Alexis Tracy Busch
Over the last few weeks, stumbling around and trying to distract myself from the massive hole that’s been ripped open in my life, I came across an interesting post entitled “The Top of My To Do List,” by writer and entrepreneur Paul Graham. Taken from another article where an end-of-life care nurse had listed the top five regrets people have at the end of their lives, Graham had turned them into a short list of five directives one might follow in order to live a happy and fulfilled life:
- Don’t ignore your dreams
- Don’t work too much
- Say what you think
- Cultivate friendships
- Be happy
And when I read this a week or so ago, it was if I’d come across Alex’s secret instructions for life, ones she knew implicitly, and was always trying to help the rest of us understand.
As we all know, Alex had an uncanny knack for living her dreams — being the first batgirl in baseball, hanging out with her favorite team, inspiring thousands of other girls (and boys) to play baseball, being invited to play baseball and live halfway around the world, traversing the other half, finding a perfect partner in Nick to share it all with — in fact, I don’t think they were ever really “dreams” to her, just what was going to happen next. Duh.
Alex was extraordinarily sharp, frighteningly ambitious, and wonderfully lazy. Maybe a better way to say it is that she knew what was really important. There was no shortage of what she could get done, nor any shortage of time wasted before getting it done.
And as a sometimes reluctant, often bleary eyed and always proud member of the time-wasting crew, (Alex, what do you mean “We’re going to the headlands?” It’s 10 and I have work at 8 in the morning… fine, fine, jeez) it’s easier and easier to see that those wasted times were the best of times.
One of the things I love most about Alex was her irreverence — she didn’t give anyone, anything, or any institution the respect she didn’t think it deserved. Besides baseball, there were very few things in life that Alex considered “sacred” and as we all know, Alex was never one to hold back — if she thought you were full of it, she’d probably let you know — and she’d probably be right. In fact, if you were really lucky, she’d really tear you a new one. I say lucky because if Alex called you on something it meant she loved who you could be — and you weren’t living up to her expectations.
If you ever had the opportunity to walk down a hallway with Alexis Busch, then you’ll know that this was something that took a Very. Long. Time. (Late to class? Alex could get away with it. You, not so lucky.) This was because Alex knew everyone, and everyone knew Alex. From one end to the other, she’d stop, chat, shoot the breeze, make a joke, catch up, say bye, and then proceed to tell you why that person was or was not totally full of it. Sometimes she’d say it a little too loudly, and I’d get all nervous and say “Alex, quiet, they can hear you” but looking back at it, I think that was the point.
Above all, Alex did everything with a tumbling avalanche of enthusiasm, a contagious goofy grin, and only because she wanted to. She was a boundless ball of energy, bouncing off the walls (sometime literally) with the very excitement and joy of being alive and sharing the world with the people she loved.
And now I am here to say that Alex has given us permission, and I take it as my very solemn duty, I hope you’ll join me, to be a little more wacky. To goof off a little more often — and to do so out of love.
And what did Alex love?
Baseball.
The Beatles.
Trees.
George Carlin.
Baseball.
Movies about baseball.
People who play baseball.
Marin, and the vast immeasurable beauty of California, from Big Sur to Lake Tahoe.
Other people.
Making fun of other people.
Time with friends.
Joy with family.
The fog.
San Francisco.
Hating the Dodgers.
And now that there’s a massive empty hole in our hearts, what do we do?
Alex and I met in 9th grade Geometry class, and bonded over the Beatles, snacks, and her awesome enthusiasm for everything. Somehow, she forgave me for not having thought about baseball since little league and quickly swept me up in her unrelenting passion for the greatest thing in the world. She taught me to see sport as art, athletes artists, and every game a once in a lifetime performance of people making beautiful art with their minds, bodies, and unimaginable skill.
She was one of the few people I’d ever met who knew she was going to make the world a better place, so firm in her belief that this is not the way it’s supposed to be. In fact, it’s getting better all the time (it can’t get much worse).
From long walks down the school hallways, to protecting me from Giant Shawon Dunston when he threatened to beat me up, to late talks on the phone or hikes through the headlands, Alex was always an amazing friend, what a best friend should be — open minded, a good listener, just a little judgmental, and often startlingly insightful.
Now, suddenly blind to myself, I’ve been searching for ways to listen to her, and lately, when the fog comes rolling in from the Farallons and stings my face, Alex’s voice rolls in with it so strongly that I know exactly what she’d say. Walk it off. There’s no crying in baseball. Walk it off.
Golf, what is it good for?
Also via tumblr and the internets.
Cat Warp
A glitch in the matrix? via Tumblr
True Wealth
“Gold is the corpse of value,” says Goto Dengo.
“I don’t understand.”
“If you want to understand, look out the Window!” says the patriarch, and sweeps his cane around in an arc that encompases half of Tokyo. “Fifty years ago, it was flames. Now it is lights! Do you understand?” […]
“Wealth that is stored up in gold is dead. It rots and stinks. True wealth is made every day by men getting up out of bed and going to work. By schoolchildren doing their lessons, improving their minds. Tell those men that if they want wealth, they should come to Nippon with me after the war. We will start businesses and build things.”
— Goto Dengo to Avi and Randy in “present day”, Chapter 95, “Goto Sama”, and Goto Dengo to Enoch Root in 1945, Chapter 96, “R.I.P.”, all from Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson
(via)
Hitchcock’s Definition of Happiness
Extraordinarily wise words.
Work, Work, Work
Three not-unrelated items of interest:
The More The Merrier: More employees + significantly better pay = more profitability. Who would have thought?
Bring back the 40-hour work week: Thought provoking only if not blindingly obvious.
Are jobs obsolete?: Douglas Rushkoff asks an interesting question.
(not) Welcome!
In an editorial in last week’s New York Times, writer and airline pilot Mark Vanhoenacker explains what it’s like to visit America these days. All I can say is, I thought travel within the US for Americans was full of rules that were unnecessary, counter-productive, and byzantine. Well:
Imagine that you’re the citizen of a prosperous, democratic ally like Britain, Spain or Japan, and you’d like to visit America. Before traveling, you must pay $14 to complete an online United States government form called ESTA, short for Electronic System for Travel Authorization.
ESTA asks for basic personal data, like your name and birth date. It also asks whether you are guilty of “moral turpitude,” whether you’re planning crimes or “immoral activities” and whether you suffer from “lymphogranuloma venereum” (don’t ask). If you’re involved in terrorism or genocide — and for some reason you’ve decided to take this opportunity to inform the United States government — there’s a box for that. And if you’re a spy — a particularly artless one — please let us know.
…
Aesthetically, ESTA’s Web site — America’s digital front porch — is a disaster: uninviting and embarrassingly inconsistent with America’s information technology pre-eminence. Ten dollars of ESTA’s fee is earmarked for “visit America” ad campaigns. Tourism promotion is common sense. But we might reconsider the wisdom of requiring travelers to subsidize it in exchange for a grilling about their sexual health and genocidal activities.
Sigh. If government is the word for the things that we decide to do together, can we please decide to improve this process?
The future of art
This is interesting:
Galleries sell one-off objects at prices the majority of people can’t afford. A fanbase means nil, if your fans can’t spend thousands of dollars on something that isn’t a computer or a car. Nothing of mine had even netted the price of a beat-up old Nissan.
It’s a problematic business model. While there’s nothing wrong with a liquor store selling a thousand buck bottle of scotch, a prestigious gallery doesn’t just position itself as a luxury vendor. They define what art is good, what gets reviewed, and what gets into museums.
If big, elaborate paintings (and reproductions thereof) are something that everyone can enjoy, why should the only people funding them be the rich collectors who can buy them outright? If the tastes of rich collectors dictate what sort of art gets made and acknowledged, isn’t that pretty limiting for everyone?
…
So I found myself with fourteen thousand twitter followers and a brain punch-drunk on ideas that I wanted to express while they were still relevant.
The snot-nosed punk kid inside of me said this: Fuck it. Stop asking for permission. Do it yourself.
Kick-start art. Medici is the Crowd. If this is where the future of art is headed, count me in.
(via)
The Most Interesting Time Lord in the Universe
Brilliant. Multo bene! MOAR!
Tron Dance is Mind Blowing
Like, damn.
(via)
The most original thought
Fuck you. But yeah, probably. (via)
Reasons why I love the internet #1032
Tolstoy looks up Anna Karenina on goodreads:
Yes, it’s a real review. And no, I can’t stop giggling at this. And full disclaimer, no, I have not read any Tolstoy because I’m lazy. And, poop shelf!
(via)
Paul Graham on Property, and Lars Ducet on Currencies
Paul Graham, founder of Y Combinator, posts another thought provoking essay, this time on the nature of what we are able to call “property”:
The reason it seems ridiculous to us to treat smells as property is that it wouldn’t work to. It would work on a moon base, though.
…..
The reason so many people think of property as having a single unchanging definition is that its definition changes very slowly. But we are in the midst of such a change now. The record labels and movie studios used to distribute what they made like air shipped through tubes on a moon base. But with the arrival of networks, it’s as if we’ve moved to a planet with a breathable atmosphere. Data moves like smells now. And through a combination of wishful thinking and short-term greed, the labels and studios have put themselves in the position of the food shop owner, accusing us all of stealing their smells.
…..
Ultimately it comes down to common sense. When you’re abusing the legal system by trying to use mass lawsuits against randomly chosen people as a form of exemplary punishment, or lobbying for laws that would break the Internet if they passed, that’s ipso facto evidence you’re using a definition of property that doesn’t work.
So how will companies who create valuable materials that can be easily replicated reap the value of what they create?
I think the answer lies somewhere in Lars Ducet’s series of blog posts, “Piracy and the four currencies”. Ducet defines the four currencies as Cash, Time, Effort, and Integrity, respectively. (He has different names for them, but this is how I ended up thinking of it.)
In essence, and the way I see it, the less cash, less time, and less effort you make your product cost to purchase directly, then you exponentially raise the integrity cost of pirating or copying your material. In fact, if you reduce cash cost to a reasonable amount, and time and effort costs close to zero, you start to edge the integrity cost up higher and higher (with the limit dependent, obviously, on the integrity of the individual).
It’s not an airtight theory, but I truly believe people don’t want to steal — But it’s just so goddamn easy! What’s more, a lot of digital items (and just you wait, nearly everything will be sooner than you think) cost too much in cash, time, and or effort purchase and not pirate. (See: The Oatmeal)
So where do we go from here? Wish I knew.
(Edited to add: Maybe the answer lies somewhere a la Cory Doctorow‘s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (one of my absolutely favorite books): find a way to increase the overall perceived value of Integrity.)
The real babelfish
Microsoft unveils a bit of news from the future:
Microsoft Research has shown off software that translates your spoken words into another language while preserving the accent, timbre, and intonation of your actual voice.
Uhh… wow. 10 points for Microsoft!
(via)
Meanwhile…
Some things about this administration don’t sit well with me, to say the very least.
Presidents Speak. People Listen.
Ezra Klein has a very persuasive (heh) piece in The New Yorker arguing that Presidents’ speech doesn’t do much to influence the public. I think he’s dead wrong, however, and I think the ever-excellent digby sums it up, via progressives and Obama:
“Barack Obama is only the latest in a long line of presidents who have not been able to transform the political landscape through their efforts at persuasion. When he succeeded in achieving major change, it was by mobilizing those predisposed to support him and driving legislation through Congress on a party-line vote.”
There you go. Of course presidents can’t really “persuade” people of the opposing party in a polarized environment, for all the reasons Ezra lays out in his piece. But I feel as if this whole argument is about doing something that nobody but President Obama, op-ed writers and some of his more fervent followers ever thought was possible in the first place. They’re the only ones who believed that the Republicans were going to fall at his feet and work together in bipartisan harmony — or that his magical powers of persuasion would create a groundswell of support among Independents and rank and file Republicans.
When progressives called for President Obama to make speeches it wasn’t with the goal that he lift his poll numbers or get Mitch McConnell to sign on. Indeed, that’s the opposite of what they wanted — the “Grand Bargains” required to get such a deal are worse than nothing at all from their perspective. The reason they wanted him to make speeches was to mobilize his followers to help “persuade” their representatives to pass progressive legislation — or even just reaffirm his commitment to shared goals and educate the public about what those goals are.
Over-emphasis mine, with apologies to digby. But that’s exactly it. (Link)
Hypnotizing
Editing! (via)
News from The Future: A heart with no pulse
A mind-blowing story about the artificial heart with no pulse (that’s keeping DIck Cheney alive);
The dire need for a practical artificial heart hit Bud Frazier like a thunderclap one awful night in the 1960s. An eager medical student, Frazier had watched the legendary heart surgeon Michael DeBakey open the chest of a 24-year-old man and install a new heart valve. Later that night, the man’s heart stopped. It was up to Frazier to reach in, grab the warm but flaccid heart, and massage it with his hand to keep the blood pumping. As long as Frazier kept opening and closing his hand around the man’s heart, the man stayed alive. And Frazier was highly motivated to continue. The man’s eyes were open and looking right at him.Today, Frazier is a white-haired eminence at the Texas Heart Institute, as calm, soft-spoken and slow-moving as his partner Cohn is loud and speedy. “DeBakey finally told me ‘Stop,’ ” Frazier recalled. “ ‘We can’t save him.’ The chief resident said the same thing; told me to quit. I didn’t want to stop. I had the boy’s eyes right on mine. Finally, I stopped, and he died. I thought, ‘My god, if I can do that with my hand, we must be able to develop something we can pull off a shelf.’ ”
“People who thought themselves civilized”
The New Yorker’s “The Caging of America”:
The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that. In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education.
…..
The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life. Every day, at least fifty thousand men—a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary confinement, often in “supermax” prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo “exercise.” (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience.) Prison rape is so endemic—more than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an uncoöperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing. The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized.