I Had A Good Feeling!

LEG ONE: JAPAN


Tokyo: May 18 - May 20
Accommodations: K's House Tokyo
20-10, Kuramae 3-chome, Taito-ku, Tokyo, Japan 111-0051
TEL +(81)-3-5833-0555 FAX +(81)-3-5833-0444
email : tokyo@kshouse.jp

Kyoto & Nara: May 20 - May 23
Accommodations: K's House
418 Nayacho, Shichijo-agaru, Dotemachi-dori, Shimogyo-ku, Kyoto city, Japan 600-8142
TEL +(81)-75-342-2444 FAX +(81)-75-342-2440
email ：kyoto@kshouse.jp

Tokyo: May 24
Accommodations: K's House


LEG TWO: SOUTHERN CHINA
Shanghai: May 24 - May 26

Guilin: May 27 - May 28
Accommodations: Ronghu Lake
No.17 North Ronghu Road, Guilin, China, 541001
Phone: 86-773-2893811

Yangshuo: May 28 - June 3
Accommodations: Yangshuo Regency
West Street, Yangshuo, Guilin, Guangxi 541900
Phone: 86-773-8817198

LEG THREE: SHANGHAI


Shanghai: June 4 - June 18th

June 6: Wallace, Brian, and Jonathan depart.
June 8: Special Guest Star arrives.

Graduation Day

Because of my lunch with the hollywood starlet, I missed my daily yoga class, and decided to take, for the first time, a level 2-3 class.

This is the highest difficulty level my yoga studio offers, and I was hesitant about taking it, but I was curious about what, exactly, all of my yoga practice was building towards.

So I waited in the lobby as my regular classmates exited the studio; one of the friendlier ones approached me and said, "You missed class! What happened?" I explained, and then my instructor emerged and the following conversation ensued:

Fav Instructor: Oh my god! Robert! What are you doing?
Me: I missed your class because I had lunch with one my relatives, so I figured --
Fav Instructor: (mock gasp) Wait! Are you taking the 2-3 class?
Me: Yes.
Fav Instructor: (mock squeal of delight) Oh, that's great. I wish I could be there.
Me: What, so you can see me in pain?
Fav Instructor: You're so strong. You'll be fine.
Me: I'm... excited about it.
Fav Instructor: Good.
Me: I'll see you tomorrow.
Fav Instructor: Bye!

What struck me about this conversation, besides the sheer number of exclamation points I have to use in order to convey some sense of my instructor's sheer exuberance, is how genuinely excited and happy she was that I was growing in my yoga competency. There was absolutely no sense on her part of feeling slighted by my brief defection to another instructor's class, even though we both know that I've hardly mastered my current class.

I haven't had a teacher be this proud of me since grade school.

Then the level 2-3 class begins.

There is not necessarily anything new about this class. But there are a handful of very difficult poses that are rarities in my regular class: Handstand. Camel. Virasana. Upward Facing Bow. Each of these poses is something we might attempt every once in a while in my regular class, as a topper to the day's practice.

In this class, WE DO THEM ALL. And no one in the class even bats an eye at the mention of their names. There's no warm-up, no extended instruction - we just go.

I manage to execute all of them, and capably at that - no stumbling or faltering. I acquit myself beautifully.

That's how good my favorite instructor is.

The Hollywood Starlet

I show up for lunch. The first thing she says to me is, "You've lost a lot of weight."

I have to admit, I am a bit taken aback by how quintessentially Hollywood this greeting is.

"Good weight or bad weight?" I ask. She laughs.

I encourage to try the porkwich. She is hesitant, but relents. Then it arrives, and she pronounces it "really good!"

We talk careers, because that's obligatory in Hollywood. The news for both of us is good. She's planning to move to New York for the summer, "just to get away". She mentions some television stars she knows personally, proclaming them "fabulous".

Just to prove the point, our conversation is interrupted by a text message from a well-known actor and celebrity, inviting her out to celebrate the cancellation of their television show.

She invites me to a charity fundraiser she's organizing.

We also talk love lives, because that's obligatory too. Again, good news all around.

Then we talk tarot readers for a bit, as she is the only other person I know who regularly consults one of her own. She asks for Judy's number, and I give it to her.

(Including her, I will have two relatives and a mom who have sat with Judy. I am working my way through my entire family.)

Then the check comes, and she tells me she has an audition. We hug, and I ask her to tell me what Judy says, if it's not too personal.

She says she totally will.

The DIY Tarot Reading

Here's a fun post.

It seemed a bit stingy to post about Judy's return and not provide any insight at all into what she said. So I'll describe something that happened at the very end of the session.

After a rapid hour of intense discussion regarding the course of my life, Judy did something she's never done before: she asked me to draw three cards. There was no question or context for the draw; the intention of this exercise was to yield the floor to any unaddressed points or final thoughts the universe wanted to make to me.

Those of you reading at home can play along and attempt to interpret this simple three-card spread. The beauty of this exercise is that there is no context or question for the spread, which means you are working with the same amount of information that Judy had. I have listed the cards in the order I drew them.

Here's a helpful guide to the deck to get you started. If you get stumped, check the comments for a bit of Judy's reaction to the draw.

1) The Lovers


OMG! This is exactly like Live and Let Die, where Bond seduces Jane Seymour by asking her to draw a tarot card, and she picks The Lovers. Except it turns out that Bond carries a special tarot deck in which every single card is The Lovers, and that's why the playa gets with the medicine woman and you don't.


2) Temperance


Some sort of intense angel-looking type, making magic cocktails. Cheers!


3) Three of Wands


A badass Greek dude looking real serious, about to grab some poles and throw down. IN THE SHADE, if need be.

Ninja Recycling

There's been a disturbing trend in the common vernacular, a propensity accelerated by the Internet, of diluting the meaning of the term "ninja". Ninja is frequently used to merely mean skillful or one who possesses skill ("Dude's a ninja at the copy machine."), which seems a rather disgraceful affront to ninjutsu and its true adherents.

Let me explain the context for this pronouncement. I've always been apathetic about recycling. Part of the problem is that my apartment building pays for private garbage collection, which precludes its residents from participating in the municipal recycling pickup every week. For a while I looked into visiting recycling centers, but none of them accept paper, which is my primary waste product.

But then I realized that all I had to do was ascertain the day of the week upon which the blue bin pickup occurs, and then dump my recyclables in a neighbor's bin on the night before pickup. Most of my neighbors don't even come close to filling their recyclable bins every week, leaving plenty of room for me to deposit my own bottles, papers, and cans. The solution to my recycling dilemma was solved, as I often tend to solve problems, by gaming the system.

So now I gather my recyclables in the dead of night, sneak outside my building, and covertly dump them in a neighbor's bin. This is a mission that literally requires the skills of ninjutsu: stealth, agility, subterfuge. There is no honor conferred nor koku dispensed for completing the task; only the satisfaction of a mission accomplished.

Now that's ninja.

Countdown to Asia

Well, it's been a bit of a lull since we shipped off our little Pillow Crisis off to movie studio summer camp. I only have a week until I fly off to Japan and China, so there's not much in the way of actual work I can accomplish. Here's my to-do list for the week:

• Lunch with my cousin the Hollywood starlet (this is not an ironic term of endearment, but rather a factual description of her profession).


• Practice nighttime photography on Larchmont as a means of familiarizing myself with new camera.


• Reacquaint myself with Lobsters vs. Butterflies. Yay! Here comes my new favorite screenplay!


• Read The Lady and the Monk (discussed previously). Also read Hagakure ("In the Shadow of Leaves"), the treatise of Samurai wisdom adored by white otaku, but considered in its nation of origin to be a document akin to Mein Kampf.


• Wait for Pillow Crisis feedback from the studio. (Twenty bucks says I don't hear from them before I step on the plane.)


• Back up my laptop hard drive in anticipation of the trip.


• Yoga.


• Pick up my brother from the airport.

The Mystery of Pico Iyer - Part I

Yesterday, as I was walking home from yoga class, I passed a neighbor's rose garden, and a thought popped into my head. It consisted of two words:

Pico Iyer.

This was a strange throught to pop into my head, as I had no idea who he was. I thought to myself, "Dude is named after a font - cool." And then - "Is that the graphic designer who named his daughter after Bodoni?" (No, that would be Tibor Kalman.) And finally - "I think he's an academic of some sort - maybe from a foreign country."

I dismissed the thought and went home. An issue of National Geographic Traveler had arrived at my apartment, and I opened it, only to find myself staring at the contributors page, and on it, the name:

Pico Iyer.

Weird. What were the odds? So I immediately turned to the article he penned, and read it. It was about a last minute trip he took to Bhutan. "What does this mean?" I asked myself. "Am I supposed to visit Bhutan? Please God, don't make me visit Bhutan." (Bhutan is one of the most remote nations in the world; only a handful of companies are authorized to bring tourists in, and it's very, very expensive.)

So I looked Mr. Iyer up on Wikipedia, hoping to see something that seemed relevant to my life. It turns out that Iyer is a renowned travel writer, and his books, while intriguing, don't compel me to read them.

The only thing I could find was a book called The Lady and the Monk. It's an account of a year Iyer spent in a Buddhist monastery in Kyoto, which is a city I will visit in two weeks. It's also the story of how he met his wife, and I enjoy a good love story as much as anybody else.

I'll read it, visit Kyoto, and report on any synchronicities.

Taking It Apart To Build It Again

Writing a big budget Hollywood movie can safely be compared to NASCAR racing.

You are building an extremely complicated machine to exacting tolerances, hoping that it has enough speed to win the race. And when the results fail to yield the desired velocity, you take the car apart, make small and subtle alterations, and put the car back together again. You shave weight, you reduce drag. You do this until you know every piece of the machine by heart, until you can map the gears of every system in your mind. And even then, the car may not be fast enough. So then you get really creative. You drill holes in wheel wells to improve air flow, you install extra fuel piping to increase capacity, you raise the spoiler to increase downforce. In short, you cheat.

Last week Huili and I actually submitted the final Pillow Crisis revision. I write "final" with some degree of hope, because our last two revisions were also the final revisions. But in this case, having utterly exhausted our capacity and desire to work on the story any longer, I'm inclined to believe that this is the ultimate revision.

One of the important things we've learned in this process is the value of rapid prototyping. Instead of pouring a lot of resources into a single perfect draft, never knowing if the final product would pass muster with the studios, we instead focused our efforts on outlines.

We began with a fifty point outline, encompassing every moment of the movie, and proceeded to justify the inclusion of each individual point. Did this moment belong in the movie? Did it need changes? Did it need to be placed at a different point in the outline?

On average, we spent about a day on each point, working our way through the outline like a Catholic praying the rosary. The most frustrating moments came during moments when we decided that we needed to throw out large sections of the chronology, which often meant going back to where we were three weeks ago. The movie mutated several times along the way, growing new appendages and shedding old ones. We spent days, weeks cultivating - and then destroying - alternate universe iterations of our movie. Imagine the cloning laboratory from the fourth Alien movie.

But that is the beauty of rapid prototyping - evolutionary errors were discovered early enough in the process so that we did not have to undertake an arduous page one rewrite of the screenplay; we merely needed to reconfigure some bullet points on our outline. We were essentially writing a new version of the movie every couple of weeks, as opposed to months.

The downside of this process is the loss of discovery - the sense of a story growing organically from the hidden recesses of your heart and subconscious. But big-budget Hollywood movies are not organic - they are machines which create the most exquisite illusion of soul. Back to the Future is ultimately a cold, mechanical movie which fools you into thinking it has a heart. See also: the entire oeuvre of Pixar. The illusion is so well-crafted that even awareness of the illusion is not enough to break it.

That is the magic of the machine you're building.

The Return of Judy

"Has it been a year already?" Judy asked.

"It's been more than a year," I said.

So I drove out to Thousand Oaks. As we stepped inside her reading room, she asked,

"What happened? Your body is completely different!"

When I asked what she meant, she said, "The energy in your chest and shoulders is much more open."

I explained that perhaps this woman (#2) might have something to say about that.

So then I spent the next hour talking to my favorite Jewish grandmother who happens to read tarot cards. And, as tarot readers are wont to do, she spoke about the current preoccupations of my life at great length.

I was supposed to bring back lots of MP3s for your enjoyment, but I've decided against posting any of the material from this year's reading. My impression is that posting it would only serve to spoil the telling of events to come. (And besides, if she's wrong (never!), it could be somewhat embarrassing. As always, though, I would be loathe to bet against this woman.)

We'll see.

How To Pack For A Long Trip

A few days or even weeks before your trip, tou take your empty suitcase, and put it somewhere conspicuous. Then, as you remember things you need, you throw them in the suitcase, one by one. By the time your departure date arrives, everything that you might possibly forget - is already in your suitcase.

A Small Recipe for Happiness

Took a month off from blogging, but I find my return necessitated by a number of exciting and forthcoming events.

In order to make up for my absence, here's a small recipe for happiness:

1) Buy a pound of strawberries.

2) Buy some Straus Organic European-Style Vanilla Whole Milk Yogurt. Do not substitute another brand of yogurt, as European yogurt is liquid, not solid.

3) Dip the strawberries in the yogurt and eat.

4) Drink the resulting strawberry-yogurt blend.

This is one of the best things I've learned all year.

Coming up next: Asia! And a brief visit with a very special guest star!

Checking In Briefly

It's been a while. Here's a rare photo of myself, posing with my friend Josh in front of one of my favorite locations in San Francisco: Dolores Park. I usually don't pose for "let's stand in front of the landmark with our beverages" photos, but Josh took someone's group photo, and she insisted on returning the favor.

I wish I had more to report. Huili and I are just about done with our final revision of Pillow Crisis for our friends at the studio. We'll see what happens, or we won't, depending on how quickly or slowly they respond. In the meantime, I am running over to the Chinese consulate to drop off visa applications for my friends and myself, attending regular planning meetings, helping my brother with internship applications in Los Angeles, and wondering where all the time goes.

The Hollywood Volcano

Today I stepped outside, only to be greeted by what appeared to be a newly active volcano in the Hollywood Hills. Massive brown plumes rose in the north, slightly tinting the sunlight towards evening. It was apocalyptic to say the least. My cousin took this photo from his office.

Anyway, I'm back from San Francisco. A few things I did:

• Took the train(!) from Los Angeles to Oakland. It's about eight hours each way, marginally longer and more costly ($112 round trip) than driving, but you can nap and read.


• Read a novel (Tokyo Cancelled) and about ten back issues of the New Yorker on the ride.


• Ate in the snack car on the train. Mental note: do not eat on a train that does not have a grill unless you like microwaved food.


• Tried Burmese food for the first time at Burma Superstar.


• Biked in city traffic through the Haight and Golden Gate Park, courtesy of my friend Josh.


• Visited the observatory tower at the De Young, and saw nothing but fog.


• Walked around the perimeter of Lake Merritt in Oakland.


• Hiked from the Ferry Building to Golden Gate Bridge - about four scenic miles along the coast.


• Almost got caught by the Bushman in the marina. My friend Vijay says you could watch this guy work all day.


• Convinced Vijay to stay up way past his bedtime talking.


• Watched the sea lions laze on their barges and occasionally push each other into the water. Vijay says that some sea lions like to be on barges with other sea lions, and some like to be alone. If one gets pushed into the water by a bully, he or she will attempt to climb back onto the barge, only to be pushed back by the bully.


• Took pictures of the Union Square area - research for Pillow Crisis.

From here on out, it's WORK WORK WORK GO TO JAPAN AND CHINA COME BACK OH AND NOT TO MENTION THAT OTHER THING YOU'VE BEEN LOOKING FORWARD TO WORK WORK WORK.

I can't believe that I've taken a year off, and all of this stuff has to happen at the same time. Way to go, destiny.

Gone to San Francisco

I took the train to Oakland today, stopped in Modesto and Stockton along the way, and will be visiting old friends this week.

I'm completely aware of this trip's lack of foreshadowing on the blog - that should tell you something about how full my life is these days.

Baby Kidnapper, Torturer, Yoga Classmate

Context is everything.

For the past few months, I've encountered a mysterious woman in the yoga studio who seemed vaguely familiar. She was older, distinctly European, with a piercing gaze. Eye contact with this woman was an unsettling experience because her gaze, intentionally or not, both implores and judges you with an acute sense of dramatic urgency.

As I'd look at her, I'd think: I know this woman from somewhere. And yet, for the life of me, I couldn't think of any context in which I would become acquainted with an older, European woman. What's worse, as we made eye contact, there was a glint of recognition in her eyes, as if she recognized me as well. Quite the conundrum.

Infrequently, I would enter the studio, make eye contact with this woman in the lobby, be slightly haunted and disquieted by the experience, and then promptly forget about her as I entered class. (I never spent any time pondering the mystery of this woman, as my focus in yoga class, is as always, yoga. But of course.)

Finally, it hit me: I knew where I had seen this woman before. The reason why my mind had failed to place her was because she was firmly removed from her proper context: a mysterious jungle island filled with supernatural phenomena.

My classmate was Rousseau. The crazy French lady from the television show Lost. The one who kidnaps infants and tortures people with electrical current. And the reason why I saw the recognition in her eyes was that she knew I had seen her on the show. Even though I myself didn't know that yet.

In my mind, my belief in her character and the universe she inhabited nullified the existence of the actress who portrays said character. And invalidated the possibility of her taking yoga with me.

My mind simply refused to recognize her because the island of Lost was REAL.

And it didn't hesitate to send subtle warnings about this woman, as if I were in danger of being kidnapped and tortured.

Context is everything.

Pillow Crisis, Japan, and My Bathroom

Random ends:

After a few weeks of non-stop conference calls to Huili in London, the final Pillow Crisis revision is complete. Final, of course, doesn't necessarily mean final at all, especially in the case of Pillow Crisis. However, three things - the state of the project, my gut instincts and my growing loss of patience for all things pillow-related -- all tell me that this is indeed the final revision. It's time to write it up, kick it down the street to our overlords at the studio, and see what they think.

Planning a trip to Japan is my second means of employment, apparently. (And we haven't even gotten to China yet!) You can't really wing it in Japan, because of the lack of English speakers, and the fact that it is so goddamn expensive. The exorbitance of your trip calls for a compressed timetable, which in turn calls for very careful planning. I've just spent two hours writing e-mails and making phone calls to various party members, to confirm our plans as we lock ourselves into reservations (hotel, rail, Studio Ghibli!).

Last week, as I spoke with Huili over Skype, workmen renovated my bathroom. According to housing inspectors, cracked linoleum is a health hazard, which means freshly installed tile for me. My first gleeful thought upon hearing this news was, "This is like getting my bathroom floor cleaned for free!" Wrong. The renovation coated everything in a fine veil of dust, and I mopped the floor several times. The good news is that my bathroom looks infinitely more respectable.

A Very Big If: The First Anniversary

Time for a lesson on the Dutch language.

A week ago, I grabbed a meal at the Fairfax Farmer's Market. In the old days, I would never do this for three reasons: traffic, parking, and crowds. But since I don't work during the day, I can just roll up, find plentiful parking, and claim acres of tables all for myself. Contrast this experience with the one experience by nearly everyone on Saturday afternoon.

So I walked to the Gumbo Pot, ordered a catfish po' boy, and didn't have to hunt for a table. The market was quiet, the sun was setting, the air was pleasant, and the sandwich was perfect. And I thought to myself, this is pretty much everything that I had hoped for.

That moment - the moment in which I recognize exactly how good my life can be - occurs to me frequently these days.

It's the first anniversary of A Very Big If, and I naturally do some thinking about exactly what kinds of changes have occurred in my life. The first one I could mention is the appearance of these moments of recognition and thankfulness - moments that were fleeting and rare when I was working a day job. The Dutch have a word for the quality of these instances - gezellig. The Dutch are proud of this word because it is uniquely Dutch, having no easy translation in any other language. Having a po'boy at a slow farmer's market on a perfect day is gezellig; being fed cold burritos from Baja Fresh at the office during overtime - not so much.

These are simple moments. After I finished my meal, I stopped in the book store and perused the remainder stacks. That would be another one. Here are some others:

• Walking down Larchmont on my way to yoga class.


• Grating parmesan cheese to sprinkle on my pasta.


• Buying cookies from girl scouts and hearing the latest neighborhood gossip.


• Sending and receiving long e-mails with old friends.


• Rarely, if ever, being in a hurry; as a corrollary, rarely using an alarm clock.


• Grocery shopping when the store is practically empty.


• Thinking of a book I'd like to read, checking it out from the library, and reading it. All in the same day.


• Subjugating the travel section at Borders each weekend with friends to plan a trip to Asia. (Sumo wrestling! Tiger cubs! Bamboo forests!)


• Writing without anyone looking over my shoulder.


• Having unusually friendly conversations with strangers, because that's what civilized people do.

I originally undertook this endeavor to actualize some important moments in my life and work. And slowly but surely, those moments are manifesting. But life is ultimately comprised not of these big moments - which flare briefly and quickly fade - but of a sustained series of smaller ones. You spend a lot more time with your toothbrush than with the trophies on the shelf.

What I have come to enjoy is the change in the quality of my life's smaller moments. They are the ones that the determine the shape of my life as I live it.

Wynton Marsalis Loves Glow In The Dark Stars

Another post about getting back on the horse.

Wynton Marsalis was interviewed on NPR recently to promote his new album. Having always borne a grudge against him for his strident criticism of hip-hop, I was surprised to hear him sounding cheerful and friendly, as opposed to the stentorian and imperious presence I have always imagined.

During the interview, he leads the reporter into the former childhood bedroom of his sons; the reporter notes that the walls and ceiling - painted a "celestial blue" - are covered with several thousand glow-in-the-dark stars, and wonders aloud of the time and labor involved.

Marsalis relates the story of the stars: he told his sons that they would together cover the wall with stars, and they replied, "No way." But Marsalis insisted. Each evening, they applied a handful of stars together, the father and his sons. Time passes, and one evening, the last star is affixed.

From the beginning, Marsalis intended this activity to pose a lesson - about doing something again and again, one step at a time - until it is complete. He's didactic and moralistic like that. But as lessons go, it's not a bad one.

There's a big difference between covering a ceiling in thousands of stars, and just putting up a few stars every night. And there is also no difference.

Remembering that has made all the difference in my life and work.

Quitting The Internet

Speaking of getting back on the horse, one of the evergreen challenges of my life right now is limiting the amount of time I waste on the internet.

I make it sound like I spend hours in front of my computer. I don't, actually. My life doesn't really allow it - I probably spend more time exercising than I do browsing the web each day. The problem is that my day has become so full that I need to cut weight wherever I can. The internet is the easiest cut to make.

I do have some experience at quitting the habit. A year ago, I made a competitive bet with someone; the terms were that both of us would go without frivolous browsing for a month - whoever committed the most transgressions would owe the winner fifty dollars.

Unfortunately, this was not a successful experiment. For reasons I won't go into, I had a vested interest in LOSING the competition. So each time my competitor would record a failure of willpower, I would offer up one or two of own. Some were legitimate, some were falsified. And since I knew I was going to lose, I figured I might as well get some browsing out of it. Things went downhill from there. In any case, I was out fifty bucks at the end of the month.

For the handful of days in which I managed to avoid the internet, though, my quality of life improved. My mind was clearer, I suffered from less hurry sickness, I opened books and read them. But I discovered that quitting cold turkey wasn't a good approach.

Quitting the internet is difficult primarily because the barrier to entry - a single mouseclick - is so low. Also because there is often a never-ending supply of new things to be clicked, even on a single site. And because other activities you engage in while seated at your computer - e-mail, shopping, blogging - transition naturally to a hazy and perpetual wasted state (see my first reason). If you work a job that involves a pc, it's even worse. There are many slow periods throughout the day, which encourages you to kill time, which slackens your browsing discipline (if it ever existed) considerably.

My new approach two managing internet time consists of several new techniques.

One, designate a block of time to engage in internet frivolity, and firewall it. No stupid internet stuff outside of that block.

Two, conscious clicking. Ask yourself before you click whether this is really necessary.

Three, don't leave the computer on throughout the day. Shut it down. This increases the barrier to entry; if you have to boot up your computer to do something, you begin to ask if it's really worth it.

Four, write better e-mails. If for some reason, you are stuck at your desk with nothing better to do than, catch up with old friends instead. As a result of this blog, I am currently exchanging lovely e-mails with people I haven't spoken to in YEARS. And I'm even going to visit one of them later this month.

Getting Back On The Horse

Do you know how I got such nice skin? Through the repeated application of seemingly futile effort. - Faye Valentine

One of the continual frustrations of this experiment is self-determination is the fact that one sets a million tiny goals, all of which seem entirely achievable, but are insurmountable taken as a whole.

I can read books, meditate, cook, clean house. I'm doing more of these things than ever; I just can't do them all at the same time. As I spin one plate, another comes crashing to the floor; I am running about three miles a day, but my kitchen floor is a mess. Reading more books (for pleasure and not research), in particular, seems to be a continually neglected task, although I've read more books than I have in years.

These small failures of mine are not an occasion for despair. After all, the cost of resuming a failed endeavor is very small. In fact, it's so small that it's actually much costlier to procrastinate and self-flagellate than it is to simply and immediately try again. Most endeavors are unlike winning the Superbowl, in that one can sustain countless abortive failures and still accomplish the task. Small steps seem futile, but they will cover the ground just as surely as a large one.

So I've learned to keep moving. And slowly but surely, the work is done.