Heartcrossings

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 ...

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 childh...

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...

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 t...

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...

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 hel...

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 ...

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 i...

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 bel...

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 a...

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 tr...

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 ...

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, o...

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...

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 ki...

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...

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 be...

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 prese...

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 releas...

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 thi...

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 ...

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, refl...

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 th...

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 ki...

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 a...

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....

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 la...

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 hopeless...

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 w...

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...

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 ...