All Of My Wordpress Posts, Chronologically

Brer Rabbit and Ferdinand the Bull [3.24.2015]

Brer Fox has captured Brer Rabbit and plans to kill him, but he can’t decide how. Brer Rabbit offers various suggestions, but begs Brer Fox to not throw him into the briar Patch. Of course Brer Fox throws Brer Rabbit into the briar patch, where Brer Rabbit was born and thrives. Brer Rabbit bounds off gleefully while Brer Fox is left without dinner.

Ferdinand the Bull is a peaceful animal whom sits under a cork tree and eats daisies. One day he’s captured and brought to the bull ring to fight the matador, but he refuses. He sits and waits and eventually they get fed up and return him to his home under the cork tree.

In both situations the protagonist faces the threat of death but escapes – Ferdinand with stubborn persistence, ‘direct action’ one could say – while Brer Rabbit employs a bit of reverse psychology and social engineering.

While you and I may not face the threat of death often, we do face situations in which we have agency to choose a course of action that would best serve to meet our goals.

It’s not as simple as saying, ‘I’m a direct action bull’ or ‘I’m a social engineering rabbit.’ We all are both. But there are implications to each method, especially when they are adopted at the organizational level.

While the tale of Brer Rabbit is an entertaining one, and there may always be situations in which concealing one’s true motives optimizes the probability of achieving one’s ends, I believe we should all strive to internalize the spirit of Ferdinand the Bull – peaceful, direct, and unwavering in his sense of purpose – daisy munching in the shade of a cork tree.

Fluid Dynamics [3.12.2015]

There’s a scene at the beginning of Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon when Lee and his master are discussing some martial arts philosophy. It’s a nice introduction to the film and the words they exchange have stayed with me. 

The master tells Lee that his abilities have transcended the physical and have reached a spiritual level. He asks Lee ‘what is the highest technique you hope to achieve?’

Lee’s response, ‘to have no technique.’

The master: ‘what are your thoughts when facing an opponent?’

Lee says, ‘There is no opponent.’

The master finishes the talk by telling Bruce Lee, ‘Now, you must remember: the enemy has only images and illusions behind which he hides his true motives. Destroy the image and you will break the enemy.’

When I reflect on this dialogue I am struck by how it can be applied to far more than just martial arts. The master, no doubt, intended as much. 

In the West, we define ourselves by our ‘techniques’, our ‘opponents’, and our ‘image.’

 We pride ourselves on having the most powerful military, the ideal university system, the most liberty and the purest democracy. 

We are lost without a defined enemy, some ideology or nation or even abstractions like ‘poverty’ or ‘drugs’ that we can claim we are locked in an fight to the death, and that we have and will always triumph. 

Finally, we worship the image. Our sense of self, both personal and collective, is hugely dependent on our sense of self image. Look good feel good is heard and shared. Our environments are flooded with imagery and our minds reflect our environments. 

‘The enemy has only images and illusions behind which he hides his true motives. Destroy the image and you will break the enemy’ the Master says.

If our technique and our opponents are images and illusions, what is our true motive?

Blogoals [3.8.2015]

The title says it all.

Huh?

That’s right. This post is about my Blogoals, or blog-goals, if you will: what I hope to accomplish with this journal.

The primary reason I have created this page is to document my experience moving to a new city, but not just any city. Rochester is significant to me personally, yes. I am descended from a long line of Rochesterians that helped give this city its character.

However, I believe Rochester matters to America because Rochester’s struggles are America’s struggles. The word ‘microcosm’ comes to mind. A century ago, Rochester was on the cutting edge of culture, science and technology. Now, the same rules of capitalism that helped build Rochester into a socially and financially wealthy metropolis have brought it to its knees. Of course, it wasn’t entirely outside of Rochester’s control. Yes, global forces wrought havoc on the local economy. But from what I’ve learned, there was plenty of stubbornness, impatience, ineptitude and disregard for progressive new ideas that held this, and many other Rust Belt cities back. At a time when innovation and hard work were needed to compete on a global level, America had grown comfortable and complicit in our post-war dominance.

Now, we are prone to treating the symptoms of our national ailments, not the causes. The causes are hard truths to think about, let alone talk about, let alone act upon.

But there are people all over this country, and the world, that are fighting against the agents of decay and chaos. In Rochester, I’ve already encountered an incredible energy within the populace here, an energy that kept the gears turning when the city had grown dark and hope was nearly lost. Those same people are still fighting to prove to themselves and to each other and to the world that Rochester it’s Rust Belt brothers and sisters that they – no, we – are still here. We are still living and working and fighting and caring for this city and it’s people and institutions no matter how tough things were or will be.

I’m new to this city, yes. I’m new to adulthood. I’m new to life. But I have a voice, like all of you. And with my voice I will be telling the stories of this city. There are a lot of them. I will have my finger on the pulse. And yes, I can still feel one.

About The Author [3.8.2015]

I’m Jonathan, but I normally introduce myself as just ‘Harper,’ my middle (and somewhat more historically significant) name. A little background for you, O reader.

I was born and reared in Portland, Maine, which is a small port city on the Atlantic Coast. I’m the youngest of four: an older brother Calvin and two sisters, Emilia and Destry, born to parents Harper and Destry. Whenever I am asked about myself I often start with these two facts: my hometown, because I love it and could talk about it endlessly, and my family because they are my friends and allies and heroes and source of inspiration and support. They taught me not just the logos of life but the ethos and the pathos. What it means to be a human. What it means to be selfless. What it means to love and care for oneself and each other. Also they had me listening to The Beatles, Queen, The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin before I could be corrupted by Top 40 radio, and for that, above all else, I am grateful.

My parents, affectionately known by the kids as Papi and Mami, met at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. Harper grew up in Rochester but went to summer camp in Maine at Kieve on Lake Damariscotta. He fell in love with the land and chose to raise a family there. His father, Harper Jr., was a businessman and his mother Beatrice was a reverend. They divorced when my father was 15, studying abroad in Rennes, France. Soon after, they both remarried and moved out of Rochester – Harper Jr. to Miami and Beatrice to New York City. My two uncles and aunt both moved from Rochester in soon after, thereby ceasing the tradition of Sibley’s born in the Flour/Flower City. According to my father, 6 generations of Sibley lived in Rochester, and I am now the 7th.

My mother was born in Mexico City to a young Spanish woman, only 19, named Rosita. Rosita was a refugee of the Spanish Civil War and when she was 3 she and her two sisters, Carmen, 12 and Elise, 8, took a steamship to Mexico to escape the violence. By 19 Rosita had met a cowboy named Calvin from Abilene, Texas and they were soon married. Sadly, he was killed one night while driving back from a farm, 5 months before my mother was born. Calvin and Rosita had chosen the name Destry for their unborn child, after one of Calvin’s favorite fictional gunslingin’ lawmen, Tom Destry Jr. in Destry Rides Again.

After Calvin’s untimely death, my young grandmother, chose to keep the name. Mother and daughter stayed in Mexico with Rosita’s older sisters for 4 years until they decided to move to the United States. My mom hid her beloved cat under some blankets in the back seat when they encountered border patrol. They moved to Phoenix for a decade before crossing the country and living in Northport, Long Island. After highschool, my mother spent a year at Northeastern University in Boston before transferring to Bowdoin which had only just opened its doors to female students a year or two earlier. To make a long story short, my parents met, married, and eventually ended up in Maine.

I went to an old school in the West End of Portland called Waynflete, starting at age 5 and graduating high school at 18. During the summers I went to my dad’s old ‘sleepaway’ camp, Kieve. Once I felt I’d outgrown it, a few friends and I signed up for a 5 week stint at a summer camp in Mexico called Pipiol. It was like an american summer camp on spicy steroids. Our ‘camp’ was an old converted hacienda. Our time there was divided like this: two weeks at Pipiol, a week at Canoas, a week at Guerreros, a week in Xalapa, and a week in Mexico City.

The following summer those same friends and I enrolled in a totally different trip offered by the same company.This one was 8 weeks – four weeks living on the 2nd floor of an old fishing warehouse while building a sailboat on the 1st floor, and four weeks sailing on a 28-foot pulling boat named Dorothea. There were 11 of us on board. We would sail (or row if the winds died) all day, then find a calm cove in one of the countless inlets on the coast or an island, drop anchor, and set up our galley(kitchen) and bunks (sleeping bags laid over the oars.) We would take turns cooking, navigating, steering, and manning the sails. The head (bathroom) was at the bow (front) of the ship, in full view of the rest. We would take turns at night doing 1-hour nightwatches. I will never forget sitting in silence on the still waters in the dark as a great fog bank rolled in and enveloped my senses. One’s mind plays tricks when all senses are deprived and trust me – the horrors our minds can conceive are often far worse than anything in nature. Also, when you pee in the water at night the bioluminescent plankton make cool little patterns in the water.

At 16 I enrolled in a semester-long educational experiment called CITYterm that plopped a group of 30 students from around the country into a school near New York City and asked them what it all meant. We used the city as our classroom and our material. Our final exam was to study a single neighborhood and learn what made it tick – it’s history, culture, demographics, how it was changing, where it was going. My group focused on Greenpoint, Brooklyn. We spent more than a few hours wandering the abandoned shipyards and factories by the east river.

The reason these three experiences got so much lip service is because I feel they were very formative events for me. I was incredibly fortunate to be able to go on these trips at such a young age. At times fun was handed to me on a platter, and other times I had to endure some pretty uncomfortable moments, but overall they really helped shape who I am today.

After high school I enrolled at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York. I majored in Government and took classes in History, Art, English, Spanish, French, Chinese, Oceanography, Economics, and Comparative Anthropology. My junior year I studied abroad in India with SIT. The program was called Sustainable Development and Social Change, and that was essentially what we studied. We were based in Jaipur for 3 months where we each lived with a host family. After, we were sent on our ISPs, Independent Study Projects. I chose to go to the tropical state of Kerala in southwest India, a poor state with a great Human Development Index. I had heard some theories as to why this was so but I sought to find out for myself. A good HDI means people in Kerala are generally healthier, more literate, live longer, and have less children than people in the rest of India.

I ‘discovered’ (read: read in some books) that there is a long legacy of valuing education in Kerala, going back a few centuries, when the ruling family decreed that educational should be available to more than just upper-caste males. But I did noticed a marked difference in the how the lower castes engaged politically. I observed a huge number of marches and protests. It seemed that a better-educated populace really is less willing to put up with inequality and a corrupted government.

At one point in my exploration of Trivandrum I came across the Padmanabhaswamy temple but was refused entry because I wasn’t Hindu. I didn’t mind too much. That is, until six months later, the largest collection of treasure in the world was uncovered in the underground vaults below the temple, valued at as little as 19 billion and as much as 1 trillion USD. If my Indiana Jones instincts had been just a little more honed…

I graduated Skidmore without much fanfare, and after a month back in Maine, I packed up and moved to midtown Manhattan with my (always) radiant and (often) pragmatic girlfriend JKP. Her older sister had rented a cool flat on the 19th floor of a highrise in Midtown, and Julia planned to move in. My tentatively plan before the reality of NYC expense kicked me in the shins a few times was to use the Midtown digs as a jumping-off point while I found work and my own place. Two weeks turned into two months and soon we had built a wall and claimed a section of the living room our bedroom. I worked at Keens, Six-Acts, Winner Media and L.A. Burdicks that year.

After a year, the experiment that was New York City pointed us to Brooklyn, where JKP and I found a “reasonably” priced railway-style apartment on the dodgy side of Prospect Park, right on Flatbush Avenue, in a neighborhood now known as ‘Prospect-Lefferts-Gardens’ because it was sort of wedged between Prospect Park and the Botanical Gardens and used to be owned by a Dutch Farmer named Pieter Lefferts. Creative thinking there.

Our realtor was a smooth-talking local who managed to convince us that it really was a decent price in an up-and-coming neighborhood (he was right both times); our super was a nice but usually absent Central American fellow named Noel who spoke mostly spanish and installed a new toilet for us when ours failed its duties; our landlord was a paranoid Hasid (windowless metal doors, unmarked office, bars on the windows, etc., (I guess the race riots a few years back did a number on their sense of security)) and our neighbors seemed to live in the hallways. (“BOBO! BOBO! BOBO!”)

The good: We spent most of our time in Prospect Park, where I worked for the year thanks to NYC Civic Corps as a volunteer coordinator and recording studio manager/engineer. We could get nearly anywhere in the city via subway. Thee food was good albeit expensive. We had a decent number of friends nearby. Tip of the Tongue, De Hot Pot, Tugboat, the Tavern, House of China, and ‘That Deli on the Corner’ kept us fed.

The bad: roaches, rats, large packs of dudes on street-illegal dirtbikes and ATVs roaming the borough, and a loud, polluted Flatbush Ave. Also, most of our friends were super busy trying to support themselves so we didn’t see them very frequently.

After two years, we were out of there.

Immediately after Brooklyn I brought my stuff to Rye, New York where my Dad had posted up in an apartment to be near his new job. JKP went to her sisters since she still had a job at Warby Parker, whereas my gig had run its course. We didn’t have a plan. I started working at a cafe because I knew it would be temporary. After more than a few conversations and brainstorms, we settled on Rochester. It was her hometown and the land of my forefathers. It was less expensive but still cultured. It was near Lake Ontario and the Fingerlakes. Before long, JKP found a new, better job, and had given her two weeks notice. I set up a series of interviews, got a hotel room, packed a suitcase, put on my top-hat, and drove off into the sunset.

Coming up next: Harper’s first few weeks in Rochester. Will he get a job, make new friends, and keep the girl, or fall into a life of crime? Why not both you say? Find out next week on Reboot Rochester.

Where Am I? A Synopsis.

Welcome to Roc the Boat. This blog is an account of my experience moving at age 25 to the city of Rochester in western New York State. Rochester is a postindustrial city that experienced massive economic decline, urban decay and population loss over the last half-century due to the shrinking of its once powerful industrial base. However, Rochester is showings signs of rebounding, and I aim to report on the efforts to revive this great city.