Contracts

Pandoodle is growing.  We've booked a great deal of consulting business creating custom media solutions, games mostly, for clients around the world.  With this expansion we are moving from our older cowboy model of shoot first, deal with the details later to a more sophisticated model of approaching each projects in stages with the right resources and procedures so that the company and our customers are clear in their expectations and protected legally.  With my extensive legal training, that is arguing with my father who is in fact an attorney, I am charge of drafting the contracts that the company will present to our subcontractors and vendors.  It might sound boring, but I have enjoyed learning to some basic degree how contracts work and constructing binding expectations and terms with nothing more than language.  It reminds me of playing football in my next door neighbor's backyard when I was very young.  The older boys in the neighborhood would change the rules of the game midway through a play, shouting, "It's now full tackle!"  They were bigger than me, and my protests amounted to nothing.  Invariably, they always won.  The power to dictate terms and ensure they are followed is great power indeed.

This example reminds me of another contract that is less overt than one signed on paper, the implicit contract between two adults as to the modicum of behavior towards each other that we expect and follow.  We assume that a real world that is intelligible and constant for normal human beings does exist externally of ourselves, and that our behavior towards one another is rooted in this reality.  For example, people do not like being manipulated or hurt, but they do like being treated with respect and kindness.  Many people affected with a mental illness do not recognize a fixed reality, and one of the most difficult challenges of dealing with such a person these fundamental assumptions of behavior towards others do not exist.  Without a firm grasp of reality, an insane person's behavior typically follows the will of their emotions; however, their reason still abides but is corrupted and made subject to this emotional turmoil.  A common metaphor for a crazy person is a horse without a rider.  I would argue that that metaphor better represents an irrational person.  A crazy person is more like a centaur, their rationality and emotions inseparable, but the latter being dominant.  Rather than addressing and responding to reality, an insane person will often use their rational facilities to force their reality in place of yours, shaping the rules to their advantage.  The smarter they are, the more dangerous they are.  In backyard football, the older boys would change the rules to their advantage, justifying it with the generality that might equals right.  There was no question as to whether what they were doing was right or wrong.  Everyone knew it wasn't fair, but no recourse existed.  Insanity is more unsettling than brutishness, because when it changes the rules, it does not recognize any reason to justify itself.  A crazy person breaks and makes rules to accord with the turbulent reality within their mind.  A sane person's less flexible view is at a disadvantage; thus, crazy always wins.  The only way to deal with crazy is to never engage.

Anti-Depressant Commercials

Recently, I started taking Wellbutrin.  The reasons need not be discussed, but the effects are a different matter.  I could kiss the mouth of whoever invented this stuff.  A fellow mendicant of this immaculate brain candy aptly described the experience when she said, "Wellbutrin allows you to see the world in color again, not just black and white."  My experience with Wellbutrin led me to ask why pharmaceutical commercials for anti-depressants are so bad?  Here's one for Zoloft:




Even if you weren't depressed, you should be after this commercial.  Your psyche is a little round ball being equally harassed by a grey cloud and a chirpy bird.  Once you start taking Zoloft, the grey cloud disappears, only to be replaced by a second-rate oboe player and erectile dysfunction, making a futile existence all the less pleasurable.

Not all pharmaceutical commercials are bad.  There are plenty of jokes about taking Valtrex and suddenly finding yourself white-water rafting, playing frisbee with friends and your dog, and dating a hot broad who somehow finds you all the more sexy for having Herpes.  The wonderfully positive and message that says, "So you have an incurable veneral disease?  Who cares?!  Live it up with Valtrex!"


Following the example set by medicine for venereal diseases, anti-depressants could do better by not focusing on the problem but by presenting a hyperbolically inflated happy ending that we all want to believe.  Anti-depressants producers should hire whoever does Coca-Cola's commercials.  Imagine this one if the bottle of Coca-Cola were replaced with Wellbutrin:



Life can be all the better depending on what is ingested.

San Francisco and Comic-Con

I returned yesterday morning from California.  I had planned to spend the month of July raising money and developing business in Silicon Valley, but because of half-baked plans and a series of misadventures, their highlight being my wrecking a Prius in San Francisco, my time on the west coast came to an early close.  Nevertheless, it was not an unsuccessful or unenjoyable trip.  I relished spending time with my brother and his new wife and seeing San Francisco for the first time.  On my only Saturday on the peninsula, I borrowed a Porsche, and Sanford and I roared off to Half Moon Bay.  While crawling through the hills that separate the valley from the sea, we admired the vibrant day and the verdant slopes juxtaposed against an empty blue sky.  The top was down and I felt my face sunburning, but as we approached the Pacific, the weather changed dramatically.  The sky filled with low grey clouds, and the temperature dropped so far that the air had the chill of autumn in it.  We parked the car and walked to the sea, crossing a moor and climbing down steep sandy embankments.  The surf roared with water as clear and turquoise as a tropical sea, but when we took off our shoes and waded in, we found it to be as cold as winter.  The Pacific cools the air around San Francisco during the summer and keeps the temperature above freezing during colder months.  The grey clouds that hang over the ocean and suck the color from the California landscape creep into the city as fog.  They form when the cold sea makes contact with warmer winds.

After leaving Half Moon Bay, Sanford and I walked around San Francisco.  We visited some famous pier that was nothing but a tourist trap.  After jostled our way through an abominable crowd in order to see sea lions basking in a marina, we found only there; the rest had headed south for the summer.  All very anti-climatic.  We walked through North Beach, San Francisco's Little Italy, stopping to have a beer here and there, and then made our way through Chinatown, where Sanford bought Susanna a polyester kimono decorated in colors unknown to nature.  At the same bizarre, we found similarly designed kung-fu outfits blazoned with roaring tigers with flaming paws, Chinese symbols, and other animals of power and grace.  If I had cash, I would have purchased my next Halloween outfit.  I wondered, though, if it would be culturally insensitive for me to wear one.  However, I decided that it would be worse to present yourself to a crowd of Halloween drunks as a kung-fu master than to assume the slight risk that you may offend someone of Chinese descent.  Asians and Caucasians are among the few races that still have a sense of humor about their racial heritage.  As a thought experiment, I imagined three white people entering a party, one wearing a dashiki, one a kung-fu outfit, and one lederhosen.  The first outfit would be the riskiest.  I then imagined three Asians entering the same party in the same outfits.  The third might win him best costume.

After procuring gifts and quaffing an aperitivo or two, Sanford and I dined at Hunan Homes (no relation to Sherlock the waitress assured me), where we ordered eel and other strange dishes. 'Twas delicious.  Sus luckily was working a night-shift when we returned to the house and promptly passed out in an MSG coma.


I spent the week working in Silicon Valley.  Despite its reputation, the area is not terribly impressive.  It's a largely affluent stretch of suburb that reminded me of NOVA with better weather, more Trader Joe's, and worse highways.  The state of the roads would lead you to think you were decaying rust-belt town, not the tech center of the world, but that's what happens when a state invests according to ideology instead of good finance.


I said my farewells to San Francisco and Silicon Valley last Wednesday and caught a Virgin American flight (amazing company) to San Diego for Comic-Con.  ComicCon is an annual event that gathers comic book, fantasy, and science fiction producers and consumers in one awkward mass.  It was an interesting glimpse of an exuberant and strange facet of American culture.  I expected the overweight superheros and acne-ridden heroines.   At Renaissance fairs I had gawked at scrawny young men in plastic armor and wenches in Eliabethean dresses that hoisted their veiny breasts up to their clavicles.  But the sheer mass of the crowd, the concentration of geeks, and the soup of incongruous cultural reference was staggering.  Comic-Con was a joyful celebration of human imagination, in which fans made their cherished ideals quasi-real by dressing as their favorite characters with nearly sacrosanct devotion to detail and authenticity.  Some costumes must have taken weeks to complete, and those who wore them were not just a grinning nerd freshly emerged from his grandmother's basement.  Nay, for that week, he was Thor or Spider Man or Wolverine in aspect and demeanor!  She was no passed-over virgin whittling away her hours fixing coffee or rearranging clothes-racks.  For that week, Wonder Woman, Black Widow, or Lady Mechanica, bold, sexy, and feminine!  Devotees of the same denomination hailed one another and compared outfits; old men sold illustrated volumes of naked women; and consumers went from booth to booth collecting trinkets and discussing the future of certain franchises.  Who cares if the cause of the celebration was cultural vomit?  The excitement and joyfulness was wonderful to take part in, and I got to play Halo 4, which kicks ass.