It's all in the past, I suspect

One of my golf group, "Captain Billy"*, showed up with a knee brace. Billy's a biker (two Harleys),  a fairly hardy guy and only a couple of years older than I but he's had his aches and pains. Had to have shoulder surgery last year, for instance.  I hadn't noticed him favoring a knee before, though. When I asked him about it, he said his knees been giving him trouble and he thought best to have some support. As we talked, others commented on it... and on their own aches and pains. Billy's remark was "It's like I hit 67 and it all started crumbling."

And from there the conversation was one of this ache and that operation and the other chronic problem.

That's what happens in a group of oldies. Conversations turn to the problems of aging. We wear out after awhile, don't we? And it all seems to come at once. My father was pretty healthy all his life, up until a few short years before his death. Even when he was sick, he bounced back quickly and often worked through an flu or cold. I can't recall him ever breaking a bone or being laid up for more than a day. His worst "injury" was when he sunburned the tops of his feet and couldn't put on a pair of shoes the next day. That was when he was in his thirties. The second day he was fine, as far as I knew, he had shoes on and went to work.

But when Dad hit 78, it all came at once it seemed. His heart was dying and would eventually take him a few years later. When he had the Pacemaker put in, the doctor told him he could have a guy do a knee replacement at the same time but Dad declined. I never found out why exactly but I suspect he didn't want to be laid up at all, didn't want to deal with the recovery. The Pacemaker insertion required only a day off his feet.

To understand about that knee, you'd have to picture and guy whose height was 60% legs. And he was tall (6'4"). And spindly legged. Like a short guy on stilts. Apparently, that knee had been shaky for some time.

Me? I'm falling apart. I've got COPD (mild) as a leftover from a poorly diagnosed lung infection that dogged me for two years starting back in `97. I broke my kneecap a couple of years ago. And now my left shoulder is giving me trouble. And my right ankle (which I sprained a couple of times in my 20's).

When I am feeling sorry for myself, though, I think of Pete (another golf buddy). Pete's 84 and has been battling a form of leukemia for 30 years, had both knees replaced, and is still playing a couple of days a week.

Wish I could have gotten an extended warranty on this body, though.

*He's called that because he is one. He sailed the Caribbean for a few decades after giving up the corporate accounting life back in the 70's.

Whither the American Dream?

Somewhere around the 1950's, it became a part of the culture to push our children into college, to "white collar" careers, to eschew the idea of factory work. So the best and the brightest headed off to business school and engineering school, and law school. And the factories no longer got them. Instead of promoting those best and brightest to improve the factory and its processes, they hired them as consultants from outside (and lacking the insider knowledge of the environment). And they believed in the clean and wonderful future touted by the intellectual class who spoke of robotics freeing us all of the mindless, repetitive labor of factory work. And that put the fathers of those kids (and their less smart brothers and sisters) out of work over time. the factories went along because they saw that they were no longer getting bright stars among the detrius but just the "leftovers", the ones who couldn't get into colleges, who could barely (and maybe not at all) get out of high school. Oh sure, a smattering of the bright showed up at the employment office but they became more and more rare. After all, they weren't stupid and they could see the handwriting on the wall. The culture said in the 1850's, "Go west, young man", and he did. In the 1950's, the culture said, "go white collar, young man", and he did.

Pogo said it best: "We have met the enemy and he is us."

The above is a comment I wrote in response to the majority of comments in response to the following piece:

The knowledge class vs. the factory class

The article/opinion and the comments brought a song to mind...

Well we're living here in Allentown
And they're closing all the factories down
Out in Bethlehem they're killing time
Filling out forms
Standing in line.

"Allentown"  by Billy Joel



There was another comment I made in response to a specific comment blaming the management class. Even though I think he had more than just management in mind, I think he was talking about the very "higher ups", the "suits", the owners and the board of directors and such.

The comment:

What an unbelievable crock. the management class has systematically destroyed the viability of blue collar jobs for the last 50 years. If there were unions, and the jobs paid $30/hour with benefits, there would be no shortage of workers. 

And repeat, it is not the knowledge class. There are many people with educations who see this. It is the rich class and the MBA class that have undermined and destroyed the blue collar middle class. Not the teachers, not the government employees, not the lawyers, not the doctors. The MBAs and the wealthy.

And my reply:

"If there were unions, and the jobs paid $30/hour with benefits, there would be no shortage of workers. "

True... but there would be no jobs for them to have.

It is a reality that one can price one's self out of the market. The glut of lawyers is becoming yet another example. A glut of engineers another. A glut of business school graduates (together with those engineers) gave us the automated factory which didn't free the workers from anything but employment. The incentive for those automated factories? The high cost of human employees. Especially as those employees became unwilling to work harder for more pay but expected the higher pay because the factories were more productive because of the increase in automation. And your unions, with the best of intentions, encouraged them. After all, if the workers made more, the unions would prosper.

And here we are today, wondering what happened to the American Dream...

And pointing fingers.

And ignoring our own guilt in the process.



 

Ok, who broke the microwave?

The weekend was eventful, as they say. Remember TGIF? Well, not so much this last Friday. You see, on Thursday evening late, Frances went to nuke a bag of popcorn and nothing happened except a loud grinding noise. The light came on, the carousel turned `round, but the popcorn never popped. The grinding noise sounded like the bearings of a fan were going bad. But a dying fan does not impede the microwaves... one would surmise. And, only a few minutes earlier, Faye had popped her own bag on microwave popcorn.

The microwave oven, a fixture above the stove for 5 years and a couple of months, no longer worked.
Naturally, we blamed it on Frances. She doesn't cause these things but she, like Joe Btfsplk, always manages to be there when something breaks.

Short of counter space, our only choice was to buy another "over the range" type unit. Faye had already given permission to have someone else install it. But I, being a normal (mostly) male, decided I would do the installation.

I mean, how hard can it be? Really? That hard?

Besides, to wait on installation would mean several days without a microwave oven. And that, dear friends, is unacceptable. We have hot dogs in the freezer and microwave popcorn and Faye's lasagna (leftovers from Valentine's Day) to reheat and eat.

We simply cannot function without a functioning microwave oven. It's uncivilized. It's just not done.

So I trudged off to Lowe's on Saturday morning. I would have trudged on Friday but there was golf to play that morning and golf to watch that afternoon. I perused the choices there and settled on a not too expensive one. Countertop types are cheaper, by half, than over the range types. But I would have needed more counter space than we have. So I had no choice.

Over the range units are standardized, thank goodness, but only in dimensions. They differ in wattage, features, and price. Especially price. I learned they also differ in mounting strategies. But that was later, during the Great Agony. I was but a child, not fully aware of what was to come.

My next step, after arriving home and carrying the rather large box into the house, was to uninstall the broken unit. This went well and I was lulled into believing this would be a simple job. The mounting instructions were specific (in that weird "not the writer's native language" way we've all come to know so well) and it soon became clear that the old wall bracket would not do and even the holes in the overhead cabinet would have to be re-drilled.

But these were minor snags, easily (okay... not so easily) overcome.

In just a few short hours (about 5), the 15 minute installation job was complete.

This one had best last at least 5 years.

Perception is reality? Or maybe not...

We are perceptive people, are we not? Actually, I think our perceptions are programmed by genetics and environment. Consider that our genetic make-up is a mixture of our parents' genes. Their genetic make-up is a mixture of their parents'. Our genetic make-up is set at conception. But we are also influenced by the people around us. From the day we are born, our parents have a huge influence on how we view the world around us. All of the people that come into and leave our lives have some influence on how we view the world. Most of us find our views have changed over the years, more for some than for others.

Think about it. Parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, siblings, teachers, coaches, boyfriends or girlfriends, friends in general, bosses, mentors, even many people you think you are influencing. Life is not a one-way street. More like Newton's Third Law of motion. "For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction." Except the reactions are not always equal.

What I mean by that is we are influenced almost imperceptibly much of the time. Consider the Big Lie theory: That if you tell a big enough lie and repeat it often enough, people will eventually come to believe it. It is the theory behind saturation advertising. And it doesn't have to be a big lie, or even a lie at all. It can be a distortion, an opinion, even the truth. Eventually, repeated enough, it will be perceived as valid and important information. But we, subconsciously, select what is "true" and what isn't. We accept as true that with which we are most comfortable. We reject what makes us uncomfortable. And then we reinforce it by blocking out that which makes us uncomfortable (by not watching or reading it).

This is why the media is so important. Especially when it comes to politics. What we see and hear influences how we perceive things. Rightly or wrongly, we form opinions based on these things. How we perceive (I believe) is decided by genetics. By that I mean how we decide what is valid and what isn't on a very basic level. Perhaps we could say on the "molecular" level. The various influences of parents, relatives, friends, acquaintances, and others who come into our lives add another layer; the thickest one.

And then we are bombarded with advertisements, opinion pieces, and the very subtle bias that is in most news. In most cases, the bias is not blatant though we often think it is. That bias is reflected in what stories are run or stressed. And it is done at the editor level on newspapers and news blogs and at the producer and director level on TV shows. Some of that bias in television slips into the regular programming.

How do we function independently? How do we form our own opinions? I don't think we do. Well, I don't think the great majority of us do. A few rare individuals might but the rest of us are following the path of least resistance, accepting the peer pressure of those around us, accepting what we see and hear as our own.

It takes courage and determination to break away from the "conventional wisdom" and form a unique opinion. Even that might have been influenced by our early upbringing and our genetic make-up. Why we feel comfortable with a certain ideology might be because our genetic make-up established the "filters" with which we determined the importance (or lack of) of the input we got from all those others as we grew up.

It's something to think about when you consider how you feel about the political parties and the politicians.

From a tablet weakly

You could call  this an experiment. It may not be successful. I am typing this on my tablet... with some trepidation. I already have the feeling that it will be a tortuous exercise to post in this manner.

The purpose of the experiment is to test the viability of relying on the tablet for posting on my next trip. That trip is scheduled for April, I think (Faye has not informed me of the date yet), and I should be gone a few weeks, maybe 4.

Using this virtual keyboard is, at best, awkward.

On the other hand, it could be impossible. For some yet to be determined reason, the cursor jumps to an almost random spot on the first line while typing in "compose" mode. Annoying and frustrating. However, it seems to work fine in "HTML" mode. If I had a better handle on HTML, this would be a decent solution. Unfortunately, I am not proficient in HTML.

(switching to desktop machine because I am running out of time)

Now that I think about it... I am not proficient at anything but procrastination. I've got that down pat.

I can bring along my spare keyboard... What? You don't have a spare keyboard? and that should work adequately.

Blogger, in its silicon wisdom, has decided to mess with us once again. It has changed its "user" interface. It "asked" if I would like to "try" the new interface and I, in my infinite stupidity, clicked on "yes". Now I seem to be stuck with it. I suppose I eventually would have been anyway. New interfaces are like bad tasting medicine (is that redundant?)... take it quickly and move on.

Have a nice weekend and try to avoid a hangover.