Doug Reviews Life of Pi

Ugh. I’ve tried to write this blog five times. It just isn’t happening. A friend of mine recommended I write about Life of Pi. It is one of my favorite books, and now after seeing the movie yesterday, on my top movies list as well. I am now simply lost in trying to review something so meaningful to me at a personal level.

Christmas time, five years ago, my brother introduced me to a book he had just read called Life of Pi. He has impeccable taste in literature (I mean, he’s read virtually everything, so he ought to have an idea of what does and does not suck). I bought the book and read it over the course of about four days. The story spoke to me in a way I’d been searching for. You can imagine my excitement/trepidation when I learned the book was being made into a movie.

Excited to see the story in film, nervous that like so often is the case, the translation to the big screen would lose the most important essence of the book.

The book touts itself as a “story that will make you believe in God.”  

The story is basically a two hundred plus page build up to a single point.  A quick Google search will show no shortage of interpretations of that one point. I once heard Rob Thomas (lead singer of Matchbox 20) explain that the power of a great song is often that it means different things to different people, and I think that explanation might hold up with Life of Pi.

But I’ll try to give you the real interpretation…

I should say here that I will do my best to avoid spoilers, but it will be difficult to not give some things away while discussing the book/movie. If you have not read the book or seen the film, maybe you ought to before reading this post.

Piscine’s name is important to the book. His nickname, Pi, is critical to the representation of life the main character plays. He plays all of humanity. He plays the numberless, infinite, irrational, imperfect and indescribable role of existence that we all face, just like his mathematical counterpart, p.

Pi introduces us to his life in Pondicherry, his experience growing up in a zoo, and his fascination with religion. Then, his family closes the zoo, sells the animals, and sails to Canada on a Japanese cargo ship. The ship sinks, and from there we are told two wildly different but eerily similar stories.

The first story is one of adventure and magic. It is an inspiring story of optimism and survival, of the promise of something better, and the assistance of heaven through mysticism and the supernatural.

The second story is much bleaker. It tells of the depths one must go to in order to survive. It speaks of shame and loneliness and the brutality of existence. There was no assistance from on high, just random luck, a fierceness to survive and a tiger like ferociousness necessary to overcome the hopelessness of existence.

At the center of it all is Richard Parker. In one story, he exists as a real life tiger to aide Pi in his survival, keep him company, ensure he is on constant alert, and provide him with a purpose. In the other story, Richard Parker exists only as a deep and primal part of Pi, an imagined embodiment of Pi’s strong instincts for survival. Whether in the boat or in Pi’s mind, Richard Parker is real enough to keep Pi alive.

The men interviewing Pi are asked the question, “Which story did you like better?” To which they reply, “The one with the Tiger.”

And so it goes with God. Even my Calvinist and Determinist friends will agree, we each get to choose the story we like best.   

There is a great quote early on in the book that was absent from the movie. In fact, the movie completely dropped the first Mr. Kumar, the teacher who professes to Pi his atheism. For me, Mr. Kumar’s role is crucial to the plot.

As Pi is adopting more and more practices from each of his religions, he discusses also the closeness he feels toward his atheist brothers and sisters. He then addresses agnosticism and doubt. For those of us who wrestle with doubt, he claims doubt is useful and we must all face it at some point. But then he says something that has stayed with me, to the point I don’t even need to look it up:

“To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.”

Regardless of which story we choose to believe, we must keep moving. That’s why I choose the story with the tiger. 

Doug Reveiws Thanksgiving

Disclaimer: This post is written for an open minded audience. It is written to be entertaining, not enlightening or accusatory or informational. It is written lightly, if you feel this is not the kind of thing for you, I hold no hard feelings if you pass on reading.

 I once had an idea that I would write a short story about an ancient king named Golumba. In my story, Golumba would be a good and decent king. The people throughout his land would love and respect him. Peace and harmony would reign.

Soon enough, however, barbaric savages would invade from the south. They would start by cutting off supply trains and eliminating the ability for the kingdom of Golumba to do any sort of trade. Then they attack small villages, raping and murdering every resident.

The savages would send messages to King Golumba, with the severed heads of his faithful subjects serving as the container carrying the messages. The message was always the same, one of death, destruction and a bloody end to the kingdom.

Eventually, through laying a horrible siege to the imperial city, the savages would obtain their victory. King Golumba would be forced to watch as his wife, children and grandchildren were all ravaged and brutalized before being tortured and eventually murdered. He could do nothing. The savages would not let him die.

Worse than death, they wanted king Golumba to live with the pain and misery of their actions. These savages would be completely unredeemable in my story. They would banish the king to the sea. Golumba, so wise and peaceful, would turn raw and maniacal during all these events. He’d become bloodthirsty and swear an oath upon the heads of the savages.

Now to King Golumba, an oath is the most sacred of things. For 400 days he would drift alone on the open seas, all the while plotting his revenge. He created parchment from his torn and tattered clothes, and wrote the history of his people on the parchment with his own blood.

After the 400^th day at sea, King Golumba would strike land. He would put his plan into action immediately. He began to rebuild. He created a small bit of wealth and married a young girl. She would give birth to a son. King Golumba would tell his son the story of his people, and pass on the sacred parchment of blood, asking his son to swear the same oath of revenge.

The king would grow old and die. His son, however, burned with the oath he had sworn to avenge his family. He would marry and have a son, to whom he would pass the story, the parchment and oath.

This would go on for two thousand years, as each new Golumba son would take on the oath, the plan, and the parchment. One day, King Golumba’s five hundredth great grandson, Cristofer, would finally put the plan into action. He went before the queen, asking for money, supplies, armies and boats, under the guise of finding new trade routes to India.

At sea, his men would notice the increasing madness of Cristofer Golumba, and the fragile parchment he grasped constantly between his fingers.

After  many days at sea, the call of land being spotted would draw Golumba starboard, where he would see for the first time the land he had been told of so many times. He would look out at America, look down at his parchment, and then under his breath he would grumble the words, “Now I bring a great plague of men, armies, sickness and destruction upon this land. Now I will avenge my forefathers.”

And fade to black. We know the rest of the story.

Anyway, I had plans to write this story, really fill it in with details, and use it as a way to sort of revise history to help me somehow come to grips with the destruction of Native Americans in this land. If somehow we could rewrite the history to make it seem like they had it coming, it would make what we’ve done to Natives a little easier to swallow, right?

But now it is Thanksgiving time and I’m white. I usually like to celebrate the season by making friends with as many Native American families as I can find. I try to get close enough to them that they feel comfortable with me inviting them over for Thanksgiving dinner.

Here’s where it gets really good. The night before Thanksgiving, I give them the wrong address to my house. The next day while they are out searching for my fake home, I sneak into their double wide and steal all the good stuff I can find and then burn the stuff that appears to have no value. Finally, as a peace offering, I leave them a case of Jack Daniels and a box of small pox spiders.

Each year, this puts me in the holiday spirit and makes my turkey taste a little juicier.

Okay, obviously I’m exaggerating. I don’t really do all those things. It would be silly, because Thanksgiving is not actually the day we celebrate the complete destruction of Native American life and our dominance over them as a race. No, we celebrate those things every day of the year.

I’ll stop now. I’m unfairly grouping all white people into taking the blame for the actions of some really crappy white people. But the facts remain, and this creates an annual conundrum for me. I am now forced to do a lot of really good and enjoyable things while skillfully blocking a lot of suffering from my mind.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Doug Reviews Influence

There is an eerie experience that some people have every day of their life that I have had only a couple of times, ever. It’s actually pretty cool. Let me tell you about two recent instances. The first time, what happened was I made a joke that I thought was worded pretty well and captured both the essence of a common experience we all have, but also painted a vague enough picture that the person hearing or reading the joke could insert their own unique imagination to make it humorous to them. I made the joke through a text message to a friend.

A couple of weeks went by, and suddenly, during a conversation with another friend, the same joke was told to me as if I was new to it. I laughed and marveled at the way good content gets around.

Then recently, I came up with something humorous and posted it to the social news site Reddit. I won’t tell you what it was and I won’t reveal my Reddit username. I like the anonymity afforded to me there. Anyway, a few days ago while browsing Facebook I saw a friend had ‘shared’ a humorous post. To my surprise, it was my original post from Reddit, now making the Facebook rounds. When I saw all the likes and replies to the comment, I was thrilled. I felt I had influenced, if just for a moment, the thinking of some folks on both Reddit and Facebook.

The experience got me thinking about the circle of influence we each have. There are certain people for me, in real life and online, that if they make a recommendation there is no way I am not following up on what they suggest. I trust the judgment of these people so much, I buy/watch/read/listen to/participate in whatever they suggest. Some of you reading this are specifically the people I’m talking about.

Imagine if we could all be assigned an influence score. The score would be based on the level of influence we each have as a percentage of the whole. You would essentially take the size of potential influence a person has, how active they are in attempting to influence members of their pool, how successful they are in actually affecting the consumer behaviors of their circle, and then compare it against their similar sized peers and create a stack ranking, assigning an individual influence score. Every single person would have a score.

Obviously, very little would change: big celebrities would get big bucks to endorse certain products or services. Trained actors would be in commercials peddling their employers’ wares. Vince would continue to sell the Slap Chop.

But what about on the micro level? Wouldn’t marketers be interested in finding the highest ranked influencers in smaller subsets to endorse their products, promote their politics, spread their religion, etc? Wouldn’t potential employers want to see these numbers and actively recruit the most influential people? I know that in my capacity as an “employer” I would find this metric to be extremely fascinating.

It’s basically taking the concept I frequently tease (Facebook Diet Shake Salespeople) and applying it to everything that generates any form of income or increase. I make fun of those Facebook Sellers, but obviously what they are doing is working. Obviously they are getting more people to buy their shakes or attend their fitness classes. Why not tap into that same influence model, pay ordinary citizens for the impact they can have and use that model for everything?

And instead of paying citizens, it seems like it would be possible to create a global “rewards program.” Instead of rewards for being a member of some club or a frequent flyer, why not use data from each person’s influence score to provide discounts based on the impact that person has on goods and services?

“Privacy! Rights! Protect the children!”

Bullcrap. If you think you have those things, you are naïve. Based on my spending habits, web-browsing history, voting records, income, tax returns, court records, and borrowing patterns I am an open book to anyone with the right access to that information.

Look, this is already happening to some extent. You know those ads that show up on the sidebar of your email account? Those ads are there based on the content of your emails and the history of websites visited. Why not simply attach all of my personal information to my secure consumer profile, factor in my influence score and give me discounts based on the success I have getting other consumers to use certain products?

It would work like this:

1)      Doug posts something on Twitter about how his family uses Huggies Diapers because they are so much more absorbent and easier to put on than Pampers.  

2)      This information is immediately added digitally to Doug’s profile with Huggies, which sure enough, checks out. Doug buys a thing of Huggies every three weeks.

3)      Over the course of the next few weeks, Huggies adds new customer profiles to their database based on new purchases. A small percentage of those new profiles fall into Doug’s circle of influence. The computer generates Doug’s influence score and applies the algorithm to his profile.

4)      The next time Doug buys Huggies, the computer automatically processes a $2.47 discount because Doug is such a good little diaper salesman.

5)      Repeat this process for every product ever made.

At first, this would cause an increase in the asinine referrals made by all of us in our respective news feeds. However, the economics of content and interest would soon balance that out so that we would only recommend great products and not risk being unfollowed, defriended, or otherwise shunned by the digital community.

Or maybe I’m just tired of buying diapers.

Doug Reviews the Election

This post is about politics, and America, and freedom, and the American Dream, and the election. If those things make you sick by now, I don’t blame you and I invite you to move on. I won’t be offended.

I rarely write about work, and for good reason. I don’t like mixing my work in with  what I try to do here, which is the sharing of myself with you. But today, I am going to draw some similarities.

Occasionally, my job obligates me to terminate the employment of another person. I hate doing it, and really, it’s the worst aspect of my job. But here’s the problem: I’m very good at doing it. Isn’t that something to be ashamed of? I’m so good at it, in fact, that  I am often asked to sit in with others when they are letting someone go. No, I’m not asked to sit in…I’m asked to take the lead. My secret? I am kind and efficient when firing someone.

Many times, I will be discussing the “firing meeting” with the other person sitting in with me and they will start talking about all the zingers they want to use. If the person being fired is argumentative, the firing manager will tell me all the things they want (or wanted) to say to that person. They will recite a long list of one-liners that they feel would really put the person being fired in their place.

 Every time this happens, I respond with the same boring old philosophy: We are already doing the worst thing we could be doing to this person. We hold all the cards. Why rub that in or say more than needs to be said? For Pete’s sake…we are already firing this person, what more do you want to do?

I then calmly and pragmatically invite the person being fired into the office, explain to them what is happening and why, let them know we wish them luck, and encourage them to take action that day in their effort to find a new job. Then I escort them out and it’s done. No arguments, no blow-ups, 5 minutes, done.

I tell you this because of the comments I heard on the radio this morning while I exercised (I will not be posting on Facebook the type of exercise I do or how good I feel or pictures of my triceps). I’ll get to the message, but first, let’s discuss some reactions to last night’s election.

To read Facebook chronologically was pretty epic last night. For my wide range of politically affiliated friends, it was funny to see one side posting about the literal end of days, the destruction of America, and a desire to move to some foreign land. Equally disturbing were the posts from the other side filled with desperate relief, as if we had just successfully fought off an invading horde of Robotic Rape Demons.

One post in particular caught my eye, saying something about America being even stupider than the poster had thought possible, and now we are all going to have to get what we deserve, indicating we deserved a visit from the aforementioned Robo-rapists.

What I found odd about this person’s post is, I know him, and I know that in the four years Obama has been in office, this individual has taken two new jobs, each one offering a raise and promotion. Has Obama really destroyed his family’s future?

Another post talked about sleeping better now that we are past the nightmare of Mitt Romney buddying up to his rich friends, destroying the middle class and taking women’s rights back 100 years. This person has also posted their despising of Mitt Romney for his money.

Hypocrisy has got to come to an end in America. Just so you know, despising Romney for his hard-earned wealth is kind of silly. Because it’s all a matter of scales. The fact is lower middle class Americans are to the average Bangladeshian what Mitt Romney is to lower middle class Americans (and the poster in question is much better off than “lower middle class”). Unless that person is selling all they have, quitting their jobs and giving everything to Bangladesh or Africa or Mexico…I’d say it’s time to stop judging.

I know you want Mitt to pay more in taxes…but he’s paid millions in taxes. That’s pretty admirable, even when you tally all the taxes I’ve paid and add in my volunteer hours and money I give to charity and money I donate to my church. Mitt has me beat, so maybe my friends and I should do more and worry less about Mitt.

Which brings me to, my original story about firing people. This morning, one of the liberal talk show hosts I listen to was pontificating about all the reasons Mitt Romney didn’t win the election. He was chastising Mitt and the republicans. More specifically, he was rubbing Obama’s victory in Mitt’s face, talking about what a failure of a campaign Romney ran.

You know that mantra I live by, “We are already doing the worst thing we could do to this person by firing them, why take it any further?” That’s what I thought this morning. Romney lost the election. He knows why because he knows how he ran his campaign. Isn’t that enough? Do we really spend the next few weeks preaching how stupid those with different opinions are?

If everyone who voted for Romney is a soulless idiot, and everyone who voted for Obama is an ignorant moron…where does that leave us?  

And back to the Romney supporters (including me, I voted for Romney). Look, the guy we voted for didn’t win. The only way that becomes the end of the world is if we actively destroy the world. The thing to do now is rededicate ourselves to the country and the president. We need to give the guy in charge our full support and do whatever we can to make President Obama the greatest US President in history!

The fact is, it will take the greatest to bring us out of this global rut, so if anyone can lead us to a brighter future, it starts today, it starts with the President we elected, and we all need to join forces to create that future.

You know what will happen if we don’t come together and push this nation forward? Nothing. The same nothing that has been happening for years, the same nothing we blame congress and the president for. It is not the government’s fault, it is our fault. So let’s all do more.

I’m not writing to the 20% of Americans that pay all the taxes and finance this country’s endeavors, and I’m not talking to the 20% that give of their time and energy as volunteers to improve the lives of others (by the way, about 7% of those two groups are the same people).

No, I’m writing this now to my fellow 66ers. I mean the 66% of us in America who give the least amount of our money and time possible to make the country better. The 66% of us who would rather watch our nightly television lineup than be bothered to actually give a damn.

Let’s rise up, ol’ 66. Let’s start a revolution of the purple politics we hear so much about. We 66% are pretty much half conservative, half liberal, and half who gives a crap. Let’s keep the first two, but let’s actually start giving a crap.

Today, I am going to the Boys and Girls Club of America. I will sign up as a volunteer to help out and tutor underprivileged youth. I hope my resolve sticks. I hope I can do more for this country than sit around and bash the other side. I hope we can, as a united nation, come together and stop bickering. Most importantly, I hope someday you’ll join me, and the world will be as one.

Lunch Break

I am back at the sandwich shop for my lunch break. Only this time, instead of the Italian BMT, I went with the Cold Cut Trio.

On my walk over here, I stopped to talk to a hobo named Walter. I didn't say much, but here's what I learned about Walter.

1) Walter has 12 kids. When speaking of them, ages 32-19, his eyes welled up with tears and he asked me, "What the H am I doing with my life?" He actually said "H," which I thought was funny because of the litany of actual F-words he said leading up to this exchange.

Anyway, his voice cracked as he told me to be a goo father and don't mess up my kids' lives like he did to his.

2) Walter has had tests performed on him. He has an IQ of over 297, and has been told he is one of the four smartest people on the planet. He told me he thinks that might be BS because, again, look what he is doing with his life.

3) Walter has been to war, and has a range of 2,917 Meters. At this point, the tears returned as he asked me why they made him kill? He explained that he never wanted to kill anyone, and he despises himself for it. I didn't really know what to say, so I reminded him he was doing what he did under orders and thanked him or his service to our country. That's when he told me he loved me for the first time.

4) Walter is some sort of Neurosurgeon/engineer. He told me he has fixed the brains of many people with brain damage. He has to keep it under wraps though, because if the government found out he was still doing it, they'd kill him.

At this point, Walter had to get to the social security office and I had to get to Subway, so we exchanged emails, I gave him a $5, we told each other we loved one another and parted ways.

Now, Walt was pretty drunk, so I don't think he was completely honest with me...but on the off chance he was completely telling the truth, was I just in the opening scene of the most intriguing movie ever? Are they filming and I just don't know about it?