Good morning. Hello. How are you? #606
Email dysfunction, sidewalk tunnelling, Xi schadenfreude, except he's not a freunde.
Good morning! Hello! How are you this fine morning? All well, I hope? Fingers crossed. I hope things are spiffing.
When I was cleaning out my closet for coats for Ukraine refugees last week, Emma saw this flannel and kept it, and she’s been wearing it lately. I’ve owned it for, god, twenty-five, thirty years. It’s such a pleasant mix of nostalgia and love seeing Emma wear it these days. Makes me happy. I’m happy it got a second life. It really is very soft, even if it’s shoulders aren’t quite wide enough.
Yesterday I tried to clear out my email inbox. I did not have any imminent written deliverables due for work. Well, that isn’t true, but I couldn’t quite face that task on a Monday, so I decided I would still be productive by cleaning out the inbox, which really had been getting out of hand. It is SO HARD to write emails now, I am just terrible at it. I will sit there and stare at an email from someone I want to be writing back to, and I just can’t manage to put any words down. In my head there are usually like ten competing thoughts at once, and I know that no one wants to read the five-to-ten page email that would result from getting those thoughts organized. So instead I struggle to get one, maybe two sentences out. It really is insane. At Barbarian it was my primary means of communicsation for years, but now the medium seems absolutely impossible. I know that I wrote emails that were waaaaay too long back then, and people hated reading them, and often just didn’t. So there’s no point doing that anymore. Furthermore, the migration to Slack has essentially removed almost every pressing work matter out of my email, so in the back of my mind I secretly know that email isn’t pressing anymore. In the Barbarian days I would spend whole weekend afternoons, whole plane flights, just catching up on email, because so much of what was in there was pressing. But now? Feels like everything in there can wait. Except it’s rude to make it wait, there are people waiting for you to write them back.
Anyhoo, it was a struggle but I think I answered… maybe 60% of the people that deserved an answer? There are at least two I can think of offhand that I should have answered, but I still haven’t. I am sorry! I AM SORRY! It really is pretty sad. Honestly, the number one way I got my inbox tamed yesterday was just by archiving every unanswered email that arrived before the first of this year. Gone. Goodbye. Of course, this is terrible, because they were probably still in your inbox for a reason, but… poof. We’ll see if there are any long-term repercussions.
It was so hard to stay on task. I kept searching for any excuse to be doing anything other than answering emails. At one point I came across an email from our septic company with the attached reports on our septic systems, and I filed them in the documents—>real estate—>valley meadow—>septic folder and I looked in the folder and thought “well, geez, this folder is really unorganized,” because who cares! It’s a folder wherein I dump the annual septic inspection reports and every five years, and wherein I dump a copy of the maintenanced contract. On the off chance I might ever need a document pertaining to the septic system, I’d know where to look, there are not that many documents in it, it’ll be fine! But now? Not good enough! Let’s fix that. Now, that septic folder is organized AF man:
That is the sort of task I decided was more pleasant than actually dealing with my email.
I’ve been watching a bunch of videos on how to put a small tunnel underneath a sidewalk, walkway or driveway, and I have to say, the whole thing seems suspiciously simple? Like, apparently you can just duct tape a hose to a piece of PVC pipe and start pounding and eventually you’ll have a tunnel? This seems… fantastical? I imagined I was going to have to get some sort of high-tech equipment for this job. But it look decidedly low-tech, albeit very messy. Has anyone ever done this? I might just give it a shot next weekend. But I would feel muchly reassured if a friend had tried it before.
Here is a picture from twenty years ago of Nick and I riding a camel in Matmata, Tunisia.
I think it might be from 21 years ago? Pretty sure we went in 2001, before 9/11.
That was a fun trip.
So later this year, China will have it’s 20th Congress. They have a congress every five years. This is when they elect their president. Between congresses, congress meets six times at meetings called Plenums. The sixth plenum of the 19th congress took place in December, and president Xi Jinping used the sixth plenum to kick off his re-election season by writing a manifesto for the country and party. Said Bloomberg, “Only Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping have ever published a so-called historical resolution, and both used their doctrines on Chinese history to dominate the Communist Party until their deaths. Getting party leaders to back his magnum opus as they huddle until Thursday at a military hotel in snowy Beijing will be the clearest sign yet Xi has the power base to clinch a precedent-defying third term at next year’s once-in-five-year congress.”
So things were going pretty will for Xi, all the stars were aligned for this dude to smoothly transition into dictator-for-life. Sixth plenum went well, his manifesto’s out there, the party’s on board, and the plan for 2022 was to have the Olympics, showcase China’s increasing pride on the foreign stage, and bob’s your uncle. Smooth sailing to re-election. For the last few years, the Chinese have been engaging in what is called belt-and-roads diplomacy, or “new silk road” diplomacy. Belts-and-Roads is a key part of Xi’s initiative, like the olympics, showing China’s increased prowess on the global stage.
Like I mentioned yesterday, of course, Putin is screwing all of that up in several ways. I mean sure, great to have Russia slowly fall into China’s orbit, sealing China’s dominance over Russia in their new axis of power. But. Problems. China is not yet enough of an economic superpower to actually completely mitigate NATO’s financial dominance. There’s an opportunity sitting in China’s lap for the renminbi (grumble grumble no capitalization) to supplant the dollar as the global currency but lol nope, not gonna happen (this is a whole separate topic and maybe that’s a controversial take but for a variety of reasons, that’s my prediction). China’s not there yet. So, that’s embarrassing.
But more problematic, of course, is that all of these countries China has been wooing with the belt-and-road initiative are, right now, watching China side with the big, bad, imperiliast bully, while the US and NATO are sticking up for the little guy. The countries receiving the munificence of the Belt-and-Road Initiative are Djibuti (where they have their first-ever overseas military base), Kenya, Senegal, Mali, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Togo, Benin, Mozambique, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Myannmar, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, but even into Belarus, Plland, Germany, Italy. While some of the former Soviet republics are probably like “yeah, cool, thanks for backing our big brother,” it seems to me that there’s a good chance that a bunch of these countries—The European ones, definitely, but probably most of the African ones—are looking askance at China’s lack of actual foreign policy leadership in the largest global crisis to happen in quite some time.
Not good! Bad look for the year of your dictatorial re-election partially on a platform of increased leadership on the global stage.
And then! Coronavirus! The great wall of China’s COVID quarantine has fallen, whole cities are being quarantined, whole industries shut down. I mean, two thousand whole new cases in the entire country on Monday out of a country of more than a billion people, which is comparable to, you know, the number of new cases in North Carolina, so let’s keep things in perspective here, but the important thing is that China is freaking out about it.
And then! Mainly because of Russia, and the Coronavirus, the Chinese stock market is in free-fall, it’s largest one-day loss since the great recesssion, dropping more than 7% in a day. I mean, sure, our stock market is hardly killing it this year, but theirs is doing a lot worse, and Biden’s not up for re-election this year.
This was supposed to be a cake walk year for Xi. He had it all planned out. Emma and I were talking about this last night and she said “man, when you’re a kid, you think being a dictator or king is probably so fun and you have all the power and get to do whatever you want but in reality they’re probably miserable and stressed all the time.” I am pleased Xi is sweating out this year. Sure, he’ll probably seal the deal in the end, for an unprecedented third term, but at least the dude has to spend the entire year in a state of anxiety and worry about it first, that makes me chuckle. And, of course, never say never! There are ambitious people in China’s Communist party! Who knows! Anything can happen.
So, that’s keeping me chipper today. Two of the world’s most brutal dictators are sweating this week, and the situation is entirely one of their own making. Okay, except for the covid part. I guess we’re back to believing the marketplace theory over the lab leak theory. Still, I’m pleased they’re both sweating. Anxiety is not healthy, man!
Okay here’s a mix, justa mix, mostly old stuff actually, I spent the last couple of days listening to the oldies. I miss Tilly and the Wall something fierce. I think SXSW happening contributes to it, cuz one SXSW I saw them like six times. They were such a great band. This is a pretty rando mix but I tried to make it flow, it gets a bit more rock-ish at the end.
Talk tomorrow! Have a good Tuesday. I hope your kid has adjusted to Daylight Savings Time, or the end of DST, whichever happened this week, I’m never going to learn which is which you can’t make me.
Whoops forgot the playlist link in the email version, it is fixed. https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3jtJslWQOIpcuzbOUFFiun?si=d86f57e048744cc0