Turning of the seasons

Flowers on the trees remind us that spring is just around the corner, as the East Coast makes a desperate last-ditch attempt to pretend that we will have a winter. It is all very disconcerting.

At a client's house the other night, the wife's son, a 28-year old from her first marriage, was getting ready to fly off to Australia to join his brother, after working for 18 months in Baltimore at some medium-shit job, which followed a couple of years of traipsing around Latin America and some time in Japan. His mom said: "at your age I had two kids and (pause, think) was divorced!"

Carolina heads towards the tournament last in the ACC.

Our narratives are changing. Admittedly, I didn't do everything by the book in my career and life arc, strictly speaking, but there was always a plan of sorts. I was gonna be a professor, live lean, and raise kids in a university town, and in some sense I'm not so far from doing that, it's just my job description and institutional affiliation are different.

At this point in time, I feel like my role is to hold things together so that my kids feel like there's enough stability in the home and the world that they can make meaningful plans for the future, and to do as much as I can to make that actually be the case. But it ain't easy. Shit is in flux.

This virus thing

It would be disingenuous of me to pretend like the coronavirus and its influence on the markets was not unsettling. It is. The situation on the ground is fast moving and it brings up uncomfortable memories of the financial crisis.

But back then I was only tending to my own family's money, now I feel some real responsibility for the long-term welfare of others.

To complicate matters, there is an internal tension between the common human response of being concerned about the health and welfare of human beings, the professional response of thinking about client funds, and -- at the furthest reaches of my mind -- civic concerns around how the situation might negatively impact a very important election year. What if campaign activities are curtailed? Or primaries? Or even, dare I say it, the general election itself?

In the middle of this I am working as hard as possible to do things to keep my horizon's lengthened by maintaining my daily routine of meditation, work, exercise, reading, and 30 Rock reruns. Reading Charlie Munger's impassioned and well-thought out calls for multidisciplinary education is instructive. In today's reading he argues for making lots of education like pilot training. I won't go into further detail than that, but he has a point. A wise dude.

Cruising

Graham's recent mastery of the interstate has opened up new possibilities for our weekend drives. On Saturday it occurred to me that we could very well check out Creedmoor. And so we did.

Someone had told me that Creedmoor had become something of an outer bedroom community for Raleigh. While that may be true for some of the areas south of Creedmoor right along Falls Lake, I saw no evidence of it in Creedmoor proper. I had also gotten to know the former mayor a little bit as he campaigned for a seat in NC's legislature.

So I was a little bit curious. Graham drove us over there, adroitly navigating all the necessary lane changes going around Durham. When we got to Creedmoor, five miles and change off of I-85, we saw pretty quickly that it was a very small town. Just a couple of blocks of downtown. On Main St the only businesses that seemed to be open were a gun store and a Mexican restaurant. There was a pretty shiny Edward Jones office (perhaps the sole data point supporting the thesis that there's some money hiding out around there), and a couple of other old store fronts were undergoing seeming renovations. All in all, I have seen many downtowns which were much more forlorn.

Off the main street there was an excellent-looking chicken and fish place which I definitely wanted to check out, and also a pizza place which held a certain amount of perverse charm. One day.

Graham pulled over and I planted the last Ronnie Chatterji for NC Treasurer yard sign I had. When we got back on 85, I realized that we could take it to Hillsborough and get rid of some of the Amy Fowler yard signs that were clogging up the back of my car. So we did it. And now my car is free and easy, for the time being.

Next week, maybe we'll hit Oxford and Butner. Just to go a little crazy. Or even Yanceyville. Or Graham. Our great state is wide open to us now.

Preparing for lift off

Laying low around the house as I wait for this stye to go away. It inclines me away from reading a little bit, so I am trying non-eye related things like talking on the phone and listening to music.

I was reminded of how my old classmate from both Yale and Columbia Stephen Johnson said that he spends about 30-45 minutes a day just listening to music. Which seems like a good idea, and has clearly worked for him, since he writes bestsellers about basically whatever he wants to and hauls down high 5-low 6-figure speaking fees. Then again I have to remind myself that the guy started out with money. I remember going to a party at his apartment near Columibia and it was ridiculously large and he had this big-assed Mac and also a real Stratocaster and I was just like hmmm. But he does do pretty good work.

In any case, I do hope my eye is better by tomorrow because by hook or by crook I will be getting on an airplane and going to Washington DC late in the day tomorrow, spending a couple of days there seeing a client and others. Booked a room in some sort of swanky Hilton affiliate on a surprisingly small amount of points. Undoubtedly I'll get the crappiest little room, but it was quasi-free, so who am I to complain?

But I do gotta figure out which book(s) to take. Not this bio of Henry Luce.

Pain in the stye

Pardon the mild radio silence, Dear Readers. I am suffering through a yicky stye, which is limiting the amount of time I feel like sitting at my desk looking at my computer. At least it wasn't conjunctivitis, and also it seems tht my touch typing skills are good enough that I really don't need to look at my screen to write. Which could be either good or bad.

It is not too terribly hard to watch TV, so Graham and I will soldier forth with the Sopranos.

Balancing act

I picked up Graham from robotics last night at around 7:30, and he announced that he had enjoyed a couple of slices of pizza. He has been moving into eating pizza like a normal person recently, even though he doesn't like melted cheese. This is a big deal, because it shows he is really outgrowing his dairy allergy. So he didn't join us at the dinner table for the daily recap.

At around 10:30 last night, as I was headed upstairs for bed, I stopped over to his room to say goodnight. He was asleep in his clothes (normal), with his iPad in his hand (also normal, and not even all that far outside the norm for sleeping). I woke him up by accident, then took the iPad out of his hands, turned off the lights, and continued on my way.

In the morning, he told me he had woken up at 1:15 with bad heartburn (whatever that is) and couldn't get back to sleep till 2. He also said he had a math quiz today and a quiz in engineering.

As I have probably blogged before, Graham has been struggling a little in the extra-accelerated math he took because all his friends took it. He got his first B in the class the first semester, thereby relieving himself of the pressure of participation in the valedictorian sweepstakes.

It could be that it's the eating of all that cheese that messed up his sleeping last night, made him fall asleep early first and then woke him up in the middle of the night. If so, oh well. He is really trying hard to figure out how to make and have friends, something that has not come naturally to a boy on the autism spectrum living in the age of the smartphone and kids isolating in their rooms. His milk allergy has not helped. Eating pizza with friends is a great thing to do, and I hope his body sorts it all out so he can happily eat lots more in the future. Including with his dad! If he has to choose between pizza and friends on the one hand and math on the other... I won't say it should be pizza and friends every time, but sometimes it should be.

The buzz

In recent weeks I have transitioned from the Saturday morning Al Anon meeting I had been attending for the last seven years or so to an AA meeting at the same time. When I got there, I discovered it was full of people I knew from various places around Chapel Hill, even one from Princeton, which was awesome.

I also added some probiotics to my consumption regime, initially in order to offset the effects of the antibiotics I took when I got bit by a dog, and then I've kept with them for the "gut health" effects, which it turns out means that your poops are better formed than before.

In the mornings, for my first round of reading, focused on spirit, I read some Buddhist stuff for a while, then some Jewish stuff. Of late I have been reading Marcus Aurelius.

I also added meditation into the mix. I could go on.

The common theme in each of these endeavors has been the search for The Buzz of the thing that is The Answer, roughly speaking. The Practice that will bring enduring enlightenment to my life. In each case there is in fact an initial buzz, that wears off slightly over time. What I have to realize is that they are all little steps in what is in fact a process of just getting better, keeping on keeping on without getting discouraged by anything.

As important as anything else is trying to get to bed earlier, something I've been doing with limited success. Also managing down my exposure to airplanes and airports.

Now it is just about time to get Graham off to his martial arts class, with him behind the wheel as he keeps learning to drive. I think today I will have him head out on 40 towards Raleigh. He has been on 40 before, but not in that direction. As long as Carolina isn't playing at home during the day, it ought to be OK.

General fitness attributes

At the recommendation of my friend Mark, whom I will visit soon, I am reading a book called The Barbell Prescription which argues -- as the title hints -- that the Athlete of Aging should lift more free weights because strength and muscle mass are super-important to people as they age. Mark's counsel is generally good, because as a general practitioner physician, he has thought about this stuff a lot and sees a lot of aging people, and can attest that those who age well are those that are strong and have muscle mass. On the other hand, Mark is a freaking monomaniac who goes through phases of doing things like running ultramarathons in thong sandals, like the Navajo or somesuch tribe of First People used to do. He has been known on occasion to let his enthusiasm get the better of him and then injure himself.

For me, the idea of focusing on a specific set of General Fitness Attributes, defined by the authors of this books as strength, power, endurance, mobility, balance, and body composition flies in the face of my long-evolving practice of seasonal cross-training, which involves having a changing mix of sports/exercise (running, soccer, tennis, walking, swimming, biking, raking, weights) depending on what the prevailing weather is outside. And I do really dig the being outside part, whenever possible.

I also have been meaning to incorporate some yoga into the mix. I've been thinking about this since about 1991.

Moreover, prizing the building of bulk flies in the face of what I've always wanted to look like: Flash vs. Superman, Ryan Giggs or Roger Federer instead of the Hulk. But I am reading the book and trying to take it in because, for one thing, Mark says I should and also because the authors are building a solid case. Also, I increasingly have to take seriously the concerns about injury from soccer, tennis, and even running. Actually, I am rarely at risk of injuring myself from running too much.

Speakers at colleges

Not long ago I was watching a talk given by Weijian Shan -- who wrote Out of the Gobi, about which I have cooed -- at Berkeley, where he got his PhD. Early in the talk he comments about how honored he was that students were there at his talk: "when I was at university I would have been studying," he said, or somesuch.

Me too. When I was in both college and grad school I pretty much went and heard speakers who were directly related to what I was studying. In college I recall in particular going to see the poets Voznesensky and Evtushenko and the novelist Bitov and probably a few more like that. Plus some sexy theorist types. In grad school it was pretty much the same.

Which is a shame, because in fact going to hear people speak about what they do and think about is one of the best ways to open one's mind up about other ways of approaching the world, particularly if they are good speakers. Listening to speakers rocks because it demands little of the listener, you just sit there and listen, and drift off if you feel like it. The dynamism of the speaker draws you back to what she was saying. Or, if it doesn't, it's because she's not worth listening to and you get a little time off to chill or kvetch.

At one level, this is just another instance of a theme I have returned to over the years in this blog, the importance of finding a balance in one's life between focus and breadth. If you don't have some focus, you can easily become useless and indistinguishable from the next goon. But if you don't have any breadth, you're just a glorified screwdriver, and nobody will be able to find you to make use of you.

For institutions of higher learning, this suggests a few things:

• Why aren't there central listings of speakers coming in to universities? Maybe there are. There could be a central bulletin board. Even better, an XML standard or RSS-type thing that everybody would put their speaker listings into. The data would have tags so that people could turn filters on and off as they liked.
• Why not offer students credit for going to hear different speakers? Say, half a credit per semester if they attend 12 different lectures sread across distribution requirements, validate their presence with geolocation using phones or a sign in on an iPad (or QR reader), and then have the students write reflections on what they heard. Even better, force the students to contribute a certain number of words/posts to a moderated Wiki/Talmudesque thingie for each speaker. That would be fun.
  
  This would be a great requirement for frosh.

My game

First time back out on the court with Z was typical, I lost 6-2, 3-2. Or, really, it was more like 3-0, 6-4. Often it takes me a few games to get the caffeine out of my system and calm down. By then the first set is half over. I suppose I could cut back on my coffee the mornings we plan to play, but then I would get less coffee, which wouldn't seem fair.

Afterwards, I showered and stood outside watching some rather talented women play. One of them was Emily, who played for the high school back in the day and is now a pro at the club. It was useful for me to stand and watch them, and particularly to notice how they flubbed things. They hit a bunch of stupid-looking shots, the kind of things I would beat myself over. But by any objective measure they were better than me. I need to keep that in mind when I play. It's a hard game, a cruel game.

Momentum

After casting about for the next right thing to read -- tried a John McPhee book about the merchant marine that meandered in his typical fashion, then some Lorrie Moore stories that were pretty good but not compelling -- I am picking up steam in Alan Brinkley's biography of Henry Luce -- who was the founder and driving force behind Time, Life, Sports Illustrated, etc. It's a good biography. Mostly, I'm just psyched to have something else to sink my teeth into, and it feels good to read through the large stacks of books that I bring home from used book stores, thrift stores, etc. I am even on a kick to taking books that I have tried to read and then failed and carrying them out of the house to little free libraries, thrift stores, etc, thereby making room on the shelves for other books. Feels great.

Walked into town yesterday to go see Carolina play Boston College at the Dean Dome. We lost. It's a crappy season. In fact, the only two times I've ever gone to games there, we lost. Which is not all bad. It lessens the allure of a pretty expensive habit. The guy sitting next to me was pretty much an idiot. , offering the most inane commentary: "we cain't shoot the ball!" "we gotta get a stop!" Not Crabill, the other guy.

On the walk up I noticed a now-disused small kidney-shaped pool right up close to the street on the west side of Franklin St, between Boundary and Hillsborough. As long as I've lived in this town, that was rather surprising. 

Citizen diplomacy with China

China China China. It is everywhere, the big theme. What's up with China? Are they catching up with us? Have they surpassed us? Are they friend? Enemy? Are they stealing from us? Do they have a right to, given how much was stolen from them and how they were treated? Behind many, if not all questions today, sits China.

But what of the Chinese? Can we speak of them as one? There are, after all, about 1.4 billion of them living in China, and another 46 million of them living abroad plus Hong Kong and Taiwan. That's a lot of people. Surely there is a lot of diversity in there.

Within China, particularly since the Tiannanmen Square events of 1989, the government has tried to stoke nationalism and patriotism based on a victim narrative: China was great, then the West came and subjugated it following the Opium Wars, then Japan occupied... China's self-injuries in the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution have been backgrounded. It was foreigners that did it.

But the West doesn't understand the extent to which Chinese patriotism is an artificial phenomenon. Surely there is just pride in the tremendous strides China has made since the death of Mao. It has done incredible things. By many measures the most progress made by any segment of humanity ever.

But in some sense I digress from where I wanted to take this. Back when the Soviet Union was our bete noire, we had an understanding that fundamentally, we had a problem with the Soviet government but not necessarily the Russian (and other Soviet) people. I don't think we have that mindset to the same extent today. For the most part, at least for people of my generation, we don't have good connectivity even to Chinese people in America, let alone in China or elsewhere in the Chinese diaspora to understand how they think and where they're at. My guess is that they are in a much wider range of places than we think they are. The tightening of Chinese authoritarianism does not help, to be sure. The broad support of civil disobedience in Hong Kong, the recent Taiwanese elections, and tight capital controls maintained by Beijing indicate that centrifugal forces remain strong.

So I need to talk to more Chinese people. Then again, I need to talk to more Trump voters too. I need to talk to more people.