Home envy

Natalie and I went out for driving practice on Sunday in Greenwood, a neighborhood my mom had suggested owing to its high median age and complete lack of through traffic. It was the second time we had practiced there, and it was a great idea, even if we forgot to grab the "Student Driver" magnet we had ordered from some very large online emporium of all kinds of goods, the name of which momentarily escapes me...

At any rate, we drove around slowly -- never exceeding 22 miles per hour -- for an hour, and it was just the kind of quality time I have come to cherish with Natalie. Quiet time to talk about nothing and everything.

It did give me time to look at the houses back there, and I confess to envying some of them. Not the biggest and swankiest, mind you, but some of the older ones, some with circular drives and redolent of gentrydom. I found myself wondering why it was I wasn't friends with many people in houses like that. Partially because I'm not that old -- and I think these are likely homes that have had long-time owners -- and partially because I haven't expressly sought to hang out with the affluent. Building relationships with the moneyed was never a clear goal for me, though at this juncture, now that I am in the business of helping people with their finances, it seems that it might have been wise for it to have been. Whatevs.

At any rate, I gaze upon these homes and have no doubt ridiculously idealized fantasies about the tranquil lives of the people who live in them. I know intellectually that this is absurd, yet I slip and slide into it anyway. It's particularly silly given that our house is itself quite nice, and our life looks quite tranquil, and by most objective measures is. Oh well. Back to work.

Heard while on a run

At the tail end of my run in Duke Forest yesterday, after I had crossed the weir or low bridge or whatever you call it, where I had to remove my shoes and wade through the rather chilly water, I was coming up the big hill headed back towards Whitfield, when off to my right I heard the most profound chorus of birds chirping and screeching.  Off to the left, nothing. I stopped and listened, trying to figure out what was up, but it exceeded my pay grade.  For a few moments it died back, then they were at it again, making a world of noise about something.

I was tempted to set off through the woods in the direction of the assembled avians, but thought better of it, fearing something out of Hitchcock. I kept going. After all, I had told Graham we were headed to Flyleaf to pick up some books, and I needed to keep my word, lest he do nothing but lay on his bed all afternoon and read.

Not that that's all bad.

Father figures

I went to the doctor this week for my annual check-up, and when I told him that I was turning 50 he came over and drew a little declining graph for me and said: "This is what happens when we age, we cruise along on our youth for a while, but then when we turn 50 things start to break down pretty quickly." Then he drew another line, extending the period of decline further out and continued "But there are ways we can manage this process, with regular exercise, good diet, cherishing and maintaining relationships with our spouses, children, and friends..." Then he recommended a book about aging.

You would think that it would be a bummer to get this lecture, but the fact is, I was so happy to receive this wisdom, because he was cheerful, upbeat, direct, earnest and -- and this is the most important thing -- he was an older male, with grey hair, even more than me.  I have been seeing him for years, and even though I'm not sure he remembers me that well, I remember him, because I so thirst for authoritative father figures.

First Mary's dad -- whom I adored  -- died in 2009, then my dad, with whom I had a very complicated relationship, and he could never offer me this kind of guidance so directly. Today after my Al Anon meeting I went out for coffee with some other guys, including a guy who's an Episcopal priest and who could be my sponsor. I haven't had a sponsor for a few months, I've never had the perfect one. I found myself evaluating him -- could he be the guy who could be my conversational security blanket?

Anyway, I have to recognize that this is all very silly, because of course no one has all the answers, and I do have a pretty solid support network in my mom, my sister, Mary, and all my excellent friends. But the myth of some grey-haired guy who can offer me easy answers lurks there viscerally, barely subcutaneous, waiting to erupt at the slightest provocation.

Sometimes. But now it is time to take Graham to martial arts. And then we will listen to Click and Clack on the drive back home. Graham is fond in particular of the sign off at the very end, when they say something like:  "And now, even though Robert Siegel reaches for his revolver every time he hears us say it, this is NPR."

My Struggle, Volume 1

I have alluded to the fact that I was taking up Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle, and now I have done so. I see what all the hype was about.

The first volume is quite something. It is all about his father, and his father's death, and his father's alcoholism, and growing up listening to alt rock and trying to get girls' attention. Obviously, it was close to home.

It is difficult to say what it is about Knausgaard, except to say that it is just all there on the page, he holds nothing back, he is intensely present and open. Probably the most compelling part of it was when he and his brother labor intensively to clean up the wreckage into which his father and his grandmother had let her home sink as he drank himself to death, and she, it turns out, helped him. Knausgaard is unflinching in discussing, for instance, how his grandmother routinely pees while sitting in a chair in the kitchen or living room.

Again, it's hard to describe, without actually working hard at it, and lord knows it is altogether too late for that. Just read it.

Inspiration

Natalie today found out that she had not gotten in to Duke TIP this summer, she's on a wait list. It's just because there's so much demand, we had gotten the application in on time, she just wasn't randomly selected to get into one of her chosen courses.

This saddens her, because she totally loves TIP and has made many besties there over the last couple of years. And yet, she bore it all with characteristic aplomb and didn't let it get her down. She just asked if she could go to debate camp instead if she doesn't get in off the wait list.

How she keeps a good attitude in spite of disappointment never ceases to marvel and inspire me. Me, Mr. Gloom and Doom, who awakes often at 4:30 in the morning obsessing about this or that, unable to get back to sleep. It fills me with immense pride to see her press forward, seemingly in possession of a somatic kind of gratitude that I must continually and laboriously cultivate.

Childhood as war, and the lamentable and self-perpetuating logic of self-segregation

An African-American guy who was a schoolmate a couple of years younger than me from elementary school through high school died recently. I don't know what the proximate cause of death was, though I know he had had a stroke a couple of years before and never quite recovered.

I never really knew the guy all through school, though after the advent of Facebook I saw him post a lot there and came to realize that he was a very special soul with a keen intellect. So I got his number and went and had lunch with him, and we had a phenomenal conversation about many things we shared, from substance abuse issues to a kid with autism to...  Not long before he died, I took him to the funeral of another mutual friend, and we had another fine conversation. He was a special guy, though I think most people are if you are able to find time to talk with them,

The fact is, I've never really known that many black guys well. Part of it is because, and I have written about this before, childhood was a bit like war for me. I was skinny, with buck teeth, a geek, I didn't feel like I fit in. Then mom got me some braces and protected me from being skipped forward a grade, and puberty treated me well athletically, so that I was able to become a contributor to some high-powered sports teams, and briefly even a star on the track team, and I had some very pretty girlfriends. All this was very good for my ego, but it didn't fill all the holes.

I was never able to be much of a player at any of the mainstream sports, especially basketball, yearn and strive though I might (and I did). Aside from having some teammates on 4x400 relays in club track and field, the basketball court was the only place I ever spent much time with black guys.

For whatever reason, they didn't get placed into the advanced academic courses where I found myself: honors and AP this and that. Even in the era of integration, I was effectively in an almost entirely segregated school context. And whatever social, romantic and athletic success I might have had, the classroom was my home court. That was where I proved myself and fought to dominate. I don't think I was ever nasty about it, it was just home court where I fought off the demons of insufficiency that stormed inside me.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is this: childhood and adolescence were always proving grounds for me, and it was honestly difficult to make the time to know anyone particularly well, outside of the people I had known forever. Boys don't have deep conversations with one another, even when smoking pot and thinking that they are. We mostly jousted and jockeyed for position, formed cliques and bonds, told jokes to make one another laugh, and so on. And the gaps were particularly huge with people from social strata other than our own.

In this sense, I think, social networks are an pretty positive thing, because we get to see our peers let down their hair and share about what they care about. There is a lot of fronting and jockeying on Facebook, to be sure, but a lot of people being real as well. And if you push through the wall of the network and make time to get to know people, there are amazing things there.

But the Dunbar number still applies. It is very hard to get to know more than a certain number of people well within the context of 24/7/365.

In any case, this post has drifted, let me try to bring it back to where it started. My point is this: though as an educated white male in the South I would have objectively appeared to be in a position of strength as a child, I was in fact hounded and driven by insecurities, and thereby pushed into a sort of war mode. I felt myself inferior to black guys on the basketball court, which was a huge proving ground. I wasn't particularly good at talking to anybody. So I probably isolated myself and didn't develop relationships with people at all, and black people in particular. So that now, objectively considered, my life continues to be segregated, certainly more so than I would like for it to be. And this trend has self-reinforcing tendencies unless I try hard to break free of it.

The Hour Between Dog and Wolf

I have slouched in recent months if not years on writing book and movie reviews, which used to be a regular feature here on the blog. Part of it is that we haven't been watching movies as much as television shows.  But I have been reading.

The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: Risk Taking, Gut Feelings, and the Biology of Boom and Bust, by John Coates, is a tour de force, but it is not light reading. He was a trader at Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank before going back to Cambridge to get a PhD in Neuroscience, if there is such a field. He writes about various parts of and influences on our brain and neurological systems: the amygdala, the hypothalamus, testosterone, dopamine, cortisol and a bunch of other stuff that I honestly can't remember, but roughly it's about how our brains and nervous systems process danger and stress and react to it, how we influence those around us in so doing -- and thereby shade into the realm of an epidemiology of fear and stress -- how some individuals do better than others, and how institutions, particularly financial institutions, could reform themselves to help them do a better job handling other people's money.

Obviously, this is a pertinent book here at the beginning of 2016, a stressful time when everyone in the world is trying to figure out what is happening, what will happen next, and what to do about it. I wish I could retain it all and synopsize it neatly for you, but I think the moral to the story is this: there is a profoundly physical component to how we handle stress, including market stress, and that physical component is in turn informed by our habits and lived experience, Over time, we can coach ourselves to be less reactive.

Blech. I should have written this weeks ago, when I finished the book. Instead I started reading another one.

Much obliged

As I mentioned before, I've been listening to a Gretchen Rubin book in my car, to wit Better Than Before. My sister Leslie said the book had been helpful to her in some regards. Of course, as I listen,, part of me is gently seething, because Gretchen and I were in college together and I envy her her incredible success. But mostly I have to admit she's worked her butt off to be as successful as she is, and that she's done good work. It's certainly better than any book I've ever published, and she seems genuinely motivated to help people with her work.

So Gretchen divides the world into four categories of people, as laid out below.

• Upholder—accepts rules, whether from outside or inside. An upholder meets deadlines, follows doctor’s order, keeps a New Year’s resolution. I am an Upholder, 100%.
• Questioner—questions rules and accepts them only if they make sense. They may choose to follow rules, or not, according to their judgment.
• Rebel—flouts rules, from outside or inside. They resist control. Give a rebel a rule, and the rebel will want to do the very opposite thing.
• Obliger—accepts outside rules, but doesn’t like to adopt self-imposed rules.

And she's got a little quiz you can take to see which one you are. In a moment of weakness, I took the quiz, and was somewhat astonished when it told me that I am not a Questioner, nor a Rebel, but an Obliger.  Part of me wanted to go back and retake the quiz, but I know that my retake would be shaded by my resistance to my initial diagnosis.

Now I know these types of instruments are not super-scientific and all that, but still, I was mildly galled. But, as I reflect on it, there is certainly an element of truth to this confusion. Although, on the face of it, going out and getting a PhD in Russian Literature while sprouting all manner of facial hair, spouting some wacky theoretical jive, and partying pretty hearty might appear rebellious, I was in many ways seeking my dad's attention and approval. And since I left that life, I have worked very hard to be a pretty stand-up bourgie guy and consider myself deeply obligated to my family. For example, even as I type I am watching the clock and thinking about the sequence of the evening:  watch Star Trek Next Gen with Graham, make fire, discuss Europe trip, watch Downton Abbey with Mary, get to bed at a reasonable hour so I can get back out there tomorrow and earn money to support all of this and serve my clients well.

I even feel somewhat obliged to blog, because I know I have a small but dedicated readership -- and I love and thank you all -- who might bail on me if I let down on some sort of regularity in posting.

At times I have felt like the Giving Tree, who gives all and has nothing left for himself. But this is a bad dynamic and it encourages me to be pissy with everyone. The fact is, I love the blog, I love Star Trek, I love my family and making fires, etc. But it is perhaps symptomatic that I find it very hard to imagine living without them, because I don't know what my purpose in life would be.

Perchance to dream

For two nights in a row, Graham has been asleep by the time I went in to his room to snuggle with him. Last night it couldn't have been two minutes between his leaving the bathroom from brushing his teeth and me making my way in there and discovering him somewhat comatose.

In so many ways, I think that this is a worthy goal in life in general. To be so tired when going to sleep that you just pass out, and to have adequate trust in the world that you stay asleep blissfully until morning.

Today I've been out shoveling snow, which is great work to achieve the same effect for me. In fact I was just about to rewrite this post, but then I thought to search my blog to see if I had written the same thought before. Of course I had.

Now must eat lunch.

Inspector Gadget

At the library yesterday, I grabbed the copy of Jaron Lanier's You Are Not a Gadget from the hold shelf and then was headed to the nave portion of the building to sit and read while Graham did his digging around for fresh books. On the way there, I ran into someone from the high school, and the conversation quickly moved over to Facebook. She said that she was able to see what I was up to, but was shy about posting herself. I assured her that it was the United States of America, and that no one was obliged to post anything if they didn't want to.

And then I sat down and continued reading the book, which I had started to peruse at David and Carol's in Princeton over Christmas. Lanier's core thesis is that human relations are coming to be defined by the internet and social media, that we are being flattened by the standards that they impose, and that this is an unqualified ill. So, for example, people feeling somehow obliged to post on Facebook and needing to apologize for not doing so. I kept reading, and I come these exhortations:

• Don't post anonymously unless you really might be in danger
• Create a website that expresses something about who you are that won't fit into the template available to you on a social networking site
• Write a blog post that took weeks of reflection before you heard the inner voice that needed to come out

Hmmmm. These are some real and legitimate thoughts. Obviously, this blog is pseudonymized, for a number of reasons. For one, I don't want to sit here sweating the editing. I'd rather just write and let it flow. Just as importantly, I want to feel free to rail and be free with the topics I choose and what I open up about without worrying about colleagues and clients being able to Google me easily.

In some sense, I think that Lanier is overly focused on the impact of social media. Yes it is a little odd that people such as myself can have multiple selves: the blog me, where I dig deep, the Facebook me, where I mostly perform, and the LinkedIn me, where I put my professional face forward. I think that people often had these same layers pre-social media, but they were instantiated differently.

But he is doing some real and worthy thinking in this book and I will keep right on reading it, along with the other stuff I'm reading, right now Knausgaard (loving it) and Kahneman (struggling mightily), while listening to Gretchen Rubin in the car.

Yesterday

Yesterday was an excellent day.  I went to my morning meeting, then took Graham to martial arts. I have been having both him and Natalie sit in the front seat with me, both to help them mentally progress towards adulthood by putting them on nearly equal footing with the driver, but also to get me to think of them as quasi-adults. Also so their perception of the road will be more like that of a driver, in terms of speed of things approaching, etc.

Teaching Natalie to drive is leading me to believe this is prudent and wise. I have been surprised at how difficult it is for her to judge where curbs are, etc. Partially this is because I have never tought anyone to drive before, but I think it may also have to do with her having spent much less time on a bicycle than I did as a kid, and much less time driving go carts, bumper cars, and the like.  Whatever. In so many regards she is so much more educated and mature than I was at her age, I think. It's pretty marvelous, honestly.

While at martial arts, mom called and asked that we come to her house for a little while to spend a little time with her husband David, who's been having some health challenges and is a little isolated around the house. So we did that, and watched a good chunk of Carolina playing State.  Graham doesn't watch enough basketball, relative to the other boys his age around here, so it is definitely good for him to watch and develop a better understanding of the game and the players, so he can take part in that part of teen boy (or, for now, "late tween boy") bonding.

We hurried home before the game was over to beat the traffic, and I went out for a longish run in Duke Forest. A good thing to do, and I did it while a radio interview I had taped back in December aired on WCHL.

After I got home, I took Natalie out for driving practice, then watched Star Trek with Graham. After she had dinner, Natalie deigned to read with me on the couch, and I put a blanked over our feet and we played footsie. Our cat Rascal even sat on our feet briefly, completing the trifecta. To cap it off, Natalie watched a couple of episodes of Parks and Rec with me and Mary while we watched dinner.

So when I add it all up I probably spent a total of three hours with Natalie, and a similar amount of time with Graham. Yes, we were watching TV for part of it, co-consuming narratives, as I like to think of it. But that's OK. There were good discussions in there too. I won't delve into them here, but it was quality time.

The urge to invade

I was at a networking event, a happy hour, out in RTP yesterday evening and I saw a young woman standing alone.  Mid-20s, African-American, hipster, a couple of extra pounds, holding a beer. I knew she wasn't likely to become a client, and that's why I was there, but I couldn't resist the opportunity to say hello. She looked so lonely.

Turned out she was looking for her next gig, had some science credentials and some technical chops, but didn't really have the job she wanted.  We talked for a little while, exchanged cards.  I thought of a neighbor with whom I might connect her and told her to ping me on LinkedIn.

Then I went and sat down to talk to some white guys with grey hair. A more likely audience for a guy like me. Turns out one of those guys was an advisor himself, a colleague of my boy Riguz.  As I was bonding with these members of my tribe, I looked back up at the black youngster. She was sitting alone, slumping, disheartened.

Today I was processing my cards from last night and I looked her up on LinkedIn. Turns out, she went to an Ivy League school. I had to resist the temptation to call her up, ask her to send me her resume, and then forward it to my neighbor.

But where does this intercessory impulse come from? In general, there's really nothing better than hooking someone up with a job. I love doing it like little else. I suspect I saw a little of myself in her. When I was her age, I was much more fucked up, much less functional than her even. I wouldn't even have gone to an event like that, and if I had gone, I would have been pounding the free beer and trying to get up with a young lady or another.

Certainly I hadn't done anything whatsoever to make myself marketable to an employer. That was beneath me.  I so wish somebody had been able to pierce my shell at that age and guide me towards reasonable employment.  Lord knows my mom tried, I just wasn't ready, for a variety of reasons.

So yes, I want to nanny this nice young woman.

When what I really need to be doing is finding clients.

This is what I think of as my Rip Van Winkle instinct. Attentive readers will recall that what got old Rip banished from his household was his tendency to help his neighbors with their household projects, and not do jack around his own house. So he went on top of a mountain and slept for 20 years.

Pulling back the veil

I took Natalie for driving practice yesterday at the UNC Friday Center parking lots, which is an area we are getting to know quite well, between using it for biking practice for Graham and now this. On the way there, I began a discussion with Natalie of some of the big topics: including some of the complexities of my career path and how much stress they have induced at times.

I wanted to talk to her about goal-directedness in her own educational path, which is as thorny a question as one can get on. On the one hand, it's good for her to have a sense of the things she likes and to explore them in depth, and she is as pre-law as you can get and still be in high school. On the other hand, she's not even fricking 16 yet, and we want for her to retain an openness to the world and a sense of wonder and not get in this paranoid lock-down if-I-don't-do-every-extracurricular-possible-I-won't-get-into-Yale-and-my-life-will-be-over mindset, as is all too encouraged in today's high-performing high school cultures.

But how to direct her? In the course of the discussion, I actually talked to her about my own stress symptoms, some of which she observes in mornings, and also when I'm cranky and irritable, and then towards the end I said what I think is true, which is that parents feed the mental illness of Ivy League focus because we fear for the future because the world has been changing so quickly. (At least in every regard except that affluent white people have it easier than others.)

And in so doing, I pulled back the veil of parental infallibility, under which I labored until relatively late in adolescence. I mean, I saw my dad do some fucked up shit, which I won't go into here, and part of me knew my mom was in some way imperfect too, but the bedrock elemental presupposition that my parents were more or less perfect and that money more or less grew on trees persisted for a long long time.

And I wonder whether it was wise to have pulled back the veil, to have said to her directly that we don't know certain things, that we have fears, and that they to no small extent make us who we are as "grown ups."  Of course she knows. But it's sort of like Santa and the Easter Bunny, only bigger.

The Long and the Short of it

In a very real sense, as consciousnesses participating in the world, as cogitos, all we have is time, and therefore the most important decisions we make involve time allocation and time management. Most of these decisions involve balancing long-, middle-, and short-term considerations. Money, as a unit of value representing stored labor (expended time), facilitates the management of time. It is a means, in a sense, of time-shifting. To a limited extend, one can work hard in the present and store up units of time for the future.

The problem is, we don't know when we're going to die. X-factors like cancer, inattentive driving (on our own part of others'), and chronic diseases threaten us at all times. These risks can be managed to a certain extent by managing how we behave (diet, exercise, sleep, mindful vehicle maintenance and driving, etc.), but there are significant risks that lie well outside our spans of influence.

On Friday, I went to the funeral of the dad of a family that were neighbors of ours in Durham 45-odd years ago and who went to the same church as us. Good people, not our twins in every way, but fine folx. One of the sons in the family spoke about his dad during the service, and he told stories of the great vacations they had gone on as kids and the memories they had made together, all six of them driving across the country to California in a station wagon ("I'm not sure that's even legal anymore") or circling the Arc de Triomphe five times before figuring out how to exit the traffic circle. Great stuff.

Which really brings it home that the most important decisions I can make now are to build strong memories for my family, and yes, vacations are an important part of it. We're supposed to travel to the UK this summer, and I know I really need to pull the trigger and start booking the trip, even though the conservative part of me keeps whispering that my practice is not yet generating enough revenue to run the household in a cashflow neutral way, and the markets are kind of iffy, to say the least.

Which raises another question. How important is it, fundamentally, that vacations be fancy? In some sense, traveling broadly exposes one's kids to a variety of the world and opens their eyes to difference.  I know the UK ain't that exotic, but I've got Graham's food allergies to think about, and they both love Hogwarts.

One the other hand, "seeing the world" is really just a marker of class status, a way to say "we are rich enough to travel.," Good memories can be formed locally too.

On balance, though, I really need to just pull the trigger and get this done.

Mom tells the story of how, in 1988, she and I were set to go travelling in Europe right after I graduated from college, and she got a phone call with a fantastic consulting opportunity. The guy who called her said she should come to Chicago or wherever right then. We were at the airport. She said no. We had a great trip. She got the gig.

Little things with Natalie

Coming back into the house just now, I heard music coming from Natalie's room: the soundtrack of Hamilton, which both of my kids have been enjoying in the privacy of their own earbuds ever since the CD that Beth sent came in the mail some time back. There is something exceptionally joyous about hearing music played aloud by these kids whose musical culture has been almost primarily individual (although they do listen to the same songs and like to sing along at times).

To digress slightly from where I thought this post was going when I started 2 minutes ago, I wonder how the fundamental nature of pop music might have shifted due to this change in mode of consumption. It kind of reminds me of the shift Ian Watt details in his 1957 The Rise of the Novel, which looked at how the novel, as it emerged in the 1800s via Samuel Richardson, Daniel Defoe, and Henry Fielding, marked the emergence of the bourgeois individual, as it was the first major narrative art form to be ingested and digested individually, as opposed to collectively (think drama). And the novel of the time focused on the inner world of individuals.

So if teenagers get their music primarily from earbuds, is the narrative content of music shifting? And the relationship of the consuming individual to that narrative?

Blah blah blah


She also watches TV shows on her phone and her new laptop in her room, but she watches with Mary and me in the rec room a little. I think I may have mentioned how much fun it is to sing along with the theme song of Parks and Rec with her.  Another thing we enjoy together is, when Netflix (really I think it's Time Warner) is having buffering issues in the middle of shows and we get a little status bar at the bottom of a black screen that tells us that the show is loading, each time the bar moves a little Natalie and I have a little game of saying "It moved!" to celebrate its progress. It freaks out our cat a little. Oh well.

Facebook

All too often I find myself scrolling through my feed, looking at pictures, watching videos, reading things my friends post. The real problem is not that Facebook is vapid, but that I am blessed with an incredible set of friends that put me in touch with a wide variety of types of discourse, and who have lovely children. It does, to some extent, blunt my initiative at times and my ability to peel out and express my own coherent thoughts. Oh well.

And yes, Zappo's does try to sell me shoes, even though I already bought some.

In with the new?

Two things I like to read as one year turns into the next are the Economist's Holiday Double Issue, which is always full of stories about a bunch of random stuff from the past and from odd corners of the globe and of human experience, and the New York Times Magazine's "The Lives They Led" issue, which has short sketches of people who died in the past year. I always intend to read, but don't always read as much of, the Economist's forward-looking issue about the year coming up, with articles by various bigwigs.

Why is that, I ask myself? Does this mean I am essentially more retrospective than prospective in orientation? Perhaps, indeed probably. Or maybe it is just because I am skeptical about people's ability to predict the future, beyond its simple arrival. Or the fact that, when people are speaking of the future, they are intensely likely to "talk their book," which is to say peddle the version of the future they would like to see happen.

But that's true in a sense of the past as well.

In any event, the intensity with which the experience of individuals resonates with me indicates to me that I am doing the right thing by working with individuals, as opposed to trying to become a true investment analyst and manage pools of money for a fund or institutions.

For now, it's time to gear up and take Graham for a run over in Carolina North, which we used to refer to as "the woods" when I grew up in Glen Heights.

Out with the old

So we are getting organized to leave Larchmont and head home, by way of Princeton. Over a couple of weeks here, Mary and Rob made herculean exertions to cull junk from the rather large attic, where it has been accruing for decades. Their mom, Mary Lee, likes to hold onto stuff, and she has done some active curating, filtering, and retaining even as we carry dust-covered stuff down the stairs and out to the street (yes, I have helped a little with some of the brute labor).

Which makes her a lot like many of us, including myself. It's hard to let go of stuff. Much of it has been and often is retained for sentimental value, but much has also been held onto on the theory that "it could be valuable to someone,"  Which is true, to a point. It's just that the work of finding the people to whom it might be valuable is labor-intensive, and the return on that labor is low unless you know what you are doing. It is, in fact, value-additive, which is why there is an ecosystem of specialists and brokers to help you sift through your junk and find new users.

But what has struck me on this occasion is that, unless you archive well and carefully, it's much more likely that stuff will find a new home and eager new users while it is relatively new than when it is older. Which really validates my sister's practice of culling actively and regularly. Leslie tells me that she goes through her and her kids'  (and, perhaps to a lesser extent, her husband's) stuff and gets it out of the house with pretty solid discipline. The house as a whole gathers less dust, and toys, books, clothes etc. find new homes before they are moldy and/or period pieces.

The irony is that the attempt to hold onto value in an attempt to make sure it is not lost in fact destroys it.

Because it is the last day of the year, the essay form suggests that I should loop this thought back and try to map it to reflections on the passing of another year. I probably could, but I am going to let go of that too. I need to do laundry and organize to get in the car in a couple of hours to go and see some more of our favorite humans, and that is more important than the thematic coherence of an individual blog post. Of which there will be more.

High and low

Bloomberg published an interesting article about American domestic migration patterns in recent years.  One of the findings is that Americans are moving from high-productivity states like New York and California to lower-productivity states like North Carolina.  One pair of researchers found that this diminution in productivity had held back GDP growth by 13.5% over some period of time.

One of the constraints is the lack of affordable housing in the big hitter states, and I can attest that this is true for sure, and indeed we can see that it's replicated in smaller markets like NC's Triangle. Chapel Hill is unaffordable for most middle-income people.

But is this all bad? If middle-income people move from high-productivity and high-cost of living places to low-productivity ones where their housing dollar goes further, aren't they in some sense getting higher productivity for themselves as each hour worked buys more house and more yard, so that in fact they are getting more? I'm thinking of something like the spatial equivalent of a hedonic index, which Republicans like to advocate (and not without some logic) into slowing the rise in cost of living adjustments to Social Security and the like.

Yes, when people move from NY/NJ to some parts of NC and the like, they may move from places where the "cultural density" goes down, there's less art and cultural diversity. For a time. But the newcomers bring new desires and new values, and the newly populated places can catch up quickly, aided by that great leveller, the interweb.

In any case, I dunno, just speculating. I just downloaded a short book referenced by the article, "The Gated City" by Ryan Avent of the Economist. Hopefully he will think some of this stuff through, and in a way that is not a total rehash of something I've already read in the magazine.

Back to work!

Looking back on 2015

Loath though I may be to contribute to the continued decline of the US Postal Service, another year has gone by without a proper seasonal letter, and so be it. I do keep up with the blog, at least, so those who care to keep up with what's going on with me and the family can certainly do so.

For starters, the picture. It is a little blurry, and for that my photographer wife will surely upbraid me, but to my mind this is the picture of the year. Natalie first speculated that she might be able to still lift Graham, despite the fact that he was almost as tall as she was, and then she went and did it. Mostly I'm picking this picture for the smiles, which seem entirely natural to me. I love them both, and it is great to see them loving one another -- and expressing it.

So what did we do this year?  Natalie did... Duke TIP and debate and mock trial and model UN and ultimate frisbee, and still found time to get good grades and bury her nose in her iPhone to text with BFFs and binge watch a variety of shows, even while pouring milk into her breakfast cereal in the morning. Some very skilled multi-tasking at that. A real highlight of my year was watching "Parks and Rec" with her, even when she plunked her feet in my lap and more or less demanded a foot rub. No need for assertiveness training with this one!

Graham has successfully transitioned into middle school at Phillips, my old stomping grounds. He continued to progress to ever darker and more imposing belts at his martial arts studio, took up and studied chess, and generally continued to astound us with his erudition and curiosity. I don't know where that came from. Graham and I watched through all of the original "Star Trek" together, and have since turned the corner into "The Next Generation," which is plenty good.

Mary continues to deepen her engagement with the local autism and other special needs community and has been progressing through a new body of photographs of people with autism.  Her new web site is up and running at www.maryberridge.com. On all of our household's behalf, she continues in her role as Chief Health and Nutrition Officer, ever more insistently pushing us in the direction of eating lower on the food chain, with less animal-based protein. However grumpy I may get from time to time, I remain grateful for her for taking care of all of us. Trader Joe loves us too!

As for me, 2015 has been the year my financial planning and advisory practice has gathered steam. Really my focus has needed to be on that, on chilling with my family as much as possible, exercise, and sleep. It has not been an easy year to build a practice, given the frisky markets. Market uncertainty may have helped me bring clients in, as it rattles people's faith in their own decision-making ability, but it hasn't been always been fun taking the responsibility for people's financial health in an stressful times. But that's how we learn things, by doing them, and doing them diligently and honorably.

Mostly, we must remain grateful for the fact that everybody remains healthy. I didn't even hurt myself playing soccer this year. I have been to funerals over the last couple of years of contemporaries as well as people younger than me, to say nothing of people's parents. All the people in my inner circle remain good as far as we know, and that's not chopped liver. May it continue to be so in the New Year.

Scenes from the road

The other evening, in stop and go traffic on the Durham freeway headed into Durham, I heard somebody revving a seemingly amped up engine and peeling out a bit. I looked to my left and all there was was a rinky dink Mazda 3, not usually a tuner's car. Then he did it again. That's who it was.

By contrast, coming around North Raleigh last Friday a nice looking car crowded me out of my lane and I thought "isn't that a Maserati." Indeed it was, a Quattroporte. If I had a car like that, I'd drive it a little more carefully. I wouldn't use it to threaten 2010 Priuses.

Yesterday was a very uneventful day coming up the East Coast. We went the Western route, up 86 to 29 and then over the Appalachians on 64 to 81. Made fine time, we did. It was interesting to note that a convenience store near Staunton, VA was hiring, offering $8.25 and hour plus health insurance and with a 401k (easy to offer that, since nobody could afford to defer into it).  This on top of the $9.50 an hour they are offering at the Sheetz near RDU convinces me that there is indeed little slack in the labor markets, and that there are in fact lurking inflationary forces out there.

Then again, gas was $1.73 in Virginia, and I actually saw a sign for $1.79 a gallon off of 78 in New Jersey, of all places, where prices are typically high due to the fact that there is no self service.

This should give you an idea of how boring the drive was. But at least dad was not made cranky by stop and go traffic between Richmond and DC.

Turn of the 20th Century

The Journal this morning reports on successful lower-cost programming coming out of TV channels owned by Hallmark. Amongst these offerings it mentions a program called When Calls the Heart, "a turn of the 20th century drama about a teacher who moves to a rural town coming to grips with a tragedy."  This is the first time I've ever seen the phrase "turn of the 20th century" and, more importantly, it's the first time I've seen the prior millennium referred back to as a specific period about which we should be nostalgic. I wonder if it's really pre-9/11 that is referenced, or if there is really something intrinsic about that period that is starting to loom warm and cozy in the minds of viewers younger and older.

Certainly, this makes me feel older, but I suppose that's fine, as it encourages me to act more maturely. It also ties back to my comments on my growing conservative predilection for happy endings and plot resolution in general (as opposed to dangling uncertainty).

And my preference for order, reflected in a mild distaste for underdog teams (like Leicester City in the Premier League this year), which upset the established order. I mean, I don't really dislike underdogs. I think they are great. But they are also mildly disquieting because they make us need to become familiar with new players and reconsider hierarchies in the world.

I am, mos def, getting old.

New Yorkers

The pile of New Yorkers I had pulled from Mary's bedside table had grown ludicrously high over on my dresser. It was maybe 20 inches tall, threatening to totter over and splay itself all over the floor. Some of them date back to 2013. So I began culling it a couple of weeks ago.

Yes, it would perhaps be wisest to just stick them straight into the recycling bin, as more disciplined friends of mine do, but I nonetheless torture myself by looking through them to see if there are articles that I should be reading. In this most recent process I've pulled out articles by particularly esteemed folx:  Andrew Solomon, Peter Hessler, and John McPhee.

McPhee, I know, can be a risky one, particularly when he breaks meta on the reader and reflects on the process of writing. Not that there are very many whose reflections on the craft would be much more interesting than his, as he has written many a good word about a wide range of subjects. But still, he can be pretty arch. But his piece on interviewing in an April 2014 issue was better than most, actually worthwhile, perhaps because it conveys his persistent enthusiasm for his craft.

Peter Hessler, however, somehow seems to have not quite arrived in Egypt in the same way he was in China, though he has now been there for four years or so. It seems that he is viewing deep cultural immersion as something of a parlor game that he thinks he can repeat, but Egypt doesn't seem to have drawn him in in the same way as China did. I suspect it is because he was young then, and now is less so. And that its hard to perform at an improbably high level in any field forever.

To the gym

I actually made myself go to the gym tonight. I had better do it now and again, since I pay for the damned thing.  Though it is cheap to go the one at the Mall.

I still do the same stretches I did when we were young, and perform basically the same weightlifting stuff I started doing in grad school, with no instruction. Basically I run three miles on the treadmill, then do 25 sit-ups, then exercise some male vanity muscles.

It is silly, but nonetheless better than nothing. Next year, since I'm turning 50, I should really consider getting some actual instruction at something. I have been meaning, for example, to take up yoga since I went off to grad school in 1991. It keeps slipping my mind. Really, tennis lessons would be good, especially serving lessons. It would be considerate to the people I play with, especially if I ever play doubles again.

We shall see if any of this happens.

The tendrils of Monday, and faith

On most days I wake up around six, often fixated on the obsession du jeur, whatever that is, but on Sundays I try to sleep later. Sometimes it works. Today I slept in till 7:30 or so. Mary sleeps soundly, and I envy her that, and at times even resent her ability to do so.

The irony of all this, in my mind, is that as I have progressively over the years become aware that my anxiety and control orientation derives fundamentally from a lack of faith and trust in the world at large, in the belief that everything will trend towards the best, or at least not capsize in some sort of catastrophe. My youthful and persistent inclination has been to approach all problems empirically, to try to learn and read as much as possible to get a handle on all of them. I have felt at some core level that that was and is what is expected of me.

As I have "matured," I've come to realize that that's an unreasonable expectation, that I have to let go of problems and trust that they will work out for the best, and the easiest, most consistent, most somatic way of approaching this has been to cultivate a religiosity in myself. Otherwise my brain will endlessly, recursively, loop back to fear and doubt.

Mary, by contrast, is fairly anti-religious. She expressly doesn't believe in any kind of God, and steers clear of religion. But she fundamentally believes that things will work out for the best, and therefore sleeps well, once she hauls her night owl self to bed.

A woman I went to college with, one Lisa Friedman Miller of Teacher's College at Columbia, recently came out with a book called The Spiritual Child: The New Science of Parenting for Health and Lifelong Thinking, the thesis of which is that parents' spirituality -- and particularly mothers' -- is hugely impactful on their childrens' well-being. I should probably read it. I like to think that Mary's implicit trust in the world conveys itself to the kids and washes over some of my struggles, which sometimes manifest themselves in crankiness and irritability.

Or maybe the book is just plain wrong. The only way to know is to read it and ponder it. I don't think I can wait for the movie.

I also need to go back to Kierkegaarde and Pascal.

Origins in Africa

I was sitting on the subway last week looking at a couple of African-Americans, both in their 20s-30s. A particularly-dark skinned woman and a guy who had some features in common with Alonzo Mourning, the same regal cheekbones.  It occurred to me how pathetically unable I am to hazard much of a guess as to where people of sub-Saharan African descent hail from.  I mean, I know the difference between an Ethiopian and a West African, but from there it really goes downhill. Nothing compared to the level of phenotype consciousness I have for people of European descent or even East Asians, where I can pretty well differentiate between Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, etc. It is odd, given how much time I've spent living relatively near to Black people. But that's how we tag people in America.

Fresh buzz

I got a haircut in a new place today, Menscutz on Elliot, next to where Locopops used to be. I had been going to a kind of redneck barbershop, and it's good to have exposure to those guys some just to be in tune with their thinking, but I had gotten sick of telling the guy to use setting #2 on my head and then feeling like he probably used a 3 or maybe even a 4, just so I'd go back sooner.  And it wasn't all that cheap, either.

I didn't know what to expect, but when I went into the new place, but I was greeted by a pleasant Asian woman who asked if I had an appointment. I said, no, and she pointed me to the nearest seat, attended by another Asian woman. There was a 3rd, and then black woman and a black guy manning the chairs.

It was very pleasant, much joking and banter between the people cutting hair, the black woman and the guy whose hair she was cutting new each other from their kids' basketball teams.  A couple of young Asian guys came in and were a little bit bashful about who was going first:  "you go first," "no, you do."

It was, in short, America. Nobody made any sly underhanded comments about Obamacare or gun control. It wasn't that cheap, but I'm pretty sure she used a #2, and at the end she massaged my head a little with a hot towel.

The woman who greeted me was watching the woman who was trimming me quite intently, and then they spoke to one another in what I'm pretty sure was Chinese. I wasn't sure if she was learning or overseeing, it turned out it was the former.

I think I'll go back, and next time I'll talk to the women more.  Find out where they're from.

Back in town

Just had a quick one night jaunt up to New York. A fine lunch and afternoon in Brooklyn, saw a couple of people at MidTown late in the day, a sushi feast with Kevin in the evening.  Today, breakfast with someone I hadn't really talked to in years, then a productive coffee on the Upper East Side, followed by (I kid you not) a $7 piece of pizza.  It was, after all, the Upper East Side. Admittedly, it was large, and tasty, but that was ridiculous. I was hungry and hadn't found banh mi.

Then a not so excellent flight home through Newark, followed by an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, in which the boy Wesley, son of the doctor, is invited onto the bridge and promoted to Acting Ensign by Captain Jean-Luc Picard. It was dark in the room, so Graham couldn't see that I actually cried when the Captain dubbed him. I can never tell when my yearning for the paternal approval that was never really forthcoming will bubble over like that and come for me. It did then.

Shoes

The first time I went out on Zappo's, I was overwhelmed by the variety of shoes there, thought there were many great ones, and went away. That was months ago. Today I came back, determined to fill the gaps in my footwear portfolio, and went through all the contenders in the categories in question (brown shoes, man clogs/slip ons), and found that there wasn't all that much. Perhaps it is just fear of making a commitment that is striking me.

Driving, crying, and helicoptering

Natalie had her first behind the wheel driving lesson yesterday, and when I picked her up at the high school at 7:30, she got in the car and burst into tears immediately:  "I hate driving, I don't want to learn how to drive."  Unfortunately, it had been her first time behind the wheel. It had crept up on us, I hadn't realized that we were supposed to acclimate her a little, she had made zero effort to prioritize it over all of her activities (debate, mock trial, service hours, ultimate frisbee) or over the well-earned time she spends watching TV shows on her phone, relaxing.

So the first time she was behind the wheel was with a total stranger and another kid in the car. Not good. She was not confident steering, couldn't reach the brake properly, etc.

She is so self-possessed, so confident, so hard-working, so self-tending, we tend to forget she is vulnerable and needs guidance. On the one hand, I don't want to be controlling and helicoptering.  All we have really needed to do has been to facilitate with Natalie.

Which exposes us to blind spots like this one where perhaps we should have been more attentive. In the end, having a child is one of the ultimate lessons in powerlessness. There is only so much one can do.

One thing. It is clear that she is infected to some extent by the zeitgeist of college goal determinism, which is to say viewing getting into a prestigious college as her ultimate end. And how could she not be, as the daughter of Joe Yale Columbia PhD and Josephine Michigan Yale MFA, growing up in a place like Chapel Hill. If she didn't have a million things to read, I would give her Frank Bruni's Where You Go Is Not Who You'll Be for Christmas. I should probably read it and digest it and look for ways to convey its meaning to her. Though I've read enough excerpts to get the gist of it.

In any case, after I picked her up last night, I took her to her favorite pizza place and got her a couple of slices, one of which she took for lunch today.

Shame

When talking to Charlie Rose Knausgaard mentioned shame as one of the core experiences he was confronting and seeking to work through as a writer, and that struck a chord in me.

The interior of our 2001 Volvo has some issues:  one of the seats has a split seam, as it has for maybe 5 years now, and the header fabric on the sun roof has been hanging down for some months. None of this should be surprising in a 15-year old car.  Likewise, retractable, solar-powered shades on one of our skylights has been messed up for over a year now. These things bother me, but not Mary.

But when we are having people over for this or that, other things bother Mary. For example, places on the armchair in the living room where the cats have gone to town with their claws, and similar spots on the well-aged couch in our rec room. To say nothing of the cleanliness of our bathrooms. When it is just us in the house, this stuff just rolls right off of us, but when people are coming over we whip into a frenzy of cleaning, hiding, minimizing, remediating.

I had often thought that this behavior was shame-driven on her part, without stopping to consider that I have the same feelings, just with regard to other objects (car, skylight). I am fully on board with the desire to have clean toilets for guests, mind you. At any case, my obsession with the specific instances of decay that bug me vs. the ones that bug her really gets down to basic power struggle and resentments within the marriage and the fact that we don't find time enough between the two of us to talk things through, as we are caught up in our own shit all the time and taking care of the kids.

And yet, what is the shame all about? It is natural that things fall apart, that's just entropy. As good members of the bourgeoisie, deep within ourselves, we feel that we should not let our things fall apart, or that we should not be seen to be letting them fall apart. So you replace things when they display decay. If you don't, the fear is that you are seen to not have enough money to keep your stuff in shape. Hence shame.

So there is a fear of the perception of poverty, but just behind it is the fear of death.

It will be interesting to read more about what Knausgaard has to say.  I have purposefully held off on reading more of his thinking while I did my own.




Yes, as concerns the furniture, one could argue that we should just declaw the cats.  But that's another discussion.

The end

Graham and I wrapped up watching the original Star Trek tonight, and I will confess to being deeply saddened to come to the end. Particularly since there was no sense that it was the end, Kirk, Spock and McCoy just ended an episode, not even indicating that they were wrapping up a season, and that was it. They had really grown on me, and the last episode was rather special, since Kirk's soul is switched into the body of a cunning ex-girlfriend mad scientist type, who had always wanted to be a starship captain but had never had what it took.

The impostor Kirk (his girlfriend's soul in Shatner's body) kept trying to keep the real Kirk (in the female body) down, but eventually they figure it out. Spock's steadfastness in asserting that it is indeed Kirk in a woman's body -- even as he is court-martialled and threatened with death -- was particularly touching. I need me some friends like that!

So, anyway, I guess we will move on to The Next Generation.  Everybody says it's awesome. We shall see.

Natalie's play

My mom and I went to see Natalie appear in a play at the high school last night.  It was called DNA. I forget who wrote it. That kind of thing seemed significant at one point in time, now I don't really care. We had planned for Graham to go see it, but Mary had seen it the night before, so Graham stayed home with my mom's husband David and watched Sponge Bob, which I think was more to both of their tastes.

DNA is a "serious" drama about pack behavior amongst teens, who in the course of typical teenage hijinks while drinking and partying torture and then "accidentally" kill one of their weakest, and then concoct a plot to cover it up, which in turn puts somebody else on the line to do life in prison or worse. The teenagers are led by a strong silent type, who spends much of the play pensively eating junk food (it looked awesome), saying nothing, while his girlfriend prattles on existentially about chimps, bonobos, and god knows what else.

I found myself wondering, "why couldn't they do a happy musical?"  Which is so not like me, because this is 100% what I would have wanted when I was their age, or particularly when I was in college. High seriousness in art. Tackling big problems thoughtfully. It is good to encourage young people to think and push boundaries and take themselves seriously. And Natalie did well, even if she was effectively part of the Greek chorus, in a sense one of the consciences of the group. Largely her character kept repeating the phrase "We're screwed!" in a tone of great anxiety, thereby conveying a consciousness of the practical ramifications of what they had done, much more so than the ethical ones. Indeed, when you get right down to it, most of the members of the chorus were like that. Focused less on the ethical issues of what they had done than the practical ones: it was going to be hard to get into good colleges if it was discovered that they had killed someone.

Which was, hopefully, not lost on them. I should discuss that point with Natalie and the other girls.

In principal, I am still for this kind of thing. It was just less enjoyable than watching Parks and Rec with Natalie. Which we did later.

Knausgaard

I had, in all honestly, never heard of Karl-Ove Knausgaard until a couple of months back, or whenever it was the Times magazine published a piece by him about coming to America, getting stuck somewhere in the maritime provinces waiting on some bureaucratic nonsense, and then somehow making his way to Cleveland or wherever. I read some of it and thought, "who is this guy and what's it all about?"

Then, little by little, I became aware that Knausgaard was a literary sensation, writer of an acclaimed series of autobiographical works in which a first-person protagonist writes in considerable detail about the course of his life, including raising children, etc. It sounded, in short, like a much more serious and fictionalized version of a certain blog. Which made me even more resentful of him.

And so, when I saw that he had published a review of Houllebecq's Submission in the Times Book Review, I thought I would give him a chance. I read it. The guy is serious, thoughful. Unlike me, he has managed to attend to the craft of writing, which only makes sense, given that he writes for a living and has done quite well by it, or so it would seem. It would appear that I am going to need to read it.

I was impressed by his diligence, I must confess. He starts reading Houllebecq and discovers that the book revolves around Huysmans, so he goes back and reads Huysmans.

For some reason, it makes me want to read Chekhov stories, in Russian, but I can't find what I believe to be the one volume I have. Oddly, after selling most of my Russian library in Princeton back in 2003 I seem to have retained only things that were core to my major research projects: Mayakovsky, from my senior essay, and Turgenev, Goncharov, Belinskii, Dobroliubov, Pisarev, and Annenkov, from my dissertation. Plus Pushkin. Curious, how I pick things.

Charlie Sheen and fear

The news about Charlie Sheen being HIV-positive this morning was a bit of a shock. Not because of his disease status, when you think what he has been known for in recent years, it shouldn't have been a big surprise, and indeed in most ways it really wasn't.

Instead, it was disruptive news because HIV and AIDS seem to have receded so much as an existential threat, even as the behavior which gives rise to them -- people running around having unprotected sex -- has gotten so much worse as the omnipresence of internet pornography has rippled out through popular culture into the sexual behavior of teenagers, college students, and twenty somethings.

And it took me back to my own college and post-college years, when I was promiscuous as hell so that I could get ongoing ego validation from a range attractive women, and really wasn't as careful as I should have been. And I was afraid to get HIV tested because my fear was so great, so I didn't, for a long time. Which fed snowballing anxiety, and the underlying, somatic sense that everything would soon go off the rails, which I recently alluded to.

How happy I was, then, to get a negative test, and then to settle down into a life of married monogamy. Really. Likewise, how happy I am to have a daughter who does not appear to get inclined to get herself into situations where she could be in trouble.

But I think back to how quickly I flipped a switch from being a kid who didn't get in trouble to one who did, and it makes me really wish I would be home for dinner tonight.

Hither and yon

A busy day of driving around here in suburbia. To AA and back. Natalie and friend to Durham for mock trial, now I've still got to go get them. Graham and friend to the library, then to the friend's house, then home (fortunately that is all rather close by).

In the middle, I ran around the lake. While doing so, as I pushed through the pain of a little groin pull from soccer yesterday (Z -- compression shorts are indeed good, but not a cure all, sadly), I first fixated on some recent unpleasantries around politics associated with a board on which I serve. I realized that, in doing so, I was going back to a pattern of letting myself get hung up on struggles with boss-like figures, and that this whole pattern of perseveration goes back to a core belief, somewhere deep in myself, that things will turn out for the worst, and that I am somehow responsible.

Which is just silly.  So Graham and I watched Star Trek, and everything turned out OK.

Red Scirocco

I was just coming back to the house and I saw a guy in a Red VW Scirocco, probably from '85 or so. Then I got a view of the driver, who appeared to be 80ish. I could not help but smile, because I figure he's probably the original owner.

I feel the guy. As for myself, I am wrestling with whether or not I should put $600 into the interior of our 2001 Volvo S40. Rationally, it's probably stupid to do so, and especially from an emissions perspective. But it is the cheapest way to hold onto a car we know works, and with Natalie coming up on getting her license soon, it's probably smart to do so. We may have to become a 3-car family.

But I know that's not what it's really about. I like holding onto old things. The cassette deck in the car pleases me, and the broken cupholder doesn't break my heart either. There is a perverse pride associated with having things forever, like the stupid futon just behind me here in the office that Mary got when she went off to grad school in '89 or so. It does a great job of holding my briefcase when I come home from work, or the bass guitar that Lor gave me when I was up at his house sometime last year.  So what if nobody ever sits on it.

Yes, in my heart of hearts I'd rather replace it with a comfie couch on which I could take naps.

But back to the Volvo.  There's just something about holding onto it, making it last. It is part of the fundamental, underlying conservatism in my nature that just gets more pronounced as time goes on.

A movie about Wallace Stevens

I am really excited about the idea of a movie about Wallace Stevens.  Whether I'll actually go and get it is another matter.

My struggle

Just started reading a piece by Liesl Schillinger about Karl Ove Knausgaard, partially envious of how cool it was for her to go and hang out with him, even though I am manifestly unswayed by what little I have read of his work.  Then I realized that, just as I must resist the temptation to watch sports on TV when I could in fact be out exercising or even doing sports, I must fight the tendency to read, and particularly to read about writers, when I know I should be writing. For what is reading about riders if not fantasizing about being one.  And all one really needs to do to be a writer is to write.

Or, it is rather to have something to write about. I just got off the phone with a fellow board member, with who I had spoken for an hour about the dysfunction of our HOA board, which was so very manifest behind the scenes at our annual meeting for the general membership. It was the second longish phone call of the day, and, as such, was rather exhausting.  I know, I know what you're thinking. Whatever the hell was I going through my mind when I put myself forward to be on such a thing.

I suppose I was trying to be a grown up and good upstanding member of the bourgeoisie. Being on boards is very responsible sounding. I'll bet even Clark W. Griswold served his community in this fashion.

This after a day of mostly obsessing about figuring out how to be a good fiduciary and make a well-informed and considered recommendation of a 401k platform for a new client.

It is all just as exciting as it sounds.

A tight day

Much to do today, a difficult instance of time allocation, on a freaking Sunday, of all days

1. I'd like to finish my book on the neurobiology of markets
2. Need to get leaves managed down, especially those on the roof.  This has been quite difficult this year, with all the rain.  But the ones on the roof really need to come down, because they trap water in corners and a big dump of rain is expected early in the week
3. Memorial service for Scott Clarke
1. Already did load of shirts so I'd have a clean white one for that
2. Go pick up Russell beforehand, since he can't drive since he had a stroke
4. Lake Forest Association annual open meeting at 7:30, where I need to present on the dam and my efforts to get to know it and take care of it, and to fulfill the state mandate to put in place an Emergency Action Plan
5. Watch Star Trek with Graham, share a few words in the hallway with Natalie

All in all, as with every day, a key theme here is the eternal struggle against decay and aging,  As the example of Scott Clarke points out, cancer is one of the true X-Factors that counsels constant humility, because it is so far beyond our control as to defy description.

It looks like aerobic exercise will suffer today, though if I do any raking in the back yard that gives my muscles some work.

Tomorrow Natalie must be at school at 6:15 am for field trip to DC.

Meanwhile, outside the windows, it's a grey day, and the leaves are coming down in blizzards.  Really it's quite lovely, but would be even better with a little sun.

All in all, I am glad I took the time to blog.

Moving right along

Graham and I were at the library today.  He's pretty well picked through a lot of the stuff in the kids' section, and I've been trying to get him to look at some of the adult sci-fi and mystery stuff.  As we left the library, we were walking past the teen room, and I was like "hey, maybe you should look in there, you're almost a teenager yourself."

And Graham goes:  "Yeah, I'm in my late tweens."

Let me Be Frank with You

I made my way through Richard Ford's Let Me Be Frank With You.  I was going to say that I had finally made my way through it, but then again it actually didn't take me all that long to read it. It just seemed like it took longer than it did. Which is to say I didn't enjoy it much.

It's difficult to say why.  I really loved the first three Frank Bascombe books. Independence Day in particular really hit home, and I cried at the end of The Lay of the Land when it became apparent that Bascombe was going to be OK.

But now I'm ready to let him go. Ford can just kill him off. Maybe it's because the most recent book is so ham-handedly organized around the topic of Hurricane Sandy, or maybe because somehow the wry neo-Holden Caulfield voice of Bascombe is so incongrous in the brain of a man as old as he is. Maybe it's my fear of my own aging:  am I going to sound like that.

Whatever it is, the book's just not as good as its predecessors. Of course, it is a durned site better than any book I have ever written, I'm well aware of that.

On to the next.  Mouse brought me some very nice books from McIntyre's today at lunch. I'll dig into one of those soon.

It's hard to give well

The NY Times week in review today had a piece on how Silicon Valley -- in its ultimate wisdom and arrogance -- thinks it has reinvented philanthropy. We can see it in the Gates Foundation's emphasis on metrics, Mark Zuckerberg's attempt to reengineer Newark's schools with a huge dump of cash. There's even a deeply ironic quote from Marc Andreesen saying the Airbnb lets people with spare rooms rent them out, thereby combating unequal distribution of wealth.  Which is crazy talk.

Now, I am not entirely disbelieving of this thesis. I think that Gates, in particular, has really put his back and brain into trying to figure out how to best use his riches. But overall, the technorati are definitely patting themselves on the back with selfie sticks. It's hard to give money away effectively, it's hard in general to determine what is the right way to allocate resources.

That is, in general, what we have government for, and why we elect representatives -- so we can delegate the resource allocation function to people who have made a profession of thinking about it. Now, it is understandable and understood that government doesn't always do this well, that government institutions develop their own inertia and instincts for self-preservation, and that corruption is a real and difficult problem.

But that doesn't mean that the right solution is to have technorati aggregating huge sums and then running out and solving our problems for us. I think it is reasonable that there should be a healthy tension between non-profits and government agencies. The former can move more quickly than the latter, and are more likely to innovate. Government can learn from the non-profit sector, for sure. But the idea that key governmental functions should be ceded to young geniuses just because they made a lot of money and want to feel like they are doing good is silly.

Alternating currents

Back in 2004-7, when I was building a hedge fund practice for the consulting firm where I worked, I read books about hedge funds, amongst them Hedgehogging, by Barton Biggs, who had been at Morgan Stanley before going out and founding his own hedge fund.

More than anything, I remember how Biggs characterized his weekends.  He basically said that he read all day long to stay informed and deepen his knowledge of what he was doing, investing other peoples' money.

I must confess that that sounds pretty good to me, particularly when I spend so much of the week talking to people or trying to do so.  And I do read a lot on weekends.  Which in some ways hamstrings the growth of my business, because weekends are when people are out so much.

I remember early on in my sojourn into the world of sales, talking to another guy who sold for a financial firm.  He said that he had talked to sales recruiters who said that they liked to recruit athletes, and lacrosse players in particular, because they were impervious to pain.  Makes sense.  We also talked about how much each of us liked to be out talking to people and he was in the 7 days a week camp, whereas I am more in the 3 to 4 days a week.

Right now, I have to talk to people more often than that.  In some ways it is only natural, as I'm making up for the 9-10 months where I sequestered myself and studied for the CFP.  Then I talked to people rather infrequently.  To say nothing of the years I spent working on my dissertation.

Truth is, that was excessive in the other direction.  I like talking to people, and listening to them, because in the end people are all we have, and books are in sense a way back to people.  When I studied, I always carved out ways of engaging with people (smoking breaks, calling to raise money for this or that or recruit people to a team or reunion).

I think it's natural for me to oscillate like this, between periods of greater and lesser socializing. But I tell you, it's vital to keep reading and ingesting media other than direct conversations with folx (film, music, dance, whatever), or I shrivel up and die.

Money as the standard of standards

Being a geek and someone who roots for the underdog, I have always been intrigued by the concept of standards, which are so integral to the everyday functioning of our lives but are so hidden that people can't think about them.  Just think about the standards that are enabling this blog post:

1. HTML -- tells the web browser how to lay things out
2. TCP/IP -- lets the computers talk to each other
3. UNICODE or ASCII -- I don't even know, honestly, whatever cross-platform standard there is that tells the computers to associate letters with keystrokes

I'm sure there are lots more that I don't know about.

Or think about standard screw and nut sizes or 2 by 4s and how they let us put things together and design things abstractly before actually implementing.

Listening to a lecture on money from my books-on-"tape" course on economics in the car today it defined money as a:

1. Medium of exchange
2. Store of value
3. Unit of account

That simplified commerce so that people could function in their economic lives, get away from barter and or weighing and scrutinizing gold nuggets. So in a sense, money is the ur-standard on which all other standards are based.

Or maybe language is.

Drop off

I drove Natalie, her Croatian friend Dora, and her Korean friend Esther to a debate tournament at Enloe High School in Raleigh first thing Saturday morning.  Pulling into Enloe's nabe on Clarenden Crescent Drive or some other such Anglo nonsense, I took note of a range of brick ranches with baronial features which told me that probably, when this nabe was being built, back in the mid- to late-60s, it was probably considered rather prestigious.

When we got to the high school, at the first turn in, there was an Indian high schooler holding a sign with an arrow on it, dancing around a little, probably to stay warm in the morning chill.  The arrow told me to keep going to a subsequent entrance.  I had to get pretty close to it to see the arrow, because my new glasses prescription doesn't correct all that well, sadly.

At the next pull-in to the high school, it was an East Asian kid with a sign, doing a similar little jig.

When I finally pulled in to the right entrance, there was a third kid, who seemed to be of maybe mixed East Asian and Anglo parents, pointing us to where to pull up to the curb.  There was an African-American mom escorting her kid in.

And there were some goofballs from the marching band headed out onto the field to practice.

What else could I think but that I was glad to be in America.

Grace, entry #2

At AA this morning there was a discussion of grace and acceptance.  Big topics.

In the course of my profession, I talk to a lot of people, and I hear a lot of very real stuff, both on the telephone and elsewhere. In the last couple of weeks I have heard of

• Recent diagnoses of breast and colon cancer (thankfully, not in the same person)
• Bad news about somebody who has been fighting lymphoma
• Someone's 6-year old getting hit by a car in a way that would have been fatal to an adult
• A friend who has bad peripheral neuropathy, so numbness and tingling in the extremities
• Some other degenerative neurological condition (was it muscular dystrophy?)
• Marriages falling apart for various reasons

In short, all kinds of health and life challenges.

This is, in fact, nothing but a function of being almost 50 and being in touch with a lot of people. Statistically speaking, things are going to happen, and the laws of large numbers dictate that, if you are paying attention to a bunch of people, you are going to hear about it.

Very few of these situations are ones in which the participants could have done anything to prevent them, whatever they may tell themselves. So in the end, the best tools we have at our disposal for dealing with these challenges are attitudinal, and in a sense spiritual.

There is a temptation for me to "count my blessings," to compare myself to everyone else and say "at least that's not happening to me."  But to some extent they are happening to me, just not to members of my nuclear family right now.  They are happening to me, I just don't know about them.

And we have faced our own challenges, be they Graham's autism, Natalie's accelerated puberty, my substance abuse and other mental health challenges, and Mary's stuff too (the marital equivalent of HIPAA keeps me from digging into any of that, but it's all just aging, really).

In short, if I choose to curse existence and whatever deity I choose, I get myself in trouble. If I accept that whatever's happening is just a probabilistic instantiation of stuff that's gonna happen to somebody, and stay positive about it, I'm much better off.

whoops

Left the Prius on the whole time I was playing tennis with Z this morning.  Stupid hybrid.

Later, was sitting on the couch reading a light morsel of an article by my neighbor Daniel Wallace when it occurred to me that I had really better be writing than reading, so I came upstairs to do so, when my eye espied the bass guitar that Lor gave me some months back. So I played that for a little while, before remembering that I was meant to write.

And now, here I am.

A judgment

I had breakfast with a woman a month or so back.  She is in a "business development" -- aka sales -- role for a consulting firm of sorts.  She allowed that she had not, as yet, sold anything. She also said that she could so some recruiting but -- she hastened to add -- she could not hire anybody with gaps in their resumes, because if someone can't go out and find a job, well then, they're just not any good.

And I'm thinking, but if you're in sales and have sold nothing and brought in no revenue, you arguably should not have the job that you have.

Later, she was telling me about her husband, who was retired.  He had a Phd, and not only that, had had a post-doc. Now, why the reputation of someone who has had a full career should be burnished by having had a post-doc is well beyond me.  I had one. Big deal.

People are funny.



*That would include me.  In the morning, after writing the above, it occurred to me that -- though I was harshing on this woman for being judgmental of others who had been nominally unemployed, look at me there standing in judgment over her, someone whom I had met only briefly a couple of times, someone I hardly know.  Life is complex, for sure. The real question is: what put me in a mood yesterday to get all high and mighty on her.

What the kids want

When I suggested to Graham this evening that we watch Star Trek, he insisted that he first have time to read the new Nutrition Action, so that he'd be better informed about updated details of dietary research that he could in turn lord over his peers in school.  He got his reading done, and then we did get in an episode before bedtime.  Spock said "sensor" several times, which I just love.

On Natalie's side, a big moment was the arrival of the soundtrack to Hamilton, purchased generously by Mr. Auntie Bethy.  When I told Natalie it had arrived, she belted out an enthusiastic "Yes!" which echoed to the rafters of our crib.  She has since been singing along with the soundtrack in her room quite a bit.

East Coast driving

In driving through Virginia and then the DC area over the last few days, experienced the ebb and flow of NPR: out in the country, you can't find it because it's not there, but in DC metro, it's difficult at times to tell what is in fact NPR from things that just sound like it.  At one point in time I felt like I had come upon Israeli public radio, so long was the focus on matters from that region.

Then there was CSpan radio, which I listened to for a good while.  First off, there was an excellent interview with Mitch Daniels, current President of Purdue University, one time Governor of Indiana, before that head of the Office of Management and Budget.  Great guy.  I'm not sure I'd vote for him, since he's a Republican, but it makes me happy to know that smart policy wonks like him still exist in the Republican Party, even if he has been pushed to the right and then marginalized. I certainly enjoy listening to him, even when I don't agree with him.

Later, I heard what seemed to be Supreme Court arguments being delivered about some very abstruse point about citizenship.  At great length.  It got so wonky I got lost, but it did comfort me to know that policy was being dug into at considerable depth by some erudite sorts, and that others were assumedly driving around DC or even sitting still while listening to it, because they cared.

I also stayed with friends who work in different parts of the government and are good and earnest people, working hard to execute within their respective corners of the public sector ecosystem. Overall, it reconfirms my belief that the whole "throw the bums out" discourse which dominates both right and left is misguided. Mostly, I think, it derives from the fact that communicating the principles and practices of conscientious governance is so far removed from the short soundbite/Twitter update mindset of a populace whose attention span grows ever shorter.

Golden Skillet, US 29 South, Chatham, VA 12:30 pm

I needed some lunch, so I stopped into a comely Golden Skillet along my path to Charlottesville today.  The only place with an outlet to charge my phone was in the back, so I sat there.

A couple of booths were filled by a group of six people in their golden years, five of them women, which is no surprise, since women live longer than men.  Of the six, only one seemed to be talking much.  "It was a pound cake from a mix.  Betty Crocker.  And it was pretty good, actually."  She repeated her declarations about the cake from a box a couple of times, it seemed because the pair of ladies in the adjacent booth couldn't hear her.

But then it became apparent that she was talking more because it was her role in this group to do so. She was the perky one, the bringer of energy, the ringleader.  She showed the others some pictures on her digital camera:  "They gave it to me for my 80th birthday, that was six years ago."

It was, in short, very sweet. Nobody else had much zing left, they had been talking to each other for who knows how many decades. So she shared what she had, and that was that.


I had a delicious fish plate with cole slaw and green beans which, though clearly from a large can, were curiously not very salty.

Competing models

I went and saw Richard Ford speak last night at Flyleaf Books. I think I have blogged in the past about enjoying the Frank Bascombe series of novels, particularly Independence Day.  Really a great series of books, and I'm glad that there's a fourth so we can get to spend more time with Bascombe.

After he read, somebody asked a question of Ford about coming back to Frank, after thinking that the 3rd novel would be the last.  Ford said this, more or less:  "I feel like, through Frank Bascombe, I am able to fully express myself," and it was clear that this is a very clear goal for him.

This morning, I saw another short Gary Vanerchuk on Facebook. Vanerchuk's message is also very clear:  anybody can be a success as an entrepreneur, but only by dint of ceaseless and unyielding application.  "Since I was 14, I worked weekends, holidays, etc."  I'm not sure what he made his money in, selling wine I guess. He's a name I've heard as an entrepreneurial guru.

His energy is good and his message is kind of inspiring, but at what cost?  He also seems to be kind of a jerk.

On balance, I'd rather be Richard Ford.  But, as with so many things, I am somewhere in the middle.

Gotta hit the road now. Off to Charlottesville, than to DC, thence to Martinsburg, WV, on Friday, to see people and try to get some business flowing.  It should be a beautiful fall road trip.

Exclamations!

I am sometimes slightly annoyed when people overgeneralize the use of exclamation points, particularly when texting.  I don't know why.  Perhaps it is a Scrooge instinct. Mary used to say that, of all the characters in Pooh's world, she identified most with Eeyore.  Which I had never thought about.

But I am not bothered when it is my daughter doing the punctuating. With her, I see it as a lovely way to view the world, where any given instance of anything is something to be excited about! Why not?

Which, in turn, makes me think I should revisit my attitude towards exclamations in general!  Why not endorse the enthusiasm, after all?

Rob Lowe's redemption

As I mentioned recently, Mary and I have been watching Parks and Rec with Natalie.  One thing I've been digging is Rob Lowe's character Chris Treager, though perhaps not even so much the character himself as the fact that Lowe is so able to enjoy playing him.

He was always an easy guy to hate, such a pretty boy -- kinda Christian Laetner-like, and then when he got snagged for sex tapes back in the 80s, it was easy to pile onto him.  In retrospect, his transgressions (having sex with a fan above the age of consent but too young to be filmed) seem relatively minor.  Compare him to Kobe Bryant, or Bill Cosby, or Tiger Woods, or Woody Allen...

In the end, whatever, he goofed up a little while younger and got dinged for it.  Looking down his filmography, I don't see any masterpieces he's acted in, but then again I'm out of the flow of movies a little bit.

But in Parks and Rec, he's good, he's funny.  Admittedly, it is still not the most multi-faceted character of all time, but it's a sitcom, and his character is good-hearted and self-effacing.

I think I pull for him in the same way I pull for Fernando Torres of Atletico Madrid, another pretty boy who has been brought low and is fighting back.

And now, it is time for me to go and kill weeds growing up the dam behind my house. Not fun, but needs to be done.

Blast from the past

I had coffee this afternoon with a teacher from my high school, a guy I didn't know very well back in the day. As we were parting, he said that back in the day there were those who thought I was a jerk, but that I have turned out to be quite a nice guy.

Time was, I would have been bothered by the fact that people didn't used to like me. Now, I really don't care. I was insecure back then about a lot of things, with the exception of my intellect and wit, which I felt pretty good about.  So I used it as a weapon.

I try to do that less these days, and I am appreciative of the fact that, though I may be clever about some things, there are a whole lot of things I don't have experience in and know little about, and that I therefore consult with and entrust to others.  I'm cool with that.

And if people didn't used to like me, that's OK too.

What we're watching

We are experiencing a golden era on Netflix here at the crib.  Graham and I are making our way through the original Star Trek, while Natalie and I (and sometimes Mary) are plowing through seasons 1 through 6 of Parks and Rec.  The highlight of my day is when Natalie and I sing along to the theme song of this fine show.

Nothing more to say.

On money

I was reflecting earlier that I haven't really blogged all that much about how I feel about money, which is odd given that I'm in the business of managing other people's money, as well as my own, and therefore have to and do think about it all the time. But I haven't written so much about how I think and feel about money.

Or have I?  A quick keyword search of the blog on "money" turned up a number of posts, more, of course, than I have time to read.

In any case, money and wealth are two of the most complicated questions in our culture, and certainly in my mind.  On the one hand, as I look around this room where I sit and type, which is effectively my man-cave, even though a bunch of Mary's photo stuff is here, I can't help but love it.  Maybe 270-300 square feet which I basically have to myself.  A desk, an external monitor, a bunch of books, a 20-year old armchair (declining fast), a 25-year old futon (mostly good for storing stuff on it), some guitars.

I definitely love having the room, both as a private space for me, but also as a place where Graham and I can mush together (for how much longer????) into the armchair and watch Star Trek in the evenings.  This room is, no doubt, a great luxury, as is our house as a whole, all 2900 square feet of it.

And I wouldn't mind upgrading the futon to a more comfortable couch, one which would, ideally, be suited for napping.  Problem is, of course, that I so rarely make/find time to nap.

But do I need it?  Sometimes it feels like an albatross, a gift which keeps right on taking.  Yesterday I spent 3-4 hours just cleaning screens and windows getting ready for a party.  And you know there's more work to do (I am writing, in fact, against the deadline of cleaning toilets and a few more windows).

I am kind of infected by the perverse house pride of our generation, though I also look at nabes with smaller houses and yards and therefore better community and wish I had some of that.

In any case, the intrinsic relationship between wealth, class, and self-esteem/image is a vein I need to mine more here on the blog, because it is real.

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.