At a swap meet a few weeks ago, I bought David a plastic guitar. It
has buttons on it that play classical or pop music depending on its
mode. David carries this guitar all over the house and puts it down
wherever he rests. He then presses the buttons and dances while the
plastic guitar sings. I have never ever danced in front of this
little boy. I haven’t danced in over ten years. There’s no way he
observed this. I am wondering if moving to music might be a genetic
or inherent thing. Any ideas?
I used to be a scared, lonely little girl who cried a lot. I hung to
my mom’s skirt often. David, on the other hand, is an independent and
happy little boy. Making him giggle takes two seconds. Last weekend,
on the plane to St. Louis, he made friends with the stewardess and
ran up and down the aisle to hug her. When she pointed at me and told
him to come to me, he ignored me and went back to hugging her. He
smiles at everyone, especially girls and women. I am not sure how he
can tell the difference but he seems to ignore men for the most part.
Maybe it’s the makeup or the hair.
I am regularly amazed at David’s sweet nature. Not that he doesn’t have his moments but he’s such a joy. If they all turn out like him, maybe having a few more is not such a crazy idea after all.
 Recommended as one of two
self-help books that gives practical, usable advice, I picked up How to be an Adult from the library.
It was an extremely quick and very useful read. So much so that I
will write excerpts from it for the next few weeks probably. Many of
the ideas were reinforcements of prior courses I took of beliefs I
already had. These are the sort of ideas that need constant reminders
so that I get used to thinking that way. His writings on
relationships were also very practical, very sensible and very much
along the lines of what I hope to accomplish. This little book made
me think a lot and I will be referring back to it in the next few
weeks over and over again.
 A
Personal Matter by Kenzaburo Oe is one of two Japanese books I
checked out after I read Kokoro. This story is about a man named Bird
who is the father to a newborn baby who has a major birth defect. The
story is about the father’s reaction and dealing (or not dealing)
with the issue. To be honest, about thirty pages into the story, I
hated the main character and wanted to put the book down immediately.
It depressed me so much that I didn’t even want to pick up another book.
For some inexplicable reason, I decided to stick with it and I am
glad I did. While this book was much more modern than Kokoro, it also
was character based and full of ideas, morals and issues surrounding
making difficult and immoral decisions. The book finally redeemed
itself to me in its final pages and at the end I felt better about
reading it.
I’ve been in a slight technical slump lately. There were many things
I hated about my investment bank job in New York: middle-management
was full of incompetent managers who found a way to make your life
miserable. There were many 120-hour weeks. I ate dinner at work at
least three out of five nights. Often more. The users weren’t all the
sweetest people you’ve ever met and technology is a male field and
combining that with the male-world of finance made the place a real
joy. (There’s a specific incident with one of my managers and a photo
of a woman and a horse that is somehow etched into my brain
permanently.)
Of course not everything was terrible. The pay was relatively good
but more importantly, the people I worked with were very competent.
Some of them were downright brilliant. I gained more practical
knowledge in one year of working with some of these people then I did
in my four years at Carnegie Mellon. Some of my coworkers inspired me
and made me a better coder. And I miss that. I miss it a lot.
In my current job I have more responsibility in some ways and I do a
wider variety of technology. I never had to administer servers on
Wall Street, they had other people to do that. And to boot machines,
and to configure files and compile unix programs (even though I did
download, compile, and install the latest version of emacs on every
machine I’ve ever used; this girl cannot live without emacs.) While I
enjoy learning about the intricacies of freeBSD and ini files as much
as the next gal, my main love is programming. And PHP just doesn’t
cut it for me. It was fun for the first few weeks while it was still
relatively novel. I liked the cleanness of Smarty and how it let me
separate stuff so I didn’t have to fill my PHP code with html crap
etc. However, two years into it, my fascination with PHP is long gone
and I need something else. I’ve coded a bunch of Python a while back
for fun and I am hoping to get back into it if only to preserve my
sanity.
Actually, my point was that I haven’t been feeling very technically
challenged lately so Jake’s been encouraging me to create a project
for myself that would be fun. After months of his badgering me, I
finally broke down and came up with an idea I liked. I’ve spent the
last week coding night and day and even though it didn’t make me a
fantastic coder, I’ve learned some new stuff I didn’t know and I have
a new website/domain now. I am hoping to roll it out for pre-alpha
testing in a week or so. If you’re interested in photography,
writing, knitting or scrapbooking (any of them) and would like to be
one of my guinea pigs, drop me a line: karen at karenika dot com.
Only if you’re going to play along tho and feel free to pass it on.
That’s why I haven’t been writing the past week. All my free time has
been 100% consumed by this. To be honest, it felt great to be
consumed by anything (other than David who’s my favorite thing to be
consumed by of course) and even if the site is a bust, I loved
working on it. College was probably the last time I felt like staying
up and working on one of my own projects as much as I did this past
week.
Jake was right after all. What a shocker.
 After the mistake with The
Cloud Atlas, I put the correct book on hold at the library and picked
it up last week. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell came
highly recommended by several members of AskMe. I made an effort to
spend my week with it and so read large chunks of it at a time. The
book has six stories. The first halves of five stories are told in
the first part, then the sixth story, and then each story is finished
going in the reverse order. The first story takes place on a ship
around 1850s and it’s the journal of a notary traveling in the
Pacific. This was the hardest story for me to get through. I had a
hard time with the language and the character. It got a bit better
towards the end of the first half but I knew the book would get
better so I kept going.
The second story takes place in 1930’s and it’s about a musician
exchanging letters with a scientist friend of his while he works with
a maestro. I enjoyed this story very much and found it easy to read
with entertaining characters. The third story is about a newspaper
journalist who discovers a plot to a corporate coverup that could
cause a disaster and it involves the scientist from the second story.
The fourth story is about a book publisher who gets signed into a
retirement institution against his will. The fifth one is a sci-fi
story about a cloned human who is part of a scientific project. And
the final story takes place in post-apocalyptic Hawaii. I wasn’t
crazy about the last story either but loved the other four. Each
story briefly mentions the previous one and there are tones of
reincarnation and strong moral lessons in each story. The writing is
forced in some parts but great in others. Overall, I found it to be a
fascinating book and I want to read more of his work.
Here’s what one reviewer says about the book, “Here is not only the
academic pessimism of Marx, Hobbes and Nietzsche but also the
frightening portents of Aldous Huxley and the linguistic daring of
Anthony Burgess. Here, too, are Melville’s maritime tableaux, the
mordant satire of Kingsley Amis and, in the voice of Robert Frobisher
— Mitchell’s most poignant and fully realized character — the
unmistakable ghost of Paul Bowles. Here is a veritable film festival
of unembarrassed cinematic references and inspirations, from “Soylent
Green” to “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” to “The Graduate” to the
postwar comedies of England’s Ealing Studios. Here is an obviously
sincere affection for the oft-maligned genres of mystery, science
fiction and fantasy.”
 My second short story collection of the
year was another AskMe recommendation. You
Are Not A Stranger Here by Adam Haslett is a fantastic, fantastic
collection of magnificently well-written stories. This author is a
fantastic, published writer and a law student at Yale. A major
loser :). Each story involves some aspect of sorrow, depression,
sadness, disappointment, family, friendship. The stories are simple
and elegant. The characters are very relatable and memorable, even in
the short space of a little story. I got attached to each and every
one of them.
After Kissing in Manhattan and this book, I might have to start
reading more short story collections. Either these two are major
exceptions, or I am finally beginning to gain the maturity to enjoy
short stories. Either way, I am delighted to have discovered Haslett.
I am not a particularly big sports fan. Actually, I can go so far as
to say I am not a sports fan in any way. I get incredibly frustrated
watching football because I have a really hard time following the
actual ball since it’s so small compared to the players and the
field. Last time I watched basketball I must have been fourteen. I
have never ever watched hockey as far as I can remember. Golf is
boring to me in concept let alone on TV. The only game I might be
into is baseball and only in very rare cases. So it might make little
sense that Jake emailed me this article by an ESPN writer.
Until you realize that he’s “talking” with Malcolm Gladwell. Probably
my favorite non-fiction writer of all time. I find Gladwell’s writing
to be consistently thought-provoking. His topics are always
interesting to me. His writing is plain, unpretentious and flows
beautifully. An amazingly rare accomplishment for a non-fiction
writer in my albeit narrow experience. Despite the fact that most of
the sports talk completely went over my head, I found some real gems
in this article. Here are a few I wanted to share.
As for your (very kind) question about my
writing, I’m not sure I can answer that either, except to say that I
really love writing, in a totally uncomplicated way. When I was in
high school, I ran track and in the beginning I thought of training
as a kind of necessary evil on the way to racing. But then, the more
I ran, the more I realized that what I loved was running, and it
didn’t much matter to me whether it came in the training form or the
racing form. I feel the same way about writing. I’m happy writing
anywhere and under any circumstances and in fact I’m now to the point
where I’m suspicious of people who don’t love what they do in the
same way. I was watching golf, before Christmas, and the announcer
said of Phil Mickelson that the tournament was the first time he’d
picked up a golf club in five weeks. Assuming that’s true, isn’t that
profoundly weird? How can you be one of the top two or three golfers
of your generation and go five weeks without doing the thing you
love? Did Mickelson also not have sex with his wife for five weeks?
Did he give up chocolate for five weeks? Is this some weird golfer’s
version of Lent that I’m unaware of? They say that Wayne Gretzky, as
a 2-year-old, would cry when the Saturday night hockey game on TV was
over, because it seemed to him at that age unbearably sad that
something he loved so much had to come to end, and I’ve always
thought that was the simplest explanation for why Gretzky was
Gretzky. And surely it’s the explanation as well for why Mickelson
will never be Tiger Woods.
and a few lines down, Simmons replies with:
On Mickelson and Sports Lent, I remember
watching one of those 20/20-Dateline-type pieces about him once, and
he was adamant about remaining a family man, taking breaks from golf
and never letting the sport consume him … and I remember thinking
to myself, “Right now Tiger is watching this and thinking, ‘I got
him. Cross Phil off the list. This guy will never pass me.'” The
great ones aren’t just great, they enjoy what they’re doing —
I find this to be completely true. If you love what you do and do it
constantly, you are bound to master it eventually. And if you truly
love it, can you stop doing it, even for a moment? Many writers carry
little notebooks with them and take notes constantly. Photographers
never leave the house without at least one camera. Musicians practice
night and day. People are often surprised at the overnight success of
a now famous person, but in most cases there is a multi-year effort
behind the success. I can completely understand taking a break
from something to recharge and relax. However, if you want to be
really really fantastic at something, I think the trick is to love it
obsessively. Then, it consumes you.
That’s sort of why I constantly
have the breadth vs depth argument with myself. If you want to do
everything and are unwilling to choose one over the others, it’s
impossible for all your interests to consume you. You have a limited
amount of time and energy and you have to make choices. Thus, it
shall be that I am never going to get the opportunity to master
anything until I give up on some things.
This is actually a question I’m obsessed with:
Why don’t people work hard when it’s in their best interest to do so?
Why does Eddy Curry come to camp every year overweight?
The (short) answer is that it’s really risky to work hard, because
then if you fail you can no longer say that you failed because you
didn’t work hard. It’s a form of self-protection. I swear that’s why
Mickelson has that almost absurdly calm demeanor. If he loses, he can
always say: Well, I could have practiced more, and maybe next year I
will and I’ll win then. When Tiger loses, what does he tell himself?
He worked as hard as he possibly could. He prepared like no one else
in the game and he still lost. That has to be devastating, and
dealing with that kind of conclusion takes a very special and rare
kind of resilience. Most of the psychological research on this is
focused on why some kids don’t study for tests — which is a much
more serious version of the same problem. If you get drunk the night
before an exam instead of studying and you fail, then the problem is
that you got drunk. If you do study and you fail, the problem is that
you’re stupid — and stupid, for a student, is a death sentence. The
point is that it is far more psychologically dangerous and difficult
to prepare for a task than not to prepare. People think that Tiger is
tougher than Mickelson because he works harder. Wrong: Tiger is
tougher than Mickelson and because of that he works harder.
This is something I’ve often discussed with Jake since he hates
taking exams so much and makes sure not to study for them. I am never
sure if he’s genuinely having problems studying of he’s just not
trying hard enough because he’s scared that if he gives it all he has
and still fails, he’ll have to admit he couldn’t achieve despite
trying as hard as possible.
I work very hard not to regret my past. I tend to get hung up on the
past as is so I try regularly to make sure my decisions are as sound
as they can be at the time I make them. I also give the things I do
all I have. I want to be able to look back and say that there was
nothing more I could have done. I used every single ounce of ability,
power, and strength in my body and soul to make something happen. If,
then, it still doesn’t happen, it’s time to move on and realize it
wasn’t meant to be.
That’s not to say that I have followed my own
advice all the time. A few years ago, I applied to Stanford Business
School. My intention was to do a joint Education and Business degree
and to get accepted, you had to apply to the business school first. I
have always hated business school but I know Stanford is the bast and
I loved the idea of this particular program. I applied to it at the
same time I applied to Teach For America. I knew that if I got into
both I would choose TFA. Most people might think that’s stupid but
TFA was what I wanted to do at the time. I figured if I couldn’t get
in and could get in to Stanford, I’d study Education Policy and hope
to start some kind of education non-profit after I graduated. I knew
TFA would get me first-hand experience and that’s more useful than
any education in most cases. (and in the end it turned out to be invaluable).
I had taken my GMATs four and a half years before I applied and since
they are good for five years, I just used those scores. I asked for
recommendations from my boss and a co-worker. I really did work hard
on the essays. Overall, it’s not fair to say that I didn’t try but I
am sure I could have tried harder to perfect my application. I am not
sure if it was on purpose or sheer neglect. I knew the acceptance
rate was very low and chances were that I wouldn’t get in. And when I
didn’t get in, I kept telling myself I didn’t want to get in anyway.
I hadn’t even bothered to retake my GMATs. It was obvious that
Stanford wasn’t my first choice. Which is all bullshit. I didn’t get
in and that’s that. If I didn’t try to make my application as strong
as it could have been, that’s sheer stupidity on my part. Why waste
time writing essays, bothering to fill out an application, and taking
other people’s time to write recommendations if I wasn’t dying to get
in? I was completely retarded to not give it my best effort. And if
this was my best effort, I should admit that I wasn’t good enough to
get in. To not try my hardest just to have some excuse to use when I
don’t succeed is really setting myself up for failure. Life’s too
short to live like that.
There’s a famous experiment done by a wonderful
psychologist at Columbia University named Dan Goldstein. He goes to a
class of American college students and asks them which city they
think is bigger — San Antonio or San Diego. The students are
divided. Then he goes to an equivalent class of German college
students and asks the same question. This time the class votes
overwhelmingly for San Diego. The right answer? San Diego. So the
Germans are smarter, at least on this question, than the American
kids. But that’s not because they know more about American geography.
It’s because they know less. They’ve never heard of San Antonio. But
they’ve heard of San Diego and using only that rule of thumb, they
figure San Diego must be bigger. The American students know way more.
They know all about San Antonio. They know it’s in Texas and that
Texas is booming. They know it has a pro basketball team, so it must
be a pretty big market. Some of them may have been in San Antonio and
taken forever to drive from one side of town to another — and that,
and a thousand other stray facts about Texas and San Antonio, have
the effect of muddling their judgment and preventing them from
getting the right answer.
This comment reminded me of The Wisdom of Crowds. Sometimes it’s hard be
objective when you know the subject too well. It’s hard to not make
assumptions and to not overcomplicate the situation. I guess the
trick is to know when you’re in that kind of situation and to seek
the help of people who are less involved for those particular situation.
All interesting points, all gathered from a sports article that I
wouldn’t have even seen had Jake not sent it to me. Shows you that an
interesting person like Gladwell is worth reading regardless of the
context.
 I first read Philip Roth last year when I
read The Human Stain and enjoyed it very much. I liked the writing. I
liked the story. I liked the pace. Since then, I made two separate
attempts to read him, both of which failed. Both of the other books I
tried were too “dirty-old-man” for me. When The
Plot Against America came out, I knew I wanted to read it.
Especially since it was political and there were many reviews that
equated it to the current administration. I asked for the book and
received it as a Christmas gift in 2004. It sat on my shelf for a
year and I knew I would never pick it up unless I forced myself so I
asked my reading group if they were interested in reading it.
Everyone agreed so we picked it and I finally got around to reading it.
The book is a what if story about Lindbergh winning the 1940
presidency instead of FDR, written from the perspective of a Jewish
family living in New York. The main character is a little boy named
Philip Roth. It was very well written and a relatively quick read.
For people, like me, who don’t know a lot about the correct political
history of the time, it’s a bit confusing to keep track of what
really happened and what’s made up. I am usually determined to avoid
any form of fiction or non-fiction that is set during the second
World War but I knew this book would be worthwhile. And it was. It
was also very disturbing and there was an engulfing sense of fear and
panic throughout the entire novel, making me thankful for the
thousandth time that I wasn’t alive during that particular time in
history even though this particular story was fictional.
As much as I despise the current administration, I would have to say
that the horrific tale of the book is not nearly as parallel to the
current times as the media made it out to be. If it really were, I do
think we’d see thousands flocking to Canada weekly. May it never ever
get to be an issue.
 Well the
little boy is getting more mischievous by the hour. He now likes to
open drawers that he cannot even see into. He pulls the handle,
reaches into the drawer and just picks an item at random. Whatever
comes his way. He then dutifully brings it to me to show his new
finding.
He is completely obsessed with screwing and unscrewing water bottles.
He cannot unscrew them all the way though and once he closes them, he
comes to me and whines and whines until I open it back up. Same for
the little bowls we feed him from. He can close them but cannot open
them. Every day, he finds a new item for me to open so he can close
it. Today, during music class, he was very upset that the little
bells on a shaker wouldn’t come off. He kept brining it to me,
thinking I could do it for him. I tried to explain to him that they
just don’t come off but he wasn’t very pleased with my answer.
He has also made the correlation between the water bottles we drink
from and his sippy cup. If he can’t find his cup and he’s thirsty, he
finds and empty or full water bottle somewhere in the house and
brings it to me. I then find his cup and he, happily, drinks in big
gulps. Who says babies can’t communicate? He has started to sign the
sign for milk, but tends to do it at random times, not necessarily
correlating with nursing. He does, however, come over throughout the
day and try to lift my shirt up so he can have some milk. Getting too
clever, David.
After several months of no more teeth, one little one left of the
middle bottom one is now peeking out. Maybe there’s more to come
soon. He’s completely mastered walking and even walks sideways now.
He also has mastered picking up an object by just bending down a bit.
He eats at least one meal a day completely on his own (veggie burger
+ turkey meatballs + peas or some other vegetable and fruits). He’s
gotten pickier about the food and likes to bang his body back and
forth in the seat if I don’t listen to him. Mother always wins in the
end though and David learns that veggies have to be finished before
he can have his grapes. He loves, loves, LOVES grapes and
blueberries. And bread. I never give him bread at home so he follows
people around for bread whenever we go out.
Throughout the day, he comes over to my desk and puts his head on my
lap. Just to say he loves me. Still as smiley as ever and funny and
sweet. Takes all his toys and comes to sit by my desk to play.
I love you, little boy.
My first job out of college was at a major investment bank in New
York City. I worked at this place for several years. I spent three
months in London and six months in Tokyo. I had over six different
managers in that time. When I decided to move departments a few years
into my job, I had decided that choosing the right manager was
important to my happiness at work. What I realized a few months later
was that my manager wasn’t just important, he was crucial to
the success of my career.
The manager I worked for in London was wonderful. He liked me and
thought highly of me and encouraged me constantly. He had me work
with intelligent people and I learned a lot working for him. He’s the
sole reason I was willing to live apart from Jake for six months to
take a position in Tokyo. The manager I worked with before him in New
York was totally the opposite and always yelled at me, never made
positive remarks about my work and constantly complained. The
situation got so bad that I was dreading going to work each and every
day. I figured the manager in London (and then Tokyo) was as good as
it got.
Until I moved to another department at the bank. When I moved back
from Tokyo, I was ready to be done with the company but at my
manager’s request, decided to look around internally before I quit. I
met with several departments, all of whom were only willing to hire
me for menial jobs since I had decided to work three days a week. One
department, however, seemed to have an interesting project and they
really wanted me on board. The head of the department, let’s call him
Carl, met with me and asked me when I’d be willing to start. The
original offer was to support and fix a specific piece of software
that was honestly built wrong and broken all over the place. After a
few weeks and many meetings, I was suddenly put in charge of
rewriting the software altogether. I spent the following two years or
so, managing a team of six in London, Tokyo and New York and working
only three days a week. What’s amazing about this isn’t that I was a
phenomenal worker. I hadn’t really changed all that much from the
previous year and my skills hadn’t improved that drastically.
But my manager had. Carl believed in me and he told me so daily. Even
though he was a Managing Director, he met with me several times a
week and congratulated me regularly. He brought me along to meetings
with partners and other important people. He asked my opinion in
public and in private. He made sure I got all the credit for all my
work. He gave me all the resources I asked for and was there to
answer all my questions. He truly supported me in every way. More
significantly, he believed in me. Everyone thought working three days
a week would be a career suicide but he put me in charge of a project
and he promoted me to Vice President.
Carl made me believe in myself. He made me feel like I was capable of
doing all that he was asking me to do. And, amazingly, I became
capable. I rose to his expectations. I became the person he saw me as.
A few years ago a friend told me to be careful about statements I
made out loud. She said that if I constantly complain about being
fat, people start thinking I am fat even if they didn’t previously
think so. I believe in the power of saying something to make it
happen. Carl believed in me, he supported it and I rose to his
expectations. If I say something out loud often enough, other people
believe it and start treating me as such and then I become that
thing. Obviously, this happens all the time in abuse cases. Someone
tells you you’re trash often enough, you start believing it. Soon you
forget what your personal thoughts were and you just see yourself
through other people’s eyes. That can cause a lot of damage depending
on the people around you.
It can also help you become a better person. It can help you have
faith in yourself. It can help you become the person you have the
potential to be. The person you already are.
It’s all about whose eyes you get see yourself through.
 The
Cloud Atlas by Liam Callanan was a mistake. The AskMe
recommendation was Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell but I didn’t make
the distinction in the title until long after I’d started reading the
novel. Since I was already over 100 pages into the novel and enjoying
it, I decided to keep reading despite the confusion. The Cloud Atlas
is about a bomb diffuser in the army during second world war who is
sent to Alaska to dismantle the bombs the Japanese sent to the United
States inside air balloons. These balloons, of which there were over
nine thousand, fell all over Alaska and West Coast of Northern United
States. The balloons were rigged with explosives and are one of the
best kept secrets of the war. A completely fictional story based on a
true-world event.
The three main characters are all interesting, each a bit too extreme
in their flaws. But I got attached to the main character and to the
story in general. I cared about what happened and enjoyed reading it
from the first page to the very last. Especially since I had no idea
about the balloons and was quite amazed it was a true story.
 The
Solace of Leaving Early by Haven Kimmel was recommended to me by
my good friend Michelle. Probably one of the most beautiful books
I’ve read in my life. It’s a story about a woman who drops out of her
doctoral program and goes back to her hometown and a minister in the
same hometown, both of whom are dealing with their own personal
problems and who are put in a situation where they have to take care
of two little orphaned girls.
It’s so touching and so very emotional to read. It’s really
beautifully written and the characters are three dimensional and
flawed and honest. There’s a lot of color in the book and great
descriptions of the children’s reaction to the terrible tragedy and
the adults’ differing ways of treating the children. It’s really a
phenomenal read.
I haven’t read Kimmel’s more famous book, A Girl Named Zippy, but I
think I will have to after this.
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monthly projects from previous years
some of my previous projects
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