READIN

Saturday, June 14th, 2003

🦋 Planning: A Digression

This is part III of a multipart entry concerning my progress — my status — part II is here.

If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.

Jesus Christ per the gospel of Saint Thomas the disciple

In the cold light of day I have changed my mind a bit — I don't see a need to go about explicating fully my reasons for going to cooking school — take it as read that I did (and how else are you going to take it?), and let me talk about how it ties in to my planning problem.

For as long as I can remember having any opinion on the matter I have disdained planning. (To cut myself off at the pass — no, I don't think this has anything to do with the fact that my father is a city planner by profession — that is a language curiosity, nothing more. Keep moving, nothing to see here.) I went so far, as I became aware of this line of thinking, at one point as to voice it explicitly as my creed — that it is better, more attractive, to fall into one's situation as it arrives; life [so I proclaimed] is a series of incidents and coincidents, and to try consciously to mold this sequence is ... undesirable. Since the time of this assertion I have engaged in a long and complex dance with this line of thinking — have worn it as a badge of creativity and depth; have internalized and forgotten it; have remembered and resurrected it; have disavowed and repented it — I find it extremely seductive, far moreso than I ever did solipsism (of which more some other time, and not as part of this series) — and equally pernicious.

Why is this? The idea is little more than a thin rationale for lazyness and inaction. I have attempted at times to make it sound like something akin to Buddhism (of which I know very little) or Existentialism (brash arrogance on my part -- the idea is about as far as it's possible to get from the thinking of Sartre, of which I know just a bit more than I know about Buddhism, or of Nietzsche).

But what I want to examine is the results of my thinking this way. I would not say by any means that they have all been bad. I "fell into" my relationship with Ellen, which has had highly desirable consequences. I fell into computer programming, which I enjoy; the caveat is that with effort I think I could have made a better path into programming than the one I took. One thing that I really want to get out of this self-examination is a better path forward in my career. (But getting ahead of myself; more later.) I even "fell into" woodworking, which I love, which I think of on the same level as fatherhood, as one of the best things in my life.

The drawback to thinking this way has been all of the roads not taken, the avenues rejected as requiring of me too acute a degree of direction. I am not going to make a list of these right now — I don't know that I would be able to — but my sense is that there are many such. And I believe at root that I would be a happier person, more fully realized, if I had chosen a path of striving. I write as if that choice were closed off to me but recognize that it is not — as I said above I want to make it and am trying to figure out how.

A final note about the nature of the somnambulistic credo under discussion: I used the terms "attractive" and "undesirable" above, advisedly. My proclamation is not an ethic. I think it is probably an æsthetic, and a sensualist one. A sort of hedonism. — To the extent that it is anything more than an excuse for sloth.

As to the subject at hand, cooking school represented a "path of least resistance" in the sense that I was deferring having to make a decision. I was not really deciding I wanted a career as a chef; trust me on this. Now, back to our regular programming. As I relate the path that brought me here, keep in mind the manner in which I was approaching this path.

posted evening of June 14th, 2003: Respond
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Friday, June 13th, 2003

🦋 How did I Get Here?

Part II of a project to assess my current situation in life. Part I is here.

And you may tell yourself,
This is not my beautiful house!
And you may tell yourself,
This is not my beautiful wife!

David Byrne, "Once in a Lifetime"

I'm going to try to figure out how the past moments of my life have led up to this one. This may take a few tries.

Let's take college as a point of origin. Which college? Well let's take Columbia — though I was only there two years and have no degree, I still tend to think of myself as a Columbia student when my mind turns to thoughts of education. I think from my first day at Columbia, a clear chain of causalities can be woven which lead inexorably to the present moment. If not causalities, at least coincidence.

At Columbia, I was studying German Language and Literature. I did not have any clear plan for what I would do after graduating with such a degree except that it involved somehow being in the academe. — "I did not have any clear plan" is understatement in the sense that I was actually vehemently, elementally opposed to the notion of developing a plan. This willful lack of preparation haunts me — I cannot understand it. But its end result is quite straightforward; when I realized that my trust fund money (the upshot of an insurance settlement after I was severely injured in a traffic accident in 1982) was not going to pay for more than two years of Columbia, and that my parents were not going to come forward with the difference (that should be phrased "were not able to" — that is not how I understood the world at 18 though), I was faced with a choice between going deeply into debt to finance a degree which I had essentially no use for, and leaving. It was no choice.

While I was at Columbia I had met Ellen. We decided we would move in together, and that I would use the few thousand dollars left of auto accident money to pay for a culinary education, to prepare for my life's career of being a chef. Wait... what? This is an item that just strikes me as really weird in retrospect, it seems so arbitrary and abrupt. Hmm. I can't glide effortlessly into a comfortable life as a linguist and intellectual. [Looks around, scratching head] ...I've got it! Culinary school! I can pay for that out of pocket, and when I'm done I will be ready to earn my living, and best of all I will be interesting! — This is a drastic oversimplification, even a caricature — at the time I had a decent rationale explaining why I was doing what I was doing, almost believable, at least to me.

So I see my conceit of a clear chain of causalities (or even of coincidence) is unraveling right at the outset; the first two links are miles apart and seem to have no intention of joining up. I think I can come to understand this decision but I will need to go back to an earlier time to do so — and this seems like a critical task to me. I want to make it clear how closely the decision to go to culinary school is related to the refusal to make a plan at college. This is something that has held me back all my life, and I think is holding me back now. I will talk about this in my next post.

posted evening of June 13th, 2003: Respond
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Thursday, June 12th, 2003

🦋 Where am I?

Scott Martens wrote a fine post last night laying bare the inputs and parameters of his life; and inspired me to do likewise. I've had a vague, gnawing feeling of dissatisfaction [all my life and particularly] these past few months and I think I'd like to make a stab at figuring out where it's coming from.

Three questions are principally interesting to me here, viz.: "Where am I?"; "How did I get Here?"; "What do I Think About It?" I know the answers to all of these im ganzen und großen, particularly the first two but the third also; however I have not yet formulated these answers word by word. I think that doing so will give me insight that is not available while the answers are bouncing around my head. I believe the most natural order to answer them in is the order in which I've asked them here, and will do so in this post and two more. Note however, the questions all deal with similar subject matter so there will likely be some overlap between what I am saying in these three entries; I am not going to interfere unduly with the natural order of my thoughts to satisfy strictures of the rubric I have asserted. Happy reading! And drop me a line to let me know what you think about it. So,

My Circumstances

I live in South Orange, New Jersey (USA, North America, Earth, Solar System, Galaxy, Universe, Mind of God), in a lovely old Victorian house, with my wife Ellen and daughter Sylvia. I am thirty-three; Ellen is older than me and Sylvia is younger. Our dog Lola is an 8-year-old Shih-tzu who has been with us through four residences. Sylvia, 2 1/2, has been with us for only two. (This house is however the third place she has lived; the first year of her life was spent at the Shanghai Children's Welfare Institute.)

I commute to Manhattan, where I work for Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC), writing code to support a statistical arbitrage trading strategy. My "daily grind" consists of: Catch NJTransit train at 6:35. The station is just across the street from my house, about 2 minutes from walking out the door to being on the platform. Sometimes I will take the 6:50 train instead. Ride to Hoboken. Catch the PATH train at 7:05 or, mutatis mutandis, 7:20, and ride to 33rd Street. My office is at 43rd and Lexington; if the weather is nice I will walk, otherwise take my third and fourth trains of the day, the "F" and the #7. I like to buy a cup of coffee from Oren's Daily Roast in Grand Central Station (brewed coffee that is — I have never been very partial to pressed). Depending on a number of variables I arrive at the office sometime between 7:40 and 8:10. Work lasts until around 4:45 — sometimes later but rarely later than 5. Occasionally I leave at 4:30. Reverse the commute and I am generally back home at 6:00, where I have dinner, spend some time with Sylvia, and put her to bed.

So that is how I spend the great majority of my waking time. Things I like to do with the remainder are, work on my house and yard, build furniture, and play rural blues guitar. The work on house and yard is in some sense an outgrowth of my interest in woodworking — I mean to say, woodworking has gotten me interested in using tools and fixing things, which extends nicely to the duties of home ownership ("duties" read expansively, I guess). I am since January the secretary of the Central Jersey Woodworkers' Association, the first club in which I have participated actively since college. (I realize as I write that that I was active in the Long Island Woodworkers' Club when we lived in Queens; but not to anything like the same degree. And before that, nothing since back to college.)

I have some friends in town; through Sylvia, I know the parents of many of her coevals, and get along with just about all of them. Just tonight, I had a nice conversation with her friend Natalie's father Norman, whom I had not met before. And through my neighbor Jim, I know several disreputable types, old hippies, from the area. Some of us (Jim, Bob, Janis, Doug and I) get together on Saturdays to play non-purist blues, the genre my former guitar teacher described as "folk and dead". — All of us play guitar except for Doug, who plays bass; Janis often plays banjo or bass; Jim occasionally plays violin or bass and I occasionally play concertina or violin.

And what else? I like food, pretty enthusiastic about it, tending especially towards barbecue these days, and good beer... That pretty much describes it. I would like to say something about my workout regimen; but alas, anything I said in that regard would be a lie.

posted evening of June 12th, 2003: 4 responses
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Here it is: a table of html escape codes!

Update: here is an even better table.

posted afternoon of June 12th, 2003: Respond

🦋 School tomorrow

Sylvia's last day of school is today, which is generating some grief for her -- we have not been able adequately to convince her that she will be going back there in a few weeks for summer camp. Today she and Ellen came upstairs to wake me up (I'm sleeping upstairs while Ellen has a cold), and we chatted about the day to come.

I said, "Will you be going to school today?" and she thought it over for a minute before answering with a question: "Tomorrow?" "No, tomorrow's Friday, you don't go to school on Friday." This provoked an extended outburst, she was crying and repeating "Tomorrow, school tomorrow"... Ellen and I talked to her about how she would have a short vacation and then go back, but I'm not sure how much of it sank in.

I like how she is using "tomorrow" now. It is the first sign I have really seen (or at least, understood) of her thinking about the future. Ellen bought some supplies for her birthday party (not for a few more months, but there was a big sale on Clifford paraphenalia) and now she points to the Clifford piñata and says we will play with it tomorrow.

posted morning of June 12th, 2003: Respond
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More Chandler on the train this morning -- his prose is so comfortable, reading it feels like swimming in a warm pool. The funny Hollywood idiom sounds totally natural in Marlowe's narration. (And I have no idea whether anyone ever actually talked that way!)

posted morning of June 12th, 2003: Respond
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Wednesday, June 11th, 2003

I'm reading Raymond Chandler's The Little Sister now and loving it -- I had forgotten how much fun his prose is.

posted afternoon of June 11th, 2003: Respond
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Tuesday, June 10th, 2003

🦋 Waiting

I am troubled by the sense that I am waiting for something to happen.

posted evening of June 10th, 2003: Respond

🦋 Striving

I originally posted this as a comment to a good post of Dr. Quiggin's regarding the ethical value of striving to acquire goods. It is something I'm meaning to flesh out more fully in the future.

This is sort of related to the Protestant Work Ethic (PWE hereafter). Mark Kleiman has a very good post up criticizing an article in the NY Times magazine last week, which pointed to the decline of the PWE as the reason for Europe's impending collapse.

The article seemed like bollocks to me but I am not an economist so what do I know. The only justification I can see for the consumerist "getting and spending" impulse which is under discussion in this thread is, it elevates demand for goods and services, so makes the economy grow faster than it otherwise would, or at all. I don't know if capitalism would work sans acquisitivity over and above people's basic needs -- well looking that sentence over I guess I can say I'm pretty sure it would not; but the lack of acquisitivity could be on a sort of sliding scale; what I mean to say is I don't have any clear idea how far down that scale you can go before capitalism either stops working or becomes something radically different.

Anyways: it sounds like Dr. Quiggin's problem with the "getting and spending" is that it encourages the wrong sort of economic expansion. (Correct me if I'm putting words in your mouth, sir, this is what I took away from your post but that could be transference since it was already about what I thought.) I believe this impulse -- in its present manifestation -- is wrapped up historically with the development of the PWE.

Update: Tom Runnacles offers further insight. And, Update: I think this article and question may have played a big part in generating the thoughts I am having now about effort vs. ease.

posted evening of June 10th, 2003: Respond

Sunday, June 8th, 2003

🦋 Who protects children and dumb carpenters

I want to tell a story about the work I did today on the shoe rack I had previously built -- and think I should make clear beforehand what I have in mind, so that I don't bog down in details. My basic points here are, that I succeeded in the task I took on largely through dumb luck; and that I ought, when I noticed that my initial design would not be an adequate solution, more thoroughly to have investigated the alternatives available.

The problem was, I wanted to bolt my shoe rack to the wall, since it is tippy and hard to avoid jostling against. However there is an obstacle at floor level which prevents the rack from backing up hard against the wall. Initially I thought this obstacle was the saddle in the door to the left of the rack, and my plan was to cut a square out of the back of the left leg so that it would go around the saddle. But when I took the rack away from the wall, I noticed that there was also a baseboard, which started about where the saddle left off, on the right side of the rack. My immediate thought was, I'll just cut a similar square out of the back of the right leg; I took the rack downstairs and got ready to do it.

But I noticed when I was laying out the cuts, the baseboard is too high; it will butt up against the bottom rail of the rack and keep it from going flush with the wall. More quick thinking; I decided to cut a mortise out of the back of the rail, to fit the baseboard. This is where I think I goofed; if I had been thinking more clearly, I would have just taken the baseboard off the wall. As it was, I made the mortise -- it took only about an hour -- and it is testament to the solidity of my joinery that the rack was able to take all that force without racking or breaking. But it is not an ideal solution -- the rack is now permanently wed to its current location, among other hassles.

posted evening of June 8th, 2003: Respond
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