• Rainer fell asleep on our way to Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods, so he was sort of groggy but awake after we got home. I tried to put him in his crib with a bottle for his nap, but heard him a few minutes later babbling away to himself. Usually this means he’s standing up holding onto the bars and hoping to be let out. But I went in to check and he was just lying there, still under his fleecy owl blanket. I gave him a couple of books, and he was content to stay there for the next 20 minutes, just hanging out in low light and paging through the books. He’s a sweet kid. After that, I was at a stopping point with the lasagne, so I took him out, made some lunch for him, gave him a bottle, and he finally took his nap at 3:30 or so.
• I’m watching Ocean’s 11 on TCM, the original Frank Sinatra / Rat Pack version. Coincidentally, this morning when I was listening to Weekend Edition while making Rainer some strawberry pancakes, Scott Simon interviewed a guy who wrote a biography of Sinatra.
• Should I quit Twitter, too?
• Tomorrow is the end of DST. I know I’ve got some DST haters out there, but the prospect of the lack of light tends fill me with some dread; Novembers have been the times of my worst bouts of depression. A passing thought as I was loading the dishwasher a few minutes ago: what if the tiny but continual saratonin drip of my facebook status updates starts a downward spiral? I don’t know, somehow, despite all these little twinges of concern, I feel better positioned to weather a November than I have in years. Bring it, SAD.

• I’m working on a mix tape (er… CD) of November music for a general audience. Stay tuned.

Or, Stuff I would have Put Into Facebook But Did Not

• Rainer’s been a total joy today. I nicked his finger this morning when trying to clip his nails (he does not like this, and moved his hand at the last minute), and there was more blood than the nick warranted, and it made me feel terrible. But he was fine and I let him watch his hour of Sesame Street while I cleaned up in the kitchen and around the house. I heared a “aaaaaaaaaaaahhhh!!!!” from the living room and saw him running into the hallway at one point. Turns out Mr. Snuffalupagus was on. Rainer’s terrified of him.
• I talked to Terri this morning; the NYC Interpol show last night that she had a photo pass to was good, but she was frustrated that security made the photographers stand in the aisles and not in the pit in front of the stage.
• We went to Whole Foods and I felt insanely ripped off at paying $4 for 10 oz. of spinach. Two weekends ago we bought 2 lbs. of spinach at Wilson Farms in Lexington for $3. I just didn’t feel up to schlepping out to Lexington today.
• I made a lasagne to bake tonight after Terri gets home. Don’t let anybody tell you that you can cut corners and don’t really need to cook the lasagne noodles before you bake it. That’s total crap. You at least have to get them flexible.
• This Neil Gaiman article in Spin about the Dresden Dolls is so very great.

Grandpa Ball was a man of great reserve and formality and, on one hand, a deep introversion, but on the other hand, a deep sense of belonging to society. He did loosen up in his old age; many years after he retired, he stopped wearing suits around the house, and started wearing sweater vests over his button-down shirts. The only time I remember seeing him not at the very least in a button-down shirt was when he stayed at my apartment in Crawfordsville, IN, one night, the weekend of my college graduation, and I saw him in his pajamas, which seemed as bizarre as, I don’t know, doing keg stands with the President of the United States.

A few months ago I was feeling like my mind was somewhat out of control and I couldn’t keep thoughts straight or get organized and everything was just getting lost in nothingness and months would go by without my having much to show for myself. Maybe because I stopped blogging for a while and I lost that particular record of where I’d been. I’d been updating Facebook pretty frequently, but that is like leaving a trail of breadcrumbs; it feels like it’s impossible to get whatever of yourself you put into Facebook back out.

So I bought a bunch of blank index cards and stuck them and a pen in my bag, or occasionally in a front shirt pocket, dorky as that sounds, and when something came to me I’d just write it down.

And a month or two ago, it occurred to me that I’d become Grandpa Ball. He always wore button down shirts, and in the front pocket was a pocket protector (he was a chemical engineer in the 40’s – 60’s and before pocket protectors became a clichéd signifier of dorkiness, it really was just What Was Done: they kept your shirts protected from the inevitable inky mess of early ball-point pen technology, and they were given out by companies as viable marketing schwag) and inside the pocket protector were a bunch of blank index cards and a pen. He’d often stop whatever he was doing, reach under his sweater vest, dig into his front shirt pocket, pull out an index card and a pen, write something down, and put it all back in the pocket, and then resume whatever he was doing without comment.

Of course, I’m not Grandpa Ball, and my cards are now a total mess, as everything that goes into my bag becomes. They’re crinkled and wrinkled and crushed and illegible and the sides are stained black and grimy. But I was sorting through some of them tonight and one dated 9/20 said “I am tired of viewing the world through the tiny window of an iPhone screen”. I don’t remember writing it, but I remember the sentiment, and it’s why I am going on Facebook hiatus for the rest of November. If I’m going to bother recording my life, it’s going to have to be in higher resolution than I get with short frequent updates. It’s going to have to be in the unfettered verbose onslaught of no character limits, free of the increasingly and strangely difficult constraint of writing for my FB audience.

There are many layers of irony in all this: the only way I can explain how Facebook has, in fact, greatly enriched my life greatly can’t be explained on Facebook itself (and will have to be the subject of another post). Also, my Facebook audience is so much more vastly diverse and challenging than my blog audience, it feels like a bit of a cop out to retreat back to the obscurity (and presumed socioeconomic homogeneity) of the blog and its relatively minuscule audience.

But it just feels like the right thing to do now.

Hi, again!

I saw this clip— I’m not sure what it’s from; maybe the Rolling Thunder tour in 1975?— when I was 13 or 14 and there was some “20 years of Rolling Stone” special on ABC, and something about it burrowed into my consciousness. I think what got me most then was the weirdly applied white makeup, to be honest. My parents hadn’t been into Dylan in the day, and so I guess I had this vague idea he was some kind of earnest folk singer. But the white makeup and the funny hat: so stagey, so… fake.

That’s what got me at 14. What gets me about this song now is the last verse:

So now I’m goin’ back again
I got to get to her somehow
All the people we used to know
They’re an illusion to me now
Some are mathematicians
Some are carpenters’ wives
Don’t know how it all got started
I don’t know what they’re doin’ with their lives
But me, I’m still on the road
Headin’ for another joint
We always did feel the same
We just saw it from a different point of view
Tangled up in blue

Terri is at the gym, Rainer is sleeping, nothing’s on TV, not enough people are on Facebook for me to waste a lot of time commenting on their statuses, so I had nothing left to do but clean out the closet in our room.

I’ve stopped using the closet in our room for the most part. Most of my work shirts are in a corner of the downstairs front hall closet, because the bedroom closet is full of Terri’s stuff. But we’re on a cleaning binge, and Terri is throwing a bunch of stuff out, so I might be able to get my side of the bedroom closet back. And I’m going through my stuff too, putting things I know I’ll realistically never wear again into the Goodwill pile, and putting the rest back in the closet.

And it occurs to me that I’ve very deeply internalized what my 8th grade home economics teacher taught us: always put your shirts in the closet with the open side of the hangers facing the same direction: inwards. That way, if there’s ever a fire, you can remove all your shirts all at once.

Now, I’ve never revisited this particular bit of wisdom that the taxpayers of Elizabeth and Forward townships paid someone to put in my head, but it seems like highly questionable advice: saving your shirts is probably the last thing you should be doing in a fire. But I’m going to keep doing it. You’ve got to hang your shirts one way or the other, right? So you might as well do it the same way, and it’s one of those things where it costs as much to be organized as disorganized, and why not fight entropy as much as possible?

Also, thinking about this made me realize I had something blogworthy, and writing this down for posterity is infinitely more important than cleaning out my closet, right? This I can do in my living room with all the windows open on a beautiful May day, after all the Tufts undergraduates have gone home for the summer.

Terri’s still not home yet? Hm. I thought Rainer was stirring, but he’s still asleep. I’m running out of things to say. …

…

*sigh* OK, back to the closet.

A confluence of events allowed me to listen to long pop songs today.

I had few meetings scheduled. I had a lot of work that required focus. Everybody else in the office was in a chatty mood.

I put on the headphones, cranked up iTunes, set up a smart list that included only songs longer than 10 minutes.

I got:

Sister Ray — Velvet Underground
Pass the Hatchet, I’m Goodkind — Yo La Tengo
Stone Free (Live, Albert Hall) — Jimi Hendrix
Jenny Ondioline — Stereolab
A Very Cellular Song — The Incredible String Band
Cosmia — Joanna Newsom and the Ys Street Band
Let Us Go Into the House of the Lord — Pharoah Sanders
I Dream A Highway — Gillian Welch
Desolation Row — Bob Dylan

… and many others showed up that I didn’t actualy listen to.

I’m sorry you had to wade through a full paragraph of tech support nonsense there. Really, the salient part of the day was the long, long time we spent in the Burren while I nursed three Guinesses over the course of a slow 5 hours on a sunday afternoon. That is the part that I will remember when I’m old and grey. That and the valentine I helped Rainey make for Terri. Speaking of old and grey, I wrote on the inside of the card “14 Feb 2010, 7 months old” because I figure that Terri will want to save the card, it being the first valentine she received from her first kid, so maybe someday when she’s too old to do math, she’ll at least know how old he was when his Dad signed his name to a little card with a red construction paper heart glued to the front.

So, I fix my blog late Friday night, am getting a little of a yen to restart blogging, and then early Saturday morning, I hit an immediate roadblock. My Apple Time Capsule— which has functioned wonderfully as a router and no-brains-required backup device for about 18 months— suddenly stopped being able to route to realfake.org, rainyplanet.org, and shyturnip.com. It took 1 support ticket to my hosting service, and a support call to my home ISP (RCN) to figure this out.  The RCN support rep had  hook a computer up directly to the cable modem to rule out the router. I rolled my eyes when she told me to do this— why would the router be the problem? So of course, when I take the router out of the equation, I can get to the site without an issue.  Why the router is doing this is beyond me– it’s an Apple home router, not exactly some esoteric Cisco thing meant for huge companies, there aren’t a lot of ways that you could even put some kind of rule in there to filter out websites if you wanted to. I spent more of my time than I’d care to admit trying to figure out how to debug the stupid thing before I finally decided that there was no good explanation for what it was doing, no good way to debug it, and probably no way to fix it even if I could debug it.

Luckily, I have a spare cheapo Linksys home router at work, so I figured that I’d grab it first thing this morning because I’d already hatched a plan to go out early and get some Valentines’ day flowers for Terri. So, Rainey woke up at 7, I changed him, we played a little, read a few books, and then I bundled him up and we trekked into town to my office. Thanks to your tax dollars and mine, the Big Dig has made this a 10 minute drive on a weekend morning when there’s no traffic. There was no parking on Pearl St, where I usually park when I make these quick jaunts. I remembered that there’s an alley behind the building, so I looped around the block and turned down it. A homeless guy who lives in the neighborhood was dumpster diving in the alley, and there were maybe two dozen huge seagulls, all squacking and waddling toward him. They were thrilled that he’d opened the lid on the dumpsters. Of course, when I turned down the alley, neither the seagulls nor the guy seemed too thriled that I turned down their alley.  I wasn’t exactly happy to be disturbing them either, and all for naught, as it turned out; the loading dock where I’d hoped to park is full with two pickup trucks. So I found a place on the street not too far off. The jaunt up to the office and retrieve the router was quick and uneventful, as was the drive back to Somerville. We stopped at Whole Foods and got some black velvetty looking roses that I figured (correctly) that Terri would like, and we came back and I helped Rainey make his mom a valentine (which Terri also indeed liked).

Once Terri woke up and found her valentines treats and we got our act together, we walked into Davis Square to the Burren for what has become our Sunday morning — er, afternoon— ritual of reading the NY Times and nursing a few Guinness and letting Rainer flirt outrageously with women 20 – 40 times his age. We had the same waitress as last week. She remembered Rainer’s name (last time we discussed Rainer Maria Rilke (and how he was only one of many factors which led us to Rainey’s name)). This time we discussed how one of the great things about the Burren is that there are no TVs.

Seriously, you can’t go into a place and have it actually be that place anymore. There have to be at least 2 TVs playing at least 2 different channels. Part of the wonderful conversation that Terri and I had during our 5 hours (!) there this afternoon concerned how we’ve really appreciated going to the Burren because it’s somewhere where there are no distractions. This in contrast to our home, which has become a bit overmediated. I definitely feel like we spend a ton of time physically there without really being there. And we have the dirty kitchen of a heavy traveller to prove it. And I realize that driving 5 miles into Boston and 5 miles back before 8am just so that I can get a router that lets me blog is precisely part of the problem. But I am also giving myself some slack; blogging is at least requiring me to sustain some thoughts for more than 140 characters. Blogging is realtime like Twitter, but in high-definition!

I realized that the archives to this blog were broken a few days ago when I tried to use Google to find something I’d written. I figured out what the problem was last night, and fixed it.

There were two side effects. First, I ended up with dozens of items in my RSS reader, as you may have too. Not sure why. The other side effect is that I got the hankerin’ to write in it again.

Actually, there’s probably another reason for that hankerin’, as I have been incapacitated to the point of boredom by a really awful stomach bug the last two days. I’m on the road to recovery now, but for the first day or so I didn’t really even have the gumption to force myself to sit up and use a computer.  I did watch a lot of movies on TCM. Well, I watched the part of Roberta with Fred Astaire and Irene Dunne that I’d seen before and slept through the ending which I hadn’t seen. I also watched the part of Seahawk with Errol Flynn that I’d seen before and also slept through the part that I hadn’t.

A colleague who is also a Facebook friend posted something about The Management Myth recently. My comment I think sums up my opinion of management books and management in general as concisely as I’ve done to date.

Comment #1: I had an epiphany as a young programmer that the best programmers were people who had liberal arts degrees rather than computer science or software engineering degrees. Programmers are supposed to make useful models of the world, and the hardest part turns out not to be the modeling part, but the understanding the world part. When I transitioned into management, I learned the same was true of MBAs.

That said, just like you can get in way over your head in software development if you don’t get some pure engineering training, there really is something to be said for management as an abstract discipline. My gripe with the literature is not so much that it’s all complete hooey, but the books have a very low ratio of valuable insights to hooey, and are very repetitive and information-sparse.

Comment #2: (when I said “the hard part turns out not to be the modeling part” what I mean is that the tools of modeling, the computer languages, the hardware, the infrastructure– those things have reached a state of maturity such that you really don’t have to spend years studying computer science to be able to use them properly).

There’s also one of those great New Yorker reviews-that-is-almost-as-meaty-as-the-book-reviewed here. Which is a pretty interesting history of management consulting going wayyy back to the 19th century.