Category Archives: Life

I just listened to a ten-minute audio journal entry I recorded in February 2003. I wish I kept a more detailed journal (if you don’t keep one or blog you must do so!). Nonetheless, this entry was pretty revealing.

I reviewed my activities for the prior two weeks. I’m shocked at how busy I was (I was 15 yrs old). Over a two week stretch, I spent five full days in LA doing pitches and every day after school doing pitches in the Bay Area. I snuck into a non-vendor conference where clients were mingling in Monterey, spent the night, and then stood outside the door the following morning to greet people. I was on the phone every single day with my chief advisor Mike as we were in the midst of a major executive recruitment process. I had conference calls during long car rides. Our advisory board and I had long weekend and night meetings. I had various lunches and calls during the week. Somewhere along the way, I was bumped up to the varsity basketball team as a sophomore. And how did my two week stretch end? A routine check-in to the doctor, of course, where I was told I had high blood pressure. Indeed.

I guess my question is: When was I at school? Did I even go to classes? Does the fact that I remember nothing from freshman year mean anything? The only thing I remember is fighting the librarian to allow me to lock my laptop to the table and take calls in the conference room….

MTV called me a few months ago. They wanted to profile me in their series True Life, a popular mini-documentary series they produce. The theme was True Life: I Don’t Fit In. They would follow me around for a couple weeks, from when I wake up till when I go to sleep. School, meetings, parties, etc.

After several conversations with the producer, who was professional and helpful, and at the recommendation of our PR people who have helped me with press inquires during spikes of activity, I said no. I was uneasy about being pigeonholed as a kind of social misfit; I would want more control over the footage; I was uneasy about the MTV audience and the other couple young people who would be featured on the show.

Tonight my brother alerted me to turn on MTV. I haven’t watched TV in several years, so it took flipping through many channels to find the station. Sure enough, it was True Life: I Don’t Fit In. It only took 10 minutes of watching the young people being profiled to know that I made the right decision.

I spent the past two nights re-certifying myself for CPR and First Aid (and AED) at the San Francisco Red Cross. I went a few years ago for this eight hour class because 9/11 taught me an emergency could happen anywhere anytime and if there’s a chance I can save a life I want to.

Surprisingly, it wasn’t torture to sit through the cheesy videos and commonsensical how-tos. It was the instructor’s first time and he told lots of jokes that were so bad they were funny. The other people in the class represented a fantastic cross-sampling of the city: a painter from the UK, a brainless 40 year-old Asian dude, two ship "captains" who lived on a boat, an educated social worker, a well-to-do Latino guy, and my friend Danielle, one of the few girls at my HS who I have a meaningful relationship with and a lot of respect for.

As our instructor dropped bomb after bomb, and as this motley crew of adults reacted in all sorts of ways, my laughter got the better of me. I started laughing, at first quietly, and occasionally with my trademark yelp which I inherited from Mark Perelman. Soon it became uncontrollable. As our instructor continued discussing, say, the sequence of CPR compressions, I completely lost control. I searched frantically for anything that could remedy the situation — jacket, hands, arms, anything to stuff my mouth quiet. It wasn’t long before the tears of laughter started streaming down my face, prompting Danielle, herself an active murmurer in the peanut gallery, to remark in a whisper of astonishment, "You’re crying!" Could it possibly be true? Could Ben, unemotional Ben who has a shell, be crying?

What prompted such an onslaught of laughter? Example: Before a citizen responder can apply first aid to a victim you need consent from victim. If they’re unable to say yes or no then you have implied consent. But what if the victim is conscious and says "no" to your offer of first aid? Instructor: "Well, you can probably just wait a minute, until they keel over and go unconscious, and then you’ll have implied consent anyway." Right.

After class I strolled home in the beautiful San Francisco weather, admired the tan I had worked on so hard during the day, and got on the N-Judah streetcar. I got out a book. Alas, a black homeless man on the train started screaming and yelling all sorts of racial epithets, sometimes in song, sometimes in impassioned prose. One zinger, "The Mexicans are doing the jobs even the blacks won’t do." Wait — didn’t a head of state say that? Oh yeah, it was the President of Mexico Vicente Fox.  As we Americans like to say, don’t misunderestimate those homeless people.

If you want to take a Red Cross First Aid/CPR class, and promise me you’ll focus at the tasks on-hand, check out their locations.

Summation: laughter is carbonated happiness.

Sitting outside on the courtyard of my school on this beautiful San Francisco day….

—
Friend: "What I’m most looking forward to is someday joining a men’s softball team. I want to go out on Sunday afternoons with a bunch of drunk co-workers in a men’s league. I’ll be like, ‘Hey, there’s Rick from finance in left field! That son-of-a-bitch, I haven’t seen him in three weeks!’ "

Me: [Laughing hard] "Tell me you got that from some movie, since that’s brilliant if you made that up on the spot."

Friend: "Quasi made up…Workplace jargon, I love it."
—

And that, my friends, is Generation Y’s loving anticipation of corporate America.

I always budget time for myself. I’m introspective.

I have a lot on my mind right now. None of it can go on my blog, unfortunately, but it’s sapping a lot of intellectual energy. Yesterday on a plane I did something I rarely do: I took out my iPod, connected them to Bose noise-cancelling headphones, and played one of my favorite songs at the moment (“Something Pretty” by Patrick Park). I put my head in hands, closed my eyes, and just thought.

It was a quiet moment. I wish I could treat myself to more of them.