Transplanting a Seattleite

Our book club will be discussing this in a few hours, and I just finished reading it. It’s great! I really and truly enjoyed it. The author is a goof, but a dad-joke kind of goof. He’s never disrespectful in a way that gives me pause. His attention to land use, economics, what he calls the Death Industrial Context, racial segregation, and Julia Morgan is absolutely fantastic in every way. I had understood The Lawn to be a response to golf courses, but this book sold me on an alternative interpretation. I’d known a lot about Olmstead, but I learned more here.

I have no idea if he’s got any other books out there, but if he does, I’ll at least consider reading them, because this was unexpectedly wonderful.

I’m looking forward to our conversation this evening.

I bought this book in e-form, altho I first saw it at a local bookstore (you can be mad about this, and I will also note that I bought several other books at the bookstore). I was really excited to read it — and other books I bought around the same time — but the lockdowns changed my focus and I am only recently returning to this book. I tried several times to read it, but it was incredibly difficult in 2020 and 2021 and even into 2022 to read about people traveling to meet extended family they learned about through genealogy.

The sections on using genetic genealogy to identify victims of crimes and the people who left DNA at a crime scene are really interesting, because Copeland captures some of who was talking about the ethics of this _before_ the GSK moved this into wider awareness, and what they were saying and the responses they got, and also how rapidly people’s reactions moved in the wake of GSK and related cold cases.

I remember working at a startup in the 90s, and the founder/CEO of the company sifting through the kinds of people to hire at an executive level as we grew rapidly. One of the possible positions was “Strategist”, or for one of the other executives to take on “Strategy” as part of their role. He concluded that it did not make sense to hire for this position or to assign this role to anyone but himself at that point in time, and subsequent events have absolutely confirmed that this decision was correct. While strategy and ethics are extremely different activities / topics / lenses, they _do_ overlap, and they share the important characteristic of imagining alternative worlds/futures and making value judgments about which one to steer towards (or away from). Since watching him go through this process and listening to how he described the tradeoffs and why he decided what he did, I have thought over the years many times about how groups of people make this decision. With genetic genealogy and crime, most of the people thinking about it before it became a broad topic were very concerned about privacy and individual control of their genetic information and the potential for large organizations (corporate or governmental) to abuse this information in pursuit of Bad Goals. Once genetic genealogy and crime became a broad topic, a few people continued to think about it in these terms. The attraction of identifying a violent criminal, or the victim of a violent crime, washed away concerns about whether or not one’s second cousin’s DNA could be used to identify oneself or vice versa. However, the solution to the pressures of these disparate positions was resolved in at least one important service to move all existing accounts to “opt out” of being included in searches and to otherwise allow these types of searches on everyone who “opted in”. At least the initial impact was to make it a bit more difficult to do that kind of search (altho not _that_ much more difficult, as warrants started to be produced to access that information).

The Jim Collins / Philip Benson babies-switched-at-birth story winds through the book, providing a frame for thinking about the changes over time in genetic testing and the size of the accessible databases. Because one of the families is Ashkenazi, the family that got the Ashkenazi baby had a very difficult time navigating cousin matches to track down the close family of their person because of endogamy. It’s amazing that Copeland used this story to show how the matching algorithms and databases evolved over time so that the basically impossible search of the beginning of the Collins/Benson search undertaken by Alice was solved shortly before that basically impossible search would become trivially easy. Technology!

Finally, as I noted in a post last night, Benson’s first wife was an Abolofia. I _said_ I wasn’t going to try to figure out how we were related, but I lied. It only took about five minutes to figure out the relationship. My dad’s first cousin married an Abolofia. His father’s niece — so, I guess her cousin by marriage — was Benson’s first wife. Every Single Time I work on this surname, the serendipity is _delightful_.

Fun book, really happy I finally read it. I can’t say I wish I’d read it sooner, because I tried and obviously, I just wasn’t ready. I bought some other books at the same time that I haven’t read so maybe one of those will be next.

I bought this in 2015, in paperback. It’s a really odd one, because you can get an audiobook version of it (audible) but it does not appear to be available in kindle format. It’s really more a reference book than anything else, _but it is a reference book that is quite readable_, which is why I bought it. I wanted to absorb at a surface level the 2 page summaries of what it is about, because I figured it would help me reading business news more quickly without constantly having to look up terms.

Anyway. It’s 8 years later, and I’ve absorbed a lot of it on my own in the meantime, but I’m once again trying to read books before getting rid of them, so here we are.

First up! Enterprise Resource Planning. The description makes it very clear that I have friends who have engaged in trying to do proto-ERP stuff and who have used SAP (how did I not know that SAP/Oracle products were basically doing ERP? That’s what this book is designed to fix in my brain tho, so, yay! Late is better than never). Also! K.’s data dictionary!

That’s kinda boring, tho. Much more interesting is Rosabeth Moss Kanter.

Best of all so far — I’m in the middle of the E’s — is BCG’s “The Experience Curve”. I’ve been trying to explain this to people! Of course, I’d never heard of it before. Basically, everyone has changed jobs, so everyone is new at their job, so everyone is slow and making mistakes and doesn’t know how to do stuff. Thus, everything is much more expensive (because slow and mistakes) which is contributing to inflation. Once everyone settles in and gets used to their jobs (gains experience) they will get faster and make fewer mistakes and they will know how to do stuff and they will be more productive and that process will be deflationary. It’s probably not worth digging further into BCG’s development of the idea, because it has a bunch of problems in the way they developed it. But I have a term I can throw around! Yay!

I don’t really recommend the book, because it is a bit out of date and it is branded The Economist, and so forth, but it is definitely serving the purpose I bought it for, albeit 8 years later.

This is _such_ a great book. Go read it.

Anyway.

On Goree Island, in Senegal, the author is talking to Hasan who is a teacher at a boarding school there.

“Hasan said it is important that the country develop a curriculum so students can develop a holistic understanding of what slavery and colonialism did to their country and their continent. This, he said, is essential because knowing their history helps them to more effectively identify the lies the world tells about Africa. It equips students with the intellectual and historical tool kit, so they won’t accept and internalize the idea that Africa has no history, that Africa’s poverty is its own fault, that Africa would be better off if it were under European control. “If they know that the arguments are false,” he said, “they will know that all the rest also is false.””

“I was struck by the parallels between how Ibrahima Seck, the director of research at the Whitney Plantation, spoke about the role of history and how Hasan was speaking about it now. They had similar conceptions as to how teaching history, a full history, would shape how students navigated the world. They were acutely aware that this knowledge gave their students new eyes, a new sense of freedom and understanding — the ability to know the lie, so they could not be lied to anymore. I told Hasan that was he was telling me made me think of my trip to the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana, and his eyes got wide. He asked me if I knew Ibrahima Seck.”

“I told him I had indeed met Seck, and that I had spoken to him when I went there in those months before coming to Goree.”

“Hasan smiled. That’s my best friend, he told me. He and Seck used to teach together at a high school in Dakar.”

History as an industry is documentarian — it’s about what is documented, what is written down. Industries can change, tho. And when they do, the incumbents in the industry resist, except for a few, who are the ones who innovate, who reform, who make the new form of the industry. A document based approach to history makes it almost impossible for us to “do” history in the absence or paucity of documents, and also when we come to understand that the primary documents are demonstrably false. Knowing something is not true does not always tell us what _is_ true. We’re starting to see the past understood through lenses of genetics and language and artifact. We are also starting to understand that what is written down contemporaneously may not be as accurate or helpful in understanding the past as what is passed down as lore and heard from a member of a group in the present. The approaches we must take when documents do not exist are starting to illuminate the many problems with history being documentarian as an industry.

Reading Clint Smith’s _How the Word is Passed_ is a delight for so very many reasons: the evocative detail of the setting in which his conversations take place, his feelings, the emotional tone of the people he listens to, the clothing people are wearing. It is also a delight because he is sorting through a universe of threads of how to think about, talk about, write about, teach about and live with the presence of the past in our present day.

Also, in this particular case, reading about Smith meeting Ibrahima Seck and Hasan months apart, and hearing how their thoughts run together across time and distance, forcefully reminded me of the importance of talking together and teaching together. Our ideas develop and clarify and ripple out into the world as a result of our conversations and our work together communicating our ideas.

Never question the value of figuring out something with your best friend. It may never be _as_ amazing as this friendship, but it’s absolutely worth the effort.

ETA:

Another long quote, from the end:

“I have come to realize that those conversations with my students [as a high school English teacher in Prince George’s County, Maryland], now a decade ago, about how we might begin to understand our lives in relation to the world around us were some of the earliest sparks of this book. I tried to write the sort of book that I would have wanted to teach them. I hope I made them proud.”

Indeed. How lucky we are that he wrote this book. Really, go read it. It is amazing.

These are _NOT NOT NOT NOT NOT_ book reviews! See, this is tagged not a book review. And the subject line says “samples”. OK? These are notes to me so that I know I went to some effort to decide whether or not to buy and read the thing, and if you think that I’m wrong and would enjoy the book, I’d love to hear _why_ you loved it in some detail. If you are the author and feel I have been unfair to you personally and would like to share your opinion of that with me, just know, it probably won’t go well for either of us.

I’ve tried reading Virginia Sole-Smith’s _The Eating Instinct_ sample several times; I apparently made it 53% of the way through (the sample!) and bailed out. I tried again, and almost immediately figured out what the problem was.

You cannot have a human developmental milestone that requires using a spoon. You can’t. That’s totally cultural. D’oh. Stop that. I used to be so much quicker at spotting nonsense like that when I was actively reading parenting literature, but at least it’s coming back slowly.

I’m mostly posting this so I don’t screw up and order it in the future.

Moving on.

_Food Foolish_ by Mandyck and Schultz

I read the sample before but totally forgot the contents. I reread it and was utterly unimpressed. Said basically nothing. Wasting food is a climate problem. Hunger has been replaced with “bad calories”. We need a new revolution in food and it is … better storage? I mean, maybe. I don’t know. One of the reviews notes that all the stuff about cold storage is a bit sus because one of the authors is highly connected to Carrier. Seems plausible. Not compelling enough to bother, but if someone I trust tells me it is absolutely worth it, I’m prepared to revisit.

_Waste-Free Kitchen Handbook_, Dana Gunders

43% of this sample occurs before where you land if you start at the “Beginning”. Wow. Just … wow.

OK, “A woman from Hong Kong once told me that when she was a child, her aunts and uncles would inspect her bowl and tell her that each morsel of rice she had left would turn into a mole on the face of her future husband! Can you imagine if we thought that way about food in our own lives?”

Let’s go down the list.

What, you think we should be programming girls to grow up to marry men? That’s heterocentric. Bad. Don’t do that.

What, you think we should be shaming people into eating when they are no longer hungry? Pretty sure we’ve been working really hard to _stop that_. Bad. Don’t do that.

Also! Interesting! When we were busy telling kids to eat the peas or whatever because people in China were starving, people in China had their own version of that to tell the kiddos. I expected that, but getting the deets is pretty cool! But the contextualization and framing is so horrifying, I think I could have maintained that ignorance for a while yet.

“There are only two things that are happening with these extra calories. Either we’re eating them or we’re throwing them out, presenting a choice between your waist and your waste. I’ll offer some shortcuts to help you cook the right amounts, so you don’t wind up with unnecessarily huge portions or more leftovers than you’d like.”

That’s … disturbing in some ways, but otherwise getting into the right spirit.

Unfortunately, the core advice conveyed is:

“The basic advice is easy to grasp and much, much harder to practice: Plan your meals, make a shopping list from that plan, and stick to the list — and then stick to the plan.”

Yeah. OK. That is never going to happen. I’ve been polling people about how they feed themselves for decades. I _have_ met a few people who say they meal plan. I have! Really!

Heh heh heh.

From _watching_ people in action over the years, the Correct Strategy is to have a really good repertoire for cooking what you currently have in the house. Any advice that isn’t focused on how to do that is pointless. The author is focused on how to stick to the list, but anyone who has shopped ever knows that if you plan to make a specific set of meals and you generate a list of what you need to make those meals, once you have bought the items and prepared the meals, there will be a lot of bits and bobs left over from the amounts that were the minimum required (or the amount you expected to use but then did not), and now what do you do.

She _does_ mostly recognize this, by having “2. Check the refrigerator” as an item on her plan. In item 6, “Unfortunately, the ingredients we need don’t always come in the portions we need them in.” is recognized.

Honestly, you’d be better off reading one of the cooking without recipes type cookbooks. Her advice isn’t any better than that from a waste-avoidance perspective and the cooking strategies are better in the other cookbooks. She only plans 3 meals a week cooked at home anyway.

Again, if you’ve read (most of) the book, and think it gets much, much better, let me know; otherwise, I’m done.

_Behemoth_, Robin Gaster

Really long sample, but does not appear to be a really long book. Not sure what’s going on here? This is weird tho!

“Twenty-five years ago, Jeff Bezos, Marianne Bezos, and a handful of staff were shipping books out of the Bezos garage.”

So, working backwards. Where’s the apostrophe to indicate possessive on Bezos’ garage? Or Bezos’s garage, depending on which you prefer? Too finicky? How about, who the hell is Marianne. I’m assuming he meant Mackenzie? Presumably? What a _strange_ error!

“And Amazon is far from done with books: its self-publishing platform is a direct attack on the traditional business model for publishers.” Tell me whose team you are on while telling me whose team you are on.

This is _so odd_. “As Shel Kaphen (sic) (Amazon’s first CTO) said, the choice of books “was totally based on the property of books as a product.”2

I’m not totally certain how to order this. First, Shel’s last named is spelled Kaphan. I’m not speculating about this. I went over to FB and checked him in my friends list. Second, Bezos _could_ have picked CDs for the exact same product qualities as books. He didn’t. Bezos picked books because of the nature of the supply and distribution universe. With CDs, it was possible — and they actually did — engage in trust-like behavior to screw retailers and customers. It’s much, much harder to do that with books, and when it was eventually attempted by Apple and the Big N, they were caught relatively quickly.

The 2 refers to a New Yorker piece by George Packer from 2014 called “Cheap Words”. In it, Packer spells Shel’s last name correctly. The error is novel to Gaster.

Also! Packer describes a loony-tunes conversation that Roger Doeren of Rainy Day Books claims to have had with Bezos at the Formerly Known as the ABA show in 1995.

““ Approaching Bezos, he asked, “Where is Earth’s biggest bookstore?”

“Cyberspace,” Bezos replied.

“We started a Web site last year. Who are your suppliers?”

“Ingram, and Baker & Taylor.”

“Ours, too. What’s your database?”

“ ‘Books in Print.’ ””

Somebody was lying here. Maybe everybody was lying here.

Gaster again: “Through just two distributors, Amazon got universal access to all books in print in the US.” *sigh* NO NEVER TRUE.

Not even all trade books. I mean, come on.

“Information was also standardized. Books in Print maintained a listing and ID system which was already available electronically and used everywhere.”

NO NOT TRUE AT ALL. I mean, you could license use of it at various price points and capabilities, but they won’t a metric fuck ton of money, and Bezos didn’t wanna pay it so he did _not_ and over time, the catalog we developed was so good that a lot of libraries (personal communication) ditched _their_ payments to Bowker’s in favor of using the Amazon catalog. Because ours was much better. “In the end, Amazon chose to use a lower quality version of the catalog from Baker&Tylor (sic) precisely because it included a lot of out of print books.”

NO NO NO

First, Taylor, not Tylor. More relevantly, we bought a database from the Library of Congress to get the out of print books. Gaster had some idiot for a source or just made random shit up. This is all _wrong_. _I_ _know_.

OK, I took a break to have a phone call with a friend. It’s supposed to be a weekly phone call, but we’ve missed … like, a month. It was great catching up. Now that I am back here, I have no idea why I wasted so much fucking time and energy on this.

You cannot trust anything in this book. He introduces errors in names that are not present in his sources. He asserts wrong shit everywhere. I have no idea how his analysis is, but how can you build decent analysis on top of a structure that riddled with wrongness? No. I haven’t finished the sample and I’m not going to. Which is a pity, because I wanted to read about logistics at Amazon, but I can’t trust this so I won’t put that garbage inside my head.

I buy books about anxiety, similar to how I buy books about personal organization, time management, decluttering, cooking, etc. I don’t need what is in these books (altho I’m constantly looking for more tips and tricks in all of these areas), and these books are _generally_ aimed at an audience that is _excruciatingly_ Not Me in quite horrifying detail, which is jarring, and I want to complain about, but feel compelled to not do too loudly in public because I mean, they are not aimed at me after all. I could just walk away.

You might wonder, but then _why_ would you buy books about anxiety? Well, I’m _surrounded_ by people with anxiety, who, for mysterious reasons find it comforting to be around me (net — on a moment to moment basis, it can be extremely harrowing to be anywhere near me). I would _like_ to better understand what is going on, so, you know, I could either be more or less helpful, depending on whether I wanted the person to feel better or, you know, just go away from me permanently. As the case may be.

In any event, here I am with another book about anxiety, that includes a bunch of somewhat science-y stuff about the brain that, as always, is not especially helpful or even accurate but, importantly, just isn’t all that relevant or persuasive. That’s fine. I don’t need to fact check it in detail because it is not the underpinning of any of the rhetoric. Just skip right over all that. Nothing to see here. Also, the random historical detail, should be ignored. Also, her description of road-raging? Let’s just pass on by there, as well.

And the stuff about emotion-faces?

Pretending that didn’t happen either.

She does have some interesting detail about public speaking and fear, and whether the speaker focuses on people who are ignoring / hostile / falling asleep or on people who are engaged / smiling / wtf. I’m mostly like, wait, you’re doing public speaking and focusing in on individual people? Seems dangerous! Treat them as a mass. It’ll go so much more easily!

Moving on from there, she describes a study in which participants were asked to do daily for two weeks, “Please try to envision, in the most precise way, four negative events that could reasonably happen to you tomorrow. You can imagine anything, from everyday hassles to very serious events.” Other participants were instructed, “Please try to imagine, in the most precise way, four neutral, routine events that could happen tomorrow, things that you barely notice, such as brushing your teeth, taking a shower, tying your shoelaces, taking a bus, or turning on your computer.”

The negative crowd, no notable mood impact. The neutral crowd, anxiety decreased. The author sums this up: “That’s because anxiety and uncertainty are so closely linked that even thinking about or planning for the most mundane, forgettable, yet predictable future events — things as simple as brushing our teeth — manages our anxious feelings. Devoted list makers — present company included — already know this.”

Well!

OK, I do make the lists. And I did NOT know this. Also, I think the explanatory summary is _insane_. It makes zero sense. There are words. There is grammar. But as an explanation, it is a bomb, and not in a good way. At a minimum — and this just makes it less bad, not actually reasonable, the word “even” should be removed. But it doesn’t explain anything! It’s just another summary!

“Thinking about boring shit reduces anxiety.”

That’s NOT an explanation! An explanation would be, anxiety happens when you sit around imagining bad things that could happen to you. But we’ve _just been told_ that people who were instructed to do that had no impact on their mood. So: imagining bad shit daily on command, no impact. Imagining boring shit daily on command, less anxiety. I think the only possible conclusion here is that _all_ of these people were sitting around imagining bad shit daily on their own, and the study basically crowded out some of the bad shit with the boring stuff. It’s hard to sit around and go, but what if my I burned my hand taking bread out of the oven, if you are busy thinking, tomorrow I will brush my teeth. Roughly, this is like cooking for someone, and stealthily reducing the sodium and increasing the fiber / vegetables. After a couple weeks, they’re like, that’s weird, I lost a couple pounds. I wonder how that happened.

But the explanation is not “Thinking about boring shit reduces anxiety”. The explanation is, “what is going on cognitively generates affect”, with a follow on observation along the lines of, “if your brain spins on boring shit you have more or less total control over, your affect will be pretty calm”.

The next paragraphs glance over at the idea of agency (“we must believe that we have the power, the control, to shape the future…do we believe that we are the narrator of our own story or that we are the helpless victim of fate”) and then shrug and wander off into the weeds.

“When we lose belief in our ability to control fate” really is in this book, I swear. I absolutely agree that when we feel like we cannot affect our circumstances, it’s not great for emotional health. But there are much better ways to word this. But wait! There’s more! Big long paragraph about a bunch of studies: “if we spin the wheel in a certain way or blow on the dice … if we pick our lottery ticket rather than being randomly given one”. _Why are we talking about illusions of control_? If you want to convince anxious people to remember they have agency and focus on what they have agency over, talking about illusions of agency seems … irrelevant? Distracting? Potentially undermines the entire approach? Whyyyyyyy? I mean, honestly, I have been thinking about the Serenity Prayer a lot, because FIL just died, but it’s a good one. I don’t like invoking the godhead for this, but consciously returning one’s focus to what we can influence vs what we can’t influence, and directing our energies to the things we can influence is a _great_ way to live one’s life. And the Serenity Prayer captures that _perfectly_ and far more eloquently than my summary.

And more! Attribution error comes up next! Altho in that incredibly obnoxious way, where psychologists persist in pointing out that people who have had a bunch of good things happen to them over the course of their lives are _happier_ when they assume that’s because of their own efforts and that trend is likely to continue. _As if this observation should make anyone feel good at all._ I mean, that is reified privilege, in a wrapper of, You’ll Be Happier If You Enjoy Your Privilege Blindly. I prefer my attribution error without the reification and wrapper, thank you very much.

“Conversely, when we reject such illusions of control of positive events, we are more likely to be depressed. Depression even turns this healthy attributional style inside out, so that we now believe that positive events are due to external, unstable, and specific causes — which means that good things happen by chance, outside our control, and only sometimes. It’s hard to look forward to such a future.”

Really. That’s _in this book_. If I thought believing picking the lottery ticket number improved my odds vs. whatever the hell that quoted paragraph was were the two choices in life, yeah, I’d be kinda unhappy and anxious, too. JFC. _Get a Better Frame._ You know, like, one which walks up to words like “control”, tosses one’s drink in its face, and then goes over and hangs out with words like “influence” instead.

Honestly, thinking of events as inherently positive or negative is sus on the face anyway. I wasn’t going to say anything, but it’s become impossible to ignore.

A bit further on: “When we’re anxious, even intensely so, we still believe that we can make good things happen in our lives.”

Clearly, this is a person whose response to Stoicism, or Buddhism, or any number of other spiritual paths, could be summarized largely as, “la la la la I can’t hear you”.

“And the most common mental action we take that helps anxiety achieve this is something we’re all familiar with. It’s worry.”

I _really_ disapprove of hope. I’ve got a book here that treats hope and anxiety as inextricably intertwined. It’s a sales pitch for anxiety is good for us, and I interpreted the pitch for this book as being aligned with _my_ belief that negative emotions exist to motivate us to do unpleasant but necessary things. I’m a quarter of the way into the book, and really wondering if I just misunderstood the thesis completely. OTOH, this could all still be the Validate the Reader’s Perspective setup. Either way, I expect I’ll be learning a lot more about how my wild disapproval of hope is a _lot_ more closely connected to my generally not very anxious character than I had previously appreciated.

Here’s hoping this book gets better. (Har de har har) I’m learning things, tho! Maybe not what the book intended me to learn, but I am learning.

ETA:

I’ve scrolled rapidly through an extremely superficial and ridiculous history-of-ideas that involved Dante, Burton’s _Melancholia_, some Freud case studies. I kept going quickly through benzos, opioids, and Xanax. I blasted right through (with eye rolls) sections on safe space and trigger warnings (yes, trigger warnings are not helpful if you then still have to consume the media in question. The entire point of a trigger warning, IMO, is that you can opt out. You know, like, oh, there is strong language in this movie. I will not watch it because I don’t like that kind of language type of thing. Have I _really_ misunderstood trigger warnings that completely? Are they just a “brace yourself — you now have to watch SA”?). I could have picked apart all of that — the fact that I didn’t does NOT mean I endorse any of it. I’m trying to figure out where the hell she is going with this.

Her definition of anxiety is quite body-focused. Her definition of worry is “motivated planning”. This is _very_ different from the definition of worry in _The Worry Trick_. She jumps _right over_ all of the detail I valued so much about _The Worry Trick_, because her response to anxiety, _that she wants to teach people_, is to believe that If She Just Does Everything Correctly It Will Turn Out OK.

Now, _that’s a stupid fucking lie that no one should ever believe much less sell to other people_.

Don’t.

It’s mean.

It _erases_ and _invalidates_ and victim blames and Everything Bad.

That said, when trouble is on the horizon, the helpful thing to do is to prepare to the degree that one can, and that is justified by the scale of resources available and the trouble on the horizon. Since there is never just _one_ trouble, one does have to balance where the resources go — time, money, thought, etc. We do our best to muddle through, and we trust _ourselves_ to live our values of the moment to the best of our ability at the time, and we believe that death will come and that to the degree we have an opportunity at the end to look back over the course of our lives, we will be at peace with the choices we made along the way.

I do love some competence porn, but, come on. If you walk around telling yourself that if you just figure it all out ahead of time and do it right, it’ll be fine, _yeah_ you’re gonna have trouble being at peace. You’ve already planned to blast yourself with some hellacious judgment. It’s not helpful to promise yourself that If You Just then It Will Be Fine. I mean, it might not be fine. Sometimes, it definitely will not be fine. If you are not okay with the _idea_ that sometimes, it definitely will not be fine, that all by itself is a problem worth devoting some time and resources to. This book is very weird, because she actually spends a lot of time on things like human relationships in person making us feel better when deeply distressed, so she definitely has knowledge and a Plan for helping people who are really distressed. I would _expect_ that knowing this would reduce some of the sting of the basic _idea_ that sometimes, no matter how much we plan, there will be ugly.

I’m roughly halfway through, and feeling somewhat discouraged.

ETAYA:

Oh, I wanted to quote some more! Because she’s one of those eye contact people! Bad words.

She’s got a whole paragraph about in person social connection and eye contact and “Unlike almost every other animal” blah blah freaking blah. “Image two people sitting quietly together.” Sure. “They turn,” what, “look into each other’s eyes, and wordlessly understand one another.” You mean burst into laughter? No, no she does not. “From the earliest days of life, children can do the same.” Uhhhh “Babies look into the eyes of their caregivers to seek comfort, learn the back-and-forth reciprocity of play, and observe how their own feelings and actions affect others.”

I need to save this passage and share it with my children when they are asking What the Fuck about neurotypical. I’ll just point to it and say, “Apparently, they all do this. I don’t understand it either.”

Anyway. There’s a minor comment about gaze coordination, but after that, she descends right back into attacks on people staring at screens.

She mentions the word “phubbing”, which I’d never heard of.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phubbing

It was a word invented as an advertising gimmick to advertise for a dictionary. I don’t even know where to go with this.

ETA still more:

“Imagine that you’re taking a walk in the woods and happen upon a bear. You freeze, and as it gets closer”

What? Has this _happened to you_? I mean, my experience with a bear encounter is that the bear is moving either away from me when I see it, or across my path and away from me.

“As it gets closer, your attention narrows to take in every bit of information possible. Does it see me? Is it moving in my direction? Are there any cubs around for it to defend? The danger of the bear is given exponentially greater priority than the aspects of the woods that you were enjoying just moments before… With this narrow scope of attention, you’re more likely to survive. Without it, you’re likely to just get the gist of the threat — not so helpful if you’re trying to avoid a bear mauling.”

Look, if you have actually been taking a walk in the woods and happened upon a bear _and are now reading this book at some time well after that_, there is an extremely slim chance that it _mattered_ that your attention focused down to the bear. But for most of those people, it mattered _more_ that they had bear spray. As a person who had a bear experience much like this (walking along, oh, look bear, hyperfocus on bear), I did absolutely nothing. The bear continued on its way. R. was behind me, and also saw the bear, but he was behind me, so he saw the bear _after_ it had crossed our path. He couldn’t understand why I was so hyperfocused on the bear. So, straight up, nothing about this passage is at all compelling in terms of making a case for narrowed scope of attention being evolutionarily advantageous. I have bear encounter experience. I don’t think the hyperfocus is especially helpful.

I will tell you what that narrowed scope _is_ helpful for. An abusive family member.

I cannot imagine why anyone would still be reading, but the next bit is astonishing.

“Now — no need to imagine here — you’re living through a global pandemic. The facts remain uncertain, but you need to focus on learning as much about the disease as possible — to take in detailed facts, judge their veracity, update information as needed, and make informed decisions. Can I really catch the virus from surfaces? How important is wearing a mask? What’s the evidence that gathering outdoors is safe? The more you learn, the more you give the realistic dangers of the virus attentional priority, while unclear or vague information (which is more likely to be false) fades into the background. This prevents over- or underestimating the threat of the virus and helps you make the best choices possible to stay physically safe and psychologically sound. With this narrow scope of attention, you’re more likely to survive.”

And _this_ is what I meant when I said above that she believe and is teaching people that if you just work really hard to do everything correctly it will turn out okay.

First off: more detailed and more clear information is NOT more likely to be true. For that matter, unclear and vague information is NOT more likely to be false. There was a ton of detail at various points of time about how it spread or did not spread, and whether community spread had happened yet and what kind of cleaning might or might not help and whether it could spread completely asymptomatically or not. And a LOT of that detail was really not accurate. Whether or not you made it through that pandemic safe and sound, physically or psychologically, had a lot more to do with whether or not you could successfully isolate / pod up and still pay your bills, whether you had to access medical care (for any reason) during the initial period of the pandemic and — most of all — how old you were. Also, there were and still are communities spreading all kinds of highly detailed falsehoods. _Sourcing_ would probably be a better thing than “detail”, but honestly, we were still figuring it all out as we went.

The next bit is about musician parents pressing schools hard during the initial return to in-person school for music education to resume. Look, I get that music is important, and more important to some people than to others. And also, this feels very, very, very like the road rage bit earlier in the book.

New section about creativity, discussion of activating moods / emotions (she uses both terms). “These activating emotions are a breed apart from deactivating emotions such as sadness, depression, relaxation, and serenity, because the latter just slow us down”.

I’m out. I may or may not revisit this tomorrow, but for now anyway, I just can’t.” You can’t say “serenity just slows us down”. That’s … a bad frame? Missing the point? Criminally unenlightened?Damning evidence that the person who wrote it is a Lifetime Member of the Cult of Busy-Ness?

Or, maybe, further evidence that the word “just” should not only be removed from sentences during editing phases, but a lot of whatever is going on around it should be reconsidered as well.

I took T. to martial arts and Vic’s. He drove both ways. Piano lesson happened and _in person_! Yay!

A. met a couple friends at Westside Creamery; they had planned a surprise birthday thing for her. Very sweet! I dropped her off and R. retrieved her a couple hours later.

T. and MIL went to Papa Razzi and were there for a couple hours have a grand time. They made it back barely in time for T. to change clothes to go to Roche Bros. for his job.

I walked with M.

I finished Misha Fletcher’s _Cooking is Terrible_, which is a fantastic book AND a fantastic cookbook. You should buy it and read it. It’s for everyone. Well, unless you are completely allergic to swears, in which case, maybe not.

I am now reading _Odd Girl Out_ by Laura James. Liveblogging may follow!

On FB, I posted:

“I’m reading _Odd Girl Out_ by Laura James. It is really interesting (I picked it for book group next month, so I’m glad it isn’t sucking), but there are really some moments.

“”You use humor to hide from your problems,” a therapist once said to me before asking me to choose which cushion I would like to play the role of my mother. I laughed, and once I started, I couldn’t stop. Turns out Gestalt therapy was not for me.”

That’s good for both insight, and a chuckle, so, fine. But then the author says this a few pages later.

“I have never quite found that breakthrough point others talk about with therapy. I have never found it painful and have never become emotional.”

I hate to break it to the author, but if you start laughing and cannot stop, that actually counts as “emotional”.”

Here is the author describing a friend she had in her very early teens:

“Even when I briefly had a best friend, Helen, it didn’t work out. She was too needy for me… She expected me to spend all my free time with her and didn’t like it if I saw any of the other girls alone. (New para in book) She thought we should have lunch together every day and walk to and from school together. She expected us to spend Saturday nights together and to sleep over at each other’s house, not leaving until just before bedtime on Sunday evening…(new para in book) She became jealous if I spent time with anyone else and would try to start arguments…She was bright and funny, thought, and we could sit in her bedroom and giggle about nothing for hours…(new para in book) We became close when we were twelve … (new para) By the time we were fourteen, we had more or less gone our separate ways… (new para) The other girls from school were less needy, and although often I felt I didn’t quite fit with them, I never felt consumed in the way I had with Helen, who would frequently storm off in a huff for no obvious reason. I missed her, though, and we became friends again later, although the friendship followed a similar pattern and once again we fell out. My divorce clashed with her wedding, and she felt I was somehow trying to steal her thunder. For years I believed it was all my fault. In hindsight, I can see it was a clash of needs, mine to have space and hers to feel connected.”

Well, from over here, sounds like your best friend maybe had some borderline personality disorder going on. Just sayin’.

This Australian urological surgeon is clearly a better human being than the rest of us, but her voice throughout this book is good-natured, clear and inviting. Her perspective is shaped by her (more than) full time job, late-diagnosed disability which resulted in years of pain, and single-parenthood. Great stuff!

Pillay is unabashedly frugal, and argues in favor of home cooking on monetary, health and taste reasons, in addition to being, she argues, faster than takeaway. Obviously, for that last to be true, it has to be an established pattern. Much of her repertoire is familiar — stirfries, rice dishes, pasta dishes. She also argues in favor of having and using a breadmaker. The baked goodies are distinctively Australian — I had to do some research to even understand what a “slice” might be. Also, jaffle irons! Who knew!

While there are some detailed technique descriptions and ratios are presented throughout, this is exactly what one expects from the more organized end of the genre: a strategy for being creative in the kitchen, using what you have, sourcing consciously, and learning as you go how to best make dishes that you and others in your household will love.

Really a joy to read, and an inspiration. Easy to recommend this one! Also, you’ll learn lots of new-to-us cooking terms and foods!

I’m in a weird head space with this book. I was expecting a history of warehouses. The foreword/intro told me to expect foreign trade zones. The first chapter does appear to be a history of warehousing. So I no longer know what to think of any of this.

I read _Oceans of Grain_ recently. It did an amazing job explaining about the ABCD grain brokers, and how during the Civil War, in an effort to actually get grain to supply soldiers, a particularly creative person invented what we now know of as the futures exchange at CBOT. My summary might be somewhat wrong, but not significantly wrong. That book was written by Scott Reynolds Nelson.

Orenstein talks about grain elevators, warehouse receipts, the trade in warehouse receipts (which is old), and how that evolved with the expansion of railroads.

“Here the farm family contributed each sack of grain to a common stock (a quasi stock exchange) and in return received a general warehouse receipt, for a specific share of the common stock rather than a specific lot of grain. The grain was now fungible.”

There are problems here. But we’re going to ignore those, because they are minor.

“The general warehouse receipt was an epochal invention. (Vladimir Lenin once commented, “Grain is the currency of currencies.”) In the late 1860s, thanks to groundbreaking grain elevators in the US heartland, brokers in the pit of the Chicago Board of Trade stopped hawking warehouse receipts and started gambling on their worth. In these inaugural futures markets nothing changed hands: brokers “contemplated elivery” while betting on prices.”

In the footnote, she actually references a _different_ book by Scott Reynolds Nelson.

It’s hard to tell if this is technically wrong or not. Certainly, she has skipped _entirely_ over _why_ the futures markets were invented (see _Oceans of Grain_). Which, why?!?!

The next many sentences are about the importance of the connection between the physical presence in the warehouses (grain elevators) of the physical item being traded, even while the trading was occurring in the pit in the form of paper receipts. And that’s great. That’s actually a really important thing that everyone who thinks they can make a killing in commodities needs to have reiterated to them over and over and over again. Because every fucking time someone gets into that trade without thinking about the physical commodity underpinning their gambling, they run up against storage limits, or accidentally wind up taking delivery of tons of pork bellies or crude oil or whatever. People do need to be reminded of this. Still. In 2022.

But then! We get weird sentencies like this. “All that was solid did not melt into air.” We get an entire fucking long paragraph quoting Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr on the topic of the _stereograph_.

Honestly — a little digression here — you might be wondering about stereographs. They are mentioned in WDW’s “Carousel of Progress”, when dad is bugging junior about getting into his stereographs of “Little Egypt”. But to most of us, a stereograph is a View Master. Why is Orenstein quoting Holmes Sr on the topic of View Masters? I have not a single clue.

Anyway. Here’s the quote:

“”Form is henceforth divorced from matter,” declared Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. In 1859 as he praised the stereograph, another medium of “universal currency” fabricated in the mid-nineteenth century: “Matter in large masses must always be fixed and dear; form is cheap and transportable.” Quite literally, following Holmes, the immobility of the “matter” locked inside the warehouse enabled the mobility of the “form” of the warehouse receipt. The warehouse receipt was like a photograph of the warehouse interior… and as it bounced from ledger to ledger it materialized the dematerialization of the pit.”

Take a moment. You are not going to successfully absorb that, because _it makes no sense whatsoever_. But it is _abundantly_ clear that this is how Orenstein _literally_ views the world. It’s _all_ about surface and appearance. And for someone who has spent way too much time reading books about bills and exchange of bills and real bills and flying bills and all the shenanigans involved in that, having a warehouse receipt treated like a fucking photograph is goddamn offensive.

WRONG METAPHOR.

Let us continue!

The next long paragraph is about kernels of grain flowing through elevators, and how that is like boxes of Argentine beef being trucked in and out of a foreign trade zone, and Marx talking about passengers at a railway station.

Really. I am not making any of this up.

Fortunately, in the following paragraph, we are back to the actual process.

“Safe passage, in turn, was ensured by those pieces of paper.” OK, not literally — that is synecdoche. “As the AWA well knew, the warehousemen needed to be trustworthy for the warehouse receipt to be bankable.”

The rest of that paragraph is about standardization of warehouse receipts, and working with congress to pass the Warehouse Act of 1916 and a licensing program for warehouses. Look, I freaking _hate_ commoditization of agriculture products. I cut my political teeth on getting a definition of organic codified into law. From _my_ perspective, from the 1990s on, the history of grading of agricultural commodities led to a gamification of farming that strip mined deep soils and destroyed ecosystems. However, I also do recognize that this process of commodification was an important component of ending starvation globally.

Next up: a nice, compact description of “field warehousing”. I’m sure this will be followed with a description of abuse, and then auditing procedures to deal with abuse. However, my daughter is asking for a mug cake, and I just drank a Jack’s Abbey Samoa on an empty stomach so I’ll be back later.

ETA:

The scandal was “The Great Salad Oil Swindle” of 1963.

I took T. to martial arts and then Vic’s. Fun! They had in person piano lesson. Awesome!

I am reading _The Kitchen_ by John Ota, since we’re having a remote meeting about Future Kitchen tomorrow. I’m optimistic about neither the book nor the meeting, but since I’ve now pitched two NF books (DNF’d both! For somewhat different reasons), I don’t even feel like I need to finish this thing if it is too obnoxious.

For reference purposes: The Great Demographic Reversal was pitched (DNF) because economists who treat labor in 1972 as the same as labor in 2022 don’t know what the fuck they are talking about and have nothing useful to say. Geopolitical Alpha pitched (DNF) for an October 2022 publication date, a thesis that if you look at “constraints” instead of “preferences” your geopolitical considerations when investing will be materially better, and a specific example of Putin won’t invade whatever. Technical, he’s right. Putin did _not_ (yet, anyway) invade any of the Baltic states. But the reasoning manifestly failed in the Ukraine case. If your idea of a material constraint is, Russia selling oil to Germany means they won’t invade whatever the fuck, well, it wasn’t much of a material constraint now was it.

John Ota so far has wildly misrepresented the Pilgrims and shown himself to be a truly horrifying ally. That was Massachusetts and Virginia kitchens. We’re now on to New Orleans. The kitchens and the visits are interesting, so I’m so far tolerating this book to a greater degree than the others.

ETA:

Things definitely take a turn for the better in the Port Ellice House chapter. Ota tells a little of the story of his Japanese grandfather and imagines himself as a houseboy in the Port Ellice House. This really helps a lot, because in the other chapters, it was so much about being awed by the extreme wealth, which I find super disturbing when it involves enslaved persons.

ETAYA:

Unrelated DNF. Before continuing with the tenement kitchen chapter, I decided to try some fiction. I had a great convo with K. on Friday about whether or not it is possible to write romance novels with protagonists in their 50s. I feel that the genre retains a few too many conventions (a narrow understanding of physical attraction and attractiveness, pair bonding that lasts decades, ets.) that are difficult to square with protagonists in late middle age / young end of old. If all previous relationships were duds, why would this one be any different? If previous relationship was good, what happened to end it and are they realistically functional again yet, or are they permanently traumatized by nursing someone through cancer / losing a loved one abruptly to trauma or massive heart attack? If they _thought_ the previous relationship was good and they were dumped, why do we think their judgment is any better now? Anyway. I figured I’d read some lists of possibilities, and Penny Watson’s “Apples Should Be Red” popped up and looked entertaining … and it turns out I already own it. OK, how’d that happen? My sister apparently read it and liked it sooooo….

Nope. Our putative hero’s first words on stage are: “Frank Bucknell is a fucking retard.” I have zero problem with f bombs. I was also expecting f bombs. I like f bombs.

I don’t like the r word. This is not okay. Also, he smokes. Marlboros. Double extra special not okay.

That was a super fast fail. OTOH, it cost me absolutely no money. Also, looking at the original order I see it also included _Darkness Becomes Her_, by Kelly Keaton, whose books written under the name Kelly Gay I once enjoyed. So maybe I’ll try that next.