Catching up

All too often, I come upstairs with the firm intention of writing something but without a clear plan of what I'm gonna write about, then get sidetracked reading stuff off of Facebook.  And, honestly, who can blame me?  Just spent 10 minutes nosing through Alvis Dunn's album of pix of almost 3 decades of trips to Guatemala, and still haven't finished reading an interview with my friend Katya Petrovskaya, who, when I saw her last in 1998 in Moscow, didn't speak a word of German, but was recently awarded the Ingeborg Bachmann Award, which is a very prestigious big deal over there.

As for me, I narrowly escaped going to the gym today and went running around the lake instead, where I was able to keep track of construction projects going on.  The people who are essentially rebuilding the Seniors old house just like it used to be, except brand new and swanky, are making good progress. Don't ask me why they would do that.

I am pleased that they are leaving the old gazebo jutting out over the lake in the back yard, because that was the scene of some very early and memorable pieces of my progress up the hierarchy of pleasurable acts with a young lady. And because it looks nice.

War footing

For some time, many years, I would say, I have felt myself to be essentially on war footing with Being. Fighting trench to trench, trying to get a longer view into the distance.

And then, for a time, I felt an easing, as if I were approaching cruising altitude.

But in the last couple weeks I have been under attack, and had to hunker down and keep my head low and my eyes focused resolutely ahead of me. The worst may be past, or maybe not. Time will tell.

The fabulous houses of Lake Lure!

So when we were up in Lake Lure for my mom's 75th we all went on a boat tour of the lake.  Things are kinda slow moving up there, so this sure promised to be plenty good family fun.

And our boat was guided, and tour narrated, by a silver-haired gentleman named Bob, I think, who surely had a wealth of knowledge about the lake.  No sooner had we left port then he slowed the engine and directed our attention to some 80s vintage condominia on the shore:  "So these are 1800-2100 square foot units, some of the end ones were listed back during the peak at around $700 grand, but have been recently listed at as low as $525 with no takers... but they're not building anymore!"  And so it went.  While he did fill us in a good detail of the history of the lake, which, like all lakes east of the Appalachians in NC, is man-made, and was indeed conceived and executed by a savvy developer, his heart was in the real estate and the dollar.

"That one has a wet bar and karaoke downstairs.....  How much do you think it would cost to mulch that slope... About $3500-4000!....  Those Adirondack chairs alone cost $1500 each!.... that restaurant has the best shrimp parmesan style you'll ever taste, they'll give you ten big shrimp for $12... just tell 'em Big Bob sent you!" and so on and so on.  I was somewhat less than shocked when he told us that HGTV was his favorite channel.

I tell you, it got mighty tiresome on the way out, when I was in the sun, but became somewhat less so on the shady side when we headed home. But I had to wonder, what would my kids make of this nonsense.

A pot melts in the Bronx

I'm currently making my way through Sonya Sotomayor's My Beloved World, and enjoying it. It is interesting to think about her path through the Bronx in the 60s and 70s, thinking back to Caro's The Power Broker  and his discussion of the role Robert Moses had in driving all that change. Sotomayor started out in the South Bronx, in a tenament neighborhood, where she was surrounded by family and a pretty tight community of Puerto Rican immigrants, then she moved to the Bronxdale projects, where at first she was isolated but then more of a community grew up as her kin moved closer -- even as gangs and junkies came to make the places nastier to live.  Then her mom moved her out to Co-Op City in its earlier days, and she also saw that transition from a bleak modernist enterprise to a better place to live (she alludes to the its later physical disintegration, but I'm only 100 or so pages into the book) and a pretty integrated place too. That's where she met her future husband, an Irish goofball and really started integrating with a broader swath of Americans.

So she wasn't forced to move from her original neighborhood by the construction of the Cross-Bronx or some other road or bridge going on around her, and she hasn't (yet) directly borne the brunt of any of the specific dislocations traceable to Moses's work, but I can see the fabric of the old New York neighborhoods crumbling even as Sotomayor benefits from some of melting of that very hot pot that was the Bronx and, indeed, the Borough, of the era.  I'll keep reading.

Ominous geese

I went for a run this evening, and then hopped in the swim for a quick swim in the gloaming. As I made my way out to the floats, I saw what appeared to be imposing little shadows out there on it.  As I drew closer, my suspicion was confirmed. Geese.  Canadian, no less. I went within 15 feet of the thing, but they were having none of it. As best as I could tell in the limited light, they looked me square in the eye and taunted me.

Miss Pym Disposes

Just worked my way through this 1948 novel by Josephine Tey, whom my dad always praised.  It is the first mystery novel in which (spoiler alert) no crime occurs until the novel is maybe 85% done.  Instead, we have our heroine, a somewhat dowdy spinster, hanging out in girl's academy somewhere in verdant England, enjoying crumpets and tea and even other baked goods, while getting to know the students and speculating on their characters.  Much consideration is given to their faces, similar to Tey's other novel, The Daughter of Time, in which our hero lies abed in hospital pondering a portrait of Richard III, while digging into historical documents and writings about the same and working towards a solution to a centuries old mystery about the guy and his purported cruelties.  I could, truth be told, not push my way through that one.

I was in fact pulled through this one as much by the mystery of when something was going to actually freaking happen as by anything else. And the shortbreads and whatnot.  But I did, and, in the end, blood was spilled, so it was not entirely for naught, and there was at least at least a healthy brace of quaint diction, just to keep the brain fresh.

But it's not her best novel.

Pushy woman at Larkspur Landing

So there we were, the whole family and I, with our lovely host, John Fox, sitting in a little outdoor eating area at a kind of upscale open air mall in Marin County, waiting for our reasonably-priced locavore Mexican food to arrive at our table, when out of his keen eye John did espy that a most Marin-like specimen of wildlife.

Some small children were dipping their hands into a pretty little round fountain, resplendent with ferns and other flora, when of a sudden they were accosted by a rather large-boned middle-aged woman with tousled hair a long skirt and -- most likely -- Birkenstocks.

"What are you doing to those turtles?" She asked them "How would you like it if some large creature were to reach down and toss you about like that?" and so on and so on.

John noted that this was most Marin-like behavior.  Meanwhile, the kids had gone back over to where their parents were sitting, and had alerted their dad to the encounter. Now the father, I'll have you know, conformed to fewer Marin stereotype, a big, cut dude with a buzz cut and an AC/DC T-shirt, and he goes over and speaks to the woman.  And, as he's coming closer, she sees him and starts to pack up her stuff (looked like she had a honking big old Thinkpad or something) to get out of there, but she was too slow. So he says something to her, and she starts going "Don't try to intimidate me, why don't you go beat on your own wife, you wife-beater..." as she high tails it out of there.

Later, John spoke to the dad, who, it turned out, was a totally nice and normal guy.  "My kids love to come here and play with the turtles, it's their favorite place to come, and she's telling them that they have bad parents because they're molesting the turtles."

Anyhoo, it was a lovely day in Marin.

White and free

My friend David was down from Princeton for the weekend of the 4th, and naturally we went to pick up some fireworks at the tent set up outside of Whole Foods. I was, to be clear, a little surprised that we could buy fireworks at all in North Carolina, as that was a franchise I thought we had granted, in our most estimable benevolence, to the benighted citizens of South Carolina. What I learned when I went into the tent on Thursday was that one can buy fireworks in NC now, so long as they don't have some sort of rocket system that sends them soaring into the sky.  At best, these fireworks promise "showers of sparks" or "fountains of sparks" (which ended up being not all that bad).

In any case, it was warm in that tent, and I would imagine it could get a little boring, so the friendly proprietors had set up an air mattress for themselves, as shown below, with a fan blowing air across it and boom box blasting out the very best of classic rock.

So, as we were checking out and buying an amusing assortment of incendiaries, David and I naturally engaged the guy at the register -- a friendly sort with a beard, some tattoos, and a pickup truck with a "Got Truck?" bumper sticker -- in banter. And, as it was our great nation's birthday, the conversation naturally wended its way around to the topic of liberty. The guy asked where we were from, and David let on that he was from NJ. The guy said "I know a guy from Manhattan. He's working a tent for me over in Winston-Salem.  And he's actually an OK person."  We were relieved to learn this.

Then, after I had walked towards the car, he shook David's hand and shared a significant moment with him in quiet tones.  When we were in the car, David, enjoying a little giggle, informed me that the guy had said to him:  "We're white and we're free, what more could you ask for?"

And, indeed, what could be better than to share in the glorious cultural patrimony of our shared whiteness on July 4.  God Bless America!

Erosion

I have been learning a fair amount about erosion as we try to dig out from this crazy rainstorm.  Let me not make it sound too bad:  we weren't hurt bad at all, some gravel went down into one ditch, killing some grass, and some mud slid in another one, partially blocking up a pipe.

But it's interesting to observe what's happened. I moved a bunch of rocks out of random places in the back yard (I have written about this epic effort before).  This has meant a couple of things:

1. In the massive rain (5 inches in 3 hours, for those of you out of the Triangle who didn't experience it), leaves washed down the rain and stopped against the wall, which apparently created a little dam of sorts.  The water ran down the dam till it found a low spot, then it went over.  This created a hugely concentrated flow of water down the backyard, completely wiping it free of leaves (exposing mud) and pushing years of leaves that we had pushed down to the steeper part of our yard (which goes down to a creek maybe 50 vertical feet below).  Just scoured it.  On the one hand, it protected some stuff Mary had recently planted.
2. On the other, removing rocks from where nature and earlier farming and construction projects over however long people have lived and cultivated this hill actually encouraged erosion.  Which it took down the hill, to Booker Creek, and eventually out to Jordan Lake.

Moral to the story, once more:  you can't win in densely populated areas. Mother nature is deucedly clever.  All you can do is try to lose more slowly.

Hackers run wild

A story in the Journal this morning on whether Snowden and Manning are anomalies or new norms. Hacker culture is not receptive to authority, yet the organs of authority need hacker skills to assure us of security.  What's a poor security apparatus to do?

This is, like so many problems we face these days, fundamentally a problem of alignment.  If people don't feel aligned with what power wants them to do, they won't go with it.  And alignment is, in the age of media and societal fragmentation and the micro-segmentation of messaging -- and the distrust the latter arouses -- a fiendishly difficult problem.  How can the government convince enough people it's doing the right thing to stop them from undermining it?

There are no easy answers. The government must start first by doing the right thing. And people must talk to each other, and not just those who agree with them, but those who don't, to take in diverse opinions.  If we all live in our little cells and don't understand the other, rectitude becomes a form of masturbation, something done in strict isolation or, for the daring, in an exhibitionist way.

Deaths of the fathers

Listening to NPR the other morning about Mandela on his death bed moved me for a moment, because it took me back to the 80s, when I was coming of age, when South Africa and Mandela provided all of us with a point of absolute moral certainty.

And then I come in to work and my boss is talking about her dog, who has been fighting some mysterious illness for months and she and her husband (and kids) are wrestling with the decision of whether or not they should be fighting to keep the dog alive, given the questionable quality of life he might expect if he lives.

And that discussion took me right back to my dad's bedside in April, on that last day, when it became apparent that dad was dying, then, and we had to make decisions very quickly about what level of intervention to make to keep him alive, and I use the term "we" loosely because, of all his immediate kin, I was the only one who was there, then, with doctors swarming around feeding me opinions as to the probability that each given type of intervention might provide him with quality of life going forward. After weeks and months of unenjoyable life as his dementia kicked in and it was apparent to him and others that he had little to look forward to other than the sun rising the next day (which ain't all bad). So I was standing there at work holding back tears listening to my boss talk about her dog.

So the deaths of fathers and authority figures makes it all too clear that we are left occupying those same positions, when inside I feel not dramatically different than I did as a kid.  I suppose I look different, and project differently, but I'm intrinsically not all that different.  And a friend of mine is a leading bulwark against insanity in Raleigh and another guy I went to college with (and who seemed no smarter than your average guy) works closely with Obama every day.  Funny, that.

Kid wanting to race

Graham continues to work on his swimming.  Sort of.  He's been spending more time in the water, getting more comfortable.

So on Saturday he and I went down to the pool at the place we were staying, the pool at the Rambling Bald Resort on Lake Lure. For the most part it was the continued astonishing display of the decline of America into languorous corpulence:  I was particularly impressed by the aptly-named "lazy river", another way of  letting machines burn the carbon while letting people move around without doing any work. I know I'm old, but I can't help being astonished by the number of women getting tattoos above and around the top of their butt cracks, whaddayacall it, the love patch?

Anyway, so Graham and I are in there, and we did some water wrestling and jiu-jitsu, though with a strict rule against stomp kicking (of course), and then Graham wanted to try to do more focused swim practice, swimming from me to the other side of the pool and back.  And so he's doing that, and few would mistake his unorthodox floppy strokes for the young Michael Phelps, but in any case a young alpha boy appears at his side on the other side of the pool and says "wanna race?"  And I don't know what Graham said, but the kid takes off across the pool next to him, and finishes when Graham's about half way across, and looks at me like I'm gonna congratulate him.  And when Graham asks him to race again Graham demurs.

A few minutes later the kid finds another victim:  "Wanna race?"  And he dusts the other kid too and then looks at me and says "I kicked his butt," again, like I'm going to confirm his manhood for him with a firm high five. I don't say anything.



This reminds me that this is the world Graham is cruising into as he glides towards adolescence. God save those little punks if they somehow test into history or math class with Graham, where he will mutilate them mercilessly. Like I used to, until somebody somehow taught me some manners.

Cleaning up

This weekend we got a message from our online backup that we have more files than our allotted quota.  At the same time my laptop has been running slowly. Time to clean up. So I dove in there.  Now, this is a computer that I bought from an employer I left in 2009, but it carried files on it from the one I left in 2007, as well as the one I most recently got the hell out of, back in 2012.  And each of them had a "domestic" folder, filled with my personal junk.

So this exercise has been much like going through shelves full of old books and papers, but with the benefit that I didn't have to get all dusty and at the end of it I don't have a bunch of heavy shit to carry out the door. Other than that, very similar, finding troves of old pictures, many of which were dupes, and so forcibly going down memory lane, looking at good old times in Princeton and elsewhere when the kids were younger.  Yes yes, not unlike the classic scene from Christmas Vacation, when our hero Clark W. Griswold gets locked in the attic wearing goofy clothes, gets carried away watching old family movies, and then puts his foot through the ceiling.  God how I love that movie.

At any rate, I dug through a bunch of crap and managed to throw away 6 gigs already, enough space to defrag my C drive, which should speed things up. This after deinstalling a bunch of software, including HP printer drivers and other nonsense like the Weather Channel desktop app which have been the bane of my existence.

And now, she's running light and sweet.  At least for a day or two.

Drop off plus

Dropped Graham off at summer camp at Camp Shelanu at the Levin Jewish Community Center off of Cornwallis Road this morning, and was impressed by the place, but impressed most by the intentional distance it seems from East Durham, where I work (admittedly, in a veritable fortress, but that's another story, kind of...).  It is fairyland for the affluent.

I noticed there was a charter school next door, the Maureen Joy Charter School, which turns out to serve kids from this neighborhood and is a high-performing one, and I thought "it's a shame they have to bus kids all the way over here, but it's cool that the kids aren't entirely locked out of this verdant, affluent area."

Then it turned out that the school was moving back in to a historic school building back over on this side of town as of August, which has been renovated with financing from the Self-Help Credit Union, and is being supported by the East Durham Children's Initiative, both good orgs where I know good people.

And so on and so on.  Shit ain't all fixed, but people are working on it.

The key thing here is that I took time to look it up and read and am pleased with what I saw, before I started writing.  But reading takes time away from writing. I often find that these days, if I go out on Facebook and just scroll down, I get all kinds of interesting stuff from friends all around the world, it is arguably more enriching to me than blogging is.

But the Grouse, alas, suffers.

Good service

An article in Bloomberg today about how people are spending silly money on weddings got me noodling.  As we've heard a lot recently, the jobs that the economy has been producing are low value-added service jobs, many of them in the hospitality industry.  These jobs don't pay much money or offer great futures, and people are generally pissed off to have them.

However, entry-level service jobs can teach you important things about service and focusing on the customer, which is the most important thing these days (ask any marketing person or, for that matter, CIO or even CEO, that's where their heads are).  I support businesses that give me good service (of late, the Tater Bread Cafe, JC's [at Fayetteville and Main here in Durham], and even the Subway in the basement of the Courthouse on Main Street), but am lukewarm on those that do not (the Blue Coffee Cafe), though I'll usually give a place another shot.

Recently, I was at the Med Deli in Chapel Hill and ordered Mukhamara, but they brought me Mujjadara. When I went back up to the counter, the guy working the line filled up a container with what I wanted and, without blinking, told me to take the other thing.  This was a young hispanic guy. Either he had great instinct or had great training. He had no fear of getting caught giving away something for free, he knew that the good feeling engendered by taking good care of the customer was worth infinitely more than the marginal cost of the rice and lentils (which were a little boring, but a free lunch for Mary).

The point is, people working hard in low-level jobs should often be able to make opportunities to do better for themselves if they focus on it.

Now, I don't want to romanticize this.  The NYTimes posted a piece yesterday with profiles of people working for minimum wage, and their lives are hard as hell.  And I am well aware that there are pathologies of managers in these jobs who enjoy their dominion and are protective of it, and that within massive corporate hierarchies that it may often be difficult if not impossible to get rewarded for focusing on being better at doing one's job or providing service.

Anyway, I'm rambling like some doddering Republican aren't I?  The other inference one can easily draw from the increase in mad weddings and luxury spending and private equity funds buying up single family homes to rent out is that rich people can't find enough ways to spend money, because they/we've basically already got more stuff than we need.  Given that the market hasn't been great at allocating money to things we really need (infrastructure, R&D, improvements to healthcare and education delivery), it would be great if the government had the money, wherewithal, and political will to do these things, by raising taxes, for instance. That would create better jobs all up and down our ecosystem.

Father's Day

I intended to do little, and to some extent succeeded, yet I did a little more than I planned to and some of it was things I didn't want to do but went ahead and did anyway.  Whoops. More focus on ignoring the extraneous next year.

But I read a fair amount, which was good, and I swam a reasonable distance, also good.

And, at least, I didn't study for my freaking CFP, and thereby saved my forehead from intense bruising, for a day longer if nothing else.

Waiting

Reading Ha Jin's 1999 novel Waiting was extremely gratifying, inasmuch as it seemed to have been conceived and executed entirely in the image of my dissertation.  I don't really have time to go into a great deal of detail, suffice it to say that the love triangle described in the novel really springs pretty much full-grown on the model of the Russian novel of the 1840s-50s, only with the genders reversed. Imagine my glee when, at the end, the protagonist actually says that he feels himself to be a "superfluous man," a direct reference to Turgenev.  I gotta ping the author at Boston University and see if he'll have a gander at my diss, I think he'll dig it.

Meanwhile, time to order Thai food and watch Masterpiece Mystery.

I mean, hell, it's Father's Day.

Pancakes

Graham came into our bedroom this morning at 7:42 am to tell us that it was time to get up and make pancakes.  This is fairly typical for him, though more often he waits until 7:43.

Because, you see, Sundays are pancake days, or, in any case, the day when maple syrup is a part of breakfast. French toast is entirely acceptable, in times of great slackness, even frozen waffles may be substituted.

And Graham has most often been up since 6:15 or so, eagerly awaiting the breakfast treats which he regards rightly as his due.  I think it takes considerable discipline on his part to wait until the time he considers it meet and right to interrupt our parental slumber.

Seeing that he is effective and consistent in this role, Natalie has fully outsourced it to him.

This morning Graham came in bouncing a balloon left over from Natalie's birthday party last week, playing the old "keep the balloon in the air" game.  He was killing it.

Carpooling to Durham

By chance I stopped in to see Toby at Flying Circus in South Durham the other day, reminded me I need to get more organized about carpooling occasionally.  There are others who live near me (Ben, Dan, Alex, etc.) who, I know, like me, drive to Durham every day.  It ain't that far, and I've got a Prius, but still...

Then I started to think about what Larry had been telling me about commuting in the Bay Area, where they have a system where you basically stand in one place near one of the bridges and if somebody comes by, they'll pick you up, and there are agreed upon rules of conduct concerning talking, radio station and volume, $, etc.

And I thought, why couldn't we do that?  And why couldn't you use something like the parking lot at the defunct Crown Honda/Volvo space as a park and ride lot.  I know the answer to the latter is that somebody owns it and there might be liability concerns that need to be addressed, but still...

Just sayin.

At the library

I had been wondering of late why we never seem to see very low-income children at the library.  Then, last week, there was an older black woman in there with a couple of kids and a big stack of books.  At the check-out, she was told that she couldn't check any more out because she had $29.70 in fines outstanding. So she said to the kids "we'll have to come back another day" and they walked away.

That's a tough one.  Part of me wanted to slap down 30 bucks and get her kids the books. Part of me wondered if they would have hassled me over the same thing.  I know they don't always force me to pay fines then and there, but maybe there's a break point in terms of dollars or time where they do. But part of me thought, here's something the state makes available for free, one should be able to manage that. I know it's likely she doesn't get email reminders, she might even have been going on her daughter's card (she looked like the grandmother).  I dunno.