Boldly seeking attention

I recently suffered through a professional blog post in which it seemed like every fourth word was in bold. Similarly, I asked to be removed from the distribution list for a guy I know from college whose emails went on for pages and consisted exclusively of one-sentence paragraphs.

One of the basic rules of writing, of any mode of communication, is that things a writer does to accentuate specific bits of content must be used sparingly. Otherwise you have the boy who cried wolf. If someone continually beats you over the head demanding your attention, it's an admission that she hasn't really earned it and that she knows it. Rules are made to be broken, but if they are being broken all the time, they aren't rules. It's just chaos. 

Lazy Sunday?

As I believe I have shared in the past, I have settled on Saturday as my personal sabbath because it is easier to shut in the demands of the world on Saturdays, compared to Sundays when all the things I feel like I'm supposed to do -- which is all too coterminous with the the things I could do -- come rushing in on me. For example, today I tried sitting in the armchair in our bedroom to differentiate my groove from that of a weekday -- when I end up in the armchair in my study at around 8:15 or 8:30 and check my phone and computer for messages and the day's futures. 

But sitting on this side of the house means I look down at the lake, so I start thinking about lake stuff. Like, for example, how the engineer who certifies our dam told me that I should "observe the dam under different conditions." This winter, unlike last winter, has featured more cold weather and therefore -- potentially at least -- freeze/thaw cycles. As any long-term reader of the blog will be aware, our dam -- built in 1938 with help from the WPA -- comprises stone held together by concrete mortar which, over the course of decades -- has developed cracks which allow water to seep through. While this is absolutely normal for a dam of this sort, one thing it is not is comforting, especially as the population density downstream from our 50 acre lake has probably increased by a factor of not less that 50 in the intervening 8 decades and change. And freeze/thaw cycles, of course, do not strengthen masonry dams with cracks in them, though I have no idea of the time frame or trajectory over which the dam gets weaker. At any rate, I should go down and check it out.

I also need to get some more firewood from our neighbor Scott (for which I need to wait till Graham comes back from robotics to help build the boy's dadgummed upper body), recaulk our shower stall -- especially because Mary spend a lot of time cleaning it on Friday evening, do taxes and create 1099s for a small LLC Mary has with her friends for a book project, make some phone calls for LFA stuff, send some emails to sell Mary's book... I'm exhausted already. In any case, it's almost lunchtime.

 

Fact and fiction

One of the most amazing things about this blog is that it offers me windows on the past when I happen to be perusing things for this reason or that one. For instance, this post from 2012 about a nine-year old Graham who was just learning the distinction between fact and fiction. 

A few minutes back I found myself looking out the window at the snow reflecting on the fact that I needed to wait till Monday to find out what followed from the most recent cliffhanger episode of Sex Education. I believe I have extolled the show in the past, if not, let me do so here. It's quite good.

In any case, it occurred to me my caring about what happened in the show was in fact a function of my own poor boundaries between fact and fiction. Since I know the show is fiction, why should I care about what happens to the characters? The answer, of course, is that it is good fiction, fiction which has made me care about the characters, because it rings true in important ways, despite the fact that so much about the show is utterly ridiculous, far-fetched and idealized (a school in which teenagers talk openly to one another about their sexual hang-ups and deepest insecurities? yeah right).

The show, in short, displays many of the hallmarks of good realism in that it captures an important human reality (characters we want to both like and hate) while idealizing some things and taking ridiculous liberties with plot pacing and probability (Maeve and Otis keep ending up alone by accident) to speed things along.

An important part of growing up, then, is learning that fiction isn't literally real. But just as quickly as we learn that, for strong realistic literature to work, we have to turn right around and accept that there can be something literally real about fiction.

Sadly, I think that nobody outside of Slavics studies the structuralists who came out of Tartu, Estonia and Moscow starting in the 60s and 70s. There were a lot of smart people that came through there, first and foremost amongst them Iurii Lotman. I remember being astounded by his statement in his 1976 Analysis of the Poetic Text that prose is inherently more complex than poetry, because it was always proceeded by negating the things that poetry did to make it art. Something like that. In the end, I think what he meant that artistic prose had to demonstrate that it was different from a simple journalistic or narrative description to demand enough attention to stand the test of time. It had to do something special to elide the distinction between fact and fiction, to walk the tightrope between ideal and real, to hold our attention. 

News, good and bad

First off, the good news. Graham got into UNC. I suppose that with his good grades and SAT scores we should have considered it a foregone conclusion -- he and his friends had looked at the data and concluded that mathematically it would be almost impossible for them not to -- stories nonetheless abound about Chapel Hill kids who should get in but don't, so it was still comforting news. I slept soundly, till about 5 am, then I took a pill.

I woke up exhausted. Between the stress of college search, the years of COVID, weeks of markets going down (which I know is natural but is still no fun, especially when you have any nervous clients, and I have at least one), running the LFA for a couple of years now, trying to push Mary's book out the door, I'm burnt out. Plus client situations. Yesterday I learned that one of my first clients, and old friend from graduate school, got bad news on her cancer. It keeps getting worse. She is a trooper, I love her dearly.

In the near future loom taxes.

Nearer even, thankfully, is this weekend.

My current books

Right now I am in a felicitous place where I'm reading two books, each of which is flowing pretty well, on top of my morning Bible reading (and Mark out in Seattle reminded me that he had given me Robert Alter's translation of Genesis, so I switched over to that for the time being). 

On the literary side, I am reading Claire Messud's Kant's Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write, which starts off autobiographical. It's entirely possible that if I didn't know Claire, I wouldn't enjoy it as much as I am, but I do know her, so it's giving me a lot of background on why she is as she is and was as she was and it's just well written. Her level of recall of little details from growing up is fairly astounding. More than anything, this book makes me wonder about what we talked about when we were in college. I spent a fair amount of time talking to her back then, especially my junior year, her senior year. It's entirely possible that this whole level of detail about her family and backstory is new to me now because I forgot it all, but it's also possible that it never came up in conversation because we didn't ask about that stuff when we were younger, it didn't seem important, that the future loomed larger than the past, or that I was just trying to impress her and was at some level blinded and intimidated by her level of worldliness and sophistication. Or that we were just amusing one another.

On the business side I am making my way through Telephone by John Brooks. Brooks -- for decades one of the New Yorker's main business writers -- wrote this book in 1978 on the 100th anniversary of the telephone, apparently on a somewhat commissioned basis from AT&T, at that time a if not the colossus of American business. And honestly, if I just stopped there, it would be enough. The book is a profound reminder of how much things change over decades and centuries, how one industry can be dominant and then fall. But it's also full of lots of fine tidbits, as books written by good writers always are.

Interruption by life

I was just about to write about something else when my phone rang. It was a client. Her mother had just died, rather unexpectedly, after having fallen and broken her hip a week or two back.  (The woman who lives across the street from us also recently lost her mother in a fall). The only silver lining of course is that my client's mom did not die a protracted death from cancer with a lot of pain. That seems to be the really big exit ramp for lots of folks. (I had thought that actuarially cancer as a cause of death actually declines for octa- and nonagenarians -- but a quick perusal of the interweb indicates that's wrong. It appears to get worse).

Falling, while not an altogether preventable risk, is one that is quasi-manageable if people focus on core strength and balance. I'm glad that my mom has focused on this stuff to the best of her ability. Her dancing is, I think, pretty key. In my mind's eye I see elderly Chinese people doing Tai Chi in parks first thing in the morning and that seems like a best practice.

I realize that this post started off sounding empathetic and human and quickly degenerated into clinical analytics. It's late in the morning by now and I kind of need to get better organized for the professional day. Not that I wasn't already doing that when my phone rang. 

Out or in? The odd tension

Last night Mary and I went over to a neighbor's house for dinner. We got there at 6:30 and left around 10. It was tremendously good fun to be at someone else's house, eating different food, talking to different people, petting a dog! But still I was feeling a little crappy because I had promised Graham I'd be home in time to watch Bosch but we were running late.

The problem of course is that it's so good for Mary to get out. As I've written recently, she doesn't get out enough, and when she does, she's understandably not eager to get home.

Even in the pandemic, I feel like I'm able to be out and about myself and the most precious thing in the world for me is time with the kids. Time on the couch watching TV is extra-special because there's no work involved, we just lie there with one or the other of the kids' feet on my lap and commune over some mediocre-to-good narrative, share a laugh or two, perhaps a gruesome murder. 

We are apparently not alone. There's an article in the Journal today about moms feeling lonely at home. Haven't read it yet

In the end, last night Graham agreed to start watching TV at 10, which is rather late for him, since there was no school tomorrow. So I got to have my cake and eat it too!

Are we listening?

We are seeing shortages in stores lately, over the last few days they have related to people -- southerners who never learned to drive in snow and others whose knowledge of or desire to do so may have long since lapsed since their relocation to NC -- bustled to stores for the proverbial dairy, bread, eggs and (here's a new one) poultry. More substantively, the number of people out of work because of COVID has had ripple effects up and down supply chains -- more recently seen in absenteeism at grocery stores and the truck-based logistics chains that gets food to them.

News outlets like to run these stories because it creates fear in people and drives their eyeballs to the media itself: "if it bleeds, it leads." Which is fine, they are businesses, after all, and heightening awareness of an issue helps focus our attention on its seriousness.

At a base level, I can't help but to think this isn't some kind of cosmic justice. Christians might say the Lord is smiting us.

But for what? I would argue that we have failed to internalize the lesson of the pandemic, which is that we have to dial it all the fuck back and just focus on the basics of caring for each other. I also don't want to delve deep into the theology of vaccines and mask-wearing. I obviously am pro, but I try not to wish death on those who resist, as I have heard others do. The Right has had a point all along about the need to recognize and acknowledge tradeoffs,* and the long drift of time will probably show that the costs of keeping schools closed as long as we did outweigh their benefits. Admittedly, that is easy for us to say, when the costs in human life would have been borne by teachers and other school staff who aren't being paid to risk their lives. It is all rather complex, but we're just not set up to manage complexity and acknowledge trade offs today.

But right now when I hear of shelves bare of chicken, I am reminded of 20 months ago when toilet paper and hand sanitizer was scarcely found on store shelves and there was a video somewhere of someone who left out either one or the other for delivery people, and a viral clip showed a UPS driver picking some up and being grateful. Admittedly, whoever was leaving out the TP must have hoarded a bunch of it and that was probably the wrong thing to do. But then they admitted they were wrong and left some out. We need more of that.

Also, this is another little reminder to all of us to be thankful for what we have. Between all of the nuts, legumes, canned fish and frozen stuff in our house we could probably get by for 10 days or longer without even going to the store. That ain't bad. Plus stores aren't really running out of food, they are running out of specific foodstuffs. We need to be constantly reminded of our plenty.

* Not that I really understand what we are trading off when we wear a mask in public. The ability to see someone smile? Yes, I miss it, but it 

Where did she go?

An hour and change back I was headed down for a nap on the still excitingly new couch in my study while Mary went outside to do a little shoveling. Graham and I had already done the driveway and also part of the neighbors' across the street (the mom over there's mother apparently died unexpectedly in a fall a week or so ago, so I figured it was only neighborly to shovel a little). For a little while I heard the new metal shovel scraping the pebbled surface of the front walkway, then it stopped. When I got up a little while later to make coffee, she was nowhere to be found. The shovel was by the door, the back deck had not been cleaned up, somewhat to my chagrin.

Mary's running shoes were in the mudroom, which makes my best guess that someone came past while walking, maybe Jonathan's wife Sharon, perhaps together with Andrea, and Mary went walking with them.

I sure hope so. The woman needs to get out of the house more often. Frankly, when I have clients who are between jobs or whatever and also need to get out, I get on the phone with them and harass them to get out and look harder. This has worked very well with a couple of clients. I kinda need to do that with Mary, honestly. Left to her own devices she ands up spending too much time... with her devices! All too often she is found with her laptop on her lap writing email or her phone in hand, scrolling through Instagram. She needs more fresh air and fresh faces.

The People of China

During the Cold War, there was a widely held recognition that the fact that the Soviet government was evil did not mean that all the people of the Soviet Union were evil. People were readily able to hold in mind the distinction between the ruler and the ruled.

At present there's a tendency in the West to show sympathy for the people of Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong and Taiwan but in general a less thoughtful attitude towards China's Han majority. In the early days of 2020 reports of the stringency of the lockdown in Wuhan elicited sympathy, but that has long since disappeared from people's minds as we've dealt with our own restrictions. More recently the lockdown in Xi'an and the story of the woman who lost her child at the doors of a hospital because she didn't have a COVID test -- a story the Chinese censors let run internally for a while in a rare instance of the Chinese system allowing a release of pressure -- bubbled towards the surface of Western consciousness.

But as most people know from interacting with Chinese people in schools, neighborhoods and businesses all around the world -- the Chinese are people too. The reason many are willing to emigrate is that living in China has a ton of challenges. We read about some of the worst of them. 

I may or may not have recounted what Leslie's husband Walter had to deal with when his father passed away. Beijing -- a city of 20 million and change -- has something like 20 centers for cremating one's loved ones. Forget about interring them, that's obviously a challenge in a place as densely populated as China. With a life expectancy around 80 and 20 million people, ballpark a quarter of a million will die each year. So 20ish cremation facilities must handle that flow, call it 12,500 each per year over 250 odd business days, 50 funerals a day.  It turns out each family gets like 30-45 minutes to commemorate their loved one's life, and can have a very restricted number of guests in. Not ideal for a culture that venerates elders and ancestors.

That's just a small instance. In sum, we need to do a better job thinking of Chinese as people too. Yes their culture is different and we need to grok that too. And the only way we can do this is by talking to more Chinese people, consuming their books, movies, etc. Old school humanism. 

Back to the basics, more deeply

Recently I finished reading AA's "Big Book" for the first time after 30 years of sobriety. The fact that it took me so long is evidence of just what a stubbornly individualistic jackass I can be, but also of the fact that I've had a lot to read and do during those 30 years and also the fact that it's really not meant to be read in one fell swoop. Reading the personal stories of the alcoholics whose lives were changed by AA one after another -- even when spread out over weeks or months -- gets rather repetitive. Reading them individually, sprinkled into life as it is being lived -- as I have over time in various meetings when they are read aloud -- that offers the possibility of magic.

The first part of the book, the core written by Bill Wilson back in 1939, that is truly special. He wasn't a great great writer and it's not always brilliant, but then it wasn't supposed to be. It is deadly earnest and from the heart and it changed a bunch of people's lives, which is all that matters.

It's also an interesting document insofar as it gives insight into what it was like to live in the 30s, 40s, and 50s. At some level I'm pretty amazed at how much one could fuck up and keep a job and/or marriage before getting the boot. Though most of the alcoholics eventually do run into trouble, just enough trouble to realize they need help, and they know full well how fortunate they are to get it.

Now I am on to reading something else I've had on my shelf for a long time but never read: the King James edition of the Bible. In fact, it's the same physical book I was given in childhood at St Phillips in Durham which has followed me around all those years. So far, so good. I'll report back.

I am also following up on a meme I've seen on the internet that sounds interesting. I've been regularly doing sit ups and push ups all through the pandemic after my morning meditation while the coffee brews. Somebody on YouTube suggested that doing 100 push ups a day for a month would have a meaningful effect on one's physique. I am one day into this program and am putting it out here on the blog to encourage myself to stay at it.

Leftover pancakes

This weekend we mixed things up a little bit. Usually Sunday is pancake day, but since I had gotten fresh bagels on Saturday, Graham and I agreed to put off pancakes till the Monday holiday and eat bagels on Sunday while they were still fresh.

As usual, there were some leftover pancakes, which Graham usually eats the next day. This morning however, I saw Graham snarfing some cereal for breakfast and I said "what about the pancakes?" He quickly explained to me that it made more sense to eat cereal on a snow day like today since it took longer to eat it than it did to eat the pancakes, so he was saving them for tomorrow, which he is assuming will be a regular school day with its compressed schedule, so that he can stay in his warm bed as long as possible (we've all been there). I had to bow down before his considerable wisdom on this one.

The Steve Meshnick Book Group

In half an hour and change I'm having a Zoom for this book group of guys 50 and up who read history books, named for Steve Meshnick, a tropical disease guy at UNC who died just prior to the onset of COVID of cancer. Steve was a great guy. In many ways it's a shame I didn't get to know him better from a younger age. That was an unfortunate collateral effect of a break that happened between Natalie and some other girls in her class (one of whom ended up being Steve's daughter, though I don't think she was present in the initial event that led to the break) not too long after we got to Chapel Hill, maybe around 2011 or so. Natalie turned out just fine, as did the other girls (who were at fault), but it was a social rupture nonetheless.

Anyhoo, Steve was awesome. Funny, witty guy and legendary in the tropical disease world. My friend Dorothy out in Seattle who works on malaria in Uganda knew who he was and I ended up connecting them. He also wrote really witty songs, some of which are available on YouTube. Here's a fine one about John Snow. 

This week the book club is discussing Scott Anderson's The Quiet Americans, which I talked about briefly a week or so back. I ended up grinding through to the end, and learned a fair amount about the early days of the CIA, most of it reflecting poorly on the agency, Dwight Eisenhower, and particularly his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, who turns out to have been a rigidly reductionist Anti-Communist who basically had his head up his ass. Between the two of them, they made a lot of what in retrospect seem very bad decisions, particularly around an opportunity to recast the relationship between the Soviet Union and the West following Stalin's death and another to support the Hungarian revolution that could have been in 1956. The book also offered clearer insight into US roles in the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran in 1953 (we basically did that) and the early days of Vietnam. The basic thrust of the book was that there were people on the ground in the CIA who learned from failures of stupid missions and had reasonable views of what the US could and could not do, but they were overruled by the President, JF Dulles and his brother Allen, who ran the CIA at the time, and we are still paying the price for it today.

The Dream of the Second dissertation/doctorate

Last night, or in the period just before waking, I once more had the dream about my second dissertation/doctoral program. Somehow it seems there was something wrong with my first one, something vaguely shameful, and I was doing a second one, except I kind of avoided going by the department. Interestingly, this time Sandy Baker, who was certainly in my class at Phillips and the high school and maybe at Seawell too (?) was in my department. I was sheepishly kind of telling her about my situation late in the day when she was packing up to go home.

In the end, I woke up fairly early and ordered fresh bagels from Bruegger's so there'd be something exciting for everyone to start the morning with.

Perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, today is the day that the last of Graham's college applications are due. Maybe the two dissertations are really about two children. As to the essays, there are four to submit, but really there's not that much work. We polished the essays for two of them yesterday evening after tennis (3-6, 6-1) and still had time to watch two episodes of Bosch before bed, which was awesome. So now we just have a couple of essays left to polish and have agreed that we'll get one if not both out the door before lunch.

I must say that I am learning a fair amount -- at least I hope I am -- about management just through working with Graham on this project. His energy ebbs and flows as he works through this alongside a really demanding semester (6 AP courses, all of them) under tough conditions. I'm learning when to nudge and when to back the fuck off. Not always perfectly. The lessons are really similar to what I was learning when riding shotgun with him as he got his 60 hours of driving practice with one of us (almost always me) in the car.

For today, once it's all done, Graham gets to pick from the entire universe of takeout options for dinner tonight. I have money on a pad thai from somewhere, but maybe he'll surprise me.

In my bones

By now I have been joking for so long about my psychosomatic COVID that Mary basically won't listen to me, and how could I blame her? Of course I don't really have any symptoms except some sniffles, which are pretty common and are probably just allergies that we are too lazy to abate around the house -- my dust mite allergy, for example -- and the fact that I am bone tired.

Today I slept till 7:40. Turns out nothing was wrong with my alarm clock save for what the immortal George Costanza termed "the AM/PM." Dooohh!

This bone tiredness of course is highly adducible to how long it's been since I had a proper vacation, and also to the fact that so many of my activities outside of work are quasi-work like. Like the fact that I am grinding through a book -- Scott Anderson's The Quiet Americans -- that I didn't choose for myself but instead got from a book group. It's 470 pages of smallish type about the early history of the CIA. For sure I am learning a lot, but it's kind of like work.

Thank God for TV. I am totally enjoying Sex Education. It gets a little ridiculous here and there but it is always warm-hearted if a little snarky and it seems like every episode another character gets deeper. Of course the skinny geek in me continues to just root for Otis and Maeve to get together, but I can also accept that it's not really that important in the end.

I should also, honestly, accept the fact that it's unlikely that I blog more in 2022 than I did in 2021, instead of trying to live up to it. 

Cars and inflation

Typically solid thinking on inflation from Greg Ip in today's Journal on inflation. In the article he quotes Biden as saying re inflation in autos, "If car prices are too high right now, there are two solutions: You increase the supply of cars by making more of them, or you reduce demand for cars by making Americans poorer." This is a rather simplistic way of viewing the problem, and admittedly Presidents do have to boil things down and speak at a high level.

But he could go on to say there's a third way. We could increase the supply of cars by extending the life of the cars we already own by being more mindful in how we use and service them. Auto repair is primarily a local industry (I don't have stats), though there are roll ups and chains like Pep Boys, etc. I'm willing to bet those are largely franchised, so they are effectively local. Moreover, the auto repair business is highly trust-based, so the successful ones are very community-oriented.

We could also reduce auto demand by thinking more about the driving we do and being less willing to hop in the car at the drop of a hat to go to the store to get one thing, go to a drivethrough for dinner, drive 400 miles roundtrip in a day for a soccer tournament, etc. Would that make us poorer? It really depends on your definition of wealth. I think that most people, if they slowed down to ponder it, wouldn't think so.

Time and again I think back to the anecdote John Bogle uses at the beginning of his book Enough. Kurt Vonnegut is at a party at the home of some hedge fund guy in the Hamptons talking to someone who remarks on how nice the house or yard or something is. Vonnegut says to the guy: "I have something these guys will never have. I have enough."

China COVID zero tolerance

After tennis yesterday I went to Trader Joe's to pick up a number of things, amongst them not meat. Which was a good thing, because there really wasn't a ton of meat in the meat display, including chicken. At that time of day (6:30) it could have been a function of trucks not getting there, or it could have been an internal staffing issue of just not having someone available to stock the shelves. At any rate, I didn't really care, both because we have been cutting meat consumption in our house for a long time and because I've gotten accustomed to shortages so they don't freak me out much. At a high level it does remind me to keep reasonably high levels of things like beans, peanut butter, tuna, etc. at the crib, but that I've been doing anyway just because it gives me a warm feeling.

Ahh yes, China. Stories continue to emerge about China's zero tolerance policies and their knock on effects. Certainly they could create more supply chain problems for us, which could lead to inflation. I think that's all good, honestly. People in the West need to learn to sort out what's really important to them, and pricing mechanisms are really the best way of helping people figure out what they really want.

The policies are also exposing cracks in the facade of absolute control by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party). The huge outcry over the woman who lost her child outside a hospital in the city of X'ian because she didn't have an up to date COVID test is one case in point. People there are tired and exhausted by the government's excesses, which also throw policies in the West into considerable relief. Those who whine about vaccine mandates and the social pressure to wear masks should really be paying attention to what real totalitarianism looks like.

More than anything, China's lockdown policy seems like a doubling down because the government can't admit it made a mistake. How it will navigate the Winter Olympics is anyone's guess. There will be a lot of bad press if they quarantine athletes and journalists in really shitty hotels.

Certainly the policy degrades any real threat to Taiwan in the short run. There is no way that Beijing can attack Taiwan if it can't allow a little COVID to run through the population.  Too many people would have to be in motion to make an attack work, and they couldn't be quarantined once they got going. Which should give the Biden administration some leverage in dealing with Putin re Ukraine, since the negotiations there appear geared more than anything to be a test bed for how far we are willing to go for Taiwan.

Lastly, given China's rapidly aging population, it's surprising that the CCP isn't willing to let COVID run through the population and cull some of its superannuation problem. We know that the CCP at a very basic level really doesn't care that much about its people. If it did, pensions and health insurance would be better and its population wouldn't have to save 50% of its income. How could the CCP jail that many Uighurs if it did, or kill so many Falun Gong, or tolerate such shoddy building standards that 13,000 could die in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake (admittedly that was better than the half a million or so that died in the 1976 Tangshan earthquake).

No, the CCP can't revise its policy re COVID because it doesn't have a mechanism for changing its mind.

Back to Reality

Deposited Natalie at RDU at a little after 5 this morning. It was a little surprising how much of a hubbub there was there, though I know lots of people take early flights and how the most seasoned business travelers use them to do out and back trips in one day and limit the number of nights they stay in hotel rooms. Which makes all the sense in the world to me by now, though my days of hard-core road warriordom are thankfully far enough in the past for me that a night in a hotel isn't the worst thing in the world.

But I digress. Natalie is gone after about three weeks in the nest with us. Not the highest octane or funnest of her life, for sure. We recrouched into the familiar postures and routines of the early pandemic (books, puzzles, baking, walks, etc) and while it worked fine, it surely has gotten old and I know she is psyched to be flying out to see Stuart.

The extra-maudlin in me pondered the prospect that this might be the last time she ever spends this much time under our roof, or at least until she has kids of her own (knock wood). Theoretically, it could be. She will graduate and then will do what is next. She and Stuart are thinking about living together, which sounds to me like an excellent plan. Not sure where, but it likely won't be at our house. Anyway, time will tell, it's all good. We got her on a plane without her getting Omicron, we're pretty sure, which was the short-term goal. Now we just have to get Graham through his college essay deadlines coming up this Friday. Then we can go hang out in redneck bars and luxuriate in Omicron to pump up our immunity.

Bonus day

I had thought that Natalie was getting on a plane at 6 this morning, but it turns out it's at 6 tomorrow morning, so we got a bonus day. Mary, Natalie and I went for walk this afternoon, not all that long after I returned from splitting two sets with Adam over 2:15 (a long two sets). Now my calves are twitching a little bit from the exertion of it, and I am excitedly awaiting the Korean takeout we are getting.

Meanwhile, Graham has had a very full weekend with a big robotics event and not one but two Quiz Bowl tournaments. Yesterday was a less competitive tournament, so Graham was the dominant player on his team and finished 6th out of 104 players in terms of points. Today is more like an all-star tournament against top-notch competition from all up and down the Eastern seaboard, so all of East's key players have showed up. We look forward to hearing it recounted over dinner.

Saturday Omelet

Woke up early this morning and decided to roll with it, particularly because I have to put Natalie on an airplane tomorrow morning at 6 so will have to be up extra early. Also, I was excited to make toast with this excellent bread from La Farm to accompany my omelet.

I have mentioned my omelet in passing before, but have never delved into the subject. Every Saturday morning for who knows how long I've had a cheese omelet, sometimes with onion or some kind of pepper (pickled jalapenos or Hatch chiles, for instance). After we went to Glacier National Park a few years back I settled on the coffee mug I bought there as the mug I drink from on Saturdays and only on Saturdays, to add to the ritual of it. Also I put some green hot sauce on it, the Picamas stuff I get at the Tienda Guadalupena off of Elliot.

Mary mocks me and says she doesn't understand how I can eat the same thing every week, but what she doesn't get is that I eat in only on Saturdays, so it's a total treat, a highlight of my week. Then I go to an AA or Al Anon meeting. It's time for that now, so I bid you adieu and happy Shabbos.

Learning when to quit

For some weeks now I've been struggling with William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's The Difference Engine. It's over 400 pages long, I'm 300 in, and it's just going nowhere. It's just a romp, using historical names, it's own quirky, earthy English dialect and a vision of an ornately dressed London of the 1850s in a world where technological and political history flowed differently, but it's not doing anything for me. I have to put it down.

This is hard for me. I was taught to finish things, but I need to learn when to walk away from unimportant things that are failing me and sucking energy out of me so I can focus on things that are productive and energy-giving for me, my family and my clients. I am reminded of a little book by Seth Godin called The Dip: A Little Book that Teaches You When to Quit. I read a good chunk of it while standing in the Bookstore on Franklin St before putting it back on the shelf because in general Godin's books are too expensive per unit of insight. Or at least they seem to be. This one was maybe $10 used for 80 pages. But at the time I thought I was taking Godin's message to heart pretty effectively.

Anyway, I think I've made my point and probably would be better off getting on with my day. Another thing I should probably draw from this is that I know now that I am a fan of William Gibson, though like most authors he's not perfect and this just isn't his best. But probably not Bruce Sterling.

A Dream of Black Shoes

Sometime last night I dreamt that I talked to Mary about my desire to purchase a nice and expensive pair of black men's shoes, similar to the Alfred Sargent boots that I bought in 1994 when we started going out. The ones I got married in and still wear fairly frequently after resoling them, though the leather cracked some during a decade or so when I wore them not at all.

In my dream I thought about how much they would cost ($400-$500 came to mind) and where I might shop for them (should I see what Nordstrom's at Southpoint might have or just wait to go to Saks when in NYC?). But I definitely knew that I should discuss a purchase this big with Mary, because that's kind of how we roll.

I have actually had some of these same thoughts in real life. But this, my friends, is pathetic. I should be able to dream a little bigger. 

Probably this is influenced by my reading of the Gibson/Sterling book described back in December, which is a little too taken up with matters of haberdashery.

Crazy daze

Last night was one of those insane nights we've had too many of under global warming -- a winter thunderstorm. Of course, it didn't feel like winter during the day, it was another winter day with temps in the high 60s/70s. The power went off around 11, then it was back on around 3 and I was thinking, great, there'll be no problem making coffee. But of course there had to be a big transformer flash and boom somewhere across the lake -- and all was black once more.

We got five college applications out the door yesterday (three of which had no supplemental essays and just needed to be put out of their misery) and right now Graham and I are ensconced on the couch upstairs working on his essay for Swarthmore. The old one wasn't really singing, he was trying to dredge life into it, so we're going with the good old blank canvas. It's gonna be awesome, but mostly it will be done.

Here we go

Off into the New Year, which kicked off somewhat inauspiciously in me allowing myself to get frustrated by other people being slow to get things done. For the millionth time, I had to remind myself that I can't control other people and that they live their own lives. I can only take care of my own stuff, of which there is more than enough.

Many years ago, I first had the realization that a key thing for my happiness was to try to limit what I was trying to do, what was in scope for me. Then I read in about a million places that others had figured that out long ago. Only more recently did I come to understand that finding and maintaining good teams and fleets of other people who knew how to do specific things better than I did was essential.

When he died in 2017 a lot of articles were published about the rolodex of David Rockefeller, which contained entries for about 200,000 people and detailed each interaction. Henry Kissinger, a close friend of Rockefeller's, had 35 cards, which listed out meetings the two had had since they first met in 1955. Similarly, Fischer Black -- the genius/geek who was one of the two progenitors of the Black-Scholes options pricing formula and who was present at the table through much of the quant revolution in finance until his untimely demise in 1995 -- had a full room adjoining his office at Goldman Sachs for his own personalized card catalog of ideas or thoughts he considered worth noting, each catalogued according to a system of his own concoction. Which reminds me (and I'll stop shortly), of how Phil Knight of Nike noted in Shoe Dog that his first employee, Jeff Johnson, a somewhat quirky hyper-energetic runner who was first a super-salesman and then did a bit of everything before retiring from Nike, lives in what he calls his "Fortress of Solitude" in New Hampshire, a house filled with reading rooms, reading chairs and books -- all organized by a card catalog system of his own making.

In reality, these are all just extreme examples of how we all live our lives, encountering other people, ideas, and texts (and other cultural artefacts) and trying to keep track of it all. Finding a balance between experiencing, interacting and retaining information and then directing and influencing others is key. Then we have let go and understand we won't retain it all, nor will we get it all done.

(While I was writing this, Graham got up, made his pancakes, and let me know he'd like to finish up his college essays for a few schools today. So now I transition to that).