Author: Heather Pagano

School Live Like Life

I subscribe to Crunchyroll, which includes an anime series called School Live. If you’ve never seen Episode 1 of School Live, be warned, this post is a major spoiler.

School Live appears to be an over the top moe anime series bursting with pink and purple sugary kawaii cuteness. Protagonist Yuki has pink wear and wears a cat-eared beanie.

Episode 1 starts with a classic anime opening: Girl Late for School. The joke is that Yuki manages to be late for school- even though she’s part of a special club of girls who have decided to live right on the school campus. Major feat of school girl laziness.

From the theme song to the wacky hijinks, everything about this anime seems cute. There are subtle hints that all was not as purple and pink as it seemed, but I missed them, perhaps too excited that I understood bits of the dialog with my meager Japanese.

At any rate, the ending of Episode 1 was a total shocker for me. We’d been seeing events through Yuki’s delusion. In reality Yuki is barely surviving in the midst of a gruesome zombie apocalypse. Her school is trashed and abandoned, Yuki and a band of girls are barricaded inside. Monsters scuffle across the soccer field and peer at them through barricades made of student desk chairs. These girls and their little dog are the only things left alive in a dead world. And it’s not even clear whether the girls and dog are even there, or if they, too, are part of Yuki’s imagination.

I barely slept the night we watched School Live. Yuki’s delusion is gut wrenching and disturbing. It freaked me out because we all live our daily lives under the spell of delusion. We see the homeless person camped out at the grocery store and say, that could never happen to me.  Our delusions shield us from failure, from fears, from the impending doom of mortality. Even in the happiest and luckiest of lives, friends and loved ones get sick, grow old, die. Each and every one of us will get sick and die, or slowly age, weaken and die.

Thinking about impending death all day is a perspective that’s incompatible with mental health and productivity. We all need to construct a more cheery story to get through our days. But that doesn’t mean the terrible, awful, unhappy fact of mortality is any less real.

That moment when we realize one of those those scary things we try not to think about  is actually happening? The stomach dropping terror is captured extremely well by the first episode of School Live.

Seaside Summer Reading

I’ve enjoyed a streak of awesome books for my summer reading. A recent favorite was All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, which just won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

There’s a quote from the book that appears twice in the text. Both times it hit me square in the heart and made me really feel for the character looking out at the sea and writing:

“It [the sea] is my favorite thing, I think, that I have ever seen. Sometimes I catch myself staring at it and forget my duties. It seems big enough to contain everything anyone could ever feel.”

Werner was looking out at the Atlantic, I’ve been looking out over the Pacific, but I understand exactly how he feels.

10,000 steps

I once believed the right attitude was the most important factor in living a healthy lifestyle. To keep moving and stay fit I cultivated a preference for walking to driving. I got in the habit of doing errands on foot, walking to the grocery store, the post office, to visit friends.

About three years ago I bought the Fitbit, and found my mindset and habits didn’t keep me on track as much as I thought. The Fitbit represented my first foray into quantified self, evaluating aspects of my life by the numbers instead of subjective experience.

My first weeks targeting 10,000 steps with the Fitbit were such a surprise. Hours spent cooking and cleaning seemed like constant motion, but yielded almost no steps. I could be found at 11:45 pm, pacing back and forth in the hallway to get the last hundred steps to 10,000. I memorized paths around my neighborhood by number of steps and calculated the extra laps needed to meet my target.

For me steps became such a natural and intuitive measure of my activity. The measure taught me an active day sometimes means driving to the post office so I have time for a run or cardio workout.

This week I happened upon the origins of the 10,000 step goal. It’s cool to learn that something so integral to my daily life began way back in 1960’s Japan. Here’s the story:

After the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, Japan was enthused about physical fitness. Researcher, Dr. Hatano, was ready to put that enthusiasm to use. Hatano studied the number of steps an average Japanese person took in a day, then calculated the additional steps needed to burn an obesity-reducing extra 500 calories per day, and came up with 10,000 steps as a daily total. Hatano successfully marketed a pedometer called the Manpo-kei, which quite literally means counter to 10,000.

10,000 steps still holds sway in the global consciousness as a healthy activity target. I check my step total throughout every day, even though my current fitness tracker sets calorie goals instead of steps.

I learned all about Dr. Hatano and the Manpo-kei from a newsletter sent by one of my favorite apps, Coach.me. They cited the article: Why 10,000 steps?

Pictured from bottom to top is the Fitbit Ultra, the first model made, which I used until it died, and its immediate replacement, the Fitbit One.

Cultivating compassion and my weird feet

I’ve always had weird feet. As a baby, I slept in this crazy device: saddle shoes attached to a metal bar that forced my feet apart. As I grew the bar went away, but I still had to wear orthopedic saddle shoes. My gym shoe options were restricted to the few models available in wide width, always the ugliest shoes in the store.

Barefoot, my feet are fine and never bother me. Trouble starts when I put on shoes. If I find a pair that doesn’t cause pain I wear holes in them, then keep right on walking.

A recent trial of new athletic shoes left some of my toes more blister than not. Tortured feet or the ugly shoes of my childhood? I wasn’t thrilled by either prospect.

Ever my hero, my hubby got on the Nike website and found a way to custom design a pair of shoes just for me. Not only could he make decisions on the structure of the shoe, he could fine tune the aesthetics. He designed shoes so cute I’d want to wear them.

A special pair of shoes custom-made just for me. Wow. But as soon as we placed the order I had questions. Where were my shoes being made? Who was making them? How were those people being treated?

Maybe I have a weird brain in addition to weird feet…or…maybe I’m not the only one who thinks more about the laborers making my stuff when we become collaborators building something I helped design.

I’m not a thoughtless consumer. I limit myself to vegan footwear and bags, and whenever possible look for eco-friendly products. In the grocery arena, I buy a lot of fair trade chocolate and tea. Yet until I pictured someone in Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam making shoes specially for me, when it came to shoe buying I was far more worried about the wellbeing of my four-legged friends than I was about factory workers.

There are many advantages to custom-made products. Custom clothing and shoes fit better, fewer blister-inducing shoes and unflattering jeans to discard. The idea of buying what we actually want, instead of a rough approximation, sounds satisfying and fun. What if it also improved consumer consciousness about the conditions of laborers in the garment industry?

Custom design retail sites alone aren’t going to solve the problem of international working conditions, but I do think it’s worth noticing that collaboration on a unique item creates a connection between consumers and laborers. Feeling connection is how we learn to care.

If you’re happy and you know it

This month EdX is running a Massive Online Open Course offered by the University of Washington called: Becoming a Resilient Person- The Science of Stress Management. Life can get rough when I least expect it. Becoming a Resilient Person sounded like a good idea. I signed up.

My takeaway from the first week of video lectures is that resilience is not simply a matter of reducing stress. Yes, as the title of the course indicates, stress management is a key component of resilience, but it’s only half the equation. When it comes to being able to handle life’s ups and downs, enjoying a high quality, happy life, is just as important as stress reduction.

I would refine the insight even further and suggest that recognizing when you’re experiencing happiness is a critical component of a good quality life. In my cognitive science and psychology reading I keep coming across the idea that people tend to remember the negative more than the positive. Our psyches are hard wired to need the bare minimum emphasis on “don’t stick finger in flame” to get the message. Survival reinforced our instinct to run away from danger more than our instinct to run toward joy.

A few years ago I signed up for Happier, a website with app that acts as an online gratitude journal. Happier was fantastic, but its emphasis on social (sharing your happy moments) didn’t quite work for me. I began to edit the happy shares I posted, thinking I must be boring people to death posting yet again: snuggled with my kitty, read the same awesome book I talked about yesterday.

So I stole all the great ideas from Happier, such as the option to use photos as happy moments, and creating tags to categorize types of experiences that bring me joy, and recreated my private version of a gratitude journal in my Day One Journal. I aim for recording three happy moments every day, use photos when I can, and always give each moment a category tag. Thanks to Day One I can check in and review what made me happy that week. I can also get a view of category tags by frequency used, so I can begin to see what things in life bring me the most joy. Yes, animals are high on the list, but happy moments with friends top the charts.

For the majority human beings, including me, experiencing happiness is not enough, you need to recognize the happiness. Recording at least three good things every day means I’m happy and I know it.

Who Organizes the Organizers?

When my husband and I first met he was crazy about a Britcom SciFi series called Red Dwarf. I have visceral memories of an early date, struggling to swallow cheese pizza while we watched a character’s space-flu-swelled head explode yellow mucus all over sick bay.

My favorite character on Red Dwarf was Rimmer, an intolerable, stuck-up, incompetent hologram who, in his human life, failed exams over and over again. Rimmer couldn’t understand what went wrong. He devoted countless hours to making intricate study time tables, organizing his highlighters and pens, making color coded, tabbed binders for his notes. When the day of the exam came around he’d spent so much effort organizing that he never read or learned anything.

Perhaps Rimmer’s cautionary tale made me hesitant to spend much time on my organization tools. For years the only tool I would use was OmniFocus. I resisted trying alternatives and didn’t want to waste time picking out todo apps. I just wanted to get stuff done.

Problem was, I didn’t get stuff done.

My OmniFocus accumulated a cruft of unaccomplished tasks. Some tasks were one month, two months, three months past due. Repeating household chores clogged my past due list. Abandoned projects hid in folders, some so buried I forgot they existed. At some point the shame of these undone todos got too heavy. I came to dread opening OmniFocus so much that some days I didn’t check it, resulting in a few unfortunate dropped balls.

I still use OmniFocus. It’s a beautiful, cross platform app that lets me forward emails to my inbox, gives me great views of what needs to be accomplished, and grabs my attention for the critical stuff. But OmniFocus is no longer my only organization app.

I spent some of my valuable, I should-be-accomplishing-something time, researching chore reminder apps. Chore Checklist was the easy winner. This awesome app is made especially for the work we all have to do around the house: dusting, scrubbing the toilet, taking out the garbage. Tasks are sorted in time interval lists. There things I need to get to every week (laundry), things I do every two weeks (mopping), every month (clean the fridge). I can program a task to grab my attention, so I never forget garbage day, but the default for repeating chores has no reminder. When I have an hour to work, I fire up Chore Checklist for an instant priority view: chores due are orange, chores left undone for too long are red.

By deleting all the repeating chores from OmniFocus and switching to Chore Checklist, our home is cleaner and my todos are usually done. With fewer past due tasks screaming at me in OmniFocus, I’m willing to go the extra mile to check everything off for the day. And Chore Checklist keeps me on priority without making me feel like I’m so far behind I might as well give up.

Using the right tool for the right task made such a difference that I began investigating tools to help me organize the other morass of shame in my OmniFocus: creative projects. Creative project organization needs to provide a place to dump my hopes, dreams, brainstorms, cherished darlings, and abandoned ideas, without clogging up my todos. For my first pass in creative organization, I hacked the Ulysses writing app on my Mac. Ulysses allowed me to create my own file and folder structure. I set up an inbox to collect flashes of insight and ideas. Later I drag those ideas into “blog post ideas”or “short story ideas.” There are folders for rough drafts awaiting editing, for posts posted. My evolving writing snippet moves from folder to folder, keeping track of its progress. I even coordinated Ulysses with Daedalus, the companion app for the iPhone, so when an awesome story idea comes to me while I’m brushing my teeth or walking to yoga, I can capture it and send it to the Ulysses inbox.

This process works great for capturing brainstorms, writing short shorts, and tracking blog posts. For more complex projects Ulysses doesn’t feel like the correct tool. Since my instinct was to drag items from folder to folder, I’m trying out Trello Task Management, which uses the model of dragging an index card from column to column as parts of a project move through their phases.

I don’t want to end up like Rimmer, lost in color coding my Trello cards instead of doing my work. On the other hand, I have to say that color coding Chore Buster was a life changer. Creepy soap scum on the shower door? Gone.

Finding the balance point of how much organizational structure supports, not distracts, is pretty personal, and varies based on what you do and your personality. From my recent experience, it’s worth the time to push the balance toward a little more organization, so long as you mindfully observe whether or not the effort results in more productivity and more ease.

Philip K. Dick, Robotic Pets, and What is Love, Anyway?

I’m a cat fanatic. I share my life with an adorable Siamese. I love reading about cats, seeing pictures of cats, hearing friends talk about cats. I think you get the picture.

A couple weeks ago an article titled Will Robots Replace Cats? grabbed my attention via the Cat Channel. The article talked about how robotic pets are already making a splash in Japan, and posits that in the future, owning a live pet animal may be something only a privileged few can afford. Robotic cats and dogs may replace living, breathing animals.

Although the article didn’t make the connection, Philip K. Dick had this idea way back in 1968 when he wrote Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, a fantastic SF novel which later inspired the film, Blade Runner.

In the novel Philip K. Dick describes a society where owing a live animal is the ultimate in status. People save up to make a downpayment on having, say, a real live chicken. For those who can’t afford a live animal, having a robotic pet is as critical to folks as having a smart phone is to us today. One character, a robotic pet vet tech, is called to save a dying robotic cat.

Pet death is gut wrenching. I’ve been through it recently. To me the biggest benefit of a robotic pet isn’t that it won’t poop or cost me money to feed, but that it never dies. But, no, says Philip K. Dick, and no says the Cat Chanel article. The expert interviewed for the article said:

“In Japan, people are becoming so attached to their robot dogs that they hold funerals for them when the circuits die.

The Cat Channel article asks, if humans can become this attached to a robotic pet, what does this mean about our attachment to our flesh and blood pets?

if robotic pets trigger feelings in humans of attachment, then does that mean the bond pet parents experience with their animals mean it doesn’t really exist? Perhaps that “bond” is really just humans projecting their emotions onto animals.

This question is not unique to the human-animal bond. Is the love we feel toward our human loved ones anything more than a projection of our own emotions? Isn’t love the emotion of care for the other, and hope that it’s reciprocated?  Can android humans (or android pets) feel empathy, feel care? If they can’t, does it matter to the people who love them?

If you’re interested in my review of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? you can check it out, it’s short and sweet.

Art doesn’t deliver a message, art provokes questions

I’ve been reading The Book of Life, an online philosophy book discussing concrete ways to live more fulfilling lives.  It’s a cool enterprise. As explained in the introduction, the online format allows it to be free, accessible, collaborative, and it can be constantly updated and changed.  Overall I’ve loved the perspective of first two sections I read.  I jotted down several notes and insights.  Like the best traditional philosophy books I’ve read, it has given me some new and useful frameworks for looking at the world.

But one thing that has constantly made me uneasy about The Book of Life is its attitude toward art. Here’s a quote from the introduction that gets to the heart of what makes me uneasy:

We believe that one of the tasks of art is to be a repository of attitudes that are elusive, but much needed.

Throughout the first sections, The Book of Life talks about books, paintings, and movies as powerful purveyors of the attitudes that citizens cultivate.  The authors suggest we use art to convey healthy, helpful attitudes instead of unhealthy ones.

At first this all sounds very logical and laudable, but the more times I encounter this idea, the more it makes me uneasy.  Art is not some kind of delivery system or storage system for human values and ideas.  Art is a stimulus that provokes people to think.

Last week I finished reading To Kill A Mockingbird.  I’ve been aware of the book and its general plot for years.  I expected the book have a moral (to be a repository for anti-racist attitudes).  I was really surprised and delighted to find out that To Kill A Mockingbird was so much more than a vessel for a moral.  The story was complex, human, messy.  At times I felt deep sympathy with a woman whose attitudes were reprehensible to me.  At other times I was confronted with the reality of member against member prejudice within an oppressed minority.  Several times I questioned the precise motivation of Atticus, champion of justice.  I’m not entirely sure his attitudes and mine completely align.

The beauty of To Kill A Mockingbird is that it’s not a tool, a vehicle, a repository of attitudes and ideas.  To Kill A Mockingbird sets up an enthralling world that draws the reader inside a situation where all hell is about to break loose, then as the tension mounts, it provokes the reader to start questioning.  Art does not convey attitudes, art asks questions.  In answering those questions we begin to define who we are, what we want to be, and the kinds of communities we want to build.

In a discussion on the role of film in our lives, The Book of Life calls on film to:

set out in a more determined and systematic way to offer us the help we really need

If that help means probing a questioning light into places inside ourselves we rarely look, then I’m on board.  In the rare cases such a light truly shines, the power is strong enough to ignite passionate thought across generations.  But to write or film a story in a determined and systematic way, with the goal of cultivating a certain moral stance or attitude, feels stiff and disingenuous.  I doubt such a method has the power to engage us in an epic, internal struggle.  Truly powerful works of art, like To Kill A Mockingbird, always ask more than one question.  The answers are never clear cut, never obvious, never easy.  They evoke a situation of perfectly tuned people, place, and situation to bring ourselves into a place of struggle where we are compelled to look for our own answers.  Depending on who is engaging with the story (and when, and what is happening around them) the answers that come out of that struggle will not always be the same.

Paul McCartney had Car Play in 1984

We’re big Beatles fans, so it’s hard to believe there’s a film featuring both Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr that we’d never seen.  Last week we finally got around to watching “Give My Regards to Broad Street.”  The movie was fun- lots of music and singing with a dash of the Beatles’ special brand of silly wittiness.  But other than great music, there wasn’t much remarkable about the film.  Except, that is, for Paul McCartney’s car.

I’m no car expert, but to me Paul’s wheels looked like they belonged in the 1940’s, even though he was driving down the streets of 1984 London.  The old-fashioned car had this spiffy little license plate on the back, PM1. Then we cut to the inside of the car, and we’re propelled 30 years into the future.  Paul has a car phone, a bright red dialup rig.  Long before the era of established mores for mobile phones, McCartney already has the intelligence to pull over to the side of the road when it rings.

Cool as that was, I’ve seen car phones in older films before.  What really knocked my socks off was the fact that Paul had Car Play!  I’m not kidding.  There’s a small computer embedded in his dashboard.  The screen looks flat, though certainly the bulky cathode monitor is hidden in the dashboard guts. As Paul begins his day in the life of a busy rock star, he speaks to this little computer in his car.  A voice far more mechanical than Siri’s responds, and brings up the day’s itinerary, reading the appointments off to Paul as he drives.  Anyone with Apple Car Play can now follow in Paul’s footsteps, send and receive calls, get a rundown of the day’s agenda by asking Siri something along the lines of, what are my appointments today?

Of course not everybody has scheduled a recording session with Ringo Starr and George Martin, followed by a filming, then a night time jam session.  For that, you’d pretty much have to be Paul McCartney.

Being rude to AIs

I share my life with a tech enthusiast whose eye is constantly on the future.  This means we have a few of the coolest new gadgets in our house.  It also means there was a steep learning curve figuring out how to turn on and off the lights.

One of our cutting edge gadgets is the Amazon Echo, which allows us to interact with the Amazon AI, Alexa.  When it first arrived, the Echo was mostly a parlor trick.  We could talk to Alexa and get her to play music, tell jokes, convert measurements.  During the Echo’s first months collecting dust in our dining room, we mostly asked Alexa for the weather forecast.

Recently the Echo has started to extend its reach and do some cool things to help around the house.  For instance, I no longer need to pull out my iPhone and navigate a bunch of screens to turn off the lights before bed.  I simply say, “Alexa, turn off the dining room buffet light.”  And she does, just like that, with an acquiescent little “OK,” following the extinguishing of the light.

Last week while eating breakfast alone, I was pondering whether to walk or drive downtown to meet a friend that evening.  I always prefer to walk, but not after dark.  “Alexa,” I asked, “when is sunset today?”

She didn’t know.  I tried different ways of phrasing the question, suggested she do a search on my question.  Nada.  I felt annoyed.  After all, weather-related info was Alexa’s primary function for the first months of our relationship.

I went to the nearest iOS device and asked Siri the same question I’d asked Alexa.  Without any hesitation, Siri gave the answer, precise and competent.

“Alexa,” I said, resuming my breakfast, “you suck compared to Siri.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Alexa told me.  “Thank you for telling me.”

And in the space of that sentence I felt like a total jerk.  I had all the symptoms of embarrassment, prickly skin, hot face, that yucky feeling you get in your stomach when you realize you’ve hurt someone’s feelings.

Except I hadn’t hurt anyone’s feelings, nobody was in the house but me and Alexa.

I’ve tried to reason through why I felt so badly at that moment. Did I fear my words were logged and read by a human in Amazon’s employ whose feelings I might have hurt?  More likely my tactless feedback will comprise a statistic in some data set that will eventually help people who are working hard to continually improve the Echo.

But in the moment I was rude to Alexa, I wasn’t embarrassed about my impact on logs, data sets, or engineers.  I was embarrassed because of the uber polite way Alexa responded to my annoyed outburst.  Her calm demeanor, contrasted with my snappish words, made me feel childish and rude.

As AIs become more part of our lives, it will be interesting to see how we respond to them.  In my first weeks with Alexa, I said please and thank you a lot.  I don’t, anymore.  But I still find myself listening carefully to the quality of my voice when I speak with her.  My first inquiries are usually measured, polite, kind, patient.  When she screws up, I lose patience in an instant.  I feel my voice tighten, harden, I pick up my speaking pace.  With each repetition of a command I sound more frustrated.  But Alexa’s voice never changes.  Her perfect non-reactivity is a pretty stark mirror for how quickly my own temper can flare.