Migration

Just in time to treat my annual bout of back-to-school/High Holy Days nostalgia, my Staples confetti-cut shredder and I have been attacking some of the paper files I dragged from Old Tappan to Park Slope to Boerum Hill to Park Hill to Highland to Lowry. Today I unearthed some treasures from the 1996-97 range: Book Court receipts for "Pat the Bunny" and "Landlording," the instructions for the pager Karen made me get when she was pregnant, estimates for repairs that made our house livable, the reminder card for the OB-GYN appointment that led to our son's inducement.

But mostly -- ah yes, it comes back to me now -- life back East seems to have been a ferocious, ceaseless series of fights. Each medical bill gives birth to a denial and three appeals; parking tickets beget warrants and failure to appear notices in envelopes with huge red letters; faulty products return whence they came but working ones fail to replace them. It is a wonder that we lasted as long as we did there, and none that we fled.

Now comes word that an old friend who endured the Eastern Seaboard far longer because he was under the impression it was the only place in America to get decent Asian food has packed up and moved to Oregon. It's a brave thing to do at our stage in life and with the job market as crummy as it is. One thing I've learned about relocating is that while a change of scenery can't make you happy, failing to move can certainly prevent happiness. So -- good move, and good luck!

Regularity

My lifelong transition from my parents' child to regular person advanced rapidly yesterday when I attended a dinner theater to see Phantom of the Opera. The food resembled coach-class airplane food from the 70s. One person in the cast was really good; everyone else was serviceable. My son was disappointed there was no chandelier. Is the main character supposed to have been injured by a chandelier? In this version he had a birth defect.

There are several dinner theaters around Denver, and this one was pretty packed. Has the theater industry found a recession-proof format?

Heck yeah, the camera lies

Unless I'm watching a different ACORN-sting video than everyone else, what this episode mainly reveals is how hopelessly meaningless meaning has become. There are so many edits in the video, hardly any full sentences survive uncut. If I had to guess from watching the footage itself without the titles and voice-overs, I suppose I'd think I was watching someone get advice on hiding herself, her children and her assets from an abusive boyfriend. Maybe the people in the video are talking about what the filmmakers say they're talking about; it's simply impossible to tell from the available footage.

If mainstream media outlets, which actually try to fully represent what people say, are liars, how are these filmmakers, with their cuts and voice-overs and supertitles and dramatic music, not liars? After being told for years that accuracy itself is a liberal weakness, perhaps it makes sense that only a film that deliberately shuns the techniques of accuracy is to be believed.

On another level, as a onetime (and perhaps future) nonprofit manager, the ACORN fiasco has got me thinking about the wisdom of being a "volunteer-driven" organization. That always sounds good, but what you get when you have amateurs (which I mean in the dictionary-definition sense) do the work, is an amateurish (which I now mean in a slightly more pejorative sense) work product. With their emphasis on training and safety, volunteer fire and ambulance services perhaps should be the role models for the rest of the sector.

Anybody see the problem with this job description?

Came across this while looking through The Forward's jobs board for kicks:

"The rabbi of Beth Sholom, who reports directly to the board of trustees through the president...."

That's like putting food directly into your mouth through your elbow. Somebody needs to take a serious look at lines of report at this organization!

Letter to the editor

I must officially be an angry old man because I've written a letter to the editor. Here it is:

Editor, The Atlantic:

The upside of America's horrendous health care is that it has inspired some marvelous writing about how horrendous it is. David Goldhill's "How American Health Care Killed My Father" will become a classic of the genre. A Democrat with a profound understanding of the power of markets to influence lives (and cause deaths) is someone who should be taken seriously by all political persuasions. While the rest of us waste energy debating how much care should be provided, Goldhill observes that we must first focus on how much information should be provided. The answer to that one is so easy it barely lends itself to debate: More!

Sincerely,

Eric Hübler

Denver, Colo.

And here's the article I'm talking about.

You use active verbs!

After getting over my initial shock, I'm now oddly attracted to the simple directness of "You lie!" It's certainly superior to its passive equivalent, "I am (or we are) lied to!" This is what I tell clients all the time: active voice shows you accomplish things, whereas passive voice shows you are content to let the world do what it will, with or without you.

It's too bad there is no verb in English that means the opposite of "to lie." "I speak truth" is, I suppose, the closest we can get. I think we need one. How about a contest?

Blogospherism

After seeing "Julie/Julia" I decided to turn my blog into a best-selling book and movie too. But I think I need a sharper theme than the theme of this blog, which is, basically, that stuff occurs to me and sometimes I write it down. I'm still searching for the perfect idea, but I've successfully narrowed the field by considering and rejecting the following:

• Good for the Heart: A Healthy American Male Eats Nothing but Canned Baked Beans, Three Meals a Day for an Entire Year, and Chronicles the Effects on Him and the People Around Him
• Oh, Mom: The Funny-Weird and Occasionally Funny-Ha-Ha Things My Mother Says
• Eyes Are Gonna Roll: A Year-Long Exploration of the Phenomenon of Eye Rolling and How It Impacts My Relationships
• Unalloyed Venom: I Pick a Person -- It Almost Doesn't Matter Who -- and Criticize One Feature of Their Personality Each Day for 365 Days
• The Year of Living Platonically: For 365 Consecutive Nights, My Wife and I Are Perfectly Sociable and Sometimes Even Borderline Flirtatious, but That's It
• Thirty-Wonderful: The Incredible True Tale of How I Went to Baskin Robbins and Had Ice Cream Every Night for a Year
• My Prius, Oh, My Prius: A Daily Affirmation About My Prius
• The Year of Living Atheistically: The Incredible True Tale of How I Gradually Stopped Participating in Any Religious Rituals Whatsoever

I'll keep thinking about it. Oy, I've got it!

• Blogospherism: A Writer Takes 365 Wild, Wonderful Days to Decide What to Write About

Experience optional

Since posting my résumé on Monster, I have received inquiries from two recruiters that genuinely interested me; a few wildly poetic, almost free-associative letters from wealthy African widows; and about 10 messages from insurance companies. The latest (this just in... the next-to-latest; another arrived as I was typing the previous sentence) says in part, "No experience is needed as we offer an extensive training program, benefits and transition pay to help you get started in your career. I believe you may have some of the needed skills to be successful with our firm."

I, too, believe I may, but I would rather take my chances with my tantalizing new Ghanaian friend Naomie. All I have to do is adopt her 8-year-old, and she'll send me 15% of her late husband's $13.8 million fortune. If my math is correct, that's $2,010,000 more than I'm supposed to be able to make in my first, wildly successful year as a Financial Planner. (Or is the job title, as the second paragraph of the same e-mail has it, Financial Advisor? HR -- if this company had HR -- would be most displeased with the discrepancy.)

I can forgive Naomie's absurd writing ("All I need now is for you to Investor this Fund for my only son"); indeed, I relish it. Our world would be a poorer place, though Lagos might be a richer city, if the Nigerian scammers finally hired a copy editor. (Question for further research: can a copy editor be held civilly or criminally liable if the message s/he cleans up is used in the execution of a financial fraud?)

From insurers in Denver, I expect slightly better writing. Friends, can we come together as a society and agree once and for all that interest can be piqued, not peaked? More importantly, I'm concerned by the constant emphasis on experience not being required. I worked hard for my experience, and while I may sometimes question its marketability, I'm nowhere near being ready to abandon it. For the most part, my experience has been -- well, a good experience.

I'm not against insurance. I'm the satisfied owner of several insurance policies (which reminds me, I must dig out those policy numbers for Naomie...). I just question the wisdom of positioning an industry as a human dumping ground.

You got your liberals. You got your conservatives. And then you got me.

The liberal and conservative positions on health care have found a meeting point that could solve the whole thing. Trouble is, nobody seems to realize it but me.

As detailed this morning on NPR and in The New Yorker some months ago, the reformist position is that letting doctors do as many procedures as they wish, and agreeing to pay for them whether they were necessary or not, is financially wasteful and can even hurt outcomes by violating the old if-it-ain't-broke-don't-fix-it rule. The conservative position is that limiting civil damages in malpractice lawsuits is the way to bring down costs.

Suppose the reformists snapped their fingers and fewer avoidable procedures were performed. Hey presto, there would then be fewer bad results over which to sue. The average award wouldn't fall, but there would be fewer awards.

Health care reform and tort reform are not incompatible. Here's hoping our leaders are sharp enough to see this, and make it the basis of ongoing deal-making.