Present - January 2, 2007

Visiting the Louvre: During the holidays I went with family to the High Museum in Atlanta. They have a visiting exhibit from the Louvre. This was a very popular exhibit and we were there with hundreds of others. --- I just realized why I am reluctant to go forward with this topic. In fact I did not enjoy the art particularly because the crowds pushed me along at a pace that wasn't comfortable and they were in the way of where I wanted to stand to look at the paintings and their talking and even their presence detracted from just absorbing the art. I responded by chattering to my companions which seemed wrong somehow too. But jabbering my complaints isn't even very interesting to me. One of the things that got me excited about blogging the other day was being able to celebrate ideas that I feel passionate about. I want be free to be critical of things when I need to be, but not as a matter of course. I want blogging to be a more positive experience in my day. So I am going to try harder to find things that please me to write about. [In spite of it being the painting that has gotten all the press, I am really charmed by the little princess. She has so much dignity, but at the same time looks like she knows that she is missing out on the carefree life a young girl should have.]
Health Care: I just finished reading a blog by Warren Redlich about health care. I certainly take issue with some of his propositions, but that isn't what struck me. I continue to have a theory that there is a missing range of services that would improve the health of sick folks and help keep healthy people feeling that way that do not require all the expensive gadgetry or years and years of professional education that we all take for granted when talking about the health care system. I think we like MRIs and specialists the same way that we like iPods and flat screen TVs. What we need to do is get the community college system set up to train folks in a whole range of personal services connected to getting and staying well -- all low tech. If you are well off and want your own dedicated individuals, so be it. If you are one of the rest of us, then you obtain the use of these folks in group settings (like maybe at work or at your gym). Think about what it is like when you have someone you love in the hospital. All the high tech diagnosis, surgery, and critical care procedures are handled with a good deal of proficiency. But there is never anyone around to help them walk to the toilet or see that they drink enough water or assess how well they will be able to carry on once sprung from the hospital. Likewise there are few people who get regular nutrition counseling, a camp-counselor type leader for a brisk five-mile hike, a morning phone call to remind them of resolutions, not to mention meals-on-wheels type deliveries of nutritious fare to help with avoiding fast food on busy days. Elderly folks have ridiculous drug cocktails and the mechanisms for making sure they are taken on schedule and for collecting symptoms of adverse events, signals of incorrect dosages, or drug interactions is simply haphazard or missing altogether. All these simple low-tech strategies I am thinking of have the potential IMHO to save millions in health care dollars because the expensive procedures performed in an impersonal vacuum devoid of any holistic monitoring of the whole self and related living context simply do a lousy job of getting folks well and keeping them healthy. This inevitably plays out in more tests and procedures and incomplete treatments for avoidable conditions. How many expensive medical procedures are simply the result of there being no way to provide people with assistance in changing habits?
Service Economy: Could one of the answers to the loss of manufacturing jobs in the US be a return to the creation of a neo servant class? Although the term is loaded with negative connotations, I am thinking of the provision of personal services by professionals who have been trained to be experts at particular types of service. This approach, it seems to me, could make them able to command more respect and pay for the work they do. We already see some of this going on, of course, with housekeeping and catering services and such. With the aging population, including quite a few folks who won't have any money to retire on, the idea of creating complex interdependency networks where everyone gets lots of personal services from other people seems both economically practical and conducive to a more harmonious society.
Escape Fiction: A quick update on The Lighthouse. I am about two thirds of the way through the book, and I am getting bad vibes on the prospects for Adam D. I wish one of my more lighthearted writers would turn up with a new [paperback]. I have a Nora Roberts, two in fact, but I just can't warm up to vampires, especially as protagonists, so I haven't started to read them yet.

Present - Very First Entry - 12/17/2006

Project Management RPG: I'm trying to convince my sons who are both skilled at various complex games played by young people that the world of project management and delivery (and portfolio management and related blah blah) should be modeled as a pastiche for a role playing game and the conduct of the project as a single game. I can't decide if this would work best as a simulation merely to meet training objectives or as a background information source for practitioners on the job. They are skeptical. It seems that they believe the exercise to be pointless and/or too boring and trivial a case for all the work that would go into creating a game. I can be a bulldog about ideas that I really believe in, so I may keep after them about this. I want some useful conversation on exactly how one would go about creating this.

The Web: I recently went to an entertaining lecture by David Weinberger and immediately went to Amazon and ordered Small Pieces Loosely Joined. Most well written books end up changing my whole world view in some way, and this is no exception. I am working to fit his key theses (as I understand them) into my current work, life choices, entertainment, conversations. My entire interior life is a crazy borg structure where I have assimilated any book that has struck me as meaningful. Except that the whole is not a neat polyhedron, just an endless collection of things slapped on top of each other. Kind of like the web.

Bio Pix: I am 51 years old. My two sons are adults (just) and off and running on their own lives. I have a job that is interesting and presently pretty rewarding. My husband is a nice man and we get along better every year. It seems to be easier to find common ground and comfortable compromises on things. All this adds up to a kind of empty space. During my long walks (for exercise and contemplation and solitude) I plot out novels I would like to write. In addition, I develop lengthy arguments about things. All kinds of things. I craft an opinion and go over it several times until I get the words I want just right. Sometimes I speak these thoughts aloud and this is awkward when I am not alone on the hiking trail. In recent years, this is as far as my writing has gone. I do not think that this makes me a writer, but the compelling urge to design stories in my head has to mean something important. To my life. I have tried numerous strategies for addressing the blank page and none have worked very well. Except that I have a pile of little spiral notebooks that contain journal like entries, most of them only partly complete. So this web approach I am presenting to myself as no more arduous or anxiety producing than my journals but also a stepping out into a new place. [All the hits for "empty nest" have a sort of self-help flavor. I was looking for something a little more ascerbic. No links.]

About Past Entries: I have the present ambition to transcribe the journals from my past into this journal here as well. I want to see what I was thinking about and who I used to be. I have a lot of trepidation about this. First, my impulse to journal in the past came when things were not going very well. The entries are a pretty whiny and discouraging view of my life. They are a truthful, but not complete account of my life. When things are going well, I am in the flow of my life and not inclined to document the details. Even worse, some of the facts about my past don't show me in a very admirable light. I would like this blog to be a dispassionate view of myself -- when the subject is my own life and not my ideas and interests. I am ok with passion about ideas. Anyway, the transcription of my journals will carry my biography back to when I was about twelve years old. I have not yet figured out what to do about the dates for these historical entries, but I have decided not to be to particular about this structural issue.
I have a lot of passion about the brokenness of the health care system. I have only recently started feeling optimistic about things getting worked out. I want to mention this as one of my interests for this maiden entry, but I am not of a mind to say anything about this subject today.
I enjoy travel more than almost anything except reading books. I don't have any philosophical positions about travel and I find travel commentary a pretty boring read, but I hope to find something worthwhile to say about places.

Listening to Music: I used to believe that I really love music. I still enjoy going to a club to hear blues music now and then. But most of the time now I prefer silence to most kinds of sound.

Bio Pix: One of the facts about me that I am not really comfortable about is that I am addicted to romance novels. I read voraciously and have consumed lots of books on many subjects, but I always return to my favorite types of romances for comfort and escape. I had a dream last night and Nora Roberts was in it. She was a little supercilious to me. This has never happened before, but isn't it strange that it happened at all?

Bah Humbug: In the past I was very Scrooge-bah-humbug at this time of year. I am feeling mellower now about the whole christmas thing, but I still wish there were some way to do without it altogether. I like my tree and the strange little ornaments the boys made as children and this and that little ornament gotten over the years. But that is about the only thing in the plus column about christmas. [The web has lots of spots with bah humbug themes, but none I really want to link to. The Slate article was amusing, though.]

Family Issues: I don't really want to deal with anything very painful tonight. So there are a few specific topics I will skip over including family health issues and my sister in law who was killed with her children in Afghanistan and this will be the first christmas without them.

About Really-Future Entries: In addition to sticking in this blog all my old journals, I am also planning to create entries from an alter ego who lives one hundred years in the future. Her name is Anne. I have some notes on her life. She lives in the Florida Keys, but she has a job that takes her all over the globe and the next big crisis will be in South America. I don't know where yet, but she really isn't inclined to go. I think her ex-boss will appeal to her vanity and her idealism, so she will get sucked in. She has a job that is very difficult to describe in terms that make sense in our current world. I will let Anne speak for herself soon.
I think I will post one historical journal entry, just to get a flavor of how this works.