Finding God

I may have mentioned before, when I told my mother I was converting to Judaism, I was surprised she was so enthusiastic. I asked her why and she said, "I'm just happy you've found God." 

Except, I hadn't. In fact, I embraced Judaism - reform Judaism, to be specific - because it challenge me to find my own definition of God. At the Beit Din, the conversion Court, I told the rabbis, "I believe there are a lot of things that we don't understand, and possibly never will understand. If people choose to call that God, I'm okay with that."

At a Limmud event, I heard a debate about which were more important, beliefs or actions. One argued that if you believed in God, then you would want to act according to his (hers?) laws. The other argued that first you had to perform the acts, and only then could you understand enough to believe. 

It seemed pretty chicken-and-egg, and irrelevant to me. I even gave a talk at a local Limmud event about converting to Judaism whilst remaining an atheist. Nobody was particularly bothered. 

For seven years now, I've been doing the acts: I attend synagogue, I light the candles, I make the prayers. I prefer saying the prayers in Hebrew because, even if I understand the words, I know I'm performing a ritual, not acknowledging an invisible God.

Except, I'm not. I am grateful to an unseeing hand that has brought me to this time and place, given me a loving family, and enriched my world immeasurably. Had I not performed the acts, I don't know where I'd be, but I cannot imagine it could be better than this.

So who do I direct this gratitude towards? The universe? Karma? I lack the words, the subtlety to express myself. If I say I'm grateful to God, people may have a different understanding of God, but they understand exactly what emotion I'm trying to convey. And that's the point of communication, isn't it?

So, I've realised why my mom was so enthusiastic when I told her I was converting to Judaism. Maybe she knew I hadn't found her God, but she knew I was engaging with something bigger than myself, and by converting I was committing myself to a path--that it wasn't just an intellectual exercise--and that if I performed the acts, I would eventually believe. 

Last week I watched all three kids on the bima. When I'd first met them, the eldest was preparing for her bat mitzvah; now the youngest was celebrating the first anniversary of his bar mitzvah. I marvelled at how they had all changed in five short years, and I thanked God for letting me be part of their lives. 

And as they came off the bima and took their seats, each one hugged me and told me they loved me, and I know that was God answering back.

Deedee

Today would have been my friend's 84th birthday.  She died three years ago, and I didn't even mention it in my blog.  To be fair, I had literally just arrived in New Zealand and was dealing with my pop-up family, but it is high time I made up for it.

I met Deedee when I was 14 and she was 50  Of course, I didn't know how old she was at the time; I only found out later that she had attended the same high school as my father, and then I found out she was one year ahead of him because he was in her yearbook.  Actually, to go right back to the beginning, when we first met I didn't even know she was a woman.

Christmas 1982, my parents bought us a brand-new Atari 1200XL computer with all the peripherals.  Why they did this is still beyond me: they didn't have any money, none of our friends had a home computer and there was no guarantee we'd actually use it.  Sure, we had an Atari 2600 game console, so perhaps they thought it would play better games?  (It didn't.)

The peripherals consisted of a floppy disk drive (considered optional even though the system didn't have a hard drive!), a dot-matrix printer and this crazy thing:

My brother and I literally had no idea what it was for, but we discovered that if you connected it to the computer and whistled into one of the rubber cups, random characters would appear on the screen.  I'm embarrassed to say, but this kept us entertained for *weeks* before I finally read the manual to discover it was a "300 baud acoustic-coupled modem."  "Acoustic coupled" meant you dialed a phone number and then stuck the handset into those rubber cups!

"Baud" meant bits per second, and one character was 8 bits, so 300 baud meant it could download 2,250 characters per minute.  A screen held 2000 characters, so it took nearly a minute to update one page (and there were no graphics).  Someone actually posted a YouTube video showing how painful this was:  

https://youtu.be/gnAAJ1FGudE?t=106

Of course, this only worked if you had someone to call, and it was another 6 months before the movie "War Games" came out to show that you could use one of these to break into highly secured government networks and override the launch codes.  (It was also 16 years before Google was invented.)  I did dial into Compuserve but it wasn't a local call, and when my parents got the next phone bill they put a stop to that.

Somehow--and I have no memory how--I did find out about some local bulletin board systems ("BBS" as we called them) and dialed in. I discovered people posting messages on all sorts of topics, and I was immediately hooked.  If my parents thought I'd use the computer to play better games, they must have been sorely disappointed that I was using it to read text scrolling very slowly across the screen.  And I spent every free moment doing it.

One particular bulletin board had a higher level of discourse than others, and I lurked in the background for a month or so before I couldn't contain myself and I just started typing.  The messages had a character limit and I ended up writing 27 messages in a row. 35 years later, it's still cringe-worthy, and it immediately got me banned from the BBS.

Of course, I didn't realise that was a thing; I thought it was some sort of technical error, but since I couldn't even log in to tell the operator there was a problem (email as we know it hadn't been invented yet!) I was a bit stuck.  However, there was one person on that BBS that I'd seen on another BBS, so I left them a message on the second BBS.  They had actually read my 27-message screed and thought there was a hint of intelligence somewhere in there, so they intervened on my behalf and I got reinstated with a warning not to do that again.

Needless to say, that person turned out to be Deedee.  BBSes often organised social activities so I eventually met her, and I found out she lived not far from my school so I would occasionally walk over to her house after school.  She was a single mom with three kids in their 20s; two still lived at home and were heavily into drugs.  She had developed rheumatoid arthritis in her 30s and was badly crippled; she could walk with crutches but sitting was a chore (she had to literally throw herself backwards into a chair) and her fingers were so curled it was hard to believe she could type.  (In fact, she'd gotten a computer because she didn't have the strength for a manual typewriter.)  She had a gang of misfit friends, and somehow a 14-year-old just fitted in.  Perhaps it was just a more innocent time, but nobody seemed to question our unlikely friendship except my mother, who seemed to think it was more Harold and Maude.

In hindsight, I can't really blame my mom; it was weird, but it worked.  We both loved computers, 60s rock, Arby's, sci-fi, plus she had a car.  We were best friends and completely inseparable for two years, and then she moved in with us.

Now, before you rush to judgment, I mentioned two of her kids were druggies, and the eldest went on a cocaine bender and started destroying her house.  I did what any friend would do: I told my dad.  My dad had a heart beyond reckoning, and I remember to this day he never hesitated: He drove to her house, picked her up and gave her the pull-out sofa for as long as she needed it.  It turned out she needed it for three years before her son took himself off to Northern California to get clean. My parents handled it with such grace that today I find it awe-inspiring.  My mother even helped get her a job with her company, and they carpooled every day.

The irony is that Deedee and I had grown apart.  I started dating a woman, and when I was 17 I moved in with her while Deedee was still living with my parents!  I still kept in touch but I started working and didn't have time for BBSes.  I'd go visit Deedee a couple of times a year, and often it was out of guilt.  That's because not long after she'd moved back into her home, her youngest son discovered crack cocaine, and he continued for another 25 years.  He stole everything he could to fund his habit, leaving her completely destitute.  The only time she had any respite was when he was in jail, but at some point he married a similar piece of trash and moved her into Deedee's house, so even when he was in jail his wife was still there.  She refused to throw them out, and eventually all of her friends deserted her because it was an impossible situation.  I think I was one of two or three friends that continued to visit.

In hindsight, I can appreciate how afraid she was of getting old, and not being able to take care of herself, and she clung to the belief that her son would take care of her despite all evidence to the contrary.  When he wasn't high, he was perfectly fine, but those times were few and far between.  The house was in a horrific state, but she wouldn't accept help cleaning it up, as she became a bit of a hoarder.  I think everyone needs some degree of control in their lives, and she had precious little so she just kept what she had.

Just before I moved to the UK in 2008, I took Deedee on a road trip to the Grand Canyon, because she'd always wanted to go.  It was a crazy, impetuous thing to do, especially with a frail 75 year old, but she loved every minute of it.  On the way back I took a sidetrip to Vegas, although that turned out to be a mistake: There was a huge boxing match in town and hotel rates were eye-watering.  Between the room, dinner and a show, I think I maxed out my credit card in one day, but she was so happy.

I saw her once in 2010 and again in 2013.  That last trip was particularly memorable because I was with my friend Lucy, and knowing me I didn't tell Deedee I was coming.  (I always did crap like that to her.)  I showed up at her door and was shocked when she answered: She'd tripped and fallen face-first onto the floor--her joints were so bad she couldn't even lift her hands to break her fall--and the bruising had just started fading, leaving her in shades of purple and green.  Worse, her dentures had been giving her problems and she couldn't afford to replace them, so she had been eating soft food for the past couple of years and had lost about half her body weight.  Her skin hung off her like drapes.  I may have been taken aback, but Lucy was in complete shock.

I got Deedee in the car and we drove to the nearest Arby's.  She didn't want to get out of the car so we drove to the local mission and parked in the shade by the rose garden, and we reminisced about the last 30 years.  I knew I'd changed a lot since I was a snot-nosed 14 year old, but at 80 she seemed exactly the same as when I'd met her.  She complained about her son, of course (who was now in his 50s) but I let that go.  There was no point in arguing with her anymore; I just listened.

Lucy had gotten out of the car and came back with a perfect red rose for Deedee. (I'm sure you're not supposed to pick them!) We took her home and said goodbye, then drove up north to see my family. That was the last time I saw her. In March 2014 she sent me an email which started with, "Tell Lucy that her beautiful rosebud lasted a whole week and bloomed all the way out to a full rose." She complained about her son, who had moved some junkies into her garage, and one of the wild cats was about to have a litter, so she was trying to sort homes for them. Her last words were, "Hope everything is going well for you. Love you much."  I sent her a couple of emails but never got a response.

In August 2014, on the day I was flying to New Zealand, I got an email from her son letting me know she'd had an aneurysm and was in a medically-induced coma. She'd just turned 81, which was longer than any of us thought she'd make it (rheumatoid arthritis tends to shorten the lifespan by 10 to 15 years).  A few weeks later her son asked me for my address, because Deedee had asked to be cremated and her ashes split between her three best friends.  (I didn't honestly expect her son to follow through, and I never received her ashes; I have no idea what happened to them.)

So that's the story of my oldest and longest friend, who watched me grow up and helped me pull my head out of my ass. She was around through three failed relationships, and passed away just as I started my next one. She knew me when I was flat broke, when I was flush with cash, and when I was flat broke again. She never made any demands on me; she always accepted me as-is, where-is. If I treated her to something, she was always extremely grateful. She didn't have a mean bone in her body, and if it hadn't been for her sons she would have led a happy and fulfilling life. She taught me what unconditional love looked like, and she taught me that you can't save other people.

In August we used to watch the Perseid meteor shower, and in March we'd go see the poppies,  I have her to thank for introducing me to the Moody Blues, the Limeliters and Arby's Jamocha shakes. I hope Deedee found peace, and I hope she knows that I'll always remember her fondly, and that I wish I'd been a better friend over all those years.

P.S. That Atari computer was the most used gift ever, and I credit it with my entire career.  I held onto it long after I'd switched to PCs, but when I was 26 or 27 I had a general clean out, and it went in the trash along with the floppy disk drive and dot matrix printer. I'd long since upgraded the 300 baud acoustic-coupled modem to a 1200 baud direct-connect modem, then 2400 baud, then 9600 baud, then a staggering 14.4 kbps, then 33.6 kbps, and finally a 56kbps modem (even though that was only a theoretical maximum that could never be achieved in the real-world).  Today my VDSL modem gets 42Mbps download, which is 140,000 times faster than my original modem.  Sadly, there's no way to whistle into it to get random characters to appear.

Camping

It's birthday season -- two of the kids have birthdays in October, right around school holidays -- and the middle child, who is turning 16, wanted to go camping for her birthday. With boys.

Now, frankly, I'm not sure she'd know what to do with a boy.  She goes to an all-girls school and all her male friends are "nice Jewish boys."  The closest she has ever come to having a boyfriend was when she was 12 she announced on Monday she was dating a boy, and on Wednesday announced they had broken up.  She said she couldn't understand why people on TV make such a fuss about it.

So we were ok with the camping and with the boys -- we would still chaperone, of course -- so she went and told all her friends we were going camping on October 6.  Two of her friends in Auckland booked flights and all of her friends in Wellington told her they couldn't come that weekend.

So somehow the plan got changed that we would go camping with her Auckland friends this weekend and her Wellington friends in two weeks time. In hindsight we should have just let her go with her friends, but instead we told the other two kids they could invite a friend.  We ended up with eight kids, four tents, and making half the kids take the train to the campsite while we transported the luggage.

I should also note that on Friday night, when we should have been getting prepared, we hosted a dinner party.  To be fair, it had been on the books since before the camping trip, but again in hindsight we should have cancelled it as the house was a disaster area of tents, sleeping bags, pillows, etc.  I also got stuck at work finishing a report so I arrived *after* the guests.

I'd like to say when they left, we got busy loading the car, but in reality we just had an argument over something silly, and I went to bed.  It didn't really matter much because we couldn't load the car -- we needed to transport five kids to synagogue on Saturday morning.  It was the anniversary of the middle child's bat mitzvah, and she not only wanted to read from the Torah, but to also be the cantor that day.  (She did it beautifully.)  Her mom led the service and I gave the drasha (sermon) so it was a real family affair.

I should note that at her bat mitzvah three years ago, she'd given the drasha and I still had a copy, so I read it -- word for word.  Expressing all my hopes and aspirations for starting high school in 2016, the rest of the congregation were a bit confused, especially because the cantor was laughing her head off. 

So we didn't even start loading the car until 1pm in the afternoon.  Gratefully, the weather couldn't have been nicer, the campsite was only 45 minutes away and all the kids pitched in, so by 4pm we were set up and enjoying a (very) late lunch.  A friend who lived nearby came over, and in the evening I dropped him at home and picked up ten pizzas from Domino's, so everyone was happy.

The campsite had strict rules to vacate by 11am but we weren't even out of our tents at 10am. It was overcast and cool and the kids were whining about going home, so I was getting pretty annoyed. However, the sun finally burned off the haze and it turned into a glorious beach day, and the campsite was only 100 yards from the beach.  The kids made pancakes and packed up the tents (somewhat grudgingly) and we finally left the campground at about 1pm, parked the car on the street and parked ourselves on a picnic blanket for the next two hours.

The eldest child was supposed to be in Auckland for two back-to-back seminars, one on leadership and the other on her gap-year program in Israel.  For some reason she decided not to go to the first one, and so was going to fly on Monday to attend the second one.  We pointed out we were working on Monday and she'd have to take the bus to the airport.  Now, it's 8 miles from our house to the airport and there's a bus that runs practically the entire way (it's about ten minutes of walking) so this wasn't some fantastic hardship.  She contacted the organisers and got them to put her on a Sunday flight instead.

So at 3pm we had to leave the gorgeous beach, drive an hour to the airport, quickly drop the luggage on our front porch, drop off two of the kids, drive 45 minutes back to the campsite to pick up the remaining kids, and come home.  I remember my dad doing such crazy things when I was a child and I thought about the circle of life, and how some things never change. I had a lot of time to think over those three hours.

Finally we were home, exhausted, with four children who were badly sunburned because they didn't have the sense to re-apply sunscreen every two hours. (New Zealand has the highest rates of skin cancer in the world so kids are taught from preschool about applying sunscreen, and they still don't listen.) They'd also bought into the myth that apple cider vinegar cures everything, including sunburn, so the middle child took a bottle up to her room to apply it.  To her credit, she did have the sense to think pouring apple cider vinegar onto a washcloth in her room might be a bad idea; however, her solution was to open a window and pour apple cider vinegar onto a washcloth outside.  She dropped the bottle, which fell two stories and smashed on the front porch where all of the camping gear was still sitting.

So now the gear is still sitting on the front porch, waiting for the smell of apple cider vinegar to dissipate.  Hopefully it will be gone by the time we next take the kids camping, in two weeks...

Chaos Monkey

This is hilarious, had to share: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_Monkey

Every company pays lip service to the idea of "resiliency" - that is, the ability to carry on business-as-usual in spite of technical issues - and vast amounts of time and money are spent setting up "solutions" which are only ever tested when something bad does happen, and then rarely work as expected. Netflix decided to turn this on its head and in 2011 created "Chaos Monkey," a tool that would, at a random time, disable a random server, just to see what would happen. As someone described it, "Imagine a monkey entering a data center and randomly destroying devices. The challenge for IT managers is to design the information system they are responsible for so that it can work despite these monkeys, which no one ever knows when they arrive and what they will do."

While intentionally shutting down a production server in the middle of the day seems crazy, it's exactly what a resilient system is designed to handle.  And of course it's not just a server crashing but network problems, security issues, etc. Netflix eventually built the "Simian army," a collection of chaos monkeys designed to find faults or problems.  (My favourite is the "Chaos Gorilla" that shuts down an entire zone!)

That said, most of us don't manage a system like Netflix, don't have a need for constant uptime and don't have the time or resources to "design for failure."  But if we don't regularly change our tyres on a sunny day, how can we be expected to change a flat in the middle of the night in the pouring rain?  We throw a spare tyre in the boot but then never check it until we need it, and hope it's okay.  Having two servers running in two locations doesn't give you "resiliency" as much as it gives you "complexity," "synchronisation issues" and "maintenance headache."

So what are the other options?  Today a co-worker proposed a purpose-built emergency system, something I'd never considered before.  Rather than complicating and overloading your production system, most of which isn't even required in an emergency, build a parallel system that is just the bare essentials.  Since it's a separate system, you can test it easily and control it better.  You know exactly what capabilities it supports and it's available at a moment's notice.  Think of it as a the nuclear bunker of backup systems.

The only problem is business mindset, because by defining an emergency system the business has to decide, "What is important?" which is one they never like to answer.  In addition, the business has to spend money to create a system that they never plan to use, as opposed to hiding the cost of "resiliency" in a new system.  And of course not every failure constitutes an emergency, so if one server fails and a system goes down you wouldn't invoke your emergency procedures, but you will lament that particular system was not "resilient."

Of course, there's no one-size-fits-all solution, which is what keeps me employed.