In short, the way students are treated in college trains them for the social position they will occupy once they get out. At schools like Cleveland State, they’re being trained for positions somewhere in the middle of the class system, in the depths of one bureaucracy or another. They’re being conditioned for lives with few second chances, no extensions, little support, narrow opportunity—lives of subordination, supervision, and control, lives of deadlines, not guidelines. At places like Yale, of course, it’s the reverse. The elite like to think of themselves as belonging to a meritocracy, but that’s true only up to a point. Getting through the gate is very difficult, but once you’re in, there’s almost nothing you can do to get kicked out. Not the most abject academic failure, not the most heinous act of plagiarism, not even threatening a fellow student with bodily harm—I’ve heard of all three—will get you expelled. The feeling is that, by gosh, it just wouldn’t be fair—in other words, the self-protectiveness of the old-boy network, even if it now includes girls. Elite schools nurture excellence, but they also nurture what a former Yale graduate student I know calls “entitled mediocrity.” A is the mark of excellence; A- is the mark of entitled mediocrity. It’s another one of those metaphors, not so much a grade as a promise. It means, don’t worry, we’ll take care of you. You may not be all that good, but you’re good enough.

William Deresiewicz on the "disadvantages" of an elite education. If it's the endgame that we look at I'd prefer "entitled mediocrity" to "the depths of one bureaucracy or another." But so too would Mr. Deresiewicz I suspect which is why his piece rings with irony. He knew people like me would read it and that we would feel like the Prep's Lee Fiora in an encounter with Cross.

Wow.

What time is it? Hm, 1pm?

My friend M was asking me over the weekend about records - whether I listened to them in the past.  I was never wild about the experience but had a cheap turntable because some music just wasn't available on CD format in my heyday of buying music.  Perhaps the biggest factor for me was that I had to listen to music on a track by track basis with the singles I most often found only on vinyl.  Today, however, I've drawn a connection between that and my YouTube listening - one track at a time.

In rotation? Some talented Japanese people -

Yukumi Nagano

Towa Tei

I stopped only once, for just a second, to look back. I debated whether I wanted to look back—I was afraid I’d jinx myself if I did—but then I thought: this is a huge moment in my life and I want to take just one more look at the homestead.

I paused, turned around and looked. Everything was quiet. No movement, no noise, no lights on in the house, nothing. I was safe. No one knew I wasn’t up in my room sound asleep. I took off again as fast as I could...

The tale is concluded.

Neal Stephenson, one of my favorite writers, has a presentation on a great online TV station called Fora.tv (after finishing his presentation I started downloading quite a bit from there). He discusses "SF" (Science Fiction) as a genre and makes a lot of interesting points, one of which had me laughing because a Hallmark film on television I happened to be exposed to was predictably NOT SF.

As Mike Ladd once pointed out, people like Mozart and Shakespeare were "writing pop sh_¹" which was why he didn't feel slighted by a lack of recognition from today's literati.  Not only is it true but if one holds something I recently read as literature in comparison with Cryptonomicon, the points Stephenson makes are as sweet as refined sugar.

I agree with a lot of his points although I thought he failed to make a distinction between "space opera" and true SF.  A piece he had in the NY Times concerning recent Star Wars films illustrates the distinction I thought would have fit in his discussion.

Final note: his discomfort and lack of polish in public speaking was heartening for me as the mark of a man who writes more than he markets.

¹I am self censoring because people used to complain to me in my previous blogging life and those of you who don't mind can handle an underscore more than those who can't stand the epithet.

I hadn’t gotten beaten by my mom that day, and we hadn’t had any significant arguments over anything. I thought that if I died, I wanted to die without being mad at my mom. So I thought, I might as well take the opportunity to do so before I got back to the house—at which point who knows whether there would be another fight or a beating.

I put a bullet in the chamber and raised the rifle up. The closer it got to my head, the faster my heart beat. I was taught that whoever committed suicide would go to hell. But I was so miserable in the Amish culture that I believed God would understand that my motives were good.

In the end, I didn’t have the guts to point the barrel straight at my head. Okay, I thought, I’ll just put the gun next to my cheek to see what it feels like.

The instant I felt that cold hard steel, I suddenly realized that I wanted to live.

I had never had that thought before in my life. I had always thought I wanted to die. I don’t know where the idea came from that I wanted to live, but it completely changed my outlook on life.

Here is the whole thing.

A few months ago I was at our local equivalent of Jiffy Lube getting an oil change. The guy working on my car not only had rehearsed and delivered their customer service script impeccably, as he worked on cars he'd yell out all the "check point" items that he'd finished. It went something like:

Brake fluid. CHECK!
Wiper fluid. CHECK!
Tire pressure. CHECK!

You get the picture.  The zeal with which he shouted his checklist was commendable - I'd wager a drill sergeant in a bootcamp somewhere either smiling, because of all the effort, or frowning, because effort like that seems out context when it's a matter of the wiper fluid or windshield wipers on a car - by extension a mockery of that much ceremonial bombast as applied to anything.

Before I could think to snicker I realized I actually liked it. If this kid took the trouble to shout and scream over an oil change, he'd take it seriously enough not to make a mess - the silly kinds of messes that I've paid for in the past - a broken wire that opens the car's hood, or a tire that's been ignored an nearly flat as I left.

These days I'm liking the people who take themselves seriously even if it seems like pomp or pretension.  Risking ridicule in the hopes of achieving something - that's something I can admire and even aspire to...

I've been thinking about my friends from high school - an effect of Facebook I suppose. It's interesting how we became archetypes that we wouldn't have anticipated. In part we knew what we wanted to be but the reality of it now has the kind of clarity that we would never have been able to conceive at that time.

The moulds that we fit: the financier, the educator, the academic, and the craftsman. 

My friend B was always cheerful in nature, easy to talk to and a quick study.  He studied at prestigious schools and now spends his days on markets, buying, selling, and maneuvering his way to sums of money that I'm sure would leave me speechless. I remember running into him in New York many years ago and he described being given a "small fund" in his early days, something that couldn't be "messed up" - the amount in said fund? A modest $1,000,000.

My friend J was, ironically since he became an educator, not so interested in school. He liked girls, sports, and driving around in a small yellow sports car - owned by his father but operated with his juvenile sensibility.  Despite his lack of zeal for book learning he always knew he'd teach history. He was the first among us to get his advanced degree and now teaches history and coaches.  J, the guy I remember yelling at his mother: "I'm 18! I know what's best for me!"

A was a quiet type - weird is what we thought but with the kind of wisdom I've acquired with age I realize he may have had a lot to say but not in the context of the type of nonsense we would banter about in high school. We all knew he was off-the-charts intelligent but perhaps it was the silence and awkwardness that kept him accessible.  He married an anthropologist and lived tribal style for the last decade while working as a linguist and Bible translator.  He has his faith sorted out - I wonder if that's another secret that would have been revealed had we asked him in between our sophomoric jokes and relentless teasing. A few weeks ago I got an email from him - mass email - that he had finished his PhD via a university in the Netherlands. 

Finally I count myself the craftsman.  In between the listlessness, the obsession with basketball (which I now see as an obsession with practice), and varying passion for what I learned (in which I now see an interest in connecting small pieces into something larger), inside there was the sensibility of a person who makes things.  I'm not sure where it came from but I don't imagine myself useful for much these days outside the realm of writing software. 

There are more archetypes but I like to think of the four of us since we were relatively close and yet our paths ended us all over both geographically (London, Portland, Sioux Falls, Holland) and as the people we were destined to become.

Today I had this thought: only you can make yourself happy. I wonder if it's my age but I hang around sites like The Happiness Project gleaning tidbits, finding little infusions of wisdom that make me retrench and work for it.

I read fantasy books. You know: swords, magic, etc... I should say I used to - of late they don't work for me quite like they used to.  But a recent quick read is reminding me of all the myths I used to envelope myself with in those books: duty, honor, true love, and, of course, a quest. Maybe it's reading about all those quests that gave me wanderlust in the first place, and that's not such a bad thing, is it?

The "serious" book I am enjoying at the moment is The Craftsman, I'll do my best to muster a review when I finish.

I listen to the Merriam Webster "Word of the Day" podcast in batches. I wrote a program to download 2 months worth and then work through them when mowing or commuting. Anyway, the word of the day on April 7 was luftmensch, a particular favorite of mine. Not to be all "meta" about it but I actually just like Yiddish words in general.