Heartcrossings

My friend T shared a short video of her performing Bharat Natyam on stage for some big celebration at her work. The last time I have seen her dressed for dance and on stage was in college. Other than being physically a bit slower than she was then, it was all the same - like time had not moved at all.  T had a decade of training before college and continued to learn once she started working for maybe another decade. A very large part of her life has been about dance and other things came to exist around it.  I remember being in awe of her ability to express herself so wonderfully. She was one of those that innately loved dance, had a lot of natural talent which the training helped perfect. It was not hard for her find time to practice for an hour each day - she looked forward to it. It was T's time to escape into her zone. I love dance but have absolutely no talent for it. For people like T, they have that gift and can create a world with it they can escape to. For me, that has to

 Reading this article made me wonder if the next step would be to scan your loved ones brains to check if they love you as much you love them. Maybe grandma is just faking her affection and really can't stand the clingy grandkid and wishes to be left alone to enjoy her retirement. Maybe the boyfriend is going through the motions in the relationship and will even propose but his heart is not in it.  ..brain scans of close friends doing the same activities are actually much more similar than those of less connected people. You literally are on the same wavelength as your besties.  All of which means that when it comes to human-to-human connection, you can gauge the extent of a pair's attachment by looking at a brain scan. Can the same be said of human-dog pairs?  A trust but verify love idea is fraught with dangers. Sometimes, you have to make peace with whatever love you can get from a person you care about - specially if that relationship is immutable. If you have a complicate

 Read this great essay in Wired about climate change involving a waterfall deep down in the ocean: When a system approaches a tipping point, though, the character of the fluctuations changes. With the AMOC, you might see the flow rate increasingly struggle to regain its equilibrium. The rate might wander farther and farther away from the comfy baseline. And the system might take longer to settle back into its routine state. These features— the greater meandering, the slower return to home base—are an obsession of tipping-point mathematicians. If you were to plot the data for a system that’s about to tip, you’d see the data points first follow a nice, predictable path; then the path gets jittery, and then it goes off on wide, whiplashing swings. The system is becoming less stable, taking longer to recover. You can almost feel sorry for it. You can sense a sort of sickness As the story goes, the brother and sister team published a paper on this patient's sickness and predicted the t

I am definitely not in the company of teenage girls driving the future of language. I thought middle-schoolers said Ick and Lit was still in circulation - wrong on both counts . Not sure if staying current with the trends will actually help me other than being able to understand conversations between young women that I am not a part of The discovery that young women drive linguistic change is not new. More than two decades ago, William Labov, the founder of modern sociolinguistics studies, observed that women lead 90 per cent of linguistic change. Then in 2003, linguists surveyed 6,000 letters, written between 1417 to 1681.  The study found there was a quicker uptake of new language contained within the letters written by women compared to those written by men. By the time it becomes acceptable for someone my age to use the vocabulary invented by such young trailblazers, that is old, dated and unfashionable language anyway. Speaking like kids would only make everyone feel awkward and w

Wonderful essay about how information was gathered and shared in the 1980s. Having such access to information would be completely magical for me back in that time. My local library was small and limited and yet offered me access to the world for which I was grateful.  From 1984 to 1988, I worked in the Telephone Reference Division of the Brooklyn Public Library. My seven or eight colleagues and I spent the days (and nights) answering exactly such questions. Our callers were as various as New York City itself: copyeditors, fact checkers, game show aspirants, journalists, bill collectors, bet settlers, police detectives, students and teachers, the idly curious, the lonely and loquacious, the park bench crazies, the nervously apprehensive. (This last category comprised many anxious patients about to undergo surgery who called us for background checks on their doctors.) There were telephone reference divisions in libraries all over the country, but this being New York City, we were an unu

I had deeply emotional response to this essay even though I never played tennis in my life and have only a passing interest in the sport. The purgatory of having potential but never reaching it is extremely relatable. Conor Niland speaks eloquently to what that feels like for a professional tennis player who can't quite float up to the top hundred. It seems ludicrously unfair that players with the caliber to rank in the top thousand in the world would be treated with as much regard as someone who plays "great" tennis at their small-town tennis club tournament.  There is a universe that separates the ability and accomplishments of the two but they are lumped in the same category of unremarkable tennis players. I am definitely one of those that never achieved my potential academically or professionally for any number of reasons. Had it not been for the things in my personal life I was so very fortunate to receive, I would feel a lot like Niland did.  A lot of futile toiling

 There is a logic in children suing governments for their climate rights   though many of their other rights are being lost too. There used to be an expectation that a hard-working young person could hope to settle down and start their own family by their mid-20s.  That is now a dream far out of reach for many people that age. They work hard enough and often have the education that was supposed to lead them to the road to financial stability if not prosperity but reality is that many are joining the the NEET ranks instead. Governments are culpable to this turn of events too as much as they are are responsible for climate crisis and borrowing from future generations.  Around the world, both innovative and old-school legal arguments are being used to go after companies and governments to seek redress or forestall future harms. At the same time, the fossil fuel industry and its allies have powerful new legal grounds at their disposal to challenge climate rules. A number of cases could be

Tracking the cost per wear of every article of clothing for several months sounds like a great way to understand if you are spending wisely and getting value. Most things I own have been around in my closet for a very long time. They speak to a significant evolution in my taste and also how I view age-appropriate attire. The clothes that are a good two decades old were great for that time in my life but they do not make sense now. Even if they fit me physically, they bear no relationship to the person I am now and if I put them on, I appear to be wearing clothes that were loaned to me by someone who I have little in common with.  With shoes, the situation is much worse because I don't wear anything that is remotely uncomfortable. Most of the older shoes that look as good as new are more fashionable than sensible - that phase of my life is long gone. The are a couple of shoes I have worn only three or four times so there is a long way to go before I achieve single-digit cost per we

Sometimes you come across a quote that seems like God was sending wisdom your way because how badly you need it. For me a few days ago it was  “Supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting — Sun Tzu While I am neither dealing with a specific enemy's resistance nor seeking to achieve supreme excellence, these are the words that I still needed to process. The equivalent of the enemy in my situation are a set of circumstances I have going on - some of my own choice and making, others not as much. Since they make me quite restless and uncomfortable, they could be construed as adversarial or inimical.  My initial instinct is to run away from things that make me feel this way and when that is not an option the situation becomes hard to tolerate - much like if were an enemy putting up a strong resistance and thwarting my desired action. So there is the question of how to cope instead of what my natural tendencies dictate. That is where the idea of suprem

A few months ago. I was new entrant in this group and a woman, F was assigned to on-board me. We started off on a bad note. My efforts to be friendly were rebuffed - she made it clear she was doing her job and not interested in anything further. I learn things by asking questions and have always been fearless about it. This was simply not the right plan with F. She made it a point to be outright rude if I asked anything at all with answers ranging from I don't know, I don't care to that should be no concern of yours. I was absolutely gob-smacked by the level of unprofessionalism.  This is a person with multiple degrees from top universities in America. The first meeting I chalked it up to F was having a bad day, she had a couple of kids returning to school after summer break and things were off to a rough start as they tend to be. In our second meeting, I asked her a clarifying question on something she had started to explain was promptly accused of being litigious. I don't

This job posting for an IT support technician made me wonder if it would matter at all that the person would a tech support for a Champagne company - presumably not. Imagine a person always dreamed of working at Lego but their qualifications land them several degrees removed from the action - where the dream came from. Then it matters little Lego or small, boring, and old-fashioned insurance company. To that person both jobs are just about the same. It made me think about the most interesting clients I have worked for. When those very interesting consulting opportunities came about, I was eager to learn all I could about their business, the market, and the competitors. There would be a few charismatic people who had history with the company and represented the culture.  Beyond that once the discussions turned to problems that needed a technology solution, it was more of the same. The wonderful novelty of the experience faded out pretty quickly - it was just business as usual. When I l

The first timed I dined alone at a restaurant would be over twenty years ago now and it felt a bit awkward. The waitress had graciously seated me in a booth - it was a not a busy time but also a thoughtful gesture on her part. Since that first time, eating out alone specially while traveling for work has become easier to the point of effortless now. I used to think it was a matter of practice over time that made the experience less fraught. It turns out that eating solo is becoming more common and I am just a happy beneficiary of the trend. Many factors have contributed to this:  “The social norms have changed. People don’t look at solo diners anymore and think, ‘You must be a loner,'” Mattila said. The growth comes as more people are living alone. In 2019, the Pew Research Center found that 38% of U.S. adults ages 25 to 54 were living without a partner, up from 29% in 1990. In Japan, single households now make up one-third of the total; that’s expected to climb to 40% by 2040, ac

Houdsen in his book Ten Poems to Change Your Life Again and Again says "A friend just told me that he has known for the last two weeks that he has prostate cancer. These two weeks, he said, have been the most alive in his life. Far from feeling fear or grief (perhaps these are still to come), every moment has had a clarity and sharpness he has hardly ever known. It’s as if some deeper vision has been switched on, which enables him to see with great intensity the fullness of each moment.". This made me wonder about how culture and social conditioning play into a person's response to knowing they are dying. Not in an abstract way but more concretely because the life remaining can be counted in weeks and months only. Does it matter what others expect of the dying person - are they supposed to act fearless and ready to live what is left of their life, pretending what they know about imminent death is irrelevant. What if those close to them were inclined to feel sorry and act

It was amusing to read this interview on happiness - the old variety that needs to be tossed and the new one embraced. The central thesis hinges on this: Due to Old Happy, Americans are struggling with unprecedented levels of unhappiness, illness, burnout, and loneliness, with no idea what’s wrong or what they need to do to feel better again. The evidence I’ve amassed about the harms of Old Happy is astounding.  I am not so sure people have  no idea what’s wrong or what they need to do to feel better again. S ometimes those things they need to do to feel better are not attainable. A parent who is running on fumes because they have school-age kids, a demanding job that is needed to pay the bills, a marriage fraying from lack of care and attention and lack of mobility due to family being rooted to their current place of work.  This person knows exactly what would make them feel better - if they could have the gift of time without being stressed about how the bills will get paid, they w

A lot of schools are implementing no homework policies and while some of the reasoning it valid. implementation of such policy feels like bathwaterism. There is completely pointless, aggravating and tedious homework that frustrates student and parent alike - it make sense to root those out entirely.  But homework which encourages a kid to step outside their comfort zone, try things they wouldn't on their own, read books and work on interesting projects are very far from useless. They can make or break the kid's school experience and outcomes from there on.  Preparing at home to have a good debate and discussion on a topic in the classroom is also one of those things that should stay. That said, all recommendations on how to restore childhood for kids, make very good sense Let children spend time with their families. The single strongest predictor of academic success and fewer behavioral problems for a child, 3-12 years old, is eating as a family. Make planned time during the d