Things the kids say

Mary sent me this article from the New Yorker "Downton Abbey" with Cats, and I must confess, it pretty much nailed us.  We've been watching Downton Abbey with Natalie as much as possible this year, and it's been a ton of fun, since she never watches television with us, preferring to watch downloaded sitcoms on her iPod from the comfort of her bed.

So, allowing for the fact that John Hodgman wrote the article with his tongue lodged pretty fully in his cheek (so I have to assume it's better as a written document than it would have been delivered orally), he intimates something rather interesting:  other people often don't really care much about stories you tell about the things your kids say or used to say.  The irony here is that, for me, nothing is more poignant than remembering the kids our things used to say, and the richest moments in life are often when we are milling about the kitchen, perhaps pretending to prep food or clean while secretly trying to get the other one to do the lion's share of it, and Mary or I digs up some chestnut from back when the kids were younger:  "You remember how Natalie used to get us confused and call me 'mom'?"  I might say, and we get a warm feeling.  There's not much better than that in life.

And I post that sort of thing here on the blog, and I'm pretty sure that at least our family members, particularly those who know and love our kids but live far away, dig it.  But maybe it's of little interest to others.

Similarly, lots of people will say of Facebook:  "It's a time sink.  I don't really care to see pictures of other people's kids doing sports or getting ready for the prom."  Me, though I can't spend that much time on it -- because it can become a time sink -- I love that stuff. Like Amy's pix of her kids playing volleyball, or Jeff's of hunting and fishing with his son. I think it's because it's less about the specifics of this kid or that doing or having done thing X, but because I identify so strongly with the love for and pride in their kids that the parents demonstrate by posting the pics.  And often the outfits are great too.

A couple of points here on different levels:

1. It is one of the key tasks of representational narrative art to bridge these gaps between the specific (picture of or anecdote about a child) and the general (the love of a parent for a child).  Good realistic novels and movies do this.
   A further codicil to this thought:  to the extent that social media usurp this function from traditional forms (novel, movie, etc.), they threaten the economics of those industries.
2. Although one hates to overgeneralize (but hell, it's my blog), I think that most people get this:  they want to be in a position to be proud of their children.  It is to some extent a first world, bourgeois luxury to be able to do so. If you are trying to subsist and need to have a lot of kids so that you'll be certain someone will be there to take care of you where you're old, you don't have that luxury. 
   
   This means that it must be a goal policy to seek to universalize this luxury to the greatest extent possible. There is a delicate dance between letting the private sector and markets operate as freely as possible and having the public sector step in and supplement and control in the right places, and we will never figure out the perfect balance between them.  Optimizing the fluid and dynamic relationship between public and private sectors what policy is all about.

Parataxis

Some years ago, when Boris Gasparov was teaching a course on medieval Russian narrative, he called our attention to something curious in one of the very earliest examples of literary prose in Russian.  Maybe it was the "Life of the Archpriest Avvakum," maybe something older, I dunno because I sold my 12-volume set of medieval Russian stuff to some Princeton graduate student when we moved from Wilton St to Linden Lane back in 2003.

Anyway, it was way back there.  And what Gasparov pointed out was this:  in the narrative, events were conjoined almost exclusively with the word "and".  What this indicated was that the author wasn't used to narrating things sequentially, that the very act of telling a story was uncomfortable, which makes sense when you think about moving from a literary style conducted exclusively in verse, which permits and downright encourages looping back and deviating from sequence, to one in prose. That kinda blew my mind.

But when I blog, I find myself overusing the word "and" a lot. On good days, in the morning in particular, thoughts just flow out of me naturally and seem to be naturally related, so it makes all the sense in the world to me to tie them together with a bunch of "ands". But the writerly way is not to overuse any given word, for example, the word "and." Moreover, often the "andness" of the connection between the thoughts I'm tying together is resident exclusively in my mind, and what I really need to do is go back and tie things up for the reader in a more considerate fashion. In a sense, I need to go back and clarify what it is I mean when a say "and", perhaps much as Clinton needed to clarify the meaning of the word "is.":

The Solace of Leaving Early

This book, by Haven Kimmel, had been stacked on top of my chest of drawers for some time before I promoted it to the stack on my bedside table.  Where, in turn, it sat for a while longer.

Then I picked it up.  And blew through it in a week.  A lovely book, really compelling, about a geeky girl who walks out of a PhD program in lit to return to a very small town in a pretty eccentric family with lots of repressed shit of its own.  And a couple of small girls orphaned when their parents killed each other with their respective handguns. And a quirky preacher who is equally well-suited to this three cow town. I think most readers can do the math and see where this story must go, but when it gets there, it's really quite moving.

Oh hell, I can't even begin to do it justice -- I had all sorts of fine thoughts about it the day before yesterday but now my brain is encumbered by a belly full or treats from a function this evening -- but I really had a hard time putting it down, I promise.

It even featured a quote from the same John Donne poem we had read at our wedding.

Stores

In preparation for tomorrow's neighborhood potluck at our house, which will happen on a warm afternoon, I was cleaning some of the rather massive stores of kindling and mid-sized branches I had put up on the screened-in porch in advance of the big storm a week and change ago, in fear that we might lose power.  Mary characterized it rather short-sightedly as "an eyesore."  So I cut the pile down by about 2/3rds and tidied up what I left up there on the porch, which I want for some nights in the 20s we have coming up next week.

Now, if you must know the truth, I really don't like the concept of "yard waste."  I view branches that come down as either potential kindling, or future compost.  Seems stupid to me to have a truck come and haul the stuff off somewhere, where it can become compost for someone else.  So, having gathered all these fine branches up, I was loathe to part with them.  So I did the only rational thing to do, I carried them up under the deck where they can await next year's burning season.

And, in this big urn type planter, there was a cardboard box, and I wondered to myself:  what's in there?  Upon closer inspection I found that it was.... some very lovely pieces of good-sized firewood that I must have carried down there about this time last year, in preparation for this year.

Next year, I tell ya, is gonna be prime burning time.

After academia

I met yesterday evening with a guy who, like me, left academia and entered finance.  He told me how he was so glad he left, because of "the pettiness, the infighting," other stuff, I can't remember.  He said he was glad he had gotten a PhD, for some reason, I can't remember.  It wasn't really convincing.

I hear this line of commentary/criticism often from people who have both left academia and who have remained within it.  Here's what I think:  universities are institutions like others, and some of them are large and complex.  So their institutional dynamics are complex.

Having been out in the corporate world for a while, I don't view academia as being particularly messed up.  Complicated, yes.  Threatened and challenged, for sure.  For-profit (and non-profit) corporations have their own difficulties and tendencies to fight through and surmount.  Universities and non-profits at least have the benefit, for the most part, of being populated with people who by and large, in principle, aligned with their employer's mission.  This alignment is not easy to maintain, for many reasons, but that's a good starting point.

As for the people in academia, I have no qualms.  I have only good memories of the people in my department, I learned lots of valuable stuff there, both in the classroom and outside of it.  I miss seeing them.  I wish they had done a better job of supporting me when I was on the job market, but maybe they did a better job than I thought they did, and I just shot myself in the foot because of my own internal conflicts and contradictions.  That's life.

There's always something to do

At my uncle Ballard's funeral weekend before last, I was talking to my cousin Bill.  Somehow the topic of home ownership arose, and Bill said "the thing is, when you own a home, you'll be sitting in your chair and you turn your head and you see something that needs doing.  There's always something to do."  And I confess, I wasn't 100% in agreement with him.  I was thinking that it depends on how much of a fix-it guy you are, and I'm not always that much of one.  And somewhere deep in the back of my mind that made me think I was less of a man.

But as I was sitting in my armchair earlier this morning, working through some of my stack of AM reading, I looked over and saw the pile of wood in the yard that needs chopping.  And I turned my head to the right and saw a Swiffer there, and below it the sun highlighting the layer of dust on my very old copy of Commodores:  Live, which we danced too in the late 70s, which in turn leans on my copy of Proust's Swann's Way, which I was supposed to read for class sometime in the mid-80s, but which I only read maybe 80 pages of, because it was damned hard and boring, especially given the other things I had on my mind (the parties, the ladies, and the like, or, to be honest, "the kind").  And, at this particular moment, that dust remains.

And yet, home maintenance issues do beckon: I still need to get something on the deck, and it has come to our attention that our mattress exceeds considerably the age at which mattresses should be replaced, and there's some efflorescence in certain walls in the basement, meaning we need to do some small things to keep moisture out of them.  We have one quote, but need others.  And we're having a neighborhood party on Sunday, meaning there's some touch-up painting needed on dings the kitchen cabinets -- at the tender age of two and change -- have acquired.  And I'm sure many more tasks will come to light and rise up the task list before the party, which is only meet and right, because hosting is the great motivator for cleaning and tweaking, which is nothing but an attempt to present to guests an impression that you have a handle on the inexorable processes of nature.

So yes, there are always things to do, the question is always:  which of them are worth doing, and why?  And do they bump the other things that need tending?  For example, the blog.  For it is all part of the great dance with entropy, which is just another face of flux.

Variously good to see things in Durham

Had lunch with my friend Scott today in Durham.  We'd been thinking we'd go to the new pizza place, but it hasn't opened for lunch yet.  What are they thinking?  What Durham needs is specifically a slice place, where you can go in and get a couple of slices and a soda for $5.  It doesn't need another dinner pizza place, which is unlikely to compete well with Pizzeria Toro (if the owner Grey could ever stop it from freaking setting itself on fire, that is).

As we were leaving, Scott remarked that, for one, the old bank building on the corner of Mangum and Main would be make a good restaurant, and, for two, that downtown Durham needed some places one could shop.  Upon closer inspection, the building in question was being gutted (for what?  I don't know), and there was a new bookstore, primarily used books, down Main Street towards Five Points.  Ask and ye shall receive.

There's also a new soul food restaurant as well as a new cafe (owned by some ex-Green Beret philosopher dude) on Parrish as well as a new pub on Main between Mangum and Roxboro.  And ground has been broken on the new apartments to rise right near the old old courthouse.  Now they just gotta figure out what to do with the hulking Albanyesque thing that is the merely old courthouse.

And the gutting of the old CCB building proceeds apace, for it to be turned into a "boutique hotel."

I didn't even have time to head off into the warehouse district to see what's going on there.

Chapel Hill is getting lapped.

Fiction, FOMO, and the male ego (at least this one)

Sometime recently, my contemporary Liesl Schillinger made a comment on Facebook about guys of a certain age not reading much fiction anymore, and I said to myself "Hmmmmm."  I fall into that bucket myself.

For the last little bit of my life, I've been reading predominantly if not exclusively nonfiction, and for the last year or so it has been dominated by biography.  Admittedly, not just any biography, ones by Robert Caro.  I just got to the end of the 2nd volume on LBJ, and not a minute too soon, because I'm about ready to shoot the guy.  And when I've not been reading nonfiction or bios, I've been cleansing my palate with mysteries and post-espionage fiction, mostly Ruth Rendell, Alan Furst, and Olen Steinhauer. Admittedly, I did somewhere slip in Jhumpa Lahiri's most recent collection of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth, which was quite good, until she started writing in the 2nd person, which I just have limited tolerance for.

But, by and large, for the last couple of years, I've had a hard time biting into serious fiction and chewing, preferring (to extend the Francis Bacon metaphor) those that are predigested by their genres.  And I have to wonder:  what's up with that?  For me, at least, there's an odd utilitarianism at work. Given my limited time to read non-professional books (nights, a little during the the weekend), I find myself nonetheless grasping for ways to explain things to myself, and if when I was younger I worked more in a speculative, abstract vein, pondering the evolution of society, the psyche, etc., by now I'm just trying to get a handle on shit.  What's up with China?  How does power work?

The younguns have the concept of FOMO (fear of missing out), and I remember it well.  When I was in my 20s, any weekend night when I was single, I was desperate to figure out where the party was at, lest I might miss meeting the One. Or, failing that, an opportunity to tie one on.  Now I'm experiencing an adult form of FOMO.  What if the world passes me by and I don't get diddly done by the time I get carted off?  And so, the focus on the concrete, history, deeds of the great and grand, as a yardstick for myself.  I reckon.

But of course, as I say it, I realize how silly it is.  Comparing my insides to other peoples' outsides, as they say...

 
At least, in the case of Caro's second volume, we have LBJ set off against Coke Stephenson, from whom Johnson stole the 1948 Texas Senate race.  Stephenson is a great figure, an utterly mythic self-made guy, stoic cowboy who rises in politics because he is serially called by the citizenry to ever-higher office, but maintains his love for his self-built ranch with a river running through it, and who returns to his ranch when defeated by Johnson to dig post holes, fall in love again, try cases in court, swim in the river, and drink whiskey by the fire.  It is, no doubt, a romantic portrait if perhaps not exaggerated, and it is set off against the manic amoral efficacy of LBJ by Caro, who is posing a very clear question about the ends of life.

But for now, I'm on to some fiction.  Haven Kimmel's The Solace of Leaving Early.  Am liking it.

Squirrelling biomass

In keeping with the wood theme of yesterday, before the big storm blew in, I got busy in the yard gathering wood to burn in case we lose power.  The wood I've been chopping has some curing to do, won't be ready till fall, yet there's enough of it there that I'm loath to shell out for more wood now.  So I'm a little short.  Certainly am short if I need to heat the house for a few days, which, knock wood, it now looks like I won't need to.

So I dove deep into the back yard looking for sizable branches that would be worth burning, the kind of thing the neat-minded are sometimes wont to call "yard litter."  I think of it as brown gold. And I got a bunch, limbs that had fallen off trees or ones that I had trimmed a year or two back when I was trying to open up the view from our rear windows down onto the lake, and then had let lie there.  All in all, a good hunk o'biomass.

Of course, not all of it is perfect. Having been lingering on the ground for a while, some of it has a little moss or a little white stuff on it.  OK, mold, a little.  Technically, if you go by what the EPA says, I shouldn't be burning the stuff, because the mold spores get into the house.  Turns out, wood is supposed to be kept dry.

This was, honestly, a surprise to me, because when I was growing up, we burnt wet wood whenever it felt right, which was often. My dad was of the opinion -- and it was substantiated -- that if the fire was hot enough anything would burn.  So we would chop wood and leave it laying about on the ground or stacked outside, uncovered, until it was time to burn it.  The key was, of course, to have some dry stuff to burn to get started, and then we would throw whatever we had in there.

In retrospect, this is sort of ill-advised alcoholic damn-the-torpedoes bravado, made practicable by the fact that we had a wood stove (so any mold spores would just get sent on up the chimney), not an open fireplace as we have now (after we got rid of the wood stove because it was rather 70s, and not in a good way).  Which returns me to the question:  do I burn what I got, or not?  Do I waste all that effort of yesterday afternoon, gathering up some of this less than perfect wood, or do I just burn it?:

Chopping wood

I've been chopping wood of late, since the power company took down trees on our street and my friend Greg brought me a maul.  It feels good, takes me back to when I was a teenager and dad and I would go out and chop wood to feed the woodstove.  It was totally a hobby, no doubt, a nostalgic turn, but I liked it, and I like the kind of tired my body gets when I do it.  Ditto for raking, which is one of the main reasons I don't use the leaf blower.

It reminds me of Roy Atwater, the old black guy who I rented from on 15-501 towards Pittsboro just after college, who always said that a good day was when he'd work hard enough to fall asleep on the front porch. I get that.

At some point in time during his poet/prophet of simple living phase, my dad opined that I'd be better off getting a job doing something simple and physical. It was when he said shit like that that I wanted to a) slap him and b) go get wasted, because it seemed so disrespectful to me and the path I had taken.

But sometimes I think he may have had a point.  In fact, there is wisdom in much of what he wrote.  It's just that he was so overbearing in his presentation of it, and he himself never really executed well on it.

Diner, College Park, MD

Early Sunday morning, mom, Leslie and I had breakfast with our cousins Carol and Annette at this diner.  It wasn't fancy.

On my way to the loo, I passed an older African-American couple, dressed up to go to church.  He had on a nice suit and tie, but she was the one who was noteworthy.  She had a hat with some costume jewelry in a triangle on the front, and a blouse also with some spangles of some sort.  Not over the top like one sees sometimes, she was just dressed up to go and give thanks and praise that morning.  It was a good look.  And she was quite pretty, in a rather austere way.

He was having some french toast or similar breakfast fare, but she had a plate of vegetables cooked on the grill.  I'm talking broccoli, cauliflower, etc. Serious vegetables.  At 9 am.  That is some hard-core discipline.

Sausage-making

Am rounding the corner on the second volume of Robert Caro's bio of LBJ, wherein our hero -- with the help of his Texas patrons -- debases himself before ultra-reactionary funders and then outright steals the 1948 Senate election from Mr. Texas, celebrated governor Coke Stephenson.  It really is quite foul, how it happened, and right now all I want to do is get through the book so I can have some time away from LBJ and his cronies to digest.

And this is, in the end, Caro's message, at least what I take thus far.  Both Robert Moses and LBJ were -- each in his own way -- crooked scumbags.  Moses, at least, began as an idealist of sorts who became corrupted by the power and money to which he became privy.  LBJ was from a very young age quite slimy, a troubled child with deep deep insecurity about some basic guy stuff, like physical strength and comfort in his body.  What they shared was energy, an understanding of the craft of politics and where the levers of power were, and a relentless focus on getting things done.  In the end, what each of them got done was a very mixed bag.  In the case of Moses, mostly negative, in the case of LBJ, more positive on balance, though there was that little thing about Vietnam.

I will keep reading for sure, but I'm about ready for a little break.

Decompressing

And so, after 5 months of being more or less chained to my desk for a succession of very solid work weeks while grinding through the 5 topic area courses of the College for Financial Planning's CFP® curriculum, I'm done for now.  Passed my last exam, now have one more course before I can sit for the final board exam in July.

Thus, I am faced with that other question, the big one, what's next?  I have a big spreadsheet of firms to reach out to, one conversation already ongoing with a firm and, thankfully, some trips and social events already lined up on my calendar so I don't have to kick everything up whole cloth.

And, to my right, my task list, filled with all manner of chores and small tasks I've been putting off, could probably keep me busy for weeks.  Most pressingly, change the oil on the Prius, probably need to have the brakes looked at on the Volvo because 1. That always needs tending and 2.  There's a mild shudder when I travel up around 70 on the interstate.  I just walked downstairs to get a banana and was reminded I need to call Marvin about putting some sort of sealant on the deck, which he pressure-washed a few weeks back (at a most reasonable price, I might add!).  Better stop, the list goes on and on.

So I must balance the high-level questions (should I go for a safer salaried job at a larger firm or take the risk of breaking out into a wholly fee-based construct in which I would have more control over my life over time), with the smaller ones.

Which is to say, it's life.  Just another day.  But a rainy one, so hopefully Natalie's away game in Durham is cancelled and I don't have to sweat the question of getting over there to spectate and dad.

Dancing man plus

The very sad news of Pete Seeger's passing yesterday took me back to something I hadn't thought about for some time.

It was Spring, 1990, a lively time for the Grouse, to say the least.  I had been translating Ilya Kabakov, along with other Russian Conceptualist and Post-Conceptualist (no kidding)* artists for a magazine and a couple of gallery shows, so when there was a big Kabakov show at the Hirshhorn in DC, along with something else I wanted to see, I hopped in my car and drove up there one weekend I had off.  I even took my beat-up classical guitar, figuring I might do a little busking.  I was kinda freewheeling.

Now, since I had just finished college a couple of years before and I knew that people my age had gravitated to the Adams Morgan area, and since I had neither money nor inclination to spend on lodging, I figured I would just drive up to DC, go to Adams Morgan, and walk around and pop into bars and restaurants until I ran into somebody.  So that's what I did.  And in the first restaurant I went into I saw my friends John, Gretchen, and maybe somebody else I knew having sangria.  So I joined them at there table and asked John if I could stay with him.  "Sure," he said (at least that's how I remembered it).  And it's a good thing it worked out like that, because, though Spring was on its way by then, it was chilly out.

John had a nice place, and he put me up real nice.  In the morning, I took the metro down to the mall and was headed across to the Hirshhorn, when I saw a big crowd of scruffy types gathering.  I went over to check out what it was. Turns out, it was a launch party for a movie called Romero, starring Raul Julia, about a Salvadoran clergyman who faught the military regime there and got iced for his efforts. I saw people carrying banners, and figured I might find even more friends there if I tried, and saw that there were people up in a sort of tower.

But when I tried to get over there, I was told that it was for press only.  Not to be easily deterred, I told them that I represented Social Text and "several Russian journals," or somesuch, but I didn't have my credentials handy.  Somehow they let me in, I dunno, and when I went in I saw that there was a staging tent, so I went in there.  And as soon as I got in there, there was Pete Seeger with his banjo, dancing and glowing and showing some cool lick to a guy I'm pretty sure was Bishop Paul Moore. I didn't really know that much about Pete Seeger, honestly, I was a young badassed punk rocker, but I knew who he was, and he had a great smile, a great aura all around.  And, in the back of the tent, I saw something that was even more amazing for me, a true hero:  Ed Asner.  He was sitting there quietly in the back, on his own, just chilling.

Now, even then I knew that it was better not to bother celebrities too much, but for Ed Asner I had to make an exception. He was great in Mary Tyler More, better even in Lou Grant (note to self, check Netflix), but I really loved him from a schmaltzy TV movie they used to show every year around Xmas, The Gathering. I'll spare you the details, because I'm running on here.  Anyway, I went up to him, introduced myself, told him how much I loved his work, asked him what he was working on, and then left him in piece, apologizing for bothering him. To this day, that was probably my best celebrity encounter ever, precisely because I loved the guy, I told him that, and then moved on.

Then I went and saw the art show, and it was nice too, then drove home to NC, taking some back roads for some portion of the way, just because that's how contrarian I was/am.  I'm still amazed I pulled off that trip and found a place to stay.  It was a fine day.



*ps. I had never heard of Conceptualism either before that, and I knew me some isms!  I also had never heard of the Hirshhorn, but somehow figured out where it was, in those pre-internet days.

Being sick

A thousand pardons for the relative silence, I've been studying hard for the last few weeks, getting ready for the Estate Planning exam, and then I got sick.  Not once but twice.  Mighty stuffed up and achey, to the level where I don't even have the strength of will to read books, so I've dipped into the pile of New Yorkers that sporadically pile up on the floor next to my bed after I rescue them from the purgatory that is Mary's bedside table.

And so I found myself reading an article about Aaron Schwarz. Not being particularly hip anymore in matter interweb-related, I never knew who the guy was until he hung himself, and even when I was flipping to the article I was wondering if he might be some minor actor the Coen brothers like.

Then I remembered, and it was very touching to read about the guy, this delicate boy genius of the internet, Quixote of information wanting to be free, had he been more task-oriented.  Clearly somewhere on the spectrum, ripped by affective disorders and sensory issues and ulcerative colitis, he reminded me a little too much of members of my family, wandering around with fine if grandiose ideas about changing the world.

It reminds me how important it is to stick to my knitting when I get too ambitious in my thinking about writing. Rest. Study. Earn. Save. Take kids on trips.  Raise $ for the causes of friends, and go to meetings and be of service in 12-step programs. And yes, blog a little. It is all too easy to drift off into delusions of grandeur.  Time to go downstairs and hang with the fam.

Code Talker

Over our last couple of family drives, we've listened to the book on CD of Code Talker:  The First and Only Memoir by One of the Original Navajo Code Talkers of WWII, by Chester Nez.  For those of you who don't know what a Code Talker is -- and I didn't until I had a kid who was gaga for WWII -- they are Navajo Marines (and maybe members of other armed services) who were used as primary communications personnel during the war, since the Japanese had managed to figure out all other codes we could dream up.  There were no grammars of Navajo, nor foreign speakers, so it was indecipherable to them.

The book tells the story of a Navajo kid who first gets sent away to school forceably, made to speak English and cut his hair (something the Navajo didn't do) and otherwise do the things the white man told him to do.  Eventually he enlists and then becomes a Code Talker.  Then he goes across the Pacific with the Marines, all the way to Okinawa, whence the nuclear missions took off.

It's a fine book, at once matter of fact but unapologetically detailing the experience of a group of people who were not treated well by the US government, but who yet identified with it enough to want to fight. But by the time he gets out into the really brutal Pacific battles, especially Iwo Jima and Okinawa, much of the experience is just straight up battles:  what it's like to be there in the trenches with the smell of sulfur and charred skin suffusing everything, the pain of stepping over the corpses of people you had breakfast with a few hours ago.  For a bit I was thinking:  "this is pretty generic, we're not getting much of the specific experience of being a Navajo here."  But then I realized that that was the point, at a very basic level he was just a soldier, at once scared shitless and in the thick of it. And he spends a lot of time talking about how he grows close with a few white guys, especially these two guys Smitty and Georgia Boy.  So by the time Georgia Boy takes a slug to the neck and is spurting out blood I was basically in tears, wondering if the kid is gonna make it (I won't spoil it for you).

I've seen a bunch of WWII movies, including Saving Private Ryan, but this book drove home much better than them the raw nastiness of the war, and the depth of the bonds formed there.  Those of us who haven't had to fight wars don't get it, can't possibly get it.

And one other thing.  The Common Core is really pushing kids to read nonfiction as opposed to fiction, on the premise that so much of their life will be dealing with nonfiction texts. At a certain level, I think that's a pretty spurious idea:  just let kids read, be happy they're reading whatever.  But if there are a lot of books of this quality for kids to read, I'm all for it.  I dunno if it's supposed to be a kids book, but Natalie had surely read it before, and knew it well.

Taking one for the team

Mary made some soup this week, splitpea with saffron and almond slivers. It was, by consensus, not the best of her many adventurous soups -- though I did just have my fourth meal of it and, bolstered by a Mexican green hot sauce, it was just fine.

In any case, last night when Natalie and I got home from her ultimate game and we were discussing what was on the dinner menu, I suggested the soup, which she deflected, on account of having had it for lunch. I said I'd have it for dinner, and Natalie said:  "way to go, taking one for the team."

God, how we love em.

Comfort in the weeds

At the dinner for dads of kids on the spectrum last night, partly to suck oxygen away from the brash new dad who was dominating discussion, I asked the group's facilitator (whom we really want to hear more of anyway, as he's been in the field for decades and is a font of wisdom) if he could bucket up the 3 to 5 categories of things that motivate kids/people on the spectrum.  The was after he had interjected that guys at the table were projecting their own neurotypical ways of thinking about motivation onto their kids, for whom these mindsets weren't applicable at all.  I just wanted to keep the mike in his hand.

So he listed them out, and they were categories I was used to, but I hadn't thought of them as motivators as much as preferences or just attributes.  For instance, structure and routine, visual cues, and facts and detail.

And that last one got me to thinking.  I too have shown a marked preference for facts and detail throughout my life.  From reading encyclopedias and memorizing sports stats (including the baseball cards of pretty obscure people) to knowing dates in history, which gave it structure. Later in life, in the for-profit realm, I've done well as the detail guy on projects, but at times was accused of "majoring in the minors," which was the owners of the consulting firm where I worked way of saying that I wasn't rising up to the big picture, putting myself in the client's shoes, and thinking more strategically.  And I think that was a fair criticism, which I worked to get past.

The fact is, there is comfort in the details for me.  Things that can be memorized can be mastered.  So, right now, studying for the CFP also offers some of that, a discrete, testable set of material with lots of details.

Last night I wanted to ask the group leader if he thought that people on the spectrum preferred facts because it offered them the possibility of mastery, or even of dominance, but I didn't want to be too pushy with the flow of conversation.  And then the guy with the big mouth got wound up again.

Ahh well.  My seafood pasta was delicious.

Where credit is due

Early in my career in consulting, back in 2000, I was called on to do some mock-ups of some screens we were building for a client. I had experience in HTML and with Dreamweaver, so this was no problem for me.  Actually, I must have been fairly new with Dreamweaver, because I remember getting excited about all the nifty things I could do with tables.  And I figured that the generous thing to do was to give the client options from which they could choose.  So I made up a bunch of different screens with really different looks and feels.  Some of them looked like Kandinsky, or Mondrian, or Malevich, you know what I mean.  I was very proud.

So we called in the whole project team, us and the client, and walked through the screens. I don't think they had ever seen anything like it.  They were very polite to me, I think.  They may have shared other opinions with my project managers, Webb and Dinesh.

So, that Friday, back at our firm's home office, me and somebody else got sat down for a lecture on basic application screen design by the firm's founder, Steve.  "Fellas," he explained, more or less, "Here's how it works. You've got a master menu in a frame across the top, these are your nouns" (and, 13 years later, I look at the screen to my right and I see tabs for "Projects," "Users," "Upgrade", "Support," and "About").  "Then, along the left hand side of the screen, you put your drill-down menus, which typically consist of verbs." (Again, glancing at my other screen, I see more or less the script being followed).  "This is how it works."  Part of me felt constrained by this heavy hand of normativity, but I had to admit it worked.

And then he went on. "The browser is going to more or less evolve into a replacement for the operating system...."  Now, I didn't know much about computers, but that sounded kinda loonie to me.  I knew that an operating system was in fact software, something like the software equivalent of a large office building.  Back in 2000, the browser was, by analogy, a broom closet.

Today, we took delivery of a Chromebook.  Now, I know that Chrome the operating system and Chrome the browser aren't exactly the same, but the OS is really just an extension or expansion of the the browser, and I fully get how a URL really just designates the location of a file, and.... In any case, hats off to Steve, in this case.  He really got it pretty early.

The aging of satire

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole is one of those books I had occasionally looked at and thought about, and kinda thought I should have read, but I hadn't.  So when I saw a copy close to hand and grabbed it, figuring I'd read it.

Only around the 70-80 page mark, I began to encounter some resistance. That's about where I have to decide whether to push on through a book, or let it go.  I'm inclined towards the latter with this one.

Here's the deal.  Toole definitely has a keen eye and a way with the words, some very humorous stuff here, some fine satire. Reminiscent of Gogol or, even more so, Ilf and Petrov (The Twelve Chairs, The Golden Calf), the great chroniclers of the foibles of the New Economic Period of the 1920s in Russia. The problem is, it's satire from a different historical era, and if it's not top rate, aged satire it often suffers from the reader's distance from what's being made fun of.*  And, although Toole won a Pulitzer... well, they give those every year, and it's kind of a beauty contest. I don't think the book rises up to transcend its era. In fact, it's kind of hard to figure out what he wanted to do with the novel.

There's one other fundamental problem. The satirical author/narrator has to consider him/herself better than what he's satirizing.  And that wears on the reader, and it's really characteristic of white guys in their 20s (Toole killed himself when he was 32).  I know.  I used to be one of them.

"Realistic" fiction, at least at a some basic level, seeks to subordinate itself to what it describes. Endless ink has been spilled on its inability to do so, but at least it tries. And even as it ages, I tend to appreciate the humility of its aim.

Anyhow, I won't hang the novel up altogether, I'll put it on the stack next to my bedside table and see how it does.




* Satirical movies age better, because, for one, they're shorter, and they also have the additional element of typically being filled with gifted physical comics with goofy faces and finely honed timing

Cryptic Silence

Returning to the long-neglected "things the kids say" category, we turn now to the phrase "cryptic silence."  This is a category Natalie often invokes when she has asked permission to do or eat something, and we have failed -- either by virtue of spacing out or (just as often) -- because I am deferring to Mary, the household chief nutritionist and imposer of dietary discipline.  Typically Natalie will be asking if she can have a banana for her fruit serving, because it is the easiest thing to get and eat.  I often will let her.  Mary, however, considers that to be slacking, when I should really be encouraging her to eat a fresh pear or a mango or something.  So I pause, to let Mary pass judgment on the question.  Mary, for her part, is often either not focused on the question or (I suspect) wants to hear what I say to see if I am being a fruit slacker once again.

Into this space Natalie slides with her catchphrase:  "I'll take your cryptic silence as a yes," at which point she grabs a banana and rips the top off before we can stop her, making it a fait accompli.

This evening, while Natalie was perusing the offerings for Duke's TIP Program for this summer, her eye alighted upon a course listing for something to do with courtroom stuff, mock law for smart kids, something like that.  All of a sudden, I imagined her in the courtroom, cross-examining a witness for murder:  "So, were you at home on the evening of the 7th?", and I could see the witness freezing in the box, at which point Natalie pounces on her:  "I'll take your cryptic silence for a yes!"  Case closed.

North Pelham, Lincoln Ave, and other wanderings

Over vacation I had to get from Larchmont to the Cross-County a couple of times, so I took Lincoln Ave through what I always thought was the Bronx, but I guess is Pelham, NY, now that I dig into it, just across the border from Mount Vernon.  Just before you get to where you get on the Hutch to to Cross-County, right about 5th Ave, there is now a Verizon Wireless store and a TD Bank on a corner that had previously been small, locally-owned businesses.  And then, in the low building where there used to be a beat-up convenience store that gave way a couple of years ago to a Dunkin Donuts, there is also a Hot Yoga studio.  Gentrification, it seems, is creeping north.

I would once have decried the loss of local character, and certainly there is some of that.  But, generally, money and services are being infused into a neighborhood that was a little bit hurting before. Admittedly, the jobs created may not be that great, but the residents should be able to do more on foot than they used to, as services are better. Maybe the TD branch took out a local bank, can't remember. As always in life, pluses and minuses.

Also went into Yonkers to meet a friend and went to a Thai restaurant (Accent Thai, on MacLean), which had a perfectly serviceable Pad-See Ew.  There was a sushi place across the place reputed to be just fine.

Starting the fresh

A couple of stories of interest on the front page of the Wall Street Journal today.  One on alternative lenders who are cropping up to loan to small businesses that are underserved in the risk-averse, post Dodd-Frank, ZIRP world of a shrinking ecosystem of traditional lenders.  Of note in this article are alternative underwriting and payment techniques used by the lenders, as well as the higher annual interest rates they charge.  Down in the right hand corner, there's another about some guy pseudonamed Russell Blake in a Hawaiian shirt and dark glasses who writes and self-publishes a novel every 5 weeks or so on Amazon's platform.  Sounds like he's working his butt off, but making good money and creating a whole new business model.  I may have to sample a book, just to see.

I love this stuff, am continually amazed by entrepreneurial creativity.  Of course, this kind of thing was highly valued in my household when we were growing up, what with mom being a leader in women's small business circles and dad's general disdain for large organizations and groupthink of any sort.

So you'd think I might be more inclined to wanna be starting something,  got to be starting something.  And, indeed, I have business ideas flash through my mind occasionally, but I typically don't follow up on them, or do so only half-assedly.  Probably that's because of my continued experience of hearing my dad talk up this crazy idea or that, and never seeing anything coming to fruition.  Being a sole breadwinner is probably part of it too.

I have seen the idea bandied about that Obamacare, far from being a dead hand on the business community, will actually in time facilitate a more robust startup culture, insofar as it decouples individuals' healthcare from dependency on employers.  By sometime around 2017-18, we should see how this is panning out.  If individuals can insure themselves (and self-insure themselves by living and dying smarter) affordably, it should work.

La Place de la Concorde Suisse

Just made my way through this little 1984 tomelet from John McPhee, which can only be termed a bagatelle.  It's all about the Swiss Army, in which all males of a certain age are supposed to serve, and how it is everywhere, and how the Swiss are at once intensely serious and, in their own way, not so serious about it at all.  How prepared Swiss soldiers are for whatever may come their way, but how they enjoy themselves immensely with wine and schnappes and bread and cheese and beer and lovely meadows and snow in their preparedness.

It is significant that McPhee gave the book a title in French, for the book is sprinkled throughout with snippets of conversation in French like so many lardons, which McPhee declines to translate for the reader, as it is assumed, quaintly, that the sophisticated American reader will read French. My French is good enough to know that I didn't miss anything in whatever I didn't understand.

The key point is that the book hearkens back to a time in American history, during the reign of Volcker at the beginning of the most recent major market cycle, when there was still something of an old money East Coast aristocracy within which reading the New Yorker and speaking French were still kind of assumed.  And McPhee's voice was one of the greatest of that time, the William Shawn era, when articles were long and narrators reigned supremely and ironically over their subject matter, thereby domesticating it and making it safe to be contained within the coffee and side tables of Manhattan and the places that emulated it.

It's a nice little book, probably not McPhee at his best, but I'll take a little break from him for now.

To be absolutely clear. Happy Holidays!

And so, here it is, the New Year is upon us and still no seasonal letter, no card, the least I can do is blog.

All in all, it's been a good year, but not without its up and downs. The early part of the year kind of had the oxygen sucked out of it by the declining health and the death of my father.  This is, as you all well know, a big event. My father and I were not all that close, as he was a challenging guy to be close to, but still he was my father, and it took a lot out of me.  On the last day of his life, I learned a fair amount about his childhood, and that was both saddening and enlightening, and brought an odd closure.

As the year wore on, we had to watch a close friend lose a child to cancer, which was.... ( insert words here), but put everything in perspective. Where we strive to keep it, that everything.

The highlight of the year was without a doubt our trip to northern California.  Until this year, our kids had been virtual prisoners of the East Coast, venturing as far as various parts of our northern neighbor Canadia, but easterly nonetheless.  So we took them out west, to San Francisco (where we were hosted and vehicled by a good friend and constant grousereader through the years), and as far south as Big Sur.  Of this highlight trip, the absolute pinnacle came from a day when we drove south from Monterrey to Big Sur. As we were walking back from one of the several astoundingly beautiful beaches we sampled, Natalie turned to me and said "Thank you so much for bringing us out here" As those of you with teenagers and those who were once teenagers may recall, they don't say this kind of thing every day, so that was special.  Then a couple of days later she scared the crap out of us when she almost got killed crossing the Pacific Coast Highway at another spot.

(click on the picture to see it bigger and get a better idea of how lovely my family is!)

Natalie extended her time out west with a week in the desert with my mom, who took her to the Grand and other canyons, as well as the Hoover Dam and whatever else they could drive to.  Natalie also did her last summer as a camper at Gwynn Valley, which was a little sad, because it's a special place for both of us. Back at home, it was a big year for Natalie as she tried out team sports, both ultimate frisbee and field hockey, and enjoyed the team part, if not always the sports part. She is doing so well academically that it would appear vain and boastful to provide any detail at all. She has basically read all the books that are written for kids her age, so any suggestions for further readings are appreciated.

As for Graham, he continues to astound us with his drive to command incredible levels of detail around military history and technology, which he shares with his uncle George in conversations of prodigious length.  He has sucked up a wide range of random other erudition while watching the Military Channel and H2 and while reading whatever he can get his hands on. And he's expanded his taste for foods tremendously, and moved forward in his martial arts classes, all while maintaining incredible cuteness.

Me and Mary, we're fine.  We've settled into the renovation, the garden is mostly filled out, thanks entirely to Mary's yeoperson efforts.  Mary has gotten more and more involved in the local autism and special needs education community, while I have spent the year transitioning into the investment advisory profession, and am happy to have moved from serving corporations to working with individuals. Due to Mary's consistent efforts, we're eating less meat, especially during the week, and I am increasingly getting to a place where I am not only at peace with this seeming deprivation, but appreciate it, because as time goes by we come to better grasp the concept, long espoused by people of a certain age, of being thankful for our health.


In closing, let me thank all of yall who continue to take the time to stop by and read my blog. I am always astounded and delighted when, in this context or that, somebody tells me they read it.  There is no end of text in the world, so much to read, so the fact that you make the time to read mine is a great honor and privilege.

Frozen, and drenched

Yicky rainy day here in Westchester, so I went and saw Frozen with Sadie and the kids.  I was told that it was animated, and that I reminded Sadie of the reindeer, so I figured it couldn't be all bad, but my idea of animated was something along the lines of Despicable Me or Toy Story, not one of these things containing pseudo-people.  But, in truth, it was pretty earnest, and there was a lot of singing, and I mean singing from the heart.  It was in fact an animated chick-flick.  And in the middle of it I got a bad attitude, and I thought of running out in the middle of the movie to go to the sporting goods store there in the complex to snatch up some post-holiday bargains.

But I stuck it out.  And although there continued to be singing, it turned out to be not so bad.  Natalie declared it to be one of the best movies ever, and Graham liked it too.  Sadie had already seen it twice, so we knew her opinion. Altogether a reasonable way to spend a blustery winter Sunday.

Meanwhile, poor Mary is stuck out in the rain somewhere in the city.  At least she is with her near-BFFs from grad school, presumably with warm beverages.

Tennis and scallops

Went and played tennis today for the 5th time in recent months, after playing soccer thrice in the fall.  And running 9 miles or so yesterday.  And swimming a lot in the summer.  And a lot of frisbee with Graham.

I think that both quantity and diversity of exercise are -- in the charming language of management consultants -- absolute success metrics for me.  The more I exercise, and the more different ways I do it, the better I feel.  Full stop.

Now, it is true that Kevin and I went out for an absolute, pull out all the stops fish feast frenzy last night at Sammy's Fish Box out on City Island.  We got both a fried platter, which had basically a smattering of everything except belly clams, and a broiled platter, with a couple of everything else. The scallops were particularly kicking in both cases.  Sammy's pretty much blows your mind with quantity, and it was good too.

And it was nice to see that we were minorities there.  The clientele was largely African-American and/or Hispanic. Man, I really don't need to go too far into this, it was all good, America at its best, though if you had plunked a couple of Europeans down there I'm sure it would have occasioned lengthy lectures about the excessive portion sizes served by American restaurants. Bloomberg himself might have tried to pass a law.  Whatever.  I'm going back.

Egads

Sitting here in the Bill Blass Reading Room (formerly the Main Reading Room, or somesuch) within the Stephen Schwartzman Building of the New York Public Library.  I know the library has been the beneficiary of largesse in the past (I also saw the name Astor on something, and that is a much older vintage of money, and I'm sure a Carnegie or Rockefeller funded the place from the jump), but this is a lot of naming rights.  Particularly noteworthy in view of the level of aggression we have seen from Schwartzman's firm Blackstone in the rental housing markets of late.  America's rental dollars, paying for the grandeur of this reading room.

It is also rather ironic, given the role the main staircase of the library played in the movie Network, in which the protagonist talk show host Howard what's his name ascends those stairs before being ushered into a large old school conference room (maybe also here in the building), in which Ned Beatty - the personification of corporate America - reads him the riot act:  "You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and you must atone!"
It does, in fact, take a lot of money to maintain a place this nice, and it is easier for the private sector to pony it up than a municipal government, particularly in a place like New York where the wealth disparity is so constantly IN YOUR FACE. But still.

A new path

Of all the times I've been running or walking in Larchmont, I would have thought I'd been down every road in the neighborhood between the Post Road and Manor Park at least once, but today, on my way back from a longish run, as I was cooling down while walking, I spied a short lane I hadn't been down.  An old service alley between some of the rather large houses that populate the streets.  And I'm thinking:  it's a short little street, what of note could I possibly see in the 3 or 4 backyards I'm likely to pass. But for the sake of exhaustive inventorying, I sallied forth.

And there it was, as I came past a hedge, back to my left, standing at the edge of his shiny garage with what I'm sure was nice cars in it, was some handsome investment banker-looking guy, dressed in his around the house wear in expensive shirt and jeans, sneaking a cigar.  He was visibly taken aback, wasn't expecting anyone to come by and disturb his stinky reverie, and I nodded hello and then faced my eyes forward, because, hell, let the guy smoke his cigar in piece.

But there was, in any case, a vignette around every corner, as there so often is.

Long day

I have meaty and thoughtful posts to write, but for now I am still processing yesterday's drive up the East Coast so I will just go stream of conscious on it.

The day began well.  Although we left, typically, some 45 minutes later than our nominal start time, we did it without anybody getting particularly mad with anybody else about running behind schedule.  I won't name names.  It is an intricate dance between family members between those running late and those getting mad, normal co/interdependency that makes us a family.  The main thing is getting better about it.

There was a lot of traffic on the 95 corridor.  I'm sure that surprises no one.  As a change of our normal arrangement, I had Mary do the driving through the crucial Fredericksburg, VA to ~Delaware Memorial Bridge segment of the trip so I could concentrate on a new, data-driven navigation methodology.  Which is to say, I more or less stayed glued to Google Maps/Traffic and attempted to do real-time route adjustment in response to traffic conditions as they arose.  And it actually worked pretty well.  We skipped the nasty piece of 295/Balt-Wash pkwy just north of DC, where for some reason it's always backed up, hopped back over to 95, and probably shaved 20-30 minutes off of total drive time.

And then, after taking 895 under the Baltimore harbor, we hopped on 40 and missed a lot of the volume as the 95 ecosystem goes back to a single pipe (after the considerable redundancy of 95 tributaries in the Washimore delta).  Not that that there wasn't traffic there.  Nor, for that matter, was there a Starbucks, as the demographics don't support it, but at least we kept rolling, for the most part.

But it was tiresome.  And then we took 95 north through Philly, which seemed rational, and the traffic kept flowing until, for seemingly no reason, there was a bunch of backup near Yardley, PA, normally a sleepy Bucks County seat of ruling class good taste.  And we, worn the hell out, were like "what's up with this?"  And as we passed the exit for Yardley, we saw:  a massive, industrial-strength installation of Xmas lights.  Not naturally occurring, for sure.  The most uber-Griswoldian thing I ever saw, and at the same time just another gross commercialization of the season ($20/$25 a carload)*.  And here it is:

Recent moments

I was just reading Josh Hilberman's (aka Josh Carmen) very funny blog when I realized that, dammit, I was supposed to be writing myself.

I was at somebody else's house yesterday for a kitchen-warming party and found myself blathering on at length about the adventure of our lost cat and the impostor who sought to usurp his place in our household (read here if you missed that episode).  I found myself almost unable to omit details, and I even asked the person I was speaking to if I should speed up.  "I'm enthralled," she said.  She has a dry wit, but she seemed relatively earnest, or in any case just earnest enough.

But I have to wonder why it is I feel drawn so inexorably into what I can only think of as "narrative recursion," a feeling that no story can be really complete without going back a step or two to give the reader some tasty background tidbit.  On the other hand, it is getting late, so I should really just stop before I start theorizing at length.


As an aside, let me just say that we just watched Jane Campion's Top of the Lake on Netflix.  A seven-part mystery for the BBC, it is in many ways a transposition of much of the basic material of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest -- minus the technophilic genius of the female detective -- into the jaw-dropping beauty of some mountains in New Zealand.  It is good watching, some nasty sexual violence implied but never too graphically onscreen, and lots of cleavage and sex from our refreshingly normal-looking if fit heroine. I displayed the virtues of having a PhD in literature by guessing two key plot twists several episodes in advance.  Not that it's too hard.  Worth watching.

Sitting down

Just finished a piece by John McPhee on structure, from the New Yorker exactly 11 months ago, now that I look at the cover.  I found it by Mary's side of the bed, where the magazines often pile up mightily, and it is one of my spousal roles to cut the piles down to size and to sneak them into the recycling.  It is an ongoing battle against one of the elemental forces of nature, much like those McPhee himself liked to chronicle.

Of late Graham has been slowing this process, as he has shown considerable enthusiasm for the cartoons in the New Yorker.  Somewhat hastily, I offered to start explaining them to him.  It would be, I thought, a rather restful process, when compared to the somewhat primal wrestling matches I have described here.  Problem is, the cartoons can be a little complicated, so I end up needing to do a lot of translating to make them comprehensible to the 10-year mind. For example, the magazine has certain set gags it likes, like a person coming into or already into a shrink's office.  Or the man crawling through the burning sand of the desert. Situations that are perfectly easy to understand for those of us who have been imbibing media all our lives, but less clear to those who survive, as Graham does, on a pretty steady diet of the Military Channel, comic books, and Wikipedia articles about tanks. 

Just as often there are cartoons about sex, often with a couple getting into or already in bed and some elaborate sight gag about the man trying to convince his mate to have sex, which is a concept we haven't gotten around to yet with Graham.  So I just describe it as "kissing and snuggling under the covers." He gets that.

So, anyway, the McPhee piece reminded me to write.

Discipline

I am now in the middle of studying for my 6th exam of the last 10 months, which is the fifth in the CFFP/CFP series, after doing the Series 65 back in February.  This process is a valuable lesson in submission and humility.

All too often -- maybe 15-20 times a day -- I read through some unbelievably boring and granular point and I think "why in the hell would I ever need to know this?"  Each time it is like a little paper cut to the brain, and each time I just have to remember that there is absolutely no profit to resisting.  I have to read it, make a reasonable effort at comprehending it.  Maybe I underline it in the book.  And move forward.  If I need it to pass the course exam, it will probably show up in the review materials.  Ditto for the final final exam. If I need it to help clients later on down the road, that will become apparent too, in due time.

But, I tell ya, the temptation to bitch is hard to fight.

People walking by

One of the fine things about our house is that, despite the fact that it's back in the woods in a confusing subdivision with hilly and winding roads, people are always walking or running past.  It's on a natural circuit for getting around the lake, since there's a crucial cut-thru path just next to our house.  So we get lots of traffic.

Like the really old guy who walks backwards down the hill, always wearing a baseball cap.  Or the guy I call "Sal", for his resemblance to the character Sal from Dog Day Afternoon, who gets waxed by the cops in the end.  This Sal look-alike speaks Russian, I heard him speaking it with what I presume to be his daughter one day when I was out running.  I need to talk to him sometime, but I'm always so durned busy.

Anyway, today it's like 70 degrees out, so I've got my windows open.  A little while back, this woman who lives over the hill apiece -- like me a Chapel Hill native, CHHS circa '98 -- was walking with her 4-year-old daughter, in a tank top.  They were singing "Up on the rooftop Old St Nick" or however that goes.  What's not to like?

El Indio

Our family went to the Florida Keys on spring break in 1981, even though I think my dad was on crutches at the time from having injured his knee at a party.  While we were in Key West, he discovered a little bodega-type place called El Indio, where they served a Cuban-breakfast sandwich on really fresh and crunchy bread. I'm sure it was ham, cheese, and egg.  As I said above, it was 1981, so just having bread with any character to it whatsoever was already a huge check-mark.  We may still have been eating Roman Meal "whole wheat" bread at the time, or we could have followed the Steins' lead and moved up to Pepperidge Farms by then, which was the height of elegance for us back in the day..

In any case, both the bread and the sandwich were very good.  I remember going to get them first thing in the morning and then eating them standing outside next to the car while they were hot and fresh.  Before taking ones to mom and Leslie.  I seem to recall this being a guy thing we did, a "son-father activity," in Graham's terminology.

My dad was a complicated figure in many ways, but he had a good nose for a sandwich, or other snack foods.

The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency

Elena gave us a set of DVDs based on this series of novels, and while we, quite typically, forgot that we had them because they ended up in the back of some dusty drawer -- and now we don't even have a working DVD player -- when I saw one of the novels on one of the used shelves at Flyleaf Books I snapped it up.

And I just read it. It's not like your typical mystery novel.  Instead of having one big mystery with a lot of sleuthing and red herrings and a good bit of plain old luck, there are a bunch of little mysteries which our heroine, one Mma Ramotswe.

One of the Russian Formalist critics from the 1920s, I forget if it was Viktor Shklovsky or Iurii Tynianov or even one of the others, had the clever idea that certain types of fiction, first and foremost quests like those of Huckleberry Finn or Gogol's Dead Souls or Ilf and Petrov's The Twelve Chairs, weren't really about their plots at all.  The plots were really just devices for letting the main characters travel around and see a variety of stuff in society high, low, and middle.

Often detective novels are just that, and The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency falls right into that bucket.  The little mysteries Mma Ramotswe solves are of no consequence at all, though they do show us some of the foibles of a rising Africa, different types of shysters and criminals as well as the decent people they harm.  And it's much about letting us get to know our heroine as she herself figures out what this whole private eye business is about, having no experience in it whatsoever, and no predecessors to learn from.  And, to be sure, it's hard to not like her.  I like her.

One thing I was struck by is how comfortable and bourgie her lifestyle is there in Botswana.  She's not super rich, but she's perfectly comfortable, and she travels amongst a set of equally comfortable small businesspeople.  They drink a lot of tea and they all know each other.  It's hard not to be reminded of the Agatha Christie world, plopped down in Africa.

So I jumped over to Wikipedia and did a little sleuthing of my own. On the one hand, Botswana is pretty durned affluent.  This was written in 1998, but in 2013 nominal GDP in Botswana is around $9500 and adjusted for purchasing power parity (PPP) it's closer to $17,500, which by African standards is not shabby at all.  However, income distribution in Botswana is exceptionally uneven (although the only available data on that is stale -- from 1994), which is almost certainly because fully 62% of its exports are from "Not mounted diamonds," and a further 18% from nickel,  copper, and "gold, not monetary."  That ain't the kind of wealth that gets spread around real good.

But what the hell do I know?  I've never been there.  The author, Alexander McCall Smith, was born in Rhodesia and, though he spent a lot of his later life in Edinburgh, went back to the region to help found the University of Botswana in 1981.  So at least it's not some white guy just projecting an idealistic vision onto the country.

I'll read more of the novels, and if I ever go over there to visit, I'll report back.

Competition

Of late, because I am considering hanging out my own shingle as a sole practitioner and I have to get better accustomed to the notion of self-promotion, I have taken for the first time ever to wearing something with my alma mater's name on it.  OK, not even that, just the letter "Y", along with "1988" or something like that and then "25th Reunion" on the back.  I have always shied away from that kinda stuff, including bumper stickers, though I have defaulted to an alumni email address because I want to be prepared to switch from Yahoo mail at the drop of a hat if it keeps degenerating and because the "yale.edu" has looked good during spates of job searching.  Not that I am necessarily shy to discussing where I went to college, or even where I got my PhD.  I am both proud of it and insecure enough that I lean on that shit sometimes when I feel threatened.

It's been interesting to see the response to my new hat.  At a neighborhood association meeting, this CEO guy who moved down from Larchmont not long ago and is in the middle of the most epic multi-million dollar teardown rebuild cycle in world history, this guy looks at my hat and says something like "I'm sorry." And when asked it turns out he went to Princeton, and then quickly I learn that he spent time at McKinsey.  So, desired effect had, in that case. He now regards me as kind of a peer.

So this morning I ran into a guy from my high school down at the coffee bar at the local grocery store.  A high-powered guy, works for a big law firm in DC, ran for elective state-wide elective office here in NC and almost made it.  Went to law school at Yale himself.  Good guy.  He'd been for a run.  We're chatting and he says to me "I just went for a 5-mile run."  I moved on to catch up with my family, and it occurs to me "why do I care how many miles he ran?  what moved him to inform me of that?"  And I thinks it because that guys like us are just competitive, and whatever we may achieve we're always half-trying to one up the other.

Was my hat setting the tone for the encounter?

Ready for the holiday

Rainy day, started in the most anodyne of settings, a white room testing center on the outskirts of corporate Greensboro, near the collisseum and some random LabCorp business unit.  Not a fun place to be first thing in the morning, people nervous, and there I was joined by Monet and his waterlillies on not one but two walls. Like the waiting room of a notional dentist.

Then I took the test, did fine, on to the next.

And the next was, in fact, barbeque.  Chapel Hill's Bill Smith of Crook's has been periodically serving bbq brought in from other parts of the state, and a month or so back it was from Stamey's, in Greensboro.  A quick check showed me it was close to my test center and voila!  A plan was hatched.

By the time you are in Greensboro you have crossed the border from the green slaw part of the state (the East) to the red slaw part (the West).*  Red slaw is vinegar and ketchup based and, from the perspective of a green slawer such as the Grouse, does not provide as effective a dialectical foil to the spicysmokiness of the meat itself.  But nevermind, when in Rome one shows props. If you don't eat the local food, it won't be there when you come back.  And it was OK, and the meat was excellent, the hushpuppies so so.  But the place itself was the joint, exactly what a bbq place should be.  Homey, old tables and very old school counter.  And all washed down with Cheerwine.  What's not to like?

Before getting back out on the high school, I stopped into a used vinyl, videotape (!!!) and CD store, which, it turned out, tilted towards the oldies.  In the small "punk" section there was a compilation CD circa 1985 featuring songs by Let's Active, The Bronsky Beat, and Miracle Legion.  Hardcore.  I snapped up a collection of Yardbirds appearances on the BBC's Top of the Pops.  I had no idea that in their early days they were such a hairless pop band, pale shadows of the Beatles.  You could definitely hear how old black blues guys would have been pissed off, so lame were some of the covers of things like Muddy Waters' "I'm a Man."  Later on they got better.



* There are some establishments, such as Clark's of Kernersville, a good spot, which hedge by offering both red and green slaw.

Grinding

Apologies for mild radio silence.  Am deep in the throes of prepping for the CFP Retirement Planning exam.  I thought, "Oh, I know about 401ks and IRAs," but not like a professional, nosirree Bob.  Many layers of learning to do. Am summoning levels of discipline I haven't touched since studying for my PhD writtens, and at least then I was reviewing Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, good stuff, as well as some fairly boring stuff.  But at least the arc of literary history and evolution has a pretty clear general trend to it.

Finance is different.

Wrestling

Before bedtime Graham and I often wrestle.  We used to do it on the floor, or sometimes the couch, but over time I have found it to be more enjoyable on the bed.

This is when I usually discover that it's time to cut his nails.

Somehow, Graham always ends up winning the aggregate count of rounds, usually by something like 5-3.  I don't know how he does it.

It used to be, in fact, that I had to put up a fair amount of effort for him to win by that margin.  That is becoming less and less the case, as he gets bigger and develops more effective techniques. Particularly when I'm threatening to pin him, he gets quite inventive. I have progressively gotten him used to not doing some specific things, such as gouging my eyes or ripping my nostrils to one side or the other, but he still is quite determined in clawing into my neck and/or exerting pressure with his thumbs right behind my ears.  You see, he doesn't like to lose, even though he suspects he perhaps should.  One specific technique that he has developed is that, when I'm on top of him beginning to count to ten, he either holds my mouth shut so I can't count, or maybe just sticks his hand in my mouth, for the same effect.

It won't be long before I'm not faking it at all. Or very much, as the case may be.

Chainsaws

It is the 3rd day or so of intensive and near continual chainsaw use right near our house as these guys from Asplundh make their way up the house cutting down all branches within 7 feet of the power lines.  Often this means whole trees.  It is not ideal for trying to jam in material for the CFP Retirement Planning exam I take 6 days from now, but thankfully we've got a fine public library and I was able to arrange for a private study room for most of today.

In general, it's a pretty astounding, downright monumental undertaking to manage the above ground power lines on the east coast.  If we think back to August, 2003, the big blackout that took down the grid on so much of the East Coast, it was caused by some random trees somewhere in upstate NY near Canadia.  Now, since then, I like to think that some kind of circuit breakers have been put in place to limit the systemic impact of similar events -- and I think there have been -- but still... we have lots of little outages with no explanation, and we did in Princeton too.  Which is not to complain.  We haven't had anything in our fridge go bad in years, and if you go to sleep by flashlight once in a while, hey, it's kind of a fun family thing, it's good for the kids, I think.

Now, think about the monumental reforestation of the East Coast since WWII.  I remember reading in the New Yorker, probably an article by Elizabeth Kolbert, about how spring on the East Coast is totally viewable from space and meteorologically impactful in the sense that there's this huge carbon sink that reappears and starts pumping oxygen back into the global system.

So there's a lot of trees and a lot of power lines.  And these guys in front of our house are moving slowly, maybe 50-100 yards up the street a day.  They have to. Big trucks with cherry pickers, four guys.  They are probably union or, if not, at least relatively skilled labor, and paying to insure them is expensive too.  Map that out across the whole wooded portion of the United States, and the cost of maintaining lines is huge.

But they could have picked a better week!  Oh well, back to the coal mine I go.

The global robs from the local

OK, I got sucked into a time-sink and looked at an article on LinkedIn by Michael Lazerow, of Salesforce, talking about how big mobile is and how companies without mobile are dead, how CEOs everywhere want to be in touch with their customers and it's all about mobile.  I kinda scanned it.

Tucked in there was this gem:

Social technologies keep us connected to our friends and collaborating with our colleagues at all times. This is why social media is the number one activity online. And mobile lets us do it all as we wait for our kids outside their school on Friday afternoons.

I'm sorry, if there is one time, one time at all, when you should put your freaking phone in your pocket and make eye contact with someone else and chat in the old-fashioned way, it is when picking up your kid from school. That is when you should be building relationships not because it's good for your employer or your career or whatever, but because it's good for your life, and your soul.  The parents of the kids your kids go to school with can be, if you make the effort, companions on the great journey through life.  Sharing with them, watching their kids play with yours, watching their kids grow, there's really nothing better, nothing more to aspire to.

But yes, you stand there and worry if your boss has lobbed something at you that is "urgent" or if someone posted a clever nugget and that little monster in your pocket calls to you.

Just thinking about standing outside of Community Park Elementary in Princeton after school and seeing friends there makes me sad right now, and it makes me feel guilty for pulling Mary and my kids away from there, from the sandbox to graduation continuity they might have had.

So I'll say right now that Facebook died on my phone not long ago, and I tried to reinstall it and it didn't work, and I think that's for the best. And I'm not gonna let that rush me to get an upgrade on my phone, though Verizon Wireless really wants to push a new phone on me now that I'm out of contract. The little social world in your pocket distracts us all too frequently from the one around us.

Unconnected thoughts about benefits

There was an article on Bloomberg last week about how progressive Wall St was being about recruiting from the LGBT community.  Which is swell.  But I guarantee you, somewhere there is a consultant or flock thereof circulating with a deck of slides demonstrating that the queer community is a cheaper set of employees, that they are statistically significantly less likely to grow their households and acquire dependents for whom large employers must provide health insurance, etc.

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In general, people significantly over value dental benefits.  After basic health insurance, dental insurance is one of the things that employees value most, but policies are designed so that it's difficult to get your money's worth, and benefits are capped. My family and I are big dental users, and last year (when we were paying our own premiums, admittedly) we didn't come close to getting our money's worth.  Our premiums were in the neighborhood of $2400 and we got maybe $1600 of benefit out of it, and the most we could possibly have gotten was $4k.

Now, most people don't buy on the individual market, so they don't see the full cost of dental insurance come out of their own pockets.  Since their employer pays maybe 50, 60, 75%, it seems like a cheap benefit.  But every dollar an employer spends on dental is not spent on something else:  a better basic health policy, group life, disability, a better 401k match, a bonus, something.

In general, your spending $2k for something that -- if you brush and floss -- you have odds of 1 in 20 of some sort of bad event that might get you $4k.  Even if you don't take care of yourself, your odds are low that you'll get your money's worth.

By contrast, people dramatically undervalue disability.  There, a small outlay could cover you for a 1 in 50 chance of a significant income disruption $50-$100k and up.

I think the issue is that tooth pain is very "top of mind" because your teeth are right there next to your brain, and if they hurt, you're hurting all the time.  They are also right there in the middle of your face, so if they look bad, you look bad, and you feel badly about yourself. 

This is why dental insurance is such a fine business.  It's like shooting fish in a barrel.

Uighur beleavers

Read a story today in the Economist about a terrorist attack in Tiananmen Square in which an SUV mowed down a crowd in front of the big portrait of Mao, killing 5, injuring 38.  It is being blamed on a terrorist organization from the Xinjiang region, home of the Uighurs, non-Chinese Muslims.  The organization is said to have ties to Al Qaeda.

This would make good fodder for an espionage novel, in which the CIA cofunds Islamic terrorists to make China focus on them as a threat, rather than us.  It could be DeLillo-esque in terms of pitting the interests of a resolutely and holistically economic vision of the world against one that is "spiritual" in nature, vs. the older world-political model of nation-states and national-isms.

Somebody has probably already written this book in connection with something else and even made it into a movie, and I just missed it.

Color on the Lake

This time of year, we are beneficiaries of the most spectacular displays of color anybody could imagine. As the son rises in the east, our windows -- facing WNW or something like that down the hill onto the lake -- captures the reflection of the trees across the lake as the sun rises in soft soft light.  On a good day there's mist rising off the lake.  Really, this is best quite early, as we get the kids ready for school, and it changes quite rapidly.  Sometimes when I get back from the bus stop with Graham, at 7:17 or so, the best has passed.

I can see what drew Monet to those waterlilies. Not that I like the paintings themselves. As the 80s drew on and impressionism became the middle browest thing of all and we were progressively suffocated by it, it became difficult to look at an impressionist painting and think of anything other than the middle class seeking to demonstrate its upward strivingness through its taste for "culture."  It has long since been superceded by alt-country (which I can't yet hate) and pork bellies (which I think I've had enough of, except when our friend Sharon makes them at Chinese New Year). I should probably revisit the Waterlilies with fresh eyes, come to think of it. But I digress.

Now, I realize I'm one to talk about markers of class affiliation.  I was just going back to the Stuff White People Like website to retrieve the piece about Living by the water, when I chanced to scroll through the whole list of Stuff White People Like, only to see how embarrassingly it nails me. Oh well.

In any case, it is really nice to look down the hill at the lake.  In general, our neighborhood really is very lovely, if not as stylish and shiny as some of the newer, more aspirational nabes here in town.  As I have tried to manage the miles we drive down and as traffic has gotten worse and worse around here, I have gotten so I leave the neighborhood less and less.  I run here, play sports in the park off my backyard, etc.  From an emissions perspective, this is good.  From a being in touch with the rest of the world perspective, it is bad.

Like a good bourgeois, I kind of turn up my nose at WalMart and think that somehow shopping at Target makes me somehow superior.  But, in fact, I should spend more time at WalMart, probably, just watching people. For it is, in fact, America.

More about Caro

I continue to make my way through Caro's bio of LBJ, coming to the end of volume 1, when our hero is about to lose his first senatorial campaign. One of the most striking thing about Caro's modus operandi is the sheer thoroughness of it.  Talking about the extension of electricity under the Rural Electrification Administration, Caro doesn't just tell us about how it's gonna be a big deal, he spends maybe 20 or 30 pages describing how Texas hill country people lived before they had electricity.  Particularly the women.  The sheer volume of water that had to be carried by hand from streams typically 50-100 yards away from the house, bucket after bucket, for lack of electric pumps. The cooking all day over hot stoves in the sweltering heat of summer.  The backbreaking labor of laundering on Mondays, followed by a full day of ironing on Tuesdays.  It's exhausting just to read about it, and astonishing they could get through the week at all.

And then he tells us at length about LBJs affairs, and the incredible composure and diligence of Lady Bird in the face of a wandering jackass of a husband, a dinner-party boor and narcoleptic.  And whatever else seems pertinent.

More than anything, Caro gives the lie to the whole mantra of "critical thinking."  Humanists are, to a person, up in arms about how "critical thinking" will suffer under the coming neo-functionalist regime of goal-oriented MOOC-enabled content delivery.  And don't get me wrong, critical thinking will suffer, as it has suffered for some time, but not in the way many fear.  People fear the loss of a tenured soapbox from which to peddle their own flattened versions of reality, their single angle that makes them feel smart.

But, by digging in deep to whatever seems pertinent, and by keeping on digging, Caro shows us what critical thinking really is. It's a matter of keeping going beyond the obvious points where one could stop and find something to confirm one's way of viewing the world. Embracing the layers of contradiction.

In so doing, Caro brings the reader as close to the life of others as one is likely to get.  The only problem is, it gets exhausting at times, and we have our own lives to live, now don't we?

Detritus

Mom and I were up in her home town on Friday and ended up going in a trailer somebody had abandoned in the one park we still own, needing to get a serial number to get wheels in motion to get title to the thing. I thought it was gonna be empty, but that was far from the case.

In fact, despite the fact that it's been vacant for over a year now, it was as if it had been vacated last week.  There were clothes in closets, shoes hanging in shoe holders on doors, with mold growing on them.

But mostly there were videotapes.  Hundreds of them, mostly junky horror movies with psychopaths holding scythes and blood dripping off of this or that. I looked them over quickly, searching for recognizable titles and starts, but there was really little to hold on to, it was the leftovers of another culture altogether.

It smelled in there from being vacant for a while, and the bedrooms are little, but if it had been neat you can totally see how somebody can live in there.  We had a single-wide down at the beach in the late 70s-early 80s. The really depressing thing was the movies, all that blood and gore, and that they had collected them.  They could have spent $3000-5000 amassing that many videotapes, unless they snatched them up at thrift stores (really the only place to buy videos).

Next door, our hispanic tenants had erected a nice new shed to give themselves some storage.  We always like to see that, tenants not just putting down roots, but adding things, showing some pride.


Later, we were driving around through another neighborhood looking for something, we kept passing by all these old abandoned houses, and some of them had huge piles of trash out in front of them.  Nobody cares. And then we went through a mobile home park we had developed in the late 80s, where we (mostly mom) took great care to lay out the lots to preserve trees and pave nicely so there'd be good drainage.  We sold this in 2004 and it has gone downhill since then, it is now reputed to be gangland.  One woman is said to sleep in her bathtub to protect herself from stray bullets.  Occupancy is now down around 50-60%.

Things are complicated.  It's not easy being poor in a rural county, far from an interstate. Unemployment is high there, above 9%.  There's lot of drugs, not much industry.  The police have in recent weeks trumpeted a big wave of arrests of drug dealers and users, over 100. It gives them something exciting to do, and to print in the newspaper, but the root causes run deep.  And both the Democrats and the Republicans have points in this debate:  education is hugely important, as are jobs, and dense regulations are a indeed a disincentive to investment, as we ourselves saw in discussions with local officials on Friday. I could type all day on this, but it's nice out, so I'm gonna stop.

Carolina North and the cloudy future of brick and mortar higher ed

Went running at Carolina North yesterday, the old area those of us growing up in Glen Heights used to refer to as "The Woods," because of all the trees there.  To catch glimpses of fall foliage from afar (check out all that alliteration, kids!  Do try that at home), I ended up running on the trails around the Horace Williams Airport, which is either closed or slated to close to make way for the proposed Carolina North Campus of UNC.

This campus will add, in phase 1, 800,000 square feet to house the schools of Law and Public Health, and other stuff, and will eventually expand to 3 million square feet for who knows what.  As Natalie used to say:  "Thassalot!"

However, it's all held up right now, there's no budget for it, not even real architectural drawings, according to profs at the Law School, which is Phase 1. And the abstemious NC General Assembly is not big on shelling out ducats.

And Carolina North is one of the key strategic drivers for the Central West redevelopment plan in Chapel Hill, which is currently being pushed through process in our municipal government.  In principle, it espouses a lot of smart pro-density policies which are good.  But it's in pretty sensitive ecological areas (Airport Road/MLKJ Blvd and Estes), perching atop pretty steep drops to a key creek which floods.

But here's the question that came to me as I ran:  does UNC really need this new campus?  A friend was recently telling me that the Kenan-Flagler Business School is losing money, and I was on campus there during the middle of the day sometime last year and it was a ghost town, all these nice facilities empty, hear a pin drop quiet.  Couldn't Law or Public Health use some of that excess capacity?

From a strategic perspective, there's a general feeling that the broad recalibration of the economy and the place of higher ed within it, the emergence of MOOCs, and most importantly the shift in the dependency curve occasioned by the retirement of the Boomers means that there will be huge competitive pressures brought to bear on higher ed, and that 10, 15, 20, 25% of higher ed institutions will go out of business.  That's a lot of brick and mortar lying fallow.  Why shouldn't the UNC system wait for some of this creative destruction and shift functionality to one of them?  Yes it would mean uprooting some faculty, and might be bad for Chapel Hill.  But I think in our heart of hearts we know that the intense clustering of smart and affluent people in narrow ZIP codes really isn't good for society.  Better to "spread the wealth around a little."  Send some professors to Zebulon, what the hell.  It will pull up their economies, tax bases, and school systems, and would be good for NC.

OK.  I'm rambling and procrastinating.

The withering of repairs and the great divergence

There is much thought and hand-wringing all around about the divergence of wealth in the last few decades.  The other day, I found myself wondering:  could a minor contributor to this process be the rise of quality control in manufacturing and the withering of the repair sector?

Before the rise of TQM, Kaizen, Six Sigma, and whatever other methodologies took root from the late 70s forward, driven by Toyota, manufactured goods used to break, and we would fix them.  Remember when there was a TV repairman?  Remember when Maytag had commercials featuring its reliable repairmen (yes, it was primarily men)?  That was a differentiator for Maytag. Now things are better made, they break less, and they are fixed less.

Having a repair shop used to be a good skilled trade, and for the more ambitious, it was a way to own a business and learn the skills of being a businessperson.

Then manufacturing got better, as management developed methodologies to relentless decrease defects, and management consultants and MBAs generalized these ways of doing things and carried them across industries. Now cars and all other things break much less often, and when TVs, etc break, we just get new ones.  More often, they don't break before they have been obsoleted by product development cycles.

And when they do break, the repair supply chains have been more tightly corporatized.  Auto dealers, in particular, have been successful, at bringing the repair ecosystem back under their own rooves, where it is a huge component of profitability.

Compare how it was back in the day.  My grandfather owned a couple of auto parts stores in an NC small town (Roxboro), and made good money by doing so. I was just talking the other day to a lawyer in that same town (who now lives in Chapel Hill for the better schools) whose dad owned a garage and general store out in Bushy Fork, and who got his parts from my grandad's store.  The store building was bought by the municipal government not long ago, and now there are Autozones/Carquests etc. to source parts (and ANSI and other standards organizations to make sure that many standard parts are not branded).

So these things make it harder to carve out a niche within which to make money and found a small business.

On the other hand, the improvements in product quality do to a certain extent support the conservative argument for the incorporation of hedonic considerations into inflation calculations:  if cars and other things break less frequently, last longer, and offer more functionality to consumers, than one is getting objectively more for one's money, however little it is, than one did 10 years ago.

What is lost is social capital and the ability to feel good about oneself, which is not chopped liver.

OK. Back to the coal mine.

Haiku

Rifling through some piles of papers in the room I like to call my office, lest Mary pull rank on me and kick me out, I found a book of haiku that Natalie composed sometime in the last few years, and which might as well be captured for digital posterity.

Ocean
Blue, or is it green?
stretching far as I can see
Shining in the sun

Seagulls
Soaring in the sky
Feathers white, short beaks curved tight
Pleading for some bread

Not too shabby.

It makes me proud of my daughter, and also reminds me how fortunate we are to live in a place where this kind of thing is valued in education, making kids aware of different forms of expression and thereby fostering a sense that there are different modes of apprehension of being. This may be all swallowed up by the narrow functionalism of the Common Core, the Race to the Top or whatever, and their bastard stepchildren. Just as likely, we're going through one of those cyclical swings that we do, and if the schools come to provide less for the soul, the slack will be taken up elsewhere in the ecosystem, in houses of worship, on the Interweb, somewhere.  Not by bread alone.

Quietly seething in the comfort of my home

We haven't gone anywhere as a family for foliage season, nor have we been to the beach pure and simple for a long time. The reasons for this are various. We are lazy, for sure, but also because it's pretty nice off our backyard.  There's the terraced park leading down to the lake with its own little beach, behind which rises hills covered with trees, which change with the season pretty durned nicely.  So we've kinda got the summer and fall vacation options baked into our backyard.  And because it's nice, people come to us.  People walking or biking round the lake, or people from around town and/or out of town wanting to go swimming or whatever.

And, since in the natural order of our weeks, we drive around quite enough, thank you, hopping into the car to burn extra carbon seems kinda wasteful.  With our old cars, I used to be proud of how many miles we drove, as if tending to the cars and keeping them for a long time was a demonstration of virtue. With this generation of vehicles, I'm now into how few miles we're driving.

I've also tried to manage down the amount I/we fly on planes, also for emissions reduction reasons. From an environmental point of view, it all makes sense.

But when I look out on Facebook at people's pictures from the beach, the mountains, the Caribbean, the Caucasus, I'm often like:  "man, that looks good.  I wanna go there," which can quickly translate into "I am such a failure, how is it we don't go there."  A large part of it is just sheer competitiveness and envy, which is just silly, and can devolve into outright counterproductivity.  Though I suppose it gets me thinking, and gives me a little something to write about on an otherwise slow brain day.