Personal, Philosophy, Politics & Culture, Writing, Editing & Journalism

What a Month!

No Comments

January is already a memory. Wow. Let’s recap some highlights.
Auto-Mania
Around Thanksgiving, I started my GMC Jimmy one morning and heard a bit of a squeal and smelled an odd aroma reminiscent of a mix of oil, burning rubber and ozone. It came, it went, life went on. But Jimmy started to act a little funny — eventually, I’d experience intermittent periods where the charging system would fail. Then it would come back to life, as if by magic.
Over my Christmas vacation, I vowed to fix the problem myself, if I could. I popped the hood and voila! — it was immediately obvious that the pulley on the belt tensioner was broken. As in, chewed to pieces. The entire serpentine belt was chafing and parts, like the alternator, weren’t being properly driven.
“I can fix that!” I said to the cats. So I did. I bought a replacement pulley from AutoZone (1.04 miles from my house by foot) and replaced the damaged part. In single-digit temperatures. Outdoors. Without gloves. Woohoo. So I got that part replaced and what happened? You guessed it — sitting for a few days, in the cold, after having had intermittent charging, left the already worn battery too weak to soldier on. So on one of the snowiest days of early January, I trudged to AutoZone on foot, bought a replacement battery, carried it home through drifts as high as two feet — and, after I installed it, thought, “Geez, why didn’t I just call a cab?”
Battery worked. But still no charge. Damn it.
So back to AutoZone for a replacement alternator. When the weather got a little nicer — as in, the upper 20s — I swapped alternators. Only hard part about that process was getting the bolts aligned on the new unit. So I fired up the ol’ girl and watched the voltmeter go from 11 volts to about 14 over the course of a minute. Then I flipped on the defroster and the system immediately dialed to 11, never to recover.
By that point, any other fixes would be guesses, because I lacked the tools and expertise to diagnose what might have been an odd fault somewhere. I took Jimmy to Community Automotive, whereupon I was informed that the problem was that the alternator wasn’t putting out a charge. Translation: They said AutoZone sold me a defective replacement part.
They also told me that the tensioner was screwed up and the serpentine belt was super worn. So I said, “Fine. Replace the entire tensioner assembly and the belt. I’ll deal with AutoZone on my own.”
I picked up Jimmy from the shop — and lo and behold, the charging system works. I’ve been driving it for a week and my voltmeter is fine and I’m clearly not driving on the battery alone.
My guess? Community Automotive determined a bad charge on the alternator with a misaligned belt. After the belt was replaced and the tensioner re-aligned, the alternator was good to go. But I’m still keeping my eyes peeled for a while for signs of charging-system faults.
Food Deserts, Public Transportation and Good Health
While Jimmy was undergoing repairs, I opted to play it safe and keep it parked until I knew the problems were fixed. That left me to find alternative transportation to work. Daily cab fare runs $50 between my house downtown and the office on the far northeast side of the city. But, I live near a bus stop, and there’s a stop about an eighth of a mile from the office. So, problem solved — for $3/day, I can just Ride the Rapid.
I don’t mind the bus. The Rapid buses are clean and run mostly on time. My biggest gripe with the system is that the metro area consists of an urban core surrounded by inner-ring suburbs that aren’t well connected to each other. The transit system uses a hub-and-spoke model that routes most buses through the downtown Central Station; there are just a handful of crosstown routes that don’t connect through Central. In a practical sense, then, getting most places takes longer than it needs to. My drive from home to office is about 15 minutes; my bus commute, door to door, takes a full hour. We really need more ring routes and crosstown routes to connect disparate parts of the metro area without having to head downtown so frequently.
(I think a shuttle service between Standale Meijer and the Grandville Library is essential, as is a park-and-ride lot at Plainfield and the Beltline where Route 11 extends all the way to the Beltline, then a crosstown route connects that lot with Knapps Corner, Meijer Gardens and then Woodland Mall. If the Rapid folks were super clever, they’d run a two-way square ring route starting at Leonard and Alpine, proceeding on Leonard to Plymouth, south to Franklin, west to Godfrey/Market, then follow Wealthy to Straight, Seward and back to Alpine — thus crossing a whopping 19 routes without actually putting in at Central Station, a potential time-saver for folks who just want to get from one part of the periphery to another. But I digress.)
My location, in the South Hill neighborhood, puts me within reasonable walking distance of a small Family Dollar and the small Wealthy Market. Neither establishment stocks an assortment of healthful foods. Family Dollar, for example, offers no fresh fruits or vegetables and the freezer section consists of pizzas, burritos, ice cream and such. Were I to aim for healthy eating, my only real option is to trudge a few blocks to a bus stop, head to the Kalamazoo Ave. Meijer, buy groceries, then trudge back. That’s a lot of time and effort — moreso than most would undertake.
I’m not a huge activist for Michelle Obama’s “food desert” propaganda, but I do note in passing that if I were permanently confined to public transportation, I’d either need to radically re-think my daily routines or acquiesce to less healthful foods. Puts the “chronic co-morbidities” question into a different lens, methinks.
Caffeinated Press
I’ve mentioned it before, but perhaps not in adequate detail. So here goes.
In mid 2014, a group of colleagues and I established Caffeinated Press, Inc., a for-profit S corporation organized in Michigan. Our mission as a small independent publisher is to connect authors and readers in the West Michigan market. I serve as chairman of the board and chief executive officer; in that capacity, I also oversee the acquisitions and editorial processes. The company includes five board members and several outstanding associates who are working hard to build the company.
I’m putting the final touches on Brewed Awakenings, the first of what we intend to be an annual house anthology. Production has been labor-intensive. I’ve had to proofread roughly 85k words, manage layout, design the cover, develop the front matter, etc. Takes a lot of time — indeed, the bulk of my month has been spent on anthology production. Eight local authors contributed novelettes to the anthology; I’m in it too, with “Providence,” a story set on Lake Michigan. Our very loose theme was “all goes dark,” but the work we’re publishing includes some humor, some gore, some romance, some speculative fiction. Good stuff. We’re producing the anthology in both paper and e-book formats; the paper version will appear in the Ingram catalog and the e-book versions on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Overdrive, etc.
The board recently authorized the production of a quarterly literary journal, called The 3288 Review. More details on that, later.
Health Data Analytics; State Leaders Team
I’ve wrapped up most of my work on the Health Data Analytics project for the National Association for Healthcare Quality. With my colleague Tricia, executive director of outcomes for an Illinois hospital, we led a team of health quality practitioners from across the country on an exercise to define the emerging competencies necessary for the next generation of practitioners. Our charge focused on health data analytics — i.e., Quality pros who specialize in analytics. Interesting work. Our report goes next to the NAHQ board of directors.
And on the subject of NAHQ, this year’s president asked me to move my cheese a bit. Instead of rotating into the second-year lead role for the Special Interest Group team, she asked me to begin a new two-year cycle as co-lead of the State Leaders team. That puts me and my new colleague, Andrew, in front of the presidents and presidents-elect of the various state-level health care quality associations across the country. Andrew is a top-notch fellow and our assigned staffer at NAHQ and our board liaison are very easy to work with. Looking forward to this new opportunity.
Surgical Site Infections
With one of our physician medical directors, I recently authored an internal white paper about the costs associated with surgical site infections for patients who are fully embraced within a particular accountable-care organization. The numbers were low — but we recognized that part of the problem was identifying SSIs correctly amid a paucity of accurate physician documentation that works its way into an administrative claim record. Looks like this early report will fuel a broader review of how healthcare acquired infections are managed within our ACO. Potentially publishable research!
Texas, Ho!
Still on track, in a few weeks, for a brief excursion to Texas. My plan is to drive from Grand Rapids to Shreveport, LA, and spend the night at a casino there. Then, drop of my friend Duane’s stuff in East Texas, then push through to the Dallas Metroplex to catch some of the Thinline Film Festival shenanigans. I’ll head back to The Mitten by means of Oklahoma City, so I can catch some prominent casinos along the way. Basically, killing three birds with one minivan.
Miscellaneous Updates
Some other tidbits of interest —

  • Enjoyed a lovely podcasting marathon yesterday with Tony. We had sushi at Maru, enjoyed some Japanese whiskey and cigars at Grand River Cigar, and then retreated to my dining room to push out four episodes. The cigars came to us courtesy of Famous Smoke Shop, an online retailer, that’s partnering with our podcast.
  • I get to hire a new intern and a new senior analyst this fiscal year. Yay!
  • One of my contract clients had a change of leadership in my area; the upshot is that I’m being invited to do more management stuff, as a contractor, that had formerly been the sole domain of company personnel.
  • We’ve got a severe winter warning right now. As I write this, I see heavy, blowing snow creating white-out conditions at a quarter mile. Beautiful. If only I had thought to buy firewood so I could have a fire tonight.
  • Looking forward to the county convention next week, in anticipation of the 2015 Michigan Republican state convention.
  • My next writing project might be a textbook about health care quality.
  • Fleshing out my author page on Goodreads reminds me of how little time I have to actually read. That said, I’m about 60 percent done with Francis Fukuyama’s Political Order and Political Decay, the second of two volumes dedicated to revisiting and extending the groundbreaking research of Samuel Huntington into the origin and evolution of political institutions.
  • I cut the cord. After paying Comcast $220 per month for years for TV I rarely watched, a phone I never used and Internet that sometimes crawled to a halt, I gave them the boot and now rely on AT&T DSL for $40 per month. I still have Netflix and Hulu Plus, and Skype and my cell phone, so … yeah.

Hoist Upon Chait’s Petard
Some concluding thoughts about this week’s pundit nerdfight over Jonathan Chait’s essay, “Not a Very P.C. Thing to Say.”
The back-and-forth over whether Chait makes a good point or whether he is some sort of hypocrite or whether he is locked in his own view of privilege — well, it’s all already been said. The most fitting coda, I think, is merely to observe that the dour puritanism of today’s Left will, perhaps inevitably, engender a systemic backlash from within the Left itself.
The human mind enjoys a finite capability to accept cognitive dissonance, let alone the doublethink that lets people hold mutually inconsistent assertions to be true without it even triggering that dissonance. Indeed, the New Soviet Man was a creature of this doublethink. But even with relentless propaganda, nuclear missiles and Kalashnikovs, the spark of truth couldn’t ever really be repressed. The events of 1989 bore that out. Yet the Left today is increasingly reliant on authoritarian systems of psychosocial control that require doublethink to avoid cognitive dissonance. At some point, the average Man of the Left will ask: Is this really what I believe? And when that happens, the bottom will fall out.
There’s something odd, for example, in holding that the concept of a gender construct is sufficient to change reality. Were I to announce that I identify as female and henceforth want to be known as Jane, most on the Left will applaud my bravery, call me Jane and use “she” as a pronoun. All that, despite inconvenient reality of my XX chromosomes (and sexual organs). One would think the “science is settled” about biological sex at least as strongly as it’s allegedly settled about climate change, but ….
So, again — the mind’s ability to square the cognitively dissonant circle isn’t without limit. Regardless what you think of Chait, or his arguments, the Thermidor he points to may dawn more swiftly than some expect.

Personal

Out with 2014; In with 2015 — A Reflection

No Comments

We are now a full 1 percent finished with 2015. Can you believe it? Tempus fugit. Lots of good stuff occurred this past year, including —

  • Earning promotion to management at work
  • Executing successfully our state healthcare-quality conference in Traverse City
  • Finishing my gear-out for scuba diving and getting back under the water
  • Trekking to Boston, Chicago, Nashville and Las Vegas — plus the Detroit/Windsor casino excursion from February
  • Receiving the Rising Quality Star honor from NAHQ
  • Establishing Caffeinated Press, Inc., and pulling together our first product, an eight-story anthology
  • Sponsoring my friend Rob into the Catholic Church
  • Maintaining a perfect track record for our weekly Vice Lounge Online podcasts
  • “Winning” NaNoWriMo with Aiden’s Wager
  • Ending the year about a pound lighter than I started it
  • Seeing my 403(b) account increase more than 6 percent from last year

As I survey the legacy of 2014, certain lessons have presented themselves:

  1. I’m more likely to get things done and to prioritize effectively when I have a lot on my plate. Conversely, the more I have pending, the more likely that fairly routine tasks will be set aside in service to the crisis du jore. Among those routine tasks are the basic “wellness” activities that too often get trumped by an external deadline.
  2. Unlike the heady days of my early-to-mid 20s, nowadays I need regular downtime to recharge. If I burn the candle from both ends for too long, as soon as a free day comes, I just collapse. That sprint-then-stop pace isn’t healthy in the long run. I’ve been tinkering with my normal to-do list to isolate Sundays. I am going to try to make Sundays a day of full and complete rest — no work, no chores, just tranquility. Maybe some reading or Netflixing or walking in the park, but nothing I have to do.
  3. The things that are important and the things that are urgent, rarely overlap.
  4. The older I get, the less I can pretend that bad habits don’t matter.
  5. Having aggressive goals does matter.

I’m not a fan of new-year resolutions — they reek of “lost cause” — but I have identified some goals for the coming year. I need to replace my vehicle and my desktop PC. I’m planning on trips this year to the Dallas metroplex, Philadelphia, Seattle and Las Vegas, as well as a return trek to Isle Royale (weather permitting). I want to learn Python and R, launch a quarterly literary journal through Caffeinated Press, upgrade my radio license to General class, earn SSI’s “master diver” rank by the end of the summer, and publish a textbook about clinical quality improvement. Later this month, discussions will commence about a possible dive trip with the Gang of Four and about a possible visit to see my friend Jared in Abu Dhabi (perhaps, twinning the UAE trip with a side excursion to Bangalore, India). I’d really, really like to try the Metro Health Marathon in October. And despite bobbing around the diocese, including extended sojourns to the cathedral and to St. Robert, I think I’d feel more at home with a return to St. Anthony.
Today is the final day of Grand Staycation IV. I got a lot done, but much remains to be finished. I’m looking forward to 2015, mostly because I have a better sense than last year of the things that are worth pursuing, versus the things I have either always done, or allowed myself to be talked into. So I think the watchwords for the coming year are “triage and consolidation” — i.e., fixing what’s not optimal and doubling down on what’s important.
Best wishes for a safe, happy and healthy new year!

Personal, Politics & Culture

On the Proactive Avoidance of Relationship Regret

No Comments

Posted on my Roadmap is my one-sentence mission: “I will be a contented and healthy man who, upon his 70th birthday, can look himself in the mirror free of the sting of regret.” Easier written than done, perhaps, but thinking about the question 32 years early opens the door for opportunities to avoid incurring regret in the first place.
I’m sometimes asked whether I get depressed about not having married and “settled down” with a brood of crumb-crunchers and a little suburban house with a white picket fence and a used minivan and a slightly dopey golden retriever. Usually well-intentioned, the question nevertheless is curious, insofar as it rests on two rickety assumptions: First, that marriage and family are normative, from which deviation signifies loss or defect; and second, that I am ignorant of what I’m missing so therefore I should pine for it.
As to the first assumption, I can only say that I’ve seen many people marry and remain happy together for a very long time. I’ve also seen friends younger than I who have already divorced. I am aware, through my own family’s experience, of what divorce does to family dynamics. A few years ago, when I more actively searched for a partner, I was dismayed to discover just how many women in the 25-to-35 age cohort are either single or divorced … but with at least one small child. Marriage isn’t the institution it used to be, and most families I know have so absorbed the individualist Gestalt that “family” is perhaps more meaningful as a tribal affiliation than as blood-kin identification.
I am not unaware of the benefits of marriage and child-rearing. Should the right situation arise, I’d get married. But I’m not drawn to the institution and I don’t feel incomplete because I live in an apartment with no one except my feline overlords. I’ve seen too many elderly people in the hospital who bet on a spouse and children or grandchildren to look after them in their dotage — and then see those bets fail. No one is guaranteed a loving family surrounding you on your deathbed when you’re in your late 90s. People die; they grow apart, they feud, they have different priorities. When I did pastoral care rounds in the hospital, years ago, it wasn’t all that rare for the older patients to want me to stick around. To talk. Sure, they had families — but, you know, they were busy. Seems odd to structure a life, beginning in your 20s, on the gamble of what you’ll need or want in your twilight years. Yet that’s the message, fundamentally, of family: They’re the ones who will take care of you when you’re back in diapers. Good luck with that.
Life is a series of trade-offs. There’s no such thing as a perfect existence — just a never-ending churn of decisions balanced against each individual person’s proprietary blend of needs and wants. With marriage and kids, you get better income stability, regular affection, family bonding, life milestones. Without marriage and kids, though, I retain the freedom to make major life choices without getting them approved by someone else — I can come and go as I wish, buy or save as I wish, avoid having to live with the inevitable compromises that come with marriage, and if I needed to take care of my mom when she gets old, I’m not subject to the whim of a spouse who may resist or resent it. And certainly not least, if I were to retire to a sailboat and see parts of the world, no one will try to stop me.
The other argument for marriage and family follows from a basic human need for companionship. To which, all I can say is that I do not want for friends. I have a long-term stable core, a middle-ring network that comes and goes, and a large flock of friendly acquaintances. I occasionally have weeks where I think to myself: Self, you need to start declining some social invitations so you can get some work done. So I’m not exactly a lonely recluse.
The second assumption — that I should pine or grieve for what I lack — flows from the first. When you accept the normativity of marriage and procreation, then not having it becomes an emotional struggle, a challenge of self-worth, a grave problem requiring resolution. I think there’s a fairly strong Christian Reformed, West-Michigan-culture thing at play, there, too: If you’re not married by a certain age, then there’s something wrong with you. I know quite a few people who unduly stress out over their lack of a spouse. Anyone who’s spoken to the aspiring MRS candidates at Cornerstone University or Kuyper College or even Calvin College knows the fairytale: You wait for your prince or princess then live happily upper-middle-class forever and ever, amen. Lots of those women end up, several years after their graduation and their weddings, with OKCupid profiles that feature them with their infants. I know; I’ve dated some of them. That toxic culture has wreaked incalculable chaos on the lives of the young and the innocent thanks to the tyranny of impossible expectations.
But I digress.
My biggest frustration with friends who do lust after marriage is that the longer they search in vain, the more out-of-whack their thinking becomes. It’s as if there’s some magical ratchet in their heads that, as the months and years slip away, creates ever-more-unreasonable demands for what they expect in a mate — until they come to obsess after an idealized spouse who could not possibly exist in the real world. In a sense, that ratchet is a defense mechanism, with a twofold task of protecting them having to engage in serious self-examination while precluding relationships that might be “good enough” but are nevertheless avoided because they won’t be perfect. The fairytale always trumps, but the drama never ends.
As for me, I guess I have nothing to pine over because there’s not much related to interpersonal intimacy that I haven’t experienced. I’ve loved people. I’ve woken up smiling with someone else’s head beside mine on the pillow. I’ve known the thrill of a first date, the pain of a break-up, the emptiness of a drunken bar hookup and the joy of bonding with someone over drinks. My closest friends have been with me for going on two decades. If I ever woke up at 2 a.m. with a crisis, I can think of at least five numbers to call off the top of my head where the person on the other end of the line wouldn’t hesitate to leap to my assistance.
I am content. So, having weighed the merits and elected my current path, all I can say is — I think I’ve avoided incurring a regret that would otherwise haunt me in late 2046.

Personal

Sixteen Days of Freeeeedom!

No Comments

When I left the office around 2:30p today, I began a vacation that doesn’t end until I return on the morning of Mon., Jan. 5. Sixteen consecutive days of vacay bliss.
This calls for a celebration. Bourbon? Check. Cuban cigar? Check. (Thanks to Scott for the generous gift!)
Ahhhh….

Personal

Be Glad and Rejoice, for Grand Staycation IV is Almost Here!

No Comments

In just a few days, I begin the fourth annual Grand Staycation. With 16 consecutive days off, I will focus on end-of-the-year catch-up and planning for 2015. I’m much more excited for the vacation than I am about the holidays, but in fairness, I’m in generally good spirits about the holidays this year, so there’s that. Anyway, see below for general updates.
VLO E-200.  Today, Tony and I hit a four-year milestone with the release of episode 200 of our Vice Lounge Online podcast. The show ran roughly 45 minutes; we were blessed with five calls, plenty of pontificating, a Christmas Martony cocktail and even five minutes of outtakes I’ve accumulated over the last year. VLO has been a wonderful experience for us. Our program — a weekly 30-minute show about casino gaming, premium cigars and fine adult beverages — has grown to literally thousands of listeners each week. We’ve been fortunate to make great new friends across the country and even in the U.K. because of it.
Anthology. I wrote my anthology story; it clocked in around 11,300 words and will be the eighth submission to the Caffeinated Press All Goes Dark anthology project. I’m excited about this effort. We have eight fun stories crossing genres, written by authors local to the Grand Rapids area. Part of Grand Staycation IV includes final editorial prep for the anthology — last line edits to the manuscripts, production, ISBNs, cover art, etc. I hope to be done by the 31st of December, for release on the market by early-to-mid February.
[Intermission: Animals by Maroon 5 just rotated up. Am I the only person who wonders whether Adam Levine still has testicles? No adult human male should make noises that high-pitched.]
Literary Journal. Speaking of CafPress, it looks like our plan to launch a quarterly literary journal will actually succeed. I’ll probably serve as publisher and Lianne as executive editor, with Alaric and John as senior editors. I think — lots remaining TBD. Anyway, the journal presents a glorious opportunity to showcase local writers. As well as the sale of advertising or the acquisition of corporate or grant funding to support ongoing operations and payments to writers. The journal is intended to help grow a well-defined literary culture within the West Michigan market.
Novel. I’ve had two weeks away from Aiden’s Wager, and in that time, I’ve figured out how the story will end given the change of direction from the original plan that came through the writing process in late November. I’m excited about this project. I’ll wrap up the first draft over Grand Staycation IV and send it off to various beta readers. My suspicion is that some of the material is far enough askance from accepted West Michigan culture that I won’t try for CafPress publishing, but I think there are some niche markets where the premise makes sense.
Project Management. I did something fun at work. We’ve been swirling so much about which teams in our division will use what one-off project management tools (at one point, we were split among Excel, Project, QuickBase, Rally and Clarity PPM) that we needed to just do something. So last week, I wrapped up what my team will use — a home-grown tool with a back end in Oracle. I built seven fact tables, normalized against several more look-up tables, with quite a few foreign-key dependencies and a fistful of sequence/trigger pairs to generate unique primary-key values. I then imported the data model into Tableau, so reporting about investments, activities, updates, issues, stakeholders, file attachments and time allocations becomes transparent to anyone who wants to look. I don’t have a front-end for the tool — I figured I’d just manually update tables using Toad for Oracle — but it’s got a slick presentation layer with strong internal referential integrity. I’m happy with it.
Surgical Site Infections. This coming week will focus on one  major deliverable keenly desired by our corporate chief medical officer: An analysis of surgical-site infections undertaken in partnership with our largest partner hospital. The hospital’s infection-control team keeps registry data about SSIs, but they don’t have access to the same administrative claims data that I do at the insurance company. Literature suggests that SSIs cannot be inferred from claims data, so I’ll use the surveillance registry to brush it against claim histories to try to calculate the true cost of SSIs to the community. Fascinating stuff, and a great example of proving the value of analytics for health-care quality professionals.
Emerging Competencies. Speaking of analytics, I’ve been co-leading an initiative about the emerging professional competences in the field of health data analytics, through the National Association for Healthcare Quality. We’re wrapping up our final report. About a dozen leaders within the analytics field, who are NAHQ members, are a part of the project. Interesting insight into where the industry has been headed.
MAHQ. My one-year appointment as president-elect of the Michigan Association for Healthcare Quality has been extended into 2015 given a dearth of candidates for the role in the most recent election. That means I have to plan the 2015 conference, too — which is fine, given that I’ve already booked the Amway Grand Plaza Hotel for October. These things are easier to pull off when they’re in your own back yard!
Socializing. Been a fun couple of weeks on the social front. Yesterday I spent three hours eating food and drinking beer with AmyJo, at HopCat. Last week, we had the “Thank God It’s Over” party for NaNoWriMo. I spent time chatting with Lianne and Stephen a couple of weeks ago. We had our Write On! holiday party a week ago last Friday — the same day I went out to Founders Brewing with Cindy, Steve and Timothy from the office (Cindy bought — the rest of us are helping her as she wraps up her doctoral dissertation).
Texas, Ho! Looks like I’ll be killing two birds with one rental. The Thin Line film festival, in Denton, Texas, occurs in mid February. I also need to get to close to Dallas to bring Duane his stuff currently in storage. So I figure I’ll rent an SUV, pick up his stuff, drive to him, then spend two nights in the Metroplex. I’m looking forward to it!
Routine Disruption. In 2013, NaNoWriMo utterly wrecked my long-standing weekend routines. This year has dome something similar. Instead of having a nightly cigar and cocktail with the news, I’m reading the news every few days and I’ve had a whopping two cigars since Thanksgiving. I think I’ll use Grand Staycation IV to try to enculturate other habit changes. Maybe exercise. We’ll see.
Web Bifurcation. Although I’ll be keeping this blog active, I’m splitting my personal and professional Web presence. I’ll be retiring Gillikin Consulting and instead using one site (this one) for personal stuff, and http://www.gillik.in for professional stuff. Augmenting the new site is part of the vacation plan.
All for now. 

Personal

Jason's Playlist … Nov. 2014

2 Comments

I do these “Jason’s Playlist” posts annually, usually in late autumn. Writing brings me closer to music.
Anyway, here are the songs surfacing most frequently —

45 (Acoustic), Shinedown
Behind Blue Eyes, Limp Bizkit
Blame, Calvin Harris
Call Me, Shinedown
Chandelier, Sia
Cyanide Sweet Tooth Suicide, Shinedown
Dangerous (feat. Sam Martin), David Guetta
Demons, Imagine Dragons
Forfeit, Chevelle
From Yesterday, Thirty Seconds to Mars
Hesitate, Stone Sour
Hurricane (Unplugged), Thirty Seconds to Mars
Iridescent, Linkin Park
Love Me Harder, Ariana Grande
Monster You Made, Pop Evil
Radioactive, Imagine Dragons
SexyBack, Justin Timberlake
Stay, Thirty Seconds to Mars (cover)
The Thunder Rolls (Long Version), Garth Brooks
Thinking Out Loud, Ed Sheeran

See you next year.

Personal

An Autumn's Repose

No Comments

Nights in West Michigan have grown consistently colder — in the 30s, usually — and most of the leaves have descended from their perches atop the now-barren canopy. Autumn’s full, glorious array reminds us to be prepared for the winter to come. A few weeks ago, I went for a walk in a county park and saw the transition up-close and personal: Bees going after every fading flower, greens turning into reds and yellows, squirrels building their stashes. All the little creatures, it seems, are fortifying themselves against the frigid desolation to come.
On Halloween day, I had my annual biometric screening. Most of the content — blood pressure, triglycerides, cholesterol, weight, BMI — met my expectations. No surprises. One measure, fasting glucose, caught me off guard. Not bad enough to freak out over, but not what I expected given that by all lights, I’m in better shape today than I was when I had my first assessment a full decade ago.
The thing about autumn is that the beauty of the landscape proves so charming that you aren’t forced to reflect on the clear lessons hidden beneath the surface. Instead, you repose quietly, enjoying the scenery or sipping the cider and relaxing in anticipation of the busy holiday season to come. So too with aging. We change styles and behaviors, but the danger that counts is the one locked deep within — we obsess about which sweater to wear but never think to check our biometric values. Like the parable of the grasshopper and the ant, at some point, the flurries will fly, and only the well-prepared will make it through. Wellness is a beast that requires daily diligence even in the warm summer sun, because if you come up short when a health blizzard hits … well, it is what it is. Now, then — some general updates, in no particular order.

  • Work continues to be busy. I just oriented my first official new hire as a department manager. Went smoothly. Our division is undergoing a significant restructuring, so it’s been “interesting times” around here in the fullest Confucian sense of the term.
  • It’s November, which means National Novel Writing Month. I’m again participating, and again hosting a write-in on Saturday mornings in downtown Grand Rapids. This year’s novel, should it be polished to the point of shopping, is literary fiction — a tale of a young wealthy man from a dog-eat-dog competitive social circle who, after he’s cut off from the family money, must develop his own life goals and set of morals while fending off the predation of his former friends, who now see a turn-about opportunity to further humiliate him. The meta-narrative of the story focuses on the main character’s investigation of the various classic sources of ethical meaning from the perspective of someone who’s working through a mash of antisocial and narcissistic personality disorders while drowning in a rich, hypermasculine peer group with similar tendencies. Given the language and very strong adult themes, if I ever publish it, it’ll be under a pseudonym. Probably my porn name, which actually makes a great author name, too.
  • The wrap-up activity after my conference took more out of me than I thought. I had to develop and compile surveys so I could issue continuing-education credits. That work, and the resulting time crunch, contributed to my inability to attend a much-anticipated Halloween party at PPQ’s house. CEs are time-consuming.
  • The election was … interesting. I volunteered a bit this year for the GOP, given my status as an elected precinct delegate. Did some door-to-door campaigning a few weeks ago for the MRP in eastern Kent County then spent seven hours as an election challenger in one of the busiest precincts in the City of Grand Rapids. Good experience, but it highlights how so much of the ground game is being run by very young people with very high self-regard who lack any substantive political experience.
  • The publishing company is humming along. We’re in the edit phase of our anthology and are actively looking toward starting a quarterly literary magazine in 2015. There’s much enthusiasm for that journal by several contributors, so I hold out hope that it’ll launch with sufficient love and nurturing.
  • The boy cat has started tunneling under my blankets at night to curl up next to me. It’s adorable. I get a little ball of fuzzy, purring warmth showing up at unexpected times.
  • Hard to believe, but Tony and I are closing in on our 200th podcast episode next month.

Personal

Out for a Walk

No Comments

I completed this afternoon a six-mile nature walk along the Kent Trails near Millennium Park, a favorite activity of mine that I haven’t had much time to enjoy this year. Gorgeous weather — upper 50s, sunny, light breeze. Got to watch, up-close, several bumblebees on a pollen run.
I love autumn. The air is getting a bit more dry, a bit more crisp. The leaves are moving from green to yellow and red and the nights have dipped into the 30s already. October and April are West Michigan’s transition months: We can get very cold, but also very warm, and the life cycle spins afresh. November through March are the chilly, wet months; May through September are the pleasant, dry months. But October and April? The best of both worlds.
The two-hour jaunt also gave me time to think about a handful of disconnected topics:

  • Lately my little friend, Murphy d’Cat, has taken to sleeping on me when I’m at my desk. Fine. As of yesterday, however, he’s now also sleeping on me if I should recline on the couch. Cute little kitty. And warm, too.
  • I am digging Peter Capaldi’s turn as The Doctor.
  • I think I put my finger in why I hate — viscerally hate — telephones. It’s because that now that email and other asynchronous communication methods are prevalent, there’s a certain arrogance in assuming that whatever you need in the moment trumps whatever I might be doing in that same moment. Immediate communications in non-planned, non-emergency situations are, in a sense, an act of aggression that says: “I don’t give a rip what you think/want/need, you must cater to my needs.” Nowadays, I usually keep the ringer off and I never check voice mails, so if you need something … the only effective way of guaranteed contact is email.
  • I’m not worried about Ebola, but I am worried about the federal response to whatever nasty disease comes next.
  • It’s probably good that Tony and I are moving toward marathon podcast sessions instead of doing two or three every two or three weeks — I enjoy my time with ol’ T-Bone, but I do also like catch-up time on Saturdays.
  • I think I might be excited for a decent holiday season this year.

Personal

The Serenity After the Storm

No Comments

I love storms — the malevolence of the sky, the crash of the thunder, the relentless drive of the rain. But after the storm passes, the damp stillness brings its own charms in the form of chirping birds, the smell of fresh rain and the juxtaposition of peace lightly scarred by the storm’s damage. After the deluge, there’s tranquility.
But not all storms show up on Doppler radar.
Two weeks ago, at long last, the Michigan Association for Healthcare Quality conducted its annual educational conference. For this year’s event, we trekked north to The Park Place Hotel in lovely Traverse City. As president-elect of the organization, the role of conference chairman fell to me. Aided by a delightful team of volunteers from across The Mitten, we continued our long, storied tradition of yanking a three-day educational event from ‘twixt our buttocks.
I was worried, though. Paid registrations nosedived — we had no idea what moving from Frankenmuth to Traverse City would do — and as late as one week before the event, much of the important stuff like menus, brochures, etc., hadn’t been wrapped up (i.e., I hadn’t gotten to it yet). And don’t get me started on the damnable attrition clause with the hotel!
Now that it’s over and the results are tabulated, I can breathe again. It appears that attendance was, indeed, down a slight bit — we ended up with 50 total attendees for the main conference plus a healthy eight for the CPHQ review course — but evaluations came back very positive. The attrition clause wasn’t enforced, so not only did we have a highly regarded event, but we probably will end up turning a small profit off of it, too, despite that I spent like a drunken sailor on things like branded messenger bags and speaker honoraria. In other words: The conference went off without a hitch!
The event, though, was just one drip in a much larger bucket. Add to that a bunch of out-of-state travel activity this summer, plus work on the anthology, plus volunteer stuff with NAHQ, plus the promotion at work, plus extra contract assignments, plus a more robust social calendar, plus deeper political engagement, plus, plus, plus … well, it’s been a wild ride. An embarrassment of riches, actually — the “busy stress” wasn’t because of bad stuff, but because of new opportunities.
Starting roughly last October, and continuing to today, I’ve experienced something I hadn’t really felt in a decade: Overwhelming workloads. Especially this summer, I’ve had to-do lists so long that I realized I just wasn’t going to get everything done, no matter how hard I tried. I don’t like swimming in that pond! So some things suffered — including, alas, my plan to attend VIMFP in Las Vegas next weekend.
But things are winding down. The conference is done, I’m getting more settled at work, the contract assignments are becoming more routinized, and the anthology is humming along. This weekend is the first since late August that I haven’t had any calendar commitments to deal with. Although National Novel Writing Month will be here in a scant three weeks, I have an idea ready to go and a plan for making things happen.
So now the storm has passed, and as I survey my task list for the next week, I can breathe the clean air knowing that the list isn’t impossible, or even that much of a strenuous exercise. It can be done!
I therefore sit, blogging, with Murphy laying on my lap and coffee on the desk and Skype open for occasional chats. I’m going to go for a walk today. It’ll be grand.
Long-hidden serenity is starting to shine through the dissipating storm clouds of 2014. At last.

Personal

Music, Unleashed

No Comments

I remember vividly the surprise on Mrs. G’s face when, as a fifth grader, I told her I had memorized all the lyrics to On Eagle’s Wings, a song new to us in the children’s choir at St. Anthony, after just a half-dozen run-throughs. How could I have learned the equivalent of a 30-line poem so quickly? Easy. It was set to music.
Music. Powerful stuff, if you let yourself succumb to its wily charms. Give someone a passage from an epic poem and instructions to memorize it, he’ll panic; put that poem into dactylic hexameter, and he’ll master it in an hour.
Tonight, as I prep for the quality conference I’ll be chairing on Monday and Tuesday, I have my old-but-trusty Sennheiser cans on, streaming my “top ranked” playlist on Xbox Music. Thing is, I’m using my new tablet PC — an HP Split — that has Beats Audio on board. After a half-hour of experimentation, I found just the right “listening experience” settings in the Beats control panel to reveal a whole new dimension to the music I loved, but heretofore had consumed using earbuds on my phone or Surface Pro.
I’m working. Trying to prep for The Conference From Hell. But I keep getting distracted by my ears:

  • The raw, glorious talent of Jared Leto’s voice powering through the unplugged version of Hurricane and his cover of Rihanna’s Stay
  • The raucous good time of Shinedown’s Cyanide Sweet Tooth Suicide balanced by the powerful message of What A Shame
  • The epic anthem that is Imagine Dragons’ Radioactive
  • The elegant simplicity of Britney Spears’s Everytime
  • The feral masculinity of Chevelle’s Forfeit
  • The classic-rock grit of Creed’s My Own Prison
  • The haunting lyrical beauty of Linkin Park’s Iridescent
  • The subtle harmonic overlays and deep bass counterpoints of Stone Sour’s Hesitate

A recent study suggested that the music that moves us imprints our psyche, which is why people tend to favor the music of their impressionable youths. Fair enough. But I know quite a few people who either eschew a deep love of music, or use music more as a matter of skinny-jeans social proofing than a source of joy and inspiration.
Get a gin-and-tonic or three in me, left alone with my music and my thoughts, and I’ll cycle between the aggressive, adrenaline-pumping animality of The Red and the tear-jerking melancholy of slow-moving acoustic ballads like 45. Then — to the horror of my feline overlords — I’ll sing along to Islands in the Stream or Fast Movin’ Train.
Thing is, you sometimes just have to let go and let yourself get lost in the moment. The right music, at the right volume, at the right moment, brings catharsis more lasting than a dozen weepy therapy sessions. Music moves us, if we unleash it.