I recently re-happened upon Stanley Bing's blog and enjoyed reading some of his material. It had been awhile since I had read Bing, and so the return of that joy was tempered by my own realization that I had not bothered to enter a single thing on our own blog for over a month. It's not as if we haven't had much going on; we've been just as busy as ever. I just haven't felt much like anything I have to offer is of value. And so I'm sorely tempted to just have a moment of stream-of-consciousness writing.
Why do they call it "stream" of consciousness? It's more like a trickle, really, like that little bead of water slowly making its way down a windowpane after it rains. Heads in one general direction (down) but, oops, just now veered right, then left, obeying its own impulses. Well, if beads of water had impulses. Or warp drives, for that matter. Although could you imagine the carnage if raindrops fell at the speed of light, or greater? A tiny chunk of ice destroyed a space shuttle; the momentum of a raindrop at c would be just ridiculous. Tiny mass, immense velocity. All speed, no vector, at least that's how it feels sometimes around the office. Not "The Office," mind you, but the one I work in, or try to, weekdays. And lately a couple of weeknights, and if Dave's right, a weekend day may be in my future this weekend. I do appreciate what Secretary Baldridge did for America, but this writeup for the Baldridge Award is not going as well as it needs to. It doesn't yet "sing," and unfortunately it's my job to make it sing. Which is what I'm pondering doing for Redeemer's Song; they need another male vocalist (desperately; there are five women at the moment) probably moreso than they need a fourth-string drummer. But if I can't keep the beat, maybe I can keep to the right key. Unless that key's the one to the Sable, which will be handed over to Debi and Courtney this summer when at least Courtney arrives for summer duty. Until she gets used to NoVA traffic, I expect there'll be a lot of time spent at the pool--which is fine, and better than just going down to the stream behind the house. Hey, maybe I should write something in "stream-of-consciousness" sometime.
Like how I came full circle with that?
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Thursday, March 31, 2011
Transitions
Tony Bladen retires tomorrow. And my mom's new assisted-living apartment is ready for her to move in.
On the face of it, these two facts have little in common. Tony rose from a GS-3 clerk to become an Assistant Director of the FBI in his 29 years. I came to know him about five years ago, when I moved to the admin section in DI and Chris took me around to meet some key people. He was always a great go-to guy, expected a lot out of you but was willing to give even more of himself. He took the chance on bringing me into his RPO nearly three years ago and I've appreciated all that that opportunity meant. Today was his retirement ceremony and the stream of the most senior leaders in the organization who stood up to testify to his incredible accomplishments, to his sacrifice, and to the loyalty he inspired in others, was outstanding as a testament to the kind of man he is.
Monday we took possession of my mom's new apartment, and Adam and I took the day to put two coats of paint on the walls (and only one on ourselves, which is a pretty decent ratio). The painting wrapped up at the end of the day, in late afternoon shadows, so I returned Tuesday for touchup work and to ready other aspects of the space--the phone, the TV, assembling a couple of pieces of furniture, that sort of thing. Oh, sure, there's a small punchlist of items they need to finish in there before Mom arrives, but they have nearly two weeks to accomplish those. But we load the truck in Vermont next Wednesday, and unload it in Virginia next Friday, and then Mom and the cat arrive Monday the 11th, for keeps.
And so I find myself in a place of transitions, of people moving on to the next stages in their lives around me. Transitions are often a place where one can pause, and take stock. And in the one instance, I hear the voices saying, "Your retirement won't be anything like that. People won't say anything about how wonderful you were, how much you accomplished, because let's face it, you're just an average bureaucrat." (The voices often aren't kind.) And at the same time, in the other instance, I am doing what little I am (as compared to my sister who, let's see, packed a house, oversaw a home remodel, and then sold a house within 96 hours), in the hopes that it will be sufficient to ease my mother into her next chapter in life. The one has a tinge of selfishness to it, the other a tinge of selflessness; the one a sense of paling in comparison and the other a sense of paling before What It All Means. And yet both are bound in the realm of transitions, which seems to be much on my mind as March comes to a close.
Will I engender the kind of respect and love that wove through Tony's retirement celebration, or will mine be "Oh, was he still here? I thought he left years ago"? Will we successfully manage the move of my mom into an entirely new phase in her life, or will this be something she regrets for the rest of her days? That's the thing about transitions: it's not really possible to tell which way the fork in the road is taking the traveler. Yet they're inevitable, there are often no manuals to follow, and how we muddle through tells us a lot about the kind of person we are. So here's to the next set of transitions I'm managing; let's raise a glass to Tony and to my mom, who, after all, really do have the much more difficult transitions to be making than I am. And then back to work.
On the face of it, these two facts have little in common. Tony rose from a GS-3 clerk to become an Assistant Director of the FBI in his 29 years. I came to know him about five years ago, when I moved to the admin section in DI and Chris took me around to meet some key people. He was always a great go-to guy, expected a lot out of you but was willing to give even more of himself. He took the chance on bringing me into his RPO nearly three years ago and I've appreciated all that that opportunity meant. Today was his retirement ceremony and the stream of the most senior leaders in the organization who stood up to testify to his incredible accomplishments, to his sacrifice, and to the loyalty he inspired in others, was outstanding as a testament to the kind of man he is.
Monday we took possession of my mom's new apartment, and Adam and I took the day to put two coats of paint on the walls (and only one on ourselves, which is a pretty decent ratio). The painting wrapped up at the end of the day, in late afternoon shadows, so I returned Tuesday for touchup work and to ready other aspects of the space--the phone, the TV, assembling a couple of pieces of furniture, that sort of thing. Oh, sure, there's a small punchlist of items they need to finish in there before Mom arrives, but they have nearly two weeks to accomplish those. But we load the truck in Vermont next Wednesday, and unload it in Virginia next Friday, and then Mom and the cat arrive Monday the 11th, for keeps.
And so I find myself in a place of transitions, of people moving on to the next stages in their lives around me. Transitions are often a place where one can pause, and take stock. And in the one instance, I hear the voices saying, "Your retirement won't be anything like that. People won't say anything about how wonderful you were, how much you accomplished, because let's face it, you're just an average bureaucrat." (The voices often aren't kind.) And at the same time, in the other instance, I am doing what little I am (as compared to my sister who, let's see, packed a house, oversaw a home remodel, and then sold a house within 96 hours), in the hopes that it will be sufficient to ease my mother into her next chapter in life. The one has a tinge of selfishness to it, the other a tinge of selflessness; the one a sense of paling in comparison and the other a sense of paling before What It All Means. And yet both are bound in the realm of transitions, which seems to be much on my mind as March comes to a close.
Will I engender the kind of respect and love that wove through Tony's retirement celebration, or will mine be "Oh, was he still here? I thought he left years ago"? Will we successfully manage the move of my mom into an entirely new phase in her life, or will this be something she regrets for the rest of her days? That's the thing about transitions: it's not really possible to tell which way the fork in the road is taking the traveler. Yet they're inevitable, there are often no manuals to follow, and how we muddle through tells us a lot about the kind of person we are. So here's to the next set of transitions I'm managing; let's raise a glass to Tony and to my mom, who, after all, really do have the much more difficult transitions to be making than I am. And then back to work.
Saturday, March 19, 2011
Daddy's New Toy...er, Car: The Midlife-Mobile!
I've got a great wife, I really do.
When it came time to start thinking of a successor to the 2002 Sable, Mary told me to go ahead and get something fun, get something I really wanted, and so I started looking at four-seat convertibles. I've driven a couple--recall the Mustang we rented for David's birthday on the Cape last summer--and when all was said and done, I had a tossup choice between the Lexus IS350C and the Infiniti G37 convertibles. (Yeah, I drove the BMW 3-series one...it really didn't impress, and seemed more work than fun to drive.)
I went back and forth on it awhile; there for a bit it was really an even race. The Infiniti had better rear visibility, slightly better mileage, and would probably be a touch cheaper. The Lexus just *felt* better, and to be honest, it had more toys on it (paddle shifters!), and when the car is itself supposed to be "something fun," well...
I'd always been so practical in the cars I'd bought myself--a Mazda 323, a Sable--and received as hand-me-downs (the Sundance, once Mary bought the Mystique) that the ability to make a choice based on "fun" was so unusual it took me a couple of days to pull the trigger. But when I did, we got it!
I'm now enjoying tooling around Northern VA as the weather begins to warm and the sun shines. Sarah, who expressed such aversion to a convertible at the beginning of this process (see "Getting What We Want" in the archive), now allows that riding home from school with the top down is a fun thing to do on a bright spring day. And David certainly enjoys the cool-by-association factor of pulling up to the bus stop in the morning in it. ("Your car is really cool, Dad"--I finally made it to the "cool" side of the proto-teen!)
Is it practical? Meh. I can get the kids to and fro, and yes, the d-pole for lacrosse does barely fit in the cabin. I can get a couple of bags in the trunk with the top down, but this is no long-distance cruiser. It's great that the kids are old enough to not need carseats, I can certainly say that. But with the Sienna rolling fine (just paid off the loan on it one day before we bought the Lexus!), we have the family-hauler as well as the haul-@$$-er. And cliche though it may be for a 43-year-old guy to get a convertible, tough: I've got one and I'm lovin' it. And if you don't give me too hard a time about it, you might get to come for a ride some April day.
When it came time to start thinking of a successor to the 2002 Sable, Mary told me to go ahead and get something fun, get something I really wanted, and so I started looking at four-seat convertibles. I've driven a couple--recall the Mustang we rented for David's birthday on the Cape last summer--and when all was said and done, I had a tossup choice between the Lexus IS350C and the Infiniti G37 convertibles. (Yeah, I drove the BMW 3-series one...it really didn't impress, and seemed more work than fun to drive.)
I went back and forth on it awhile; there for a bit it was really an even race. The Infiniti had better rear visibility, slightly better mileage, and would probably be a touch cheaper. The Lexus just *felt* better, and to be honest, it had more toys on it (paddle shifters!), and when the car is itself supposed to be "something fun," well...
I'd always been so practical in the cars I'd bought myself--a Mazda 323, a Sable--and received as hand-me-downs (the Sundance, once Mary bought the Mystique) that the ability to make a choice based on "fun" was so unusual it took me a couple of days to pull the trigger. But when I did, we got it!
I'm now enjoying tooling around Northern VA as the weather begins to warm and the sun shines. Sarah, who expressed such aversion to a convertible at the beginning of this process (see "Getting What We Want" in the archive), now allows that riding home from school with the top down is a fun thing to do on a bright spring day. And David certainly enjoys the cool-by-association factor of pulling up to the bus stop in the morning in it. ("Your car is really cool, Dad"--I finally made it to the "cool" side of the proto-teen!)
Is it practical? Meh. I can get the kids to and fro, and yes, the d-pole for lacrosse does barely fit in the cabin. I can get a couple of bags in the trunk with the top down, but this is no long-distance cruiser. It's great that the kids are old enough to not need carseats, I can certainly say that. But with the Sienna rolling fine (just paid off the loan on it one day before we bought the Lexus!), we have the family-hauler as well as the haul-@$$-er. And cliche though it may be for a 43-year-old guy to get a convertible, tough: I've got one and I'm lovin' it. And if you don't give me too hard a time about it, you might get to come for a ride some April day.
Monday, February 28, 2011
Words Fail?
If I were better-educated, or at least better able to pull off the upper-crust affect that would work in this sentence, I'm sure there's some fancy (probably German) word for how these last few days have felt. It's not schadenfreude, it's not angst, it's not ennui (wait, that's French)...but I'm not sure how exactly to describe it.
The examples at work go like this: On returning to the office this morning after a weekend in Vermont, I began making the list of the various projects and due-outs that I need to be on top of. Some of them were pretty darn immediate, like letting Procurement know whether we had any mission-essential contracts before noon. And as I look down the list, there's already a number of tickmarks that I've crossed off.
But the principal ones I'm stuck waiting on someone else before I can do anything. Whether it's data quality validation for a project for the ADD, or data collection for a GAO audit, or the go-ahead for publishing the first-quarter business metrics reports, or the "OK" to use the new briefing materials I produced for outbound SACs, or the "looks fine" on our statement of top Division accomplishments since 2001, I'm left waiting on others inside or outside my Division before I can get anything done. Consequently, I'm left vaguely bored, and having to chew on lower-level projects that frankly I don't wanna do right now, just to kill the rest of the day.
There's a similar something like that happening around the house. I know in four weeks I'll be taking the day off to begin painting my Mom's new assisted-living apartment, and that between now and then there's some work that needs to be done, and certainly from that day out there will be tasks. But right now, it's waiting...it's far too soon to buy paint (it'll separate back out again in a month), we can't arrange phone service until we know her room number. So in anticipation of what will likely be a busy end of March and early April, I can get started on...well, nothing.
So how *do* we describe this feeling? It's not really "boredom," although there's probably an element of it, because there's certainly things that *can* be done, just not the A-level priorities right now. It's not just the cliched "calm before the storm"--there's something a little deeper than that at work. It's not "burnout," because I'm actually looking forward to doing the business metrics and having the outreach paper back to work on it again, and so on.
If only I'd studied German more. I'm sure there's some Freudian word out there for this.
The examples at work go like this: On returning to the office this morning after a weekend in Vermont, I began making the list of the various projects and due-outs that I need to be on top of. Some of them were pretty darn immediate, like letting Procurement know whether we had any mission-essential contracts before noon. And as I look down the list, there's already a number of tickmarks that I've crossed off.
But the principal ones I'm stuck waiting on someone else before I can do anything. Whether it's data quality validation for a project for the ADD, or data collection for a GAO audit, or the go-ahead for publishing the first-quarter business metrics reports, or the "OK" to use the new briefing materials I produced for outbound SACs, or the "looks fine" on our statement of top Division accomplishments since 2001, I'm left waiting on others inside or outside my Division before I can get anything done. Consequently, I'm left vaguely bored, and having to chew on lower-level projects that frankly I don't wanna do right now, just to kill the rest of the day.
There's a similar something like that happening around the house. I know in four weeks I'll be taking the day off to begin painting my Mom's new assisted-living apartment, and that between now and then there's some work that needs to be done, and certainly from that day out there will be tasks. But right now, it's waiting...it's far too soon to buy paint (it'll separate back out again in a month), we can't arrange phone service until we know her room number. So in anticipation of what will likely be a busy end of March and early April, I can get started on...well, nothing.
So how *do* we describe this feeling? It's not really "boredom," although there's probably an element of it, because there's certainly things that *can* be done, just not the A-level priorities right now. It's not just the cliched "calm before the storm"--there's something a little deeper than that at work. It's not "burnout," because I'm actually looking forward to doing the business metrics and having the outreach paper back to work on it again, and so on.
If only I'd studied German more. I'm sure there's some Freudian word out there for this.
Monday, December 20, 2010
Parallels
Certain times in the year remind me of my dad. Obviously, his birthday and Father's Day; obviously the anniversary of his passing. Christmas, yes, to a degree--although not as much as when my mom passes, since practically half the ornaments on the tree are ones she made or gave to us.
But I found myself caught unexpectedly last week with the passing of Ambassador Richard Holbrooke on December 13th. I never knew the Ambassador, it probably goes without saying. But a number of the circumstances surrounding his death brought my dad's back to mind in a way I hadn't expected.
Amb. Holbrooke was 69. He was at work, in a meeting with Secretary Clinton, when he took ill and was rushed to the hospital; surgeons quickly identified a torn aorta and set to work trying to repair it. As I understand it, he survived the surgery, but complications set in and he passed rather suddenly.
The parallels affected me moreso than the passing of probably any other Washington figure this year. The age, 69, was the same. The fact that it was a failing heart that first brought him to the attention of doctors. The notion that he survived the surgery but not the aftermath--or, as my own dad had put it en route to the hospital for the last time, "the surgery was a success, but the patient died anyway." And the collective Wow of people coming to grips with the suddenness of the loss, the capriciousness with which we all live day by day.
One radio commentator observed how his passing shows the importance of living each day as if it were the last, because, You Never Know. I confess to not being able to do that, especially at this time of year, so wrapped with To-Do-Lists as we are. But the gentle reminder embodied in the passing of the late Ambassador has stuck with me. God willing I can so order my life that way.
But I found myself caught unexpectedly last week with the passing of Ambassador Richard Holbrooke on December 13th. I never knew the Ambassador, it probably goes without saying. But a number of the circumstances surrounding his death brought my dad's back to mind in a way I hadn't expected.
Amb. Holbrooke was 69. He was at work, in a meeting with Secretary Clinton, when he took ill and was rushed to the hospital; surgeons quickly identified a torn aorta and set to work trying to repair it. As I understand it, he survived the surgery, but complications set in and he passed rather suddenly.
The parallels affected me moreso than the passing of probably any other Washington figure this year. The age, 69, was the same. The fact that it was a failing heart that first brought him to the attention of doctors. The notion that he survived the surgery but not the aftermath--or, as my own dad had put it en route to the hospital for the last time, "the surgery was a success, but the patient died anyway." And the collective Wow of people coming to grips with the suddenness of the loss, the capriciousness with which we all live day by day.
One radio commentator observed how his passing shows the importance of living each day as if it were the last, because, You Never Know. I confess to not being able to do that, especially at this time of year, so wrapped with To-Do-Lists as we are. But the gentle reminder embodied in the passing of the late Ambassador has stuck with me. God willing I can so order my life that way.
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