The cube (in praise of solvable problems)

Saturday, February 1, 2020

Years ago, we bought a big box of new doorknobs to replace the old doorknobs in the old house we were living in. Once I had my technique down, I could replace a doorknob in a couple minutes, but every door was slightly different, warped with time, so there was enough thinking involved to keep each replacement interesting. I found the process enormously satisfying. So satisfying, in fact, that I didn’t replace all the doorknobs at once. I saved a handful of doorknobs for times when I was feeling really stressed out.

When so many of life’s problems are unsolvable, solvable problems are a wonderful distraction. When so many things seem unfixable, fixing something feels amazing.

My son got a Rubik’s Cube for Christmas. Something compelled me this weekend to sit down and try to figure it out. I missed the whole craze in the 80s, so I was completely new to it. After watching an online tutorial, I discovered that there are step-by-step systems you can apply to solving it. You can actually attack it like a programmer with code: You basically look at the cube and run if/then statements in your head to find the right algorithm to apply. After the first dozen solves, I felt like I was replacing doorknobs again, except there were as many doorknobs as I wanted!

There’s something about keeping your hands busy when your brain feels broken. I have friends with depression who build elaborate LEGO sets. I’ve read about veterans with PTSD who put together gigantic jigsaw puzzles.

We’re wired to want to turn chaos into order. Randomness into meaning.

It’s why hobbies are so important…

https://www.instagram.com/p/B8Eybh5AnIG/

There is art left to be made in this world

Saturday, June 8, 2019

Anthony Bourdain died one year ago today, when I was in the middle of making Keep Going. I gave him the last spread in the book.

My mom came to visit today. We were looking out on the lake and talking about the kids and their (seemingly) limitless curiosity. We were wondering (debating?) whether some people just come pre-wired with curiosity, or if it’s something that everybody has, like a muscle or an organ that you use or lose.

I was reminded of another similar conversation near the water: the one between Bourdain and Iggy Pop on S5E2 of Parts Unknown:

Iggy Pop: You seem like a curious person.

Anthony Bourdain: It’s my only virtue.

Iggy Pop: Curious is a good thing to be. It seems to pay some unexpected dividends.

Bourdain was a great, curious elder. I’m sorry he didn’t get to hang in with us longer, but I’m grateful for the fruits of his curiosity that he left behind.

For the rest of us, we have to stick around. Stay curious. Ask for help when we need it. There’s art left to make.

Draw a picture of Batman

Tuesday, January 15, 2019

Kid drawings of Batman (from the #kidsdrawing tag on Instagram)

Here is how I think art works: If you’re depressed, draw a picture of Batman depressed. You’re still depressed, but now you have a picture of Batman.

Page from Lynda Barry’s “Let’s draw a car and then let’s draw Batman”

UPDATE (9/26/2019):

When I was visiting my mom’s house, we found this drawing of Batman from when I was six-years-old.

A very simple rule

Monday, August 27, 2018

A letter to Emerson’s daughter, excerpted in my new one, *Keep Going*

I have a very simple rule that serves me well: Don’t think too much about your life after dinnertime. Thinking too much at the end of the day is a recipe for despair. Everything looks better in the light of the morning. Cliché, maybe, but it works.

Most parents know about “the witching hour”: that weird block from 4-6PM when your kids are more prone to meltdowns. When my oldest was young, we white-knuckled through those hours with beer and Seinfeld reruns.

There’s also a weird thing called “sundowning” that happens with to people with dementia. As the sun goes down and the shadows fall, patients tend to get more confused and anxious.

I, too, tend to suffer during these hours, which is why I have my rule. I shared it on Twitter, and a follower replied:

Great rule. I met a veteran who lost both legs in Iraq, struggled with depression, and instituted the same rule. Deal with problems in daylight. I apply that lesson at least once a month, for years now. P.S. The guy ended up getting a dual degree from Harvard, is married now

“Deal with problems in daylight.” That’s perfect.

Dark Days

Saturday, June 9, 2018

Part of the problem with depression is that it’s somewhat beyond description, and almost impossible to fathom for those of us who haven’t experienced it. I’ve been bummed, sad, melancholy, etc., but never actually depressed or suicidal, and I never really began to understand depression until I read William Styron’s 80-page memoir, Darkness Visible:

Depression is a disorder of mood, so mysteriously painful and elusive in the way it becomes known to the self—to the mediating intellect—as to verge close to being beyond description… it has to be emphasized that if the pain were readily describable most of the countless sufferers from this ancient affliction would have been able to confidently depict for their friends and loved ones (even their physicians) some of the actual dimensions of their torment, and perhaps elicit a comprehension that has been generally lacking; such incomprehension has usually been due not to a failure of sympathy but to the basic inability of healthy people to imagine a form of torment so alien to everyday experience.

Styron does his best to describe it for the reader:

The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come — not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute. If there is mild relief, one knows that it is only temporary; more pain will follow. It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul. So the decision-making of daily life involves not, as in normal affairs, shifting from one annoying situation to another less annoying- or from discomfort to relative comfort, or from boredom to activity- but moving from pain to pain. One does not abandon, even briefly, one’s bed of nails, but is attached to it wherever one goes.