In virtual gospel choir, everyone records herself separately and the director combines those recordings to create an online presentation. Although hearing oneself sing on a recording is always a shock-Who the heck is that?-I didn’t have any real trouble with the first three, but the most recent was hard for me. The tempo was slow, challenging my breath control, and the pitch of my section was lower than usual. I just managed to get it in on deadline, not my usual MO, and I felt compelled to sent an email apologizing for the quality.

Yet on hearing the result, I realized I wasn’t the only one who struggled. Unlike our previous efforts, this audio was pretty lousy, characterized by sloppy articulation, poor intonation, and weak expression.

The other choir members, at least those reacting on Zoom, showered this recording with the same effusive praise and expressions of love and thanks as they did the previous three. This is an open chorus, but many of its members sing well, and none to my knowledge is tone deaf, leading me to conclude that humans are as likely to undeservedly celebrate meh actions by our tribe as we are to undeservedly denigrate actions of all those weirdos out there who think crazy stuff.

While this was hardly a Light Dawns on Marblehead moment, it’s a bit of a poser when it happens in a class. Isn’t the point, after all, to learn how to do something better? If everything is already perfect, that’s literally not possible. We could have created a teachable moment by asking the musical question, Why do we sound so much worse this time?, then answering it, and then making changes.

This “class” is tribal in that one can take it repeatedly and some members have belonged for twenty years. Many of the longer-term members feel quite comfortable speaking out and have developed expectations and habits around both effort and results. While the director joined more recently and is anxious both to instruct and to produce strong performances, by age, profession, and inclination he is firmly ensconced in our century’s zeitgeist of relentless positivity.

What’s wrong with that? I would argue strongly that expecting effort to produce results, strangers to be trustworthy, employees to work to the best of their abilities, and dogs not to bark makes those results more likely. That’s positive thinking, right? But being unable to make a correction in the case of wasted effort, swindlers, slackers, and obnoxious dogs is foolish as well.

Improvement is change, and change is effected by stress. I hope I remember to remind myself of this the next time I’m running late to work and drop the milk bottle on the kitchen floor.

Santa Cruz is the first small town in which I’ve lived. To forestall your obvious smart speaker query, it’s a small city of 64,000 in a county of 270,000. Not exactly Our Town, you say? That’s what my husband and I once thought. Santa Cruz is about the size of Brookline, Massachusetts, where we lived for over twenty years before moving here, so we thought it would be about the same.

The parochial nature of SC didn’t sneak up on us though; it started thumping down all around us from the first night in our condo. After a lot of work moving in we went out for a nosh around 8:30 pm, and pretty much everything was closed. The sidewalks would have been rolled up, if SC had sidewalks, which it mostly does not. We managed to find a taqueria to keep from starving that first night, and we do fealty toward it still.

The next thump was needing work done on the house. There are a certain number of contractors in SC, and they book up; contractors were offering their services months in the future. At that point we remembered that when we wanted a bathroom refinished or a roof installed in Brookline, we had turned to a contractor a town or a few over. But SC county is surrounded by farms and mountains, not a population one-million plus metropolitan area.

Then we went to the symphony. Its music director has Metropolitan cred, Yuja Wang is among the soloists in regular rotation, and the first program we saw was Rossini’s The Barber of Seville, with the lead female role played by a singer who would reprise it at the Met a few months later. It was energetic and funny and rousing, yet from the first measures of the overture, clearly a provincial effort. One does not appreciate the accomplishment of getting all the members of the orchestra to play the same notes at exactly the same time until one has experienced its lack. One knows one did not significantly appreciate the pre-program talk of exposition, development and recapitulation after one has sat through the pre-program talk of the composer’s love interests, family strife, and childhood anecdotes.

I really don’t want to criticize SCS, which makes a wonderful effort. And since we live an hour’s drive from San Francisco, we were able to hear SFS, as well as SFO, as often as we were willing to drive there, which was roughly monthly when musical performance was still a human activity. Traveling there reminded me, a former resident of both Houston and Boston, of traffic, true traffic, 40 minutes-to-move-0.8-miles-level traffic. It was almost nostalgic for me: Truly, we are in a city!

Santa Cruzans love to complain about traffic, which to them means a journey that took five minutes in 1960 now takes an unacceptable quarter-hour. More annoyingly, they underestimate traffic Every Single Day. This is my burden in my current job as a receptionist for a naturopath. Patients are Late, and they are late because of Traffic, even though they Left Early, allowing much more time than it has Ever Taken.

Santa Cruzans also bemoan crowds, the same crowds whose components fuel the city’s tourist-based economy. How dare those folks come “over the hill,” aka as “from Silicon Valley,” to visit our beaches? They should get their own beaches. And what about the homeless, sleeping on picnic tables we want to use? Yet those who own property do not disparage the outsiders who purchase vacation homes in our area, driving housing prices up and up.

Are these common human reactions? Yes. Do I have any such irrational reactions of my own? Often. Do I embrace the crazy quirkiness of human nature? Almost always. Do many people recognize their own inconsistencies? Many. Does Santa Cruz offer numerous compensating amenities? Very many.

Does city life seem to me like Glory Days? Only sometimes.

Tonight I thought that I would ease back into blogging with a descriptive post of general interest that would not require much creativity. At the end of the day I am so tired though, and I wanted to dictate instead of type, so I went in descending circles trying to figure that out. I swear it used to be in my Accessibility settings, but I could not find it. After several fruitless google searches with results like, Click on the microphone icon at the upper right except there wasn’t one, I decided to pout for a while. With the result that twenty minutes after starting to blog I hadn’t gotten past the title.

Now it’s much closer to the time that Tanglewood may drop their classical schedule for this summer, something that is supposed to happen on April 8, so I’m thinking that might happen at midnight Tanglewood time–a much nicer albeit more obscure moniker than Eastern Daylight Time–and if it does I certainly need to be done with my blog because I want to buy a bunch of tickets and then book some flights. So now I am more distracted and less likely to concentrate on generating a salient blog post.

This sort of thing happens a lot. I am really careful to minimize time on small devices. I don’t even like small devices. I block computer ads and mute TV ads when I can’t fast forward through them. I don’t subscribe to Facebook or Instagram or Twitter or even Reddit. I still read books, lots of books, and I don’t have trouble concentrating on books, at least not in a quiet reading environment. Maybe that last is the key.

It’s pretty quiet in my house right now, though, so let me try a little harder to describe the item of general interest, quickly, so I can get back to refreshing tanglewood.org.

Today our younger son got vaccinated at a vaccination center in Oakland. He showed his appointment-confirming QR code to the gatekeeper and was directed to join a stop/go line of hundreds of cars, snaking through a convoluted path in the parking lot of the Oakland Coliseum, a major league sports stadium. He was in that path for about an hour. At the end, the path separated into 18 lanes, each containing ten vaccination stations. Each lane would be emptied at the same time, after which ten more cars pull up to the ten stations so their drivers can be vaccinated. Our son was confident the time in the vaccination lane was less than five minutes for the ten cars.

So this center vaccinated 18 lanes * 10 drivers per lane, or 180 drivers, every five minutes, which would be 180 * 12 or 2160 people per hour. I do not know how many hours the center is open, but if it’s eight hours, that would be over 17,000 people per day. It’s not the only vaccination center in the Bay Area either.

Oh, and I should mention, the entire operation was managed by the National Guard.

Finally the US has found something we are good at doing: getting lots of people vaccinated. Our son was able to get his appointment through the website Vaccine Fairy. He discovered it yesterday and got a shot today. He even got the J&J vaccine, meaning the trip was One and Done.

Now is the time to re-structure this post, give it a story arc, and circle back to the beginning at the end, but I’m not going to do that. I’m going to go rest my fingers while I wait for the BSO to keep their promise. I put a toe into the blog pool today at least, so maybe I will immerse myself a little more soon.

I woke up and thought, I should get rid of my fitness tracker.

My primary concern in life at this point is not having enough time, and I spend a lot of my time mucking about with my tracker. It tracks some forms of exercise automatically, while others I have to enter, which I do, along with my weight. It tracks my sleep, doing a very meh job of discerning sleep cycles, but I still check it obsessively every morning. It displays the time and date. It has to be charged every couple of days.

It can track eating, but I don’t use it for that. In the great chain of I’d-never-do-that, I think people who enter everything they eat into their fitness trackers are crazy. Plenty of folks think I’m crazy for the way I use mine. Everyone thinks David Sedaris is crazy: 65,000 steps a day?!

My tracker has the warm fuzzy feature personal tech is most proud of, allowing one to constantly share one’s details with friends. This can be connecting, competitive, assaultive, or propagandizing, as now know. I think mostly millennials do that, though not all of them. Generation Z pretty much all do it. I have not been tempted for a moment.

Of course it has the primary income-generating feature of ads, but I’m pretty good at not seeing those. I’m so determined not to see ads that I think I now miss ephemeral events in the real world, having trained my eyes not to stray.

My tracker definitely has the secondary income-generating feature of planned obsolescence, and it is time for me to make a decision. They aren’t that expensive, and mine has lasted at least three years, yet they are made of plastic and in no wise recyclable. It’s a small gesture for the planet, but if everyone did it…

The most compelling reason for me to give up my tracker, though, is to reduce the number of tiny, self-focused activities in my life. I already resist* Youtube videos, Reddit pages, and online news, things that may be entertaining or informative, but are small. I want to be entertained at concerts and informed by reading books, big things that required investment of time and effort that they pay back proportionately. Most important, I don’t want to replace all the big things with small things to the extent that I forget that big things are Worth It.

Plus, I can tan my left arm evenly, losing that unsightly strap mark.

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• Resist, not avoid. I’m not planning to give up my phone either.

I’ve become addicted to The Crown, which is the first show I have not only started to watch as a streaming show, rather than in its original incarnation, but also pursued avidly. Usually I dabble in older shows, watching in a desultory fashion, and I’m not sure I’ve ever finished a series. But this one I’m racing through, at least by my standards, having finished two seasons in five weeks.

Although I feel compelled to watch, I can’t elucidate what about it compels me. The main character is Queen Elizabeth II, and she is portrayed as a poised but hapless figure, easily persuaded to alter a declared firm course, standoffish to a fault, and rarely affecting events significantly. Although her personal struggle is compelling, it is certainly fictional; I can’t imagine there was any cooperation by the principals with Netflix.

The characters are real people and a lot of the events are known to me, as is, of course, the “ending,” as it were–Charles will never be king, Margaret will not find happiness in marriage, etc. I am learning history, if reading Wikipedia can rise to that phrase, because I research almost every episode after watching it, and usually the reality is not as dramatic as portrayed, and in some cases actually misleading. I noticed that with the first part of Game of Thrones, one of the reasons I stopped watching, but those deviations were from fiction. As much as I love the portrayals, I’m not completely comfortable with Netflix rewriting recent history about currently living people for a large audience.

I’m concurrently reading Black Swan by Nassim Taleb, a book about the power of narrative to shape our opinions, alter our memories, bolster false confidence, quash our estimating abilities, and in general make us dumber, more gullible, and less competent. He’s got a take-no-prisoners approach to his thesis. I’m not completely convinced, but there is some meat to it, and I find echos in the fetchingly crafted false narratives of The Crown, which are sure to outpoll any real understanding of the events portrayed in the memories of its audience, including me.

Does it matter if the prevailing narrative is real? Is it possible to even formulate a “real” narrative, given the diversity of human experience? These are key questions of our time.

When we unpacked the Christmas decorations this year, we found our tree-topping star had shed its glitter cover, disintegrating into a minimalist net of wires and bulbs worthy of an appearance in The Nightmare Before Christmas. We tried wrapping some paper around to spread a rosy glow and produced sort of a Son of Eye of Sauron. Perfect for 2020!

Those decorations are gone now–the star into the trash–and 2021 is here with strong promise. The days are getting longer, and ever-so-slightly warmer. The vaccine is being distributed. A subset of the Trump supporters–I know you guys, I love you, but I don’t understand you–raided the Capitol building with the unintentional results of a) converting some of the most ardent Trump enablers into this-has-gone-too-far speechifiers, and b) demonstrating both the ineptitude and the racism of US law enforcement for all to observe. And a miracle occurred on Epiphany: the Democrats got control of the Senate by sweeping the Georgia runoff elections.

I regret that lives were lost in the Capitol assault, but overall I think the event benefitted our country, allowing us all to see how far beyond social media posting some fellow citizens are willing to go to overturn democracy and flout rule of law. I was especially moved to hear Senator Tammy Duckworth explain that she fought in a war in Iraq, a war in which she did not believe, prosecuted by a president for whom she didn’t vote, because that’s how much she supports democracy. She lost both legs in that war.

Other speeches were less compelling. I’m not buying the This is not America line. This is us, baby. WYSIWYG. Not saying we can’t be better. In fact, we’d have to try hard to avoid it. Though we may never again “Be Best.” Were we ever? Let’s make it a goal.

best /best/ noun That which is the most excellent, outstanding, or desirable.

One woman’s opinion: The best human society is one in which every person has peace, health, equality, and a chance to seek self-contentment. To be ideal, it would also avoid, or rather stop, ruining the health of its planet and destroying all other species.

Maybe my expectations were lowered too much by 2020, but 2021 is lifting my heart. I feel a touch of hope I haven’t felt in quite a while.

In prior years, I’ve commented that Christmas sneaked up on me, but this year I have felt the rails rattle and heard the whistle blowing every day since Thanksgiving, as it bears down inexorably. Meanwhile, I’ve been tied to the tracks. Today I finally settled the last two out-of-town gifts and started thinking about getting something for the folks I will actually be seeing.

I don’t think there will be a Christmas missive from me this year either, both because I have no time and because I really don’t want to remember anything at all about 2020. I don’t want to chronicle it, I don’t want to retain any habits from it, I don’t want to count my blessings. I want to wallow in churlishness. 2020 Soaks.

Yet it’s hard to maintain grumpiness in Santa Cruz, with the weather in the low 60s under cloudless blue skies five days before Christmas. I headed to the funky gift shop Jones and Bones with the convertible top down, Christmas in the Ashram playing on KPIG. Later, my husband and I walked to Two Birds, a new Bookstore! 0.4 miles from our house! That’s just whipped cream on Paradise.

Most of the homeowners in our condo association went early and big on Christmas decorations this year. We went to sleep on November 27th with spinning and blinking lights filling our bedroom window, at least until we drew the shade.

In unit 3975C however, I’m the driver of the decorations, and I started yesterday, after a few days of mental preparation. How could I do something new outdoors, given that decorations have long been sold out locally? We have a deer, and I decided we should put it the eucalyptus tree in our front yard. At Christmas, a deer in a tree is plausible.

I enlisted my sheltering-in-place family and with the help of the ladder, it was quickly done. Here’s a rough idea, though the picture could be better. You can get an idea of the height from our front door at the lower right.

We patched the outside light display into Google Home with a 5:30 to 10:30 pm daily schedule. Later that evening, I asked my husband, Did the Christmas lights come on? He assured me all was working, I stepped outside to admire, and found Dasher hanging straight down from the branch, in all his lighted glory.

Ah yes, those Southerners, lynching the reindeer.

Instead of seeing this as a grammable moment, I immediately turned off the lights, reducing the visual range of the grisly scene. Then we retrieved the ladder and some paracord and secured Dasher more securely to the branch.

Christmas spirit restored? Or were small children traumatized in the interim?

You’ve heard of people who are Unread or Well-read. I believe there is a category of people who are Overread, and I am among them.

If you’re Overread, you are constantly convinced you know more than most journalists, both radio and print, as well as most radio and TV hosts. You aren’t happy about this. Really it would be better if the journalists would present verifiable information, which could be helpful for the portions of their audience who are Lightly Read, or rely on industry-curated social media for information, or are headline grazers.

I used to talk back during these stories, but I’m trying to reserve my crazy lady episodes for critical situations like keeping my kids from poisoning themselves with bad nutritional choices, or getting my husband to do stuff because he feels sorry for me. If you’re crazy all the time, the world and the people in it spin away. So now I just switch to the classical station or find something expert-based to read.

The latter sets me up for a positive feedback loop of overreading.

As everyone with a field of expertise knows, when you read about your own field in the popular press or hear a radio program about it, you will encounter errors. That’s a little sad, because people who are interested are getting some misinformation, but everyone can’t be an expert at everything, and often these errors aren’t egregious. Journalists, hard-working and necessary as they are, usually report on something outside their areas of expertise.

Recently though, I feel this way about almost every story, and often the errors are egregious. Today I heard a radio host arguing with his expert guest about the likelihood of life on other planets, and the expert, who was trying to encourage listeners to take ecological threats seriously, told him that life on other planets is “at least rare.” I’ve read a lot about this. It’s not a matter of odds; there are an almost unimaginable number of stars, but how many have planets? How many of those planets are gas giants vs. rocky? How many are outside the path of gamma ray sources? Our relatively remote galaxy has helped in this last factor, since gamma rays effectively sterilize a planet.

Even if there are lots of microbially-rich planets, that doesn’t mean Star Trek is likely to remind us of a documentary soon. Check out the Rare Earth hypothesis.

Why do I know all this stuff? You know why.

During this time of no concerts or dances or volunteer work, I read even more, and I am exposed to more sloppy journalism in the guise of Covid reporting, which seems particularly influenced by the attitude of the journalist presenting it. The ones who are terrified of getting Covid report it differently from the ones who are dismissive of the whole idea, who report it differently from the ones who feel responsible for saving the world. Then there are ones who spin everything positively–Vaccine ready, plenty for all!–and negatively–We’ll all die soon!

I think I know better, but I get no satisfaction from this. Just a headache.

I feel as though I’m standing on the edge of a cliff, preparing to dive. I will probably survive, but this is a dangerous undertaking, and I may end up paralyzed, or an amputee. I have been preparing for this dive for a very long time, and now the moment has arrived. I try to focus, to visualize a triumphant ending, yet honestly, I know I can’t control the outcome.

I feel like a caterpillar born into a hostile climate. I have managed to find enough food, as well as a place to hang while I create my chrysalis, which I have constructed very carefully, as it must protect me during the most vulnerable moments of my life. For a very short time, just after I emerge, I will be powerless to defend myself from threats ranging from hailstones to wasps. I have no choice but to proceed, no path that avoids risk.

I might be a cancer victim, filled with a growth that is killing me, on the eve of a risky operation that will provide a small but real chance of reclaiming my health. A myriad of other results is also possible.

Perhaps I am a pedestrian walking downtown on a windy day, on the sidewalk below a high-rise under construction, just as the ironworkers lose control of a hanging girder. I neither see nor hear it hurtling toward me, though I know, I’ve always known, that construction sites can be dangerous. I don’t have a choice, I have to walk this way to try to reach my destination. Whether I succeed will be decided in moments, though not by me.

I feel like a passenger on a roller coaster that has just pulled away from the loading platform and started up the steepest grade, where there is no turning back. This scary ride is going to happen and I am going to be on it. This particular coaster, though, was very recently repaired after it jumped the tracks, injuring a few people. Then groups of other people, with a wide range of knowledge and opinion about how roller coasters work, built different pieces of it in different places, and just now it has all been put together, or maybe it’s being put together while I’m riding it, just-in-time.

Four more days.

I’m blogging from one of the above. At the moment, which may be fleeting, California, with 12 % of the US population, leads most other states in reversing the coronavirus resurgence. Its method? Slice and dice. Vis-a-vis Covid rules, each of its 58 counties is monitored and regulated separately, so acquiescence is quickly rewarded and insouciance quickly punished.

From most to fewest restrictions, the colors are Purple, Red, Orange, and Yellow. The level assigned is based on two criteria: daily new cases per 100,000 people and percent of positive tests. Obviously, minimal testing would help with the second criterion, so a certain percent of county residents must be tested each week in order to qualify.

This standard is strict. Santa Cruz County, with 2,771 total cases and 25 deaths in a population of just over 270,000, was Purple for a long while because it did not have enough testing, and even now is Red. A falling county must comply with new restrictions immediately, while a rising county must maintain for 14 days before adopting looser restrictions, and no category allows back-to-normal living.

No Green.

San Francisco County, pretty much comprised of one city, leads in the Bay Area, having been moved to Yellow five days ago. I remember that SF opened outdoor venues like its zoo when it was Red and indoor museums at Orange. I think Yellow may take some indoor dining up to 50% occupancy, from 25%.

Our younger son is in California for the nonce, so all four of us went to the Zoo SF last weekend, with only outdoor displays open, timed tickets and masks required, and water fountains limited to bottle-filling. Sadly, the boardwalk through the lemur exhibit was closed; too narrow? We saw the lemurs from below, including a ringtail; was it Maki, kidnapped only the week before, and found by a 5-year-old boy whose family received lifetime zoo membership?

Returning to the topic: I’ve voted by mail since I moved West, and this year it’s even easier, plus we have vote tracking. I signed up, and received text messages when my sample ballot was mailed, when my real ballot was mailed, when my completed ballot arrived at the post office, and when my completed ballot arrived at the County office. We have pre-checking of course, so I also received assurances that my vote will be counted. If there had been irregularities in my ballot, I would have been given a chance to verify my identity.

I feel pretty safe here, but I sort of wish I could fall asleep and wake up when the election is over. Though that might be eternal sleep. My nightmares involve declaration of a national emergency, which would give the President emergency powers, including that of suspending the election. If he were given to irony, I would almost expect him to declare one over the Covid resurgence.

Then there’s the possibility of having our election decided by the Supreme Court, or the House of Representatives in one-vote-per-state mode. Meanwhile, I have a phone appointment on November 3rd to try to switch my health insurance out of the exchange, in advance of its likely abolishment by the Supreme Court in a week or two.

So many paths to my needing to move to another country! Choosing a destination is hard now that US passport holders are so widely unwelcome, whether from states Red or Blue, badly run or otherwise.