Jeremy Blachman's Weblog: 2009

Thanksgiving

I'm thankful for a lot of things, and it's pointless to write a blog post about them.  This isn't a post about Thanksgiving, this is a post about my grandma and I'm forcing myself to write it because hopefully writing it can help me figure out exactly what made me completely lose it for about ninety seconds at dinner the other night, and maybe writing it can help me remind myself that of course I'm thankful that my grandma, despite her limitations, is alive, seems happy, can show glimpses of the person that she was....  I tried to write this post yesterday, when the emotions were more fresh, but I couldn't figure out exactly what I was trying to say, so the window stayed open in my web browser and it never got written.  This morning, I'm trying again.

My wife and I had Thanksgiving together for the first time-- our three previous Thanksgivings were all spent separately-- last year I was out in LA (and had Thanksgiving dinner with a friend at a Chinese restaurant in the San Gabriel Valley), and the previous two years I went to my relatives and my wife had Thanksgiving with her parents.  Her parents invited my family, so there were ten of us all together--

My grandma's working memory doesn't work since her stroke -- I have pretty much the same phone conversation with her every day when I call, she asks where I'm living and how I'm doing, she says she loves me-- some days I catch her at a good moment and we can have something that resembles a conversation, I say something that sparks something in her memory, she remembers I'm married, or we talk about what I'm making for dinner, or about some writing I did, and the back-and-forth can almost feel real, like it's still my grandma and like we're actually talking to each other.  Some days she remembers she had a stroke, and we talk for a few minutes about how it's frustrating for her because she knows her memory isn't working and she doesn't know how to work around it and she feels like a burden because she can't do anything for herself and knows she isn't the person she used to be.  Some days she's confused by something she's just been watching on television and she thinks something strange is going on in her house and she tries to explain it.  The explaining part of her brain works-- she's constantly trying to make sense of what her memory is telling her.  In the moment, she makes sense.  The things she says make sense, she knows what she's saying.  But because the inputs don't stick, sentence to sentence it's hard for anything to progress in a conversation.  The other day we were talking about how it's my six-month wedding anniversary, she said congratulations, that's so exciting, and I should put Nina on the phone so she can wish her... and she paused... "a happy new year?"  She had gotten to the end of the sentence, and knew that the previous few words meant she was talking about wishing someone something, but by the time she got there, she forgot what it was she was talking about, so she guessed, and the guess made sense. Her guesses make sense-- her memory just doesn't work.  But part of what has kept me motivated to keep calling, and trying, and attempting real conversation-- besides the fact that I love her and know this isn't her fault and don't want to feel like I'm abandoning her and leaving her to sit at home all day without any human contact-- but part of what makes it not just an obligation and has made me think it's possible to continue to try and have an actual relationship is the feeling that maybe something is sticking-- not necessarily in her working memory, but somewhere deeper, she knows what's going on-- somewhere deeper, she's still herself, we still have some kind of relationship, there's some essence of her that is still there.  I mean, she knows who I am when I call, she's excited to talk to me, she says all the right things--

Thanksgiving was hard.  We didn't really expect her to remember having met my wife's family a bunch of times, and she didn't, but the social part of her hasn't been much affected, she's able to be in a social situation and act in a reasonably appropriate way, it's just that every few minutes she forgets who some people are and needs to be reminded of the relationships between everyone and what's going on.  So it's a lot of explaining and re-explaining who someone is, and how they're connected to everyone else.  And it unavoidably gets uncomfortable when for the twentieth time, you're answering "and how is everyone here related," again.  She'll get stuck on an idea-- "first meetings of the family are difficult, but don't worry, we're not murderers or anything like that," was something she kept trying to start a conversation with.  But we got through dinner, she was having a nice time-- her mood is actually really good, and physically she's doing well, not in any pain, and even when she can't remember who someone is, and new people seem like strangers, she likes strangers, she's not anxious about social situations, she talks to people, she makes sense-- and then she went to the bathroom and was in there for about fifteen minutes and it's like somewhere in there, she hit the reset button.  It was past her bedtime, and she was more and more confused, and if something wasn't directly in her line of vision, she really wasn't aware that it existed.  So we were reminding her who my wife is, and I'm showing her the wedding band, and, yes, that's her mother, and that's her father-- and I got up for a second to carry some dessert plates into the kitchen, and I hear her say, "so she was married to Jeremy-- but what happened to Jeremy?  Did he die?"  And my mom says no, he didn't die, he's right here.  And I hear her say, "but I feel like something happened-- did he die for a while and then come back?  He wasn't dead?"  And I come back in and I show her, I'm still here, I just went into the kitchen, and she looks at me, and knows who I am, and everyone's laughing because the reality of it is that it's uncomfortable and some of the things she says end up sounding funny, even if she's just trying to make sense of what her mind is telling her--

And I kind of lost it -- I was sort of laughing but then I was crying, and I couldn't really contain it for a minute, my wife and I went into the kitchen, went to the bathroom to just take a deep breath-- I think what got to me is that if she's not even solid on whether someone is alive or dead, if it's all so fleeting, you're talking to her one second, you've vanished the next-- then, sadly, is there really anything still there?  Is there really still a relationship, is there really any essence of the person still inside if the memory is so flawed and so impermanent?  What are either of us getting out of a phone conversation?  How much of her is really still her?  And it made me really sad, and made me feel really helpless in the moment.

I talked to her on the phone yesterday evening, and it was like it always is-- she said she remembered she saw me the other day, that we celebrated a holiday, and we should do that more often.  We had the half-conversation that we often have, it didn't feel different.  She knows who I am, I know that.  And even if she didn't, it's not her fault, it just is.  It was late, it was a long day for her, it was a lot of meeting and re-meeting and re-re-meeting new people, it was a lot of social time, it must have been overwhelming for her.  I can rationalize it all, I can make it make sense.  It's just really hard.  It's just really hard to remember the person she was and every day talk to the person she now is, and recognize the huge gulf between those two people.

That's all.  Happy Thanksgiving.

Frequent Flyer

I just watched a 20-minute documentary online called Frequent Flyer (streaming free on Vimeo). A friend linked to it on his Facebook page, so I checked it out.  The film is about folks who try to accumulate as many frequent flyer miles as possible, and then reap the rewards of platinum status, get upgrades, free trips, etc -- and because the counter starts fresh every year, they need to constantly make sure they're doing what they can to maintain status and keep flying.  I'd never before heard the concept of "mileage runs" where people find cheap flights just for the purpose of getting miles.  One guy paid people to fly back and forth on an $8 flight in Thailand, multiple times a day, just to get miles.

While I suppose there is some appeal to the idea of having enough miles banked that I could go anywhere I wanted and not have to worry about the cost, and get upgraded to a bigger seat, I really just don't get it.  To get to that point in the first place would cost tons of money, but the bigger issue for me--

I hate airports.  I'm not afraid of flying, I don't really mind the actual on-plane experience-- but the hours spent sitting around waiting for a flight, the trudging around with your bags, the constant underlying worry about whether the flight is really going to take off on time, and whether you're going to get wherever you're going and won't have to start figuring out other plans, the overpriced and terrible airport food matched only now by the overpriced and terrible food on the plane itself, the rationing of reading material so that I don't end up with three hours to go and nothing to do.  Packing, unpacking, repacking.  Picking the right security line.  Feeling trapped.  Having no control at all over whether or when I get anywhere.

Maybe if I liked traveling more, I wouldn't dislike the airport experience so much.  I actually like being in a new place.  I like exploring things I haven't seen before.  I just dislike the drudgery that goes along with it.  Having to schedule every minute of the day, because you can't just sit in a hotel room on vacation, there's nothing to do, I don't like sitting by a pool or on a beach, I like doing and seeing things-- but there's only so much sightseeing worth doing, there's only so much time I can spend in an art museum-- although I'll certainly admit that my art museum threshold is much lower than most people's.

I did much too much flying over the past few years, with the TV-related meetings in LA, and constantly flying back and forth.  Even what's in my mind as constantly flying wasn't really constantly in the sense that people who fly a lot fly -- I was on a plane like 20 times in 2007, and probably 20 more in 2008, and significantly fewer times in 2009.  I suppose if I had been methodical and organized about it, I could have accumulated some real amount of frequent flyer miles.  Instead, I flew Southwest most of the time, because it was cheap, and it gave me the flexibility to cancel and change without fees.  The few times I flew on another airline, because it was cheaper, a meeting would get moved, or a meeting would get added, or a meeting would materialize out of nowhere, and I'd find myself having to call up the airline and search the web for a decent fare, and pay a change fee, and agonize over whether it was worth it, and should I commit to the change, and will the meeting really happen or am I wasting money.  After a couple of times of that unpleasant game, I just started booking Southwest flights when they were cheap, knowing that I could at least try and make my meetings work around some constellation of flights, and then cancel the ones I didn't need and use the credit to rebook future ones.  And it worked.  And I ended up with like two free roundtrips over two years, which was probably nothing compared to what someone who thought about miles would end up with.

My wife is slightly more conscious of this stuff than I am, and had been accumulating miles on her credit card (I'm doing that too now, and trying to charge whatever I can in order to get those miles, instead of never thinking about it), and so our honeymoon flight was basically free, combining both of our miles and credit card points.  That was cool I guess, except what's been even cooler is that I haven't had to get on a plane since my honeymoon.  It feels silly, since I'm not elderly, I'm not incapable of going places-- but I really like not traveling, I like not thinking about getting to the airport and packing a suitcase and dealing with taxis and guidebooks and things that cost money that I don't want to pay for.

Maybe that's more of it than I'm giving credit to-- the money, I mean.  Maybe if I had some amount of money that made me feel comfortable, and I didn't worry about every time I spend anything, traveling would be easier and more fun.  If I didn't try to decode the public transportation system to avoid taxis wherever possible.  If I didn't try to comparison shop water in the airport (in LA, I discovered that orange juice at McDonalds was the cheapest beverage there-- cheaper than water at the newsstand-- thus on a $119 flight, I consoled myself with the idea that I was being frugal by saving 79 cents on a beverage).  But I'm not wired that way.  I think even if I had no reason to be worried about it, I'd still be worried about it.

On my honeymoon, we booked our hotel at hotels.com, and we didn't pay a ton for it -- not the high tourist season, I think it was like $109/night or something like that.  A few days before we left, I did a stupid thing and rechecked the price online.  And it had gone down significantly, to something like $69/night, since I guess they had a lot of rooms free.  And hotels.com had some sort of guarantee, but only up to some number of days before the trip that had already passed-- I was too late.  Called and tried to plead a case, but no dice.  And I was really annoyed at myself for not checking the details and not realizing I could have been checking all along and if the price had gone down earlier (and I don't know that it had), I could have gotten back the difference-- and even though I knew we weren't paying some crazy amount of money, and the flights had been free with miles, and all in all we were being pretty smart about things-- it still nagged at me that I'd possibly "lost" a few hundred dollars.

I think this is why gambling holds no appeal for me.  The thought of a loss hurts more than any potential gain.  I went to Las Vegas twice-- once when I worked in Texas before law school, the company flew everyone to Vegas for a weekend to celebrate the end of our training-- I won $7 in a slot machine, decided that was enough for me, and treated myself to ice cream-- and for a friend's bachelor party, where I lost $12 and, again, decided that was enough.

I must be in the mood to ramble this morning-- anyway, the documentary was interesting, and totally worth watching.  20 minutes is a nice length for a documentary-- feels like a TV episode, not so short as to say nothing but not so long as to bore.  Recommended.

Scripts

I read a fair number of scripts.  Not as many as perhaps I should-- I tend to read them in bursts-- but I've probably read a hundred movie scripts this year and about the same number of TV scripts.  Most of what I read is not that inspiring.  Some of them I can appreciate even if I don't love-- most of them I can see why they're getting made or not getting made-- but very rarely do I read something that has me laughing out loud at my computer, or forgetting that I'm sitting in front of my computer reading, forgetting that I could stop and do something else instead.

I just read the script for Albert Brooks's movie, "Mother."  I've seen Mother three times, I think.  It's absolutely a terrific movie, I've forced more than one person to watch it, it's very very funny.

Sometimes I really like a script and then it turns into a less terrific movie (The Invention of Lying comes to mind).  I don't usually experience it in the other direction-- I don't usually read scripts when I've already seen the movie-- so maybe it happens this way all the time, but, gosh, I was blown away reading the Mother script.  There are some scenes, or at least some lines, that felt new-- I assume they were cut from the movie, or the draft of the script I stumbled on wasn't the final version.  But even the ones that weren't new still had me laughing, out loud, alone, at my desk.

I forget sometimes that a script can be really good.  That a great script can read great-- that no matter how tempting, I shouldn't be rationalizing to myself that something can be funny in execution that isn't on the page.  Yes, that happens-- but it doesn't always happen, and the standard can still be funny on the page.  Good script, good movie, I wish Albert Brooks made movies more often than he does.

Really Good Book I Just Read

Sorry I forgot for the past week that I have a blog.  Wasn't intentional.

Anyway: I just finished reading a great book with a not-great title.  "And Then There's This," by Bill Wasik.  From the title, do you have any idea what this book is about?  Anyway, the subtitle helps: "How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture."  It's about the stuff that everyone links to, why some things take off and some don't, and how to think about marketing in the Internet age.  More specifically, it's about a bunch of experiments in viral culture that Wasik played around with -- starting flash mobs, creating a fake backlash against a hipster indie rock band, building websites that would spread like wildfire, etc.  It's a smart book.  Plays right into the kinds of stuff I like to think about and read about.  Wasik somehow gets it exactly right, I think, as far as his overall thesis-- we live in a media-dominated world where every ten minutes, something new is going to hit, the word will spread, and it will just as quickly die, only to be replaced by something else.  So many of us are spending so much of our lives online, reading, consuming that it's inevitable things will grab us, and explode.  Figuring out why some things explode and some don't, and whether you can engineer the system-- that's the fun part.  I don't think I could recommend this book more highly.

Which is why it's sort of funny that for all of Wasik's relatively successful efforts creating ideas that spread, which he talks about in the book, the book itself has spread pretty darn poorly.  There are 7 amazon reviews, and it's ranked #191,302 on there.  I've found a few reviews online (mostly positive), but, really, there's not much out there. 

This is interesting to think about.  Because the book is good, and Wasik has established success finding audiences. 

Part of me wants to give the easy answer -- spreading a link online is free, buying a book isn't.  The online "audience," as I certainly discovered with Anonymous Lawyer, is of course going to be bigger than the audience willing to spend money on a book.  Of course.

But that can't be all of it.  Is it that the audiences are in fact completely different?  Well, I don't know about that -- I can't imagine that amount of time spent reading things online doesn't correlate at least slightly positively with number of books read.  Sure, there are definitely book readers who don't spend time on the Internet, but if you compare someone who's reading things and following links online, versus someone who's reading nothing -- I have to expect the people reading online are also the ones more likely to be reading offline.

Is it that books about Internet culture are doomed to fail because they're in the wrong format?  I wrote a few weeks ago about Scott Rosenberg's book on the history of blogs, Say Everything.  Also excellent.  9 Amazon reviews, ranked #105,624.

Are certain topics book-worthy and some just aren't?  I'll admit, Wasik's book wouldn't suffer it were a long essay online.  The links would help-- I've gone to the computer a few times while reading to see if I could find more about whatever he's writing about.  There are certainly compelling e-book features I could picture going along with this-- except I don't think anyone's making e-books with unique features rather than just dumping the text into ePub-format.

I'd sort of love to have this conversation on a bigger scale-- to talk to other people who've written books about or based on Internet kinds of things-- and see if together we could figure out not only why the audience isn't there, at least in numbers approaching what we can build on the Internet, but whether there are any answers or broader lessons to be learned about the future of books, the future of blogs, the future of content, I don't know. 

Not quite sure how to go about that-- if I got an e-mail from an Anonymous Lawyer reader asking me why I think my book (though it sold nicely, and the reviews were really quite unexpectedly positive) didn't approach in sales the number of people reading the blog, and whether I want to talk about that, I'm not sure how inclined I would be to give it a real response-- but maybe by throwing this post up there, it will find its way around somewhere and I could have that conversation with someone interested in having it.

OK, so the book is recommended.  Check it out.

New piece on the WSJ Law Blog

Just wrote a fun piece on law firm bonuses, on the Wall Street Journal law blog.  Link here. 

I think it might be the first time I've used the words "whimsy" or "clawback" in anything I've written.

(How's that for a teaser?)

New Anonymous Lawyer Post

New anonymous lawyer post about the $1.26 billion default judgment against PepsiCo because a legal secretary screwed up.  I think it's funny, hence the link.  Enjoy.

The World Series

I have yet to watch a moment of the World Series, and I'm not entirely sure why.

Part of it is that I haven't been home at the start of any of the games, and I've gone to sleep early all three nights, so the most I would have seen is some middle innings.

Part of it is, especially as a Mets fan, I don't really have a rooting interest.

And even without a rooting interest, that usually leads me to root for underdogs-- the Phillies won last year's world series, and the Yankees can never be the underdog.  There is no underdog.

Part of it is that postseason stats don't count in fantasy baseball.

Part of it is that I have not yet converted my wife into a baseball fan, although her baseball game tolerance has somewhat increased.

Part of it is that we're not at the elimination games yet, and those are always the most interesting.

Maybe I'll watch tonight.  Maybe.

No Impact Man: The Book

Six weeks ago, I saw No Impact Man: The Documentary.  (The link is to my blog post about the movie.)  Mostly the film made me wonder why the man and woman were married to each other, and whether the whole thing was just a gimmick to make a movie.

The book is far more interesting than the movie. 

Mostly because the guy seems a lot more human, and honest.  And there's space to talk more about why he was doing what he was doing.

That said, the book also makes the movie feel extremely false.  In the movie, you're sort of led to believe that everything happened pretty much at once.  They're going to live for a year without electricity, with local food, etc.  But in the book you realize it was gradual, and it wasn't until six months in that they turned off the electricity, and they still used the washing machine, and they still went out to restaurants if friends invited them, and they didn't actually give up coffee (the movie makes a huge deal out of the coffee).

I don't blame them for making exceptions, and not being completely insane for a year-- but after reading the book it seems like the movie pretends things were different from how they really were.

Part of that is perhaps explained in the introduction, where he mentions that the filmmakers got involved partway through the experiment.  Which I think must mean that at least some of the scenes in the film were staged or re-created.  Maybe not, but it seems like they must have been, just to cover things like the beginning of the experiment, or maybe that's just why it seemed like they did everything at once-- because by the time they were being filmed, they were months into it.

Read the book instead of seeing the movie.  It's quite a bit more worthwhile.

Capitalism: A Love Story

Saw Michael Moore's film about capitalism.  I feel kind of the same way about this one as I felt about Sicko: Michael Moore is really good at making movies.  They're entertaining, they're compelling... and it's only when thinking about it afterwards that you realize that even if the underlying message sort of makes sense, the movie kind of doesn't, a lot of the examples don't actually make the right point, and a bunch of it is merely "hey, look at this bad thing that happened to these good people," without effectively making the case that it's evil-thing-of-this-particular-movie's fault that this bad thing happened, and that sometimes bad things just happen and it's not entirely fair to blame insurance companies or the government or capitalism.

I think, if the film was trying to be completely honest and straightforward, it wouldn't be called Capitalism, it would be called Corporate America.  Moore's problem isn't with capitalism as an economic system-- it's with large corporations and how they treat their employees.  And how they influence government.  I'm on board that a lot of corporations treat people pretty badly, and have a lot of power in our government, and that in a lot of ways that's probably not a great thing.  But I don't think that necessarily means capitalism is the underlying problem.

If I write more about it, I'll spoil parts of the movie.  So I'll just leave it at that: entertaining movie, but not entirely logical.