My hotel review for TripAdvisor

This is a hotel that has pretty much all the pieces to make for a good hotel, but they don’t quite fit. The hotel is terraced and wraps around a hillside, which gives all of its rooms good views, and the rooms are a nice size (time for some new TV’s though). But the terracing robs the hotel of a natural center of activity because the lobby is so far from the spa, pool and beach and associated restaurants as to require a shuttle or a lot of stairs. 

The pool is huge and beautiful, but the water is too cold so in the week I stayed here I never saw more than a few scattered people in it. The beach is small but nice; the ocean bottom is too rocky (coral-y I guess) to comfortably walk into the water. There always seem to be enough lounge chairs available. There’s a lovely rooftop terrace that would be a nice place to sit if there were any chairs.

The food is pretty good, but the service is atrocious, and though the all-inclusive plan includes what they call 7 different restaurants, there are never more than 2 or 3 available, in part because one restaurant is called 3 different things. The reservations-only restaurant, Baci, had no busboys when we ate there, so the hostess would disappear for 5 minutes every time a table turned so she could clear and re-set it. It took a good 15 minutes for us to be seated at a table that had been empty since we’d arrived. When we ate at Manor House, the main restaurant, our waiter failed to tell us there were specials and disappeared for long periods of time. At breakfast, it was hard to find a waitress once we were seated. The one espresso machine in the place (not all-included) broke the day we arrived and never got fixed (Our favorite line: Q: When will the espresso machine be fixed? A: It only broke yesterday). As a result we ended up eating dinner out a couple of times.

A few more details: We chose the hotel in large part because of its spa. I didn’t use the spa myself but my family members who did said it was great as advertised. The workout room was nice and well-equipped. Vernill at the Tour Desk was wonderful.

The hotel is what they call “cat-friendly,” which means the outside areas are crawling with them. They’re cute and don’t bother you, but don’t come here if you hate cats.

The safe in our room malfunctioned twice. When we first arrived it was stuck open. More scarily, two hours before we were set to leave it locked itself and refused to open. A security worker finally got it to open an hour later and I carried our valuables with us for the rest of the time. The front desk then tried to charge me for the phone calls he made from the room trying to make the safe operational.

Make sure to join the Wyndham ByRequest before you go. It's the only way to get free wireless internet.

One of the really good ones is gone

A good friend of mine died last night. If you divide your friends up by how often you see them, Mike was not someone I saw often at all. It had been a couple of years at least. But if you divide friends by how close they are to your heart, he was right there with the best of them.

My friend Mike was the sweetest, gentlest, nicest man I've ever known. I know people sometimes say I'm nice but I couldn't touch Mike on my best day. I met him in 1975 (maybe a bit before but I don't remember for sure) when I worked with him on a summer job in our company's office in Brea, CA. He was the chief technician for that office and eventually the entire company and was about 10 years older than me. Mike was a geek before geekiness was cool. He was a tinkerer, an audio freak who loved music but loved the gear a little bit more and a ham radio operator, and he was brilliant around a circuit board. At that time he had 4 sons and a wife he would divorce shortly thereafter.

Mike was fun to hang out with. He had lots of interesting stories from his days in the military as a communications officer in Vietnam. But I loved him from the start because he was a contemplative, perceptive soul with a permanent smile, a mischievous streak and a love of good Scotch. When I had my first go-round working for my father, he was the one person who could settle me down when the family/business stuff started to close in on me. He was selfless and generous and boundlessly caring for those he loved.

I was lucky enough to be present when Mike met the love of his life, Louise, and got to spend many happy times with them during the early days of their romance. They were the cutest couple ever, just a shade over 10 feet tall between the two of them. I can still remember how their faces lit up when they talked about each other then, and even after 20 years.

Mike emailed me this summer and told me he had been diagnosed with leukemia. It didn't respond to treatment and it was a steady downhill path to yesterday. I haven't seen him much since we stopped working together, but I still feel a huge loss at his passing.

Rest in peace, my friend. I know you wouldn't want anyone to mourn, but I'll have to admit I did that a little. But I'll celebrate your life from now to New Years and beyond.

Scattered thoughts from vacation

I think the problem with this hotel is that it has no center. The closest thing to a hub is the pool area, but that's a couple of elevator rides and a hundred stairs down from our room. The lobby is a whole separate space, far from the pool. So there isn't any place for the guests to gather and feel like they're all someplace together.

And the food setup leaves a bit to be desired too. The breakfast is okay, though they run out of things by the end. Lunch and dinner is pretty scattered though. The first night we had a buffet which wasn't bad. Second night the kids were sunburned and unhappy and so we got pizza for the room. Tonight we went to the main restaurant for the resort and had a truly odd meal. First, there was Christmas music playing over the restaurant sound system, but at the same time there was a Jewish event of some sort going on in the private dining room, complete with a DJ and professional sound system and dancing. So for the first part of dinner, we had these two competing strains of music going simultaneously, but the Jewish music kept getting louder and louder until by the time they got to Oseh Shalom and Hava Negilah you really could hear very little else in the dining room, including conversation.

We didn't mind this that much, of course, it was just like any Bar Mitzvah. Not so sure about the Gentile contingent though. This weirdness was supplemented by as bad a waiter service as I've ever experienced.  There wasn't anything laughably bad. It was just plain and simple bad. Slow, inattentive, didn't tell us about the specials, dropped a tray that thankfully (or not) didn't contain our meals. The food itself was mediocre and such small portions.

Part of the awkwardness/charm of going to these kinds of places is that there is such an obvious disconnect between the affluence and sensibility of the clientele and the staff. Life in the tropics is slow and easy, which is as much of an attraction sometimes as the weather. On the other hand, the people are poor and there sometimes seems to be some tension below the surface. I'm not sure if there are any islands around here where that is not the case.

I went for a walk yesterday, which made me the object of some curiosity, but I always go for walks, wherever we are. Here, there are no sidewalks and the roads are just wide enough to fit cars going in both directions, so walking along the road has a sense of excitement it might not have elsewhere. I never exactly had to jump out of the way of a car, but I did have to be strategic about where and how I walked. There was absolutely nothing to see on the walk, though I did eventually reach a nice little beach, and there was a very peculiar looking cemetery that looked kind of like a morgue set-up with a bunch of slots, some of which were covered up and with wreathes on them.

When I was a teenager/young adult, my family would go on these very nice vacations around the holidays. Once we got to whatever resort there was, I would pretty much see my parents at breakfast and dinner and that's about it. The rest of the time I'd find whatever group of younger people existed and hang out with them the whole time. This caused some occasional difficulties, like when we were supposed to leave for the airport and instead of packing I went with the other kids and drank several pina coladas instead of packing. That incident is now a family legend, but overall, it worked very nicely.

Needless to say, when my kids were younger I used to look forward to the days when they became teenagers and would go off by themselves when we were on vacation, leaving my wife and I to relax and spend some time together.

However, like everything else, this type of thing has been ruined by us baby boomers. Thanks to years of participating only in organized, parent-managed activities, my kids and all the other teenagers I've observed over the years stick with their families. I cannot think of a single instance where my kids, who are 16 and 19, have wandered off or just decided that they didn't want to hang out with their parents. Maybe my brain is muddled by the bright sunshine, but I seem to remember that back at home, our presence is considered more of an intrusion than a necessity.

What it comes down to for me is that if I want some quiet time, I either have to get up before everyone else or announce that I want to go do something that I know nobody else wants to do. The latter is harder than you'd think though, and I sometimes suspect if I said I wanted to go to Pick Up and Snuggle Disgusting Creature Land, that my kids would still rather do that than be left to their own devices.

I'm quite sure that the difference is generational, that because my play time when I was a kid consisted of walking outside, seeing if anyone else was there, and then knocking on doors if there wasn't anyone, I was ready to act in a similar fashion on vacation. Now, in the age of playdates and Mommy and Me, the idea of independently finding your own fun is foreign. I think that's a shame and it reminds me of a line from one of my favorite movies, State and Main. Discussing country living, one of the characters says that they make their own fun, because "If you don't make your own fun it's not fun, it's entertainment." Wise words, I think.

So let's talk about this hotel a little

I've stayed in a bunch of hotels. Hotels are funny things, full of what they call rooms that are unlike any other kind of room in any kind of house, unless you have a room with a teeny balcony, individual climate control, a bathroom, a TV housed in a dresser, and a small refrigerator full of drinks and snacks that you can purchase for an outrageous fee.

One of the nice things about traveling to places that are out of the way or in less populated areas is that they tend to be more idiosyncratic. Major chain hotels in big cities and suburbs tend to be remarkably the same. I remember that Stevie Wonder, the blind singer, always stayed in Holiday Inns because all the rooms are identical.

In the Caribbean, however, even the chain hotels have their oddities. We're staying at a Wyndham hotel. I don't know much about Wyndham hotels. It's pleasant to say and it has the kind of upscale sound one might come up with someone were trying to name a hotel, like Otis Spunkmeyer (which was made up by the owner's kid) or Mr. Clean, (one should note that Orville Redenbacher was a real person). 

Okay, we just had an earthquake, but I will neither give credit nor blame that on the hotel, since I'm guessing people in other locales (like Puerto Rico, where it was centered).

I've stayed in a bunch of hotels. Hotels are funny things, full of what they call rooms that are unlike any other kind of room in any kind of house, unless you have a room with a teeny balcony, individual climate control, a bathroom, a TV housed in a dresser, and a small refrigerator full of drinks and snacks that you can purchase for an outrageous fee.

One of the nice things about traveling to places that are out of the way or in less populated areas is that they tend to be more idiosyncratic. Major chain hotels in big cities and suburbs tend to be remarkably the same. I remember that Stevie Wonder, the blind singer, always stayed in Holiday Inns because all the rooms are identical.

In the Caribbean, however, even the chain hotels have their oddities. We're staying at a Wyndham hotel. I don't know much about Wyndham hotels. It's pleasant to say and it has the kind of upscale sound one might come up with someone were trying to name a hotel, like Otis Spunkmeyer (which was made up by the owner's kid) or Mr. Clean, (one should note that Orville Redenbacher was a real person). 

Okay, we just had an earthquake, but I will neither give credit nor blame that on the hotel, since I'm guessing people in other locales (like Puerto Rico, where it was centered).

Walk around that level until you arrive at another elevator, which takes you down to the stairs (99 they say) that take you down to the beach.

Along the way, you may be struck by the large number of cats you see. Yes, cats. At one point there is a sign that says you are in a "cat-friendly" hotel and that they are spayed, fed and cared for. This doesn't really explain the one staring up at us as we ate dinner the other night, but okay. At least they're not eating the iguanas. I've gone back and looked at the hotel's description and there's nothing about cats mentioned. I'm guessing that if you were a hotel you wouldn't mention that there were a couple of dozen cats roaming the property, properly cared for or not.

This is what is called an "all-inclusive" hotel. This means that all of your food and drinks are included, except for whatever isn't (lobsters, lattes, laxatives). It also means that you're given incentive not to eat out. I don't love eating out so that's not a huge deal. But how much buffet food can one eat, even if it's not bad.

And I'm very upset because I missed coconut bowling yesterday.

I feel like I’ve written about airports and traveling so many times that there’s nothing left to say. There’s two basic kinds of airport experiences- when you’re in a hurry and when you’re not. When you’re not in a hurry, airports are usually boring, vaguely unpleasant places with too many places to buy bad food and not enough chairs. When you’re running late, airports are exciting and magically grow larger at a rate inversely proportional to how much time you have to get to the gate. Of late, I seem to pick the time to arrive at the airport when nobody else is there. Today is December 23, one of the busiest travel days of the year, and we arrived at the airport to find exactly zero people on line at the curbside check-in. This, of course left us with well over an hour before our flight boards. We then strategically planned out time usage so that we could ultimately end up rushing to board at the last minute.

The big discovery I made this morning was that my USAirways credit card, for which I pay what I consider to be an exorbitant amount, qualifies me to not have to pay to check luggage. I did not know this. I typically either fly Southwest or do carry-on only, but traveling with 3 females makes this completely impractical. Let’s just say that there is no a direct correlation between the size of the person and the size of their bag. But the free baggage checking more than covers the cost of the credit card.

Next, of course, came the security thing. We stood in line, debating whether to get scanned or felt up. Since I get patted down every time I go to a ballgame (though exactly what they’re looking for and how they can tell if I have it by touching my pants for a second I’m not sure), I enthusiastically voted in favor of the feel.

I should note that I think this whole thing is stupid. They’re doing this stuff now because that was what the last would-be terrorist did. Hopefully, next time the perpetrators will hide stuff in their hair because I don’t have enough hair to make a scalp search necessary. For the moment, though, I’m willing to bet on their being only a tiny percentage of TSA folks who are doing the patdowns because they enjoy them. Plus, I don’t get the big deal. Is it degrading? I guess if it makes you feel degraded then it’s degrading, but I’m not convinced that there are many inherently degrading things, and this doesn’t strike me as one of them.

But ultimately, the only person called out was my 16 year-old daughter who was wearing one of those oversized sweatshirts that look cute on teenage girls and nobody else. Somebody called out “enhanced!” and they quickly penned her up between some of those fabric row dividers like they use to make you shuttle back and forth on line. A small woman came over and checked around the sweatshirt in a not sketchy way, joking with my completely unfazed daughter the whole time.

We then walked to the gate. I’m not wearing a pedometer, though I bet there’s an app on my phone for it, but it must have been a half mile from security to the gate. This was because USAirways makes you check in in one terminal, even if the flight’s gate is in another terminal. Plus, we were in the international terminal, where they have to space things out to make room for those passageways that make you feel like cattle when you arrive from a foreign destination.

We made the usual futile attempts to find decent food, only to discover that they were boarding the flight 15 minutes early. So of course we had to go rushing to the gate.

My favorite news story of the year is now the NY Jets foot fetish story, where the coach has these videos of his wife’s feet or something like that. To be honest, when this started, I thought they were still talking about the coach who tripped a player during a game because that was sort of about feet too. But now I see NY Post headlines like “Distressed Jets Coach Bares His Sole!” I don’t personally care about feet one way or another. As long as my own feet don’t hurt, that’s about all I think of them. On other people, I guess nice looking feet are nice, but not necessarily any more so than nice looking anything else. Others may feel differently.

Flight update: One of the bathrooms in the coach compartment is broken. Presuming the flight is full, this leaves one bathroom for 162 people on a 3 1/2 hour flight. Our seats are right next to the bathroom and I’m sitting on the aisle, so the area right in front of my seat is probably the most action-packed place on the plane. There’s been a line ranging from 2 to 6 people here for an hour and a half, including one guy who’s about 6’ 7” whose been here twice and seems to stay in there for a really long time. I wonder if it takes longer for him to pee because he’s further up.

In my capacity of logistics manager for our trips, it’s my job to worry about whether everything is going okay. Now that we’re on the plane, the worrying shifts to what the hotel will be like. If we were someplace larger, I’d be worried about getting to the hotel, but St. Thomas is small and we have rolling bags so I’m guessing we could walk to the hotel by nightfall if we had to. Really, what I’m waiting for is the reaction from my kids when they realize that the guest rooms don’t have wireless Internet.

Strategic planning

I was out walking my dog this evening. We've had this dog ofr 12 years. She's a Welsh Corgi and very cute. She does enough annoying stuff (mostly barking and occasionally peeing indoors) that I don't LOOOVVVEEE her, but she's okay, and it's dawned on me that the only time I really see my neighbors is when I walk the dog. In fact, when we had our neighborhood Hanukkah party, I said to someone, "It's nice to see you indoors."

So tonight I'm out walking her and my next door neighbor is out with his dog. And he asks me if I'm going to watch the eclipse of the moon. Now I'm crazy about eclipses. Last time there was one I watched almost the whole thing. They're almost as much fun as meteor showers and much less frequent. So I say that I'd like to but it's at 3:00 in the morning, so I'm not sure if I should set my alarm or if I should just hope I get up. And he says he figures if he gets up to go to the bathroom around that time that he'll come outside.

I really don't want to go outside and see my neighbor going to the bathroom, but I'm not sure that's what he means. He may mean that he'll go to the bathroom in the bathroom and then go outside. So I started thinking, maybe I'll just drink lots and lots of water before I go to bed and then maybe Mother Nature's alarm clock will get me up at the right time. I wonder if that will work? Worth a try, I suppose.

As a Phillies fan, there's a lot to like about getting Cliff Lee back. As a baseball fan, perhaps the best part is the chaos it causes. Lee was to be the big prize for either the Yankees or the Rangers, but they both knew that one of them would lose out, so I'm sure each of them had a Plan B. But I'm pretty sure they never expected to both have to use their Plan B. There's a cascading effect that will ripple through every team's offseason in unexpected way, which will absolutely make it all more fun to watch.

I always find this kind of thing appealing. One of the reasons I like teaching is the potential for chaos. I know that in a formal lecture situation, you can plan down to the minute what you want to say and present. This has no appeal to me. I love the give and take about ideas, mathematical or otherwise. And who better to provide chaos than a bunch of teenagers? And finding the sweet spot where order and entropy are in perfect balance is always my goal.

Chaos makes you think on your feet, to be ready to react, respond, and advance based on whatever just happened. It's a lot like improvisation. In improv, the first rule is that whatever somebody says or does is a gift and that you accept it and give something in return. You never reject it, even if it's funny. So in a math class, if somebody calls out 7 when the answer should be the square root of 11, the proper response is never "No," it's "So how did you get that?" One is a dead end. The other is a journey. And the best part of journeys is the unexpected stuff you run into along the way.

One of the most fun parts of my last cross country drives was when my wife and I were driving through west Texas, which is very big and very flat. It was getting dusky and we decided to cut a corner on a back road. We were cruising along when suddenly, up ahead, we saw a cow standing perfectly in the middle of the road. We were at least 25 miles down this road, there were muddy ditches on both side of the road and nothing else around, and there was no way I was going to try to squeeze the minivan around the cow, so we stopped. We honked the horn a couple of times, as if a cow would know what that means. I love cows but they are unbelievably stupid, especially about motor vehicle courtesy.

So we got out of the car. It was getting dark and a full moon was rising. It was quiet and desolate and beautiful in a barren sort of way (which is an exquisite sort of beauty if you're open to it). Just us, the car, the moon and the cow. And after about 15 minutes, the cow moved. I was going to write, 'decided to move,' but I'm pretty sure that cows never decide anything. They just do. And we were on our way, and I still remember it 25 years later.

Maybe a math class isn't as memorable as that, but when I walk out of the room at the end of the period, what I'm thinking about is never the planned part of the lesson, it's the unplanned parts and all the discussions that sprung from them.

Simpler ain't always better

This is going to be an interesting couple of years, politically. The Tea Party movement, which is fueled by nothing more than anger at things that range from vague to nonexistent, is now faced with something it never really wanted to do, that being governing. There are many avenues of stupidity to explore in the tea party "platform," if you can call it that, but I'd like to focus for a moment on what is the central point of their so-called "governing philosophy" (I'm already tired of using quotation marks, so excuse any format weirdness to come). That is to CUT TAXES.

Clearly, nobody likes taxes. They take money out of your pocket for, well, who knows what? The thing is, though, that taxes pay for stuff you want. Roads, airports and public transit, police, sewer, garbage disposal, schools (I am purposely leaving national defense aside, but that too). Public services. Things that are paid for and used by the public at large. This is by and large the kind of stuff you pay for when you pay taxes. But these are generalized things, things that you have no ownership feelings toward, as opposed to your money, which is, well, YOUR MONEY!

So the debate, if one is going about it in a logical and truthful fashion, as opposed to what the current Teapublican Party is doing, is between taxes and services. It's always been about taxes and services because that what taxes pay for. And at least in the current environment, it's cutting taxes versus maintaining or improving services. This is a debate that cutting taxes usually wins in the public forum. Why? Because it's a better argument? Absolutely not. Because it's a simpler argument.

Taxes are money directly away from you. Services are shared, and nobody uses all of them. People take services for granted. You use them when you need them. This makes it way too easy for tax cutters to give a laundry list of services, none of which could possibly apply to any one person or small group. So those people can conclude that services are wasteful and needless, because every such laundry list contains many services that they don't personally need at that moment. It's not technically lying, but it's not truthful either.

It's pretty much impossible for anyone to quantify the value of the services that they receive for their tax dollars, both because there are so many of them and because they're not stuff you can go out and buy. Taxes are easily quantified. Argument over, because the other side of it is too complicated to analyze on TV. I worked in marketing long enough to trust the consumer to make choices that are the best for them, But that's assuming that they have the information they need to make a proper decision. That's simply not the case here, where tax cut shouting drowns out everything else.

It's pretty frustrating for someone who is trying to look at this in a thoughtful manner. The first sign of the ramifications of tax cuts as a core policy is taking place in Nassau County, NY, where the newly elected tea partier in charge cut taxes, in spite of a budget deficit, sending the county to the brink of bankruptcy. And it's only a month after the election. And he's only doing what he promised to do.

So how long before people understand the consequences of what they're doing and learn to properly value the services they expect and want? That's what'll have to happen before people start making wise choices at the ballot box. I'm not holding my breath.

My holiday resolution!

Just to show my general enthusiasm for the holiday season, I will be using lots of exclamation points in everything I write!

In the past week, several people have described me to my face as being laid back. I know they mean it as a compliment but they wouldn't say that if they knew what was going on inside my head. I always kind of have two trains of thought going at the same time, one of which is focused on whatever I'm doing at the time, and the other in the background constantly asking, "What the hell is going on?" That second train tends to mute my immediate reactions a bit, because there's always some figuring out of what really is going on.

Since I'm apparently sending out incorrect signals, I will be using exclamation points to denote enthusiasm. Hopefully, this will let people know that I really do have strong reactions, even if they're not obvious. This assumes, of course, that I'm using them honestly and not faking enthusiasm because I have found that it's easier to fake it with an exclamation point than with actual emotions.

I took a little vacation yesterday. I needed it after these past couple of weeks. I was on my way to a meeting in Connecticut this morning, after which I was planning to stop by my daughter's school in New York and drop off her winter coat and bring home some summer clothes. I was halfway up the Jersey Turnpike when my sister called and told me that the meeting was cancelled. I was already pretty far from home and my daughter needed the coat and I wasn't going to just turn around so I continued on into New York.

Once I got up there I did a couple of shopping errands I'd originally planned to do in Connecticut and then it was still a couple of hours before I was supposed to meet my daughter, so what was I going to do? My first thought was to go down to midtown and watch people scurry. This is usually pretty entertaining, especially during the christmas shopping season. But I just wasn't in the mood.

For some reason, it popped into my mind that I wanted to go to the Frick. The Frick, for those not familiar, is a small museum a few blocks south of the so-called Museum Mile, where the Met and Guggenheim reign. It has a small but by all accounts spectacular collection of paintings, including several by that most elusive of artists, Jan Vermeer. There are only around 35 Vermeer paintings in existence, and they are all exquisite. Three of these are at the Frick, along with some other Dutch painters like Rembrandt, Hals, Van Dyck and Holbein, along with a nice collection of Turner paintings. I had never been there, even having lived in New York for close to 30 years. I'm not really what you'd call an "art lover," and I have no education in art or art history. But I've learned over the years that anything truly great is worth taking time to appreciate, even if it isn't really your thing, because it enriches you in ways that you can't anticipate.

The museum is very small, and seems to be in the rooms of what had been a mansion (I'm too lazy to do the research to find out of that's actually what it was) and there are masterpieces in every room and two of the Vermeers are in the hallway. Even there, Vermeer's unparalleled use of light to reproduce depth and texture comes flying off the canvas. There isn't even a mediocre piece in the entire collection and most of the paintings are knock-your-socks-off great. I spent an hour or so in there, with a few dozen other people, and was totally transported. I left with a huge smile on my face. I had been in a totally different universe during that time.

Then I stepped out on the street and realized I was hungry, so I used Yelp to find me a nondescript little pizza place a block away that had terrific pizza. It was time to get over to meet my daughter, so I attempted to walk across Central Park, but was so enchanted by the Rambles that I forgot to keep track of my direction and ended up going in a big circle. So I ended up taking the bus over instead of walking, but it was a marvelous couple of hours.

I remember when I lost my innocence

No, not that kind of innocence...Your minds are all in the gutter.

When I was around 8 I joined the Cub Scouts. I wasn't a great scout. I had no facility for tying knots, which was a big part of the skill set required for advanced scouts. But I went to the meetings and got a couple of badges and certainly wasn't the worst scout in the pack. And occasionally we'd go on an interesting field trip.

The most interesting field trip was to be part of a local New York game show called "Just For Fun." It was broadcast on Saturday mornings from 9 to 11. I loved that show. It was a game show for kids. There were two teams- Blue and Gold (Cub Scout Official Colors!). I always rooted for the Blue team. There were bleachers for each team with about 75 kids per team and some kids would get selected to do what they called "stunts" in competition. They were mostly exaggerated party games- toss this through that, climb something, do something with a blindfold on. Your team got points if you won, and winners got prizes and even losers got decent prizes.

Actually, the best thing was the blindfolded egg walk, which I'd never seen before. They covered the studio floor with plastic and put a couple of hundred eggs scattered around the floor. They picked 2 kids from each team and had them take off their shoes and blindfolded them. They then instructed the kids to walk across the studio, and that their teams would call to them to guide them across the floor. Whoever broke the fewest eggs won. And while they were explaining this, the stagehands were removing all the eggs. So you have these kids, tiptoeing across the floor, trying to avoid eggs that weren't there. Hilarious. But not the point of this.

The rule for being on Just For Fun was that you needed to be 10 years old to participate. I was almost 10, but still 9, as were several of my pack-mates. So on the bus, the Pack Leader, our paragon of honor, told us that if we were 9 and they asked us how old we were to tell them we were 10. He told us to lie. My Pack Leader told us to lie. Life would never be the same. I almost expected him to then tell us to cheat to win.

So we walk in and some woman comes over and asks me how old I am. I say "Ten." And she picks me to be in the ultimate Just For Fun event, the treasure chest. At the beginning of the show, one kid from each team would be given brought to a locked treasure chest with a bucket of 1000 keys, only one of which opened the lock. The kids would work throughout the show, trying to unlock the chest. If you succeeded, your team got a lot of points and you got a load of prizes, including a new 10-speed bicycle. There wasn't always a winner in this stunt. There's no way to get through trying 1000 keys in a lock in 2 hours.

And with about 30 minutes to go in the show, my key opened the lock. I couldn't believe it. I got all the cool prizes and my team won because of me so everyone on my team got prizes too. And all because I lied. I was not exactly wracked with guilt over this, but I clearly never forgot.

Rhythm and Blues

Most human endeavors fall into some kind of rhythms. Businesses have slow periods and busy periods that are relatively predictable, and there's always some time where you need to set the next year's budget and everyone has to work long hours to completely analyze what everything costs. I remember well my one budget season at my first ad agency. It was two 7AM to 10 PM 7-day weeks, culminating with an all-nighter. My part of the process was analyzing sales data for the top 50 markets in the US (# 50 is Honolulu, FYI, with 375,000 people). I worked my butt off on that analysis and learned absolutely nothing useful. But I was very knowledgable when they asked me questions about Coast Soap's market share in Louisville. And I did all my calculations on a calculator with paper tape (we were still about 5 years pre-PC) and never tore the tape, so I had 2 rolls worth of calculator tape unspooled, covered with weighted averages calculated, completely filling the side of my desk on which I did not sit.

School rhythms revolve around tests. Nobody really likes tests. Students certainly don't, and as far as I know, teachers don't really care for them either. They're extra work and stressful work at that and less fun than actually teaching. But the value of being forced to immerse yourself in something can't be underestimated. I think it's especially true now, when people's attentions are so scattered by the countless distractions. There's no way I can make students integrate a bunch of chapters of material into a coherent whole without forcing them to use all of the material at the same time. Literature essays work the same way- without an assigned paper on an entire book, students would consume it in chunks depending on what's due the next day, rather than thinking about a book as a whole. This by the way, is part of why college is so much better than high school, because you actually have the time to learn things in an integrated fashion. Coming from any elite high school (and especially the one where I teach) this is a marvelous, freeing experience.

Even my paper-tape-filled all-nighter wasn't a complete waste of time. Once I got some sleep, I really did find myself with a better perspective on the business, not to mention a couple of cases of product samples that I gradually snuck out with over those 2 weeks.

Blah blah blah

I was reading about a show called "Men Of A Certain Age." I think it's about 3 middle-aged guys talking about how disappointing their life has been, or something. That's what it looks like but I always mute the commercials. I'm not sure who would watch a show like that, but that isn't really the point because if people watch people who can't dance dancing, why not watch living men not really living? The article's point was that adults express themselves more freely than younger people because they've given up most if not all of their hopes and dreams, and therefore feel that there are no consequences to being open and honest.

I don't think that everything about that is false, but the thought is so depressing that I refuse to buy into it. I'm someone who has become a lot more open in the last 15 years or so. This has happened for a number of reasons, including 24 years of marriage, kids, therapy, just growing up and pretty much everything except for self-help books, because even the people who write those things think they're stupid. I haven't had any hopes dashed or dreams crushed. I've got problems like everyone else, but I'm pretty happy. So I'm not more open because I don't care any more; I'm more honest because that's the way you really become part of your world, and what could be a better goal than to be fully immersed in your own life.

And I do think there are consequences to opening yourself up. There are just far more positive consequences than negative ones. And if part of what elders are supposed to do is guide youngers (?), then showing them that it's okay to really be yourself is part of being a good role model. Teenagers and young adults are notoriously insecure, and for a good reason- they generally don't have a clue as to what the hell they're doing or what's going on around them. All I can tell you from my certain age, is that you'll figure it all out a lot faster if you don't spend so much time and effort speaking and acting differently from how you're genuinely feeling.

I think one of the biggest problems people face is disassociation, more now than in the past. We're bombarded with so much information that trying to choose a course of action based on outside sources is almost impossible. The array of choice is paralyzing and I see far too many people teetering on the edge of paralysis. The only way around it is to follow your heart, to say what you mean and mean what you say. I know this sounds like overly earnest blah blah blah, but I don't think a little earnestness ever hurt anyone.

Warmedover leftovers

That is how Jean Shepherd used to describe the less than delectable reheated foods of his youth. I just had some leftover turkey from our "Thanksgiving" (Sunday, actually) visit to my mother-in-law's house. My MIL is a pretty good cook for an old English lady, but she now prefers not to make the effort to cook for even the small crowd that we were on Sunday. At first she'd make part of the meal, then less and less until she now does no cooking at all.

We bring parts of the dinner, but since we're driving a long way, we don't handle the hot food, someone else does. That person is very smart, a doctor who's head of an important function at a major hospital and lives alone in Riverdale. My experience with single people and cooking, however, is that they fall roughly into two main categories. There are those who take cooking on as a hobby and enjoy cooking gourmet foods for themselves and anyone they might have over. Then there are those who cook because are sick of tuna fish and cereal and they need something to eat in order to not die. This person, unfortunately, seems to fall into the latter category.

As a result, each year, the Thanksgiving meals have gotten progressively tastelesser. The roast turkey is now turkey parts with, at least as far as I can tell, no seasoning whatsoever. This does not yield really flavorful gravy either. The crispy pan-fried potatoes that were a pain to cook but beloved are now mashed potatoes (with no butter or milk for kashrut). Not a pretty sight.

Of course, we have to take leftovers, because it's rude not to. We just had some of them for dinner and they will not make a repeat performance on the table or anywhere else. Even with my making our own roasted potatoes, it was still a difficult slog to get most of the way through the rest of it.

There's no real moral to this story, aside from helping me to remember that it's okay for the point of Thanksgiving to be the company rather than the food and the company was good. Can't make sandwiches from it though.

Creating traditions

Periodically, you'll hear about something being a "new tradition." This is a perfect example of internal contradiction, where the combination of ideas negates all meaning.  There simply is no such thing nor can there be.

I think what people mean when they call something a new tradition is that they want to start something new, but that it relates to some traditional form. That's fine, I guess, but things are usually traditions for specific reasons that can't just be created out of thin air or whole cloth or whatever cliche you'd like to insert. The Harvard-Yale football game, and the revelry that surrounds it, is a tradition because they've been doing the same thing over and over again for a really long time. I'll bet you that in 1875 nobody was saying they were going to start a new tradition, or creating a soon-to-be traditional rivalry. I'd bet that nobody really gave it any thought for many many years.

Usually, what happens is that people do something, think it's cool, and say, let's do that again. Then it grows organically from there until it's finally thought of as a tradition. I suspect that many minor holidays developed this way, and Thanksgiving certainly did.

We've never really had a big Thanksgiving thing in my family. I'm pretty sure we always did the whole turkey thing, but it was never as big a deal as, say, Pesach. It was never a "let's everyone get together and make a family meal" kind of thing. It just wasn't the way things went.

As much as I may feel deprived because I rarely had the kind of big, warm, family gathering that's described to me by friends, I can't just decide that I want to suddenly have something like that and then just make it happen.

This became vivid to me when my mom got sick about 10 years ago. My mom and I were never super close, for a variety of reasons. We got along fine, but our relationship was nothing much more than that. So when we found out that she had ALS and would be declining steadily, I was struck by an urge to pull close. But after a couple of visits and some consideration, I realized that we weren't close for a reason. The relationship was mature and had not been changing for the previous 10 years, so why should it change now? Was I going to try to create something where nothing existed before? It struck me as arrogant to think I could do such a thing,  and silly to think that I would do it.

So now, 10 years later, I have little regret for that decision. My mom has many admirable qualities, some of which I am proud to have inherited. But there was no chance that I was going to be able to create a new tradition of closeness between us, even if I really wanted to.

Things I am thankful for

If I'm walking along and the wind blows I don't topple over

I have never been bitten by a squirrel

Plastic trash bags- you young folks can't imagine what it used to be like

My job, my colleagues, my students

Dancing with the Stars is over and American Idol hasn't started

Quiet moments

Funny old photographs of me and my friends

Coffee

That double-acting Baking Powder really does act twice

Indoor plumbing

Google maps

Potato chips

Les Paul, The Beatles, Mozart, Gilbert and Sullivan

I haven't seen or read anything Twilight-related and yet somehow know the whole story

The sky on a cold, clear night

I'm sure there's more, but that'll do for now.

The Annual Black Friday survey results

Who you gonna call? Doorbusters!

Last year seemed to be an off year for Black Friday ads. This year the doorbusters are back in fine form. There's been a steady trend toward earlier by the mainstream stores and this year is no exception. So here are the Friday opening hours for all stores whose ad's I've received.

Midnight: 1

3:00   1

4:00   6

5:00   14

5:30   1

6:00   7

7:00   1

8:00   1

9:00   3

No hours mentioned (an odd thing, I think. When are we supposed to bust the door?)   8

Open Thanksgiving Day   2

The winner this year is Old Navy, with second place to Boscov's.

I have this book called "The Final Four of Everything,"where you pick a topic and make brackets like in the NCAA basketball tournament. The categories are fun, Breakfast Cereal (Crunch Berries rule!), Bald Guys (hmm, Ghandi vs. Homer Simpson), teeth (done by a dentist, of course), and more. One of my favorites is Dangerous Animals. It's not determined by what people are afraid of, but by how many people they kill each year. The final 2 competitors are bees and white-tailed deer. And though a bunch of people die each year from hitting deer with their cars, it's a weak second to the number of people who die from bee stings. Snakes, bears, wolverines don't even figure into it.

I bring this up, believe it or not, in response to the big hoohah going on about the security stuff in the airports. Everything you do every day affects the risk you expose yourself to. The safest way to live is to not get out of bed. And stay out of the kitchen and bathroom, the most dangerous places in the house. And anyone who pays attention knows that the most dangerous action they take every day is to get in a car and drive somewhere.

All of life is about risk management. We take calculated risks every day. And it is impossible to anticipate what sorts of risks one will face on any given day. In fact, anticipating future risks is nearly impossible, because life is complicated and there too much noise and distraction for anything to be clear. So we end up trying to avoid the last thing that happened to us, since we don't know what's next.

And that's just what's happening at airport. Every new security measure is put in place to prevent what has already happened. I understand, but does anybody really think that someone else is going to now do exactly what the last person did? And what exactly are we preventing? Preventing methods of terrorism isn't the point. It's acts of terrorism that we're trying to stop.

OK. Time to have lunch. But not on a plate because I broke one yesterday.

We have a houseguest

Having someone staying in your house is sort of like an organism having an infection, except instead of antibodies and white blood cells engulfing the visitor you envelop them in food, chit-chat and entertainment instead.

Really, as an adult, your main goal when you have a houseguest is to avoid having the visitor leave your house shaking their head and muttering, "Wow, I thought I knew those people, but they're weird."

So how do you avoid that? Every family develops its own quirks, and how do you keep them away from the interlopers? It requires a certain amount of observation of so-called normal people and then a serious self-examination to see how your life differs from the norm.

You notice things and ask yourselves questions you never ask, like do we have too much junk food in the house? Is the refrigerator inappropriately full or empty? Is there too much beer? Is it strange that the liquor cabinet is locked or is that just what parents of teenagers do?

Do we speak in a dialect that only we understand? Do we talk to our pets as if they are people and people as if they are pets? And how many cats is too many anyway?

Is the house too dirty? Too clean? Does the house smell funny? Do we keep the thermostat at a level that is not well-suited to human beings? Has the decor been updated since we moved here 20 years ago? Is that okay? What is that thing on the windowsill? Who is that picture of, anyway? Does the visitor know him? How long has that been there? Is it okay to have ______ in the middle of the _______? Can you turn the TV on without an instruction sheet?

Is 6 kinds of coffee excessive? Do we really need that much butter? mustard? eggs? mayo? capers? How many kinds of pasta could one really need? If we have 12 is that okay?

You answer as many of these questions as you can and either breathe a sigh of relief, panic, or enter a state of unease somewhere in between. Somewhere in self-image limbo. It's a relief when they arrive.

Mischief not managed

My daughter was shooting rubber bands around the house, which reminded me of my fun summer in 1979. I had been accepted at the oh-so-prestigious Wharton School in the spring and was pretty much just killing time until September. I was no longer working at the regular job I'd had for the past year and a half, so first I went on a cross-country trip and when I got back I started working at copy shop (like a Kinkos) around the corner from my apartment on 2nd Avenue and 83rd St. This was only a part-time job, so I looked around for something else, and answered an ad in the paper for a place called Aspen Systems.

At that time, there was only one phone company, and its monopoly was being broken up by a series of lawsuits, among other things. Part of the process involved uncovering evidence of anticompetitive behavior. The would-be phone companies successfully subpoenaed all relevant documents from Bell and vice versa, and both sides reacted the way any rational company would; by sending every single document they could photocopy, relevant or not. Enter Apsen Systems.

I don't remember which side Aspen was working for, but they had 3 floors of a half city block-sized building, On my floor, there were no offices or even cubicles, just a sea of desks as far you could see, in one huge room with a high ceiling. They filled these desks 24 hours a day with people with 2 or more years of college, sorting through documents, looking for anticompetitive language. I was on the swing shift, 4PM to midnight.

Since none of us knew enough to actually analyze, we were given a list of keywords that might relate to the lawsuits, "competitor," or any other word with "compet" as a root, and so on. We were to note these on the sheet that came with each numbered document. We were given a pile of 100 pages of documents held together with a large rubber band to code, and when we finished we were given another pile. They were then shipped off to another department that checked our work and if we'd done it correctly we never saw them again.

About 3 weeks into this job, I found out that we had a quota of 180 pages per shift. By this time, it was taking me about 2 hours to do double that. There was no point in doing much more. Being too productive meant they'd make you a checker, which was harder and paid the same. So I had to do something, so I settled on mischief.

Propriety prevents me from going through all of the mischief, but let's just say that I behaved in a less than mature manner, and nobody ever asked me what was in my thermos bottle. My favorite activity involved the rubber bands. These were beauties, 6 inches long before you stretched them and thick enough to not break even extending them an arm's length.

You have to imagine what this place looked like- a square probably 150 feet on each side, filled with nothing but rows of desks. My best friend there sat 5 desks in front of me, so I couldn't nail him with a rubber band without endangering the people in between. So what I learned to do was fire the rubber band at the ceiling, where it would hit and then drop straight down. Within a few days, I could drop a rubber band on the desk of every person in my coding group. This was doubly enjoyable because it was a display of skill while being disruptive with the bonus of not injuring anyone.

How did they discipline me for this behavior? They offered me a promotion, which I refused, of course.

What constitutes creepiness?

I needed to change a train reservation, and since you can't do that on the Amtrak website, you need to call their 800 number. When you do that, you get Julie, the automated agent. She asks you some questions to either do what you need done or shuffle you off to someone who's more of a human being and can do a somewhat larger variety of things. I have a friend who really likes to scream at the automated agents as if they're furious at them, or speak with a totally sarcastic tone or whatever, depending on her mood. I just try to get through as quickly as I can.

This time, the agent tells me that she lives in the same town as me, actually the neighboring town. This is an unusually familiar thing for a phone agent to say, but what she said next was even odder. She said she knew where I lived because she used to work at UPS and had delivered packages to my house. This seemed ever so slightly creepy to me. I often enjoy goofing around with phone reps, because I know their job is boring and repetitive and everyone deserves to have a a little fun in their day. But usually these people are bound and determined (and often required by work rules) to keep themselves completely anonymous. This seemed just a tad inappropriate.

It got me thinking about how different commerce is now. Not that long ago, you knew almost everyone you bought stuff from. It was one of the nice things about being from a place as opposed to being transient. In my local dealings, I still know almost everyone I interact with and I like it that way. I go out of my way to add a little bit of real conversation to every interaction, whether I know the person or not, because I think it's a nice thing to do and it makes people feel good. Now we do most of our business in a completely impersonal way- big stores, phone, online, and we expect and want it to be impersonal. As someone pointed out to me, this is at least partly because they know who you are, have your address and credit card number, and you don't have a clue who they are.

I guess I don't care whether my shopping is personal or impersonal, but I think the comfort level comes from there being some apparent symmetry to the relationship. It can't be personal on one side and impersonal on the other. It violates some form of social contract to interact as equals, whether that means as numbers or as people. It also reinforces the notion that there are people out there who know stuff about you. And yeah, I find that a bit creepy.

Where I spent my morning

While my daughter was not having fun at Funplex this morning, I went to a place called Centerton Square in Mt. Laurel. Here's a nice aerial view. Just to give you a sense of scale, it's about 3/4 mile long and 1/4 mile wide at its widest point. Maybe someone who likes math more than me can estimate the number of parking spaces. My favorite physical feature is the road that goes all the way around the back. I saw cars going back there trying to exit the place. Don't think that worked out too well. And notice the Acme across the street from Wegmans. I wonder whose idea that was?

Does this not look like the least inviting thing in the world, even if you like to shop? Does so-called convenience matter so much that you're willing to subject yourself to a place like this? I sure hope I never find myself there again.

A couple of asides- Mt. Laurel seemed pretty flat for something with "Mount" in its name. Also, why would a camp have their reunion at a place like Funplex, which is just a huge arcade with a bowling alley in it? Isn't the point of a reunion to be able to catch up with people you haven't seen for a while? How are you supposed to carry on a conversation in a place like that? Give me the bar/bat mitzvah-style reunion any day.

Notes from the AP

This morning I went to an AP Calculus Workshop. Let me start by saying that yes, there really are things I'd rather be doing at 7:45 on a beautiful Saturday morning than driving to a local high school and sitting in a classroom for 7 hours. I did manage to convince myself that although there are lots of things about Calculus that I don't remember, that I wouldn't be the biggest bonehead there. This is an advantage to being arrogant, a characteristic I keep under wraps most of the time, but which I can fetch out of my mind's closet when I need it.

We get to the room, which was just your basic public high school classroom (History, I think) and the instructor gave us a fat booklet and pointed to a list of questions that we were supposed to work on. This was exactly what I didn't want to do- work. I just wanted to sit there passively and have knowledge stuffed into my brain, you know, like a regular student. But work I did. I even surprised myself a bit with what I could do.

Then we started to introduce ourselves. We found out that there were two people sitting next to each other, and one had taught the other in high school. I found out that a local high school has at least 2 teachers teaching AP Calc who had never taught calc before. Another woman who wanted to be the first non-white-male in her high school to teach AP Calc.

Then our instructor told us about what it's like being a grader (or reader, as they're called). They all go to a convention center somewhere and about 800 teachers sit around tables and grade the same problem on hundreds of papers. This reminds me of a job that I had for about 2 months in between when I was accepted to Wharton and when school started. Remind me to talk about Aspen Systems sometime.

There's apparently a whole hierarchy of graders- up to "Chief Reader." Their goal is consistency. Fairness enters into it not at all. The College Board pays for everything, but she said the cafeteria food gets really boring, and if you're a normal person who wants to get anything from the vegetarian food line gets shooed away for not being a "registered vegetarian." I have many friends who are vegetarians, and I do wish they had to register, because sometimes you don't want to go out to eat with them.

After an hour of this we started going over problems and she would explain how they were graded. It's pretty interesting and I think I understand it well enough to explain it. The rest of the day was doing math problems and talking about them. I don't really like math that much, but considering there were several unfamiliar things at least I learned something. And I got 0.6 credits toward something with initials that I don't know what it is.

I did mean to say on the survey sheet afterwards that they really need to have coffee at lunch. Going back into the classroom for the final 2 1/2 hours was pretty brutal and being half asleep didn't help much. I also remembered, too late, that last time I went to one of these things I brought a seat cushion because sitting in those hard plastic classroom seats hurts your butt after a couple of hours.

Oh, and the name of supposedly the best Calculus teaching wiki? Designated Deriver.

Is bullying a symptom or the disease?

I promise the next thing I write will be lighter.

When I was writing about bad language the other day, I didn't know what exactly what was going on in the assembly in school, but I did have an inkling. I'm glad we did that exercise. I think when anthropologists are studying the history of American culture, they will look at the turn of the millenium as the point where meanness became one of the most prominent aspects of American life. They'll look at media content and trends and whatever else it is that anthropologists do. And they'll see a thread of nastiness that is unmistakable.

It's kind of depressing to see, really. I've lived through a decent variety of national moods, but this is possibly the worst I've seen it. Teenage bullying is just a symptom, because you can see adult bullying all the time in political discourse and other places. But really the larger question is why and what, if anything, can we do about it?

In my usual rigorous manner, I will now make a definitive statement without anything to back it up. This is a skill one learns in advertising. Not in the ads themselves- there you have to back up any claims you make- but in the selling of your ideas and your importance to the success of whatever you're advertising.

My sense it that there are several concurrent trends that are leading us down this path. We'll start with the automobile and the rise of suburbia. I don't want to mythologize city life, but when you're thrown together with people all the time, every day, you learn to live with them- even the ones you don't like. There's a commonness of place that connects people and being squashed together requires cooperation (try to imagine walking down 5th Avenue at rush hour if nobody made any effort to get out of anyone's way). In the burbs, everyone's in their own little space. And the rise of the car as the primary mode of transportation has been a horrible mistake on so many levels that I can't even start to enumerate the reasons why, (just a few examples- air pollution, traffic fatalities, and the overall crappy way divers treat other drivers). But as a social influence, the way driving isolates drivers from everything and everyone around them is pernicious.

Let's add in more and more home video entertainment- cable TV and video games- and the Internet, and I think you can see a culture in a place where everyone is isolated in their own little bubble, mistrustful of anyone from the "outside" and intolerant of any kind of shared responsibility for making sure things go well. It's like in the 2000 Year Old Man, when Carl Reiner aska about caveman life, and the Mel Brooks says that every cave had its own national anthem. "What was yours?" says Reiner. "Mine was, 'May they all go to hell except Cave 57.'"

Good thing we've come so far since then. The next question, of course, is how do we fight societal trends like this?

Washing your mouth out with antibacterial liquid soap.

I was driving to school today and a song on the radio had a chorus that repeated over and over, "I'm just #%&@ing everything up." I'm the first to admit that I've felt this way from time to time, but it's not really the kind of thoughtful sentiment that I'm used to getting in alt rock. It also reminded me of a discussion a few of us were having recently about the increase in the amount of foul language that we've been hearing around.

When I worked in advertising, it was rare to hear a sentence spoken without some kind of profanity. It was just the way everyone talked and I kind of liked it. And I'll even admit that my inner dialogue has a fair share of unprintable words. But I decided quite a while ago that using swear words indiscriminately is just laziness.

An easy, quasi-swearish example is "sucks." Now let's ignore for the moment that this particular non-leech-related use of the word is a reasonably graphic reference to oral sex. What really bothers me is how when you start using it a lot, it becomes generic in meaning, like "is very bad." And when you use it repetitively you lose all the nuance available to you when you insult something or someone. In the books of famous great quotes, there are probably more insults than anything else. When that woman said to Churchill accusingly, "Mr. Churchill, you are drunk!" and he replied, "Yes madame, and you are ugly. And in the morning I will be sober," it wouldn't be nearly as interesting if he'd replied, "You suck." And calling someone an a-hole isn't nearly as interesting as calling them a snotty-faced heap of parrot droppings.

When you substitute one word for many available words or expressions, you cheat yourself and whoever's listening. It gets repetitive to the point of losing its meaning. It's fun to listen to those people on "Jersey Shore," who operate with a vocabulary of about the same breadth as Go Dog Go, but you probably don't want to talk like them. So I guess my objection to profanity is that it encourages lazy thinking, but almost as bad as that, it's boring.

On a personal note, when I feel the need to genuinely swear, I take my guidance at home from the father of Jean Shepherd, writer and narrator of "A Christmas Story." This is from his (fantastic) book of depression-era vignettes, In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash, on which the movie was based.

My father was always a superb user of profanity, but now he came out with just one word, a real Father word, bitter and hard. "DAMMIT!"

Consequences or Truth (remix)

I wrote this a few months ago, but I re-edited it and thought it might be interesting to some.

All over my neighborhood, city, state, country, and as far as I know, world, there are high school seniors in a state of paralyzing anxiety, agonizing over a monumental decision. Where do I go to college next year? And of course, it's not just the students. It's their parents, friends, relatives and school guidance departments poring over facts and figures and planning visits to faraway lands (okay, I'm exaggerating- let's say rural Maine) in the search for the Right Choice. Hours of thought and thousands of dollars, all spent on the first important decision many teenagers make.

Selecting a college seems like a big decision for a young person. After all, it's what they're going to be doing and where they're going to be for the next four years and possibly more. It's their first experience away from home, living somewhat independently, meeting new people and exploring new horizons, growing in ways nobody can imagine. For many people, it's the first time they get to choose their own path. It's the Biggest Decision Of Their Life.

Or not. Maybe it's the least important decision. How could I ever say that? Because the consequences of a college selection cannot be anticipated and, in fact, may never be known. Nobody can predict the ultimate results for any given person at any given school with any degree of accuracy. It's weird to think that you make this huge, exhaustively researched decision and you'll probably never know if you made the right choice. But it flows directly from the old nature versus nurture question that child psychologists argue endlessly over. 

Nobody knows for sure how much of what a person turns out to be is dependent on the individual and how much comes from their environment. And if we don't know that, given the wide range of parenting styles and home situations, how are you going to glean a difference from a bunch of fundamentally similar institutions? Does it matter if you go to Middlebury versus Bowdoin, Bates, Skidmore, Wesleyan, Hamilton, Kenyon, Carleton or Haverford? Even comparing any of those places to "dissimilar" types of colleges like Penn State or Universities of Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Texas or Florida, could you possibly assure me that a person's life will be fundamentally better, or even different, if they chose one versus the other? It's just not possible to do so.

If there are no knowable consequences to making a decision, what kind of decision is that? If you normally make choices based on expected outcomes, on what basis are you going to evaluate this one? You simply can't, at least not in any scientific kind of way. If you talk to college students, my experience is that almost everyone likes where they're going to school, whether it was their original first choice or not. Because college is cool and college is fun, not because it's the correct college for that person.

Then how is this any more important than choosing Diet Coke versus Dr. Pepper? Of course I'm not saying that college itself is inconsequential; college is a terrific experience for many people. I'm saying which college is inconsequential. And I understand that there are situations, like financial considerations or ultra specialized programs, where a particular choice matters. But I'd argue that these cases are a small minority.

So does that mean that it's not really such an important decision? I hated where I went to college, but maybe I would have been just as immature and miserable anywhere else and pretty much nothing in my post-college life seems even remotely connected to the particular school I attended. Other big decisions, like finding a job, getting married, buying a house or having kids, give frequent and often specific feedback as to whether or not things are working out.

I'm convinced this craziness is all us baby boomers' fault. Not only did we create the demographics that have lowered admissions rates, we obsess over our children in a historically unprecedented way. 

I don't want to seem totally oblivious to how monumental this all seems. Late adolescence and early adulthood are important times in personal development and for some, if not all, people, college is a key time of personal growth. Just because you can't know the consequences of a decision doesn't necessarily make it unimportant, but it does mean that maybe people shouldn't be fretting about it as much as they are. Because you never know. Really, you never know.

Malled

I just dropped my kid off at the Plymouth Meeting Mall, a most peculiar place. It's not really like a mall. It's like someone took a mall and whacked it with a giant baseball bat like a pinata, and the mall stuff went spilling out all over the place. Macys here, Chicos and Olly there, movie theater here, big piece of paper mache' there left with Boscovs and a food court inside. Then they took an office building and put it in one empty space and a giant Whole Foods in another empty space. And only then did they think, "Oh yeah, we need roads to get in and out of this place." To get from the movie theater to the one and only exit I think I went north, south, east and west each at least twice and stopped at about a dozen 4-way stops. A little like driving in Boston, I guess, but that's another story.

Want some au jus with that?

My favorite lines I've heard today:

"We discussed that for ad nauseum."

"On grandparents day, my grandmother is going to be sitting right here. She's crazy, so if she raises her hand, don't call on her."

My daughter has a seminar class called Memory this year. Sounds like a great class- they're reading fiction and non-fiction on the topic and they watched Memento for homework.  And one day, one of the students brought in her mother to speak. Her mother has actual amnesia from taking a blow to the head and remembers virtually nothing from before the incident, which happened only a few years before this student was born. I always figured that amnesia, like six-pack abs, white teeth, and straight noses, was one of those things that only happened on TV or in the movies.

It's clearly more prevalent in pulp fiction, but the implications are fascinating. Within a movie, you always see the people talking just like they would have before, just they don't remember who they are. What if you didn't know what a toaster was called? How would you ask for toast, or would you even know what toast was? I don't know the answers, and I'm guessing nobody does. A movie is just a couple of hours. This woman has spent 24 years reconstructing herself. It's like 17 Again except you don't get to look (or dance) like Zac Efron.

But it isn't even just that. How much do you do every day that's routine? And how hard is it when you have to learn a new routine- new school, new job, new spouse? Really hard, right? I'm sitting here typing this now. What if I not only didn't know how to type, but didn't even know what those grey markings on the keys meant? I don't know enough about either this woman or the brain to know if the language center gets wiped out in the same way childhood memories do. And I'm not even getting into the whole question of identity.

It does give one pause, though. And it reminds you not to take things for granted.

Paving the road to hell

I was reminded today that no good deed goes unpunished. But that shouldn't oughta matter anyway, because if you're not doing good for its own sake, because it's the right thing to do, you're just pretending to be, as the Wizard of Oz says, a good deed doer.

Most everyone I know buys into the whole "do unto others" thing for the most part. I always found that too passive to be useful as a life philosophy, though. Quite a while ago I resolved myself that in every situation I touch or that touches me, that I try to leave it better than I found it. Do I always succeed? Does it always make a difference? Of course not. I've screwed up in ways ranging from trivial to accidentally causing one of my best friends and his girlfriend to break up. But more often then not, having positive intent combined with understanding yields positive results.

And making benevolent choices has its own satisfaction, whether it's helping someone reach something on a high shelf (though truth be told, I'm probably not the best person for that) or letting a car merge in front of you or giving blood or whatever. It's good for the soul and it helps a thinking person live with themselves and feel good.

Out of service

You know those people where you say, "I can read him or her like a book?" I don't think I'm that person. My family still can't always tell if I'm serious and joking. I have what seems to be a cynical sense of humor. I don't really think so; I think my humor is more absurdist. On the other hand, I don't even really know what that means, so let's move on. What it comes down to is that it takes a while for some people to get that I'm actually pretty positive and optimistic. Students actually get a more upbeat picture of me than most because I enjoy that part of my day so much.

This is a long way of getting to a pretty surprising conclusion. There was a lot of value to the in-service today and I enjoyed quite a bit of it. Remember that I despise doing this kind of thing. I don't like working in groups. I always feel like I know better than everyone else (because I do know better) and there's always someone who's annoying. And all of that was certainly true, but for at least an hour, I got to discuss some pretty interesting topics with some smart insightful, (and yes, perhaps loud and annoying) people.

The task was to look at a year-old survey of parent attitudes towards the school compared to other somewhat similar schools. At the heart of the discussion was an age-old marketing problem. You have a product and a market that seem to be mismatched in some fashion and you ask yourselves a couple of questions. Is it a problem with the product? Or, is there something the market doesn't understand about the product that can be mitigated by a good communications effort?

The kinds of answers depend on the product, of course. My first advertising job was on a product called Coast soap, made by Procter and Gamble, the largest soap manufacturer in the world. They make many kinds of soap- Ivory is the biggest seller- and as a result each brand they sell has to have it's own specific niche in the market. Otherwise you're competing against yourself. Coast's "Positioning," as we advertising dudes call it, was The Refreshment Soap. It was a pretty blue and white color, meant to evoke surf, I think, and had a strong but pleasant, upbeat kind of scent and made lots of lather when you used it in the shower. The tagline was "The Eye-Opener" and we made funny commercials about draggy people suddenly being perky after showering with the soap.

Coast was very successful for a while, but by the time I was working there it had entered a slow decline in sales and everyone was scurrying around trying to turn it around. The reason for the decline seemed obvious enough. People get tired of the smell or it loses its novelty and you don't really smell it any more (the dreaded olfactory wearout), plus it made all that lather because it dissolved quickly and therefore got used up quickly, making it expensive to use over time.

The lathering/dissolving thing was fundamental to the product and there was nothing to be done about it. So clearly, the way to go was to change the scent (or offer a second scent). And here the company put itself in a box. The Chief Marketing Poobah (I think that was his title, maybe it was VP or something boring though) stated from on high that if Coast as it currently existed was The Refreshment Soap, how could something else also be The Refreshment Soap? Logically, that couldn't be true because, as we all know, if you call something "the" it implies that it's the only one.

Everybody looked at the CMP and nodded and agreed and we moved on to advertising slogans and packaging and such. Coast's sales continued to decline, the ad agency where I worked was fired and P&G eventually sold the brand to rival Dial. But how stupid was that? There's only one kind of refreshment? Rather then violate the brand positioning you'll blow up the entire thing?

To make a long story maybe not so long, soap is a simple and people choose their soap for simple reasons. A product change was needed. A school is a very complicated product and it's possible for there to be both product and communications changes needed. So that was what we spent the morning discussing. The funny thing is, the problem for Coast was that the positioning was too inflexible. For the school (and though this is only my opinion, I know I'm right), the problem is that there is no positioning. Maybe there once was but it didn't survive the move and name change. Fixing this requires some deep thought and tough decisions about what exactly our product is and does. That was the part of marketing that I really liked, but nobody asked me (which is too bad because, as I said, I really do know better).

The Fundamental Theorem of Meetings

Wisdom + Wisdom = More Wisdom

Remember the difference between theorems and postulates? Postulates you don't have to prove and theorems you do. But sometimes people who run meetings forget that there's no assurance that bringing a bunch of smart people together is going to garner anything more than chaos. The Wisdom of Crowds can be useful when the goal is to develop standards, but is a path to mediocrity in other cases.

The Fundamental Postulate of Meetings is the same as for any other activity. Without clear objectives and leadership, meetings are a waste of time. 

That's one of the values of sports in education. In sports, the objectives are clear and leaderless teams usually lose. In other activities, the outcomes are less clear unless the leader has set and communicated what the goals are. So it's much easier to fool yourself into thinking that you're getting somewhere when you're actually sitting still.

Speaking of paying attention

Our head of school reads a lot of reports online on the state of education and forwards things to teachers on a daily basis, often more than once. Today we got something titled "Does Technology Distract Students and Harm Learning?" Results of a non-scientific test by some middle school teacher say "yes."

Well, duh. The report should be titled "Do Distractions Distract Students..?" Well of course they do. The problem isn't the technology, it's the context. What kind of learning are you talking about? The kind that's best done free of distraction? Anything that requires single-minded concentration will clearly be adversely affected by interfering stimuli, but is technological distraction any more harmful to learning than having the room too warm or somebody blowing leaves outside the window? Or maybe I could bring some cute puppies into class during a Calculus test and see how well people do.

I'm just poking holes here (and poking them in nothing really, because I didn't actually read the article, just the title and subhead). Before you can answer a huge, broad question like that, you need to ask an even broader one- what's the objective of school? Or if even that's too specific, what's the objective of learning? This is one of those questions that's more important to ask than to answer, but here's a thought or two.

I sometimes wonder what the people who set educational objectives are thinking about. For me, school isn't really about the specific things you're learning. I mean, only a tiny percentage of people who take biology are ever going to be biologists or even biologers (?). The point of the class is understanding the scientific method and how the natural world works. The point of reading Hamlet isn't to be Shakespearean. It's to learn to appreciate the power and richness of the written word and how it can be used to illuminate humanity.

So let's just say that the goal of school is to prepare people to live rich lives when they are no longer in school. If that's the case, I'm here to tell you that single-minded concentration is only one of the skills one needs to live a rich life. In fact, given life's chaotic nature, being able to concentrate when faced with multiple distractions is as important a skill as one could possibly acquire. I'm not a fan of multitasking, but I understand the benefit of being able to balance competing demands for your time and attention. Prioritizing and managing your personal resources, whatever they may be, are key both to making a positive impact on the world and to enjoying yourself.

Miscellaneous

I was going to call this "Random Notes" because that's what people say, but there's absolutely nothing random about it. Not that there's ever really anything random about what people usually call random; the word is almost always misused. Being a non-sequitur in no way makes a statement random.

We have new neighbors across the street. On recycling day today, they left on the curbside 2 open boxes filled with old bills and bank statements. Hello? What year is this? Ever hear of identity theft? This is why I seldom worry about having that kind of thing happen to me. If I act with reasonable precaution and common sense, that's bound to put me in the upper 10% of guardedness because so many people just don't think. And in the meantime, too bad I wasted the mental effort remembering their names because now I can have not only those but their financial wherewithal and purchasing habits as well.

Here's the kind of conversation you can only have if you've been married a really long time:

Me: "I'm still not feeling well. I'm not going to work tomorrow."

Spouse: "Any chance of your getting a haircut soon?"

Apres-mortem

I'm not really big on this kind of thing, but considering the kind of baseball season it's been, I thought I'd toss my impressions into the cap.

My perspective is unusual, I think. I've been to 9 World Series. I may be the only person who was at the Mets improbable win in 1969, the Reggie Jackson game in 1977, the Phillies win in 2008 and Roy's no-no this year.  So I'm at a point where I don't live or die for winning the Series. So here are my impressions of the 2010 Phillies, trying to skip what everyone else is saying (e.g., they underachieved, etc.).

One thing you couldn't possibly get on the full effect of on TV but was amazing at the ballpark was the contrast between 46000 people screaming as Wilson readied to throw the last pitch and the dead silence after strike 3 was called. I've never heard anything like it.

Let's dispense with the Cliff Lee thing. Sure, he's great, I loved him last year and would have loved to keep him. But not having him didn't cost the Phillies anything, given that they got Oswalt instead. In fact, while Oswalt was helping to carry them back into first place, Lee was ineffective and injured. He only got his act together at the very end of the season. Even in the playoffs, it's unlikely he would have helped. Oswalt wasn't good against the Reds, but in the SF series he was their best pitcher.

It's easy to focus our attention on the ultimate failure, but there were many successes along the way.  Just in the last month I've been at the park and seen them win a game on a walkoff homerun after being down 5 through 7 innings, sweep Atlanta to get a stranglehold on the division (which meant going to games 5 straight days, something I'd never done before), Halladay's no-hitter (my only one after attending around 1000 games) and the comeback win the next night versus the Reds, and Oswalt's gem in NLCS game 2. So it's not like it's been bad or anything. Just disappointing because they had good chances to win NLCS games 1, 4 and 6 and didn't take advantage.

Now we get to watch the Jason Werth saga play out. Management doesn't have a perfect track record, but they've earned my trust with their body of work. These have been some of the best years in Phillies history and I feel privileged to have gotten to see so much great baseball in such a terrific ballpark.

What it adds up to for me is how rich baseball is. Nobody would ever say that Texas and San Francisco were the two best teams in baseball but here they are in the World Series. The best team doesn't always win, but the team that plays the best does. And that's okay with me.