Your parents' meet cute

In a recent episode, I mentioned in passing having "had the perfect meet cute with my dream woman 40+ years ago in the Hopkins cafeteria." I was surprised when Moriah texted me to get the scoop on the meet cute because I thought Dylan would have known the story, but he didn't, and apparently neither did the rest of you. So here it is.

A thousand butterflies

I just finished The Book of (More) Delights (2023), Ross Gay's endlessly entertaining second book of "essayettes," each documenting his delight of record every day for a year. Two of you at least should be able to appreciate this excerpt from his entry for July 7 about the courtesy of truckers:

Very occasionally, at night, when I'm tired but with miles to go before I sleep, I'll let myself slip into the fantasy that a truck behind my is a demon truck, like that Stephen King movie, and let it be said that Stephen King kinda ruined a lot of shit. Tell me you wouldn't be afraid to stay the winter for free in a big beautiful empty ski lodge with lots of food and these days probably Wi-Fi and a pool. Tell me you're not a little bit afraid of homecoming or prom or whatever. Tell me you're not a little bit afraid of bid cuddly slobbery dogs, or clowns, or '57 Chevys, or cornfields, or your pets, or your kids. See what I'm saying?

The Gray Lady goes rogue

Everyone knows how Brad and I love to do the Thursday through Saturday crosswords (the rest are too easy) from both the New York Times and Newsday, with Newsday's Saturday Stumper taking the prize as the best and most diabolical of them all. Dylan often complains about all of the "old people" clues and answers in crosswords. But more and more the New York Times is trying to prove a degree of coolness through some of the clues and answers in its crosswords. Last Friday's puzzle was about as far out on a limb as I've seen the Gray Lady, so nicknamed in part for its sober style, go:

 

Maybe the Times should change its famous slogan to "all the nudes that's fit to print." (And no, we did not need The Closer's help to finish this puzzle.)

 

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Outsourcing my blog, episode V: Moriah's back

When Dylan and I were staying in Charlottesville this spring, I made this every night for Jeopardy!. It comes together quick, and it’s just the right amount for one or two people to have a tasty few bites! 

Guest post #3: Susan's turn

[Moriah’s parents, Susan and Ezra, visited over the Memorial Day weekend to be here with Moriah for her birthday. Susan brought two yummy treats to share. The first photo below shows Moriah lovingly admiring a piece of the chocolate chip torte after we all sang “Happy Birthday” to her and Jancalo.]

This Hungarian chocolate chip torte is quick and easy to make, and one of our family’s favorite recipes. Moriah’s Grandma Eileen was a very good cook and she loved being with her family. She regretted being an only child and always wanted a big family, so she was proud to have four children and eight grandchildren. She used to make big family dinners for every Jewish holiday. She went to college in her 40's after raising her children and got her Master’s in social work. She always said that she wanted her family to be proud of her and we were!

She would have loved to meet Dylan and your whole family, and I'm glad you got to taste her torte in Charlottesville when we came to visit.

 

My 2023 reading

According to StoryGraph, I read 68 books, totaling 20,065 pages, in 2023. Of those, ⅔ were nonfiction and ⅓ were fiction, which is more fiction than usual. That's because I read all three books in the Scholomance series (teenage wizards, but incredibly dark) that Cassie recommended and all eight books in Mick Herron's Slough House series (so far; they were released from 2010 to 2022) that my friend Bill recommended. In a New Yorker profile, Jill Lepore asked "Is Mick Herron the Best Spy Novelist of His Generation?" I don't read enough spy novels to have an opinion, but I do highly recommend all of the Slough House books, as well as the three seasons of the Slow Horses series on Apple TV+ based on the first three books. 

As recent episodes might suggest, one of my contenders for the best nonfiction book I read in 2023 is The Good Life: Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness (2023) by Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz. The subtitle says it all. The book distills the lessons the authors learned as the director and co-director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development. They boil 85 years of the study down to one principle for living: "Good relationships keep us healthier and happier." They go through the evidence and give suggestions for how to "cultivate warm relationships" in all aspects of your life. There's a ton of good information in the book, conveyed in an approachable style.

 

As much as I enjoyed and learned from The Good Life, my favorite nonfiction book I read in 2023 is Why Fish Don't Exist (2020) by Lulu Miller, which I picked up for $1 at the Fall 2023 book sale after first learning about it on one of those employee recommendation cards at the independent Third Place Books shop near Dylan and Moriah's house. It's an odd book which doesn't fit into any neat categories. As the publisher describes it, it's part memoir, part biography of David Starr Jordan (the founding president of Stanford University), and part scientific adventure, but the total effect is significantly greater than the sum of its parts. The book is probably not to everyone's taste, but I found it both intellectually stimulating and packing an emotional punch. One of a kind.

Some other books I'd recommend if the subject matter interests are: Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us (2023) by Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross; The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder (2023) by David Grann; Sorry I'm Late, I Didn't Want to Come: One Introvert's Year of Saying Yes (2019) by Jessica Pan; Foreverland: On the Divine Tedium of Marriage (2022) by Heather Havrilesky; and Built to Move: The Ten Essential Habits to Help You Move Freely and Live Fully (2023) by Kelly Starrett and Juliet Starrett.

All the books I read in 2023

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20 percent bullshit allowance

I have a whole lineup of podcasts I listen to when I'm driving around or working out. Last week on the Next Big Idea podcast episode with Morgan Housel, author of The Psychology of Money (2020), I heard an idea I think is really useful: the "20 percent bullshit allowance." Housel explained it like this:

Like anything else in life, anything that is rewarding comes with a cost attached to it. And the cost for a lot of things in life is the willingness to put up with and endure uncertainty, hassle, nonsense, pain, bullshit, all of it. I think in anyone's life, you should give yourself a 20 percent bullshit allowance, that 20 percent of the time and 20 percent of the days, 20 percent of the things that happen are gonna be things where you're like, alright, I guess I gotta put up with this. My flight is delayed, my toilet is leaking, my car broke down, I'm sick, my kids are sick. Whatever it is, 20 percent of your life is going to be some form of b.s. And if you are not willing to put up with that, you are blown apart by the tiniest petty annoyance in your life.

This strikes me as a corollary of the idea that you'll have a happier life if you just lower your expectations. The best-known formulation of that idea is this equation (though there are variations*):

Happiness = Reality − Expectations

There's an article in Psychology Today describing the "pitfalls" of maintaining low expectations to boost happiness levels, but it can definitely have some benefits for those of us who let our enjoyment of some things (like new restaurants) suffer because our expectations going in are way too high. And it’s a great reminder that you can have an awesome vacation despite the inevitable travel hassles.

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*I've also seen the equation expressed as "Happiness = Reality/Expectations,”which really bumps up the effect of lowering expectations. In the much less pithy version in Mo Gawdat's book Solve for Happy (2017), he gives the equation as "Happiness ≥ your perception of the events of your life − your expectation of how life should behave."

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The good life, part II: Reach out

In "The good life, part I," I talked about The Good Life, Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz's 2023 book summarizing the chief lesson of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which started in 1939. The lesson is that social relationships of all kinds are the key to human health and flourishing. As Peggy Liu et al. put it in their 2022 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology on "The Surprise of Reaching Out," "[m]aintaining connections in one's social circle is essential to well being." Even "brief interactions with a wide range of relationship partners are associated with positive psychological outcomes, including increased social and emotional well-being, protection from stressful events and anxiety, personal growth, and increased cognitive functioning." But even though we probably all know that intuitively, we often find ourselves out of touch with family and friends.

 

Professor Liu and her colleagues set out to determine why people don't "reach out" more often. They defined "reaching out" very broadly to encompass just a "minimum criterion consisting of a gesture to check-in with someone to show that one is thinking about them—for instance, by sending a short message (e.g., to say hi, to say 'I'm thinking of you,' to say 'I hope you are well') or a small gift." The message could be delivered by email, text, or phone. Through a series of experiments, they documented a significant underestimation by the "initiators" of such reach outs as to how much the "responders" appreciate their efforts. The authors of the study also found evidence to support a simple explanation for the difference in how initiators and responders perceive the reach out: since the initiators know they are reaching out, they don't experience any surprise; by contrast, the responders have no idea the reach out is coming so they experience a pleasurable jolt of surprise.

 

This may seem like common sense, like a fair bit of social psychology research, but it's still a good reminder. If you're thinking about reaching out to someone you haven't seen or spoken to in a while, do it. It'll be appreciated more than you think and create a pleasant social interaction for both of you. Even a quick text message will do.

 

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It’s here!

There's nothing like waiting all summer for the figs on your tree to finally ripen, and then one day they are busting out all over. Fig season is better than Christmas! We have hundreds on the tree this year, and it looks like we'll be picking and eating them for a few weeks, hopefully. I know this is less exciting for most of you, but I read this passage recently in Ross Gay's Inciting Joy (2022), and it's describes my feelings perfectly:

And though it is the same sort of ridiculing joke I make to other fignoramuses, I myself was one and thought figs were more or less what was inside a newton. So, if you’re reading this book, probably you know that when I bit into the first one, it was soft, deep purple, and probably had the slightest tear at its eye, as, after turning the fruit in my mouth, did I. A ripe fig—this cultivar we speculate is either Brown Turkey or Chicago Hardy—is like that. It will make you cry. It will change your life.

It will change your life indeed.

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The first ever UaKS movie review

Barbie • PG-13 • 1:54

 

The first half was sufficiently tedious that I fell asleep and caught some much needed 💤, so that was a net positive.

 

In the second half of the movie, when most of the audience chuckled during one scene, a little girl seated two rows down exclaimed "What's so funny?! It's not funny!" Out of the mouths of babes …

 

I especially enjoyed when America Ferrera's character shouted what was literally the entire point of the movie at me, just in case I otherwise would have been too thick to understand it for myself. But I suppose subtlety is a luxury you can't afford when you're taking on the Patriarchy.

In the end, Barbie was doomed to come off second-best in a genre that was both defined and finished by Toy Story. Of course, it's entirely possible I think that just because Barbie had only a cameo role in the Toy Story sequels, while the stars were always two white males—and a cowboy and a spaceman to boot: I mean, how much more embedded in the Patriarchy can you get than Woody and Buzz?

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Two old geezers talking about skid marks

Last night we were talking to Dylan through FaceTime while he made some Vegetable Broth Base, which Dylan insisted a while back that I bold on the "Recipes" page and that he says is their "most-used recipe," probably "3x a week," so you never know what's going to catch on with someone. While we were chatting, Dylan showed us the latest feature of their revamped kitchen—a pegboard modeled on the one pictured above in the UaKS header 🠝🠝🠝🠝🠝🠝🠝🠝🠝🠝🠝🠝🠝🠝🠝🠝🠝🠝🠝🠝🠝🠝🠝🠝. I love that Moriah spray-painted it a bright color to bring a pop of JOY into their kitchen.

 

Among the other topics of conversation was that it's a good thing Brad is still home so it's not just "two old geezers talking about skid marks" in their underwear. So any pride I felt at having Dylan and Moriah make use of the "two best features" of Dylan's formative kitchen—the pegboard and the spice drawer—was tempered by a solid dose of reality. Thanks for keeping it real, Dylan!

 

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The Index Card of Fatherly Wisdom, Second Edition

Each of you went off to college with a copy of the Index Card of Fatherly Wisdom strategically placed somewhere in your belongings for you to find after Mom and I dropped you off. (You did find it, right?). The original formulation contained just two principles and four words and I haven't felt much need to revise it over the years.

 

 

Still, I've always worried that the first principle maybe sounds a bit too moralistic when that wasn't what was intended. Then Jim Ryan was appointed the President of UVA and brought with him the idea for the University to be "great and good" in everything it does. Although the Index Card of Fatherly Wisdom™ predated UVA's new slogan, the University does, for better or worse, have a greater reach than I do, making my first principle now sound derivative.

 

And so, I am finally taking the opportunity to make some small changes to the Index Card of Fatherly Wisdom™. While I undertake this task with great trepidation, knowing that my principles have undoubtedly guided every big decision you've made over the years, I think you'll find it a worthwhile exercise.

 

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Vulture rehab

The fall Friends of the Library book sale is being held this week, and it is one to remember! Not because it was a particularly good selection—I did much better in the spring—but because Brad finally came with Mom and me, voluntarily! And not only did he not stare over my shoulder like a vulture trying to get me to leave as quickly as possible, as in the past, but this time he actually picked out some good books for himself. In fact, whereas I only spent $10 on myself (the first Friday night), Brad spent $25.* Progress!

 

Here are my buys from several visits to the book sale (as you probably could have guessed from the Successful Aging title):

This is what $30 buys you at the book sale

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*Brad would insist that I tell you here that $12 of that was for just one book: a signed, first-edition copy of The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehishi Coates, which was the only copy he could find. Cassie told him not to read it, but to instead encase it in glass because someday it will be worth "millions." I'm not so sure about that, though it already appears to be worth more than $12.

 

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Gathering the shards

Of the happiness-enhancing activities I've tried over the years, running every day has provided the biggest bang for my buck. But running requires staying healthy, which can be a challenge even when I'm just sitting on my ass at work. Other than running, the practice I've stayed with the longest is Three Good Things, which is one way of just noticing delights. The way I've done this practice the last few years is to sit down every night right before going to bed and write down in a notebook three to five good things that happened to me that day. These don't have to be big things, even small delights like seeing a hummingbird feeding at the plants outside counts. The benefit of doing this practice at night is I have to look back through my day to figure out what the little (or big) delights were. After a while, I started looking for delights throughout my day, which has proven crucial for me in turning a generally negative outlook on life into a generally positive one.

I recently read Bittersweet (2021) by Susan Cain, who described a wonderful metaphor for this practice from the Kabbalah,

the mystical version of Judaism which teaches that all of creation was once a vessel filled with holy light. But it shattered, and now the shards of divinity are scattered everywhere, amidst the pain and ugliness. ... Sometimes it’s too dark to see them, sometimes we’re too distracted by pain or conflict. But our task is simple—to bend down, dig them out, pick them up. And in so doing, to perceive that light can emerge from darkness, death gives way to rebirth, the soul descends to this riven world for the sake of learning how to ascend. And to realize that we all notice different shards; I might see a lump of coal, but you spot the gold glimmering beneath.

I love this image so much. Now, instead of just looking for delights everywhere, I'm also gathering the shards of holiness that are scattered all around us. When I see a shard and pick it up, it's a little moment of transcendence.

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The cookie exchange, episode II

I was supposed to get to these cookies shortly after publishing episode I on last year's cookie exchange with Mom and her female work buddies but c'est la vie. Among the favorites Mom always brings home from the cookie exchange are the ROLO® Pretzel Delights I wrote about in December and these faux "Honey Bunches," which are apparently copycats of the ones that C'ville Coffee has been selling for years. I can neither confirm nor deny how close these are to the originals since I've never had them (or anything else, sorry) from C'ville Coffee, but Mom says those are dang good. Others apparently think so, too, because there are at least two copycat recipes floating around the internet. I went with the first one, which matched the ingredients in the instructions provided by Mom's friend who makes these every year for the cookie exchange. I made only one change in decreasing the brown sugar by 25%, since I've always found these a touch too sweet for me (though they're still plenty sweet). Whether or not they approximate what’s available from C’ville Coffee, they are tasty little treats.

 

Better late than never, episode II

For Cassie's birthday, I almost always make, at her request, some kind of strawberry dessert: usually strawberry shortcakes, but it could also be Grandma Pina's Strawberry Cream Cake or, if I'm feeling really ambitious or we're feeding a crowd, the Cook's Illustrated Strawberry Cream Cake. This year, though, Cassie asked for Katherine Redford's Chocolate Chip Cookies, so that's what she got.

 

But yesterday I was looking through my folder full of recipes I set aside to try (and cleaning out the ones I've changed my mind about) and saw this one, which is a simpler strawberry cake than any of the ones I listed above. Mom had just brought home a big container of strawberries, so I decided to give this a shot. It was really easy to throw together, and we all liked it a lot, especially the Strawberry Girl herself, who specifically asked that I post the recipe.

 

The cookie exchange

Mom has been attending the fabled cookie exchange with her female work buddies every year for many years. One year, Mom talked me into attending, only to have me discover, too late, that men aren't really invited.

 

For some odd reason, one of our family's favorites among the cookies Mom brings home every year are these pretzel delights. If you buy a package of ROLO® candies, you'll see the "recipe" printed right there on the back of the bag. At our taste testing, we were split between topping the softened candy with another pretzel or a pecan half, the latter being as stated and pictured on the bag. Brad helpfully suggested that gently toasting the pecans first would probably give these a hint more sophistication, and I concur.

 

Use a microwave, episode II

When Brad got home for his week off for Thanksgiving, he took Carter's famous "Don't have to" to the next level. Not long after he arrived, Mom said we were going to need some help with three visitors here and she'd start assigning chores. Brad immediately put the kibosh on that idea, loudly announcing that "I ain't doin' squat!" Mom remembered that we never did squat either when we visited Grandma Pina and Grandpa Guy and how much we appreciated the break. Of course, neither of us dared to proclaim "We ain't doing squat!" when we got there, but I guess we didn't have to, because Grandma Pina wasn't about to let us lift a finger anyway. So now Mom knows just to keep her list of chores to herself when you visit. You can thank your little brother for that one.

 

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Littlewood’s law of miracles

The law of truly large numbers holds that with a large enough number of samples (as opposed to a single sample), any outrageous thing is likely to be observed. A particular application of the law of truly large numbers is Littlewood's law of miracles. Cambridge University mathematician John Edensor Littlewood calculated that any one person is likely to see something they think is miraculous, but he described as merely surprising, about once a month. Littlewood defined a "miracle" as an event of special significance occurring at a frequency of one in a million. He then figured that the average person who's paying attention (he made these calculations before people walked around all day with their snoots buried in their smartphones) sees one "event" per second. If we're alert for about eight hours a day, that means we take in 28,800 events per day (8 hours x 60 minutes x 60 seconds = 28,800 seconds/events a day). If a "miracle" is a one-in-a-million occurrence, then we'd all expect to see a miracle every 34.7 days, or a little less than once per month.

I know Littlewood was showing that what we perceive to be miraculous events are actually pretty commonplace. But somehow I see the opposite in his numbers. Be mindful of your surroundings and you'll see an exceptional event once a month. That's pretty darn cool, even if it's not "miraculous." Now look up from your smartphones and start paying attention.

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The right Mou for the job

Ever since our beloved AS Roma shocked the soccer world by hiring José Mourinho—the self-anointed "Special One"—to be their next coach, Brad, Dylan, and I have agonized over the choice. On the one hand, he's one of the most successful football managers ever, having won multiple trophies, including the Champions League with two different teams, one of them the treble-winning Inter Milan during his first stint in Italy. On the other hand, he's achieved that success largely by developing a bunker mentality amongst his players and playing a defensive brand of football ("parking the bus") that is not the least bit pleasing to the eye. But here, based on his response to the question of what is his favorite music, we have definitive proof that Roma has found the right man for the job:

 

 

 

Daje, José, you're now the Boss, too!

 

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