Bad news from the world of medicine

I got terrible news from my doctor. No, there's nothing wrong with me; the news doesn't have anything to do with me specifically. What he told me, though, was first, that I should expect to experience what he called "age-appropriate memory loss." He tried to minimize it by talking about not being able to find your keys. But I don't lose my keys, nor am I likely to, for reasons I can only describe as boring. So now I'm afraid I might lose something more serious instead, like my wallet, or my house.

The second part was that the best thing for maintaining a good memory is conversation. This is awful. For me anyway. If you're someone who likes talking to people, it's great. But for someone like me for whom all social interaction is unnatural, maybe not so much. It's nothing personal. I just don't like talking to people very much. Never have. I know that sounds strange from someone who gets up in front of a room full of people every day and talks for 45 minutes, but that's not conversation.

I will say that the whole idea is interesting. The process of listening and responding is apparently very good for maintaining neural pathways. Go figure. No more crossword puzzles, no more chess. Or whatever else they come up with.

So starting tomorrow I am going to try to start up a conversation with at least one random person every day. What will be my first topic? How about how annoying it is to lose your keys?

Walking to Kentucky (with video)

I know, why, you may ask, would anyone really want to walk around Cincinnati. Well, I might reply, if you find yourself in Cincinnati, what are your other options?

Saturday evening I walked around downtown. The city has marked 1, 2 and 3 mile trails, with signs at each corner directing you along the route. I took the 2 mile trail and wound around through various parts of the area. I can't say it's the most impressive or pleasant downtown I've seen, but it has its moments. City Hall is quite striking, and there are a few other pleasant sights. For the most part, though, it's pretty run down, making it difficult to appreciate the decent architecture.

I had more success Sunday morning. My downtown walk had not included the waterfront, which is arguably the best feature of the city. Unlike Philadelphia, which has totally bungled its Delaware River waterfront, Cincinnati is at least trying to make it a nice place. The setting is not unlike Philadelphia's, with an interstate running below ground level to allow access to the river. But both the football and baseball stadia, as well as the large indoor arena, are right on the river's edge. It's open and pleasant. The area also features the Underground Railway Museum, which was unfortunately closed when I walked by. It's quite large and impressive looking.

The biggest reason I went down there, though, was because it occurred to me that I could possibly cross a bridge into Kentucky. I've never walked to Kentucky before, so it was something I couldn't pass up. As I approached the river, wondering how I would cross, I rounded the museum and saw what looked an awful lot like the Brooklyn Bridge spanning the Ohio. This was a great bonus, so off I went. I learned as I crossed that the bridge was built by John Roebling, father of Washington Roebling, who build the Brooklyn Bridge. It was considered to be the prototype, though the Brooklyn Bridge is significantly longer and the engineering challenges were much greater. It's a beautiful old suspension bridge, though, and having the opportunity to not only walk to Kentucky but do so on a 150 year-old suspension bridge was a treat.

Once in Kentucky, I looked around the nondescript area on the riverbank. Nicer than Camden, but not as interesting. I then realized that I had also never walked to Ohio, so back I went. 

  

PTX Live

We went last night to see an A Capella group called the Pentatonix. My daughter is a choir nerd, and all choir nerds seem to proudly stick together. This group ( I keep wanting to call them a band but that is clearly a misnomer in this case) acquired a following on an alleged tv show called The Singoff. I had neither seen the show nor been aware of it in any other way. There are lots of singing shows now. They are cheap to make ("I know, let's make a show with free talent!") and some of them get good ratings.

I believe this particular bandImeangroup won the singoff on the Singoff, and they have a very popular YouTube channel and a rabid fan base, my daughter among them. And they are truthfully very good.

The concert was at a place called Bogarts, which is similar to TLA in Philly. Because my daughter is such a fan, she and my wife had VIP access, which included a meet and greet and first dibs on getting into the theater. It was a waste for me to do that, so I met them there later,(I went for a walk and ate Skyline Chili). Of course, they were at the very front and center of a big room full of people standing for the show and it was a challenge for me to join them. My progress was aided, however, by the two of them jumping up and down and waving wildly, which amused the people I was trying to squeeze in front of enough that they got out of my way.

Standing isn't that much fun, but the audience was busy singing along with the screaming goat part of Taylor Swift's I Knew You Were Trouble. So the time passed quickly.

The show was great fun, the highlight being cello boxing, which is like beat boxing but done while playing the cello. That particular group member also was premed at Yale, so no talent there. At one point they divided the audience into 3 and had them each sing a part. Not only could pretty much everyone in the audience sing on key, but they remembered their parts without any reinforcement. Very impressive, really, and confirming the choir nerd chops of their fans. One of the performers got ill and was unable to come out on stage for the encore, and the entire audience sang his part, on key and on beat. Okay then. 

When the journey is half the journey

Tonight I find myself in Cincinnati of all places. Why I would intentionally find myself in Cincinnati on a Saturday night is a mystery to me, and why anyone at all would be here is a complete mystery to me. Getting here is its own sort of odd experience. Not the the flight is weird in any way. The airplane goes up and down, like airplanes tend to do. It's just the Cincinnati airport is a little odd.

Setting aside that the Cincinnati airport is not in the same state as Cincinnati and is actually called the Northern Kentucky Regional Airport the design of the place is unusual and perhaps cruel. I've not studied airport design, and can't really tell you what happened, but let me describe what happens after landing.

We arrive a some gate at the end of the A concourse, walked with the help of some moving sidewalks (Hey people, they call them moving walkways, not moving standways) toward baggage claim. This goes on for about a quarter of a mile, or 4 sets of moving walkways. Then, following the signs toward baggage claim and ground transportation (which is, of course, only called that at an airport) you go down a long escalator that takes you to a place where you can either take a train or walk to baggage claim, ground transportation having been left out of the mix until this point.

Normally I'll take a train anywhere, but this one didn't seem to say where it way going, so my love of trains was soundly defeated by my general insistence that I know where I might be going before I go there. So we walked down an equally long corridor, hoping it would lead is to ground transportation (there was no visible sign, though we later saw one behind a post. At the end of this corridor we left the security area, and I remarked to the TSA guy there about what a trek it had been and he responded simply, "It's a nightmare."

Not that any of it is specifically bad. There's just a whole lot more of its space than is needed and the distances are ridiculous. Once we got to the end of that long corridor we saw another, smaller one that once again said Ground Transportation. So off we went down another long corridor, at which point we finally saw windows and signs pointing to rental car buses. We stepped outside into, we'll, nothingness. You could see there were roads and airline terminals, but there was really no visual stimuli. And not even any rental car buses. Finally our bus came and whisked us off to the rental car station. And off we went to the actual state to which we heading.

My past comes back to haunt me

People warned me about this, and they were right. I came to this school 10 years ago after 20 years of working in advertising and marketing, and though these topics continued to interest me in a passing manner, I wanted no part of any sort of professional conduct. In fact, one might say that unprofessional conduct is one of my specialties. But I digress (digression-related thought- I just had a physical and my doctor told me to get used to "age-appropriate memory loss." I wonder if age-appropriate digressiveness is a similar thing).

What this mean is that, no matter how many times the school has tried unsuccessfully to market itself effectively, I have steadfastly not gone beyond an annual offering of general assistance. This, now, has changed.

A couple of things have caused this, aside from the slow decline of the school's enrollment. First, there has finally been a directional change toward competent leadership. It's still at the stage where the most competent people are overwhelmed (as tends to be the lot of the competent), but at least there's a recognition that this is the case and a desire to improve it. Second, the school has (finally) agreed to merge with a competitive but financially disastrous middle school, creating a new entity.

What sent it over the edge for me, though was the most recent attempt at creating an effective marketing program for the new school. From the teachers' perspective, this meant that we were recruited for what was incorrectly announced as a "focus group" to talk to a market research professional about how to move forward.

What transpired was something that even the researcher said was not a focus group, but kind of a large-scale group interview. The content of the session, however, was not in any way satisfactory to the interviewees. The questions seemed off-base and not particularly useful, and it was regarded to be at best a waste of time and generally as an nothing more than an irritant.

In the past, when stuff like this has happened, I've just shook my head (yes, I know that's not grammatically correct) and gone back to teaching. But this time, for whatever reason, I decided to, and I shudder at the very phrase, get involved. No need to go through the details of how this happened, but next thing I know I'm directing things on behalf of the school. Not like I'm in charge, but I'm completely tied into the process.

On a certain level, this is highly stimulating. What's going on now is mostly the part of marketing that I like- information gathering and strategy development. On the other hand, now I've gotta call the building coordinator and book a conference rooms and coordinate having people sign up. That being stuff I don't like and am not particularly good at. Plus, I still have a huge range from which to choose my level of involvement. I don't really want to be responsible for anything.

But it's a journey, right? And it's always about the journey, not the destination. But considering this is my first time sticking my head out of the foxhole, it would be nice if it made a difference.

Taking the train while losing track.

I took the train to New York this evening with the ostensible purpose of attending a family foundation event. It's a perfectly pleasant event, held where my daughter is in college, but the main reason I'm making the trip is to have a couple of drinks with a friend.

This guy is one of a couple that I've made by playing Rotisserie League baseball all these years. He and I began to develop a friendship beyond the game after 9/11, which affected him very deeply for reasons I cannot recall and am not sure I ever knew. He's the only person in the league that I do not know through other means whom I have seen outside the confines of the draft room, when we pick our players. He's a major baseball fan and we have been to several games together and will see more this season.

I bring this up just because of the difficulty of making new friends as an adult. It seems to be easier to make friends when you're a kid. I'm not sure why that is, since adults certainly understand better what's required for a good friendship. But does better understanding make it easier or harder to form bonds.

Many people look wistfully back at their youth and wished they'd known then what they knew now. Unless it was such that you were the only one in that condition, what good what that do really. If everyone knew then what they knew now, how would anything be different? I mean, I guess that a bunch of teenagers with the wisdom of adults were in high school, I'm sure it would be different. But it seems to me that when people say that they weren't thinking about other people knowing more, just them. This strikes me as nothing more than cheating, wanting an unfair advantage of some sort. The while idea is stalkerish and kind of creepy.

But I digress. Anyway, I am enjoying my friendship with this guy, which is kind of ironic because I used to be pretty good friends with his boss, by total coincidence. That was a friendship that never progressed because I didn't know then what I know now. Well, I guess I knew even then that getting a crush on someone else's girlfriend was wrong. I just didn't know what to do about it until the whole situation collapsed around me. Or maybe i just freaked out and fled. I don't remember, which is probably good because it's still a cringe-inducing event for me, even 35 years later.

But I digress again, which means I'm never getting back on track so I'm going to stop and try again another time, once I remember what it was I was trying to say.

Car talk

There's a comedian named Elayne Boosler, who was popular in the 80's and 90's, who was known primarily for (1) dissing Mother Teresa on national TV, and (2), being Andy Kaufman's girlfriend. She wasn't a great comic, but the one line of hers I remember was that she would rather be on the road with someone who was drinking and driving than someone who was eating and driving, because at least the drunks were trying to drive.

It's a good lesson to keep in mind when we decide whether we want to text, check email, or talk on the phone while driving. I personally find it almost impossible to resist the temptation to check email when I drive, and though I seldom even peek at it except when I'm at a red light, I have to admit that there have been instances where I have glanced down while the car is in motion.

As much as I admire the ability to focus, I'm willing to accept that multitasking is just the way of the world. What tends to get ignored in all of the hoo-hah from my generation fussing at the young-uns is that while singular focus is not the same be all and end all (in a multi-tasking environment one might argue that such a thing doesn't exist anyway), that makes the ability to prioritize even more important. And probably more difficult.

So when you're driving, what's the most important thing? I'm having trouble deciding between not dying and not killing someone else. So if the goal is to get from one place to another without causing any human death, it would seem like answering texts would be a somewhat lower priority. Is that really so hard to keep hold of?

Split ends

Having a BA in psychology qualifies me to make extraordinary pronouncements about people's state of mind, whether I know them or not. And I'm sure that scattered among the journalists and analysts covering the Boston bombing are other psych majors who feel the same way. It's kind of depressing to see the storylines developing before anyone really has a full picture, and I am constantly on guard about being set up with a neat explanation.

The prevailing winds carry the tale of a nice college boy, corrupted by a fancy-dressing (Horrors! Americans hate it when people get dressed up!), possibly radicalized older brother. Here's the thing that concerns me. People are very good at associative thinking, and thus are prone to confusing correlation with causation. My dog is good at associative thinking too, and it's clearly disappointing to her that every time I put my shoes on it does not mean I am taking her for a walk. Yet she perks up visibly whenever I do so.

I won't feel like I know anything until I start hearing about motivations. I'm a great believer in humans' rationality (emotional outbursts notwithstanding). Even if their assumptions are completely wrong, people tend to do what they do for a reason, and my observation over the years is that even the most horrible people do what they do, not for the sake of doing evil, but because they want something. Bin Laden thought that American bases in Saudi Arabia were blasphemous, and wanted his country purified. Delusional, of course, and with reactions taken to immoral extremes. But he didn't do evil for its own sake; it was done for the purpose of advancing a cause.

So I'll need to know a whole lot more before I reach any opinions on this whole thing. Yeah, we know something about the means, but how about the ends?

In the aftermath of the carnage in Boston, it is time for us as a nation too all ask each other, "Well, what do you think about what happened in Boston?" This follows the period of time when we ask each other, "Did you hear about what happened in Boston?" For myself, I have mixed feelings about even knowing what happened in Boston. I certainly understand the value of sharing information, and its likely that we can learn things from this that might prevent other such events from occurring.

But on the other hand, once I ascertained that neither I or anyone I knew was directly impacted, on a certain level that's enough for me. Then endless reportage of the human tragedy gets numbing after a while. And over the top, as noted in The Onion.

And then there's the almost game, portrayed beautifully by Garrison Keillor in Lake Wobegon Days. At the beginning of that book, a cornice falls off the bank on Main Street, shattering on the street and not coming close to hitting someone. Conversation in the town for the next week was consumed with how everyone had almost walked by that very spot at that exact time.

For my part, I had walked by that block, and almost by the finish line, a mere 48 hours earlier. On the other hand, I do have one story, which I know I've told before, so excuse me. In this 100% true tale, I had reluctantly agreed to help a not especially close friend move early one Saturday morning. I agreed because I was the only one in my friend group who both lived in New York and had a car.

I got up somewhat groggily and got my car out of its space on East 84th Street, about a block from my apartment. Like many buildings in the neighborhood, it was being renovated and was covered with scaffolding, but I managed to get it out easily enough and headed downtown. I was gone for most of the day, shuttling boxes back and forth, and when I returned late afternoon, I began cruising for a spot. As I headed down that block, I noticed that the scaffolding was gone, and realized that the building, or whatever part of the building was left in the midst of renovation, had collapsed into the street, collapsing the scaffolding and leaving the car that had taken my space under a 6 foot-tall pile of bricks. Yes, it was on that day that I vowed to always be a helpful person.

I know, that story is completely irrelevant, but hey, that makes it only slightly less on point that much of the news coverage these days.

Trip reporting

We flew up to Boston for a day at Berklee College of Music, where my daughter will be attending in the fall. It's accepted student day, which is, I suppose, mostly an opportunity for the school to sell itself for prospective students who may be considering going elsewhere.

Let me note right off the bat that if whether or not to attend this school is a difficult choice for you, then you are in need of serious decision-making help. To call the place "different" would be an understatement of criminal proportion. If ever a place could truly be called "really unique" (which it can't, because unique means literally one-of-a-kind, a designation that defies veryness), it would be this school. In fact, the director of admissions said at one point that if this school is for you, it's probably the only place for you.

Unlike pretty much every other music school, Berklee is solely focused on contemporary music and the music industry. You can take a class in the music of Paul Simon, or Wayne Shorter, or Esmerelda Spalding, and there is a decent shot that they will show up at some point to sit in. Yes, it's that cool. I don't remember Hamilton College mentioning how many Grammys their alumni had won when I interviewed. Here it's 229 and counting.

Really, the first thing you need to get over as a parent is that you're not the one who gets to school here. Even though that isn't fair. Once you get past that, you see a school obsessed with long-term contemporarity, or whatever you want to call it. Anything new? We're there! School is a good place to do this, because in real life that kind of cutting edge focus can get you bankrupt far more easily than it can get you rich and famous.

The speeches were relatively short, and interspersed with performances by a jazz-rock student band. The band members then talked about their own experiences at the school, except for the drummer, who said his name and nothing else.

After speeches and tours, we went for an information fair, which, speaking of unfair, is completely unfairlike. It was a bunch of table of people with piles of paper to give out. No rides, no cotton candy. And yes, I know I've made that joke before but I like it.

Like pretty much all of these unfairs, this one was far too long, and most of the people at the tables were left talking to each other while the students and their parents massed around the housing and financial aid tables. Eventually, my daughter toddled off with some kids she'd been talking to on Facebook for the past few weeks, so my wife and I found quieter accommodations.

We eventually reconnected, had lunch at a nice coffee bar called Pavement Coffee, and then decided, reluctantly on my daughter's part, to walk around. We got about 150 feet down Newberry Street, went into a store, and have now been here for an hour. I'm starting to feel scammed at this point. I wanted to walk and all I've done is sit.

(2 hours later) We must have left that store at some point, because now I'm on an airplane on the way back to Philadelphia. But I don't know how it ever happened. Fortunately, there was a reasonable place to sit in that store, so I could watch the parade of nearly identically dressed 16-22 year-old girls walk in and out of the store. I saw 2 or 3 boyfriends and a couple of dads and moms, but everybody else was that narrow demographic.

It was crazy walking around downtown Boston. I don't know if any of you have heard of something called the Boston Marathon, but apparently it's a big deal. It was in the 40's and the number of people running by in little shorts was quite remarkable. 

All in all, it was a successful trip. Despite not having the chance to really have any kind of experience aside from the college stuff, it was worth going.

TripAdvice

A few years ago, for reasons that I can't remember, I started writing hotel reviews at Tripadvisor a few years ago. I've done it enough that I have a badge next to my screen name, announcing me as a senior contributor.

I try not to sound too generic when I write these things. The way I use Tripadvisor is to find common threads among a bunch of reviews, so no one review carries too much weight (unless one of the reviews was mine). I try to stay observational and point out things that some readers may care about and not care whether some may not. I always, for example, write about easy access to food stores, because I always want to know that for myself.

So here's my review of the Westin Copley Plaza in Boston:

Let me start by mentioning that this hotel has a 13th floor. We are stayed on it, though as far as I can tell, the only bad luck it brought was some peculiar elevator behavior. This is a large hotel and they (fortunately) have lots of elevators, so many in fact, that they seem confused as to what they should be doing at times. It made me grateful that elevators are very limited in their mobility.  If they did anything other than up and down it could cause real trouble.  In this case, I just had to get off at a floor other than my intended destination. This happened twice out of maybe 5 trips up and down, which seems like a lot to me.

We were only in the hotel for about 12 hours, which was not enough time to really explore. The check-in was quick and easy. The lobby is on the second floor, which also houses restaurants and a bar and a few stores. There's a full-service Starbucks, not a stand, in the lobby as well.

The rooms are spacious, with a nice view, even from the 13th floor. The bed is comfortable and the climate control is easy to use and responsive. We had 2 rooms and the lighting was sufficient in one, less so in the other, corner room. A bathrooms are small but well equipped. The doors rate highly for lack of slamminess. Nothing outside woke me up at any point.

Can we all agree that the most annoying hotel trend of the last decade is the minibar where you get automatically charged, not just for what you consume, but what you touch? This hotel likes the idea so much that they have added a tray of stuff sitting on the dresser that if you pick anything up, you're charged for it. They used to charge you for stealing a robe. It looks like soon they'll charge you for putting it on. On the same theme, Internet access is $12.95, though you can sometimes get it included with the room rate if you try. You can also rent a real refrigerator if you're into that kind of thing.

The hotel was very busy because the Marathon was a couple of days away, but it never felt frantic or overwhelming. It's probably a good place for a conference. There's a supermarket a block away and a 24 hour CVS across the plaza.

Spring is Here

So what exactly happened to spring? You know spring- days in the 60's, April showers, that kind of thing. I guess that's just a memory for now, though within a few years that might be February. It reminds me of Desiderata, a 1927 prose poem popular during my college years. It's an advice kind of thing, full of sentiments like "Surrender gracefully the things of youth," and "Speak your truth quietly and clearly." It was famously parodied by the National Lampoon, in something called Deteriorata, which features such sage advice as "Rotate your tires" and "Hire people with hooks." It also lists some things of youth you should surrender, like clean air and tuna. At this point I guess have to add spring to those things.

I'll leave you with this seasonal favorite

Opening Daze

I have been watching baseball all afternoon (two games simultaneously for the most part), and have seen some pretty good stuff. I have a few observations so far, some baseball-related and some not.

I know that it's politically correct for the networks to all stick around to show all of us at home the various performances of "God Bless America," but even setting aside the fact that I can't stand the song and resent having to stand and remove my cap for a song that is not our national anthem just because Irving Berlin put the words "God" and "America" together in it, after hearing Lyle Lovett sing it last night, everything else is going to sound second-rate. (How's that for a parenthetical clause?)

I can also tell that the bane of my existence this summer is going to be those commercials for Scott's fertilizer. Is there a more annoying character than "Scot for Scotts?" Nails on a chalkboard for me. It doesn't help that I used to work at Scott's advertising agency, where the people who worked on the account casually referred to the product as, "the sh-t." The last thing I want this spring is some ginger scolding me about my lawn.

There were a couple of great pitching performances too, none of which were turned in by CC Sabathia. I like Sabathia (how can you not like a guy who wears such big pants?), but I'm concerned that his lack of velocity is going to be an ongoing problem. On the other hand, Clayton Kershaw and Stephen Strasburg? Shut the front door! Simply great.

I also would like to comment on the women's basketball game, where Louisville beat Baylor, who had merely won 71 of their last 72 games, and were ordained tournament winners before it even began. That was one of the craziest games I've ever seen, where a totally superior team was beaten by an incredible display of outside shooting (16-25 for 3-pointers anyone?). The cruelest twist was that Baylor had trailed for the entire game, and by 16 with about 7 minutes left, and came all the way back to take the lead for the first time by 1 point with 9 seconds to go, only to have a Louisville player, who had moments earlier missed a key free throw, dribbled the length of the court, got fouled with 2 seconds left, and calmly sunk both to win. Incredible theater.