I am a bit ADHD. It’s untreated by choice because I view it more a personality trait than an illness. If ten percent of the population can be diagnosed with something, it does seem to me more of a trait. In any event, it works well for me. I can change topics or tasks very quickly. I can also work with ease in two or more programming languages within the same page or project.

I’m also OCD. I don’t have much in the way of ongoing compulsive habits, like hand-washing (although that was one for a year or two) but I develop random-seeming obsessions like golf, ultrarunning, lightweight-backpacking, homebrewing, and cyclical obsessions with fishing.  The ADHD and the OCD work together well for me in that I can obsess over multiple short-term projects on parallel tracks. At least to some degree. Distractions are real and frequent so I have to manage those like anyone else with ADHD.

I’m also a daydreamer, but I prefer the term “visionary.”

These three things combined make golf challenging. I find it hard to be in the moment throughout four hours or so of playing. Hell, I find it hard to stay in the moment over a single shot. Damnably hard. It’s not so much the external world that distracts me, but all the stuff going on in my head. The constant inner dialogue about things on my mind. The demons of insecurity, doubt,  and unearned-glory are ever-present. I can be standing over the ball ready to swing and a thought creeps in, one totally unrelated to anything going on. It just appears. Too often, I’m already committed and the shot goes astray. I need to learn to back off, or at least to not let the thoughts in.

For good or ill, I would argue that this freedom of thought, or lack of discipline, or just ADHD, has worked well for me overall. It has helped me find connections and see relationships, especially in data, that others don’t see. So, I really don’t want to mess with it.

Ummm, yes. So, just accept those bad shots and work to eliminate those caused by bad mechanics or sloppy setup.

Today, the putting woes from last week were gone. Absolutely gone. Putting was gorgeous with only one bad putt. Short game was also good. The demons though were in full-throated voice during the first several holes. I couldn’t concentrate as I couldn’t put a problem aside that I have been chewing on a few weeks now. I finally gave up trying to put it out of mind and just ran with it. All but ignored my playing partners (was unaware when Zach broke a club upon impact with the ball) and just churned through thoughts, almost making the game secondary. That took a lot of stress off the shots and actually allowed me to concentrate better on each shot. Seven-shot stroke difference from the back to the front. Could have been more save for just a millimeter or two of difference in the putter face or if I had ignored my partners better on 16.

Sometimes the best way to manage your inner demons is to embrace them and say, “Hey buds, lets’ party!”

So, caring sucks.

So does a lack of caring.

I think this is my problem. I apparently don’t know when to care, or when to care enough, or how to act on it.

Last weekend, I did not have a standout day in the tournament. It wasn’t particularly bad, but it also was not particularly good. Unfortunately, it didn’t even rise to level of so-so. My playing partner, a 15 handicap (18 course handicap) shot the round of his life (so far) with an 80 – giving him the winning net score of 62. (Which irritated a number of low-handicap players to no end.)

What I observed about his round was that he approached every short game shot like his game was on the line, particularly putting.

I’ve also seen this with my regular playing partners, leastways those that play better than I do.

I don’t approach things that way. And I am not sure I can. I don’t know if it is that it is not that important to me. Or maybe that I can’t take it seriously enough. Or perhaps that I am lazy.

I guess it just seems to me that I just expect things to work for the more I practice and play. For example, I step up to a putt choose my line and speed, and hit it. If it goes in, great, if not, I hope to have left it close. I see no reason to spend time studying all the angles and getting all wound. The same is true for chips.

The fact is, that right now I am not very good at these things. When it comes to chipping, I am still very much working on my touch and commitment to enough of a swing when the ball is buried deep. Putting I consider easy, and am simply not worrying about it much right now. Yes, those are easy strokes to eliminate, but I am so focused on fixing/cleaning up tee and approach shots that everything else falls behind.

I’ve always struggled with figuring out what to care about. Some things are obvious. Others are not. I don’t think I am going to add this until there is adequate evidence that I must.

Check target alignment.

Check left-side vertical alignment and weight distribution.

Remember: Don’t break the horizontal with left arm when swinging irons.

Fast hands, slow body turn.

Crisp.

Have fun.

(Forget about all the work to do. The problems to solve, the chores. It is time to be off, time to have fun. It’s a game, dammit.)

Trigger warning. This is a golf post.

I’ve been frustrated the last few weeks (really the last 52) with making progress. So I spent a half-hour with my pro tonight. Two minor changes to my set-up. Reduce the tilt of my shoulders a bit and bring lead shoulder fully over hip and knee. From there he just worked me with a three-quarter swing, just about as slow as I could make it.Shot after shot was crisp and clean, or close to it.

“See? Not much needed to change. I know it feels like you’re not hardly swinging, but look at what you’re doing. Right on the money, great distance (~140 yards), and this is all you need to swing an 8-iron.”

“Actually, it’s the 9.”

“Even better!  This is all the swing you need for a short iron.”

So, two little changes in setup and less backswing. I’ll work on it.

Sometimes it seems that this all that is really needed. A couple of minor changes in how you start and things get better. This has also been the story since starting golf lessons. At the beginning, we worked on some bigger changes set-up followed by reinforcing the good points of my swing. Each lesson after the first two were about the little changes needed. I can look back at the progression and see that.

This is not much different than how I try to teach programming or “coding” as the cool kids and non-programmers call it. We start with a basic model that replicates the most important aspect of what the student (generally a staff member) needs to be able to do and gradually expand on that. Along the way I try to offer tweaks in terms of structure and style that I hope will also increase understanding.

The difference between teaching coding and golf is that teaching is a lot less frustrating.

(Fyi, this text is identical to what I use in my project management presentation on the slide entitled, “Completing the Project.”

I get it. In order to get your way you will hold your nose and roll around in the mud with the pigs. You’ve decided to sell your honor and any semblance of commitment to your alleged faith with hopes of getting the SCOTUS appointment you desperately want.

Stephen King wrote about this just about 40 years ago in the short story “Nona.” You embraced Drumpf like the I-guy in this story embraces a monster:

In the dream I see her walking toward me. She is wearing a white gown, almost transparent, and her expression is one of mingled desire and triumph. She comes to me across a dark room with a stone floor and I smell dry October roses. Her arms are held open and to her with mine out to enfold her.

I feel dread, revulsion, unutterable longing. Dread and revulsion because what this place is, longing because I love her.

This is you and he. The revulsion is real enough, but the desire for the control of others is pathological in its intensity, combined with your blind hatred his opponent, overcomes the revulsion. As it overcomes your professed alleged values.

I went to Nona. I went to my life.

Her arms reached around my neck and I pulled her against me. That was when she began to change, to ripple and run like wax. The great dark eyes became small and beady. The hair coarsened, went brown. The nose shortened, the nostrils dilated. Her body lumped and hunched against me. 

I was being embraced by a rat.

“Do you love?” it squealed. “Do you love, do you love?”

Remember: If you kiss monster, it may eat you.

You chose this. Embrace it.

You tend to imagine. Often wrongly.

My father’s college students had a hard accepting/imagining him coming home each today to put his feet up and watch reruns of the Beverly Hillbillies while drinking a Dr. Pepper and eating a Snickers bar (a combo he learned from his mother). They, and most everyone else I encountered, had a different image of him than the reality. They assumed his intellectualism never stopped. Nor did they know that his working of crossword puzzles was not only about the pleasure of the challenge, but to always help him with finding and remembering words that substitute for words with an “r” in them.

Of course, this is true for all of us – our home lives are often secret lives, save specific examples like the Jenni.cam in the 1990s.

But actually I want to talk about golf.

So I learned something the other day. I had heard and read (forum posts and blog posts) that a player would normally shoot his handicap about 40% of the time. I learned this is wrong. The answer is closer to 20-25% of the time and that is when adjusted for course difficulty.

A player’s handicap is calculated thusly:

1. Calculate the score differential of the last 20 rounds. This is (Score – Course Rating)*113/Course Slope. (A 92 at my regular course translates to (92-71.7)/134=17.12)
2. Use the 10 lowest differentials. If you have fewer than 20 rounds, the USGA has table telling you how many scores to use.
3. Take the average )mean) of the lowest differentials and multiply that by 0.96 and this is your handicap.

So, what does it supposed to mean? What is it supposed to tell you and others?

Basically, on a good day, you will shoot your “target score” or perhaps a bit lower. The Handicap Index is simply a way compare your potential to that of the potential of other golfers, and is normalized to each course. That’s what the target score is – your handicap adjusted to the difficulty of the course you are playing.

The Course Handicap = Handicap Index * (Slope Rating of Tee on Course / 113)  or, in my case, from the white tees at my course, 17.2*134/113=20.4, rounded to 20.

Add the course handicap to the course rating and round, (71.7+20)= 91.7=92. And so on a good day, I should a 92 or bit better, maybe 20-25% of the time according to the USGA. Most of the rest time, the USGA says I should shoot about 2-4 strokes higher. Key word is “most”. Normal distributions suggest on occasion I will shoot even higher especially since my worst scores, half of my most recent 20 aren’t included.

So, if you think about it as a data problem, and its associated math, it’s quite easy to understand that your likelihood of playing to your handicap or hitting your target score is going to have a lot to do (mathematically at least) with the dispersion of your scores. Someone with a great deal of consistency, with scores that vary within a range of  maybe four strokes, will almost always play close to their handicap. For someone like me who has a current range between 88 and 112 (ouch! bad day at a tournament) a really good day is between 88 and 92, a regular day, about 50% of the time 92-96 or so does seem to be realistic. And it comports with my reality. A quarter of the time I do worse.

So, I really should give myself more of a break than I do. Much more of a break. I’ve been thinking all along that I should be playing much better than I do. Of course, I keep trying to, but I should probably try harder to just enjoy.

Much of my life seems to be about from failure to failure, punctuated with a few periods of less obvious failures that most people see as success. It is kind of a harsh view, but I am a tough critic of myself.The simple fact is that I fail a lot. With a little luck, a lot of practice, and when I can muscle up the courage, a lot of self-honesty, I find opportunities to learn in failure.

Today was one of those on the golf course. Of course, it doesn’t really matter in the big scheme of things, but I tend to assume anything I learn has potential value.

This weekend is men’s club tournament between our club in Powhatan and one of the clubs in Montpelier. It is two-man best-ball match play event, one day each course. Today, I failed to break a 100 due to an occasional inability to get off the tee or general sloppiness. The key was that I did not let it get to me and I just focused on not doing stupid stuff to a better degree than my competitors (as we were pretty evenly matched). This strategy worked well as we were able to win our round.

More importantly, I was able to learn a bit more about my swing and solving problems on the course. I guess we’ll find out tomorrow if I have learned enough.

And this is the way I do things. Sometimes I fail on purpose to see what I can learn. (Of course, one might read this as “I sometimes purposefully do stupid stuff to see what happens and see if I can get out of trouble.”)  In other words I am more interested in learning and enhancing my problem-solving skills than facts and such. That’s not to be dismissive of facts – I use and quote such all the time to the annoyance of people around me.

I like problem-solving.So, generally once I can get out of the moment of unhappiness about failure, I can celebrate it and take a learning from it. Now, some may just say, “Who, your real goal was to win, not a break 100, your score doesn’t matter.” True, really just half-true as my goal is to always shoot as low as I can, consistent with my handicap index or lower. In fact, one of our competitors challenged me on my handicap. Not surprising, I have beautiful swing and adequate distance to be a much better player, I am just wildly inconsistent.

Wildly inconsistent.

(You may have noticed such inconsistency on this blog.)

I seriously do.

I never know who is going to show up. Or rather, whose swing is going to show up.

Sometimes I feel convinced that I have a beautiful swing. It is on a perfect plane with 3:1 tempo and strikes through the ball cleanly and crisply. Unfortunately, most often the ball seems to disagree. Personally, I would like to believe that the great majority of balls I hit are defective. Maybe bipolar. Probably.

• Since Christmas 2015, I have hit approximately 12,000 golf balls at driving ranges.
• I have had eight (maybe nine) hour-plus lessons with an excellent pro.
• I have played over 60 18-hole rounds of golf:
  • 47 of these have been tracked and posted with Game Golf so far.
  • All eligible scores have been posted for my handicap.
• I have hit uncounted chips and flop shots in the backyard.
• I have read a lot. I mean a lot. Half a dozen books, 100s of pages of forum discussions on golf issues.

And I still suck. Sure, I am officially a “bogey golfer” shooting in the 90s. I’ve broken 90 exactly once, and on a really bad day have shot as high as 112 (in a tournament, no less) but after licking my wounds and spending two hours at the range, turned in a 92 the next day. My handicap has dropped from 25.1 to 17.1 , but since the handicap index is even more artificial than an FTE, and only representative of your best 40% or so of your recent rounds, it is hard for me to get too excited. Especially since most days I don’t seem to play close to that. (Nor should I, really, but that’s not the way the male mind works, is it?)

What is it about this silly, pointless, game of chasing a little white ball around a great big meadow that gets under my skin?

Maybe I need new clubs.

While possible, I don’t actually think it is my clubs. Or the balls I use. I think it is a damnably hard game, one that is harder still for someone with only balance nerve intact, anger issues, and a general lack of coordination. I am also rhythm-deaf and have a horrible sense of tempo and timing. (Except in humor. My timing is perfect there, except when it is off by a few years since I am often ahead of my time.)

Golf is hard.

After 27 disappointing holes on Saturday, I played in a scramble at Quantico Marine Corps Base in a fundraiser for the Young Marine Foundation. Since it was team effort where  we would each play from the result of last best shot, individual score wasn’t kept, and all I had to do was contribute. No stress. And my swing really did feel perfect much of the day – and the results very often matched.

Maybe the difficulties are in my head. I need to better manage the expectations I have for myself and just enjoy the experience. The problem is that I find it hard to enjoy not being awesome. Or good. Or even adequate.I really need to learn