Are we done?

Mary had what we hope will be is the last surgery in her breast cancer treatment on Wednesday. All went well. We are seasoned old hands at this by now.

After staying at home all day yesterday, I am headed into the office today because, after all, the weekend is fast upon us and as we have learned during the pandemic, if one has an office, one should use it to give that little absence to help the heart grow fonder. Living on top of one another 24-7 rarely engenders optimal marital relations.

Took a couple of Japanese mystery novels back to the library the other day and picked up a few books, which immediately hopped the queue and got in front of the myriad unread books on my shelves. Funny how that works.

A conversation at the office with a guy about his intricate shelving system at home made me think about my own, somewhat helter-skelter system. Last night I started just cramming the books I happen to have read onto a shelf of their own, by definition separating out those I had not read. Pretty revealing.  

25 Years

Yesterday marked 25 years since I entered the private sector at Princeton Consultants after walking away from a post-doc at Columbia's Harriman Institute. The post-doc basically paid me (albeit not that much money) to do nothing more than polish my dissertation to make it a publishable book -- which I wasn't even doing as I focused primarily on finding a next job. So leaving seemed like a foolish thing to do from one perspective. 

But Natalie was well on her way at the time. Mary was about seven months pregnant and Natalie joined the family exactly two months later, joining Leslie and also Mary and me (who were married on that day) as a member of the June 7 club. So it made sense for me to get started early so that I'd know shit from shinola before my paternity leave kicked in a couple of months hence.

As I have discovered, the business world is not all wine and roses. But net net, I'm pretty sure I've learned more by leaving academia then I would have by staying in it. Who knows? It's not really a fruitful line of inquiry. I'm here. I'm doing fine.

Little Marco

Running a little behind, so quickly: Marco Rubio in recent days said something like "I've revoked 300 student visas or so and I think other nations would do the same: you don't want people coming into your country and opposing the government and its policies." The Secretary of State on the United States of America, the erstwhile home of the free.

Spineless idiocy. Trump was right to deride him as "Little Marco."

One of the values immigrants bring is new ideas, which means occasionally they will oppose the government. Deng Xiaopeng went to France as a student and ended up a member of the Chinese Communist Party there. You can be sure he wasn't supporting the French government in all of its endeavors.

The things that Deng saw there formed the kernel of an understanding that would allow him to lead post-Mao China out of the complete self-immolation of the Great Leap Forward of the 50s and the Cultural Revolution of the 60s-70s and bring hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and become one of the primary economic drivers of the last 40 years. He wasn't perfect. He ordered troops to move on and crush the uprising at Tiannanmen Square. But net net he did a lot of good in the world, and not just for the Chinese. All of our living standards are higher than they would have been in the absence of China's rise.

We want immigrants for their ideas, so we need to accept that we will disagree with some of them. Just like we have historically tolerated neo-Nazi speech in America. Which we are coming to regret. 

Making Mary smile

I woke up a little early this morning and so went downstairs early for my early morning routine, very much the favorite part of my day. Thankfully, after a drought, the Post Office finally decided to start delivering my Economists* again so I don't have to bring my laptop down to have something to read while eating breakfast. 

So I made coffee, meditated, did a small increment of stretching and core work, sampled the Tao and some Emerson, ate breakfast, and then did a little Japanese on Duolingo. 

Then Mary came downstairs. I kissed her good morning and then made some witticism or something, I have no idea what it was. She smiled and laughed a little.

It's hard to describe how much this means. After 30 years together, half a lifetime, coming up on 28 years of marriage. After the innumerable instances of my "wit" to which she has been subjected, to be able to still elicit a warm smile and laugh on occasion (not at every joke, to be sure. She quails and rolls her eyes not infrequently) is incredibly meaningful.

Later OneDrive threw some memories at me. "On this day in 201X" Photos from spring breaks in Austin, college travel with Natalie. I am such a sucker for that stuff.

*Still no relief on The Atlantic, which hasn't come in months

DOGE at Kitty Hawk

While Mary and I were down at the Outer Banks over the weekend we stopped into the Wright Brothers National Memorial. First off let me just plug it. It's a really great museum. It focuses on the Wright Brothers' process of achieving flight through various stages. Four years in a row they came back to Kitty Hawk from their home in Dayton, Ohio. After the second year (1901) they were despondent at their lack of progress over that summer, then they were invited to speak at an event and they discovered that they knew more about flight than anyone else there and they had been learning through their struggle.

At some point in time I looked over at the front desk and the young guy there had his right hand raised and was talking to some young children there with their parents. It looked very much like he was swearing them in as honorary park rangers, something like that. A really good touch.

There were some tributes there that seemed like they might get wiped away by DOGE's furious drive to wipe DEI from all things US government. There was a picture of a black guy -- I think his name was Dunbar -- who collaborated with the Wright Brothers back in Dayton. There was a portrait of one of the Tuskegee airmen.

Later I went up to the guy at the front desk and asked if there had been an effort to wipe some of the DEI stuff from the exhibits, like the portrait of the Tuskegee Airman. I should clarify that the guy at the front desk was not of exclusively European descent. He looked like he might have a Latino parent or grandparent or something. He surprised me when he said he would honestly prefer it if that stuff was taken out, then mentioned that they had briefly lost a couple of employees, including the people who took payments at the booth at the entry to the facility. Instead they had put a QR code where people could choose to pay. Apparently their receipts diminished and they quickly changed course.

Part of me wanted to stop and discuss his earlier response about removing the portrait, but he was at work and needed to focus on that so it would have been inappropriate. Interesting nonetheless.. 

Tax $ @ work

Fabulous spot at Merchants Millpond State Park in the Great Dismal Swamp.

While sitting here a park ranger came out to get a canoe some people had rented. He looked like an oversized Boy Scout in his olive shorts and ranger shirt and was carrying a can of Sprite, which he deposited on a tree stump. On his belt he had a walkie-talkie and, to make all of us feel safer, no doubt, a handgun.

Which got me to wondering. How much does it cost us to outfit public employees with guns? The guns themselves cost some hundreds of dollars. Training employees to use them, per the internet, is not a big expense for most public safety organizations. So the biggest cost is likely legal settlements when someone gets shot in error. And paying the defense attorneys. Maybe some insurance.