Personal

$10 or 10 minutes

A while back I posited that [the best way to save money was to not spend it](http://ryskamp.org/brain/personal/the-fastest-way). As an extension of that, I’ve been considering a rule to “not sweat the small stuff”–namely, not worry about price differences less than $10. If I’ve decided to purchase something, and a price difference of less than $10 is causing me angst, I choose to purchase what I like and disregard the price difference.

Similarly, I wrote about leaving earlier to arrive someplace sooner. The analogous extension of that is to not worry about stressful practices that will result in less than 10 minutes of time saved. So I make the stressful move over to the carpool lane for an hour-long drive, but not for a 5-minute one, since I couldn’t save 10 minutes on the latter.

The sum of all these small compromises does add up to more than $10 or 10 minutes. But so does the stress from worrying about all those little decisions, and I’ve decided that it’s not worth the stress for so little gain.

New brain findings

[The Medici Effect](http://books.google.com/books?id=RNiFM9br5PwC&pg=PP1&dq=medici+effect&ei=MVk-R6_SH6butAPY5vmvAg&sig=13bKqiqAfZLPqqZ03IVms35d9Ck) tipped me off to the benefit of [reading magazines from other fields during plane flights](http://books.google.com/books?id=RNiFM9br5PwC&pg=PP1&dq=flight&ei=MVk-R6_SH6butAPY5vmvAg&sig=13bKqiqAfZLPqqZ03IVms35d9Ck#PPA86,M1). Several things I picked up from an issue of Psychology Today picked up for my plane trip yesterday (not online so I can’t link to it directly):

* Dreams may be a way for our minds to [practice important situations before we encounter them in real life](http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/OldArchive/bbs.revonsuo.html). Ever wonder why you have so many scary dreams?

* Simply thinking faster [makes us feel happier and more creative](http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/09/060926171045.htm), no matter what we are thinking about.

* Jasmine scent can make us sleep better.

* [Yawning cools the brain](http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/06/070621161826.htm) to help us think better, and its contagious nature could be linked to better group survival when everyone did it.

Okay

Beautiful quote from a film tonight (left unnamed to protect the surprise):

  • I’m not perfect.
  • I can’t see anything that I don’t like about you…
  • But you will…
  • Right now I can’t…
  • You will think of things and I will get bored with you and feel trapped cause that’s what happens with me.
  • [pause] …Okay
  • [pause] Okay

Low-stress Freeway Driving

I’ve found two ways to drive on the freeway with low stress: be the fastest driver on the road, so I only see slower cars in front of me; or be the slowest, so that I only encounter faster cars behind me.

But in the latter case, it’s really the cars behind me that have to do all the work of getting around. You can probably guess which tactic my lazy self uses…

Job advice

A friend related this story his mentor told him on his first day, in an industry famous for its emphasis on face time and work hours:

> First, figure out when everyone else gets into work, and arrive 5 minutes before them. Then figure out when they leave, and take off 5 minutes after that. Finally, take a 3-hour lunch break, but leave your jacket on the back of your chair. People will just think you’re in a meeting. End result, you work about half as long as everyone else but you look like you’re spending more time than anyone.

Hey, they got from him exactly what their work culture emphasized…

Only in Berkeley

“What’s that?”

“Oh, it’s just a mask.”

“A mask on a trampoline?”

“Yeah, it’s from the tree people.”

Changing nutritional guidelines

On our [pilgrimage to the Kwik-E-Mart](http://www.flickr.com/photos/bobman/841391155/) today, I was enticed into buying and eating a neon pink donut and a neon blue Slushee. I downed those on the skateboard ride back to work (yep, work), and almost immediately regretted it. My body just couldn’t handle the sugar, which took me on a wild ride from hyperactive to headache in less than 10 minutes, and left my throat feeling like a cold was coming on.

I used to ingest just about any food with no problems. Now that I’m taking care of my body and watching closely what I eat, I no longer have that tolerance. Is that because of my normal carefulness? Or am I just getting old?

Vietnam

Just back from Vietnam, wanted to get some thoughts down. Overall, an amazing trip–a bit of adventure, a bit of relaxation, and a lot of food. (You can skip ahead to [our travel photos](http://flickr.com/photos/bobman/sets/72157600757880288/)–and [my pictures of strange things](http://flickr.com/photos/bobman/sets/72157600763136587/)–if you like).

We flew into Hanoi with little more planned than our first night’s hotel. This was partially because we were too busy to plan before we left, but also an experiment to see how flexibility (even just a week’s worth) could change a trip. Our first day we stumbled into a travel agency (mostly because it looked air-conditioned) to check on plane tickets within Vietnam, realized that almost all the ones we needed were booked, and planned the rest of the trip sitting there with the agent. This turned out well, as she knew Vietnam better than most anyone in the U.S., and picked us some nice stuff to do. Lesson learned–you can easily travel to Vietnam with just a plane ticket there, but you’d better get your act together quickly once you arrive.

Another lesson: Vietnam in July is *hot*. Chalk this one up to our casual trip planning too, but we went at about the hottest time of the year. Hanoi varies from around 55 degrees in the winter to 95 in the summer; Ho Chi Minh City from 78 to 85; we went in the summer. It doesn’t seem to bother the locals, and you do eventually get used to it, but you are always sweating, and as a traveler, always looking for places with air conditioning. Most of the sights we saw in Hanoi were the ones that lay on the shortest route from one air-conditioned cafe to another. Fortunately all the food in Vietnam is inexpensive and good, because we spent a lot of time in restaurants hiding from the sun. Most shops don’t run A/C; those that do got most of our business. Hotels sometimes charge two rates–one for a room with A/C, one for a room without. We didn’t experiment with the latter.

We eventually learned to deal with the incredibly busy and chaotic traffic in the major cities. Especially in Hanoi, the streets are filled with thousands of “motos”, mopeds driven in every direction and every way, usually carrying at least two people each–although we saw up to four, and heard stories of five. This chaos actually works, in a strange way. Each driver is constantly aware of everyone around him, and intersections are managed with a thousand tiny adjustments and collective decisions: who goes first, which side will I pass on, is my direction flowing or stopping. It’s like a really elegant dance once you get used to it, aided by the constant use of the horn.

The horn in Vietnam plays the role that calling out “on your left” or “inside” does in a bike race, letting people know where you are and what you plan to do. Honking strategies vary by driver but use frequency, burst length, and timing to convey with one sound what you’d think would take hundreds. _Lonely Planet_ recommends that Americans not rent cars in Vietnam; I’d concur with that. Driving there is different enough that our skills in cruise control and high-speed freeway driving would get us in trouble fast.

One hand always on the horn:

In Hanoi (and most other cities we visited) you immediately notice the ubiquitous vendors on every street. Every inch of streetfront is covered with shops; every square inch of sidewalk is covered with vendors. This is the city, of course–there are many people outside the city who aren’t entrepreneurs or salespeople. But most inside the city seem to be. Certainly no one is ever just sitting around idly.

Everyone on the street is constantly selling. They might be cooking dinner for themselves and their family, but they have a bucket of fruit, a blanket covered in purses, bottles of water for sale to anyone who might pass by. You see themes in these sellers (those three types are very common), so much so that you wonder if they work off a franchise model, where everyone gets the same products and they go off to compete with each other. They almost never have anything to distinguish themselves from the others selling the same thing–signage and marketing for these sellers consists of writing (or shouting) the types of products you sell, not branding yourself. Where do they all find buyers? Is it really just whoever happens to be in the right place at the right time? Many of these people migrated here from the countryside hoping for a better life. Is this it?

Hanoi is especially interesting, as there are entire streets devoted to a single type of product–padlock streets, sunglasses streets, tin box streets. You walk through the neighborhoods and pass dozens of storefronts that look almost exactly the same; like aisles in a supermarket. I’ve read that the same thing happens with entire towns in China–padlock towns, sunglasses towns, tin box towns.

Stuffed animal street:

The near-universal entrepreneurship and rampant copying were the two things that fascinated me most about Viet business. Millions of people start their own businesses, but many of them copy others exactly. Maybe this is because of a lack of “regular” (aka Western-style industrial) jobs, where people often go to work without thinking explicitly about what to do…but it can’t be entirely. After you see a line of 40 lock shops in a row, you really wonder what these people were thinking when they each started their business next to others that looked the same. In the old empire capital of Hue, there are even three restaurants touting deaf staff, recommendations from “Lonely Planet” and “Lovely Planet” guidebooks, and near-identical names. Who copies a restaurant run by deaf people, hoping to steal some of their market share?

Maybe it’s just my outsider perspective on another work culture. I’d love to hear a native Viet person opine on Western work culture–we’ve got serious issues too.

One thing that came out of all this competition is incredibly low prices. Specifically, labor is astoundingly cheap. Materials still come at a small discount, so plastics and wood can be bargains. But the real deals come in service. Taxi rides in most towns were around $1.50; $3 will get a driver to wait for you half an hour. Our day-long boat trip, staffed by a husband-wife couple, was $25. We had clothes made in Hoi An; the family tailor worked all day and overnight to make us clothes that were 1/3 the price they’d cost here. Our driver from Hue to Hoi An got the wrong instructions and rose at 5:30am to drive and pick us up by 8; we didn’t meet him until 10 (the time we had scheduled); he said “no problem.”

The cheap labor put me in a moral bind–I’m used to being able to buy my way out of the guilt for taking someone’s time; even normal prices for labor in the U.S. will make me feel ok about consuming their day. But in Vietnam I was so clearly underpaying for what I received that I tried to make up for it in other ways–by showing up exactly on time to avoid wasting their time (well, except for that one driver), by tipping well (and against custom) for all service–even that which, as in most restaurants, was not great (perhaps a vestige of the non-tipping culture?).

Another thing that all this entrepreneurship makes you wonder is what impact Communism really has here. It doesn’t seem to be the restriction on free enterprise that we saw in Russia. Specifically, it makes you wonder what we were so worried about in the 60s and 70s. However, the government made many economic policy changes in the mid-1980s, called _Doi moi_ (renovation), so what I saw had gotten better since then. [Wikipedia explains](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doi_moi):

> Although not simultaneously accompanied by an articulated policy of increased social or political liberty (such as political _glasnost_ accompanied economic _perestroika_ in the Soviet Union), the Communist government has nonetheless tacitly permitted many personal freedoms much greater than in the past (apart from taboo issues such as criticism of the Communist regime) since the beginning of the _Đổi mới_ era.

It is a different culture, though. Traveling in Vietnam made me realize what a strong cult of the individual we have in the U.S. Everything here is focused on individual success, and we value individual persons and lives incredibly highly. The Viet people seem to be much more collective in their mindset; family, city, and especially national concerns are valued more highly than any one person’s. For example, the Viet people worship their ancestors, to the extent of having them buried in rice fields where they work and building temples to them in their backyards. There is a tiny emerging pop star space in their culture, but it hasn’t nearly permeated Vietnam as much as it has the U.S. I couldn’t figure out if the Communist government had created this culture or been created by it. The dominance of Buddhism, and its emphasis on transcendence and denying individual reality, may be fundamental.

I was struck by two things about the war. First, how welcoming the Viet people were to Americans. I was amazed they’d even let me in the country after seeing my U.S. passport. This might also be due to their Buddhist culture, or possibly the great scramble to rebuild afterward kept them too busy to hold a grudge. Either way, we were welcomed wherever we went, from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City.

Second, how much was destroyed. In Vietnam, a country with truly ancient beginnings, you’d expect to see incredibly-old things. The oldest thing we saw was from the early 1800s, although it looked older than the Roman ruins. Everything there has been destroyed, and often rebuilt only to be destroyed in the next war. Between the old wars with the Chinese, occupation by Japan during WWII, conflict with the French, the American War (as they refer to it), and the other [Indochina Wars](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indochina_Wars), most of the really ancient things seem to have been destroyed (in My Son, near Hoi An, there are ruins from the 4th century, though we didn’t see those). The American War did the bulk of the damage, though, with bombs and land mines that still threaten today. We went to the Citadel in Hue, which was crumbling and being rebuilt, and two days later looked at pictures from the war of American troops shooting rockets at the walls of this historic city. Truly nothing was spared in the fighting.

At the Citadel in Hue:

One lesson I learned from the combination of the war history and the collective culture–don’t attack a Buddhist country. Individuals there will not hesitate to sacrifice themselves for a cause that benefits their people as a whole.

I read _The Shadow of the Sun_ while traveling. It’s a collection of stories about Africa from a pioneering Polish journalist, Ryszard Kapuscinski. Many themes from Vietnam echoed with the ones in the book–the exploitation of colonialism, universal entrepreneurship, the searing heat of the noontime sun, people leaving the countryside for cities in search of a better life, the demand for better infrastructure (physical, business, political). When we got back, we watched the movie _Indochine_, about Vietnam in the early 1900s, and saw these themes repeated. Some of them occur in American history as well; is Vietnam just moving through these on its way to the same destination?

I hope not. There’s something special about Vietnam. My memory of its feel is already slipping away, on my second day back in the U.S., but I at least still remember that it is different. I spent a lot of time there thinking about fun ways to blend the cultures in my own life. Imagine a world where you could attend a meeting via satellite videoconference from a boat floating in Halong Bay, then finish the meeting, close your laptop and dive into the South China Sea before a snack of fresh [lychee](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lychee) and [dragon fruit](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitaya). Now that’s a cubicle I could get used to…

And now you’ve read about the trip (every word, right?) Ok, then run along and check out [our travel photos](http://flickr.com/photos/bobman/sets/72157600757880288/) and [my pictures of strange things](http://flickr.com/photos/bobman/sets/72157600763136587/), if you like.

Stuff question

After moving our lives to Berkeley last weekend, and then reading the insurance contract I signed with U-Haul where they disavow all responsibility for the stuff I haul in their trucks, I have a new question I ask myself when dealing with the things I own:

*If this thing was completely destroyed in a fire, would I replace it immediately?*

If the answer is no, then maybe I don’t need it at all. After all, no matter [how you got something](http://ryskamp.org/brain/personal/taking-what-youre-given), if you don’t need it then it’s just holding you back. Moving, even 40 miles, makes that very clear.

Plus it’s better to do this sort of thinking before a catastrophe happens than [after](http://www.veen.com/jeff/archives/000719.html).

On commuting

As I just posted [a bunch of links](http://www.ryskamp.org/psst-all#2760) to a fascinating recent New Yorker article on commuting in America, [There and Back Again: The soul of the commuter](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/04/16/070416fa_fact_paumgarten?currentPage=all), I thought it might be a good time to chronicle my thoughts about commuting.

I haven’t owned a car in more than five years; before that there was a brief fling with a Ford Explorer that sparked, fizzled, and died tragically on the curb outside my first post-college apartment. That experience ended badly enough that I was in no real hurry to repeat it. I had plenty of bicycles, so I just rode them everywhere, as I had before buying the Explorer. My 10-year history of racing bikes didn’t hurt, either.

Since I lived in downtown Palo Alto at the time, everything I needed to survive was a short bike ride away: groceries, entertainment, work (singing waiter variety), lovely girlfriend. Riding was usually faster than driving anyway; I could cut corners, take back roads, snake through traffic. When it rained, I got wet. If I needed to, I borrowed a car, but that didn’t happen too often.

I got a new job in Santa Clara and took the [Caltrain](http://caltrain.com), a commuter train with special cars to ferry bikes, most of the way there. On that train, I saw lots of like-minded commuters, most of them traveling from San Francisco to destinations farther south than mine. For them, the train was an alternative to a 100-mile daily drive; for me, it was a 15-minute convenience.

Moving to Mountain View put me closer to work, though I still took the train most days. I was further from the other important things, however, which meant lots of late-night train and bike rides from Palo Alto in the dark. At the time, I was returning to bike racing, so the 5-7 miles was a simple spin of the pedals compared to my full training load. Still, I remember tearing through darkened neighborhoods with vivid dreams racing through my mind. It’s hard to explain…go riding at night sometime.

I still didn’t seem to have an acceptable explanation for why I rode everywhere. I usually said that I couldn’t stand driving, that sitting in traffic made me feel helpless and trapped, and that I really really loved riding my bike, that the worst day on the bike was better than the best day driving. People didn’t really seem to believe it.

Back to Palo Alto two years later and a new job in Mountain View; now just 15 minutes from work, that ride got much easier, and I set up a bike specifically for it. This made regular commuting easier, but there were still things I needed to borrow a car for (hauling heavy items, driving other people places). My new work commute route took me through a large wetlands preserve that ended about 100 feet before my office; I thought it was the best commute in the world.

Around this time, there was a real shift in the perception of my commuting. Up until then, most of my friends and coworkers told me that they didn’t understand why I didn’t have a car–I had money, a clear driver’s license, and lots of commuting to do. I got funny looks when I pulled up on my bike; people laughed when I told them how I commuted. But suddenly those conversations turned into questions about how I did it; discussions about how they dreaded their commute and wanted to do the same; how they never got any exercise; how they thought my principled approach was, while still crazy, at least admirable.

Maybe it was living with three roommates who also rode to work, or the cumulative commuting hours my friends had racked up since starting work 4 years earlier. My new coworkers certainly seemed to understand, and many of them rode as well. Suddenly my commute was cool, and I didn’t worry about showing up on a bike.

I still get funny looks pulling up to the grocery store on a bike with [my groceries trailer](http://bikerev.com/pg3.cfm); I still have trouble hauling big things. When it rains, I still get wet (though [my new Gore-Tex shoes](http://www.performancebike.com/shop/profile.cfm?SKU=23896&estore_ID=115) help a lot). But I also still love it, and I still think I have the best commute in the world.

So how did it happen? There were a few important factors:

1. I chose to live close enough to a group of important people in my life that I could bike to see them. This meant that my options were immediately restricted to about a 10-mile radius.

2. I chose my jobs by looking only within that same range. This meant my career options were limited by my choice of friends; I was ok with that. I’ve been hilariously successful within those boundaries, though I realize I easily could not have been. But everything you do affects your other opportunities; I just chose friends first.

3. Housing close to mass transportation. Even if you’ve set up the two items above as I did, there will still be times you need to travel further. Living close to the train meant I’d always be able to get elsewhere.

4. Punctuality. The train waits for no man. This schedule actually taught punctuality to me; beforehand I was a terrible laggard.

5. A good bike. A commute bike is an interesting beast–it needs to combine speed and comfort with waterproofness, lighting, simplicity, and packability. It’s really hard to get that mix right, and it’s different for every commuter. I’m still working on my mix, and I’ve started a [bikehacks group on Flickr](http://www.flickr.com/photos/bobman/tags/bikehacks/) to chronicle the cool methods other people are using. Fortunately, since I don’t own a car, I feel very comfortable applying that budget to a good bike.

6. Showers at work. Not a full necessity, but it sure makes a longer commute nicer. I also keep a second wardrobe at work so I don’t have to haul clothes everywhere.

7. Good weather. Yeah, I got wet my fair share of times. But it’s still easier to do this in California than in Michigan.

8. Supportive friends. This all got easier when my friends started supporting my efforts.

The final question: why bother? Cars are easy–they keep you clean, dry, consistent, and fast. But I just can’t handle them. Kudos to all those who can, but I can’t. Given the opportunities I have, I can’t get in that car.

The New Yorker article explains the situation in a way I love:

> A commute is a distillation of a life’s main ingredients, a product of fundamental values and choices. And time is the vital currency: how much of it you spend–and how you spend it–reveals a great deal about how much you think it is worth.

An hour on a bike, in the rain, late to a meeting, beats 15 minutes in a car any day of the week for me. Take those “fundamental values” and smoke ’em.

The ironic part of writing all this now is that I’m moving to Berkeley next month, where my wonderful wife will begin business school in the fall. That puts me an hour and a half by car (optimistically) from my current office. Would I drive it? Never. I love my job, but I’d sooner quit.

Fortunately, the company operates a daily shuttle service from Berkeley. I’ll get to ride my bike there in the morning, and home at night. Add a bike at work to ride at noon, and I’m back in business. I’m excited, too, about the potential of concentrating three hours of my day on focused and isolated reading and sketching.

As before, how I spend this time will reflect my life’s priorities–it’s just a chance to express new ones. That’s why I commute the way I do now, and why I hope to continue prioritizing my commute in unique ways in the future.