You’ve Got A Friend

Who is a friend? I made a friend on socials, then went to visit her, and the potential friendship was not natural, not evident, not easy. I came back home, and the next day I struck up a ridiculous argument in order to fracture the friendship in my head and gain some distance.

It was her compartmentalization that to me appeared as the less visible depth dimension of our friendship graph. Sure, we communicated well about feelings, about family, about reaching goals, but what it took a trip to her town to notice was that none of these insights had any tangibility. I couldn’t sit up and and say, “Hey, when your ran over a cat with your car, I was there for you, and now that we’re here in the same room you won’t even tell me your name or your address.”

In the last century, we didn’t have access to people’s inner ears as we do now, we couldn’t coo into them and conversely have them ease our pain and frustrations. Now that we do, through the power of socials, the mismatch effect is powerful, where the person to whom you’ve been cooing is not actually a person you feel comfortable spending time with. Keep this in mind for the future.

On the flip side, if you have a crucial friendship online, take care to explain how you feel to your friend and be explicit about how you see this friendship. Or, if you feel that a friendship might be misconstrued by your friend as a crucial friendship, then do the same thing. Talking clearly about your feelings reduces misunderstandings. In the end, it’s not productive or healthy to spend my every evening engaged in chat with someone who doesn’t view my friendship as crucial.

Gone Viral!

Weirdly, I have a viral video on IG. After an IG favorite person, Patricia Miguel Dias, had her account hacked and lost access, I posted a remix video. My video remixed her reel (video) from the VisitPortugal IG page with a series of handwritten calls to action. I put Johnnie Taylor’s “Hijackin’ Love” on top and published it. It sat in my reels for two weeks doing nothing.

Then, just about the time that Patricia got her account back, my video started to rack up likes and views. I noticed it get to 100 likes, a milestone for me, then it kept on going. My notifications filled up (you only get 100 at a time) every night as I was sleeping. By the start of this weekend, I had 13,180 plays and 988 likes; by now, Sunday morning, I’ve passed 2,000 likes and 15.830 plays.

As the beneficiary of the IG algorithm, my benevolent gaze surveys the territory of IG reels, a pretty wasteland of inattention. I now enjoy browsing around to other IG original posters (OPs) and see how many plays and likes their videos have garnered. Most of the bread videos and pottery videos I check on top out in the thousands of plays. There are OPs, like bakesmarterwithsmarter, who post three or four reels every week who have only once received over 10,000 plays.

I can state with assurance that my viral video has no reason to go viral. First, the call to action (CTA), “Help Patricia!” has been answered and resolved. So that’s a dead letter. There aren’t any hashtags that would bring audiences to this reel. Also a dead letter. The production values are terrible; I can barely read the text I wrote, and I’m the one who wrote it.

The song is amazing, however; Johnnie Taylor has the most complicated perspective on love that I’ve ever come across in a pop singer’s repertory. And not only does it have deep lyrics (none of which come across in the 15 second clip I’m using), but it’s a banger like most Stax singles of that era. And I’ve never heard it on IG. I won’t hear it anywhere else either, as my video is still the only use of the song on the platform.

This dynamic, I’m afraid, is something that we have to get used to. If everyone is graded on social credit determined algorithmically, it’s pretty likely that most people’s “success” is the result of pure luck or worse, the alignment of a slapdash product with algorithmic goals (show more faces, show more remixes, play more Stax singles). There might be a point to “using what I’ve learned” to create a reel product with the same qualities that also supports my own social credit goals, except for the fact that I don’t actually have any social credit goals.

Back to Work

This morning I was rolling in bed, wondering what to do about this blog, when I finally decided to resubscribe to my various services and resurrect it. I haven’t had it active for the last few years as you probably noticed, but the files corresponding to each of the lovingly crafted posts were still live on the server, even if there wasn’t a website to access them with.

So I “invested in myself,” and here I am again!

my face
My face

A lot has changed, yup! I’m living in a different state, working at a different job, and I have different friends. I’ve started a whole ‘nother music collection, this one on vinyl records, and in the past couple months I’ve begun to livestream myself playing music from my collection to the people who I’ve gotten to know from enjoying their livestreams. I’ve been posting my baking pics on instagram and thereby building my “social media presence.” But I’ve missed having a spot that is all mine; I pay for this blog so I can provide it to you for free, without any of the residual weirdness and marketing that you get on social media.

My original idea with the bicycle-advocacy posts was to write down what I thought were good arguments for what I believed, in the certainty that anthropologists from the future would see them in conjunction with the crummy arguments I’m trying to dissect. It’s a long game. After spending two years posting #ovenspring and #yeastpets on IG, however, it’s become obvious that IG is a terrible tool for collecting important insights and keeping them available as the contemporary becomes the past. IG doesn’t care about the past. I however am crucially interested in the past; this blog now comprises at least 15 years of thoughts, some of which I was really excited about at the time. And because of the blog’s simple date index and tag features, I can actually go back and reconnect with them.

I’ll stop this ranting now so you can flip through the posts and find the good ones; I can’t even remember myself which ones are the good ones.

Thank you!

‘Baking, by contrast, was solving the same problem over and over again’ —R. Sloan, ‘Sourdough’

It was a decidedly different kind of work.

At General Dexterity, I was contributing to an effort to make repetitive labor obsolete. After a trainer in the Task Acquisition Center taught an arm how to do something, all the arms did it perfectly, forever.

In other words, you solved a problem once, and then you moved on to more interesting things.

Baking, by contrast, was solving the same problem over and over again, because every time, the solution was consumed, I mean really: chewed and digested.

Thus, the problem was ongoing.

Thus, the problem was perhaps the point.

—Robin Sloan, Sourdough, page 69

This slim novel by Robin Sloan is all about how a young person working in coding finds meaning in baking, until the sourdough starter that she uses eats the East Bay. I’ve picked out this quote because it does encapsulate something that I’ve noticed about baking. According to the logic of fiction, however, Sloan swerves away from a novel of toil and personal industry toward a novel that, like a blackjack player, doubles down on other, more attractive themes.

Really, the weird thing about the book is how the narrator’s decision to become a professional baker comes without much consideration. Perhaps Robin Sloan did not want to write a book about how a young person who works in coding becomes a young woman working in food. I confess as someone who dabbles in baking, I have concluded that the hobby’s great benefit is how it helps me build stronger relationships, not how it can advance the plot in the novelization of my life. Certainly I would prefer to write a novel about a mysterious yeast that attempts to consume California than to write a novel about daily life in the Secret City, or a novel about how my friend Dan G comes over nearly every evening and when the fresh loaf comes out of the oven, slices off a piece and microwaves it for added warmth before eating it.

In this way, the novel Sourdough becomes another exhibit in my collection of Books That Have Nothing to Do With Real Life as I Live It.

The quote above does however contain some insight about how the routine of baking becomes its own reward. I keep pretty detailed notes on every loaf of bread and pizza crust I bake, and the shelf of bread diaries does document how my baking methods have changed over time. The conditions of the kitchen don’t change all that much, and the finished loaves pretty much satisfy my criteria for how bread should look, feel, taste and smell, so the thrill of the hobby is seeing how the small changes I make (fold bread three times after kneading instead of two, refrigerating to proof instead of proofing at room temperature) are reflected in the results I get.

It has also revealed to me just how much the experimental conditions actually change with the days, and how silly it is to assume that they stay the same and that the usual techniques I employ have a constant effect. I always have to adjust for the humidity and the ambient temperature, as well as for the amount of time that the loaf will spend fermenting; these variables change slightly but noticeably over time. The constancy of the practice thereby provides the reward in how the daily problem is solved with the tools and techniques to hand. What other hobby does that?

If changing your life was this simple, why was he ever concerned about the everyday stuff? Elmore Leonard, Rum Punch

Nothing to it. If changing your life was this simple, why was he ever concerned about the everyday stuff, writing fifteen thousand criminal offenders? He said to Jackie, ‘Okay,’ and was committed, more certain of his part in this than hers. Until she stood close to him in the kitchen and he lifted the skirt up over her thighs, looking at this girl in a summer dress, fun in her eyes, and knew they were in it together.

—Elmore Leonard, Rum Punch, chapter 20

“Fun in her eyes” has to be among the most Leonardish phrases out there. His books are populated largely with women with fun in their eyes. There’s a great bit in Djibouti about how the heroine is feeling, standing on the deck of a cargo ship in the Red Sea, as the plot she’s involved in ravels or unravels, I can’t remember which. She’s cool, curious, slightly excited; she appears in pretty much every Leonard book.

In Rum Punch, the bail bondsman, Max Cherry, gets these lines above, and maybe he’s actually the cool, curious one in this book; Jackie Burke, his love interest, takes more of an active role in the plot than is usual for a Leonard female protagonist.

I like the quote because it illustrates why Leonard’s oeuvre is so attractive to read; instead of a thriller, where the reader is pulled into the story by empathy for the protagonist’s troubles, in Leonard’s books the protagonist pulls the reader along by sharing just how interesting life has gotten. During the course of Rum Punch Max gets involved in heisting several hundred thousand dollars, a vault into the upper middle class that allows him to quit his day job and file divorce papers with his estranged spouse. Max is able to rise above the existential dread that you or I would feel while on such a voyage of self-reinvention, but that’s why it’s a book and not real life. As I’ve mentioned before, people who radically alter their circumstances in the course of 300 pages are a genre of people who you only meet in books.

“They thought these things so that they were not terrified all the time,” Denise Mina, The Long Drop

But Mr Cooke knows what has happened to his daughter. It has happened before out there, in those fields. Girls and women attacked and no one caught. He thought, his wife thought, that women should not be out at that time. He thought and his wife said, they must be peculiar kinds of women to be out there at that time, in a field with a man. They didn’t think these things because they were nasty people, or spiteful or uncaring. They thought these things so that they were not terrified all the time. Otherwise they would never have allowed their Isabella out of the door.

—Denise Mina, The Long Drop

Mina’s entire book is written in the present tense except for this paragraph, which serves as a kind of aside to the reader: this is the way things were, the way that my book describes, I want you, dear Reader, to understand how things differed from the present day.

The entire book, set in a coaldusted postwar Glasgow has a sheen of unreality, abetted by the use of the present tense throughout. As I’ve been realizing lately, the way people think in books is not necessarily the way I think in real life. Mina has intuited this also and tossed the contemporary reader this bone; I read this parenthetical remark and not only the critical distance between the book’s 1950s and the contemporary day but an appreciation of Mina’s reverence for the milieu came into focus.

‘An American history that doesn’t essentialize notions of “us” and “them”‘

In that light, the most poisonous consequence of raising the curtain with 1619 is that it casually normalizes white Christian Europeans as historical constants and makes African actors little more than dependent variables in the effort to understand what it means to be American. Elevating 1619 has the unintended consequence of cementing in our minds that those very same Europeans who lived quite precipitously and very much on death’s doorstep on the wisp of America were, in fact, already home. But, of course, they were not. Europeans were the outsiders. Selective memory has conditioned us to employ terms like settlers and colonists when we would be better served by thinking of the English as invaders or occupiers. In 1619, Virginia was still Tsenacommacah, Europeans were the non-native species, and the English were the illegal aliens. Uncertainty was still very much the order of the day.

When we make the mistake of fixing this place in time as inherently or inevitably English, we prepare the ground for the assumption that the United States already existed in embryonic fashion. When we allow that idea to go unchallenged, we silently condone the notion that this place is, and always has been, white, Christian, and European.

Michael Guasco’s full piece I found on the Smithsonian Magazine website. The brief article seems to summarize what seems to be the one possible way to get out of our national obsession with white people and their privileges; let’s just build American history back up from the beginning, like some kind of new algebra, starting well before the arrival of Europeans to the North American continent.

Also the article nicely as an aside points out the essential fallacy of the Monument Avenue, Richmond, VA theory of Important Great White Supremacist Male People; the Confederacy, as represented on Monument Ave by Lee, Stuart, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis, is not even the only Virginian politico-cultural initiative consigned to history’s dustbin to date. Perhaps as a corollary to broadening our repertory of historical references by investigating and honoring the precolumbian civilizations of the James River watershed, we students of critical history might want to spend some time looking into what exactly makes white supremacy such a durably attractive organizing principle.

Bike Friendly streets de-privileged

A specific case was a couple of years ago when Bike Friendly Streets were all the rage. I thought it was the craziest thing I had ever heard of. It’s a suburban solution. And it makes sense in some communities around the city for sure. But in the communities I cover, gang and other issues mean that the side streets are actually not that accessible to most people. They stick to the main streets because those are neutral, busy (lots of eyes), and folks feel safer, even if they’re more likely to get run over there. Also folks aren’t riding for pleasure a great part of the time—they need the most direct route…which are the main thoroughfares. So the idea of spending money to implement all of this stuff that nobody but the occasional white person who was riding through the community could use made me insane.

—Sahra Sulaiman in a comment on her article on the women’s march, posted on LA Streetsblog

I really appreciate these kinds of impromptu comments because in my view they clarify the issues in a very quick and decisive way. I have generally felt not particularly fond of the bike-boulevard concept because I think that all streets should be accessible to bicycles and pedestrians. It is my belief that the creative process that leads to establishment of a bike boulevard necessarily implies the designation of a complementary route as an “traffic sewer,” a condition which doesn’t attract bicyclists. Or put another way, once the bike boulevard is designated, bicycle traffic will shift from the main road to the bike boulevard, leaving people who want to access the main road’s attractions by bicycle more vulnerable. As Ms. Sulaiman notes, the BFS doctrinally avoids the direct routes that save people time. Shortcuts, however, are more valuable on a bicycle because the two wheeler’s slower speed makes each mile of detour more onerous than it would be in an automobile.

Over the long run, it feels to me as if I am slowly accumulating a body of evidence that carefully disputes many of the most cherished truisms of bicycle advocacy. It takes a long time and leaves me with the sinking feeling that many people whose wisdom I have counted on are engaged in a process that supports only a small sliver of the population on bicycles.

Communicate safety in the future…

…By building better streets that look and feel safer to people on the fence about getting on a bike every now and then. It’s not rocket science.

Streetsblog commenter, 12/17/2015

I haven’t responded to this comment on my soi-disant authoritative comeback to all safety-based arguments: How are we in the future going to communicate the safety of bicycling in a way that is not true today? It’s been sitting there for more than a year now.

The answer is obvious; those streets are there already but nobody is riding on them, for reasons that have nothing to do with the safety of riding a bicycle. Every weekday afternoon I pedal through the quiet leafy streets of northeastern Queens and only on rare occasions do I see another person riding a bicycle. Again, my observation is confirmed. People will ride bicycles when it makes sense for them to ride bicycles, but not now; at present they just find it easier to drive around and do their errands. Nothing is stopping them from bicycling; there is not a lot of traffic, there are no steep hills. They just feel more comfortable driving.

In order to change this I humbly suggest moving away from safety promotion toward promoting the enjoyment of bicycling and the fun it involves. I am sitting inside on a sunny day and I am itching to go out and ride; why don’t more people feel this way?

Origins of interpersonal problems

In her consulting practice, Dr. [Amy Cooper] Hakim says, many interpersonal problems boil down to a failure to communicate directly about the real problem with someone who can actually resolve it.

Good advice from the Rob Walker Workologist Sunday advice column in the Times, this one from 22 January of this year.

I appreciate this as lately I have seen so many iterations of this type of problem, where there appears to be a real problem but the person affected doesn’t seem to be willing to move very far to solve it.