It has been ages since I contributed to the family blog. I can’t even remember the last time. My life has changed considerably in the last year so I thought I’d get it all down on paper. This is a very long post. I won’t be hurt in the slightest if you give up after the second paragraph ;)
Family – Martha and I had a pretty good thing going this year. I’d normally get home around 6:15. We’d eat dinner and then I’d hang out with Sienna for a while. I’d put her down for the night and then hit the books from 7:30 to 9:30 before calling it a night. I always had homework to do, but evenings were generally quiet and relaxing. Everything changed when Noah was born. Sometimes it seems silly for a parent of two children to go on about how tough it is, especially when I’ve known lots of people who have four, five, or more children. What I’ve learned is that there are no economies of scale when it comes to raising kids. For example, getting 2 kids to fall asleep takes exactly 2x longer than getting one kid to fall asleep… not 1.5x longer or even 1.75x longer. Mr. Noah is a cute little munchkin, but man he can be a pill.
So I may not have learned how to wrestle two kids at once yet, but I have learned something else: Martha is a warrior. I’ll resist the temptation to offer up the usual “my wife is amazing” platitudes. But seriously… my wife is amazing.
Then there’s me. Sometimes I hear people say, “I don’t know where I’d be without my wife.” Well, Martha and the kids were in Utah visiting her family the last ten days, and while she was gone I got a glimpse of what my life would be without her. When I wasn’t working, I was on the couch watching either football or “Parks and Recreation” (thanks to Hulu Plus), all whilst consuming dangerous quantities of bacon. Last Sunday, after my 2nd NFL game and my 3rd breakfast sandwich I thought, “What on earth is the point of my life?”
Business School – A little over a year ago I was working as a corporate accountant at a medium sized public software company, consolidating financial statements for their SEC disclosures. My career was going places, but not really to places that I wanted it to go. Not at all, actually. My accountant bosses called themselves “decision makers,” but the only decisions they made concerned whether we were presenting the company’s financial results in accordance with the guidelines established by some government agency. It took me several years to realize that the real decisions were being made by others in the company, and that accountants were there just to organize the effect of those decisions into pretty little reports. When I told this to my friend Peter Harker, he said the best way to become a real decision maker was to get an MBA. He was right.
My first year at Foster was amazing. The professors are great, the classes are awesome, the facilities are beautiful… blah blah blah. The real best part about Foster is getting to know my classmates. It’s a program full of amazing people with incredible skills and huge goals. There’s this once guy, Jason, who is an affable Seahawks-loving Birkenstocks-wearing ex-consultant on the outside, but inside he’s really a freakin’ robot, accomplishing more in a single day than I could hope to achieve in a week. I’ve never met anyone before who can examine a business problem and, seemingly without effort, cut right through the crap and identify what needs to be done.
There’s this woman named Natalia who is one of only two mothers in the program. There are lots of dads at Foster, but only two moms. Respect. How Natalia can juggle school, clubs, case competitions, and an internship search, all while raising the second cutest little girl you’ve ever laid eyes on is beyond me. Hats off to the moms, people!
There’s another guy named Colin whose most amazing talent is omnipresence. As you may or may not know, omnipresence is one of God’s greatest powers: the ability to be everywhere in the universe at once. Colin is not God, but he is omnipresent. The guy has been at every Foster event, both school related and social, since the program started. In fact, just yesterday I went to meet a friend at a bar to watch the UW football game. I walked in and… BAM!... there’s Colin. Omnipresence.
I could go on forever.
Internship – This summer I worked as a Senior Financial Analyst intern at Amazon.com. My first day on the job, my supervisor, a women named Brandi, came and picked me up from orientation. She spent 30 minutes with me going over my summer project. Afterwards I went to my desk to start reading through some documents she had given me. While I was reading, she walked into her boss’s office, announced that she was quitting, went back to her desk, gathered up her things and left. WHAT!? I spent the next week sitting around waiting to be reassigned to a new department. When I did get reassigned, it was to the coolest project I have ever worked on in my life. It was in the “International Category Expansion” team, which evaluates new markets for expansion of the Amazon retail business (which includes everything you’d find at Walmart plus like 10 million other items… seriously). My new boss sat me down and said they needed a 10-year financial model to support the launch in this specific country that they had identified for expansion. I spent the next 3 months gathering data, developing assumptions, building the model, analyzing how the outputs from my model might impact the business team’s expansion strategy, and communicating my recommendations to management. Now I know that this will sound like an exaggeration, but from a professional point of view, this internship was literally the hardest thing I have ever done. But it was also the most rewarding. At the end of the summer I sat in a room with 3 VPs, 3 Directors, and about a half-dozen other interested parties to present my analysis and recommendations. After the presentation, everyone was sort of nodding their heads and generally seeming to agree with my ideas. All I could think was, “If you guys actually think that I know anything about anything, than the joke is on you!” After 25 minutes of questioning I left the room, while everyone else stayed to decide whether to extend a full-time offer. I went straight to a vending machine for a soda to calm my stomach, which was knotted up like the cords behind your TV. All’s well that ends well though. Two weeks later I got a call from HR offering me the job! I can’t wait to be back next summer.
Politics – If you’ve made it this far than you probably actually care about what I think, which is why I’ve left this section for last. Since I’m something of a confused mess when it comes to politics, I like to occasionally write about it, if for no other reason than because doing so helps me sort things out in my mind. Shortly after the 2008 elections I posted an update called “I am not a Republican. There! I said it!” In that post I described my realization that my opinions didn’t seem to line up exactly with either party, and that I would thereafter refer to myself as independent. This was a big step for me, since I come from a very religious and generally conservative background. I am a devout Mormon, and since becoming an independent I have struggled to define the extent to which my religious beliefs should be reflected in my political opinions. Indeed, history is rife with examples of religion coming down on the wrong side of issues both scientific (astronomy, evolutionary biology), and social (slavery, women’s rights, interracial marriage). If history is any indication, then I have to entertain the possibility that following today’s conservative drumbeat on scientific and social issues could be a mistake.
Since becoming an independent, I find myself more and more troubled by the loudest voices on the right. Last week I saw a clip from one of the Republican presidential candidate debates. Brian Williams introduced one of his questions to Rick Perry by stating that “your state has executed 234 more death row inmates than any other governor in modern times.” At this, some people in crowd cheered. Like many people on both the right and the left, I was disgusted by the crowd's reaction. When the cheering stopped, Perry said he'd never lost a night's sleep for any of the executions over which he's presided. At another debate, Wolf Blitzer described a hypothetical healthy 30 year-old who chooses not to get medical insurance, and then gets in a terrible accident. He asks Ron Paul who should pay the medical bills. Someone in the crowd yelled “Let him die!” which led to more cheering. Then Paul said something about how “the churches” will take care of him, but that the government should not. To me, the idea that America's widely fragmented religious institutions could come together to deliver effective mass charity care to the nation's uninsured is a total pipe dream. These two incidences make me wonder why the "party of the Christian right" has such a conspicuous lack of compassion. If Jesus could love the murderer and the adulterer, then why can't we find it in our hearts to care for someone whose worst mistake is not buying medical insurance? Admittedly, the people who cheer in a public debate in support of capital punishment and withholding medical care represent the worst of the far-right, but they seem to be growing both in number and popularity.
I’m also constantly confused on economic issues, but I usually come down with the Dems. My reasoning is that, no matter what they say, both parties spend like crazy, but only one is willing to try to collect the money needed to pay for everything. When it comes to government debt, my favorite conservative talking point is the one about how the federal government should be held to the same financial standards to which hard working American families hold themselves. I have a couple of problems with this. First of all, the personal savings rate in this country is something like 1%, so the average American family is not actually the definition of fiscal prudence. Secondly, the national debt is about 98% of GDP, while any American who owns a home has debt well in excess of his annual earnings. By that measure, the federal government is far more responsible than the average American. Anyway, maybe I read too much Paul Krugman, but I don’t believe the social security fund is about to run out, I don’t believe the U.S. is about to be crushed under the weight of its own debt, and I definitely don’t believe in “trickle-through” economics.
So if it sounds like a Democrat, and smells like a Democrat, but looks like a Mormon… what the heck is it?
Thanks for reading :)
