Monday, January 21, 2002

those kids are in their thirties now

"I refuse to accept the idea that the "isness" of man's present nature makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the "oughtness" that forever confronts him."

Martin Luther King

I'm not early to rise today. FFP is there with some coffee, though, and after my shower I'm feeling good. Except for the going to work part, of course.

I do some personal e-mail that I'd intended to do over the weekend, clean up the journal entries. I need another day of weekend. But I also have a deadline looming for a presentation for work so I need to get to work. PowerPoint is all I program anymore. And the occasional Web page and e-mail, of course. It's sad.

Work. I review the material I wrote last week and start on some new material. I think I'm on schedule to finish the presentation, but I'm not sure how good it is.

I receive four or five e-mails and a phone call informing me of the death of someone else who often presents at these same conferences. Someone who is a good deal more famous than I am for it. I maybe spoke to the guy a few times, bought him a drink with a slew of other people at a bar a few years ago. I didn't find the guy likeable. He seemed arrogant and, well, a womanizer. But I didn't really know, of course. And never will.

There are changes coming at work. They may disrupt my comfortable work life. In extreme or small ways. Can't tell yet.

Lunch. SuRu agrees to go to Whole Foods with me and have salad. I want to eat a healthy lunch because we are going to a dinner at Fonda tonight honoring the hosts for a Project Transitions party we are all giving in our various homes in two weeks time. (This organization provides housing for AIDS sufferers.)

We have our salad and I go to Linens 'N Things and get some stuff to line shelves with and some stuff to organize my newly clean gadget drawer. As SuRu and I say, 'we like to buy more stuff to organize our stuff.' I've tried to resist this lately.

Home from work I get ready for our event. Then we watch part of Boston Public and I work the crossword puzzles. The major answers for the NYT one go ten, twenty, thirty (Ten Commandments, Twenty Questions, Thirty Something).

The dinner at Fonda honors people who are giving dinners at their expense for a fund-raiser. We aren't so noble because of giving such parties. Giving parties is fun. And this evening with the other party givers is also fun. Self-interest converging with some good. We sit with this woman whose parents and grandparents helped build our neighborhood, with another woman who used to date one of our caterers and with a couple who went to Paris and wrote about it for the local paper. Very cool.

We watch the end of Boston Public on video. Then Ally McBeal. For the record, I don't really care much for either of these shows. But then I'm reading the paper while they play.

Early to bed. Yeah, right. It's after midnight when we get there.

JUST TYPING
Eloquence.
Seems to work, long term.
In the service of noble ideas.
Even if the speaker is not so noble.
What, of course, is noble?
Is anyone really without self-interest?
And that being so, is there real noble action and thought?
Or the accident convergence of the good of mankind with self-interest?