Speech Upon Turning 30.5 by Tom Lehman Lyrics
I delivered an abridged version of the following speech at my 30.5rd birthday party on 7/26/2014 (so strictly speaking it’s a “speech upon turning 30.564383562”).
Ostensibly it's about art, age, humility, Mike Bostock, and the feeling that now at 30.5 I'm no longer a spring chicken w.r.t. the “having original ideas” department.
But it was also part of a meta-joke / brand gesture called “make everyone get dressed up in black tie for my half bday party and force them to listen to a drawn-out speech about how cool my plagiarized maze art is and how humble I am”, which symbolized.. well, what exactly DID the broader joke symbolize? Or at least that was the question racing through my head as the mic started cutting in and out mid-speech and I began to lose the audience whose patience for this ridiculous frippery I had far overestimated.
And so, as the speech spiraled further and further away toward disaster, I started to get my own meta-joke less and less until I cut the speech short in favor of spending the rest of the party checking my phone and grinding my teeth until finally I went home feeling tired and vaguely ashamed.
But the following week, after talking to some people who WEREN'T trapped in my head, it seemed like the overall vibe was “fun party, Tom – I got wasted! Thanks!”. So who knows. Anyway, here's the speech:
***
Thank you all for coming!!
Wow, 30.5.. what a crazy feeling. Ask anyone over 30.5 and they’ll tell you the same thing: 30.5 is the most intense half-birthday there is. Like no half birthday before it, 30.5 marks the beginning of a new age of life and I’m so happy to be able to share this with all of you.
But before we get started, I want to do a little exercise to remind us of simpler times and simpler half-birthdays. I am going to ask you all a question, and I want you to channel the impetuousness of your most youthful half-birthday and answer it in less than 2 seconds.
But first, let's do a little warm up. I want everyone to say the word “shop”. Now I want everyone to spell the word “shop” out loud. Say the word again and then spell the word. Okay do it one more time, say the word, spell the word “shop”. One last time. Okay, now here is the question, you’ve got 2 seconds to answer it, and I want you to yell your answer. What do you do at a green light?
[Hopefully everyone yells “stop”]
REALLY? Really? At a green light? That’s what you do? Ok, enough channeling the impetuousness of youth!
Now a few words about the art.
You’re watching a 3 step looping metaphor: first we draw a maze, then we flood it with color to reveal its structure, and finally we solve it.
The first part – the drawing of the complicated maze of post 30.5 life – is the most interesting. To create the maze we’re using a technique called Wilson’s algorithm. Here’s how it works: we start by adding a single white cell to the maze in the bottom right corner. Then, we begin a random walk from that cell – which you can see in yellow – which continues until it reconnects with the existing maze. Once it does, the path of the random walk turns into a passageway in the maze and we start a new random walk. However, if the random walk intersects itself, we erase the resulting loop and the random walk begins again from the intersection point.
Now, of course, you’re probably wondering “is this algorithm even guaranteed to terminate? What if the random walk continues forever without reconnecting with the maze?” At this point I was hoping to direct this question to the one man I know who DEFINITELY has the answer, a certain Todd Schneider, but unfortunately he can’t be here tonight! Give it up for Todd anyway!
If he were here, what I think he would say is that the algorithm IS in fact guaranteed to terminate, but only for 2 dimensional mazes. Wilson's algorithm is not guaranteed to generate a 3 dimensional maze, so keep that in mind if you’re thinking about one-upping me at your half birthday.
So the algorithm’s guaranteed to finish, but it can take a really long time! And so in this respect, building the maze of post 30.5 life is just like living post-30.5 life. It takes awhile to get going, often it’s not clear whether you are making progress, and then, hopefully / suddenly, it clicks and the rest of the maze fills in.
There are other maze-generating algorithms that take less time to get going, but they generate less interesting mazes. In fact, Wilson’s irritatingly unbounded algorithm is the only one I know of that’s guaranteed to generate a random maze. Other algorithms that requires less randomness and are therefore less irritatingly unbounded, generate less complicated, less interesting mazes, and, metaphorically, less complicated, less interesting post-30.5 lives.
So that’s one metaphor for you, but the deeper meaning of this art project is that it is also an animated tribute to my being completely out of original ideas. You see, this entire thing is lifted almost whole-cloth from a far greater post-30.5 artist, someone who did this stuff in a speck of spare time between creating d3.js and doing that sweet buy v. rent calculator for the New York Times.
Of course I’m talking about Mike Bostock, who unfortunately ALSO couldn’t make it here tonight, but who is most definitely, as T.S. Eliot would say, Il miglior fabbro. Mike, wherever you are, you are the greater magician!! YOU are the Ezra Pound!! Give it up for Mike Bostock!!
Mike made these 3 maze explorations – all I did was glue them together and make it loop. And, in general, post-30.5 it seems like all I’m good for is gluing cool things together and making them loop. I had some cool ideas in my twenties and during the first half of the first year of my thirties, but now all I’m capable of is encouraging, curating, harnessing, and fostering the ideas of others.
But ah, I just feel incapable of expressing exactly what I mean here.. excuse me for a second..
[Takes out a piece of paper and reads]The trick to appearing awesome is to surround yourself with people doing awesome things, and then figure out how to synthesize their ideas into something new and (hopefully) transformative.That’s better.
This, of course, is a quote from Mike Bostock himself, who, in addition to the maze concepts, also deserves credit for teaching me about the idea of synthesizing the ideas of others.
Which brings me to my favorite college philosophy professor, Chris Shields.
I still remember him opening the first lecture of Introduction to Ancient Philosophy with the famous Thales quote “everything is water”. He repeated it a few times and then explained that he thought it was important, not because it was true, but because it had “the ODOR of truth”: it sounds like it, or something like it, could actually be true.
Now, had I heard about this “everything is water” business at a different time in my life I might have reacted like my friend and future roommate Noah, who’s here tonight, reacted then, which was to say “Oh, so THIS garbage is philosophy? Peace” and he walked out of the lecture, dropped the course, and now he's a 6 handicap.
But I was more credulous back then, and I'm glad I was because I still love that phrase “the odor of truth” and still to this day love saying “the odor of [some abstract thing]”. It’s related to the concept of a “bad pitch”, which is how you introduce an idea when you’re trying to say “here’s a thought, but I don’t mean this exact thing, but rather something like it but better”.
And this is how to understand Thales. Thales is important because he gave the first ever “bad pitch” for science. He was like “look, scholars, there’s this thing called ‘science’ that’s going to be huge. But I can’t put my finger on exactly what it is – the best I can do is to say that it involves making statements like, bad pitch, ‘everything is water’. Trust me – someday there’ll be these ‘scientists’ walking around and they’ll all be saying stuff like ‘everything is water’.. well, not exactly that, but something LIKE that but better”.
Thales didn’t tell us what science was, but he might have said just enough to get our juices flowing so that we could figure it out ourselves. And that’s how I feel now that I am post-30.5 – all I’m capable of is making bad pitches that will maybe inspire someone else to say something actually meaningful. I feel very much like Thales in this regard. Has anyone else here ever felt like Thales? Hands up if you’ve ever felt like Thales!
So: I am out of ideas, and all I can make are bad pitches.
But I do have one final thing to offer you all and that is love. Everyone always asks me about my obsession with right side hugs – hugs where your head goes to the right of the other person’s head instead of the left.
It’s a notion I’ve been pushing on everyone for the past several weeks, and I’ve never been down to say exactly why until now: the beauty of the right-side hug is that it allows the huggers’ hearts to touch as they hug. So, tonight, I invite everyone to give someone – maybe me – a right-side hug, and when you do, I want you to to feel your heart touch theirs.
Thank you all again for coming, I love all of you, and I look forward to touching all of your hearts. Cheers!
Ostensibly it's about art, age, humility, Mike Bostock, and the feeling that now at 30.5 I'm no longer a spring chicken w.r.t. the “having original ideas” department.
But it was also part of a meta-joke / brand gesture called “make everyone get dressed up in black tie for my half bday party and force them to listen to a drawn-out speech about how cool my plagiarized maze art is and how humble I am”, which symbolized.. well, what exactly DID the broader joke symbolize? Or at least that was the question racing through my head as the mic started cutting in and out mid-speech and I began to lose the audience whose patience for this ridiculous frippery I had far overestimated.
And so, as the speech spiraled further and further away toward disaster, I started to get my own meta-joke less and less until I cut the speech short in favor of spending the rest of the party checking my phone and grinding my teeth until finally I went home feeling tired and vaguely ashamed.
But the following week, after talking to some people who WEREN'T trapped in my head, it seemed like the overall vibe was “fun party, Tom – I got wasted! Thanks!”. So who knows. Anyway, here's the speech:
***
Thank you all for coming!!
Wow, 30.5.. what a crazy feeling. Ask anyone over 30.5 and they’ll tell you the same thing: 30.5 is the most intense half-birthday there is. Like no half birthday before it, 30.5 marks the beginning of a new age of life and I’m so happy to be able to share this with all of you.
But before we get started, I want to do a little exercise to remind us of simpler times and simpler half-birthdays. I am going to ask you all a question, and I want you to channel the impetuousness of your most youthful half-birthday and answer it in less than 2 seconds.
But first, let's do a little warm up. I want everyone to say the word “shop”. Now I want everyone to spell the word “shop” out loud. Say the word again and then spell the word. Okay do it one more time, say the word, spell the word “shop”. One last time. Okay, now here is the question, you’ve got 2 seconds to answer it, and I want you to yell your answer. What do you do at a green light?
[Hopefully everyone yells “stop”]
REALLY? Really? At a green light? That’s what you do? Ok, enough channeling the impetuousness of youth!
Now a few words about the art.
You’re watching a 3 step looping metaphor: first we draw a maze, then we flood it with color to reveal its structure, and finally we solve it.
The first part – the drawing of the complicated maze of post 30.5 life – is the most interesting. To create the maze we’re using a technique called Wilson’s algorithm. Here’s how it works: we start by adding a single white cell to the maze in the bottom right corner. Then, we begin a random walk from that cell – which you can see in yellow – which continues until it reconnects with the existing maze. Once it does, the path of the random walk turns into a passageway in the maze and we start a new random walk. However, if the random walk intersects itself, we erase the resulting loop and the random walk begins again from the intersection point.
Now, of course, you’re probably wondering “is this algorithm even guaranteed to terminate? What if the random walk continues forever without reconnecting with the maze?” At this point I was hoping to direct this question to the one man I know who DEFINITELY has the answer, a certain Todd Schneider, but unfortunately he can’t be here tonight! Give it up for Todd anyway!
If he were here, what I think he would say is that the algorithm IS in fact guaranteed to terminate, but only for 2 dimensional mazes. Wilson's algorithm is not guaranteed to generate a 3 dimensional maze, so keep that in mind if you’re thinking about one-upping me at your half birthday.
So the algorithm’s guaranteed to finish, but it can take a really long time! And so in this respect, building the maze of post 30.5 life is just like living post-30.5 life. It takes awhile to get going, often it’s not clear whether you are making progress, and then, hopefully / suddenly, it clicks and the rest of the maze fills in.
There are other maze-generating algorithms that take less time to get going, but they generate less interesting mazes. In fact, Wilson’s irritatingly unbounded algorithm is the only one I know of that’s guaranteed to generate a random maze. Other algorithms that requires less randomness and are therefore less irritatingly unbounded, generate less complicated, less interesting mazes, and, metaphorically, less complicated, less interesting post-30.5 lives.
So that’s one metaphor for you, but the deeper meaning of this art project is that it is also an animated tribute to my being completely out of original ideas. You see, this entire thing is lifted almost whole-cloth from a far greater post-30.5 artist, someone who did this stuff in a speck of spare time between creating d3.js and doing that sweet buy v. rent calculator for the New York Times.
Of course I’m talking about Mike Bostock, who unfortunately ALSO couldn’t make it here tonight, but who is most definitely, as T.S. Eliot would say, Il miglior fabbro. Mike, wherever you are, you are the greater magician!! YOU are the Ezra Pound!! Give it up for Mike Bostock!!
Mike made these 3 maze explorations – all I did was glue them together and make it loop. And, in general, post-30.5 it seems like all I’m good for is gluing cool things together and making them loop. I had some cool ideas in my twenties and during the first half of the first year of my thirties, but now all I’m capable of is encouraging, curating, harnessing, and fostering the ideas of others.
But ah, I just feel incapable of expressing exactly what I mean here.. excuse me for a second..
[Takes out a piece of paper and reads]The trick to appearing awesome is to surround yourself with people doing awesome things, and then figure out how to synthesize their ideas into something new and (hopefully) transformative.That’s better.
This, of course, is a quote from Mike Bostock himself, who, in addition to the maze concepts, also deserves credit for teaching me about the idea of synthesizing the ideas of others.
Which brings me to my favorite college philosophy professor, Chris Shields.
I still remember him opening the first lecture of Introduction to Ancient Philosophy with the famous Thales quote “everything is water”. He repeated it a few times and then explained that he thought it was important, not because it was true, but because it had “the ODOR of truth”: it sounds like it, or something like it, could actually be true.
Now, had I heard about this “everything is water” business at a different time in my life I might have reacted like my friend and future roommate Noah, who’s here tonight, reacted then, which was to say “Oh, so THIS garbage is philosophy? Peace” and he walked out of the lecture, dropped the course, and now he's a 6 handicap.
But I was more credulous back then, and I'm glad I was because I still love that phrase “the odor of truth” and still to this day love saying “the odor of [some abstract thing]”. It’s related to the concept of a “bad pitch”, which is how you introduce an idea when you’re trying to say “here’s a thought, but I don’t mean this exact thing, but rather something like it but better”.
And this is how to understand Thales. Thales is important because he gave the first ever “bad pitch” for science. He was like “look, scholars, there’s this thing called ‘science’ that’s going to be huge. But I can’t put my finger on exactly what it is – the best I can do is to say that it involves making statements like, bad pitch, ‘everything is water’. Trust me – someday there’ll be these ‘scientists’ walking around and they’ll all be saying stuff like ‘everything is water’.. well, not exactly that, but something LIKE that but better”.
Thales didn’t tell us what science was, but he might have said just enough to get our juices flowing so that we could figure it out ourselves. And that’s how I feel now that I am post-30.5 – all I’m capable of is making bad pitches that will maybe inspire someone else to say something actually meaningful. I feel very much like Thales in this regard. Has anyone else here ever felt like Thales? Hands up if you’ve ever felt like Thales!
So: I am out of ideas, and all I can make are bad pitches.
But I do have one final thing to offer you all and that is love. Everyone always asks me about my obsession with right side hugs – hugs where your head goes to the right of the other person’s head instead of the left.
It’s a notion I’ve been pushing on everyone for the past several weeks, and I’ve never been down to say exactly why until now: the beauty of the right-side hug is that it allows the huggers’ hearts to touch as they hug. So, tonight, I invite everyone to give someone – maybe me – a right-side hug, and when you do, I want you to to feel your heart touch theirs.
Thank you all again for coming, I love all of you, and I look forward to touching all of your hearts. Cheers!