Talking Money

This was presented to my students after they read and wrote about The Great Gatsby:

Many of you have a problem with “money.” You don't trust it; don't want to be too involved with it. You find it . . . vulgar. At the very least, you don't want to be defined by how much you have or how you use it.

Now, let’s stipulate that while some of us in this room may have considerably more family money than others, it is nonetheless the case that by comparison with most of the rest of the world, now and certainly throughout history, we are all filthy rich. So your high rise may be 20 floors taller than mine, but both of them tower over the shanty towns of the rest of the world.

And yet . . . we distrust money. I believe that the distrust of money is a luxury only the rich can afford because we can’t really imagine how we will ever go hungry or cold and by that I mean hungry and with no knowledge of when or from where the next meal or meals will come come. We take money for granted because we can. Remember, in this context, we’re all rich. Remember also, someone has ponied up $34K to have you go to this school when there are free schools all over the city. That $34K is more than most people will see in a lifetime. This is not meant to make you feel guilty . . . just responsible for knowing what’s up.

Money is not the problem. The problem is the stupid ideas we all too often have about money. The two – money and stupid ideas about money – are separable.

Some of you express a distaste for what is expected of you: go to college, get a job, make bank, raise a family, and the young ‘uns start it all over again.

Here’s another way to look at that process: Develop your intellectual talents because your brain likes a challenge otherwise you never would have learned to speak; apply your intellectual talents to an attractive occupation and trade those talents for the talents of others. I teach. I trade teaching for, say, dentistry.

Money is just a tool that allows us to trade skills efficiently. With money, I don’t have to find a parent of one my students to do the dentistry in exchange for my teaching. That would be an inefficient use of my time. I couldn’t teach as much and the dentist, in search of teachers, couldn’t . . . dent as much.

Developing your talents because it brings you joy is fine. Developing your talents so that you can apply them to the most profitable occupation available, is deeply dangerous. You run the risk of a lifetime, your only lifetime, consumed by boredom and little fulfillment.

I can’t imagine being a dentist. I’d maybe make more money, but I’d be bored to the point of depression after 10 years or less. I hope my dentist loves dentistry. If she’s doing it just for the money, I hope she learns to love dentistry. If she doesn’t love it or learn to love it, I pity her.

Now, also, don’t be too unrealistic about money. Some people say, “Do what you want and the money will follow?” That’s ridiculous. Nothing could be more ridiculous.

More accurately: “Do what you want and the money won’t matter as much . . . unless you’re also responsible for the lives of others . . . like your children . . . in which case you can either sacrifice the ‘what you want’ self-indulgence and maybe attend to your kids or you can work hard to convince your kids that money doesn’t matter.” So . . . let’s get real about money. And let’s not denigrate the man and woman who didn’t have the opportunity to develop their intellectual talents and must now work some soul-deadening jobs to give kids a chance to develop their talents and live a fulfilling life.

So give money a break. It’s the messenger. Not the message.

The Fulfillment Curve from treehugger.com.

What I'm Reading: Purple, the Color, Its Origin . . .

From Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky:

"When the Romans took over the Phoenician salt trade, they discovered how to make a purple dye. A logical byproduct of fish salting, the dye was produced by salting murex, a Mediterranean mollusk . . . . The painstakingly extracted purple dye was a luxury item of such prestige that the color purple became a way of showing wealth and power. Julius Caesar decreed that only he and his household could wear purple-trimmed togas. The high priests of Judaism, the Cohanim, dyed the fringes of their prayer shawls purple. Cleopatra dyed the sails of her warship purple. . . . Pliny wrote that men were slaves to 'luxury . . . inasmuch as men scour . . . all the rocks of [North Africa] for the murex and for purple.'"

Photo by Patrick Hamilton.

What I'm Reading: Impact of Cameras, Records, etc.

From The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa by NYT art critic Michael Kimmelman:

"Before cameras, educated, well-to-do travelers had learned to sketch so that they could draw what they saw on their trips, in the same way that, before phonograph records, bourgeois families listened to music by making it themselves at home [sheet music was bought instead or records], playing the piano and singing in the parlor. Cameras made the task of keeping a record of people and things simpler and more widely available,and in the process reduced the care and intensity with which people needed to look at the things they wanted to remember well, because pressing a button required less concentration and effort than composing a precise and comely drawing. During the last century, the history of amateurism in American, whether it entailed snapping photographs or painting pictures or tickling the ivories, like so many other aspects of life, increasingly centered on labor-saving strategies to placate our inherent laziness and to guarantee our satisfaction, a promise, if you think about it, that should be antithetical to the premise of making art, which presumes effort and risk."

I Know the She's

Was rockin' my dark blue tee with the reindeer that loves the She's today and the barrista making my cappucino says, "Oh, man, the She's ROCK!"

I asked her if I rock, too, since I'm wearing the She's tee.

She hesitated and then said, "Uh, yeah-uh!"

But the hesitation spoke the truth and it said, "Sadly . . . no."

So I said, "Your hesitation spoke volumes and it said, 'Sadly, no, you do not rock. Nothing could make YOU rock.'"

"No, REALLY!" she insisted. "You rock."

"No way I rock," I said, steadfast in my understanding of the communication of hesitation.

She looked at me the way people look when they've been caught . . . in a terrible lie!!!!!!!!

So I pulled out my secret weapon: I said, "I know Sami and Sinclair."

She showed no recognition.

"They're just the bassist/singer and drummer for the She's," I informed her, " . . . and I know them really well. Really, really well. We have a small club. Meets Wednesdays at lunch. You can't be in it."

She tilted her head slightly and looked away.

"Now who rocks?" I queried as I took my cappucino and walked away.

Just When You Think . . .

Without Tits There Is No Paradise is a very popular televised soap opera in Colombia.

The USA tends to be a bit more prudish about television. More prudish, in fact, than most of the world. Perhaps now I'm more grateful for that.

I sometimes grit my teeth as I consider some of the more vulgar, stupid examples of USA culture polluting other lands like an imperial invasion of junk. I give you the most popular American television program abroad: Bay Watch. Or consider the McDonald's on the same piazza as the 2200-year-old Pantheon in Rome. However, these folks elsewhere do ask for this junk. And, of course, upon going abroad, I quickly find examples of home-grown nastiness that competes with anything we here in the US send over.

Still, if what I read in the current Atlantic Monthly is true, Colombia wins the junk wars. In the Atlantic Monthly it's reported that "one of Colombia's most popular television show [is] Without Tits There Is No Paradise." It's apparently the continuing saga of a "flat-chested" and impoverished teenager "who wants to sell her virginity for a pair of implants."

I decided not to post visuals for this entry.

This Teacher's Nightmares!!!

There ought to be a word for nightmares that aren't nightmares like Tina gets (she's being chased and her screams come across the pillow as moans born of horror and agony which awaken me, quickly, and so I heroically awaken her and am then assured by her still-asleep and breathless "thank you" which makes me wonder if I entered her dream and thoroughly kicked some assailant's ass (which I can't even do in my dreams so I'm grateful for the possibility of doing it in hers) or . . . did I just obliterate the nightmare altogether by awakening her?. No. No drama in mine like that. Mine are just annoying visitations based upon my own insecurity about what I fear is a presumptuousness going on 20 years, i.e., what business do I have in a classroom full of bright, disciplined kids? I get these two dreams, each is annoying and each attempts to put me in my place about once every six months or so:

I'm scheduled to play a piano concerto with the San Francisco Symphony. I know, but it becomes clear to me that no one else seems to know -- or maybe they do! and they certainly should! -- that I don't play anywhere near well enough to play classical music much less classical music with Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra! I don't play classical! I don't sight read very well at all. I have very limited technical fluency or facility on the keyboard so that anything beyond a ballad's tempo or any run up or down the keyboard or any contrapuntal activity requiring a left hand that does anything more than pound chords on the 1 and 3 is wholly beyond me. How did I qualify for this gig? And why do people seem to look forward to my playing? And at what point did I think I could perform with aplomb, fooling everyone? Or did I just go along with whatever ill-founded confidence the music world extended to me? These questions come to me after I awaken, but in the dream they are the inchoate miasma which makes for whatever nightmarish quality the dream imposes upon me.

So . . . here I am, getting ready to go on stage (I guess we have, in fact, rehearsed even!!! and I somehow pulled it off!) in my tux to be greeted by hearty applause, the welcoming smile of MTT, and everyone's happy anticipation of a night of artistry! MTT lifts his baton, the symphony comes in and . . . I play. And sure, I'm a little anxious all the while that I'll be found out, but actually pretty confident, too, and . . . I pull it off! There's applause!

I get the hell off stage . . . .

And there the dream ends.

You might well ask, "Dude, what's wrong with that? That's no nightmare!"

But, of course, it is! Because I know I'm a fake who just succeeded with my fakery . . . and, worse, it will just encourage me to continue with my con and not ever really learn the craft of playing the piano (see "teaching") well. And one day, I will get caught. MTT will step off the podium, look at the music in front of me, look at me, and with both of us scandalized in that moment, he'll point to the f*******ing door.

Who am I to be teaching Shakespeare, Sophocles, Hurston, et al?!!?


And now, for a couple years or so, a new annoyance visits my sleep and in this dream . . . I do get caught:

I'm about to take a final exam in a class for which I have not only not done the work since about the first week of school, I even forgot this class was on my schedule . . . or conveniently forgot . . . up until this moment, the moment when all will become clear as I stare blankly at and leave blank my final exam. And I know that this will mean that I will fail the class; it will mean humiliation.

In this dream, there's no faking it . . . yet anyway. I always wake up, humiliated, before I have to take the final exam. Although I'm not confronted in the dream by any authority, it must be clear to all that I haven't been in class, just about ever, and that I cannot possibly be prepared for this test. I know I don't know and I know that everyone else must know that I don't know . . . anything.

But how is this different from playing with the Symphony? Perhaps one night I will take that final exam and bullshit my way through. I'll hand it in and hang around just long enough to gather my things while noticing the professor leaf through my pages. Yes, in this dream, I can't tell if I'm in high school or in law school (where I was negligent, but not that negligent), and I seem to be a younger man, but with the life experience of the 55 year old that I am. Seems that way anyway.

I wake up mildly disgusted with myself, but then I chuckle because I've escaped the reality, the Truth, represented in the dream and am back in the material world where my smoke and mirrors continue to work wonders.




There must be a name for these dreams. It's not stage fright. As the pianist, and despite my incredulity about being accepted as a classical pianist, in my dream I actually have some confidence that I can do this. Otherwise, I would have run to the nearest exit.

In the final exam dream, I have no intention of "performing" on stage.

I should note that Tina had a somewhat similar recurring dream years ago when she waited tables. She dreamt she had too many tables to wait on. But, you see, in this dream, she didn't create the problem. She's blameless and the injustice of it causes her to scream, a scream of agony that comes across the pillows as moans. So I wake her up. I'm good at that.

G-Gear: My New Clothing Line and Fashion House

Like my other creative friends, I've started my own clothing line, my own Fashion House, so let me hear you say "GREG IS IN HIS FASHION HOUSE!!!" I call it "G-Gear"!!! "G-Gear" . . . pronounced "Guh-Gear" not "Gee-Gear." Teeshirts and denim. Send me $100 for full ensemb.

Here, the highlights are kept under wraps before the Milan spring season show.

It just makes sense: My creativity is not restricted to my blogging even though my blog is eclectic. I am musical! I have painted. And sculpted. I sculpted detritus in my backyard long before Andy Goldsworthy, a little known sign painter when he and I first lunched amidst my "Eucalyptus Seizure" installation. And don't we all -- well, all of us of an artistic bent -- regard our bodies as canvasses or sculptural scaffolding upon which we struggle with the creations of others to express our inner nature sartorially.

How to Disqualify Yourself as My Friend

There's a lovely stand-up piano in one of the classrooms at my school. Occasionally, late in the day, I might sit and mess around with whatever I might be working on. This piano has better action than mine at home -- though I love my piano -- so it's fun to try out little bluesy fills in songs with a lot of space like Gershwin's "Our Love Is Here to Stay" or the old spiritual "Motherless Child."

Well, recently, I'd been playing and didn't notice several girls standing at the door listening and when I did notice, I stopped, embarrassed by the prospect.

"No, keep playing!" one said.

Pleased, I asked if she liked what she heard.

"Oh, yes," she assured me. "It makes me feel like I'm at Nordstrom's." She seemed so pleased to extend what she perceived as a compliment.

I smiled and thanked her. But in my heart, I had her killed.

And then it occurred to me that the piano could be a potential friend litmus test. I should play for everyone with whom I might strike up a friendship and if my prospect hears "Easy Listening Dentist Office Pablum" then, well, I'll have nothing more to do with him or her. But if they hear bluesy mistake prone beat challenged edgy jazzster, then we can hang.

Conservatives and Endangered Species

Now, I'll admit I'll occasionally hear about some species of . . . whatever, but anyway it'll be peculiar to some small area and holding up some form of development because, well, liberals like me tend to be alarmed about killing an entire species of anything. So, do we protect the buffalo? Sure. The tiger? Yes. Whales? Mos def.

But a moth? A moth that can be found, say, only within a five acre expanse in Napa county and would be wholly eradicated by a proposed vineyard? It's a hypothetical, but we hear about these smallish species with powerful friends quite often.

So how do we liberals decide what to do?

Well, here's how current conservatives decide: Kill. Death to the species. Hunt it, competitively, to extinction. The last guy to eat a meal of the animal's flank or make a dollar off its hide or as a result of its extinction wins!

Okay, so maybe that's not as representative of conservative thought as it used to be (and it sure as hell used to be . . . and it might be again if the Tea Party wackos get enough power to eliminate the EPA). Today, conservatives say we should kill the small, localized species that get in the way of the development of whatever cookie cutter mediocrity planned for the day. These conservatives don't value diversity much in their effort to make America look the same wherever you go.

But how DO conservatives really decide to deal with these species? Do they cite Evolution? Yes, only if they can argue that the species in question is not fit enough to survive the "evolution" of the ecosystem in question.

However, conservatives hate Evolution, or at least a scientific view of it, preferring Biblical Literalism/Fundamentalism instead.

This, of course, brings us to Noah and his Ark. God commanded Noah to take two of every species, right? So did Noah take two of some of those species peculiar to the continent that Noah's contemporaries couldn't even imagine? Or did he just take two of every animal as he understood the word "animal"? If the latter, wouldn't God object to Noah's having overlooked some species?

God: Dude . . . where's the buffalo?

Noah: Buff-a-what?

God: Dude, it's on the other continent. Dude, y donde el Snail Darter?

Noah: WTF?!!? You're just NOW telling me there's a whole 'nother continent?!!?


Yes, yes, conservatives believe that we have Dominion over God's creatures and we can do with them as we see fit. But does that mean we can off a species? I just don't see the conservative god happy with that.

God: You eliminated my Speckled Daisy Moth so that you could build another Costco? You are SO going to Hell.


But, to be fair, what about the original question: How do liberals deal with small, localized species? Right now, I believe that just such a species is threatened by the development of a "sun farm" in the desert somewhere. A renewable energy entrepreneur wants to set up big solar panels somewhere, but . . . . So how do we liberals decide which of our oxen to gore? I'm not sure, but, yes, it will require several studies and it may be comically burdensome. But I don't think the answer is to kill the EPA and any species that happens to cross our paths.

Experiment with Twitter

Here are all my Twitter postings until I got rid of Twitter:

Got my own line of clothing now! "G-Gear" . . . pronounced "Guh-Gear" not "Gee-Gear." Teeshirts and denim. Send me $100 for full ensemb.

Economics is no more about money than English Literature is about the alphabet.

To my students today: "I'm on Tweeter!" Response: "It's 'Twitter.'" Then me: "Isn't that what I said, that I'm tweetering?" Eyes roll.

If you see me and it seems I've forgotten that I'm a white guy, remind me.

I'm a'tweetin', but why? Not enough room for jokes, but okay for punchlines. Ex.: "Four! One to charge and three to yell 'Ole!'" Hahaha!

My Twitter vs. my blog: http://theeclecticgreg.blogspot.com/ Which will gain more followers? Not fair. I may kill my Twitter account.

Guess how many followers for the band Coldplay? The number is too long for the rest of the characters I had left after asking the question.

My followers are > those followed. So I am not lame. But close. (Two followers just want my money, so really: followers < followed. Lame?)

We are bored to the exact extent that we are boring. Bored a lot? You are way boring. Bored now? Your boredom = 132 characters.

I have discovered my religion: Procrastinarian. Tell you more about it later.

3 of my 8 followers are strangers trying to sell me stuff. "Bezmoney" ,"TweetPower" , "FinanceMentor" . . . stop following me! I'm wise 2U

Why are there "suggestions" for who I might follow? I can imagine following strangers, but why these? Am I "suggested" to others?

I'm not using Twitter right. Everyone else has big announcements. My announcement? # of followers = # followed: 5. The same 5 for each.

Giving kids time to write in my class. 500 words for them. 140 characters for me. I have 43 left. "Write more!" I tell them. Me, too!!!

Killing my Twitter account. Novelty worn off. 5 twittering following + 5 twittering followers: I kill 10 birds with one stone. Goodbye!

Okay, killing the twittering is kinda' involved and I'm lazy. Will kill later.

Pledge Break

Send me money . . . and I'll send it back right after Google CUBES your donation!

Now's a good time!

Because Google will not double, not triple . . . no Google will CUBE every amount sent in dollar terms.

So, sure, if you're some hobo who sends a dollar, then, yes, 1 x 1 x 1 = 1 and Google will send a lousy dollar.

But imagine if you sent, say, $20! Google will then send 20 x 20 x 20 and that equals $8000!!! With only 100 $20 donations from my readers, I can quit my day job and write the entertaining, thought provoking, intelligent blogposts you've come to expect . . . and I can do it all day long.

This CUBING grant from Google will last only a month, so any time you feel like sending, say, $10, Google will CUBE it! And because Google will CUBE it, I promise you this: Any donation you send in the next month WILL BE RETURNED TO YOU!!!