Make Your Own Rules

Many pints of ice cream and successful lottery tickets ago (I’m just kidding…about the second thing) I wrote about giving myself a nickname. One of society’s unwritten rules holds that Thou Shalt Not Apply Thine Own Nickname, so giving myself a nickname was unusual.

Why did my peers go along with it? I’m not sure. Hypotheses include (in descending order of likelihood):

• No one noticed my nickname was different from my regular name
• Johnny Roboto was too catchy and could not topped
• My peers had been looking to make an ironic statement on man’s approach towards the singularity, and finally found a way to do it
• My charisma as a monotonous accountant was overpoweringly persuasive

What is a Boogaloo?

Enter Nickname Part 2: Electric Boogaloo.

(Note: I don’t know what a Boogaloo is, or the difference between an electric and acoustic one. I just know it was a subtitle to some movie no one’s ever seen that now gets appended to ill-advised sequels.)

(Note 2 – Electric Boogaloo: Quick research has shown that the sequel in question was Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, a break-dancing movie featuring Ice-T, America’s greatest actor whose name is also a beverage.)

Emotional responses have been getting more frequent in my brain, from zero to at least one confirmed response. This is a percentage increase of infinity, which I have been told is a lot.

As a result, the Johnny Roboto nickname doesn’t really work anymore (unless I need a stage name if I ever join a punk band).

J Curve

Enter… J Curve! Not as catchy as Johnny Roboto, but more functional (see below). And boy, do accountants prefer function over style!

Just in case someone reads this, and just in case that person does useful things in life instead of studying financial graphs, I’ll explain the J Curve.

Most people have heard the Biblical phrase, “You gotta spend money to make money.” The J Curve is a graph of that phrase. The X-Axis is time, the Y-Axis is profitability/cash flow/your favorite buzzword.

Let’s say you borrow money to start a business. Initially, profitability is negative as you spend money to get started. Over time, if you spend money on the right things and start making sales, your income becomes positive.  Your spending pays off.

On a graph, you get a curve that looks like a J: it drops and then goes up.

Metaphor Alert

So perhaps I can nickname myself the J Curve. I’m hoping to match the shape of the J Curve with the trajectory of my life. I’ve made mistakes and had setbacks (that’s a job interview translation for “turned my life into a flaming wreckage”). But lessons have been learned, and profits can be earned if I have the guts to keep moving forward.

Sometimes I don’t want to move forward, but it’d be a shame to quit now. Who quits a business after the lean years are over and it’s prime time to grow? Or gets tonsils removed but turns down ice cream? Who (does something else that’s painful) and then (turns down a benefit)?

Monkey Mind is still around and tries to goad me into self-criticism. Luckily, I’ve got people around me that I can trust to tell me if I’m doing:

1. Right Things, or
2. Dumb Things

I worked long and hard on that categorical framework. As I write this, reports from the front are positive. We’ve moved from B to A.

Maybe one day the monkey will be quiet …that’s a blog post for later!

Yesterday was Memorial Day 2017, and I had the good fortune of playing a round of golf with my Dad and Brother. My round went about as well as you could expect for a man of Irish descent who doesn’t practice: alternating flashes of bonhomie and blind rage.

The best thing about golf is the variety of ways to ruin my golf round. I thought about past personal golf wreckage and arranged common causes of calamity from most to least likely to result in one of my clubs going airborne:

1. Whiffs: This is tolerable or embarrassing depending on my acting skills and the cynicism and proximity of other golfers. There is a chance missing the ball can be turned into a “practice swing” if you sell it. I’ve found it helpful to say things like “Wow, I just made a great practice swing” and “It helps me stay loose when I intentionally miss the ball every so often.”
2. Missed putts: Based on what I’ve observed, most greens are rigged so that the ball doesn’t go in the hole. However, getting too upset with this reality is like getting upset with gravity—not helpful (if gravity were helpful it would make my ball fall in the hole). Instead, I find it more productive to focus on peace and serenity. In any case, anecdotal testimonies suggests I only count 2 putts per hole anyway.
3. Sand: As dispiriting as it is hitting my ball into the sand trap and thinking about the 7 hacks and 14 pounds of sand I’ll need to displace to get out, at least I didn’t lose that free golf ball I found in those weird plants earlier. Unfortunately, displaced sand grains coat my sticky, sunscreen-slathered skin in ways that are not enjoyable. I look like a Spiderman villain.
4. Rough: I’ll be honest, most golf course layouts are incredibly poorly thought out. Usually the longest grass is where most of my balls go! I can usually live with it except when the grass gets so long I can’t find my ball 3 inches off the fairway. Also, it’s embarrassing when I forget where I hit my ball and lose it. Fortunately, surreptitious ball-dropping skills come in handy. Drop a replacement ball, act like nothing happened, and avoid counting a penalty stroke. The penalty stroke for a lost ball is unfair anyway. Like I said, they purposefully put long grass where I hit my ball just to thwart me!
5. Houses: Where’s Bernie Sanders when you need him? All these elitist homeowners telling me I can’t go on their “property” and hit my ball? How bourgeois. They should thank me for leaving divots in their yards; they don’t have to mow those areas now.
6. Hitting it thin: Why strike the whole ball if you can just hit the top half? Efficiency is usually rewarded in life, but not in golf. If I strike only 50% of the golf ball I’m rewarded with the sight of my ball piddling down the fairway with urgency equivalent to a DMV employee.
7. Hitting it fat: The obesity epidemic can extend to golf as well, namely when I excise a massive chunk of turf out of the ground before striking the ball. And 3 more pelts afterwards as I exact revenge on the Earth for causing me to hit a bad shot.
8. Water: Very rage-inducing. Classic self-fulfilling prophecy: “Avoid the water. Avoid the water. Avoid the water…it’s in the water.” Prophecies are the worst.