The meeting

Went back to Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowlands after some time away to read a couple of suspense novels (an Alan Furst after the Highsmith I mentioned). Shortly back into it, the heroine meets with a professor who lavishes great praise on a paper she had written and tells her to go to grad school. This is the second time I've read such a passage recently, the prior time being in Jeffrey Eugenides' The Marriage Plot, and each time I've been profoundly moved, wishing that some professor had given me such a talk. Not that I was treated unkindly in grad school or even college, mind you, I just never had that talk. Well, OK, my undergrad advisor did promise to get my senior essay published, and actually saw to it that it happened, but still.

Clearly I still identify all too strongly with the hole that Lahiri's heroine has in her ego, which needs to be filled in, even all these years after I have passed beyond academia. Oh well.

Also, my back hurts, I am lying in bed, and a storm is blowing in, which promises to make it difficult to grill, as Mary had hoped I would. But it's pretty.

Being the market

Some years back, as I was transitioning into the financial advisory world, I asked a woman whose firm I was considering joining, who invested only in actively-traded mutual funds and herself traded little, only to rebalance to fixed asset allocations on a quarterly basis, why she read about individual companies and trends if she was outsourcing the task of implementation to others. "That's a really good question," she allowed.

And it is one I could easily ask of myself, since I use ETFs and mutual funds to implement portfolios almost exclusively. In the final analysis, I feel obliged to read about individual companies and their securities because there is a simple pleasure in being the market, in observing the warp and woof of history as it plays out in its infinite complexity.

I would say also that the work of the markets, by and large the broad provision and distribution of goods, services and opportunities to the world's population, is a relatively uncontroversial good. Yes, the ecology of it all is complicated, to the extent that we would appear to be rendering the world progressively less if not outright un-inhabitable, but we are working on that. Hopefully quickly enough, though I'm not sure. Also, there is a very reasonable and time-honored debate as to how good the markets are as arbiters of who gets what, and what is the role of the state as both regulator and provider of capital. I doubt this debate will ever reach resolution, but we may hope that it will trend towards optimization.

This is by way of contrast with politics and social discourse, which are themselves also complex, fluid and dynamic to an extent none of us can grasp fully, but only as they unfold on a day to day basis. But they are ever fraught with conflict and minefields, so it is hard to try to take them in anything resembling an objective fashion, without being drawn into the emotions of their flow.

Saccharine rides

Went for a walk this morning with a friend who sells software to corporations. At the end, I brought the conversation around to carbon offsets, as I often do, and we got into the tired discussion of whether or not what we do as individuals matters in aggregate. Of course it does.

We started talking about car mileage and he starts telling me that in the tech sales community, you have to have a sweet ride or you have no credibility: "You'd get hazed if you drove a Prius." I was not too surprised by that, because I had recently heard how another guy had been harassed by "golf buddies" into selling a Prius within a couple of weeks of buying it. He ended up with an Audi, and also has a couple of Porsches. Still, it's pretty pathetic for adults to get pushed around like this by peer pressure.

I got home and went for a swim, because the walk -- a slow walk of 4 miles -- really wasn't enough exercise to justify my love for food. On the way out I saw another guy who sells tech in the corporate world. So I asked him: "Nope. I drive a 2010 Acura, paid off, 100k miles. If I had to drive a lot to cover my territory I'd be looking for something with good mileage."

So there you have it.

Together again

Graham and mom came back from their Italian biking adventure last night at around midnight. Mary and I both went to pick them up, though mom's new boyfriend insisted on bringing her from the airport separately.

It was a long day of flying for Graham, involving some sleeping and, surprisingly, some puking at Dulles, though that seems to have been a passing thing. We'll get more of a download later today.

On the way to the airport it occurred to me that this was far and away the longest I had ever been away from him since his birth, by about a factor of 3.

Our little phase of test run empty nesting went well. No fights, got some things done, had a nice trip. We did not open a portal to marital magic, but then we didn't really expect to.

I'm bacckkkk

Mary and I got back from Boulder last night at about midnight. It is not the magic time of day when blog ideas drift gently through my brain freely, but I'd better end the drought quickly. A few reflections.

• Here it is humid, there it was dry, but the sun was intense.
• Elevation is no joke. Mom and I had gotten a little altitude sickness our first day in Mexico City, which is about 7,000 feet above sea level. Boulder is about 5,200 square feet, which we adjusted to pretty quickly. But when Mary and I went up to Rocky Mountain National Park, all of a sudden we were at 8,400 square feet at the start of our hike, and I could definitely feel it in terms of getting tired coming up hills, and I think I even saw it reflected in slightly elevated anxiety regarding storms blowing in. And the weather was mighty fickle up there. The sky would darken, the wind would blow, maybe a little rain would come, and then it was sunny.
• It's interesting to see NIMBYism in its many manifestations around this great land of ours. In Boulder, there is apparently pretty strict code about adding height to any structure, anything that would cast a shadow and/or impede a neighbor's view of the cliffs. So housing prices are way jacked up. Plain-looking, unreconstructed ranches 4 miles out of town go for $900k. You see things like the below, a Tesla charging in the driveway of a house in need of a little TLC.

To be clear, however, any snarky remarks the Grouse may have offered on Boulder by no means offset its many many positives. It's a beautiful place with tremendous municipal amenities, first and foremost an incredible and convenient set of public hiking paths (also bike paths). We only bothered to leave town once. There are great used book stores, good coffee, pretty solid if not exceptional food. I had the best Vietnamese dish I've ever had (steamed fish with eggplant and heaps of basil). All the things that the Grouse thrives upon. We will be going back.

Drummers

It was about 7:30 as we pulled into the parking lot at the top of Flagstaff Mountain outside of Boulder. A rather aristocratic, grey-haired man in a trim down jacket came over to our car. I thought for sure there was a wedding or something going on. "Are you here for the drumming circle in the amphitheater?" he asked gently. I allowed that we were tourists just checking the place out. "Well there's still plenty of parking," he said, and gestured over towards an empty spot.

Naturally, we had to investigate the drumming circle, though I was a little scared to get too close, lest some one might hand me a dembe or something. It was a bunch of white folks working on their best African rhythms, led by a guy who was saying "rhythm is medicine to your body" and things like that.

Boulder

Mary and I are out in Boulder, CO on the first trip we've taken without the kids for many years, staying at Leslie and Walter's new house. It is pretty darned nice here. A little less than a mile from their house is a trailhead which opens onto a pretty major system with miles of trails going up into the hills. Not too shabby.

It does feel, if anything even more coddled and sheltered from reality than even Chapel Hill. Certainly it's a good deal whiter.

But it is our vacation so I'm not going to complain, am just noting. I am also making some progress reading through a novel (Patricia Highsmith's 1986 Found in the Street, which I happened across at a used bookstore recently, pretty sure it was the one in New Haven where the convenience store was when I was in college -- a great improvement, although the cheap hot dogs at about 1 in the morning hit the spot back in the day). It is good to get traction in a book, for sure, however light, after flailing against a number of weighty ones recently. There is something -- and I think I may have blogged about this recently, about just reading a lot, just letting the ideas pass through like krill through the baleen of my mind. It doesn't matter what they are, so long as they flow.

Donut sticks

In the vending machine in the break room next to my office there are these donut sticks, each a little bit larger than a Twinkie. They come in packs of three, and are glazed. I had been eyeing them for some time, thinking of them a little too much, until last week I broke down and got them, figuring that they probably woudn't be that good and that by sampling them I could get them off of my mind.

I could not have been more wrong. They were instead simply scrumptious. I looked at the nutritional information and discovered that they contained a lot of calories and also saturated fat, which did not surprise me. Thankfully I did that before I had eaten all three, so I put one in my desk drawer (in the wrapper, mind you) and ate it that next day. It was just as good.

Thankfully, they are none in the machine right now, so they are not taunting me. Soon I will move to a new office, further down the hall, so that their siren call will be somewhat more removed.

The day I bought them, I saw something shiny and substantial down in the reservoir where purchases fall. It proved to be a Snickers bar. I ate that too.

A little guilty

Somebody I know is dying, a guy I used to run around with a little in the years between college and grad school, back when I was smoking and drinking and generally bouncing around. Not my best years, mind you, but thankfully I didn't kill anybody.

So this guy, whom I'll call Billy, never quit drinking or smoking, or just generally hanging out in bars. He doesn't seem to have formed any deep relationships, certainly not a family. I used to have fantasies about running into him in AA but somehow it never happened. In his case, the memo never quite arrived. And now he is dying of lung cancer.

The last time I saw him, he was doing something pretty asinine, and most of the times that I saw him in the last decade or so he was kind of a jerk. So part of me feels like his dying is really no big loss, even though I see an outpouring of affection for him on Facebook.

At the end of the day -- which is about where he is -- I think what is nagging at me is the sense of superiority that creeps into my sense of who I am relative to him, when that flies in the face of the concept of substance use disorders and mental illness as diseases. The guy is just sick, and it has killed him in the end. Something else will kill me in my time.

Keeping it cool

Saturday morning. My personal shabbos, in the best of times, but in fact so much of that is an effort to bracket and fend off the things vying for my attention in the short term and elongate my horizon. Work stuff, Board stuff, politics stuff... try to focus on parenting stuff and health stuff.

But it's hard as ideas and responsibilities stream into my mind. Call this person about this, write to that one about that...

And it is made even harder when I sit down in my thinking chair to be quiet and my neighbor cranks up his leaf blower to blow the leaves out of his driveway. Though of course, I understand all too well what he is doing, and why he is ultimately doing it. After all, Mary did slip and fracture her arm in the driveway this spring, and if I had been more systematic and consistent in keeping our driveway clean of organic debris by blowing and even pressure washing, it would not only look cleaner, it would have been less slippery even after a crazy rain season and she might not have had the accident.

I must also acknowledge that the blog is sometimes one of those things that nag at me, I feel it within me when I have neglected it for too long. But the process of writing is itself akin to diet, exercise, sleep, reflection, and the cleaning and maintenance of physical things, it is all part of the Great Program.

Politely yawning

Oh lordy am I glad that finals season is almost past, and will be this afternoon. For the last couple of weeks I have been pretty consistently spending evenings and some weekend afternoons with Graham at the dining room table, helping him grind and polish his study skills for the classes that require a little more discipline: math, Latin, engineering.  My math is rusty, my Latin amounted to all of one year back in 1982-3, and I've never studied engineering, so I was doing some learning myself.

I was also trying to teach Graham an inchoate set of skills: how to study. Which is something I've been good at in my day, but it's also something that I haven't done that much of in the last few years -- since my CFP cramming days -- and certainly not for these disciplines. More importantly, it's something I've never taught.

This morning when the alarm went off I was dead tired, definitely wanted it to just go the fuck away. But I hauled myself out, fed the cats, made the coffee, meditated, sit ups, push ups, did morning reading, checked email, calendar, market futures, made my task list (as always, plenty full). And now here I am, ready to shave and whatnot and face the day.

It must be owned that, thus far, it is a beautiful day. It was downright chilly, breezy and fresh out on the porch as I started my reading cycle. I think it promises to be relatively mild all day. Onward,

The grass

We had a new structure built out by the lake, "The Pavillion," it has been dubbed, really a little shelter with picnic tables inside it, as well as ceiling fans. It is pretty nice. But the crazy rains of winter and spring made the project drag out for much longer than any of us thought that it would, and then the town took its own sweet time issuing permits and generally blessing the thing.

The contractor had to cut a little road through the grass to get material and equipment over to its location, sheltered up close to the trees across the park from us, so there was an ugly gouge cut through the grass and around the shelter itself, a small sea of red clay in the otherwise verdant park. As late as two weeks ago, maybe three, just red mud.

Then the contractor smoothed it out and threw down some grass seed and hay and hauled off into the sunset, and I thought nothing was gonna grow there. I was, frankly, in my low bore way, slightly obsessed with the thought that we'd be staring out at the red clay, and that the park was going to be somewhat unusable through the summer months.

But then, but then, the grass began to grow, or maybe it's weeds, but it is in any case green. I am, of course, still mildly obsessed with it, charting its progress with a little too keen an attention. It will be good for Mary and I to get on an airplane in a couple of weeks and leave town so that the poor grass can be left alone to grow on its own, away from my prying eyes.

Soon it will be gone, just like the cut on my hand from New Haven a few weeks ago, and I'll have to find some other little process of Mother Nature's onto which to project my mighty will.

Body language

When I was in New York a few weeks ago I had lunch with a friend of mine who works at the New York Times in its new lunchroom. For lunchroom fare, the food was not bad, if not cheap. But hell, it was Manhattan.

One thing that struck me was the vibe of the room, the body language of those there. Not good. There just wasn't much energy or joy. It was very quiet, which is cool, but not very vivacious, for a lovely spring day. Maybe it was the self-selection of those who had to eat in the lunchroom instead of venturing out into the streets on such a day, maybe they were bummed about that. I dunno. Or maybe it was the aftermath (I think) of the Mueller investigation, in which the Times was to a certain extent caught out by its presumption of guilt by the alleged colluder. That orange bastard.

But for one of the organizations upon whom we lean most heavily in the fight for limitations on the power of the executive and the government, I would have liked to have seen more panache, more visceral joy, or at least righteous indignation.

After lunch I went down to the lobby and, on the way out, checked out the "Moveable Type" installation by Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen. This was powerful stuff, giving a mystical sense of what it takes to make the news, to edit and curate the world, as it were, on an ongoing basis.

Goal setting

Indian helicopters found a few more bodies along a little-tried route to the top of Mt Everest in recent days. This after the world was regaled with images of the traffic jam at the top of the mountain during a rare window of opportunity to summit. Way to go, people.

In other news, Dubai-based private equity firm Abraaj collapsed, Tesla seems increasingly unlikely to survive as an independent corporate entity, Softbank is having trouble raising another $100 billion fund, and Uber and Lyft are struggling after their IPO. All of which signals that the era of the unicorn may be drawing to a close, which is something I can live with and even celebrate. The ultra-rich, apotheosizing their extreme wealth and seeking to nurture it in private domains away from the discipline of public markets, may be having their comeuppance as they seek to exit.

Meanwhile, Rome burns as climate change progresses unabated, opioid deaths increase, populists are elected everywhere, and discord reigns throughout the planet.

What's the common thread here? Despite all the talk of the import of setting goals, we haven't gotten good at sharing values and setting good goals. Wealth and conquest remain key goals for too many. I am doing what I can.

Broom in hand, I made a fourth pass over our screened in porch this weekend, trying to make it an even better place to hang out, in order to recapture that Montana-like feel I wrote of last week. It looks pretty good. The happier I am at home, the less carbon I will burn going somewhere else. While sitting out there, I saw some peeling of white paint which reminded me that I should call Marvin and bring him over for a painting consultation, which will both help me take care of the property but also hang out with my friend Marvin for a little while. I don't see enough of him.

Gotta hop.

Speed, reading

I have been passing through a difficult period with books of late. Having started any number, I keep grinding out in the middle of them, unconvinced that it's worth it to keep going. Right now I'm halfway through Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowlands, but am flat out not feeling it, my view partially tainted by a couple of people I've talked to recently saying what a bitch she is. Likewise, I am struggling to gain momentum in Ezra Vogel's bio of Deng Xiaopeng.

But what I love is churning through reading material, knocking the pages down, feeling the enthusiasm. I have recently resorted to the rare expedient of reading New Yorker articles, drawing from the rich archive of back issues I have stacked on top of my chest of drawers, harvested from Mary's bedside table, where they pile up.

Ultimately, a diet of magazine articles doesn't get me where I need to go, but sometimes I just have to refresh my palate.

Im-posture?

As I meditate more and also focus on core strength, I am paying more attention to posture. It has long been clear that if I sit and stand up straighter, my body looks better, particularly my belly. Mary and I laugh about that sometimes.

But maybe all those people who seem to have great abs etc. focus more on their posture. The problem with posture is that it seems like an attention drain, one has to keep one's mind on it. It is also conceivable that if one is mindful about posture more often, one develops muscle memory and over time it takes less attention.

Who the fuck knows? Never really gave it a shot for long enough.

First thing, the second

As I said, heading out on the porch in the morning has been a fine thing. This morning, after a week of brutal heat and then some cleansing -- if pretty intense -- rain, the air out on the porch reminded me of going out on the porch for coffee with Natalie and the delightful little dog from next door last summer in Montana, near Glacier National Park. My guess is this kind of moment could be pretty well captured just by getting outside earlier more regularly.

But what is the biggest impediment to doing so? Most likely, it's the difficulty I have getting up early, which is largely a function of getting to bed too late. And one of the things that aids and abets my challenge with early bed time is cable TV and my tendency to turn it on and look for some sport to watch (basketball, tennis and soccer are the only ones worthwhile) at around 10.

Which gives me further impetus to just fricking cancel cable. It's $100 a month I'm spending for no good purpose. We hate our land line. 98% of the calls that come on it are robocalls of one sort or the other. Need to talk to Mary about that.

The other issue with getting to bed early is the kitchen. If I do a better job there, it will give less crap for Mary to putter around with, and maybe she will get to bed earlier.

Worth trying.

First thing

My morning routines keep shifting, slightly, in tone and practice. A month or so ago, when my meditation practice was brand new, I was waking up extra-early every day, excited to start the day. Not quite as much right now, though I keep getting up earlyish. Thoughts of the day and of business are drifting more into my mind as I meditate, and I'll be damned if I've figured out how to stay still and mindful for much beyond when the coffee is ready.

I am likewise less excited about my current book, Joseph Telushkin's Jewish Wisdom, than I was about my prior one, Chogyam Trungpa, though this ebbs and flows sometimes on a daily basis.

I have taken to going out on the porch to read to capture some of the morning coolness, and it's interesting to see who's out there. There's an older dude who walks his cat on a leash with his morning cup. It would, of course, not be surprising if I saw the guy up close and discovered that he is my age. That's about where we are in life.

All in all, what I see consistently over the years is that one hunk of my life, in this case my morning routine, will feel like I have it nailed for a little while, and then that sense of having it just right will wither and decay, so I have to change things up. And keep on truckin.

Accountability partner

I thought of this over the weekend, then resisted doing it, for obvious reasons, but here goes. The blog has had many uses down through the years, here is a new one: accountability partner.

I hereby pledge to getting my weight down to 175 by the beginning of next soccer season. I was 183 this morning. It's not that I am fat, but I carry more weight than I need to around the belly, and I am well aware that my diet is suboptimal, and that as I age this becomes more and more real. And I can feel the additional weight in the waist bands of certain pants.

It is going to be hard to get this done based on exercise, so I will have to work on diet. Thankfully, as time has gone on and Mary continues to pummel us with things she reads about meat and the environment, it is easier for me to reduce meat in my diet, especially red meat. Though we did eat a fair amount of it while she was out of town, just cuz it's easier to make dinner around meat than around not meat. Also cheese. Am trying to reduce that.

There. I've done it.

Back to normal

The household is back to its normal trinitarian state now: father, son, and holy spirit. Just kidding. But in truth, Natalie is safely in Rome, having spent a world-class evening and day with my friend Eric as she recovered from jet lag, and Mary is home from New York. The latter is particularly good, as we have spent too much time apart this spring. Between my trip out West, going to Mexico with mom, my week in the Northeast, and now her week up there with her mom, we have spent a full month apart out of the last three. Which is fine, but a lot.

I am happy not to be going to work today. I suppose I'm particularly tired out from spending a week not just primary breadwinning, but also being responsible for all meal planning and execution as well as carting Graham to things (fortunately not so many) and also scooping the cat box. We gotta get Graham on that. And then, in the end, putting Natalie on a plane, which was not particularly hard work, but it's always bittersweet saying goodbye and sending her off on her next adventure.

But now, it's time to put on the lake manager hat. My neighbor and partner in lake crime prevention John and I have a date to meet on the dam and "exercise the valves", something we are supposed to do annually but didn't get done last year because we were too helter skelter, in our own lazy Southern way, to get organized to do it.

On spousal dominance

So Mary's mom Mary Lee has had a little health scare, really a health update, a raising of everyone's collective consciousness that, at a soon to be 87, she can't just clicking along timelessly as she seems to have an inclination to, alternately setting and cleaning the table, watching CNN and listening to NPR while taking notes so as to lead current events discussion groups at the Osborn or elsewhere.

Since George Sr passed away coming up on a decade ago, Mary Lee in many ways has come into her own and become a more relaxed and relaxing person, albeit with her quirks, which we all have. It is difficult to ascribe that to anything other than his absence. George Sr was a fantastic guy and grandfather and a good dad generally, although there were issues for sure. As a father-in-law, I couldn't have asked for anything better.

But as a spouse, maybe he was a little domineering. Apparently he made some specific wardrobe demands on Mary Lee, nothing crazy, but then again in some sense anything is crazy. He was a strong-willed holder of opinions, and certainly he made the vast majority of the money in the household. I wasn't around while he was actively working. But what I sense is that his primary breadwinner status might have been lorded overweaningly, and in a way that didn't acknowledge some of Mary Lee's best properties and encourage them to come out.

And I wonder to what extent I replicate that with Mary Lloyd. Certainly it is something I need to look at as we progress towards emptynesterdom and the next phase of our relationship. I need to keep doing a better job of supporting, acknowledging and encouraging instead of guilt-tripping and playing the wage-earner victim card.

The blur

Busy weekend. Mary's mom is having health woes, so we put Mary on a plane yesterday to go North to help her siblings take care of her while she recoups in the hospital or rehab or otherwise moves forward on her journey. Aside from that there was soccer, a memorial service, buying Natalie a backpack, and cooking dinner for my mom and her new boyfriend Matt in a belated Mother's Day celebration. Which also meant (as Mary reminds me so often) planning, shopping, even getting extra propane.

I had intended to go to war with the pollen encrusting and enveloping the deck. That didn't happen, though I did get the ashes out of the fireplace and get cat puke off of an old comforter of Natalie's (actually Mary told me it had been left to us by the Norwegians who rented from mom the year before we came back, so we could just let it go. But we won't).

The highpoint was yesterday, when I was "helping" Natalie with the puzzle she is working on (I've fit in maybe 5 pieces out of 300) and we listened to Abba and Paper Boi, the rapper from Atlanta.

Addendum, for future reference:  a couple of days later, when "we" finished the puzzle together, Natalie put on "The Final Countdown" by Europe. It was rather hilarious.

Amongst the books

When I was in Cambridge last week, I had coffee with an old friend who has become quite a successful novelist and teaches at one of the universities around there. We started talking about all the stacks of books around, and she professed that she was saddened by them, and by the fact that when we died, all that work of reading them was gone. She started talking about her mother, and all the reading she had done, and all the books that had been around her various abodes when she passed, especially some vacation cabin in Canada. "My husband had a piece about in The New Yorker." I confessed that I had read it (I'm pretty sure). Her husband is a well-known (and justly so) critic, and also teaches nearby.

This morning, as I made my way through my morning reading routine amongst all of my books as well as a couple of papers Natalie wrote this last semester, the deep irony of what she was saying came to me. Because, far from being lost when we die, in the best cases (which happen often unless we are complete assholes), the digestion of the texts and the culture of it lives on in scholars and readers and is bequeathed to those around us.

And this is particularly true of those who, like my friend and her husband, live and die by the pen.

Anticipating nostalgia for the cut on my hand

While I was helping Natalie move out of her dorm room last Thursday, I got a cut on my hand. We were in a rush to get her on a train, then I had to get to Boston to have lunch with Leslie, so I just shrugged it off and kept going. Of course I never cleaned it or put any kind of stuff on it. Over the next few days it didn't get much better, it got red and sore, and by the time I was driving south with her Saturday and Sunday it was totally bugging me.

When I got home to NC, I put some hydrogen peroxide and then bacytracin on it, and covered it with a bandaid, and it has been getting better. Which is nice. On the one hand, I want it to get better. On the other, I have this somewhat morbid interest in it, I keep wanting to check it out and see how much it has progressed over the last 12 hours.

But the irony is, and this is pretty typical of these kinds of little boo boos, that I kind of don't really want it to get better. I'm glad it has stopped hurting, and I am academically interested in its progress, and I don't relish the process of putting the bandaids on it, but somewhere in me there's a resistance to letting go of it. Maybe it's a mild baby tendency, the fact that I can feign injury for certain tasks, even if I haven't figured out what they are. And I've had this feeling before.

Jury duty

Was called to Hillsborough for jury duty, part of a citizen's duty, no problem. The problem was why I was there. Or, rather, why the 50-odd of us were there, between the judge, the officers and staff of the court, the DA and his assistant, the two police officers who were witnesses, and the potential jurors.

It was a relatively affluent-looking white woman in her 30s-40s with a little black dress and a tight, austere bun, accompanied by her dad, fighting a DWI. Literally 50 people were there, some paid by the state, others disrupting their days, so she could fight a DWI.

This was white privilege at its absolute worst. She either blew a .08 or she didn't. It was clear from the defense attorney's questions during the voir dire that he was going to cast doubt upon the credibility of the breathalyzer test or some failure of due process on the cops' part. But if it was the former, where was his expert witness? If the latter, where was his corroborating witness? Was it the father of the accused, who was there protecting his little girl.

Complete and utter bullshit. They better be glad the didn't impanel me.

David Thaden

Found out today that David Thaden passed away last Friday. He tought me English in junior high, and I think he was the coach of the track team too, though if he was he didn't know a ton about it. I don't remember all that much from his classroom.

None of that matters. What matters is that I remember him as being a good guy and someone whose classroom I was happy to go to each day. That's a big deal.

It is interesting that the teachers I remember from middle school are all male: Dave Thaden, Jim Charles, Freddy Kiger, Tony Yount, Wayne Pollack. Not all of them were perfect human beings, though there's no reason to go into that now. I think it's most likely because my dad was even more imperfect, so the presence of relatively stable male role models was a big deal. Plus most of them were either into what they were doing or made a really good show of it.

The Faces of God

Just back from my grueling but most enjoyable trip up and down the East Coast, about 1500 miles over 7 days. I ended up with ten planned meetings, and some significant hanging out with another dozen or so folks, mostly family.

I have continued to think about what both Atul Gawande (in Being Mortal) and Daniel Pink (in When) have said about how people trim down their circles of friends and acquaintances as they age. It makes a lot of sense, and feels right. Older people don't need broad social circles as they did when they were younger. We don't need the ego validation. We know who we are, for better or worse, and if we are fortunate we have made peace with that. The fortunate amongst us also have the economic security that makes us have less need of the instrumental advantages of broad networks, who can do what for us, and vice versa.

And yet, and yet... There is still something beautiful and special in talking to people. By way of contrast, books or other bits of media offer us moment in time distillations of another person's consciousness, or, rather, the honed product of someone's deliberate and considered labor over a long period of time. But the person him or herself, that's something else entirely.

I know I know, we never quite get that either, as we are all continually performing ourselves for others, fronting, dipping, darting, acting out our longings and insecurities in ways we can't ourselves have half a handle on, so the person him or herself is itself a mythical being akin to Snuffleupagus, but having access to and dialogue with lots of people is a special thing, much like the Borges character who falls down the stairs, hits his head, and sees all of Being beaming out from one of the risers above. That's what we can get if we are both lucky and diligent.

But it takes work, and lord knows I'm tired now.

New day

And so, coming up on 10 years after we left Princeton, an era seems to be coming to an end. David and Carol (and Helen and Margaret and Maxie) are actually leaving town, for realsies. David's job in San Francisco has of course been going on for almost a year now, but the family has stuck around Princeton, even as the girls have gone off to college. But now they have a lease in San Rafael, and an actual plan to decamp for California, so it seems things will conclusively shift westward.

With that, our deepest tie to Princeton will be cut. There are still plenty of people we love here, but will it be enough to bring us back here with any regularity? Now that the place we have camped out twice a year for a decade will be no more?

Have I written this post before? Or one like it? Probably. I'm too tired to check now.

In other news, we went across the new Tappan Zee today coming over from George's house. Like butter.

The road

Apologies, my readers, for the deafening silence of the last week. It has been long and full as I've worked my way up the coast: DC, New York, Larchmont, New Haven, Boston. Tomorrow I retrieve my girl from the City of Elms, and we will rocket back down the coast more rapidly, as she will be missing her cats rather intensely, and Sunday is, after all Mothers' Day, and we must fulfill its claims. Next week should be a good deal better.

The big news this week was that Graham got a 100 on a math test, after having performed much less well on one a few weeks back. Which freaked him out quite a bit. So we hunkered down together and I helped him learn his trig, including 90 minutes on the phone before bedtime Tuesday night as we prepped him for the test. Which was not as entertaining as The Wire, but is much more edifying. I'm durned proud of the boy.

Little reminder

In DC, just had coffee with a friend whose wife works for the EPA. He confirmed to me how toxic the working environment is there, how great a departure it is from the climate even under Bush, when the political appointees at least sought to engage with the professional staff and look for input when formulating policy. "They come in and lock their doors" was the basic message. Oil company people come in to set policy. Scandal continues at the top even long after Pruitt's departure.

It is easy to lose sight of just how far the degradation of our public culture has gone.

Inbox

There have been times that I looked at my email inbox despondently, it was dominated by stuff that was sent to me automatically by marketers, and I was made to feel alone by the fact that there wasn't much in there from individual human beings that I knew and liked. I suppose I should first thank Microsoft and Google as well for figuring out how to sort inboxes into different types of mail. That has been helpful.

The more important change has happened in my business and in my engagement with what I am doing. Right now I look at my inbox and see email from people that I like and love, some of them clients, some of them prospects. Enough of it, but not too much of it.

More importantly, I can go hours and even days and get none of this good email and be totally cool with it. I don't feel abandoned by the universe. I always have a more than full task list on the little yellow pad eternally perched off my right elbow, full of good thing to do. And that's all I need.

Ever fuller integration

As the years have progressed and my blog has continued to do the same, or has at any rate persisted, the deep interconnection between many of the themes that have recurred here has become apparent to me. The relationship between entropy, flux, and contingency, which I fastened onto at the very beginning, remains key. Care of self, loved ones, stuff, and money, risk management, blah blah blah blah blah. For those of you who've been with me for a while, you know what I'm talking about.

But the regular practice of sitting meditation has raised my consciousness of it to a new level. And not, by the way, because I have been able to consistently Commune With Tha One as I sit. I still have monkey brain all the time.

No, it is because I am feeling the muscles in my hip and butt region become incrementally more flexible, and this provides me with a physical reminder of what I am trying to do, throughout the day. Which in turn encourages me to continue best practices: sit ups and push ups, stretch hamstrings for 30 seconds in shower, brush teeth, maintain task list, blog, try to eat less crappy food, etc. It has even helped me get out on the porch and sweep pollen in the evening, or learn to be more patient and mindful in helping Graham learn to study better, or scoop the litter box for Mary.

It has not yet inoculated me to the seductive charms of tuning in to the NBA playoffs in the evening and watching, say, Denver vs Portland for 20 minutes, even though I don't really care. There is always room for improvement.

On deep background

It has never been easy to get Graham to cut his hair. Almost always it is a process. A few days before I am thinking of taking him to the barber, perhaps even a week, I start seeding the idea: "Graham, do you think you might like to get your hair cut sometime soon?" Most often he will respond something like: "I'll consider it." And then we'll repeat the discussion a few days later, and eventually I'll take him.

Over the last year or so, for my own hair cutting needs, I have upgraded my service provider from a barber, since the election the team at Menscutz, who have always done a perfectly decent job and have offered me the opportunity to talk to people from different parts of the world and walks of life without leaving the rarefied domain of Chapel Hill. I've been using Ashlyn Davis Hayes, an old Tiger like myself, who has set herself up on Rosemary Street with a nice little jernt. So a month or so back I offered to take Graham there to get a little bit better treatment, but was unable to make an appointment before he started tripping over his bangs. Surprisingly, he agreed.

I have an appointment this evening, and simultaneously Graham's hair has started to get a little long, if not really all that unruly. This weekend I asked him if he'd like to go an get a bit of an upgrade for a haircut, and he quickly agreed.

Now, I'm not saying that he definitely has specific ulterior or strategic goals in mind, but puberty is definitely going on there, and I think that he is not altogether disinterested in the charms of the fairer sex. We shall see...

But this is all, I should be very clear, on deepest background, and no comments should be made to the young man on pain of death or banishment from the ranks of the Grouse's readership.

More observations on Mexico while it's fresh

Before we left Mexico City we did -- with the help of the hotel staff -- discover the sections of the burg that have earned it a reputation for culinary currency in recent years, and we ate some very good food and saw some lovely and hip neighborhoods. But most of the voices we heard in those places spoke English and it was hard to escape the feeling that we might as well have been in some place named Portland. Not that I begrudge the town the tourist dollars in any way.

The Monday we were in Mexico City we learned that, unfortunately, all the museums were closed. The ever helpful staff at the hotel suggested we hire a car and driver -- through them, naturally, at a non-trivial rate -- to take us out to Teotihuacan -- a site with some truly impressive pyramids about 20 miles out of town. So we pulled the trigger while biting the bullet and rolled with it, and a nice fellow named Victor in suit and tie rolls up in a black SUV to take us out there. Thankfully, he took off his tie as soon as the hotel was in the rearview. He suggested that we visit the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe on the way out. Having not done my reading to prep for the trip, I wasn't aware that it was so close by.

Our Lady of Guadalupe was an appearance of the Virgin Mary to a peasant back in the early 16th Century, not long after the Spanish got there. It was really considerate of her to visit so early. She visited not once, but four times, and she impressed herself on a cloth in a way that is really reminiscent of other images of the virgin in Europe.

OK. I see I am running on here and should hang it up for today. I was glad Victor took us out there and really glad we rode with him, because he was a super nice guy and we had great conversations with him about Mexico and learned a lot. Really it was one of the best days of our trip.

I'm back

So I thought I would write more from Mexico but apparently I didn't. Partially it's a function of not world-class internet in the hotels, and by the time I was done wrestling with Google Maps planning dinner and the next day, I was pretty much done. Plus I was reading a good book (Amor Towles's A Gentleman in Moscow). I even watched a little TV to broaden and refresh my vocabulary.

Where to start. Driving in Mexico was not as bad as I thought as it was going to be. Even the web sites that were very pro driving in Mexico were more negative than they actually needed to be. Though I saw a little rule-bending in town in Mexico City when we were in cabs and Ubers, it wasn't really bad, and I drove straight out of town after we picked up our car at the airport. If anything, Mexican drivers are more norm-bound than are Americans. They really wanted to pass on the left, not on the right. If I was in the left hand lane and somebody didn't think I was going fast enough, they were much more likely to come up behind me and let me know their thoughts than they were to go by on the right.

The places we went outside of Mexico City: Queretaro and Guanajuato, were lovely. Being hilly, Guanajuato was a little more picturesque, but then it was also more intensely geared towards tourists and therefore more precious. Querataro was also flat out gorgeous, but a real place. It has a huge historic center, a UNESCO world heritage site (as is Guanajuato), but so much of it that most of it is used by residents as a place to work and live normal lives. So we'd be walking down little streets and have no idea what might be in the next door. Could be a language institute. Or a chess club. Or a ramen place. Or the "Union for the Transparency of Executive Power." Or a shoe repair shop. Or a store selling quinceanera dresses. Actually, there was a whole street of those.

It was really cheap. I don't think we ever spent more than $90 on dinner, and for lunch we got by for as low as $3 for the two of us. Of course, it helped that mom didn't eat much when we were in places that cheap. So we didn't eat quite as close to the street as I might have liked, but what do you expect when your 81-year old mom with a bit of a delicate tummy is along.

I ate a lot of Mexican food.

Mexico City

When we arrived at the airport yesterday, we were a little tired, having gotten up early after not getting to bed early enough (on my side at least). Not much jet lag, but the altitude does make a difference. Mexico City is at about 7,350 feet above sea level, which is not chopped liver.

The drive from the airport was not inspiring. I was a little surprised at how junky everything looked, and assumed we were still out on the outskirts, when the driver told me that the Zocalo, the massive square at the center of everything, was maybe 100 meters to our right. It was pretty dirty looking, and I was fearing that I might have brought my mom to the wrong place. Turns out, that's just not the right side of the Zocalo.

But our hotel is quite nice, as it better be, as it's the frickin Four Seasons, and we settled in and rested and hydrated (the canonical recommendation for altitude sickness). Then in the evening we went for a stroll along the lovely, tree-lined Paseo de la Reforma, on which the hotel is located. All the big multinationals are here: Aon, Deloitte, Citibanamex, Chubb, etc. etc. The Mac store is across the street. The Central Park analog is just to our left. So we are at the heart of the First World in Mexico.

From here we branch out.

Cadence

I have grown deeply attached to the rhythm of my day, getting up early when it's quiet to meditate and read, proceeding through breakfast and the paper to my morning session with notepad and computer, slowly proceeding from topics of very long term nature to those of the day. First something spiritualish, then the paper, focusing on longer-duration stories rather than market news of the day, before checking the futures and email. Easing into the day, as it were. Generally, the exercise is one of attempting to maintain as long a horizon as possible.

Then I get in my car and listen to a book, right now, having finally polished off Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow, I am returning to Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens, which Mary and Graham and I had listened to some of months ago and then I let slide. Then I read more of Harari's stuff in another context and learned that the guy does silent meditation for two months a year (yes, he talks to nobody during that time, and I think consumes no media) which is just freaking crazy but intense and, clearly, fruitful.

A friend and client recently asked that I write a quarterly newsletter outlining my thinking on markets, something I am considering. But I think that the quarter is such a constraining, artificial, and misleading construct that it will warp anything I write. I also think it's too short a time period to be meaningful. (I think in principle that quarterly reporting on the part of corporations is distortive -- but that from a control and compliance perspective it's good because it provides actors within firms with an incentive to keep it tight, and it gives analysts a window into firms to spot fraud).

I'll figure something out.

On the lawsuits

Just finished reading this New Yorker article about the lawsuit against Harvard by some conservative guy and an alliance of Asian-American organizations he cultivated. First off, let's start by saying that the kid who first got very riled up about not getting into Harvard did get into Penn and ended up graduating from Williams. Fucking Williams. If not the then absolutely one of the top 3 best liberal arts colleges in the USA, and he's whining.

Overall the Asian-American beef is that all these kids get 1600s on their SATs and 4.7 or whatever elevated GPAs they had and then they don't get in at their top schools.

Here's my perspective. I got the equivalent of a 1600 (they have renormed the SAT twice since I took it and scores have gone up) and I was the only person at CHHS to be 4.0 when I graduated. And doing those two things was fucking child's play compared to the other things I did. Winning the state championship, running a reggae band, etc. Even more importantly, the other things I did were so much more important to my life. Learning to be on a team and accept a role and appreciate and celebrate my teammates, many of whom had very different profiles from me and have done different things in life, that was huge.

And perhaps the most important thing I did was something I didn't do all that well, which was basketball. I never got that good, but I did try, and doing so gave me some contact with a lot of other people with whom I would never have otherwise been in contact. And it taught me humility and a since of my own limitations. And I kept trying, and over time I got marginally better.

But back to the college admissions thing. I interview for Yale, and when I do so, my job is to get a sense of who these people are and convey it back to the rest of the admissions team. Whether they read it or weight it much, I don't know. I have interviewed a bunch of Asian kids who I'm sure look great on paper, and some of them are interesting and have a spark in their eye because they are warm and engaging souls, others of them don't. I try to reflect that in my comments. In that regard they are just like everybody else I interview. I talked to a kid this year from Cary, some generic white kid, and he was an asshole. That was gently reflected in my comments, mostly as the very faint praise that damns.

Overall, as has been well publicized, many Asian nations -- China, Korea, Singapore, etc. -- along with the Finns, have been kicking America's ass on standardized tests, especially in STEM fields. It is presented as a national crisis. And yet America has been stubbornly more productive then most other nations (though China, Israel, and Estonia are catching up) at entrepreneurship and economic dynamism. Why is that? I like to think that it is partly because our society is structured in such a way as to reward things other than GPAs and test scores. Creativity, grit, what theorists call "multiple intelligences". Once you graduate, the market really doesn't give a fuck where you went to school. If you have a good idea, if your empanada is tastier and you can produce, market, and distribute at scale and at an agreeable price point, you win.

Re the Asian kids themselves, mostly I feel sad for them. They are victims of the culture of GPA and SAT, of tennis, chess, and violin. They get hauled in to afterschool study sessions with intensive Chinese lessons like the ones that happen or used to happen at Seawell. They are deprived of enjoyable, goofy, foolhardy, American teenagerdom. I have seen it.

******

In all my years of education, some of the most enjoyable time I spent was on the basketball court at Columbia. There was some good ball, and an interesting and very meritocratic culture, as evolves in most gyms. Winners held the court, and the best players had a wide variety of backgrounds. In addition to students, there were guys who worked for the university of a wide variety of ethnicities, black, hispanics of many shades and ethnic mixes. I was decidedly lower-middle tier, which meant that most of the time I wasn't playing on court #1 at peek hour (5-7 pm).

There was this one Asian kid, maybe 5'11", not the most athletic player out there, but fast enough, fit enough, and with a tremendous handle and a smooth jumper, so he could create driving opportunities because they had to respect him outside. Long before Jeremy Lin, so he had no role models at the top level, just a kid who had driven himself to excel. That guy got picked up on court #1. But he was a loner, barely spoke to anyone.

And then there were a bunch of other Asian kids who flat out sucked, but they came out now and again. I remember one night, probably a Friday, there were a bunch of them out there I got involved in a game of 3 on 3 with them. They were horrible. They were throwing up ridiculous hook shots and crazy shit that would hit the backboard if they were lucky. And then they would fall on the ground laughing. I'm not sure I've ever had more fun on the basketball court.

I do hope the Asian ultraachievers of today have this much fun, More importantly, I hope their parents allow and encourage them to hang out with lots of other kids and do all sorts of things that are silly and often counterproductive. The great virtue of doing those things when you are young is that -- under the best of circumstances -- you can go home and talk to your parents about what you did and learn lessons in a safeish environment. There were definitely times when it seemed like that wasn't happening with some of Natalie's Asian friends.

On the road again, narrow wheels edition

Yesterday morning I had to drop Graham off for robotics competition, and I saw a guy I know from out in RTP whose kid is on the team. I stopped and talked to him, and he told me he was riding 65 miles that day, ramping up to a 100-mile charity ride. His wife, he told me, wouldn't let him get a motorcycle.

Later in the afternoon, after hustling with Mary down to Buies Creek to catch the tail end of the robotics (we were a little late), I decided to go out riding myself. It was either that or go running, and I was sore from a longish run on Saturday. Plus I have been nagged a little in the back of my mind by the thought of my bicycle rusting and languishing in the basement. When I bought the bike back in 2007 or so it was, after all, the most expensive thing I had ever bought for myself -- as opposed to a house or a car. It has since been passed in that category by the little laptop I am typing on, but not by much.

In any case, I went out for a bike ride, with the intention of just "reminding the biking muscles that they exist." In the end I went all the way out to Calvander and then looped back home through downtown Carrboro and Chapel Hill, just because I like to. By the end I had done more than remind the muscles they were there. I was sore and a little bit concerned that I might get some cramping.

But I didn't. I made it home and rehydrated and ate a bunch of food. It was all good. I do think that the sitting meditation and the mindfulness re stretching it is encouraging is helping me all around.

And my bike did fine. No blowouts, brakes were good. I gotta keep mixing the biking in to my exercise portfolio.

Argument, and procrastination

Mary and I just got in an argument. I am tempted to add details, but that would contravene my policy of not writing about marital strife.

Then, while paying bills, I chanced to look at Natalie's bank account, which had risen since I last looked at it. I must confess to feeling considerable pride looking at her list of transactions and the frugality that they imply. Mostly because I know it's about her being super busy doing cool things, as opposed to squandering money on beer, cheeseburgers and the like, as I did in my day. And I know that she is actually having fun, or at least faking it pretty good.

Then I paid bills, including for a couple of Aflac policies my mom started for me years ago of questionable value. I refreshed my memory of what one of them is for.

It is, in short, remarkable the range of things one can poke one's nose into while trying to procrastinate from doing taxes.

Alpha, mastery, and purpose

In recent weeks I've had a number of conversations with individuals who invest their own portfolios in individual stocks. A couple of them have done well, one of them exceptionally so.

One thing they have in common is that they each of them is somewhat underenthused about and underengaged in their primary breadwinning activity, in one case academia, in the other case law. But they each got really excited in talking about their stocks, or their practice of investing in them (in one case, we didn't talk specific stocks, just the fact that the person bought and sold them).

Then there's also the case of someone local, a woman, artist, somewhat quirky, was living at home with her parents last I heard, who wanted to get together and talk markets. She has been day trading S&P index futures, I think. I suggested we get together for coffee around 3, and she was like "no no no, that's the trading day." She said she couldn't possibly get together before 5, because she had "aftermarket activities" to engage in. She had also reached out to me sometime to see if I knew where she could rent an apartment around our neighborhood. By that time I'm trying to shut down and exercise and/or get home to my family.

Which leads me to wonder: is active engagement in the market -- trying to beat it -- often really reflective of a feeling of lack of engagement and/or success in one's primary professional activity?

And, now that I say that, I must ask it of myself. To what extent have I followed that path?

In any case, for the moment I need to get back to the business of taking care of my people.

Dinner date

We had dinner with some neighbors yesterday evening, who have a boy who is Graham's age and who shares some of his enthusiasms and quirks. The two of them were very animated at dinner, to the point of loudly monopolizing the dinner table conversation, such that Graham wasn't hardly even eating. I tried to lightly steer the conversation by, for example, looping in the boy's less quirky younger sister, to open things up.

Afterwards, our neighbor suggested we all go in the back yard to watch the sunset, apparently something they do regularly. When we were out there I was, I fear, slightly too negative about some of the things the boy was doing (pursuing ultra-accelerated math, thinking about entrepreneurialism as a path [my gut was he didn't have the people-skill inclination that would make him good at going out and pitching endlessly]). I wasn't overbearing, but the mom did pick up on it a little.

I hope not too much. I think I was ultimately coming from a place of fear about Graham's own social ticks and how they might mess him up and, of course, my own experience -- mom not letting them skip one grade and doing lots of things (getting braces on my teeth early, buying me Izod shirts, etc) to help me assimilate towards the middle socially, which ultimately has given me a bigger pack of people with whom I can associate and more social practice, in a sense, so maybe somewhat less bad social skills, in aggregate.

But last night I was not at my best. My own insecurities got tapped, and I acted out a little. But the kid is truly an excellent kid and we want Graham and him to hang out as much as humanly possible.

There's clearly only one thing to do: write an effusive thank you note and promise to have them over soon.

IRL again

The news broke this week that Facebook was under attack by the US Dept of Housing and Urban Development under the charge that its microtargeting of specific demographic categories, when carried to a logical extreme, replicated the "redlining" practices whereby, in days that seemed to be of yore, African-Americans and other minorities were excluded from buying houses in specific developments, which turned out to be almost everywhere except where white people wanted them to live.

We were talking yesterday after our soccer game about how game designers employed behavioral psychologists to figure out how to make games more addictive, just like they used to tune the nicotine content of cigarettes to keep people puffing.

More and more, the virtual world, as it extends to encompass all aspects of our lives, comes to replicate the ills we have sought to curtail IRL (in real life) through accrued wisdom, so we have to learn lessons all over again.

It is reminiscent of nothing so much as the world of Jose Luis Borges, in which the noumenal world extends to be coterminous with the phenomenal. As in the famous fable of the map which comprises the story "On Exactitude in Science"

... In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

But now it is time to shave and get ready for brunch.

Kids

A little annoyed right now at my beloved daughter. I'm working hard to coordinate flights for her around Europe and home in late June right now, and she goes dark on me, despite me communicating with her entirely in the coin of the young people's realm: the text. Ah well.

On the positive side, our soccer team won today after getting whumped last week, and most of us had to play the whole game because of the large number of slackers off galavanting on some beach cuz it's Spring Break. I will have the last laugh late in the season, when I do some of my own traveling, because it will be hotter then. Cosmic justice, you gotta love it.

Mary is working in the yard now, and won't want to come in till it's pretty much dark, so I should really go have a snack.

Starting the day

One of the great things about not being on the road is being able to more easily adhere to healthy rhythms and practices, and one of the absolute best and most crucial for me is my early morning quiet time.

I get up early, before everyone else, when everything is quiet and do basics: make coffee, feed cats (so Rascal will leave me the fuck alone). While the coffee brews, I have pure quiet time. For some time it was closer to the "prayer" modality, which is to say that I sought to channel my thoughts intentionally and often in the form of words towards some other presupposed entity, if not necessarily an anthropomorphized deity.

More recently, I am moving towards more of a "meditation" mode, which I view as being more about focusing on clearing the mind. I put "prayer" and "meditation" in quotes because who knows what the words actually mean. In a sense the practice of engaging in either or both of them is groping towards one's own workable conception of them, or perhaps rather one's practice of them, inasmuch as each of them are actions of a sort.

Then I mix in crunches and push ups.

By now the coffee is ready, and I do some reading. The reading has varied over the years. It began with Al-Anon daily readers, but it has branched out to include other spiritual traditions. To date select Jewish stuff has been best, especially Abraham Joshua Heschel, but a slim volume of the stoic Epictetus was also good, as was Tim Galloway's The Inner Game of Tennis. Right now I am reading Chogyam Trungpa's Shambhala: The Way of the Warrior. I haven't found anything Christian that I can read just yet.

After breakfast, prior to working on morning correspondence, I read Nick Murray's daily reader for financial planners, Around the Year. To date Murray is the only one who has grasped and gone after the truly holistic demands of what we do as planners.

Soreness

Natalie came out for lunch yesterday, and before feasting we went for a bit of an exercise walk to "justify our love" for the delicious food we were about to inhale. Natalie has been playing club ultimate frisbee at Yale, meaning she is exercising more and more consistently than she did in high school, where she nominally did frisbee but was really too busy doing mock trial, debate etc. to go to practice much.

I had discussed with her a few times how much doing sports was integral to a good life for me, to the enjoyment of life, and how some baseline level of physical fitness was too. So I asked her if she was enjoying the fitness part of it more, and she said not really, and specifically cited being sore all the time as part of the problem.

I had never really reflected much on the issue of continual soreness, but I will say that it has been with me so long that I think of the mild discomfort as itself just part of life. A little muscle or joint ache tells me that I have done something recently. And if it is not there, I feel slack. Particularly on vacation, I actively want to get to the end of most if not all days having pushed myself hard. I would rather walk seven miles than three miles. And for sure, part of it is that it lets me eat more. No doubt.

Which isn't to say that I don't wrestle with laziness and actually getting out there and doing something. Even as I write this, I'm realizing that I need to hustle to pack my bags for work, including a gym bag so I can stop in to Planet Fitness end of day and put in my statutory 3 miles or so on the treadmill. I don't do it every day, but I need to do it enough days so that I don't have to go out and buy new jeans, which are always uncomfortable at first. And so we can check out Don Chicken on Elliot tonight!

Bad pop music

Natalie is home for spring break, and right now she is back in her room listening to some crappy pop music I have never heard before, singing along. There is a fire in the fireplace, as I try to burn off all the wood I brought onto the screened in porch before it gets warm, so I don't have to haul it back up to the wood pile. All in all, life is pretty good.

Robotics

Mary, granny and I rolled out to day 2 of East Chapel Hill's quest to win a robotics competition in Gibsonville. Graham's role on the team has been limited. He is part of the build team but it's unsure just what his specific responsibilities are. Which is cool. Mostly he is learning about being on a team. He has been staying rather late in the evenings, occasionally to the detriment of his school work. But he's sorting that out too.

The competition was rather intense. It was pretty amazing to see how different the robots were. Each team had to make decisions in the design phase about what aspects of the game to focus on. East's robot focused on "cargo" (hefting bouncy balls into chutes -- worth 3 points) and being a high climber (at the end of each round, the robot hauled itself up to a high platform worth a whopping 12 points). Other teams (Carrboro's team - in its rookie season) specialized in hanging disks (worth two points) and playing defense (making forays into the other team's area, banging against their robots, and generally messing them up). After the qualifying rounds, teams picked others to join "alliances", since it's always a game of 3 on 3. During the qualifiers, Graham was a statistician, and he did a fine job at that. It was important to form teams of complementary skillsets, as opposed to just the ones with the hwas ighest scores.

In the end, East came in 2nd (of 36) and won some special awards. The whole shebang was surprisingly engaging, and when it looked like East might get knocked out in the quarters, I was momentarily crestfallen. They came back.

All in all, I have to give it up to parents who do this all through their kids' childhoods. That is, haul themselves off to soccer, basketball, chess, whatever kind of competition. It's a total time- and soul-suck, involving an epic selflessness. Or does it? Certainly one hears of all too many instances of parents getting excessively wrapped up in living through their kids' accomplishments, and the college admissions scandal that broke last week may be just the most extreme instance of that. My point being that this utter level of commitment is not in some sense so selfless at all.

Our team picked the team from Orange High School as an alliance partner, which was a little surprising initially because they weren't ranked that highly. But the parents were right next to us in the stands, and they knew what they were watching (unlike us). They were also vigorous cheerers, and there was a lot of back and forth between alliances between rounds. Blue Alliance vs. Red Alliance, etc. True call and response. At one point in time, the opposing alliance, across the gym, started chanting "We believe that we will win" and then pausing, waiting for us to respond. I was ready to shout them down. The Orange parents did not. The woman to my left, a schoolteacher, explained to me that they did not like that cheer and did not participate in it. Good eggs.

Back and forth

I have been toin and froin a bit since last I wrote. A stop in through San Franscisco to see some peeps, now down in N Myrtle Beach to pick up Natalie from Spring Break. Having an all too rare sighting of the Atlantic Ocean as we speak, here at this condo "resort" where they only had non-dairy creamer for coffee not just in the room but also in the breakfast place (conveniently right across from my room). The woman was about to charge me $2.15 for a cup of milk for my coffee but I reminded her about the internet. Since she gave me some milk I will refrain from naming the resort.

Otherwise all good. Nice to see the sea, slept with my sliding glass door open, but my phone kept beeping at me. I didn't need that.

More later.

Home again, as it were

Back in this same cafe in Seattle near Mark's from whence I posted two years ago. The croissants are so damned good.

Not surprisingly, I return to the same theme, or a variant thereupon. There was a woman about my age, OK, probably younger, who was in here with her young girl (that's how I know she was younger). She started talking to a woman standing next to her about how she was from Ann Arbor and moved here a few years ago and how much Seattle was like Ann Arbor, blah blah blah.

I resisted the temptation to jump in and say: "My wife went to school there and her dad is from there and I really want to visit and get a sandwich from Zingerman's blah blah blah." Because the game she was playing and that we play all the time is "I am from the same tribe you are and we are educated and affluent and isn't that nice?" And that's all there is to it. We are from the same tribe. It is good sales technique.

And look where that has got us.

Whiplash

At around 8 on Friday night, I was headed up to Josh's house at the lake. It was a nasty night. Driving rain made the brights almost counterproductive. When I got to PayJay's on Route 1, I pulled off into the parking lot to enter the lake house address into my GPS so it would guide me the last bit, which I didn't feel confident to navigate in the dark.

I pulled off into the exit from the parking lot onto the road, so that my car was parallel to the road. In retrospect, it wasn't the absolute best place to perform this task, but there was plenty of space behind me, at least two if not three car lengths, where anybody could get around me to get into or out of the parking lot, and I wasn't gonna be there but 30 seconds, and my lights were on.

All this notwithstanding, I'm sitting there with my phone in my hand when I hear a crunching sound off to my right and I feel the rear of my car shifting to the left with a reasonable amount of force. Yes that's right, fair reader, somebody exiting the parking lot had slammed into my parked car, going pretty fast. I exclaimed something, most likely an expletive, but then within a microsecond or so my brain, ever the optimist, entered into denial and thought "that didn't just happen, did it?" But of course it had.

I got out, looked at my car, then looked back into the parking lot where some small car had a portion of its front bumper hanging off. I went up to it and knocked on the window. A guy was sitting there with his cellphone in hand, and I asked him "Are you OK?" (honestly, what he should have been asking me), and he's like "Yeah, I hit someone." "That was me." "Oh, I didn't see you, my windshield was a little bit fogged up." When I told him I thought we needed to call the cops he said. "Do we have to? My license is a little bit messed up. But I do have insurance. I was just calling my guy about my insurance."

Anyway, this is taking longer to narrate than I thought it would. I called up Josh because I didn't think he was in front of me and confirmed we needed an incident report, then called 911. Not too long thereafter, Melvin (the guy, who was entirely apologetic, and promised he had insurance) and I were waiting inside the store, and Josh shows up. Being hungry, Josh of course availed himself of not one but two pieces of the fried chicken I had in the back of the car, and I joined him in a drumstick while we waited for the sheriff's officer to get there. It was still hot.

In due course, the officer arrived, took our licenses and plates, but not our insurance and registrations, surprisingly, and in any case it didn't really matter because Melvin "didn't have no GEICO card on him" -- which somewhat begged the question of how he had been calling his insurance guy earlier. The officer promised a report would be available at the Warren County Sheriff's office on Monday morning, which we shall see about soon. Josh's professional assessment was that Melvin almost certainly did not have insurance, and the cop didn't want to embarrass him further by citing him for it, and I get that.  It was a rainy Friday and the guy had fucked up his car or, worse, his mom's or cousin's, and there was no reason to mess him up worse. He was a nice guy and was sincerely contrite. It's for situation's like this that we carry uninsured motorist coverage.

As to whiplash, my back felt and feels a little bit achy but I think it's getting better. Konanc didn't make it up there to give me a free professional opinion, sadly. Even more sadly, I didn't play basketball although the court was, surprisingly, dry enough. The car drives fine but I wouldn't be shocked if it needs $7k in work.

Listening in the car

Right now my car listening is Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow. I have the actual book but have never made much headway in it, because it is boring, as most behavioral finance stuff is. I have been listening to a lot of this kind of non-fiction in the car, vaguely stuff that is supposed to help people learn how to think about stuff and manage life. I can't even list all the titles, and I also start to forget the authors a little because they blur together a little (but include Angela Duckworth, Daniel Pink, Ray Dalio...)

In fact, narratives stick better in my mind, including the bios of John Hope Franklin and Trevor Noah, as well as The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides. Probably I should listen to more of those. I was, after all, a literature person rather than a philosophy or other social science one, and there's a reason for that.

But of course!

A fair amount of ink has been spilled in the financial press this weekend about the troubles at Kraft/Heinz and how that has impacted Berkshire Hathaway's results. The story basically goes like this: "Kraft/Heinz got pummeled because the American consumer is moving away from legacy brands like Oscar Meyer and Heinz ketchup, but these are the kinds of brands Buffett likes so therefore Berkshire's model is at risk." And we all say, "but of course, that makes all the sense in the world." And it does, and I, having read one very fat bio of Buffett plus about 50 of his roughly 55 annual letters, can attest that this thesis makes a lot of sense.

Problem is, I didn't see it coming beforehand, even though I was aware both of the ever-diminishing stickiness of American brands as consumers move more to store brands, generics, fresh food (kinda) and so on. I was also aware of Buffett's love -- thanks to the strong influence of Charlie Munger -- of a good brand.

That's because there are all too many themes, trends, and theses out there in the marketplace, and tracking and weighing any of them consistently and confidently is deucedly tricky. I'm sure there are a few gurus who saw this coming and will bask in the financial media sunshine for a few days for having done so. Some of them may have made good money placing bets here. But guessing which guru will be right cycle after cycle is its own game. It is therefore imperative that in thinking about markets, we focus on data over long periods of time and the things that have offered consistent incremental advantage, namely factors, and investor behavior.


nb. By far the best thing to have come out of the reporting of the Kraft/Heinz results was the piece in the Journal on Saturday about Buffett's Brazilian partner 3G and its practice of zero-based budgeting, how it has influenced management in consumer goods companies worldwide, and how the relentless focus on cost-control at Kraft-Heinz meant that it wasn't paying enough attention to the consumer and got hammered. That was where the wisdom was.

Driving and scrapping

Graham and I went out driving at the Friday Center parking lot for the 3rd time today. He put the car in reverse for the first time, which is an odd thing for sure. There are very few analogous experiences in life, there's not even much that preps you for that in the experience of riding a bike. I suppose back in the day bumper cars helped prep us a little. But my kids have never been into going to the rides or the State Fair -- we were never really at the beach enough for it to be an issue.

In a recent conversation with another parent of a kid on the spectrum, I learned that that kid -- now a college graduate -- was living at home and refused to go places because he didn't know his way around town, except to go to the gym. So I am beginning, as consistently and programmatically as possible, to try to get Graham to pay attention to where we are going and to have him give me directions to common places we go. It is surprising how little attention he pays, how few places he knows how to get to. So we will work on that.

After I got back Mary and I got into a little scrap. As a matter of policy, I don't delve much into marital difficulties here on the blog. Ultimately for us -- and I think for many -- many of our disagreement come down to the question of who is giving up the most, who is making the greatest sacrifice, for the sake of the household. Which is a tough thing to work through. But conversations with many others, women as well as men, confirm that I/we are not alone in this.

What is mine

At my normal Saturday morning meeting today, my mind continued to focus on a business meeting I had yesterday, in which one of my partners kind of rode roughshod over our plan in a way that annoys me and is reminiscent of my dad. I was able to listen to what was shared some, but not too much, perhaps not quite as much as would have been optimal.

After the meeting, I said hello to a client with whom I hadn't been able to connect for a while. He shared a bunch of issues with me, some of them kind of financial, some of them familial. Some of them are in domains in which I could be of service, if asked, or I could refer him to someone who could: and he knows it. But he didn't ask, because he was too far down in his own weeds.

And I realized it was time to get Graham to martial arts, that I can't ultimately control either of these folks, and I shouldn't let myself be subsumed by them. In the case of the Friday's meeting, we either get the business or we don't, neither is fatal. With my client, I just need to give him what he wants.

Self torture

Today is a holiday for me: Presidents' Day. I could work, but I'm not going to, aside from working on my taxes a little. And I'll do some reading, indeed, have already done so, about the new economic zone on the border of Kazakhstan and Xinjiang and how the politics of China's Belt and Road Initiative are complicating things there, even as BRI itself breathes life into an otherwise sleepy place.

So it would have been nice to have had a restful night of sleep. But no, my brain's not gonna let that just happen. Instead, somewhere around 5 in the morning, it starts obsessing about the 4 main things that go into underwriting a mortgage. I only know about this from a project I did back in the summer of 2003 doing a time and motion study of mortgage underwriting for a private mortgage insurer.

I could think of 3 of the 4 (the borrower's credit rating, income, and assets), but not the 4th. Somewhere around 630 or so I realized the fourth might be the appraisal of the property being bought (it is). Mostly my brain just tortured itself.

But why, we may ask. Why would it do that? Maybe because Mary was pregnant with Graham then, indeed, it was during that project that I was in Albany in August 2003 when the power went out all up and down the East Coast, scaring the shit out of me, since I initially assumed it must be September 11 redux. Then yesterday I'm out teaching Graham to drive.

Or maybe it's because it was on that mortgage underwriting project that, while visiting with our client down in Raleigh, I found myself across the table from an African-American woman from my high school class that I had never heard of and could have sworn I had never laid eyes on, but she was our homecoming queen. And tonight we have a 35th reunion meeting at which there will be a couple of African-American women, and I can't begin to put faces to names.

It is a very odd thing. I was in almost all honors and AP classes as high school wore on, and there weren't many black people in them. I knew all the black guys because I played basketball with them -- like any NC male, I played ball, but there were few black women out there (Pam Clarke), and few in classes with me, so I largely don't know them.

Killing cinema

Today's obit in the Times for Bruno Ganz made me ponder the state of the cinema today. It listed so many films I had never heard of, by directors I know. There was a time that I stayed on top of this kind of thing, but that time is long, long past, having been superceded by the earning of dollars and the raising of rugrats.

But I wonder if we have perhaps failed these very rugrats by not letting them know that we care about cinema. Mary and I used to go to a lot of movies, even films. Our very first real conversation, after all, was anchored by sharing our love for Dushan Makaveyev's work (and Wikipedia now tells me that Makaveyev died a few weeks ago).

So there is this very broad corpus of great work to which we haven't exposed our kids at all. Yes, we have shown them Monty Python, and Peter Sellers's best work (including The Mouse That Roared), and Airplane. When they were young, I had a copy of Mr Hulot's Holiday and I tried to get them involved in it, with a little success. I think we've shown them a little Hitchcock.

But mostly not. Mostly we watch whatever we can get them to watch, which has been a lot of sitcoms for Natalie and an awful lot of adventure for Graham. A lot of Star Trek, which has been good for me.

And I guess they are just at the age at which the great and slow stuff might even begin to appeal to them. To get to that stage myself, I basically had to consume such a huge volume of genre stuff that I was exhausted by its conventions -- that I basically already knew what was likely to come next.

I think Graham is getting there. We're in the middle of season 3 of The Wire now. Barksdale just got out of prison, and has reentered the world of his criminal enterprise, which has been nurtured by Stringer Bell in his absence, who has substantially corporatized and defanged it, making it more profitable and less deadly, but something Barksdale can't understand. Graham looked at Stringer and Barksdale and said: "I think within three episodes one of those two will have killed the other one." I agree.

Bezos and his dick

Yesterday's news that Amazon will not set up HQ2 in Long Island City is big. I won't go too far into it, save to say that I think it is a loss for New York and for America, in the sense that we are not nurturing our densest metro area which -- for all its faults -- is one of our great treasures, and has been slammed by a lot of things, but nothing so much as the 2017 tax bill and its treatment of state and local taxes, which has provided people with yet another reason to leave the tri-state area. So much good happens there. I will refer you again to Broughton grad Ryan Avent's The Gated City and his well-reasoned defense of density and its benefits writ large.

I am sure that I have shared my love-hate relationship with Amazon and the tech giants. We all have it. We love them and we fear them. Amazon has been ruling the most in the last few years, so it is front and center. As an investor with a data-driven reticence to focus on the selection of individual securities, I frankly expect it to revert to the mean before too long, as most investor infatuations do.

And it is interesting to see how that might be happening: having become the world's richest man, Bezos gets a little caught up in Hollywood, glamour, and beautiful people. Has an affair with a supermodel looking woman. Gets caught. Moves toward divorce from his wife of a quarter century or so.

So now, all of a sudden, Bezos -- who had viewed HQ2 as a way of decentralizing power within the organization -- is staring down the barrel of a divorce which could see his holdings in the company cut in half, roughly, which would further erode his control of the company. So -- HQ2, having been split in half already, is dialed back. The Northern Virginia campus will continue to grow, but it will be a lesser outpost, as will the new Nashville facility. Amazon's core strategic growth for the foreseeable future will continue to be focused in Seattle, a place which is already having a huge affordability crisis. So it is going to be hard to attract and recruit talent there. They are already having to hire just whoever is already there.

Wellness

Everybody in my industry talks about holistic financial planning, and there is tremendous buzz about the concept of financial wellness. Many of my reflections here on the blog have been about the interrelations between aging, decay, and maintenance, and you can be assured that in the back of my mind I am thinking in terms of time allocation, which can be managed with and translated into money. And I have often made the analogy between the financial advisor/planner and the general practitioner physician, in conversation if not here.

The more I think about it, I am increasingly of the mind that there is no fine or firm line between financial wellness and wellness generally. They are intimately bound up together. This thinking is to some extent being facilitated by William Goetzmann's Money Changes Everything, a book by a Yale professor which looks at the roots of finance going back to Mesopotamia. It is not light reading.

I have to present to a 401k in a couple of weeks on financial wellness, am in the process of developing the presentation. We'll see how much I meld the concepts of financial with physical/mental wellness in this presentation.

Funny pages

While we were gone to New Orleans, the newspaper delivery person -- someone I actually know from high school, which is cool -- slipped us a free copy of the News and Observer Sunday paper. Which included funny pages, which I haven't seen for a long time.

I took the time to read through them, and was mildly amused. There were no moments of convulsive guffawing, just some low-volume chuckles and slight curling of the mouth. But, as someone who makes and has made an effort to produce a volume of hopefully readable and worthwhile text over a long period of time, I have all the respect in the world for the people who draw and write the comic strips. It ain't easy to just keep producing, day in day out, or week in week out, year after year.

Perhaps more importantly, it's very helpful for me to adjust my expectations of what constitutes good humor. What's wrong with dredging a slight moment of sympathetic recognition or a remembrance of childhood from the funny pages, as opposed to the full body laughs that came from the best of Dave Chappelle's first season? You can't have genius all the time, and if you are demanding it of the universe constantly, you're setting yourself up for unhappiness. Much better to accept what's on offer and roll forward.

Big and easy

Mary and I are getting ready to go to New Orleans tomorrow for the weekend, our first time ever. The occasion for the trip is a little talk I have to give at a conference of Slavists on alternative career paths -- the last time I am ever doing this for free, unless it's a short drive from home.

It's also the first time we've ever gotten on a plane to go somewhere for a weekend for fun, and our first weekend alone as a couple for several years. We did it maybe in 2015 in Asheville or so after dropping Natalie off at camp or something.

It's obvious that it's a good thing to do for our relationship. Graham is 1/8th of the way through high school now, and of course it's clear to me that that will be over tomorrowish, the way time flies at our age. We need to relearn how to spend time together enjoyably as a couple.

The other day Adam said the blog was sometimes repetitive, and I know that I have been thinking about this theme for a while, so it's likely I've blogged about it. So I'll stop.

The great cycle of forest-trimming

I got home from lunch and a couple of errands yesterday, and what should await me but a bunch of Asplundh trucks in front of our house, trimming back branches. Making a lot of noise. Great.

I remember well the last time they were on our block, I wrote about it in this post. So now we can see they are running in about 5 year cycles here, at least in our mature, forested neighborhood. Their deployment was no doubt occasioned by the couple of outages we've had this year, though I honestly can't say if our neighborhood is worse than any other around here.

One thing that does appear to be the case, at least anecdotally is that Duke Power is being proactive and mindful about managing the risk associated with overhanging trees. Hopefully it has done enough, unlike PG&E, the Northern California utility that was forced to file for bankruptcy last month because of claims arising from all the fires in that region -- many of which have been put down to its failure to keep its power lines safe.

Of course, the weather (and climate?) has been kinder to North Carolina in the last decade or so than it has to Northern California. We haven't had a drought, so our trees are healthy, whereas NoCal's have been weakened by drought. The story is more complicated than that, to be sure, but I can't speculate further right now, because it's time to pack up and get ready for first tennis (coming for you, Z), then work.

College fun

We had a nice video call with Natalie on Sunday evening while granny was over for dinner. She was working in the Branford library, then had to go outside because the fire alarm kept going off, then, once that was over, she retreated to the Branford common room where a Super Bowl party was going on and sat in front of a mirror (details added for future memory sparks).

She told us that she had a paper due for her essay-writing class the next evening at 8, and that it was hard because it was in the autobiographical mode, which wasn't something she was comfortable with (despite having written fine college essays).

Then, yesterday evening at 7 she texts mom a picture of the menu from a pescatarian (mostly vegetarian) Chinese New Year feast she was attending, and said it was running longer than she was expecting and that she didn't have her paper done. This made Mr. Achievement over here nervous, and I nudged her a little. She said that she would only get marked down a third of a grade for being late, and that it wasn't worth rushing.

In the end, I think she made the right decision. Trying new stuff out, meeting people, experiencing the world, those are the benefits of being in college and going to a place like Yale where there's a lot on offer. Her grades will be fine, she works plenty hard and is super organized. Straight As her first semester, something I never quite pulled off. And Lord knows I wasted tons of time doing many things much less productive than eating a bunch of interesting Chinese food.

The lesson for me is, clearly, back the fuck off.

Evolving identity

Over dinner last night I learned that Graham needed to focus on Latin homework rather than starting season 3 of The Wire with me because he had gotten a 40 on a Latin test. Not a quiz, a test. Now, this teacher is known for giving hard tests and for letting kids make up their mistakes, but a 40?

We are paying $80 a week to an executive function coach to help Graham with issues around studying and being organized, and a few weeks back she came and found me after their session to tell me that Graham was on top of his Powerschool, which I interpreted to mean that I should get out of his jock. I perhaps shouldn't have backed off as far.

Then I sat with Graham to help him with his Latin, a language which I only took 1 year of, 35 years ago, more or less as a lark because it wasn't an honors class and it was super easy. Needless to say, despite years of Spanish and French and traveling in Italy and Brazil and also knowing Russian and other Slavic languages so I am comfortable with a language with cases and declensions, it wasn't easy. Particularly since they were translating pretty abstract passages from freaking Cicero.

And Graham did not have a handle on it. He was struggling pretty mightily.

So now Graham is on the cusp of getting at least one B in his first semester in high school. Which would axe his chances of being a valedictorian, i.e. being in the top 10% of his class. Sigh.

So I guess I need to be more attentive and offer more guidance. Mostly around the structured process of how to study, the need to put in the work, and making choices (maybe not staying at Robotics Club till 9 several nights a week).

Over the course of our lives we learn to distinguish between the things that come to us more or less by nature -- in our case (me and Graham) great memories, curiosity, persistence in searching down answers -- and the things that come to us by adjusting our natures to the demands of the world so as to channel our gifts towards accomplishment. In some real if paradoxical sense, it is only the latter -- what we become by learning the Way of the World -- that can really said to belong to "me," because it reflects intentional effort on my part. Which is to say, to extend beyond the logic of Descartes' cogito ("I think therefore I am"), that my truest "I" is the part of me that overcomes the tendencies bequeathed me at birth.