Taking the long view

Within the past 12 hours, both of my kids have asked me to explain the "fiscal cliff" (and doesn't the need to put that in quotation marks just about sum it up?) to them and in the course of explaining it, I'm finding it impossible to avoid using the phrase "because the current Republican party is insane" repeatedly.

I remember reading a book by the conservative former National Lampoon editor PJ O'Rourke where he said "The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it.”  Clearly, much of the dysfunction of the past few years has been the result of a clear Republican strategy of weakening the Federal government in particular but all governments in general. I'm starting to wonder though if the current lunacy is a strategy or an unintended consequence.

You can argue it either way. You can say, oh poor John Boehner (Republican Speaker of the House), he can't control his caucus and he can't get anything done. And he does seem like a sad, pathetic figure, and that's how he's portrayed in the media and the public's view of Republicans and especially congressional Republicans is very negative.

But maybe it's all an act. Maybe the bigger idea is a game of chicken, where the Republicans do everything they can to screw things up in every way with the hope that they can make the whole thing collapse before they're run out of town. It's not hard to see why they'd do that. They know they're losing the demographic battle and there's only a certain point to which they can succeed in trying to keep Democratic types from being allowed to vote. It's just a matter of time.

So why not throw the Hail Mary pass (a phrase which either originated with Notre Dame in the 30's or with Roger Staubach and the Dallas Cowboys in 1978) and see if you can just blow everything up and leave the Democrats presiding over nothing? Yeah, it's kind of a nihilist approach, but that's entirely consistent with their behavior.

PHSSD

I am feeling assaulted. That's pretty much my theme for 2012 (note to myself: vow to be reflective at some point other than the week between Christmas and New Years). The first 2/3 of the year brought other people's overwhelming medical issues and the incessant tension surrounding them. When that finally dissipated, shingles got me within a week. Now that's fading out after nearly 4 months, and I'm reeling from weeks media frenzy, which may have been there all along but I'm just really honing in on it now.

I think that it struck me right around Christmas day, because there was an ad inserted in the paper that screamed in bold type Doors Open at 7:00AM December 26 and in subhead type Redeem Your Giftcards.

Having just endured what seemed like an endless series of sales, from Black Friday to Cyber Monday to Free-Shipping Day, still every day there is someone screaming at me to buy something. NOW!

I'm at the point now where I don't even want to buy the stuff I need to buy, which is bad because I really need to buy that stuff. I feel like I should be waiting for a sale, or even better, a DOORBUSTER SALE.

I'm being only slightly facetious here. I always liked reading ads, but at this point it's simply too much shouting. We'll go right from New Year's to post-holiday clearance to White Sales to Valentine's Day to President's Day. It will never stop.

Book report, part 2

Although I was shamed into beginning The Count of Monte Cristo, it took almost no time at all for me to get completely wrapped up in the story. I knew virtually nothing about the book before I started, but it takes only a few pages to offer sufficient hints to understand the path of the story.

It's clear from the outset that a virtuous character will suffer grievous harm at the hands of those jealous and selfish in fairly short order, and that the remainder of the book will be devoted to his efforts to right those wrongs. And boy, does he ever. It's a classic of revenge, slowly built and intricately constructed and definitely served cold.

Even though it's easy to suss out the basics of the story, nothing prepared me for the richness of detail and florid descriptions of every setting, from abodes both modest and opulent to prison cell to palace to den of thieves. We follow the hero from prison to the island of Monte Cristo, where we leave him while the remainder of the sprawling cast of characters is introduced and brought to life.

And then the plot plays out. We learn gradually how the Paris social web inhabited by these characters is woven and how the Count becomes part of it. Slowly and subtly so as to be beyond the notice of the offending few, the noose tightens, and by the time the Count, brilliant, rich beyond compare, master of disguise and everything else, reveals his identity to the villains they are completely undone.

I don't want to reveal more. The free digital version (from iBooks) that I read is 1600+ (small with big type) pages but it moves along without ever dragging (though I'll admit I did not read every detail of every luxurious salon) or skipping ahead too fast. I could not recommend it more highly.

Book report, part 1

We didn't go away this year, for a variety of reasons. Usually when we travel,  I do a great deal of reading and so decided to undertake to do some at home as well. Choosing a book is always the rub.

I have always tended toward reading non-fiction rather than fiction, which I don't think reflects well on me (and why else would someone do something other than to have it reflect on them). Non-fiction is simply too easy, and worse, much initially interesting non-fiction doesn't bear finishing. From my experience, a great number of popular and/or worthy non-fiction books make their points clearly and well within the first 50-100 pages. The rest is merely amplification and explication. No matter how well-written and interesting, non-fiction books tend to have a point of diminishing returns. If I get the point, I get the point. I don't need it explained and exemplified to me repeatedly.

Fiction, on the other hand, is a building up process, and requires more patience. You inhabit a new world and have to decide if you want to live in it for a while, and you never want to leave the best of the lot. I also like when you reach the point where you're thinking and sometimes even talking in the style of the book. This is particularly true when reading something like Jane Austen. That kind of language is addictive.

It's hard to choose fiction, so even though I rarely read it, I'll often read book reviews just to keep current. It was in this spirit that I read a critic's top ten list, and though I didn't read anything on the list, I did see something that intrigued me. In her description of a book called "The Black Count", a biography of Alexandre Dumas' father, Salon's book critic, Laura Miller begins: If you’ve ever read Alexandre Dumas’ swashbuckling novels — and if you haven’t, what a sad, drab reading life you’ve led, my friend —and it stopped me dead.

How had I never read any of those books- Three Musketeers and the others? The comment cut me to the quick. It was Christmas Eve Day and all the libraries were closed, but I was certain that the Gutenberg Project would have all of them, so down to my iPad it loaded and I have spent the past few days immersed in The Count of Monte Cristo. All I can say here is Oh. My. God. For more, see part 2.

Overheard in line

As is our Judaic duty, we were planning on seeing the 3:10 showing of Les Miz at the local cinema. There was an unruly, ethnically homogeneous crowd in front. I stood on line and chatted with the woman right of me, a retired teacher who told me the guy at the window was "an idiot," and who did not want to come back at 6:30 (it was about 3 at this point), so she decided she would see Lincoln now and buy a ticket for Les Miz on Friday. She approached the booth and:

"Can I get a ticket for Lincoln?"
"Yes."
"And can I have a ticket for Les Miz on Friday?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because you didn't tell me what time you want to see it."
"When is it playing?"
"Twelve o'clock and 3:10."
"Three-ten."
"One?"
"Oh, there's a show at 1? That would be better."

At this point the 'idiot' rolled is eyes and I started laughing so I didn't hear the rest of it.

Down the rabbit hole again

It's depressing to think how my recovery has taken so long that I can think of it in stages, but since all the world's a stage, I guess I can deal.

I have reached the stage formally designated at Screw This (this is one of the seven stages of recovery and an important part of any 12-step program). In my case, that means I'm getting off my medication and damn the consequences. I have no idea whether I even need some of the stuff I've been doing/taking, so I'm in the process of chucking it all.

I don't recommend this in all cases- it's probably a bad idea for cancer and heart patients- but I'm at a point where I seem to have 2 symptoms and that's it. The pain part I think I can manage and again, I have no idea that the prescription stuff helps anyway. I do know that the medication has potential side effects, and I'm more concerned with that than the pain. I would, for example, be able to have more than one glass of wine if the situation calls for it, and truly, what situation doesn't? If it wouldn't benefit from a nice glass of wine, it's not much of a situation.

Seriously, though, the most troublesome things at this point are my memory lapses. These could be caused by (1) aftereffects of the shingles, (2) medication side effects, (3) getting older, and (4) an overestimation of how good my memory was in the first place. Medication cannot help with any of these things and might even be prolonging the problem, so why bother? This will be different, and as Phil Connors would say, anything different is better.

Earlybird special New Year's resolution

Given everything I've observed over the course of the year, I've decided that in 2013 I will readjust my charitable giving downward somewhat and spend the difference doing as much shopping as I can at local businesses and buying American-made, preferably union-made products.

I'm not going to absolutist about it. Chain stores are more convenient at times and have longer hours. I don't live in New York where I can go to Fairway or West Side markets a 11PM. And there are some things, like office supplies for instance, where the small businesses have completely disappeared, at least around here and there are some things specifically made for chain stores that I like. This all necessarily means buying more organic, or at least locally produced items, and that's fine with me as well.

I do not kid myself into thinking this will work for everyone. I am very fortunate to have both the financial flexibility and the variety of local outlets to do this. But I am very worried about the future of my country and I owe it to myself and everyone involved to put my money where my mouth is.

Just a routine pick-up

I promise you that I am neither inventing nor exaggerating anything here.

My daughter finished her final exams on Wednesday and so after work Thursday we headed up to New York to pick her up. We decided years ago to give up our SUV, keep smaller cars and rent something big when we needed it. So I started the morning by walking to the local rental car place because if I drove over there I'd have to drive 2 cars at once which I'm not good at.

As it turned out, I only got a few feet from my house when a neighbor drove up, stopped and asked if I wanted a ride. He has a very nice car so I said okay. He is also someone who smokes cigars while he drives, which I'd forgotten. I asked him how he was and that took up the entire ride. I gave him openings to ask how I was but he was clearly uninterested. I'm guessing his motivation is that he wanted to talk and preferred to have someone listening while he did so.

So I get the minivan and take it home and then off to work I went. When I got home a bit after 1, we headed out. There was no traffic at any point. We were speculating that this was because of all the GRIDLOCK ALERT - USE MASS TRANSIT signs on the roads, though how someone who is driving on a highway is supposed to stop and take mass transit is beyond me. You'd think that message should be imparted before you get on the highway.

We make one short stop and get to the dorm at 4:30. My daughter disliked her suitemates, so she decided to change rooms after this semester. She had been assigned a new room and was supposed to find out if we could just move the stuff over instead of bringing it home or back. She said it was fine, so we packed 2 sets of bags- dorm and home. This made packing the car kind of like a number squares puzzle, because the pieces all needed to fit and we needed to be able to get the dorm bags out without having to remove the home bags as well.

The loading and packing took about 2 hours, mostly because the carts the school offers to move things just barely fit into the elevators, meaning that if there was more than one other person in the elevator when it arrived, you had to just wave it on and ring again. There are 15 stories in the building and only 2 elevators, so you can imagine how often it was arriving completely empty.

But finally we finished, and we went over to the other building. My daughter went in to get her key; I hesitated to unload because I didn't want to unload the stuff and then have to reload it if it turned out that she couldn't get the key. Unfortunately, that turned out to be prescient, as there had been some sort of mix-up and the key was in an office which was closed by that time.

At this point, we needed food and my wife wanted pizza, so she Yelped our way to Koronet Pizza on Broadway and 111th Street. Koronet has an unusual way of utilizing resources because they figured out that the way to get the most pizza into an oven is to have it be one big piece, so their pies are (almost) as wide as the oven, yielding slices that look like this:

Yes, pizza bigger than your head (not specifically my head). Pretty darned good too.

Pizza in lap, we went downtown and out by the Lincoln Tunnel, which, by the way, seems to have approximately 43 different entrances, stretching from 9th Avenue and 40th Street to 11th Avenue and 36th Street. Pretty remarkable for one tunnel and almost too silly to be called confusing.

Then finally we were on our way, cruising down the Jersy Turnpike when, just a couple of miles south of Exit 11, the "low tire" indicator came one. I've had these in my cars from time to time, but this was an unfamiliar car, so I slowed down in case it got bad, and sure enough, it did.

So to set the scene, we're at Mile 90, in the cars only lane, on a shoulder big enough to fit the car and plenty big to get in and out of the car if you're Flat Stanley. Otherwise, it was terrifying, standing 18 inches from cars going 70 miles and hour. We called AAA and the ordered us up some service.

After about 25 minutes, a van pulls up behind us. A big young guy comes over, explains the costs, (like I'm going to negotiate, like no way I'm paying $30 for this. I've got a van full of clothing and supplies, I'll start a new life right here on the shoulder). Meanwhile, I'm thinking we're going to have to unpack the whole car to get the tire out. The good news is that minivans (or at least Chrysler minivans) don't have the spare inside the car. It instead hangs underneath, so total unpacking was not necessary). The guy tells me he needs to get in the driver's seat to lower the tire, so I get out.

It certainly was pleasant out there.

I hang out and then another guy gets out of the van. He's not as big, but they start discussing things. I'm presuming it's some sort of division of labor thing, but then they come back to me and ask where the owner's manual is. Uh-oh, so they don't actually know how to get the tire ("We're trying to get it out without breaking the bracket..."). But back at it they went. Eventually they booted my wife out of her seat as well, leaving only my daughter in the car. She enjoyed their little Two Dumb Guys show (favorite quote: "My title is mechanic but I like to think of myself as a technician.") while Ronnie and I sat in their van to keep warm, since it was about 35 degrees and windy. After a total of about 30 minutes, the big guy comes around back with the spare. He consults with the other guy in animated fashion and then comes back to the van and announces that we have to get out of the van.

"Why?" I say.
"I need to go get some equipment"
"What kind of equipment?"
"Well, we don't have a jack."

So there you have it, ladies and gentlemen. They dispatched a guy (the non-technician was just along for the ride) to fix a flat tire and he neglected to bring a jack. Why, one might ask, does he even need to remember to bring it? Do they not know who is working for them? Are there flat tires that can be changed without a jack? Are the service vans not loaded with at a minimum the equipment needed for the simplest of services?

Back into our own car we go and wait. After another half hour, the van returns and we feel the rear of the car start going up. I don't really think you're supposed to do that with people in the car, but hey, I'm not the technician.

Finally they come back to roust us, and I pick the tire up off the shoulder and somehow squeeze it into the packed read of the car. I then ask, what's the range on these donut tires? "Oh, around 50-60 miles." This sounded too vague for me, so I looked it up. Seventy miles seems to be a popular number. I then check Google Maps and how far are we from home? 71 miles.

Hmmm. So I ask if they think they have replacement tires at the rest area and they have no idea. They said if I called the rental company that they'd have me go back to Newark Airport because that was the closest open branch. I said no f---ing way was I going there because (1) by the time I got turned around it was 30 miles back to there, and (2) rather than replacing the tire they would almost certainly want to just replace the car, which would entail unpacking and repacking the entire thing. Uh-uh. I decided we should go for it.

My daughter was impatient to get home, but was mostly motivated to get to a rest room, as were we all. One of the myriad of ways you can divide people into two groups is that there are people who "do" other people and those who don't. By "do" I mean do impressions. My daughter is one of those "do" people, and she had us laughing the whole way to the rest stop reciting their conversations.

I should note here that 71 miles, while not too bad when you're going 70-75 mph, feels very far when you're going 50 mph, the max for the spare. But after an hour and a half or so, at 11:30, five hours after leaving Manhattan, we pulled into the driveway, spare intact. It had been raining steadily for most of the drive back (though not while we were standing on the Turnpike shoulder) and I uttered 6 words (three of them being 'no, way, and now'), lay down on the couch, pulled a blanket over me and the next thing I knew it was 1AM.

Which way is up?

Today, I was showing the Calculus class how to analyze graphs using something known as a side chart, which is a number line with random-looking scribbling on it. I was setting this up and somebody gently asked, "Is it okay if I put -2 to the left of 0 and 2 to the right of 0?" So I looked and saw that I was doing my number line backwards, counting down instead of up as I moved from left to right. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this. The number 2 is not to the left of 0 any more than North on a map is actually up.

There is no correct way to make a number line, no matter what the math teacher and book says. When you are doing one "correctly," what you are doing is what the convention is and what the authority figure told you to do, nothing more. In fact, any Algebra book is filled with number lines that don't go from left to right. Every graph has one that goes up and down as well, and a 3D graph would have one sticking straight out from the page, if lines were actual things. Any convention that is dependent on the orientation of your paper is just silly (what I did would be perfect if you were looking at it upside-down) and violates the beauty of working with something that is entirely conceptual. Math certainly has plenty of absolute rules, but none of them say anything about left, right, up and down.

Maps, on the other hand, are a completely different thing. North and South are just ways of going around in a circle, and there's nothing up or down about that. And making a map means taking the surface of a sphere (or spheroid, anyway) and translating onto a 2-dimensional representation. There are few things less 2-dimensional than a sphere, so the whole idea is a travesty and a sham. It's done for people's convenience with no regard to accuracy. It's a mess and I just hope nobody ever tries to do it to me.

Teevee

This may surprise you, but I can't wait for the Bachelorette wedding. Those two are so cute. I'm not going to watch it or anything.

Though the DirecTV commercials with the DVR warning screen are tasteless and awful, they do highlight perhaps the quintessential First World Problem of the early 2010's- the overflowing DVR. How the hell did this become a stressful thing? Do we really need to have so much stuff ready to watch at any one time?

Here's my observation, and correct me if I'm wrong. I believe that if you have so many episodes of something on your DVR that they're beginning to drop off, you're never going to watch the show.

And speaking of dropping off, what is the deal with the phrase, "Dropping like flies?" Someone told me last week that so many students were getting sick that they were dropping like flies. As the designated flycatcher around here, I can assure you that flies have a limited action vocabulary. They fly and when they're not flying they are standing on something, usually a window. I've not seen them drop, but I've not seen students drop either, so I guess it is the same.

Back to TV. I'll tell you my mom's favorite story about my TV watching when I was a kid. When I was around 8, I was limited in how much TV I could watch. Not sure why then in particular, but I was told that on school nights I could watch only 1/2 hour of TV. I accepted the news with grace and dignity (I assume, I don't remember this), and then came back a few minutes later with a piece of paper and reported to my mother: "Okay, I'll watch 8 minutes of Bugs Bunny, 5 minutes of Sandy Becker (a local fave), 10 minutes of the Flintstones and 7 minutes of Yogi Bear." My mom always thought that was very funny, but little did she know how well I had anticipated the modern ADD world in which we live in.

We got our first color TV in 1967. I remember clearly because we got it in time to watch the very first Super Bowl. It was a 13-inch GE Portacolor, the first portable color TV. Portable was important then, because most people only had 1 TV. Having a second one you could relocate was a luxury.

That TV figured prominently in my most frightening TV-watching experience. We brought the portable TV up to our new country home. My parents went out to a friend's house, leaving me and my friend, Charlie Broadwin, also Brooklyn born and bred, alone in this isolated, unfamiliar house in the woods. We started watching a movie called The Beast with Five Fingers, where Peter Lorre hallucinates that a severed hand is chasing him and is trying to strangle him. Near the climax of the movie, Lorre is sitting in a room, paralyzed by fear; he hears a distant thump, a creak outside the room, a shutter blows in the wind and bangs against the window, a lute mounted on the wall has one of its strings suddenly break, he quivers with fright. And then, perfectly in rhythm with the scene, the handle on the top of the portable TV, by which you carried the TV from room to room, the handle tipped over from its upright position and fell against the top of the TV with a loud bang, and Charlie and I both suddenly levitated about 3 feet, straight up, and ran out of the room. My most memorable TV-watching experience.

Just sayin'

Maybe it's just because of the election followed by Hostess and Walmart, the Michigan legislature's rush to do every possible bad thing in 4 weeks before they're booted out, the tax/debt standoff and now yet another school tragedy, but I've never been more aware of how today's Republican party has taken the stance of, "What position should we take on this? What would the worst person, the most evil, selfish a--hole I know say about it?"

From what springs all the anger, resentment, lack of empathy and vindictiveness? How bad can their lives really be? Because this is not principled conservative thinking. It seems like barely thinking at all. I've generally leaned liberal, but not always and not on every issue. But now it's really hard to continue seeing these people as opponents and not see them as out and out enemies. I can't be the only one thinking this, am I?

Scan this!

In a rather unusual phrasing, N. Joseph Woodland, the grandfather of the bar code died today. To get funeral information, just scan below:

It's kind of unusual to have the grandfather of something noted, but it appears that there wasn't any father of the bar code. This clearly makes no genealogical sense at all, but he was the guy who, while a student at Drexel, came up with the idea (drawing lines in the sand at the beach with his fingers and thinking it reminded him or morse code) that someone else perfected (with his assistance). 

Having grown up during the time when supermarket checkers entered prices by hand on cash registers (there were typically keys for cents, multiples of 10 cents, and dollars), so a price tag was affixed to everything and the adding up of the grocery bill was about as accurate as anything people enter into calculators. Meaning pretty accurate, but far from perfect, and slow.

The whole story is pretty interesting, and if you want to read the guy's obituary, it's here, and make sure to click through to the 2011 obit of Alan Haberman, the supermarket guy who implemented the codes and oversaw its advancement for many years. His story is maybe even more interesting.

Attention to the bold (or bolded, at least) advice

I've occasionally ranted about the need for people to pay attention, just to one's life in general. The explosive increase in stimuli has ignited a debate (not literally, though that would be fun), on what constitutes attention. Is it focus, implying attention to a single thing? Or is it, I don't know what the word for the opposite of focus is aside from blur? Blur implies that no one thing is more in focus than anything else, so I can go with that. What it refers to is attending to multiple stimuli concurrently.

My generation as a whole thinks that blur is bad and focus is good, but I'm not ready to accept that this isn't an archaic idea. How do we know which is better than the other? Maybe the best is to be able both to spread your attention and to focus, depending on what is required of the moment.

The best example I can think of where blur is superior is driving. No, I don't mean driving with blurry vision. That would be bad. I mean playing attention to many things simultaneously.

The objective of driving, let's remember, is to get from one place to the other without bumping into anything. Necessarily, this elevates giving attention to all potential bumpees at all times. I've spread this advice around before, but I'll repeat a bit here.

First of all, stationary objects require the least amount of attention. Trees, lampposts, buildings and the like can have their position noted and avoided, no more. Cars and pedestrians, on the other hand, have a tendency to move around and are therefore much more likely bumpee candidates. So the safest way to drive is to do everything possible to avoid them.

I'll tackle cars here (again, not literally and not even potentially as entertaining as igniting a debate), since there tend to be more of them on the road, at least around where I live. The good thing about other cars is that they are big, recognizable (as cars) and easy to spot. The bad things about other cars are that they (1) do not sit still and prone to changing speed and direction, and (2) are controlled by someone other than you and therefore somewhat unpredictable.

Since most people can recognize the presence of cars pretty easily, you should use that information to keep away from them in every way possible. This entails leaving as much space as possible between your car and the others. Since a car is pretty rectangular, that means there are 4 sides, all of which must avoid the other cars. Front is easy because it's right there- you just have to look straight ahead, something even the most attentionally challenged can do if they're not texting. Don't follow another car closely. Cars have a nasty habit of stopping or turning without giving you advance notice.

The rear is accessed my a mirror. A taxi driver once told me that the front of the car was his problem, the rear was his insurance company's problem, and that's true. If someone hits you from behind it's almost never considered your fault if you weren't breaking the law (see the above note about not following closely). I check the rearview mirror occasionally, but mostly to see if someone is getting closer to me. I do, however, always check the rearview mirror when I brake, because I don't know either if the car behind me knows I'm braking or if they're unable to stop for some reason. I've avoided accidents of both sorts by checking, one of which probably would have been fatal to people in the other car. (By the way, that thing they teach you in driving school about not turning your wheels when stopped and waiting for a left turn but instead waiting until you stop moving is very good advice. I know from potentially disastrous experience).

The sides of the car are tricky because you can't check them both at the same time and because there are typically places you can't see at all without moving your head around. Cars on the side of you are more likely to hit you than cars either in front or behind, because they potentially can't see you either. Therefore. they should be avoided at all costs. It's fine to clump up at a traffic light when you're not moving, but otherwise, if you're driving on a multi-lane road, do not drive with another car next to you. This will (1) avoid another car hitting you, and (2) give you an escape path if something happens in front of you. I can't count how many accidents this has saved me. If traffic is moving slowly and the spacing doesn't permit this, try to place yourself at least slightly in front of the car next to you. This makes you much easier to see.

There's way more to it than this, but it's a start.

My mind is literally in the gutter, or on the gutter

I was driving near my daughter's school today and suddenly it got very loud in the car. I looked around and saw that some vandal had cut strips out of the road. I was annoyed, but then I saw signs on a lamppost that said RUMBLE STRIPS. And they certainly were that. You'd think they'd fix the road instead of just calling attention to what was wrong with it.

But seriously, these thing were near an intersection where there was a fatal accident a few weeks ago, so I guess they want people to slow down. And to aid the slowing down process, they also are employing something called SPEED CUSHIONS. What the hell are speed cushions? I've seen speed bumps and even speed humps. Maybe the speed cushions is where the speed bumps do their speed humps. You can fill in where the rumble strips fit in.

Starting over anew again

Today was my third first day of the school year. I had one back in September, then another a few weeks ago when I returned to teach one class, and now today when I added a second class. If all goes well, I will have yet another first day after winter break when I add my third (and for this year final) class.

This has required some adjustment on my part. Over the course of the past week or so, I've become more and more aware of what I'm dealing with. My energy level is noticeably better and can stay that way for hours, then suddenly I'm wiped out and need to lie down. My brain is acting a little wonky too. I have a touch of memory loss. Not the fun kind like in movies or soap operas where you have amnesia and don't know who you are or where you are and you get to live your life anew, perhaps even falling in love again, only this time with your true love, not that loser you were with before your accident.

No, not like that. Like, being reminded that a week ago you said you'd do something and now have no memory of ever talking about it. I've forgotten appointments and have forgotten to look at my calendar to check. I have a slight suspicion that I'm being punked at times, but I have no way of knowing for sure. We're not talking Memento, but still.

It's weird, because if I'm teaching I'll have blank moments, but because I'm standing in a classroom at a whiteboard writing something down and a bunch of kids are watching me, I have a bunch of clues as to what I'm doing and how I need to fill things in (looking at what I just wrote is a good one). But without that kind of specific context, it can be difficult.

So the only conclusion I can reach is that my mind is having the same kind of reactions that my body is, where it will be humming along (literally, I hum incessantly) and then just stop operating properly. This would probably be bad if it happened when I'm driving, but everyone on the road is always so insane at this time of year that nobody would notice.

More than anything, this reminds me of an old SNL bit. Guess I just have to see what happens next.

Update on my favorite topic- me

I got a personality test back yesterday. Don't ask why I has a personalility test done in the first place; maybe I wanted to make sure I had one, but mostly it had to do with it being free. Apparently, my personality passed, because they didn't arrest, institutionalize, or eject me when they gave it back. In fact, it was very disappointing in that it was boring. I sounded so normal and well-adjusted. As a psychological therapy consumer, this is crushing.

Last time I had one of these things done there was much more drama in the analysis. I was someone who was completely out of balance because I would generally withdraw from situations, but would kind of pop in from the periphery to disrupt things from time to time. The phrase they used was "bomb thrower." I took great pride in that. Now I get "...prefers to attain a balance between emotion and intellect, using rational decision-making and pragmatism." How dull does that guy sound? I really should have had my daughter fill it out for me like I was originally going to do. That's what I get for being respectful of the psychological process, so here's something less respectful.

So I'm sitting in the room with this group, and the psychologist, as an example of a particular sort of behavior, is describing someone who had been a client at some time in the past. The description is a well-constructed blend of vagueness and specificity to allow us to understand the point without violating anyone's privacy. Anyway, as the description builds it begins to remind me of something, and suddenly it hits me, I know this person. Someone once said similar things to me and matches this description. Now this was a very long time ago, like over 200 in dog years, but we're talking about a pretty unforgettable character, brilliant and attractive and funny and sociopathic. Sounds like a perfect date, yes?

And I'm dying to call out, I know them! That was the person who recommended you to me in the first place! And I went along with it because if you could handle someone that insane, you could certainly help me with my first world problems. But I couldn't because that would violates all the rules and would blow up the entire point we were trying to make, so maybe I was being respectful of the process at that moment, but I'm biding my time.

Did you know there are people inside banks, not just ATMs?

Because I have a sarcastic sense of humor, people regularly refer to me as being cynical. I consider this unjust, because I think I'm an optimistic realist. I try to see things clearly and not get caught up in what other people want you to think. And I think people who spend time with me find me to be a pretty upbeat, positive person.

Part of the problem is my marketing background. Marketing is all about manipulation, developing communications that affect people's behavior. That's why it's fun, getting people to try something new, or keep doing what they've been doing even though they might want to make a change, or whatever. It's always about understanding who you're communicating with, what they think now, and what you want them to think when you're finished with them. This kind of background doesn't make lead one to unthinkingly take things at face value. Everything done in a good business is done for a reason, and I'm always looking for it.

I understand that it can seem cynical, but it's not. I won't even say that the people crafting the messages are cynical. It depends. Sometimes people really should stop behaving in one way and start in another. However, I gotta say, there's something about going at PNC Bank, anywhere, but especially in Bryn Mawr, that sets off my coded message detector.

I'm not sure what's gone on there, but beginning about a year ago, when I walk into the branch, I am besieged with friendly greetings in a way that seems suspicious. Oh, Frank, you may say, there you go taking a cynical view of people being friendly. Au contraire, mon frère. I have no problem with people I know or am acquainted with being friendly. I'm friendly to people sometimes myself when it suits me. But I'm not friendly all the time no matter what. And I don't effusively greet people I barely (if at all) know every single time one walks through the door. And keep in mind that while I never found it unpleasant going in the bank, the level of personal interaction never really registered with me. But now it's a minimum of 4 or 5 enthusiastic "hellohowareyoutoday?" people every time.

So here are the possibilities that I can think of: (1) Something changed markedly for the better in the lives of all of the people who work at PNC and made them all more friendly and cheery and they're just all living the dream. (2) They fired all the normal people who worked at PNC and replaced them with Stepford (I'm sorry, that was cynical) genuinely friendly creatures. (3) Or everyone miraculously got the same idea about how to reach when customers come into their place of business, or (4) There was a corporate directive that noted that people were a) starting to really hate banks, b) beginning to especially hate huge banks like PNC, and c) seek other places to park their money, and which told everyone who work in the branches that they'd better be friendly to the customers or else.

I'm not faulting the people who work at the bank on this. They do a reasonably good job of being friendly, and it helps that I always try to talk to customer service people as if they're real people, not machines that take care of stuff for me. It's just kind of creepy, that's all.

Buttoned up

I am dreadfully sick of people asking me how I feel and even more tired of talking about how I feel, so rather than just be rude to everyone (though that sounds entertaining, come to think of it, and people would excuse me because "Poor Frank, he's not feeling well and that's why he's being rude," so it's a win-win) I'm going to just wear a button that says "Don't Ask," and for school I'll have another one that says, "Oy, Don't Ask."

Well, isn't that convenient?

I know I'm not venturing into a new topic here, but convenience foods are on my mind. I was reading the coupon insert that got stuck through our mailbox yesterday (who doesn't?) and was $1 off a bag of "flame grilled" Ball Park frozen hamburgers. Yeah, already cooked, microwaveable. This disturbs me on 3 levels. First, just ugh. Second, I'm never getting a hamburger at a ballpark again because I'll assume they're using these. Third, how frigging hard is it to make a hamburger? Who doesn't know how to flatten a lump of ground beef, put it in a frying pan and cook it? And if that's beyond your skill level, how can you afford the frozen precooked kind?

It's like pancake mix. I make pancakes from scratch every week. You know what's in pancakes? Flour, salt, sugar and baking soda in a bowl, and pour in an egg mixed with milk. And it you go from start to serving in 10 minutes tops. Is this so hard you need to pay 5 times the price to get a mix? Or buy them frozen? Oy.

I like my convenience foods to add value. Like a chocolate bar. That's convenience food. It's hard to make chocolate. Or even cereal. Even if I can find corn, I don't have the steamroller thing they use to squish it into flakes. And whatever it is that makes Cap'n Crunch so crunchy? I'm pretty sure I don't have any in my house. So come on food manufacturers! Come up with some better ideas!

Easily worth 30 second of your time

We were talking about the awful and funny side effects of botox, which I'd mentioned in a previous post, and what I kept going back to is one of the funniest commercials I've ever seen, a spot from the pre-baby E-Trade campaign. I have nothing to add, so enjoy:

My new perspective will be to keep everything in perspective

I've been sick, more or less, for nearly 3 months now. That's a long time to be sick, especially for someone who's not really used to being sick. My therapist (yes, I go to a therapist sometimes. I'm neither proud nor ashamed of it. It's just helpful sometimes, like when you've been sick for a long time) says that having to partially shut down the way I have can give me a new perspective on life. It reminds me of something I read in a baseball magazine when I was a kid. It said something like, "Hank Aguirre arrived at spring training and announced that he was starting the year with a new attitude, setting a new major league record for consecutive years, new attitude by right-handed pitcher. Aguirre said his attitude this year would be surly."

So what is the new perspective that I've gained? The usual stuff- appreciate what you have, live each day to the fullest, blah, blah blah. The thing is, I've been through a lot of crap in the last few years, and the last thing I really needed was some catastrophic event to remind me of how lucky I am. Keeping things in perspective and being thankful for what I have are kind of obsessions for me. So the best I can hope for is to be reminded of things.

Given that reduced goal, and setting aside trivial like the fact that I hate being a passenger in a car, I can come up with 2 things. First of all, slowing down is a good thing. Being really busy doesn't make you a better person- it just makes you busy. Even if you're "productive." So what? The other thing is, and I have to credit my daughter for reminding me of this, all the best stuff happens when you get outside of your comfort zone. The best thing you can say about a comfort zone is that it's comfortable. That's admirable for a couch or a pair of shoes, but it's not much of life goal. It's in unfamiliar circumstances that you feel most alive. I think that's why I like traveling so much, even to places that aren't considered exciting. As Bill Murray says in Groundhog Day, anything new is good. And my illness, by limiting my possible activities, has cut almost every shred of novelty out of my life.

I guess that's not the worst thing someone could come up with. We'll have to see if it sticks once
I'm better or if I just forget it and go back to whatever it is I used to do.

Why can't they name a beverage after me? End of November ramblings.

Another week done and another month done. I really need to start an anonymous blog, because lately, most of the unexpected, weird, funny, interesting stuff in my life revolves around other people, and I'm into respecting people's privacy. It's no fun continuing to write about being sick. Being sick is boring. Also, maybe I don't want everyone to know every bit of truth about me, even if I want to write about it.

And of course it's inappropriate for a teacher to reveal too much to the students. Lord knows I'm inappropriate enough at times. From around 8th grade on I was always, though not exactly a class clown in the sense of always wanting attention directed at me, pretty much of a wiseass. I always did enjoy disrupting a class, and now I find as a teacher it's just as much fun as when I was a student, maybe even better because I don't get in trouble.

Today I wasn't exactly disruptive, but I did somehow get 8 generally well-behaved honors students riled up enough that the teacher in the classroom next door started banging on the wall to quiet us down. What does that say about me that this was my favorite moment of the day, or at least the one that makes me most proud? I do like a bit of disruption for its own sake.

For the record, I was only kicked out of class a couple of times in high school, a fraction of the number of classes I cut. Once I was mad enough at a teacher that I switched into another class for a day. But ultimately I went back because even though the teacher I was mad at (who was, I believe, equally mad at me, except he was mad at me for something I didn't do- though I wish I did because it was hilarious- and I was mad about being blamed) was kind of a jerk and had distinctly frog-like facial features, he did have the redeeming quality of being obsessed with Rasputin, the Mad Monk of Russia, a character quite deserving of obsession, (my favorite part of the Wikipedia entry is that Rasputin had "several beverages names after him"). And the other teacher gave a lot more homework and the day I was in her class was wearing a bright pink dress with absolutely the worst pit stains I'd ever seen. I'm still traumatized by them.

The other time my ejection was pretty much year-long. I always disagree when students say "that teacher hates me." Teachers don't tend to actually hate students, even the annoying ones. But this guy really did not like me and I must admit I enthusiastically gave him plenty of cause; I didn't much care for him either. He was very tightly wound and I enjoyed trying to unwind him. So we made a truce. I could skip class and hang out in the senior lounge except on days there were tests and as long as I kept getting A's on the tests I never had to come to class. Not having to go to class was such a great incentive for me to work hard that I believe I got the highest grades in that class of any non-math class I ever took.

Much of this week has been spent making up a midterm for my Calculus class. Technically, an exam at the end of a trimester cannot possibly be a midterm, but there's no catchy term for an exam you give after 1/3 of the year.

The rest of my not-in-class time this week was spent either expressing disbelief that the foundation who saw fit to give iPads to every student in order to bring us into 21st century education was balking at getting them for all the teachers as well. I asked nicely, if I can't have an iPad can I at least get an iPad mini? But it was to no avail.

Age: 55 to death

A recent issue of the Philadelphia Inquirer contained a special section titled "55+ Living." Wow, I thought, I'm 57, which is more than 55, and I'm living, so this is perfect from me.

So I open the section up and I'm completely confused. Here are the headlines about 55+ living:

• New Providence II Model: big hit at Spring Valley Village 
• Home Towne Square: A desirable community in Lancaster County
• New sites now available at Meadow Glen at Skippack
• Dublin Terrace 55-plus community now leasing
• Solana Horsham provides persopnalized assistive living care
• Discerning buyers turn to D.R. Horton
• Heritage shores: One of the best "master-planned communities" in the country
• Two local neighborhoods by Orleans Homes give convenience, privacy
• Customize your dream home at Coldstream Crossing
• Villas at Foxfield: Perfect for single, snowbirds, couple
• Downsizing in style at The Villages at Pine Valley

That's all. Wait, am I supposed to spend my 55+ years buying residences? I already have a house. Why do I need all of these?

 At this point I notice that that last article is right next to an ad for the very same Villages at Pine Valley. What a coincidence! Since it's right there I read on and Oh My God, it is so de-puh-ressing. First of all I can't even live there, because even though the article has a quote about "out 55-plus community," you actually need to be at least 62 to live there. So now I'm suspicious and I read on, only to discover that this section is very poorly titled. This section is not about 55+ living, it's abut 55+ dying, as in where am I going to live for that awkward pause between when my kids move away and the true death.

Clearly these people don't read the rest of the newspaper, because everyone knows that the kids don't really move out until they're around 30, and by that time I'll be much closer to 70, not 55 (but at least by then I'd be eligible to live at Pine Valley, where All My Children takes place). And maybe I'll eventually get to a point where "Discover just enough independence, without being alone" doesn't sound creepy, but I ain't there yet.

The rest of the information talks about how to make your new, smaller quarters seem larger, which seems to defeat the purpose of downsizing, though their ideas seem solid. Like don't keep clutter from your previous home, trade those bulky end tables for stylish, standing lamps, and my favorite, accessorize with accents. This means to add a splash of color with bright toss pillows. Toss pillows? I guess when you're 55+ you no longer have the energy to have throw pillows. There's also, more mass with glass- replace your end or coffee tables with glass. All this promises to make you new home "stylish, while being comfortable and grandchild friendly."

Don't drive if you can't see or control your bladder!

I'm perusing my new purloined copy of Neurology Now, because after all, what's the point of going to the neurologist if you can't sneak out with a copy of Neurology Now?

So what kind of stuff makes the front cover of NN? The story of a comedian with cerebral palsy, and article titled Navigating Life With a Brain Tumor, with Brain Tumor in orange type, and an invitation to enter the 2013 Neuro Film Festival. Hmm.

Inside cover is a happy woman carrying flowers and an invitation to get your Copaxone injections for no more than $35 per month. Black Friday indeed. The next ad is for Botox, not for cosmetic purposes, but to relieve migraines. They illustrate this with a picture of a troubled looking but still overly attractive young woman. The ad part is about a third of the first page and the rest of that page and the next 2 and half the pages are made up of detailed warnings. These include sage advice, like if you experience double vision, blurred vision, drooping eyelids, trouble saying words or trouble breathing, that you should not drive a car. Good advice even if you're not taking Botox. And for good sport, one potential side effect is headaches.

Holiday foolishness

I've been getting lots of email with special deals. I get a lot from the Phillies, who seem to alternate between 25% off and buy one thing, get 50% off a second thing. Even though those are substantially the same deal, it doesn't prevent them from also offering $25 off a $100 purchase. I can't decide...

The worst special deal I've gotten is from Dean and Deluca, a specialty food place in New York. The deal is, buy one gift, get 15% off a second gift of equal or lesser value. Wow, I'm blown away. But wait, there's more. They're offering 50% off shipping too. You just have to choose one or the other.

I don't understand this at all. Aside from its looking ridiculous compared to every other offer from every other company, I don't know who is going to care. Dean and Deluca is one of those places where you read the catalog and say, "Hey look, they have a tote bag full of candy for $75 and another tote filled with olive oil, vinegar, barbecue sauce, mustard and jam for $95. Isn't that silly?" I know people buy this stuff (and I guess I did once too since I'm on their mailing list) but who would be thinking, "Hmm, I'd really like to get that bag with the oil and mustard and the one with the candy, and if only the one with the candy was $65 instead of $75, or if only shipping was $8.75 instead of $17.50, gosh darn it, I'd buy it."

I'm not usually a fan of slick, made up names for things. But I do really like Cyber Monday. Not because I think it's such a great name- it's kind of meh, but the entire premise is that people are going to be on their computers shopping all day instead of doing their jobs. It used to be you had to sneak out of work to shop 'till you drop. Now you can sit at your desk and shop 'till you get up.

Even though I would normally just make up numbers to support this kind of argument, there's actually been some research. It's widely reported that 59% of companies are more concerned with the loss of productivity than with security breaches, and over 60% expect the loss of productivity will be greater than last year. On the other hand, over half of companies with network administrators will be blocking access to shopping sites this year, and of course we know that nobody is ever able to get around blocks like that. Unless, of course, they have a cell phone or an iPad or a laptop.

In the advertising business, when we were building production schedules for projects, we would pretty much chalk up December as useless because our suppliers were unproductive, and that was before computers. I can only imagine what happens now, when the people running the projects are too busy consuming to produce.

The symmetry of the whole thing is beautiful. The estimated Cyber Monday sales? About $1 billion. Loss of productivity? Also $1 billion.

Metafeeling

Thinking about what you're thinking can be exhausting. One of the challenges of a long recovery like I'm having is my desire to be gauging progress. Am I feeling better today? Oooh, I feel dizzy, tired, energetic, sharp, unfocused, just okay. What does that mean? And just because I ask that question, does it really mean anything?

More generally, at this point when you're asked to give your greatest strengths and weaknesses, I think the safest possible answer is that human brain's ability to detect patterns is perhaps its greatest strength while its desire to detect patterns is its greatest weakness. Finding real patterns is no more useful than finding patterns that aren't really there is deleterious. It's a bit like mistaking correlation for causation, but it's even more general than that. It encompasses all sorts of dubiously related observations being interpreted as having some larger meaning.

This makes long-term decision-making difficult. Whenever anyone is faced with a major decision and has sufficient time to ponder it, they have no choice but to refract everything that happens through the lens of that decision. I'm tense this morning; maybe I shouldn't take that job. I slept really well; maybe I should ask Kiki to marry me. I'm irritable; maybe I should break up with Kiki. Breakfast doesn't taste right; maybe I should buy the minivan instead of the crossover. The sunset looks beautiful; maybe I should shave my head and get a tattoo. You get the idea. Some of them might make sense, some might not, but if you're spending a lot of time seriously thinking about shaving your head and getting a tattoo, that's what happens.

Just a Grey Saturday thought

The front page of the Philadelphia Inquirer yesterday had a big headline: Culprit in early store hours? Their conclusion? The Internet, of course. It's online, always open shopping. That's whose fault it is. Yes, we say, satisfied.

How about this? It's our fault. Not the stores, not the Internet, us. To paraphrase Billie Dawn (in the original Born Yesterday), if a building is in flames and nobody calls 911 until it burns to the ground, who you gonna to blame, the fire? Stores open earlier for one reason only; we want to go and shop.

Yes, the holiday spirit (okay Fox News, the Christmas spirit) has become so pervasive that people need to go shopping, ostensibly for presents, on Thanksgiving Day. To hell with hanging out with family and friends, being thankful for our many blessings, and having some plain old relaxing time. We need to shop!

Crass commercialization doesn't get more crass or commercial. No holiday matters except for its purchasing patterns. We can throw blame around wherever we want. The secular humanists, Jesus, the stores that open early, the Internet, climate change. Whatever you say. But we all know, deep down, that this is wrong and we feel guilty about it. Otherwise, nobody would be writing about it.

Anybody want an Ordinateur de la Pomme?

Of all the things I read in the newspaper this morning, the most interesting had to be a report of the struggle of American-based chain stores to use their accustomed brand and logo in Quebec. Because they like to think of themselves as an independent country when everybody knows they're really not, the Quebecois are really snippy about when you have to use French. It's something they can control, so like any amusing and harmless petty tyrant, they're having at it. Stores must have their aisles marked mostly or even completely in French. Until this year, however, they haven't been nearly so strict about exterior signs.

Recently, however, the local attitude has done an quick change and without warning has now commanded all exterior signs to be in proper French, like Poulet Frit Kentucky. Companies whose names don't naturally lend themselves so easily to translation are up at arms. Apparently, there was a near fistfight in cabinet meetings over how to deal with the 'R' in Toys R Us. Okay, I made that part up. But just barely. The legality of all of this is dependent on the difference between trade name and brand name, because you can have whatever brand you want but your sign announcing your business has got to be French.

Some disconnected Thanksgiving thoughts

I know the usual parlance for this is "random thoughts," but if all the thoughts come from me, then they are pretty much the opposite of random, so unless I'm trying to be ironic, it's just wrong.

First a couple of holiday links. Here's coverage of the Thanksgiving Day Parade Eve balloon inflation event that "real" New Yorkers prefer to the parad itself. Then, having nothing to do with Thanksgiving, some interesting social commentary, or is it?

Oh, and before I forget, make sure to be thankful on Friday, Saturday and Sunday too. All of the good fortune you celebrate on Thanksgiving day is yours every day, and if you don't spend at least a moment savoring it, you're depriving yourself and others.

Since the announcement of the "word of the year," which is inexplicably 'GIF," which is neither a word nor in any way new, we've been discussing the most overused word or phrase that we wish to rid ourselves of. There was some discussion of store clerks' annoying "Are you sure?" when you say you don't want to put your purchase in a plastic bag. But the hands down winner (a phrase I assume has card game roots) is "Honestly...," or it's more loquacious cousin, "To be honest with you..."

This was alarming to me because I then became aware of how often I used that verbal tic. I wouldn't get too caught up in the implication that I'm not being honest the rest of the time, though I suppose that might be true for some people. I just don't like using phrases as catch-alls, both because it's an excuse not to think and when overused it becomes meaningless.

What's more interesting to contemplate is why that particular phrase at this particular time. I mentioned an article from the New York Times titled "How To Live Without Irony" which I found as interesting as an article dependent on stereotyping can be. Is there a general sense that people and institutions are normally less than honest? Is that a healthy thing?

For all the noise about certain politicians undermining Traditional American Values, the seasonal example being the so-called "War on Christmas" (which actually not about Christmas at all but whether you use the phrase 'Merry Christmas' or the more generic 'Happy Holidays'), the real undermining of TAV is being done by stores like Walmart, Target, etc. that are opening on Thanksgiving evening. What connection is there between being thankful for what you have and buying stuff? I don't get it.

Okay, time to start getting ready for my family's traditional Thanksgiving dinner, which this year is Breakfast For Dinner. None of us like turkey and whenever we're in a diner we all order breakfast stuff, no matter what time of day it is. So we can do any kind of breakfast items, as long as there's no turkey in them. Challah french toast, blueberry pancakes, fritatta, bacon, home fries, biscuits. Yum! Next year we're going to do Thanksgiving as our ancestors would have done after getting through Ellis Island- kashe varniskes, pot roast, latkes, blintzes. I can hardly wait.

Misadventures in teaching

Being a teacher, I always feel like it's my job to push the students to squeeze every possible bit of learning from any given situation. Sometimes I decide I'm going to extend that to everyone else I encounter in my life. Almost shockingly, this is not universally well received by the population at large. These people just don't understand the value of challenging their assumptions.

Today I was taking the train and so I stood by the edge of the platform and intently looked down the track in the wrong direction, for the sole purpose of helping people not take for granted what they assume to be true. Nobody thanked me and told me how good it was to have their minds freed from its closed state. They all just told me I was looking the wrong way and seemed perplexed when I replied, "I know."

Cheer up, Eagles fans!

Here are some bad things that have not happened to the Eagles this year:

1. Not a single player has spontaneously combusted on national television.
2. There is no proof that Jim Johnson has actually rolled over in his grave.
3. They have not had an entire game of coming up a yard short of the first down.
4. No Eagles quarterback has been sacked by his own team. At least not on purpose.
5. They have not given up a touchdown on a fair catch
6. They have not tripped an opposing player running down the sideline
7. No Eagles quarterback has pretended to have a concussion just to avoid having to take another snap behind their offensive line. Oh, wait...
8. They have never been caught with too many time outs at the end of the half.
9. Nobody has come down with "turf toe."
10. They didn't get the city to pay for a brand new stadium and then trade away all their expensive players and pocket the difference
11. Andy Reid hasn't yet said that whatever's wrong with them can't be fixed.

I am the dog

Back in my younger, wilder days, I did have moments where I felt that my dog and I were one, but those moments were brief and artificially produced. My current dog is old and her day consists of long periods of lying on the floor and resting or even sleeping, punctuated by high activity levels around meal time. Since I've continued to do the cooking even while sick, this mirror my patterns pretty much perfectly.

I only had some anecdotal data, such as the fact that yesterday both the dog and I went outside the house 3 times for the exact same period, because I only went outside to walk the dog.

Now, however, I have compiled the following data

November 17
My time spent lying on couch (MTLC), resting or sleeping: 14.5 hours
My time working in kitchen (MTWK): 55 minutes
Dog's time spent lying on the floor (DTLF) resting or sleeping: 14.75 hours
Dog's time sniffing around kitchen (DTSK): 52 minutes

November 16 (I was out of the house for part of the day so can only note what happened when I was home)
MTLC: 10.25 hours
MTWK: 47 minutes
DTLF: 10.25 hours
DTSK: 45 minutes
and so on...

I have data going back a month and the correlation is well over 90%, and the overlap of specific times of day  for all of these measures is also over 90%. So there is only one conclusion to be made; from a statistical standpoint, my dog and I are indistinguishable. Since math is the only thing that matters, I am therefore my dog.

Okay, after this I promise to go back to the fun stuff

As disorganized and dysfunctional as the Occupy movement was, we as a country owe them a great debt for changing the political conversation to highlight wealth inequality. It's not going to be easy to correct it even now, but it certainly wouldn't have gotten easier if we'd kept going down the same path.

The question now is what to do about it. A change in taxation definitely helps, but the Hostess closing really highlights the problem in hedge funds buying distressed companies and bleeding them dry.

Another fascinating labor issue at the moment is what's going on in and around Walmart. I'll admit to not liking Walmart and avoiding shopping there whenever possible. The only time I've been in a Walmart in the past 10 years was when I need to buy something at 5AM and they were the only store open (long and not very interesting story). Walmart is evil. They're not unmitigated evil, I know, but their core retail strategy rests upon abuse of its labor force.

I saw an excerpt from one of their internal documents about their pay scale and they start people at $8 an hour and then the maximum annual is raise is 60 cents an hour. So a perfect employee has to work for 4 years to get their pay rate up to $10 an hour. And then they limit hours to prevent most employees from receiving benefits. So if you top out at 29 hours per week (the typical cutoff for benefits being 30 hours), your maximum annual earnings at $10.40 an hour are $15,678.00. The federal government considers $23,000 to be the poverty line for a family of 4. Does that sound okay to you?

Twinkies are dead, long live Twinkies

I was definitely one of those kids who ate Hostess cakes when I was a kid. Twinkies were not my favorite necessarily; I tended to favor the chocolate (or in modern parlance, chocolaty) products. Yes, products more than strictly cakes. My favorites were Ring Dings (aka DingDongs) and Yodels, which had a shiny chocolaty coating, chocolate cake and creme filling. Devil Dogs, named I believe not after Cerberus (kind of like Fluffy from the first Harry Potter book but in Hell) but a type of chocolate cake with the provocative name of devil's food, were hot dog-shaped and less delicious.

But any discussion of Hostess Cakes has to come down to it's iconic brand, Twinkies. I read a book last year called Twinkie Deconstructed, where a man tracks down the origin of all 21 ingredients in a Twinkie. I recommend this book for anyone interested in food. It was very enlightening and cast a new light on the, let's just say extraordinary shelf life of Twinkies.

When I was in college, there were urban legends about the properties of Twinkies- that someone pasted one to their wall for an entire school year only to find its texture unaltered- that kind of thing. After reading the book, all of that became clear because I learned that Twinkies were developed specifically to be a cream puff (puffy pastry filled with whipped cream for those with poor deductive skills) with long-lasting properties. The problem with cream puffs from a bakery is that first the pastry gets stale and then the cream soaks through it turning it to a soggy mess. That's why "creme" filling was invented- to stay moist but not soak through the cake. Of course the cake also had to be modified to repel moisture.

So they were designed to last as long as possible, making it possible for stores to keep them on the shelves for days or weeks rather than hours. They were (and still are) a marvel of food technology.

The decline of Hostess traces originally to changing consumer tastes, as is the case with many declining brands. More recently, it was a victim of what became popularly known during the presidential campaign as "vulture capitalism." This is a pun on the financial term, venture capitalism, where investors supply the necessary funds for a company to grow and expand. In vulture capitalism, investors buy a struggling company for the purpose of extracting as much money as possible from it before leaving it to die. It's more like vampire capitalism, but I guess we've had our fill of vampire references these days. If you want a more complete and less opinionated description of the process, read here.

The most recent owners, known euphemistically as turnaround artists, had Hostess take on a crushing amount of debt, leaving it unable to modernize or pay decent wages. Eventually, the workers went on strike over having their paychecks slashed drastically for a second time. The owners declare bankruptcy and close the company, keeping as much of the money generated and borrowed as possible. This kind of thing is what Mitt Romney famously did for a living at Bain Capital before he got his new job whining about how people with a thousandth of a percent as much money as he has want things.

Longterm, most of those workers have permanently lost their jobs. Other companies already in the business of making cakes unaffected by the passage of time will bid for the famous brand name. The company that bought Tastykakes is reportedly interested. The former owners will pay their lawyers and pocket the difference, so they'll have plenty of money to buy Twinkies whenever they make their return, which I'm betting will be before the ones I have in my cabinet get stale.

I know I'm going to get tarred for saying this

But it needs saying.

In any conflict, especially one with complex roots, the biggest mistake you can make is to ignore or oversimplify the motives of your enemy.

I'm completely on Israel's side in that I want them to be able to live and thrive with secure borders and no threat of attack. On the other hand, when I hear people refer to the Palestinians as just being evil or things like, "life means nothing to them," it makes me want to tear my hair out.

Throughout history, everything big has happened because somebody (person, group, country, empire, etc.) really wants something very badly, not because of some character flaw on their part. I'm not denying that there have been some very, very bad people, people who could accurately be called evil. But to ascribe their motivation to evil for its own sake takes you into the realm of James Bond movies. People want power, money, geopolitical advantages, resources, and whatnot. Some people do evil things to accomplish these goals and yes, they may be evil people. But I don't think that evilness for its own sake has been a major motivator in any conflict I can think of.

Please don't misconstrue me here. I'm parsing the difference between seeking world domination and committing genocide. Both are unspeakably horrible. but they are different. One is an end. The other is a means to an end. It does nobody any good to confuse the two.

Hi Ho, Hi Ho, Part Ho

So at a moment when I have a much appreciated pause in my workweek (no class tomorrow or Thursday), I want to continue my Calculus discussion from last time, just because I'm bored and cranky and have nothing else to talk about (aside from some crazy baseball trade action).

In talking about real-life motion in Calculus terms, the curious thing is that the harder it is to conceptualize something, the easier the math is. For example, people understand the idea of speeding up and slowing down pretty naturally, but the math of that is harder than the math of velocity, which can be positive or negative and can therefore be confusing.

Even more confusing is displacement, where positive and negative totals mean that from the time you get out of bed in the morning until the time you go to bed at night your displacement is exactly the same as someone who didn't get out of bed in the first place. In fact, the major reason we use  distance instead of displacement is because the Puritans valued industriousness and wanted to reward people who got out of bed and did stuff, so they invented something called distance to give them and the idea caught on. But it's still nice to get back into bed and have your net displacement equal 0.

Mathematically, distance is just like displacement except it values all motion as positive. So driving 6 miles to work and 6 miles back is counted as 6 + 6 instead of 6 - 6. Unlike displacement, distance cannot be undone, as Ferris Beuller and friends learned.

As for velocity, where the 35 miles per hour I travel to work is undone by the -35 miles per hour I drive home, we have a similar thing called speed. Speed was invented by Asa Whitney, cousin of Eli Whitney who invented cotton gin and cotton martinis. Asa Whitney was a proponent of the transcontinental railroad who believed the achievement would be diminished and use of the railroad limited if people thought that the east to west velocity was negative. Speed treats all velocity as positive, whatever direction life might take you.

The math of distance and speed is more complicated than displacement and velocity because going 6 miles one way and then returning to the same spot takes you back to the beginning, thank you, not 12 miles away. We segregate this type of behavior into something called absolute value, which is useful but annoying in math.

But now back to acceleration, which is the change in velocity. You can't take direction away from acceleration. If your velocity is positive and your acceleration is positive, your velocity is increasing. If your velocity is negative and your acceleration is negative, then your velocity is negatively increasing (or increasing in magnitude, if you must. Magnitude, by the way, was invented by Magnus Pompey, the Roman General, who just liked naming stuff after himself).

Whatever the direction, we call this state "speeding up." If your velocity is positive and acceleration is negative, or vice versa, you are "slowing down."

Of course, everyone since Asa Whitney has known what speeding up and slowing down are. But Calculus gives us tools to determine what's going on and a series of somewhat confusing techniques to measure it. And that's as much math as I'm going to do tonight.

Hi ho, hi ho, Part Hi

Of all the things, my head is swimming with Calculus after a solid week of helping both of my daughters and my own class with a circumscribed but still broad base of topics.

I like Calculus, and it's comforting to know that practically everybody feels the same way about it. People love Calculus. And why not? It's challenging (the traditional authority figure euphemism for 'difficult') and requires not only a strong understanding of new concepts and procedures and the accuracy to complete complex problems without error, but solid algebra skills and a working knowledge of Geometry and Trigonometry as well. I mean, who doesn't have that?

One of the topics du jour is something called rectilinear motion, the one-dimensional change in position of an object. By one-dimensional I mean back and forth along a given line. This seems pretty removed from reality, but if you think about it, unless your car can drive sideways, fly or burrow, driving is pretty much one-dimensional business.

The core measurement of rectilinear motion is something called displacement, the change in position from where you started to where you end up. For example, driving from home to school, I have been displaced in some measurable kind of way. And even though I am three dimensional and so is my car, a road is kind of like a line, the one and only one-dimensional thing.

It is sometimes said that displacement is "distance with direction" and technically, that's true, but what it means is that moving in one direction cancels movement in the opposite direction. For example, if I'm lying on my couch and then get up and off to work I go and then home from work I go and then lie back down in the same spot on the couch, that my displacement is 0. But that's not a very good description of my day, which included my walking 100 ft to my car, driving 6 miles to work, then walking 50 ft. into the office, then back to my car, drive back home and get back on the couch. I actually traveled 12 miles in the car and 300 ft. walking. But my displacement is 0. Weird, huh?

So once you have displacement and, like it or not, displacement takes time, you have velocity, which is the change of position per unit of time. It has that same unreal directional component in that if my drive to work has a velocity of 30 miles per hour, my drive home is -30 miles per hour. And with velocity comes acceleration, which is the change in velocity per unit of time.  This makes a little more sense in that if you're sitting still, then start moving, faster and faster until you reach the desired speed, then slow down until you stop again, that's positive and negative acceleration. Okay, but we're not up to the Calculus part of this yet, to be covered in the next post.

New perspective

I had my first week of part-time work this week. Each day I would go into the office, teach one class and maybe one sort-of class, and then go home. If there was a long gap in between them, I would go lie down for a while and maybe even sleep.

Each day I would go home an pretty much crash for the duration. I took long naps and stayed on the couch for most of the remainder of the day. This demonstrated an interesting principle for me, the idea of zero-sum energy.

I think I've noted before that I've always felt confident in my energy reserves. I could always summon up 5 more minutes of stamina, be it running or cycling or lesson planning or teaching or whatever. It was comforting to know that I always had that little extra for the occasional times I needed it. Well, I can say without a doubt that this does not in any way describe my current physical condition.

I haven't been able to find any explanation of why shingles causes fatigue, but every description of symptoms says that it does. For whatever reason, I find that on any given day, I have a finite amount of energy. Some of that is contained in my body when I wake up, and the rest comes from food and drink. But it's finite- it runs out eventually. And when that happens I physically crash. I get dizzy and weak and have to lie down, drink something with sugar in it, and wait to replenish.

I know this sounds depressing and to some extent it is. But on a scientific basis, it's really very interesting. I never thought about my energy stores in this way. They used to say, "You are what you eat," and that's much more literally true for me right now than it's ever been. A bowl of cereal, mid-morning snack, lunch, afternoon snack, dinner and evening snack give me a certain budget of energy. And even more interestingly, it's not just physical energy, it's mental energy as well.

I've noticed this because I've been helping both of my kids with their schoolwork- both with Calculus and one with an English paper as well. Thursday night through Saturday afternoon I spent a lot of time doing this, and then suddenly on Saturday evening I couldn't read anymore. I could look at a page, I suppose, but I was unable to take in any of the information. How weird is that? I've always been a sponge for information of any sort, and here it is, staring me in the face, something interesting and intellectually stimulating (an article on Hamlet that my daughter needs for a paper) and I just kept looking at the page and my reading muscles wouldn't engage.

This gives me a different perspective on how to budget my time in that I have to inventory my energy levels as well as my to do list. Today is the first day I've started with that perspective from the very start, so I'll let you know how it goes.

And now, because I'm lying around watching TV so much, and as much as I dislike that animal videos are a thing, here's a mysterious video of a pug somehow climbing a flight of stairs.

And here are two cats and a banana box

Today's News

As I'm beginning to recover, I intend to be posting more frequently. I'm going to start small because I have a lot to write about today.

The front page of today's Philadelphia Inquirer had a couple of interesting items. First, was an article about false confessions. I'd never thought much about that topic, but it turns out that 25% of people found guilty and then cleared by DNA evidence had confessed. This is fascinating and enlightening. At first glance, it seems like this happens most often to people with some sort of mental or emotional issue and people with little prior interaction with police,which makes sense. But it doesn't cover everyone.

So if any of you readers are much into social justice, this might be something you look into. The first step in protecting people's rights would probably be the videotaping of interrogations, which would provide context to the confession. The example in the article is the illiterate guy who couldn't read what he was signing (he's since been exonerated).

On a less weighty matter, literally, the Inquirer also announces that the newspaper will be converting to a "slightly narrower page width." It's clear that this sort of thing is done specifically to save money (like the tightfisted boss who buys toilet paper that's 1/2 inch narrower than standard) and the announcement doesn't deny that. They just mention that lots of other newspapers are doing the same thing to "enhance their commercial printing opportunities." In other words, use a printing press that can also be used to printing other stuff.

They are careful to note that they are not reducing type size. And they tout various "enhancements". My favorite among these are the "improved pages for comics, puzzles and games (emphasis theirs) for easier use (italics mine). I love this. I'd really like to read the comics page but it's just too damned difficult to use. And those puzzles? There are all kinds of things I could use the puzzles for, but it's just too hard. And don't get me started on the games. I think society would be better off if people were just honest with each other instead of playing games, I don't need my newspaper encouraging people to be manipulative.

Seriously though, did you know there were games in the newspaper? Forget about Words With Friends; I'm going to play the newspaper. I have to look for these games. I'll report in if I find them.

A few election notes (Updated)

Thank goodness. Lots of good news tonight.

I thought that Romney's concession speech was gracious and genuine. The problem is that we just as easily could have heard him spew all kinds of lies in exactly the same tone of voice. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt for now. In fact, he sounded so gracious that the pundits were saying, "If only the had seemed that genuine during the campaign..." Hmm, Al Gore, ever hear that before? These guys are too beholden to their contributors or bases to learn that lesson.

I think the problem that Romney faced, aside from the general unpalatability of the Republican platform, is that he reached the nomination almost entirely by negative ads. That's fine as far as it goes, but considering how viciously the right has attacked Obama, calling him un-American, Muslim, socialist, communist, Nazi, whatever from the moment he was elected, what exactly were the negative ads going to say that was going to rise above the noise?

On other topics, the whole thing was worth watching for the moment Elizabeth Warren was announced as the winner of the Senate seat in Massachusetts. Marriage equality had a big night, and marijuana was decriminalized in a couple of states, something that was, and I say this literally, nothing more than a pipe dream back in the day. The emergency manager law in Michigan (hopefully) getting defeated was a big win for democracy.

Obviously, the big dynamic, beyond the presidential race, was the obvious failure of the Republicans to nominate senatorial candidates who were in step with anyone aside from the most radical right wingers. I'm glad it happened because it alone kept the Senate in Democratic control, but really guys, for the good of the country you claim to love, get your act together.

Of course, Obama's speech was excellent as well. I just want to see that guy governing, not the hesitant compromiser who did some good stuff but squandered some opportunities as well.

Taggmentum 2016!

And here we go

Today I'm finally back at school. Technically, I was in school last week, and even led an elective class on business math, but today is my first day back and teaching a "real" class, AP Calculus. I am a little nervous and a little medicated, but I think it'll be fine. It's not as terrifying as it seemed last week. This is all I am teaching for the next month or so, just to make sure I'm up for it. I think I am but I've been very wrong on several occasions, so it's good to be sure.

This all feels kind of curious and a bit unworldly. I think that's in part because I've been forbidden by both my wife and my supervisor from driving to work. I understand and support this decision; I can't be trusted to decide this kind of thing, but it somehow unmoors me from the normal reality of work. I guess it's the lack of control and the lack of routine. I'm captive of other people's schedules.

So I'll check in later to let everyone know how it went.

Just by the way

I am not in any way, shape or form contagious. You cannot catch what I had. Even at its worst, the only thing that could have possibly happened if something freaky occurred is that you could catch chicken pox if you haven't been vaccinated. And if you haven't been vaccinated, I strongly recommend that you do so. If you never get chicken pox it is impossible for you to get shingles.

But where's my glass and ice cubes?

It's been all I can do to stop myself from filling my blog with page after page of complaining about how crappy I feel. I've written plenty, but when I read it back to myself, it all just seems whiny.

You may say, well Frank, you're Jewish, you're supposed to be whiny. Yeah, but it's not funny or even interesting. The best I can find is from a not-quite-post titled "Life As A Ghost"

Neither Casper nor Beetlejuice. Not Nearly Headless Nick nor even Sam Wheat (though even I am probably a better actor than Patrick Swayze). I'm not a ghost in that I've lost corporeal form. My losses have been less obvious (yes, I'm aware that most changes are less obvious than being dead, but I'm trying to make a point here). I'm a ghost in the sense of being more a shadow than a whole person.

That's actually not bad, but where do I go from there except to complain?

Anyway, since I've been in this state, I've struggled to find much interesting to say, and I certainly haven't even tried for anything uplifting. But I spoke with a psychologist this evening, and she advised me that finding myself at a low point like where I now sit is a prime opportunity for spiritual growth. On one hand, yeah, that sounds good. I should take advantage of my changed and humbled perspective to take stock of my life and figure out what's really important to me. On the other hand, this sounds like a very professional way of saying, "If life gives you lemons, make lemonade."

Campaign wisdom

Finally, a bit of clear-thinking sanity in this overheated campaign.

Important soccer stuff

Having now watched many hours of European and British soccer action, I believe that I now have what it takes to be a professional soccer player. Of course, I'm not very fast or strong, and I've never been good at kicking the ball with either power or accuracy. But yes, I've mastered soccer's 3 important expressions.

First, there's the face on both hands, followed immediately by a pleading look skyward. This is what you do when you've missed a wide-open goal from maybe 10 yards out and instead kicked the ball into the upper tier of the stadium. No further explanation needed, right?

Second, there is the two arms stretched out and up in the air along with a confused and exasperated facial expression. Whenever a player from one team makes contact with someone from the other team, everyone within 10 feet or so on both teams is required to immediately take this stance as if to say to the referee, "How could you not call a foul on the other team? Are you blind?"

And finally, there is the pained expression. All players are required to make this expression whenever any opposing player touches them. For maximum impact, it is recommended that you begin making that face a split second before you actually get hit, so that there is no delay in the display of agony. This is usually done along with a headlong dive and grabbing of one leg, which need not be the leg that was hit. If done properly, this virtually guarantees that a yellow card will be given to the player who fouled or appeared as if he might be fouling.

That seems to be it, so I'm ready to go, don't you think?

Weather notes

Probably more than enough written about the hurricane, but considering that I'm situated such that I can simultaneously watch out the window and on TV, I guess it's the main thing going.

It's raining right now. I'm not a fan of rain. I am, however, a fan of living on top of a hill rather than in the lower elevations. I can see water streaming down the street, headed for some neighbors' houses. We get a bit in the basement, but that's about it.

I realized last night that I'd bought this little thing called a power inverter so that we can plug things  into a regular outlet in the car. I had one made for airplanes and charging computers, but when that got lost, I bought a more standard one, which apparently is made for camping. Not rustic camping, mind you, but camping where you want to run a refrigerator and a TV. So all I have to do is hook this puppy up to my car and we'll have at least some power so we can watch TV while we eat tuna out of a can.

Part of me is glad this isn't snow but part of me would like to see the 4-8 feet you'd get with this amount of precipitation.

I'd actually like to go out for a walk in this, just to experience it. And I probably would except that I'm afraid of a branch falling on me. We live in a stone house with no trees large enough to even reach the roof around, so I'm thinking we're going to be pretty devoid of drama here. Maybe devoid of electricity as well, but I'll take that trade-off.

What the hell were those 17 people doing out on the (replica) HMS Bounty today? And now, to paraphrase Louis CK, of course the Coast Guard has to go out and save those people, but maybe, just maybe, they deserve what they're getting.

On a related note, we got an email from the school saying that students are writing in and asking what's going to happen with with tests that were scheduled for today. Part of me finds this funny and part of me finds it terribly sad. I'd also like to invite anyone who feels like they really need to take a math test to drop by and I'll make one up for you.