Tim Receveur got tickets for the Hispanic Caucus Awards Gala and shared one with me. He got them from a band IIP works with called Ozomatli. Tim has been one of their biggest supporters. They are a multicultural band, which goes well with our programs and very easy to work with, which makes our PAOs overseas happier. Their music was very good.
President Obama was there and gave a speech. It was mostly about health care, but he added a Latino twist. Evidently a significant number of the uninsured are Latinos, especially if “undocumented workers” are included. The President’s speech didn’t go into much detail, but he did repeat “todos somos Americanos” on several occasions, which was a crowd pleaser.
Unfortunately, he went the other way as he left the building, so I didn’t get to shake his hand. I was figuring that a close encounter might cure the minor arthritis in my left knee, but no such luck.
I had a good time, even if I didn’t get to meet the big man personally. The night started off with a mariachi band. I am fond of that music. It has down-home sounds. The old man listened to a lot of country and western music and a lot of his cowboy music shared the southwest roots. Marty Robbins, Gene Autry and the great Bob Wills all played on the familiar themes, often with Spanish speaking musicians or even lyrics. Another familiar aspect was the recent immigrant vigor you could feel. The American dream is still alive and people come from all around to take part in it.
Sonia Sotamayer was there, so were Marc Anthony and Jenifer Lopez. Soladad O’Brien won an award. I always wondered re her unusual name combination. Her mother is Cuban. Her father is Irish-Australian. In America they met and married.
What I noticed was a lot of old fashioned assimilation. It is not fashionable to call our country a melting pot anymore, but it is nevertheless. The crowd was a lot like I remember immigrant families from Poland or Italy in Milwaukee. The older people maintain their ties of the home country. The younger people have a second-hand connection but a lot less real feeling for the place. And when they marry out of the community, the children don’t think much at all about ethnicity. The difference in the Hispanic community had been that immigration renewed the ties constantly. This may be changing now, as birth rates are dropping in Mexico and Central America.
The process is best illustrated by a simple statistic. It was repeated a couple of times that Hispanics are America’s largest ethnic group, with something like 47 million. This is not entirely accurate. Germans are the largest ethnic group in the U.S. 58 million Americans claimed German ancestry on the 1990 census, which is the last time I think they asked the question. This is significant because it is NOT significant, i.e. nobody really cares. Germans have enriched America with their cultural contributions (decent beer, kindergarten, hot dogs & sauerkraut) and their hard work, but they are so thoroughly American now that it passes completely w/o notice. When I mention it, people roll their eyes and discount it. They say that it doesn’t really count and they are right. It made a big difference in 1909. Who cares today? The same will happen with Hispanics. At some point they may indeed become a quarter of the U.S. population, as the Germans were 100 years ago. But nobody will really pay attention by the time that happens. This is America. Todos somos Americanos. That is how we roll.
Anyway, it was an interesting event. Everybody had to wear tuxedos. This made for an elegant evening, but it presented an unexpected problem. When everybody has a black tuxedo, you cannot tell who is the waiter. When people come around with plates of food, you might just be stealing somebody’s snacks.
BTW – Tim’s wife April took the pictures, if you notice the better quality. She does this professionally. You can find her other work at this link.
I like to sit in my chair and look out the window. This time of year, the sun comes in low at the edge of the house and paints the leaves of the plants and trees by the window. The pictures don’t do it justice. I am not sure which I like best, now when everything is still green or a few weeks from now when the leaves on the bigger tree will be yellow and those of the Japanese maple will be crimson.
The tree fills with birds in the evening this time of year. They sing so loudly you cannot hear the TV if you leave the door open. I like it, although they do crap all over. We don’t need to fertilize around that tree.
The picture below is parking under the freeway. It is a brutal scene, but maybe so ugly that it is interesting. I always kind of liked Chicago under those El Tracks, ugly, but gritty. I think that is why I liked “The Blues Brothers,” because of Chicago.
Chrissy and I went down to watch the tea party protest today in Washington. I like to watch protests. I got in the habit when I lived in Madison. The crowd filled the lawn from the Capitol down past 4th St. None of the anti-war marches were as big.
The demography was the interesting part. I bet the median age was around forty or fifty and I thought about what I said in Revenge of the Geezers a couple days ago. It has usually been hard to get a crowd of people over thirty-years-old to come out to protest. Most of the other protests I have seen are staffed by the young and unemployed. This protest was unusual in that included mostly people who probably actually pay taxes and I think it was largely organized online. This might be the harbinger of political activism of the future.
Once you get a full time job and other responsibilities, you don’t have as much time or inclination to march, chant and protest. This explains why youth has driven protest movements. There is no mystery to it. They have extra energy and time on their hands. Beyond that, they are vaguely bored and a little bit resentful because they think others don’t pay enough attention to them. As the older population becomes healthier and retirement stretches on for many more years, this is increasingly a description that applies to old people.
The other thing interesting about this crowd was its lack of professionalism. Most protests I have seen have their core of bused-in experienced protesters, with well constructed signs and organized chants. This one had almost all hand lettered signs. There was very little unity among the messages. Most clearly didn’t like the President but most of the anger seemed directed at congress. One of the most original signs had pictures of members of congress and said, “Don’t give your cash to these clunkers”
The crowd was very well behaved, but not very well organized. Most were probably first-time protesters and I got the feeling that many would be taking their children or grandchildren to see the monuments in Washington after they wandered off when the protesting was done. Some brought lawn chairs. If someone had fired up a grill, it would have seemed a lot like a July 4th picnic. Of course we didn’t stay long. Maybe it got more intense later, but I doubt it.
People remember where they were on 9/11 (more on that below) but it is harder to remember how you felt and what you thought. At first it was just surprise and then anger. I don’t remember exactly when we found out Osama bin Laden was behind it. There was a lot of speculation before that. It was considered racist to jump to the conclusion that it had been Middle Eastern terrorists, but I think most people jumped in that direction anyway. Go with the probabilities.
I wrote notes to myself that evening, so I have some documentary sources beyond fallible memory. I wondered if this was going to be a big break with civilization, that would build to something catastrophic like the assassination of Franz Ferdinand let to World War. I understood that militarily all the countries of the Middle East combined could be defeated by a single American carrier group, but I also knew that would not be the type of conflict we faced. Everybody thought the terrorists would hit again and there was talk about a new normal where it became routine to have terror attacks.
When I look back over the years since 9/11/2001, I am relieved. It was not nearly as bad as we feared. We did a good job of countering the bad guys. I know we feel a little guilty now because we treated some of bad guys harshly and nobody can say what would have happened had we been less aggressive, I have to say that we achieved a good result. I would err on the side of caution and if that means some terrorist are uncomfortable, that is just the way it is. In eight years they have been unable to hit us again. It is not for lack of trying. Terrorism is a disease that will never go away entirely, but it can be controlled with proper treatment.
When I think back to the crowds and how we felt on 9/11/2001, I bet anyone in the crowd would have happily held anyone responsible or even associated the attacks underwater for as long as it took to make them talk or drown them. If fact, I bet a majority would have still held them under AFTER they talked. Considered judgment from a position of safety is usually different from the decisions you make when you are in the fray, when your life or those of your loved ones seem in the balance, and I don’t think we really have the moral right to be too strict when judging methods unless we also can recreate the state of mind. It is like telling someone that he used too big a caliber in stopping the attacking beast since a smaller one PROBABLY would have worked.
But it is human nature to second guess and to want to hold someone accountable for producing a result that was not as good as it is possible to imagine. I don’t hold with that. IMO people should feel afraid to attack the United States; those who kill Americans should anticipate a lethal response. And they should get it. The 9/11 attacks came when the U.S. was ostensibly at peace. We had just finished saving millions of Muslim lives in Kosovo. We had invaded no Middle Eastern countries. In fact, we had liberated one (Kuwait) from a particularly brutal tyrant. Al Qaeda had no reason to attack us, at least no reason a civilized human being would accept. As I write, I feel the anger return even after years have passed, so let me move along before I post something too bloody minded.
What I did on September 11
I was in the middle of a seminar on websites at FSI (yes, even back then) when someone came into the room and said that there had been a terror attack in NYC. We thought it was something like a suitcase in an airport, but we went out to the common area where CNN was on. We saw the towers burning and then they just collapsed. Somebody said that they could not have collapsed and it must just be the smoke hiding them, but it was a collapse. By then the Pentagon had also been hit so they decided to evacuate FSI, since it also was a Federal facility. They sent us home. I didn’t have a local home, since I was assigned to Warsaw and was on TDY in Washington from a conference. My hotel was the Holiday Inn in Roslyn near the Potomac, so I started to walk in that direction.
People were all over the streets, mostly going the opposite direction. Everyone was asking questions, but nobody knew any answers. I was surprised how friendly and helpful people were. There was no shoving or fighting even though the crowds and traffic were massive. There was also no panic, which is surprising when I think about it. When somebody would start to talk about a frightful thing, others would calm him down and say that we all just had to be calm. It is a couple of miles from FSI to the Potomac, so I passed lots of people walking and standing on porches. Despite the tragedy, or maybe because of it, I felt a peaceful easy feeling of solidarity with my fellow Americans, even as we could hear and see all the emergency vehicles screaming toward the Pentagon.
The Holiday Inn was full of people from posts overseas, since that is where we all were staying. Some worried about paying for the unexpectedly long stay. The Holiday Inn folks assured us that we could stay as long as we needed to. Soon State Department guaranteed that our travel orders would be amended to account for any differences. Those assurances were important. We all called our families to make sure they were okay and to tell them that we were fine. Actually, we tried to call. The lines were jammed. I don’t remember when I finally got through. Email worked, however. I figured the my family, living in Poland, were among the safest people in the world anyway.
I walked over to the Key Bridge. You could see the smoke rising from the Pentagon. It was actually pretty against the clear blue sky. I thanked God for the brave Americans working to protect us, all those firefighters and police in New York, and those ordinary Americans who stood up to the terrorists on Flight 93 and probably saved much destruction and death in downtown Washington.
I was stuck in DC until September 17. If you see that Michael Moore movie where he makes a big deal about the bin Laden family getting out “early” on September 21, know that he is full of crap (about that and everything else, BTW). Flights to Europe resumed on or before September 17 because I was on one of them. I had to go via Atlanta and Rome to Warsaw, but it wasn’t too hard. The planes were almost empty. I got upgraded to business class and the seat next to me was empty.
I got back home and back to work, sadder, a little less trusting and a lot more aware of being American in a world that seemed more dangerous.
My father was born on this date in 1921. I don’t really know much about him and some of what I think I know is probably wrong. We didn’t have much contact with his side of the family. Both his parents died before I was born. He and his fraternal brother Joe were the youngest. They were born twenty-two years after their oldest sister, Helen.
On the left are my grandparents.
I was named after my father, so I am technically John Matel, Jr. John Matel Senior was born in Duluth, Minnesota. His father, Anton, had come over from Poland a few years before. I don’t know when. His mother, Anastasia, was of Polish ancestry too, but she was born in Buffalo, NY. My father never told me much more than that, although I understand that her family was from Galicia in the Carpathian Mountains.
I found out later that my grandfather’s family was from what is now eastern Poland: Suwalki and Mazowieckie. I learned this from a cousin called Henrick Matel who found me in Poland. His father was my grandfather’s brother. His father & another brother went to France to work in coal mines there. My grandfather made a wiser choice and went to America. Henrick didn’t know much else. His father had been killed in a train accident when he was only eleven. Henrick unwisely returned to Poland after WWII, believing the communist promises that things would be good there. Young men make bad choices.
Henrick lamented that the Polish side of the family were a bunch of drunks. Things didn’t change much in America. Now you know as much about my father’s prehistory as I do and I suspect a little more than he did.
My father talked about growing up in the depression. He kept some of the frugal habits from those times. He used bacon grease as butter, for example and would get really upset if we threw out any food. His childhood home was small and crowded. It was on 4th Street. I went up there to see it. Of course, by then it was different. It was in a yuppified neighborhood and a small home for a single couple. My father’s home housed eight. Their toilet was in the basement, which has a dirt floor back then. He told a funny story about his youth. The family went to see “Frankenstein” and it scared my future father. His brothers set up a dummy in the basement and the made it sit up when little Johnny went down to use the toilet. He said he no longer needed to use the toilet.
He got a job with the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and was stationed near Superior, WI. He planted trees and cut trails. It gave him a lasting appreciation for forestry, which I think he passed to me. How else can you explain a city boy so attracted to the woods? Some of it is myth, or just a feeling, but whenever I look at the groves of trees planted by the CCC I think of him. They are mature forests now, but in the Dust Bowl years they were pioneers.
After getting out of the CCC, my father got a job at Medusa Cement, where he stayed his whole working life, except for the time he was in the Army Air Corps. He was drafted into the Army soon after Pearl Harbor. He would never tell me much about that part of his life. I know he got seven battle stars, so was a participant in all the big action of the war in Europe. Of course, he didn’t really have to be there for all of them. Anywhere the planes went, he officially went. He landed at Normandy a few days after D-day. According to what he told me, the only time he actually got near the Germans was during the battle of the bulge, closer than he wanted. He got a Purple Heart.
They had a point system for discharge from the military. My father had a lot of points because of those battle stars & Purple Heart mentioned above, so he was among the first U.S. soldiers discharged. He always expressed a special fondness for Chicago, where he was discharged. Since he was among the first to come home after the victory in Europe, people were eager to welcome him and buy him drinks.
I am embarrassed to say that I don’t know exactly when he married my mother, but it was soon after the war. They told me that it took nine years before I was born. I was born in 1955, so counting back we get 1946.
On the left are my uncle Joe (blond), Ted (tall) and my father.
Our house in Milwaukee was full of artifact of my father’s work. He and my mother’s father built the boiler, constructed the steps in the back and built the retaining wall, for example. All these things worked, but they were odd. The boiler threw most of the heat out through the sides. That meant that the basement was very warm – the rest of the house not so much. The steps were all uneven. The wall leaned and the drainage holes were lined with beer cans cut out on both ends. The evident surplus of beer cans explained much of the other things.
During my childhood, my father mostly worked. That’s what I recall. It was the time when they were building the Interstate freeways and there was a big demand for cement. He regularly worked twelve hour shifts and was tired when he came home. He drank a lot of beer, at first Schlitz, later Pabst and then Budweiser, but he never missed a day of work because of it, or for any other reason. I don’t remember him ever taking a sick day. Maybe he just denied sickness because he hated doctors. He went to the doctor only once from the time he got his discharge physical out of the army in 1945 until the time he died more than fifty years later. On that occasion, he had a cyst removed from his stomach. The doctor forgot to sew it up. After that, he said that the medical profession had their chance and he was not going to give them another. When the doctors finally got their second look at him, the day he died, they couldn’t believe my sister when she told them that he didn’t take any medication besides Budweiser.
Wedding day
I really didn’t get to know my father until my mother died in 1972. He was grieving too, but he tried to make it easier for my sister and me. He tried to cook, but wasn’t very good at it. But my father was nothing if not stubborn. He ate what he cooked and made us eat it too. I remember watching some bread bake in the toaster oven. The old man asked if I thought it was ready. Just at that point it burst into flames.
My father dropped out of HS in the tenth grade, but he made sure I went to college. He also got me a job at the cement company, where I got to work those twelve hour overtime shifts and make the big bucks. At one point, they assigned me to unloading hopper cars. I worked from noon to midnight, which was great. I could sleep late and then meet my friends at the bars at midnight. At the job, I got to lift very heavy tools and smack things with sledge hammers (something young men like) but in between the hard work I got time to just hang around by the river and wait for the cars to empty (something else young men like). Then I got to ride the cars to the end of the dock, applying the brakes and jumping off just before the rammed into the car in front. I mentioned to my father that I thought this was fun. The next day, he made sure the boss gave me the midnight till noon shift, which didn’t suit me at all. He told me that the worst thing a young man could get was a job he liked that didn’t have a future and he was going to make sure that I would not get it. He wanted me to stay in school and I did. Thanks Dad.
Daddy
I worked hopper cars during Christmas break and it was less fun, BTW. I remember working in the evenings and looking at the temperature on the Allen Bradley clock tower. It always seemed to be 5 below zero. I would work as fast as I could out there by the tracks, get the cement moving and then rush into my father’s office and sit in front of the heater. My co-worker, LC Duckworth, used to sleep in front of his own propane heater very close. I couldn’t stand it because it let out these terrible fumes. He had no complaints until he started his pants on fire. We put him out w/o any lasting damage, but he never sat near that heater again.. LC was the strongest man I knew, but his ability to sleep almost any time was his unique skill. I learned it from him.
My father retired when he was only fifty-six. He already had thirty-six years in, since he got credit for his time in army. I can understand why he wanted to quit. The job was noisy, dusty and hard. But the plus side is that he had lots of friends. His job involved loading trucks and he knew all the drivers. It was fun to watch. It was a different man I met when I went with my father to work, a happy man with lots of social connections. Retirement was a bit of a mistake, IMO. But I suppose he thought it was worth it. At first, I think it was. He had time to read and relax. It deteriorated after that.
We drifted apart as parents and children often do, when we moved away. In the FS, you are FAR away. My father had a blind spot when it came to this career, BTW. It was the only time I had to really disagree with him. When I told him that I planned to take the FS test, he told me not to waste my time. He said that such careers were “only for rich kids” and that I could never get a job like that. Had I taken his advice, it would have been true. I can’t blame him. It was just farther than he could see. I think that is a big problem for the “disadvantaged”. They hold themselves back with low expectations.
Daddy, Jake, Chris
I didn’t make it back in time when he died. My sister called me and I got on the next flight form Krakow. But the next flight was the next day and then I got stranded in Cincinnati. When I called to tell my sister I would be late, my cousin Luke answered and told me that my sister was at the hospital and my father had died. I figure he died as I flew over Canada. I remember looking down at the savage beauty, the forest and the frozen lakes and thinking it was over. I don’t know if I REALLY thought that or if I have just created this memory ex-post-facto. The mind works like that.
My father never made much money, but after my mother died he spent even less. He never went anywhere, didn’t waste money on clothes and ate mostly bean soup, cabbage soup and kielbasa. He used to talk about his stash of “cold cash.” We didn’t think much of it. But when my sister was cleaning out the freezer, she found around $20,000.00 in $100 dollar bills, wrapped in foil like hamburger. The old man hated banks and didn’t want to have any money that would earn interest that he would have to pay taxes. When dealing with old depression era people, it was a good idea to look around and don’t hire stranger to clean up those nooks and crannies.
According to what my sister told me, my father fell down and couldn’t get up. When asked how he was, his last words were, “I can’t complain.” He used that phrase a lot and it was not surprising he would fall back on it, but it seems an appropriate thing to say at the end. Happy birthday, Daddy. I still miss you. I hope my kids will be as lucky as I was. I can’t complain.
Today is our anniversary. I am not going to share emotional things on the blog, but rather just the memory. Chrissy & I have built a life and a family. It began twenty-seven years ago. I could not have guessed how lucky we would be.
Things were not looking so good in 1982. I had just found out that I couldn’t get into the Air Force because of a misdiagnosed ulcer when I was fifteen. In theory, I was still chronically sick, ironic since I was one of the fittest people I knew back then. I had not taken the FS test that would end up getting me the job I have now. It would be two years before I got my MBA. Unemployment was over 10%. I was working for “flexi-force” sometimes. Chrissy had a part time job at First Wisconsin bank, which was a small ray of lights, but we had no assets, no prospects and a negative net worth.
We couldn’t afford much for the wedding. Chrissy wore her mother’s dress. I wore my best (only) suit. Chrissy’s mother and grandmother did most of the planning. Chrissy was very generous – and wise – to let it be. (All those silly ideas that the bride should get all the indulgences she wants just creates lots of heartache and makes even nice women into those bridezillas they show on TV.)
We got married in Holmen Lutheran Church with Pastor Evavold doing the ceremony. A local singer called Walton Ofstedahl sang for the ceremony. He was an old farmer with a really good voice. The thing that made it special, however, was how much he loved to sing. We had the reception at the Moe Coulee game farm. Chrissy’s father knew the guy who owed it. Actually, that was a great place to have a reception. It was not just a wilderness. They had a nice cabin with a pretty pond and picnic area and you could watch the animals wandering around. Chrissy’s relatives and her family’s friends and neighbors brought things – including the red jello – and helped make the reception very satisfying. It was sort of thing you might expect Garrison Keillor to talk about on the news from Lake Woebegone. Of course, before we headed off, Chrissy and I had to pitch in to put away chairs and tables and that also made the experience memorable.
Our honeymoon was at Chrissy’s parent’s farm in Holmen, Wisconsin. They cleared out for a couple days and left the place to us. These days you might call it “agro-tourism.” We just liked it because it was free. I remember the cows mooing waking me up in the pre-dawn twilight. The Johnsons had switched from dairy to beef cows a couple years before, so we didn’t have to milk them and there were no other urgent chores. Today we would say they were “free range” cows, but back then it was just that cows hung around in the fields and ate grass during the summer. You really didn’t have to do much except move them around to different fields in rotation. That’s about all I knew (or know) about that.
Since the cows eat grass and there seemed to be a lot of grass, I guessed that once in the proper pasture they would just look bucolic and take care of themselves, but they evidently like their special hay for breakfast. Chrissy informed me that they don’t actually eat grass, or at least that is not their preferred food. They like alfalfa. Cows are more complicated than I thought. Anyway, they complain loudly when they don’t get what they want, so at dawn we had to toss a few bales of whatever Chrissy’s father prepared for them over the fence. The first morning I learned that hay bales don’t fly as far as you think they would when you throw them off the truck. One landed on the barbwire fence and broke it. Cows aren’t ferocious or eager to escape and they didn’t try to stampede out through the newly created opening, but we had to fix the fence before they aimlessly wandered off.
It is true that anyplace is great when you are with someone you love and things started to improve for us soon after. We were lucky starting off behind the eight ball. You can take more satisfaction in how far you have come, but more importantly you have a lot less fear of failure after you have experienced it. I know that I could live off peanut butter, sauerkraut and potatoes (I still really like those things) if I had to and hard times really aren’t so bad if you have a good partner, family and friends. Besides, it is good to get that failure vaccination when you are young and resilient.
Twenty-seven years is half my total life. We can probably do at least twenty-seven more.
I took Espen to his new dorm today. It was an easy move. He didn’t take much with him. I have been bragging that when I went to college I had to hitchhike up and could have only what I could carry in my duffle bag. I think that helped make him want to show his own capacity for simplicity. Anyway, he is not very far from home, so he can come back and forth. The dorms are simple, cinderblock. The kids share toilets and showers. Small rooms are good because they don’t hold as much stuff. Kids today have too much stuff.
Espen actually could commute to school, but we think it is useful for him to be immersed in the college environment. The place is very young and lively, with gyms and basketball courts nearby. He will be studying computer engineering, which is tough program, so I figure it will not be all fun … but I hope he will have some. College is a magical time and I want that for him but I will miss him.
I was reminded of the void his absence will create when I stopped at the grocery store on the way home. I will have to buy less food and it made me sad to think that I would now not need to buy some of his favorite foods. We had a little ritual putting the food away. I would toss it to him and he would put it where it belonged (or not). We started doing it when he was little and not really a very good catch. As he got older, he often complained that I made him do it and said it was silly, but he did it. The tossing was one part of the game and the complaining was another. Little things, but important.
I still have Alex for a couple more months, but he will be leaving and going to James Madison University this spring. Alex was unenthusiastic about education when he graduated from HS and I think we made a wise decision to give him the space to make his own decision. Soon he decided to go to Nova, where he started to study and his grades got better and better. He will be a junior next year when he starts at JMU, so he is essentially on the track I would have wished /planned for him, but he made his own decisions and along the way saved me a lot of money. Nova tuition is only about 1/3 as much and Alex lived at home. But he deserves the college experience too. JMU is in Harrisonburg in the Shenandoah Valley. It has a good reputation and the kids who go there all seem to love it. I think it is great that he will be going, but I will miss him.
There is an ironic imbalance in the parent-child relationship. When they are little, they follow you around and you have to watch them all the time. You look forward to when your time will again be your own, when you can read when you want, eat where you want (i.e. not only Happy Meal providers), and watch the television programs you want. Then they transition and by the time you have the freedom you think you wanted, it is not as sweet as you thought. I have been enjoying my time with the kids and I will enjoy the visits with them, but the time is passed when we are really together. So sad.
The boys and I went down to the woods today and saw some thinning operations. I will write more about that tomorrow. But when I was loading the pictures from the forestry, I found these above and below from Arlington Cemetery that I took yesterday.
They open the gates at 8am, and I took the pictures as I was waiting for them to open on my way to work. The pictures have an interesting play of light. I don’t know where it came from, since I didn’t see it when I took the pictures. I would guess it was something on the lens, but you will notice, especially on the lower picture, that it is in back of the truck coming in the gate.
Alex was making fun of my workout. He said that I didn’t work out that long, I went too fast and my form was not good. He is right. But I explained to him that he was missing the point. My workout is SUSTAINABLE. I have been consistently working out w/o significant breaks since I was in 7th grade that is more than forty years. So I figure have the right to pontificate about these things.
My weight workout consists of only eleven exercises three times a week. I use the machines at Gold’s Gym and I can do the whole thing in less than ten minutes if nobody gets in my way. Of course, somebody usually does get in the way. Some people have the obnoxious habit or resting while sitting on the machines, but that is a subject for another post.
The exercises are balanced to let one set of muscles rest while the others work. I don’t know what the exercises are really called, so I will just name them what I think they are. In order they are curls on the isolation pad, complete pull down to knees, sitting bench press, sitting rowing, flies, wing pull downs, inclined bench press, pull downs, bench press, dumbbell curls, military press. Moderation in all things is important, so I don’t push the weights up too high. My highest weight is the bench press where I use 240lbs. I have learned NOT to push too hard or add too much.
I think warm up and stretching are overrated. I get warm up enough riding my bike over to the gym. I also think hydration is overrated. I never bother to drink during workouts, even when I run or ride my bike and am out for hours. There is time enough to drink before and after. I drink from bubblers if I find one, but otherwise I go with Coke Zero. I sometimes put ice in the glass. I also like to eat watermelon or pineapple when I am thirsty. And I think water is overrated. I spent a year in Iraq hydrating with Coca-Cola, BTW. I don’t say everybody should follow my idiosyncratic habits, but it works for me.
I have been running regularly since 1973. I started out of necessity. I used to like to be in the woods, but the woods near Stevens Point, Wisconsin (where I was an undergraduate) were so full of mosquitoes that I had to move at a trot to avoid being eaten alive. But it wasn’t really running for workout until 1978. That was about the time they invented decent running shoes. I had some “waffle stompers” and used to run along the lake trails in Madison or through Warnimont and Grant Parks along Lake Michigan.
My system for running is actually time, not distance based. You have to run at least twenty minutes to get a decent workout. When I go to a new place, I run out for twenty minutes. Usually I walk back, which is good exercise in itself. Now I have several variations of the run. My favorite local runs are around the Mall in DC. But I have run in some great places. In Norway, there was a run through a place called Bygdoy. It was a mix of forest and nice farm fields with crops and good looking cattle. The King of Norway owned the farm. He evidently didn’t need to make a profit, so it was beautifully maintained in a traditional form. In Poland, I used to run in Las Wolski, among some of the most magnificent beech forests I have ever seen. As I have written on several occasions, running is more than exercise, but it IS good exercise.
I think it is nearly impossible to be truly fit w/o running, but I bet I log more total aerobic hours on my bike. I ride for transportation and I almost never ride just for pleasure. But it is a pleasure to ride. My ride to work is seventeen miles, or it was to SA 44. It is around 15 minutes less to my new office, but I still have to ride to the old SA 44 Metro stop. I just have to finish the ride after work. I am allowed bring my bike on the Metro after 7pm, but it is way too crowded by the time it gets to Foggy Bottom. Oh yeah, I have compromised on the riding both ways.
BTW – You see the picture of my bike and me at the top. Notice that I don’t have those silly lycra tight shorts. Below are storm clouds gathering over the Potomac, seen from my office window.
I ride to work in the morning, when it is relatively cool, but I take the Metro home. I think this actually means I ride MORE total miles because I do it almost every day and it extends the biking season. I don’t like to ride in the dark or the twilight. I work until 6pm or later and it takes around 1:20 to get home, so that means that if I need to ride home my biking season doesn’t start until April and is over in early September. The one-way trip buys at least another month on both sides of the season. I also admit that I am lazy about the ride home. I used to do both ways, but I more often found good reasons not to use the bike. I also used to get caught in afternoon thunder showers a lot. Now I know if it is not raining when I take off in the morning, I am probably okay. Besides, it is mostly up hill on the way home and often against the wind. The Metro is a good choice.
I could ramble forever, so let me get to the bottom line. Every good exercise program must include both strength and aerobic training. To be sustainable, it must be integrated into daily life and cannot be so hard that you will avoid doing it. That means that you sometimes have to compromise. Sometimes it is good enough. It is great to pursue excellence, but most of those people fall off the edge before they reach middle age. It is also good to have something you can do cheaply and by yourself. It is hard to find any activity that is less expensive than running or walking. You have to buy a new pair of shoes maybe once a year. Biking is also cheap. I bought my bike in 1997 for around $700. I have replaced a few tires and tubes and I had to replace a sprocket once. I expect to have the thing for several more years, so I figure it costs less than $100 a year. If I figure in the gas and Metro fare saved, I bet I actually made money.
The caption on one of my old running poster says it all about exercise in general, “the victory is not always to the swiftest or the contest to the strongest. The winner is the one who keeps running.”
The United States Information Agency (USIA) was absorbed by State Department in 1999. I was there when they took down the USIA eagle and prosaically renamed the building State Annex 44 (SA 44). There was and still is a palpable feeling of loss among some of my colleagues and I miss some parts of my old agency, but not much. By the time of the anschluss with State, there was not much left of USIA worth saving. USIA suffered truly horrible top-leadership through the 1990s and they wrecked the place. We closed our libraries, shut branch posts, let our contact networks atrophy, laid off experienced FSNs and the director seemed actively hostile to hiring new public affairs officers; by 2000 there were only around half as many of us as there had been ten years before.
Our fearless leaders were under a general impression that since we had won the Cold War we didn’t need relics like public affairs anymore. After 9/11/2001 we found we were wrong and suffered mightily from our compromised ability to communicate with foreign publics. But all that is history.
I think we are better off integrated into State Department. But I still remember with nostalgia and pride coming into the USIA almost a quarter century ago, so the final closing of our offices in the old USIA building makes me sad. We are moving out next week and my group is the last to go. It is finally finished.
Tim Receveur took a few pictures of the end of days at SA 44 and you can see them on this post. There is a kind of Twilight Zone feeling to the old place. We will be moving to a new building across from the Harry Truman Building. The offices are nicer, but the location is worse. SA 44 is in a great place. The Orange Line is nearby and you always get a seat on the way home since you board before the big crowds get on after Metro Center. Gold’s Gym is a few minute walk. We are near the Mall, as well as restaurants. Our new building is near nothing. The State cafeteria is not very good and it is a little expensive for what you get. I will adapt. I just need to find a place to lock my bike and take a shower.
USIA has been gone for ten years, now the building is recycled and all its denizens scattered and relocated. I guess that’s all there is. Move along. Nothing left to see. Only a vague remembrance of past glories.
