Busy days

Neighbors coming over for dinner, which means toilets must be cleaned, cobwebs gotten off of windows, and so on. Meanwhile, a snafu on scheduling with Graham's executive function coach brings me up to a busy cafe in Carrboro not once but twice in a day. Could be worse.

Reading Sam Quinones' Dreamland, an amazing book about opioids, heroin, and America. I must say it has given me a little anxiety thinking about Natalie circulating out there in the big world, in the place where my issues got worse.

But we talked to her on the phone today and she sounded great. Graham too is doing well, and we're psyched that he's finally getting to know the neighbor boy who is coming over for dinner tonight, with whom Graham shares a lot of features. Full circle.

Back to my book!

Exclamation points

Natalie is off in college but we of course talk on the phone and, this being 2018, text. She continues to punctuate with multiple exclamation points where we would have none. I hope this practice persists through the college years and onwards.

Drop off day in New Haven

In the end it was, of course, anticlimactic. A typical day of meeting new people, reconnecting with old friends, observing human nature, walking around, eating some good food, checking stuff out and, in the end, a bit of a rush because we hadn't been studying the calendar properly. You don't need to know the all the gory details.

Natalie's roommate (the only one we met), seems very nice, as does her family.

It was fairly astonishing -- but not really surprising, given the intensity of her focus on what it is she is doing at any given moment -- that Mary had basically never been in many of Yale's buildings, so she was kind of blown away by the splendor of it all. To me it just looked like college.

Graham, who had himself been overwhelmed by the Gothic architectural detail of Sterling Library on Monday, had pretty much a normal day, which is to say he was tired and a little droopy by the end. I think on Monday it was really the weight of expectations on him. He fears that he can't do what Natalie did. And, from an organizational perspective, it will indeed be a bit of a lift for him to get to Yale or the like. From a management and motivational perspective, the challenge is ours.

Natalie, of course, was like a pig in shit. She will be very happy there, and we will miss her terribly, but we will see her very soon.

Bunnies

Yesterday evening Mary, Natalie and I went for a walk before dinner. One last walk before dropping Natalie off for her big hiking orientation, also one last chance for Natalie to break in her hiking boots and get her legs in shape for what may be a little arduous for her.

Natalie studiously went slow, and stopped to take pictures of all the bunnies she saw. Mary and I both would have walked faster, trying to get some exercise benefit in, but Natalie wasn't having it. She was making a little declaration of independence. I'm outta here, yall.

Today, we dropped her off. We have dropped her off at summer programs many times, so we are used to it. We will see her on Friday when we go and check her into her dorm. Then we will be back in six weeks for Parents' Weekend. Then she'll be home for October break. Then for Thanksgiving break. So we'll be seeing a lot of her.

But still. This was a little bit different.

After we got home, I went for a run. I saw a lot of bunnies.

One down, one to go

Tomorrow we take Natalie off to Yale, for a week of hiking on the Appalachian Trail for orientation. Everybody seems to do it these days.

Today she is pretty much keeping to herself, coming out for meals, promising to watch have dinner and watch some TV with us later. She's supposed to go for a walk with Mary later, I may have to opt in because the rain won't let me and Rob go play tennis.

Graham asked her to play cards. He's never done that before.

And so, she is pretty much off. It must be owned, we've done pretty well. She is a very nice young person, able to stay positive and focused even when we have been a little cranky at times.

Now all we have to do is shepherd Graham through high school, which may be a little higher touch.

Quiet day

Rob and I hit the tennis courts early. After getting down 1-3 and beginning to psych myself out, I wrestled control of myself, started to hit deep to his backhand, and beat him 6-3. That was good. Though my serve was not so good.

Then, as we had arranged before, Natalie and I walked up to the Larchmont Library and, as planned, went and got our favorite sandwich at the deli. Soon we must head up to Uncle George's in northern Westchester. It is well air-conditioned here in the library. That, along with the sandwich, is why we are here. It has become mini-tradition for us.

On Monday we take her to New Haven. This is a big step. I am not sure I am ready for it, but I will get through it, as I must

I am pretty much taking the day off from raising money for our October event, after at least a $3k day yesterday. Still waiting to hear what the Silicon Valley VC I know from college stuck in there.

Mercantile culture

I had in recent weeks been pondering -- in response to fallow real estate in downtown Roxboro, Dolly Parton's distribution of the 100 millionth book from her getting kids to read initiative and my mom's enthusiasm for it -- what it would look like to put something like a used book store -- lending library -- cafe -- study center on Main St in Roxboro. Not a shiny hipster coffee place like we saw in downtown Burlington, but a very basic production with an emphasis on encouraging kids to read and study. A safe space.

I thought momentarily about how nice it would be to get Jeff Bezos on board funding a scale up of this concept -- not unlike Carnegie's libraries back in the day. Bezos definitely needs to figure out what he is up to with his cash.

And I also thought about the risk, if such a space were established and use of it was contingent on a purchase of a coffee or something, that it would become just another place to hang out for a subset of affluent white kids. Which would defeat the purpose.

So you'd need to figure out some way to encourage the African-American and Latinx kids to come in there and use the space, and even hopefully get some of them to donate hours (eventually this kind of enterprise would require lots of donated time). But that then you'd run into the potential challenge of bridging a cultural divide often framed in terms of cultural dynamics and identities: white English vs. Ebonics, white norms of behavior and style, etc.

Which got me to wondering about the issue of mercantile culture and language, and whether anyone had studied it. To wit, did similar cultural norms of politesse and standardized modes of address evolve similarly around the world in different mercantile cultures (English, Dutch, Venetian, Hanseatic, Jewish, Han, etc) to facilitate commerce? In short, to what extent is what is perceived as culturally-determined in current debates actually more "structural" in origin than specific to a particular time and place?

Certainly I thought back to Greenblatt's The Swerve -- generally a shitty and overrated book, as I've probably said elsewhere -- where he talked about the origins of the expectation of quiet in libraries as a development within the culture of medieval monastic scribes. That idea has a certain romantic appeal, though I do wonder if the library at Alexandria was much really a great deal rowdier, as he half implies. It does seem like quiet is a pretty natural attribute of places where lots of reading happens, or at least relatively even white noise, as at a cafe or on a commuter train.

Which brings me to my joy, sitting here in Larchmont, at learning that this little burg has been rather forward-looking in its banning of leaf blowers, which might make it a mecca for readers and writers around the tri-state area, were it not so durned expensive.

Calm on the court

Had a good outing on the tennis court this morning. Was playing with someone I usually beat, and I beat him. Much more importantly, I stuck to my basic game plan of placing the ball and letting him make mistakes, as opposed to trying to transform into a hitter of lots of winners just because I had the upper hand. So I basically didn't think a lot, and therefore didn't make a lot of mistakes. And I got a lot of exercise.

I also concentrated on consistently praising him whenever he hit a good shot. That just feels right. If I do these basic things whenever I play, I enjoy myself.

One other thing. I often lose track of the score. Sometimes I want to upbraid myself for this, but really it is just symptomatic of staying in the point, and not caring about the score. Each instance of hitting the ball should be just what it is, rather than a big moral drama. Though I can imagine annoying whomever I am playing with because I have to keep asking about the score.

Syndicated or retained handyman

I was looking at the jiggly handle on our shower door, which I have fixed once before. I even put a post-it note on my desk to remind me to do it. I haven't done it yet.

Small jobs suck. It's so hard to find someone to do them, but everyone needs them done. So people, mostly guys, need to haul themselves out to Home Depot or Lowe's on Sunday afternoons to buy tools that they use once if ever, acquiring skills that don't build on one another and atrophy quickly.

How much better would it be if communities (HOAs, etc.) could retain handypeople, or could syndicate their costs amongst themselves. Like apartment complexes or office buildings sometimes do. Depending on the scale, they could have specialists: a plumber, an electrician, a painter, etc.

An HOA could even make sure there is housing available so that these people don't have to commute 25 miles, and thereby to some minimal extent counteract the noxious effects of segregation by income and class that we've witnessed in recent years.

I know that it would be operationally and even socially complicated -- people would have to teach their kids not to be assholes. But it could perhaps work.

The soft and the hard

There is a lot of gnashing of teeth and rending of hair these days about the automation of everything, the idea that computers will eventually do everything and there will be no work in the future. So there will be lots of lower-skilled people sitting around un- or under-employed because their jobs have been automated away. Hogwash. It's hard to imagine that there could ever be a shortage of work, because humans can't get along.

Yes, grocery-bagging or legal due diligence may disappear as jobs, but there is so much work that needs to be done to bring people into alignment, to get them to understand and empathize with one another. Particularly when there are perceived resource shortages and Malthusian macronarratives are peddled to draw in eager eyeballs.

Somewhere in my education I decided that I didn't need to study hard sciences because, in my mind, nature (photosynthesis, gravity etc.) worked fine, so why did I need to worry my pretty little head about them. Society was different. It needed work. In the intervening years, there have been many occasions when I've regretted this choice, as STEM curricula have been apotheosized around the world.

But in essence I think I was right. The best example of this is climate change. The hard science of it is pretty much settled. There's very little doubt that the world is undergoing human-driven climate change which threatens our survival. The planet itself, of course, will be just fine, and could give a flying fuck about us, to say nothing of the universe, which doesn't even know we are here.

But the soft science of climate change? Mama mia! It is factionalized beyond belief. Rich countries vs. poor countries. Right vs. left. The chattering class desires/needs to display wealth through travel, but this competes with our internal understanding -- and we must understand this, right? -- that flying burns a lot of carbon and is really bad. It would be interesting to go to airports and count the number of hybrids, EVs, and plug-in hybrids in the parking lots. So much conflict, so much contradiction, both between and within us.

Yet social science has progressed immensely too. We see it in the race of the big tech companies to aggregate ever more data about us to create models of who we are, in Cambridge Analytica's successful use of that data to help Trump win (which is really just an instance of the leveraging of big data), in China's implementation of a panoptical state in Xinjiang using facial recognition software and every other tool in their arsenal to control dissidents. The soft sciences are getting ever more scientific. We must figure out what we would like to use them for.

And we must cultivate the soft arts and, perhaps, the hard arts, whatever they may be.