Roulette
But every once in a while, New York gives you a free pass. She throws you a string of days that makes you feel unstoppable, turning you into some pinball that glides across the span of the board—through all the flashing lights and beeping sounds—without hitting a single bumper. This was the New York that greeted me when I visited for a few days in September. Trains were practically waiting for me as I approached subway platforms, and good thing, because there was always somewhere to be.
Planned were catch-ups with good friends, visits to my favorite tea places in the city and face-time with Mike (who’s one-third of Disrupto and the only one of us living in New York at the moment), along with trips to the magnificent Highline and The Dig on Governor’s Island. Unplanned were meals at two wonderful new restaurants, a Passion Pit/Phoenix show in the park (hat tip to Michael for the extra ticket) and a Foursquare-initiated, home-cooked, Mad-Men-watching dinner.
I also hung out with Danny, Spencer and Saha in the new HQ of Danny’s company Harvest, a time-tracking and invoicing app that made life a heck of a lot easier when I was freelancing. The office is a minimal loft space on Lafayette St. with conference tables made from repurposed doors and a fresh coat of Ideapaint on the walls. Here’s where I say how much I’ve missed the city, and how things in Michigan remind me of New York. Yet, that nostalgia trigger works both ways: things in New York were reminding me of Michigan.
When I was still in school, I was almost fired from my summer job. I worked at one of the many medium-sized companies entrenched in the automotive halo of Metro Detroit. I helped out with various computer-related things, from conjuring Excel voodoo for multi-sheet revenue forecasts to figuring out a new piece of software the company bought to make revenue forecasting easier (it didn’t). I also had a stint in the IT department, writing some code for (and I’m just remembering this now) an internal time tracking tool.
Even though I showed up at the office from 9 to 5:30 every day, my mind was elsewhere. After I discovered that my work computer had a piece of remote-desktop software that let you connect to and operate another machine you set up with the same program, I went home that night and promptly downloaded a copy of it off KaZaA (back when it wasn’t exactly, you know, legal) so I could connect to my home PC and play around with Photoshop. In those days, I was an active participant in the Photoshop contests at Worth1000 and went to great lengths to get my entries in before the midnight deadlines.
More than once, my supervisor caught me connected to my computer at home and politely warned me to stop. Part of it was me being so engrossed in blending guitars into renaissance paintings that I lost track of everything else. The other part was that those cubes were designed so others could come up from behind you and see what you were doing without you noticing. Either way, I didn’t listen to my supervisor. When the head of IT finally found out, he was furious. The only reason they didn’t fire me was because there were only two weeks of summer left.
In retrospect, this worked out hugely in my favor, because those extra hours I spent honing my Photoshop skills helped me land a MAIP Internship in art direction at the end of my junior year. “So this was what I was meant to do!” I thought. I returned from the summer in New York energized and in love with the City.
I was sick of Michigan. I wanted senior year to be over as soon as possible so I could move to Manhattan and start my advertising career. I picked a bunch of classes that sounded somewhat interesting, but more importantly that fit well with what I was already good at. One of these was Intro to Human-Computer Interaction, one of several “experimental” new courses in the generalist Communications Studies program at the University of Michigan. There were twelve people in the entire class. We read books from usability gurus like Don Norman and Jacob Nielsen. We talked about doors, websites, alarm clocks and iPods. Most of it seemed like common sense. For our final group project we had to team up and to build a website—for anything we wanted—that incorporated the things we learned that semester. My friend Maggie and I made up a fake indie rock band called The Nielsen Normans, came up with a tracklist based on a bunch of the class’s inside jokes, and even had a “merch” section filled with things like green plastic sleds emblazoned with the band’s yellow impossible teapot logo. I wish I still had that website.
Now, over four years later, I’ve had my turn at advertising and realized it wasn’t what I was meant to do. I’m still building websites and sitting on my nightstand is Don Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things. The question I keep asking myself is, “why didn’t I pay more attention?”
But not in a regretful way. I’d say it’s more of a curiousity—I might not have paid attention at the time, but for some reason, the memory of it stuck around and is proving useful to me now. I picture experience as this tide that washes over everything, like the plane of water flowing across flatland you see in those Discovery channel documentaries about the formation of the earth’s topography. We move with the front edge of that tide, where everything we come across is more or less on the same level. But over time, little grooves start forming where the water’s been. Gradually those crevices deepen, their emptiness burrowing ever downward, until you look back one day and you see canyons with odd little rock formations still jutting out. “Why these?” You wonder. “Why are these particular ones still standing?” They have to mean something, right?
Apophenia is the name for our brains’ tendency to seek patterns in random data, like looking at the blinking vertical sign next to the roulette table and thinking you know what the next number is going to be. I believe it’s also the reason New York feels so special. When you cram millions of people onto a tiny island, you start noticing what seems like more than mere coincidence. In a place like New York, that wheel gets spun so much more frequently—the friction generates so much more data to pick from—that your apophenia’s working in overdrive. Sooner or later, you notice the same number come up a few times in a row and it feels like magic.
Now I’m thinking, what if this whole thing is like one big game of roulette? You place your bet, the wheel spins, the little ball lands in its slot and you see how you did, before laying down your chips again for the next spin. One day, the game ends, and regardless of what you believe does or doesn’t happen after that, all you really have to work with while you’re at the table is the hope that when it’s over, you’ll be able to find some grand pattern that explains all the randomness.
“Everything I’ve experienced has prepared me for this!” is a feeling I get from time to time. I’ve been getting it a lot more lately, and I think that it’s because I’ve made more time for pattern-seeking—more time for contemplation. The best part is that when you think you’ve found that pattern that binds your past experiences, you can use it to make your next move. Then the wheel spins and you find out if it works. If it does, you keep using it until you come across a better one. New experiences start highlighting patterns that were previously invisible and new decisions have the potential to push you toward more interesting patterns.
If you’re with me on this apophenia thing, then not only do write our own patterns, but at any moment, we can willingly jump to a new one. We can look at the random numbers on that blinking sign and give them meaning. That’s incredibly empowering. And I think it’s the best we can hope to do, before we place our bets and the wheel spins again.
