Media Fodder

Nice essay on the temptations and perils of monetizing children. It might have started benignly even, the desire to share pictures of what you love and adore most in the world - your brand new baby. Though all babies are largely alike and are blessed with the same infinite cuteness, to the mother theirs is totally unique and that is how nature intended it. But the likes, comments, shares and reposts trigger addictive dopamine hits until over-sharing about that child becomes routine. The consequences can be bad for those kids who are being turned into media fodder without their consent (which they would be too young to provide anyway). In that sense, these mothers are no better than those pushing their children into labor. The difference is that later may have no choice given the crushing grind of poverty but the former do.

 ‘When mothers put little girls at the centre of their feeds,’ Bailey of BSM Media tells me, ‘I get uncomfortable … because we will look at the followers and there is a slightly higher amount of male followers.’ As more and more children front brands, this is not the only blindspot. We are (rightly) outraged if a dress is assembled by an eight-year-old sweatshop worker in Bangladesh; but we don’t think twice if that same dress is marketed to us by an unpaid, unprotected eight-year-old in the US. Influencer kids are not being kept out of school. They don’t live in crushing poverty and are not going to lose a limb if a machine malfunctions. But that’s not to say that their exposure extracts no mental toll. Performing your childhood for an outside, unseen and adult global audience can mess you up – just ask Macaulay Culkin.

Old Spark

The engineering team of the company I worked for in India a couple of decades ago, made the news recently. My father an avid newspaper reader send me a picture of the story - he was proud that I had been part of the organization once and the innovation was around emission reduction. An automotive engineer himself, this is a cause that was always near and dear to his heart. I have written here before how sometimes I feel like I am no longer talking to the father I grew up admiring as a role model for how to be a true professional. He was respected as the authority in his subject matter and brought in to resolve many a engineering deadlock. 

As he grew older, I watched that part of who he was fade and recede to the distance. He turned into the average retiree doing mundane things day after day. While there is no harm in the mundane there has been a missing spark. Back in the day, if I read something in the media that was related to innovation in the auto industry, he was definitely interested, had commentary and opinion. I loved those conversations not because I am any kind of subject matter expert but just to observe him dissect the information and analyze it. This is the skill on which I have made my career and in large part I learned my trade by observing my father. Our domains of work are very different but the learnings have been transferrable for me. It was a wonderful experience to see a bit of that old spark in him once again. 

Freak Show

Reading these rules of etiquette made me feel like I have lived under a rock for the longest time.  Some of the rules are commonsensical this one stood out for me:

I don’t ghost people because abandonment is my central trauma and passive-aggressive has never been my style. (I’m more aggressive-aggressive.) I suppose I can understand the appeal of ghosting as an easy way to cut someone off for whatever reason, or for none at all. What I cannot understand is ghosting someone and then coming back several years later to request a favor that would have been a considerable ask even if we had remained friendly.

I have been ghosted a fair bit in my life and there have been these rebounds that came around to say hello. The first few times I had experience with rebounds, I told myself that the ghosting was on account of me being out of line somehow. So I was happy they thought to reconnect. I can't say these folks requested any favors from me but they were back out of curiosity - to see if I had ended up in the ditch as they had predicted would be my lot. If not yet in the ditch was I striking distance of such. Once those questions were answered they would promptly ghost me again. It took a while to understand that I as a person had no intrinsic value to these folks - I was more a freak show they checked in on at times. Something that they channel hopped to on occasion between their regular favorites just a status check.

Survivor's Guilt

One of my former co-workers wrote today about survivor's guilt having by now survived two rounds of layoffs - the latest round hit close to home where peers he respected were laid off for reasons that were not obvious to any of those left behind. Many among us can relate to that guilt he speaks of. One of my friends posted about the moment she found out. She was away from home meeting with a client. They were in the middle a proposal review she was leading with a dozen folks from the client team in attendance. Someone from the company team pulled her aside and told her to check her personal email. L is a true professional but this is beyond anything she had faced in her long career. She was in complete shock at how it was handled and what it meant to be professional under the circumstances. At that moment she was persona non-grata at the meeting and her proposal meant nothing to anyone anymore. 

She was free to leave with her personal belongings, use the rest of the day as she pleased. She was supposed to return home the following day but chose to check out the hotel and rebook her flight. The sense of stupefaction was overwhelming. I want to reach out to L and tell her that she acted with as much grace as anyone in her situation could muster but it is very hard. But I don't have a right to say much (if anything) until I have actually been in her shoes. Until then my words don't matter. I wish I knew people who are currently looking for someone with L's background - she is awesome. But I don't so empty offers of help don't count either. This feels like the only place I can express how it feels. I might be the next one to go through what L did and should that come to pass, I hope I can show as much grace under pressure as she did. 

No Cliff

It makes sense that Reddit wants to charge for API access being that the soul of AI is made from it's posts.

Reddit is far from the only online depository of information used to train large language models, as data scrapers like Common Crawl are also frequent chatbot tutors. However, Common Crawl and related services trade in raw data, as in large pools of information sitting online, whereas Reddit consists of conversations between humans. A well-rounded AI requires access to both types of data to increase factual accuracy and person-like behavior

Our collective self will be manifested in this "person-like behavior" that the AI demonstrates. If we want it to be any better, we would need to become better versions of ourselves, iterate on that improvement so we get closer to perfection. Though what exactly constitutes being better can vary by person and context. Even so, that is much more positive way to look at what the future holds than this:

Perhaps though we are driving ourselves off a cliff. We might react radically and negatively to the AI mirror. People could be stoked into desperation and despair. The counterargument to that downbeat doomsday clamor is that we are stridently instead going to ascend to grand levels that we never imagined possible, prodded by, and enabled via AI. Get used to it.

Always Listening

Loved reading this story about how the magic happens in Taco Bell's Innovation Lab, The tenets for innovation are simple but clearly very effective - how to make things fast and how to make them delicious. To even get to the point there needs to be reason rooted in a consumer need. 

Liz Matthews, chief food and beverage innovation officer at Taco Bell, says it all comes down to a problem, a hunch, or a common request from consumers. In research groups, consumers often said they liked putting potato chips in their sandwiches. Others said they loved the flavor of Doritos. It took some time before the dots connected and the Doritos Locos Taco was born.

“The biggest thing for us is to always be listening. Once you do that, things start to fall into place,” Matthews says. “We’re always listening to the consumer and always exploring and trying new things.”

The trick of listening at scale, parsing signal from noise to clarify the actual voice of customer is not a trivial process. If Taco Bell is rolling out hits, that process is clearly working. I remember talking to a prospective client a while back who led innovation for a similar fast food chain. They had very good instincts about their customer and were serving them well-enough but I did not get the sense they were doing such a good job of "always listening". It is no surprise, they delivered very few hits when they tried launching something novel. It is almost as if their customers questioned their motives as being something other than filling a need in a way that was fast and delicious. In light of that experience the Taco Bell success makes even more sense.

Keeping Simple

My friend L called after a long time to catch up. They have their oldest getting ready to apply for college next year and the younger one coming in the high-school the same year. Life is the busiest its been for them and L decided to change careers - a controlled middle-crisis experiment like he calls it. We were wondering about what it takes have a simple life in today's world and L posited its a combination of not being too bright and not being too ambitious. And both by self-assessment, not based on what others think of you. I have long believed that I have a relatively simple life compared to my peers - even adjusting for the upheavals I have gone through due to upended marriage and all the trouble that followed in its wake. 

I do believe there is some truth to what L is saying - because the conditions for having a simple life per L, do apply to me. My peers are significantly more ambitious are have goals they are not shy to talk about or achieve. In terms of level of brightness, they are successful in large part because they have confidence in their abilities - which would likely lead them to believe in their own brightness. Reading this Wired story about blue collar vs white collar jobs reminded me of my conversation with L The take-away from the story is a bit of a let-down. I was expecting better and more from Wired on what ChatGPT holds for the future of jobs

If this trend is any indication, we should expect to see softer skills—humor, presence, personality—become the game. In this light, we may already be halfway there without quite realizing it: Perhaps the future belongs to the influencer.

What might it take to have a relatively simple life in a world where both blue and white collar jobs can be disintermediated by AI. I want to believe the rustic and simple will have enduring value - making things by hand that reflects many generations of knowledge and wisdom being passed down. Where a baker has an approximate recipe but her own memories of learning from older generations fill the gaps in that approximation - something unique comes out the other end. A person can be a roboticist in a cheese factory but it is not going to replace what someone in a four hundred year old farm is doing by hand just as generations before them had done. Holding on to these stories, tactile memories by doing things under the guidance of the expert will likely be the path to a simple life in the future. 

Being Useful

C and her husband are much younger than us and they just celebrated their baby's first birthday. C is corporate lawyer so her parties tend to have more than a fair share of those in attendance. I found my chatting with a group of them and the conversation turned to the value (if any) of advertising. It was interesting to hear their perspective which I think is a bit different from that of more heterogenous sample of people. They were unanimous in their opinion that all advertising is not bad. There needs to informational or entertainment value. 

People love Super Bowl ads for the later reason and AARP ads for the former. When it fills neither need and poses an interruption to whatever task the person is trying to get done, that is when ads are truly annoying and must not exist. All that said, these folks thought there is no reason to reject advertising overall. It made me wonder if there could be a future for advertisement where there was explicit contract for value exchanged between the advertiser and the consumer. 

Yes, pitch me your brand's latest shampoo but do it in a way that in informational - maybe teach me a bit about the chemistry of shampoos and conditioners when you first show me the ad, share a trivia about human hair the next time the ad shows up. Make it worth my while to see it through the end. Once you run out of ways to make the ad informational or educational stop showing it to me. Chances are I will associate good and positive value with your shampoo and will likely buy next time I am shopping for some. Perhaps doing all of this is much easier with generative AI.

Lipstick Index

Recently, I had to deal with Happy Returns at Ulta and did not find the process nearly as "happy" as advertised. But I am not a habitual shopper at Ulta so presumably the incentives did not line up for me. The store unlike many others in the mall was a hive of activity. 

I recall being surprised that women were still in the mood for cosmetics shopping notwithstanding the times. There is obviously truth to the story that inflation has had no effect on beauty product consumption. The Lipstick Index is at work - there is always a bit of money to spend on something that offers instant gratification 

The survey found that beauty procedures consumers do regularly were ones they were least likely to cut back on -- various eyelash extension and tinting services were rated as the last thing to be cut for financial reasons. 

A young lady I know told me that she does not hesitate to get her eye lashes done professionally every so often. There is a always time and money for that. Her logic was that if her eyelashes are great then it simplifies the overall makeup routine, she ultimately saves money and looks perfect without making a big effort. The logic seems to be sound. She is on a budget and yet the eyelash services are not impacted. 

Coping Mechanism

One way to read this story is that nature thrives despite our destructive tendencies. And that is a win.

While the currents that create the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre largely trap items within the Gyre, it is home to island habitats that could potentially be colonized. And it is possible that some items can cross oceans without being caught in a gyre, potentially making exchanges between coasts a relatively common occurrence in the age of plastics.

Finally, the researchers caution against a natural tendency to think of these plastic-borne coastal species as "misplaced species in an unsuitable habitat." Instead, it appears that they are well suited to life in the open ocean as long as there's something there that they can latch on to

Wonder if over time these creatures will convert that plastic into something more suitable and useful for them to thrive in. Adversity is the mother on invention after all. Humans are consuming food and water contaminated in so many ways and yet not everyone is dropping dead from the full battery of ailments these contaminants can cause. The majority are learning to cope with nano-particles, heavy metals, pesticides and worse in their bodies. We are not that different from these creatures who learned to make a habitat out of plastic. 

Viva Voce

In my day there used to be a viva voce component to exams in college. The finals were all taken in the exam hall in long hand, no multiple choice. Just transitioning to pen and paper essay style responses can go a long way in fighting plagiarism by AI 

.. the oral exam experienced a decline as universities began to gravitate toward written assessments in the 1700s. Academics at the time considered written exams more efficient, with the opportunity to numerically grade students individually. This contrasted with the complicated system of placing students in broad class categories that reflected their performance in oral examinations.

Exams have evolved into something that is a little too easy to manipulate and this was well before the time of Generative AI. Some people are very efficient and astute test takers. This is manifested in the world of professional certifications very strongly. The higher the number of certifications a person has the less likely they are to be able to perform well in the real life, solving actual problems for business. These tests are even easier to crack once you understand how the questions are structured how to eliminate the obviously and likely wrong answers. That is the skill being tested and certified not the actual knowledge or understanding of subject matter. I am all in favor of putting real pen to paper and bring viva voce back.

Gordon Gekko

I watched Wall Street for the first time and now get the point of Gordon Gekko. It brought to mind a conversation I had with someone my parents were trying to match-make me with way back in the day. The guy in question lived in Manhattan at the time and worked somewhere on Wall Street. I had just graduated college and working my first job in India. The living was super-simple and my public sector salary was just enough to give that sense of freedom a young person craves for. 

Now I was able to pay for things I needed and wanted (granted I was and still am a person of pretty simple tastes, so it did not take much). That feeling was quite priceless. When I connected with Wall Street guy (I cannot recall his name so I will say W), he asked me about what I did and what I thought of coming to America - specially to his neck of the woods. I told him I only knew Manhattan through books and movies so it was hard for me to tell how reality would compare against that. Scenes from movies set in Mumbai don't exactly match the reality of living there. I imagined the same is true of other places - even iconic ones.

W asked me if there was a book I had read that had shaped my impressions of NYC and as it turned out the answer was yes - that would be The Bonfire of Vanities. The character of Sherman McCoy defined Wall Street types for me and that is what I said to W. I was expecting some mild form of outrage given the nature of the  shenanigans Mr. McCoy gets caught up in leading to his catastrophic downfall. W had not read the said book but he shared that Gordon Gekko was the seminal Wall Street character for him and that I should watch the movie. 

I had no idea what he was talking about but something told me right away that this conversation had already run its course. I could not tell if W aspired to be like Gekko or was just fascinated by him in a morbid sort of way. Whichever the case, Gekko was a relevant party in this conversation and me not having the slightest clue did not help. The parents on both sides tried to get us further acquainted but we each went our separate ways. It was amusing to recall that silly conversation between two Bengali people from India about two fictional characters from New York while watching the movie so many years later.

Privacy Design

Loved this story about privacy by design. Deploying fashion against facial recognition software is wonderfully creative- born out of a rather simple idea:

..merge fashion design and computer science to create something you can wear every day to protect your data. Coming up with the idea was the easy part. To turn it into reality they first had to find — and later design — the right “adversarial algorithms” to help them create images that would fool facial recognition software. 

It would be nice to have make-up that looks nice and normal on the face but creates a blur for the software. There is already the concept of anti-surveillance makeup but the nicer trick would be for ordinary looking makeup to have a ace up its sleeve and show a pixelated view of your face to the camera. As more ways are created to chip away at our privacy, it would not be surprising to see labels like privacy by design, anti-surveillance and such on the labels of unexpected things - like clothing and makeup

Cried Out

Reading this Emily Dickinson poem made me think about how people don't have many tears left to cry after a point in their life. It seems to be related to time spent living in the world combined with the total amount of pain experienced - from micro-aggressions to tumultuous, calamitous event induced pain. People have a certain reservoir of tears they can cry and once those are cried out, pain and sadness are experienced in tearless (and often unhealthier ways).

If the stillness is Volcanic

In the human face

When upon a pain Titanic

Features keep their place —

If at length the smouldering anguish

Will not overcome —

And the palpitating Vineyard

In the dust, be thrown?

I could imagine the pain breaking a person from inside until they are blown to figurative dust. My friend A has suffered disproportionately later in her 50s than she did ever before. But there had been enough pain till then for her in her life to be all cried out. It is true for her that "upon a pain Titanic Features keep -their place -"

Putting Distance

Watched Play Misty for Me recently. Its a movie that has aged well even if the story unfolds predictably for a modern viewer:

When the stalker is a man, the story often follows a formulaic, predictable route. When the stalker is a woman, the story paves the way for a more compelling thematic orientation and the potential to revise societal tropes. One highly singular film was produced and released at a time when stalking themes, and especially female stalkers as villains, were still unheard of.

Evelyn smothers the man she is fixated with with adoration. At first he does little to resist it but the suffocation grows over time and he tries to break free. What is depicted in an extreme degree in the story parallels how real-life relationships work too. Each person has a comfort zone of how much adoration they can tolerate - cross beyond that point and you make them angsty. This is not just in intimate relationships but between people in general. 

Recently, I was chatting with my niece about how some people are the glue that keeps family together - they do all the hard-work and are rarely appreciated let alone rewarded for their troubles. My niece is one of those people - she wants family to come together, be there for each other and so on. She tries hard and is often disappointed by how little weight everyone else pulls. And sometimes she can get quite upset which these folks then make their reason to more difficult. We talked about the value of being such glue. My told her my view - its that is in the nature of the person, they should just do it because it brings them joy but not imagine that they are serving some greater cause that they need to be lauded for. I believe she and everyone else will have it easier and happier if she did all she does so well while inoculating herself against disappointment that everyone else fell short. 

Forced Reset

This story and the several comments resonate with me. I would be one of those "Tech vets" looking for a reset. A few weeks ago, I chatted with a woman who calls herself a career pivot coach. She told me that she talks to a lot of people just like me - at some cross-roads in the life where they must have a choice to change or reset on their own or will have the choice made for them. I had set up that appointment with L because I have the very same fears. Pushing that reset button feels incredibly hard because it is easy to keep doing what you have done for the longest time and got good at even it happens to deplete your soul of joy. There is a certainty and control that comes with staying in the rut. A few of my peers are waiting for the choice to be made for them. 

I can think of two women one in her mid 40s and the other in her mid 60s who are in very comfortable tech jobs and think they could be cut in the next round of layoffs. Both seem to want that decision made for them almost as it it would free them up to push that reset button. But knowing them I know they will find it emotionally difficult even though they wish so much to have a forcing function to reset. Lucky are those who can find a gentle path to transition into a whole new world without it needing it come in the wake of a traumatic event. The short conversation with L gave me plenty to think about but it also clarified to me how unready I was mentally to do what I have long craved to do.

More Driven

 Gen Z is more ambitious than advertised. Should not be such a surprise finding. When the odds are stacked against a person, chances are they will fight harder to overcome and prevail. Some will give up and accept their lot. There is no particular reason that one generation will have an extraordinarily low percent of fighters. When survival is at stake, chances are that people will more likely fight than not

Financial security is important to Gen Z workers, according to interviews with and surveys of about 100 Gen Z workers between November and January conducted by the Conference Board. About half of Gen Zers and millennials said in a 2022 Deloitte survey that they live paycheck to paycheck, and about 30% of each group say they don’t feel financially secure.

I personally know atleast a couple of dozen Gen-Zers and the majority are not lazy or lacking ambition. They arrived at the workplace following different paths due to family circumstances, quality of education and opportunities they had access to. Notwithstanding, they are making the most of the hand they were dealt with. There are a few that are living with parents, have failed to fully take off (if at all) and mostly it is because those parents have failed to set boundaries with their adult children. 

There were no expectations set for achieving freedom and independence by a certain time. These things have happened in all generations not just for Gen Z. It could appear that this generation is lazy because their parents are having to be a safety net for a lot longer for Gen Z because jobs are hard to come by and harder to keep given all that is going around. That is not because the kids lack ambition - times are just tough.

Being Naïve

Watched Ides of March recently and more than a decade later felt just as relevant. The twenty year old woman who finds herself pregnant ends up being a pawn in a grown up game involving a number of older powerful men. The level of her dispensability is shocking to the viewer. If a young, attractive woman also happens to be ambitious, the onus is squarely on her to stay out of trouble. By default she will be in situations where trouble will come looking for her. 

Molly in this story is not vigilant - she is navigating a snake pit in the manner befitting an ingenue but not for some who dreams of making a political career. And that is her undoing. The moral of the story (if there could be one) is for young women like Molly to proceed with great caution when deploying their charm to get ahead in their career. There is a way to do it in a safe way that will likely not produce blockbuster results but going too far on the scale of risk taking can produce tragic consequences.

Turning Corner

There is a hair salon less than a mile from my home. T's has been a fixture in the neighborhood for over three decades.  T is an immigrant and has struggled mightily to get to this point. He works six days a week and is on his feet eight hours a day. Last time I was there he told me how hard it was to run the place without help. I asked him where his usual crew was since I did not see most for the hairdressers I was familiar with. According to T, commuting for the job was not working out for many of them because gas was so expensive. They had set up shop in their own homes and some had moved on to other jobs that paid better. He was forever short-staffed and could not keep up with the demand. The wait times had grown much longer. That was also the first time that T did a bad job with my hair. So bad infact that I would have gone to another place to set it right had it not also been too short for such correction. I had to wait it out a couple of months, until it was long enough to fix. 

I want to support T because he is so hard-working and gracious to his customers. But comes a point when good intention does not go far enough in business. When T is stretched to the point where he cannot perform the basic function of the business he is running, then all other considerations go out the window unfortunately. I will likely not return there and I am afraid other loyal customers may do the same over time. It will be a natural balancing between what capacity he has left to serve and how many are looking to be served. Reading about Walmart's site re-design to compete with Amazon, brought T to mind. I wasn't sure why at first and then it occurred to me that it has to do with being scrappy, thrifty and really caring about customers to get to the top and then losing the plot in degrees by force of circumstance perhaps - maybe by becoming a victim to the success as T has been.

Needing Blanket

J probably does not remember this anymore. Such is the fickleness of a young person's memory but not their parent's. She had a blanket and a specific corner of a couch she liked to curl up in. Sometimes, I would find her there even on a warm day when a blanket seemed a touch excessive. If I asked her about it she would say "Its a cold world, I need a blanket". It was said in jest but there may have been a tinge of truth to that as well. Those were the hardest years of her young life and it is plausible that the world felt cold to her given how narrow their confines were for her at the time. This was before the first stage of freedom that gave with a driver's license and then the ownership of a car. The blanket remained her steadfast companion until she left to college but her relationship with it evolved with time. 

Looking back, I wonder if the world had started to feel more warm, as she stepped into it more often and on her own. J's blanket is one of many that sit in my linen closet and I use it sometimes. When I find myself reaching for it on a warm day, I wonder if I like J back then sense a cold world and need a blanket. I try to remember her smile as she said her little catch-phrase. When she visited for a couple of days recently, she never sought out the said blanket. She's a young woman starting out in life - her world is filled with ups and downs, dreams and frustrations that in balance likely keep her more warm than cold. These thoughts crossed my mind when my friend L talked about how she could sweat in a cold pool because she's menopausal. L has interesting coping strategies to deal with a cold world. Each time someone upsets her she holds a plank for a minute. 

Pink Silk

 I have a pink silk tunic that's a decade old. Its one of my favorite things to wear but I have done so sparingly and always taken good care of it. Much has come and gone from my wardrobe but the tunic remains. It was the bought in Chennai during business trip. A good family friend A met me during my short stay there and took me to the best place to buy such things. I remember buying kajal and an embroidered bag on the same day. Back home, things were falling apart - it was hard for me to share that with anyone but with A it was easy. I poured my heart out, begged for help and intervention. A was sympathetic but made it clear that what I was asking for was impossible. I was on my own - a mistake had been made, I was paying a steep price for it but I was on my own as far as fixing it. 

I told A, that I did not have it in me to fix things so far beyond repair, that I might sooner leave the mess behind me - attempt a do over. That was the beginning of the end - I did not know it then. That afternoon in Chennai, after we had shopped, A took me to a nice restaurant for lunch. Have way through my meal, I told A, there was no repairing in my future. A had nothing to say in response - the message was received. We moved on to other topics. I did leave the mess behind and moved on. the tunic remained with me the whole time. A relic from times, long left behind but untouched by the darkness. It always made me happy.

Getting Dinner

I had met C at work a few months ago and went to dinner with her recently when we were traveling to the same place. We chatted for hours until the restaurant owner was ready to close. We were women in approximately the same life stage - grown kids, living their independent lives and us not sure what we were doing other than being driven by inertia of motion. Too much time had gone by living life a certain way, routines had been set that kept us sane through professional and personal turmoil. C and I both admire the gusty women who go off the beaten track, dare to live their dreams as crazy and risky as that undertaking may be. We cheer and clap for them, root for their greater success knowing full well we will never be able to step in those shoes. Our lives are far more mundane and no grand missions will be fulfilled.

We will move the cause of our kids and other loved ones a bit further, be there to support them, be their sounding board and so on. That is what the next phase is about. As C says - the job of parenting is not done. It used to be that they were upset for not making the softball team or not being invited to a party now the reasons are bigger and more complex. We helped them work through disappointment then and we do so now as well. In degrees they separate and establish their lives and a new eco-system supports and sustains it. We recede back but hopefully still always count - maybe not the first call but second in the highs and lows of their lives. Dinner with C was most timely - her kids are all older than J and she has been through my phase three times. It was very useful to learn from her experience and see how the world looks for the parent a decade down the road from where I am today. 

Familiar Sounds

I got into a bad place last night where every word had a triggering effect on me,  We had just planted lilies around the crepe myrtle in the front yard. It was hard but very satisfying work - unlike getting rid of a dense row of invasive bushes working every weekend for over two months. Planting the flowers for me was a way to escape my worries of the moment. These days I envy the Rs who live in the house behind mine. They are retirees with two grandbabies that were born within a month of each other. The Rs went from being the people who got the community together to completely oblivious of their surroundings. Those grandbabies have consumed their whole lives in the best possible way, For the first time, I understand what envy feels like - I want what they have. They are retired, surrounded by three adult kids that live in a hundred mile radius of the home they grew up in. 

Two of them are married and recently had babies. The third is still single. R's have a full life - a blooming garden where everything is flourishing. Their actual garden is beautiful too - something they have outsourced to a landscaper who does a good job. I don't want to do that route so I have what I have. And that is true about parenting my way versus theirs. I wanted J to have wings, fly away as far as she needed to - and my wishes have come true. My kid has not been home for over a year. The last time she was here, it was only for a couple of days and this time it will be the same. 

Unlike the R's kids, J is not ever going to come around after work or over the weekends - the visits will be few and far between. My garden will look bare and overtaken by the wild. R's will look controlled and pristine. An allegory for our relative life choices. I heard squealing babies there today and the familiar thump of basketball being shot through the hoop outside their garage. 

It was their youngest son shooting hoops - much like he used to do when I moved to this house over a decade ago. More things changed, more they remained the same for them - not at all for me. Maybe that was what was driving my testiness. I cannot change my wants and they are what they are - I still want J to fly far and way, find her own bliss in ways I could never imagine. I want those things even though it means giving up all those comforts the R's have. 

Paying Respect

Nice essay on expressing connection with things that should have been ours but are not - which these Cambodian artifacts sitting in an American museum are to a person of Cambodian descent. Reading this brought to mind several things at once. The ease with which people pray to things as they appear randomly along the way when you are out and about in India. A little temple, a shrine under a tree, a deity set up somewhere you would not expect but shown respect all the same. People do stop by and pay their respects. 

No one thinks anything of the incongruence. We also don't take ourselves too seriously when it comes to prayer, temples and such - there are some oddities out there that draw people too. The wayside shrines that dot India can be treated as organic part of the culture without going too deep on the topic as some have done, it can be delved into as a research topic. Whichever way you, everyone has a right to express their religiosity if they so wish to any shrine they feel a connection with. The museum guard had not received the memo.

Middling Lonely

Neuroscience suggests that loneliness doesn’t necessarily result from a lack of opportunity to meet others or a fear of social interactions. Instead, circuits in our brain and changes in our behavior can trap us in a catch-22 situation: While we desire connection with others, we view them as unreliable, judgmental and unfriendly. Consequently, we keep our distance, consciously or unconsciously spurning potential opportunities for connections.

Loneliness can be difficult to study empirically because it is entirely subjective. Social isolation, a related condition, is different — it’s an objective measure of how few relationships a person has. The experience of loneliness has to be self-reported, although researchers have developed tools such as the UCLA Loneliness Scale to help with assessing the depths of an individual’s feelings.

Interesting essay about chronic loneliness and what it does to the brain. What is loneliness and how it can be measured is a big part of it. I tested myself on UCLA Loneliness Scale and came out middle of the road and presumably boring. Folks like me would likely feel somewhat lonely sometimes and suffer the consequences moderately. But not much will change - we would just keep sloshing around in the waves of average and remain exactly there. 

The afternoon I took this test was spent working in the yard, pulling weeds. I do not particularly enjoy yardwork but always look forward to that time to help my mind go on complete break. Maybe my level of loneliness drives this craving for solitude and disconnect from people as well - it helps to preserve the status quo.

Late Rise

Loved reading this bit of satire on the greatness of waking up early. There was a time in my life when I aspired to be one of those magical early-risers to improve my life in every way possible, Every effort I made only resulted in failure - that was almost a guaranteed outcome. So after a dozen or so failures to launch, I gave up and accepted that I was not destined for winning and greatness. Now that I am over this entirely, I can chuckle in peace at such headlines knowing I don't even need to apply:

“Winners Wake Up at 4:30 a.m.: The Science of How We Can All Become Rich by Being Less Pathetic”

“I Wake Up Before You Do: Nine Reasons Why I Have a Brand-New Tesla, a Full-Time Startup Job, an Online Side Hustle, and a Great Family, While You Retweet the Dalai Lama, Like a Loser”

I love that as an empty-nester, my mornings can start much later than they ever did. I also don't need to be productive right away. If I want to savor two cups of tea in peace, I can actually do that. I will never become rich and less pathetic but in my defense I am not re-tweeting Dalai Lama despite not having the markers of "success" so well-defined by the author of this hilarious piece. 

Reading Mirror

Chup by Deepa Narayan was an emotionally difficult read for me. I stopped many times along the way feeling depleted. Finally finished reading it on my way home a few weeks ago. Indian women will find some part of their story told in this book in the words of other women or in the author's narrative. The story is not a pleasant one and Narayan does not hesitate to emphasize that point over and over - hence the recurring feeling of depletion as you read. 

I had to wonder if this book will resonate with Indian men or people from outside of India. There are some universal themes there but the focus is very sharply on the Indian woman. The one theme that stood out the most for me is the lack of trusted relationships between women - we are indeed a house divided. I am guilty of not preferring to work for a female boss and conversely do not enjoy managing female employees. I did not have the courage to introspect the reasons for the this - what exactly drives that behavior in me and many other women.

Narayan talks about the lack of trust between women - believing we can actually have each other's back. Perhaps this is a driver. I mentor early career women and find it very satisfying. From the feedback I have heard, my mentees value their relationship with me. But I would not want to convert that people management situation where those same women worked for me. I would rather they used the lessons learned from our conversations to go work elsewhere for someone else. In personal life, the lack of trust bleeds to lack of anchoring friendships that can tide a woman over crisis. 

I have tried with atleast four women I thought were my friends - reached out to them in my most vulnerable time. All four of them decided it was best to move on from me once the crisis was over - they simply did not want to have my "normal" self in their life. I might have been an interesting or even worthy "project" for them so they did what they could to help in that bad patch. But without my project-worthiness I was not someone they wanted to deal with at all. I wondered many times over the years why that was but never could find a satisfactory answer to that question. Maybe it is the inherent lack of trust.

Showing Up

Every time I read stories like this, I feel a sense of hopelessness on behalf of every person out there who is highly productive and delivers results remotely but now has to show up in office and be counted because their employer demands it. When you are threatened with consequences for not congregating at the workplace to "collaborate" one can only hope that the collective resentment will cause people to strike out on their own and create the work-life balance they need and deserve. Last week, I was talking to my old friend L after many years. He is close to retirement and was recently laid off. L describes his process of trying to find a new job at his age - its is arduous. He needs to work another two years in his estimation until he can retire. I hope for his sake that is all he needs because he sounds beat. 

He reminds me of my friend E who says the happiest years of her life started post-retirement - a milestone she had been dreaming of since her 40s. I never thought of myself as the kind of person that looks forward to retirement- I always want to stay busy doing things that I am good at. These kinds of diktats tend to become norms - the standard is set for all to adopt and follow. If these are the conditions in which one can be employed, I am not sure I want it anymore. My peers share my sentiments - those who can afford but never actually craved retirement are feeling differently about the issue. There is something deeply disrespectful about telling a person they are required to show up to an office for their work to count - even when they have a track record of delivering great results from wherever they are. Comes a point in a person's life when they don't want to be controlled like this anymore. 

Dreaming Past

I was taking a day off on a Monday recently and had early morning dreams of meeting P - in an unfamiliar house in India. I was hosting. Some of my family was around but in a blur. He was with his wife and an adorable little daughter. He looked as young as I as remember him - a certain immutable quality to his face, age and time did not make him a different version of the person he used to be. There is good and bad to that as I would find out in my dream. I sought closure, which was always the theme of my dreams about him spanning close to three decades now. I tried to have the conversation that I was too young and stupid to have back then. He did not have much to say back then and in every dream that I have since, we always leave with lack of closure. 

There was something blocked at the core of our relationship that made it so hard to cross the chasm that presumably we both wanted to. He struggled as much as I did but for reasons I did not understand. The vividness of these dreams and their lingering aftertaste of regret blended with sadness has not diminished over the years. Every time there is a hiatus in the dreams, I imagine this time its over and and I am truly done - but as I found out again that morning, not quite. Maybe the dreams are meant to tell me something quite different - that P was not the man I could grow with. 

Life's experiences would wash over him and never change him in any discernable way - you had to wonder how he could be so impervious. He was a Peter Pan of sorts but always mindful of his responsibilities. I wanted see evolution even in those formative years that I knew him because I was experiencing transformation myself. That was before Life happened. The pace of change in me accelerated even further. My dreams of P are stuck in the groove of his mental state - which is ever unchanging. Maybe that's why they will never stop.

Talking Over

I found this essay interesting having been around both men and women going through divorce. The women talk about it - sometime even incessantly until the wounds ultimately scab over. In any divorce there is two sides to the story. The women skew it their way even if they admit to some fault. The men do not like discussing it. They definitely do not like unpacking what went into the unraveling of the marriage - if the wife was egregiously at fault maybe there will be some words said to describe that situation but in a way that still made him look like he did not take a bruising. 

They hurt in silence and likely don't fully heal. They need a friend that they don't always have. The fear of projecting weakness, of being a loser or a failure is too strong to be candid about what went wrong. There is a good deal of overcompensation to prove that the divorce did not impact them at all. 

I was in a dark place for a decade after I decided to leave my ex. Many women I have known over the year can relate to that and will gladly share their own stories. But mean will not talk about it as readily but they do share with people they trust and are know will not judge them. This talk is not driven by need for catharsis as might be the case for women.

Men have fewer friends, fewer sources of support, and are far less likely to reach out for help. This means that, when they fall, there’s often no one there to catch them. Worse, they often won’t let anyone know that they’re falling.

Visiting Again

The experience of visiting the same city over the years in different life stages and mental states creates for a mosaic of feelings. My first time in Seattle was a few months after I first came to America. A new bride and immigrant, starry-eyed about the future and visiting the Pacific Northwest for the first time. We stayed in a nice hotel down-town though I simply cannot remember where. Remember being able to walk to Pike Place Market in the morning and loving its exuberance. I have returned several times over the years - no longer new to my would be future, no longer new to Seattle. 

It is as if the bright colors of this city muted in my eyes to become tinged with the a certain boredom and sadness. I still like it when I visit but it is never like that first time. Like me the city has changed over time - maybe it was a more exuberant then than it is now - maybe the change is mutual, not one-directional. Uncle B lives in Kirkland. I knew him since I was a child, he was close to my parents then but not anymore. I never fully understood what caused the rift between them.

In my single years, he visited me in my apartment a couple of times and crashed on the couch in the living room - which in hindsight was a bit strange. He would bring me a bottle of wine and we drank it together sitting in the balcony after J had gone to bed. We talked about lot of things and I was glad to have conversation with an adult that was not about my problems. I thought nothing of it then - my mind was thrumming with the noise of things I needed to get done to keep my head above the water. The appropriateness of a married man, close to my father's age choosing to spend the night at my apartment was not the most pressing problem I had to deal. If he was trying to get me interested, I did not have the mental capacity to notice.

At some point, I ceased to be single and I did not see Uncle B much - he did stop by when he came to my town for work. Uncle B is a childhood memory gone sour - I don't know what to make of him. He have me a lot of useful parenting advice, insights into how the "system" works in America and ways to navigate it. He used to be one of the people I could call when I had questions about things. But there was something off about his visits and those late night chats in the balcony. Was he always predatory and I was just too clueless to notice or was it that he found his opportunity when I was most vulnerable and I luckily remained just as clueless. Whatever the case, I have never contacted him when in Seattle. Yet, the facts are he never did anything that crossed the line - it was never clear to me what his end-game was if any.