On Intellectual Curiosity and Mental and Physical Exercise

This one is badly written. I'm still working out some very incoherent thoughts, but I want to keep this blog somewhat regular. Also, anyone with interesting brainteasers please send to me because I hate going on Wall Street Oasis. That forum is a cesspool of IB obnoxiousness and ivy-league self-importance.

The head counselor here is a 21 year old former junior hockey player. He spent two years out of high school doing nothing but playing hockey. Now that his junior career is over (junior is under-20), he's gone back to school as a college freshman, while playing NCAA. The way he puts it: not using your brain for a couple years makes you stupid. One day I put out one of the silly brain-teasers that's commonly found in finance interviews. For some reason, that piqued his interest. He's been asking for one a day now. He hasn't actually solved one yet, but he's not going to stop until he does.

The problem is that few of the brain-teasers out there are actually any fun. Most require some knowledge of probability, game theory, algorithms, or competency in mental math. The people here, they're competitive. Most of their lives, they've been competitive in a physical way, but they don't like to lose. And they're not stupid either. They haven't practiced their multiplication tables enough to crunch number at lightning speed; they haven't been exposed to 14.12 or 6.046 to be know what "being rational" and "exponential time" mean in the technical sense. Giving them conditional probability questions seems obnoxious and unproductive. I prefer questions that require a clever trick, or that is easy to solve on a small scale and just need induction to work for case n.


But this post wasn't supposed to be about me and my elitist educated self being all superior and schoolmarmy over a bunch of dumb jocks. It's actually to wonder at what makes a productive wholesome life.


A few days ago, the camp twitter account sent out this observation:

You know you are busy when you go to work, you are on the the property, and don't make it upstairs to your office.

This is the mantra of camp. Every person here is a bundle of physical energy. They work out, they work hard, and then they work out some more. My boss comes into the office, sees us two interns fiddling with video editors, and she cries "what have you accomplished all day?"

To her, an office and a computer are for checking email, also a brief respite from business and real work. For us, real work is what keeps us in the office, our lard-asses stapled to our chairs. For them, work gets them outside, dirty, sweating, and tanned. The couple of weeks I've spent here, I've noticed that you rarely find folks working in their office. They are working in the gym, on the deck, in the shop, almost always on their feet, sometimes on their backs or knees. Work is spraying the deck, washing the car, laying sod. Work is not sitting at a desk scribbling notes to yourself.

Yet their physical life does not make them intellectually indifferent. They are as curious about mental exercises, not the way nerdy math students at MIT are curious, but the way we are curious about foreign cultures: hesitant, fascinated, a little intimidated. Just like I am not indifferent about physical exercise. But I am shy about working out here. My work-outs would not be considered work-outs, and I feel physically stupid next to these fine folks. My  lack of physical confidence makes me physically lazy, and I fall further and further behind; further and further out of shape. It's ok, I tell myself, because the important part of life is intellectual curiosity and mental fortitude. At least that's what's important in my life. At least that's what I tell myself.

I'm sure that's how they feel about my puzzles and the fancy college degrees I've got on my fancy resume. Never mind that next to my fancy friends, my resume suddenly looks average, if not lacking; here, it's most definitely an anomaly. Just like most of these guys here will never whiff a professional career much less an NHL one, but to me they look like beasts in their physical approach to not just exercise, but life. They like to hear my brain-teasers and the solutions the way I like to watch power-plyos, with morbid and bemused fascination, and maybe a sinking realization that I don't have it in me to work that hard to do what they do. (Well, maybe that's just wishful thinking; black hats/white hats don't give quite the same rush as a big sweaty dude flying over a five-foot obstacle.)

Environment, culture, natural aptitude. They forge the kind of paths we will tread, the kind of paths we feel comfortable and confident treading. For a few lucky ones, their lives include both physical and mental fulfillment, both indoors and outdoors curiosities, a truly well-rounded gift-from-the-gods. I am not one of them.

I leave you with a happy picture, because writing this kind of depressed me:

Downtown Nisswa: only about two blocks long, but pretty good shopping indeed. The Chocolate Ox is the Ice-Cream and Candy Shoppe to be at.

In which I am thrown into the strange world of competitive sports...

I'm just checking in from Minnesota. Wanted to see how everyone's doing this summer. 

So far, mine's been great. Minnesota is beautiful and quaint in the way only the Midwest can be, from gas stations that sell racks of pipe tobacco, to the government-owned pub.

The work I'm doing and people I'm interacting with make me feel like I'm not in real life. The camp owner, who's opened this place since 1980, used to work for the Rangers and last for the Penguins. Last week, he brought in his Stanley Cup Ring from 2009 to show campers and staff. His two sons are a scout for a west-coast NHL team and a player agent respectively. His daughter-in-law, my boss, basically runs the camp as well as the PR/Charity-lives of three NHL-ers. Her office is all-at-once the shipment-center for player merchandise, meeting-place for camp-counselors, and play-stall for her three-year-old daughter. 

When you think of the glitz and glamour of these professional major-league athletes, their Las Vegas paprazzi photos, and the millions of dollars they make (granted, they're not the NBA, but still), it's incredible to think that none of it is being managed in the shiny sky-scrapers of New York City or Los Angeles. Instead, it's all run out of little wood cabins in middle-of-nowhere, MN (population less than 2000).

If you want to check out some of the photos from camp, here they are. Part of my job is to photograph/film campers, so there are a lot of work-out shots, but hopefully a few fun, goofy ones too (particularly with the Russians, they're hilarious).

There is only one NHL-er (I won't post his pic here, but you can find it in that album) at the camp right now, and he's already treated the camp staff on a Saturday night out when we ran into him (at Zorbaz, where pizza is apparently Mexican food, and it's the only place within 50 miles that people of ALL ages get wasted together). Most of the pro's will start coming mid-July, so hopefully I'll have more exciting updates then.

When I say that I don't feel like I'm in real life right now, I don't just mean that I'm all the sudden within a couple of degrees of separation from people I see on TV. That's part of it of course. Sitting in on a two-hour conference call with a professional athlete and his family, and having access to their personal information, is surreal and surprising. I'm shocked but also honored that my boss trusts her two spazzy interns (who basically twitter-stalked their way to this job) with such confidential information. Moreover, I feel odd peering behind the curtains. Here in Nisswa, people have so many inter-personal connections with professional and NCAA athletes, that they don't think twice about it. But where I come from, or more specifically, the culture and environment that I grew up in, one that is sheltered in academics, white-collared jobs, top-tier education, and polite conversation, this place is a whole different world. Physical exertion is more than just healthy activity or bread-earning work, but both process and achievement. I have entered one extreme of society (let's be honest, we white-collar $100K+ salaried workers are in the 10% if not 1% of American income), to another niche of extreme society. The end-product, the entertainment of the sports industry, may be a luxury; top-tier athletes may be paid an exorbitant amount of money; but the work to get them there, and the businesses that support them, are anything but.

The stories these people tell are so clearly of one very unbalanced but vivdly exciting world. In one, my boss cuts off Wayne F'ing Gretzky in the bathroom line of some hockey charity event. He comes up to her husband, the player agent, and jokingly demands to meet "the only person in the establishment who does not know who I am". In another, a coach retells the tragic events of his brother's college roommate and linemate, who was going to be called up by the Anaheim Ducks. He took his visor off his minor-league team helmet to put on his NHL team helmet. That night, in the last game he was to play in before his major-league debut, he got high-sticked in the eye. Never skated again. One coach has six daughters, each of whose name starts with "Br-". He teasingly asks his daughters to use hyphenated last names when they get married, because he has no sons to carry on the family name. They chat about the up-coming CBA-negotiations and the UFA market. Casually, not with the heated passion of fans, but with a matter-of-fact, almost grim, realization that they, those on the cusps of the billion-dollar business, but paid only pennies, their lives will be the most impacted by labor movements and player/team strife.

But maybe their lives won't be changed at all. These are the folks that have lived and breathed the sport their entire lives. They work 10-month contracts at schools, at arenas, and come back to camp in the summer; the same camp that they probably attended when they were 10 years old; the same camp they got their first job in scrubbing dishes in the kitchen; the same camp that provided them the connections and taught them the know-how around the hockey world.

On Packing

The days before a trip are full of anticipation; antsy, nervous energy. No matter how fun the destination, the preparation is painful. Between giving parents every single contact number and fighting that voice of reason in your head that still hasn't quite accepted your abandonment of responsibility, you have to deal with packing. Ugh...packing.

Luckily, I'm a speedy packer. I make a list a few days before I have to pack, and add to it until I think I've got everything. Then it all gets crammed haphazardly into a duffle bag, which takes about 20 minutes. However, this trip presents a new challenge.

I've mentioned that I am going to work for a professional hockey player. And that I found out this job via his personal twitter. Basically, I stalk people online, and occasionally finagle a way to meet them. This is not the first time I've done it. I've previously successfully stalked a Chinese martial artist and somehow got myself invited to hotpot with him and about a dozen small time actors and entertainment personalities in Beijing. If someone were to tell me that I'm a creep, I wouldn't disagree. I'm way worse than the puck hounds who stake out hotels, because all they ask for is the residue of some pen strokes. I ask for the residue of interpersonal experience. The fact that said martial artist is not actually all that famous (or all that dreamy as I found out), and said professional hockey player has a public twitter account that he uses specifically to connect with fans, does not make my actions more excusable; it just means there are people as sad and pathetic as me.

So the challenge of self-representation arises. When you meet with these people, who you have scoured the internet for information --- real, rumored or completely made up --- how do you hide your complete disregard for their privacy? How do you play it cool? Theoretically, you've always known that these individuals are real human beings and not just brands and assets, but realistically, in your little cocoon of anonymity, you've complacently objectified these men as false idols and vessels of your vicarious fantasies. Suddenly, you're going to meet them, and not just for a handshake and an autograph, but to work with them, for them. Their celebrity will shatter, and along with it the security and entitlement of your presumptions.

What does this have to do with packing? Well, packing requires me to re-evaluate my T-shirt collection. I don't have very sophisticated tastes. My wardrobe consists of a couple of basic tees, loads of career-fairs shirts from college, some band-camp shirts from high school, and a few hockey-related tees. By a few I mean 10 or so and that doesn't include a half dozen of X-Large playoff T-shirts passed out by various teams. In terms of purchased official merchandise, I only have Bruins gear. As a fan of the team, I would feel dirty to buy another team's merchandise. However, I feel no guilt being a fan of a player if not of his team, and have on numerous occasions spent on player-centric items, those created by a player himself, or created for him as tribute by appreciative fans.

So lets say I find myself working for a certain redheaded athlete known best for his tumbles on the ice, and I own nearly every merchandise he's pimped for himself and his teammate (hey, it's for charity!) Not only that, but I also own many shirts associated with other players on other teams. I can go for more than a week wearing a different hockey-related shirt every day. Suddenly I'm self-conscious of my inner-creep. As a fan, those things seemed funny and dedicated, inside jokes only other hardcore need-a-life people can understand. As an employee I am now wondering how unprofessional, juvenile and desperate I must seem.

As I go through my collection, I store away the those I think are inappropriate for being too affiliated with players and teams irrelevant to our foundation:

• Tuukka Rask official Bruins T-Shirt
• 2011 Bruins Stanley Cup Championship T-Shirt
• Sully's Darth Quaider shirt celebrating Bruins defenseman Adam McQuaid and his occasional but frighteningly maniacal rage
• George Parros Defend Anaheim T-shirt in bright Anaheim Ducks colors complete with sparkly gold bits
• Original Sauce Hockey BizNasty Feeds the Homeless T-shirt

I did pack a few hockey shirts, some because they were actually bought from the foundation and thus, I hope shows my bright-eyed enthusiasm, and others because they were too amusing to give up on. In particular, my new Ryan Getzlaf Old English T-shirt, which celebrates his alleged inebriation in Finland and wonky google translations. As others have written on the event, I won't rehash it, and simply link to the story here, and the t-shirt here.

I've been reading some books by Jack Falla and by Bill Gaston. They both ruminate on hockey-celebrity and the silliness and pointlessness of memorabilia-collecting and the general phenomenon of being star-struck. I will reflect on these literary inspirations later. What I want to say now is that I admit I am a bit of a hero-worshiper and fame-chaser, and I am old enough and mature enough to be a bit ashamed. But I'm not old enough or mature enough to stop.

Pilot

This is my gazillionth attempt at blogging. I confess I'm not very good at it, and I'm not very persistent either. My last attempt was a couple of months ago, fueled by the beginning of the NHL Playoffs and unemployment. But that enthusiasm and free time has given way to watching episodes of Bones on Netflix. It didn't help that I felt myself unable to come up with "new angles" and was hopelessly regurgitate things I've read from others. Basically, for me blogging is like dieting. I start but I never finish, but that wouldn't stop me from trying again.

This time, my blogging is being inspired by life-changing events. Not the kind that introduces romantic partners or takes away a parent. The kind of life-changing event that happens when, like me, you're 23 years old, and you've quit your first job. You quit during a terrible employment market, from a job that even during the best of times, would be considered fabulously well-paying by the rest of society. You've only worked for a bit more than a year and what you saved isn't enough to hold you over for another. You bum around for a few months not really putting in any serious attempt at finding a new job. Instead, you immerse yourself in what used to simply be a hobby. In my case, that's hockey fandom. The advantages of social media means that you can follow all the interesting people in the business (and also all the uninteresting ones). One day, a funny, redheaded professional hockey player retweets an internship position available at his charitable foundation. Next thing you know, you've booked a plane ticket for small town Minnesota, and you're spending 10 unpaid weeks doing...well you're not really sure what you're doing...at a summer hockey camp. But whatever it is, your mother is speechless because you're flushing that $40,000 a year, top-tier private school education down the drain. And your father is worried that you'll get pissed drunk, like your generation is wont to do, and end up in a gang-bang video on youtube and TMZ. Family friends think you've gone nuts because you're a nice, typical Asian girl, and nice, typical Asian girls get stable white-collar salaries and then settle down with nice, typical Asian boys, or sometimes a Yellow-Fever inflicted American, where American always means a white man of WASPish background. Your friends, the ones who are traders, brokers, bankers, consultants, developers, engineers, and grad students, they envy you just a little, but they also worry about you too. They would probably envy more and worry less if they cared anything about hockey. But they don't, because they're also American, and usually of the California variety.

So my life-changing event is nothing crazy or poignant or tragic. It's simply that I have tossed away 2 months of being a couch potato pretending to do something productive in exchange for 2 months of putting my obsessive fandom to use at something sillier than saving the world, or in the case of my old job in the financial sector, stripping the world away from their money because we're smarter than you stupid dumbasses.

But it will be something new and surreal. Truth be told, I've never gone to summer camp. I've gone to summer programs, but I don't think taking science and writing classes held by grad volunteers at community colleges is quite the same thing as looking out into a lake from a cabin and sweating exhaustion. And being from the Southwest, and not even from a city that inexplicably has an NHL team, I've definitely never just chilled with OMG hockey players before. Now I will be meeting and working with them, not only of the 8-yr-old-please-tie-my-skate-laces-for-me variety, but of the honest-to-god I-see-you-on-TV-and-that's-exciting-because-I'm-a-superficial-celebrity-chaser variety.

My point in all this is that I will have plenty to blog about in the following two months that's not regurgitated material. Since I can no longer use that as an excuse, hopefully this blog will last longer than previous incarnations.

As part of my job, I will be keeping a blog for the camp, which will be focused on camp events, campers, official business, etc. This blog here will be more about my personal experiences, not necessarily related to camp. Hopefully it will be full of insightful things rather than a page spam of OMG-look-who-I-met-and-took-a-picture-with!!!!!! Also hopefully, I won't break any media rules like tweet "hey everyone! so-and-so is eating dinner with a pretty lady at blah-blah restaurant. Go surround him with cameras and autograph requests!" Good luck to me, and good luck to us all.