Signs of Spring

This is a compendium of posts from another place, gathered here for your convenience.

(March 20)
I guess it is Spring after all. I saw a ladybug and killed a mosquito yesterday.

(April 12)
Signs of Spring: moving the plants outdoors again.

(April 14)
Just had coffee and cake in bright sunshine, in the garden behind the office. I'd say that it is a good 12 °C (20 °F) warmer than on Friday. Perhaps this is finally Spring?

(April 15)
1. The lizards have emerged from hibernation and were sunning themselves on the stone wall by the railway gardens as I walked to lunch.

2. Over the span of a single weekend I went from walking on the north side of the street to enjoy the warmth of the sun, to walking on the south side of the street to avoid the heat of the sun.

(April 16)
3. Hay fever. Ah well, it can't all be golden.

4. The local restaurants have budded out, covering the sidewalks in tables and chairs.

(April 17)
5. Eating icecream outdoors in the garden behind the office, in shirt-sleeves.

(April 18)
6. It takes ages for the water to run hot, because the heating is off.

(April 19)
7. Cold rain on the weekend. Eh, whatever.

(April 23)
8. Feeling a tickle on my arm at work, and looking down to see an ant wandering along between the hairs.

(April 24)
9. The joyful shrieks of the kids at the daycare centre, as the pretty brunette caregiver hoses them down in the garden.

10. Dandelions, hundreds and hundreds of them, covering the road and railside verges.

11. Eating an icecream cone as I walk back to work after lunch. (Maracuja / Peach Cream, since you asked).)

12. Magnolias!

(April 25)
13. Comfortably wearing a short-sleeved shirt to work.

(May 1)
14. Entering the yellow phase. Tulips, daffodils, goldenrod, other stuff I can't name.

15. The swifts (not swallows) are back! Heard (and saw) them screeching and wheeling above the rooftops today. Bliss.

(May 2)
16. A fragment of eggshell on the pavement, quite small; the palest turquoise with tiny flecks of fox-orange.

17. A bright blue butterfly crossing my path.

(May 6)
18. Towering clouds stacking up miles high into the sky.

18a. And rapidly turning very dark indeed, and giving forth much lightning and thunder.

18b. And me hurrying to get home before the storm, making it to the very streetcorner of my block before the first drops fell.

Venice

Sitting in the quiet of a shared rental apartment, drinking coffee (not cappuccino) and eating chocolate-filled croissants. This is the first time I've been here in about six years, according to the blog and to my notebook. Certainly I haven't been since G and U stopped going because of their kids, which is five years ago.

Venice sounds like Sunday, no traffic and hardly any voices. The apartment is only about fifty metres away from the main traffic stream between the Stazione and San Marco, yet we hear nothing but occasional voices (in Italian) of residents and the workmen restoring the house at the head of the alleyway. The quiet is very refreshing, almost meditative. It feels a bit like the places we used for our retreats.

Mind you, the busy buzzing world is still out there, only 50m away. There's a supermarket just the other side of the bridge, where we bought groceries last night. (I'm here with members of the meditation group, though we won't be meditating as such. One is here now, two more arrive on Friday.)

I don't see much change in Venice, though of course shops come and go. Perhaps looking for change here is as conceptually wrong as looking for it on the artificial Main Street of Disneyland. It's all about continuity, repetition and predictability. That may be the reason for the phenomenon of tourists travelling huge distances to shop in the same chain stores that are known to them from their home countries. Or perhaps the tourists who do shop there don't have those stores, perhaps they only know them from advertising and fulfill a long-held aspiration by visiting. I've never been in such a chain to see who actually shops there.

Today's forecast is for cloud and storms towards evening, so it'll probably be just a day of local wandering. Biennale tomorrow and Thursday, forecast to be dry and mostly sunny.

Making coffee in the pretty but minimally-equipped rental apartment: ripped-open packet of coffee, spilled grounds in the sink, boiling water in a saucepan, using towel as a potholder. It reminds me of Winnie the Pooh bumping down the stairs on the back of his head, thinking that he might possibly be able to think of a better way to do it, if only he weren't being bumped on the back of his head all the time.

Yes, I did just quote Winnie the Pooh. It's not all Tolstoy all the time.

"Mystifyingly equipped" might be a better description. Dishwasher and washing machine, two fully-equipped bathrooms, wifi and computer and widescreen TV — but no potholders or sharp knives, and only one bar of soap between the two bathrooms. And remind me to tell you about the process of locking and unlocking the door.

I came here by train, overnight via Munich. I slept surprisingly well, the bed was long enough and comfortable. One learns quickly enough to suppress the initial reaction of startled fear when the train tilts into a curve and your head goes down.

My cellmate was a youngish DJ, on his way to a music studio in Treviso to record a new song. It seems a busy and very hard life, he'd been home for one day in the last three weeks before heading off on this trip. I didn't ask for his name or any particular questions about his music (in fairness, we only spoke during the dozen minutes between waking and his disembarking). He probably thought of me as a harmlessly pleasant old guy.

For the first time ever I find myself thinking in terms of what I can and cannot afford. I've truly never thought that before, up to now my income has always been sufficient for what I wanted to do (and its corollary: my wants were always simply and cheaply fulfilled). That has changed during the last few years, and not because of inflationary wanting. I can't really afford to be here now, I have to watch my expenses if I am to get through the week on the handful of cash I brought.

The reason is that my income hasn't kept step with inflation. If I remember rightly, I am earning the same hourly rate now that I was in 2002 when the currency changed. I certainly cannot remember negotiating or being given a raise. Yet costs have doubled, the beer that used to cost four Deutschmarks now costs four Euros.

I'm experiencing a really strong urge to delete this, to censor myself. Fuck that. This will be the truth, or as much of it as I can bear to make public.

Noon. Time to go outside and do stuff.

Finished

We sent the competition off at 3 o'clock this afternoon, and I have been lazing about since. The weather is wonderful, sunny and warmish and a perfectly blue sky, the air is fresh and clean and smells of the forest. After finishing up and debriefing, I walked downtown for lunch (at 3:30) and then bought supplies for dinner. I'm going to cook tonight and tomorrow, which I haven't done in ages, perhaps in weeks. I hate the collateral damage of working on competitions: the weeks-on-end of too little sleep and far too much packaged food. My body feels like I've spent a month at sea, eating nothing but sugared white bread.

We finished the presentation drawings at half past 3am last night, then drank a beer together to celebrate. In the end I only worked 26.5 hours this weekend, not the 30 that I had feared. Small mercies.

The project looks really good, it's got a simple, clear and sensible plan, we met all the stated criteria and only overran the required floor area by around 2%. Assuming that we don't fall through in the first round of judging, I reckon we'll land in the money again.

So, I had the afternoon off and will have tomorrow off too. I walked downtown and sat on the terrace of the Kunstmuseum for a sandwich and cappucino, thinking as I walked how nice it would be to escape to another city for a little break. As I sat over my meal, I changed tack and began to think of what I would do if I were in, say, Zürich rather than Stuttgart. Everything I thought of doing there, I was either currently doing here or could do with no additional effort or expense. Had to laugh at myself about that.

I watched the crowds flow past, and the circling pigeons, and the shadow of the setting sun creeping up the hillside opposite. There are times when I stop and look around and am almost surprised to remember where I live. This is a lovely city, and I'm lucky to have found it.

Updated to say that we lost in the second round. No money, no fame. Ah well. Sitting here (in New York, jetlagged and sleep-deprived, early morning) I find that I cannot remember what the jury said about our scheme, nor even how it looked.

Kyoto - fifth day

I'm settling in well after nearly a week here, finding my way around the city and the mentality. I noticed yesterday a particular sign of the process of getting accustomed to the place: People in the street don't look "Japanese" any more, they just look like people. I still have terrible trouble judging ages (at least from a polite social distance), but then that sometimes confuses me in Germany* too.

I haven't had a Lost in translation moment yet, but that is probably due to having Piet and Eiko as my hosts and guides. It would be much trickier were I on my own. Yes, fewer Japanese speak English than I expected, and (more significantly) many of those who can are reluctant to do so because they fear embarrassing themselves or inconveniencing me by their mistakes; but on the other hand I've managed to buy food, books and batteries for my camera, and take the subway, a bus and a taxi by myself without causing offence or laughter. I'll expand on this at another time. (The Japanese love that movie, by the way, they recognize the truth of Bill Murray's confused isolation and their inability to help him. I like it too, and would recommend it to anyone who hasn't seen it yet.)

I haven't really done very much, mostly just walked around and looked at stuff. I haven't yet been out of the city, for example, nor out to the suburbs to see Katsura-Rikyu (by appointment only, booked out until after Christmas!) or Ryoan-Ji. My plan for the remaining time is to keep my room here in Kyoto as a base and do day trips out, with at most an overnight stop in Tokyo.

The temples are beginning to merge in my mind, or at least their names. I'll remember the Buddhist prayer ceremony I happened to see (and hear) at Choin-Ji, and the hanging terrace above the woods at Kiyomizu-Dera, and the sand garden at Ginkaku-Ji, and the mirrorlike reflection of the illuminated autumn leaves in the pond at Eikando Zenrin-Ji last night, and my feeling of awe in the shrine at Kennin-Ji. On the whole, Kennin-Ji was probably my favourite so far, for the beautiful painted screens and because almost all of the shrine complex is open to visitors. It reminded me of the courtyards and ambulatories and ancillary spaces of the European cathedrals (though entirely different in scale and materials, obviously). Kennin-Ji is one of the few shrines I've seen where you can actually walk into the building and approach the altars; Choin-Ji is another.

Time for a walk in the garden at Heian Jingu, before lunch and more discussion with Eiko.

* I first typed "real life" instead of Germany. Japan is very much like Second Life!

In transit

Sitting at the gate in FFM, with an hour to go. There is of course no free public wifi here, but I still have the UTMS usb stick that I used to access the Internets all those months (I now have a working ADSL connection at home, btw, after two false starts when the installers screwed up). The stick works here just fine.

This will have to be a brief post as the battery is running down faster than the hour of stick-time that I bought.

Next stop Osaka and Kyoto. It's been a really hectic couple of weeks lately, getting everything shipshape for the holiday season. And it is a season: I'll be away in Japan for two weeks, then two weeks home, then off to Canada and the States for two weeks over Christmas and the New Year.

I'd been a bit apprehensive about the chance of flying on an A380, given the recent engine trouble. As it happens, this is a 340; definitely large enough. I've now seen a 380 "live," there is one across the way loading up at one of the A terminal gates. It's huge. It's REALLY huge, even bigger than I thought it was. Imagine taking two 747s, slicing the roof off of one and the belly off of the other, and glueing them together along the seam. That's a 380. It's as long as longer than a 747, but at first glance it seems short because the body is so oddly tall. I'll admit to being relieved that I'm not flying on one, but I am also vaguely disappointed.

So, to Kyoto. I'm invited by friends from SL to talk to them for a week about the societality (nice word) of Second Life; specifically two topics: identity and character, and how these are developed; and the development of ethics and community values in a virtual world where neither of these needed to develop (consider the level of vitriol and abuse in the typical chatroom for an example of VWs where they did not develop). After that, I've got a guide book and a handy-dandy-phrasebook and a JapanRail pass that takes me almost anywhere on almost any train, and I'll let the Moment move me. I'll keep you posted, here or on Twitter or even on the dreaded FB.

Next post, gods and terrorists willing, will be from Kyoto.

On the inconstancy of time

So here I am sitting in Starbucks waiting for the 11am (SL time, 8pm my time) Fracture dance and conversazione salon to begin, and realizing that it seems a very short time since I was here.

This week has been about ten hours long, subjectively. I'm aware that there are seven days between Saturday and Saturday, and I know that I wasn't comatose for a week (G would have surely said something), so clearly I slept and woke and ate and brushed my teeth etc etc etc. But for all the record it left in my memory I could have spent this week dead.

It's somehow vaguely worrying.

In happier news we seem to be heading for a proper Altweibersommer, the Southern German equivalent of what North Americans call[ed] an Indian Summer. Is that term still socially acceptable, I wonder? In any case: blue skies, sunny and warm, gentle breeze smelling vaguely of Autumn. Lovely. I have a burning desire to go to Venice for a long weekend.

In much happier news I'm going to Japan at the end of November! Two weeks in the land of the Rising Sun — and Sony and sushi and various things that begin with "s." I'm so looking forward to this! I'll have a week in Kyoto to start off, booked into bed-and-breakfast place 20 minutes on foot from the Katsura Palace. I have been in love with [a particular image of] Japan since I was a child, based on the wonderful black-and-white photography of Takeshi Nishikawa. Forty years on, I can still feel the texture of the paper and smell the ink of those enormous, beautiful books.

I know that it's an illusion, that loving Japan because of 1970's photographs of the architecture of the 16th and 17th century is as doomed to disappointment as, say, loving England because of the novels of Alan Sillitoe would be. Nonetheless, these books were my introduction to the place and the culture, and they remain a major block of influence in my mental picture of the world*. Nishikawa had an eye for shadow and for the gradations of darkness that was unequalled. Before seeing his photos, I'd thought of shadows as failures, as errors in an image. His images of highlighted leaves against a dark wall brought home the essence of chiaroscuro better than any art teacher could.


* Rather like Alan Sillitoe's novels, in fact. I must write sometime about his books, in particular the William Posters trilogy (an old British grafitti-joke: it was and perhaps still is traditional to scribble "Bill Posters is innocent!" on signs stating "Bill posters will be prosecuted").

Quickly

I have 19 minutes to post something before going to work. (I start at noon on Fridays to accomodate a meditation/discussion group thing that Susan runs in SL at 10am my time.)

Work has been utterly crazy lately. The concrete work is falling behind schedule, the steelwork is being held up by the façade contractors who can't get themselves organized, they are being held up by the electrical engineers who keep discovering new things that need to be cabled up. That we have been asking the steelwork and façade contractors since February to send us detail plans for approval is somehow irrelevant to the fact that they cannot send their unapproved plans for fabrication today. And all of this is of course the architects' fault.

Anyway.

I had a really nice day so far. Went to bed early last night (before midnight, for the first time in ages), got up early, went to the post office to collect two books from Amazon, and took them downtown to my favourite cafe on a nameless square to open. Perfectly blue sky, gentle breeze, birdsong, temperature around 28°C which is in my opinion all it ever needs to be.

I bought two books on virtual worlds, which will feed into Susan's workshop this summer. Zach Waggoner's "My avatar, my self" is about the construction of identity in real and virtual worlds, and how these affect each other. Edward Castronova's "Exodus to the Virtual World" seems to be primarily about how RL and VL will be affected by the withdrawal of the time and money that we VL'ers are not spending in our RL environments. It seems like he will have a lot to say about happiness too:

For every happy, fulfilled person, how many are there who are bored, frustrated, unappreciated, defeated, unhappy? There's quite a lot of self-medication going on. Whatever people learn in schools, it doesn't seem to be leading to stable homes, happy childhoods, and emotionally grounded adult lives.

I'll be in Canada in less than a month. Sis and BIL are getting married this summer, after twenty-five years together. There will be a small but select ceremony and celebration, with only the most immediate of family in attendance. Various other plans are afoot too, including a further meditation retreat in Halifax (after Malta, and in the place of San Francisco in April).

Harpier cries, 'tis time, 'tis time.

Balconia, 2010 edition

It's been a long, chilly and wet Spring. This weekend marks the first time I was able to have lunch on my balcony! In previous years, I'd been sitting out there as early as mid-April. Bah.

The job presses on, we are barely keeping ahead of the construction workers — and now have to stop for a week to submit a building-permit application to add a waterslide to the project. This must go through straight away so that the concrete-laying company can get the shell finished before the steelwork starts, because once the frame goes up they will be unable to use their crane to transport the roughly 80 tonnes of concrete needed. Shifting that lot by wheelbarrow is not feasible.

I've been mostly off-duty this weekend, bar an hour today finishing up two drawings that I didn't get done on Friday evening. Had sushi for lunch on Saturday, then went on to the Skybeach for an iced coffee in a deckchair with my feet in the sand; today, walked downtown again to meet G and U and the kids for a cappuccino on the terrace of the Kunstmuseum, then made it back home just in time before the rain started.

I've been reading Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, in the newish translation by Volokhovsky and Pevear, and am approaching the end. It's a good read, despite Tolstoy's manifest disapproval of Anna's life and choices. What a prude he was. I get the impression that he was surprised and shocked by the way the story unfolded as he wrote it.

I mentioned some time back that I had started playing Dragon Age: Origins. I'm finding it hard to get the time to play it: unlike Second Life I feel that I can't just drop in for a half-hour or two, it feels like I need a block of two hours or more to be able to get into the story, so I have let it go. As far as I can judge, it is a very good game: the characters are well written and their interactions are interesting and surprising, the world is visually very appealing, there are plenty of side quests to intrigue and entertain; but it's just not Second Life. I can determine which of several train tracks the story will take, the decision tree is a veritable labyrinth (to mix my metaphors), but the fact remains that the story does follow along a path that someone else has set. It's brought into focus something that I had felt but not fully realized about SL: my joy in it is based in personal contact and conversation. I'm also becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the relentless killing. I guess I'm just not a gamer.

I will be running a workshop in Second Life this autumn on "the SL-ness of SL," and have started making notes for discussion topics and practical exercises. It is all theoretical stuff about identity and shared culture, and would be of very little interest to non-Second Lifers; there's nothing about me and little about Susan in that blog. Nonetheless, if anyone is interested, let me know by e-mail and I'll send you the URL — on the condition that you never mention it (or the avatars' names) here. To forestall unhappiness: please note that I will mercilessly and instantly delete any comments made here that break this condition.

Finished, said Sisyphus

After two weeks of more than full-time work, we posted the competition drawings last night with twelve minutes to spare. G will be out of the office for two days of on-site meetings, Thursday is a public holiday (Christi Himmelfahrt aka Ascension Day) and I'm taking Friday off (as one does). it's going to be a good week.

So, hey, I have a four-day weekend coming up. What to do? Several options are open:

1) Train to Paris, or for that matter to Nice. Haven't been there in a decade. (Weather online says "rainy and as cold as Germany." Ah well.)

2) Last-minute flight to Tel Aviv. (Just looked at prices, the cheapest flight on an airline that I would actually trust to convey my body and worldly goods costs 788€. Ah well.)

3) Train to Hamburg. I really liked the city, and it would be nice to see AY and Ingrid again. (Assuming they would be there and available/interested.)

4) Stay home and not answer the phone, spend the time in Second Life and/or playing Dragon Age: Origins and/or installing Ubuntu on my PC.

Number four is the clear favourite for many reasons geekish and practical. I could cook for myself instead of eating fast food or going to restaurants, after two weeks of competitioning this has a strong appeal. I could go to the Staatsgalerie for the first time in 2010. I could walk up to Vaihingen on the Blauer Weg, or down to the river, both for the first time in 2010. I could sleep in every day.

[Updated] I read this again and had to smile at myself. What a homebody geek I am, that I would choose staying in and cooking over going to Paris!

Tel Aviv: first attempt at a summary

Trainblogging again, on the way to Munich to meet a client. Things always go crazy just before Christmas, as people realize that they haven't yet spent their year's budget. It's amazing that even in these hard times of belt-tightening etc, some corporations still apparently think that saving money is a bad thing. If you give me a budget of X and I spend X minus ten thousand, then surely you should thank me for reducing the corporation's costs, not punish me. Because that is what many corps still do: If you do not spend all your budget, then not only does it not carry over to next year, but you might find that your future budget gets cut by the amount you saved! The corporation forces its employees to waste money. How absurd is that? Bah.

Anyway, that's not my problem, except insofar as it causes a rush of urgent business in December.

Here I sit in an EC (older, slower, no electricity or canned radio) on a cool and sunny Wednesday. There's been a lot of rain recently, the rivers are all running fast and high, and the lowlying fields are wet. Hasn't yet been a frost except in the uppermost highlands, but that may change this weekend.

I haven't finished with Israel yet, though it is six weeks behind me now and all but forgotten in the mudslide of mundaneity. I have not yet sorted and posted my photos (nearly said "slides", how quaint) on Flickr, and probably won't have time for that before January.

But I do remember, with pleasure, walking the sunny streets and sitting by that perfect sandy beach. After the first Soup Salon, on my second day in Israel, Savtadotty and Miriam and I walked down Rothschild (pronounced in the European way, meaning "red shield," rather than the American "child of Roth") to a wine bar and sat outside (at 9pm, in late October) for an hour. I looked across the broad street, with its double row of plane trees and central stripe of garden, at a house on the opposite side, where a group of six thirtysomethings were having dinner by candlelight on their large balcony. I watched for a while, then pointed them out to the others and said "This is just perfect, you live in paradise." They agreed; then Savtadotty said with a wry smile "Even paradise is sometimes just another place after you've lived in it for twenty years."

Paradise indeed; had I been twenty years younger, I might well have stayed. (That marks the first time I have said such a thing about myself. Getting old.)

I met one of Susan's Second Life meditation buddies (whom I had previously met in Princeton last summer) and his wife (whom I hadn't met before) at the Manta Ray, an excellent fish restaurant at the beach. The food was marvellous, the wine was good, the conversation excellent; considering the quality of experience the bill was quite moderate. We talked much of expatriatism, as they had both lived abroad (separately and together) for several years. She had just finished two years as a Fellow at the IAS in Princeton, working on theoretical computation (I think she was teaching data-mining systems to act intuitively, but don't ask for details), which is how her husband met Susan in SL.

Perhaps I was lucky in my choice of restaurants, but I found the food in Tel Aviv unexpectedly good, the standard is universally very high. Fresh food, well cooked, well presented. It's not cheap, one can eat for less in other cities; but a meal of the standard that we had at the Manta Ray would have cost more in Germany.

Given my love of symmetry and repetition, it was appropriate that the week ended with a second Soup Salon, which went on until well after 10pm. It was such fun that we decided to meet the next morning for brunch, before my flight, at Idelsohn on Ditzengoff. Memo to anyone having dealings with Israelis: take appointments and timekeeping with a generous pinch of salt, and be prepared to wait. I got there at the agreed time and had the staff put together a long table for the eight of us, at which I sat alone for twenty minutes until Lisa and Savtadotty arrived. Anyway, it's just a local habit that one gets used to, the mirror image of the equally irritating Swiss über-punctuality. It was a very good brunch, in great company; and then I took a taxi to the airport. (No trains or buses run in Israel on Saturdays, travellers be warned.)

The airport. Israel is perhaps the only country in the world that is harder to get out of than into. Immigration on the way in was a bagatelle: the border guard looked at my passport, asked whether I was there on business, then waved me through. Getting out was an adventure.

It starts with a very long lineup, as usual, but slower-moving than most. The line is patrolled by young women (I'd guess that at least 80% of security and border-control staff in Israel are women) who pick people out of the line and draw them forward into a small open area. I was one such person. She took my passport and boarding card, then started asking questions about who I was and where I had been. "Who did you meet? Where does she live? Do you speak Hebrew? Do you have family here? Where does she live again? Did you pack your own suitcase, and has anyone else been able to get to it since? Who did you meet? You seem nervous, why are you nervous? Who did you meet again?" After about ten minutes of this, she decided that I was a hard case and went to get her superior (a slightly older young woman), who repeated the process with more emphasis on my supposed nervousness. Superior decided after five minutes that I was a harmless idiot, and sent me to the first baggage examination, literally pushing me in at the head of a long line of waiting people. My bags passed through the x-ray, and I was sent to the second baggage examination, this time by hand: swiping my laptop with the magic wand and feeling around in the depths of the suitcase while a colleague watched my facial expression closely.

That too passed, and I moved on to passport control, by contrast a mere formality. Off to the gates, passing through a third and final baggage examination on the way, this time the now-traditional x-ray scan and sensor gateway setup.

The reason for all this caution is obvious, and I am not complaining at all. I am not going to be lured into a trollfest of competing polemics, least of all by myself.

OK, I've been trying to avoid saying this, but the words are forcing their way out. The principle joy of being in Israel, even more than the weather, even more than the universally marvellous food, was being surrounded by Jews. Imagine an entire city populated by the offspring of George Steiner and Susan Sontag: that's what Tel Aviv is like. People of the book indeed. I have a fixed belief that the Jews as a group are the cleverest people in the world, and meeting the Israelis confirmed that. It's the result of millenia of knowing what's in the gene pool and minding that you stay at the deep end of it (in my favourite cousin's wonderful phrase).

Or perhaps it's just the fallacy of self-selecting groups in action: I like people who are like me, and they like people who are like themselves, so it's very highly likely that I will like their friends too. Tiny but utterly representative example: on the way down Rothschild to the wine bar on that first Friday, Jane walked with us as far as the bus-stop, saying as we arrived "I hope I won't have to wait for ages"; turned around and there was the bus pulling up. "Mirabile dictu!" she cried, and with a wave stepped on board.

Tel Aviv felt like home.

(On the train back to Stuttgart, after an embarrassing and short meeting. There is an internet connection available in the train (of course, just as each ICE train is a travelling cellphone node) but they want €30 for sixty consecutive days. Ain't paying that.)

Jewishness intrigued me as a child, because I could never figure out what it meant. I heard people said that other people were Jews, often vaguely implying that this was somehow a bad thing, but I could never figure out how they knew — nor why they cared so much about something that seemed so petty (in the sense that I couldn't see it and didn't care when I did). The amusing thing is that the people whom I eventually learned to spot as Jews were clearly superior to the rest of us. They were the best students: the musicians, the comedians, the ones whose assignments when read out loud in class had us roaring in laughter or nodding our heads thoughtfully. Theirs were the bylines that I learned to look for in the New Yorker and the Times Literary Supplement; the names I spotted in film credits and at Massey Hall.

I was three years old when Eichmann was captured and tried, so it is unlikely that I have any direct memories of the event; but I do remember something about him appearing in the papers in the mid-sixties (probably in connection with Stanley Milgram). I remember at that time asking my mother why the Holocaust happened, because I just couldn't understand why Jewishness was so important, so utterly other as to make genocide seem a reasonable response. I don't remember my mother's answer, but I do remember that it didn't satisfy me, didn't explain how or why this could happen. The search for that answer has been a lifelong occupation.

I remember a few years after that, aged 15 or so, spending the summer in an intensive music course (a string chamber orchestra run by my violin teacher); hearing two of the violinists (far better players than I) playing a strange and lovely song in duet. I asked what it was, and they replied in surprise that it was the Kol Nidre, hadn't I recognized it? I felt quite flattered after I looked it up at home that evening.

Rosebud

U went into labour just after midnight last night (i.e. this morning), three days before her scheduled caesarian. U and daughter are fine, G is wandering around the hospital delirious with relief and happiness, Oma is upstairs with Ralph.

An odd thing: just after midnight last night, lying in bed, I suddenly had an urgent desire to figure out how I might get to their house in the middle of the night, and how long it would take to get there. I decided that waiting for a taxi would be slower than walking, and therefore that it would take me nearly twenty minutes from a lying start (as it were), and with that the urgency passed.

At about the same time, G was wondering who to call to take care of Ralph for the hour it would take U's cousin to drive Oma in from their house in the country; he concluded that I could not get there fast enough, and called Famous Photographer instead.

It's probably just a coincidence, but it is a very interesting one.

Tel Aviv: first impressions

… and we all know how often these are false and/or incomplete. Google tells me I have an hour before I have to walk to Savtadotty's weekly soup salon, so I will jot down my thoughts without any pretense at putting them into a sensible framework.

It is really odd being in a place where I cannot read the alphabet. This was brought home when I was texting with Savtadotty, trying to describe where I was. How to tell someone the name of a cafe, when you cannot even begin to pronounce that name let alone repeat the letters that your keyboard doesn't possess? Fortunately, all service-industry people speak at least one European language. I am obviously foreign here, twice I have been addressed in English before I had spoken a word. (My pale-as-the-belly-of-a-dead-fish skin might just be a clue.)

This is a marvellously exciting and active city, I haven't seen this much bustle anywhere but midtown Manhattan. I was quite lucky to get a hotel right in the middle of downtown. (My first impression of the hotel was deeply negative, but I am coming to terms with it. Is it acceptable? eh, sure. Would I recommend it? no.)

Pedestrians and drivers are impatient, pushing and honking at the slightest perceived delay, but they are also surprisingly law-abiding. Almost nobody jaywalks, and absolutely nobody crosses a street in the middle of the block rather than at a corner.

Very dry air, at first surprising given the presence of the sea less than six hundred metres away as the crow flies; but then again, this is the Middle East, and just a few kilometres in the other direction is what I would not hesitate to call "desert."

Rules about societality and communication are subtly and not-so-subtly different to Europe. Israelis love their cellphones, you see people cycling along with a phone jammed between cheek and shoulder. It's common and apparently accepted for two people to sit together at a cafe, both talking on their cellphones and occasionally speaking to each other. Internet access seems paradoxically to be both omnipresent and difficult, one often sees people standing on the street or in malls* with their laptops precariously balanced on one splayed hand, doing e-mail or some such thing. Why don't they sit in a cafe or do it at home? A mystery.

I sat outdoors last night at a cafe in Dizengoff, eating an endive and avocado salad with sweetish lime dressing and carraway/cumin/seasalt/whole-wheat bread, and did an hour or so of peoplewatching. There was a nearly-all-male celebration (birthday party?) happening indoors at the cafe, at a pair of very long tables; since smoking appears to be prohibited in every cafe I've seen (coincidence or a general ban?) the guests kept walking out to the curb in half-dozens, to stand and smoke. One of them spoke for a good dozen minutes to the male of a couple who were sitting near me — without either of them acknowledging the female other half in any way! He stood right beside her, his thigh nearly rubbing her elbow (Israelis don't seem to need much social space), and did not even glance at her. She played along, apparently content to be silent and still all that time. What to make of this? In Germany, for me to speak to a friend for so long without introducing you, would be understood as an insult.

There seems to be little consumption of alcohol here. I asked in the cafe for a local beer, and was told that they didn't have any (ambiguous: is there no local beer, or do they not stock it?)**, and looking around the only alcohol I could see was the champagne that the celebrants were consuming (they typically drank one glass and then switched to cola or water). The club-type place across the street, next to the walk-in botox clinic that was open for business at 10:30 pm, was probably serving alcohol, but I didn't bother to go and find out.

Weather is marvellous, high twenties (mid-eighties to the Americans) and clear skies.

Time to go. Shabbat shalom, my dears — and fancy my being in Israel to say that!

* I went to the Dizengoff Center to look for the Friday food court thingy that Lisa wrote about in her Tel Aviv City Guide (great book, I would recommend it even if she weren't a friend.)

** Savtadotty pointed out that this was probably a misunderstanding, as there are several breweries in Israel: the waiter probably thought I wanted a particular brand of beer named "Local."

Down to the wire, again

Ask me why I am in the office still, 10 hours before I have to leave home for the airport, with my suitcase unpacked and my clothes unwashed and my kitchen uncleaned? On second thoughts, don't.

I found a hotel-type place for €10 a night less than the local hostel (Google knows everything); even got a bulk discount: book four nights, pay for three. It'll either be an undiscovered gem or a disaster. Wait and see.

This time tomorrow, I'll be having dinner in Israel. Wow.

Dear Israeli readers, my e-mail address is at the left and I will be checking it as often as circumstances allow. I would love to meet you all.

Booked

I booked flights to (and indeed from) Tel Aviv today, for a long week in three weeks' time. Tooth be damned. I'm feeling very brave and adventurous, and also tired as hell having just got home from work at 00:48.

Milwaukee and Toronto

I haven't written about being in Milwaukee yet, because I couldn't find a way to say anything worth reading (assume for the moment that my ramblings are potentially worth reading) that didn't get into matters that should remain private. "What happens at [the wedding] stays at [the wedding]," as it were. There is much that I would like to say about it, about the people I met and the things I learned, but these stories are not mine to tell.

I can say that it was the happiest wedding I've ever been to, completely free of tension and status games. There are two reasons for that, I think. First, that no family members were present (other than N's daughter): the group consisted solely of friends, and while nobody but the happy couple knew everyone, it is also true that everybody knew at least a half-dozen of the others. Secondly, and relatedly, that we were composed of two overlapping self-selecting groups: we had a buttload of common experiences and interests to unite us.

The ceremony was conducted in the couple's back yard; a friend from Second Life officiated, and we all took turns to say a few words of congratulation and blessing, after which we celebrated with margaritas, sparklers, live music and waterpistol fights. Woot.

On the last evening, we had a spontaneous meet-up in Second Life, which was vastly amusing: picture us sitting at our laptops around the dining table or in the living room, chatting both in SL and across the screens in RL. It was vastly amusing; but you probably had to be there to appreciate the humour of the situation.

It was a wonderful weekend, full of joy and companionship and great conversation and fine food, and of near-constant and near-random hugs and headscritches. What I miss most is the hugging, actually, the easy and comfortable bodily contact between friends. There's not enough hugging in the world, peoples. Get to work on this, please.

I have been in Toronto for four days now, talking with my parents and hanging about downtown. I'll write about my father's condition another time. Tomorrow I fly south to visit another SL friend.

"Infinite Jest" is proceeding well. I'm reading the chapter about AA meetings, and am finding it so rich and so thoughtprovoking that I am artificially slowing myself down, making myself take time to think about it as I read. There were several Twelve-Steppers (as they call themselves) at the meeting, reading this makes me see them with different eyes.

Shabbat shalom, my dears. I hope you are happy and healthy, and encourage you to hug a friend — or even a stranger.

Chicago

Arrived in the Windy City last night after a very pleasant flight: I was upgraded to Business Class because the plane was overbooked. The food was much better, the service almost embarrassingly attentive, the seats comfortable (mechanized things that folded out almost flat). Would I pay the extra for this? No. Because the problem with travel is not the food or the discomfort, as much as having to do it at all. I would pay extra for a flight that was two hours long instead of nine, but not even First Class can offer that.

There was some last-minute (almost literally) change of plans: My father was ordered to remain within car-driving distance of the hospital that is treating his circulatory difficulties, so they will not be at the wedding in Vancouver and therefore will not be in Regina with my sister next week. In the circumstances, my father's comment that "it would be nice if I could visit them in Toronto" felt pretty much like a command, so I dropped the Regina leg of the trip. Sorry Sis, but we'll catch up at Christmas.

Travel confounds expectations. One hears that Chicago is a big and dirty and dangerous city, as all American cities are; yet the first thing that Jubi said was "if you want to go out for coffee, just leave the front door open." We are right on a main street, close enough to downtown by American standards of space and distance, and yet it is no more noisy than my own apartment. I do miss hills though, Chicago is as flat as a tabletop.

I watched a tribute to Michael Jackson on the flight (without sound, my headphones didn't work and I couldn't be bothered to ask the crew to deal with them), and found myself feeling really sorry for that cute little kid Mikey. How and why did he end up as that ghostly, ghastly figure? Poor guy. Too much fame, too much pressure, far too much money. I wonder whether he had a life as a kid at all? Did he ride a bicycle and play baseball and hang about the mall exchanging half-truths and boasts? "Rosebud!"

Weather is grey, very warm and humid. Planning to take a boat tour of the river(s) and wander about downtown for a while, then to Milwaukee this afternoon/evening. But first, I shall go to the coffee shop across the street (whose wireless bandwidth I am currently scrounging) to charge up my inner batteries and clear my conscience.

July already

Odd to think that I will be somewhere in North American airspace at this time in a week. Booked several flights, about two years' worth of flying by my usual measures.

The itinerary is unnecessarily complicated, due to North America's inability to offer sensible and convenient train travel. Case in point: Milwaukee (destination two) and Regina (destination three) both have train stations, but one is Amtrack and the other is VIArail. Their networks connect at precisely three points, none of which is in the Midwest. So I will fly from one city which has a train station to Toronto and there take a connecting flight to another city which has a train station. Absurd. This hub & spoke arrangement might make economic sense for the airlines but it is hell on us passengers.

In case you are curious, the list of places I will voluntarily visit is: Chicago, Milwaukee, Regina, Durham NC, and New Jersey. I will pass with gritted teeth and not-only-subvocal expressions of dismay through: Toronto, either Calgary or Edmonton or Denver, and possibly Raleigh NC.

I have started reading Infinite Jest by the late DFW, responding to the challenge/invitation issued by the crew at Infinite summer: to read the whole damned thing, all 981 pages (in this edition) and 388 endnotes, some of which have footnotes of their own. I'm up to page 212 and endnote 74* and am loving it.

I can't for the life of me think how IJ stayed below my radar for these thirteen years***, because it is very much the kind of book that I love: Excursive, discursive, voluble, laconic, fond of words as things in their own right, curious about and amused by the whole world. Probably I was put off it (or DFW, as I hadn't read anything longer than a magazine article by him) by the enormous hype. In this case, surprisingly enough, it was justified. IJ is quite marvellous, it's sure to be one that I keep and re-read.

Other than that life has been going on much as it usually does. Lots of panic this week, with an average of 10.5 hours a day on the first four days. Tomorrow will be easier, Fridays are always only half-days for me (because Susan hosts a meditation session in the mornings) — but architects' half-days are often six hours long anyway.


* I think I've had that one already. It's hard to be sure because I tend to keep reading beyond the end of the note that I flipped** back to read.

** Well, I say "flipped" but in fact I have a second bookmark set in the notes.

*** Actually this should be no surprise at all that I didn't read IJ when it was new and highly praised, as that is my usual response. I assume that the reviewers are in fact praising the item's fashionability and up-to-date-ness, and further assume that it will be seen as nearly worthless once the fashion changes and the calendar has shed a few leaves. This spares me having to read a buttload of dross, but means that I occasionally miss out on significant delights. Ah well, better late than never.

Dull, summer edition

The rain stopped, mostly. During the last fortnight we have had sometimes as many as three days in a row without precipitation. On the bright side, the rain and cloud keeps the temperatures low. We haven't had any days above 30°C yet, which is fine by me.

My summer holiday plans are gelling nicely. I booked flights to and from the US (almost exactly half the price of flying to Canada, bah) for mid to late July, and am now trying to get committed dates from the friends I want to meet. (Note: if I haven't contacted you, that does not mean that I don't want to meet you! Time and money are short, and I already have firm dates a total of 4850 km apart, so a fair amount of my time and budget will be spent travelling. Trips to the southwest, northwest and southeast will have to wait for another occasion. Sorry.)

Work is going well at the moment, I'm getting an amazing amount of stuff accomplished. This is in part due to G being often out of the office, so there are fewer interruptions and much less stress. It's odd (but pleasant) that the phone doesn't ring when he isn't there.

Oh yes, my nose. I knew there was something else to say. I had a series of spontaneous nosebleeds over the weekend, sometimes quite intense, so I went to the doctor first thing Monday morning. He looked and prodded, said that it was probably just a minor thing, and sent me to an ENT specialist. He looked and prodded, said that a minor vein had burst, and cauterized it.

More geekery

Three years and a week after I said "by the time the database software is optimised for Mac-Intel, Alberich will be ready to retire," I have bought his replacement: a new Mac Mini named Maimonides (because it's my thirteenth computer. Consider that a challenge, he said and grinned evilly.)

It's a wonderful machine: absolutely silent, even quieter than Alberich, and under real-world conditions it is at least twice as fast. I compiled the database on Alberich and Maimonides as a test:

                     Alberich    Maimonides
Syntax check             10           4 seconds
Compile                  50          19
Generate application     46          29
Total                   106          52 seconds

(I bought the "larger" version of the Mac Mini this time, because it had a significantly better graphics card than the "smaller" one, and increased the memory to 4 gigabytes.)

The betterness of this becomes clear in a computationally and graphically intensive environment, for example in Second Life. Alberich would struggle to get frame rates of 2 to 6 images a second (imagine a jerky old newsreel film), with his little fan blowing its heart out all the while, even though I had turned the resolution and image quality down as far as they would go (no anti-aliasing, no shading, no shadows, no reflections, no texture mapping, no sky details, no water details, nada y nada y pues nada as Hemingway once said).

I set up SL on Maimonides using the same conditions as on Alberich, and went to a site where I would usually get 6 fps. Maimonides got 32 frames per second! I couldn't believe it, that is better than cinema quality. I could see my avatar moving smoothly in real-time as I pressed the arrow keys. That got me curious to see what else might be possible, so I turned up the resolution and turned on all those filters and shaders and whatnots — and still got around 16 fps. Second Life is so beautiful! Who knew?

I have to admit it wasn't all joy. Setting up Maimonides was an unexpected and unnecessary pain in the arse. I can't put it better than Tim Bray, who also struggled mightily and in vain: In the old days, I would have been happily running on the new machine by now, cheerily blogging about my shiny new Mac. As it is, it looks to me like Apple, not to put too fine a point on it, removed a killer feature from a flagship product. This doesn’t feel like a good idea. I will write about this at length another time.

Plus ça change...

I would blame my three-week silence on the pressures of work etc, but regular readers know that there have often been such lacunae in recent years. I apologise to everyone I've been ignoring, all the bloggers whose posts that I haven't been commenting, all the birthdays I have forgotten (or worse, remembered and then put from mind because I couldn't deal with it). My behaviour upsets me at least as much as it does you.

Work has changed direction. I stopped the translation for half a year after the mess last summer, with them wanting me in Münster and then withdrawing the offer shortly before we signed contracts. Last month I realized that I had (relatively) enormous debts and no chance to pay them back without doing more or different work, so spoke seriously to G and U about my work in their office. The theoretical 20 hours a week had been creeping upwards, reaching an average of 35, which was a break-even level but no chance to repay or save anything. I explained all this and said I'd need to cut back to a real 20 hours in order to take a second job, terribly sorry. They thought about it overnight and made a counter-offer: 45 hours a week, slight raise in the hourly rate, and a productivity bonus guaranteed for 2009 that would let me pay all my debts.

I have to admit, that option hadn't occurred to me. I took it, and am now working fulltime and fairly happily. But it means that my lovely mornings at home have gone, so I am seriously behind on my blog- and book-reading, riverbank-walking-down-to-ings, and Second Life play. A fair exchange, perhaps; in any case I was glad to take it.

With the change in hours has somehow come a change in my style and manner. It feels as though I've shifted up a gear, or crested a hill and am now running on the level. I've started taking the job more seriously, sometimes arriving first and often leaving last, and am taking on more management and steering. Much of the technical discussion with structural engineers and HVAC planners and others that ilk, now devolves to me, and to my surprise I am enjoying it.

Second Life is changing direction too. I have stepped back a bit from the meditation group discussions, which lately had been more philosophical discussion than meditation. I often couldn't follow the sense of the conversation, for example the idea that the image of a chair on a screen is not distinguishable from the one that you are sitting in right now, dear reader, and I found that stressful. I have joined some more traditional groups to get back to calm and centering: "Sit down, shut up, just breathe."

Time for work. Let me leave you with a truly marvellous video (a genuine cinema short, btw, 16 minutes long) called Validation which offers exactly what the title says. Highly recommended, do watch it!

Shabbat shalom, dear friends. I do think of you fondly, even in my silence.