Thuggishness and history

Today in the Journal Sam Walker has a piece about how calculated thuggishness and rule-breaking is rewarded. He specifically cites the instance of Real Madrid's Sergio Ramos taking down Liverpool's Mohammed Salah in the Champions League final, injuring the Egyptian's shoulder and taking him out of the game, part of what led to Real Madrid's 3-1 victory (on top of errors on the part of the Liverpudlian goalkeeper that are basically unforgivable at this level of soccer).

On his overall point, he is right. The decision on whether to adhere to or break rules is always and everywhere a risk-reward calculation. Almost everywhere and at almost all times, people are happy to go 67 in a 55 and the cops will let it go. Going 73 in a 55 is a different version of the same calculation.

But what Ramos did to Salah is different, for a variety of reasons. Salah is the greatest new star in the soccer firmament, a joy to watch, comparable only to Messi in his creativity (Christiano Ronaldo is different because he is taller and faster and his technical virtuosity is of a different type). So hurting him robs us all of a source of delight.

More importantly, Salah is Muslim, and he celebrates goals on the pitch with displays of Muslim devotion. Therefore, taking him down on the world stage -- as Ramos did -- will surely have been interpreted in terms of the Dar-al-Islam vs. Dar-al-Harb, or echos of the Reconquista, in many places where people gather around the Islamic world. Ramos is fucking Spanish, think about it. We don't need this kind of shit in a world where we are still trying to figure out how Judaeo-Christendom and the Islamic world can best coexist.

If you think that's stretching things, just consider that soccer is played with low scores and low margins for error. Every goal in major competitions is remembered by fans. Sergio Ramos is a great defender, but he is basically a thug in much of his game. He has been for a long time. This level of calculated cynicism debases the beautiful game.

Twilight of the luxury brands?

Today's Journal was filled with interesting stuff, but perhaps the most heartening was a little note about an unexpected way the food and beverage value chain is being disrupted. Specifically, how German discount grocer Aldi has produced a scotch that won a rating in a taste-test by liquor industry professionals that exceeded that of some Chivas Regal premium label, but costs half as much.

I love this stuff. The guy through the wall from me at my last office, a CEO at a medical devices company, and I were always comparing the quality of cheap K-cups of coffee from places like Aldi and Costco to Starbucks. Starbucks is still better, to my mind, but doesn't necessarily justify a 40-cent unit-cost premium for everyday drinking.

The important thing is this: if companies can make great stuff cheaper and challenge incumbent brands, that is just awesome. It means people's return on an hour of labor -- measured in quantity/quality of goods purchased, gets better. It's all good.

Buffett liked to call out See's Candies as an example of a really successful business that was not capital-intensive, and therefore had high margins. The flipside of it is that these businesses are therefore dependent on the quality of their brands, which ultimately consists in a few of things: dependable and consistent quality of product, metonymy with economic class association (i.e. you feel affluent because you buy it), and perhaps some quasi-Proustian connection to an earlier-in-life experience on the part of the consumer. Most of the price may be built into the second two, which in some cases may afford the producing firms a surplus margin which lets them focus on culture within their firms, which lets them focus on product quality.

If great product development and execution can nail the product quality question, and marketing and social networks can get the word out, it will exert pricing pressure on all producers and ultimately result in a better unit cost of quality for everybody. I for one would rather not pay more for a brand.

Pride, and shame

Natalie gave the valedictory address at ECHHS graduation on Saturday in the Dean Dome, and she did an awesome job. To be clear, she was one of 35 valedictorians in a class of 400ish, but, of those, only five wanted to speak, and they all submitted speeches which were anonymized and then voted on by all 35. So she won a little competition, fair and square, to be able to speak. Go Natalie!

When I posted pix of her talking on Facebook, Mary wanted to add a note of clarification about her being only one of thirty-five, and part of me wanted to do that too. But this instinct to not self-promote, motivated by some WASP sense of justice and modesty, is one of the things that hold us back commercially as a family. Not that we are starving, but we perhaps make things harder for ourselves than we need to.

On Friday night, there was a smaller ceremony just for the valedictorians and their families. At this one, all 35 had a chance to get up and address the crowd. One of them took the opportunity to promote a small business he and a friend were starting. I can't remember what the business was, but I have to give him props for making use of the opportunity. He had a ready-made audience of what can be assured was, on average, a pretty high-achieving and affluent cohort. He was handed the mike, and he asked for business. That is a good instinct. One has relatively few free opportunities in life handed to one on a silver platter, and you gotta run with them.

Figuring out exactly what it is you want to do with them, aye, there's the rub.

A dream

Graham had to be at Phillips at 7 this morning to get on a bus for a field trip to Carowinds. It was my job to get him there, and my alarm was set a little early. Naturally, I was in waking mode prior to the alarm going off.

While I was in that state, I had one of those dreams. I had agreed to leave my car somewhere so it could be used by my friend Nick. The place where I was was a shifting amalgam of Princeton and Chapel Hill, so the parking spot I was leaving the car in had features of each place, now the train station, now a shopping center. The car I was leaving was the old Volvo, the blue 240 I had inherited from mom right after Mary and I got married, actually the car my mom bought as a present to herself upon her divorce from my dad (odd to think how quickly one event followed upon the other, within the lifetime of one car). At one point in the dream it seemed to me that the car was a convertible and I couldn't figure out where the button was to put the top back up, which was important because for some reason I had agreed to leave my phone in the car for Nick's use.

My friend Elizabeth was with me and I felt some responsibility for getting her to the train station on time. Therefore I felt time pressure.

At a very high level, I think the key thing about this dream is that I had overextended myself for some reason. Why was I leaving Nick my car? More importantly, my phone? Why did I feel responsibility for getting Elizabeth to the station on time?  Or, fundamentally, why did my subconscious load all these additional burdens onto itself?

It is probably not entirely incidental that today is my wedding anniversary, and therefore also Natalie's birthday, and also Leslie's, facts that have been obscured in the lead up to Natalie's graduation this weekend and the arrival of guests (Rob and Mary Lee) and the graduation party we are throwing. Things that kinda slipped my mind as I was focused on getting Graham ready for his field trip -- the first big school field trip he has ever gone on.

The Club

On Saturday I talked to Graham about going to play tennis at "The Club." It turns out, he was a little confused about what I meant by that, not clearly identifying "The Club" with the Farm, or Faculty Club, where he is used to swimming. So he thought we were going to a club where "everybody looked like they were out of a Patek Philippe commercial, like wearing khakis and the khaki version of shirts." We got him straightened out.

ER visits

As we approach Natalie's graduation and 18th birthday this weekend I have reflected a little on this parenting thing. One success metric which came to mind is number of visits to the emergency room.  In 33-child years of parenting (Natalie 18 + Graham ~15), we have been to the ER a grand total of 3 times:

1. When Natalie was just a baby I came home and Mary was freaked out because Natalie was puking, but mostly because Mary had left her on the bed earlier and she had fallen down and Mary was terrified and ashamed that she had had a nasty bonk that was the cause of the puking. So we took her down to the ER, and they checked Natalie out and even did an MRI. I remember Natalie as 15-month old or whatever with her little head in the MRI looking up at us all WTF as we held her hand and sang "Bah Bah Black sheep" or something to keep her calm and still.
   
   She was fine. She must have eaten something or had a little bug. Hence the puking.
2. We had gone up to Chester, NJ to do some antiquing when Graham was two or so, so Natalie must have been five. Mary was having fun, but the kids were bored as hell and I was taking care of them. It was winter, so we had on coats and gloves. We were crossing the street and Graham was pulling away from me real hard and his glove came off, so he banged his head on the street. It was a rough pavement, so he had a pretty decent gash in his forehead and I picked him up and he was bleeding all over me and I freaked out a bit. I called Mary on her cell and yelled at her and she came over and we put Graham down on the sidewalk. Somebody had the bright idea of immobilizing his head. An ambulance came, and we rode to an ER 25 minutes away.
   
   Turns out he was fine. If you cut your forehead like that, it just bleeds a lot.
3. We were up at Kate's place at Canandaigua and Natalie stood up and hit her head, then got a little woozy. Mary was at Wegman's with Carol and David and Maxie, so I had all the girls: Natalie, Helen, Margaret, and also Graham. I had to take all the kids to the ER, and had to put Margaret in the front seat. Being a rule-follower by nature, she was a little scandalized by that. Helen was in the back seat with Natalie and Graham. Natalie let her head fall towards Helen but she was having none of that, and pushed Natalie's head a little cavalierly.
   
   This time, Natalie actually had a little concussion, and was unable to swim with the other kids for a day or so. This occasioned a little meltdown, as was documented here back when it actually happened.

In some ways I almost view this low incidence of ER visits as a parental failing, to the extent that it represents super high risk aversion on the part of my kids. There was something magical in the way that, as a child, I would break a bone or something and it would hurt like fuck, and then we'd go to the ER and they'd calm it and me down and all was better. Somehow this experience taught me that the world would figure shit out, that all would be in order no matter what despite immediate indications to the contrary. But you have to test fate to get to that understanding. Perhaps.

Deep Space 9: The Final Frontier?

Graham and I finished watching DS 9 some months ago, I probably shared about it. At that point in time I, for one, was excited about continuing on to watch Star Trek: Voyager, and I thought Graham was too. There was just the little matter of finishing up with The Blacklist. 

However, I have since learned that Graham is not psyched at all to watch Voyager. It looks increasingly like it may never happen. When Graham forms an opinion of something, it tends to stick.

I am very sad about this. For one, I just enjoy watching something with him every night, curling up under a blanket on the couch and chilling. Really it's about physical contact with a loved one. Watching Brooklyn 99 with Natalie is plenty good, and he often joins us so that is double fun, but I know that's gonna end.

But Star Trek has special status in the world of watching because, frankly, it is generally positive in orientation., unlike most crime shows It may take multiple episodes, but eventually the good guys win.  And like all of Star Trek, it is resolutely multi-species, multi-cultural. There are positive characters from generally negative species. The core team shows they love each other in surprising ways, especially when the ultra-mercantile Ferengi Quark backhandedly demonstrates his affection for the changeling cop Odo. All kinds of good stuff.

I would like more. I think perhaps I should suggest to Graham that we together go to a Trekkie convention to rekindle his interest.

The center of it all

In Stegner's Crossing to Safety, there is a moment when the narrator describes the writing cabin of the father of one of the protagonists up at their summer lake house in Vermont, and as evidence of his level of abstraction and distance shows him working on the Bogomils and Albigensians. My heart, of course, fairly leaped at this little point.

There was a moment when I was working on my dissertation, call it 1995-96, where the confluence of Bogomils and Albigensians seemed right at the heart of it all. The Bogomils were a sect that, in their day -- 12th-13th century, somewhere in there -- were amongst Slavic lands most popular in what subsequently became Bosnia. It was their relative success that made Orthodoxy weakest amongst the Bosnians, so when the Ottomans came through a couple of centuries later, Bosnians converted to Islam, whereas those who later came to call themselves Serbs and Bulgarians stayed true to Christianity. All of which was a precondition to the wars in Bosnia in the mid-90s, in which Islamic patriots from as far away as Afghanistan came and fought.

The Albigensians were a Western outcropping of the same heresy, centered in Languedoc, over between Provence and the Pyrenees. In his 1939 classic, Love in the Western World, Denis de Rougemont somehow tied the Albigensians into the concept of tragic love that became the norm in Western romance, such as that of Lancelot and Guinevere.

So, at one feverish moment when I was deep in my dissertation on the allegorical nature of love narratives in the Russian and western novel, the Bogomil/Albigensian thing somehow was a big freaking deal, it tied together what I was working on and what I was seeing in the headlines, and made me feel like I had my hand on the pulse of history. I'll be damned if I remember exactly how it all fit together, but it did. In Stegner's novel, nobody wants to talk to the old scholar about the Bogomils, after lunch they send him packing back up to his little scholarly shed, but I would totally have loved to talk to the guy. For 10 minutes or so. Then I too would have fallen prey to the blandishments of the lake.

Archival post

Easing into this Memorial Day. Mary is away in Georgia with her photography school buddies, we're planning to have sushi with mom this evening in Carrboro. It's overcast now, and I slept in as I'm still recovering from four days of talking to people up north.

While I was up at Yale I talked for a little while to a guy who was in my residential college, but whom I didn't know well at all, to say the least. It turns out we're in the same business, nominally, though firm now manages about $28 billion with about 30 employees, orders of magnitude more than we do. I will confess to getting curious, and I looked him up at the SEC web site and also using the Google. I was somewhat comforted to see that he is in a family business, which was founded by his dad. His lifestyle was evident on the web, and he's just a ton richer than I am. His vacation house is crazy nice. He basically lives on another planet.

But the fact of the matter is that the planet I live on is just fine. Last night Graham and Natalie and I had poached eggs and asparagus with nice bread from Whole Foods (Natalie's idea). Actually Graham ate chicken. Then we gathered under the very soft blanket on the couch and watched two episodes of "Brooklyn 99." Then I watched Lebron finish off the Celtics, which was pretty boring basketball, but I have to admire him and them for getting that done in Boston.

Graham, who acceded to getting a haircut yesterday, just emptied the dishwasher and went to the curb to bring in the recycling container and get the mail. All without having been asked to do so. Then I came downstairs, with the intent of checking to see if Graham had any homework to work on before his friend came over. He was sitting on the couch working on something, "also hanging out with Rascal," he added. Rascal is sitting in one of her favorite spots on the couch, the same spot where she hunkered in amongst 70-80 people when we did a fundraiser for Josh in January.

I haven't heard Natalie fill the dishwasher. I may have to ask her. Then again, she is probably reading Anna Karenina, of her own choosing, which ain't chopped liver.

Oh yeah, yesterday Natalie had a young man over to bake scones. I will omit his name out of respect for his confidentiality, but he was a very nice young fellow. They baked both scones and banana bread. For some reason the boys at East never seem to have appreciated what a lovely young lady we have raised. Maybe she intimidated them.

On the pond again

And so, the spring travel season draws to a close. Over 8 weeks, Charleston, some swamp near Columbia, Seattle, Greenville, Asheville, New York, New Haven.

This week's was a particularly long trip, four long days, three nights, a little too late in the season from a weather perspective, though somehow I didn't wilt in Manhattan in black jeans when it was maybe 90 out. Perhaps it is a sign of aging, my mother's mild cold-naturedness setting in. How many people did I talk to, 35, 40? It's a total blur, as reunions often are.

Late Saturday at LaGuardia it was practically desolate. I suppose everyone had already hied off to wherever they were going.

Pressing forward with Wallace Stegner's Crossing to Safety, per Emily's suggestion. When I started it, I first thought "ugh, On Golden Pond with higher sheen," but there is something about it that is worthwhile, earnest. Fact is, I actually liked On Golden Pond, though I imagine it would be feel like a period piece of its own by now.

Romance

Watching the pilot for "The Office" with Graham last night, trying to figure out what we'll watch together next. Afterwards, Graham said he didn't like the Pam-Jim plot line. "You mean the romance?" I asked. He said yes. He also said he had a list of other shows that were ruined by romance plot lines.

We're getting there.

Parallels

Late yesterday afternoon, on Facebook, I came across a post from someone I know from high school. Her son, whose middle name was Clark, had died at the age of 25. I looked closely. He was a musician who had struggled with mental illness and substance abuse, and finally lost his struggle. The specifics weren't clear, they do not matter.

All I can say is that I am infinitely fortunate to have found help when I did, at the age of 24, helped on by conscientious law enforcement and mental health professionals, and also that my challenges came to light when they did historically, long before it was socially acceptable for middle-class kids to dabble in opiates.

It was late in the day when I saw the post. After reading the kid's obit, I packed up my computer and went home to see my family.

The beginning, not the end

I have to keep telling myself that. I was just ordering tickets for Natalie's last show at East, and I had "an emotional moment", as men say (i.e. I started crying). The idea that she's leaving continues to be pretty overwhelming.

In happier news, we were delighted to hear that Brooklyn 99 has been picked up by another network. Natalie and I have been watching in recent months on one of the streaming services.  We have a tradition of singing along to the theme music, developed during Parks and Rec and The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. Since there are no words to the theme for this show, we dance.

Before sitting down on the couch with me and getting under the couch (where she sticks her feet in my lap and wiggles her toes to beg for a foot and calf rub), Natalie gets a jar full of "bubbly" (i.e. sparkling water), so we have bubbly together. All very civilized.

The archive

Yesterday at Mother's Day dinner Natalie started asking about when she learned to read, so I checked the archive, which is of course this here blog. Somewhere in there I found this post detailing what the putting the kids to bed routine looked like back in December 2005. Natalie really dug it.

And I will confess that those posts, the deeply archival ones, personal memories, are the ones that I like best too, when I re-read them. All the philosophizing comes off a little shallow. Though I am who I am, and I gotta be me somehow.

So perhaps I should rededicate myself to the memoiristic function, perhaps with the aid of family photos.

As for yesterday, I attacked several of those chores which needed to be done, though a couple of them were over my head. Often, I just need professional help. I am not mr fix-it.

Late in the day I went for a swim, really planning to wake my swimming muscles up from their slumber. While on Saturday I play 80 minutes of soccer in the mid-day heat and came out sore but fine, yesterday swimming for maybe 15 minutes totally called out to a bunch of muscles that had forgotten they had work to do. Bodies are wierd.

Just walking down to the lake, swimming, and coming back, I ran into and talked to 15 people.

Natalie pitched in and went to the store for flowers and asparagus, then cooked a little. Graham swept the back deck, including the seam between the deck and the wall, which he felt was a little futile. I explained to him the Pareto Principle, that the first 20% of effort typically gives you 80% of the benefit of the whole kit and kaboodle. Hopefully he got it.

Mother's Day

Somehow, it is almost noon.  I promise I haven't been just messing around all morning. I have been reading, sent some important emails, renewing books, put in laundry...

And yet, somehow it is almost noon and it feels as if I am way behind in the list of things I should be getting done for Mother's Day, primarily things related to home improvement. Things I hate thinking about but generally feel good about having done once I have done them, however half-assedly.

They include:

1. Get ashes out of fireplace
2. Caulk around back of kitchen sink
3. Assemble coffee table for porch
4. Take Subaru to car wash, clean it up, take pix and post to Craigslist so I can get some $ out of this thing before I fall entirely in love with it
5. Sweep pollen off of back porch (the ultimate Sisyphian chore)
6. Make sure I have all I need to cook dinner
7. Fix faucet in Graham's bathroom (before Mary's mom and Rob come for Natalie's graduation
   
   Also
   
8. Go for long swim in lake
9. Try to talk Graham into getting a haircut.  If so, get it done (mine too)

That's a lot of stuff. Better hop to it.

The world on my coffee table

Some months back I got basically free subscriptions to a bunch of magazines out of unused airline miles: Inc, Fast Company, and News China.  Mostly they sit on the coffee table and gather dust along with alumni mags and things like North Carolina Agriculture that I pick up at conferences. I barely scratch the surface of the Journal on a daily basis and The Economist weekly.

Which is a shame, particularly in the case of News China, a shared venture with Newsweek. Although it is totally state-sponsored media, undoubtedly heavily vetted and blessed by Chinese censors, it nonetheless provides a lot of insight into what's going on in China. Which is, not surprisingly, a lot. Today I picked up and article about a guy who custom paints sneakers, and does an awesome job, charging $100-$300 per pair.

It is not surprising to see this happening in China. On the one hand, I remember well how David Winters, the portfolio manager at the Wintergreen Fund, was some years ago very heavily overweight luxury watch manufacturers on the theory that the emerging Chinese middle class favored watches as a means of displaying wealth because they couldn't do it with their homes (everybody lives in apartments) or cars (too expensive to keep and maintain for many, plus no driveways to park them in). Then there was the West African guy -- a friend of my friend Alan -- who told of travelling to China just on an exploratory trip and discovering that in Beijing there is a shopping mall dedicated to nothing but sneakers. Ponder that.

I also had momentary twinges of guilt upon reading the article, because I really haven't taken the kids travelling as much as would be ideal. Natalie is headed off to college and has never been to Asia. Shit, I've never been to Asia. Graham would at least love the dumplings and noodles, even if he was exhausted and overwhelmed by the travel.

In any case, Natalie will get there one day if she really wants to. As will I.

Autism, individuality, and the division of labor

Richard Grinker of George Washington University came and talked at Duke a couple of weeks ago as part of Autism Awareness Month. He had a very interesting and thoughful presentation on autism, mental illness, and stigma. One of the most fundamental points he made was that capitalism, to the extent that it forcibly normalizes a model in which people grow up, leave home, find a place in the global economic machine, and replicate the model in their own families -- stigmatizes those who are challenged, through no fault of their own, in so doing. Good point.

As a counter-example Grinker, an anthropologist, told the story of a kid in some African tribe who was non-verbal, probably autistic, but had a remarkable facility with understanding the sheep and getting them in and out from pasture, finding lost ones, something like that. This kid, his point was, has no place in modern, thoroughly functionalized, societies.  I get that. It rings true and, by pointing out that an modern economic construct unnecessarily stigmatizes people who don't conform, is humane and hopeful.

However, we can flip this. Thinking back to economist Ryan Avent's work (see Kindle single The Gated City) on the benefits of highly granularized division of labor and how it boosts aggregate productivity, it's easy to argue that the only way we get an anthropologist who can tell the autism story in this way is through capitalism: i.e. we need very fine-grained division of labor, high amounts of generalized economic surplus, for Roy Grinker's work to exist.

In AA yesterday I was thinking about how this phenomenon connects as well to the effacing of individuality and regionalism and the increase in homogeneity in the corporate workplace. There is a tendency amongst the cultural elite to decry this cultural flattening. But the fact of the matter is, that to have people on far-flung teams working together, they have to be able to work together on things like conference calls, which means their language must be more or less interoperable. And they must be expected to behave more or less the same way. You can't have people being perceived to undercut and diss one another in emails, text threads, conference calls etc. because they have different dialects, intonational patterns, and in jokes. Team players have to gravitate towards a center, more or less, to be able to work together and get the benefits of working in a corporation (so you don't have to hunt down specialized vendors and service providers every time you need one - which takes time. This was the essential insight of Ronald Coase into the nature of firms: see this thumbnail). It is sad that individuality suffers. People need to reclaim that for themselves.

As in so many things, there is a need for balance between the One and the Many, and lord knows it's complicated.

Knocked off kilter

Came upstairs with the firm intent of writing something and then got derailed by my phone beeping: somebody wants to move this meeting by 30 minutes, somebody else wants confirmation on dinner. I got sucked into an article about how the Indonesian market has been hit hard over the last few days, and how a bunch of very wealthy people, including Betsy Devos, have gotten spanked by the collapse of Theranos. That's why they are "accredited investors." They can take those losses, and anybody who put a bunch of money into a company because its blonde, attractive, twenty-something female CEO did a remarkable imitation of Steve Jobs deserves to get spanked.

This is how it unfolds.

But now I have to get on the road.

The Cave

I hadn't been there for many years, I don't know how many. Certainly I hadn't hung out there since I quit drinking, so a quarter century or so. But I was sad to hear that it was closing, so, after some internal back and forth, I pulled on some jeans after Graham and I had watched our show yesterday evening and went up there.

It was packed, sweaty, and stinky. At first I didn't see anybody I knew, just an endless sea of people who looked like I used to look back in the day. Scruffy, bearded, smelly, funky. They looked right past me as if I wasn't there, because to them I was just encroaching on their scene and its twilight. I would have done the same in my day.

Then I found a few people I knew and settled in. A few more happened by. Also a guy who had a pretty decent-sized dog on his shoulders. There was barely room for him to make it through the crowd. The dog was remarkably chill.

I was surprised and pleased to see the size of the crowd, it made me nostalgic for those "good old days." In truth, they weren't all that great, as epochs of my life go. The years between college and grad school were hard times, I was fucked up and kind of clueless. But I was surrounded by similar people who supported me, and they were by no means bad people, just wayward idealists, many of them with substance abuse problems. But not evil. A necessary part of society. It is sad to figure out where they will go in Chapel Hill in the future. Probably Durham. Hopefully Roxboro, eventually. We have some land to sell, and the "creative class" plays an important role in the lifecycle of communities.

At the same time, I've started reading Leslie Jamison's The Recovering, in which she details her own path to sobriety. In the early chapters she focuses a lot on the mythology of the drunken writer which guided her in some of her early days:  Dylan Thomas, John Berryman, Raymond Carver, Elizabeth Bishop, Jean Rhys. Frankly, I am bored by that stuff. I think her editor could have trimmed a little.

But I'll keep going.

Western swing

Drove west late in the week, first to Greenville, SC, then to Asheville for a conference. I was mostly on interstates, so I didn't really see anything interesting -- though looking at the construction on 85 near Kannapolis and how it looked like they were putting in drains in the area between the east- and westbound lanes got me to thinking -- on the drive back, on how that might be a limiting factor on whether or not to plant trees there in the median.

I mean, really, why don't they?  In some places they do, in others they don't. It seems like trees in the middle of interstates would be an unalloyed good: shade, carbon sink, noise dampening, etc. Then again, maybe they would be just another thing for people to run into and kill themselves, plus they would shed leaves (or pine needles) that would need to be cleaned up, and they could blow over in hurricanes, etc. The world is deucedly complex.

I spent a good deal of time listening to Stephen Pinker's Enlightenment Now, which I think is pretty well argued. He takes on not just Trump etc. (you knew that was coming), but the romantic declinism and anti-progress bias of cultural elites. I.e. those who claim that we don't actually progress in fundamental ways. And he is right, this is a major strand of thought amongst the literary elite. I think at worst it devolves into a lazy excuse on the part of the chattering class not to study science, a fault to which your fair blogger, sadly, must confess guilt.

What it is not is a scintillating page-turner. He cites a lot of data, referencing charts one can't see as one drives down the road. There are some serious critics of Pinker out there, he is accused of cherry-picking. I'll try to dig more deeply into them when I finish the book. For now, I think he has some points.

Was also listening to Cat Power, who has a great voice.

What Zuckerberg hath wrought

So many of the people I like best and admire most are not on Facebook. Or, perhaps, they just stand out as distinctive for taking a stand and/or just being distinctive, like wearing a cool shoes or a groovy jacket, because many of the people I like best and admire most are on Facebook too.

There's no question that it's a big potential timesuck. But it's also true that, in its absence, there's no way I'd be in touch with or tuned in to the concerns of so many people who are differ from me in meaningful ways. Yes, I do need to seek them out intentionally and intently, because the algorithms hide them from me, and there are vast forests and oceans of people who are even more different from me whose pages I have occasionally made my way over to, only to get a little bit freaked out.

So yeah, it's unquestionably a mixed bag, and it plays on our insecurities insofar as it tempts us to become like-whores (if you can't quickly grok that phrase, good for you!).

The everlasting grind

I could certainly get more sleep. I tell myself that every day, every night, but somehow I never quite do it.

There is always so much to do, and for some reason I feel like I need to do most of it. It is great to get help from unexpected places. For example, getting ready to meet with a client tomorrow, that rare client who has a defined benefit pension plan. To plug the projected benefit into our planning software, I need to figure out what the projected benefit is, which can be a lot of work. Fortunately, the client's wife kicks ass and has gone in and figured that out for me, and in an email exchange it's become clear that I probably can't do that specific chunk of work better than she can.

Which is excellent, because it lets me go do something else that will help them and/or someone else.

Like the crap I need to do for my HOA board before tonight's meeting. Blech. I guess I should go do that. It's gonna be a long day, but a good one.

Zadie Smith

I just finished Zadie Smith's Swing Time, the first book of hers I've read. I don't know whether I was resisting it or what, maybe it's just because I was reading it almost only before going to bed, but for much of it I had a hard time fully catching the groove. Maybe it was because the protagonist was herself floundering, looking for direction. Maybe it was because the regular alternation of past and present felt a little stilted at times. In any case, there were definitely times I felt like it could have been shortened 100-150 pages.

But now that it's over, I'm a little sad. I suppose it's because our heroine was just beginning to see some openings, to find some direction, to emerge from the shadows of others, in her own way of speaking. But then she was gone, like Keyser Soze.

I will read more.

Seeming agony

When I was growing up and running a lot, and somewhat fleetly, I remember seeing older guys running along the side of the road, slowly, painfully, wearing the grimmest of grimaces. I would look at them and think, those poor souls, why do they even bother to come out and run?

Now that is me. Grey and plodding, but determined. And the fact is, as often as not I am slow and in pain because I did something more athletic and punishing to my body the day before, soccer, tennis, something a little less age appropriate. So it hurts to run because I am sore and inflamed. Yes, it is true that I am also not all that lithe and carefree, there's no denying that I'm not a competitive marathoner, but much of the apparent agony derives from something I am recovering from, which is also something I would rather not live without.

I wonder how much of this I have in common with those other guys from back in the day. Probably some.

Fatties

Natalie called me up yesterday to ask for my advice. She needed to read a novel for English, something she could write about from a Marxist perspective, and she wondered if I would recommend Anna Karenina. I of course had to remind her that it was a pretty thick book, which I think she knew, then she listed off a bunch of other options. Almost all of them were shorter; none of them were compelling. So she decided to roll forward with Anna K.

Let's keep in mind that she's graduating in 7 weeks or so, and she has AP exams between now and then. She has also been enjoying herself some, going on little hikes and picnics with friends, relaxing a little. Watching Brooklyn 99 before bed with me. But Tolstoi it is.

I was reminded of how, sometime after the academic pressure was over my senior year, I don't remember if it was before or after graduation, I decided it was time to read Crime and Punishment. I was reading it at the beach, sitting in a squat chair in the shallow waves near our beach place at Emerald Isle, working on my tan, while the rather country girls in bikinis and whatnot walked up and down the beach. I never did make much progress getting to know them, primarily because I was kind of afraid to speak to them because what the hell was I gonna say? We had little in common.

At some point in time I left my Dostoievskii sitting on the arm of my chair and it fell into the water. I decided that this meant I wasn't supposed to read it then, and probably picked up a spy novel.

Things got better in New Haven.

Which side of the big picture

In the Journal this morning there were couple of big-trend articles which caught my eye

1. Teenagers are getting drawn into the workforce because of labor shortages
2. There is a massive shortfall of housing units since the financial crisis

Item 1 is generally great for labor market participants. Unemployment was going in the right direction for a long time under Obama, and has kept doing so since Trump unleashed animal spirits in the business world. We just can't argue that. We like to think that, net net, people will benefit.

The housing shortfall is clearly related to item 1: construction workers are in short supply.

Both the labor and housing shortage are exacerbated by the failure to reach an agreement on DACA.  We could use the 800,000 dreamers for sure. In my mind, the big question becomes, is it worth vilifying Trump at every turn if we drive the dreamers out, if we guarantee their departure from American soil? I don't know. That is a question above my pay grade, but we have to think about it.

In some sense, the Dreamers make the struggle with Trump into something like a classical tragedy. As he goes down, presuming that he does, he will thrash around and there will be collateral damage. Will it be worth it?

I suspect that, if we can revivify and recenter the Democratic Party, it will be worth it. But there are costs.

In the public eye

An article in the NY Times this morning about women lured into questionable surgeries so they can be potential high-return participants in class action suits got me to thinking about public vs. private markets and where we stand right now. The article details how alliances of law firms and hedge funds and other private funding vehicles track down and then convince women to have vaginal mesh implants removed, because women who have had them removed can recover large settlements in suits, whereas if they haven't had the procedure, they don't get much $.

Meanwhile, the number of publicly-listed companies in the US has declined by about half from 1996, from 7300ish to 3700ish.  Estimates of global assets in hedge funds and private equity funds stands at about $8 trillion (note that a large chunk of the former is in publicly traded securities). The best estimate is that there are now 233 "unicorns", privately held firms with valuations in excess of $1 bln. The best known of them in the West include household names like Uber and AirBnb.  It is impossible to guess how big the universe of small, privately-held speculative investment opportunities there are out there, but participating in private deals is de rigeur amongst people with money these days, it is a mark of status.

Now, what do these two things have to do with one another, you may ask? The fact that it is cool to invest outside of public markets, combined with the decline of public markets, encourages shitty things to happen in the shadows, like cold-calling working class women and telling them they might die next week if they don't come get some questionable surgery, so they can get cash in a settlement which you then take from them. Securities regulators and the transparency mandated by their reporting requirements acts as a general force for good in the world. They don't stop this stuff, but they funnel cash towards less evil behavior, in aggregate.

But it's complicated. Companies don't list on exchanges because the cost of compliance with regulations is high. We can't force them to list if they can get money elsewhere. One of the biggest and most onerous of the filing requirements is Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), which came in after the scandals at Enron, WorldCom, Adelphia, Tyco and others back in the 2001-2002 timeframe.  A friend of mine from a large consultancy referred to SOX as the "universal consultant's employment act" at the time, because figuring out how to comply and then complying was such a huge undertaking.

I don't necessarily favor getting rid of SOX, I'm just citing that as an example, but balancing the costs of regulatory compliance with other downstream knock-on effects is not simple.

Keeping score

I am fast approaching my 52nd birthday, a milestone made particularly meaningful by the fact that it means I will be exactly twice as old as the guy who anchors the defense for me on our soccer team. A guy who, I should mention, in practice on Tuesday was trying to nutmeg me and instead hit me in the nuts as hard as I have ever been hit. It was excruciatingly painful. He may one day hear the end of it, but it is difficult to predict when that will be.

Actually, as I said in my last post, right now everything is framed by the fact that Natalie's high school graduation is fast approaching, and she is headed off to college soon. With all the planning I have to do in various domains, I get planning fatigue, and I have been dragging my feet on vacation planning. We don't know what we're doing this summer. In recent evenings, I have been digging into this topic. On the one hand, I am a little exhausted by two summers of point-to-point vacations, where we start in one place, end another, and have lots of logistics to deal with in the middle.  So I want to just more or less be in one place. On the other hand, I'd like for Natalie's potentially last summer vacation to be special and memorable.

Part of me does scorekeeping at the level of: "I went to Europe twice before college (she's been once), and visited more tropical places than she has (zero)." I feel like I should give her something roughly at parity with that. In my mind I even handicapped it and guilt-tripped myself: "The world is more globalized now than it was, people go to Asia and shit now."

But here's the main thing. She sings to herself in her room. When I was bored, I was driving around drunk, getting high, measuring my own self-worth by how many women I had slept with (and how hot they were), etc. The other night for fun she went to a candidates' forum and came back discussing the relative merits of the wise incumbent (David Price) vs. the breath of fresh air challenger (Michelle Cotton-Laws).

So I think I am doing OK.

Decisions, decisions

It is only 10:25 and already my mind is at risk of getting hijacked by the swarm, the concerns and anxieties of others. Which is to say that I responded to a couple of texts and looked at Facebook before turning to the blog, always a somewhat risky proposition. I've also had a fair amount of coffee, including some before eating, which is something that I do every day even though I know I probably shouldn't, according to a lot of research.

In any case, the topic at hand is: college. Specifically Natalie going to college. She had a great application season, candidly I will say she got into Yale (which I've already said), UNC, Smith, Barnard, and Cornell, but got dinged by Columbia and waitlisted by Duke. She had already come to the realization that she didn't want to go to a place where everybody camped out to get tickets to a basketball game, so Duke was more or less off the list anyway in the absence of a fat merit-based offer.

She reasons that, having grown up in Princeton and then Chapel Hill, she has always lived in college towns, so she is biased against Smith and Cornell on that basis (this was exactly my process in weeding out Amherst back in the day, so I can't fault her there) So the decision is now basically down to Yale vs. Barnard. Yale's financial aid offer was better, largely because its financial aid formula treats home equity in one's primary residence more favorably, so that's a mark in Yale's favor.

Plus Yale is just, well, Yale.

So we are restraining ourselves and trying to let her make her decision, but I will confess that it's hard not to just take her by the shoulders and make the decision for her.

But Barnard has things going for it too, and last night at Caroline's 50th birthday party James and Hayes were plumping pretty hard for Barnard, saying how the Barnard kids they hired were totally kick-ass, while some of the Yale kids were kinda duds.

I am reminded as well of the experience of a couple we know, whose girl (a friend of Natalie's) got into Columbia and got a full ride to Emory but almost had a nervous breakdown and ended up going to Duke. They stayed above the fray and let him make his decision.

In the end, it's all good. I remember a couple of summers ago, Natalie and I took a one-night road trip from Larchmont up to Cornell and Colgate, plus hanging with Corinna (a Barnard grad) and John Adams on the way. We listened to Frank Bruno's Where You Go is Not Who You'll Be, a very wise if occasionally dry book about our college-selection insanity culture. In essence, he is right.

In honesty, I am being driven crazy by the fact that she is leaving, not the brand with which she will be associated going forward.

Moment of clarity

Yesterday afternoon I was at a light on 15-501, coming around south of Chapel Hill, having made very good time on 40 on my way to Rainbow soccer practice. My Subaru was all covered in pollen, flowers were blooming. I was listening to Sufjan Stephens, only kinda singing along, cuz I didn't really know the words. A college girl in a dark green Nissan looked over at me at the light as if I were not unattractive. I was feeling a little badassed.

At practice, I scored some goals.

Rain in Seattle

I have heard that it rains a lot in Seattle but, oddly enough, I had never seen it until today. It is grey, cold and, yes, a little wet now. But Mark and I are about to head out and put in a few miles because, Lord knows we have been eating a fuckload of food. And it is a good place to do that.

Last night, before bed, I discovered videos of this kid Mac McClung, and the genre of basketball reaction videos. Just watch.

Defeat

In Seattle now, hanging with my friend Mark, who recently had his Bar Mitzvah, at the tender age of 52. For our inaugural distance book club, Mark suggested that we read Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik's mid-sixties classic The Lonely Man of Faith. Soloveitchik takes as his jumping off point a well known split within the Old Testament, which happens at the very beginning. Genesis I narrates the creation of a man (Adam the First) charged with achieving majesty and dignity, of commanding over nature. Genesis II, by way of contrast, has another creation myth, in which man (Adam the Second) is created from dust and is charged with caring for nature.

On this chilly Shabbos morning, I woke up to find Mark studying the book, and he read me passages about Adam the Second in which Soloveitchik characterizes his posture before Being as one of "defeat." I had read the book -- admittedly I kind of jammed through the second half of it on the plane out here -- but hadn't really picked up on the "defeat" aspect of Adam the Second's condition. This demands reflection. In some sense, it is not so different from the word "Islam," which literally means "submission," as opposed to "Jihad," or "struggle."

Just sayin.

Off the grid

On the way to Charleston yesterday, as you may have guessed, we stayed off of 95. Took 1 south to Southern Pines (where the team at Subway was exceptionally pleasant), then made our way to Georgetown on an array of smaller roads. Some of them much smaller, thanks to Sergei and Larry.

Mostly, the trek was not rewarded in terms of scenic beauty. A stultifyingly flat and lonely landscape of low economic activity, punctuated now and again with a Dollar General, a church, a truck, a cluster of ranch style houses. In one yard, a guy was driving a golf cart, for no apparent reason. But, on the other hand, the overall effect was that we left the Eastern Multiplex of big roads, warehouses, subdivisions, strip malls and chain restaurants for a few hours, so that when we re-entered it on the outskirts of Charleston, it was a little jarring.

And we got a clear view of the challenges, nay the near impossibilities, of leaving the places we passed through, and thereby an appreciation of how fortunate we are.

At many country crossroads there were signs advertising for high-speed internet. Access to it is by no means a foregone conclusion outside the Multiplex. I was reminded that, at the Person County Democratic meeting, there was a resolution read out, one that was making its way up from another local chapter, which talked about the import of high-speed internet for those in the countryside. It was filled with a great many "whereas" clauses ("whereas, access to the internet is indispensable to modern living...."), so it sounded very quaint. But it bespeaks a real and present need.

And now we are here. Outside it is cold and rainy. It is not supposed to be that, in lower South Carolina in late March, but what are you gonna do. Time to saddle up.

Gearing up

Getting packed to head out to Charleston, SC on Spring Break.  I may or may not be posting from the road, time will tell.

Was up in Roxboro last night with mom and Natalie at the Person County Democratic Convention. Each time I step out and get into this process, I learn a little more, but mostly I appreciate how much other people are doing. There is a small core cadre of people up there working hard, but much to do.

It was nice to let mom show Natalie where she grew up, though we were a little rushed.

My big mouth, as yet unopened

Yesterday evening I attended a fundraiser for Josh at the home of Bill Bell, the former mayor of Durham. I should say first off that the man's house was not ostentatious: there is not a hint that the man has had occasion or inclination to misuse public funds or influence thereover. He worked at IBM for a while, and then served the citizens of Durham for a couple of decades, and appears to live like an entirely normal person.

Secondly, it occurred to me that, as I spin wheels trying to figure out how to help the Democrats achieve goals in the 2018 cycle, specifically up in Person County where we are trying to help them win back District 2 for the NC General Assembly, rather than trying to pull rabbits from a hat in a place I don't know well, I should be thinking about raising money down here in Orange County, where there is more money to be raised. So maybe we do another event.

However, that will involve talking to Mary. Since we've done some work on the house, I ought to be able to pull it off, but I will tread gently for now.

Me and my big mouth

A non-profit on whose board I serve has some financial challenges (which doesn't?).  Legislation promulgated after another scandal won't let it pay its Executive Director properly (the E.D. is an MD), and its primary client, a division of the state of NC, is way behind in paying its bills. And there's other little stuff, mostly about cash flow and political challenges to the organization's ability to diversify its funding streams. I won't bore you with it.

The key thing is this: we haven't been good or aggressive about asking for money and building a donor base, and partly that's a function of not having learned to tell the organization's story. So I had the great idea of kicking off a fundraising campaign at the organization's big conference, which is in 5 weeks. And, in yesterday's board meeting, I led the discussion and said that the drive should be led by the Board, and that a member of the Board should address the conference. I was of course thinking that the Chairman would be the best person, as he has been leading the Board for many years now. But it turns out he has to go to Africa on work.

So guess who gets to make the speech?  If you guessed me, you win.

So, over the next five weeks or so, I have a fair amount of learning to do so I can make a rousing speech. I also need to get myself a new suit, something I have been meaning to do. I just hate going to the mall.

I also may end up calling up some individuals to ask for money, so don't be shocked if I call you.

Dailiness

I was just reading Nick Murray (as I do daily), in which he exhorts advisors to journal daily, on the grounds that it makes us better people. It was a goal of mine when I started this blog to write daily, and I did it for a while, then I trailed off a little, though my aggregate productiveness over these past 13-odd years is not bad. I've blogged on more than half the days.

Yesterday I'd say my most important lesson was around time management, and some of it was about my own productivity, some of it about observing someone else. I had a ton of things on my task list, as I always do. A colleague showed up unexpectedly at the office, and took me off on an abstract topic that really wasn't headed anywhere and really wasn't productive. Later in the day I got further insight into some really bad habits that lead to chronic underproduction, which cause me to focus more on what I should be doing: learning things that help me help others better, and connecting more with people whom I can help.  Also, continually focusing on limiting the number of things I'm involved in. I basically resigned from a board yesterday in an email. A board with an ill-defined mission, non-inspiring leadership, that just isn't doing much.

But I continue to try to ramp up on Democratic Party activity, in Person County specifically. And get home for dinner.

That's it.

Fire potential

Pretty much constantly, I find myself driving past piles of wood by the road from trees people cut down in their yards and thinking: "Free firewood! I ought to throw that in the back of the car and take it home to burn it."

The problem is, of course, that I am too lazy to actually make the fires. I kept the fireplace clean this year till after my fundraiser for Josh, and since then I have made maybe three fires. I keep finding myself in the rec room with Graham or Natalie watching TV rather than in the living room with Mary, watching a fire.

Fact is, the narratives of the two are more or less one and the same. It is just that TV excites more passion in the moment and offers one more to discuss, whereas fire expresses the essential truth.

Bureaucracy and spiritual progress

A couple of weeks ago I was at an Al Anon meeting, and we were reading from How Al Anon Works, a section which tells the tale of the early days of the fellowship. It was founded by Lois, who was married to Bill W, founder of AA. In the early days, it was just her and a few other wives of alcoholics, but then they started having groups and a small office for the national organization, and soon the small cadre found themselves dealing with massive volumes of correspondence and administrative work to support groups in formation around the country and figure out how to develop some basic reading materials, guidance, etc.

I was reminded of a thread I vaguely remembered from Juan Linz's Sociology of Religion course I took in 1986. This was not a class I did particularly well in or took particularly seriously. But I did take a couple of things from it, namely volumes I and II of Max Weber's monumental Economy and Society. These are dense and daunting tomes, the reading of which did not really match up well with my somewhat indisciplined way of life in college.

But I took certain key things away from the course. Foremost amongst them is the idea that baseline religious worldviews permeate everything we do, and that, in Weber's view, there was something special about Protestantism (and Judaism) that seemed to account for their success in forming societies which generated wealth. And that bureaucracy, to the extent that it facilitated a diffuse, abstract, rational and granular division of labor across an ever more abstract economy, was good, the embodiment of rationalization. And that the monasteries of the Middle Ages played a key role in the preformation of modern bureaucracy.

Some of this I may have imagined. I now just pulled the books off the shelf and pawed through the tables of contents, then looked at the Wikipedia article on Weber. Each is enough to make your eyes glaze over.

In any event, to bring it back home, my point is this: it was the belief in an idea, in the case of Al Anon the idea that alcoholism is primarily a family disease, at first the idea that an alcoholic's behavior fucks up a family and makes family members crazy, later the idea that dysfunctional and destructive behavioral patterns are learned by successive generations of families within which substance abuse dominates and are passed on, it was the belief in this idea that drove Lois W and her early team members to sit down and do a bunch of tedious work that eventually evolved into something that has persisted and done a lot of good. The belief in an idea let them suck it up and grind on through boredom, and this grinding was, in some sense, holy.

The truth is painful

After the first soccer game of the season, I am in considerable pain, both in my calves and also my right knee. The trick is to get through this evening without letting it become too apparent, so that Mary won't be able to claim that I am "injured," and thereby have some sort of moral authority over me. I will tough it out and keep it on the dl.

Talking points

Met with a guy this morning about the Orange County Dems "County to County" initiative. My mom and I are trying to figure out how to move the needle up in Person County, where she is from and where we own property.

Then I get back to my desk and read that Kudlow is trying to push the "phase two" tax cut concept even before he is fully in the saddle as National Economic Advisor. It occurred to me that the Democrats really need to figure out how to articulate the value proposition of government per se. We have let the Republicans define the agenda ("the state is bad") for all too long. The underlying thread to most of it is:

1. The government takes hard-earned money that you owned and gives it to people who don't deserve it (mostly people of color)
2. You should be able to do whatever the fuck you want to. Regulation is bad

The Republicans have defined the narrative for too long, because they have figured out the simple themes and have been able to pound them hone relentlessly by staying on message.

We need an equally simple counter narrative.

Retreats

We were out at the house of this artistic couple who have openings at their house all the time, and have a little apartment which lets them hosts artists in residence. The guy their had taken a sabbatical in which he drove 20,000 miles across 21 states and visited 50 retreats over the course of 5 months. It occurred to me that I might apply using my blog. I mean, I write more than most writers do, no doubt about that, I just don't edit much.

Old pictures

For the second day in a row I was sucked down into the rabbit hole of looking at old pictures of the kids when they were younger. At some level, there is nothing more rewarding. At another, nothing more wasteful. It is hard to figure out which is more true.

But it is not the right time of day for it, that's for sure. I need to get this season's soccer games on my calendar and then press on with the day.

Pre-Genesis aliens

The Al-Anon daily readers with which I have been starting my day for some time had gotten a little stale of late, so I conferred with my friend Mark, out in Seattle, has been reconnecting with his Jewish heritage. He suggested a few titles for me, including The Lonely Man of Faith by Joseph Soloveitchik, a towering figure in the rabbinical world who for decades taught Jewish Philosophy at Yeshiva University. I had suggested to Mark that we might have a distance book club, and that this might be a good place to start. To which I said, OKURYV.

In this 1965 book, Soloveitchik takes as his jumping off point the contradictions between Genesis I, in which God makes man to dominate the world, and Genesis II, in which God makes man to tend to it. I read for a little while, and then realized that, if I was going to really take this little book of Soloveitchik's seriously, I needed to go back and take in the referenced scripture. So I went and got my Bible off the shelf. Actually, I got the New English Oxford Study Edition, with the revised translation, because I couldn't find the King James edition I have had since childhood (but never really cracked). I know it is around here somewhere.

So I start reading, from the beginning, and God is making the world by proclamation, using all these words: light, water, earth, firmament, fruit, seeds, beasts, etc. And I realized that the only way (s)he would have all of these words was if (s)he had already made other worlds.

Which really made me pine for Star Trek. Since Graham and I finished watching Deep Space 9, he has insisted that we watch The Blacklist, in which James Spader has a lot of fun playing a master criminal, and lots of people die. But, compared to the majesty of the Star Trek universe, with its ever-expanding cast of extra-terrestrial beings and its genuine, multi-decade attempt to grow a franchise which meditates as seriously as possible on the growth and interplay of civilizations and species, it fairly pales. I will make a serious push for us to get started with Voyager as soon as possible.

Newer cars

After resisting for a while, because I really don't want to sell her, but I know I should, I went to the car parts store to get "For Sale" signs to hang in the window of my lovely 2008 Silver Outback with a stick shift (98k miles, $8500). As I was checking out, the guy at the register, an African-American guy in his mid-late-20s, asked me what I was selling:

"A 2008 Outback, but with a stick shift"
"Oh, a newer car."
"Newer?"
"Well, I've never owned anything newer than a 2000."

Turns out, right now he's driving a 1995 Lexus. "It's in great shape. I mean, it had the engine rebuilt a couple of years ago, but it's basically like new."

I do love people who drive their cars for a while and come to love them just because. That aspect of car culture is endearing, and its slow demise with the advent of autonomous vehicles will be bittersweet.

But I also remember when the natural order of things seemed to be three TV networks (ABC, CBS, NBC) plus a little more (PBS, channels that carried syndicated stuff) and three automatkers (GM, Ford, Chrysler) plus some scrappers and foreign cars for those cool enough to live in university towns. And that all changed.

Tuning the boy

Mary was out at a meeting yesterday evening, and before transitioning from homework to TV time I paused Graham in the living room, where we had a small basket of laundry to fold. Graham asks me: "So I asked mom and I guess I should ask you: when you were in high school was there anything you weren't good at?" I assured him that there were plenty of things: science, scoring goals, high-level leadership, music (even though I organized our monstrous reggae band, I wasn't very good at my instrument, which is no surprise, since I had never played it before), basketball... The list of things I sucked at was actually longer than the list of things I was good at. We just don't talk as much about the things we're not good at.

Graham is beginning to perceive a fair amount of pressure. Natalie got into Yale, I went there, Mary went there, his friends are getting increasingly geared for the long game of high school. There are even those who question aloud whether the pressure-cooker atmosphere of East Chapel Hill is right for Graham. It could be that it isn't.

But I have to believe that he can make it through. Natalie has exceptional drive and discipline, it is true, but also just a good groove about her. She and her friends are so incredibly supportive of one another. In many ways many attributes the stereotypically sisterly components of female gender coding has just plain worked for her, have carried her through. We need to figure out how to harness some of that for Graham, to get him to knit better with his friends.

He and Jake had a blow up a few weeks back, Graham got frustrated and tossed a chess board that he and Jake were playing. Almost certainly Graham was losing, which would have annoyed and threatened him. Graham sent an apologetic email after mom figured it out and coached him. I wonder if a follow-up phone call or in-person conversation might not be in order. Email is better than nothing, but actual human contact is better even.

Processing speed

Played tennis with Z yesterday, we will not discuss the results here. Let's just say that he played really well, I was proud of him.

All week long the meteorologists predicted that it would be breezy, and man were they right. There were gusts of up to 50 mph, or so they said. All I know is that it was really windy, and that we were the only ones out there fool enough to be trying to play a match.

On one side, the wind was more or less at your back, on the other, more or less blowing towards you. But there was also substantial cross wind. And, in tennis, you switch sides after every two games, which means the conditions were changing regularly. Add to that the natural variability of the wind, there was a lot of change to process.

Graham not too long ago had a neuropsych evaluation done, which determined that his cognitive processing speed was somewhere around the 18th percentile, while his verbal communications were something like in the 99th. That's a big gap. My sister Leslie, who works with kids on the spectrum, knows of others with similar gaps, and it's hard to coach them to bridge this gap.

It strikes me that I am probably something like that too. I am not really all that quick, which means that, from a young age, when guys were standing around trading barbs and whatnot, I was far from the quickest. I might drift off, think of something pertinent, and then be looking for a place to interject it, but the really quick and dominant guys (Cool, Whitey, Josh, Crabill) would have long since carried the conversation elsewhere. That's not where my core strengths were best focused.

A blog is just my speed. And, since all the research indicates that the number of people who can trade in the markets on a short-term basis and add value in a statistically significant way is vanishingly small, shepherding people towards long-term financial goals also makes a lot of sense, counter-intuitive though it may appear.

And this was particularly apparent to me yesterday out on the court. It is always hard for me to stay on message on the court. Usually it's best for me to try to run down balls and let the other person make a mistake, but it's boring and hard to stick to that. Shifting winds and trading sides added even more variables to the task of sticking to my game plan. But it was all good, I got some exercise, had some good yucks; it was a hundred times better than just going for a run.

Imagine your calendar full

I got an email the other day from a guy, a 401k wholesaler, which said something like how he had some magical system for filling my calendar with prospects. There are those who really want that, to have some system that generates lots of leads with generic prospects to whom they can sell things so they can create a huge book of business. It is like they want to develop a machine that puts them into the situation which all doctors complain about now, where they are providing cookie-cutter services under time pressure for a bunch of people they hardly know.

When I think about that, it just bums me out. I would much rather have what I have now, an organically evolving business in which I get to help out and spend time with people I've known for a long time. In which I get to keep learning stuff which is useful to them.

And now, it is time to go brush my teeth and keep reading about the evolution of the post-war, post-Bretton Woods global currency markets, and the defense of the British Pound in 1964. Good stuff.

Down on the farm

An article on the front page of the print section of the Wall Street Journal this morning describes how a huge chunk of America's farming population struggles to make ends meet and stay on their land, taking second and third jobs, working their asses off continually, etc. It is hard not to feel their pain. They are like many sectors of the economy, under relentless pressure to specialize, scale up and build in economies of scale to survive. In general, and I've probably blogged about this before, I think that the mounting difficulty for people to have their own businesses and survive as independent entities is a little-understood undercurrent of many of the maladies facing our society today, starting with the "deaths of despair" phenomenon documented most authoritatively in the work of Ann Case and Angus Deaton, but really visible anywhere you go outside of economic power centers around the world, and ending with craziness like Brexit, Trump, and Putin.

People feel powerless, and men, who are the ones most likely to get worked up and get violent just because of physiology, feel emasculated. As a sidebar, let's just admit that the furor over the government taking away guns is about that: castration. Or, more accurately, having our penises taken away. By God, the Founding Fathers wanted to be sure we could have our metal penises with which to destroy others, in whatever shapes, sizes and capacities we could dream up. You know that was foremost in the minds of Jefferson and Madison.

But I digress.

The thing about the farmers is, we all want farmers to survive. It is part of our sense of place to think that plants and animals are being managed out there in the areas where we don't live and that somebody who looks like us is growing them, getting up at dawn, milking, bailing, etc. It allows us to feel whole. The idea that the countryside might be fully aggregated into large corporate forms is dystopian. There is a long history of rich people making money and then buying farms with pretty houses and porches that run at a loss just to regain that sense of connectivity late in their own lifecycles. We might call them Potemkin farms. At a higher level, the Japanese put insane tariffs on rice, to be sure that there are a few rice farmers left to preserve their national heritage.

So yes, we want these farmers to stay on the land. At least I do. But they all seem to have voted for Trump. We need to figure that out. And it's not because they're stupid, we need to get that shit out of our heads. That's what got us in trouble.

Borlaug and the Green Revolution

Made the mistake of looking at Facebook just now before turning to blog. So easy to get drawn into other peoples' mindstreams.

But what is going on?  I know very well where I am right now. I have to take Graham to martial arts in 20 minutes, and after that my day heats up. It is quiet here at my desk, except for somebody with a leafblower across the ridge over there. But I have written about that before.

What is new is this:  I just finished reading Our Daily Bread, a biography of Norman Borlaug.  And who is that, you may ask. I also didn't know until last year, but he was the guy who drove the Green Revolution, the introduction of new hybrid wheat varieties as well as best practices in the application of fertilizer, and also new ways of getting these best practices disseminated across the farming population, a conservative lot by and large. The Green Revolution pulled a lot of the developing world (first Mexico, then Pakistan and India, then other places) out of a condition of dire poverty and widespread hunger. In later years some of the farming practices it popularized have gotten more complicated (think of fertilizer run-off into the Gulf of Mexico and the dead zones caused by hypoxia), but that's life.

The interesting thing is that I had never heard of him till last year, when I heard of him at an AgBio conference. A woman I met with yesterday, a former derivatives salesperson for JP Morgan and Morehead Scholar, also hadn't. But Graham had heard of him through online discussions of the most important people who weren't widely known, and Natalie was broadly familiar with the Green Revolution from AP Earth Sciences.

In other words, our kids are so frickin well-educated it's not funny.

In any case, back to the discussion of this book. It's a fun book, well-written by a guy who is obviously a big fan of Borlaug's (and rightly so), and it tells the story of his growing up hungry in Depression-era Iowa, being the first in his family to leave the farm to go to high school, and he ends up schooling heads of state, including Indira Gandhi, on how to manage their economies. At one point in time he tells the PM of Pakistan to print money so he can support wheat prices so that farmers will bring wheat to market instead of warehousing it for lack of good pricing, while others were starving. Quite a path.

Gotta hop!

The Reality of Money

At Phillips today, I participated in an event called "The Reality of Money," in which a bunch of parents, teachers, and others helped students work through real-lifeish decisions about spending. Each student was given a role (Nurse practitioner -- 2-year degree - one kid -- $30k income....) and then they had to go out and make smart decisions about spending. I was on the Help Desk, which is where kids came when they spent all their money. We would counsel them about making decisions -- scaling back spending, or maybe getting another job. The roles available to them varied by level of educational attainment.

Lots of kids ran out of money because they made stupid decisions, or just because they were legitimately stretched.

Graham ended up $500 in the black each month. He was the only kid I saw who saved money by living at home with his parents, and he selected the cheapest option available wherever possible.

Of course, it's quite possible that many other kids chose to live at home with their parents, and that's why they didn't end up at the Help Desk trying to figure out how to make it all work.

In the end, Graham came up to me and asked how much interest he could earn on his money.

Lengthening perspective

Just came back from my Saturday Al-Anon meeting, which is a key moment in my week, and which I had missed two weeks in a row owing to Natalie's Mock Trial and then guys' weekend at the lake. And I have been busy during the week so haven't making meetings then.

So I was kind of in re-entry mode, my mind swimming with a thousand things, many of them professional in origin and, frankly, nature. First off, listening to these people whom I have been getting to know for 6 years now on a more or less weekly business as they shared about health crises and other stuff with spouses or kids, or watching the couple where the guy always brings his wife with dementia to the meetings, but whose condition has progressed so far that he now has to physically help her sit down in her chair, it occurred to me that so much of my job is helping people lengthen their perspective. To think better and more clearly not about what is happening today, this week, or even this year, but what is likely to happen over time period between now and when their next financial goal (college, retirement...) or potential risk factor (health event, war, identity theft, car wreck...) gets in their face. And that the people who are best able to conceptualize and manage long horizons are those with disciplined spiritual practices, deeply-held values, or, possibly, athletic practices. Something else in their lives that transcends the present.

It could be argued that community organizations, and in particular religious communities, are particularly well-suited for offering this perspective because they are so often explicitly thematizing continuity across major life events (births, comings of age, marriages, deaths).

I also, it must be admitted, started thinking about emerging markets (EM) and how active management might theoretically add value vs. passive because of the absence of overarching regulators to encourage the development of strong corporate governance. I.e. how index funds channeling money into immature markets might be sending dumb money into the hands of scoundrels. It made me want, on the one hand, to reach out to my friend who is head of retail distribution at BlackRock to ask about how they are handling governance for EM, but also I think it validates paying a little extra for Environmental-Social-Governance ETFs for Emerging Markets because they provide this influence inexpensively.

Thankfully, is a three-day weekend so some of this train of thought may die back a little.

Guys in a pizza place

I went to Randy's Pizza on Miami Boulevard to get a slice today. They messed up my order, so I had to stand around for a couple of minutes while they fixed it. As usual, the place was largely full, and 95% full of guys. Guys in denim, guys in khaki, guys in flannel, no guys in suits. In other words, regular guys, not fancy guys.

Now, I'm sure they were more educated than most. Probably the incidence of advanced degrees in that room was much higher than in your average group of 80 guys around America or the world. But they weren't all Ivy-educated PhDs in frickin Russian Literature or something equally useless. I'll bet there were a lot of MS in Engineering from NC State or Virginia Tech kinda guys. I.e. degrees attainable by normal people who figure out something practical to study and apply themselves to achieving a goal.

And my point is (as I'm sure you were wondering) -- I think these guys were regular guys who had worked hard to get their educations and did pretty well, but they didn't come from silver spoon backgrounds. They got the kind of education anybody could get if they applied themselves and figured out a way to move towards educational and career opportunity, be they from a county red or blue. So why on God's green earth are we bending over backwards to keep dangerous, boring and soul-sucking manufacturing jobs in rural counties when we should be focusing on moving people towards where jobs are and getting them better jobs and better lives? That's my point.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light?

Now I am reading Maybe Esther, by my friend Katya, recently released in English. This morning I was reminded of the irony of reading it while up at the lake, with almost all of my oldest friends (we missed Konanc this year), after writing about the wistful envy she felt when I told her I had such long-lasting and rooted relationships (see here).

After making my way through Knausgaard (still eagerly awaiting Volume 6 in English) and Ferrante, it is hard not to see something in the intense first-personness of all these books, and how compelling it is. It is as if the I of the narrator, attacked from all sides by big data, artificial intelligence, social media, what have you, insists upon itself energetically.  And yes, as an individual myself, it is hard not to root for the I, to believe in the distinctiveness of the individual.

We can only hope that it is not a rear guard effort. Though I guess I must say that I should speak for myself. As if there were anything else I could do.

Hanging by the fire

It is the end of a long day of hanging with the boys up here at the lake. Eric was just saying something, probably unimportant, but Niklaus turned up the music so loud we couldn't hear anything because they were playing a song that was popular when he and Marvin went to Jamaica 30 years ago.

Thankfully, Carolina beat State earlier, or the mood would be much less buoyant.

Unfortunately, it was too wet out for us to play basketball ourselves, so Crabill and I had to go for a run, to supplement our earlier walk. This, of course, to justify the excessive amounts of food we have eaten/will eat later. I for one am intent on hitting the pecan pie from Bullock's left over from last last night.

Props due

After a relatively lazy Sunday, I am still in recovery mode from my 15-hour day with Natalie and her team members at the Mock Trial competition. They did not, in the end, win. They lost in the Regional final to a team of home schoolers who are apparently the children of lawyers, for whom Mock Trial is apparently like the Olympics. They were almost flawless, if a little smug.

The amazing and beautiful thing was the speed with which Natalie and her teammates accepted the loss and turned positive. In the car they were all effusively professing their love for their teammates and for Mock itself, though there was a little frustration with some of the specific judges' scoring. Of the third attorney beside Natalie and her fellow senior, a freshman, who was a little meek and unpolished, and who probably dragged their score down, all they could say was how good she was going to be. I was nothing but proud of Natalie and friends.

I am also, I must say, most impressed with the stamina of all my fellow parents who cart their kids around weekend after weekend and then go to work on Monday. For various reasons I won't dig into here, Mary and I have been somewhat spared this fate, and often have two-day weekends at home, not infrequently involving naps for your boy. I am utterly spoiled.

The flow of discourse

It is almost lunch time, and I am frankly hungry, because Sunday breakfasts are just pancakes with some nuts on them. So I am in some sense racing against the clock to post, because I know that after lunch I will fill the pull of my schedule: need to work on taxes, on other stuff and then exercise before mom comes over for dinner around 6.

It is often thus on weekends, particularly on Sundays, as I see the weekend slipping away towards Monday, which doesn't look too different in my life to the untrained eye than weekends do, though I serve a slightly different set of masters slightly differently.

For me, I am always scambling internally, however to optimize my input/output ratio, a theme I have taken up before. On the one hand, I hear the voice of my friend Blue, a rather capable writer who has settled in to self-publishing prolifically on Facebook, who noted some time ago than when you are reading, you are not writing.

Which is true. But the question this begs is: why should I prefer output to input? Isn't that just egocentrism, this belief that the world profits more when I am spewing my mouth?

Ultimately, I think what I am seeking is an optimized equilibrium within the flow of discourse. Reading enough to keep me dynamic and thinking, writing enough so that worthwhile thoughts are crystallized and shared. Really, I just need to make small notches in the tree of discourse, less so that others can remember that I was there, more for my own sake. Like the spines of books facing out, so I can remember I was there.

But now I am in need of protein, and I know all too well that if I get too far behind this curve, I will pay the price later in the afternoon in my inability to do much of anything. Which is good for noone.

Twinges

In High Point, at a Mock Trial competition. Natalie and friends are competing against another team that they don't consider strong competition, but it's hard for me to figure out who's winning, so this produces some anxiety. I really freaking want them to win. Which is really kind of silly, given that Natalie is already in her dream school, so is her friend Makenna.

But damn, I want them to win, and will take it personally if they don't!

Missing Natalie

Graham and I walked to the library yesterday and thence to the grocery store, office supply store, and pharmacy to pick up stuff. Yall can probably guess which ones, no reason for me to plug them here.

I wanted to do the walk because Graham had told me how his friend Jake knew how to walk from the library to the grocery store to get a baked treat, and I was frankly a little shocked that Graham didn't have this geography straight in his head. So we got it straight.

As we walked, we talked a little about high school, looming next year. I asked if he was mostly looking forward to it, or mostly not. The latter, he said, but one of the biggest reasons was because Natalie was going to be reason. "Is it just because you'll miss her?" I asked. "Yeah," he said.

My kids do make me proud.

State/Gown relations

I met a guy from the University of Georgia over Christmas vacation, a humanities professor. He said that when he joined the university some years ago -- and this is still a common practice there -- they put him on a bus with other new hires and took them around the state to introduce them to people.

Just now, I was reading an article about weather volatility -- basically how global warming will make the incidence of extreme weather events rise. Not just warm weather, but extreme cold snaps too. And, thought the thesis makes sense, and it is supported by data and well-grounded principles, this is the kind of thing that climate change skeptics eat for breakfast. Here's what they say: "See, the ivory-tower liberals don't really know anything, they just want to make you get out of your truck and into a little Japanese car because they hate America. They'll twist their story around however they need to."

But part of the problem here is that the universities are so distant from red counties and don't make much of an effort to bridge that gap. And because university business models don't encourage behavior that would bridge it, like sending faculty or even grad students out to rural high schools or chambers of commerce to give talks about what they do and the high-level state of their fields.

This is, of course, more easily said than remedied. The fact is that professors and future professors are competing with people in Stockholm and Beijing and Canberra to produce research that moves the ball forward in their fields.  Building presentations for general audiences is really the work of PBS and National Geographic etc. But they also lack effective footsoldiers and advocates, as they are squeezed for cash and need to focus on their own core demographics to survive.

But it is work that somebody should be doing. It is, frankly, the function of the pubic sector to do this kind of work that markets do poorly.

The snow

There is a lot of snow on the ground, and looking at the weather, it's not entirely clear that it will all melt out and then have the ground dry in time for people to be able to park on the grass out back for our fundraiser for Josh on Thursday. Oh well. We shall see. That is well beyond my control.

It has been an eventful snow.  Wednesday, the day of the big dumping, we lost power from about 2pm till midnightish. Natalie was at a friend's house, and at length we were able to convince her to ask her friend's mom to let her stay the night. Meanwhile, we were trying to figure out whether to make a break for my mom's house (she still had power). Around 5, we decided to do it.

First, we had to find Graham.  He had headed out at around 2 to enjoy the snow. We thought he was out back sledding, but his friends Ethan and Daniel informed us that he wasn't. So we had to call around. Turned out he was down at Ben's, showing good initiative on his part. He had walked down there and knocked on the door. Two thumbs up!

So we gathered stuff and started heading out to the car to drive to mom's, when I was approached by two neighbors, a mom and a daughter. Turned out the granddad (father of recently divorced husband, who was in Chile), a 95-year old guy on oxygen, was alone in his house a mile or so away at the bottom of a hill. They needed Subaru help. So we piled in my Subaru and went down to get him.

It was slippery as fuck. To make a long story short, the car did pretty well going downhill, and after considerable effort to get Pop-pop in the car with his wheelchair and a bunch of oxygen tanks, we headed back uphill.

This didn't go so well. At a switchback turn, my car slid side to side and just stopped making progress. So I had to back down the hill, between a bunch of parked cars, with poor visibility, trying to keep moving for fear I would get stuck again. We made it, and got Pop-pop back in his house, but it was fucking hairy, and the Grouse was sweating no little bit through all of this.

I left the car at the bottom of the hill and walked home. Graham was asleep already on the couch. Mary made a hearty soup on our gas stove. We ate by candlelight. I was asleep by 10. Pop-pop got through the night fine, I learned the next day, helped in no small part by the fact that his house was usually kept at 79.

In retrospect, I wish we had had Natalie walk home so she could have shared the memory with us.

Slow going

January has been a bit of an exasperating month.  I see that I blogged last about college financial aid applications, so I will not go deep into the details of my continuing logistical struggles on that front. I will say they are technical right now, involving file-size restrictions for efaxing things to a college that requires faxes or hard copy mailings. Had I known what a pain it was gonna be, I would have just stuck paper in the mailbox.

Arghh, enough of this whining. It is beautiful and white outside. The kids didn't really need three days off of school, but they got em. Last night we watched multiple episodes of Brooklyn 99.  It is a good show, not great, the main thing is that Natalie will come and sit on the couch with me. Which, given her pending disappearance from the house, is a big deal.

My other computer has finished, wheezingly, the simple task I had set for it, so I need to get back to work over there. One of these days I will fully transition to this new one.

Positive and negative

Graham and I are now alternating Deep Space 9 one night with The Blacklist the other. Actually, we are ending up watching The Blacklist more often, kind of because it is the shiny thing, kind of because James Spader is somewhat irresistible in the role of Readington, though the rest of the cast is pretty much from generic multi-ethnic casting 2018. Not that they are bad, it's just they are who and what they are.

I have framed this as "positive" vs. "negative" viewing, as DS9 typically ends up affirming our belief in humankind or, to be more precise, humanoidkind, whereas the Blacklist can get pretty durned dark. There is often a fair amount of killing. However, as Graham has pointed out, the last couple of episodes of DS9 got a little dark. There was indeed some murder, though it was in the end committed by a Vulcan who was annoyed at pictures of people laughing with friends, which is more or less understandable. And Spader is just a lark.

So, in the end, it is by no means black and white.

Early rising

Awoke early this morning, earlier than usual on a Saturday. In the run-up to our event a couple of weeks out, Mary re-initiated the theme of "I have to do everything" (pertaining to getting the house ready) and I got a little miffed. The depth of her lack of understanding of what I do, of what it takes to run our household, outside of the obvious, physical tasks (yardwork, cleaning, cooking, etc.) never ceases to astound me.

To wit, I endured a proctological exam from Yale this week concerning the financial details of running our household. The amount of money we spend, without doing much that looks expensive, is pretty astounding. Putting it in their buckets (they had a bucket for haircuts and toiletries but not for home maintenance) was a lot of work. They were obviously interested in the lumpiness of my income. Building a business as a small businessperson is a hard fucking thing. It takes a lot of effort over time to become sustainable.

So I am tired, it is Saturday, and it was not my intent to be up quite this early. But here I am, ready to greet the day. Now that I am drinking some coffee, it will get better.

I'm excited to meet with mom and a couple of people from the Orange County Democrats later about trying to flip Person County in the state legislature this fall. The county went 57-40 for Trump in 2016, a margin of less than 4,000 votes. It should, in principle, be doable.

The early daze

I've been reading Richard Ford's Between Them, about his parents and his memories of growing up. Good, but not his best work. Certainly not worth $26 for the slim hardcover.

It got me thinking about the kids' early years, and the function of this blog, which was partly intended to be a scratchpad for the experience of raising them. So I started looking over some of the early posts. Sadly, there wasn't as much direct description of being with the kids as I would have liked. Much of it was just me rambling. Hopefully if I read on into 2005, 2006, 2007, I'll find more about the kids.

Certainly the blog came to late to capture the early memories of Natalie, who was north of 4 by the time I got started. So it missed out on precious things like how when I would read her Green Eggs and Ham, she pretty quickly got so she could fill in the end of every line.

As in:
(Clark) "I do not like" (Natalie) "green eggs and ham,"
(Clark) "I do not like them" (Natalie) "Sam I am!"

She got to this point pretty durned fast. It was beautiful to see.

Recently Graham has been joining me in late afternoon walks, as I try to make sure he does something with his body on any given day. Today we went all the way around the lake for a second time.  Today he told me that, in telling him the story of my own complicated career path, in which I resented my mom pressuring me to become an economist, he had discerned vague pressure from me for him to become an economist. I assured him that I meant to put no pressure on him at all, and told him that it was great he could tell me that (as indeed it is).

The odd thing is that he would have heard that message at all. We have to be very careful in how we communicate with our kids, even when we are just trying to be open.

Labor market growing pains

In a number of contexts (dealing with our broker/dealer, at lunch sandwich place, at a Starbucks, at our pharmacy) I am seeing service standards slip of late, new employees who don't seem to know exactly what they are doing. This is generally reflective of growing pains as people enter/re-enter the job market. As consumers, we must be mindful and tolerant of this.