AuthorWilliam Alba

better things

Fourteen years ago today I put my best friend out of his pain. My familiar, my zeroth born, my companion.

He did not give up easy. Weak as the rest of his body had become, his breath labored hard for what seemed like eternity. He wanted always to be there for me. His heart was so strong, for running and playing and going wherever I would go.

For a long time afterwards, when I was driving alone in the car I would play this on CD, singing along as best I could with Ray Davies:

Here’s wishing you the bluest sky
And hoping something better comes tomorrow
Hoping all the verses rhyme
And the very best of choruses to
Follow all the doubt and sadness
I know that better things are on the way

Here’s hoping all the days ahead
Won’t be as bitter as the ones behind you
Be an optimist instead
And somehow happiness will find you
Forget what happened yesterday
I know that better things are on the way

Last week Helen-Faye spoke on the panel that I arranged for class, to answer students’ questions they asked of their future selves fifty years from now. She reminded us grief comes on its own schedule, there is no right or wrong to it.

My friend continues to be with me wherever I am.

This morning I sang “Better Things” while strumming on the guilele.

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what we know vs. who we are

On Monday evening I delivered my presentation on long-term thinking and sense of gratitude to the first-year students in the Mellon College of Science. First I described some long-term scientific experiments, culminating in the Grant and Glueck studies. On that slide I highlighted a quote from Robert Waldinger, the Director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development:

The clearest message that we get from this 75-year study is this:

Good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Period. 

After leading the students through an activity I created (Giving and Gratitude: An Exercise in Sweetness), we heard from a panel of four people who are significantly older than the students. The panel addressed the students’ questions they had written in response to the prompt

Imagine that you could send a message to your future self 50 years from now and receive a reply. What questions would you ask? That is, what life advice would you want to hear from your future self, about something you are going through right now or about anything you may need to decide over the next five decades?

Last month I enjoyed the company of Stuart Levine, my dear friend and former dean. At 87, Stuart said that he realized something new about teaching just in the past few years. The focus of education, he told me, is affection. When the students experience that among themselves, then you know the class is a success.

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that life would be death

Of the 141 human language families, I know only two: Indo-European and Austronesian. I have traveled, but only to places where three other families are spoken: Japonic, Uralic, and Sino-Tibetan.

Primary Human Languages Improved Version me

Within Indo-European, I can communicate to some degree in Classical and Koine Greek; French and Spanish; and English — twigs within the Hellenic, Italic, and Germanic branches of that family tree. I have forgotten more Classical Latin and Russian than I learned in classrooms, and have a tourist’s knowledge of Italian, Icelandic, and Standard German.

1500px IndoEuropeanTree svg me

This map and this family tree display the vastness of my ignorance. Except for Tagalog, my ability to communicate is entirely confined to the Indo-European family. Even within that tree, I completely lack knowledge of the extensive Indo-Iranian branch, as well as of Celtic, Armenian, and Albanian. While I can often infer the meaning of a word when I travel in Italy, that is more difficult for me in Iceland or the Czech Republic, and impossible in Wales.

Meanwhile, human languages are only a small part of knowledge! There will always be something I do not comprehend. But consider the alternative: to be omniscient, to know everything, to be unable to learn. How boring that kind of life would be, that life would be death.

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in medias res

I have been reading The Testaments, the sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, which I had read soon after its release in 1985. Although 34 years have passed between the publication of these two novels, within the dystopian universe of Gilead it has been only 15 years. Initially I thought Margaret Atwood made this temporal choice in order to provide both herself and the showrunners of the Hulu television series a specific degree of creative breathing room as the seasons continue to unfold. However, I soon realized the narratives for at least two of the main characters demand a time gap of less than a generation. Atwood has been handling the separate threads deftly for the reader. I am at the point in the story when the three primary characters are beginning to converge.

In The Histories, Herodotus relates when Croesus and Solon met. Croesus is the wealthy and powerful king of Lydia, while Solon helped establish Athenian democracy and is now considered one of the Seven Sages. Croesus asks Solon: Who is the happiest man in the world? However, much like the mirror, mirror, on the wall, Solon does not respond that his questioner is the finest. Instead, Solon eventually informs Croesus that no one can judge the happiness of a life until after it has ended. Under this view, I cannot provide a proper review of The Testaments until after I have finished the book, nor can we consider the happiness (or any other condition) of its characters until we reflect on their lives well after they have died.

As a counterpoint to Herodotus, when I taught my course Revolutions of Circularity, on the second of the three days that we discussed Plato’s Meno, I asked the students to consider the dialogue in medias res — in the middle of things — and to predict the flow of the conversation based upon what they had read so far. I reminded them that we are always in the middle of our lives, yet we are called upon to make decisions and judgments.

(Decisions and judgments, testaments and secrets: these are central themes in the novel.)

So while I cannot provide a comprehensive review of The Testaments because I have not yet finished the book, I would still recommend it to anyone who has read The Handmaid’s Tale and seen all three seasons of the Hulu series. And if you have not yet read and seen those, of course you must, and you must start there.

And while we perhaps cannot fully judge the happiness (or any other condition) of the characters until after their deaths, as with the the first novel, the very existence of these testaments suggests that the reader inhabits a far-flung future, more enlightened at last and at least in some ways, than the misogynistic theocracy of Gilead.

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Uber (nod to Harry Chapin)

About 23 years ago I started a poetry writing group in Chicago, where every week we invented an assignment for ourselves. On one occasion we decided to riff off pop songs (I interspersed Boston’s “More Than A Feeling” with my own lines), and on another we wrote our own songs (I composed a diatribe against Bill Gates called “Gates of Hell” that included a rousing chorus we sang in the coffeeshop — this was before Gates woke up and found philanthropy). Today I found a shirt from Southport Lanes, signed by the poetry group and other friends during my birthday party there in 1998.

While I haven’t been writing as much poetry, this weekend I drafted a song to follow Harry Chapin’s “Taxi” and “Sequel“. 

Uber

… from the journey ‘tween heaven and hell,
With half the time thinking of what might have been,
And half thinking, just as well.

I took an Uber to Montauk that morning
To stay there a week or two
Before heading farther east out from JFK
For a Paris rendezvous

When the car hit the Long Island Expressway
And passed an exit sign in Jericho
I said to the driver in a voice hardly mine
There’s a place where I have to go

It took a while before he looked in the mirror
And to hear me, he turned down his song
Then he turned his car into the driveway
Past the gate and the fine-trimmed lawn

I walked among the stones that morning
Bowed back, in search of your name
A smile then came to me slowly
It was a sad smile just the same

And I said, How are you, Harry?
He’d have said, How are you, Sue?
Through the too many miles, and the too little smiles
I still remember you

You see, I was gonna be an actress
And he was gonna learn to fly
I took off to find the footlights
And he took off to find the sky

Don’t ask me if think often of him
Or whether I started to cry
Don’t ask me if I thought of what might have been
Better let sleeping dogs lie

I looked on the ground for some meaning
Blinking to heaven, then down to earth
He had left a six-line message
What one man’s life could be worth

82f22c70fdb017813c131434094c1322

Oh, I’ve got much more inside me
Beyond your spots gone blind
There’s a whole world living in me
Illuminating my mind

Oh, I’ve got much more inside me
And what my life’s about
It’s outside song and story
Writing, ’til my time, runs out

Now that you’re gone for as long as
You were here forty years
I’ll tell your songs were as wrong as
A dear old friend’s tears

There was not much more for us to talk about
No address to forward his letters to
So I lifted my fingers from the place where they rest
And brushed my dress of the morning dew

As I walked away in silence
It’s strange, how you never know
But we’d both gotten what we’d asked for
Such a long, long time ago

You see, I was going to be an actress
And he was going to learn to fly
He took off for the footlights
And I took off… well, did I –

And here, I’m acting happy
With some part of my story told
And Harry, he’s flying on the airwaves
Staying young, while I grow old

Oh, the years fly by, and I grow… old…

…

While this is a reasonable draft borrowing extensively from Harry’s own words, it feels unfinished to me. One of the virtues of Harry Chapin’s lyrics is how effectively he tugs on the heartstrings with direct turns of phrase. Although some music critics feel he can get too melodramatic, I find his tone perfect in these two songs. I haven’t done them justice yet.

I also need to work out the chords. There are at least four patterns (which I call Verse A, Verse B, Bridge, and Interelude), as well as the Intro and Outro. 

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fuel cost per distance

I suspect many people in the United States, unless taking a long road trip, don’t consider how much money it costs to drive their cars a certain distance. Instead, they just drive whenever they need to work or shop or dine out or run errands, then fill up when they have to. For many Americans, the car is an essential means of transportation. We would sooner give up food for our own bodies than gas for our cars.

The weak Sapir-Whorf hypothesis seems obvious: the language by which we habitually express our thoughts nudges us towards and away from having certain thoughts. So let us pay attention to how much it costs us to drive everywhere.

Fuel cost per distance traveled is straightforward to calculate, even though we Americans tend not to think about this term. We rarely discuss this number, which varies with local gas prices and depends upon the fuel efficiency of our individual cars. Here’s how to remember and then estimate this calculation:

…

The retail cost of gasoline is commonly expressed everywhere in the world in units of {local currency per volume fuel}. Thus, the sign outside a gas station in the United States might read 2.979 US dollars per gallon. Similarly, a sign today in Spain might show 1.292 Euros per liter. (By the way, this price is approximately 5.45 US dollars per gallon.)

It makes sense to express the cost of automobile fuel in {currency per unit volume}, rather than {volume per unit currency}. While someone might hand a twenty-dollar bill over to a cashier in order to receive that amount of gas, in general whenever we compare prices or purchase something, we want to know cost per unit.

Fuel efficiency of an automobile is also derived by dividing two quantities: distance traveled and volume of fuel. However, around the world there is a difference in which is the numerator and which is the denominator.  In the United States, fuel efficiency is expressed in miles per gallon (mpg) — that is, {distance traveled per fuel volume}. Our own gas-guzzler is lucky to get 19 miles per gallon in the city. However, in most other countries, fuel efficiency of an automobile is expressed in units of {fuel volume per distance traveled} — that is, the inverse of the United States. A typical car in Europe in an urban setting might be rated 7.1 liters per 100 kilometers — 7.1L/100 km (about 33 mpg).

Raised in the United States, I perform mental gymnastics whenever I see the quotient flipped on fuel efficiency. And yet I wish our fuel efficiency were in units like gal/100 mi.

If gasoline costs about 3 dollars per gallon and my car receives about 20 miles per gallon, I divide the retail cost of gasoline by the fuel efficiency to calculate 15 cents of gasoline per mile.

If gasoline costs about 1.3 Euros per liter and my car uses about 7 liters every hundred kilometers, I multiply those two quantities to know my car needs about 9.1 Euros of gasoline to travel a hundred kilometers (or 0.91 Euros per ten kilometers, or about 9 cents per kilometer).

Quite simply, multiplication is easier to perform in our heads than division, especially because we don’t have to remember which number divides the other.

…

In any case, our car costs at least 15 cents to drive just one mile. Even a quick round-trip to the local branch of the public library is 20¢, to our favorite grocery store is 30¢, dropping the sixth-grader off at school is 70¢, and going to the closest Wal-Mart is $3.00. It’s important to note that this is for fuel alone, and excludes auto insurance, motor oil, tires, brake pads, and other maintenance. The GSA estimate in 2019 is actually 58¢ per mile.

Even the GSA estimate doesn’t account for the driver’s time sitting in a car versus, say, writing a poem or playing a musical instrument. It also doesn’t account for the health benefits of walking, and the environmental benefits to the planet of lower carbon dioxide emissions.

Nevertheless, knowing fuel cost per distance encourages us as citizens and consumers to reserve money, conserve the environment, and preserve our happiness.

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design outlets

When I was a professor teaching science, math, and writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the late 1990s, I enrolled in graphic design classes as a creative outlet. This experience has given me confidence to make my own projects, although I do tend to rely on the perfection of geometric forms. While this conservative tendency goes way back, at least as far back as middle school when I enjoyed constructing mazes, I may have ossified more over the years. Let’s see:

About four years ago I created an emblem to be burned onto the surface of a music box, as a prototype for an artifact that would survive on the Moon for millions of years. I regularized and aligned medieval symbols for Earth, Moon, and Sun. Looking at it again now, I find this icon striking but static; it could belong on a headstone as much as on a time capsule.

Earth Moon Sun 2016 02

About fourteen years ago, before the children were born, I designed a family flag, which I later had made into a lapel pin. Focusing on this project must have been a comfort as I mourned Mookie; the four colors represent the surface tones of the four mammals who had been the members of the family. While I obviously lean on geometry here too, the colors help introduce some movement.

Family flag 2005

About eighteen years ago I completed a book project that combined my interests in design and in poetry (honed in the writing group I started in Chicago and in writing workshops I taught for Bard College). Below is a sample of page layouts.

Before the Rain Contents 2001 04

Invocation Violation 2001 04

My dog 2001 04

Your first time 2001 04

Given this limited sample, it does seem to me that I have become less daring in my designs. I wonder if this is due to a heavy reliance upon keyboard and trackpad, or perhaps just lack of practice to push myself in this way. The children continue to produce wonderfully sloppy, dynamic drawings, but this type of artistry is not limited to youth. After all, when we travel this winter I expect to admire how Gaudí and Picasso produced work that was increasingly more organic and free-flowing in their later years.

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measure twice, cut once

Living in the same house for fourteen years, we see how long things last.

The dishwasher that came with the house lasted six years. Its replacement began to leave debris on the plates after eight years, eventually complaining loudly by buzzing and then bleeding water all over the kitchen floor. 

The boiler for our heating system failed after four years into our residence, because the solenoid that shuts off the gas to the pilot light needed to be replaced. Today, about ten years later, that same thermocouple needed to be replaced. The repair guy said that they can last one day, or twenty years — there’s no way of telling.

…

On the other hand, some items are built so well and have such straightforward functionality that, with a little care, they can last a lifetime. Victorinox, for example, makes solid Swiss Army Knives and other tools.

So what is the business model for Victorinox? How can they make money when their products are so durable? They have a loyal customer base who recommends their products. And there are two additional reasons for me. First, I have misplaced and needed to replace some of mine: a Super Tinker and a Climber, as well as my first SwissCard, from moving across the country, loaning them out, and related to confiscation during air travel. Second, I have come to trust Victorinox for quality anytime I need different sets of tools for different occasions. As a result, although I already have three 91mm knives as well as four other models, I am already considering what my next purchase would be.

My heftiest Victorinox tool is the SwissTool RS, which is the first item I grab whenever I need to repair anything around the house. This well-crafted block of steel is an entire toolbox in one hand. My lightest is the SwissCard Lite, which crams so much into an incredibly easy-to-carry package. I also have a NailClip 580, which I purchased even though it is easy to find clippers at the pharmacy, and a Precision Compass, for my neck lanyard.

My oldest 91mm Swiss Army Knife, which I have had for more than a quarter century, is a Climber. This particular knife has served me well on brief and lengthy camping trips; it has more than I really need on a daily basis around town. Looking to lighten the load, I found a heavily discounted Serrated Spartan, which is very similar to the Climber except the large blade is serrated (two different edges is great) and is one layer thinner because it lacks scissors. Missing those scissors, this month I stepped up to the Explorer as my EDC, to replace both a Benchmade Bugout and the Victorinox SwissCard Lite. The Explorer has all of the Climber tools, plus an eminently useful magnifier and a solid Phillips screwdriver. I’m thinking of replacing its scales with Plus scales, to carry a pen and a pin in addition to tweezers and toothpick.

(The following family tree is from SAK Wiki, a great resource for information about Swiss Army Knives.)Victorinox wish list 2019 10 18I carry the Explorer in my shirt pocket, but still long for something that is thinner while retaining my favorite tools: scissors, magnifier, and can opener. A sensible way to slim down is to merge the bottle opener and can opener into a “combo tool” that replaces the small blade. This would also require going without the awl, which is on the back layer of the standard opener tools; although I have occasionally found the awl useful while camping, I can live without it. In addition, some users indicate that the combo tool is a bad compromise and is not robust for prying. Still, making this change reduces the Climber by one layer to the Compact model (which comes with Plus scales), and the Explorer trims to the Yeoman.

I prefer the Yeoman, in order to retain the magnifier, even though the Compact already comes with Plus scales. But Victorinox no longer manufactures the Yeoman. My grail knife would be a Yeoman with Plus scales (preferably dark-colored low-density metal scales, such as the aluminum and titanium ones made by Swiss Bianco), the uncommon hook with a nail file surface, the standard magnifier in production since 2012 (6x glass mounted in clear plastic), the “old” scissors (with an adjustable screw for a pivot), and well-stamped liners. To honor its custom manufacture, I would call it a “Yo, Man” or “Yahmin” or “Gnomon“.

I did mention “well-stamped” liners because, sad to say, my new Explorer has ugly liners. The aluminum is rough instead of polished on the edges, and there is even a little divot out of one of the internal liners. The corkscrew was rough and had some extra metal I scraped away with my fingernail. These issues don’t compromise the usability of the tools, but it’s disturbing that they passed Victorinox quality control, because these tools, with care, last a long time and proclaim the reputation of the company.

Artifacts survive us when they are durable, prove useful, and/or hold sentimental or informational value. Perhaps one of these knives, well-worn and one day freely given, will continue to serve beyond me.

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pie vs. cake

Some people are pie people, and some people are cake people. It took me more than a half century to realize this, when I hosted an event at the university and several students expressed that they dislike pie and much prefer cake. I was shocked — it seems clear to me that, in general, pie is better.

Some pies I like: pecan, maple pecan, chocolate pecan, cherry, apple (although it’s difficult to find done properly), key lime, peach (definitely peach), cheesecake, flan, blueberry, pizza, banofee, chess, egg tart, Mississippi mud, pasty, quiche (depends), Canadian sugar, Linzer torte, fruit tart.

Some cakes I like: Sachertorte, Bundt (sometimes), bibinka, brownie (when chewy and crispy, that is, cookie-like), carrot, flourless chocolate, funnel, German chocolate (sometimes), ice cream, Kouign-amann, moon (although mooncake is more like a pie), pineapple upside-down, mille crêpe.

Looking over this list, I like cakes when they are moist (but not all of them: not fruitcake, for example). Most significantly, I generally don’t like frosting unless it’s made of fresh, real buttercream. A thin layer of icing is fine too.

I’ll be co-hosting another interdisciplinary student event towards the end of this month and we have a planning meeting tomorrow. Last year we made halo-halo, and in previous years with the Science and Humanities Scholars I’ve had frozen custard, s’mores, and other goodies — but this time, oh this time, it’s going to be pie.

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obsession with passion

I have worked at enough colleges and universities to discern distinctive cultures. Then again, anyone familiar with art schools would expect students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago are primarily concerned with expressing themselves. Likewise, anyone acquainted with the Great Books Program at St. John’s College wouldn’t be surprised to learn how much students there revere dialogues on curated texts.

The contrast between those two institutions, where I taught successively from 1995 to 2003, is especially clear to me because the students approached their educations in entirely different ways. The students at the School were interested in history only when this information informed their own art. The students of the College were stellar at analyzing how the ideas of others relate to each other but sometimes struggle with their own independent identity after graduation.

When I arrived at Carnegie Mellon fourteen years ago, I quickly observed how students here want to work together, to make things, in order to share those products with the world. Spring Carnival is the most obvious sign of these characteristics. Whenever college students anywhere receive a four-day weekend towards the end of the academic year as the weather turns warm, you can see their true colors. Here at CMU, the students construct human-powered buggies to careen rapidly along the city streets, build two-story booths to entertain and educate themselves as well as local children, design robots to race each other, stage plays, sing a cappella, and otherwise practice for weeks and months before their long weekend in the spring. They do all of this, not for college credit or for pay, but rather because — when given free time — they like to work together, to make things, in order to share those products with the world.

This quality is in the bones of the place. The university started as a trade school to educate the children of factory workers; nowadays, the internships and entry positions are more likely with software companies and financial firms. Either way, the story is the same: CMU students, for all their wonderful virtues, are disinclined to care about knowledge unless it moves them towards employment, and tend not to consider the societal implications of the jobs they take, as long as those pay well. Furthermore, they seem to think of themselves as gears in some vast machinery (“good grades, enough sleep, social life: choose two”) and to overwork themselves to exhaustion.

“My heart is in the work” is the motto of the university, which is a beautiful sentiment on the face of it. Given a choice, who wouldn’t want a job they love? The problem comes when “my work is my heart” — when work is judged significant only if it also possesses your heart, or worse, when work becomes the measure of self-worth.

…

When I arrived at the university, one of my colleagues frequently advocated that we faculty should help students “find their passion”; she often invoked “passion” when meeting prospective students and advising current ones. She proselytized this gospel of passion because, she observed, students seemed happy and successful when they found a career path that deeply aligns with their interests.

But what does this unrelenting emphasis on passion convey to those who have not yet, or never will, find passion in work? Why should all of us expect to derive unending satisfaction from our employment? Work is not always fun, nor should we expect it to snap us out of our beds every morning. We don’t have to throw our hearts at the same job every day for decades. Let us decide for ourselves where our hearts belong.

Obsession with passion for work is pitiless. It smacks of privilege: few people have the luxury to choose a profession that aligns with passion. It reduces education to a mechanism towards employment, initially to identify passion for a certain line of work, then to receive vocational training. Food and rest exist only to enable further work, which becomes the one true reason for being. Leisure, once considered the basis of culture, is a word that simply ceases to have meaning.

…

I helped construct the new undergraduate Core Education in the Mellon College of Science, and have taught Eureka, the introductory course in this sequence, since we launched it five years ago. This week in Eureka we assigned students the task to consider goals for themselves.

The lead instructor for Eureka keeps the rest of us yoked together, so that students share a similar educational experience regardless of recitation section.I always question what we do. In particular, two years ago when we were instructed to show our students Scott Dinsmore’s TEDx talk “How To Find and Do Work You Love“, I chose two briefer portions. The first excerpt begins and ends:

Eight years ago I got the worst career advice of my life. I had a friend tell me, “Scott, don’t worry about how much you like the work you’re doing right now, it’s all about just building your resume.” … 

I wanted to find the work that I couldn’t not do.

The second Dinsmore excerpt concludes:

[T]he best way to do this [push yourself to believe what is possible] is to surround yourself with passionate people. The fastest way to do things you don’t think can be done is to surround yourself with people already doing them.

Even knowing that Dinsmore had died while pursuing one of his passions as a mountain climber, I could not let his message pass uncritically to my students. To provide counterpoint, I also showed another video, from the beginning of Terri Trespicio’s TEDx talk “Stop Searching for Your Passion“:

[T]here’s a dangerously limiting idea at the heart of everything we believe about success and life in general, and it’s that you have one singular passion and your job is to find it and to pursue it to the exclusion of all else. And if you do that, everything will fall into place. And if you don’t, you’ve failed … 

This passion vertical is unrealistic and, I’ll say it, elitist. You show me someone who washes windows for a living and I will bet you a million dollars it’s not because he has a passion for clean glass … 

[Scott] Adams says that in his life, success fueled passion more than passion fueled success.

I align with Trespicio more than with Densmore: passion and profession need not be chained together. She and I are not alone in our concerns about this unhealthy obsession with finding your passion, an attitude that corresponds with a fixed mindset, rather than a growth mindset that encourages development.

When I reported the changes I had made to the lesson plan, other professors revealed that they and their sections had also been uncomfortable with the overemphasis on passion. Since then, everyone has modified the exercise to include a hard interrogation of the passion narrative.

My work here is done.

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