Jah save us from Great Men

Jason Zweig's column in the Journal tells the story of Micro Strategy, whose founder has been buying up Bitcoin for years now, recently going so far as to issue a big chunk of convertible debt to do so. His company is valued at a substantial premium to the value of its underlying software business plus the Bitcoin holdings (even with Bitcoin hovering around an all-time high) because the market imputes to it a "genius premium." What absolute and utter bollocks.

All too often the world lets itself be held in thrall to the exploits of "great men." Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Narendra Modi, even Warren Buffett and Barack Obama, everybody wants to line up and worship them. It's sheerest laziness and just a shitty way to be.

If we want to look for a leader right about now, I would suggest MacKenzie Scott.  

Math nerds, autism and institutional racism etc.

A recent op-ed in the Journal (I am embarassed to say I read them sometimes. In the age of Trump some of them are almost moderate) Gerald Baker compares some things the left does today to Nazi Germany. It's not his most convincing argument. He links to this article in Scientific American about racism in the math profession, which he erroneously conflates into the statement that left says math is racist. The rest of his article is less stupid.

The article he links do does draw attention to some worthwhile instances of people trying to raise the representation of people of color and LGBTQ  people in math, which sounds good to me. I'm sure there's some institutional overreach too.

But it got me to thinking about the older math nerds who are creating the bad conditions in the first place. First off, I'll bet a bunch of them are autistic and therefore don't have a good understanding of how others perceive their behavior. And I will tell you for certain that a lot of them were picked on brutally when they were younger and have a big fucking chip on their shoulder. They have carved out their little corner of the universe and will protect it at all cost from anybody, or at least anybody they didn't know from grad school. They weren't good at football or basketball and didn't have a bunch of friends in high school but they had math, and the ones who made it to tenure at the university have fought hard for that tenure.

Now, most of the math people I knew and the ones I grew up with aren't like that exactly. Most of them are pretty chill and enlightened people. But every so often I will see an edge to one of them, a certain "don't fuck with me I know what I'm worth." And the very most accomplished math people never expanded their social circles enough to meet someone like me. I'm sure there are some rough psyches in there, people still fighting the battles of their childhood and, to the best of their knowledge, winning consistently.

Another Spring Break come and gone

Took Graham back up to his dorm last night after dinner, marking the end of spring break. Quite typically, Graham came home, slept late, watched TV and movies with us, had dinner with family, and applied himself a little to the process of looking for a summer job. He couldn't be bothered to look for an apartment since he and his future roommate already have one which they judge good enough, even though I figure he'd likely be happier a little closer to downtown. Not a priority for Graham. He interacted with his girlfriend briefly when she brought some homemade Chinese deserts by the park behind our house.

As always, it was unfailingly pleasant to have him around. He's a fine young man. He even stepped in and remembered to do his normal chores with minimal prompting. I am sometimes a little mystified by the lack of diversity of the things that drive him. He continues to work hard to learn. He was reading Chinua Achebe's memoir over break and then some book for a class. He loves Quiz Bowl and his friends and teammates. Really he loves his communities -- including the chess and robotics communities.

I by contrast at his age was a hot mess of ambition, lust, feelings of insufficiency, desire for status and glory. I wanted to do everything and beat everyone at everything while seeming nonchalant and casual about it. As a result I was killing myself and bouncing off of walls. I've only gotten a little better, honestly. I have reduced the number of ways in which I gradually kill myself, which has slowed the process. By sheerest good fortune I've perhaps done a better job at this than many, but nobody's really counting. 

There is much to be said for Graham's approach. We are happy to have him so close.

American Fiction

Continuing on with our family movie week, we watched American Fiction over the weekend. If you haven't read the plot summary, a black author and literature professor (Thelonius, but he goes by Monk) gets in trouble at his university for traumatizing his fragile students by writing the n-word on the blackboard and is rusticated back to Boston for a spell. Since his high-brow books aren't having commercial success, and he sees another very well-educated Black woman author selling tons of books by publishing bullshit tales of blacks on the street full of Black patois ("I axed him fo some chicken" and so on), he gets drunk and writes a parodic novel from the point of view of a streetwise felon. Hilarious hijinks ensue.

The backdrop to all of this, which takes up most of the screen time, is conflict within his high-achieving family, from whom. His sister gets sick and dies while she and Monk are out for drinks, which was a bit far-fetched but one has to move the plot along. His recently out of the closet gay brother, a plastic surgeon out in LA, comes home from the funeral. Their mother has Alzheimer's coming on. Monk's always been the emotionally removed one, which causes problems in a new promising relationship with the charming neighbor across the street.

In short, real family shit of the sort one sees too little of in movies these days. Unironic and earnest, though punctuated with laughs for sure. Altogether the movie was like a throwback to the 70s and 80s before blockbusters and franchises came to unrelentingly dominate the screen, when Norman Lear permeated the zeitgeist and Kramer vs Kramer and Ordinary People won awards. Very refreshing.

Plus the fact that white people are almost entirely marginalized and treated as stereotypically earnest idiots. There was a lot of truth in there, it must be owned.

Doctor Zhivago

From our running list of potential shows and programs to watch, Graham selected Doctor Zhivago, which I had put on there some time ago after he had shown an interest in the Zhang Limou-Gong Li series of historical Chinese movies from the 90s. I think he had seen Farewell My Concubine. Really the old David Lean epics are their own thing.

Of course it lost a lot by being viewed on the small screen, and is a little overwrought by contemporary standards, but it nevertheless remains a worthy classic, and I'm glad Graham chose it for some spring break viewing. More than anything, the unironic forthrightness and earnestness of the characters -- the absence of snark -- takes one back. We've come a long way from that and it's good both to be reminded that it was once an ideal and for kids to be exposed to it.

Personally, I was surprised to see just how well the three potential suitors (Komarovsky-Zhivago-Antipov/Strelnikov) and their treatment of Lara, the Julie Christie lead character, fits into the schematics of my dissertation. I can't recall if I thought about it at the time and rejected it or (more likely) was just too lazy to read the book.

Speaking of, I really need to read more Russian. Maybe a Chekhov story. But now it's time to grind out a little Japanese on DuoLingo before getting to work.

Acceleration in the wrong direction

First thing this morning I got a text from a dearly beloved client letting me know that her cancer has been accelerating and that it will kill her soon. Meanwhile, a medical specialist let me know that we'd be doing kidney ultrasounds on me annuallyish for the rest of my life to keep an eye on some "cysts" in there that are a normal side effect of a medication I took for a while to manage a medical condition. Also, per the colonoscopy guy (whatever you call him) I am on the "3 to 5 year plan" for colonoscopies due to some "polyps" they encountered down there. My internal medicine person interprets that as the 3-year plan, and I work for her.

All this medical shit is piling up over here.

Meanwhile, I went to an ENT yesterday due to some head stuffed uppedness (not to get too technical) I've been experiencing since skiing in Colorado. She had no magical fix but my comforted me that the OTC stuff I've used cleared out all the wax and that since my symptoms have 90-95% abated, nothing is too wrong in there. On the way out a guy about my age or maybe a little older had accompanied his mom, who had a cochlear implant, to the doctor. He told her he'd have to take her back for another check up in a month or so. She was fine with that, then she looked at me and said "before I got this thing I hadn't heard out of this ear for a long time!" She was psyched. It was a beautiful and sunny day. I need to stay on that bandwidth, lest I descend ever further into Andy Rooneydom.

On housing as an investment

Clients often daydream about buying second properties as investments. It seems so logical. For primary residences, we hold them a long time and they seem to rise in value really quickly.

But there are lots of problems with this line of thinking. First off, we overestimate the rate at which they compound. Mary's family bought its house in Larchmont in 1974 for $87k and sold it in 2020 for right at $2,000,000. It seems like a fabulous return. But annualized, it's a 7.2% nominal (not inflation-adjusted) return. Meanwhile the S&P 500, over the same period, returned 11.3%. (though that's a pretax return, taxes on the dividends and capital gains/distributions aren't factored in)

Moreover, there are ongoing expenses like maintenance, taxes (very significant ones for the Berridges) and insurance which capital markets investments don't have. Then again, people who choose capital markets as investments but rent instead of owning have analogous expenses, so maybe that side of things is a wash. Except.... people owning homes in high tax jurisdictions will continue paying the high taxes (for which they get fewer services once their kids graduate from high school) due to inertia, emotional attachment to their homes and neighbors, and high transaction costs).

There is one very important function to that inertia, though, that helps homes serve as stores and accumulators of value. It is often said that not timing the market but time in the market is the most important determinant of returns. If you can hold on to something, for example an S&P 500 index fund, for a long time, it will compound for you. All the emotional things and high transaction costs that keep people in homes for a long time allow compounding to take place.

There's lots more to this argument. I apologize, by the way, for two financialish posts in a row. I know that's a little aberrant. I'll get back to the good old stuff soon enough.

Also, I drifted away from the question of second homes as invesments, which is really a different thing. I'd come back to that sometime in the future but probably you could give a fuck. and rightly so.

On ESG or wokeness in capitalism

In recent years the Republicans have been pushing back hard against ESG (environmental, social and governance) in investing and corporate governance, branding it "wokeness" in capitalism. They have had some success. At the very highest level I have interpreted the turn towards ESG in corporate governance as a reflection of the monied portion of the electorate getting annoyed and frustrated at the inability of our legislatures to work together to compromise. Additionally, I think the educated have been frustrated with the way that demographic trends (the tendency of productive economies to cluster ever more tightly in and around a few cities) have intersected with constitutional provisions (the electoral college) and sheer Republican craftiness/genius in capturing state legislatures and then gerrymandering the fuck out of everything.

So if the affluent haven't been able to get the government to do what they want it to, we've turned to other means (ESG and shareholder proposals) to push corporations to effect broader policy aims that we'd like to see come to pass. One of the big problems here is that people who work in the private sector on balance do so to earn money and thereby advance their own private economic motives. So using ESG to effect public goods is pushing these people and institutions in a direction not native to them.

Another big problem is that all these ESG proposals compelling corporations to report on this or that metric create mini-bureaucracies inside the companies. And if the ESG aims sought are non-standardized, they are bespoke mini-bureaucracies. It is not unlike the effect of the Trump administration preference for bi-lateral treaties (US-Thailand, US-Malaysia, US-Vietnam, US-Mexico etc) instead of multilateral ones (TPP, NAFTA). These create more regimes for corporations to comply with and therefore inherently raise compliance costs, which are passed on to consumers.

Then again, effecting social change through the actions of multiple on multiple stakeholders (ESG campaigners vs. corporations) has an inherently bottom up feel to it. We know that ultimately change is very hard to force top down. It can be led top down by great leaders at moments of clarity and consensus, but it cannot be forced. Bottom up bends the needle more sustainably and meaningfully over time. 

The pushback from the right is all part of the great contest of ideas and is ultimately fruitful.

Respecting Trump voters

And so, we have the election nobody wanted. Biden vs. Trump, again. Ever the master of messaging and reading the public, we must give him that,* Trump has been able to cast the "lawfare" strategy waged against him as another instance of his victimization, which justifies his return to the White House. Never shy of going all the way over the top and back down again, he even likens himself to Navalny.

My gut says that the resonance of Trump's victimization inheres in the way his electorate feels like he represents them precisely because they have been disrespected and maligned. I'm sure this point has been made a million times in op-eds I've ignored, so forgive me for repeating it. One way to defang it, therefore, is to go out of our way to respect his voters, however crazy their Trump regalia look, however wacky the things they say may be. The video outtakes I continue to see from late-night TV shows about how stupid Trump voters are may keep ratings up and help networks and local affiliates sell ads, but they aren't helping our cause. Instead of focusing on how stupid the other side is we have to focus on just respecting them where they are and showing them we're not ourselves godless pedophile demons.

*Though reading Bob Woodward's Fear, about Trump in the White House, makes clear to me how much the insight is Steve Bannon's rather than Trump's.

Belated Barbenheimer

The weekend before last Mary and I finally caught up with the rest of the world and watched Barbie followed by Oppenheimer. I came out preferring Barbie, though each of them could have easily been cut by 20-30 minutes and nobody would have left feeling ripped off. In fact, the theater owners would have made more money. It is a sad fact that directors these days feel like a topic has been ennobled, when in fact all they are doing is pissing me off.

Barbie was in the end fun and clever with some great deets. Oppenheimer fairly ground the classic theme of genius/madness/autism into a very fine pulp. Then stomped on it a couple of times for good measure. Matt Damon was good, as always.

Mary and I would do ourselves some good socially if we went and watched these things at the same time as everyone else. Then we could participate in discussions at parties and whatnot. But we are an ornery pair and prefer to wait until they can be rented cheaply on a streaming platform which can pay me some money if it wants me to name it.

On writing for more people

On LinkedIn recently I saw a guy from my co-working space posting about how he had written for an impressive number of days in a row on the platform and how his content had been seen by 10s of millions of people and he has over a hundred thousand followers. All of which has helped him raise his income.

He is, not surprisingly, a sales coach.

I confess I am a little intrigued by all of this, but transitioning to that kind of mode would be a huge shift for me. It's hard to tell if I am just bedazzled by all the numbers, as yall know I am a sucker for numbers.

Meanwhile, I am pretty much worn out now from a weekend of being with people. My sister came to town and stayed with us for the weekend, while Mary's brother Rob also arrived in town and will be residing in the house just across the lake parking lot from us. Which is lovely, but also potentially hugely disruptive to my well-established rhythm.

Getting ready

Hanging out on the couch in my study preparing for the arrival of two siblings: Leslie is coming to stay with us for a couple of days before going to mom's for a week, while Rob is also arriving with the plan of staying for a month on a trial basis in an apartment across the LFA parking lot from us, in John and Barbara's house, also incidentally the former home of a high school girlfriend, also name Mary. I'm looking forward to seeing both of them.

But I'd be lying if I said that my anticipation of Rob's arrival wasn't mixed with some apprehension. He's gonna be living awful close. Mary and I spend a couple of decades raising our delightful children, who are now mostly launched into the world and thriving (though obviously we're happy to have Graham here at UNC). But we are also happy to be on to enjoying the empty nester phase of life and not having default socialization at any time. So we're gonna have to figure out how to establish some norms and boundaries.

Thankfully Rob eats earlier than us and also goes to bed earlier and also really likes his own space, so this should all work out fine. And I have this couch here to retreat to at any time if he and Mary are riffing out on something some evening when I need to be on my own. Let's just hope the need doesn't become too acute to often.

The Slim Messiah

I have rotated back to the Old Testament for a little while in my Bible journey. Just read through the Song of Songs which is truly sui generis, it really feels like it doesn't belong in the Bible at all.

Continued on into Isaiah, where I was surprised to see references to the messiah (though not by name, just anticipations of the Lord coming in seemingly human form). Which got me to thinking that this was new, I hadn't seen that before in the Old Testament. So I turned to the back of my New Standard edition of the Bible and looked up "messiah". There really wasn't much there from the Old Testament.

Of course, you Google "how many references to the Messiah in the Old Testament" and there is predictably a wide range of answers, the most interesting of which is how the references that there are anticipate details the messiah's arrival and life and therefore prove the prophetic nature of the whole thing and therefore how true it is... This is precisely the type of rabbit hole I ain't going down.

Lifestyle change -- Itchy Boots

While I was out in Colorado my friend Dave turned me on to an amazing series on YouTube: Itchy Boots. This is the video log of a Dutch woman who travels the backroads of the world, pretty much anywhere there's a road, on her motorcycle. I have watched little bits in the Himalayas and also in West Africa and one in Central America. It is pretty amazing. Here is episode 1. 

It needs little commentary, but it does occasion thought. For example, as she travels down nicely paved roads in central Republic of Congo, on the one hand I can understand how people in Africa could give a fuck about Ukraine if China is building them roads. On the other hand, I'd probably have to dig into it a little more deeply because it's entirely possible that the government of Congo went into debt to China to build that thing and that net net the people of Congo are being fleeced to pay for infrastructure they really don't need and can't afford. That is the story of much of China's Belt and Road initiative. 

BTW, this is a lifestyle change because it is starting to usurp time that would be otherwise spent watching scripted TV and/or sports. But there is so much here. She sees so much. Pretty soon I will learn her name.

Canceling the Wall Street Journal

I've been getting paper delivery of the Wall Street Journal for a long time, but I've decided to go online only. I tried to make the change online, but it was impossible to do so. They said they have "too many pricing options to quote prices online", which is total and utter bullshit. Of course they want me to call and and speak to a person so they can try to retain me. Fine, that's business.

But I just tried to call in and it was "outside of our normal business hours" without saying exactly what those hours are. I'm sorry. Also bullshit. The paper has a million paper subscribers and another 2.5 million or so online. They can staff a couple of retention specialists to their call center on weekends. Or they could outsource it to a vendor in the Philippines or something, which is probably what they're doing anyway. It's not always apparent to the naked eye but I am busy during the week. 

The Funniest Girl in NYC

Really I'm just kind of bookmarking this.

 

Good news, bad news

Went to the dermatologist yesterday for what will, I suppose, be an annual ritual from here on out. On the one hand, unlike last year, they didn't even find any little pre-cancerous doohickeys that they had to zap with a little freeze spray. Apparently they had done so last year. I had forgotten. Once more I've been encouraged to wear sun block more consistently.

On the other hand, I had bad blood pressure readings. I had had a good one when I went to my annual with my general practitioner last month, which caused me to doubt the accuracy of my home blood pressure monitor (which had also been giving bad readings). What this presages, it seems to me, is greater dietary discipline, maybe even cutting back on coffee, less salt, less fat, a higher dose of blood pressure med, all messages I expect to hear from my nephrologist next month. All of this has me a little down.

Mentally of course I remind myself of the good example of my client who has literally been told that cancer will likely kill her in the next year. She has maintained good spirits. Why can't I? 

I'm pretty sure it's just of lot of poor me resentments of feeling like I'm working hard all the time (but not nearly as hard as so many others, like the newcomer to our fair country who delivered the rug Mary ordered to our doorstep this morning at around 7:45 and then hustled back up the stairs to get in his rug and go deliver something else as I was wrapping up round one of morning reading).

Get it in gear, Grouse. Gratitude vs Everything!

A new phase

Yesterday I had a call I knew was coming, but which saddened me greatly nonetheless. An old friend and client who has been battling cancer let me know that her most recent round of chemo had failed to shrink her tumors. She asked her primary oncologist how much time she had to live. He told her maybe a year.

This is a person I love dearly. I began to write out the story of our relationship just now, then stopped. It's too early for that. She has good spirits and energy now and a focus on preparing for her children's future and for living the time she has left in as much joy as she can muster, which I am sure will be not a little.

Since this blog is a bit of a selfish space for me, I won't pretend that this isn't a milestone of sorts for me. It's the first time that someone I am this close to is coming face to face with death in this way. But honestly we are back to that moment at which I arrive almost always when writing the blog. The workday moves forward and I with it. Andiamo. 

Presidents' Day

A cursory survey of the Grouse shows me that I have never made this point before, but in principle I think that Presidents' Day follows too hard on the heels of MLKJ Day. It might be better if the holiday were pushed back into March to get a better spread of holidays across the year.

Then again, this morning I'm feeling pretty good about not having a slew of normal work tasks to do. Even if much of the non tennis-playing (you know that's happening) portion of the day will be devoted to getting my ducks in a row for tax season. It will feel good to have done so. Meanwhile, I am easing into the day rather luxuriously, drinking coffee, reading the various magazines that languish on flat surfaces throughout the house, dashing off notes on this question and that, scheming on things I plan to do (wash sheets) and outsource to others (restring and clean up my acoustic guitar) because researching them on YouTube convinced me that I don't have all the tools or knowledge I need to do it best.

Long held tradition would seem to dictate that there should be a third paragraph here to pull together the mildly disparate threads from above and knit them together neatly. The structure for such a paragraph flashed briefly through my mind, then evanesced. Godspeed to it.

President handing out pizza

When I was taking Graham back up to campus after two mental health days earlier this week I asked him changes at UNC, the installation of the Program in Civic Life or whatever you call it and the departure of Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz for Michigan State. Graham said that he had shaken Guskiewicz's hand something like four times and that he had been out serving pizza to students just a couple of days before his departure was announced. The "new guy," Lee Roberts, by contrast, hadn't been seen at all. And he certainly could have come out for the 40th anniversary of the opening of Davis Library the prior week, where I'm pretty sure pizza or perhaps cake was served. Graham was there.

So we see what makes an impression. And also that free pizza still has a certain allure even when more or less bottomless pizza is available in the dining hall all the time. There's just an eternal magic to it.

Attention Titans

I just happened across a reference to a proposed cage fight between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg from last summer. I had forgotten all about that little brouhaha. A quick Google confirmed it didn't happen because, basically, Musk wimped out despite some typically boisterous Tweeting.

And there you have one curious bit of modern living in a nutshell. In the attention economy those who can hold our attention are the big winners. Trump and Musk are masters of it, as is Taylor Swift. And so on. It's all kind of a big waste of time except to the extent that it gives us shared discourse to discuss. In a slower information flow world dominated by text, people used to be able to have marginally more serious discussions about more serious topics more frequently. Or so it seems to us with rose-colored, 20/20 hindsight. I'm not sure what's actually true.

A turning point

Over at Jonathan and Sharon's the other night I was talking to Kip, who had been one of the Pacers coaches back when we ran for the club and had also taught English at the high school. I was recounting our 9th grade track season, really the height of my individual athletic career, when I scored more points than Jonathan and he and I (together with Konanc) scored maybe 80-90% of our overall pretty middling team's points. I scored the most points only because I could do more events than Jonathan (he was limited to running just the mile in meets where he ran the mile, maybe his best distance).

The other salient point here is that I never beat Jonathan once. In meets where we both ran the 400 and the 800, he always beat me. That was no surprise in the 800, which verged on being a distance race, but the 400 was a bit of a surprise. I was more of a sprinter and I think I was faster than him over 400 in 8th grade. 

So there, mixed in with my moment of greatest triumph overall, I was faced with the fact that I really wasn't the best at something I had thought was perhaps my domain. And I think I took it pretty well, even then. I just had to accept then and there that Jonathan was faster than me. We were teammates our interests were aligned and it felt like we were doing something impressive together, us two skinny geeky boys. One thing that made it easy to process and accept was that Jonathan was not from Glen Heights and had never once been mean to me during the more challenging early years.

All in all, I think it was a big developmental moment. 

I think I was pretty careful to never race Jonathan over 200, though. I didn't want to face potential disappointment there. So we'll never know.

Canvassing in Butner

On Sunday Mary and I made our first foray out onto the campaign trail to knock doors for Terence Everitt for NC Senate and Bryan Cohn for NC House up in Granville County. We ended up with a route in Butner, a town of a little more than 8,000 (though I don't know where they all live, based on what we saw) most famous for the correctional facility where Bernie Madoff lived out his days, having reportedly earned a lot of cred from his fellow prisoners for the sheer amount of money he was able to steal before getting caught.

Certain things I forget about between canvasses in middle- to lower-income neighborhoods came right back at me as we started out. First off, the sense that most of these homes are regarded as little fortresses by their inhabitants. The blinds are always closed. Often the stale smell of cigarettes wafts out at one even through the closed door. The Google Nest doorbell has taken over wherever people have a little money for the upgrade. The ability to see who is actually at the door clearly holds a broad appeal.

So often the houses are quiet, and I have some guilt about the possibility that we might be rousing somebody who works hard throughout the week from a well-earned nap. Especially on an overcast day in February.

If someone actually comes and opens the door, the interactions are usually positive even if the residents aren't strong Democratic supporters. Even Republicans have to respect the work that goes into going door to door, for the most part. Most often it's the middle-aged to older Black people who truly seem grateful that we're out there advocating. On Sunday we got a few good interactions. One Black guy in his 40s was wearing a T-shirt that said "Gratitude vs. Everything." When we asked him what issues were top of mind to him he said programs for youth, especially troubled youth. Most people couldn't think that far, or couldn't be bothered. 

At the very tail end of the canvass the door was answered by a white guy in a UNC T-shirt. His wife was registered as an independent. When we handed him the information cards about the two candidates he immediately tore them up and said all politicians were criminals. But he stayed and talked for longer. About how the government never gave him anything (though it turned out he had a son at Appalachian State who wanted to go to UNC grad school, and they had spent $1 million on a sidewalk across the street which, although he framed it initially as an outrage, especially because the elderly fellow across the street who worked so hard on his yard now had this concrete going though it, but it did give the older folk a place where they could take a walk without getting runned over by a car (I quote). And the worst thing is you can't drink the water because it has all these chemicals in it and there's a weird pink slime in his pipes... He stayed and talked with us for maybe 15 minutes. Seemed like he liked being heard.

Rainy Sunday

Thus far, letting my blogging cadence slip has not resulted in an efflorescence of inspiration for things to write. In fact, I keep up coming up with ideas, little things to write about it, but then I think that it sounds more and more like the blog is devolving into Andy Rooney territory, where some old guy sits around and whines about aging. But then, I'm turning 58 in a couple of months, so what the hell do you expect?

Boca Raton was about what one would expect. The weather was lovely -- which is why I had chosen to go there in February, after all. There were palm trees, cute little bungalows mixed in with more lavish residences, more recent condos which were executed in keeping with a classic Florida groove: I would never have guessed they were brand spanking new. When I got checked in to my hotel, which was about a mile in from the beach, I changed into shorts and proceeded directly to the ocean, where some bad-assed 20-something young Hispanic women were getting ready to go surfing. Then I hustled back for some seafood (I ended up with some fried belly clams, a treat I hadn't had for several summers because of little time spent in New England and them disappearing from the menu of the Nantucket Grill, which had never been able to keep them in stock since the pandemic started). That was a pleasant surprise.

Over the next couple of days out on the streets I saw a wide range of cars one doesn't see much of in NC: a Maybach sedan, an Aston-Martin convertible and also a Maserati one, a Lucid. Which was kind of fun but honestly I'm just as happy to not see that stuff. It's kind of like watching TV ads for cheap pizza in which they get the stringiness of melted mozzarella just right when someone lifts a slice out of a pie but you know it's crap you don't need.

System conflicts, and Florida

As I think I've written before, my life has become extremely systematized, which generally works well. One example is that my morning pills are taken downstairs, so I have them organized in a drawer there, whereas my evening ones go down my gullet upstairs, where they are all neatly counted out in one of those weekly pill dispensers so that I don't have to waste time counting them out each night. So far, so good.

Then I go on the road. Thinking myself the seasoned road warrior, I throw my pill dispenser thing in my bag and go. But of course, as the attentive reader will have noted, all that has is my evening pills. On a short trip I can get by just fine, cannibalizing tomorrow's evening pills for this morning's (there's only one overlap). Except. Except except, I have no Sonatas, in case I have sleeping difficulties, as I did last night, and as I used to often in hotel rooms (I just forgot about it). The long and short of it is there is no perfect system for everything. Though I should have remembered the sleeping pill thing because I literally just went through it in Colorado and had to cadge an Ambien off a friend as insurance.

In any case, here I am in Florida, in Boca Raton, at the home office for some internal meetings. It's a little odd to be here. Most of the people I saw yesterday were on the older side, which makes me think. This morning in the hotel's breakfast area the majority of people looked to be business road warriors, which comforted me oddly, though it brought back memories of a time of life I'm happy to keep dialing back. More on Florida later.

On slowness and method

Nine days after I got back from the Rockies and my right ear have still not resolved from the pressurization they got first coming down out of the hills and then from flying home. To be sure, it's less bad than it was, but it wasn't fixed. Eventually I reached out to my doctor and she recommended I try an over the counter thing, more or less what Dr Internet had suggested but I really try not to listen to him much. Also, there are itchy rashes on my legs where the ski boots hit, though Z pointed out that I probably hadn't been paying enough attention to keeping my socks hiked up.

The key thing is that though each of these is a nuisance, neither one of them is really slowing me down, let alone killing me. Therein lies one of the most important things I have learned over the many decades here on the planet, if it doesn't kill you, it's not fatal. Keep going, pushing and adjusting.

I have been trying to imbue Graham with this sensibility around his search for an internship this upcoming summer. I know how hard it is to balance many projects in life, school, social life, looking for a career. I didn't do any of this shit when I was in college and, to be sure, I turned out fine (or so I'm told), but doing a little bit of career exploration also wouldn't have killed me and might even have enhanced the college experience. Or maybe not. At any case, I am having weekly check ins with Graham centered around a spreadsheet of internship ops, so I have the pleasure of seeing his face and hearing his voice weekly. Maybe that's cheating. So shoot me. 

On with the week

On the one hand, nothing particularly special is going on today, though later this week I head to Boca Raton for some internal meetings. In eight years with this firm I've never made the trek down there but it seems appropriate to do so now as we grow and change. 

It was largely a quiet weekend at home, praise the lord. Though I did throw in some minor curveballs. On Sunday I went to the penultimate instance of the Chapel Hill Piano Salon and caught a concert by Sophia Shuya Liu -- a 15-year old from Japan (despite the Chinese last name) who moved to Montreal to study with a master. Apparently she has won some competitions and is very much the real deal (I could easily be fooled). The host has a camera he trains on the pianists' hands and then projects onto a couple of big screens so the audience can watch. It is pretty mesmerizing.

On the one hand, as I have written before, I am generally skeptical of skill and virtuosity as the goals of art. On the other, man, the proverbial 10,000 hours of practice and the attainment of virtuosity do open a lot of doors of possibility.

Last night Mary and I went to the curiously named Pirate Captain up on Franklin to pick up some noodles. I got spicy Karaage (Japanese fried chicken, mmmmm) Udon and, most likely unadvisedly, ate the whole thing. I tend to do that when I get take out when I really shouldn't because I was pretty full before I went for the second round. A stupid habit. But that place makes some good noodles. I do hope it survives.

Dead Lions

Just before lunch I polished off Dead Lions, the second of Mick Herron's Slough House series. While it was good, it was maybe a bit of a comedown from the first one. No matter, the series still holds water and they merit reading. I just won't rush off to get the next one next week. Instead, I have added it to my list of things to buy (all of them books), which is maintained for me free of cost by the largest online purveyor of goods in America if not the world, at which Mackenzie Scott was one of the first employee.

One reasonable question that arises at this juncture is whether I should hold onto the book now that I have read it or whether I should return it to circulation by taking it to a bookseller and allowing them to buy it from me cheaply, mark it up and sell it. Jamie Fiocco of Flyleaf Books -- who recently took a turn as President of the American Booksellers' Association -- told me that used books provided Flyleaf with higher margin than new ones. 

Then again, after we had some built in bookshelves put in downstairs before our event for Josh back in December, I now have some emptyish bookshelves. They are actually mostly filled with office supplies and crap I bought from Home Depot but never used because I was too busy reading and writing, but they yearn to be occupied by books. If I don't cull my collection at some point, it will just evolve into a problem for our kids in the future. Then again, they are resourceful kids, and if one of them decides to occupy this house when we leave it sometime in the future, they can just keep the books and grow the collection over time.

Missing out on some big things

I awoke this morning feeling pretty good, then I realized it was a work day. That's not a good sign. It's not so much that I dislike what I do, it's more that I suffer from having to deal with too many of the quotidian details of people's planning. Our organization hasn't matured enough for me to delegate enough effectively. We are working on it.

I know I know. Cry me a motherfucking river, you may well be thinking.

One thing I haven't really put enough time into pondering is AI and where it will actually be useful. Mostly I wallow in the dystopian but very real concerns about things like deepfakes and the influence they may have on politics. Today I read a very hopeful story in the Economist (you knew that was coming) about ways AI may be very useful in things like education and health care in the developing world. Lots of good people trying to do good with the new technology.

As I've said before, the really big issue here, I think, is alignment and leadership. For any of these efforts to work they need to be developed and implemented in places where people fundamentally believe that society is stable enough that tomorrow could well be better than today if they work together. So at the top level you can't have really corrupt regimes trying to steal all they can and whisk it away to a numbered account in Switzerland or an apartment in London, Dubai, Moscow, or even New York, or trying to let the Wagner Group come in and help them crush their opposition. It's a hard ask but we have to believe in it and work towards it.

Letting go of hot sauce and salt

My nephrologist team suggested that I dial back on salt in response to my mild hypertension. This, it goes without saying, is a hard thing to do, though I understand the principle and the rationale and I even get it when they told me to cut down on food that comes in boxes, cans, and from restaurants. They had it all tied up in some nifty acronym which I have since forgotten.

In truth, I am trying. I have given up adding salt to anything whenever I can and keep in mind their injunction about hyper-processed foods. Needless to say, it ain't easy and I am far from anything vaguely resembling 100% compliance.

At the same time, I am making an effort to cut back a little on my tendency to put hot sauce on as many things as possible. I don't have a specific health directive around this effort, it has more of a strictly aesthetic/ascetic goal, namely to try to reconnect with and better appreciate quiet pleasures, to find more in less. So far, so good.

Off the Road again

Returned late yesterday from my second ski trip out west with college friends. In many regards, the results were much the same. I had a nice day in Boulder with Leslie (this time augmented by a freshly-retired Walter). I escaped unscathed by injury and didn't even gain weight despite eating pretty freely while out there. I improved my skiing, but didn't push myself too hard.

In terms of hanging, this year's trip was an improvement over last year's because I was more used to being with this bunch of guys and knew more what to expect. We never were able to quite arrive at something to watch after dinner that was perfect for everyone. What was different is that rather than try to go through the grueling work of squaring that circle perfectly, the outliers just peeled off and went to bed. 

It's late now and I've got to get on with the day. I had taken a short hiatus from the trying to jam blog posts in every day but Danny was working hard to convince me that regular practice is essential for any flourishing practice. I'm still not certain if 240 is the right number of posts to target for the year. Does a number like that promote the production of dreck?

Upcoming wedding

I opened Facebook this morning (it tends to happen sometime during your average day) to find a post announcing the engagement of Emily, daughter of my good friend Eric from college. I started crying from joy immediately. I don't know why I was struck so hard. I think that, as an almost 58-year old, we are getting to the place in our lives where we should be going to more marriages to offset the steady cadence of funerals, mostly those of our parents' generation but also, to be sure, of some of our peers. Like Rick a couple of weeks back.

Emily was two or so when we wound up our honeymoon at Eric and Anna's place outside of Rome back in '97. We have very sweet pictures of her running around at Castel Gandolfo (the Pope's summer place up in the hills south of Rome) and being wrapped in a warm blanked coming out of her bath. Super sweet memories.

Really I have nothing else to say. A great way to start the day as I get ready to head out to Colorado to ski with other college buddies.

Of Wisdom Teeth and the Raging Zombie

I had held off going into these details for a little while, but for posterity's sake I think this story needs to be told. As I have mentioned in passing already, Graham got his wisdom teeth out a few weeks ago. The process did not pass without drama.

Graham has never been a fan of needles and having blood taken. Who really is, after all? With him this aversion is a little stronger than average. So when the assistant to the oral surgeon asked whether Graham would rather have his blood sampled before or after he went under general anesthesia for the procedure, he was agitated. Then they put him under and did their thing on his mouth.

When he awoke, he was not in good shape. Mary had taken him, and when they brought her into the room when he was coming out from under the drugs his mouth was all bloody because he was pulling the gauze out (it had evoked a reaction from his choking aversion) and he was banging his head against the back of the dental chair.

Then he sprang into action. When the assistant leaned over him to unhook something he grabbed her, pulling her closer to him. He said he had wanted to grab the pens in her pockets to use them as weapons (which makes me doubt the wisdom of watching all those John Wyck films with him). They called in the whole team to restrain him -- it was Mary and four members of the team.

Somewhere in there Mary texted frantically that I needed to come help her get him out of there. Then she changed her mind. Then again when they were in the parking lot (though had rolled him out there in a wheelchair. He refused to get in the car, later saying that he was thinking it was cold and he wanted them to be cold). Eventually he got in the car and came home.

When he was walking in the house he looked like a zombie. Very pale with blood caked around his mouth. When we were asking him about what he was thinking he said something like: "I just wanted justice. They had hurt me so I wanted to hurt them.". 

We were all gathered in the kitchen, all four of us plus Mary's brother Rob. Shortly after Graham made the above statement, Natalie was walking between the kitchen island and cubbard cabinets when she fell to the ground. She was on her back and her eyes were moving back and forth as her whole body shuddered. I freaked right the fuck out. We were all afraid she was having a seizure. I got up and ran to my phone to call 911 when she came to. Apparently she had fainted. 

Whew. What a morning. Apparently what happened to Graham wasn't crazy uncommon. Maybe 15-20% of people have short-term adverse reactions to general anesthesia. I think it didn't interface well with his autism and anxiety about having blood taken, so his reaction was pretty extreme. 

Mary and I talked and decided not to discuss it with him for a few days, but when she did, he said he recognized that he had been in an altered state and had behaved badly.

Pushing back on self love

Somewhere in my consumption of content the story of Gladys McGarey flashed across my field of vision. She's a 103-year old doctor who is still working. Intrigued, and with a lot of Audible credits to burn through, I snagged her book and started listening to it in the car.

Turns out McGarey was one of the earliest practitioners of holistic medicine, so I've been hearing a lot about that. One of the things she advocates is the power of love and, specifically, self-love. She instructs listeners to do things like hug themselves.

My interest was flagging a little bit and I started listening to another podcast (The Vital Center by Geoff Kabaservice, a guy I went to college with who literally wrote the book about moderate Republicans and is probably as close to the purest-bred RINO that Trump et al could imagine. Really a smart guy) which is interesting, but then I realized that my problem with McGarey's book is not so much that I was bored with it but that I was resisting it. There's a lot of truth in there but not the kind of truth the grinder in me predisposes himself towards. So I've gone back to listening to this joyful old doctor and reflecting on how it might apply to my life. 

Progress report

A few posts ago I mentioned that I was undertaking the project of a financial daily reader. Part of me still thinks that's a good format, because I'm obviously used to writing regularly in short and daily chunks. Another part of me (and I'm not about to say which part that is) wonders if in fact I would be better served to try to write a coherent book-length argument about the nature and practice of personal finance before decomposing it across the span of the year. I have at least begun the process of laying out the daily reader across months. It could be that the process of assembling the thought chunks will instead lend itself to a unified argument.

I have not yet managed to disentangle myself from DuoLingo. In our semi-annual confab in support of my meds maintenance, my psychiatrist confirmed what I had read, namely that there are real cognitive benefits to continued language study. Not that he knows everything, but I'll respect his opinion.

Most importantly, I have begun to settle on some guitar gurus to help me, especially with Travis picking, the very bedrock of all finger-style guitar. I need only take the leap from watching videos to regular practice. Or, rather, I need to stop watching videos and just practice more.

What has suffered from all this, sadly, is my TV viewing. Such is life. But as I watch less, I feel enriched by the way my back queue of potential shows and movies to watch gets deeper and deeper on the platforms.

Me and my big mouth

When Thomas came and built us built in bookshelves in the rec room downstairs before our event for Josh back in December, we had to fill them with something, so we harvested a great number of books from the overflow of the shelves in Graham and Natalie's rooms. When they were trimmed down, we went to the only place left, the shelves in my office. So now I have a lot of unsightly empty shelves up here, which is dispiriting and, frankly, a little embarrassing. Really there's onlm one solution to this conundrum and it's rather obvious. I need to buy more. I picked up a few at Flyleaf on Friday, but that really only nibbled around the edges of the problem.

So when Mary complained about the boredom of running around the lake every day -- which I understand -- I saw an opening and suggested that maybe we should break out and go for a hike down at the White Pines Preserve down between Pittsboro and Sanford. I also wanted to take a quick gander at the progress of Chatham Park and, obviously most importantly, stop into Circle City Books in Pittsboro, far and away the best used book store on our end of the Triangle. I was able to pop through and snap up eight solid books in about 15-20 minutes, several of which were on my Amazon list (thanks for providing us with such great list functionality, Jeff!), one of which was an impulse buy at the register, a book on Bill Gross of PIMCO which I can mentally characterize as work.

And now there they are, gleaming on my bookshelf, calling out for attention (actually I am making my way through Ted Chiang's Exhalation, which I had found on Natalie's shelves). Problem is, I absolutely, unequivocally promised that I would caulk the upstairs shower this weekend. We even stopped at Lowe's last night to pick up the supplies. I fear there is no escaping this.

(Monday update: somehow I had neglected to publish this. The caulking is 95% done. Turns out getting "all the old caulk" off, as everyone says you should, is practically impossible. Caulk removal is very much a Pareto process, and the last 20% is a vexing challenge)/

Shabbos squared

As I'm sure I have shared before, Martin Luther King Jr Day is perhaps my most favorite holidays, both because it commemorates a great guy and also because there's almost nothing ever scheduled this weekend, which makes it a time of proper rest at the end of the much busier "holiday season." Today I kicked off the holiday weekend properly with a postprandial nap on my beloved office couch. Later I will play tennis.

I am studiously foreswearing anything resembling work, including home improvement tasks. This latter actually takes very little effort for me, as it is something I have rather successfully practiced for many decades now, with little to no negative impact on my marriage. I probably shouldn't even be blogging.

Financial daily reader

For years now part of my morning routine has been reading from a daily reader from Al Anon, which dispenses a page-length nugget of wisdom to help one center. There are three such readers historically and a new one just came out. I'm sure there are many more examples of the genre, because for example Tolstoi compiled one of sayings from others, but it is largely insufferably didactic, which is really no surprise because that's how Lev Nikolaevich rolled in his later years. Nick Murray has one that is dedicated expressly for financial advisors. I have read it for years but may give it a pass in 2024 to let it refresh itself in the fertile garden of forgetting.

I recently listened in the car to Morgan Housel's The Psychology of Money, a worthy listen and read. It got me thinking that he should produce one of these daily readers of financial wisdom for a general audience. But then I thought, hold on a minute, why should he do it? Why not the Grouse?

So I have stubbed out an outline document for this project and begun the process of thinking about a flow. This may draw attention away from the blog. I may have to beg your forbearance, dear reader.

Graham's mismatched shoes

My apologies to those of you who read this yesterday, I thought I was saving a draft and accidentally published. Let's consider that a trailer for the actual post.

We took Graham back up to his dorm room Monday night, after I had left work on the early side to take him to Nordstrom at the mall to buy him a nice shirt and pants to match his nice jacket so that he'd be ready for any interview that might come his way this semester. Along with the syringe for irrigating the spaces left by his removed wisdom teeth (another tale yet to be told), he left his good black shoes at home. For some reason he had decided to bring them home for the holidays.

Because Graham hates shopping, his shoes are an old pair of my shoes. In the morning I was gathering them up so Mary could take them to him, I was looking at them and remembered how comfortable they were and actually admiring how passably fashionable they were, especially as I'm in my 50s and don't have to give much of a fuck about what anyone thinks of my fashion sense any more. So I put the left one on.

Strangely, it didn't seem well molded to my foot. Then I looked at it and compared it to its pair mate: it looked much newer. Then I turned them over. This is what they looked like.

Clearly, this was not my shoe. It was, rather... AN IMPOSTOR. But a clever one at that. It is the same model, the same size, just a whole lot younger (not unlike the relationship of Graham to me). 

Did his roommate have the exact same model shoe in the same size? Did they get confused with a team mate's shoe on some Quiz Bowl trip? When asked Graham, not surprisingly, had no idea. We may never solve this mystery, Dear Reader, but we will appoint a Special Counsel to dig in and get to the bottom of it and report back, in the fullness of time.

Pets in the lifecycle

A quarter of a century ago, I thought about pets primarily as means of young adults getting ready to be parents. Learning to deal with other beings' excrement and need for food, recreation, etc. Learning to manage one's temper when another being gets riled up out of an understanding that failure to do could have feedback effects on the other. Etc. etc.

Our cats are getting older. In recent months Rascal had been puking a lot, more or less on an every day basis. I had discovered that some seltzer did a pretty good job at getting it out of almost everything, and indeed may have underreported this to Mary while she was away in Alaska just because she would have freaked out a little. By November it was getting old, so Mary took her to the vet and discovered that Rascal was hyperthyroidal and that there was a treatment for this: rubbing a cream on the inside of her ear for every day FOR THE REST OF HER LIFE. Fortunately, it seems to be working for now and we are now on a vomit-free streak of a week or so. Also, the cats are being much more productive in the litter box of late, I'll leave it at that. There's a clear understanding around the house that the cats are old (14 or 15) and may not be with us forever. 

All of which leads me to believe that pets have the additional function of normalizing the over life arc within families. Watching pets live out their lives prepares all of us, and kids in particular, to experience the deaths of loved ones. 

Not a particularly deep insight, but one that was drilled home this morning as I scooped the litterbox and carried out a bag that had been filled up in two days. Of course, there's also a positive interpretation of that. Rascal had lost a lot of weight due to her hormonal imbalance and may just be eating more to regain weight. Also, both the cats have been drinking heavily from the sweet sweet piney water of the Christmas tree, which will soon follow its own lifecycle and exit the home.

Grinding and Building in the age of generative AI

Generative AI tools have been out there for over a year and, in my typical not-so-fast-follower fashion, I haven't really engaged with them. Instead, I continue to grind on building competencies the old fashioned way. I keep studying languages on DuoLingo, reading books and magazines, and writing this blog, instead of upskilling myself on various tools that could perform these linguistic and intellectual functions for me.

There's a fundamental dichotomy here. Is the task to figure out how to avail oneself of various functionalities the most efficient way or to build strengths for ourselves? We approach this problem differently based on the type of tasks we need to perform. As far as transportation is concerned, we long ago pretty much gave that up and decided that we'd adopt tools (trains, autos, planes, boats) to get us from place to place rather than cultivate the competencies that would allow us to do that better under our own power (walking, running).

That decision has facilitated modernity, but it has come with many many costs. Traditional communities and cultures have been shattered as it became easier to visit distant people and places. As local cultures have slipped away people have struggled to reconstitute them, sometimes rather farcically. The overcoming of distance has also caused us to overconsume carbon with our cars, trucks, planes, asphalt and deforestation.

Much will be gained as people outsource more and more tasks and functions to AI, but much will also be lost. We just can't clearly envision what that will be.

Conservation and consumption as forms of prayer

As the holidays draw inexorably towards their end (Graham returns to campus this weekend), we continue to chip away at their bounty in the kitchen. We have a lot of bread and sweets (many of these rather mediocre) to work through, moreover largely without Graham's participation since he is still eating a constrained diet while his mouth recovers from the removal of his wisdom teeth last Friday.

This week I am working at home instead of going in to the office to spend more time with Graham and nudge him towards a little greater proactivity in his search for an internship for next summer. As a side effect of that I am mindfully working through our surplus of baked goods, bearing in mind what I wrote about a post or two back, namely that I could stand to lose a few pounds.

This morning for breakfast I made a one-egg omelet with a sliver of smoked salmon and put it on a piece of toast from the batard that Mary had brought home to supplement some festive meal a week and change back. This loaf had spent some time in the freezer, mind you, when our surfeit was particularly large. Now it is being whittled down.

As I sliced it I was transported back to the early days of the pandemic, the really good times, when we were all sequestered together in our homes and worried whether there would be enough of this or that sort of food or paper product in the store. That condition rather focused the mind and aided appreciation of what we had, so that every meal was perceived as an occasion for gratitude. It is a good place to be. 

Family time with boo boos

Just now I accidentally placed a check mark on my task list on the place that indicates I have blogged for the day, when in fact I hadn't. So, let me quickly blog.

Yesterday evening, with our family now whittled down to just Mary, Graham and me and with no parties to go to, we were quietly determined to have a proper family evening at home. It did not go off without mishaps.

First off, the spoon bread. With Graham's limited tooth capacity and also his dislike of mashed potatoes, we're a little limited in what we can feed him. I thought of spoon bread, which had been one of the many specialties of my aunt Francis, AKA The Bread Lady from the early days of the Carrboro Farmer's Market. I grabbed her cookbook from off the shelf and set to work. 

Unfortunately, when it came out of the over and I tasted it, I knew at once that something was amiss. A quick glance back at the recipe brought me to the culprit: I had put dramatically too much baking soda in it, having mistaken the quantity of sugar called for for the quantity of baking soda. It was inedible. Being greatly disappointed, after dinner I tried again, this time doubling the recipe because I wanted there to be enough for me while also leaving a bunch for Graham. This batch came out much better.

Later, we went through the old "find a movie that everyone can agree on" two-step. The first couple of movies, sourced from a NY Times 10 best of 2023 list that featured a number of holiday season releases, were not yet available for streaming or not at a reasonable price. So we tried a recent Wes Anderson release: Asteroid City. In short, it sucks. Wes Anderson has gotten too much validation from the world and descends deeper and deeper into self-indulgence, supported by A-listers such as Tom Hanks and Scarlet Johansson and many others who agree to participated. Don't waste your time.

Still, it was nice to have all of us together watching. It would have been even better if Natalie was still around, but she is off visiting friends around the lower 48 already.

What I'm doing here

The most eagle-eyed amongst you may have noticed that my pace of blogging diminished in 2023 and I did not make my 20 posts a month target. OK, in fact only one of you likely noticed, aside from me myself. I could see where it was trending and could surely have pulled it out in the last week, but I decided to let it go because nobody really cares and nobody should really care.

First and foremost, I need to stop caring about little crap like that and need to get back to focusing on what's important, not bullshit little metrics like how much I post, how many points a day I get in DuoLingo (I maintained a roughly 400 points a day pace since I fell into the app's dastardly clutches. Again, with focus and effort I could have dragged myself back up to that target, but for what?).

Overall, I need to let the numbers go, unless they are important. I have and make enough money, within reason I need to not get caught up in tracking that, though it's a nice game.

My weight and my blood pressure are probably numbers to keep an eye on. I went to a party last night at a neighbor's house and ate like a motherfucker because the food was so good. This afternoon I'll get out and burn some of that off and in upcoming weeks I'll dial things down. My nephrologist told me to keep an eye on my blood pressure so I'll work on that. Similarly, getting to be early and sleeping enough should continue to be foci. Giving enough money away and figuring out how to balance between politicians (to help bend the needle of policy and governance back towards reason) and charities (for more direct impact) -- that's worthy of attention.

For now, back to this mystery novel (Elizabeth George's A Traitor to Memory), which at 800 pages clocks in rather unnecessarily on the long side. If I didn't care about the arcs of the characters running throughout the novels on the detective team, the smart thing to do would have been to skip it. But since I see that observing these arcs -- as I had failed to do when I read Ruth Rendell's Inspector Wexford series in the order in which I found them in used book stores rather than chronologically -- adds to one's appreciation of the books, I soldier on.

Warm glow from transactions

I spent a good deal of yesterday going through a download of last year's credit card transactions categorizing them, firstly so as to declare charitable and political donations (which we have gotten up to a reasonable 10% of income by fighting through and against deep-seated if ill-founded fears of reversal and penury) but also to get organized for tax season.

As I pawed through last year's transactions, certain of them brought back good memories. Above all, it was the ones I wasn't present for: Mary's trip to Alaska. Each time I saw one of those charges I got a warm feeling within, glad that she's able to get out and enjoy the world.

There were also good memories from a lot of trips I participated in, France, Spain, Alaska, the northeast, there were a lot of them. I could stand to travel less in 2024. Then again, I could stand to travel some. We'll see how it flows. Mostly I need to travel around NC to keep Trump and Robinson out of office. Job one.

Most superb of news

This morning I got confirmation that our next door neighbor Margot had gotten into medical school, which is fantastic. Both Margot and her sister Natalie are absolutely wonderful young people, but Margot had the mild misfortune of being slightly less of a rocket scientist on paper that her younger sister, graduating from Denison rather than Harvard, having to build a resume to get into med school instead of joining McKinsey straight out of college, etc. Margot has been around the neighborhood more the last couple of years, taking care of their house and dog while her parents spent a couple of years in Cincinnati on a career move they ultimately didn't embrace, so we've gotten to know her a little better. Fantastic news to put a cap on the year.

The whole ahnchilada

It is rather interesting that Mary and her siblings say "ahnchilada" like my mom does, like Mary Lee must have, like I used to before I studied Spanish, and like I probably still do if I'm tired and unattentive. This almost certainly derives from the fact that our moms had a glancing familiarity with French when Mexican cuisine first came to America and just figured that Spanish and French had similar pronunciation, or that they just kind of mapped French sounds onto Spanish words because each were "foreign". Entirely innocently, trying to pronounce new words as best they could. My generation carries it forward.

Christmas Eve in NC

Our first hosting of Christmas in NC for the Berridge clan gathers steam. Yesterday Rob and I played doubles with Z and Patrick, then I made a vegetarian enchilada pie for everyone before dashing to RDU to pick up Kevin. Today we will try to balance late young adult wakeups with Mary's very sensible desire for a walk in the woods at Brumley and the long time it takes to cook this enormous pork roast.

It appears I have neglected to tell the tale of the pork roast so let me lay it out here for posterity. In accord with her ongoing effort to have us eat less meat and also Rob's near vegan "flexetarianism" (he tries not to eat meat or cheese but will stoop to anything -- including eating meat -- to make sure food is not thrown away) -- Mary and Natalie decided that they would be making vegan and vegetarian galettes, respectively, while I would be permitted to make a "small pork roast." Pork because it has a lower carbon footprint than beef or lamb.

Unfortunately, by the time they decided this it was too late to order something from the fancy hipster butcher out at Saxapahaw. They had all this beautiful things like bacon-wrapped porchetta that were expensive but just right. On Friday I ended up in Carrboro -- I'll spare you that story for today -- and stopped into Weaver Street to get Mary her favorite breakfast bread (walnut raisin). Master foodie Chad has long sworn by Cliff's meat market, so I went over there (not without moving my car to avoid the parking Nazis currently roaming the Carr Mill parking lot to generate big commissions). 

Upon consultation, the guys in Cliff's told me that for a group of eight diners, a six- or seven-pound bone-in loin roast was just right. It was also the only one they had in the case and I didn't have the heart to tell them to cut it down into two pale shadows of itself. So I came home with the largest hunk of meat I have ever purchased, a far cry from the "small roast" that was authorized by our queen of the kitchen. I hid it deep in the meat drawer and then sprung it on Mary when she was in a good mood.

Turns out, Kevin has to fly back to NYC on Xmas day to see some of his people so he will miss Christmas dinner, and he was going to be one of my main carnivore allies at the table. So I am cooking it today. 

Oh yeah, I neglected to mention that, Tuesday or Wednesday evening, we all received instruction from Sadie and Natalie that there would be family PowerPoint night on Xmas eve. There was light grumbling in some quarters, primarily amongst those for whom PowerPoint (or the Google analog) presents a technical challenge. That's not me, but I have neglected to get my shit organized thus far and am not 100% certain what I will be presenting on. I'll figure it out.

Rivers of wealth

For some years now I've been reading Nick Murray's Around the Year, a daily reader for financial advisors and planners, in the morning when I'm at home. From his newsletter I know that he's to the right of me politically and I don't agree with him on everything about practice goals, equity allocations, etc, but he's generally a thoughtful guy and has been around and thinking about the role of the advisor for a long time, so he remains absolutely a solid read. If someone else would come up with another daily reader for advisors, I'd probably check that out.

Here in late December, Murray ruminates on the nature of wealth and postulates that wealth is something that transcends generations and allows families that have it to do good. It's true that lots of families with wealth do focus on giving to causes they believe in and that in the best cases philanthropy becomes a driving force within the family. But few of them really trim their living standards to give a ton away. And philanthropy can also evolve into a greenwashing myth that validates peoples' lifestyles.

We quickly get back to the questions of what is the best way for society as a whole to allocate funding between the effecting of public vs. private goods and how to balance economic dynamism and the desire to provide for one's own with making sure that everyone can live a decent life. Europeans always tout the relative lack of extreme human privation in their countries, but that is balanced by the fact that they don't make much of anything new that the rest of the world wants much of. Luxury goods and a pharmaceutical here or there are the obvious exception. Plus tourism

By now I'm oversimplifying dramatically because my work bell is ringing pretty loud. This always happens. One of these days I'm going to have to stop skirting around the edges of problems and write a book.

Reading more deeply

In a somewhat duplicitous move, I've turned off receiving the paper Journal while Rob is in town, out of respect for his deeply honed and entirely heartfelt environmentalism. Rob prefers e-books to physical books for environmental reasons, for instance.

Since I still don't want to turn on my computer first thing in the morning, I find myself reading more of the Economist with breakfast and coffee and therefore just reading more of it. This is probably an information consumption regime I should seriously consider.

But there is the problem of Monica, who delivers my newspaper each morning (though I never see her, not even at the recent show at the Cradle raising money for research for a cure for Glioblastoma, which took her sister Sarah from us all too early). I addition to Sarah, Monica also lost her brother Joe a couple of years ago and her mother passed this summer. Meanwhile her brother Dexter, to judge from his recent performance at the Cradle, is not conquering his own demons quickly.

We'll see what happens with the physical paper in 2024.    

Doubles vs Singles

We were supposed to play doubles again this afternoon but Rob is having some pain in his forearm so Z and I may end up playing singles, as per usual. But that would leave Patrick out, so Z suggested doubles, which may yet happen.

I am inclined to prefer singles because it is freer for me, in my mind. I've written about this before. In singles it's more me against myself (and, admittedly, my opponent). If I fuck up I don't mess anyone else up. It's rather like managing my own portfolio and financial life vs. helping others. Maybe this is part of the problem. Throughout the work day I feel responsible to others so it's nice to have that removed during my leisure.

But I do need to look at doubles as a growth opportunity and roll with it. Nobody really cares much, though they kind of do. Mostly people are out there for yuks. That's what I have to keep in mind.

Some very good people moving on

Yesterday the news broke that former UNC star Eric Montross had passed away after a relatively brief struggle with cancer. I was stunned. I knew he was sick, but had no idea he was that close, but that is how it should be because even though I am good friends with some people who are close to him and his family, nobody wants their cancer journey to be broadcast even semi-publicly.

Though I didn't know him well, every time I had ever seen him, whether in person or in video, he was doing something positive, usually raising money for some kind of cancer-related cause, whether Be Loud! Sophie or something else having to do with UNC's Lineberger Center. I spent more time on Facebook yesterday to see people's tributes to him, the best of which was Orange County Sherriff Charles Blackwood who shared about how Montross would come by his office when the Sherriff was out and move stuff around on his desk to mess with him. Good fun. But maybe the most moving was a picture of Montross near the bench with his arm around Coach Smith. It is hard sometimes to believe that Coach Smith has not been coach for over a quarter century and left us altogether about a decade ago. We are fortunate to have one of his players at the helm of the program now acting as lodestar.

Last week Liz Magill was defenestrated from her role as President of Penn after her admittedly suboptimal performance in Congress answering questions from Elyse Stefanik in too lawyerly a way. Liz was the first to pay for a few reasons: because her facial expressions were impolitic when she responded to questions posed specifically to elicit the answer she gave (answers very much on the advice of counsel); because Penn is dominated by Wharton and thus money; because photographers caught her at some very bad moments, and because she is blonde and blue-eyed and a Hillary Clinton proxy, easily sacrificeable. Liz was in my year in Branford College and was politically active from a young age and went out with (if memory serves correctly, and it may not) a guy named Bill from Arkansas. They were both a little too clean-scrubbed and positive for me, as my college years were kind of a dark time, so I didn't get to know her well. But I ran into her again in Princeton somewhere around 2004-2005 when she was doing a sabbatical from UVA at the Woodrow Wilson Center and we had lunch, then she brought her kids to our house for a play date. She is a lovely and excellent person and will go on to do further good things in the world. Admittedly, her ability to do great things at scale will be temporarily constrained by having fallen into the maw of the outrage machine, but such is life. She was in the wrong place at the wrong time and was acting on advice of counsel.

The joys of marriage

As has been my habit since the beginning of the pandemic, I gave myself a buzz this afternoon. I had been feeling a little fuzzy. Since it's chilly and will be even more so later this week, I decided that the "3" setting on my clippers was short enough for the back and sides, then finished up with a little free range, self-expressive scissor work on the top.

Towards the end of this period of manual snipping, I noticed that this cow-licky spot on the back of my head -- one that professionals have called out as a challenge -- looked a little bushy and figured I'd give it one more go with the clippers to see if I could bring it down a little. So I grabbed them, turned them on, and ran them over the area in question, only to see an implausibly large clump of hair drift downwards towards the bathroom floor. I gasped then looked at the clippers. I gasped again. There was no 3 attachment on them at all. No indeed. I had in fact run them bare backed over the back right of my head. When I looked in the mirror at the area, it looks somewhat like the head of someone in the early stages of recovering from chemo.

This, my friends, is where I am happy to be married, and happy that our large fundraiser is in the rearview, as indeed is pretty much all business development-related activity for fiscal 2023. I've got plenty of work to do in the next couple of weeks, but no sales. Yes, it is possible that my mom may notice and be vaguely scandalized at Christmas, but I doubt it. The light will be low and hair grows fast. Onwards.

Accepting dental situation

A couple of weeks ago I shared the story of the gums around my front lower incisors not so felicitous encounter with a plastic toothpick hidden inside a catered slider. Since then things have been getting slowly if steadily better. My bite has gone from feeling out of whack to back to normal. The pain has subsided except for in certain situations, for example when biting into crusty bread. So I had been largely avoiding those.

Then I had an appointment for a cleaning at the dentist. My hygienist, an excellent woman, took a closer look at the situation, got my read on it ("93% better"), shot an xray, looked closely around the tooth, then gently informed me of her opinion. "If I were you, given your amount of bone loss (from periodontitis), I'd be very careful biting into things that require you to tear, like apples or pizza crust." Her tone of voice implied that she was giving me general advice, not strictly limited to this specific tooth and its period of convalescence.

Which leaves me in the camp of more knife and forking, smaller bites, generally more circumspection, lest I fall into the permanent soft diet camp or even more expensive and tenuous dental interventions. Rage, rage against the dying of the light is not really on the menu here. I just have to make peace with the situation and roll with it. 

Fortunately, now it is lunchtime and I snapped up an intriguing new bowl from Trader Joe's, the chicken schwarma bowl. Let's see how this one goes.

Post game wrap up and transition

It's now Friday and Mary and I are largely recovered from hosting what turned out to be 113 people in our home Tuesday to raise money for Josh. We raised good money, though I feel like touting the exact figure -- if I even had it -- goes against norms.

Of course that night we were completely toast but we also went to sleep in a house that was 95% clean because that's just kind of the worker bees we are. On Wednesday I worked from home. Mary seemed to spend a good part of the day carefully scrutinizing the sun as it played across the wood floor at different angles. When she espied a stain of some sort, she pounced and broke out some combination of broom, wet Swiffer and vacuum cleaner and remediated the issue.

Partially it was because we were having one of our patented night after hoover up the leftovers get together. It was hard to rustle people up so close to the holidays but we eventually fed a few people and poured a little wine down the throat of a neighbor. 

But Mary was also, in typical but also necessary fashion, on to the next. Namely, Christmas, which kicks off this afternoon when Graham comes home. Then Mary's brother Rob arrives for two weeks on Sunday, then Natalie on Thursday, Beth, Sadie, and their dog Catfish on Saturday (they have an AirBnb to keep the dog away from our cats). 

It will be our first Christmas hosting, the first since both Mary Lee and George Jr left us, so it will be new territory.

Lost Girls, the wrap

I was all keyed up to write about something that someone had told me -- that it is illegal to ship books in France (to protect book stores from Amazon) -- but it turns out that what I was told is not true. The French did, however, recently institute a minimum 3 Euro shipping charge on orders of less than 35 Euros to protect booksellers. Which doesn't appear to have been particularly effective at protecting them outside of major cities, if Google Maps is to be believed.

So let me turn instead to Bob Kolker's Lost Girls, which I finished recently. It's a very solid book about a bunch of murders I had never heard of, the Gilgo Beach murders in which four clearly connected murders of prostitutes were unearthed after the disappearance and death, possibly directly connected but probably just etiologically twinned, of a fifth, Shannan Gilbert. Indeed, I just Googled the Gilgo Beach murders and found out that someone was recently arrested for them this summer.

Kolker does deep investigative work into the life arcs of all the murdered women as well as Shannan Gilbert and then tracks the course of the investigation while getting to know the people in the Long Island community near where they were found, as well as the online community of true crime gawkers and speculators who got sucked into the drama of it all. Which makes for a lot of dramatis personae, a lot of mothers (but few present fathers), grandmothers, siblings, children, and pimps/drivers/boyfriends. It became a lot like a Russian novel in that there were an overwhelming number of names of people to keep track of, particularly when I was reading in short chunks when tired before bed which made me feel guilty because so much care had gone into the research and writing but as a reader I was somewhat failing to individuate.

In the end it was brought home beautifully and humanely, albeit tragically. I won't say more. I cried. There is much to think about in this book about an America seemingly very far from my own, but just around the corner and available via the internet and a phone call. 

Game day!

After months of build up and coordination, in eight short hours we'll have a hundred-odd people streaming into our home to support Josh Stein's candidacy for governor. Thankfully I've arranged the day so my work responsibilities are light after a 10 am team meeting.

From here on out it will be a rolling process of checking off things on a task list while discovering ever finer bits of tuning as I go. The first thing I discovered is that we are a little bit short on toilet paper though we likely have enough. Mary thought she had bought some and then we discovered, in classic fashion, that it was in fact paper towels she had bought. We've all been there.

Later people will start arriving, first helpers and staff, then campaign team, then guests. Enough of this writing stuff. Andale.

A year in carbon

The odometer on my car just went over 96,000 miles, which reminded me that we had flipped 90,000 back in January when Mary and I were out at Lake Mattamuskeet. Given that my car is by far the biggest mileage vehicle in the family, that's not too bad. Mary's Prius (whom we call Beatrice) pretty much just goes to the store these days. The Subaru (AKA the "Marubaru") largely sits there while Graham is in school unless I am quite intentional about getting her out for exercise.

Admittedly, I'm cheating a little here. I probably put 1,250 miles on rental cars in Europe this summer. And maybe 300 on rental or borrowed cars in Alaska in June.

Then there was the flying. Europe, Alaska (though I did pause and stay in Seattle for extra days so as not to fly West twice), 4x to New York for George Jr's funeral, David Dennis' shiva, my 35th college reunion, and just business. Actually, the proximate motive of the last trip was to meet the children of a client with terminal cancer while she is still alive so that I wouldn't be just some random dude who is a trustee on their trust when she leaves us, so it was a pre-funereal exercise. Even on the Europe trip, I will give us credit for not just flying for four days but instead extending the trip to two weeks and vacation to be sure we made use of the carbon burnt.

I've also done a pretty good job dialing back the red meat. I really am at just about once a week and fairly often it just crosses my path at some kind of business event, which is to say I'm not consciously ordering it. Honestly I'd rather have less of that random red meat and more burgers I order at Al's or the like but such is life.

All in all, not too shabby. But tell that to the planet. Reading a pretty daunting survey in the Economist of the current state of carbon capture and storage technology and how woefully inadequate it is to the scale of the planet's problems.

Acceleration

Right about now, after a more than adequately busy fall, the year feels as if it is accelerating quickly. The fundraiser is fast upon us and there are a few more things that need to get done by then, followed by Mary's family coming in for the holidays. Meanwhile client questions and wrinkles are popping up left and right. It is hard to keep it all stable and solid to hold down the middle.

Which is where the virtue of my routine comes in. (Even as I type this, I hear that the neighbor's landscaper has fired up his leafblower, which is my signal to get it in gear and get to the office).

Staying on the topic, however, of acceleration, I should note that the Bible too accelerates a little as my reading of the New Testament progresses. I am now reading First Romans, Paul's first letter. We've had the four gospels and then Acts, in which the early church, primarily Paul, travels about spreading the Word amongst Jews but more notably Gentiles. In First Romans, Paul (it appears that the authorship here is not questioned) starts to abstract Christianity up into more of a general proposition, presumably based on thinking occasioned by a lot of wrangling and debating with others during his travels. He goes back to the Old Testament for precedents, but really he's at the beginnings of building a systematic theology on the basis of a lot of tales and stories. Moving from haggadah to halakhah, but in a more universalizing way. 

The moment of maximum pressure

Listening to the Acquired podcast about the history of Visa now, fascinating story both in its unfolding and its telling. But for a dork like me, the most compelling moment was the 1968 processing crisis for Visa's predecessor entity BankAmericard that brought all the issuing banks of the time together and ultimately gave rise to Visa. Back then, authentication of charges were done manually. If you were trying to charge something that was above the "floor limit" for the card, often $50, the salesperson would have to call the store's bank to check the customer's remaining credit limit. Then the store's bank would call the purchaser's bank and speak to a person there. It could take minutes. Obviously this constrained growth.

In 1968 all the banks that were using BankAmericard -- then a licensed product of Bank of America -- got together to talk through approaches in some boring place, maybe Columbus, Ohio. The solution that emerged (I'll spare you the details -- listen to the podcast) became Visa.

What's most intriguing here is that all this coincided precisely with the "paperwork crisis" on Wall Street which closed markets for months at a time and gave rise to an analog to Visa in the capital markets -- the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation -- much less a household name but similarly important in terms of providing a shared standard for data transmission and payment exchange for securities trades. Nb. and fun fact the DTCC was helmed by the father of a Larchmont neighbor of Mary's and the father of a friend of the Berridge family.   

It seems likely not entirely coincidental that all this came to a head in 1968, not just the great year of social upheaval in the streets of Chicago, Paris, and also the Mexico City Olympics but also the year the first cohort of Boomers turned 22 and headed out into the working world. There was just too much growth, too much commerce. It was also the year Intel spun out of Fairchild Semiconductor as the world began to spin up ever more computing power, which would be key to facilitating the liberation of commerce from the shackles of paper, with all its attendant goods and ills.

Dialing it in

Enjoyed the Gliobastoma show at the Cradle last night, for the most part. It was great to get out and see people and to watch some of my contemporaries revisit their respective youthful selves onstage. What Peggy Wants were great as usual, Ensslin remains the master performer, though he was a little more understated than recent incarnations and could, honestly, have used a little makeup. No matter, we cannot ask him to live out all of our dreams of disinhibition and full flight for us all the time.

The Popes were solid, the Bad Checks rocked hard and super tight. Snatches of Pink unfortunately fell victim to the temptation to live out years away from maximum amplification by turning their amps up to 14. Too much.

Then came Dexter. He has lost a lot, admittedly, in recent years. Not just Sara, but also quite close in time to her passing his brother Joe (of the band UV Prom, I think) died. Then sometime this year his mom did. His sister Monica fought her own battle with cancer, seemly doing OK now. She delivers my paper every day and it's nice to know it's her passing by, though I never see her.

But Dexter just came out on stage last night and pretty much winged it. It didn't seem like he'd been practicing much at all, or had a set list worked out or anything. Indeed, it might have been hard for him to practice, because not long ago Benson had been looking around on Facebook for a guitar for Dexter. Let's be clear here. Dexter is a genius, a genuine talent who has done amazing things in his life and has been consistent throughout all of it. I'll never forget the time he showed up in European History class and did a oral report on Denmark, and specifically a cultural trend that was huge in Denmark at the time: Rockabilly.

But just being a genius doesn't absolve you of doing the work. If you wants my time and attention, show up. Dexter last night was a few inches from Jack Whitebread (may he rest in peace) with a case of beer onstage at BeLoud! a few years back. You have to respect your audience and its time.

Blissful quiet

Tennis was cancelled because of rain this morning and Mary was out at the Extraordinary Ventures holiday sale hawking her book, so I came home to a blissfully peaceful home. I almost didn't know that to do with myself. In the end, of course, I read my book,.in which I've gotten a little bogged down. 

There's a bunch of stuff that needs to be done around the house and we have a flood of people coming in in a mere ten days. I suppose I'd really better go and do some of it now that Mary's gotten home. I always feel better having done so, even if the doing of it is drudgerous.

My tooth seems to be improving with time, though it's still a little off. I keep thinking back to the example of Mary Lee's best friend from college, who had lost her sense of taste some years before I last saw her and kept a sense of optimism about her. The worst case scenario is I loose the tooth and either get it replaced or learn to work around it.