Narrow and wide

All too many of Natalie's courses seem interdisciplinary in nature (history, literature, art, sociology...) and based upon themes ("Race, Politics, and the Law," "The African Encounter with Colonialism"). A couple of caveats:

1. As an area studies (Russian and East European Studies) major, I participated in this and
2. The students do work awfully hard and read a lot of books by people I've never heard of -- which indicates to me that they're digging deep -- and
3. Natalie is objectively better educated than I was at her age, meaning she and the system are doing a lot of things right

I nonetheless wonder if the relative lack of single-author or more narrowly focused classes (I took classes with titles like Pushkin, Wittgenstein, Augustine, Russian Symbolism, Dostoevskii and Tolstoi, Russian History to 1796) etc. means that the pendulum has swung a little too far towards professors presenting their own pre-baked theses, leaving a little too little space for students to do their own thinking. Certainly Natalie has already run into trouble in one course where she disagrees with the professors and they gave her a crappy grade on a paper, she thinks mostly because they don't agree with her.

As an example of something I've seen in my own learning about a topic along these lines. I've complained here on the blog about the slowness of Ezra Vogel's bio of Deng, and how it seems stuck in interminable discussions of how China worked through Mao's legacy and its own ideological direction following Mao's death. I pined for tales of what was actually happening in the street. So I stated listening to Weijian Shan's book about exile to the Gobi in the Cultural Revolution, and there I learned just how intense and real the ideological discussions were all up and down China during this period, and also during the preceding and arguably crazier Great Leap Forward of the late 50s-early 60s. The absolute seeming insanity of what the Chinese would do on the basis of fine points of ideology. Kill all the sparrows. Try to scale up steel production by building millions of tiny forges in backyards and melt down pots, pans, knives, bicycles....

Fast forward to today and look at the conflict between Houston Rockets owner Darryl Morley and his little tweet about the Hong Kong protester, and Alibaba #2 and Brooklyn Nets owner (also Branford College '87, so a guy I knew in college) Joe Tsai's response characterizing what is happening in HK as a "separatist movement", seeming to toe the Beijing party line. But then he explains that in fact it's not just the party line, but that because of the Opium Wars and also the Japanese occupation prior to and during WWII, Chinese are extremely sensitive to perceived intervention. It's complex.

My point is that perhaps the best way to grasp the complexity of being is to dig deep in specific places and do your own spelunking.

Also, who are we to say the Chinese go overboard about fine points of ideology, we a nation of people who allow the proliferation of hundreds of millions of guns and very high rates of gun-related violence because of a romantic view of our "right to bear arms." And other stuff too. Liberals also do crazy shit because of very fine parsing of sacred ideas. But now it's time for work.

Elegant density

Beth and Kevin have this knife block that is very low slung and fits very neatly within the drawer to the left of the stove. Or perhaps it's more accurate to say Beth has it, because I can tell you fo sho Kevin didn't find it. It's not his thing.

In any case, it is rather ingenious and is an example of the marvelously efficient ways that city dwellers use space, which is something I first really saw when I started coming to New York regularly in the 80s, at Mark's family's apartment at 91st and Park but more particularly at Hilary's at 89th and Madison. His family was a little more affluent than hers, which meant, frankly, that her place was smaller and therefore more thought was put into it, and it was more homey.

There were bookcases in the narrow hallway outside of Hilary and Ellen's room, lots of bookcases generally. Not built in, for the most part. I remember as well a display of Medallia d'Oro coffee tins in the kitchen atop the cabinets, a decorative flourish and therefore not the most efficient use of space, but it was way up there and none of them was Sheryl Swoopes, so it wasn't really usable space. But to a North Carolina boy it was a lovely touch, urban and urbane.

But overall the place did have this quality of making a warm and hospitable home out of a small space, which is one of the magical things about city dwelling. And now I have come to the fourth paragraph, and the alarm bell in my head signals that it's time to stop blogging and move on with the business of the day, a day much less intense than yesterday's 5 meetings. Which I can live with.

Ditmars

Staying at Beth and Kevin's new place in Ditmars, Astoria, Queens. To get there had to hop the M60 bus from 125th St because the N wasn't running. Which seemed like a pain in the ass initially, but proved to be a lovely introduction to the nabe. From the bus stop just off 278 at 31st St I saw a Maltese cultural center, and then a few blocks up 31st, just to the West, was the Cheski Dom (Czech House) and a Bohemian Beer Garden, which, in Halloween stylie mode, was done up as the Bohemian Fear Garden.

Astoria is awesome, very reminiscent of Flatbush in the 80s, or probably the 90s, as the hipster/gentrification process is well underway. Is that good or bad? It's a tough call. On the one hand, some of the lower income people will in fact get pushed out, even without Amazon's HQ2. It's just happening. On the other had, money will flow into the neighborhood and the physical plant will be renewed and there will be opportunities for owners to exit and move to places with more space and yards and, frankly, better schools. It is bittersweet but not all evil.

In Manhattan now, one conference call down, waiting for meeting 1 of 4 to arrive. Here she is!

Digging deep

I started off this post with an enumeration of the ills that are weighing on me right now, but you don't want to read that, and I don't want to read it 20 years from now when I come back to check out my blog.

Hmmm.

In the afternoon yesterday an Indian couple in their 50s came in to talk to me. They have twin boys who are applying for college now, and they have very specific questions about making concrete decisions right now about where their sons will apply and the financial implications of it. Basically, if one of them gets in Duke Early Action and has to commit to going there, no matter what. Even if Duke doesn't offer them enough $.

The fact of the matter is that they are making this decision right as their backs are up against the wall of a deadline, when they should have been thinking it through months in advance. They came to my seminar in April, and could have been educating themselves about it a long time ago.

Of course, they are to some degree subject to the whims of a couple of 18-year olds.

I feel some guilt about not being able to answer their questions right off the top of my head, but that's being too hard on myself. I haven't guided people through this specific decision just like this, at this point in time in the decision cycle.

What this really is is an opportunity to dig deep, gain some knowledge, and better equip myself to serve people in the future. Gotta run with that.

Change up

In my ever-changing quest for an early morning routine that starts my day off right, my most recent iteration has involved: up around 645, start coffee, feed cats, meditate, crunches, push ups, then read with coffee. The reading has been "spiritual" in nature, for a long time Al Anon books, then I've moved on to stoics, Jewish thinkers, most recently Buddhists. Not thinking that anybody was going to have the answer, mind you, just looking for daily deposits in the bank of tranquility before I head off into the day.

The blog has been pushed back to later in the morning, after reading the paper and checking email, futures, etc. Which is a delicate place for it to be. Sometimes it happens, sometimes my attention gets sidetracked. In fact, my attention is always at issue. For a while the novelty of meditating was good enough to offer me a bit of a buzz.

For today at least, I'm slipping the blog in early, just to mix things up a bit.

I will grant that the book I am not reading today, Chogyam Trungpa's Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, has a decent point, namely that people are chasing after spiritualism in a materialistic way, looking to conquer tranquility and/or notch up scalps on a path to it. Is that me? Kinda? Maybe?

Still, I have struggled reading the book to fully groove on it. I know in truth that the answer is likely to be that need to strive less, but that is hard to do.

Him

To the extent possible, I try to post little about Trump. He already sucks up all too much oxygen from the world's discursive ecosystem. It is difficult to ignore him, but I try not to have him monopolize my attention. Mary's attention, to my mind, constitutes a more than sufficient investment from our household.

Yet it is hard to do so, because he is so inane, because he is so dangerous, as he tramples on all the norms of checks, balances, due process, alliances built up painstakingly at many levels by well-meaning representatives of various parties all up and down society.

But also because he does represent a fundamental truth, that there's a huge chunk of society who feels like they have been ignored and left out but that this one guy, this flaming asshole - and his analogues in different countries -- can save them. That he cannot, that they are the only people who can and that to do so they must cast down their cell phones, remote controls and Bibles and other sacred texts and figure out how to help themselves -- and that the state is desperate to help them do so while corporations are content to Taylorize them into irrelevance -- that truth has not sunk in yet.

OK. I just have to stop. It's not productive.

Level-setting

Listening to Weijian Shan's Out of the Gobi in the car now, really an incredible book, the autobiography of a guy from Beijing exiled to the Gobi desert during the Cultural Revolution, where he dug ditches, cut reeds on a frozen lake, made bricks, was trained as a "barefoot doctor," and did a host of other things under rather subhuman conditions of starvation, cold, and general privation. Then how he came out, went to the US for college, and eventually becomes an investment banker and private equity deal guy.

And in parallel the story of China and its history. I started in on this book while taking a time out from Ezra Vogel's life of Deng Xiaopeng, which is a plodding court history, for the most part, about the shifting sands of decision-making at the heights of the Chinese Communist Party during much of the time period Shan describes. Shan's is a much more readable book for the general reader, which is pretty much me.

Shan's story is also just a story of an incredibly hard-working, decent guy. He has pretty much herculean stamina and forbearance, which is a nice reminder of what is possible when I am feeling put upon or grumpy.

But of course it is an autobiography, so one needs to take things with a grain of salt. It would be interesting if there were critiques out there of Shan, blogs from people who knew him that said things like: "Actually that guy is a total dick!" But I doubt it, and it is certainly nice and inspiring to read these stories. We want to believe them.

Asleep, Woke

There was a piece in the WSJ's Mansion section one recent Friday about Santa Fe as a great place to buy a house if you are "woke." I didn't read it, I never read that section, but gather it may well have been tongue in cheek about the term "woke." As well it should be.

"Woke" is a nice word for use by students who -- just venturing forth into the world -- must figure out who they are and find purchase in the big slippery world by establishing group affiliations: I am this, not that, etc. But its use by adults is not just silly, it's dangerous right about now. Right about 3 years ago we got our asses kicked by something that came at us out of the blue and was completely unexpected. Despite the fact that we had just seen it happen in the UK, and that we had seen nationalist-populism creeping forward in places like France for years. Far from being woke, we were asleep. And we still haven't actually woken up.

The problem is not that I disagree with those that like to use the word "woke" to complement themselves for their rectitude on matters of substance. Far from it. We are aligned on more issues than we are not, most likely.

But they/we still haven't figured out how to win, and we still haven't made a substantive and earnest effort on an individual basis to understand why we lost.

There was a humorous situation at our house on Saturday. I got home in the afternoon and found a Spectrum van in our driveway with its engine running. We've been planning to cut to cord and go internet only, and in the run up to that our phone was dead. I was also having trouble with the cable TV.

You don't need all the gory details, but we were pissed at Spectrum so we decided to have them send a service guy out to fix our phone and cable. So when I got there the guy made a joke about taking my parking space and I said I didn't care about that but that his engine was running. This was the day after the Climate March. He said he always left it running when it was hot. It was mid-80s and in the shade, so his van would not have gotten hot if he turned it off. But I held my tongue.

To fix our TV he grabbed the remote and turned it on. He said the TV and cable box both needed to be on. I frickin knew that, and had turned them both on. But it was mostly embarassing. But I don't really care because it's just not worth watching cable TV, or it's not worth the attention it takes to find something worth watching.

The phone -- after 45 minutes of head-scratching and trips to the van and back -- turned out to have been unplugged by the alarm company guy when he installed the cell phone alarm system we needed to have our alarm keep working once we cut the cord.

So there I was, pissed that his van was running, thinking about how Spectrum should have a policy about this, and it was all because stuff was either unplugged or I had been hitting the wrong button or just didn't care. If only Spectrum would prorate the bill for when we shut off, the issue would never have arisen.

But at a higher level, I didn't know this guy. It would have been great to have been able to have a real conversation and figure out why it was he really didn't think running his van mattered, or who had convinced him that climate change was bullshit. And the best way to have the conversation would have been really slowly, in a non-judgmental, friendly way. But I knew that if I did so, he'd just keep running his van for longer, that he was on the clock, and I really just wanted to move on with my day.

But I do hope somebody from Spectrum brand management catches this blog in their filter and they should have a policy, because at the end of the day it's costing them money. And the reason they don't care is because they have too few competitors to force them into disciplined cost control.

On skill in literature

At the end of my class on Eugene Onegin on Monday, a guy asked "If it doesn't have a particularly deep meaning and it's not particularly uplifting, why is it so acclaimed? Why should we care?" Although the entirety of my lecture had been dedicated to addressing this question in a complex fashion, I didn't have a one-line answer for him other than to say that it wasn't generally a requirement for literature to have one or the other quality, and I cited Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther and the suicide epidemic it had kicked off in the decades prior to Onegin as an instance (I had the timing of it wrong in my mind, Werther was published in 1774 though Goethe was still alive as Onegin came out).

But it does raise an overall question: why is skill and/or technical accomplishment not a sufficient attainment for literature? In painting (Vermeer), sculpture (Michelangelo), music (any number of people) skill and technical complexity in and of themselves are more or less considered adequate to get an artist into the canon, or at least it's understood why they are monumental accomplishments when they first are published.

With literature, it's different. We do want something more, almost from day 1, though verisimilitude often gets you brownie points in the early days.

The Fall

It's a lovely morning, and I was all teed up to write about the crispness of the air, how nice it is to have on sweatpants, etc, when I started watching a video of an interview on CNBC (which I try not to watch) with Jeffrey Gundlach of DoubleLine (who is indeed very smart). I didn't get very far, because the day is too short to watch this kind of thing, or, rather, I have higher impact things that I need to do.

But it did take me back to a fundamental point: there is so much discussion and thought in the markets about monetary determinism: interest rates, money supply, blah blah blah. When fundamentally the drivers of economic growth are population size and productivity. The developing world is troubled by shrinking populations. Everywhere birth rates are below 2.1, including the USA. It's worst in Japan, South Korea, Finland (I think), but everywhere rates are low. Meanwhile there are people around the developing world who want in.

We need to let more of them in, to support economic growth. Which doesn't necessarily need to mean more interstates and McMansions. And our lives are so much happier and better when we let more of them in. The food is more interesting, people get more interesting and beautiful when people from different places fall in love and have children, music gets better... It's all good.

But our political culture is going in exactly the wrong direction with the expansion of neo-nationalism. And we need to fix that.

I don't know who is having conversations with the angry white men and women of the hinterlands about what they are doing on at least a monthly if not a weekly/daily basis to expand their skillsets and become more marketable. Do they listen to books in the car, or do they listen to talk radio that just pisses them off? I suspect the latter.

Missing books

I culled my library a couple of times over the years, once when we moved from Wilton St to Linden Lane in Princeton in 2003 in anticipation of the birth of Graham (who will be 16 tomorrow) and once more in 2009 as we were paring down to come home to Chapel Hill. So that would have been right around the time of George Sr's passing. So, at watershed moments in life.

My Russian library was what suffered most, of course, as my distance from my academic field grew greater and more pronounced. I have retained a bunch of books, to be sure. Complete sets of Mayakovsky, Turgenev, and partial ones of Goncharov, Belinsky, Pisarev, Pushkin, plus the core canon in translation and a bit of reference.

But getting ready for this Pushkin talk has brought to light that I let go of some important ones. First and foremost, that brown criticism anthology edited by Victor Ehrlich that contained translations of both Shklovsky's article on Pushkin and Sterne -- which I would really have liked to have had over the last couple of weeks -- and, more importantly, Jacobson's "On the Generation the Squandered its Poets," written shortly after the Mayakovsky's suicide in 1930, a very special and rare little gem. Yes I can find these things on the internet, and yet I feel like they are part of my life and I'd like to have them around. I may yet hunt for them again. But not on the internet, that would be like cheating. In the used bookstores of America.

Hustling over here

Still a little snowed in under Pushkin, after a decent soccer game with a came by DC Whitenack and a lovely 35th reunion this weekend. Gotta run Graham up to Carrboro shortly.

Yesterday I took Graham to the Service Fair at Carrboro High School to learn about various organizations through which he could earn service hours. At first he appeared to be just rambling around aimlessly, so I tried to give him some direction about some he could check out. After standing with him at a couple of booths, he says to me: "I'm happy to learn more about these, but it's not helpful to have you breathing down my neck." So I backed the hell off, proud that he could tell me that straight up like that. The boy is learning.

Saying no, and specializing

Somewhere recently I heard it said that the difference between successful and very successful people is that the latter say no to almost everything. By that measure, I am an abject failure, but I am getting better.

But this notion aligns with so much that is wise. Today I had a long meeting with a new client, then got a haircut and took Mary to the office, before hopping on a conference call for a Board thing, wherein I pushed something forward without getting formally stuck with leading a project, though I did suggest that I could do some nudging.

Then I heard that one client got a job, while received news that another had had a baby. Both were extremely welcome.

Most business gurus suggest that to have a successful business, you should really specialize quite narrowly -- which is really just a very specific way of saying no to a lot of possibilities -- and I get that. But the problem is that by doing so close yourself off to a lot of experience. So you narrow yourself. So in the end I still come down on balancing specialization and generalization.

And now, off to meet NC's next Treasurer, and then buy soy milk for Graham, before helping with math homework, and maybe working on my Pushkin lecture for next Monday. Sigh.

Home Improvements for Dummies

There was a copy of this book sitting out on our coffee table. I had taken it off the shelf and put it there for some reason before we went to the Northeast in August, but had forgotten why it was there. Then, sometime last week, I remembered that it was because I had to fix something in Graham's toilet, the black plastic floatie mechanism, not the clapper (I have long since mastered that one).

In a moment of pride I mentioned to Mary that I had remembered why I had the book out and she looked at me and, in perfect deadpan, said: "I don't know why we even have that book in our house." We both like to had fell out laughing.

There is really nothing much better to making your spouse crack up hard. After a couple of decades it ain't always easy.

Time out

Need to focus on prepping for lecture on Onegin on the 16th. I called up NC State yesterday to find out how many were signed up. After being on an "Alternative Career Path" panel at an academic conference attended by 3 in February in New Orleans, I was prepared to be underwhelmed.
Instead I learned that there will be 22 people there. So I'd better get my game geared up.

Also, soccer game at noon and a very busy week coming up.

Therefore, most of my brain is occupied by stuff to do, not much of the relaxation that typically lets me blog interestingly. But I'm thinking of you, fair readers.

Chappelle special

Watched a bit of Dave Chappelle's most recent show on Netflix last night. He's doing stand-up in Atlanta.

The thing that impressed me first and foremost is how surprisingly much his groove dovetailed with the Trumpians and other male whiners about what is being taken away from him. How hard it is on celebrities these days, when everybody is all up in Michael Jackson and R Kelly's business just because they were having sex with children. All celebrities have targets on their heads, he tells us. And then he was complaining about how come he couldn't say "faggot" when he could say "nigger." Oh cry me a river.

Throughout history comics have played an important role in critiquing society's repressive tendencies: Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, SNL, etc. They burst through boundaries for us. That's great, thanks. But right now Chappelle just sounds like a little too much like some dude on Reddit whose had his Nth Amendment freedom taken away.

Still, he's pretty funny here and there. Because he's Dave Chappelle, bitch. Not as funny as the first season of his show, but that was like an all-time peak for comedy, he ain't never going back there.

A donut

After all my deeply insightful blogging and after a fine showing last time out, Adam crushed me 6-0 today. But it was a competitive 6-0. The first game probably had 8 points at deuce.

One thing I need to remember is that, sad though it may be, I really have to be careful with my swimming as we turn the corner into soccer season. I slightly strained a quad today running for a particularly deft drop shop of Z's because I was still tight from an extra-long swim on Monday. Swimming doesn't dovetail nicely with the sports involving sprinting and changing direction quickly. Which is particularly sad, because as the days get shorter and less hot, the water in the lake gets fresher, so it's a nice time of year to swim. I guess I'll have to stick to recreational as opposed to exercise swimming.

Didn't do anything terribly today, though there were three double faults, mostly I just went for winners and missed too many shots. Though there were some beauties to be sure.

Next time.

Watching the transactions

One of the great things about having shared bank accounts with our kids -- along with being able to move $ into them easily -- is being able to observe their spending. Graham doesn't spend on anything -- except the time he signed up for some "Free TV" thing on the internet and some German company was dinging him for $35 a month for a while. That was fun. BofA credited it back to our account.

But Natalie is out in the world, so I can see what she's up to. Laundry. Book store. A coffee or two a week. Now and then a Lyft or Metro North to NY. She is a good kid, which is a beautiful thing.

What more can I say?

How things are done

At our Lake Board meeting the other night, the Chair was describing how the staff currently sweep the sometimes copious goose poop off the floating docks into a bucket and carry it in a boat or canoe back into the woods to dump it there. Because meetings always run too late and this was much too small a topic to kick off a potentially contentious discussion, I didn't say anything. It has always been my practice to kick the stuff off the dam with my foot, or if necessary my hand, into the lake, and then splash off the remnant using lake water. This tends to get the dock to an appropriate Pareto or 20/80 level of cleanliness.

It is a frickin lake, after all, and animals are pooping in it 24/7.

Often there are parents over on the beach 20-30 yards away, and none of them has ever said "oh my god! My child is swimming in this lake and you are putting goose poop in there." Far from it, I believe they are actually thinking "thank God that guy is taking care of that nasty work. I just had to change a diaper (or just got through that stage a couple of years ago) and am tired of dealing with poop."

The next day, I and another member of the Board, a scientist who tests the water and deals with environmental contamination professionally (teaches at Duke, consults with Beijing, New Delhi on air quality) if it would be Ok if the staff just swept the poop into the lake. Of course it would, I said.

Today I was sitting on the porch reading The Economist, and I was very happy to see some kid float out to the docks on a boat and do exactly what I described above. Did a great job of it, in fact.

End of summer

So here we are, Labor Day weekend, about to move into the busiest part of the year, and I'm tired. It was a lovely summer, in so many ways. Lots of important milestones.

Graham had the most transformative summer. The biking trip in Italy with granny plus three weeks at Duke TIP really have opened him up to the world in a lot of ways, and it's a beautiful thing to see.

Natalie's own trip to Italy and then Spain was lovely for her, but really a more incremental step forward since we already knew she could handle herself wherever she was perfectly well. But she had fun and made friends and learned a lot, so it was all good. I think her internship with the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, in which she spent a lot of time driving around rural NC, going to county law enforcement offices and asking them for data (and understanding why they couldn't just snap their fingers and get it), probably showed her just as much of the world as going to Europe. Just seeing a lot of rural America and walking in the buildings taught her a lot about where she lives and what she has.

Mary and I, we went to Boulder for a week and stayed in Leslie and Walter's house, which was lovely. Then there was work. Then we went to Larchmont and helped pack up Mary's mom's house. Not quite enough vacation. Oh well.

I would try to chill out over the weekend, but I have to prep for my lecture on Eugene Onegin at NC State in a couple of weeks. How the heck did I let myself get talked into that?

Spousal competition

Natalie texted Mary about a couple of things yesterday evening while my phone was upstairs. It sounded like the kind of thing I might have been cc'd on, but I wasn't. Meanwhile, there have been things she has texted me about and Mary has said "why didn't I get that?"

It is odd that, of all things in the world, there should be even the slightest bit of competition between spouses for the affection of their children, but of course there is, and at some level we encourage it. By mildly criticizing one another to the child when the other is absent, or by carping at each other in front of the kids about trifles, for instance, instead of presenting an eternally unified front. But it's ultimately -- obviously -- not a good thing. What is a good thing is that our kids should feel free to reach out to each of us about whatever without a need to include the other for worry that our feelings might be hurt.

Generally speaking, my family -- which started off as a family of four and in some sense remained that through my dad's death -- has a much more robust culture of one-on-one communication than does Mary's -- a family of six. They tend to do things communally, and even regard my family's insistence that we break away for one-on-ones -- me and Leslie going to the store or for coffee over Thanksgiving, for example -- with mild suspicion and envy.

So really I should (and in general have done) encourage Mary and Natalie (and Graham) to cultivate dedicated and open communication channels to one another. The sibling bond is super-important for after we are gone.

If there is a silver lining to this jealousy, it is that the kids will remember it when they are adults (and hopefully raising our grandkids) and realize that it was all about our own insecurities and imperfections, because we had not in fact figured it all out and were always just doing our best with our limited means. Because that's also all they'll be able to do.

Saddling back up

Back in NC now after a bittersweet visit to Larchmont and the Northeast. On the one hand, life rolls forward, so we experienced a full week of lasts:

• Last stroll in Manor Park -- at least from walking out off the porch
• Last swim at Manor Beach (I realize all this "Manor" stuff sounds vaguely ridiculous, but these are the actual place names)
• Last lunch at the Village Deli after popping out from the library, where Natalie and I ceremonially enjoyed a final chicken cutlet with LTO and hot sauce together. This had become our go to sandwich
• and so on

Or at least we hope we did, because once we list this house we sho nuff hope it sells.

In the course of this, I twinged my back after carrying too many boxes up and down steps, so I ended up spending a fair amount of time sitting in the highly automated recliner that was purchased for Mary Lee during her health bouts this spring and I must confess, I liked it. But it is a little sad that, I spent the last week in this house, so majestically oriented towards the Long Island Sound, in the darkest room in the back of the house, even if the sitting was top notch. Between my back, the lack of air conditioning and the concerted effort to keep the humidity in the house down to stop the mold so heroically battled down by Rob last year from returning, and the general state of reminiscence-infused chaotic packing of the rest of the house, I spent precious little time in the sun room, including that most magical of happy places, the couch in there, upon which I have read so many excellent books while listening to the gentle metallic sounds of boat parts whose names I don't know because I didn't grow up in a boaty place clinking against one another out on the water.

But it was perhaps a function of hiding away in the back, and also in the Public Library during the day, which deprived me of the spunk needed to write.

Adrenaline and cathexis

I have realized that the key thing for me on the tennis court is to let everything go as quickly as possible. I must forgive myself every error, every flubbed point, right there where it happens, and get back to internal equilibrium before the next point starts  -- because I have a tendency to extrapolate wildly from each error and feel that it is a reopening of wounds from time immemorial, to flagellate myself and think that I will never get better. Which I know objectively is idiocy, yet it has been hard to fight the tendency.

Similarly, when I hit a great shot, run down or stretch for something that seems impossible, and get that charge of adrenaline and ego, I have to let go of that too, I must not read my own press and get all hyped up, because that's when I let down my guard and mean regression kicks in. Each point ends, a new one begins, none of them matter much.

So I have to consciously slow down between points to let the prior one go. I have to actively focus o my breathing, the sky, something other than the game.

Certainly I am not the first to make this observation, everybody who does any sport knows this, and I have made the observation and even written about it before, most likely.

But it was only today that I realized that the factor that I had not considered was adrenaline. When I hit a good shot, or hit a shitty one, or when my opponent does one or the other, there's always a little burst of excitement at the end of the point, but particularly when it is me who does the good or the bad thing. And in that moment my self-judgment is cathected, or infused with meaning and intensity, by the adrenaline. And that is what messes me up, and that is what I need to walk away from, to let the adrenaline die back and let me get back to a calm place.

Which was news to me.

So I beat Rob -- who has been practicing a lot -- 7-6 (7-5).

Writing every day

I was just reading a blog about writing every day, when I realized I should really rather be writing than reading. After all, the initial premise of Chew Your Grouse was that it should be a daily blog, though I have slipped from that practice somewhat. Having kept a pace of about three or four posts a week over coming up on fifteen years is really not too shabby though, so I won't beat up on myself too hard.

We are getting ready to head off on a "mini-vacation" as a family. We'll go from Larchmont up to Cold Springs to go for a hike. Natalie picked the hike for us, the Hudson Highlands Trail. As luck would have it, I'm 90% certain this is the hike Mary and I made the day after the day after our wedding, when we took a mini-honeymoon and stayed in a B&B in Croton-on-Hudson.

This was the day that we went up to Garrison to get sandwiches, the day the dudes drinking beer in the parking lot used the word "cleanity," as described in this post.

At any rate, while Mary and I were out on the Hudson Highlands Trail, we encountered a young couple in a meadow who got up somewhat sheepishly, as if they had been enjoying themselves in the traditional way. We kept right on hiking, but actually hastened back to our B&B pretty quickly thereafter.

Re-intermediation

There has been a lot of excitement in recent decades about the virtues of disintermediation, or making it possible for people to get goods and services without access to intermediaries or gatekeepers. Everybody hates salespeople.

But there are all kinds of problems with this, with the demise of the gatekeepers. First and foremost we see this in the decline of expertise and respect for it. If everybody DIYs everything, nothing ever gets done well. Things fall apart, then we have to go back and do them again properly. If we even get a chance to do so, as we might not with the rainforest.

At the very worst, we get conspiracy theorists and crackpots being pushed by YouTube algorithms in ways that destroy everything, as we have seen in recent electoral cycles. This article from NYT on YouTube in Brazil illustrates this principle well. YouTube begets Bolsonaro, who may be more destructive than Trump.

How do we move back to a model where expertise is respected? First and foremost, by respecting it ourselves and paying for services when we can. Subscribe to newspapers. Buy books. Hire handymen, and lawyers and accountants. These are threadbare answers, I know, but it's a start.

Bowie, MD, Town Center

On the way up the coast the other day, we found ourselves in Bowie, MD in an upscale shopping center called "Town Center." It was neo-urbanist in design, so it was laid out like real streets with parking behind, to make it as town-like as possible and make people see each other from across the "street" while walking. Pretty cool.

One thing that was distinct about it was that it was a pretty African-American place. Probably 75% of the people were black.

I was pretty exhausted from fighting through and around DC suburbs and exurbs, while dealing with some Eastern Shore traffic too from bad planning. And I wanted to check on Google Maps to be sure the next leg of our route was the best one in terms of balancing time and scenery (i.e. 97 to Baltimore vs. 50/301 across the Bay Bridge then up to Delaware that way -- sometimes a good bet in terms of time vs. aesthetics). But it was hard to get a cell connection inside, and the music was really loud in there, and I got a little annoyed.

So I really wasn't able to accept and appreciate that I was in a different kind of place, a place where we were in the minority as white people and just roll with it and dig it for what it was. I need to go back there sometime when I'm not in a pissy mood and check the whole place out.

Home and away

Installed now on the front porch at Larchmont, looking out over the Long Island Sound. Of course, for what is likely to be our last summer trip here, it is perfect. The air is cool, the sky is blue, etc.

Yesterday we picked our way up the East Coast at what I have decided is the typical rate of travel for us. Including the time for all stops (2x bathroom plus lunch, coffee, and gas), we made our way from Chapel Hill to here at 49 mph. This is pretty much how it works out.

What is astounding as time goes on is how the center of pain has shifted south. From Richmond to Baltimore it is pretty much hell, and then the gates open and we fly through Delaware, NJ and NY. With a little pain on the approaches to the Delaware Memorial Bridge and the GWB. I wonder if this is a function of population shifting south and the failure of infrastructure to keep up. But it does make me kinda want to move back to the North.

But now we must get this household ready to move. After all the trauma and the onset of reality of the last few months, the acceleration of Mary Lee's health events and the begrudging realization that it is time to move on, not much seems to have changed in the house to get her ready to move and it ready to be sold. Some rooms have been painted. I hear a lot of progress has been made in the attic. Some bookshelves have been cleared. But not much else.

Of course not. It's a big step, and they've been here for almost half a century. But it will be on us to act as catalysts and try to shift things forward a little.

Mid point

Whenever possible, I prefer to read using natural light, so I have taken to opening the skylights on the side of the house where our dining room table is in the morning, so I can read the paper at breakfast by their light. Only recently did I realize that the one on the street side of the house is much more important than the one right over my spot, but that's another story.

At any rate, this morning, there was less light than usual, and I realized it's because we are just about midway between the summer solstice and the autumnal equinox: days are getting shorter. It's the south, it's hot, we're not close to the true end of summer, but school starts soon, we drop Natalie in New Haven in just two weeks, then Graham's school starts the week after that. And this proximity is pretty palpable.

In some sense I feel like it hasn't really been summer because we haven't had a true vacation. Six days in Boulder, sure, but that's pretty short and we didn't have the whole family there. Better get used to it, there will be more of that coming and that's just life.

On Saturday we drive north for what may be the last of our August visits to Larchmont, maybe (if we're lucky and the house sells in the fall) the last long stint in the house at all. If I haven't blogged about it, Mary's mom is selling the house they've been in for 45ish years and moving to the retirement community where she worked for many years. She had resisted moving to what feels like the office, one can understand that, but her accelerating health events finally brought it home to roost that it was time to suck it up and move.

Underlying all of this is a sense of time accelerating, a natural codicil of aging, and thus the need to cultivate an appreciation of the passing of time itself and little good things. Like kicking Adam's ass at tennis yesterday.

Slow weekend

First weekend in a long time in which I had really not much to do, so I got a lot done.

On Saturday I went for a very long run (9 miles), which naturally ended up involving lots of walking. Basically I circumnavigated the area in which I've lived most of my life. Up Kensington, then crossed by path onto Piney Mountain. Out into Carolina North. A little while on the single track trails in the pine forest (Outer Neverland Loop) before returning to Pumpkin Loop, and from there into Glenn Heights, past the Hookers', the Konancs', The Clarks', the house Carol Ann rented while doing renovations, the Steiners', the Deknatels', the Turnbulls', and the Harmons'. All within 200 yards! Then past the Gulf Station, the Mini Mart, over the Lake Ellen Dam (the lake still empty after the event a few years back -- but they're working on it!), down Shady Lawn (where Kiger lived), past Mary Rice's house, around the East side of Eastwood on Lake Shore Lane, then along the creek and up the hill back to my house. My feet and calves were killing me.

Then I ate a bunch of food.

Yesterday I finished a finance book I had been grinding through forever, talked to Leslie on the phone for a while, fixed Graham's toilet (kinda), then went out to dinner with mom. After dinner, all four of us watched a couple of episodes of "The IT Crowd", which Graham and I have seen (Mary watched some on first go round), but Natalie hasn't. Still a good show, with one and a half comic geniuses, which is more than most have.

And I put in a quick three miles, for good measure, and worked on a Townes Van Zandt song on guitar.

The evening before the morning

The magic of morning meditation has largely worn off as the pace of my business -- indeed my life, in certain regards -- has accelerated. I get up, start the coffee, feed the cats, plunk down on my mat and try to clear my mind, and all the concerns of clients and business flows in to fill the gap. I can concentrate on my breathing and it helps to a certain extent, but something of the thrill is gone.

But I keep at it, and my gluteal flexibility continues to rise, and I keep doing my situps and pushups, and then I go out on the porch and read a little of something, right now Trungpa.

What I am not doing, and perhaps I should try, is meditating in the evening. Instead, after my nightly course of TV with one child or other (last night Graham and I revisited "The IT Crowd" with Natalie, to see if she might like it), I go up to my desk, make sure no email needing attention has come in, and then I watch some sports (Messi, Federer, Jordan, that kind of thing) or music (right now Townes Van Zandt) video. Last night I was watching vids trying to teach me a Townes Van Zandt picking pattern for an awesome song.

But one way or another, the things I am watching are aspirational in nature. The things the greats do. I am dreaming of being them, or even, if I am studying picking, trying to emulate them. Instead of just focusing on being there and accepting that I am fine. Then I go to bed and read a book which is itself most often geared towards edification. No wonder I wake up tired, mind racing.

JW

Went to an AA meeting this morning, where I ran into someone who reminded me of Akin, who in turn reminded me of JW, about whom I have written recently. I had hoped to run into each of them in AA in North Carolina, but they never quite made it there.

There was a time we were friends, and had fun together. He road tripped with me to Bloomington (where he had gone to high school, I think) the summer of 1990 when I went for a summer course in Slovenian. He had gotten a book called Learn Italian By Yourself. He refused to speak any Italian with anyone else, insisting that he was learning it by himself.

Over time JW degenerated into someone I was generally not excited to see. We were on very different wavelengths. I had quit drinking, had kids, and was focused on the future in addition to the present. He had not, not, and was living resolutely in the present. Apparently there were many who found him charming, and I will confess that, on Facebook at least, he seems to be handling this whole death thing pretty well.

But it would have been great to have seen him get a handle on things and live a little longer.

Slightly charred

Woke late this morning, fairly burnt out after an intense two weeks, crowned by the social intensity of the last two weeks: client party on Sunday, followed by 10 neighbors coming over Monday to eat and drink leftovers, and a Board meeting at the house Wednesday to work through more of the pappadam and beer.

I am encouraged this morning by a couple of stories in the Journal, one about regional variants of pizza around the USA, another about the blossoming of baseball in Peru in the hands of Venezuelan immigrants fleeing Chavez and Maduro, in turn. Twas ever thus, the spread of culture. And it's a good thing.

Along those lines, I am intrigued by the Turkish Cultural Center opening near us on Franklin Street. It is certainly odd, given the low density of Turks around here. A little Googling shows that it is being funded by one Aziz Sancar, a UNC biochemist who won a Nobel Prize (Daily Tarheel article referred to is as "Noble" -- a shameless lack of copy-editing and/or basic cultural literacy).

So, the obvious questions: how close is this guy to Erdogan, and is there a Turkish government role in funding it?  He met with Erdogan in 2015 after getting the Nobel, and again in 2017. Erdogan was already descending into autocracy by then, though he wasn't as much of a cad as he is now, enboldened as he is by the world's turn to nativism.

It will be interesting to see the path of this center over time. If there are deep pockets of Turkish emigres around here, deeper than I know, then it may flourish. If it is dependent on Ankara for funding, I would like to think that it will fail in time, as the autocratic mode retreats. Although perhaps an enlightened regime in Turkey will support it too.

In any case, it is certainly odd to have a faux Turkish building going up just down the way from the always oddly place Hotel Siena.

Time to go pick up Graham from Duke TIP!

Thoughts on inflation, value, and values

Most economists think the Phillips Curve -- describing the inverse relationship between inflation and unemployment -- is broken. Therefore we can keep cutting interest rates as long as there is no inflation these days.

I think that in fact we don't have an absence of inflation these days, we have inflation that is not being measured properly, because it is expressed in the inability to find people to get things done. Contractors who don't call back because they're too busy, for example. Businesses that can't expand because they can't staff up quickly enough. Right now Amazon is seeking to hire 20,000 people nationally, 10,000 in Seattle alone. But housing is so expensive in Seattle that a medical practice downtown (where a client works) can't hire young doctors because they can't afford to live within an hour's commute of work. That is a to a large extent a zoning problem (they need to build more housing and to do so must tear up restrictive zoning).

A couple of stories have supported my thesis. The Fed is taking the view when people say they can't hire they aren't offering enough pay (see here in the Economist). Meanwhile, the town of Emeryville, CA has raised its minimum wage to $16.30, but businesses are having trouble because their margins are eroded. A large part of the problem there is that one small town was trying to take action on its own, so it made its services more expensive than those of neighbors. Why pay $18 for a burger when you can drive 5 miles and get it for $13?

Fundamentally it's a problem of price-inelasticity: people balk at paying the prices that things actually cost, so they substitute or go without. If we want things to be cheaper, we need more people.

But that clearly means we need to arrive at an immigration policy that is acceptable politically. Unfortunately the current situation at the border was probably fueled by an instance of judicial activism (a 2015 court decision that created an exception for families seeking asylum, vs. individuals seeking asylum) that has created an opening for nativist extremists, who also are suspicious of judicial activism. Better that the border situation be addressed legislatively and the nativists defanged.

Almost done

After several days, one large party and a smaller one to attack the leftovers, we have reached the point where we are almost done with the tandoori chicken from Vimala's catering, and we are left with only rice, channa, naan, papadam, and some sauces. Which is not terrible, but still a little sad. Also some beverages. And cookies.

One very positive outcome was that I attacked a lot of things that had been nagging at me around the house, aside from the standard cleaning of windows and all the white paint on the porch, I also did some touch up painting, changed filters in the AC units and also the water filter, and even tested out Marvin's proposed method for cleaning the roof (hand-wiping with a bleach solution), which would be rather labor-intensive but is probably a plausible way to go about mitigating the really dirty areas. And it would be a good way to hang with my boy. Though the logistics of having enough of the right kind of rags to clean it all off is pretty daunting. And rinsing and wringing them while up there. In some ways it's a kind of crazy plan. But it would work without messing up the plants, and no power washers will send us a quote, it seems.

But the house is intrinsically in much better shape than it was a week or so back.

The role of the advisor

To probabilistically frame the nature of the tradeoffs between present enjoyment and future security inherent in a given choice for a given counterparty, and then contextualize it for them in their own life or business situation. All of this is subject to the uncertainty of the future course of events well outside our control, the limits of the client's willingness to share with the advisor, and indeed the limits of their own self-understanding.

Grasping

In recent months I've had difficulty achieving the zen-like state of morning groove that I try to get to from my early routine. While meditating, I keep getting distracted by business and other topics. My readings haven't felt as deeply engaging. On the positive side, it has gotten much easier to do 100ish crunches and 20 push-ups (those I can keep track of more easily than the crunches, perhaps a bad sign... Probably should ramp up and do more)

I have taken to going out on the porch and reading with my coffee when it's not too hot out. Today, while reading Chogyam Trungpa's Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, where he was talking about "seeking" (or not seeking, ideally) to do away with a firm distinction between "I" and "this" (whatever we're doing), I found myself increasingly distracted by the sound of birds singing and absolutely grooving on the wind blowing in the trees (always a fave). And I realized that I was doing pretty well.

Once more

Back from the lake, my face is scratchy from its deferred date with the blade. Made surprising progress over the weekend re-reading Eugene Onegin, getting ready for my upcoming September lecture at NC State on the topic. Which is, by the by, going to be huge and of considerable interest to all.

But now I must get in gear and get out to the office. Long day of stuff to do, thankfully most of it interesting.

Getting moving

Gotta hustle up to the lake so will keep this brief.

After a week of not swimming much, my lower back pain is back (not acute, but worse than yesterday and the day before) after maybe 25-30 minutes in the water yesterday evening. Hmmm.

Also spent some time around dusk yesterday getting the house ready for the party next weekend. First I swept leaves and grass cutting out of the driveway. I wrote not long ago of the place of keeping the driveway clean in the The Great Program, and I cannot help but to think back one of the original moments that led me to think about this, watching shopkeepers sweep the sidewalk in front of their shop. I forget where I was, Italy, Spain, Harlem, Brooklyn, somewhere. And I thought "why would he do that? It will just get dirty again tomorrow." But, as time goes on, and it becomes clear that keeping one's space relatively clean, and thereby bracketing not entropy itself, but its impact on those who enter your space, is one of the few instances of control permitted us by the universe. So, far from being futile, this Sisyphean effort to sweep the sidewalk, it is fundamentally noble.

Also makes the place look nice, attracting more customers.

More later.

Ghosts of things past

Today being Sunday, it was of course pancake day, so I made pancakes. Graham has come to prefer pumpkin pancakes, even in warm weather, so I made "pumpkin" (actually substituting sweet potato because he can't tell the difference and I am a little sick of pumpkin myself). But today's batch tasted funny. Had Graham forgotten to put sugar in the dry ingredients, which he mixed? He had not, he allowed surely. Hmmmm. What was it?

Turned out, it was the baking soda. We had left a thing of it in the back of the older Prius after Mary thought she had squished a baby mouse in the door many months back. I was never sure about that, but there was a smell. Well, the baking soda didn't absorb all of it, but clearly it absorbed some. Neither Graham nor I finished our pancakes.

Later in the day, after we had checked Graham into TIP over on Duke's west campus, we were eating lunch in Brodhead, Duke's swanky new uber dining hall/food court. After we got our food and sat down, I realized we were in the old dining hall, and I remembered the last time I had been there, in early 1990. I was auditing courses in Duke's graduate program in literature with Fredric Jameson, and he together with the Duke Slavics Department had sponsored a conference on new trends in literary and historical thought in Russia. We had a great set of people come over, people I didn't know from Adam but who turned out to be players.

Surprisingly, in the crowd of attendees, I saw a name tag that said Joseph Kosuth, who turned out to be the Joseph Kosuth, who back in the 60s had been a leader of the Conceptualist school of art in New York. A pretty well-known guy. I pointed out to Jameson that he was there, then introduced myself. Turned out he and the guy he was with, maybe a finance guy from New York, were hungry. I escorted them over to the dining hall -- the one we were sitting in today. We went through the line, and Kosuth got very excited when he got to the soda fountain and he realized he could combine sodas however he liked. So he went at it, mixing up Coke and Sprite and Mountain Dew and root beer.... like an 8-year old. It was pretty disgusting. Artists.

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.