There is the concept of what some job might – or should – be. There is the noble idea of a vocation – or a calling to do some job professionally and help make the world a better place. Through your life’s work you can contribute to the collective, rather than merely taking away from it. A person can earn money and make a difference in the lives of others at the same time. Your job can be the ultimate expression of your reason for being alive – the pinnace of your existence – your “life’s work.” I fully understand plenty of people just take a job for the money,…

I am the proud owner of a cat. Our family cat, Dixie, came into our lives some five years ago. It took us some time to find the right family pet, with several misfires before we found Dixie. My wife and I tried to adopt a cat back in 2004, but it peed all over our apartment and was so disagreeable my wife took it back after a week. (Turned out we adopted the cat of an old girlfriend of mine who had given it up, and so maybe there was a logic to this?) We had a similar experience with an abandoned dog from Fillmore, California which my wife…

A year and a half ago I agonized over the approaching Dobbs v. Jackson decision by the Supreme Court. I had no problem seeing the flimsy legal parapets of Roe v. Wade torn down: that decision had always been highly suspect, with the 14th Amendment stretched beyond recognition and an “unenumerated” right to privacy in that case, which was a pure invention by the Supreme Court back in the 1970s, and as such was rightly decried. But the question of abortion – the decision to abort a fetus or carry it to term; when did “life” begin exactly, and the law regarding this – is endlessly complex, and so I…

I am currently watching the Friday Night Lights TV series with my younger daughter. I don’t really want to watch it, but my daughter loves having a show we can watch together. So each night we watch one episode while we cuddle on the couch.  This particular show has given us countless moments of discussion over thorny issues high school students face: the legal system, mental health, romantic relationships, parent-child dynamics, bullying and the like. In fact, Friday Night Lights has been no less than an entree into a whole situational ethics conversation between father and 13-year old daughter. If I tire of the TV sitcom artificial cheese drama –…

“Daddy, she is a social media influencer! Wow! She has millions of followers!” In 4th grade my daughter told me this, making a person with millions of followers on social media out to look like the second coming of Jesus. A social media influencer! Wow. I was not impressed. My daughter made this Internet “celebrity” out to be like someone who had discovered the cure for cancer. It is the same old story: the siren song of fame and popularity— brittle and temporary — but with a new Internet twist. My daughter was awestruck by social media celebrities with millions of “followers.” These social media “influencers” — who seem to…

So the House of Representatives this morning passed a bipartisan bill to suspend the $31.4 trillion debt ceiling and avert a government default while cutting federal spending. A compromise was constructed by President Joe Biden of the Democratic Party and House Speaker McCarthy of the Republican Party, and it had broad support from a coalition of Democrats and Republicans. This is the way government is supposed to work, and it used to be called “business as usual.” But in an era of intense political polarization it is unusual, and so it is worth taking a moment to understand why that is. First of all, the stakes were high. If the…

It is both a weakness and a strength that I am not always the most attuned to the opinions that others have of me. In college, in retrospect, there were times young women were coming on to me and I was just too dumb to recognize it. They would almost have to throw themselves at me before I got the message. As a result, I missed out on various opportunities for romantic adventure. That is a negative. But it goes the other way, too. At work there have been times when certain people have been angry with me, for whatever reason. I was not always all that attuned to the…

My father ages, slowly but surely. Next week he turns 84-years old. The changes in his physical health, and the decline in his critical faculties, are glacial. But they are also cumulative. Like a glacier wearing down a rock formation over millions of years, one does not notice much in the short-term. But zoom back and take the long view, watching over a millennium or two, and the change can be drastic. Entire mountain ranges can be reduced. In similar fashion formerly strong and healthy persons are laid low by Father Time, who is inexorable and unremitting.  My dad recently suffered two small strokes in the left hemisphere of his…

My daughter surprised me today on the way to school with this fun fact: our family account with Audible, a company selling audiobooks, has accumulated 19 months 9 days 13 hours and 27 minutes of listening time over the past 13 years. Here is what my iPhone shows: That equals approximately 50,791,153 seconds, or some 846,519 minutes, of text read in audiobooks by our family, according to my back-of-the-napkin math. Those are big numbers. Over the years our Audible account has been a long-flowing river of word-after-word which collectively has emptied out into an ocean of literature. I don’t even want to know how much money my wife and I…

I spend a lot of time looking at young people and sizing them up. My children and their friends, my students former and current – I get a good look at so many. And some of them struggle. Well, many of them struggle. Hell, all of them – all of us, young or not – struggle. To be human is to struggle. But some people sure struggle more than others. I will tell you one thing which almost always gives me encouragement when I regard a person. If they participate regularly in exercise, if they self-identify strongly with a sport, if they belong to an athletic  team or exercise community,…

Is this blog of mine a diary of sorts? An online space where I can process what happens to me? A place to work out the psychic and emotional issues of my day? A sort of therapeutic tool? CBT in progress via prose? Sure. Is it a place where I can strive to make sense of my larger life? Understand where I came from, where I am now, and whence I would like to go? Can it help me to have a plan, other than simply drifting through life? Of course. Is my personal webpage how I can seek to sharpen the inchoate thoughts I have on politics or art…

One reads many accounts nowadays of parents, especially mothers, who seem to be overwhelmed. They seem to regret the choice to become a parent – “All Joy and No Fun.” Recent generations are hardly alone, as the amount of childless-by-choice adults in America has been increasing. The birth rate in the United States has plunged over the past five decades, as it has in many other countries. Becoming a parent seems unpopular. It is probably for many reasons: kids are hugely time-intensive, enormously expensive, one needs a partner (ideally) to do it, kids get in the way of life plans, etc. One could go on and on. In this context,…

I read that the blogger Heather Armstrong died yesterday. Struggling with depression and alcoholism, she committed suicide. Heather was 48 years old. She left behind two teenage daughters, 19-year-old Leta and 13-year-old Marlo. Yikes. Many women claim that Armstrong helped to bring about the “warts and all” style of oversharing of Internet writing in the early 2000s. She was the harbinger of social media activist aggressive opining about life or whatever – Armstrong was acclaimed for her raw, angry, and honest writing on her blog. “Radical candor,” some called it; “inappropriate over-sharing,” others would say. By all appearances, Armstrong helped shape the ethos of online confessing, in the good and…

Another horrible shooting took place last weekend in Allen, Texas. Another deranged individual decided, for God knows only what reason, to show up somewhere in public armed to the teeth and start shooting strangers. They would commit random murder against as many as they can, before the police or anyone else nearby, puts them down. My first response was to wonder what freak of nature was behind this. A disaffected loner? Another person with no friends, no hope, and no end of rage? Almost seven weeks ago a trans person in Nashville, Tennessee attacked a private Christian school. This time in Allen, Texas it appears to be a Latino guy…

Every year for one day I allow a Marine Corps recruiter to come talk to my high school seniors. I debrief my students the very next day about the presentation. I say to them, “Everything that guy said yesterday is true, but you should also keep this in mind…” I explain to them the other side of the coin: the advantages and disadvantages of military life. That is fair. What I get out of these visits is learning about the recruiter. Three of the four sergeants who have come to my class were Latinos from working class backgrounds. They were impressive. They talk about the opportunities they had to travel…

The Indian Wells Tennis tournament, sometimes called the “Fifth Slam,” sees the very highest professional tennis played anywhere, similar to Wimbledon or the US Open. But the “BNP Paribas Open,” as Indian Wells is formally called, is also a zoo: some 440,000 people attended this year, and the parking and crowds are off-putting. Indian Wells is an ordeal for these reasons, in my experience. But The Ojai Tennis Tournament is different. It is much smaller and more approachable. It involved not just a few hundred participants in the pro tennis tour, as in Indian Wells. The Ojai sports tennis players all the way from juniors to community college to Division…

This Internet experiment – my person webpage – is pretty much as old as the World Wide Web itself, having been started in late 1996. So I have had occasion to watch the popular use of the Internet develop over time, and have commented on how it has changed, for the good and the bad. So I read with interest Peggy Noonan when she opined in her column “AI In the Garden of Eden” about how she, too, was excited at the dawn of the Internet Era, but has since soured on the Internet and technology as it has been used in real life. Noonan speaks about the “brutal downsides”…

I was sitting there reading the newspaper two days ago around 5:15 pm. The school day had ended, tennis practice had concluded, and at last I had a moment to myself. So I was grabbing a bite to eat and communing with the newspaper. And then I saw a former student of mine entering the restaurant. He is now a Captain in the Ventura County Fire Department, and he was followed by another former student also working serving in the VCFD. We talked animatedly for a few minutes. They were both now married and had young baby daughters at home. I remembered them back in high school, and they were…

So last week I lost a tough doubles tennis match in a super tiebreaker.  My partner and I were the better team on paper, but that does not always matter in sports. On any certain day, the lower ranked team can win. It just didn’t seem like our day last week. Our shots were a few inches out, and their shot’s a few inches in: it happens. My body didn’t feel good, the other team was on, and we lost. A few points here and there and it could have gone the other way. But there hung a vibe on the court that day which seemed to say, “Today is…

Luckily it was only a ricochet, so it didn’t hit me with full force. But it stung, and I felt as if I had been kicked high up on my left thigh – like someone smacked me with a stick, very quickly but not deeply. I hopped around with my jaw dropped. “Ouch!” I was at a firearms training class, and we were running a drill where the instructors were moving targets straight at us and we had to draw our weapons, step to the side, and fire at the charging targets. Perhaps shooting at a slight angle caused the ricochet. I limped over and picked up the slug which…

So I received the announcement today that my blog received its 100,000th visitor. That is visitors to my blog, not my website. The number of visitors to all the pages of my site in the past 26 years would be a much larger number. But still. It gives me pause. On the one hand, if I did not want anyone to visit my website, I would hardly have taken the time and expense to put it online. Nevertheless, I neither advertise my website nor seek to expand my audience. The usual business model for personal blogs and online work is to try to increase the traffic and then monetize it.…

Some ten years ago my father told me that his first wife – my mother – had confided in him that she very much regretted losing her temper and yelling at her young kids. My mom felt as if she had done damage to us by screaming. My father never repeated the story, but I never forgot it. Now he is almost 84-years old and has forgotten most details from those days. But I do not doubt my mom told him that, as nobody would make up such a story. My mom died back in 1996 when I was 29-years old. But I remember back in the early 1970s when…

AI and Human Evolution I read Thomas Friedman’s Op-ed piece today about Artificial Intelligence this morning with interest in the New York Times today. His essay makes ambitious claims about how Artificial Intelligence will affect almost all aspects of how we live and work. Here is one typical quote from that article: “You need to understand,” Craig warned me before he started his demo, “this is going to change everything about how we do everything. I think that it represents mankind’s greatest invention to date. It is qualitatively different — and it will be transformational.” Thomas Friedman “Our New Promethean Moment” I read the Wall Street Daily everyday and the…

Lawyers Depending on how you look at it, I have been blessed and/or cursed to have been born into a family of lawyers. My father, various uncles, brother-in-law, cousins, my cousin’s husband – there are lawyers everywhere in my family tree. My brain tells me to respect lawyers. They play a vital role in society, I reason to myself. My heart tells me, in contrast, that most lawyers do it for the money – and they are mostly brawlers hired to fight for you. I know, I know… being a tax lawyer is different from being a real estate lawyer which is different from being a courtroom litigator who brawls…

A few days ago I wrote an essay reflecting back on my older daughter’s 16th birthday. Then I read and reflected about an essay I wrote a few days after this daughter’s birth 16 years ago. Wow. How the time has passed. I won’t say the time passed quickly. There were hard years of childrearing, and those did not pass quickly. From one point of view, the days and months from 2007 until today were full of labor and seemingly endless tasks at home and at work. The past 16 years were intense and often my time was not my own: family and work obligations took most of my time. …

So it happened. My oldest daughter just turned 16-years of age. In about three months she will get her driver’s license. With the ability to drive (ie. freedom) I suspect she will be gone from the house with friends a good chunk of the time until she leaves for college. So it has been with the children of my friends who can drive: they aren’t around much. Teenagers get busy, and their friends are everything. My daughter is growing up. How do I feel about this? I am proud. My daughter is a stellar student and a standout athlete, and my wife and I have had almost no serious reason…

It was approximately 3:17 pm when we arrived at Adolfo Camarillo High School with my boys high school tennis team. Our team arrived in two vans, with the name of our school on it; it was obvious who we were and why we were there. But the security guy at the guard checkpoint at the front of the school was skeptical. “Who are you? What time are you expected?” After a short discussion on his radio while we waited, he told me, “You are 45 minutes early for your 4:00 p.m. match. Why don’t you go to the nearby Starbucks and park there until that time?” My blood pressure started…

Ah, the written word. How I love it. How I crave it.  My brain drinks the words in. I remember having flunky post-college jobs where I would be doing some mindless-rote tasks, and I would be bored and seek out intellectual nourishment. I would work as a bartender at the Olive Garden restaurant, for example, and sometimes I would just read the menu because I would need the written word – anywhere I could find it. I’d read rumpled newspapers customers left behind. Anything.  That was over 30 years ago, but I haven’t changed. I am still curious. Reading is how I learn, and writing is how I process new…

Sometimes I think back to when my oldest daughter was in fifth-grade and I would pick her up from the bus stop at 3:10 pm. She would exit the school bus and walk over to me exhausted and in tears. She arrived to me in quite a state. I realized her friendships took a lot of work, even at 10-years old, and the trials and tribulations of life on the elementary school yard were significant. But I would get her a snack, give her half an hour to decompress, and my daughter would be good for the rest of the day. I still think about this often. My daughter was…