Easter egg MVP

Our tradition in recent years has been that Natalie hides Easter eggs for Graham to find, and vice versa.  This year it is very wet and rainy, so we did it inside. Graham hid (and Natalie searched) upstairs. After about 15 minutes or so, she had about 18 of 20 and had done pretty thorough searching, so she decided to throw in the towel and head downstairs for some feasting.

At about that time Rascal, the more social of our two cats, appeared on the staircase and nudged a pink egg through the banister. It crashed to the ground and opened, spraying jelly beans across the floor. She is a clever one.

Movers

We moved offices a week or so back. The whole moving crew was young African-American guys, with the exception of one Hispanic fellow.

When it came time to order them lunch, I took on the arduous chore (I jest, lest you linger in doubt) of getting their orders. We were going to order from Jimmy John's, but a number of them weren't familiar with that establishment, and were a little uncomfortable ordering from a place where they didn't know the menu. One of them was uncomfortable ordering roast beef that was pink, he liked it brown. Several of them asked for extra mayo, one of them wanted extra oil and vinegar. I tend to view sandwiches from chains as commodities (though I do know what I like from Subway, etc.), but I had the impression that this was a pretty novel experience for some of these guys and they didn't want to squander it and/or get something they really wouldn't like.

Later, one of them had apparently been talking to our Chief Investment Officer about what we did, and was asking for financial advice. The CIO said talk to me about how much money one needed to work with us, and I sheepishly named a figure well below what is considered the minimum for having a profitable client relationship, while saying I'd be happy to just talk to him. Unfortunately I didn't have a card on me, and didn't connect with the guy later. I would have liked to have been able to just tell him the basics (save, don't try to get rich quick by beating market, use revolving credit cards warily).

These guys were working their butts off, carrying heavy boxes and furniture up stairs. When they realized how late their day was likely to go (ended up being till about 9pm), they groaned a little. They marvelled at the machine the guys from the copier company had, which slowly moved the delicate copier up the stairs.

I'm making an effort to chronicle all this because, in fact, at this point in time in my life I have so little contact with younger Black people. For the most part, I interact with African-Americans primarily on Facebook, where I'm connected with lots of people from my high school. This is considerably better than nothing. Especially since being fast-tracked academically as a youth put me in what was essentially a segregated school environment.

At times I can only agonize that the nature of my profession is so intensely focused on helping middle-class and richer people defend their class status. I see younger Black so rarely.  There is one kid from a rehab that has been turning up at the Sunday morning AA meeting I have been going to regularly who comes from an entirely different place than me, but who speaks so beautifully, who seems to be really getting it. I need to make my way across the room to him next time I am there and introduce myself, before he is hustled into the waiting van and taken back to rehab. I don't know why they do that.

Fear and the father

I'm making my way through Volume 3 of Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle now. This tome tracks the young Karl Ove and his family as they move to a new subdivision on an island in southern Norway and begin a new life, in his case, school. So it starts when he's 5 or so.

As with the other volumes, it rings true emotionally. In particular Karl Ove's fear of his father, his self-consciousness moving around the house, his concern that his dad my blow up at him at any moment. This is really the primary shading of our narrator's life, the fear of being chastised for just about anything, the cold distance of the father.

One episode in particular stands out. Karl Ove and his dad are alone in the house before school, and his dad feeds him some corn flakes (about which he had already waxed poetic) for breakfast. The milk his dad had given him had gone bad, but Karl Ove, fearing his dad's temper, eats his bowl of cereal anyway. Then his dad sits down to join him:

"Ugh!" he said "The milk's off! Oh, good grief"

Then he looked at me. I would remember that look for the rest of my life. His eyes were not angry, as I had expected, but amazed, as though he was looking at something he could not comprehend. Indeed, as though he were looking at me for the very first time.

And here it is as if Knausgaard has pulled the curtain back on a whole new layer of consciousness, the father who cannot begin to fathom the level of fear he instills in his son.

I get it. As an adult I am still driven by my own demons, my own insecurities, despite the profusion of grey hair on my head, and it is hard at times to imagine how my own behavior is perceived by my kids. What is it they say: "There are no real grown ups." We just look like them, we just play the roles.

Anyhow, it is now time to go play the role. If I can get dinner nudged through quickly enough, there might just be time enough for me and Graham to watch an episode of Next Generation. Or we can just lie on the couch and read with our feet under the blanket.

Turning a corner

Just glanced at the blog and was surprised to see the consistent negativity there. That shows I have been slipping in my ability to appreciate the good stuff around me. For example, I now have an office with four walls and everything, and it is Spring and everything is in bloom or bud.

Yesterday I picked up Natalie from her ultimate game out at Friends School and it occurred to me that she could drive home from there. So she did.  It was late in the day, so there was tail end of rush hour traffic, albeit on country roads, and there was some slightly blinding light from the horizon, so she wore a baseball cap and used the visor too. But she handled it all like a champ, accelerating as high as 45 momentarily. She has come a considerable distance from her major tear-spouting the first time I picked her up from behind the wheel training, which just broke my heart.

In any case, yesterday was lovely.

Fight or flight? Flight

After the meeting today, I went up to this guy who had shared about going to a meeting somewhat randomly while he was out of town and then having the opportunity to commune with a newcomer. He had told it beautifully, and I engaged with him on the topic.

I said something that set him off, and he started talking. It quickly became clear that I had unwittingly placed myself in the grip of a dogmatist. He started talking about how there were people who came to meetings that weren't really alcoholics, but were really just heavy drinkers, as was described in AA's Big Book, and they weren't really alcoholics because blah blah blah blah blah. And I was looking at the clock, feeling annoyance rise from deep within me as my Sunday slipped away from me listening to this guy who felt a need to share his authoritative wisdom. I was saved by someone telling us that a steering committee meeting was about to convene, and I made my way to the bathroom.

I know damn good and well whence comes my aversion to this kind of person. I won't even say it.

Thursday night, I was at Local 506 for a friends and clients meeting of a law firm with whom I am friends. I saw this grey-haired lawyer holding a beer talking to a buddy of mine and I said to myself, "he looks familiar, I'll bet he knew dad." So I went over and talked to them and my friend introduced us and, sure enough, he knew dad, and told me he had a story to tell me.

So many years before, in the early 90s, he had been returning from the beach through the sleepy, moss-hung town of Maysville with his family when he saw a barefooted guy on the side of the road with a pillowcase over his shoulder, thumbing a ride.  At which point in time he says to his wife "That was Mike Troy, I gotta go back and pick him up." To which his wife responded "Are you crazy? We have 3 kids in the car, there's no room." But he picked up dad anyway.  Apparently dad and his then girlfriend had had a tiff of some sort and dad set out to make it home using only feet and thumb. In any case, for the lawyer and his family, the ride back to Chapel Hill passed more quickly and easily than it ever had before, as my dad regaled the kids with stories and jokes of this, that and the other.

So there you have it. If you were subjected to a lot of my dad, he was overbearing and ultimately unbearable, because it became apparent that he was incapable of listening to others, because he knew the answers to everything already. If, on the other hand, you saw him only rarely, he was almost a magical figure, because he always had another story to fill the gaps.

Flow

I have now arrived at the moment when I have become accustomed to blogging each week, Saturday morning, between Al Anon and taking Graham to martial arts. If I can permit myself, it is a time of relative quiet and reflection, before I snap into being dad and spouse. Often I have a clear topic in mind.

Not so today. Came home and was distracted at trying to fix one practical matter (I won't bore you with it), then went to close the windows upstairs because it's chilly and promises to continue being so. While doing so, in my peripheral vision I saw something describe an arc. I turned and focused on it, and saw it was a red-tailed hawk alighting from one branch to another down the hill. Now, I'm not going to break all mystical on you about the beauties of nature, but I will say that it is very cool to see hawks flitting from branch to branch like that in the yard, even though I should allow that it is odd that we should consider it calming to see mighty predators like that hanging out by the crib.

Reminds me of seeing Jeff, the guy who is responsible for The Monti series of live storytelling around the Triangle here, telling a tale of going running in the Carolina North woods (to those of us who grew up in and around Glen Heights back in the day, these were known just as "the woods") and mysteriously losing his hat. Turned out, he later figured out, it was stolen by an owl, most likely, which he realized when he heard of others losing their hats in the woods. I kinda suspected it from the beginning, because I remember Mike Long sharing on Facebook about being attacked in his yard by a hawk while doing yard work in Cary one day.

But the topic of the Monti, where I have long thought of trying to speak, makes me think of what should be a real, longer blog post, which will draw together themes I have shared over the years, and which could turn into a Monti talk.....

stay tuned

The inner game, spoken

Out on the tennis court with Z today, I found myself yelling at myself things like "Stupid!" when I made poor shot selection or just executed poorly. I had to remind myself that I would never speak to someone else like that, and wonder why I do it to myself.

The tendon tenderness I've been experiencing for a couple of months now didn't cripple me, which makes me optimistic for soccer season, coming on fast.

Crazy talk

At the end of the work day I met with a couple of youngish ladies in the lobby of a Marriott Courtyard Suite where 54 hits 55, just off 40 so I could be schooled in how to maintain a web site built on WordPress. Not too difficult.

As we sat there, corporate travelers streamed into the hotel with their little rolly bags, seeking direction as to where to go and eat, "Where can we get bbq, or a steak?" Perversely, I found myself a little jealous of the simplicity of their lives: go get dinner, go to hotel room, sleep, get up and go present at client or perform project work, collect salary.

Amazing how quickly the grass starts to look greener on the other side. Hell, what do I know? For all I know those people carried heavy sales quotas. I used to hate business travel, and rightly so.

Short takes

Quickly on some books I've read recently:

Red Notice.  Hedge fund manager Bill Browder, who was robbed blind and kicked out of Russia by Putin some years ago, wrote this book about his own trajectory, but more about Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer who was on his team and was pretty much killed in Russian prison but refused to repent or submit to pressure to lie. This is a good, not a great book, but it gives considerable insight into how business was done in Russia back in the day, and, more importantly, Browder shows himself to have been truly indefatigable in campaigning in DC for justice for Magnitsky and sanctions against the Putin regime by the US government. Also gives a pretty good window into how DC works, the importance of access to people who know people.  "Human capital," as it were.

The Last Girls, My dad idolized Lee Smith, really worshipped the ground she walked on. She represented all that he aspired to in the Hillsborough literary scene. And, as human a human being as he was, I figured I'd give her a shot, and I picked this book up at Nice Price in Durham one day when I took the kids there (just as he and my mom had always taken us to used book stores). This is a good novel, not mind-blowing, but a solid, humane, earnest piece of humanism geared at helping us understand how people grow and how they come to feel about the complex trajectories of their lives as they live them. As a plus, as the title states, it's mostly about women, a group of them, so as a male it's helpful to me in terms of getting women's perspectives on life.

And, for all the rigor mortis that successive waves of theory threw at literature and art in recent decades, this is a noble function, and not easy. I will read more Lee Smith. In this, as in many things, my dad was not wrong.

The Old Man and the Sea, I snagged this nugget of Hemingway in the PTA Thrift one day last year. We were in there and we ran into Juan, the father of Graham's classmate Jasper, who piped enthusiastically about having picked up a first edition of this book there. And then I saw this little volume at that PTA discount.

In contrast to the Lee Smith, and not surprisingly for old Earnest, this is a book about being a man. An old guy who hasn't caught anything for a long time goes out and hooks a big one and struggles mightily to bring it to shore, showing great respect for his adversary. It's a riff on Moby Dick.

A fine book, reminds me of the benefits of going back and re-reading the people I used to read (though this was my first time with this one). All too often I treat books like scalps or trophy kills, I want to bag them and put them on my wall. Why, after all, am I writing these little reviews?  In fact, there is much benefit in going back and revisiting things that used to seem meaningful.

Decoded, Ma Jia. I have no idea how this contemporary Chinese "mystery" novel came to my attention. At first it seemed good, kind of mythic in its ambition and scope. As it progressed it seemed to devolve into something infused with Socialist Realism. Sort of ham-handed. Honestly, I didn't finish it. Something in me wants to go back and finish it, but I probably won't.

The Payoff: Why Wall Street Always Wins, Jeff Connaughton. A decent, not a great book, by a guy who had a successful career in the revolving door of DC, mostly within the sphere of influence of Joe Biden.  He was alternately a staffer and a lobbyist. Basically his point is that Wall Street throws lots of money at getting heard in DC and gets heard loud and clear. For the last bit of his time in DC, Connaughton worked for Ted Kaufman, the guy who filled Biden's seat in DC after he ascended to become Obama's veep. Kaufman and Connaughton faught Wall Street's influence on some important matters but couldn't really notch that many victories, because there was too much to fight.

Once that was done, Connaughton took his substantial hard-earned cash, moved to Savannah, and wrote this book. So it's one of those: make your million, step out, criticize the system.

Connaughton in particular was not positive about Biden, viewing him as an opportunist user with a short memory for his footsoldiers (of whom Connaughton was one). That's why I was very pleased that Biden was so kind to Niklaus and Lucy when he came to Duke a month or so back.

Snit

Just came home from my morning meeting, and saw a multitude of tasks needing to be done around the house. Got on Mary and Natalie about doing them, and Mary justly pushed back against me, saying that she was just trying to get work done, and I come home and sigh exasperatedly about things needing to be done that weren't priorities.  She then told me about stuff that needed to be done in the yard that she needed help with, to which I protested that I have taxes and other financial stuff to work on.

Not an optimal marital dynamic. Division of labor is hard, balancing fluid priorities is hard, particularly in the absence of clearly stated strategic goals. In The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People Stephen Covey suggests having something like a family constitution or set of strategic goals that can guide lower level and implementation-level decision-making. It sounds so unbearably corporate and geeky, but maybe there is some wisdom in it.

My resistance to VR

I just finished up with Jaron Lanier's You Are Not a Gadget.  I hadn't read a book like that for a long time, sort of wacky and wildly interdisciplinary yet very cogent and, which is perhaps more important, very humane.

Lanier is one of the inventors of Virtual Reality, which is one of those concepts which, though cool, has never really held much attraction for me. I tend to view VR as too much like doing drugs, as if it would be consciousness out of control and therefore scary.

Tech geniuses like Lanier are a bit like that in toto-- "scary smart" with a polymathic ability to range across domains which can be intimidating. Admittedly, if I had enough financial freedom and confidence to just talk to whomever and write freely, I might do OK.

For the time being, maybe personal finance attracts me in its relative finiteness. Though it can be god-awful boring at times.

Hilary and the conservative impulse

This most surely is a kooky electoral season, as is evidenced by the fact that the NY Times today reported that some Republicans have come to the conclusion that, if push were actually to come to shove and Trump was their nominee, the only rational choice left to them would be to vote for Hilary.

I must confess that, deep within myself, I know that in fact the impulse to vote for Hilary is in many ways driven by a certain conservatism. Watching Bernie posture and orate reminds me of the old saw, that, and I don't have this verbatim, that if you are not a socialist at the age of 20 you have no heart, but if you aren't a conservative at the age of 50 you have no brain. Bernie is a beautiful soul, his heart is in the right place, but so much of what he advocates is impracticable and would impact the USA negatively.  In saying that, I am reiterating if not outright regurgitating what many others have said and say daily.

And it feels right for me to say it because I am such an outlandish beneficiary of the status quo, and therefore am deeply bought in. In so many ways, I am rentier coasting on quantitative easing. I could explain that, but it would take to long to do so and I have to take Graham to the library and then to the school to kick a soccer ball.  Just the fact that our library and school facilities are good enough to be worth going to tells a story right there.

Therefore, I vote for Hilary because she's the most likely not to upset the apple cart, while doing ethically defensible things, for the most part. And yes, because she is ultimately the most qualified of all the candidates, but that's just what makes it easier to vote for the one who won't rock my world.

Turning 50

I was corresponding with a high school friend this week who said she was freaking out about turning 50, I honestly hadn't reflected on it that much, though I am ever mindful that the half-century mark si coming up for me mighty soon, but now that I pause to think about it maybe it has been weighing on me more than I care to admit.

40 was big, and I marked it with an excellent party in Chapel Hill with some of my oldest friends, even though I lived in Princeton at the time. For 50 I haven't planned an event, somehow I am slightly loath to do so, but why?  At some level I must confess it is probably driven by a little bit of shame about where I am professionally, which I conceive on most days as struggling to get my practice up and running.

Why I can't view myself as ever building towards living the dream, that I can't tell you. I do know that I can't help but to compare myself to peers who are more stable and are just flat out kicking ass on many cylinders. I know that I profit little by doing so, and even hurt myself by doing so, but it is hard to break the pattern.

Frankly, it is only by getting out and putting myself into positive contexts that remind me of how fortunate I am that I am able to get a proper perspective. Which is why I have to keep doing that. Also getting plenty of sleep helps too.

Time to take Graham to martial arts.

The value of insurance

At a Chamber of Commerce lunch today, I was blathering to someone next to me in line as I squeezed the bbq sauce bottle, which was a little stuffed up, and it went all over my white shirt. Luckily, I had another, brand new white shirt in a drawer at work, and I put that one on.  My former colleague Elizabeth had left a bottle of some sort of spray-on that was designed for carpet cleaning and which, naturally, was effective on getting a stain out of a white shirt. So the one I put on this morning is fine again now.

Baring it all, or not

On the way back from a leads group this morning I heard on NPR about alarmingly high suicide rates amongst those who are on reality TV. I hadn't stopped to consider the relationship between reality TV and the social media phenomenon, the whole idea of normal people living their lives increasingly in public, baring more and more to more and more of the world. I'm sure there are reams of books on this topic, they just are in the category of ones I haven't read.

It took me back to Jaron Lanier's book and how I need to push through to the end of it. As well as Knausgaard, who apparently screwed up many of his own relationships by being too open in his series.

I have long made it a practice not to talk too much about work or marriage here on the Grouse. I sometimes feel disingenuous in putting this limit on it, because these are big factors in my life, to be sure, and there are stressors in each of them. But I know in the end this is a rational limit, because I am basically fortunate to have both work and to be married, that nothing in life is perfect, that all problems are to be worked through, and it just doesn't make sense to open the kimono too far to too many.

Then there's the whole other angle of performativity, the shaping of one's life by its being a performance. There are many angles to this. Back to work.

Sneaking it in, almost

At a beach house with friends, in an exceptionally nice place, it must be owned.  After a breakfast made late by our own drowsiness, everyone else walked off to the beach to begin the day's excursions and activities. I feel that's a little like trying to make the European trip of 12 countries in 5 weeks. I am also a little lazy.

So Knausgaard and I repaired to the roof deck, where I sat in the son and a gentle breeze and listened to birds, interrupted only by the gentle and ever present droning of climate control and yes, a small plane or two off in the distance. As he rounds the corner towards the end of Book 2 of My Struggle, which has been a harder slog than Book 1, Knausgaard is beginning to tie things up.  400 pages after we left him, we are reunified with him as he smokes a cigarette after the 50 page birthday party which began the book. 10 pages after that, we rejoin him and his whole family as they leave some playground where he and his wife had been fuming at each other at the very beginning of the book, I think. The whole thing coheres more and more. There is method to his at times seeming overindulgence in detail.

Over breakfast here in this bastion of the almost if not quite 1% there were typical discussions of for-profit corporations and the need for more regulation thereof and income inequality. It always makes me feel more than a little guilty, given what I do for a living, which is help people hold onto their money, and much of that involves counseling them to think about the ways the US tax code incents certain behaviors. To be sure, most of my clients don't have enough money to be doing anything exotic. It's all about 401ks, 403bs, 529s, being mindful of capital gains, holding onto receipts associated with legitimate business expenses, etc.

A loud noise just came on downstairs.  The pump?  Hard to say. Too loud to think and write, that's for sure.

At any rate, back to my initial premise for this post, sitting there on the roof, in the sun and the breeze, I was reminded of you, my reader, and our implicit contract. That is, it was a quiet time on Saturday morning, the mind was relaxed and fruitful, therefore it was time to Grouse.

The need for humanists

Bill Gates came out with his annual letter yesterday.  I haven't read it yet, but I did read excerpts from an interview he did in connection with it, in which he says this.

If you zoom out a little bit, and you look at the acceleration of science over the past 100 years, and the basic understanding we have gained and the tools we have, and the percentage of people in the world getting literate and getting engineering degrees, those numbers are on the constant rise.

Of course the humanist in me wishes he had rued the absence of people getting humanities degrees, but he didn't. The market pricing of those certainly indicates that the world thinks it is getting enough of them, and it is always difficult to argue with the market.

Certainly the humanities have done a good job of shooting themselves in the foot by trying to be ever holier in thou in their calls for ever greater purity and complexity around a greater number of granular behavioral standards. Although, at root, humanists are trying to address the big questions, they all too often shy away from letting the questions stay big and letting students wrestle with them to apply the big to the small in their own lives. Instead, they concentrate on the small, and treat lack of fealty thereto as treason against the big.

Buried deep within the current state of the humanities is a belief that absolute progress in ethics can be made, that we can stand on the shoulders of our elders. I tend to doubt that, though certainly our legal code and institutional infrastructure can instantiate progress, individuals must individually come to their own understandings of and positions on the big questions.

Then again, the fact that more than enough people go out and get degrees in the humanities and social sciences at least attests to the fact that lots of people really do want to do good. And the drift of people like Gates from tooth and nail profit-making to trying to address the big questions also attests to the fact that the big questions eventually exert their pull on, if not everyone, than many.

So maybe we don't need more humanists. But we could use more respect, if only we could earn it.

Downton Abbey, the final season

I will say this. They have been digging deep to make a plot in this season's Downton Abbey, and at times it has been slow going and has even gotten quite silly. But I am OK with that. Yes, the show is sentimental and maudlin and hopelessly idealize, but it still works for me, and it works on me. Almost every week, I find myself moved to tears by some stupid little crap. Somebody steps up and does something large and magnanimous and it is moving.

I will be sad to see it end. Then, what will I have to get Mary to come sit on the couch with me and watch TV with any regularity at all? PBS has itself not found a worthy heir.

Watching Star Trek

I see from a quick scan of the blog that I have mentioned watching Star Trek with Graham a number of times over the last year, which is not surprising, because we have been doing it regularly. As the Grouse has matured over the years, I have drifted ever more into the reflective mode, veering away from the descriptive, archival purpose that was one of the things I was trying to do when I started: just write down what I was doing and what it felt like. More for the future me than for non-me readers in the present.

Actually watching Star Trek: Next Generation with Graham goes like this. First, we wedge ourselves into the armchair in the corner, which is itself a venerable artefact, having been bought right when Mary and I started going out right at 21 years ago. The chair has survived quite a lot, two infants/toddlers and a dog. We'll leave it at that. Right now, it is beginning to disintegrate in places, hastened, I believe, by the extra wear and tear of the two of us sitting there. Oh well, it is rather cozy. I will be sad when we are too big to sit there together. We hold hands a lot.

After the 2-3 minute segment introducing the plot runs, the theme music and opening credits start rolling. I personally like to whistle the theme, but Graham finds that "incredibly annoying," so I have desisted. How I wish we could ban the use of the word "annoying" from our household, but that would be hard.

Then the show starts in earnest. Graham often takes exception to technical details in the plot, little bits of illogic therein. So he starts to blather about them and try to essentially outsmart the script writers. His objections may actually delve into correction of Trekie pseudoscience, pointing out how one episode contradicts another: ("In the episode with the Quillians they said that an antimatter-matter imbalance would result in an implosion, not an explosion," something like that) I'm sure I did this when I was younger. Shit, I kind of do it now.

But when we are mashed together in the armchair, I am often trying to follow the plot myself and either do my best to ignore him or shush him. I don't know if that's the best tactic, but I'll be damned if I don't want to follow the show.

On days when I am very tired, I may lean my head back and drift off to sleep a little. Honestly, that's the best.

Earning Spring

It's supposed to be a very mild, Spring-like day today here, following a short period of wintry weather, and I can't shake the feeling that Spring has, in some way, not been earned.  I probably don't need to dig back too far to figure out where this line of thinking/feeling originates:  it feels rather Christian, WASPy, this idea that good things must be earned by depriving yourself of them, and that you can't just have them because they are there.

In fact, I half wonder whether this attitude might not be shaded by the
fact that the Christian worldview was so intensively formed within the 4-season paradigm of Europe. Certainly Ecclesiastes 3 ("To everything, there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven") was written within a climatic zone where the difference between winter and summer was less dramatic than what people experienced in temperate Europe, and in particular the northern Europe whence Protestantism and its intense notions of predestination took shape. But it certainly feels right that the northern seasons imbued the cyclical worldview of Ecclesiastes with deeper coloring. I would be shocked if there aren't a number of books written about this topic.

Speaking of cyclicality and earning things in a fundemental, ethical sense, there's also the question of demographics, market cycles, and debt, and the way generations lord their sacrifices over on their kids and grandkids. So people brought up during the Depression and the "The Greatest Generation" guilt-tripped to Boomers about their consumption and failure to save.  Or the deep anxiety and recrimination we feel about taking on huge amounts of federal debt for our kids to pay off during a period of negatively shifting dependency ratios (i.e. lower ratio of workers to retirees).

To bring it back to my initial point: lurking inches behind my feelings about "earning Spring" is the worry about global warming, of course, and we all know that has been foisted upon our children.

Then there's the issue of my always trying to interpret things based on religious-cultural background. Sometimes I think the course that I took with Juan Linz based on Weber's Economy and Society back in my sophomore year in college influenced my thinking so profoundly precisely because I did so little of the reading, because it was so boring.

All the Rage

I had the pleasure of joining in a viewing of Suki Hawley and Michael Galinsky's work in progress All the Rage, a documentary about John Sarno, an NYU-based physician whose radical work on back pain and pain in general, which focuses intensively on the connection between mind, emotion and body and rejects musculo-skeletal determinism prevalent in mainstream medicine. Sarno has not, to be sure, been a figure welcomed in the medical establishment.

The film focuses just as much on Galinsky and his family's own connection to Sarno. First his father, than his twin brother, then Michael have been helped if not permanently cured of back pain and other issues by Sarno, and Michael's desire to legitimize and raise consciousness around Sarno's work has been a long-running and entirely heartfelt effort for a goodly while by now. And it's more than that too, in many ways Galinsky is reaching to make a deep, holistic statement about life, family, ambition, self-worth, how we treat ourselves... there's a lot of stuff going on. You'll have to see it when it comes out.

But here's the thing. I identified with a lot of Michael's journey. We're from the same place, same generation, issues with dads (who doesn't have em), ambition, worrying about how what he does impacts his kids, blah blah blah, he's telling a universal story through his own experience, and in a very open way.

But my story, my conflicts with my dad and our own family narrative (including plenty of stuff from my mom's side has always been filtered through the lense of substance abuse and affective disorders. So when the film started trotting out statistics about how big of a problem chronic pain, and in particular back pain, was in America ("$600 billion annual economic impact") I found myself feeling left out. Because though I've had intermittent and sporadic issues with back pain, it's never been more than that, or so I was thinking...

And, sure enough, like clockwork, I had back pain when I went home that night. The same kind of seemingly causeless upper back pain that I've had before, now and again.  And of course, it has been recurring with greater frequency since then. It's almost like my back and my body are willing me to have recourse to Dr. Sarno and his book, because it seems like such an appealing paradigm: journaling, being in touch with the feelings which lie at the root of your pain, etc.

In the middle of writing this post, on a cold day, I drove out to big box land to get some running tights, having left my other ones in Larchmont over Christmas. I always leave something there. As I may have mentioned, I am no fan of the big boxes, and on my way out I found myself getting pissed off at a variety of Andy Rooney-type things: the traffic (which, viewed differently, is but a natural outgrowth of Chapel Hill's anti-development policy which pushes all that stuff out to the Durham border, and living in a succesful metro area), how expensive stuff is (anger and shame at myself for not having found the fabled easy path to sustainable revenue).  And yes, my back was twinging, though it abated a bit as I looked at those pulling into the shopping center and saw how many lands they seemed to hail from. Made me proud for a moment to be in a reasonably hospitable corner of America.

More time passed, ice came down over a long weekend, and I realized that I in fact have had more intermittent back pain than I was giving myself credit for. Had I not, for example, called up my friend David the neurologist at some point in time and gotten a reference to a book about exercises to do to calm the aches back there? Had I not had Graham walk on my back many many times? Did I not, after many months of working through the CFP curriculum, start standing at my desk for 3-4 hours a day to mitigate pain.

Oh yes, gentle reader, all of these things are true, all of them I have done. I have just not focused on my back pain as being a core issue. But now, my back hurts. I am in the game. Better get the book, and add it to the pile.

Competition, self-promotion

I just scrolled through Facebook and was happy and supportive of every post I saw until I came to the post of someone who was promoting their work. An actual friend, someone who has been successful and has worked his/her butt off to do so, someone who has fought past a type of adversity I have not and has done so with aplomb. Yes, it is also someone with some issues, for sure, who has been involved in conflicts with friends and others I'm close to.

At any rate, I arrived at this self-promotional post and my la la everything is so happy and nice mood was spoiled.

But why? Who else do I expect will promote this person if not him/herself?  I know I have to push my own stuff, however conflicted I may be about doing so. Whence this instinct to compete at all times and therefore, at some level, to wish to tear others down? Where else but from my own self-image issues.

I must go back and like that post just now.

What we're burning

This winter we are burning through logs from the tree that was taken down in our front yard in November of  2013.  The wood from this tree was impossible to split at first, destroying a maul and then challenging me mightily even after I went out and got a shiny new axe. I remember whacking and flailing away at it futilely in the driveway as runners and walkers went by, with very limited success and no little embarassment.

So I let it dry for a year.  Much of it split better, I guess we burnt some of it last winter.

This winter it is burning quite nicely, thank you very much. Even some of the big pieces that weren't of a good shape to be split, those are burning too.  It is very gratifying.

A good portion of the tree was chipped and placed at the back of our lot. It was a big assed pile. I spread it out as mulch to try to suppress the growth of the dreaded Japanese Stiltgrass, which it has done fairly successfully. That was a laborious task.

I would say that we are putting this tree to good use. When it is gone, I may have to go out and actually purchase firewood, which will be a bummer.

Refreshment

Now is the time, after my regular Saturday morning meeting, when I have gotten in the habit of blogging.  Usually my mind feels refreshed by having gotten up and gotten out to see like-minded folx, and today that is true to a limited extent.

The truth is, I am worn down right now mentally, emotionally, what have you, by the yoinky markets and the challenge of building a business. I feel responsible, undoubtedly excessively so, for other people's financial situations. Which is silly, because I can't control the markets, I didn't drive my clients' savings behaviors that got them to where they are today, I can't understand all the nuances of federal, state and (this month) New York City and perhaps some international tax code, and I can't single-handedly change behaviors. But still, I put a lot on myself. I have to remember that I am a generalist, and need to call specialists all the time, and that I am just one guy. But I want to do it all right.

In the evening, I am often tired, and I have found myself watching whatever is on ESPN at times. The other night I watched Iowa play Indiana, and I must say that I found myself rooting for Indiana, and wanting to go back to that point in my childhood where Indiana and Bobby Knight were the enemy. Obviously, it was really a longing for Dean Smith, my ethical father figure, and the Cold War, when the Soviet Union was our ideological antipode and America's moral and ethical role in the world was relatively clear.

It's also just nice to watch kids work hard towards a well-defined goal with clearly defined rules. In the end, the thing about sports is they are a pretty simple narrative, and one that is easily graspable, so long as you know the rules. If you get to know the players, so much the better.

As I watched, I also found myself loving, strangely enough, Dick Vitale. Indiana's point guard shot a three from 28 feet or so out and Vitale calls out "He launched one from Indianapolis!"  A couple of minutes later, they showed a replay and he said exactly the same thing. Rather than being annoyed, I was comforted by the familiar voice and, frankly, the genuine enthusiasm. Annoying as he may be, I think Vitale basically loves the game, and what's not to like about that?

Last night, I remembered that I could watch Netflix, specifically Aziz Ansari's Master of None. Ansari is a very special guy, smart, earnest, funny, in all ways a great American and the hope of our nation: an immigrant kid with an open mind and heart and courage.

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.