The Casual Blog

July 10, 2010

Dropping some weight and hitting some golf balls

I came back from the long weekend in St. Croix five pounds heavier than when I left.  It’s difficult to account for the sudden gain, since I was reasonably careful about not over eating and held the veggie line against temptation.  Perhaps our very pleasant seaside daiquiris, pina coladas, and pain killers had something to do with it.  In any case, I managed to shed all the extra weight this week with some vigorous early morning workouts, and as of this morning was at my fighting weight of 160.

Earlier this week the NY Times published a piece by Gretchen Reynolds on the positive effects of exercise on the brain.  http://tiny.cc/deokh  Studies with rats show the exercising rats with much superior brain functioning (“little rat geniuses”), and the apparent interaction of BMP and Noggin leading to increased production of neurons.  I can believe it.   When I first began regular exercise in my college years, I viewed it as primarily benefitting the cardiovascular system, but especially in recent times, I find that I feel duller if I can’t find time for a workout.

We’ve had a record-setting heat wave this week.  This Saturday morning, I was hoping to get an outdoor swim at Lifetime Fitness, but unfortunately the outdoor lanes were all taken when I got there at 6:40.  I made do with the indoor pool for 60 laps, then 15 minutes of yoga in the sauna, then 5 minutes in the steam room (whew!).  Then I headed over to Lake Jordan to drive my sports car on some backwoods roads.

I ended up at the end of a gravel road off US 64 at a down-on-its-luck golf range with a old barn on one side.  There was no one there when I showed up, but a guy emerged from a small adjacent house and got me a bucket of golf balls.  He couldn’t take a credit card, and couldn’t break a $20, but he agreed to let me have a $9 bucket for all the smaller bills I had ($7).  Then he drove off, and left me alone to practice.   The grass was very long, and so I was effectively working on shots from the rough.  A good thing to practice, though not so fun.  I got sweaty and tired, and was happy to get to the bottom of the bucket and see the last ball fly away.

Leave a comment
July 10, 2010

Driving on the left

When we rented a car in St. Croix last weekend, the Hertz agent informed me that they drive on the left.  The guard at the airport exit reminded me again to drive on the left.  As did a policewoman at a drunk driver check point.  And with good reason:  it’s hard!  I’m guessing a lot of American tourists have accidents or narrowly avoid them.  The rule that one drives on the right gets deeply grooved into the brain.  The first two days, I consciously reminded myself repeatedly that left was right.  But by the third day left was starting to feel natural.  Then we came back to Raleigh, USA.  The first day I found myself hesitating — left or right?

That minor culture shock quickly receded in the face of the everyday challenges of work etc.  I did have a couple of days, though, where it seemed that every leaf on the trees I saw on my commute to work was distinct and clear.  The short Caribbean adventure transformed things just a bit.

1 Comment
July 7, 2010

Greetings from St. Croix

Last July 4 weekend Sally and I decided to burn a vacation day to make a four-day  trip to St. Croix.  The main objective was to dive some of the largest coral reefs in the hemisphere.  We were eager to try out some new diving equipment and see some exotic flora and fauna.  The program we settled on involved a night dive, four daytime dives, and a snorkeling trip.

The diving was rewarding.  The reefs were reasonably healthy, and there were luminous tropical fish in abundance.  We saw our first spotted eagle ray, a magnificent and haunting creature.  We had our first see horses, first spotted moray eel, and first rock beauty.  We saw two large sea turtles and barracuda. Especially on the night dive, we saw many bizarre critters whose names we didn’t know.  It’s hard to do justice to the beauty of  reef diving.  The visibility was not great by Caribbean standards – around 40 feet most of the time – but we could see a lot.   So much life, in so many shapes and colors, some shy, some friendly, some intimidating.

Along with the diving, we had several unusually rewarding talks with various travel companions.  On the flight down, we met a 22-year-old guy working on Wall Street with a hedge fund.  One of our divemasters was a guy from Indianapolis, another from New Zealand, and another from northern Virginia.  They all had interesting personal stories.

I’ve been thinking recently about the way we each create and embody stories.  Constructing them is part of the work of being human, and communicating them is a defining characteristic of our species.  That is, to be complete, actualized humans, we need to tell our stories to each other.  On this theory, I’ve been more conscious of encouraging people to tell their stories, particularly if it seems they might be at all interesting.  I’m usually not disappointed.  Often stories that I expected to be ordinary turn out to be unusual and absorbing.

I used to have an aversion to the clichéd expressions of small talk, but fortunately I got over that. I’m now convinced that these clichés serve a very important purpose as tools for encouraging story telling.  “Where are you from?” is an invitation to begin a narrative.   The same goes for “How are you doing?”  From there, the story can go in any direction.

We had our setbacks and frustrations.  My regulator malfunctioned when we first tried a night dive at the Fredricksted pier, so we had to scrub that attempt.  The next night we made the intimidating jump from the pier to the dark water below, but got separated halfway through the dive.  The travel home involved painfully slow gate agents and customs agents, and a connection in Miami that was too close for comfort.  But we made it, and it was worth the trouble.

1 Comment
June 26, 2010

Supreme Court connections to gifted people

This week I signed a letter in support of the nomination of Elena Kagan that was written by Peter Keisler and Harry Litman and signed by most of the Supreme Court clerks from the year (OT ’86) our group worked for the Court.  I always liked and respected Elena.  She was bright and friendly, and I was happy to guard her in our clerk basketball games, where I was fortunate to have a meaningful height advantage (she could shoot).   I find it reassuring that in a world where Tea Party whack jobs are sometimes taken seriously that Elena with such old-fashioned and relatively unexciting qualities as intelligence, balance, and decency has quietly risen to the apex of the legal profession.

I made another Supreme Court connection this week when I caught up with Larry Lessig.  Lessig clerked for Justice Scalia a few years after I did.  Now a law professor at Harvard, he’s distinguished himself as a constitutional and intellectual property law scholar and reformer.  His work on copyright law, including Free Culture and Remix, challenges the received wisdom that more copyright protection promotes greater creativity and shows that the opposite may be the result.  In this area, he’s a true rock star.

Lessig’s current project is focusing on the corrosive role of money in our political system.  On Tuesday Mel Chernoff and I attended the talk he gave at Campbell Law School promoting public financing of elections.  He’s well known for his extraordinary slide shows, which use super quick cuts to press points, and this was a good one.  We’d corresponded by email previously, and it was good to make a face-to-face connection after the event.  In addition to being brilliant, he seemed like a warm and sincere guy.

When I have personal encounters with really gifted people, I generally find it unsettling.  It’s inspiring, and I find myself thinking so much more is possible, but also being more-than-usually aware of my personal limits.  As John McPhee once noted in the context of great tennis players, there are many levels of the game.   It’s a privilege to play with higher level players, and rewarding. If it doesn’t kill you, it makes you stronger.  But it does not promote calm and tranquility.

It is

1 Comment
June 19, 2010

Liberation — death, sorrow, life

The Gulf of Mexico oil spill has been a big news story these last few weeks, but the news reports have given little coverage to the fact that millions of sea creatures that will die.  Our scuba experiences in the last couple of years have made us more conscious of the teeming life in the oceans, the unbelievable profusion, a cornucopia of bizarre, beautiful life.  The loss of life now taking place is impossible to fully grasp, and painful to consider.  I think it’s good, though, to try grasping it, and accept the pain of it.

We humans are generally deathophobes.  At the same time, it’s obvious that death is a fundamental part of life.  It’s in front, behind, and all around us, and avoiding it is really not possible.  We may as well have a little courage and honesty and figure out how to think about it.

I keep coming back to the line by Wallace Stevens in his poem Sunday Morning:  “Death is the mother of beauty.”  When I first read it, I thought he was just being provocative, but I now see he was struggling with something profound.  It isn’t that death itself is beautiful.  But it is an integral part of the natural cycle of change, which is a defining characteristic of life.  In Sunday Morning, Stevens asks, “Is there no change of death in paradise?  Does ripe fruit never fall?”  The Talking Heads got at the same idea with the funny line, “Heaven/ is a place/ where nothing/ ever happens.”  Such a paradise would be inhuman.  And very boring.

But coming to terms with this part of reality is not just a matter of working through the ideas.  It’s also accepting some unpleasant feelings, like grief and sorrow.  It seems natural to avoid such things, but it won’t work.  Those feelings are integral to the human experience; they’ll always be there.  We may as well face them with honesty and courage.  Opening ourselves to those feelings makes us more human.  It’s liberating.

Sally had a harsh and sad confrontation with one animal’s death this week.  She was monitoring her blue bird boxes at the Lochmere golf course for new for baby blue birds, which is usually a cheering thing.  She came upon  a young Canada goose that had had a horrible accident that destroyed its beak and left it bloody and mutilated.   It could still move, but was plainly suffering and unable to survive long.  The poor thing needed to be euthanized, but there was no practical way to capture it without making matters worse.  She had no confidence that the animal control service would be able to assist without increasing the animal’s fear and pain.  There was no solution, other than nature itself.

Sally began to cry as she told the story, and continued to wonder whether there was something else she could have done.  She is a tender-hearted soul, and I love her for it.  I was reminded of the time years ago when she arrived home in tears at having run over a little frog as she was parking her car.  I knew then, once again, that she was the girl for me.

Leave a comment
June 12, 2010

Money, and the ballet

There’s a tension between art and money.  Money is instrumental, a means to an end.  It’s associated with commerce and a variety of  tawdry of human attitudes and behaviors. Randy Newman’s song, It’s Money that I Love, is deliciously ironic, since it’s simply pathetic to love money.  Art is different.  It’s nourishing.  It opens doors.  It expresses our best, and makes us better.  Art feels ambivalent about money, but somehow they need to get along.

Last week I found myself reflecting on art and money after Ginny Hall invited Sally and me to take a tour of the studios and offices of the Carolina Ballet with Ricky Weiss, the company’s artistic director.   We’ve had season tickets for the last decade, starting shortly after the beginning of the company, and have seen all or almost all of Weiss’s ballets, some of them multiple times.  He’s a great choreographer in Balanchine tradition.  He has achieved something truly incredible in building a very strong company in our own Raleigh, North Carolina, and we’re so grateful.

As a longtime fan, I looked forward to talking with Weiss, but felt some anxiety about the money issue. I was well aware that the company needed it to survive.  Sally and I had discussed a possible contribution several times and agreed that we’d feel good about making a meaningful gift.  But it was not something I looked forward to discussing.  Where I’m from, we didn’t like to talk openly about money.  I’m not clear on the reasons, but we didn’t talk about things like salaries and prices for big ticket items.  It was taboo.

In the end, though, our meeting was surprisingly fun.  Weiss and Hall walked us through the studios and work spaces, which were not especially beautiful, but that was part of the point.  He made clear that he’s very conscious of managing money carefully, not spending it on things that don’t matter, and spending as much as he can afford on what counts.  He talked in detail of the cost of point shoes, costumes, and sets, of paying the dancers and staff, and of expenses such as disability insurance.  He compared his productions to those in New York, and admitted his sets were less elaborate, but he took pride that his productions cost a fraction of those.  As a person interested in the backstage, I found all this really interesting.

Weiss told us about falling in love with the ballet as a kid, dancing for Balanchine for 19 years at the City Ballet, leaving to become artistic director for the Pennsylvania Ballet, and leaving there under difficult circumstances.  He also described a six-year period of free lancing and searching without success for  the right position.  He said that during this time he considered leaving the field.  (This would have been a tragedy.)  He talked about the Ward Purrington’s long effort to bring professional ballet to Raleigh with no idea of the long odds against success.

I’d wondered whether Weiss, with his enormous and continual creativity, would find it interesting or helpful to have a philosophy of art and dance.  He did.  He seems to view ballet as not simply expressive, but also magical, transcendental, and yet at the same time basic to human existence, like food.  I was surprised, then, that he had no real trouble with the idea that some people don’t especially enjoy ballet, or even actively dislike it.  He didn’t feel compelled to win over everyone.  He noted lightly that someone once took him to a hockey game, and he didn’t particularly like it.

It turned out that Weiss had an unexpected gift for asking for money.  Without any hints from us, he at last said he’d like us to consider giving the exact amount that we’d already decided we wanted to give.  It was uncanny.  I felt happy and excited.  It’s wonderful that we can help with something that has brought us so much joy.

Leave a comment
June 6, 2010

Our anniversary

Sally and I celebrated our anniversary on Saturday, the same day of the week as our marriage in New York 28 years ago.  We had quickly agreed last week that we needed to mark the occasion with a special meal, and gave consideration to several fine area restaurants.  We settled on Piedmont in Durham, a place we’d been meaning to try for a while.

As usual, we did not do anniversary presents.  Sally is fundamentally unacquisitive — not deeply interested in expensive jewelry, clothes, or other consumables —  and so holidays at which presents are integral, such as Christmas and birthdays, are challenging for me.  She likes books and practical things.  For her birthday last week, she wanted a special type of binoculars strap, which I found, and I also got her a hardcover called The Ballet Companion.  Plus flowers, a card, and cupcakes.  She seemed happy.  For the anniversary, she got me a sweet card, and I, after a difficult search, found her a humorous card that at least wasn’t dumb or tasteless.

Piedmont is on Foster Street near the Armory, where we used to do swing dancing, in a block of short commercial buildings.  The decor is post-modern Euro bistro, evocative of a lot of things, some warm, some cool.  The menu is interesting —  modern Italian, with locally grown organic ingredients.  It is vegetarian friendly, which I define as having more than one plant-based entrée.  I had zucchini mint soup, which was lovely, with just a hint of mint, and ricotta ravioli with olives and tomatoes, which was acceptable.  Service was the one disappointment — too slow.  For dessert, we split a rich chocolate torte with chili ice cream and chocolate sauce.  The chili idea created a certain risk, and it was rich and rewarding.

We talked about food, music, dance, science, and travel.  We’re thinking of another scuba trip to the Caribbean and considering the Bahamas, but the horrendous ongoing Gulf Coast oil disaster, with vast quantities of oil moving into the Gulf Stream, is an issue.  We continued our discussion of making a larger donation to the Carolina Ballet, which we love.  As I was reminded recently in reading Dee Brown’s book about the settlement of the American West, the performing arts spread and survived because of patrons, not because of ticket sales.  We started our married life with no assets other than cheap furniture and clothes to wear, and the experience was formative.  I never imagined when we married that one day we’d be giving thought to the right way to handle charitable giving.  We’re very lucky.

This morning the Times had an interesting take on the breakup of Al and Tipper Gore after 40 years of marriage.  http://tiny.cc/lve8n  We were sad to hear of their split, and of course, curious about the cause.  And as Tara Parker-Pope notes in the Times, there’s just no way to know the root cause.  But it’s a reminder that marriages change, and they require nourishing.  Apparently couples who do new and different things together are happier.  Certainly, it’s good to try new restaurants.

Leave a comment
May 30, 2010

A beach trip, with a note on failure

For Memorial Day, we took Clara on her first road trip out to Jane and Keith’s beach place.  I enjoyed the drive.  We came over the bridge towards Nags Head just as the sun was setting.  The Outer Banks are not Monte Carlo.  It’s not about glamor.  But the area can induce serenity and happiness.  Traffic on the island moved slowly, and we sampled the local radio stations — a fundamentalist preacher, 80s rock, country, and my favorite, hip hop.  It was good at last to see Corolla again.

Keith is a grill chef extraordinaire, and for our benefit volunteered to go all vegetarian for the weekend.  Having recently mastered gluten-free cooking, he seemed to appreciate the challenge, like a high jumper who wants to go higher.  He made waffles with fruit and honey whip cream for breakfast.  Delicious!  A tomato cucumber soup with hot cheese pie for lunch.  Scrumptious!  Stuffed peppers and corn flan. Extraordinary!  He tried a rich chocolate torte, which he judged too dry and threw out.  The second effort was a great success.

We went to the beach in the afternoon,  Sally donned a wet suit and swam with my niece Kylie and nephew David.  I piloted a kite for a bit before it crashed, and I reread a bit of Endurance, by Alfred Lansing, the incredible story of Ernest Shackleton’s 1914 expedition to cross Antarctica, which was a failure in terms of its original mission, but a success in terms of its plan B — survival.  It’s nice to a frigid, desperate story and a sunny beach.

David, 10, is mad for lacrosse, and insisted while we were on the beach I learn something about it.  He let me use the shorter stick.  Under his intense coaching, I managed to make some catches and throws, and was pleased.  I also missed some catches and made some bad throws, which was less fun.  But I persisted for a while, even with little expectation of ever being any good, partly to humor David, and partly to continue road testing my theory of failure.

It’s this:  greater acceptance of failure increases the possibilities for happiness.  Part of the reason is that we learn from failure.  In any new endeavor, we start out incompetent, so we make mistakes, and if we persist we gradually work out how to make fewer mistakes.  Every significant accomplishment (apart from the occasional stroke of pure luck) is the result of many failures.

But there’s a broader reason for greater tolerance for failure.  Clearly, failure does not always lead to success.  Most of the things we could try will not turn out well, because no one can be good at everything. But if we decline to accept our own failure, we narrow our range of experience.  I might have missed lacrosse, or skiing, or Liszt.  If we give ourselves permission to fail, we can try new things, and be happier.

Leave a comment
May 28, 2010

Clara, a car, goes to the track and does what she was born to do

My car, Clara, had her coming out event this week — a track day at Virginia International Raceway.  After several weeks together, I knew she had many virtues — beauty, sophistication, and awesome power.  Clara is the ultimate product of generations of  German engineering genius   a 2006 Porsche 911 S,in a particularly lovely color, lapis blue.  Is this just a car?   You could say so, and certainly, it serves as transportation.  But viewing her that way seems overly crude.  She’s a work of art.

But calling her art suggests stasis, and her nature is kinetic.  She was bred for speed and agility. She is a sports car.  It would be a waste to treat such a machine like any old car.  Thus I felt a certain responsibility, as her new owner, to get her to the track and let her do what she was born to do. I was happy to sign up for the PCA event at VIR, near Danville, Va.

VIR is a world -class road course.  3.2 miles, 180 feet of elevation change, curves of every description, surrounded by forest and countryside .  As a driver in the novice class, I was assigned an experienced teacher, Glenn Mead.  There were a few rules about such matters as passing and emergencies.  But no speed limit.

We did four half-hour all-out sessions.  Like all drivers, Glen and I wore helmets, and we communicated via a wireless system.  Soon Glenn found a few things he liked about my driving, and several that could stand improvement.  At each of the turns, he was looking for the perfect turn.  I hit a few, and he effusively praised these efforts.  Others were not so great, and he made sure I knew it.  The point of the perfect turn, I eventually realized, was to carry and keep as much speed as possible.  Glenn encouraged greater and greater speed.  It occurred to me that he was not only a good guy, but also a brave one.

After a few imperfect turns, I realized that there was an aspect of Clara that was frightening.  I could not sense the limits of her power, and could not tell where I would lose control.  At each turn, the margin of error was thin.  And I didn’t really yet know Clara’s characteristics of balance and handling.  At one point, Glenn reassured me.  “This car is a ballerina,” he said.  “She’ll do what you tell her to do.”

She was, and she did.  We had a few squeals and skids, but we worked on technique. It got better and better.  I got a big dose of adrenaline, and also the aesthetic pleasure of some beautifully shaped turns.  Clara did what she was born to do.

Leave a comment
May 22, 2010

Daunting derivatives and Sleeping Beauty

Tuesday evening I boarded the flight from RDU to Dallas, and was confused at first as I looked in the coach section for my seat.   5E wasn’t there.  It slowly dawned on me that I had a first class ticket, either as a result of a computer glitch or some unexpectedly generous rewards system.  After I wedged my way forward through the human tide and found my seat,  I tried not to look too ecstatic.  Ah, such a comfy, roomy seat.  And so sweet to have a flight attendant who’s attentive, and little luxuries like warm peanuts and hot towels.  My neighbor was a precocious nine-year-old boy with a stuffed toy traveling to see his mom.  He’d flown this route many times.  He wanted to be an inventor when he grew up.

On the trip, I finished The Big Short by Michael Lewis.  I picked up the book on the strength of his earlier book, Liar’s Poker, and out of concern that I probably didn’t fully understand the drama in the U.S. and world economy in the last two years.  After reading the book, I’m quite sure I didn’t.  I now know a little more, but my larger takeaway is that part of the cause is that the mechanisms involved are so complex that they defy conscious human understanding or control.  I don’t think this is Lewis’s intended message.  He tries to create some heros and villains, or at least intelligent actors and dupes.  The intelligent actors had rational thoughts, and realized that subprime-mortgage-based derivative investments were much riskier than advertised.  He casts some blame on clueless regulators and unscrupulous investment bankers.

Lewis implicitly suggests the slightly cheering possibility that if people were more reasonable and diligent, they might set up regulatory and other systems to avoid financial catastrophe.  I found this encouraging message not very persuasive.  There were surely some monsters and frauds involved in the recent debacle, and plenty of examples of unsavory pure greed and indifference to human welfare.  But right now it looks to me like the big driver was the financial engineering of investment vehicles that were practically impossible to understand, even for professional investors and regulators, never mind individuals.  Creating them was far from unnatural.  In nature, technology, and other human  systems, greater and greater levels of complexity over time is generally the rule.  At some point, there’s simply too much for the human mind to deal with.  Our rational systems are overwhelmed, and our fallback emotional systems have no guideposts from experience.  Disaster is not necessarily inevitable, but we are less and less in control.  Yes, it’s scary.

But life, amazingly, goes on.  Sally and I went to the last program of the season for the Carolina Ballet last night, which was Robert Weiss’s version of Sleeping Beauty.  The music is by Tchaikovsky, and as Weiss explained at the beginning, the choreography comes in significant part directly from Marius Petipa’s nineteenth-century work.  For the most part, this was a very traditional, classical form of ballet.  I generally prefer the more abstract athleticism of Balanchine and his school (including Weiss) with modern dance inflections.  No matter.  Sleeping Beauty was wonderful.  Even the junior members of the corps de ballet showed considerable authority with classical technique, and the soloists were masters who communicate emotional depth within that framework.   Margaret Severin-Hansen as Aurora was etherial.  The costumes were also classically inspired (gowns and embroidered waistcoats and many tutus), and gorgeous.

We got a backstage tour courtesy of our friend Ginny at intermission.  It turned out, the action hadn’t really stopped.  On the stage behind the curtain, some of the dancers were practicing difficult passages or doing deep stretches.  It was disconcerting at first to shift from observer of a carefully planned spectacle to quasi-participant in the assembling of the spectacle, but fascinating.  We met Lilly Vigo, a great favorite of ours who was off for the night, and talked about her new baby, who was six months old that day.  We examined up close the intricate costumes and saw the swan boat and the huge dragon puppet in the wings.  A friend once told me that I was the kind of  person who likes to look behind curtains and see what’s really going on, and it’s true.  One of my fantasy careers is to be a stagehand.

After the show, we decided to have a drink at the Foundation, a tiny bar on Fayetteville Street that features a huge menu of American-made designer spirits.  The downstairs space was crowded, so we settled on stools at street level and did some people watching.  Two of our favorite soloists from the company, Lara O’Brien and Eugene Barnes, arrived shortly afterwards, and sat down next to us.  They seemed pleased that we were big fans, and we really enjoyed talking with them about favorite ballets, goings on in the company, and the travails of the professional dancer’s life.  This is the end of an arduous season for them, and both are looking forward to recovering from injuries over the summer.  We’re looking forward to seeing them again.

Leave a comment