Category: Life

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Life Travel

Thanksgiving in South Africa

tableThere’s a crack my tribesmen tell. It goes like this: two Jews, three opinions. That’s how Thanksgiving had started to feel by the time Saturday arrived.

That’s right: Saturday. Three of us had decided to host the holiday for a group of Americans and our South African guests, and for days we planned…and wrangled. I proposed we serve both turkey and lamb but my co-hosts vetoed the idea. One guest emailed that he planned to bring a Peking duck. “No,” we said. To brine or not to brine: that was another question. Thursday or Saturday? I’m still unclear why we waited. By the weekend the back-and-forth produced 59 email messages and left me wondering whether we could pull off the holiday.

Whatever doubts I had dissolved by Saturday. The day began sunny but by nightfall the rain arrived. No worries, we had pitched two tents, one to serve as an auxiliary kitchen and the other for the bar, which we adorned with strings of Christmas lights.

Krista grilled a turkey on the braai, the South African term for barbecue, one of two birds we prepared. Rachel prepared scalloped potatoes that were sliced razor thin and piled layers deep. Jordan made potato latkes – our dinner conincided with the fourth night of Hanukkah – fried in duck fat that we ate with a dollop of sour cream. Thobe baked jeque, Zulu steamed bread. We also had mashed potatoes, two types of stuffing, green beans, cranberry sauce, Waldorf salad, sourdough bread, cheese, wine, coffee, and, thanks to Kate and Amber, three pies: pumpkin, apple and pecan.

I served as greeter and bartender. The specialty cocktail of the night was Jack Daniels – in tribute to America – with dry lemon, in honor of our host country. The combo seemed to be a hit, judging by reactions.

Before dinner we went around the table and everyone said what they were thankful for. For our South African guests, the dinner was both their first Thanksgiving and their first Hanukkah. After dessert we lit the menorah. Everyone took a turn.

Categories
Life

Embracing chance…

I recently heard a talk that changed how I think about the world.

The talk was by Kevin Slavin, an assistant professor of media arts and sciences at MIT’s Media Lab, who chronicles the history and future of luck and has a message about the role of chance in our lives and society.

“It’s amazing, the idea that anything that seems to be built out of chance, or instinct or luck can yield to a computational assault, and that this is the essential narrative of our time,” says Slavin. “The myth that we live in is that you don’t just get what you get, you get what you deserve.”

“There’s so little luck left in the world,” he adds.

In the talk, Slavin chronicles how we’ve made chance the enemy despite irrationality’s surrounding us.

Chance has been a part of the games we humans play since the earliest times, according to Slavin, who observes that for most of human history we’ve been playing games, which come from dice.

“The impulse to play games is anything but trivial,” he says. “What we’re doing when we hold dice in our hand is something that’s actually unpredictable.”

Yet as Slavin shows, we inhabit a culture of control and live in an age when the prevailing belief is that life is meritocratic, that problems will yield to analysis of so-called big data and that all we have to do to get ahead is, as one best-selling book advises, to lean in.

Slavin asks what might happen if we praised luck instead of burying it. “There’s a pleasure and a value in not knowing what the future will bring,” he concludes, “and a truth in not pretending and to simply face forward and say, ‘Bring it.’”

Categories
Life

Why I ordered a Tikker

I recently contributed $39 for an online campaign to build a digital watch that counts down the seconds you have left to life.

The device, known as Tikker, is the creation of a Fredrik Colting, a Swede who works in publishing and who found himself confronting the prospect of death after his grandfather passed away. “I realized that nothing matters when you are dead,” Colting told Fast Company. “The only thing that matters is what we do when we are alive.”

The Tikker draws on such information as your age, body mass index and where you live to determine your life expectancy. (Unclear whether the Tikker factors in the ages of one’s parents and grandparents.) The Tikker also tells time.

Apparently Tikker’s fundraising push resonated. In just over a month the startup raised more than $98,000 or nearly four times its goal.

I’ve wondered why I pre-ordered the Tikker. I know intellectually that my days are numbered and that my life could end at any moment. You don’t have to wait for the Tikker to obtain a guess as to your life expectancy. I am expected to live for 78 years and to die on Friday, April 5, 2041, according to the Digital Death Clock, an online site that will give you similar information.

I don’t even wear a wristwatch.

Maybe it’s my journey this year, having stepped out of America and decided to live awhile in Africa. Maybe my support for the Tikker comes with my being in a profoundly different culture, or having to make my way as a freelancer or to figure out what problems to work on. Some days I feel as if I launched from a skateboard ramp into mid-air.

That’s to say there’s urgency. I have to do everything as soon as possible because there’s little time. I would like to meet everyone whom I hope to meet and to ask as many questions as I can ask and to write as many words as possible and to do all that as soon as I can because I don’t know and you don’t know how much time we have left in this life that we’re all passing through.

There are many things to do and to make and to discover. By putting the date of our death on our wrists, the Tikker aims to spur us to appreciate the life we’re living. That’s a Kickstarter for me.