone. Here’s a list of other things to consider:

• Mood
• Body Fat Percentage
• Breathing Rate
• Breathing Volume
• Resting Heart Rate

It is not an exhaustive list, but it’s a start. Sometime in the near future, I’ll write-up part two about food because that’s the key in weight loss and general fitness.

I read this delightful children’s book called “Lauren Ipsum” by Carlos Bueno and Ytaelena López about a girl named Lauren who journeys through Userland trying to find her way back home. It utilizes Computer Science topics weaved into Lauren’s story. One of the delightful characters she meets is Eponymous Bach, a woman who composes ideas and puts her name on them. “Eponymous” is an actual word that means giving a name to things. For a name to be eponymous, it must use someone’s name behind the thing or idea. The Eponymous Bach character made me think about the power of names.

You can go on Wikipedia and find an article about Eponymous laws. These are laws named after people, like Moore’s law, the observation that the complexity of integrated circuits doubles every 2 years, or my personal favorite, Murphy’s law, which states anything that can go wrong will go wrong. To fall into the Wikipedia trap, you can search for Eponym to find a whole list of other eponymous things.

Names allow us to put into words complex ideas. I’ve been coding on a daily basis for a little over a year now, and I’ve started to recognize design anti-patterns, or the ways not to design a piece of code. For example, when a piece of code becomes too long to do what you thought was a simple task, we call that a “code smell”. Typically, if that occurs, you scrap that piece of code and start over because the resulting code become hard to maintain in the future.

Another anti-pattern, called the “Big Ball of Mud”, is when a software project is strung together with little or no architecture. This results in code that is sloppy, duct-taped, and difficult to maintain. This is common when there are poor business practices, huge developer turnover, and code entropy. A friend who works at a large, public company told me the engineers who initially wrote the code for their product took many shortcuts to meet release dates, which was in conjunction with their IPO. After becoming public, many of these engineers sold their stock and left the company, leaving code that was hard to maintain and close to being useless. The result is a system that may be prone to errors and difficult to scale up and add more features.

Giving names to ideas makes those ideas more comprehensible and cohesive or “sticky”. For example, my roommate uses the horoscope as a heuristic to quickly judge someone’s character. The horoscope provides a quick framework for personality types. It plays off the elements, earth, wind, fire and water, and uses it to describe behavior and traits. For example, Capricorns, who are Earth signs, are more grounded and set in their ways. She will use that to categorize the Capricorns she meets. Of course, we may not really fall into these buckets or groups, and my roommate takes this with a grain of salt, but it’s just a guide to aid with understanding personality. The same goes for the different Myer-Brigg’s types.

Names act as a heuristic, or shortcuts, for our brains. As an example, if we know people with the same name, in my case, I know a few people with the name Michael, Nick, and Chris, I’ll give each one a nickname. And my friends will typically give me a nickname back. In fact, the name of this newsletter is the “Jear-Bear Letters” because some fine folk over the past summer started calling me “Jer-Bear”.

In olden times, names would include titles. Alexander the Great, Pliney the Elder, Joan of Arc. These would help with passing down stories through oral tradition. Saying Alexander doesn’t have the same ring as Alexander the Great. If you’re going to tell someone a story by word of mouth, their more likely to remember it if you put a descriptor title to it. If you’ve read Lord of the Rings, or A Song of Ice and Fire (the book series for the TV Show, Game of Thrones), you will recognize your character immediately given the character’s title.

Sometimes, in fantasy tales, names have a literal power. For example, in “The Name of the Wind”, by Patrick Rothfuss, you can summon the wind by bellowing its name. In the Harry Potter series, Lord Voldemort is the household name everyone fears to the point where not many will utter his name. The words we use to call each other or ideas have a profound effect. When you become a household name, people will stick your name to your face, your brand, and your life’s work. Take Madonna for example. When you bring her up in conversation, we are ignited with thoughts about Material Girl, Evita, or that recent song “4 Minutes” whom she has a duet with Justin Timberlake.

When you can put a name to an acronym, you make it into a mnemonic acronyms in which you can use to your advantage in everyday work. For example, I’ve been designing websites, and I use Robin Williams’ graphic design principles in her book, “The Non-Designer’s Design Book”, known as “CRAP” (Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, and Proximity). When I’m coding, I use the SOLID principles for good practices in object-oriented design.

Next time you start learning something new, learn the concepts by associating them with names. If they don’t have names, give them one. If you don’t have a name, give yourself one.

On International Women’s Day, my former hack-mate from Science Hack Day tweeted out female scientists that are inspiring to her. You can read her full article here. In that spirit, I wanted to talk about meeting someone who inspired me.

Ze Frank

Ze Frank is an Internet sensation primarily known for his Internet show back in 2006 entitled “The Show”. In 2012, he released a new show with the help of Kickstarter backers called “A Show”. It also became a hit for its run during its first year.

If you haven’t watched any of his videos, you should begin with “An Invocation for Beginnings,” his first episode for “A Show”. He talks about the fear of beginning and calls out people to join him in beginning something.

This is an invocation for anyone who hasn’t begun! Who’s stuck in a terrible place between zero and one.

— Ze Frank, “An Invocation for Beginnings”

Or this video on “Crushing Words,” where Ze just talks about words that have had a crushing impact on his life. Ze is able to present his vulnerabilities, creating an atmosphere of authenticity, human emotion, fun and play in his videos. In a lot of ways, these essays echo what his videos convey, a place where we can actually talk about insecurities and vulnerabilities.

The Exhibition & Showcase

In “A Show”, Ze held a bunch of different “missions” where artists and fans would collaborate to create pieces of art, like a jacket made of pages from diary entries submitted by the fans. In 2013, Ze created an art exhibition using the pieces created in the missions. The exhibition was held at The Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History where the public was invited to come to the exhibition and participate in the workshops. At the end of the exhibition, the public could watch Ze and Stefan Bucher present their work in an interactive showcase. Being a fan, I was a bit giddy to finally meet him in person, so I drove down to go see this exhibit.

Nina Simon, the museum’s curator, spent years creating this museum interactive space where each exhibit is a participatory art piece. It was no coincidence Ze chose this museum. Within Ze’s exhibition were different workshops where you can make your own finishing stamp, look at some of the projects made by the artists on his show, and write comforting messages to stuff into a teddy bear, known as the “Comfort Bear.”

Before the showcase began, Ze addressed the crowd who was lined up to go into the auditorium. He asked everyone to disperse and talk to strangers you’ve never met. It was the first in a string of social experiments he asked us to participate in. I walked around the room meeting people of different backgrounds, like students at UC Santa Cruz, NASA Ames employees, and Youtube Stars from the UK. After a few minutes, he told us to gather back together and asked us to make a laughing circle. To create a laughing circle, you have someone would lay down and start laughing. Another person would lay down, rest their head on the first person’s belly, and then commence laughing. This would repeat until a circle is formed. A few people participated in this activity, including myself.

Our superego holds us back from saying things that might be too offensive, too brazen, or too radical. It may stop us from participating in activities that might make us embarrassed. But this activity of resting our heads on someone’s laughing belly tricks our superego from telling us this is an awkward situation because it’s never encountered such action before. As my head was bouncing up and down, my mind stopped rationalizing what was going on. I just laid there laughing at the absurdity that was unfolding. Heads around me in similar bouncing fashion, bobbing up and down laughing.

Other activities followed along the same thread as thing one. Feeling oddly elated, we all sat down in the auditorium. I had this sense of play and joy, as I listened to him talk about the process of creation and how participatory activities brings about conversations. He made me think about, and eventually write about, how to get others to interact with me on an empathetic level. It goes past the level of acquaintance and to a level of real human emotional feelings. We take off this mask and actually show ourselves raw.

The physical realm is full of strange and awkward emotions because we have to deal with each other. The internet masks us with anonymity. So how do we get to the important conversations?

— My journal entry from that day in reflection to the talk

Continuing The Dialogue

After the talk, I lined with with the rest of the fans to meet Ze. Watching his videos is an intimate one-on-one experience. You open your laptop, go to his website, and click play to start watching his latest video. He talks about something to a camera, and you view the final, edited version. And a lot of times, you watch it alone.

Here was a chance to finally bridge that digital experience into the physical world. Except, the exhibition, the silly activities, and his talk made me realize I’m not the only one who has this experience. I get to share it with the fans. We get to continue this conversation, through the medium of video comments, the missions, or this live event. And through this live event, I was finally able to talk to people about the important things, like how to be yourself, how to deal with bad news from the doctor’s office, and how to determine who is a friend versus an acquaintance.

When it was my turn, I thanked him for the participatory experiences of the event. He signed my poster and probably doesn’t remember this brief encounter. And to be honest, I don’t really either. He brought himself to the level of the fans, not as an apotheosis. He was the instigator, the person who started the ball rolling. The fans are there to continue to roll the ball and perhaps crack it open to find something magical inside, like raw emotion, solutions to our everyday problems, or how to cope. Ze was make the event more than just himself. In true spirit to his attitude in his videos, he made this event about the fans.

Ze opened my mind to think about how to live and cope with awkward emotions. They’re of human construct, and the only way to really deal with it is to open a dialogue. It’s not to comment on a video, give our ten cents, and leave it at that. It’s to draw out someone else who shares similar perspective and figure out what makes us human.

My friend, Miss Keegan, is the bravest person I know. She’s my best friend and someone I truly care about, sometimes even more than family. Two years ago, she wrote me a very long letter. It took her months of writing and re-writing to ultimately tell me she was transgender. Deep down, she was asking for acceptance. She was also worried that if she sent this letter, there would be a slim chance that I wasn’t going to accept her for who she is. Despite being risk-averse, she took that leap of faith, risking our friendship. When I received the letter, I took some time to really read it, then called her. I told her I accepted her for who she is and there would be no way in hell I was going to react negatively.

We had been friends since our freshman year of college. We met at this club event right outside of the university our first weekend before classes started. However, it was only brief, and all we did was introduce ourselves with a handshake. The second time I met her, I stumbled into her dorm room drunk while she was trying to have a good time hanging out with her friends from back home. She held no angst towards me, but showed me out of the room. Despite my rude behavior, she was drawn to me and we started hanging out more often. Eventually, she became one of my first true friends in college.

One of the things we wanted to do was travel up the west coast to Canada. In my car, we drove a thousand miles up and down the coast seeing the beautiful and gorgeous Pacific Ocean. But we also had a lot of time on our hands. We each created a playlist that we thought would reflect our lives. That’s where I learned Miss Keegan was into scream-o music once upon a time ago. Eventually, we ran out of music, and we talked for a long time. I felt comfortable enough talking about myself. I told her about an old High School crush I never got over, of parental expectations, of where I thought my life was headed. She drove, listening to my stories, soaking it in. Miss Keegan only talked briefly about her past, and I could tell she was holding something back. Something deep and dark, and I was worried she didn’t trust me. I didn’t press her on it and felt that if she was ready to tell me, she would.

We took a class together in our junior year on LGBT media studies. In that class, we discussed topical LGBT issues and read one or two books a week. Because of high textbook costs, we decided to split the cost of the books. However, one of the books I bought was incorrect. I bought Kate Bernstein’s “Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation” when I was supposed to buy her first book, “Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us.” Miss Keegan bought the book off my hands and read it religiously for a week.

I didn’t feel surprised when she wrote to me she was transgender. I received the letter on my birthday the year after I graduated college. In addition to coming out, she also told me for the past year, she was taking hormones without prescription. She talked of depression and of finding herself lost and confused, crying in her room. Reading that reminded me of specific incidents where she would just disappear during social events.

Miss Keegan and I were at a party held by a mutual friend about a half a year before I received the letter. She left the party after feeling dismayed because some of the guests talked about gender binary norms. She had taken a walk without telling anyone, and no one noticed until I was finally ready to leave the party. We had drove together, and since we lived together, I assumed I was also driving her home, but Miss Keegan was no where to be found. Another friend accompanied me as I drove around looking for her. After a half an hour without finding her, we decided to swing around my place hoping she found her way back with someone else. I got back and she wasn’t there. I asked my roommates if they had seen her, but they didn’t know. Before I called the police, she came back, safely. She was dumbfounded by my distress and told me she just needed to take a walk to clear her thoughts. I sighed a huge relief, but was worried by Miss Keegan’s need to clear her thoughts.

Shortly after I received the letter, I called her and told her I was totally supportive of her and willing to help her if she ever needed it. I also asked if this was why she had left the party I mentioned in the previous paragraph. She said it was distressing that nobody understood her perspective and scared that if she brought it up, she would be rejected. She felt like she was in a hopeless place, trapped in a dark room when people make such off-handed comments.

One of the first things I did right after college was write to Miss Keegan letters. Snail mail, not email. It was refreshing. I was able to write these longform essays, much like what you’re reading now. Sometimes she would respond. Sometimes she didn’t. It didn’t matter. I was able to get something off my chest because I knew she could read the things that were hard to talk about. After I received her long coming-out letter, the letters meant even more because she was also willing to talk about the hard things as well. When I received one of her letters, I knew they were precious because there is limited space on paper. You have to be extremely thoughtful of what you’re going to put in that space.

Writing these letters reminds me of that time I was writing letters to Miss Keegan. I’m writing about the hard things to talk about, except now, there are more people reading. I feel very vulnerable, scared I’m going to be judged by every set of eyes that read this. But what really helps is when I get responses back. They’re not like a reply on a Youtube video, they’re replies of empathy. I get really cheery when someone responds back with, “I felt the same way” or “This really touched me.” It makes me feel less alone and lights up that dark room within me. I don’t have an intention to write these letters in hopes they will make me famous, because they will certainly not. I write these because it’s the thing keeping me sane and happiest. I love you Miss Keegan. Thanks for being there.

Losing The Soccer Game

There’s this story I heard where parents convinced a pee-wee soccer referee not to count points for their kids’ game. This pee-wee soccer game would have no winners or losers and the parents wouldn’t have to worry that their kids would be devastated if they lost. However, what I believe that does is the kid will lose out on essential character building. As Calvin’s dad says in the comic strip, “Calvin and Hobbes”, everything not worth doing is an experience to build character. This trait goes by other words, perseverance and grit, and it’s one of the most important life lessons. Things may not go our way, but we have the choice to continue to push on or fail to recover. The reassuring thing about the pee-wee soccer match was the referee noticed the kids were keeping track of the score in their heads, so at the end of the game, they knew who won and who lost.

Trading Spaces

In the film, “Trading Spaces”, Dan Aykroyd’s character is this rich stock broker who has everything going for him — a good career, a smoking hot fiancée, and a large home with his own butler. Being white and privileged, he had never faced much hardship in life. He went to an Ivy League college, has a group of posh friends, and never had to beg. The word “suffer” doesn’t seem to be in his vocabulary.

His counterpart, played by Eddie Murphy, is at the absolute bottom. He’s poor, had to fight his way in the hood, and a scam artist. At the beginning of the movie, he pretends to be a war veteran with no legs panhandling. The difference between these two characters is Eddie Murphy’s character has faced a lot of rejection in his life and had to live with it. Dan Aykroyd’s character didn’t.

As the movie progresses, Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy swap places and Aykroyd finds himself at the bottom. Everything is taken from him — his job, his fiancée, and his home. When he finds out that none of those thing will come back to him, he hits rock bottom.

This film might be the worst case scenario of losing everything, but it provides a wonderful lesson. Despite hardship, we can choose to process through that and work past it. Dan Aykroyd almost that rejection overcome him, nearly meeting his end from a suicide attempt. Throughout this portion of the movie, I was thinking, “pull yourself together. You can get through this.” But I understand his behavior. It’s that resistance we have built up because we can’t process the rejection. In the end, he did pull through and eventually getting even with the people who wronged him.

The Break-up

Take a recent break-up from a close friend as an example for the denial of recognizing rejection. In this break-up, my close friend delivered the blow to her boyfriend for the fourth and final time. A few hours after, the boyfriend reached out to me to meet up with him later that week. I was hesitant at first, but eventually agreed, despite knowing he doesn’t like me. I had been talking to my close friend about her relationship more deeply than he was, and it angered him.

We met up at a local library where he showed up drunk. He was stammering through some of his sentences as he spoke. At first, he tried to ask me what he needed to do to get his life on track. I tried to give him some sort of advice, but he ended up taking over the conversation. He rambled for a good hour about his problems, where he thought the relationship went wrong, and how he planned to win her back. I tried to give him the bad news; he needed to take care of himself first. He was a mess, and despite how much we want to help with someone else’s life, we have to be selfish and take care of ourselves first.

One of the reasons the relationship went sour was the boyfriend was trying to accommodate for his partner by trying to provide her with rich, material goods. But the thing he couldn’t provide her with, the thing that mattered more, was the ability to socialize with her. When she asked him how his day was, he would give a one word answer. When she pressed him for an opinion, he gave her nothing. When they were hanging out, he would rather be on his phone playing games instead of being present with her. When things went south for him, like losing his job and facing family crises, he let that overwhelm his life. He blamed her for a lot of the downturns, even to go as far as saying she was the reason he lost his job. He resorted to cursing at her when she did made a mistake. He couldn’t blame himself for these actions until it was too late, after they were broken up.

After the end of our conversation, I thought about what he said, and I realized he didn’t get it. He was in complete denial and didn’t admit that she was not coming back. During the conversation, he talked about scenarios in which she would get back with him if he won her back. He did try to fathom she would never get back with him, exclaiming, “I’ll be happy as long as she’s happy.” However, that was followed with, “I will never love anyone else except her.” It made me think about my abysmal dating life, and how much rejection I’ve faced over the past few years. My difference is, when someone tells me they don’t want to see me anymore, I respect that and try to live on without them in my life. Of course, there’s a lot of sulking, ice cream, and hours of mindless reality television, but after that phase, I bounced back and put myself back out there.

Before we parted, he asked me if I could be his friend. I said, “it depends.” I place a no tolerance rule in my friend group for people who have to spotlight their baggage. They go into my “acquaintance” bucket. My roommate calls them the “woe is me” people. They’re like a vampire trying to leech you of all your positive energy, and when you’re done talking to them, you feel overwhelmed and can’t do much else. In the past, those friends take my advice, but never give any back. As soon as I bring up my own issues, they’re not willing to help. When I invite them to group events, they tend to bring the whole group down. I quietly ignore their pleas to grab my attention until they stop reaching out. My life is typically a lot quieter and goes back to emotional equilibrium.

Since our meet-up, he’s reached out to me a few times. Each time, he has tried to ask the world of me where he tries to force me to sympathize for his baggage. He’s going into the acquaintance bucket.

“Our job in this lifetime is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it.”

— Steven Pressfield, “The War of Art”

Originally from SFGate. Photo: Courtesy / Lauren Colman

Crossing the River Styx

Around 5pm this past Monday, Caltrain hit a car that was stopped on the tracks. Tragically, a female driver who remained in this car during the collision died. This and subsequent trains were stalled for hours as the police and train operators ran through, sadly, a very common procedure. As if that wasn’t enough, a few hours later that night, there was another fatality. Caltrain had hit a pedestrian.

I was rather deterred from writing about these fatalities the last time it happened a month ago. It seemed a bit morbid to write about because of their recency. But because they seem to happen at least once a month, I think it’s time to re-think the way we think about these events.

I wrote an essay earlier last month about my personal journey through anxiety, depression, and suicidal thoughts. I feel like I can relate a little to the mindset of what may be running through the mind of a person who is on the train tracks, crossing the river styx from life to death. While life may be in a cloud of uncertainty for the suicidal person, knowing there is certainty of death from a head-on train collision could be solace. There’s no claim that either of these two incidents were successful suicide attempts, but I’ll still take this as an opportunity to think about suicide prevention.

“In the last five years, there has been an average of 14 fatalities a year on the Caltrain right of way. Of these, 90 percent were caused by suicide.”

— Official Caltrain PR

An Invocation For Awareness

In the past, I felt insensitive to these events; conditioned to think this is commonplace. There’s an awful joke that I seem to hear myself saying, “Why couldn’t they do it on off hours when I’m not on the train?”. My brain used to filter these stories into soundbites, forgetting that each one of these people had life-long stories with a tragic ending. It doesn’t help that the media reporting these stories only give us soundbites of the reaction from close friends and family spliced in between the press conference from the Palo Alto Police Department and Caltrain officials. There’s much heart in the souls that were lost. I’m reminded of prison inmates who wear numbers, who have lost their identity to this boundless, intangible symbol.

Perhaps I should construct an identity to this woman and all other fatalities. The gravity and weight would be better felt. It’s a thought exercise to remember if I encounter someone displaying suicidal patterns, I should intervene.

The Proactive Good Samaritan

With mental disorders, depression, and people on the verge of suicide on the minds of most Americans, we forget how to intervene when given the opportunity. And suicide prevention isn’t something you’re supposed to learn and shelf. This is a constant reminder there is more than can be done for those still around. Perhaps you know there’s a person behind a mask ready to give up. You have a voice and the power of presence. I may not know this woman, but I sure know that she’s a reminder that I will act more aware of these situations if they should arise amongst my friends. The experience brings back our awareness and we need it most when we have our guards down. Armor up and become the proactive good samaritan.

National Suicide Prevention Hotline: (800) 273–8255

National Suicide Prevention Website

Update: 3/20/2015

Caltrain has come out with a response to the recent suicides. You can read it here. I’m going to quote two points that I agree with Caltrain’s proposal for truly making an impact to these tragic events. Thanks to @MarkSimon24 for writing a response I’ve been waiting to read.

Point 4

Engage in a community-wide effort to address underlying mental health issues, suicide prevention and lifting the stigma of seeking help. This is the long solution — it can take decades to change community attitudes about mental health to the point where a troubled individual can openly admit that he or she needs help. And even if, together, we did everything we could and transformed our community, there is no guarantee it will work. Some of the recent cases have involved people who had sought help and had been identified as struggling with mental health issues. To the credit of our community, this mental health/suicide prevention effort is underway and has been for years. There are a number of government-, community-, and school-based organizations throughout San Mateo and Santa Clara counties that are working hard to improve the availability of services and to help guide all of us on how we can work together to reduce the risk and to reach out to one another. That is commendable and we need to consider how we can redouble our efforts, together.

Point 5

Reduce the harmful news media attention to these deaths. There is ample science to establish that giving high profile coverage to these incidents makes the problem worse. There are many professional journalism organizations that actively assert coverage of suicides should be minimal and non-sensational. Every leading suicide-prevention organization issues media guidelines that beg news organizations not to describe the means of the suicides in detail. And yet, as recently as Tuesday’s tragedy, every news story described exactly how the death occurred. The news media has to take some responsibility for the story it is creating, not just covering. This makes some journalists angry. A recent social media assertion along these lines provoked a very angry response from one local news organization. They defend their coverage as newsworthy because of the disruption to the daily commute. Or because the deaths themselves have become newsworthy. But this is something that can be done right now and, evidence suggests, can have a positive impact.

Update: 5/20/2015

KQED wrote an article about suicide prevention on Caltrain Tracks.

Stephanie Weisner runs Wellness and Recovery Services at StarVista, a San Mateo County nonprofit. Weisner credits Caltrain with sending its employees into the community to participate on boards and committees focused on suicide intervention.

“We have monthly meetings,” Weisner explains, “where we all sit around and brainstorm, and we work closely with other counties, including Santa Clara County.”

Does she want more fencing and security cameras? Yes, she says. But she adds that none of that frees the rest of us from having to pay more attention to the people around us: in school, at work, at home.

Weisner says, “People often give out signs that they’re thinking of really hurting themselves, or taking their lives, and there’s things that we can do — reducing the stigma around getting mental health services, and encouraging people to reach out for that.”

I’m not smart enough.
I know those watching me
With vindictive eyes
Are judging my wits.

I’ll stumble on something I don’t know
Stuck in an inner maelstrom.
Do I try to figure this out,
Or blame my lack of knowing?

I’m not pretty enough.
My mom told me that.
She believed it,
And it hurt when I believed it

I shy away from woman,
Thinking I’m the beast outside.
But then a compliment.
Am I really ugly?

I’m not rich enough.
I couldn’t buy the next must have.
Wishing I owned more
Wondering the price tag of a new life.

Old Joe’s living paycheck by paycheck
And I’ve got more.
Would it be crazy
To give him a helping hand?

I’m not social enough.
I put on an armor against being vulnerable
And I’m left to my own devices,
But I can’t bare to listen to myself.

Then I wonder why no one will talk to me
Initiate a conversation
Counsel me when I need them the most.
I am alone.

I’m not good enough.
I never was good enough.
This voice inside my head
told me I’m not good enough.

I’m afraid everything given to me
Will be taken away in a heartbeat
And I would’ve wished I could’ve appreciated it
When I still had it.

I’m not available enough.
Family and friends wonder
If I’ll ever make it out.
I wonder too.

I can’t bare to make the time
Because there’s always fires around.
There’s always drama
And there’s just no way I can move things around.

I’m not fit enough.
My belly is too big,
I run out of energy too soon,
And the gym is intimidating.

How could I muster
Bringing myself on the treadmill?
Exercise wasn’t made for me
I’m fat because of genetics.

I’m not happy enough.
All the world is suffering,
So I must also suffer,
Because it’s the proper thing to do.

Satisfaction is for losers
Who don’t know the doom that’s coming.
Woe is me,
Why can’t I just be happy?

I’m not enough.
Given my circumstances,
You can see I’m not enough
You can feel I’m not enough.

I’m told I’m wrong.
How can I believe that
When I can’t feel it inside?
Just believe?

I’m enough

I have enough time
To sit and chat with a dear old friend
Reminiscing about the good old days
And talking optimistically about the future.

I created a space
Where people can come in and out of my life
Whom I can be genuine with
And be amiable.

I am happy enough.
I’ve given myself enough time in the day to meditate,
Joke around with the people I work with,
And I don’t get angry over the little things.

I’ve made peace with God.
There’s a spot for spirituality
And for wholeheartedness
And soft-serve.

I’m content enough with my wisdom.
I know there’s so much I will never understand in the world
And I know there will be those who carve a very selective niche
To study those things.

What matters more is the people
You can share your experiences with
And pass down
From one generation to the next.

I’m rich enough.
In fact, I give back most of what I earned.
Because what’s more important than money or things
Are the experiences we have on this Earth.

I am delighted to have the things in my life
That can draw me closer to those I can’t see everyday.
But I don’t hold on to items like a crutch
Because they are only tools.

I’m healthy enough.
A wise man once said
”What the point of being ultra-healthy
When you can’t even enjoy the time you have here?”

There is no excuse to find time for exercise
When you’ve already incorporated it into your life.
Habits are the foundation
To creating a worry-free life.

I’m pretty enough.
I don’t need to look like a million dollars
And then some
Because I can stare at myself naked in the mirror.

I feel great in this skin
And all of the blemishes it has.
All those blemishes have stories
That I get to share.

I’m enough.
I’ve surrounded my life with family and friends,
Who all encourage me in my endeavors
And make my life rich.

Enough is the baseline
Not a static comfortable point.
We have accepted who we are
And are not afraid to change.

I’ve writing down what I’m grateful for
My life, my health, my family and friends,
The abundance, the emotions, the creativity
And a chance to share it all with the world.

“You never know how strong you are, until being strong is your only choice.” >

— Bob Marley

A few years ago, I binged through several episodes of “Inside the Actor’s Studio.” Towards the end of each episode, the host James Lipton asks a lightning round of questions to his guest. I’m always intrigued by the answer the actor or actress gives to the question “What is your least favorite word?” Many actors and actresses have the same answer — “no.” As being the greats and the top performers in their field, my interests were perked. “Could I also stand up to someone telling me, “no?”. The answer is prevalent in our everyday lives. “No.” When faced with adversity, shame, and humility, the greats do not take “no” as an answer.

And yet, years later, I would say “no”. I said “no” to quitting a horrible job. I made a conscious decision every day for two months leading up to my voluntary termination that I wasn’t ready to quit my job. I had put in over a year’s experience at this job, I was burnt out and ready to leave, but I was conflicted. I thought there was some saving grace of staying and working.

On one hand, I got to work with devices that could potentially save someone’s life. And I got to work with fun, yet difficult design challenges. But the payoff felt so minimal because as soon as I finished one project, another one would follow suit. I had no satisfying feeling of having a job well done. I remember after completing a huge project, I went to the break room to take a rest. Management came in to tell me I had another big project due tomorrow. It felt defeating because this was the fourth or fifth time this happened that quarter, and I had the feeling this would never end.

On top of that, the job wasn’t getting easier. I spent each morning pressing the snooze button on my alarm hoping to have just another hour of rest from hell. I rarely made dinner after work because I worked 12+ hours a day. I hated how disorganized the work space was, spending an hour or more sometimes trying to find a tool. Upper management had a passive-aggressive management style, creating a workers who read between the lines on how their work performance was like, but never truly knowing. One of the other engineers was paranoid he would be fired a month before he was axed. Operations had a reactive rather than proactive stance, deciding to go making mistakes today and fixing them tomorrow.

I knew none of this was going to slow down. I let the stress affect my self-worth and self-esteem to the stage where I woke up every morning and thought, “I hate my life.” I would try to shake the thought, and by the time I arrived at work, my line of thinking was, “let’s put on a good attitude, because I don’t want to spill my shitty feelings onto anyone else.” I was emotionally uncomfortable with myself.

Yet still, I thought, “no, it’s not time to quit yet.” We oftentimes belittle ourselves into being our own worst critic. Our superego takes over and becomes a loud speaker. “You’re making a stable income. There’s nothing to worry about here.” I was shouting at me and I couldn’t dodge it. Sometimes, the superego was wildly irrational. “You’re letting your parents down if you leave this job. No one will support you if you leave.” This made is all the harder to overcome that pestering “no”.

Feeling a bit lost and overwhelmed, I reached out to a family friend and an old boss of mine for an opportunity to teach. To my surprise, they offered me a deal to do some substitute teaching. Taking it as a sign, I went home to discuss it with my roommates. After a glass or two of wine, they were convinced that I needed to quit now. I told them about my hesitation and a list of non-reasons why I shouldn’t quit. The job didn’t pay well, it would only be for a few months, and I would have a long commute. But I thought back to the adverse effects of saying “no”. I reflected on all the shitty mornings and thoughts of hatred towards my life that I stopped talking excuses and asked for help. I finally had convinced myself I needed to take action to quit. My roommates helped me craft a resignation letter, and after an hour, I had a pretty good final draft for a resignation letter where the tone didn’t sound like I was going to burn my bridges. And then the moment of truth. I had the resignation email prepped and ready to send. But I hesitated in pressing the “send” button. Everything in my brain tried to reason that this was not the right decision to make. That’s when I decided that I would send the email right before I was going to pass out. That way, I reasoned, I couldn’t think about the worst case devastation.

The next morning, I breathed deeply as I checked my email before going to work. There was no reply from my boss or the head of the company. “Maybe the email didn’t go through,” I thought. When I got into work, my boss grabbed me aside and congratulated me on my career move. I had thoughts all morning that I was going to be reprimanded. It was a huge sigh of relief, and thinking back at it now, I wonder why I had taken so long to take action on the stress that had caused me anxiety and depression for a few months. Upon further reflection I believe I limit myself and my ability, being fearful of opening up and being vulnerable for a difficult conversation I would have to have with my superiors. I think I over-complicated the matter and focused on the wrong consequences which makes me feel trapped and helpless. Out of the helplessness, I felt alone with no one to really turn to.

I learned months later that the voices in my head would never truly go away for me. My therapist explained to me there are a few ways therapy tries to cope with a loud superego. One way is to try to remove it through mental conditioning. Another way, the one I prefer, is to turn down the volume of the superego through mindful practices. When I’m feeling stressed and there’s this loud voice in my head telling me “no” with phrases that make me feel unworthy, shameful, and anxious. At this point, I stop what I’m doing and try to find that mindful state, and imagine I’m looking at myself with a nonjudgmental gaze. I feel the emotion sweep through me and instead of trying to reason with it, I let it pass. I don’t try to suppress the superego; I just let it talk. When I’m done with this exercise, I resume what I am doing without the stressed feeling as before. Everything becomes clearer, like the irrational conclusions the superego was making.

Along with this, I prepped myself with trying to build a solid foundation for my emotions. I didn’t want to say “no” anymore, so I picked up habits that I now use as a defense when I am stressed out. After listening to Brené Brown’s TED talk, I bought her book, “Daring Greatly,” and one of her recorded seminars, “The Power of Vulnerability.” It is from her teachings that I learned about building empathy and exposing my vulnerability to trustworthy people. I found solace in a friend who will always listen to what I’m saying and not judge me for who I am. She never tells me “no,” that I’m not enough. And she expects I do the same, even when she doesn’t tell me that. I don’t try to tell her “no”, because “no” means you’ve made a decision to believe there is no possibility.

When I find myself saying “no” to going to do something new, I stop myself and wonder, is it because I’m afraid of the shortcomings that may occur? That usually changes my “no” response to a “yes”. Last week, I did exactly that. I was saying “no” to going to a house concert, but after realizing I had no fears of going and the resistance was just built up from general work stress, I said “yes” to the RSVP. I had a blast and couldn’t fathom after the experience how I was ever resisting this meet-up. These kind of conversations happen on a weekly basis. Sometimes it’s about hesitation in doing something new at work. Sometimes, it’s working up the courage to ask someone a favor. Nonetheless, I have taken these opportunities to test my emotions because I know they can be a fickle bitch.

This week, a friend asked me, “Will you find me a good but not crazy or preachy “learn to like yourself more” book please??” I gifted some books and followed up with a lengthy email for why I selected those books. I decided to blog about it and share my recommendations.

‘Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well’ - Douglas Stone

A group from the Harvard Business School came out over a decade ago with their seminal work about office relationships and communication called “Difficult Conversations” in which the team tried to understand what it is that makes us avoid having tough conversations with co-workers, family and friends. They turned that study into a book called “Difficult Conversations” on how to initiate these conversations. This book, “Thanks for the Feedback” explores the next step, which is someone has posed a difficult conversation to you, and explains how you should respond. You don’t have to read “Difficult Conversations” to understand this book at all, and it’s practical from the very beginning. I really wish I had read this when I did my senior project and had to manage a group of 5 people.

‘Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead’ - Brene Brown

This book is almost a must for anyone who feels shame, guilt and vulnerability, which is to say, everyone. The book chronicles how to deal with vulnerability and how to expose yourself to being vulnerable. This has been Mrs. Brown’s work for over a decade as she takes her qualitative research and distills it down to some simple principles that can relieve us of anxiety in the future. Her TED Talk is the most viewed talk on the TED website.

‘The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It’ - Kelly McGonigal Ph.D.

A week-by-week manual on how to improve your goals. This book is taken from Dr. McGonigal’s class at Stanford and goes through exercises to build habits. This was a sacrifice over “The Power of Habit”, which also details willpower, but I think this one is more practical and that you can use the moment you start reading. One of the things it taught me was a keystone habit, in which one habit may actually bring about multiple good habits.

‘The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom’ - Jonathan Haidt

You’ve read this guy’s other book, “The Righteous Mind”. Before he wrote that, he wrote this book about what advice the ancients had and how to find a way to live in modern life given those set of principles. From this, I learned the concept of proper balance, between removing oneself away from materialism versus being fully immersed in it. The author really tries to distill the decades of work he has found in old, philosophical texts as he’s a professor of Philosophy.

‘Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking’ - Susan Cain

This book was a struggle to keep on the list, but after thinking about the impact it had on me, I had to keep it on. Susan Cain talks about how one mode of thinking is not great across the entire spectrum of introverts / extroverts. In fact, most of the commonplace attitudes to think about how to collaborate, how to think, how to work are based off of the ideas of extroverts. What may work for you may not work for someone else who’s an introvert. Also, she details that most people lie on a spectrum, and not actual opposite ends. This is where I found out I’m actually an ambivert, someone who lies in the middle of the introvert / extrovert spectrum.

‘The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter—And How to Make the Most of Them Now’ - Meg Jay

My cousin shared her TED talk, and I ended up buying and reading her book. Dr. Jay is a clinical psychologist at the University of Virginia who counsels students and patients in their 20’s and 30’s. Her hypothesis is the habits and foundations we build in our 20’s will help define and shape who we become for the rest of our life. This was a revelation to me because I was compromising too much of my life and deferring many important matters and questions to an indeterminate future date. In fact, after reading the book, I starting focusing on the things that I am most uncomfortable with, relationships, emotions and mental health, religion and spirituality, and my career. Many of her claims challenge conventional wisdom, like her claim about early cohabitation in a relationship, and how it harms relationships in the long run.

‘The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love that Lasts’ - Gary D Chapman

A fairly short book about building relationships in the long run. This was recommended by my roommate and many people on the Internet. Most relationships break down because of communication, specifically each partner does not know how to speak or listen to each other’s love languages. When you learn about each one, you can start to notice your past relationships and see where things started to break down. Dr. Chapman has been in his field for over two decades counseling marriages when he wrote this book, and it’s a culmination of distilling into 5 simple points of how couples speak to each other. Ignore the fact he’s religious because there’s practical value here, and he tries to be fairly secular.

‘Mindset: The New Psychology of Success’ - Carol Dweck

At a school development meeting at my job at the Prep School, this book was highly praised. Dr. Dweck is a researcher at Stanford who studied kids and success, and came up with the concepts of growth mindset and fixed mindset. I took two days to sit down and read this book, and came to thinking differently about my own learning and career. I learned to ask questions and not to put up walls when I find something difficult to do. Most of the claims Dr. Dweck makes is based on her studies she’s run for over two decades.

Here’s an additional list of books that I wanted to send to my friend, but I was over-budget.

‘The Art Of Asking’ By Amanda Palmer

Amanda Palmer is a musician, known for her work in the Dresden Dolls as well as her own solo work. She raised over a million dollars on Kickstarter for her latest album, which I’m a backer of, gave this excellent TED talk, and this book is a part memoir, part practical advice on asking for help. The audiobook, which I purchased, also contains songs between chapters.

‘A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy’ by William B. Irvine

I choose ‘The Happy Hypothesis’ over this book because this book only focuses on the stoic teachings, and not the entire spectrum of philosophy. However, that said, there’s plenty to learn about controlling emotion and minimalism from the stoics. If meditation doesn’t work and you must reason your way through stress, this book shows you exercises on how to cope.

‘So Good They Can’t Ignore You’ by Cal Newport

I’ve followed Mr. Newport’s blog for quite some time and read his other book, “How to Be a High School Superstar”, because I wanted to know if it was good to give my sister a few years back when she asked me what she should do in High School. To me, this is thecareer book. It begins by telling you that the pursuit to do something your passionate about is a myth. In fact, Mr. Newport claims that it’s the job and career that guides you to your passion. You have to build your own career up, and it’s going to have lots of twists and turns before you truly know what you’re going to do. I’ve gifted this to my cousin and she has taken this advice and went back to graduate school because she wants to build up the skill to do more in graphic communication. I didn’t consider this book to give to you because I thought about self-help before career advice, so maybe you should ask me nicely for your birthday next year (but in all seriousness, purchase this book if you can. It really is worth it).

‘Adulting: How to Become a Grown-up in 468 Easy(ish) Steps’ by Kelly Williams Brown

It was a toss-up between this book and the Dr. Meg Jay book. This is a very actionable book for twenty-somethings. It goes through a lot of different aspect of tuning up your life. I’ve only read sections of this, and I’ve found it useful for tips on what friends to keep, how to declutter, and how to maintain work relationships. It’s a rather fun book that was started as a blog.

‘Don’t Go Back To School’ by Kio Stark

Kio Stark is a professor at NYU’s ITP program (Interactive Telecommunications Program), a writer, and a graduate student dropout. Before I even heard of ITP, I heard about this project from Kickstarter. I was a week too late to back the project, but I really wanted to be included. I signed up on the mailing list to be told when this book is going to come out. I wasn’t disappointed. This is a book about a series of interviews with accomplished people who did not decide to go to graduate school and let their careers guide them through figuring out what they wanted to do. Mrs. Stark also talks about her own experiences, and then gives a great follow-up companion on how to start learning things on your own that don’t require graduate school. Definitely a good read if you’re thinking about going down the graduate school route.

Side Note: I went to New York last year to check out ITP because I was thinking about applying.

The Miracle of Mindfulness’ by Thich Nhat Hanh

This book is the entry book to practicing meditation without all of the spiritual fluff that’s usually included with most zen meditation practices. Perhaps anything else, this book taught me the importance of awareness and that meditation should be an extension of that awareness, not an escape from reality. Also recommended is “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind” by Shunryu Suzuki, which introduces the concept of proper meditation. Here is a great talk (or rather meditation session) he did @Google.

‘Stumbling on Happiness’ by Dr. Daniel Gilbert

Despite being a book about happiness, this isn’t a self-help book about how to become happy. It’s actually Dr. Gilbert’s research into perception and cognitive biases and how our imagination deceives us. The book is profound with it’s findings, but I didn’t think it has much value in immediate changes. You have to think about it for a while and be aware of how our mind deceives us. Obligatory TED Talk.

‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’ by Dr. Daniel Kahneman

I’ll call him the Godfather of modern pop psychology because he work brought about a slew of other psychologists you hear at the top of their field. This book cleared up the concept of loss aversion, anchoring, and our two modes of thinking. I find myself going back to this book again and again to clear up some very core concepts in rational and irrational thinking. In the appendix of the book is Kahneman and his collaborator’s (Amos Tversky) seminal paper on prospect theory that won them the nobel memorial prize in Economics.

‘My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey’ by Jill Bolte Taylor

This book was a lot shorter than I imagined. It’s about a scientist who studies strokes and finds herself having one early in life (in her mid-30’s). She talks about the journey into her mind as she’s having the stroke and the path to recovery. I watched her TED Talk before reading her book, and I must say I am amazed at how much I didn’t know about strokes, especially at the rates that it’s afflicted people. I could relate to stroke victims because that’s what killed my grandfather a few years ago.

‘The Power of Habit’ by Charles Duhigg

As I mentioned, this was my second choice. I think this book is great in its research on habits and the author’s journey changing one of his habits that resulted in weight loss. But don’t take his weight loss story as motivation to read this book. It’s more about the power good habits can bring to your life and how bad habits are hard to unlearn. However, by the end of the book, Duhigg breaks down habit formation in easy steps and you can follow it too. There’s also this great infographic about the steps online.

Honorable Mentions

You’ll often find Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People” on many people’s list of top self-help books. Published in the ’30s, Carnegie tells some simple ways to talk and interact with people. It tells you to be kind and listen to others. To me, it was a bunch of common sense, but at the same time, it’s worth a quick flip through. If you actually read the book, you’ll hear about Carnegie’s fascination with Lincoln and a ton of parables to back what he’s saying.

Also, Stephen Covey’s “7 Habit’s of Highly Effective People” is also rudimentary for common sense. It’s read widely by Cal Poly’s Business 101 course, and I pulled a few things out of that, like the basics of negotiation. Honestly, I don’t remember the fine points of this book, like the actual 7 points, after reading Covey was a Mormon. After I shook off the religious bit, I couldn’t concentrate on what he was saying anymore, which sounds really shallow of me. I had the opposite reaction to Anne Lamott’s book, “Bird By Bird” after reading she was a Christian.

This past Friday, I went to a funeral for my dad’s uncle, my great uncle. Still mulling some thoughts about his recent passing, I want to share some insight on the funeral service and celebration of life.

We are still living after we are dead.

The people who gather for the funeral service have some memory or recollection of this person. The person who’s past still lives on in us as long as we continue to remember them, their stories, how they made us feel, and how much we can imprint onto others how they made us feel. I recently learned that my dad was influenced by his uncle on retiring early and really enjoying what life offers us. I didn’t know that before my dad gave a speech in front of congregation. It made me feel differently about my dad.

I’m reminded of “American Gods”, by Neil Gaiman, of the concept of the forgotten god. They disappear from our society when we no longer give the god some importance in our lives, like ceasing the worship to them. But we make the gods stronger by influencing their reach onto others, spreading their words and worship.

Funeral services are well prepared.

As I sat down on the pew, I noticed the nice gesture of having a tissue box in every row. It’s the little small things that make this ceremony go smoothly. It was raining during the service, so the cemetery groundsman informed us a Hearst will drive the coffin to the grave site, relieving the pallbearers of lifting the coffin in the mud. I must have been grieving too much to recognize this during the past few funerals I’ve gone to.

I accept the faith of others, even as an agnostic.

We had a pastor recite a passage in Psalms. It was pretty lengthy, and it had to do with passing from this life to the next. I clasped my hands in prayer, but I wasn’t praying. I was tolerant of the faith of my family even though I don’t care for it myself. I find too many atheists and agnostics have an issue with having religion being shoved in their faces and will try to make their point by not participating in such events. However, I wanted to be there for my family, and it’s a really hard line to cross to shove my personal beliefs onto others.

Priorities are reset.

For our own fears of death, we take this time to realign our priorities. Perhaps we don’t understand what we’re doing in life, dick around, and pretend we have eternity to do anything. Perhaps there’s something nagging we wanted to do, but we feel it’s too late to do it. Perhaps there’s a goal you want to accomplish, but you keep putting it off. The death echoes our fears and tells us we need to take action with these priorities we’ve left to the waist side and we pick them up. Of course, this newfound energy is ephemeral and we forget all over again only to return to this cycle after the next funeral.

Funerals are this funny time. We’re emotionally distraught. We get overwhelmed by the amount of grieving around us. Then we return to a normal life, supposedly, like it didn’t happen and we get back to work. But we have the choice to figure out what to do with this raw, human emotion.