Be Commanding One Day

I understand that New York got hit with a blizzard last night.  No sign of it here.  Every tree I see is ready to begin to bloom.  There are willows and poplars and of course cherry blossom.  Tokyo must be just about ready to explode, one of these days.  Some of these parks along the north fifth ring road look nicer than I can ever remember seeing them.  Ahh yes, the Olympic park is out there.  Hurrah.  Spring is here. 

Soon we’ll have dust.  Soon we’ll have the puff-balls of the liushu form a dusty film across the city.  But today, we’re alright.  Spring is always forgiving.  The traffic is slow but I’m actually enjoying the view and I left rather early so I’m OK for time.  It looks like its the exit for the G6 up to Bei Lu  . . . Someojo8.

Yes.  I dozed off to a flurry of dream snapshots. They were all real, and they are all gone.  I’m back to traffic, shifting to the left lane but then stuck.  Passing the first of the daily fender benders.  The resolution appears civil.  No tire irons.

Cherry trees command attention over all other blossoms. This, even though they are all quite small and fledgling.  The trees in Tokyo aren’t exactly towering redwoods, they were all presumably planted after the war, after the fire bombing, so they’ve sixty five years of growth behind them.  These Beijing highway beautifiers, all appear to be about five years old.   Perhaps they too will be commanding one day like the ones that extend along the Nakameguro canal.

I’ve reached Shangdi in about seventy five minutes which is fine because I’ve budgeted eighty, instead of the fifty five I’d usually allow.  I should have time for an espresso in the lobby café.  


Wednesday, 03/15/17

Tawny, Chaulky, Winter Earth

Spring has just about come to Shandong.  The fields are green.  From a distance you can see buds, faintly on the trees.  But most of the trees are still bare.  Most of the land is still tawny, chalky, winter earth.  And soon it will all change.  It’s right before me, as I speed across Qi Guo at remarkable speeds.  If we were heading the other direction on this high-speed train, south, the waxing spring would be undeniable as Shandong turns to Jiangsu.

It’s a remarkably blue, optimistic day.  There is some particulate matter in the air, but it isn’t oppressive.  In this distance there is an odd tower of some sort.  It resembles the Shandong city of Dongying looks like from a distance.  But it may be a plume of smoke.  It is obscured like a Monet painting of London.  Soon this rural setting will give way to Tianjin, which seems to be approaching in the distance. 

The train is remarkably silent.  I hear my colleague talking in Chinese.  To my side another colleague is speaking in English.  Reasonable Chinese train behaviour.  These though, are the only voices I hear.  No one is watching any videos on their phone.  No tinny jingles are reaching my ears from anywhere else on the train.  Occasionally I try to take a picture of what I see.  Why is everyone else so quiet?

The young lady in a purple uniform strolls by.  I ask her for a bottle of water.  “Which kind do you want?”  “It doesn’t matter, any kind.”  “Any kind?” she asks incredulous.  “They’re all different!”  I pick out a bottle that seems a bit bigger than the others.  “I’ll have two.”   More plumes of smoke.  Closer now.  I can say for certain that this is smoke, certainly, contributing to the particulate day.  I can see where the fire should be now.  I just saw a little grove of cherry blossoms.   The villages still appear, but now they are dwarfed by housing complex in the distance.  And here are a pair of nuclear reactors that come and go from our site.  

We are leaving Tianjin south station.  A building rose up to the right.  From the distance I assumed it was the new tower, Beijing’s tallest, located there near Guanghua Lu.  But it is just another new hundred story building there in Tianjin.  Nothing special.   Hundred story towers like pagodas then, after a storm. 

 Tuesday, 03/14/17

Fluffy White Pillow

My nights are getting gobbled up.  I’m better, I suppose at protecting my mornings.  I don’t generally book any calls till 8:00AM.  I’ve got the gym routine.  I like having breakfast, such as it is, with my kids. I can make exceptions but 8:00AM tends to be a logical threshold.  Last night was the first night I’d had calls after the U.S. sprang-forward and reclaimed their day light hour.  All my calls became discombobulated and conflated and soon I was apologetically rescheduling things out past 10:00PM

At 1:00AM another call is looming, like an insurmountable wall.  A new client has graciously organized a large training.  But the only time they could schedule it was to begin this seven hour session at 1:00AM.  I hugged a pillow in the downstairs bedroom around 10:30PM and painfully made my way back to my office when the alarm went off, two hours and fifteen minutes later.

Like Linus, I brought my fluffy white pillow dragging behind me.  I put it on the floor and considered what it would be like to listen to this call, from the floor.  Fiddling with one and then another conferencing app I realized I was broadcasting my image and, looking like a platypus, I quickly shut it down.  Attending, viewing maybe.  I draw the line at broadcasting myself at this hour. 

Two, turns to four and I’ve managed to multi-task this into a reasonably productive catch up session on various to-dos I have.  Steadily the evening makes its way towards 6:00AM.  This is a turning point.  One any normal morning I would throw on my shorts and wake my younger one up and head to the gym.  Could I?  The alternative is to lie down and surrender to sleep.  But I know I’ll be leaving home in two hours anyway for the train station. 

I’ll sleep on the train to Jinan then.  I’ve got my blue shorts on and go to tell my little one its’ time to get up.  All the while, the conference all continues to broadcast in my ears.  I suppose I’ll bring them all with me on to the stair master if we’re still continuing on. 

Monday, 03/13/17

The Fabric More Durable

I did a puzzle when I was home for Christmas.  We all participated doing a large, complicated representation of the globe.  It’s good to spend some time now then with a finite project that you can progress against and then actually finish.   History is obviously a puzzle.  One will never be done, but each piece considered in place next to the others makes the overall picture that much clearer, the fabric more durable.   

“City of Fortune” by Roger Crowley helped to properly place a number of pieces today, stitching a thread between two spaces that otherwise had no straight linkage.  Continuing on in weekend binge-reading, I finished it off this morning and my head is spinning.  Trips I’ve taken and historical verities long known have a new bookend.  Of course I knew Venice and Genoa competed, but I’d never traced the battle.  Yes, the Portuguese spearhead of trade around Africa challenged the overland trade through the Near East.  But precisely how did such a simple change render Venice obsolete?

A few years back when on Crete I learned that Chania and Rethymno were actually built out by the Venetians.  Really?  What were they doing down here, I wondered at the time.  Is that right?  The city had an empire?  Oh, the Roman horses that should be here in the Istanbul Hippodrome were looted in the thirteenth century by the . . . Venetians?  They’re in St. Marks now?  Right.   I’d never really considered Venice the city as a force beyond its civic definition.  They managed a large part of the medieval Mediterranean and the shrinking Greek civilization.

Now I should like to consider it all from the Genoese perspective.  I should put proper time in with Mehmet and his extraordinary rise.  A big project for some other time in my life will be to finally connect these pieces to China through the heart of Persia.  What a remarkable pivot they held between the two sides of Eurasia.  There’s hardly a single piece there in that corner of the puzzle.

Sunday, 03/12/17                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     

Myself The Plunge

Some people binge on television shows and find themselves staying up late to watch episode after episode of what was supposed to be viewed over the course of a year.  I didn’t do that, last evening.  Rather I treated myself to some binge reading.  I was caught up.  Mostly.  Most everything had been shot back to all the people who needed to be shot at.  You see, I have a pile of new books and decided to finally allow myself the plunge.   Critically, somehow, round midnight I’d wound up with a second wind or this would have been a very brief indulgence.

Even as I, per my earlier entry, slowly, slowly, in the moment, finish off some of the Byronic romp that had finally reached Venice and the Bridge of Sighs, my phone kept notifying me that new emails had arrived.  I’d like to say I blew them all off with a steely resolve.  I didn’t   Every time I looked.  Immediate or eventually?  Regardless I’m regularly tapped upon by the U.S. workday traffic when I was supposed to be surrendering to someone’s introduction to Venice.

And when I finished with ‘Childe Harold’, I could turn to Brodsky.  He’s also in Venice.  He looks just like Sergey Brin, the Google founder, when he was young.  He’s also asking tough questions about the place as a foreigner, marveling at the city as a “northern man” from St. Petersburg. He writes, in his nonnative language, so beautifully.  I’m humbled by his description of the people he meets and the late nights he walks around within.  I spent a bit of time on the simple biography that Wiki provides.  I quite liked this quote of his from a his Soviet trial as a 23 year old:

They called him "a pseudo-poet in velveteen trousers" who failed to fulfill his "constitutional duty to work honestly for the good of the motherland". The trial judge asked "Who has recognized you as a poet? Who has enrolled you in the ranks of poets?" – "No one," Brodsky replied, "Who enrolled me in the ranks of the human race?" Brodsky was not yet 24.”

Before I went to bed I started a history text, which is almost a bonbon after reading the essays and poems   We’re back with the Fourth Crusade and the Venetians agenda is to destroy Cairo, to solidify their trading position.  The Crusaders however, thought they were off to liberate the Holy Land.  The boats are being built by the Venetians.  The Venetians will be steering the boats.  A mutinous, manipulation seems certainly pending as we finally set off, out of the Lagoon and into the Adriatic.  Watch out Zara.   

Saturday, 03/11/17