Late Year Swoon

Final work day of calendar year.  A few loose ends, really nothing that cannot wait until the next calendar year.  Then I start having some Musts.  IRA withdrawals, a court date.  Some medical care.  And some Like To's.  A short trip, resumption of OLLI, next entry to Voices of UD contest, alleviating Loneliness, visiting some new places.  And some Should Do's.  Public writing, tending to house, telling My Story.

The transition of the calendar year can be a useful demarcation point, which may be why half my Semi-Annual projects have that as the start date.

It's been a tough exit to the closing year, though still with its share of accomplishments.  But time for a new set of Semi-Annual projects and a new commitment to completing them.

Languishing

I needed to get out, escape My Space and the screen.  I've not felt particularly well.  Cheer seems to elude me, though there are pockets of reversal, usually when in conversation with somebody else, suggesting more loneliness than depression.  I've done a few changes of pace, getting away for the day, going out for coffee or breakfast or lunch.  Getting myself stuff, or even looking at stuff to purchase in a store on online does not change my perspective.  

Not that those changes of location are worthless.  They are not.  Just transient.  Doing something for myself does not seem to do very much.  I've devoted some effort to making My Space closer to what I had originally envisioned.  I ironed shirts.  I've made a few special dinners.  All things that now generate less pleasure than they once did.

Post-Holiday sales.  To Boscov's.  Second floor: stuff, none needed, none wanted, none discounted. First floor.  Clothing.  Some attractive button down shirts.  Maybe go back for one if I get invited someplace where I could wear it.   Then Marshall's.  Decent discounts, about 20%, and a fair amount of stuff referenced to St. Louis, if you count Budweiser as part of St. Louis.  There are things that I could use.  In fact, I replaced my broken safety razor.  But a 20% discount on something you don't particularly want does not alter loneliness.

My forum of engagement has recently been kiddush after shabbos services or having guests to my shabbos table.  But as the final weekend of the secular calendar approaches, I find myself shuled out, annoyed with a couple of key people, and approaching Jewed out but not quite arrived there yet.  Need a break from synagogue.  An offshoot of work burnout for me.

Electronic interaction with others has not gone especially well.  While Twitter is a public blight, it is a forum for me to convey what I think.  Responses are few, and it is the responses that ease loneliness.  FB is a little more personally interactive.  The Stanford alumni of their how to deceive people into thinking they are engaged when they really aren't understand the value of Likes.  Any kind of response is fine.  Reddit allows me to express what I think, and occasionally people write back.  But all these lack the spontaneity of banter at kiddush.

As I move into the new secular year, addressing what appears to be loneliness needs to be one of the twelve Semi-Annual projects.

Winter Plants

Inventory of what I will try to sustain through the cold, mostly indoors, is complete.  Herbs stay outside if above freezing, inside to avoid the frost.  I have active leaves of sage, rosemary, spearmint, and basil.  In chia pots, parsley seems to be taking hold.  New seeds for chives and basil.  And I planted six pods of aerogarden, don't remember what, but they are labelled. I also have a Bonsai sprig that needs to get six inches tall before transplanting to a larger pot.  And in a small box there are seeds for another Bonsai that I can prepare in the refrigerator according to package instructions. Check on Tuesdays and Fridays for the indoor plants. Daily weather report for the herb pots.

I don't know why my indoor plants never seem to look like the indoor herb gardens that the TV chefs snip in their home kitchens when they need aromatic leaves.  Maybe they aren't.  Perhaps they go to a nursery the day before a TV shoot, buy something flourishing there, and bring it to the kitchen for the camera to capture the cook harvesting.  TV Land has a way of making somebody else's reality better than mine.

But for now I have some chance of enjoying some home herbs in my own kitchen before spring arrives.

Mopping the Floor

When I remodeled my kitchen, using an annual bonus to fund the project, I focused on utility along with visual appeal.  Wipable refaced cabinets, stainless steel sink, tile backsplashes.  And modern resin tile floors in a faux granite pattern.  Soil resistant.  Needs no protective sealants or resurfacing.  It does need periodic cleaning, something I perform much less frequently than I should.  It was long past due time for a thorough mopping.

Another advantage of the tiles is their 1 x 1 foot size. Mopping the kitchen floor requires exposing the floor's surface.  The convenient square pattern enables me to create zones.  I can move some furniture with my wife's assistance, creating zones of about ten square feet, then sweep and wash.  Let it dry, then expose another zone.  In one afternoon I mopped about half.  I can easily assess what still needs to be done and move enough stuff to do two or three more zones of the remaining surface.  Then with nothing in its usual place, I can decide if there might be better places to situate tables, carts, bins, or other parts of the floor designated to a set purpose.

I bought two new mops.  The Mr. Clean one, the more advanced of the two, I could not figure out how to use.  Some pine sol and hot water into a galvanized steel pail with rollers purchased not long after I moved into my house, then wet and wring the mop.  The water turned muddy.  The tile cleaned look cleaner, though not stunningly so.  I got a sense of where the grime accumulates.  Mostly where we feed our cat and along the stove, sink, and refrigerator, that triangle which makes a kitchen function.

Finish today.  I probably need a better schedule for doing this.  Rather than removing all things that cover the tiles, that can be done once or twice a year.  Maybe monthly, I can take a brush and pail with some pine sol or spic n span and hand scrub the more soiled area in the usage triangle.  Or maybe make my dormant Swiffer system functional or restore a sponge mop, both easier than the string mop.

That still leaves me with cabinets and light fixtures to clean.  Maybe windows.  Somewhere I will probably need professional cleaners, but not yet.

Semi-Annual Grid

Roughly two weeks remain in this calendar year.  Each June and December I select twelve initiatives for the six months to follow, doing my best to think in the manner of SMART Goals.  Titles go on the Whiteboard to the left of my desk in My Space, within my direct line of sight.  I did OK this cycle, not great, not poorly.  And not very differently than other end of six month assessments.  Yet the projects selected six months ago, even if not brought to completion in the time frame set, as SMART Goals require, were still the right initiatives.  

So for the last week or two I've been filling out my twelve rectangle grid.  Categories are the same each cycle, taken from a master template.  

1. Health
2. Community
3. Family 
4. Self
5. Frontier
6. Purchase
7. Mental
8. Travel
9. Long Term
10. Friends
11. Financial 
12. Home 

It's a useful template, though as a senior, empty nester, retired person, some categories matter a lot more than others.  My Health comes less under my control.  There is not a lot of future for Frontier.  I don't need to save for any big purchases.  Long term has a limited trajectory.  My finances are what I've made them over a working lifetime, not subject to any serious enhancement, though their management will change as I enter a mandatory IRA withdrawal requirement.  It may be better to have two, even three pursuits in a relevant category and drop one or two which my best efforts can no longer seriously influence.  Yet the twelve block template offers focus.  It makes my thinking orderly.

Each block in the grid has gotten five minutes on a timer.  I can generate a lot of ideas in five minutes if the title of that section prompts the creative sections of my mind to its possibilities.  For most categories my five minute sessions can generate about ten.  Now all filled out.  I need to select only one for each category, if I opt to keep or twelve.  Some coffee at a coffee shop while I sort further.

Ineffective Message

Two years ago I enrolled in a course at the Osher Institute which highlighted contemporary issues.  Each week the course committee of four which organized the presentations invited an expert, about half from my state university faculty, the others from non-profit agencies that promote the communal good.  I sort of panned the class in the semester evaluation and never enrolled in subsequent semesters, in large part because of a message theme, that idea version of the Greek Chorus, which for many classes registered as I'm not buying that.  Most of my other course selections get rave feedback for content, effort, and teacher.  As a university graduate, medical graduate, and physician, credibility has always been the coin of the realm.  I have no reason to dismiss Thermodynamics even if my understanding is now paltry, or to tune out a survey of American education where disagreements with the presentation are integral to the discussion and welcome.  For the contemporary issues, there was a committee agenda and challenge was sidestepped.  The price of not confronting legitimate challenges to the party line is usually some version of disrespect.  The legitimate points unify with the dubious, or even manipulated ones. They go into the mental wastebasket without separation.

There's a disturbing poll making the news.  Without getting into the science of polling, just accepting the results at face value, it seems young people ages 18-24 expressed a majority view that the world would be better without Israel.  https://nypost.com/2023/12/16/news/majority-of-americans-18-24-think-israel-should-be-ended-and-given-to-hamas/

As an older fellow, I fall into the senior citizen majority, an overwhelming majority.  Indeed, from the mid-30s, that age when Americans can be elected President, there is no element of Gee Whiz.  It is as much a poll on responsibility as it is on political views.  Indeed, my first Presidential vote went for McGovern at age 21.  He wouldn't appear in my political universe at age 40, if only because I had become partly responsible for an America of respectability.  That is probably the best interpretation of the results.  Though not the only one.

Following the poll's release, Jewish advocacy agencies came out in force to belittle the young adults, their secular educators, the news media, cyberspace.  But sometimes Pogo is right, we have met the enemy and he is us.

Back to the OLLI Course.  An esteemed guest, the regional associate director of the Anti-Defamation League, took her turn on the weekly Zoom presentation.  I absolutely support the aims of the ADL, reporting my own anti-Semitic encounters to their ongoing database, and putting their retired Executive Director Abe Foxman as the most esteemed Jewish advocate I have ever personally met.  And she dutifully told the OLLI group the activities and initiatives of her agency.  She put public education of anti-Semitism at the top of her list.  The ADL has been doing this for a hundred years, prompted by the lynching of Leo Frank in a very racist Georgia prior to World War I.  The obvious question at the presentation, at a time when the anti-Semites were becoming more public in their American presence, would have run along the lines, "if the ADL is so good at this and has so much experience, why is anti-Semitism ever on the rise in America as it is now?"

There are a lot of answers to this.  They probably have an element of Dunning-Kruger, where people and agencies overestimate their ability.  A more valid assessment would be that education makes the advocate feel accomplished but really does not impact behavior nearly as effectively as enforceable laws.  We see that in many settings.  Public Service Announcements on seat belt use and smoking cessation appeared regularly on TV for decades.  People drove unharnessed and smoked until fines for not buckling up and eliminating smoking from public buildings and the workplace became the enforceable behavioral expectations.  Of course the insight of the legislators who enacted these came in part from the understanding of the problem that the advocates promoted, but the solution came not from education but a vision of how to achieve a desired outcome.

So with the poll, AJC, ADL, every Jewish advocacy organizations have their pet excuses, though never an internal one, never the realization that educational initiatives do not bring desired results.  Yet they lack any enforceability.  They may not even have the ability to create negative consequences for deviance.  And our universities don't help.  Some of those elite institution Admission Offices laid an egg.  These kids already demonstrated the ability to learn, which is why they have acceptance letters from the places that sent me thin rejection letters in my era.  The goal is not to change attitude but to change behavior.  And that means creating consequences that favor one behavior over another, something our advocacy groups don't seem to understand.  The alumni of those elite schools are not in that 18-24 cohort.  They understand propriety.  They understand what type of person makes a good protégé.  So the solution would be to create a disadvantage to sloganeering for the odious, either by fist in the air or online trail.  When the med/law interviews don't come, when the lucrative hiring goes someplace else, behavior would change.

Does forced, or coerced behavioral change reverse fundamental thinking or reasoning processes?  It probably does, though not for certain.  People did not really reject American slavery as an institution until abolition was mandated.  Once they couldn't own slaves, it was short shift to shouldn't even if allowed.  Same with seatbelts.  Behavior forced, but soon accepted as the proper thing to do.  Or integrated restaurants or not smoking.  I can't eventually becomes I won't even if I could.  It is a difficult transition, one requiring examination of what our esteemed agencies really want to achieve, and abandoning what has not worked well, especially when it can never work well.

Alas, I think many of my Jewish advocacy agencies, whose goals align with mine, have just gotten too inbred to schect their sacred cows to breed a sturdier cow.

Escape for Coffee

Coffee Houses of Europe. They go back a long ways, not only as places to perk up for the day but places to enhance the mind and spirit.  Friends met there.  New friendships blossomed.  People wrote books, imagined their next musical creations, even discussed religion and politics in a cordial way.  And they sipped coffee, in part to block their adenosine receptors but also to savor the taste of a liquid not as readily available to them as it is to me.  I don't know what a Viennese menu would look like.  Most likely drip coffee and pastries.  And I would imagine on a chalkboard.  Maybe Turkish coffee or something made in a finjan, poured with ceremony.  I suppose they could froth milk with a whisk.  And no reason not to have a stovetop espresso brewer.  I really don't know the history of how the different forms of coffee preparation came to be.  

Coffee for me, as for many others in America and beyond, starts my mornings, nearly always at home.  Clever minds have created k-cups and drip machines that require no effort other than placing a cup in the right place and pushing a button.  There are drip machines for ground coffee and individual cones that require only a Melitta filter, a scoop of coffee from a can or bag, and some patience while hot water is poured over the ground beans.  Then the mug, mostly from my collection with decorations or writing that mean something to me, gets a splash of white stuff and goes upstairs to my desk.  Spills are rare.  I sip and begin whatever task I think best to undertake.  By the second cup, I feel fully alert.  Cost, minimal.  

We still have coffee houses and we have takeout, something our European forebears had not really thought of.  In my younger years, coffee at a diner counter was part of other caloric intake, though with the development of styrofoam and 7-Elevens, people could pick up a cup and move along.  Instead, we had coffee breaks, which exist today.  Workers set aside their tasks for some social time.  Food trucks stopped at large employers' parking lots.  Companies kept an urn in a central place.  Part nutrition, more restoration and interaction.  For about thirty years, though, the coffee house has been repurposed.  WaWa and the like does enough sales to offer a variety of urns with different flavors, then a counter where people can customize additives before placing a spill proof lid atop the cup, paying, and returning to their car.  They usually sip alone.

Starbucks and regional shops offer fewer varieties, usually four or so, but they offer people.  Sometimes people go as small groups, though usually not.  And they bring their laptop computers. Not that different from Vienna, where some came to schmooze while others came to work, though without that disturbing silence of a home nook or corporate cubicle.  

Periodically, My Space is not the best place to perform my next task, even if making the next cup of coffee is trivial.  It is often worth putting on a coat, deciding which of five destinations would be my preference and driving a few minutes to get there, select my coffee, pay the barista, and find a place at a table or counter, all before I've done anything productive.  Then as I sip, with chatter around me sufficiently unintelligible to keep me from trying to listen, I take out my pad and pen, rarely laptop or smartphone, and focus on the work I brought with me until the coffee is gone, sometimes a bit beyond.  I am not really buying coffee as much as I am renting workspace for $3.  Counting driving time back and forth, I could have devoted more task time by not venturing out but at the expense of focus.  So I travel a few minutes each way, settle down, but with coffee fixed to my preference I usually depart having accomplished something of satisfaction.  Never regret the effort or the expense.