Why can't I stop listening to "We're Not Young"?

I'm not young.

I recently posted about the song "We Are Young" by FUN. featuring Janelle Monae and explained how the nostalgic but hopeful sentiment of the song was infectious. Recently, a parody of the song called "We're Not Young" went viral. (Thanks, Jackie for providing the blog fodder, or blodder.) The ditty distills the hopelessness and anxiety of my generation into four minutes. The clever lyrics are a laundry list of daily endeavors that we undertake to avoid the boredom that engulfs some of us in our 30s, when we find ourselves at the end of the life path that society has mapped out for us and realize that the rest is up to us. It can be a scary time, but it can be pretty exciting as well.

The song elicits two consecutive emotions. The first is levity as you listen and say, "Hey, that's me! Ha ha!" The second is depression as you listen and say, "Hey, that's me! Wah wah!" I've written out the lyrics below and compared my life to it. You can do the same, if you want to be sad.

Give me a second, I . . . I don't have time, it's getting late (I think I've been out past midnight maybe once in the last year)

My friends are all parents now, dinner parties with cheese plates (The first part is true, though my friends who are into cheese plates do not have kids.)

My girlfriend, she is waiting for me to buy a diamond ring / Been together eight years now, feel like I'm settling (None of this is true for me, but perhaps that's because my girl preferred seeing rocks to getting a rock)

You know that college was ten years ago (True next month)

I know you're trying to forget (Already have)

Depression and anxiety / Has come on strong since 33 / Made it hard not crack (If this blog becomes a downer in a year, you'll know if this is true--or maybe it's already on its way)

So if by the time I'm 40 and I'm still a waiter here / I'm killing myself tonight (You could have replaced 40 with 32 and "waiter" with "grad student" and it may have been me)

Tonight we're not young (Well, not as young)

We're all somewhere in our 30s (Yep)

Done nothing worthy (Sorry to say that grad school often feels like that)

This ain't fun (At the very least, it's different)

Tonight we're not young (We could be older)

I guess I'll learn Photoshop, maybe I'll sell pot, start a blog (I've done two out of three--the legal ones)

Now I know that I'm fat / Shut up about that (My new job has me headed this way)

I guess I'll do elliptical, maybe I can finally do that yoga class (Oooh, elliptical sounds much easier on my knees)

But I probably won't / HDTV (TV!)

Gonna stay at home and watch Modern Family (Used to do that, but now there is better stuff on)

Tonight, we're not young (Dang, I do need to go to bed)

Gonna get our shit together (Maybe, but what is "together") / Be less distracted (huh?) /

Words with Friends (Definitely--or any other Game with Friends)

Tonight, we're not young (OK, when you repeat it this many times, it's hard not to believe)

It's time to get my prostate checked / I'm a nervous wreck / That's not all (Uh, I don't think this an appropriate topic for my blog)

Apply to grad school tonight (I learned that lesson in my 20s)

Yoga teacher training tonight / Real estate test tonight / Improv class tonight (Not quite into any of these yet, but I know people who have gone these routes)

Might have a drinking problem (Where's my scotch?)

I got a DUI / So will someone come and drive me home tonight (Nah)

I need health insurance (Not quite true since I'll be doing my fourth health care insurance change in one year when June rolls around)

I let the dental slide (Not quite though the teeth are definitely on the down slope)

And I'm really gonna start that blog tonight (What do you think I'm doing?)

Tonight, we are scared so let's . . . oh my god (I have to admit there were times when I was really scared during the past year--the real world blows)

Tonight, we're not young (I feel like I'm 60)

We've accomplished nothing (I have to admit there were times when I felt exactly this during the last year--grad school blew)

I have no money / Where's my gun (Yep, but that may be because I buy too many apps, chais, and Scotch.)

So if by the time I'm 40 and I'm still a waiter here / Oh please God I don't want to even imagine it / Tonight

If you're in the wah wah phase of emotional response, read on. Like most comedy, the song is funny because it's partly true. Ours is a generation of advanced degrees and delayed family starts, making our 30s the new what-the-hell-am-I-going-to-do-now-that-I-am-out-of-college phase--or an early midlife crisis without the money and kids. (This is especially true if you spent the majority of your 20s in grad school.) Both stages of life force the question of "What's next, now that I've successfully met society's expectations?"

For many of us, the answer is "Start a family", and many of my friends have successfully (congrats!) done that. They seem to be deeply in love with and happily consumed by their ever changing children, and I am truly happy for each of them and wish them more nights of sleep than they are probably getting. I have always assumed that being a parent provides a higher purpose in life, a reason for doing the job you may not quite love or putting off writing that novel--or maybe that's just growing up. However, I am unready to relinquish the freedom that allows me to selfishly indulge in my hobbies like jogging, blogging, and reading quietly on the beach. If you've met my wife, you know she is a career woman, and I can tell you that she has not been happier in a job since I've met her. So, I'm not just being a typical guy who is putting off becoming a dad so I can spend more time hanging with the guys. In short, kids are a little ways off, which means the question of "What's next?" remains unanswered. (I apologize to any potential grandmas who may be reading this.)

I also thought that getting the right job and making a little more money may solve all my problems. Though I really enjoy my new job, it doesn't bring as much fulfillment as I thought it would. I like honing my skills and learning new things daily in an environment where I am not 100% sure what each day will bring. I could probably bury myself in work and feel completely fine with that, and the extra money provides a little bit more freedom as well. But for some reason, "We're Not Young" still rings true--perhaps even more true than it would have three months ago, when I had a goal of obtaining a new job. But I have what I've wanted for the last four years and now I have to figure out what's next. Of course, I'll be working hard, but I would be doing that regardless of where I work. I've set personal goals, such as running faster and reading more, and I've found some satisfaction in working towards those goals. But the song still strikes a chord with me.

The conclusion I have come to is that I am always looking forward, hesitant to accept the present or acknowledge that what I have done in the past is worth acknowledging. I've always downplayed my past achievements because they have come with what seems like little sacrifice. Or perhaps I feel like I sacrificed too much and regret that. Either way, my past is my past, and it's made me who I am today, and I am realizing that I am really good with that fact. I have to modestly say that I think I'm a pretty awesome person. I'm reasonably intelligent, hard working, funny, conscientious, trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly--now I'm just reciting the Boy Scout Law because I'm lazy.

And as a group, we thirty-somethings can look back and realize that we've accomplished much. We've earned advanced degrees. We've started families that will make us proud and drive us crazy. We've gotten new jobs, sometimes two or three. We've read and learned and had tiny epiphanies. We've sent pieces of ourselves out into the world in the forms of writing and art and hard work. But most importantly, we've made friends, been there for each other, and shared some special moments. We may play Words with Friends, watch Modern Family, and suffer from insomnia, but there are plenty of new experiences ahead, new people to meet, and memorable times to be had. Sure, some of those times will involve a prostate check (or other unpleasant medical experiences), drinking (maybe some that will result in days of required recovery), and being scared (of more things than we can really imagine). It will all certainly be different, but plenty of it will be worth remembering. The song is right that we're not young--but we are still far from being old.

Why is prepackaged food the best?

Figure 1. Surprisingly to me, tracking what I was eating actually changed my eating habits.

The general consensus on prepackaged, processed food is that it is bad, bad, bad for you. I am going to give you an example of why it is good, good, good for you--well, me. As I mentioned in my last post, which some of you liked and some of you really, really liked, I have departed the lab and am now confined to a chair for most of the day. Sitting for long hours requires a break, and where is more appropriate to take a break than the break room? Unfortunately, that room is stocked with different foods from Costco. The ploy is genius. Work hard, take a break, eat food, get fat, grow large, increase immobility, stay in chair longer, work more. That may have happened if leaving the lab hadn't left a void in my life. I am talking about the main purpose of my last decade at the bench: collecting data--well, that and avoiding collecting data. Sitting all day and reading about nutrition inspired me to start tracking what I was putting into my body for the first time in my life. At the end, I realized that it seems much more efficient to diet than to exercise.

Calories In

People count calories when trying to lose weight, and I used to wonder how they do that. I still wonder a little because understanding how many calories are in the hodge podge of items I eat at lunch and dinner is difficult to calculate. I can't measure anything by eye and the imprecision drives the scientist in me nuts. And nuts are high in fat. Some of you are thinking, duh, which is fair. I'm a novice to calorie counting, so I'm way behind people like my sister who know all the current nutrition trends and can estimate the grams of monounsaturated fat in a meal with 17 ingredients if she knows what kind of oils were used to prepare the meal. The advantage of prepackaged foods is that it's incredibly easy to precisely quantify what I am putting into my body, at least snack-wise. It's a fun little science experiment (albeit with no controls, a low n, and a biased experimenter), and I was surprised at the results.

Here's a list of the foods that I have inhaled at some point since I started keeping track:

Nutrigrain breakfast bar

Quaker oatmeal bar

Kudos bar with some sort of candy

Tiger's milk bar

Trio bar

Beef Jerky single serving package

Tropicana orange juice

Activa yogurt

There were plenty of other options, but I started with these.

My focus has been on five main categories (though I have data for many more, like vitamins). I have been trying to minimize calories, total fat, and sodium while maximizing protein and fiber. Most of the above products are fine in the sodium category, except one. That's right, don't eat beef jerky everyday because each package has one third of your recommended daily intake (RDI). I knew it was salty, but damn. Say hello to hypertension. But also say hello to muscles like a major league slugger because you also get a third of your protein.

I like salt literally more than anybody I know, but even the amount in beef jerky seemed like too much. I wanted to maintain the protein but decrease the sodium, so I switched to having Trio bars (starting on Day 2), which are packed full of nuts. They don't have quite as much protein as straight up meat, but they have a fair amount, plus way more fiber--and that comes with less than one twelfth of the salt in beef jerky. What a great deal! Such a great deal that I was eating two a day. But two Trio bars equal one half of your RDI of fat and almost 25% of your total calories. Oh, that's why they tasted so delicious.

I stopped eating Trio bars and stuck to a Tigers Milk bar, which comes in three flavors. The one I eat is called "protein rich", which means that it has six grams of protein instead of five like the other flavors. So rich with protein! I also ate fewer items and not because was busier. I just stopped grabbing two of everything when I was in the break room. Weird how that works. Here's where the numbers were on Wednesday (see also Fig. 1).

Calories: High 49% Wednesday 27%

Total Fat: High 66% Wednesday 20%

Sodium: High 51% Wednesday 10%

Protein: High 64% Wednesday 32%

Fiber: High 52% Wednesday 20%

So, I'm a little deficient in the protein and fiber categories, which I fix by chowing down on more salad, fruits, and protein at my work-provided lunch. Of course, then I eat as many cookies as I can find when I get home from work just because I can.

I started by saying that prepackaged food is awesome, and it is if you don't care about keeping track of the big meals like lunch and dinner. How many calories can be in those anyways? The majority of your RDI? Whatever. The interesting thing is that keeping track actually influenced what I've been eating, which I didn't really expect. True, it's probably not the eating of the prepackaged food that changed my diet but tracking my intake that made the difference. However, keeping tabs is much easier if it's written right on the food--or at least the environmentally unfriendly plastic that encases it. It's also easier to keep track of your carbon footprint.

Calories Out

Caloric intake is only half of the equation. The energy you spend also factors into the equation. Or does it? This article from Slate summarizes some findings that say diet may be more important than exercise when it comes to weight loss. When you look at the numbers, this makes perfect sense. I've calculated how many calories I burn running a mile using this handy calorie calculator. Basically, a person of my weight burns around 120 calories per mile run, at a pace between six and ten minutes per mile. So, ten minutes equals 120 calories gained. I can eat a Nutrigrain bar in 10 seconds. Eating is just way more efficient than exercise. I can negate an entire ten minutes of running with ten seconds of eating. So it's easy to see why gaining weight is way easier than losing it. Of course, eating brings pleasure whereas running brings gasping for air--at least when I run. So it's much harder to cut the eating than to add the running.

This little prepackaged food experiment has revealed to me that the diet part of the diet and exercise equation is more important to watch if a person is trying to change his or her weight. Exercise is for the birds! (Or anybody who is trying to maintain decent cardio fitness, which should be everybody, of course.) All this sitting and writing has made me hungry. Time for a cookie! I hope I can get the package open.

Why is working in an office different than working in a lab?

New job, new shoes.

I've survived two weeks in my first full-time office job since 1999, which makes it my second cubicle job ever. Every other gig has involved mixing solutions, magnifying specimens, and moving microliters of liquid from one tube to another. The first two weeks have exposed a few differences between the world of tubes and the world of cubes.

Sitting

I now know why America should be worried about our sedentary jobs. In a lab, I was forced to walk a mile or two during the course of the day because equipment was spread throughout the building. I quantified it for awhile using a pedometer, but I didn't write the data down in my notebook. Typical. Just kidding, old bosses! I wrote everything down--somewhere--but probably illegibly. In my office job, I can literally work all day without walking over 200 steps between entering the office in the morning to leaving it at night. The day requires me to walk into the office, walk to and from a meeting, walk to and from the lunch room for lunch, and then walk out of building. Maybe throw in a bathroom break, but given that I am sitting so much, I could probably get away without that. Now, let's compare that to my bathroom patterns in a lab. Or not.

At the office, I force myself to take a quick walk every day, which means I amble along a street lined by one-story office parks that are full of glass and cement. Compare that to my last two jobs where I could jog around a tree-laden college campus or through a world renowned state park. You may be thinking, "Yep, the grass is always greener . . ." However, there is no grass where I currently work; so the saying would go, "There is grass on the other side." I miss those days when there was grass.

The one positive that has come from sitting so much is that I think I understand my dad a little better. He would run 20 miles a week when he was working office jobs, which I didn't comprehend because I hated running. I couldn't figure out why people would want to run more than the length of a soccer field. I now realize that I've taken for granted all of the walking my lab jobs have required. After a day of sitting at a desk, I need to move my legs. I still can't say I love to run, but I am starting to see why my dad ran so much. Maybe someday I will be as fast as him, and run a 10K at a seven minute-mile pace, which he did in his 50s. Then again, I am genetically predisposed to being a sprinter so maybe not.

Appearances

There is a slight difference between the wardrobe requirements for a human in an office and a grad student in a lab, but there are other appearance-related issues as well. Let's start with the clothes though. As many of you know, you can wear pretty much anything to lab, especially if you are in the right county. Lab safety requirements and their enforcement vary, so at Stanford, I wore flip-flops, shorts, and T-shirts on a daily basis. My friend took it step further and often wore clothes with holes in them. You know who you are. In San Diego, I was forced to wear close-toed shoes and pants, which was a real drag. My wide feet and chicken legs are my best assets. When I switched to an office job, I had to buy a new wardrobe, which meant shirts with more than three buttons, pants that post-dated college, socks that weren't all identical (so I wouldn't have to match them after washing--duh), undershirts without holes, shoes that had most of their soles left, and underwear that--hey, mind your own business. Then I had to figure out how to wear these things. I'm still not sure how to tuck in my shirt properly. And I think my pants hang on me in a weird way because my butt is flatter than my back. And I am considering buying those things that old guys wear to hold up their socks and tucking my shirt into my underwear and doing all those other sexy things I never understood.

Beyond the wardrobe, I am forced to do two other things that I didn't do in a lab: shave regularly and look busy. I probably shaved two or three times per week when working in a lab because . . . well, because I don't think anybody cared. Or at least I didn't care enough to see if anybody cared. Add the fact that I don't grow a 5 o' clock shadow because I am not a barbarian (or manly?) and there just wasn't much need to shave. Oh and I was super busy thinking about science. Except that I wasn't.

In lab, I could kill an hour or more surfing the Internet. I would say that I was abnormally lazy, but I am pretty sure everybody did this--for at least an hour. Back me up, science friends. There are many reasons surfing the web in lab is so commonplace. First of all, everybody else is doing it--but I guess that's the chicken and the egg problem. Second, you're usually in a space where only one or two people can see what you're doing on your screen, so there's no public shame involved. Finally, you're going to be in lab for another nine to eleven hours, so what's an hour or two on the web? On the plus side, it leads to a lot of smart people from different backgrounds being overly informed about the rest of the world, which is kind of awesome. Or it lead to a lot of poor people looking at retail items they can't afford.

In my office, I work in an open space. I don't even have a cubicle, so I have zero privacy. My back is to the rest of the office so anybody walking by can see my screens. I make sure I have some work on at least one screen. If I'm chatting, I tuck the box into the corner so it's slightly less obvious that I'm not working. I'm probably not being as sneaky as I think am, but I have eliminated almost all ESPN and Facebook at work (except on my phone if I'm bored-shhhhh). These sites used to easily suck an hour or two out of my days in lab, especially during college football season, and now I rarely visit them. The result of looking busy is that I am a less informed person about the world of sports and the lives of my friends. Sorry, friends. I do care that you posted some song lyrics and--ah, let's face it, most of my news feed is from pages I "liked".

People

This is the "I have no friends yet" section. Seriously though, the people were the most important, yet least appreciated aspect of lab life that I have noticed. I am still surrounded by scientists in my new job, so we can remove that variable from this experiment. However, they are a bit older than me, have teenagers, and have different goals than me. For them, this is a job. For me, this feels like a huge opportunity. In my immediate vicinity, they are all scientists who read and summarize papers, whereas I am the only one now who is shaping those summaries into client-friendly sentences. Most of them are gone by 5:30, whereas I stick around until 6:00 and still feel like I'm leaving too early. Not a lot of sports fans, possibly because it's an international group--or maybe because it's a group of scientists. Bottom line is that there are a lot of demographic differences between the group and me, and I'm not seeing many potential drinking buddies.

In a lab, you are in a group of self-selected, super smart, underpaid people who work long hours and gripe about their projects, their boss, their careers, and their own quirky issues. They are people who understand exactly what you are going through because they are going through the same psychologically grueling process. I was lucky because I made some good friends, but I was beyond lucky because, at each of my major lab stops, I found a person or two who I still really like, even without our continued shared experiences at the bench. I found a few really good friends who made the workplace feel less like work.

Leaving the lab means I'll miss those random chats that happened during the day while sitting at the scope next to somebody or peering under bottle-laden shelves. No more late night talks or pulling plates for somebody on the weekend, those moments that made you realize you were in it together with somebody. No more random and sometimes heated conversations about sports or international politics or a policeman's responsibility when using lethal force. No more distracting talks about personality types, where to get a less cheap-looking but still cheap haircut, or the worst part about throwing up. Those great friends who accepted all the anger and wackiness that come with me are the people who make my new workplace hard to appreciate.

I'm pretty sure I don't miss lab, but once in awhile, I do really miss the people who were in it with me and the simple and free life that it allowed. So when my butt outgrows my fancy new clothes, I'll think back to a time when I was unhappy with where I was in life but happy that there were great people right there with me.