Reflection on multi-conversing

I think I've just figured out something. Many people, but mostly men with their slightly different way of relating to people than women, have issues keeping several lines of conversation going at once. On a large scale, this is obviously true. Not even I, le grande writer of this blog, can hold a conversation with more than three people, although I do enjoy the challenge. It's mostly a vision thing. I like making eye contact with people I'm talking with, and once you get more than three, you have to turn your head, and you can completely lose sight of the third person, therefore miss all the visual cues you might want.
I have found that most of the men I work with - ok, all - have a hard enough time keeping one conversation going, much less interaction with more than one. And I believe, based on my own experience, men also have issues when they can't see the person's face.

sweet potato buttermilk cornbread

I made some a few days ago, and at first, right out of the oven, I didn't think it tasted very good. It was slightly bitter, which I attribute to the sweet potato, and slightly too wet for cornbread, which I attribute to using agave nectar as opposed to granulated sugar. However, day 4 in the life of the sweet potato cornbread seems to bring it to the peak of its existence, much like a wine that needs to settle into of its flavor. Odd.

Anyway, here's what I did.
1 cup flour
1 cup Bob's Red Mill 8 Grain Cereal - good enough substitute for corn meal
3 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. salt
1/4 cup butter
1/4 cup agave nectar
1 beaten egg
1 cup buttermilk
1-1/2 cup peeled and grated sweet potato.

Pre-heat oven to 425. Mix dry ingredients together. Cut in butter until mix is crumbly. Add wet stuff - everything else. Grease a baking dish that's at least 9x9x2 (I used a round cake pan.) Pour mix in, bake for 20-30 min. Voila!

Notes:

1 - I really enjoy cutting butter into flour. It's knowing that these small bits of butter you're embedding with flour will make tasty, greasy, buttery pockets in the final product. It really feels like you're doing something. Not unlike, say, cleaning out the basement.

2- I think the bitterness at the beginning of the life of my cornbread was perhaps because the sweet potato wasn't cooked enough. Not sure, but I would experiment in the future with grating it finer, or even pre-cooking it and just adding mashed sweet potato to the mix.

3- I sprinkled cinnamon and nutmeg on top after it was almost done baking, but definitely adding those into the mix, or at some point in the process is recommended.

4 - I feel that there is a chocolate version of this somewhere in the ether...chocolate chips, perhaps, or cocoa powder. Mmmmmmm.

Sounds!

SO, I think it's interesting how getting older has meant that my ears are more sensitive to musical nuance than ever before. I think it's an emotion thing - emotional maturity, emotional experiences, having had the chance to develop myself on an emotio-spiritual level...or something.

Anyway, sounds. Lovely sounds...

Just heard April Verch. Wow. She's cute, sings, dances, plays violin, writes songs, leads her band, teaches...and she played at the Olympics in Canada. Her legs are like John Jorgensen's fingers. A little unworldly.

John Jorgensen's "One Stolen Night" from the album of that same name has stolen my heart. I listen to it at 7am on the train, and I feel like the luckiest person in the world to be able to listen to it and see morning sun angle over the marshes of the shoreline...

April Verch's kick-ass guitar man, Clay Ross, hailing from South Carolina, has a group called Matuto. It means something in Brazilian, but I don't know what, but they have put out an album that is a mix between Brazilian music and bluegrass. And from what I'm hearing right now, it's got some funky reggae-zydeco-honkytonk-backroom blues-hint'o'grunge thing going on. Yeah! That's what I'm talking about, man! He played these awesome Brazilian shakers - they look like two small balls attached to each other by a short length of string...pickchers, need pickchers...


There. Marakas. He showed me how to play them, but it reminds me of hackey-sack - I can kick it once or twice, but to actually do something cool with it might take some effort...I think I do however have the hang of the pear shaped shaker...I need to buy one of those.


What really gets me about these people is that they are real, honest-to-god, making-a-living-as-musician musicians. And they are really amazing. And they aren't making the kind of money your average hedge fund manager is making. What, by the way, is the hedge fund manager contributing to joy and happiness in the world? Oh, well, I suppose they pay the taxes that help support unemployed people...OK. That's worthwhile.

April does this Ontario step dance thing that is pretty much tap dancing. But, my god, it's so cool...and she will sometimes play violin while tap-dancing...

OK. Enough rhapsodizing.

Working, for now, and Good Ideas

So I started working again today after about 7 months off. I like not working better, but it was fun to do something different. Gotta keep thinking about other things to do because this job I can do already. It will bore me quickly.

I also liked this Inc. article about how good ideas don't always make it to the top. Yet, be optimistic, anyway, as a function of being human.

Humility vs. Pretention

Was thinking it was important to consider some of the things I hated about my previous job. One of them was a certain quality of pretentiousness I found myself constantly experiencing during work. Reflecting on that period is leading me to question what it is about pretention that drives people nuts, and yet, why people are drawn to positions that are almost certainly bound to lead to brushing up against a load of pretension.

I'm reviewing this article that explores humility. A few thoughts:

0. Humility in Western society seems to often be tied directly, in a knot, with Christian values. I'm not Christian, and I find it virtually impossible to view the religion without feeling a certain amount of displeasure and disgust at Christianity's sins and foibles. That discomfort with the religion makes viewing humility through that lens an avenue I will not endeavor to take.

1. For a moment, think of what pretentiousness evokes: unjustified or excessive claims of value, exaggerated importance, arrogance, pompousness, disdain, vaingloriousness, self-centeredness, to name just a few. I think the fact that there are so many words that are fundamentally about the same thing, just shades of difference, hints at how big an issue this is for us humans. The opposite word, humility, has quite fewer synonyms, two notable examples being modesty and unpretentiousness.

2. Pretentiousness is a kind of inauthenticity, an untruthfulness in essence. Pretention is a close relative of pretending, hearkening back to praetendere, meaning to stretch, extend. In our modern day world, we find people who stretch truths, extend inauthentic versions of experience to attempt to gain power, money, and quantifiable gain.

3. In our competitive society, rebellious teenagers, younger people starting in the world are told "That's just how it is." Should you try to change this status quo, you run up against brick, concrete, and crap walls. It can make a person trying to operate out of humility, or at the very least, out of a sense of authenticity that isn't about achievement, feel very lost and lonely.

4. And yet, people recognize or at least pay lip service to the idea that life's true meaning, the real worth of this experience we are all currently sharing of living, breathing, eating, crapping, sleeping, seeing beauty, seeing tragedy...the whole shebang is worth it for most people through things that deny pretentiousness. That is, true connections with others, love, service, helping others. These things, some say, are what lead to a good life, a life that when your time is up, you will be able to look back on and have no regret. And not have to lie about it to yourself.

5. Not easy questions, by far. I think of John Paulson, the hedge fund manager who, as portrayed in the book The Greatest Trade Ever. By some of society's standards, he has achieved pinnacles of success, becoming a billionaire, winning an unimaginable sum by taking advantage of systemic flaws in the social fabric. I think he's someone who was made with a drive to earn money. And so that's what he does. It's a fairly simple thing, but the milieu in which he operates is one that I cannot believe isn't oozing with pretentiousness. Can you have a moral compass amidst all that money and power?

More thoughts later.

Music, Gongs, and Cows

Gongs are the shit. http://gongsongs.com/products.html

I love listening to gongs. Apparently, so do cows. (look for Massimo Piazza on the gongsongs page)