Category Archives: Route 53 – Life is A Highway

Just ramblings about my everyday life. I often wonder if other people think these things too. Some day my children can read these thoughts and maybe the will say, “Hmm, so that is what dad was really thinking” or, “At least I would know what dad would do if he were in my situation”

Always Looking Up

05 Sunday Apr 2009

Posted by in Breast Cancer - A Loving Fight, Route 53 - Life is A Highway

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The only thing worse than an opportunity you don’t deserve is blowing an opportunity.  Michael J. Fox

Optimism is something that once you catch, you have to learn how to keep catching it everydayand be persistent about it .  Friday’s are always a good day to catch it.  It seems to be more abundant and people always seem to be looking for it.  Once again my Friday ended and my weekend started with my leaving work at 5pm like a normal person (I usually stay late) and raced across the beautifully sun-swept San Francisco skyline to pick up my son at his baseball practice.   Seeing him smile as I arrived at the playground just lifted the wear and tear that the week’s toll and coma the week-long business conference had put me in.  Putting a smile on someone’s face by just being there, especially your child’s, is one of the most special things in the world and I don’t think I’ll ever want it to stop.

My son looked up to me and I realized how unconditional our relationship is.  Not that every father-son relationship should be that way, but I think ours is that way.  Sometimes when I talk to him I see him look up with his puppy dog eyes and his gap-toothed smile that will someday cost me a few thousand dollars and I don’t know if he is hearing what I am saying but he continues to look up and nod.  When we received our children’s report cards this week, we were not only happy to see that both children had received stellar records.  But even more important was to meet with the teachers and have them tell us how easy they are to deal with.  No matter what anyone says, parents go into Parent-Teacher conferences to see “their own report card” as a parent.  I know our son is easy to work with but the bigger news was to hear how well our daughter is doing.  It makes a parent feel good to know that they are doing things right.  We work really hard to make sure our second child doesnt suffer the fate of being the second on everything.

Speaking of being optimistic, the title of this entry refers to the new book of that name by Michael J. Fox and talks about his fight with Parkinson’s Disease.   Despite the religious connotation of the title, it actually refers to Fox’s short stature.  The subtitle though, “Adventures of an Incurable Optimist”  talks about how he has kept his hopes up despite his illness.  He even says that it saved his life and marriage.  This disease which is crippling him has helped his marriage?  Where have I heard this before?  Yes, these diseases and illnesses bring perspective to one’s life.  As we race through our twenties and thirties we often don’t face up to our own mortality and the responsibilities of those who are always looking up at us for guidance.  Fox, who has battled long and hard for the cure for Parkinson’s despite even the inability to brush his teeth is so optimistic that a cure will be found that he claims he’ll be able to dance with each of his three daughters at their weddings.  The overall title alludes to an emotional, psychological, intellectual, and spiritual outlook that has served Fox throughout his life because of his height and made him tough enough to fight his illness.  The book covers his retirement from his acting career and how he was forced to look at himself (he continually does this in the mirror every day so as not to fear what he might see or worry about what others might think of him) and now how to reinvent himself as a speaker and advocate for a cure for Parkinson’ s.

In the book, Fox talks about how seeing his children grow up motivates him more than ever.  When his daughter wants him to read to her, she climbs on to his lap and Fox worries when this might end.   I can just picture how Fox cherishes every moment he gets with his children because his condition changes from hour to hour. Every morning he wakes and doesn’t know how his body will be on that day. 

Today upon coming home from my son’s baseball game I walked in and saw my 7-year old daughter dancing around to some Miley Cyrus (or is it Hannah Montana?).  Anyway I came across a couple of her items that just made me smile.  First is her inspirational new song called “The Climb”.  It’s about being persistent and I think both my children got the message as I saw my son shed a tear as he got up and hugged my wife.  It is so touching to see when children get the message.  Here is the official video.  Just close your eyes and listen.  No need to look at the bad video. 

I’ll also close this on a more casual and upbeat note.  Get your dancing shoes on people!  And for my friends out there in the music industry who are going to discredit me for making two mentions of Hannah Montana in the same blog entry, I don’t care.  This is marketing!  Your kids are going to be doing this in a couple months so just do it.  Miley Cyrus is following up in her dad’s footsteps (Remember the Achy Breaky?)  Well get ready for the ‘Hoedown Throwdown”  Oh yes, line dancing is going to be back and you’ll need to learn the steps for a wedding coming to a reception near you this summer!  Check it out:

Thanks for listening everyone.  Keep looking up and let’s see those dance moves!

All’s A-Twitter…It’s Always On.

04 Saturday Apr 2009

Posted by in Business - Affiliate Marketing, Route 53 - Life is A Highway

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       “My interest is in the future because I am going to spend the rest of my life there” – Charles Kettering, inventor

This marks the 5th year of the Web 2.0 Expo (3 years of the Expo and 2 years prior under a different name).  I have traditionally found this to be the best palce to meet the best minds in the tech social media industry.  It’s evolution is indicative of its name as when it first started people took notes on pad and paper  feverishly as speakers spoke.  Some brought tape recorders.  But over the past few years I’ve seen more and more laptops with people using voice recognition devices to help.  Laptops were everywhere and it resembled more of a college conference than a business conference.  People often held them like a cup of coffee and  dropped them and kept the nearby Apple store busy with servicing requests. This  year was  a little different as more people are now holding up their iPhones and Blackberrys and taping the speeches and then with a click of a button sending those clips to Youtube, Twitter, Facebook and Myspace instead of posting to their blogs and taking notes.

To be honest, the show was a little lacking this year and as one friend put it, lots of features with little business.  The question is what is Web 2.0?  Well it has many definitions:  It is the movement from static (non-interactive pages) into more interactive pages.  For many of you that means instead of looking at news page or a single page, it is more about communities and aggregation of information and content that is shareable.

So what does that mean?  It means for example that the newspaper that you used to have delivered to your house is no longer relevant not because it is killing trees but because the news is old by the time you get it.  The news on your newspaper’s website is old too.  For example, let’s say you wanted to see a show.  You used to check the newspapers for a review written by some paid journalist who got free tickets and that review might be old anyway or be written by someone you share little taste with.  You could also get that review on the newspapers website with comments from people who have also seen the show and maybe agreed or disagreed with the reviewer.  But now web 2.0 is different.  You can find a community such as Youtube where people have taped snippets of the show recently with their cell phone and made comment such as “the lead actor was out sick”  and receive the latest updates about casting changes, etc.  Just like this conference, people have already posted photos and comments and I don’t need to wait until tomorrow morning to read about it from some journalist who was not able to watch concurrent sessions.

Now back to my friend’s comment.  One of the wonderful things about Web 2.0 in the past was meeting the innovative companies such as Facebook, Google, MySpace, Twitter, etc.  Hearing from all of these companies which were aggregating communities of shareable content.  Well, that was seriously lacking.  All you found this week were those big named companies which were trying to show you that they had infrastructure and platforms to help you with that content.  What is exciting about that?    The irony is that the company that was most talked about and most utilized, TWITTER, was only 5 blocks away and nowhere to be seen represented at the conference.  Granted, they only have 30 people in their company and their business was overwhelmed by the people at Web2.0 who were sharing videos, photos, and “tweets” in large volumes.

So people of my generation and older always say, “Hey, what’s with the Twitter?  Why should I do it?”  I’m not here to try and sell anyone on Twitter, but my response is usually that if you are texting, using Facebook, Myspace, an iPhone, a Blackberry (or other smart phone), or have toyed with starting a blog, just get the Twitter account now and “wait for it”.  At the very least, protect your name.  If your name is Joan Smith, got to Twitter.com and sign up so you can save your vanity domain, www.twitter.com/joansmith.  At some point you might start to receive some “tweets” and become interested enough to find out how to make your “content aggregation” easier. In fact, if you find that I don’t update this blog enough, you can follow me on my tweets and you don’t even need to go to my Twitter to see it.  You can just look over in the right margin of this blog to see my latest Tweets.So now you don’t have to stay up late waiting for me to update you on my life.

My cousin’s kids follow me all the time.  In fact I learn a lot from them.  Of course some of these things I shouldn’t even know.  Seeing your cousins kids in sometimes compromising situations is some of the “bad” about this new social media.  Having to tell your cousin that you think their son or daughter has been doing some underaged drinking and posting it to their website is not my intention but my duty.  Anyway, they follow me to hear about the latest concerts and other news.  In return I get to hear all the new slang.  The latest one was, just 5 minutes ago, “Erik, you are so AO”.  AO?  Yes, that means “Always On”.  Well that is what Web 2.0 is.  It is always on and you can find what you are looking for all the time.

Now you are probably asking….but wait.  Why are you telling me this?  I thought you only wrote about hotel reviews, celebrity sightings and cancer.  Well truth be told is that I do have a job.  The last 10 years or so I’ve honed my skills as an affiliate marketer with traditional products and platforms.  But now Web2.0 and social media have created a new challenge.  Many of these social media businesses such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter are trying to show they can make money and have been trying to do it through advertising.  Today the average user of Facebook spends 2.5 hours on it.  Pretty good advertising opportunity, don’t you think?  Well, now I’m working on some cool projects that provide completely relevant advertising content that is embedded and unobtrusive to the user.  Shopping via social media is like hearing about something cool from a friend.  When you talk to your friend, banners aren’t thrown in your face.  They usally tell you about something cool they saw or heard or di and then you follow up on it because it sounds interesting to you.  To me that is what collaborative filtering in social media communities is all about.

So how does a beginner begin to work with Twitter?  Just set up an account first and start playing around with it.  It’s pretty addicting.  I will follow up with another post on some great applications to make your Twitter experience more enjoyable.

All's A-Twitter…It's Always On.

04 Saturday Apr 2009

Posted by in Business - Affiliate Marketing, Route 53 - Life is A Highway

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       “My interest is in the future because I am going to spend the rest of my life there” – Charles Kettering, inventor

This marks the 5th year of the Web 2.0 Expo (3 years of the Expo and 2 years prior under a different name).  I have traditionally found this to be the best palce to meet the best minds in the tech social media industry.  It’s evolution is indicative of its name as when it first started people took notes on pad and paper  feverishly as speakers spoke.  Some brought tape recorders.  But over the past few years I’ve seen more and more laptops with people using voice recognition devices to help.  Laptops were everywhere and it resembled more of a college conference than a business conference.  People often held them like a cup of coffee and  dropped them and kept the nearby Apple store busy with servicing requests. This  year was  a little different as more people are now holding up their iPhones and Blackberrys and taping the speeches and then with a click of a button sending those clips to Youtube, Twitter, Facebook and Myspace instead of posting to their blogs and taking notes.

To be honest, the show was a little lacking this year and as one friend put it, lots of features with little business.  The question is what is Web 2.0?  Well it has many definitions:  It is the movement from static (non-interactive pages) into more interactive pages.  For many of you that means instead of looking at news page or a single page, it is more about communities and aggregation of information and content that is shareable.

So what does that mean?  It means for example that the newspaper that you used to have delivered to your house is no longer relevant not because it is killing trees but because the news is old by the time you get it.  The news on your newspaper’s website is old too.  For example, let’s say you wanted to see a show.  You used to check the newspapers for a review written by some paid journalist who got free tickets and that review might be old anyway or be written by someone you share little taste with.  You could also get that review on the newspapers website with comments from people who have also seen the show and maybe agreed or disagreed with the reviewer.  But now web 2.0 is different.  You can find a community such as Youtube where people have taped snippets of the show recently with their cell phone and made comment such as “the lead actor was out sick”  and receive the latest updates about casting changes, etc.  Just like this conference, people have already posted photos and comments and I don’t need to wait until tomorrow morning to read about it from some journalist who was not able to watch concurrent sessions.

Now back to my friend’s comment.  One of the wonderful things about Web 2.0 in the past was meeting the innovative companies such as Facebook, Google, MySpace, Twitter, etc.  Hearing from all of these companies which were aggregating communities of shareable content.  Well, that was seriously lacking.  All you found this week were those big named companies which were trying to show you that they had infrastructure and platforms to help you with that content.  What is exciting about that?    The irony is that the company that was most talked about and most utilized, TWITTER, was only 5 blocks away and nowhere to be seen represented at the conference.  Granted, they only have 30 people in their company and their business was overwhelmed by the people at Web2.0 who were sharing videos, photos, and “tweets” in large volumes.

So people of my generation and older always say, “Hey, what’s with the Twitter?  Why should I do it?”  I’m not here to try and sell anyone on Twitter, but my response is usually that if you are texting, using Facebook, Myspace, an iPhone, a Blackberry (or other smart phone), or have toyed with starting a blog, just get the Twitter account now and “wait for it”.  At the very least, protect your name.  If your name is Joan Smith, got to Twitter.com and sign up so you can save your vanity domain, www.twitter.com/joansmith.  At some point you might start to receive some “tweets” and become interested enough to find out how to make your “content aggregation” easier. In fact, if you find that I don’t update this blog enough, you can follow me on my tweets and you don’t even need to go to my Twitter to see it.  You can just look over in the right margin of this blog to see my latest Tweets.So now you don’t have to stay up late waiting for me to update you on my life.

My cousin’s kids follow me all the time.  In fact I learn a lot from them.  Of course some of these things I shouldn’t even know.  Seeing your cousins kids in sometimes compromising situations is some of the “bad” about this new social media.  Having to tell your cousin that you think their son or daughter has been doing some underaged drinking and posting it to their website is not my intention but my duty.  Anyway, they follow me to hear about the latest concerts and other news.  In return I get to hear all the new slang.  The latest one was, just 5 minutes ago, “Erik, you are so AO”.  AO?  Yes, that means “Always On”.  Well that is what Web 2.0 is.  It is always on and you can find what you are looking for all the time.

Now you are probably asking….but wait.  Why are you telling me this?  I thought you only wrote about hotel reviews, celebrity sightings and cancer.  Well truth be told is that I do have a job.  The last 10 years or so I’ve honed my skills as an affiliate marketer with traditional products and platforms.  But now Web2.0 and social media have created a new challenge.  Many of these social media businesses such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter are trying to show they can make money and have been trying to do it through advertising.  Today the average user of Facebook spends 2.5 hours on it.  Pretty good advertising opportunity, don’t you think?  Well, now I’m working on some cool projects that provide completely relevant advertising content that is embedded and unobtrusive to the user.  Shopping via social media is like hearing about something cool from a friend.  When you talk to your friend, banners aren’t thrown in your face.  They usally tell you about something cool they saw or heard or di and then you follow up on it because it sounds interesting to you.  To me that is what collaborative filtering in social media communities is all about.

So how does a beginner begin to work with Twitter?  Just set up an account first and start playing around with it.  It’s pretty addicting.  I will follow up with another post on some great applications to make your Twitter experience more enjoyable.

Finding Daily Inspiration: 6 Months Post-Surgery

01 Wednesday Apr 2009

Posted by in Breast Cancer - A Loving Fight, Route 53 - Life is A Highway

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“If the sun is not shining on you, may it be shining in you.” – Dean Karnazes, Ultra-Marathoner

I’ve been asked by many how my wife is doing physically after her latest procedure and why I don’t discuss it more here.  Well fortunately my wife is doing well such that we don’t have to discuss her battle every day. While someone suggested I actually keep a cancer blog and a non-cancer blog, I just don’t have the time.  This blog is about my life.  Its work. Its family. Its my thoughts all in one place.  For anyone who reads this and puts their foot in my shoes, they’ll likely be touched by the same family, work and health issues at some point in their lives.  For me it is about finding others like me.  Some might be in exactly in the place I am or might have been where I am in the past and help me get through some of life’s issues.

So the answer is: My wife is fine and back at almost normal activity levels although she can’t exercise full on for a few more weeks.  She still has some sutures that we don’t want to pop out like they did last time.  It is important that the sutures are allowed to heal naturally so that the scars will heal properly.

It has been a little over 6 months since her cancer surgery and it feels like so long ago. It has also been 3 months from the follow up procedure to complete her recovery and those physical scars while fading and healing well do not compare to the mental healing she has done.  I have primarily focused on my wife’s mental well-being because I think it is just as important as her physical healing and in many ways I think helps a person to recover.

In fact, her mother always used to say that she knew my wife was feeling better when she started yapping away.  Tonight my wife was yapping away about all the plans she had for the next couple of weeks.  Of course my telling her to slow down only turned into a mini-discussion in which I told my wife I was so proud of her comeback and the fact that she wanted to relieve me of my worries about her as well as her wanting to show me how she has learned to embrace life more than ever.  Holding back a couple weeks should not preclude her from anything that life has left in store for her.  It’s like keeping a stallion in the starting gates before a big race!

As I’ve said in the past, my wife is my current inspiration and like everyone I look for different kinds of inspiration physically and mentally all the time. Why is that?  I just think that some points of inspiration lose their effectiveness after repetitive use.  Sometimes its a song, its a person, its a story, but for me I am constantly in search of a new idea or passion to get me through that next high in life.  My wife is learning the same.

She is now in her fourth month of her 36 month trial of monthly shots.  I laughed and told her it is like making 36 monthly payments on a car.  She gave me a wry smile.  Sometimes my analogies make her just cringe.  The good news this week is that she got the reports back that she is metabolizing the Tamoxifin very well which means that the drug is taking effect and hopefully the results will be good.  The shots are actually for 3 years with the daily drugs taken for 5 years.  Her oncologist says her results look good and that she feel comfortable in resuming many of her regular habits and live life.  of course my wife’s first question….”Can I have wine?”  I laughed, and the doctor, recognizing the humor said, “Moderation is good.  Just make sure you make it worth your while.”  In other words, don’t waste it on Two Buck Chuck (Charles Shaw, a $2 wine sold at Trader Joes).

Yes my wife is inspired by life in general at the moment and there is nothing more inspiring than to be around someone who really knows how to enjoy life.  They shine, they don’t sweat the little things, they somehow don’t get distracted by the bad things, and they are always looking out for others who seem to be stuck.  When you surround yourself with people who are living in the moment it can be magical.  For the past few weeks I feel as though I’ve been walking around constantly with a light bulb over my head.  My own energy is high and my pain is low.  My exercise regimen that started just before her diagnosis is now at an all time high and each night my wife inspires me to keep running.  The sun is definitely shining on her and within her.  I’ll just soak in her rays and feel her warmth.

A Beautiful Day

28 Saturday Mar 2009

Posted by in Breast Cancer - A Loving Fight, Route 53 - Life is A Highway

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“Touch me.  Take me to that other place.” – U2 lyrics from “Beautiful Day”.

I don’t subscribe to the TGIF motto.  My father always worked 6 days a week and played golf on the 7th.  Fridays were never an extension of the weekend and he always told me that weekends are two days for the common man, 3 days for the lazy man and 1 day for the man who takes life seriously.  I’ve felt that people who said TGIF were coasting on Fridays.  Well now that I have a family the 1 day weekend is no longer in my repertoire but the 3 day weekend is not something I’ve ever longed for.  Fridays to me are always my most efficient days.

Yesterday Friday took on that TGIF feeling.  it was one of those warm mornings in San Francisco where you put the top down and turn up the music.  What played?  Yep, my CD Player happened to randomly select, U2’s Beautiful Day. Work started with an informal BizDev breakfast in San Francisco’s SouthPark .  I like going here in the mornings to have a casual coffee and chat about different ideas and network with other industry players.  South Park is modeled after an English neighborhood and was once the home to the first real neighborhood in San Francisco.  It then became what has been termed “ground zero” of the dot-com revolution and is now considered to be a leading player in the Web 2.0 movement.

I try to take one or two good ideas out of this gathering each time, but Friday it spurred some great ideas after some conversations with some attendees.  With these new light bulbs over my head I walked back to my office in the bright sunshine and got into work (still the first person into my office before 8am) with a bundle of energy and a load of caffeine in my body.  Before I new it I had already taken action with my new plan and was seeing results.  I love it when change can be affected just like that. The morning and the afternoon flew by and one of my conference calls turned into a great opportunity that I cannot wait to see implemented by one of our partners.  It isn’t often these days when two companies put money aside and focuse on proper execution and that is what we are doing.   Hopefully it will succeed and people will take notice by the results we achieve.

By the time 5:30 rolled around I was able to “blow out” of the office.  5:30 is early for me and I was still one of the last to leave.  These Fridays I am motivated by the chance to pick up my son from his late Friday baseball practice.  Especially on this beautiful Friday afternoon I laced up some tennis shoes and threw on my glove and walked into the middle of their practice.  I don’t care what anyone says, but meeting your son on a playground after work on a beautiful Spring evening and having him come running up to you and giving you a big hug just warms your heart and brings a smile to your face.  He just smiled his big smile and said, “hey dad, can we call mom and get a pizza for dinner?” (Sure, what the heck!).  We tossed the ball around practicing his fielding and working on his batting swing.  This is the American Dream, is it not?  We stayed a little longer after practice and talked about our days.  I don’t know if he thought my day was as exciting as his, but he pretended to be interested.  We picked up a pizza and had a nice family dinner full of smiling faces and lots of great kid stories.  My wife had helped out at our school fundraiser which includes a luncheon for the school moms.  It is one of the events she looks forward to every year at the school and although she didn’t say it, I think she was glad that cancer hadn’t interrupted her ability to attend.  The event includes a big plant and flower show and she picked up a plant for the other mom in our class who is recovering from her cancer surgery earlier this week. [As an aside, our thoughts were interrupted this week with the news and an email from another family friend who found out she has breast cancer and will be having surgery on Monday].  For our household, bedtime is easy.  Friday night was a funny one as we take time for our kids to read to us and we read something of our choice to our kids.  It is our way of bonding with them.  As my daughter read to me on this evening i fell asleep next to her on the bed.  The next thing I know, she’s poking me in the cheek, ‘Daddy, you going to kiss me or what?”  Oh boy, when she gets older, the boys are going to be in trouble (and so am I trying to keep up with her)!

So how do I end a “Beautiful Day”? A little 5 mile workout to clear my mind and an early bed time to rest it.  It was another great run with my body feeling relaxed on a warm night.  It was a great day to reflect on.  It might just be another day in the book of my life, but it will hopefully be a good chapter when all is said and done.

Running with Heart

27 Friday Mar 2009

Posted by in Breast Cancer - A Loving Fight, Route 53 - Celebrity Sightings, Route 53 - Life is A Highway

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“I have learned that there is no failure in running, or in life, as long as you keep moving. It’s not about speed and gold medals. It’s about refusing to be stopped. You might find that one particular direction proves difficult, but there are many directions on a compass. Infinite, in fact. As long as you keep searching, you’ll find your way.”  – Amby Burfoot, Executive Director of Runner’s World Magazine

This has been a long week, but not as bad as one would have thought it would be.  It’s amazing what you can accomplish in a week.  Surgery, dentist appointments, music concerts, fundraisers, gymnastics classes, baseball clinics, shopping at Target, and of course your normal 55-60 hour work week done. 

Because of my wife’s surgery I did a lot of the normal morning chauffeuring and morning herding of the kids.  I am so lucky to be blessed with really cool kids who understand the gravity of some of the things their parents are trying to accomplish and were really well-behaved.  My 73 year old mother told me that she thought I had the coolest 9 year old and 7 year old.  Of course that is a proud grandmother speaking.  This is the same lady who laughed at me early on as a parent saying I was too strict.  On Tuesday, the day after my wife’s surgery, I put the kids to bed and made sure my wife was settled in and comfortable before heading out to a concert.  I was feeling a bit guilty about going to a concert the night after my wife’s surgery but she told me to get out and that she was okay. It was not just any concert, but my first Country music concert.   My daughter asked me where I was going and with whom.  When I told her that I was going with my best friend, Dave, my children asked, “What makes a Best Friend?”  These questions get harder don’t they?

I told my children that the criteria for a best friend changes with age, but in the end the best friend is always there when you need them and sometimes when you don’t even know you need them.  My friend Dave has done everything friends do.  We’ve gone to concerts together.  We played on the highschool basketball, swimming, track, and cross country swimming teams together, we drove long roadtrips together, we were each other’s best man, we’ve seen historic sporting events together, and we helped each other out when our fathers died.  But now we are heads of our households and spending time together is few and far between.  Now a best friend is someone you can call after not talking to them for a month and inviting them out of the house on a school night.  Dave really is the best friend a guy could have.  Dave is always honest and dependable, and when I’ve made mistakles in life that I’ve regretted he essentially put his arm around my shoulder and told me it was alright and to put it behind me.  I remember his telling me for his bachelor party that he didn’t want me to do anything too crazy in case his legal career took off and he ran for public office someday.  I never questioned it.  Dave is that trustworthy and honest.  If he ever did run for public office, his background would be as squeaky clean as you could possibly imagine.

When I called Dave and asked him if he wanted to go see a country music concert, he thought I was kidding.  The last concert we had seen together was for Foreigner in the 80s and we went on a double date (we rubbed our shoulders as we reminisced about our dates sitting on our shoulders for a couple hours so that they could see).  I told him I couldn’t take my wife and since his wife had been egging him to get out of the house anyway, off we went.  We went to see Keith Urban, who to the non-country music set is married to actress, Nicole Kidman.   He hadn’t even heard of Keith Urban but I convinced him that you haven’t really lived in San Francisco until you’ve been to the famed Fillmore Theater (The Fillmore).  The Fillmore was a haven for 6os rock.  The Who, Cream, Santana, Jefferson Airplane, and Hendrix all played there and now it is an honor for anyone to play there.  The intimate setting with chandeliers and posters commemorating all the bands who have played there make it an ambiance like no other.  Dave was in awe.

The Fillmore Stage

The Fillmore Stage

 

Fillmore Balcony

Fillmore Balcony

We thought it was cool that here we were, two 40 somethings surrounded by hundreds of teenage girls and their mothers.  We were definitely not in our element for this particular show, but we laughed at the irony of the situation as we were probably two of the older people there and needless to say we were probably the only two who didn’t know the words to every song.  We did take mental notes on whether this was the kind of event we could see our children at in 10 years ( as I watched the 3 “Tweenage” girls scream in front of me and blow kisses I wondered where their parents were and envisoned my daughter begging me to go to a concert like this on a school night).  Seriously though we were able to catch up with each other and check on each other’s condition, our wives, our kids, work , and our other friends.  We laughed and said that we needed to start getting out more often.  The concert actually wasn’t half bad and we were quite impressed  by Keith Urban’s guitar play as you can see in the following videos:

The concert was part of a VIP secret concert series in intimate settings to help promote his upcoming album.Although it was a concert on a weeknight, Dave and I agreed that it was a pleasant distraction and we were both recharged and ready for the week.  I even got home and went for a run to clear my thoughts.  Although it was 11pm I ran longer than normal.  The concert had filled my head with many thoughts and hanging with Dave brought many memories.  I started to vividly remember the long talks we’d have about what we wanted out of our careers on the long drives back and forth between Northern and Southern California suring our college years.  The life paths we’ve taken aren’t exactly the ones we dictated to each other but we had found different roads to get there and had pushed until we found our way.  Along the way I passed my neighbor Dean Karnazes  (Karno) in the darkness of the night.  I didn’t acknowledge him as we passed each other as he was deep in thought as well. 

Karno  is one of my inspirations although he doesn’t know it directly.  As one of the greatest endurance runners ever, he’ll be the one to tell you that running is his therapy and where he gets piece of mind.  He says the greatest words he ever got were from his high school track teacher, “Run with heart.”  His runs are not about speed but about mind over body.  Tonight I did as he says he likes to do and ran past his destination just because I felt good.  My mind just turned off and I ran and ran.  I dedicated tonight’s 6  mile run to my wife.   She continues to amaze me.  More beautiful and radiant than ever, her surgery on Monday barely stopped her.  She didn’t even have to take her pain fighting Vicodin pills and was already off running good deeds for others like the other mother in our class who is at home recovering from breast cancer.  If you don”t believe that breast cancer can create a community, you’ve never seen this sisterhood. 

Still,  I’ve had to intercept her on a couple of occasions this week to have her stop exerting herself.   She is learning to run with heart as well, but she can ease into it as far as I’m concerned.  I have to remind her time and again that the road is still long.  I think she is just now discovering what it means to give back and enjoy life but she needs to pace herself.

Back in a Familiar Place

23 Monday Mar 2009

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If you raise your children to feel that they can accomplish any goal or task they decide upon, you will have succeeded as a parent and you will have given your children the greatest of all blessings.”

-Brian Tracy

So here I am again waiting in the 3rd floor waiting room of the UCSF Mt. Zion cancer clinic as my wife goes into surgery for the third time in 6 months. It is a very familiar place although it has memories that I’d rather forget. Yes it is a bit easier and the procedure (that is what we call it for children so as not to alarm them) is less serious than the first two.  When my wife was first diagnosed with cancer almost 8 months ago I never imagined the path we’d take and where we are today while better than possibly imagined is not one of the many scenarios that ever ran through my head.  We’ve learned to appreciate what life has given us and to that we can’t control everything.

The venue and many of the faces are still the same here at the hospital although some things have changed or at least the first two times I was too distracted to worry about.  Over in one corner of the waiting room is a wife (I think) who is trying to hold back her tears.  She looks as if she is in her 70s or so and is elegantly dressed with a hat ( this should be definitely designated as a chapeau).  She has a lot of makeup on and you can tell she was raised in an era and with parents who told her that if she were to go out, she always needed to dress to impress.  Everyone else is sitting in here talking on cell phones and updating their loved ones, reading outdated magazines or sleeping upright waiting for their name to be called.   Of note is that Lance Armstrong and His Ride for Hope took a serious spill today as he broke his collar bone in a fall.  Also, the television overhead in the waiting room is showing photos of Liam Neeson and his two teenage sons  at the funeral of their wife and mother, actress Natasha Richardson.  The grief and sorrow are the images I had imagined for myself 6 months ago.  As I said, you just don’t know what direction life is going to point you.  You just have to take it as it comes sometimes.

As we walked into the hospital a couple hours ago I noticed we both had a bit of a smile on our faces.  We even joked a little with the admissions staff.  But what made it even more noticeable was that we ran into one of the other mom’s from our kid’s school who was just coming down from her pre-op appointment before her breast cancer surgery tomorrow.  The two mom’s hugged and I shook the husband’s hand.  Very quiet and private people (he’s a physician himself) we could see their worry and concern on their faces. We kept the conversation brief and wished each other luck as we needed to stay on time.  My wife even had a moment to discuss a play date for our two sons in the next week while she rested.  How odd is that? My wife and I got up to the room and talked about the chance meeting.  “That was us 6 months ago”.   The other couple noted that this was our third time through and mentioned how they hope this would be their only surgery.  We only hope that we showed a positive attitude and a good outlook in the face of surgery.   

That is what it is about, isn’t it?  A positive outlook?  Last night my wife even asked for a hall pass to get out and have a drink and chat with a girlfriend.  I said of course.  I mean how many other women go out and do that the night before their surgery.  The first two times my wife needed Ativan to calm her nerves and get to sleep.  This time she was ready and not worried.  I almost forgot she was having surgery when I woke up this morning.

Speaking of positive outlooks we were talking about the short term memory of our own son.  He had a bad offensive game the day before with the “hat trick” (three strikeouts) in his first little league game this season.  Although just 9 he is playing with 11 year olds twice his size and at least held his own defensively.  Other kids out there were crying when they missed a ball and we were worried that our own son was going to be deflated.  After the game I asked how he felt. “Hungry”, was his response.  And after another pause he smiled, “Don’t worry dad, I’m not going to strike out everytime.”  I laughed and he smiled back.  Here I was worried about him and he was telling me not to worry. I can’t wait til he’s 30 and able to take care of me and tell me not to worry.

Has it been 6 months?  Yep.  The timeline:

Breast Cancer Diagnosis: 7/27/08

Bilateral Skin Sparing Mastectomy: 9/9/08

Beginning of clinical Trial: 12/1/08

Exchange Surgery: 12/12/08

Revision Surgery: 3/23/09

It seems like it has been a long time but 6 months really have just vanished from our lives.  At the same time our love has grown enormously and so has the maturity of our children.  Even moreso as a couple, our respect for life and the people we meet in life’s journey has grown.  We can only hope to enrich our lives by challenging it, embracing it and finding joy whenever it is presented to us.

Thanks to modern medicine we’ll be able to continue this journey in a couple days.  I think it is amazing that within 24 hours after I get my wife home, she should be back to normal.  She’ll be stiff with limited mobility, but most importantly she’ll be here for our children, for me and for her friends.

A Little Spring In Our Step

21 Saturday Mar 2009

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“Spring is Nature’s way of saying, “Let’s Party” – Robin Williams, comedian

The first day of spring and hope was in the air.  It is always a day where I start to see hope for people (of course the stock market took a bit of a hit yeesterday after a rally so not all is good).  More importantly personally we waited for my wife’s results from her BRCA test.  This test is to see if my wife has an abnormal  BRCA gene which indicates a higher probability of having ovarian cancer.  It has been found that those who have breast cancer and the BRCA are more likely to have ovarian cancer.

The average woman (without an inherited breast cancer gene abnormality) in the United States has about a 12% risk of developing breast cancer over a 90-year life span.  In contrast, women who have an abnormal BRCA1 or BRCA2 gene have up to an 85% risk of developing breast cancer by age 70.  Women with BRCA1 and BRCA2 abnormalities are also at increased risk of developing ovarian cancer. The lifetime risk is about 55% for women with BRCA1 mutations and about 25% for women with BRCA2 mutations.  By comparison, about 1.8% of women without an inherited BRCA abnormality get ovarian cancer. The risk for certain other cancers may also be higher with BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutations. But these risk increases (for cancers such skin or digestive tract) are much lower than the increases in risk for breast and ovarian cancer.

This cloud has been hanging over our heads since last July, but obviously the figth with breast cancer came first.  The thought of another surgery (given that we are having revision surgery on Monday) just isn’t something we wanted to consider right now.  Well the results came and my wife is negative which is a relief and slightly expected since her mother was negative.  It is quite possible though that since my mother had cancer that I could have pass it along to my daughter but we can’t test her until she is old enough and the oncologists said that she doesn’t need to be tested until she is 30 or so.  Amazingly we shared the news via phone, talked about it for 2 minutes and then went back about our business.  No celebrating, no hugs, no kisses.  Just another hurdle that we’ve met and jumped over without incident.  No doubt though, this was a big deal.  Nobody wants to mess with their ovaries in their 40s.  My mother-in-law had hers taken out in her 50s and I think psychologically it is a tough transition and although she is fine and have never really talked to her about it, it is something that affects you more mentally than physically.  I know my wife was not wanting to follow that route.

We even remarked at here we are concerned about cancer and how in current events today, Natasha Richardson, a beautiful actress our age could have an innocent fall and one day later be lost to her family.  People always say. “What if you got hit by a truck tomorrow…”.  Well this is just one more reason to focus on living life to the fullest and not worry about every detail.

So with that Spring in our step I took the time to get out for a walk for lunch yesterday.  A beautiful day for San Francisco with crisp clear skies, I sucked in the air, walked by the Martin Luther King Memorial fountain and pool in Yerba Buena Gardens where people were sunbathing, and read his quotes about his dreams.  I passed by two Japanese tourists with matching “Have a Nice Day” T-shirts with those yellow Happy faces.

For those who remember the 70’s a vision of the ubiquitous yellow “happy face” is burned into memory. From every direction this cheerful circular icon extolled us to “have a nice day” and none of us was curmudgeonly enough to not strive for compliance.   Along with “Hey the Fonz”, my OJ Simpson football jersey, my Willie Mays jersey and my Farrah Fawcett t-shirt, my “Have a Nice Day” t-shirt was part of my t-shirt rotation that I wore every day after tearing off my school uniform.  I was even part of the lunchbag brigade that had white lunchbags with the yellow smiley face which read “HAND” (Have A Nice Day).  Instead of the graffiti we see today, you saw Yello Smiley face stickers everywhere.  You couldn’t escape it.   My dad loved those lunch bags.

After a while they started having different sayings on those lunch bags and then it started getting expensive to just buy those lunch bags.   Eventually my parents got economical (or cheap) and started going to brown paper bags for lunch that they’d expect me to use at least 10 times before they would retire it.  Every night my dad would write a new saying on the bag.  Something inspirational , but mostly something that our friends would snicker at like: “Take care of your body”, “Listen to your teachers”, “Share with your friends” or “Be humble as pie”.  Needless to say, we’d hide our lunch bags from the view of our classmates, but once they knew it was all over.  As funny or corny as it was, I obviously remember it fondly and maybe it is something I should do with my children by leaving a little message for them each day.   Just seeing my daughter roll her eyes or seeing the funny smirk on my son’s face as he reads each message will be priceless.

Yes, hope springs eternal and the first days of Spring not only bring new energy and new dreams, but remind us of old ones that we need to renew.

March Madness – The Human Spirit

18 Wednesday Mar 2009

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How do you go from where you are to where you wanna be? And I think you have to have an enthusiasm for life. You have to have a dream, a goal. And you have to be willing to work for it. –
Jim Valvano, ex-coach NC State and founder of the V Foundation 

Before I begin with today’s post, please indulge me for a second.  In a continuation of yesterday’s post I was hit, by one of the new employees at my company with the question of “Where do you get your dry cleaning done?”  I told her that we lived far apart and that my dry cleaner, despite the “secret Chinese discount” she offers me would not be worth the 5 mile drive for $1 per shirt.  She looked at me stunned and told me she pays $6 per shirt for her “Green Cleaners”  $6 per shirt!!!  Are you kidding?!!  The only thing green about that is the money laundering they are doing there!!!  I’d rather throw out the shirt and buy a new one!

Has this world gone mad?  I promise not to go on an AIG tirade. It serves no purpose.

Of course this time of year is when American sports fans go crazy with their college basketball brackets.  I’m no different ever since my high school chemistry teacher got us hooked.  It became more of an addiction when my wife went to business school at Duke University which along with UNC combine to make March Madness an annual tradition.

The pageantry and the emotional ups and downs of each year though pale in comparison to the lifelong lessons that have come out of this Men’s basketball Tournament.  While Duke, UNC, Kansas, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisville and UCLA have combined to win 37 of the 70 championships, to me nothing has defined March Madness and the popularity of the tournament as the stories about those underdogs and especially those underdogs who showed us what heart and emotion can bring to any situation.

The quote for today’s blog comes from Jim Valvano, the coach of the 1983 Championship which many will claim was one of the two greatest upsets in NCAA Championship game history (the Villanova perfect game against Georgetown being the other).  More memorable than the dramatic last second victory was Jim Valvano’s crazy celebration and then 10 year’s later his speech at the ESPY awards as he battled cancer.  The quote above was once of his many quotes from that evening and in his speeches that he made up until his death.

To me. equally inspirational was the story of Hank Gathers and Bo Kimble, two young men from Philadelphia who transferred to Loyola-Marymount in Los Angeles and made them into a one-time wonder.  In 1990, Hank Gathers died from an abnormal heart condition during the teams last game of the season.  The team was still given a birth in the tournament and with a heavy heart Bo Kimble led his team to the regional finals with the spirit of fans everywhere behind them.  Bo shot free throws left handed in honor of his childhood friend who was left handed and made upset after upset victory until they were eventually eliminated by the eventual champion, UNLV.

So while many may look at this tournament as just another result of sports crazy hysteria in the US.  I look at it for stories of the human spirit.  I don’t know if I will find anything new, but you never know.  The stories of everlasting friendship and courage in the face of death would be hard to beat.

Some may say that I am over-extending the meaning of what this tournament represents, but it is what it is for me. 

Today we met some new friends (they are actually old friends that we met online) and what might have looked like a casual meeting was really more than that.  We met another couple we befriended through an online breast cancer forum.  They have gone through much of what we have gone through with the same physicians but about 15 months ahead of my wife.  After meeting for lunch I had a brief chat with my wife.  She remarked at how happy they looked and I agreed.  While we didn’t discuss it I could see that my wife was making a mental note.  She asked me again how far ahead of her surgery they were in terms of time and noted that timeline would put us somewhere around August 2010.  Her mind was racing there.  For her it wasn’t the mental model but the physical model and goal of where she will be heading.

For me, this is the most wonderful time of the year.  March Madness, the Masters, and baseball is beginning.  Yes, my spirit sure is being lifted.  March Madness means different things to every one of us, but as long as it means something, that’s good!  Just have a dream and a goal.

It Ain’t Easy Being Green

17 Tuesday Mar 2009

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When you find out you will die, thats when you decide to live. – tagline from the upcoming movie, Veronika Decides to Die

Happy St. Patty’s Day, and if it still is wherever you are, you can take off that silly green shirt or even those horrific plaid green pants!  Yes I do own a pair of lime green ones for special golf occasions.  I do think that the Irish probably get together and laugh at all of us for wearing all these shades of green.  I mean, look at me!  Asian guy, who needs to work on his tan and wearing this pale green oxford shirt.  Not a pretty look!  You’d definitely need to down a few beers to look at me in this shirt. 

Speaking of “Green”, it sure is getting expensive to be “green”  In fact, it sure is costing more. In San Francisco where we pay for the highest gas prices in the continental US, we are thinking of adding another tax to drive more people to alternative fuel usage and to drive less.  Gas prices incidentally are already high due to taxes to pay for roads and better fuel emission standards.  We already pay more for our Green compost boxes which in our household seems to be getting more full and stinkier than the regular trash bin and the “recycling” bin which seems to get no love anymore.  Part of that is because we no longer use paper bags at the grocery store and we have seriously cut back on our use of the printed media.  Speaker of the House (and my former neighbor when I was a kid), Nancy Pelosi, is trying to save our local newspaper from bankruptcy.  I hate to break Mrs. Pelosi’s heart (yeah, that’s what I called her growing up) but we have to let go.  The online newspapers are here and in much the same way that “television killed the radio star”, newspapers are being overcome by the internet where we cannot wait for the printed word as by the time it reaches us, it is old news.  Hey it won’t hurt to save a few trees either.

I think government is learning a hard lesson these days.  In fact, I think the economy is teaching us all a big lesson.  I have always been a big believer in business and trusting the efficient markets and the bright people who run corporate America.  Well obviously that has changed eith the way senior management have run some of our largest institutions into the ground.  Now on the other side, here is government saying that they can help save these organizations and regulate them yet we are now overrun by the outrageous scandal of the AIG and its executives who have taken the money we provided to them from taxpayer money and are rewarding their executives.  Obviously governmentis not prepared to regulate the behavior of our corporations even when they own 80% of them.  Human nature just can’t be controlled to that extreme and the power of the people is too powerful.  It requires leadership of incredible proportions.    For those who know the “Myth of Sisyphus”  who was condemned to push the same rock up a hill over and over again I can only imagine an avalanche chasing Barack Obama and Timothy Geithner down a hill.

Business is just too tough for the government to try and regulate.  I look  at one of my current businesses where the government were unable to regulate (and I’m not sure they could have stopped it) the free downloading of music.  What did this do?  It ruined the royalty income of many great performers who wanted to sit back and earn their royalties from every sale of their albums and CDs.  They say that an artist would earn a dollar from every album sold but yet today they get maybe $.10 when someone legally downloads a song but nothing when they share it with their 10 friends for free.  So what this has done is it has forced many performers to keep touring instead of retiring.  Concerts used to be less than 15% of an artist’s income while album royalties made up over 75%.  Now it is just the reverse.  The only thing is that I don’t know if I still want to see Styx or Air Supply anymore.  To put it to comparison, Michael Jackson was the greatest of his time in the ’80s and when you compare to U2 the numbers are staggering.  In his day, Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” alone sold over 110 million copies (not to mnetion his other 11 other studio albums) while U2, undoubtedly the greatest rock band of today, has sold 145 million in total (12 albums). 

So now that these artists want to go out and sell tickets on tour, governments are now listening to the consumers who feel cheated by the high price of tickets.  These are the same consumers who are getting this music for free because the governments failed to regulate their illegal downloading and copying. 

Yes, tis a vicious cycle and what is scary in times like this is that everyone is forced to think about themselves first and others second.  Everybody holds on to what they have and supports issue that help them get back to where they feel most comfortable.  it is definitely all abot the “green” money.

So how do we get out of this?  I don’t have any great solution.  Yes I went to a great business school and even had 2 Nobel Laureates in Economics as professors, but this recession is bigger than any one of us.  We do all have to suck it up and work together. 

Yesterday I heard the head of the Fed say that the recession would be over later this year!  I just can’t see it.  Until we all regain our money lost in our pensions and 401Ks, we all feel more comfortable about our jobs if we still have them, and our faith and trust in our financial system is restored, there will not be a recovery.  What are these people thinking?

My best solution?  Well I’d recommend a universal 4% interest rate.  It would put homes in range of those who can afford it.  Those people who have money and equity in their homes can take on some debt and throw that back out into the economy as well. I think the current solution to the mortgage problem is not a big enough move and only helps those in trouble today and it may not help them for good.  It just postpones the inevitable.  Those who lost their jobs and are having problems paying their current mortgage will still have a problem tomorrow without a job.    The problem with my solution?  Well the banks will lose some income as their margins are reduced on their profitable mortgages.  They’ll likely start charging more for other services and other debt such as credit cards. …….ah yes, “the greening of America” .  I think Kermit the Frog must be rolling around wondering what is going on here!

Which leads to probably the last line of this rambling blog entry….What the heck is he thinking about that quote at the beginning?  Well I’ve been writing recently about how my wife has had some great motivation.  It just made sense to me although it really had nothing to do with this post.  The tagline by the way came from a movie that is coming out.  Last year before my wife was diagnosed with cancer we happened to be out for our anniversary at a cool hotel in New York called The Hotel on Rivington (Thor).  We happened to be there the same night of a closing party for the filming of a the movie, Veronika Decides to Die.  The hotel was closed only to guests and the party.  Somehow I got caught in the elevator with the cast and swept into the party.   I did write a review of the hotel.  Well today, I just saw my first preview advertisement for the movie, so I thought I’d research it and found the tagline for the movie.