Heartcrossings

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

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 ev

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 alway

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 devoi

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 se

 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 DeLi

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

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 t

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 met

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 stre

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 brea

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 "W

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

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 educa

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

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.

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 t

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 peo

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 h

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 wai

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 a

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

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

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 unio

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 t

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

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 th

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

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 layof

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 fr

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 q

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 wha

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