Category: reflections

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A couple of days ago, I finally met with my former colleague – iI can’t say that we lost touch, but it had been a while since we met in person. We made plans multiple times, but it took a while for these plans to materialize. We finally met this week, and we had a lot to talk about, both professionally and personally. While we shared what had happened to both of us during the past several years, he said: I always admired how you can be passionate about several things at once. I can be passionate about my job; I know how good it feels, but the moment I start to be passionate about something else, a political cause or a personal project, my job becomes “just a job.” I do not know how you can do what you do – care about multiple things at the same time.

It was an interesting observation – I never thought about it, or rather it never occurred to me that this is an exceptional quality, but I started to think about it, and I had to agree – many people I know have only one big passion in their lives. And then, they can’t understand why I am not 100% focused on a project that I am doing together with them, because they can’t imagine that for me, it’s one of many things I am doing.

I am not saying that I am right, and doing multiple things instead of focusing on one cause and supporting it with all resources might not be the best idea. It just reflects who I am. I have a difficult time saying “no” to new potential experiences and opportunities to make the world a better place. And I do not want to sound pathetic 🙂

RIP

Simon Riggs is gone. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sam-holdstock-marshall-76365b45_it-is-with-a-heavy-heart-that-im-sharing-activity-7178702287740022784-X0FI/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

God takes the best, all I can say. I admired him for many years, not only as a professional but also as a person of great integrity. I was fortunate to know him. That’s the void that can’t be filled.

I just realized that I didn’t click publish when I wrote this first paragraph. Eulogies were coming for the rest of the day. Though I understand that everbody wanted to say something, after several hours of checking LinkedIn I felt very close to how I felt on the day when Melody Lord died. I could not bear listening on the radio and the top of each hour “Melody Lord died…”

I made a mistake of checking all updates which were posted on Postgres Telegram channel, so I first saw the BBC news about the crash and later, The Sun publication. That latter one had too many graphical details about the crash – as it turned out, one of the visitors of the Imperial War Museum was filming…

Being Black

The Back History Month is officially over, but my mind is occupied by conversations I had recently.

For our Black History Month event in the firm, we had a panel with Nwabueze Phil-Ebosie, the Director of Engineering at ComEd. He came to the US from Nigeria when he was seventeen, and after obtaining a degree in Engineering from Perdue, he worked at ComEd for his entire career. He talked about his experience of coming to the US from a place “where everybody looked like him,” to a very different environment. The moderator’s questions were mostly about the challenges our guest experienced during his career at ComEd, and about what needs to be done to attract more Black talent to Engineering, and how to create the environment that foster innovation. Then there was time for questions from the audience, and many of them were more pointed.

As it often happens, I was an icebreaker, asking him how he keeps himself opened to new ideas working at the same organization for eighteen years (later I got the mike twice, asking about the fear of failure which accompanies any innovation and about starting to engage into STEM earlier, in the middle school the latest). Then other people started to come with their questions, and very soon the most important question came up: How you deal with hostility? Phil-Ebosie said that in the beginning of his career he it often about choosing his battles, and often times choosing focusing on work and ignoring hostility, but now he would not tolerate hostility and would calls things out. One of our coworkers asked whether wouldn’t it be that if he won’t be silent in his earlier days, he won’t rise to the position where he is now, and won’t have the power to call the hostilities out. He replied that he just thinks that now is the time, but I think that the person who asked was not convinced.

I was not convinced either, especially having several conversations with before that night, and after the meeting was over, we all moved to the cafeteria and the conversation continued. I do not want to share personal information which people related to me, but many stories shocked me, even though I consider myself to be “informed on that subject.” The scariest part is that many things you would have thought are the things of the past, are happening right now. It makes me angry when I hear that Black people state that they understand that the passerbyes think about them as a thread, as “big Black man,” and ll these things. Again, i do not want to dig into personal stories, but OMG! Even at school, even among neighbors… I am aware that there is very little I personally can do, but I can’t sit still and do nothing. At least in my little corner of the world, I want to make a difference. I am not the right person for that, as people mentioned that there should be conversations, and can’t be rushed, and we should find common grounds, and yes, it takes time…

Russian Music And Navalny

There is no connection between these two subjects except for the timing. On Tuesday, my neighbor and I were at the Chicago Symphony concert for the all-Russian (except for one Finnish piece) concert. The conductor was Hannu Lintu, and I didn’t like him. I didn’t hear any of his personal interpretation of either of the pieces. Yes, all the pieces were very well-known, but when Riccardo Muti conducts Tchaikovsky, it’s always a discovery, a revelation. The piano soloist was from Uzbekistan, and although his technique was excellent, he also didn’t add anything of his own vision to Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto. Yes, this piece was so often performed in the Soviet Union that I remember almost every note of it, but once again – I heard more original performances! Also, for the anchor, the pianist played the “Neapolitan song” from Tchaikovsky’s Youth Album, and I was like – is it a joke?

The last piece was Shostakovich’s Ninth Symphony, and once again, I was wondering how one can make such a bold, unruly, almost hooligan-like piece so boring!

Usually, we do not talk much on our way home, or we talk about the show we just attended, but since we agreed on our disappointment, she asked me whether we could talk about Navalny. On February 16, she messaged me at 7 AM, expressing condolences, and I replied that although I was outraged with yet another political murder, Navalny’s views were not much better. She said that she wanted to hear more, and we agreed to talk about it.

By Tuesday, she watched that documentary, and said that she started to understand why I said what I said. We had a longer conversation, and I told her why I saw it as a problem that many people in and outside Russia would consider Navalny a good alternative to Putin, which, again, does not by any means justify this political murder. I gave her a short version of our conversation with Lena over the weekend and told her why I believe that “Navalny’s return” was staged. All I know about Putin supports this conclusion, as much as I hate conspiracy theories.

February 24 Again

When Lena and I went to the Ukrainian rally, we made sure to be quiet and not speak Russian. On our way home, Lena said: all went well, we showed our support, and we didn’t get beaten at the Ukrainian rally.

I recalled what Boris said in the early days of the war: now, Russian sounds the same as German after WWII, and it will take at least fifty years, if not more, for this association to go away. (I would add – if…) I had an acute feeling of exactly that at that very moment, and looking at the posters depicting bloody Putin, I was thinking: screw you, what did you do with Ukraine?! What did you do with Russia?! And immediately, I stopped and thought: no, not him. We allowed it to be done.

After we got back home, we talked for several hours. We talked about the necessity of Russia’s complete defeat as the only way to start over. I shared with Lena Igor’s thoughts about educating people and creating the base from which another country could be born. Lena told me about the large Latvian community near where she lives, and how these Latvians were keeping the language and the culture alive for three generations, hoping to return “when the occupation will be over.” Still, when the occupation was over, none of them returned.

I understand what she says, and I agree that people who have lived away from their country for generations are extremely unlikely to go back. I do not think I will ever come back for good, but that’s because there was no political reason for me to leave Russia. I consciously chose the country I now call home. But I hope that the day will come when I will be able to come and help to build a new and better society.

But before that, as I promised to a person who is hopefully reading this now, I will invest in their nursery garden. And I am sure that this day is closer than we think.

Theft, Building Access, And What To Do About It

We had several cases of stolen packages in our building back in December, and you may remember that some of my outgoing mail (four packages with holiday cookies) was stolen as well. At that point, our association raised a question of rekeying the building, but many residents doubted that the theft had happened due to somebody having the building key. They thought that, most likely, the residents were buzzing visitors in without looking. I doubt that (everyone has windows facing the gate, and it takes a second to check). Also, I knew that my packages were stolen during the night hours. In December, everybody agreed to wait till we got new management in January.

A week ago, there was another case of theft, and the same as with me, it happened during the night hours. Once again, there was a conversation about the building re-keying, but this time, our board member related that this project is expensive, and she does not think it will help since the locks are not difficult to break. She even shared the link where you can buy a “lock gun” online.

At first, I was distraught with the decision not to rekey the building, and I was about to write an angry letter to the board, especially when they suggested I could have my packages delivered to a nearby Walgreens (it’s not “nearby,” and time is the most precious resource for me). But then I thought about it and reread the email one more time. This time, I realized that she was right and that locks do not stop thieves, and I am very well aware of that. If somebody is determined to steal, no lock will stop them. The theft does not exist when there is no reason for it. I thought about how I was always against “gating” oneself from the rest of the world and how now I was about to suggest just that, so something was wrong with my moral compass. And then I thought I already knew the answer: the only way to reduce crime, including theft, in my community is to improve the community itself. And my participation in the beat meetings and my new idea to get involved with Howard Community Board were all about that.

I often hear people complaining about the increasing number of homeless people on the streets of Chicago, and I hear their cries, “What do police think?!” I understand that seeing a lot of this misery is disturbing and unpleasant. And I hear some well-off people articulating that they want to be able to pay for never seeing “all that.”

Recently, I thought about how it felt on the streets of Chicago 150 years ago, when there were a lot of very poor people and very few rich people, and how these rich people felt walking the streets and seeing other people’s misery, and how they probably didn’t want to see it, and the policemen were here ready to remove the beggars from the public places. And how these rich people could isolate themselves from the reality behind the closed gates. And I do not want to be one of them.

And I do not want to be that

Freakonomics

After years of listening to the Freakonomics podcast, I finally realized that there is a book and a documentary with this name and that the whole idea came from the book by Levitt and Dubner. Yes, I expect to have such late discoveries for the rest of my life! I watched the documentary last weekend (in parallel with doing other things), and I am going to read the book. It felt like a gap in my education that had to be filled. The documentary is almost twenty years old, and it’s surprising that so many things that are mentioned there are still not commonplace and still not taken into account. And politicians and voters still debate on the consequences of potential actions or lack of those without consulting the data which is already available. A couple of takeaways.

  1. The first episode in the documentary (about how a name defines a person’s future) is probably the only one that is well-known and frequently cited. In fact, the reason I turned “to the source” was a citation in another book I was reading at that moment. It’s good that we know what might drive our biases, but unfortunately, it rarely helps the situation.
  2. The episode about the impact of Roe-Wade on the crime decline twenty years later was a shock. I never saw this research results, I never heard anybody speaking publicly about it, and if that’s me, a person heavily involved in the reproductive rights struggle, what does it say about the general population? And another question – what should we expect twenty years from now?!
  3. The last episode (about monetary incentives for falling behind students to improve their grades) conveys a very important message, and not only in the field of education. It demonstrates that when the gap is too wide (somebody falls too far behind), even a relatively big incentive is not enough for a person to start moving in the right direction. That’s the rationale for many programs that offer support for people in a challenging situation to help them on their way out. For many people, no legislation and no financial support is enough to reverse the course of their lives, and more targeted actions are needed.

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About what happened yesterday. Yes, that was yet another political murder. Yes, the cinicism with which people with even a slightest potential of attracting supporters are removed from this world, is unbelievable.

And no, what have happened, didn’t change my opinion on either Navalny or Putin.

TIME Magazine: Less Social Media?

To be clear, the question mark is mine, not TIME’s. This is one of many new-year-resolution-related articles called “How to reset your relationships with social media?”

I keep wondering why people want to use social media less – I feel like I am not doing enough of it because I do not have enough time. Often (and this article is not an exception), the author would emphasize “meeting with people” and “communicating in person” instead of on social media. In my case, however, the only people with whom I communicate on social media are people whom I know in real life but who either live too far from me or have challenging schedules. This way or the other, it is not easy to regularly communicate in person, and I want to know what they are up to. I often feel that my very real friends are upset when I do not pay attention to their lives. And it’s not just “them,” I would love to be informed about what’s up with them. As for professional social media, it’s even more important. Firstly, I also know many of these people in person, and secondly, in my profession, it is vitally important to stay on top of what are the new things others are doing. I always feel like I am missing out on important professional updates (until somebody pings me explicitly).

Anyway, here is the article (and I am trying to do almost all the opposite of what they suggest!)

Continue reading “TIME Magazine: Less Social Media?” →

Nostalghia

The Siskel Film Center started the screening of the newly restored Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia, and I decided to go. I tried to watch Nostalgia twice before, and both times, I didn’t have enough patience, so I decided that watching it in the movie theater would pin me to my seat for these 2+ hours.

I love most of Tarkovsky’s movies, and I like the ones I do not love, so I thought that I was missing something with Nostalghia. Now I watched it to the end, and although I appreciate the artistic work, it’s probably the first of Tarkovsky’s movies I didn’t like. Most likely, it’s about me, not about Tarkovsky, but now I am thinking whether it’s time for me to watch again the ones I loved for many years.

I know one thing that changed in me: I am not interested in lengthy discussions about personal relationships, like who thought what and who did what because of what they thought. I am now realizing that it’s the bulk of classic literature and movies :), but I hope that there is still something out for me!