Perfect Frames

The Color of Pomegranates had been on my list for a long time and watched it recently. I came to the movie knowing close to nothing about Armenian culture or history and had not heard of Sayat-Nova whose work and life the movie is the subject of.  

Every scene in the movie could have been a work of art in a museum - visually striking, perfectly composed and rich in detail. It's easy to want to pause and take in the every detail of the frame. I can't claim that I understood much of what I saw notwithstanding the subtitles, but this was still among the most remarkable movie experiences I have had. Maybe that was the director's intent as well - for viewers (even uninformed ones like me) to steep in the experience: 

 The Color of Pomegranates, inventively reveals the life of the 18th century Armenian troubadour Sayat Nova (King of Song) through his poetry and his inner world instead of a conventional narrative. We see the poet grow up, fall in love, enter a monastery and die, but these events are depicted through images of how Paradjanov’s imagination perceived Sayat Nova’s poems, poems that are seen and rarely heard.

The movie can be explored in so much detail, a perfect treat for anyone who wants to learn the craft.

Following the intertitle, We were searching for ourselves in each other, a sequence of shots juxtaposes Arutin and Ana within what would appear to be the same space, dressed in similarly blue clothing, and, in keeping with Parajanov's deliberately loose treatment of personal identity, played by the same actress, Sofiko Chiaureli. Several of these compositions are repeated almost exactly the same way in a later sequence following the intertitle How am I to protect my wax-built castles of love from the devouring heat of your fires. Again, colour functions as the most obvious variant, with the poet dressed entirely in black and Ana in red. A framed, spinning or swaying cherub returns, as does a length of lace, which changes from white to red and finally black in the hands of the poet. The implication that we have reached another stage in the life of the protagonist and his relationship with Ana is clear from the chronological progression of the story, but more importantly, these sequences and others where we see Sayat Nova together with his younger self, bring to the surface a sensation of the past repeating in the present, and doing so in what would seem an aesthetic accord with Nietzsche's doctrine of eternal return. 

Flexible Perimeter

Our walks in the evening frequently take us past a tennis court where people around the community come out to play. Recently, while passing by we saw a toddler sitting by the edge of the court away from the action engrossed with picking out tennis balls from a bag one at a time and squeezing in through the gap between the fence and the ground. Outside, there were at least a dozen balls scattered on the slope leading the the street and some on the street itself. The child was intensely focused on getting those balls out while his parents played tennis. On our way back, we found the balls gone and the child prancing around the nets as his parents were wrapping up. A common and amusing sight to see child do such things but it got me thinking about what it means more broadly to allow unrestricted freeplay and if choosing to disengage the child from an activity which the adult does not like for some reason, the best way to make that transition. 

It called to mind the times in J's childhood when I would get worn out by her "silly" games and want a pause or even a total stop. While I tried to not to stifle her spirit, I don't think I knew the proper way to get her to transition from the silly play mode. There is no book of rules that parents can follow for such things. Each kid is different, they can be different levels of risk averse and each situation presents its unique challenges. Most importantly, the parents of a child that age are very likely to be perpetually exhausted - it would be very lucky if just one of them is not. A young dad I work with is grappling with this problem and shared his solution - create a flexible and permeable perimeter around the child, so the rules and guidance are shape shifting. It seems like a good idea except that it goes against the traditional wisdom that children like structure and predictable outcomes. 

Favorite Genre

Reading this quote about dystopian fiction gave me food for thought. It might also explain why true-crime and murder mystery thrillers are such popular genres specially with women

Studies of true crime have found that white women are the largest demographic that enjoys the true crime genre. The hypothesis is that because “women, in particular, have anxiety about potential threats,” they turn to true crime to feel better prepared if something violent were to happen to them. One piece of research that Phillips uses in Media Ethics confirms the theory through studies that examine women’s consumption of nonfiction violent media and why it is higher than men's.

Maybe dystopian fiction allows the entitled people to feel prepared for bad things should they come to pass, much like women supposedly use nonfiction violent media to understand what is possible and how to be prepared. As a mother, I have always paid close attention to real stories of girls and young women who got in harm's way. It adds to the repository of knowledge we use trying to keep our daughters safe. This is the supposedly the underlying driver for the popularity of the murder mystery genre with women.

..safety. To my mind, that’s the real pointer toward why women love murder mysteries. Safety is, for us, an all-important consideration. As women, we understand what it feels like to live with fear humming constantly in the background of our lives. Most of us grew up being consistently told—by the media, by our protective parents, by horror tales at summer camp, by the experiences of our older sisters—just how vulnerable we are. We’re not to wear short skirts. We’re not to walk alone at night. We’re not to smile at men in bars. We’ve been told effectively that just by virtue of being female we’re wearing a big sign proclaiming, “Victim here! Victim here!”

Regaining Charge

J was about ten when I experienced a series of hardships ballooning into an unmanageable mess. While I was able to keep our unit of two afloat, my batteries were completely drained and could not be recharged. It was a year-long struggle and every bit of energy I could summon up was spent in creating the facade of normal for the kid. I would wake up on time, make breakfast and get her ready for school. For that hour, I was the mom she had always known. Once she left the house, I curled back up in bed feeling the walls closing in on me. There was simply no way I could leave the bed and not feel horrible - this was my only safe place. It was an incredible blessing that my work was remote and our conference calls did not involve video. My laptop always sat on the nightstand in those days. So I would work from bed until it was time for me to prep a snack for J and pick her up from school. It was also the time, the I finally made my bed. The rest of the afternoon, I worked from the kitchen table so J would see normalcy. 

We caught up on her day, she ate her snack and so on. After work, there were usually things to be done for J until it was her bedtime. I was back in my cocoon under the blankets, my brain refusing to still and calm for the night. This pattern continued for about six months, after which I was able to function out of the kitchen table from the beginning for the workday. A year later, I was reliably working out of my home office. In hindsight, I was in a disabled state for almost a year and without the flexibility my work afforded, there was no way I would have managed to stay employed. In my condition at the time, finding a new job and holding on to it might have proven impossible. It is thanks to my employer at the time, that J and I made it through that very difficult time, no permanent harm was done to either of us. Things could have gone very differently for both of us and I am even afraid to think about how badly it could have all ended. Reading about mandatory return to office mandates always reminds me of that time. Some people will have very tragic outcomes because of it, just like I could have back then. 

Fake Wisdom

Read this very self-serving and blithely oblivious to reality piece of wisdom predictably dispensed by a rich and entitled tech bro. If I had to guess he rose to the level that he did in large part on account of being at the right place at the time while being a white male. His worldview seems rather myopic. As such, he picks on the poor, hapless Eloise who has correctly sized up that she is in a dead-end team where leadership has no strategy or vision and no matter what she does she has no path forward, she will just spin like a hamster in its wheel with the chance of promotion dangled before her just a bit out of reach so she continues to spin away and do the relentless grunt work needed to keep mismanaged things from falling apart. 

This is the reality of life that even the supposedly unintelligent, unsophisticated and non-big picture seeing lowest guy in the totem is able to size up fairly quickly. Eloise made the mistake of speaking truth to power in this instance and became the subject of this pithy anecdote. The homily is presumably meant to inspire the likes of Eloise to take charge of their destiny - go grab that promotion, create think-big solutions where none are sought and even actively discouraged by people up the food chain because they do not align with the OKRs they need to deliver on to secure their own promotions. 

The sad truth of the matter is that Eloise can create the best dashboard in the world and it won't move the needle one damn millimeter. Ofcourse for a former big honcho who presided over legions of ineffectual middle managers and such, this is not the reality he wants to know or see. He knows a different better reality in his imagination and so he writes it all up. His summary is quite amusing infact, It is not a clear sign of poor if not failed leadership all the way up when an organization is riddled with so called "opportunities" that no one wants to deal with ? Isn't the right question to ask the author and the likes of him what should they have done differently so the likes of Eloise are not left with the choice of cleaning poop by hand or finding a good scooper ?

I've repeatedly heard the same story. There are problems. There are opportunities. But those aren't the opportunities anyone wants to deal with. Why? Because they're ambiguous. The value isn't clear. The outcome isn't clear. It's not a classic hard challenge, like “Make movie recommendations better than Netflix's recommendations,” but it's a challenge for a senior leader all the same.

I won't be surprised to see him publish a book which captures this and other wisdom so Eloise and her ilk can stop being such lazy, whiny losers and start taking charge of their careers.

Train Living

Such an interesting way to work remotely - just live in a train. It seems to be working out for someone: 

Lasse travels 600 miles a day throughout Germany aboard Deutsche Bahn trains. He travels first class, sleeps on night trains, has breakfast in DB lounges and takes showers in public swimming pools and leisure centres, all using his unlimited annual railcard.

Having to carry your material belongings with you at all times and be on the move has a certain ascetic quality to it. The story made me wonder, if I person kept at this way of life for long enough would they ever want to return to a stationary and "normal" way of life where your belongings no longer fit in a backpack.

Maybe this notion of being free to leave any moment is a function of youth. I know a few young people with similar dreams and recall how into my thirties I often took stock of my belongings and asked the question if it could all fit in the trunk of my car. If not, I probably had too much. This test helped clarify what was superfluous and irrelevant in my life. Those times are long gone but reading about this young person living on a train reminded me of simpler, uncomplicated years.  

Unwanted Wishes

I had the amusing experience of S (one of my best friends from high school) call me on International Women's Day to ask if it was okay for him to wish me on the occasion. He was concerned I would be offended and consider such action pejorative. As it turns out he had seen a flurry of angry exchanges between folks (we both knew from back in the day) when men had wished women.

S was very sure there was no ill-will from the men but their felicitations were very poorly received. We chatted for a bit, caught up on things but S was not sure he would risk congratulating any other women that day - too stressful and not worth the trouble. I told S I would not be receptive to wishes from random guys (people I work with or know socially etc.) because chances are I am dealing with a man who makes it difficult for me to negotiate the world as a woman. 

Being wished on Women's Day by a man of this ilk would feel like insult upon injury - I would be unhappy. For this to work and not become a problem, the man in question should have established his credentials as a friend and ally a long time ago. He should have consistently demonstrate he treats women respectfully and is not intimidated by those who are stronger and better than him in more than one way. He treats the women in his life the way we would want men our lives to treat us. S checks all those boxes and coming from him, such wishes are not controversial. But he was right to fear that he might not get so lucky the next time and would trigger someone to climb on their feminist soapbox.

New Baseline

I was chatting with another parent with grown-up kids about how we dodged the bullet by getting kids out of college before the time of ChatGPT and the like. That conversation left me thinking about why we both felt that way - what harm can come to the process of educating a child due to AI, how much of it is the fear of unknown versus feeling inadequate about seizing the opportunity that is now available. 

Reading this excerpt about Swami Vivekananda's views on what education is and is not, helped clarify my thinking a bit. If education is the manifestation of perfection already in us, then the presence of AI should not feel threatening at all. We can perhaps enlist as one of the many tools to help manifest that perfection - maybe it even helps with doing that. Information or access to information is not education: 

“If education is identical with information, the libraries are the greatest sages in the world, and encyclopedias are the rishis.”

Access to and assimilation of information has suddenly become barrierless and frictionless. This levels the playing field for children with vastly different ability and/or interest in information gathering and reproduction. So the point of education can be honed in on the idea of perfection and what drives it. A person is probably their most perfect when they are using their talents to do the greatest good in the world. If AI can be an enabler in this process then it should be enlisted enthusiastically and not with the kind of prejudice my friend and I felt. 

Line Crossing

Just got done reading Kristi Coulter's Exit Interview and would highly recommend it to one and all - not just current or former Amazon employees (though they would be the most edified of all). She had a great story to tell and it is told extremely well. The core of what makes this company (and others similar to it) so incredibly hard to survive is captured with authenticity. No matter what you do, its never good enough, never world-changing enough and so on. And if you are not superhuman don't even bother to get recognized. On the off-chance that you are superhuman, then make sure you are at the right place and the right time being observed by the right people so they can shine a light on your superhumanity. While you wait for those multifarious miracles to visit you, be prepared to see others who don't seem to bring anything to the table beyond what you do (if that), hop skip and jump ahead. Their proof points will remain a complete mystery to you. You will be told to believe that the system works correctly.

Not everything in Coulter's story has to map what a person has or is experiencing in their own workplace, but there are themes that transcend Amazon, startups and tech. They apply as one reviewer pointed out, even to a school teacher. Irrespective of who we are and what kind of job we do, chances are that we are being gaslight in some way. If that is the case, then this book is for you. Some might ask why could the author simply not quit and get on with her life. Clearly, she was not desperately in need of anything Amazon had to offer her including the money. Those of us who have been in somewhat similar boat can answer that question - there is always a compelling reason and it differs by person. People are not stupid or insane even if it appears to others that they might be both. 

For me (for example), it is about the fear of giving up on income potential I currently have that I may no longer have in a few years. I was raised to believe that opportunity should be treated with due respect and not squandered thoughtlessly and frivolously. Just like one is lucky to have food on the table, they are also lucky to have the means to an income - these things do not come easy to one and all. To that end, I will choose to stay in a toxic swamp for as long as I find that I can manage the situation without impacting my physical and mental health. That is my red line. It can be argued that I could have a much better quality of life, more sense of purpose and a feeling of happiness about what I do for work - while that is all true, the toxic swamp I inhabit has not quite doing me in yet.

So I haven't crossed that red line that I have defined for myself. I believe such is the case with Coulter too - she had her line and it was only crossed at the point that she decided to quit. It is very hard for an observer outside looking in to make sense of a person's decision-making or rationale. But there is a sound logic for everyone who decides to stay and "suffer". Whether that logic is objectively sound is another matter.

Pot Stirring

I don't know that I can agree with this idea of women needing to ignore all the popular wisdom about career. A mentor can be from outside the organization entirely and from a different business. They should be selected on the basis on their own accomplishments which the mentee might want to emulate. The championship is not a required criteria. Any person should have several mentors not just women. Changing the way you speak is also gender neutral in a sense. 

There is company specific speech coding people do need to adapt if they want to get ahead, be considered an insider and so on. This means adapting you speech to smooth out what is not considered company-speak. Failing to make these corrections may impact women disproportionately depending on on male-centric the company's culture is. It seems unwise to deny such reality. Being confident in many situations is to take on a big hairy audacious goal and believing you have what it takes to deliver. If you don't do as well as expected have a way to manage up and come out unscathed from the calamity - even better, fail up.

Such is the nature of all successes at work - does not matter if its a man in charge or a woman. If a woman sets up an unrealistic bar for success and therefore lacks the confidence to take on such goals, that is problematic an should be addressed. Being confident is not the issue. The advice on work-life balance is fair but the applies equally to men. You can't find such balance in a toxic, dysfunctional workplace no matter what your gender. Equally, everyone should seek such balance - making the required moves until they do so. Other than trying to stir the pot by making this about women's equality, nothing is achieved here.

I have know many women to fake it until they made it and very successfully so. They did not feel ashamed about it and their journey proves that this is a viable path - even for women. The last two items in the list about just being yourself (have I never seen that to work in all my years for anyone) so I would tend to agree its generally unwise advice. Finally asking for advice - this one is a mixed bag, depends on the situation, context and the level of experience the person who is seeking advice has. There is no reason for women to seek advice disproportionately to men - that makes them appear unsure of themselves and a bad signal. But timed well, it could be a power-move to seek advice. 

Things Converge

Reading these lines from Nandan Nilekani's Imagining India: The Idea of a Renewed Nation, gave me pause. I had to remind myself the author is talking about the average Indian politician and not the struggles of middle management in a large matrixed organization except they deal with performance review cycles that are no less predictable than an Indian election cycle: 

..an Indian politician for all his faults faces a complicated balancing act in our government, where the socialist ethos is still dominant. Being a legislator in this system means negotiating for money from both the central and the state governments; getting work out of an often reluctant bureaucracy; navigating an agenda through the various, often unconnected, state organizations; and of course meeting the demands of one’s constituents and somehow retaining power through our unpredictable election cycles. These various pulls and pressures mean that when it comes to policy the urgent wins over the important, tactic triumphs over strategy and patronage over public good.

Similar to the said Indian politician such operating environment often breeds deep cynicism. A middle manager may see no upside to a worthy idea someone brings forward. It does not help their cause enough and the time to value is just as long as a major infrastructure development might be for a up and coming minister from Uttarkhand aspiring for better things.

Pointless Feedback

Performance reviews only make sense if all voices matter in an equal way. The lowest person on the totem should have a right to express how they feel about the performance of the CEO - Glassdoor style and those votes should have a tangible impact. If that is not the case and the people lower in the food chain don't feel confident about telling the powers that be that their manager is doing a supremely shitty job, then it does not matter if feedback comes all year long or annually. 

I have almost never seen a culture of skip level managers trying to consistently gather feedback on the performance of the manager from those they manage. This tosses accountability out the wind immediately. There is no particular reason why upward feedback has to be bounded by so many rules of engagement. That serves as a deterrent to providing any feedback at all because the conditions are impossibly uncomfortable. People do need their raises and promotions. The manager has the power to grant or deny those wishes. That is already a major impediment to providing candid feedback on said manager. If anything, the process should allow for unfiltered, no holds barred feedback. It is upto the recipient of the feedback to process it and come to reasonable conclusions. This is an expectation from a person in that role. If they are not capable of it, then perhaps they are not fit for the job. 

This particular piece of wisdom was particularly amusing and juvenile in the context of senior executive who are also people managers:

To keep your feedback solution-oriented, offer your idea of the best way forward. Future-focused feedback, or “feed forward” as it's sometimes called, is intended to help its recipient grow. Instead of concentrating on the past, discuss potential solutions, such as behavior changes they could make moving forward.

The reality is people are set in their ways by the time they reach the highest levels of the organization. What you see is what you get. There is almost no way you can "feed forward" such a person's management style. They are who they are because it has worked for them very well for a long time - if it had not, they would not be in the positions that they are in. There is no earthly reason for them to change. The question is more one about fit - do the teams the manage (and the company) benefit from their style - whatever that might be. Or are they likely to steer the company the way of Vice. 

Fake Art

I came close to gifting a dear friend and AI generated work of art - my prompt, my idea but not my art. Reading this Wired column made me glad that my effort had failed - I had to come up with something more personal and original. In my case, the AI was not able to execute on my vision and what it produced was a far cry from what I imagined was possible.

I would not have been able to create what I had in mind on my own lacking the artistic talent needed to do so. However, I had an interesting idea that a competent artist may have been able to do something with. But that would not feel genuine or real - the artist is supposed to draw on their own imagination to make art, not try to fit into someone else's desire to express themselves artistically.

..any genuine encounter with art completely obliterates the usual logic of fairness and economic value. When you stand in awe of a Hokusai painting, you are not thinking, typically, about the price you paid for admission to the museum, or wondering about whether it was a good deal. The gift of these encounters leaves the recipient inspired to create something herself, and so the generative energy continues to pass from one person to another.

There is a temptation to believe that AI can lend wings to the imagination of people who like me lack the skills to make it reality. But as my own experience showed, it's not so easy and I was glad to have failed - despite initial disappointment. It would be a sad world where we no longer have "genuine encounter with art" and random hacks were getting AI to generate pseudo-art and it crowds out what is real.

Superior Air

The idea that the very rich can breathe different air than the rest of us takes entitlement to new heights. 

On June 7, 2023, New York City briefly had the worst air quality in the world. The sky turned auburn as smoke from wildfires in Canada spread throughout the boroughs. The horizon vanished into an orange haze. It was not hard to feel that we were living in an era Stephen Pyne, an emeritus professor at Arizona State University, has called the Pyrocene.

It just so happened that I was in New York for work right around the time the air quality was breaking world records. The worst had passed by then but it felt horribly unpleasant no matter where I was - indoors or out. Then one evening, while out with a group of coworkers, I passed out and an ambulance had to be called. It was an awkward and scary experience. The paramedic told me later that they had many such calls in the last few weeks and I should stay hydrated and inside as much as possible. 

I could see such technology doing very well in India where there is no escape from bad air quality but there are plenty of highly affluent people who can afford to make their homes a safe haven

The notion that smoke could be a democratizing force, afflicting everyone equally and perhaps motivating them to take action to mitigate worsening climate conditions, is already colliding with the reality of an emerging luxury air market, yet another example of how, as the environment becomes less habitable, the wealthy will continue to insulate themselves from its worst aspects—even as their lifestyles disproportionately fuel emissions.

Being Ghosted

Over the last five years, I have being ghosted at an exponential rate. Both professionally and in personal life. Email has gone the way of phone calls it seems - most people will not respond unless they were expecting to hear from you (via email). Job applications end up in the reject pile about 99.9% of the time these days. Attempts to network and broaden the base of professional connections end up failing at about the same rate. 

People I was once friends with don't respond to text messages for months and may randomly show up out of the blue asking if I want to hang out. I took them up on those offers a few times in the interest of jump-starting a near dead friendship but it proved to be a waste of time. You cannot maintain a meaningful connection with people if you see them at very random intervals of time - there is no story of you and this person that has grown together. Very fortunately for I have long exited the dating market so at least don't have to deal the special kind of misery that being ghosted by someone you thought you had some spark with. 

I don't know if ghosting is a contagious thing the world is picking up from Gen Z. It seems like if a person is ghosted often and long enough they will end up ghosting others - this is about having their expectations reset to the point where the only socially acceptable form of response is no response at all. To otherwise might signal being needy or overzealous - not useful or positive things to signal. Those of us who lived a different life before this became the cultural norm have to adjust to the reality of the times we live in. 

“The high rate of reciprocal ghosting may be due to a cyclical emotional pattern,” says Licensed Clinical Psychologist Dr. Alexander Alvarado. “Once people experience the discomfort of being ghosted, they might unconsciously adopt the same behavior as a self-defense mechanism, thinking that it’s better to disengage first than risk emotional harm.”

After V scheduled lunch with me for the 14th time, I decided it was time to stop. This is someone I have known for a decade and half but there is still a line. It seems if someone has personal emergencies at that cadence they probably need to sort more important things out than where to grab lunch with a friend from a long time ago. 

Traveling Young

I met a young couple at a class we took recently. We shared the table and got chatting. To their credit they were eager to get to know people their parents' age and we were glad that they would even consider it. Adjusted for their age, they have traveled a fair bit together. It was interesting for me to understand if seeing more of the world than the average person of their age from this little town would somehow make a difference. It seemed like the experiences were like a small but unremarkable imprints on their life not that much different than having an nice time at the nearest beach town. 

Meeting with these kids (if they about J's age, that is the only way I can think of them) reminded me of a Francis Bacon quote I had read years ago:

Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience. He that travelleth into a country before he hath some entrance into the language, goeth to school, and not to travel.

I have found this to be true in my own experience. The travel of the younger years might have served to educate me in some haphazard way just like school might if the student did not arrive prepared to learn  - not knowing the language while traveling to a new place was fairly common in India, just crossing the state line could put you in that position. In my later years, I have made an effort to learn the language of the place I am traveling to and it has made a big difference to the experience. 

Garden Salve

There is a small jar of gardener's salve on my kitchen window sill. It reminds me of Camden every time I use it. We were trying to start a life together after having failed before. It was mid-summer and the weather was glorious. That short vacation had elements of perfection and the undercurrents of despair. We bought the salve at a locally owned store but it was not quite locally made. But to me this has come to define the smell of Camden. It's ideal shelf-life might be a year but we are well over a decade here. The trip was the beginning of the end - an end, I pushed as far out as I could to believe I gave it my best. 

Over the years, almost everything from that time was discarded but the remnants of the salve remains. The beeswax and coco-butter have turned a bit rancid but the lavender still shines through - I am not even sure how the smell can hold for all these years. I loved how it smelt and felt when I rubbed it into my hands - that was where dreams begin. I want to believe there were elements of wonderful about us and though it was not meant to be, some of what was best remains. The few words of wisdom, the acts of real friendship and glimpses of what might be possible. That salve should have been long gone if I was any real gardener. 

Mirror Image

This experiment sounds a bit like recording and replaying yourself to come to independent conclusion about the error of your ways. 

Initial data on Laika is promising: 75 percent of the 60,000 students who have participated in the program since October 2023 reported that they wanted to change their relationship with social media after chatting with Laika, according to the team. However, the long-term impact of the program remains to be seen.

And Laika’s impact might be more complicated than it seems. Julia Stoyanovich, the director of NYU’s Center for Responsible AI, expressed concerns about using a project like this with children, a vulnerable population, without prior evidence of its efficacy.

The data could be viewed as promising or not. That 25 percent that did not feel moved to change their relationship with social media after interacting with the bot, could be seen as a cohort to be deeply concerned about. Maybe the exact opposite happened - they want to redouble their presence and efforts in social media to the greater exclusion of everything else. Anyone who recalls being a teen or has raised one knows that teen-brains do not follow the same logical flows as adult one. They tend to do things that cannot be explained rationally but it all computes perfectly for them. The most at-risk population likely has ways of thinking and working that are many standard deviations away even for a teen. One could assume that forms the 25 percent and their troubles just got so much worse thanks to meddlesome AI.

Reading Muscle

Interesting essay about the degradation of reading skills among college students. Everyone is impacted by the malaise but the younger you are the longer you will live to suffer from it

Even as a career academic who studies the Quran in Arabic for fun, I have noticed my reading endurance flagging. I once found myself boasting at a faculty meeting that I had read through my entire hourlong train ride without looking at my phone. My colleagues agreed this was a major feat, one they had not achieved recently. Even if I rarely attain that high level of focus, though, I am able to “turn it on” when demanded, for instance to plow through a big novel during a holiday break. That’s because I was able to develop and practice those skills of extended concentration and attentive reading before the intervention of the smartphone. For children who were raised with smartphones, by contrast, that foundation is missing. It is probably no coincidence that the iPhone itself, originally released in 2007, is approaching college age, meaning that professors are increasingly dealing with students who would have become addicted to the dopamine hit of the omnipresent screen long before they were introduced to the more subtle pleasures of the page.

The muscle needed to latch on to and finish reading a big book without getting distracted is one I lost a while back. But I am able to recover it sometimes - specially, if I happen upon something that really grabs my attention or connects me to memories from a time before the internet existed. I am pretty sure I would be no different from the college kids this author writes about if I did not have sufficient mileage pre-internet. That is the only saving grace.

Picture Perfect

This story about a woman who is a professional bridesmaid made for a fun read - particularly loved the infographic that details the cost of being one (the regular kind). It could put a serious dent in the budget of a young woman. I was watching a movie recently where the woman tells her long-time boyfriend that she wants her wedding to be perfect because that's supposed to be the best day of her life. It is pursuit of such perfect that makes it possible for a professional bridesmaid to exist. A wedding so perfect that is the best day of a person's life seems both like an impossible bar to achieve and also somewhat tragic. Life could be full of many wonderful (even spectacular) moments. Most people get married relatively early and still have the majority of life left to live. It's sad to think that the high point is long gone since nothing can exceed the greatness of a perfect wedding.

If instead, the pressure is taken of that one day and its allowed to be of many joyful things in a person's life, then balance might be restored. Some couples I know who have been happily married for most of their lives had the most unremarkable weddings. They can barely recall the details and the pictures from the event are fairly mundane. They may have a great story about how they met or at what point they decided they want to get married. This lovely chance encounter story is the kind of stuff some lucky people have in their lives - it is also the kind of story that everyone else wants to hear and marvel at. I doubt these folks had the most picture perfect lineup of bridesmaids at the wedding - the lack of it obviously did not matter, 

Olive Memories

Cleaning up my fridge recently, I found an almost empty jar of kalamata olives (my favorite kind) that was promptly used. That jar of olives brought childhood memories of my aunt's exceptional olive pickle. She always had some in her pantry and knew how much I loved it. If I was visiting her home, it would be brought out to the dining table without fail and I could not have enough of it. The steaming rice and dal with the pickle on the side is perfection meeting happiness for me as a kid. This was the thing I could count on amid the chaos of the world, the arbitrary things that adults expected me to do and the pointlessness of most growing up. It was all this useless work to start the cycle of joyless things like employment and marriage. 

My aunt is old and frail now. Last time I met her was over a decade ago and she had already started to decline. There is no one who knows to make her olive pickle and its not something anyone cares for anymore. I did have a meal at her house when I was last there but it was not like childhood. They live in a modern flat now - there is no cavernous, ill-lit pantry hiding wonderful secrets anymore. Everything is in it's proper shelf and easily visible under the track lights. There are many good and useful things there but no home made olive pickle. I missed it but did not mention it and I am sure she was aware of its absence at the table. I want to try my hand and making the Jolpai er Achar (olive pickle) from how I recall the taste. My aunt has been struggling with memory for sometime and I don't want to ask her for a recipe that she may struggle to recall.

Reading Early

While incomparably less well-read than someone like J.G. Ballard, I can still relate to his regret of having read the best books of his life before twenty. Around my mid-twenties, I started to struggle a great deal with finding books that held my interest and I could recall the details of. I was reading plenty but in a haphazard sort of way, trying to find the thing that I could latch on to. I was longing to find my few favorite authors that I would love and read forever - like finding a family that is yours. That never came to pass. 

..I now regret that so much of my reading took place during my late adolescence, long before I had any adult experience of the world, long before I had fallen in love, learned to understand my parents, earned my own living and had time to reflect on the world’s ways. It may be that my intense adolescent reading actually handicapped me in the process of growing up — in all senses my own children and their contemporaries strike me as more mature, reflective and more open to the possibilities of their own talents than I was at their age. I seriously wonder what Kafka and Dostoyevsky, Sartre and Camus could have meant to me. That same handicap I see borne today by those people who spend their university years reading English literature — scarcely a degree subject at all and about as rigorous a discipline as music criticism — before gaining the experience to make sense of the exquisite moral dilemmas that their tutors are so devoted to teasing out.

Like Ballard, I was trying hard (and rather unsuccessfully) to get J into reading like I did. She reads more now and gets a lot more value from it than I was able to by her age. She is coming to great writing with some life experience of her own that I simply did not have when I read those books. I am not sure all that reading was wasted on me - its shaped my world view and how I process things in my personal and professional life. If I have been leading a sensible life in balance, it could be argued the reading has helped make that possible.

Chasing Beauty

Sad story about marketing cosmetics to tweens. The overall system is designed for frictionless consumption. Points of friction like needing ID to buy things that could potentially be harmful to a tween would never be popular. There is also the business of parents being unable to prevent limitless social media access though they could easily prevent irresponsible use of their credit cards. 

..tweens have been spending increased amounts of time on social media since being cooped up during the pandemic.

They're among the biggest consumers of some social media platforms, says Shah, founding director of Georgia State University’s Social Media Intelligence Lab. All that social media time is, in turn, exposing these young users to influencers paid by brands to use and promote beauty and skincare products. Increasingly sophisticated algorithms also feed this exposure, serving users recommendations about beauty tips and influencers after just a few searches on the topic.

Add to this mix the fact that tweens are known to be concerned about how they look – and you have the perfect storm. "Tweens are preoccupied with personal appearance. They’re very, very self-conscious in terms of how their growing bodies are going to turn out and about their developing self-identity," says Shah. "There’s a lot of sensitivity around that and that’s existed for decades. And these two factors combined are what's really driving the sales in these younger demographics.”

Being all too familiar with parental guilt myself, I can see how it's expiation could take the form of  letting your kid spend money without asking too many questions. A lot of people I have worked with over the years have recounted how their kids go on shopping sprees and they indulge it because they don't have any capacity to give them time and attention - that has to be compressed into the few weeks of vacation every year. The rest of the time its about keeping your head above the water so the family can enjoy the standard of life they have grown used to. 

Sadly (but unsurprisingly) marketers have found a selling opportunity arising from the confluence of consumerism and dysfunction at the family level which is driven in large part by need to keep making money at all costs because people cannot count of either the government or their employers for anything. The Sephora tween trend is a symptom of all that is broken around us and how that brokenness creates revenue opportunities for businesses making them behave in ways that makes things worse for all concerned. 

Being forced to chase and unreal and unattainable standard for beauty as a tween is tantamount to robbing a person of those years of their life where they are supposed to be go back and forth between childhood and youth until they feel confident to leave childhood behind. That is a meaningful rite of passage that these kids will not get to have. 

Being Chirpy

There was an unhappy baby in the flight who went quiet shortly after the plane took off. Once we landed the baby got back to being noisy but now in a happy, chirpy way. She was propagating the good cheer with her trills, giggles, coos and gurgles. 

A lot of us turned back to smile at her. The baby had truly brightened being stuck in a full flight for many long hours. Sadly the mother did not view the public attention on her child too kindly. She started to admonish her to stop her racket and behave because people were staring at her. 

I could attest to the fact that no one there looked at that baby with any malice - we were all smiling and enjoying her good cheer. I made sure not to turn toward her once I heard the mother. Others did much the same - we did not want the poor baby scolded. She was too young to even understand what she was being told or what she had done wrong - she was just expressing happiness.

The event made me sad for the child - there is never a reason to kill the spirit of a person so young. When J was this age she could be quite noisy and loved attention from everyone. People noticed her and engaged her - and that formed a virtuous cycle. She saw it as a reward for being friendly, happy and outgoing. It never crossed my mind that my chirpy baby was offensive to some stranger who had seen her only for a few minutes. 

Earlier in the plane a little one passing by my seat smiled and waved at me showing off her cute water bottle. She loved that I responded positively to her overture and admired her water bottle. The parents smiled at the interaction, did not chide her for "bothering" a stranger. I wish all babies could be afforded the same courtesy and respect for being wonderfully themselves,

Food Source

Having dinner with friends at a farm to table establishment recently, brought to mind this story about how prison labor is involved in a lot of food we eat. 

The number of people behind bars in the United States started to soar in the 1970s just as Ingram entered the system, disproportionately hitting people of color. Now, with about 2 million people locked up, U.S. prison labor from all sectors has morphed into a multibillion-dollar empire, extending far beyond the classic images of prisoners stamping license plates, working on road crews or battling wildfires.

The world is full of contradictions that make you pause. One the one hand we want to pay a premium for getting very close to nature - organic and foraged food because it promotes positive feels about the provenance of what we eat. But some of the staples that went into putting that wonderful meal together might have not had such beneficent origins. 

..U.S. prison labor is in the supply chains of goods being shipped all over the world via multinational companies, including to countries that have been slapped with import bans by Washington in recent years. For instance, the U.S. has blocked shipments of cotton coming from China, a top manufacturer of popular clothing brands, because it was produced by forced or prison labor. But crops harvested by U.S. prisoners have entered the supply chains of companies that export to China.

Sharing Lessons

I met a former co-worker after a few years recently when I was in her hometown for work. R looked much the same but a lot had changed since I saw her last. She had suffered a miscarriage right around that time and suddenly it made sense how she always looked sad. It did not feel appropriate to ask her about it because these conversations are awkward unless in person. I felt contrite that I had not reached out, been more present in the life of a colleague I really liked. She spoke of feeling trapped and in a rut in her job, not seeing any prospects for moving forward and not being able to decide if she wanted a baby. I hope I was able to give her some guidance based on my own life lessons given I am much older than her. Removing the problem that was most draining on her and impacting her personal life should be the first priority I said. 

If she is staying out of loyalty she should know that she and everyone else is no better than commodity that will be dumped out whenever required. Loyalty should be a two-way street and in her workplace it absolutely was not. She laughed about how such loyalty is like her first serious relationship that lasted a decade and turned completely toxic half way through. R stayed on because she had invested time and effort and was trying to recoup something. In hindsight that was a bad idea and also a lesson that transfers well to her situation at work -she is being that girlfriend again, wasting the years on her life where nothing can be recouped. I hope I will see R in a much better place all around next time I see her - hopefully a mother as she clearly wants to be and is just afraid to wish for what is so dearly desired. 

Starting Well

I saw a young woman not much older than J enter a nice apartment building with her poodle on a rainy evening while on my way back to the hotel. The rain was spent by then and only a mild spray remained but the dog was a bit drenched and so was the woman. They were coming back from her dog-friendly place of work most likely. 

The scene brought to mind the question of effort, quality of life and desire for more. By most standards, this young person was doing very well for herself barely out of college. Back from work at a very reasonable hour, accompanied by her dog and living in an upscale neighborhood. If a person has attained all that already then would they care to take on risk and discomfort to try things that are better long term but come with a lot of short term pain.

 If this is the only work life a person has known since college and continues to for several years after, it may impair their ability to accept other harsher realities. Maybe there is no harm in that - to land into comfort early in life and just keep it that way. The last part though is fraught with peril - this is not an easy thing to keep as years go by. Comfortable jobs tend not to be challenging either and make you irrelevant in the broader market very quickly. 

My first job out of college was the epitome of comfortable - well paid, low to no stress and a very short walk from my apartment in a safe neighborhood. I was surrounded by families with young kids and there were also singles like me.  - there was plenty of company after work so I did not have to go further to have a social life. It took me about two years to overcome the inertia that this combination of comfortable things produced and get out to the real world. 

I started to learn things that would make and keep me professionally viable only after I left that job and city. Had it not been for the ambitious peer group I had started with (who all left the place within a year), I don't think I would have summoned up the energy to get out myself. I was infact the last person from that group to leave and it may well have been my last chance to get out. 

Remembering Grandma

Watching The Umbrellas of Cherbourg reminded me of my grandmother who passed away when J was a couple of years old.  As some who lived past ninety, she had a lot of wisdom about old age and the process of aging. She used to say when the a person's time is nearly up, and they look back at their life, more often than not they would find that come out ahead and further than they thought they would. The good often outweighed the bad. She said that was true for her life as well. All the sufferings of the early years had given way to having safety and comfort among familiar things and people - the fact that her life was so routine was a big blessing for someone who had been through many upheavals - she was very glad for the lack of change.

This film which to me was a meditation on the nature of true love had a similar message. There is no one ideal true love. There were three relationships in this story that could qualify and each involved one of the two lead characters. To fall hopelessly in romantic, juvenile love which never comes to mature fruition can be the one true love of a person's life. But that does not preclude them from finding a person who loves them unconditionally and only desires to see their burdens eased - a more nurturing, older kind of love but not less true. And finally the love of a person who is sincere, without pretense and well aware of their limits and limitations - they can provide the foundation of what is an equal and reciprocal relationship - also a true love. The characters in this story love and lose and yet come out ahead in the end. We leave everyone in the closing credits better off than when we first made their acquaintance. 

Finding Dinner

A couple of co-workers and went to dinner recently in a town two of us knew nothing about and the third had just recently arrived here so was still a relative stranger. We picked a place that looked promising from the outside - fairly busy but still a few open tables and everyone seemed to having a good time. 

Across from us was a group of three women who seemed have come out to celebrate something - maybe a birthday. They were all wearing evening gowns and nice jewelry. No one else there on a weeknight was quite as nicely dressed. The hostess gave them a table at the epicenter of the place - which only made sense. The place as it turned out was mainly known for their cocktails and the food while nice was not the main event. The ladies were clearly local and knew what they were doing. The drinks arrived soon accompanied by hors d’oeuvres. 

Here at our table, we were not quite sure what to get. It had been a late day and we had an early start the next morning so no one really wanted any drinks. That left us with food options that made little sense on their own. But here we were - already seated and ready to order, it would be weird and rude to walk away specially that the place seemed to make people all around us pretty happy - specially this festive trio. We ended up liking the food - the waitress told us about specials not listed in the menu that worked out perfectly. Walking back to the hotel, I thought of the experience in terms of the emotional components in each phase of it. 

Being drawn to the establishment by seeing how everyone seated there seemed to be having a great time. We failed to notice that it was cocktails were the main draw. Stepping in a still failing to see that and having an epiphany once seated and looking at the menu. Then these ladies show up dressed to the nines to celebrate and we feel compelled to make it work for us too. And we discover there is a path for us to have a perfectly nice dinner without any drinks. It all works out in the end but had any one of the factors been just a bit different, we would have had totally different outcomes. Building on an apparent mistake is not always a bad idea. 

With Butter

I am reading Six Seasons : A New Way with Vegetables and found this intriguing idea for combining pickled vegetables with butter.

Pickled Vegetable Butter Stay away from bread-and-butter pickles and the other basic cucumber-based pickles. Focus instead on a mix of vegetable pickles—such as carrots, green beans, fennel, radish, turnips, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts—which will give you more flavor and complexity. If you like heat, you can add some pickled peppers to the mix.

It brought to mind a marketplace in Athens where vendors sold pickled vegetables of different kinds. During our stay there, J and I went around to this place almost everyday and bought something interesting to eat for dinner at the hotel. The pickled vegetables featured in our meal everyday - it was absolutely delightful and we could not have enough. Incorporating this lovely dish into butter makes sense - bring the flavors to a toast (something I did not think about at all). 

Butter here is a conveyor of flavor and taste and brings things to toast that would have otherwise never made it there. It made me think of other options that could work just as well once I get comfortable of with the different ideas McFadden has in this book - green garlic butter is next on my list. I have a garlic planted in my yard from last year that should be back up sometime between spring and summer. Then there is watercress butter that I think would be a winner. 

New Rentals

On my way to a store I don't go to often, I passed by a few new apartment communities on both sides of the street. These did not exist a year ago when I was there last - atleast that is what I was telling myself. I had just missed a turn and gone further away from home that I needed to - things are changing rapidly around me but not this fast. 

As I found my way back, I could not help wondering who lived in this community and why so many apartments - this is a smaller town and population is not very transient. Maybe there is more than meets the eye here. These could be younger folks who have been priced out of the housing market given salaries that do not support saving up for a down-payment and then the mortgage rates are what they are. These could have been homeowners but they are forced to rent. I did not think about the 65+ year population as potential renters - could see then downsizing but wasn't clear to me that they might prefer to rent instead: 

By 2030, one-in-five people in the U.S. will be 65 years or older. While homeownership rates are highest for this age group (78.6%), a growing number of 65+ are choosing to rent. According to the Joint Center for Housing Studies, the number of renter households headed by someone aged 65 or older jumped 43% from 2009-2019. 

Maybe by then homeownership is more confining and irksome than it's worth. There is always that phase of life where the roots in home and community bring comfort and inconvenience in the same measure - that is likely when a person would prefer to rent and pay a bit extra for freedom.