California – Page 7 – Hobbits In Rivendell

Representative Democracy

March 2, 2017

11:05 am

With all of the political chaos going on in the US, there’s been quite a lot of political engagement, particularly with people going to “town hall” meetings between the representatives and their constituencies. Well, I went to one the other day, here in Vallejo, for Congressman Mike Thompson.

I should have brought knitting.

It was like going to the most horrible, boring, irrelevant church service ever, except they didn’t even have singing.

Dear Politicians: do not tell us the same old schtick. We have this thing called “the internet?” It tells us all of these things. It’s how we knew where to track you down. We do not need for you to tell us these things. We know them. We want to ask you questions. We want to know what you are going to do. We want to know that you hear us, which means you need to actually listen to us.

Of course, at least the congressman had the guts to meet with us (in the Vallejo Senior Center, which is why there’s a permanent Bingo board behind him). This is unlike Senator Dianne Feinstein, who apparently doesn’t meet with you unless you cough up a bunch of cash. And I guess he was interesting enough, if you’re used to listening to the radio or watching TV – you know, low-bandwidth information consumption.

To put this into context: I either read my news or I listen to podcasts … and the podcast app I use lets me turn up the playback speed, so I can adjust it so the information comes at me way faster than having to listen to someone’s natural speaking voice. This is me: I consume information rapidly. Listening to a speaker drives me crazy unless I have something to do, and playing games on the phone isn’t quite enough to make me OK with the hard chairs and the repetitive information.

Representative democracy. Bleh. It’s either doomed or it’s entirely irrational. (Go read those articles, please – yes, the author is probably a liberal, but these are about political science rather than policy.)

Lesson learned: politicians are a low-bandwidth form of information delivery, and deliver information which can be easily consumed elsewhere, and they choose places with hard chairs. Oh, and they don’t want you to bring signs.

On a totally different note, we’ll be off to the Tri-Cities area of Washington State next week for interviews. We’ll be off sometime the following week to Seattle for interviews. And my current client has apparently realized that I’m seriously going to be going somewhere, so they want me to come and and do some work and, oh, would I be available to support them remotely through to the end of the year at least.

-D

Santa Barbara … Nope.

by David T. Macknet

February 28, 2017

4:08 pm

3 Comments on Santa Barbara … Nope.

California, Rant, Upheaval

Well, that was one of the stranger interview experiences I’ve ever had! Long story short: I’ll not be taking that job in Santa Barbara!

So, I went down to Santa Barbara to interview with this company after having had a few phone interviews, including a technical interview. Before going down it had seemed like things were really going well, like we were a great fit (albeit with a few things I’d have to get used to). I get to the interview at 11:00, we chit chat, go out to lunch, and then settle in for interviews. At this point, I’m expecting to meet people, talk with people – basically, to see what things are like and have them sell me on what a great company they are and how much of a nice place it is. Hahahaha, Nope!

Instead of selling me on them, they proceed to ask me tricky programming questions. Which, OK, fine, yes, people do this. They usually do it earlier in the process, but whatever, I can roll with it. The questions are usually idiotic, so that’s not unusual, even though I thought we were past this point, but hey, not getting hung up on that. Did I expect each of the three different interviewers to demonstrate odd personality traits that I would find distasteful to work with? No, certainly not. Did I expect to be pushed to answer when I had stated that I did not know the answer? Nope. Did I expect someone to mimic my body language? Like, I was fiddling with an earring while thinking about a coding question and the guy goes and tugs on his earlobe? Oh, no, I did not expect this. Nor did I expect them to be rude to other employees (a lady asked to change the thermostat in the conference room, since it was freezing in their space outside the conference room, to which the interviewer responded that he didn’t care).

After this strange day, wherein I sell myself to them and straight up do not respond to complete rudeness, I go back to the hotel basically exhausted and play some mindless games on the phone (frozen bubble is fabulous for not having to think, by the way). As I’m playing, I’m thinking over all the little things, and I’m adding them all up, and I’m reaching the conclusion that these are not nice people, and this is not going to be a nice place to work.

So, we drive home, and I talk it all out with T, and I write the recruiter a politely worded response to say that I don’t think it’s going to be a good fit.

And then I get a call from the hiring manager, wanting to talk it over.

The hiring manager tells me that these behaviors were intentional. They had intentionally done these things to see how I would react.

Let that sink in for a minute.

A potential employer essentially conducted psychological experimentation with a candidate. Over the course of 6 hours, and by 3 different people, they attempted to see whether I would react negatively to their behavior.

Here’s a little secret, people trying to hire: if you act like someone with whom the candidate would not want to work, that candidate is going to decide that they do not want to work with you. If you later try to tell them it was all a test? Well, that says that you felt entitled to know how the candidate would respond to stressful situations … which says that you intend to subject them to those types of situations, else why subject them to the test? If you do not intend to treat them poorly, why would you need to know how they will react to being treated poorly?

I don’t think there can be any ethical justification of such a test.

In talking with the hiring manager I told him that maybe, if he’d told me what they’d been doing before I left the interview, I might have reached a different decision. Thinking it through, though, I do not think so; I think that even knowing it was a test I would be offended because, again, If you do not intend to treat me that way, Why do you need to know how I will react?

I think I find this especially frustrating because I feel like it was a lie: that I wasted my time going down there because they were not being honest about the purpose of the meeting. Whatever they learned, I hope that they learned that some people react to macho BS by being polite and then removing themselves from the situation as quickly as possible.

I have a few more interviews lined up for the coming weeks, one of which I think looks like it could be quite interesting, the other of which is more “let’s talk more and see what kind of a company you really are.” We’ll see.

-D

“Where Do We Go From Here?” – by Martin Luther King, Jr., 1967

by TadMack

November 10, 2016

1:12 pm

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California

I must confess, my friends, the road ahead will not always be smooth. There will be still rocky places of frustration and meandering points of bewilderment. There will be inevitable setbacks here and there. There will be those moments when the buoyancy of hope will be transformed into the fatigue of despair. Our dreams will sometimes be shattered and our ethereal hopes blasted. We may again with tear-drenched eyes have to stand before the bier of some courageous civil rights worker whose life will be snuffed out by the dastardly acts of bloodthirsty mobs. Difficult and painful as it is, we must walk on in the days ahead with an audacious faith in the future. And as we continue our chartered course, we may gain consolation in the words so nobly left by that great black bard who was also a great freedom fighter of yesterday, James Weldon Johnson:

Stony the road we trod,
Bitter the chastening rod
Felt in the days
When hope unborn had died.

Yet with a steady beat,
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place
For which our fathers sighed?

We have come over the way
That with tears hath been watered.
We have come treading our paths
Through the blood of the slaughtered,

Out from the gloomy past,
Till now we stand at last
Where the bright gleam
Of our bright star is cast.

Let this affirmation be our ringing cry. It will give us the courage to face the uncertainties of the future. It will give our tired feet new strength as we continue our forward stride toward the city of freedom. When our days become dreary with low-hovering clouds of despair, and when our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, let us remember that there is a creative force in this universe, working to pull down the gigantic mountains of evil, a power that is able to make a way out of now way and transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows. Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.

Let us realize that William Cullen Bryant is right: “Truth crushed to earth will rise again.” Let us go out realizing that the Bible is right:

“Be not deceived, God is not mocked. Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” This is for hope for the future, and with this faith we will be able to sing in some not too distant tomorrow with a cosmic past tense, “We have overcome, we have overcome, deep in my heart, I did believe we would overcome.”

The Southern Christian Leadership Conference Presidential Address
By Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., 16 August 1967

And, after Tuesday…

by TadMack

November 7, 2016

10:34 am

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California

Tony Hoagland

HARD RAIN

After I heard It’s a Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall
played softly by an accordion quartet
through the ceiling speakers at the Springdale Shopping Mall,
then I understood: there’s nothing
we can’t pluck the stinger from,

nothing we can’t turn into a soft drink flavor or a t-shirt.
Even serenity can become something horrible
if you make a commercial about it
using smiling, white-haired people

quoting Thoreau to sell retirement homes
in the Everglades, where the swamp has been
drained and bulldozed into a nineteen hole golf course
with electrified alligator barriers.

You can’t keep beating yourself up, Billy
I heard the therapist say on television
to the teenage murderer,

About all those people you killed–
You just have to be the best person you can be,
one day at a time –

and everybody in the audience claps and weeps a little,
because the level of deep feeling has been touched,
and they want to believe that
that the power of Forgiveness is greater
than the power of Consequence, or History.

Dear Abby:
My father is a businessman who travels.
Each time he returns from one of his trips,
his shoes and trousers
are covered with blood –
but he never forgets to bring me a nice present;
Should I say something?
Signed, America.

I used to think I was not part of this,
that I could mind my own business and get along,
but that was just another song
that had been taught to me since birth
whose words I was humming under my breath,
as I was walking thorough the Springdale Mall

“After Tuesday,” the pastor said this weekend, “God will still be God.”

And, after Tuesday, we will still be us, and America will still be America, for good or for ill.

And, after Tuesday, the planet will still spin. Life will go on.

Traveling abroad even briefly in the past two years, the conversation most people outside the US have wanted to have with us was our opinion about the election. And we quickly got tired of talking about it. Especially after going through the mail-in ballot so early in the process, we both have sort of pulled back from reading about politics, engaging about it on social media, etc., etc.. There just comes a limit, which we reached roughly about ~~six~~ twelve months ago. It is all too easy for us as Westerners – and, perhaps as human beings – to retreat into endless self-preoccupation which limits our point of view. There’s a lot more happening in the world than the bloviating nonsense currently occupying the national stage.

This poem resonates because so many of us have felt that if we disengage and claim that, “it’s not my issue,” that going along to get along is good enough; that leaving well-enough alone is fine. But, we are all connected in so many ways; every act is connected, and we are not only involved, we are complicit. This is not to say that every act of living is guilty, but that we all ultimately hold some responsibility for each other. Giving a hand-up and paying the gift of what we have forward to our communities means getting involved on behalf of others. Speaking on behalf of those who aren’t heard is our privilege. If nothing else can be learned from this national conversation it is that listening to those who are not usually heard is just so much more important than speaking.

Whatever way the world shifts, at least this election season has taught us that.

After Tuesday, here’s hoping that perspective remains, and that all sides in this contretemps can agree to disagree, and to compete again without so much rancor, perhaps. If nothing else, may we remember that we are not opponents ordinarily, but community, with many of the same goals and beliefs, and the same hopes for our future.

“Lived reality is always a muddle.”

by TadMack

August 16, 2016

7:36 am

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California, Life, Rant

It is a truth universally acknowledged among T’s family and friends that D. is “the smart one,” in this relationship, and, in the face of a vast body of evidence, T generally concurs… however, as she has just sent him off to work after a failed attempt to start the car without the key, she would like to herewith state the time-worn truth that it’s a good thing that “cute”… can take one a long way in this world. ::cough::

The big buzz in adult literary circles at present, from Oprah on down, is Colson Whitehead’s THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD. There’s a brilliant New Yorker essay by Kathryn Schulz this month which talks about the actual historical facts of that portion of abolitionist history, and the well-stitched (quilted, even) lies and mythologies which have generally overtaken its history. Whitehead’s novel is kind of a magical realism; the railroad – complete with cars and track – is real, in his point of view, and the novel – which we’ve not read – apparently takes into account who that would work for, and what it would cost them emotionally and physically as well as probably monetarily. Schultz’s essay has some great points about the history, and how Americans tend to view it – and mythologize it – in the general scope of today’s history and politics. Inasmuch as it caused frothing at the mouth for some to consider that slaves even built the White House, it’s obviously easier to recenter the narrative about slavery to the people who helped and healed, rather than who benefited, and to canonize them. We also like to imagine that “had we been there,” we’d have been working shoulder to shoulder with the abolitionists, ever on the side of right.

It’s such a nice fantasy.

The final statement in Schulz’s essay really stuck home:

“One of the biases of retrospection is to believe that the moral crises of the past were clearer than our own—that, had we been alive at the time, we would have recognized them, known what to do about them, and known when the time had come to do so. That is a fantasy. Iniquity is always coercive and insidious and intimidating, and lived reality is always a muddle, and the kind of clarity that leads to action comes not from without but from within. The great virtue of a figurative railroad is that, when someone needs it—and someone always needs it—we don’t have to build it. We are it, if we choose. ♦

Lived reality is always a muddle.

ALWAYS. A. MUDDLE. Oh, for the moral high ground which many people seem to find, and assume that their lives would have been peerless and blameless back in the day. They would have turned away from anything smacking of sexism or racism. THEY would have never kept slaves. THEY would have taken the kids out of the city for a camping trip to Jericho instead of being in Jerusalem the weekend they decided to crucify Christ. Always with the superiority complex, we humans! If it were all that easy, we’d all be swanning around in perfection, perhaps on golden streets. It’s NEVER that easy – life is also coercive, and insidious, and intimidating, full stop. This reminds me to, for the love of God, to give a bit of grace to others in terms of their follies and mistakes in the here-and-now.

We recommend Schulz’s entire essay, “The Perilous Lure of the Underground Railroad” where she considers Whitehead’s novel and Ben Winter’s alternate history novel, Underground Airlines within the context of history, historians, and how it we consider this piece of our collective past today.

Swallowed With All Hope

by TadMack

August 15, 2016

2:38 pm

1 Comment on Swallowed With All Hope

California, Life

Despite T thinking she was a bit old for it, T’s mother often sang to her a Mr. Rogers song “Let’s Thing Of Something To Do (While We’re Waiting). A jazzy little oddity from the show, Let’s Thing of Something To Do was helpful for preschool teachers dealing with Lifestyles of the Small and Antsy. Sadly, though some of us are *cough* larger now, the antsy-ness has not demonstrably decreased… – if you can’t control any or everything around you, there’s really no point in twitchiness, but astonishingly, it is not a grace that all of us receive, that ability to “possess thy soul in patience.” August is barely halfway in, and already it seems a heinously long month.

So, we wait. This poem is a slightly less catchy (?) version of Mr. Rogers’ song, which we’re holding close in the Hobbiton, in these days of waiting for phone calls, waiting for interviews, waiting for critiques, waiting to finish manuscripts and waiting for this, the summer of our discontent, and this onerous election cycle to be OVER and please God, please, please please can you give us a time machine, and we promise not to skip ahead past February of next year, if we could just miss these next eight to ten weeks???

No? ::sigh:: Okay. Waiting again, then.

Things to Do in the Belly of a Whale

Measure the walls. Count the ribs. Notch the long days.
Look up for blue sky through the spout. Make small fires
with the broken hulls of fishing boats. Practice smoke signals.
Call old friends, and listen for echoes of distant voices.
Organize your calendar. Dream of the beach. Look each way
for the dim glow of light. Work on your reports. Review
each of your life’s ten million choices. Endure moments
of self-loathing. Find the evidence of those before you.
Destroy it. Try to be very quiet, and listen for the sound
of gears and moving water. Listen for the sound of your heart.
Be thankful that you are here, swallowed with all hope,
where you can rest and wait. Be nostalgic. Think of all
the things you did and could have done. Remember
treading water in the center of the still night sea, your toes
pointing again and again down, down into the black depths.

~ by Dan Albergotti from The Boatloads. © BOA Editions, Ltd., 2008

Automobile Woes

by David T. Macknet

May 6, 2016

7:56 pm

They’re baaaack….

by TadMack

April 20, 2016

1:44 pm

1 Comment on They’re baaaack….

California, Life

Despite the perception of turkeys as Thanksgiving beasties, they’re really showing off those traditional tail-feathers in mid-to-late Spring. They’re noisy and twitchy and generally a mess, as most grooms are.

Meanwhile, the intermittent rains keep are keeping things gorgeously, almost historically (hysterically?) green — and we find ourselves torn — wanting to go outside and revel in all the color, while knowing full well we’ll end up sneezing and wheezing and regretting the whole thing. Life with seasonal allergies; life in California. Life in the Spring.

Carpe diem.

Landscape plotted and pieced-fold, fallow and plough…

by TadMack

April 2, 2016

7:56 pm

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California, Life

Pied Beauty

~ by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)

Glory be to God for dappled things—

For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;

And áll trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spáre, strange;

Whatever is fickle, frecklèd (who knows how?)

With swíft, slów; sweet, sóur; adázzle, dím;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is pást change:

Práise hím.

First published in 1918, the above poem can be found in:

Hopkins, Gerard Manley. Gerard Manley Hopkins. Catherine Phillips, ed.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Harmon, William, ed. The Classic Hundred Poems (Second Edition).
New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.

Happy National Poetry Month!

Rode hard, put up wet, still smiling

by TadMack

March 11, 2016

12:28 pm

1 Comment on Rode hard, put up wet, still smiling

California, Life

Friends in the East are having very different weather than ours today. “Oh, spring has sprung,” one said Tuesday. “The rest is just details.” Another crowed on her blog the other day, “The air is glorious like wine! Saw my first tiger swallowtail, and all the frogs are singing!”

Our friends are reveling in their gardens, sitting on front stoops with cider and books, and stretching their limbs in the sun. “Must be nice,” we sigh, as another gust of wiiiind slaps a handful of rain into our faces, but then we look over our shoulders nervously. We are NOT, repeat, NOT tired of the rain. No, no! Californians who whine are subject to lightning strikes about the head and shoulders, so we are NOT whining, not when we’ve finally seen a light at the end (well, the beginning of the end) of the nastiest drought tunnel in years. Even in the face of a potential Category 3 storm (the weather person who said this was met with bewildered, “What?” faces), we are sucking it up to relearn appropriate rain behavior. We first met this in Seattle, and really learned the ropes in Scotland. The Just Do It school of rainy weather behavior is “if you let the rain chase you indoors, you’ll never come out again ’til July,” so we’re managing the trick of being out/about anyway when we’d rather stay in and read and bake and schlepp around the house. One of the ways we keep moving, as Lake Shasta and the reservoirs, creeks and rivers are filling – or in poor Sebastopol/Guerneville/Monte Rio’s case, overfilling AGAIN – is to step outside and remember one of the ten thousand reasons to be happy right now.

So, go outside. We’ll wait.

You out there? Good. Listen.

In the daytime, in between the soughing of the wind and the plink and prickle of raindrops against the earth (and the unfortunate wail of sirens, as people collide and slide across the road) you can hear something else. Birdsong. Millions of birds, tweeting and squeaking and singing. And, of an evening, you can hear this:

Okay, this is two hours from our house, on the edge of a meadow facing a great thousand acre swath of woods, true, but the frogs are singing at our house, too- even in the damp and cold and wet (why would that make a difference to them??) – singing. Singing aloud – I’d say with joy, but no point in waxing ridiculous; they’re singing aloud with an “I’m an available mate” tune going on. 😈 It’s what Spring is all about.

As the traffic snarls and you watch the eejits in front of you speed, then hydroplane and fishtail up the road (note to people who own pickups – in high wind and rain, put something in the truck bed; didn’t they tell you that in Driver’s Ed???), remember the birds. Remember the frogs. Drive carefully, stay out of the wind, if you can, and remember to take a little bit to listen – and be grateful.

Happy storm weekend.