Buddhist Marketer

The emotional roller coaster of seeking approval

I just want to do good work, find mathematical models that can represent observed micro- and macro- behaviors, prove that my idea that in the age of the network economy the importance of distribution > the importance of brand, be able to go off in search of answers to that which has caused me intellectual dissonance during my past ten years in corporate America, and contribute to the universe in a manner that celebrates my comparative advantage.

I hate the idea that I could be locked out of the club, yet again.

I thought the ups and downs of a doctoral program wouldn’t start until I was actually in a doctoral program.

Good heavens; no wonder girls aren’t good at math.  Dwelly McDwellersons!

From the blogosphere, echoing James Baldwin:

When you spend your life hearing that you’re not able to do something because of who you are, even if you want to believe otherwise, there’s going to be part of you that believes it.

My self-apppointed to-do list:

1. Rustle up some paint color chips from Home Depot
2. See if I can squirrel my way into classes skewing math-theory next semester, perhaps at the CUNY Grad Center
3. Find a good game of pick-up ball
4. Bake a pie
5. Try not to dwell on the last problem of the GRE math section, whose blank I didn’t have time to fill in because I accidentally clicked the HELP button and spent half-a-minute trying to figure out how to click out.  Damn you, 790!

If I didn’t care, I wouldn’t care, but I do, and so I do.

* sigh *

James intersect Alec intersect Anittah

Quoth James Baldwin,

You know, it’s not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself.

From Ian Parker’s “Why Me?” in the September 8, 2008 The New Yorker:

According to Lorne Michaels, the executive producer of “Saturday Night Live” and an executive producer of “30 Rock,” [Alec] Baldwin “guards against enjoyment.”  [Says Michaels, to Baldwin;] “‘It’s a great time in your life.  It’s an all-good thing.  And, if you were capable of enjoying it, it would be even better.’”

But we erect our personal pipes and through these structures our realities flow, unadulterated by dismal objectivity.  We believe that which we want to.

Continues Parker:

Then began a period where, in Baldwin’s description, “I ignored all of my instincts and started to do what other people suggested I do, but I knew it was wrong.”  Baldwin is perhaps too easily seduced by a narrative of grand failure, rather than accepting a quieter story of qualified success …

“My life, in some ways, has been a half-measure.  I didn’t commit myself all the way to my marriage and family, because I would have given up more.  And I didn’t go all the way with just being selfish.  I always wonder where my career would be if I was more selfish.”

I worry that my mind will (continue to?) work like this in a couple of decades.

After a flirtation last Saturday with the idea of merging and acquiring my way to a chief executive officership by my early forties, I realized a couple of things:

1. My commitment to pursuing a doctorate is that much stronger
2. I refuse to be intimidated by two years of economic theory
3. I am not the only one lured by all that glitters (/ain’t gold)

I’ll let you figure out how the above paragraph intersects with the following, again from Parker:

His mind turned to the example of Conrad Bain, the actor with a fine theatrical background who came to Philip Drummond, the white father of two adopted African-American boy, on “Diff’rent Strokes.”  Embroidering on this thought, Baldwin imagined an actor who signs up for the quick money of a sitcom pilot quite confident that the show will never be commissioned:  “The agent’s saying, ‘Don’t worry, it’s the biggest piece of shit in the history of show business.’  Cut to six years later:  you’re in your dressing room, you’re in season five, and on the wall are posters of you from the New York Shakespeare Festival — these achingly beautiful posters on the wall.  By that point, you’re making a hundred and seventy-five thousand a week, you’ve got a house in East Hampton, you’re getting laid constantly, you’ve got closets of beautiful Italian suits, and you’re got three cars in the garage and you’re paying alimony to your ex-wife who’s living down in Florida.  And you’re doing the same jokes, again and again and again.”

And if you haven’t yet figured out how haunting I find these unrelated Baldwin boy thoughtstreams, I’ll leave you with these words.  Quoth Alec:

When I get onstage … I feel very safe, very protected, very fulfilled.  I go out there, I can’t tell you how happy I am.

An addiction?  A demon to wrestle?

Answers: empty set.

Matty Charles’ new album comes out 10/30

One of my favorite artists in the whole wide world is Matty Charles, whose music was put on my radar as his bassist, Josh Stark, is the oldest son of my ‘god’mother Neal, the ‘N’ in ‘ANP’.  When I lived in Brooklyn, every Sunday evening I’d hop into my Jetta and drive over to Pete’s Candy Store in outer Billyburg to experience the intimate live show.

As a marketer, I know that people are more likely to buy Product X of Quality N if it’s framed against Product Y of Quality Less Than N.  As a human, I love to sing, an experience I treasure all the more for its concomitant demons that I had to slay.  So, here:  you can play this YouTube video while reading the rest of this post.

The song I am singing along to is “Valentine Song” by Matty Charles and The Valentines from their 2003 album Land Beyond the Sea.  The lyrics — and the lyrics are one of the reasons I love Matty’s work so — start out:

Would you be a flower just for me
When the days are short & cold
and I won’t have to face the darkness all alone
if I have you there to hold

* Swoon *!

From his MySpace page (bolding mine):

If you want to know where I’m from, all you need to do is listen to my music. I don’t hold well to the idea of mere geometrical placement but the land is one of long rains and low clouds, stolen from the past and lurching unsteadily towards the future. In fact, the place of my childhood no longer exists. It’s an old brick building that has since crumbled. It’s a framework upon which I hang my thoughts and my feelings but it’s impossible for you to see just as my own vision of it has grown dim and unreliable.

My haunts were junk stores, old movie theatres, used book stores, rooms containing boxes and bins of old records and the people who would hang around looking for something exceptional in those dusty catacombs. Most of it was garbage but occasionally the needle would slip into the groove and colorful flowers of music would grow right out of the speakers. The clock would stop and so would the rain and monotony would cease to exist for a while. Most of my life happened internally and this is how it’s always been.

With any luck, my strategic inclusion of my own novice singing alonging butted up against Matty’s own have made you fall in love with his music too.

I am so grateful for artists like Matty who reach deep inside themselves and place palms out to the universe so that the rest of us can experience the ways in which they see the world.  And when their vantage point seems sympathetic to my own, it makes me feel like

I won’t have to face the darkness all alone.

Come to think of it, I think this is why I write.

Lux begets veritas

From Rabbi Rami Shapiro’s “Roadside Assistance for the Spiritual Traveler” column in the May-June 2008 issue of Spirituality & Health (bolding mine):

I have a Hindu friend who says that life is maya — illusion — but if life is maya, then nothing matters. Am I misunderstanding him?

A Hindu swami explained maya to me this way: Imagine that you wake up in the middle of the night to find a deadly snake coiled next to you on your bed. Filled with terror at the thought of being bitten, you spend the night frozen in fear. But as sunlight floods your room the next morning, you discover that the “snake” is really a belt you forgot to put away the night before. Maya is mistaking the belt for a snake and living in fear at your own illusion. Does the snake matter? No. Does the belt? Yes. It is your perception of life, not life itself, that is illusory.

Baby, have you noticed the sky is rearranging?

(Play this in the background)

I flick the TV off, am up past my bedtime, but am jangly from an evening run and couldn’t-sleep-last-night and tomorrow-is-the-first-day-of-school.

The city’s quiet even though I have a window yawning big-wide-open. Manhattan is not supposed to sound like this. But tonight’s chorus is the chorus of Maine, the chorus of Indiana, the chorus of Berlin. As if, in anyplace with four seasons, the scaffolding of mid-August is the gentle braiding of singing crickets and solitary locusts and whispering autumn.

Hopelessly into you
’cause you know how to
Unwrap my feelings ’til I’ve
Opened up from inside
No reason to be shy
Every reason to be mine

Tomorrow night. Linear algebra. Not since 1994.

I’ve been in classes since. Couple of MBA classes five years back. Five semesters of writing classes. These are nothing. I mean, they’re not nothing. But to grip from De La Soul, with math, stakes is high. Three thousand feet high and rising.

Numbers whirling, dancing, shift, shimmy, spiral. My first love. A safe space, an ordered space, where rules mattered, reason breathed, and action n+1 was predictable.

Fall into a head space
Deep into a new place
Spinning out of control
You should know
I don’t want to be safe
Every reason to be mine

I kill the lights, worm my way deeper into my couch, and look out my window. Wow. How did I miss those clouds? The city bounces off them. Makes their spirits glow amber.

Nothing’s really sane but everything’s amazing
Slowly taking over me
Baby have you noticed, the sky is rearranging
I feel it move in me

I remember, from childhood, late night drives with Dad from Chicago after free White Sox games. Past the orange lights of the big city, looking out the window at the clouds, that color! Back home to Indiana, darker, darker, darker, the sky soon blanketed us, no more brightly lit service islands, now just two white arms of light feeling their way around the highway in front of us.

And still, all the way home, the chorus of crickets and locusts and wonder.

Look at the sky, I think.

And tomorrow -

And tomorrow.

Lyrics: William Orbit’s Spiral, from Hello Waveforms

Protected: Yale Alumni Magazine > January / February 2008 Class Notes

Protected: Yale Alumni Magazine > September / October 2007 Class Notes

Class Secretary candidacy

A charming old codger stole my ear outside of JE to decry an abundance of puffery under his 50th reunion’s tent: blah blah blah from former bigwigs.

Egads. Fellow ‘99ers, just say no to puffery! Which isn’t to say that classic milestones like marriages, births, and additional letters like M.A.Ph.D.Esq.D.D.S. etc. shouldn’t be celebrated, or that traditional markers of success like election to public office, entrance into the landed gentry, or acquisition of small islands should not be heralted with fanfare. But those of us whose life’s seas have us sailing down lesser-known paths need to be well-heard in our alumni notes as well. Laid off? Rejected by all the top business schools? Rock on! Me too.

Here’s to alumni notes that celebrate all of life’s messy complications alongside its triumphant successes. Let’s make our space truly ours in honor of the old codgers that have come before us.