We had a double family night last evening with Mr. Jones and his crew. It was very pleasant. We played loud word games with the kids, sizzled up some steaks on the grill and generally had a good old time. It was Jones' birthday. He's an interesting bloke, something of a cowboy out of water. Sometimes I think he wishes he was someplace where people don't ask stupid questions like if a pig is smarter than a chicken, but know from experience. Don't really know though. Like me, he's more comfortable giving comfort rather than asking for it, so our conversations don't get so very comfortable. More often than not, they're interrupted by the requests of our respective families, and so we're off to do something useful.
We tend to talk about the various inversions of the market, he orders of magnitude more familiar than I. He seems calm enough about the whole thing, not showing any particular nerves. He mentioned that being a trader is hardest for engineers because there's never enough time for them to figure it out, but best for ex-pro athletes who are most eager to change tactics and admit they were wrong. Me, I'm a bit shaken about things. It's difficult for me to know what might happen next. I'm unsettled about the chaos which is some evidence that I feel that I haven't got enough granite under my feet. I've dropped Buffett's biography and picked up Niall Ferguson's history of finance. I intend to read myself into confidence.
All of this is due to that nagging middle aged suspicion that I haven't done enough. It's not an objective observation. Rather it is a consequence of boredom. For three days this week, having finished Jonah Goldberg, Corialinus, The Deer Hunter, Silas Marner and a half a dozen blog posts I found myself at a point with nothing new to feed my restless mind. And so I had to engage in the various domesticities, dialing down to kid speed. BD is just finishing up (yay) Anne Frank and Sprite is doing crosswords, and came close to beating me in Boggle. Boy is boy and now on the wrestling team, football done and with a 4.0 GPA at the quarter. Restless. I'm unsatisfied and restless - I can't give comfort when everybody is doing well. So I keep grabbing for achievements in my videogames.
Then just yesterday afternoon prior to going to the Joneses, I eyeballed Bain & Company. It had been creeping into my head earlier this year when I was doing six months of contracting prior to joining another consulting team that I should measure myself up against the global top dogs. So I briefly considered Bain tangential to researching Romney. When I was an undergrad, I used to think about McKinsey. I was there at Xerox as an intern when McKinsey revamped the entire company and the guy I knew whom I thought was going to be the first black president, who did his JD/MBA at Stanford in three years was working at McKinsey. I've always thought of McKinsey and of Bloomberg as the pinnacles of my field, but ain't no dirt on BCG, ATKearney and Bain. Mr. Jones, it turns out, has contacts at BCG. That's good, but unsettling to know.
Baldwin famously says that the price for being a professional insider is to know the extent to which professional ideals are actually corrupted in your industry. That idea was what scared me away from the law, but since then I have grown the kind of thick skin which would have allowed me to deal with it. I very much related to George Clooney in Michael Clayton. But I still think of the scientific and analytical aspects of my profession from a geeks point of view. I'm absolutely committed to integrity. I have the comfortable conceit that 95% of my customers can't push me beyond what I've already done - so I'm patient and don't have to cut corners. It leaves me hungry for challenge, and I've almost grown complacent. I don't know how I would react to having to really learn a bunch of new things in order to be competent at a higher level. Hell, I might even have to quit my blog. Imagine a career that fulfilling!
I don't. And I tell myself that's cool. But I really don't know if I could step up. I really don't know if I should. I kind of like my boredom. It makes me feel that I'm doing everything I need to do and that I have time to spare; time to knockabout in spirited discussions about people and processes I google at leisure; time to bet Nulan a buck and call his speculation bullshit. Time to indulge in the recreation of being a news junkie.
But I think about getting to know pigs and chickens too. I think about sitting on the banks of a slow wide river and watching birds swoop low. I think about laying in a hammock and learning the constellations firsthand. I think about listening for birdcalls and loading up the pickup with 400 bucks of staples from the WalMart 40 miles from my door. I think about paying 1200 bucks a month for my five bedroom on 6 acres. I think about it all the time. I think about time to be free of the foolishness.
Somewhere there is a humble solution to all of this. It must be the only one that works. I am too accustomed to being awestruck, perhaps it is human nature to want to be, to think I will need to manage it all. And I'm trying, on Sunday, to keep that in mind.
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