Serendipity

When I headed out to Colorado a couple of weeks ago, I went without a proper mystery novel, which is something I like to have on vacation. Fortunately, I had sussed out that Breckenridge had a used book store and when I went there and was browsing its mystery section, it magically turned out to have exactly the Elizabeth George novel I was looking for, the eighth in her Inspector Lynley series, In the Presence of the Enemy.*

I finished the book yesterday and I must say that it really hit the spot. It is the eighth of her novels I have read since the pandemic's onset, and maybe the best of the lot, or at least since the first one. Early on in the series the soap opera aspect of the main characters' love lives was initially charming, then became annoying. In this one it is present but nicely leavened in there, never oppressive but just enough to remind you of what's going on in the protagonists' broader arcs -- and I do root for them, don't get me wrong. (quasi spoiler alert) There is even an unexpected head fake that integrates with the mystery plot -- I'll say no more than that. Once I hit publish on this post, I'll put the 9th novel in the series on my Amazon list so I'll know to look out for it in upcoming weeks as happen through stores.

* Later in the week, after I had finished McPhee's Basin and Range and discovered that McPhee had a book about going to Alaska, the store repeated the feet of having exactly the book I was looking for, despite not being the greatest used book store ever, and certainly paling beside the one Mary and I discovered in Boulder back in 2019. But perhaps my assessment of the store is not so much a measure of the store as it is a reflection of my changed way of browsing from my youth, when I would happily snap up books by authors I had just barely heard of because they were cheap or "looked interesting," only to bring them home and have them gather dust. 

A surprise visit

Yesterday I basically did a good job of enjoying my personally-imposed shabbos and did little other than go to a meeting, bike, nap, eat and read. Towards the end of the day, however, I faltered, when I saw the handle that had fallen off of Graham's chest of drawers and realized I needed to try to reaffix it to its home. I'll spare you the gory details on that one.

But when I looked at Graham's room I saw that it was uncharacteristically and inexplicably neat. I made a mental note.

Sometime later, as the grill was heating up to do its own work, I came downstairs and saw Graham and a nice-looking young woman in the living room. Hmmm. "Dad, this is Jennifer (not her actual name)," said Graham. The two of them have now had perhaps as many as four planned meet-ups, one of which, as Graham was at pains to convey to her, he had considered "a date." Clearly progress is being made.

Graham showed her back to his room where, a little later, I espied them sitting cross-legged on the rug, with him showing her a book of some sort. Smooth move. We delayed dinner a bit but eventually she took off and we sat down to eat. Turns out, this little encounter had been pre-planned and Graham had not told us about it because he was concerned we might make him not just neaten up but also vacuum his room. Clever lad.

A late night for Graham

After dinner yesterday Graham said he and Jake were going to get together. Jake lives nearby, up and over the hill, and has a habit of walking down to the lake pretty often, so they were gonna sit in the pavilion down by the lake, as they often did last summer when Graham and/or Ben had a shift.

I myself had been sitting all day, so I went out for a walk, first checking out the dam, then going up and over Ridgecrest (where I saw Brian Galligan's car in his driveway -- probably his wife, I think he's out shooting a film somewhere) and back up Markham. When I got back, Jake was up at the end of our driveway. Turns out, he and Graham had decided to go uptown to check out The Gathering Place, a new game-focused bar/cafe upstairs in the building where Trolls used to be. Which is awesome.

But come bedtime, Graham was still not home, which was a little odd for us. This was the first time that Graham had ever stayed out later than 11 or perhaps even 10 for something non-extracurricular related. Except for the special school-sponsored party after the night he graduated. Natalie was also not much of a partier. Lying in bed, Mary and I realized how tremendously spoiled we had been all of those years of child-raising, especially compared to what our parents had had to experience when we were growing up and were out engaged in all manner of self-destructive and dangerous mischief, at best.

Codifying service jobs as springboards

Home from the Rockies, last night at dinner we found ourselves discussing Graham's summer. Right now he is scheduled to be working at a chess camp for 3 hours a day for 4 weeks starting July 4 and also filling in on some shifts at the lake. I think he can and should do more, maybe get a shelving job at a grocery store. Mary doesn't quite get the point.

For one, he could generate earned income which we could use to put in a Roth IRA for him, which could grow tax free for the rest of his life. For two, he could get valuable experience in the world interacting with other people and doing things other than just reading. It would be good for him.

Reading an article in the Journal this morning about a small manufacturing Renaissance in Singapore involving automation and also Powell's comments on the possibility of a recession as higher interest rates impact the economy, it occurred to me that if there is a recession, our institutions need to be prepared, by which I mean not just social service agencies but community colleges, churches, etc. Us in general. One thing the confluence of the two stories brought to mind is that if the share of manufacturing jobs in the economy is unlikely to recover, we need to do a better job codifying and thematizing the things about service jobs: waiting tables, manning registers, stocking shelves, etc. -- that can help people grow, improve, add more value and advance in their careers. The things I recall from waiting tables include: learning to juggle tasks and execute quickly and consistently, cultivating and maintaining short-term memory, learning to deal with difficult customers, recentering myself in flight, etc.

I don't know if community colleges and/or HR departments have any formal programs helping people learn how to abstract up from client-facing service work to get better. Not just classes (though those could be great), but maybe something like Toyota's Kaizen, maybe a touch point at the end of each shift or weekly where people can come together, share, reflect and improve.

As populations age and it becomes ever more difficult to attract and retain, building and empowering organizations from within should become progressively more important. If enough people feel more validated and invested in, they should feel less threatened and more secure and might even become less reflexively opposed to and scared of immigrants.

Denver

I had never really been here, but based on what I had seen from the highway when headed from the airport to Leslie's in Boulder in 2019 and then this year to Breckenridge, I must confess I was a skeptic. 

No longer. After a couple of days here I am now firmly in the believer camp. We are staying in a nice little bungalow in Highland, a shady older neighborhood undergoing what looks to be pretty rapid gentrification. Day 1 took us first to the Botanic Garden, really an awesome exemplar of the genre, and then the Historical Museum, where we learned a fair amount about silver mining, the rise of the Chicano movement in Colorado, native Americans from back in the day and also how they got fucked later by white folx, Japanese internment in the 40s (which we had learned in 2018 was also a thing near Missoula, Montana), the Dust Bowl, and water challenges in Colorado. Also it was air-conditioned. Getting dinner was somewhat of a clusterfuck but what do you expect coming out of this pandemic. I am surprised frankly not to see teenagers everywhere doing the nasty by the roadside.

Both nights thus far we ended eating takeout in the back yard of our Airbnb, not bad at all given how mild the evenings are. Tonight we are hauling off to some food hall to see Mary's cousin Steve, whom we haven't seen since our wedding. If we are lucky, we will meet his daughter Chiara, who was born the same day as Natalie 22 years ago. Though she just found out a couple of days ago she got COVID. Sigh. One of us is due.  

Success!

It is often said of those that say they plan to kill themselves that the simple expression of the desire -- though certainly concerning -- should not raise great fears in those who love them and/or hear the declaration. However, when someone expresses a specific plan: "I am going to take my shotgun and put it in my mouth and blow my head off this evening", that is concerning.

Often I have difficulty tearing myself away from a plate of appetizers, especially the very nice cheeses and crackers my sister is wont to pull together for family gatherings. This evening I made use of the observation about suicidal ideation described above: instead of just telling myself I was going to quit eating the cheese, I made a specific plan: "I will put cheese on one more cracker and then take my water glass across the room to get my computer to take it upstairs to charge and so I can take a shower." It worked! 

Vacation blinders

Out here in the Rockies, I am doing my very best to ignore what is going on in the markets until they close around 2 pm, Mountain Time. This is not easy to do. I know things continue to be dicey out there, down, up, down, but mostly down. It is easy to get freaked out by it all, by the idea that "this time it's different' and that this market decline will be the one that really fucks us all.

But in my lifetime, there's been only one time that has been truly different, and that was the collapse of the Japanese market from 1989 forward. Japan has never really recovered. And of course it's not really about the Japanese market, it's about Japan.

So the question we must ask ourselves is: "How are we different than Japan?" First and foremost, I have always seen the great difference between the US and Japan as being our attitudes towards immigrants. Our degree of openness and closure has waxed and waned -- and the recent instance of anti-immigrant sentiment personified but certainly not caused by Trump is just another instance, amplified by social media and siloed traditional media channels as well as the general decline of literacy and print as a preferred way of ingesting news.

But what is even more exceptional about America is the fact that the nation does not exist without its legal framework in a way that is not true of older nations. America began as a debate about the role of government and centralization in the managing of public and private goods and continues to exist as such. And our capital markets are a function and instance of this struggle, a struggle which takes place at a variety of levels, from the SEC to the Fed to Treasury to FINRA to the IRS to the analogously long list of private sector actors on the other side, including a robust press apparatus. It is all playing out in real life at all times and at many levels. In the end, things balance out and roll forward.

So this week I am sleeping and eating and walking in the mountains and hanging out with family.

Basin and Range

I had been ploughing my way through this 1982 John McPhee book, sometimes at an appropriately languorous pace, for some time, but I knew it made sense to finish it out here in the Rockies. It is a quintessential (non-fans would probably call it typical) piece of McPhee, rambling at times, not always clear in its trajectory, but one that rewards the patience of a reader who can just roll with the narrator. The moral of the story here is that the earth's history is long and humanity will almost certainly prove a short chapter of it, but also that science is fluid, ever-evolving, many-faceted and made by excitable and diligent humans driven by a broad range of motivations. McPhee chooses on fact to encapsulate the work, that the top of Mt Everest is made of marine limestone.

Somewhere in there it occurred to me that, having discovered the New Yorker of William Shawn when I was going out with Hilary at Yale and realizing that there was a whole perspective on the world that I had missed growing up in NC where I had heard of but never really grasped what it was, I have in more recent years spent more and more time in it, reading so many of the classic New Yorker writers of the day in book form, first and foremost McPhee and John Brooks, but also others.

In the car on the way from the Denver airport out here I realized I knew rather little of Shawn and, indeed, often got him confused in my mind with his some Wallace, star or both The Princess Bride and My Dinner with Andre, neither of which, I must admit, I have ever seen. So I looked up Shawn the elder on Wikipedia. Turns out he was born William Chon, son of a non-observant East European Jew, who changed his name somewhere along the way, which hung together with so much of the intellectual history of the 20th. He was also very shy and eccentric and had a child later diagnosed with autism as well as a University of Michigan drop out, so his biography had a little catnip for all members of our family.

In the hills

Here's the view from where I'm sitting just now. I had to retreat from the great room downstairs because there's a little more conversation going on than I need right now. The intensity of travel and visiting the last few months has taken its toll on my social stamina.

I am ever so slightly reminded of Hans Castorp and his retreat to the solitude of his porch in the Magic Mountain, before descending into the endless conversations of the sanitorium dining room at Davos. 

Right now I am reading a novel by David Lodge about an old British academic who goes deaf and retires before getting drawn into some sort of romantic near misadventure with some unbalanced American grad student. Right now Lodge is going deep into the realia of living as a deaf person (what's it like on the train, in the theater, watching TV...) which I guess sets up the protagonist to get sucked into this young woman's attractions. It also is more or less about Lodge staying limber as a writer, as he has a fine eye for observation and reflection. It gets a little old, I could stand to move on with the plot, but then who would I be to criticize someone for writing just because. That would be the pot calling the kettle black indeed.

Flying west

Up and out the door on the early side to go to Breckenridge to see Leslie and family. It will be great. We've seen Leslie since the pandemic started, but not Daniel, Caroline or Walter. Caroline just graduated from Carleton and is trying to figure out what's next. Daniel's working up in Portland, Maine, not yet in his dream job as he sorts through his own path forward.

I hadn't really read up on Breckenridge till yesterday. At 9600 feet up, the weather is a little different. Tomorrow, for example, there's a high of 62 and an overnight low of 42. I also discovered that there is at least one pretty decent-looking used book store, which is good because I don't have a very clear go to mystery novel for this trip. I tried to talk Natalie into going to Circle City Books in Pittsboro last week but for some reason she doesn't think much of the place.

Just before waking up a little before 6 this morning, I had an anxiety dream about being in negotiations with the Moylan brothers about some kind of business dealing. The odd thing was that the negotiations themselves weren't really stressful, but in the back of my mind I knew it was about heading out on the road when the markets are freaking out about interest rate policy, inflation, etc. I got a stressed out email at the end of the day Friday from a surprising client, a guy who had been all bullish back in the spring or 2020 as COVID was peaking. I think it's likely because he's a closet Republican (I think). I think people tend to exaggerate threats when the other party is in power. And I'm not just saying it's something they do, it's us too.

Ok. Enough of this. Time to take off

Graham graduates

And so, as anticipated, Graham graduated from high school yesterday. Here's a picture of Sam, with whom Graham will room freshman year at UNC and who has been a close friend to Graham the last few years and Ronen, who was closer to Graham earlier in childhood and then a little less close in high school. After a year in Grenada on a study abroad program, Ronen will join Sam and Graham at UNC.

I thought it was important to get pictures of Graham with people he had been friends with earlier in life because life experience has shown that friendships ebb and flow over time but that the ones formed in early years of schooling end up being very meaningful, even if you don't stay tight for years or decades at a time.

The graduation ceremony was mostly par for the course, with the exception of a video of students sharing reflections and wisdom. The video cycled back over the same five people on maybe five topics, two of whom were speakers. They seem like nice people, no younger or more green than any other 18-year old, but mostly we didn't need six examples of any one graduate's wisdom. They should have had more kids in the video because, after all, all we really wanted to see was our own kids or, failing that, more examples of other kids we'd seen grow over the years and decades.

Which takes me back to one actual bit of true wisdom shared by a speaker, quoting someone else: "take pictures of people, not buildings and statues." Absolutely true. Which makes my failure (as a 15-year old, admittedly, and a cocky one at that) to take pictures of Leslie at the royal wedding in 1981 one of my greatest failings ever. But we already knew that.

Guy stalking Kavanaugh

Very depressed about the guy stalking Kavanaugh's house planning to kill him. Obviously I'm no fan of Brett Kavanaugh. I didn't know him in college, but those I know who did know him say he was totally an ass. And we disagree on questions of jurisprudence. But we don't go around trying to kill people on the basis of differences of opinion.

We all occasionally have fantasies. I actually briefly thought about stabbing McConnell with a big knife in a restaurant the other day. But we don't follow through on that kind of thinking. Probably my case is helped by the fact that McConnell and I likely have very different tastes in restaurants. Being from Kentucky, for example, I'm sure he has absolutely horrid taste in BBQ.

In debates about the legalization of marijuana I've seen discussions of heavy pot smoking by some of the recent shooters in mass shooting events. I think that line of thinking is not entirely baseless. We obviously both need more gun control and have a genuine mental health crisis and smoking lots of pot doesn't help one's mental health. The fact that alcohol is legal and also is in this mental health mix doesn't fully justify the legalization of weed. I don't know if this line of thinking seals the deal, but on balance I'm probably not pro-legalization. 

Reading the Bible

As I've mentioned before, after meaning to read the Bible for a long time, I have recently been actually doing it, if in fits and starts and bouncing around to find the right translation/version.

I'm in Exodus now, and Moses has just come down from the mountain, found that Aaron made a golden calf at the bidding of those around him, smashed the tablets on which the 10 commandments were written in God's very own handwriting (we have to wonder what that would fetch for an autograph collector).

I was surprised to see that -- at this juncture, Exodus 32:27 -- Moses gathers the Levites and tells them: “This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: Each of you, take your swords and go back and forth from one end of the camp to the other. Kill everyone - even your brothers, friends, and neighbors.” So they go and do that, killing about 3,000 folks, and the plot rolls forward.

I had to break from my reading right about there, but that little part of the story tends to get elided in most retellings. In general the Bible is a pretty weird book. I don't really know how much Christian in general focus on the New vs the Old Testament since I don't really hang out with many actual Christians. Certainly if I were to found a religion I would go for a more high-level, principles-based text. There's a whole lot of Bible and I can see how people could spend much of their lives trying to figure out how the fuck it's supposed to make sense if it's really the word of God. That would be confusing to anyone.

Another big day

As some of my most faithful readers will recall, June 7 is a big day in our household. It is my daughter's birthday (22) as well as my sister's (ask her) and also our wedding anniversary, and this year it's our 25th. As fairly uptight WASPs, Mary and I are not good at public gushings of emotion, but we do love each other, have been through a lot together and have no plans to go elsewhere.

A friend who went through a divorce a few years back once told me about some of the sex he'd been having with his new girlfriend, who looked attractive in a picture. He told me of one day when they basically had sex off and on all day and he had three orgasms and basically collapsed in exhaustion at the end of it all.

It sounded awesome, reminding me of my early days of getting it on back in my late teens and early twenties. And middle-aged men do definitely idealize those days, and why not? Those were good times. But the fact is we're not in our teens or twenties anymore, we're in our fifties. For me, I am able to pretend I'm younger than I am by jumping over the tennis net in the middle of each match just to show myself that I can, and just by playing lots of singles (though this joint pain that is becoming suspiciously constant in my elbows and hands is beginning to hint of something like arthritis, which I will certainly not Google and much less mention to a doctor, at least before my fast-approaching annual check up). 

Other than that, I pretty much know who I am. Though certainly I could continue to make progress on eating more like a sensible 56-year old, and lord knows where I'd be in that process without Mary.

And so, on with the day. I think I hear the birthday girl moving around downstairs. Time to get ready for my 10 am team conference call, joy of joys.

End of an era? or...

Tonight will mark the end of an era as I convene and preside over my last meeting of the LFA as chair and, indeed, as a board member at all. After eight and a half years, I have done my time and am out of there, though I will remain an advisor to the board on matters pertaining to lake finance and dam observation and maintenance.

To say I have learned a lot would be an understatement. I've come to understand much of what I learned as a management consultant, only I've figured out how to generalize it and apply it in a broader context. I've been dragged perforce into some vague comprehension of what elected officials and other public servants do, taking into account competing claims of different sets of stakeholders and thinking strategically about how to align them. Over years of little carping from the peanut gallery over this and that, I've gained a thicker skin and now understand how people's complaints often derive from their own insecurities and limited perspectives, so I've come to care less about what people think.

Sounds rather boring, I know, but between this milestone and my kids graduating from college and high school, respectively, plus our 25th wedding anniversary (tomorrow) and Mary letting her grey roots grow out, on top of burgeoning tennis elbow from all the time on the court with Z, I feel sort of like a complete adult. Time to dial it back a touch and see what's next.

Some new poems in the home

There was a piece in the New Yorker not long ago about Wendell Berry, which was a name I had heard, but I had never read any of his work. Still haven't. But I liked the sound of him. I looked at his Wikipedia page and saw he had buttloads of work, a fact the article had mentioned. Then I saw a quote from him in something my friend Jack was pushing out over one platform or another. So I asked Jack for a recommendation, and he in turn asked for my address. This week a book arrived in the mail. I opened it and it proved to be a volume of Wendell Berry poems. 

If it had been me buying I would have bought a novel, but I guess I'm gonna be reading some poems, something I haven't done a ton of since graduate school, save for a period of trying to read through Leaves of Grass and giving that talk at NC State on Eugene Onegin, which called for immersing myself in Pushkin for a while and also re-reading Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate, always worthwhile. And, of course, occasionally picking up something of my dad's work.

A few more poems won't hurt me.

Self promotion and the productive ethos

My friend Michael Galinsky publishes oodles of pictures on Facebook all the time, often narrated with detailed remembrances of what the pictures mean to him. It is all direct and from the heart. There's a lot of it, but I try to read it when I can because he's a brilliant guy, has done and seen a lot, and it all hangs together. He also makes movies (like, real ones. And gets paid money by places like ESPN to make them) and is in a solid band and publishes books of his work... for all I know he also is a sculptor. More than anyone I know, Michael has generalized the punk rock ethos of just keeping on producing, rolling forward and sharing his work with the world. He is a shameless self-promoter, but why indeed should there ever be any shame in self-promotion? Somebody's gotta do it, and if it ain't you most often you have to pay someone actual money to do it.* And much of what he produces is "quite good", in the sense that it resonates with me and plenty of others and/or is pleasing or evocative to the eye and/or ear.

The last time we had lunch Michael encouraged me to push my blog out more consistently. He's probably right. All too often the blog is just a tree falling perhaps not even in a forest, but on the more or less barren plains of the blogosphere, mostly devoid of flora and fauna due to the massive clear-cutting of the social media platforms.

And yet I soldier on over here like those Japanese guys on the islands in the Pacific, fighting the last war.

*Upon reflection I have to say that the issue is balancing the allocation of scarce internal resources to distribution vs. production. I.e. if all I have is 24/7 and I'm spending a lot of time and energy on distribution, it cuts into time for production. Following this line of thought out would require a whole nuther post. Or a book.

Things falling apart

Had to hustle home from the office today after Mary said there was a problem with a circuit upstairs, the one that powers the lights and also the ceiling fan. Which is important, because our AC is out up there. After we paid like $900 a couple of weeks ago to fix it (we're waiting for the guy who fixed it to come back in since he's the one who took the thing apart recently). So we need that ceiling fan.

Meanwhile, the "r" key on my laptop is messed up, Mary's car still kinda stinks despite my valiant efforts to get the smell out a couple of weeks ago. One of the ceiling fans out on the porch is messed up, which is important now that it's getting truly hot, and we have a couple of windows and a skylight that need work -- a long-running condition but I am I guess in a fix it mode now. We also need to paint the master bedroom. Marvin is ready to go, I just need to get Mary to pick out a color.

Owning objects just sucks. Books are much better. The worst that can happen is if you spill coffee on them, and replacing them is almost always cheap.

The good thing about our current predicament is that we've been keeping the upstairs at 78 or 79 by using fans, and it turns out that as long as the ceiling fan is on that's a reasonable sleeping temperature. So we've been resting up just fine.

Self-restraining shotgun

First off, a quick recap of the tournament. Graham and crew (or, more accurately, Ben MB and crew, which included Graham), took an unexpected 3rd in the National Academic Quiz Tournament, AKA Quiz Bowl. They really outperformed expectations and were at some point in time in there ranked #1. It was pretty thrilling. I can't believe I considered not going.

After and excellent breakfast with my childhood friends George and Eric Dusenbury, Graham and I headed north. We had a fine drive back from Atlanta yesterday, mostly occupying ourselves with the two-part episode of Acquired on Standard Oil and John D Rockefeller. On the way down we had listened to Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, partly to familiarize him with the plot in case it was a question in a Quiz Bowl round. A good if not great book.

There was very little traffic, praise the lord. As I had on the way down, I put Graham behind the wheel for a couple of hours. For this leg I was more successful in sitting on my hands and letting him make his own decisions. A couple of times he got closer to the car in front of me than would have been ideal, a few times we found ourselves going 48 in the right hand lane behind some truck going up a hill. For the most part, I let him draw his own conclusions.

Conservative talking points in liberals' mouths

Yesterday we had dinner with the ECHHS Quiz Bowl team and parents, a nice group of people for sure. Mostly academics, scientists and a couple of political scientists. There was much discussion of the excess of ineffective administrators at the universities as well in at the school system. It was not the first time I've had the discussion with liberal faculty.

It could have been lifted right from a set of conservative talking points about what's wrong with the schools. There was also indignant outrage about an instance of someone serving on a search committee and for a Principal and having heard someone say: "do we really want to end up with some white guy?" 

The same thing happens quite often when people are discussing the crazed frequency with which we hear of someone's kid wishing to transition from one gender to another. Liberals are certainly less rooted in the idea that there are only two genders, but there's a great deal of skepticism about the medical establishment's feverish embrace of gender transition as a cash generator.

Of course, people would be very careful saying such things in conversation with Republicans, since it would signal weakness. But since Democrats so rarely speak with Republicans, in practice it's not too problematic.

Atlanta, National Academic Quiz Tournament

At the Hilton in downtown Atlanta, for the national quiz bowl tournament. Graham and the A team went 6-1 in the morning, narrowly losing the one. 

After losing lots of sleep in Houston due to crazy noise toxic males and their jackass engines in the streets, I got us a room on the 24th floor of this Hilton. which made for much better sleeping. Now it's time to get ready to go meet a friend to watch the Champions League finals somewhere else in the car-crazed metropolis. Very odd scenes on TV from Paris where the game is happening and Liverpool fans have not been let in to the stadium. Game delated 30 minutes for no clear reason. 

Long COVID and our CHO

Sometimes it seems to me that out household Chief Health Officer Mary goes overboard in her obsession about health risks. Of late she has seemed to be a little focused on long COVID. Unfortunately every time I see an article about it the statistics cited seem to bear out her concerns. 

Large numbers of people do seem to be getting long COVID and vaccination confers little protection, according to a recent study. Regrettably, this argues for continued mask-wearing and managing down of exposure by not hanging out in large venues, for making use of warm weather that lets us be outside. We are fortunate to live in the south, where we get more of it.

Once more, Mary is right. Thank God she doesn't read my blog so she can't see me admitting that!

Yale Graduation

We are back from the Northeast and Yale graduation, filled with vaguely equal measures of hope and sadness. Hope, because Natalie has passed through the august institution and kept her balance and poise and general goodness and has found a fine thing to do with her future. On August 15, she heads off to Juneau, Alaska to work as an intern (I think, but who cares?) for an organization that lobbies in the Alaskan state legislature on behalf of public school administrators. It will be a fine adventure in a markedly different place and she will learn and experience a lot of new things. What more could one ask for from a post-collegiate job?

Sadness because... so much of her college experience was taken from her by COVID. But also, I guess, because I had so hoped that she might be able to have a much better experience there than I did. Mine was marred by my parents' marriage falling apart and my own substance abuse challenges. I tried to be cooler than thou and hung out with all these super cool off-campus artsy people and somewhat marginalized myself from the core of the student body. So I was something of an outsider by graduation.

It felt like Natalie ended up having a similar trajectory, for different reasons. It made all the sense in the world to move off campus her junior year. Living in an apartment and cooking and getting food from around New Haven seemed much more sensible than living in a dorm and getting takeout from dining halls and living largely sequestered in a dorm. But then she was cut off from the great mass of her peers in her residential college.

Admittedly they looked like the same somewhat daunting class of tightly wound overachievers that were there when I was there, maybe even more so. If anything there seems to be less room for divergence from the straight and narrow than in my day. But also greater diversity and tolerance in important and meaningful ways.

In the end I think she was able to make better use of her time there in important ways than I did. She got involved very energetically in super positive endeavors organizing Yale kids to provide mini-courses and other services to kids from the community. Her friends were all very nice and looked less dissolute than my did (though mine were also all fundamentally good people too). I was very happy to see her have a genuine and heartfelt interaction with a dining hall worker in Branford on her very last day; she had taken the time to treat them as peers and it was clearly appreciated. I guess mostly the problem was that so much of her college life ended up spent alone behind a computer screen, not a recipe for joy. There will be more to come.

Mein Phone ist tot!

Getting into the elevator at the Osborne in Rye, headed out to the beloved Sal's Pizza in Mamaroneck, my phone died. It had been low on battery and sometimes it gets a bit skittish at that level, but I was hoping to make it to the car to plug it in.

Made a little nervous by not having navigation, it was confusing getting out of the Osborne, I haven't done it all that many times, but after a wrong turn I made it to the Post Road and was able to navigate because, after all, I was going to Sal's, a place I have been picking up pizza from for coming up on 3 decades.

Then, to add insult to injury, when I got back with the rapidly cooling pizzas and less rapidly warming salads, nobody answered the buzzer because they were out on Mary's mom's porch in the back and they were all just assuming I'd call or text when I got back. Eventually, they heard it.

Being without a phone is exhausting, but I think I've thought of everything I absolutely need and will make it though the day.

Time to Board at LGA.

A surprise

On Friday I visited with a pretty well-known author, someone I went to college with, in his family's brownstone in lower Manhattan. When I arrived and pressed the buzzer, a voice responded that its owner would be right there. I wasn't sure it was the writer's voice, but then you know how those buzzers distort people's voices. Nonetheless, I was surprised when the door was opened by...

The butler. Or perhaps he was not a butler, strictly speaking, but rather a valet or some other kind of manservant. At any rate, he was clearly in the writer's employ. It was, in my time here on this big blue marble, a first. 

The butler/valet escorted my into a very lovely library and offered me a sparkling water, which was served in a crystal type glass, which was very welcome, because I was rather sweaty from having walked south from Rockefeller Center after visiting with a former colleague because I had the time, needed the exercise and wanted to have a look at more of my beloved Manhattan. It was a beautiful day for it and many memories continued to flow past as I walked the streets. It was particularly nice to see such rareties as the storefront of a hat wholesaler on the west side of 6th Ave somewhere around 26th.

Acting my age

On the train to New Haven, somewhat crowded, a young woman got on with a small pet carrier and a large suitcase and looked around quizzically for a place to sit and put her bag. Ever the gallant, I offered to put her bag on the upper rack for her.

Turns out it was a bad idea, cuz the bag was heavy as all get out, and I seem to have yoinked my back a little. I'm sure it will be better in time, but it might hurt tomorrow morning. Such is life. 

My cousin Neva's husband Tim recently married off his daughter Nola while in excruciating pain from what turned out to be cancer that required a bone marrow transplant.* I'll make it through this graduation. Probably if I dressed more like a 56-year old I'd act more like one.

*I guess that's probably a leukemia of some sort. I have successfully maintained a studied ignorance of many of the details of cancer, just because I know that commanding them won't help me sleep better.

Midtown magic

Spent the day at Midtown with Corinna, my first time there since the beginning of the pandemic. I had read that Wednesdays were the days of highest occupancy in the new culture of return to the office from work from home/hybrid work, and was pleasantly surprised to see that this was somewhat accurate in Manhattan, though the 7 train back to Queens that I hopped on around 5:20 was surprisingly uncrowded, if not outright empty. Still, the sidewalks were pretty crowded, and Bryant Park at the end of the work day was operating near capacity on a beautiful spring day. Though frankly, I was reminded of sitting there at 8:40 in the morning on 9/11, right before it all got started.

Just before Corinna and I walked south from Rockefeller Center, who should I see ambling across the street but David Buza, my old colleague from Princeton, a Duke grad who met his wife Caroline in Kryszewskiville (sp? Who cares?) back in the 90s. We will have coffee tomorrow morning.

That took me back to sitting with him in the food court below Rock Center in 2002 just after I joined a project at AXA when I explained to him and Cyrus that I would be running into people I knew at Rockefeller Center through the simple expedient of looking at people as they walked past. Shortly thereafter, maybe that same day, an old colleague from Soros named Greg walked by. Haven't seen him since.

In general, this will happen less often as I age and people leave the workforce through retirement and death. But I was happy to see David yesterday, and moreover, this is the magic of cities and even their economic value. People come together and share ideas. Some of them end up being good ideas. Companies form or iniatives take flight. Value is created.

Burnt out but need to burn

Had my alarm set for 7:10 this morning but didn't actually get up till 7:45. It was a long weekend of cleaning and then hosting the robotics end of season party, not just of the inside of the house but also the porch and deck. The irony was that in the end, people were super-observant of the COVID restriction and almost no one ventured into the house, immaculate though it was.

There was a moment when I enlisted Graham's help in putting back the upper sashes of the windows in the living room when I explained to him my limited comprehension of how the damned things work, and he remarked that the spring-loaded mechanism was not unlike one of the designs they had considered for the robot. It made me wonder whether I should have been getting him more involved all this time in the variety of tasks I do around the house. Of course, part of the problem is that I am in fact not Mr Fix-it so I am so often reminding myself of how things work or just trying to figure it out myself. Maybe that's in fact how most people are. I think I'm just a little fixated on the idea of him leaving, for some strange reason.

The food at the party was ridiculous. Egg rolls, ribs, chicken, plus some vegetarian Indian stuff. The most amazing carrot cake ever from Nathan's girl Dharma.

Then after going out for a bike ride I was about to hop in the outdoor shower when I saw some shadowy figures moving on bikes through the woods. One of them I recognized as Woody, who's often passing through with one or the other of his kids; the last in line was Crabill, who stopped in for an outdoor shower and helped us eat some of our party leftovers.

I awoke tipping the scales at just shy of 181, up from a pandemic low of 168. Sigh.

A brief interlude of calm

In 27 hours we will be hosting the end of season robotics party, which means that shortly Mary will likely come up here and want to talk about the things that need to be done first. I have the makings of a list in my head already (get most recent deposit of pollen off the stuff on the deck, get tables from LFA shed down by the lake, clean off stacked plastic chairs down in the basement and array in the flat parts of the back yard, clean toilets, get Graham to clean room, wash windows, clean out fireplace, more or less in that order).

Meanwhile it's calm, the air is pretty cool, up the hill I can hear Judy's chickens clucking. 

I have started to think more and more about a book. Right now I'm thinking the focus should be on public and private goods and how they are funded/delivered (insourcing/DIY vs. personal savings vs. bank loans vs. capital markets (equity vs. debt) vs. taxing and spending by public entities (local, state [or province], or Federal) and how that changes over time and space. It's also necessary to think about risk management spending in this context. I.e. how much time and effort is spent on paying for something to be done vs. preventing the need for it in the first place (risk avoidance and mitigation) vs. aggregating spend (risk transfer).

Obviously it's a big question set. I nibble around the edges of it all the time here on the blog. I may have to try to sort it out somewhere in the 250-300 page mode. I don't think it's worth writing an academic magnum opus that answers all the questions, but it is worth trying to frame them in an interesting way that facilitates discussion.

Frances Ferguson

In a departure from my normal practice of focusing on TV shows, I watched this short movie on Amazon over the last couple of nights. It's an ultra-deadpan tale of a young woman in a Nebraska town in a soul-deadening marriage who has an affair with a student in a high-school class where she's a substitute teacher. That said, don't expect much sex. All we see is her masturbating in her car fully clothed, and even there we don't actually see her hand doing any work.

Indeed, the movie is very much an exercise in what it doesn't show, in not showing things. Which makes sense, since a quick search reveals that it had a budget of only $500k, which makes it something of a miracle that it has voiceover from Nick Offerman of Parks and Rec. Or, rather, instead of a miracle it's a reminder that lots of actors are artists first and foremost who love participating in projects they like.

The movie is billed as a comedy but I didn't laugh a whole lot. And yet... it was pretty memorable and clever in many ways, for instance in how it thematized the titular character's good looks. Part of me wondered if I would have kept on watching if the lead actress had not been an attractive blue-eyed blonde, albeit in a very conventional way. The film plays with and dances around this topic. Early in the film an older guy in a store says to Frances: "You're very attractive," to which she responds "You say that as if it's a good thing." Later, in support group, another pretty blonde says to her "You're not that hot," to which Frances responds "Thank you." All of this she does with an absolute minimum of affect, save for a more or less permanent application of so-called resting bitch face (Google it).

In short, in only an hour and 15 minutes or so, Frances Ferguson is able to get a fair amount done. Not a waste of time. And the ending offers hope. I am inclined to check out other stuff from its director, Bob Byington, especially now that I see that an earlier film with high ratings -- Harmony and Me -- stars my brother-in-law Kevin Corrigan.

Old White man

Some months ago my college girlfriend Hilary dropped me a note on one platform or another informing me that she intended to spend some time reading my blog. It's always an honor when someone allocates a chunk of any given day to reading my blog, what with the veritable universe of content out there I'm competing with and the negligible pizzazz of my modest corner of it. I awaited her feedback. Somewhere in there she asked for my address and then she sent me a copy of EB White's apparently classic tome of essays One Man's Meat, a collection of columns he published in Harper's from 1938-1943 after he had retreated from New York to Maine to tend an old family farm. White is of course the author of children's classics like Charlotte's Web and Stuart Little, neither of which I have read, and one of the two creators of The Elements of Style, which I have around here somewhere.

This handsome little tome has now shared space on my bedside table for a while but I've been reading a little more of it recently, in preparation for maybe seeing her sometime over the next few months on some foray north. The first thing that strikes me as how old mannish White's reflections sound, despite the fact that he was only 39 when he started writing the essays. Then again, I was 38 when I started this blog. Surely some of the relative maturity of White's style derives from the historical moment when he was writing. His project commenced long prior to the advent of rock and roll and the permeation of youth culture down through the age deciles, which encourages all of us to pretend to be young for a long time (I of course still do a two-footed hop over the tennis net in every match) so as to preserve each individual's identification with the acceleration of product cycles and manufactured obsolescence. Young people consume more so it behooves a consumerist society that we should all feel young and ever in need of the ego support of our next purchase.

But around 1940, life expectancy in the US was 61 or 62. White was 2/3rds of the way there, roughly where I am now. Old assed bitch.

Victory?

Somehow I had failed to chronicle the smell in Mary's Prius. A mouse, it seems, had crawled up into the climate control and died, yielding a rich smell for all of us. We took it to Auto Logic and spend maybe $600 with them trying to get rid of it, but in the end they said it was so deep in there that it would could $1500 or so to take the whole dash apart to get to where it seemed to have died.

So Mary suffered and I tried all manner of remedies to address it: sachets of charcoal, plug in ionizers, etc. Admittedly I never sprinkled baking soda on all the seats and carpets and then vacuumed it out.

The internet told me that the animal should have long since desiccated, meaning that the only conclusion was the the smell was deep inside the upholstery. The car was also filthy after first being the family road trip car for a long time and then after accompanying Natalie to California and back last summer, so it just needed some attention.

Eventually my office mate Adam asked if I had tried one of these "Little Green" machines. Essentially they are small steam cleaners, the kinds of things car detailers use. I of course had not. He lent me his. Over the weekend I finally did the baking soda thing and then spent a few hours attacking the seats and carpets with the Little Green thingie. Let's hope that the smell stays in abatement. 

The moral of the story of course is to just keep plugging and not accept defeat from trying only lazy man approaches to problems. As with many things, I surely could have outsourced this one and a detailer would probably have done a better job, but then I wouldn't have the satisfaction of having done it myself. I know I've said that before.

Epiphanic Delusion

Yesterday morning at AA the topic was "moments of clarity," which in the context of AA is really about the conversion narrative: the moment when one realizes that one can live without drugs or alcohol and be happy or just live at all, for starters. The moment that makes the rest of your life possible. It's a big deal, this moment of clarity. I'm sure I've told the story of my big similar moments somewhere on this blog over the years, though I just did a quick search to make sure I haven't written this exact same post before, which sometimes happens.

The problem is that the moment of clarity is also analogous to the concept of "buzz" in substance abuse, that ever-elusive state of momentary vision and joy that substance consumers seek. Back when I was in college, Mark and I had a practice of doing mushrooms once in the spring and once in the fall but no more. Timed for nice weather so the day could be spend outside, wandering around, talking, throwing a frisbee, communing with the One. We knew not to do it more often because shrooms were very powerful and took a day or two to recover from. It was clear that tripping was chasing enlightenment of a sort that one could not take with one upon return from the trip, however hard we may have tried. Really good weed offered a shallower and similar if even more evanescent clarity with shorter recovery periods. It also left one more or less on the same planet with other people, unlike psilocybin.

Moments of clarity in sobriety are like that. They are highs to which one keeps trying to come back. The fortunate thing is that the culture of 12-step programs, with its well-developed apparatus of meetings, peer support, literature, steps, traditions, etc., is all geared towards helping people memorialize and institutionalize those insights in one's life. But it is the engagement in and doing of those things which offers us hope and the possibility of preserving the clarity found in those moments. 

After all, one would never think to ask Michael Jordan "What was the moment of clarity when you became a great basketball player?" It was decades of hard work and practice, Malcolm Gladwell's proverbial 10,000 hours. Maybe the question would be "When was the moment when, as a sophomore at Laney, that you came to believe you might make the varsity team?" Could be a bad analogy. He probably never doubted it.

On not Reading Solzhenitsyn

I have never read much Solzhenitsyn. Not The Gulag Archipelago, The First Circle, or even One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. For that matter I've never read Shalamov or Ginsburg. I had recently written about how I also haven't repeatedly plumbed the depths of the Holocaust. It's not that I try by any means to deny history's worst atrocities. I have read the numbers and high level accounts of the absolute worst moments of the 20th century, I just haven't chosen to dive down into all of the details.

Ukrainian writer Oksana Zabuzhko recently had an article in the Times Literary Supplement which argued that all of Russian Literature is shot through with the destructive imperialism that led to the invasion of Ukraine. It's tough to swallow, but not hard to understand given the perspective of the writer right about now. It's not unlike a low-income Black person whose path forward in life has been blocked time and again by a world seemingly constructed to engineer her failure and death having a hard time with almost the entirety of white culture, from Bing Crosby to Mia Hamm. After a while you can imagine how it all might sting.

Certainly my own perspective on Russia is limited by my having filtered out the worst of it. I guess I should probably work on that a little.

Along parallel lines, I have stopped in the middle of the bio of Holocaust survivor Siggi Wilzig that I wrote about a month ago. The faults of the book have conspired to halt me in my consumption of its story, which is basically about how this guy kept going no matter what. Maybe I should try to push through there.

Judging people's age

I used to think that I was good at guessing people's age. When the kids were little, I could guess the ages of toddlers within months, but as the kids have grown up my accuracy with that group has gone down tremendously, which is only to be expected. I spend less time amongst them. Half of me wants to add "praise the Lord," the other thinks "sadly."

Now older people have become a problem. I was just up at Sutton's waiting for a 77-year old I had never met. I looked over at one guy in a booth who I figured was 63 or so, or was he? Then another guy came to the door and at first I thought it could be him, but as the guy came in I realized that he was my age or younger.

Of course it's partly about the denial of aging and partly about my potential need for new glasses, no matter what the instruments at the optometrist's office say. For a while I think my internal age was mentally anchored somewhere around 22. It edged up over time, but Jack Benny may not have been far from the mark in saying that he never edged a day over 39.

Certainly I am a long way from giving up my practice of doing a two-footed jump over the net in the middle of each tennis match.

Retooling

Today in the Journal there's a piece about supply chain woes for chips in the chip-manufacturing value chain. Which is to say that the companies that manufacture chips and tools for that process are having a hard time getting chips.

Which pushes us backward in the digitization of everything which techno-optimists have long heralded as a utopia but which many of us with a certain number of decades under our belts have looked and thought "yick." It's not that I don't realize that we derive a ton of benefits from these little computers we carry around in our pockets and those all around us, it's just that we always seem to be rushing headlong towards jettisoning everything uncritically while being pushed by the market and the forces of generalized acceleration into cycles of upgrades and replacements that don't seem to correlate with increased happiness.

For the moment, the process must forcibly slow down and people will have to solve problems differently and tend to their existing objects. It will probably be good for all of us, if not for the centralization of all commerce in fewer and ever larger companies. 

Insulation

As I may have shared in the past, I have a very deliberate rhythm to my mornings through which I very intentionally try to shut out the concerns of the day. In particular, I don't look at stock futures, texts or email till 8:30, if I can help it at all.

At times this is a very difficult discipline. Right now, with the sirens of escalation in Ukraine, inflation fears, shortages, blah blah blah, it's very easy to get caught up in the anxieties of the moment. To make matters worse, our neighbor's dog Opie has been yapping and now the landscapers out at the park in the lake are going full bore with their riding mowers.

But I do what I can. Today I finally made it through the annual letter of Kanbrick, a "mini-Berkshire Hathaway" founded by a woman who was Warren Buffett's assistant for some time that aims act as a Berkshire for middle-market US companies. Her letter is nowhere near as good as Buffett's -- probably because she doesn't have a Carol Loomis to help her with it -- but I like what Kanbrick is trying to do in general, so I'll try to keep an eye on the company.

Anyhow, by now the day is upon me.

The forgetting of authors

After we got back from Houston we discovered that our family had burned through its data allowance in about two weeks. We were using about a gig a day, and Mary and I were the worst offenders. I still haven't been able to figure out what it was. Some combination of podcasts, maps and music for me, for her probably taking all those pictures and storing them in the cloud before immediately throwing them away.

Which tells me that I need to be downloading then jettisoning content more proactively. So I downloaded a book on Audible. I had a few credits for use after the lengthy listening of that dry book on China and also listening to a few podcasts from Acquired.

Before heading out to work one way I went through my list and quickly selected Damsel in Distressed, about a woman who worked in distressed debt at hedge fund Canyon Partners for a couple of decades. So far the book is fine but not great; it would of course be better if she read it herself but I guess she figures her time is too valuable. Frankly thus far I don't think it would be a great book even if I was reading it off the page as it's too full of cliches. 

After listening for several days I knew she was French but I had no idea what her name was. A quick Google tells me it is Dominique Mielle. This is by no means the first time I've forgotten the name of the author of a book I'm listening to. In fact, it's pretty normal. Largely it's a function of the fact that I'm not picking up a physical object with the author's name printed on it each time I am consuming the text.

But I also forget the names of authors of books I read. I even forget their titles, or the fact that I read them at all.

Is this bad? I think as we come through the educational system there's a lot of emphasis on authorship and proper citation. Jenny Jones wrote that on page 16 of Book X. One needs to be able to demonstrate that one has had ideas for oneself and that one hasn't "stolen" them. Also it's because the authorship industry has to have a leg to stand on. If we want people to be able to support themselves as thinkers and writers, they must have some rights and "intellectual property" to defend.

But as consumers and as the decades roll on all that's not really important. The only thing that matters is having wisdom and the seasoning to implement it in life. The primary reason to remember authors' names is that one wants to be able to see them in a used book store and buy their books if there are good discounts. And to honor them when it is merited.

In the penalty box

It appears that I have not mentioned that I am under quasi-quarantine at home, having driven home from RDU on Sunday night a friend and teammate of Graham's who subsequently tested positive for COVID. Sigh.

We are eating outdoors when we can -- though ironically it's pretty cool here for late April -- and Mary is sleeping downstairs in Natalie's bed while I am exiled to the upstairs. Fortunately -- thanks to the addition of the couch in my study and the presence of decent reading chairs in both study and bedroom -- there's plenty of good seating up here so I could go on for some time like this.

Still, it's rather dreary. Also Mary is wearing a mask much of the time downstairs and would prefer that Graham and I do the same. He is not having it, I am complying much but not all of the time. It's a drag. Are we going to go on like this forever, each time a little variant crops up, of however minimal serious threat to our health?

Thank God we're not China, that's all I have to say. A lot of Americans have gotten good vaccines and between that and community spread the broad threat from a variant like BA2 seems minimal. The people of Shanghai and soon -- it would appear -- Beijing are hurting. The WSJ recently published an op-ed by James Freeman about how the US and the West had erroneously imported harsh Chinese measures like strict lockdowns but it's total bullshit. Our lockdowns were never that harsh. Even in the very early days of April 2020, people weren't really forcibly locked in their homes. Though, admittedly, we did err slightly to the side of caution for a brief period while we were figuring things out.    

Musk, Twitter and anonymity

One problem with Elon Musk buying Twitter is that elevates him to Trump-squared or -cubed, and that it extends the paradigm of the biggest, richest guy having the biggest megaphone to say whatever the fuck he wants to. Platform as penis.

I am carried back to my memory of Woolf's To the Lighthouse, in which a female character (the narrator?) listens to a male character blather on about politics or philosophy or something but all she can hear is him saying "I, I, I, I..." Earlier in the blog I classed this masculine tendency to try to stick out, however possible, as "Protuberance."

To counter this tendency myself, I continue to leave this blog pseudonymized. I of course love it when people read the blog, and try to gently promote it here and there in person to person dialog and one-to-one correspondence. Although there is wisdom in Jaron Lanier's idea that we should always speak from our own name on the internet, that is countered by Walter Benjamin's assertion in "The Task of the Translator": "No poem is meant for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the audience." It has to be for the work itself, not for the attention it garners.

Speaking of which, the work day is well underway. Onwards

The price of Clorox

We were driven to the airport in Houston by a guy named Abelardo. Nice guy, a little chatty, which initially seemed like a liability but our conversation was interesting.

Unsurprisingly, we talked about inflation. It seems like it's a problem that's on everybody's mind these days. What did surprise, however, was the data points he called out in support of it. "You used to be able to get Clorox for like $4 a gallon but now it's $9" he shared. He cited some similar point about Lysol. Aside from the fact that each of these dearly beloved household cleaning products had its moment in the headlines over the last couple of years, is either of those prices really meaningful or impactful? I mean, I can understand if people complain about the price of gasoline or bread, that's meaningful. But Clorox and Lysol? Sounded to me like he was listening to a little too much talk radio. But maybe he's just bored and resorts to that because he's driving around Houston trying to make a living. It's all good.

He was unaware that there was a new variant of COVID making the rounds.

He also shared with us what a bummer it was driving drunk people home late at night, how often they puke in his car. I get that. That's no fun at all. He also said that a problem he faced was people putting their unaccompanied kids in the car to go across town to their grandma's or whatever. About how he's afraid he's going to get scammed by somebody claiming child abuse or the like. Seems like there's a lot of scammers out there being consistently creative.

Though he was born in the US and was a citizen, he had spent a couple of decades back in Monterrey, Mexico, his family's hometown. He was glad to be back in the US because he said Mexico was a third-world country, incredibly corrupt because of the need to pay off the cartels, which had made his uncle's business impossible to run profitably. "Mexico is a third-world country," he told us several times.

In the end, I was happy to be a safe fare for him to the airport, easy and low-stress money.

Recap from FIRST Robotics Competition in Houston

The East robotics team had a good time in Houston and learned some valuable life lessons. In the week before, Graham had hinted something like "maybe we could make it to the semis." Uh-uh. This was The Big Dance in robotics and Chapel Hill meant nothing to nobody there. Our robot finished in the lower middle of the pack of about eighty robots in one of six divisions and was not selected for an alliance to compete in the divisional playoffs.

Really that should have been no surprise. Of the two main things a robot could do to score points (shoot and climb), we only did one -- we shot well -- though it was the higher-scoring and more important of the two. But we didn't shoot well under a lot of defensive pressure, and there were bots that did. That got us through NC competitions -- NC is not as competitive as core regions like CA or MI or Israel -- but it didn't take us very far at Worlds. Also, we just weren't well-known. There were teams there who had been at Worlds 11 years running and had been in the Einsteins (think Final Four) for eight years running. They had huge cadres of parents and mentors there and had thought through every aspect of logistics, down to pre-booking a conference room for a celebratory pizza party and having coolers of drinks chilled. We'll get there, if we want to and stay at it.

Our team had some stupid teenager problems that messed them up like running a robot on a half-charged battery (Dooooohhhh!) or forgetting to flip a switch before a match because they were playing video games on the controller laptop. Could those have changed the outcomes at the margins enough to have let the team be picked up on an alliance in playoffs? Probably not, but maybe. If so, the kids can think about it for the rest of their lives, particularly when drafting or implementing design specs or preparing for important presentations in sales or other funding request contexts. It's a low impact context in which to learn a valuable lesson about attention to detail when working under pressure.

Most importantly, the kids had fun. Our coach and mentors (mostly still college students themselves) had done an awesome job thinking through a lot of stuff, like chartering a bus to go to the Johnson Space Center on Sunday. 

Of the eightish NC teams there, the one that did best in the end was the Omegabytes from Spindale (Team 5727). Their ticket to Houston was punched by winning the Chairman's Award for NC, the top award given to a team that best embodies the spirit of FIRST. Spindale is a town of about 4,000, and with about 40 students and 20 parents and mentors participating in the team, it had about 1.5% of the town's population onboard. They were super-inclusive and did a ton of community outreach.

They also had a very solid robot, maybe 6th or 7th in NC at the end of the season. At Worlds theirs outperformed ours and they made it to the semis of their division. Towards the competition's end all the NC teams were down there cheering them on, so per Graham there were about 200 North Carolinians down there cheering against about 150 Israelis. Pretty cool.

Bitch with little robots

As a joint birthday dinner for mom and myself we went to Toro Toro at the Four Seasons, which had some delicious stuff going on. A friend with lots of friends in Houston bought us a bottle of wine and arranged a special birthday dessert by calling ahead, a nice surprise.

I saw a sign that there was robot practice going on in one of the conference rooms, and we saw it while we were leaving. There was a bunch of South Asian kids sitting on the floor with a nifty little robot, turns out they were from West Windsor, NJ, just across Rte 1 from Princeton. Very nice young fellas.

Then we saw there was robot action going on in a small room with a glass wall so we went over to check it out. This blonde woman who looked like she played rugby came over and started telling us about it. "We're from First Technology Challenge, not First Robotics Challenge. There's a different philosophy in FTC. We're more start-up people, whereas FRC is more like the culture of a Boeing or Lawrence Livermore Labs. You guys have bigger teams and members can get by without knowing anything about technology. All our kids have to get their hands dirty. I myself started three companies. You guys have a short season but we go on all year..." She would have kept blathering on all night about how FTC was better than FRC if we hadn't realized it was time to move the fuck along. If I had been thinking clearly, I would have said "Have a nice life."

She was from Lexington, MA. Hopefully Google leads her to this someday and she'll realize what a pompous biatch she is.

In Houston

We're in Houston for the FIRST World Robotics Championship. Never been here before. From the highway downtown Houston looks like a modern city with lots of high-rise buildings, etc, leading me to expect a city-like environment. And while it is urban, it's not much of a city in its core. Instead, it's more like a dense, highly-centralized office park, with parking decks appended to office buildings and hotels. In lots of places, you can be walking past a window and you turn and look and there are parking spaces behind the glass. That's how valuable street-level retail space is.

For eating, there are lots of expensive steakhouses where one might wine and dine a client but very few places to get, say, a sandwich, a piece of pizza, or a bowl of noodles. Praise the Lord there are food trucks that have come down to where the robot thing is happening and there are some vendors inside the convention center.

Actually, there's a very nice park area next to the convention center. But even that -- as I was told by my college buddy David who is a city councilman here -- used to be a big parking lot. They've done a lot of work to make Houston as inviting as it is. 

To be clear, I'm well aware that there's lots of great stuff and great food around Houston -- David gave us some excellent tips. I hope we are able to go check some of it out. But it ain't downtown.

High-level trust

On the way to work yesterday I was listening to the episode of Acquired (check it out!) about Ethereum and the guys were riffing on something and somewhere back around my amygdala I had a flare-up of fairly acute anxiety, verging on fear. "Omigod" I thought "I have no idea what the fuck they are talking about? How can I make a reasonable decision about this stuff?" I successfully turned onto the onramp to I-40 then merged with traffic while I wrestled my demons to the mat, remembering that of course I don't need to understand everything, I just have to fundamentally trust that people will generally do the right thing.

The guys at Acquired are brilliant and incredibly full of energy and enthusiasm and openness, they are generally trustworthy and totally worth listening to (despite their questionable statement that Taylor Swift's net worth of $500 million is "just not a lot of money" -- though I know what they mean). I'm not worried about them.

More broadly, though, what's important is that we generally trust the direction of the world and the intent of those around us. That is harder these days. Between the hyper-fragmentation of the attention universe from the relatively centralized era of Cronkite to the time of Facebook and YouTube when algorithms are crafted to deliver hyper personalized messaging calculated to move us to do specific things (buy this! vote for that! hate those jackasses!). Things Are Falling Apart.

In some sense, we were lulled to sleep by Obama's dulcet tones. An algorithm could scarcely have generated a more appealing avatar for the sweet comforts of the period of late globalized capital. Then Trumputin shook us from our slumber and we are struggling to reconstitute a center in which most of us can believe and trust. 

The illusion of bounty

I was at the Wegmans on 15-501 today and I scooped up some whole wheat Goldfish -- one of our true pandemic new loves -- which are much cheaper there ($1.79) then at Harris Teeter or Walgreens ($2.49-$2.79 of late, when they are even in stock). I was mildly intrigued to see that when I grabbed the three on the front of the display, that was all there was. On the way out I saw an older gentleman arranging bags of pistachios on the display there in the hallway leading out. He was also arraying them along the front. It was more or less a Potemkin Village of display, intended to create the appearance of plenitude.

We have gotten used to there being shortages of this or that, but still our retailers, bless their hearts, are doing their best to maintain the facade of bounty. What's interesting, actually, was that Wegmans had the staff to do the stocking. Most places are having a difficult time staffing. Given that it was an adult -- a white male no less -- doing the stocking, as opposed to a teenager, I'm guessing that Wegmans provides decent healthcare and other benefits.

Why study Russian?

A friend and fellow Slavist on Facebook recently expressed despondency over the need to respond to the question: "Why it's important to study Russian now?" This follows on a question from Niklaus some years ago, probably around Putin's invasion of Ukraine or some particularly egregious bit of anti-gay legislation or action in Russia or the assassination of an opponent like Boris Nemtsov or... Niklaus basically asked, what the fuck is up with the Russians, do they have any redeeming features?

Reasonable questions all, and I was reflecting on them while running in the woods yesterday. Aside from the obvious national security imperative, which fell away following the seeming end of the Cold War but which has been thrust back in our faces all too urgently of late, there are lots of reasons.

The thing that came back to me while running is the intensity and purity of the intellectual tradition of the resisting Russian intelligentsia. Just look at Navalny and his team today. They aren't fucking around. Some of them will end up dying for their beliefs but they don't care. They are incredibly smart and industrious and maniacally dedicated to the cause of freedom and better governance. And they are the heirs of a long tradition going back to the 19th century of intellectuals putting themselves in the way of harm for the greater good.

Moreover, there is deep kinship between American and Russian intellectuals. Just read Emerson's 1837 "The American Scholar" and Piotr Chaadaev's 1826-1831 Philosophical Letters next to one another and the parallels are obvious: both America and Russian intellectuals found themselves in a servile position before European thought. Each had to figure out a way to become its own. America went broad with commerce, Russia went deep with the novel and associated forms. 

Lastly, we need to care about Russia for the same reason we care about the people of China, India, Africa and everywhere else in the world. If we honestly believe that liberal democracy and capitalism checked by the state offer the best context for aggregate human flourishing, we have to work to make it happen. Our system of higher education exists as it does to facilitate a fine-grained division of labor across a web of complex global value chains striving to help more humans live better lives. Nobody said it would be easy.

56

It's my 56th birthday, so mostly I've been taking it fairly easy. I did go to work, mind you, and did the things that I needed to do, but I didn't work that hard. We got lunch from Ideal Sandwich in East Durham which, if you haven't been to, you should. Top tier Italian-style sandwich shop which bakes its own bread and so on. It also has prepared foods, cookies, etc. It's open 20 hours a week now. I had heard that there was always a line so I got there ten minutes before opening and I was the first person there, but not by more than a minute. It was a smart move. There were 10-15 people in some stage of waiting by the time my order was ready at 12:10.

Then I had to figure out how to get myself some coconut cake. They had none at New Hope Market on 86, but my second call -- to 9th Street Bakery -- bore fruit. As it were.

Somewhere in there I got a second booster shot to get ready to go to Houston. I see that the BA2 variant is rising not just in the Northeast but also here in Orange County, so it feels like the right thing to do. Also it's time to mask back up in stores and eat outdoors for a little while.

Now I am back at home, read my book, had a little nap here on the couch in my study and should probably walk or run before dinner.

BTW, it occurred to me that I had never published a photo of my new couch, my most prized possession, so there she is. Mary is honestly not all that enamored of the color but she doesn't spend her time in this room and it's fine with me. It is comfy and it is here. I can ride out several more pandemics.

Costs

Maybe for the first time ever, I am seeing clients start to freak out over various aspects of their financial lives: tax surprises, the costs of meals, flights, what have you. Certainly the unexpected return of inflation is scary.

Unquestionably many of us have had our lifestyles floated on the rising tide of markets and government largesse for a long time and have become accustomed to not considering or making tradeoffs in a disciplined fashion on a consistent basis. For the short term, at least, it would appear that we will not be accorded that luxury by the universe. Frankly, I think we need to embrace it and accept it as a new flavor of adulting. It ain't easy, but it is what it is.

To Campbell and back

Most of the weekend was spent at Campbell University so, a few words. As a creature of fancier schools, it is tempting to harsh on the place. It has a nice little campus, but it's nothing special and is ringed with parking lots. It's not very selective and doesn't exude much scholarliness or anything. It is mostly surrounded by chain restaurants and even a place that claims to have hot dogs, burgers and fries, but didn't have them when I went in there. I have a client who used to work in the law school who said the management was pretty durned Baptist (all meetings began with prayers).

Then again, they've worked hard to build the place over the years and have done a pretty good job. The newer health sciences buildings look rather nice. They take good care of the place. I have a former colleague who is an alum and has been successful and I see out on LinkedIn that he (and I'm sure others) continue to work hard to raise money for the place and improve it further. I remember walking with my client to lunch in Raleigh (where the law school is) one day and running into an enthusiastic young Black student whom my client praised to the skies. Honestly, we should be celebrating and encouraging all of our small colleges and universities. They do a great job hosting the state robotics competition. There is, I was told, an independent coffee shop that was perfectly decent in an adjacent strip mall. Certainly it is much better that they are there than it would be if they weren't there. 

The drive down there took us through Holly Springs, where subdivisions are clawing there way through a formerly bucolic landscape, with all the attendant tradeoffs. As the Northeast replants itself down here, we need to be careful not to replicate its mistakes, but I see that's not really happening.

Robotics in Buies Creek

The FIRST NC State District Robotics Championship went down at Campbell University this weekend and it was a nail-biter. Graham's team (East Chapel Hill) got aligned with its cross-town rival and my alma mater Chapel Hill High in the playoff rounds, so we formed one big cheering block. This was particularly excellent because the East and CHHS teams had collaborated in the weeks leading up to the competition, with East sharing some of the magic behind its first class shooting mechanism (there is debate between just how much IP was shared...) while the Tigers let the Wildcats use their practice space -- a pretty big one in the swanky new building -- and offered some guidance on a climbing mechanism.

They got paired up with a team out of Hillsborough (which had also graciously let East use its practice space) and one out of Greensboro -- each of which had more years of experience and more championship banners between them than our teams. As the alliance formation process happened, I had a sense that the years of experience could prove meaningful.

It was. In the first game of the final, the East robot got trapped into committing a foul by a very astute play by the Greensboro bot. By the second of the two matches, the CHHS bot was visibly overheating and wasn't able to shoot well. In the end, the raw capability of the robots themselves proved less determinative than how the players were able to make the robots play the game.

Still, it was awesome. Neither East nor CHHS had ever gone this far. The CHHS robot was by far the most improved over the course of the season. East is headed to Houston for worlds and I think my Tigers are too. The only thing that was missing was Carrboro High to fill out an alliance. Next year.

Return of the Devil

Last night there was a fundraiser for Josh and I ate too much. How was I to know that the first table of food was just appetizers which was to be supplemented by more food, in this case some delicious banh mi type things. That was after going out for a team dinner the night before where we went to Osteria Georgi and we ordered more things than we needed, which were then piled onto by the wait staff who brought us extra stuff because Denis is friends with the owner and goes there a lot. Of course I ate the stuff.

My weight -- which may briefly have bottomed out around 167 (for a dehydrated instant, to be sure) in summer 2020 -- has gone back to 180. Yet another indication of how hard it is to maintain discipline.

Then again, I guess it's no news that discipline is hard. If that weren't the case, why would we call it discipline? No reason to wallow in my failures, in fact there's every reason not to. It's the wallowing that is the problem. Much better to press on and keep marking things off my task list, doing the right thing, and pushing through the day with good energy.

Male merge

A couple of weeks ago the night before the robotics tournament Graham was printing some things in my office and was running late. I saw that he was inserting the same number into spots in a couple of separate documents then printing them, one at a time. "You should use a mail merge for that" I said. Of course he had never heard of such a thing, I never had till I got out into the working world.

At any rate as we're approaching the upcoming state championships Graham needed to do the same thing and -- in a show of solid organization -- reminded me about it a couple of days beforehand. Excellent. Turns out to run a mail merge in Google Office you need to write a script, so it seemed the best thing to do was port it over to Word, which of course kids don't have on their computers.

So it was to be a father-son project or, as Graham so famously said once, a "son-father" project. Fair enough. 

Graham got home from practice last night around 9:30 and he came up to my office and we knocked it out. In fairness, it was mostly me doing the work, though I showed him the basic concept so he at least knows the term and knows some of the steps it takes, which is half the struggle. After that you just need to Google and trust yourself to figure it out.

It was nice to have a little project like that with Graham in the evening. It's lovely to teach your kids stuff.

The streets of Russia

I was messaging with a friend from grad school who has basically relocated to Moscow: "This is my home now" was a recent statement. She definitely does not support Russia's war effort but... Russia is a place that has made her happy after some disappointments in the US. 

So after asking her where she lived I found myself poking around the streets of Moscow on Google Maps to see how it has changed in the quarter century since I was last there. The answer: a lot. It looks a lot better, much more like a fancy European city.

The questions, then, as I've posed them before, is how deep the transformation goes and what explains it? The stability Putin has brought, the interaction with the outside world?

My guess is that the transformation doesn't run that deep, though certainly those living in the larger provincial cities have benefited at least to a limited extent. For example, of IKEAs 17 stores in Russia, 8 were in either Moscow or St Petersburg, while the rest were further flung in places like Ufa, Rostov-on-Don, and Omsk. So at least those living near to regional capitals were experiencing the benefits of Russia's integration into the world. Not so much anymore.

Which memories are we preserving?

I've been going through old videos from the early days of our kids' lives and I came across one of Mary Lee and George Sr, mostly the latter, with Natalie shortly after she was born, it must have been autumn 2000, in our house on Wilton St. As an aside, in the video we discussed that the camera itself costed $900 (we let my mom and Mary's parents buy it for us). Compare that to the cost of a phone today and it gives you a sense of the progress of technology just in the intervening years.

In the video George Sr starts talking about how it's the right time of life to get such a camera so we can preserve the memories of the kids when they are little. And I've got plenty of that, especially of Natalie, who is dramatically better documented than Graham is in certain ways just because when your first is born one enters into an entirely new dimension of life, parenthood, and that's what we're capturing as much as anything. Yes the child, but also the sensation of having created new life, the possibility of a different kind of futuricity, the understanding that your life will never be the same.

But what is really rare in the video is not the footage of Natalie, but of George Sr. It's striking and moving to see him there doing his thing, making faces at the baby, being a regular guy. And, also, footage of Mary. Here and there I let the camera linger on her and she senses it and looks at me and is annoyed, seemingly gesturing towards Natalie: "Get the baby!". Mary criticizes me alternately for not taking enough pictures of her and of taking pictures of her when her hair looks crappy, the light is unflattering, from a bad angle, etc. I'm glad I have some. I'm hoping I find more video of her.

Well well

As I'm sure I've written before, a large part growing into adulting for me has been learning to operate at a certain emotional distance from UNC basketball. When we win, I can be happy. When we lose, I don't let it bother me.

This has allowed me to stay largely functional over the years through some trying years, but it also lays me open to claims of being a fair-weather fan. Such is life.

Last night, a small group of Tar Heels logged gruelling minutes due to a shallow bench and braved foul trouble and an absurd number of turnovers in which we just threw the ball right into the hands of Blue Devils. No matter. We prevailed and had the great joy of sending Coach K packing not once but twice in the space of weeks.

Even better, I was able to bring Graham, in the throes of deciding between UNC and maybe Lafayette or perhaps even Case Western Reserve (though he's never been to Cleveland and there are no kin nearby, he has left it on his list because it's "prestigious", sigh) up to watch the game. Graham has watched UNC games with me before and once with a friend at a pizza place, but the enthusiasm has never really taken in an enduring way.

Last night he seemed to kind of enjoy the enthusiasm, and then we walked from Alan Haig's new Franklin St pied-a-terre up to the temporary center of the universe at Franklin and Columbia. He is not fully immersed in the whole thing, but he has seen it and not rejected it, so it's not all bad.

As for me, I am still caught up in the excitement of it all. How could I not be?

Challenged

By now I am having trouble making it through this book about Holocaust survivor Siggi Wilzig. Not because he wasn't an impressive guy, he clearly was. I'm sure he could and would have run circles around me in almost any context, or just outlasted me. But it's kind of a shitty book. Because he admires Siggi so, the author, Joshua Greene, heaps golly-gee-shucks praise on him for business practices which, viewed objectively, would be worthy of considerable eyebrow-raising if not more, like browbeating and intimidating clients into giving him more business. Basically the whole book suffers from the author's lack of objectivity and the rose-tinted corneas.

But is has been worth the price of admission just to read the story of Wilzig's experience in Auschwitz. It is all too easy to forget what happened there. If anything it reminds me that I should probably make sure my kids have seen at least Nacht und Nebel (which I'm pretty sure we watched at Seawell) if not Shoah (which I never watched in its entirety). We need to remember what has happened and could happen if we're not careful.

Wilzig was instrumental in the founding of the Holocaust Museum in DC. For that reason alone I should probably continue to pick my way through his bio, despite its failings as a book.

Gong south

Bobby and I had breakfast at the Breakaway Cafe today, since I had a coupon for a free breakfast sandwich. Pretty good, though it pales beside what you can get at Deli Edison, so I recommend going north on that front. I liked the place, though, and the trip was enhanced by the fact that, after I waited for the bathroom for a little while, the person who came out was former Tar Heel great Kendall Marshall. A celebrity sighting!

Afterwards I took a half an hour to drive down to Pittsboro to check things out. Not surprisingly, lots of development going on, including some substantial apartment buildings or condos near the school at the south end of Briar Chapel. Multifamily is greatly welcome.

But I was also very surprised when I drove back into the core commercial area of Chatham Park. The Root Cellar had been there for a long time but it was closed when I went by. I quick Google shows me that it has been rebranded "Cafe Root Cellar" and is open Friday and Saturday 4-8 pm only. That's crazy. Shouldn't even pay the rent with those hours.

I have to assume the issue is staffing the place, and/or maybe demand that is slow in coming because they are having trouble building out Chatham Park, again because of lack of people. Politicians need to shut the fuck up about "jobs." That is last decade's problem. We need people, and housing. There's a chicken/egg problem here for sure.

Gotta go cook dinner. 

Becoming inured to war

One of the calculations Putin seems to be making is that we in the West will tire of the war in Ukraine as a story, that day upon day, week upon week of pictures of bombed out buildings in Kharkiv and Mariupol will cede the front page to The Slap and the Duke-Carolina game, etc. In this calculation he is not entirely wrong.

Once more this point up the importance of a professional government, the so-called swamp, the people who provide depth and continuity to our embrace of and interface with the world and all of its complexity, across administrations. We cannot have a wholesale shift of focus every four or two years based on which way the winds are blowing and which soundbites and memes are resonating most clearly. People in different parts of the government will have different foci and views of the world. They will fight amongst each other for budget. There will be tussles along ideological grounds. But we can't burn it all down or cut off all their heads every few years just because it polls well and draws eyeballs.

Being informed

My body has informed me that it is Spring Break and that I am not supposed to work this week. Certainly not today and I'm guessing that tomorrow is also out. Instead, I've done some minor tax-related chores and read a book. After dinner we will watch television.

Graham had some rather heavy gloves out on the island in the kitchen and I asked what they were for. He said it was in case he had to drive to Srinivas' house to help with the robot or something like that and he showed me that it was 36 degrees outside. As I pointed out, clearly if he needs heavy gloves for such conditions, he belongs in school in Chapel Hill and not in Easton, PA, Schenectady, NY or Cleveland, OH. Really it's pretty clear. 

For Christmas I got this book Unstoppable about a guy named Siggi Wilzig, an Auschwitz survivor who became a Wall Street legend, albeit one I had never heard of. Somebody gave it a good review, so it went on my list and Santa brought it. 

Frankly I got it for the Wall Street part because I've learned a lot about the business and business in general by reading page-turners like this. But to get there, I had to go through the Auschwitz part. I hadn't read a Holocaust narrative for a long time, but it was good to go back through it and to have what happened thrown in my face in detail. We easily forget how horrific it was, what people are capable of under the right conditions. What we are seeing in Ukraine is but a pale shadow. 

We have to wonder what is actually going on in Xinjiang.

Eastbots rule

Over the weekend the East Chapel Hill High Eastbots went to the Guilford Regional Championship in Gibsonville, where they dominated. They went undefeated, including within rounds (i.e. they won the first two of each of their best of three serieses in the quarters, semis, and finals). Moreover, I can't remember a match which was close. Several times their team scored in triple digits. Even when their robot was disabled for the second half of a quarterfinal after some vicious D by a competitor knocked something loose, they had built up enough of a lead and were complemented by the nimble and hot-shooting bot from 1533 Triple Strange out of Greensboro that the game wasn't even close. Not that it wasn't a moment of nervousness for a lot of us up there in the stands. But our top notch mechanical team sorted it out in the pit area between matches and we were back up and running quickly.

Next up, the state championships at Campbell in a couple of weeks. I do hope we win.

That said, just having a win under his belt provides us with an opportunity to have a talk with Graham. A week and change back when he was processing his rejections from Williams and Swarthmore (which, on top of not getting in Tufts or UVA probably sets the stage for a similar outcome from Yale and Cornell), Graham had displayed an unexpected level of angst and bitterness. He wants recognition from the world for his intellect and it also seems he wants to lord it over some people in his class who he doesn't think are as smart as he is. Probably some payback for people who were mean to him somewhere along the way.

But he may not get it this round, because he took some risks in math earlier in his high school and got a couple of Bs. That's life these days.

It's great for all of us to win sometimes. But we don't need to win all the time or at everything. If you get that mindset, you could end up like Michael Jordan or Coach K. Very impressive figures, no doubt, but each a jerk in his own way. One much worse than the other, for obvious reasons.