The State of the Union

I Do Not Care For It

I despise the State of the Union speech, and from what I read, I am not alone. I did not watch President Biden the other night, nor have I in his previous offerings. I did not watch his predecessor.

The President

It should not be this way. I am a political animal, I have a great respect for our Constitution and the government it frames. I am a man of ritual, and the speech is nothing if not ritual. Not only SHOULD I be watching, I SHOULD be excited about watching. But sadly, I am not. There are many reasons for my disdain, and I think I’ll lay some of them out for you.

First of all, I haven’t really been enthusiastic about the person delivering the speech since George Bush the Younger, but he was so prone to malapropisms that I spent most of his speeches clutching my fists and hoping he’d just get through it. Obama and Clinton were just good at speaking, so I watched a few of theirs, though I did not enjoy the substance.

Second, I DESPISE the “guests” sprinkled in the audience and pointed to by the President. Yes, I realize that my boy Ronaldus Magnus (thank you Jerry Hendrix for that one) started this crap, but that does not mean that I have to like it.

Third, there is the utter fakery of the President’s entrance and departure, the “Black Rod” parliamentary announcement of the President, and the camera hogging members who cluster on the aisle like teenaged Swifties.

But the thing I hate most of all is what the speech has become. For the President, especially one seeking re-election, it is a campaign stop. For his opponents in Congress, it is an opportunity to exhibit bad behavior to a massive audience (although it is sadly true that many in that massive audience love the bad behavior), and for his supporters in Congress it is an opportunity to outdo themselves in vying for Groome of the Stool honors. The call and response nature of the speech, with the President churning out a few lines to springbutt repeated standing ovations, is annoying, and there is very little chance that a speech delivered in this fashion could ever rise to the level of “great”, no matter who was giving it or what was in it.

We went over a hundred years between Jefferson and Wilson without Presidents giving the speech in person. I’d surely like to see a return to that. But then again, I’d like to see a return to Congressional legislating, strong political parties where conventions mean something, and Presidential modesty about the extent of their power. I’m just funny like that.

Daylight Savings

Speaking of things that people bitch a lot about, as you read this, we are back on Daylight Savings Time (as I write it, I am luxuriating in the last afternoon of Standard Time). I prefer Standard Time, but what I’d really like is just to pick one and stick with it.

One of the reasons I like Standard Time is that I like to eat dinner by candlelight, and I like to eat dinner early. There’s nothing like sitting in a dimly lit kitchen with a few candles blazing on the table eating one of my gustatory delights at 5:30PM in the evening on a dark winter’s night. The extra daylight in EDT is wasted on me, as I still eat early and I tend not to do very much after dinner anyway.

My inamorata is however, a BIG fan of Daylight Savings, as she likes to work outside on her gardens and flowers and such, but she doesn’t like to do so in the heat of the day. My early dinners work well for her, because then there’s two hours plus for her to knock around outside. I sometimes pitch in by watering the plants, coffee in hand. Because I’m very helpful.

On Scheduling

I must tread lightly on this topic, as it involves the aforementioned inamorata who occasionally reads these things and does not like seeing herself mentioned. As so much of my meandering involves mundane, everyday things, I must occasionally fly close to the sun and risk her ire. This is what the Big Boy Pants are for.

The subject is scheduling, or more importantly, long range planning. We (she and I) recently attempted a bit of it, and it raised our differing approaches to the subject front and center, providing me with something I find interesting enough to write about.

You see, I am a retired Navy Officer. More to the fact, I am a retired Surface Warfare Officer (SWO) which means I went to sea in ships. In those ship tours, I spent four and a half years in two jobs—CIC Officer and Operations Officer—where scheduling the ship was central to my job. There were all sorts of things that went into the creation of a good long range ship’s plan, and I think I was pretty good at it. When I left ships as Operations Officer, Executive Officer, and Commanding Officer, I am confident that the people who relieved me had at least 18 months of scheduling bliss ahead of them. Again—because I’m helpful.

I apply many of the same tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTP) to the maintenance of my personal long range schedule, and it works for me. There are recurring meetings, there is recurring travel, there are daily practices, there are recurring social events, etc. I put all of these in my schedule. When my poppet mentions something in the future that is a “maybe”, I put in on the schedule (if there isn’t something there already) and I schedule around it. It it remains tentative for too long, I will bring it up to see if it remains viable, or if I can expunge it and apply that open space to other things that come up. I will put things on the schedule way out into the future that are way below 50% probability of occurring.

My approach is methodical, and it is optimized for deconfliction and stability.

The Kitten has a very different approach to these matters, one in which she maintains maximal flexibility for the maximal amount of time. For her, putting something important on the long-range schedule too early is sometimes a burden, in that it removes that time from some other thing that might be more important or desirable. Not that there is anything specific, mind you, just that there might be.

In other words, my objective is to eliminate white-space in my calendar. Hers is to maximize it. These approaches are not well-aligned.

We were able to accomplish a few things in our attempt, but far fewer than I would have liked (far more than she would have liked). I suppose that’s what being in a grown up relationship is all about, no?