The Unknown Enemy

"I don't like avocados," said Su, as he slipped a slice of pizza covered in avocado slices toward his mouth. The three of us were sitting outside at the below-mentioned "Sicilia Fresh."

"So," I said, "You dislike a food you don't recognize?"

Suddenly suspicious, he stopped before biting down.

Goats and Rhinoceri

Reading about this odd couple brought me a spark of morning "awww" after an all-nighter devoted to DemiPlanning.

My Last Column

At dinner tonight, a high school senior was aghast at the idea of someone going to Europe on her own. “It would be like—like driving without a cell phone,” she said to me, between bites of a BLT. “So dangerous!”

Having both gone to Europe on my own and driven for years without a cell phone, I felt lucky to have lived this long. And I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I got my first ticket (for an illegal left turn) driving out of the cell phone shop parking lot.

Yes—I was playing with the buttons.

Only one person I knew had a cell phone in high school. His parents used it to track him down at night, thereby interrupting our breakfasts at Denny’s and our various exploits with the school keys. They made up for it by taking us out to sushi.

Now I carry my phone everywhere (though I’ve resisted PDAs and iPods, both of which are bound to eventually become part of our cell phones anyways.) When I graduate from the Kennedy School in two weeks, I’ll be traveling with it to Boston on a flight I booked at www.aa.com, staying with it at a hotel I pricelined™ and carrying a laptop with a Verizon wireless card on the same account, for broadband access anywhere in the city.

Nowadays, this sounds passé. But then I look back again, and remember that I didn’t even have an e-mail address until I got to college.

The first day of orientation week, I shot off a message to a friend at U.C. San Diego. We had been told that starting college meant losing touch with almost everyone in your past life. That wouldn’t happen to us, my friends and I figured: this new e-mail thing would keep us connected.

It mostly did. I think we remained more closely-knit than if we had gone our separate ways just a couple years earlier. I can only imagine how much more true that might have been if we’d had livejournals, free nights and weekends, and the Facebook.

I only discovered the World Wide Web at the start of my sophomore year. It was a barren place. No Napster, just a few pioneering class web sites, hardly any flaming. Amazon was two months old—and had been around several weeks longer than Internet Explorer. The term “cable modem” made us think of modems with cables sticking out of them, and DSL sounded like some kind of foreign shipping company. Hotmail was what happened when you sent a letter to Arizona.

But it wasn’t just the Internet that was different then. Californians had only recently discovered the appeal of blending fruits, yogurt and ice to make smoothies (to the delight of a fledgling company called Juice Club.) The SAT still had antonyms (I never understood why they went away.) Bookstores were places where people bought books. “Is” never meant anything but is, and an animated movie signified something hand-drawn, not Shrek but Beauty and the Beast. Airlines served meals and your parents could walk you to your departure gate. Buffy hadn’t slain any vampires yet—at least not on TV.

There were no TVs in Tressidder, let alone flat screens—and, alas, by the time they were installed, Buffy wasn't slaying vampires anymore. You had to file paper forms to get pretty much anything done, from transcript requests to selecting your classes. The parking lot didn’t take credit cards. And people who regularly snacked on froyo from the now defunct CoPo were busy founding companies with equally Stanfordish names—like Yahoo.

By now I probably sound primeval. But I graduated from Stanford not that long ago, in 2002 (true, I took two years off along the way.) Some of you were around then; you probably remember how poorly cell phones worked on campus even at the start of the 21st century. None of this was very long ago.

Still, there are times when I look back at my original Stanford days (because there are bound to be more) and miss that palpable sense of opportunity in the air, that feeling that tomorrow hadn’t been shaped yet—and that we would be the ones to shape it. Every few days it seemed another friend had left Stanford to join a start-up—or had come back post-IPO to recruit the rest of us.

Then I remember that Stanford’s probably always been that way and undoubtedly still is. Our "wind of freedom" continues to blow towards the future (though not always towards Washington) and from our place on the Farm (or the Arrillaga Alumni Center) we get to help make the weather.

---

This fall, Daniel Berdichevsky will be traveling overland (on his own, but with a cell phone) from Malaysia to Madrid. For details, e-mail him at dan@demidec.com.

Sicilia Fresh

I'm writing DemiDec "letters of engagement" at a restaurant that looks suspiciously like Baja Fresh, right down to the white lacquer tables, except it serves Italian sandwiches, pizzas and salad. There's even a salsa bar, which features coleslaw (I wish it had gelato.)

There's wireless Internet, and to the side of the restaurant is an integrated coffee shop with its own tables, Starbucks-style. That's where I'm working. The chairs have cushions.

At the table next to me, eight women are holding a knitting party.

* * * a few minutes later * * *

One of the women, her hands moving quickly, is talking about how her two dogs, Spike and Ernie, died within a month of one another: the first of of lung cancer, the second of diabetes. I can ignore Starbucks music, but this I can't help but listen to.

Now, another is talking how her dog got cancer. "They amputated his leg to get rid of the tumor. But the chemo was so expensive that my husband would go to Tijuana every few weeks to buy the drugs. They were much cheaper there."

A third chimes in. "Mine died, too. Glaucoma and then kidney failure."

Someone else tries to change the subject by saying, "I like this sweater."

Doesn't work. "I had a cat who got cancer after having a deworming shot," interrupts a fourth. Everyone expresses outrage. "Yes," she confirms, "A deworming shot. It became a fast-growing cancer, and they couldn't close the wound. At the time, I took him to a pet oncologist and he'd never seen an animal come down with this after a deworming shot..."

This is apparently turning into a pet loss support group. I may need to leave before I ask if I can learn to knit with them.

Quiet Days

Today I met a Polish plumber. He cut my dad off in the middle of his describing exactly why he wanted more water in the toilets. For this, I was thankful.

Earlier I visited with the USC/MAST Decathlon team. They fed me delicious chips and salsa. "We don't want to be forgotten," their coach explained, and I don't think they will be. They're starting early and are poised to have a tremendous year.

This made me giddy yesterday--the opening to The Hitchhiker's Guide of the Galaxy. My friends Ali and Igor basically fell asleep during the rest of the movie, but I was won over by the rhyming dolphins and never looked back.

...the world's about to be destroyed /
there's no point getting all annoyed...

Now, if it had been alpacas singing and doing backflips, I might have died last night a happy man.

Faro and Away

As I drove away from a house that was sort of a home this morning, the radio played a couple lines by the Eurythmics:

Here comes the rain again
Falling on my head like a memory.

The rain was actually yesterday, and here I was wearing sunglasses and pondering a dash to the beach, but it still seemed fitting.

Link to my latest column at the Stanford Daily: http://tinyurl.com/coykf. It may be interesting to compare how it's published with how I wrote it.

I just finished reading Spin, a novel in which mysterious forces shield the Earth, then accelerate time all around it, so that for every year that passes on the surface, a hundred million pass in outer space. Imagine: in just 40 years the sun would be expanding into a red giant. We're talking serious global warming.

The author, Robert Charles Wilson, is masterful at coming up with interesting "big ideas." It used to be that his characters, his plots and his endings didn't measure up to them. Now his characters and his plots do, and his endings are quickly catching up. Between Spin and The Runes of the Earth, the muse in me is stirring again.

Last quick (but important) update for the day: I learned this morning that I passed my thesis. My advisor's comments were kind, and her criticisms valid:

This is not necessarily a traditional PAE in that there is not an obvious theoretical framework - a gap I lament. Moreover it must also be said that during the process of researching and writing his PAE, Mr. Berdichevsky availed himself only very occasionally of faculty input. However, having said this, it is also the case that he is a gifted writer, a smart student, and an entrepreneur who in this case was clearly committed to his client, Grupo FARO. It should further be said that his final product, tellingly titled, "As Faro As I Can See," is full of practical recommendations, tactical and strategic insights, and also some cautionary notes which, under the apparent circumstances, seem entirely justified. Because Mr. Berdichevsky is so gifted in so many ways, I would not claim that this document represents his best work. It's less deep than it might have been, less well organized in its overarching framework, and less far reaching in its implications than would ideally have been the case. Nevertheless, it's professional and practical. And, from the evidence at my disposal, it's seems the client came out well ahead, and was in general satisfied with, and grateful for, the relationship.

Which means I'm really graduating in three weeks (!) and that it's time to start looking toward next Fall, when for the first time in several years I won't have school to attend. I'm tentatively planning an overland journey from Malaysia to Madrid.

Dry Erase Pen on the Door

This is it. The last time I'll sleep in this house. I've never really known it that well, as I've mostly been in Boston and in the Bay Area since my parents moved in five years ago--but there's still a lot that's happened here for me.

I watched the 2000 Election, witnessed 9/11, rooted for the Clippers. The neighbor and I once had a serious disagreement about shrimp. Mike, Steve, Sheldon and I gave birth to a board game in the bedroom. Misty bit a magazine salesman at the front door, and years later died in the kitchen. And, of course, much more. It's odd, though: a lot of the things I remember about this place are the places I left it to, from great trips to grad school.

I didn't get to say goodbye to my Cambridge apartment. It was rented to a new tenant while I was in Taiwan finishing my thesis (which was not on Taiwan.) Perhaps better that way: a clean break, free of seeing the shelves empty, the boxes piled up.

Inevitably, a lot of things turned up in the process of packing. Among them, my sophomore year roommate's missing keys (sorry, Sasha), a CASIO check I forgot to deposit (henceforth a high-opportunity-cost souvenir, not unlike my CASIO experience overall), and my tenth grade journalism ID (I had poofy hair.)

Column Six

Three weeks ago, I was nearsighted. Once I would have had little choice in the matter. A few laser bursts later, I see 20-20.

I’ve heard innovation in science and technology described as the process by which the impossible becomes possible, the unimaginable imaginable, the unprofitable profitable. These things may be as true as they are grandiose; I don’t presume to judge. But here’s my take: innovation, and “progress” in general, steadily shrink the role of the arbitrary in our lives.

Flat irons straighten hair, perms curl it. You can have longer fingernails in about five minutes. Air conditioning makes it possible to live (and die) in Las Vegas. Perfume, deodorant and Listerine strips let us choose how we want to smell.

Electric lights allow us to achieve sleep deprivation. Cell phones and the Internet (Facebook, anyone?) mean our friends aren’t just limited to people who live nearby (though it doesn’t seem to reduce the incidence of dormcest.)

Not even the day someone’s born is completely arbitrary nowadays. Sure, you have no control of it—unless you’re very spunky in the womb—but expectant mothers can schedule C-sections for particular days, and now that the mystery of conception is a little less mysterious, many couples try timing pregnancies to fit larger life agendas.

Web sites where you can “virtually hunt” have been in the news lately. You select an animal you want shot, and the company does it for you. It’s ghastly—but it’s in keeping with innovation’s erosion of the arbitrary. Why let the fact that you live in a penthouse apartment in Manhattan stop you from terminating an elk in Missouri?

People change their names. There’s even a newly-minted Jesus Christ with a driver’s license in Washington, D.C.

People change their faces. Makeup has allowed this for years, but now we have Botox, facelifts, rhinoplasty, photofacials and whatever Michael Jackson did. Sooner or later there’s bound to be a pill to stop hair from going white. In the meantime, there’s dye.

People change their heights. Children can opt for growth hormone, and adults for surgery—a painful procedure, involving the intentional breaking of bones, but in a world where higher shoulders correspond to higher salaries, maybe not an absurd one.

People can even change their gender. Their moods. Their attention spans. The sizes of their various parts.

First cable TV supplied us more choices; now DVRs permit us to watch what we’ve chosen whenever we want to watch it (VCRs once promised the same but nobody could program them.)

Our location and local climate no longer limit what we can eat. Fast shipping and good refrigeration give us apricots in February and cheesecakes as far as UPS can ship them.

So when I consider what future innovations may bring us, I look toward the things that are still more arbitrary in our lives. For instance, Red Bull notwithstanding, we still have to sleep. Someday we may see treatments that reduce how much.

To some extent, we’re still limited in where we go to school by where we live, and we’re still limited in where we can live by how much we own or who we were born to. E-learning promises to give us more choices no matter what our location or economic condition. Controversial political innovations, such as vouchers, address the same issue.

We can’t control the weather—but once we couldn’t predict it, either. We can certainly change it (see global warming) and someday we may be able to do so intentionally. For instance, scientists have been working on ways to divert hurricanes and to seed rainstorms during droughts.

The fact that most of us can’t learn languages as well as native speakers past a certain age—and that we don’t get to choose the language we natively speak—is arbitrary. Tools and treatments to allow genuine language mastery later in life would be a hit, and not just with expats, church missionaries and the spy industry.

Studies have shown that on average people tend to be attracted to others who look a little like them. But why should the length of someone’s second toe (which correlates closely in married couples) make a difference in your choice of life partner? “Love at first sight” is the most arbitrary thing of all. Companies already sell perfumes laced with pheromones that claim to increase your physical desirability. Someday, someone is going to hit on the right formula. On any given night you may be able to choose not only how attractive you are, but what kind of mate you want to attract.

A hot debate in politics, one that may have helped sink John Kerry in the final presidential debate, is whether or not people choose their sexual orientation (in other words, whether it’s arbitrary or discretionary.) So far science has weighed in on both sides, and this isn’t going to stop anytime soon.

What definitely isn’t arbitrary is whether technology ought to keep pushing newfound options into every nook and cranny of our lives. We should pause more, evaluative and decipher an innovation’s significance. Drugs aren’t the only things that have side effects. Maybe some things are better off within the realm of choice—but maybe others, like our children’s hair color or the age when they enter puberty, shouldn’t be.

Of course, even all-holds-unbarred innovation ultimately runs headlong into some immutable arbitraries of life.

Men can’t bear children (with one notable exception who can’t run for president because of where he was, arbitrarily, born.)

We can hide it, but we still grow old.

We can defer it, but we still die.

Did I say these things were immutable? I take it back. I’ve imagined them (and I’m far from the first one) so they aren’t unimaginable. They may sound impossible, but so was FedEx, once. And they’re bound to be profitable.

Notes on Harvard

My family is moving, which means I'm packing boxes and finding old things. Tonight I came across the notes I wrote when I first visited Harvard as a pre-frosh. Here are some excerpts...

* * *

The good: Freshman accommodations generous, campus beautiful, free long-distance calls for pre-frosh. Food not unpalatable. Lunch area very polished. Well-versed professor. Spring weather.

The bad: My host was late and very hungover. Some people look unfriendly. Some dorms remodeled, many not. "It takes six months to develop friendships." -- Stranger #1. "The change in culture and climate can be a shock." -- Stranger #2. Limited conversation at lunch table, almost a reluctance. See no fire, only ice.

* * *

I flip on. The notebook is filled with my small, black script. Different pages are dated different years. Here and there, an e-mail address. Physics notes. A blank page labeled, "Notes on AP Government." A story sketch titled, kind of pretentiously, "For Peace to Endure." Notes on health, from when I took it with my running coach over the last six weeks of high school (it was that or not graduate.) Diary entries from each time I visited Harvard, for whatever reason, between when I left as a freshman and when I returned for grad school. One of them leads off with, "What you leave behind can find you again." On another page, I lament the loss of Baja Fresh's original "to go" dishes. I flip again, and find an equation: "E equals h times v." Next to it, a quote from my friend and teammate Sage Vaughn, now an artist: "Creative ideas are sown in the soil of noncomformity."

The Replacement (Not)

Apparently a local raccoon (or maybe a carbs-obsessed coyote?) realized we were short a pet and nominated itself as Misty's successor.

I was up late (still am), reminiscing a bit, writing a bit, when I heard noises coming from the kitchen. This didn't exactly cheer me up. So my mother and I went down to investigate. Nothing there. We returned upstairs.

About fifteen minutes later, the noises resumed. We all went down again, and this time I admitted to myself that maybe I was still a little afraid of ghosts. After all, this was the same kitchen.

But if it was a ghost, it must have been a very hungry ghost. We found shreds of Chilean ayuyitas (sort of like biscuits) all over the counter. It's nice that the pet door is still getting some use. Nonetheless, we reject the nomination.

The Only Explanation

I've been thinking, and I've concluded Misty must have been at least one-tenth alpaca; nothing else could explain how cute she was.

Sunday Night

In the end, she didn't make it. My dad and I just found her, stiff but peaceful, in the kitchen.

When the Mist Recedes

I wish more of you had met Misty when she was younger--even just a year ago, when she could still climb the stairs and jump up and down like a kangaroo. Now she is dying. Several times a day she goes into convulsions, then falls over. Sometimes she yowls: a cry of pain as if she were being eaten by the neighborhood coyotes (the sad fate of many pets in Porter Ranch each summer.)

It's been a sad week, in a cumulative sort of way. I could see 20-20, but one of my grandfathers went blind for ten minutes--most likely a small stroke. My grandmother suffered a stroke, too, a larger one, or a combination of several, and lost the ability to walk. My mother flew to Chile to spend the weekend with them. That left me Misty. And I want her to live long enough for my mother to get back and say goodbye.

* * *

In happier news, I attended a political rally yesterday. John Kerry came to Valley College to endorse Antonio Villaraigosa. In many ways it felt like a leftover bit of the 2004 campaign. Bush-Cheney supporters showed up chanting "four more years" and flaunting anti-Kerry signs.

At one point, the microphone blew out. Kerry continued to orate, in his kind of clumsy, kind of affable way, for a few mute seconds before realizing no one could hear him. The crowd grew uneasy. The Bush-Cheney chanting grew louder. Then a man with a shock of white hair and a considerable tummy stepped forward, lifted his hands, and began singing the Star-Spangled Banner.

Everyone took it up--and while that melody of hope and pride drifted off-tune through a warm spring afternoon, the Bush-Cheney supporters quietly exited stage left.