A Yale dream

Last night I had a dream about Yale and its libraries. It wasn't flattering. I had been hired by some newspaper, presumably the Times or something because who else hires generalist science correspondents. I was hanging out the in the main library (jump cutted with some staff meetings with my editor in which I tried to figure out what the heck I was doing). I was trying to get my hands on a couple of things, a tome of generalist writing on science stuff and also a volume called Cuttlegraphy, which I assume was mentally modelled on one of those theory books that everybody read when I was in college like Hal Fosters Anti-Aesthetic. 

The problem was the library kind of sucked. When I went to the place where the catalog terminals were there weren't enough of them and even the little pieces of paper to write call numbers on were too small to be useful. So I decided I'd just go back and look things up on my laptop (obviously the reason I didn't start there is that I am old). Then I needed to drop a friend off at the lake but when I went in the bathroom all the toilets were messed up and had big floaties in them. 

Eventually I left. Then somehow it turned out there was a whole nuther library in yet another town, so I went there but eventually I couldn't find the library but got shunted into a bookstore, where of course the books I was looking for were available for purchase. But by then I was pissed.

This is all very ironic because, of course, I have rather fond memories of Yale's libraries. I spent a lot of good time in them, did a lot of interesting work, flirted with a lot of cute girls.

Shaking it off

Since Graham went off to college 6 weeks or so ago, Mary and I have been apart for about four of them, between her three trips to the Northeast and my one to the West Coast. We still don't know when Mary will come home to NC because I keep testing positive, though I am largely asymptomatic. Maybe today I'll get lucky (though I now see that the CDC wants two negative tests 48 hours apart before it liberates me 😞. It is getting hard to keep my motivation together properly. I'm not really used to being alone this long.

So Mary Lee passed away early in the evening the day before yesterday. I started to write a post about her today, but don't really want to force it. The right memories will bubble through in time. Though she was no more perfect than other humans, she certainly did a pretty remarkable job of maintaining equanimity through thick and thin, at least when I saw her. She was not fundamentally a needy person, much more of a giver in almost all regards, really perhaps to a fault. There are many worse faults to have. She will be dearly missed.

Smart and Dumb Money

The Journal this morning ran a story about how US retail investors (often referred to as "Dumb Money") have been continuing to buy into falling markets, while institutional investors (aka "Smart Money) have been net sellers. This is a pretty noxious mindset in general. The retail buyers appear to be fools relative to the clever professionals.

Right about now, with markets having become more volatile, I've seen discussions about how volatility creates a favorable environment for "active managers," utilizing their superior judgment to jump in and out of markets at the right time and/or pick the right stocks to outperform indices. Indeed I saw one datapoint "validating" this thesis. Apparently in the first half of 2022 52% of active managers outperformed their indices, the first time that happened since 2009. Clearly, a great renaissance of alpha is underway.

At a macro level, if we prefer capital-markets equity (stock) to debt (bonds) or even bank-based debt financing (loans) or public sector (taxes + government allocation) as the primary way of funding economic enterprises providing private goods, we shouldn't have this snide "look at the stupid sheep" attitude towards those who steadfastly support that funding mechanism through thick and thin. It would be problematic, admittedly, if there is no mechanism for constraint. We can't have everyone just be 100% in stock all the time because it's theoretically the best way to encourage entrepreneurs to try new things. There need to be guardrails and consequences for failure. Honestly that's what the concepts of diversification and investment horizon should provide.

And, of course, all the funding paradigms listed out above are necessary to provide the range of goods public and private we want as a society, each has advantages in different contexts. We've just found over time that a large dollop of equity is part of the secret sauce that unlocks creativity, amongst other things.

Place names and wonder

As I continue to make my way through the Old Testament, I am often tempted to jump ahead and leap past the long and enumerative portions where land is apportioned amongst the tribes of Israel. Leaving aside the question as to why it seems to have been done at least twice (and I certainly don't have the discipline or time to go back and validate that impression), I try as best I can to resist that temptation and just read the text, because you never know when something's gonna jump out at you. For example, Joshua 19:17-22 tells us that "The fourth lot was cast for the sons of Issachar family by family. Their boundary included Jezreel, Kesulloth, Shunem, Hapharaim, Shion, Anaharath, Rabbith, Kishion, Ebez, Remeth, En-gannim, En-haddah, and Beth-pazzez."

This brings to mind nothing so much as the wonder of reading place names in Dr. Seuss, themselves likely drawn from the etymo-topological base of the Bible. The names were fresh and mysterious when reading them as a parent to Graham and Natalie and so must have been doubly so when I first read them as a child.

Which makes me ponder the impact on imagination of the shrinking of the planet and the omni-availability of all information via the interweb. While it has many beneficent effects, it also dims the power of our imaginations to conjure worlds from nothingness, much as Google Maps makes it harder for us to remember to learn how to get around places, because we don't have to anymore.

Or, perhaps, I am just turning into Andy Rooney, whose cantankerous 60 Minutes segment was inaugurated, per Wikipedia, when he was just about the age I am now.

Stepping into the swirl

COVID symptoms seem to be largely dying back. Night sweats were less bad last night, but maybe that's because it was cooler? I can make myself cough if I breathe deeply, so mostly I just don't push it. We'll find out on the court with Z this afternoon what the real deal is.

Was checking in on FB this morning to see if there was notification from the Be Loud! Sophie team on how much $ this year's concert took in. There was a bit of a surprise when somehow Preesh, who had been supposed to do a set of Police songs, were somehow absent and replaced by a trio of ruffians with long beards who played, of all things, a set of ZZ Top songs. Somehow actual law enforcement was not called in in defense of their wayward musical allies. Clearly this defunding of the Police thing has gone too far, if this is what's gonna happen.

Then I saw there was a post by Alvis Dunn about something from his lifetime of growing up in Bonlee, then bouncing around Central America before becoming a history professor at Asheville. I knew that I was going to have to read it, as I invariably do (they are amongst the highlights of that half-occursed platform), and I was reminded of my friend Blue's evergreen admonition that if I'm reading, I ain't writing, so here I am. But now I've got to turn the corner towards a Zoom with my friend Eric in Rome and Sarah out on the Marin Coast and whoever else from our crew might show up. Eric will be working on Rosh Hashanah dinner, so I must greet him properly.

Another day

Once more, another day and weekend is sliding away from me as I sit in this chair and manage the streams coming across my devices, as well as the things going on outside my window, like this stupid deer that is nibbling that the nubs of what was once considered a "deer-resistant" garden before the deers' palates grew more sophisticated and encompassing of a broader array of leafy greens.

Mom and I had our morning catch up and inventorying of our respective COVID symptoms and our progress in vanquishing them. We're both fine but could be better. It appears there's an asymptotic element to the fade of this thing. My court date tomorrow with Adam will be the true test.

Meanwhile, Natalie had an early flight to Anchorage en route first to Fairbanks and then, after a couple of days, to Homer. She regaled me via text with stories of what she saw, like the guy in front of her in line who took forever because he was checking his weapons, or the way she initially took offense when they asked if she was traveling alone but then realized it was because flights were so empty on such small planes that they needed to factor these things in for weight balancing purposes. Apparently she needs explicit permission to move around the cabin on her first flight. I'm sure as she goes through the week eventually she will be on planes that don't have bathrooms. Adventure!

In any case, I am pretty deep by now into day 2 of my lamentable COVID-era (i.e. since 3/2020) practice of not showering or shaving till late in the day. Often I've been doing it in the evenings. Yesterday it was 8 and I hadn't even begun dinner and I was just like to hell with it. Better go fix that before my phone rings.

Internal exile

My internal exile here at the house continues, while Mary and her siblings continue to sit with her mom up in Westchester. The plan is to move her home from the White Plains to hospice at the Osborne, where she spent many decades as a social worker and then managing the social work team, and then resisted moving for a while because -- beyond the generic resistance to giving up the house where she raised her kids and had a lifetime of memories -- she also had a lifetime of memories at the Osborne, and they were work memories! But when she got back there, it was as a beloved returning heroine.

I had planned to spend today much as I had spent the last couple of days, reading my book, watching an episode of Michael Galinsky and Suki Hawley's "Bananaland" (good fun), perhaps napping. But somewhere in there I just decided to do a few hours of work. And I thereby moved from the anxiety of not working to the equilibrium of being at the helm of my little ship of commerce. Mind you, it offers zero control of the ocean on which it sails, which is rather stormy just now, but it turned out to be better than trying to ignore it.

I even drank a little coffee, which I had been studiously avoiding since my COVID onset. This, unsurprisingly, perked me up a little.

The dread bug

And so, Biden's declaration about the end of the pandemic notwithstanding, I am home with COVID and so, it would seem, is my mom. It could be a lot worse but, frankly, I wouldn't mind it being a whole lot better. I have the cough and sore throat and temperature, managed tolerably well with Acetaminophen.

With the exception of pizza on Graham's birthday a couple of years back, I have for the first time ordered something for delivery by one of those delivery services, some spicy chicken tortilla soup from Monterey. I will be happy when it gets here.

For my reading pleasure I have been making my way through Michael Chabon's The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which I'm pretty sure Beth gave me some years ago. It is a fun, if fat book, and it diminishes my respect for Amor Towles, who now seems derivative. Not that Towles is bad, he's just not as original as he seemed.

Graham turns 19

Yesterday was Graham's 19th birthday, so of course he planned to come home and eat pad thai with us. In the afternoon he went first out to Chapel Hill High School for an open house that the CHHS and East Robotics teams were conducting for kids with an interest in the sport. Then he went out with some of the team for Boba tea. The night before he took Carolyn, his girlfriend, out to dinner and to a movie at the Lumina in Meadowmont (turns out it was the same movie Natalie planned to see in Juneau that night). Tonight he plans to drive up to Raleigh with some other East-UNC kids to have dinner with some of the East Robotics-NC State contingent. He also mentioned that -- had he stayed on campus this weekend -- he might have gone out to the home of one of the graduate students who run the UNC Quiz Bowl team --which he has already joined -- where a bunch of those guys planned to watch The Magic Flute or something like that. 

It is both astonishing and most gratifying to see how far he has come socially but also in other ways. For example, he will be driving Mary out to RDU in a little while to send her back up north to be with her mom and siblings (I'm staying out of the car because I had a COVID exposure Friday night and have therefore been banished to the porch pretty much all weekend).

Late yesterday afternoon I went for a walk, and I decided to walk down to Eastgate and then through the settlement basin/park behind Eastgate and the shopping center where Breadman's and the Tienda Guadalupena are. This "park" had been criticized by the opponents of the town's proposed Booker Creek settlement areas, who termed it a "heat island" and said that it wasn't growing trees and other foliage at the rate it was supposed to. I wanted to assess.

On the way back, up near Whole Foods, there was a dad who was exasperated with a 10-12 year boy and was waving his hands around and talking loud. The boy had clearly been crying and, when he saw me, turned away to hide it because, of course, boys don't cry. I'm pretty sure I've never been through this little rite of passage with Graham, a fact of which I'm proud.

Forum for admissions

One striking feature of our current political system is that there are few if any public venues where it is permissible for public servants and/or party representatives to admit to policy mistakes and/or any wisdom from the other side, for fear that they will be set upon like wolves by their opponents and the sound bite jockeys than gin up discord, ratings, and thereby sell ads for their media channels. It would be far better if there were safe contexts in which this could be done. Maybe they could be treated like courtrooms, where cameras are excluded and only print if any journalists were admitted. 

I listened to a phenomenal podcast this last week with Anthony Gonzalez, a Republican, former-NFL player who sits on the House Financial Services committee. Incredibly smart, hard-working guy. I agreed with so much of what he had to say, though I'm sure if we talked long enough I'd find something to disagree with -- probably I would put the accents in different places in the regulation of crypto, though I hear where he's coming from and it was awesome that he cited Clinton's attitude towards regulating the early internet as his precedent. He is one of the 10 Republican members of the House to vote to impeach Trump the second time (though not the first -- I disagree with him there). At any rate, it's tragic that people like him are being forced out of public service by the oath of fealty to Trump which is the shibboleth for Republicans these days.

Recovery morning

Had to process a lot of aggression and unhappy people around some restructurings of long-term relationships yesterday. Some bitterness and anger. Brought up memories of my youth.

I was never really the fixer in our household when my parents' marriage fell apart, that was more Leslie, I think. I was basically off on my own planet, stoned, drunk, chasing girls, doing sports, studying, whatever. High school was more or less a campaign for me to write my own ticket to someplace else. When it looked like Duke might give me a full scholarship, I made sure it didn't by smoking weed on campus the weekend they interviewed all of us and by spilling an enormous soda during the interview meeting. Though that was an accident, it seemed at the time. But I got the hell out.

In my current situation things are more complicated, but then now I'm more of an adult. I'm a little more capable of mediating conflict, but ultimately it's not all on me. I just need to be professional and protect my clients and be working to figure out how to find the best environment to take care of them. 

Home alone, ish

I put Mary on a plane to Westchester yesterday morning so she could go help her siblings support their mother, whose advanced years have brought accelerating health challenges, so for the second time in a month I find myself home alone, at once a pleasant and somewhat unsettling thing.

Yesterday as I was nursing my knee sore from tennis (I played on it Friday foolishly, but that didn't stop me from showing Z what the deal was 6-4) I had some periods of flat out loneliness. Tried calling Leslie, to no avail (I'm sure she's legitimately busy taking care of someone or something out in Boulder). 

I decided to head uptown to watch the US Open final to see Alcaraz conclusively enter history and parked on Franklin St. Ran into Ben and Paul from Scoremore in front of IP 3, but they were just watching football in there, so I continued on to 401 Main in Carrboro, whose owner Chris had recently celebrated three years of keeping the lights on -- no mean feat for a bar in these last three years -- in a Facebook post. Watched some of the match, had a flounder po boy with sweet potato fries and talked to Chris for a bit while there. Turns out he has some rentals available if Z doesn't have the right one for Graham next year.

Then I went to Trader Joe's and bought a few things, but forgot to snag a delicious dessert item. However could that have happened?

Later, while I was watching Ozark, my phone rang. It was Markus, out for a walk in his neighborhood, back from seeing his daughter in Atlanta and having had a classic Markus-type adventure. I was surprised to receive a call from him at 10 on a Sunday evening. This morning I got a call from Wes, whom I haven't talked to in a year and change and haven't seen in a decade or two, just checking in.

 It is fairly remarkable how robust a small town soccer network is. 

Institutional self-validation

First thing yesterday I went to the AA meeting I've been going to pretty regularly in the last few years, particularly since my home Al Anon group sank too deeply into questions of equity and then failed to  re-emerge convincingly enough from the pandemic. As I've said before, I love AA and I always will, but it's not in all cases all that.

Yesterday the speaker floated a somewhat open-ended question about where I go when I am in need of support and I thought it through, I realized that it's definitely no AA. It's my family, Mary, Leslie, Mom, or friends and colleagues or whatever, depending on the situation. Of course, I wouldn't be in any shape to have good relationships with them had I not been through decades of retooling first via AA then via Al Anon, but that doesn't make them always and in every situation the first line of defense. They are key elements in my arsenal of sanity and balance, yes, but not the be all and end all.

I thought about sharing that in the meeting but I dared not. because the genre of the 12-step share mandates that one at all times sing the virtue of the Program. On the narrow theory that the primary focus of the meeting should be newcomers and providing them with the tools to keep living without whatever they're addicted to, I get it. But in the end it does ring a little hollow, this eternal need of these marvelous quasi-organizations to hear their own praises sung, as if any admission of an imperfection on their part would dash them against the rocks of unbeing. In the end it's unnecessarily limiting.

All Tomorrow's Parties

Just finished William Gibson's 1999 novel All Tomorrow's Parties, which turns out to be the third and final installment of his Bridge Trilogy. I had read the second of them (Idoru) a couple of summers ago, then recognized a couple of character names in this one and consulted the old interweb to see what was up. When I see it somewhere on the shelf of a used bookstore I will pick up the first of the three, Virtual Light.

Fortunately -- and as I knew from his first trilogy (Neuromancer -- Count Zero -- Mona Lisa Overdrive) -- the knitting of parts in Gibson is loose. Much indeed is loose overall. Having finished this one, we're not 100% sure what was supposed to have happened in the climax, though it seems to have somehow been ironically disrupted. For the most part it appears that the good guys have won and lived to see the sun more or less rise. Really Gibson is not so much about plot as he is about tone, texture and conjecture. If it all seems rather far-fetched, we need only look back to the good old days of land lines, Walter Cronkite, Sears catalogs and Hee Haw of our collective youths and compare it to where we are now to see that his ability to look forward has merit. And in the end, they are all pretty much buddy books, in which we celebrate the successful exploits of a bunch of misfits.

On the separate topic of reading serieses of books out of order, oh well. I suppose it's better to read them in order but the world doesn't always work out like that. At some later point in my life I may decide, for instance, to go back and read Rendell's Inspector Wexford mysteries in order to see the characters mature. Or maybe not. Time will tell.

Bill Harrison and his memorial

This morning found me at the Church of the Holy Family for the memorial of Bill Harrison, whom we had known from St Phillips in Durham back when we went to church. I hadn't seen him for many years but have very fond memories of him. Mostly, truth be told, from when I was working at Aurora between college and grad school and he and his wife Mary would come in. It was, frankly, a hard time for me. I was still processing my parents' divorce, which meant drinking, smoking weed and general underperformance by most metrics except getting up with fine ladies.

One time during this period a guy from my high school class, initials BW, came into the restaurant. He was almost offended by the fact that I was waiting tables. "You went to Yale to do this?" Not helpful, jackass. He is pretty much off my list. By contrast, when Bill and Mary came in they were super-warmhearted and kind. They'd ask me questions about this or that concerning Russia or Russian literature or whatever, all I really remember is that they went out of their way to be positive and supportive, and obviously I remember it to this day and am grateful.

It was lovely to hear his children tell stories of him today. They were equally genuine.

The service itself though, I must say, surprised me in its stiffness and formality. Even perhaps relative to memorial services uptown at Chapel of the Cross, this seemed stiff. I've never seen Episcopalians cross themselves in church, for instance. Particularly in contrast to the more direct services I've been to at less fancy denominations, particularly the Baptist church uptown, which are a little direct. A friend said of the relative formality of Episcopalian services that the point is that we are all equal in the eyes of the Lord. Whatever. I ain't carving time out of my weekend for that.

But still, one must pay one's respects. 

On mental health and decorum in sports, mostly tennis

The tennis commentariat is all atwitter about Nick Kyrgios getting worked up and busting some racquets after his quarterfinals loss to Karen Khachanov at the US Open. This makes little sense when everyone is so ready to indulge Naomi Osaka, Simone Biles and others when they call attention to their own mental health struggles. 

Nick Kyrgios also has mental health challenges. The difference is that his are continually manifest for the world to see and in a very male way. I.e. they are mixed with a lot of testosterone. So he busts up some tennis rackets, so what? Whatever, slap him with a $10k fine. I am torn with whether his racquet sponsor Yonex should be the one paying the fines although, I must admit, I wasn't entirely aware that Yonex was still making racquets till I saw Kyrgios smashing them so perhaps Yonex should be encouraging and paying him to whale away at them with gusto whenever. Kyrgios faces assault charges from a former girlfriend and has a scheduled court date. For that he deserves whatever the law throws at him; for the rest of it, so long as he doesn't hurt anyone, it's probably good for the sport and people need to accept the fact that mental health challenges manifest themselves in different ways. 

In general, it must be said that the social codes around professional tennis can be rather daunting. The whole stadium has to be quiet or the umpire will eject offenders. Players can be given warnings for cursing, etc. It's an extreme microcosm of bourgeois capitalism. It's hard on people with feisty natures and it adds to the mental nature of the game. In the end, though, I must confess that I very much relish certain aspects of it, especially the obligatory handshake/hug at the end of the match. I watch to see how earnest each side is at that moment, it's like a window into their soul.

The Jumbletron

Back at it today, another 24 of trying to manage through the competing claims on my time and attention. First and foremost now Mary's mom's health challenges up in Westchester, followed by client concerns (a young client thinking of dropping $ on Portuguese citizenship, a single mom my age trying to work on her house and travel with her teenager while planning for retirement and long-term care, a 401k thinking of changing platforms...). Then there's handing off the dam to current Board members, working with Natalie on holiday planning, selling some land up in Roxboro, planning an article in the local news site.

To say nothing of beating Adam at tennis this afternoon. And then a Bulls' game with a bunch of the fellas, mostly old Tigers.

All I can say is that I thank God for these small yellow pads that have grown into my daily organizers over the years. There are a gazillion apps out there designed to help us keep stuff straight, and indeed I use them -- a calendar, a CRM, two separate filing systems on my laptop/the cloud (one personal, one work), numerous Google sheets for different projects, and so on. But without my little yellow pad I'd be lost.

Acceleration

Today I slept till 8:30, the third morning in a row that I slept that late. Can't recall the last time that happened.

I need to meet Alex in the park in 14 minutes to go across the dam and talk to the neighbors over there about a place where water is not flowing where it wasn't some years ago. Also they chopped down a tree that I wish they wouldn't have. Heading into hurricane season, we will watch the area behind that end of the dam carefully.

Felicitously, when Alex saw my Yale Peabody Museum hat yesterday he mentioned that he had spent about a decade at Yale himself in the forestry school, so I asked if he knew my friend Tony. Turns out, of course he did, quite well in fact. Now we have additional leverage to get Tony, Missy, and Tensing to come visit sometime.

We had dinner with Graham's girlfriend, her mom, and her fiance. Turns out it was her fiance's dog Hunter who had bit me a few years back when I was running on North Lakeshore. Long story. I may have told it before.

Gotta hop.

Rising potential

Today in the Journal the main long story branching off the front page catalogs issues companies throughout America are having training new employees after the post-pandemic hiring frenzy. In the short run it is negatively impacting productivity. In the long run it represents purest potential.

Yesterday I had an instructive interchange on the phone. I had asked Walgreens via its app to send me a prescription in the mail because I was going to be on the West Coast, but it was never delivered. Then the scrip disappeared from my Walgreens app. I was running low on the med, so I called up Walgreens and bullied my way through to a pharmacist at my store and asked what was up. She looked up my record and told me "We no longer have the scrip, it's been forwarded to 'Healthcare Solutions'." "What's that?" I asked. She said she didn't know, but gave me an 800 number. When I called that number, I got through quickly. Turned out it was a Walgreens business unit, the woman straightened everything out quickly and competently and promised to overnight me the med and that Walgreens would eat the cost of overnighting it. In short, great customer service.

The first instance, the confused pharmacist at my local branch, was probably just a new person there. That store had restricted pharmacy hours due to a staffing shortage and in fact is still running somewhat restricted hours. So we're really dealing with a labor market issue here.

But if we can just stay patient and let people learn to do their jobs and continue to migrate to higher value-adding functions, things will get better. Aggregate total factor productivity will rise. We just need to stay patient and be thankful for the things we have.

Losing the long game

Stories keep crossing my view about the resilience of the Russian economy and capital markets in the face of sanctions, mostly because the rest of the world does not have as clear a black and white picture of what's going on in Ukraine as we do. More than anything, this bespeaks a failure on our part to have played a smart long game diplomatically in the Global South. 

With our shifting ideologies, now rigidly anticommunist, now opportunist, now isolationist, and our more recent focus on "draining the swamp," we have failed to build a stable, professional and coherent diplomatic core and practice. This is coming home to bite us in the ass.

All is not lost, we just need to get serious and thoughtful again. Certainly, rather than vilifying long-term government employees, we should celebrate and encourage them, though it's true the organs of state mus be managed critically. I wonder what the possibilities are for things like kaizen and TQM in government.