The Urbane Homestead

Nobody cares except your mother

I've now started my very last semester of business school. From here on in, only easy, fun classes (i.e., nothing involving statistics or the time value of money). Surprisingly, I've realized recently that I've learned a lot in the MBA program. It's surprising mostly because I'm a big snob and I expected the program to consist of pI've now started my very last semester of business school. From here on in, only easy, fun classes (i.e., nothing involving statistics or the time value of money). Surprisingly, I've realized recently that I've learned a lot in the MBA program. It's surprising mostly because I'm a big snob and I expected the program to consist of practical knowledge that anyone could learn on their own, if they took the time to do it. That's true, of course: it's true of any kind of professional school, which, historically, developed in part as a substitute for life experience in the field. On the other hand, it finally dawned on me that academic graduate school is also a substitute for life experience in the field, but there the experience consists mostly of reading. Nevertheless, as I approach graduation, I realize I've learned to look at things in a new way, which is the real point and a good thing.

But that's not my point here. Throughout the program, many of my instructors have been in my age range. This is not surprising since I am currently in my peak working years and should also be at the peak of my career, like my instructors. I'm usually somewhat older than most, although not all, the other students, although, thanks to a good hair stylist, sun block, and good genes, there is usually someone who looks older than me in each class.

Nevertheless, it never fails: the instructor at some point makes a comment about how young the students are. Usually it's couched in the "I'm a lot older than you...." or "You're too young to remember...." reference to something from the 80's. Please, old instructors! Turn up your hearing aids and let me tell you a thing or two! There are many reasons that this is a really tedious thing to say and is bound to lose the attention of your audience, whatever their average age may be.

Cultural references are not necessarily age-specific. My instructor the other night didn't get a half an hour into his lecture before he brought up the movie "The Paper Chase," which he then qualified with "You are all too young to have seen it."  Whether or not many the students in the room were too young to have seen the movie in a first-run theater, there's incredible news: movies are now recorded and can be seen again and again, even after the writers and actors and director are all crumbled into dust!

But more than that, there's something fundamentally demeaning about assuming that people are younger than you. The implicit message is that there is something that the younger audience simply will not understand until they are told, or until they experience it themselves. That may be true, but it isn't any truer than the fact that there are things about being a woman, or a Jew, or a midwesterner that those who aren't in that group won't understand until they're told—and these are observations we would be very unlikely to make so casually.

Moreover, we can't know what someone else's experience of life is. We can't know how much or how little someone has learned in the time they've been alive. We all know people in their teens who seem unusually wise, because they've spent their time observing and absorbing. And we all know boring and shallow people who have spent their time on earth doing pretty much nothing.

I think people make comments like "You're too young..." or "I'm a lot older than you, so..." because they are having trouble wrapping their mind around the fact that every day they are aging and moving closer to death and farther from new possibilities. They feel surprised that they are as old as they are. It seems so sudden. Where did all that time go? Everyone seems to feel this way. I can't believe I'm middle-aged. My parents can't believe they're almost 70. My 6th grade friend can't believe he's in middle school already. What! 18/30/50/95 already! It seems like just yesterday I was....

Everyone on earth is subject to the passage of time and is taken aback at how suddenly they've gotten older than they used to be. That's why no one really cares how old anyone else feels. Surprise! We are all only worried about ourselves, not about you. "You're to young to remember...." is never, ever going to be interesting as a rhetorical device. Please leave your fear of death and regret about lost possibilities back in your office, and find something more engaging to talk about.

One cup

You know how sometimes you're walking along the sidewalk and you see one lone shoe, dusty and tired, all by itself on the side of the road? You wonder how it got there—maybe it fell out of someone's unzipped backpack, or was dropped out of the window of a passing car by a teasing pesky younger sibling. It's hard to find these scenarios plausible, but it's not that hard to think them up.

I am, however, at a loss to explain the half of a bra that I saw today in the dusty grass between First Street and the parking lot behind Pizza Pino's. It was a plain black bra, the kind you wear for a "smooth profile," with no lacy bits or little ribbons or rosebuds. And there was just half of it: one cup, one strap, one little strap adjustment buckle. Where was the other half? How did the two get separated? And is there even a word for half a bra?

Somehow I think there's a story there that I don't really want to know.

A match made in Bedlam

Some years ago, right around this time of year, Henry and I received a visit from a Kirby vacuum cleaner salesman. It was a learning experience. We consider ourselves to be reasonably savvy consumers, leaning more toward the suspicious than the gullible, and, moreover, frugal. And yet. In the course of the demonstration of the Kirby vacuum cleaner's virtues, we were enthralled by its high-tech Lexan parts, its versatile attachments, its sheer power. We were appalled by the exercise that proved beyond doubt the filthiness of our home. We were, in short, completely sucked in.

So did we sign on the dotted line? Indeed, we did. Did we write a check for a $1200 vacuum cleaner?  Yes, we did that, too. Did we sorely regret it not two minutes after the salesman left? Why, yes, how did you know?

In the end, we were able to return the vacuum cleaner, and got all our money back. What we learned from the experience was this:

1. We are not as smart as we think we are. We are just as likely to get caught up into the moment and to make bad purchasing decisions as your average consumer. As a result, we now make these decisions only with careful, private consultation with each other, with a sufficient time lag, so that starry-eyed feeling has been obscured somewhat.

2. We really needed a new vacuum cleaner. We ended up going out on Henry's birthday to buy a high-end Miele model from a local retailer, which pays its salespeople on salary rather than commission. We've been very happy with this vacuum cleaner; it picks up pet hair and all the minute detritus a home on a busy street collects.

The new vacuum cleaner is now six years old. So why do I bring all this up now? Because of the little warm dog that is snuggled up against me here on the sofa, and who is going back to her foster home this morning. Another lesson learned: do not go to an animal adoption event alone.

Bullwinkle

Oh, come on, what could be cuter than a puppy?

The dignity of the ancient world

Vicki has some lovely pictures today of Greek vases. The last two pictures are of a shallow, two-handled bowl, called a kylix and used for drinking wine. These were used at symposia—dinner parties, such as the one made famous by Plato—where participants would often get very drunk indeed, which is why many kylixes are decorated with pictures of grapes, wine gods, and people throwing up. A popular game was to set up a target in the dining room and guests would sling the dregs of their wine at it from their drinking cups, and as you might imagine many cups were smashed to smithereens by accidentally getting slung too.

That was one of my favorite things I learned as an undergraduate classics major. I could relate! Not about smashing the cups, of course, because for our Friday night "Keg Club" parties we usually used those red plastic cups which one still sees strewn about student housing neighborhoods on football Saturdays. But certainly the heavy drinking accompanied by hours and hours of twaddling on about deep and important issues regarding life. Are we born merely to suffer and die? That sort of thing.

I read recently about an entrepreneur who found herself dissatisfied with small talk at parties—all about weather, work, and children. She missed, she said, those in-depth discussions of her college days. So she created a conversation crutch—a set of cards, displayed in a fancy plastic box suitable for the living room, which contain a selection of "conversation starters" such as "What historical sporting event would you most like to witness?" Okay, first of all, she must have gone to a different college than I did, because we sure didn't talk about that kind of thing at Earlham, home of the Hustlin' Quakers. But secondly, get this—her conversation card business projects $5 million in sales for this year! That's a lot of money to replicate drunken post-adolescent blathering.

Maybe the conversation is better when the beer cost more than $5 a case.

It figures

I like pictures. I like blogs that are mostly pictures, like Vicki's. I like pictures that illustrate text—for example, I think they can add a lot to those tedious blogs where people just go on and on about how busy their boring lives are. (Ahem.) My own photography tends to suffer from entropy, so I have lots of pictures of the first day or two of most of my travels, and none thereafter. But sometimes I get an idea that is best expressed through photography, and then I'm willing to keep at it; Window on the Day is just such an idea. I've been thinking about doing that project for several years now, and when I happened to think of it first thing on New Year's morning, well, it was clearly kismet.

And now kismet is biting back. My shiny little camera, which has spent most of its time since arriving here at the house a year and a half ago relaxing in its special cushioned bag with the Indonesian embroidery, put up with daily use for exactly one week and then broke. Doesn't it just figure? Sheesh.

I will plod on with an older camera, an early digital model that could usefully double as a doorstop. But somehow the tiny new camera made me feel like I was stealing a quick bite of the morning light, while this one feels like when you take a bite of something that turns out to be much, much chewier than you expected, and just when you're realizing that it's going to take you several minutes to chew it up into something you can actually swallow, someone asks you a question and the entire table turns toward you with expectant faces, waiting for your answer.

How we suffer for our art.

It fills up those empty hours....

I've added another blog, Window on the Day. Here's the description:

Our house is tall and old. The third floor, which was once the attic, is now a bedroom, and framed in the two large windows to the west are the top branches of a maple tree, with nothing but sky beyond. This is the first thing I see when I wake up every morning. Every morning is different - the color, the textures, the light - and here I'm going to share a year of mornings with you.

Changes

Here's the nutshell: by September, my job at the Depression Center had become almost unbearably frustrating.  I was unable to accomplish anything, due to a total lack of organizational strategy, their refusal to give me a budget (I mean $0), and my own downward spiral of depression. Ironic, yes, I know. In October, my mother had heart valve surgery and my supervisor was reluctant to let me take vacation time to be at the hospital. The surgery was a success—when the surgeon came into the consultation room afterward, he said: "I did a great job!"—and the soaring relief I felt made me realize something. There are very stressful things I can't control, like the outcome of major surgery on a loved one, or the culture of an organization I work for. And there are stressful things I have some control over, like whether or not I get another job. And then there are stressful things I have total control over, like myself and my own behavior. So I quit.

Of course, if it were that simple, I would have quit a long time ago. I'm lucky, though—very lucky—because I'm married to someone who has also had many, many rotten jobs, and has now, for the first time, a job he likes everything about. And I'm also close enough to the end of this MBA program that I have the skills to create my own job, if I want, and make it pay. I could, of course, have created my own job in the past, but there isn't a lot of demand for Hittite translation services.

I love being on my own. I like the flexibility, and the variety, and the challenge. I like being at home when I want to and being the art class parent at Joe's school and I like going to networking events and talking to people. I like thinking about all the different things I can make happen and then choosing which one to do. And I like sitting here at our old dining room table in the basement next to the washer and dryer and the bicycles about a million times more than sitting in an Aeron chair in front of a Steelcase executive office configuration and being miserable. For one thing, it's a lot easier to keep up with the laundry.

Here I am

I know, I've been gone forever. The irony of it is, that I have an absolute ton of things to blog about. Let's just think of this little post as a toe in the water, with total immersion to come.

When in Rome

My nephew Sam caught a salmon with his bare hands while we were in Skagway, Alaska! Pictures at The Plot Thickens, my sister's blog.