email counting

Did a quick bit of arithmetic this morning and learned I receive, on average, about 40 work emails a day and send, on average, about work 12 emails a day. Nothing to add, just wanted to note that somewhere.

coming back around to participatory grantmaking

And my thesis. 

Question: What percentage of a given community's GDP is derived from aid and development funding?

Question: What kinds of education should be tied to participation in grant-making processes? 

Question: What obligations other than care in evaluating applications should be placed on participants? 

Question: How can PG be meaningful when funds will sunset after a relatively short period (e.g., 4-5 years)?

repertoire

I'm coming to the end of the beginner section on Justin Guitar. Still have months to go before I'll be ready to move on, there is a lot still to cover and get proficient at. But one of the things he recommends in the last beginner lesson is to develop a repertoire. This seems like an excellent idea. Who gives a shit if someone can play parts of a bunch of different songs? Much better to be able to play a few songs all the way through, cleanly, and in time. So here's my target beginner repertoire, based on using at least one song from each of the lessons so far:

1. Born in the USA, by Bruce Springsteen
2. How Bizarre, by OMC
3. Bad Moon Rising, by Creedence Clearwater Revival
4. Cortez the Killer, by Neil Young
5. Use Me, by Bill Withers
6. Chocolate Jesus, by Tom Waits
7. Ain't No Sunshine, by Bill Withers
8. Get Lucky, by Daft Punk
9. Hey Joe, by Jimi Hendrix
10. Wish You Were Here, by Pink Floyd (with intro!)
11. Brown Eyed Girl, by Van Morrison
12. Free Fallin', by Tom Petty
13. You Can't Always Get What You Want, by the Rolling Stones 
14. La Bamba, by Ritchie Valens
15. All Along the Watchtower, by Bob Dylan
16. Dreams, by Fleetwood Mac
17. House of the Rising Sun, by the Animals
18. Song 2, by Blur
19. Smells Like Teen Spirit, by Nirvana
20. All the Small Things, by Blink 182
21. Boom Boom, by John Lee Hooker
22. Johnny B Goode, by Chuck Berry
23. Norwegian Wood, by the Beatles
24. Knockin' on Heaven's Door, by Bob Dylan
25. Jane Says, by Jane's Addiction
26. The Passenger, by Iggy Pop

The songs in bold are ones I've already started learning to some extent. Kind of neat to look back on the past six months and see how far I've come. Not as far as I might have, to be sure, but still. Six months ago I had basically never picked up a guitar. 

Will keep working on other things, of course, but this list gives me some shape and structure for song practice. 

john fahey, misogyny, and separating art from the artist

I've been watching John Fahey videos on YouTube. I'd always liked his weird, haunting music, and of course the contact high of someone of such genius being from right around the corner was always fun. But as I move through the levels of novice guitar playing, I'm appreciating him in a whole new way. The phrasings, the tunings, the attention to detail: all stuff I didn't really grok before and am starting to be able to understand now. I'm still far from even being able to attempt to learn a song like his arrangement of "Poor Boy Long Ways From Home" - still working on finger-picking "Happy Birthday" - but it's a cool feeling to know that I should be able to one day in the not-too-distant future.

So imagine my delight when I came across, in a YouTube comment, a PDF of a songbook he published in 1970. 170+ pages of sheet music/tab notation. Gold mine! It opens with a manifesto of sorts about his approach to guitar playing and practicing. There's some wonderful stuff in there about the importance of emotionality, a few digs at "middle class guitar players" (present!) who sound like metronomes and don't really listen to what they're playing (I'm not even good enough to differentiate myself yet, but okay something to avoid), his stance against practicing scales in favor of practicing chords. That last bit really stuck with me: he said he used to practice 4-6 hours a day, focusing on chord changes until he got them absolutely perfect. And that, as he was practicing, melodic lines and combinations would come to him unbidden, as if his brain was unable not to try to make meaning out of the rote repetition. It's breathed a little life into my own practice over the last couple of days, helped me start to understand and play around with the idea of tension and resolution (hello, C11*-G7-G-F-C, you pretty sequence, you). It's pretentious and nerdy and deeply felt. "If you sit and listen to yourself," he writes, "the creative act will happen." Lovely.

Then, imagine my shock at arriving at the section of the manifesto called "Homosexual guitar playing." Wait, what? Fahey proceeds with an astoundingly misogynistic and homophobic screed about the need for a guitar player to get over their fear of the guitar, that "mastering guitar is really very similar to conquering a woman," and the failure to master the guitar is like being rejected by a woman. Let me just quote at length:

When you are alone with your guitar, you must win it if you are to be a man ... Those who fear their guitars are essentially cowardly faggots ... Homosexual guitar playing is an imitative gesture of the non-essential (i.e. temporary) characteristics of women--bitchiness, frivolity, flightiness, and super-sensitivity. These superficial characteristics are not the essence of the feminine. Look at the homosexual guitarist pick up the guitar--he is afraid to touch it. He is afraid of it. He thinks it hates him because he hates it so much. He is a Nazi... He must overcome this fear of the guitar. And he can. The guitar must be his secret love, narcotic, whatever image he prefers. But, he cannot forget to abuse it also.  

Holy shit, John! Project much? The racial politics of the introduction are also a little, um, dubious, but more in the sense of being dated because the thing was written 50 years ago. He calls Black people Negroes and there's some ill-advised stuff about his mythical old blind Negro guru. But it's clear that he reveres a lot of Black players and gives effusive credit where it's due. That all seemed okay to me, all things considered. The misogyny and homophobia, though, read like they could have been posted last week on a particularly nasty men's rights subreddit. 

This all prompted me to think, again, about the separation of art from artist. Fahey was a genius. And it seems he was, at least around 1970, a vicious hater of women and gay people. And he's dead. I guess where I land on it is, I still want to learn to play his version of "Poor Boy Long Ways From Home," and having a fuller picture of the person who produced it will make me think about it and hopefully play it in a different way than I would have without knowing that background. Thinking about, for example, all the poor gay boys (and girls, and trans men and women, including some I've known) who still have to flee home and it up a long ways away. It helps, frankly, that he's dead.

*My "favorite" chord at the moment, if I had to name one. I like to sit there just strumming it or, increasingly, picking it over and over. 

bad internet

For the consultancy I've been working on, I have to interview people in different countries. Some of them have really poor internet, but none as bad as the guy I talked to today. We'd been trying to talk for a week and a half or two weeks but been thwarted repeatedly by the quality of the connection on his end. Today was the best we'd gotten, so we forged ahead. To give you a sense of how bad it was before, this was the first two minutes after I started recording:

Luke:

So I'm recording now.

Abas:

Yeah. [inaudible 00:00:06]

Luke:

So, just because I don't want to lose you while I have you, can we just go ahead and start?

Luke:

(Silence)

Luke:

Hello?

Luke:

Hello?

Luke:

(Silence)

Luke:

Hello, can you hear me?

Luke:

I'm afraid I can't-

Abas:

Hello.

Luke:

Yes, hi.

Abas:

Hello?

Luke:

Can you hear me?

Abas:

I hear you now.

Luke:

Yes.

Abas:

Hello?

Luke:

Abas?

Abas:

Hello.

Luke:

Yes, Abas. Can you hear me now?

Abas:

[inaudible 00:01:38] no? Yeah.

Luke:

Okay.

Abas:

Let us try. Let us try.

Luke:

Let us try. So I'm just going to-

Abas:

You were [inaudible 00:01:49]

Luke:

Okay. So can you first just describe the timeline of your involvement with the country capacity assessment?

Abas:

Hello?

Luke:

Hello?

Abas:

Hello. You can make the phone [inaudible 00:02:16] for what?

Luke:

For you to be involved with the country capacity assessment.

home

Arrived at Dulles last night after a strange - only 28 passengers on the plane and PIA-level in-flight service - but smooth and easy trip over from London. M&D picked me up, N95 mask at the ready, and drove me home. No trouble staying up to a normal bedtime, although I was up early this morning and my body is not happy with meal timings. Think I'll force it for a couple days though, always better to be uncomfortable and adjust quickly in my experience.

This is not how or when I imagined I'd be arriving back in Silver Spring. More on that at some future date. For now, I'm grateful to have such a place and such parents to come home to. 

solidarity means taking the same risks

Che Guevara said that. Once I'm home, and quarantined, and tested, I'm going to the next goddamn protest I can get to. If it means quarantining and getting tested again after that, so be it. Time to go put myself in harm's way.

why in the living hell didn't i take up guitar 20 years ago

Seriously?!?! All I want to do right now is practice. My fingers can't take more than an hour at a stretch yet, but that's way up from the 15 minutes they could take a couple of months ago when I discovered Justin Guitar.

I'm learning so fast, it's really fun. Today I learned "Free Fallin'", which is an admittedly extremely easy song to play, but my god after about five minutes I could at least play a simplified version of the strumming pattern along with the original track. Also started to learn "Brown Eyed Girl," which is also very easy and for which I'm looking forward to learning the riff.

The tips of my left fingers can't decide whether they're sore or numb.

Feeling foolish for waiting until I was 33 to start. 

on being exasperated by people you fundamentally agree with

I'm writing an essay right now about the role of NGOs in social transformation. Overall I am going to argue that they can help effect it, in ways that are smaller than they sometimes claim but are nevertheless meaningful. One of the points I'd like to bring up as a critique of the role of NGOs is that of the racism that is inherent in much of development. This critique is decades old. A book I read last year, Escobar's Encountering Development, argues forcefully that development discourse constructs white societies as the norm against which black and brown societies are found wanting. This is painting with a pretty broad brush, and it doesn't give black and brown societies enough credit for subverting and repurposing the white/liberal/Enlightenment-normative perspective that underpins a lot of development thinking. But he's not all the way or even mostly wrong, it's a super important point. Anyway his book is almost 30 years old and so I was looking around for some more recent reflections. One I found is by a Liberian-American (seems she went to high school in DC, actually) academic currently at Oxford, writing about race as an unspoken but pervasive presence in development. Fantastic! Could not agree more that race and racism are conspicuously absent from the field and that, as she puts it late in the paper, development agencies need more "radical rabble-rousers" to shake things up.

The problem is that the paper suuuuucks. It's sloppy, poorly written, ignores relevant literature, and makes lazy, dubious claims. Instead of nodding along and making notes to draw on later, as I'd hoped to do, I found myself compulsively picking it apart. For example, referring to how white people are still pretty much in charge in development:

Pailey claims that “one need only take a cursory look at the traditional institutions of global development (for example, the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organization, United Nations Development Programme), their NGO proxies and international development or development studies departments even in the most non-mainstream institutions, such as SOAS, Sussex or Open University, to see this reality confirmed” (Pailey 2019: 7). But a cursory glance reveals that six out of UNDP’s top nine leaders are non-white, as are over half of UN agency heads overall. The same goes for the WTO, which lists 41 councilors and members of key committees, of whom 24 are non-white. Of the world’s four “most powerful” NGOs, according to Foreign Policy magazine (Anonymous 2008): six of eight directors of BRAC, which was founded and is headquartered in Bangladesh, are non-white; 13 of World Vision’s 25 directors are non-white; only three of Oxfam’s 12 directors are non-white but its CEO is from Sri Lanka. Admittedly, the Gates Foundation exemplifies Pailey’s point a bit better. That is not even to say that she's wrong in her overall point, just that the evidence she casually tosses in to support it doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Later in that paper, she calls for development organizations to “[elevate] radical rabble-rousers who challenge and dismantle the status quo,” not just “[recruit] people of color … to fill tokenistic diversity and equality quotas” (14). But who is to say when such recruitment is tokenistic; by what standard is a hire judged to be radical enough? I suppose that, to paraphrase Potter Stewart, she knows it when she sees it. 

That's all got citations and stuff because I cut and pasted it from my own essay. Anyway I'm not going to end up using most or maybe any of it. Her paper is just so...amateurish. I don't come away feeling like I've learned anything. She sets out to argue that critical development studies and critical race theory could learn from each other, which is an interesting premise. But her analysis is below the level I would expect from myself -- a master's student with a shaky, if improving, grasp of the literature -- on a course paper. She just lays out a half-baked description of each, points to some places where each admits to blind spots that could be filled by the other, and leaves it at that. I would be embarrassed to submit something that poorly argued and poorly written for class, much less publication.

In conclusion, it is exasperating to find someone who is making a point, from a prominent place, that I think is important but swinging a pickaxe at her own foundation while she tries to put the walls up.

guitar part 2

Here are my self-assigned songs to pass grade 1 of the Justin Guitar course.

1. Ain't No Sunshine
2. Three Little Birds
3. Bad Moon Rising
4. Knocking on Heaven's Door
5. Born in the USA

When I can play each of those songs all the way through without messing up too badly, and have played at least one of them for SRB and/or the fam, it'll be time for grade 2. I've passed all the little milestones Justin suggests, now just need to keep practicing chord changes and actually learn a few songs well enough.

Also started trying to learn Norwegian Wood, which done properly is more advanced than I thought, but which will give me something different to work on while I drill the stuff I've already learned.

guitar

I'm actually going to stick with it this time, I think. 33 years old. Never too late. The trick, it turns out, was to find an online course that's actually a course. Specifically, the beginner course by a guy named Justin something or other, whose website is called Justin Guitar. Extraordinary stuff, a global treasure: well-structured, progressive curriculum with what must be hundreds of hours of extremely clear videos that break everything down into very digestible parts. So, instead of getting discouraged and lost amid the infinitude of tutorials on YouTube, I'm making steady, almost day-to-day progress.

Three weeks in and I've learned all eight chords taught in the first "grade" of his beginner course: A, C, D, E, G, Am, Dm, and Em. I'm getting better at strumming, although that remains difficult. I've learned "Born in the USA" well enough to play along with the track (badly, and the A-D change is one of the easiest, but still) and I'm working on "Eleanor Rigby" (very hard because the transition from Em to C and back is big), "Hey Joe" (not as hard, although I can't play it very fast yet), "Bad Moon Rising," and "Knockin' on Heaven's Door." And shortly I'll start on "This Year's Love," by David Gray, which I didn't know but which Justin recommends as a good beginner song to practice in 6:8 time.  EDIT: Nope, screw that, I'm going with "Norwegian Wood." Harder but also a song I know and like. Also started learning a few riffs: the "Seven Nation Army" one, "Sunshine of Your Love," the bassline for "Coming Home" by Leon Bridges (great song). And a wee bit of ear training: I've almost figured out how to pick my way through "Happy Birthday."

Long story short, I'm excited about guitar in a way I've never felt before and didn't expect after a number of false starts over the last couple years. So far I've been borrowing SRB's beloved Brunswick dreadnought, but I'm considering getting my own beginner guitar. Not that we need another guitar in this house, I'm just so stoked. And I'm already dreaming about what I could learn once I've "graduated" from this course. Need to not completely drop the piano book I bought, either, since by all accounts learning music theory is much easier on piano than guitar. And if you want any further indication of how excited I am about all this, it's that I feel like I need to start learning music theory. No rush, I can still barely transition confidently between C and, well, almost any other chord. But something to keep doing. And while we're locked in, what better time to start a hobby in real earnest?

Bless you, Justin Sandercoe (remembered his name!). I'm only sad I didn't discover you years ago.

a dream about anthony bourdain

Last night I dreamed that I was watching "No Reservations," a scene in which Anthony Bourdain goes spearfishing. It was visually very dramatic: a throng of men holding spears over their heads and periodically throwing them down into the water, backlit by a brilliant orange-red sunset. All of a sudden, a spear flew from off-screen and hit one of the fisherman in the chest. He went down. And Anthony Bourdain intoned, "Sometimes, when you go spearfishing, you accidentally kill a guy." He'd killed the guy!

This is day 22 of self-isolation for me. I spent the first week -- before the official social distancing rules came into effect -- voluntarily staying home because of what seems to have been a light cold. Then everything shut down. Things got much easier once I no longer felt sick. The weather has been sunny for the most part and it's starting to get warm, so I've been running and going for walks. Short grocery shops are a near-daily event because we almost always need something that they didn't have in stock the last time one of us went. About a week ago Sainsbury's marked places to stand and wait on the sidewalk so they could keep it to 15 customers inside the store at any one time.

Schoolwork proceedeth apace. We were supposed to have an in-person exam last Monday, which was replaced by a take-home essay task. Much easier and less stressful! I also made a bunch of progress on one of my term papers last week, after finishing the exam faster than I thought I would. The other term paper is now creaking back into gear. It's hard to do them in parallel, partly because the topics and readings are so overlapping, and partly because momentum seems to matter for me when I'm working on something intellectually engaging. That was rarely a problem at work because most tasks are so collaborative, so I had no choice but to work in fits and starts while waiting for input or feedback. Anyway I have to keep myself on task with both: It would be bad to suddenly find myself without enough time to do a good enough job on the one on which I haven't made as much progress. Shared outline for the first one with the professor today, so I've been kind of able to switch my brain off about it.

As I think many people are discovering, it has been nice to reconnect remotely with some people whom I otherwise might not have called or might not have called me. I organized a game of Beyond Balderdash with some friends from Michigan/Chile/DC last weekend that was really fun. And SRB and I have both now organized little events within our apartment building: she gave a concert the Sunday before last, and yesterday I ran a pub quiz. It'll be interesting to see how much these new kinds of engagements stick after everything starts to return to normal.

Enough for now, back to work. 

the mirror and the light (1)

Pages 249-250, with line breaks added every 10 (sometimes 11) syllables, a break when it shifts from third to second/first person, and a few words removed (marked in brackets). Blogger's formatting functions suck so I used periods to space out the end of verse one and beginning of verse two, which together form a 10-syllable line. Just to see what it looks like in verse form.

She's still got it.

Don't look back, he had told the king, yet he
too is guilty of retrospection as
the light fades, in that hour in winter or summer
before they bring in the candles, when earth
and sky melt, when the fluttering heart of
the bird on the bough calms and slows, and the
night-walking animals stir and stretch and
rouse, and the eyes of cats shine in the dark,
when color bleeds from sleeve and gown into
the darkening air; when the page grows dim
and letter forms elide and slip into other
conformations, so that as the page is
turned the old story slides from sight and a
strange and slippery confluence of ink
begins to flow.

........................ You look back into your
past and say, is this story mine; this land? Is
that flitting figure mine, that shape easing
itself through alleys, evader of the
curfew, fugitive from the day? Is this
my life, or my neighbor's conflated with
mine, or a life I have dreamed and prayed for;
is this my essence, twisting into a
taper's flame, or have I slipped the limits
of myself -- slipped into eternity, like
honey from a spoon? Have I dreamt myself,
undone myself, have I forgotten too
well[? M]y sins seek me out; even as I
slide into sleep, my past pads after me, paws
on the flagstones, pit-pat: water in a
basin of alabaster, cool in the
heat of the Florentine afternoon.

blood on their hands

The more I read about the US response to covid-19, the more convinced I am that Trump and company are about to have hundreds of thousands of people's blood on their hands. Every member of the cabinet who decided not to Article 25 him out of office is in that group. We're talking mass manslaughter. For secret service agents, it's the trolley problem: do you let the train barrel forward and kill countless people? Or do you shoot the driver (and maybe the vice driver, and probably get yourself killed) so that someone who isn't utterly divorced from reality can redirect it down a track with a lot fewer people on it? Time's running out.

By nature, I am not a worrier. But I'm worried about people back home. 

suddenly worrying about work

I have been lucky to be in pretty much constant employment since I was 16, and to have had a steady and steadily increasing paycheck every two weeks from age 21 to 32. That, despite graduating from college as the global financial crisis was peaking in 2008. I gave up that stability last summer so that I could become a full-time student. But I was sanguine about the prospects of getting a job as soon as I finished. Suddenly, the economy looks headed for an even worse hit than the bankers caused 12 years ago. And suddenly, for the first time in my adult life, I'm worried about getting a job.

I've started to enter my CV into various companies' talent pools, both for consultancies and for staff positions that may open up. And I'm going to start emailing former colleagues soon to let them know that I'll be looking for consultancies from as early as June or even late May. Or maybe earlier if it's a part-time thing. Arrogantly Cockily, I had been expecting to be able to be selective in what I applied for, even to avoid applying for straight-up business development jobs. Looks like a wider net will be necessary.

(EDIT: Trying not to be so hard on myself.)

school reform

I read an article in the Post by a champion of "school reform" about why it failed. It astounds me that people can be so well-meaning, so well-educated, so evidently bright, and yet so deeply wrong about the root of problems. The failures of NCLB and the charter movement failed because they are liberal and neoliberal, with their focus on individual freedom and individual responsibility and their utterly misplaced faith in the market and the ideal of "competition." A charter advocate has a "gee golly we should have focused on the funding gap" moment at the end of the article. That is just exasperating. How did you miss the structural problem, lady?! Schools are embedded in society. They are a public good. The idea that you could fix the problems of poor and minority-majority schools by making stricter and narrower standards and then punishing poor performers is just nutty.

It reminded me of something Jonathan Kozol said when I saw him speak at Michigan in ~2005: "People say to me, 'So what are you saying, we should just throw more money at schools?' And I say, 'Yes! Yes, exactly!'" Also, bring back busing. I should ask Gabby about this, he worked in charter schools and now he's assistant principal of a public school. 

the other shoe

So far, the government here is talking basically just pleading with people to do the right thing with social distancing. But people aren't, so they finally closed pubs, restaurants, gyms, etc. on Friday. And today the mayor of London put out a message saying they might get the police to start enforcing social distancing. It feels like past time, given how things have gone elsewhere. People still aren't taking it seriously. SRB and I went to the Olympic Park today to get some sunshine and there were lots of people out and about. That would be fine, as far as I understand, if everyone stayed in little pods limited to the people they live with. And most seem to be that way: parents with kids, obvious couples, singletons. Maintaining plenty of distance. But there was a group of 15 or so doing a boot camp-type workout and they were periodically getting into little circles and doing sit ups much too close together. Separately, I saw a guy pick up an errant Frisbee that a couple were throwing back and forth. I wanted to yell at them all. Weird impulse.

A helicopter was hovering overhead for a while, I wonder if it was monitoring how much mixing was going on below.

The boot campers weren't even touching each other, as far as I saw. But still it seems really irresponsible to be gathering in a group at all, especially outside. And I wonder if SRB and I ourselves are being too blasé, even though we kept good distance when we do go outside for a walk or run and haven't had any in-person social interaction with anyone other than each other since Sunday for me, Monday for her. I was self-isolating even more strictly for the past week because of my cold. Went to the grocery store around the corner yesterday for the first time and even then I didn't interact with anyone and held my breath passing people in the aisles.

A friend from Islamabad, who's now posted in El Salvador, texted a group we're both part of that the government there just imposed a 30-day quarantine, Wuhan-style. One person at a time can leave to buy groceries, any other outside journeys severely curtailed, necessary sectors continue working under strict conditions, payment of bills suspended for three months, financial assistance for low-income families, restaurants can do deliveries. Police are patrolling and anyone caught violating quarantine will be sent to a government camp or detention center of some kind of the rest of the 30-day period. And, unbelievably, my reaction to that is, "Well, seems a bit harsh, but fair enough." Something similar going on now in Kazakhstan, another group member said.

It's amazing to me how quickly my brain adapted to the idea that what is essentially martial law could be sensible, how quickly I've accepted that people need to be protected from themselves and their own stupid behavior in such an extreme way. It is hard to imagine that ordinary social interaction with apparently healthy people could be harmful, even with the media telling a consistent and alarming story about it. It is hard to change behavior so fast. Coming back to SRB and me: I don't want to believe that my being outside in public, alone, is too dangerous for society at large, regardless of whether or not it is. But I don't really know. So I'm sympathetic to people who draw the line a bit more self-servingly than I do.

I suppose the quarantines are a bit like a temporary and very extreme form of seatbelt laws or drunk driving checkpoints. Especially in countries where the health system is really not prepared for a heavy onslaught, even more so than places like the UK or US. But then again, detention centers? Charging people with a crime? I still don't like that. Plus detention centers seem like they'd be incubators. 

elinor ostrom

I'm only a chapter in but I think Elinor Ostrom's book Governing the Commons is going to be one of the best things I read this year. (I'm saving The Mirror and the Light for the weekend and glorious guilt-free uninterrupted pleasure reading hours; I started it last week but it's unsatisfying to take sips.) The tragedy of the commons always struck me as an overly pessimistic assumption, and I'm sad that it took so long for me to come across such a trenchant and concerted attack on the idea that it's an inevitable outcome of leaving people to manage resources without imposing private property rights or central planning. 

how to survive a plague

Current circumstances bring that title to mind, if not the content of the movie. Good documentary, very illuminating for me as a person who was generally aware of the early history of the AIDS crisis but didn't have a real appreciation for the intensity of it.

It's a bit odd to be in the UK at this point in the covid-19 pandemic when other countries in Europe are declaring states of emergency and schools are closing for weeks. The government here is urging much less stringent measures than in other countries, declining to close schools or issuing any social distancing recommendations beyond "stay inside for seven days if you have a severe cough or fever." People should always do that, in fact it drives me nuts when they don't. The tube has been a little less crowded than usual but not too much. We did have class remotely this morning, as a Zoom meeting, which worked better than I thought it would. And UCL, along with many other universities, decided to have all classes be remote for the rest of the term (only one more week in my case).

But SRB and I are still planning to head to Dover this evening for a long-planned weekend getaway. We are both feeling fine; I'm a little congested at the moment but doesn't seem like anything out of the ordinary for the wintertime: not even sniffling. Just more attuned to it than usual. Still, I packed my thermometer.

I'm looking forward to seeing the white cliffs of Dover and eating at a restaurant up the coast from where we're staying, which a reviewer in the Guardian called "heroically wondrous." And to getting a change of scenery with SRB. It's been a tough few weeks and even months for us. We had some intense conversations last weekend that seem to have helped. And having a break from our routine, our shared space, our everyday food and furniture and views, should be nice.

In unrelated news, I have some kind of bizarre plantar fasciitis that's entirely in the arch of my foot, not at all in the ball or heel. It's fine -- no pain or even discomfort -- 90% of the time but on some runs starts to bug me a little in the first couple of kilometers and on other runs bugs me for a little while afterward. I tried to ignore it for a while because it's never severe enough to hobble me and it's usually not there at all. But it's also not going away, so finally had to concede that the only solution is to rest and to stretch feet and calves. Vexing.

piano and guitar

SRB bought a piano the other day after talking about it for years. While she was in Pakistan recently I also finally started learning guitar and have now stuck with it long enough (a week and a half) to have passed the "fingers hurt to much to keep going" stage and am moving toward the "can almost play along with 'Born in the USA'" stage. She passed out early tonight and so I plugged my headphones into the piano, loaded up a YouTube lesson on Für Elise for rank beginners, and played the melody of that piece all the way through for the first time in at least 15 years. It ruled.

I've been piddling away at card tricks, too, and even learned a couple of really basic ones. But the truth is magic is no fun to share with anyone until you're great at it and music can be fun even if you're mediocre. Now I just need to start learning how to sing a little. 

kobe

EDIT: And just for fun, here's a corrective to my use below of the term "complicated." https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/m7qbqx/kobe-bryant-was-no-more-complicated-than-anyone-else. What he said.

The original post (to be clear, I meant in terms of my position as a fan, not in terms of Kobe's character):

Kobe was never one of my favorite players. I was in high school when he and Shaq went on their historic tear through the league and I vastly preferred Shaq's exuberant dominance to Kobe's joyless drive. He always seemed to be trying too hard; that manufactured scowl he adopted later in his career verged on embarrassing. And god help anyone who tries to give themself a nickname, although to his credit he managed to make Black Mamba stick. But even though he might never have been the best player in the league -- Shaq and Tim Duncan were ahead of him early in his career and LeBron and KD late, Steve Nash probably should have won the MVP again the year that Kobe got his consolation one -- he was an undeniably giant presence, a superstar. And an undeniably great player.

A basketball writer I follow on Twitter posted today that one thing Kobe's death is making clear is that people who do not understand the emotional power of sports cannot understand why people are taking the death so hard. That's really true. SRB was trying to tease out of me the other day an explanation for why watching sports live is so important, and she concluded that it's because of the fact that watching live means a fan can share the emotional journey of the game or match with thousands or millions of other people, even if only virtually. That is certainly a big part of it, but there's more to it than that and I couldn't describe it to her in a way that landed. Sports fandom is ineffable, like fandom of any aesthetic pursuit. Why do people love ballet, or the theater, or going to watch their favorite musicians sing live? It's magical, that's why. Watching Kobe cook was, sometimes, magical.

It's especially hard to explain to someone who doesn't like sports why there's this outpouring for Kobe, who raped a 19-year-old in Colorado in 2003, when he was 24. The charges were dropped and he settled a civil suit with her out of court, but in the aftermath he said words to the effect of, "I genuinely thought we were having a consensual encounter, but after reading the court documents and speaking with her lawyers, I understand that it was non-consensual." Non-consensual sex is rape, Kobe raped her, QED.

In this sense Kobe's death and the way he's being memorialized are tied up with #MeToo and society's reckoning with the violence of patriarchy. Do we still get to enjoy public figures who have done terrible crimes? The default to canceling sometimes seems wrong, as it did with Aziz Ansari. I don't think there's a blanket answer. In Kobe's case, he spent the 15 years after the case ended outwardly doing everything he could to be a good husband and father, and of course being a basketball star. He paid the woman he raped some presumably large amount of money and admitted to what he did. As far as I know, it's the only time he was accused of such an act. He was a great basketball player, an inspiration to millions of people, an apparently genuine family man, and, judging by the tears of many NBA players as their games tipped off last night, a valued friend. And practically every time someone brought him up to me in the last 15 years, I said something about Colorado.

So I guess I conclude that any honest memorialization of Kobe's life has to include an acknowledgement that, along with all his accomplishments and good qualities, he raped someone. That it's okay to celebrate the former as long as the latter is not buried. Not breaking any ground there, I don't think. But the reflection is valuable for me as a guidepost in evaluating other public figures. How bad was the crime? That's part of it. We'll hopefully (for the sake of the woman involved) never know the details of Kobe's crime but it was pretty bad. Did the person admit what they did, accept responsibility? In Kobe's case, it seems like he did, or maybe kinda-did. Did the person seem to learn from the experience of committing the crime and to change their behavior accordingly? Seems like Kobe did, or at least was the kind of person who could: He once called a ref a "fucking fag" after being given a foul, and, in response to the outrage, apologized and started working with GLAAD and eventually scolding his own fans for using gay slurs.

I don't know. It's complicated. In any case my heart goes out to his wife and three surviving daughters, and the families of the other people killed.

...

On a completely different note, I've been lucky enough to spend a lot more time than most people riding in helicopters. it's an incredibly cool way to get around. And the pilots and flight engineers at the company I worked for were extremely highly trained, experienced, and cautious professionals. Close to 50% of the flights I was supposed to take over the years were cancelled or cut off early because the pilots had such high standards for flying conditions, especially visibility. I read an eyewitness account of the Kobe crash that made it sound like it might have been caused by a combination of visibility (it was so foggy) and mechanical failure (it didn't sound right). So I'm grateful today for our pilots' hyper-cautiousness. 

fever

Worse than heartburn. Felt fine all day until I was on the way home from school. When I got home I lay down and when I woke up: 101. An hour or so later: 102.2. Now it's up to 102.6. SRB is ministering to me but this just sucks. Taking the day off tomorrow, hate to skip class. Emailed the professor to see if there was any way I could dial in.

heartburn

It's a drag. Had it pretty bad while lying in bed last night. No apparent cause: I didn't eat anything unusual or too much, hadn't drunk any alcohol. I had a low-grade fever and generally felt like crap, but that's never been linked to heartburn for me before. It's back this evening, after eating some very bready food that SRB brought home via an app that connects restaurants who have leftover food that they're about to throw out with people who want cheap food. It was pretty bad, but again, nothing out of the ordinary. Have I suddenly developed an aversion to, I don't know, white flour? I had two PB&J sandwiches for lunch with no problem, albeit on whole grain bread.

I've tried some baking soda dissolved in water and may give a bit more of that a go in a few minutes if things don't calm down. That eventually did the trick last night/early this morning.

measurement

I haven't updated my blogroll in a while. Blogroll, now there's an obsolete term. One that I've been reading the last year or so is From Poverty to Power, by Duncan Green at Oxfam. Recently he posted a list of the blog's ten most-read posts from 2019. A couple are really interesting. One, by the outgoing CEO of Oxfam, is about strategic planning. It includes this chart, which I just love:

Another, by the feminist development scholar Naila Kabeer,* is about the blindness of randomized controlled trials in development to human agency; in other words to why interventions that appear to work, work. An extremely relevant critique especially now that Duflo, Bannerjee, and Kremer have won the Nobel.

On that subject, we read a post from another blog for Social Diversity, Inequality, and Poverty class this week about the limitations of RCTs in development. I've always been skeptical of RCTs, even when I first became aware of J-PAL and Esther Duflo 7-8 years ago (thanks Caryn). They're expensive and have little independent ability to learn anything outside the very narrow context that they set out to study. The author of that blog points out (paraphrasing) that learning something through an RCT about incentivizing teachers to show up to class in rural Kenya is unlikely to tell you anything that you couldn't already intuit through theory about incentivizing teachers to show up in rural India. And in fact, it's crazy to expect an RCT to do that! They're only good at measuring internal validity (a good new term for me).

We're going to spend a lot of time this term learning about measurement, which is exciting. I spent 10 years doing super conventional development project M&E: log frames, PMPs, baseline surveys, etc. It'll be fun to learn about those things anew and then to learn what else is out there in terms of how to figure out whether policies and practices are having the intended effects.

*Who rules, by the way. 

academic publishing

Partway through the first week of term 2, and I've just returned the final library book I'd checked out for the papers I wrote for term 1. It's Hybrid Media Activism, by a scholar at the University of Cardiff named Emiliano Trere. I found it very helpful, in fact I built one of my papers around his understanding of the ways in which social movements use and are shaped by communication practices. His analysis is rich and insightful and the cases he presents -- not all of which I had time read -- are very interesting. It's the kind of book I'd just like to have on my shelf at home. But it's published by Routledge, so it costs 120 pounds, or $90 if I were buying it in the US. Riddle me that. Academic publishing is a scam.

Term 2 is looking promising. On Tuesday we started the "citizenship" part of my two-term class called Social Policy and Citizenship. Term 1 looked at different models of social and economic policy, planning, and development. This term will be spent using ideas of citizenship as a way to understand who has access to rights and entitlements in different places, especially now in the context of globalization. This morning was the first session of my one new class, NGOs and Social Transformation. Based on the readings and the first lecture and activity, seems that it will be everything I hoped and dreamed.

It's just after 5 PM now. In a few minutes I'll head into a workshop about some research on nationalizing the Sustainable Development Goals, hosted by the NGOST professor. He strongly encouraged us to come. I haven't attended as many of these extracurricular events as I should, so figured this would be a good one to start with. Doubt I will learn anything revelatory -- contextualizing SDGs is something I did professionally. But there's a networking drinks afterward, so maybe I'll get some interesting conversation out of it. SDR may join, as well, once she gets off work.

Unrelated update: I started lifting weights again on Monday. Easing back into it: I'm so sore today that I couldn't even finish warming up on squats and had to cut things short. But I've done nothing but run for more than two years and figured it'd be good to mix things up and give my body a different stimulus for a while. Planning to give it six weeks, see how much strength I can recover (I'm VERY weak compared to where I was a few years ago), and then shift my focus back to running. 

a little royal curiosity

So big news in the UK today is that Prince Harry and Princess Meghan have decided to "step back from senior royal duties" and "work toward becoming financially independent." Generally speaking, I am indifferent to the royal family. They are an unfairly rich anachronism and a source of pride and an important symbol for many people here. Whatever. But I noticed a funny tendency on Twitter today: the men I follow who tweeted about the move shared the same sentiment, which I'll sum up as, "LOL as if royalty could ever even know what it means to be financially independent, this is dumb, who gives a shit." And the women I follow who tweeted about it shared the same sentiment, which I'll sum up as, "Yasss kween! This act of boundary setting is profoundly erotic to me!" 

As the day went on the reactions started to mix a little. But for a while there was a super stark gender divide. Kind of interesting.

ahmad jamal trio - poinciana

I have listened to one or another version of this song about 15 times today. Not sure why it slays me so.

ponte de areia - wayne shorter ft. milton nascimento

two years

Today marks two years since Jack died. I'm in London, so the time to mark is 6:50 PM (1:50 PM Eastern time), although, because there weren't any witness that I know of, that's just an estimate. M, D, Linc, and I checked in this morning for about fifteen minutes, just going over what each of us was planning to do today. M seemed to be feeling the most fragile, she started to cry a couple of times during the call. She and D are going to Sugarloaf Mountain -- to scatter ashes? something we'd discussed, but they didn't say for sure -- and she's cooking dinner for a childhood friend of mine who just had a baby. Acorn squash, something Jack liked to eat. Linc is going for a hike. And I've reopened FB for the first time in nearly two years, to look first at what I wrote about Jack in the days after his death and then to look at his profile. Later today, we will talk again at greater length, focusing on things we loved about Jack and happy memories of him.

I opened Blogger for the first time in ages just now, as well, and of course it brought back a lot things I hadn't thought about in a while: dreams I had of him -- that's something we all had very intensively in the months after he died; reflections on trying to write about him; poetry that touched me. I'd been reading Faiz, whose poem "My Companion, My Friend" seems even more poignant now than it did at the time I first encountered it. Wonder why that is. Maybe I'll read it tonight. I should also go get the collection Klein gave me in 2018, Black Aperture, down off the shelf. It's poems about a guy who killed himself, by that guy's brother. Close to home.

Something I'll bring up again on the call, as well, if I remember, is the idea of writing a biography or at least oral history of Jack.

I'm feeling okay today. It doesn't seem like the most important anniversary to recognize: two years ago today I still had no idea he was dead, and wouldn't for several more days. Blissful ignorance. The tenth, early morning, is the moment I will never forget. And of course his birthday, to be commemorated as Word Games Day forevermore. But the exact timing of an anniversary like this is beside the point, the point is to set aside time and space to remember, and ponder, and feel. I have too much work to do before class starts next week to spend a whole day on that. But I'm doing it throughout the day and looking forward to tonight's call.

prayer, by faiz ahmed faiz

Come, let us also raise our hands to pray
We who have forgotten the protocols of prayer
We who don't remember anything
No God, no idol, nothing except the burning pain of love

Come, let us pray
that the beloved called Life may pour
tomorrow's sweetness in the poison of today
Lighten the burden of the days and nights
on the eyelashes of those
who don't have the strength anymore to bear it

Brighten with a candle, any candle
The nights of those whose eyes have lost the power
to sustain the glance of morning's bright face
Bring to light a path, any path
Before the eyes of those whose feet haven't the support
of any kind of road

For those whose dogma has been to talk the path
of untruth, of hypocrisy: let them be vouchsafed
the strength of denial and intrepid search for truth
Let those whose heads await the executioner's sword
be granted the puissant grace to wrench and spurn
the murderer's hand

The buried secret of love, which is like a fever in the spirit
Let's confess to it today and obliterate the burning pain
The True Word, which throbs in the heart like a thorn
Let us say it today
and take away the stab of the pain

the sudden death of a child

I came across this article today at my desk, an excerpt from a memoir by a man whose two-year-old daughter was killed in a freak accident. I had to fight myself from getting choked up, because I'm at work and that is not a good look. The author's description of being in the hospital resonated so, so very hard. God damn it.

grandfather's golf cart

Last night I was overcome briefly by a memory of being at Liz's, the day after Christmas, talking in the kitchen with Andrew or Katie or Uncle Larry. At some point we became aware the the house had quieted down, and then that the cause of this peace was the absence of the little cousins. Where had they gone? And then I looked out through the French doors into the backyard and saw Jack placidly driving grandfather's old golf cart back and forth, with seemingly the entire roster of Peale cousins piled on and laughing gleefully. Jack wasn't smiling but his face looked relaxed and peaceful. I have no idea where he'd gotten the idea to do that, let alone the keys to the cart. Jack never learned how to drive and I'm pretty sure that's the only time I saw him behind the wheel of anything off a go-kart track.

Not sure what happened after that. I suppose he stopped driving the cart, the kids came back inside, and he did, too. Uncomfortably slotting himself back in with the Allen-Peales, probably heading back out for a cigarette at the earliest opportunity. But in the moment on the lawn feeling happy and comfortable

The image of him on the golf cart is one I cherish, for its incongruity, for the joy on the faces of our cousins, for the way it reminds me of Jack's mischievousness. 

dreaming about jack

The last two nights, I dreamed about Jack. First two in a while. On Wednesday, I walked into a laundromat to do my laundry, looked over to my left, and there he was, casually looking at his phone on an orange plastic chair. He was about his 19-year-old self, thin and with his boyish short blond mop. He looked up and we made eye contact. I was stunned, unable to say anything. He started, but then composed himself quickly. I guess he realized the jig was up. He explained that he'd faked the suicide to try to get away from some problem, I can't remember the specifics of his explanation. I was flabbergasted and confused, unsure whether to be furious or elated.

Last night, I was at home when we got a call that he'd tried to kill Maura L before killing himself. I was in the process of writing her a long letter, apologizing on Jack's behalf, when I woke up.

Wonder why the back-to-back dreams. While I was making breakfast this morning, the old guilt about not listening right away to his raps on Soundcloud or watching his videos washed up to the surface. I miss him.

life is short

Two Three friends died suddenly in the last two weeks. The first was a newer friend, a young Islamabadi woman who was funny and keen. She was a passenger in a single-car crash a mile or so from our house. Apparently the driver had looked at her phone to change the song, lost control, and gone off the road into a water-filled ditch. The driver and two of the passengers drowned, two other passengers survived. It happened while SRB and I were in Lahore a couple of weeks ago and we drove past the spot on the way home. We stopped and got out and it was strange to see the newly-broken branches on the shrubs that she crashed through.

The second was an older friend, someone from C@P, who died last week. We hadn't been in touch a few years. I found out via a post on the C@P Facebook page. Linc forwarded me a message from another friend explaining that the friend who died had gone to the hospital for breathing difficulty, been diagnosed with bacterial pneumonia, spent a week in the hospital and been discharged. Then when the problems resurfaced they went back to the hospital and were diagnosed with cancer and TB. Three massive heart attacks followed and that was it.

The third was a childhood buddy and baseball teammate who drowned when his kayak flipped in some rapids. A gentle, sweet kid. I used to look up to his dad, too, who seemed like a cool guy. He (the dad) worked at the Textile Museum in DC. We'd been out of touch for many years.

Jack dying last year was a worse blow by orders of magnitude. There is no comparison. But still, it's terrible to feel such a sudden loss of people you care about, even if only a little or mostly in memory.

One of the things it's made me think a lot about is fear. I talk a big game sometimes about not being afraid in situations where I have no control. Turbulence, for example, doesn't much bother me because (1) plane crashes are exceptionally rare, while turbulence is common; and (2) by boarding I've ceded power over my life to the pilot and to the plane itself. The lack of control is freeing, in a way: if we go down we go down so what's the point in stressing about it? When others are scared during turbulence I genuinely feel okay about it.

But part of the grief I feel in the aftermath of these deaths is imagining of the panic and pain they felt at the end, and my heart aches for them. The first and third friends drowned. For the first, that means she was still alive when the car hit the water. I hope she was knocked out by the impact, because the thought of being awake, trapped, and pulled under water is almost unbearable. For the second, it's hard to imagine that he wasn't conscious, fiercely trying to right himself or get out of trouble until it was too late. And I hope the friend who died in the hospital was unconscious when his heart failed. But even if so, it must have been bewildering and terrifying to suddenly be in the hospital and sicker than most anyone expects to be in their mid-30s. Cancer? TB? Fuck.

2018 review - work

*Wrote this back in January but didn't publish it before for some reason. Maybe I thought it was unfinished.*

In 2018, we submitted 23 proposals valued at $95.5 million. That's nearly two per month, and for much of the year I was the only dedicated business development person on staff. That is a lot of ad hoc team formation, coordination, and management, not to mention the writing, consultations, design workshops led, Of those we won four, valued at $7.4 million, and lost five, valued at $9.4 million. The remaining 16 proposals, worth $78.7 million, are pending. That doesn't include the stuff we submitted the year before that we're still waiting on, or the $80+ million worth of potential projects we're negotiating with a few different donors. And, you know, all the other things I'm responsible for: communications, monitoring and evaluation, gender, stakeholder engagement (which includes the odious task of planning visits for big muckity-mucks).

I try to keep a pretty modest view of my own competencies. On the plus side, I'm a good writer and editor. I'm personable and confident and I can run a meeting or chip in usefully to someone else's. I'm committed to inclusion and justice in the office and in our work, moreso perhaps than many of my colleagues. But I'm not super well organized, prone to procrastination, a well-liked but uncertain and probably too-passive manager (although I think I've improved a lot over the last two years), and at least slightly out of my depth on a couple of the key things my department is responsible for: monitoring and evaluation (about which I know the basics but am not super strong) and communications (about which I barely know even the basics, apart from being able to write well). Occasionally my procrastination and dislike of certain tasks means things slide that shouldn't. When we're not winning money, that negative stuff really sticks out and it's hard not to question or feel bad even about the parts of my job I think I'm good at.

So it's kind of nice to look back and realize that what I perceive as a lack of success last year isn't due to a lack of hard work or productivity. We really did bust our butts. 

the silk roads

Extremely well-written and exhaustively reported history of the region running from modern Turkey and Egypt to western China, and from the Central Asian steppe to the Persian Gulf. The first half of the book is told at a breathtaking pace: Richard I merits barely two sentences in a chapter about the early Crusades. And it is told really from the perspective of the people who lived and traveled around the "Silk Roads" region. The Vikings are relevant only because they were big traders of slaves from Europe into Persian and Arab markets. Even Rome is an afterthought. Much more important

Frankopan slows down as he gets into the rise of Europe over the last 500 years, and gets progressively slower as the tale gets more recent. The last 200-odd pages are dedicated to the period from World War I to the present. And oddly, for a book that sets out to be a corrective to Eurocentric narratives that look "at the past from the perspective of the winners of recent history," the perspective of the second half of the book is decidedly Eurocentric. Sure, various European countries took turns becoming the dominant power during that stretch. But it's disappointing that we're not told that story from the perspective of, say, the Levantine traders who partnered with Venice and Genoa, or the Persian bureaucrats who signed away the country's oil wealth to Britain and the Persian businessmen.

Partly that must be because records from recent centuries are so much richer than those from longer ago. And partly it may be because the organizing principle of history in Frankopan's telling is the trade of luxury goods (and, recently, bulk commodities like wheat and oil). As Europe became the world's main consumer and eventually trader of those goods, maybe it's inevitable that Frankopan would start to speak with their voice. Still, it's a bit of a let-down. I bet the Persians kept keeping records.

The last couple of chapters rehashed events I'm already pretty familiar with: US and British fuckery in this part of the world, the Cold War, and then 9/11 and its fallout. Still, there were some nuggets in there that I didn't know or had forgotten, such as Dick Cheney's personal role in selling nuclear technology to Iran in the 1970s. And Frankopan is a lively enough writer that I didn't mind racing through that bit.

On the whole, it's an impressive historical survey of a crucial part of the world. Easy four stars.

patricia lockwood

I came across this piece by Patricia Lockwood in the London Review of Books, "The Communal Mind," and it is blowing my little mind. I've not finished it yet because it's long and I'm at work, but holy crap. I was vaguely aware of her poetry and online presence -- the title of her collection Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals is hard to forget -- but now I'm dying to read more of it. This prose poetry, whatever it is, in the LRB piece, is about the experience of living a life that's connected inextricably to the internet. I think a lot about my own compulsive clicking and scrolling, worry about it in a vague way, occasionally make efforts to reduce screen time. I am, luckily, not a terribly compulsive person, so I don't think I have it as bad as some. But no one has ever crystallized the experience of living online like this, at least not that I've read.

A sample:

The next morning your eyes were gritty and your tongue even less pink, and the people who filtered past you at your job were less real than the vivid scroll of the board dedicated to the discussion of candida overgrowth, which didn’t even exist.

Why were her lungs so shallow after three or four hours of it, and her pulse like a rabbit’s, its whole body full of the thought what’s there, what’s next, what is that wind? And blood, do I smell blood?

Was there even a gloaming any more, or had the computers eaten it?
And had there always been this many mystery blobs washing up on seashores, or was it new?

A picture of a species of tree frog that had recently been discovered. Scientists speculated that the reason it had never before been seen was because, quote, ‘It is covered with warts and it wants to be left alone.’

me
me
unbelievably me
it me

baccara, or, who the hell is that?

Down some infernal internet rabbit hole this afternoon, I ended up on the Wikipedia page listing the best-selling songs of all time. Three of the rarified top group, which have sold more than 15 million copies, are Christmas songs. Bing Crosby's got two: "White Christmas" and "Silent Night." Mariah Carey's "All I Want for Christmas Is You" is eleventh, with 16 million copies sold. The others in that group are all instantly recognizable. "Candle in the Wind," that sort of thing. But I did a double take on number nine: "Yes Sir, I Can Boogie," by Baccara. Didn't ring a bell. So I looked it up on YouTube thinking it would be something I knew but not by name.

Two things:

1. It is a terrible song. 
2. I'd never heard it before. 

What? How is it possible that I had never in my life heard even a snatch of the ninth-best-selling single ever? The other songs on the list are, again, ubiquitous. Part of the fabric of existence, as impossible to avoid as the golden arches. "My Heart Will Go On" plays in muzak form in the lobby of my office building every single day. But I made it to 32 without ever hearing "Yes Sir, I Can Boogie." 

traveling

My friend Andrew made a post in his training journal about being excited to use racing as an excuse to travel in 2019. He said he's never been on a plane and only left Florida twice. Got me thinking about traveling and about how much I take for granted my own experience of it. When Linc came to visit last year, he hadn't been overseas in a few years, since he visited Alex in South Korea. He was nervous about arriving in a strange country and extremely relieved that SRB and I were waiting for him outside the terminal. M&D went to England four years (?) ago and haven't been overseas since. They are coming in April and they'll stop in Istanbul on the way for a couple of days, an adventure they would not likely be planning if I hadn't decided to live 7,000 miles away.

Meanwhile, I've built my life around traveling. SRB is even more extreme: apart from living in Pakistan, her mother, father, sister, and brothers all live in different countries (South Africa, France, Australia, UK), and as she becomes part of my family that's another country altogether (US, obviously). If we stay together over the long term, even if we settle down somewhere and leave the field we're in, which requires international travel, we'll still have to fly long distances to visit family.

One of the reasons I was interested in international development as a field coming out of college was that I wanted to get paid to travel and eventually live overseas again. I was less than a year removed from living in Chile when I got my first job and itching to see new places. Eleven years later, that mission is well and truly accomplished. I'll finish 2018 having flown nearly 90,000 miles and having been to ten countries (^ = my first time there):

1. Pakistan
2. USA
3. Tajikistan
4. Portugal^
5. UK
6. Singapore
7. Malaysia^
8. South Africa^
9. Botswana^
10. Namibia^

Pretty cool. I've been incredibly lucky.  

stuart: a life backwards

It's not often that a book can make me gasp out loud involuntarily. Stuart: a life backwards is moving, funny, sad, extraordinary. I'm quite sure I've never read anything like it before. The high-wire act Masters pulls off of telling the biography of a personal friend, with himself as an omnipresent but not intrusive character, is a real feat of storytelling. He makes himself a foil for Stuart without getting cute or cynical or maudlin. And Stuart. Stuart! What a person. And what a portrait. Baffling, hilarious, thoughtful, violent, wise, generous, self-destructive to an unbearable degree. The parallels with Jack are obvious, although so are the dissimilarities.

And the revelation in the epilogue is just, well, gasp-inducing. 

oops a daisy

Today I learned that the big boss has seen and registered my name. Not that big boss, think bigger. Yeah, that one. The one whose name is the other name on my business card. And, through absolutely no fault of my own, not in a good way. Sigh.

Seems that he was recently reading a mission report for a trip I went on. I write these as a matter of routine whenever a senior foreign dignitary goes to visit our programs. Ambassadors and the like. Because I went on this trip (not sure which one it was), my name and title are on it. Again, routine. But this time, seems he circled my name and title, wrote, "Who is this?" and was displeased when he found out that I'm a 31-year-old American. He has a thing about titles. I kind of knew that already but it had never applied to me personally so it was always just something to shake my head about. The leadership defended me, apparently, as they must because my position in the organization is their responsibility. This is not a big deal, really. But it means that they had to spend time and energy defending my existence to the man our organization is named after. And therefore, one of the feelings triggered by my name now among the top leadership is discomfort and irritation.

Not great, Bob.

This information came to me from my old boss, JT. She is in town, along with a big delegation of our global program people. We had a good long talk this morning about a couple of things, one of which was frank information from her about the narrative that has developed around me in the absence of active input on my part or, really, awareness that such a narrative existed. It's not super negative or anything, but she had some really good advice about people to cultivate who I have not been cultivating. And about how to more actively inform the story about me. Basically, we talked about the internal political game and how I could be playing it better.

Ultimately, it may not matter. I'm planning to leave next year, do my master's, and try my hand in some other company. But her input is a really good reality check about where I stand. And some of the advice is universally practical in a big bureaucracy: if the higher-ups think sunny thoughts when you come up, it doesn't matter very much how good a job you're actually doing. Don't complain overmuch about intractable problems. Acknowledge them, park them to one side, and describe what you're doing to address problems you can do something about. Actually, that's practical advice for life in general, in a bureaucracy or anywhere.

Much to absorb and reflect on this weekend.

dream - murder most foul

Recently I had a dream that I was with a couple of friends - not real people, just dream characters - and we were crashing at one guy's house. Then the main guy I was with poisoned someone to death and I was right there so he made me help him dismember the body and put it in bags. The other guy was asleep. I was terrified, but mostly of him, so I went along. He poured us gin and tonics at one point.

Later, I met up with M&D in the post office in downtown Takoma Park. I was freaking out but keeping my cool externally. We went to an outdoor concert in a wooded area. I had to poop, so I went off in search of a bathroom. There was none; the toilet was inside an old beat-up couch sitting out in the open but far enough from the stage area to be obscured by trees. Nothing to stop anyone just walking up to you, though. But the urge was bad, so I flipped back one of the cushions to reveal a toilet seat. Then I woke up.

biography

In an interview I read a couple of years ago, Hilary Mantel describes reading as a writer as being partly about constantly tracking how the story is told. In other words, she couldn't help but pay close attention to what was being done to her by the author on the other end of her interaction with whatever book she was reading. I have moments like that, but they're mainly flashes of wonder: stepping outside John McPhee's description of taking a walk in Alaska while his compatriots readied their canoes for a river journey and thinking, "How in the hell is he making this incredibly mundane experience so compelling?"

New resolution is to pay closer attention to that, not just from a prose standpoint but from a structure standpoint. Might even start taking notes sometimes. Other resolution is to start reading more great biographies. I am seized by the idea of writing a biography of Jack, as I was this summer by my dream/vision of him as a 46-year-old with a teenaged daughter. That ran aground, as I've said before, on the need to make sure such a projection is true to who he was, that the intervening decades grow organically from the point where in this universe he ended his life. And so the more I thought about that, the more I realized that I needed to grapple with and understand and face his life. What a life he lived, what a life we all lived around him. But it's very difficult to know where to start. The most I have is snatches of this and that, a kind of haphazard list of Things To Talk About.

• How he died, when, where
• His itinerantness
• The joys of our suburban childhood, brotherhood
• The puzzlement we all felt at his early and persistent pessimism
• Laughing at him when he got angry because he was so cute
• Playing "bang" and "sock wars" in the backyard and in the addition just after it was finished and before we had any furniture. 
• Tickling him and Lincoln until they couldn't take it anymore, the "ultimate punishment"
• Drumming
• His drive to practice anything he wanted to be good at: dribbling, popping wheelies, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4
• His athleticism
• The inadequacy of our mental healthcare system, and the competence and compassion of some of the people working it
• Mom and Dad's (especially Mom's) relentless advocacy for and support to him
• Heroin, cocaine, meth, and the drug crisis
• Lincoln's moving and profound acknowledgement, during the memorial service in May, of Jack's shame at his own inability to meet the expectations of a capitalist, patriarchal society
• Words: poetry, rap, Scrabble
• That brief moment after his coma, before he'd been prescribed new psych meds, when he was detoxed from any and all chemicals and as lucid and clear and happy as I ever saw him, ripping through One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Hobbit
• Jail and juvie
• Scars and physical brokenness, the toll that years of mental illness and drug abuse and losing control of himself took on his body
• His dignity, his despair

And so on.

Right now I'm reading Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World, by Joshua Freeman, and Home Fire, by Kamila Shamsie. Also The Island of Doctor Moreau, out loud with SRB. Once those are done, time to start in on some biographies. 

Also, time to start doing a bit of research on oral history techniques. And, well, research.

opioids

At a party last night a friend mentioned that she'd been listening to a German podcast (she is German) about the American opioid crisis, and how fascinated she was by it. So much of the attention in the media, including the German media, apparently, is on the role of OxyContin and its like. My friend mentioned the Sacklers, for example: their company's role in perpetrating the crisis is unforgivable. There are so many stories about people getting injured or having surgery, getting addicted to the painkillers their doctor prescribed, and eventually shifting to heroin because it's cheap and easy to get. It's a compelling story: hardworking ordinary people as victims of a conspiracy of greedy corporations and doctors gone wrong.

Not everyone who ends up addicted to narcotics took that path, of course. 

debt-free

Today, exactly nine years and 11 months after I began paying off my student loans, I got an email from Cornerstone Education Loan Services. Subject line: "Congratulations! Your Loan(s) Has Been Paid In Full!"

When I graduated in May 2018, I got a six-month grace period before I had to start making payments. By November I'd been in my first full-time job for five months, making not very much but living at home. So when the loan service provider -- it was a different one then, no recollection of the name -- emailed me that it was time to start making payments, I entered into their online form an automatic monthly payment amount that would set me free in ten years.

Since then, I have been continuously employed (except briefly, by choice, in the months before moving to Pakistan), with increasing responsibilities and concurrently increasing salaries. I lucked into an extraordinarily cheap apartment in DC in 2009 and lived there for seven years, meaning hundreds of dollars a month that most of my friends were spending on rent was going into my savings account or 401k. I'm a somewhat cautious and non-impulsive spender, although I've taken some big trips and bought some splurge-y things over the past ten years. And every month, without my thinking much about it, a portion of my salary has gone straight to paying down my student loans. Until today.

There's an exercise called the unpacking the privilege backpack, created in the late 1980s by a feminist scholar named Peggy McIntosh as a way to critically examine the power she gained from being white in a racist society. In reflecting on my newly debt-free status, I re-read the essay she wrote about it. We used something akin to that activity in City at Peace, standing in a line and physically stepping forward and back as we decided whether each statement of systematically conferred (i.e. unearned) power, or lack thereof, applied to us.

I am white and benefit from the conferred power of that fact. Same goes for my cisgendered maleness, my heterosexuality, my native fluency in English, my American citizenship. And my economic status. Most people in the US think they're middle class and I was no different, but looking back I think we were in the top income quintile, at least when I graduated from high school. In any case, my income now places me in the upper quintile of salary earners in the US. My net worth is a little behind that, but relative to other people under 35 I'm way out in front. My income and wealth status are amplified in Pakistan by an order of magnitude or more: in the news recently has been the fact that less than one percent of Pakistanis earn a formal salary to pay taxes on.

Whatever hard work I've put in, whatever good planning I've done, is built on a foundation of unearned economic advantage. Systems of power and oppression are inextricably intertwined: In the City at Peace version of unpacking the privilege backpack, I ended up standing way out in front of most of my peers.

McIntosh concludes the essay about the privilege backpack this way: "Though systematic change takes many decades, there are pressing questions for me and I imagine for some others like me if we raise our daily consciousness on the perquisites of being light-skinned. What will we do with such knowledge? As we know from watching me, it is an open question whether we will choose to use unearned advantage to weaken hidden systems of advantage, and whether we will use any of our arbitrarily-awarded power to try to reconstruct power systems on a broader base."

In one way today is a happy day: there are systems of unaccountable financial power and oppression far greater than me or any individual person, and I am free from being beholden to them. That is something to celebrate and be grateful for. But it's also a day for reflecting on McIntosh's challenge. What am I doing with my consciousness of my own power to erode the foundations on which it's built? What am I doing with my arbitrarily-awarded power to try to reconstruct power systems on a broader base? Not nothing, but not enough. Must to do more, and more consistently. 

on prs and goal setting

One of my big goals for 2018 is to run under 20:00 in a 5k race. I've chosen to live in a country of 200 million people in which not a single formal, chip-timed public road race has been organized in the two years I've lived here. When I did two timed races in May, in the US and UK, I hit 20:40-20:50. A little research shows no races in any of the places SRB and I will be in southern Africa in November, and I won't be home again until Christmastime. So meeting my goal officially may have to wait until next year. Such is life.

However, that doesn't mean I can't keep pushing myself and training now. A good intermediate goal on the way to a sub-20 5k is a sub-12 3k. I read somewhere that a 3k time trial (i.e. a run done alone, rather than in live competition with others) is a good gauge of 5k race fitness. Well, this evening I warmed up and then ran 3 km in 11:48. Feeling very happy about that right now. Good capper to what was kind of a shitty week at work.

a sick child

Last weekend I went to a cafe to do some work and attend a meeting of the Desi Writers' Lounge writing club. I'd gone to DWL's book club meetings before -- quite regularly, actually, until they moved the meeting time up to when I'm still at work. But after starting this summer to write creatively for the first time in many years (doggerel sonnets and limericks to counteract boredom excepted), I'd lost the big mo. SRB encouraged me to go and see if it kick-started me. I didn't find the group until an hour after the meeting had started because apparently the format is an hour of silent work, followed by an hour of discussion. But when they started talking, I put away the proposal I was writing and introduced myself to the group.

My foray into creative writing started with a waking dream of Jack at 46, in a car with his teenaged daughter, fleeing something or someone. As I fleshed the story out, his stand-in character ended up living in Richmond, VA, in a US that's been effectively divided along the Potomac. The coast line has receded with rising sea levels and most everything east of Richmond is a kind of marshy archipelago regularly buffeted by formerly rare mega-storms. The southern US has become a kind of libertarian hell, in which the government is no longer able to provide services or do much of anything. Stand-in has been sober for 15 years, since the birth of his daughter flipped a switch that he'd been unable to flip on his own. He's twenty-years estranged from his family after doing something terrible and being overcome by shame. During a hurricane, while hunkering down in a shelter with his daughter, she goes wandering at night and accidentally sees the leader of the gang to which they belong killing another member of the gang. He notices that he's being watched but can't catch a clear glimpse of her as she flees back to her dad. The story opens with them two of them stowed away behind the false back of a trailer being towed toward the Potomac and an uncertain meeting with his parents.

The story started to unfold in reverse order. But I didn't get very far before, as I said, losing steam. One of the reasons for that is because I was fixated on the protagonist as being a real stand-in for Jack. That means thinking really deeply about what he might have been like as a middle-aged man, which means thinking really deeply about what he was like as a young man. How to create a character that is faithful to him? He would still be mentally ill, but would he have figured out how to adjust his own pH so it was a little closer to the water he swam in, to extend SRB's metaphor? There were other difficulties, not least with the world building, which turns out to be hard to do credibly (surprise!). For example, he's in a gang. Why is he in a gang? How big is it? What does it do? Inventing a political economy that makes sense is hard. Also, what the hell do I know about 15 year old girls?

Anyway the biggest challenge was imagining future Jack, writing his biography. And eventually that led me back to an idea that Mom had talked about for years: co-writing a book with Jack about living with mental illness. Not sure how much they ever developed it but I gathered that it would kind of a join memoir. And then I thought, what about writing a biography of Jack? A memoir of our family as five and then four? The struggle of, as Linc spoke about during the memorial service, a kid who was devalued and cast aside by society because he couldn't be economically productive? Who suffered because of the horrible lack of services for people with his degree of mental illness, and whose parents suffered through years and years of trying to find those services? I need to read Stuart: A Life Backwards.

I read this piece today, by a father writing about what it's like to have a very sick son, who stopped writing abruptly when his son died and only published the essay, unfinished, more than a year later. And I watched a lecture recently by a guy named DJ Jaffe, about how society fails the seriously mentally ill. That guy keeps dubious company politically but the lecture was provocative and resonated with the struggle M&D and Jack had finding places that could take care of him, where he could take care of himself and thrive, and where other people could be safe from him because he was, frankly, dangerous at times. It reminded me that the most lucid and animated that I ever saw Jack after eighth grade was in the locked psych ward at Georgetown, after he'd come out of a coma. Other psych wards were awful and that one wasn't sunshine and roses, but he was safe there.

Something to talk to the fam about. 

absence

I've written a few posts since the last one but left them all unpublished. One is about labor, class, and economic power, and the difference between making a five-figure salary in the US and making a five-figure salary in Pakistan. Another is about calling out colleagues for making jokes that contribute to oppression. Those are difficult topics to write about thoughtfully and sensitively, and the former in particular is one that makes me uncomfortable in ways that I'm still working out. So for one reason or another I haven't felt comfortable putting them out there. Not sure whether that'll change.

Tonight I'm back to reading Faiz Ahmed Faiz, so here's Baran Farooqi's translation of "View (2)":

Road, shadows, trees, houses and doors, edges of the sky dome

Upon the terrace, the moon bared her breast, gently

As someone loosens the strings of her dress, slowly

Under the edge of the sky dome, the still blue Nile of shadows

Forming an indigo lake

In the lake floated ever so quietly the bubble of a leaf

Floated a moment, moved away, burst, softly

Very softly, the cool color of wine, very light

Poured into my glass, slowly

The wine glass and the wine, the wine jar, the roses of your hands

Like the pattern of a distant dream

Formed on its own and faded, gradually

My heart repeated some word of love, softly

You said, "Softly."

The moon bent down and said

"Yet more softly."

guests

We had people over a couple of times last week. On Thursday we had the fifth Salon Slolab, the silly name we have given to dinners where we invite a group of 4-6 people to come over and eat with us. They have been a learning experience food and planning wise (we've alternated kitchen captaincy and both had big successes and times when we did not, ah, prepare enough food). Funny that despite a lifetime of going to dinners at adults' houses, it takes hosting to realize that actually it is nice to have multiple courses and doesn't feel quite right if there's only one. The dinners have all been really fun and lovely and each one different from the others. They've also felt faintly ridiculous, a little like adult-couple cosplay. But hey, SRB and I are an adult couple.

On Friday AF -- SRB's former roommate, back in town to apply for his visa to the States so he can join his girlfriend in NYC -- and a few other friends came over after a concert at FACE, the local arts nonprofit. AF has been recording music and he played us a couple of finished tracks, which was cool. One of the guys who came over was a huge rock star here in the 90s. I've met him a bunch of times, he's around and a nice and interesting guy. (His second act has been to create an animation studio whose flagship is a children's TV show about a schoolteacher in Pakistan who dons a burqa to disguise herself as she fights bad guys.) SRB had a friend from high school visiting in April, one thing led to another, and now she's planning to stay for the foreseeable future. She's a travel writer/vlogger so I guess Pakistan's as good a place as any to be, and apparently unfazed by the 23-year age difference.

Anyway they were over, and AF was clearly chuffed to play him the songs and get notes. And just as clearly, he was into the music and the role of veteran musician offering advice: got up to leave the circle of conversation and get closer to the speaker so he could really listen. It was cool to witness and something I couldn't imagine in the States: the equivalent of Alanis Morisette or Eddie Vedder happening to be over at my house in a group of 7 or 8 people, drinking a whiskey and soda helping a friend who's just starting to commit to music. 

faiz and the importance of poetry

The greatest Urdu poet of the 20th century, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, was a committed communist and agnostic who spent time in prison for his activism in the years after Partition and eventually fled Pakistan altogether. A little while ago I picked up a copy of The Colors of my Heart, a collection of his poetry translated and published recently by a professor at the National Islamic University in India. No surprise: He wrote beautifully about the struggle against oppression, and also about compassion and love both romantic and not.

I've been thinking about Jack again a lot over the last couple of days. Today I woke up feeling slightly sick, and while I had to rally to go to a meeting in the office for a few hours, it was a temporary rally. Two words come to mind: malaise and melancholy. So this evening, while Steph goes to a party I was looking forward to but am definitely not up for, I've been reading Faiz.

"My Companion, My Friend"

If I was sure, my companion, my friend
If I was sure the weariness in your heart
The sadness in your eyes and the burning in your breast
Can be dispelled by my comforting words, my love
Were my words of solace a medic which
could bring back to life your desolate and extinguished mind
Wishing away the stain of humiliation from your forehead
and cure your ailing youth
If I was sure, my companion, my friend

Day through night, morning through evening
I would spending whiling away your pain
Singing to you light, melodious songs
Of spring, gardens and waterfalls
Of sunrise, of the moon and the planets
I would tell you tales of beauty and love
I'd tell you how
Unresponsive bodies of proud, snow-moulded women
Melt under the heat of passionate hands
How the stable contours of a familiar face
Change shape in an instant
How the crystal-bright visage of a beloved
Flushes red with a sip of the ruby red wine
How the rose branch offers itself to the flower-picker
How the night's mansion becomes fragrant
I would sing to you, go on singing for you
Weaving songs for you, always around you
But my songs are not the cure for your grief
Melodies may not be surgeons, though they
can be friends and sympathizers
Songs may not be lancets, though
They can be a salve for pain at least
There's no help for your affliction but the knife
And that cruel blood-letter is not in my power
Not in any earthly being's power
Except you yourself, you, only you

on writing, on bodies, on home

Lying in bed one morning a while back, I had a kind of half-waking dream. Jack was in his 40s, with a daughter, and they were in a car, on the run from some threat. It was the first time I'd had a real vision of Jack as an older man. There he was, wrinkled, with a salt-and-pepper goatee. A fifteen-year-old daughter in the passenger's seat, scared but full of love for him, trusting and not trusting him. Middle-aged Jack would still be sick, but maybe he'd be mellowed out a bit, maybe he'd be sober, maybe having a kid would have snapped him to in a way no other circumstance could.

In the weeks following that dream I wasn't able to get it out of my head. Much like in the days after we cleaned out his apartment I had a kind of loop playing: Jack on the balcony on his broken lawn chair, staring blankly at the frigid sunset and ashing his cigarettes into the empty Coke bottle on the ground. Jack five minutes later, scribbling furiously in his notebook. Jack frying an egg on the stove. Jack half-lying on his bed, looking at the wall, smoking. All the time thinking about death, about killing himself. Arguing with himself about it. But the loop is just images, no voiceover or even much sound.

So I've started writing about the dream. Playing it out. I googled some tips on writing a novel and have been following one of the sites I found. For a couple of weeks I kept to writing every day. That fell off in the last ten days but not altogether and this morning I wrote a chapter, the first chapter I've ever written. It ends with a fictionalized version of Jack and his daughter escaping in the false back of a refrigerated trailer. Heading toward Silver Spring, home.

**************

Friday marked six months since Jack died. I was thinking about it a lot on Thursday night. For some reason I kept coming back to his body, his physical presence. Get to a certain age and everyone is banged up in one way or other. I've had arthritis in my feet for nearly ten years. There's something screwy with my right knee that acts up sometimes when I try to run fast. I get migraines once in a while. But Jack had more than his share. His reconstructed left leg, which pained him at all times and especially when the weather was bad. His face, which had been bashed in years ago in an incident none of us will ever know. The crooked ring finger on his left hand, broken in the southern Utah winter when he was a teenager and then left to heal in a banana shape because he couldn't get his gloves on over the splint. (Pretty fucked up of the program that he was in at the time not to take better care of him, in retrospect. Get him a mitten at least.) His collapsed veins. The burn scars on his wrists and torso. The marks left over here and there from the worst case of chicken pox our pediatrician had ever seen.

But his body wasn't only an assemblage of scars. He had beautiful eyes, long lashes. Strong, straight white teeth that flashed when he laughed. Long legs and arms over which he had preternatural control even after drugs and disuse slowed him down. He only had to learn how to do something once before he could do it gracefully.

On Friday morning I'd forgotten. It's been a long few weeks at work and at home, too: SRB has been going through a dip; story for another time. So I went to work and plowed through the day. Budget details and logistics have a way of occupying the mind when they're pressing, and they were yesterday. But in the middle of part two of the proposal budget meeting I was having yesterday, Mom texted our family WhatsApp group to remind us of the significance of the day and to say she was planning to have a moment of silence around 1:50 PM, his time of death. It brought me up short. How had I forgotten? I did not outwardly react but inwardly I all of a sudden felt heavy and that I badly wanted to be alone and quiet. But we had to finish this conversation yesterday, time marches on. And my boss kept asking me to follow up on this logistic thing that shouldn't even be my responsibility. As a side note, I'm actually curious why he asked me to deal with it in this particular way rather than doing it himself. Involved dealing with other CEOs and I have to coax them with his implicit backing, whereas if he called them himself he'd have been able to get a straight answer right away. I'd ask him eventually but I think he'd interpret the question as a desire to avoid responsibility on my part.

Anyway, I finally managed to leave work a little early. Samson and Shamshad, our cleaner and cook, were here, so I went into the bedroom, closed the door, lay on my back, and put on "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright" twice through, and then "This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody)" three times. In the middle of the third one, SRB came home. Without a word, she came onto the bed and lay down on her side next to me, left arm on my chest and left leg across mine. I cried until the song was over and then cried a little more in the quiet.

That song is so much about bodies, about the physicality of being alive and being in love. And in it, love is home and home is love.

Home, that's where I want to be, pick me up and turn me round.
I feel numb, born with a weak heart, I guess I must be having fun.
The less we say about it the better, make it up as we go along.
Feet on the ground, head in the sky, it's okay, I know nothing's wrong.
Nothing.

Hi-yah! I got plenty of time.
Hi-yah! You got light in your eyes.
And you're standing here beside me.
I love the passing of time.
Never for money, always for love.
Cover up and say goodnight, say goodnight.

Home, it's where I want to be but I guess I'm already there.
I come home, she lifted up her wings. I guess that this must be the place.
I can't tell one from another, did I find you or you find me?
There was a time before we born. If someone asks, this is where I'll be.
Where I'll be.

Hi-yah! We drift in and out.
Hi-yah! Sing into my mouth.
Out of all those kinds of people
You got a face with a view.
I'm just an animal looking for a home and
Share the space for a minute or two.

And you love me till my heart stops. Love me till I'm dead.
Eyes that light up, eyes look through you. Cover up the blank spots
Hit me on the head, I got ooooooh, oooh ooh ooh.

I am not the first person to find that song indescribably powerful. I've listened to it hundreds of times, maybe thousands, since I was a teenager. It means something different to me now than it did when I was 18, or 23, or 29.

Jack left his body six months ago. His body came home for the last time as ash. His scars exist only in photographs and in our memories of them. And his pain lives only in the echoes it left in our imaginations. In our pain.