Good morning. Hello. How are you? #397
Projects, dreams, re-reading Three Body Problem, Apple in China, JIT Gurus never got their just desserts, and another rock star child molester.
Good morning. Hello, there. How are you today? Did you get through your Monday unscathed? We managed okay, the Webb family. Emma and I had a conversation about how every day is like the next day and how that’s a little tedious, but how it’s also a little interesting, because after like four hundred and thirty plus of them, you’ve got a lot of the edges honed down, much of the pain of existence has been sanded away. Most parts of the day, I can look forward to them, even if only be channeling my inner child and getting really excited about toaster time or something. But all in all, most parts of the day I look forward to. There are exceptions, of course, but the exceptions are… irregular occurances. They do not happen with regularity. Anything that happened with any regularity that was unpleasant has been whittled away from the day, in an effort to make the whole thing tolerable. It’s worked pretty well. We’re like those bloating people on the spaceship in Wal-E. Except Emma is not bloating. Neither is Jane. Or Janet. Okay I am bloating.
I am working on a fun project today, though. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a few months now. It’s a lot of work and not super fun to do, but I know I will be very happy that it’s done, years in the future. It’s a documentation project. Don’t worry, you’ll see it when it’s done. But it is making for a slightly different day. Which is nice.
Of course, things like Jane tantrums and work and weather are different day-to-day, and those things can be bad. And of course we had that two month stint where my mom was here and that was pretty rough at first. But as her health improved, and the routines incorporated mom, even that got to be mostly pleasant as the days went on.
Oh, my neck. And my arthritis. Yeah. Those are things that are happening that are not pleasant. I forgot about those. A friend in New York told me yesterday she just lined up all her doctor’s appointments and went to them all in one day and I should really do something like that. Or at least go to my weirdo primary care physician Paul and get referrals to bone and neck doctors, since my last doctor just moved away and left me behind. Yeah, I need to do that soon. Maybe I’ll make those appointments today. Hahahaha. Yeah, right. I am not making those appointments today.
Okay! What do we have in our GMHHAY notes for the day?
The kitties got in a very cute position. I didn’t quite nail the photo, but I think you’ll get the idea:
Wow yeah Photoshop really saved that one. Been a while since I opened up a photo in Photoshop and cleaned it up. Usually just do some light cleaning in preview and crop and am done. But not this one. Still not perfect but… cuter.
I’ve been re-reading the The Three Body Problem this week and it is so awesome. I finished the woke sci fi series and was looking for something new to read. I wanted to read the new Daniel Kahneman but it wasn’t out yet (my email told me it was delivered today and I am so excited). I don’t think I’ve ever re-read a book so quickly after reading it the first time. I first read The Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy in 2019 (so the indespiensible but crappy Goodreads tells me). But it just came over me: Emma and I were sitting there, having just finished another thoroughly intellectually stimulating and difficult episode of Great British Baking Show, and I thought to myself: “I need to read The Three Body Problem again. I need to read all of them again.” And here I am, doing it. Kind of a weird urge, but, man, my urge was so right. It is absolutely every bit as rewarding the second time, which is CRAZY, because my primary memory of the first time was “oh my god I can’t believe the plot is doing this crazy thing I totally did not see that coming.” Well, now I see it coming, and it is still awesome. Just so rewarding. Defintely going to read the first two. May skip the third, it was my least favorite. But, then, it was my least favorite because I had very specific issues with the plot that I can no longer remember, so mayhaps I ougtta see if that is still the case.
As I was getting into bed last night, giddy and loaded after two tiny wines (I get the option of a tiny wine on Jane bedtime nights, and once a week I get the option of a second tiny wine on the evening I put away my laundry my god I am such a rebel in life), I remembered that there is a driving force in my life that I’ve never really written down. Or, at least, I haven’t in many years. And it is this:
When we’re young, we’re overwhelmed with all the things we want to do in life. And if we’re lucky and have the means, we start doing those things. We knock as many off of the list as we can. Of course, a bunch of them can’t be done yet because we don’t have the money. We know this, and subconsciously we sort our list accordingly: doing the things we can knock of the list now, and postponing the ones we can’t afford until a later date when maybe we can afford them. So, too, with other dreams that may not be feasible right now for whatever reason, like getting the senior discount on the Super Bird at Denny’s (OMG I miss Super Birds so much) or going into space. This is all normal, and we all kinda do it, to the extent that our luck, privilege and resources allow.
But one thing I think a lot of people are less good at factoring into the equation are things that take a long-ass time. Sometimes we understand this: like if you want to be a doctor or lawyer you understand you should probably get your schooling done ASAP. We tend to be better about this in our professional lives. Sometimes we don’t really think about it. Like it took me years to realize that lingering in the background of my subconscious was a very specific image of laying on my deathbed having live a life well-lived, and having a family there. And in order for me to ever accomplish that, of course, I have to a) have a family and b) live a life well-lived. And of course B involves a lot of other stuff.
But the thing about these long-term dreams is that sometimes they don’t require us to do anything for them to be on track. Let us take the simple example of a tree. If you want a big old oak tree in your front yard, all you gotta do is plant an oak tree, make sure it doesn’t die, and not die yourself. Boom. Wait thirty years, you got a big ole oak tree in your front yard.
[and yes, of course, you could move to a house that already has a big ole oak tree, but our dreams in life are often interlocking, interdependent on one another. Let us assume for the sake of simplicity here that your dream is also to finish the fresco you’ve started intrinsic to the walls of this house, and you don’t want to move].
So, the first trick here is to realize that, while sorting your list of dreams you want to accomplish, there is a bit of an art and finesse to it. You can’t just knock off the ones that are immediately obtainable (ahem, getting drunk and making out with people), because some of the longer-term ones need to be set in motion now. Of course you can’t just focus on the long-term ones, but they need to be factored in. Sometimes those require short-term sacrifices, that’s just life, no getting around it. And ranking the most important first makes a lot of sense, but if the most important ones are all really long term, and don’t require a lot of additional work once they’re set in motion (the oak tree), you probably have the energy to sneak a few more in there.
For a long time, I thought of my oak tree dreams as things that were on track, but that now just involved a lot of waiting. For me, it was an exercise in patience. My mind would race to the future when I had a big ole oak tree, and I just couldn’t wait to get there. But of course my personal Big Ole Oak Tree included B) Living a life well-lived and I don’t know much about life but I know that sitting around waiting all the time does not make for a life well lived.
BUT what I am realizing during this pandemic is that these big dreams don’t have to just be sources of impatience: they can be sources of strength. Even while you’re sitting there, doing absolutely nothing, picking your nose, you are following your dreams.
During the pandemic, that has been a very, very useful prism for me.
Here is a photo of Jane under the covers from yesterday when we played Under The Covers:
There’s an article in Bloomberg yesterday that talks about how the whole world is having supply chain issues in everything: soda companies are running out of cans, we’re all running out of lumber, car companies need microchips, aluminum foil companies and mattress companies can’t get the raw materials they need to get their products made. It’s pretty interesting and distressing, but the main thought I had while reading it was: is there ever going to be reckoning with all those just-in-time delivery, zero-inventory, that’s logistics assholes who broke a bajillion companies through stock market attacks driving down the value of any company that held an inventory of parts or finished items? It was only the single-most consistent, driving trend in business management since the early 1990’s. And they were fucking wrong. And no one is calling them out on it. Right now, even as these inventory shortages are everywhere, Accenture, McKinsey, Ernst & Young et al probably have a bajillion inventory management engagements with companies, and they’re probably still fucking them up.
Speaking of supply chain fuck-ups there’s a great article today in the NY Times about Apple’s faustian bargian with China, both as a supply-chain source and as a market, and the death-by-a-thousand cuts China is applying to them, slowly compromising their user data security, forcing them to use data centers not owned by Apple but by a Chinese company, and also forcing them to keep the secret keys to user data in China. No surprise there, but there was a passage about their decisions to build their supply chain in China that struck me:
One of his first research projects was Apple’s Chinese supply chain, which involved millions of workers, thousands of plants and hundreds of suppliers. The Chinese government made that operation possible by spending billions of dollars to pave roads, recruit workers, and construct factories, power plants and employee housing.
Mr. Guthrie concluded that no other country could offer the scale, skills, infrastructure and government assistance that Apple required. Chinese workers assemble nearly every iPhone, iPad and Mac. Apple brings in $55 billion a year from the region, far more than any other American company makes in China.
What a horrible situation to find yourself in as a company. Oh and also the reason Apple stopped saying “Designed in California on Apple” on the back of their devices is because China got pissed. So now, not shockingly, the tides are turning somewhat in the relationship between the largest democracy and the largest country in the world. It’s interesting everyone believed that if we brought China into the capitalist system, they would change. This theory has been everywhere in America since Nixon. It was Bill Clinton’s rationale for improving China’s trade status. And China just nodded along, sure, sure, I’m sure you’ll right we’ll probably get better. Ha. Nope. Man, they masterfully played that one.
I should take a moment here to say that when I talk about countries, I am talking about their governments. I don’t talk about a country’s people as a monolithic entity. In truth it’s probably not realistic to even talk about governments as monolithic entitites. That’s just shorthand. But to say something like “Oh China really played us on that one” is not saying something about individual Chinese human beings or Chinese human beings as a group. There is a difference between a government and its people, I think we all know that. And when you’re talking about Democracies, or at least countries that pretend to be and the vote still matters, when you’re talking about governments you’re often talking about administrations. When you say “god America really messed that up” when you’re talking about, say, Trump’s trade negotiations with China, you are saying “the Trump administration really messed that up,” not “individual Americans messed that up.”
It can, of course, be useful to distinguish. I should get better about that. This is particularly fraught with Israel. Consider trying “the Netanyahu administration” when saying “Israel” needs to do something. It’s fuzzier with China, with a more-or-less continuous government. One does distinguish when their polices change under a new leader, but that is relatively rare.
Okay I’m rambling a bit here but one more current events thing I wanted to tackle is that it turns out that Peter from Peter Paul and Mary was a child molester the whole time. He was actually pardoned for it by Jimmy Carter (!) but no one really noticed because it happened the day before the hostages were released from Iran. Also no one knew at the time, but it turns out that was one of multiple instances. The whole thing is sickening and it really upset me yesterday when I found out. I think because I spent so much of my childhood listening to songs by that guy and now I am just completely grossed out, appalled, and unnerved.
Jesus. I’m a non-child molesting man but even I can’t help but think sometimes “WTF are all men that terrible?”
And, finally, a programming note: I think I am going to end the “book” of these posts with my trip to Alaska in about four weeks. Not to say I’ll stop posting, but that’s the rough end date for the batch of these that will, someday, be the quarantine book. I think. I am not 100% sure yet. But that’s my current though. I suppose current events may dictate otherwise, but that seems like… right and proper at this moment.
Let’s do a mix. Moody and quiet. All over the place. That Katy Kirby song rocks out more than one would think. Consider it “moody” vs “quiet.” I don’t know much about her but that album is fantastic. That David J song has been a song I’ve been listening to since my junior year in high school. That Verve song is one of my favorite B-Sides of theirs. And that is probably my favorite Beyoncé song.
Okay have a lovely Tuesday! See you tomorrow! Chin up chin up!