Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Uncategorized”
I have read that a raccoon will wash a perfectly clean food item in filthy water before consuming it as a matter of genetically-based behavior. The inclination to rinse food prior to eating it must have historically served as an evolutionary advantage, even if in some circumstances it may harm the raccoon. In a similar vein, I hail from a …
One of the awkward parts of being a kid is navigating what type of humor is or is not appropriate when you incompletely grasp the context. One second your adult audience is rolling in the aisles and you are killing like a comic on the Sunset Strip; the next moment, the muscles in your parents’ necks are pulled into taut …
When our investments reached certain milestones ahead of schedule, we discussed over several months whether we ought to take some risk off the table. In the end, we revised to a more conservative target asset allocation of 60/40 equity to fixed income. Then we mulled it over some more, and modified it to 45/40/15 equity/fixed income/real estate. This was in …
The title of this post comes from an excerpt of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s excellent book, The Black Swan, which explores the role of highly improbable events in shaping our lives more definitively than recurring, predictable events tend to do. Taleb uses it to refer to a phenomenon he witnessed firsthand during the outbreak of Civil War along religious lines in …
I came home from an early morning shift to find my daughter feeling down. It seemed she was in a COVID funk. This would be the first year of Halloween where she could not go trick or treating in our Norman Rockwell community, where we would routinely meet up with a couple of families we love and run into another …
The first and second installments in this 3 part series described the ideal attributes of my Second Act, and how (with one rare exception) every possibility I’ve pursued has been a total dud. I remain an incorrigible dreamer, so in Part 3 I’ll spell out my latest hare-brained idea for an encore career that might meet my needs once I’m …
We all have some crazy in us, and finding a constructive means of channeling it is often what separates the person ordering the meds from the person receiving them. I’ve referred in the past to pathology with utility, the concept that an obsessive trait placed in the appropriate context can function as a superpower that yields superior performance. I’ll be …
In the first installment, I described some guidelines for the type of work I hoped to pursue as part of my Act Two, and explained why I did not end up pursuing an opportunity practicing outpatient palliative care medicine or attempt to join a med tech startup. In this second installment, I’ll describe several other pursuits that did not pan …
Sometimes you set yourself up for failure, and you can only clearly see it in retrospect. A few weeks ago we decided to day trip by car to make a socially-distanced visit to family who live a few hours’ drive from us. We planned to hit the road early, and piggybacked a shopping trip for shoes for one of my …
One of my goals has been to figure out what to do with that new balance of time I’ve carved out. I want to find something that will keep me busy after the kids leave home; a fiefdom of my own that lets me settle into an empty nest rhythm; something to sustain me going forward. It’s hard to figure …