Beginning With A Bi-Modal Distribution

Three things: One for the youth, born full of hope/One for the blogger, indiscreetly wise/One for the prof, at the end of his rope/One post to join them all, where the shadow lies.

First, the oldest nephew blew through Kitsilano on Sunday on his way to Point Grey and the heartstoppingly beautiful campus of the University of British Columbia.

From Alaska-in-Pictures.com. Why? Because this is one of  the  great things you see on an Alaskan cruise. Book yours today!

That's 29 years, give or take a day, after I did the same thing. I've every reason to hope that he'll do better than me (first year flunk-out become History PhD working at a grocery store), but if you have a somewhat underemployed failed-intellectual uncle living in a garret,* you better damn well know that he's going to be looking out for you as best he can. And while hitherto failed-intellectuals have been content to observe the world, the point, rather, is to change it. By posting on their blogs. Tremble, ye kings and potentates, for I wield Blogspot, and am over-caffeinated!

Second, Brad Delong, driven to distraction by the intractably high unemployment rate, chanced to utter the secret that we generally keep from nice young boys like my nephew: that getting a job depends far more on who you know than how hard you try. Third, there is Paul Campos on the "law school scam." I've linked to a short post at Lawyers, Guns and Money in my Tolkien pastiche above, but he goes on at much greater (and fully justified length) here. So I'm going to put it all together with an insight from an earlier round of the same discussion. Specifically, it is hard for most beginning lawyers to repay their student loans, because the claimed high average pay of beginning lawyers in fact masks a noncontinuous distribution of incomes. Something's going on here: just check out this attempt to defend these statistics, and the acid comments following.

 Some law students, generally the ones with the highest grades at the Top 20 law schools, get into prestigious legal firms that charge deep-pocket clients very high hourly rates to do their vital work for them. So where you went to school determines your salary. Or, in fact, whether you get any salary for legal work at all. And that's why you get this emergent bimodal distribution of legal incomes.

What I'm here to argue is that this isn't a peculiarity of law school, but rather a much more common phenomenon that plays a crucial role than is obvious in the state of things today. The bimodal distribution isn't a bug. It's a feature. Okay. It's a bug, too. It can be both!

*The self-pity party aside, I actually have a pretty sweet contract. It's just that it took thirteen years for the middle-class pay, benefits, paid time off and generous vacation provisions to vest. The garret's because Kitsilano is expensive. And it's expensive because it's such a nice play to live. You pays your money...

July, Birthdays and Bigger Things

You can see Hornby Island from my mother's place, poking around the corner of Denman Island. I don't have photos. I can make them, now, because I haz joined the 21st Century and got a smartiephone. Now all I need is smarts! Or time to learn how to use the phone. Or fewer excuses. You take your choice of reasons. (The smart money is on the last.)

So I stole a picture!

Stole it from here!

About the same angle, shot from a great deal closer. You take the ferry to Vancouver Island, then you take another ferry to Denman Island, then you take another ferry to Hornby. Sounds easy enough, but imagine the worst three connection bus trip you've ever been on (no, not Greyhound, that's too horrible), and that's what a three connection ferry trip is like. Except that you can do your waiting in bars and cafeterias, which is better than hanging around at the bus stop. Though that might be a bit of torture for young men trying to live on what musicians make.

It's hard to imagine a worse venue for a music festival. It's just such a drag to get there. Or maybe it's the best venue, because the journey is the destination. But I'm going to go with the former. The audience there might be enthusiastic, but it's also small. Hard to imagine so much enthusiasm after such a long trip, but maybe they were waiting for the band. Maybe, for once, they got there before she was gone.

I went on the ferry to celebrate my birthday, to my mother's house, a place just south of the ferry landing for Denman. It was just past her birthday, and not that far from my aunt's, come to that. And my brother marked the occasion by bringing his wife and as many of my other set of nephews and niece (Hi, Katy, if you ever read this!) as he could. The eldest was absent, working at a grocery store. The second-eldest went to see Harry Potter with his girlfriend and worked a closing shift that night. Because when you're young, you can do that. He also showed me how to do some things with my new iPhone. My brother has been to Denman Island, and so has the second-eldest.

There's irony to knowing that both of the older boys have summer jobs in the grocery business. And there's a sense of Death's grey wings brushing by, knowing that the eldest will be at university in less than a month.

I never took the turn for the ferry to Denman Island, although I've been there, on Pearl's boat. If I'd listened to her when I was as young as these musician boys, maybe I would have. Everything would have been different.

Or maybe not. I've no wisdom to offer about that. Only regrets that I didn't see more of three nephews and a niece in these last five years, and hope that I'll see more of them in years to come Maybe I'll even make the ferry to Denman.  Maybe I'll find someone waiting there for me.

June: Birthdays, Summer

The Girl doesn't necessarily like Poison, but her musical interests are developing in a certain direction of music that's too cool for her uncle, and she did get a Poison bumper sticker for the Child Delivery Module.

I missed her birthday due to work, and my visit this week was in the middle of the Last Week of School, rather than at its blissful end, that preview of Paradise. I also got to see her being the cool girl at school.

If she weren't my sister's daughter, at that point I would have doubted our relation. But that evening we ran with the dogs through the forest trails of Princess Park together, and it was good.



I also played  Colonization with The Boy. And he was the one who got the disc!

Pearls of Wisdom

More of my themes than one converged at a buffet table I attended on Sunday. It's banal, even disrespectful, to be struck first of three pearls of wisdom that I ate  pickled pearl onions at a memorial service, because this is why one sometimes recoils at the phrase, "celebration of life." The mind makes trivia out of solemn events, and so I was struck to only then learn that she had been christianed Pearl. Pearl is dead, and people are sad. They should be. For   all that she was born in the middle of the First World War, and that she has been slipping away from us for a very long time, she is still gone. (Better had I phrased this idea of a celebration in terms of the  niece and the nephew. Pearl was dear to me because she was precious to my cousins and it seems fitting that we all take these opportunities to give the next generation a chance to be with their cousins. Children playing. Now that is celebration.)

A second pearl; If you knew Pearl, you will be wondering why I am calling her that, and not the name that she chose for herself. It is so that you can take as much or as little intimacy as you like in the way of the Internet, but also to highlight that we can and do choose our names, if we are wise.

So I have family, and  semi-anonymity on the plate as well as my other themes. For a reason; I recall, some years ago, a relative that I will not name (as far as I am concerned, this is memory playing tricks, and there is no relative to name, or blame) telling me a story about Pearl and her son.  That story was that Pearl had finally revisited her distinguished Scottish pioneer ancestor and admitted that she was descended from his Salteaux Ojibway "country wife" and not his "white wife." (Though "white wives" are sometimes as dubious as "country wives, but that's yet another story.)

And another story, the one that her son told at the memorial. That story, told through actions and carefully-posed and mischievous photos was of a woman who played with, and hinted at, her aboriginal ancestry. It was, he said, another side of the story of his mother's life to put beside her class-conscious striving for genteel status.

But was it? Society imposes its canons of authenticity, according to which one must be one or the other, White or Indian, upper class or lower class. Each status belongs with its companion on the other side of the comma. To mix them up, to make the wrong combinations is ... well, what is it. I'll put it this way, any "or" that narrows us down into little  boxes of meaning is tyranny. And that is especially true when the subject is so tender as race. It did not suit Pearl. This the last, and best pearl, and Pearl's. It does not, I suggest, suit us.

Stories About Little People

It's one of those school holidays today in North Vancouver, so I got to hang out with the Boy and the Girl on their Friday night. The Girl had a playdate after school, so I spent less time obedient to her whims than usual --hardly a bad thing. The Boy is into his bulletin boards, grinding, and Sonic the Hedgehog. Not surprisingly, he spent a great deal of time growing Chaos in the afternoon, after correcting his uncle's painful misunderstandings. Sonic is a Sega, not a Sony character. Who knew? Everyone but uncle.

After that, the Boy launched an adventure game. Or is it the same game? Sonic Adventures 2 for Wii, Wikipedia suggests; but I might be wrong. He was complaining about characterisation, story depth, and dialogue as he did, though. There's pain there. I feel so helpless to see him going through what I went through at his age. He's already developing a callously sarcastic crust; although that might just be adolescence. Or adults modelling. Oops.

After the Playdate left, the Girl launched into a painful story of her own, of social confusion and rejection involving a bit of costume jewelry lost in the brush. I hate to be a coward, but I really want to leave the problem of raising/not raising a Mean Girl to others. That being said, the least I can do is deflect the conversation rather than validate any inappropriate behaviour. So I brought up my old stories about the Prickle People, and, Hallelujah, it worked!

Great Literature Inspires Me Every Day!

Strictly, in the story, the tiny people live in a miniaturised land surrounded by thorn forests, but ever since I read this book, I have never been able to look at a bramble patch without imagining tiny little people building tiny little cities deep within the thorns. I don't spend as much time mucking around in bramble patches as I did as a boy, but, still, thanks, Edgar Rice Burroughs, you crazy coot, you. And if I've anything to say about it, neither will the Girl.

Of course, her interests relating to very small people living under the prickle bushes are slightly different from mine, her being a girl and all. (Oh oh, indefensible gender politics alert!) I like to imagine skyscrapers a foot high, and the shepherd boys and the milkmaids herding their aphids up into the summer heights of the horse chestnut tree; escaping everyday life in the hot city for somewhere cool and green.

She, in her sweet, girlish way, plots genocide with squishings and sticky tape traps. Adorable!

Stories. Good ones make us happy. The ones that make us happiest, we make our own

March: Werewolves and Minecraft

I really try to make it over to see the boy and the girl (and my sister) more than once a month. But time goes so quickly when you're a procrastinator, and I procrastinate about more important things than this. (Of which there are not many in my life.)

The girl now likes the tango and tried to play along to this song (and others) on a guitar and her recorder. She'd probably benefit from lessons, but whether she'd put up with something so structured is another question.

The boy, who set the precedent in terms of resisting structure and lessons, is now a Minecraft addict. I know. Well, the worlds that he creates and orders are probably a comfort when the adults around him cannot do the same.

Fever, February

The boy was too sick to go to work on Wednesday when I was over to visit. Too sick to play video games, even. Though he perked up in the evening enough to play the "virtual console" Wii game Legend of Zelda: Missing Link. (Which he described as an almost unbearable pun. So if you want to date the moment when puns stop being funny, go to midway through sixth grade, and push a little further on.)

The girl, meanwhile, is filling out her "Healthy Choices Journal," which includes entries for healthy eating, specifically, vegetables. Yeah. Like that's going to happen.  Way to not go, first grade health Gestapo.

As for what's beyond the barrier of puns, the boy demolished most of this during his sick day. Now I have to get another copy. And a short dark.

Stupid, Stupid Zombies

On the one hand, you're doomed. On the other, the only thing standing in the way of you levelling is the size of your magazine. I don't know. I see a disconnect here. This thing about contradiction: wherever you sit on A and not-A, you shouldn't ought to think both at once.

The flip side of being doomed is

You get killer boots and a red dress!

I think I get what it's about.  I could get all humanities grad student here, but, really, best not. It comes down to this, that there's you, and there's the red dress, handed down by the Big Guy in the Sky. Or some guy at the worstest corporation in the fiction-universe. (In real life, Umbrella's "business plan" wouldn't make the top 10 list of stupid.)

Now, I don't hate zombies, even if the last zombie movie I really enjoyed, even including Shaun of the Dead (sad face!) was Night of the Comet, slow pace aside. But the red dress is a problem, no matter how much my inner Y chromosome might like it. Jeff Smith throws rat-tails at his protagonists again, and again, and every time the story gets deeper and richer, even if he can't stick the ending. Zombies go the other way: more, morer, morest! You have cool, and no story, and it doesn't matter, because story is your story.

What? The reason that I'm talking about zombies now is that my sister can't even get confused about how to kill them without my niece explaining the facts of life to her. Head shots all the way, Mom. That's what we learn in  first grade! So if you've got an extended magazine, Arizona-style, you're safe as long as there aren't more than 30 zombies.

Except, and here's my problem: there are always more zombies than you have bullets. You seem to have agency. But you don't. Unless you happen to be the protagonist. In Max Brook's World War Z, the United States Army, with all its technology, gets routed out of New York because it doesn't understand how to kill people.  Government.  Eventually, the US army is reorganised around line rifle fire tactics, and slow marches back across the continent, head-shotting convenient mobs of zombies like a particularly accurate Eighteenth Century army.



No subtext there! I wonder if Max Brooks understands that some thought went into this before he came along. Yes, people, unlike zombies, go for cover. But that makes them harder to kill. Because, and this is a little-known scientific fact, I admit, brains are an evolutionary advantage. That's why, more than  a hundred years ago, the the French invented this in order to improve on the killing power of a gaggle of riflemen. The basic concept was to shoot people lots, and if those people choose to stand around taking it for a long time, well, lots of people end up getting shot. (Look, Ma! I'm Aristotle!) Ever since, it's basically been upwards and ever onwards for the killing people arts. Headshots admittedly not guaranteed, but there's always chainmail hipwaders and a splitting ax for tidies after.

The story of a zombie movie is that there's an apocalypse, and you survive. When the red dress shows up, it says that you didn't earn it. If you're chosen to wear it, you can kick all the zombies to death. If you're not, it doesn't matter if you've got a gun, a tank, or the US Army on your side. The zombies will walk across the bottom of the ocean. They'll defy the laws of thermodynamics and your own made-up rules. They won't get freezer burn. They'll be in the house waiting for you. They'll get you.

I could worry about who gets the red dress. For example, if I were going to criticise Brook's politics (and, Lordy, what else do we do on the Interweb?) I'd point out that he gives it to Israel and South Africa and take that to town. But I'm not, because I have a Generation X objection instead. The red dress is story-nepotism. The protagonist isn't the one that earns it. The protagonist is the writer's nephew, and the story saves his worthless butt so that he can make lots of money and have the nice vacation and house and tell you that he earned it because he hasn't the faintest idea how hard it is to kill zombies if you don't have the story on your side. Good stories feature people who become protagonists by working hard and persevering and doing brave things. They teach that in first grade, too. But the noise drowns it out.

Fine thing for someone who can't even nerve himself up to ask a girl out to say. But still....

Monsterbird Lizard

monsterbird

lizard

This is my niece and I figuring out what we could do with the Windows 7 splicing tool. Google Blog was the first thing I could think of to transfer it over to my sister's old XP machine so that we could print it. I could erase this testimony to my Luddism.

But, heck, it's my blog.