Cycling with a Friend
Month: June 2020
In 3s
Things go wrong in threes. That’s what they say, right? So if that’s the case, we’re done. First, the roof. A leak. Fortunately, insurance wrote us a new roof.
Second, the lawnmower. Two hundred dollars to fix it. I could have bought a new lawnmower for that. Of course, it would have been a cheap piece of junk, but the fact stands.
Then the dishwasher. We paid a repairman $75 to tell us what I thought I knew: the main board was gone. So we went to a few places looking for a replacement, including a local appliance store that sells the crazy cabinet-depth $20,000 Sub-Zero refrigerators. You’d think that’s the last place to find a deal, but we did indeed find a deal. The real deal: they had it in stock. Big-box stores didn’t, and we’d still have to wait weeks for delivery.
So we got the dishwasher installed, ready to go. We’re waiting on the roofing company to catch up with their work that’s been thrown off schedule with all the rain. And I’ve already used the mower once. Are we past the threes? Who knows.
The Boy’s Photos
Visitor
Sunday with Friends
In many regards, they might as well be sisters.
After all, our kids refer to each other as cousins, and they’re here for all the major holidays.
If that doesn’t make us family, I don’t know what does.
Typical Saturday
Work-Around
I figured out a work-around for the lack of storage that, upon talking to the local Lenovo service department, promises to be relatively easily mended.
So I spent a little time this afternoon seeing just how much faster the new computer is than the old. It’s fast. Blazing fast. The old computer was particularly sluggish in Lightroom when doing spot adjustments with the brush. Switching on the mask overlay could take a few seconds if there were enough adjustments on the photo. On the new computer, it’s instantaneous.
Review: Rules of Civility
I wasn’t sure what I thought of this book at first. There wasn’t much of a plot: just some randomly connected incidents pulled together by the simple fact that they were happening to the same character. She goes to a nightclub; she eats dinner somewhere; she does this; she does that.
Then I started picking up on the allusions. This book is jam-packed with them. While there are some allusions to music and art, most of them refer back to novels. And then I started to see that the structure of the novel was itself an allusion to a classic novel we’ve all read. And then I started to see how Towles was taking yet another novel, itself a modern classic, inverting the structure, and placing on top of the allusion to the classic novel.
And then came this passage between a rich New York aristocrat (with a good and pure heart, though) and the narrator, a working-class girl born to Russian Jewish immigrants. The aristocrat is visiting the narrator’s apartment and notices the books:
“You’ve got a lot of books,” he said at last.
“It’s a sickness.”
“Are you … seeing anyone for it?”
“I’m afraid it’s untreatable.”
He put his briefcase and the wine on my father’s easy char and began circling the room with a tilted head.
“Is this the Dewey decimal system?”
“No, but it’s based on similar principles. Those are the British novelists. The French are in the kitchen. Homer, Virgil and the other epics are there by the tub.”
Wallace wandered toward one of the windowsills and plucked Leaves of Grass off a teetering stack.
“I take it the transcendentalists do better in sunlight.”
“Exactly.”
“Do they need much water?”
“Not as much as you’d think. But lots of pruning.”
He pointed the volume toward a pile of books under my bed.
“And the … mushrooms?”
“The Russians.”
This is, at its heart, a book about books, cleverly camouflaged as something else, but it is in essence a giant hat-tip to literature. That’s not all it is, of course, but that’s it’s organizing principle.
I won’t mention what exactly the classic novel and modern classic are — that would be a spoiler. I fear in mentioning them at all I’ve given too much away.
For all it has going for it, though, this novel is clearly a first novel: execution doesn’t quite meet conception. Perhaps Towles’s A Gentleman in Moscow, which I read first, set me up to expect too much. This is a solid novel, though, and an enjoyable read even if it does drag just a bit at times.
Day 81: Frustration
Here are the specs for the order:
Notice: a 2 x 2TB hard drive for data storage.
Here are the properties of that drive (since it’s a raid, the two drives should appear as one 4TB drive):
That’s 2TB. Half of what I ordered.
I called so many people. I chatted with online help. Most of the conversations went like the online chat:
To say I spent most of the day alternating between laughter, fury, frustration, and resignation is a vast oversimplification.
This is the last time I will ever order a computer with customizations online. From here on out, I’m either building the machine myself or having someone else locally build it to my specifications.
All of that to say that we have this incredibly powerful computer that has a woeful lack of storage. I’m working on a short-term workaround, but the upshot is simple: still no pictures for today.
Day 80: Transitions
It’s almost embarrassing how long we struggled along with the same old computer as our main computer. I was the main user: Chromebooks, laptops, and now Nana’s old computer filled the void for the others. We finally broke down and bought a new computer, though, and it’s a beast: Intel Core i9-9900 vPro (3.10GHz, up to 5.0GHz with Turbo Boost, 8 Cores, 16MB Cache) with 48GB of RAM, a 1024GB solid-state drive for programs, and a 2 x 2TB RAID hard drive for storage. It’s blazing fast. Lightroom work should be so much quicker. But there’s the problem: I have 126,000+ image files constituting 1.25TB to move before I even think about installing Lightroom and beginning to reconstruct the LR catalog.
And so for today, I have nothing more than the thought that transitions between computers are probably about the easiest transitions there are. After all, the computers do all the work…
Day 79: Celebration
The eighth-grade assistant principal, Mr. M, retired this year. What a year to retire — everything tossed in the air and mixed up, then tossed again.
“Are you going to stay another year so you can end normally?” I joked.
“Oh, no!” he laughed — Mr. M’s famous “Oh, no!” that’s his default answer to silly questions or ridiculous situations.
“Just wanted to let you know that student X decided to get up and tell student Y how very fine he thought she was and how…”
“Oh, no!”
Mr. M, who seemed to know everyone, who seemed able to remember more names than a telephone book. “You remember So-and-so? About six years ago? Well, I saw her working at the Spinx on X Road…” There was not a student he couldn’t remember, unless the student was one who flew under the radar the entire three years. “Oh, he’s a good kid — I don’t know many of them,” he joked. But he was joking about not knowing them and the false dichotomy he had just created — he didn’t really believe in “good” kids and “bad” kids. They’re just kids. Some of them seem more determined than others to make their life’s share of bad decisions before turning sixteen, but he didn’t see them as bad. That’s key in an administrator. Or a teacher.
So what could the school do for a man who’d given decades to the school and its students, who was known and loved throughout the community, respected as a tough but fair administrator who wanted all the kids to succeed but wouldn’t suffer any foolish behavior that might jeopardize that — what does a school do when he retires in 2020, when in this last week of school it’s been two and a half months since we’ve even worked together in the same building? In a normal year, we’d have a party with cake and speeches, pictures and laughter, people standing in line to congratulate him, to pat him on the back, to hug him. But this is not a normal year, in any sense of the word.
What do we do? We have a party in the new 2020 fashion — a drive-through party, with honking horns, cheers, signs, and well-wishers blowing kisses from their cars.
What a thing to be so loved, to be so respected. It’s likely every one of us would have a group of people who loved and respected us this much, but some of us might have fewer in that group than Mr. M.
But then again, not all of us are legends.
Day 78: Thoughts of Polska
It’s June 1, which means that my mad experiment of maintaining a 1,000/word/day average for an entire month is at an end. Adding in the journal writings — thoughts I want to record but not necessarily share — brings me to 1,002 per day. At least according to the WP widget that measures that. Something about it seems a little off, but I don’t care — it’s all over now anyway.
The more significant event of it being June 1 is that it’s the anniversary of my first departure for Poland in 1996:
I don’t know what to write — I don’t know what to feel. I’ve been shoved to this moment by a force more powerful than anything I’ve ever encountered. It seems time was jerked from me like a tablecloth yanked from a table. It’s been so sudden that I don’t believe I’ve even begun to deal with the emotions. What I’m about to do still feels as unreal to me as the landscape far beneath me.
Yet as I leave, as I finally get under way, a calm has settled in. The most difficult part is over. I cannot turn back now even if I wanted to. With that finality is an almost perverse security. Now that I can no longer cling, I no longer reach. Of course this is just the eye in the first of many emotional storms I’ll face. I suppose part of it is simply the beauty of flying — it’s difficult to be upset up here.
Saturday 1 June 1996
That was 24 years ago; I was 23 on that day — it was more years ago than I was alive when I was experiencing it. Put it another way: it was more than half my life ago. It’s a common sentiment here, I know. It’s just that I’m always looking around and noticing it again.
My time in Poland was one of my most prolific journaling periods: I averaged 25,000-30,000 words a month. There was so much to write about when everything was new and every day presented new challenges.
That number decreased when I moved back to America. But as I reread my journal from 1996 last night, I decided to do something I used to do fairly frequently but haven’t in a couple of years: go look at the day’s date twenty years earlier.
I’m back in America. I have been for almost a week now. And I feel awful. Just as I suspected/expected I would. Even “just as I feared I would.” “Tell me that it’s nobody’s fault, nobody’s fault but my own,” sings Beck now, and I guess that’s somewhat appropriate. I don’t know if “fault” is the best word choice, but all the same . . .
I feel like I have a huge choice to make in about six months or so: stay or go. The implications are huge. I want to go back to Lipnica so badly it’s killing me — paralyzing me with depression sometimes. Yesterday I just lay on the couch, thinking, “I have to go back, and yet I can’t go back.” […]
So what are my options? One option seems most promising: go back for one year to see. I don’t know that I can ever stop thinking, “I might have made a terrible mistake in leaving,” unless I go back for a while and test the hypothesis. At any rate, that’s what I want to do. The implications of that are fairly substantial, though. […]
And here’s the shock: four years ago I’d just finished my first day of training in Radom. It’s around 4:30 in Poland now — I’d be just about to finish the first day. Four years ago. Four years. That’s 1,460 days ago. A long damn time. No, quite the opposite. Four years is almost nothing. Two years is nothing. I guess it’s true what they say about time going faster the older you get.
What I don’t want is to realize that I’ve been back from Poland for four years and think, “I’ve done nothing important with my life in that time.” I don’t want to think at the age of sixty, “I wasted my life, by and large.” And that’s exactly what I’m afraid will happen — unless I go back. I keep treating that as if it’s my only option, and it really isn’t. But it’s the only one I’m aware of; it’s the one I feel is sure to bring me happiness and fulfillment.
Two quotes — from the same song — seem particularly relevant now:
The nearer your destination,
the more you’re slip slidin’ away. . . .
A bad day’s when I lie in bed
and think of things that might have been.What makes all this so difficult is that I could talk to someone in Lipnica about my dilemma — Teresa[, a former student], for example — and she would simply reply, “So come back.” How I wish it were that easy!
It turned out, it was that easy. And so almost nineteen years ago, I went back. It all seems so distant and so near at the same time.
The same thoughts plague us now. We bought airline tickets for Poland this summer well before the pandemic was even a blip on the radar. The tickets for the kids and me are dated June 16. From the beginning, we said, “Let’s wait and see.” Lufthansa informed us that, due to the pandemic, fees for rescheduling would be waived (I’m assuming for one rescheduling), so we’ve just sat on the tickets, waiting.
“We won’t be going,” I kept saying. “There’s no way.” Yet restrictions are lifting. Poland is opening its borders to international flights June 15; Lufthansa says the flights are still a “go.” All passengers have to wear masks the entire flight, and there will be fewer people on the plane, but it’s not canceled. But then there are the questions.
- “International” in this case only means “European” it turns out. We’ll flying into Poland from Munich, though. Does that make a difference?
- Would we be quarantined upon arrival?
- How will the protests around the country affect this? I expect to see a huge spike in cases in a couple of weeks — just when we’re leaving. Will that affect things if it tragically comes to fruition?
- Most importantly of all: is it even safe and sane to be considering this?
To be honest, we wouldn’t be considering it at all if we were on our normal two-year cycle. “We’ll skip a year because the situation demands it,” we would say. But the problem is, we already said that last year. K hasn’t seen her mother in three years now. Sure there are the Saturday-morning Skype chats that can go on for quite a long time, but that’s hardly a substitute.
We’ll make a decision next Monday, we decided. It will still be a week in advance, and it gives us one more week to sort things out.