Interviews

I had a couple interviews last week. The first was at a company in the southish bay which models electricity generation, distribution and sale in wholesale electricity markets. In a loosely structured format, I talked with one person and then another, took an Excel spreadsheet test and a writing test, and chatted with other people who happened to be around. I loved the work environment and the main drawback would be the commute. The second was at a regional agency in charge of air quality. I thought from the job description (and this was pretty much confirmed in the interview) that they wanted someone more senior than I, but I thought I'd at least go there, see what it's like, meet people, get my name known, etc. No such luck. Here the interview process was tightly controlled by HR: a 40-minute writing test followed by a 40-minute interview with three people asking six prewritten questions. I got no chance to meet people, find out what working there is like, whether there may be other positions opening up more suited to me, etc. Everyone was friendly enough, but there wasn't much point to my going there. Perhaps the only positive aspect of it is that I know I can expect my rejection in about three weeks, whereas at the first place there was only a vague "yeah, you should come in and meet the president, who's at home today dealing with a burst sewer, and let us know what your salary requirements are". But, still, I hope it comes through.

Revisiting

A few months ago, I wrote the following draft for a post, after a series of visits to Berkeley and Oakland.

Whispering Ghosts

I spent summers age four to twenty one in a small Cape Cod town. By the time I spent my last summer there, now many years ago, the collective weight of memories made there felt stifling. I felt some mix of anger, resentment, and pain about the place in which I had, over the years, had so much fun. Maybe it's that, by that last summer, I had so far reached the bitter end of summer life there, after most of my friends had left to do other things, I was mourning the lost childhood idyll. At the time, however, it felt like the ghosts of the past were gibbering ever louder in my ears, clouding conversations with people actually present. Every place I in which I found myself was a place I had been hundreds of times before, with many different people or alone, making the air dense with personal history. I don't think I ever psychically escaped so much as I physically stopped going there.

Recently, I have noticed having similar feelings while making trips to the East Bay. I cannot pass anywhere, it seems, without remembering something, often many things, which happened there some number of years ago. A group of friends, a girlfriend or crush, a restaurant which used to be there, an academic triumph or failure. All these things come to mind and crowd out my actually being there at the time, although perhaps in a subjective sense my memories help make the place and time what it really is. These memories are not ghosts; they are I, and I will listen this time.

On subsequent visits, I tried that - the listening, that is. Suddenly, those voices whispering from behind my ears, just out of view, fell silent. Once engaged, they vanished, and I was left not alone exactly, but more fully there.

J turns 0.5 years old

J had a couple new experiences today, his six-month birthday. He went into the North Beach swimming pool, continually held by L, of course. And we gave him a little bit of "solid" food. The pool he seemed a little nonplussed by, as he was already a bit tired. On the walk home, he completely conked out. The "solid" is in quotes because it was rather liquid rice cereal. He's been really eager to have some of whatever we're having for a while, but we'd been told to wait at least until he was six months old. He liked the rice cereal, but the spoon was confusing and frustrating for him. Not bad for a first try, though.

Fountain Pens

In part just to be able to write with my fountain pen, I used to write long letters to friends in different parts of the country. Then email came along, and I mostly used my fountain pen to take lab notes in grad school and to do derivations of formulae. Now I use it to write in my daily planner or to make margin notes on post-its in the books I read. I love how the slipping friction of the nib feels on paper, but I don't have much use for pens at all anymore. I don't have lab notes or need to derive formulae, and I don't have that much to write to anyone anymore.

Rationalizing my Addiction

Part of my problem in developing a coffee habit was simply practical. Coffee doesn't seem to make me a happy "coffee achiever" unless it's delicious and strong. My description of this is that coffee takes my mood and runs (leaps! sprints! gallops!) with it, so if I'm cranky that the coffee tastes bad, then I won't be able to work afterwards, caffeine or no. Thus to have the chance of a productive coffee buzz, I need to hand pour the coffee through grounds in just the right way, etc., at least twice a day. You can see this is risky. Now, however, I make enough coffee for the whole day and pour out enough for morning, afternoon, and evening at the time I need some. The larger batch reduces the fluctuations in quality and the coffee keeps pretty well in a jar in the fridge all day. Why, this could even work if I actually got a job or something.

The other part of the problem, though, is why I even need a coffee habit, or, rather, want one. The real answer is that I don't and probably shouldn't have one at all. But that is of the same vein in which I should probably stop drinking alcohol, too, and I am not ready to do that. This gets into all sorts of zen issues about how "I" will never be ready to give these things up, that that is not the nature of the small self. However, at the moment, it feels (illusory, I know at some level) like I need these things to keep myself going through the job search process. I tell myself that I can, and may actually need to, give these things up after I have a stable job. We'll see, I hope.

J takes to the bottle

So... a few weeks ago, my mother S arrived to spend a few months with us as L goes back to work. This has invovled a bit of re-training for everyone involved. While J was fed first from bottle and was taking it eagerly as late as early November, he apparently got a bit rusty feeding only from breast. S, of course, hasn't taken care of a baby in nearly forty years, and I'm informed that my temperament was a bit different from J's. But they both seem to be getting the hang of it. J was a bit unhappy at first without L around most of the day, but after a couple good bottle feeds today, we hope he's over the worst of it. However, J has often shown us the danger of making statements like this. Baby and mother-in-law logistics aside, L is enjoying being back at work, so I guess that part didn't involve too much re-training. And of course I'm relieved to have the help with J so I can pursue the job hunt. If I'm ever successful, that's really going to involve recalling some old habits.

And in a non-sequiter, was Jim Webb great last night or what?

J at the Christmas party

Although J had been more fussy than usual during the day yesterday, when we took him over to a neighbor's Christmas party, he was wide awake and happy. I carried him in a bjorn carrier facing outwards, so he could enjoy looking around and meeting people. He was so excited, kicking and waving his arms, that he threw up a little, but after that he was fine. He loved all the attention, shamelessly making eye contact and smiling at everyone who cooed at him, for the whole two hours we were there. At this point at least, he is far more sociable than his parents. After all that excitement, he slept soundly for five hours.

J's first real mushroom hunt

A couple times earlier, we went to places where we thought there might be mushrooms, but no luck. On Tuesday, we went up in the East Bay hills to one of our favorite chanterelle spots, but there was only one old chanterelle. We found several oldish Boletus truncatus before J made us go back to the car to change his diaper. I went back out by myself while L fed J in the car, and found a decent batch of Amanita calyptrata (or lanei, depending on who you believe), which was nice since I had found only one or two of this delicious mushroom in the last couple seasons.

Today, we went to another East Bay hills spot where I found a very nice bloom of A. calyptrata a few years ago. There were a nice bunch waiting for me there, so, more tonight. Also, from a stump we passed by, I plucked a beautiful cluster of Armillaria mellea, honey mushrooms.

My vision, which has been pretty good, is finally deteriorating somewhat. I reflected on the hunt today that I looked forward to J becoming a new sharper pair of eyes on the mushroom hunts.

Dancing with the babe

This is, not so surprisingly, the first time in my life that I've said, "Hey, baby!", to a literal baby. So now the calmer of all those groovy dancefloor moves are now being used to soothe J to sleep. For a soundtrack, I like streaming audio from SomaFM, especially the Spacestation or Cliqhop channels, or KFJC (depending on show). L seems partial to baroque, though, and to my surprise the Musical Offering actually worked quite well. J himself, as far as I can tell, doesn't care much about the music itself, just the motion it inspires.

More on the unity of religions

I came across a pretty nice quote by Cheri Huber in SFGate's Finding My Religion column:

Through seeing the [spiritual] transformation that's possible in my life I grew to love all spiritual practices and religions.

[Question:] All of them?

Yes, because at their heart, at their core is the same desire to be one with that which animates us, that which gives us life.

This is pretty much what I have seen as well, in a vision I had in the desert at Burning Man 2003. (No, I was completely sober!) Meeting a woman who had been in the hospital for leukemia for the previous two years made me intensely aware of how incredibly fleeting life is but how lucky we are for it, and I had to ride out to the open playa to be with all that this brought up. I saw a giant sun, and there was only this giant sun, on which were little "solar flares" that instantaneously winked in and out of existence. Even though these "flares" vanished before I could mentally "turn to look at them," I knew that they were all the possible charactistics with which you might describe someone, good, bad, indifferent, in all extremes and everything in between. I saw that the whole ranges of human behavior were only manifestations of this one sun, the "source" or "reality" behind everything. At the time I thought of it as "just the fact of being alive" or "just wanting things to be better", but it is clearly the same thing to which Ms. Huber refers, the "thing" beside which there is nothing else. All religions are, and can only be, intimations of this one truth in some form or other. More mundanely, all human activity can be seen as largely inchoate grasping toward this source, trying to acquire and control it without realizing that we are it.

Moving up in the world

By about 12 feet, that is. We're all moving to the flat upstairs from where we used to live. Overall, this is promising in terms of getting more sunlight, but for now there are the disruptions of not having easy phone and internet access, and having all our stuff in places where we're not exactly sure where it is or how to make use of it. I'll send out an email with our new address and phone number when we get it, but, in the meantime, the old ones will work for us.

J Moves Onward (Backward?)

Okay, just to let you non-parents know the kind of things you're reduced to when dealing with a newborn, J pooped. Especially since we'd been used to his pooping three or more times a day when fresh out of the oven, we were growing alarmed by his not pooping for 2.5 days or so, even though the books warned that rate of pooping would decrease over time. However, now, he just let out the biggest, goopiest poop I've ever seen from him. The thing is, I'd love to have a shirt or pair of pants that cooked-pumpkiny color of brownish orange (dyed, not stained).

Escape to Portland

When we received the announcement from an Oregon winery I like a lot for their harvest celebration last Saturday, L, tired of being in the house with me and J so much, suggested we go. I shrugged and said, "Okay." We took Amtrak's Coast Starlight up to Portland, stayed a few days there, and took the train back. The first night we had to stay in a regular hotel, but the next days we stayed at the Hosteling International hostel in NW Portland. It was new and superb, highly recommended.

Saturday, we drove out to the winery in Carlton. The countryside gets rural quickly, and is quite lovely, with gently rolling hills of fields, orchards, farm buildings. We had a great time at the tasting, with the proprietor / winemaker's wife holding J for a while, indulging ourselves in buying a half case on futures of their best 2005 wine. Scott is very enthusiastic about this wine (and about the 2005 vintage in general), calling it his "favorite wine he's made," and with good reason. It's delicate, subtle, and complex, but with plenty of strength and tannin to hold it together for a long time. When I described to the other winemaker (Kelly) that the wine was being to reticent for me to tell what it had to offer, she suggested that I put my hand over the top of the glass and shake it up and down to aerate it. It would never have occurred to me to be so violent, but it did work very well to open up the wine. Getting home was more problematic, as J would be put into the carseat only to start wailing a mile or two later. We'd pull off and think we had him settled down only to repeat the scene. But we eventually made it home just fine.

Sunday, we walked several blocks to a very lovely classical Chinese garden, recognizing along the way, an elegant urban park that had been a setting in an otherwise terrible movie.

The train rides were fun and pleasant. Or at least I had fun figuring out how to work the bunk beds in the cramped rooms, and sleeping in them for a few hours at a stretch. J liked the train a lot. As people pointed out to us, all we had to do to rock him was just to hold him. He liked the scenery going by, even if he likely couldn't actually focus that far away.

But we've been back for a few days, and are working on moving all our stuff to the flat upstairs. (Mail will always still reach us at our present address.)

Social Weekend

After keeping pretty much to ourselves since J was born, we saw lots of friends this weekend. At one point, we had three other adults, none related to us, in our living room. Three weeks ago, we'd never have guessed it could happen. It all worked out great. Thanks, everyone who came over! (and, thanks, of course, to J, who's a great sport about all this)

I do not like Blue Bottle Coffee

for a couple reasons. First, they seem to focus on making an ever-so-smooth-and-subtle blend, while I seem to prefer a more idiosyncratic coffee with particular characteristics that jump out at you. Maybe I should try some of their single-origin coffees..? Except that the one time I tried their Ethiopian Yirgacheffe, it was terrible. The beans were of irregular size and misshapen. My father, who grows coffee in Kona, Hawaii, said, "It looks like our 'number three' - our trash," and the coffee had the strong flavor of artichoke stem.

The other thing I don't like is that they often don't roast their coffee as dark as I seem to prefer. This leaves a light-caramel flavor which I find a bit simple and cheap. I recently got their Bella Donovan, a Mocha-Java type blend which they call one of their darker roasts, and, because of this issue, I tried gently roasting it more in a small skillet. This improved it considerably to my taste.

Oh well, I'll just have to get to Cole Coffee in Oakland when I can. Someone recommended Sweet Maria's, also in Oakland, so maybe it bears investigation.

Escape from the bedroom

A couple days ago, L, J, and I with trepidation made our first venture forth since we brought J home nine days before that. (He's two weeks old today, and doing great.) We went across the Bay to run a couple errands and indulge ourselves: cakes at Crixa, fresh fruit from the Bowl, ribs from Flint's. J handled all this very well although, of course, much of our timing was on his schedule - stopping when he needed to eat, moving when he slept. We were worried he might have a meltdown on the bridge, when there wouldn't be much we could do for him stuck in his car seat, but everything was fine. I'm really looking forward to taking him on mushroom hunts this fall. The rain so far was only 1/3 inch, but maybe that will be enough for some Agaricus augustus to spring up.

The whole GOP meltdown

At least I hope that's what it is. As pretty much everyone is pointing out, there's the National Intelligence Estimate which says that Iraq has set the US back on the "War on Terror", there are the "revelations" in Woodward's new book, and finally, there's the Foley scandal dragging down Speaker Hastert and associated other Republican House leadership. On one hand, all this couldn't happen to more deserving people, but, on the other, I'm dismayed that it's the Foley scandal which is really threatening to turn the House and maybe the Senate to Democrats in the midterm elections in a month. Okay, sure, Foley's behavior and the Republican leadership's covering it up is reprehensible, and I agree that it perfectly highlights how the "party of values" really only cares about power and money and not actually principles and governing. However, what about the real disasters of the Bush admin: invasion of Iraq, loss of New Orleans, Abrahamof / DeLay money laundering, gutting environmental and labor law, regressive tax policy and enforcement, Medicare "reform", inaction on global warming, creating and then doing everything it can to lose the "Global War on Terror"... really the list could go on for pages (no pun intended) -- basically caring about nothing except funneling money to people who are already very wealthy and who will recycle some of that money into the Republican Party coffers. Really, while I'm glad that the Foley scandal dramatizes these character qualities for the public at large, is this really what it takes???

The biggest mystery to me, still, is what took people so long. Why wasn't it evident from day one (or before, as it was to Paul Krugman) that telling the truth is the exception for the Bush admin? Or, if the political class and journalists knew, why didn't they care about the obvious ideological blindness and incompetency of this crew?

My thoughts often return to a former co-worker with whom I carpooled for a while. I tried to tell him before the invasion of Iraq that there were no "Weapons of Mass Destruction" (in quotes because this rubric includes chem and bio weapons as well as nuclear, for no reason that I can understand) in Iraq (thanks, Scott Ritter), that there was no Iraq / Al Qaeda connection (thanks, Czech head of intel and other sources), that the Aluminum tubes were for missiles and not centrifuges (thanks, Oak Ridge National Lab), etc. I tried to tell him I. F. Stone's (not that I know much about him) saying that "All you really have to understand is two words: 'Governments lie.'." I was so obnoxious that he left the carpool, but to no avail. He'd keep saying things like "I think they believe they're doing what's best for the country." And this is someone who self-identified as liberal, who read the Washington Post and the Economist (maybe, you say, that's the problem). I keep wondering what he thinks now, four years later, when all this and more is now conventional wisdom (except for approximately a third of the country!). Does he wish he'd paid more attention to the news, or does he dismiss as coincidence the things I told him then? Does he even remember what I, admittedly rather incoherently, tried to tell him at the time, or does he still go around with his head in the sand, doing nothing and hoping for the best?

Anyway, I hope the Democrats can do something useful when they're back in power, but, judging how they've handled things the last six years, I'm not that optimistic about them, either. I guess I have to take the uncertain success of Democrats over the certain failures of Republicans. I am heartened, though, by things like this.

newest addition

L delivered our son J (name inspired by the street on which we live) on Sept 24th, early morning. They arrived home the following Wednesday night, a week ago. He's regained his birth weight plus a little more, and is a real delight. He's about the most adorable thing we've ever seen. I figure we'd better enjoy the time now while he's cute and innocent and it's pretty easy to satisfy his needs. In some sense of propriety or something, we were hoping he'd arrive after our first wedding anniversary, which was a couple days ago, but we've no complaints.

Religions and the current world

Karen Armstrong gets it. Read the whole thing. Will update with second part when it's posted.

Part II

analysis article

In what looks like it will be a continuing attempt to more widely dissiminate articles which contain analysis not often seen in mainstream US media, here is an article in the London Review of Books by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. They are political science professors of international relations in the "realist" tradition, which interprets the actions of nations through the lens of self-interest, discounting moral or cooperative influences. Readers here may recall that Mearsheimer's book The Tragedy of Great Power Politics has had a great influence on me.

The Israel Lobby by John Mearscheimer and Stephen Walt in the London Review of Books.

This is based on a longer report, links to which are at the bottom of what is already a rather lengthy article. A summary of the summary can be found here.