Two weeks ago yesterday, I turned the big 4-O. I look back on my
thirties as a decade that vastly improved on my twenties, which weren't
too bad. I optimistically look at my forties as a time for profound
growth and change and undoubtedly, deep challenge.

Gore Vidal wrote in tribute of the recently deceased Barbara Epstein (The New York Review of Books: Barbara Epstein (1928-2006)):

Ultimately, in fact, she could accept almost
anything in the way of a point of view if she was convinced that it was
expressed in good faith: needless to say, she had a difficult time
dealing with the baroque lies of the neocons which have made mephitic
the swamps of bookchat.

I had to look up the word "mephitic," which was Dictionary.com/Word of the Day on June 23, 2001 in dictionary.com. One definition is "offensive to the smell; as, mephitic odors."

Last Sunday, while listening to the sermon at church, I tried to remember Maxwell's equations.
Years have passed since I last thought at any great depth about
electromagnetism while I was pursuing my Ph.D. in biophysics. Now I can
barely remember them. There's no going back, really. Not that want to
go back to a career in the sciences. But I do wish to know more about
the latest in my erstwhile field. I do flip through Scientific American, Nature, Science, and Physics Today but only sporadically and with little forethought.

There have been many things on my mind lately, and I've not had the
discipline in place to make them flow together coherently. The
"bookmarks" I have saved on my del.icio.us account
gives some indication of what I've been pondering, but by no means, a
complete picture. One thing is for sure: all this distraction has
pushed my blogging to the side. Today, I will get back on my blogging
podiums to write about both the personal side and the work side of what
I've been up to.

On the personal side:

As I jumped in wondering what I should actually write about, I felt
instantly pulled in too many directions. Fortunately, I was reminded of
the central lessons of the last weeks: that I should start in a place
of great stillness, which also happens to be a place of great depth. As
I hold myself still, I am able to accept that I am a little human being
living in a world with outsized needs, including my own. I remember the
pledge I had made to pray for Darfur, and I pause to do so. We put up a
display to raise awareness about Darfur at First Pres Berkeley and will host a postcard writing event for A Million Voices for Darfur
in early April. I am relieved that spring break is coming up, primarily
because it gives my students and me some breathing room for the course.

The absence of activity on my electronic presences belies the churn of
words on my computer. Having just read about super-prolific Stephen
Downe's recently announced hiatus from blogging
to take time to stop and reflect made me wonder whether I'm going in
the wrong direction by trying to get back into blogging.

The situations are certainly not parallel. First, I've never been the
regular and prolific blogger that Stephen was. I have had lots of time
to reflect, though I can stand for more in this time of change,
challenge, and opportunity. Most importantly, I believe that regular
weblogging would be an excellent discipline for me since it would force
me to work in smaller chunks, to begin and to complete manageable
pieces of work on a regular basis. Without forcing myself to write
coherent sentences and paragraphs, I will generate monstrous lists of
suggestive phrases. Writers understand the seductiveness of such lists,
which seem to contain more content than they actually do.

On the work side:

There is a huge amount of change afoot in my workplace and in my own
professional career. Although it would be inappropriate for me to write
about some of these matters, I can certainly write openly about my
personal vision for information technology at UC Berkeley and beyond.
This is an opportune moment to rethink every aspect of my professional
work as I look at the field at large and the challenges, opportunities,
and risks before me specifically. The product of my (over?) cogitation
has been long EccoPro
outlines with phrases such as remix, interoperability,
gather/create/share, grids, bibliographic metadata, knowledge
repository, seamlessness. My job now is to write these outlines in
little essays that make sense to others. time to step back to ponder
what we do to best serve the academic and research needs of the campus.

At a party late last fall, someone asked me what I thought about the
stories that were breaking in the San Francisco Chronicle about how the
perks that senior administration at the UC system were getting. I
expressed my natural outrage at the situation but didn't think a lot
more about the matter since I didn't think anything would ever
change. (I've gotten sufficiently cynical to expect bad behavior from
the people at the very top. Isn't that sad?) Recently, I started to
follow more closely the ongoing coverage in the Chronicle (including
the latest article SENATORS DEMAND ANSWERS ON UC PAY / Unreported compensation raises ire at panel's hearing ), as well as the PR responses of UC Berkeley and the system as a whole.
The more I learn, the more I'm longing for some deep wisdom in this
matter. How much I get paid or you get paid or anyone gets paid -- or
should get paid -- is a hot-button issue. I've been fascinated by the
types of arguments that have been marshalled to justify various
positions. At the risk of incorrectly characterizing the debate, it
seems that those who are justifying the high pay of senior people argue
that we need horizontal parity; UC leaders should be paid at
comparable levels to leaders at peer institutions. Those who express
outrage at the compensation of senior leaders draw our attention to the
lack of vertical fairness; is it right for the pay at the
highest levels to be going up, while the rank-and-file (who could
really use the money!) are not similarly benefiting?

I know that it's more complicated that what I set out here -- and
that's what I'm trying to get at as I sort through the arguments. More
fundamentally, I've been searching my own heart on how I currently feel
and how I would feel should I ever going higher (or fall lower) down
the hierarchy. I keep asking myself to what extent are my views -- and
those of everyone involved -- more self-serving than reflective of a
concern for others. There's a lot more to say. I will close with
bemusement the following quote from the Wikipedia entry on Peter
Drucker: Peter Drucker - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

His most controversial work was on compensation
schemes, in which he said that senior management should not be
compensated more than twenty times the lowest paid employees. This
attracted criticism from some of the same people who had previously
praised him.

(I'm looking for the source for the 20:1 figure and plan to follow up once I find it.)

One of the things I most love about the early morning is the bit of
breathing room it provides for me. I have been saying to myself and
Laura that I need to learn how to draw sharper boundaries between work
and non-work part of my life. Isn't there something wrong when I resort
to calling the rest of life "non-work"? Hmmm....part of my problem
comes from not being able to properly conceptualize what I'm dividing
my life between. Although I initially rejected the division as that
between "work" and "rest", I now say, yes, that's a good way to put it,
noting that by "work", I don't just mean the stuff I do professionally
or for a paycheck but all forms of striving to be productive. By
"rest," I do not mean the cessation of action but the richness of
Sabbath. Maybe I should totally take the focus away from work by
thinking of my life as "rest" vs "non-rest".

Boy, I wish I could talk directly to Milosz or a prophet of old. As a
Christian, I believe that we can pray directly to the One In Charge,
the Lord God Almighty. Alas, that isn't enough for me. I want to
consult unearthly wise people who had walked before me on this planet,
who struggled with pain, doubt, temptation, and defeat. I believe that
Jesus did all those things, and hence, God can sympathize with our
plight as humans. Yet Jesus did not sin. I want to commune with great
but frail people who sinned as I have. I want to ask how they kept
going even while they bumbled and messed things up. To his credit,
Jesus never screwed up -- he was perfect.

Let there be no mistaking me: it's the greatest news that Jesus was
both like us and not like us. He showed us that there is a way beyond
our own individual and collective quagmires. I don't need a besmirched
Jesus. Yet, even as a card-carrying Protestant, I confess to the appeal
of holding up a pantheon of capital-S Saints, those who fall between us
and perfection.

For the vast majority of nights when I turn off the lights for sleep, I
have been blessed by a clear conscience. Last night, I started to lose
the courage of my convictions, which is a terrible thing to happen when
I'm trying to sleep. I need to put a stop to working too late. The
demons of self-doubt are strongest when I set out to work on a task
that is greater than the time I have before me. It's time to reapply
what I learned when writing my Ph.D. dissertation: set a time to stop
work well before bedtime (regardless of how much I accomplished or
didn't accomplish that day), and honor the Sabbath. When I was feeling
most desperate and helpless, working long hours for six days a week,
Sundays were the most sweet. I long to come back to that experience of
rest and freedom in the midst of busyness.