Eamon Glen Hubbard

Our son and Signe's brother, Eamon Glen Hubbard, was born just over a week ago. All went well, Merry and Eamon are healthy, now we are all home again.

We had a harder time naming Eamon than we had with Signe, a fact we explained first with gender (we had several girl names we liked when Signe was born, but had trouble finding inspiration for boy names). We knew (or perhaps justified) that we needed to see him before we named him, as we had with Signe, and indeed, his scrunchy face and head of thick blond hair prompted us to eliminate most of our list.

Eamon was a name I first liked because it seemed vaguely western and cowboy-ish (though perhaps this was just a liminal influence of Longmire). Caring for him in our room, the name took on a certain appropriateness when Merry realized it was a near-anagram of "no name"! We settled tentatively on it and started looking for a complementary middle name.

We first considered some options which "flowed well" (e.g., Eamon Gray, Eamon James) but these held no meaning to us. On the last morning in the hospital, I suggested Glen, telling Merry that Glen Canyon was a place my grandmother had first told me about. It was her I had most wished to link Signe's name to, though no workable opportunity had presented itself then.

What does it mean to name a person for a place, albeit one eliciting association to another person? First, it's worth noting that "Glen" is actually two references - the specific Glen Canyon in Southern Utah and Northern Arizona, named by John Wesley Powell on the 1869 expedition of the Colorado River and submerged beneath Lake Powell in the 1960s, and glen, the term for a secluded valley. Extrapolating from the latter, Eamon Glen implies a fictional or undiscovered place, ("a glen named Eamon") and, to me, at least, is euphonically pleasing (i.e., Tolkien's "Cellar Door").

This also provides a foundation beneath the specific place of Glen Canyon, a place neither my grandmother nor myself ever visited (though I did jet ski on Lake Powell in 2002 and visit Hole in the Rock in 2008) and which Eamon and I remain unable to visit - at least, until such a fortunate future age when Glen Canyon dam may be removed.

At that time, the sandstone will be 'bleached' by the water and the old riverbed and stream beds covered in a thick layer of sediment, much of which may be toxic. Riparian zones could take decades to reappear, and the canyon's original biodiversity may never recover. Assuming Glen Canyon re-emerges, it will resemble a wasteland, of no use to either of its previous constituencies - those who enjoyed the canyon, and those who enjoy the lake. What meaning could someone possibly find in that third state?

It wouldn't stay inhospitable forever. And within that slow recovery it powerfully evokes the archetype of redemption, in which something lost is recovered, in a diminished form which nevertheless retains a core essence. Or stated from the perspective of the redeemer: the process by which meaning is derived from loss (such as the loss of a loved one), honoring its memory and finding new life within it.

My grandmother passed away fifteen years ago, yet she is often the one I think of even now when I am struggling with moral decisions - what would she think if I did [x]? Clearly there is still life in my memory of her, a small part of which I give to Eamon Glen. We are thrilled he is here with us.

R.I.P., Walter Scott, Jr.

Walter Scott Jr., a prominent Omaha philanthropist, recently passed away at 90. I had a link to him: for a couple years, I threw his money down the toilet.

I was a Walter Scott, Jr. Scholarship recipient in the college of Information Science & Technology (IS&T) at UNO. I found out a few weeks before I graduated high school, and having applied to too few other colleges, I had already decided to attend UNO anyway, to stay close to my high school girlfriend. At my parents' urging, I called to check in on my application - because I had never heard anything - and they called me back the next day to tell me I had been accepted!

Walter Scott had big plans for the IS&T program at UNO in 1999, but at the time it was just the Peter Kiewit Institute for Technology and a lot of empty land. I was most of the way through my first semester when I fell into a severe depression. I ended the semester with two A's, a D, and two F's. Two weeks into the spring semester, I stopped attending classes altogether.

That May, my parents helped me make an appeal to Scott's scholarship administrator to reinstate me that fall, given that I was undergoing treatment and, we believed, showing progress. They agreed. This time, I was an inaugural resident in the new Scott Dorms, intending to focus myself on school life.

I didn't. I moved in, but only lived there a week. I never attended a single class. Over Thanksgiving, my dad went and got my stuff out of my dorm - I was too ashamed and embarrassed, I couldn't face my dorm mates. I couldn't even admit to myself what I had done - I didn't have the strength to face the darkness of my own failings.

It took me almost a decade to fully recover from depression, during which time I developed myriad coping mechanisms. One of these was to "reverse engineer" equanimity for my life situation - whenever I made a mistake, I would say to myself: who was I to have known where that decision would lead me? I was an 18-year old whose naiveté and ignorance were not only plausible, but to be expected. The consequences of my actions, I concluded, were tragic, but they could hardly have been avoided.

It took me many more years to fully internalize my sense of personal accountability, and to think frankly about what I threw away - not just a philanthropist's money, but my own opportunities, and time. And yet, to try to dig the root cause out of the past - not my academic failure or depression, but the behavior that precipitated those - seems so intractable as to be pointless. Those propensities were a part of myself as far back in my memory as I can reach. It was inevitable that I would have to face them. Could I have maneuvered around them so as to limit the damage? The question seems detached, by my estimation, from reality.

A different question: was I predestined to this particular outcome, or should I have been more accountable?

Well, both, along a continuum, I guess. The reconciliation of the two requires a belief that every day is an opportunity to become a better version of ourselves. If I lacked resilience from a young age, then the right time to start building resilience was whenever I became aware I needed more. Same with temperament, same with discipline, same with patience, same with focus, same with anything. And it's still true.

We can all fall victim to the vicissitudes of life. But resilience is our defense, and even without knowing where I would've ended up, I do wish I would have known the value of possessing resilience earlier.

Goodbye, Avantas

Today is my last day at Avantas. I started working there just under 17 years ago, in August of 2004, while I was in college. My first job was as the receptionist. I had applied for an early-morning job running reports and doing other "office work" for a department called Agency Management. The shifts were 4am to noon on Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays. The idea of waking up early terrified me, but it was by far the best paying job I could find that fit with my class schedule, so I applied, then followed up the next week, and was more than a little surprised to get an interview.

I wandered in uncertainly and was soon taken into the main conference room to meet the HR leader and the Director of Operations. I was in a good mood - which must have been apparent - and they were in good moods, we all laughed, I gave honest answers even when they were unflattering and I remembered their names when we parted. I got a call the next day - they thought I'd be a good fit for an IT internship instead, which was fine by me, but I'd work at the front desk the first two weeks while the IT leader vetted me. Avantas managed hospital staffing, and the receptionist position was normally filled by one of the secretarial pool staff that were not on assignment. But, business was booming and everyone was on assignment. Having built websites in high school, I immediately started helping the Marketing director rebuild the company's. Meanwhile, the IT director gave me data entry tasks and some rudimentary data analysis.

Two weeks later I got a cubicle next to his, and along with the other intern (a guy named Jerome who I incidentally knew beforehand) the IT group grew from two to four. Jerome was doing statistical research to predict patient volumes and I was running & modifying Crystal Reports, then learning to build them, later I started using ASP.NET to build an online portal & dashboard, learning as I went. The latter took me a few months, I coded all the graph rendering from scratch using the drawing libraries (I was too naive to know there were 3rd party packages to do this). A lot happened in the first year - Jerome and the other IT guy left, then my boss was let go. I had already been promoted from Intern to Analyst - within a year I was promoted to Analyst 2, then Analyst 3. The two guys I worked closest with then were both cynical and endearing, I had a fraction of their experience, but they were patient, they accepted me, and they taught me a ton. I didn't appreciate it enough then, but looking back, I'm tremendously grateful we crossed paths.

We modified a mostly-finished version of a web-based shift signup application that a contractor had previously built - fixing some glaring omissions and hard-coded parameters, while I softened the shrill UI. We had enough time for functional testing, but not load testing, and the night it went live (at midnight, for reasons lost to time) it timed out on the users due to the database load. No customer support plan existed, and when users called into our 24/7 staffing office, they transferred them to us. We hacked together a series of fixes that night and the following days.

Soon after, we started building version two of the app. We convinced our new director that it would have to be rebuilt from scratch - too many of the foundational assumptions in the code were wrong and couldn't easily be refactored, plus the database was horribly un-optimized. The process of defining the requirements and technical design of the new version was one of the joys of my professional career. My coworker friends taught me how to think about requirements, business object definition, database design, coding standards and more. I look back in awe at what I learned that year. Mid-way through the project, one of them left - then the other six months later. We hired a new UI Developer and I was promoted to Lead Developer. As I was finishing up the last pieces of version 2 - testing the [properly modular] interface I had designed to our 3rd party staffing software - work halted. My boss had signed a contract for another company to build us our own staffing software from the ground up! Being reliant on a 3rd party solution had long held our consulting and business intelligence businesses back, so this was a huge strategic opportunity for Avantas, and one the company subsequently capitalized on. But it meant that version 2 - the only software app I ever designed and built from the ground up - would never see the light of day.

I moved into a Product Manager role and began collaborating daily with the owner of the other company. He and I collaborated to craft and execute an initial product vision and iterative roadmaps - I was a liaison to the users and a subject matter expert, he had experience bringing new software solutions to market, which we did with Smart Square in less than four months, in the spring of 2007.

The following year and a half was a whirlwind, spent building out the rest of the toolkit that we had long envisioned providing our customers. Meanwhile, the idea of going back to school nagged at me - I had never finished my degree, having accepted a full-time position with my second promotion after my internship. I went part-time in 2008, then left completely at the end of the year to do a semester abroad in Finland (I started this blog just prior).

I came home in mid-2009, when the the financial crisis was weighing most severely on the job market. Avantas had done a round of layoffs during my absence and any hires were out of the question. But at the end of that year, a woman who had started our Data Analytics department in 2008 hired me back to work on our patient forecasting - she actually contracted me back for a set number of hours (80, if I recall correctly, mostly to build and validate some data cleansing improvements in SAS), afterwards I proverbially 'kept showing up'. Soon thereafter, she left, and I found myself the sole member of our Analytics team!

When I graduated in the spring of 2010, I was hired back full time into a senior version of my old role. If there is one time in my history at Avantas that I wish I could go back to, it is then, so I could tell myself: "make sure you stay on a track you want to be on." Instead, I stayed - almost mindlessly - in the same role for eleven years. Why?

Because it was good enough in the right ways, I think. It paid enough, I knew enough, it was occasionally satisfying and I was always ready to believe greater things were just around the next corner. But too often in eleven years, they haven't been. The size of our team has increased by an order of magnitude, but it feels like the ability to innovate died years ago, and ultimately the promise of innovation is what has motivated me to work there since the earliest days. I am endlessly proud of the string of achievements from my first five or six years at Avantas. But the solidifying organization strangled our degrees of freedom, leading to a step-change down in our ability to deliver incremental value to our users. Successes now are small and isolated things, and many days it feels like the company - or at least the product - is in some sort of slow "run-off" mode, even though we're still signing contracts and growing revenue.

But I don't want to dwell on this, and even now it's not what I think about when I take a step back to assess the whole arc of my journey at Avantas. Even from the last decade, I'll remember working in good faith with coworkers and customers I liked and respected. And I hope - if I choose to work in technology again - that I can recapture the feeling of those early years, when I walked into an opportunity I couldn't then comprehend, stumbled around, somehow falling mostly forward and upwards, and came out the other end with the skills and experience that would define my career.

What is Impenetrable? + On getting older

In My Struggle, Karl Ove Knausgaard recounts a long series of failed attempts to write about his dad, redeemed only by the completion of My Struggle itself, in which he talks about him at length. Something about the subject of his dad and their relationship was hard for him to capture in writing - below I offer what is likely a flimsy and/or unoriginal hypothesis.

Capturing the essence of any real thing is not trivial, but it is harder yet when we are close to it. In our myopia, our understanding is often distorted. What I think is happening in these instances goes like this: we possess a mental construct of some thing (such as Knausgaard's concept of his dad) for which the core contents are inaccessible, the construct itself being impenetrable. In such instances, the 'surface' of this construct (the part we can still examine) are associated emotions which we have reinforced through repetition - an example being Knausgaard's reports that he felt anxious when he thought of his dad, even when he wasn't there - indeed, even after he had died!

Evidenced by the fact that My Struggle was published and it talks about his dad, Knausgaard got past his writer's block. But did he successfully capture the essence of who his dad was? I'm unsure.

It's been said that the best part of his book is his focus on the real, meaning what actually happened. He writes plenty about his dad and how he acted: the strict discipline and swift punishments, his fear from a young age, his dad's alcoholism and their awkward relationship as he becomes an adult. This brings the reader into Knausgaard's own state of doubt, rendering it clearly. But it never produces a satisfactory explanation as to why his dad is how he is, and Knausgaard draws few conclusions of his own.

It's a limitation of style, to be sure - Knausgaard mostly avoids speculating - and trying to answer why -which helps keep the book in the past, where it is at its best. But those why's might have been evident from what is written - certainly a person's actions can tell a coherent story, which I'm not sure they do in this case. It's odd in a book that he has said is about his dad that his dad's motivations remain so inexplicable (and note: saying he was "just an asshole" categorizes - and thus similarly fails to explain). 

Other readers might find the inexplicability interesting - I think it was a drawback for me, but that's okay, I did greatly enjoy the book as a whole. Left nagging at me is the intuition that there is something left un-penetrated in Knausgaard's understanding of his father. I suppose my flimsy hypothesis, then, is that Knausgaard hasn't fully come to terms with his memories and feelings for his father.

Before I go further: it's entirely possible that if I'm right, it just makes the book interesting in a different way. The risk, of course, is that I'm armchair quarterbacking his writing in a way that isn't useful or is off base. That's okay, it's just a sense that I felt compelled to explore by writing down. And besides, I'm getting old, it's about time to start telling stories whose points approach ephemerality, if not total nonexistence.

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In my own past, I've found quite a few topics to be impenetrable in the same sense - on some I've reached a breakthrough, while others I haven't. Sometimes it's hard to know - truth be told, it's probably not binary, but rather a question of degree. If that's true, then it follows that I only have my own intuition to tell me whether I've arrived at a satisfactory place. (Of course, this suggests lots of interesting possibilities, such as the epistemic uncertainty regarding how completely we have penetrated such a topic.)

I recently started writing about my early 20s. Disconnected as I've been from facts about that time period, my preconceptions were mostly made up of the things I've repeatedly told myself, which are self-reinforcing and reductionist. But a truth still existed! I just had to penetrate the surface that had formed over those memories. The process of doing so seemed to correlate with a period of intense dreaming, which I imagine as the psychic equivalent of how massaging a knot out of a muscle releases toxins.

Today I turn 40, and I find myself pondering what remains impenetrable in my past, and how to go about massaging those mental knots away. One of my biggest realizations this year has been that such 'humanist' pursuits (and not material ones) need to be my primary emphasis in the second half of my life. Otherwise, what may become impenetrable is my own pathological avoidance of the feelings and experiences of everyday life.

The Years of Magical Thinking

It's October of the Year Which Shall Not Be Named, we've just gotten an early season snowfall, wind is breaking the seals around the windows, and Signe is crying in the next room, asking for a hug while Merry gives her a time out. My door is closed, I'm supposed to be working, but for the past few days I've found myself fixated on a particular corner of my memories, the time period after graduation in 1999 until I moved into the Dewey house at the end of 2003. I spent most of this time on antidepressant medication, in and out of therapy. I remember it as a painful time, I've long glossed over it, generalizing it to myself as "the years I spent depressed", much of it spent alone in my room, during which I made little progress on anything that mattered.

Where did this sudden curiosity begin? I suppose it was reading Knausgaard's autobiography, which is well-calibrated in observing distant topics, and engaging even about the banal. The "anxiety of influence" inspired me to write about my 20s, though I first intended to focus on the later years, when I lived at Dewey. I wrote about finding the house, what it was like those first few months, and what changed when I met my ex-girlfriend. But an energy kept pulling me backwards. Perhaps it was simply the narrative impulse to explain why. Why was _____ the way it was, why had _____ happened, why did I feel _____? All of these answers lay in the past, so I went searching for evidence - primarily pictures, but what I found were my old digital journals, which I had kept from the beginning of 2000 to mid-2004. What I've read in them over the past few days has re-awoken a world I had largely forgotten.

The events of those years have been weathering and congealing in my brain for over fifteen years, so of course I had forgotten plenty that occurred. And not just certain events, but the reasons for them, their sequence, how I felt about them and made decisions. And of course, most of my memories have proven vastly simpler than what I wrote in my journals. For example, did I spend a lot of time alone in my room? Well, yes, though mostly sleeping or journaling. I spent the rest of my time doing what most people do at the same age - working, in classes or doing homework, and seeing friends.

Harder to quantify, though qualitatively true: I despaired for joys past and to watch the days of my early adulthood burning away in the stasis of a life I didn't know how to live. I struggled with questions of meaning and often got hung up on the "meta" layers of decisions. Meanwhile, my tactical, day-to-day decision-making was atrocious, I didn't yet understand that success is usually a long series of small victories. I was discovering the world and was passionate about many things I was finding - music, writing, people. My writing lacked nuance, swimming in hyperbole. But I was sincere, I had real feelings, in getting excited over new possibilities I often went too far. More than anything, I was prone to magical thinking, often convincing myself of the impossible. I would do anything to shield my ego from the truth, that I was a novice at most things, and couldn’t avoid the hard work required to find my way. Instead I told myself that my misery must be other people's faults, or fate, the plight of the universe, or whatever steered its course.

It hasn't bothered me to be reminded that I was full of delusions. I already knew that, it was only a matter of degree, and the particulars I had forgotten, or repressed. And it reminds me that somewhere along the way, I did manage to climb out of the hole I was in - after all, I ended up where I am today. Things are not perfect in my life, but they are better than 21-year old me had any right to believe in. And indeed, there was a real magic in my thinking then, because imagination is a double-edged sword: engaging with the fantastic has its own capacity to enrich us. Maybe it's the imaginative potency of those years that my mind has latched onto the last few days, as the pendulum of my life may have since swung too far to the other end of the spectrum, where every minute is grounded in practicality (the constancy is, itself, practical). It's not too late to think magically again, though moderation this time might go a long way.

UBI and Inflation

Time for my one economic bloviation of the year - at least I'll try to predict something.

Armchair economists (and plenty of actual economists) have been predicting inflation for years, based on ballooning budget deficits. But both treasury yields and inflation 'break even' measures suggest little market concern. Why would this be?

I believe Robert Shiller generally when he says that the Great Recession changed people's mindsets in a lasting way. Monetary velocity has plummeted as budget deficits have ballooned - part of this may be explained by foreign dollar holdings (foreign governments turn over dollars slower than US consumers). The remainder, however, must be explained by people's time-value preference for spending and saving. Since 2008, people have essentially felt less certain about their own future financial security, and they are saving more to compensate. A third factor is that we are slowly inflecting from a pension-based system to a savings-based system. The latter puts the onus on the individual to concern themselves with things like withdrawal rates and adverse market fluctuations (and the popular narrative is that these are becoming more severe when they occur).

If all this is correct, I predict that we'll get inflation when a UBI (Universal Basic Income) program is passed, which I suspect may just be a matter of time. Why? Not because of budget deficits, but because UBI is essentially a state pension. It would increase perceived financial stability because it would be a permanent income stream (assuming people found the legislation's permanence credible).

When I say, "not because of budget deficits", what I mean is that I believe inflation will follow even if the program is deficit-neutral. I don't even have to know the details - my prediction assumes the dollars being spent into existence in this program will have a profound impact on monetary velocity. Why? Because, as I said, UBI is like a state pension, and thus eliminates the need for proportionate savings. Just for argument's sake, if UBI were $1k/month ($12k/year), how much required savings per person would that eliminate just to 'break even'? It depends on withdrawal rate, etc., but assuming an annual 4% withdrawal rate, it would offset $300k of savings.

What would happen if every American suddenly realized they could do some combination of: spend $300k of savings they already had, or forego saving $300k of future income? Would that have a profound effect on inflation? My modest guess, as of August of 2020, is yes.

Goodnight

The other night putting my daughter to bed, she gave me a hug without me asking and said, 'love you, daddy', and I had a moment of recognition for how fast she is growing. I also imagined, quite suddenly, that she will be there when I die, standing over me as I lay in a bed, and in that moment she might bid me farewell much as I bid her goodnight so long before, as if pushing out from the shore onto a lake shrouded in fog into which I would, in a moment, disappear.

In that gesture, my daughter was also a primitive sort of savior, guarding my passage into the following realm.

(It's not that I believe anything awaits, but if this is all we have, then it is more important yet.)