Parentified Child

Much food for thought in this essay about parentified children. The concept explains what many of us have endured in our childhood, assuming it was normal because we had no baseline of normal: 

The parentified child who supports the parent often incurs a cost to her own psychic stability and development. The phenomenon has little to do with parental love, and much more to do with the personal and structural circumstances that stop parents from tending to the immense anxiety and burden that a child might be experiencing on their behalf. The parent is often unable to see that their child is taking responsibility for maintaining the peace in the family, for protecting one parent from the other, for being their friend and therapist, for mediating between the parents and the outside world, for parenting the siblings, and sometimes for the medical, social and economic stability of the household.

With my parents, the root cause was marriage without emotional readiness for it. Two people thrown together because the families thought it made sense. Neither of them had completed their journey to becoming fully functional, self-reliant human being before they became parents. The rest is history. All around me, were families very similarly configured. Women married off end of high-school or half way through college. Motherhood coming at them at a time, they were not yet done with needing a mother. The dependence carried into how they raised children, the baggage they saddled them with unwittingly. Now the thing has a name

Museum Visit

Effective or not, the idea of being prescribed free museum visits by a doctor to help with mental health issues sounds wonderful  

Like exercise, an afternoon enjoying art can cause an increase in serotonin levels, Hélène Boyer, the vice president of the Montreal-based medical association Médecins Francophones du Canada, told the Montreal Gazette’s Brendan Kelly in 2018. The art exposure program is particularly promising for those who can’t exercise due to age or disability.

Museum visits with a loved one can make for indelible memories. You share in the experience of something beautiful and thought-provoking. Sometimes the discussion that follows creates value of its own. That event becomes part of your story with that person and is revisited fondly over the years. I lost one such loved one a couple of years ago. We had been to a museum dedicated to dolls. Given the difference in our age, we saw the exhibits very differently. I was too young to appreciate craftsmanship or history - it was all about the endless variety of dolls. From my own experience, it seems like the value from a visit to the museum can last life-long, beyond the mental health benefits in the near term this article refers to

Bringing Flowers

Loved these lines William Mcfee's essay The Market - Roses just now predominate. There is a satisfying solidity about the bunches, a glorious abundance which, in a commodity so easily enjoyed without ownership, is scarcely credible. I feel no desire to own these huge aggregations of odorous beauty. It would be like owning a harem, one imagines.

The exactly describes how I feel in a florist shop or in a flower market. Being around the abundance is plenty gratifying. Bringing it all home would turn the living room to a funeral parlor. One or two bouquets would be the limit. That requires the process of eliminating a hundred other excellent options to bring something home that has already started to die and will complete the process while I am watching. I don't see the benefit of that at all. The flowers are in a better place where they are, their beauty enhanced by the abundance that will be stripped away once separated from the crowd.

The only flowers I have ever bought for the house are from the grocery store flower stand. It seems to fill the utilitarian need of bring life and color to my living space, much along the lines of filling the fridge and pantry with what food. 

Bird Work

I have a pear tree outside my kitchen window that blooms every year but has never produced any fruit. When we first moved in over a decade ago, the top branches of the tree were below my eye level. Now they are higher than the second floor windows. A few months ago, I noticed concentric bands on holes in its bark and a friend told me it was the work of a wood-pecker. Since then I have been keeping an eye out to see this wood-pecker. In the last few days, I have seen the bird almost every morning. It works around the periphery methodically but does not make any noise. 

It is much smaller bird than I expected - the small gray kind. Not the pileated woodpecker that I have seen before. The bird works on the tree for a bit and then disappears. The same routine follows the next day. I keep track of the bird on the weekends but am not around the rest of the week. It made me think that the bird and I are not that different. It plugs away at the tree, gathering food each day. I plug away at my work which involves a computer for reasons that are not so different from that of the gray woodpecker. I don't know whose life is more complicated.

No Delight

The self-checkout machine at grocery stores is a solution to a problem most customers did not have. So it is no wonder that it does not work that well. The "Just walk out" model makes much better sense if it reliably works 

Could we ever see a world without self-checkouts? Yes, if customers refuse. “Businesses are looking for creative ways to cut labor costs, and if they can figure out how to convince customers to do more of the work, they’ll do it,” says Andrews. “I tell people to vote with your pocketbook. I went to my local supermarket the other night after work and filled up my cart. The staff said to go to self-checkout – and I just walked away. Because my thinking was, ‘I’m not going to sit here and scan 60 items. It’s just not worth my time.’”

This is exactly the opposite of great customer service. The store wants the customer to do extra work and waste their time in the checkout line, so they can cut their costs. The employees at the register these days have a lot let experience doing their job compared to the pre self-checkout generation. There are fewer of them and they work shorter hours. Now the customer has no winning scenario - the cashier at the register will struggle with different parts of the process than they would have had at the self-checkout line. Neither experience will come anywhere close to producing delight.

Office Work

Sometime in the middle of 2022, I wanted to start coming into the office a couple of times in the week - for all the reasons that are usually cited for collocating with those who you work with. After a few turns, it became painfully obvious that times had changed and that most people simply did not want to do what used to be norm once. It would take days and weeks of pre-planning to make sure atleast some of the people I wanted to meet in person were infact going to there when I was. That was uphill to say the least. 

When I did meet folks who just happened to be there that day, chances were that they wanted quiet time like they have at home even while in the office. It would be rare to find anyone sitting in an open area showing any signs that they want to engage in a random conversation. Given the abundance of space relative to the number of people in the office, I would find people in small conference rooms working alone or even sitting in phone booths. It seems like we got too used to having our privacy and space during the pandemic and are loathe to give it up. Being in the office at the point is only symbolic. Maybe if you are lucky you meet a few folks physically instead of on Zoom but that does not move the needle in anyway. 

The article in Slashot aligns very closely with my own experience. There has got be a certain critical mass in any office environment for it to be able to confer the benefits of collocation and face time with your co-workers. If that is not achieved, people are like ships passing each other in the night and come a point when they make decisions like my friend E. 

When I asked him for the fifth time in the year if he planned to be in the office on the days I was planning on, instead of his usual "Sorry, I won't be in that day. Let me know next time you are around", he was more assertive "I don't plan on returning atleast until summer of 2023. Every trip to the office is two hours wasted on commute and I don't need that". E is a very sociable person and this was interesting coming from him. I am guessing he met a ghostown on the majority of his forays into the office much as I have in mine. 

Human Backup

Nice essay on what it means to be a human backup to a chatbot. We don't usually think about what hoes on behind the scenes when engaging or choosing not to engage with a chatbot. It is interesting how the lines between a response of a bot and a human can turn blurry if the question is such that no clear response is possible. We have all been there - talking to a real human rep in person or on the phone about a situation too unique for them to provide a resolution. They are have no human backup like Brenda the chatbot does in this essay. 

They resort to the exception option in their script that sounds very much like an insensitive bot response. How can they not hear the words coming out of our mouth, how can they be so oblivious to our plight - are questions that come to mind. Surely, they too have to deal with life situations that are off-script and need someone on the other side to hear and understand the real issue. Why does that empathy not transfer to their transactions with people in uncommon situations. The author answers that question quite well here. I particularly like the way she experiences the passage of time being the human backup to a 24/7 chatbot

Time went through a variety of contortions. Every second was a monolith. As I watched the clock, I felt stranded; time had left me terminally in the present. Hours, on the other hand, were as thin as tissue. I would start a shift in the morning and then, in an instant, find myself on the other side, sitting in a room of lengthening shadows, as if the intervening hours had been snipped out with scissors.

Hand Writing

Reading this essay produced feelings of nostalgia for my childhood and the time when I came into my first pen. It was two-toned bottle-green and black, had a nice weight and a smooth nib. I remember feeling edgy in my choice of ink-color deciding that I was a blue-black kind of person not blue or black. 

Putting pen to paper for the first time was a transforming experience. This was a the rite of passage that signaled the end of childhood and the beginning of adolescence. What I wrote had greater staying power and could not be erased away. I had achieved a certain parity with adults and could be more visible. 

The maturity of my penmanship improved over the years and with it somehow my ability to use words. It is as if the tools of writing had not changed, this maturation would have never occurred. I have never restored any pens but can totally understand the author's perspective 

I found the pen restorations relaxing. I often stared at screens, tapping and clicking on cold interfaces. I was writing but where? My words pixelated on cold, electric blankness. They appeared to me like silent ghosts yet born into the world. Restoring vintage pens offered respite from that abstraction, with the reward of a writing instrument I’d be able to use. I could cheaply buy pens neglected in someone’s drawer for decades and give them new life.

All Prattle

Reading this article reminded me of a recent offsite event where I spent time with a few co-workers for a couple of days. Outside of work, it was a lot of the small-talk that does not help you understand the people behind the prattle. Eventually, there are those who are talked out can't find anymore trivial things to have a conversation about nothing. At the sauna in the recreation center we go it, I often find a couple of folks strike up a conversation that proceeds to be about nothing and lasts the entirety of the time they are there. 

You can swap out the people and it would be the same type of conversation - the place they have lived, visited and wanted to visit, weather, where their friends live, how long they lived in a certain place, homes, boats and other stuff they own will come up along the way. The talk does not serve to enrich anyone's life - nothing was learned or gained from the interaction. In the sauna, I am just the bystander listening to this random talk and it fills me with boredom. When I am required to participate in one of these things then it brings a great deal of tiredness as well. I have in my ways tried to follow this advice but it gets hard if the other side is intent on only small talk and nothing more:

So remember, the next time you're in a conversation, try to make your partner feel like they're the most interesting person in the room. In the process, you'll become the person they love to be around.

Being Inspired

One of my former colleagues, C decided to quit her job and go a different direction about a year ago. C was over 60 at the time. She has since tried a few different things including founding a startup and being lead vocalist in a punk rock band. And that is just scratching the surface. C has been through the whole cycle once - having a career, being a mother, getting divorced, staying single, seeing her son get married and so on. So when she quit, she had been there done that. For another person to up and leave suddenly as she did would have seemed like a bold move specially for someone for her age. But for C it seemed very natural. That is the kind of thing she must have done over and over in her life to reinvent herself and become the person she has become. 

C was easily the most creative person in the room, full of original and interesting ideas, saw the most mundane problem in a way that made everyone else wonder why they had not thought of it before. That is her special skill - to see what is hidden in plain sight and see it with new eyes. She could get along with people of all ages, experience levels and cultural backgrounds. All in all a joy to work with and someone everyone could learn from. I valued the few months we got to work side by side on a client engagement. It was super-rewarding for me and I can only hope she got some value out of it too. C is inspirational for women who are getting to that point in their lives where most of their mandatory jobs are done and there is time to think about what is next. 

Playing Field

 Interesting study about the impact of remote and hybrid work for young people starting out in their careers. Anyone who is able to work hybrid would prefer that to having to show up to work every single day no matter what - choice is empowering. If the person has a lot of outside interests, an active social life that includes people they do no work with then the time saved from needless commuting and sitting in place without respite, reduces the amount of time they have to live outside of work. Such people will likely want the ability to stay remote without requirements to show up in person on set dates. There is just about no one who will have a problem with hybrid and most will be good with remote. 

The question is how that ends up working out for their career over time - will they like the results they see 5-10 years out. This is specially true if some of their peers are more present in the office, have face time with decision makers, build serendipitous connections along the way and get ahead faster. That is is a trade-off decision that a person has to make without the benefit of having been in the workplace before - out of college they can't possibly know what such trade-off will look like and what that means for them financially and otherwise. If the playing field is not level - there will be winners and losers inevitably. 

Age and Timing

Was at a happy hour recently with some folks I know and few that I don't. The age range of the group ranged from mid 20s to mid 60s. Singles, couples, empty-nesters, gray divorcees and grand parents were included in the mix. How people make surface level chatter seems to be informed by who they consider to be part of their identity. Work is a big part of it and then its who is at home or absent from there. Finally what they do in their personal time and who they do it with. One of the men in the group had been hit with the trifecta of divorce, pandemic and having his only kid leave to college - all within the span of three years. He comes out the the other side of it, the world is making the most of "normalcy" while he is dealing with a confounding emptiness and the rotating cast of women he has first dates with it. 

The friends as he mentions them in the passing are also divorced guys with older kids - college and beyond. In our ad-hoc group that evening, he was one of kind in a life stage a bit too novel for the rest of the crowd to find relatable. As you get older, the pool of people available to consider a relationship shrinks exponentially. Both sides have become too set in their ways to make any realistic and lasting change. If one side has been single for a lot longer than the other, they would not have much patience for dealing with the shock and awe of becoming suddenly single at an age people are mentally preparing to enjoy the coasting stage of life. On the other hand if both are in the same boat, they may more sympathy of each other but not necessarily the resources to help.

As we parted ways, I could not help thinking how big a role age and time played in helping a person in his situation bounce back. If he had been a decade younger or the event had occurred a decade ago, chances are he would be back in the saddle by this time. Age and timing were not on his side and that made it the hard situation it was. 

Over Hearing

Arrived in a small mid-western town for work almost an hour away from the airport. The hotel I had booked was closest to my meeting venue and as it turns out the most magnificent thing in this town. I was stepping in history. The building is 125 years old and so is the elevator which still works like a charm. Only that you can't ride it alone - an operator needs to accompany you. The room has been remodeled over the years but the historical touches remain. When I arrived I was told my room was not ready and I would valet check my bags, work in the lobby or walk around town as I chose. I did a bit of both and the room was still not ready and the lobby areas were full of people like me waiting to check in and trying to work while they waited. 

A young woman at the front desk recommended I wait in the bar downstairs that was closed and quiet. So it was until two employees came in to discuss an HR situation with another employee in "privacy". My presence there was ignored and they proceeded as if they were alone in the room. So I ended up hearing about intra-employee feuds, some guy's mental stability being questioned, another woman being accused of stealing from the cash register and so on.

 The conversation went on for a good hour and at some point it became clear why it was taking forever to check-in. There was the bad manager who was the topic of this HR discussion who was also potentially unstable and volatile. His demeanor had made a lot of employees quit and around the holiday season things took a turn for the worse. Given the low levels of staff, these two ladies discussing the HR issue were working on ways to make this woman who was threatening to quit - stay. 

They were working through reasons why she may or may not agree. It was interesting how a perfect stranger from nowhere they cared about had found themselves in the thick of their intense domestic issues. I am sure most of what I heard was unknown to many that worked at this hotel and called the town their home. 

Trying Enough

I have been told my well-meaning family members that I need to try harder to stay in touch with people.  Lately, I have been taking action on that suggestion and making an effort to re-connect. For the most part it does not work. Sometimes there is a quick spark of rekindled friendship that is more light than warmth. Then things die down completely. 

My experiences past and present have brought home the realization that I have the emotional capacity to be a properly good friend to maybe four people total. That is all I can do with the resources I have. Those slots have been taken a long time ago by people I have known forever. There are those who have capacity for much more and they can replicate the quality of relationship I have with my microscopic set of people to a much larger group. It is no surprise the connections fade out for me and it is hard to restart them despite my "efforts". 

The quality is clearly lacking and the other person feels it. A few days ago, I congratulated V on her new job (new to me because I had not kept up with her - she has been there for over six months) after losing touch with her for close to four years. I lacked the patience to persevere with her as she juggled a complex set of issues in personal and professional life for years. At some point it must have become evident to V that while I was doing all the right things, there was no soul there. In a tough phase, soul is what really matters not the discrete actions you take. Its no surprise that V did not bother to reply - there is not much to say in this situation. It was a shot in the dark and she sees it as such. Best to gracefully accept my limitations and not strive to be who I cannot be. 

Discovering Music

Despite having a few music loving young friends in India, I did not know of Amit Trivedi being the tie that binds some of the recent music that I have enjoyed. It made me think about how we don't experience what is right in front of us in our immediate environment. To my friends and family, Trivedi is part of daily life - they don't need to pause and pay attention to music he is making. Over time, he may even come to define the standard by which other music being produced is measured. The novelty is reserved from those outside the eco-system and trying to stay connected best they can. 

One of my young friends is professional vocalist and performs on stage around India. She is not quite a big, household name but she has what it takes to join those ranks if the stars align for her. When I met her on my trip home earlier this year, music was a big theme. We recorded several songs - mostly songs that I love and requested her to sing. She had a few as well but minding our generation gap, she chose music I was familiar with. It was a great time. Both her parents are talented singers as well so they have influenced her taste in music a great deal. It made for a few wonderful evenings of music but none of it was modern. 

J and I parted ways in musical taste back in her middle school years. She could appreciate stuff I liked because it was so much part of her childhood. But the reverse was not true despite my efforts to find common ground. In later years, I was able to love some of what she did it was far from given that our likes would align. I had to wonder if this modern and alternative music from India might give us that missing piece of the puzzle. 

About Hair

Interesting reading about things that human hair can be turned into. The versality and usefulness of something we take for granted and so is so freely available is amazing:

As it turns out, hair is tensile enough to be braided into rope, flexible enough to be woven into felt, and resistant enough to be pressed into a panel that resembles wood. 

For those in the know, there is nothing particularly novel about using hair in a variety of ways. Among a myriad of things

human hair/clay mixture (along with other binders) is used in plastering house walls, lining ovens, making wheels, and so forth. The addition of hair significantly reduces cracking and prolongs the life of these structures. Research shows that human hair reinforcement enhances the structural strength as well as the thermal insulation capacity of the clay structures

Reading about many good things that human hair can do for the world, reminded me of a rather silly poem on the topic

Delia, the unkindest girl on earth, When I besought the fair, That favour of intrinsic worth A ringlet of her hair, Refused that instant to comply With my absurd request, For reasons she could specify, Some twenty score at least.

Baking Right

Love the idea of a mixer in the kitchen that can make someone like me come out looking like a baker. Based on the review, the appliance seems to have been designed for the right target user and comes with solidly good bones. The things that matter to the novice and super-occasional baker have been taken into account. There is no way to develop intuition about baking without a ton of experience. Those (like me) who try to wing it intuitively without having put forth the time, effort and lessons learned from failures do so to their own peril. Developing a syntax for recipes that a device like this can understand can go a long way. 

I am dreaming of a time a few years out, I can upload a recipe from an old Provencal cookbook and the system is able to translate into something the appliance can handle. That would be a big win for all those who aspire to bake and are overwhelmed by the high likelihood of failure. Every once in a while, I take a baking mix, add things to personalize it and produce a cake that tastes a bit different from a mass-produced version. It is very small consolation for not having the skills to do any better. Can't wait for a more versatile version of an appliance like this. 

Sans College

The travails of Gen Z joining the workforce makes for sad reading. The bar to make enough money to stay afloat and pay off student debts (if any) is becoming ever harder to reach. Education for the sake of learning and personal growth is a luxury that some can ill-afford. Young people need to have a vocational lens from early on which makes some wonder why they are even wasting time in college - all it leads to in the end is a very expensive piece of paper that they will now have to pay off in addition to their ongoing living expenses - there is no apparent sense in this. 

Parents of our generation and older do not know better and don't have a crystal ball to look into the future. Will employers twenty years out care at all if you have a college diploma and would it ensure that you increase your income potential? The truth is that we don't know. It would only take a few large employers to change the hiring climate drastically. If they started to say that they need a high school diploma and being able to get through their entrance exam to have a job. The new hire will be in training for the next two years at a very low pay to make them fit for any type of job in that company. If the person chooses to leave they will have to repeat the same process at another company. 

But once trained in one they will create mobility for themselves and not need to re-enter through that first door over and over. A plan like this could work for employers if there is a business value attached to it - say it provides the company with the exact skills and qualifications to be successful in growing their business, reduces attrition and company culture is built from the ground up. 

This process does not work if people who at the end of their training period simply leave. But there could be ways to mitigate such flight risk by making such candidates feel unwelcome in the larger marketplace. If the market placed a premium on stability - completing the training and having 2-3 years of steady employment at the same company, it would reduce the propensity to jump ship too soon for this process to make sense for the employer. In the tech business the skills to do the job are very different from what a person studied in college - they would be lucky if there was even a tangential connection. 

Accenture launched an apprenticeship program in 2016 and has since hired 1,200 people, 80% of whom joined the company without a four-year-degree. Earlier this year it expanded the program with the goal of filling 20% of its U.S. entry-level roles — everything from application development and cybersecurity to cloud and platform engineering — from apprenticeships.

Seeking Love

Watched Qala a few days ago and it was a great experience. There is a societal expectation that a mother's love for her child is and must be unconditional. Everyone operates under the assumption this is an inviolable truth of nature. Yet for those who do not experience such love or are unable to feel it, the world they live becomes impossible for others to access. They live in a personal hell while appearing to be just like anyone else - those normal people whose mothers are capable of and do love their children unconditionally. Such is the case with the mother and daughter in this story. 

The desperation for the mother's love and approval takes a young woman past her break point, the mother is unable break free from the icicles that surround her heart like a permafrost. The mother's universe is confined to herself and the blighted dreams of the past of which the daughter only serves as a sad reminder everyday. There is no redemption for one whose existence is their first mistake. Both characters are very well played. The music was able to create the ambience for the era in which the story is set. 

Weaponized Stupidity

My friend T and I met up after almost four years - we've both changed jobs and gone through some life stage changes in this time. There was much to catch up on but at some point conversation turned to the the concept of weaponizing stupidity in the workplace. We were both able to recall a few people we have worked with over the years who sit the highest end of middle management for an unbearably long time and make everyone's life miserable. 

They have a very simple MO - that gets them promoted to this point and keeps them afloat there for a long time. It goes something like this. They are the supposed subject matter experts in a certain area so they hold the power to approve big decisions that impact large programs. They are a toxic combination of mentally lazy, incurious and ambitious. So when something is brought to them to make a decision on - they know better than to say Yes or No. 

That is taking a stand and has consequences for their career, it also needs mental effort and courage - all things they don't want to expend on a job that is cozy and pays well. Instead they proclaim very loudly the content that was presented to them for them decision making is absolutely incomprehensible - there is not a word of it that is understandable so obviously they don't have enough information to make a decision. Frequently the people that put the said content together feel like they missed the mark in being able to communicate their problem statement succinctly. 

This is aided and abetted by the wall of silence that usually follows such a pronouncement by the expert - it is also the wall of shame. The hapless folks go back to the drawing board and take another crack at it - the expert still does not get it and this process continues until someone higher up makes a decision and absorbs the risk. The expert is viewed as leadership material for being so bold and insisting on the highest standards that the rest failed to meet. It is a spectacular way to converting stupidity and laziness into a tool for career advancement - both T and I have seen this strategy to work every single time. 

Pantone Color

Not sure how I feel about the 2023 Pantone color of the year. One of my colleagues was grumbling about it being a hysterical start of the year but he also hates the Yahoo purple for reasons dating back to his time working there. But for M, I would not have taken a peek at the color that was causing him so much grief. M is an interesting character. He thrives on his little pieces of trivia that he can drop when least expected and often with the goal of lightening a tense situation. It tends to work. 

The bitching about the Viva Magenta started to lighten a feedback session on the UX mockup the designer was taking us through - by calling attention to a random thing like color, he helped everyone else stop picking apart the guy's work. The criticism was not merited and M had the perfect way to stop it. People tend to build on things - one mistake is noticed and the next and the next - the good is left aside. So it was with the poor designer until was saved by strange shade of red. 

The incident reminded me of a client I had worked for a long time ago. P was a designer and introduced me the existence of Pantone colors and the announcement of the color of the year was a big deal for him. I was never entirely sure why but those around him shared in his excitement. 

Civil Service

This news story reminded me of India back in my college days. There some private sector hiring, multi-national companies were all the rage and paid much better than Indian private sector. But the overwhelming majority of kids were aiming for public sector jobs - they were not glamorous, did not pay very well and the work itself was cutting edge. It was assumed to be the slower but safer track - meant for those who had limited ambitions, valued security over the razzle dazzle of the working outside the confines of government and semi-government. This is not even counting the civil service aspirants - of which there were many. Some folks I grew up with went on to become career beaurcrats and from what I can tell its not such a bad life. 

Grass is greener and all that I suppose but from the vantage point of those who do not have that life, there seem to be advantages. There seems to be much higher degree of predictability in how a person's career will evolve and with that their socio-economic standing. One of my friends who was a part of this world until a couple of years ago, decided to shake things up and give private sector a shot. It was a very bumpy ride for her until she settled in. 

Even so, she compares her life now to a roller-coaster ride, where as in the past she was being chauffeured in an old but trusty car that could not go above a certain speed, was not particularly luxurious but the basic stuff worked. The car could break down sometimes but it would be taken care of - she just had to sit back and relax. That is very far from the life she has now. The trade-off is income and greater freedom to spend which can be liberating if the person has the gift of time to enjoy the bounty. My friend has yet to take a vacation since she started her new job so to her these concepts are still theoretical. 

Confetti Bits

My best friend S had a bad dream about me recently and needed to talk it over. I can understand it - sometimes dreams can leave a bitter aftertaste that nothing else will wash-off. So we spent a couple of hours chatting one Sunday morning and she felt better. 

Something about the conversation left me struggling to return to the point where we had been from childhood until that Sunday. It was a line we had crossed together having that chat and now we were both on the other side of it. I did not seem to like it here or even find it comfortable. My friend that I knew and could count on without reservation was left behind somewhere on the other side of Sunday. 

I have tried time and again to chat with S, wash of this unfortunate event which was triggered by a bad dream but I feel rooted to my spot. I am not sure what this means but it does feel like we pressure tested our childhood relationship as middle-aged women and each side came out feeling differently. We had chosen to be in that alternate universe where time moved sluggishly - the density of memories being highest from the time we were together and declining over the years. 

That space was filled with confetti of nostalgia, idealizing each other to be far more perfect and wonderful than we really are. The Sunday morning chat dispersed all that happy, floaty stuff and replaced it with something cold, heavy and hard to shake off. I miss S, simpler uncomplicated times of early youth. Maybe there is a path back yet and someday, it will magically appear/

College Future

 The future of college per this story is mostly bleak with the big names still winning. Like everything else, when the person or the entity has a lot of built in cushion, there is plenty of hardship they can endure but those less fortunate will not last long. That weeds out competition and only the "fittest" survive. In the case of colleges, if the logic this article is based on turns out to be true, then there will be only elite colleges where gaining admission will still resemble winning a lottery only with better odds. For those that fail to make it, options will be bleak and limited - they will regress to the dark ages without enlightenment. 

I'd like to believe there will be many creative and innovative alternatives to traditional college for those that don't win the lottery. People can learn what they love and at a pace they like - maybe the joy of learning for the sake of learning will return. The plebians that don't make it to fancy colleges may come out ahead in the end without student debt dragging them down. Maybe this is a cliff worth falling off of. 

Role Model

I happened to meet a couple of small business owners at a Friendsgiving. They are CEOs too but a very far cry from Elon Musk whom they grudgingly admired for his widely publicized down-sizing moves at Twitter. Their opinion (which I have also heard and read elsewhere) is that as the CEO, Musk needed to make the company more productive and there was simply no sense in having an engineering staff that size to run a silly social media platform that is not even so useful. 

There is this smooth blending of facts, conjecture and opinion that when coming from a long time business owner, an average person may very well pay heed to. One of the two complained about his former sales people that simply refused to go above and beyond responding to inbound requests from customers - they inserted themselves into the money flow and collected their commissions. They did what was easy but were incapable of bringing in new business. They were all fired over time - his only regret was that he did not act sooner. 

Musk in his opinion has problems incomparably bigger than his but it comes down to the same thing - people are overcompensated for jobs that they are severely underperforming at, so cuts absolutely need to be made. The other small business owner was in complete agreement with this sentiment. Around the room people could largely agree tech jobs paid outsized salaries even though tech is getting more and more commoditized. 

Barely any art or craft is needed to churn out code - to that end the inflated salaries make no sense. Pizza making and writing micro-services should earn a person about the same paycheck. College degrees are fairly irrelevant for a developer - I am a strong opinion on this one but decided to hold my peace. Notwithstanding, being from the tech industry myself, I have to same there is some truth to what everyone was saying there. Whether that is the whole, complete and universal truth is a very different matter but this is the conversation people are having after too much to eat and drink and having had a crazy year upto now, not to mention the pandemic for a couple of years before that. They are allowed to vent. 

Reading Online

For the last decade all of my reading from the local library is been e-books and audio books borrowed online. I have been to the library that maybe a dozen times during that period. Before that J and I were there almost every other day. We borrowed and returned books, tapes, CDs and DVDs or just spent time there reading physical books. That was all so long ago that I have even forgotten what that felt like. Strangely, I have no desire to return to that way of life anymore. Sone people love and need the feeling of a physical book to make for a satisfying reading experience, I am not one of those. I love my Kindle and Kindle app that allows me to use snippets of time to catch up on reading. 

The Overdrive app has all my audio books which I can listen to whenever or wherever I have the opportunity for it. To me the idea of having my personal library available for use 24/7 is far more satisfying that the touch and feel of a physical book. Reading about the struggles libraries have with buying e-books is sad to read and it explains why a lot of what I would love to read is not available at the local library - they have likely been priced out by the publishers. As readers we tend to focus on what we desire to read and not as much on what it takes to fulfill that desire - starting with the writers and the full machinery of the publishing business. 

Till such time the writers and readers can come closer, overcome the layers of friction in between both sides will continue to struggle. Readers from lack of access what might truly capture their attention and imagination and writers from finding that loyal following that makes them truly successful. Today both sides are the mercy of the machinery that works as in intermediary - that system picks winners and losers, plays the role of a taste maker, establishes trends and decides what is popular and sellable. 

Old Books

 I started to read The Count of Monte Cristo sometime in fall and had to pause many times for lack of time. Over Thanksgiving break, I made it to the half way mark and hated putting it away. This is the first time in decades, I have experienced the joy of being transported to a different place and time by fiction. 

I used to think that phase of my life is over but it is not. Just that I read many of the classics before I had access to the internet and long before I had the responsibilities of being a mother and the sole provider for J. Access to the internet remains and can be distracting when you want to zone into a book but J is now grown up and busy with her own life. I have more time on hand than I have had in a while. Having experienced the joy of reading Dumas yet again, I now have my list of classics I'd like to re-read and add to it the ones I long wanted to but could not get around to it. 

Maybe there is a reason that we return to old books in a way of coming full circle in life. The last couple of decades, my reading has led to me to interesting discoveries but not once to a book that made in indelible, lifetime impression. It is likely that sort of impact is possible only on the young, impressionable and unjaded. I was none of that. It is heartening to relive the joys of reading from childhood and youth again - as if some parts of life remained pristine, untouched by chaos. 

Age Successfully

The pictures of aging celebrities on magazine covers makes me think of how much help they had over the years and every day to achieve that look. If your look is what earns your money makes every sense to invest in it continuously if you want to keep that paycheck coming for many years. This is no different that a good developer learning and keep up with current technology so they remain competitive in the market full of new and hungry talent. There are those who are the very gainfully and profitably employed into their 60s and 70s because of their level of investment. They are masters of the game and everyone in the business looks up to them. The truth is very few in the developer community have what it takes to age well. Most will fade out to irrelevance well before 60.

It would be unthinkable and absurd to feature developers who have aged successfully on the cover of top publications in technology. It is an even bigger stretch to imagine a not so well aging developer looking these covers and feeling inadequate. But at the checkout register at the local grocery stores, women are seeing the pictures of models and actresses in their 60s and 70s and asking themselves, why they are nowhere in the same ballpark. It often prompts them to take action to "improve" their appearance to that unattainable standard. They don't see this as an absurd undertaking with no redeeming value if the focus is on the look and not on the feel. This is not even going into the reasons why some parts of the population simply don't have the privilege to age well.

Inkstand Heart

Reading The Count of Monte Cristo for the second time and these these lines felt particularly poignant in this reading. At thirteen when I had first read the book, such details would have wholly escaped me. It takes certain maturity and life experience to understand the intent beyond the words. 

Danglars alone was content and joyous— he had got rid of an enemy and made his own situation on the Pharaon secure. Danglars was one of those men born with a pen behind the ear, and an inkstand in place of a heart. Everything with him was multiplication or subtraction. The life of a man was to him of far less value than a numeral, especially when, by taking it away, he could increase the sum total of his own desires. He went to bed at his usual hour, and slept in peace.

In later life, a person encounters people just as Danglars was described by Dumas. They may end up on the wrong aide of the arithmetic and understand what it means to be taken away figuratively. Experience also teaches that trying to right wrongs can lead to unintended consequences and sometimes the best option is to let things go. Sadly, those things simply cannot be explained to a young person who has not gone through the full circle of experience and internalized the lessons learned along the way

. 

Warm Connection

This past Thanksgiving, I reached out to everyone I could think of that had a role in my life that I should be thankful for. As I sent these text messages out, could not help thinking how little I have invested in these people over the years. Not for lack of care or concern but not being able to make the time to keep those relationships warm. There was always something that was higher priority. 

The few where I have done well, it was on account of me reaching out to these folks every so often and setting aside some time to catch up even if only by a phone call. In my younger years, I used to resent that it always needs to be me initiating contact and somehow that meant it was not worth for the other side to make the effort. 

Over time I have come to realize, the "other side" I speak of have a dense social network of which I am a very small part. They are the kind of people who have the energy, interest and inclination to carve out precious time from their lives to bring their friends and family together. It gets harder for them to keep up with someone like me who shows up very occasionally. I am not part of their natural social rhythm. So I want to be seen and counted, I need to make the effort. Such clarity likely comes to people at different points in their lives - I wish it had come sooner to me. 

Three Truths

Over two decades ago, my parents and I went through a very traumatic life event. The worst of it lasted a couple of years but the echoes remained in our lives for much longer. Recently, we had to revisit that time and I was amazed at how differently we each have processed what happened. I have seen with relative clarity the roles we each played - my personal responsibility in the outcomes and my big mistakes. For my father, the event is an undefined block with clear input and output parameters that he correctly recognizes but he uninterested introspecting the process by which things came to pass. It is a logical approach. He has cleared to the field of outputs to focus on what matters to him. The rest is irrelevant. I am not aligned with him but I understand his position. 

Mother's way is by far the hardest for me to reconcile with. She has re-imagined just about everything to creative a narrative that absolves her of any responsibility or accounts for her contributions to what happened. In her alternately remembered version of the facts, she is far backstage of the events with not even a supporting role in defining outcomes. The truth is very far from that. Her has made the entire cast of characters except herself accountable and responsible for all that happened. 

Revisiting the event was painful on its own but with three different version of the facts to deal with even worse. For than anything, it left me feeling I don't know or understand this woman at all that is my mother. In that sense, I am saying I don't know or understand atleast one half of me. That is like having a stranger's body and soul reside in what you think is you.