IRL again

The news broke this week that Facebook was under attack by the US Dept of Housing and Urban Development under the charge that its microtargeting of specific demographic categories, when carried to a logical extreme, replicated the "redlining" practices whereby, in days that seemed to be of yore, African-Americans and other minorities were excluded from buying houses in specific developments, which turned out to be almost everywhere except where white people wanted them to live.

We were talking yesterday after our soccer game about how game designers employed behavioral psychologists to figure out how to make games more addictive, just like they used to tune the nicotine content of cigarettes to keep people puffing.

More and more, the virtual world, as it extends to encompass all aspects of our lives, comes to replicate the ills we have sought to curtail IRL (in real life) through accrued wisdom, so we have to learn lessons all over again.

It is reminiscent of nothing so much as the world of Jose Luis Borges, in which the noumenal world extends to be coterminous with the phenomenal. As in the famous fable of the map which comprises the story "On Exactitude in Science"

... In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

But now it is time to shave and get ready for brunch.

Kids

A little annoyed right now at my beloved daughter. I'm working hard to coordinate flights for her around Europe and home in late June right now, and she goes dark on me, despite me communicating with her entirely in the coin of the young people's realm: the text. Ah well.

On the positive side, our soccer team won today after getting whumped last week, and most of us had to play the whole game because of the large number of slackers off galavanting on some beach cuz it's Spring Break. I will have the last laugh late in the season, when I do some of my own traveling, because it will be hotter then. Cosmic justice, you gotta love it.

Mary is working in the yard now, and won't want to come in till it's pretty much dark, so I should really go have a snack.

Starting the day

One of the great things about not being on the road is being able to more easily adhere to healthy rhythms and practices, and one of the absolute best and most crucial for me is my early morning quiet time.

I get up early, before everyone else, when everything is quiet and do basics: make coffee, feed cats (so Rascal will leave me the fuck alone). While the coffee brews, I have pure quiet time. For some time it was closer to the "prayer" modality, which is to say that I sought to channel my thoughts intentionally and often in the form of words towards some other presupposed entity, if not necessarily an anthropomorphized deity.

More recently, I am moving towards more of a "meditation" mode, which I view as being more about focusing on clearing the mind. I put "prayer" and "meditation" in quotes because who knows what the words actually mean. In a sense the practice of engaging in either or both of them is groping towards one's own workable conception of them, or perhaps rather one's practice of them, inasmuch as each of them are actions of a sort.

Then I mix in crunches and push ups.

By now the coffee is ready, and I do some reading. The reading has varied over the years. It began with Al-Anon daily readers, but it has branched out to include other spiritual traditions. To date select Jewish stuff has been best, especially Abraham Joshua Heschel, but a slim volume of the stoic Epictetus was also good, as was Tim Galloway's The Inner Game of Tennis. Right now I am reading Chogyam Trungpa's Shambhala: The Way of the Warrior. I haven't found anything Christian that I can read just yet.

After breakfast, prior to working on morning correspondence, I read Nick Murray's daily reader for financial planners, Around the Year. To date Murray is the only one who has grasped and gone after the truly holistic demands of what we do as planners.

Soreness

Natalie came out for lunch yesterday, and before feasting we went for a bit of an exercise walk to "justify our love" for the delicious food we were about to inhale. Natalie has been playing club ultimate frisbee at Yale, meaning she is exercising more and more consistently than she did in high school, where she nominally did frisbee but was really too busy doing mock trial, debate etc. to go to practice much.

I had discussed with her a few times how much doing sports was integral to a good life for me, to the enjoyment of life, and how some baseline level of physical fitness was too. So I asked her if she was enjoying the fitness part of it more, and she said not really, and specifically cited being sore all the time as part of the problem.

I had never really reflected much on the issue of continual soreness, but I will say that it has been with me so long that I think of the mild discomfort as itself just part of life. A little muscle or joint ache tells me that I have done something recently. And if it is not there, I feel slack. Particularly on vacation, I actively want to get to the end of most if not all days having pushed myself hard. I would rather walk seven miles than three miles. And for sure, part of it is that it lets me eat more. No doubt.

Which isn't to say that I don't wrestle with laziness and actually getting out there and doing something. Even as I write this, I'm realizing that I need to hustle to pack my bags for work, including a gym bag so I can stop in to Planet Fitness end of day and put in my statutory 3 miles or so on the treadmill. I don't do it every day, but I need to do it enough days so that I don't have to go out and buy new jeans, which are always uncomfortable at first. And so we can check out Don Chicken on Elliot tonight!

Bad pop music

Natalie is home for spring break, and right now she is back in her room listening to some crappy pop music I have never heard before, singing along. There is a fire in the fireplace, as I try to burn off all the wood I brought onto the screened in porch before it gets warm, so I don't have to haul it back up to the wood pile. All in all, life is pretty good.

Robotics

Mary, granny and I rolled out to day 2 of East Chapel Hill's quest to win a robotics competition in Gibsonville. Graham's role on the team has been limited. He is part of the build team but it's unsure just what his specific responsibilities are. Which is cool. Mostly he is learning about being on a team. He has been staying rather late in the evenings, occasionally to the detriment of his school work. But he's sorting that out too.

The competition was rather intense. It was pretty amazing to see how different the robots were. Each team had to make decisions in the design phase about what aspects of the game to focus on. East's robot focused on "cargo" (hefting bouncy balls into chutes -- worth 3 points) and being a high climber (at the end of each round, the robot hauled itself up to a high platform worth a whopping 12 points). Other teams (Carrboro's team - in its rookie season) specialized in hanging disks (worth two points) and playing defense (making forays into the other team's area, banging against their robots, and generally messing them up). After the qualifying rounds, teams picked others to join "alliances", since it's always a game of 3 on 3. During the qualifiers, Graham was a statistician, and he did a fine job at that. It was important to form teams of complementary skillsets, as opposed to just the ones with the hwas ighest scores.

In the end, East came in 2nd (of 36) and won some special awards. The whole shebang was surprisingly engaging, and when it looked like East might get knocked out in the quarters, I was momentarily crestfallen. They came back.

All in all, I have to give it up to parents who do this all through their kids' childhoods. That is, haul themselves off to soccer, basketball, chess, whatever kind of competition. It's a total time- and soul-suck, involving an epic selflessness. Or does it? Certainly one hears of all too many instances of parents getting excessively wrapped up in living through their kids' accomplishments, and the college admissions scandal that broke last week may be just the most extreme instance of that. My point being that this utter level of commitment is not in some sense so selfless at all.

Our team picked the team from Orange High School as an alliance partner, which was a little surprising initially because they weren't ranked that highly. But the parents were right next to us in the stands, and they knew what they were watching (unlike us). They were also vigorous cheerers, and there was a lot of back and forth between alliances between rounds. Blue Alliance vs. Red Alliance, etc. True call and response. At one point in time, the opposing alliance, across the gym, started chanting "We believe that we will win" and then pausing, waiting for us to respond. I was ready to shout them down. The Orange parents did not. The woman to my left, a schoolteacher, explained to me that they did not like that cheer and did not participate in it. Good eggs.

Back and forth

I have been toin and froin a bit since last I wrote. A stop in through San Franscisco to see some peeps, now down in N Myrtle Beach to pick up Natalie from Spring Break. Having an all too rare sighting of the Atlantic Ocean as we speak, here at this condo "resort" where they only had non-dairy creamer for coffee not just in the room but also in the breakfast place (conveniently right across from my room). The woman was about to charge me $2.15 for a cup of milk for my coffee but I reminded her about the internet. Since she gave me some milk I will refrain from naming the resort.

Otherwise all good. Nice to see the sea, slept with my sliding glass door open, but my phone kept beeping at me. I didn't need that.

More later.

Home again, as it were

Back in this same cafe in Seattle near Mark's from whence I posted two years ago. The croissants are so damned good.

Not surprisingly, I return to the same theme, or a variant thereupon. There was a woman about my age, OK, probably younger, who was in here with her young girl (that's how I know she was younger). She started talking to a woman standing next to her about how she was from Ann Arbor and moved here a few years ago and how much Seattle was like Ann Arbor, blah blah blah.

I resisted the temptation to jump in and say: "My wife went to school there and her dad is from there and I really want to visit and get a sandwich from Zingerman's blah blah blah." Because the game she was playing and that we play all the time is "I am from the same tribe you are and we are educated and affluent and isn't that nice?" And that's all there is to it. We are from the same tribe. It is good sales technique.

And look where that has got us.

Whiplash

At around 8 on Friday night, I was headed up to Josh's house at the lake. It was a nasty night. Driving rain made the brights almost counterproductive. When I got to PayJay's on Route 1, I pulled off into the parking lot to enter the lake house address into my GPS so it would guide me the last bit, which I didn't feel confident to navigate in the dark.

I pulled off into the exit from the parking lot onto the road, so that my car was parallel to the road. In retrospect, it wasn't the absolute best place to perform this task, but there was plenty of space behind me, at least two if not three car lengths, where anybody could get around me to get into or out of the parking lot, and I wasn't gonna be there but 30 seconds, and my lights were on.

All this notwithstanding, I'm sitting there with my phone in my hand when I hear a crunching sound off to my right and I feel the rear of my car shifting to the left with a reasonable amount of force. Yes that's right, fair reader, somebody exiting the parking lot had slammed into my parked car, going pretty fast. I exclaimed something, most likely an expletive, but then within a microsecond or so my brain, ever the optimist, entered into denial and thought "that didn't just happen, did it?" But of course it had.

I got out, looked at my car, then looked back into the parking lot where some small car had a portion of its front bumper hanging off. I went up to it and knocked on the window. A guy was sitting there with his cellphone in hand, and I asked him "Are you OK?" (honestly, what he should have been asking me), and he's like "Yeah, I hit someone." "That was me." "Oh, I didn't see you, my windshield was a little bit fogged up." When I told him I thought we needed to call the cops he said. "Do we have to? My license is a little bit messed up. But I do have insurance. I was just calling my guy about my insurance."

Anyway, this is taking longer to narrate than I thought it would. I called up Josh because I didn't think he was in front of me and confirmed we needed an incident report, then called 911. Not too long thereafter, Melvin (the guy, who was entirely apologetic, and promised he had insurance) and I were waiting inside the store, and Josh shows up. Being hungry, Josh of course availed himself of not one but two pieces of the fried chicken I had in the back of the car, and I joined him in a drumstick while we waited for the sheriff's officer to get there. It was still hot.

In due course, the officer arrived, took our licenses and plates, but not our insurance and registrations, surprisingly, and in any case it didn't really matter because Melvin "didn't have no GEICO card on him" -- which somewhat begged the question of how he had been calling his insurance guy earlier. The officer promised a report would be available at the Warren County Sheriff's office on Monday morning, which we shall see about soon. Josh's professional assessment was that Melvin almost certainly did not have insurance, and the cop didn't want to embarrass him further by citing him for it, and I get that.  It was a rainy Friday and the guy had fucked up his car or, worse, his mom's or cousin's, and there was no reason to mess him up worse. He was a nice guy and was sincerely contrite. It's for situation's like this that we carry uninsured motorist coverage.

As to whiplash, my back felt and feels a little bit achy but I think it's getting better. Konanc didn't make it up there to give me a free professional opinion, sadly. Even more sadly, I didn't play basketball although the court was, surprisingly, dry enough. The car drives fine but I wouldn't be shocked if it needs $7k in work.