Espen will go to George Mason next fall. He is excited about a program they have in gaming and simulations. All that time in the World of Warcraft may yet pay off. Gaming is much more than games, as I have written before. Games will be the future on online collaboration and learning.
George Mason has the advantage of location. They are in easy contact with all the government and government support activities as well as the high tech in N. Virginia and the biotech along the 270 corridor in Maryland. It really is a superb area to work and learn. Housing prices are a little high, but once you have the house there are lots of opportunities.
I appreciate being in Washington with all the history and monuments, but I often forget about the dynamism of the suburbs. N. Virginia’s tech and services produces more jobs for the area than the Federal government, but the presence of the Feds makes us recession resistant.
Sorry my picture is blurred. Think of it as impressionistic art. This is the Patriot Center.
George Mason went a little over the top with the welcome. They evidently have a successful basketball team and they were using the sport excitement methods. The Patriot Center is also hosting the Ringling Brothers Circus, so they took the opportunity to put on a show with a band and ring master. It was interesting the difference with the orientation at University of Virginia. Virginia emphasizes tradition. They remind you that Thomas Jefferson founded the place and laid out the plans and that the university has been there a long time. Mason talks about the opportunities of the future. It is much more of a competitive feeling at Mason. I suppose they are both playing to their strengths. Virginia is established and everybody knows its value. Mason is hungry. I was glad that Mariza went to UVA and I think it will be good that Espen goes to Mason. You can get a good education almost anywhere if you work at it. The world is full of opportunities. It is up to you to take them.
Espen got a summer internship with Lockheed-Martin. He will be working on computer engineering 40 hours a week and they are actually paying him to do it. I think that will give him a jump start on his future. Those are the kinds of opportunities available around here. I talked to a guy from Lockheed on Friday about a different matter and mentioned the internship. He told me that they probably liked it that Espen had A+ certification (whatever that means) and that he probably understood online collaboration – again with the gaming. It goes to show that value can be added in unexpected ways.
The GMU program in gaming sounds good, but one reason you go to college is to expand your options and ideas. No eighteen year old really knows what he wants. I always thought that any kid who graduates with the same plan he came in with lacks imagination. I am glad Espen will be close. We still want him to live on campus for the experience, but Fairfax City is not a long way off.
A lot of things make me stop and think. Sometimes I remember to take a picture, but I don’t have enough for a full post. Here are a few short notes.
Above is Franklin Roosevelt’s ORIGINAL monument. The one he wanted. The one he had before they built the elaborate one down near the river. Below is the explanation.
Below is “nature at work.” It is very touching how we pretend to preserve. I am glad they save this tree, but it seems a little strange to make such a Federal case of advertising it. Maybe just do it. I don’t like this because it makes an artificial distinction between nature and non-nature.
Below is nature REALLY at work. The developers did a good job of creating a drainage. It doesn’t just run off, but rather pools and soaks in.
The fountains in Washington now have flowing water again after the winter.
Below is an interesting sign in Baltimore. Read it a couple times.
Below are new oak leaves on April 14, 2009
Below is crabcake platter at Koco’s bar in Baltimore
Below is the advert for an exhibition at the Newseum. I don’t think it is right that they pair Lincoln with the clown that shot him.
You have to look for changes & there are so many things going on the time.
Below are a couple of guys advertising for Gold’s Gym. I couldn’t capture their skill and speed on the still picture. They twirled the signs and threw them up in the air. I don’t know if many people were persuaded to join Gold’s Gym, but they certainly got a lot of attention.
Below a building I have been watching in Arlington since last fall is almost done. I have included the previous picture.
The Capitol at various seasons and moods as I see it on the way to work. The light and warmth are returning.
My bike trail and Shreve Rd in Falls Church VA on March 9
I write in a simple way. I don’t use the passive voice very much. Most of my sentences are simple noun, verb & object. I don’t use circumlocutions, but I do use the most appropriate word, for example, “circumlocutions”. Using that one word avoids having to write two or more sentences.
Plain writing requires a wide vocabulary. You have to use the words appropriate to the ideas you are trying to express. Speaking of writing plainly does not mean making it so easy that a fifth-grader can understand. Some concepts are beyond the understanding of a fifth-grader. We have education to improve people so that they can indeed understand more.
Lord knows that government writing can be convoluted and confusing. (Note the use of the word “convoluted”. That is the best word for this thought. An easier synonym for convoluted is difficult, but that does not adequately convey my meaning.) I guess I am afraid that this great idea will be misused by some in the government to dumb-down our writing. Some overzealous official might strip out words like “circumlocutions”, “convoluted” and … “overzealous”. That would make my writing more simple-minded, but not simpler and not easier to understand.
There is no small irony in assigning a bureaucratic process to the art of writing. Bureaucracy is the biggest reason our writing is difficult to understand (note that I did not use the word “opaque”, which was my first thought. Instead I had to use three words (“difficult to understand”) that do not exactly convey the meaning I had in mind. Much is lost when writing becomes a lowest common denominator group exercise. The first goal of bureaucratic language is not to offend anybody, BTW. Conveying meaning is always a subordinated goal.
When I was in Poland, one of my Polish staff wrote a note asking for office supplies. It was very clear, but also very clearly written by someone whose native language was not English. The person receiving the request sent it back to me with a snarky comment “Didn’t you edit this.” I wrote back much more politely, “No, I did not edit it. I understood what she wanted and so do you. Just send us the requested supplies and don’t bother me again.” This was very clear and it caused some consternation among the admin folks. My boss even called me to caution me about hostility, but they never bothered us again and it was worth it. Had I knuckled under, I would have empowered the pedants and all of us would have spent many hours rewriting great prose like “Please send five boxes of pencils.”
Government employees spend an inordinate amount of time on these sorts of things. Life is a lot easier if you just say no.
And, BTW, the legislation specifically does NOT apply to regulations. They can remain as opaque as ever, so that ordinary educated people cannot figure them out with any certainty. I think we call that the “lawyer and bureaucrat full employment act.”
Our Foreign Service evaluation period ends this month and it is time again for all of us to list our myriad achievements in a couple pages of dense prose. I hate that. Coming from my conservative Midwestern background where bragging was discouraged and ridiculed, I am at a significant disadvantage vis-à-vis those who consider pushing oneself forward a pleasure. I have always hated hustlers and hustling. But there is the time for those things.
I have gotten better at it and developed methods and rationalizations that help me through. My best method is to imagine I am writing about someone else. In my job, I often have to “sell” ideas. I make the self-promotion exercise just another job like that. I have never lied or even exaggerated in any of my assessments, but it is amazing how different achievements can seem when put in context or surrounded by the right words and phrases. And I guess I have done all right in the promotion game, despite all the gnashing of teeth.
If you stayed in the Foreign Service for 200 years, things would even out and you would probably end up more-or-less where you deserve, but in the course of a 20 year career there can be lots of random events that affect your success. I know very capable colleagues who suffered some kind of career downdraft through little or no fault of their own and forever stalled at mid-level and there are a happy few who have risen to very high ranks on the strength of some random occurrence or lucky break. Of course, some people can’t get ahead no matter what breaks they get, but chance matters too.
Good or bad luck can affect whole generations, so you have to compare people to their peers. During the middle 1990s, it was very hard even for good people to get promoted because they were cutting the FS. It is easier now when we are expanding hiring. I read in a biography of Eisenhower that he despaired of ever getting another promotion back in the late 1930s. But it worked out for him. His became “the class the stars fell on” (the class of 1915 produced 59 generals out of 164 graduates, not bad) when WWII expanded the army. Eisenhower, Bradley, Marshall, Nimitz, Halsey etc were able men and they were successful, but had the war come five years later we would have had a whole different set of five-star leaders. Colonel Eisenhower might have found himself called out of retirement to run a training program, but the crusade in Europe would have had a different champion. “There is a tide in the affairs of men …”
Below is a statue of Gen John Pershing, General of the Armies, the only man to attain that rank during his own lifetime. Later Congress passed a law stipulating that no American ever had or could outrank George Washington.
Losers blame their circumstances, and they are right just enough to keep the idea plausible. With the caveat of comparison mentioned above, promotions are correlated to actual merit, but certainly not perfectly correlated. There is a statistical quality to them, which is not always fair or right, but in the long term and for the most part you can understand what happened.
Some people have opportunities dropped in their laps; others have to work hard to find them. You do need opportunity to shine, but what you do with it makes all the difference. The FS is a very good laboratory for achievement because we have such a variety of jobs and we move among them. Even though we are all similar in background, and the FS test ensures that we are all smart in the academic sense, you can really see the difference people can make in positions. Posts and positions may suddenly become important and effective just because a new person has come in. The reverse is also true.
In my observation, chronic underperformers are those that avoid responsibility and refuse to make consequent decisions. It has to do with that opportunity thing I mentioned above. In choosing mediocrity, they cannot be blamed for failure, but they also never have the opportunity to succeed. In a knowledge organization like the FS, the preferred method to avoid responsibly is to over analyize every situation and then spread risk by involving lots of marginal participants in your decision making. I don’t think that most of those doing this really understand the implicit choices they are making. They think they are being prudent and honestly don’t understand why their list of achievements pales next to those of their “crazier” and “less hard working” colleagues.
I have real trouble understanding how I achieved the success that I have enjoyed and I cannot believe that I deserve it. This doubt is not a malady I suffer alone. I find that most successful people who are honest and self-aware fear that they are frauds whose mistakes and faults will someday be embarrassingly revealed. This is a useful attitude. It keeps us more humble and stimulates a desire for continuous correction and improvement. I pity the fools who believe they have no serious faults left to correct. But self-doubt can result in the risk-avoiding mediocrity I mention above and you have to be careful not to be overly influenced humility and self-doubt at evaluation time. Evaluations are comparisons. In this universe of imperfect people, where do you stand in relation to others? Nobody is perfect and the ostensible quest for perfection is another way people avoid responsibly to make choices. If we disqualify ourselves based on the faults & fears we know we suffer, all we do is allow the more dishonest or self-deceiving people among us to prosper and rule … and those are not the kinds of people you want running the show.
It is not only your right, but your proactive duty to ensure that you can make a contribution commensurate with your capacity. That means we have to engage in what I would call bragging at evaluation time. Unfortunately, evaluations are like a race run in the fog, where you might have to judge the winners by who is bragging the loudest because the actual finish was unclear.
The arguments we make for ourselves should be honest, but well crafted. We can share credit and take credit for common efforts at the same time. It is not a virtue to allow your achievements to be hidden or ignored, since that means that your ability to do more will be curtailed and it is likely that a less competent but more confined guy will take your place. In my circumstances, getting promoted really doesn’t mean making much more money, since our pay is capped. It does mean having the opportunity to do more useful and interesting things before they kick me out (we have an up-or-out system).
Anyway, those are the things I am telling myself as I embark on my creative writing exercise.
We get to write our own first page on our evaluation forms and tell the promotion boards why we are worthy. I will imagine that I am writing for somebody else and give that guy the benefit of all doubts. I have some interesting narratives this year and I suppose I can spin some gold out of that common straw.
It has been a cooler than average spring, but we are getting there. Today I met Chrissy for lunch up near the U.S. Naval Memorial. It is around a ten minute walk from my office and it was very nice today. I don’t have much text, just some pictures from a warm spring day.
Above are kids flying kites on the Mall
Magnolia grove near National Gallery of Art
Springtime in Washington in John Marshall Park
John Marshall, longest serving Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. His rulings shaped the Constitution. Among the key opinions: Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. (1 Cranch) 137 (1803); Fletcher v. Peck, 10 U.S. 87 (1810); McCulloch v. Maryland, 17 U.S. 316 (1819); Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 17 U.S. 518 (1819); Cohens v. Virginia, 19 U.S. 264 (1821); Gibbons v. Ogden, 22 U.S. 1 (1824); Worcester v. Georgia, 31 U.S. 515 (1832); Barron v. Baltimore, 32 U.S. 243 (1833)
Monument to the Grand Army of the Republic
US Navy Memorial. Look closely. The patio is a map of the world. Those guys are walking across Texas and Mexico.
Horse Tamer near world commerce center
Fountain at Navy Memorial. In background is the Archives Building
I rode my bike into work for the first time in the season. There was a very brisk wind from the NW, which was great, since I travel SW and the tailwind pushed me along. If only it could be that easy every day. I lost a couple of week because of early daylight savings time. I don’t like to ride when it is still dark. Only now is it getting light when I have to ride.
It is 17 miles from my house to work by the routes I take. I usually enjoy the ride. It is like a mini-journey with several distinct segments. First I leave to complex and cross the freeway. Then I climb a hill along narrow Shreve Road. It is a typical suburban street. About two miles from home, I catch the W&OD bike trail. It follows the old railroad right of way, so it is not very hilly. There is a big bridge across Leesburg Pike, but then you go down a segment punctuated each block by city streets. This is not so good, because you really cannot safely get up speed. After crossing Lee Highway, you come to the next segment.
This is the part you can fly. It is gently downhill, well-paved bike trail next to Route 66. It goes under the streets, so you don’t have to stop for a couple miles. It is a pretty ride with Four-Mile Run on the right side. Beavers dammed the creek a few years ago until local authorities persuaded them to leave. There are lots of flowering trees, especially crape myrtle and oak and poplar forests. The trail goes through some crowded neighborhoods, but you cannot tell.
Bike/running/walking trails on old railroads are good. They form long narrow parks that provide passages and a lot of accessible green space. It is a matter of geometry. A square park is compact with little surface area to intersect with neighborhoods. In some places, the W&OD park is only about 100 yards wide, but the green impacts lots of space and the acreage goes a lot farther.
You pass under Wilson Boulevard along the creek. It doesn’t take much rain to make the creek rise and flood because there is so much hard pavement and rooftops in the watershed. One time I was riding home during a thunderstorm and almost got swept away by the creek. I saw that the path was flooded, but I figured it was shallow enough to muscle through. I got a head of speed and hit water higher than my waste. I had to get off the bike and pull it out. After that, I was a little more circumspect around the creek. It is very unstable.
Right after Wilson Boulevard you come up a little hill and go down some city streets to Carlin Spring Road, then down some more little streets past Glebe Road into Arlington neighborhoods. They are very pleasant. I have to track north, a little out of the way to catch Clarendon Boulevard. I used to be able to go down Pershing and through Fort Meyer, but since 9/11 you can’t pass through the fort. Clarendon has a bike trial on the street. You feel a little safer, but not much, since you still share the road with cars and trucks, many of which consider bikes a nuisance that don’t belong on the roads. I cut across Hwy 50 at Rhodes Av and head toward the Iwo Jima memorial, then downhill along Arlington Cemetery and across Memorial Bridge into Washington.
Usually I then go past the Lincoln Memorial, along the reflecting pond to the Washington Memorial and then along the Smithsonian Mall to work. Today, however, I cut south along the Potomac to the Jefferson Memorial to see the cherry blossoms. They are a little behind this year. Its been cooler than usual, but a couple of warm days will get them back on track.
Anyway, it is a nice ride with good variety. I know I have provided too many details, but I feel very much attached to my bike trails. I have been riding variations of this trail on this bike (I have put thousands of miles on this bike) since 1997 and some of the closer in sections since 1985, when I lived in Clarendon. One of the things I like best about living in Washington is that an ordinary ride to work can be such an adventure.
People are breaking down the doors trying to get jobs for the Federal government. In these inconsistent economic times, the promise of steady work and a good pension trump dreams of riches.
My original plan when I joined the FS was to stay in for about seven years and then start a different career. It didn’t work out that way. When my seventh anniversary came, I was in Norway in a great job. Then I was in Krakow. Who would ever want to leave a job in Krakow? Then Warsaw, Fletcher School, it was always something good. The only time I was really unhappy with the job was brief time when I was doing shift work in the Operations Center 1997-8, but I was only there for nine months and they sent me to Poland for three of those months to work on NATO expansion issues, so I never got around to sending my resume around.
You have to look at the totality of life that goes with a career, not just the job alone. As an FSO, I get to travel, meet interesting people, work with a variety of ideas and serve my country. I am not being facetious when I say that I had the opportunity to go to Iraq and the privilege to live with Marines. Few jobs offer that sort of adventure to a man north of fifty years old.
State Department has long been a popular place to work and the FS never has any trouble recruiting good people. BTW – it is a good time to be looking for a job as an FSO. They are hiring a lot this year. This year, however, people government jobs are popular across the board. I have mixed feelings about that. It depends on why you want to work for the USG. There is a special responsibly when you work for your Uncle Sam. Government jobs should be callings, not refuges.
I am glad that we have so many good people who want to work in the USG. I welcome them in the FS – follow this link. But we don’t want too much of a good thing. America has been an exceptional country ever since our revolution and even before. There are other models. France has followed a different, more directed, strategy since its revolution, for example. France is a great and beautiful country, but I prefer America.
In France, the best students dream of getting secure jobs in the government. Young Americans have always had visions of being entrepreneurs or running businesses. I am delighted to have enthusiastic and smart young people eager to work with us and they are coming at just the right time. We will face a wave of retirements in the next five years. We will need them in the FS to accomplish our mission. But I hope they are doing it for the right reasons (because they want to do good service not just for security) and I hope that soon young Americans will recover their confidence in the economy and themselves. I hope that some of them will still want to work with us, but maybe not so many.
It is probably a genetic maladaption. My mother had all that kind of stuff – vegomatics, cap snafflers – all those labor saving devices that make more work while ostensibly being labor saving. I saw the “Slap Chop” on television and called in for one. I got the Slap Chop and the bonus Graty for the one low price of $19.95. Great.
It does what it is advertised to do. It easily chops onion, potatoes, mushrooms and other vegetables with one slap. It just isn’t worth the trouble. In this respect, it is a lot like the “Fry Baby.” It does what it is supposed to do, but you have to go out of your way to put it to good use.
The one good labor saving device I have is the “Pizzaz Pizza Oven.” I actually cannot take credit for this thing. Chrissy bought it. It cooks frozen pizzas to perfection. If you put a few fresh mushrooms (I suppose I could use the Slap Chop) on a Tombstone Pizza, it is as good as the average take out. I have learned to put it first only on lower to crisp the crust and then do dual to finish the job. The kids eat a lot of pizza, so this thing make sense for us. It is more useful than a toaster.
Below – magnolias are flowering near the Smithsonian.
I am still glad that I bought my hybrid car back in 2005 but on TV today, they reported that hybrid sales are down. Last year they couldn’t keep them on the lots. Consumers are fickle, but logical. They respond very rapidly to one thing – the price of gasoline. Everybody I talk to claims to be interested in saving the environment and concerned about our addiction to Middle Eastern oil, but their behavior tells a different story.
Today we had the Mariza/Alex birthday party. They were born two years and two days apart. Mariza came down from Baltimore for the event. We went to Outback Steakhouse and had some cake. They are both full adults today, as Alex has now turned twenty-one. It has been a long time, but the time flew by when I look back.
Mariza was born in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil. She was born on a hot fall day (seasons are reversed down there). The hospital was a nice place built by Germans many years ago. It was on a beautiful street lined with jacaranda trees. But it was old fashioned. It didn’t have air conditioning and the windows didn’t have screens, so it was not the most comfortable place. Mariza was very blond as a baby. Well… blond but not much hair in general. Chrissy sometimes taped a bow to her head to tell the world she was a little girl. Mariza lived her first two years (almost) in Brazil and her first words were Portuguese. Brazil was a good place for babies and toddlers. The Brazilians are very child friendly and there was easy access to play groups and day care.
Below – I carried the kids on my back all over the place. This is Mariza in the Brazilian pine forest.
On the down-side, there were shortages. Mariza was born about the same time the Brazilian government set up the Cruzado Plan, which imposed price controls. Predictably, goods disappeared from the store shelves, including pampers, baby formula and related products. Big bugs were annoyances. They have giant tarantulas in Porto Alegre and we were careful that Mariza didn’t try to play with them.
We had a little pool on the roof of our apartment. Mariza always liked the water and was never afraid of it at all. She couldn’t actually swim, however, so we had to watch her closely.
We chose a Brazilian name for Mariza, since she was born there, but we spelled it with a z instead of an s (Marisa) as they do. Brazilians pronounce the “s” more like the way we do “z” (not exactly of course, but closer). For example, they spell their country’s name Brasil. We hoped that people would pronounce it with the “z” sound, as they do in Brazil. Most people still call her Marissa at first, however.
Alex was born in Lacrosse, Wisconsin. He is the only one of the three kids born in the U.S. Chrissy and Mariza had to go up to the U.S. earlier. I had to stay down in Brazil and finish my work there. They stayed in Wisconsin with Chrissy’s parents. Chrissy’s sister in law, Barb who is a nurse, was very helpful. I was in Washington for Norwegian training, but I was lucky enough to get to Wisconsin exactly the right time for Alex’s arrival. He arrived right on time and right fast.
Alex came to us during a disrupted time. I was in Norwegian training and we were on TDY in Washington living in temporary housing. By the wacky definition they use today, we were “homeless.” All joking aside, it was stressful to not have a permanent place. Alex was a good baby. Our apartment had only a bedroom and the living room. Alex had a crib in the living room, so he was always with the family.
We moved to Norway when Alex was six months old. Getting to a “permanent home” (we stayed there four years) helped calm Chrissy and me and it had an effect on Alex and Mariza.
I used to take Alex to the swimming pool at the NATO element as Kolsas, not far from Oslo. I would wrap him in water wings and floaters and he would paddle around the pool. He developed a lot of endurance.
We had a townhouse in Norway, with a big room downstairs that opened onto a small yard. That room became the playroom for Alex and Mariza. Alex always loved dinosaurs and teenage mutant ninja turtles. He seemed to like these things before he could talk. We had a lot of educational tapes. I suppose he saw it on them.
Norway is one of the most beautiful places in the world, but it is a strange place for a new baby because of the winter darkness and the midnight sun. In the middle of the summer, it never gets completely dark. It was hard to get the kids acclimatized. During the summer they did not want to go to sleep until it got dark and it never got really dark.
Below is Alex at Gettysburg in 1993. He has always been interested in history.
As I said, all that was a long time ago. It is a strange wonderful thing being a parent. Past and present mingle. When I look at the kids, I see them as they are now, but I also have images and feelings accumulated over the previous decades.
I didn’t have a blog back when Mariza graduated from UVA and I didn’t make a web page. We are lucky in Virginia to have such a good public university system and I was glad that she went to Thomas Jefferson’s university. It is not easy to get into the University of Virginia these days and I was proud that she got in and thrived there.
Below is Thomas Jefferson looking over our family.
