First day of school
School started this week, and I haven’t been this nervous or excited in decades.
I don’t remember my absolute first day of school ever—it was sometime when we lived in New York and the memory of those years are getting fainter and fainter as I age—but I do remember my first day of school in Canada.
It was partway through the school year (we had immigrated in the cold of winter) and I was bundled up in hand-me-down snow gear when the bus pulled up at our stop. The driver, Mr. McDowell, welcomed me aboard, and offered me a seat near the front next to a cheerful and friendly young girl. (That girl, I learned later, was Elizabeth, the bus driver’s daughter. We ended up being in the same class, and shared the same birthday, all the way through middle school, and she became among my best friends.)
Getting off the bus, I followed the crowd into the school, and made my way to my classroom with a lot of help from Elizabeth leading the way. I entered the class and immediately went to my teacher, Madame Boughton, and introduced myself—in French. I had been practicing for this moment, and felt proud that I was able to communicate clearly and be understood.
I put my stuff away in my cubby, and went to meet the other students. Some of them—Elizabeth, Leah, and Justin, most specifically—ended up becoming my best friends that year. I felt welcome, and warm, and included. It was the best of introductions to a new school, to a new country. I will never forget that feeling.
Our daughter had her first day at school yesterday. We dropped her off in the morning and watched her file into her classroom with the rest of her classmates. I could see a mix of apprehension and excitement on her face, understandably: this was a new experience for all of us, and none of us really knew what to expect. The day went well, I think—it’s hard to get many details from a kindergartener—and aside from a few tears (just a tiny bit), our little one did great.
I don’t know if she will remember this first day of school when she gets older, but I know I will, vividly. I will remember packing her a lunch and snacks the night before, remember waking her up half an hour earlier than usual so we’d have ample time to have breakfast and make it for the morning bell, remember walking her to the door and helping her line up with the rest of the students, remember telling her I loved her as she was greeted by her teachers and walked through that big door into the great unknown.
Soon, school will become routine, and the novelty will fade. Packing lunches will become part of the evening ritual, and morning drop-offs will become less climactic. But for now, everything is new, everything is exciting, everything is a memory that will remained etched in my consciousness forever. I will always remember this week, the first week of school, and all the excitement and nervousness that came with it: a next step in the grand adventure of life.
A poem
Advice for a Stegosaurus
Jessica Goodheart
Never mind the asteroid,
the hot throat of the volcano,
a sun that daily drops into the void.
Comb the drying riverbed for drink.
Strut your bird-hipped body.
Practice a lizard grin. Don’t think.
Stretch out your tail. Walk, as you must,
in a slow deliberate gait.
Don’t look back, Dinosaur. Dust is dust.
You’ll leave your bones, your fossil feet
and armored eye-lids.
Put your chin to the wind. Eat what you eat.
Some links
Pete Wells articulates what many of us have been thinking: are high-end restaurants focusing more on the “show” than the food? I’ve still had excellent meals at some highly-ranked places so I’m not that disenchanted, but I will admit that I’m less enamored with “restaurant culture” than I was before.
Related to the above: getting a restaurant reservation seems harder and harder these days. I’m pretty good at logging on as soon as reservations open to get a seat, but even then I’m often unlucky. I didn’t realize that there was a whole gatekeeping system in place that allowed access to the privileged few before the rest of us got a chance.
Also related: the Yelp-ification of the world, particularly restaurants, has made it obvious to me that the most important way to discover new things is through personal and curated recommendations, not through reviews from the crowd:
Bitchiness only drives engagement, and this is what Yelp harnesses when it calls for a "chorus of unvarnished reviews," an echo of The Real World's slogan that pits "polite" as the opposite of "real." To be unvarnished is to be harsh and raw. To be real, much of the internet assumes, is to complain.
The existential dread of shopping for groceries:
The infinite web of multinational trade organized by ravenous corporations is outside of anyone's control. Everything is to blame, so no one is to blame. We've built a food system that no one can do anything about other than keep making money.
Roxane Gay wrapped up her “Work Friend” column with poignancy:
We shouldn’t have to suffer or work several jobs or tolerate intolerable conditions just to eke out a living, but a great many of us do just that. We feel trapped and helpless and sometimes desperate. We tolerate the intolerable because there is no choice. We ask questions for which we already know the answers because change is terrifying and we can’t really afford to risk the loss of income when rent is due and health insurance is tied to employment and someday we will have to stop working and will still have financial obligations.
Related: white collar work is just meetings now. I’ve noticed that ever since taking on this new manager role at work, I spend almost 75% of my day staring into the camera on Microsoft Teams.
My response to people who ask me about how to network effectively is always to “forget about networking, focus on being curious.” Mandy Brown puts it another way, and I love this framing of making kin rather than nets.
Making friends as you get older is tough; it got even harder when we had a kid and my free time diminished quite considerably. I’ve heard that it gets easier to connect with other parents once our child is in school, but for now, I can empathize with this piece on the challenge to make a new friend in one month.
I’ve been reading a lot about AI recently (especially since I’m still grappling with what it will mean for my work) but the best piece I’ve read is this: I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again:
Can you imagine how much government policy is actually written by ChatGPT before a bored administrator goes home to touch grass? How many departments are just LLMs talking to each other in circles as people sick of the bullshit just paste their email exchanges into long-running threads? I guarantee you that a doctor within ten kilometers of me has misdiagnosed a patient because they slapped some symptoms into a chatbot.
What are we doing as a society?
Navneet’s essay on AI as a false god is also a must-read for a more philosophical introspection about the role it does and can play in our lives:
Before we do, in fact, cede any more ground to our tech overlords, it’s worth casting one’s mind back to the mid-1990s and the arrival of the World Wide Web. That, too, came with profound assertions of a new utopia, a connected world in which borders, difference, and privation would end. Today, you would be hard pressed to argue that the internet has been some sort of unproblematic good. The fanciful did come true; we can carry the whole world’s knowledge in our pockets. This just had the rather strange effect of driving people a bit mad, fostering discontent and polarization, assisting a renewed surge of the far right, and destabilizing both democracy and truth. It’s not that one should simply resist technology; it can, after all, also have liberating effects. Rather, when big tech comes bearing gifts, you should probably look closely at what’s in the box. […]
Life and its meaning can’t be reduced to a simple statement, or to a list of names, just as human thought and feeling can’t be reduced to something articulated by what are ultimately ones and zeros. If you find yourself asking AI about the meaning of life, it isn’t the answer that’s wrong. It’s the question. And at this particular juncture in history, it seems worth wondering what it is about the current moment that has us seeking answers from a benevolent, omniscient digital God—that, it turns out, may be neither of those things.
This piece on AI as self-erasure is also resonant:
LLMs (large language models such as ChatGPT) won't return us to a pre-linguistic state, but they do point to a post-human one. In The Language Animal, Charles Taylor points out that in our use of language, "we are continuously responsive to rightness, and that is why we always recognize the relevance of a challenge that we have misspoken." In other words, we care.
This is because, unlike an LLM or a parrot, things have significance for us, and we search for words that will do justice to this significance.
It’s somewhat cliché for an Xennial to complain about influencer culture—or perhaps more accurately, just not understand it—but it is a significantly interesting anthropological phenomenon, as this piece by Roxane Gay articulates.. I’m tempted to download TikTok and Instagram sometimes to really learn what it is all about:
On TikTok, anything and everything can be content. For those who are willing to play that particular game, they can film and share and monetize every mundane or salacious aspect of their lives. Nothing is sacred and everything is scalable. […]
It's striking that TikTok, on the surface, prizes individuality but what truly sustains the platform is imitation and repetition and the all-too-human desire to be just like everyone else. Despite the many charming or strange or jaw-dropping videos on TikTok, far more of the videos are fairly mundane. They receive little attention, but the creators seem undeterred. In the absence of an audience, the hope that an audience might yet find them sustains.
Feeding all the athletes at the Olympics was no insignificant task, so this look behind what goes into the food service at a major sporting event was fascinating.
Before I met L, I had never bought a travel guide. Now we buy one for every country we visit, and the collected guides make a nice library of memories of trip gone by. This excerpt detailing the history of Lonely Planet, our preferred guidebook brand, was really interesting.
I’m starting to really enjoy travel writing (I know, I know, where have I been until now) these days, so I enjoyed this piece on traveling to a resort in Cancún on a Costco travel package.
Every video by Jay Smooth is a good one. Even if you weren’t interested in the conflict, Jay breaking down why “old heads hated Kendrick vs. Drake is an enlightening watch.
I’ve been lucky to have been on a few boards in my past, and have had people ask me what a board of directors actually does. This post by Anil sums it up quite comprehensively.
We spent a lot of time looking into lunch boxes and backpacks for Zoya entering school, so this article on Japanese randoseru, that almost all students in the country use in elementary school, was fascinating.
I use Markdown for all my text editing, so this nerdy look at the markup syntax made me happy.
I first learned how to computer program using BASIC—I even wrote a “matchmaking” program using it in high school—so I really enjoyed this history of the programming language and how it set the stage for programming today.
An interesting piece on slang, social media, and identity:
Social media, however, has standardized our language to the point that exformation has become endangered. For the past 10 years, the English language's wealth of previously exformative, subcultural slang has dispersed into a single, universal argot that is simply Phone.
My media diet for May and June, for July and August, and things I learned these past few months.
These opening paragraphs from a recent issue of Heather’s newsletter are wonderfully and beautifully evocative, and a perfect way to close off this post:
We can simply begin. What happened to starting without stopping, believing without second-guessing, diving off a tall cliff without mapping the trajectory of our fall in advance? When did we stop starting?
We don't have to drink coffee and stare at things we can't afford. We can drink coffee and write music. What happened to faith, unraveling for the sake of the sublime, digging for your fears? We don't have to toss back drinks we can't afford. We can soak in sunlight and play with notes, bat them around the room like cats with mice, joke with them, tease them, make them obey our commands, watch them run away and catch them just in time. When did we start labeling our instincts as indulgent, decadent, indecent when everything else is? We can leave these distractions behind and pander to the spirits like the birds do, begging for divine intervention as the leaves curl into crisp brown question marks.
Just a little announcement: I’m not-actively-but-kinda-sorta looking for what’s next for me in my career. I’m in no rush to go anywhere, but starting to think it’s time for me to explore something new. I’d like to stay in the public sector, but I’m open. Here’s a brief overview of my CV; please let me know if you hear of anything. Thanks!