It’s that holiday time of year again. And again I have a holiday card to share with you all. Spend some quality time with people you love whether they are your given family, chosen family, or whoever else. Eat something good. And I’ll see you in 2024.
Anyone with children will know that kids toys love to make noise, especially cheap electronic noise. The books sing. The tables sing. The chairs sing. Everything sings these horrible, tinny, little songs that you can’t escape. They’re awful. I hate them. They are a one-way ticket on the express train to Headache Town for me.
I hate them so much, in fact, that when they come into the house via some well-meaning gift-giver I make them quietly disappear as soon as the children have wandered away from them. As my sister once said to me, gifts are meant to be given and after that it’s up to you what you do with them. I’m paraphrasing a bit, but that’s the gist.
However, one such toy found it’s way into our lives and made an impression on me.
When Penny and Bea were just becoming mobile, they were absolutely obsessed with the television remote. They are still obsessed with it, of course, but now they know what it does. Back then it was just a fun thing to hold on to that was always hanging around and being used by the grown-ups. The obsession got so serious that we had to hide the remotes out of their field of view or they would get upset at not being able to play with them.
Sarah or I—not sure who—had the brilliant idea of getting a couple of toy remotes for them to mess around with so the real remotes might lose their fascination. Sarah found one on Bezo’s store and it arrived shortly thereafter. The girls were happy and the toy became a beloved thing. Here is a photo of it.
The remote features a big 3 stage switch on the side to set it to off, low volume, or high volume. At first, this switch confounded the children. I could set it to off and be sure that I wouldn’t hear the beeping and chirping and music it polluted the room with. Gradually, as their fine motor skills developed, they learned to switch the thing on and had no reservation to set it all the way to high volume. Of course! Things are so much more fun when they are very loud, right?
And so, despite our valiant efforts to keep the thing set to off, we became acquainted with the music it made. At first you try to ignore it, let it fade into the din of two small children. Eventually, though, it starts to cut through the noise, it starts to insert itself into your consciousness, and you become aware of what it’s saying.
Most of the sounds the remote makes are pretty regular. Calling out the numbers. Stating the functions of the buttons. A song about how distressed the singer is that there isn’t more time in the day to watch television. You know, normal stuff.
Fortunately for you, you’re reading this in a multimedia format, so I can share the sounds with you. Here’s a sampling of what I am talking about.
There’s one song, however, that plays any time you turn the remote on. You hear it a lot because the kids are always switching the thing on and off. Then you start to really listen to the words the woman is singing from the remote. And then you realize that the lyrics are pretty weird. Like, seriously weird.
It’s great. And by “great” I mean “distressing”.
Seemingly innocuous, right? But really pay attention to what the words say.
Let’s gather round to pretend We’re going to enjoy some TV shows With our friends
Are we pretending to watch TV shows with our real friends? Or are we pretending to watch TV shows with our imaginary friends? Are we pretending to enjoy TV shows we are actually watching? What’s going on in this song? Is it calling for us to deceive our friends while we watch TV with them?
What adult thought this song was a good idea? Who paid so little attention that this thing is embedded in who knows how many toy remotes floating around the world?
The children will never understand the nuance if they even process the lyrics at all. But I’ve been thinking about this song for like a year and a half now. Maybe longer? I can’t figure it out. I don’t think I ever will figure it out.
But now I have shared it with you so it can take root in your mind. You’re welcome.
Listen to me reading you this post right here.
Sarah and I finished our sort-of-annual Whole30 this week. It’s a nice thing to do once a year or so when you feel like it’s time to clean up your act a little. And it’s a good way to be thoughtful about your eating and drinking, even if those aren’t problem areas for you. We’ve done it a bunch of times over the years and some are harder than others. This was one of the more challenging ones.
For those who aren’t familiar, the Whole30 is an elimination diet/habit-breaking challenge. For 30 days you don’t eat added sugar of any sort, grains, legumes, dairy, carrageenan, or alcohol. Additionally, you don’t recreate baked goods or treats with approved ingredients. So, no Whole30 cupcakes, no Whole30 pancakes, no Whole30 whiskey sours. You get the idea. Finally—and this isn’t a huge deal for me—you aren’t allowed to weigh yourself during the month.
Not so bad, right? With a little practice, it’s not. The real issue comes with the sheer amount of label-reading you are required to do. You’d be surprised how many items in your grocery store have banned ingredients in them. No added sugars isn’t just no white sugar; it’s also dextrose or maltose or sucrose or many others. No grains isn’t just no bread; it’s also no canola oil or corn starch or rice. No legumes isn’t just no beans; it’s also no soy sauce or peanut oil or tofu.
Go ahead. Read the ingredients in your pantry items. You’ll see all of these things in there. It’s a lot.
The first time you do this, it’s a real challenge and requires quite a lot of learning. But, as mentioned above, this isn’t our first time. It might be our sixth or seventh? We’ve got the label-reading thing pretty dialed in.
All that aside, I’ve got some thoughts and reflections about my experience on this most recent Whole30.
That’s it. I recommend the program if you’re at all interested in tinkering with your nutrition and habits. It’s pretty eye-opening and, once you’ve figured it out, it becomes a nice reset button.
We could also call this “Failure State – Believing in Myself” but it’s not quite as snappy, is it? “Failure State – The Ability to Think My Decisions Are Good Decisions and Not Bad Decisions”.
“Failure State – Feeling Good About The Creative Choices I Make”.
Nah. None of that is good. Let’s go with “Confidence”.
You know that feeling when you’ve been working on something creative and literally at no point at all through the entire process do you feel good about it? Not like the work itself is stupid, but more like you’re stupid? Like, somehow, you totally misunderstood the assignment and you’re spending all this time making something that completely misses the mark creatively, intellectually, and spiritually? You know how you feel that feeling all the time about everything you make?
Good. I’m glad it’s not just me. I feel this way about literally everything I’ve ever made, professionally and personally. My whole career. Everything. The entire time. And I’ve spent most of my adult life working in a creative field! Even when we were doing the greenhouses, I felt this way. I’ve never not felt this way about something. Can you relate?
Worse is that this feeling puts me on edge like crazy. I’m so worried that I am making a dumb mistake that my anxiety spikes and I work myself into a sulky mess. The anxiety also really slows down my progress while I spin out about whether or not I am metaphorically shitting the bed. What a colossal waste of energy.
For example, just yesterday I received a very nice compliment from someone to whom I sent an audition for a VO project. She didn’t need to say anything to me about it. It could have just gone out there into the void like 99% of auditions do to never be heard about again. But, instead, she took time to tell me something nice about the work I put into it. It was really nice! And I really appreciated it! And she absolutely did not need to do it! And what did I say back to her? Just look!
What the actual fuck, Joe. How about a “Thank you!” or a “That’s awesome! I am glad she liked it!”
No.
Instead I offered a self-deprecating joke and then totally hammered it home because I felt weird. Slick, dude. So slick. Then I spent the whole rest of the day thinking about—and feeling bad about—this exchange. So bad, in fact, that I am now writing this post.
I’m not worried about the person who sent me the text and this weird little exchange having some effect on our relationship. We’ve known each other for a long time. It’s totally fine. But, man, am I a doofus sometimes. Like, just be gracious and take the W, dude.
Maybe allow that there is a chance, however slim, that you are actually ok at some stuff and just have faith in yourself? Maybe just a little bit? A teeny tiny bit? A speck of faith?
With professional creative work, I grind and I spin and I torment myself until the deadline comes and it’s time to present the project. I am sure I’ve written about this here before. I make my presentation with this profound shrugging feeling inside my soul that screams “I have no idea if this is good or right or if I’ve completely misunderstood and fucked it up but here it is and oh god I’ll never work again”. And boy does that suck a whole lot. I experience this every time I start a project. And, if I am being honest with myself and with you, the feeling has led me to actually fuck up some projects because I was so far inside myself that I couldn’t put one foot in front of the other to get the thing done correctly. I couldn’t put the right amount of effort in with the time allotted. And those regrets haunt you. I always want to do a good job, but sometimes I get in my own damn way.
And with personal works? Forget about it. As soon as this rears it’s hideous, malignant head the project stops. If I could share with you all the sheer mountain of aborted projects littering my projects archive, you would go mad in the face of true hopelessness. A thousand thousand projects—good ideas all!—begun and abandoned because deep in my heart I truly believe that everything I make is trash and that no one will ever want to read/watch/listen to them.
For the projects that do meet completion, by the time they are finished I have spent so much time feeling weird and uncomfortable about them that I can never see them in a good light. Even when they are good, like the audition I wrote about above. And this feeling of… shame? embarrassment? uneasiness? none of those are right, but you get the idea. This lingering, haunting feeling impedes me standing behind my work or promoting myself with any real vigor. This has been a major professional failing that we will discuss in further depth another day.
I am always in awe of people who can really promote themselves and the effort they’ve put into a project. It’s impressive! I wish I had even a tiny ounce of that, but I don’t. I can feel the inside of my chest just crawling thinking about it. The most self-promotion I can stomach is the occasional post here on The Black Laser and that is insufficient.
Another recent example I can’t stop thinking about. Ever since Verdant folded, I’ve been picking up freelance video edit projects to try and pay for my kids and life and stuff. It has been pretty tough because I live in Delaware and everything is remote. The time gap between the last time I was active and now is quite long, so people have moved on and I am out of their minds. Normal stuff. I sent an email to someone I used to work with to let them know I am on the market and looking. I made a mention in the e-mail of how awkward I find that sort of inquiry e-mail. And while that is completely true, why the hell did I write that? Why self-deprecate at all? All it does is feed the void and that’s not helpful at all. Does this person now think I find them awkward? I don’t. I really just want to work. But I couldn’t help writing some dumb ass shit because I felt nervous about representing myself and, God forbid, asking for something. I wrote that e-mail in May. I never received a reply. I think about it every single day.
Yet things do get finished. Otherwise there would be nothing here for you to read and I’d have starved to death ages ago. Worry not for things will continue to get finished for as long as I am making things. I am more than three decades into feeling like this and I don’t see it letting up any time soon. Just have to live with it and work through it.
Welcome to Failure State, a series exploring my (many) failures in life and what, if anything, I’ve learned from them.
I’ve been feeling a little fragile recently, a little bit like I’ve made too many messes in my life. Maybe not fragile. Maybe tenuous, or volatile, or prone to melancholy. Maybe fragile. Perhaps the lack of sleep only a sleeping newborn can provide is doing it. Perhaps it’s tied to my current lack of gainful employment. Perhaps it’s because I have no friends here in Delaware and no good way of making them. Perhaps perhaps perhaps. In reality, it’s all those things and more.
My hope with this series of posts is to work through some ventures in my life that I feel missed the mark. Maybe at the time I thought they were doing ok, but in retrospect they weren’t. And other times I knew I screwed the pooch in the moment.
Everyone has these experiences, but not a lot of people talk about them. Sure, everyone loves to discuss their successes, their triumphs, how they conquered their fears and won the day. But I want to digest the trials I lost. What could I have done differently? How could I have changed my thinking about a problem that might have instead lead me to success? How have my bad habits, my bad patterns of thinking about things, led me astray?
Join me over the next few months as I do some critical thinking about my life through my finger tips. This first entry will be pretty straight-forward as a way to ease us all in.
In waning hours of 2018, I was excited about what we were doing with the greenhouse business. It was tough, but I was learning a lot all the time. It soon became quite clear to me that there was still quite a bit I was completely clueless about when it came to the running, growth, and expansion of a business. How do you expand a business? How do you market a business? What the hell is a stock option?
Now, we certainly didn’t have any of that stuff on our plate with Verdant. We were busy enough trying to keep jobs going and making sure people were getting paid. But what about the future? There was going to be a future, right? (spoiler: not really) And, if there was to be a future, then this was stuff we should probably know about.
I decided to start looking at MBA programs. I wasn’t going to move anywhere for school, so close to home was ideal. I went a couple open houses for various programs. I spent months studying for the GMAT. I bought some books. I taught myself Statistics because I had never learned it before. I dug out my old Ti-82 calculator. I called up people to get recommendations. I filled out the applications. I took the test, and I did pretty well on it.
I was accepted to Santa Clara’s Leavey School of Business with a scholarship. Nice! Santa Clara worked great for me: it was close to work, close to home, and with the scholarship not unaffordable. I started the program in the summer of 2019.
I was excited! I had worked hard to get there and it felt good to be surrounded by smart people who wanted to learn. It was a feeling I missed in my greenhouse construction life. Sure, JJ and I were working and learning for Verdant, but intellectual curiosity was not a job requirement for most employees.
And the material was fun at the beginning. Certainly quite different than what I learned in film school nearly two decades earlier. It was great for a while!
Soon, however, I started to realize that I wasn’t actually learning about how to run a small business like the one we had with Verdant. Instead, we were learning how to be middle managers in large corporations of the type that cover Silicon Valley. A type I find to be particularly onerous, unfortunately. A huge focus was put on tech companies, how they are run, how they go public, and how they are eventually sold. And it makes perfect sense! Santa Clara in located right in the heart of Silicon Valley, so why not learn about how business is done there?
None of this is inherently bad, either, no matter how I feel about the funny-money “disruptors” who fuel the wild speculation of Silicon Valley and are more interested in extracting value at all cost than creating it. The ethics in the situation rely more on what you do with the knowledge than the knowledge itself. Not everyone who runs a technology company wants to pull together angel investments on a business model that cannot possibly run profitably but looks compelling on paper, put traditional forms of the industry they are disrupting out of business, make absurd amounts of money going public, and then sell it all off for it to collapse under its own weight once the angel investment is spent. But lots do. Too many do. And that’s not me.
Why, then, was I in the program? What was I looking to get out of it?
Was I going to leave my life to be a manager somewhere at Google/Facebook/Whatever? No, of course not. What I wanted from running a business was more autonomy, not less.
Was I going to start my career over? No way. At one point I was exploring some sort of lateral moves based on what I had already spent many years doing. The job counselor suggested I look into taking an entry-level position in the AV department somewhere. That was eye-opening. First, I understood in that moment that she had absolutely no clue about what my previous work was, even though I explained it. Second, she was incapable of giving useful advice. Third, a lateral move probably wasn’t likely. I guess eBay doesn’t really care about how much DaVinci Resolve experience I have?
Was I going to drink the Kool-aid and prostrate myself at the altar of that year’s Elon Musk so that I might imagine I could one day be another billionaire king, even though I don’t have the same South African diamond mining wealth? No, not in a million years. I’ve never been much of a joiner. In fact, I might be a bit too much of an iconoclast to exist in a big corporation. I could barely keep it cool in the ad industry.
So what was I doing in a place where the target was a life I didn’t want to lead? What, exactly, was I investing in? I wrestled with that. And, I am not sure that those feelings were enough for me to leave the program by themselves. As Sir Francis Drake wrote in a letter to Sir Francis Walsingham in 1587,
“There must be a begynnyng of any great matter, but the contenewing unto the end untyll it be thoroughly ffynyshed yeldes the trew glory.”
You might have heard the more popular version of that quote as it was adapted 1941’s Daily Prayer by Eric Milner-White and G.W. Briggs.
“O Lord God, when though givest to thy servants to endeavour any great matter, grant us also to know that it is not the beginning, but the continuing of the same unto the end, until it be thoroughly finished, which yieldeth the true glory”
You, dear reader, will know I am not a religious man. Yet I often think about these words when I am considering dropping a pursuit or not. They have become deeply ingrained in the way I think about things. It should be no surprise, then, that I would probably have continued through the MBA program except for one other, little thing that happened.
My third quarter began in January of 2020 on the eve of a world-stopping pandemic. We began the quarter as any other. We met in person. No one had a stash of masks in their car. You were weird if you were constantly sanitizing your hands. Do you remember those sweet, innocent days?
Just before the quarter’s end in March, all classes went online-only. Everyone struggled with the transition, as can be expected. And we all sort of thought it would just be a temporary thing and that we could hopefully resume in-person classes in the next quarter.
Oh how wrong we were!
The entirety of the next quarter was online. It made sense. Covid-19 was ripping through the world and creating all sorts of havoc, not to mention killing and incapacitating people all over the place. It was terrifying. All the protective measures—as restrictive as they were—were put into effect to keep people safe. That’s not up for debate. I understood why things had to be the way they were.
But that didn’t change that I did not click with the online class format. I’ve never been good at paying attention, not in class, not at home, not at work. It’s a miracle that I get anything done at all. A shiny thing off to the side? Oh hey neat! Attention shattered. Something to tinker with while I should be doing something else? Fun! What was I doing? Oh well, time for a coffee.
If I am to dig in and focus, I require that all distractions be removed or that I am being held liable by other people. The classroom environment was great for both of those requirements. I wouldn’t even bring a laptop; I was fully pen & paper only. Internet access in class? Prescription for total focus loss. Plus, I was surrounded by other people. They weren’t paying attention to me in the slightest, but I still would have felt weird slacking off in front of them.
With an online class, though, all that is out the window. Surrounded by no one. Constant internet access. Everything’s on the computer. The ability to turn off my Zoom camera and wander to the kitchen for a snack. Can we see how bad this was for me? And that’s just on my side. Never mind that regular technical issues got in the way from all angles. Or that the professors, no matter how knowledgable or proficient at teaching, had a hell of a time adjusting to this new format. Or that everything was slowed down at every step by the remoteness. Or that I felt totally disconnected from my classmates. It was a disaster for my learning. I don’t think I remember any of what we learned that last quarter, just how miserable the process was.
And then my scholarship ran out. I knew that was going to happen. It wasn’t a tragedy. But it did weigh into my feelings about continuing.
It was clear at that time that the rest of our MBA program was going to be online-only. We had four quarters left and the pandemic wasn’t slowing down. Was I going to go into 60 grand of student loan debt to learn material I was reasonably sure wasn’t going to play into my life? Was I going to struggle through four more quarters of online classes when I could barely manage to get through one, during which time I had learned absolutely zero? Was I going to invest the time and energy into a program that was not going to pay for itself through career opportunity? (Not to say that it doesn’t pay for other people, just that it wouldn’t have paid for me.)
Oh! And we were also asked to move out of the house we were renting because the owner needed to sell to pay for the full-time care of her mother in law. No hard feelings. She did was she needed to and was reasonable about allowing us time to get our shit in order. It was nevertheless a bummer. Our house search during these early pandemic days of the eviction moratorium was a nightmare. Our only real options were wildly inflated dumps up in the mountains that we couldn’t have afforded anyway since Sarah lost her restaurant job. That was when we were offered shelter here in Delaware and decided to move.
Add that to the list of questions. Was I now going to be doing an online MBA in California from Delaware with zero chance to go back even if in-person classes did resume? Would I add “timezone difference” to the list of things that made it basically impossible for me to pay attention during online classes?
No, I wasn’t.
In July of 2020, just before we packed up and moved across the country, three little embryos cooking away in Sarah’s belly, I sent Santa Clara notice that I was taking a leave of absence. I knew I wasn’t going to return, but I bought myself a year to change my mind. And that was the end of my MBA journey.
At this point, I have no intention of finishing. I don’t see the value in it for my life. When I need to learn about business again, I can buy a book. Or books. Many, many books with the money I didn’t spend. Sometimes I feel like I should have finished, but only because of that Drake’s Prayer mentality burned into my brain.
On the eve of the three year anniversary of that fateful e-mail, do I regret that I dropped out? Yeah, sometimes. A little. Maybe more than a little. Mostly because who knows where it could have led in a different life. Am I like 80% confident that I made the right choice? Yeah, I am. And sometimes 80% is all you can ask for.
I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this dive into one of my personal failures. As I wrote in the intro, this was an easy one. Next time, we’ll dive into a subject I feel much, much more conflicted about. Guilt! Shame! Regret! It will have it all. I’m not even sure which topic it will be yet, exactly, because that description fits most of them.
On Thursday March 30, we welcomed Wilhelmina Shields Dillingham to the family. Some quick nickname options for those who find four syllables to be too many syllables: Willie, Billie, Mina, and (if you’re dad) Wilbur.
Her birth was reasonably quick and, for her, uneventful. She emerged at 34 weeks and 4 days at a healthy 5 pounds, 15.2 ounces. Quite a big baby for that developmental age.
She was whisked off to the NICU for monitoring, as we expected with a premature baby. Her stay in Hotel Neonatal Intensive Care was similarly uneventful. She just had to learn to eat through her mouth. That’s something you don’t expect one needs to learn, but it is. For the first few days her nutrition was supplemented through an NG tube. What she didn’t take through her mouth was forced into her stomach through her nose. Calories are more important than style, sometimes. A few nights later she pulled the tube from her nose in a grand declaration that she would only be eating through her mouth from then on, thank you very much. And she did!
She was strong enough and big enough that some of the scary things that happen with premature babies—and happened with her older sisters—didn’t happen. No oxygen saturation issues. No heart rate issues. No digestion issues. She’s what the doctors referred to as a “feeder and grower”: an easy, boring baby that just needs a little bit more time to cook under medical supervision. It’s really all you could hope for in the circumstances. Miraculously boring.
The NICU and the related PCICU at Johns Hopkins are hard places for Sarah and me. We experienced some of our very worst days there. And it would be disingenuous to claim we didn’t go into this with that trauma hanging over our heads and clouding our expectations. So to have Wilbur’s stay be so profoundly boring? That was the greatest relief.
On the thirteenth day, she was released to come home. Her sisters, who until this point only had a vague notion that there was another baby on the way and were convinced that mommy and daddy had new babies in their bellies, greeted her warmly and proceeded to try to kill her with a toddler’s kindness.
In the days since, the accidental homicide attempts have continued but so has the love. Fortunately, Wilbur is growing more robust by the day and will soon be able to withstanding her sisters’ clumsy expressions of adoration.
Welcome, Wilbur! We love the crap out of you!
A few years ago, when we moved back to California from New York, we needed a car. Well, we needed two cars, but that’s beside the point. We needed a car because we were coming from a place where we needed zero cars. And where we had zero cars.
A generous friend of mine let me assume ownership of a well-used Honda Civic he was not using. Sarah named her Judy. She was a good car and she served us well first as a commuter for Sarah, then as a second car during the pandemic, and finally as a family car we didn’t mind getting a little sandy with the children.
With the recent acquisition of a minivan, Judy became redundant. I wasn’t sure what to do with her so I asked my friend if he wanted her back. She’s about 60,000 miles further down her road, but she’s been well maintained and even got a brand-new air conditioning system a couple years back when the old one decided to die in July in New Mexico.
So I asked my friend if he wanted her back. I figured if he didn’t I could probably sell her for a decent bit of coin with how ridiculous the used car market it right now. I told him her could have her for the price of coming to get her. He agreed that it was a good deal and hired a company to come load her up and drive her to Santa Ysabel, CA. For a pretty fair price, too! He paid the trucking company basically what he would have spent to fly out here, get from Baltimore to Delaware, and then drive all the way back, except that he saved himself five days of travel and crappy roadtrip meals. Good move.
Last Saturday, a man came from Pennsylvania and loaded her up on one of those trucks I’ve seen many times before and as many times wondered about how they got cars on there. The answer is: they drive them.
It was pretty cool! I thought he was going to screw it up a couple of times, especially as he came back down the wheels going toward a car with a much greater resale value than Judy. He didn’t, however, which is good.
Before he loaded Judy up, he walked around with his phone making notes on where there was damage, as if I were renting a car. He showed me the diagram covered in dots indicating existing damage. “She’s not a looker,” I told him, “but she goes,” and signed to release the car.
And there she goes! Easily the nicest car on the truck. Goodbye, Judy! You were a good car and served our growing family well. If I could have fit three car seats across your back row, I would have kept you until your wheels fell off. Enjoy your new-old home and may you drive many many more miles.
Apologies for no audio version on this one. Ran out of time before relocating to Maryland for the new baby’s arrival. I’ll come back and record it down the road once settled.
Another year has come and another year has mostly gone. That means holidays, and holidays mean holiday cards. Consider this my holiday greetings if you celebrate or don’t or whatever.
Check our this year’s holiday card. I think we’ve outdone ourselves this year. It started out as a Halloween card idea, but with a couple of minor tweaks it became a Christmas card. Sweet.
And, yes, Penny was not at all happy about being held upside-down for the photo. Fortunately, she is resilient and two blue M&Ms turned her mood right around.
