Alex still has some headaches and body aches and it is hard for him to concentrate, but he seems to be doing okay. I will drive up to Harrisonburg to see him later today and bring him home if he is still feeling bad. This will create some troubles for his classes, since papers are due and exam time is here, but I think he has a valid excuse. His attack made the Harrisonburg papers, although they didn’t mention him by name, so he has some credibility
There is an interest health care debate permutation, however. Alex has only a few days left on our insurance, since he turned 22 last month and he gets a month of grace time. We have signed him up for insurance, which will take effect on May 1. So he will go into eight days of non-insurance. Even when he gets the insurance, it has a high deductible, so we may end up paying a lot anyway.
The irony here is that if he had been in an accident, if someone had hit him with a car, he would probably had everything paid for by the insurance of the driver. He would probably get an extra pay out for pain and suffering. Or if the authorities had acted inappropriately he would have been in line for a huge compensation. But since he was the victim of random but deliberate violence, he is just on his own. Well, not on his own since we will take care of him, but you get the irony.
If I accidentally hit a pedestrian while riding my bike, and he sustained injuries similar to Alex’s, I would probably have to pay damages to include the actual medical costs, plus pain and suffering and probably punitive damages. But if I successfully avoided the crash and the guy fell into the hands of a thug who beat him, he would get nothing.
We have created a system where an honest citizen must fear lawsuits even for things he doesn’t directly control and a legitimate victim of deliberate violence can expect nothing. Violent perpetrators w/o significant assets can pretty much get away with anything from the civil point of view and even from the criminal one. We are also more likely to take seriously a bent bumper on a car than a bump on somebody’s head.
We got a call last night that Alex was in the hospital in Harrisonburg and would be soon having a CAT scan to see if he had any damage to his brain. He was transferred to UVA hospital in Charlottesville. We drove through the early morning darkness to get him. It is not good, but it looks like he will make a full & rapid recovery, fortunately, although he will have some scars and will be in pain for a while. We hope follow up exams find nothing new. The story that we learned between that call and now is troubling. I don’t know if I have all the details down right, but let me try.
Alex was attacked by six young men in what evidently was an act of random hateful violence. They hit him over the head by a beer bottle, so Alex doesn’t remember much about the attack. What we learned came from witnesses, the police & the perpetrators themselves.
Alex remembers someone running past him and then he was on the ground being kicked by six guys. What happened, according to witnesses, is that these guys wanted to beat somebody up. Their first victim was the guy that ran past Alex, but as they chased him they decided Alex would do just as well. So one of them hit Alex with a beer bottle from behind and the others joined in the beating. The original victim called the police, who were already in the area and quickly arrived; this and bystanders scared the perpetrators off before they did lasting damage.
The police told Alex that they caught the guys who did it and that they would probably be charged with felony assault. Alex and the running kid were not the only ones they attacked last night. This was not a simple case of drunk and disorderly. These guys were looking for someone to hurt. They didn’t know Alex; they didn’t try to rob him, ask him anything at all or even look him in the face before smashing him over the head and commencing the beating. The motivation was simply atavistic hatred, based on nothing, nothing at all, maybe a lust to do violence.
How do you deal with someone who wants nothing from you except to do you harm? We look for motivations. We might feel more at ease if they had tried to steal Alex’s wallet or if we could discover how he antagonized them in even a trivial way. But there is no comfort there.
Chrissy is staying with Alex in Harrisonburg tonight and maybe tomorrow to make sure he is okay. Espen had been up there visiting one of his old HS friends who also attends school up there. He didn’t know about Alex until we told him this morning. I drove back with Espen and we talked along the way. It seems the block party got out of hand generally. People were throwing beer bottles.
Espen and his friend headed toward his friend’s dorm room and Alex went toward his, which was only a short distance from where he was attacked. Unfortunately for Alex, his dorm was right in the middle of a place where lots of rowdy people were gathering and Alex had to walk through the crowds. Fortunately, the police were there too and that is probably what ended up saving him from a more severe beating.
The cops interviewed Alex. They took pictures of his various injuries and examined his bloody clothes, but he couldn’t tell them much that was helpful, but there are lots of witnesses and the perpetrators are evidently talking. I am interested to see how this case plays out and I want to learn more. I don’t know anything about the perpetrators and I will admit that I am more than a little angry at them for hurting my boy. But I think there also is a rational argument for making sure this does not get passed along. I don’t think the attackers are hardened criminals but the kind of hatred and violence that went into this attack is dangerous. It is not something we can ignore or forgive. Letting the attackers too easily off the hook would do them no favors if the lesson they learn is that what they did is no big deal. It is something we have to confront.
I drove up to Harrisonburg for Alex’s birthday. He is doing okay, but is still having some loneliness problems. We didn’t do anything extraordinary, mostly talked. We did go to lunch and supper together and went got a few necessities at Walmart. Lunch was at Kyoto, one of those Japanese steak houses where they do the grill show with the food.
Mariza’s birthday was a couple days ago. She came down from Baltimore for it. We had some cake, but we aren’t very big on the party things.
I wrote the birthday stuff last year and nobody feels comfortable about too much recent information being divulged. There is a kind of declassification period that must be respected.
Suffice to say that I am proud of the adults they have become and I enjoy their company, but I miss the children they were. These are the times that I feel that most acutely.
I was drove Alex back to Harrisonburg and dreaded making the return trip alone in the dark, but with the full moon providing just the right amount of softly silver light and a good audio program to listen to (I am finishing Donald Kagan’s Greek history series) , it was actually very pleasant.
Alex is doing well at college, but it is a tough transition for him. He started in the spring semester, as a junior and got stuck in the dorm farthest away from campus. It is an overflow dorm. It used to be a hotel and is not actually on the JMU campus at all. These types of things make a big difference and he just had bad luck with all of them. He is doing well in classes, however, and I think he will adapt all right. I think what he really misses is his job at Home Depot. That gave him contact with people and something useful to work on. They really seemed to like him there. I hope he can get the job back for the summer.
The picture up top shows Alex at Cracker Barrel, where we stopped in Woodstock along I-81. They sell good old fashioned food. I had a good pot roast with mushrooms. Alex had sirloin steak. It feels like home. They had a wood fire burning in the fireplace. It is a nice smell. They sell that old fashioned candy shown in the middle picture.
At the bottom is the sushi shop at Tysons. It is not related to the other pictures or text. The conveyor is in constant motion. I don’t know how they can tell who takes what and how much they should pay. It reminds me of those old cartoons portraying modern times.
I wrote about Espen’s birthday last year. He is unenthusiastic about me putting too much about him or recent pictures of him on the blog. He came home for the weekend and we had a cake, but Mariza and Alex were unable to come, so it wasn’t a party. Espen wanted to go over to Fuddruckers for his birthday dinner and we had a good talk, but I don’t want to post all that on the blog. Suffice to say that I miss him, but I am glad he is close and proud of him. Happy birthday, Espen. We love you.
Alex is off. I drove him up yesterday and left him at James Madison University today. I am proud that he is becoming more independent but sad that he is pulling away. Above is Alex at the quad. Below is Alex next to James Madison. It is life sized statue. He was a little guy.
I used to talk to the kids at bedtimes. Sometimes I know that they allowed me to ramble on just to prolong the time before bed, but I enjoyed it and I know they learned some things because I hear them saying them. I miss that.
Above and below are buildings on campus.
James Madison is a good university and looks like a nice place. It reminds me a little more of a Midwestern university than it does of Virginia. Maybe the stone buildings on the hills remind me of some of the building at UW along the lake. Maybe it is the spruce trees. Spruce trees can and do grow in Tidewater and Piedmont Virginia, but they don’t thrive. They do better in the cooler, more continental climate of Western Virginia.
Above is Alex’s dorm room. Below is the TV lounge.
We spent Saturday night at the Marriott Courtyard in Harrisonburg. Alex wanted to get there first thing in the morning when the university opened. We didn’t need to do that. Alex was the first customer when the dorm opened. The hall lights didn’t work, so we had to find his room by sense of touch. Empty dorm rooms are vaguely depressing, but it literally brightened up when we opened the roll-up shades. His room has a nice southern exposure. Alex appreciates the sun too and since he was first in, he could claim the bed near the window.
Above is a view from the quad. Below are Norfolk and Southern RR tracks that run right through the center of campus.
Alex hadn’t been able to make the orientation, so the second thing on our list was to get his ID. The place didn’t open until 1 pm. We were second in line. It went very efficiently once we got in. The ID is the key to success. Alex can now use the libraries, get into building and – perhaps most importantly – eat at the chow hall. Below is the lake at JMU.
I didn’t want to leave Alex but the time came and I went. Alex will be fine. He won’t be as close as Espen. It is an exciting their lives, full of potential and contradictory emotions.
I drove home through the mountains of Shenandoah National Park and along Highway 211. It is still rural much of the way with beautiful woods and fields. There was not much traffic and it was a relaxing drive. Back home, a little more lonely than before but hopeful, grateful and optimistic. Above is Sperryville, VA.
Espen went off to school this year. It is sad for Chrissy and me not to have him around all the time, although we are happy that he is not far away at George Mason University. He comes home a lot, but we sometimes don’t see much of him anyway, since we are generally awake during the day while he is sort of nocturnal.
Experiments in sleeping
He is trying a sleep experiment over the Christmas break. His idea is to go to bed a couple hours later and sleep later every day until he moved completely around the clock and can wake up fully rested early in the morning in time to go back to school. It should work. It is much easier to go to bed later than to wake up earlier and I read that this moving around the clock is one way they use to cure insomnia. He has fallen off the discipline recently, however, since he has been going out with his friends.
Studying computers & interning at Lockheed
Espen is studying computer engineering. He has to take a lot of hard classes, but there is strong job growth for those who make it through. He had a paid internship at Lockheed-Martin working on their computer systems last summer and will probably get the job back next year. That will probably be as important to his future prospects as what he learns in school. They also got him a security clearance, which is very valuable for jobs around here with government and government contractors.
Alex starts at JMU via NOVA
Alex will be going to James Madison University in January and starting as a junior. His is a real turn-around story. He was an unenthusiastic student and wasn’t ready for college when he graduated HS. It was hard for Chrissy and me not to push him in, but I remembered my own early college experience. I wasn’t emotionally ready to go and I didn’t study and managed to achieve a 1.67 GPA in my freshman year. Alex found a decent job at Home Depot, which both helped him with his basic discipline and made him see the value of formal education. He started to go to Northern Virginia Community College and eased into higher education part time, soon studying hard and getting good grades.
Valuable experience at Home Depot
It might have been better for him to wait until fall semester to start at JMU. He has been doing very well at Home Depot, working hard and getting some of the respect and opportunity that comes from doing a good job. I think it would be good for learn some more useful skills. He has been scheduling contractors and working with appliances and fixtures. This experience is worth a lot in the real world, but I understand that he is impatient to get on with the next steps in his life. I will miss him. We have been attending Smithsonian lectures together. Unfortunately, I think that has made him even more eager to get to JMU. He is usually by far the youngest person in the audience and he feels life is passing too fast.
Following in my historical footsteps
Alex likes history and that is what he probably will study at JMU. Studying history is not directly applicable to any particular career but it is a great general background for life. My history MA has been as useful as my MBA, although it doesn’t tend to impress hiring managers as much. I think there is a big difference between rigorously studying history and just coasting along. Alex really tries to understand.
Mariza working at Travelers’
Mariza is still working at Travelers’ Insurance in Baltimore. She is an insurance adjuster for environmental claim, which means asbestos, mold, oil spills & sewage – all the fun stuff. Most the clients are firms and it is usually third party liability. A lot of these things are subject to interpretation. Of course most of the claims are legitimate, but she also has to deal with hypochondriacs who probably really believe that they were made sick by various things and predatory lawyers who prey on insurance companies, firms and putative victims alike.
New apartment not far away
She moved to a new apartment last summer, not far from her old one. It is a cheaper and she doesn’t have to share with roommates. Mariza was the de-facto property manager in his former apartment. It was hard for her to get her sometimes lackadaisical and deadbeat roommates to cough up the cash for rent. The landlord did the old “joint and several” lease, whereby every individual was responsible for the whole rent every month. Mariza’s roommates had a higher tolerance for risking eviction and/or bad credit and that is how she got stuck trying to herd the cats and get them to pay up.
Baltimore has some nice neighborhoods
Baltimore is a very nice city, if a bit uneven in its attractiveness. There are some very distinctive sections that are almost like towns within the city. Mariza used to live on Bolton Hill, which was an area of nice old building, some being renovated. She lives in Mount Vernon now, dominated by an interesting monument to George Washington. It also has some of the spillover of students from Johns Hopkins University. Nearby, however, are some very gritty and dangerous looking places. Espen and I drove through one area after dropping Mariza off. We noticed some really little kids just hanging around and it reminded Espen of a Dave Chappelle skit you can watch it at this link if you are not offended by colorful language.
Chrissy doing HR at Department of Labor
Chrissy is doing well at the Department of Labor. She got an award this year and will probably get her promotion next year. The Civil Service is not like the Foreign Service. Our ranks follow us personally not matter what job we do. The FS system has its disadvantages, but the rank-in-person allows us to take a wide variety of jobs. The all important arbiter in the GS system is the position description. Chrissy spends a lot of her time analyzing and assessing job descriptions. It is, unfortunately, almost impossible to reward well-performing individuals. Managers have to rewrite their job descriptions or move them to new positions. They are not supposed to do that just to reward employees and that is the problem Chrissy often faces. She has to keep them to the rules.
Mine safety is serious business
Her section deals with mines and mine safety and Chrissy gets to travel around to do job fairs and recruitment. Given the nature of mining, these fairs tend not to be in the large and sophisticated metro areas. They have a lot to do in West Virginia and rural Pennsylvania, for example. The mine inspector program has a diversity problem that upsets some of the leadership. Given the location of most mines and nature of the industry, people with significant mining experience tend to be white and male. Also given the life-and-death nature of mine safety, you cannot fake or fudge this experience as you can in many other jobs.
On top of all that, inspecting mines is a physically difficult and demanding task. All this means that “achieving diversity” is a daunting task, which is why they do job fairs in places like El Paso and Puerto Rico.
Federal hiring process is confusing
It is hard to get jobs in the Federal government, hard because of the arcane and Byzantine system they use for most recruitment. They system is designed to be perfectly fair and perfectly transparent, but because it tries to do these thing perfectly in theory it usually means that it is unfair and opaque in practice. It is a frustrating challenge for Chrissy a lot of the time. But that is a story that she can tell, not me.
Public diplomacy moves to social media
My job had its ups and downs this year, but nothing spectacular. I wrote about some of the public diplomacy we helped do for President Obama’s appearances in Cairo and Ghana. IIP has really become a new media center and my colleagues are developing programs very nicely. I am getting a little concerned, in fact, that the new media is getting a little ahead of our capacity to use it effectively in public diplomacy. In the last couple of weeks, I have had the chance to work with FSI to develop training in social media for decision-makers. We are hoping to make this a policy level course, not just a how-to but a why-do. It is too easy to get beguiled by what we think we can do w/o asking what we are trying to accomplish and what tools are most appropriate. I have appropriated the poetic phrase that we must not let our new media reach exceed our public diplomacy grasp.
Our reach exceeds our grasp
I worry that the ubiquity and easiness of new media will convince us Washington that we can reach overseas and influence far-away audiences with a one-size-fits-all strategy. We really need the on-the-ground presence and expertise. There is no such thing as a world brand or a strategy that works all over the place. The strength of our FS is that we can be decentralized and near the “customers,” responding to local cultures and nuances. But this kind of work looks plodding compared to the excitement of the new media. It is tempting to go direct. We tried to bypass our posts in the 1990s. In many ways, the dot.com debacle was like the new media craze. We unilaterally dismantled a lot of our networks in the late 1990s and paid the price later. I hope we don’t do that again and I will do my best to prevent it.
Back overseas for me … in 2011
I suppose I do have a dog in that fight. I agreed to go back overseas, back to Brazil. I will be public affairs officer there with lots of up-close, hands-on opportunities. I won’t be going until summer of 2011, so there is a lot of time to prepare. I haven’t keep up much with Brazil, so I have some catching up to do but I am looking forward to it. My favorite issues relate to economics, environment & Energy and those are the crucial ones in Brazil. I will also be glad to have some line duties again. The Wall Street Journal has a Portuguese version. I have been reading it for the past couple days and can still do it reasonably well. I don’t think it will be too hard to take it up again.
All things considered, not bad
It has been a good year for us, all things considered. Both boys took the next big steps in their lives, but I didn’t see any major turning points and we end this year as we might have expected at the start. Of course, you often don’t see the big changes as they happen. They are clearly evident only later and when you look back you cannot believe you didn’t know at the time. Maybe there is something like that. We go into the new year grateful for the blessing of the present and optimistic about the future.
America has most of the world’s top universities, but what really stands out about our country is the depth and breadth of opportunity on offer. You don’t have to be in a big city or an important capital to find a first-class education and you don’t even have to be in college to get started. Community colleges are increasingly filling roles as not only technical trainers but also launching pads for academic careers.
I am biased. Alex graduated from Northern Virginia Community College and will start as a junior at James Madison University next month. But that also gives me some special insights into the subject. I won’t say Alex is typical of all students, but let me tell a little about college and community college with him in mind.
Alex didn’t have a plan when he graduated from HS. He had not been an enthusiastic student and his mother and I made the hard decision NOT to push him right into college. I made that mistake myself long ago. All I did was drink beer (the drinking age was eighteen back then) and my 1.60 GPA in my first year at UWSP continues to haunt me to this day.
Alex avoided that. After HS, he went to work at the local Multiplex. It was a really crappy job, but he soon did better, moving to Home Depot, which treats its employees well. He has continued to work there and won the respect of his bosses and co-workers. This experience will serve him well in future. It disturbs me that many college students have never actually done any real work.
After a few months, he decided to start community college while continuing to work part time. Community college makes the transition from work to study easy. Tuition is cheap and students can take a few courses at a time. Alex eased in and started to get good grades.
Not everybody is ready to go to college at eighteen. I wasn’t, neither was Alex. I think this is especially true of boys. They tend to be less interested in academics and a little more rambunctious. They might need a little more time. It is certainly out of style to say, “Boys will be boys” and it is not true of all boys, but it is indeed generally true. They get clobbered when they are pushed too soon into some situations and sometimes they don’t recover. Alex matured and after passage of time, he was ready to do well. To everything there is a season and a time for every purpose under heaven.” The old wisdom makes sense. Sometimes waiting is best, but it hard.
No size fits all. But I think we would be well served to rethink college entrance in general. I don’t think it is possible to make a good admissions decisions when a kid is eighteen years old. An eighteen-year-old is largely the product of his/her parents. A couple years later you get a better look at the adult. AND the kids make better choices. A couple years make a big difference at this time.
It might be better to start most kids in community colleges and then let them move on to university as their demonstrated talents and now better informed choices indicate.
Alex also saved me the big bucks. Community college is about half the cost of State schools and Alex lived at home.
Now let me shift to the other side. I am glad that Alex is going away to school. I think it is important that kids NOT live at home the whole time. They learn a lot from living with other young people and being away from home. And as I wrote a few paragraphs above, one size does not fit all. Mariza and Espen went right to college after HS and Mariza was only seventeen (she skipped second grade).
So I am glad that we have options. America is the land of opportunity because it is also the land of second and third chances. There are many roads to success and lots of time to take them.
The kids are back for Thanksgiving and it is nice to have them home. We had the usual turkey dinner, probably for the last time. I don’t mean this is our last time together (hope not) but we decided that nobody really likes turkey that much. Next year we will have something else. My favorite parts of the meal are the potatoes and stuffing with some corn on top.
We see wild turkeys down at the farm. I read that they are elusive. They don’t see very elusive, just dumb. Sometimes they just wander onto the road. The return of the wild turkey is one of those unlikely ecological success stories. They were rare just a generation ago. Some experts said they could never come back in large numbers because they required larger ranges than they could have in a settled modern countryside. Turns out that nature is much more adaptive than that and that turkeys can live and prosper in close contact with settled civilization.
Taking a Different Way
My walk down 23rd St. from Foggy Bottom Metro to the State Department is less pleasant than the trip I used to make along the Smithsonian. The sidewalks are a little narrow and you have to jostle with lots of other pedestrians. There also seems a surplus of smokers getting in their last drag on the way to work. It stinks up the sidewalk, even in the open air.
But it is easy to avoid this. All I have to do is walk one block down. It is quiet and uncrowded. It adds less than five minutes to the trip. Sometimes solutions are easy.
But it still isn’t as nice as Smithsonian walk. One of the little things nice about walking along the Mall is the tactile and auditory pleasure of walking on a firm gravel path.
Nutty as a Fruitcake
I don’t know why so many people make fun of Christmas fruitcakes. I like them and I am happy to see them on the store shelves this time of year. They are packed with nuts and packed with calories, so I have to be careful not to eat too much, however.
Maple Leaf
The Japanese maple in the front yard turns differently each fall. The leaves tend to hang on well into the cold weather, but the colors are different. I suppose it depends on the weather and when the first hard frost comes. A couple years ago we got an early frost that killed the leaves before they were ready to let go. The colors weren’t very nice, but some of the leaves persisted until they were pushed off by the new growth in the spring. This year was cool and rainy, but we haven’t had a hard frost yet. I think that is why the tree is such a bright red this year.
We spent our last day in Arizona at the Bryce Thompson arboretum, where you can see trees and plants native to the desert southwest, the Sonora and Chihuahua regions, as well as those from deserts in South America, Africa and Australia.
Desert landscapes are strange for someone who grew up in Eastern North America, although the Sonora vegetation is vicariously familiar because of all the cowboy movies. Almost everything has thick skin and thorns and takes a long time to grow.
The exception is the gum tree or eucalyptus. It is a type of miracle tree from Australia. It can grow very fast in dry harsh conditions. This wonderful capacity for growth and adaption has made eucalyptus an invasive species. It can often out-compete the native desert flora, but it provides little for wildlife to eat.
Kuala bears eat the leaves, but most other animal avoid them. I suppose this is because they smell like Halls Mentholypus cough drops and probably taste like them too. It is an acquired taste. Like everything else, its value can be judged only in context. Eucalyptus are great trees to provide shade, cover and erosion control. They get big. The one pictured below was planted in 1926. And they are attractive individually and in clumps.
Date palms were familiar from Iraq. Dates are a very productive desert tree. I have written about them before. I cannot tell them apart, but I understand that there are dozens of varieties.
An arboretum is not only a pretty place. It is also a place to learn about natural communities. They say the desert speaks, but I like to have someone put up a few signs to interpret it for me. The biggest surprise was an Australian she-oak. It is not related to our oaks (quercus). I had absolutely no idea what it was. Below are Maleah, Diane & Christiana in the date palm grove.
