Park Life

I have long been critical of the office park as a gestalt, thinking it soulless.  Just now I had to rest a little before going to a networking event in a little while, so I went for a walk.  There is a path that wends between a couple of parking lots, and beside it a leafy bower (just watch as my diction gets all bucolic on ya).  I ambled along there as the sun was going down, when I came to a little spot where there were some weathered picnic tables in the shade.  I could have kept walking and turned left and been back on Emperor Boulevard as rush hour traffic headed out, but I thought, no, I'll have a little rest on that picnic table.

So I lay down in the shade there, and there was a nice breeze, and around me, I could hear the gentle swooshing in the distance -- on the far side of the trees and the many 2-4 story glass, steel, and brick edifices which surrounded me on all sides -- of rush hour traffic.  The air was mild and it was, in all honesty, quite nice.

In principal, yes, I would rather be headed home to see my kids, but since I need to stick around out here in Park to go hear Josh give some Republicans hell on a panel on public universities, in the hopes of both enlightening myself and meeting some well-heeled prospects, it could have been a hell of a lot worse.

Presence, reflection, and blogging

Graham and I were playing with a little helicopter blade toy (don't know what to call it today) when I had the horribly sinful thought that sometimes I get bored playing with him and that I resent that I am called upon to be his constant playmate (as opposed to Mary doing more). Then it occurred to me that I just needed to focus on being present and in the moment because he is getting older and before too long he will be off to college.

But as I realized that I needed to write about that thought, a further thought came to me:  that this constant need to blog, to reflect, to write, bespeaks a consciousness of an absence of fullness in the present, in simply being.  Whereas I in fact strive to be present, to be grateful for where I am at any given moment.  Which is why things like soccer and laughter are such joys to me, they offer such fullness, they keep me in the present.

And if, as many have postulated, the act of reflection or abstraction is what ultimately distinguishes humans from animals, it is also the thing that keeps us in our heads, divorced all too often from unmediated experience, or being in the present, which I think is pretty much in tune with Czikszentmihalyi's concept of Flow (I gotta read that book), which we all seek.  So the thing that makes us what we are and which has facilitated the marvelous division of labor which has in turn allowed us to develop so much wealth and longevity and control so many of the hazards and perils that buffet us continually, this same thing cuts us off from and problematizes our ultimate goal.

Living local

So I met yesterday with the guy who arrested me for my second DWI, 24 years ago.  Great guy.  28 years on our home town police force, has grown through a number of roles on the force, and has done a lot of interesting other things and has been well-integrated in the community.  Wise fellow, great aura.

In the course of our conversation, it comes out that he has only been west of the Mississippi once, to go to a conference in Utah.  Which raises the question of the value of travel.  It is accepted almost axiomatically amongst the chattering class in which I find myself that traveling the world broadens the mind, enriches the soul, yatta yatta yatta.  But is it necessary?

I like to galavant around a bit myself, and I think that seeing more stuff gives you perspective on where you live and where you come from.  But it is not a necessary precondition of wisdom or happiness.  It is more, I think, of a conversational bauble.

Quick meeting

I met with this Russian realtor woman in North Raleigh yesterday at the end of the day at some swank cafe in a ridiculously faux shopping center.  She was late, and she was also 6'2" or so.  She hails from Rostov-on-Don, like my dissertation advisor.

At first she was perfectly pleasant, but pretty soon she was visibly almost laughing at me. We talked about getting back to Russia, which she does, but I haven't done, which isn't all that surprising.  I allowed that I couldn't figure out how to arrange it, and she said "Americans are always making excuses like that."  Me: "But when I travel, I want to take my family, and it could easily cost $12k to take the four of us over there for any length of time."  Her: "Russians always travel on points, I pay my mortgages with credit cards."  Me: "I don't have a mortgage."  Her:  "You only have one house?"

Apparently, she owns multiple rental properties, pays her mortgages with her credit card, having found a mortgage company that would let her do that, and flies on the points.  And I was an idiot for doing anything other than that.

After discussing what I was doing trying to network my way into the Russian community in the Triangle, she gets her car keys out of her Louis Vuitton bag:  "Russians don't like paper.  We like gold, silver, houses.  I don't think we're a good market for you."  Pretty soon she was taking off.

So I went home. It wasn't all bad that we wrapped up quickly.  It was, after all, my birthday.

Wedding weekend

My cousin Neva's girl Brooke got married near Greensboro yesterday.  It was a lovely event, and it was great to see lots of peeps from my mom's side of the family.  For dinner, there was breakfast food, which is apparently a tradition in their family.  The bride was beautiful, the groom charming.  What was not to like?

I did find myself curious about many of the wedding attendees, kids in their mid to late twenties maybe thirties, comfortable in suit, tie, and party dress.  So many of the songs played were wedding and party classics, and had dances or singalonging well-known to the revellers.  When "Sweet Caroline" was played and the song "good times never felt so good", the throngs on the dance floor called out "so good, so good, so good."  I had never heard that one.  It was all very tribal.  As one who never quite joined the tribe, I couldn't help but look at these young guys in suits and ties, singing along, doing the little dances with aplomb, and wondering what it was like to be them, focused on learning the steps, climbing their ladders, taking comfort in belonging.

Mom took an entirely different approach. When their were step dances going on that everybody knew, she got right out their and tried to learn the steps.  This just a week and change after her 77th birthday.  It made me rather proud of her.

Natalie too joined in the dancing, with me and mom and later mom's sister Faith and her daughters and granddaughters. That was pretty awesome.  Graham maintained a wallflower atttude.

There were also a couple of black kids, 6-year olds, who were the flower girl and ringbearer, who were out on the floor the whole time, and a couple of UNC-G students (I'm guessing), who were doing funky dances with them and forming a ring, holding hands with somebody getting in the middle having a Soul Train-style spotlight on them.  That was rather cool, seeing these un-self-conscious guys holding hands like that.

In many ways, the whole thing encapsulated many of the simultaneously hopeful and mystifying characteristics of the South today:  at once old school and new.

Not so, novel

Last weekend I was delighted to find a copy of Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy at the Bookshop on Franklin St, still perhaps my favorite commercial establishment of all time.  I remember reading that book 20-odd years ago, probably not too long after it came out in 1993, and being completely enraptured.  I still think it is one of the better novels of the last couple of decades, and recommend it heartily.

But I'm having a hard time getting going.  It is a big book, on a big canvas: 1400-odd pages about India and a bunch of families and politics and lord knows what else.  It's been so long, I forget.

I was about to expound at length on my resistance to fiction, and then I thought:  have I blogged about this before?  And of course I have.  Here.

I'm having a lot of trouble with it now.  Oh well.

Gotta go push family into motion. We need to leave for my cousin Neva's daughter Brooke's wedding in Greensboro soon.

Anniversary

Attentive readers will note that I have been posting perhaps more than average about my father and fatherhood of late.  Only yesterday, I was reading one of the little Al-Anon daily readers and the reading concerned how the writer had always thought of his alcoholic dad primarily as a monster but then only later in life realized how messed up his dad's own life had been, how challenging a hand he had been dealt.

Which took me back to sitting next to my dad's deathbed, holding his hand in his last hours of life, particularly as I was waiting for Leslie to get there from Boston, while dad's sister Frances was telling me stories about how crazy their own childhoods had been due to their own fucked up parents.Stories I had never heard before.  Somehow my dad had never thought to tell me this stuff. or, more likely, had been unable to.

And then I realized that it was the 2nd anniversary of my dad's death. It was an emotional moment.*

Which raises the question, what do I tell my kids about our own childhoods?  My memories of it are, at best, episodic and inchoate. I often rely on other people telling me stories of things I have repressed and/or just forgotten.  Certainly, even if I were to recover all of it, I wouldn't tell them everything.  Mostly it's helpful to recover memory to get in touch with the roots of my own patterns of feeling.

Maybe my dad was right, to a certain extent, to shelter us from the nasty backstory of his own upbringing, though it limited my ability to connect with him.  Life is complex.




*Interestingly, Facebook took it upon itself to remind me that it was the second anniversary this morning, by reposting the picture I had posted of him the day after he passed.  Thanks, Zuckerberg.

Jule Carr

I've been reading Meena Webb's biography of Jule Carr, a rich industrialist dude from Chapel Hill who was instrumental in the development of Durham and the tobacco industry therein (and who knew that Durham was a nothing crossroads until the 1870s) and then later bought the mill in Carrboro and had the town named after him.  My dad was really into Jule Carr, and he in fact gave me this book.

It's pretty good, but it veers too deeply into the sheer enumeration of detail and wealth at times. Yeah, the guy was rich, and hard-working, and he built some amazing houses and whatnot.  But it gets old.  One gets the feeling that the author just has a ton of pride that our part of the world had its own little robber baron, though of course he got his ass handed to him by Buck Duke.  What's even more interesting is how captivated my dad was by the guy, given my dad's demonstrated disdain for wealth in general.

Admittedly, many of my dad's markings in the book are about Horace Williams, the great scholar from UNC who played a key role in early days of Trinity College, which then became Duke.  Dad named his cat Horace Williams.

But the book is dragging a little bit.  I may have to go back to Caro and LBJ for a little while.

Father figures

Some months ago, my Al Anon/AA sponsor fired me and, he said, all of his sponsees, needing to focus on himself.  Which is cool, I get that.

And yet, some months later, he seems unwilling to actually engage me in any real way.  After today's meeting, in which I had identified particularly with what he shared, I went up to him to tell him that, and he basically looked past me and moved on to speak to someone else.  Which is pretty odd.

But the main thing I have to admit to myself is that, 2 years to the week after my dad's death, I am still excessively dependent on substitute father figures.  I have had a bunch in my life:  my high school soccer coach and my wife'd dad stand out in particular.  In the absence of a good one, I easily substitute whoever is my boss at a given moment.  For example, my current boss, who shares many character traits with my dad, some positive, some negative.  I certainly lay myself open to being too dependent on his approval.  In the absence of it, I feel fear.  Of course, with a boss, you do kind of need their approval.  The key thing is not to over-cathect it.

At some level, my basic situation is ridiculous.  Everybody's father dies at some point in time.  Mine, in particular, was less than ideally available when he was alive, but so are a lot of dads.  So we have to learn to live without them.  On the other hand, it's pretty normal.  As we age, we learn that there are really no grown ups, there are just those to play the role better.

And today, one day after her 77th birthday, I should well and truly give thanks for having an awesome mom. She has her quirks, and she herself grew from a problematic relationship with her own parents, but she is always there for me.

On teaching chess to Graham

I wrote about this a month ago, but it happened again yesterday.  There we were playing, in the waning light of an early spring afternoon, and I discovered that I had accidentally put my queen in a place where she was actually trapped by Graham's pawns.  All he had to do was move one pawn and there was nothing I could do, I'd have to trade my queen for a bishop.  Not a good trade.

And I felt actual shame and fear:  oh my God, I thought, my queen, how could I do this.  So I resorted to subterfuge, I moved some things around on other places of the board and distracted Graham so he didn't realize the opportunity that he had.  And I got out of it.

Again, in retrospect, I could have shown him how much power and opportunity he had, but the drive to win was too strong.

I shared about this in an AA meeting this morning, and several people identified, including a grandmother who had recently been playing chess with her granddaughter and had a similar thing go on, she was overcome by the lust for battle and dominance.  The very nice male-to-female trans-person who sits in the corner came over to me and said that she plays and coaches some chess and that actually I should not let Graham win, that he would know and it is demeaning to him.  I was glad to have that vote of confidence.

But the shocking thing is, of course, the actual fear I felt at putting my queen in a stupid situation. It is not, in essence, dissimilar to the hypertrophied level of commitment that drove me to foil a goal-scoring opportunity in a soccer game last September -- and thereby sprain my hand pretty badly.  I'm still not 100% healed.

The question is:  why do I care?  and should I?

On science, Yale, and linear pragmatism in higher ed

Having yesterday complained about somebody waxing macro and pretentious, I'm gonna turn around and do it myself.  So shoot me. It's my blog.

There was an interesting article in the most recent Yale Alumni Magazine about science coming to Yale, starting from 1802 forward.  It's hard to fathom, but before that there was literally no science.  Zero.  Then Ben Silliman went out and collected some curios, self-educated about chemistry, and became a one-man science faculty.  OK.

It's astonishing to see the progress of universities generally over the last couple of centuries.  I'm reading Meena Webb's Julian Carr, right now, about Carr, who grew up in Chapel Hill, later was one of the drivers of the growth of tobacco in Durham (and of Durham in general), and, presumably, will have something to do with the founding of Carrboro before all is said and done.  Apparently UNC had student bodies of something like 40, 50, 70 throughout the 19th century, and was almost done for when the Reconstruction government basically defunded it after the Civil War (admittedly, nobody had any money), and the faculty worked for free.

Things are better now for sure.  And, as the article on science at Yale continued, it moved towards the present, when President Rick Levin made efforts to raise the profile of the sciences at the university, in response to a perceived lack.  Which brings us back to recent uproars in New Haven about the university's underinvestment in science and computer science specifically, which Yale has in recent days addressed by funding an expansion of the CS department.

Whew!  That's a lot of prefatory rambling.  Here's my main point: society overall and universities in general have gone overwhelmingly over towards focusing on the practical in education, at the expense of pure enquiry into values, upon which the humanities and social sciences have historically focused, and in which they have excelled.  And yes, to create economic value you have to be able to do pragmatic stuff, we know that.

And yet the fundamental questions we struggle with most are not how to do things, but what to do, and how to get people to do them.  Overwhelmingly the world struggles from a lack of alignment on core values and leadership to create that alignment.  The world needs universities and other institutions of mind and spirit that focus on the big questions and developing people who can bring others together around approaches if not answers to those questions.  Hence the huge interest in TED talks.  We're like lost puppies.  And the genuine excitement when a skinny kid with a funny name struts across the stage, or a new pope changes the focus of the Catholic church.  Yale, and UNC too, should stay strong around their core missions and not kowtow to narrow-minded pragmatists.  But that's much more easily said than done.

The free-range public intellectual

I checked Megan McCardle's The Upside of Down: Why Failing Well is the Key to Success out of the library some many weeks ago.  I have liked her work on Bloomberg pretty well, and I liked the looks of the book from the intro.

I'm now about 80 page into it. As many of you faithful readers (I love you all!) know, this is often an inflection point for me with books, and I may just need to return this one to the library soon.  My core issue with the book is this: I was connecting with McCardle well when she reflected on her own challenges and how she overcame them.  But then she veered off into abstracting about the nature of human experience using a wide range of materials drawn from anthropology, business anecdotes, behavioral economics, and I can't remember what else.

It seems to me that the influence of Malcolm Gladwell as well as a general trend towards interdisciplinarity in academia hasn't been all that felicitious for the reader, necessarily.  The temptation for a writer to draw together disparate strands of discourse into one big narrative is huge, it makes us feel big and mighty.  Lord knows I fall victim to it.  At least the bite-sized snippets I serve up here on the blog steer clear, to some extent, from the temptation towards aggrandizement.

But all too often it's easier to connect to people writing about things that are nearer to home.  The dictum for years has been to "write what you know," and it's deucedly hard to have true command of a lot of stuff, and harder yet to bring it all together coherently.

Yes, that is the goal in the end, to make sense of it all.  To communicate that sense is terribly hard.

Repetition and identity

So I was about to blog about the most recent Inspector Wexford novel I read, when I thought, "I wonder how many times I've blogged about Ruth Rendell?"  I did a quick search of the blog and discovered that the answer is:  many.  Dating back to 2009.  Though I have been reading her since before that.  As attentive readers may have noted, I highly recommend Rendell's novels, especially those about Wexford and his sidekick Mike Burden.  I have probably now read 3,000-4,000 pages about these two and a bunch of murders in and around their fictional town of Kingsmarkham.

Then I looked at my post from two days ago "Squirrelling biomass," and I thought:  "that phrase sounds familiar."  So, after a quick search, I found another post with exactly the same title here, from just over a year ago.

I suppose it should come as no surprise that I repeat myself.  I am, after all, me, and my brain has not changed dramatically in how it works, nor how it thinks about things. If anything, this points up the need for me to push outside of my comfort zone and do other things.

But hell, I'm doing that every day, these days. Sales, by god, selling financial advisory services.  It's new for me.  I'm used to thinking about markets and money and finance etc. etc., and have been getting better at it all the time, but convincing people to entrust their life savings to me and our firm, that shit is new.  So I guess it is natural that, come bedtime and weekends, I tend towards continuity, reading the same things, doing the same things, thinking similar thoughts, being myself.

Certainly my commute is not feeding me flavor like it used to in the Northeast.

One thing I'll tell you is this:  often, at bedtime, I find myself fantasizing about biscuits from the Biscuit Kitchen. I know I am on record as not finding them as good as the food press makes them out to be. They are not that much better than Time Out or even Biscuit Kitchen, but they are damned convenient in that drive-through format.  So I lay my head on the pillow and fantasize about a sausage, egg and cheese.  And then, in the morning, I eat the same cereal that I eat every day, and then carry on.

Bored bots, what they mean for Google

(I wrote about this a month ago, it's still going on.  Here's a new thought)

For some now, an absolute majority of the traffic to my blog has been Google bots going over old posts.  I wonder if this has something to do with the thinning of the internet as so much interaction has migrated to social media and people and businesses stop maintaining traditional sites with their own domains.  So that the bots have less to do, and keep traipsing over the same old internet, perhaps looking for new connections.  Good luck with that.  I think it also has implications for Google's core search business and legacy business model. Not that Google doesn't find ever more ways to be everywhere. But making money off of ever new offerings may get more challenging.

squirrelling biomass

After all the recent storms, many trees are down around here, and as I run I often look at fine-looking piles of wood and think, "if only you could be mine."  Today my mom had me over to her house to help her and David and his son Ethan take care of a big holly tree that had come down. I got there a little late, though about when I said I would, and saw that the big tree had already made its way out to the street.  So there were these good-sized logs just sitting there. A little longish, perhaps, but then I have a big fireplace, now don't I?

So I loaded those puppies into the conveniently present Prius and carried them back around town to the crib.  But there in the wood stack were big sections of the Poplar that the people from the electrical company took down in November of 2013 because branches were encroaching on the electrical lines (here's what I wrote about it then).  I burned a bunch of that bad boy this winter, but there are huge sections of it that had just not wanted to split, even when I tried 4-6 weeks ago before we got our big snows.  But I didn't want to pile new wood on top of them if there was hope for them yet.  So I got out the old axe to give them one more chance.

And they split.  I guess 16 months is kind of a magic number for curing wood, or something about the change of the seasons loosened them up.

Meanwhile, I have been converting the seeming "yard waste" of branches taken down by the storm into what I like to think of as "yard bounty," by breaking em down into short sections and piling them up as kindling up under the deck getting ready for next year.  Soon, I will need to take all the ashes out of the fireplace.  I was going to put them in the compost, as I have on occasion in the past, but the internet just told me not to.  Sigh.

Racism and UNC football

I was talking to a guy last week whose son had played football for UNC.  He told me about the incredible level of racial tension on the team, of how black and white players do not sit together for meals and how the black players flat out hate the white players.

Presumably, the coaching staff does little to manage this situation.  I don't know about you, but this strikes me as less than ideal.  Time was, the American core culture sports -- basketball and football for the most part, to a lesser extent baseball, at least in the south -- acted as a great melting pot, the test nucleus for integration.  They weren't universally successful in terms of providing a path to integration and economic progress for everyone, but at the very least lifetime relationships were forged between black and white players.*

The week before, I had been to a talk by Duke football coach David Cutcliffe.  Not caring much about football, I had never heard of the guy.  But he talked a good talk about focusing on the character of his players when recruiting, on looking specifically for kids who didn't just do well in school, but who had shown character in getting their butts to class on time. I must say I was impressed.



*As an aside, I should note that I've always felt a bit of guilt that, as a soccer player, I was, unbeknownst to myself, part of the leading edge of resegregation. I just knew I was too scrawny to play football and somehow never developed into much of a basketball player.  I tend to put my basketball underperformance down to late-blooming and poor fine motor skills, but who knows, maybe that's just excuse making.  Other skinny white kids did OK.  Like our boy Riguz.

I made Natalie cry at the dinner table

This week one evening when Mary was out at a meeting of some sort, Graham, Natalie and I were having dinner.  Natalie and I were talking about her course selection next year, and she said she wanted to take Theater.  I asked if it was honors, and she said no, that Theater 1 and 2 didn't have honors options.  Then we got into the whole GPA discussion and how this would hurt her GPA and thus her class rank, all of that.  I wasn't being heavy-handed, was trying to keep an even keel.

But she was getting upset, tears started welling up, she was really stressed out. "Just tell me what to do," she said.

This whole college admissions psychosis is the hardest thing in the world.  Frank Bruni's piece in the Times today was very good.  It made me cry. We have tried not to guide her too much, to let her find her own way, because she makes such good decisions and is doing so well and is so smart and is generally pretty happy.

And the problem is, we don't know what is the best thing for her.  On the one hand, I went to fancy schools, and though college in particular was a difficult time in my life for a lot of reasons, I'm glad I went to the college of my choice and I really enjoyed the quality of education I was able to access there.  And it was hugely validating to my ego to have set the goal of getting in there and then doing it.

On the other hand, too much of my ego is tied up in educational prestige.  That all happened 25-30 years ago, and it has limited influence on my happiness today.  Except I do still like books and learning and I appreciate having intelligent friends who are good human beings that I made back during college and grad school.  But it also put me in a peer group of people who have gone out and ruled the world, and sometimes I fall victim to measuring myself against them and feeling like shit about myself.

I also made some wacky career decisions that have at times complicated my life later.  Part of me wants to counsel her to be practical in her career decisions so that she doesn't live her life like a temporal pretzel, as I sometimes feel I have.  But she's not even 15 yet.

There are lots of people I know who didn't go to fancy schools and who seem to have done just fine in life.  Who knows if they are confused on the inside. One must be careful not to judge one's insides against other people's outsides, as I am at times wont to do (for example, 2 paragraphs ago)

My dad, particularly in his later poet phase, and probably when we were younger and I was tuning him out, often espoused living the simple life and eschewing materialism.  When we moved back to NC, he told me that Chapel Hill was basically corrupted by the rat race and that Hillsborough was a better place.  Sometimes I wonder if he was right.  But it was impossible to listen to him because he was so overbearing and insufferable in so many ways, he listened so poorly.  Most likely, there's probably a "grass is greener" aspect to that argument.

A portrait of Ellie

I was told by my first girlfriend Mary that I should really go to Chapel Hill Sports Club to meet people for business purposes, and that the path to that went through Michelle's dad Charlie.  So I called up Charlie, formerly head of the state high school athletics association, and he informed me that the Durham Sports Club was in fact better, and that it met at the Croasdale Country Club and I should come there.  So I did.

When I got there at 11:30, I discovered that the mode, if not the median, age of those attending, was about 75, and that therefore 11:30 was a little bit late to show up for a lunch buffet.  There was a spot at a table with some fellows of about that age and one a good deal younger, so I sat down with them. I introduced myself, and a couple of them said "you're not Mike Troy's son, are you?"  I allowed that I in fact was.

So most of the people at the table knew my dad, had gone to high school or junior high school with him, and remembered him fondly, if not in elaborate detail.  One of them was the same class at Durham High as my dad's brother Ballard, and asked after him, and I had to inform him that Ballard had passed away a year or so back....

Which made me think back to our visit with Ballard in the summer of 2013, when the fam and I stayed with him in College Park, Maryland, using that as a base for traipsing through our nation's capital.  Ballard had a portrait of his wife Ellie -- who had predeceased him some years back -- out on the piano, and when we came home late in the afternoon we found him enjoying a healthy glass of whiskey and sitting with her portrait.  It was part of his daily routine, this communing with her likeness.  I don't know whether he disclosed this habit with the lady friend he was courting.

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.