Category: Newsletter (Page 1 of 19)

The Durham Performing Arts Center punches well above its weight, both as a venue and as a draw for events and performances. It also helps that I can walk to DPAC, which I did twice in the past week. My first visit was to see Shucked, a touring Boadway musical comedy. My second visit was to listen to a lecture from Dr. Jordan Peterson as part of his current tour.

My Shucked visit was not as originally intended. Illness forced a change in plans as my expected guests were unable to come and my weekend plans were scuttled. In an era of digital tickets, I was still able to go and managed to find a home for one of the others. I knew very little about the show going into it, which was probably for the best. The premise bordered on the ridiculous but that was deliberate and the writers leaned in hard to the corn motif with what is surely the highest concentration of corny jokes in the history of musical theater. One of the minor character’s monologues were the piece de resistance of this corny humor and he got the biggest laugh of the evening with a joke about how politicians are like diapers. I haven’t seen Book of Mormon but a few people said Shucked was like a toned-down version of that show. It had some vulgarity but wasn’t blasphemous. I’m glad I didn’t travel to New York to see it (especially after seeing Hamilton when I was in New York in January), but it was a nice change of pace on a Thursday evening.

Dr. Peterson’s lecture was much more what I anticipated it would be and more impactful. It was a solo trip and the second time I’ve seen him give a lecture. And while I wish he (and everyone else) would refrain from Twitter/X, his writings and his recorded lectures have been of great value to me during the past few years. The lecture focused on conscience through the lens of the stories of Elijah, Jacob, and Jonah and how those Old Testament stories offered a preemptive repost to Nietscheze’s idea that man would be able to reconstruct a value system after the death of God, how the existence of conscience itself points to problems with Nietscheze’s claims. The lecture paralleled the thoughts contained in the prologue to his latest book, which I started reading just this weekend so it was almost like spaced repetition of the ideas as you might study flashcards in order for the content to seep deeper into memory. These two exposures to a particular passage of scripture aren’t even the only ones I’ve had recently as one came up in my church small group as well a few weeks ago. It has all left me thinking about creating still and quiet instead of crowding it out with noise and stimulation at all times since that quiet is where the best things come from.

In my Sunday night curling league, I skip. That means I’m something like the team captain. I am the one who calls the shots for the first three team members and the one who throws the final two rocks of each end. It is still new for me and presents a number of additional mental challenges that are not present when I play any of the other three positions on a team. It is part of my continued growth as a player and I enjoy it, except when I don’t.

In each of the last two weeks, my team has had the lead with the hammer (meaning we throw second each time) into the final end (think of an end like an inning in baseball). Both weeks, the last end has not gone according to plan. Last week, we won in overtime when I threw my tiebreaker stone closer to the button than the other team’s skip. This week, I executed a draw with my last rock and we scored one to win the game. Neither should have been that close.

I’ve decided that the cause is that in both games I changed my approach in the final end. I played defensively and called different types of shots, shots that I’d not asked my teammates to play in earlier ends.  This has caused a few misses and those misses have led to problems. In other words, I went away from what was working in favor of a different approach at the end and nearly cost my team wins both times as a result.

I’ve been thinking about this issue, sticking with what’s working and continuing to do more of that rather than change things, in relation to the law firm this week as well. Shiny object syndrome is a real thing and it’s hard not to chase after every new opportunity, especially after going through lean times like we have in the past few years. That said, we are getting better at sticking to our core strengths. Even this morning we turned down an incorporation-type project that was a regular part of our practice a few years ago to stay focused on what we do best.

I’ve been thinking about a book’s cover art this week. The book is Effortless if you want the visual for yourself, but the cover art is two arrows pointed upward albeit with one basically straight and the other a mess of scribbles and circles before finally pointing in the right direction. My working life has definitely felt like the crazy scribble since I returned from Morocco, and on more than one evening I’ve questioned whether I’m even pointing in the right direction at all.

While I eat meals in such a way that I eat a little of this and a little of that so that I finish each item within a couple of bites of the others, that is not how I work. When working, I like to do one thing at a time and drive it to completion before attending to the next task. Given the nature of some of my current projects, that hasn’t been possible in these last few weeks. I’m able to do a little bit, but then I have to wait on something external to be able to proceed to the next step. That means there are several things active and nothing has been completed.

This feeling has only been compounded by the success we’re starting to see. We’ve talked to a lot of prospective clients this month, so many that I’ve limited the number of meeting slots available each day as a stopgap measure. A champagne problem for sure, but it comes with prep work, scheduling and rescheduling emails, follow ups, etc. And for better or worse, we’re simultaneously building systems for which the need became glaringly obvious during our January travels. There are a few other areas in a similar situation. The net net has been fading back into some old, unsustainable work habits. It will only be for a season (I tell myself) and work and life will be better on the other side, but right now isn’t the most fun. That said, we are making progress. Paso a paso, no?

My big souvenirs from my Morocco trip were two rugs. They are different from each other, different from the rest of my décor—much busier than anything else in my apartment and with pops of color. I was attracted to them by a similar compulsion that attracts me to the works of Jackson Pollack in a white museum gallery, order within chaos within a larger order. They are also hand-woven antiques with slight asymmetries that add to their charm. Computers aren’t very good at recreating those slight imperfections, at least not yet, so that makes the human touch stand out even more. 

One of the rugs is a long runner. It fits nicely in the hallway connecting the entry to my apartment with the main living space. I enjoy its yellows and blacks and greens and reds and crazy interwoven patterns each time I return as there is so much going on that I see something new each time and so it still hasn’t become familiar. Having it has also produced a side of benefit of me taking off dirty shoes at the door so that my whole living space stays that little bit cleaner. 

The other, roughly 7×10 feet, is even more special. It’s also older and was much more expensive, but as my maternal grandmother loved to quip money only makes you happy when you spend it (not that I fully agree with that statement, but there have been many more times in my life when I’ve regretted not purchasing things when I travel than times when I’ve regretted making such purchases). It is reds and blues and different patterns in rectangles of threes and multiple focal points as well with different textures for the borders. I won’t attempt a detailed visual description because, selfishly, doing that might strip some of the magic for me. 

One day, it will be a floor centerpiece in my home office/study. As I sit here writing this, however, the floor of my office is largely taken up by the bed in what is also my guest bedroom. That presents a slight conundrum. The rug is currently straddling different spaces in the main living area so that I can enjoy it, but it doesn’t quite fit there. I don’t think there will be a solution to this dilemma while I’m living in this apartment, but that won’t be forever even though I have no present intention to move.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve worked my way through Blue Eye Samurai. It is an animated show set in late medieval Japan. I haven’t watched anime since I watched Pokémon as a child so this was not a show that the algorithms would have chosen for me. I never would have even found the show if not for YouTube. Via that platform, I’ve found two different movie review channels that I watch that are very different from each other. One is highbrow and analyzes the technical aspects and artistry of filmmaking and storytelling (Thomas Flight). The other is more widely known and most of its videos are takedowns of Hollywood blockbusters (The Critical Drinker). I heard about this show via the series “The Drinker Recommends,” a series I find more helpful since it is about what I should watch instead of what I shouldn’t (though the positive videos get fewer views and so the series is sporadic at best).

I have not yet watched the final episode. That said, I’ve enjoyed it thus far. All of the characters have depth. The hero is also part antihero, the villains have redeeming or at least ameliorating qualities. Even the minor characters contain multiple facets and competing emotions and goals. The animation is sharp and the shots well-constructed, but as I’m no connoisseur of anime I don’t have the most educated opinion on those technical items. It is on the graphic side so this is yet another item I’ve included in these missives that isn’t for the children.

I’ve always liked an outsider story too, and the premise undergirding the show is the main character’s blue eyes and what those blue eyes mean in a time when foreigners were banned from Japan. I’ve never dealt with anything like the ostracism the show portrays but have felt an outsider at many points in my life. Addressing those internal feelings has compelled and continues to compel me to try new things in search of belonging, here more than in any place I’ve lived since I left for college. Lest anyone be too concerned, though, I’m not at risk of going on the sort of quest for revenge that Mizu embarks on in the show.

While in New York City for the Acquiror Summit, I finally had the opportunity to see Hamilton. The show has been going for almost a decade now and has even been here in the Triangle while I’ve lived here, but I hadn’t seen it before Saturday. Mom and Dad joined me at the show as part of a long weekend in New York City.

I’ve seen six shows on Broadway now and several others off-Broadway, and Hamilton is right there with The Lion King with the two hard to compare as I saw them at different points in my life. None of us listened to the music beforehand, which I would advise anyone who doesn’t regularly listen to hip-hop to do so that you can understand more of the lyrics. I read the Chernow biography in college, though, and I was able to understand the words in all of the songs. The place was packed and the energy was high even for a Saturday matinee.

King George was hilarious with his short vignettes during the performance even if fans of John Adams might be upset by the treatment he received from the British monarch. Thomas Jefferson was also cast in a soft villain role, which worked from the perspective of Alexander Hamilton but is not a universal view. The real villain of the story was Aaron Burr, the man who shot and killed Hamilton on the dueling ground. His character received little development, a deliberate and well-executed choice given Hamilton’s perspective that Burr lacked any real beliefs. The play accentuated Hamilton’s immigrant status and the actions and life of his wife, but it wasn’t done in the beat-you-over-the-head-with-my-ideology sort of manner preferred by lesser writers. In summation, I left the theater without wondering why the show has seen such a long run.

I’m now back from my vacation and have jumped right back into the swing of work. This week, I’ll record a few of my favorite parts of the trip. You’ll note that the motorbikes in Marrakech will not be on this list.

My favorite places of the trip were the areas away from the cities and where I was either alone or with only my guide. There is something enchanting about large sand dunes in a moonlight glow. And a little off roading during hikes to waterfalls or up narrow slot canyons gives a walk a little more sense of adventure. I opted for a more physically demanding tour than most would choose, but even if you aren’t interested in hiking you will need to be ready for stairs when visiting most places in the country.

On the trip, I purchased a couple of Berber rugs. I saw a few that I liked and so I decided to buy them. Then it was a matter of agreeing to a price. It wasn’t the usual sort of dynamic with wild differences in valuation and I wasn’t eager to make it such due to the nature of the business as a cooperative. There was still some back and forth, though, done by writing numbers as a means of limiting the possibility of confusion. Then the call to prayer rang out from the mosque in the village. And that was that, with the price already more or less in the middle of where we’d started the discussions and the owner of the co-op making reference to the transaction being divinely ordained. We shook hands and that was that. I chuckle a little thinking about how the whole thing played out.

The two most memorable and enjoyable meals on the trip were the two meals where I did the least. In both instances, I just went exactly where the guide told me, sat down, and let the guide order for me. One was near the main square of Marrakech. The place was unassuming and I probably would have just walked past it, but Salam stopped and told me this was where I needed to eat lunch. The oven was actually built into the ground, and there were several lambs being cooked. I had both some lamb meat from this kiln style oven and tangia, a beef dish slow-cooked in a covered clay pot with all kinds of spices. I ate at a single communal table in the back of the restaurant stall alongside people of multiple nationalities and sprinkled the lamb with the mix of salt and cumin that was on the table in front of me. It was great, and the tangia was even better. The other was on the drive back into Marrakech on the last day when we stopped at a roadside food hall of sorts. There was one stall for the butcher and another stall for the cook, running two different businesses. It was Friday so other stalls were closed, but on any other day there would have been a place for drinks open and a pharmacy too. I had meatballs and Moroccan salad, but what made it special was sitting there on the plastic chairs being the only white person surrounded by people eating, drinking tea, and having a pleasant if late lunch.

My guide was also a celebrity in Morocco. Everywhere we went people came up to him and spoke with him or asked to take a picture with him. He started publishing videos during COVID and now has a few hundred thousand followers on the various platforms. It was funniest at police checkpoints, where the police would often stop him but only to talk; there was only one time where the officer even asked for his ID. The videos are all in Moroccan Arabic, but I actually took or recorded some of his most recent content. Links if anyone is curious: Facebook; Instagram; TikTok; and YouTube.

This is shoulder season in Morocco (high season is the spring and low season the summer), so at several points I’ve been the only tourist staying in my accommodations, eating at a restaurant, or visiting a store. This was starkest during my overnight stay on the edge of the Saharan dunes. My camel ride across the sand was in a caravan of one, even if there were other groups around headed for some of the other tent camps. I chose when to eat my dinner and sat in the large tent alone next to the space heater. Then I retreated to my tent.

As the moon was nearly full, I was denied a mind-bending view of the stars sans light pollution. It made for a slightly eerie glow instead; there was enough light to be able to see all around but not to see fine details. I’ve watched a few nature documentaries shot with low light cameras in recent years that have had a similar visual effect, but city lights drown it out most places. And the wind whipped through the night. In a different time it might have been a djinn of the desert, but such stories aren’t told as much anymore. The moonset in the west more or less coincided with the sunrise over a raised plateau in the east that forms the Algerian border and I was up early to take them both in a short distance from my tent camp and towards the giant dunes. Then it was off to breakfast and then onto the next destination.

There have been a lot of windshield miles on this trip. As it’s just me with my guide/driver, we sometimes go long stretches without speaking, though our conversations have grown deeper as the days have passed. Morocco is not a country filled with wildlife either. The only animals are birds, herd animals, dogs, and an obnoxious number of cats in the cities and villages. It is a country with varied topography, though. I’ve seen the Atlantic Ocean, four different mountain ranges, beautiful high-walled gorges, rolling hills of wheat and olive fields, valley oases, a lake at the base of a desert sand dune, and miles and miles of high shrubland plains. It provides time for thinking, and me not accessing the internet for the last few days has given me some mental space for that thinking time to be more than just focused on the next work tasks I’ll tackle when I return next week. It has been refreshing and something I’ll try to replicate at intervals through the year even without traveling across an ocean to do so. Even as I type this out, I’m sitting alone on a patio, sun back over my right shoulder and me facing the Anti-Atlas Mountains to the south. It’s a nice view, especially since I have some dates and cookies in front of me which my host so generously provided.

On Saturday, I flew first from RDU to JFK then overnight to Casablanca. It was yet another overnight flight where I failed to get any sleep. Maybe someday. My plan was for this to be a true vacation. I even built in a buffer of a few days in case one or more transactions bled into the new year. Alas, a couple of matters have dragged more than a few days into the new year and I’ve worked early mornings and into the evening. Maybe I jumped the gun a bit and should have waited until this week to start the vacation, but I’m not sure that there will ever be a great time and I only have a few days back in Durham before heading out again for a work trip anyway.

Sunday was a wash given how tired I was. The itinerary called for very little time in Casablanca. The only stop was to tour what is the third largest mosque in the world, which was much more ornate than the only other mosque I’ve visited. This one has a minaret that is something like 200 meters tall and holds around 25,000 people inside. The scale was beyond what my tired mind could truly appreciate. Then it was off to Rabat, the capital city. A bit more touring and a seafood platter for a late lunch that involved far too many bones and I holed up in the hotel for the evening to sleep. I didn’t even go out for dinner.

Yesterday was a transit day (I’m writing this on Tuesday evening) to the northeast and into the Rif Mountains. The destination was Chefchaouen, a city I’d never heard of a few months ago when I decided to visit Morocco but one that the travel agency put on my suggested itinerary. It is the blue city of Morocco and has become much more visited in the era of Instagram. I arrived in the late afternoon, worked some, then ate a late dinner of a beef tagine with dates and plums that I chased down with the sour lemonade that I’ve now had on multiple occasions. It really should’ve been better than it was, but maybe it was because it was so late and didn’t really sate my hunger.

Today marked the first day when I felt like I was on vacation, for a while anyway. After a work session this morning, my guide drove me around the mountains into which Chefchaouen sits for a full day of hiking at Akchour. It was my sort of place—gravel crunching under hiking boots with few people around and limited cell service. Along with my guide, I walked first to God’s Bridge, a high natural arch over a river that offered a really nice view. Then we took a much longer walk to a series of waterfalls. Those were underwhelming, with the larger falls probably looking something like Bridal Veil Falls but there was only enough water for it to be a trickle. That is unusual for this time of year, but so it goes. Then we came back into the city and I had what is so far the best meal of the trip, a beef rib with some roasted vegetables. It was in a fancier restaurant and there was a guy playing mostly classic standards on the guitar. The song playing when I left was “My Way,” a personal favorite. Then as I walked back up the stairs towards my hotel, the call to prayer rang out for the final time today. It was quite a juxtaposition.  

By the time this newsletter goes out, I should have arrived in Fes. It will be my third different home thus far in Morocco. This trip marks a return to a faster-paced vacation format that I went away from during the past few years of spending roughly a week in one place before moving onto the next destination. It’s too early to know which format I’ll choose next, though perhaps my next travel vacation won’t be a solo one. Again, one can dream.

The new year brings reflection. As I’ve written previously, I’m not big on resolutions for the new year, but I will spend a few hours today looking back at my calendar and thinking about what I enjoyed most (and least) and what I might change going into this year. It may not be as glamorous or celebrated, but I’ve found it much more practical even if the exercise looks slightly different each time.

In comparison to the past few times January 1 has rolled around, there is much more stability in my life today. Two years ago, I changed my residence on New Year’s Day. Last year, I was a few months into my residence in Durham and celebrated with friends by watching the fireworks in London through the power of streaming television. If anyone has children who want to see fireworks for the new year, that is a handy trick. This year, I’m in the same apartment, there were thunderstorms on New Year’s Eve, and I was in bed by 10. Sure, my mood is not as dark as it was during the COVID years, but the hopeful expectation of positive change from the last couple of years is absent.

There are plenty of reasons why I should be excited—I’m coming off time with family, I have a well-positioned business, my social calendar is fuller than it was a year ago, and I have an upcoming extended vacation—yet I’ve felt morose these past few days, even on this bright and sunny morning. I’m sure I’m not alone in that, and it is my hope that reading this helps at least one of you know that you’re not alone if you are experiencing malaise yourself. After scheduling this to send, I’ll take a walk in that sunshine.