Walking the walk

Once more I walked the mile into town to get a sandwich today.  As I was walking out of my office onto Main St. a couple of young ladies were walking along, carefree, listening to music. One of them looked at me and said: "Do you have a dollar?"  No prefacing it with "I need to get something to eat" or anything.  I said no. 

It is a pretty windswept walk. I go past several generations of public housing, a couple of them quite nice, a couple of them not at all so. I pass JC's Kitchen (where Brian and I ate a couple of weeks ago, awesome) and a walkup takeout called Not Just Wings where I know I'm headed one of these days, I just haven't yet pulled the trigger. There is the Centro Hispano, and multiple Durham City Government offices.  The Housing Authority, etc.  There is a massive and gleaming new project which will soon be Durham's Office of Human Services, which looks nice but which reiterates all the modernist mistakes made by the new Court House and Police Station and some other faceless piece of pseudo-Corbusier crap down the way a piece:  big building with lots of glass closed off to the street, no storefronts, no life.

And I pass St Phillips, the church where I was baptized and where I sang solos lo those many decades ago when I had not even heard the word puberty and had a nice high voice (so my mom tells me), where my sister was married, where I absolutely slaughtered people in look-up-shit-by-chapter-and-verse competitions, and where I sat every Sunday looking up at the stained glass centerpiece of Jesus and some little lambs, fully expecting a brick to come flying through it, cuz the nabe was rough even back then, being as how it was next to the Greyhound station, long since gone.

In general, Durham East of Roxboro St awaits the dawning of the age of foodiness and ironic facial hair. The Golden Belt is an island of private sector whiteness. There's a new building going up along Fayetteville St, and I thought that boded well. And then I saw the sign: DaVita Dialysis. It's good to have a modern facility for people to go get there treatments, to be sure, but at the end of the day it's just another place for Medicare and Medicaid to be spent, not really a productive asset.

Today I came in to work and there was a tarp over the front door of our building, which had been hit and run by some drunk dude in a Mercedes, who careened through the parking lot and into our front lobby, before reversing and high-tailing it out of there.

Idea for app

My office building has only one toilet in the men's room.  Which becomes a problem when guys spend a lot of time there.  It appears that, as occupancy rises, this is happening more and more.  Which is why I think there should be, if not a webcam (at foot level, showing if there are shoes in there), then an app which we can have on our desktops telling us if the door to the stall is locked, or if the seat is warm, or whatever, because it's a bummer to walk out there and then find that somebody's in there working on the Great American Novel.

Ramseur St

Trying to avoid the light at Fayetteville and Main, and intrigued by a row of little businesses in small storage-like buildings on Ramseur St., I turned down it to see what was there.  Turns out that, down the way a piece, there are several church spaces set up in these commercial storage areas, some hispanic, some anglophone. It also appears to be a quick way through to the taqueria on Alston Avenue that I espied on my way out last night, the one with bars on the windows.... looks muy bien to me!

Wrapping up the ultimate season

And so, Natalie's first season of ultimate is over. Let the record show that she:

1. Threw for one point
2. Caught 3 points (two in one game!)
3. Generally got into it and made friends
4. Got in shape and really seemed to appreciate the exercise component
5. Looked beautiful and healthy coming in off the field, ruddy-cheeked in the winter air.

Let us hope that it sticks.

Graham reading from book

Both of the kids really like to share details from their books that they find infinitely amusing.  As adults know, this is a difficult thing to do:  giving your interlocutors enough background on what you're reading so they get it without giving so much that it bores them to tears and/or wrenches them out of their own flow is a tricky balancing act. Neither of the kids have mastered it.

However, we want to encourage them to read and maintain their enthusiasm for it. So, this morning on the couch, Graham was talking to me about a book he was reading -- I think it was one of the ones Natalie bought yesterday at the Bookshop on Franklin St. (shameless plug for an institution that really has shaped my life in so many ways) thinking that Graham would like it.  So Graham starts telling me about a little place in the book that he finds really funny -- and I have no earthly idea what he's talking about -- but he finds it so intensely funny that he goes into spasmodic screw-up-his-face belly laughs, particularly as I nod and giggle and laugh along with him.

Awesome.

Speaking myself

I remember when I saw my first Atom Egoyan movie, The Adjuster, back in 1991, that one of the most striking things about it was the way his characters presented themselves to others.  The lead character, an insurance adjuster, has to deal with people in post-crisis situations, and he introduces different himself to clients using more or less exactly the same words and intonations.  And most of Egoyan's other characters do the same, looking backwards at his earlier movies.  He's made a lot more films now, can't keep track of it any more. But the main thing that we glean from is that the characters are performing themselves, of professional and personal necessity (you can't make up a new self several times a day), out of habit, and in an attempt to control others' perception of them.

And one of the things about being out in the world as a consultant, a social person, a person sometimes looking for next career moves, is that I have to tell my story a lot. And I know that I do it all too often in the same way as Egoyan's characters do.  I hear myself describing the arc of my life (being a geek, PhD in humanities, jump to consulting, raising a family, getting interested in finance) as an out of body experience, almost. When I'm getting more personal I add in a layer about parents getting divorced, substance abuse, recovery, marriage, kids, Mary's family, a special needs kid, etc., and that is less rehearsed and more organic, but still a little bit.  Certainly I try not to drone on too much and engage with whomever I'm talking to, almost to escape this rote self-enunciation. And certainly I'm grateful when someone asks questions that push me out of the zone of myself.

In any, case, it would be nice to move beyond this stage, to the point I discover new facets in myself.  The problem is, one of the only feasible ways of getting there is by talking to others and hearing their stories (rote though they may be), and you rarely get much of that by being quiet about yourself. Share and share alike.

Prius skeptic

Don't get me wrong, I like the car.  It is comfortable for the family, carried us smoothly to and from the Northeast, and it gives us the feelings of piety and virtue that WASPs so crave. And the sound system sounds nice.

But there are some messed up things, nonetheless. For example, the control which is supposed to let you move the side mirrors around is poorly designed and was all too easily mashed in by my over-zealous and lovely wife. And the passenger side seatbelt is messed up.

Mostly, I am suspicious of its claimed mileage.  It says it's getting 46, but when I fill up the car with, say, 9 gallons of gas, it has suspiciously travelled only 370 miles or so since last getting filled up, which is more like 41.  Which is great, mind you, but my dashboard shouldn't be freaking lying to me.  I will be watching this thing, and will report back to you.

Taking down the Xmas tree

After we took off all the ornaments and lights, I had to bale all the water out of the stand so I can get it out of the house.  Our cat Leon sat under the dining room table and stared at me the whole time, no doubt cursing me under his kittie breath, cursing me and the unbearable cruelty of my taking away his source of sweet pine water and the wondrous bower to hide behind. Till next year.

Good hair and Ms. POTUS

I was thinking about Chris Rock's movie Good Hair the other day. I probably blogged about it.  If you haven't seen it, you should. Basically it's about the insane amount of money black women spend straightening their hair, and the amount of self-hate that implies, and how Chris researches it upon the birth of his daughter.

And so, I ask, what's up with Michelle Obama's hair. It's mighty straight. Now that Obama is in his second term, I think it would be great to see her shave her head and go Cleopatra Jones style, let it grow out as it would, all natural like. That would be a strong message to send to America's women of color. The only good reason I could see that she wouldn't would be if they got a lot of campaign money from the hair industrial complex.

Xmas tree water

Leon has decided that, beyond any reasonable doubt, the water in the Christmas tree stand is much better than the water in the kitty dish. Rascal, for the most part, really seems to prefer drinking from the toilet.

We have come a long ways from last year, when Leon ran away for a few weeks, and then was for a week or so supplanted by the duct-diving impostor kitty we dubbed Noel.  It took some months for Leon and Rascal to reacclimate to one another.  They kept their distance for some weeks, snarling and posturing and scrapping. But for many months now they have been back together, sleeping on each other, Leon sticking his butt in Rascal's face in the gentlest and most loving way, and licking each others face. Very nice.

Lunch in Durham

Durham is quietly booming, and you can tell it around lunch. Yesterday I went to the taqueria in the cheap Asian grocery store off of Lakewood (yes, I did just say that). First off, it was good. But I got there at 12:20, which was not a good idea. There was no place for a gringo to sit, and my order fell in line behind the orders of all the other trabajadores who were getting a little almuerzo. Next time, I'll be having some of what they were having. So that took a while.

Today, I walked the 10 minutes from my office at the Golden Belt to the Subway in the basement of the old court house (yes, I did just say that).  I got there at 1:10, and there was a line of 10 or 12 folx in front of me.

The problem is not that there aren't places to eat in downtown Durham, there are:  Toast, the chicken and waffles place, Grey Brook's new Pizzeria Toro, Scratch Bakery, 9th Street Bakery, Little Havana, etc. The problem it is, it's all so upscale. Plenty of places to get your $9 sandwich, few places you can get in and out of for five or six smackers, which is what I'm talking about. Durham needs a slice joint. It needs a place with the $5.99 all you can eat buffet with saag paneer and chicken vindaloo where everybody can go when it's blue shirt day. Nothing fucking artisanal or coy, just grub.

Competing with Graham

After a little bed wrestling the other night, Graham speculated a bit on how it was that he was able to pin me to the pillow with such regularity, when his cousin Sadie, all eight years and maybe 50 pounds of her, was able to compete with him more effectively in wrestling. "I bet I know why it is," he said. "It's because she's quicker than you, people get slower as they age." Well, I didn't really know what to say to that, he really had me there.

Somehow, Graham has been able to maintain a remarkable competitive advantage over me through the years.  He beats me regularly at running, wrestling, by God, even at soccer. Tonight he defeated me 25-22 at our patio version of soccer, even though I did land a few real "zingers," as he said.

I must keep trying.

In brief

I am vaguely oppressed by my own long silence.  In short, let me just say that I have to, gasp, go to work tomorrow.  In Durham.  First day of the rest of my life and all that.

We are just back from a blissfully uneventful holiday trip to the northeast. The worst of it was Graham puking in the car on the way up there.  Poor guy. It seems he is not meant to play with an iPod while traveling. That was a long trip north, over the mountains of Virginia to 81 and through Harrisburg, Scranton, and all that. And then, to add insult to injury, we had to divert to the Tappan Zee (now christened the Chimpanzee) because of traffic on the GWB..

Yesterday, by way of contrast, was a blissful sail south through Baltimore, DC (where all the cars must have been parked downtown debating the cliff legislation), all while listening to CDs of E.H. Gombrich's magisterial Short History of the World. We learned a lot, though perhaps a tad too much about Roman generals and German tribes and people like Theodoric and Alaric, but what are you gonna do?

Shlock doctrine

In the Wall Street Journal this morning a story noted that the futures were off as everybody was apprehensive after Boehner said the Republicans had balked at his "Plan B". I quote:  "A selloff in the US Friday would revive memories of September 2008 when the chamber voted down the Bush administration's first Wall Street bailout plan, sparking a 778-point fall in the Dow Jones Industrial Average."  Ummm. The Dow ended up the day down 121 points, not even a percent down.

Similarly, a new conservative member of the Board of Commissioners or whatever in my mom's hometown voted not to approve funding for the next phase of a Senior/Recreation Center, stating that it would be irresponsible to move forward, given that "we're in a depression."

Well, I'm sorry, but this is all bullshit. We are alternately beset by memories of the financial crisis and their shadows, but we are not still there. It's all reminiscent of Naomi Klein's shock doctrine.  The deep-pocketed (of whom there are many) are trying to freak out the less so by preying on their fears, the better to scoop up their assets. Unemployment is not crazy high, the markets aren't insanely overvalued, and the fiscal cliff is not the abyss that was autumn 2008.  Shit, the Fed just put forward QE4, promising to pump another $45 billion of liquidity into credit markets monthly, on top of the $40 billion it pledged just a few months ago.  This most recent tranche, at $540 billion annually, is just about equal to the total projected impact of the Fiscal Cliff if we go over it.

Shit is a little bit crazy out there, but it ain't all that..

More books by and about men

Just worked through Eric Ambler's Cause for Alarm.  Of the great triumvirate of old spy writers:  Le Carre, Ambler, Graham Greene, I must say I'm most convinced by Le Carre.  Greene is too self-serious, Ambler is a little too larky and lah-di-dah at times. That said, he was really just developing the lexicon of espionage himself, so it's hard to fault him too much. Things he does seem ham-handed sometimes because we've seen this stuff honed so finely as the genre took flight.

Now I'm on to Robert Caro's The Power Broker, about Robert Moses. I'd always been intrigued by the book, but all the hullabaloo around his most recent volume on LBJ made me go out and buy it. It is truly a tombstone of a book, Tolstoyan.

I'm all too aware of the fact that I've been reading exclusively male books, need to remedy that. I'm sure I won't plow directly through the Caro, will have to intersperse it with some novels.

Graham's new joke

Q:  What do  you get when you cross a German dessert with an annoying person?
A:  A pfeffernuisance.

China needs an Olga Korbut

China has all of this money, and is tired of just lending it, it wants to buy things -- land and companies -- and participate in commerce. Problem is, the west is afraid of China, doesn't get it. There are very few friendly Chinese faces to the west, real ambassadors. Gong Li was close, but she's just a mask, albeit a comely one. Jack Ma of Alibaba and Taobao may be as close as the country has come, but he's a total geek.

China needs somebody like Olga Korbut. Come to think of it, Yao Ming was also not bad, but at 7'6", he's kind of an outlier. Oddly enough, Jeremy Lin,* who's honestly as American a story as you could get (think if Dave Chappelle ran a "National Draft" instead of a "Racial Draft".  How much would China and the USA bid for Jeremy Lin?  It would be huge.



*currently putting up decent numbers in Houston

Ultimate! Natalie scores!

It was cold and rainy yesterday, but the Philips ultimate team nonetheless trucked over to play its former arch nemesis Culbreth. When I got there a little before halftime (I have to remember they keep starting early to use sunlight), Natalie told me she had caught the frisbee once (her first in a game), and proudly showed me the mud on the knees of the black sweatpants I had been so happy to find in her size last week at the Target out by Southpoint.  And we were up 6-0, after getting spanked 15-0 by Smith the day before (a couple of strategic personnel moves by the coach didn't hurt).

The second half was even better.  Natalie caught two, one of which was for a point, and she threw a completed pass to a teammate (also a first).  It was a little wobbly, but who cares. The Phillips B team won, and the A team lost only 9-8 after a bad day the day before at Smith.  And Natalie was glowing.

The Dreamscape

Mary says she doesn't understand watching sports. I understand that it can be overdone. And yet, you've gotta watch some. Part of it is just watching what I term The Struggle being acted out before me, and beyond that, there's something idealized about The Struggle being conducted within a pretty strict format of rules and honor/sportsmanship. Sports are the way life's supposed to be.  You step onto the field and everybody understands the rules. There are heroic/tragic moments like Luis Suarez of Uruguay putting up his hands to stop Ghana's desperation ending seconds' goal in the World Cup 2010 finals (in Africa!). At the time, I thought it was the most low-down and despicable thing he could do, but upon reflection, it was the absolute right thing to do, the only thing he could do, and he processed it in microseconds and realized what he needed to do.* Maybe the most dramatic moment in sports ever. And then Gyan (a super nice guy, who had killed the US in the previous game) blows the penalty. Before stepping up to hit the first penalty in the PK shoot out that happens.

Mostly, I view watching sports, and for me soccer, as an eternal dreamscape.  It is about imagining what you can do if everything goes right. As in below.

*I later heard that Suarez was bawling in the locker room after he did this, blown away by the emotion of it all.

Native Speaker

I had better go ahead and write about Chang Rae Lee's Native Speaker before the book fades from memory. It is a very very good book, richly layered and folded back onto itself, yet direct and human as well. The one and the many, this one, that many. I can't very well pass judgment on its evocation of the immigrant experience, but it rings true, memories of father and son lost, seemingly nearly regained, then exploding and fading, all at once. Well worth reading.