Recently in analysis paralysis Category

2 months ago it left me most violently, but with a whole lot of worrying, grumpiness, irritability, self-deprivation, sanctioned over-indulgence, and maybe even a little bit of hard work, i feel like it's getting back to me.

last night i listened to great music, grilled some excellent chicken and veggies with my wife, then ate it all with some literally (literally!) unbelievably good california olive oil into which we dipped some literally (literally!) believably great olive bread. once my mojo returns fully, i'll pair that meal with a fantastic california red wine, but for now, i guzzled down a hipster artisan ginger beer.

my life is filled with good stuff, and days like yesterday show it's possible to drown out the bad stuff.

i had a little help from my friends, of course. for whatever reason, months ago hops said we should watch Neil Diamond in "The Jazz Singer". It arrived the other day, and we watched it last night. When I was a kid, the folks watched that movie with me many times, and we sang the songs all the time in the car. I'm not sure if it was just the fond memories, but hops and I both agreed that Neil has an incredible voice and presence, and even though the acting was horrific and the plot silly (it sure is lucky that Jess has so many second chances! everything wonderful falls into his lap, except for his horribly unsupportive family), we enjoyed the film.

this morning, i went for a nice 5 mile run, and soon i'll have my weekly cannoli run.

it almost sounds like i've already got my mojo back. what more could i want?

someone else gets it.

Anyway, there was a big fake blowup yesterday when Hillary Rosen said Ann Romney's "actually never worked a day in her life." Republicans promptly clutched pearls and pulled out their smelling salts. "Why, I never!"

the only thing that has ever defeated me is reality
what do we call that which can defeat us? our enemy
therefore, reality is my only enemy

i was willing to give this chump the benefit of the doubt so i suspended my disbelief until he got to this bit:

That is, if we want to survive as a species. If we think that humans are just another form of pollution, then there is no reason not to haul down the flag of procreation and party until the last person turns off the lights. Which seems to be the game plan for some.

yeah dude, that's the ticket. the WHOLE FUCKING HUMAN RACE is at risk because most people in the USA use birth control. that's right, if the USA stops breeding, the human race is doomed.

because there's not 6 billion other breeders on this planet. oh no.

of course, this is thrown in for a bonus:

But when radical feminists publicly demand that their right to worry-free fornication be subsidized via a new government-enforced entitlement aggressively shoved down the throats of religious institutions in direct contravention to their principles, heedlessly trampling the First Amendment, it's time to use scorn and ridicule to fight back.

hyperbolize much?

I recall the first amendment forbidding Congress (not the president, if we want to get technical here, and why wouldn't we?) from establishing religion or limiting the free practice of religion. that was easy to look up. now, show me the part of the Catholic scriptures that says charities funded by the Pope are forbidden by God from participating in insurance plans that provide coverage for contraception.

Gee whiz, that's a bit tougher, isn't it?

Now, the United States has laws against murder, which directly infringes on the religious liberties of Satanists and Thugees, not just minor infringement by-proxy of unwritten and hitherto unmentioned "freedom of conscience". Where's the outrage in Forbes?

Anyways, government-enforced entitlements aggresively entitle me to worry-free driving on state-funded highways, worry-free eating of state-inspected eggs and milk, worry-free walking around my neighborhood without being shot, and worry-free turning on of my lights. why should my fornication involve worry? talk about spoling the mood.

edit: ah yes, in the comments the author goes on to fearfully dismiss a "socialist utopia" that "people like you" want to bring about. well, damn right i'd like to bring about utopia. utopia sounds a lot nicer than rapture or armageddon or whatever it is Forbes is rooting for (hint: in the same comment the author complains that employers should not be forced to provide healthcare. on this we agree: the government should be forced to provide it). it's clear that capitalism is incapable of bringing about utopia. in fact the stated goal of capitalism is not to bring about utopia. why is utopia not a worthy goal? by definition, it's nice. so now this guy wants to ensure we never have utopia and we must worry while fornicating. what a sad life.

i'm still using 10.6.8 on all my macs. i don't remember what animal name that was and i don't care. it's one release behind, and reading about the next release, i don't see any reason to upgrade.

i remember being a windows user and seeing not a single reason to move past windows XP. as a mac user, i now see no reason to get involved with the iphone-ification of my PC. i realize that at some point i will no longer have a choice. that'll be a sad day, because i'll be too old and tired to put up with the bullshit of running linux, and i can't ever go back to windows. i wonder what i'll do? perhaps quit computers altogether. or maybe go work from apple and fix things from the inside (ha ha ha).

my aunt nin passed away a little over a week ago.

i don't necessarily believe in an afterlife. i don't necessarily not, either. i don't see much evidence for it, but absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. i remain undecided.

afterlife or not, aunt nin has moved on to a better place. she was undeservingly afflicted with alzheimer's, and now that i've witnessed that several times in my family, i will say with no hesitation that it's not a pleasant way to be for the afflicted or for their families. at some point, there's so little left of the person that even being dead must be better. when someone's got a fatal but not-instantly-so gunshot wound or they're bleeding out from a missing limb, they can tell you they're suffering and that it's awful. with alzheimer's, they can't tell you they're suffering. they may not even actually be suffering. but if they're not, it's only because their mind is so horribly wrong that they don't realize it's gone and left them. there's no hope of recovery. there's no way out except the end of it all.

it's horrible for everyone involved and i've explored it in my imagination far more than i would have liked to. for aunt nin, it's all over now, and whatever came next for her has to be better than what she was up to the moment before, either terrible suffering or mindlessness. you see? there's no pleasantness to be had at all from the situation. so enough about that, it leads nowhere nice.

that's why it behooves us to remember not her end but her middle. i never knew her beginning, of course. but her middle is so intimately intertwined with my own beginning that her passing marks the passing of my own childhood. besides my parents, there's no person who has had so much influence on my life. my entire childhood was shaped by aunt nin. she was there for all of it, in one way or another. much of the best of it was directly her doing. my strongest and fondest memories all revolve around her.

i can't remember much from my childhood, but i can always remember floating in her pool, waiting for someone to arrive with take-out nachos from The Islands. she'd let us drink the fruit punch and eat the nachos in her pool. in the mornings, she'd bring us supreme crescents from jack in the box -- which i still crave to this day (i had one yesterday). i can't ever forget waking her up by dropping grapes into her snoring mouth. any holiday involving gifts revolved around aunt nin. her gifts were always the best, and the most anticipated, even if they never really were living pets as she liked to pretend.

and of course, the happiest and most memorable parts of my childhood were spent on the beach in Carlsbad, where for a summer or two she lent my parents her condo (or "the beach house" as we called it). we'd walk down to the beach and feast on fried zucchini and sand, i'd boogie board and build sand castles and drag giant kelp ropes around town. at night we'd load up bowls of yogurt with kix cereal and play crazy 8's, and i'd listen to the eurythmics "here comes the rain again" on my walkman, which was very likely a gift from aunt nin.

my best friend and childhood pet was the product of an accidental breeding of aunt nin's bouvier and a hapless standard poodle.

then there is the legendary travel of the schmeck family from california to the midwest to attend my cousin's wedding. i still have, and use, the suitcase she gave me for that journey. we walked through the airports and the shuttles and the planes, my dad, my aunt, my brother, and me, and introduced ourselves as the schmeck family. we had a grand old time being ridiculous. i'm still pretty ridiculous, and that love for being silly came straight from aunt nin. i never really knew her as an adult, but i think she didn't take life too seriously, and that's why she was so great with kids.

bugs bunny said you shouldn't take life too seriously, or you'll never get out of it alive. i think that's a maxim that aunt nin and i would have agreed upon.

she had her downs as well as her ups. she was quite the adventurer before i knew her, and in many ways unknown to me at the time, while i knew her. we drifted apart as i grew older and more selfish, and i'm sorry for that. alzheimer's removes the possibility of catching up with your sick relative. remember the times when we were happy? no, not really.

but i do. the happiest times of my childhood were all with or because of aunt nin, and they outshine almost all the rest. every time i miss being a little boy, i'm missing my aunt nin. because i didn't have one without the other. they were part of one package.

life is a cruel sonofabitch, taking away everything that it gives. our one power as fragile humans is to cherish our memories while we have them, to bask in the familiarity of objects and people. every time i smile in the mirror, i see my grandmother, i've got her smile. when i bike through the streets of my home town, as i did just days ago, i remember my aunt ruby, whose house i would bike to on the way home from school, to get a soda. when i taste peanut butter, i recall my grandpa, who would make the freshest peanut butter in his beloved cuisinart. when i see blueberries or mud, i recall my nana and pop, who would feed me the one with my cereal before i'd go out to their yard to play in the other. when my hair's a mess i see my uncle john. and of course, when i remember being happy as a kid, i hear aunt nin laughing. so many loved ones have passed, but they live on with me in the only way this world lets them.

their stories have ended, and the time for tears is nearing an end. there will always be time for more tears in the future. it is best to take the moments as they come when we can live without the waterworks.

President Obama Will Accept His Nomination at a Stadium Named After a Giant Multinational Bank

this weekend provided me with a great example of the extreme difference between the service you get from an enormous corporation and a small business. our society is barreling down the road toward a future comprised only of gigantic corporations. it is possible for a well-run corporation to provide good customer service -- if the corporation makes that its goal. in my personal experience, apple has made customer service a priority, but a quick google search will reveal that many others have had the same horrible giant-corporation service experience that I have had.

people in my parents' generation have noted the effects of increasing corporatism in our society, but i don't think it's well understood that the sheer size of giant corporations guarantee the impossibility of customer service, at least in the sense that my parents grew up with. my two stories from this weekend will illustrate what I mean.

on Sunday, I went for a bike ride. 25 miles from home, my shifting cable broke. this meant that my bike was reduced from 30 gears to 3, and as a bonus, they were the three hardest gears. this meant, in my hilly home, i was basically stranded. i probably could have biked home over the hills in the hard gears, but i very likely would have injured my knees.

like an idiot, i had no money on my person. still, i took a chance and rode an extra 3 miles to a bike shop. i walked in, explained to the mechanic that i had no money but did have a broken cable. he was already working on a bike. he took it off the rack, put mine on the rack, replaced the broken parts, and fixed my bike. he told me i could pay when i got home. we'd never met before, i had never bought anything at that bike shop. i rode home on my perfectly fixed bike, showered, then brought my money and my bike back to the shop. i paid for the repairs and gave them my bike to perform additional expensive, non-emergency maintenance.

the bike mechanic (who was not the store owner, and did not ask anybody for permission for extending me credit) treated me like a human being and took a risk on me. like a good member of society, i rewarded this shop with my business.

starting last Monday, our home internet was failing for 1-2 hours every night, beginning at 9PM. it was entirely predictable and repeatable. on Thursday we called Comcast and reported the outage, while it was in progress. they acknowledged the outage, said they didn't know the cause, and scheduled a technician visit for Saturday morning. the technician arrived on Saturday and said he had no idea what the problem was, and that he could not see it. of course he could not see it, we said, because it happens at night. Comcast will not send a technician at 9PM. we confirmed with the technician that there was no way for them to put a technician at our location when the problem was happening.

he said we had a very old modem, which is true, but he also said it was extremely unlikely that the very old modem would cause a scheduled outage. he also said some of our coax wiring was faulty, which also was not the cause of the problem. he rewired the house anyway, to satisfy some urge of his own. he apologized for not seeing the problem, and left. that night, at the regularly scheduled time, the internet went out. we spoke to 4 different Comcast service reps, and each one told us a different thing. one claimed that he could not fix our outage because our very old modem was not supported by his database. this didn't seem to present a problem for the subsequent technician. one tech asked for my social security number, the other three did not.

after a lot of frustration, Comcast reset something, and our service was restored -- for another 24 hours. the problem occurred, as scheduled, Sunday night. We expect it to return tonight. We have a new modem that will arrive on Tuesday, not because we have any great need for a new modem, but because until we have a new modem, Comcast will keep blaming our "unsupported" modem for the problem. When our internet goes out Tuesday night, with our shiney new "supported" modem, what options will we have? They won't send a technician at the time the problem occurs, and when the problem is not occurring, there's nothing for the technician to see. So we're stuck.

Now, out of the 6 Comcast personnel we've talked with in the last week, 5 of them were very nice, and as helpful as they possibly could have been. But not a goddamn one of them spoke to any of the others. Nobody properly took notes on our problem, and nobody read the notes. They didn't even have a proper standard procedure for dealing with customers (social security number? why?). They did useless, unasked-for repairs. They blamed my hardware for the problem, and offered absolutely no plan for resolving this problem. In the end, we may have no choice but to take our business elsewhere.

Unfortunately, as a gigantic corporation, Comcast is able to buy up all the bandwidth in a region and squash small startups. This is "capitalism" according to some. What it means in practice is that a customer of Comcast may expect overall entirely incompetent "service" from the company, while each individual person may actually be very pleasant. The problem is that the corporation is so huge, decentralized, and isolated from its actual infrastructure and customers that communication -- and thus competent problem resolution -- is not possible. It is possible to solve common "we've seen that a million times before" problems. But real debugging of complex problems, in a timely fashion that would actually satisfy customers, is entirely impossible.

It is the very size of the company that causes this problem. It is why I quit Bank Of America after being a customer for a decade and a half. BofA is "too big to fail" and they're also "too big to be competent".

The constant, cancerous growth of corporations into giant corporations is going to make our future a nightmare. Imagine a future where all bike shops are organized like Comcast or BofA. when my shifter cable snaps, I have to make an appointment for between 8am and 12am, and the technician says he's not sure what the problem is but he's going to replace my handlebar wraps because that can't hurt. where every time I call "customer care" to ask them to fix my shifter cable, I have to explain from the beginning what happened, and they tell me that my shifters are unsupported and I need to purchase a whole new bicycle. Imagine that this is the only bike shop within 10,000 miles.

this is where we are heading. the notion that "capitalism" means unchecked growth and consolidation fails totally to consider the unpleasant consequences. it is simply untrue that gigantic corporations can be dealt with like the small businesses in my parents' memories. when BofA "accidentally" arranges the order of your transactions so that you incur a major fee, there is no person you can talk with who gives a shit. when Verizon charges you a thousand bucks in overage fees because you forgot to turn off your phone before checking it to Australia, who is going to help you out? you signed away your rights as a human being when you entered your contract with them.

there are solutions to these problems. capitalist solutions, in fact, as jefferson and washington understood capitalism. the sort of capitalism that was destroyed by the railroads and our first American monopolies.

infrastructure is owned by the people. the highways and freeways of the USA are publicly owned (or used to be). the same for bridges, waterways, airwaves, and aquifers (again, used to be). the infrastructure is licensed to companies which can then compete on quality of product and service. there are no monopolies, no duopolies, no false competition like we have between the 3 mobile carriers or 2 internet providers that americans can "choose" between.

i have roughly 30 bike shops within 20 miles that I can choose from. i don't need scare quotes around the word. i can truly choose. and as a middle class person with a reasonable wage, my choice can actually be based on something other than price. i don't have to choose the closest, cheapest bike shop. i can choose one that provides the best service. and in this way, i can promote good service.

poor people don't have this luxury. they must choose based on price. and thus, a growing pool of poor people promotes cheap service, not good service.

this is the crucial broken part of our "capitalist" system. as more and more people become poor, as more and more of our collective national wealth, resources, and infrastructure are handed over to the Comcasts and ATTs and BofAs of the world, there are fewer people who are able to promote good service with the tools of capitalism. As the giants grow and consolidate, as competition is killed before it can get a foothold, the giants have less incentive to provide service. soon, good service is a forgotten memory, with nobody wealthy enough to demand it, and nobody left to provide it.

that is where we are heading. until we start caring, large scale, about living in a society and stop pretending that we're all isolated islands of total self-sufficiency, we'll keep sliding into the united states of comcast.

i need to get back into focus. i delayed a bunch of distractions (new obsessive video game, rekindled espresso obsession) to make room for the winter vacation, and then when i got back, i indulged all the distractions. so rather than space them out over a couple of months, they hit all at once. this, of course, leads to suffering in the arenas of language study, job focus, athletics, etc. in other words, i need to get back on the get-smart-and-exercise wagon.

fortunately, i think the new espresso setup requires so little tinkering to get good results, i should have plenty of time for the good stuff.

now i just need to beat the video game two or three times, and get bored with the online play, so i can get on with the rest.

and tomorrow, everything will change again.

today, things are pretty much the same.

but between yesterday and tomorrow, our lives in 2012 will be rather different from our lives in 2011.

fortunately, both changes are likely to unfold positively.

i'll post pics on thursday so you can see what i mean :)