Nothing doing

Having a very low activity day after what has felt like a very active couple of weeks. The main activity has been pushing through to the end of Lee Smith's Family Linen, which I had picked up somewhere used and I guess I started reading it because it is a rare book in the "pocket paperback" format which used to be so popular but no longer is, for whatever reason (is it because Boomers aged and their eyesight got weaker? Or is it that trade paperbacks offer booksellers higher margins?).

In any case, I took it with me when I went North to fetch Natalie the week before last because it would be less heavy in my bag, but it proved to be pretty slow going. Smith is a little too dedicated to the Rashomon trick of having many narrators tell a story from many perspectives. It is also quintessentially low on plot and long on texture, focusing as it does on intergenerational stuff in a small southern town. So no car chases. Yet it rewarded persistence, at long last, because there was a there there.

Otherwise, Graham is pulling his first shift as a Lake Forest staffer, while Natalie was out for a walk with a friend as she and Mary prepare for blast off headed west tomorrow. I know that Natalie's excited, while Mary is perhaps more apprehensive, as it will be her first cross-country drive. But they're gonna have a good time, as they've budgeted plenty of time to do it, and it will be their longest jaunt together ever. It will be all good. It had better be. 

Fundamental Rights

Yesterday I was Zooming with an old friend, who has been drifting in a measured and reasonable fashion towards a more conservative way of looking at the world as his hair greys and he rises up the income tax brackets. Somehow our conversation ambled around to gun ownership and I mentioned how Josh had not long ago characterized gun ownership as a public health issue and invoked the progress we have made controlling traffic fatalities over the last six decades as we've incorporated seat belts, air bags, rumble strips, regs on tensile strength of different parts of car bodies, driver's ed, drunk driving laws, etc., into our social fabric.

My buddy raised his voice about how he was a bit uncomfortable discussing a "Fundamental Right" such as gun ownership in such terms. But the thing is, the right to bear arms is certainly no more fundamental than the rights to speech, assembly, or press, and certainly our understanding of how each of them is best implemented under different technological conditions and at different historical moments has evolved over time. I would argue that the very fundamentality of a right means that we should think deeply at different times over what it means then, debate it openly and often, and then implement our understanding of it.

Certainly the idea that the founding fathers were some sort of holy men who has it all figured out and who laid down holy writ is overplayed. They were not Moses gone up on the Mountain of Reason. They were a great generation, no doubt, arguably one of the greatest, and we are in many ways fortunate to live in the country they founded and even on the planet they trod, but they did not have it all figured out and could not anticipate all that would follow them. It is meet and right that they should be studied, but not in a silly attempt to explain everything.

Messy interlude

Between Natalie and her roommate Anya, we filled a pretty good sized storage space in New Haven. But we also brought home a pretty full car of stuff. Given that she's headed out to California soon, it wasn't really clear what all this stuff is for, but really I'm one to talk. I seem to remember bringing my whole stereo and all my vinyl home from college, I think just for Christmas, because how on earth was I ever going to live without it for 3-4 weeks?

And now it is pretty much strewn all over the house, though it's gradually being cleaned up. The inveterate neatnik in me really wants to let her know it bugs me by stomping my feet and making a scene but... I know she's only here for a week so it's really not worth creating a ruckus over it. There will be enough tensions that arise.

This, then, is the essence of adulting.

Recovering

A bit ragged out after the run up to last night's meeting of the lake community and the stressful run up to it. It was a lot of hard work after a couple of weeks of heat. In the end, the aggressive keyboard cowboys of the listserv scarcely bothered to raised their heads in the curiously harsh glow of a Zoom call. Funny how people get shy when people are watching. I don't really get it.

Then, today, work, then tennis. Not my best day on the courts but it was good to get out there and run. More tennis Thursday.

Natalie is getting me grooved into Bojack Horseman. A bit of a taste that must be acquired, perhaps not unlike beer.

Hop to the hinterlands

Yesterday I hopped up to Josh's place up on Lake Gaston for a sliver of guys' weekend, before heading back to Chapel Hill for dinner and a movie with Natalie and Graham. For lunch we went to this place at a marina down the lake, where pretty much nobody had on masks. I did see one African-American guy wearing one from his car into the restaurant. The pandemic, it would seem, is over.

But it's not. It rages on in the developing world. Supply chains are disrupted, there is huge inflationary pressure from stimulus, etc. People are all so pent up from having to stay at home more and having had it be harder to consume a wide range of things. While it's good on the one hand for people get out to see friends and relatives and stoke demand to get people integrated back into the workforce, folks also just need to calm the fuck down, think about what's important, and recognize that we're in a weird place as a planet.

There is still a lot of opportunity for good and for improvement, if we can get our heads right. 

Home again

We made it home after a largely uneventful 670-mile day home from New Haven in a 21-year old car, which did very nicely, thank you. Largely uneventful -- because we took evasive action, first skirting bad traffic on the George Washington Bridge by skooching up to the Tappan Zee, then by heading west via 78 to 81 because it was clear our late start doomed us to hit DC around rush hour. Finally, after we got news that a truck carrying cars had caught on fire south of Harrisburg caused a nearly 2-hour backup on 81, we took another jog (via a beautiful mountain traverse in Maryland which took us across the AT), though eventually we ended up back on 81 and dropped down to Danville on 29.

Things might have been different had we left earlier, but we didn't, because between racing around New Haven in a rented truck jamming things into a storage unit with Natalie and her most excellent senior year roommate Anya (who grew up in Atlanta but whose family is from Tbilisi, so we call her Anya from Georgia Georgia), Natalie bustled around seeing friends. Which made sense. COVID made this a tough year for socializing and exams were just over. So it was good to see her wanting to touch base one more time with her peeps, who are a really nice group of folks.

But in any case, we got home late, at which point in time I got an email from a former fellow board member which was the equivalent of a large stinking unflushed turd. Joy of joys. On with the day. 

Breakfast at Nica's

Though it didn't exist when I was in college, this place has been integral to our experience of Natalie's time at Yale. On her very first day, Mary's friend Marion suggested we get sandwiches from there before we went to have lunch with her and Greg and their daughter Valerie and her recently born twins at her place a few blocks up Orange Street. Yum.

Now Natalie lives even closer to it than Valerie did, though only for this year. In any case, Natalie and I have taken to provisioning ourselves here before heading out on the road, often with a simple chicken cutlet LTO with hot sauce(no cheese). A true classic we landed on at the deli near the library in Larchmont, but they do it better here. Sadly, those probably won't be ready today before we head out.

The illusory romance of grad school

Once more at an Airbnb in a New Haven neighborhood primarily inhabited by grad students, it would seem. I am momentarily nostalgic for graduate school.

But then I recall the feeling of stepping on to campus at Columbia the other day and remembering that graduate school wasn't actually that romantic. It's not like college. It's kind of a grind. Lots of great stuff happened in grad school, no doubt. Learned a lot, met Mary, got sober, got to know New York better, learned how to make a delicious lasagna by making a normal lasagna and then pouring a container of heavy cream over it, but it wasn't a time of adventure in the same way college was. It was instead the time of the end of adventure in the old sense, the time when I realized that hopping around obscure corners of Europe (the most adventure I'd allow myself) got old.

Maybe it would have been different had I ventured further afield, but I doubt it. But there's something about New Haven that makes it look exciting. An optical illusion, no doubt, caused by the fact that I went to college here.

4:02 to New Haven

I ran a little late in Brooklyn and could only get on this train instead of the earlier one I had been hoping for -- the trains before 4 are technically off-peak and have a lower fare. But it turns out that all trains are off peak until full service resumes, so I'm in luck! The train was maybe 60% full, fuller than I thought it would be. Just as the subways are pretty full but not packed.

Though I didn't make it around midtown much, my qualified prognosis is this: New York lives. People are inching back to normalcy, day by day. Residential neighborhoods are full of life. Everyone is happy for the warm weather -- late coming this year -- so they were out.

There is no doubt persistent pain. Crime is higher. There is still a lot of hunger out there. My client who's a school principal in East Harlem tells me that the school continues to serve twice as many meals as it does during the normal school year as people from the community come in to eat. This has been a little understood function of the city schools: they have big kitchens, so they have been feeding lots of people. 

It's interesting to observe mask-wearing in different neighborhoods. In Flatbush today, on the streets, there was maybe 85-90% compliance in a largely Caribbean neighborhood. In Ditmars, Queens, it was probably around 50-60%. In Central Park, maybe 35-40% of people wore masks as they walked. Up by Columbia, maybe 70%.

The science is pretty clear that there's little risk of outdoor transmission, but New York hasn't changed its guidance just yet, and a lot of New Yorkers have died. So people are keeping it together and staying masked up on the streets. It's good to see, even though I hate wearing the durned things outdoors myself, especially when it's hot.

W Train from Ditmars

On the subway for the first time since October 2019. I bought a large MetroCard figuring that, if some of it goes unused, it will be a small contribution to the future of the MTA because -- and let's be clear here -- public transportation and cities are important, and New York is the most important city in America and always should be.

Then, when I reached the turnstile, it appeared that one could just tap a credit card and pay per ride. I do hope the MTA is charging a premium for that service, because really it is in its interest to sell rides at higher volumes. Unless the transaction costs of managing the infrastructure are too high.

As the train pulled in, I saw one woman who had her mask pulled down because she was talking to someone on the phone and, clearly, it was very important that the person she was talking to should hear her well. Looked like she was on speaker phone. Sigh. Some things never change.

Headed to RDU

It's not without anxiety that I'm all geared up and ready to head out. It's been 15 months since I got on an airplane and, to be frank, the staying home part of this pandemic has been mostly good. I know how fortunate I am to be able to say that, but I say it nonetheless.

It's a little autumnal outside, so I am feeling a touch like Pushkin in November 1830, preparing to leave Boldino and the period of his greatest productivity. Not to flatter myself unduly.

Preparing for liftoff and a proper accounting

Flying to NYC on Sunday on my way to pick up Natalie from college and road trip home. Frankly I'm only mildly excited about leaving home. I was just in DC and PA in March, what's the rush? Though I'm psyched to see her and others as well.

One conversation I look forward to having is with my niece Sadie in Queens. At one of our low points of the pandemic, on a Christmas family Zoom call we reacted poorly and unsupportively when Sadie was telling us of her alternative route through high school and into acting school. Our stick in the mud by the book belief in a standard academic path through life reared the ugliest parts of his head, and we apparently sat their aghast in a way that freaked her out and made her cry once the call was done. Not a good Christmas present at all.

It is sometimes hard for all of us to believe that there are paths through life other than the ones we have trod ourselves, and I think being the one of the deepest moments of the pandemic probably made that even worse. So I will apologize to her again in person, even though we already did it on the phone.  

The little things

When working at home, one of the steps of getting started with the day is making my bed. Perforce, I have to wait till Mary gets up, which is a little later than me. It's not because I work in the bedroom. Really it's just because.

So I was in there making the bed today and I looked over at the reading chair over by the window facing out towards the lake. With the leaves back on the trees, it is shadier than ever, which makes it a poor place to sit and read in the afternoon for lack of a lamp. There's a lamp on the desk in front of it, the desk Natalie used as her work station through the deepest months of lockdown, but that lamp sucks. I tried to get Graham involved in rewiring it -- obviously not my bag -- but he had no interest. Which is why I really don't think he's an engineer at heart.

In any case, the reading chair needed a lamp. Conveniently, there was a standing lamp in my office not being used as a standing lamp. I will spare you the description of what it was being used for (probably elsewhere on the blog, in any case). I brought it into the bedroom, took the lightbulb out of the broken lamp on the desk, got the shade for the standing lamp from the top of the old filing cabinet, put it all together and turned it on. It works!

Problem solved. I am very excited by this. Another place to sit and read late in the day and at night. Admittedly, the chair is 26 years old and needs to be replaced, and Mary will start to hate the standing lamp soon enough. But the wheels are in motion....

Leaving town this weekend and am a little sad about it after such a meaningful and affordable upgrade to the old living space.

Righteousness and wickedness

When I headed off to grad school in 1991, I fully intended to take up yoga. Still haven't quite gotten there, though there are some nice videos on YouTube. For a similar length of time, I've been meaning to read the Bible. I've had a King James translation since I was a child, I got it at St Phillips in Durham. I got a New Standard Oxford Study edition sometime in college, probably for reference when I took that course on rabbinical literature.

Recently I started reading it in the morning, alongside the Tao Te Ching (much easier going). Because the Bible is so daunting, I figured I'd start the Psalms, which are reputed to be real nice.

Even there, however, the whole thing is weighed down by this Manichean view of righteousness and wickedness, 24/7. I'm like, ease up fellas. Don't be so sure. Then I got to the end of one of them and it had this line: "Let the words of the my mouth, and the meditations of my heart, be acceptable in the sight, Oh Lord." It took me a few minutes to realize where I knew it from.

 

More on court insight

Beautiful weather today, mid-to-upper 60s when Z and I hit the courts at a little before 11. The first set was interesting. He went up 2-0, then I fought back to be up 3-2, then he closed me out 6-3. As we were hydrating before starting the second set, Adam tells me that I had won only 2 points the last four games. Which was odd, because I didn't feel all that bad about it and what I remember most was a beautiful down the line backhand passing shot I hit on one of those two points, that nestled snugly in the corner. In the second set I was up 4-2, then he came back to tie it up 4-4, then our time on the court ran out.

I feel fine about it all. Especially after Thursday, when he took me 6-1 in the first while I was feeling shitty because of all this crap going on out on the neighborhood listserv, people attacking the Board and whatnot. Then I came back and took him 6-4 in the second set, hustling my ass off. That was a true mental victory.

But the thing about today which is really interesting is that it fits a pattern that I remember from when I was playing a ton of tennis with David in Princeton back in 2008-2009 ('m sure I wrote about it then, but don't have time to look). He and I would trade off, he'd beat me 6-4 one day and I'd beat him 7-5 the next but it was always even. On the one hand, I don't have it within me to beat my friends badly. Something within me will always let up or trip me up to keep it close. On the other hand, I also very easily let up and let myself off easy. If I win 3 or 4 games in a set and am not beaten badly, my internal meter kind of goes "good enough" and my mind drifts. I start blogging or thinking about work or something.

Is it that I am slack and slightly underachieving, or is it a sign of ego health that I don't feel like I need to prove much to anyone? I'm 55, in decent shape, obviously a passable athlete, why get all worked up?

And nobody else can blog like me. Here, I am the uncontested world champion.

As for now, I gotta go work on Mother's Day dinner.

A good day to me

After a couple of days of stress around HOA stuff involving a disgruntled former Board member and things the current Board is doing that threaten his legacy -- and some shit he has stirred up on the nabe listserv, we are moving on. Also, Graham took his SATs today. 

And I am moving towards the end of my most recent Elizabeth George mystery novel. On the one hand, that means I will have to get back to reading one of my more serious books. On the other, it's nice to get to the end of this rather slow-moving mystery and figure out what the hell is going on. Really, by this time I could do with a little bit less of the soap opera in the lives of the main characters. Yes, it would be nice if St James and Deborah had a baby, and if Lynley and Helen would tie the knot, and if Travers would sell her old family house and move on with her life. But I don't care that much. It would be nice to see a few more corpses, honestly. It has been nice to have a long narrative to come back to throughout the pandemic, but now I'm ready for the next book.

I have folded the laundry. Now I must bike. Then Graham will select our takeout for the evening.

The flattening of conversation

Saw a headline about a place where commercial landlords have leverage and restaurants are filling up and I thought, where's that? The answer, of course, is Israel, where the vaccine rollout has gone rather smoothly.

My mind quickly ran to the conversations of the people in the restaurants, and indeed to conversations I am having with people in general. The great thing about talking to people is that you get a lot of really diverse information about the wide range of things people are doing in the world. Over the last year and change, we've all been doing more or less the same thing: sitting behind our computers, exercising, getting take out, watching stuff on Netflix, etc. The range of recent experience to make conversations lively has narrowed or flattened.

Which doesn't mean it's not still good to be talking to people. It just kind of means that you have to talk to people for longer for it to get interesting, and that pre-existing relationships where you've known people for a long time are much more fruitful than new ones.

In a sense, it's another constraint on idea liquidity, alongside the exodus from cities and the decline of face to face retail.

Resisting the tug of the day

My morning reading and task routine is pretty extensive. I think I have laid it out for you before, I won't bore you with it again. In general its burden and intent are to keep me focused for as long as possible on matters general, common and long-term -- before being pulled down into the thicket of specific implementation details for individual clients. 

I nonetheless have a practice of checking email and texts on my phone at around 8:30, and also the stock futures, just in case there's something pressing that needs quick attention. Usually there is not.

But in actual fact there is no conflict between these two, the general and the specific. Rather, I'm trying to take in wisdom from varying sources -- right now ranging from Psalms to Bezos' annual letters -- to apply to specific client needs. And in the short term it is all about the specifics, and that's where the real joy is.

Yesterday I was helping out an 18-year old zero fee client (child of another client) who had a problem with a small deposit. She also wants to take a gap year and go abroad next year, so I'm gonna put her in touch with a friend in Spain, someone I met when I was 15. Very long shot. I love this shit.

But I also need to take the time to read up on some deep in the weeds tax stuff and to counsel a client about changes in tax structure that are coming on just as he starts to earn big money. This is the fun stuff, the warp and woof.

Dinner table conversations

A friend of mine who works at home alongside her husband recently joked that she and he have to be careful not to speak much at lunch so they can have something to talk about at dinner. We have a little bit of that going on in our household. Every night we drag ourselves down into the mire of: "How was your day?" Which can easily get bogged down in excessive detail or frustration or even -- if one of us has a particularly good day, and it's more likely to be me because I leave the house more -- mild envy.

When there is so much going on in the world but it's so hard to talk about it. Right now -- India. Burning up with COVID, so many dying, so much pain. On the one hand, who wants to talk about it. On the other, we kind of need to because ultimately we are all bound up together in all of this and we need to convey to our kids an understanding of that, and the global topics are almost more easily addressed because they are more distant from us than the local ones.

But we get bogged down in our little shit.

The good fortune of a slow day

Forgot to set my alarm and woke up this morning a little after 8. Whoops! No biggie, my calendar is pretty light today in terms of fixed responsibilities, if not items on my task list. There is never a shortage of productive things to do. Rather than beat myself up, I really just need to remind myself how fortunate I am to not have to sweat such matters.

But also, I'll take it. Looking forward, I must say that all I see for the summer is a continual scramble of logistics: trip to NYC, then getting Natalie out of her apartment and back to NC. Getting her to California (Mary's handling that one, but I'll have to frontrun the logistics). Visiting clients Seattle. Taking Graham to visit colleges and starting work on essays. Visiting family in NY. Roadtrip back from Austin with Natalie (that will be true adventure. I've never been to the deep South, really, and we could go through Alabama and Mississippi).

Much of this will be fun, in its own way, but it's also a ton of time behind the wheel, and I'm not sure where the vacation happens.

So if I sleep in one fine morning, so be it.