Most Jobs Shouldn't Have 8-Hour Shifts

My regular coffee place in college would close for no reason whenever the managers felt like it. It was between my parking spot and my morning class, which was perfect. I'd be running late and have no time to pack food and it made me crazy when I'd try to grab something right before class but they were closed with no explanation.

The hours listed were something like "7ish to whenever", that was what the sign said on the front door. Or it might have said "closed whenever we feel like it", there was some funny sign like that. What a horrible business model, right? Who can expect to build a customer base with that attitude?

No, it made people want to go there more. Every successful trip to this place was a rare event and made you feel lucky. The frustrating closings made people more determined to get in, like they had to settle unfinished business. Their hours became this shared joke around campus, but only for people that went to that school, weren't brand new students, and had to go to the super early classes. They got constant free publicity out of it and students were always talking about them.

I had no idea why they were closed. It's possible they strategically closed during peak business hours so that the greatest number of people would see their sarcastic signs, but I don't think it was anything calculated like that. I think the manager would just run errands or go eat somewhere or whatever and close the place whenever he felt like it.

My favorite neighborhood bar right now has this weird ass bartender that will start singing or dancing for no reason. But he knows a ton about beer and gets right to business whenever you have questions or if you look ready to order. He said they have no set closing time, if things are busy they stay open til last call (4am around here), if things are slow they could shut down at 11pm. A four hour difference! He said "sometimes I'll stay here until 3am even if it's slow, if I'm having a good time."

At my current job, which if you work in an office is probably a lot like your current job, you stay for eight hours no matter how busy things are. You can sit there doing nothing for five hours on the off chance a customer walks in the door and spends $5, while the business owner spends thousands on operating costs. I have a finite amount of work to do every day, and if I'm done in three hours, I have to find five hours worth of whatever to fill the time. This is not only accepted, but encouraged. Just find something to do, get a head start on tomorrow's stuff, learn a new skill for the company.

It makes no sense for a company to pay for electricity, heating and cooling, security, janitorial crew, overtime, and a million other things because someone decided the job takes 8 hours no matter how much work there is to do. If a cubicle job announced that employees can leave for the day whenever they've finished their work, two things would happen: they would never ever be short on applicants, and their workers would increase their pace to superhuman speed to jam through everything and leave by 11:30am.

Workers would become ultra efficient. No one would want to quit. They would be the most loyal employees ever. If the company dumped extra work on them, they would work even harder in order to get all that done and still leave early. They would learn whatever they had to, and get as good as possible, to get everything done early and error-free (they could be fired for too many mistakes). They'd be less stressed and more excited to go to work. They'd drive less.

But jobs with hourly pay don't work that way. You're here for 8 hours even if you have one hour of work to do. Let's say you were hired at a $15 hourly wage to do customer service. If you're the superstar of your department, you get $15 for that hour. If you're the very worst customer service person in the building, you still get $15 for that hour. Every workplace has this person. By definition someone has to be the worst in the office.

Since you're getting paid the same no matter the quality of your work, why not reward the more efficient people by letting them leave? No one wants to be there, that's why it's called a job. And it's basic math that you won't be paid totally fairly, because the entire premise of employees is that you have to pay them less than the value they generate, otherwise there are no profits for the business. So it only makes sense to let people leave if they've done the amount of work that management has decided needs to be done. Real tasks don't follow a 24hr clock. They start at the beginning, and they end when you're done.

There are plenty of articles showing an inverse relationship between GDP of a country and the length of their workweek. Google it yourself, I've only got a few hours of weekend left before the next 8 hour shift.

Personal Experience Isn't Enough

I like being fed up with political articles and the news, because it covers up the fear that I'm horribly under-informed. It's easy to score coolness points by acting like current events are noise distracting me from some important life wisdom. It's easy to say "it's futile to try to keep up with current events".

That's better than admitting I'm being lazy by staying ignorant of what's going on. Or even worse, that maybe even if I did have the stamina to stay up on a lot of things, admitting maybe I don't have the intellect to make sense of what's happening in the huge space outside my routine. That space, by the way, is most of the world.

It's easy to distrust something that's hard to understand, or to discount things that have little to do with your daily life. I feel like I have so much to concentrate on every day, that I can get fooled into thinking that the long list of concerns has some kind of global relevance. It doesn't really. Think about the fact that there are societies separated from you by an ocean, speaking a language you don't speak.

I've been in plenty of arguments where the other person speaks mostly or only from experience. It's true that there are certain things we can learn only by doing, but it's a giant mistake to think we can only learn by doing. Other people have done, and have learned by doing. Some of those people wrote books, some of their doing has been included in statistics. No matter how strongly I feel a connection to something, I have to remind myself that there may be literal billions of people that do not relate to that.

And the longer I live, and the more attachments I develop, the harder it can be to care about events across the street. Which is why I always try harder to read more, try more things, listen more, observe more, look for patterns. And do my best (which is usually not very good) to remember I represent a very small amount of humanity.

There are over 7 billion people on Earth. Any personal opinion represents a tiny fraction of a fraction of a percent of human experience. More people are on Earth every day, which means your views represent a smaller and smaller percentage of people every day, and every year. That means every year an individual opinion represents less and less of humanity. Which means as a person ages, any argument from personal experience is going to be less representative of humanity overall. So the older we get, the less relevant our personal opinions get.

Another issue is when arguments from personal experience ignore the experiences of people that are better in some way. Finding your own way in a craft, or to physical fitness, or to your life philosophy, is all well and good. But if you think personal experience is the ultimate authority, then what about someone whose personal experience led them to be better than you at your craft? Healthier? What if they have a cooler life philosophy than you?

Science, books, facts, statistics, it's easy to dismiss these as not being useful if you feel some intuitive truth that conflicts with what you're hearing. Other people also discovered amazing things on their own, off the beaten path, and maybe better than what you discovered. Will you dismiss those discoveries because they didn't come from your own brain?

There's not much difference between that reality and science, books, statistics. It's one of the major advantages of being a human being instead of a fish or a giraffe. You don't have to (and shouldn't) rely only on what happened to you, because smart people have already figured out lots of things and all you have to do is read them.

There Are No Extra Hours

One of the smartest people I've ever heard of recently said one of the dumbest things I've ever heard. I was listening to a podcast with Sam Harris, who has a PhD in neuroscience and is a world-famous bestselling author, media personality, philosopher, and makes me reconsider my life philosophy almost every time I listen to him.

As a person concerned about the evolution, thriving, and well-being of the human race, he was answering the question from a listener "What will we look back on in 20 years with disbelief at how ignorant we were?". Harris said he thought the eating of animals would be a top contender. He said that he tried to address this by switching to a vegan diet for six months, but went to a doctor and had blood work done and a lot of measurements were out of whack due to his over-consumption of carbs. So he had to switch back for his own health.

If anyone wants to start some productive habit, such as reading more, working out more, they might start with the idea to spend 30-60 mins a day practicing this new habit. Obviously there's only 24 hours in a day, and the concept of opportunity cost tells us that there's no such thing as pure addition to one's day. You can't just add an hour of working out to your day. You are working out an hour a day instead of doing something else. In order to start this new habit, you also have to decide "What activity am I cutting by an hour to make room for this? Video games? Work? Sleep?"

From a financial standpoint, I find that opportunity cost is sadly often overlooked by young college students. You're not just paying tens of thousands of dollars to go to school, you're also sacrificing thousands of dollars that you would have earned working during the time spent at school. And of course countless hours of time spent in class and doing homework, that could've been spent at work or doing anything else.

On the flip side (way less obvious!), there's no such thing as pure subtraction from your day either. If you're going to cut something out, it must be replaced by something because 24 hours are still going to go by no matter how many activities you cut. Want to spend less time eating donuts? Hanging out with people you don't like? Practicing a hobby that no longer brings you any joy? Guess what, something else is going to fill that time whether you like it or not.

This is what bothers me  about Harris's comment, and what is such a shame about many people I've known that have attempted and failed to keep a vegan diet. To be clear, I'm not advocating a vegan diet to anyone. I'm pointing out that if you cut something from your life, it has to be replaced by something, and if you don't consciously choose what that something is, life might pick something that works against your main objective.

Cutting animal products from your life won't help you at all unless you replace those items with something else that contains the B12 complex, fats, calcium, iron etc that you need to thrive. If you cut yogurt and chicken from your life and don't choose a replacement, life will choose potato chips and gummy bears. The same goes for any other "quit in the name of health" quest. If you want to cut your TV watching by one hour a day, you have to increase your reading time, workout time, or beer-making time by an hour, or else you'll just increase some other unhealthy habit by an hour to fill the void. Doesn't make sense to cut TV time by an hour just to increase video game time by an hour.

Decision making got harder once I realized this and that's probably never going to change. I've spent a lot of time doing things without weighing it out. Which is fun. But now every time I want to do something, I have to think about what activity I'm giving up in order to do x. Which can still be fun. Make the decision to do x, knowing that you're giving up y, and then make sure that sacrifice was worth it.

Earth Food vs. My Alien Biology

I made excellent German potato salad for a potluck once and nobody ate it. It was an extra large batch because a million people we're going to be there, and I didn't know a lot of them so I did an extra good job to impress everyone. I wound up taking 90% of it home and the consensus around the potluck was that it was too spicy. Spoiler alert: it wasn't.

It was vegan but still tasted good. It's supposed to be vegan, German potato salad is just incidentally vegan, normally, in Germany. It tasted totally correct. And yet these Earth people told me it was too spicy. Ingredients: potatoes, mustard, vinegar, sugar, etc. Not spicy.

Did you know that some people prefer coffee that you can see through? Milk chocolate? Yellow beer? White bread? Provolone cheese? White turkey meat? White turkey meat!!! These are shared preferences among many people. I've heard explanations from otherwise great people about why these foods are good.

The entire concept of light food versus dark food makes no sense to me. In life, are we not supposed to want good things? If you learn about something better than what you had before, do you not want it? If somebody offers you a choice between one of two free options, do you not take the better one? And yet, there's a trap there.

I've picked the better one every time and it's only made my life worse. I let beer experts turn me on to pitch black 10% abv stout beers, now everything else tastes like apple juice. I let some Santa Cruz hippie talk me into trying 85% cacao chocolate and now milk chocolate is basically cotton candy. It works with music too. I've followed a trail of progressively weirder and more complicated metal music to the point that classical music bores the shit out of me and I have a Masters in it.

It's usually more nutritious too. Black plums are one of the most nutritious foods in the world. Know why chai tea is delicious and green tea tastes like a lawn? Chai is made with black tea. Black rice is better for you than white rice. Black beans have more fiber than pinto. Love blueberry pancakes? Try blackberry pancakes, friendo. Purple potatoes, purple carrots, red onions, all better than their light counterparts. But people don't eat them even if you prepare them well and give it to them for free.

There's always someone around me saying they can't get into the best foods in the world. I come from a planet where people have bodies that respond well to spicy foods and dark foods. Here on Earth people leave transparent coffee in hotel rooms, break rooms, Starbucks, all the worst places where you're most in need of color and flavor. Recently some Earth woman saw me getting coffee and said "Oh, I can't drink that stuff in the morning." I felt awkward so I said "Aw yeah, I like my coffee so dark that it absorbs all the light around it. When I make coffee at home the sky gets overcast. That's how I like beer too haha." She replied "oh... I'm a fan of Bud Light."

This isn't just blogging, that was verbatim how that exchange went. What do you even say to that. I'm ready to go home now, take me back. I miss the coffee from my home planet, it's nothing personal, people of Earth. Your Sumatrans and Ethiopians have done all they can.

I forgot to mention someone at the potluck brought homemade guacamole. It didn't have any cilantro or jalapeños in it.

It's Idiotic that Presidential Debates have a Live Audience

Most people I know get 0% of their election information from researching the candidates. It's usually from Facebook articles making statements that have been re/mis/de-contextualized so many times that they have nothing to do with the original claims. Those articles don't address real issues, they just take a stance on something and then pad it out with other stuff that's logistically unrelated. But you're supposed to care since members of your club all take the same stances on that set of unrelated issues.

Don't read a book on economics, reflect on it, then vote for a candidate that aligns with those views. Just click an article by someone who also didn't do that. Oh and it isn't actually about economic policy, Trump just said something idiotic so you're voting against whatever economic policy he wants.

It's become a cliche that social media is shortening everyone's attention spans, so I'm not gonna talk about that even though it's 100% true. But instant access to a million pandering pieces of media have turned legitimately world-changing issues into entertainment. And we take that philosophy with us to the debates when we watch them. It doesn't matter what happens at tonight's debate, which I won't watch. I'm just excited at all the memes that will be on my wall tomorrow.

The live studio audience is absolute idiocy. A debate is supposed to be a series of arguments between two people, with the winner decided by panel based on the strength of their argument alone. In real debates, people get thrown out for making noise. At the presidential debates, people can boo and cheer and make faces on camera, all of which sways public opinion and none of which has anything to do with the strength of the arguments. My favorite moment in all non-fictional TV this year was when Bernie Sanders made some comment that caused a raucous cheer, and Anderson Cooper said "I know that plays well with this crowd, but you didn't answer the question."

There are real articles in the world that say a given candidate "won" a debate, and base part of that opinion on how the crowd cheered for them. Then that gets passed around the internet until it eventually reaches you, helping to add to the vague mush in your mind that tells you the candidate is superior. They won the debate because they are better, which I know because it's all over the internet, in articles written in response to something other than the candidate's argument.

The only reason Trump has gotten this far is that he's been practicing this longer than Hillary and has way more experience. Oh no no no... not in politics, no. In entertainment. He's been practicing every day for years, so he's great at entertainment now and no one cares that he will literally contradict his stance on major issues mid-paragraph. And hey, whether you're talking about Gwyneth Paltrow or Kim Kardashian or Trump or Rush Limbaugh or whatever, there is no law of man or of nature saying that only good, skilled, competent people are allowed to succeed.

Much like Trump himself, these articles (and the people posting them) can make any moronic claims they want to with zero fear of repercussion, and people pay attention. And if those claims get soundly debunked and revealed as being moronic, does the author write a retraction? Does the FB poster do any clean up? No. They don't post a status saying "Hey I apologize, I've recently learned the status I posted on 10/23/2016 was based on a lie and I retract the whole thing, I highly suggest anyone influenced by that status reconsider their position, as I have done." That will never happen.

Not in a world where a debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton has a live audience. Where the studio invited (non-debating) women allegedly harassed by Bill Clinton (also not in the debate), and gave them closeups, purposely to influence public perception (not a deciding factor in declaring a winner) of the debate.

Anyways my wife and I are gonna go run a 5k and then do homework and drink beer. My personal favorite beer, Xocoveza (made by Stone) has come back on the market after previously being declared a seasonal one-off and retired. It's an imperial stout that tastes like Mexican hot chocolate.

I Prefer Rudeness to Obliviousness

Some purple explosion had happened in the fridge, leaving dried residue on everything. I had to pull hard with both hands on a mustard bottle, until it loudly cracked free. Every item I removed sounded like velcro. 

Me and two friends were cleaning the break room fridges, three large ones full of expired food left by 120 people, some as old as a year. Elbow deep in grime, harsh cleaning agents, stinky gray sponge water. We only had an hour to accomplish this, everyone in the building had been notified by email to stay out of the way for this single hour. We had to run to the sink every 30 seconds to rinse something off.

And yet one woman needed to meticulously wash a dish in the one sink during this one hour. With a towel laid out, a sponge, dish soap, hand soap, paper towels, waiting for the water to heat up, building up a lather, scrubbing, drying completely, getting the water temperature comfortable, building up a lather of hand soap, washing her hands, drying completely.

I stood right behind her, fantasizing about what I could yell. What's the point? Would yelling be any more obvious than three grime-covered people doing a gross cleaning project? With several warning emails and a shared calendar event? Fluorescent signs on the three fridges? On the break room wall? This isn't hyperbole, that preparation actually happened. 

Standing there with this leaking sponge, I'm wondering what else I can do to make this person understand that there are other people in the room. I thought that was already obvious because there were other people in the room. I thought of a few things that would have a lasting impact but were illegal.

We were throwing things away. Every two minutes someone would come in and say in an annoyed rhetorical tone "wait are you guys just throwing stuff away?" And I would answer "yes, we're cleaning the fridges. Several emails were sent saying that every expired or unlabeled item would be thrown out." No matter what spin I put on that idea, it always came out sounding rude. So every two minutes I felt like I was in the wrong, because at some point we decided bluntness is worse than bothering everyone around you for years.

Every time my downstairs neighbor smokes, plays guitar, has someone over, or has a phone conversation, the eight apartments that share walls with his have to participate. But if we ask him to be quiet, we're rude, like New Yorkers. It happens almost every day. Does he think that some days the smoke doesn't smell like anything, or that his loud guitar playing isn't loud? As a human being, he knows about sleep and what will wake someone up.

I was at the gym this week and three others were working out. This smiling friendly looking man came in with his gym stuff and switched on every overhead fluorescent light and the TV, which came on at a very loud volume and was set to Trump/Clinton election coverage because of course it was. He walked right out of the gym to the locker room, all these changes were so that the room would be set up the way he wanted when he came back.

When he came back, an older man in better shape asked him to turn everything back off, and was immediately accused of rudeness. The older man would have been breaking the rules by swearing at him or punching him in the face. Most workplaces would rather be at a constant simmer of low level resentment and frustration.

There's a lot of misrepresentation about people from big cities, and how rude they are. But they're used to a faster pace, busier life, more complicated transit, more money at stake. Whenever someone's rude I consider whether they're being that way because they're trying to get something done and I'm slowing them down. I'm rude sometimes, but I'm almost always monitoring the people near me and I think that trait has more karmic importance than rudeness.

It's amazing to me that the older man from the gym is still motivated to confront people about their obliviousness. I think it's futile and I don't have the energy for it anymore and I'm half his age. Which is pessimistic. But I'm optimistic in deciding that some people are oblivious to those around them. Because the other option is deciding that they are aware of other people and choose to inconvenience them on purpose.

10 Ways To Play Guitar Sooner

What's this awkward title? I'm not talking about playing faster, or better, I'm talking about going from someone who doesn't play guitar to someone who does. That's it. If you want to get crazy with buying gear and learning musical theory later, that's great. Most new players just want to start making musical noise as soon as possible, so let's do that.

1. Listen to a ton of guitar based music all the time.
If you don't listen to a lot of guitar based music, you will never get good at guitar. It's simple. People listen to what they like, if you listen to guitar that means you like it, if you listen to it a lot that means you love it, and if you love it that is the best motivation to get good enough at it. Also you need a lot of songs in your brain for later when you decide which songs to play. You don't need to be well-rounded.

2. Decide who to copy.
Google the player(s) you like the most from step 1, learn their names, listen to everything they recorded on Spotify, watch YouTube clips of them playing live. Make a conscious effort to copy them and be derivative. Originality is great, but it takes time and years of experimentation and we're trying to get you playing right now. Important: if your favorite player uses a pick, you have to use one too or else you can't copy them. If your favorite player doesn't use a pick, you have to learn to play without a pick. I don't recommend choosing virtuosos such as Joe Satriani or Eddie van Halen.

3. Buy cheap gear.
A common phrase in music instruction: "buy the best gear you can afford". This doesn't work for beginners because they don't know enough to judge the quality of gear. I suggest buying a cheap piece of crap, because you might hate playing and give up, so it's better to not waste money. I recommend pawn shops and eBay. Get something with obvious cosmetic damage, these sell for cheap even if the functional parts of the instrument are high quality. I have personally done this and recommend it to everyone. You don't even need an amp, but the distorted sound of your guitar through an amp might be a good motivator.

4. Get Smartchord.
It's a great app that becomes more valuable the better you get. For now you only need the tuner feature, which tells you how out of tune your guitar strings are when you play them into your phone's mic, and it tells you which direction to twist your guitar's knobs to make the strings be in tune. It's my favorite tuning app, and has a million bonus features that will come in very handy later on. Tune your guitar, or else it will sound bad no matter how well you play.

5. Pick a few simple songs and get tabs, not sheet music.
"Tabs" are ultra simple sheet music for learning songs, and you don't need to know music theory to read them. Say you want to learn "Smells Like Teen Spirit". Google "Smells Like Teen Spirit Tab" and pick whatever tab is the most popular. If you want to figure the song out by ear, I salute that, but it is a much slower process unless you have great critical listening ability (most people don't). You will never have to learn how to read sheet music in order to play rock n' roll.

6. Play along to recordings instead of a metronome.
Everyone says to play along to a metronome and that's wrong. Two excellent reasons for this: recordings make you learn and play every part of the song from beginning to end, in order. Second, recordings make you develop realistic rhythm. Recordings are better than a metronome because you develop solid rhythm but with the variations and imperfections that great players have. If you get behind or forget where you are, the recording marches on without you. This helps you build musical reflexes and the habit of recovering quickly from mistakes.

7. (Optional) Learn every note on the two fattest strings.
Use one of the features on Smartchord that shows a diagram of the guitar neck, with little letters all over it to tell you which notes are which. Learn the notes on the fattest string, then if you want you can add the notes of its neighbor string. There is a predictable pattern to the note names, if you spend enough time messing with the diagram and playing each note on the fattest string, you'll figure it out.

8. (Optional) Learn these chords on the fattest string: F# major, F# minor, F#5 and  F#7.
Smartchord has diagrams to show you how to play these. Once you learn these shapes, you can move them all over the guitar. If you did step 7, you know where the notes are on the guitar. If you learn F# major, all you have to do is move it up to the note C, and now you're playing C major. If you learn F# minor, just move it up to the note C, now it's C minor. And so on. When you have a grip on that, learn them on the second-fattest string as well. Now you know 99.7% of all chords you'll ever need.

9. (Very optional) Learn the Ab Major scale, Ab minor scale, and Ab blues scale.
Again, Smartchord has diagrams for this. Just like before, you can use the knowledge from step 7 to move the scale to any note and it will be a different scale. Once you've learned Ab major, move it up to the note D and play the same scale and guess what? Now it's D major.

This isn't necessarily the best way for everyone in the world to learn to play, but it has worked well for me and everyone I've taught. It also minimizes the amount of dead time that you will endure before being able to start playing songs. And the amount of money you have to blow on equipment and books.

I cut out tip #10 so you can start playing even sooner.

The Hiring Process Is A Joke

I was the least qualified person at the interview, but I knew I was getting the job anyway. Because the boss was wearing the same outfit as me.

After 13 years of auditioning for singing gigs and getting turned down for most of them, I've been told many times " don't take it personally, the audition isn't about you", and I didn't realize how true that was until this interview. There's no degree you can get, no job on your resume, no research you can do that can replace the coincidence of showing up to an interview looking just like the boss.

And what's so bad about that, really? Having a degree doesn't mean you'll have any of the skills that all college grads are supposed to have, plenty of people graduate without communication skills, competence at technology, mathematical ability. Depending on the school and the professors, you don't need any special intellectual curiosity or perseverance to graduate.

The resume doesn't say much either, since anyone can put whatever they want on it. You could make ludicrous claims without the company checking up on it. If you put an amazing claim on your resume that is true, that doesn't mean those hiring are going to call anyone that can verify the claims. I've listed references that are casual friends I never worked with, just because they sound good on the phone.

Sure, you could do research on the company to impress the interviewers. I've definitely done that in the past, and then had interviews where I was never asked anything about the company. I've done research and watched people get hired who did zero research. If you research a company top to bottom, impress everyone and get the job... does that have any bearing on whether you'll be good at the job once you're working there?

The jobs pull the same stunts. Here's the classic one: the job lists Excel proficiency as an absolute must, you feel good about your Excel skills so you apply, you get hired, and then none of your coworkers can do anything on Excel. You remember seeing on the website for the job that the supervisor position requires a Masters in Accounting, which you don't have, so you applied for a lower level position. You start working there. The supervisor doesn't have a Masters in Accounting.

But you're not surprised at this nonsense. When you first applied online, the application made you attach a resume. After you attached it, you got an endless application asked you to type out every aspect of what's on the resume. The application specifically forbids you from typing "see attached resume". You also had to write the address of every previous job, and phone numbers of supervisors that don't even work there anymore.

One summer I read a dozen books and a hundred articles on financial matters because I felt like a financial illiterate. That year I had three job interviews (I got all three of the jobs) and asked these great detailed questions about the benefits, most of which the committee couldn't answer. At the third job, after already receiving an offer, I said I would need to see the informational packet they give to new employees so I could study it before accepting the offer. I was told the packets would be given out at orientation. But that's too late, I said, I need to know this information to tell whether I want to work there! I was told the packets would be given out at orientation. I took the job anyway because I needed the money.

The packet didn't have specifics about the dental plan. The HR rep couldn't answer my questions, my coworkers couldn't. I dug deep into the file structure of a shared hard drive only accessible by employees that have a company password, keycard, electronic profile... established hires that are already committed to the job. I found something explaining the dental plan. It covered all preventative care, but took $14.66 out of every paycheck. I only needed basic cleanings once every six months, but $14.66 out of every check means $381.16 per year... so I'd pay the equivalent of $190.58 per cleaning. That means it was cheaper to pay for cleanings out of pocket, an extra cost I didn't have at the last job. Suddenly the extra money earned at this new job has decreased.

And I got that job because the boss showed up wearing the same outfit as me. I matched his speech, leaned on the table the same way, cracked a couple jokes about things I figured he'd be interested in, and my whole past became irrelevant. I knew the three other people applying for the job, and all of them would have done better at it.

They should tell you about that in college. Or maybe high school. It might not go over well to tell college kids that a 5 minute conversation matters more than 4 years of sweat. That $50 spent carefully at Ross goes farther than $60,000 at school.

103 Bad Songs in a Row

Spotify is an amazing tool for discovering music, and I don't use "amazing" the way that people talk about a normal food that has bacon added to it - I mean I feel legitimate amazement at its usefulness. I'm learning more about music with Spotify in the background at my cubicle job, than when I was a doctoral candidate in music at the top-ranked music school in the world.

I've been listening exclusively to rock and metal for over a year, so I thought it might be nice to dive back into modern pop. For a while I was totally up to date, I made an effort to listen to the entire Billboard Hot 100 a couple times a month just to stay current. Using Spotify, I took the most direct route possible to get caught up: click Browse, then Pop, then Today's Top Hits, which at the time was a 103 song playlist of pop from 2016.

I always complain about sound quality in modern music, and there's tons of scientific research to explain and support that stance, which I'll get into some other time. Nutshell: recordings have become loud and dynamically unvaried, a consistent level of noise for every instrument in every moment of every song of every album. Our brains treat it as noise, and we're wired to ignore repetitive sounds for our own survival. We have no processing power for important things unless we can shut out a dripping faucet, traffic, the A/C humming, the fridge buzzing. Thus badly produced music gets ignored so we can function. We can only pay attention to modern pop is if it's ingenious enough to overcome that survival mechanism (it usually isn't) or if the lyrics are thought-provoking enough to hold our attention (they aren't).

Revisiting pop for a 103 track binge was an exercise in frustration that made me wonder whether

• All of it sounded like trash due to bad production only, and there was some good music hiding in there that my brain was biologically unable to appreciate, or
• The music itself was bad and the loud production was sadly its only attention-grabbing feature.

I'm inclined to think the latter. I tried something on the opposite end of the spectrum to test whether I accidentally made myself hate music: the second track from Aerosmith's "Get Your Wings", a song from the early 1970s that I had never heard before. The production was much clearer, with frequent, varied, and complex melodies, way more textural variety, the lyrics seemed to tell one continuous story from beginning to end, and the rhythmic content was way more advanced than anything from the 103.

An aside about rhythm. People seem to think that rhythm is a big feature of current music because the percussion is really loud and easy to follow. Rhythm doesn't get any less important than in modern pop, I understand that it's easy to confuse a really busy percussion section with rhythmic complexity but they're not the same. Percussion is locked into a quantized grid in a digital audio workstation and cannot swing, improvise, or subtly vary in tempo, and it never changes meter, it just counts to four over and over. 103 songs of machines counting to four in the same tempo. That isn't rhythmic.

The irony of the 103 is that modern technology allows musicians more variety in sound choices than ever before possible, but the loudness of the production tells our brains that it's white noise. How does more variety sound more monotonous? That's insane! There are more sounds but less texture, explicit lyrics sung to childish melodies, more percussion but less rhythm, complete musical freedom but zero improvisation.

I've since become more familiar with "Get Your Wings". I tried listening to it while writing this but it was too distracting, so I put on Today's Top Hits for some background noise.