AI forever?

As I process the ongoing stream of messianic enthusiasm for AI I continue to come back to the central problem: how are a bunch of turbocharged nerds who are excited by delusions of grandeur going to solve the fundamental problems of the world? Our biggest problems are that too many people -- rural, urban, suburban -- feel disconnected and lost in the world, unable to do something that both feeds their families, helps others, and allows them some degree of enjoyment. We should be focusing on the things that allow a greater number of people in the world to progress up Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Full stop.

Right now the most important task is to calm the geopolitical situation so that a global conflagration doesn't escalate and also to manage down internal tensions so that internal conflicts don't ramp up. The best way to make that happen is to effect more person to person contact across social and geographical boundaries. People need to understand other peoples' challenges and perspectives to grasp complexity. 

Concentrating ever greater economic power in the hands of a few nerds won't do it. If the stories of Sam Bankman-Fried, Elon Musk etc. don't make this clear, I don't know what will. Bill Gates offers us hope, but there are challenges even with that model. I deeply appreciate how Bill has chosen to spend the latter part of his life. He's a brilliant guy who tries to make the best possible use of his wealth. I should read his blog more to piggyback on his reflections. But having philosopher-kings determine the best use of aggregated wealth is ultimately suboptimal. 

As for AI, for sure it can and will do a lot of good. But it ain't all that.

Dog Tired

Fell asleep last night more or less in the middle of doing my evening Duolingo. Hard to tell what's making me so tired, particularly after a restful weekend down at the beach with Jonathan and Sharon. Driving back on Sunday evening? Just watching Jonathan in his continued quest to master the repair of any item possible (HVAC, golf card, you name it)? The break in routine? A strenuous match against Z last night (6-4, 1.6)?  Or is it just getting old? Probably a mix of all these things.

In any case, it's all good. It was kind of refreshing to pass out under the weight of my own exhaustion rather than after a complete menu of pre-bedtime YouTube consumption. It was all rather reminiscent of Roy Atwater falling asleep on the recliner on his porch after a day of tending his pigs. Good living.

A secret mission

Sometime a few months ago, when I was averaging about 420 points a day on DuoLingo, I decided to raise my average to 500 points a day. Given that I was maybe 220 days into a streak that was no mean feat. Over the 80-odd days I needed to average about 720 points a day to get there. It will come as a surprise to few of you that I did it, and I did it on my 300th day, on which I clocked 150,000 total points. Somewhere in there I finished the Ukrainian course and switched to Japanese as a third language to rotate in there with weeks of Italian and German.

It was all a bit of a grind, but honestly it was better than focusing on staying in the Diamond League, which I have nonetheless done this whole time. For now I am going to hold off on setting new aggressive goals, but I'll try to maintain this 500 points a day pace because it's really not that hard. And I'm learning stuff.

Continued triumph

My victorious streak on the Farm Men's 3.5 ladder continued yesterday evening, as I beat a guy 6-1, 6-2. Adam had had more trouble with this guy than I did, and since Adam and I are pretty even (though historically he probably holds a 60/40 advantage in our matches), I consider this a victory. Mostly over myself, honestly. I decided on a strategy (defense, wear the guy out, let him make mistakes and beat himself up mentally while staying chipper) and stuck to it.

At this point in time I am 4-1 and leading the competition, since the one guy who beat me, nay destroyed me, has dropped out, probably having been kicked upstairs to the ranks of 4.0s. For the most part this is the most success I've had in an individual sport since my 9th grade track season, made all the more remarkable by the fact that it's very much a mental competition in which I could easily torpedo myself by getting off kilter.

We'll see how it goes. Adam and I will have an official match before too long. Today we will play unofficially.

Guilty by association?

Continuing forward in the Bible, for whatever reason, I find this passage, Colossians 3:18-24

¹⁸Wives, be subject to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord. ¹⁹Husbands, love your wives and never treat them harshly. ²⁰Children, obey your parents in everything, for this is your acceptable duty in the Lord. ²¹Fathers, do not provoke your children, or they may lose heart. ²²Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything, not only while being watched and in order to please them, but wholeheartedly, fearing the Lord. ²³Whatever your task, put yourselves into it, as done for the Lord and not for your masters, ²⁴since you know that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward; you serve the Lord Christ.

To the modern eye it's impressive how naturally and seemlessly the text flows from talking about wives and children to slaves, who were just that integral a part of the landscape that you couldn't not address them. To the modern eye that throws the whole enterprise into question. Were wives and children really so analogous to slaves? Certainly even for me there's a bit of a gut punch as you read through it. One wonders how the clergy in today's Black church thinks through this stuff. The passage does go on to enjoin masters to do right by slaves, to be sure, which might have been pretty revolutionary at the time.

And then it immediately goes on to speak very abstractly to everyone, in a way I suspect was novel. (Colossians 4:5-6)

Conduct yourselves wisely toward outsiders, making the most of the time. Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer everyone.

All in all I continue to see how the Bible study project intrigues so many. But there are so many other books too. To say nothing of movies, music, blogs, YouTube serieses, and the like.

Birthday weekend

We stayed deliberately quiet here on the home front this past weekend, which of course marked the celebration of my 58th birthday. Honestly we were more celebrating the very good news that a strange bump on Mary's brother Rob's chest turns out to be not male breast cancer, which is a apparently a thing, if a very rare one. But not on Rob's body. It was some other wierd shit, but benign.

On Saturday I did as little as possible, which turned out to be quite little. I had told my neighbor Caroline that I would put together the electric mower that we had bought for our two households after years of borrowing their gas mower (and sometimes taking suboptimal care of it due to my personal idiocy). That 100% did not happen. 

The one thing I did do on Saturday was a second round of pollen remediation out on the screened in porch, in preparation for having the family (including Rob and Graham, Mom and Matt) over for my birthday feast of chinese food and coconut cake (from New Hope Market). I swept while listening to Bella White, then I even did some raking of the patio. On Sunday I went further and actually broke out our old vacuum cleaner (after asking Mary's permission) and vacuumed the porch. It didn't let me listen to music while working, but man was it gratifying. Shout out to Caroline Slade for the vacuum cleaner tip.

It turns out that a more or less usable screened in porch was the very best birthday present I could have given to myself. I had breakfast out there this morning and it was perfect.

Sweetgrass

Reading McPhee's 1986 Rising from the Plains, was reminded of this film

If you haven't seen it, you should. Ununseeable once seen.

No surprises here

The Journal yesterday came out with a story about how ancillary costs of homeownership (insurance, maintenance, taxes) have been rising along with mortgages. I also saw in the Economist not long ago -- in a story about the acceleration of the melting of Antarctica -- that the Army Corps of Engineers are projecting that the cost to build a megadyke near Galveston will be $57 billion, mostly to protect the petrochemical industry around Houston which keeps getting pummeled by storms. That's the initial projection. For comparison's sake, the 2022 CHIPS Act authorized $39 billion to support development of domestic leading-edge microchip manufacturing.

A big driver here is climate change, no question -- hurricanes, fires, etc. driving up insurance premiums. If government won't price the risk, the insurance industry will. But there are also a labor supply questions as well as a monetary supply ones. Lack of labor drives up construction costs (we could let more immigration happen). Excess liquidity feeds inflation, making it harder for local governments to hire, so they have to raise taxes to pay up to staff up.

Again, we could have addressed macro monetary issue after the pandemic-driven rapid expansion of monetary supply by raising taxes, but everybody was like: "that's my money you're trying to take", despite the fact that the money hadn't existed until the government printed it. Inflation is a tax by other means.

But the government does need to look at expenditures too. We cannot cut back on military spending now with Russia and China driving so much of the world towards autocracy. If we believe in anything, if WWII was fought for anything, we need to maintain our strength while also driving our allies to do the same. Discretionary government spending aside from defense barely moves the needle, but some sacrifices will need to be made on a pro forma basis. Entitlements are the only meaningful lever we have to pull, so we need to pull it.

A new day

After a league match yesterday evening (6-2, 6-0), I got back to my car and saw I had a lot of texts. Only one was important. Someone very dear to me had passed in Brooklyn.

There has been no announcement yet, so I will stay detail lite. I was reminded of how it occurred to me some years ago that one of the curses of knowing a lot of people is that, once we reach a certain age, someone we know will always be fighting cancer in one way or another. Right now I have several, some quite close to me.

And perhaps I am getting to the age now that someone will always be dying, though it feels a little early for that. Time will tell. As I have remarked before, I do hope that I will start to see an offsetting quantity of weddings and births happening amongst my broad brood. Niklaus did just tell me that Elsa and Eric are officially wed now, in the eyes of NYC and, one may hope, the Lord, though their party wedding in Switzerland, to which people like me aren't invited, is not yet till summer. Eric and Anna's girl Emily is also engaged, up in Washington Heights. I better get a freaking invite to that one. Meanwhile my cousin of some sort Madelyn (my mother's sister's daughter's girl) has announced she is pregnant with her second over in England. So I guess that counts. 

Another goodbye

I went out to Saxapahaw yesterday for the memorial for Dexter Romweber. It was lovely to see a wide range of people and to remember Dexter, though he was, in truth, a cypher. Everybody had great Dexter stories, indeed, how could you not. Even as he was the very embodiment of music and art, he was also in many ways a carefully calculated legend in the making his whole life. But few seemed really close to him. I know I never was.

There was lots of great music, which honored the seriousness with which Dexter took music, rising to a surprising crescendo when two guys from the band Starcrawler -- itself a full band, not a two-piece -- ripped the place up in a guitar-drums Kiss cover and a traditional ("Froggie Went a Courtin" which Dexter was apparently known to play) in which they thrashed around in a way that seemed to raise Dexter from the dead. I was almost moved to tears. (go to 2:12:50 to see these kids. The second song at 2:15:55 blows the doors off the place)

John Howie was also great doing a George Jones song. That was one of the several ways that the day was evocative of the day, almost a decade back, when we had first gathered at Saxapahaw to send off Steve Akin, who had like Dexter, like Tim Brower, basically lived and then died art and rock and roll. I think maybe that's why Marvin didn't come.

Witch trials

Listening to Witch Trials of JK Rowling. Interesting that Christians sought to ban Harry Potter books because they promote belief in magic, when so much of what legitimates Christ (and even Old Testament figures) is magic he performs (loaves and fishes, raising the dead, healing the sick, etc), as indeed was a non-trivial amount of the Old Testament (parting of the Red Sea, water from stone, walls of Jericho tumbling down, birth of Isaac when Sarah was 95ish). Even modern day preachers profess to do magic (faith healing). 

The problem, it would seem, is not that reading Harry Potter inculcates in readers a false belief in magic, but that it exposes them to the charms of the wrong kind of magic, the magic of the wrong team.

As an aside, one almost has to wonder why the Christian right has not inveighed against Duke's popularization of its mascot "the Blue Devils." Particularly when the support thereof so literally involves the support of the dark (blue) vs. the righteous light blue of UNC, the university of the people. Indeed, is it not strange that Duke Chapel, one of the tallest church buildings in NC, is part of an institution associated with such blasphemy? And what of the Wake Forest Demon Deacons? Is all of this cool with fundamentalists?

My greatest accomplishment

We were discussing something pertaining to our cat Leon this morning and I made Mary laugh. When I can do that, I consider it really my greatest accomplishment. We have recently gotten to the point where we have been together half of my life and almost half of hers, so she has been exposed relentlessly to my "humor," my timing, my jokes, all of it. So getting a laugh out of her when we are not around other people and she is just pretending that I am witty is not chopped liver.

Medical history in the present

Somewhere in the last year or so the spouse of a friend of mine had a heart attack. I see her a few times a year on Zoom calls and if the stars align when I pass through the town where she lives, which has happened less frequently in recent years. She didn't really make a big deal of it on one Zoom, so when she referred back to it in passing in a subsequent call I was a little surprised, which admittedly was my bad.

In retrospect, I think it's rather exemplary. As we age we will all be passing through medical crises of various sorts and we have the option of being more or less transparent about them. The more one calls attention to one's own medical crises and those of one's family, the more one creates reporting relationships to the rest of the world: they expect to be updated regularly, which becomes a burden. Hence the popularity of such sites as CaringBridge which allow people to send out updates to targeted audiences of friends and family.

When friends get together they don't want to get dragged down into all of that. We all know things get hard. It's part of the deal with life. Getting involved in a competitive cycle of my woes are worse than your woes is no fun for anyone.

Conflicted victory

In this week's 3.5 ladder match I beat a guy 6-3, 6-2. On the one hand, it's nice to win. On the other, it's not really pleasant to make somebody feel crappy about themself, as I could tell he did after I got a rhythm. The guy is 71 years old and honestly I will be super fortunate if I am as fit and mobile as he is when I reach that age, a super nice guy.

With all of that said, I am somewhat proud of having had the mental discipline to go ahead and beat him as opposed to taking stupid risks and letting him back in the match. I kept doing the things that were thwarting him and they kept working. It was not easy to maintain my focus like that.  

Parasites vs decay

Up at a friend's lake house over the weekend, we saw some changes to the landscape. Where there had been a derelict gas station/convenience store by the interstate, there is now a "Games of Skill" place (i.e. gambling), matching the one across the street from PayJay's -- the historic corner store a couple of miles off the highway that has been there for years. Is it better that at least there are utilities running in these buildings instead of having them slowly decay and collapse? Maybe.

Meanwhile, next to the old corner store a shiny Dollar General has sprung up. We had to take a trip there because the idiot who brought coffee brought only enough for one day. In the past I've been able to score Starbucks at rural Dollar Generals. This place had only Dunkin Donuts, and for the price of $10 for a 12 oz bag. Even in the post-pandemic world of more expensive coffee that is paying up quite a bit.

We are rooting for PayJay's, though I must say I was disappointed when I went in there and the grill wasn't up and running when I went in there in the morning for the milk forgotten by the breakfast crew. I had been hoping perhaps for a quick biscuit.

Quick resolution of a tax issue

When I got back from DC a couple of weeks ago I found a letter from the IRS telling me that we owed $12k for failure to file 2022 taxes for an LLC I had managed for Mary and her photo friends from grad school who were trying to publish a book in honor of their friend Jeannette, who succumbed to cancer a few years back. Then the project lost steam. I had agreed to handle the finances and taxes because... I am an idiot. That's enough detail.

The note from the IRS instructed me to call an 800 number to discuss the issue. Since it was late March when I did so and therefore peak season for filing, I approached this task with dread. But I went ahead and did it. A nice young woman from the IRS was able to resolve it for me in just under half an hour. This was a very pleasant surprise. I assume this was because the 800 number I had was for a specific use case other than people filing taxes for last year, so I wasn't part of the general flow. That's good management and process design. 

Since I had relied on guidance from the IRS website in not filing the return in a year with no income and no expenses, I was annoyed when I got the initial notice. To say the least. But it all turned out OK in the end, so I guess I'll just take the win and move on. It also gave me a nice if not scintillating blog topic.

The Atlantic today

 The Atlantic numbers among the many publications we pay for. Often, that means it's among the many publications I don't read. But sometimes I pick it up and read it. Of late, it often seems like a voice of moderation and sanity in today's often overwrought and cartoonish world of hyperventilating obsequious social justice warriordom. The most recent issue, for instance, contains a reasoned piece about Woodrow Wilson, who despite being a prig and a particularly racist and a guy who made some very bad mistakes around WWI (not pressing for peace in 1916, sending many thousands of US trips to their deaths by not digesting the lessons already learned on its battlefields -- all of this war stuff is entirely news to me in the last couple of hours, by the way) was a real force for good both in enacting progressive reforms and in setting out a vision for America's place in an insitution- and rule-governed world order that we are still striving to achieve, nationalist-isolationsts be damned.

There's also a great piece on playwright Michael R. Jackson, a guy I'd never heard of but am now very intrigued by, and how Jackson seeks to surmount all the reductive focus on race, sexual orientation, blah blah blah and create good and deep work that elicits a variety of human responses in different audience members.

This is all despite being owned by the Emerson Collective, the non-profit arm of the empire of Laurene Powell Jobs (spouse of Steve), which sounds like it is generally an empire of firmly left-leaning money seeking to do trendy things, most of which I agree with, of course. It's good the Atlantic appears to have some editorial and intellectual independence.

The Walking Path (from 2006)

Going through old drafts for posts I found this one. This was at Union Central, a life insurance company in northern Cincinnati where I worked on a project in 2006: 

________________________

Here in the basement my midwestern insurer, I noticed a sign overhead in the tiled hallway leading to the men's room across the hall from the other men's room, which was closed for housekeeping. The sign said "walking path," and pointed down another tiled hallway. Intrepidly, I set out along it. At the end of the tiled hallway, the path entered onto a long carpeted hallway with fetching fluorescent lights. I took this too.

It was lined with boxes of old documents, and occasionally gave way to views of large rooms filled with paper files.

At the end of that hallway, it turned down a short hallway, and then doubled back along the length of the building again, another long box-lined hallway. Towards the end, and old forelorn mainframe cabinet.

Mysteriously, when the hallway ended, there was no sign for the path. Could I have lost the thread? There was a door to the garage, which was actually a loading dock with a few fancy cars (Jags and Caddies), which curiously supplemented my comment the other day that there were no fancy cars in the parking lot, only workaday vehicles. The executives had hidden the fine rides in the bowels of the building.

My walk ended, I found it hard to concentrate on work, dazzled as I was by the glamour of it all.

More thoughts on the Bible

I keep slogging through the Bible. Just got done with Galatians, in which Paul argues that not being circumcised demonstrates superiority in that Christians are following and made whole by the love of and spirit of Christ rather than by fealty to the law. In some sense, we are getting somewhere. In another, who cares?

At a very high level the biggest problem I'm having with the Bible right about now is that, to borrow one of its metaphors, it builds a castle on a little bit too much sand. So much of Jesus's authority seems to derive from magic he performs: multiplying loaves and fishes, raising the dead, healing the sick, etc. Which is all good and well, save for the fact that it's not replicable. Or, rather, that some portion of it (scaled up food production, medicine augmented by hand-washing, antibiotics, pasteurization, etc) has only become replicable thanks to the Enlightenment and scientific method, thousands of years later after a couple of millennia of very slow technological advances while much of the west was waging silly wars in Christ's name. It might perhaps have been better for humanity to have been more focused on abstracting up from Aristotle, assimilating more math from the near East, other technology from China and appreciating the local wisdom and understanding of native peoples around the world as they were encountered, assuming that exploration and colonialism happened in roughly analogous fashion in the absence of a religion that encouraged conquest.

The rabbinical and monastic communities seem to indicate that if you devote your life to studying the holy texts and cross-referencing them, you can get to a good place, ish. But is that the highest and best use of one's time and are those really the best texts to spend all that time reading? Maybe, maybe not. Right now I'm not feeling it. Not sure if I slog on or take a break. 

Subway at a Virginia truck stop

On my ride up to DC last week I was excited to get back to a Subway and get our family's favorite sandwich (rotisserie chicken on whole wheat with pepper jack... I'll spare you all the granular detail). It's a sandwich we Mary, Natalie and I settled on after a lot of trial and error over the years for our jaunts up and down the coast to the Northeast, so we were very sad when Subway briefly axed the rotisserie chicken from its menus during the pandemic.

Right around noon I got off of 85 at a truck stop between the VA-NC border and Petersburg. When I walked into the Subway section of it I was surprised by an exceptionally enthusiastic greeting from the woman at the register. No argument there. It being the very tip of noon, there were maybe eight people in front of me, but that's what one gets for stopping right at the statutory hour of the mid-day repast. I stood and waited.

Shortly thereafter a few Black* people came in and the woman behind the counter greeted them with cheer equal to what she had offered me and then asked: "Are y'all off of that bus? How much time did they give you?" The newcomers said something like 15-20 minutes and the woman behind the counter said she was pretty sure she could get them through in time. This was the moment of my fail. I probably should have offered to let them go in front of me right about then. I was slightly pressed for time in that I wanted to get to my hotel in downtown DC before rush hour and then to my co-working space to work on my presentation for the next day. But it's not like I had a bus that might leave if I didn't make it through on time. I'm pretty sure they got them served anyway. They were cranking.

*I draw attention to their race only because the woman at the register was white and country and in all likelihood a Trump voter. The urban intelligentsia's view that that makes them entirely, inherently and reflexively racist is entirely devoid of nuance. Plus we're as racist as fuck in our own way anyhow. We just mask it better with pieties, yard signs and layers of bureaucracy.

A banner day

Yesterday was a super happy day in our home. After running a disciplined process of finding and following up on leads for summer internships, Graham got an offer from the Carolina Population Center up on campus to work this summer. It's perfect. 40 hours, working on site, getting some exposure to using Stata (some software that economists use a lot), for 8 weeks. Which means he gets some real job experience, learns to work with others, is supervised by someone other than me, has some time off before and after the job starts to maybe travel a little but certainly to sleep in some. And for all this they'll even be paying him some money.

It's awesome. I was such an idiot about this kind of thing when I was his age. My stated position at the time was that having a realish job like this would be soul-sucking and... I don't even know what I thought. Really it was just pigheaded stupidity, laser focus on academics because that's all I knew about, and fear of doing something different. Much better than Graham should learn to work in normal office to see that it's OK and that you can learn stuff while doing so.

Go Graham!

The Bond King

When Mary and I were down at Circle City Books in Pittsboro back in January I picked up this book about Bill Gross and PIMCO. It's a typical rise and fall story. I hadn't realized how integral Gross was to the early stages of active bond investing when he got PIMCO going back in the 70s. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, because everything I read over time indicates how much the science and practice of finance has progressed over the course of my lifetime, which also indicates how humorous the idea of efficient markets back in the early days of its advancement, back in the 50s and 60s. Back then there was still money lying in the streets for those who worked hard. The problem was that with a growing population, protected sinecures for white men and endless improvement to be had in all facets of commerce, there just wasn't much need to work that hard, for the most part.

Anyway, The Bond King by Mary Childs of NPR's Planet Money is pretty good but no better than that. It could have been trimmed by 100 pages with no great loss. The story of Gross being a continuous dickhead to everyone around him just isn't that interesting.

At the end of the book it was interesting to see that Gross trots out the belated recognition that he's on the autism spectrum as a justification of why was so rude to everyone. Unfortunately, it doesn't work like that. I know lots of people on the autism spectrum and though sometimes they commit social gaffes (who doesn't? I remember the time the Bordens from Durham were over at our house for Christmas and I got out the nail clippers because somehow I had never registered that it was typically done in private), being autistic is not a social get out of jail free card. Decent autistic people have consciences and moral compasses.

Jah save us from Great Men

Jason Zweig's column in the Journal tells the story of Micro Strategy, whose founder has been buying up Bitcoin for years now, recently going so far as to issue a big chunk of convertible debt to do so. His company is valued at a substantial premium to the value of its underlying software business plus the Bitcoin holdings (even with Bitcoin hovering around an all-time high) because the market imputes to it a "genius premium." What absolute and utter bollocks.

All too often the world lets itself be held in thrall to the exploits of "great men." Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Narendra Modi, even Warren Buffett and Barack Obama, everybody wants to line up and worship them. It's sheerest laziness and just a shitty way to be.

If we want to look for a leader right about now, I would suggest MacKenzie Scott.  

Math nerds, autism and institutional racism etc.

A recent op-ed in the Journal (I am embarassed to say I read them sometimes. In the age of Trump some of them are almost moderate) Gerald Baker compares some things the left does today to Nazi Germany. It's not his most convincing argument. He links to this article in Scientific American about racism in the math profession, which he erroneously conflates into the statement that left says math is racist. The rest of his article is less stupid.

The article he links do does draw attention to some worthwhile instances of people trying to raise the representation of people of color and LGBTQ  people in math, which sounds good to me. I'm sure there's some institutional overreach too.

But it got me to thinking about the older math nerds who are creating the bad conditions in the first place. First off, I'll bet a bunch of them are autistic and therefore don't have a good understanding of how others perceive their behavior. And I will tell you for certain that a lot of them were picked on brutally when they were younger and have a big fucking chip on their shoulder. They have carved out their little corner of the universe and will protect it at all cost from anybody, or at least anybody they didn't know from grad school. They weren't good at football or basketball and didn't have a bunch of friends in high school but they had math, and the ones who made it to tenure at the university have fought hard for that tenure.

Now, most of the math people I knew and the ones I grew up with aren't like that exactly. Most of them are pretty chill and enlightened people. But every so often I will see an edge to one of them, a certain "don't fuck with me I know what I'm worth." And the very most accomplished math people never expanded their social circles enough to meet someone like me. I'm sure there are some rough psyches in there, people still fighting the battles of their childhood and, to the best of their knowledge, winning consistently.

Another Spring Break come and gone

Took Graham back up to his dorm last night after dinner, marking the end of spring break. Quite typically, Graham came home, slept late, watched TV and movies with us, had dinner with family, and applied himself a little to the process of looking for a summer job. He couldn't be bothered to look for an apartment since he and his future roommate already have one which they judge good enough, even though I figure he'd likely be happier a little closer to downtown. Not a priority for Graham. He interacted with his girlfriend briefly when she brought some homemade Chinese deserts by the park behind our house.

As always, it was unfailingly pleasant to have him around. He's a fine young man. He even stepped in and remembered to do his normal chores with minimal prompting. I am sometimes a little mystified by the lack of diversity of the things that drive him. He continues to work hard to learn. He was reading Chinua Achebe's memoir over break and then some book for a class. He loves Quiz Bowl and his friends and teammates. Really he loves his communities -- including the chess and robotics communities.

I by contrast at his age was a hot mess of ambition, lust, feelings of insufficiency, desire for status and glory. I wanted to do everything and beat everyone at everything while seeming nonchalant and casual about it. As a result I was killing myself and bouncing off of walls. I've only gotten a little better, honestly. I have reduced the number of ways in which I gradually kill myself, which has slowed the process. By sheerest good fortune I've perhaps done a better job at this than many, but nobody's really counting. 

There is much to be said for Graham's approach. We are happy to have him so close.

American Fiction

Continuing on with our family movie week, we watched American Fiction over the weekend. If you haven't read the plot summary, a black author and literature professor (Thelonius, but he goes by Monk) gets in trouble at his university for traumatizing his fragile students by writing the n-word on the blackboard and is rusticated back to Boston for a spell. Since his high-brow books aren't having commercial success, and he sees another very well-educated Black woman author selling tons of books by publishing bullshit tales of blacks on the street full of Black patois ("I axed him fo some chicken" and so on), he gets drunk and writes a parodic novel from the point of view of a streetwise felon. Hilarious hijinks ensue.

The backdrop to all of this, which takes up most of the screen time, is conflict within his high-achieving family, from whom. His sister gets sick and dies while she and Monk are out for drinks, which was a bit far-fetched but one has to move the plot along. His recently out of the closet gay brother, a plastic surgeon out in LA, comes home from the funeral. Their mother has Alzheimer's coming on. Monk's always been the emotionally removed one, which causes problems in a new promising relationship with the charming neighbor across the street.

In short, real family shit of the sort one sees too little of in movies these days. Unironic and earnest, though punctuated with laughs for sure. Altogether the movie was like a throwback to the 70s and 80s before blockbusters and franchises came to unrelentingly dominate the screen, when Norman Lear permeated the zeitgeist and Kramer vs Kramer and Ordinary People won awards. Very refreshing.

Plus the fact that white people are almost entirely marginalized and treated as stereotypically earnest idiots. There was a lot of truth in there, it must be owned.

Doctor Zhivago

From our running list of potential shows and programs to watch, Graham selected Doctor Zhivago, which I had put on there some time ago after he had shown an interest in the Zhang Limou-Gong Li series of historical Chinese movies from the 90s. I think he had seen Farewell My Concubine. Really the old David Lean epics are their own thing.

Of course it lost a lot by being viewed on the small screen, and is a little overwrought by contemporary standards, but it nevertheless remains a worthy classic, and I'm glad Graham chose it for some spring break viewing. More than anything, the unironic forthrightness and earnestness of the characters -- the absence of snark -- takes one back. We've come a long way from that and it's good both to be reminded that it was once an ideal and for kids to be exposed to it.

Personally, I was surprised to see just how well the three potential suitors (Komarovsky-Zhivago-Antipov/Strelnikov) and their treatment of Lara, the Julie Christie lead character, fits into the schematics of my dissertation. I can't recall if I thought about it at the time and rejected it or (more likely) was just too lazy to read the book.

Speaking of, I really need to read more Russian. Maybe a Chekhov story. But now it's time to grind out a little Japanese on DuoLingo before getting to work.

Acceleration in the wrong direction

First thing this morning I got a text from a dearly beloved client letting me know that her cancer has been accelerating and that it will kill her soon. Meanwhile, a medical specialist let me know that we'd be doing kidney ultrasounds on me annuallyish for the rest of my life to keep an eye on some "cysts" in there that are a normal side effect of a medication I took for a while to manage a medical condition. Also, per the colonoscopy guy (whatever you call him) I am on the "3 to 5 year plan" for colonoscopies due to some "polyps" they encountered down there. My internal medicine person interprets that as the 3-year plan, and I work for her.

All this medical shit is piling up over here.

Meanwhile, I went to an ENT yesterday due to some head stuffed uppedness (not to get too technical) I've been experiencing since skiing in Colorado. She had no magical fix but my comforted me that the OTC stuff I've used cleared out all the wax and that since my symptoms have 90-95% abated, nothing is too wrong in there. On the way out a guy about my age or maybe a little older had accompanied his mom, who had a cochlear implant, to the doctor. He told her he'd have to take her back for another check up in a month or so. She was fine with that, then she looked at me and said "before I got this thing I hadn't heard out of this ear for a long time!" She was psyched. It was a beautiful and sunny day. I need to stay on that bandwidth, lest I descend ever further into Andy Rooneydom.

On housing as an investment

Clients often daydream about buying second properties as investments. It seems so logical. For primary residences, we hold them a long time and they seem to rise in value really quickly.

But there are lots of problems with this line of thinking. First off, we overestimate the rate at which they compound. Mary's family bought its house in Larchmont in 1974 for $87k and sold it in 2020 for right at $2,000,000. It seems like a fabulous return. But annualized, it's a 7.2% nominal (not inflation-adjusted) return. Meanwhile the S&P 500, over the same period, returned 11.3%. (though that's a pretax return, taxes on the dividends and capital gains/distributions aren't factored in)

Moreover, there are ongoing expenses like maintenance, taxes (very significant ones for the Berridges) and insurance which capital markets investments don't have. Then again, people who choose capital markets as investments but rent instead of owning have analogous expenses, so maybe that side of things is a wash. Except.... people owning homes in high tax jurisdictions will continue paying the high taxes (for which they get fewer services once their kids graduate from high school) due to inertia, emotional attachment to their homes and neighbors, and high transaction costs).

There is one very important function to that inertia, though, that helps homes serve as stores and accumulators of value. It is often said that not timing the market but time in the market is the most important determinant of returns. If you can hold on to something, for example an S&P 500 index fund, for a long time, it will compound for you. All the emotional things and high transaction costs that keep people in homes for a long time allow compounding to take place.

There's lots more to this argument. I apologize, by the way, for two financialish posts in a row. I know that's a little aberrant. I'll get back to the good old stuff soon enough.

Also, I drifted away from the question of second homes as invesments, which is really a different thing. I'd come back to that sometime in the future but probably you could give a fuck. and rightly so.

On ESG or wokeness in capitalism

In recent years the Republicans have been pushing back hard against ESG (environmental, social and governance) in investing and corporate governance, branding it "wokeness" in capitalism. They have had some success. At the very highest level I have interpreted the turn towards ESG in corporate governance as a reflection of the monied portion of the electorate getting annoyed and frustrated at the inability of our legislatures to work together to compromise. Additionally, I think the educated have been frustrated with the way that demographic trends (the tendency of productive economies to cluster ever more tightly in and around a few cities) have intersected with constitutional provisions (the electoral college) and sheer Republican craftiness/genius in capturing state legislatures and then gerrymandering the fuck out of everything.

So if the affluent haven't been able to get the government to do what they want it to, we've turned to other means (ESG and shareholder proposals) to push corporations to effect broader policy aims that we'd like to see come to pass. One of the big problems here is that people who work in the private sector on balance do so to earn money and thereby advance their own private economic motives. So using ESG to effect public goods is pushing these people and institutions in a direction not native to them.

Another big problem is that all these ESG proposals compelling corporations to report on this or that metric create mini-bureaucracies inside the companies. And if the ESG aims sought are non-standardized, they are bespoke mini-bureaucracies. It is not unlike the effect of the Trump administration preference for bi-lateral treaties (US-Thailand, US-Malaysia, US-Vietnam, US-Mexico etc) instead of multilateral ones (TPP, NAFTA). These create more regimes for corporations to comply with and therefore inherently raise compliance costs, which are passed on to consumers.

Then again, effecting social change through the actions of multiple on multiple stakeholders (ESG campaigners vs. corporations) has an inherently bottom up feel to it. We know that ultimately change is very hard to force top down. It can be led top down by great leaders at moments of clarity and consensus, but it cannot be forced. Bottom up bends the needle more sustainably and meaningfully over time. 

The pushback from the right is all part of the great contest of ideas and is ultimately fruitful.

Respecting Trump voters

And so, we have the election nobody wanted. Biden vs. Trump, again. Ever the master of messaging and reading the public, we must give him that,* Trump has been able to cast the "lawfare" strategy waged against him as another instance of his victimization, which justifies his return to the White House. Never shy of going all the way over the top and back down again, he even likens himself to Navalny.

My gut says that the resonance of Trump's victimization inheres in the way his electorate feels like he represents them precisely because they have been disrespected and maligned. I'm sure this point has been made a million times in op-eds I've ignored, so forgive me for repeating it. One way to defang it, therefore, is to go out of our way to respect his voters, however crazy their Trump regalia look, however wacky the things they say may be. The video outtakes I continue to see from late-night TV shows about how stupid Trump voters are may keep ratings up and help networks and local affiliates sell ads, but they aren't helping our cause. Instead of focusing on how stupid the other side is we have to focus on just respecting them where they are and showing them we're not ourselves godless pedophile demons.

*Though reading Bob Woodward's Fear, about Trump in the White House, makes clear to me how much the insight is Steve Bannon's rather than Trump's.

Belated Barbenheimer

The weekend before last Mary and I finally caught up with the rest of the world and watched Barbie followed by Oppenheimer. I came out preferring Barbie, though each of them could have easily been cut by 20-30 minutes and nobody would have left feeling ripped off. In fact, the theater owners would have made more money. It is a sad fact that directors these days feel like a topic has been ennobled, when in fact all they are doing is pissing me off.

Barbie was in the end fun and clever with some great deets. Oppenheimer fairly ground the classic theme of genius/madness/autism into a very fine pulp. Then stomped on it a couple of times for good measure. Matt Damon was good, as always.

Mary and I would do ourselves some good socially if we went and watched these things at the same time as everyone else. Then we could participate in discussions at parties and whatnot. But we are an ornery pair and prefer to wait until they can be rented cheaply on a streaming platform which can pay me some money if it wants me to name it.

On writing for more people

On LinkedIn recently I saw a guy from my co-working space posting about how he had written for an impressive number of days in a row on the platform and how his content had been seen by 10s of millions of people and he has over a hundred thousand followers. All of which has helped him raise his income.

He is, not surprisingly, a sales coach.

I confess I am a little intrigued by all of this, but transitioning to that kind of mode would be a huge shift for me. It's hard to tell if I am just bedazzled by all the numbers, as yall know I am a sucker for numbers.

Meanwhile, I am pretty much worn out now from a weekend of being with people. My sister came to town and stayed with us for the weekend, while Mary's brother Rob also arrived in town and will be residing in the house just across the lake parking lot from us. Which is lovely, but also potentially hugely disruptive to my well-established rhythm.

Getting ready

Hanging out on the couch in my study preparing for the arrival of two siblings: Leslie is coming to stay with us for a couple of days before going to mom's for a week, while Rob is also arriving with the plan of staying for a month on a trial basis in an apartment across the LFA parking lot from us, in John and Barbara's house, also incidentally the former home of a high school girlfriend, also name Mary. I'm looking forward to seeing both of them.

But I'd be lying if I said that my anticipation of Rob's arrival wasn't mixed with some apprehension. He's gonna be living awful close. Mary and I spend a couple of decades raising our delightful children, who are now mostly launched into the world and thriving (though obviously we're happy to have Graham here at UNC). But we are also happy to be on to enjoying the empty nester phase of life and not having default socialization at any time. So we're gonna have to figure out how to establish some norms and boundaries.

Thankfully Rob eats earlier than us and also goes to bed earlier and also really likes his own space, so this should all work out fine. And I have this couch here to retreat to at any time if he and Mary are riffing out on something some evening when I need to be on my own. Let's just hope the need doesn't become too acute to often.

The Slim Messiah

I have rotated back to the Old Testament for a little while in my Bible journey. Just read through the Song of Songs which is truly sui generis, it really feels like it doesn't belong in the Bible at all.

Continued on into Isaiah, where I was surprised to see references to the messiah (though not by name, just anticipations of the Lord coming in seemingly human form). Which got me to thinking that this was new, I hadn't seen that before in the Old Testament. So I turned to the back of my New Standard edition of the Bible and looked up "messiah". There really wasn't much there from the Old Testament.

Of course, you Google "how many references to the Messiah in the Old Testament" and there is predictably a wide range of answers, the most interesting of which is how the references that there are anticipate details the messiah's arrival and life and therefore prove the prophetic nature of the whole thing and therefore how true it is... This is precisely the type of rabbit hole I ain't going down.

Lifestyle change -- Itchy Boots

While I was out in Colorado my friend Dave turned me on to an amazing series on YouTube: Itchy Boots. This is the video log of a Dutch woman who travels the backroads of the world, pretty much anywhere there's a road, on her motorcycle. I have watched little bits in the Himalayas and also in West Africa and one in Central America. It is pretty amazing. Here is episode 1. 

It needs little commentary, but it does occasion thought. For example, as she travels down nicely paved roads in central Republic of Congo, on the one hand I can understand how people in Africa could give a fuck about Ukraine if China is building them roads. On the other hand, I'd probably have to dig into it a little more deeply because it's entirely possible that the government of Congo went into debt to China to build that thing and that net net the people of Congo are being fleeced to pay for infrastructure they really don't need and can't afford. That is the story of much of China's Belt and Road initiative. 

BTW, this is a lifestyle change because it is starting to usurp time that would be otherwise spent watching scripted TV and/or sports. But there is so much here. She sees so much. Pretty soon I will learn her name.

Canceling the Wall Street Journal

I've been getting paper delivery of the Wall Street Journal for a long time, but I've decided to go online only. I tried to make the change online, but it was impossible to do so. They said they have "too many pricing options to quote prices online", which is total and utter bullshit. Of course they want me to call and and speak to a person so they can try to retain me. Fine, that's business.

But I just tried to call in and it was "outside of our normal business hours" without saying exactly what those hours are. I'm sorry. Also bullshit. The paper has a million paper subscribers and another 2.5 million or so online. They can staff a couple of retention specialists to their call center on weekends. Or they could outsource it to a vendor in the Philippines or something, which is probably what they're doing anyway. It's not always apparent to the naked eye but I am busy during the week. 

The Funniest Girl in NYC

Really I'm just kind of bookmarking this.

 

Good news, bad news

Went to the dermatologist yesterday for what will, I suppose, be an annual ritual from here on out. On the one hand, unlike last year, they didn't even find any little pre-cancerous doohickeys that they had to zap with a little freeze spray. Apparently they had done so last year. I had forgotten. Once more I've been encouraged to wear sun block more consistently.

On the other hand, I had bad blood pressure readings. I had had a good one when I went to my annual with my general practitioner last month, which caused me to doubt the accuracy of my home blood pressure monitor (which had also been giving bad readings). What this presages, it seems to me, is greater dietary discipline, maybe even cutting back on coffee, less salt, less fat, a higher dose of blood pressure med, all messages I expect to hear from my nephrologist next month. All of this has me a little down.

Mentally of course I remind myself of the good example of my client who has literally been told that cancer will likely kill her in the next year. She has maintained good spirits. Why can't I? 

I'm pretty sure it's just of lot of poor me resentments of feeling like I'm working hard all the time (but not nearly as hard as so many others, like the newcomer to our fair country who delivered the rug Mary ordered to our doorstep this morning at around 7:45 and then hustled back up the stairs to get in his rug and go deliver something else as I was wrapping up round one of morning reading).

Get it in gear, Grouse. Gratitude vs Everything!

A new phase

Yesterday I had a call I knew was coming, but which saddened me greatly nonetheless. An old friend and client who has been battling cancer let me know that her most recent round of chemo had failed to shrink her tumors. She asked her primary oncologist how much time she had to live. He told her maybe a year.

This is a person I love dearly. I began to write out the story of our relationship just now, then stopped. It's too early for that. She has good spirits and energy now and a focus on preparing for her children's future and for living the time she has left in as much joy as she can muster, which I am sure will be not a little.

Since this blog is a bit of a selfish space for me, I won't pretend that this isn't a milestone of sorts for me. It's the first time that someone I am this close to is coming face to face with death in this way. But honestly we are back to that moment at which I arrive almost always when writing the blog. The workday moves forward and I with it. Andiamo. 

Presidents' Day

A cursory survey of the Grouse shows me that I have never made this point before, but in principle I think that Presidents' Day follows too hard on the heels of MLKJ Day. It might be better if the holiday were pushed back into March to get a better spread of holidays across the year.

Then again, this morning I'm feeling pretty good about not having a slew of normal work tasks to do. Even if much of the non tennis-playing (you know that's happening) portion of the day will be devoted to getting my ducks in a row for tax season. It will feel good to have done so. Meanwhile, I am easing into the day rather luxuriously, drinking coffee, reading the various magazines that languish on flat surfaces throughout the house, dashing off notes on this question and that, scheming on things I plan to do (wash sheets) and outsource to others (restring and clean up my acoustic guitar) because researching them on YouTube convinced me that I don't have all the tools or knowledge I need to do it best.

Long held tradition would seem to dictate that there should be a third paragraph here to pull together the mildly disparate threads from above and knit them together neatly. The structure for such a paragraph flashed briefly through my mind, then evanesced. Godspeed to it.

President handing out pizza

When I was taking Graham back up to campus after two mental health days earlier this week I asked him changes at UNC, the installation of the Program in Civic Life or whatever you call it and the departure of Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz for Michigan State. Graham said that he had shaken Guskiewicz's hand something like four times and that he had been out serving pizza to students just a couple of days before his departure was announced. The "new guy," Lee Roberts, by contrast, hadn't been seen at all. And he certainly could have come out for the 40th anniversary of the opening of Davis Library the prior week, where I'm pretty sure pizza or perhaps cake was served. Graham was there.

So we see what makes an impression. And also that free pizza still has a certain allure even when more or less bottomless pizza is available in the dining hall all the time. There's just an eternal magic to it.

Attention Titans

I just happened across a reference to a proposed cage fight between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg from last summer. I had forgotten all about that little brouhaha. A quick Google confirmed it didn't happen because, basically, Musk wimped out despite some typically boisterous Tweeting.

And there you have one curious bit of modern living in a nutshell. In the attention economy those who can hold our attention are the big winners. Trump and Musk are masters of it, as is Taylor Swift. And so on. It's all kind of a big waste of time except to the extent that it gives us shared discourse to discuss. In a slower information flow world dominated by text, people used to be able to have marginally more serious discussions about more serious topics more frequently. Or so it seems to us with rose-colored, 20/20 hindsight. I'm not sure what's actually true.

A turning point

Over at Jonathan and Sharon's the other night I was talking to Kip, who had been one of the Pacers coaches back when we ran for the club and had also taught English at the high school. I was recounting our 9th grade track season, really the height of my individual athletic career, when I scored more points than Jonathan and he and I (together with Konanc) scored maybe 80-90% of our overall pretty middling team's points. I scored the most points only because I could do more events than Jonathan (he was limited to running just the mile in meets where he ran the mile, maybe his best distance).

The other salient point here is that I never beat Jonathan once. In meets where we both ran the 400 and the 800, he always beat me. That was no surprise in the 800, which verged on being a distance race, but the 400 was a bit of a surprise. I was more of a sprinter and I think I was faster than him over 400 in 8th grade. 

So there, mixed in with my moment of greatest triumph overall, I was faced with the fact that I really wasn't the best at something I had thought was perhaps my domain. And I think I took it pretty well, even then. I just had to accept then and there that Jonathan was faster than me. We were teammates our interests were aligned and it felt like we were doing something impressive together, us two skinny geeky boys. One thing that made it easy to process and accept was that Jonathan was not from Glen Heights and had never once been mean to me during the more challenging early years.

All in all, I think it was a big developmental moment. 

I think I was pretty careful to never race Jonathan over 200, though. I didn't want to face potential disappointment there. So we'll never know.

Canvassing in Butner

On Sunday Mary and I made our first foray out onto the campaign trail to knock doors for Terence Everitt for NC Senate and Bryan Cohn for NC House up in Granville County. We ended up with a route in Butner, a town of a little more than 8,000 (though I don't know where they all live, based on what we saw) most famous for the correctional facility where Bernie Madoff lived out his days, having reportedly earned a lot of cred from his fellow prisoners for the sheer amount of money he was able to steal before getting caught.

Certain things I forget about between canvasses in middle- to lower-income neighborhoods came right back at me as we started out. First off, the sense that most of these homes are regarded as little fortresses by their inhabitants. The blinds are always closed. Often the stale smell of cigarettes wafts out at one even through the closed door. The Google Nest doorbell has taken over wherever people have a little money for the upgrade. The ability to see who is actually at the door clearly holds a broad appeal.

So often the houses are quiet, and I have some guilt about the possibility that we might be rousing somebody who works hard throughout the week from a well-earned nap. Especially on an overcast day in February.

If someone actually comes and opens the door, the interactions are usually positive even if the residents aren't strong Democratic supporters. Even Republicans have to respect the work that goes into going door to door, for the most part. Most often it's the middle-aged to older Black people who truly seem grateful that we're out there advocating. On Sunday we got a few good interactions. One Black guy in his 40s was wearing a T-shirt that said "Gratitude vs. Everything." When we asked him what issues were top of mind to him he said programs for youth, especially troubled youth. Most people couldn't think that far, or couldn't be bothered. 

At the very tail end of the canvass the door was answered by a white guy in a UNC T-shirt. His wife was registered as an independent. When we handed him the information cards about the two candidates he immediately tore them up and said all politicians were criminals. But he stayed and talked for longer. About how the government never gave him anything (though it turned out he had a son at Appalachian State who wanted to go to UNC grad school, and they had spent $1 million on a sidewalk across the street which, although he framed it initially as an outrage, especially because the elderly fellow across the street who worked so hard on his yard now had this concrete going though it, but it did give the older folk a place where they could take a walk without getting runned over by a car (I quote). And the worst thing is you can't drink the water because it has all these chemicals in it and there's a weird pink slime in his pipes... He stayed and talked with us for maybe 15 minutes. Seemed like he liked being heard.

Rainy Sunday

Thus far, letting my blogging cadence slip has not resulted in an efflorescence of inspiration for things to write. In fact, I keep up coming up with ideas, little things to write about it, but then I think that it sounds more and more like the blog is devolving into Andy Rooney territory, where some old guy sits around and whines about aging. But then, I'm turning 58 in a couple of months, so what the hell do you expect?

Boca Raton was about what one would expect. The weather was lovely -- which is why I had chosen to go there in February, after all. There were palm trees, cute little bungalows mixed in with more lavish residences, more recent condos which were executed in keeping with a classic Florida groove: I would never have guessed they were brand spanking new. When I got checked in to my hotel, which was about a mile in from the beach, I changed into shorts and proceeded directly to the ocean, where some bad-assed 20-something young Hispanic women were getting ready to go surfing. Then I hustled back for some seafood (I ended up with some fried belly clams, a treat I hadn't had for several summers because of little time spent in New England and them disappearing from the menu of the Nantucket Grill, which had never been able to keep them in stock since the pandemic started). That was a pleasant surprise.

Over the next couple of days out on the streets I saw a wide range of cars one doesn't see much of in NC: a Maybach sedan, an Aston-Martin convertible and also a Maserati one, a Lucid. Which was kind of fun but honestly I'm just as happy to not see that stuff. It's kind of like watching TV ads for cheap pizza in which they get the stringiness of melted mozzarella just right when someone lifts a slice out of a pie but you know it's crap you don't need.

System conflicts, and Florida

As I think I've written before, my life has become extremely systematized, which generally works well. One example is that my morning pills are taken downstairs, so I have them organized in a drawer there, whereas my evening ones go down my gullet upstairs, where they are all neatly counted out in one of those weekly pill dispensers so that I don't have to waste time counting them out each night. So far, so good.

Then I go on the road. Thinking myself the seasoned road warrior, I throw my pill dispenser thing in my bag and go. But of course, as the attentive reader will have noted, all that has is my evening pills. On a short trip I can get by just fine, cannibalizing tomorrow's evening pills for this morning's (there's only one overlap). Except. Except except, I have no Sonatas, in case I have sleeping difficulties, as I did last night, and as I used to often in hotel rooms (I just forgot about it). The long and short of it is there is no perfect system for everything. Though I should have remembered the sleeping pill thing because I literally just went through it in Colorado and had to cadge an Ambien off a friend as insurance.

In any case, here I am in Florida, in Boca Raton, at the home office for some internal meetings. It's a little odd to be here. Most of the people I saw yesterday were on the older side, which makes me think. This morning in the hotel's breakfast area the majority of people looked to be business road warriors, which comforted me oddly, though it brought back memories of a time of life I'm happy to keep dialing back. More on Florida later.

On slowness and method

Nine days after I got back from the Rockies and my right ear have still not resolved from the pressurization they got first coming down out of the hills and then from flying home. To be sure, it's less bad than it was, but it wasn't fixed. Eventually I reached out to my doctor and she recommended I try an over the counter thing, more or less what Dr Internet had suggested but I really try not to listen to him much. Also, there are itchy rashes on my legs where the ski boots hit, though Z pointed out that I probably hadn't been paying enough attention to keeping my socks hiked up.

The key thing is that though each of these is a nuisance, neither one of them is really slowing me down, let alone killing me. Therein lies one of the most important things I have learned over the many decades here on the planet, if it doesn't kill you, it's not fatal. Keep going, pushing and adjusting.

I have been trying to imbue Graham with this sensibility around his search for an internship this upcoming summer. I know how hard it is to balance many projects in life, school, social life, looking for a career. I didn't do any of this shit when I was in college and, to be sure, I turned out fine (or so I'm told), but doing a little bit of career exploration also wouldn't have killed me and might even have enhanced the college experience. Or maybe not. At any case, I am having weekly check ins with Graham centered around a spreadsheet of internship ops, so I have the pleasure of seeing his face and hearing his voice weekly. Maybe that's cheating. So shoot me. 

On with the week

On the one hand, nothing particularly special is going on today, though later this week I head to Boca Raton for some internal meetings. In eight years with this firm I've never made the trek down there but it seems appropriate to do so now as we grow and change. 

It was largely a quiet weekend at home, praise the lord. Though I did throw in some minor curveballs. On Sunday I went to the penultimate instance of the Chapel Hill Piano Salon and caught a concert by Sophia Shuya Liu -- a 15-year old from Japan (despite the Chinese last name) who moved to Montreal to study with a master. Apparently she has won some competitions and is very much the real deal (I could easily be fooled). The host has a camera he trains on the pianists' hands and then projects onto a couple of big screens so the audience can watch. It is pretty mesmerizing.

On the one hand, as I have written before, I am generally skeptical of skill and virtuosity as the goals of art. On the other, man, the proverbial 10,000 hours of practice and the attainment of virtuosity do open a lot of doors of possibility.

Last night Mary and I went to the curiously named Pirate Captain up on Franklin to pick up some noodles. I got spicy Karaage (Japanese fried chicken, mmmmm) Udon and, most likely unadvisedly, ate the whole thing. I tend to do that when I get take out when I really shouldn't because I was pretty full before I went for the second round. A stupid habit. But that place makes some good noodles. I do hope it survives.

Dead Lions

Just before lunch I polished off Dead Lions, the second of Mick Herron's Slough House series. While it was good, it was maybe a bit of a comedown from the first one. No matter, the series still holds water and they merit reading. I just won't rush off to get the next one next week. Instead, I have added it to my list of things to buy (all of them books), which is maintained for me free of cost by the largest online purveyor of goods in America if not the world, at which Mackenzie Scott was one of the first employee.

One reasonable question that arises at this juncture is whether I should hold onto the book now that I have read it or whether I should return it to circulation by taking it to a bookseller and allowing them to buy it from me cheaply, mark it up and sell it. Jamie Fiocco of Flyleaf Books -- who recently took a turn as President of the American Booksellers' Association -- told me that used books provided Flyleaf with higher margin than new ones. 

Then again, after we had some built in bookshelves put in downstairs before our event for Josh back in December, I now have some emptyish bookshelves. They are actually mostly filled with office supplies and crap I bought from Home Depot but never used because I was too busy reading and writing, but they yearn to be occupied by books. If I don't cull my collection at some point, it will just evolve into a problem for our kids in the future. Then again, they are resourceful kids, and if one of them decides to occupy this house when we leave it sometime in the future, they can just keep the books and grow the collection over time.

Missing out on some big things

I awoke this morning feeling pretty good, then I realized it was a work day. That's not a good sign. It's not so much that I dislike what I do, it's more that I suffer from having to deal with too many of the quotidian details of people's planning. Our organization hasn't matured enough for me to delegate enough effectively. We are working on it.

I know I know. Cry me a motherfucking river, you may well be thinking.

One thing I haven't really put enough time into pondering is AI and where it will actually be useful. Mostly I wallow in the dystopian but very real concerns about things like deepfakes and the influence they may have on politics. Today I read a very hopeful story in the Economist (you knew that was coming) about ways AI may be very useful in things like education and health care in the developing world. Lots of good people trying to do good with the new technology.

As I've said before, the really big issue here, I think, is alignment and leadership. For any of these efforts to work they need to be developed and implemented in places where people fundamentally believe that society is stable enough that tomorrow could well be better than today if they work together. So at the top level you can't have really corrupt regimes trying to steal all they can and whisk it away to a numbered account in Switzerland or an apartment in London, Dubai, Moscow, or even New York, or trying to let the Wagner Group come in and help them crush their opposition. It's a hard ask but we have to believe in it and work towards it.

Letting go of hot sauce and salt

My nephrologist team suggested that I dial back on salt in response to my mild hypertension. This, it goes without saying, is a hard thing to do, though I understand the principle and the rationale and I even get it when they told me to cut down on food that comes in boxes, cans, and from restaurants. They had it all tied up in some nifty acronym which I have since forgotten.

In truth, I am trying. I have given up adding salt to anything whenever I can and keep in mind their injunction about hyper-processed foods. Needless to say, it ain't easy and I am far from anything vaguely resembling 100% compliance.

At the same time, I am making an effort to cut back a little on my tendency to put hot sauce on as many things as possible. I don't have a specific health directive around this effort, it has more of a strictly aesthetic/ascetic goal, namely to try to reconnect with and better appreciate quiet pleasures, to find more in less. So far, so good.

Off the Road again

Returned late yesterday from my second ski trip out west with college friends. In many regards, the results were much the same. I had a nice day in Boulder with Leslie (this time augmented by a freshly-retired Walter). I escaped unscathed by injury and didn't even gain weight despite eating pretty freely while out there. I improved my skiing, but didn't push myself too hard.

In terms of hanging, this year's trip was an improvement over last year's because I was more used to being with this bunch of guys and knew more what to expect. We never were able to quite arrive at something to watch after dinner that was perfect for everyone. What was different is that rather than try to go through the grueling work of squaring that circle perfectly, the outliers just peeled off and went to bed. 

It's late now and I've got to get on with the day. I had taken a short hiatus from the trying to jam blog posts in every day but Danny was working hard to convince me that regular practice is essential for any flourishing practice. I'm still not certain if 240 is the right number of posts to target for the year. Does a number like that promote the production of dreck?

Upcoming wedding

I opened Facebook this morning (it tends to happen sometime during your average day) to find a post announcing the engagement of Emily, daughter of my good friend Eric from college. I started crying from joy immediately. I don't know why I was struck so hard. I think that, as an almost 58-year old, we are getting to the place in our lives where we should be going to more marriages to offset the steady cadence of funerals, mostly those of our parents' generation but also, to be sure, of some of our peers. Like Rick a couple of weeks back.

Emily was two or so when we wound up our honeymoon at Eric and Anna's place outside of Rome back in '97. We have very sweet pictures of her running around at Castel Gandolfo (the Pope's summer place up in the hills south of Rome) and being wrapped in a warm blanked coming out of her bath. Super sweet memories.

Really I have nothing else to say. A great way to start the day as I get ready to head out to Colorado to ski with other college buddies.

Of Wisdom Teeth and the Raging Zombie

I had held off going into these details for a little while, but for posterity's sake I think this story needs to be told. As I have mentioned in passing already, Graham got his wisdom teeth out a few weeks ago. The process did not pass without drama.

Graham has never been a fan of needles and having blood taken. Who really is, after all? With him this aversion is a little stronger than average. So when the assistant to the oral surgeon asked whether Graham would rather have his blood sampled before or after he went under general anesthesia for the procedure, he was agitated. Then they put him under and did their thing on his mouth.

When he awoke, he was not in good shape. Mary had taken him, and when they brought her into the room when he was coming out from under the drugs his mouth was all bloody because he was pulling the gauze out (it had evoked a reaction from his choking aversion) and he was banging his head against the back of the dental chair.

Then he sprang into action. When the assistant leaned over him to unhook something he grabbed her, pulling her closer to him. He said he had wanted to grab the pens in her pockets to use them as weapons (which makes me doubt the wisdom of watching all those John Wyck films with him). They called in the whole team to restrain him -- it was Mary and four members of the team.

Somewhere in there Mary texted frantically that I needed to come help her get him out of there. Then she changed her mind. Then again when they were in the parking lot (though had rolled him out there in a wheelchair. He refused to get in the car, later saying that he was thinking it was cold and he wanted them to be cold). Eventually he got in the car and came home.

When he was walking in the house he looked like a zombie. Very pale with blood caked around his mouth. When we were asking him about what he was thinking he said something like: "I just wanted justice. They had hurt me so I wanted to hurt them.". 

We were all gathered in the kitchen, all four of us plus Mary's brother Rob. Shortly after Graham made the above statement, Natalie was walking between the kitchen island and cubbard cabinets when she fell to the ground. She was on her back and her eyes were moving back and forth as her whole body shuddered. I freaked right the fuck out. We were all afraid she was having a seizure. I got up and ran to my phone to call 911 when she came to. Apparently she had fainted. 

Whew. What a morning. Apparently what happened to Graham wasn't crazy uncommon. Maybe 15-20% of people have short-term adverse reactions to general anesthesia. I think it didn't interface well with his autism and anxiety about having blood taken, so his reaction was pretty extreme. 

Mary and I talked and decided not to discuss it with him for a few days, but when she did, he said he recognized that he had been in an altered state and had behaved badly.

Pushing back on self love

Somewhere in my consumption of content the story of Gladys McGarey flashed across my field of vision. She's a 103-year old doctor who is still working. Intrigued, and with a lot of Audible credits to burn through, I snagged her book and started listening to it in the car.

Turns out McGarey was one of the earliest practitioners of holistic medicine, so I've been hearing a lot about that. One of the things she advocates is the power of love and, specifically, self-love. She instructs listeners to do things like hug themselves.

My interest was flagging a little bit and I started listening to another podcast (The Vital Center by Geoff Kabaservice, a guy I went to college with who literally wrote the book about moderate Republicans and is probably as close to the purest-bred RINO that Trump et al could imagine. Really a smart guy) which is interesting, but then I realized that my problem with McGarey's book is not so much that I was bored with it but that I was resisting it. There's a lot of truth in there but not the kind of truth the grinder in me predisposes himself towards. So I've gone back to listening to this joyful old doctor and reflecting on how it might apply to my life. 

Progress report

A few posts ago I mentioned that I was undertaking the project of a financial daily reader. Part of me still thinks that's a good format, because I'm obviously used to writing regularly in short and daily chunks. Another part of me (and I'm not about to say which part that is) wonders if in fact I would be better served to try to write a coherent book-length argument about the nature and practice of personal finance before decomposing it across the span of the year. I have at least begun the process of laying out the daily reader across months. It could be that the process of assembling the thought chunks will instead lend itself to a unified argument.

I have not yet managed to disentangle myself from DuoLingo. In our semi-annual confab in support of my meds maintenance, my psychiatrist confirmed what I had read, namely that there are real cognitive benefits to continued language study. Not that he knows everything, but I'll respect his opinion.

Most importantly, I have begun to settle on some guitar gurus to help me, especially with Travis picking, the very bedrock of all finger-style guitar. I need only take the leap from watching videos to regular practice. Or, rather, I need to stop watching videos and just practice more.

What has suffered from all this, sadly, is my TV viewing. Such is life. But as I watch less, I feel enriched by the way my back queue of potential shows and movies to watch gets deeper and deeper on the platforms.

Me and my big mouth

When Thomas came and built us built in bookshelves in the rec room downstairs before our event for Josh back in December, we had to fill them with something, so we harvested a great number of books from the overflow of the shelves in Graham and Natalie's rooms. When they were trimmed down, we went to the only place left, the shelves in my office. So now I have a lot of unsightly empty shelves up here, which is dispiriting and, frankly, a little embarrassing. Really there's onlm one solution to this conundrum and it's rather obvious. I need to buy more. I picked up a few at Flyleaf on Friday, but that really only nibbled around the edges of the problem.

So when Mary complained about the boredom of running around the lake every day -- which I understand -- I saw an opening and suggested that maybe we should break out and go for a hike down at the White Pines Preserve down between Pittsboro and Sanford. I also wanted to take a quick gander at the progress of Chatham Park and, obviously most importantly, stop into Circle City Books in Pittsboro, far and away the best used book store on our end of the Triangle. I was able to pop through and snap up eight solid books in about 15-20 minutes, several of which were on my Amazon list (thanks for providing us with such great list functionality, Jeff!), one of which was an impulse buy at the register, a book on Bill Gross of PIMCO which I can mentally characterize as work.

And now there they are, gleaming on my bookshelf, calling out for attention (actually I am making my way through Ted Chiang's Exhalation, which I had found on Natalie's shelves). Problem is, I absolutely, unequivocally promised that I would caulk the upstairs shower this weekend. We even stopped at Lowe's last night to pick up the supplies. I fear there is no escaping this.

(Monday update: somehow I had neglected to publish this. The caulking is 95% done. Turns out getting "all the old caulk" off, as everyone says you should, is practically impossible. Caulk removal is very much a Pareto process, and the last 20% is a vexing challenge)/

Shabbos squared

As I'm sure I have shared before, Martin Luther King Jr Day is perhaps my most favorite holidays, both because it commemorates a great guy and also because there's almost nothing ever scheduled this weekend, which makes it a time of proper rest at the end of the much busier "holiday season." Today I kicked off the holiday weekend properly with a postprandial nap on my beloved office couch. Later I will play tennis.

I am studiously foreswearing anything resembling work, including home improvement tasks. This latter actually takes very little effort for me, as it is something I have rather successfully practiced for many decades now, with little to no negative impact on my marriage. I probably shouldn't even be blogging.

Financial daily reader

For years now part of my morning routine has been reading from a daily reader from Al Anon, which dispenses a page-length nugget of wisdom to help one center. There are three such readers historically and a new one just came out. I'm sure there are many more examples of the genre, because for example Tolstoi compiled one of sayings from others, but it is largely insufferably didactic, which is really no surprise because that's how Lev Nikolaevich rolled in his later years. Nick Murray has one that is dedicated expressly for financial advisors. I have read it for years but may give it a pass in 2024 to let it refresh itself in the fertile garden of forgetting.

I recently listened in the car to Morgan Housel's The Psychology of Money, a worthy listen and read. It got me thinking that he should produce one of these daily readers of financial wisdom for a general audience. But then I thought, hold on a minute, why should he do it? Why not the Grouse?

So I have stubbed out an outline document for this project and begun the process of thinking about a flow. This may draw attention away from the blog. I may have to beg your forbearance, dear reader.

Graham's mismatched shoes

My apologies to those of you who read this yesterday, I thought I was saving a draft and accidentally published. Let's consider that a trailer for the actual post.

We took Graham back up to his dorm room Monday night, after I had left work on the early side to take him to Nordstrom at the mall to buy him a nice shirt and pants to match his nice jacket so that he'd be ready for any interview that might come his way this semester. Along with the syringe for irrigating the spaces left by his removed wisdom teeth (another tale yet to be told), he left his good black shoes at home. For some reason he had decided to bring them home for the holidays.

Because Graham hates shopping, his shoes are an old pair of my shoes. In the morning I was gathering them up so Mary could take them to him, I was looking at them and remembered how comfortable they were and actually admiring how passably fashionable they were, especially as I'm in my 50s and don't have to give much of a fuck about what anyone thinks of my fashion sense any more. So I put the left one on.

Strangely, it didn't seem well molded to my foot. Then I looked at it and compared it to its pair mate: it looked much newer. Then I turned them over. This is what they looked like.

Clearly, this was not my shoe. It was, rather... AN IMPOSTOR. But a clever one at that. It is the same model, the same size, just a whole lot younger (not unlike the relationship of Graham to me). 

Did his roommate have the exact same model shoe in the same size? Did they get confused with a team mate's shoe on some Quiz Bowl trip? When asked Graham, not surprisingly, had no idea. We may never solve this mystery, Dear Reader, but we will appoint a Special Counsel to dig in and get to the bottom of it and report back, in the fullness of time.

Pets in the lifecycle

A quarter of a century ago, I thought about pets primarily as means of young adults getting ready to be parents. Learning to deal with other beings' excrement and need for food, recreation, etc. Learning to manage one's temper when another being gets riled up out of an understanding that failure to do could have feedback effects on the other. Etc. etc.

Our cats are getting older. In recent months Rascal had been puking a lot, more or less on an every day basis. I had discovered that some seltzer did a pretty good job at getting it out of almost everything, and indeed may have underreported this to Mary while she was away in Alaska just because she would have freaked out a little. By November it was getting old, so Mary took her to the vet and discovered that Rascal was hyperthyroidal and that there was a treatment for this: rubbing a cream on the inside of her ear for every day FOR THE REST OF HER LIFE. Fortunately, it seems to be working for now and we are now on a vomit-free streak of a week or so. Also, the cats are being much more productive in the litter box of late, I'll leave it at that. There's a clear understanding around the house that the cats are old (14 or 15) and may not be with us forever. 

All of which leads me to believe that pets have the additional function of normalizing the over life arc within families. Watching pets live out their lives prepares all of us, and kids in particular, to experience the deaths of loved ones. 

Not a particularly deep insight, but one that was drilled home this morning as I scooped the litterbox and carried out a bag that had been filled up in two days. Of course, there's also a positive interpretation of that. Rascal had lost a lot of weight due to her hormonal imbalance and may just be eating more to regain weight. Also, both the cats have been drinking heavily from the sweet sweet piney water of the Christmas tree, which will soon follow its own lifecycle and exit the home.

Grinding and Building in the age of generative AI

Generative AI tools have been out there for over a year and, in my typical not-so-fast-follower fashion, I haven't really engaged with them. Instead, I continue to grind on building competencies the old fashioned way. I keep studying languages on DuoLingo, reading books and magazines, and writing this blog, instead of upskilling myself on various tools that could perform these linguistic and intellectual functions for me.

There's a fundamental dichotomy here. Is the task to figure out how to avail oneself of various functionalities the most efficient way or to build strengths for ourselves? We approach this problem differently based on the type of tasks we need to perform. As far as transportation is concerned, we long ago pretty much gave that up and decided that we'd adopt tools (trains, autos, planes, boats) to get us from place to place rather than cultivate the competencies that would allow us to do that better under our own power (walking, running).

That decision has facilitated modernity, but it has come with many many costs. Traditional communities and cultures have been shattered as it became easier to visit distant people and places. As local cultures have slipped away people have struggled to reconstitute them, sometimes rather farcically. The overcoming of distance has also caused us to overconsume carbon with our cars, trucks, planes, asphalt and deforestation.

Much will be gained as people outsource more and more tasks and functions to AI, but much will also be lost. We just can't clearly envision what that will be.

Conservation and consumption as forms of prayer

As the holidays draw inexorably towards their end (Graham returns to campus this weekend), we continue to chip away at their bounty in the kitchen. We have a lot of bread and sweets (many of these rather mediocre) to work through, moreover largely without Graham's participation since he is still eating a constrained diet while his mouth recovers from the removal of his wisdom teeth last Friday.

This week I am working at home instead of going in to the office to spend more time with Graham and nudge him towards a little greater proactivity in his search for an internship for next summer. As a side effect of that I am mindfully working through our surplus of baked goods, bearing in mind what I wrote about a post or two back, namely that I could stand to lose a few pounds.

This morning for breakfast I made a one-egg omelet with a sliver of smoked salmon and put it on a piece of toast from the batard that Mary had brought home to supplement some festive meal a week and change back. This loaf had spent some time in the freezer, mind you, when our surfeit was particularly large. Now it is being whittled down.

As I sliced it I was transported back to the early days of the pandemic, the really good times, when we were all sequestered together in our homes and worried whether there would be enough of this or that sort of food or paper product in the store. That condition rather focused the mind and aided appreciation of what we had, so that every meal was perceived as an occasion for gratitude. It is a good place to be. 

Family time with boo boos

Just now I accidentally placed a check mark on my task list on the place that indicates I have blogged for the day, when in fact I hadn't. So, let me quickly blog.

Yesterday evening, with our family now whittled down to just Mary, Graham and me and with no parties to go to, we were quietly determined to have a proper family evening at home. It did not go off without mishaps.

First off, the spoon bread. With Graham's limited tooth capacity and also his dislike of mashed potatoes, we're a little limited in what we can feed him. I thought of spoon bread, which had been one of the many specialties of my aunt Francis, AKA The Bread Lady from the early days of the Carrboro Farmer's Market. I grabbed her cookbook from off the shelf and set to work. 

Unfortunately, when it came out of the over and I tasted it, I knew at once that something was amiss. A quick glance back at the recipe brought me to the culprit: I had put dramatically too much baking soda in it, having mistaken the quantity of sugar called for for the quantity of baking soda. It was inedible. Being greatly disappointed, after dinner I tried again, this time doubling the recipe because I wanted there to be enough for me while also leaving a bunch for Graham. This batch came out much better.

Later, we went through the old "find a movie that everyone can agree on" two-step. The first couple of movies, sourced from a NY Times 10 best of 2023 list that featured a number of holiday season releases, were not yet available for streaming or not at a reasonable price. So we tried a recent Wes Anderson release: Asteroid City. In short, it sucks. Wes Anderson has gotten too much validation from the world and descends deeper and deeper into self-indulgence, supported by A-listers such as Tom Hanks and Scarlet Johansson and many others who agree to participated. Don't waste your time.

Still, it was nice to have all of us together watching. It would have been even better if Natalie was still around, but she is off visiting friends around the lower 48 already.