Coming Up Aces

“I told him that a player on a streak has to respect the streak… because they don’t – they don’t happen very often.” – Crash Davis, Bull Durham

I’m not one to believe in the graces of God coming down to redirect our sails into greener pastures. I’m not one to believe that the universe is laced with some cosmic equation of karma that proportionately awards behavior in a ‘what goes around, comes around’ kind of way. (Proof). I’m sure there are dozens of other, similar-type belief structures that in one way or another, explain a lot of the hows and whys of every day human life. I’m not one to believe in those either. Not because I’m an overall non-believer, but it usually takes a little more evidence for me to buy in. It helps me to believe in the tangible. And part of it, I’m sure, is that it helps me believe in me. If I had to justify my successes by admitting they were a product of a greater majestic blueprint, it would start to take away a feeling of accomplishment.

But I’m not here to make this all about beliefs. I’ve done mildly well avoiding that gigantic, polarizing bag of opinions, and this time, I only use my abbreviated thoughts as a spring board to the most prevalent topic on my mind. I opened this post with a quote from one of my favorite movies. I was going to say ‘if you haven’t seen it, you should,’ but that’s not entirely true. If you really hate baseball, well, then I’d say skip it. Otherwise, it’s classic. And what the quote is referring to is a scene in which a young pitcher is the driving force behind a triple-A ball club’s winning streak. Now, the point of the quote is that it never matters how or why a streak starts, but whatever you believe you’re doing or not doing that might or might not have sparked the streak, well, you just keep doing or not doing it. As Crash says, moments later, “If you believe you're playing well because you're getting laid, or because you're not getting laid, or because you wear women's underwear, then you ARE!”

This kind of superstition is rampant in baseball. From never stepping on the foul line (guilty superstition) to adjusting your batting gloves to tapping your toes to touching the center field fence before every inning, I’ve never met a player that doesn’t do or believe in anything, as silly or serious as it might seem.

Funny part is, this quote applies to baseball and real life the same. I know plenty of people that find small or insignificant things in their habits that they deem responsible or any number of random victories or rolling hot streaks. Whether it’s a guy having good luck with meeting girls after switching shampoos, or a lawyer winning case after case because of a new leather binder, it doesn’t take much to assign a reason.

So why do we do it? Why do we think the winds don’t change for any reason? Why can’t we accept that we might be doing something different which elicited these new results? Why don’t we see there might be consistently random patterns of success and failure based on things out of our control?

Assigning something responsible for a run of good luck is regrettable. I think there is a lot to be gained by blaming yourself as your successes or failures begin to stack at unprecedented rates. Believing that a new pair of shoes is responsible for your better free throw shooting percentage is silly. Now, believing that you think the shoes make you better, but in reality, they just give you more confidence to go do your thing? Well that’s a theory based in much stronger reality.

There is also the theory that winning begets winning and confidence begets confidence, or combing the two and saying confidence breeds success. So now we have the idea that you don’t know why things have taken a turn for the better, but it’s a snowball effect. It happens once? Luck. It happens twice? Coincidence. It happens three times? Well obviously I can do no wrong, so I have no reason to believe that numbers four, five, and six will happen without even having to try. And a confident person will typically have a higher success rate, so once again, is based in some sort of reality.

So there are a lot of reasons that can be applied to a hot streak. Quite honestly, most of them are plausible, and I’d be lying if I said I really thought any of them were 100% correct. But what I do know is they’re rare. Maybe not specific to an athlete, since I’m pretty sure it’s not rare that Derrick Rose is a badass on the court every night. And maybe not to a brilliant mind, since I’m pretty sure getting A’s throughout high school in college goes past a ‘hot streak.’ But for those caught in the middle, those of us somewhere between slightly above constant failure and just below constant success, streaks are not a dime a dozen.

When you find yourself turning over aces every time you’re dealt a card, don’t bother checking the deck. It might be random, it might be you, it might be a higher power, it might be your shoes; it doesn’t matter. Whatever keeps you moving in the right direction is worth believing in.

Hold Back the Day

When I listen to heavy metal, which is still pretty frequently, it isn't always easy to decipher the lyrics. "All they do is scream, how can you understand what they're saying?" I often hear. Well it's true. Without the lyrics printed in the inlay of the CDs back in the day, and now, without the internet, it was quite difficult to know, word for word, what some of your favorite songs are talking about. This isn't true across the board, but it helps me launch into today's topic.

So I was driving to work yesterday, listening to some of that aforementioned metal, and was jamming out to one of my favorite songs. Attempting to sing along, I realized I had very little assurance that what I was screaming was accurate to the original lyrics. I wanted to look them up so I could sing along with a little more confidence, but there was another reason, and a reason that can apply to all music. So often, we blindly sing along with songs without thinking about their meaning. Aside from surface-level pop songs where the meaning is about as subtle as the intent behind girls' Halloween costumes, there is probably a meaning to the songs we know and love that flies under the radar or over our heads. With the song I referenced, 'Hold Back the Day' by Devildriver, I wanted to read the lyrics so I could figure out what the hell the song was about. It kinda loses its luster if your favorite song is actually presenting the message of worldwide genocide or puppy slaughter. The music and the sound and the talent of a song is one thing, but if you're not on board with the intent behind the lyrics, it's hard to truly identify with it. I think this can accurately explain why I haven't left the world of heavy metal yet. The average person might _think_ metal is all about genocide and puppy killing, but more often than not, the song lyrics are so well written, so poetic, so deep, and with so much more social, political, romantic meaning than the pop music released these days.

Fast forward to me reading the lyrics to 'Hold Back the Day,' and trying to figure out the meaning. I took what I discovered and combined it with what I already had uncovered and tried to piece together meaning. It was during this process that I realized, 'it doesn't matter.' Sure, like I said, we all want to believe we're singing along to words that we could see ourselves writing. But the reality is: art, in all forms, is under the control of the audience.

So often we look at a painting or listen to a song or read a poem and think, 'what is the artist trying to say?' You see two red dots on a canvas of yellow and try to conjure up the thoughts of the person behind the paint brush. The artists is sitting behind the painting saying, 'can't you see it! It's the back of the school bus! It symbolizes the lack of detail we pay attention to the education system, even though it's right in front of our face!!' Really, Picasso? Unfortunately for you, the deeper meaning, the hidden tricks, the small details of your work, will most likely be lost on anyone who’s not an enthusiast of your work. Same goes for music. You could masterfully maneuver the strings of a guitar that no human has ever done before, but if the average listener just goes, 'huh, sounds cool,' in between bowl hits, well then all the talent in the world is lost. Writing: you could interweave and disguise hundreds of references, jokes, symmetries, quirks, nuances, or any other skillfully arranged piece, while at the end of the sonnet, the reader goes, 'so, Shakespeare was gay?'

I was a really bad English major a.) Because clearly I don't enjoy following the rules of grammar, and b.) There were times where I couldn't get away from thinking, 'maybe he just wrote it to write it.' You know, maybe there are not 10 different meanings to the poem. Maybe it wasn't a social game-changer. Maybe it didn't have political subplots and conspiracies. Maybe it was just one night that Whitman got a little drunk and thought it was funny. And all that thinking is obviously the lazy, easy-way out, not wanting to write a paper on it mentality.

But now I see, that's not the case. In the same way that we, the audience, might miss the intricacies of a piece of art, we can also over-analyze something that was never meant to be anything more than entertainment. The point being, the author doesn't get to choose. I have no idea how what I write impacts those who read it, the same way that musicians have no idea their audience will interpret the newest single. It's asinine to blame a band for a school shooting. The kid can say 'Marilyn Manson was the reason I did this' all he wants, but that's just because when he listened to the CD, that's what he got out of it. Sure, you probably won't have people bringing guns to school after hearing a Britney Spears song, unless they're scared of organized teenage dancing in school hallways, but the point is the same. When you create something, you don't have control of how people will interpret.

It's with that point that I bring this full circle. I looked up the lyrics to 'Hold Back the Day' hoping to find meaning that I could latch on to, when I already had something in my head that I liked:

'Miles to go and skies to fly, hold back the day,

Miles to go and skies to fly, it's darkest before the dawn.'

I created my own interpretation. Sorry, Dez (lead singer), but I'll take from it what I need.

The Best Laid Plans...

I spend the majority of my waking hours at work or in a car. This is common for the average person. I bring this up because given that on any given day, I spend approximately 11 hours of my day either inside my building or inside my car. Needless to say, that's where most of my thinking takes place. My latest revelation pulls examples from my everyday experiences.

There is a famous quote that goes "The best laid schemes o' mice an' men / go oft awry." A book I've never read, but a quote I enjoy.

Now, I'm a strong advocate of planning, and without realizing it, we take for granted how many things in this world are actually planned out to the smallest detail. From the label on your water bottle to the flight schedules at an airport, there aren't many aspects of life that didn't receive a great amount of attention and planning.

I opened with that work/car explanation because when you're so engrossed in something, it's easiest to take examples from what you know. Admittedly already confessing my distaste for traffic, I realized something recently. Besides just tacking on lane after lane until it takes 10 minutes to cross the road, I'm always wondering why our road systems weren't designed better to increase the flow of traffic and alleviate the bottle necks and traffic jams. Every single day I witness the follies of our 'expressway' system, crawling past exit after exit at the pace of a small child riding a Powerwheels. Aren't there people out there smart enough to orchestrate a scheme that allows for high capacity work traffic? Surely, I don't have the answers, but what I can tell you is that whoever was behind the planning of the current traffic system in this city, thought it was all figured out. You can't tell me someone would propose a new grid to a board of officials and say, 'well, based on my calculations, this expressway from Northbrook to Chicago will be bumper to bumper and crawling more than twice a day, assuming the number of cars on the road increases at its current rate, traffic coming from the on and off ramps will cause a mild form of hysteria, and any hint of additional construction will bring the whole thing to a screeching halt.' APPROVED! No, sorry. You can't propose something that you know will fail based on reasonably unlikely but still possible scenarios (unless you're Thomas Andrews), and have people agree. You have to propose something that without a doubt will succeed. That's the only way something of this magnitude would be given the green light.

So based on that theory, when these highways were designed, built, modified, and maintained, each instance was thought to be perfect, maximizing fluidity and reducing stoppages. So then, aside from increases in population, which obviously factors in, why is there so much damn traffic? Because, like I've vented recently, people don't know how to drive, don't pay attention, don't care, and ultimately exploit a system that would most likely succeed without questionable drivers.

Now let's go to a work example. Part of my job includes designing online training. Employees or customers register online for a course, then must log in to our system to find their learning path. Any course they registered for should be in there, you go through the course or courses, complete the requirements, and you get credit. It seems so unbelievably simple, and for the high majority of people reading this, I'm sure it would be easy for you to complete the process. Yet my team here has been reduced to creating every single 'safety valve' so people don't screw it up. We tried putting the instructions on how to properly exit the course as the last slide, but no one ever read it. We made it a window that pops up before the training even starts, people either forget it or close it without reading. We can't make adjustments or advancements to new training ideas because we always have to consider how the functionality will appear to people that can't pay attention long enough to figure out how to complete a training. We get calls about people not receiving credit, and when we ask if they viewed all of the slides, they'll say no. We have devised a program and a process that should be clear as crystal to a 4th grader, but functioning adults in the world can't comprehend the simple instructions that we beat over their heads.

The point of this was not to throw all of my fellow employees under the bus, as I'm sure a few of my coworkers will read this, but it's to point out that no matter how we set this system up, as perfect as it was constructed, there are still people that poke holes in the blueprint and ruin your structure.

The best laid schemes of mice and men - often don't consider the human element. We are an amazing species. We have the ability to destroy that which was built for us, to abuse that which is there to make our lives better, to ignore that which can make our lives simpler, and selfishly trounce through life without considering the consequences of our careless actions.

I know, that was a reach, a broad slap in the face, and probably off topic enough where it deserves its own post, but I don't always stay on topic. I shouldn't generalize, so I won't. There are people out there that are like water in a broken surface, they will always find the cracks. And once one does, the rest will follow, until the crack is a hole, and the surface shatters, requiring repair to once again be functional. There is no plan for the human element besides planning to adapt and repair.