Preston L. Bannister { random memes }

Not much on my weblog in the past year. The past year has been about personal change.

At the work-level, went from working at a dull company with a dull product (kept alive only by a couple extreme efforts on my part). Served the purpose I needed. Allowed me a decade at home to raise my kids. The kids are doing great, and no longer need the time. The new job is anything but dull. (There was a bit of a worry on my part. Maybe I had become dull? As is turns out, hell no! This is fun … and my work could turn into more revenue for the new company than the entire gross income of the old company. Fun. A strong challenge. Definitely fun.)

At a personal level, had knee surgery about a year back, and working to bring my physical self in line with my self image. Hard to explain, perhaps. There was a time between high school and university when I did not know if I could reach the future I wanted. Hope was uncertain. Something woke, an aspect of my self, that took me then from an average cyclist to riding with UCSF category 2 cyclists (which at the time meant able to compete at a state and national level). These pictures are from that time:

Somewhere at the back of my mind, my mental self-image has always been something like what was in my mind at that time. In the past year, that long sleeping aspect awoke. Clearly I will never again be physically capable of what I could do as a 19-year-old kid, but I will do all that I can. Which as it turns out, is quite a lot. My weight has dropped, a lot. My endurance has increased. And I have added muscle mass. Lots of iteration needed. And something else.

Climbed up Saddleback Peak last weekend. The second time since resuming hiking. (The first was September 25, last weekend February 25.) My time to the top was close to 3 hours (for 8+ miles with 4000 feet of elevation change) with a similar time for the hike down. Perhaps my strongest hike yet, on that mountain. Took my regular ~11 mile longer hike through Whiting Ranch this weekend, and finished in my fastest time yet (a bit over 3 hours for ~2500 feet of elevation change – expected to be a slower, as still recovering from the Saddleback hike.) Getting steadily stronger.

Not done yet.

It is fun, having intelligent children. Was trying to remember a phrase. I have an odd memory. I cannot remember a person’s name, told to me moments ago, but came recall an interesting notion from decades back.

There was a quote. Something like “Confuse the idiots”, but deliciously subtle. I could not recall the exact phrase, so my daughter started hammering at Google, trying to find variants. Not sure that we found (eventually) the exact phrase, but this comes at least close in subtlety:

When in doubt, confuse the innocent.

Sometimes I think, as a Father, I did not completely screw up.

Just after, I found this: Adam’s Family reference Still looking for my Morticia.

I am trying to tie together a whole lot of threads into a coherent whole. This is going to be rough (very very rough), in the first iterations, under I can better sort things out.

Of late, I have been wandering around, trying random things, trying to get socially reconnected. But I am odd. What I find interesting is not what is most common. That means the existing venues are – for me – just not interesting.

The first part of the problem is the shape of our current suburban society. In fact, there is not a whole lot of society. For reasons that are both too simple and too complex, most folk live in a physical and social environment that promotes silos and isolation. No intention, no design – and not enough understanding of the problem.

Well … we cannot revamp the physical world, but perhaps through focused choices, intentional action, we can route around what does not work.

Quite a lot of social coherence grows out of incidental interaction – which for the most part just does not happen by default in suburban society. Can we intentionally build social coherence? I think so. There are always a few exceptional actors, but they need a clear plan, and a plan that works. What plan works?

One notion that I find interesting is Stranger Dinners. I suspect that what works for a single 20-something attractive female as a host does not necessary work for another host or age group … but the base notion is still interesting. The notion of pulling together mostly-unrelated folk for interesting incidental social interaction seems to make some sense – if we can find a simple formula that can be readily replicated, for many hosts.

Pulling folk together outside of our usual silos has to be a primary. Putting together mutually interesting small meetings of dissimilar folk has to be also(?) primary.

Initial Questions:

• How distinct in terms of group should be each participant?
• Am I massively over-analyzing the problem? (likely)

The above all needs to be reduced to a simple and clear message.