Well, so much for the more frequent. How about two weekends ago?

This has been a ridiculous week, that really left me no time to think, much less write. Adulthood can be like that, where you get busy and can't get out of it. The performance artist, Karen Finley, referred her busy self as "I am not a human being; I am a human doing." That was my week.

Just to summarize, Saturday night I went to the Eagles game. This ended unfortunately, and it was a comedy of errors getting there, including misunderstandings about where to meet up, bad traffic, and a minor incident at security, when my daughter, who was paranoid because she had a flask of Fireball hidden in her Ugg, was flagged for having too big a purse. She went inside to warm up, while I ran back to the car, dropped off the purse, downed the Fireball that had not fit in the flask, and ran back. Missed very little of the game. I'm not sure I'm interested in having season tickets anymore. I just don't really like going there and watching with those people, even though the people in the section around us are fine. It would also help if the Eagles saw fit to turn the heat on at the club level. Though the club does a good job of keeping rain off your head, the temperature inside during this game couldn't have been more than 55 degrees. It was 20 outside, and nobody was taking off even a single layer when they got in. Jerks.

Sunday was time to take my daughter to JFK airport for her trip to Israel. That's a short sentence with a lot of content. How to break it down?

Well, she's on what's called a Birthright trip, and all-expenses paid tour funded by an organization with a goal of connecting young people to Israel. She had been talking about doing this for a while, but was only recently in a place (physically and mentally) where is was possible. This was a group of students from her school, so it sounded ideal.

The thing is, traveling has never been an easy thing for my daughter. She loves to go out and do things, but she likes her nest too and wants it just so. At this point, she's perfectly capable of packing herself being ready roughly on time and all that, but nothing ever seems to be routine. Sunday, of course, was one of the freezing rain/black ice days, which concerned me. However, we got out of the house on time and, as it turned out, the conditions frightened enough people that it kept everyone else off the roads. I've never driven to JFK with so little traffic.

I'd kind of forgotten how chaotic the design of JFK is. There are 8 terminals (though one of them is closed apparently) and they are arrayed in no discernible order. I warned my daughter that I was likely to get lost once but that we were early enough that it didn't matter. But in fact I didn't get lost (it helped that the flight was in Terminal 1, which was almost miraculously the first terminal we reached). We pulled up, she got out and we wrestled her bag out of the back, and before she was even inside the door people inside were waving to her. I parked for a minute and said goodbye and off she went.

And off I went. I was hungry; it was mid-afternoon at this point and I'd not eaten since 7 AM. I decided to get off the Belt Parkway at Brighton Beach. There had to be some Russian food there if nothing else.

Yelp led me to a Turkish kebob house under the elevated train track. My Mom grew up around here and we used to come to visit my grandparents when I was very young and to go to the beach at various times thereafter. It's a marvelous juxtaposition, the urban, ethnic, under the train tracks vibe a block and a half from the beach. The Turkish food was good, though I chickened out on getting the coffee because I was in a hurry.

The ride back was a bit more trafficky, but I made it. One more adventure in the books. I wonder what'll happen next?

Massaging

Of all the heartless and sometimes downright nasty stuff forced on the US by the latest incarnation of the Republican party, perhaps the most insidious is their messaging. My recollection is that they have a really skilled guy who's great at picking out words and phrases that convey the desired message while imperceptibly bending or breaking the truth.

For some reason, the phrase that popped into my head today was "job-creators," beloved of Romney in 2012. This is a code word for rich people and was used to argue against raising taxes on people making obscene amounts of money to help fund a fully functioning government. I've spent enough time in my life around rich people and, in fact, creating jobs, to know that this is pure spin.

I ran a small ad agency that "created" a peak of 17 jobs and over the 10 years I did it, about 10 on average. Did I do it because I was rich? Because I had some extra money to spend so I decided to create jobs? Of course not, that even sounds stupid. I created jobs because I worked for a company that needed a particular functionality and it was my task to create that functionality. Didn't cost me a cent; cost the company some out of pocket but saved it back in other areas.

That's why companies hire people, because if they don't hire them it will decrease their profit. There's nothing altruistic about it and it has nothing to do with whether the marginal tax rate on individuals making more than a million dollars a year is 25% or 28% or whatever. It's a rational, profit-driven decision.

I'm going to keep an eye out for more of this stuff...

Snow day

I think 2014 will be the year of shorter, more frequent posts. I seem to lack the attention span necessary to spit a long post out these days. I suppose that could change, though of course that allows the possibility it will get worse.

What a waste of a perfectly good snow day! Why couldn't this wait for Monday? This has been a relatively low key winter break for me, and we've now reached the time where I start to think "I don't want to go back to school." I understand the ridiculousness of that sentiment. I love going to school. It's endlessly entertaining and rewarding and I'm getting a little tired of being home all the time. It has nothing to do with school itself, it's just my inner 2 year-old saying, "I don't wanna!" You want me to do this? I don't wanna.

Funny how, at least in some quarters, I've acquired a reputation as being affable and even perhaps agreeable. I'm not sure how I've allowed this to occur. I never had any ambitions toward being pleasant. It just happened- a product of suspect parenting I suppose. I always aspired to be more on the contrary side. And what passes for agreeability, I think, is a combination of laziness and curiosity. I naturally take everything at face value, and often one thing seems as good as the next, so why not?

I can't say I'd recommend this to anyone. I'm not even sure it's good for me. People ask me to do all kinds of things that I probably ought to say no to but I usually don't. Now all that remains to be seen is whether I can get all the papers sitting in my bag graded in time for Monday.

Refractions on 2013 into 2014

My daughter mentioned that lots of people are reflecting back on 2013, so it occurred to me that it would be at least as worthwhile to refract 2013 into 2014.

I went for a walk this morning. Yes, I'm now one of those people who walk as exercise. You've seen us around, us walking adults. I'm not the one in the track suit though and I never will be.

It was a long walk- around 4 miles, and during it I thought about death. Not exactly death, but the dissociation of molecules. I thought about this because I found an old potato in the back of my car. It was still recognizably a potato, but it had obviously been sitting on the floor of the rear seat for some time. When I found the potato I picked it up and tossed it under the car and as I walked, with neither the car nor potato to consult, I began to mull its fate.

I presumed that the potato had been or was in the process of being eaten by some thing or things. It was in the city, which probably limits the possibilities to pigeons and rats, with perhaps some ants mixed in if it was warm enough. Either that or it was simply decaying. In any event, it was quickly or gradually ceasing to be a potato. This led me to think about my own decay. Not so much my current state of decay, aka getting older, but the decay that would take place after I was no longer alive.

I didn't really go into what the meaning of my life has been. That's not really for me to judge and I'm not living to create a legacy. I thought more about the significance of consciousness. Not the nature of consciousness, I'll leave that to philosophers to argue over to no apparent effect. But the significance of my having been more or less conscious for the past 58 years. But even this seemed too deep for a morning walk to the drug store, so I began thinking about New Year Resolutions instead.

Honestly, I think picking a date to make resolutions is kind of dumb. I prefer to make my resolutions when I think I have a chance of keeping them. It's fine for me to say that I want to lose 5 pounds (actually, 4.6 pounds based on the scale this morning), but it's silly for me to try to do that during the winter when it's so much easier when the weather is nice and I can burn off 3000 calories a week riding my bike.

Looking forward into 2014 isn't a bad idea though. I start the year healthy for the first time in several years. I'm really enjoying my job and my family. But resolutions are just not really my thing. It's not like I never plan anything. Travel-type things I plan all the time and I'm pretty good at it, but on a more personal level I prefer to deal with things as they come. I have that luxury because my life is pretty gentle and I'm pretty resourceful.

But in the spirit of the season, here are my resolutions, in no particular order:

• Get a new dog- Maybe something small and yappy
• Learn to use the food processor- I cook/prepare food pretty frequently, but I have never once even tried to do anything that involved a food processor. Maybe I'm scared of it, maybe its just the name. I suspect there are Youtube videos about how to use them.
• Be more like Beyoncé- Because honestly, wouldn't everyone like to be more like Beyoncé?
• Learn to do this- Or maybe learn to do something else instead