WONKESS

Bug Racist and other Rants...

My husband is an arborphile (as am I, though to a lesser degree).  Part of the reason that we both love the US so much is because of the vast areas of wooded wilderness that are still scattered across this immense country.  J strives to have an encyclopedic knowledge about trees, and he's relatively good at identifying the various species of evergreens and deciduous trees.    

So one of his biggest pet peeves is the devastation that has been wrought by invasive insects on his beloved hardwoods (maple, poplar, birch), specifically, by the Asian long-horned beetle.  And in the great tradition of irrational patriotism, he has extended his hatred of the specific to a broader hatred of the general.  At this point, if it destroys his beloved forests, it must be an Asian invasive species (which, it goes without saying, must be eradicated).

So yesterday, I showed J this NYT article about a menace that has been destroying millions of acres of pines out in the West: the mountain pine beetle.  Without even glancing at the article, his immediate retort was "I bet it's from Asia."

At which point, your Chinese-born blogger went berserk and declared him a "Bug Racist."

Just for those who have no interest in reading the article, it turns out that the mountain pine beetle is indigenous, but has been seeing exponential growth due to, among other reasons, "softening" weather conditions in the West (i.e. less cold).  Thank you global warming.

****

This morning, as I was just about to enter my place of work, a worker who had been loading stuff into a ginormous truck parked near the back entrance of the building dropped an entire crate filled with what looked to be mugs.  My last glance at the scene as I entered the building was a sidewalk full of smashed ceramic, with the lone intact mug drifting into traffic.

I was thinking at the time that the worker was probably not going to be held liable for destroying the mugs.  When I used to work retail, if one of my girls (I was an assistant manager) accidentally ripped or stained or otherwise destroyed a piece of clothing, we had a checklist to go through: see if it is salvageable at the retail level, salvageable at the outlet level, or marked for destruction (total loss).  To some extent, this is risk distribution at the most micro level.  I imagine that in a less industrialized society, if you break the wares of your employer, you might see your pay docked until that cost is recouped by the employer.  Now, every company probably budgets a certain percentage of their costs to cover these incidents (which are then spread out via increased costs to their customers or decreased pay to their employees - but basically spread out to a broader group of people).

Generally speaking, I like the power of risk distribution.  Given how random some acts of destruction can be, it seems somehow unfair (I know it actually isn't: this is an emotional, rather than rational, response) that the burden would be so heavy on someone who just got the short end of the luck stick.  In large organizations with at least one shared goal (I think it is safe to say that w/in one organization, most of the employees/managers have the shared goal of the organization doing well), having certain of these risk costs born by the collective organization makes sense (partly because it is only pennies for the individual, and partly because there is probably some administrative efficiency to be gained to not have to police and keep track of these risks and their costs).

It is amazing, however, that when you extend the risk sharing beyond a single organization and out to disparate groups that have basically no shared goals, how destructive the sharing can be (relative to the benefits of sharing).  And of course, I'm talking about the asset backed securities (and their extended family of derivative securities).  These were the ultimate expressions of risk sharing.  As this entertaining (and highly recommended) article by Michael Lewis (or Liar's Poker fame) points out: "big Wall Street investment banks took huge piles of loans that in and of themselves might be rated BBB, threw them into a trust, carved the trust into tranches, and wound up with 60 percent of the new total being rated AAA."  Mathematically, it was possible to take a huge pile of dog shit, carve it up, and come out with 60% gold.  Amazing.

Of course, this was only possible because the company doing the carving was not keeping any of the risk in-house.  They were using their mathematic models to convince the ratings agencies to grant the gold standard to the top tranches of CDOs based on BBB rated MBSs, and then, as quickly as possible, moving those securities off their own books.

It's like this: if you knew that you had a worker (who you cannot fire) who has the weakest arms in the world and his job is to load breakable goods into trucks, would you internalize the cost of the goods he might destroy or would you go out and find an AIG to insure against him? 

Summer's End...

I do love the fall, and despite the brief weirdness this weekend that was Tropical Storm Hannah, the city is definitely hinting at the autumn to come.  It's still warm, but the light is different, and the breezes are different.  There are acorns falling off the trees.  I'm not sure I ever noticed that before, that acorns fall at the end of summer.

Is it possible for a four year old to have nostalgia?  Loo certainly seems to be experiencing it.  She comes into our room in the morning, floops on our bed and starts remembrances of things past.  She'll say something ridiculous like, "remember when I went to Auntie P's wedding and we went to the carnival and then we had ice cream?"  Or worse, "remember last week, when I used to like Dora the Explorer?"

*rolls eyes*

Meanwhile, her baby sister is the incarnation anti-christ, in full on biting and pinching mode - Loo, the nanny and I all have the marks to prove it.  And this is not experimental biting and pinching, this is the sly glance to the side, smirky faced, how-many-times-can-I-do-it-and get-away-with-it  biting and pinching.  She is a calculating two year old torturing machine.  I've told Loo that if her sister bites or pinches her one more time, she has my consent to knock Kali on her ass.

Unfortunately, Loo really is a pussy.  She couldn't hurt Kali any more than she could hurt the cute furry puppy from next door.

J's back in school for another year of classes and whiny students and convocations and faculty events and academic committees and student advisoring and.... oh yeah, a contract review.  I guess the count down begins: we will know in about 6 months whether or not we'll stay in Boston or if it's off to another school in another state. 

Hoarders R' Us...

I use to hoard.  Places like Costcos?  Made for (the old) me.  Even now, when I'm at my mom's, or going through an unopened box in our basement storage, I will find an unopened bottle of shampoo, a brand new notebook, a box of unused pens (stationery has always been my Waterloo), half or quarter used bottles of lotion, face wash, etc...  It hasn't helped that I've lived in several countries and several states over the past  10 years.  I'm a fast packer but a far slower unpacker, there's always a stray unopened box that contains some sooner-or-later essential that I end up restocking. 

I've been trying desperately, since Kali was born, to cure myself of my frightful hoarding.  I'm now religious about purging, especially papers.  When reading a magazine, I'll take quick notes, but then it's into the recycling bin.  When I get the chance to read a book, and if it doesn't strike me as keep-worthy (a much higher standard now), it goes into the donation/swap pile, I've started to work through the boxes of unused stationery goods instead of buying new ones.  I've also been medieval with my clothing.  I've edited down what once would have filled an entire walk in closet (and then some) down to one smallish closet and one large underbed storage drawer (well, two officially, one for winter, one for summer).

But it has been an unsatisfying, sisyphean task.  Whatever gains I make on my side is constantly being neutralized by J and the girls.  J is a srsly crazy hoarder (I blame it on his Mom, who really elevates hoarding to a sport).  J only marginally hoards material goods - he hardly has any material desires - but as an academic, he hoards books, papers, magazines, papers.  He has one of those professorial offices whose number we dare not mention - you know the kind.  He literally has a small swath of floor to walk through to get from the door to his desk, outlined by stacks upon stacks upon stacks of books and papers (despite the fact that two walls of his office are lined with floor to ceiling shelves, which are, incidentally, completely full).  And whereas once, as a beginning academic, his office contained his madness, now that he's had 6/7 years of teaching under his belt, with all the incidental new purchases, new works and old hand-me-downs, his work has spilled into our home life.  For example, we have a small, unused corner in our living room, where I used to breast-feed when the Kali was a baby.  The rocker, and the entire surrounding area has now been infiltrated by folders, tons of old newspaper, stacks of books, and various other academe sundries.

It is driving me INSANE.

And I am expressly forbidden from touching any of J's "work".  Oh, and don't think that he doesn't notice.  Just yesterday, he came home and looked on our desk and noticed that a pile of his correspondence had been moved from the middle off to the left side.  Psycho.

But this post is not about J... or at least it was not meant to be.  The thing that has me so worked up is the apparently genetic incidence of hoarding.  Because Loo (not yet Kali)... well, she has taken up hoarding with a passion. 

It's a habit of hers that I've been subconsciously aware of for a while.  For a while, I would take it upon myself to sit with their toys in the wee hours of the night to "edit" out the broken, the age-inappropriate, the mis-matched, the general "yechs".  Loo had not yet learned the fine art of categorization, so missing toys have generally gone unnoticed, until their dense excuse of a father mentions an edited toy for no apparent reason.  Alas, the time of the short memory span has come and gone.

What really brought Loo's hoarding to the forefront for me was going through her pictures on my computer last night.  That's when I noticed that in many of her pictures, she is clutching some coveted found "thing" that would ultimately wind up at home with us, in her toy box (until one of my edits).  From the pool, she's found lost balls, discarded bottles, broken necklaces, all of which she lovingly collects and obligingly brings home.  At the zoo, she found a pair of 3D glasses (one of those wear and toss kinds) that is now in our toy box.  She has a broken car that we found when watching the Memorial Day parade, a natty beach ball that was found at the beach this weekend.  And it's all documented on film!

Loo also clings, valiantly, to her possessions.  She asked for a spiderman figurine sometime last year when the latest spiderman movie came out.  Since acquiring said figurine, it has: lost its legs, its head, lost two of the three accompanying spider web accessories.  And she refuses to let me toss the sad, sad spidey torso.  With arms.  What a grotesque testament to a her possession obsession.

I am dreading the day when her little sister follows suit.

What My Husband Got for Father's Day...

Sex.

And it was long overdue.