Learning about epigenetics, body regeneration, and the role of alien DNA (microbes) in my daily cravings has made me feel a bit like a colony. Today I was thinking about how much I had changed in the last thirty years. In the heyday of my career, I was purposeful, confident, demanding, and dismissive of some persons outside my tribe. Not constantly–kids take the edge off delusions of control and omniscience pretty conclusively–but for the most part.

I think it’s interesting that the new me has kept so many of the same old friends. Some of them may not know I’ve changed, because I don’t see them often. Some may have changed along with me. Some may rely on our shared experiences, though memory could well distort those. Some may detect some unchanging core to me, and perhaps there is.

I have new friends too, and they know the newer me, who is an intense people person, always looking for the deeper connection. I’m still a worker bee at work, but outside of work I’m pretty relaxed, and I’m very keen on leaving the workplace when my shift is over. I don’t demand anything of anyone on a regular basis, and while I occasionally make suggestions, those are mostly ignored. I managed to get my own health back, but I can’t seem to help anyone else with that, leaving me with some doubts about what worked and why.

One thing I thought I* would always be is a fact believer. There is Truth and Falsehood, perhaps not in philosophy, but in science, and in statistics, and in observable living, or so I would have asserted in the past. Yet I can no longer deny that most of the facts of my life have disintegrated.

• Science facts are subject to the next discovery, and most of the fundamental science of the 20th century, including scientific reductionism, the germ theory of disease, the tyranny of genes, the mutability of the nervous system, and everything doctors told us about nutrition, has been either weakened or completely debunked.
• Statistics are so contextual that it’s hard to come up with one that can’t be knocked down by another. There are a few that do fairly well, eg, most countries experience gun violence in proportion to the number of available firearms–but there are clear exceptions.
• Political polling is just a joke at this point. Maybe people lie to pollsters, or it’s impossible to get a random representative sample in the age of cell phones, or the wording of the questions skews the results, or entire swaths of voters don’t participate, or all of the above. For whatever reason, it’s no longer reliable, and I don’t know why anyone bothers to either give or consult polls.
• Life facts are subject to the vicissitudes of memory, which we now know is so unreliable that the more enlightened countries are banning eye-witness testimony in court. Any story you’ve ever told twice, you’ve altered. The more dramatic and searing the experience, the less likely you remember it accurately.

I do still have a model of the world that works for me, and so far inoculates me against conspiracies and reinforces my belief in coincidence. I hope I will keep at least that base, since those without it, I observe, suffer from fear and doubt to a disabling degree. I also am grounded by my friends old and new as well as my nuclear and extended family members. Though we are all changing colonies, our links seem to be strong and immutable.

• Perhaps as a colony I should use we? Those royals were centuries ahead of the science.

My husband and I attended a virtual Met performance of the titular opera last night. As much as I shun screens, the Met is hundreds of miles away, and I miss it. We are fortunate to have very good opera companies in both SF and SJ, but the venues can’t compete. Five balconies! Sputnik chandeliers that float 65 feet from the ceiling, then ascend! Enormous sets, stacked above the stage and rotated into place! Yannick Nezet-Seguin!

Yannick is not part of the venue, but he holds a place in my heart because he also leads the Philadelphia Symphony, whose chorus includes our younger son, and because he is dedicated to inclusion in the arts. This is the Met’s first production of an opera composed by a Black person, Terence Blanchard. Though this is not his first opera, Blanchard is a jazz musician and film score writer, and the music, orchestration, and singing demonstrated more jazz influence than is usual for opera, though not so much that you would have been wondering whether you had stumbled into a jazz club by mistake.

The opera is based on a memoir by NYT columnist Charles Blow which I have not read. The opera focuses on his childhood struggles, including a single incident of sexual abuse by a cousin. I was apprehensive about viewing this, but the incident was well-handled in the production, leaving most of the act to one’s imagination. That did not make it unaffecting; in fact, I was in tears at the end of the first act, which culminates in the event, and not completely recovered by the end of the intermission. I teared up again at the end, an ending of redemption and personal integrity, though not forgiveness.

Operas usually have what I think of as a boffo component. The protagonist may be discarded by a lover, or cruelly banished from home, or pulled into the depths of hell, yet since the emotion expressed is both extreme and extremely expressed, it may spur a little skepticism or amusement. Sometimes. I feel that way about Tosca, Rigoletto, and Cosi fan Tutti for example, but not about Turn of the Screw, Madama Butterfly, or Aida.

Fire Shut Up in My Bones has plenty of moments of fun and joy, but the emotional journey of the protagonist is raw and compelling, with nary a trace of boffo. For most of the first act, the actors portraying Charles as adult and child are on the stage together, the adult in sort of a magical flashback, observing scenes from his childhood. The singer who portrayed the young Charles was pitch-perfect, and while you may expect that in professional opera, I am referring to his acting as well as his singing. In any case, watching an actual child in this frightening situation amplified the emotional resonance.

The Metropolitan Opera HD Live cinema series is supposed to be simulcast, and there was a simulcast of this performance, but we weren’t keen to see it at 10:00 AM on the weekend, so we bought tickets to the rebroadcast version, which made for a more pleasant date-like event. The performance we viewed was the final one in the run, so in all the ways that matter, we were watching a production that no longer exists. I hope and expect that there will be many other productions of this dramatic and spirited work, and recommend that if you get a chance to see one, you will.

Could I mean you? Perhaps! Depends on how you define the two title words. In this particular case, I’m writing about well-known people whom I admired who were alive when I was alive, and now are not. To some extent, these feel like missed opportunities, though my meeting any of them was wildly improbably even while we shared the planet.

The idea was sparked by David Graeber, whose new book, The Dawn of Everything, seems to be reviewed in all my feeds this week. I was unaware of him previously, though I am very excited to read this book, which appears to fall squarely into my confirmation bias comfort zone. Graeber died unexpectedly in Venice in 2020, so the reviewer in The Atlantic wrote a touching tribute as part of his review, a tribute so affecting I regretted the loss.

My paternal grandmother’s cousin, Gale Storm, surely the most famous person in my bloodline, died in 2009. I have been aware of her for most of my life, and considered her the progenitor of the several singers and actors in my extended family, both professional and amateur, including my own younger son. I considered sharing this with her via her fan club while she was alive, but never did.

Buckminster Fuller has been my response to Name the famous person you most admire for most of my adult life, and I was astounded when I learned our lives had intersected for multiple decades, though I may not have been aware of him when he died in 1983. I was a nascent adult then. Best known perhaps for improving and popularizing the geodesic dome, he was an inventor, author, and futurist who made contributions in a wide range of fields, and seemed able to support himself simply by doing what he loved and sharing what he thought. All of it was substantive; if you’re thinking of him as an early “influencer,” please desist.

Leonard Berstein died in 1990. He was only doing limited conducting during his last decade, but his very last conducted concert was at Tanglewood in August of his last year. I was living in Boston at the time, and could have seen that concert, or perhaps others in Boston or NYC, except I didn’t. Since then, I have discovered many links between his works and my life, and feel both an appreciation of his many contributions both musical and humanitarian as well as regret for the goals he failed to achieve, which weighed on him heavily at times.

The amazing philosopher, historian, and author Isaiah Berlin died in 1997. I’ve read and re-read his works, mostly on topics such as Russian philosophers and the Enlightenment, avidly since I was a very young adult, yet since his works were about things in the past, I somehow thought he lived and died in the past as well. I was astounded when I learned, after his passing, that our lives overlapped for four decades. I think of myself as a fox rather than a hedgehog, but if you disagree, let me know.

My own mother died last month, and though she was not a celebrity, I have been contacted by many people for whom she provided deep friendship or solace, and even several who regarded her as a substitute parent. This has quite taken me aback. During the latter part of her life she was increasingly reliant on me as well as apparently self-centered, and while we talked more often than weekly, I had gotten out of the habit of viewing her as someone with wisdom or support to offer. Now, though, I see that her strength was simply re-directed, and I am happy for those who were able to benefit from her counsel, and grateful to them for the love they gave her.

One of my favorite nutrition guides, Catherine Shanahan, MD, wrote a book last year that I somehow missed until recently, The Fatburn Fix. I own one of her earlier books, Deep Nutrition, which is filled with great info, including how to look at folks and evaluate their genetic quality: Rate your friend’s kids! It’s really a tome, though, much too detailed for practical use. Which I always thought was unfortunate, since Dr. Cate started the slender athletes movement with the LA Lakers, so obviously has some practical advice to offer.

This newer book is shorter and much more accessible, although as a compulsive explainer, she does preface the how-to section with two others, i) why most of us are on the road to diabetes and ii) how the fat-burning mechanisms of the body are waylaid by popular eating habits. No guilt is implied. How can we figure out what we should eat when Big Food trumps the medical establishment on nutrition research? Billions spent on research–plus marketing and lobbying–have honed the production of food that makes us eat often and badly, while healthy nutrition researchers are poorly funded and mostly ignored by the medical establishment.

Dr. Cate is a doctor, not a prose stylist, but she occasionally comes up with a vivid metaphor, and that’s certainly what she needs when she’s trying to convince modern readers that food doesn’t provide energy. She reminds us to think of what happens to a wild animal that doesn’t have food.

What doesn’t happen: the animal calls Uber Eats.

I choose to envision a lioness, though a rabbit will do if you prefer something cuddly, or a bonobo, if you prefer something humanoid. I chose the lioness because I remember so many nature shows featuring an apex predator hunting for days without getting a kill. I used to think the editors were worried about the audience reaction when savanna Bambi gets asphyxiated by fangs clamping its throat closed. Now I’m thinking the portrayal is accurate. Yet the lioness never starves. She keeps hunting, day and night, as long as it takes, and eventually gets to eat. As does any animal, hunter or gatherer.

The lioness can keep moving because her energy is provided by burning body fat, and that’s how human bodies evolved to work, too. We can choke our fat-burning mechanisms by gorging on processed vegetable oils and excess sugars, or we can live like a lioness. Sort of. I have a high level of energy for staying on my feet all day on production lines or stocking shelves, without eating any extra meals or snacks, but I haven’t made any glorious kill bites lately.

Some of us are old enough to remember that old Memorex commercial featuring Ella Fitzgerald. For the rest of you, Memorex is a brand of cassette tape…but you don’t know what that is, do you? Think of it as a really fragile CD with static on playback and all the songs recorded as a single track…or do you remember CDs?

The marketing message insisted that we would not be able to tell whether we were hearing Ella live or on tape, and insinuated that the taped version could break a wine glass. Like all marketing messages, it was a combination of lies and misdirection. First of all, we were hearing this from a TV, so it was neither Live nor Memorex. Cassettes had some tells, like hiss. Also, can a human voice really break glass?

I am skeptical.

Pre-pandemic, my husband and I semi-regularly attended a monthly shantey sing held aboard the 1890 steam ferryboat Eureka in San Francisco’s Maritime National Historical Park. How casually we treated the opportunity to join 80 others in joyous singing, our voices echoing through cargo bay, an opportunity I wonder if I will ever have again. Like many public organizations, the MNHP is very conservative, and their shantey sing seems banished to Zoom forever, a format which precisely prevents its most endearing quality, that of mingling one’s voice with others’.

Or so I thought, until last week when the park’s email newsletter showed up bearing a subject line which read in part, Live Shantey Sing. Alas, it was but a cutesy turn of phrase, something along the lines of, Next month, the shantey sign will be Live…in your home. My thoughts briefly turned to criminal acts to which I could subject the author, then I Unsubscribed from the newsletter.

I am impulsive.

Words being confused with their own antonyms are scattered along our descent into the Idiocracy. My favorite, which in the spirit of this topic means the one I abhor the most, is literally substituted for figuratively, a construction that was alarmingly popular ten or so years ago. For me, never hearing it again would be figuratively a dream come true.

Confusing the concept of live performance with on-screen performance is reality slippage. We went to the SF Symphony last weekend, and even though we had to both show vaccinations cards and wear masks, the experience was exuberantly Live. Witnessing the musicians at the moment of performance, thanking them with applause and cheers, gasping or laughing as one with hundreds of others, and even walking to our car past the graceful Civic Center were all enlivening experiences. On a screen, that experience would literally not be the same.

I’ve lost interest in screen-based folk festivals, concerts, and classes now that live ones are available. Next week, however, we will be attending a replay of a recent performance by the Met in a movie theater.

I am sometimes inconsistent.

Fire season is winding down, and the unemployment office is getting a bit prickly about the intensity of my job search, so I’m starting work in the health and beauty section of Whole Foods tomorrow. This job is part time, but I’m going to quit drawing benefits, because being part time is my choice. I put in two applications, at a school and a store, got two interviews, and canceled the second because I got the first job, which starts later in the morning and is closer to home.

My husband continues to encourage me to retire early, and sometimes I wonder why I am still taking these small jobs. Ostensibly to pay for health insurance, but honestly, I’ve been working since I was sixteen, so maybe it’s just a habit, or even an addiction. I’m hardly a workaholic–I didn’t apply for the full time job with benefits at WF–but work seems to be something I need to do. Maybe I’m just a bourgeoisie at heart, though these jobs are on the proletarian side.

I’ve read that human habits are similar to addiction in that we form them quickly and lose them with difficulty. To get yourself to the gym regularly, one influencer recommends dressing out and driving to the gym on a regular schedule for a couple of weeks, without staying to exercise; she claims that by the end of that time period, your body will crave the trip, and at some point it will occur to you that since you in workout togs at the gym, you may as well go in.

My recent work history is too variable to be habit-forming, though I have added some neuronal paths. For the CalFire catering job, for instance, I have a driving route on auto-pilot, a regular outdoor spot where I eat lunch and read, and a fierce loyalty to my crewmates, though I will likely never see any of them again after this week. For some folks, eighteen months of pandemic was habit-forming, but I had an in-person job the whole time, was able to keep my outdoor exercise routine, and never developed an interest in baked goods.

I did develop an aversion to screens. I’m joining the anti-QR code menu movement. The main thing I want from a restaurant now is time away from my phone.

As a job seeker who wishes to retire in one year, I stuck my thumb into the Temp/Gig pie and quickly pulled out a plum. Starting last week, and with luck through the rest of our fire season, I am part of a crew supplying lunches to firefighters curbing conflagration.

“Disaster catering” turns out to be a thing. The catering company supplies staff, kitchen, food, and supplies to make cooked meals at the fire sites, and also trucks in the bag lunches we create in Santa Cruz Country. Our deliverable is a box of five lunches, each containing a fresh sandwich along with other items. We’re not talking bologna either: the meat sandwiches contain salami, pastrami, roast beef, ham, or turkey, with 4-9 slices of meat plus two of Swiss or Cheddar cheese per each, depending on the type. We also offer cheese-only for the vegetarians with a meat:cheese-only ratio of about 700/100.

Sandwich-making takes place inside a refrigerated cargo container with ample food preparation space for 15-20 people working at once, either assembling sandwiches, wrapping them, or keeping the supplies of bread, meat, and cheese flowing.

Five lunch bags, each containing a condiment pack, go into each box, and another task for us is to assemble these items. We can fit 36 boxes onto a pallet, six layers of six boxes each.

Even a generous sandwich needs sides, so there are a lot of pre-packaged items to separate and dump into large totes, such as organic salads, nuts, raisins, various dessert items, fruit cups, and beef jerky. Every lunch also gets a fresh apple or orange and a set of plastic cutlery.

Once we have roughly 4-5 pallets of boxes, 800 sandwiches, and ten totes filled with side items, all hands convene to form an assembly line along a roller conveyor in an open warehouse space. Each person on the line is responsible for loading two items into each of the five paper bags in each box then rolling the box to the next person. At the very end, people seal each paper bag with a sticker then close and stack the full boxes on the newly-emptied pallets. If a supply tote runs low, we can signal for someone to move another one in place so we don’t have to stop.

It takes 50-75 minutes to run 160 boxes through, an intense time during which everyone is standing and constantly moving, though within a small area. We each set our own pace, but we all strive to keep the line moving. There is a great sense of accomplishment when the last box rolls by.

The conveyor makes a mechanical noise when the upstream person rolls a box toward me, a noise that evokes in me something akin to that small thrill one feels when, after a long wait in line, your car pulls up, and it’s time to subject yourself to defiance of gravity, or in this case, rapid and precise bag-filling.

Interesting things about this include the highly industrial environment, with lots of machinery, loud noises, and opportunities for injury if you aren’t careful; the extreme physical challenge, especially near the end of an eight-hour day; and the wide variety of life experiences and outlooks of the team members, who nonetheless bond quickly, expend effort willingly, and support each other.

This is not exactly doing the lord’s work. California taxpayers pay $250/box, or $50 per lunch.

I still hope the fires are quenched sooner rather than later! Gigs there are a-plenty.

My husband volunteers for an organization helping Spanish speakers navigate the English world, currently an EE from Colombia stuck in a gig job and highly motivated to improve his skills, who has a lot of interesting questions. One of the things they discussed today was why native English speakers might refer to this year as twenty twenty-one or two thousand twenty-one, but would never refer to the year nineteen ninety-one as one thousand nine hundred ninety-one.

This sort of thing reminds me that I will never become fluent in another language. First off, I can’t answer the question definitively, though I agree with premise. Secondly, I can’t imagine speaking poorly enough to make such a mistake. Or maybe not a mistake; I can think of ways I might extend the number-name of the year as a joke, or social commentary. None of them is particularly nice, but nice has never been my leading strength. Of course if I did do such a thing, listeners would have to be pretty fluent in English to get my drift.

So maybe that sort of thing is pointless, or even shows a little bit of hater vibe, saying things the people around you might not understand. Though perhaps not, because they could learn something? In any case, mightn’t you be disrespecting them by dumbing down your speech, assuming they might not understand?

I have often, especially during my time in high tech, had highly intelligent work colleagues who expressed themselves at an elementary level in English. I’ve imagined them navigating the dry cleaner or the UPS store, possibly being viewed as dumb by someone who hadn’t seen them in their native milieu.

Because of that, when someone can’t communicate well with me, I remind myself that there is someplace where they are culturally attuned and I am effectively gagged. I don’t want to be in that place, though. I want to know what is going on around me.

If you’ve traveled in a foreign country, you may have seen people, often Americans, getting overcharged or worse because they a) can’t speak the language, and b) think that English is easier to understand at higher volume. A guide can help, though the guide by definition filters the experience, even if trying very hard not to do so.

Communication missteps are possible when everyone speaks the same language, too. That may be the new common experience in America. I see a lot of people on TV who are saying things using words whose meanings have clearly been altered. Heck, that happens in my erstwhile workplace as well. For instance, the phrase There’s some truth in everything is a common aphorism there. What does truth mean in that sentence? Not what I thought it meant.

And yes, I am no longer employed, and probably will just dive into early retirement. When I get the processing done and the severance pay in hand, I’ll share more.

A new study from Israel postulates that humans evolved as hypercarnivores, creatures who hunted megafauna in bands and primarily ate animals, nose to tail. In case you are interested in the source, here’s one link:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/04/210405113606.htm

This study sought to discover the diet of “stone age” humans using techniques other than observation of modern-day tribes, including examination of artifacts at habitation sites, analyzing DNA, and piecing together anatomical features from ancient bones and teeth. It concluded not only that humans lived well with minimal plant-based foods for millennia, but also that we could do so today, because “evolution remembers.”

Hypercarnivore sounds pretty scary, and the term apex predator also appears, but I had to conclude our species is more goofy than menacing, sort of like those really large dogs that expose their stomachs and wag their tails when approached. We switched away from eating megafauna after we basically killed them all, so we had to switch to smaller animals and add some plants. Ultimately, we had to create agriculture because the only way we would have enough food was if we had it right there with us, under our control. That led of course to self-domestication, reduced brain capacity, inequality, large-scale wars, opera, and TikTok.

Definitely worth it.

Like anyone with a confirmation bias, which is to say, anyone at all, I’m happy to find a science story that reinforces some of the information on the dark nutrition sites I like. But that doesn’t make it true. I have Questions that Are Not Answered.

My main question concerns the timeline, which is given as two million years. Homo sapiens has not been around for two million years. There were several branches of hominids co-existing on Earth as recently as 50,000 years ago, and lots more before that. Most of those branches didn’t become us, and I don’t see why it makes sense to include their data to describe our habits.

My husband thinks all my questions will never be answered, and I should mediate or something instead of being such an inquisitive pest, though I’m sure he would never state it that way. There is some satisfaction in accepting that all of this can never be more than speculation, and peace in accepting that much is not knowable…UNLESS advanced aliens arrive with recordings of our planetary development. That movie will be a global hit.

I was astounded when the US government announced its intention to release a report detailed UFO encounters, often witnessed by US military personnel, with the warning that many of them are unexplained. I immediately read How the US Started Taking UFOs Seriously in the New Yorker, which led me to download the Kindle version of UFOs by Leslie Kean, of which I’ve read about half.

“Read” may be overstating a bit. The concept of UFOs was so thoroughly debunked in the last half of the 20th century that I have it firmly consigned to the part of my brain that stores other things I consider cockamamie, such as reincarnation and the Q-Anon conspiracy. I skimmed the article and I am stutter-reading the book, as my incredulity keeps rising up to ask, Are you really reading this? Each time I remind myself that the US military believes these things are real, then I wonder, But does it really? Maybe I dreamed that! Then I go to nyt.com to confirm that this is an actual event, and I think, NYT has been scammed before…

It’s just so hard to believe.

Piling on, my younger son and I decided to view The Phenomenon, a recent documentary on this topic. Some of the encounters from the book were there, encounters which involve disk-, cigar-, or delta-shaped craft that fly silently, erratically, and swiftly, seem to be able to temporarily disable electronics from a distance, and sometimes interact with observers by following them or flashing lights. But I had not yet read, or perhaps skimmed over, the accounts of encounters with the occupants of these craft, straight out of central casting with childlike bodies, proportionately large heads, and large, slanted eyes. Pride of place goes to a school in Zimbabwe, where in 1994 sixty-two children aged 6 to 12 experienced an alien emerge from a landed craft and engage them telepathically.

As you may imagine, plenty of reports refer to this incident as mass hysteria.

On the other hand, there is some very dope technology on display here, and now that it is acknowledged as real, I expect our corporate overlords to waste no time in getting it into our hands and heads. Amazon can replace those throbbing Smart-car-sized drones crushing our garden gnomes with our now-pulverized deliverables with silent disks that appear, gently alight, deliver, then disappear, almost instantly. Anyone bothered by a boom box or public cell conversation can zap the offending device with a field that makes it inoperable until out of range. We’ll stop wishing for jet packs and ignore electric vehicles once we have silent, collision-avoiding, flying craft that hit speeds of 2000 mph.

I do worry about the telepathic communication though. Imagine what Facebook would do with a direct line into your head? Someone should start developing the anti-telepathy helmet right away.

I’m trying to believe, really I am!