Got to burn some calories before our honeymoon in Bali next week as there is a lot of great food in Bali and I don’t plan on holding back.

I don’t have a big thing for pandas (that I know of), but this photo is too cute:

Aren’t pandas actually supposed to be vicious? It seems like I read that somewhere.

I thought it might be interesting to create a word cloud out of my whole blog to see what words I’d used the most, etc. It was a little more involved than I thought it would be – and frankly not that interesting.

First, I had to export my blog as an XML file, which is easy to do using WordPress. Then I converted that XML file into a PDF of my blog using www.blogbooker.com. Created a 1,869-page PDF of my whole blog. (Pretty handy actually for backing up my blog in case WordPress ever goes down or whatever. I am emailing myself a copy of that PDF file and so will always have a copy of it on Gmail. I will try to remember to back it up every three months or so.) Then I had to convert that PDF into TXT – I downloaded a small freeware program to do that. Then cut and pasted the text into www.wordle.net to create the word cloud. If you click on the following thumbnail it will show you a larger version of the cloud.

The only thing I don’t like about is when I converted the blog into PDF and then into text, it inserted a lot of formatting type words like “embedwebsite,” “page,” and “authkey.” I wish there was a way to tell Wordle not to include certain words – otherwise I would have to go through the text file and delete them all manually, I guess. Not worth it.

Anyway, for what it’s worth, here you go:

I wasn’t that excited for the Super Bowl this year – not having ready access to NFL games, or college football games for that matter, I just don’t follow the season as closely as I used to. But I bought a few spots in one of those pools where you win money based on the score at the end of each quarter, etc., so I thought I’d get up early (it started at 6:25am here) and watch it.

I got up and got it going online, but after a few minutes I realized I was basically just bored and didn’t care and turned it off and went back to bed. I’m glad the Saints won – just because when I was a kid they were always the NFL’s perennial doormat, and I’m happy to see something good happen for New Orleans. But other than that, just not that interesting for me.

I suppose some people watch the Super Bowl for the commercials – but now you can get on the internet and watch all of them immediately as soon as they’ve aired: http://www.youtube.com/adblitz I watched a few later today and although a few were somewhat funny, overall I wasn’t that impressed with the commercials either.

So I started thinking today about the amount of time I devote to reading about sports. Much more about college football than about the NFL, to be sure, but overall just a lot of time about sports in general. And I realized that I am actually more interested in is the stuff going on in the background than I am in the actual games – recruiting, coaching hires, the draft, etc. But when it comes to the games themselves, I usually get bored pretty quickly unless it’s a really compelling game.

And it doesn’t help that there was an article in the Wall Street Journal recently analyzing the number of minutes of actual gameplay in an average NFL game: An average game lasts about 185 minutes. But only 10 minutes and 47 seconds out of a game are actual gameplay. That means that 174 minutes are spent on commercials, timeouts, shots of players standing around on the sidelines or running on or off of the field, etc. That blows my mind – only 11 minutes out of a 3 hour and 5 minute game involves actual gameplay.

Anyway, so what, right? Well, I spend the most of my nonproductive time reading about technology, politics, and sports – in that order and with sports coming up a distant third. But I am going to stop reading about sports – I’ve deleted all sports RSS feeds, browser bookmarks, etc. I’m sure I’ll still hear about major stories in sports inadvertently, but I’m going to try to cut out the time I spend on sports, give up watching the games from Vietnam, etc.

The real challenge will be not filling up that time with just more time reading about technology and politics. Maybe one day I can even cut out the politics – but that will be a lot more difficult for me than the sports.

1 Remove your doors
2 Eat half of each pet
3 Sit on a big, thick book
4 Something something keyring holder
5 Paint clocks cheery pink
6 Wear discarded food
7 Makebelieve girlfriend chair
8 Sleep in liquor cabinet
9 Embrace hug love hug meow meow
10 Small room to plan crimes
11 Hack your house key organizer
12 Mail a surprise toaster
13 Just stare more
14 Fourteen
15 Poke holes in paper things
16 Macrame shoelace tree
17 Scrapbook poop and pee
18 Euthanize even faster
19 Amputate favorite limb
20 Pencil shaving gallery
21 Immigrant coat rack
22 Shoebox of dangerous porn
23 Zen unicorn rainbow zen journal
24 Icepick to one good eye
25 Simplify fourteen harder
26 Aluminum foil swan cozy dryer
27 Smell your finger. All of it.
28 Resimplify your simplicity
29 Habitualize your zen
30 Remind your drapes, “I love you, Mrs. Textile”
31 Freeze your clutter
32 Couch fort dinner party
33 Nicene creed robot
34 Only sodomize things that forgive
35 Coaxial sweater vest
36 Transitive verb predicate clause
37 More crying but quieter
38 Inhaler nativity
39 Contact paper taxonomy binder
40 America’s Roast Beef: Yes, Sir
41 Breathe like no one’s dancing
42 Unbridled solo diaper play
43 Illuminated panty shrine

I’m back, beeyotches, I’m back. In weight-loss mode that is.

My buddy that I mentioned before that has been dieting for about three months has now lost 68 pounds. Unbelievable. I give him all kind of props for being able to do that.

I bought some new lights – front and back – today for my bike. My other ones weren’t getting it done. I also bought a whistle. One thing I miss riding a bike instead of a motorbike here is the horn. This whistle does pretty good thought. Usually the only time you hear a whistle here is if there’s a cop nearby, so it really gets people’s attention.

Peace.

That’s all. 45km tonight.

[*APPARENTLY THE WHITE HOUSE CONTACTED REUTERS AND HAD THEM RETRACT THE STORY BELOW DUE TO CERTAIN FACTUAL ERRORS. I'M NOT SURE WHY REUTERS DIDN'T SIMPLY CORRECT THE FACTUAL ERRORS INSTEAD OF PULLING THE WHOLE STORY, BUT IN ANY EVENT THE STORY IS NOW GONE.]

. . . this:

“Let me be absolutely clear. If you are a family making less than $250,000 a year you will not see your taxes go up. . . . No taxes. Your taxes will not go up.”

. . . with this February 1st article from Reuters:

Backdoor taxes to hit middle class
By Terri Cullen – Mon Feb 1, 4:09 pm ET
NEW YORK (Reuters.com) –The Obama administration’s plan to cut more than $1 trillion from the deficit over the next decade relies heavily on so-called backdoor tax increases that will result in a bigger tax bill for middle-class families.
In the 2010 budget tabled by President Barack Obama on Monday, the White House wants to let billions of dollars in tax breaks expire by the end of the year — effectively a tax hike by stealth.
While the administration is focusing its proposal on eliminating tax breaks for individuals who earn $250,000 a year or more, middle-class families will face a slew of these backdoor increases.
The targeted tax provisions were enacted under the Bush administration’s Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001. Among other things, the law lowered individual tax rates, slashed taxes on capital gains and dividends, and steadily scaled back the estate tax to zero in 2010.
If the provisions are allowed to expire on December 31, the top-tier personal income tax rate will rise to 39.6 percent from 35 percent. But lower-income families will pay more as well: the 25 percent tax bracket will revert back to 28 percent; the 28 percent bracket will increase to 31 percent; and the 33 percent bracket will increase to 36 percent. The special 10 percent bracket is eliminated.
Investors will pay more on their earnings next year as well, with the tax on dividends jumping to 39.6 percent from 15 percent and the capital-gains tax increasing to 20 percent from 15 percent. The estate tax is eliminated this year, but it will return in 2011 — though there has been talk about reinstating the death tax sooner.
Millions of middle-class households already may be facing higher taxes in 2010 because Congress has failed to extend tax breaks that expired on January 1, most notably a “patch” that limited the impact of the alternative minimum tax. The AMT, initially designed to prevent the very rich from avoiding income taxes, was never indexed for inflation. Now the tax is affecting millions of middle-income households, but lawmakers have been reluctant to repeal it because it has become a key source of revenue.
Without annual legislation to renew the patch this year, the AMT could affect an estimated 25 million taxpayers with incomes as low as $33,750 (or $45,000 for joint filers). Even if the patch is extended to last year’s levels, the tax will hit American families that can hardly be considered wealthy — the AMT exemption for 2009 was $46,700 for singles and $70,950 for married couples filing jointly.
Middle-class families also will find fewer tax breaks available to them in 2010 if other popular tax provisions are allowed to expire. Among them:
* Taxpayers who itemize will lose the option to deduct state sales-tax payments instead of state and local income taxes;
* The $250 teacher tax credit for classroom supplies;
* The tax deduction for up to $4,000 of college tuition and expenses;
* Individuals who don’t itemize will no longer be able to increase their standard deduction by up to $1,000 for property taxes paid;
* The first $2,400 of unemployment benefits are taxable, in 2009 that amount was tax-free.
Link: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100201/bs_nm/us_budget_backdoortaxes

The following is an email I sent earlier today to a friend of mine who is about to turn 40 and recently emailed me saying that they are feeling like they want to do something different with their lives. My reply does a fairly good job detailing my views on these issues so I thought I’d share it on my blog. But other than the fact that my friend is a practicing attorney (shocker), I’ve edited the email to remove any identifying information. Also, I am not sure why but I used a lot of cuss words in my reply. Maybe I get passionate about these issues – quit your job! yay! – so I tend to cuss more? Not sure what that says about me as a person. Regardless, for those of you with tender ears I’ve carefully replaced the cuss words with other non-cuss (non-cuss?) words that START WITH THE SAME LETTER AS THE ORIGINAL, OFFENDING CUSS WORDS. You can probably figure out what the cuss words were. Here goes:

[WARNING: THIS IS PROBABLY THE LONGEST EMAIL YOU HAVE EVER RECEIVED. SORRY FOR THAT. I'VE REALLY THOUGHT A LOT ABOUT YOUR EMAIL AND I HAD A LOT TO SAY. AS I'VE TOLD YOU BEFORE, YOU WERE A BIG INSPIRATION TO ME IN GETTING OFF OF MY [ANACONDA] AND ACTUALLY MOVING TO SOUTHEAST ASIA AS OPPOSED TO JUST CONTINUING TO TALK ABOUT IT. TRYING TO RETURN THE FAVOR. PERHAPS FAILING MISERABLY. BUT TRYING.]

Hey [PERSON OF NON-SPECIFIC GENDER], sorry it’s taken me a while to get back to you. I’ve actually sat down and started to reply to your email several times, but I wanted to wait until I had enough time to write a thoughtful response.

When is your actual birthday? I thought I had it on my calendar but I don’t.

For me at least, I don’t think turning 40 will bother me anymore than turning 38 did or turning 39 does. It’s just another number. But what does bother me is that, regardless of what number it is, that’s one more year of my life that’s gone and that I can never get back. Or, to put it another way, I’m one year closer to being dead.

I don’t know if you and I have ever talked about mortality – we probably have given all of the [SALAMANDERS] we’ve talked about over the years – but my mortality is something I’ve really struggled with in the past. It’s easy to walk around knowing in the back of your mind “Yeah, I’m going to die. We all die. Whatever.” But if I really stop and let myself think about it long and hard and really, truly realize that I, Hank Webb, am really going to die – as in completely cease to exist, as in disappear and never even know that I ever existed, or that any of the people I love ever existed, etc. – and that it’s really going to happen and there’s absolutely nothing I can do about it – that scares the [SYMBIOSIS] out of me. Especially when I think that I’m about to turn 39 and if you double that to 78, that’s already right at or older than the average life expectancy for a man (and that’s in the U.S. – I’m sure it’s much lower in Vietnam). Meaning that right now I’ve probably already been alive longer than the amount of time I have left before I am dead. And these first 39 years really seem to have flown by.

So I used to drive myself crazy thinking about it and being scared and reading about various religions, etc., to try to figure out if there could possibly be any way out of it. And I basically concluded that there isn’t, and that other than being aids to comfort us and make us feel better – and to control us as you’ve always pointed out – religions are not anything we can ever really be 100% sure about and so they don’t really give me much comfort. So that just leaves me as a biological animal that’s going to die just like every other animal and I figure I have two choices: (1) to continue to dwell on it and freak out about it and scare myself, etc.; or (2) to just try not to think about and to try to enjoy my life as much as possible.

I’ve been fairly successful going with the second option – I basically don’t let myself think about it anymore. And I do try to enjoy my life more. I will never say, like some people do, that I “live every day as if it was my last,” etc. If that was true, I probably wouldn’t spend 3 or 4 hours a day surfing the [FRANGIPANI] internet reading about technology and sports and politics and other meaningless [SHADRACH]. And I probably wouldn’t get angry about stuff as much because what does it really matter if you’re dead tomorrow? You get my point.

But this whole move to Vietnam was really part of attempting to do just that – to try to enjoy my life more. And it’s been successful for the most part. [PERSON OF NON-SPECIFIC GENDER], you probably remember how miserable I was practicing law. And I think you probably feel that way sometimes yourself – fortunately for you I think you feel that way much less frequently than I did. But I was really [FORMICA] miserable. I hated that lifestyle with every fiber of my being and I pretty much hated everything about it. I hated the long hours. I hated the [ARTICHOKES] I had to work with – and that includes my clients, my colleagues, and opposing counsel. I hated the billable hour system that truly made me feel like I could never just chill and relax – that whatever I was doing I could have/should have been billing time, etc. I hated the fact that I was spending the majority of my waking hours working on a bunch of meaningless [BARNACLE] that I didn’t really care about for people that I didn’t really care about. I know I’m putting about as negative a spin on it as one can, but that’s really how I felt much of the time.

And you’re right not to be too Pollyannaish about my move over here. It’s not perfect. Vietnam is [FOOTBALL] up in so many ways that I frequently am like “What the hell [DO I REALLY NEED TO REPLACE "HELL"? COME ON PEOPLE, YOU CAN HANDLE "HELL"] am I doing here?” But then I stop and think that America is also [FLARED] up in its own, different ways. And so is Canada. And so is probably every single place in the world. Human beings are [FACTORY] up and we do [FASCINATING] up things – and so to think that there is some place, any place, in the world that is inhabited by people and is not going to be [FINICKY] up is just wishful thinking. So it’s not like moving to Vietnam has been the answer to all of my problems simply because it’s Vietnam. I think I could have moved a lot of places and been equally if not more happy.

But here are some major things that have changed in my life:

(1) I work a hell [IT'S JUST "HELL" PEOPLE] of a lot less and so I have so much more free time to do whatever in the hell I want to do. I remember when I was working hard and I’d stop in Starbucks and there were all those [FINGERS] in there at 11am or 2pm or whatever just sitting around surfing the internet on their laptops, reading the newspaper or a book, chatting with their friends, etc., and I was like “Who are these [FRIENDS]? Don’t they have jobs?” Well now I am one of them. And the answer is yes, they (and I) have jobs – they just don’t have jobs that consume every waking hour of their lives. They have jobs where they can get done what they need to get done in a few hours a day, and where there’s no such thing as the billable hour system to monitor how they spent their time in six-minute increments. So when they’ve accomplished what they needed to for that day, they can go chill out at Starbucks for a while. (The only problem with that scenario is we don’t have Starbucks in Vietnam. Yet. So I’m chilling out in Huong’s House of Ca Phe or whatever, but you get my point.) (Another thing I like about teaching is everything resets every few months with the start of the new semester. You don’t have these projects, cases, etc. that drag on and on – you teach a semester and it’s over with and everything resets and you move on to another batch of students and have another shot to teach the material again. So it’s at least a little different every few months.)

(2) I make a lot less money but it is more than enough to live well on here. Yes there are times when I wish that I made more money – especially now that I’m married and thinking about having kids, etc. But money goes a lot further here since everything is so cheap. And given the drastically less amount of work I have to do for my salary, I’ll take doing what I’m doing now and making that salary in Vietnam over doing what I did in Atlanta and making more money any day of the week. Also, it doesn’t feel like such a big hit for me because even when I made that salary in Atlanta I was in the midst of either paying off my student loans and so sending a lot of money to pay off my loans each month. So my lifestyle now is truly not that much worse than it was then.

(3) I stress out about [SEAMONSTERS] a lot less. I still stress out about stuff – don’t get me wrong. And I still see people doing dumb [STEREO] and think to myself “I should whip your [FRENCH] [ANTICHRIST],” etc. But it’s not the same type of serious, wake up at night and can’t sleep stress that I used to have. Basically my attitude is that barring death, serious injury, or imprisonment, no matter what happens to me here – no matter how bad it is – all I have to do is take a 25-minute cab ride to the airport and I can be on a plane home a couple of hours later and I can leave all of this [SERENITY] behind. That will change a little bit now that I’m married and will probably have kids, but that’s a very freeing feeling to have. It’s kind of like all of this is just a dream and I can up and leave any time. So stuff just doesn’t seem like such a big deal. (And the reality is – back to the mortality angle for a moment – everyone can and should have that same feeling because everyone is going to die at some point and none of the pointless [SCINTILLA] we spend our lives stressing out about will mean a damn [I THINK "DAMN" FALLS IN THERE WITH "HELL" - I CAN SAY THIS] thing at that point anyway.)

(4) My life is interesting again. Prior to moving here, the most interesting time of my life was actually law school. Not because I was studying law, but because I had just moved to the Pacific Northwest which, as you know, is a lot different than the rural south where I grew up. Prior to 1993 when I moved to Portland, I’d never lived in any city with more than 100,000 people (and most of the places I’d lived had far less than that). Moving to the northwest really opened my mind up to so many new experiences, types of people, etc. It was just an extremely interesting time for me. And since graduating from law school in 1996 I really missed that. I still lived in the Northwest for four years after that, but I was working all of the time so it wasn’t the same. I always used to say that when you work as much as lawyers in big firms do, it really doesn’t matter where you live – an office inside of a building that you basically never leave is pretty much the same in Seattle, Portland, Atlanta, Detroit (well maybe not Detroit), etc. Since I’ve moved here, my life has become interesting again, and that has a lot of value for me.

There are a lot of other things that have changed in my life too, obviously, but those are four big ones. And I know that this is a novel-length email already, but here’s my point. None of those things required me to move to Vietnam. Number 1 is basically “Work less and in a job without billable hours.” (*Notice – it doesn’t say “Find your dream job,” or “Find something you’re passionate about so it doesn’t feel like work,” etc. That would also be great, but I think the more important thing for happiness is to just work less so you have time for the other things you happen to be passionate about.) Number 2 is basically “Live somewhere where your money goes farther and be willing adjust your lifestyle downward a little bit if necessary.” Doesn’t have to be a foreign country – could be a smaller town in the U.S. where [SHELTER] just doesn’t cost as much. Number 3 is “Chill the [FELT] out.” No further explanation needed. And Number 4 is “Find a way to make your life interesting again.” Again, doesn’t have to be by moving to a foreign country or anything that drastic. And actually Number 1 – working less – will probably make your life more interesting just because you have more time to do the things you’re actually interested in.

I’ll wrap this up like this: Only you know whether you’re happy or not. And only you know what would make you happier. But if you’re not happy and could be happier, then figure out a way to do whatever it is that would make you happier. We are 40 now and it’s not a [FLEMISH] joke anymore. These are our real lives – we’re really doing whatever it is that we’re going to be doing – it’s not a dress rehearsal. It’s going to suck if we’re 75 or 80 and looking back and saying “I wish I’d done this or that but I never did. I was too busy.” And [PERSON OF NON-SPECIFIC GENDER], don’t try to wait until [YOUR CHILD OR CHILDREN - ALSO OF NON-SPECIFIC GENDER] go to college. There is no guarantee that you’ll even be around 15 years from now – who knows what can happen? (It’s like that partner I worked with once who was going to retire at age 55 and then at age 52 got terminal cancer and died within a year. What the [FRACTAL] was he working so hard all those years for?)

Maybe climbing Mt. Everest or buying a boat and sailing around the world for a year are too extreme for [YOUR SPOUSE], but what about less extreme things. What about taking a year-long sabbatical and you and [YOUR SPOUSE] spending a season with your [CHILD OR CHILDREN] and snowboarding somewhere like [VARIOUS NON-SPECIFIC PLACES WHERE YOU CAN SNOWBOARD] and then taking your whole family to spend six months in [OTHER NON-SPECIFIC BUT INTERESTING PLACES] or wherever [YOUR SPOUSE] would be interesting in checking out? Even if it were only for a year, that would be an incredible experience for you and your [CHILD OR CHILDREN] – something you’d remember and cherish for the rest of your life. Or what about moving permanently somewhere like [SOME NON-SPECIFIC CITIES OTHER THAN WHERE YOU CURRENTLY LIVE] or somewhere a little more laid back and cheaper? Figure out some way you could telecommute, work for a smaller firm there, start your own firm, etc.? Maybe these things have no interest for you – I won’t pretend to know what would work for you – but something would. There’s got to be something that you and [YOUR SPOUSE] would both be interested in doing that would be a great experience for you and your family – figure it out and go do it.

I know I’ve probably written this as if you’re as miserable in your job as I was in my old job and as desperate for change as I was – and I know that’s not the case. But you’re clearly searching for something more or different right now and all I’m saying is figure out what you want to do and go do it. At every stage in our lives there are reasons – good, solid reasons – not to do anything out of the ordinary. But there are also ways around those reasons and plenty of people still figure out ways to do extraordinary things and to have extraordinary lives.

Jesus I sound like a bad Dr. Phil.

Later,

H.