At the Nasher

Last Wednesday went to an opening of a show at the Nasher, curated by my friend Joe. Modern and contemporaryish art, stuff I'm not in contact with much and haven't really been for some time.

Now, time was, I used to roam the galleries of Soho, checking stuff out, particularly when there was free wine and, when that became less relevant, snacks.  I liked to rub shoulders with all the good-looking and fashionable people because it made me feel -- you guessed it, good-looking and fashionable.  Not that I think all that many people were convinced.

By being near all that art and occasionally reading a critical journal about it, I was able to sometimes actually have an informed opinion about it, which would allow me to talk about it, thereby enhancing the impression of my being well-informed.  Some of it actually made an impression on me and made me think. Other times, I was just playing the game.

Wednesday, however, I was well-removed from the game, as I have been wandering the caverns of finance and raising children for some time.  So I was able to view the art as a garden-variety philistine.  Some of it was thought-provoking, other parts of it less so.  Honestly, I was there to work the room and look for paths towards potential future clients, so it was difficult for me to maintain a calm and genuine focus on the art.  I also wanted to eat the ribs, which were perfectly decent, and the seared tuna doohickeys.

But it was good to go back in amongst the art and at least check it out, note my distance from it, and know that I had to come back.

In particular, there's a room-size installation of flowers blowing in the wind projected onto the wall that was beautiful and meditative, and a wall of mostly aerial photography by Ed Ruscha.  I will try to get back there with more time before the show closes.

Tweaking the Code

Towards the end of a generally thoughtful piece in today's NY Times about how finance continues to attract too much talent to developed economies, Gretchen Morgenson notes that "one way we subsidize debt in this country is by providing tax deductions for mortgage interest.  That policy encourages borrower to take on bigger home loans than they otherwise might."

Reform of the mortgage interest deduction has been on the table of tax reformers for a long time.  I think everybody just assumes that it is one of those quirky giveaways in the tax code, but in fact is a restriction of the principal once enshrined in the tax code from the 1913 passage of 16th Amendment empowering Congress to levy taxes that all interest was deductible from income.  I just looked it up, it was news to me.  It wasn't an issue back then because at that time, almost all interest was incurred by businesses, so financing costs were legitimate business expenses.  People paid cash for houses most of the time, and/or got land given to them by the government through homesteading provisions as the nation moved west, and then built a house out of some trees and rocks, godammit.

In any case, the mortgage interest deduction does at this point in time feel a little distortive and like a middle-class entitlement. If it is ever going to be taken away, now is the time to do it.  With interest rates at an all-time low and with almost everyone who can refi already refied, the dollar impact of the mortgage deduction to government revenues and household balance sheets should be at a cyclical low.

This is similar to what the Economist and others have argued about that explicit and implicit subsidies (i.e. tax rates too low to cover actual externalities) on petroleum.  That is, with the price of oil so low, now is the time to reduce subsidies to it (as Indonesia, India, and Malaysia have done).

If we're gonna do it, get er done.

Hustle and Flow, again

After a couple of wacky snow-disrupted weeks, this is shaping up to be a particularly busy weekend followed by a similarly loaded week.  This evening, the Frank Porter Graham ACLU dinner  (thanks to Jane and Adam for offering to host us at their table).  Before that, Graham has asked me to go outside sledding, so he can show me how he goes over this little ski jumpish bump.  So I gotta do that.  And I gotta go exercise.

Tomorrow more, similar stuff.

Meanwhile, my task list fairly burgeons at my right elbow, including such items as "taxes", which I've done much of the high-level stuff on but haven't done the donkey work of totting up expenses. And there's some plumbing to be done too.  And I should really order myself some new shoes from Zappo's.

But things keep popping up, things that should be done nowish, intervening into the flow of things that really need to get done at some point in time.  So we return to the eternal dance of fluid prioritization which we call life.  Back to it.

Getting there

This is my last post, perhaps, in my series about Coach Smith's memorial service.  It is the least flattering for me personally, but I feel it needs to be recorded for the sake of historical accuracy.

I, like many others, was operating under the assumption that it was going to be a crowded event.  For over a week beforehand, we had heard about how there would be shuttles running for the Friday Center, and my boy Crabes had even speculated that there might be televised overflow space at Carmichael.

So the day of I started calling around to figure out how to get up there.  I figured carpooling was rational, because there would be no place to park.  I ended up riding with Dan, Susanna's dad, and his son Eli.

Now, Dan has been to the Dean Dome many times before, as compared to my one time, and had a favorite place to park.  Nonetheless, as we approached while heading around on the bypass south of town, there was traffic (on top of the memorial service, there was church traffic from St Thomas More), and I had the brilliant idea of parking at my mom's house, which, as the crow flies, is very close indeed to the Dean Dome.  From walking around back there with Mary, I remembered that there is a very fine trail system, which, I reasoned, would get us through to the Dean Dome very easily.  I convinced Dan that this was a fine idea.

However, neither Dan, nor Eli, nor I am a crow.  We parked, and then we set off to the Dean Dome.  I remembered that, at the end of the cul-de-sac through the woods up behind my mom's house, that there was a trail.  On closer inspection, it wasn't there.

Meanwhile, the clock was ticking. We had gotten to my mom's house at maybe 12;50, and doors were to open at 1 pm.  You must recall that we assumed it was going to be crowded and the we needed to be there to get good seats.  So I'm getting nervous, thinking "This is Dean Smith's memorial service.  It's a big deal.  And here I am messing up and making not just Dan but Eli late for this momentous, once in a lifetime event.  We're going to get horrible seats."

So, to make a long story short, we ended up cutting through somebody's back yard (and a deep pile of leaves) before we found the cul de sac that had the trail off it.  Then we had to cross a creek on some rocks and climb up a pretty steep embankment.  Oh, had I mentioned it was muddy because of all the recent snow and ice?  It was slippery, we got some mud on our jeans.

We finally made it there after navigating this truly very nice trail system that was not very linear at all.  And the punchline was...

It wasn't all that crowded. We got pretty awesome seats.  I have already told the rest.  Never again will Dan trust any great ideas that might come to me on the spur of the moment. And rightly so.

At the Student Activity Center

So today was Dean Smith's memorial service at the Dean Dome, or as Coach Smith would have had it named:  The Student Activity Center.  He was really opposed to having it named it after him. Several people said that.

It was a long afternoon.  We left my house at around 12:30, got home 5ish, but it was worth it.

I cried a lot.  It was very moving.  Few people were as well loved as he was, and rightly so.  Really an amazing guy.  I realize that I am still processing my dad's death, and that in some sense Coach Smith, like Mary's dad George, was the steady regular guy dad figure that my own more freedom-loving dad never quite wanted to be.  Not that my dad didn't have his good points.

So what can I say.  Lots of people told beautiful stories about Coach Smith and his influence on them. I should say that I am calling him Coach Smith because Roy Williams said that he never called him Dean, always Coach or Coach Smith, even after he was invited to be on a first-name basis, long after the elder of the two retired.

Many spoke well and movingly, all of them, really.  Coach Williams himself did a good job and was very direct, expressing regret for never having told Coach Smith that he loved him, and imploring all of us to let the people around us to know we loved them.  That was well done.

Going back to my wish list from a couple of days back. There was no mention or acknowledgement of the murder of the three Islamic students two days after Coach Smith died.  I thought that was in bad taste.

There was very little allusion to the academic scandals.  All the players who took the stage represented the university well. Antawn Jamison alone didn't really sound like someone who had graduated from a top-notch university, though it was noted that he in fact had.  And he still sounded like a fine human being.

Only when Dean Smith's daughter got up, unannounced, and specifically acknowledged Chancellor Tom Ross and then attested to how much her dad believed in the mission of the university, did we start to get anywhere.  Then Robert Seymour of the Binkley Baptist Church, minister to Coach Smith and maybe to Bill Friday too, was helped to the podium by Brad Daugherty (who himself had done the university proud in his remarks).  Seymour spoke movingly, and noted that the university should never place athletics before academics.  Point blank.

Well done.

Numbers

As is my habit, I began my Sunday by reading the sports page of the Sunday NY Times.  It's the only sports page I get all week, and I particularly like the lead story each week, which is typically not about a big name team or player but rather about the normal human struggles of people who love whatever game they play and/or overcome something.  This week it featured a New Zealand basketball team that plays in the Australian league.

So I read that, and was as inspired as I usually am by the tale of spunk, perseverance, and generally good human nature.  Then I started reading stories about the NBA. The interesting thing was that I don't really understand any of the stats they were quoting.  I mean, I can kind of guess, but I don't know how they are calculated, really, don't understand the inputs to them, all I know is that there were no mentions of your typical stats:  points, rebounds, assists, steals per game, shooting percentages.  None of that.  Which just goes to show how thoroughgoing has been the influence of the new metrics ushered in by the reign of Sir Billy Beane at the Oakland As, as chronicled by Lord Michael Lewis in the canonical Moneyball.

All of this is ironic, given the extent to which I used to memorize sports stats when I was younger, the extent to which I clung to an ability to remember and regurgitate numbers as a demonstration of my self-worth, my primary weapon in the games of dominance we played as young boys.  I wasn't great at sports, I didn't attract the ladies, but I could memorize and spew out some stats, that I could.

On the other hand, I did yesterday finish reading Peter Bernstein's 1992 Capital Ideas: The Improbable Origins of Modern Wall Street, which chronicles the development of the science of thinking about investing and markets, from the formation of the first indices through the development of portfolio insurance, and its (perhaps exaggerated) contribution to the 22% crash on October 19, 1987 which remains, even after the financial crisis of 2008-9, still the greatest single day event of most of our lifetimes.

This is the third of Bernstein's books that I've read, having started with his 1996 Against the Gods. still one of the better books I've ever read.  Capital Ideas is a good book, with the primary fault that it doesn't actually lay out any of the formulas whose evolution it charts (Williams's Dividend Discount Model, the Sharpe Ratio, the Treynor Ratio, the Capital Asset Pricing Model, the Black-Scholes Equation).  I suppose it presupposes that anyone geeky enough to read the book would already be familiar with them, as indeed I am, due to the CFP curriculum.  And having the equations in there would surely be boring.  But he could have at least taken the time to do a one-page explication so that readers wouldn't have to refer back to external materials and/or their own faulty memories to contextualize things properly.  I know I didn't bother.

But I still love the guy.  And I suppose I still kinda live on numbers, just a different sort of them.

Hey, here's a tie back. Michael Mauboussin of Credit Suisse Asset Management said at a conference not long ago that batting .367 today is the equivalent of batting .400 back in Ted Williams's day, due to better pitching, fielding, etc.  I.e. batting .367 is a three-standard deviation event, something like that.  And that's how it is in investing too, was his point.  Think about it.

What I'd like to see

Tomorrow is the big memorial service for Dean Smith at the Dean Dome.  Here's what I'd like to see:

1. A discussion of what Dean Smith meant to the university and the community.
2. Discussion of the shootings of the 3 Islamic students, and how that, combined with the death of Dean, marks a watershed for Chapel Hill
3. An active admissal of how fucked up the academic-athletic scandal has been and the extent to which it endangers the credibility of the university.
4. Invocations of Bill Friday and a discussion of how Tom Ross getting forced out of the Chancellorship and the twin threat of Art Pope's ascension threaten UNC to its core.
5. Some mention of Gene Nichol and the attempt to close the Poverty Center
6. Carol Folt in the driver's seat, and Roy Williams in a supporting and subsidiary role.

I wouldn't bet on any of this, beyond the first.

Graham goes sledding

Today, for the first time in his life, Graham went out by the lake and really sledded.  Which is to say, he went up and down the hill, multiple times, with enthusiasm and glee. He didn't embrace the absolute riskiest elements, to be sure.  He controlled his speed of descent by dragging his feet, but he went from the tops of pretty steep slopes to the bottoms of them, and he was digging it.

It's hard to express how huge this is.  He's always been a little shy of speed and being out of control.  It is true that he went on a biking trip with Granny, David and Natalie last summer and had some pretty awesome downhill runs, even skinning a knee a little.  But today was nonetheless a breakthrough.

And he wants to go back out after lunch.  I had better eat and get some work done.

Teaching purpose

As I have continued to plow through the literature of self-help, motivation, and sales training, one consistent theme is that to do anything well, you've got to have a clear sense of purpose in life, and that you must perceive that what you are doing is aligned with that purpose. Otherwise, people will basically smell weakness and/or lack of commitment and won't trust you. So all the gurus tell you to figure out what your purpose and/or goal is, write it down, repeat it, visualize it, so that you can actualize it.

Problem is, life is complicated, and we only divine our purposes as we go.  But this kind of thought process could be facilitated at younger and lower levels.  So, given the centrality of purpose, why isn't it tought more?  That is, while we can't teach people what their purpose (and I can hear those of you who recently attended the special showing of The Jerk thinking;  "special purpose") is, we could be more explicit about designing curricula and methodologies around the process of working towards a purpose.

As well as on goal-setting and processes for tracking progress towards that purpose.

This would be good stuff.  Easily as important as courses that dither around making sure kids have read Shakespeare, Sophocles, and Toni Morrison -- although those courses direct kids obliquely towards the same questions.  Why not just put the questions out there, bluntly?

Cleavage sells all

So this week at a local "leads group" I've attended a few times now, a woman did a slide show about her horse farm and the various riding programs it provides.  One of her young daughters was working on the farm while figuring out what to do with her life.  This daughter was blonde, slim, and -- being a member of the ruling class -- not unattractive, and she featured prominently in the slideshow. In fact, there was even a picture of her on a horse, leaning forward, wearing a tank top which, seemingly not by accident, displayed non-trivial cleavage.

I was a little surprised by this. I know that marketers always choose to feature attractive young women to sell anything, but I would not have expected to see a fairly crunchy and PC woman putting their daughter's body out there like that.  Even if she was pretty hot.

Tipping points

Was talking to my friend Eric yesterday when he suggested that I read Gladwell's The Tipping Point and think about some of its implications for the way I should be trying to generate business for myself.  This is a different way of thinking for me.  As a blogger seeking to pretend to a certain Zen level of generating a General Theory of Everything which will wow and generally overawe my readers, when I have read Gladwell in the past it has, naturally, generally been in the spirit of competition.  As in, "though I'll never have hair as good as Gladwell's, my blog is nonetheless deeper than his writings, and therefore I am superior."  You can see the fruits of my sophomoric sniping during my first reading of this book by following this link.

So now I'll go back and reread Gladwell, more in the spirit Eric suggested of trying to take useful nuggets from it which will help me provide good services to clients and thereby generate more business. We'll see how it goes.

On his passage

I had wondered how it would feel when Dean Smith died, and now it has happened.  Yes, it is very sad, but at least his family has been released from the burden of watching a great man decline into dementia.  We were spared the same fate with my dad, who went much earlier in the process of decline, due no doubt to the fact that he didn't make sure that he always got the best medical care available to mankind, whereas Coach Smith was undoubtedly attended to at all times by veritable flocks of caregivers.

So He is gone now, following not so very long behind Bill Friday, and now UNC is on its own, and perhaps will be lorded over by none other than Art Pope.  God save us.

Over this past Christmas, when George Jr. was in the hospital and Mary Lee was upstairs sick with the flu, it occurred to me at some point in time during the holiday dinner process that there were no adults downstairs, it was just us kids in charge, and that we could do whatever we wanted to.  Never mind that there was we the kids averaged roughly 50 years in age. I forget which article I read recently about the things one figures out in one's 40s, first and foremost is that there are no adults.  Dean's passage brings home the fact that, even if we are still kids inside, that if we behave sensibly and decently, we can at least fool our kids and propagate the myth of adults for at least another generation.

The comfort of the Book

I just saw that I had twice alluded to the transition from a Spiderman series to a Justice League one within the space of a few weeks, which marks a new low in terms of me repeating myself.  Ah well. The ravages of age.

Now I will return to another theme I've touched upon recently, though from a different angle: I find that I am at my best when I have a book to which I return at the end of the day that I am really into, which pulls me along.  And why is that?  Precisely because the book gives me a comfortable story within which to ensconce myself, to protect myself of the uncertainty of the broader narrative of my life:  will I get that account?  Will the kids do well in life?  How long will I live?  Etc. The radical contingency of all that is unnerving.

So everybody's got their narrative fix that comforts them.  Sitcoms, TV crime shows, movies, pop songs, comedies and tragedies on stage, they all ultimately resolve in a way that is expected and comforting.  Except, of course, the ones that don't.  And I've written elsewhere about how I've gravitated over time towards happy endings because the unhappy ones upon which the most arch of avant-garde literatures focus so much of their energy do, in fact, mess with my head.

People who really have religion and/or are deeply embedded and invested in particular ideologies probably need fewer narrative prostheses because, after all, they feel they know how the big picture is going to end.  Alternately, one could say that the obsessively perseverate over the same stories (the Gospels, Socialist Realism, etc.) as a way of keeping other narratives out.

But of course this blog is quite the opposite of a well-constructed book.  It is instead something like a running Talmud on my life.




I was about to bring up the point Robert Belknap of Columbia once made about the piece-bien-faite, but then thought to see if I had mentioned it before.  Of course I had.  Not once, but thrice.

Help!

OK, I've done it again, I've squandered an otherwise potentially useful evening on Facebook. Admittedly, I did reconnect with someone I went to high school with and then refriended in grad school and got to see that she lives in Southern California, that her daughers are the same age as my kids, and that they play a lot of soccer and go on some awesome trips. Truly, it was good to reconnect, even at that most basic of levels.  But still.

And I have done some laundry and eaten some chocolate babka and, earlier, Graham and I enjoyed an episode of Justice League Unlimited, which is head and shoulders above Ultimate Spiderman, the last thing we watched together.  Admittedly there is still a lot of reciprocal smashing of good guys and bad guys, but at least we don't have the wisecracking asides of the would-be wise guy teen superhero.

Oh man, gotta go get packed for guys weekend at the lake and get to bed.  Somehow I'm low on inspiration these days.

Tipping the garbage guys

As I was pulling out of my nabe this chilly morning, I found myself behind a municipal truck with a couple of guys in day-glo vests collecting yard waste.  One of the two guys had hopped off and was collecting a bit of scrub, and there was a bit more than he could get in one armload. Maybe I'm just projecting, but his body language to me conveyed fear, because it was rush hour time, and here I was, a guy in a white shirt and a tie (I'm headed to Victor's memorial service later) in a silver Prius -- which conveys its own attitude.  I rolled down my window and said "you're good!" and then, as they pulled away up Ridgecrest, I rolled down my other window and called out to both of the guys "have a great day!"  They were visibly enthused, and waved and smiled and called back to me.

I have often thought about tipping the garbage guys.  We now tip school teachers, newspaper delivery people, baristas, etc.  These people are all worthy of some sort of gratuity, to differing degrees, but the people riding on the outside of those stinky trucks more so than most.  The trick is, how could you do it?  Unlike the newspaper people, they can't leave notes telling us about their lives and how to send money to them.*

Sometimes waste handlers work for outsourced companies like Waste Management or North Carolina's own Waste Industries.  Most of these firms have implemented good processes to use mechanical arms to pick up trash and recycling without a human jumping off the truck.  That's part of another thread about automation and low-paying jobs disappearing.  Forget about them.

Back to the guys riding the trucks in the cold.  How can we tip them?  This is a worthy question.









*Now that I think of it, how do I actually know that the note left in my driveway around the holidays is from the actual newspaper person?  That would be a great scam.

A few words about Cary

So, honestly, I really do my best to stay positive about Cary, to seek out the best stuff there.  I had lunch with Gina at Belle a few months ago, and that was pretty nice.  When I needed to have a coffee with a professor from State, I suggested La Farm rather than a Starbucks he mentioned, because Our State magazine (to which I have recently subscribed -- yes, gentle reader, I am that old) said it had the best bread. It was a little disappointing to realize that La Farm was the place that baked bread we get at Whole Foods in Chapel Hill, but what can you do.  We like the bread, there was just no discovery to be had.

So when, at lunch the other day, I saw that Cary magazine was having its annual best of issue, I thought I'd check it out.  And what did I find.

Best Burger:  Five Guys  CHAIN
Best Fries:  Five Guys  CHAIN

Best Place to get a coctail:  Bonefish Grill  CHAIN

Best Mexican Restaurant:  Los Tres Magueyes  CHAIN (OK, a small one, 8 locations)

Best New Restaurant:  Firebirds Wood Fired Grill  CHAIN

Best Asian Restaurant:  Sushi Thai... come on, that doesn't even make sense

Best Pizzeria:  Mellow Mushroom  CHAIN

And get this:  Best Italian Restaurant:  Daniel's Restaurant and Catering

Here are some highlights:  "Our parmesan dishes (eggplant, veal, and shrimp) are prepared in-house, hand cut, breaded, and fried when ordered so they're nice and crisp.  We top the entrees with our marinara sauce, and a healthy amount of mozzarella cheese."  This is not really worthy of comment.

However I try to find the best of Cary, there is no there there.

Writing

Time was, this blog was for writing, though it has of late devolved into something more like transcribing.  Though nobody has been irreparably harmed, it is something of a loss.

I checked out and then started rereading Don DeLilllo's White Noise this last Sunday.  The plan was that it was gonna be for a book club, but then I discovered that the club meets the day after I get back from guys' weekend up at the lake, and it may just conflict with Downton Abbey, as well.  I didn't remember liking White Noise  that much.  I read it maybe half my life ago, and I figured that if I didn't like it that much then, odds were I wasn't gonna like it that much now.  So I should tell you I've been pleasantly surprised.  There is much in the book that is just plain silly, yes, I'll grant it that, but DeLillo just plain old writes good.  Like he's been practicing or something.  Which should come as no surprise, as he is in fact an actual writer, who strings together works in a becoming fashion quite frequently.

Maybe not every day, but often enough. Gotta keep practicing.

Playing chess with Graham

I have never had any difficulty letting Graham win running races, or soccer kicking contests, or anything like that.  Recently we have begun playing chess, and somehow this is different.  The urge to dominate and win is somehow more overwhelming, there is an almost moral compulsion to make the next move that will best allow me to win.

This despite the fact that Graham, like lots of kids on the spectrum, has a difficult time with competition and losing (those who have known me for many years might be thinking: so do you, Cleric), so it really falls to me when playing with him to try not to win and to help him learn to just play better.

Yesterday I did a good job with going slow and pointing out to him threats that might emerge two or three moves in the future if he didn't take action to foil my plans beforehand.  Strategic thinking. Still, by hook or by crook, in time I found myself in a very good position, threatening his king in many ways.  Thankfully, he said he was a little tired and thought we should quit the game for the night, which suited my purposes nicely.

Then, I made a fire and he lay down next to me and put his head on my stomach for a little while. Which was quite nice.

The mysterious lingering Googlebot

For some weeks now a majority of the traffic here on the Grouse logged by Statcounter -- one of the two ways I can track visits, the other is the counter native to the blogspot/blogger.com platform -- has come from Googlebots, which are the little automated agents Google uses to keep crawl from link to link and thereby index everything going on on the web.  I'm not talking about yesterday's post, either.  The bots are going back and looking at stuff that's years old.

Which strikes me as odd.  Google has to know the stuff has been there for some time.  After all, blogspot is freaking owned by Google.

So what are the bots doing?  Do they like my writing? Do they find it insightful?  I doubt it.  My guess is that Google is throwing some natural language processing at the blogosphere to try to actually understand bloggers so as to one way or the other market the data.  Build bigger and deeper datasets into which they can delve more deeply to sell more stuff.  That's what it's all about, after all.

Cat videos and grip

All too often late at night, when I know I should be blogging or working on taxes or reading one of the many books around me or playing guitar or talking to Mary or just trying to clear my mind, I find myself on Facebook reading what others have posted and perhaps even looking at cat, or goat, or puppy, or other random videos.  It's kind of embarrassing, honestly.

But it shouldn't be.  What's really happening is that my ability to be goal-directed is shutting down. Instead of watching late night TV and looking for a laugh or a nugget of insight there, I'm letting Facebook serve it up, in a manner which is curated by the people I've known throughout my lifetime, as opposed to by programming people at one of the networks.  And cat videos are nice, short, good-natured little narratives, or reflections on Being.

And yes, Facebook is learning who I am and what I click on and is honing its algorithms to serve up to me posts by the people it knows I prioritize, and then it is selling that knowledge to marketers, so they can give me more of what they know I want, etc.  To that extent I am outsourcing the disposition of my attention, and in some sense the formation of my ego and my legacy.

Whatevs. In all things there is and should be a balance between goal-directedness and just letting go. In baseball, if you grip the bat too firmly, it hurts your hands more when you strike the ball and you are less able to make the ball do what you want it to do.  One needs to grip the bat of being in the right way (insert penis joke here).

Starved for narrative

Home from work in the evening, all too often I find myself starved for narrative, and specifically narrative that has beginning, middle, and end, as opposed to the endless middle and constant becoming of the markets, the economy, and the lives of the people I work with.  And so I find myself scurrying about, following links off of Facebook, reading this, that or the other.

On my bedside table, right now, the struggle continues to push forward through Caro's third volume on LBJ. I read half of Rabbit, Run before taking a break.  Just picked up a volume of Nabokov's stories, some of which are blissfully short, but they are written in a way that is so distant from my life now.

And so, the blog suffers.  My focus is diffused into so many shards of attention, on so many interesting and worthwhile topics, yes, but still.

Certainly I get a dose of somewhat discrete stories from watching superhero videos with Graham.  We just finished season 2 of "Ultimate Spiderman," praise the Lord.  I was sick to death of the wisecracking asides of that instance of Spiderman.  Bleck.  Now we have begun a 2001 series based on The Justice League, those old DC comic stalwarts.  It is astonishing how radically the quality of animation has changed since then.

Anyhoo, late now, off to bed.

Women with really short hair

I was just at a meeting where there were 3 women with really short hair.  Actually, two of them have been letting their hair start to get a little bit bushy, and I'm just sitting there going:  "no no no, go get that buzzed down again nice and tight."

I love the really short haired look on the ladies. It shows such confidence, no need to hide behind a bunch of follicles.  Almost all women who cut their hair really short look good.  Maybe there's some self-selection about it, I dunno.  I wish I could convince Mary to roll with a very tight look, but I think it will be quite some time before that happens.

MLKJ Day Celebrations

Somehow we as a nation haven't figured out how to celebrate this holiday.  There are plenty of civic-minded speeches and gatherings to discuss the progress or lack thereof of people of color and others who aren't doing so well, but celebrate it?  Why aren't we evolving a tradition of potluck suppers and getting together and enjoying one another's company?

For one thing, and I can attest to this for me, Martin Luther King Junior Day has become the final coda to the holidays of December and the New Year's, when our family is invariably traveling.  Then we come home, get back into the rhythm of office and school, and work hard through January to get things in gear for the New Year.

So by the time this one comes around, it's great to just kick back and enjoy life a little, have a truly quiet and peaceful holiday.  I had a coffee set up for this afternoon with a guy, but it got canceled.  And I'm totally cool with that.  Graham and I will play some frisbee, maybe some chess, watch some Spiderman videos.  Mary has gone to Lowe's to get the mailbox that she asked for as her Xmas present.  I am backing up her computer.

Last night mom made us corned beef and cabbage and potatos, kind of impromptu, and it was very nice.  Maybe that will become a tradition.

Meanwhile, I see that in Durham, at a place called 5850 Bistro and Martini Bar on Fayetteville Road, they are having an MLKJ Day throwdown.  It's in an area where the population seems to be mostly African-American, but the gallery of pictures online makes the clientele appear to be pretty evenly mixed white and black.  As anybody who lives in the United States knows, this is pretty rare.  I really should haul my lazy but over there, because it looks like they are doing it right.  But I will probably stay home with the family.

Google maps in Canada

I can so totally get sucked into looking at Google Maps in Canada, trying to find roads and pictures of the remotest parts of this great northern swampland.  What is astonishing is that you can be nosing around a place that is completely in the middle of nowhere, where there are no roads, no towns, nothing, and you'll happen upon a place that is designated a "Preserve Ecologique" or parkland or something.  As if there's some sort of need to invoke law to protect a place that is utterly impossible to get to.  Silly Canadians.

Suggestibility

In the Times yesterday it mentioned that Manuel Neuer, goalkeeper for Bayern Munich and Germany, might snake the FIFA Ballon d'Or award for the best soccer player in the world in 2014.  He would be the first goalie to win in over 20 years.

Immediately my mind went "well, if he's the best goalkeeper of all time, why shouldn't he?"  And where, gentle reader, did I get the idea that he was the best goalie of all time?  Well, they said it on TV during the World Cup, now didn't they?  And once  they had said it, I watched him and thought:  "well dag, he is rather good, sure enough."

Now, I watch a lot of soccer.  Not as much as many people in the world, but I like to.  And I try to be as discerning a judge as possible.  Those of you who read my blog are well aware of how hard I try, how important to my ego it is for me to try to be well-informed and impartial evaluator of just about whatever comes in front of me.  But, honestly, it's hard to evaluate this kind of stuff.  Sure, Neuer has won a lot, but he's been on great teams, has had great defensive teams in front of him.  Sure, he makes great saves, but so do other keepers. I think objectively I can accept that he is exceptionally effective coming out of his box and squelching opportunities proactively. But "best of all time?"  Honestly, what the hell do I know?

But all TV had to do was plant that seed in the back of my mind and I'm half ready to accept it. Therefore, the Ballon d'Or seems only meet and right.

The bigger point is that it's deucedly hard to make these kind of decisions, to decide what is the absolute right thing.  And that the easiest way to do so is to accept expert testimony at face value. For most domains in life, thankfully, we don't have to make an absolute right decision, we just have to make one that's good enough and move on.

Same with the Ballon d'Or.  Messi and Christiano Ronaldo have split it between the two of them for the last 6 or 7 years.  I say give it to Neuer.  Give it to a keeper.  Share the wealth, and keep on going.

Rooney's lack of class

So Southampton just beat Manchester United 1-0 at Old Trafford, and after the game Wayne Rooney was being interviewed.  He was philosophical in saying "that's football," in the sense that in a low-scoring sport it's easy to lose even if you play well, but when asked whether Southampton played better than Man U, he responded "well I've seen them play better."

Now, if he had been Dean Smith, he would have said "yes, they outplayed us," and he would have praised the opposing coach and team.  Of course, basketball and soccer are indeed different sports, with different scoring profiles, and soccer does admit of much more randomness than does basketball in determining outcomes.  Basketball is much more aggregative and cumulative in a given game, whereas soccer is cumulative over the course of a season, but less so in a game. But still, it wouldn't have been so hard for Rooney to have been more gracious in losing.

So why wasn't he?  Is it more important in soccer for players to believe in their superiority even when they lose?  Is it inherent in the role of the coach rather than the player to be the gracious one?

Or has something fundamentally changed in the way we view competition?  Certainly, for UNC, something changed since Smith departed.  And now the university is on the point of paying the price for it.

More Things Kids Say

This morning, as we were getting the Sunday pancakes ready, Graham addressed me as "mom."  He hadn't done that recently, but I totally love it when the kids get us confused.  I feel like it hearkens back to the time when we were basically an undifferentiated parental unit, a bulwark against the world.

From the depths of memory, something reminded me of how Leslie's girl Caroline, when we were visiting them or they were visiting us, must've been 12-13 years ago, was playing with Natalie. Natalie was either trying to snake some of her toys, and Caroline said "Natalie's trying to be grabby." That's cute right there.

The World Made Straight

Went and watched the opening night showing of Dave Burris's premier film The World Made Straight this evening.  The film was not as violent as the trailer would have you believe, and it was much better than the New York Times gave it credit for being.

Yes, there was some silly stuff. The protagonist goes and shacks up with the professor after getting kicked out of his own house after only meeting the guy once, and a couple of days later he's already casting this guy as a father figure.  Similarly, he tries to hop up on his candy-striper new girlfriend on their first date, on which he's taken her out to a creek to watch him fish.  But it's a movie, not a novel, and we have to make allowances for these kinds of accelerations sometime so that the movie can proceed through its narrative within the standard 2-hour expectation.  And movies can also be permitted to work at this archetypal level, where things are just simpler and flow more easily than real life.

Overall, it's a quite a good film.  I'm proud of our boy Durris for getting this done. No mean feat.

The content of anxiety is irrelevant

I have shared here before about how I have on occasion had anxiety dreams.  Back when they were in their worst efflorescence, a few years ago, I saw a cognitive behavioral psychologist for a little while. Can't recall if I shared about her.  Love her.

One of the things she talked about was how the content of anxiety is irrelevant.  If you are prone to anxiety, as I on occasion am, the anxiety finds a vessel.

Case in point:  last night.  After a couple of nights of imperfect sleep, I've gone back to taking a melatonin at bedtime.  It has worked pretty well.  This morning, at some time, my brain got focused on whether melatonin was bad for my kidneys, or nephrotoxic -- though as I half-slept I was thinking the word was "neurotoxic".  I have to monitor nephrotoxicity.  I don't know if I've shared about it, but it's one of the little medical things of which I have to be mindful.

So I lay in bed and thought about it ("perseverated," technically).  Not too badly, and as I did it I was more or less aware of how ridiculous it was.  I didn't lose too much sleep.  But still.

While in Princeton, I had the pleasure of having coffee with one of my most regular readers, who recently had been through a little heart surgery, and was looking and sounding fantastic.  This kind of thing puts it all in perspective.  The trick, of course, is to keep it there.

95 Express lanes south of DC

I am sure that I have ranted about I-95 between Richmond and DC, particularly around Quantico and Fredericksburg.  Because the 95 system is but a single pipe through there, because there are no alternatives parallel to it, there is all too often butt nasty traffic through there.  I hate it.

But today we were able to take the fresh express lanes south from the 95/495/395 confluence for 15-20 miles, courtesy of our EZ Pass.  In several places, we were cruising at 70 while traffic in the local lanes was crawling.  I felt like a king.

As of now, I don't know how much it cost us to do that.  10 bucks, 12?  I could look it up on the EZ Pass website, and I'm sure I will.  Saving us 30-40 minutes and the heartache associated with dad sitting there in the front seat acting pouty and grumpy made it money well-spent, for sure.

But what if I were a commuter and came through there a lot, daily.  The ducats would add up pretty quick. It would, in fact, be a pretty regressive and exclusionary road, a perk for those willing to pay the premium to book these expenses daily.  And how much did it cost to build this highway for the pretty wealthy?  I'm sure I could look that up too.  It was maybe 20 miles of road that goes north with morning rush hour and south at the end of the day, therefore with complex reversible entrance/exit ramps.  My guess is not less than $10 billion.  Is that the best use of our transit dollars?  Hard to say.

It worked for us today, I can tell you that.

Alan Furst, Blood of Victory

I had been unable to finish the last Alan Furst novel I tried to read.  It was too much seafaring, too boaty -- and those of you who recall my wedding will remember that I was very pleased with its setting at the Larchmont Yacht Club -- with the sole caveat that the lovely view was marred by all those stupid boats (I pray the boaty contingent of Berridges will not take offense).

At any rate, I picked up Furst's Blood of Victory at the Friends of the Chapel Hill Public Library sale for two bucks a few weeks back, and it has proven to be a good use of money.  This takes us back to dry land, with Furst's typical rag-tag group of Eastern and Western European resistance/intelligence agents toing and froing about Europe, trying to quietly stop the Nazis or their precursors or something.

Once again, our hero shacks up with a lady of shared interest, and they do the nasty in some cold rooms and other makeshift settings. This is one of Furst's great motifs -- the, if not quite transformative, at least salvative quality of staying warm and getting busy in the face of death. Not quite love, but necessary companionship at a time of maximum uncertainty, which grows into something more, almost love, good enough, deep enough for the circumstances. Much better than nothing.

Ringing in the new

A good day here.  Coffee with Michael Goldman in Port Chester.  A prospect declared her desire to become a client at around 3, George came home from the hospital, so Natalie and Graham and I went up and visited with him and Susan an Paolucci late in the afternoon. We sat around his bed and told jokes. There was no traffic on 95 or 287 going either way. Just had lasagna from Mercurio's for dinner, and then snuck in a little peanut brittle for desert. Took Kevin to the station, and listened to a some fine songs by the Shins on the way back.

All in all, a perfectly decent way to ring out 2014, which was a reasonably serviceable year.  We're gonna ramp it up a little in 2015.  More energy, more joy.  Happy New Year to you, dear reader.

Discipline

Looking back to the beginning of the Grouse, one of my goals was to give myself a place to write, and to force myself to do it.  Daily.  In this last bit I have failed in recent years, despite knowing full well that it is the act of and effort it takes to do something that ensures that one remains good at it. Not that I am by any means positioned to comment on the quality of my writing.  At the very least, I know that writing more increases the probability that what I write does not suck.

And yet, as I have said, I am to the point in life that I really need to let go of the romance of being a writer, and certainly I can't let my ego hinge on my being one.  Nor, indeed, can I let my ego depend too much on what I do in general.  All too often I find myself reading about other people (just now about British statisticians during WWII in The Economist) and I become jealous of them for finding such a firm calling in life.

This I gotta get over. Do my job one day at a time, hang with the fam, read, write, exercise, sleep.

Right now I need to shower, shave, then maybe go to the hospital to sit with George.  Or play chess with Graham.  A new thing.  Last night I had a check mate opportunity staring me in the face for five moves and I kept not taking it, hoping he would see it.  In the end, it was getting late, I had to do it.

In retrospect, the better move may have been to alert him to the threat and help him think through ways of trying to get out of it.  That's my next move.

All quiet on the Eastern Front -- Not

We've had busy holidays here in Larchmont.  George Jr. in the hospital, Mary Lee with the flu, Beth falling down the stairs and hurting herself while holding the injured dog Jenny, lest Jenny injure herself worse.  Graham having mysterious abdominal pain that, Praise the Lord, just cleared up. Mary and I have been fighting off colds.. or is it allergies in my case?  Flooding in the upstairs bathroom,, then the downstairs bathroom.  The stopped-up kitchen sink.

For the moment, all is calm, so I will stop tempting the gods with my litany.

Recovering joke oxygen

Visited with Frank Miller of Columbia yesterday, one of my professors from back in the day, a fantastic guy.  He's in the hospital at the moment for some trivial crap, but it's no fun to spend Xmas there for sure.

Like my dad, Frank is a great teller of jokes, and I found myself going back to Daniel Wallace's Big Fish, telling Frank about the old jokes that were in there, the ones my dad had told for decades, and being shocked that he didn't know them.

I tried to tell them again, but could only do so ham-handedly, forgetting many of the key inflections and the timing, only kind of remembering the flow.  As I think I may have said here on the blog, though I have been known to make people laugh now and again, I have never been a joke teller.  That was always my dad's domain.  He sucked all of the joke oxygen out of the room.

Now, all of a sudden, I am feeling somewhat energized about jokes.  I'd like to learn some, learn how to tell them.  I think you can see why.

Perhaps not coincidentally, at dinner last night my mind wandered back to the 1995 movie Funny Bones, with Oliver Platt, Jerry Lewis, and what should have been more of a breakout role for Lee Evans, as this kinetic comic savant from Blackpool, England.  I need to watch this movie again.

Back to the city

Some days in New York I'm just sad I ever left.  There is a vitality to being in the streets of this place unlike that of any place I've spent a lot of time, though in principle I recognize that some other places should be similar.  London, in particular.  Probably Hong Kong too.  Big, dense, open cities where people flock to from all over, but aren't focused on some kind of local of national purity.

So today, coming down Park towards Grand Central on the East Side, a security guard-type guy, African-American, greeted some other black guys with Local 147 jackets on. "Merry Christmas, fellas, don't forget to praise the Savior."  I had a feeling it was in solidarity, real happiness to see other black people in a pretty cold and white place.  But there was such enthusiasm in it that I, done up in quasi-Wall Street office casual, with my black leather briefcase and all that, was caught up in the moment and broke into a big and utterly genuine smile and merry christmased him right back.  And he was cool with it.  And why the hell not?

My shoes, which are pretty freaking old, were lacking in tread and slipping around on the wet pavement, and I remembered I intended to do some shoe shopping, so I hung a left and went back up to Saks Fifth, stopping in a couple of other footwear-dedicated emporia on the way.  Nothing really caught my eye, and when I went into Saks -- fed by the memory of snapping up some nice keds on sale some years back -- I found myself cruelly disappointed.  Everything was way more expensive than I was gonna pay.  All the shoes on the sale racks belonged there.  Butt ugly.

And being in there reminded me of how intoxicating the wealth of Manhattan is.  All the svelte ladies and aloof gents. All the mirrors on the escalator which give you lots of time to assess yourself.  And I was reminded that it is not me.

On the way out, caught up in the spirit of the season, I thought "maybe I'll look into some pretty little useless trinket for Mary."  (What she wants for Xmas is a new mailbox, and she'll get it, too).  I stopped at a display of cashmere scarves and examined the price tag.  $1100.  Nope.  Kept on walkin.

Too young for that

Last night Natalie went to a party at a friend's house.  Before the party, her friend Melanie came over to hang out.  Both of them were very pretty in little party dresses.  I assumed that there would be boys at the party, and, indeed, when I knocked on Natalie's door to tell her it was time to head over, they were sitting in the middle of the floor reading The Good Girl's Guide to Boys.

Naturally, I inquired whether this was to be a co-ed party, to which Natalie responded "We're too young for boys."  There may well have been a note of sarcasm in her voice, but I believe that the party was, in any case, largely if not entirely boy-free.

But, I mean, whatever, she's in 9th grade, after all.  I'm sure that she rubs shoulders with the occasional boy on the debate team, or perhaps at model UN, or even at mock trial.  But not on the girls' frisbee team or in feminist club.  She stays busy, to be sure.

Heroes

So I continue with the reading of books recommended by my boss that I would never have even considered in earlier life, part of my program of radical submission to a new master.  Most recently, it has been Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich, published in 1937.  It is apparently a classic of capitalist inspirational literature, having sold something like 20 million copies.  And, to be sure, there is much wisdom in it, if also much hokiness.

One interesting point that made me stop and think.  He asks who the reader's heroes are.  And I have to ponder:  who are my heroes?  Beyond Dean Smith, it's tough to say.  Joe Strummer, Mick Jones, those are cool guys for sure.  Heroes?

Do I lack for heroes because of deep deep seated skepticism?

A clean well-lighted sandwich

The night we were married, Mary and I made off to Croton-on-Hudson for a mini-honeymoon of a couple of nights, having planned a real honeymoon in Italy already (see here).  We got to the bed-and-breakfast in Croton at about 4 in the morning, and the next day, whenever we woke up and then subsequently got up, we set off to have some fun.

First, we needed to feed ourselves.  I had memories from a teenage visit to our friends the Adamses of their some nice little spot down by the river in Garrison, not too far up the way from Croton, so we headed up there.   But when we got there and went down the hill to the train station, I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to get where I was thinking of.

But there were a couple of teenager dudes hanging out there in the parking lot, leaning up against a Saab drinking Beck's (OK. At least that's how I remember it).  So I pulled over by them (and we, admittedly, were driving a Volvo) and asked if there wasn't a place to get lunch down by the river.  And one of them goes "Oh yeah, if you go around over that way there's a store where they can make you a sandwich, but it's maybe not the best from the point of view of, whaddayacallit, cleanity."

Cleanity.  He actually said that.  The rest of the dialogue is best effort on my part, but I'll be damned if he didn't say the word "cleanity."

And so we went around over that way and got ourselves a couple of roast beef sandwiches and sat in some little park down by the Hudson and ate them.  I believe there may have been a yellowjacket or two trying to get a piece of me.

Beanbag, fleece, and trivia

So Natalie spends -- as so many of you will be shocked to hear -- an inordinate amount of time in her room with her face glued to her iPhone.  In moments of inspiration and determination I go in there and plunk myself on her beanbag and pull over me the very fuzzy aquamarine fleece that, if memory serves correctly, her cousin Caroline gave her for Xmas in a recent year.

Of late, she has been playing a trivia game with her friends.  If I sit there long enough, she will start asking me for help with some of the difficult questions, and she actually appreciates the help.  I can get in a good solid 20-30 minutes of quality time on occasion.

Taking it to the next level might involve actually playing against her.  Gotta try it.  She will most likely win.

The Prom

Went to the Splinter Group Prom last night at the Back Room of the Cradle.  Fabulous party -- all thanks and praise to Lane, Steve, and Frank for putting it on -- good food, good band -- but they seemed to have their instruments turned up to 11 the whole time.  Which was a little high, and the day after I have a little headache, either from staying up late or the loud music or something.

Events like that can be a challenge for me.  Everybody thinks I'm Mr. Crazy Social, but I am in fact fairly introverted, and drinking used to help me push through my anxiety about talking to other people.  I retain the muscle memory of how to do it from when I used to party, and have redeveloped it from being in client-facing and sales roles over the years, but it's still learned behavior and not entirely natural.

I ended up eating a lot of the ham biscuits (thanks Matt and Sheila of Neal's Deli).

The Prom was the fourth night in a row that I was out and about, talking to people.  That is a lot.  I'm very happy to be home tonight, and even today, as Graham just informed me that we're not going to martial arts today because he has a bit of a cold.

On the road

Yesterday evening, stuck in traffic in rain that was making me late headed into Raleigh to an event at Gerda's house, listening to the album by Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks that I had picked up for $2 at the Friends of the Library sale on Saturday, I had to admit I was feeling good, despite the traffic and the rain.  I guess there's just nothing like a good bargain on some fresh tunes.

And being in motion.

Creative tension

On my left screen, I see that Galapagos Art Space -- an arts powerhouse in Brooklyn that I may have been to many years ago, not sure.  If I wasn't there, I was someplace similar many years ago.  I remember talking to some artist type and being astonished to learn that bananas have fat in them. Galapagos is setting out for Detroit, which appears to be gathering momentum in its epochal turnaround.  Seems very exciting.

And then, I turn my head to the right, and see the picture of Natalie that I recently placed on my desktop to keep me on task when my attention waivers.  There she is, happy as a clam, in the L&B room of Sterling Library at Yale, which is full of nooks and comfy chairs and middlebrow novels, to encourage students to kick back and enjoy a book for a while.

Is there a contradiction between the two?  Between the frisson of the arts community -- at least viewed from afar -- and the desire to support my kids and get them where they want to go educationally?  Tough to say.  Yes, we'll need money for her to go to a good school, but we also want to show her that we value vitality too.

(follow-up:  I think the actual tension I'm evincing here is that between the romanticization of the arts and the general cultural distaste for and suspicion of finance and for-profit endeavors.  Because the arts and creative pursuits are romanticized, at least within some circles, including the ones in which I travel, it is tough to convey the same degree of enthusiasm for the creative aspects of making money. But by gum, somebody's got to do it, in order for others not to)

A wierd dream

But then again, when was the last time you had a normal dream.  "So there I was, watching the game, and I needed to go to the bathroom, but I was afraid I would miss an important play.  And my kids didn't want to do their chores just then"

Anyway, the other day I was so happy to wake up and realize that the dream I had been having was just a dream and I could just go downstairs and have coffee.  In my dream, I discovered that Natalie and Akin had been having some wierd and unseemly correspondence in some chatroom or something.

I know where the Natalie side of this dream came from.  Like so many other teenagers, her iPhone all too often appears to be surgically welded to her fingertips, and it is her main portal to the world, to the seeming detriment of her relations to her family members.  Which is not to say that she is so much different from the rest of us and the overwhelming extent to which we seek validation from our little devices.  Facebook likes, blog traffic, texts, etc.  I know that I am all too susceptible to it, and that it is not my best feature.  But with my beloved daughter, yes, there is some concern as to what she may be up to out on the internet.  Yet I don't want to convey mistrust to her by micromanaging and controlling her.  She is fundamentally a good egg, just a teenage one.

I may have mentioned that my friend Katherine told me that she and her husband had instituted a no-screens policy after dinner or something, and that they find themselves sitting on the couch talking more.  I keep meaning to talk to Mary about that, but then I get tied up with whatever I'm doing on my computer.

Getting back to my dream, the Akin part of it was perhaps more disturbing.  First off, there's the problem with him being dead.  Not that the dream part of my brain should care about that. What was really disturbing, I suppose, was the idea that that's the kind of thing he would have been up to. He was a fine human being, albeit one with problems.  I'm sure he got slotted into the dream because Crabill and I had run into his parents after the Carolina game.  At which I needed to go the bathroom, but I was afraid I would miss an important play.

The receding of the writerly

When I started blogging 10 years and change ago, a large part of what I was up to, one of the intents of the blog, if you will, was to maintain the practice of writing.  I felt a need to write that had been suppressed or something in my first few years in the for-profit world.  So it spewed out of me, all of this pent-up barely warmed over grad schoolness.  Part of me, it would seem, thought I was just moonlighting as a wage-earner, but that I would eventually get back to charming the world with my deep observations and keen witticisms.

Over time, it has become clearer and clearer that I'm over here in the moneymaking world for the duration -- and that that's OK, because there is no end of fascination and growth and challenges to be had in the course of feeding the family and vouchsafing its future.

But, as time as rolled forward, the style of the blog has -- and I think my gentle readers will concur -- gone downhill some.  When I get a chance to write, I am generally tired and/or squished for time.   All too often I look back at a post and see that half the sentences start with the word "I" and the other start with the word "And" and I'm, like, whatevs.

At the same time, I feel like I'm getting realer and realer, doing less fronting and bantering of fancy phrases for their own sake, and trying to actually lay out where I'm at on a given day and a given theme.   To which you yourself may well say, whatevs.

In any case, if you are reading this, I love you, because I do appreciate any and all attention my humble blog is accorded.  Keep coming back.

Why I rake

I've seen a fair amount of discourse out there about how raking is silly, how Mother Nature intends for the leaves to stay there on the ground and decompose and enrich the soil.  I totally get that.  I do. But I am married to a gardener, and she has plans for our backyard, the hardwoods out there be damned. So it has been ordained that our backyard will be raked, and for the sake of marital accord and household harmony, I participate.

But, you might ask, why not just blow the suckers?  So much easier.  I expect you know the answers to that question. First, and foremost, leaf blowers are noisy, and spew emissions.  Perhaps just as importantly, if I let a machine do the work, that means it's work my body is not doing.  Right now I'm in from a good solid hour of raking, and I can totally feel it in my back and arms and lateral abs or whatever those damned muscles around the side of my body are.  They just got a little workout, and are sore, and the sleep I sleep post-raking has a special quality.

And then there is the social aspect of raking.  If you are using a leaf-blower, people just pass right on by.  They may want to say hello, but they can't, because you are pushing them away with your decibels.  When raking, people amble by and say hello, often making some wise comment about the great bounty of leaves bestowed on us.  Which is true.  The door is thereby opened for me to make some wisecrack about how we've got it all under control.

Plus, I collect and put in lots of kindling for the burning season ahead.  Mostly, though, I work, and then I stop, and I look down the hill at the lake or the stream way down below in the gully, and that is enough.

Gratitude

It is the order of the day to post about gratitude, so I will make a placeholder post for now.  I have been up at my computer now for over an hour, working on things I needed to get done.  Stuff for the family, to be sure. Meanwhile, Natalie and Mary are downstairs baking pies, one pumpkin with dairy, because Natalie really wanted to make it, and one apple non-dairy, because we must have justice for Graham on this holiday, now mustn't we?  Mary just put on a very nice Linda Thompson CD that I hadn't heard for a while, Versatile Heart.  Time was, back in Princeton around 2008 or so, we probably overlistened to that one.  But today it sounded refreshed after lying fallow for a while.

I had a dream last night about a friend of mine who has been having some wacky turns in his life.  I ran into him in the hallway of my office building, near the bathroom.  I asked where he was staying, and he showed me the down comforter in the back of his SUV, saying it was quite comfortable indeed.  I got in the car with him, and noticed that the steering wheel was on the right. When I asked if he had gotten it in the UK, he said no.  Then he proceeded to drive slowly into my office building (there was plenty of room, but still it was a silly thing to do) and through the gift shop we had in there.  We were able to move the racks of merch out of the way, nothing was hurt, but still it was silly to do it, simply because he didn't feel like putting the thing in reverse.

I should give him a call.

To return to gratitude, I am, in fact, deeply grateful for everything.  The more I keep that front and center, the better I do.

Being quiet at meetings

Sometimes at AA meetings I hear something that I identify with and feel a need to share, and then look for a good time to do so.  Or I may waffle and think to myself:  "is that even worth taking the group's time about, should I talk?"  In either one of those cases I get distracted on the issue of whether or not I should speak, and end up listening poorly and reflecting less.  So the quality of being there is lessened.  Essentially my mind wrestles with my ego's desire to poke itself out and demand attention, like a small child saying:  "Look mom, look mom."  Often I'll wrestle with this right till the end of the meeting, and then I'll just go ahead and say something.

When I just commit to being silent at a meeting and listening, and just let my mind drift off to whatever, it often ends up being more fruitful.  Not unlike being in church when younger.

Commerce and guilt

I've been writing some about my transition to an increasingly sales-focused role, though the fact is, it's not my first time.  I had a spell as a consultant when I was selling my firm's services, looking for clients, spinning what we could do. The big difference is that now, more than ever before, what I am selling is my own services.  Though actually, in some regards it's not all that far from being an academic, going to conferences, presenting one's research, because that was all about trying to win the audience over to your point of view, and trying to be the best one on your panel.  And one of the keys to it then was to always have the shortest paper with the fewest points to make.  People loved it when you got done before their eyes glazed over.

But it's different when you're asking people to entrust their money to you.  It's a big ask. And people have a negative association with sales, in particular financial sales, but sales in general.

And some recent conversations have made me think back to what I think may be the best post I ever wrote here on the Grouse, certainly one of the most amazing conversations I ever overheard.  It was on the NJ Transit train from Metro Park into Manhattan, a mid-afternoon train.

10/27/4
I slunked into a seat and broke out my lunch. Roast beef on rye, fritos.

Across the aisle from me sat a woman sitting facing her roughly thirteen-year old daughter, dressed in a hot pink shirt, jeans, sneakers. I munch away, not paying much attention, until I hear her say to the girl: "And now I want to talk to you about negotiations. What happens when a supplier is trying to get a higher price out of you and you want to keep the price low" (door opens, random train noise) "You've got to always keep a stone face, impassive. Never let a customer get to you. If you have feelings, save it for home, for the dinner table."

By now I'm convinced that I'm not hallucinating. The mother is briefing the daughter on how to be a merchant. At this point mom reaches down and takes the daughter's hands in hers: "(train noise) is going to teach you about cash control, inventory management... there are three types of corporation: a sole proprietorship, a C corp, and an S corp (open door)... You should always have more than one product, and never buy stock in a company with only one product."

And so she went on, passing to her daughter all the rudiments of trade. And always very tenderly and solicitously, never turning imperious. I looked at the daughter to see if she was bored and annoyed, but no, she was fine, listening to Mom hold forth.

Wild. It was like a whole nuther dimension. My mom fancied herself an entrepreneur, even went to the White House for some small business hoo-ha when (cough cough) Reagan was occupying it , but she never passed on the gems to me like this. Just the parable of the talents, and some yummy frozen tacos for the nights she got home late from the office.

This conversation was so striking to me because, having been raised somewhat Christian, certainly liberal, often in quasi-Marxist circles, I circulate within a world which is at the very least profoundly ambivalent about money and material success.  We all like to live nicely, and we appreciate a good bargain, indeed we search for them, but we tend to regard commerce as low and dirty, even as we benefit from it.

So the idea that a mother could be instructing her daughter about commercial education in this deeply loving way was just bizarre.  And yet every day now, time and again, I put myself out there asking people to let me help them with their money.  After working my ass off for many years to get to the place where I'm skilled enough to be able to help them.  And it's hard at times to get past the wierdness of it all.

In truth, the cultural rift here goes back to the way Max Weber elaborates out the way the concept of salvation differs from Judaism to Christianity.  In short, the way he saw it (could be wrong), Jews believe in this-worldly salvation, whereas Christians believe in other-worldly salvation.  Which endows us with profoundly differing feelings about commerce and profit.  Hence "It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven."

Big Fish

I had been meaning to introduce myself to Daniel Wallace, who lives just over the ridge from me, but it seemed like it would be polite to read one of his books before doing so.  So I snapped up a copy of Big Fish at Nice Price Books, or maybe at the thrift store.  Dunno.

But when I peaked inside, I saw that it was about the death of his father, which seemed a little close to home. So I put it aside Then, leading up to the release party for a new children's book he has out, I thought I'd read a little.  I knew I could use a little fiction.

So I looked everywhere for it, but couldn't find it, until Sunday, when I found it.... just where I thought I had put it. It was as if I had been purposefully blind to the thing.  I started to read it, and have found it relatively easy going, cast in a mythopoeic groove just this side of Carl Sandburg's Rutabaga Tales.  It didn't seem too close to home at all.

Until it did.  All of a sudden we find the narrator sitting at the side of his father's deathbed, in multiple versions, like Rashomon, or the multiple versions of Abraham and Isaac with which Kierkegaarde opens Fear and Trembling.  And his father, lying there in what promises to be the location of his last breaths, keeps his family members at a safe distance by telling jokes.  Constantly. The son tries to get him to be serious, to no avail.

Thing is, some of them are good.  Like the one about the kid who keeps dreaming that kinfolk are dead, and then the next day they die.  So one night he dreams that his father dies.  And the next day the father paces back and forth in agony, fearing his imminent demise.  At the end of the day he's fine, but he says to his wife:  "Good god, I've had the worst day of my life."  And she responds, "you think you've had a bad day, the milkman dropped dead on our porch this morning!"

Mindfulness

I have never taken a yoga class, so I have no idea whether I'm using the term mindfulness correctly. And I don't feel like looking it up.

However, I will say that having an injured right hand -- and this is my strong hand -- certainly encourages what I think of as mindfulness.  That is, thinking about what I'm doing, trying to be purposeful in my actions. Because if I am not "mindful", to my way of thinking about it, I can aggravate my hand doing almost anything.  And, sad to say, I do.  Pulling back the blankets on my bed, getting into the car, etc.  Almost anything can tweak it and make me go "ouch."

So, I was thinking about this while making lunch.  And I opened a new bag of baby carrots after cutting some cheddar, only to realize that I had been insufficiently mindful of what I was doing from the point of view of Graham's dairy allergy.  So I had to put the carrots in a new Ziploc bag.

Sigh.

Graham sweeping the deck

One of Graham's chores is to sweep stuff off of our back deck.  Yesterday, after I pushed leaves off of the roof, there were a lot of leaves there, so we sent him out to take care of it.

Through the rear windows, we watched him take care of business.  He would push the big push broom around, sometimes in a little dance maneuver, and then stop, and look out across the lake at the sun as it got low on the horizon, lost in thought.  Then he laughed a little, and kept going.

He did a decent job on most of it.

Change of pace

I have gotten into something of a rut in my reading.  It is probably hard to imagine how that might happen, given that I have read maybe 3500 pages by one white guy over the last couple of years, in biographies of two white guys.  And then, on weekdays, I read the Wall Street Journal every morning, and then the Economist during the week.

On Sundays, to mix things up, I read the Sunday Times in a less practical order.  First I read sports, then I resist the temptation to read the business section, and instead work through the Review section, which focuses on bigger, slower-moving questions of policy and/or life, death, etc.  It is all very Bob of me, I know.

So today I decided to mix it up.  I've been conscious of feeling a little bit frumpy while I've been out in the world calling on people during the week.  These barbershop haircuts I've taken to have been getting pretty loose pretty quickly, and all of my pants are too big, because somehow I've managed to lose weight and keep it off over the years, without really trying too hard. I picked up the Style section of the Times, figuring I'd look at lapels and shirts and shoes and whatnot, to get an idea of how I might refresh/reboot myself, Instead, I found myself looking at the profile of one Anya Hindmarch, leading British handbag designer,  And in particular how she had been inspired by Philippe Haisman's jumping photos, which I had never heard of, but which do, as she notes, bring levity to some pretty sour people.  Below there's Nixon.  And then I read about Olafur Eliasson, which was a name I knew but didn't know much about.  Now that I have read 3 pages about him, I still don't know much, except that he sounds pretty cool.



I also got an infusion of Bloomberg Businessweeks from the office.  My subscription had lapsed.  Compared to the Economist, it is like candy, but that's good.  I can lie on the couch and read it and hear about stuff I didn't know about.

Certainly, I need to read some fiction.  I've been looking around my room for a copy of my neighbor Daniel Wallace's Big Fish, but I can't find it.  Had been hoping to knock it back before his book release party tomorrow.  Had tried to read it 6 months or so back, then saw it was about his dad dying, which was a little too close to home.*

In any case, this reminds me that I need to stay diverse to stay fresh.  Yes, it's important for me to read the articles about how doubling up in itemized deductions in one year and then using a standard deduction the next can result in tax savings over time, but assholes aloft are important too.


*Found it!  Right where I thought it should be.  Somehow I missed it the first two times I looked for it.

Population growth and assimilation

Tyler Cowen had a piece in last week's NYTimes about how important a driver of economic growth population will be in decades to come, and how societies that can assimilate newcomers will have a competitive advantage over ones that can't.  So, the USA and the UK, for example, will have advantages over Japan, China, and Italy.

That took me back to a couple of moments over the last few weeks of ranging across the Triangle. One of my regular readers has made the point that, however liberal Chapel Hill may think it is, nice restaurants do not hire lower-income people, and particularly people of color, to serve as wait staff.

Recently the labor market seems to be changing that. At Bull City Burgers and Brewery in Durham, for example, an African-American woman who clearly wasn't brought up middle class was working the front of the house.  At the University Club the other night, an hispanic guy was serving deserts and an hispanic woman was busing and serving coffee, etc. There was something else but Mary just distracted me.

Oh yeah, on a tour of the homeless shelter at Urban Ministries of Durham, I saw help wanted ads for Hardee's and Bojangles.

All this says to me that labor market pressures are making it harder and harder to fill roles, which are opportunities for assimilation and growth.

I know you're thinking, big fucking deal, people of color getting shitty service sector jobs that don't pay well.  The point is that they are turning up in higher-touch, client-facing roles in more expensive types of food service establishments, the kinds of places that have historically preferred to hire younger, somewhat career-confused middle-class white kids. And that is where one learns how to deal with demanding customers, more complicated service needs, and more fluid processes, which are themselves more susceptible to improvisation and improvement.

At Rite Aid

In Roxboro today, we stopped in to see mom's cousin, who works there, and who had recently lost a sister.  She was happy to see us, and in fact said that the lord had sent us by to brighten her day.  I'm fine with that.

While we were talking to her, an African-American guy was buying some lottery tickets, then he asked if he could use the store's phone.

A heavyset woman in her twenties then asked if a photo she had submitted for printing over the internet had been printed.  It had. It costed 20 cents.  She reached into her change purse, and gave mom's cousin two dimes.

Features and benefits

I met with a woman early this evening to talk about potentially working with her, and I started off by talking about how we help clients, and then we talked a bit about her situation, what she owns, what she owes, etc.  Maybe 20 minutes into that she brings the conversation back around to her goals, which is where I should have started.  This is what is meant when we speak of leading with benefits rather than features, because nobody really gives a hoot about what any product or service does, they want to know how it will help them.  And rightly so.

In any case, no biggie.  Another piece of wisdom I am gleaning is to focus less on what I did wrong, and more on what I did right.  And the next thing to do right is to set up more meetings, where I can do them even righter.

Meanwhile, I got home early enough to go pick up Natalie from Mock Trial, and then after Graham and I unsuccessfully scanned the internet for Episode 7 of Avengers Assemble, Season 2 (it won't air until Sunday), so we had to watch an episode of some Spiderman thing.  Not as good.  Mostly, I am sad that they cancelled Young Justice, which was most righteous.

Books are so long

I'm reading Tim Tyson's Blood Done Sign My Name, which is a good book.  It's about racial politics, the KKK, and so on in North Carolina, specifically in Oxford, NC.  This is rather close to home.  My mom's dad owned a couple auto parts stores, one in his hometown of Roxboro, the other in Oxford.

The book is kicked off in 1971, when a black guy goes into a store in the ghetto owned by a virulent white racist, and is chased out into the street, pistol-whipped, and then shot dead.  This was when I was 5.  My granddad's store was right around there.

Not shockingly, some violent rioting ensues, rather Ferguson-like.  Black people burn up a bunch of shit, then the white power structure of the town lays down the law and puts a curfew in effect.

Anyway, it's a good book, I'm glad I'm reading it, but it goes on for 320-odd pages.  I feel like the material could have been handled in maybe 200-250 or so.  It seems like there's a bias in non-fiction towards bulk, as if a shorter book can't encompass a serious topic.

Aftertaste

I'm still digesting this week's midterm election results.  Here in North Carolina, what particularly rankles is the vindication of the Republican legislature that comes not only from Tillis beating Hagan but from their picking up a seat in the state senate.  That's hard on our boy Josh, and it's hard on us.

What makes it worse is looking at the map of the painfully gerrymandered congressional districts that let the Republicans take all but three congressional seats in Washington, and how Tillis's narrow margin of victory clearly reflects the success of the Republicans' making it hard for college students to vote.

And it will be worse in 2016, when voter ID laws come into effect.

It is rather dispiriting to see Tillis sent to Washington, after reading the history of the Senate with which Caro begins Master of the Senate, volume 3 of the LBJ bio.  The US Senate, with its 6-year terms which provide for a third of the chamber to turn over every two years, was designed by the Founding Fathers to be a brake on law-making, to make things go slowly, and throughout its history it has fulfilled that function pretty darned well, and has been driven by white southern bastards like Tillis.  The first half of the 19th century was spent dithering over letting states into the Union so as to maintain a balance of power between free and slave states, and for much of the 20th century and into the 21st, the Senate has been a place where southerners have trumpeted the doctrine of states rights as a constraint on such noxious efforts at the "dangerous concentration of power" inherent in things like federal anti-lynching laws, or the dreaded Obamacare.

------------

So last night I was at a fundraiser here in liberal Chapel Hill for an excellent organization (skjajafund.org) that provides funding for lower-income kids to do afterschool and summer activities, take trips and the like.  As is all too often the case, almost everybody in the room was white, except some kids and representatives of an organization that received money from it.  This happens all too often.  It is hard to change things.

Moving to the ball

So I keep meaning to post something about the elections, UNC's scandals, etc., but the spirit isn't moving me.  Then I make the mistake of scrolling through Facebook, or through one of my email inboxes, which sucks the spirit right out of me, so that I want to go eat.

Natalie is at an ultimate frisbee tournament today up in Norfolk.  They are away for two nights, staying in a hotel, with 5 girls to a room.  Awesome.  This is a first for her, being away from us, sharing a room with friends.  She will remember this for a long time.  Hopefully the experience will be enough to spur her to want to keep with the team sports.  She continues to be much more into the team part of it than the sports part of it.  Which is fine.

Actually, I was at an all-day tournament with her in Raleigh a couple of weeks ago.  She announced Friday at 9pm -- having come home from a football game at the high school -- that she did in fact want to go to Raleigh and play.  It was news to me that there was even a tournament to go to, but she wanted to go, and she needed to be there by 8 am, so there you had it.  Up early, off to the Biscuit Kitchen for some fortification, and off  we went.

I knew that I had to get back there by the end of the day to pick her up, and there were other parents there, so I decided to stay for the whole day and watch and cheer.  As I watched her, I saw her familiar pattern of kind of going through the motions on office, executing the plays the coaches had taught them, but not really doing a good job to insert herself into the run of play because, in fact, she didn't want the frisbee, because she didn't and doesn't believe in herself as a player.

Much of that is because of lack of practice.  She goes to practice a couple of days a week -- when it doesn't conflict with Mock Trial, or Model UN, or Debate -- but she doesn't really try too hard to improve her technical skills with the disc:  throwing, catching, important things like that.  Since she's doing something athletic and having fun and deepening friendships, I resist the temptation to jump in there and push too hard.  Eventually the peer pressure from teammates should push her to focus more, or she'll quit the sport.

But back to the main behavior, this being near the ball, pretending to be part of the play but not forcing herself into it for lack of confidence:  I recognize that from my own development.  Even now it is an issue.  In the past when I have had activity metrics goals put in front of me (number of times cited in major publications, number of reports published, etc.) I have often been able to make them, but have not figured out how to translate them into revenue.  The difference is that then I was salaried, but now I am paid for production.  So I have to actually be certain that I go and get the ball and put it in the back of the net.

Which, to some extent, explains why I've been blogging less.  I'm going and getting the ball.

Parking ticket

I was headed in to lunch in Durham, and had parked in the lot off of Parrish Street behind what is now the old courthouse, but which didn't exist when I was a kid and I visited my dad's office on Main Street.  I remember him going to what is now the old old courthouse.

So I was paying the newfangled electronic meter there, and it only let me pay in 1 hour increments.  Which rankles me.  I mean, lunch may at times run for an hour and a quarter, an hour and a half at the outside, but two hours?  It always seems like such a rip-off.

And I decided to gamble and just pay for one hour as I headed in at 11:55.  As I did to, I thought to myself:  if they are smart, they'll send somebody around this parking lot at just after 1, because they'll know that people have taken this bet.

Indeed, I was disappointed but not shocked when, as I returned to my car, I saw an orange piece of paper on my windshield.  They got me.  But it was only $10.  Luckily, Mary doesn't read my blog, so I should be OK here at the crib.  But I must take my hat off to the City of Durham and its parking enforcement team for doing exactly what they should be doing and making a quick pass through the parking lot right after 1.  Genius.

A high point of college

So around 1987, in the fashionable literary criticism/theory circles at Yale, there was a moment when Jewish tradition became hip.  Geoffrey Hartman edited a volume on Talmud and criticism and had a seminar, Derrida did something too.  This was before the scandal over Paul de Man's WWII collaborationist journalism.  It was an innocent time.

I had been reading a lot of Kafka and had been intrigued by the fact that Kafka and Max Brod had, in the early 1920s, been drawn into low-brow traveling Yiddish theater and other emblems of their otherwise repressed Judaism.  Likewise I had been intrigued by the relationship of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, and had even purchased a volume of Buber's tales of the Hasids and put it on my shelf, though I never much of it.  In general, the concept of Jewish self-hate as manifested in the Jews of Vienna and Prague at the turn of the century was really forming a template for emerging ethnic and other repressed group studies concepts (African-American, Women's, LGBT, etc.).

So I, in my purist, holier than thou way, bad-assed do-anything-to-impress-the-girls kind of way, decided that rather than read more theory, I should go and look at the actual Jewish traditions of reading and interpreting holy texts.  There was a course called "Rabbinical Literature" offered, tought by a guy named Stephen Fraade, and I went and signed up for it.

I was the only undergrad in there, and the only goy.  Which was perfect for me.

So I learned about Pentateuch, Mishnah, Midrash, Gemarah, Talmud, and other stuff, as well as hermeneutic principles (from general to particular, or vice versa), and the main schools of thought (Rabbis Ishmael and Akiva, I think).  Thank goodness there's Wikipedia now to refresh my memory.

So there I was in the Judaic Studies reading room, way up high in Sterling Library, with a bunch of Judaic Studies grad students trying to figure out what the hell I was doing there.  And I had the most profound experience of my whole formal education.

So there is an injunction in the Mishnah against transacting commerce on the Sabbath. Fair enough, we gentiles have that kinda thing to.  Hell, there are dry counties in NC, and in Connecticut liquor stores closed at 8 and no alcohol was sold on Sunday. There was discussion in the Rabbinical literature and in our class of whether or not it was cool for the baker to put a loaf of bread on the sill of his window, and for someone who wanted the bread to take it and put a coin there.  Did that constitute commerce, and thereby violate the ban?  And the rabbis and the students bickered a little on this question, but basically they came down and said:  no no, that's cool, that's not commerce.

But I sat there, quietly, and thought to myself:  "That's outrageous!  Of course that is commerce. Even though there is not a direct exchange of bread for money, they both know what they're doing."  And then I realized, that what was welling up within me was right at the heart of a huge, multi-millenial debate.  We have Paul in Corinthians saying "for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life."  And this rumbles on through the ages, from Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Law through the judicial activism of the Supreme Court, especially under Earl Warren, down to the countervailing forces of strict constructionism and loonie Tea Partiers toting around constitutions they haven't read.

The whole Letter/Spirit thing is huge, and between Jews and Christians (or Orthodox and Reformed Jews) it can be a thorny issue.  How outrageous does it seem to turn on the TVs before sundown on Friday and leave them on all Saturday so as to evade a stricture against using machines on Shabbos?

And there it was, right within me in that class. Well worth the cost of admission.