1 The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem.

2 “Vanity[a] of vanities,” says the Preacher;
“Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.”

3 What profit has a man from all his labor
In which he toils under the sun?
4 One generation passes away, and another generation comes;
But the earth abides forever.
5 The sun also rises, and the sun goes down,
And hastens to the place where it arose.
6 The wind goes toward the south,
And turns around to the north;
The wind whirls about continually,
And comes again on its circuit.
7 All the rivers run into the sea,
Yet the sea is not full;
To the place from which the rivers come,
There they return again.
8 All things are full of labor;
Man cannot express it.
The eye is not satisfied with seeing,
Nor the ear filled with hearing.

9 That which has been is what will be,
That which is done is what will be done,
And there is nothing new under the sun.
10 Is there anything of which it may be said,
“See, this is new”?
It has already been in ancient times before us.
11 There is no remembrance of former things,
Nor will there be any remembrance of things that are to come
By those who will come after.

–Ecclesiastes, 1, 1-11, New King James Version

Some of the best conversations are those that never really end. They are conversations between friends that may take place in both the physical and the virtual, and may vary across the synchronous and the asynchronous. It’s a conversation about something shared that allows for multiple threads of thought. Sometimes one of these threads takes a startling turn.

“Vanity is an interesting companion to morality. ”

Indeed it does. On the other hand, my minor dyslexia has caused me to read this as “mortality” for two whole days. So that’s the way I have I have been thinking of this conversation. Vanity and mortality.

Contextually, I was thinking about mortality and a scene in fantasy novel where one of the antagonists admits that it was his vanity that got him in the end. More directly I was making a link between weight and typical aesthetics. There are some things I do strictly vanity’s sake, but to only a small degree, because too much could be risky or counter-productive.  My thoughts rambled further, thinking about a delicate balance between vanity and mortality, that we’ve upheld certain ideas of fitness and wellness that sometimes look like vanity, but really they are just personal pride in looking a certain way and achieving or constantly striving to achieve a peak level of fitness.

Back when Billy Crystal was on SNL doing an impression of Fernando Lamas, one of his catch phrases was, “It’s better to look good, than to feel good.” This is kind of the ultimate in the vanity of the aesthetic. Perhaps an example of the other end of the spectrum is the runner who really obsesses over running and does little else, while becoming so whittled down,  any standard sense of a traditional aesthetic has vanished. I’ve known a person like this and he was not healthy.

Sometime around 2004 or 2005 I was in Clearwater, FL for a meeting and I went out for a morning run. About three miles in, I ran into an old guy coming towards me. He asked how far I was running and if he could join me. Told him I had done three and planned another nine miles. He looked me up and down, “I’m impressed. You don’t look like quite that fit.” (I was weighing about 250 at the time and had done a couple of marathons, three successful ultras, and a couple of failed ultras.) I looked him up and down, “I’m impressed  that you’re out here running in flip-flops.”

“Oh yeah, they’re good enough and they only cost about a buck apiece.”

Right.

We ran and talked for a couple hours. He was certifiably nutty. Nice, but nutty. Retired and lived in a one room apartment and did very little but just run everyday, all day. He’d carry a spoon and a little bit of cash to buy ice cream along the way to eat while he ran. Sometimes he would just carry a bag of sugar. He claimed he usually ran a full 50K (about 31 miles) and never less than 16 miles each day.

Every day it was all he could do to just get out of bed, he said. It just hurt. Every part of him hurt. Especially his feet and legs. He’d wake up, struggle to a sitting position, sit until he felt he could stand, and then do it all again. He had no discernible fat on his body, nor teeth. He admitted sometimes to spending the winter up north with his family and trying to get “fat” and then return to Clearwater to run it off.

I have no idea how long someone can keep that up.  I don’t think he was as old as he looked, and he really did not look good to my eye. He looked like he was in the process of being consumed. Whatever level of fitness he might have once been trying to achieve he seemed to have taken it too far to a fairly dark place. You can take anything too far.

***

And conversations continue.

“The challenge with deciding to live, not just accepting the body’s deteriorating condition, is really about why.”

While we are young, we feel immortal. Even when someone in our age cohort dies it may shake us, but it seems like we don’t really start feeling mortal until age 30 or so. I remember when one of the guys in our Infantry company died. A popular guy, he took a fall off a cliff while rappelling one weekend. While the guys were pretty shaken, since beer and pot were involved, invincibility and immortality was back in less than a week.

By the time we comprehend and accept, or at least begin to accept, our mortality, our bodies have long since begun to deteriorate. One might stay fit and train at the highest levels, but the fact is the body is aging and wearing.  This is all in the early stages of deterioration for most people, it’s generally not even noticeable. It is the time of life where late night hours are spent in childcare or the endless work cycle of trying to get ahead. Things change though. Harry Chapin touched on this in the song, “There Was Only One Choice.”

So we age. Our attitudes age along with our bodies. We begin to recognize the costs of choices we made in our youth and we likely become more cautious, more conservative in our choices. Less recklessness, greater thought for the future.

Because there is less of it, the future. Less of it for us as individuals. We know the future is not some far distant point in time. It keeps getting closer. A friend talks about how small children see time as taking so much longer – a year from now is just so very far away. For a five year-old, a year is 20% of the time they know. For a 50 year-old, it is only two percent. The days run out as we want to do more, to be more, to achieve more, because we finally feel like we know what we want to do, what we can do.

But we grow tired. We tend to be heavier. Our choices have begun to maximize comfort over fitness. We have perhaps actively chosen this, or just accepted the default. Either way, have we chosen to live, or to just continue? And why?

***

Back to the intersection of vanity and morality.

In Oscar Wilde’s, “The Picture of Dorian Gray” we get a morality lesson on vanity. The title character is so enamored of his  portrait and recognizes that every day he on he will be less beautiful than he appears in the portrait, that he offers to sell his soul if only the portrait would age instead of himself. It does not go well. That sort of vanity never does end well. The weakness in Dorian that expresses his willingness to sell his soul is the same weakness of character that leads one into all kinds of debauchery and unsavory activity, activities that affect both physical expression and the aesthetic appearance of the face. These qualities become apparent in the portrait as Dorian’s behavior and soul grow darker and more cruel.

Vanity, narcissism, too much of sense of self over others, are problems. When the inner dialogue is the only dialog that matters. When we never hear the words of others if they are anything short of praise for the self. This is not only bad, it is evil. It is a turning away from society, from community. We don’t exist alone.

***

How do we choose to live with the deterioration of our bodies?

Either following my diagnosis, or following surgery, in my researches, I read that events like heart attacks, brain tumors, cancer, can cause one to to feel that our body has betrayed us. That it has attacked us. This can be devastating to someone trying to find the energy and will do the work of recovery.

It seems to me, looking back, there was no defining moment in my case where I said was going to get through recovery. There were instead of thousands of little decisions to keep trying, to try just one more time, to take one more step, or to forgive myself one more time for not quite taking that next step. Eventually it became a habit, the same way I became obese, the same way I got older. I kept making certain decisions out of habit, a choice to keep to going. And then I made a choice to get healthy again, and this time I would do it right. I would avoid injury and real self-abuse. I would learn from the past about making thousands of little choices over and over again, including choices of self-forgiveness.

In fact, I made the choice to be much more forgiving to myself and stop with negative habits toward a poor sense of self. I accepted that failure in little things, was to be expected, and that success did not, does not require perfection, only commitment and practice.

In the end, there was really only one choice – to live each day, to be present each day that is left. But like the Preacher says, there is nothing new under the sun.

“Love is hard.”

“Love *is* hard. And sometimes lonely.”

A snippet of conversation between two friends about marriage, caregiving, and family. Most everyone knows that love is hard. Not always, of course, but there are moments, days, and multiples of days in which love is very hard. The hardness generally comes from difference. All couples/families have them to some degree.

• Difference in politics.
• Difference in expectations.
• Difference in desire.
• Difference in ableness.
• Difference in ability.
• Difference in perception.
• Difference in wellness.
• Difference in strengths.
• Difference in power/position.

And so on. There are no limits to the differences possible. Most of the time there is probably never an issue, but sometimes the differences bubble to the top and conflict evolves. If we don’t learn to handle conflict effectively it can get out of hand create more conflict.

There are times though that the differences seem almost insurmountable. Times where the gulf between two people just seems unimaginably large. This can easily happen in a caregiving-based relationship where there is great a differential in the partnership role. It can be lonely doing all the work that *should* be shared between two people (recognizing that in most households there is nothing close to an equal distribution of housework and child-rearing).

That’s one type of loneliness. Another form of loneliness is that of waiting as a part of caring. Waiting at a clinic, practicing patience, perhaps alone with your thoughts of hopes and fears for the future. Waiting as a parent for your child to return home late at night. Or more acutely, waiting by your child’s bedside for the fever to break, waiting for them to cry out. Waiting for a loved one in a hospital to draw a final breath, to say a final goodbye. Waiting for your partner to make the decision to live and be well. Love can be a very lonely vigil.

It’s fun to focus on the excitement, the joy, the goodness, of love. We talk about the hard work of love when we get frustrated if things go wrong or get icky, or we have to do the truly hard work of love. We rarely talk about how lonely love can be. Probably this is because the loneliness is only there when we are doing the hardest work of love – keeping a small light burning in a largely silent vigil.

A friend shared this link with me today, “We can’t survive in a state of constant agitation.” This paragraph is particularly good:

“Yes, actions are important; they are absolutely essential, in fact. But I don’t believe we can survive for long in a state of constant agitation. Our bodies and hearts need rest to replenish stores of energy. This is something best done from a place of love.”

This is the core, I think, of self-care, acting out of love for yourself. Treating yourself as you would a loved one – with kindness, compassion, and honesty. I know this is sounds new-agey to some, and crunchy-granola to others, but ask yourself this: Why shouldn’t you treat yourself this way? If self-love really means treating yourself in this manner, and the reason for doing so is to improve your life, what exactly is the problem?

I never understood this previously. It never occurred to me to treat myself halfway well. That’s why anger became lifestyle and stress became habit. I went on day by day, functioning, sometimes well, but more often than not, it was just good enough. I also didn’t enjoy life the way I should have. I loved my family, I loved my job, but life, perhaps not so much.

As I’ve written before, breathing helps. Counting single breaths, finding the moment, and remaining there, makes a difference and leads to patience. Impatience is costly as it leaves one unsatisfied.  All of this is related to agitation and reversing it. Stress, anger, impatience, are just ways to become and remain agitated. Remove the sources of agitation, if you can, change the responses to stress, and living becomes a little easier. If you can’t remove the agitation, try to reduce the amount of time it crosses into your life.

I have had a number of friends and family members dealing with addiction over the years. Sometimes it was them, their spouse, or other family member. Regardless of who it was with the problem, one of the issues we faced is “dwelling.” In recovery from addiction there is challenge enough for the person with the addiction to deal with the yen, the desire, for the substance or behavior at the source of the problem. In recovery, and I have seen this also with PTSD,  dwelling on past behaviors and failures becomes an issue. I think though it is about more than forgiveness of self or others, that’s hard enough. It is instead about moving on and living in the current moment.

This is hard.

You can dwell on the past all you want, but it is the past. It’s over. The only way you can change it is to change the remembered narrative. You can rewrite your memory. Make yourself the hero, or at least remove the blame from yourself. Of course, doing so is contrary to your best interests. It is fundamentally dishonest with one’s self and that just creates more problems on down the road. Somehow, you simply have to find a way to move on, while maintaining an honest recollection that allows your continued growth and development.

So, I think once you have learned to accept yourself and your history, and learn to love yourself as you are – a flawed individual seeking personal growth and development, you can learn to take better care of yourself. Self-care is critical and when done well, makes all these other things easier. You know you are engaging in good self-care when breathing becomes an act of love instead of a mere act of survival.

This picture popped up in a discussion between my sister me (she’s the disheveled little girl causing trouble). But notice me. I’m ready for anything. There’s nothing I can’t handle.

After all, I’ve got my trusty six-shooter by my side.

Spending one’s boyhood in Chickasha, OK (the horse-trailer capital of the world and the birthplace of Cleavon Little (but I suspect more people know that I was born there than he)) made it next to impossible to know something about cowboys and to want to be one. It was also the time of the Lone Ranger, even if in re-runs, and the return to “those thrilling days of yesteryear.”

As a family picture, this is kind of oddity in that probably shortly after this, Daphne became the outgoing one, the focus of all attention. I think it must of have been not too long after this photo that things changed and she settled fully into her role as the middle child.

This picture bothers me. My eye continues to be drawn to the holster at my side. Even though it’s a toy, I feel look too comfortable with too much of a challenge in my eye. I don’t remember being a troublemaker at that age. I think that came much later. So I kind of hate the idea that I might be feeling empowered by having a gun at my side, even if it is a toy.

If I carry a gun today (which is rare, but I do deer hunt with a handgun occasionally), I feel weight. I feel the weight of responsibility in all its dimensions and risks. I feel far more responsibility than power. I also feel the actual weight. My choices in weapons lean towards the heavy and reliable. But heavy. I really find nothing empowering about a gun, knife, or other weapon. I find them burdensome, with the exception of a really good knife or Leatherman’s Tool in the great outdoors.

I’ve carried and used a lot of weapons. Everything from a pellet gun to a 90mm recoilless rifle with a lot of dangerous in between, so it’s not a question of lack of experience or knowledge. I have had some serious training, including sniper school at Ft. Campbell and I know how much fun it can be to just blow shit up with explosives. But I think I would tell little Tod, if I could, to find other toys. Not to ask for the Johnny Eagle M-14 and M-1911, both of which shot spring-loaded bullets.

On the other hand, I grew up having compulsion against serving in the Army and tackling whatever came my way, so it may not have been all that bad a thing to have all those toy guns. But Zach did not grow up with a toy guns, and instead had other toys that may have included cabbage patch dolls, but still he became a hunter. Peer experiences can be powerful.

I notice a lot of people carrying around town.

They don’t really seem to have the confidence of the little boy above.

More than any place else I lived in growing up, I called Joplin, MO home. It was my Home of Record when I was in the Army. It was the place I went home to for the holidays and special events. It was the place I always returned to when life changed until after grad school.

Joplin is Midwestern town through and through. Coming of age there in the late 70s and early 80s cars, girls, and danger. Dragging Main Street was the thing to do on the Friday and Saturday nights. The endless cruising, talking car to car, stops in parking lots, the occasional fight, and the more frequent race off the change of the light.

I got a sixty-nine Chevy with a 396
Fuelie heads and a Hurst on the floor
She’s waiting tonight down in the parking lot
Outside the Seven-Eleven store
Me and my partner Sonny built her straight out of scratch
And he rides with me from town to town
We only run for the money, got no strings attached
We shut ’em up and then we shut ’em down

-Bruce Springsteen, “Racing in the Streets”

I kind of loved it all. Even though most weekends it was pathetically boring.

Except the racing.

Joplin is laid out overlapping the bulk of two Survey Townships. Two thirty-six square mile grids with main streets (including Main St.) spaced a mile apart and razor straight. Not flat, but not hilly enough to do much more than hide a waiting squad car. Officially, Main Street proper seems to be just under four miles. It’s not much, but it doesn’t need to be much with a dozen or so traffic lights interspersed and the only distance that matters is between two traffic lights.

I might have won a few races here and there. Now, I’m not admitting to have ever actually raced, because that would be wrong. Would have been wrong, and against my parents’ wishes and the way I was raised. And we know, a 1977 Ford Pinto was never expected to be fast.

Unless you knew it had a 2.8L six cylinder under the hood instead of a weak-ass four-banger.

I love cars when they work. I’ve learned to hate cars when they don’t. I tried being a mechanic. I replaced the warped aluminum four-cylinder of a Chevy Vega with an eight cylinder Chevy 350. That car was dangerously fast. Especially when the steering linkage failed.

***

Much of my life can be described as history of cars. Some good, some bad, some that I really, really, really should have stayed away from. There were one or two that seemed my heart and soul.

But I have no pictures of most. In some ways this is kind of strange, because for years I was trying to be a photographer. I never took pictures of my stuff or my life. I just took pictures of other people, other lives. This was brought home last Sunday when I received a Facebook friend request from someone I served with in the Army. We connected, exchanged a few messages, and I noticed he had pictures of those days.

It never occurred to me take pictures of my Army experience. Never. Admittedly, my life was pretty miserable because of the marriage I was in at that time so I am pretty sure I wasn’t thinking I would want to recall those days. There are pictures of my son from that time and a few family pictures and that’s about it.

***

“Racing the Streets” is one of my favorite Springsteen songs. I don’t actually make an effort to play it. It is one of those songs, like “The River”, that I think is best when it just comes on the radio and I say myself, “Ahhh, I really love this song.”

But now there’s wrinkles around my baby’s eyes
And she cries herself to sleep at night
When I come home the house is dark
She sighs, “baby did you make it all right, “
She sits on the porch of her daddy’s house
But all her pretty dreams are torn,
She stares off alone into the night
With the eyes of one who hates for just being born

-Bruce Springsteen, Racing in the Streets

But I remember us riding in my brother’s car 
Her body tan and wet down at the reservoir 
At night on them banks I’d lie awake 
And pull her close just to feel each breath she’d take 
Now those memories come back to haunt me 
they haunt me like a curse 
Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true 
Or is it something worse 
that sends me down to the river 
though I know the river is dry 

-Bruce Springsteen, “The River”

I remember these days of cars, of the Army, long ago. I don’t really recall what my dreams might have been, other than perhaps of glory and fortune. Clearly, those did not really come true, insofar as most people might measure these. But did the dreams die or did they evolve?  Were they every really there?

What I do know is that time rushes like a damn river. It passes by quickly and no matter what you do, you can’t step in the same piece of water twice. It is always moving, always different, never at rest. Time passes and the water moves on. It’s this moment that matters. What has been done can’t be undone, what has happened can’t be changed, and one can only seek redemption in the current moment..

****

A few months ago I wrote about the price of impatience. In my continued reading about mindfulness and trying to live in the moment, I ran across this passage from “Wherever You Go There You Are” by Jon Kabat-Zinn:

I see patience as one these fundamental ethical attitudes. If you cultivate patience, you can’t help but to cultivate mindfulness, and your meditation practice will gradually become richer and more mature. After all, if you really aren’t trying to go anywhere else in the moment, patience takes care of itself. It is remembering that things unfold in their own time. The seasons cannot be hurried. Spring comes, the grass grows by itself. Being in a hurry usually doesn’t help, and it can create a great deal of suffering, sometimes in us, sometimes in those who have to be around us.

Patience is an ever present alternative to the mind’s endemic restlessness and impatience. Scratch the surface of impatience and what you will find lying beneath it, subtly or not subtly, is anger. It’s the strong energy of not wanting things to be the way the are and blaming someone (often yourself) or something for it. This doesn’t mean you can’t hurry when you have to. It is possible even to hurry patiently, mindfully, moving fast because you have chosen to.

From the perspective of patience, things happen because other things happen. Nothing is separate and isolated. There is no absolute, end-of-the-line, the-buck-stops-here root cause.

And the river keeps rushing by. I read this and said, “Yep, just says it differently. The price of impatience is to be unsatisfied and anger is at the source.” These have been the big things I have tackled this year, with some success.

You make up your mind, you choose the chance you take 
You ride to where the highway ends and the desert breaks 
Out on to an open road you ride until the day 
You learn to sleep at night with the price you pay 

Now with their hands held high, they reached out for the open skies 
And in one last breath they built the roads they’d ride to their death 
Driving on through the night, unable to break away 
From the restless pull of the price you pay 

Oh, the price you pay, oh, the price you pay 
Now you can’t walk away from the price you pay 

-Bruce Springsteen, “The Price You Pay”

Patience.

Take a breath.

Count to one.

Exhale.

Repeat, as needed.

You are always in the moment of the current breath. Why count beyond? There is no need to race about, no need to just react. Breathe. Be. Patience.

Melinda and I just finished a three-week road trip  covering 5,024 miles. There will probably be a post about that trip, but I have been thinking about previous road trips. I have now visited all 49 continental United States and have done some extraordinary trips.

Summer 2017. First real vacation since 2017.

AIR Forum 2003. Not an epic trip, but memorable.

SREB Data Exchange , 2016.  The second of longer road trips with Melinda after her multiple surgeries. The first was a somewhat similar route to Austin, TX for Vertex.

Leg 1 of a family road trip in the summer of 2000 that included a visitS to Crater Lake and Dinosaur National Monument.

Leg 2 of the trip in 2000. Stops included the Field of Dreams, Rushmore, Crazy Horse, Devil’s Tower, Yellowstone, Grand Coulee Dam, and Multnomah Falls. Both halves of the trip were predominantly tent camping.

In 1983, my unit (B Company, 2nd Battalion, 502d Infantry) at Ft Campbell, KY rotated as a unit to assignment in at Ft Richardson, AK. We were all to meet at SeaTac to fly in together. We turned this into a rather crazy trip to see family and sights.

In 1985, when I left active duty, we drove from Anchorage, AK to Joplin, MO.  Sections of the highways in Canada were still gravel. It was late March. The personal dynamics between my first and wife and myself were, shall we say, difficult. Very difficult. Much of the trip is a blur, enough so that I might wish to revisit the route.

There are other cross-country trips that could be included. The move from St. Louis to Oregon, with two small children, a U-Haul towing a truck and a separate car. Or the move from Oregon to Virginia in January 2001. Winter trips are often a much different sort of experience. Plus dozens of trips to Joplin, MO and/or Chickasha, OK to see family, from various points. Basically, just a lot more miles than I sometimes appreciate.

Bottom line is this. I love road trips.

​

“It’sa dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.”

― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
It is likewise a dangerous, or perilous might be a better word, business to begin to count things. Once you start counting, you never know where it will take you. What you do know, or at least what you should know, is that where it takes you is highly influenced by your assumptions in place when you began to count.

Counting is fundamentally an act of control. We seek to understand and thereby control our environment or our relationship to our environment. We seek to control things by counting in order to manage their exchange or monetizing the things being counted. We control people through counting in a number of ways, not the least of which is to define groups in and out of existence.

The notion of “information justice” captures this latter idea. Jeffrey Alan Johnson defines it thusly in an upcoming text:

“Information justice refers to the fundamental ethical judgment of social arrangements for the distribution of information and it’s effects on self-determination and human development. It is a broader subset of the notion of political justice, applied to questions of information and information technology.”
And so my challenge of how I think about and how i perform counting and analytics is this.

How do we count without doing harm, without taking away voice and recognition from minority groups, and how do we use analysis to improve outcomes without stealing it denying agency of those we claim to serve?

So, I have a few principles that I follow.

1) Counting must give safe voice to the voiceless. We can’t allow counting to become a tool of targeting subpopulations. We must think about the act and processes of counting to protect confidentiality as appropriate.

2) Counting and reporting should illuminate and guide decision-making in non-harmful ways. By this I mean that data and information displays should follow good practices of clarity and appropriateness of context and completeness. There should be clear statements of the limits of any measure. Average wages of graduates by itself has so much potential used by itself to be completely unrepresentative of 80% of people reported under such a measure. Distributions matter.

3) Analytic models that result in risk factors that include race/ethnicity or gender are indicators that you are measuring against the students or clients you wish you had, not those you have. We should delve more deeply into understanding the relationship between what we do and who we think we are serving.

4) Slick displays and data visualizations are too often like air brush paintings where the artist can’t draw. Slickness is often used to hide the lack of substance. Simplicity and basic displays are better for highlighting difference or the lack of distance.

5) There is often no other more powerful act than the act of definition. In the absence of definition, creating and publishing one is powerful, even without fanfare. A definition may seemingly lay dormant on a web page for years and then appear in law. It’s powerful and a tremendous responsibility.

I guess to sum up I would say this.

I count to give voice and support to those we serve, striving to do no harm, and to never restrict nor deny agency to those being counted. The analytics I perform are to improve systems’ and institutions’ understanding of self and to support individuals in finding the excellence in the lives they desire, within the domain of my work.

I’ve been doing higher ed data and data policy for a long time now, almost three decades. I now have staff that are younger than the length of time I’ve been doing this stuff. It’s enough time to see that we continue to try and solve the same problems, just with different language and different metrics.

I think also not many of my fellow practitioners are thinking deeply about why we count. It’s easier to talk about what to count, how to count, but not why. There is a lack of fluency with the history of higher education and how it connects with American history. Also, it the nature of counting itself seems to be of non-interest. I draw blank stares when I talk about counting to one or counting as an act of control (although sometimes a light goes on here).

So now I am bringing the concept of “information justice” to the discussions. That seems to stir interest. It’s still the same conversation, just at a different level that seems more actionable since it provides a script, or at least the appearance of a script. But justice of any type is not something that should have to originate out of the idea of “doing justice.” Instead, it should originate from your thoughts about why and how you are doing something to ensure fairness and equity. Too often justice comes into play after the fact in order to clean up the messes that occur from sloppy thinking and acting.

Another thing that is clear to me is that I need to write up the philosophy that drives what I do (and what I don’t do). See, my thinking about analytics and data use has evolved tremendously over the years. I used to be a true believer about using neural networks and other precursors of predictive analytics, but now I have serious doubts. More and more I have become concerned about information justice, long before I knew there was such a term. I’ve generally thought about things in much simpler terms like “counting to one.”

Stay tuned. I will be writing a philosophy of counting while on vacation.

I. Am. Not. Good. With. Small. Talk.

I’ve said this before, I’m sure. I do the make the effort though. I will  talk with anyone, especially if there is a possibility of learning something useful.

There is also something about how I present to the world that attracts a more than generous share of persons with alternative experiences of the world I live in.

Tonight, west of Chicago in a service plaza, I encountered such people. They (an older, elderly couple) had pulled up nearby while Melinda and I were eating sandwiches constructed out of the back the car. They seemed very interested in us. Actually, it was our trailer. The old guy said he used to sell RVs and has never seen a camper like ours. Seemed to think it was something the Germans would build. (For the record, our SylvanSport Go is built in North Carolina.)  So, anyhow he wanted to know about the trailer.
After I gave him the rundown, he asked if I was salesman. Nope, just a traveler. Asked where we were going. I gave him few places. He had opinions. Not as strong as his opinions about Illinois and Chicago and why they were moving too much saner Florida on the Redneck Riviera but opinions. (Yes, I laughed openly at this.) Apparently every place he has lived has treated him badly.

In five or six minutes I learned more of his life history than he was ever going to learn of mine. I also learned I probably wasn’t going to learn anything really useful in this conversation. This caused me to immediately get bored with it all land just listen politely hoping that some of clown twenty years from now listens politely while I ramble on about the injustices of my life.

I’m sure I could do this better. But it seems like I would have to ask more questions. That would seem to indicate interest where I have none.

I guess I have to learn to be more interested in strangers.