Return to energy

Had a fine lunch yesterday with a guy from my neighborhood, where of course we were talking about our kids and college and next life stages etc, because of course we were, and my mind drifted back to the quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes via Robert Caro; the only thing that matters is energy. And, I would add, sustaining it over life stages. Enthusiasm. 

But to this must be added the question of time periods. Ideally energy should be husbanded and sustained across as many time periods as possible, decades, years, months, weeks, days, hours, telescoping down. In reality that's hard to do and must be managed carefully by balancing sleep (especially through the judicious insertion of naps), diet, exercise, work, blah, blah and blah.

Right now I am tired but need to get my butt in gear to go to Greensboro for Graham's robotics competition. I ain't really feeling it but I know when I get there it will be exciting and I'll be glad to see robot 4795 do battle and, most importantly, will be in the flow of Graham's one great team endeavor, one which could form a part of his life for years forward in various capacities should he choose to stay involved.

First may take a COVID test cuz I have a little sniffle and we have some here at the crib.

Myth and reality?

Before Natalie headed back off to college after Christmas I asked her for some book recommendations off of her shelf of many interesting-looking books. One of the books she gave me was Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong, which tells a tale, which at least seems at least largely autobiographical, of a young, gay Vietnamese boy growing up in Hartford, CT with his mom and his grandmother. Though we may eventually prove gorgeous, through the first half of his book his life is anything but. It's a hard immigrant's life full of poverty, hard physical labor, shitty food, sleeping on floors, all carried forward by a narrative style that's fairly stream of consciousness, proverbial and non-linear -- flitting easily from the present in Connecticut to origins in Vietnam. In many ways it's stylistically reminiscent of another favorite book of Natalie, Karla Cornejo Villavicensio's The Undocumented Americans in that the immigrant first-person view of the world is very fragmented, violent and precarious.

It's hard not to contrast it with the immigrant tales told by Jhumpa Lahiri, in which we read of South Asian graduate students -- future doctors, professors, what have you -- who struggle in cold apartments in Rhode Island or wherever while thinking of family and food back home and have to deal with dislocation and disconnection, but we know they will settle in. "Model immigrants," little Horatio Alger tales. The stories of coming to the New World that we want to hear because they recapitulate our own origin stories from centuries past. In reality, making it to the middle class in America is more of a slog for most newcomers than it is for Lahiri's Brahmins and their stories are harder to tell because we are less used to and open to hearing them.

Running on

One of those typical weekends, some biking, some tennis, some serendipity (running into Chuck down by the lake while he was recovering from Carolina's epic second half collapse against Baylor), a party (Whitey's 56th with a fine Dead cover band - words I thought I'd never issue from my keyboard), some drama (Natalie's COVID diagnosis, Graham struggling to process rejection from top tier schools -- in this case Williams and Swarthmore) and a couple of Zoom calls with college and family around the globe. 

All of this against the continued backdrop of war in Ukraine and the sadness that Russia -- a place to which I dedicated a big chunk of my life -- is going down the tubes.

Speaking of Russia and tubes, one issue I haven't seen pondered much is the implications for global warming of the economic embargo on Russia's energy infrastructure. They have a lot of natural gas being piped through a network of largely above ground pipes. It's a big country with a poor history of rational asset allocation. A lot of the pipes are old and leaky. There's a huge risk that they degenerate and spew a lot of shit into the atmosphere because Russia is going downhill and they could give a flying fuck about anyone else right now.

Arghh Fucking COVID!

On a beautiful mild spring day in North Carolina, I was looking out at the flowers, emailing a client about something TIAA-CREF fucked up, when what should arrive but a text from Natalie informing us that she had just tested positive for COVID and could therefore not go on her senior spring break trip to Portugal with her friends. COVID has not harmed our household too terribly, but I feel horrible for the experiences of which it has robbed my children. 

So much of Natalie's college experience has gone down the gullet of this fucking bug. At least she spent her junior and senior years in New Haven and had developed some really good friendships. She and her besties were all teed up for a fun-filled week in Portugal. Tickets were cheap. They were flying out tomorrow. She had worked hard and was in good shape on her senior essay, etc. All her ducks were in a row, as they tend to be.

Then today she wakes up with a sore throat and reads an email saying that her test yesterday had come back positive. Arghhhhhhh. Thank God for her lovely boyfriend whose spring break is not the same as hers (he is at Wesleyan) so at least she'll have someone around to talk to. But this just sucks.

 

The lint filter

On the island downstairs this morning there was a note from Mary for me to check the dryer to see if the load was dry. She had washed Natalie's bedspread, on which our shy cat Leon spends his days, so it had been pretty replete with cat hair and she had dried it on delicate, I guess because those were the instructions on the label. I checked the lint filter, which turned out to be covered with a thick snow -- an amalgam of cat hair and stuffing from the bedspread.

For some strange reason I derive a perverse pleasure from a very full lint filter. I suspect that it is part of my curious workaholism and I appreciate the earnest and diligent efforts made even by the machines of our household.

Our dryer, I'll have you know, is the same one that was there when we took over the house from my mom back in 2009. I don't know how far back beyond that it goes. The door is a little bit broken, some threaded bolt popped out of it sometime during the pandemic and you have to bang on the bottom left corner to get it to close right, but I have perfected that art. Mary blames me for putting hampers of wet laundry on the door when transferring loads from washer to dryer and she may not be wrong, though I'll never admit it. I got mom's new boyfriend Matt (an engineer who likes to fix things) to look at it a month or two back and he was unable to figure it out. In time I'm sure we'll need to get a new one, but not yet.

Dreams of New York

Last night I dreamt that I was in New York. The first night I was there I stayed in my old building on Claremont Avenue in the apartment of my friend Jill (she is actually, in fact, in Moscow now. She says she is not leaving because it is now her home, though she like any educated Muscovite is horrified by what is going on). Out on the street, it appeared to me that the cross street between Claremont and Broadway had the wrong name (it is actually LaSalle) and that a small building on the north side of that street was missing. I was discussing this with someone else there in the dream.

I decided to move on and go down and stay the next night down at the Yale Club near Grand Central. I have never joined the Yale Club -- it seems too expensive -- but over the years as I tire of being a guest in other peoples' small NY homes it becomes more attractive. In my dream I was also not a member, but I sneaked back to where the rooms are and changed my clothes in one of the rooms and then was heading out front to see if I could talk them into letting me stay a night or two on a test basis before becoming a member. I actually dream about this kind of thing. It crossed my mind in my dream that I might run into a client who is a regular reader of the blog and who sometimes retreats to the library there through an agreement with the UVA alumni club, which was a very nice dream-thought.

There's no doubt but that this dream was motivated by a meeting we had yesterday in which I and one of the partners in my firm -- together with a prospect who could be large for us. Things seem at last to be turning a corner to where my business will grow in without my needing to do everything, where we might see some real synergies -- to use that dread word. I will take it. 

Robotics in Greenville

The East Robotics team ventured down to Greenville and ECU this weekend for the year's first competition. This year's competition is basketballesque, with a low basket that got a robot one point and a high basket that earned two. There was also a climbing station at the end that let a robot earn 3, 6, 9, or 15 points, depending on how high it could climb. Points were also offered for doing things in "automatic" mode, based solely on programming, at the beginning of each match, before being taken over by human drivers.

Because of the technical complexity of the tasks, very few robots were very good at both shooting and climbing. Ours is a shooter and is very good at the automatic routine, consistently getting a couple of shots into the upper basket. It could also climb for 6.

In fact, what our robot and team was best at getting the ball up there. Once it's up in the basket area, there's a lot of randomness because of the shape of the basket and the bounciness of the balls. So just getting them up there is the name of the game.

OK. I'm getting into too much technical detail. After the qualifying rounds, we were 3rd, and got picked to be on the first alliance of three teams by a team from Raleigh with a 15-point climber (no alliance could have more than one because of spatial constraints) that was also a decent shooter but wasn't that mobile. We were crushing everyone but lost in the best of three final. We won the first game handily then lost the second two by one point in each of them after the Raleigh team's climber froze up. Literally in either game if one of many shots that bounced out had gone in, we would have won.

On the first day the competition's spirits seemed a little bit down relative to pre-pandemic tourneys. Mostly that was a function of no dancing. One of the best things about FIRST Robotics (an org founded by Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway scooter thingie) competitions is how hard they work to make it fun and inclusive, and one of the best ways they do that is through leading the kids in line dances and also singalongs during breaks between matches. Classics like "Buffalo Girls," "YMCA", "Sweet Caroline," etc. FIRST volunteers and MCs lead down on the competition floor while the kids in the stands get into it. At first Graham was reticent to participate but by now he has gotten into it, which is a wonderful thing to see. All in all FIRST just does an exceptional job creating a fun, collegial and sports-like competitive context for a population of geeky kids who might not otherwise have a place to be part of a team. Lots of kids keep volunteering for FIRST during college and after. I can totally see Graham doing that.

Checking our priors

Bayesian analysis says that one should be careful and diligent whenever possible to "check your priors," the beliefs and prejudices one carries with one into a given situation that cloud one's judgment. I am feeling that now.

Perestroika and glasnost kicked off in Russia when I was in college. The Berlin Wall fell in '89. Nikolai Ceausescu and his wife were shot in 1989. Mandela was released in early 1990, Freedom was on the march globally. This has formed the backdrop to my whole adult life, so the narrative seemed inevitable.

Recent events have seriously called that into question, I won't enumerate all of them, but it hasn't been just one thing. It has been complexity defined. Putin's invasion of Ukraine really demonstrates how high the stakes are.

Of course the whole situation is greatly complicated by the improvements in living standards we've seen in societies where freedom is under the most acute threat, specifically China and Russia. To what extent are those improvements a function of the opening of those societies to markets, and to what extent do they derive from the stability of their governments? We think one thing, Xi and Putin another. That's where the rubber meets the road. Time will tell.

One other thing. The Journal today quotes Democrat Mark Kelly of Arizona, a former Captain in the Navy of all things, of saying in a debate about gas tax relief that Americans shouldn't be bearing the cost of this conflict. Oh yes we should, motherfucker. All of us. We are not at risk of losing our lives yet, but we have money and at the very least we need to be contributing that.

Every fiber of my being

Last Friday Graham had tickets to High School Musical: The Musical, out at East. We were pretty excited about this because Graham had never been to or shown interest in this kind of thing, he didn't have close friends in it, really he was just going because everybody else was going and it was the social thing to do. I was in Hillsborough with a client but I grabbed food at a taco truck and hustled home to feed Graham the agreed upon repast. Graham duly snarfed his tacos al pastor and headed off. We expected him back at around 9:30, 9:45, somewhere in there.

Maybe 35-40 minutes later, we hear the door to the mudroom open as Graham comes back in. "What's up?" we asked him. "I hated it with every fiber of my being," he informed us, "I walked out during the first song," at which point in time he retreated to his bedroom. Thankfully, it turned out, he had been seated near the back so the whole school did not note his hasty retreat.

So Graham and I got to get up under the blanket and watch the last episode of Season 6 of Bosch, with Rascal perched on the back of the couch, as she is wont to do. Worked out for me.

The Silent Discourse on Inflation

As public balance sheets were growing at an unprecedented pace during the early days of the pandemic and even during the build back from the financial crisis -- a cycle which has never quite turned -- much discussion was had in the business and economic press about how equilibrium might eventually be regained. There are two basic paths out. Annual government deficits could shrink through reduced public sector spending and increased taxes. Or we could inflate our way out of it.

This second option is less intuitive. Inflation measures the cost of a basket of goods purchased at a given point in time. As costs go up, people get paid more. We're seeing that. So people get more money for each our of their time.

But what doesn't rise is the real cost of debt -- measured in the amount of time it takes to earn an amount of money. So someone with a 30-year fixed mortgage who makes a payment of $1500 a month has to work fewer hours to earn that amount of money, which means that servicing her debt is now cheaper for her.

This is also true for governments. A billion or trillion dollars of fixed rate debt becomes cheaper for a public sector entity who is benefiting from increased taxes on wages, sales, etc.

The problem is that this process is regressive in its benefit in that it helps only those who have bought things by borrowing money. Homeownership in the US has risen from a nadir reached after the financial crisis, but there are still an awful lot of people paying rent. Over time, rising rents and the collapse of retail real estate should bring more rental housing into being and bring down costs. But that will also depend on the liberalization of zoning and less zealous NIMBYism. 

The Great War as touchstone

One of the great ironies and complexities of our current situation is that -- however much everyone protests that they want to avoid WWIII, both of the lead actors in the current drama derive the core of their self-concepts from their behavior during WWII, so each in a sense is motivated by a return to it. Russia, most obviously, sees WWII -- along with the campaign against Napoleon -- as its moment of greatest heroism and triumph. In each case Russia, by means of incredible sacrifice and loss of life, beat back a formidable invading power. Victory Day, May 9, is a huge celebration. Here's a quick video to give you a taste.

In the US, likewise, WWII was our moment of greatest moral clarity. We were attacked. We joined the war, stormed the beaches at Normandy, turned the tide of the war, liberated Auschwitz... Then we launched the Marshall Plan, yatta yatta. After WWII, it got more complicated. We tried to do the right thing, but time and time again we did things that were questionable (Mossadegh, Vietnam, Allende, Iran-Contra, Abu Ghraib...). We like to see ourselves as defenders of a rules-based international order that promotes and defends democracy abroad, and certainly the world votes with its feet and people are on average happy to come here, but it's complicated. Time and again realpolitik and the simple realities of operating in a complex world draw us into behavior that is less than ideal, certainly not black and white like fighting Hitler was. In the end we can only hope that on balance the judgment of history will be positive and strive to make it so.

At the end of the day, the Make America Great Again sentiment, hearkens back to the time of Eisenhower, when America manufactured things, the hierarchy of things seemed relatively clear to the majority, and we still basked in the glow of our victory in World War II when everyone rowed in the same direction, or at least seems to have done so, viewed from the whitewashed perspective of several decades of remove and forgetting. But Democrats also long for that moral clarity. While we understand that the world is complex and compromises must be made -- so for instance right now we must cozy up to Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalists as a counterbalance to Chinese dominance in Asia -- we'd much prefer to see ourselves as an unalloyed Force for Good globally, and to do so makes us think back as far as WWII.

The past ideal that Russia and the US share is a problem, to say the least. For the two of us, if not for China. 

Life During Wartime

Throughout the pandemic, as we've cycled through serial reopenings and retightenings, shortages and blockages, we've always been bolstered by the expectation that soon it would be over and life would return to normal, that superabundance to which we had all become so accustomed and which we had come to believe was our birthright. And then along comes Putin, who says: not quite yet, my friends. I'm going to fuck with you some more. So we return to yet another new normal, with another new set of challenges weighing on our supply chain and our value chain.

But again, perhaps we are faced with another version of the same challenge by the universe because we so singularly failed to rise to the most recent one. We need to get our act together, figure out what we are about on this planet and focus on doing that.

Twice on Friday a client and I tried restaurants for lunch, only to be gently turned away. One wasn't open because it couldn't staff the shift. The other had only one server so we had to wait 20 minutes to be seated. So we went to another one. In the grocery store on Sunday I'd say 95% of the things we were looking for were stocked, whereas at PetSmart we got one of the two special cat foods we feed our delicate-stomached felines, and they didn't have our preferred litter. We will get them elsewhere or get something else. For now, we have to let these little challenges remind us not just of how much we have, but of how delicate and fragile is the balance of forces that lets us have so much.

We need only look at the pictures of Ukraine coming to us each day to be reminded of how much that is. 

Spiritual experience

Today in AA the leader put out as a topic spiritual experience, as it is a tenet of the 12-step world that somewhere in there everyone who is successful in the program will have a spiritual experience that will be integral to staying sober or off of whatever else ails them. So we all think about it a lot. What was mine? Did I have it? At our lowest moments we all wonder "was her spiritual experience more profound than mine?"

For me the first one was early in sobriety, back around '92 at Columbia in NYC, when I was suffused with profound gratitude and realized that it didn't really make sense for me to be grateful for nothing, that there had to be something on the other side of that gratitude, something I was grateful too. Beyond AA, I'm still not exactly sure what it is. In many ways the last 30 years have been a process of trying to maintain that gratitude.

Since I have recently been going to only one meeting a week, quite often when I am in a meeting my mind is drifting all over the place and I have a hard time listening to what everyone is saying. Sometimes I feel guilty about that, but really I needn't. It has much in common with being in church as a kid and having my mind be all over the place during the sermon or the reading of the scripture or lessons or whoever was droning on about what up there at the front of the church. It's a once a week thing where more or less like-minded people come together and agree to be still and quiet while somebody else talks. There's no quiz at the end. In a sense it also has a lot in common with the so-called "monkey brain" that afflicts most of us during meditation, which we manage through the admonition to "come back to paying attention to your breath." It is a place for recentering.

It's all good.

A Great Reset

I must confess I am very glad that attempts to gather up trucker convoys in the US have fallen flat, not so much out of triumphalism over the folly of the Trumpians but because we have come to a point where we have bigger fish to fry. We need to forget all about masks, vaccines, etc., at least in the hyper-political sense in which we have been indulging in that discourse. For the moment, we need to back off talking about who fucked up worse in the lead up to Ukraine and also about microaggressions and trans kids participating in sports.

Instead, we need to recognize that armed forces play an important part in keeping us safe to have those discussions, and that diplomacy does too. So we need to speed confirmation of diplomats (Cruz and Hawley were the main offenders there as of last November) and be less negative about the role of non-political professionals in government who work across administrations. But we also need to be open to higher levels of defense funding as we confront a structural challenge from China aligned with Russia (and, it turns out, others in Asia).

But global warming looms in the back of all of this. John Kerry was right when he said in Munich the week before last that it remains an existential threat above and beyond the threat posed by Russia. Perhaps if we can dial down our internal rancor we can find ways to get those on the right to accede to what they already know in their hearts of hearts, that global warming is a real problem that we aren't addressing at appropriate scale.

Overwhelming

More than anything, Russia's attack on Ukraine drives home the complexity of the world, and therefore how fortunate we are that we have a large and diversified economy with different institutions doing different things. Right now I'm thinking about the military and diplomatic establishment, such as it is across the various governmental entities, think tanks, suppliers... However much I read, however much any of us tries, we'll never take it all in. And it's important that there be continuity to it across time.

All of which argues for the importance of the non-partisan "administrative state," as it has been called by the Right. The expertise developed by all those people shouldn't just be jettisoned because it doesn't make sense to some congressperson or collection thereof who spends a good chunk or most of her time out winning elections.

Certainly, within the military, there are a lot of people I'd be initially disposed to disagree with, because they see the world differently and have literally seen a different world than I have. That's OK. We really need more channels to get their way of thinking through to us, and vice versa.

I must say that my eyes were significantly opened yesterday by this article  from NYT about how various Asian nations view the situation in Ukraine. On the one hand, I think about how much goodwill have we squandered through the years through rigid ideologically-driven adventurism abroad. On the other, I remember how limited our span of influence and control is at the end of the day. We'll never get everything we want. Nor, in some sense, should we.

The luxury of home

Of late I've been trying to coax a friend to finish up a project, occasionally with a touch of impatience. Mostly my problem. Saw him today and was delighted, and I was reminded of my friend Katja, originally from Kiev, currently living in Tbilisi after spending time in Tartu, New York, Moscow, Berlin and sometimes jetting around the world in support of an award-winning book. I wrote about our comparative situations a few years back.

Back then she just wasn't living in her hometown. Now it's not clear if she ever will be able to and, per a message I just got back from her, she has family members who are currently far from safe. I, by contrast, am in continual contact with people I've known for many decades all the time, which I am aware is an incredible gift and luxury. Events of the last week remind me more than ever that it's something we cannot take for granted, something that's been fought for and earned by others. Let's hope we don't need to do it again on a grand scale.  

A different Monday

In times like this it is very hard to maintain equanimity and calm. Putin's putting forces on "special combat readiness" considerably ups the ante and takes us into territory we've not been to before. The Cuban Missile Crisis was before my day but I imagine we're in the same ballpark.

The difference now is this sense that Putin is doing crazy things from the position of a wounded animal, which makes him less predictable. Also that he knows now that he must win something to stay in power, otherwise he is gone.

His whiny justification about Russia having been a great power that was brought low through no fault of its own disregards some essential facts. The Soviet Union was a shitty place to live. Its implementation of Communism failed to provide its citizens with the more than the barest rudiments of life. Sure, people figured out how to get by. The bread was good. Donuts were cheap. They improvised admirably with what they had. But it was boring as hell, the waste of human potential was immense and it wasn't going anywhere. One of Gorbachev's early reforms was to let city dwellers have little plots of land where they could grow their own food. Many grew potatoes. It was like that. 

The West does not have it all figured out, far from it. Lots of people are left out of the general prosperity and lack the means of getting it. We don't have perfect consensus on how to remedy this. There is and always will be internal tension about the role of the state versus the role of individuals, families and other smaller units in addressing our problems. But there's a reason people clamor to move here from all around the world. We are fortunate that they do. 

Robotics practice

Today finds us in an industrial park in Charlotte at a Robotics practice field operated by the YETI team, a community-based team that has been running for about 15-20 years in the First Robotics universe. I had a good discussion with the guy who runs it while I was working on taxes and he ate lunch. Born in Durham, grew up in Efland. A proper engineering nerd who gives up tons of hours to the cause. Packing up now!

Another all-too-adult dream

Just before waking this morning -- and I really needed to pee -- I had a dream in which I was at the beginning of a Board meeting -- actually a general meeting at which community members would be present -- and we didn't have printouts of all the financials we needed, and it was going to take at least half an hour to get all that stuff. It was really quite embarrassing.

It is ridiculous that these are the kinds of dreams I have. Must get a life.

The promise

I was on the phone just now with a young woman, most likely of more recent African descent judging by her voice, helping her think through how much to save into her 401k and how much to pay down student loans. She had taught in Charlotte and gone to grad school in NC before moving back to Alabama, our loss, their gain.

As I was on the phone I heard texts coming in. Turns out they were parents who will be driving down to Charlotte with me on Sunday for a robotics thing. The teacher organizing the trip has a German/Slavic name, the parents are from East and South Asia.

Which makes me ponder what's going on across the sea and how I feel like I am fundamentally in the right place, however stupid, ham-handed and hypocritical our foreign and domestic policy may be. At its best America genuinely tries to acknowledge its faults and strive to be better over time and maintain first amendment rights so that people can haul us out and criticize us when we fail, time and time again. Democracy is better than the alternative.

Special Valentine

Let me not pretend that the news of Russia attacking Ukraine is not disturbing. It is. 

So I am very much focused on trying to be good in my own sphere. I stopped in to Whole Foods to pick up lunch (and also some soy milk for Graham since I was there) and was particularly mindful of others while there and went out of my way to be extra courteous.

Driving to work I listened not to the book in Chinese Grand Strategy which is the currently assigned reading for the Steve Meshnick Memorial book group, but to a book of dramatized conversations between Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama that I listen to on occasion when trying to dial it down. It's kind of silly at times, but still there is much wisdom in it.

Somewhere in there I was reminded of how, on Valentine's Day, the young woman who is interning with the company from whom we sublet brought in some little chocolates for each of us in the office. Probably cost $2 a pop, for all four of us. She is a graduate student and an immigrant to our fair land, judging by her accent and her name (I'll leave it off the blog out of general recognition of others' privacy). I had met and spoken to her exactly once before she brought me a gift. Extraordinary.

I noticed that she used some of my half-n-half when we all had coffee one day last week (unlike my coffee snob office mates who drink it black). So I bought more creamer at Whole Foods to be sure we are well-stocked. I also brought enough pecan Kringle from Trader Joe's for her to partake.

This is the spirit.

Back to the One and the Many

As I may have said, I've been reading the Bible recently. I'm still making my way through Genesis. It occurred to me that all of the passages in which "X begat Y" and "these are the generations of Z" form the basis of traditions in which the enumeration of individuals trumps the drive to aggregate and abstract, something I first started writing about some decades ago: I thought back to this post from April 2005.

But that post referred me back to this post, about which I had forgotten entirely, which speaks of Russians' loathing of Gorbachev, their understanding of Stalin, and their willingness to shed blood in numbers. Which bodes ill in today's environment.

What will the next days and months bring in Ukraine? We don't know. One thing we do know is that Russia's demography is not stellar, though it is far better than it was pre-Putin (I was, frankly, surprised to see when I looked just now that under Putin there have been significant gains in life expectancy and that there's a relatively decent [if still below replacement rate of 2.1 and therefore signaling population decline] fertility rate in Russia -- slightly worse than the US but much better than Japan, South Korea, or Finland). So Russia just can't afford to lose that many people right about now. It has a big land mass to command.

Grinding on

Busy day. A client needed cash to buy a house, just as Putin had decided that he did, in fact, feel like invading Ukraine. Thankfully the markets resisted the temptation to swoon in the morning, and I in any case had a bunch of short-term fixed income out there in anticipation of a possible house purchase. Just not quite as much as was actually needed. Then I had to work on separating some assets for a client going through a divorce, and some complex estate-planning stuff for someone else. Not designing it, mid you, just figuring out how to do what the lawyer was telling me needed to be done.

And then, home. Now I need to call my mom about stupid tax crap. Or maybe that just waits till tomorrow.

I haven't really been watching the Olympics, since I don't have cable anymore. News of the clusterfuck women's figure skating finals did poke its way through to me, and it sounded rather sad and dysfunctional, redolent of the same spirit as the sick doctor from U of Michigan who abused all those US gymnasts or what Alberto Salazar does to young women distance runners out at Oregon. A little lite Googling showed me that I wasn't the first to notice the resemblance. 

Over and out for the day, it's time to clean the kitchen, throw some pecan Kringle in the toaster oven, and watch Schitt's Creek, which I went back to after a multi-month hiatus yesterday night and found to be full of yucks.

Date walks

Even before the pandemic, Mary had been getting bored with her custom of running the three miles around the lake every day. I can't imagine why. As the pandemic progressed and I got to know the various trails around Chapel Hill better, it occurred to me that she and I should really go on a "date walk" both to get quality time together and to expand her horizons. For a long time she resisted, saying that she was too busy sitting with her laptop in her command post in the living room, that she needed to "get things done."

Then we tried it once, then twice, and now she is more or less hooked. Yesterday I took her over into Cedar Falls Park, then down into the surprising gorge that runs along the east side of Kenmore along Cedar Fork Creek. Then we walked up to East (Chapel Hill High School), where I showed her the two ponds back there behind the school, then made our way home via the Dry Creek Trail and the cut through from Weaver Dairy to Sedgefield.

There have been times when we have gone walking or running when we have talked less than perhaps would be expected, when maybe our conversations weren't as good as might be hoped. There are many hard things about being married, amongst them the tensions between egos and balancing out goals that aren't always perfectly aligned, but also just the fact that spouses spend an awful lot of time together.* As we approach empty-nesterdom, or something vaguely resembling it, it's something we need to work on. Yesterday was a good instance.

*My officemate David said recently that a friend of his -- a woman -- said that she had married her husband "for better or for worse... but not for lunch." There is a lot of wisdom in that.

The Idea of Roanoke

This morning I awoke at around 5, having had a dream that someone (not me, exactly) had tried to pass a car though a mountain tunnel to someone down at the other end by getting out of the car and letting it coast, causing a traffic backup, made worse by the fact that it was a pretty big road, perhaps an interstate. I encouraged this someone to go to the authorities and tell them what had happened, and apparently believed it wouldn't be that big of a deal.

I could delve into the whys and wherefores of that dream, but it's really not that interesting. What's intriguing is that roundabout there my mind latched onto the idea of Roanoke. The city has come up a number of times recently. Ted and Kirsten (from Princeton)'s daughter Zoe is in Physician's Associate school there at Radford University, by Ted's telling happily getting to know human physiology by dissecting her very own cadaver. Adam at the office told me that lots of cool little restaurants etc. are springing up there, quasi-Asheville style. Niklaus and Lucy went there to have dinner with Paul Youngman over Labor Day weekend after Spruyt's wedding.

In general it would make sense if some of the Asheville energy moved up there. Same basic idea: smallish city in the mountains. Less than three hours away.

And my waking mind took off. Natalie and Stuart could move there! We could buy a second house near there (I'm sure they could be cheapish)! We could go check it out this weekend! So many ideas. The solution to so many problems, and all before breakfast. Even now, it's not entirely crazy.

Specialization and the liberal arts curriculum today

Just got back from a kidney ultrasound at the UNC Radiology Center. First off, all the credit in the world to them for getting me in right at 10 am and out by 10:30, right on time.

I was attended to by Bethany, the senior radiology tech, and Kylie, a radiology tech student. There was an embarrassing moment for Bethany in there when she called Kylie "Kennedy" by accident, but it turned out to be an understandable mistake, because Kylie and Kennedy are the first two students in a new bachelor's program at UNC for radiology techs. Kylie was new to Chapel Hill, having transferred up after getting an Associates Degree at Coastal Carolina Community College. 

Unfortunately they got me in and out so quickly I didn't get to learn more about the distribution requirements for her program. Will graduates need courses in humanities, arts, blah blah blah? Frankly I don't know much about what UNC's distribution requirements are right now. 

But would it be appropriate for a flagship campus to be issuing degrees in narrow specializations without broader requirements? It's a big question, but at this moment in history my gut is that it probably is OK. If we need people to do these jobs they need to be at institutions with medical facilities and staff to train the kids up. Certainly she was a nice young lady and plenty well educated to understand the merits of whole wheat Goldfish, which we discussed, since I was headed to Walgreens afterwards. She comes from a military family and went to high school in Fayetteville, where her dad was at Camp Lejeune. It's highly likely her politics and culture differ from mine. So it's good for her to be in Chapel Hill and get a taste of Deep Blue living but maybe not have the worst excesses of it jammed down her throat. It would have been nice to have talked further.

Robbed? Or given a huge present?

Our family is in the habit of stopping at a Subway on road trips. We always get exactly the same thing, which makes ordering easy, so we can just concentrate on our respective bio-breaks. So you would think that when I was out on my own this weekend coming back from DC, I might try something different.

But I didn't. Actually, I kind of did. On the way up on Saturday I stopped into a Love's Truck Stop which had a Subway in it. On the way to the bathroom, however, I saw that it also had a Godfather's Pizza. I though I may have riffed in the past on my fond memories of the Godfather's at Kroger Plaza, but I see that I haven't. We'll come back to that in the future. 

In any case, on the way back from DC I stopped at a Subway and got our traditional sandwich, and upgraded it to a combo (drinks and chips), as I always do with family, giving Graham the chips and splitting the Diet Coke with Natalie to give myself a little mid-day caffeine burst. At check out the guy rang it up and it was about $12, plus the tip I put on it. "Holy Smokes!" I thought to myself, this inflation thing is no joke. Later I looked at my bill and it turns out that upsizing to a combo added $2.99 (not really a great deal and very high margin -- note to self for the future) to the $5.99 sandwich, then the guy had charged me another $1.99 for the drink, which pissed me off. Was it a mistake, or was he taking advantage of me? I momentarily thought about getting in touch with the franchise owner but then decided it wasn't worth it. But I did keep thinking about it, and here I am blogging about it.

But even if the guy did it to rip me off, it was more than offset by the $40 the woman at the desk at my hotel in DC saved me by advising that, instead of paying for parking in the indoor parking lot (apparently not affiliated with the hotel), I should park on the street. "It's free" she said "and I'm looking at two spots right now." How could I not love this woman? If I had had a five or a ten I should have tipped her then and there.

In the end, when it came time to check out, all I had was twenties in my wallet. So I left one next to the bed for the people who clean the room because after many years of not tipping for hotel rooms (I didn't know) or even for take out (I'm an idiot) I am playing catch up with the big cosmic bank.

Green Maserati

As I was walking to the memorial service at the Georgetown Presbyterian Church (nice but far from gaudy, as one would expect) from my cheapish hotel near GWU I was passed by a guy slowly circling the cobblestoned blocks looking for a place to park. He was driving a car painted a color green I had never seen on a car. Not the deep racing green of the old Triumphs and Jaguars of the 60s-70s. Not a loud tacky lime green like you sometimes see on Dodge Chargers or Mitsubishi tuners. No, this was like the green of a healthy deciduous tree or bush. To make matters more astounding, the car was a four door Maserati, with its comely low growl.

Now, as I have shared in the past, the Maserati sedan is the luxury car for which I have the softest spot. Not soft enough, mind you. But they intrigue me. But a custom green paint job? (I confirmed that this isn't a stock color. Of course not. Italians have never painted cars green) Who goes out and gets that? In retrospect, I kind of would have like to talk to the guy behind the wheel -- and of course it was a guy. Who goes out and buys the most demure, understated performance machine on the planet and then paints it a color never before seen on a car? OK. Maybe I've seen something like this on an older Volvo. But that's exactly the point.

Release

Driving up 95 today, headed to DC for a funeral, I decided to get back to listening to "The Magic Mountain," which I had left off back in December when I got back from my road trip to GA and SC. You just can't listen to a book this long in the 20 minute chunks that come with commuting.

The plot -- I will refresh your memory -- is young Hans Castorp coming to the sanatorium at Davos to visit his cousin Joachim is being treated for tuberculosis. In a shocking turn of events, it turns out that Hans too has the dread disease and must stay to take the cure. When I rejoined the novel a few hours ago, his three week stay had been extended to a year.

Of course, driving north on 95 between Richmond and DC I hit -- you guessed it -- traffic. A bunch of it. It was stop and go for 45-60 minutes. Like Hans Castorp and the other patients, I tried hard not to focus on the passage of time.

And then, 18 months into his own stay, Joachim tells the doctor of his firm intention to leave the mountain and go to join his regiment. The doctor hems and haws, but Joachim will not be swayed. Just about then, the traffic began to ease, and I had this full sensation of opening and moving forward.

Are we doing the same with this whole COVID thing? It's very hard to say. I can tell you for sure that in the rest stops along 95 most people think it's done for sure. Only about 25% are opting in to the now optional masks. Here in DC, where Omicron seems for sure to have turned the corner, things are of course different. Indoor mask wearing seems to be pretty consistent and expected except in restaurants and cafes. I'm in one myself now, having my afternoon pickup. We'll see.

Dream of laundry

Right now I have a client who is fighting cancer and is at home after another round of surgery and some chemo (I think. Having a hard time keeping up from Facebook. Must call her).

Last night I dreamt that I was over at her house, having promised to help out. One of the things I had either promised or seemed to need doing was laundry. First I gathered it up and it seemed like there was an awful lot of it. Then we were talking and I got distracted and she got a phone call which was actually an amusing video of some sort from someone on the faculty at Chapel Hill (she lives in Brooklyn, has no relation to Chapel Hill, so it was "random" except it was a dream so nothing is really random). Other distractions happened, time kept passing and I didn't do much helpful though we hung out and amused ourselves. Then finally I gathered up the laundry and found that it had mysteriously shrunk in volume but whatever. I went to get it started but got confused because her living room was decorated with lots of vintage washers and dryers, many of which looked very similar, though actually they were more the size of microwaves.

Border troubles

Last week Facebook told me it was the birthday of Volodya, who had led a section of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy or something back at Yale, so I checked in on his feed, remembering that he had not been altogether party line Democrat back during the Trump administration. Don't think he was a flat out Trumper, but he wasn't saying exactly the same things as everyone else. He chairs the Slavics Department at Brown now.

Sure enough, there he was posting some videos of himself as a talking head on Chinese-government sponsored CGTN (their version of RT) arguing that the US was exaggerating the threat of a Russian invasion of Ukraine, grounding his argument on the fact that -- amongst other things -- 100k troops on the border is not much more than the 80k that have been there more or less constantly for the last few years. I fact checked this to the best extent I could using Google for 10 minutes and found that, indeed, in 2018 there had been 80k troops there.

Through numerous channels I am now seeing that the Russians are more or less claiming that the West is manufacturing the crisis in Ukraine for its own benefit. There is some merit to the claim that Biden needs to repair its image after the mud on its face in Afghanistan, but I'm not seeing the motive for Germany and the rest of Western Europe.

Gotta hustle now. In the very big picture, there's no question that the ever-tightening alignment of Moscow and Beijing is not a good sign, and it has been going on for years now. But slow strategic containment is our best approach. Demographic decline and the lack of both Russia and China's ability to generate exportable entrepreneurial ideas in the absence of deep interplay with the West will doom them in the end. But we ourselves need to open up to immigrants to offset our own demographic challenges.  

The Quickening of the Day

It's evening now, but this topic came to me first thing in the morning and then got blown away by the day itself. The quickening. Which happens when I sit down and think about all the things that could be done in the day, which starts to take on a momentum and life of its own, despite the exhausted state in which I so often begin it.

Which is, all in all, a good thing. Though a little too often I find myself getting sucked down into little bullshit systems tweaks and integrations which divert me from the funner stuff. But it nonetheless beats the alternative of having nothing to do.

A highlight of my day today was attending a Zoom AA meeting at Mary's family's old church in Larchmont, a meeting I had gone to many times when the family still owned the house in the Manor. Somehow I had missed my normal meeting on Saturday and I know better than to let too long go between meetings. Thought about attending one in Rochester then lost the URL, then remembered the one in Larchmont and, sure enough, they are running hybrid there, so there were maybe 10 people there in the room in the basement but also another 12 or so online. Which was all good.

In the middle of it my office mate poked his head in and offered to buy me lunch at Sister Liu's if I went and picked it up cuz he had a guest in the house. A reasonable trade, all in.

I guess I might as well head home now, though Mary has a meeting till 8 and Graham has one with a coach too. Modern living.

A calm, trim day

It was actually an odd weekend, in that I made pancakes on Saturday because I planned to be out with a prospect on Sunday morning, fully intending to get a bacon, egg and cheese at Deli Edison on Sunday. All of this in fact came to pass and it was all good, save for the fact that they gave me my sandwich on a bagel -- admittedly a rather good one -- instead of the requested hard roll. As we have all heard, it's hard to hire right now and somebody goofed my order. 

As we grind on towards what we hope will be the close of this pandemic my horizons have obviously slimmed down a little. My days vary little. This weekend was a standout in that I napped not once but twice on the couch in my study. Today's was extra-delicious.

Yesterday there was of course tennis.

With little variety in my life, the fodder for the blog narrows ever further into more or less what I read and watch and what I think. I suppose it has been ever thus, but I'm really feeling it right now. The approach of spring and the seeming fading of Omicron will, I hope, broaden my horizons a bit, which will in turn diversify what I can bring to the blog. For your sake, dear reader, I hope so.

One highlight, just remembered. Was over at Alan Haig's sweet new crib last night for the Duke-Carolina game (let us never speak of it again) and Cashwell was there, natch. He told me that his son Sam, maybe two-three years younger than Natalie -- remembered her from their days together at Gwynn Valley as having been very kind to him. As we roll on through the years, this stuff matters.

TGIF

It's been another of those five day weeks. Five consecutive days. Moreover, earlier statements about Saturday being my sabbath notwithstanding, I find that I have a walk with a prospect scheduled for first thing in the morning tomorrow because that's when he can meet. I will miraculously transform that into play by going to Deli Edison afterwards for a breakfast sandwich. Then I have tennis at 12:30.

But I will also need to carve out some of the foregone Saturday into a lower-intensity Friday, which can easily be arranged with the aid of my COVID-era work attire (to wit, sweatpants, soft long sleeve T-shirt, slippers) and my home office set up.

My car is having scheduled maintenance by the good people of Auto Logic, always a fine feeling. In the evening we have planned Peruvian take-out from the new place on Elliot, Alpaca (no, wait, the interweb tells me it's not open yet, but it's an NC chain with 10 locations at present, so I am all for it).

Today I will work on some new problems: helping a client and old friend learn to manage credit card debt; helping a medical practice 401k client track down a new CPA that can help them select and implement new systems so that the practice manager can start taking things off her plate and downshift over the next decade; scheduling time with mom and some real estate types to help us keep slimming our real estate portfolio up in Roxboro and simplifying our lives; a little continuing education coursework so I'm ready for my late April renewal of a professional credential. Work.

Tired in the morning, a pattern?

Had a fine night of sleep last night after a couple of less good ones. You would think I would awake fully refreshed, but no. I am tired still.

What could it be? Am I a little tweaked from giving blood yesterday afternoon? Possibly. Apparently giving blood impacts various people differently. Am I beat up from playing tennis on hard courts yesterday? Could be. Certainly it is harder on the old joints than clay courts, and Z and I have had to make do with hard ones for the last few weeks as we work through this whole highly objectionable "winter" thing that has beset us of late. Is it COVID that I got while sitting with a mask off at the Red Cross place on University Drive in Durham yesterday, eating Cheez Its and cheap chocolate chip cookies (they had no Nutterbutters)? Probably not. But you never know. Or am I experiencing the cumulative effects of several years without a proper vacation after catching up with a client who was headed to the British Virgin Islands late in the day Monday? This is the most likely culprit, which is why I have set a proper two-week vacation as a goal for 2022. By which I mean sitting in one pretty place, not acting as the logistics and touring manager for my family in some exotic locale.

One thing that seems certain is that I am not worn out from watching the 2013 Muscle Shoals documentary last night. If you haven't seen it, I can't recommend it highly enough. It's a pretty amazing story at the heart of R&B, rock and roll and Southern Rock.

Dream of the Cruise Ship home purchase

I was up last night from 3 to 5ish and tried out some of the tricks I had read about for "second sleep," the time when people back in the olden days would wake in the middle of the night and do some work or sit by the fire or whatever before going back to bed. Naturally, I used the time to do so reading, to make a little headway in the Helen Oyeyemi novel that Natalie lent me when I asked for some suggestions off of her shelves.

In the end, however, I had to take sleeping pills. It happens sometimes. Eventually I went back to sleep and I dreamt that for some reason we had sold our house and bought this old fashioned cruise ship which specialized in doing dinner cruises, formal dinners, off the coast down near Wilmington or something. I had the impression that I remembered the ship from another dream. All the rooms on this ship were small, I had no idea where I would put my books, and I completely dreaded the idea of having this nightly dinner obligation. We had to close on the transaction around April 15th. "What the fuck was I thinking?" I thought in my dream.

I was beyond delighted when Mary's alarm went off sometime around 8. Saved by the bell, again.

Boldly seeking attention

I recently suffered through a professional blog post in which it seemed like every fourth word was in bold. Similarly, I asked to be removed from the distribution list for a guy I know from college whose emails went on for pages and consisted exclusively of one-sentence paragraphs.

One of the basic rules of writing, of any mode of communication, is that things a writer does to accentuate specific bits of content must be used sparingly. Otherwise you have the boy who cried wolf. If someone continually beats you over the head demanding your attention, it's an admission that she hasn't really earned it and that she knows it. Rules are made to be broken, but if they are being broken all the time, they aren't rules. It's just chaos. 

Lazy Sunday?

As I believe I have shared in the past, I have settled on Saturday as my personal sabbath because it is easier to shut in the demands of the world on Saturdays, compared to Sundays when all the things I feel like I'm supposed to do -- which is all too coterminous with the the things I could do -- come rushing in on me. For example, today I tried sitting in the armchair in our bedroom to differentiate my groove from that of a weekday -- when I end up in the armchair in my study at around 8:15 or 8:30 and check my phone and computer for messages and the day's futures. 

But sitting on this side of the house means I look down at the lake, so I start thinking about lake stuff. Like, for example, how the engineer who certifies our dam told me that I should "observe the dam under different conditions." This winter, unlike last winter, has featured more cold weather and therefore -- potentially at least -- freeze/thaw cycles. As any long-term reader of the blog will be aware, our dam -- built in 1938 with help from the WPA -- comprises stone held together by concrete mortar which, over the course of decades -- has developed cracks which allow water to seep through. While this is absolutely normal for a dam of this sort, one thing it is not is comforting, especially as the population density downstream from our 50 acre lake has probably increased by a factor of not less that 50 in the intervening 8 decades and change. And freeze/thaw cycles, of course, do not strengthen masonry dams with cracks in them, though I have no idea of the time frame or trajectory over which the dam gets weaker. At any rate, I should go down and check it out.

I also need to get some more firewood from our neighbor Scott (for which I need to wait till Graham comes back from robotics to help build the boy's dadgummed upper body), recaulk our shower stall -- especially because Mary spend a lot of time cleaning it on Friday evening, do taxes and create 1099s for a small LLC Mary has with her friends for a book project, make some phone calls for LFA stuff, send some emails to sell Mary's book... I'm exhausted already. In any case, it's almost lunchtime.

 

Fact and fiction

One of the most amazing things about this blog is that it offers me windows on the past when I happen to be perusing things for this reason or that one. For instance, this post from 2012 about a nine-year old Graham who was just learning the distinction between fact and fiction. 

A few minutes back I found myself looking out the window at the snow reflecting on the fact that I needed to wait till Monday to find out what followed from the most recent cliffhanger episode of Sex Education. I believe I have extolled the show in the past, if not, let me do so here. It's quite good.

In any case, it occurred to me my caring about what happened in the show was in fact a function of my own poor boundaries between fact and fiction. Since I know the show is fiction, why should I care about what happens to the characters? The answer, of course, is that it is good fiction, fiction which has made me care about the characters, because it rings true in important ways, despite the fact that so much about the show is utterly ridiculous, far-fetched and idealized (a school in which teenagers talk openly to one another about their sexual hang-ups and deepest insecurities? yeah right).

The show, in short, displays many of the hallmarks of good realism in that it captures an important human reality (characters we want to both like and hate) while idealizing some things and taking ridiculous liberties with plot pacing and probability (Maeve and Otis keep ending up alone by accident) to speed things along.

An important part of growing up, then, is learning that fiction isn't literally real. But just as quickly as we learn that, for strong realistic literature to work, we have to turn right around and accept that there can be something literally real about fiction.

Sadly, I think that nobody outside of Slavics studies the structuralists who came out of Tartu, Estonia and Moscow starting in the 60s and 70s. There were a lot of smart people that came through there, first and foremost amongst them Iurii Lotman. I remember being astounded by his statement in his 1976 Analysis of the Poetic Text that prose is inherently more complex than poetry, because it was always proceeded by negating the things that poetry did to make it art. Something like that. In the end, I think what he meant that artistic prose had to demonstrate that it was different from a simple journalistic or narrative description to demand enough attention to stand the test of time. It had to do something special to elide the distinction between fact and fiction, to walk the tightrope between ideal and real, to hold our attention. 

News, good and bad

First off, the good news. Graham got into UNC. I suppose that with his good grades and SAT scores we should have considered it a foregone conclusion -- he and his friends had looked at the data and concluded that mathematically it would be almost impossible for them not to -- stories nonetheless abound about Chapel Hill kids who should get in but don't, so it was still comforting news. I slept soundly, till about 5 am, then I took a pill.

I woke up exhausted. Between the stress of college search, the years of COVID, weeks of markets going down (which I know is natural but is still no fun, especially when you have any nervous clients, and I have at least one), running the LFA for a couple of years now, trying to push Mary's book out the door, I'm burnt out. Plus client situations. Yesterday I learned that one of my first clients, and old friend from graduate school, got bad news on her cancer. It keeps getting worse. She is a trooper, I love her dearly.

In the near future loom taxes.

Nearer even, thankfully, is this weekend.

My current books

Right now I am in a felicitous place where I'm reading two books, each of which is flowing pretty well, on top of my morning Bible reading (and Mark out in Seattle reminded me that he had given me Robert Alter's translation of Genesis, so I switched over to that for the time being). 

On the literary side, I am reading Claire Messud's Kant's Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write, which starts off autobiographical. It's entirely possible that if I didn't know Claire, I wouldn't enjoy it as much as I am, but I do know her, so it's giving me a lot of background on why she is as she is and was as she was and it's just well written. Her level of recall of little details from growing up is fairly astounding. More than anything, this book makes me wonder about what we talked about when we were in college. I spent a fair amount of time talking to her back then, especially my junior year, her senior year. It's entirely possible that this whole level of detail about her family and backstory is new to me now because I forgot it all, but it's also possible that it never came up in conversation because we didn't ask about that stuff when we were younger, it didn't seem important, that the future loomed larger than the past, or that I was just trying to impress her and was at some level blinded and intimidated by her level of worldliness and sophistication. Or that we were just amusing one another.

On the business side I am making my way through Telephone by John Brooks. Brooks -- for decades one of the New Yorker's main business writers -- wrote this book in 1978 on the 100th anniversary of the telephone, apparently on a somewhat commissioned basis from AT&T, at that time a if not the colossus of American business. And honestly, if I just stopped there, it would be enough. The book is a profound reminder of how much things change over decades and centuries, how one industry can be dominant and then fall. But it's also full of lots of fine tidbits, as books written by good writers always are.

Interruption by life

I was just about to write about something else when my phone rang. It was a client. Her mother had just died, rather unexpectedly, after having fallen and broken her hip a week or two back.  (The woman who lives across the street from us also recently lost her mother in a fall). The only silver lining of course is that my client's mom did not die a protracted death from cancer with a lot of pain. That seems to be the really big exit ramp for lots of folks. (I had thought that actuarially cancer as a cause of death actually declines for octa- and nonagenarians -- but a quick perusal of the interweb indicates that's wrong. It appears to get worse).

Falling, while not an altogether preventable risk, is one that is quasi-manageable if people focus on core strength and balance. I'm glad that my mom has focused on this stuff to the best of her ability. Her dancing is, I think, pretty key. In my mind's eye I see elderly Chinese people doing Tai Chi in parks first thing in the morning and that seems like a best practice.

I realize that this post started off sounding empathetic and human and quickly degenerated into clinical analytics. It's late in the morning by now and I kind of need to get better organized for the professional day. Not that I wasn't already doing that when my phone rang. 

Out or in? The odd tension

Last night Mary and I went over to a neighbor's house for dinner. We got there at 6:30 and left around 10. It was tremendously good fun to be at someone else's house, eating different food, talking to different people, petting a dog! But still I was feeling a little crappy because I had promised Graham I'd be home in time to watch Bosch but we were running late.

The problem of course is that it's so good for Mary to get out. As I've written recently, she doesn't get out enough, and when she does, she's understandably not eager to get home.

Even in the pandemic, I feel like I'm able to be out and about myself and the most precious thing in the world for me is time with the kids. Time on the couch watching TV is extra-special because there's no work involved, we just lie there with one or the other of the kids' feet on my lap and commune over some mediocre-to-good narrative, share a laugh or two, perhaps a gruesome murder. 

We are apparently not alone. There's an article in the Journal today about moms feeling lonely at home. Haven't read it yet

In the end, last night Graham agreed to start watching TV at 10, which is rather late for him, since there was no school tomorrow. So I got to have my cake and eat it too!

Are we listening?

We are seeing shortages in stores lately, over the last few days they have related to people -- southerners who never learned to drive in snow and others whose knowledge of or desire to do so may have long since lapsed since their relocation to NC -- bustled to stores for the proverbial dairy, bread, eggs and (here's a new one) poultry. More substantively, the number of people out of work because of COVID has had ripple effects up and down supply chains -- more recently seen in absenteeism at grocery stores and the truck-based logistics chains that gets food to them.

News outlets like to run these stories because it creates fear in people and drives their eyeballs to the media itself: "if it bleeds, it leads." Which is fine, they are businesses, after all, and heightening awareness of an issue helps focus our attention on its seriousness.

At a base level, I can't help but to think this isn't some kind of cosmic justice. Christians might say the Lord is smiting us.

But for what? I would argue that we have failed to internalize the lesson of the pandemic, which is that we have to dial it all the fuck back and just focus on the basics of caring for each other. I also don't want to delve deep into the theology of vaccines and mask-wearing. I obviously am pro, but I try not to wish death on those who resist, as I have heard others do. The Right has had a point all along about the need to recognize and acknowledge tradeoffs,* and the long drift of time will probably show that the costs of keeping schools closed as long as we did outweigh their benefits. Admittedly, that is easy for us to say, when the costs in human life would have been borne by teachers and other school staff who aren't being paid to risk their lives. It is all rather complex, but we're just not set up to manage complexity and acknowledge trade offs today.

But right now when I hear of shelves bare of chicken, I am reminded of 20 months ago when toilet paper and hand sanitizer was scarcely found on store shelves and there was a video somewhere of someone who left out either one or the other for delivery people, and a viral clip showed a UPS driver picking some up and being grateful. Admittedly, whoever was leaving out the TP must have hoarded a bunch of it and that was probably the wrong thing to do. But then they admitted they were wrong and left some out. We need more of that.

Also, this is another little reminder to all of us to be thankful for what we have. Between all of the nuts, legumes, canned fish and frozen stuff in our house we could probably get by for 10 days or longer without even going to the store. That ain't bad. Plus stores aren't really running out of food, they are running out of specific foodstuffs. We need to be constantly reminded of our plenty.

* Not that I really understand what we are trading off when we wear a mask in public. The ability to see someone smile? Yes, I miss it, but it 

Where did she go?

An hour and change back I was headed down for a nap on the still excitingly new couch in my study while Mary went outside to do a little shoveling. Graham and I had already done the driveway and also part of the neighbors' across the street (the mom over there's mother apparently died unexpectedly in a fall a week or so ago, so I figured it was only neighborly to shovel a little). For a little while I heard the new metal shovel scraping the pebbled surface of the front walkway, then it stopped. When I got up a little while later to make coffee, she was nowhere to be found. The shovel was by the door, the back deck had not been cleaned up, somewhat to my chagrin.

Mary's running shoes were in the mudroom, which makes my best guess that someone came past while walking, maybe Jonathan's wife Sharon, perhaps together with Andrea, and Mary went walking with them.

I sure hope so. The woman needs to get out of the house more often. Frankly, when I have clients who are between jobs or whatever and also need to get out, I get on the phone with them and harass them to get out and look harder. This has worked very well with a couple of clients. I kinda need to do that with Mary, honestly. Left to her own devices she ands up spending too much time... with her devices! All too often she is found with her laptop on her lap writing email or her phone in hand, scrolling through Instagram. She needs more fresh air and fresh faces.

The People of China

During the Cold War, there was a widely held recognition that the fact that the Soviet government was evil did not mean that all the people of the Soviet Union were evil. People were readily able to hold in mind the distinction between the ruler and the ruled.

At present there's a tendency in the West to show sympathy for the people of Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong and Taiwan but in general a less thoughtful attitude towards China's Han majority. In the early days of 2020 reports of the stringency of the lockdown in Wuhan elicited sympathy, but that has long since disappeared from people's minds as we've dealt with our own restrictions. More recently the lockdown in Xi'an and the story of the woman who lost her child at the doors of a hospital because she didn't have a COVID test -- a story the Chinese censors let run internally for a while in a rare instance of the Chinese system allowing a release of pressure -- bubbled towards the surface of Western consciousness.

But as most people know from interacting with Chinese people in schools, neighborhoods and businesses all around the world -- the Chinese are people too. The reason many are willing to emigrate is that living in China has a ton of challenges. We read about some of the worst of them. 

I may or may not have recounted what Leslie's husband Walter had to deal with when his father passed away. Beijing -- a city of 20 million and change -- has something like 20 centers for cremating one's loved ones. Forget about interring them, that's obviously a challenge in a place as densely populated as China. With a life expectancy around 80 and 20 million people, ballpark a quarter of a million will die each year. So 20ish cremation facilities must handle that flow, call it 12,500 each per year over 250 odd business days, 50 funerals a day.  It turns out each family gets like 30-45 minutes to commemorate their loved one's life, and can have a very restricted number of guests in. Not ideal for a culture that venerates elders and ancestors.

That's just a small instance. In sum, we need to do a better job thinking of Chinese as people too. Yes their culture is different and we need to grok that too. And the only way we can do this is by talking to more Chinese people, consuming their books, movies, etc. Old school humanism. 

Back to the basics, more deeply

Recently I finished reading AA's "Big Book" for the first time after 30 years of sobriety. The fact that it took me so long is evidence of just what a stubbornly individualistic jackass I can be, but also of the fact that I've had a lot to read and do during those 30 years and also the fact that it's really not meant to be read in one fell swoop. Reading the personal stories of the alcoholics whose lives were changed by AA one after another -- even when spread out over weeks or months -- gets rather repetitive. Reading them individually, sprinkled into life as it is being lived -- as I have over time in various meetings when they are read aloud -- that offers the possibility of magic.

The first part of the book, the core written by Bill Wilson back in 1939, that is truly special. He wasn't a great great writer and it's not always brilliant, but then it wasn't supposed to be. It is deadly earnest and from the heart and it changed a bunch of people's lives, which is all that matters.

It's also an interesting document insofar as it gives insight into what it was like to live in the 30s, 40s, and 50s. At some level I'm pretty amazed at how much one could fuck up and keep a job and/or marriage before getting the boot. Though most of the alcoholics eventually do run into trouble, just enough trouble to realize they need help, and they know full well how fortunate they are to get it.

Now I am on to reading something else I've had on my shelf for a long time but never read: the King James edition of the Bible. In fact, it's the same physical book I was given in childhood at St Phillips in Durham which has followed me around all those years. So far, so good. I'll report back.

I am also following up on a meme I've seen on the internet that sounds interesting. I've been regularly doing sit ups and push ups all through the pandemic after my morning meditation while the coffee brews. Somebody on YouTube suggested that doing 100 push ups a day for a month would have a meaningful effect on one's physique. I am one day into this program and am putting it out here on the blog to encourage myself to stay at it.

Leftover pancakes

This weekend we mixed things up a little bit. Usually Sunday is pancake day, but since I had gotten fresh bagels on Saturday, Graham and I agreed to put off pancakes till the Monday holiday and eat bagels on Sunday while they were still fresh.

As usual, there were some leftover pancakes, which Graham usually eats the next day. This morning however, I saw Graham snarfing some cereal for breakfast and I said "what about the pancakes?" He quickly explained to me that it made more sense to eat cereal on a snow day like today since it took longer to eat it than it did to eat the pancakes, so he was saving them for tomorrow, which he is assuming will be a regular school day with its compressed schedule, so that he can stay in his warm bed as long as possible (we've all been there). I had to bow down before his considerable wisdom on this one.

The Steve Meshnick Book Group

In half an hour and change I'm having a Zoom for this book group of guys 50 and up who read history books, named for Steve Meshnick, a tropical disease guy at UNC who died just prior to the onset of COVID of cancer. Steve was a great guy. In many ways it's a shame I didn't get to know him better from a younger age. That was an unfortunate collateral effect of a break that happened between Natalie and some other girls in her class (one of whom ended up being Steve's daughter, though I don't think she was present in the initial event that led to the break) not too long after we got to Chapel Hill, maybe around 2011 or so. Natalie turned out just fine, as did the other girls (who were at fault), but it was a social rupture nonetheless.

Anyhoo, Steve was awesome. Funny, witty guy and legendary in the tropical disease world. My friend Dorothy out in Seattle who works on malaria in Uganda knew who he was and I ended up connecting them. He also wrote really witty songs, some of which are available on YouTube. Here's a fine one about John Snow. 

This week the book club is discussing Scott Anderson's The Quiet Americans, which I talked about briefly a week or so back. I ended up grinding through to the end, and learned a fair amount about the early days of the CIA, most of it reflecting poorly on the agency, Dwight Eisenhower, and particularly his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, who turns out to have been a rigidly reductionist Anti-Communist who basically had his head up his ass. Between the two of them, they made a lot of what in retrospect seem very bad decisions, particularly around an opportunity to recast the relationship between the Soviet Union and the West following Stalin's death and another to support the Hungarian revolution that could have been in 1956. The book also offered clearer insight into US roles in the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran in 1953 (we basically did that) and the early days of Vietnam. The basic thrust of the book was that there were people on the ground in the CIA who learned from failures of stupid missions and had reasonable views of what the US could and could not do, but they were overruled by the President, JF Dulles and his brother Allen, who ran the CIA at the time, and we are still paying the price for it today.

The Dream of the Second dissertation/doctorate

Last night, or in the period just before waking, I once more had the dream about my second dissertation/doctoral program. Somehow it seems there was something wrong with my first one, something vaguely shameful, and I was doing a second one, except I kind of avoided going by the department. Interestingly, this time Sandy Baker, who was certainly in my class at Phillips and the high school and maybe at Seawell too (?) was in my department. I was sheepishly kind of telling her about my situation late in the day when she was packing up to go home.

In the end, I woke up fairly early and ordered fresh bagels from Bruegger's so there'd be something exciting for everyone to start the morning with.

Perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, today is the day that the last of Graham's college applications are due. Maybe the two dissertations are really about two children. As to the essays, there are four to submit, but really there's not that much work. We polished the essays for two of them yesterday evening after tennis (3-6, 6-1) and still had time to watch two episodes of Bosch before bed, which was awesome. So now we just have a couple of essays left to polish and have agreed that we'll get one if not both out the door before lunch.

I must say that I am learning a fair amount -- at least I hope I am -- about management just through working with Graham on this project. His energy ebbs and flows as he works through this alongside a really demanding semester (6 AP courses, all of them) under tough conditions. I'm learning when to nudge and when to back the fuck off. Not always perfectly. The lessons are really similar to what I was learning when riding shotgun with him as he got his 60 hours of driving practice with one of us (almost always me) in the car.

For today, once it's all done, Graham gets to pick from the entire universe of takeout options for dinner tonight. I have money on a pad thai from somewhere, but maybe he'll surprise me.

In my bones

By now I have been joking for so long about my psychosomatic COVID that Mary basically won't listen to me, and how could I blame her? Of course I don't really have any symptoms except some sniffles, which are pretty common and are probably just allergies that we are too lazy to abate around the house -- my dust mite allergy, for example -- and the fact that I am bone tired.

Today I slept till 7:40. Turns out nothing was wrong with my alarm clock save for what the immortal George Costanza termed "the AM/PM." Dooohh!

This bone tiredness of course is highly adducible to how long it's been since I had a proper vacation, and also to the fact that so many of my activities outside of work are quasi-work like. Like the fact that I am grinding through a book -- Scott Anderson's The Quiet Americans -- that I didn't choose for myself but instead got from a book group. It's 470 pages of smallish type about the early history of the CIA. For sure I am learning a lot, but it's kind of like work.

Thank God for TV. I am totally enjoying Sex Education. It gets a little ridiculous here and there but it is always warm-hearted if a little snarky and it seems like every episode another character gets deeper. Of course the skinny geek in me continues to just root for Otis and Maeve to get together, but I can also accept that it's not really that important in the end.

I should also, honestly, accept the fact that it's unlikely that I blog more in 2022 than I did in 2021, instead of trying to live up to it. 

Cars and inflation

Typically solid thinking on inflation from Greg Ip in today's Journal on inflation. In the article he quotes Biden as saying re inflation in autos, "If car prices are too high right now, there are two solutions: You increase the supply of cars by making more of them, or you reduce demand for cars by making Americans poorer." This is a rather simplistic way of viewing the problem, and admittedly Presidents do have to boil things down and speak at a high level.

But he could go on to say there's a third way. We could increase the supply of cars by extending the life of the cars we already own by being more mindful in how we use and service them. Auto repair is primarily a local industry (I don't have stats), though there are roll ups and chains like Pep Boys, etc. I'm willing to bet those are largely franchised, so they are effectively local. Moreover, the auto repair business is highly trust-based, so the successful ones are very community-oriented.

We could also reduce auto demand by thinking more about the driving we do and being less willing to hop in the car at the drop of a hat to go to the store to get one thing, go to a drivethrough for dinner, drive 400 miles roundtrip in a day for a soccer tournament, etc. Would that make us poorer? It really depends on your definition of wealth. I think that most people, if they slowed down to ponder it, wouldn't think so.

Time and again I think back to the anecdote John Bogle uses at the beginning of his book Enough. Kurt Vonnegut is at a party at the home of some hedge fund guy in the Hamptons talking to someone who remarks on how nice the house or yard or something is. Vonnegut says to the guy: "I have something these guys will never have. I have enough."

China COVID zero tolerance

After tennis yesterday I went to Trader Joe's to pick up a number of things, amongst them not meat. Which was a good thing, because there really wasn't a ton of meat in the meat display, including chicken. At that time of day (6:30) it could have been a function of trucks not getting there, or it could have been an internal staffing issue of just not having someone available to stock the shelves. At any rate, I didn't really care, both because we have been cutting meat consumption in our house for a long time and because I've gotten accustomed to shortages so they don't freak me out much. At a high level it does remind me to keep reasonably high levels of things like beans, peanut butter, tuna, etc. at the crib, but that I've been doing anyway just because it gives me a warm feeling.

Ahh yes, China. Stories continue to emerge about China's zero tolerance policies and their knock on effects. Certainly they could create more supply chain problems for us, which could lead to inflation. I think that's all good, honestly. People in the West need to learn to sort out what's really important to them, and pricing mechanisms are really the best way of helping people figure out what they really want.

The policies are also exposing cracks in the facade of absolute control by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party). The huge outcry over the woman who lost her child outside a hospital in the city of X'ian because she didn't have an up to date COVID test is one case in point. People there are tired and exhausted by the government's excesses, which also throw policies in the West into considerable relief. Those who whine about vaccine mandates and the social pressure to wear masks should really be paying attention to what real totalitarianism looks like.

More than anything, China's lockdown policy seems like a doubling down because the government can't admit it made a mistake. How it will navigate the Winter Olympics is anyone's guess. There will be a lot of bad press if they quarantine athletes and journalists in really shitty hotels.

Certainly the policy degrades any real threat to Taiwan in the short run. There is no way that Beijing can attack Taiwan if it can't allow a little COVID to run through the population.  Too many people would have to be in motion to make an attack work, and they couldn't be quarantined once they got going. Which should give the Biden administration some leverage in dealing with Putin re Ukraine, since the negotiations there appear geared more than anything to be a test bed for how far we are willing to go for Taiwan.

Lastly, given China's rapidly aging population, it's surprising that the CCP isn't willing to let COVID run through the population and cull some of its superannuation problem. We know that the CCP at a very basic level really doesn't care that much about its people. If it did, pensions and health insurance would be better and its population wouldn't have to save 50% of its income. How could the CCP jail that many Uighurs if it did, or kill so many Falun Gong, or tolerate such shoddy building standards that 13,000 could die in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake (admittedly that was better than the half a million or so that died in the 1976 Tangshan earthquake).

No, the CCP can't revise its policy re COVID because it doesn't have a mechanism for changing its mind.

Back to Reality

Deposited Natalie at RDU at a little after 5 this morning. It was a little surprising how much of a hubbub there was there, though I know lots of people take early flights and how the most seasoned business travelers use them to do out and back trips in one day and limit the number of nights they stay in hotel rooms. Which makes all the sense in the world to me by now, though my days of hard-core road warriordom are thankfully far enough in the past for me that a night in a hotel isn't the worst thing in the world.

But I digress. Natalie is gone after about three weeks in the nest with us. Not the highest octane or funnest of her life, for sure. We recrouched into the familiar postures and routines of the early pandemic (books, puzzles, baking, walks, etc) and while it worked fine, it surely has gotten old and I know she is psyched to be flying out to see Stuart.

The extra-maudlin in me pondered the prospect that this might be the last time she ever spends this much time under our roof, or at least until she has kids of her own (knock wood). Theoretically, it could be. She will graduate and then will do what is next. She and Stuart are thinking about living together, which sounds to me like an excellent plan. Not sure where, but it likely won't be at our house. Anyway, time will tell, it's all good. We got her on a plane without her getting Omicron, we're pretty sure, which was the short-term goal. Now we just have to get Graham through his college essay deadlines coming up this Friday. Then we can go hang out in redneck bars and luxuriate in Omicron to pump up our immunity.

Bonus day

I had thought that Natalie was getting on a plane at 6 this morning, but it turns out it's at 6 tomorrow morning, so we got a bonus day. Mary, Natalie and I went for walk this afternoon, not all that long after I returned from splitting two sets with Adam over 2:15 (a long two sets). Now my calves are twitching a little bit from the exertion of it, and I am excitedly awaiting the Korean takeout we are getting.

Meanwhile, Graham has had a very full weekend with a big robotics event and not one but two Quiz Bowl tournaments. Yesterday was a less competitive tournament, so Graham was the dominant player on his team and finished 6th out of 104 players in terms of points. Today is more like an all-star tournament against top-notch competition from all up and down the Eastern seaboard, so all of East's key players have showed up. We look forward to hearing it recounted over dinner.

Saturday Omelet

Woke up early this morning and decided to roll with it, particularly because I have to put Natalie on an airplane tomorrow morning at 6 so will have to be up extra early. Also, I was excited to make toast with this excellent bread from La Farm to accompany my omelet.

I have mentioned my omelet in passing before, but have never delved into the subject. Every Saturday morning for who knows how long I've had a cheese omelet, sometimes with onion or some kind of pepper (pickled jalapenos or Hatch chiles, for instance). After we went to Glacier National Park a few years back I settled on the coffee mug I bought there as the mug I drink from on Saturdays and only on Saturdays, to add to the ritual of it. Also I put some green hot sauce on it, the Picamas stuff I get at the Tienda Guadalupena off of Elliot.

Mary mocks me and says she doesn't understand how I can eat the same thing every week, but what she doesn't get is that I eat in only on Saturdays, so it's a total treat, a highlight of my week. Then I go to an AA or Al Anon meeting. It's time for that now, so I bid you adieu and happy Shabbos.

Learning when to quit

For some weeks now I've been struggling with William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's The Difference Engine. It's over 400 pages long, I'm 300 in, and it's just going nowhere. It's just a romp, using historical names, it's own quirky, earthy English dialect and a vision of an ornately dressed London of the 1850s in a world where technological and political history flowed differently, but it's not doing anything for me. I have to put it down.

This is hard for me. I was taught to finish things, but I need to learn when to walk away from unimportant things that are failing me and sucking energy out of me so I can focus on things that are productive and energy-giving for me, my family and my clients. I am reminded of a little book by Seth Godin called The Dip: A Little Book that Teaches You When to Quit. I read a good chunk of it while standing in the Bookstore on Franklin St before putting it back on the shelf because in general Godin's books are too expensive per unit of insight. Or at least they seem to be. This one was maybe $10 used for 80 pages. But at the time I thought I was taking Godin's message to heart pretty effectively.

Anyway, I think I've made my point and probably would be better off getting on with my day. Another thing I should probably draw from this is that I know now that I am a fan of William Gibson, though like most authors he's not perfect and this just isn't his best. But probably not Bruce Sterling.

A Dream of Black Shoes

Sometime last night I dreamt that I talked to Mary about my desire to purchase a nice and expensive pair of black men's shoes, similar to the Alfred Sargent boots that I bought in 1994 when we started going out. The ones I got married in and still wear fairly frequently after resoling them, though the leather cracked some during a decade or so when I wore them not at all.

In my dream I thought about how much they would cost ($400-$500 came to mind) and where I might shop for them (should I see what Nordstrom's at Southpoint might have or just wait to go to Saks when in NYC?). But I definitely knew that I should discuss a purchase this big with Mary, because that's kind of how we roll.

I have actually had some of these same thoughts in real life. But this, my friends, is pathetic. I should be able to dream a little bigger. 

Probably this is influenced by my reading of the Gibson/Sterling book described back in December, which is a little too taken up with matters of haberdashery.

Crazy daze

Last night was one of those insane nights we've had too many of under global warming -- a winter thunderstorm. Of course, it didn't feel like winter during the day, it was another winter day with temps in the high 60s/70s. The power went off around 11, then it was back on around 3 and I was thinking, great, there'll be no problem making coffee. But of course there had to be a big transformer flash and boom somewhere across the lake -- and all was black once more.

We got five college applications out the door yesterday (three of which had no supplemental essays and just needed to be put out of their misery) and right now Graham and I are ensconced on the couch upstairs working on his essay for Swarthmore. The old one wasn't really singing, he was trying to dredge life into it, so we're going with the good old blank canvas. It's gonna be awesome, but mostly it will be done.

Here we go

Off into the New Year, which kicked off somewhat inauspiciously in me allowing myself to get frustrated by other people being slow to get things done. For the millionth time, I had to remind myself that I can't control other people and that they live their own lives. I can only take care of my own stuff, of which there is more than enough.

Many years ago, I first had the realization that a key thing for my happiness was to try to limit what I was trying to do, what was in scope for me. Then I read in about a million places that others had figured that out long ago. Only more recently did I come to understand that finding and maintaining good teams and fleets of other people who knew how to do specific things better than I did was essential.

When he died in 2017 a lot of articles were published about the rolodex of David Rockefeller, which contained entries for about 200,000 people and detailed each interaction. Henry Kissinger, a close friend of Rockefeller's, had 35 cards, which listed out meetings the two had had since they first met in 1955. Similarly, Fischer Black -- the genius/geek who was one of the two progenitors of the Black-Scholes options pricing formula and who was present at the table through much of the quant revolution in finance until his untimely demise in 1995 -- had a full room adjoining his office at Goldman Sachs for his own personalized card catalog of ideas or thoughts he considered worth noting, each catalogued according to a system of his own concoction. Which reminds me (and I'll stop shortly), of how Phil Knight of Nike noted in Shoe Dog that his first employee, Jeff Johnson, a somewhat quirky hyper-energetic runner who was first a super-salesman and then did a bit of everything before retiring from Nike, lives in what he calls his "Fortress of Solitude" in New Hampshire, a house filled with reading rooms, reading chairs and books -- all organized by a card catalog system of his own making.

In reality, these are all just extreme examples of how we all live our lives, encountering other people, ideas, and texts (and other cultural artefacts) and trying to keep track of it all. Finding a balance between experiencing, interacting and retaining information and then directing and influencing others is key. Then we have let go and understand we won't retain it all, nor will we get it all done.

(While I was writing this, Graham got up, made his pancakes, and let me know he'd like to finish up his college essays for a few schools today. So now I transition to that).