Previous - 162. It's been a while
Sports!
Back by no demand.As usual, I'm writing not as the normal fan but in response to something remarkable. Our local basketball team, the Warriors, are in the Finals for the third straight year against the same other team -- the Cleveland Cavaliers. They won in 2015. They suffered a painful loss in 2016. Now they're doing "best 2 out of 3."
After the loss in the seventh game last year, the team when out and acquired one of the best players in basketball to fill the "three" position where they had been weakest. (Confusingly, the three position is also known as "small forward" but Kevin Durant, the new three is one of the taller players on the court.) KD, as he is commonly referred to, got an amazing amount of criticism for leaving his previous team, the competitive Oklahoma City Thunder, where he had been one of the two core stars. At GSW (Golden State Warriors), he is one of the four core stars -- if you can describe all but one of the starters as a "core." This is now an All-Star team at virtually every position except the five (center.) But the five is where it gets interesting for me. But let's stick with KD for a moment.
The notion that an athlete should make employment decisions based on preserving competitiveness in the league is odd. I can't imagine anyone actually doing that. The league might come up with rules that have that effect, but the player is always going to do what seems to be in his own best interest. In this case, KD seems to have believed that joining GSW would give him the best chance of getting a ring (winning a Championship) while also making him a better player by helping him improve on defense -- a strength of GSW.
And, listening to the analysis of the first two games which GSW have won decisively, what you most hear is what a revelation KD's play on defense has been. Nearly everyone says something like, "We all knew he was one of the best scorers in basketball but the way he is dominating as a defender is something new." And when the commentators are players -- either retired or stars who's teams have already been eliminated -- they are clear that the reason for KD's excellence is that on his new team he isn't expected to do everything himself. Surrounded by players who also excel at defense, he can do more with less.
His decision to join GSW is looking more and more like the no-brainer I always thought it was. Any player with his talent would have been a fool not to have made the decision to join what is generally accepted to be the best run team in the league.
And that brings us to the five position. To sign KD GSW had to part ways with all the players who had previously played center for them and to acquire new players at mostly bargain basement salaries. David West was an experienced older player who cared more about a shot at a ring than money. JaVale McGee had become a joke for his absentminded play and GSW signed him on an almost "what the hell, we'll give him a look" whim. Both of these players, along with the wonderfully named Zaza Pachulia, have managed to find ways to contribute to GSW's success and JaVale has even become a fan favorite for his enthusiastic play. While GSW is now much stronger at the three because of KD, it seems to be largely overlooked how much stronger they are at the five with these new members of the team.
And there are some younger players who've found ways to contribute. The world may see the Warriors as four All-Stars, but the role players -- older or new to the league -- are an important part of the picture. When GSW is dominating a game at the end of the third quarter, they can put in their reserves who almost always can hold their own, giving the starters time to rest for much of the final quarter.
The other thing about this team is that they have a lot of fun, which is fun to watch.
Thanks to my delay in publishing this, GSW has now gone to win the championship four games vs one loss. KD was the unanimous selection for Most Valuable Player in the series.
The Road to Character by David Brooks
Random House 2015
While there is something of Levin to Day -- her determined seeking after some greater truth and more supportive life -- I would just stick with a comparison with the Karamazov boys. She seems to be a curious mix of Dmitri and Alyosha. But mostly Dmitri. She is what Dmitri dreams of becoming while locked up at the end of the novel. And just as he doubts his ability to really change his life, Day never really seems to find the peace she keeps seeking. Ivan would tear her to pieces... and this despite her being familiar with his Grand Inquisitor.
What she actually reminds me of, even more than a Karamazov, is a heroin addict. She is always in need of support even as that support grows less effective. Even if she switched to methadone, and became a determined methadonian, she would need occasionally to add some real heroin to the mix.
What I can't see is her putting herself in the hands of an Elder. Her's seems to have been a very self-willed life of "obedience, servitude, and self-surrender" and sacrifice. I'm self-willed, too, but I'm not trying to turn my life over to God.
Yesterday I worked the Sikh Parade and Festival here. Aside from the distinctive dress, it was similar to many other events we work, with lots of food generating lots of (mostly compost) waste. By chance, it was a cold and windy day and, after we had secured our eco-station trash boxes to trees to prevent them blowing away, we were informed that wasn't allowed. So rather than doing my usual roving sorting of a bunch of busy stations, I was stuck at one station (that looked to be the busiest) as I was both monitoring the station and preventing it from blowing away. We had to have a person at each un-secured station -- which meant there weren't enough people to do roving sorting in other areas, and those stations (the ones I had put up, as it happens) got completely trashed.
But why this is going here is that unlike Dorothy Day, I realized while standing at my station for most of the day, correcting the sorting mistakes of the crowd, I do what I do because of the WORK not because of the people.
I would say she was motivated by her own need to help others, rather than their need. This works well for both parties as the people being "helped" often have no interest in changing, which means the "helpers" will never run out of people to enable, I mean "help."
But let's say I'm wrong about that. Maybe God really loves these people whose lives he has fucked up and God, the helper, and the helpee (?) all benefit from these good works. My motivation is quite different. There are two different ways of looking (justifying) what I do, but neither of them has anything to do with people exactly.
My goal when I work an event is to divert as much waste from the landfill as possible. (Also, to keep the event working smoothly, which means no over-flowing trash containers.) If I ever thought you could educate people (and especially vendors) to do their own sorting, it was a long time ago. I will explain as much as I can to the public (and the vendors) because it's part of my job, and I think I'm pretty good at it. But I don't expect them to give a shit. I'm more interested in getting the compost and recycling out than in transforming the crowd into environmentalists. My job satisfaction comes from looking at well sorted dumpsters at the end of the day. That's the first aspect of "the work."
Unfortunately, just as in my coding and technical writing career, I don't have complete control over the fate of my work. I've heard about the composting facilities where our dumpsters of food and paper get sent to, but I've never visited one and don't know how good of a job they really do. I don't even know for sure that all our dumpsters get sent there. And at some events I bag but don't dump the bags into the dumpsters, so, despite my bag labeling, all I can say is that I've done a super job of collecting a well sorted bag (usually of compost.)
Just as some of my best coding and best writing was for projects I either didn't care about or that were aborted before completion, I'm still satisfied with my work when the actual diversion rate falls short of what I would have hoped for, due to circumstances.
Of course, Dorothy Day and Mother Teresa may have felt the same way about their work.
Apotheosis
p102 Finally reading the end of the section of Dorothy Day and we're explicitly into how she, in the 1960s, was opposed both to the "bourgeois culture of commerce" and the "bohemian culture... [of] self-gratification."
p103 Day's life... was about the surrender of self and ultimately the transcendence of self... Through The Long Loneliness and her other writings she practiced a sort of public confession... Day's confessions were theological, too. Her attempts to understand herself and humanity were really efforts to understand God.
...
p104 [Shortly before she died to Robert Coles] ...I was going to try to make a summary [of her life] for myself, write what mattered most -- but I couldn't do it. I just sat there and thought of our Lord, His visit to us all those centuries ago, and I said to myself that my great luck was to have had Him on my mind for so long in my life!
Coles wrote, "I heard the catch in her voice as she spoke, and soon her eyes were a little most, but she quickly started talking of her great love for Tolstoy..."
I need to add something here from earlier in the chapter,
p79 She protested on behalf of the working classes. But the most vital dramas of her life were going on inside. She had become an even more avid reader, especially of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky (sic).
It's hard now to recapture how seriously people took novel reading then, or at least how seriously Day and others took it -- reading important works as wisdom literature, believing that supreme artists possessed insights that could be handed down as revelation, trying to mold one's life around the heroic and deep souls one found in books. Day read as if her whole life depended upon it.
...Day was "moved to the depths of my being" by Dostoyevsky...
Maybe I should re-title my blog, "Wisdom Literature." Maybe the author chose to focus on the Russians (this chapter really does assume a good deal from the reader), but I'm surprised she wasn't also influenced by The Magic Mountain, though that may have been too dry and cerebral. It's Father Zossima, not Ivan or Alyosha that attracted her in The Brothers Karamazov. A quick search on "Dorothy Day" and "The Magic Mountain" doesn't reveal much.
Do Millennials (or Gen Y or even Gen X) read novels the same way we did? Since "we" was a tiny fraction of my (and previous) generations, I suspect there are still some people who do. I think fiction is a perfectly reasonable way to do philosophy and a better than average way to expose others to philosophy. And it even is educational in two directions, the author has to consider what will attract an audience. I'm surprised The Magic Mountain was as influential as it was, but it's obvious why people read Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and metaphysics was the least of it.
Neighborhood characters
There's this small, older but not elderly, woman who is almost always walking, standing, or sitting somewhere on the three blocks of the street just below my building. She's probably a couple inches shorter than she started out, and I have a morbid curiosity to see what an X-ray of her spine would look like. The reason I notice her is that she is always smoking. I'm also curious as to whether she is on the street to smoke or if smoking just gives her something to do as she roams these blocks. I'm pretty sure she lives in a building in about the middle of her range, but that's just because I most frequently see her there.If I were the police -- and if I really cared about neighborhood policing -- I would be on good terms with her since she probably sees everything that happens on that section of street.
The second character I see much less frequently, only when I go to my second favorite pizzeria (this is not based on the quality of the pizza, neither my first nor second pizzerias have particularly good pizza). She seems to spend most of her time in this restaurant which she treats as her home. She opens and closes windows to suit herself. She makes them change what's on the TV to suit herself. She seems "personable" and knows everyone's name, but she drives me nuts and if I worked there I would poison her.
And she's both loud and chatty, which is why I've left the pizzeria and am finishing this at Starbuck's.
