Sorry, but this is a bit of a rant

I went to the movies last night. I used to go to the movies a lot, even went to several film festivals, but we got out of the habit when the kids were little and haven't gotten back in the groove. It's important when you're at my stage of life, that being later middle age when the kids are kind of on their way out, to make sure that you don't just keep doing what became normal when you had greater responsibility for your childrens' moment-to-moment well being. Because ultimately you end up depriving yourself for no good reason.

The particular result of not going to the movies much is that I don't see many movies. I know, I know, but I don't particularly like watching them on TV, so I really never see them. I'm not sure how big a loss this is, but I know I used to enjoy it.

In any event, we went to a movie called The Artist. It was in black and white and I liked it except I couldn't hear a damn thing anybody was saying. But it's nominated for a bunch of Academy Awards, so we went.

Seriously, it was a good movie and it was nice to see someone playing with the classic silent genre. But it got gimmicky at times and although it's unique I didn't see it as quite being worth all the fuss, except that so many major movies are just so downright dull that it looks like a masterpiece by comparison.

My perspective is clearly different now than when I was younger, but it seems to me that movies may be following a similar path as music. With music, you can clearly see that the mainstream is congealing into a soulless mush- stuff called R&B that has neither, whiny-boy rock that sounds no different from any other, Nickelback. Need I say more? At the same time, as it's become easier to produce and distribute music independently, interesting things are happening around the edges. But the general effect is that of a slow slide into mediocrity. Maybe the same thing is happening in movies.

It's easy to make the case that both rock music and movies are just plain tired. Rock has a fairly uncomplicated format and for the most part its output is limited to a bunch of 3-4 minute pieces. Maybe there's only so much one can do with an electric guitar, keyboard, bass and drums. And how many interesting ideas for movies could there possibly be? Are there an unlimited number?

What's interesting for me is that while the technology of delivering visual entertainment and music and any sort of popular art has advanced and dissolved and re-formed in sometimes revolutionary ways, the types of expression has changed very little. Yeah, 3-D movies, mashups, more realistic shooter games. But so what? There is clearly nothing revolutionary about that. It may not even be evolutionary.

 And yet the underlying themes are just as powerful as ever. I always thought movies were abut storytelling. And so is a good song. So are we out of stories or are we just being stupid about it? Or maybe lazy is a better word. I'm afraid the advanced technology is mostly being used to make it easier to make crap, rather than to expand horizons.

The Train Experience, Part 2- Conclusional

Or maybe delusional. It's hard to tell, at least on the train because I was by myself and had no way to know if anything I was seeing or doing was real. That isn't unique to train travel; anytime you're alone for an extended period you start to lose context for your life and you can become doubtful or confused. That's also part of the pleasure, for me at least. You have a lot of "wait, what?" moments. I'm always so moored in all the stuff of life that it's refreshing to be completely free of it. What strikes me is that being able to do this kind of trip requires one to be pretty comfortable with one's self. You spend the major portion of your time inside your own head, so you'd better be able to stand being there.

Before I go further, here are the routes I took:

Southwest Chief (Los Angeles to Chicago- you can click for more information if you want. I boarded in Flagstaff, AZ)

Capitol Limited (Chicago to Washington)

When I last took a long train trip, around 1980, it was much more solitary than it is now. In 1980, scientists were just demonstrating that cellular phone service could possibly work- the idea of being able to seamlessly move from one transmission tower to another was radical at the time. They weren't really available for several years and weren't useful outside of big cities until well into the 90's, so the only time you could talk to people not on the train was when they would stop to change crews or gas up (long distance trains run on diesel, they're only electric around a few big cities) and stay in a station for 20 minutes or so. So the time a flood washed out a bridge in North Dakota and my train from Seattle to Chicago had to back up 50 miles and reroute 100 miles south, it wasn't until we were in Minneapolis almost 24 hours later that I could call my friend and tell her not to bother trying to pick me up at 6 PM because we would be arriving around 7 the next morning. Now, of course, I could call home at most, though not all, times and update my progress.

The relative lack of solitude, though not ideal when the point was to get some quiet, didn't really bother me. What kept running through my head the entire trip was how everyone needs to get out and take a look around. There's lots of discussion about how technology and the flood of information makes us less able to concentrate, interferes with this and that, is ruining our children, blah, blah blah. I think the real danger is if it draws us inward and stops us from exploring outside of our personal bubbles. I like to stay in my comfort zone as much as anyone, but going outside that zone has provided many of the best experiences of my life, and if you're resourceful can expand it as you go. I used to be able to do that and I was glad to see that I still could.

This country is vast. Traveling even through fewer than a quarter of the states gives you a perspective that's impossible otherwise. Every place I passed through had intrinsic beauty. Clearly, the Southwest and Cumberland areas are especially scenic, but I don't accept that the flatlands of Kansas are not beautiful in their own right. A grassy hillside looks like nothing among soaring peaks, but if it's the only hill for a mile, it can be graceful and attractive and welcoming. I spent nearly every waking minute on a 55 hour trip just looking out the window, and feeling guilty for every moment I didn't. There is always something to see.

So should you do this? It depends. Going by yourself is not for everyone. It doesn't seem odd to me, but I seem to have a much higher tolerance for solitude than most. Going with a friend or child or grandchild? Could work. Don't get a Roomette for more than one person, they're too small; the bedrooms are much roomier, but someone's still gotta sleep on the upper bunk, which scarily drops down from the wall like the changing table in an airplane bathroom. Don't do it if you're fidgety, or perhaps more important don't do it if your companion is fidgety. There no escaping that or anything else that's on the train, though of course you do escape everything that isn't on the train.

Finally, I guess the question is did the trip serve its purpose, did it help clear my head? I'd have to say that it did. I was able to renew my sense of myself a bit and get back to the day-to-day. I got some quiet and didn't have to drive 2000 miles to get it. And I hope I have another chance to take another trip like this before too long.

The state of my life

If you want to know about my family dynamic, my wife got an iPhone and is doing custom ringtones for all of us. For my HS Junior, it's "I'm sexy and I know it;" for my 20 year-old classic rock fan it's "Baba O'Reilly." For me? "Sir Robin's Song" from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

The Train Experience-Part 1, Anecdotal

I continue to be inspired by my National Archives Experience brochure and will for the time being try to describe everything I do as an Experience. I think I will start with the random recollections and observations that didn't make it into the travelogue. And then I'll try to pull it all together in another post if that ends up being possible.

Although I mentioned communal seating earlier, I forgot to mention the main benefit for a solo traveler like myself. If I didn't sit at a meal table with other people, I could go for the 36 hours I was on the train without talking to anyone. Not that I have a problem with that. I know from past experience that it's hard to return to life where you do have to talk to people if you don't do any of that for a while. I was alone from Tuesday afternoon until Friday evening, so it could have been bad.

On a related topic, a couple of people asked me what I did with myself for that long a time. Part of the way I keep myself occupied is to talk to myself. I do this almost constantly. I have a running monologue going on in my head almost all the time that gets woven into everyday conversation. In this kind of situation, though, it's very much exaggerated and I feel the need to comment (to myself) on almost everything that happens and everything I do and consciously think. That and I look out the window.

I forgot to mention that I took a shower on the train. The larger sleeping compartments have their own very tiny showers, but the roomettes share a single shower on the lower level. I regret that I don't have a picture of it, but it's actually a fairly normal looking shower with decent water pressure and enough hot water. I'm pretty sure I'm the only one who used it for the duration of the trip, which is a frightening thought. I'm ashamed to admit that I did not do this while the train was moving, but rather while we were sitting the station in Kansas City. This reminded of the train trip I did 30-something years ago, where the bathrooms all had prominent warnings not to flush the toilet while the train is standing in the station. This is because flushing was pretty much just opening a trap door. You could see the tracks going by down below. Some bathrooms were missing the trap door.

Since train travel doesn't necessarily attract the mainstream, you get a cast of characters who tend to appear and reappear in your small range of movement (Compartment, dining car, Observation/lounge car). Both trains had an extended Mennonite family, with several young men, a couple of young women and an extremely well-behaved baby. They pretty much kept to themselves in the lounge car, ate food they'd brought, played cards and dice and did embroidery. I did chat with one of them who was telling me about a Mennonite man who figured out how to use the stars to design a train tunnel such that you could start from both sides and meet perfectly in the middle. They got off in Pittsburgh to go to Lancaster. The Brazilians were more out and about, but nobody could understand them (one sat briefly at my lunch table and took his food to go). The rest of the train broke into 5 main groups: budget/student, fear of flying, retired couples chilling, natives of towns not served by airlines, and train junkies. I guess I fit best into that last category, though the real hardcores frame every reference in terms of a train trip they've taken.

One of my favorite characters that I didn't really have anything to do with was Philosophy Girl, 20-ish, tall, thin, mousy/pretty, bangs, big glasses, fuzzy clothing and boots, wool hat with pom-poms hanging down. She spent the entire Chicago-Washington run sitting at a lounge car table reading Hegel and occasionally writing something. One of the young Brazilian men (OK, I've held back for a long time but here goes: Presidential Aide: Three Brazilians were killed in a military exercise yesterday. GWB: How many is a brazillion? Sorry.) seemed to be chatting with her for a little while during the evening but otherwise I never saw her move or speak.

Saw some bald eagles out the window at various points. Also went by a plowed, unplanted field where many of the rows were filled with white birds just sitting together with more swooping in and joining them. My breakfast companions wondered what gulls were doing in a place like that and I blurted out, "Maybe they're free range chickens." They looked at me and said, "That fly?" Honestly, I wasn't serious but still.

Finally (for now, anyway) on the last leg of the trip, one entire car was filled with a bunch of girls, high school seniors or maybe college freshmen, on their way to New York to go to plays. I stood behind them on the snack car line and one asked the attendant, "Can I have a cup of coffee?" Then, "Do you have different kinds or just regular coffee?" The guy behind me and I started to chuckle and he said, "There's the Starbucks generation for you. Looking for a frappucino in the train snack car." I was tempted to ask the attendant the same thing but did not.

Be back later with conclusions.

End of the (rail)Road

 It’s 9:40 in the morning on Friday and we have stopped. Even though the train is over an hour late already, we have stopped to do a routine inspection. I could overhear the conductor telling her assistant to check every wheel- not just look but touch (I guess to see if it’s overheated or maybe just so the guy would know what train wheels feel like). This is a long train and it could take a while. It’s a safety thing, so tough to complain.  Five minutes later we started again.

The western train made a test stop as well, this one mandated by the track owners. Amtrak does not own any track except the northeast corridor. They lease most of it from freight companies. Those companies have the right to stop trains and make sure they’re following all the rules and that was some kind of signal check. That took almost half an hour, but they build so much slack into the schedule that they were able to catch up in the flats of Kansas.

No such luck this morning. We’re in the hills of western Pennsylvania, headed toward Cumberland, MD and the country is too rolling to give the people who build the railway much of a choice, they have to follow rivers, which with few exceptions proceed in a fairly orderly, though often curvy, right of way. The terrain limits what kinds of speeds you can attain. Trains are bad at hills and curves. 

We haven’t had a lick of cellular service for the last 45 minutes, so I can’t check my map to see where we are exactly. It’s very isolated and very pretty there are occasional rustic houses (with outhouses) and a road here and there, though I haven’t seen any cars today. It’s not the limitless expanse of the west, but beautiful and peaceful nonetheless.

Even after the stop we crawled for about a half hour. Apparently there was not one, but two minor derailments of freight trains here yesterday and there are still workmen around. As the conductor said, if we hit one of them we’d get delayed for another 2 or 3 hours minimum. At this point we started going through a series of tunnels, which I guess is another way of cracking the topographic challenges.

I had breakfast with an older guy who did not look in the best of health, but he was among the liveliest company I’ve had this trip. He seems to like to travel everywhere, or at least anywhere he can drive or take a train, and we spent a while talking about Alaska.

Spent most of the morning in the observation car, listening to the extended family of Brazilians chatter on in Portuguese. We were tracking along the Youghiogheny River (pronounced yokageny or yok for short), which heads north into the Monongahela at a place called, conveniently enough, Confluence, PA. It’s a very nice river, with lots of dramatic views. There’s also a bike/walking trail that runs along a converted railroad right of way.

The train was supposed to arrive at 12:40 so there wasn’t supposed to be lunch served, but since we were well over an hour late at that point, we were provided with a meal if we wished. My tablemate was another guy traveling alone. He had a slow, kind of reluctant manner, but ultimately was good company. He’s from Terre Haute, IN, says he owns a farm but doesn’t farm it, and has been an adjunct professor of a variety of miscellaneous subjects at nearby colleges. I never did find out what he did for a living or if he did anything. I said I knew there was someone famous from Terre Haute, and though he wasn’t originally from there, Larry Bird went to school there, of course.

The main attraction at lunch was sitting across from us, a set of twin old ladies, dressed identically, who were busy regaling their tablemates with stories of their travels. Apparently they’re performers of some kind, because I’d heard from a conductor that they had been dancing in the Observation Car. At lunch, all they did was sing along with synchronized hand motions, while the Brazilians took video of them. They were very cute and it appeared that that was what they did with their time, travel around, be cute, and maybe perform.  Nice work if you can get it.

After lunch it was time to clean up my little roomette and get ready to arrive in Washington. There’s a huge amount of slack in the last part of the schedule, so rather than arrive the expected 2 hours late, we were a mere hour and 20 minutes.

This gave me enough time to stroll around the lovely Washington train station, swinging through the food court, which I’d not seen before. It was truly impressive- almost every kind of food was available at the stands, ranging from Cajun to Indian to Jamaican to BarBQ to plain old pizza and deli. I was sorry I’d eaten on the train. If I’d know I’d have time I would have waited.

Finally got on my train northbound for the quick, routine hop up to Philadelphia, Or not. A few minutes out of the station we stopped, then began to back up. At first I was afraid there was a mechanical problem, which would force us all off the train. But instead it turned out that the train in front of us had had the problems, and we had to back up to a switch where we could get onto another track. From there on the trip was routine, Good trip. A few reflections later.

Day two on the train(s)

When I woke up we had magically changed from half an hour late to half an hour early and we were in Kansas City. I’ve been in Kansas City before and like it. I’d like to go back. There are lots of places I’d like to go back to.

It was cold there, so I was forewarned for what Chicago might be like. We arrived a few minutes early, so I had a couple of hours to walk around, which pleased me greatly. I love Chicago. If you like architecture it’s a place where every place you turn is a new bit of eye candy. It is also unspeakably cold in the winter. I bundled up properly but forgot one thing, well, ten things, actually- my toes. I stupidly wore my sneakers instead of my more protective hiking shoes. I learned a couple of years ago at a baseball game that sneakers and extended exposure to cold do not mix.

It was 14 degrees with a slight but noticeable breeze, which made for a lively walk, punctuated with frequent ducking into lobbies and stores to ward off frostbite. The city is just glorious. I saw a building I’d never seen before- the public library, which although partially obscured by the El, was spectacular. 

Every building had some interesting design element. You think of Chicago was just blue collar and to an extent I guess it is, but the Fire left the city barren at a very rich time for architecture and building technology (skyscrapers, for instance, require such things as elevators), and a tradition of design ranging from thoughtful to spectacular was begun.

By the time I was done walking, I was fully refrigerated and ready to stay inside. Chicago’s Union Station is a maze and at rush hour a very busy one. There’s a decent food court that is hard to get to because during the evening rush all the escalators are running down and some portals have no stairs. I eventually found my way up there via a secret-looking escalator that I guess is there solely to run the opposite direction from what every other escalator is doing.

The train got to the station late and we were boarded quickly. The train began to pull out and suddenly over the PA system we hear “Judith’s not on the train! Judith’s not on the train!” Apparently, the dining car manager had gotten off to pick up some cash and the train started to leave without her. She still sounded out of breath when she called us for dinner 15 minutes later.

My dinner companions this evening are a couple from Baltimore. She doesn’t like to fly and he puts up with it. They’re slightly odd. They have salad dressing in packets and after she finished her salad she kept squeezing bits of dressing onto her finger and licking it off.

Nobody to talk to in the lounge car this time. Most of the people in there are Brazilian and barely speak English. I went to bed on the early side.

Intersections and diversions

Yesterday was the school ski trip. I've been chaperoning this trip for the past 6 or 7 years because I like to ski and it's a fun day, and in this case had the added benefit of allowing me to miss a day of meetings. This trip proceeded through the usual routine for most of the day. We loaded up the bus, left 15 minutes late, and had an easy trip up.

By the time everyone was checked in and ready to go it was around 11 AM and I got my skis on and headed up the mountain. It was decent snow, considering that there was no snow for 100 miles in any direction except for what was on the trails. I had new boots which hurt but I could tell were much better than my previous boots and which saved me from falling at one point because of their betterness.

As sometimes happens, I met up with a bunch of kids that I knew who asked if I wanted to ski with them. I never ask in because I don't want to intrude, but I'm usually happy to join, and I knew these were good skiers who I'd enjoy being with. We skied for a while and then decided to have lunch. Lunch can be a bit awkward in these cases, because I never know if the kids want a teacher sitting there with them, but in this case I put my stuff down on a table and everyone else did too.

It was fun sitting with a pretty big group with a good-sized age range. Lots of back and forth silliness a lot of laughing. I joined in (though not for the grosser stuff) and really enjoyed it. And as we were packing up to go back out a thought hit me.

I've occasionally pondered the relationship between teachers (me in particular) and students. Our lives intersect at various points, usually in class and occasionally on trips or other events as well, but we're not friends, no matter how friendly we are. We're never going to each other's house or going to the movies together. This is neither good nor bad; it's just the way things are. So I was thinking, here we are, a bunch of people who know each other pretty well,  doing the same thing together and all having fun. But our lives could hardly be more dissimilar. My perspective is necessarily completely different from theirs. At any given moment, even if we're sitting on a ski lift together, there is practically no chance that we're thinking about the same thing at any point.

So we were, in fact, sitting on the lift while I'm congratulating myself for this profound revelation, when I check my phone as part of my chaperon duties, and there was a missed call from the bus driver. I'm on the ski lift, what's up? I texted him. He texted back A kid is injured. He's at First Aid . I tell my companions that I've gotta go and I say to myself "Bingo! This is exactly what I was thinking." Not only is there no way any of these kids are getting that phone call, but none of them can even conceive of getting that kind of call and being expected to act on it.

So, my profound realization in hand, I head off to the first aid center and ultimately to a local hospital where the kid, who broke his arm but is otherwise fine, was treated and picked up by his father, who drove me home as well. Very full and interesting day indeed.

Happy New Year

The Washington Experience

It's one thing to report on what one does on a vacation-type trip, it's another to really think about what happened, what the trip was about. The reporting is usually kind of shallow, but it serves a purpose in helping me remember things I might have lost over the course of time, but I'm not sure how interesting it is.

What spurred me to think about this was a brochure that I seem to have brought home called "The National Archives Experience." The brochure contains the sort of stuff one would normally find at an attraction, a map of exhibits, some verbiage on same and scattered pictures of happy visitors enjoying the premises. It just struck me as odd that they're equating a list of what there is to do with the experience itself. There are lots of things to do at the Archives, but I can tell you exactly what most people's experience is:

You walk in, you go through a metal detector, as you do pretty much anywhere you go in Washington. In fact, if I had to summarize The Washington Experience it would be a kind of serial airport security activity, except with exhibits instead of airplanes. I was pleased that they didn't need to search me when I went to Trader Joe's. After passing through security, you look for signs that say Rotunda, because that's where the famous documents are. Follow them and then find yourself in a very long line with markers like at Disney World about how long you would have to wait from any given point.

You wait in line anywhere from 15 minutes (us) to over an hour (any busier time). This gives you the opportunity to watch the provided introductory video 8 or 9 times. Eventually, they let you in with a group of around 40 people  and you all make a beeline for the Declaration of Independence, then move clockwise to the Constitution while you complain that the Declaration is so faded you can't see it and that it's too dark in the room. Then maybe to the Bill of Rights if you're still interested. This takes around 15 minutes. You then go to the gift shop and buy a facsimile copy of the Declaration and then you leave.

I can assure you this is not the experience described in the brochure. I'm sure some people visit the other exhibits, but not when I was there.

Archives aside, Washington was summarized for me once by a friend who'd gone to school at GWU with "You gotta like your big white buildings." This could not be more true. After we got out of the Holocaust Museum and wanted to get lunch, the entire next square block, which is probably 3 square blocks anywhere in Philadelphia, is taken up by the Department of Agriculture building. It's very impressive, but you have a hard time convincing me that you need a building that big for anything. The Mall is other side of the street, so the area is completely barren of anything to see, do or eat. Much of downtown Washington is like that, and though I'm always a willing walker, it's a bit much to deal with a half mile walk just on the chance there might be something on the other side (especially since there might not).

Thank goodness for the Starbucks app, which though we never set foot in Starbucks, would lead us to areas where there might be something to eat or drink. As city people, this was distressing to both my daughter and me, because some level of street life is part of what defines a city. I know enough about urban planning to know that you can't have any sort of street life if there's no reason for anyone to be on the street. That's why downtown parking lots are awful, they're just dead space. Large parts of Washington are nothing but dead space for that exact reason. It's more attractive dead space than a surface parking lot, but no better in many ways.

The only pace we saw real street life was in Georgetown, which has lots of things going on at street level and the landscape is not dominated by cars. Though they do have those odd Walk/Don't Walk signals that start counting down from 50 or 60. Those are a function of wide streets, which are also not so good for street life.

Overall, I guess Washington is okay to visit. The quality of the attractions makes up for its negatives, at least for a short visit. But since I tend to divide places into "could live there" versus "couldn't live there" this would have to fall into the couldn't live there category.

Washington, Day Two

Got kind of a late start on day two. First stop was the Newseum. This is a new museum, about the news media, and it is a gem. We started off at the lower level, where we saw an exhibition of photographs by Neil Leifer, who has about 200 covers of Time and Sports Illustrated to this credit (most famous one- Ali standing over Sonny Liston after knocking him out). You then take an elevator up to the top and walk around the the atrium and down a level at a time. This seems to be the standard arrangement these days, and I think it started with the Guggenheim in New York, which spirals down in such a manner as to tempt even the most hypothetical of skateboarders.

I grew up not so much a news junkie as a newspaper junkie. Breakfast for me has always meant sitting with a daily newspaper, starting with the sports section and then moving on to whatever looks interesting. Today, for instance, the New York Times had an article about how online retailers are targeting people who have been drinking because they are more likely to impulse buy. In any event, this place was like heaven for me. It's the history of news, starting with printing presses and up through citizen journalism. In between they have hundreds of newspapers in drawers with headlines about every important story since the Civil War. I could have spent hours there and probably will some day.

They have a bunch of other cool stuff too, from a bullet-dented-but-not-penetrated armored truck that protected a journalist working in Africa, to a piece of the Berlin Wall and part of the antenna that sat atop World Trade Center building number 1 against a backdrop of dozens of newspaper front pages.

We needed food at that point, and after yesterday, when we'd walked for almost 3 miles without passing any sort of food-selling thing, (Washington is very strange that way. Many of the buildings are so huge that they block out all street life), we were concerned if we'd find something, especially since it was pouring. But fortunately, there was a Cosi across the street where we huddled and ate, during which time the rain stopped and a rainbow appeared.

From there we scurried inside the National Archives as they were closing their doors and saw the Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights, things I hadn't seen since I was a kid. They're pretty badly faded but still recognizable, especially the big "We The People."

Then we spent a couple of hours in the Natural History Museum, which is always fun. Then back to drop some stuff at the hotel and then over to a place called Blues Alley. This is a small Georgetown Club that has live jazz most nights. I'd never heard of the guy who was playing. He's an 80-ish pianist who's a fixture of the DC jazz scene. He was very good and the rest of the band too, especially the guitarist. The set was too short (exactly 70 minutes, just like Yelp reviewers had said) but enjoyable.

And that was pretty much it. We had a good time with almost everything. I have a bit more to say about the hotel but will send that along tomorrow.

Day One in Washington

I've not spent much time in Washington. I guess I have the same lack of interest as my parents, as I think we came here exactly once when I was growing up, around 1964. All I remember was the Wright Brothers plane because I was obsessed with the Wright Brothers at the time and seeing JFK's grave at Arlington Cemetery, though I also remember my father giving me hard time for being whiny while standing on line to see the grave. I came down once for a day with biz school friends, and I brought my kids down for a weekend once but nobody ever was interested in going again.

This time, I was looking for a place that was close enough to go for a short time where there was a reasonable variety of stuff to do. So here I am.

This day played out like most days we're on vacation. I get up long before anyone else in my family even thinks about it. I really can't stay in bed past 8:30, maybe 9 and the others are all happy staying in bed until 11 if not prompted to do otherwise. This is fine with me. I love my family but getting up early gives me a chance to have my own space.

Whenever we travel I go for morning walks with no particular destination or route in mind. I best way I can describe it is that I want to know where I am. Whether this is inherently interesting or not depends obviously on where we're staying. Right now we're staying in an area heavy with Embassies and not too far from Georgetown, so I headed over that way.

I've been in Georgetown, but not for many years and my memory is foggy enough that I suspect I'd been bar hopping before getting there. I'm not sure. But it's a very nice place to walk on a cold morning before the stores are open. The commercial street is varied enough that it doesn't look like a mall and the side streets are beautiful, lined with pretty old houses and brick sidewalks. It's not unlike parts of Old City in Philadelphia, but more upscale looking. The main drag exhibits the split personality of the place. It's a very upscale college area, so the stores are mostly pretty high end, like Kate Spade and MaxMara, but the food places are all pizza, pubs, and various Asian, Indian and Mexican restaurants.

On the way I crossed over a nice park alongside a stream. If it were warmer I'd have taken one of the bikes that the hotel has for guests (they also have rental bikes on the street like in Paris) but walking across was fine.

Once back my daughter arose and we headed out for a fun-filled day of looking at things about dead people. I know that sounds flip, but package together the Lincoln Memorial, followed by the Vietnam War Memorial and then the Holocaust Museum and that's a lot of dead people. Oddly enough, I enjoyed it thoroughly. The Lincoln Memorial is familiar from pictures but that sucker's big. The text of his Second Inaugural Address, one of the great speeches of the modern age, is on one of the walls and it nearly moved me to tears to read it in that spot.

As aware as I was of the building of the Vietnam War Memorial, I never had a sense for what it looked like and I was almost thrown by its scale and simplicity. Walking slowly along, seeing name after name after name, brought the entire tragedy top of mind again. I was lucky enough to have been too young to get drafted. My 18th birthday year was the last year of the dreaded draft lottery and I was assigned a number, but the war had ended, they did not draft anyone born in 1955, and they eliminated the draft soon afterward.

The Holocaust Museum was more of an immersive experience. I have some issues with the design of the place. There was some interesting and important information displays in places that were bottlenecks for the good-sized crowd and it was tough to see some things. But you can't deny the power of story and you can't not feel the weight of the horror. My family on both sides left Europe even before World War I so I have no relatives who were involved. But I certainly know plenty of people who do, and you can't feel Jewish and not feel the pain.

At this point we'd had enough death and despair and wanted to get something to eat, so we cabbed it to Georgetown, where we had lunch and then walked up and down the street and looked and occasionally shopped in stores. Finally dinner at the hotel, the highlight of which were perhaps the most amazing french fries I've ever had. The taste was the good news, the fact that they were fried in duck fat is perhaps not such good news, buit they were very delicious and I was able to eat less than half of them.

Stumbling into luxury

Once again, I'm on the road. This time I'm in Washington, DC with my older daughter, who recently finished finals.

The train trip here was easy enough and we caught a cab to the hotel. The hotel. Let me tell you about the hotel. As I usually do, I went on Tripadvisor to scout. Tripadvisor is a good site, but like any other review site you need to learn to read it properly to get the information you want. If you look at one or two reviews you can get a skewed, even inaccurate impression, and if the reports are too specific you need to evaluate them carefully. I look for commonalities, consistent themes and reports. Then I check prices.

I settled this time on a hotel called the Park Hyatt. It had great reviews, was considered to be among the best hotels in the city, and for some reason was barely more expensive than most of the other nice hotels. I have no idea why this was the case. I've stayed in Hyatt, Grand Hyatt and Hyatt Place hotels, but none of them were anything like this.

First of all, it's barely marked. There's a small lighted sign at ground level at the corner, but you'd be hard pressed to see it. There's nothing on the front of the hotel itself. I had debated reserving upgraded accommodations, but I just had a sense that if I could get rooms for less than half of what they usually cost, that the hotel might be empty enough that I could get that without having to reserve and therefore pay for it.

Happily, this proved to be the case. We were both upgraded to junior suites that connected. The rooms are made up of a living area and a sleeping area separated by a partial wall. THe living area has a desk and some comfortable chairs. The sleeping area has a bed and the usual bed-related stuff. The bathroom is huge and has one of those rain showers in an open area of one end. The closet space has enough to either stay for a week or make a complete outfit change 3 or 4 times a day for a weekend. My favorite touch is that the safe has an outlet inside so you can charge your laptop while you're out.

I'm going to skip ahead in time to give you an idea of the level of service in this place. The next day I wanted some beer to have in the room so I wouldn't have to use the motion-activated-you-lift-it you've-bought-it minibar. Normally, I would ask a hotel's front desk where I could go to get beer, but I know if I did that here that they would insist on going out and getting it for me. Oh, and my daughter said she didn't like the pillows, which are much mushier than the memory foam pillows we have at home. So I called housekeeping to ask if they had that kind of pillow and they responded, "We will get them for you and once they are in the building we shall place them in your room." Now I'm not sure that means they went out and bought us pillows, but it might.

Oh yeah, and then there's the Internet thing. One of the most infuriating things about staying in nice hotels is that, unlike a places like Hampton Inn or Motel 6, you have to pay for Wifi. There's no justification for this; making Wifi available in a hotel costs them almost nothing and yet they're perfectly comfortable charging you $10 a day for it, unless you're a high level frequent guest. So here the bellman seemed almost perturbed at the notion that we might have to pay for Internet and so brought us an access code for one computer and had the guest services person call and say not to worry that they would take the charges off the bill. This should serve notice to anyone ever staying at a nice hotel that you should ask for almost anything because they just might do it for you.

Small sample size theater

When you're evaluating a baseball player, you always approach with caution even the best statistics compiled for only 50 at bats or so. Why? Because everybody knows that baseball is the game where you have 600 or 700 at-bats in a year and 50 at bats is not enough to make a judgment of how a batter will perform over an entire season.

The technical term for this is sample size error. What it means is that you don't have enough information to make a well-informed decision. With that in mind, let me tell you all about Tucson, Arizona.

Tucson looks at first glance to be in the desert but actually it rains here almost constantly. I went for a hike yesterday and I have to take my shoes off four times across little rivers (they called them "washes," that's a laugh- I got all muddy). There also signs everywhere that say Do Not Enter If Flooded. This is such good advice that I'm resolved to follow it in all circumstances, but I've never seen them anywhere else so it must flood here a lot. So why are there so many cacti around? I don't understand. It's also really cold the temperature doesn't seem to get much above 50 and it goes down into the upper 20s at night.

They also have signs everywhere saying high fire danger but I don't understand how that can be when it's raining all the time. In fact, I've not seen anything or anyone on fire since I've been here.

It's also dark almost all the time here. The sun doesn't rise until after 8 o'clock in the morning. Then it's just dark because of the cloud cover. I guess this explains why it's deserted. There are almost no people here. The hotel where I'm staying looks like it has room for 1000 people or so and yet I seem to be the only person there except for the staff.

They make all the buildings here the same color as the landscape so that you can't find them. "Where is that place?" "Make a right after the blow-slung brownish building that looks like every other building within 100 square miles." Thank God for brightly colored plastic signs or I never would have found anything.

In sum, based on my experience Tucson is nothing like what they say it is.

Some impressions of Tucson

I'm in Tucson, Arizona doing an errand of sorts. I've never been here before. It is about as different-looking from Philadelphia as you could possibly get. Thanks to Siri, I'm writing this as I'm driving along the road called Miracle Mile. I've been down this road several times in the last couple of days and I still have no idea what the miracle part of it is. The only miraculous thing I can think of is how many strip malls they've managed to cram into a mile of road. I have yet to get into downtown Tucson. During the day today I went hiking in the mountains, and then it started to rain so I was back at the hotel mostly writing report cards.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised because so much of the construction here is new, but almost everything I see here is a chain store of some sort, including all the restaurants. I had to drive quite a ways to get dinner at a place that was not a Red Lobster or Chili's or someplace else where I could've eaten at (according to Siri, easily kidnapped) in Philadelphia. I guess the stuff that's here is the stuff that peoples want it but just how many Target's do you need? I passed three between the airport and the hotel, and it's not that far.

Tonight I went for Mexican food. I drove all the way to South Tucson to this little family type restaurant. The specialty of the house is called the President's platter in honor of Bill Clinton who had this particular meal there about 10 years ago. My parents have met Bill Clinton, who rented house in  Martha's Vineyard not far from where their house is. I've not met him, but I know enough about him to know that if he ordered something for dinner that I wouldn't be able to finish it. And sure enough, it was a little bit like a tasting menu at a fancy restaurant, except that on the tasting menu they give you little bits of everything that they make. Here, they give you full size portions of everything that they make. It featured a tostada taco chili Reno a tamale and an enchilada. Fortunately, I was pretty hungry and I felt comfortable enough eating about half of it. It was good, just way way way too much food.

Enroot

Currently sitting at the airport bar in Sky Harbor airport, the self-proclaimed "friendliest airport in America," located somewhere in the vicinity of Phoenix, Arizona. I am on my way for a short, not particularly pleasant, but necessary trip to Tucson for a couple of days. I'll add some pictures tomorrow but there's nothing to see right now. It's around 10 PM and a lot of stuff in the airport is closed. Not the bar, fortunately. The janitorial staff is wheeling big carts full of garbage around. They didn't seem particularly friendly, though I suppose it's not the same to say that the airport itself is friendly as to say the people who work there are friendly.

The bar is okay, though they don't have any munchies. How can you be in the Southwest and not have chips and salsa on the menu? Seems sacrilegious to me (and is it just me or does that word look like it's spelled funny). Fortunately, I have a bag of peanuts in my bag and am sneakily eating them with my beer.

Anyway, 5 hours from Philly to Phoenix and now another 45 minutes or so to Tucson. I could have driven, I suppose, but it's 200 miles and I just wasn't into the idea. The flight was uneventful, which is about as much as you can want from a 5-hours-in-coach experience. I spent most of it listening to music and writing report cards (due at midnight Eastern time tomorrow- gotta remember the time difference!), until they took my portable electronic devices away.

Nothing more to report. I'll have more to say tomorrow after I've explored a bit.

Near my house, they opened one of those trails that used to be railroad tracks. I went for a walk on the trail the other morning and I liked it.

I think a big reason people like these trails is that they're flat. Trains are not good at climbing hills, that's why the transcontinental railroad took so long to complete (okay, that one's long too). I remember reading somewhere that a train can only climb a 3% grade, which means for each hundred feet it goes forward if you can only go 3 feet up. This makes train rights of way pleasant for bicycling and walking, provided there are no trains there of course.

There's another reason I like it though. Nobody does anything to make their house or business look good from the train tracks. Usually it's an area that's at best neglected and at worst trashed. In the case of people's houses, your looking at their backyards from a perspective you never get if you're walking out back of your house. There are no Corinthian columns, Restoration Hardware wooden benches or porch swings or interesting stonework. Instead, you have screen doors, plastic chairs and stucco.

Not that there's anything wrong with or unusual about that. New York's City Hall was built with an impressive marble facade but a plain brownstone back because it sat on the northernmost point of the city and the time and the city fathers were sure nobody would ever have the opportunity to see the back because it was all wilderness back there. Kind of like now but with Starbucks.

Walking along the trail, it almost feels like I'm peeking into someone's private life. This was at 7AM on a cold weekend day so there was nobody in back of anyone's home, but it all seemed terribly exposed to me- no fence or anything separating the likes of me from someone else's backyard. Does that mean if I want to bail out I can just walk down someone's driveway? I think not, but there's nothing saying so. I kept looking for No Trespassing signs, but there were none to be found.

After about 20 minutes I arrived at a legit way to leave the path, at a town park. I decided to exit there and walk back home, but as soon as I started I realized that my house is up a fairly steep hill from the park. How did I get down there? I didn't notice walking downhill. I will have to try it in the other direction because if I can walk down to the park and then return without having to walk uphill, we have some serious magic going on.

Tebowmania

There's been a lot of chatter recently about Tim Tebow, the quarterback of some NFL team that I don't care about. He's put together an impressive string of comeback victories, confounding those who doubted his football ability. Of course, we'll know he's actually good when he doesn't have to keep coming back in order to win, but that's another story.

Talk about Tebow is only partially about football, though; it invariably transitions into the place of religion in sports. He's referred to as being the most devout Christian athlete and such. He's certainly the most vocal about his faith, and that's the point of the controversy, I think.Although Tebow may be as devoted as any pro athlete, I don't really believe that he's the most devout. Since there's no scale of measurement for devoutness, nor is there even any consensus as to how to measure such a thing, that's an impossible statement to make.

What Tebow does that makes him controversial, at least in my eyes, is that he uses his position as a public figure to advertise his devoutness. When he put legible-on-TV bible chapter and verse numbers on the black gook those guys where under their eyes, that was the last straw for me. Anyone that desperate to shout "Look at me!" for any reason, perhaps faith most of all, is not any kind of role model for anything good.

The funny thing is, the fact that he's not really prosthelytizing is what makes his behavior so annoying. Those verses in the black gook? It's gibberish to a decent portion of the population and an "Oh, I've got to look this up" moment for many more.

If Tebow's point is that he's a person of faith who is proud of that fact, it's prideful but maybe acceptable. If he is in any way implying that he is more successful than others because of his faith, well that's arrogant and downright insulting to almost everyone else, whatever their beliefs. So people who dislike Tebow aren't anti-religion, they're anti-braggart.

Intermissient musings

I can't think of a better opportunity to meditate on entropy than at a school band concert. Entropy is a complex topic, which is perhaps best understood as a lack of order. Everything in the universe tends toward disorder and it requires energy to keep things organized in some fashion. As an example, it requires energy for the atoms that make up your computer (or you, for that matter) require energy to stick together to form the computer. Without that energy, all of those atoms would be randomly spread throughout the universe. In a state of complete entropy, the entire universe would be made up of evenly distributed matter and energy, with nothing binding together to form anything.

That's a big topic, as you can imagine, but I'm not really concerned with that right now. I'm thinking about the school band concert. My understanding is that the purpose of a band is to play together in some arrangement in order to create music for an audience. Most of the time I simply take this for granted, but when at a school band concert, especially something called a symphonic band, which is like an orchestra with no stringed instruments except bass and lots of wind instruments, I've noticed that it takes considerable work on the part of the audience to discern music within the sounds coming from the stage.

I have a pretty discerning ear, and it almost physically hurts me when music is out of tune or tempo (or both). So one of the ways I protect myself during these concerts is to get into a meditative state where I block out the idea that it's music coming fro the stage and receive it as a conglomeration of random sounds instead, a state of musical entropy.

From that state, it becomes kind of a game called "Find the Music," where I close my eyes and try to find the music amidst the random noise in the room. This is kind of like when you leave a quarter in your pants pocket when you wash them, and then it comes loose and bangs around in the dryer. I have been in laundromats where I've need people tapping their feet to the rhythm of the quarter. It's kind of like that, except with saxophones, flutes, clarinets, french horns and trombones instead of quarters.

I know it sounds weird, but for me at least, this is really fun. It's almost calming to listen to a sustained level of noise, and then every once in a while I can discern a melody or a beat. It's strangely satisfying to find the music in the noise, the order in the entropy. So here I sit at intermission, waiting for the next game to start.

Science

What is it about holiday shopping that makes people insane? Is it just that the words Christmas and Crazy come from the same Latin root? By the middle of December I want to be a shut-in, because I can't go anywhere or do anything without somebody driving crazily or walking too quickly and not noticing that they're pushing. It seems like the speed:attention ratio is just off. My current operating theory is that this temporary unhinged behavior is caused by incessant Christmas music. I call it ICM Syndrome, and its symptoms include vacant stares, anxiousness, and incessant humming.

Although there have been lots of sociological (and therefore meaningless) studies on holiday behavior, there hasn't been a lot of rigorous research done on the physiological effects. What I've read proves only that there is a moderate but noticeable shift of brain activity from the cerebral cortex and its logical thinking to the amygdalae, otherwise known as the "lizard brain" once people have been exposed to "Winter Wonderland" or "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer" 10 or more times within a 4 day period. Over time, this can lead to enlargement of those lobes, possibly crowding out the logical thought centers. An extended study is needed to see if the damage is reversible. 

This would be bad enough if I hadn't had the Hallelujah Chorus stuck in my head for the last week. I need a vacation.

One of the challenges of growing up is to progress from the me me me-ness of two and three-year-olds to something more nuanced as an adult. This can manifest itself in a number of ways, depending on your intelligence, your neediness, and the degree to which you are a shades-of-gray person or a black-and-white person.

You can dig into this as much as you want, but I think when it really comes down to is how much can you get over yourself. If you're someone like me who has and unnaturally high opinion of himself this can be quite a challenge, but the thing that makes it possible for me is that I have no trouble distinguishing between what is appropriate when I'm by myself versus when I'm interacting with another person.

What tends to impede getting over yourself is people's natural tendency to want to win. This is a primal urge and difficult to combat, and often manifests itself in the need to get the last word or to be RIGHT. This is typically not a useful urge. The core problem is that everyone wants to get the last word in and everyone thinks they're right. Otherwise, why bother? So going into a discussion sure of your rightness is a recipe for disaster, or at least for nastiness, and being insistent on that point only raises the stakes.

I'll get to a broader discussion of this in a moment, but I think it's best illustrated by and example, and I'll use my current job because it's unique in ways yet generalizable.

The teacher-student relationship is one with a clear authority figure. As the teacher, I have ultimate say in pretty much everything that goes into the functioning of the class. This allows me to say "because I said so, that's why" or perhaps something slightly more mature-sounding. In fact, it compels me to do so, because if I don't there's chaos. What the authority position does not do, however, is make me right. The only thing that makes me right is being right, and what's right isn't always clear. It just allows me to say, "I understand what you're saying, but the discussion's over." Of course that only works if I can refrain from saying anything else, but since I don't actually like to talk that's not too hard.

Getting back to the larger topic, I think the key to getting over yourself is listening. I've gone off before about how I think good listening is a skill that we really ought to spend more time teaching and developing, and what's needed here is two kinds of listening. First, you need to really listen to what the other person is saying an evaluate it on its own merits, not filtered through your own feelings. Second, you need to listen to yourself and get an idea of how you are sounding to others. It's all part of looking outside yourself.

In advertising there are two-plus questions that must be answered right off the bat. What am I trying to accomplish, and who am I talking to and what do they want? I am not in school to talk about math for math's sake or for my own. I am there to fulfill the needs of my students and their parents. Doing this effectively requires understanding what they want and how they expect to get it. That doesn't mean you have to do everything they want or the way they want it. What is does mean that it's not all about you and you must consider how what you do will be received.

This is very easy to say but can be very difficult to do, and it means being able to live without being right all time, but I can tell you from experience growing up as the "smart kid," being right isn't all it's cracked up to be.