My father subsisted on pea soup and bean soup, more or less, for the last twenty years of his life, those things plus some Polish sausage and almost ripe tomatoes. Making them is easy and cheap. The biggest challenge is remembering to soak the beans/peas overnight. You can use leftover ham as a base, or the parts of the ham that you didn’t want to eat because they were too fat or too hard to pick off the bone. You can see why this is such a wonderful peasant food. It stays good for a long time. In fact, it improves with age. Nothing is wasted. You can also toss in whatever vegetables were laying around. It all turns into a kind of thick gruel that tastes pretty good if you put in a little pepper and salt.
I don’t make these soups as much as I did when I was in college. Back in college pea soup and bean soup were among the foods that had the three attributes I craved: they were cheap, reasonably nutritious and I could make them. That is probably why my father ate them all the time too. But my kids don’t like either, so they cannot form the basis of a family meal. As I recall, I didn’t like them either when I was a kid. I learned to like them when I was in college. No doubt under my father’s influence, I made it from scratch, the less expensive and better way, rather than buying the pre-made stuff in cans.
We had ham for supper and we have ham bone left over, so today I made bean soup. In a couple of days, I will make some pea soup with what still will be left of the ham. This week, we will dine like the old man taught me.
Oh yeah, he used to make cabbage soup too. I haven’t made that for a long time. No matter how much of this kind of food you try to eat, you really cannot get fat on it. These kinds of food fill you up before they can fill you out – the original diet food.
“Groundhog Day” is one of my favorite movies. I was watching it this morning, dubbed into Portuguese with Portuguese subtitles, so I could assuage my guilt for not studying enough.
I like it for several reasons. One is unrelated to the movie itself. The movie was on cable at the Condo where we stayed when we took the kids to the theme parks in Orlando back in 1994. It seemed to be on over and over, so I recall it being on the whole time. It was a good time. The kids were excited about Disneyland etc. The weather was perfect that October when we went and our sense of relief was accentuated because we were coming from Krakow, where the weather was turning bad and – more significantly – the air pollution in those days was horrendous. So I remember being in a clean, green place with Chrissy and the kids having a good time. Everything associated with that basks in the glory of that moment, including “Groundhog Day”. But there must have been other things on too that I don’t recall. “Groundhog Day” had other things going for it.
The setting is comforting. The movie is set in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, but it was filmed somewhere in Illinois, so it has a thoroughly Middle American feel. Of course, I have never actually seen a small-medium sized city that is as lively or has so many diverse things to do, but it is nice to imagine.
If you have not seen the movie, you should. A brief summary is that a weather man comes to Punxsutawney for the annual groundhog festival, but each day he wakes up to the same day. It repeats, over and over. They never say how long this happens, but it is a long time, maybe thousands of years’ worth of February 2. The main character, Phil Connors played by Bill Murray, goes through predicable stages. At first he is confused; after that he takes advantage of life with no consequences; then he gets depressed and kills himself many times in many ways, but each day he wakes up in the same place. Finally he decides to live in the moment. He improves himself by reading and learns to play the piano. He also improves the lives of the people around him w/o any expectation of personal gain. He does these things essentially because they are the right things to do at the time when he does them. Finally, after living the perfect day, he progresses to the next day and that is the end.
The movie raises lots of philosophical questions, but it does it in a stealthy almost unconscious way, which makes it such a unique film. I suppose you could watch the whole thing just for the fun of it w/o getting any deeper than the funny lines and situations. But I think it would be hard not to think about it, if you were at all paying attention. Most of us have thought about how we might do things differently if we could do things over again, if we had a second chance. This takes us a little beyond that. What should be your ethics in a world where there are no permanent consequences to your actions? I think that the film leads to the conclusion that there ARE permanent consequences, even if external conditions don’t change, because the consequences are contained in the person, who chooses, or not, to do the right thing. The movie is a story of personal development, of redemption.
Phil starts out a selfish a-hole, who after many renditions of the same day develops into a man balanced and at peace with himself. It is not the he just becomes unselfish and helpful to others. More profoundly, he becomes selfless in the true sense of the term. He merges himself with the people, things and the place around him. He becomes his task no matter what it is, he becomes what he does and loses himself in it. He no longer works on being good, no longer thinks about doing the right thing, he just does it because it has become what he is.
I suppose I am reading way too much into a Bill Murray movie. But I have read many books of wisdom: the Zen of this, the Tao of that or meaning of everything. I am not saying that watching the movie is the one-big-thing. There is no one-big-thing; however, if someone asked me about the great spiritual sources, I would include this movie. Like all works of philosophy, it should be watched, considered and discussed over time. The book – or in this case the movie – doesn’t change but your different experiences make it different each time. That is why it is impossible to understand any philosophy at the first sitting. It takes a while to sink in, maybe years with differing conditions.
Lately I have been giving a more philosophical career advice. I tell the young people who ask me that they should strive to become the person they want to be, become the person who deserves success rather than strive for success itself. Success can be limited. Only a few people can be the bosses, champions or among the best at anything. But everybody can aspire to become what they think is a good person. Reasonable success will almost assuredly follow anyway, but no matter what, you will have something of value when you are finished.
The picture up top I took of the TV with “Groundhog Day” playing. The other pictures I took when I was wandering around getting the car serviced. You can see Fairfax Honda and the Borders Book where I got the Hadrian book I wrote about yesterday. The last one shows the respect that pedestrians get around there. I was clearly in the middle of a car-preferred zone. It is no place for old men, since you have to make a run for it when you want to cross the road.
One of the punks that attacked Alex is up for trial. He is summoned to give testimony. He doesn’t remember anything, but he has to go anyway. I don’t know how strong a case they have against this particular guy. I am fairly sure he is guilty, but as I mentioned before he is one of six guys who attacked Alex. The bad guys are taking legal refuge in the confusion about which of them actually did the kicking and stomping.
The attack on Alex has made me a lot more sensitive to random crimes and hate crimes. He is very lucky that he was not hurt more seriously or permanently. I read in the paper about a kid about his age who was in a fight that put him into a permanent coma. Of course, Alex could have been killed and for nothing. He was just in the wrong place and had the wrong appearance. I like to think that the world is rational, but not always. Life can change in a second and all the hopes and aspirations can be gone.
Alex really had a hard time last year. He starts a new school, away from home for the first time. That is stressful enough. Then he gets set upon by six thugs. He still finished his exams on time and never complained about his bad luck. He didn’t even want to tell his professors why he missed a week of class and why he had some trouble concentrating after he came back. I admire him for it, although I thought that he should have at least played for a little sympathy. It must have impacted his grades.
My other contact with the legal system next month will be jury duty. I have been a registered voter for nearly thirty-seven years, but I have never served on a jury. Of course, I was overseas a lot of that time, but I don’t think I was ever even summoned before. We are lucky to live in county with lots of voters in relation to criminals. Some of my colleagues who live in DC, where the ratio tends to run less favorably, serve on juries with monotonous regularity. I don’t know if I will actually get to/have to serve on the jury. I just have to report and see if they need me for anything. I want to serve on a jury, to have the experience, but I would prefer not at this particular time, when I am focusing all my energy and attention on learning Portuguese and about Brazil. I suppose there is never a really perfect time to do jury duty, but last October would have been good.
I picked up Alex at James Madison today and brought him home for Christmas vacation. I am glad to have him home and I like to ride with him, so I don’t mind the drive up and back. The road has become familiar and I have developed routines. For example, I always stop off at the Wilco Truck stop on the way home. I have around fifteen cents a gallon on gas, as compared to the prices in the Washington metro area. They have everything I need, a Hess gas station, a Subway Sandwich shop & Dunkin’s Donuts. But I don’t save any money despite the cheaper gas because I waste a couple dollars in quarters in the gambling machine you see up top.
You drop quarters in and sometimes they push more quarters into the tray and you “win.” The quarters perch enticingly on the edge, as you can see. In fact, there is no way I can win at this game and I know it. Oh yeah, I can win a few rounds. Sometimes I get the joy of hearing a pile of quarters fall into the tray, but those just permit me to play a little longer. It is just a diversion. I can afford it. I suppose it is more transparent than bigger deal gambling in casinos. At least with these machines it is easy to understand that you aren’t really going to win.
Speaking of things you cannot win, I used to play “Space Invaders” when I was in college. Sad to say, I got very good at the game, which indicates how much money I wasted. It costs a quarter to play, and that was back when a quarter was a lot more money for me. I could “beat the game,” which meant that it went through nine cycles and started back at the easier level. You never got your quarters back, but you could put your initials on the high score board. For a few glorious months, there was status in winning at video games. That was when college students (i.e. semi-adults like I was) were the champions. But we were soon replaced by teenagers and then children who had even more spare time than college students and more capacity for the mindless repetition it takes to master games. There isn’t much honor in beating a kid & even less in being beaten by one. In fact, finding an adult too good at any video game is not a good sign. I had a colleague who was master of Minesweeper & computer solitaire; not a good worker.
Of course, today games like Space Invaders are hopelessly primitive. My kids laugh. I explain that it used to be a bigger deal and that it is more challenging to play in a bar after you have had a couple of beers. My other favorite game was Missile Command. That game took more coordination than Space Invaders, so I played that one earlier in the evening. On my way to pick up Alex today I got out a little ahead of the rush hour traffic, but I still was happy that I could use the HOV lanes on the way out. One of the advantages of the hybrid is that I can use the HOV lanes. Frankly, I don’t think it should be allowed. We have HOV lanes to cut congestion. Conserving fuel is only a secondary goal. My car does indeed save fuel, but I noticed a single guy in a Lexus SUV hybrid who also had the special right to use the HOV lanes. I suppose a Lexus SUV hybrid gets better mileage than an ordinary SUV, but I bet it gets poorer mileage numbers than an ordinary Honda Civic.
We got our first snow today. It was only a couple inches, nothing like some other parts of the country have been suffering. Still, it is a big deal for Washington, a city that combines southern efficiency with northern charm. Schools closed; the government had liberal leave policy, i.e. you could take unscheduled leave if you wanted. Most of it will melt soon, even if it stays cooler than usual, as it has been. You can tell we are in the south by the leaves on the magnolia tree near the sign, still green with the snow swirling around them.
The pictures show some of the buildings near FSI & Balston. If you can read the sign in the picture, you can read that this area was built between 1937 & 1953. It was supposed to be a low density garden city community in the colonial style popular at the time. It is a nice setup. They originally were rental properties, but many have now been converted to condominiums.
It must have been fairly remote back in 1937, but now it is near densely developed cityscapes. The Balston Metro made the development more attractive. You can see above across the street and below the new construction just down the block. I felt sorry for the poor guys working high up in the snow.
I attended a lecture this evening on Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive movement. It was an interesting talk, but the whole thing made me feel a bit inadequate. There were lots of smart people in the audience, such as Michael Barone and Ben Wattenberg. They asked insightful questions, but it wasn’t just that that made me feel lower. I have never been able to keep my experts straight. These guys can compare subtle differences between works of various people and between philosophies. I have a more mix & match mind. It works well in many things, but I am outclassed by the big brains when it comes to straight intellectual debate.
FSI gave me a kind of an aptitude test recently. I didn’t pay much attention, but it did “reveal” that I don’t set clear boundaries, meaning my learning style is find similarities instead of differences. They spend a lot of time developing these tests, but they never really tell you what you can do about it, since they always say that all the styles are equally okay. IMO, the holistic approach works for lots of things, but it doesn’t work for the intellectual parsing I talked about above. I enjoyed the talk and I took notes. I will use the information for something in the future, I suppose. But I will be unable to keep it straight.
That Michael Barone is a genius. I have long read his books and watched him on TV. He seems to be able to remember the details of every political contest, down to the county level, since the founding of the Republic. The interesting thing he brought up was the hypothetical about what would have happened if Roosevelt had not died in 1919. He probably would have run for president in 1920 and almost assuredly would have won. How different would history have been? Would he have repeated the energetic presidency of his youth, or would the second act just have ruined his reputation and maybe hurt the country. Of course we will never know.
On the plus side, I had my informal first Portuguese test and I got – unofficially – 2+/3. This means nothing to most of you reading this, but it is a decent score after six weeks of instruction for someone who has been away from a language for twenty-five years. The assessments are on a five point scale. Zero is when you cannot say a word in the language; five is educated native proficiency. Even many native speakers in a language cannot get a five, since it is an educated speech. We have to get a minimum of 3 speaking and 3 reading, which is “minimum professional proficiency.”
I would like to get to 4 both speaking and reading and I think I have a good chance, but it is hard, since the difficulty rises exponentially. It is a lot easier to get from 1 to 2 than it is from 3 to 4 and – as I said – almost nobody gets to 5, even if you are born in the country. Four is good. Everybody knows what you are talking about and you don’t make any serious mistakes, but you retain a (no doubt) charming accent, think Ricardo Montalban. Language is such and important part of my job that I think it is worth the effort. I had a 3+/3+ in Polish, which served me fairly well, but I can do better than that in Portuguese. I already have some background; besides it is an easier language & State is giving me the time and instruction I need to get the job done. Back in 1985, I went to Brazil with 3/3. During my time there, my language improved, but I didn’t test when I came back, so I don’t know what I had. I don’t think it was better than a 3+. I was very fluent, but I lacked the polish that I hope to get this time around.
The pictures are from my walk around the Mall today. It was cold with a very strong wind, but I walked from State Department to the Gold’s Gym at Capitol after my Portuguese class and it was okay because the wind was from the west, i.e. at my back. I took the Metro up to the stop near AEI for the lecture this evening and so avoided the freezing wind most of the time.
The top pictures are of the Grant Memorial near the Capitol. In the second picture, notice the half moon above Grant’s head. Below is the skating rink on the Mall and some portraits along the path. I recognize Washington and Napoleon, but I don’t know the other two.
BTW – I am sorry that I am not writing more. Portuguese and Brazil is taking most of my intellectual energy, as I mentioned. I watch the Brazilian news every day and read some books and magazines. After the homework is done, there is less time to write. language training is serious business, but rewarding.
The Danes are the happiest people in the world. The U.S. is up near Denmark, while poor little Togo is both the unhappiest place on earth and the among the poorest, if you believe measurements of those things. China & India fall in the lower middle of both. They have some growing to do before they reach that land of sweet contentment where hardships don’t prevail.
I am happy until I ask why. Then I am just perplexed. Maybe that is because identifying the components of happiness is hard and they are often ethereal. When we look at them closely, they may disappear or seem insignificant. What made me really happy on Saturday, for example, was sitting in front of a south facing wall, after my run, soaking up the warm sun on a cool day. What goes into that, however, is having energy and time to run and to doze in the sun after. It is also the earned freedom to rest after even a small accomplishment. It would not be the same if I just went out and sat in the sun.
Enough money is clearly a component in happiness, since it gives you options and helps avoid hardships. I recall the old hippie saying, “Life is a shit sandwich; the more bread you have, the less shit you have to eat.”
Some people are naturally happier than others. But almost everybody can be made less happy by circumstances, some of which can be avoided by having money. Nevertheless, it remains a sort of statistical process. A rich person has better odds, but a poor person may come out better off with better luck and wise people may be able to maintain their equanimity despite the vicissitudes of capricious fortune. We all die pretty soon no matter what, which evens out all the material possessions, so it is probably not a great idea to get too wound up in the acquisition of stuff – or the lack thereof – anyway. Sic transit gloria mundi.
This interdependence of wisdom, wealth and luck is more or less what Solon explained to Croesus. Read the story at this link. (BTW – the Greeks thought of almost everything we care about in philosophy. This shows us that our problems are nothing new and ensures that you can always quote one of them if you want to be erudite.) A quick summary is that Solon was known as a wise man. He was asked to make reforms in Athens, which was going through challenges a lot worse than we are facing in America today. They had their own sort of globalization (or at least Mediterraneanization) going on and when you said you were a debt slave back then it was literally true. Solon did his duty and after he was done he wisely got out of town before the glow of the people’s gratitude and enthusiasm wore off. During his travels, he met Croesus, the King of Lydia & the richest man in the world. Croesus asked Solon who was the happiest man in the world, expecting that Solon would pick him. (The ancient Greeks rarely made a strong distinction between happy and rich, often using the same word for each w/o distinction.) To his surprise, Solon named others. Croesus thought Solon was nuts, but in the end it turned out Solon was right.
Read the link above if you want the rest of the story and if you are apt to complain about not being happy, cut it out. If you cannot actually be happy, pretend to be happy. Acting happy is sometimes enough to actually make you happy. But even if that doesn’t work, at least you won’t be bothering other people.
Alongside is “Our Lady of Sunoco.” We used to call it “Our Lady of Exxon,” but I noticed that it is now a Sunoco down there. I used to pass this place all the time when FSI was located in Roslyn. I suppose a church can be anywhere, but it just seems odd to have the gas station with the steeple on top. There is a lot of new construction going on in Roslyn. It doesn’t seem to have hurt the area that FSI moved away.
Below is the bike rack at Dunn Loring with a motor scooter. This seems to be part of a trend. I am seeing these motor scooters more and more places that used to be the domain of bikes that actually require some muscle movement to propel them.
I am a bike snob. I don’t consider motor scooter folks as up to being in the “bike club.” Just having two wheels is not enough to qualify. The scooters have the additional negative of often being loud and stinky. The irony is that those little engines make a lot of pollution.
They don’t belong in places with bikes.
I remember how the scooters and mopeds made walking around in Rome a lot more stressful. A moped can go pretty much anywhere and the pinheads riding them feel free to ride down paths and sidewalks. Bikes shouldn’t be in some of the places either, but the moped people tend to be more aggressive. Mopeds and scooters have never been very common around here. Let’s keep it that way. I put them up there with leaf blowers as marginally useful devices that we would be better off without.
I have been getting off the Metro at Ballston and walking from there to FSI. Ballston is part of the suburb of Arlington, but it is much more urban than many areas called cities, with a greater concentration of tall buildings than in a place like downtown Milwaukee, for example. Many of the Ballston buildings are residential, with retail and offices below.
Arlington has a good “transit oriented” development, with dense concentrations near the metro stops at Roslyn, Court House, Clarendon, Virginia Square and Ballston. Ballston is the tail. When you get into Fairfax, there is a lot less development around the stations in Falls Church or Vienna. Our own metro stop at Dunn Loring is supposed to be among the more developed ones in Fairfax. I doubt it will ever get as dense as Ballston, but some construction has begun on our “Merrifield Town Center” or “Mosaic” project. The recent downturn slowed it down a bit.
Above is continuing construction near Ballston. Below is the construction near our stop at Dunn Loring. They are going to widen the road and put in a gardened median strip. The areas at the Metro, which you cannot see but is to the right of the photo, will get tall residences along with retail on the ground level. I understand they will have a bakery and a Harris Teeter, among other things. There will be a multiplex cinema down the road. All this stuff will replace the mulch shop, the dumpy buildings, the Anatolian stone yard, the storefront offering legal services to illegal aliens and the various warehouses. The neighborhood is improving.
Below is my new Gold’s Gym near Ballston Metro. It has the usual equipment, but a younger crowd than the one near the Capitol. They seem to locate these places in old warehouses and industrial buildings.
I went over to see Alex in Harrisonburg and drove down I-81. This is the route that trucks use to transport freight up the Eastern Seaboard. It passes through mostly rural areas, but is nevertheless usually crowded. There has been some talk about building lanes especially for trucks or improving the freight rail to get the goods more effectively transported.
Above is a rest stop along I-81. Below is Harrisonburg at a strip mall with the Wal-Mart Super Center, Home Depot AND Lowes. It seems to be the happening place. There are the usual couple dozen chain restaurants around there. All of them were crowded when Alex and I went down there at around 6:30. We ended up at a not-so-good but not-so-crowded Mexican place. The next morning we had breakfast at Bob Evans.
You don’t think of yourself getting older. But you do. At the cafeteria today, an acquaintance was talking to the checkout woman about coffee. He told her that he could remember when coffee was a quarter. Then he looked up, noticed me and said, “And that guy can remember when it was a nickel.” Actually, I can’t, although maybe it is just because I didn’t drink coffee. But the young checkout clerk seemed to accept it w/o serious doubt. She looked at me and asked, “Really, you used to be able to buy coffee for a nickel?” I suppose it is better to be talked about than not talked about. I just mumbled “yep” and let it go at that. This is my last day here, so I don’t need to maintain my credibility.
I am done and the day is not even over yet. I turned in my Blackberry, did the final checkouts, said my last goodbyes and reduced the size of my email box (according to IT, the most important thing). Nothing remains but to slip out the side door. Transferring within the Washington Metro area is not very hard. I look forward to the adventure of language at FSI and then to Brazil, but it is always sad to leave.
Of course, I will miss the big things like the people I work with and the job. But I am past that now. Now I am thinking about some small, prosaic things that have contributed to quality of life. For example, the shower/locker room downstairs is what really made bike communing possible. It was very refreshing after a hot ride. It also made lunchtime running a realistic option. It is really important to integrate exercise into the day, because you will usually be too tired, busy or have some other excuse for avoiding workouts in the evenings and weekends. A valid excuse is weather and darkness. In the winter you can run during the middle of the day, when it is often sunny and reasonably warm even many days in January. By evening it is dark and cold.
Another pragmatic benefit was Gold’s Gym, although when we moved to our new building that became less useful. But when we were in our old building, Gold’s Gym sat between my office and the Metro. There was never any excuse not to work out. In fact, I felt compelled to go in, even if I was “tired from a long day.” I have been lifting weights fairly regularly since I was fifteen, which is now forty years, but over the past six years (except for my Iraq time) I lifted MORE regularly because it was just more convenient. FSI has a gym, although I haven’t looked closely at it. It probably will not be as good. Gold’s Gym doesn’t have the really fancy equipment, but it is a place more attractive to people who really want to work out, as opposed to the dilettantes who just want to be seen looking good.
Well, one door closes and another opens. I am sure I will find plenty to like in my new incarnation. I am eager to get to the kinds of work I do well and the intellectual challenge of the language and area studies is attractive.
Time passes slowly but before you notice it has lurched forward and the future has become the past. The many days of doing routine things and seeing the same places seem to merge.
It is funny how things end. That is why it is more important to have goals re what the type of person you aspire to become, rather than attaining particular jobs or positions. The day after you leave your job, no matter how exalted, is the day you are a former-whatever it was you were. You cannot take the nice office with you and the fancy title is meaningless once it is done. But you always take yourself along wherever you go, so it is a good idea to get to like what you are and to work not so much to win respect as to be worthy of your own respect and that of others, not matter what position you currently hold, or not Sic transit gloria mundi.
The pictures show the Lincoln Memorial at dusk. Next is the Capitol with the preparations for the John Stewart/Stephen Colbert show. Last is the Commerce Department from the Mall.
