I lived in Arizona briefly.   My parents recently moved there, from Boston, to a development in the hilariously-named town of Surprise.  (I always feel like I should type that in all caps, with an exclamation point.)

I’ve spent some time in Arizona.  In truth, I love a lot of things about that state.  The landscape is stunningly beautiful, it’s easy to get around, and I have a lot of good memories there.  I have a number of family members there, and they are thoughtful, intelligent people.

With all of that having been said, the discussion around immigration and the extreme measures AZ has taken recently in a purported effort to protect itself from the ills of illegal immigrants are frustrating me.  Here’s the thing.  I don’t pretend to completely understand.  I don’t know whether the net effect of the illegal immigrant population on Arizona’s economy is a positive one or a negative one.  I don’t know how much sales tax revenue is derived from that population, or what types of services are so subsidized by the use of inexpensive illegal labor that they would be come unprofitable and disappear or diminish if that labor force evaporated.  I don’t know if the citizens of Arizona (or of the rest of the U.S., for that matter) would be better or worse off if more resources were devoted to securing the border.  I don’t even know what the right approach to border security would be, or if we would benefit more as a society from the devotion of those resources to, say, cancer research, or improving education in economically-challenged schools.  I think the idea of devoting massive military or para-military resources to watching a line in the sand for fear of some dark, malevolent enemy swarming in seems, intuitively, to smack of fear and ignorance rather than rational risk and opportunity-based decision making.

My experience is admittedly limited.  When I was in Arizona, I saw many people whom I, in my ignorance, would probably guess were of Mexican descent.  They may have been from somewhere else; I am not especially talented at identifying ethnicity or national origin.  Because of the proximity of the Mexican border, I tended to assume they were Mexican.  I remember them.  Some were students, like me.  One was a genius, who scored a perfect score on his Math SAT, but couldn’t get a job at a gas station near campus, because they said they didn’t hire Mexicans.  I don’t remember ever seeing someone I perceived as Mexican and thinking: “lazy” or “criminal”.  That was never my assessment, based on objectively observable facts.  In the 100+ degree summer desert heat, you see a lot of darker-skinned guys working HARD, repairing streets, laying patio tile.  I remember wondering how they did it, how the human body could adapt to an environment as inhospitable as the surface of Mars.  I know this is just one observer’s opinion, and my opinion is not predicated on a foundation of quantifiable facts and figures, but my position is this:  I’ve observed Hispanic men and women adding value far more consistently than I have, for example, Caucasians.  I’ve seen less idle and sloth, less greed, less immorality, less conceit, less self-righteousness and less entitlement.  That’s not to say that there aren’t bad actors.  That’s just to say I have no evidence to support the position that immigrants from Mexico, regardless of legal status, have a net negative impact on our society.  I hear and read assertions that illegal immigrants are sending millions of dollars home to their families.  I read that they cross the border to have their children, so that their children will enjoy the benefits of U.S. citizenship in spite of the illegal act that made it possible.  I read that their presence elevates crime, takes jobs from hard working Americans, and strains our social welfare programs.  I’ve seen no evidence to support any of these claims.

I’m not generally a morally presumptuous guy.  I’ll admit that my gut tells me discriminating against anyone on the basis of race is intuitively wrong, but I’ll also acknowledge that I think I recognize the interests that people in Arizona are trying to protect.  People who are different from you can be scary.  People who are hungrier, more motivated, used to living with less, used to working harder for less, doing things you may not be willing to do… all of these things are genuinely intimidating and threatening, and that fear may not be irrational, per se.  My personal belief is that what is really scary here is the inevitable acknowledgement that the sense of entitlement we’ve cultivated for a few generations is unsustainable.  It’s easier to say the enemy is at the gates, and focus on trying to keep them out, than to recognize and deal with the fact that your son or daughter may not enjoy the same standard you’ve enjoyed.

Lean and hungry can be quite terrifying to fat and lazy.  I, for one, would welcome a reasoned discussion of immigration policy informed by well-documented facts and evidence in support of each proposed position.  Without resigning ourselves to amorality, I think it appropriate for rational decision-making to aggregate and analyze available information, and make a self-interested decision based on the best data available.  Even as I type that, I struggle with the word self-interested, as one would like to believe that decisions ought not be exclusively self-interested.  Still, as I said, I’m typically not morally presumptuous, and I think the challenge here from a moral philosophy perspective is the definition of “self” in self-interested.  I do think it appropriate for the United States to establish and define an immigration policy that is aimed at promoting national self-interest, which, if representative democracy works, should reflect the perceived self-interest of the citizenry.  We’ll tackle the “if democracy works” discussion another day.  It’s about time I get to work.

One of my favorite law professors, Jeff Rosen, recently spoke to NPR about “security theater” at airports. http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2010/01/law_prof_decries_security_thea.html

Bertrand Russell, reflecting upon his life:

“Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.
I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy—ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness—that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it, finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what—at last—I have found.
With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.
Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a hated burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.
This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.”

Driving in to work today, I listened to an NPR story about patients seeking medical information online. The general idea was that patients are, in some cases, better informed with information regarding their specific symptoms than their physician is during their initial consult. In fairness to doctors, it’s pretty easy to understand why this would happen. As a lawyer, I’m frequently approached by someone seeking legal advice about an area of the law outside of my area of expertise. I can’t give them an educated answer on the spot. A meaningful response would require thoughtful research. I think people give doctors even less latitude. They expect them to be omniscient, or nearly so.

I had a related experience a couple of years ago, which I wrote about here. My bulldog, Bella, had developed a limp, which had not resolved itself after a couple of weeks of restricted activity. I took her to a local vet, who relatively quickly suggested that it appeared to be shoulder dysplasia, and that she wanted to have a visiting orthopedic specialist come in and look at her xrays, after which she expected a surgery would be required. An hour of web research turned up a number of bulldogs roughly the same age as mine, presenting with similar symptoms. Several owners outlined horror stories of repeated surgeries and staggering vet bills still failing to solve the problem. Several also pointed out that this breed often goes through a period of growing pains, which can manifest in limps, and which will pass over time. I tried to bring my research to the vet’s attention, and she was wildly defensive. After some ridiculously dramatic back and forth, she suggested I find another vet, and made it clear that she was utterly disinterested in even considering the output of my research.

The happy ending of THAT story is that Bella’s limp has completely subsided. She developed a limp again after some rough play about a year or so after that vet’s diagnosis, after which I started giving her glucosamine supplements with her morning meal. Since those supplements began… no sign of any limp whatsoever.

I wonder what all of this means for the notion of subject matter expertise generally. As information becomes so widely searchable, and as trust models develop to help us sift through the noise and focus on information resources that are reasonably reliable, the value of storing a lot of information in your head seems to me to be radically diminished. Instead, there seems to be a marked shift underway, where the most valuable skill, by orders of magnitude, is the ability to ask the right questions, and the ability to organize the results of queries drawn from vast oceans of information into comprehensible meaningful answers. Thinking a lot about this, lately…

This reminded me (for reasons that are neither obvious nor logical), of a conversation I had with a good buddy a while back.  He’s a pretty conservative guy, who had always made me feel (not deliberately – he’s a good guy) more than a little bit guilty about not saving nearly as much as he was, on a percentage of income basis.  In response to his whining about his portfolio having lost 40% of its worth, I told him “see… if only you’d put your money where mine was going: exotic cars, guns and bulldogs, your investments would be performing precisely as expected.”

He wasn’t amused. 

Funny:

http://finance.yahoo.com/retirement/article/107414/surviving-the-end-of-civilization?mod=retire-planning&sec=topStories&pos=5&asset=&ccode=

I received my new iphone 3GS on Friday afternoon, just as promised, despite the AT&T website waiting until the last possible minute to post tracking information.  I had ordered in on June 10, from the AT&T website, as I had run my contract on my first-gen iphone, and figured the 3g speed and additional bells and whistles probably justified the upgrade.

 AT&T fumbled the ball horribly… When I received the phone, I followed all included instructions to activate it.  I received the nebulous and certainly-not-encouraging message “Awaiting Activation.  This may take a while.”  The first time I saw that, I thought the phrasing was pretty funny… it lost its comical appeal by the following morning.  I ran a few google searches, and saw that many others were having the same problems, and that some were receiving messages that it may take up to 48 hrs to resolve.  The only online advice was to keep cycling the power, so I tried that several times, to no avail.  It didn’t inconvenience me so much, actually, as my other iphone was still live, and I had a 2 hr drive ahead of me, with dinner plans at the other end, so I was doomed to wait until Saturday to play with my new toy, in any case.

On Saturday morning, I saw another post that indicated someone had called AT&T 10 times, and that they finally got their’s activated, and that they believed it would not have ever been successfully activated had they not jumped through the customer-support hurdles.  I thought I’d give it a shot, and see if I got lucky.  On my first call to AT&T, I was definitely NOT lucky.  The automated system first routed me to Apple, who, after a relatively short wait, politely advised me that this was an AT&T issue, and that I’d need to call back and talk to them to get it resolved.  I dutifully jumped back into the automated system, and landed at a call center somewhere in the US, where an unpleasant customer rep advised me that they couldn’t help, and that I needed to call Apple.  When I explained that I was looking at hundreds of posts online, and that what she was telling me was inconsistent with what ANYONE else was hearing, she slightly revised her response and said they had recieved an email that morning telling them that anyone with activation problems was supposed to go to an Apple or AT&T store to get it resolved.  I asked to speak with her supervisor, and, after a longer hold, was put on with her assistant supervisor.  I explained that the direction I was being given was inconsistent with everything I was seeing anywhere else, and that I believed what she was telling me was inaccurate.  She elaborated that there is an AT&T team that can resolve the activation issues, but that they will not take calls directly from customers, that they will only take calls from reps within the Apple or AT&T stores.  That’s probably about the time that I started getting really annoyed.  I explained that it wasn’t convenient for me to go to an Apple store or AT& T store, and that I wanted her to help me solve my problem directly.  She responded by saying that she would be happy to locate the nearest Apple or AT&T store, if I’d give her my address.  I got her name (which I left on a post-it, so I’m not including here), and hung up.

I figured I’d give it one more try before heading out to breakfast, so I dialed back in to AT&T, and was almost immediately answered by a delightful, competent rep, presumably from another call center.  (Probably the one that the assistant manager above had mentioned, and said she couldn’t transfer me to…)  She said my issue was simple to fix, that it was well known, and that it resulted from the fact that, because I had ordered online, something about my acceptance of the terms and conditions in connection with my plan change didn’t route through their system and trigger activation of my new SIM.  She activated my SIM (which deactivated my prior SIM, causing us to be disconnected and momentarily sending me into cardiac arrest), and called me back to make sure everything was working properly.  She apologized for my experience up to that point, accepted my gushing gratitude gracefully, and went on, hopefully, to help other customers having the same problem.

OK – all of that having been said… the phone is very cool.  I picked up a “moshi” case for it at Microcenter, which is really low-profile and doesn’t make the nice and slim phone too bulky.  I’m not seeing the huge battery life gains I had hoped for, but that may just be my perception, at this point.  I’ll post pics and vids soon in case anyone’s interested in the improved camera quality.

Time keeps racing by, relentlessly.

I am frustrated by my own tendency to dabble myself to death.  I mean that figuratively, in the sense that I take on so many projects, interests and hobbies, in conjunction with my already-demanding career and core personal commitments, that I sometimes feel doomed to achieve mediocrity in everything, rather than excellence at anything.  That’s not acceptible to me.  In a different sense, I mean it literally, in that time seems to accelerate with each passing year, and my proclivity to tinker and experiment, but never fully commit myself to any single effort, seems likely to carry me right through the 50 or so years I have left, probably without building the legacy of which I’m probably capable.

 So, how to fix it?  Well, I suppose a reasonable first step would be to look at the things I do today, and figure out where there are opportunities to change and improve.  That’s a daunting exercise, but one probably worth taking on.  I’ll add that to my list of things I want to do, as time permits.  Can’t do it tonight, though, as I have a guitar lesson, need to fold some laundry, finish customizing the linux install on my laptop, rip the dvds that come in today, play with my sort-of-new D300, and, of course, spend some quality time with the dogs, and absolutely have to get to bed at a reasonable hour so I can get up at 5:30 tomorrow morning for my morning workout.  Need to fit dinner in there somewhere, and have to water those plants on the front deck… and Brendan may finally be able to get a game in, which sure would throw a wrench in the gears…

OK, I couldn’t help myself… that title came to me at the gym this morning, and I chuckled, realizing that it sounded precisely like something I would’ve written, (and been quite proud of) in undergrad.

 So, by way of disclaimer, I don’t think this post is especially insightful, or brilliant, or that it even justifies the bits, bytes, or whatever else are wasted between between my writing and your ill-considered reading.  Still, I persist, and I will admit I’m amused by the self-referential irony of a post about a flavor of neo-exhibitionism trying and failing to satisfy the need for some sort of seminal relationship, some feeling of connectedness or “belonging-to”.

I, like everyone else, am inundated with inputs every day relating to social networks and other sorts of virtual touches that are facilitated or intermediated by technology, specifically networking technology.  I’ve written before about how people of “my generation”, (the thirty-somethings), have really taken to Facebook with an almost pathological passion.  I myself am guilty of checking in on old highschool friends, triggering nostalgia-sometimes-bordering-on-depression and often resulting in some random twitter about how old I feel.  The core of it seems to be, for me at least, that I have some faint memory of how incredible it felt to be that closeto people, to a fairly large group of people, and to feel like my life, my well-being, my interests, my emotions – were all somehow tangled up with, if not always completely aligned with, theirs.  I think I’ve settled on the conclusion that losing that seems to be a related to the process of maturing into real adulthood.  Maybe we have to become more emotionally disconnected (or at least focused on a very small core group of family/dependants), to manage the increased responsibilities that come with taking on “real life”.  I can’t help but think of that quote in Breakfast Club, that when you grow old, you inevitably become like your parents, in that your heart dies.  It really seemed that way, at times, looking down the road at adulthood from the passionate and intensely conflicted perspective of youth.

Jumping back to social networks, I can’t help but think they’re somehow a thin, sorry, and possibly dangerously illusory substitute for those real relationships we miss so desparately.  It’s like emotional fast food; it’s perpetually available, always there when you need a quick fix, seemingly satisfying in the moment, but nutritionally empty, and maybe even toxic when taken to gross excess.

Don’t get me wrong… I’m no luddite.  I’m so far the opposite that you’d have to know me to understand.  I tweet and post to facebook from my iphone, I have at least 8 computers in my home, (where I live alone, at the moment, save the dogs), and I maintain multiple websites for no immediately obvious reason.  I love technology, and I don’t want to imagine what my life would be like without the Internet.  I’m also not some socially-retarded shut-in.  I have, (I believe), very healthy relationships in my life, and I sincerely think that those who know me best will agree that I’m blessed with regard to friends, love, and family.  And I interact with all of the important people in my life, at least in part, across the very media that give me pause.  I appreciate the immediacy of those relationships that would never before have been possible.

 Still, I wonder how, in the midst of all of our tweets, status updates, friend requests and other white noise, the way we think and feel about one another, and how we create, maintain, and ultimately let go of relationships, is changing as a result of this perpetual and pervasive interconnectedness.

Steel grey skies

release the rains

that somehow make “out there”

so far away

No coherent theme today, just random thoughts and observations, sharing where my head’s at.

 I received an unprecedented amount of feedback to my 12 reps post.  I received comments here, messages on facebook, and direct emails.  It was surprising to me, that so many people read it, and, moreso, that so many people bothered to share their thoughts with me.  Of the responders, those with whom I’m closest tended to dive right to the obvious metaphor, and just express optimism that my perspective sounds promising.  Several other friends focused on the workout piece, and had questions or comments comparing my approach to their own.  One (you know who you are), was just critical, suggesting that I should get over myself and get a life.  To be fair, though, when I showed her some pictures of my new house, her initial reaction was to criticize my cheap toilets. I suspect she’s projecting some unresolved internal angst.  Still, she’s hilarious, and her husband’s a plumber, which is always a handy guy to know… so I’ll continue to cut her some slack.

Moving on…  I’m already sick of hearing about this Supreme Court strip-search case.  Seriously sick of it.  That any reasonable person thinks school officials should have unfettered authority to direct a teenage student to strip down is terrifying to me.  That they could do it based on nothing but the verbal accusation of another student who was herself trying to avoid punishment… absurd.  No matter how this case plays out, I would most certainly direct my child (when I have one) to insist that they call the police, and that they call me as soon as possible.

 So much to do, so little time… More soon.