And That Right There...

...is an example of why I get dejected writing the blog. I had a point to make, both about the Stewart/Cramer interview in particular (I thought I had some points of analysis that were somewhat different than what I found on the blogs I read) and about the market and CNBC in general, but it was lost in a morass of my off-the-cuffness. I also could've just linked you to this, which would've communicated 70% of what I wanted to say in about 15% of the space and time.

Blogging Bonanza?

The tension between what I envision this blog being - short, pithy, tossed-off mini-rambles interspersed amongst longer, carefully composed if a bit rambly reflective thought pieces - and what it is - long, pithy, tossed-off rambling reflective thought pieces - continues to frustrate, but isn't the only reason I've gone a month without blogging.

I have in my mind a weekend in which I pump out four or five considerable posts. But I have a lot of things in mind that tend to not happen, so we'll see. Given the amount of thought I put into these posts, and the type of process by which they migrate from my brain to the computer screen, I'd probably be better off podcasting, since all I'm really doing is transcribing what I'd be saying if I were vocalizing my thoughts at the moment I had them.

Up next: Jon Stewart, Jim Cramer, why the stock market isn't gambling, it's meta-gambling, and my weird emotions about how all of that plays into my personal intuitions about the world of finance. (Pronounced, please, in the snooty and possibly British manner.)

The Next Day

The post right before this is even sloppier, more incoherent, and poorly edited than the usual longer rambles I post here, and probably not worth reading in its current form. Having somewhere to put those thoughts and reactions without having to directly impose myself on somebody else's attention is 65% of why I'd like to keep blogging, but my general process - write the thing in one long go and hit publish, because I don't have the energy or inclination to revise it for coherence and grammar - makes me kind of dejected. Oh well. I have a few other brief comments in mind but I'm going to try and split them up into discrete posts over the course of the day rather than doing my usual Bimonthly Digest schtick.

"You'd Have Remembered That!"

So said my doctor after administering a test for certain sexually transmitted diseases during my standard Actually, Your Heart Is Healthy But You Need A Physical physical. Said test involved the brief insertion of, I guess, a swab, or a Q-tip, or something, into a portion of my anatomy I've been known to stress as emphatically having an understood if invisible sign hung over it that says: "Exit Only." I thought I'd been tested for these infections when I was in college, but either I wasn't or the test they administered was different, because I'd definitely never experienced that particular sensation before. Prior to the administration she said, "I'm sure it's not that painful," and I half-shouted "How would you know?! Do you listen when guys tell you pregnancy isn't a big deal?" Dr. G-O made a reasonable point about the relative size of the foreign objects under discussion, so I hastened to make clear that I was referring to the value of the opinion, not trying to engage in misery poker - after all, how the hell would I know? (It wasn't that painful, but it was quite unpleasant. I imagine it's the sort of thing you could get used to.) I've found that in general I have a higher-than usual need, at the doctor's, to lean on the constant wisecracks, probably to deflate the awkwardness of being all but naked in front of a relative stranger. "Are you sexually active?" "Well, in principle." I'd like to be able to pull off the air of a guy who is completely businesslike and unflappable when being poked and prodded, but remember that I can't piss in a cup when people are waiting for it (and this was, in fact, an issue today!), so the prospect of getting checked for testicular cancer by a lady I've met once before in my life is a bit of a stressor, if you will.

More goes on in my life than my boring adventures in routine medical care, but frankly, being in the depths of a severe depressive period is great news for my exhaustion, apathy, and general anhedonia, but extremely bad news for my blogging.

Housekeeping

When I started this blog it was my intention to have a bunch of posts which were primarily hidden on the main page - you know, where you can read the first paragraph or whatever and then there's an "click to read the rest" link. I didn't want all the posts to be like that, though, and I didn't like Blogger's options for executing a workaround where only some of the posts would be coded this way. In practice, however, it seems like almost every post I write is a miniature essay between four and seven screens long.

So I ask You, the Three People I Know Are Reading, does the format of my blog make your eyes glaze over? Or is the glazing solely due to content? Should I hide stuff on the main page for better readability? Also: I didn't explicitly say so in the post from last night, but I'm actively wondering if other people feel the same way about adaptations as I do, so I please encourage you to comment on the post directly below. Just scroll down for about fifteen minutes and you'll find the proper link.

My John The Conqueror Root

No one's actually raised it with me, but I hubristically imagine that some of my readership might've been perplexed by the reference to "[white man's definition!] mojo."

This comes from conversation with another of my distinguished readers, Mr. ELH, wherein we observed that the mainstream use of the word mojo, and its use by white people in particular, has mojo meaning, roughly, "groove". So if you're not listening closely to the lyrics when Muddy Waters sings "Got My Mojo Working," you might think he's saying "I've got a lot of sex appeal and it is going on tonight."

But actually, in its initial use in blues music and African American culture, "mojo" isn't your groove, it's a supernatural charm that bestows groove - or its supernatural facsimile - upon you. It's not a force, it's a thing, not "I have mojo" but "I have a mojo," like you have a four leaf clover or a rabbit's paw. And actually in "Got My Mojo Working" the narrator's got his mojo working but it's not working on the girl he wants it to, so he's planning to go down to Louisiana to get a stronger one. In his version of "(I'm You) Hoochie Coochie Man" Muddy Waters memorably sings that:

I got a black cat hand, I got a mojo too
I got a John the Conqueror root, I'm gonna mess with you

Just so's you know.

The Busy-ness

So I'm trying not to let blogging become like all my other hobbies and avocations, where I spend more time thinking about what I'd do if I had the time than I spend actually doing. But I've been exceedingly busy of late - or at the least exceedingly occupied. My company has now passed through the transitional period and has officially taken over control of its part of the contract, so there's busy-ness there. On the first day, in the call center, nobody's phones or computers worked at 8:30 in the morning, so we kind of started out way behind the eight ball. As I cheerily said later in the day, though, "the screwups today were entirely the fault of GACWTP's IT department, so we're not to blame. We didn't even have the ability to screw up!" Today was better but there's still a lot of craziness as people are finally able to figure out what works, what doesn't, what the real deal might be on certain topics, and who didn't do enough preparation (which seems to be entirely unrelated to the six weeks of transitional meetings leading up to this point).

Also, due to the transition, my dad's around, which means I'm staying out even later - out the door at 7:30 in the morning, home around 11:30 at night - because I want to spend time with him. Also, if I hang around after hours, I get two tangible benefits aside from, eventually, an hour or so of alone time with my father: a free meal and the ability to hang out with my dad, his business partner, and sometimes my immediate boss. In these sessions (aside from good dining) the metaphorical ties get loosened and I'm privy to stuff that's usually a lot more interesting and often a lot more educational than what I actually did during the work day. I couldcome home when I'm officially done with my work, but aside from wanting to spend time with my dad I do enjoy listening to and occasionally taking part in these conversations, despite the fact that I get home and wish I had more time available. (I should note that afterhours "educational" is meant in a broader sense; I'm learning [a lot] during the day about the parameters and management of the relevant program, but it's the afterhours unwinding between my dad and his partner where I learn about the specific personalities, the quirks of their business, being a supervisor/manager, and various other glimpses into human nature. Plus gossip.)

At dinner today I offered my generic observation of a particular individual that tried to contextualize a specific problem my dad and his partner had: i.e., his current behavior is part of an observed pattern that he can't, for whatever reason, publicly admit to anything less than perfect calm and control and ideal functionality. Whatever the issues with his employees or his system are behind closed doors, he can't bring them out into the open, and as a result obfuscates or just plain lies to avoid admitting that he might have a problem. I also compared it to another associate of theirs with the pithy nod that everyone has their personal flaw which needs to be managed; the other person's, discussed the previous night, is the myopic pursuit of making sure everyone knows he's very smart and incredibly knowledgable (which he is), the pursuit of which has rubbed a lot of people the wrong way and led a few to wonder if he's a bigot (which he's not). My dad was immediately interested as to what I thought his flaw was, and at dinner I demurred.

Afterwards I pointed out that: (a) I still have much less exposure to him in a professional/business/managerial context than I have to his partner; (b) that I love him; (c) that I admire him and both consciously and unconcsiously he's a powerful model for me, and I'd therefore have difficulty feeling like I could pick out a "flaw" in this sense because I'd be less likely to view it as a flaw, since it's probably also a big part of my personality. I'm intensely self critical, but most of my self criticism is counterproductive and bullshit, and it avoids the truly salient aspects of my personality. A legitimate flaw is that (like many) I compensate for extreme insecurities by layering them with a confidence that borders on arrogance, but this same confidence/arrogance is going to keep me from perceiving elemental personality traits as flaws. Objectively, for example, I'm extremely confident in my intelligence, and more to the immediate point, my perceptiveness, intuition, ability to mentally cut to the core of an issue or a process, and get there faster and better than the people around me. Sometimes I'm right and sometimes I'm probably wrong and ostensibly that overconfidence could become a problem, except I'm too confident to truly doubt my own self-perceptions. I'm running in circles right now, but that's the nature of self-analysis, I suppose, especially a self-analysis as involuted and repetitive and, frankly, hateful as I've been subjecting myself to for the past ten years. Anyway, to break out of the circularity, I also pointed out that some of the things I perceive as flaws in myself are things I criticize myself for because I think, compared to the example of my father, I fall considerably short.

For example, I become extremely contemptuous of people and their behaviors extremely quickly. Not any people, and not for just any reason, but there are particular personality traits that cut right to one of the things that most bothers me about other people, and my reaction to those I (rapidly) judge as petty, small-minded, vindictive, etc., is to build up a towering edifice of disdain that borders (depending on the nature and history of the petty vindictiveness) extremely close to hatred. By comparison, my dad projects the impression that he's pretty much above it all and it's water off his back; he points out that I'm 25 and, when he was my age, he got caught up in a lot of other people's pettiness as well, and even today he can still get amped up about some small person's bullshit, but he certainly handles it a lot better than I do. I assume this is all related to my self-nominated status as the official Grudge Holder in the family. It's, between the two of us, an attested fact that at some point I basically decided that (we're skimming over a lot of deep water here) it wasn't right for my mother (and, by extension, my father) to have forgiven her mother, my grandmother, for having been a pretty horrible person, and I was therefore going to pick up the slack by disliking her for everything my mother had moved past.

[Redacted due to extreme and irrational paranoia.]

So, you know, that's probably a personality flaw.

I was hoping to write an impressionistic preview of the NBA Finals before they actually started and contaminated the integrity of my thoughts, but I've only got one more night to do it in.

#1 Hit Ain't Good Enough

Thought of the day: the Paul Simon song "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover" would be better if Simon had actually listed the fifty ways.

This is cute, but I feel that for thematic and rhythmic consistency the list should be restricted to monosyllabic men's names. Boding ill for the title, I project that I could only come up with thirty or forty of these suitable for use in very short rhyming couplets that don't repeat a rhyme (i.e., we've already got Stan, so no Dan or Bran or Flann or Jan or Ran or Van).

I'm also very happy to report that "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover" was directly preceded as a #1 hit by "Love Rollercoaster" and directly followed by "Theme From S.W.A.T.".

Since scrolling around the page with my usual overlong posts is awkward, I'm looking for a solution in the whole "click to read more" vein but I don't like nitty details of any one yet. Shall continue pondering.

Alsø alsø wik:

And I think that's it for my blogging about "new to me" TV shows, at least for a while. I've actually managed not to see the entirety of the final season to any of the three great HBO dramas, but if I ever blog about those I think I'd want it to be in a more comprehensive capacity, which would at this point require a lot of rewatching as well. (Plus, honestly, I'm not exactly chomping at the bit emotionally to watch them right now.) I generally have less to say about comedies, so even though there are some I'm interested in I doubt I'd write about them, and I've essentially seen most/all the other dramas I was interested in. As a fan of David Milch I suppose I should go back and check out NYPD Blue but it's a big project for another day. Also I'm thinking I want to scale back my Netflix subscription (again) to something that would be suitable for watching movies on a regular basis but not sufficient to let me rip through TV shows the way I like to. I want to get more reading done and spend less time passively sitting at the computer, so cutting down on the whole "I watched eight hours of DVD this weekend!" would be a good start.

Plus I'm thinking about embarking on a project I've had in mind for quite some time now, where I go episode by episode through my favorite TV universe of all, probably the only one I have remotely that much to write about, and just get everything I have in my head by way of response out on paper. It's a long project, and it'll take a *lot* of writing, and it'll probably be of no interest to most of my readership, but I want to spend the time luxuriating in this show, its' spinoff, and some of the extended media, plus it'd be a major flexing of various types of critical muscles.

That's right. Coming soon: Medrawt Blogs Buffy.

The Week That Was

It had been my intent to start this blog around May 1st, in the caesura between leaving my old job and starting my new one, but lethargy, mild illness, business, and the indignities of modern society (more on that in the next post) have delayed me until this inopportune hour. There's probably going to be a flurry of posts over the next day or two as I try to squeeze out everything that, in my head, I thought I ought to blog when I get it going. I've tried blogging before, but it shouldn't be hard to turn this into my most sustained effort in the medium (at least my most sustained quasi-public effort). Anyway.

Left my old job, amicably, at the Medium Sized Law Firm (MSLF) in Chicago [I decided that playing coy with my residence was silly and unsustainable]. I may write more about this old job in the future. I have started a new job at a Government Agency Concerned With The Poor (GACWTP), also in Chicago. I did not come by this job completely honestly, which is to say that in qualifications I am capable and I deserve it (or so I think, so far), but in practice I got it through a family connection, and a much more direct one than that which yielded me the previous job. GACWTP has for many years contracted out one of its major functions to private consulting firms, and after roughly twelve or so years of one firm monopolizing this project, a company half-owned by my father competed for the most recent contract and was after a lengthy process awarded roughly 35% of the project, while the incumbents get to keep the other 65%. There's a lot at stake for My Dad's Company (MDC) (this one third of a contract is the biggest contract in the brief history [between one and two decades] of his company), for The Other Guy (they want to prove the GACWTP wrong and take the whole thing back), and for the GACWTP itself, since they feel (correctly) that they'd completely lost ownership of this important component of their mission. Into this mix I've been dropped to basically do I'm not sure what, other than be clever and observant.

It should be noted that though my dad is currently around a bunch and will be intermittently in the future, it's his business partner (50/50) who is directly monitoring this contract and even she is not the full time person in charge. This other lady is, most properly, my boss, and so far my job has been to impress on her that I'm not just trustworthy due to being In The Family, but that I'm actually capable of doing whatever she wants me to do; so far I think I've done a better job convincing her of this than myself. She was out of town last Friday and today (should be back in the office tomorrow) for an extended Mother's day trip home, and in her absence I didn't get accomplished quite everything I was supposed to, because basically my ingenuity and inquisitiveness ran up against my meek acquiescence in a new environment. There was a body of information I was supposed to gather, and while I gathered it, I could and should have done more; there is a lot of information that will be necessary to MDC that, right now, it's not entirely clear where it is. We need maps, for example, maps which break down things like zip codes and census tracts and alderman's wards, but it's not clear who has these maps or when we can get them, so I wasted too much time on Friday dicking around with what passes for a free zip code map of BMC available online. Similarly there are various sub-programs and initiatives wrapped up in this contract which are at best ill-defined in the official documents, and I don't know or didn't want to get out there and ask The Other Guy to help me out on this.

My sense of things right now, as we gear up to officially take control of our share in a couple of weeks, is that we're Getting Ready to Get Ready. I think on the actual start date we'll be ready to get ready to do the job, but too much of the focus right now is necessarily on things like hiring all the necessary people and making sure we've all got network logins and making sure we didn't extend a job offer to anyone who lied on her resume so that we need to rescind it and asking for more chairs because really we need more chairs. There's some agitated headless chicken action going on, and most of the people currently in the office are concerned with getting the human and logistical infrastructure in place for us to do our jobs. Since I don't have a defined job yet and I'm floating around like a free agent, I'm pretty much the only person I've met whose primary concern is the informational infrastructure we'll need to conduct our jobs, and I'm not the guy to just whip that into shape without some support. We'll see.

Theme Song

We never knew his fantastic head,
where eyes like apples ripened. Yet
his torso, like a lamp, still glows
with his gaze which, although turned down low,

lingers and shines. Else the prow of his breast
couldn't dazzle you, nor in the slight twist
of his loins could a smile run free
through that center which held fertility.

Else this stone would stand defaced and squat
under the shoulders' diaphanous dive
and not glisten like a predator's coat;

and not from every edge explode
like starlight for there's not one spot
that doesn't see you. You must change your life.