Failure to delegate and upskill

So I had an appointment for coffee with a guy who owns a store that sells specialty retail goods, guy stuff.  High end outdoorsy stuff.  I won't be more specific than that.

We were supposed to meet at 10, when the store opened.  He had, I think, 5 employees.  A couple of guys who were basically mechanics, one guy who managed the parts department and phones, and another couple of guys who were ostensibly in sales.

But this guy did everything on the floor.  When the phone rang and there were complicated questions about products, he had to answer them.  When some clients came in to look at purchasing what might have been a $300-$400 item, it was he who had to show them how to get it ready to work, how to pack it up, etc.  His salespeople weren't even paying attention, didn't even try to learn.

At one point in time he got frustrated with a slight mess on the shop floor and he cleaned it up himself, while muttering under his breath.

It was really pretty shocking.  I stayed there for over an hour, waiting for him to break free, but he never did.  I got a lot of stuff done there on my phone, talked to a client in Europe, made a couple of appointments for next week, caught up on some reading.  But I had plenty of time to watch this guy.

Now, I had asked for the meeting, and odds were he didn't need my services.  Maybe he was trying to demonstrate that to me.  But I think not.  Mostly I think he had either hired people who were glorified bumps on logs, or he just didn't encourage them, or he didn't know how to manage.  Or he couldn't hire decent people because he didn't pay them enough.

Who knows.  It was a mess, I'll tell you that.  I'm not going to bother calling him back.

Being Mortal

I just read through to the end of Atul Gawande's Being Mortal.  There is a reason that it is a best seller, and indeed that all his books are, and that is that he is not just a great writer, but a beautiful soul. He manages to bring both prodigious erudition and curiosity together with tremendous bigheartedness in pretty much whatever topic he tackles.

In this case, he writes about aging, and dying, and how it can be better facilitated by the medical world.

Around the time I first cracked Being Mortal, I also started reading Graham Greene's 1959 Our Man in Havana, which is basically a spy novel as farce.  You would think that would have been more entertaining.  But no, it was Gawande who pulled me through first, so real was it. It made me think back all too often to my dad's last couple of days.  Difficult though they were, I feel that, ultimately, we made the right choice in not seeking to keep him alive by whatever means necessary.  He had no interest in living a half-assed, half-witted life in some institution.

Grace

I was talking to someone I used to drink with in the late 80s in North Carolina, who ended up getting sober in the West Village in the 90s, unbeknownst to me, while I was doing the same on the Upper West Side.  At some point in time she characterized her path in life, or her current state, in terms of "grace." This is a rhetoric which at one point in time would have been repugnant to me, but where I am in life now, I was right with her.

This morning I went to an AA meeting that I try to get to as often as I can, maybe one week in three on average throughout the year.  In front of me there was a guy who had once shared about killing someone while driving drunk, and the guilt and shame he felt about it.  Afterwards I had said to him that it could have been me, could have been many of us, because he was by no means alone in driving drunk.

Sometime during the meeting someone asked (and this usually doesn't happen in the middle of meetings) if there was anyone there who had less than 30 days sober.  The guy in front of me raised his hand.

And I was brought back around to my incredible sense of gratitude for the fact that, somehow, through submission, however imperfect, to the concept that I am powerless over certain things -- and as I proceed through life my consciousness of my powerlessness increases more and more -- that I have been able to stay away from an ever-wider list of things which harm me: alchohol, drugs, cigarettes, even junk food (an ongoing battle, to be sure).

What's more, I can't help but to recognize that I am of the ruling class, more or less, while this guy does not appear to be. I think about people working through dependence on drugs, alchohol, and other challenges and entering the workforce only to find it incredibly hard to find decent ways to earn decent livings.  Not that it's impossible, but it ain't easy. Nor is a policy solution to it.

It was good to see the guy in a meeting, fighting the fight for today, but it was sad to see him leave before the closing prayer.  I had hoped to congratulate him on his time. It is said that alcoholism is a cunning and baffling disease, and that's no lie.

Service getting better

I went to a business networking lunch a couple of weeks ago for a group that meets in the same place every week.  The service wasn't good.  Particularly when it came time to pay, the wait staff was slow to come give us bills and take our cards.

At the time I reflected that the wait staff was African-American women, and, given that the labor market is pretty tight around here, it was not improbable that they were new to waiting tables.  In fact, that day I remember one of them taking a really long time getting another table's order, right when we needed to get our checks, which is typical of new staff, trying to make friends with every table and acting too much as a "meal counselor."

Net net, it's probably reflective of a healthy situation where new people are being drawn into the workforce and are learning to work with customers, an all-important skill in many if not all types of work.

This last week, things ran much better at the lunch.  They got our checks early and turned them around really quickly.  It may be that the one of our group had spoken to the manager beforehand, whatever.  It's all good.

More on happy endings

I took a bunch of boys to see Inside Out as part of Graham's 12th birthday party.  After the movie, as we were driving home in a borrowed minivan, I heard one of the boys behind me ask "why do stories always have happy endings?"  The boy seated next to him responded:  "I read a book one time that didn't have a happy ending. It sucked."

So, there you go.  That's where we are at age 11-12. I have shared before my growing if not unconditional predilection for the happy ones, so while I'm not 100% down with where the kid was coming from, I still get it.

Graham's 12th

So, Graham's 12th birthday party is almost done, and the most important, and stressful part of it -- the preparation -- was completed hours ago.  This would be the 27th birthday party we have hosted, and though I did fairly well in the run-up to it, there was a moment when I lost track of the Zen of spousal relationship around birthdays.  That is -- don't fight it.  Just do what is asked.  All of the house-cleaning is eventually good in that the house ends up cleaner and more orderly than it was before you started. All the anxiety of preparation is about the fear of looking sloppy in the eyes of other moms dropping off and picking up. This is a fear that must be acknowledged, honored, and moved through. Resistence is futile, nay, counterproductive.

Resisting and appreciating Caro

I keep struggling to get back into Robert Caro's Master of the Senate, which I am about 2/3rds done with, which puts me at having read about 3,000 pages of his in the last couple of years.  I am, to some extent, sick of his style.

But then I read Nicolas Krystof's piece "From Somaliland to Harvard,"  in last week's Sunday NYTimes, in which he described a kid who used to spend two hours a day hauling water from a well to his home, and I really understand what that means to a household when I think back to Caro's chapter about LBJ's herculean efforts under the Rural Electrification Administration to bring electricity to the Texas hill country in the thirties, and how transformative that was for the lives of rural women in particular, but also children.  The ability to pump water up from water sources cuts out that 2 hours or whatever of water-hauling.

So I know that there is so much in Caro for me. I just must muster the patience to take it in.

The kid in the Krystof piece is, of course, the one who has gone to Harvard (with the help of $ from some hedge fund guy), and who plans to return home to Somaliland to try to bring change there. Let's hope he sticks to the plan.

Plot protection

Graham and I are now well past the halfway mark in watching the original Star Trek, and he has already articulated a very important principle that he has observed.  All the main characters, Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Scottie, and Uhura, are said to have "plot protection."  That is, no matter how dangerous the situation, we know that they will not die.

Now, this is an important learning for a kid to have. I think that in time we all come to realize that this is true of main characters, and it is one of the great assurances, indeed the key functions of narrative of this sort, to instill in us this belief.  That no matter what happens, the hero will survive the episode, the sun will rise tomorrow.  It instills in us the optimism to keep plugging forward, no matter what obstacles life puts in our path.

Actually, Graham is already in touch with the idea of "Deus ex machina" coming in to save the day.

It makes me think back to the time, 5 years and change ago, when we went to see Toy Story 3 (chronicled in this post), and Graham did not have anything resembling this level of trust in the masters of the plot.  So it is good to see what some years of imbibing plots will do for a young fellow's intellectual and temperamental development.

Tonight, it looked not so good for Kirk, McCoy, and especially Spock, who boldly set out in a hovercraft as the Enterprise was being drawn inexorably into the center of a 11,000 mile long energy-sucking amoeba, which was threatening to reproduce.  Luckily, Kirk thought of injecting some anti-matter into the chromosomal core of the thing, based on some analysis Spock had radioed, seemingly with one of his dying breaths.  Luckily, it worked, and everybody survived, and a hearty laugh was had by all.  But it was tense and, it must be owned, a little emotional.

Rally for Recovery

I drove up to Raleigh yesterday for a Rally for Recovery, a public event for people in recovery to come together and celebrate their progress.  It is all connected with a movement to make recovery community more visible to the world, to peel back the layer of anonymity and shame which covers it and help people better understand that:

1. Substance abuse is an illness, like diabetes
2. There are lots of success stories
3. There is substantial ROI in investing in mitigation

I felt like it was important for me to go because I have recently joined the board of a non-profit that works to secure funding for programs around substance abuse and raise consciousness about the issue, and that because my background in this world is so overwhelmingly 12-step that I really don't understand a lot of the rest of the ecosystem of providers, services, interventions, etc.

When I got there, I found that there were lots of people smoking, and that a non-trivial portion of them were drawn from the less-affluent portions of society, including a lot of people of color.  They were giving away free food, which always makes me hungry, but then when I looked at the line for people getting the free food I saw that it was a lot of people who looked like they needed it, whereas I just wanted it.  Particularly one of the sausage biscuits from Bojangles. So I didn't get in line.

The fact of the matter is, I was a little uncomfortable being around people who are not like me.  And I need to get over that, because a lot of this world is people who are in fact not all that like me, save that they are Americans with dreams and problems, but fewer advantages than I've had.

There was tall, skinny, young African-American guy who was standing near me listening to the speakers.  He had gotten a bag of food from the line, and it was at his feet.  It had potato chips, bananas, an apple, maybe other stuff.  Absent-mindedly, he stepped on the bag and tripped a little. He quickly picked up the apple and took a bite, maybe because he wanted to get it in his belly before it bruised, or because he was just anxiously conscious of the fact that he had almost squandered a resource.  Or maybe I'm projecting.

Internal bitching

I was driving over to a client's house in Carrboro an hour or so back, listening to Stephen Malkmus, wearing flip flops, on a beautiful sunny day.  I caught myself moaning to myself that I was working on a Sunday.

Then I realized that I was driving through Carrboro on a beautiful sunny day, wearing flip flops and listening to Stephen Malkmus.  I was, in short, living the dream.  And that I had been entrusted by a client to do something involving a significant amount of trust, which is a great honor.

So, enough already with the bitching.

Durham lawyer

I met a lawyer in Durham today who grew up down the street from my dad, was maybe 7 years younger than him.  He said that my dad came and talked to him about law school when he was considering applying, and that my dad's encouragement was part of what made him choose the law.

Which is funny, considering how my dad came to revile the profession.  Still, it is very interesting to go around Durham and hear all these stories of what dad was like back in the day.

Pine Plains

I talked to my friend Nick yesterday, and it brought back memories of going up to his family's farm in Pine Plains, NY, most often with his brother Tony, in the late 80s and early 90s.  I must say these are some of the warmest memories of my life.

Pine Plains was a pretty Chekhovian place.  Nick and Tony's dad had left Wall Street many years before and bought up 400 acres up in Dutchess County, beautiful land, hilly, with views off into the distance where the Hudson is.  To keep preferred tax status, he needed to generate a certain amount of revenue, and hay wasn't doing it.  He needed cattle.  Meanwhile, the ranch house they lived in had been subjected to what is termed in institutional circles "deferred maintenance."  There was a spot on an old sofa where Tony's dad liked to sit that was dark from dirt from his work clothes.  We called it "the hole" or something like that.

But it was always great to be there. In particular there was one weekend, probably in the fall of '91 or '92.  Their family was ramping up its production of beef cattle, and as part of this effort we were putting up metal fencing around what where to become paddocks.  It must have been late October or November, so it was chilly, and Tony and I were working pretty hard driving posts into the ground.  I remember taking shelter from the cold in the barn, hanging out on some bales of hay.  I was probably smoking a cigarette at the time, like an idiot.

Then there was lunch.  Liverwurst sandwiches. Something like a direct infusion of fat and protein into the bloodstream at a time of great need.  Yum.

All in all, there was just something great about getting away and doing physically tiring work with a clear goal in a beautiful setting with a good friend, during a time of some transition and uncertainty. Which, in retrospect, is just life.

My prayer

At Al Anon this morning the topic was how people meditate and pray to connect with their higher powers.  Yes, this is how we talk.

I will confess that meditation does me no good, I can only pray, and I try to do it each morning.  We are enjoined by Step 11 to try to achieve conscious contact with "God as we understand him," praying only for knowledge of his will for us and the power to carry that out.

Already the first thing in the morning, my mind shoots off on its habitrail of concerns about business, this client and that client and the market and the responsibility of managing peoples' money and funding my family's operations and this that or the other with one of the kids...  It is hard to center myself.  And yet, I try to do it each day.

Having been raised Christian, of sorts, or at least among "Christians", the only way to do this that feels natural and comfortable is more like prayer than meditation.  The problem is, I don't exactly believe in God, and certainly not in the sense of some grey-haired human-looking guy up there in the clouds pulling strings to make things happen and having a plan for everything.

But nonetheless when I try to connect my mental model is that of prayer. And I must confess that, rationally, when I look at the external circumstances of my life, I really can only be grateful, and as I believe I have blogged before, it makes no sense to be grateful to nothingness, and therefore something on the other side of my gratitude is presupposed.

I haven't figured it out yet.

I did think that, having recently read the chapter in Dean Smith's bio about his faith, that if I were to believe in God, that Dean Smith's concept of a deity seems a fairly decent one.  Gotta love the guy. It was appropriate, therefore, that I was sitting at the time in Binkley Baptist Church, where Coach Smith went for almost half a century.

(two days later) Just found a note in a private journal on this topic. In some sense, when I try to figure out the concept of God for myself, to make a firm decision on the existence or non-existence thereof, and/or what a deity looks like/consists of etc, I am trying to outsmart everybody else once more.  This attempt bespeaks insufficient humility before the question itself, which is what I really need to strive after.  I am not going to resolve this question.  I can only let go.

Pascal's Wager remains so pertinent.

The conservative impulse

Watching Man U lose to Swansea the other day, I found myself challenged at some basic, root level. On the one hand, I think it's good for things to get shaken up, and I should like to see a team like Swansea do well.  I have no reason to like Man U in particular.  They are the Dallas Cowboys of soccer.

And yet... something in me longs to see the traditional order of things continue, and it saddens me to see them perform so shittily.  Why should I care at all?  The roster of players has turned over almost entirely.  It's pretty much just Rooney and Valencia left from my early days of watching them, and of the rest, there's very little compelling about them, though I like Phil Jones.

Nonetheless, I kind of want them to win, because they represent a stability of sorts that is appealing to me.  Just because.  I suppose that's kind of a middle-aged white guy way to view the world.

Being quiet, '15

Be Loud! 15 has come and gone, and it was a rousing success, as last year.  Such an incredible couple of evenings of music and people and love.

As for the music, to my mind the technical high point was Preeesh! doing the Pretenders' "Kid" with Mary Huff of Southern Culture on the Skids channeling Chrissy Hynde.  So beautiful.  This morning, as I try to sing that part, I find my voice breaking a little bit, and I start to fight back tears.

I may have shared about this in the past.  Not infrequently, when I try to sing something that is genuine and emotionally charged, it is physically and emotionally difficult for me to do so.  I start to cry.  I think it has something to do with some sort of psychic disalignment deep within me, a sense that I am perhaps doing the wrong thing in life.

I am easily bumped off course internally, a little fragile.  Just now I was reading Stephen King's interesting piece in the NY Times about being prolific, and I fell victim to that old "I shoulda been a writer" vein of thought.  So, naturally, I came upstairs and wrote.

But it is a silly line of thinking and feeling for me to be dragged down into.  There is no one thing I should be doing with my life.  I did just fine yesterday.  I raised some money for Be Loud! Sophie.  I showed up on the soccer field and played 70 minutes in 85-90 degree heat in the first game of the season at sweeper, a position I haven't played in years, anchoring a decent defense to a 4-2 victory. In the middle of the day I even roped in a solid recruit on the spot because I knew we'd be a little short-handed.

I also talked to a bunch of people (50?  60?), so that at the end of the day I was just emotionally drained.  Today, I will hang out exclusively with family, as much as possible.

Boys in the Boat

I should have noted that my post on earlier this week on the high point of summer was prompted by my reading of Boys in the Boat, about the University of Washington 8-man crew that went to the Berlin Olympics and won, upstaging Hitler much like Jesse Owens had.  Admittedly, they weren't black, but still.

Up in Larchmont there was great fervor about this book, apparently some poobah of some sort anointed it the greatest work on non-fiction since sliced bread. Naturally, this called forth the sleeping cynic in my breast, ever-envious of anyone who might pretend to write the greatest book of any sort, which I believe, of course, is in fact crouched somewhere within me, waiting to pounce on something.

But I read it anyway.  And it was good, if not transcendent.  Even though I knew what the denouement must be, it was suspenseful nonetheless.  It was difficult to not like the main character, Joe Frantz, particularly since the author worked so hard to make him likeable. The fact is, even though I knew where it was headed, and even he telegraphed the moral thrust of the book -- that these hard-working honest working-class kids from bumfuck nowhere looked deep within themselves to rise up and conquer the elitists of the East as well as Nazis -- I found myself crying at the end.  It projects an ideal of America that we, or at least I, want to believe in.

What's more, I learned quite a bit about Goebbels, Leni Riefenstahl, and the pig dog apologists on the 1936 US Olympic Committee.  All told, a fine book.

And it reminded me of Seattle.

Reflections from our Northern swing

While up North, on those days that I didn't play tennis, I did some running around Larchmont.  It was difficult not to notice how many of the fine homes in the Larchmont Manor were being spruced up. One house that I have often thought amongst the worst exemplars of the "car commercial" house had apparently bought or begun developing some land across from it so it could have symmetrical semi-circle driveways on either side of the road (it's hard to see due to shadows in the pic below, but this gives you a notion of what the house is like)

So.  Lots of $ going into private residences.

Meanwhile, the streets and highways were falling apart.  They're building a new Tappan Zee, hoorah, but lots of other roads are just in crappy shape.

Meanwhile, the world's markets are going to hell because there is a commodities glut.

So, here's my modest proposal.  If things keep going south in the markets, we need quantitative easing that buys up not mortgage-backed securities and the like, as before, but that buys bonds slated to build bridges, roads, even the damned tunnel that Christie and Cuomo are arguing about.  Use the cheap commodities to build things at fire sale prices.

The End of Summer

The kids have gone to bed, and I will soon too, so it's time to reflect on summer's high points.  Truth be told, the apogee was probably right here, aboard the Seattle harbor cruise.  We had somehow been talked into buying these tickets that got you discounts to all the top tourist attractions.  Natalie had been excited about it, so I pulled the trigger.

Amongst these attractions was numbered the harbor cruise.  When we boarded, Mary and Graham opted to sit inside, while Natalie and I staked out some seats on deck.  But when we got going, it was too chilly or sunny or something, so we joined Mary and Graham inside.  It wasn't fancy, but it was cozy in there, and not crowded at all, and the guy who narrated the tour was just really good at his job.  He was almost as good as the guy who gave us the tour in the glass-bottomed boat at San Marcos, Texas in the spring of 2014, which I seem to have not recounted.  Alas.

In any case, it was comfy, and not crowded, and most informative and witty.  We got some kind of something, maybe a coffee or some such, and Graham requested a bag of Lays Potato Chips, which he declared to be his favorites.  He enjoyed them immensely.  So we just sat there and listened, and it was awesome.

Seeing my friend Mark for the first time in almost 20 years was also pretty epic, but that was more of a personal treat than a family one.

Our best meal of the summer, by general consensus, was at a French restaurant in Vancouver, after we had endured a hot and sweaty afternoon nearly circumambulating (oh yes I did write that) Stanley Park.  Natalie got many fine selfies there.

The waning of metaphysics?

Is metaphysical speculation, like sex, a young man's game?  10 years ago if I had posted reflections on a long drive from north to south, they would likely have been filled with more deep thoughts. Today, I am more empirical in orientation. Is it simply from a lack of energy for speculation, or am I intrinsically less likely to speculate?

The fact that I am asking these questions now suggests a couple of things:

1. I ain't dead yet
2. The morning is a better time to think expansively than late at night, when I am tired from a day of driving.

Maybe I am just a repressed morning person.

Or perhaps, as Chad McCracken put it in his poem many years ago about Bear Bryant, "heaven is where the ground is."

Home from NY

We drove home from Larchmont to Chapel Hill today, taking a slightly different route.  At the start, we took the New York Thruway rather than the West Side Highway down to the GWB, owing to traffic, and as we curled slowly around the entrance ramp to the Cross-Bronx, it was hard not to take note of the masses of filthy, melted plastic bottles that people had tossed out of their windows along with other assorted trash.  Nor could I say I could really blame them, because when you think of how the highways cut through the old Bronx nabes like they were nothing so that Moses could get suburbanites in and out of Manhattan and or from NJ to Connecticut, it's hard not to see the communities themselves as much other than human trash.

Further south, we took 301 from just past the Delaware Memorial Bridge all the way down to just north of Richmond, effectively skipping all but the easternmost edge of the DC-Baltimore sprawl. Maybe 30-45 minutes longer than using 95 and all its tributaries through there.  Or, depending on traffic, maybe not. Certainly not as much of a hellhole as 95 between Richmond and DC.  Lots of beautiful old motels and other roadside Americana, much of it just hanging on.

Before I forget

It being a quasi-vacation week, I have been somewhat remiss in my blogging.  Just sent Graham off to bed, and I'd better get my fingers, brain, and browser aligned here before I get distracted.

Tennis again with Rob today here in Larchmont.  We decided against keeping score, which was good, and we hit together well for an hour or so, but at the end I needed to hustle back to the house to head into Manhattan.  My phone, which had been snuggly nestled inside of my racket cover, went into my pocket and then, as if all that computing power gave it an actual brain of its own, it hopped right out and tumbled to the court.  Crack! Went the screen, and that phone is toast.  I can't even answer a phone call, so screwed is the screen.

And so, I fumed and flagellated myself mercilessly, but I had to get my shit back in gear, as Mary had convinced me that I should escort the kids into Manhattan to see Hamilton, which had received such rave reviews from everybody with a pen and a platform to publish on, and which Beth had somehow gotten tickets for, 3 days into its Broadway run after debuting to rave reviews at the Public.

The show, in point of fact, was phenomenal.  I will try to give it its due in a later post, but now I must go and put Graham to bed.

The inner game of my tennis

Played tennis with my friend David the other day in Princeton.  It followed a pretty predictable script. I started off serving poorly, but playing well, even as I felt in my mind that I was fucking up.. But I kept playing conservatively, letting him make mistakes.  Pretty soon I was up 4-1.  He was frustrated.

On the one hand, I felt good for playing well.  But a conflict arose.  David and I are generally pretty evenly matched, and to crush him would upset the balance of power, and we don't see one another very often.

I by no means tanked the match. I would have liked, honestly, to have had the discipline to keep executing according to plan and playing well. But I didn't really care to mess with my boy's head.

Plus, playing conservatively and letting him make mistakes is somewhat boring.  Also, he was a little angry.  He stepped up his game, and I started going for some winners.  Indeed, I hit some.  But before long, he was up 6-5, and the sun was getting high in the sky, and it was time to swim.  We decided that we would not be playing a tiebreaker, no matter what.  It ended up 6-6.

Although I lost the eye of the tiger as far as winning goes, the second half of the set was much funner than the first half, because I stopped focusing on beating him and got into the groove of having fun.

Which brings us back to the broader question of goal-directedness, and the general focus thereupon in contemporary "success" thinking.  What was my goal in getting on the court?  Winning?  Exercise? Having some yux with my boy?  Clearly 2 and 3 were more important than 1.  So that's how it went down.

Quick to judge

So there was a guy who went to college with me, he was friends with some guys I roomed with freshman and then sophomore year, they all played soccer for Yale.  One time he was working on a paper on Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, and he was asking me about it and talking about how he thought it was a commentary on the oppressive Soviet regime.  Never mind that it was written in the early 1860s.  I thought he was a lunkhead.

While in college, I told that story to others in the tony literary circles in which I circulated, as a demonstration of how limited some student athletes were and how, by extension, superior we self-appointed intellectuals were.

I ran into him on the subway once when I was in grad school.  He was in med school or in residency uptown at Columbia Presbyterian, and he was very friendly and pleasant (as indeed he always had been).  I tried to be the same.

Not long ago, I heard that he had died.  Suddenly, at the age of 48.  It turned out he had become a... brain surgeon.  In fact, the head of neurosurgery at a major hospital, where he mentored lots of people, performed 300 operations a year, published hundreds of peer-reviewed articles, all about aggressive brain cancer.

The moral to the story is, aside from the fact that insecure 20-year old potheads do not have the greatest judgment, is that it's really difficult to know people in any way unless you make the time to talk to them at length.  What the hell did I know about this guy?  Diddly.

And, unfortunately, this really seems to validate the theory of the Dunbar number, which says that any given person can really only begin to know about 150 people, and of them you can claim to know only a handful well.

So, eventually, you have to abstract up and start to behave towards people based on gross generalizations.  But the best way to do it is to try to be generous and assume the best.

Stewart and Cronkite

We hadn't watched John Stewart for a while, he is on too late, but when I heard on NPR that last night was to be his last show, I knew that it would be special.

And it was.  The first bit where he gathered all of his alumni together ran on a bit, but it was sweet in nature, and I guess that's how it had to be because that's how big his posse was.  Same thing for the second bit, where he went backstage and introduced us to everyone who was back there.  It was a big team, but he did the right thing by introducing every single one of them, seemingly.

Then there was the last bit when he just looked at us and gave us a little sermon on bullshit.  And then Springsteen played.

By the end, I was in tears.  I am, in fact, crying a little bit now.  Partially from exhaustion from having gotten up early two days in a row and then staying up too late last night.

But partially because it is, in the end, just sad, truly the end of an era.  When I had watched the show in recent years, which was an infrequent occurrence,  I felt like it had slipped a little bit into a rut. But who doesn't, after all?  Doing a show, or even a blog, daily over years is an extraordinarily hard thing to do.  Staying funny and relevant is incredibly difficult.

In the end, it was his purity of heart and spirit which distinguished Stewart, and will continue to do so. Watching Colbert speak straight from the heart to Stewart last night was truly special.

And I realized this morning that there has been only one true parallel moment to Stewart's passing the baton like this. Not Carson.  Not Letterman. Not Leno.

Cronkite.  Walter Cronkite defined what it meant to cover the news and public discourse when we were young, and he did it with incredible dignity and forthrightness, and his retirement was an epochal moment, really, the beginning of the end to broadcast news.  I was 15, and I still remember it. Stewart, despite operating within an ironic mode, did the same thing.  He was funny, he told jokes, but right below the surface he was deadly serious, and we knew and know it.  It wasn't the many layers of indirection of the Colbert Report, beneath which we knew what Colbert was up there.  Stewart's earnestness was always just millimeters away.

And so, sigh, we will wait to see what comes next.  Hopefully, it will air earlier in the evening.

This actually happened

So some friends told us how they had been at the beach last week somewhere in North Carolina. Their kids were swimming in the waves, and it being this summer, everybody's got sharks in the back of their mind.

Except for those who have sharks in the front of their mind. These rednecks came down the beach, planted a confederate flag in the sand, and started shark fishing, running bloody bait out into the surf using some sort of small boat or something and luring sharks and other big fish back towards the shore where they could be caught.  Eventually they caught some massive stingrays or something.

But it was no longer a good place for kids to be swimming, that's for sure.

America's proud white men will always find a good way to say fuck you.  Of that we can be certain.

The Loudness of Hulot

Long-time readers of the blog will already know that I am a big fan of Jacques Tati, and in particular the 1953 classic Mr Hulot's Holiday.  The topic has come up before, in particular in this 2004 post.

I submitted this post to Niklaus and Lucy for inclusion on the Be Loud! Sophie blog.  It is written in a somewhat pretentious way, but WTF ever.  There's a little bit a of a backstory. Early in Sophie's illness, I gave Niklaus my copies of Mr. Hulot's Holiday and Auntie Mame, both of them VHS tapes since I had had them for so long, thinking that Sophie would be in the hospital bored and would be in a position to appreciate classics.  Also because I knew she was a special girl. But what happens?  She is obsessed with binge-watching How I Met Your Mother and never watches them. Which is fine, I miscalculated.  But then Niklaus has the nerve to mock me (albeit gently) for my wacky idea that a teenager could have an interest in old movies. 

So I admit that I am a little eccentric. But still, Hulot is great, and plenty Loud. 

A dog lays in the middle of the main street of a provincial French town.  When a bus rumbles through, the dog moves, and then resumes its former place.  Soon thereafter, a small car appears, an ancient, claptrap, backfiring convertible, top up, beladen with all manner of fishing poles, nets, tennis rackets, and other vacation props.  The dog does not move. A hand reaches out of the car and squeezes the old fashioned bulb horn on the car's side. The dog languidly raises itself from its position of leisure and ambles round the side of the car to see who it is.  The hand pets the dog, before the car moves on.

And so the world is introduced to Mr. Hulot, the main character of Jacques Tati's 1953 classic Mr. Hulot's Holiday and several sequels. Perhaps never before, and never again, has so thoroughgoing a meditation on the nature of Being Loud graced the silver screen. Hulot is a bumbler with a heart of gold, Tati the king of slapstick. Everywhere he goes he wreaks quiet havoc, whether playing ping pong while bouncing from room to room, accidentally rearranging card game players and creating fights, listening to jazz cranked up to 11 in the dead of night while sitting stock still, smoking his pipe, or opening just doors that let in the powerful breeze off the sea, deranging everything from hairpieces to tea being poured.  Whenever possible, having accidentally created chaos, Hulot scampers unseen up to his garret room in the inn by the sea that is the film's central setting, often leaving telltale footprints.

Hulot, in short, is the great disrupter, the puncturer of balloons, the man of the hour.  If you haven't seen this movie, run out and do so.  It is the quintessence of summer.

Role Models

After it was suggested by our friend Lisa K, who in fact bought us a copy, we watched the movie Role Models the other night.

It is, no doubt a silly movie, implausible in a wide variety of ways, so many it's not even really worth listing them.  And yet I liked it. It was emotionally satisfying.  The good guys overcome some challenges and then triumph.  There were goodly yux.  It was a perfectly decent evening in front of the television.  1.5 thumbs up.

Rose-colored glasses

Natalie had some old pictures from Princeton of herself and Graham on her bookshelf, ones taken by Mary, so better than this, to be sure.  Looking at them I thought, "oh how cute, what an idyllic period of our lives," and so on.

Then I reflected again that, in fact, at the moment when Mary was taking them I was probably being pissy with her and in a hurry, stressed out about work, irritated that it was taking her so long to take them. Probably trying to figure out how to get my next snack. Because that is part of how we operate. She takes a long time to do things, and I get cranky, but the results are nice.

Big River and goals

Out on the lake today for a long swim before the afternoon storms rolled in, I realized I was getting a lot of sun, and was reminded of Big River Man, a documentary about a Slovenian guy who sets out to swim the Amazon from its source to the sea.  He does in fact achieve his goal, but he goes kinda nuts in the process and ends up pretty much back where he started, broke and half-broken.

Which struck me as kind of a cautionary tale to all the one reads about goal-setting, the importance of having clear and well-defined goals if you're going to achieve anything noteworthy.  Case in point: there was an important and oft-cited study involving Yale (or was it Harvard) grads about goal-setting that showed that those who had written down their goals early in life were more likely to achieve them.... or was there?

Here's a blog post that suggests that this famous study is in fact apocryphal, though the blogger did find another small study that validated the basic idea.

Whatever. If in actual fact an unexamined life is not worth living, and I buy that hypothesis, setting goals early in life and mindlessly following may help you reach your goals, but at considerable cost.

In any case, it is time for lunch.

Free stuff, enjoyment, and productivity

The Wall Street Journal ran an article yesterday about how economists in Silicon Valley, including and especially Hal Varian, Google's Chief Economist, believe that standard measures of productivity don't adequately account for the improvements to our lives that technology has ushered in.  How much easier it is to search for things, get directions, to do any number of other things that the web and smartphones other technologies have let us do.

There is some merit to their arguments, though they are awfully reminiscent of how neo-Austrian and other economists argue that products are so much better (dishwashers and cars break down less often, etc.) that we should adjust how we measure inflation, and thereby reduce the annual increases to government benefits such as Social Security, which will therefore make it easier to balance the budget.

In essence, the argument is:  if a unit of production or productivity (the ability to find a movie, cool milk, or drive a mile) is cheaper over time, people need less money to maintain their standard of living.

This flies in the face of all the research that indicates that people's perception of their economic well-being hinges less on their absolute ability to do live in a certain way than in how they compare to their neighbors.  I think, in a sense, that people feel well off if they feel that they are in a position to influence the arc of their life: that there is hope that they and their children can do and get better.

I had lunch with a guy who spends a lot of time in China a couple of days back, and I asked him if he would rather be poor in the US (where they objectively might have higher income and be able to buy more stuff) vs. rural China, and he said probably the latter.  China, messed up as it is, perceives itself to be moving forward, whereas we don't.

The other big issue with the Silicon Valley argument that the internet makes us better off because it gives us more information and more choices about a variety of things is that, as behavioral economics has taught us, more choices is not necessarily better than fewer ones.  More choices complicates decision-making, on average.  That's why there is consensus that the right number of investment options in a 401k is 10 or 12 max, because otherwise people sit around second-guessing themselves.

Oh yeah, one other thing.  If we are all sitting around looking at the internet researching and choosing and shopping, it decreases local interdependency.  People are less inclined to walk next door and ask a neighbor's opinion, and thereby get into a conversation about a thousand other things and get to knoiw one another better.  Facebook etc. facilitate complex peer-based decision-making, but in a virtual, rather than a physical model. Jane Jacobs thought that Le Corbusier and Robert Moses were the death of the neighborhood and the city, but maybe it's the internet.

The end

So after 3 months or so I have come to the end of my re-reading of A Suitable Boy.  Certainly, I am glad to have read it again, no doubt.  But I confess I was a little disappointed in the denouement, I thought it was going to go in another direction, towards the ideal, rather than what Vissarion Belinskii -- back in the 1830s -- called the "reconciliation with reality," and Franco Moretti, much later, termed "The Way of the World."  That is, the way that fictional characters grow up and come to grips with life as it is, as opposed to how we would like for it to be. I am being deliberately cryptic, and I won't spoil it any more for those of you who haven't read it yet.

But I am nonetheless excited for the sequel to come out in the fall of 2016, if all goes according to schedule.  A Suitable Girl, it will be called. I remember vividly how I wished for the sequel when I came to the end of it for the first time.

Perhaps I should go back and re-read The Golden Gate in the interim.

Mortality

Between home and work today I heard of two recent deaths:  the expected one of the 93-year old mother of a client's husband, and the shocking one of the 36-year son of a friend.  It is in the nature of things at this stage of my life that, as someone who talks to a lot of people both by inclination and profession, I hear more and more of these things as I age (admittedly, I heard from the father of the 36-year old of a wedding too, so it wasn't all doom and gloom).

But it does put things in perspective, and reminds me to keep facing forward and staying positive, wherever possible, because I profit little if at all from going the other direction.


Before either of those conversations, let me add, I had a very interesting conversation with a dental hygienist about epigenetics and leaky guts and food allergies (she had lots) and Celine and, now that I think of it, my growing preference for happy endings in books as I age.  Which is right on topic.

The root of all...

So Natalie was just recounting to us her experience her first week at Duke TIP, where she's taking Criminal Trial Advocacy, and she told us that she had won best in the class for some argument they presented, even though many of the kids in there are older than her and have copies of the Declaration of Independence and/or the amendments to the Constitution posted above their beds.  She also said that nobody's arguments had been particularly water-tight, including her own which she considered rather half-baked.

And within me I felt swell up at the same time tremendous pride, and deep below that a sense of relief that "my child will be OK."

This, I submit, is at the root of the hyper-competitiveness for our children to achieve at the absolute highest level, to get into Ivy League schools and then keep going, it is this fear that if they don't, they will not be OK later in life, that they will be subsumed within the wave of global competition and automation and shifts in the competitive landscape (you should hear doctors talk about the projected impact of Obamacare on their earnings prospects going forward) that continues to eat up once seemingly safe white-collar professions.

I don't think this is a new insight on my part, but I felt it pretty viscerally just then.

But the idea that my daughter-- super-smart, born into a family and place that prioritizes education and with other socio-economic advantages -- is at particular risk is, well, silly.  Compared to kids from truly at risk populations?

But we, members of the chattering class, are nonetheless driven by a deep-seated need to protect our littluns.  And, lord knows, we do.  We wear ourselves to the nib driving them to activities and paying for enrichment opportunities. We advocate for gifted programs in already high-achieving school systems.    And then we wonder why there is an achievement gap and blame the school system.


Anyway, today on the phone I did what I considered the most important thing for my daughter: I encouraged her to not be hard on herself for any imperfections in her legal arguments, because she had done great.  And when she said that she had been fighting a little cold and hadn't been running in the mornings as she had planned (because she wants to stay in shape for an ultimate tournament she has the day the summer school ends), I told her to rest, hydrate, and have fun and don't beat herself up.

Because, lord knows, I am all too good at that, and that's what I don't want her to learn to do.

Haircut

Having short hair is an addiction of sorts, and it can be expensive.  For years I have been going to barbershops, rather than to hair stylists, to feed this addiction, and also because barbershops tend to be a little less rarefied than their upscale cousins, and as such they are places where I can dialog with less fancy people than those who are my natural cohort, having gone to fancy schools and gotten advanced degrees.

My most recent barber is kind of country, though he went to the same schools as I did (Seawell, Phillips, CHHS), his household had a different educational/socio-economic profile than my own. But once he had to leave his old location because of price, his prices have crept up to where I've been paying $23 after tipping him out.

And that's expensive, since I have to go in monthly or so to keep it tight.  So yesterday Crabill and I had lunch at Jamaica, Jamaica, out where 54 hits 55, and I had noticed that there was a barber school next door.  Like the one in Durham I went to a couple of years ago, this one appeared predominantly African-American, judging from the guys who hung out outside it at lunch time, as I had seen before on other occasions when I had ducked in for jerk chicken or fish in gravy.

But it is cheap, only $5 a cut, so I decided to give it a shot. I went in, paid my fiver, and was assigned to, shockingly, the only other white person in there, a skinny white guy with longish hair pulled back tight in what looked like a hairnet but wasn't. Low melanin count notwithstainding, he was very African-American in his diction. As he cut my hair diligently and with great attention, we talked, as one often does. Turned out he had seen tours of duty in in Iraq and Afghanistan, and had another part-time job over at Syngenta.

The place had great music and a great vibe, Marvin Gaye and the like, and I watched all the other guys (it was almost all guys) working with clippers, being very attentive to detail as they cut people's hair. There was much more attention to detail then to speed.

I had to wonder if I potentially messed with the groove of the place by being a rare white business guy going in there.  There's only one real way to tell:  keep going back. On day 2 he seems to have given me a fine cut, a little bit shorter off the top than the country guy I usually go to, but that's good.  I had been meaning to see what it looked like if we went shorter up there.

Territory and deterritorialization

I was listening to My Bloody Valentine's collection of EP's from 1988-1991 this morning, the couple of songs that fit into a short drive.  The first song is really good, but then it drops off a little.  I find myself wondering if it was worth the money to buy it, even if it was given to me as an Xmas gift. Then the fourth song comes on, and at first I think "this is a pretty good song," then it occurs to me that, indeed, the song is no more than pretty good, and that I am cutting it some slack because I like the band and, as I said, I don't want to feel like the money or even the time spent listening to it has been wasted.

It occurs to me that a large part of aesthetic judgment is just like this:  we really root for our own stuff, the home team, because it's just so much easier for us and it justifies our own behavior.  So, for instance, all the players on Manchester United or Chelsea seem like big stars because we see them on TV all the time, they are familiar.  It is much more difficult to be objective in evaluating players on minor teams who you don't see all the time.  And we have to like or appreciate what we see, or we must admit to ourselves that we have been wasting our time watching crap.

So much of life is like this.  You have to pull for what you know, for what you do, because that's all you have to go on, and the alternative is to go around beating yourself up continually for doing or buying the wrong thing.

The world needs for people to specialize, to have a well-articulated division of labor, in order to have some efficiencies of scale.  How screwed would I be if Mary and I had to both build and maintain my living structure, raise and prepare all my own food, be 100% responsible for raising my kids and curing them of maladies, etc.

But specialization by its nature creates silos, and to be firm and secure in our ever deeper ensconcement in our own silos, we have to keep digging in.  But the deeper we go, the less oxygen and perspective their is, so we must diversify too.  Or, rather, we must always seek a balance between specialization and generalization, a mix of desk time and interaction with others.

To bring it back to culture, we need particularity and local culture, folk music and landscapes and landmarks and street food and barbeque regional chauvinism and dialect and all that.  We need a sense of place.  But if that was all we had, we would be screwed. We also need a healthy interaction with the big Other.

Finding the right mix is the crux of it.



I am reminded of Deleuze and Guattari and their talk of deterritorialization.  It was always a bad-assed sounding word, though I never really knew what they were talking about, because it was so impossible to read them.

The jungle

As a member or the LFA Board, and the one living closest to the dam, I have been made responsible for overseeing the dam.  Which fits squarely within my qualifications as a rusty scholar of Russian Literature and a financial advisor to a growing host of wooly Chapel Hillians, Brooklynites, and the like.

Soon, we will have an engineer come and examine the dam, which was apparently put there in the 30s as part of a CCC project.  Because it was so far back, and there aren't really great records, we're not really 100% sure how it's constructed.  But we do know it has been faithfully restraining 70-odd acres of water, going as deep as 16 feet, for a long time.

The thing is, this being the south, and it being rather moist, plants like to grow.  And since there are little crannies in the stones and mortar which form the exterior of the dam, plants like to grow there. In particular vines. Rather aggressive ones at that. I'm sure they have a name, I'm just not very good with plant names.

What I have gotten rather decent at, however, is ripping the plants from the face of the dam. It is difficult, however, to kill the bastards.  I took all that crap down sometime last year, maybe September, and I looked at the dam today and the damned things had grown right back up the face of the dam.  So I weed-whacked a little, and got down to the roots as best I could, but I know that the fact of the matter is that they'll be growing right back up the dam, because there's no way I can really get down to the roots, which are hidden down beneath a bunch of rip-rap.  Together with, if I am to believe the young fisherman with rather ornate moustaches who was there today, at least one copperhead.

It really is a freaking jungle out there, in short.  Plants just grow. And we have to cut them back, and then do something with the stuff we cut off.  It's a never-ending process, a no-win situation.  Which is why I sometimes think it would be better to get out of this land-owning business.

Driving culture

Driving around the Pacific northwest, a couple of things jumped out at me

1. In Washington state, people pretty scrupulously adhere to the posted speed limit.  Even in a 70 mph zone, very very few people were exceeding 71 or 72, and many were going 65 or so.  This is very strange coming from the east.  Compare, for example, the 70 zone on I-85 between South Hill and Petersburg, VA, where, despite signs warning that speeds are being monitored by airplane, people routinely are pushing 83-84 and up.  I myself trend towards 77-78 through there.
2. When you cross the border into British Columbia, all of a sudden people start testing the limits again.  Even though it's Canada (or, as I like to call it now and again, Canadia), where people are reputed to be so law-abiding.

Part of me wants to say this has to do with an urban/rural divide, because once you cross into Canada, you transition from a pretty rural to a very urban zone, as 95-98% of the population of BC lives south of the mountains just north of Vancouver.  And urbanites push the envelope. But that doesn't explain the limit acceptance of the drivers in the Seattle region, so very law-abiding.

The speculative me wants to attribute this to Turner thesis* driven behavior.  In the east, we are always conscious of the loss of the Frontier, and we buck against its absence, as if to demonstrate our desire for the elemental freedom forever lost to us.  In the West, where they have lived beyond the bounds of the Frontier ever since they got there, and where wide-open spaces still seem, at least, to abound, there is less of a need to demonstrate freedom.

In any case, I'm off to the coal mine.

Rental Car

I had an opportunity to get a luxury rental car from Sixt, a company I had never heard of, for this trip, for the same price as everybody else was charging for your domestic 4-doors.  I figured, what the hell.

But when I got to the pick-up desk at the Seattle airport, all they had was a Mercedes SUV, an ML-350. This thing was a tank, and it drove like one of those Oldsmobiles from the 80s, which is to say, like a boat. It had a big engine.  It was "swag," as Graham has taken to saying, but I was not very comfortable driving it, physically, or socially.

And then on the second day, while we were still in Seattle, I started to get a message on the dash saying it was low on coolant.  "Check the owner's manual," it advised.  Not really my plan for vacation.  So the day we were to leave Seattle, I called up the rental company, and they said "just bring it back and get something else," which is the plan I had decided made sense too.

So I went back out to the airport, and I saw that they had a BMW 5-series, a Camry, and maybe a Volvo wagon too.  And when I got to the counter to trade in the paperwork, I said, "just put me in a Camry," and then I paused, before saying "or I could take the BWM 530 or the Volvo." But it was too late.  She had jumped on opportunity to give me the Camry.

I think it was the right thing.  The controls are just like my Prius, it gets good mileage and, now that I am out here in the hills, I see very few fancy cars.  Lots of Subarus, Hondas, Toyotas, and, yes, trucks.   It feels like a place where people aren't expressing themselves through cars, which is nice.

Chapel Hill used to be a little more like that.  Now I see more Porsches and even more exotic Italian things.  I am at home in this Camry.

Loose grip

I did 90% of the planning for this vacation, all of the logistics (where to overall, flights, lodging, car, etc.). Natalie did the rest of it, looking into what we should do when we were in the places we were going to.

So my goal for this trip was to try to maintain a loose grip, to just drive the car and help get us from place to place, from attraction to attraction, and otherwise just enjoy the ride.  I am discovering, however, that that is more easily said than done, because I have something of a control tendency.

Yesterday, for example, while driving through the North Cascades on Route 20 (gorgeous, do it!), we had to figure out where to stop to hike.  Although Mary and Natalie had been doing the reading about where to hike, they weren't sufficiently decisive for my tastes, and I got crabby and pissy.  Our car was a smorgasbord of rainjackets we haven't needed, bottles of water, bags of quickly browning bananas and other snacks, and maps of various granularities.  And I was pressing for the right map, and getting a little short with my ladies. Graham, of course, just wanted to get to the hotel so he could read books and play on his iPod.

Then this morning, I woke up before Mary, and took on the epic quest of figuring out how to get us breakfast without spending $50, while making use of the fact that we have a cabin (here in Winthrop, WA) with a kitchen and a dining room table, so we can skip restaurants for all three meals today.  I did figure this out, but not without heading into town and getting a little bit bossy and crabby with various baristas (one of them was out of breakfast sandwiches, in the other, another didn't know what kind of bread the pre-wrapped $4.75 sandwiches were on).  All told, I kind of acted as a poor ambassador for the East Coast. Though I did speak Russian with a Ukrainian barista, and even apologized for having to use Russian rather than Ukrainian, so I get a gold star for that.

Now, I am sitting on my deck looking out over the Methow River, enjoying the cool morning breeze, wondering what these itsy-bitsy birds are diving for.  Must be insects of some sort.

Sunny Seattle

The latter day-Griswolds, us true ones, not to be confused with the ones in the new remake of Vacation, thus find ourselves out in Seattle, where, despite its reputation for gloom and rain, it has been admirably sunny.  And we have been playing our roles of good tourists in a perfectly dutiful manner, hustling and bustling to all of the greatest attractions.  Thus far, the best has been the harbor tour, not so much because the boat ride was special, but because the guy who was giving us the play by play on the intercom was exceptionally well informed and enthusiastic.  We learned a lot about orcas and containers, and indeed the regional economy.  Graham, for his part, enjoyed a bag of Lays Potato Chips.  Which hit the spot.

We then saw some otters and octopi in the Aquarium, before lunching and sprinting to the Space Needle via the monorail, before Graham and I made our way back to the hotel for some iced coffee and cold chilling.. Natalie is very happy to make all the right photo ops, while Graham is happy to pass on many of them.

But I will tell you that, after reading a good hundred pages on the flights out here, my heart is with Lata Mehra and her extended family as she thinks through the epic choice between Kabir Durrani and Haresh Khanna, though perhaps even Amit Chatterji will reemerge as a contender for her hand.  I remember finishing A Suitable Boy 20 years ago and thinking how perfect it was, and wishing for the sequel (which has still not come) immediately.  The resolution was emotionally right, but pointing towards an intriguing future.  I cannot recall who wins Lata's hand eventually, I only know it is right, and she has a number of good options.  Which is a fine way to be.

Redemption

So there I was, plowing through A Suitable Boy, actively angry at Vikram Seth for making me read 30-40 pages about the festivities at Pul Mela (historically, it was actually called Kumbh Mela), when all of a sudden there is a dramatic event, wherein the child and math prodigy Bhaskar is separated from his mother Veena during a crushing crowd event.  And all of a sudden I couldn't put the novel down, I had to see what had happened to Bhaskar.  Would he be OK?

And then it turns out that Seth will use this event to surmount one of the great gulfs in the novel, between... well, I really shouldn't say.  I am back to believing that, challenging though this book may be, it is worth it, it is magical, if not each and every one of its 1474 pages, then a good chunk of them, and as a whole.

I was reading it outside of Graham's martial arts studio when these dramatic plot turns started turning, and as I realized what was happening, I started crying.  Not quite bawling, mind you, but yes, overcome with emotion, and like any good male I tried to cover it up using hat, sunglasses, walking out to the car (where I discovered that someone had just dumped a huge amount of trash out of their car in a most inconsiderate manner), but tears were flowing.  Thankfully, nobody was around to notice, so no one need ever know about it.

Material goals

One constant of the sales and inspirational stuff I have been reading and listening to of late is the importance of setting goals, so as to provide oneself with impetus to improve ones skills and sell more.  Most of my goals are non-material, which is easy enough for me because we already have a pretty nice house, etc.  Our basics are in good shape.

But one thing that rings true from this material, especially Brian Tracy's Psychology of Selling, which is a pretty good 6-CD set, is that we have a mental image of how much money we are worth and that we earn pretty much in keeping with that, and that this mental image is a self-limiting concept. So, for example, I am mentally geared towards thinking of myself as earning what I used to earn as a management consultant, and my baseline goal is to get back in that ballpark.

But why don't I want to earn more than that?  Why don't I believe that I could and should?

Part of it certainly derives from coming from a place that did not really prize money first and foremost.  In a university town, we prioritize education and travel first and foremost, and that's what I'm about.

But I think another part of it derives from beating myself up for not having embarked on a path of earning and saving earlier in life.  I feel no little shame and (vis-a-vis my kids, and especially Natalie, on whom we spend less than others on things like traveling to other parts of the world) guilt about it.

And partly this comes from growing up Christian, Scotch-Irish (thrifty), and left-leaning, but also from growing up in an alcoholic household in which it was communicated to me that, whatever I did was fundamentally insufficient to warrant consistent love and attention.  I'm talking about dad here, not mom, to be clear.

In fact, a line of thinking within the 12-step world says that self-abnegation is in fact a direct reflection of low self-esteem. We (I) don't want more nice things because I don't believe at deserve them.

Anyway, the fact of the matter is I have a lot of baggage around earning and spending on myself, but a deep-seated belief in saving and aggregating.  So I gotta work on it.  There is no good reason, for example, why I shouldn't want to get a newer car to replace the 2001 Volvo?  Or a more comfortable couch to replace the futon here in the study that Mary got before she went to graduate school in 1989? Nobody ever sleeps or sits on it, hardly. I just put my briefcase down on it. I could nap and read there, in my ample spare time.

Gotta hop.

Beam me up

Somehow, we had never gotten to this, but I have convinced Graham to watch Star Trek with me, and so we have started at the beginning, in 1966.  I had never done this, I have always watched the show randomly, just when it has happened across my screen, but I must confess that I am digging it.

From the very first episodes there is an ethical complexity and richness to the plots.  Civilizations that have undergone catastrophes, races that are dying out, and must use shape-shifting powers to trick humans and lure them to their fates.  Admittedly, as Graham pointed out, episode 1 -- the pilot, in which only Spock is there from what would become the classic cast -- and episode 2, in which the gang is for the first time all there, were pretty much the same thing.  But that's OK.

I did, however have to assure Graham that there would be greater plot variety as the show rolls forward, and that damned well better be the case.  Because I'm enjoying this, and it promises to be some major and quality bonding between the two of us.  Much better than Ultimate Spiderman and Hulk and the Agents of S.M.A.S.H., each of which subsisted on an all-too-steady diet of wisecrackery and random smashing.

A quiet afternoon at home

Getting ready for the Champions League final shortly, though I've resisted the temptation to turn it into a social event by calling around to see who's watching it where.  I was just lying on the couch with Graham, quietly plowing my way towards the halfway mark of A Suitable Boy, when I remembered that I have been somewhat remiss in my blogging.  And though I really have nothing specific to say, it is only by saying a little something that I can preserve an appropriate input/output ratio.

Natalie turns 15 tomorrow, and Mary and I will have been married 18 years, a fact which we all too often forget as we celebrate Natalie's birthday.  What's more, Leslie will be 51, up there in the Beantown region.

Meanwhile, a wide range of tasks are piling up around me in various inboxes, out in the yard, and here in the house.  Sigh.  It is never-ending, and therefore I struggle with the wisdom of even beginning.

And completely by accident, I just turned my head and watched an awesome video of people doing flips and jumping and whatnot on Facebook.  Whoops.  Perhaps I am slipping.

Game time.

Being Loud at Farrington

It was an amazing evening yesterday at the Barn at Farrington, as the Red Clay Ramblers with special guests Don Dixon and Tift Merritt played a great show, with Eric Montross MCing and auctioning off some very cool experiences.  There was much magic in the air, but for my money the best was Tift telling the story of how, some years before when she was a busperson at the restaurant at Farrington, she had the opportunity to clear the dishes from the table of Eric Montross and his family, and she was utterly starstruck, and marveled at the size of his hand relative to her own rather petite one.

It was a beautiful moment, with her on stage as the star of the show, for that moment at least, and him out there in the audience, and at the end of the show he came out and gave her a high five to compare their two hands.  I was into it.

Crazy woman in a bar

So Niklaus and I were up at the Be Loud! Sophie First Monday at the Tiger Room at the Station (where most of you were sorely missed, and which was the best ever).  There we were, sitting at the bar, talking about our kids and the other things discussed by homo suburbanus, when this blonde sits down at the bar near us.  Not altogether unattractive. Yet.  As we shall see.

So she leans over to us and says:  "I'm going to go out on a limb here, are you guys gay?"  And we were like, um, er, well, no not exactly.  And she clarifies:  "It was just because of the checked shirts and khakis and hair product."  And indeed Niklaus had recently gotten his wig tightened at Syd's and it looked good.  So we weren't offended or anything.  Yet.

Anyway, she starts blathering on about how she had met some woman and thought she was cool but then she found out she was in fact rather reactionary.  And she just goes on and on.  Really pretty annoying, honestly.

A few minutes later she asks Niklaus how old he is, and he says 50, because he will be in October, and you might as well round up.  And she doesn't believe it, and she says how much younger he looks than Lucy, whom we had pointed out earlier as his wife.  So now she's starting to veer into offensive territory, insulting Lucy.  Then she says how 50 is so hard to imagine, and I look her over and go "Well of course, given that you've got 18 years before you turn 50." (being polite, guessing way young on her age) To which she allows that she is in fact 40, and I hinted that I was just guessing low to be polite because I was raised well.

Then she starts railing on how people in the South, as well as the MidWest, have these fake manners that drive her crazy, her being from California and all ("this place was just a blip on the map to me before I moved here.").  So I say "Would you prefer that I be direct and frank with you?" "Yes", she says.  So I just say "Well, before you got here, we were talking," and then go back to talking to Niklaus, shutting her out.

She was, in short, and this is a term we don't really use that much for women, but perhaps we should, an asshole.  It reminds me of the danger of going into bars, where you are fair game for sad, lonely people with mixed drinks.

The effects

(this is a refresh of an old post, from 2015 or so) 

So, at my boss's direction, and I may have written about this before, I don't feel like checking, I have been listening to sales training CDs and tapes (in the Volvo, where we still have a very nice cassette player, thank you) in the car.  People like Brian Tracy and Zig Ziglar, each of whom are very interesting figures, with considerable wisdom for me to soak in, if only I let it.  Which I am working at. I have therefore not been listening to that much music in the car, as I have in effect been working as I drive, as best I can.

So, after refreshing the music CDs in the car, as I chronicled yesterday, I've been listening to some tunes. Yesterday I listened to the Costello, and there were some good songs on there.  This morning, on the way to a meeting, I threw Stephen Merritt's Obscurities in the player.  I bought this CD when the Magnetic Fields came to the Cradle a couple of years ago.

I have a mixed relationship with Merritt.  On the one hand, he is one of the greatest songwriters of his generation, and incredible librettist, for lack of a better word, a writer of the words of songs.  On the other, he can be a little arch, sometimes unsufferably. But today, with my spirit somewhat undernourished with song, and with me being a little bit tired from generally working pretty damned hard at getting my practice up and running and dadding and husbanding and whatnot, this song ("Plant White Roses") hit me hard.  I literally started crying while driving. It happens sometime.

It is, in so many ways, the perfect little love song, and I like this version of it.  Clean and pure.

I wrote once about reading A Suitable Boy and how good Vikram Seth is at -- in the romance of Lata and Kabir -- capturing the intensity of young love, and how the sensation of young love is what we all (meaning me) yearn for at times.  This song, or at least this version of it, did it again.  Whoops.  The first verse is perfect.

Fresh tunes

I have a lot of driving to do today, which means some quality time with the car stereo, as well as the kids. I took a little time to refresh the CDs in my little CD holder thingie -- and yes, I am old enough that I still buy physical CDs, just like I like physical books.  I feel refreshed.  Digging through the stacks of discs I found all these things that I kind of remember buying, but kind of don't.  Like Elvis Costello's All This Useless Beauty.  I'm sure I didn't pay retail for it, that's all I'm sure of.  Have I ever actually listened to it?

I will soon find out.  If I remember to put it in the CD player, that is.  In any case, it's a good feeling to have different possibilities.  We tend to carry around excess bluegrass out of deference to Mary's tastes, which is fine, but a little limiting at times.

Plowing forward

At the library yesterday I made myself sit with A Suitable Boy and push forward.  I had been in a rut of reading only 3-5 pages at night before falling to sleep, which is really not a winning strategy with a 1500-page book.

I will confess that I have been challenged by the relatively late in the novel introduction of the Chatterji family. As if it weren't sufficiently challenging to keep straight all the Kapoors, Mehras, and Khans, and then other pivotal figures like Kabir Durrani, here's a whole nuther brood I have to wrap my skull around.

It brings to mind the concept of the Dunbar number, the idea that on average people can only have reasonably deep social relations with 150 others.  I think that's about right, but how much more mind-bending is it then to have to try to keep track of another 30 to 40 fiction.al characters and roughly hold them in memory.

The functional limit on "knowing" is one of the things that drives us to abstract, generalize, and think in categories:  girls, boys, old people, people in golf clothes, liberals, Catholics, etc. To get by in the world, you have to do this. You cannot move through the world on a day-to-day basis and not utilize some abstraction.

And of course, this makes it all too easy to fall into prejudicial behavior.  Black people do this, hispanics do that, etc. Good novels, movies, and other art invite us to get to know individuals and remind us that, behind the generalizations we make, there are individuals.

Man, this post is degenerating into a little preachiness.  Oh well, must go to the store and put the laundry in the dryer.  This is what holidays are made of.

Philomena

After being together, and being kind of tightwad homebodies, for 20-odd years, Mary and I have watched so many movies, that we have grown a little tired of them. Mary, in particular, rarely cares whether we watch anything at all on a weekend night.  As I'm sure I have blogged before, we long ago fell into the practice of watching half of a movie on Friday night and if -- if and only if -- we found it compelling, watching the rest of it on Saturday night.

Often we get discs from Netflix and let them linger in the Almirah drawer below the TV for months. Such was the case with the 2013 Stephen Frears film Philomena, which Mary had put on our list because it had won some prizes.

But this was a very very good film, and it restored my faith in directors, and made me want to start digging around and looking for good filmic stories again. It tells the story -- based on actual events -- of an Irish flack/journalist type who gets fired from a pretty high level government job and is down on himself. He gets paired up with an older woman, in this case Dame Judy Dench, who had had a child out of wedlock when she was young, and had done so within the auspices of an evil nunnery, who gave the kid away, as per their business model. They team up to find out what happened to the kid, and in the process find themselves, blah blah blah.  Sounds corny, but it is masterfully done.

We watched the whole thing. We laughed, we cried.

Rent it.

Un Buen Carnicero

Saw this documentary about Tolo, a butcher at Cliff's Meat Market, at the Southern Documentary Fund event in Durham last Sunday.  It's a good video, worth the 15 minutes or so it takes to watch it. Or at least half of it.

What's interesting is that, though it's "about" Tolo, the theme that jumped out at me was that Tolo and Cliff are basically just embodiments of a Platonic ideal of the butcher -- or anyone in customer service, for that matter.  Which isn't surprising, since Tolo was trained by and works for Cliff.

On the one hand, it's nice to see a cross-section of Carrboro's legacy African-American and newer hispanic populations.  On the other, there are almost no hipster white people in this doc, which seems a little out of keeping with the reality of Carrboro today.  It is a sentimental casting of a "real" or "authentic" Carrboro which does, as we see, still exist.  But it's not all there is, not by a long shot.

Cambria Suites, Morrisville, 6:43 pm

So I went to an event co-sponsored by the local MIT Alumni Club and The Indus Entrepreneurs, which, as you might imagine, is an organization of Indian expats who support entrepreneurialism.  I was surprised, when I got there at around 6:15, that everybody was already getting dinner.  I was expecting coctails and milling about for an hour or so, which is traditional at this kind of thing.  That's how you get to meet a bunch of people.

But I nonetheless bellied up to the buffet and got myself some chicken breast, really delicious and cheesy noodles -- like mac and cheese from a box on steroids -- plus salad and a pecan chocolate tarte thingie.  Not bad all told.

I found myself seated next to the guy in charge of the Google Fiber rollout to the Triangle.  Except for those of us who were there to mill about and prospect, he was the guy everybody was there to see. And he was a cool guy. From Ann Arbor, moving to Chapel Hill.

So a little bit later he gets up in front of the room and starts presenting, talking about the experience of the pilot Google Fiber rollout in Kansas City and how much energy that spawned.  Very cool. Steve Rao of Morrisville asked some intelligent questions. Then the open Q&A starts. And it goes like this:

• "Is there a special package for small businesses?"  "Yes"
• "Is there a special package for non-profits" "No, use the small business package"
• "When can we expect Google Fiber to come to my house" "I don't know.  It depends upon permitting in specific towns and how long it takes to do the physical rollout. Impossible to predict."
• "Is there a special package for a company like mine, an IT services company that co-locates within a data center."  "No, Google is not a wholesaler."
• "No but seriously, when can we expect Google Fiber to come to our houses" "I already told you I don't know"
• "But really.  2 years?  5 years?" "I don't know"

It kind of got old.  It would have been better to have more time to mill and learn about the other people in the room instead of having him answer the same stupid questions over and over again.

Long weekend

Busy busy.  Driving hither and yon.  Talking to people.  Eating a lot.

Ended the soccer season with a 2-0 loss, but concluded the season with only the most trivial of injuries, which must be considered a victory.  Looking forward to the fall with gusto.

Inflammation

Played tennis with Adam Thursday, then soccer yesterday, and now my knee is swollen and sore. Today I took Graham out to throw the frisbee a little and found myself pretty immobile, unnable to chase the damned disc.

This should not come as a shock to me, as I am several weeks past 49, closing in on (gasp) 50.  But it was, in fact, rather disconcerting to me to be constrained in my ability to get around.  I found myself viewing it as rather portentious.

Fact is, however, that I am much less immobile than I was, say, 5 years and change ago, when I yoinked my butt muscle while waterskiing after getting shitty advice from Niklaus on technique. That took a while to heal, and I wasn't 100% certain that it would.  I seem to recall being somewhat philosophical about that incident.

The difference is, I think, that my next birthday is in fact that big 5-0, and that I am therefore fearful about and in denial of aging.

Baltimore and the banality of evil

The NYTimes ran a story today on the cops who were involved in Freddy Gray's death in Baltimore. Basically the story is that they were normal people:  the black woman cop was a particularly good egg, a church-going model citizen who was from Tnd lived in Baltimore, unlike 65% of Baltimore cops (normal -- cops get paid lower-middle to middle-class salaries and typically don't want to live in a ghetto and/or can't afford to live in expensive pockets of infill/reurbanization). One of the white cops had some mental health issues and had had his weapons confiscated three years previously -- which is pretty normal too, from a number of perspectives.  Per NAMI, the National Association on Mental Illness, 6.7% of the population lives with major depression, 18% lives with anxiety disorders.  The guy driving the van was a passive guy, hadn't made great career progression, which is pretty normal too, not everybody is gonna make captain.

These cops worked within a dysfunctional police department in a city with a challenged political culture.  Normal.  There was institutional racism.  Normal.

I'm deviating from the point I set out to make.  These were regular people who fucked up in the course of doing their jobs, and a kid died.  There may have been malice (I admit I haven't been following the details too closely) Now there are heavy charges filed against them.

I was reminded first of Marx's old phrase from Das Capital:  "Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es", "They know not what they are doing, and yet they are doing it."  Marx used this phrase to characterize commodity fetishism, the way in which the social relationships between people were made material items within the economic system, so that the original relationships (the way in which commodities are produced) are forgotten.

Slavoj Zhizhek came along 140 years later and used the phrase to characterize ideology as such. Ideology, per Zhizhek, is the process of sedimenting relationships into the everyday so that their origin is forgotten).

And so, back to Baltimore, normal cops, some exemplary, some simply human, all-too human. Between them, they cost a kid his life.

But what about me, sitting here comfortably in my leafy abode?  Where do I fit into this?  I think a lot about soccer. I love the game. It was a game I could compete in when I was young, being too skinny to play football or basketball when very young.  We had a great team.  We won the state championship.  We were all white.

Fast forward 30 years and soccer is the great warrior sport of suburbia, dominated by white, affluent kids who can pay for expensive coaches from a young age.  Yeah, the hispanic population does pretty well too, but you don't see that many black faces.

When in school I had some black teammates in track and field, and lord knows I tried to be a good basketball player, never with much success, but that's where I got to know some other black guys at the most basic of levels.  But mostly I lived in a segregated world.

And now, it's even worse.  I see almost no black people in my work, except when I go to lunch, where I might be served by some at Jimmy John's.  Excellent guys, both the guy who works the register and the older guy who works the sandwich line.

Anyway, I ramble, and I must stop.  My point is this:  it is a shame that good people were involved in Freddy Gray's death, but we all are.  The officers getting charged are in a sense serving to exculpate us, to ascend the cross to atone for our sins.

Good meeting

Caught the second half of an AA meeting near my office today.  A woman shared about her deep gratitude for her job, which was at a family casual kind of restaurant, which was hard for her to get. She had a few felonies, it seemed.  She was in her 50s, and lived with her mom, who has dementia. But she had a number of years of sobriety, which had been inconceivable to her before she got started, in prison.

This is why I go to meetings.  This was true, deep, and earnest gratitude, of the sort one so rarely hears outside of "the rooms."  There's nothing like it.

In progress

Graham appears to have lost the key to the Prius, and he swears it's somewhere in the mud room.  So I have been going through the mud room looking for it.

I don't know when the whole mud room concept bubbled up into consciousness and became a thing that we all must have, but it did happen, and we have one.*  It is, to pull back one of the greatest hit words of era of literary theory, very much a liminal space -- that is, a threshold -- designed for taking things off, and putting them down, before continuing on.  Conceptually, it's first and foremost about getting things off while heading into the house.

In our case, it has evolved or devolved, depending on how you view it, into the place where things slow down before heading out of the house.  For example, paper and plastic bags headed either to the thrift store or to the grocery store to be recycled. And other stuff, similarly headed out for its next, new life.

It is very easy for me to get judgmental about this kind of thing.  In my mind, I am very much the get things done, drive things through to completion kind of guy.  One of the things that sometimes drives me crazy about other people (and I won't name names here) is their tendency to let things sit and not finish them up.

Excavating the mud room looking for the Prius key is kind of driving home the point that I am deluding myself.  Things I have found that are on my plate include:

1. A bag of tennis balls that came with the hamper I bought at least 7 years ago so I could work on my tennis serve.  I never have.  The balls suck.  I should throw them away.
2. An old headset that went with some cell phone. It sucks.  I did just throw it away.
3. A biker-type bag for Tata Consulting Services that I picked up at some conference.  It is ugly, and I have never used it. Should go to thrift store.
4. A bookmark from a used book store in Durham which was new within the last year or two.  I stuck it in a book.
5. A bike bottle holder, which I undoubtedly bought to put on some bike.  I put it in the cubbard above the washing machine

The list goes on and on.  Similarly, there is a pile of old New Yorkers dating back well into 2014, perhaps 2013, that have been sitting on top of my dresser waiting for me to go through them to see if there's anything worth reading.  I sorted about half of them last night, then it was time for me to help with dinner.

In any case, the point here is that I too am always behind in everything, that there are always too many little projects, that I need to really let go and focus on the most important stuff.  Right now that includes eating lunch with Graham, and then getting outside to enjoy the beautiful spring day.

Soon, it will be hot.

*I am shocked that the mud room did not make it onto the list of "Stuff White People Like." It belongs there, I think.

A wee vacuum

Graham is out at Sam's birthday party.  Soon they will be headed off to see the Ultron movie, having enjoyed their pizza.

Which is odd for me.  Normally Graham and I would be getting ready to settle into the couch to watch an episode of an animated superhero series ourselves.  Right now, we're watching Hulk and the Agents of S.M.A.S.H, a pretty stupid show featuring, as you might guess, a lot of smashing by Hulk and his crew of other Hulks (Red Hulk, She-Hulk, SCAAR, and Blue Hulk).  It's a nice time of evening.  I'm able to look out across the lake as Graham snuggles into me and the gamma-irradiated crew does battle with a host of evildoers.

At least it gives me a few minutes to blog.  Not that, strictly speaking, I am all that short on time to do so, it's more like energy and impetus.  All too much of my days these days are spent doing things which would once have seemed almost a bit far-fetched:  cold-calling, warm-calling, following up, lunch, coffee.  I haven't been listening to music or NPR in the car, I've been listening to sales training and other "inspirational" CDs, which I have been told is what salespeople do.  And I, right now, am developing sales discipline.

Fact is, there is much wisdom in what I am consuming these days, as I know I've mentioned before. It is just quite distant from what I once considered wisdom, so that it's difficult to say what's so wise about it.  Except for the fact that it counsels belief in oneself, courage, and persistence.  And rest.

Taylor Swift and show tunes

Just drove Natalie and some friends home from an ultimate frisbee game.  We plugged Natalie's phone into the car stereo, and then drove along singing along with show tunes, Taylor Swift and god knows what else.  Light years away from work.  Need more of this.