We live in difficult economic times. Soaring gas prices, troubled financial institutions, and spiraling unemployment are creating a devastating impact on our economy. But there another, far more insidious power at work here as well: the do-gooder.

This was driven home to me today when, after loading my groceries into my friend’s car, I placed our shopping cart in an out-of-the-way location for the cart gatherer to pick up. My friend made an exasperated face and trundled the cart across the parking lot to where a lonely, mostly unused cart corral sat.

“Now, Nate,” you might say.” “She was just being nice by taking the cart to the corral.” And on the surface, I might be tempted to agree with you. “And Nate,” you might continue. “There are signs all over the parking lot that say you should clean up your cart.” Again, a valid point.

But consider this: Wal-Mart, being the corporate megalith that it is, has perfected the art of überspecialization. They have thousands of employees with a very specific job function, and that job function is cleaning up the carts in Wal-Mart parking lots. Now let’s imagine that everybody decided to pay attention to those signs that Wal-Mart places in the parking lot and starts putting their carts away. All of a sudden, there’s no work for the parking lot cart attendents. Wal-Mart, always looking to pad their bottom line, decides that they can afford to fire those parking lot cart attendents to save a few bucks, and they then get the old people greeters to go out to the corral every couple of hours to pick up the neatly-stacked carts.

So really, by putting those carts away, you’ve deprived someone of a job, and furthermore, you’ve forced an elderly person to do a job that they’re probably not equipped for (if you car about such things). So do the economy a favor. Leave your carts in the parking lot.

Given the recent rash of engagements among my friends recently, I feel that the time has come for me to write yet another post on the topic of marriage. Rather than make this a diatribe against what is unquestionably a timeless practice that is credited with maintaining stability and continuity in cultures the world over and throughout time, instead, I want to talk cracks in the shiny facade that is the Utah Valley Marriage Propaganda Machine™.

First, don’t pretend that such a machine doesn’t exist. It is very real. It is orchestrated from the highest levels: talks in conference and church about the importance of marriage. Then there are subtle reminders from parents and their married friends. And then it gets much more insidious. Your friends start to get married. And then all they do is rave about how great it is, while trying to set you up with their friends on the hope that you too can be as blissfully happy as they are. Now, at first, resistance is easy. But it’s like Chinese water torture. All the little drips keep hitting you and hitting you until, at last, you can’t take it anymore, you find yourself a ditzy blonde from Orem who’s just out of high school, and you join the ranks of the indoctrinated, basking in connubial bliss. In summation, I’m convinced that this is a massive conspiracy perpetrated on young LDS single adults in Utah Valley.

And here we come to the aforementioned cracks in an otherwise perfect mechanism. At my place of employ, I am one of only a handful of single young adults. They’ve purposely kept us all separated so that we can’t communicate with each other to find solidarity in our singleness. Fortunately, I managed to rope an intern out of our tech support department who happens to be single, so I have some comradeship. Anyway, I think because all the married people are surrounded by othe married people, they let their guard down and forget that they’re supposed to be convincing us to join their ranks. For example, a coworker walks into our office, plops down and prefaces her story by telling me and the intern, “guys, don’t ever get married.”

The CEO walks in and tells us to “enjoy being single because once you get married and have kids, your fun will dry up.”

My boss walks into the bathroom and sees me cleaning something off of my shirt and tells me “just wait until you have kids and all your shirts get throwup stains on them.”

Occasionally, there is useful advice sprinkled into the cynicism: “buy all your toys now because when you get married, you can’t buy anything fun.”

You get the idea.

My favorite part about all these comments is that, once we remind people about their duty to convince us to get married, they quickly backtrack:

Them: “Being married sucks.”
Us: “Phew, well, I guess I won’t do that then.”
Them: *clicking sound as conditioning kicks in* “Oh, no, don’t get me wrong, marriage is great. You should do it!”
Us: “Right.”

So that’s my theory. If you love it, spread it. If you hate it, it’s probably because it’s true.

Every so often, and actually pretty regularly these days, I ask myself, “self? What are you doing with your life?” Well, let me tell you.

A while ago, Overstock.com’s CEO Patrick Byrne was on NPR doing an interview. Apparently he has a good friendship with the legendary Warren Buffet, and so the interviewer was questioning Byrne on that relationship and some of the ways that it had influenced Byrne’s life. In response to one of the questions, Byrne shared this analogy that Buffet had told him at some point:

You see, life is like a baseball game where you’re perpetually up to bat. So more like a home run derby, actually. Anyway, life will throw you lots of pitches. Some will be good, and some will be bad, and the temptation is going to be to swing at all the good pitches. The problem is, if you swing at all the good pitches, you might knock a few, but you’ll be exhausted from all the swinging. Instead, you should sit and wait for a big, fat, slow pitch right over the middle. And once that pitch comes along, you swing away for all you’re worth, and because you’ve saved your energy, your odds of hitting it out of the park are multiplied.

I’ve chosen to adopt this strategy, so anytime I ask myself what I’m doing, I tell myself that I’m waiting on a big, fat, slow pitch. I just hope that life keeps throwing.

Whenever a big company loses a court case, the losing lawyer usually makes a statement concerning the company’s feelings about the loss. Generally these feelings are described using the words “shocked,” “dismayed,” and/or “deeply disappointed.” The statement “company X is shocked and deeply disappointed about this verdict,” is a textbook example of proper usage. I have two things to say about this.

First of all, I love how this is almost universally the leading statement that the losing lawyer says. There must be some class in public relations or something in law school where they teach law students to say this exact statement just in case they have to represent a client in front of cameras because it shows up so consistently. And of course, who can blame the lawyers for expressing this sentiment? After all, what corporate lawyer is going to get up and say “yeah, we totally saw this coming, and, well, we’re really not all that torn up about it?” But at the same time, I could use a bit more variation.

Second, the sheer hyperbole of the statement is audacious enough that I’m considering using it in my own day-to-day operations. After all, how much more sincere will I sound if I’m “shocked and deeply disappointed” when I don’t get my way, as opposed to just “bummed?” This new phrase is guaranteed to pull at the ol’ heartstrings of everybody who hears it, thus swaying public opinion in my favor, which is all I was going for in the first place.

A friend of mine confessed to me that her mother had purchased from just about every magic juice MLM known to man. Xango, Noni, you name it. “Coming from a sales background has made her really susceptible to sales techniques,” my friend confided.

My first inclination was to scoff. After all, what kind of salesperson allows themselves to be undone by the very tactics that they should be familiar with?

However, yesterday as I filled up at Chevron, I started to wonder why I insisted on paying several more cents to go to Chevron, as opposed to gas stations with cheaper prices. And then I realized that I was EXACTLY THE SAME AS MY FRIEND’S MOTHER. Turns out that all Chevron’s marketing, what with the happy, clean colors, cute car mascots, and all that talk about top-tier gasoline and Techron additives has worked on me. I’m a Chevron customer, bought and paid for. And why? You would think that as a marketer I’d recognize the tricks and schemes that they use to convince people to pay more for a gallon of gas. Nope. In fact, it’s because I like their marketing so much that I continue going to Chevron. I feel good about using a brand I trust and like, and that feeling is totally worth the extra 50 cents at the pump.

So to make a long story short, I think I’m a way bigger sucker than I previously suspected.

One of the unwritten rules of being a guy is that, if given the proper opportunity, you are not to shave. (Proper opportunities include camping, significant other out of town, midlife crisis, etc.)  These opportunities are called “excuses,” which we need in order to justify “laziness” to “women.”

Generally, at the end of these opportunities, we drag a razor across our faces and create a presentable front for ourselves, earning us praise for our clean-shavedness and non-laziness from the womenfolk. However, occasionally, we decide that since we put all that laziness work into getting our facial hair to grow thus far, it would be a shame to throw all that effort away. Thus, we grow either a.) moustaches, b.) goatees or c.) mountainman beards.

In my case, I chose to go with the goatee. I imagined that it would make me look cooler, tougher, more debonair. Instead, I just got older. Every time I’d look at myself in the mirror, I pictured a 35-year-old me, stuck in a dead-end job, potential wasted, slightly overweight, overworked, and underpaid. Needless to say, the goatee is now gone. Remind me to regrow it when I’m 35.

I remember reading in some economics book about the diamond-water paradox. Basically, this paradox comments on how water, though far more useful to sustaining life, is generally valued far less than diamonds, relatively speaking. There are various theories that seek to explain why that is.

I, like many others, contend that as long as water is more plentiful, it’ll remain less valuable than diamonds. But just jack up the utility that you get from water, and see what happens. Here’s a real-life example, which is really the story that I wanted to tell in the first place.

So readers of the blog will no doubt remember The Rash. Well, The Rash was well on its way into oblivion, until it mysteriously reappeared, this time on my fingers and lips. “Dismayed” hardly begins to describe my feelings about this. After a couple of days of trying to fight this on my own, today I decided to call my doctor.

You’d think the second time around he’d react a little bit better, and you’d be completely wrong. He had another freakout, very similar to the one he had the first time I went in. He called in a prescription to the pharmacy nearest my work, and demanded that I come by in a week for another checkup.

So I walked into the pharmacy and picked up my prescriptions. As the pharmacist pulled my prescription, he stopped and said “Woah. What’s wrong with you?”

“Umm, I just have this rash that I need to get cleared up.”

“Well, this is a really heavy dose of antibiotic. I mean, REALLY heavy.”

“Umm, I guess he doesn’t want things to get infected?”

“I guess. But at this dose, you’ll be at risk of yeast infection instead.”

At this point, my brain said Woah. Stop. Yeast infection? Sounds like a feminine problem. You’re lacking some essential real estate for that problem, buddy. It’s not possible.

However, if the pharmacist says it’s a risk, then it must be a risk, right? So I told my brain to shut up and tried to play it cool, like I wasn’t panicking. “Yeast infection huh? Umm, anything I can do to avoid that?”

“Just drink plenty of water when you take it, and you should be fine.”

Done and done.

Fast forward a few hours. I had just finished a Bleu Ribbon Burger at Red Robin (delicious!), taken my medication (scary!) and was on my way to see Kung Foo Panda (hilarious!), when I realized that I hadn’t drunk nearly enough water with my meal for my medication. So once we were in the theater, I went to the concessions counter and asked for a big drink of water (because there’s no way in hell I’m getting a yeast infection). When the guy working the counter tried to hand me a small cup, I told him No way. It has to be a huge cup. You see, I need PLENTY of water. PLENTY. That’s big cup, even huge cup, but not little cup. The employee then informed me that if I wanted a large cup, I would have to pay for it like it was a large soda, even if it was just full of water. Obviously this was a total ripoff. No way a measly cup of water was worth the outrageous prices they charge for sugar water (and Dots) at movie concession stands.

But all of a sudden, the specter of a yeast infection loomed menacingly within my mind, crowding reason and thriftiness out. As I walked away from the counter with my $4 cup of water, I decided that Adam Smith would have had a way easier time with this paradox if he had been threatened with a yeast infection.

Tags: rash, yeast infection, decisions, economics, diamonds, water

During this last year of college, I wrote a paper entitled “The Anxieties of Freedom and the Perils of Choice.” This paper centered around a Henry James story about a man who returns to his childhood home after an absence of many years. As we walks around the empty halls of the house, he finds that it is haunted by the ghost of who he might have been had he chosen to stay at home instead of traveling abroad.

This story has come to mind several times recently as I’ve experienced the vicissitudes of graduated life. I was just commenting to a friend about how, before I graduated, I used to think I had it all buttoned up. I already had a full time job, decent salary with benefits, a (relatively) clear life plan, and an intense desire to be done with school so I could get on with it. But something strange happened when I walked across that podium and received that piece of paper. It was as if somebody had taken my neatly-planned and projected life and shook it up. All of a sudden I was presented with a dizzying array of choices. I mean, if I decided to pack up and move to New York City and become a waiter, what was to stop me? And then there was the even more terrifying status-quo.

Here’s where the anxiety and peril comes in. When you’re faced with so many viable options, how do you choose? And moreover, what don’t you choose? Because for every choice that you make, there are a thousand other selves that will never be because of the decisions that take you away from who you might have been had you chosen differently. And how do you choke down the paralyzing fear that, at some point, that alternative self might come back to haunt you?

Ultimately, I guess we have to choose and accept the consequences, whatever they might be. I just hope I do a good job of choosing.

(Thanks to this article from The New York Times for the awesome title and some of the ideas contained herein.)

Tags: choice, introspection, graduation

Today, I saw a news story about a bunch of F-16s that were mistaken for UFOs in Texas. I confess that I was actually really disappointed. There’s nothing worse, in my opinion, than getting my hopes up and then totally crushing them. You see, deep down, I think I want to believe in UFOs. Now I’m not a conspiracy theorist. There’s a certain amount of angst towards the establishment that’s required to take that title, and frankly, I’m just not worthy. Rather, I just think it would be totally awesome if there were alien spacecraft flying around checking things out and kidnapping people.

Now I realize that this should scare me, but for whatever reason, it doesn’t. Maybe I’ve seen too many sci-fi/adventure flicks. Maybe I think that the aliens are friendly like the ones in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” Maybe it’s because I’m pretty sure that if they were going to invade us, they would have done so already, because of their vastly superior technology. Whatever the reason, all I know is that I would LOVE it if it turned out that all these encounters were real for the following reasons, among so many more…

• Once the government admits that aliens are real, we can start to use their hi-tech gadgets commercially. I know that I personally am very excited about hovercars and self-drying clothes.
• Sci-fi becomes real. All of a sudden, documentaries are a whole lot cooler.
• Alien ambassador programs.  We’re hoping that they’re done with those probes now.
• Then we’ll be able to focus on finding out who REALLY killed JFK.
• Fox Mulder will finally be vindicated.
• Finally we find out that we’re not alone! Now instead we’re just insignificant and backwards.

I mean, doesn’t looking at that list just get you all excited inside? Never mind…

Tags: aliens, ufo, conspiracy, welcome

As sappy as I feel saying this, I had a hard time believing what I was seeing when I saw the news update that Heath Ledger had died. After all, I had no deep, overwhelming connection to his work. And while I enjoy several of his movies, I don’t know if I would list him among my top ten favorite actors. But seeing his picture under the headline proclaiming his death, well, there was something about it that made my blood ran cold. Perhaps it was because it was sad to see yet another promising young life cut short before its time. And perhaps it was because he wasn’t too much older than me.

Perhaps I’ll live life a little bit differently tomorrow.

Tags: heath-ledger, death, reflection