Job hunt, concluded

What a long road it has been since my last posting on this.  Long, and yet the road went where it was supposed to go, and got me there in time, albeit just in the nick of.  More than that:  the road ran just about as I thought it would, with mile markers about where I'd expected them, and nary a decreasing-radius turn (my father's most detested of highway design miscegenations; mine, too, having ridden a motorcycle for some years).  I did not crash, I did not miss my exit, I did not run out of gas...though the warning light had quite unambiguously flared on.

I think of myself as a planner, but in truth most of the "big" things I have done were executed with very little forethought, and most of the "big" decisions made on the basis of embarrassingly trivial factors.  Abandon a career in historiography:  no plan.  Spend a decade as an independent consultant:  no plan.  Amsterdam: no plan. This time, though, I had a plan, and on top of the great relief at exiting this period of relative penury and excessive parenting, enhancing the genuine excitement at the prospect of new intellectual challenges, there is a certain feeling of exultation at having seen my plan succeed.

I guess the real reason I think of myself as a planner is that planning successfully is what I most admire in others.  I think here most immediately of my mother-in-law who has on more than one occasion produced an artifact, stored for years or even decades, at exactly the right moment, and transferred it to someone (typically one of her children, of course) who is just as grateful as she imagined they would be when archiving the item all that time ago.  There is something to it of Roger Staubach's perfectly executed Hail Mary pass in the 1975 NFC Divisional Playoff (he says, displaying nothing but his ability to click on a highly ranked item in Google's search), that is to say a wonderful mix of daring, preparation, and luck.

But given the title of this post I suppose I really should be talking about the job and about how, in the end, I got it.  The story is simply told, especially if one is willing to simplify:  the company I had in my sights had provided any number (well, nine actually) of "informational interviews" (plus two more after I had applied for the job, and that's not including communications with recruiters), and while most of those had concluded with mutual agreement that the company would be well served in employing me, none of them had actually led to that end.  Along the way, though, a job opening was posted for which I was well suited and to which I applied.  In addition to submitting the resume and cover letter I marshaled my forces, who started bombarding the hiring manager for this position with recommendations.  Impressed by my network (which included, among others, her boss) she agreed to interview me, and the rest is history.

As if.  You may recall (I know you don't, and yet it seems the right thing to say) my comments about how tortuous and dysfunctional the "hiring" process has become, and indeed it proved true here, too.  I submitted my resume and cover letter, and had I left it at that I never would have heard another thing:  the recruiting intermediary, for reasons I will not speculate on here, did not act on my resume until specifically ordered to do so by members of my Hiring Team.  There have been and will prove to be yet more benefits of having infiltrated this organization, but the most immediate one was that it saved me at this critical juncture from falling between the cracks.

I am to start my job on the third of January.  I will assume the role of Senior Analyst, which is to say I will help the business understand itself, and will translate its desires as needed into plans and designs. Flatteringly, people seem excited at the prospect.  We are rearranging our child care, shopping for a commuter's dream bike (30 minutes each way, 20 if I really lean on the electric assist), and trying to get Gideon to sleep through the night.  Come January I will spend a good deal less time walking these village streets, but I will do so free of the haunting sense that I am living here on borrowed time.

A Goldilocks story

What on earth is that, you ask?  That is Felix's toothbrush in Felix's toothbrush holder which has been stuck onto the cap of Felix's toothpaste by--you guessed it--Felix.  And frankly, I admire him for it.

I don't think anyone can accurately predict what sort of parent they will turn out to be.  Having become one, however, your natural parenting style manifests itself in short order.  I was unaware of this fact and thus long before the birth of my own children imagined I had already chosen what sort of parent to be.  I had three models before me, having observed my eldest three siblings with their own kids over the years.  It looked (upon what was never better than casual inspection and that with the willfully callow eye of the bachelor) like a Goldilocks story:  one was too strict, the other too permissive, the third just right in her (oops, I gave it away) balance between the two.  Well now, I'll be, let's see, hmmm...hey, I'll be just right!

I'm not.  I'm too strict.  At some deep level I feel it better to be feared than loved.  Misbehavior offends my sense of order.  With sleep in short supply I exist in a base state of annoyance.  Whatever the reason, several years of experience prove that I am not just right, I am certainly not too permissive, I am, simply said, too strict.

Felix is a bright boy with ideas of his own.  Lots and lots of ideas.  His latest such was that his toothbrush and its holder should live in his room.  Do I need to explain to you what a bad idea I found that to be?  Are you surprised to hear that I dismissed this proposal out of hand?  No.  But did that stop Felix?  Of course not.  Felix, tired of the toothbrush always being in the same place, certain there was a better arrangement to be had, invented (quite behind my back) a compromise.  I am delighted to see it and hereby publicly confess that he is the better man for having found it (or even looked for it) first.  Good for you, boy.

And how will Gideon deal with this too strict father of his?  As my other entries have perhaps suggested, Gideon is mischievous by nature.  Suggestion, however, is but a part truth, so let me state it more baldly:  that kid is flat out trouble.  So, how will Flat Out Trouble deal with this too strict father of his?  I don't know, but something tells me the thoughtful and practical compromise will prove more characteristic of the older child than the younger.

Confidence man

My father-in-law, who knows me well enough to have had me (among others) in mind when he posted to Facebook Yesterday at 7:13am near Philadelphia, PA, recommends an article in a recent issue of the Times:  "Don't Blink! The Hazards of Confidence" (nor is he alone:  it's the #2 emailed article even some days post publication).  He took from it the following lesson:

In general, however, you should not take assertive and confident people at their own evaluation unless you have independent reason to believe that they know what they are talking about. Unfortunately, this advice is difficult to follow: overconfident professionals sincerely believe they have expertise, act as experts and look like experts. You will have to struggle to remind yourself that they may be in the grip of an illusion.

True dat, but how, practically speaking, do you tell the difference between an actual expert and, say, Supergid?

You could develop your own opinion on the matter at hand and compare it to the expert's supplied opinion. More conveniently, you could examine the reasoning the professional expert included (or is, one hopes, prepared to supply) by way of supplement and background to his or her own assertions, and evaluate its soundness for yourself.  Either way, you are prepared to evaluate a chain of logic, aren't you, and surely you care enough to try?

My business experience suggests otherwise.  In the course of some years' consulting I have worked for only two people who wanted to review (much less understand) my chain of reasoning in any depth, and one of those two was way ahead of me at every step regardless, being altogether more expert in the subject at hand, not to mention even more powerfully possessed of the feeling of confidence.  People have typically hired me as an expert (or, on more than one occasion, as someone they expected to become expert) because they were not prepared to do that thinking themselves.  In general, you should not take anyone at their own evaluation unless you have independent reason to believe that they know what they are talking about--after all, underconfident people are as misguided as overconfident ones--but the fact is we seek the opinions of others, in business life at least, precisely because our capacity to evaluate is limited by our own bandwidth, experience, and abilities.

You want some really actionable advice?  Never trust someone wearing a cape.

Made in China

Recognize these boats?  I expect you do:  likely your kids play or played with them in the tub.  And guess what:  likely you did, too.  I found the boat on the left at my mother's house some months ago.  I immediately identified it as a bathtub toy from my own very young childhood, part of a set that included a sailboat and a PT boat, possibly one or two others.  I reclaimed it, as well as the sailboat that turned up nearby, and brought it back to my own boys.  It has floated (or, more often, sunk) in our tub ever since.

As of yesterday it no longer sails alone:  a nearly identical ferryboat, not to mention the rest of the set, all shiny and new, suddenly appeared in our bathroom, legitimate prizes, I am told, from a playdate at Luca's house.  This means that someone in China (see below) has been churning out the same set of plastic vessels for forty years.

How many pieces of industrial design can claim a lifespan of so many decades essentially unchanged?  As a historian of technology I ask this not as a simple exclamation of surprise but as a serious research question, good material for a seminar, say, or even a dissertation ("Constant Companions:  A Century of Consistency in Nautical Toy Design").  And as an historian I will offer an educated guess:  not many.

It also raises the question of whether and to what degree new toys are good toys.  I trust we have all heard by now that the "Baby Einstein" phenomenon is nothing but snake oil for tiger parents, but I must admit the boys show no greater interest in the Playskool and Fisher-Price pieces of yesteryear (again, retrieved from our parents' archives) that Talia and I have bestowed upon them than in the more up-to-date pieces from, say, Plan Toys.  Another educated guess, this time speaking as a parent:  electronics aside, the new toys are no better or worse than the old.

That having been said, there's no beating a true classic, such as Hasbro's Millenium Falcon, found roadside and shown below, in an unguarded (by the older brother) moment:

Good toys, bad toys, there's one thing that surely endures throughout the ages:  the sibling's eternal war cry, "THAT'S MINE!"

Johannes is jarig

Hoera!  Hoera!  My dear friend Johannes just turned 65 (both of us shown, somewhat younger, above).  I, as per our usual unspoken agreement, did not wish him happy birthday on the day of, but did happen to call him the day after.  I was surprised to learn that the birthday in question was his 65th, but, having discovered this, was not particularly surprised to hear that Het Parool, the newspaper in which he does the bulk of his publishing, had dedicated an entire issue of its weekly magazine to him.  He mailed me a copy, and here it is:

“Johannes is jarig” it announces. “Een feestnummer.”  And there he sits, not exactly happy but surely not as grim as he gets, beneath a festive aerial display with at center a green disc with a big purple “65” in its middle.  Johannes himself is hoisting a flute of champagne—freshly poured the bubbles tell us, and almost certainly spilled in the process, overfull as it is—but you may be sure he didn’t taste it if it were anything below Bollinger. Before him sits a taart, from Holtkamp it must be, that much they surely knew.  The taart is ready to be cut, but where is the cake knife?  How will Johannes, who has his cake, get to eat it too?  He will use his own knife—it’s there at his right elbow—one of many hundreds he owns, most likely his favorite, a folding, French-manufactured blade of his own design, though the handle of this one is white and my memory (and his style) says it should be black.

Small mysteries, but the biggest one is that such a magazine cover would exist at all.  Johannes does not care to have his birthday noted, much less celebrated.  In fact, he detests it.  This is why I call him only the day after his birthday, to point up that once again I have not wished him happy birthday.  And yet here it is:  not only did Het Parool dedicate an entire magazine to him but Johannes even appears to have cooperated in the endeavor.  Why?

We turn the page, and there he is again, this time pouring, the bottle carefully turned so as to avoid product placement, and mis-pouring at that:  one pours the champagne down the side of the glass, as he would be the first to tell you.  Below:  “Mijn verjaardag doet mij helemaal niets,” which is to say “I don’t give a damn for my birthday,” just as I said.  But oddest of all, the commentary bottom right by the stripling editor of the magazine in which he names Johannes an “ouwe brombeer,” which is exactly what I would expect Christopher Robin to call Pooh in translation.  It makes me want to smack the snipe; I can’t imagine how it makes Johannes feel.

Page on and we find some lovely photos of Johannes as I know him best: at breakfast by Hoppe (he swears by their coffee as if insisting so will hide the fact that it is solidly average and simply the only thing at that hour available within reach of his door); at the bar of De Zwart; and, my favorite, Johannes at home, indeed, at table, his obscenely cluttered workbench showing its usual slew of books and papers at left, miscellanea in the middle, food at the end, which is where I always sit, for obvious reasons.

In between you are given Johannes’s life story as told by the man himself, or rather as retold for what must be the hundredth time, plus a few mini-bios by friends and colleagues.  I have met all those people, always at a table at De Zwart, and heard what they had to say about Johannes, albeit from Johannes’s lips rather than theirs.  I read on, hoping to find some morsel that really satisfies, but the truth is I just miss Johannes, and neither pictures nor words will do much to feed me.

I still don't know why Johannes agreed to all this.  Searching, I turn the last page and there is Ilja, Johannes’s faithful (it’s the only word for it) assistant and, to my mind, only conceivable heir to the old man’s throne. Another mini-bio this, and though I’ve spent a good deal of time with Ilja there are here a few facts I did not know.  Best of all, and worth the rest of the issue put together, his closing comment--“We hebben allebei het hart op de tong”--which stands as the best single summary of the man there could ever be.  But I close the magazine, and this entry, without an answer.

Camping with Dan

I went camping with Dan a little while back.  It was a wonderful trip.  We've gone camping before.  Those were wonderful trips too.  No stories this time, though.  Rather, some panoramas, captured on my dandy new camera.  For those with screens to justify it I'd advise saving the more promising pics, below, for full-size viewing outside your browser.

Ma

BBQ's of yore

We do a lot of barbequing these days, and in the classic American style.  Still, I miss those OB BBQs, they really had the best of the old world and the new.



Apologies for the sudden fit of nostalgia.

Who sleeps?

My last posting, I realize, may have given the impression that I am exasperated to an abnormal degree by child-raising.  That may be your impression, but it is certainly not mine.  I live in a village, and while it does not actually take a village to raise a child, the village environment, in which you see the same parents dealing with the same children day after day, provides ample evidence of the daytime trials that most parents face, and of the not always graceful manner in which they meet them.  Comforting it is.

Ah, but what of the night?  What happens behind closed doors, in those wee and terrible hours?  Village or not we don't all share the same house, we don't awake to each others' children.  In this, we know only what others choose to tell...until, that is, we go camping together.  In camp we do all share the same house, we do awake to each others' children, and, in anticipation, in fact, and in aftermath, we learn what we otherwise could only suspect, namely that in the face of these nighttime trials other parents do much as we do, which is to say, they freak out.

From an email exchange generated by our plans to go camping earlier this summer with a couple of other families:

• Mother 1:  "I will need the following:  1 tent (for Pack n Play and me); 1 sleeping bag (for the kid - no glow sticks included please); 1 Alec clone to address nighttime crying; 4 stiff drinks, possibly more, to get me through the first few hours of camping acclimation."
• Mother 2: "I need 4 stiff drinks to address my own nighttime crying. Our boys have been practicing all week to get their nighttime wake-ups in steady 2-hour intervals. They are ready to take the show on the road."

Ha ha!  What funny mothers, how jocular, how jovial!  In point of fact they were not kidding.  First night we had near-continuous coverage, beginning with Mother 1's number 2 son's broadcast (a lovely song called "cry it out," took us all the way through to the last dying embers of the campfire), followed by GM's wakeup-and-smell-the-bottle number.  Not to be outdone, Mother 2's number 2 came through with some very late night programming of his own.  And, as threatened, the four-year-olds made their own contribution:  put to bed in a single tent, they were redistributed to two additional ones by morning.  No adult managed more than an hour of uninterrupted sleep.  And, as usual, morning came at dawn when the Littles (the three kids between 1 and 2) all woke up and began chirping.  The second night--and in writing this I find myself surprised at the mere fact that there was a second night--we dismantled the separate tent for the not-big-enough kids but were nonetheless subject to a really impressive display of nighttime terror by one of the older boys, in addition to relatively minor disturbances by the usual chorus.

Here's the punchline:  this was our second camping trip with these same families, whom we love.

Growing up

"They grow up so quickly," I am told.  "They grow up so quickly," I am told again.  And again.  And again.  "They grow up so quickly," I am told, "so enjoy it while you can."

Will you stop already?  I know you are right, but I know, too, that you don't remember a damn thing about what it was like to be immersed in baby, to have child wrapped about you, night and day.  You have forgotten the sensation of having a sick infant sneeze directly into your ear canal.  You have misplaced the revenge you swore while being driven to distraction by a four-year-old's inane, unending, pre-dawn retelling of the battle of the purple half ninja/half clone/half tiger/half Bionicle© and the KungFuWonderPets.  The panic you felt as the one child prepared to take off the other child's head in a game the rules of which neither understood but which both are about to learn, that panic is long gone.  So, too, the sight, sound, smell, and sensation otherwise of a shouting infant as it exults, slamming its free hand into its shit-encrusted crotch while you stand there, clutching its other three limbs in one fist, an exhausted wipe in the other, yourself screaming as the remaining wipes fall to the floor past the overfull diaper you hold pinned against the dresser with a knee.  And why do you not remember any of this as you stand there on the sidewalk, in your clean clothing, on your way from a point of your own choosing to a destination entirely suitable for adults, gracing me with your avuncular advice?  Because when, for you, this was all happening you were never allowed to sleep for more than an hour or two at a time and were thus physiologically incapable of laying down new memories.

"They grow up so quickly," to which I reply--to date silently--Imagine what would happen if they grew up slowly.  Just imagine that.

Crows

While getting my degree at Cornell I fell into the habit of working late and rising later and would oft supplement my sleep with a nap in the afternoon.  And oft, too, that nap would be disturbed by cawing crows, of which there were an abundance in Ithaca, and several in particular who seemed to spend most of their time perched outside my window, waiting for me to fall asleep.  The day came for me to leave, but, being petty by nature, I determined to have my revenge before I departed.  I decided to wake the crows.

In our backyard there grew an enormous pine tree, and in that pine tree, in winter months, there was to be found a quite sizable roost of crows.  The phenomenon of roosting, I am surprised to learn, is not thoroughly understood; my personal hypothesis is that crows come together in large numbers for the night because they are highly sociable creatures and because they like disturbing each others' sleep as much as they liked disturbing mine.  Certainly the process of settling down for the night was, for the roost, a long and drawn out one in which each individual crow among the hundreds bickered and fought its way to a suitable branch, discussed the experience with its near neighbors, discovered itself to be thoroughly incompatible with those neighbors, drove off some, was itself driven off, found a new spot, and began the process all over again before...well, suffice to say that going to bed took them all a good hour or more.

It was a cold winter's night when I left to catch the Lake Shore Limited out of Syracuse.  Bags packed, ready to go, I slipped out the back door and tiptoed to the crow's pine to say my wicked farewell.  In my hand I held a string of tiger crackers.  As per the instructions, I lay the string on the ground beneath the tree, lit the fuse, and retired quickly.

As the string began exploding I looked up and was gratified to see one of nature's lesser-known wonders:  hundreds of terrified crows erupting from a single tree, forming a terrific mass of smoke that obscured the starry night sky.  The noise, even without the firecrackers, was deafening and delightful.  Well satisfied with my cold revenge, I stepped into the waiting vehicle and left forever.

Since that day I have now and again joked that the crows are looking for me, spreading the word from colony to colony, and that eventually and surely when I least expect it they, too, will have their revenge.  You can imagine my discomfiture at reading, therefore, the following in the latest Science News:

Crows may have gotten cozier with people, but the birds don’t forget insults. Crows even appear to recognize and remember the faces of upsetting humans, Marzluff and his colleagues reported in Animal Behaviour in 2010. Marzluff and other experimenters trapped wild Seattle crows just once while wearing rubber masks sold on the Internet as caveman faces. More than two years after the incident, people of various genders and ages and with different body sizes and walking gaits attracted shrieking, dive-bombing crows when wearing the masks. Yet the same people could walk unmasked with hardly any attention from crows.

Crows can even learn grudges from other crows, the Marzluff team reported in June online in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Five years after the original trapping episode, crows that weren’t among the offended birds — and crows that weren’t even hatched at the time of trapping — now scold people wearing the masks. The tendency to mob someone wearing the dangerous face has become twice as common at some Seattle sites and spread at least a kilometer from the original study area, apparently via crow information networks.

"Crow information networks":  is there any more chilling phrase in the English language?  Not late at night, burdened with a guilty conscience, and facing another day at the playground which, whatever its many pluses, is absolutely infested with crows. Not late at night there isn't, and not when the crows know.

Job hunt

A recent NYT headline: "Social Media History Becomes a New Job Hurdle." The gist of the article is that in addition to making people wish they'd never friended you, those mildly offensive comments, slightly obscene party photos, and other infelicitous postings you made on Facebook may eliminate you from consideration for a job should HR run across them pre-hire. Thank you, Times, for once again choosing to write about someone's roman holiday rather than reporting on something really important, namely that social media, and above all LinkedIn (whatever the WSJ may say about it), is revolutionizing how people go about getting a job.

I am engaged in a job hunt. Disillusioned by the state of the self-tracking industry post the first annual QS conference and now painfully aware that Big Data consulting, despite the hype, is still a long ways away from becoming a really significant and productive industry, I'm trying to find a comfortable niche with one of the very, very small number of local companies possessing large-scale data or, failing that, with a company further afield. Since returning to the US I have on several occasions tried doing things the old fashioned way:  find a job posting for which you are well suited, submit a resume as instructed, go in for an interview or two, discuss terms, you're hired.  That hoary process, as best I can tell, no longer works, at least not anywhere I'm applying.  There's no trouble with step 1, but an increasing number of companies make use of third-party hiring platforms (Taleo, Resumator) that, according to me, to people trying to hire me, and to the intermediaries in HR themselves, are more likely to drop applicants into a black hole than they are to get the right CV on the right desk.  At any rate, that process has failed to get me so much as a return email, automated "we have received your application and will contact you if necessary" messages aside (and some of these systems don't even seem to be able to produce that).

So how does one get a job these days?  As ever, by networking.  My current diagram for one of the companies I am targeting looks like this:

Let me point out a few things of generic interest:

• Networking begins by broadcasting your needs:  I need to get in touch with this one company.  Who responds and who can actually help is unpredictable, so just keep an open mind and start talking it up.  Widely.  In my case this led to a motley crew consisting of a long-ago colleague, friends, and even a playground contact.  This core circle is then expanded upon, hopefully exponentially, by meeting with their contacts and requesting from them additional introductions.
• All leads should be followed:  there's no one "not worth" talking to.  For example, my friend's current colleague who worked at the company a decade ago and who only knows one person who still works there?  Well, if he knows someone who worked there a decade ago and who is still there then that person is likely to be reasonably senior by now (indeed, a VP), so while it's a narrow line it's potentially important.  In addition, one is able to ask stupid questions of a non-employee where one might be hesitant to do so in front of a potential future coworker or boss.  Very valuable.
• Actually, not all leads should be followed.  In the diagram, above, I show a link from my college roommate to the CEO of this company.  I do not intend to ask for an introduction as I cannot imagine what I would say to this person.  Perhaps that will change as I go along.
• Recruiters can be helpful, but need to be managed for best results.  They do not have the expertise to do your (potential) job or even to understand it in much detail, and they are busy.  The good ones will understand well enough to get you started in the right place--and I have been lucky enough to meet a couple of good ones here--but you have to fight your own battles.  Also, not unimportant, they can make sure there's nothing wrong with your resume that could short circuit this process.  A recruiter, like everyone else, is more likely to invest in you if you are introduced to them by someone they know.
• Everyone will respond to a request to meet if properly motivated.  In the great majority of cases the mere fact that you're asking and that your request has a recognizable name attached to it is enough:  yes, people are busy, but people like to help; they like to help friends, they like to help themselves, and they even like to help strangers.  In the two cases where my request has been met by silence I solved one simply by asking my go-between to offer the introduction again, a reasonable period of time having elapsed, and the other (Chief Data Scientist, understandably an abnormally busy person) I will solve by barraging him with additional requests from other sources (Data Architect and Senior Director, Marketing Intelligence & Operations seem the obvious ones) once I have met them and convinced them of the worthiness of my cause.
• There is no substitute for a face-to-face meeting.  Wait if necessary, but accept no alternatives.

All this having been said, the real key to success in networking is leveraging one meeting into more.  This can only happen if the one meeting goes well.  And here's where LinkedIn makes the critical difference:  using LinkedIn (and, to a much lesser extent, Google and other sites) as a research tool, it is possible to enter most meetings with a thorough knowledge of your counterparty and his or her environs.  You can and should know who they report to, who they manage, where else they have worked both within and without the company, and, since companies are increasingly moving their hiring activities to LinkedIn, you should know what, if any, positions that person has open or is involved in filling.  All this in addition to knowing the company itself, which knowledge is also facilitated by LinkedIn's ability to reveal the internal structure of an organization.  It is not only we helpless individuals whose every secret is being revealed by nosy parkers sniffing around social networking sites.

As you network your way along you will inevitably start to sound more and more like someone who already works there.  You will learn the relevant topics and the right language in which to express them.  You will mention the right names at the right times.  You will know where to park and how to get a visitor's pass as quickly as possible and will therefore no longer keep anyone waiting.  All this helps.  And eventually--let us hope sooner rather than later given the frightening economic situation--this knowledge of and comfort with the environment will combine with your obvious capabilities to make the possibility of hiring you seem a very obvious step to take to someone in a position to take it.

One other thing deserves mention:  your desired goal in networking in the first place is likely to evolve as the process of networking unfolds.  This in itself is very helpful if, like me, your goal is not to get one particular posted position but rather to find, or if necessary arrange to have made, a job that really suits.  Where will I end up, assuming, as I must, that I end up somewhere inside?  In Big Data, Web Analytics, Corporate Strategy, or some other area yet to be defined?  My thinking on this evolves as my network grows, and if this process, laborious and time-consuming as it is, leads me to the right place then it will have been very well worth the trouble.

The rising waters

Living with the first baby in a small apartment was something like being in one of those movies where the protagonist (me) is trapped in a cube (the apartment) as the water (Felix) slowly rises. Living with the second baby in our current house is like being in the preview of that same movie: everything happens much more quickly, with the exciting moments highlighted. Except for one thing: the leap in water level that is heralded by a baby's first steps has been long delayed.

Give me a break, Gid. You were fully capable of walking--the strength, the coordination, the examples galore--from a year on if not earlier, yet it was only a few days ago that you decided to take some steps. Progress, if such it should be called, was rapid thereafter. A quick photo essay by way of explanation:

Monday: I catch Gideon playing baseball in the backyard. He immediately plants it and swears it was all a coincidence.

Tuesday: While out shopping I turn around and discover Gideon giving Tai Chi lessons in the Japantown food court. He sits down and mutters something in a language I do not understand.

Wednesday: Gideon, unaware that I am no longer holding him up by his overall straps, walks across the room. I film it. Faced with incontrovertible proof he admits he can walk, and asks if we are going to stop feeding him and changing him and all that. I assure him there is no connection between walking and his full ride. I am unable to explain exactly why he does get a full ride, but walking or the failure to do so has no bearing on the matter. Reassured, he strolls down the hall, climbs up on Felix's bed, stands, and starts ripping all the stickers off the bottom of the top bunk. He then eats the evidence.

Thursday: We go to the beach where Gideon emphasizes his new-found ability by walking in soft sand, which is really very difficult, you know.  I am so pleased with him, we have such a wonderful afternoon, and afterwards, washing the sunblock off in the shower, he stands up and yanks on my bellringer so hard I hit overtones.

Gimme a kiss you big lug, you, and enjoy your Friday.

I Salute You, Ernie Pyle

World War II is an utterly ridiculous subject for a blog post:  there simply isn't enough Internet to hold it all.  But I think about World War II a lot and I finally have a way in to a small but important piece of it, so here goes.

Choose a topic, any topic, and follow its path through the 20th century.  Five will get you ten that path breaks when it hits the war, and then, when it comes out the other side, it does so at a completely different spot from where it went in.  (Not the best imagery, I suppose, but it's better than the trite "the war changed everything.")  This disjuncture, this fault across the landscape of history, makes World War II, for me, endlessly fascinating, as does the sheer enormity, in every sense, of the war itself.

And so I read:  Studs Terkel's "The Good War," Morison's History of United States Navel Operations in World War II (15 volumes, don't miss even one), Overy's The Dictators, Das Boot, Churchill's own history of the war (a thousand pages in its condensed version; I'm starting the full six volumes next week, having found, yes, found, five of them on the street a few days ago).  I read and I read, but I do so haphazardly, and so it is that I have only now consumed what everyone over here read while the war was going on, namely the articles of Ernie Pyle, famously the greatest American war correspondent of that conflict.

Perhaps it's the day-by-day nature of his recounting, perhaps it's the man-on-the-ground perspective and his close focus on the grind as experienced by the average front-line soldier, but the net effect of reading these many articles is what feels like a realistic sense of the experience, a sense, almost, of having been there. For the first time I find myself uninterested in the big questions and wholly focused upon the quotidian, which, of course, is how most people took it most of the time. So thank you, Ernie Pyle, for allowing me some satisfaction after all this time of wondering.

And as if that's not enough I find I love the man. Pyle was a wanderer and a writer and a truly great journalist, and his life was the best story of all. I have read biographies for many years now (having been turned on to the genre not by my own historical studies but by my mother's suggestion of Sandburg's bio of Lincoln, about which another time) and what tends to happen if you read enough biographies is that you start thinking in those terms, that is to say in terms of an entire life, start to finish, a life as a whole, and not just about people as individuals, changing from day to day, sometimes this, sometimes that. You start thinking in those terms, and you start valuing people in those terms, too. Lincoln's life is a perfect example, and it's part of why I love the man so: much struggle, many years of wandering in the wilderness (literally and figuratively), the shaping of character by the hammer blows of experience, until finally he becomes the ideal tool for that one very particular job. But what makes Lincoln's life perfect--and apologies if this seems a bit morbid--is his death: the tool, having been used, having done its destined job, was then immediately cast aside.

And so it was for Pyle. He lived the war and he wrote about what he saw and felt, hundreds and hundreds of articles that communicated the battle itself to the (primarily American) millions who did not experience the fight directly. And then, as the war was drawing to its close, after years of marching with the infantry, sleeping on the ground, eating dirt, after living with the terror of air attack and shelling, after participating in the greatest amphibious actions, naval battles, and air bombings of this or any other war, after experiencing and relating all this and with the end clearly in sight, he, like Lincoln, was killed by a bullet to the head, fired by a Japanese soldier a third of a mile away. As Wikipedia notes, "He was buried with his helmet on, laid to rest in a long row of graves among other soldiers, with an infantry private on one side and a combat engineer on the other." Perfect.

I have no desire to go to war, and certainly no desire to die so. I would, though, love to live a life with a real shape, with a unique purpose, and would, I think, be willing to forgo some of its later years if in doing so the ones that I did have were thereby made into a narrative, burnished and perfect, like Ernie Pyle's.

Catnap

I've decided to make fractured sleep my specialty: wake me, wake me, I'll steal it back later on.

Happy Birthday, Talia

Is there cake or shall I stop at wf to get some? I have no issue with doing that...

From: Talia Cell
3:02pm 5/20/11

Even a single-line message offers an opportunity to read between the lines.  Allow me to translate:

You failed to make anything much of Mother's Day or even to ensure that the kids did, you yourself don't care for cake and are probably assuming that having a birthday cake at my birthday BBQ on Sunday is all the birthday cake I require anyway, and in general, dear husband, you've been kind of botching it lately, so in an effort to ensure that I don't end up entirely depressed on my own birthday I am hopefully shaming you into finding a cake in the next couple of hours or, failing that--and I do mean failing--I will attempt to shame you in a more substantive and permanent fashion by actually bringing home my own cake on my own birthday and eating it alone in what will hereafter be called "my" bed with my headphones on while watching America's Top Pastry Chef and you can finish raising the children by yourself.

 Gotcha!

Before I get too smug, it occurs to me that I did not think to arrange a cake for the birthday BBQ tomorrow....

Now that they're back

A faithful reader asks "What did you actually get done while the wife and children were away?"  Faithful and perhaps a bit pedantic, but you asked for it so here it is:

• Wake up and read:  I did this every morning.  Now that they are back I get woken up and read in the middle of the night.  It's not the same.
• Put toilet paper on toilet roll:  I did this right away.  Now the paper is back on the toilet tank where Gideon can't (yet) get at it.
• Fit a year's worth of social and business engagements in the city into like four days:  Did it.  My best day was the 14th on which I had five separate engagements in the city and found good parking spots for each one.
• Get a massage:  Did it on my way to the airport to pick them up.  Have not yet recovered from that.
• Fix marriage timer:  Did it!  Set up a spreadsheet and carefully entered the starting time, the stopping time, the dip switch setting, and the numeric reading.  I was prepared to go through all 4-prime possibilities, but the first setting did it!  Welcome to day 2134!
• Completely reorganize all storage spaces:  Well, "completely" is perhaps an exaggeration, but I certainly did some very gratifying reorganization.
• Make proper shelving in kitchen:  Thought some more about this, but no, didn't do anything here.  Not sure we will.
• Find packaging for camera so I can return it. Get new camera:  Got new camera, returned that camera, never found the packaging for my old one.  Does that count?  I hope so, because I really can't figure out what happened to the old packaging.
• Hang new curtains:  Therein lies a story; see below.
• Get rid of futon bed:  Made a plan to do same, which plan has just yesterday come to fruition.  Immediate result of which was a terrible, sleepless night last night.  Hmmm.
• Really deal with media computer and networked storage and stereo and all that:  Really dealt with some of this.  Data all backed up on a new 2TB drive elsewhere on our network, media computer stripped down somewhat, am faithfully investigating getting a new amp and a phonograph.  LPs are the surest way to solve the MP3 problem, no?
• Find non-cardboard based storage system for toys in living room:  SO did it!  Er, almost.  As the picture above shows, I got an awesome chest and put it up on wheels thereby solving not only this problem but the "lack of coffee table" problem to boot.  In doing so I created the "super dangerous finger crushing four inch redwood lid" problem, which is proving tricky to solve.
• Sharpen everything:  Did it. Many thanks to Johannes for introducing me to the Istor.
• Register some fictitious businesses and go to Costco:  Did it.  Quickly ran out of grapefruits, but the business names are good for five years.
• Search for comma key. (If I fail to find it I will move the useless tilde key to the comma spot and put a tiny sticker photo of Gideon's face on it and push it a lot.):  Failed to find it.  Moved tilde key.  Applied sticker.  I push it faithfully.

Now, the promised story which is, perhaps, not terribly interesting, but illuminating nonetheless.  While the family was away I went to IKEA and got all the right hardware and curtains for covering the spaces that require it (not to mention a long-overdue lamp for the living room), but I failed to hang them:  I needed to ask Talia a thing or two about just how high she wanted the new drapes.  Still, I was determined not to let the advent of my dear family halt me in my tracks, so, soon after they returned, I extracted the old hardware and set the new materials out on the at-the-time-still-present futon bed in the living room. Plan was to ask Talia the height question that night and finish the job on the morrow.  Let us call that "Day 1." In point of fact here's what happened:

• Day 1: Remove old hardware thereby generating lots of dust and paint flakes on floor. Am certain I will finish tomorrow so don't bother to vacuum. Exhausted at day's end, I fail to ask Talia how high she wants the curtains hung.
• Day 2: Wake up, stumble into the living room, discover Gideon on the floor playing with my electric screwdriver and the (fortunately locked) shears; all the hardware is now on the floor under the bed because Talia needed to sleep in the living room bed the night before thanks to self-same Gideon. Fail again that evening to ask Talia about desired curtain height.
• Day 3: Remember to ask Talia about how high to hang the curtains and in doing so realize there's only one reasonable answer. Don't have a chance to do the install. Discover Gideon playing with paint chips. Vacuum carpet.
• Day 4: Install anchors but, in a rush to get it done before Gideon wakes up, blow the first one when I drill too large a hole. Install larger anchor on that one. Hang curtains. Vacuum carpet.
• Day 5:  Curtains fall down:  larger anchor simply too large for screw. Reinstall using larger screw.
• Day 6: Gideon pulls curtains down:  larger anchor too large for larger screw when 23 pound baby is hanging on it. Install smaller anchor inside larger anchor. Hang curtains.
• Day 7: Gideon pulls curtains down:  smaller anchor unable to secure firm enough purchase inside larger anchor. No time to reinstall today. Vacuum carpet. Begin to despair.
• Day 8: Wake up to find Gideon playing in curtains on floor. Miraculously, I arrive before white curtains become some color other than white. Determine to finish damn job today.  Install large metal anchors at all questionable points. Hang curtains.

To date they are still up--see background to photo above--but just writing about it is exhausting.

What's next?

Alone

Wife and children are gone. Far away. A whole week to myself.  This means:

• Wake up and read. This is pretty much my favorite thing to do in the whole wide world.  Going back to sleep after reading some is also pretty great.
• Put toilet paper on toilet roll.
• Fit a year's worth of social and business engagements in the city into like four days.
• Get a massage.
• Fix marriage timer.
• Completely reorganize all storage spaces ("summer configuration").
• Make proper shelving in kitchen.
• Find packaging for camera so I can return it. Get new camera.
• Hang new curtains.
• Get rid of futon bed.
• Really deal with media computer and networked storage and stereo and all that.
• Find non-cardboard based storage system for toys in living room.
• Sharpen everything.
• Register some fictitious businesses and go to Costco (same direction).
• Search for comma key. (If I fail to find it I will move the useless tilde key to the comma spot and put a tiny sticker photo of Gideon's face on it and push it a lot.)

Delicious.

Gideon's tale

Notice anything different?  A certain terseness?  Something of a staccato rhythm to my sentences?  A sharp reduction in parenthetical statements?  There is a reason.  A good reason.  I have been deprived of my comma.  Literally.

This is a story about Gideon and a fable about persistence.  Its moral is this:  if you keep your goals in mind and work hard at them you will be rewarded with success.  It is a tale for our times.  It is a tale for all times.  It is Gideon's tale.

Gideon has many goals in life.  The more important among them are:

• Emptying completely the kitchen cabinets
• Ripping that fascinatingly exposed bit of tape off of one of our packing boxes
• Throwing himself down the concrete steps that lead to the garage
• Drinking out of the toilet
• Destroying my computer

I term these "goals" and sense that they are important to Gideon because he returns to them repeatedly.  I think most babies share these same goals (though I trust most babies are not interested in my computer per se) or ones much like them.  And I am sure most babies are enthusiastic in their pursuit of their goals.  Gideon is more than enthusiastic.  Gideon is intensely and maniacally committed to achieving these things.

Each of the doors in our house makes a unique sound upon opening.  The sound of the bathroom door opening causes Gideon to drop whatever he is doing and immediately start sprinting in its direction.  Likewise the sound of the door to the garage opening.  It is really remarkably how fast he can crawl when he perceives an opportunity.  Like a very fat bullet he crawls.  He also does this when we open our bedroom door.  The upshot is that it is impossible to open any door in this house without within some seconds sharing the resulting doorway with a large and very determined baby.  The exception to this is the door to his own bedroom.  Sometimes it is possible to pass through that in peace.  Sometimes. 

It is my main goal in life to see that Gideon does not achieve these goals.  I used to have other goals but now really I have only these goals:

• Stop Gideon from emptying completely the kitchen cabinets
• Stop Gideon from throwing himself down the concrete steps that lead to the garage
• Stop Gideon from drinking out of the toilet
• Stop Gideon from destroying my computer

I don't really care if Gideon ever gets that last piece of tape off or not.  But that aside I seek to thwart him and I trust it is obvious why I do.  And so it is we find ourselves at odds.

Gideon is remarkable in his determination and in his sense of the future.  He accepts defeat calmly.  He appears to be certain that in the end all setbacks are temporary and that his goals will ultimately all be achieved.  Certainly the track record thus far warrants confidence on his part.  Certainly this same record suggests that I am in trouble.

I will tell you what really worries me right now.  It is not that Gideon will eventually empty completely the kitchen cabinets and throw himself down the stairs to the garage and drink out of the toilet.  I am not even worried that Gideon will destroy my computer.  He has already done that:  the comma key is gone and he took it.  What worries me is that he also took the m key and that while I found that one I have not found the comma.  So what worries me right now is the thought that in all likelihood he took the comma key and he ate it.

In closing I offer a picture of my opponent by way of explaining why this is all so terribly humiliating for me.

 You win Gideon.  You will always win.

Happy Birthday, President Lincoln

OK, it's a bit complicated, but here's the story.  I'm walking to school with Felix the other day and apropos of nothing he asks "What does 'perish' mean?"  ("Uh oh," I thought to myself.)  "It means to die or disappear."  Pause, pause.  "What does it mean to 'perish from the earth'?"  ("Perish from the earth?  Where have I heard that before?")  "Like the dinosaurs, that all of them are dead forever."  This seemed to satisfy him.

On the way home, just me and the Gid, I realized where I'd heard that phrase:  the final lines of the Gettysburg Address.  Allow me:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

And sure enough, this is where he got it.  As you may recall from my posting on our trip to Hawaii, we gave Felix an mp3 player and headphones, noting that "With books you can at least judge them by their covers. With audiobooks, who knows? I hope it's good for you, whatever it is you're listening to so intently."  One of those books was Just a Few Words, Mr. Lincoln, a read-along version, book and CD, I'd borrowed from the library intending to read with him on the trip.  This plan never came to fruition--vacation plans, or rather plans for vacation, rarely do--and having returned home I took back the item.  But it did not occur to me to erase the mp3 file still on his player, and apparently, having listened to Ozma of Oz, some Just So Stories, Amelia Bedelia, and quite a lot else, he arrived at this.

Truth be told, you often can judge a book by its cover, at least if you take the trouble to look at it.  I admit I didn't, at least not closely enough to notice the subtitle, "The Story of the Gettysburg Address."  I picked this up for Felix assuming it contained a few short, humorous tales about Lincoln and about why he was so great.  You know, the "Honest Abe" one about him walking miles to return a few pennies to a short-changed customer, that kind of thing.  It did not occur to me that it would discuss the Battle of Gettysburg--bloodiest battle of that most bloody of wars--or Lincoln's leaving his son's sickbed to travel to that place, or the speech itself, which, though elevating, contains a good deal about death and the dead.

Ah well, there's no undoing it now:  things have a way of sticking with Felix.  Indeed, the only way is forward:  I'm going to make him memorize the Address, that's what I'm going to do, and I'm going to make sure he understands it, too.  Happy Birthday, Mr. Lincoln, and thank you again for your words.

Libraries I have known and loved

I love no place so much as a library.  I love what they contain (books and readers), I love what they represent (careful storage, all-inclusive organizational schemes, the hush of concentration), I love what they look like (the sole exception being the disaster that dominated what little skyline my hometown boasted), and somehow, while I do not love the masses, I feel a real sense of charity toward all whom I encounter in a library, not least that sexiest of beings, the librarian.

My earliest library-related memory is from elementary school. Here's a picture of that memory:

Ignore the children, I don't know them, but the pit to the left I know very well for I spent most of my first and second grade years there. An adventurous school, influenced I suppose by Montessori, it allowed children of tender years to design their own schedules. This was a problem. More precisely, the fact that they allowed the children to do their designing in pencil, that was a problem. I quickly developed a routine whereby each Monday I would structure my week such that I took a week's worth of library time all on Monday and Tuesday, with less desirable subjects, penmanship in particular, left for the end of the week. On Wednesday morning, eraser in hand, I would reverse my week. One result of this is that my handwriting is totally illegible. Another, I argue, is that I really, really love books.

My hometown contained wonderful public libraries, too, in particular this one, the Jones:

This fine building contained the entire Oz series (which I am now rereading in company with Felix:  what a bizarre world that is!), Flash Gordon serials, Tintin, dozens of volumes of Tom Swift, and so much more, most of which I had to read within its stone walls: my mother being congenitally unable to return a book on time (or ever) and not above stealing her children's library cards, borrowing privileges for the entire family were in a more or less permanent state of suspension.

I was a librarian myself once, or at any rate, I worked in a library.  And not just any library, but one of the world's greatest, the Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library, core library of the Harvard system, the grand staircase of which is shown here:

At the time this single library contained 4 million volumes held in stacks extending over a dozen or so floors, four of which were deep underground.  On my way to work each day I routinely ignored the doorway shown in the center of the photo (others might not: it leads to a room at the very core of the building which houses one of the world's few complete Gutenberg Bibles), but I never failed to note the mural to the left of that doorway, which I first encountered as a summer school student a few years previous. Here it is more clearly:

Sargent's "Death and Victory," an entrancing horror showing a representative of the Entente trampling a German corpse even while stumbling beneath the load of a couple of Concepts. Few works of art have made such a deep, albeit indefinable, impression on me, and none have been so fatefully influential: I attended Harvard, rather than Stanford, my other great option at the time, because of this mural and the fascination it held for me.  Really.  It was a close call, and the mural decided it.  (I was 19, what do you expect?  As it happens, many years later I was a visiting scholar at Stanford, and I can say with certainty that their libraries, as a system and each taken on its own, do not compare.  On the other hand, they have the sun.)  The mural decided me, too, on getting a job in that library, which job was to keep people out of the stacks:  I examined the IDs of those who tried to get in via the portal to those stacks, separating thereby the Doughboys from the Huns. And occasionally I was tasked with running some errand or another in those stacks.  Holy was that place to me, and my lifetime right to access it is the only benefit of being an alum I treasure.

There have been other libraries since then, of course. I had access to and found excuse to use the LoC when on the Hill. I spent some time in a grad student carol in Olin Library at Cornell. I wrote most of my dissertation in various of several branches of the SF Public Library system, and researched more than a little of it in the NYPL main branch, a great library if ever there was one. However, I made little use of libraries in the Netherlands, which are typically closed stack and not much worth exploring even if you can get by their guardians (the Amsterdam public system just built a lovely new main branch but the collection was and remains poor). The one really notable exception to this last is Johannes's library, which I have spent more time in, or at any rate sitting next to, than any other, but that's a story for another time.

And so we arrive back at the present day when, I am happy to report, I once again have a really fine library at my disposal:

Fairfax Public. A solid collection, both for adults and--of increasing importance these days--kids; functional carols with wireless and outlets; a sundeck; coffee allowed. Most of my (paid) work these days is done from here, one of the very most special privileges in what I am increasingly recognizing is a very privileged life indeed.

Our Hawaaiiaana Vacation

Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien.  That could be the motto for the blog's current lapsed state.  Well here's one where the photos speak for themselves, and are captioned to boot.  Oh, and there's a soundtrack.  So, without further ado, our trip to Kaua'i, in pictures.



Seems like a lifetime ago already.