Friday, October 09, 2015

The Month That Was - September 2015

That'll be 55. Birthdays really don't affect me anymore. I was never much of a crisis-on-a-milestone-birthday guy anyway. Still, I must admit that my time in my "mid-fifties" is passing me by and will soon give way to "pushing 60". On the other hand, I just did my first triathlon and my second Tough Mudder, so there's that.

Some personal housekeeping this month - house, car, phone, etc. I'll try to get out of my own life and into something more interesting for next month's posts.

[House and Home] Home, Bittersweet Home
[Cars] Wheels Go 'Round
[Tech] Microsoft, I Can't Hold On
[TV] Mr. Robot

[House and Home] Home, Bittersweet Home

I believe I have been in my house for just about 5 years now, and it's been an interesting journey. I decided to buy the house because I thought my credentials as a mainstream adult were weak. As a lifelong bachelor, there was never any urgent need to lay down roots or make a home and safety zone for family and a bulwark against the world. My abodes were always simple places that only contained a bed, wi-fi, and cable TV. I almost never cooked. My furniture was rudimentary -- no, not lawn chairs, but nothing you couldn't buy on clearance at Art Van. My life revolved around work, travel, endeavors in fitness, and keeping up with my friends. Opinions on such a life would vary. Some would focus on the absence of family and deem it empty. Some (including some with families) would envy the freedom.

Strangely, I think what made me buy the house was my contrarian nature. The story-book middle class life is often seen as a trap -- a delusion that lacks some form of authenticity. Many in the highly-opinionated classes dismiss the everyday activities of normal suburban life as shallow and soulless. The McMansions, the mowing of lawns and grilling of meat and painting of bedrooms, the raising of children -- these are often thought of, or at least fictionally portrayed as, distractions from deeper and more noble concerns and unacknowledged sources of oppression and disappointment for the inhibited, deluded people who engage in them. We, instead, worship the city-dwelling creative hipsters and the sorts who eschew the world in search for their own Walden Pond.

Except.

The contrarian in me does not see things like that. I don't think of normal suburban life as empty. My first assumption about it is that it must be about the best life possible because everybody seems to want to do it. Most people in world who struggle day-to-day would identify an upper middle class life in the exburbs as paradise; perhaps even more so than a rich-and-famous life. This leads me to inevitable assumption that those who see the common suburban world as peopled with mindless sheeple are probably just doing some sort of signalling about how edgy and unafraid they are. I also suspect that, when push comes to shove, they'll often end up driving minivans to soccer practice and concocting excuses why it doesn't really count as selling out. (This somewhat dovetails with a growing belief I have that most people in the developed world are happy, but they can't bring themselves to admit it.)

So the idea in my head was something like this: If everybody is doing it or wants to, maybe there's something to it. Even if I don't fit the demographic, maybe I should spend a few years finding out what the attraction is. It didn't hurt that this coincided with the bottom of the real estate melt down which helped me purchase a house that even five years before would have been out of the question.

My house is much bigger than I need it to be: 4 bedroom/3.5 bath/2.5 acres -- all for just me. It is in one of the very best and most beautiful neighborhoods in the area. All this was possible because of the drop in real estate prices. I have no doubt the previous owners took a beating. Whether that means it's going to be a good investment or not is another matter. The expenses of homeownership have been quite a cold shower. Within a year I had to spring for a new furnace. Despite it being the most efficient model possible, heating the house is astonishingly expensive, even though I have the entire upstairs closed off and vents covered.. I have a well, which saves on water bills, but salt for water conditioning is a steady expense and I just dropped a couple of grand for a iron removal system -- makes me miss city water. God knows what it'll cost me if the well pump fails. Keeping up the lawn and yard is another expense. I started mowing the grass myself, but a with yard that large and sloping it was pushing two hours to finish -- did that for a couple of years and now I have a service. In fact, all landscaping is costly, even when I do it myself which typically ends in failure and I have to re-do it. The lawn needs to be sprayed and the trees need attention, because in my fine neighborhood you just don't let your gardens go to weeds or your lawn be other than fresh and green. A couple of grand to replace some dying trees. New asphalt driveway and periodic sealing. New deck, fireplace, flooring. The latest: removal of a couple of red squirrels living in my walls and keeping me awake with their squirrelish scurrying about. The list goes on. It's serious scratch to own such a house above and beyond buying it, none of which will be recovered at resale time. And it's serious time to maintain. Just vacuuming the place takes all afternoon. I could outsource yet more tasks, and probably will, and the expense will just keep ratcheting higher.

So those are the Cons. Where does that leave me on the Pro side? Well, I have learned a lot. I can paint a room without taping the borders. I can install toilet and sink hardware. I can change the belt on a riding lawn mower. I can clear a driveway with a snow blower. I can have house guests without any sort of crowding or discomfort. And frankly, my house is just beautiful. It abuts an extended protected area and the view out the windows of my living room, bedroom, and sunroom (yes, there is a sunroom) is sweet. But the fact is I don't enjoy it as much as my visitors because when I look around I often just see so many projects. I am no longer the carefree, irresponsible lad, but a fellow who has certain roots and responsibilities (if not truly a full slate of them) on his shoulders. Oh, and I can converse intelligently, and from experience, with normal adults about homeownership. The fact that I list this as a pro gives me pause to wonder whether I actually took this path not to understand the experience but because I was concerned with my image to others. I hope not, but I can't deny that for certain because I am as capable of self-delusion as anyone.

Another discovery is that my sense of dissatisfaction runs very deep and is perhaps insurmountable. Like I said, when I look at the place I see projects, others look at it and think it's really quite lovely. They are right. It is. Yet I can't hang out at home and think, "This is great. I'm sure glad I did this." There is too much I would like to do in terms of renovations to get the place to point where it matches my vision of perfect. It's become something of a challenge to see if I can get the place to a point where I do feel I would be content just to hang out and enjoy my home. So my attachment to my house is heavily depended on my desire to rise to a challenge. Weird.

Maybe that is the core issue. Can I really be satisfied with my surroundings, or for that matter, can I be satisfied with anything? I strongly suspect the answer is no, but I plan to give it a few more years of effort.

My next house will certainly be different. The next one will have to be simpler and smaller as it will probably be the home that I reside in to senescence. It will also fit better with my lifestyle, but I will only know what fits me better because I will have been through this house. In fact, I will likely miss this house when it is gone. The good memories will last. Whatever the vagaries of my feelings now, I am confident I will appreciate it very much in retrospect. When it is no longer a challenge.

Said and done: I can see why people love this life. It is safe and clean and comfortable beyond imagination, and the concerns I listed above are all manufactured and personal, not existential or even external. In my first novel, one of the passing characters was a Korean immigrant who was convinced that his beautiful suburban home in Grosse Pointe was the ultimate state of being. I wrote that only half-sincerely, but it should have been absolutely sincere. The character was right. The upper-middle class ex-burbs are really the pinnacle -- short of pure Utopia, but probably as good as us poor flawed humans can get. We should appreciate it more.

[Cars] Wheels Go 'Round

After a year of ownership I have come to really like my car. If you've been following along, you know that my 2014 Acura TL is the first non-Toyota of my adult life. It seems like it would be a small change from the Camrys I drove previously -- yet another Japanese mid-sized sedan -- but since I had been driving Camrys for nearly 20 years it was a big change for me.

The biggest problem was the combination of keyless entry and my paranoia about losing my keys. For as long as I can remember I carried a spare car key in my wallet. With key fobs generally assuring that you have your key with you when you lock your car, I only think I ever used it once or twice in twenty years, but it was a real security blanket to me. The Acura, on the other hand, has no key start. There is a back up key to open the door, but not for the ignition. Furthermore, there is no On-Star like service with remote unlocking capability. In other words, you have the fob or your car is a brick. Obviously, there is no way to carry an extra big ass key fob in my wallet. Worse still, the only place to get a new key fob is at an Acura dealer, which aren't exactly on every corner. So my horrific fear was that I would be that I was somewhere hundreds of miles from the nearest dealer, lose my key fob, and end up paying god knows how much to have my car towed to the nearest dealer to have a replacement made.

Well, I finally developed a plan for dealing with this. I purchased an extra door key on a flat which I keep in my wallet as before which can get me in the car, then I store an extra key fob and battery in the car, battery removed from the fob so as not to trigger the keyless entry system. So now if I am hundreds of miles away from a dealer and lose my fob I just open the door with the key in my wallet and load up the battery into the spare fob and Bob's My Uncle.

Because of my weird psychology, that small accommodation has made it possible to fully enjoy my car. It literally made the car rise in my eyes from a 6 to a 9. Now I have come to appreciate some of the great qualities it has. It is rock solid in all circumstances. It handles flawlessly. The engine revs effortlessly. Its athletic abilities are evident even to someone like me who practically never pushes it beyond 70% of its ability. It is not as tomb-like as a Camry; some road feel and noise come through, but it is by no means harsh in any way. Acura's philosophy is somewhat different that Toyota's in that respect; the emphasis is not on isolation, but mellowing the edges of the intrusions.

I've also come to terms with some of the technology. The voice translation system for texts is great (although it seems to get confused now and then). The stereo doesn't exactly match up with my preferred behavior (wanting seamless access to about a dozen XM presets), but it works well enough. It still will not import my contacts from my phone, but you come to expect incompatibilities when you have a Windows Phone. The nav system has both saved me and betrayed me. However, I fail to understand how I drove for nearly 40 years without a backup camera and the service at the dealership has been top notch. As a result, I am now a big Acura fan. That will work out well for them if I happen to buy another car before I die, which is iffy.

[Tech] Microsoft, I Can't Hold On

I am still a Windows Phone guy. Hell, I am still a Zune guy, for that matter. But it's getting harder and harder to support Microsoft's excellent, yet apparently unappreciated and unsellable, handheld hardware.

Zune has been dead for years, of course, but I still have two. One is a 32 gig Zune HD which holds my entire music collection and has seen me through countless flights. The other is a little 8gb jobby that contains my running playlist which I use exclusively for running. Both continue to work flawlessly.

Still it's getting harder and harder to resist power of the Android/iOS axis. I recently bought an Amazon Fire Phone, not because I needed a new phone, and certainly not because I want another piece of Amazon hardware after my disappointing experience with a Fire HD tablet. I bought it because Amazon is bailing on the phone market and they were selling the things for $130 plus a year of Amazon Prime. Amazon Prime costs $100 and since Prime is about the best deal in history and I would buy it anyway, I am essentially getting a Fire Phone, which is a mutant version of Android, for about $30.

I'm not even going to put a sim chip in it. It's going to be wi-fi only. It can hold almost as much as my Zune HD holds, i.e. my nearly entire stored music collection. It can also run Pandora or Spotify and Amazon Prime music, of course. I hear there is a way to put Google Play on it which I might try. So boom, I have all my stored music, and all streaming music anywhere there is wi-fi.

Whether it can replace my little Zune for running remains to be seen, but I don't see why not. Could I have done all this with my Lumia? Sure, but I would risk running down battery life at inopportune times, and my Lumia is down to about 19 GB of storage thanks to all the photos and apps, and I don't want to risk frying my main phone with running sweat.

The ideal next step would be to find a cheap data-only plan for the Fire phone but I don't think such a thing exists. It should. The first one to do that will make a mint. For now, it's wi-fi and stored music only. We'll see how this little experiment pans out.

It's even getting harder to keep my Lumia. Windows Phone gets all the major apps (except Instagram, apparently) but it lacks all the specialty apps, particularly the ones produced by individual organizations. At my day job, they will create apps to support upcoming conferences and events -- Android/iOS only. Things like electronic hotel keys or scanning check deposits to my bank or ordering from Chipotle -- never will you see these apps for Windows Phone. My Lumia is sweet and solid, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone for practical reasons and that means I wouldn't recommend it to myself going forward. The only questions are will I go Android or Apple and what will be the final straw to push me.

[TV] Mr. Robot

I binged Mr. Robot, an odd, yet striking cyber-thriller on USA network. It is very skillfully constructed and produced, with a very unusual tone -- the closest thing I can think of as far as atmosphere is the old cult favorite The Prisoner. The basic story is of an clinically anti-social computer genius who gets sucked into a cyber-terror revolutionary cult with anarchistic aims.

There are two major threads running through the season, one is following the plans and schemes of the anarchists, known as "fsociety". This thread ham-fistedly advocates anti-corporate, anti-capitalist, occupy-style class warfare. The bad guys are a business conglomerate so vast that bringing them down will upend society. The company is called Evil Corp -- that's not a nickname, it is a corporation literally named Evil Corp -- and it is peopled with slick folks who speak like cartoon villains. In other words it's the sort of narrative that someone who got the bulk of their knowledge of the world from watching network TV and reading Buzzfeed would build. Here's how bad it is: In the end, when the anarchists pull off their coup and society disintegrates and chaos rules the streets there is complete unity of public opinion that it is a good thing. Consequences never occur. It's an adolescent revolutionary's wet dream.

It's so bad, and in such stark contrast to the obviously high level of thought and effort that went into the show, that it makes me wonder whether it's actually just a set up for something either more realistic or more fantastic.

The other thread is the personal story of the main hacker, who is clearly in the throes of mental illness and for much of the series cannot be certain that anything he does or remembers is real. This is a bit more human and affecting. It takes a number of twists and turns all hinging on what is or isn't just happening in the protagonist's mind. The most interesting story lines are when he uses his hacker superpowers to help the individuals he cares about; it's here that the idea of a cost to good intentions is actually broached and it makes these stories more fulfilling.

But any way you cut it, the storylines are really just kind of "meh". The star here the dramatization and production. It's one of the few shows around that does a good job of showing rather than telling. Complicated situations arise, but more often than not we are blissfully spared the standard expository dialogue. And the sets, the lighting, the camera angles and beautifully done and generate an individualistic style. I wouldn't argue with a cinematography Emmy here.

Despite that, I'm on the fence whether I'll pick it up again next season. And if I do, they'll need to elevate the plotlines if I am going to stay.