Baking Again

This past year, I returned to bread making after a multi-year hiatus. The recipe I started with was one of the easiest yet and worked out wonderfully. It was exactly what I needed to get back into the flow of things - relearn how the dough should feel to touch when it is ready. I was experimenting a good bit back when I started to bake until I met M. Admittedly, I do not know legions of excellent home bakers but M was certainly highly excellent by any standard. Her breads were the kind you would buy at an upscale bakery. It would be one thing to know of M's talents but I had the privilege of watching her in action in her own kitchen. If she was "baking bread" I am not exactly sure how I would describe my efforts - the level of play bedazzled and bamboozled me to the point that I could not return to baking bread anymore. 

While my productions had been far from perfect, artisan bakery quality - they had been like a solid effort with acceptable results. That was life before I was in M's kitchen. After that it got difficult to view my work in such charitable terms. Then the pandemic happened and everyone was being a sourdough parent - I sat out the trend but enjoyed seeing the efforts of others. It helped me overcome the shock and awe M had created. These folks were having very decent success in their efforts and none of it was perfect - maybe there is path for me yet. Somewhat back in the saddle again, I have decided not to strive for levels of excellence that are simply out of my reach. Home bakers can range from the likes of me to those like M. Every person who aspires to bake a loaf of bread should feel free to do so, no matter what they produce. 

Candle Fixing

On a recent Saturday morning, I decided to melt, re-wick and clean up my dozen or so old candles that have been gathering dust for a long time. The project was generally pointless, took over an hour to complete but it felt deeply satisfying. Melting wax, the smell of the essential oils and the remembering how these candles came into my possession over the years were all components in the experience. Most importantly perhaps the fact that I had the leisure, mental and physical ability to spend a weekend morning in this way. 

Not everyone my age and life-stage can do that. My friend L was out early that morning driving a couple of hours south of where we live to support her daughter who has been fighting a bout of illness and is not even twenty yet. B is out to be with his elderly mother who has been in a series of near death situations and yet too independent to ask for help or gracefully receive it when offered. Any number of folks I know have similar challenges they are coping with every day. My silly candle fixing project made me feel deeply grateful for what I have. That was the best reward of the project perhaps.

Spice Mixing

I used to have a jar of berebere that I made myself a long time ago. The empty (and hand-labeled) jar remains but the spice has long gone. It's too easy to over-use because it really lights up the taste of things. No surprise I did not save the recipe but vaguely remembered that some components of it were roasted and others were not. After some looking around found one that sounded about right. Thinking back to the time about when I had first made this spice mix, brought back memories of the events leading up. There was a kid I knew at the time whose boyfriend had made a lovely dish involving berebere. That was the first time I had tasted it as a distinct spice used like pepper to season a dish that was already prepared and ready to serve. Everyone at the table enjoyed the meal and like me they all learned about the spice that was the star of the show. I have since forgotten what the dish was exactly, but I recall how I looked up a recipe soon after and made my own. 

There is always the first time for the taste of a very memorable spice-mix. Miss M's aunt's dhansak spice mix - one that no one could replicate because the old lady never thought to write up her recipe and she seemed immortal when she was alive. L's sambar powder with its strong cinnamon top note that blended in ever so smoothly with the freshly grated coconut she always added to her sambar. I wanted to stay in that kitchen just to smell the dish come together in stages until it was time to eat. There are any number of sambars I have tasted but L's is the one that defines the baseline taste of what I am aspiring for when I cook my own. Then there was this semi-sweet mashed pumpkin dish R used to make when I was a kid. She always saved some for me knowing how much I loved it. All of these people are no longer in my life - one of them deceased. But the tastes keep them alive in my memory forever. 

Collective Lens

Also from White Noise (which I am really enjoying) these beautiful lines about tourist hotspots:

“Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see. The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We’ve agreed to be part of a collective perception. This literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism.”

That was the experience coming face to face with Monalisa or David. Walking up to Rialto Bridge, looking into the city from Sacre Coeur , the Parthenon and so many others. There is no way to see these places or objects except through the collective gaze of everyone who has or will see it. You simply cannot come to your own conclusion about it or leave with an impression that you can claim to be private, novel or unknown. It is impossible to form any sense of intimacy with them. So you have to ask yourself, why even bother to be one among millions. I have experienced such places and things as being devoid of life and energy in a way. The intensity of our collective gaze seems to be snuffed out the essence of what we are meant to admire and be in awe of. 

I have had two opportunities in my life to visit Thirupati and come in the presence of the deity for what seems like an extremely short period of time considering the wait and effort it takes to get there. While millions have come to that exact same spot for hundreds of years, both of the times I hade the privilege were unique, personal and deeply moving. It was as if I had experienced the act of being present near the deity in a way only I could. I believe that is how every person feels about it - millions upon millions of way to experience the same moment. Reading these lines from DeLillo brought this highly contrasting experiences to mind. 

Good Reading

Just finished reading The Devil in White City and absolutely loved. Last Larson book I read (and also enjoyed greatly) was The Splendid and the Vile so my expectations for this book were high. The way the two plot-lines flow in parallel supported by a common event - the World Fair, makes the book an engrossing read. The protagonists in both Daniel Burnham (the chief architect of the World Fair) and H.H Holmes (the serial killer) execute impossible things amid constraints most would find hard to overcome. A strong inner-drive and preternatural self-possession help both succeed the former in splendid and the later in a vile way. 

The thing that struck me most is how easy it was for Holmes to go about his murderous spree for as long as he did without detection. His choice of target made it so and that is still the kind of woman who would be most vulnerable. Ingenue in a big, bad city chasing dreams that were bigger than her small town would support. It reminded me of the Gilgo Beach serial killer podcast I had listened to a while back before the suspect was arrested. There is always a certain category of human (women more so than men) who are simply not considered material or relevant enough to society to warrant a sustained interest in their disappearance. It's like they were invisible the whole time - so nothing really changed when they were gone. 

Power Haunt

 In his book White Noise Don DeLillo writes this of a blended family with his and her kids :

Babette and I do our talking in the kitchen. The kitchen and the bedroom are the major chambers around here, the power haunts, the sources. She and I are alike in this, that we regard the rest of the house as storage space for furniture, toys, all the unused objects of earlier marriages and different sets of children, the gifts of lost in-laws, the hand-me-downs and rummages. Things, boxes. Why do these possessions carry such sorrowful weight? There is a darkness attached to them, a foreboding.

Even without them being boxed, past-life remains can carry with them darkness and foreboding. You can remove them from sight and be aware that they exist and imply things that you do need to resolve. The other approach is to attempt a peaceful integration with the here and now. That can be a mixed bag to depending on the kinds of triggers such amalgamation brings about at inopportune times. I found DeLillo's description of kitchen and bedroom as power haunts for such couples very poignant. Food for the body and soul, sleep, and love - that is what it takes to keep such unions in a state of peace and tranquility.

Soaking Music

Discovered this quirky essay on raagas while looking for the history of Raag Chhayanat - one of my favorites and well-known to be a crowd pleaser. There are many amazing renditions of this raaga but the one I love the most has to be by Rashid Khan - no matter how many times I hear it, there is always the special kind of resonance. 

I have not been fortunate to attend any of his concerts but even listening to a recording can create that soaked-in music feeling that I love. Many years ago I had read a piece by an architect who said that music soaks into the pores of buildings - bricks and stones, so there is a great value in playing beautiful music throughout a home. In time you can feel the difference. I don't believe this was any scientific evidence provided to substantiate this claim but I loved the concept of inanimate things soaking up music and the house being "alive with the sound of music" in a sense. 

Since reading that I have always tried to see if I can tell the difference between places that are exposed to a lot of great music and those that are not. I heard a trio of musicians accompanied by a pianist perform some popular arias in an old church recently. The acoustics of the place were fabulous and the setting very intimate. We were seated three rows way from the performers' dais. It seemed to me that the church had steeped in so much beautiful music for hundreds of years that it was able to take an active part of our musical experience that evening. It would not be the same thing if the venue had been something modern without as much experience with music. Maybe the walls, pews and the altar has soaked it all in.

Priced Out

Any plebian schadenfreude reading how hard it is for the uber-rich to live their lifestyle will not last too long. While those billions go pretty fast it seems but they keeping making more (unlike the rest of us) to cover for inflation: 

Many luxe life amenities rose much more than the average, of course. A 3-course dinner for 40 people catered by Ridgewells of Maryland is up 9% from a year ago Ridgewells CEO Susan Lacz says rising food prices and increased costs for both labor and transportation contributed to the jump. A dozen bespoke cotton shirts from London’s Turnbull & Asser will set you back $10,020, up 7%. The price of an Olympic-size pool is up for the eleventh consecutive year, to $4.8 million, a 6% increase. Talking about your problems with an Upper East Side psychiatrist now costs $500 per 45-minute session, up 5%.

Prices of non-essential, discretionary things stopped making any sense to me a while back - there has to be some foundational reasoning behind the cost of things. When that is no longer evident, as an average shopper I move on. The price of eggs has been an interesting one in that regard for me. Given the very low volume of consumption, it is not hard to afford even the most expensive variety but the question is why should a consumer pay such absurd prices? With food prices people do have some choice - they can always scale back and down. 

False Hope

R has been my LinkedIn connection for nearly two decades now. Since we stopped working together, I ran into him once at a local park where he was jogging - and that was by now nearly ten years ago. Lately R always has the actively hiring badge on at all times. I did not wise up to this fact at first. A friend had been recently laid off and I pinged R to see if he was hiring for her skills and he replied quite promptly he was not hiring at all as business was tough. I imagined it was a timing thing - the window of opportunity had recently closed. 

Sadly, a few more folks I got caught up in other layoff cycles and my pings to R produced exactly the same response. I came to the conclusion that the badge is more signaling and marketing purposes, unrelated to any reality of his business. R manages the US operations for his company - so he has visibility to all US-based roles. That is the reason I even reached out to him the few times that I did. 

This badge seems to have become a vanity metric these days - R is the not the only one purporting to be hiring away when infact they are not or haven't been for a while. In theory if a purple unicorn walks in the door asking for intern-level pay with retiree-level experience, R might consider hiring. But that does not describe the average person out in the market looking for work. I wish someone would tell R and those like him to stop sending these false signals of hope specially in tough times such as these have been for many. 

Inner Beauty

My first encounter with a beauty parlor was in my teens and in Bihar so a lot of this essay takes me back in time and place. I don't remember the name of the woman who ran the parlor but it was located inside a maze of back alleys away from the main street and the storefronts of the marketplace. I usually went there with my mother and once we got deep enough in the maze, the sounds from the street would die down. That quietness followed us into the parlor. The woman was younger than my mother, neatly dressed and chatty. She would get to work on me quite unprompted- almost divining what improvements my teenage self needed to shine from within and without. My mother had her hair cut sometimes but that was usually not the reason for our visit. 

The process was completed in under thirty minutes if there were no other customers - which was often the case. But there were busy days and we would need to wait. Perms were common then so I observed women getting those. Getting your hair streaked with bleach was not quite in vogue yet but there were some folks who were "edgy" enough to try that. It was fun for me to observe the transformation these girls went through - they came in one person into the parlor and departed another. The woman was like a magician with her jars of spells and potions. I remained mostly as I was but the act of "beautification" felt good anyway. My mother was always pleased with the results and that was an important metric in my life at that point. I did not think of the beauty parlor as an escape from the male patriarchy - maybe it had been but the fact just escaped my attention. Maybe that is where the inner glow came from.

Eating Out

I have never been to Argentina and I am not a meat-lover but this lovely essay makes me want to take the trip and definitely try the meat. Lot of useful tips for the would-be traveler, including this one about steering clear of the bread basket

With any order from the master menu comes the Bread Basket, which should be treated as you would treat a basket of wax fruit, that is, as a purely decorative ornament. It is considered bad form to actually eat anything from Bread Basket, as this will force the restaurant staff to send someone down into the bread cellar for a replacement roll before placing it on the next table.

In fact, you won't find good bread anywhere in Argentina. You can buy day-old baguette segments in a plastic sack, or else purchase the large sheets of white American-style bread used to make their triangular canapes (sandwiches de miga). The latter are actually punched out of the bread sheets like cookies from rolled dough - I would not be surprised to see miga bread being sold on a giant roller, paper-towel style.

I can't say I love dulce de leche but I do like a well made tres leches cake which in my mind is somehow related. But this summation of the dessert's place in the world made me smile - that would be true about all the mishti I once loved and still available in great abundance in Kolkata but I can't work up nearly the same enthusiasm I once had for them. 

Dulce de leche is a culinary cry for help. It says "save us, we are baffled and alone in the kitchen, we don't know what to do for dessert and we're going to boil condensed milk and sugar together until help arrives". This cloying dessert tar is so impossibly sweet that you wish you were ten years old again, just so you could actually enjoy it.

Tracing Origins

Interesting reading about ancestry tourism. All parties involved in the trend are making a buck thanks people craving to feel rooted to some place and something real

So-called heritage tourism has grown into its own travel category, like skiing and whale watching. In 2019, an Airbnb survey found that the share of people traveling to “trace their roots” worldwide had increased by 500 percent since 2014; the company announced that it was teaming up with 23andMe, the DNA-testing service, to meet this demand, offering trips to clients’ ancestral homelands. Ancestry, the company behind the family-search website, has partnered with a travel agency. The governments of Germany and Scotland have websites devoted to heritage tourism. Conde Nast Traveller is all over this trend. In Dublin, the Shelbourne Hotel’s “genealogy butler” can research your Irish side, if you so please. 

Ancestry and 23andMe have built a nice product portfolios all around the universal question of "Whom Am I". So many ways to answer that and just as many ways to monetize. Bring in interested partners to the party and the size of the pie only grows bigger. It got me thinking about common themes that tie people's travel behavior and some of the more universal ones. Coming home for the holidays wherever home might be and whatever the holiday of note. Going on pilgrimages. Following in the path of - this can be quite versatile. The path of history, a modern icon, a place popularized by a fictional literary hero, a real movie hero and so on. 

Moon Ashes

Do people really need to have their ashes buried on the moon ? Reading this story made me think about the Tibetian Book of the Dead

O nobly-born, that which is called death hath now come. Thou art departing from this world, but thou art not the only one; [death] cometh to all. Do not cling, in fondness and weakness, to this life. Even though thou clingest out of weakness, thou hast not the power to remain here. Thou wilt gain nothing more than wandering in this Sangsāra. Be not attached [to this world]; be not weak. Remember the Precious Trinity. 

The question of sending ashes to be buried on the moon seems to be a bit of self-aggrandization combined with clinginess that we are advised against. What does it matter where the ashes go in the end? Who will care about it anyway?  It seems the less fuss made over it the better - specially for those who survive and have to deliver on such last wishes.

However, sending a clipping of your hair or the ashes of your pet dog to the Moon may not qualify as culturally and historically important.

The problem, therefore, is where we want to place a line in the sand as we step out into the cosmos onto the shorelines of other worlds.

We cannot turn back the clock on private space enterprise, nor should we.

But this failed mission with ashes and vanity payloads exemplifies the unexplored questions in the legal and ethical infrastructure to support commercial activities.

Might be best to leave the moon and other celestial objects alone and confine our activities to place we were granted space to live on - not like we are doing a great job of being custodians of the earth and its many bounties. Not sure why we feel like have we earned the rights to expand the scope of our mindlessness and profligacy.

Feeling Human

This quote from Rebecca Goldstein in Annaka Harris's book Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind made me feel better about my own lack of real scientific education and even vindicated my whole-hearted support for J getting a humanities degree: 

It is somewhat depressing to think of an absolute limit on our science: to know that there are things we can never know. . . . Mathematical physics has yielded knowledge of so many of the properties of matter. However, the fact that we material objects have experiences should convince us that it cannot, alas, yield knowledge of them all. Unless a new Galileo appears, who offers us a way of getting at properties of matter that need not be mathematically expressible, we will never make any scientific progress on the hard problem of consciousness.

The "hard problem of consciousness" while not solved and explained in a scientific way can be approached from a non-scientific perspective. Maybe a humanities education allows a person to observe the many manifestations of human consciousness more acutely and discern the foundational elements that make it up. 

I grew up around a lot of artsy, non-scientific people who appeared to have a richer inner-life compared to those who went the traditional route of math, science and engineering education - there were plenty of those in my family. While I was not so bold as to follow the "whimsical" artsy path - my need for early independence and financial security was too compelling for that. But I always remained enamored of a solid humanities education. Maybe that vibrant inner-life that I observed came from understanding something deeper about human consciousness that math and science could not explain - it made them more alive and interesting as people.

Number One

Traveling over the last few years has been specially rewarding for me coming as it does after a long hiatus. There were so many obstacles to getting away and going away - a lot of it self-inflicted but some were true logistical challenges. Freedom has been exhilarating and each trip has made me think of what is has been on the top of my bucket list since childhood. That has never changed and I have yet to travel to my number one place of all places. I am hoping this year I will be able to get there. Any dream that goes so far back becomes imbued with a grand sense of purpose and meaning. This one will not be just any other vacation but the trip that begins to get things I wish to get done before I die - certain places are included there as are goals. 

Recently, a kid I know asked me what made me work hard at my job if I did not have a big project to work on - like a major home improvement project people my age take on for instance. I answered that it was always travel for me - that is my reward for a year of hard work and the thing I look forward to. Any project done or possession acquired does not move the needle nearly as much. We have completed some useful projects around the house over the years but I certainly did not feel like a dream come true when the job was done. Some places I have visited very much felt that way - and these were places that were nowhere near the top of my bucket list. The idea of getting to number one feels monumental. 

Sin Washing

Over the years, I have spent a lot of time trying to resolve my relationship with my mother. Issues remain where they are and time is running out. The only way forward is to accept the status quo and make the most of what is and has been good, ignore the rest. This seems for work for my mother and I but has consequences for my relationship with J. 

I see how intergenerational trauma manifests itself but don't know exactly how to break the cycle. I used to be deeply trusting and ready to share everything with my mother when I was younger - it felt like the ultimate safe space. As I grew older and suffered a series of serious setbacks in my personal life, I started to realize I was giving infinitely more than I ever received from her. My mother as a woman has always been a perfect stranger to me - I know close to nothing about her that matters because she is a deeply private person. The bar for privacy is so high that the person becomes a two-dimensional caricature of a human being. That is who she is and that is best I will ever get. 

I strove to be a very different kind of mother to J - be truly an open book where nothing is off-limits. She only has to ask and she will get a complete and truthful answer. For J's personality that is like being told to drink out of a firehose until it stops when she only ever needed a sip of water. She needs a nuanced approach to communication on things that are material and relevant to her - not my no-holds barred style. 

Coming out of decades of feeling gaslighted and betrayed by my mother who soaked up every morsel of information I gave her acting as if it were her right to have it my duty to provide, I cannot modulate my approach with J. Any filter, any calibration feels like repeating the sins of my mother - something I cannot do. For me to be at peace with myself, I have to do it my way and ironically it does not serve J at all. 

Redundant Technology

This particular use case for AI far exceeds the usual level of pointlessness as things go. In many parts of the world finding food to survive is still a big deal so snacking is not even a concept. Surviving the day takes so much mental and physical effort that the person has no capacity to game even if in theory they could. The next level of uselessness is the chip-crunch silencer so the gamer is not annoyed. 

To design its “crunch cancellation” technology, Doritos partnered with Brooklyn, New York-based interactive design studio Smooth Technology, which developed the software over six months. The development team used artificial intelligence and machine learning to train its software to recognize the precise sounds involved in a Doritos crunch, analyzing more than 5,000 different crunch sounds along the way. Once the software singles out and recognizes a crunch sound, it filters it out before it is transmitted through your microphone, in effect canceling the crunch and allowing you to silently enjoy your snack.

But all games are not made equal - there are those that aim to solve real world problems. 

.. EarthGamesUW offers students from diverse disciplines—computer science to English, information sciences to education—the opportunity to produce real products and practice professional skills, all while having an impact on climate change.

In the same vein, maybe the crunch-silencer application can go a different more socially useful direction in the future, become a selective noise cancellation solution. There are homes where a child cannot fall asleep because the adults are in a loud, heated argument - there is value in canceling that noise out so the kid sleeps in peace, has less stress and anxiety in their life - wakes up ready to learn at school, create a path out of the turbulence at home. 

Bringing Together

Such a wonderful way to bring students and senior citizens together. It would be great to see such partnerships be the norm around the country instead of an limited, experimental exception. 

The University of Tulsa School of Music and Montereau recently entered into a novel partnership. In exchange for free room and board, two TU music students are residing at Tulsa’s premier not-for-profit retirement community, where they will interact with residents, perform concerts and conduct open practices throughout the year.

“Intergenerational socializing and connecting are so important and enjoyable,” said Scott Nield, Montereau’s CEO. “Our young and older adults have more in common than you think and can learn so much from one another. Having young adults with the gift and specialty of music living with us will enrich the lives of our residents and give these young performers the opportunity to hone their craft, all the while enjoying living in a resort-style campus filled with wonderful people.”

All the talent and experience of the elderly can be locked away in some assisted living facility even as younger generations flounder along looking for help and guidance in their lives. This is a great way to connect people who can give and receive without any further obligation than just being present in each other's lives. This is something to cherish in a transactional world where everything comes with a price tag. 

Dragnet Charm

These lines from Emile Zola's Au Bonhuer Des Dames capture the exact feeling of being caught in the throngs of holiday shoppers all gawking at shop windows

..Denise had the sensation of a machine, operating at high pressure, whose movement had reached the shelves. They were no longer the cold windows of the morning; now they seemed heated and vibrating with inner trepidation. People were watching them, arrested women were crushing themselves in front of the mirrors, a whole brutal crowd of lust. And the fabrics lived, in this passion of the sidewalk: the lace had a quiver, fell and hid the depths of the store, with a disturbing air of mystery; the pieces of cloth themselves, thick and square, breathed, blew a tempting breath; while the overcoats arched more on the mannequins which took on a soul, and the large velvet coat swelled, supple and warm, as if on shoulders of flesh, with the beating of the throat and the quivering of the loins. But the factory heat with which the house burned came mainly from the sales, from the jostling of the counters, which could be felt behind the walls. There was the continuous hum of the machine at work, a crowd of customers, crowded in front of the shelves, stunned under the goods, then thrown at the checkout. And this was settled, organized with mechanical rigor, a whole population of women passing through the force and logic of the gears.

Even today, the shopping district in any iconic city feels exactly as Zola describes. The shop windows are like dragnets sweeping the gawking shoppers in and then through a series of moves that occur within the shop, the "machine" separates them from their money and spits them out on the street with things they most likely do not need and will experience buyer's remorse over. The cycle repeats in many shop windows as they work their way down the street, swimming in the great tide of shoppers like themselves. 

I am not a shopper and just about everything that looks beautiful in a shop-window feels extremely over-priced to me. Those are not numbers I am comfortable with so buying is not even a remote option in my case. There are things I might enjoy looking at and there are things that I will actually purchase for personal use - the two are very far apart from each other. Being thrust in a crowd that is intent on real shopping is a very suffocating experience for me and I look for the first opportunity to duck into a side street where there is little if any action. It's where I feel safe from the machine that Zola so eloquently describes. 

New Words

I learned that there is such a word as situationship from this story about the OUP word of the year (also a word I did not know). Having learned of its existence, decided to read a bit more to understand what situationship means. Sounds like, it labels a certain type of relationship that has existed for the longest time. People need a person they can represent as their significant other when the need arises, without needing to be in sober earnest about that individual or the relationship. 

For many it is a way to escape feeling lonely and hopeless about their romantic prospects. They have someone available to fill that spot on-demand, while they explore more durable options. Not a great situation to be in if the goal is a real and meaningful relationship but life is complicated. There are compromise choices that we understand are less than ideal but feel compelled to make anyway. Rent in a big city can be enough to drive a young couple into a situationship. They cannot afford to wait until the right one comes along - they do have a have a roof above their head today and some semblance of a life.

Money is the main factor in both Gen-Z and Millennials' decisions to move in with their partners, coming in at 80 and 76 percent respectively. The percentage significantly drops for the older generations, with finances only factoring into 56 percent of Gen-X and 44 percent of Baby Boomers' decisions

It is quite a luxury for a young person to have the emotional and financial resources to remain single until exactly the right person appears on the scene. The job market for young professionals presents some unique challenges these days. When you combine that with the loneliness epidemic, it is no surprise that many will jump into a situationship to survive until better things happen.

Socially Distant

This article about the end-times of social media for those who were there from the beginning resonates with me even though my social presence is sparse at best. I have seen people bring their digital behavior into in-person interactions as well. It is underscored by the acting social, friendly and wanting to have a real conversation when in fact the person does not have the capacity or inclination to do any of that. A typical text message from some of this ilk will read like this "Hey! you have been on my mind. It's been forever since we met. Sorry I have been busy traveling most days of the month. How is the the last of this month? I am in town and would love to grab lunch or dinner". 

All that sounds great except nothing materializes from this. In the past, I would respond with specific availability to see what worked from the other person. There would be crickets after that because the intent of the message was not to actually meet for anything at all but act social and keep the connection alive. I would be one of several dozen people in receipt of that message. Over time, I have learned to play along and respond in the manner expected. I just reply "Sounds great! Would love to meet" and then each go our separate ways for the rest of the year, not feel obligated to do any further touch-points to keep the connection alive. 

Social media today is less driven by actual social connection. It is powered by the “appearance of social connection,” says Marlon Twyman II, a quantitative social scientist at USC Annenberg who specializes in social network analysis. “Human relationships have suffered and their complexity has diminished. Because many of our interactions are now occurring in platforms designed to promote transactional interactions that provide feedback in the form of attention metrics, many people do not have much experience or practice interacting with people in settings where there are collective or communal goals for a larger group.” This has also led to people being more image-conscious and identity-focused in real-world interactions, too, Twyman adds.

This is my experience as well - the appearance of social connection is the key driver. If a real world interaction is supposed to provide feedback in the form of attention metrics, I can see why most people would shy away from it. The only in-person meeting that will make any sense is one that converts into a digital record that attracts a lot of desirable attention. I can see why meeting one such as myself for lunch or dinner is simply not going to deliver the needed metrics, so the person will not prioritize it. 

Friend Family

It is great to see India is evolving out of the obsessive-compulsive need to be married and achieve social standing. The fact that people who are single by choice or ended up that way after a failed attempt at marriage have a choice to remain that way is huge progress from my times which sounds pre-historic by now. 

Some research has shown that the happiest segment of the population is women who are never married, and without children. Housework and taking care of children is largely done by women, which benefits men. If they are financially independent, women stand to gain more from being unmarried, which allows them to have greater autonomy

I know a few women who would belong in the happiest segment according to the said research. Reality is a bit nuanced - it is not happiness without some penalties. These women are expected to provide material and other support to the rest of the extended family. Being single is construed as unlimited time and resources to help anyone and everyone who is in need of it. 

My friend L has been enlisted repeatedly to be the guardian of a second cousin with severe mental health issues. No one else in the family feels like this is part of their collective responsibility specially that a single woman with no kids is bouncing around with no purpose to fulfill in her life - they are graciously giving her one. The other ladies I know in this segment have their own set of unique troubles. But I would agree that in balance they are happier than their peers who are married to meet their social obligations our out of filial duty. 

I would love to see this style of cohabitation become an option for elderly couples and specially those who lose their spouse - it sounds way better than being consigned to an old-age home or left to fend for themselves with kids living far away and unable to provide the level of care they need.

Breaking Rank

Very interesting article about AI and early adopters among contract workers. It brought to mind a former client who was ahead of his times being a digital marketer when it was not even a well-defined line of work. P took to new technology like duck to water even though he was not the youngest or the most educated in his peer-group at work. The other marketers were comfortable doing things the old way even when they had seen P succeed with digital tools. They just did not see the connection between the tooling and the creative and iterative nature of their work. For most of these folks, the tools broke their natural rhythm - they were not resisting adoption because they were technophobes or luddites. They simply could not gain the acceleration P was using the set of tools he was so adeptly using. 

Fast forward some twenty-five years, P is still in the same role he was in those many years ago. Everyone else he once worked with has moved on to do other things - some have changed careers a few times. If I think of that experience as something to learn or extrapolate from, I have to question the wisdom, merits and even feasibility of at-scale adoption of this technology to the point all employers can have require and expect every employee to augment their work with AI to be more prolific, productive and other things. There will be the likes of P and then there will the rest. For some the benefits will be hard if not impossible to harness and they will find some other way to adapt to the world as they find it - just like all those folks who worked alongside P did.

Watercolor Fireworks

I like Alice Munro to admire her style but don't get as much out of the stories themselves. The way she starts off Nettles is the kind of perfection that draws me to her writing: 

In the summer of 1979, I walked into the kitchen of my friend Sunny’s house near Uxbridge, Ontario, and saw a man standing at the counter, making himself a ketchup sandwich.

There is so much to think about in that short and dense introduction. It was a summer (in my mind still daylight). Her visit is likely not one that Sunny had anticipated. But the star of the show is the ketchup sandwich. I have no idea what that is but ketchup has got to be the main feature and that makes it sound like a dish a person with limited access to ingredients, inexperienced with cooking and seeking a short-cut would do. 

To a reader, a lot has been said about this yet unknown and unnamed man by placing him in the act of making said sandwich at Sunny's kitchen counter. I turned pre-disposed to believe that a romantic union between Sunny and this man would not be fruitful or enduring. To be able to achieve all that in the mind of a reader in an opening paragraph which runs a sentence and a half has got to be genius. 

The next gem in the story that did at all not proceed in the way I that I imagined it would reading that opening was:

Lust that had given me shooting pains in the night was all chastened and trimmed back now into a tidy pilot flame, attentive, wifely.

Such a beautiful description of how a relationship might evolve into tidy, attentive reliable - spousal.

The story was nice enough but as with any and all of Munro's writing, I am there for the magnificent word play that to me is like watching someone make a watercolor painting with fireworks.

Thinking Plants

I love houseplants but have very few of them given how the work involved in keeping them all alive grows exponentially with how much life and beauty they bring into the space. There is certain divine fairness to that equation but one that does not serve me well specially when I am away for several weeks a at time. My friend M gifted me an orchid plant several months ago and I had managed to keep just about all the flowers alive for the whole time feeding it ice-cubes weekly. When I returned from vacation there was not a single flower left though the leaves remained healthy and green. The idea of plant straws is great and logically it might even work. I need to experiment with a home-made version of the thing to see it deliver in practice. A bit of thin PVC tubing should in theory serve the same purpose as the brass straw. 

Thinking of houseplants and my somewhat theoretical love of them always brings T to mind. I worked with her some years ago. She lived in a condo in Chicago at the time and when you walked through the front door it was as if you had stepped into a tropical rain-forest. The place was teeming with houseplants of all shapes and sizes. T traveled a fair bit and had elaborate mechanisms to keep her plants thriving while she was out. Some of those plants were over a decade old - they were acquired when T first moved to America from Spain. Keeping them alive and well had symbolic importance to her. That was a love of plants manifested in a tangible way. T was that kind of person - she did not just imagine the life she would like or love, she took steps to make it happen. 

Seeing Places

The villages of Tuscany just before the holiday season appeared extraordinarily bleak. I am not sure what I was expecting to see but the lack of people, light and activity felt quite remarkable - a far cry from how the bigger cities were decked out for Christmas. People come to this part of the world hoping to see their mental image of Italy come to life in some way. My earliest ones of Italy were formed from black and white movies by De Sica, Rosellini and Fellini. 

So there has to be disconnect there - too much time has passed between then and now. The cars on the roads of the Tuscan countryside are not much different from those in America. Everything feels to big for the size of the roads but people make it work. Each time, I see a large SUV parked on a cobbled road hundreds of years old, I have to wonder how it got there and why. After a while, the villages blend into a singularity of The Archetypical Village. Since the people are nowhere to be seen, the personality traits of each one does not quite shine atleast not in a way that a foreign traveler can discern.

The more the world gets photographed, recorded and socially shared, the less the reality of it fails to move the soul. The tourist hotspots during off-season are impossible to enjoy in solitude. It is a variant of getting a glimpse of the Monalisa. Where the off-season does not support services, the scene is devoid of life - like you walked into Disneyland afterhours. I felt like I experienced a bit of both lately since we have been traveling off-season. 

Planned Meander

Reading about this word that describes travel, intent and wandering in a holistic way was fun. It helped me understand how I travel

In a literal sense, coddiwomple can describe a physical journey or expedition. It embodies the idea of setting off on an adventure without a fixed itinerary, allowing oneself to be guided by curiosity and spontaneity. This could involve exploring unfamiliar places, taking detours, or simply meandering through uncharted territory.

Metaphorically, coddiwomple can extend beyond physical travel and encompass various aspects of life. It can represent a mindset of embracing uncertainty and embracing the unexpected. It encourages individuals to step outside their comfort zones, embrace new experiences, and approach life with a sense of open-mindedness and flexibility.

My vacations definitely follow the literal sense of the word. It usually starts with thinking about the general sense of what I would want to experience on the trip and booking the round-trip to the major airport. The rest is an outline at best of the places we will try to see. On my better planned vacations, I have booked places to stay for the first few nights. Everything is flexible after that except the return date. So adventures happen along the way and we end up going places that were never part of the plan and decide to drop things that were on the list. 

I don't believe I have taken this to the metaphorical level yet. Judging by how much I get out of my coddiwomple vacations, chances are I will gain a great deal by extending its remit to the rest of my life.

Child Again

Reading The Lioness Awakens has been a wonderful experience for me even though I bought the book as a gift for J. It turned out to be complicated to give her exclusive access on our shared Kindle account so I ended up reading it. Every poem in the collection can give a woman food for thought. Reading some took me back in time - a time of ignorance and stubbornness laced with vulnerability. 

This short one for example made me think of my late teens when I still lived with my parents. The value and importance of marriage was being impressed upon me regularly because I was demonstrating signs of being a contrarian - not sold on the concept at all and looking for ways out of that inevitability that was to come in my twenties.  

The idea that you invest the best years of your life to overcome friction and incompatibility with your spouse so when you both finally run out of steam to fight and are too old to need much beyond a nurse, you have a reliable one at hand free of cost, seemed like the very definition of living in hell. Why would any sane person want to sign up for that was beyond my comprehension. Eden has the best words for that feeling:

They’re all looking for someone to grow old with and I am looking for the one who can make me feel like a child again.

First Out

It wasn't clear who this CEO was called out making a mistake for his layoff messaging. It seems like did did and said what everyone else does. Over-hire when it is expedient to based on bad, ill-conceived bets that will predictably fail. The reason that company leadership fails is related to the bad hiring that manages to float up to the top before getting laid. They are able to do this because they learn to manipulate the system of rewards exceptionally well and that does not require or even support any actual performance on the job. 

When the entire leadership team at the company is comprised of this ilk, cycles of hiring frenzy followed by layoffs will be part of their operating rhythm until they cease exist. It is commonly understood that layoffs are a sign of bad management but somehow the said bad management never has to face the consequences for being bad. I can't help think about how the person giving their "thoughts and prayers" speech on the eve of a layoff needs to be the first one to be escorted out the door but never are.

Ripe Problem

On a recent vacation in the rural part of another country,  I recalled reading this article about Airbnb product managers or in this case their supposed demise. The place we stayed had raving reviews, the location was perfect and the hosts supposedly made a real effort to help the guests get to know the country they were visiting. That all sounded awesome. The one bit of detail that I had missed is that none of the reviews were from guests who visited this place off-season as we did. I have no doubt all that was said about the place is true but what is true of summer may not be for the dead of winter. The first night the place was freezing and the insufficient heating would not warm it up until early morning. The next night we tripped a breaker and lost power for several hours. The third and last night was largely uneventful. By then the host and I had got our relationship pretty strained and testy. I was glad to be out of there and I am sure she shared the sentiment given the high frequency of events during a short stay. 

Looking back, product managers could have done a lot to help with a situation that is fairly common in older towns without modern amenities - the house simply does not support them. The host usually has a set of rules that is longer than a car manual and the guest misses details that will prove critically important during their stay - it sours things for everyone. The host is always on alert for the next issue that will arise, the guest feels like they made a mistake believing reviews and so on. In reality the long set of rules and instructions should be converted into FAQs supported by audio and video like an e-learning program. 

While the guest is not expected to get trained the rules of the house before they check-in but it may not hurt to give them karma points that convert into discounts over time to do the diligence ahead of time - save everyone needless hassle. Once they have an issue, a natural language search should point them to the exact part of the house rules training where their question is answered. The host can and should reasonably expect that the guest did this search and looked for help before contacting them. In every negative experience I have had over a decade of using Airbnb, it has always been the lack of access to information in a way that was standard and understandable. This is an area ripe for improvement for those designers and product managers that remain with Airbnb - the problem is overdue for solving. 

Leaden Incurious

Reading the Carl Sagan quote in this article almost made me tear up because its so true and sad. He said this way before we had the tablets and video games stepping in as nannies for young kids because the adult caregivers in their lives have no capacity to do better than that. 

“My experience is, you go talk to kindergarten kids or first-grade kids, you find a class full of science enthusiasts. And they ask deep questions. ‘What is a dream, why do we have toes, why is the moon round, what is the birthday of the world, why is grass green?’ These are profound, important questions. They just bubble right out of them. You go talk to 12th grade students and there’s none of that. They’ve become leaden and incurious. Something terrible has happened between kindergarten and 12th grade and it’s not just puberty.”

Year after year, the workforce draws from the vast ranks of these "leaden and incurious" adults we raise as a society. That lack of curiosity and inability to ponder deep questions leads to bad outcomes for enterprises of all kinds. Work  becomes about going through a new set of motions without the desire to do wonderful, amazing and novel things. 

Anyone who tries to do something different, challenge the status quo is met with a lot of inertia and resistance. This would be the kind of person who refused to let go of their kindergarten-era curiosity and does not fit in with their generation. It is no surprise that you run into very few of this type, much less often you see them be able to break the resistance barrier and do good in the world.

Missing Data

Reading this book recommended by a friend who is a lot younger than me and is also a voracious reader. I love catching up with her to learn about what she's read lately and what she truly enjoyed. I cannot match the clip at which P reads - that was me more than thirty years ago, but it is great to live that life vicariously through her. This statistic caught my eye for a number of reasons :

A 2016 study found that 90% of French women had been victims of sexual harassment on public transport;55 in May that year two men were jailed for an attempted gang rape on a Paris train.

I have used public transportation in Paris only as a tourist and for the short duration of my stay. From my vantage point it did not seem particularly unsafe but I was in the hive of activity during daylight hours, not commuting like a local. It goes to show how far the gap can be between perception and reality. I do have a lot of commuter experience in India and the 90% number would be about right based on what I know. I had to wonder if a woman from France traveling in India by local bus or train would come away with the same false sense of safety as I did in Paris. Maybe the locals in India would be less likely to bother her and perhaps that was true about me in France because I was a tourist. 

In 2017 a Danish woman tweeted about what happened when she reported a man who was sexually harassing her on a bus.65 After asking her what she expected him to do, the bus driver commented, ‘You’re a pretty girl, what do you expect?’ Her experience echoes that of a twenty-six-year-old woman riding a bus in Delhi: ‘It was around 9 p.m. A man standing behind touched me inappropriately. I shouted and caught the guy by his collar. I made the driver stop the bus too. But I was told to get off and solve it myself because other passengers were getting late.’

The level of apathy described by the woman in Delhi is one I am very familiar with but I wanted to believe that women have it better elsewhere. There is a part of of me that clings to that notion for the sake of J and other young women. There must be a safe haven for women somewhere in the world. Reading this book has been hard for me. I understand why P said it made her angry to the point she had to stop reading and could only return to it later. 

The lack of data on that the book cites over and over is a double-edged sword in a tragic sense. Lack of data on the one hand makes the world appear less awful than it is for women. Imagine where every incident was recorded and data was freely available for all to see. It would paint an extremely bleak picture of the world that would  make every woman and her family members fearful, perhaps to the point the freedoms women have only recently started to enjoy, would go away through self-policing of some sort by the women themselves or those who care about them. I am not sure that is the answer to the problem either. 

Inside Fold

This was written several weeks ago in hopes that it would help me make lasting change. Reading on the first day of the new year, I think the acting of writing did help and so I imagine with revisiting this day sometimes to make sure I remember 

It was one of those days when things start to get off the rails early and often. Had been restless all night from a cold that was threatening to get worse but did not actually - just ended up being steady threat that would not let up. I missed my breathing exercises and yoga stretches in the morning because there was no time left. It is only a fifteen minute routine that does not feel like anything at all until I skip. Its as if I forgot to lock my front door and a big storm barged into the house turning it upside down. That is how little control I seem to have on my mental state without assist. There were minor aggravations all day at work and I was coping the best I could. 

Around 4 pm, I had my last call with one of the most difficult teams I have to work with. It ended up being hard and hostile. Instead of staying calm as I normally like to do I started to act condescending in degrees and made it impossible for me and the other side to recover from the mess that we had both contributed in making. It is easy to see what the other side has been and continues to do wrong - there may even be a lot of truth to my perception in this case. But there is a lot that I am adding to the mix - in the way I respond to everything that comes at me from this inarguably difficult set of people.

I realized later that evening that I was failing to make progress because I was expecting them to act out and do their worst - just as everyone around expects them to do. They have built  a reputation that precedes them and you have your guard up expecting to fail if you don't fight. But at the end of the day, everyone goes home to a life that has nothing to do with work. Seen in that light we are all alike - we just attach different weights to things we consider important in our lives. 

At work, this group is extremely territorial and will resist anything and anyone that could be competing for their turf. It is how they find security in challenging and uncertain times - it is the source of their strong internal cohesion. They present a collective me against the rest of the world posture that signals to others that they will be impossible to work with. You fight the rest of the world and close ranks to do so. You most definitely do not want to collaborate with the enemy outside the fort. I wanted to break the cycle that has been a no-win one for a long time. Maybe ask to be let into the fold instead of being in the out group, part of rest of the world.