Watching time, the only true currency // A journal from John B. Roberts
This neglected blog (damn you, Twitter!) reached its sixth birthday today. This is the 1,435th post, but the pace has definitely slowed.
I’m glad to say that my birthday mile has not. Yet.
5:22 for the 4 loops (1:20 / 1:22 / 1:21 / 1:18) around Kezar is a second faster than 2008 and 2007.
I know it’s only a holding pattern in a “race” I’m going to lose, but still feels good.
Past birthday blog posts: 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, and 2003.
Waltz with Bashir made for an eye-opening Tuesday night. One man’s animated (literally) attempt to reconstruct his role in the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, Waltz with Bashir uses comic book techniques to tell a tale of young men at a war and a massacre perpetrated during that invasion. What little I know of the Lebanon war comes from reading Robert Fisk, but the outline of events only frame the author’s personal recapturing of memories he’s buried deep in his head. The few breaks from animation are jarring, visually and emotionally. This is, truly, “based on actual events.”
I’m not running with Metacritic here, which measures 90 for “universal acclaim” — but it’s a very good film. Waltz with Bashir earned an Oscar nomination this year.
I’m a week late on this, but I started Super Bowl Sunday (February 1, 2009) in my traditional way, with a race in Golden Gate Park. I finished the 5K 10th overall with an 18:44, for 6:03 miles, if distances are accurate.
One of the two runners right behind me had a GPS on his watch, and said the course is actually 3.27 miles long, beyond the official 3.10. It felt a bit long, given the smooth downhill slope of the last two miles. I began the morning pretty beat after a long bike ride the day before, but ended a hard week with a good race. (Been resting/recovering most of this week.)
Not consistent courses, but here’s my history. Before looking at this, I was happier with my time!
The trailers for Gran Torino menace, and the film darkens your spirit from time to time. A retired auto worker buries his wife, and then faces the changes in his neighborhood with the same coldness (at first) he shows his less-than-agreeable children.
But any gloom in Clint Eastwood’s new movie is lifted by simple moments and insights, and a touch of humor. The caricature of grumpy old man suits Eastwood here; he must have enjoyed substituting growling for dialogue as a blunt marker of his character’s dissatisfaction with his family, neighborhood, and life. When Eastwood’s character does speak, it’s blunt, unfiltered, and unambiguously racist. The slow thaw in his relations with Asian neighbors is foreseeable, but not rushed. You can almost imagine his transformation being real, and his later sacrifice is contextual, if still surprising.
The gloom and grit of suburban Detroit are, strikingly, always portrayed in sunny summer weather. Any decay is presented in bright sunshine. The contrast underlined the point, rather than hiding it.
Only 72 from Metacritic? Bahhhh…too low. I missed dinner beforehand, and didn’t even mind being hungry for this one.
I clicked on Seth Godin’s head long ago. Given all he’s shared online, I haven’t spent much time with his books. But The Dip was front and center at the library last weekend, and admirably small and brief, so it was an impulse read. With the goal of being the best in the world, with a careful definition of best, Godin commands you to quit at the right time: not when things get hard, but strategically.
If you’re going to quit, quit before you start. Reject the system. Don’t play the game if you realize you can’t be the best in the world. [page 43]
Of course, the flip side is the urgent reminder that being the best in the world at anything requires working hard, pushing through the eponymous Dip.
A woodpecker can peck twenty times on a thousand trees and get nowhere, but stay busy. Or he can tap twenty-thousand times on one tree and get dinner. [page 29]
Pushing through The Dip also requires sacrifice of other things…which returns to quitting smartly.
The brief words do make me think about two things.
I once aimed that high athletically, but that’s more than a decade in the past. No matter how much I enjoy competing now, age-group glory isn’t world class — and I’m not training hard enough or smart enough to pretend otherwise.
Being a parent makes me feel responsible, but it’s not a contest…at least, not one you can win, and certainly not one you quit. Husband, brother, son… ditto.
With work, there’s too many different skills required — and employed — for me to pick a specialty. Maybe that’s a problem. I enjoy translating the many requirements and needs of a business into an online presence. I’ve done it successfully for companies big, small, and in between. But because I can’t state right now exactly why I’m the “best ________” for the job, I recognize a bit of focus would be rewarded. Maybe after we launch an easy-to-use online store for industrial adhesives! 
(Joking aside, I do want the experience I create to be top-notch. But it’s never a solo effort.)
Despite my more realistic viewpoint about my running and cycling, I’m not quitting those selfish pursuits. Few things keep me moving mentally like pushing myself physically.
I’ve addressed family above. Work isn’t something I’d want to quit, nor is it an option.
So, reading is probably the time sink I’d have to address if I were going to quit something. I’m not ready to choose between books, magazines, newspapers, websites, personal blogs (and Twitter), and the other gap-fillers just yet.
Oh, and there is one other thing I could drop: blogging here. Nope. Not yet.
p.s. The fact that persistent effort and practice are rewarded with success evokes the well-publicized new Gladwell book, Outliers. But I haven’t read it, and don’t feel compelled to after all the noise gave me a flavor.
Still reeling after stretching my brain, I wafted my way through John Grisham’s last-but-one, The Appeal. I suppose I’ve read a half-dozen or more of Grisham’s 22 books, with general satisfaction.
The Appeal is a quick, reasonable read. The writing is clear and more than competent. But the ending bugged me. Grisham doesn’t write the Hollywood ending, which felt strange given the arc of the story. The Appeal is a morality play without a comeuppance for the villains. That may be real life all too often, but the pace and direction of his characters point in one direction. When the climax and denouement go in another, I felt like the author tried too hard to avoid the tidy conclusion. Since the rest of the story is told smoothly, the visible effort broke the spell.
Phoebe Damrosch somehow found time while serving as a backserver and waiter at Per Se to write a book about the experience. Service Included: Four-Star Secrets of an Eavesdropping Waiter is her journal of the years during the opening of the top-notch Thomas Keller restaurant. It’s highly personal, and includes her growing relationship with a co-worker André, who (from her website) is now her husband and father of their child. From the tone of the book, that’s mildly surprising. But personal insights aside, I enjoyed the light look at the intimate details behind the scenes at a restaurant that treats food, dining, and service as higher arts.
It’s also interesting after the book to read the 2004 NYTimes review which anchors the book’s restaurant threads. Reviewer Frank Bruni shares this:
I am handicapped slightly in evaluating the service, because the vigilant staff repeatedly recognized me, and kept a special watch over my table.
From Damrosch’s tale, you know that Bruni’s meals were anticipated and hashed over more times than one could imagine possible. Special watch, indeed.
Damrosch left the restaurant, and some of my interest in her anecdotes dwindled with that departure in the waning pages. Still, a gentle, amusing look at a world I rarely taste.
After an endorsement from Neal Stephenson in Anathem, I pulled Julian Barbour’s The End of Time out of the San Francisco Public Library. Subtitled “The Next Revolution in our Understanding of the Universe,” this book made me work hard. Barbour tells you what he’s going to tell you, and then he tells you. He encourages the less-scientific reader with “boxes” of asides and explanations, which I appreciated. Still, this intellectual workout left me thinking I need the equivalent of more mental hill repeats.
For Barbour, time doesn’t exist. What we perceive as time is simply a full “configuration” of the possible universe which includes in its defined space all the elements of what feel like “the past” to our conscious minds. Quantum ideas drive this thinking.
To help the reader accept his radical concept, Barbour patiently walks the reader through the history of physics and the dissemination of idea. For instance, as an introduction to why Einstein matters, The End of Time fascinated me. Connecting the dots on Schrodinger, Mach, Dirac and many others, Barbour details a history of ideas with love and appreciation, even when he no longer agrees with the interpretations. For that care and insight, I’m grateful. I might read The Discovery of Dynamics, his “historical study that covers the period from antiquity to the publication of Newtons’s Principia in 1687 together with conceptual clarification of Newtonian dynamics that occurred in the 19th century.” But not just yet.
On the larger idea, I suppose I understand enough to wonder if it’s possible… but I’m not sure it matters. How the theory will ever be proven (or disproven) remains unclear, at least to me. More importantly, I can’t imagine what would change in how we think or act or behave if Barbour’s proposal turns out to be accurate. Our biological wiring can’t interpret motion (Barbour’s “kingfisher in flight” example) any differently, so the essence of time remains even if it’s a shared fiction.
Google Book Search allows a glimpse at the book. Wikipedia displays 24 minute video which attempts to explain the ideas visually. Called Killing Time, it’s from Dutch TV, but (mercifully) is in English. I’ll leave it running while I tackle other things and see what I can learn.
In the film Revolutionary Road, Kate Winslet ignores Leonardo DiCaprio’s errors, and nothing cuts colder. This snapshot of a 1950s couple’s failure to adapt their dreams to their actual life feels like a good play, with an emphasis on dialogue. Winslet stands out visually, though, as she goes beyond resentment into apathy. Ignoring someone freezes the soul much faster than white-hot hatred.
Late in the movie, the breakfast after a stormy scene creeped me out. The absence of action and emotion from Winslet’s wife — and the puppy-dog earnestness of DiCaprio’s husband to take the change at face value — left me stunned. Read my immediate reaction from Tuesday night.
Metacritic offer a lower-than-expected 69, but maybe I’m cutting DiCaprio some slack and over-emphasizing Winslet’s ability to raise a good movie into the great category.
Official results weren’t posted until earlier this week, so I’m late posting this, too.
In 2007, I jogged the Miracle Mile with the boy. This year, I got the entire family out for the mile race, and then I ran the Christmas Classic 5K on my own. The rain held off until the second mile of the 5K, so the family was already driving home, fortunately.
My 5K time of 18:31.78 put me 13th overall, and 2nd in the M30-39 division of this low-key local race. Clearly, I wasn’t in top shape in 2006. Mile splits and heart rate measurements over at DailyMile, which I’ve been using for a few months.