Everything Under the Sun

May | Health and Fitness |   Week 21 | 5/28/2023 What ideas do you have on the future of health?  Think for a second, that the body is like a large corporation. From the outside looking in, we see the advertisements, we see the big flashy buildings, the products that hit the stores. From the exterior, a company looks and appears to be put together. But the reality of what is happening inside the buildings, in the board rooms, at the desks of thousands of employees, could be and is very different than the outside vantage point. A business is a complex system of smaller businesses. For example, Amazon, my company, is really Alexa (Devices), Cloud (AWS), Retail (Fulfilment) and a dozen other businesses which make up Amazon.com. Individuals in a company are the same as cells in a body. They are performing the function of the lowest level of necessary requirement, specific tasks like Finance, HR, Sales, akin to white blood cell, red blood cell, neuron. Small teams are like organs. ...

May | Health and Fitness |   Week 20 | 5/21/2023 Talk about your health regimen  My health regime is to me what a core processing program is to a PC. My regime is Windows 11 - it forms the basis for my actions and my decisions. It took years to develop and years to master, and it will be updated and fine tuned in perpetuity. I started thinking about a "program" of some sort at a very early age. My father, being a former bodybuilder and supplement junkie was always encouraging in this domain - some vitamin C if we had muscle aches from soccer, some Lysine if we had a cold sore, some pre-workout before a swim meet (lol). Growing up as a kid I saw the medicine cabinet as a source of wisdom, a competitive arbitrage, an entire universe of potentiality to help me. Later in life, when I was stricken with disease, my diet, exercise, and supplementation protocols would become very significant as I attempted to ease the muscle atrophy, inflammation, and wasting away I saw happening bef...

The stranger who passes knows not of my path. Through all the miles, the tribulations and trials, Mine is a feigned smile, covering a layer of wrath. And every so often it slips through my grasp. I'm remorseful for my ire, every present has a past.  Every tree has its roots, every day has its dawn, But if I ask myself seriously, am I a cultural chameleon? I looked in the mirror to see which version of me I had drawn. I've traveled to and from, the feeling of home doesn't come. It's not as if I'm lost, its as if I was gone all along. Reflecting now I know it's certainty which I envy.  Not the coveted life of picturesque rendering. My ego makes me pretend to be without a single enemy. With all the luxuries of a metaphorical spending spree. But the truth of the matter is, I'm left with me, myself and I: The three don't agree, on which me is me and which me is a lie.

May | Health and Fitness |   Week 19 | 5/14/2023 A dissertation on Crohns and Colitis Introduction | On many occasions I have sat, quieted my mind, and documented the history of my disease, looking for a pattern, an origin story, and a silver bullet. I never found that silver bullet, no switch I could flip that would end the suffering. But along the way, I did uncover many interesting things about the history of my disease and fascinating correlations. In fact, I found enough interesting things that I have developed a working theory of IBD, which I'm excited to finally compile. As an aside, most, if not all of the information I'm going to present here was never surfaced to me by my physicians, part of a deeper problem in our health system. For example, there is a statistical correlation between colder climates and autoimmune disease (my ancestors are from the hills of Ireland). There is data linking a lack of breast feeding to the onset of autoimmune disease (I wasn't brea...

May | Health and Fitness |   Week 18 | 5/7/2023 A commentary on physical exertion and mental clarity Sometime between the years 4 BC and AD 65, Seneca, one of the great philosophers of Stoicism, was quoted as saying, "The body should be treated rigorously, that it may not be disobedient to the mind." We read this today and marvel at the profundity and wisdom of a statement made ~2000 years ago. Seneca was in truth, recapitulating a loosely understood amalgam of older concepts fundamental to the human condition. 800 years before this quote, in the year 776 BC, the first Olympic Games were held in Ancient Greece - a celebration of physical fitness, competition and achievement. These Olympic games predated any of the renowned philosophers whom we quote from ancient Greece. Plato, born 427 BC, argued in The Republic ,  some 300 years after the Olympic Games, that physical exercise could help to cultivate courage, self-discipline and other virtues. Diogenes, born 412 BC, famously...

May | Health and Fitness |   Week 17 | 4/30/2023 A commentary on chronic illness and the value of good health Let me kick this off by humbly quoting myself. In an essay entitled Black Hole , published October 2021, I wrote the following, "Black holes are invisible to the naked eye. They can only be detected by their event horizon or their proximal distortion of reality. In that way they are the perfect analogy to chronic illness. Much of chronic illness is internal reality, invisible to the world, only partially realizable by external indicators. For as long as I can remember, I've battled the gravitational pull of my disease - desperately trying not to fall too close and slip into the abyss."   When one lives with chronic illness, which at some point in their lives most humans will, it is as if you have poor vision, but you've lost your glasses and cannot find them. For most humans, both literally and metaphorically, the majority of their life is spent with 'good...

April | College Years and Friendship |   Week 16 | 4/23/2023 Talk about senior year of college Seneca famously said, "travel and change of pace impart new vigor to the mind." He is correct. Senior year of college really taught me that. The experiences I had and the friendships I made, became the activation energy necessary to propel me on a journey, unending to the very day of writing this week's essay - having returned from Japan 24 hours ago with the two roommates who will be much the subject of this essay. Senior year I gained three valuable things, [1] a career, [1] brotherhood, and [3] a true love of travel. When I returned from my monk-mode summer in Spartanburg, I moved into the new apartment with Zach and Daniel. This was to be our golden year, and we all had a similar feeling that something special was happening in that place, at that time. We were right. Within weeks of moving in, I was tasked to report to New Zealand for a case competition. I'd been to Eur...