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The Center of Conversation

In every group discussion where people are free to move around, people always form an approximation of a circle or simple polygon around a central point. This “center of conversation” is not a tangible thing, but it’s very visible in the dynamics of groups.

Today, I’d like to talk about this social concept, and for those of us who don’t utilize this important source of positive social vibes, explain how to start.

What I call the “center of conversation” is the point that’s on average equidistant from each participating conversation member. Even people who don’t use this concept have an intuitive understanding of it, to an extent that social interactions feel more awkward when all parties involved are not standing at appropriate distances around the center (that is, on average equidistant from both the center and each other), and likewise they feel smoother when all parties observe this rule.

People who understand this concept will find themselves shifting around the center as people walk around, leave or join the conversation, or as the group dynamic otherwise shifts. People who really understand this will find themselves glancing toward the conversation center whenever they need to break eye contact.

The center of conversation doesn’t dictate that people have to stand in perfect circles all the time. Peoples’ personal preferences and convenience always take precedence over the center. But with preferences accounted for, people arrange themselves according to it. Given a choice of two places on a couch, people will choose the one closest to their appropriate place relative to the center. If an outlier in a group doesn’t understand the center and moves counter to it, the rest of the group will likely shift around to readjust the center.

If you’re the social butterfly type, try to find the center of conversation that you’re subconsciously moving around. If you’d like to make yourself more likable, once you find that center, try glancing at it instead of away from it whenever you need to break eye contact. Eyes are powerful indicators of attention – looking in a direction has the same weight as pointing in the direction. If you look toward the center, you’re pointing toward the other people, toward your conversation together, and you’re indicating that both of those things are important to you. Even if the other people don’t realize what you’re doing, they realize that you are doing it and they feel appreciated.

If you’re the kind of person who probably breaks this rule all the time, don’t sweat it. You can teach yourself to pay attention to the center of conversation just like you can teach yourself any other skill. Next time you talk to anyone – in a group, one on one, whatever – think about where the center is. It’s easy to find between two people, it’s just the point right in the middle of the space between you. Among larger groups it’s slightly harder, but not much. Think about the middle of the space between you and pinpoint whatever you think is closest to the center of that space. You don’t have to be perfect – it’s a vague area that you indicate by moving around it or glancing at it, not a point you have to precisely identify on a graphing calculator. Just get the vague gist and you’ll be golden.

It could take a while to get the hang of doing this, but in doing so, you’ll make people more comfortable around you. In this modern, segmented, isolated world, comfort is the single most important thing, in both our personal and professional lives. When clients buy a service, they’re primarily buying their comfort with the people providing that service. And what more could anyone want than to be comfortable around the people they care about? Any way you can make those around you feel comfortable is an advantage you have – not over them, but with them.

How to Be Happy

Growing up, my mom used to tell my siblings and I that when we were upset and didn’t want to be, we could choose to be happy instead. The whole concept seemed ridiculous to me. “I can’t just flip my emotions on and off like a light switch,” I remember telling her.

But the problem was, she was right. It’s entirely possible to “flip your emotions on and off like a light switch”. There’s a lot of research backing up that statement—not surprising, my mom graduated with a Master’s in psychology, I should have known she didn’t pull this idea out of nowhere. Further, though it took me longer than I would care to admit, I did personally realize the wisdom in her two-word advice, “choose happy”.

Many experiments show that if you smile, you’ll feel happier. It’s not even entirely about the conscious decision to feel happy – merely moving your facial muscles or even forcing a smile using chopsticks can do the trick. Your brain just has an association between smiles and happiness and so smiling can make you happy.

So the research says. But I doubted it. For years, until I realized the truth of it independently. Today, I’m going to dissect the reasons I doubted it, because I feel many people probably have the same doubts when reading articles like this one.

I had two reasons to doubt “choose happy”. The first was that I was afraid people would look at me weird if I went from crying to laughing in the span of less than two minutes. The unaltered procession of human emotions is a slow ebb and flow, and a drastic change would make people ask uncomfortable questions.

They probably would have done that. But I wish someone had told me that there are things much more important in life than seeming strange. Spending a majority of my time feeling depressed and anxious for no reason was dramatically worse than it would have been to have some people think I was odd. I should have weighed the pros and cons of feeling the emotion versus letting it go.

The second reason I doubted the wisdom of “choose happy” was that I thought all emotions were important. I thought that they were always there for a reason, even if I couldn’t find what that reason was. It was a gradual realization that led me to the simple fact that some emotions don’t make sense – they’re the result of hormonal imbalances, meaningless stressors, mental overstimulation, and many other things which don’t need to be dwelled on.

Nowadays, I think about emotions in the context of net utility. Is feeling this emotion useful to me? If I’m feeling embarrassed about a stupid mistake, that feeling can be useful, to prompt me to fix the mistake immediately. But after I’ve done everything I can to fix the mistake, including making the appropriate social reparations, I can let the emotion go, because it’s served its purpose. Continuing to feel embarrassed even when I can no longer do anything about the mistake, including learn from it, is pointless.

And if the emotion didn’t have any purpose to begin with – say, if I’m feeling angry because I’ve had a long difficult day at work, which is not even slightly connected to any particular problem that can be solved – I can analyze the cause, decide it’s pointless, and let go of the emotion.

How do you let go of emotions? After your brain stops intuitively holding on because it thinks they’re important, or that it would be weird to let go, it’s typically as simple as focusing on something else. If just passively thinking about something else doesn’t completely fix it, try smiling, putting on a fun or silly song, deliberately focusing on happy thoughts, or even closing your eyes and imagining a pleasant location to hang out for a while. (I’m deliberately giving advice that doesn’t require getting up, because I personally don’t like advice that says “get up! stretch! jog! sweat!” – it does genuinely work, but it’s always delivered in a very pushy way. That being said, if you haven’t already heard this advice from a hundred thousand people, being outside and/or exercising does in fact make you healthier and happier, so try it if you feel inclined.)

So the list of question to ask when you feel any emotion is:

What emotion is it? Is that really what I’m feeling? Emotions are frequently very transparent, but they can become tangled. Further, some emotions can mask others: a lot of men have a tendency to express anger when they’re truly sad, for example. If your emotions are unclear, sort them out.
What probably caused this emotion? Go over salient events in your mind and find the proximate cause. It doesn’t have to be anything major and it frequently isn’t. You’re looking for a cause, not a good reason.
Does this emotion have net positive utility? Feeling negative emotions has inherent negative utility, but that may be outweighed by the positive utility of the action it makes you take: learning from a mistake, apologizing for a misdeed, fixing an internal or external problem, etc. Figure out if the emotion is prompting you to do anything useful, and if it isn’t, if you really need to keep it. Compute the net utility.
An important note about these utility evaluations: A common trap I’ve seen many people fall into is where they keep a negative emotion around because they believe it prompts them to do something good which, in fact, they would do anyway. In particular, a lot of high-achievers end up with the misconception that being miserable is what prompts them to achieve things, when in fact, they would achieve more if they were happier. Therefore, strongly doubt any utility evaluation that leads you to the belief that you need to be miserable all the time in order to get things done.
If you determined that the emotion has net positive utility, keep it around, but only as long as it continues to be useful. As soon as you’ve done everything useful that the emotion was prompting you to do, throw it away. There is no reason to be miserable longer than necessary.
If you determined that the emotion has net negative utility, toss it immediately, using any of the tricks described above.

A final note about the utility of positive emotions: feeling good is a good thing. I’ve seen people be happy but wonder whether they really should be feeling happy. You can dissect the emotion and what actions it makes you take to figure this out, but don’t decide you need to be unhappy because it’s uncommon to see sane adults who visibly care about anything. Emotions are good to keep if they’re useful, and being happy uniformly makes your life better, so ceteris paribus, happiness is useful, and therefore, happiness is almost always good to keep.

In conclusion:
Choose Happy.

5 Tips for Living On A Budget in San Francisco

I just moved to San Francisco for a new job at a digital marketing startup, which means I’ve been living in the single highest cost-of-living city in the United States. And, I’m making about 100k less than that article says you should be to “live comfortably”. If you’re moving to SF anytime soon, if you’re living in SF and you’d like to be more financially stable, or if you just want an entertaining read about how living in SF works, here are 5 tips for that.

#1: Want Less Stuff

This is kind of a meta-tip for making your whole life better, not just compensating for the crazy cost of living in San Francisco. It’s based on this article by Mr. Money Mustache, which is generally a great blog I’ve been reading that has excellent financial advice, and that I’ll be citing multiple times in this post.

Essentially, it is what the heading says. Instead of denying yourself things you want, which uses up mental energy, just want less stuff. Decide that you’re happy with how you’re living right now. There are a ton of tricks to do this, such as closing your eyes and imagining you had suddenly gone blind, imagining your entire life while adjusting to being blind, and then suddenly miraculously regaining your sight. The general concept here is remarkably similar to Classical Stoicism.

A similar idea, if you’re a bit further along in your career, is getting rid of “I can afford this now” mindset. My mom tells a story of a friend she had in college. When the two of them met, they both got appliances from the Scratch and Dent and clothes from Goodwill and generally did all the things that broke college students do. But after they both became established in their careers, my mom’s friend stopped buying cheap. She started getting clothes from Target and even more expensive stores, buying brand-new cars, and overall spent a lot more money on luxuries. Meanwhile, my mom was still shopping at Goodwill and buying used cars. And they were both a little incredulous! My mom’s college friend said something like, “Why are you still shopping like you’re broke, you can afford to get nicer things now”, and my mom said something like, “Why don’t you have a million in the bank yet”.

Paying $20 for a t-shirt at Target instead of getting it at Goodwill for $3 adds up, and paying $25k for a brand-new car instead of getting a comparable older used one $12k adds up faster. You get to a million in increments of ten, and savings is critical to both current and future survival.

#2: Get Roommates

If you’re on a tight budget, or even if you’re just being financially sensible, you are not going to afford your own apartment. The sooner you come to terms with that and optimize for it, the better. Even if you make enough dollars to afford it in principle, if it would cost more than a third of your income, you can’t afford it. Unless you want to be living hand-to-mouth and perpetually spinning that hamster wheel, you can’t afford to not save at least a third of your income.

Here’s my current budget, because you might not believe me otherwise. Through my Praxis apprenticeship, I’m working full-time and making $17 an hour. My fiancé is making $15 working as a manager at a local grocery store. Multiplying that out, we get around 5k a month gross revenue. We have a roommate situation set up, where we have one small bedroom in a house with five bedrooms (that presently houses seven). We pay a little under 1k a month in rent. Other budgets include transit (I take BART to and from work, which adds to about $200 a month), food (we all take turns buying groceries so a very generous food budget is $500 a month), my fiancé’s student loans and my Praxis payment (~$600 a month total), and a few other things. In total, we spend a little more than half our total income, and save the other half.

One-bedroom apartments in California start at $1700 a month, with a shared bathroom, if you’re lucky. If you want your own private bathroom, you’ll be spending $2200 or more. That’s roughly as much as my mom is paying for a mortgage on her five-bedroom three-bath family home! So give up on the idea of having your own place, and optimize for roommates.

I found our current group house through a Facebook group meant for rationalists and effective altruists living in the East Bay. There are many such groups for many different people-types, and if you go looking, you can find one for a type which matches you pretty well. That will be your best place for house-hunting, or more aptly, roommate-hunting. You’ll want to shop around before you arrive if you can, but if you can’t, it’s not a big deal: stay at a hostel (there are many people-type-specific hostels as well; I’m staying at one for rationalists called Berkeley Reach) or an Airbnb as you shop around in person.

Find a group house you like and roommates you enjoy spending time with. Don’t worry about proximity to your work or to a BART stop – you probably won’t get it, so just walk or get a bike (/electric scooter/electric skateboard /etc). Do worry about price, though, because private rooms range between $1500 for a bit of a pricey one all the way down to $950 for a really awesome find. If you’re moving out here as a single person on a tight budget, your best bet is to find a shared bedroom; I’ve seen some for less than $700.

#3: Find All the Cheapest Places for Food

There are several ways to do this, so I’ll mention them all, since I’ve used them all. First, you can look on Google Maps around the areas you’re considering staying and look at their prices online; second, you can look up keyword phrases like “cheapest places to buy groceries around [location]” and read articles and watch videos about it; third, you can go around to the local stores with a list of all your common staples and make a price-comparison spreadsheet; fourth, you can keep all your receipts and cross-check prices for things you buy often. I did all four, in that order.

Looking on Google Maps was a bit useful for pre-moving planning, but not all that useful; I noticed that a lot of stores, especially the small ones that turned out to be the cheapest, didn’t have their prices listed online anywhere. Still, in terms of figuring out what’s in your area, this is a good first step; just don’t spend too much time on it. Reading blogs and watching videos is very useful for finding insider info: there’s a 99 cent store around here that I found on a Youtube video. Don’t get too caught up in it and forget your other moving plans, though.

I highly recommend a spreadsheet as a way to figure out prices for staples, but don’t get too carried away in comparing prices for things you don’t buy often, because then your spreadsheet will be brutally long and you won’t want to actually go around and compare things. I also recommend keeping receipts, because actual after-tax price is not the same as the price listed on the price tag, and prices can change, etc etc.

#4: Don’t Own a Car

Cars are really expensive, especially in SF. They’re expensive to drive, expensive to park, and expensive to insure. In addition, if you so happen to live and work on different sides of the bay bridge, you’re going to spend a huge amount of time in traffic. I saw an ad in a BART car once that said “because walking to BART beats sitting in traffic” and I’ve found that very accurate. If you live near work, walk or bike or whatever to work. If you don’t, walk or bike or whatever to BART and take BART. Either way, cars are expensive. (And, like, also, saving the earth and stuff.)

#5: Track Your Finances

The best thing you can do when you have a tight budget is keep track of it well. There are a few ways to do this, but they all boil down to a simple concept: spend your money on paper before you spend it in real life. If you’ve already allocated—”spent”—every dollar before you ever pull out your wallet, you’ll know exactly how much you can spend and what you can spend it on, and thus, you’ll never have to worry about whether or not you can afford something.

There’s a simple paper-and-pencil strategy for this, and then there’s a financial tracking app I use now that I can recommend. With the paper-and-pencil strategy, start with your current funds, then mark down your foreseen future revenues and expenses and make a short calendar with important dates (paydays, bill due dates, etc.) and mark how much you’ll have after those points. Then, using those numbers, calculate how much to spend and save. If you want something quick and dirty you can do in five minutes so you can stop freaking out about money, this is a perfect strategy.

If you have a bit more time and would like a comprehensive long-term solution, you can try Fast Budget. It’s an excellent financial planning app available for iPhone and Android which separates your financial world into categories and sub-categories. First there are sets of incomes and expenses, and then each income or expense can have components for individual things you’d like to keep closer track of than usual. Say you have a budget for groceries, but you know you tend to over-spend on soda, so you create a sub-budget for soda under the groceries category to track your spending on that one particular thing.

You can constantly re-arrange this budget to suit your needs, and even sync your credit cards and bank accounts (though I haven’t personally needed to do this, I just keep receipts in my wallet and input everything into the app at the end of the day). Also, you get a nice-looking Overview page with neat pie and bar charts. Everyone loves pie and bar charts.

And That’s All!

These are the most important things I’ve needed since moving to San Francisco. There are a handful of other things relating to the process of moving in particular, but I’ll cover those in another post. If this helped you out, please comment it below!

How To Make A Resolution

I have never once made a New Year’s resolution. I have never decided to change something significant about my life, starting on January 1st.

That isn’t to say that I’ve never decided to change something significant about my life. I decided I was sick of being overweight and out of shape, and I started hitting the gym. But I did that in April. I decided that I wanted to learn how to speak Japanese. But I did that in September. I’ve resolved to do a lot of things, but I never hung around twiddling my thumbs until January to start actually doing them.

This seems, at least to me, to be the reasonable course of action. If something about your life needs changing, it makes sense to start changing it as soon as possible. If you decide you want to quit smoking, program in Python, speak Mandarin Chinese, lose thirty pounds… start right now, not at year’s end.

Now, perhaps people make resolutions on New Year’s because the start of a new year prompts people to look over their life and actually make the decision that they want to change their lives. This seems like a reasonable argument at first, but then you have to consider that the culture of making resolutions on New Year’s is really more a method of putting people under the gun and demanding that they find a Grand Way To Change™, rather than a way of sparking consideration or discussion on the possible ways one’s life could change direction.

Furthermore, a lot of people don’t even keep their New Year’s resolutions. Actually, a frankly huge number of people don’t keep them, to the extent that I frequently wonder whey people even bother setting them. (I read a statistic that around 8% of people keep their resolutions, which seems likely, but I can’t find the original research, so I won’t tout that as fact.)

What’s wrong with people? Why do we have a societal expectation where, once a year, people will set goals, then fail to follow through with them? Why do we harbor a culture of annual disappointment?

Part of the reason people don’t keep resolutions is that there is no actual change happening between December 31st and January 1st. They’re two days which are right next to each other, just like March 18th and March 19th. The only significance to that particular collection of days is the cultural expectation we’ve attached to them: that is, a new year should be a quantum shift of progress.

The cultural expectation of some kind of quantum shift, coupled with the fact that no such quantum shift actually happens, leads otherwise reasonable people to set incredibly unrealistic goals for no good reason. People who, if they made this kind of goal in mid-March, would say “I’m going to try and start hitting the gym once a week on Sunday afternoons”, suddenly go off on ridiculous moonshots like “I’m going to start hitting the gym every single day as soon as I get home from work, and I’m also going to cut my carbs in half and become a vegan” as soon as December 31st rolls around.

As such, my best recommendation for how to set resolutions and then follow through on them is to not set them on New Year’s. Any other time of year will have much less pressure attached to it.

Actually, I amend that statement. It’s probably better not to set resolutions at all. Just decide that you want to improve in an area, and get started with the baby steps right away.

A big goal like “I want to become conversationally fluent in Mandarin Chinese”, even if you have a pretty good idea what ‘conversationally fluent’ means, can be incredibly daunting. That kind of thing will absolutely take you years, maybe decades, and looking at the whole thing at once can just make you want to quit outright. On the other hand, googling “beginner Chinese lessons” and watching a handful of funny animated Youtube videos on the subject is easy.

This works with every big goal. “I want to lose thirty pounds”. Okay, how about we start with keeping track of what you’re eating? “I want to find a life partner.” Okay, how about we start with making a list of qualities you find attractive in another human? Break it down until you’ve found a thing you can do right now. Then do it. Right now.

These kinds of “resolutions”—goals with no particular time limit that you’re setting purely for self-improvement—should theoretically be the easiest kinds of goals you set. Whereas in the work world, you have specific deadlines and deliverables, you don’t have any of those in your personal life. You don’t need to learn Chinese in five years. Maybe you want to, but that’s not actually the same thing. Personally, I’d like to learn Japanese in less than a decade. But I’m not going to be fired from my job if I don’t achieve that goal on schedule.

A resolution should be a matter of fun, personal self-improvement, not of disappointing annual self-loathing. So, even and especially if you’re not reading this on New Year’s – what’s your new resolution?

Something Hurts. What Now?

Our educational system does a pretty terrible job at teaching the majority of important life skills. The general retort seems to be “those things are the parents’ job to teach”, but that doesn’t generalize: what if the kid’s parent doesn’t know? What if the kid doesn’t have parents? It’s a silly argument.

One of the most basic things that our education system fails to teach is how to take care of yourself. If you have an ache or pain, is it serious or not? If it isn’t, what palliatives should you use to mitigate the pain?

Today, I’ll be discussing all those things, and also some easy remedies you can use to prevent potentially costly problems.

Diagnosing Problems

What hurts?
What kind of pain is it? (i.e., is it aching, shooting, stabbing, etc, and how bad is it)
How long has it been going on? (this includes whether it’s constant or intermittent)

That’s it. Three-step system to help you diagnose your pain. Here are some illustrative examples of how it works.

What hurts? The back of my head. What kind of pain? Moderate ache and stiffness. How long? Pretty constantly all day. This would be a tension headache, caused by knotting of the muscles in your neck. When you use muscles, the muscle fibers get torn apart a bit. If you don’t stretch properly after a workout, or if you stay in a position that uses a muscle for too long, that muscle doesn’t mend correctly after it’s torn. This causes the muscle fibers to get tangled, or “knotted”.

What hurts? My ankle. What kind of pain? Severe stabbing when I move my foot in a particular way or try to stand on it. How long? Since I fell a few minutes ago. This would probably be a sprain. You can distinguish a sprain from a broken bone with two factors: 1, a sprain is much less painful. My skating coach fell and broke her ankle, and described it as so painful she couldn’t stop screaming. 2, a sprain will only hurt when you try to move it, whereas a broken bone will hurt constantly. Still, there are very minor breaks (called ‘fractures’) that can feel more like a sprain; fortunately, there’s an easy test. A sprain will feel better after a few days using the RICE method (see the next section); if a fracture isn’t mending easily, it will take longer, and in that case you can see a doctor for an X-ray.

What hurts? My eyes. What kind of pain? A moderate ache, like there’s pressure inside my head. How long? Constant for a few hours. This is a sinus headache, likely caused by a minor head cold or some environmental irritant. Your sinuses run from your nostrils up through your forehead and around your eyes, such that sinus pressure can result in headaches.

So you see, first you match your symptoms up to a cause. If you don’t know what something means, ask people. Look stuff up and do research online (using reliable sources of course). This way, you can build your own library of pains and causes for them.

The next step is to match up the cause with the way to heal it.

How to Heal

Muscle pains, as characterized above by aching and stiffness, can be remedied in four ways. You can do all of these or just some of them.

Take two 200mg tablets of ibuprofen. Ibuprofen is an anti-inflammatory, which means it reduces swelling. Knotted muscles tend to get swollen since blood can’t move through them normally. Ibuprofen is also an analgesic, so it helps relieve pain.
Stretch the muscle out. If you don’t know how to stretch it, look up “muscles in the [body part that hurts]”, find the specific muscle or group you need to stretch, then look up stretches for it. The internet is a wonderful thing.
Give yourself a massage. This will not feel nice, but it will ease your pain. First, get into a position such that you’re not using the muscle. Some muscles are easier to not-use than others: for your leg you can just sit on the ground, but for your neck you’ll have to rest your head on a steady surface (your knees, a countertop, etc) in such a way that you can still breathe. Then, press into the muscle, starting at one end and working toward the other steadily. If you feel a lump, that’s a knot. Put a little more pressure on it. Keep pushing on it harder until it starts to give way. If it slips out from under your fingers, don’t worry, just find it again and push on it some more. If it starts to feel like you’re going to get a bruise, stop with that knot and keep moving. After you’ve either rubbed out the knots or can’t work on them any longer, you’re done.
Put a heating pad on the muscle. This is best used in combination with stretching and/or massage, because heat relaxes the muscle, but doesn’t inherently remove any knots by itself.

For sprains (i.e. knee, ankle, etc) or other kinds of strain, use the RICE method. For this, it is important that you do all the steps.

Rest. Stop using that part of your body. Sit down, lay down, generally use it as little as possible. Rest will help it to heal. If you’ve sprained your ankle, say, use crutches to get around if you need to. (Crutches are not expensive, they’re like $10-20. I own a pair, and I’m young and broke.)
Ice. Grab an ice pack, or simply a bag of frozen veggies in a pinch, and put it on the affected area. Leave it there for about 10-20 minutes, then take it off for the same amount of time. Repeat for the first day or two after your injury. When you injure something, your body sends lots of blood to the area to try and mend it, but your body does not know the meaning of the word “moderation”, so it frequently sends too much blood and the area swells up, making it actually harder to heal. Ice works to fix this because your body doesn’t want its blood getting cold, so if the area is cold, it takes the blood back to a warmer part of you so that your core temperature will stay the same. It’s the same reason the blood drains from your hands and feet when you’re outdoors in the winter. Important Note: ice hurts. It’s supposed to hurt. Don’t put thick towels under your ice pack until it doesn’t hurt anymore, because then it’s not doing any good. You need nothing more than a thin sheet to prevent frostbite.
Compress. If you have Ace bandages, use them to wrap the affected area. If you have a compression sock, that’s even better. If you have neither of those things, buy some Ace bandages. It will serve you very well. Compression works for pretty much the same reason ice does: it helps stop inflammation. Be careful not to make your bandages too tight; it should feel like a necktie, not like a noose.
Elevate. This is yet another method to remove excess blood from the area. (Yes, all of this is necessary. I told you your body has no idea what moderation is.) As a rule of thumb, you should elevate the injured body part in such a way that it’s above your heart. Do this as often as you can manage it, but unlike rest, you don’t need a great reason to stop: “I’m sick of this for now” is enough.

Middle and outer ear infections are the least problematic types of ear infections. You can treat them by disinfecting them.

Middle ear infections are characterized by aching pain in the ears and/or difficulty hearing, and are remedied by doing something to disinfect the ears. Use either isopropyl alcohol or hydrogen peroxide solution: you can find both at your local drugstore. Just stick some in your ear, leave it there for a few minutes, then drain it. Repeat 3 times daily till it goes away.

Outer ear infections are characterized by an itching or redness on the external, visible bit of the ear. You can fix them with antibiotic ointments.

If either of these things doesn’t go away within a few days, you probably have a more serious infection and need prescription antibiotics. Further, if you’ve got symptoms like fever and nausea, that’s probably an inner ear infection, which is very bad, see a doctor. (I sound like a warning label on a pill bottle, sheesh.)

Ingrown toenails are best treated early on. If you notice a stabbing pain in your toe when you walk, employ this remedy straight away. If you let it get bad, the surgery to get the nail removed is $150-200, but on the other hand, you can buy all the supplies to fix it early on for less than $10.

Grab some toilet paper or tissues. You’ll need less than one piece. Get a pair of tweezers, a pencil, or some other relatively pointy object. Finally, get some epsom salts, and a container big enough to fit your foot in (you should probably buy one specially for this purpose, since you don’t want to use the container for anything else afterward; epsom salts are toxic).
Fill the container with very hot water (slightly hotter than you can stand to stick your hand in) and mix in the appropriate amount of epsom salts (it’ll say on the box, but it’s probably about a quarter cup of salt to a gallon of water or something). The mixing process will cool the water down slightly such that it’s now about as hot as you can stand. Stick your whole foot in and soak it for half an hour or something like that. Your foot should get super wrinkly.
When you’re done with that, take your foot out. Rip off a tiny corner of your toilet paper or tissue, wad it up, and shove it under the offending ingrown toenail. Shove as much as you can under there, then wait. The pressure from the wadded-up tissue should push the nail up, and since the epsom salts have softened everything up, this is an easy enough job.

Go through this process in full every day until your toenail pokes right out where it belongs, and in the future, don’t clip your toenails too short.

Sinus headaches and sinus problems in general (including a stuffed-up nose as a result of a cold) can be remedied with a very strange but simple method: neti potting.

A neti pot is a small piece of plastic or pottery shaped like a squashed teapot. There are two holes: a big one in the top that you put the saline water into, and a little one at the end of the elongated spout that you stick up one nostril. Here’s a modern one with a fancy soft tip that comes with saline packets.

Basically, what you do is you fill it with saline solution (I know the exact formula for this one since I do it so often, I’m very susceptible to sinus problems)—1/4 teaspoon salt to 1 cup water—and stick the spout in one nostril, doesn’t matter which. Tilt your head to the side and tilt the neti pot up such that it’s pouring the saline into your nose. Since your nose and sinuses are actually just one long tube, the water will wash out all the gunk and come out the other side.

Make sure you tilt your head forward and lean such that the water isn’t coming down your throat and out of your mouth. (Oh yeah, those are connected too. Basically the whole human body is one long meat hose.) It might take some work to get right, but it’s not difficult. If I was able to get it right at age six, you can do it.

Also, if the saline doesn’t come out the other side the first time, don’t worry. That’s just because your sinuses are too blocked for the saline to flow through. Just drain the saline from that side (lean over a sink, then wipe your nose) and switch to the other side. Pouring saline in from both sides will help to loosen and eventually dislodge the gunk that’s causing the congestion and also probably the headache/infection/post-nasal drip/whatever else. It’s weird, but it works.

As with the pain to cause relationship, you can do research regarding the cause to remedy relationship. Just understand that companies want to not get sued, so they’ll tell you to go to a doctor if anything even potentially bad might happen. Look up “home remedies” before you go hit the UrgentCare.

Questions, comments? Any good remedy you’d like people to know? Add it to the comments section below!

Why You Should Learn a Living Language

The benefits of learning a language are numerous. Bilingualism in general has many mental benefits. The research that demonstrates these things, though, doesn’t tell you a crucial point: all languages are not created equal. Specifically, living languages are very different from dead ones.

I spent, depending on how intensively you define the word “studying”, between four and ten years studying a dead language. I started around age seven with Rosetta Stone Latin (yes, that exists), and studied intermittently through elementary and middle school before taking four years of intensive high school Latin, culminating in the AP test. With the exception of two brief classes in Spanish and Mandarin Chinese, the vast majority of my experience in learning languages has been with a dead one.

Last year was my final one taking Latin. After a little while, I detoxed myself of the apathy I’d acquired for anything resembling school, and I kind of missed it. Silly, right? Missing studying vocabulary lists? And maybe it is silly, but it happened anyway. So, intermittently in accordance with a busy schedule, I took up Japanese.

Immediately I was shocked by the differences in learning methods. First, a living language necessitates pronunciation. My proficiency with Latin was orders of magnitude greater than my current proficiency with Japanese: circa last spring, I could read and understand complicated books written in Latin. I read the Aeneid and the Gallic Wars in the original, which is immensely difficult: they’re huge, thick books with tiny type and long, complicated sentences. By contrast, I can hardly form simple sentences in Japanese.

But you can get to where I was in Latin without ever speaking a single word out loud.

Seriously! I learned nearly everything from written words on a page. I read silently, studied flashcards silently, translated silently. I only ever spoke a word of Latin aloud under two circumstances: I was in my one-hour once-a-week online class and I was reading a passage aloud to the class; or my linguistically-inclined brother had asked me the Latin word for something.

By contrast, the veritable instant that I began my study of Japanese I was talking. To an empty room as a pronunciation exercise, but still. The pronunciation actually mattered. I watched Japanese cartoons (commonly called anime) and repeated what the characters were saying under my breath. “Nan desu ka?” a character on the screen would say, and I’d mutter under my breath, “nan desu ka”. I learned so much vocabulary this way, and I learned it painlessly.

That brings me to another point. With a living language, there is media in that language. It’s possible to learn words and phrases purely from watching and reading content. With a dead language, this method of “learning by input” is impossible: there is no content to consume. There is no anime in Latin. I learned exclusively through exhaustive memorization of grammar. It was boring and uninteresting, and now, six months or so after finishing my studies, I’m hard-pressed to remember most of it.

The combination of these two factors—lack of pronunciation and lack of auditory input—made me feel less like I was actually fluent in Latin, and more like I was simply knowledgeable enough about its inner workings that I could basically deconstruct it like a puzzle. I think that, even at the height of my Latin knowledge, if I’d been teleported back to Ancient Rome and met with a native speaker, I could not hold a conversation.

In other words, I didn’t speak the language, I could only deconstruct it.

To hammer in this distinction, let me ask you a question: do you know what a pluperfect is? No? Here’s an example: “We had arrived.” I guarantee you use the pluperfect all the time, but you never knew what it was – and you never needed to. But with Latin, I was backwards. I knew the grammar and all its terms inside and out – if you asked me what the pluperfect subjunctive ending in the third conjugation was, not only would I have understood you, but I’d also have been able to supply the answer. However, I had literally never used any of those words in an actual conversation.

This is the most important difference between learning a living language and learning a dead one. If you learn a living language, you will come out of your studies with an ability that is practically useful: the ability to have conversations. You don’t come out of studying a dead language with that. You only come out of studying a dead language with the ability to deconstruct it.

What does all this mean for you? Take a closer look at the article I linked at the top. The reason bilingualism is helpful for improving mental acuity is that “both languages of a bilingual speaker are constantly active to some degree, even in strongly monolingual contexts”. Aka, the auditory and visual processing for both languages is always online. This makes the biggest difference in conversation, where the bilingual person’s brain has to continuously figure out which language it should use to process information: “this difficult selection is made in constant online linguistic processing by bilinguals is that the general-purpose executive control system is recruited into linguistic processing, a configuration not found for monolinguals.”

But wait, didn’t I just get done saying that one of the chief differences between living and dead languages is that you can learn a dead language completely without ever having a conversation?

Yes. That is exactly my point.

If you’re planning on learning a language for purposes of improving your mental abilities, I highly recommend learning a living one. Looking at the reasons behind the statement that “bilingualism improves your brain”, it seems to me that learning a dead language is much less likely to benefit you than a living one.

Plus, we shouldn’t deny the benefit of having conversations with others in their native tongues. To quote Nelson Mandela, “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.”

The Importance of Support

Being Jewish was always something I felt like I was in the abstract. I had a different culture than most people, I celebrated different holidays, I had a different native country, my family spoke a different language. I was different, sure, but not in any way that mattered.

Otherwise, I’m just like every other American. I celebrate the Fourth of July with fireworks. I stay up late on New Year’s Eve watching the ball drop on TV. Unlike many Jews, I even celebrate Christmas: my dad grew up Christian, so we decided to maintain the tradition from his side of the family. Being Jewish never got in the way of these things.

When I told people I was Jewish, I was sometimes met with confusion, but rarely with hate. In fact, it happened so infrequently that I can recall each individual instance.

This is why I was so shaken when I heard about the shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue. I didn’t understand how this man could look at a bunch of people who celebrated our holidays like he celebrated Christmas, who had a native culture and history like other Americans might be Irish or Norse, but who were also American citizens just like anyone else, and decide we must be eradicated off the face of the earth.

How do you look at my family on Rosh Hashannah, smiling and laughing and passing around a brisket like many families would pass around a honey ham on Christmas, and decide that “all Jews must die”?

I don’t think I can hope to know, but I was scared nonetheless.

I personally am relatively safe. I go to a different synagogue which doesn’t happen to be in a Jewish neighborhood, and I only go on high holidays when they have a decent amount of security. Everyone I know personally, even those who go to the Tree of Life, is okay. But though that diminishes the fear for the personal safety of those I know, it doesn’t do anything about the more general fear I have for my people.

If you’re a member of a majority culture, you may not understand the strong bond between members of a minority one. Try to think of it as if all Jews are members of the same extended family. (Technically speaking, with Jews in particular this is actually true; you can only become Jewish by marriage or by being the child of a Jewish family, so all Jews are in some sense related.) So, though nobody I knew personally was killed or injured, many members of my extended family were. And that feels pretty awful.

There is a light in the fog, though. It’s the reason I decided to write this essay, as opposed to many others I could have written around a similar topic. And that light is the fact that a lot of people, all of them goyim, have been asking me questions like these.

“Jen… are you okay? I mean I know you weren’t in it but… anyone you knew?”

“Hey, you okay? Cole mentioned you live near Pittsburgh.”

“Is your family safe?”

I’ve never had so many people asking after me before. It was really nice to know that so many people cared. It helped me to realize that, in the words of my skating coach, “Those who hate are a small percentage of the country. The people who love are so many more in number and power and we will always win in the end.” Just because one man thinks that I shouldn’t exist doesn’t mean that everyone thinks that.

This is the importance of support. And it’s not just about mass shootings that make national news; it’s about every crisis, big and small. If you ask one simple question, “are you okay”, you can lift one straw off someone’s breaking back. You can make their day that much more bearable. If you ever question whether or not to reach out to someone going through hardship, do it. Reach out.

It really does help.

The Value of “Just” Showing Up

My siblings are pairs skaters. Every day, they wake up at 5am to skate for three hours. Sometimes, after returning home to do school and work, they return to the ice rink to skate again. Even when they don’t skate twice a day, they frequently do an off-ice workout in the afternoon. They’re devoted. They’re serious.

Still, they’re hardly the best team out there. They are now at the third-highest level, and will stop being competitive before advancing, because they started late. Unlike many skaters, who devote all their time to the sport, my siblings have significant academic commitments which they refuse to sacrifice to spend more time on the ice.

And yet, they get to Nationals. Recently, even, a few internationals. They didn’t expect it, but it happened. How?

They “just” showed up.

Putting in the effort every single day to keep up with the blistering pace of competitive figure skating is hard. The age brackets for the levels work such that if you’re not putting in as much effort as my siblings are, you just plain don’t get to be competitive. Sorry, have a nice day! The requirements for pairs are even harder, because not just one, but two skaters have to be devoted enough to put that much time in. Not only that, both of them need to be good at doing jumps – if you’ve ever watched the Olympics on TV, you know jumping is hard.

My siblings get national and international assignments, because they are one of less than twelve pairs teams at their level in the country. They show up. There’s no “just” about it.

They say it’s not enough to just show up. But is that really true? To “just” show up, you need to have the necessary skills to get in the door, you need to be reliable and consistent, you need to be able to put in the work every day. That’s valuable. That’s important. And those are skills a lot of people don’t have.

When people hunt for jobs, the focus is on the job-specific skills: what programming languages do they know, how proficient are they with Excel, do they have the appropriate certifications, etc. And those are important. But many job-seekers act as if those things are all that matters.

In reality, being reliable and dependable is just as important. There are tons of people who have the job-specific skills, but who aren’t reliable. They get tired, they get bored, they see a shiny object, they would rather be doing something else. They don’t show up. If you “just” show up, you can be better than them.

Show up.

Explain Your Culture

I answered a lot of questions about culture growing up. As an American Jew, my culture was a minority, so nobody really knew about it. They didn’t know what I believed, what foods I ate on what holidays, what purpose those foods or those holidays had within the culture, etc.

Like many people in minority cultures, I was always happy to answer these questions. My family has had several non-Jews over for our holidays over the years, and when our goyish (informal term for non-Jewish) guests inevitably ask questions about the rituals or foods, we tell them. Once time I brought in kosher macaroons to work for Rosh Hashanah and I got to explain both the holiday and the concept of kosher.

These are highly informal and easy explanations. Our goal isn’t to proselytize—Jews aren’t allowed to proselytize anyway, but even if it was allowed, that’s not our goal so we wouldn’t do it—our goal is simply to educate. For example:

“This little funny hat is called a yarmulka, and men are supposed to wear it to bring them closer to God. Women don’t need to wear them because the ability to give birth brings us closer to God.”

“We prepare these foods because they’re culturally significant, or just because we like them. But we need to make sure that if we make something just because we like it, that it follows our dietary rules for holidays. Those rules are called kosher.”

“Rosh Hashanah is the Jewish new year. Our holidays run on a lunar calendar, not a solar one, so they shift around on the Christian calendar. And the current Jewish year is 5779, because our years don’t start from the birth of Jesus, they start from the birth of the Jewish race.”

Christians in America have it completely the opposite way. They can practically assume that their culture is ubiquitous, which has a lot of implications.

If your culture is ubiquitous, you never have to explain your holidays. You can just presume that people know about them. You can talk in depth about highly specific issues with just about anyone, because you can presume they have the necessary cultural background. Every business closes its offices in observation of your holidays.

To help my American Christian pals understand what it’s like to not be a cultural majority, consider this.

Imagine you had to ask your boss for time off to celebrate Christmas, which he has never heard of. Imagine driving over an hour to get to the only church in your area, when at the same time there are three different synagogues within a two-mile radius of your house. Imagine your entire culture decides to make Labor Day into a huge celebration, because you’re all sick of not doing anything while the rest of the country celebrates Rosh Hashanah. (This is exactly what happened with Chanukah. It’s actually a very minor holiday that American Jews made into a much bigger deal because they wanted something to do at Christmastime.)

Unless you decide to move to a non-European country, you’re probably not going to experience any of this personally, but that’s fine. There’s nothing inherently wrong or right about being a member of either a majority or minority culture.

There is, however, one thing that members of majority cultures could learn from members of minority cultures: an attitude of explanation.

Growing up Jewish, I never really understood Christianity. Not for any lack of Christians around me, for a lack of Christians around me who were willing to answer questions. People in majority cultures aren’t used to answering simple questions about their culture; if I asked who Jesus was, people would look at me like I’d just said I’d never heard of toilet paper. In their eyes, I’ve just said I don’t know about something they thought was both ubiquitous and completely impossible to live without. By contrast, however, I’ve had a ton of people ask me who Moses is.

Similarly basic question, different culture.

But if every member of a majority culture has this attitude, then the small percentage of the population that wasn’t raised with that culture is left out of the loop. They didn’t learn about the culture growing up, and they never will.

So, the best thing to do if you’re a member of a majority culture is to be willing to answer questions. Even questions that seem like they ought to be obvious.

The (Perceived) Problem with Long-Distance Relationships

Is love an emotion or a choice?

If you’re like many people, you’ll say that it’s an emotion. It’s the floaty, bubbly feeling you get around someone. It’s the perfection of every little thing they do. It’s the pointlessness of the rest of the universe when you’re together. To quote Dean Martin, when the world seems to shine like you’ve had too much wine, that’s amore.

What if I told you you’re wrong? And what if I told you that this definition of love is the biggest cause of failed relationships?

Hear me out.

Relationships are hard. Lots of people say that. And on a surface level, if you’ve been in a relationship, you understand the truth of the statement intuitively. But let’s look deeper. If love is an emotion, how can relationships be hard? Deciding to keep working on a project even though it’s complicated and difficult is hard. Deciding to not give up on your little sister even though she’s being an entitled brat is hard. Deciding to apologize to your lover after a fight is hard.

Being happy isn’t hard. Being sad isn’t hard. Being angry isn’t hard. And being in love isn’t hard.

What’s hard is maintaining a relationship.

Thus, there have to be multiple components to love. One part is of course the feeling awesome at the beginning, but another is what many people call commitment: the choice to be together, to care about each other, to support each other through thick and thin and such. From experience, the latter is much more important. Your brain acclimates to anything after a while, even the company of The Perfect Person™, and eventually the emotion will fade. Your commitment will not. Do you honestly think that those couples who’ve been together for 70+ years are still love-drunk?

What does this have to do with failed relationships, long distance ones especially?

If you think that love is an emotion, you’ll just quit when you acclimate to their presence and the emotion leaves. You’ll think you don’t love them anymore. In reality, you’re simply no longer infatuated – that’s the term I’ve come to realize refers to that initial state of love-drunkenness. You’re perfectly capable of continuing to love that person if you simply commit.

Since distance can prolong infatuation by virtue of not seeing the person very often, long-distance couples who move in together are most susceptible to this problem.

If, on the other hand, you know that love is a choice, you won’t need to worry about what happens when the world stops shining. It’ll keep on turning nonetheless. Your love will go on. You’ll actually be able to work through the logistics of a real relationship as opposed to simply drifting through it because nothing except that person’s presence matters.

It’s not like once the infatuation wears off, you have no feelings for this person anymore – you’re still affectionate and loving – but you no longer feel like the only sustenance you need is their company. You start to decide that no, that habit isn’t endearing, it’s annoying. You start to notice stuff they do that isn’t perfect. And over time they see those things in you, too. But if you’re committed, you both work around the things that you can’t change, and you work on fixing the things you can, and ideally you both become better people in the process.

That is what relationships are about. That is the difference between love and mere infatuation.