Dear J-

You can admonish me any way you like later but here you go: Cal 34, Stanford 28; it’s always a big deal when our alma maters play. And this despite the Cardinal running it up against two teams that pounded Cal earlier this year, Oregon and USC. Yes, Stanford had a chance to pull it out in the end and next year, who knows? But for me, I’m curious why I should feel a sense of accomplishment when a team wins or a gnawing sense of disappointment when they lose: it’s not as though I’m personally responsible for them — they are unlikely to hear me yelling at them through the television, and it’s not as though I ever suited up to do battle on the gridiron. All I know is this: after the giant swoon of 2007, all is forgiven (for now), let’s not dwell on the three losses, let’s trumpet the win over a nationally-ranked Stanford team and sing praises for the role of spoiler. By the way, it looks like Oregon’s going bowling for Roses; here’s hoping that the Buckeyes find out how tough the Pac is.

It’s the second day of my weekend, which found me out of sorts early — impatient, crabby, tired (figgy pulled the same early-morning trick on us again — either we need to keep her up later or find some way to graft the sleep habits of a teenager onto her); we revived a bit with breakfast (figgy with her first, voracious taste of egg) and crashed a bit back at the Zoo over little things. It’s always the little things that dismay me: one week she spilled some water, which for some reason brought me to unthinking rage (it’s not as though there aren’t drinking fountains and drink vendors all over the place, so a little spilled water is no big deal in the grand scheme of things); this week, it was her runny nose, perhaps from the flu shots she got yesterday, causing her to completely deplete my stash of napkins. Again, I’m not paying for them, they’re ubiquitous and yet seeing the last one go because she doesn’t like to reuse brought me to some impatient snappiness.

Point is that there’s so much in my life that’s out of my control nowadays; I used to hate my parents hosting parties partly because it meant that I’d be in charge of the other kids, but more, I suspect, because that meant they’d be touching my stuff. MY stuff. It’s not that I never learned to share; I never learned the joy in it, and I find myself going slightly crazy now that there’s a life and a will I can’t control. Guide, yes; control, no — and it’s going to mean that the things I do aren’t necessarily going to have any effect, but somewhere between the futility of cheering at the television and creating a clone is the right mix to raise a child (crazy daughter that she is); it is perhaps the most fascinating experience (experiment?) I know.

Mike

Dear J-

“She calmed down, like, five minutes after you left.”  It was the most reassuring thing I’d heard all day, this weird long day.  The story starts yesterday; as we’re sitting there watching television (a prerecorded episode of Glee, pleasing as always) figgy came trotting up hesitantly — hand to mouth, as though to shush her way past the ever-vigilant cats guarding the long hallway from bedroom to television.  Though she’s been able to escape the bed for at least a month, she had, until then, reserved that ability solely for early morning snuggles.  theVet turned around, hearing me greet her, and we shared a quick double-take as we realized that there was a third person in our midst — after 7:30 it always seems like we’re back to two.

She followed up that late-night preview with an early show this morning, crawling into bed somewhere in the dark between the “do you know what time this is” hour and the “go back to sleep already” hour.  After putting up with various thrashings and gnashings, I got up to let theVet sleep, knowing that she had to work and I’d have a chance to nap later; we shared some cereal in that dark center of the day before light.  Then on to the main attraction — doctor’s appointments, one for me (hepatitis vaccinations) and one for her (allergist and then flu shots; she is as allergic to peanuts as ever) and then the trauma of dropping off at day care.

I remember when my sister-in-law was dropping off my nephew at day care; I’d never seen the little guy get quite so weepy and sad and I silently, foolishly resolved to not be that person.  Forty minutes later, as I held her for what felt like the umpteenth time I called theVet out of desperation:  what do I do, she’s gotten to the spasmy-diaphragm breathing that comes after a long solid crying jag — and the answer — to just leave her — seemed so heartless, especially when it wasn’t to go off to do something productive.  I spent the next few hours wandering around various thrift shops feeling hollow inside — the man who just wanted an afternoon to himself, and who would abandon his child to an uncertain fate; was that truly who I’d become?  I’ve learned to never say never, but am I learning fast enough?

Mike

Dear J-

I suppose it’s the nature of work relationships to be transitive, especially in a place where the site population is so large:  there are those folks that I recognize by sight, but not name, even in my own building, and then there’s the voices on the phone (occasionally competing with the voices in my head) where I know the name but not the face.  Still, besides the folks in the office it’s the remainder of the vanpooligans that I know best, and watching them go is like having to switch schools between grades:  the setting is familiar, but the people are not.

Although the internet makes for easy connections with folks from your past (from the scary-good networks that Facebook pulls up to the overload of minor knowledge and trivial connections of Google) I’m not convinced that it’s more than a superficial link unless you work at it, like any relationship.  “Ya hey,” you say, “we’ve got pictures, we’ve got videos, what more do we need?”  We live in an era of drive-by information:  staccato pulses of words substituting for thoughts, conversations reduced to chats and texts.  It’s all very easy; now how do we make it meaningful?

Whenever you hear about authors’ estates bequeathing their papers to libraries and collections I always scan the article to see if those papers include a collection of letters and correspondence.  Inspirations and plotlines don’t just appear from a vacuum, and writers have lives of their own that informs and shapes their output.  And not so many years ago the correspondence in their lives was inherently archival and unique:  short of carbon copies, letters written in longhand are tangible and impossible to precisely duplicate.  Yet the electronic equivalents have the advantage of swifter delivery and reproducibility, which lessens the thought process required, at least for me.  I’m not saying that all electronic forms of correspondence are inherently bad; I’m just saying that the easier the media, the more thought should flow into it:  after all, if you can type fasterthan you can write and don’t have to spend time looking up physical addresses, then that’s more you can invest into a thoughtful letter.

Mike

Dear J-

Perhaps the sun seems brighter here in Southern California because of the lack of shade trees — sure, you see the palm trees all over the place, but they provide precious little shelter and are prone to  dropping large, tough fronds at the slightest provocation.  Whereas you look out at the side of the roads here to see the occasional tree, for the most part there is no significant native growth here aside from low scrub — no forested canopy stretching away into the distance.

Whenever we would visit Canada we would remark on how it seemed just like home — only greener and politer; part of that was hopping the border over to Vancouver, on the rainy coast, but everywhere we would go west of the Cascades seemed to have thick stands of forests lining the roads — it’s the difference here between, say, Crescent City amidst the sea of redwoods, and Redding, a dusty station along Interstate 5.  No trees means little shade here, and it also means no shuffling your feet through leaves (no whispering crunch) as you walk along the sidewalks.

There are compensations; raking is an occasional chore, rather than a once-weekly morning lost.  I find that the older I get real luxury comes from being able to spend time the way I want, rather than as I need — there are days I’m convinced that the endless ennui I had those summers before college was the real reason folks like to say that youth is wasted on the young.  With no trees in the way of the sun, though, summer here seems to stretch into an eight-month season, and we’re all the richer for it.

Mike

Dear J-

Chalk it up to another one of those random stories you hear about — supposedly, the executives at GM flew out every quarter or so to try out the new vehicles being rolled out; the test drives would take place in GM’s Arizona proving grounds (and if you’ve ever had to live through a muggy Detroit summer, the dry desert heat must have been a treat).  Instead of pulling typical vehicles off the line, though, they’d be in specially-prepped vehicles, hand-massaged to sweat the details:  panel gaps, fit and finish,  squeaks and noises all carefully tweaked to perfection.  GM can make world-class vehicles; they just can’t do it for anyone but the top brass.

Besides blinding the executives to typical quality control issues, I wonder if they ever figured out what was happening; is what we present to our bosses an honest face, or have we all been guilty of sweeping issues under the carpet when company comes calling?  For all I talk about management transparency and letting information percolate down the ranks without impedance, it’s a closed feedback loop:  if the front-line reports are all uniformly good, of course the generals will believe victory is imminent.  GM executives were dumbfounded that their product was unappealing (for the most part, any mid-size not named Camry or Accord doesn’t have sufficient name recognition to be successful) after having driven some of the cars and seeing the published reports of Nüburgring trials where GM products were world-beaters because of their insulation.

There’s a difference between telling the truth to be honest and to be brutal, though; the former is meant constructively, and the latter, as a kind of torture:  let’s watch them squirm.  How would you have changed GM’s executive test drives, for instance?  If you read car magazines regularly, one of the features is always spy shots (many times by the estimable Brenda Priddy or her associates) featuring shakedown drives, where extreme conditions are used (heat, cold, altitude) to iron out any kinks over multi kilo-mile drives; I say have the executives spend a day riding along — mutely, and without jeopardy to the test drivers/data loggers’ jobs.  One culture supports the other; proverbially walking (or driving) a mile in their shoes, so to speak, brings us into closer understanding of daily pressures, and knowing more people has never been a detriment, in my experience.

Mike

Dear J-

I was thinking about the expression “dropping a dime” on someone in the context of informing on them, wondering about etymology and how a light dime could have caused much damage (there is the classic urban myth of the penny, in falling from the top of the Empire State Building, turning into a deadly projectile), or the alternative meaning of dime being a tenth or ten of something (hints, tips perhaps) when I figured out that it probably meant putting a dime in a payphone and making an untraceable tip.  “Dropping a dime” is redolent with meaning;  a public payphone, well-trafficked and difficult to pin down one user — a whispered secret, maybe through a handkerchief, and then back out into the crowds.

Nowadays the closest we have — after all, wouldn’t it be more suspicious and memorable if someone did use a payphone? — in this age of cell phone ubiquity is the prepaid phone, but I don’t see hard-boiled detective fiction using the term “mobile virtual network operator” any time soon.  More efficient, sure; more poetic, no.  Much has been made of Twitter, Facebook, and other various social media — by the way, the sell-by on Twitter-is-the-death-of-reasoned-discourse jokes expired, oh, six months ago — but it’s just another way life keeps evoloving.   I’m still old enough to prefer my albums as physical discs rather than downloads, although it’s hard to resist the appeal of instant gratification; in the end efficiency wins out, doesn’t it?

It’s important to know the new (you knew the now), but it makes the past seem so old-fashioned, doesn’t it?  If I had to explain “dropping a dime” to figgy, I’d have to start with explaining what a payphone was, and then, possibly, what coins and cash were (there are whole weeks that I hardly ever see any bills lying in my wallet), and then why someone would want to call instead of send e-mail.  My teachers always told me that the world we grew up in was so different:  ours was amongst the first few classes that grew up with a computer in the home — but those were days when 1200 baud was a luxury, and getting online meant Compuserve or a BBS, not the Internet.  Today’s world has changed with the always-connected computer, no house an island, nobody alone.

Mike

Dear J-

It took me roughly an hour to change the inner tube on my bike this evening, between prying the bead off the rim (I’m thinking that something like this is an amazingly good idea) — I resorted to using a screwdriver instead of the tire levers I keep buying and snapping in half — and feeling around for various sharp pointy objects that may have found their way past the tire liner and goo-filled tube I installed last time. I was half afraid of what I might have found, as the goo has been remarkably effective — if it seals punctures, what happens to all the extra stuff that leaks out?

We spent a brief spell at the Zoo this morning, as theVet had to head off to run a vaccine clinic this afternoon; there were a few new animals, but nothing too remarkable besides counting on riding the tram back from the far side of the Zoo (it was down for annual maintenance, and the tight schedule meant bearing figgy up and down hill at rapid speeds as she wailed the injustice of a short trip). Time drives us all in different ways; is it an investment, or is it something we can’t help watching tick by helplessly? Where do we choose to spend it?

Mike

Dear J-

Today we tried something a little different; instead of the pass-controlled parks, I thought we should see what delights the neighborhood holds for us. The last couple of times we went on long walks, I had some way to tote the tot — whether a stroller or backpack, the longer we journey, the sleepier she gets. Indeed, she had a nap on my shoulder as we walked along; perhaps its the last remnants of the flu as it passes through our family (we headlined as the Coughing Trio all this week) keeping her more tired than usual. I’m used to seeing her with inexhaustible energy, after all.

We headed down to Tecolote Canyon after a few false starts (I was surprised we made it there, much less all the way out and back, given how big she’s grown without a corresponding growth in my muscles, still stuck with the scrawny frame of high school) and in contrast to the throngs we always run across in the Zoo and Sea World, I saw maybe five people those three hours we spent in the lungs of Clairemont. They are a taciturn bunch, the canyoneers; I spent the day saying more words to myself than anyone else — we smiled, nodded, and said hi, but we got no return greetings until after noon.

It’s an escape from the urban spaces we deal with every day, I suppose; we’ve got no problems that don’t dissolve under the sunlight as filtered through trees, dust swirling around your feet. My arms, laden with sleeping figgy, leaden with fatigue; my mind keeps flashing back to the contrast as the path threaded between clearing and copse, hot and cold, dark and light. We’ve been bouncing between health and sickness; I appreciate the peaks more after trudging through the valleys.

Mike

Dear J-

The love-hate relationship I have with my bike centers around its reliability; while I have no significant complaints about the frame (it has borne my carcass around for over two years without significant complant), the drivetrain and componentry scream that it was built down to a price, and that’s where the compromise was forged.  I remember going in to the bike shop to explain what kind of chain I needed (“Yes, it’s a nine-speed Sunrace.  Stop laughing.”) and that exact moment of realization that I’d either need to start taking better care of it, or face the all-too-frequent breakdowns I am now.  Today I had a flat on the way in — halfway along, and too late to turn back to get the car.

What I really need is something with solid tires and a sealed drivetrain; I could live without the suspension on the back, which has ended up causing nothing but compromise after compromise (difficult to fit a fender or a rack, and it seems to cause the chain to derail every time I go over a bump).  I could get better tires, but the dream of going to hub gearing would mean that I’d need to upgrade the crank as well (it is depressingly cheap, like the rest of the components).  I am unstintingly cheap about these things, though the difference would be having a bike I didn’t have to worry about versus the occasional pain of having downtime to fix the beast.

I suppose like everything else it comes down to how much you value your time:  is it worth doing, and is it something you enjoy doing?  I think even if I had a workshop and tools, I’d still resent having to fix up another tool I use to get to and from work; there’s too much else to do and enjoy to have to worry about things that should just work.  It was just about seven years ago, in fact, while I was teaching myself TeX that I started to realize these things:  instead of shelling out a few bucks on a shareware text editor with basic formatting capabilities, I convinced myself that TeX was the way to go — it was, after all, the professional typesetter’s choice.  Stepping back twenty years in user interface (there’s a reason every computer comes with a mouse, after all) — or finding ways to make your life harder isn’t the right direction.

Mike

Dear J-

What is actually out there?  If you accept that of all the stars in the universe, surely some have planets and of those planets, there must be a few that have Earth-like conditions, then there must be someone else out there wondering aloud what’s out there too.  Distance and relativistic limitations mean that we’re unlikely to ever meet, barring some kind of Star Trek warp drive and the acceptance of unacceptable risks (unless you assume that successful extrasolar exploration is predicated on society being peaceful/united enough to support it).

I used to play a lot of Spaceward Ho! when I was in college; it’s a game with some strategy, but it ends up being closer to Risk in space, with some minor resource management issues.  When you start the game you pick the number of planets (I’m assuming planetary systems), the size of the universe, and the number of players; my winning strategy invariably revolved around creating colony ships with long range, no weapons, and slow speed; fighters swift and well-armed; scouts lightly armed but as swift; and ringing all colonies with layers of satellites with state-of-the-art weaponry in case of accidental discovery.  Scouts were expendable to figure out whether a planet was worth going to (or to feel out the other player), with whole fleets of fighters along the front lines until satellites could be established, and colony ships bringing up the rear, ready to pounce on new discoveries as needed.

I would count the number of players I’d run out of existence, and sometimes it was less than we’d started with, meaning that the computer had exterminated itself in internecine warfare.  For some reason it would make me obscurely sad:  though I realize that the goal of the game was being the sole player standing it felt a little like electronic genocide — rather than seeing them as separate players, they always seemed like separate species, unreasoning and uncommunicative, rapacious and just like the player in front of the screen.  I haven’t played Spaceward Ho! in a long time, now.

Mike