Category: Commentary

When I read an excerpt of, for example, an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel or a quote from a poem by John Keats, what am I missing? What am I gaining?

I miss two things: 1) The rest of the story; and 2) Developing the skill required to recognize the remarkable.

I gain one thing: 1) Time.

I’m beginning to think that I should stop reading the excerpts and start reading the novels, poems and other works that are excerpted. How can I claim to have lived my own life – to have found my own path – to produce anything original if I have no understanding of that which surrounds the exceptional? That is, if I am to be exceptional, I must know the unexceptional as well.

Last weekend I saw The Informant starring a chubby Matt Damon. It was good, but nothing like what I expected. When I bought my ticket, I was expecting to see a movie along the lines of one of the “Bourne” films. The Informant is about price fixing and corn, not international spies.(Link)

This confusion in expectations threw me. When I left the movie, I was underwhelmed. I said that the movie was good, but not what I expected. I was tempering my reaction, because I felt taken. If I had watched a preview, I would have known that the movie is based on a true story and tells the tale of Mark Whitacre (Damon), a bipolar executive at Archer Daniels Midland, who is forced into becoming a whistle blower on price fixing schemes performed by ADM and its competitors. The movie goes from there.

Reflecting on the movie, I liked it very much. The story is interesting and the dialogue is compelling. The audience is constantly hearing Whitacre’s grandiose, absurd, creative, self-indulgent thoughts, which provide most of the laughs during the couple hours of run time.

I recommend the movie to those who appreciate a creative adaptation of a real-life story. I liken the feel of this movie to Thank You For Smoking.

I’m not so quick to buy into throwing out the status quo just because it’s the status quo. Nothing is perfect, I’ll give you that, and we do need to change the healthcare system. However, I don’t think that allowing the federal government to both regulate the private system and become (more of) a market participant is the best long-run solution. I simply don’t agree with allowing the federal government to sit back and watch during good times and then intervene when things go bad. I believe the free markets should actually be free of regulation and bad ideas allowed to fail.

As I understand it, there are two noble goals proposed by the new healthcare bill:

1. Expand healthcare coverage to more American citizens; and
2. Reduce the cost of healthcare to those Americans. (Correction: I intended to say that the goal is to reduce the cost of healthcare for all Americans.)

Other changes will include more government regulation of the private market to prevent the private insurance companies from denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions. I assume the companies will be allowed to have some flexibility in setting higher premiums for high-risk individuals, otherwise I don’t see how this is a winning idea.

There will also be a “public option” in which the government will become a player in the market by offering a low-cost healthcare alternative to the private offerings. This is absurd to me, especially when combined with the above increased regulation. Not only will the government have control over its competitors, but the government will be in the game too. (Not that it isn’t already.)

So far this all sounds like a petri dish for corruption and increased debt.

I heard yesterday that eighty-three percent of people are happy with their healthcare and that sixty percent receive healthcare from their employer. Those two statistics, crude and unsubstantiated even, give me a whiff of why there is resistance across the board to the healthcare bill. Why change something decent and certain for something questionable and uncertain?

A principal by which I live is to question whether the band wagon is drivable before jumping on. The noble goals set out above would indeed make the United States a better and stronger nation, however I am not sold on the means of achieving them.

In the meantime, I’ll be eating well and exercising to decrease my chance of needing healthcare for a preventable self-induced condition. You should be, too.

I’ve made significant changes to my online identity lately in an effort to tighten my personal brand. I did this because it seems like the right thing to do at this point in my life. I’m currently searching for work as an attorney, and hope that anything a prospective employer finds online will strengthen my image, not hurt it.

Managing one’s online brand is no easy task. The privacy settings on Facebook, alone, require a graduate degree in Gen X to decipher. Add to that Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Delicious, Flickr, and a dozen others and there is significant room for negative exposure.

I’m taking three steps to ensuring I have the positive and respectable online brand I wish to have:

1. Socialize with upstanding individuals – I read once that you’re only as good as your five closest friends. If they’re not going anywhere, it’s likely that you’re not either. This passes double for the internet. I friend true friends whom I know in person and I trust their level of maturity.
2. Vigilant use of privacy settings – When number one fails, it’s nice to be able to contain the damage. By setting the privacy settings such that only friends can see comments I don’t like, I can keep them from the public.
3. Abstinence if necessary – Sometimes it’s just not worth it to be on a certain service, either because of the people attracted to it, a lack of privacy settings, or another reason. In these cases, I would rather sign off permanently and not have to worry about it.

Some people fear having an online presence, and I’ve always fought that. There are two main reasons I like sticking my neck out:

1. Having an online brand is a reality of today. It’s easy to connect and communicate online. I’ve kept up with far more friends – even on a digital level – than I otherwise would have.
2. Another positive specific to blogging is that I am able to establish myself on dozens/hundreds of topics. No other medium would allow me flush out my thoughts or you to access them. I can take a stance, argue it, and create discourse – for better or worse. Whether my beliefs change or are strengthened by the process, only time will tell.

Blogging, twittering, and facebooking are worth it, to me, for those two reasons.

I saw Departures at the State Theater in Traverse City, Michigan last night. The movie is a Japanese film by Yōjirō Takita that won the 2008 Best Foreign Picture Academy Award.

The movie is about a cellist, Daigo, who, because of the dissolution of his orchestra, is forced to move from Tokyo to a house his mother left him in rural Japan. He unknowingly becomes a mortician and his life becomes complicated from there.

There were a couple things I loved about this movie.

• Diago’s wife, Mika – Ryoko Hirosue is the actress who played Mika. I thought she did a wonderful job opposing Diago’s emotions throughout the movie. She’s sweet and understanding in the beginning of the movie, but lacks a true sense of her husband. By the end of the movie they a more linear understanding of each other.
• The construction of the movie – As my sister pointed out, music is used sparingly. In the few instances that it is employed, it is very powerful. This seemed appropriate to me, considering much of the movie is about death, a topic that is often uncomfortable to focus on for any length of time. The stillness of life allowed the celebration of death to resonate – scenes of the family huddled over their deceased, the family’s many thanks to Diago for making the deceased beautiful, and the muted emotions of Diago, who finds himself through comforting the families. The process is beautiful, open and, eventually, accepted.

I recommend the movie. It is well acted, interesting, and thought provoking.