Limits

I often come across people who are in career transition, or perhaps have substance use disorder issues, or maybe are trying to grow a business, and I want to help them by sharing my own experience. I have been through a lot of this stuff and have meditated, read, prayed, and otherwise just pushed through various flavors of this stuff, and I always believe that I can be of service to them. In recent weeks I've had a client and a good prospect who are in the middle of looking for their next roles, and I've held myself out as a resource.

But then, in fact, as I wrack my brain for how I can actually, concretely help them with contacts etc., as opposed to with general exhortations ("get out and talk to people, have faith in yourself, keep going, read this, everybody's been through it"), my stable of resources is somewhat thin on the ground.

Right now, that's largely reflective of the fact that I haven't been out and meeting that many new people myself, I haven't been in the streets as much. On the one hand, that's no big loss. Intrinsically, and I've blogged about this before and have read about the phenomenon in both Daniel Pink's When and Atul Gawande's Being Mortal, there's no particular reason for me to want to be out meeting more people. People's desire to do this winnows as we age. I know a lot of excellent people, and I don't have time to adequately fulfill all the roles that I have allowed to settle on me and keep in touch with all of them.

I've also been trying to focus on physical health and being at home with my kids and Mary, as we have launched Natalie into the world and I'm all too conscious that Graham is on his way to the bigger world. And I just feel fat.

But there is something about being in the streets, about looking for angles new things, meeting more people, that is invigorating, and opens new pathways in the brain.

Sweet relief

I was supposed to meet with a pretty good-sized prospect today, back for a second meeting to discuss a proposed portfolio/approach, but their dog had gotten cancer and needed to go to the vet. Seriously. I could have been better prepared, having gotten caught up at a client's house for longer than anticipated yesterday, so I was behind in prepping. So I was pleased to be relieved of this task, to put it off for another day.

Then, while I was at martial arts with Graham, I got a text from his executive function coach, asking if we could move his session tomorrow back from 10 am to 2 pm. Oh yes we can! So I can chill and enjoy my Sunday pancakes a little better, instead of feeling pressed for time to hustle over to Carrboro.

It is excellent and most welcome to have a second weekend in a row in which there is little I really need to do. Sure, I could be trying to get out ahead on taxes, and yes I could be carting stuff off to the Goodwill Store. But I'm not. Instead, I chilled on the couch and read the pretty decent mystery novel I've been working through. Now I will do a little more serious reading (Buffett's 2014 shareholder letter) before heading out for a run, because I'm not but so slack.

Half-Lion

Just finished up a biography of Narasimha Rao, who was President of India from 1991-1996 and was the guy who fundamentally opened India up to liberal capitalism, after it had moldered under the Nehru-Gandhis. I had never heard of the guy, and am not sure how it got onto my shelf. Probably The Economist had given it a good review or something.

In any case, it was a tough reed, but ultimately a rewarding one. The world is such a large place, there is so much going on out there, and it's impossible for us to have our arms around all of it. But that doesn't mean that diversifying what's coming into one's brain doesn't bear fruit. Alongside Our Daily Bread, the bio of Green Revolution scion Norman Borlaug, this book opened new doors into the recent history of the developing world in a way that very little else has.

In the end, the key learnings from this book were the following:

• to effect significant change, it's often important to present the change as being continuous with the ideas of that which is being changed: Rao used Nehru's rhetoric to validate some of his reforms
• be wiley and think several steps ahead. This is hard for idealists like myself. Tactics sometimes precede strategy

The author, a young PhD candidate from Princeton named Vinay Sitapati, characterized a bio of Deng Xiaopeng by Ezra Vogel as "magisterial." That's high praise. That book is now on my list.

Losing weight

Just went upstairs with a firm intention to get my computer and blog, but I got sidetracked into first changing the sheets and then responding to a couple of emails from clients and/or potential partners. Worked through that.

So I weigh too much. I know that. 10 pounds more than I should, 15 more than would be ideal. My pants definitely know that, or at least they tell me that. And I hate shopping.

I have been trying to exercise more. I ran a bunch on Saturday, did some core and upper body work yesterday (should have done more, but was kind of hamstrung waiting for a truck so we could deliver Graham's old bunk bed to a Burmese family -- I'll spare you that story), etc. I will work out today at the gym, I promise I will. Even though this couch here is mighty warm and nice, as is this novel I am reading.

But I have a real difficulty eating less. I am just not good at it. I like food too much, and I consider it my due, since I have quit so many other things that are bad for me. Yesterday night we went to a new place (Haw River Grill on Elliot, perfectly fine if not exceptional -- not better than Al's, for example) and I had a burger and shared a bunch of fries with the table. I surely ate more of them than anyone. My attempt at moderation consisted of not getting cheese on the burger.

To seriously lose some of this weight, I need to eat less, or seriously ramp up the exercise, and the latter is hard because of time constraints and, frankly, aging concerns. Non-muscular pain in my feet if I run too far/long, for instance. Sigh.

Volunteers at the core

For the second morning in a row, Mary was off to some meeting pertaining to the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Schools Special Needs Advisory Council, on which she's been serving for some time now. She volunteers in a lot of other contexts, and she takes it seriously. She gets anxious before meetings, worried that she won't come off at her best.

A woman who serves on a board with me, and who has served on many and has very good instincts, said at a meeting not long ago that she had been thinking a lot about the extent to which many organizations -- and by extension much of our society -- was propped up on female volunteer labor. One of my first, if not quite my first (OK, maybe my first) instincts was to say to myself "hey, I volunteer a lot too," but then I realized it was not all about me and I didn't say anything aloud.

But I was thinking just now about the overall health of high-performance school systems like ours may be partially explained by the presence of a lot of volunteer hours filling in with little or large touches to support this or that activity or initiative that the school system itself doesn't have the institutional agility to support. And that he absence of this pool of volunteer labor -- whether because less affluent working moms have to participate in the labor force at higher rates and work more hours at shittier jobs, or because they weren't imbued with as intense a sense of responsibility for or influence over their kids' educational outcomes by the models of displayed to them by their parents -- might play a big role in the challenges of school systems in lower wealth areas.

Maybe.

As counter-examples, I remember one time going to an orientation meeting about how non-profits could volunteer for shifts to feed people at a homeless shelter, and I was impressed more than anything by the fact that the upper middle class was significantly under-represented, whereas there were a lot of people from working class churches etc. there. Also by the fact that the working class -- whatever its political persuasion -- really seems to show up big time in disaster recovery efforts after hurricanes, etc, in a way that the chattering class does not. Which is to say that our volunteerism is arguably more self-serving, driven as it is by an urge to protect our interests as a class. Which is one of the things others hate about us.

The extreme grey

It is very grey outside today, as it has been for so much of the last few weeks, which hasn't really helped. Meanwhile, Natalie has flown north after a long and lovely holiday break, and we took down the Christmas tree. As if in honor of all of that, I find myself in my finest charcoal grey outfit of flannel, chamois, and sweats, waiting for the plumber to call to come fix our water heater, which keeps breaking.

Intensely interesting story in today's Journal about Northern California's utility PG&E, and all the things that have put it in trouble (a subsequent story says that it is already filing for bankruptcy). Basically, the fires in Northern California -- and insurance claims related to them -- have bankrupted the firm. So many themes come together: climate change, population density, control of people's land (not wanting to let utility on to cut down trees in danger zones) etc etc. Utilities are an intensely-regulated business, and they are not able to easily change rates to price things properly, that runs through California's state house.

But ultimately, we are talking about the utility that serves the Bay area and its hinterlands, a place creating a lot of wealth and innovation that is intensely dependent upon electricity. Apple, Facebook, NetFlix, SalesForce, Google, and so on ad infinitum. There is a lot of money there, and they will figure out how to pay for this, it just won't be fun.

But understanding what's going on and getting buy in around the structural changes that need to happen to make a solution workable, that is a political problem, and people on both sides of the aisle, and who watch all the major cable news networks, need to be brought to understand what's going on. The right needs to accept that climate change is happening. The left will need to accept greater flexibility in rate-setting mechanisms. Everybody is going to have to suck it up and let utilities cut more trees on the property to which they hold title.

The "nineteen hundreds"

On NPR yesterday evening -- in rapid succession -- two separate commentators referred to the 20th Century as "the nineteen hundreds", once in tight concatenation with "the eighteen hundreds." This was the first time I had heard the century in which I spent the first two-thirds of my life referred to as something seemingly deep in the past, as opposed to relatively recent history. I felt old.

At home, however, we continued to enjoy our new Alexa speaker's ease of calling up things from its music catalog, but I stumped it by asking for the Swedish Chef's song, which seemed like a pretty simple request. Natalie was not familiar with this Muppet Show masterpiece. YouTube was more than happy to serve it up to us, and she caught the bug. We sat on the couch and watched about 15 minutes of Swedish Chef highlights, with her cackling enthusiastically: "it's so funny!" After about 12 minutes, the joke was getting a little old, but it is still quality.

Rebuildng little publics

Everywhere I go, and I'm sure I'm no exception, retail space is being hollowed out and opened up as Amazon et al eat the world. Yes, there are mild counter-trends as specific retailers learn to fight back, but that's the trend.

To the extent that theses spaces are finding tenants, they seem to be being replaced by two kinds of places: ones where you can ingest calories, and ones where you can burn them off: gyms, spin cycle studios, etc.

The common themes between these two seem to be the outsourcing of difficult functions (making interesting food, having the willpower to work out), but also just being in public. People seek places to come together and be with one another. Main streets and malls used to provide this outlet, but they are withering.

And one reads about the "epidemic of loneliness" and the fragmenting or splintering of society and I think there's much to this.

I know that I miss the days when Graham and I used to go to the public library on Sundays, both because it was a sort of ritual for the two of us, and because it was a great place to run into somewhat random people. Similarly, I am in principle happy to go to the grocery store, just to see people. Admittedly this kind of random bumping in is just good for my business, a necessary component of it, even.

This is one of the key drivers of the profusion of coffee shops and coworking spaces, and even the growth of WeWork, which is trying to create walled garden versions of this for professional people.

Which made me think of something Ben at the Faculty Club said to me about what we're doing over here at the lake. "Any amenity you can add is good." It makes me wonder whether it might not work to add a small library, study house, coffee space to a place like the Farm. It would be a huge risk, for sure.

Repetition by accident, and things Mary's mom says

Not for the first time ever, I just wrote a post that substantially repeated what I had written before, only this time just a couple of days ago. In other years I have seen the same themes, even the same jokes, repeat multiple times, on those rare occasions when I go back and re-read things.

But this time it was just a couple of days ago. That's a new low! You would think I might have remembered it. Another of what can only be termed a "proto senior moment." I'm pretty sure I've used that phrase before.

Speaking of seniors, I may take a moment to catalog a few Mary Leeisms. I did this for the kids when they were younger, the cute things they said. I'm sure the kids could do it for us too. Graham recently pointed out that Mary and I were the only people who pronounced "Mueller" like "mule." Everybody else says it like "mull." So shoot us.

In any case, Mary Lee sometimes says words she didn't grow up with funny, and it can only be classed as endearing.  These include "salza" (for "salsa"), "fruton" (for  "futon"), guacamole pronounced with a silent "e" at the end. Over Xmas, she came up with the best one ever. She kept calling spanakopita "cornucopia." You can't beat that.

She turns 87 this year, she won't be with us forever, so we might as well have a written record of this stuff for future reference.

My mom has a few. She is the only person I have ever heard say the word "hurricane" as if it rhymes with "pelican".

Back in the Office

Strange as it may seem, it is good to be back here. The familiar halls. Peanuts just over my shoulder in the cabinet. Coffee machine just around the corner, accompanied by friendly if quiet scientists. And now darkness has descended outside my window. Soon I will wander home.