The Casual Blog

October 12, 2010

Watch out for robo cars

I expected that self-driving cars would get here eventually, but I was still startled to learn this week that they’re already here. On Sunday the NY Times reported that Google has created vehicles that can steer itself through city traffic without human intervention. http://tiny.cc/f6d1z They’ve logged thousands of road hours without a serious accident. The cars can sense other cars and obstacles and read road signs. Apparently the only common traffic issue they haven’t solved is how to interpret the gestures of a cop directing traffic.

My first reaction was excitement at such amazing technology. As the Times pointed out, there could be major benefits in terms of safety (computers don’t get sleepy or drunk) and energy efficiency (vehicles can be lighter because they won’t be running into each other). And without the need to pay attention to the road, perhaps there will be gains in productivity, or even creativity, where once there was road rage.

I try to make it a rule, where feasible, to embrace change, since change is one of life’s constants. But pretty quickly I started thinking about the downside of robo cars. In the charming animated movie Wall-e, after planet earth is destroyed the remaining humans are cared for by advanced robots, and, relieved of their responsibilities, the humans have become doughy dumb blobs. Will robo cars make us weaker and less connected? When freed of the need to drive, instead of more reading, will the average amount of time spent watching television increase from the already amazing five hours a day? If robo cars are much safer than human driven ones, how long will society tolerate fallible human drivers? Are we coming to the end of driving as we know it?

In my earlier urban days in New York and D.C., I was politically opposed to cars and largely made do with public transportation. When we moved from D.C. to N.C. and became suburban householders, I realized driving was going to be a part of my life, and I might as well enjoy it. So I embraced the change, and started to find pleasure in cars. I’ve enjoyed driving more and more, as I got nicer cars. Now, with my 911 S (Clara), I adore it. I love going out on country roads, adjusting the suspension to the “sport” setting, and feeling the road. I love the engine’s throaty growl, and its wild banshee cry of joy in acceleration. I love its agility as the road twists and turns, and I love the g forces.

At the same time, the massive power of the car demands respect and attention. It could quickly get out of control. This means there is an element of challenge. But that is part of what I like. So I’m not looking forward to robo cars. They’re surely coming, but I won’t give up my Clara till they pry her from my cold dead hands.

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October 10, 2010

Soccer and football

I really enjoy reading the newspaper on Sunday. When I lived in New York, sometimes I’d actually buy the Times from a newstand on Saturday night and get an early start reading the Week in Review. When I don’t have a Sunday morning golf game, as happened this Sunday, I devote a good chunk of the morning to current events. The events may be unsettling, be they natural disasters, wars, or political strife, but the orderly presentation, with morning coffee, is pleasantly soothing. This is not, of course, reality, but rather a highly scrubbed and edited simulation. But everyone knows that.

However, I was disappointed that today the Sunday News and Observer failed to cover the playoff victory last night of the Carolina Railhawks, our local professional soccer team. Sally and I were there for the event, with midfield seats close to the field, and saw them defeat the Minnesota Stars 4-0 to advance to the semifinal round. The team is part of the USSF D-2 Pro League, which is surely a candidate for the worst sports league name ever. But apart from the name problem, this is a good team and a good sport.

This was the third game we got to this season, and with each game I found myself seeing more of the nuances, both of the athletes’ incredible individual skills and of the team tactics. I’m developing more knowledge of the rules and more confident opinions about bad calls by the referees and faked injuries. I’m starting to like certain players. In short, I’m getting to be sort of a fan.

It was a beautiful evening, just cool enough for a light jacket. We’d previously learned that the concession stands had not evolved any vegetarian options, so we brought a couple of Jersey Mike’s veggie subs with us, and split a chocolate chip cookie. The stands were far from crowded, but there were enough people to make some noise. Sally noted that the field seemed very large, and I said I believed it was the same length as a football field — 100 yards. (I later checked with Google and learned the official length may be between 100 and 130 yards, and the Cary field is 120 yards.) Sally hadn’t known the length of a football field. As a former American football participant, that distance is one that is seared into my mind and body.

I played Pop Warner football in Winston-Salem for the Tiny Demons beginning at age 12, and finished my football career at defensive end for the Wiley Junior High team at age 15. Even back then, football seemed physically punishing and usually far from beautiful. But I liked being part of a team and liked some of the guys. It was challenging. I was in no way outstanding, but every now and again I exceeded expectations and make a good play.

And I still enjoy football at some level. But more and more I’ve found it seriously disturbing. It’s just too dangerous, and the high risk is part of its essence. For professionals, certainly, but even for students and kids, there’s just too great a risk of brain injury or other serious accidents. I’d like to think that if I were a Roman citizen, I’d object to holding gladiatorial fights to the death for entertainment. Our football games aren’t quite that bad, but there’s an uncomfortable resemblance. We should disfavor games that risk destroying lives.

I admit, I can’t help being glad when the N.C. State Wolfpack wins. But soccer is much more in line with my values, and more to my taste. I do worry that heading balls can cause brain injury, and I’d favor protective headgear to mitigate that. And I realize soccer players can break their necks. But the sport itself is not designed to cause high speed collisions of humans. It’s about speed and agility, as well as power.

Anyway, hurray for the Railhawks. Nuts to the News and Observer sports page. The team played with heart and skill, and defeated a worthy opponent. Good luck in the next round. You guys are awesome.

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October 9, 2010

Starting the weekend with some exercise and music

Late Friday afternoon I returned some phone calls, cleaned out my e-mail queue, checked my to-do list one last time, jammed some weekend work in my book bag, and did the short drive home. Sally had left for a tennis tournament, but had first fed the animals, so they were sleepy. I played the piano for a few minutes and moved to a different mind zone — a Chopin nocturne (D flat major), a Debussy prelude (La cathedrale engloutie), Liszt’s Sonneto del Petrarca 47. I also played J. Strauss’s Blue Danube waltzes in honor of the poor Danube, currently under assault by toxic sludge. I filled a small plate with some leftover pepper casserole and brown rice, warmed it in the microwave, poured a glass of pinot gris, and had a quiet, delicious dinner.

Then I walked over to hear the N.C. Symphony do the first fall concert of our series. It was a lovely fall evening, mild and clear, and I savored the walk. This is one of the pleasant things about living in downtown Raleigh. There were two new buildings going up along the way, and people on Fayetteville Street eating dinner at sidewalk tables or walking about.

I had an unusually strong sense of physical well being. It was a good week for exercising — no travel or serious time crunches at work — so I’d gotten up at 5:30 a.m. every day to either swim a freestyle mile (2x), do a yoga class, or take a spinning class (2x). Spinning is still new to me, and I’m still enthusiastic — it’s an amazing aerobic workout. The basic idea of stationary bike plus music, rhythmic movement, group activity, and a cheerleading coach previously struck me as not at all my style, but it is remarkably effective in (a) raising my heartrate, (b) making me sweat, and (c) leaving me feeling pleasantly endorphinized.

With fall in the air, I’m looking forward to winter, and skiing in Colorado, and I’m using ski thoughts for extra workout motivation. Last year the hour-long climb in the snow at over 12,000 feet up the narrow ridge to Highlands Bowl at Aspen Highlands taught my body a brutal lesson it won’t soon forget. I was, in truth, too whipped to attack the long double black diamond run from the top, but there was no alternative way down. I survived, but next year I hope to do more than merely survive such situations — to exult! That may be too much to hope for. It will always be difficult to go from a few hundred feet above sea level one day to vigorous activity at several thousand feet the next, but I’m looking to be in better shape next season and bettering my odds.

At a leisurely pace, it took 23 minutes to walk to the concert hall. (Afterwards I picked up the pace and got home in under 20.) I was interested to hear Rachmaninoff’s first piano concerto. The composer was still a student when he made it, but it has the seeds of the more familiar and almost too gorgeous second concerto. It is certainly a virtuoso showpiece, and Jean-Philippe Collard played it with power and authority. I was mainly interested in the second half of the concert, a performance of Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony, a piece I was not familiar with. It was strange and beautiful, with novel and varied textures, and diverging moods. It approached the richness of Mahler. There were good loud places, where the brass expressed themselves fully, and a fine solo for the bassoon. I plan to get a recording and listen to it some more.

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October 3, 2010

Young lives lost, and a note on homophobia

One of the things I like about my morning newspaper is the obituaries. I paid no attention to them in my younger days, and thought it odd that older people read them. Then, somehow, I got older, and became sort of a fan. Many are pro forma statements, but as a group, they give some clues as to how people manage grief. Every now and again, there is an account of someone who apparently lived a life that enriched the lives of those surviving, and those cheer me up.

But the obits I tend to focus on are those involving young people. Old people are supposed to die eventually, but not young people, so there’s always an element of tragedy. Every now and again, I get a sobering dose of pain, as when a death looks like it could have been a child of my own. There was one such this week — a young woman named Grace White from Cary (like use, until recently), who’d just graduated from N.C. State (like my dear Jocelyn), worked in Hemlock Bluffs Nature Center (where I’ve been many times), who died in a wakeboarding accident on Harris Lake. Apparently she hit her head hard in a fall and had a fatal brain injury. Her dad is speaking out on the dangers of wakeboarding without a helmet. I am so very sorry for his loss.

This week the suicide of Tyler Clementi, an 18-year-old violinist at Rutgers University, became a national story that also seemed close to home. Clementi jumped from the George Washington Bridge into the Hudson after his roommate posted a video on the internet of him kissing another male. Much of the commentary has focussed on the effects of bullying and the power of the web. But the story is surely in part about homophobia. The reluctance of the mainstream press to treat this aspect of tragedy directly is dispiriting.

I keep thinking we may have turned the corner on homophobia, but Clementi’s death is a reminder that it’s alive and well. The resistance to gay marriage has weakened, but a major segment of the population is still fearful of gays, and there are still politicians (including gay ones) who exploit this fear. One of the hardy perennial fear narratives is conflating gay sex between consenting adults with deviants who prey on children. I think such myths are gradually losing their power as more people realize that gays are normal people with normal ethics who pose no special threat. Everyone knows and gets along with gay people, whether they know it or not. But there are still minds that need to be changed. The Clementi tragedy reminds us that this is an urgent matter, because some lives are at risk.

One aspect of the story that made it more personal for me was the fact that Clementi apparently was a talented music student. In my time as music student at N.C. School of the Arts and Oberlin Conservatory, I knew many gay students, and came to understand that gays are major contributors to our artistic life. Just as gay friends have enriched my life, gays have made our society richer.

I have a theory as to why gays are so important in the arts. Artistic expression involves emotional exposure that runs counter to male stereotypes. Stereotypical American males don’t say much about their inner feelings. Art goes against this grain, since it involves exposing feelings. You don’t have to be gay to be an artist, and plainly being gay will not make you an artist. But the willingness to reject stereotypes is something gays almost have to have, and that type of courage is helpful for an artist.

I’d guess that Clementi had not worked through and accepted his sexuality, and so he was probably particularly vulnerable to cruel homophobic gibes. That sort of behavior, and homophobic thinking, has got to stop. It could help to speak up on the issue, and invite others to examine their prejudices. I’ll say it, though it probably rules out any chance of elected office: gays are good for our society. Or to put it in bumperstickerese: gay is good.

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October 2, 2010

Freedom and private matters

I finished Franzen’s Freedom on the flight back from Dallas earlier this week. Although the last half of the book was not as surgically precise and constantly surprising as the first, it was still very fine, and I was glad I read it. It passed my test for a novel that is in every sense worthwhile: it explored questions and won insights that just can’t be got at through any medium other than a novel. The subject matter involves some of the big issues of our time, such as global warming, overpopulation, environmental irresponsibility, and species extinction. But just as in other great novels, most of the interesting revelations relate to private matters — interior lives and intimate relationships.

Writing about things that are generally considered private is a risky business. Even with the license of a novelist, it takes a degree of courage close to recklessness to be direct and truthful about intimate aspects of our lives. For all the things Freud got wrong, he was surely right that civilization depends on a degree of repression of our basic urges. By the same token, our social lives would be unsustainable if we lifted all self-censorship. It’s true, as Jack Nicholson once violently asserted: we can’t handle the truth! At any rate, we can’t uncritically expose all of our feelings and our emotional lives without causing outrage and social havoc. But this is part of the gift of the great novelist: to guide us into and through these hidden things in a way that enriches rather than injures.

I’m constantly struggling, when I write for the Casual Blog, with the question of what is too private for public exposure. Where one draws the line plainly depends on what kind of person one is, which in turn depends on every other social variable — personal history, family, community, customs, laws, etc. And the line may also vary according to the subject involved. And the best answer for today may not be the best in the future. Pushing the line may actually change the kind of person one is or is perceived to be, either for better or worse. My current model involves trying to be conscious of the line and to get close to it without going over it. But it’s always a judgment call made in the fog of complexity. Mistakes are sure to happen. In such cases, I have to hope the parties affected will forgive and eventually forget.

I’ve wondered whether it crosses the line to explore the implications of Jocelyn’s latest adventure — free form travelling in South America. This is not all happy stuff. As a dad, I’m in a fugue state: full of admiration for her spirit and courage, full of pride, but also full of worry. As I told her very bluntly, she is throwing herself in front of some existential risks without understanding them very well. She did not appreciate this criticism, and just as bluntly told me so. She is highly confident of her ability to deal with the unexpected, which is impressive, yet worrisome. Does she have any idea how vulnerable she could be? Is it better if she doesn’t? At any rate, I’m sufficiently on edge and preoccupied with such risks as kidnapping that I will refrain from discussing her itinerary. But I should also say, according to her emails, she’s having a fantastic time.

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September 25, 2010

My favorite gadget

My iPhone is a marvelous gadget, but as will happen with gadgets, the magic has faded somewhat. Part of it is simple familiarity: a year-old gadget is just not as exciting as a new one. Part of it is competition: I’m in that wonderful phase of new love with my iPod. Also, with the introduction of the slick new iPhone model, my 3G seems the tiniest bit frumpy. And part of it lately has been frustration with minor glitches from the new operating system, which I downloaded three weeks ago. In particular, the device started asking me for a password to my voicemail, and I didn’t have a password. I was locked out.

I’ve been super busy at work lately and simply haven’t had the combination of free time and fortitude needed to call AT&T, navigate the voicemail system, and get a sentient human to solve the problem. Meanwhile, there’s been a constant low-grade worry that someone might leave me a voicemail that could have consequences if left unattended. It’s probable that a business voicemail to my iPhone would have a related voicemail on my office phone, or a related email somewhere. But not certain. And there’s even less certainty that a personal voicemail would have a margin of safety. How many friendships have been lost due to ignored phone messages? There was definitely risk involved.

Last week at Red Hat we had the mother of all meetings, a week-long assembly of the legal department personnel from around the globe. In addition to organizational and speaking duties, I contributed many hours of attention to the presentations. I particularly enjoyed getting to know some of my really interesting colleagues from distant offices (Singapore, Beijing, Sao Paulo, Munich, Mountain View, Tysons Corner). And in the course of a gadget discussion with Tom Y, I got a lead on how to solve the voicemail problem — attwireless.com

So, finally, on Saturday morning, I woke up early, went to the gym, swam 1700 meters, did some yoga, got some gas for Clara, came home, walked Stuart, fed him and the cats, had some coffee and cereal, read the Times, and then went to attwireless.com. It took some looking about, but I finally found the proper tab for resetting the wireless password, and got it done. But along the way there was one last challenge.

I had to choose security questions and enter answers. The questions were mostly in the form of What’s your favorite whatever — favorite food, movie, song, etc. You’d think, or at least ATT&T must have thought, I’d know such things. But I could not come close to determining what I would probably say in the future was my favorite in any of the categories. There were too many possibilities, too many things in each category that I really liked and might on a given day think could be my favorites. And for things I really care about (including movies, food, and music), I hate the thought of being unfair and untrue and designating as a favorite something that is not the true, ultimate, most fantastic favorite. Admittedly this was a minor problem, but still, a problem. In the event I could not remember my password, missing the security questions as well could be a real headache.

Fortunately, in the end, there were questions involving personal history that I could substitute and be reasonably confident that, absent traumatic brain injury or dementia, I’d answer consistently. So, I’m back in business with voicemail. Somewhere ahead there’s a new gadget problem, but right now I’m good. iPhone, don’t tell anyone, but you’re my favorite.

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September 21, 2010

Welcome to fall and a new ballet season

Of the four seasons, fall is my favorite. Finally there’s a break in the hot weather, and the cooler temperatures make it easier to move. Days shorten, leaves change their colors, and migrant birds flock and prepare to move south. Harvest time is at hand. And the new arts season begins.

Our first event of the new arts season was Carolina Ballet’s performance last Friday of a program entitled Firebird. I was sorry to see the there were a good many empty seats. The audience is an important part of a performance. Those of us without dance training have a role to perform — that is, the audience role, absorbing and responding. I always feel like a better person after the ballet, with posture at least temporarily improved.

Why were there empty seats in Fletcher Hall? I do not know. People squander their precious life hours on the most amazingly nonsense yet pass up such richness close at hand. At any rate, those who made it were well rewarded. There were strong new works by Weiss and Bourtasenkov, as well as the repertory masterpiece set to the great Stravinsky score. And of course, the incredibly talented, disciplined, beautiful dancers.

As a Mahler fan, I was especially interested in Weiss’s new Sturmische Liebe, a pas de deux to a Mahler chamber piece with Lara O’Brien and Alain Molina. It was taut and tragic to the danger point, as though the end of love could only mean the end of life. It seemed to draw on the spirit of tango. I admired Lara’s intensity and her total immersion in the character, which was so somber that I briefly forgot it was acting and worried she might be a danger to herself.

I also particularly enjoyed the very different new Weiss piece Moving Life, a non-story to three enigmatic works by Erik Satie. Part of the music, the Gymnopedies, was familiar to me from a marathon performance I helped with years ago, and I went home after the show and ordered the sheet music online from Sheet Music Plus. Peggy Severin Hansen was again magnificent as the Firebird, in many regards birdlike — astonishingly light and quick, yet elegant and powerful.

Sal and I spotted Lola Cooper at the second intermission with a cast on her foot. She greeted us warmly and brought us up to date on her news. She’d had surgery a few weeks before to address a congenital bone problem. She seemed upbeat about the good progress she was making on her rehabilitation. It has to be so difficult for a dancer with such dedication to be sidelined even for a few weeks.

After the performance, Sally and I parted temporarily, she to hunt for her Mini Cooper and I my Clara. There was a street fair on Wilmingstreet called SparkCON. I spent a few minutes watching performers dancing with fire to African drumming. I couldn’t figure out how a flaming hula hoop didn’t case burns. It was fun to see the street performers, and I would have given them a few dollars if they’d asked.

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September 18, 2010

Freedom, my Provo novel, and TCI diving

I used to think of reading novels as a basic necessity, like food, water, and shelter. Novels were also my friends. Some were fun, some were wise. Reading novels was necessary, I thought, to build a conscious mind.

Beginning in my mid-teens, I took on, in no particular order, a lot of big classics, including Russians (viz Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky), Brits (Austen, Dickens, Trollope, Elliot, Hardy, Joyce, Woolf), French (Proust), Germans (Mann), and Americans (Twain, Melville, Hawthorne, Conrad, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Wharton, James, Wolfe, Faulkner, Salinger). In the seventies and eighties, I read many great books of the previous or current generation, including Nabokov, Roth, Updike, Heller, Cheever, Naipaul, Pynchon, Bellow, Vonnegut, Stone, DeLillo, Gardner, Kennedy, Davies,and Millhauser. At times I had enthusiasms for genres, including espionage (Le Carre), hard boiled (Chandler), mysteries (Christie), sci fi (LeGuin), historical (P. O’Brien), and horror (King). And on and on.

And then it was over. I didn’t suddenly stop reading, but at some point it was no longer necessary for me to have a novel near to hand. No, it was worse than that: I lost my faith in novels. I was no longer sure they were a good investment. Perhaps it was because of new circumstances in my life (too busy? but I was always busy), or maybe the change reflected a shift in the larger culture. Could the era of literature be ending? I’m not sure. But in bookshops, when I looked at the fiction shelves, instead of seeing endless exciting possibilities, as I used to do, I was struck by the opposite — masses of books that, I felt, would probably do nothing for me.

I shifted my non-professional reading diet to mostly history, biography, science, and journalism, along with poetry. I began applying a tough filter for taking on fiction: only books that I thought might be transformative or unforgettable make the cut. I continued to find such ones from time to time (McEwan, T. Wolfe, M. Amis, Spencer, Roth, Eugenides, Shteyngart, Yates). But not every day — or week, or month.

A couple of weeks ago I found another. For Labor Day weekend, Sally and I took a diving trip to Providenciales, Turks and Caicos. I’d just read the first rapturous reviews of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, and decided to pick it up in an airport bookshop. On the trip down, it was nowhere to be found (though it was in the front of all airport bookstores by the following weekend). Therefore, I went to Plan B. As soon as we got to Provo, I downloaded it onto the iPad — my first contemporary enovel.

It is a great book for a long sandy beach with palm trees, blue skies, and turquoise water, but also a great book for a long plane trip, or extended insomnia. It contains multiple lives, with problems you know well (like painful family relationships, loneliness, global environmental disasters), in settings you know well (various American cities) but have never seen from these angles. It requires no conscious effort, though you pause now and again to note the incredible craftsmanship (no visible strings or joints). Reading it is like living a different life. And when you emerge, it makes you grateful to have your own life.

On our diving days in Provo we left the Royal West Indies hotel at 8:00 a.m. and returned around 3:00, after two dives and a good number of nautical miles. Then, exhausted, we’d sit on the beach or by the pool and read for long periods. From time to time, we’d take a dip to cool off or have a rum drink. It was sweet.

Of course, not perfect. My new reading technology, the iPad, did not work in direct sunlight, so I read some paper books as well. I also had to address some diving technology glitches. On day two, I decided to try to perfect my weighting, which required obtaining more lead from the boat, which required swimming against the current, which led to falling behind the group and working to catch up, which led to over exertion, overuse of oxygen, mild narcosis at 100 feet, problems reading gauges, an out-of-air emergency, sharing air with Sal, and, back on the boat, loss of all stomach contents. On another dive my octo malfunctioned and started rapidly dumping air. We had to abbreviate that dive, but had some good sightings.

We had close and rewarding encounters with several reef sharks, sea turtles, barracuda, and countless luminous small fish. Unfortunately, we saw many lion fish, which are spectacular looking but poisonous and horribly destructive of the reef ecosystem. In areas, the coral was dead, a ghostly white. But there were large, healthy areas, with bizarre shapes and bright colors of otherworldly beauty.

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August 29, 2010

Ebooks and charity ideas

This week I went to Dallas and back twice. I will not complain, except to note that long periods confined in small seats do not get easier as the hours pass. I sat next to a fifteen year old kid on the way back, who, by the end of the flight, was writhing in discomfort, and I remembered how this was even tougher when I was younger.

I spent some of the seat time reading my first ebooks on my iPad. As a confirmed bibliophile, I doubted I would really like ebooks, but my compulsion to have handy several books when I travel has created problems with weight limits, and pushed me towards trying this lightweight solution. Using the Kindle software, it took me just a few minutes to fall in love with the format. I like the typeface and type size, the ability to highlight and annotate, and the light weight.

My first ebook was Against Intellectual Monopoly, by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine, an against-the-grain discussion of the problems with our patent and copyright systems. I was gratified to see a discussion of Red Hat as a primary example of why patents don’t achieve anything close to their intended purpose in the software area.

It’s interesting how ideas can seem particularly interesting during cross-country flights, and how frequently new ones pop up. I found myself thinking about an NPR story from last week about individuals who commission new pieces of music or plays. The point of the story was that the cost could be shared with others and spread over time, so that being a patron and bringing a new piece of art into the world could be more affordable than you’d think.

I really liked the idea of contributing in a direct and immediate way to new art. If I can’t be a composer, perhaps I could help in the creation of music by funding one. So, how about a web site to allow composers, choreographers, or others to propose commission-worthy projects, and donors likewise to seek suitable artists? Sort of an arts-funding Craigslist. Sure, it could be there’s just not sufficient interest, but then, not so long ago Craigslist sounded like a fantasy.

The web today is a big part of my life, and of the lives of most people I know. In almost no time it’s gone from a novelty to a utility, and now I take it for granted much like the interstate highway system. Yet we may have just begun to scratch the surface of what it can do — things that go way beyond shopping and entertainment. Facebook and Twitter haven’t really inspired me, but they point in the direction of more immediate and wide-ranging connections that have more human meaning. It could reduce the barriers to charitable giving by making needs and resources easier to see and connect.

For example, it’s hard for me to visualize the enormous suffering from the current flooding in Pakistan, and hard to feel like there’s much I can personally do about it. But if I could connect with a person who’s lost everything and understand their story using web multimedia, it could help me, and I suspect others to open their hearts and wallets. People who’ve lost everything can’t easily get online, of course, but the tools that could get them there already exist. It would take some thought and energy. This could be an open source project.

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August 22, 2010

Good sports

Last Friday I reached my latest swimming objective: 1500 meters of freestyle without a break. This was for me, a considerable achievement, which not so long ago I found almost impossible to imagine. I’ve been doing a 1500-meter workout for some months, but with 30 second breaks at various intervals. A few weeks back, I decided to work towards doing the distance non-stop. I began gradually reducing the breaks, from 10, to 5, to 3, to 2, and finally to 1. Then, finally, none.

On Saturday morning I did an hour and a half of Vinyasa yoga in an open level class at Blue Lotus with Yvonne. That’s a lot of yoga! I tried very hard not to look at my watch, but once I was well drenched with sweat, I checked to see if we were almost done — and we were only half way through. I still can’t figure out at all why this strange system works, but it does: I felt absolutely wonderful at the end.

That evening Sally and I went out to Zebulon to see the Carolina Mudcats play the Mobile Baybears. It was a warm but not sweltering night, and we had great seats — a few yards beyond first base on the first row, close to the visitor’s bull pen. From this close in view, we could see how fast they run, how hard they throw, and generally how amazing they are. This is AA-level baseball, where the players are serious contenders for the big leagues. The pitchers were throwing fastballs in the mid-90s, and I don’t think I saw any errors. There is something really pleasing about seeing a real life high-quality baseball game on an August evening. The competitive drama is involving, but the whole experience is also relaxing. It’s good to have a beer and slice of pizza, listen to the buzz of the crowd, the organ, the announcer, the crack of the bat. It was a good, close game, which Mobile won 2-1.

When I stop to think about it, it amazes me how much I’ve changed with regard to physical activity and sports in recent years. As a kid, I played the usual sports, and used to imagine that I would play well one day, but in competition I never managed a level much higher than average or worse. And gradually, I came to think of myself as a non-athlete and sports-phobe. Particularly during adolescence, it was annoying to see the social advantages (in particular, success with girls) that accrued to the gifted athletes. I looked forward to adulthood as a time in which sports and athletics would be no longer relevant, and my lack of any particular athletic giftedness would cease to be a liability.

In retrospect, I can see this was partly a problem of lack of time. Part of the problem with athletic skills and kids is the same as with academic skills, which is that kids learn at different rates. This is kind of obvious, but schools are not set up to address accommodate different rates of learning. Instead, a class is given a set time in which everyone must master a set of skills, and those who are slower are shamed and punished. And those slower kids eventually figure out how to avoid the painful activity, perhaps by dropping out. While I was generally one of the quicker kids at mastering schoolwork skills, I was not so in sports. Because of my July birthday, I was always one of the youngest in the class, which was part of the problem. But of course, I had no idea of that issue at the time. I just knew that my relative lack of success in sports was somewhat painful. Like other slow learners, I eventually opted out.

Fortunately, over the years, I’ve found that the level of mastery needed for enjoyment of many activities activity is not impossibly high and with no tight time deadlines I’ve reached that level in some things I really enjoy. This has been the trajectory with swimming, skiing and golf, and I’m starting to see the outlines of that level of accomplishment for yoga. Slow and steady wins the race.

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