Hearing Voices

A few nights ago, as I was taking Gemelli for a late walk, he stopped to say hello to a small black-and-white cockapoo.

“She’s very cute,” I said. “What’s her name?”

“Josie,” said her owner.

And I thought, oh, you’re [Jon Ronson](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Ronson).

Later, [Google backed me up](http://www.babusinesslife.com/People/Pets/Pet-theories-Jon-Ronson.html). But I was sure from that first word. I don’t know why, but I’m exceedingly good at recognizing people by voice.

I drive Jess nuts with this when we watch television, as I can’t help but reflexively call out the name of the person doing the voice over for each commercial.

You can’t pick your talents.

|  

Brain Drained

A few years back, Google introduced an experimental Google Labs feature for Gmail, called Mail Goggles. The idea was simple: at certain hours of the day (or, more likely, night), a Gmail user with Mail Goggles turned on would need to answer a series of easy math problems before sending an outgoing message. Back when I was in college, the drunk dial still outweighed the drunk email in overall popularity. But, even then, I’m sure there were enough embarrassing late-night proclamations of love, enough angry breakups entirely forgotten by the following morning, and enough incoherently rambling drunken messages in general to have made Mail Goggles a reasonable idea. In today’s digital world, those Mail Goggles seem like more than reasonable idea, and nearly collegiate necessity.

In my own life, however, well post-college, I’m rarely up and emailing at 3:00am regardless of sobriety. Still, on occasion, I do end up having a drink (or, god forbid, two) at a business lunch. After which, I would usually come back to the office, plunk down at the keyboard, and launch into a burst of unrivaled productivity. Only later on those afternoons, once I’d sobered back up, would I re-read those ‘productive’ emails, and begin to worry that Yale might be calling shortly to request my degree back. I think of myself as someone who can hold his liquor. But, really, even a glass of lunchtime Riesling is apparently enough to knock me down to a roughly fourth grade writing level.

Fortunately, with age comes at least a little wisdom, and, by now, if I’m foolish enough to have a lunchtime drink, I generally manage to stay off email completely for an hour or two after, averting potential disaster.

But, it turns out, it’s not just liquor than can addle my email brain. Two nights back, I came down with a pretty spectacular stomach flu, and proceded to toss my cookies nonstop for 24 hours. Well enough, in fact, that I actually lost about seven pounds in a single day. (Bulimia: it works!) Of course, rapid weight loss is usually just dehydration. And since more of the water in your body is in your brain than anywhere else (your brain being made up primarily of water), it turns out that quickly losing 5-8% of the water in your body (as I just did) probably isn’t a great booster of mental function.

All of which is to say, if you got an email from me yesterday or this morning, and it makes absolutely no sense at all, please disregard. I’ve been easing my way back to solid food, and getting as much fluid as my stomach can currently handle. And I think, by now, I’ve edged up to largely coherent. But, really, I’m in no position to self-judge. So if this post is also a total mess, give me another 24 hours grace period, and accept my advance apologies for anything wildly offensive I manage to pull off before then.

|   

Inequilibrium

Early this week, struck by a slew of business insights, I spent three or four straight hours madly scribbling on yellow pads and wall whiteboards.

Certainly, this was a longer stint than most, but nearly all my good ideas, business successes, and small victories trace back to just such frenzied sessions of ‘Eureka!’ idea capture.

These bursts of thinking leave me energized to the point of manic, and I want, more than anything else, to share them. I want somebody else to get equally excited. And, unfortunately for her, the person who usually bears the brunt of that ecstatic, high-speed explaining is Jess.

Though Jess is the realist to my optimist, she’s kind enough to listen supportively, ask interested questions, and only later tell me the full list of problems she immediately sees that I haven’t even begun to consider.

Still, I can’t imagine it’s an easy task. Which might explain why, when Jess walked in to the office, and found me scrawling elaborate diagrams and flow charts on the wall, her first reaction was to roll her eyes, and say, “Beautiful Mind time, is it?”

|    

Spare Some Change

“Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time.”
-Mark Twain

After thirty years of life, I’ve picked up a slew of bad habits – persistent behaviors that I don’t like at all, that serve me in the moment, perhaps, but never in the long-term.

And what I’m finding is, almost tautologically, those bad habits are bad habits because I revert back to them without thinking, without even realizing what I’m doing. I catch myself in any of them, and it almost seems a surprise – how did I end up here?

So, recently, and on more fronts than I can count, I’ve been trying to break those habits. Trying hard. And, frankly, I’m still doing a mediocre job overall. On many days I make the same mistakes I’ve made on many days before.

But now, increasingly, I see the mistakes as I make them. Not always. And even when I do, I can’t stop myself 100% of the time. Still, I’m starting to see those habits with new eyes. To really pay attention to them. To puzzle over how I built them, and how I can unbuild them.

Imperfect as my attempts still are, I take them as big progress. Because Twain, I think, is right: the only way to leave a habit behind is the way it was built up – one step and one step and one step at a time.

|  

Vindication?

For at least the last decade, I’ve been obsessed with lazy eyes. First and foremost, with celebrities who have them – Paris Hilton, Keri Russell, Tina Fey.

But secondly, and perhaps more terrifyingly, with the possibility that I might have one myself. And that, even worse, like the sufferer of persistent halitosis, I’d be the last to know about it.

Obviously, that’s a ridiculous concern. Which I know because I’ve both analyzed enough of my own photos to confirm eyeball alignment, and because, every time I tell someone about my ocular neurosis, they jump in to reassure me.

But fast-forward to a month or so back, when I’m picking out a pair of sunglasses from one of Jess’ client, Jordan Silver, owner of a high-end vintage sunglass boutique. I call in to my uncle (and optometrist) Robert, and ask his office to fax over my prescription.

Diopter. Astigmatism. Prism.

Prism?, I ask.

Yes, Jordan explains. Prism. Correction for a tendency of the eyes to try and pull apart in use.

As in, a lazy eye?

Well, technically, yes. Not the kind (like strabismus) that fascinates me most. But a form of lazy eye nonetheless.

|   

Birthday, T Minus 1

My Keeper of the Pinstripes colleagues caught me off guard this afternoon with candled cupcakes and a birthday card full of notes and warm wishes.

And, I’ve got to admit, it gave me a lump in my throat. I assume this has something to do with aging, the long, slow slide to becoming a father and therefore tearing up at things like The Lion King.

But regardless, I was touched. And I think it augurs well for an excellent birthday tomorrow, and an excellent upcoming year.

Heading home shortly, then off to the airport en route to Charles de Gaulle. Au revoir a vous et bon voyage pour moi.

|  

Shyster

While I don’t have a law degree, after eleven years of running contract-intensive companies, I do sort of feel like I’ve gone through law school from the other side.

And while I’m bad, my CFO is worse; he previously worked for a few years as a strategic consultant at a law firm, and he’s taken to referring to his position at Cyan as ‘war time consigliere’.

This week, however, as we’ve been neck-deep in finalizing the PPM (for those without even an imagined law degree, ‘private placement memorandum’) that serves as the next step in our MovieSTAR hedge fund fundraising, it’s become readily apparent that we’re not, actually, attorneys at all.

Because while real ones can somehow spend all day, every day, reading their way through page after page after page of exceedingly dense legalese, we can only make it about twenty minutes at a stretch before our eyes glaze over to the point of effective blindness.

Which is all to say, it’s a damn good thing I didn’t go to law school in a spurt of mercenary money-chasing; I’m pretty sure I’d have ended up offing myself years before I even made partner.

|  

Susurrus

I’m a talker. So it should be little surprise that, even while sleeping, I continue to jabber away.

According to Jess, however, my intelligible words are few and far between. Deep asleep one night this week, for example, I apparently slapped my chest twice, thrust my arm into the air, and shouted, “halfway!” But, even then, a few minutes later, another chest slap and arm thrust was followed by “spreak!”, a phrase for which I have no real explanation.

More frequently, it seems, I just mumble.

“Hapatapapatapa…,” I’ll say.

Recently, Jess has taken to playing along.

“Oh, really, hapatapapata?” she’ll ask, to which I invariably respond, “mmmhmmmm.”

While I’m not much of a somnolent conversationalist – my entire set of answers limited to shades of “mmmhmmm” – I’m apparently still relatively expressive. I have a contented “mmmhmmm”, for example, and another when I’m annoyed to have her bothering me mid-oration.

It’s apparently a family trait, as my grandmother used to drive herself to tears of laughter through similar nonsensical exchanges with my mother, when my mother was a girl. And whenever I share a room with my brother David, he keeps me up through the night with buzz-saw snoring punctuated with long, mumbled chains of semi-words.

Which makes me think I’m probably less than a joy myself. Still, as Jess continues her long-held traditions of both stealing all the covers, and kicking me, hard, while asleep, I’m calling it even on calling it a night.

|   

Look Both Ways

I am, it turns out, obsessed with lazy eyes. I hadn’t realized as much, until Jess pointed out the frequency and gleefulness with which I observe them – from celebrities (god bless you, Paris Hilton) to passersby on the street.

But any time I observe ailments in others, I can’t help but worry I possess the same myself. A close-talker with halitosis invariably leaves me cupping my mouth and nose to test my own breath.

So the wall-eye obsession is a double-edged sword. Sure, I find unexpected joy in Tina Fey’s outward-swinging eyeballs. But, at the same time, they leave me scheming methods for candid self-portraits, where I might catch such previously undiagnosed strabismus in myself.

|   

Dire Situation

Inexplicably, there’s no running water in Cyan’s office today, a bit of a problem given that I – like most of my team – drink through several bottles of water daily, and consequently pee like clockwork every half-hour.

Crap. Or, rather, not.

|