I went to DC last weekend to visit friends. On my last day there I rented a car and drove to Maryland for the afternoon.

The drive over was very pretty, but the places I'd known since I was a kid felt small and ordinary. Compared to the dense urban environments I've been in for the past seven years (and even to the somewhat dense suburban environment that is Fremont, CA) the place seemed like the country or even some sort of weird 80s throwback.

Once I arrived I parked in front of the house we used to live in. I wasn't old enough to drive when I left, so the action was vaguely reminiscent of a big dog coming back to mark his old stomping grounds. Then I went to say hello to the family that lived across from us. Their son, Ryan, was one of my best friends back when I was 12.

Wasn't sure what to expect but I got a warm welcome. It was heartening to see that the neighbors were still the same nice folks they were. Ryan gave me a tour of the house, remarking that it was pretty much unchanged. Then he threw open the doors to the backyard and said, "But we did get a pretty sweet upgrade!" Pointing at a lima-bean pool with beautiful blue water he remarked with a huge grin, "It would have been pretty sweet to have a pool growing up, huh?"

I agreed, but really I felt sad. The pool was certainly nice, but it had completely destroyed the physical presence of one of my favorite childhood haunts. See, when I was living in Maryland Ryan's backyard, and several backyards to the left and right of it, were all grass with a few trees. No fences. Which meant that growing up we had one glorious unending field of our own to do whatever we wanted - full-field football, massive games of freeze tag that wrapped around to the other side of the street, 12-kid watergun fights. When I moved to California I was confused by the fences that created sad, lonely little lots. Why wouldn't people want to share, I thought. That was when I stopped playing pickup football.

Anyway, after sobbing uncontrollably over the loss of my idyllic childhood (or some beers and the end of a Redskins game, your choice) Ryan and I headed over to his place. He's still the same nice, smart guy that he was and he still (hilariously) listens to a lot of the same music. But in the back of my mind I was astonished by the completely different paths we took. He is bright and went to a pretty good public university (UMD); I was a better student and went to Harvard. I am guessing we are both on median paths given the colleges we went to, which brings into sharp clarity exactly how outside the norm my life experience has been thus far. It's something I know in the abstract, but hanging around similar folks tends to dull your memory of how sharp the differences are.

All in all, catching up with some folks I grew up with was awkward but worthwhile. I feel like we've changed a lot in the past 12 years. More so than we will in the next 12, or the 12 after that. Hopefully next time will be better.

It's 3AM and I can't sleep. It's raining outside and it's not quite cool inside, giving rise to that restless sensation where you're tired and know you ought to be drifting off but are kept just alert enough that your mind automatically focuses on whatever stimuli it can - 45 minutes ago a cop car drove by, sirens wailing on its mad dash to nowhere, breaking the interminable rain for a bit. Before that it was the warmth of the sheets, searching out the cool spots among them. Now I can hear the sound of the keyboard's keys, amplified, their intermittent stridence completely out of sync with the muted hum of the night.

The other reason I can't sleep is that when I try to turn off my mind, it starts to focus on all the things that have gone wrong over the past few years. Or rather - all the things that haven't gone as I just sort of naturally expected them to.

Up until 6 months ago I would have been fine staying in Boston, given the right job. I even found one - great company, great people, wonderful boss. I also found out that a couple of people I really like will be staying in/moving to Boston, which would have made it an even better proposition - friends, a good job, and a great city. Despite all this I've gradually shifted, explaining to people that I really like Boston but I'd rather live in San Fran or New York. But that's not really it - it's not that I just happen to have some vague, undefined preference for A and B over C. What I'm not telling them is, if I stay here it will remind me of my failures. Of a bunch of things that could have been but weren't, due to some undeterminable mix of my lack of effort, my unwillingness to change, and my lack of innate talent.

I always assumed that I was free to do whatever I wanted and that I was the lucky one - the guy without any baggage, without any sort of expectations or straight and narrow path set out before me by my family, by my peers, by myself. Sure, I wasn't going to become a bum, I'd do something cool - but it didn't matter where I made the cool happen, just that I did. Now I'm finding out that's not the case, that there are some paths I wanted to take because it would have been easier to meet others' expectations by taking them. Those paths have inherent value, sure, but they're not the things I'd be able to look at as 12-year-old me, or 16-year-old me, or even 21-year-old me and say, "I really admire that you're doing that." Now, the things that I'm heading toward are riskier - in some respects by being the safe bet, by having a more pedestrian set of outcomes. I don't know, we'll see where this process leads me. But if I leave this place and end up just as unsatisfied I don't think I'll have the option of running away again. No, that's not it - I'd still have that option. I'd just know it wouldn't solve anything.

Idea I had for getting things done, politically:

The federal government makes a lot of decisions - some of them affect a lot of people in a significant way, but many are much smaller. And even when it comes to making the big decisions, something as tiny as the specific language with which legislation is phrased can have profound impacts on how it is allowed to play out in the real world. There is a lot at stake, and a lot of it is in the minutiae.

A lot of groups try to influence which particular minutiae/policies play out. There's the public at large, who are interpreted by holy seers we call pollsters. There's the actual legislators themselves, who are often charged with carrying out the specific will of those they represent but often allow personal judgments to affect the outcome. And then there are "outside influences" - this is a broad category including everything from venerable think tanks like Brookings/Heritage to small single-issue advocacy groups. I'll call all of these "lobbyists". The most interesting are the ones who are advocating for specific issues or specific subsegments of the population, as opposed to coherent ideologies or large coalitions.

In public choice economics, the existence (and more importantly, success) of a lot of these smaller lobbyists is attributable to the "concentrated benefits, dispersed costs" problem.

I'd be delighted to see someone start a group lobbying for "dispersed benefits, concentrated costs". Basically, anytime a policy came up for discussion, this organization would figure out which concentrated groups stand to benefit from it, triage based on whether or not they did so at the cost of a dispersed majority too rationally ignorant to advocate for themselves, research the outcome that provides the largest dispersed benefits to said majority and then lobby on their behalf. Call it the "95% principle": any policy that benefits 95% or more of the US population will be supported by our lobbyists.*

The 95% Group, or whatever you want to call them, would be supported by donations from individuals. In return, donors would get a pamphlet every year on interests we supported/opposed, and the total effect on a donor's household's bottom line. (At first this would be an average - "in 2010 we saved the average US household $350"; later it could become personalized based on donor-provided demographic information.) If they want, they can read about specific interests and issues but I suspect the "bottom line" would be more interesting to most donors.

I realize this is probably similar to existing groups, if not necessarily in raison d'etre then at least in actual effect - perhaps Nader-ish consumer advocacy groups fit this description. But I think the interesting idea here is explicitly making rent-seeking the enemy, and convincing people to join by quantifying the overall benefits of a large number of small victories in an easy-to-understand fashion. Things would probably be rough at the start - where will initial funding come from? what high-profile lobbyists capable of reaching legislators would want to join such a group without commensurate pay? - but it could be a force for good in the long run. Thoughts?



*Caveats would probably apply - for example, we wouldn't advocate anything illegal or inherently involving discrimination based on race, religion etc. After all, we wouldn't want to support eating the richest 5% of the population and then distributing their wealth among the remaining 95%. At least, I wouldn't because I hope to be there someday. Yeaaa Veil of Expectations-Weighted Ignorance!

I think what the world needs now is a sequel to The Birds but starring... squirrels.

The movie would start with people in a peaceful New England town. Squirrels would be watching the town's residents, as if sizing them up. When things get violent they would attack en masse by hurling themselves through windows, which I think would be infinitely more entertaining than birds just crashing into things. The signature sound could be a slowed-down, lower-pitched squirrel chirp.

So, who's ready to finance this baby?

If Google's official motto is "Don't Be Evil", my unofficial one is something along the lines of "Don't Be Stupid".

...except when it comes to humor.

I am suffering from online communications overload syndrome. (For now we'll call it OCOS.) As of today, here are all of the possible ways you can reach out to me, or I to you, without being in the same room:

Facebook
Blogger
LinkedIn
Twitter
Google Chat
Google Reader
Work email
Gmail
Cell (both voice and texting... plus integration with several of the above)

and this is just a list of the ones I'm at least nominally active in. I'm pretty sure I also have other accounts floating around, and I'm not counting snail mail/singing telegrams/smoke signals.

What I don't understand is, how do people have the time to interact with all of these on a regular basis? I understand if you set-and-forget a profile on something (basically what I've done with FB... and I know, my profile is long overdue for an overhaul). I also understand if you just react or send out communications infrequently, or if you use something like Twitter where you don't really have to think about what you're saying. But ALL of them?

I'm probably oversubscribed to stuff and will probably start using some of these less (Google Reader seems a prime candidate at the moment... why not just use Twitter to post and respond to articles, and also get other things done?). In general I wonder what the steady-state number of "dominant" services in this area will be. We've gone past the point where there are a very limited methods of communicating - now there will always be many, it's just a question of how many, and of those how many will have significant share.

I value self-control for many reasons. First, and most obviously, it keeps me productive - it's always tempting to slack off instead of doing what I need to do. Second, it helps me remain healthy - exercising, eating well, whatever it takes to remain able to perform at my best. But perhaps most importantly it helps me socially - it acts as both a filter for my behavior that puts one of my better (read: less awkward, less unconventional, more pleasant) faces forward and as a means of controlling/ignoring/redirecting emotions I don't want to feel.

Lately my work self-discipline has been pretty similar to its recent average (say TTM), which is good. However my emotional self-discipline is nowhere near its usual levels. We all have a bar for experiences that affect us (for some it's personal experiences; most of mine are reading/watching fiction or nonfiction, since my personal life is not particularly stressful/tragic). Mine has historically been pretty high. But now I find myself getting watery-eyed for much less valid causes - a biography about Mark Everett's dad, the end of Capote, even walking down the street and just thinking about... things. (Or maybe that's just the bitter winter wind here in Boston). I've gotten drunk and said things/acted in ways I don't necessarily feel ashamed of, but definitely wish I'd done much much differently.

Whether this is temporary or permanent, I'm not sure. I hope it's temporary - that it's just a side-effect of my crisis of confidence and feeling that I'm not living up to what/where I expected to be at the age of 25. But if it's not - I don't know, this makes me more like everyone else, and I guess that's something to feel good about, right? But somehow the thought's not very comforting.