De li non aliud

It's astonishing how different my attitude is towards blogging, into which I pour what I actually think about just about anything, and which I do freely, and professional writing, where I comment on a much narrower range of matters and restrain myself to a pretty much technocratic point of view, which totally gives me the willies and  makes me feel like my skin is on fire.  Part of it is the fear of being called out for making mistakes in a professional context, which I feel like I'm at risk of doing fairly frequently, since I'm writing about areas in which I'm often something of a novice compared to people who might read my work. Part of it is simply the fact that they pay money for it, which gives me higher degree of accountability.  You would think I would feel more exposed and at risk in the text into which I have invest more of myself, but in fact I am more exposed where there is more that is not me. And, I guess that kind of makes sense. I'm happier to be myself that to be something other than myself.

Lot size, wildness, and noise

Just read Wade Graham's "Jesus is My Gardener", a Kindle Single.  Good stuff. One of the things he notes in there is that, in LA, wherever you are, you can always here some sort of landscaping equipment.  I often noted the same living in NJ, probably even blogged about it years ago. It is one of the prices we pay for imposing order on nature.

When we moved to NC a few years ago, I wrote how Mary was put off by the wildness of the landscape, and even by the size of the lots, accustomed as she was to the greater density and higher degree of maintenance that one sees in the Northeast. You can see what she's talking about.

But, there is a benefit. Bigger lot sizes, quicker growing rates, and a lower desire (or ability or commitment) to tame nature (the embodiment of contingency or, in Nietschean terms, the Dionysian) means that working at home during the day can be less of an exercise in noise suppression.

Vignette

The boys across the street play a lot of hoops in the driveway.  It's good to see, because so often kids aren't outside working on their game and just goofing off.

Around 6:30, as the light was getting soft, I was sitting at my desk banging through an edit of a draft when the elder boy from across the street ran out from his garage, jumped up to touch the rim, then kept running out through the driveway (I was trying to figure out what he was up to), balanced on the railroad tie the edges the driveway, and finally came out to the street to wheel the garbage can back in.  It was a perfect little childhood moment.

Just then, an 70ish guy in a tank top and shorts came past him, running down the hill making his way round the circuit of the lake, like everybody does.

And there it was, childhood, old age, and me up here chained to my desk, raking a few ducats. Three major life phases at dusk.  All we needed was an adolescent with a boom box and we would have had it all.

Back to the sandwich line

I wrote earlier about this sandwich maker. Over time I've come to believe that he probably does have some sort of "different ability", in the most PC parlance, and have developed much greater patience with him. I am, in fact, happy to see a guy like that be able to hold down steady employment. Lord knows I'm a fucking mess in my own way.

My kids like to go to the public library almost every Sunday, and it's located at the mall now while its permanent home undergoes a renovation. I had seen the sandwich guy waiting for the public bus near the mall, and now I have started to see him there at the library on most Sundays, usually attired in business casual Sunday best. My guess is that he doesn't have a family, maybe even doesn't have an internet connection, who knows?  The library seems to be part of his Sunday routine. We recognize each other and say hello.

I must say I like it, it makes me feel kind of warm inside to live in a place that provides a good public place where a guy without much money can go and dress up and feel dignified. A church would work much the same.  Maybe he goes to church first. All good.

People looking at our house

People go past our house all the time as they circumnavigate the lake, and they turn and look at our house.  Or are they looking over it, getting that last glimpse of the lake.

Many people congratulate us on it, say how great it looks.  As I think I have said before, I don't really identify with the house and how it looks, I don't feel like it reflects me in the same way as say, the blog does. But I do wonder if they really like the house, or are just saying so or, as is so often the case with me these days, are they just happy to see people putting money into their houses or even into commercial construction just because it indicates and is in fact identical to economic activity.  And yes, it reflects on the value of their own houses, however tangentially.

Central coherence deficit, midlife crisis, and the fragment

Was talking to Leslie about the concept of central coherence deficit ("CCD") and its relationship to autism spectrum disorders and the anxiety that is their fellow traveler. Basically, CCD theory says that those on the spectrum capture details super-effectively but have a difficult seeing the big picture. Since we're looking at these issues in our family now even as I struggle through what seems like an endless midlife crisis accompanied by serious anxiety, it all seems very apropos.

Going back to Stephen Covey's "7 Habits," which I've kind of characteristically stalled out in the middle of, one of the things he enjoins readers to do is to kick back and think about what we'd like to have people say at their funeral service, really dig into what their core purpose in life is, what they'd like to be remembered for. That's a hard fucking thing to do. There are so many swirling priorities, life is so many faceted. In the end, in my case, it's much easier to say what I don't want to be remembered for than what I do want to be remembered for.

Certainly life is much easier for those who see the world in very black and white terms, and in many ways that's what central coherence would seem to correlate to.  Boiling it all down to "make more money" or "save the planet" or "help poor people" or "protect my children" or just "pay the bills" makes it very easy to live. If you can or must accept any one of these you can roll forward easily.

Temple Grandin et al. trumpet forth the idea that if everybody was neurotypical, the world wouldn't move forward a whit. Somebody needs to focus down on details and see stuff that the big picture obscures.  Certainly the part of the Western tradition that has appealed to me has been the part that opens discourse.  In philosophy, the fragmenters rather than the systematizers, Heraclitus, Plato, Pascal, Nietzsche, Benjamin, Wittgenstein rather than Aristotle, Augustine, Kant and so many others whose spines I could scarcely crack. To say nothing of scripture. In prose, always Dostoevsky and Balzac before Tolstoi (and I do think Bakhtin is right that the miracle of Dostoevsky is the way the various voices coexist within the novels).

In the end, the great thing about the world is its breadth and texture, even though we all breathe, love and shit much the same.  Or rather, we all aspire to do so.  The great paradox of modernity, capitalism and material progress is that it tends to flatten out the breadth of human experience even as it makes it easier for more people to perform some of the basics (and yes, paradoxically once again, even as global capitalism and crappy tax policy has in the last couple of decades created insane wealth dispersion, it has also pulled more people in developing markets out of abject poverty). And, to be sure, it's destroying the planet.

Years of data

I must admit that I do occasionally go back and look at the traffic statistics for this blog, that I've been keeping track of over at Statcounter for over 7 years now.  So I can and just did easily run my numbers from today back to March 2005.  One thing I can tell ya, it ain't pretty.  My blog used to get more traffic because.... I used to write more, and better. But it's pretty cool to have all that data, and for free, and it means absolutely nothing to anyone but me, whom it variously flatters, chastens, and insults, depending on the time period.

The Snowball

I've been reading this long, sanctioned biography of Warren Buffett, The Snowball, which purports to pass along the oracle's sage wisdom about life. So far, lots of great anecdotes about his genius and eccentricity and, indeed, his well-wrought sense of honor, but not so much sageness. Mostly, it convinces me that I'm right not to try to invest like Buffett because I'm not like him.  I was not the polymath son of a broker and was not obsessed with stocks and making money from a very young age.

The author, a former Morgan Stanley managing director, is a little obsessed with the glamor of the man, and gets completely bogged down in the gorey details of the collapse of Salomon Brothers under Johns Gutfreund and Meriwether.  I don't understand why she'd want to hover over territory Michael Lewis and other more talented writers have already beaten to death.  OK, Buffett did have a good role at the end, but still.  I skipped a bunch of that and felt good about having the backbone to do so.

Cousins in town, scenes from a clearly gendered weekend

Caroline and Natalie decided to make a "Hummingbird Cake," which had a bunch of fruit in it and lemon icing. They found the texture of the batter and the icing so appealing that they decided to do all of the mixing by hand. The kitchen was an utter wreck, with flour down in the silverware tray and batter down on the drawers at ankle height. But they enjoyed it and the cake was good, so it all turned out well.

Later, Carolina was on TV playing against Creighton in the second round of March Madness.  I've been trying to get Graham to watch games so that he'll have more to talk about with the more neurotypical boys, so it was definitely excellent to have his cousin Daniel there to explain things like 3-pointers to him while I hustled hither and thither grilling pork, cabbage (yes, grilling cabbage), scallions, and whatnot.

All good.

Big River Man

When I saw that Mary had picked out a documentary about some fat Slovenian guy swimming down the length of the Amazon, after having already conquered the Mississippi, the Yangtze, and the Danube, I was like, oh great.  But, in fact, I can and must recommend this movie, it's intense and infectious.  Crazy...

That was the first half.  By the end of the second half, it gets a little darker and seriouser.  Still, a pretty good movie.

It was good just to see the footage of Ljubljana.  I fine little burg.  Crazy to think it was nigh unto 20 years ago when I was there.

Baruchs

At the bar mitzvah of Josh and Anna's boy Sam, a great plethora of Baruchs, blessings. Really a beautiful service in many ways, with Sam truly rocking the Hebrew and a lovely woman leading the singing on guitar, until they got to the part about Israel and I was like, oh yeah, that.  Not that I'm Mr. PLO or something, it's just that the whole thing fairly reeks of geopolitical conflict in support of one specific scripture. It ain't about all that.

And then overeating at Solas on Glenwood, and, as penance, a 5-odd mile run with some walking and chatting with Woody and his kids and then NickNack and Isabel and, as a closer, the first swim in the lake of the season.  Yes it was chilly, but tolerable.  And then, rinse off in the outdoor shower, looking down at the lake. All good.

Good day with Natalie

Today I went in Natalie's room and hung out for a full hour without being kicked out. We talked about favorite books, and then I started going through the dad/daughter activities book she had gotten me at some point in time which had ended up in her room. We invented a killer secret handshake.

Later, we went to Flyleaf Books where she used some gift certificates she had been hoarding since her birthday 8 months ago and I bought a few books myself, mostly to assuage my guilt for buying from Amazon. Then we had coffee at Foster's next door, where I wondered at the many fine things on their menu that I hadn't known about.

All told, a good day.

Watson!

Going through a bag of crap I got at trade shows last year I came upon a cheap little notebook I got from IBM with something about Jeopardy and Watson on it.  So I gave it to Natalie. When she realized what it was about her face warmed up and she gave a little smile and said "cool."

Sometimes it's hard to get to the tweens, but when you can, it's nice to do so.

Rapprochement

Since the real Leon has returned, he has reverted to form, staying elusive and reclusive during the day, maybe hanging out with Natalie on her bed, but generally being a scaredy cat. Then at night, after the kids are in bed, he becomes attention seeking. Last night he came up on our bed and just begged to be petted, then lay down between me and Mary and purred.  So we're sure it's him.

Rascal, however, doesn't recognize him, and has been very territorial and dominant.  The first few days she would always position herself on a bed, chair, couch, table, something elevated, and look down at him. There has been a fair amount of hissing.  Apparently, with him having been gone for six odd weeks, he's like a new cat to her.

They have, however, been spotted sitting closer and closer to one another on the couch, and have today had a couple of little nose kisses, though afterwards Rascal swats at him a little, not quite ready to give in entirely.

Chicken and waffles

Chicken and waffles seem to be popping up on menus in lots of places around here. Yesterday I was in downtown Durham and this place that serves them had a line out the door.

I had never heard of chicken and waffles till I read James Cain's Mildred Pierce some years ago. When I read about chicken and waffles back then, I must confess that, as a confirmed low to middle brow eater, it sounded good. As I noted in my original musings, it's a good book, offering a lot of texture about what it meant to persevere through the Depression. When I read it, it was 2006, and nobody was thinking about the Depression.

Now we are, and presumably that's what got Mildred Pierce made into an HBO miniseries last year (I just found out about that when I googled it a few minutes back). And chicken and waffles must be to 2011 what meatloaf was to 1991, a return to lost roots.

Post-Renovation stress

So, after thinking for months that getting done with my renovation would remove my stress, I found instead that it made it worse in certain regards, as the removal of the immediate financial demands of the seemingly bottomless whole of remaking the home now leaves me standing naked -- to paraphrase Steve Jobs' eloquent Stanford graduation speech -- before the rest of my life. So I've been going to more AA meetings of late. Tonight I was at one describing my predicament and I kept confusing "rehab" with "renovation."  There was much belly laughter.

I was talking to my mom about my issues and she suggested I read some management books, so I picked up The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, mostly because it is one of those books whose title is so repulsive to arrogant intellectual snobs like myself that I knew that just picking it up would be a good act of humility. And, lo and behold, it's a good book. I've been reading it with breakfast instead of reading the paper, which I'm having trouble focusing on anyway.

I will give myself a smiley face sticker.

Suckerburg?

I've been a little stressed out recently, so when I was looking for someone on the dominant social network while laying on the couch with my son I started scrolling through people's faces (using a tablet from a certain computer company) --  and was somehow overcome with joy looking at all these people from various phases of my life, all of whom having selected a picture of themself which they think represents them best to the world -- an excellent smile, or a picture of them with kids.  And I was, truth be told, thankful to Mark Z. for having put together this pretty cool platform.

It's not that I'm not conscious that users of fbook are lambs to the slaughter of marketers.  I get that and find it a little discomforting too.  But at the end of the day, the platform has its uses, and it does a good job putting and keeping people in touch.

There was an article in the Times somewhere recently on the death of the cyberflaneur, the early promise of the web to promote random strolling and serendipity in the style of the heros of Walter Benjamin's and Charles Baudelaire's visions of the great avenues of Paris back in the day.  And it's true, one doesn't do much of that.  But if your network on the platform which must not be named is fat and random and inclusive enough (i.e. you're friends with people of opposite political parties), you can still get a reasonable degree of randomness out of it.

In any case, the overwhelming feeling I had looking at all those smiling faces was that I'd love to see so many of those people more often.

It gets better

So a couple of weeks ago I told of how our cat Leon had run away, and was now living in our basement. Well, this evening at work I got a call from Mary, who tells me that she is at the vet with.... the real Leon, which means that the cat in the basement is.... you guessed it, an Impostor!  The nerve of the cat. We had a definitive ID on Leon from the microchip he had implanted in his neck.

Truth be told, I had thought that the cat looked a little different from Leon and even meowed a little different, but I figured he had been off in the wild for 5-6 weeks and so he had changed a little, manned up, as it were.

And now Leon is back and is so much friendlier and more trusting than ever he was before, and all are overjoyed. Except for the poor sweet woman who had been feeding him for only the last 5 days, had been in fact plying him with eggplant parmesan, which she said he had taken a shine to (indeed, what's not to like with a nice eggplant parm).  She apparently was moved to tears when it became clear at the vet that Leon was lost from his former home.  We will have to have her by.

The fall of the ACC

The Wall Street Journal today ran a story about declining attendance at ACC basketball games.  Here's what the commish had to say:

John Swofford, the ACC commissioner, said in a statement that the conference's "proud and storied" basketball history has "captivated fans over five decades." In recent seasons, he said, the league has experienced "transition in coaches and membership including eight coaching changes in the past three years." Swofford said the ACC's conference tournament has the highest average attendance of any in the country. He added that TV viewership "remains strong and we are on more platforms than ever before." With Pittsburgh and Syracuse scheduled to join the conference by 2014, he said, "the future couldn't be brighter."

With all due respect, what has the man been smoking.  The league has been bastardized beyond recognition for the sake of football revenue.  Miami and Boston College already make no sense -- and not just because the BC bus clipped and killed CHHS legend Harry Alston --, Syracuse and Pittsburgh even less so, with no disrespect to Boeheim for taking Dean Smith's place on the all time win list or for harboring pedophiles.  Florida State was fine, even Virginia Tech. They are from the same general region with similar institutional profiles. Even with the mass murderers and all. But leave the freaking Big East teams out of it. The reason people don't go to watch games anymore is that it's harder to sustain rivalries if you don't get the home and way thing. It's not organic anymore.

Vaporware

Met with some guys today in a rather dour office somewhere in Research Triangle Park.  I had met with one of them a year ago (along with a guy who passed away in the interim), and they told me about this great software they had.  All they needed was a client. Checked back in with them today, one year later, and the song remains the same. All we need is the one "pilot" client, then everybody will clamber to get on board.