Return from the dead

Tomorrow I will return to work, after almost a week of staying at the house, more or less, first with a cold, then with a holiday, then more or less pretending to have a cold.

Things have been piling up. A lead I thought was dead has come back to life. I need to sell a car (to wit, a 2008 Subaru Outback with 96k miles, a new

1. clutch [yes -- a stick shift]
2. head gasket
3. timing belt, and 
4. front brakes).
   Tell all your friends!

With the possibility of a tax bill passing looming ever closer, there are things that some clients should do between now and the end of the year to protect themselves.

There are leaves on the roof, and in the yard.

Graham and I need to go out and procure tacky Christmas sweater for a themed party we plan to attend in a couple of weeks.

And then we head North. Come to think of it, I need to call Princeton to make sure our plans for stopping in fit with theirs.

In short, many things I have been deferring are piling up and need to be dealt with, which doesn't really excite me. For some reason, I have rather enjoyed lounging about on the couch, reading a mystery novel (Sebastien Japrisot's A Rather Long Engagement), even if, truth be told, I am also ready for this novel to come to a close.

Alright, enough whining. It is almost noon, time to embrace the day.

Fighting off the demons of reading material

To my left, an article, almost completed. On an adjacent tab, another. Books on the bedstead behind me. Stacks of New Yorkers to be combed through and discarded on my chest of drawers. Along with other books. The need to read is a constant treadmill for me. Everywhere I turn, something to read.  And yet, I have a blog to feed and tend, becuase ain't nobody gonna write it for me.

I have been fighting off a cold all week leading up to Thanksgiving, and it seems to be 80-90% gone away by now. Which I guess means that I will have to go exercise later. But I have been lying on the couch reading a novel for much of it, and it's a good thing too, because the most vibrant colors of the season are dropping from the trees as we speak. Soon, the trees will be bare, but it has been a great week to spend on the couch looking out at the trees and the lake.

And then hanging with the family. In fact, even as I type, I realize I need to call up Leslie quick and try to make a plan to get together before she and her crew head to the airport, especially because Graham would really like to play chess with his cousin Daniel before they head out. It has been a fine few days of traditional cousin activities: puzzles, card games, meals, silly YouTube videos, hiding behind trees on the family's traditional walk in the woods behind the UNC Botanical Gardens, etc. Just a few hours left. Daniel is a true trooper for hanging with Graham as much as he does. Thankfully, as they age, they are getting closer in age on a relative, if not absolute basis.

Thanksgiving rambles

I had a bunch of frequent flyer miles that I needed to use up for something before they timed out, so they were pushing magazines on me, which are presumably prized still as advertising delivery media to desirable demographics. We ended up getting Inc, Fast Company, and some cooking mag for Mary that hasn't come yet. The first two just started coming yesterday.

I started pawing through Fast Company, and immediately all this stuff from the YouTube and other social media/tech universe was flashing before my eyes (esp. "What's Inside" on YouTube, a big hit), things and dynamics I was entirely unaware of. Then I fired up my phone, and I had a friend request from some "woman in Nebraska" with whom I had one common friend (who appears not to have checked her out). The woman from Nebraska appears suspiciously to look like a spoofed feed of a teenagish guy from Mali with a penchant for taking pictures of himself in front of luxury cars making some sign with his hand which is probably the Malian way of saying "I'm cool."  All of his friends give him likes and commend him with comments like "Cest tres coooooool, mon frere," with various words in African languages interspersed. I won't try to spoof them.

There were also quotes from the Koran on "her" page in Arabic, and links to "Candidates of Paradise of Firdawsi", which appears to be an Islamic propaganda/proselytizing feed. Nothing explicitly terrorist, mind you. But there was an interesting post on there about how there is no airport in Mecca, and how birds and airplanes cannot fly above the Kaaba, because it is the gravitational and magnetic center of the universe, and therefore nothing can fly above it, even if it wanted to. And somebody commented on that, in French, saying how it was idiocy and made muslims look stupid. And then people argued with the commenter, saying of course the Kaaba was the center of the universe....

It is astonishing how much is going on in the world, how impossible it is to take it all in, and adjudicate it all and figure out what's what. William James, I think, was the first to coin the term "the pluriverse." Ultimately we must all recur to some sort of core, bedrock faith in some sort of principles to help us sort it all out.

The fragmentation of the media landscape via social media does not help. It underscores the need for leadership at the very highest level. Blah blah blah

Despite a lingeriing cold, it is time to get organized to go out for the traditional Thanksgiving activities, including walking over by Morgan Creek and the traditional eating.

Flashback

We were married in '97. We were headed to Italy for our honeymoon, but had to fly through London and spend the night there. I don't know why, but we did. It was the early days of the internet, before Google Maps or really any good maps, so I called up a travel agent to book at hotel near the airport in London, and she booked me a room. So far, so good.

Or so I thought. When we landed in London, we got in a cab to go to our hotel, and the cabbie hauls off. We go like 10-15 minutes, I'm watching the meter, we're on a big highway, and I ask the guy:  "Isn't this hotel close to the airport?" He responds, "No, not at all, it's downtown."  Now, mind you, I had like 10 pounds or something -- and it was before credit cards were accepted in all cabs -- and I just went ballistic. I broke out all the big words: "Rackem, frackem, b#*!#t" and then some, and the cabby gets really mad at me "Now sir, there's no reason to use foul language here in my cab!"  He was from somewhere in Asia, and was apparently a good deal more religious than I was.

In any case, I calmed down. He hung a uey, took us back towards the airport to another hotel from the same chain where at first they said they didn't have a room and then they somehow figured out that they did. The cabby accepted some combination of pounds and dollars, and my apology.

After Mary went to bed, I went downstairs to have a cigarette, and I noticed that the sign, while using recognizably English words, was barely comprehensible. Something about no parking or something.

The honeymoon was on.

Checking in

It has been an uncharacteristically long time since my last post. In the interim, what has been going on?

• Fundraisers for Graig Meyer, Floyd McKissick, and the SKJAJA fund
• A going-away party for Lindsay Graham (no, not that one) of Car Pal and Saxapahaw fame
• Big Data and Life Sciences event at NC BioTech Center
• Lake Forest Association annual meeting (it passed bloodlessly)
• Tennis with Z (no comment on outcome)
• Several client reviews

Through all of this, Graham and I have maintained our steady diet of Star Trek: Deep Space 9 episodes. I looked at my timeline on the most famous of social networks, which shall remain nameless here, and saw that we wrapped up our viewing of Star Trek: Next Generation on January 20.  We have now watched six seasons of DS 9, so 156 episodes over ten months, so one every other day or thereabouts. We have achieved this momentous accomplishment despite deaths in the family, business and pleasure travel, work, school, all manner of impediments. This shows what one can do if one sets one's priorities correctly and keeps one's eye on the ball.

Much of this has been accomplished on our new couch. Recently, Mary put this very soft brown striped alpaca blanket that we bought in support of our neighbor Chadd's non-profit Teachers 2 Teachers International. They do very good work setting up peer-to-peer partnerships between US educators and those in the developing world. You should check them out.

More importantly, the blanket is exceptionally cozy. Graham sits under a grey fleece blanket, and I use the alpaca one, because he is too tall now for us to share one blanket. Often, I start dozing off during the episode, but I still hear the dialog. Also, after Graham leaves, the accumulated warmth on the couch persists, and sometimes I hang out and snooze a little.

Even Natalie, climbing in under Graham's blanket to watch an episode of Stranger Things with me and mom, recognized the exceptional coziness of Graham's set up. This is good livin.

The big stall

Listening to Ben Sasse's book on the way to a conference this morning, began pondering the much-ballyhooed stalling of median incomes since the early 70s. Began to ponder: is this in some sense reflective of an aggregate, homeostatic lack of desire for higher incomes? I.e. if one gets on the "hedonic treadmill" north of ~$75k of income, are we really dealing with broad problem of abundance, not scarcity?

As a society, in the West at least, we generate enough wealth to give everybody a decent life. But we don't know how to balance wealth generation and wealth distribution. People are geared to want more, more, more, both status and wealth. Deciding when you have enough and when to slow down is hard. And then what do you do with yourself? The cultural model tells us to eat better, live more fancily, travel more, but people don't get happier by doing these things, beyond a point. And we haven't discovered effective mechanisms for redistributing wealth via the public sector. Or at least we don't promote them well enough.

Again, we get back to the question of values and leadership. If more public-spirited behavior was validated more broadly and more convincingly, people would do more of it. But these values don't sell stuff.

Flat and round modalities

There is a lot of hue and cry these days about the dangers that social networks pose to the fabric of society. We're all aware that they have positive and negative sides. It is great to see people's kids, learn what they're up to, crowdsource wisdom about need x, y, or z, etc. And hear their reflections on the topics of the day.

The problem is that people only have so much time to put themselves out there. Or, if they really devote time (say, blogging), they sacrifice other aspects of their lives. To have recourse again to E.M. Forster's categories of flat and round characters, everybody is always more or less flat on Facebook or Twitter, certainly in any given post they are. You could take the time to study them over time, and maybe they get more round.

Social networks are of course only one context in which this happens. Anybody who is out in the world interacting with others one a more or less regular basis is alway truncating and trimming their self-presentation to play a professional or societal role: salesperson, politician, project manager, teacher, etc.

And we are all limited in the number of deeper, rounder relationships we can have. You just can't have more than a handful or truly best friends, we each get one mother and father. Maintaining all these relationships takes time.

But social media exacerbate all of these general tendencies.  Even, dare I say it, traditional blogs like this one. There's only so much time, and I gotta hop.

Dominance in the Hierarchy of Needs

These days I sometimes feel like I can't leave the house without tripping over Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, which is invoked as a framework supporting just about anything.  According to Maslow, people have basically five kinds of needs: physiological, safety, love/belonging, esteem, and self-actualization, arrayed in a pyramid. Take care of one level, and you can move on to the next.

So where does dominance or conquest fit into all of this? Somewhere around the esteem level, I would reckon, having never actually read the book. But, I would argue, on the macro scale, it is hugely important.

This was brought to mind by an article in the Times this morning about smuggling baby chimps and other primates, which is apparently big business. Rich people and provincial Asian zoos apparently gotta have them, and many chimps are trained to smoke cigarettes and drink beer because, of course, that's just adorbs.

Which is, honestly, one of the reasons why sports can be so great. People get to enact their need for dominance in a forum which is, when managed properly, relatively painless. When fans get too worked up about it, it gets silly, for sure. That's why it would be great if China could get good at soccer quickly. It is fine for them to have awesome divers and table tennis players, but if they could come to have success on the biggest of world athletic stages, it would probably go a long way towards letting them get their macro rocks off. Just sayin.