Gimme the Mic

Project Management V

2011-05-05T22:26:00.000-04:00

I do know who Osama bin Laden was. What I cannot do is understand him. Perhaps this is not remarkable. Why, though, can I only and ever misunderstand the meaning of this man's life?

Because, as Morrisey would say, tonight is just like every other night. That's why I have no insight into Osama bin Laden. Because it would be wholly unlike the truth of my life for me to comprehend somebody else's mind. Should I try to learn more, I could hope only to shift the sands under yet another blind step. No, information is of no use here; I need, rather, much less than that.

Time to slow things way, way down.

Osama Who?

2011-05-04T09:54:00.005-04:00

Via Matt Yglesias

Yglesias beat me to this, and comments "Oy!", but I say spare me the hand-wringing. Indeed, I'll do the those kids one better. Not only is it okay that plenty of young people don't know who Osama bin Laden was, but I'll also predict that those same kids aren't really improved for now knowing. Knowing about Osama bin Laden = politics. Most people = don't know and don't care about politics. This is not the big, and certainly not the new problem people suppose it to be. It really is okay. Put me down for this same conclusion about the mass of people you're not hearing about who know perfectly well who Osama was and yet aren't feeling the joy, catharsis, or anything else that t.v. and the internets are telling us we're feeling. For lots and lots of people, it was mostly just Monday, and it's bad history to act like this wasn't so.

Nothing really to add, except that I'll be watching the Yglesias comments thread on this one for the usual declensionist narratives of how we all used to know everything and now we don't know anything and any day now the ~~Russians Japanese~~ Chinese will be running laps around us. I call bullshit. People don't not care anymore than they already didn't care. I'm reminded of this nice little post by Jonathan Bernstein on same general topic. Makes me wanna go read about those Mugwumps!

Project Management IV

2011-04-27T01:40:00.002-04:00

I feel like I'm in Vietnam. All high and in a war.

I am neither. Only it feels so. The matter is highly confused, and so insistent upon me that its persistence becomes the one thing I can make stick. Its enduring character I can count on. All else seems only dressed up restatement. What this matter is remains inaccessible. Is it the fact of living, breathing, and being? Is it the awareness of dissatisfaction? Is it the problem of language itself? Every day, so far, I wake up to this eternal Vietnam. To assert more than this seems a lie.

There is no advance - no border, indeed, upon which to move. It is distinctions that make borders, but is it any use to proceed upon knowing that there is being and not-being if the existence of the latter is a mere supposition? In what direction is the first step? Were I to encounter my predicament at spaced-out and contained intervals, I might yet have some hope of comprehension. If only to be able to distinguish among kinds of experiences. I am supposing here that distraction may be valuable. Attention and not-attention. A foothold. Instead, it is all grasping at vapors and ghosts. So what's the harm, then, in re-tracing some steps? Or in taking a rest? I'll wake up all the same to the project again.

Sounds Like a Party

2011-04-25T20:42:00.003-04:00

It didn't occur to me to that so many people would find the competition off-putting.

And, really, I should not have allowed myself to be surprised like that. As it was, I had to wait about two minutes into the game before I saw the clicks of recognition flicker on one face and then another until an absolutely distinct minority had wordlessly, event-less-ly disengaged, drifting back into the chit chat of the day. It was as though some magic potion had worn off more or less at the same time, with the guests vaguely aware something was out of place, that they'd been plucked out of time for a moment, and yet unable to care why or how. I continued as a distracted host, and in my own way also chose to move on; indeed, in delivering my performance anyhow, but as a slightly ironic imitation of how I would have done it had I had the crowd with me, I gave much more of myself than I otherwise would have. For the first time in a long time, I was right where I wanted to be.

From the Persistent Complaints Department

2011-04-24T19:10:00.000-04:00

Ideology knows the answer...before the question has been asked. Don't recall from whom I stole that. Secondly, a list. I regularly get my political commentary from Talking Points Memo and Mattthew Yglesias; those are the two sources I read daily. Less often, I read Ezra Klein, John Bernstein (A Plain Blog About Politics), and Paul Krugman. All leftists. I don't read writers with whom I regularly disagree on any regular basis; less than once per week is accurate. And even then I'd say it usually takes the form of my following up on something set in context for me from one of the preceding writers.

How dispiriting. I am aware enough to know that this is simple and hopelessly unsatisfying confirmation bias at work, but listless or insecure enough not to do anything about it. Anybody have success stories about dealing with this kind of habitual shallowness?

In part, motivated to post briefly on this topic after seeing Yglesias flag this bit about patterns within this world of mental shortcuts. To repeat, any help on this?

p.s. Pardon the blog absence. I went on spring break, but am back for real.

Blech

2011-04-07T00:59:00.000-04:00

You know it's bad when you see used plates on the coffee table that were absolutely for sure from an hour ago and think, "Wait, did I eat? I don't remember eating...Whatever."

Nothing to add. Just unremitting tiredness from now through Friday. Birthday came, birthday went. Just running and running. Also, the indignity of being broke all the time. I'm not actually in a bad mood, just escaping into the blog for a few mins before the one a.m. to five a.m. sleep cycle begin.

In the Sisyphean sense, excelsior, my friends. Excelsior.

Project Management III

2011-04-02T09:37:00.001-04:00

Simplicity is hard to come by. What is not hard to come by is what is not simple. The non-simple, the confused, the self-contradictory, the multi-faceted, the rich-context-dependent, the puzzling, the incomprehensible, the non-self-same, the difficult, the disputed, and the deep: this seems more around all the time.

At the same time, the simple is often boring. It asks to be forgotten so that one can attend to other things. Is this why I am so bad about washing the dishes as I use them? Who can know a thing like this? I have been unequal to this question for years. Unfortunately, the demands of life are such that one cannot pause life to concentrate on this question of the dishes, however difficult it may be to answer satisfactorily. It is much more likely that even bigger, and much more practical demands will demand attention. Actually washing dishes, for example.

And in this time the question of dishes drifts in and out of one's consciousness. It is not always pressing, but does live on as a kind of persistent failure. And having an unresolved worry like this in the background is not consistent with simplicity of living. So which is the simpler path, then: to reject the many spiderweb-like dead-ends of wrong-headed-because-malformed-ill-informed-and-at-some-level-malingeringly-purposeless meditation, or to engage them to no good end, vainly hoping for something other than the mere performance of self-reflection, for something that was not there in the beginning, and which product of reflection changes future thinkings and doings? Of course, I've assumed without demonstration that thinking about this question from the standpoint of simplicity is the appropriate approach. How much time would it take to properly argue the relevance of that?

When I say simplicity I really only mean to invoke that which is most desirable for coming to terms with a course of action. Sometimes, the right answer is to walk away from a whole way of approaching things. Actually disinvest from rigid habits. But that takes help, I think, and there's no amounting of introspection that substitutes for what other minds and bodies can do.

Explaining the joke: is there a point to this reflection? An intended communication? There may indeed be no matter at hand, but I don't think so. The question I think I have been really asking is what is it to act as person? What are the possibilities and constraints for action? I suggest that inaction, hesitation, and self-doubt persistently frustrate purposes, and that I don't know the meaning of that moment when you find yourself at the point of reconsideration upon what to do next. I recognize, though, that I am drawn back to it again and again. So what I am doing now to grab onto something that seems like advancement or change on this project is to number these musings. How's that for progress?

Accompanying musical selection: The Talking Heads' "Road to Nowhere"

Options

2011-03-30T22:06:00.000-04:00

Tired. Exhausted. Enervated. Wiped Out. Drained. Done. Beat to Hell.

Choose one.

Welcome to Our Great Club!

2011-03-28T21:50:00.002-04:00

In this club, we have editors. Also, it is a fashionable club.

Also, this club endorses loyalty to friends. Members know the difference between matters of mere interest, and those of worthiness. Nonetheless, we appreciate the pleasures of frivolity, and are cheery almost always. The club and its members are forgiving of unimportant errors, whether of judgment or calculation. The club's members balance ambition for lives well-lived with a patience borne of humility. From this same shared sense of unpretentiousness stems the group's collectively gracious manner toward newcomers. We, too, were once outsiders, and, I can only imagine, felt keen appreciation for the kindnesses shown us in those first days. I, at least, remember well the gratitude I felt toward the first who placed an arm around my shoulders, and said, "Come on in." I have never since wanted for friendship.

It really is a very good club.

I Like American Music

2011-03-26T17:46:00.000-04:00

Courtesy of Bob Dylan:

Well my ship’s been split to splinters and it’s sinkin' fast
I’m drownin’ in the poison, got no future, got no past
But my heart is not weary, it’s light and it’s free
I’ve got nothin’ but affection for all those who’ve sailed with me

Why share? Because I like saying, "well my ship's been split to splinters." That's why. Also, because I have this song on a mix CD titled, "MLB's 2010 Mix" and if you don't have it, then you need to get a copy ASAP. Not only are there several songs I keep playing over and over again, but one of them is by Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros, a group I'd never ever heard of. New music equals good.

Getting Better All the Time

2011-03-23T13:22:00.001-04:00

Maybe it's the two exceedingly large cups of coffee I had this morning, but I want to tell the internet that I really, really like Joshua Foer's "Moonwalking with Einstein".

I have this on audiobook, and for non-fiction it's easy on the ears. In short, this is a book about Joshua Foer learning to improve his memory while also investigation the way memory has been understood to work throughout history. I'll let you link to the review for more of the gist, but I'll tell you now that one of the things I'm really enjoying is the chapter entitled, "The OK Plateau." Here, he places memory improvement next to all kinds of efforts to develop expertise, and comes back again and again to the virtue of deliberate practice: focus on your technique, remain goal-oriented, and get immediate feedback. Perhaps because I'm teaching Kaplan courses right now, I appreciate the reminder that such firmness of purpose is the cornerstone to sustained improvement. And that's it right now; time to throw my whole deliberate self into vacuuming, loading the washer, and washing some dishes!

In which present-me despairs of past-me and his idle ways

2011-03-21T00:31:00.000-04:00

Why am I in classic mode?

Because despite having three days to plan out my whole week of Spanish lessons, I found myself at 10 p.m. with diddly squat nothing done. At this point, spending time being disappointed in myself just feels like throwing good minutes after bad. I pulled it out, I think, though only through tomorrow. As long as I can get up by five, then I'll have time to get ready, make the drive, and print out the copies I need before others get to the copy machines first. I tell you this because I want to step outside myself just for a minute before diving back into the week's work. With any luck, I'll heed the Salutation of the Dawn tomorrow and make the best of a classic R life situation. The question of why will have to wait.

Project Management II

2011-03-15T20:25:00.000-04:00

What is R doing for the next six weeks?

That's right, I'm teaching first- and second-year Spanish to ninth-grade students. And it's been a fascinating couple of days so far. I am absolutely overloaded with observations about how this new adventure is going. Whether it's how to select appropriate activities, assess learning, or even just monitor the pace and rhythm of class time, I feel like I've just opened so very many loops of thought at once that I'm going to collapse from exhaustion thinking about them all. The car ride home, still the seventy-minute trip I've had for two-plus years now, has felt like a living and breathing world in which what did happen, may happen, and commands my attention without interruption. Just so pressing and all-consuming...odd.

Aside from weighing pedagogic options and thoughts along the lines of what is and is not working as education in itself, I think that getting to know so many new people, even for just the few minutes that I spend with any one person, is just such a performance. I mean that it's tiring work to be "on" for so many hours in a row. I know I've blogged about this before, but I'll say it again: there is a very strange "flow state" after effect in which you just feel like you're "back" into some kind of recognizably not task-oriented self-consciousness in a way that's like getting thrown out of a car. I've been living in respite-free teacher mode for what seems like dozens of hours in a row.

I better stop writing and go to sleep. I'm hampered enough as it is by my lack of editing; this post can only be the more disjointed and, to some not-in-a-bad-bad sense, but nonetheless in a real-felt-I-recognize-something-like-it way frustrating. A frustration borne of the promise that interpretation yields a reward, that you would be transformed somehow, taken into a state of knowledge or better yet awareness of something that was once not there. And at the end of one of these researches, you ask if the minutes in which you gave yourself over to something like this flow-state in trying to comprehend and perhaps evaluate something like a judgment or relation that some other mind put forth do indeed change you.

Why Would Jerry Bring Anything?

2011-03-12T21:39:00.006-05:00

Imagine you are in conversation with someone, and find yourself relating some set of facts. I'm talking about the kind of conversation in which you and the person with whom you are speaking are trying to understand or come to know something that one or both you believes to be or not be the case; that is to say, you could, for the purposes of this thought experiment, be talking with anyone about anything. In this dialogue, you and your interlocutor continually show through words, body language, and, I suppose, pheromones that you are or are not on the same page about any number of aspects of the conversation. My question to you comes after the jump:

Further imagine that as you are delivering your description of some events, the person with whom you're talking sometimes tells you, "I'm with you," and also, "I hear you." What do you take these two phrases to mean? For some reason I feel like I've been using them more than usual lately. I want to trace my use of these phrases back to when I worked as a payroll rep and spent a lot of time working through issues with people on the phone. I want also to say that "I hear you" was my stock phrase for a wide range of meanings. Sometimes, it was meant to communicate that the person could continue speaking, and that I registered their intended meaning - an elongated, "uh huh" I guess. Often, I used it to set up some question or rebuttal. As in, "I hear you...what I'm still wondering, though, is...".

I bring this up right now because I was talking with a friend about this, and she told me that if she heard "I hear you" she would take it to imply agreement. And while I think that the phrase does suggest some kind of assent, I think I went to that well again and again precisely because it created that intimacy of shared understanding while at the same time withholding an explicit statement of agreement. Am I, then, being disingenuous if I, nodding and smiling all the while, think that saying "I hear you" commits me to nothing? File this under non-urgent musings, and then, perhaps, let me know what you think.

The Condor of Calabasas Did it First

2011-03-09T23:06:00.003-05:00

There must indeed be a word, Professor Burke, for when we think one thing is a derivative copy of another only to find out that the supposed copy actually came first. I bring up this old question because while watching Charlie Sheen's Ustream performance I was reminded of the Aldous Snow character in "Get Him to the Greek." who described the look he was going for as "White African Space Christ." It was a wonderful performance on the part of Russell Brand, and although his character's happy-go-lucky drug-addled rock persona shares none of the bitterness with that of the self-styled total freaking rock star from Mars, I think that schmoyoho's send-up captures something of a shared crazy-creative-utter-blow-out core. Taking nothing away from "Get Him to the Greek," I think Sheen's done a good enough job of bringing the crazy that I feel like going back in time and accusing anyone else who epically crashed and burned before him of stealing his bit.

Fill in the Blank

2011-03-08T18:32:00.003-05:00

Premise 1: The federal government is like a family.
Premise 2: A family must live within its means.
Conclusion: The federal government must ___________.

Some guesses: Stop ordering take-out on Tuesdays when there's still two slices of pizza, including the one big slice, from the weekend. Buy watercress only if a) it already has a recipe that calls for watercress, or b) it really, actually intends to look one up in two days, three days max. *Gulp* Ask brother-in-law for a loan. Consider robbing old folks and making the dash. Sell collection of college textbooks on Craigslist for a quick fifteen bucks (applies only if the government has unused copies of I, Rigoberta Menchú and Faulkner's As I Lay Dying). Double check credit card statement to make sure it never signed up for AOL service in the 90s and just forgot about it. Come back for one last heist. Stop making charitable donations to Planned Parenthood. Refrain from cutting credit card down the middle for symbolic purposes and then having to pay ten bucks for a replacement. Canvas neighborhoods for compiling of comprehensive list of "Kids Eat Free" specials. Consider the financial rewards of a stint in the armed services Do a little web design on nights and weekends. Or, on a final and topical note, see if they're still hiring on the set of Two and a Half Men.

The Yet-Unrealized Fruits of Reconsideration

2011-03-07T14:07:00.001-05:00

A print of The Salutation to the Dawn, a Hindu prayer, hangs framed just outside my kitchen. It has been there for years, but I hardly ever pay it any mind. I want to take note of it today because there is time left yet to do so:

Look to this day!
For it is life, the very life of life.
In its brief course
Lie all the verities and realities of your existence:
The bliss of growth;
The glory of action;
The splendor of achievement;
For yesterday is but a dream,
And tomorrow is only a vision;
But today, well lived, makes every yesterday
a dream of happiness,
And every tomorrow a vision of hope.

Project Management

2011-03-05T22:23:00.000-05:00

Of what nature is the exercise of control over oneself? This is a bad way to start; it may be better to ask what hope there is of ever coming to better understand one's own efforts at self-direction. The wherewithal to exert restraint over oneself, however, is paradoxically the necessary condition for coming through time and experience to appreciate what does and does not contribute to a clearer understanding of the issue at hand. For without capacity to command oneself through time there can be no assurance that one will maintain the steadfastness of purpose necessary to submit one's way of thinking to continued scrutiny.

In the beginning, it is dissatisfaction that gives rise to the question of the nature of self-control. From here, there are many fruitless ways to proceed. What, for instance, is an appropriate scope for initial study? And what criteria are likely to be useful for discriminating between useful and useless lines of inquiry? Also, how might introspection about one's desired outcomes help illuminate the appropriateness of even beginning, and if so then with what commitment to continue, this project when one finds oneself always already involved in wholly distinct projects?

Experience tells me that the one sure way to remain stuck in this insidious chain of obtuseness is to continue to ask these questions without the benefit of other people's perspectives. There is something in the nature of dialogue, I seem to have found, that makes it very hard for two people to be stuck in the same way over the same thing. Such is some kind of progress, and yet something in me remains that motivates reflections such as this. The project is, as it has long been, in some sort of real, actual trouble.

The Country You Actually Live in Was Created in 1866

2011-02-27T12:45:00.002-05:00

Short interpretation: this.

Less short same: When you think about it for just a little bit, it seems that Founding Fathers obsessiveness tells the American story as if the New Deal never happened. And, indeed, FDR's legacy is under assault. But the bigger omission, I think, is that the back-to-basics crowd is actually acting as if the Civil War never happened. More on this later, but I think there's something going on here in the silence about the tremendous expansion of central government power brought on by the Civil War and then Reconstruction.

Who Remembers the Grizz?

2011-02-24T22:39:00.002-05:00

A plain blog about politics: Outside the Political Junkie Bubble

So people either are or are not sure if health care reform is still the law of the land.When it comes to forgetting history, I guess there's no time like the present.

On the other side of that very coin, have you heard of Herman Cain? If you're the same person on the street, of course, the answer is and always will be no. If you attended CPAC, the big conservative get-together earlier this month, you could probably narrow it down to three guys who may or may not be black waiters. And if you say that he's some businessman running for the GOP presidential nomination then you should probably take a survey about internet addiction. Why? Because unless following national politics pays your rent, then nothing about this guy should matter to you. Nothing.

News stories build up the Hermanator as a guy who can shake up the GOP field. He can't, and he won't. Note, of course, that people writing those stories get a pass from my advice, as they do in fact put their kids in shoes by telling stories about guys like Cain. One such account I really enjoyed comes from Michael Lewis's "Trail Fever" about the 1996 election. It's not actually about Herman Cain at all, but about another Southern businessman named Morry "the Grizz" Taylor. Remember him? He was Lewis's favorite guy in the whole campaign - a straight-talking, conventions-be-damned self-made man who set out to remind America that it ain't the American dream if you can't make that green. He traveled to campaign stops in a fleet of boats emblazoned with his own logo. And he did a lot of other things, but I'll stop here because my simple argument depends only on analogy. If you don't remember the Grizz, and you don't much mind, then take heed. Get offline, forget about Herman Cain, and go wash some dishes.

Is It Really So Strange?

2011-02-23T22:37:00.001-05:00

Tell the truth: do you like The Decembrists' song, "The Sporting Life", from their album Picaresque? Wistful narrative, richly told, of course, but also that punchy "Touch Me"/"Lust for Life"-esque (and even, don't you think, a little "Say Hello to the Angels"?) accompaniment. C'mon, it's good, and you know it, and if you don't think so then tell me how much of a chance have you really given it? I mean skipping it when you listen to the album? That's just not at all how I feel about it, and I can't help but think that I can bring you around on it. What do you say, this time for real?

The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

2011-02-23T02:28:00.004-05:00

Looks like Sasha Issenberg has a book, The Victory Lab, coming out for the 2012 political season about social psychologists, et al. who work on what actually makes people do the things that political campaigns are always trying to get them to do. David Plouffe's The Audacity to Win, especially during the Iowa chapters, conveyed some of the extent to which campaigns are grasping for evidence-based best practices, but this looks like new ground. This topic is definitely one of those things that now that I hear about it am surprised hasn't been done, yet hadn't thought of before. Especially since I missed Sasha's article on same this fall.

Don't you wish you could just rent this whole apparatus of investigators and put them to work on yourself? Ask them to look into why you waste so much time online and how to stop. Also, "how come I never clean my apartment enough?". And, of course, "what will it really take for me to show up to work even five minutes early at least once a year?". And you could write a book about it too. Working title: "Lifehack: How a crack investigative team helped one man do some things around the house, and also to be somewhat more punctual." If you're looking for the next big thing, take heed. When science unlocks those secrets, and puts them in book form, I, at least, will be the cost of one Kindle purchase poorer.

Sacrifices: Shared, and Also the More Selfish-Style Ones

2011-02-21T03:14:00.004-05:00

In Sunday's op-ed, Paul Krugman lays into Scott Walker, accusing the Wisconsin governor of dissembling his true intent - union-busting - by posing as paladin of the tax-paying silent majority. He writes:

"In this situation, it makes sense to call for shared sacrifice, including monetary concessions from state workers. And union leaders have signaled that they are, in fact, willing to make such concessions.

But Mr. Walker isn’t interested in making a deal. Partly that’s because he doesn’t want to share the sacrifice: even as he proclaims that Wisconsin faces a terrible fiscal crisis, he has been pushing through tax cuts that make the deficit worse. Mainly, however, he has made it clear that rather than bargaining with workers, he wants to end workers’ ability to bargain."

I want to focus on Krugman's attention to the verbal gambit whereby the phrase "shared sacrifice" is supposed to help us see the sense in any plan to reduce benefits. The image speaks for itself. The fair thing, the truly equitable and just thing, is for all of us to accept some privation so no one of us (read: business interests or high-income earners) is made to carry the load for the rest of us. So far, so fair, huh?

But calling something shared sacrifice isn't enough to make it so. Raising the retirement age for Social Security is the most clear-cut example of this I've been reading about lately. Does raising the retirement age really affect the rich, middle-class, and poor equally? Are all seniors in this together? Or, since current benefit recipients are so often excluded from these austerity measures, will tomorrow's retirees be uniformly giving up no more and no less if they have to wait to retire? Extend this same line of questioning to all state benefits under attack, and it seems to me you'll sometimes stumble upon cases wherein some of us won't suffer at all from service cuts and some of us will see substantive reductions in our quality of life. And that's the general problem with this kind of talk: the equity of sacrifice is merely asserted, not proved. And by the time you're telling Wisconsinites that fiscal survival depends on making union members undergo a certification vote every year, then I really need you to slow down, can the slogans, and start spelling some things out.

Unfortunately, I think politicians will be leaning more and more heavily on the "shared sacrifice" trope cattle prod voters into repudiating the redistributive welfare state. They're free to make the argument, but it's the self-evident stand-ins for argument, the ideological short-hands, that are harder and harder to take. I don't want a smarmy appeal to simple, across-the-board nationwide self-sameness when what's on the table is a social safety net that by its nature assumes we have some stake in unequal sacrifice.

Principled Outrage and the Bad Uses of One's Life

2011-02-17T21:08:00.001-05:00

There's this woman who teaches band to middle-schoolers. Is that what you say, teaches band? Everyone at the table was talking about, or listening to conversation about, Valentine's Day. A couple of the women, and the room was mostly women, had husbands/boyfriends who, "refuse to celebrate Valentine's Day on principle." This woman, as such a one, got a text from her bf saying that he wanted her to know that he had to withhold expressing his love until the next day. As I listened, I sat in judgment of such idiotic rigidity. To make such a show of dissent, this is what you do with your life? So there's this semi-official holiday centered, and is the only one so centered, on celebrating romantic love. Will you be contaminated with political bad faith if by participating in this ritual with your s.o. - the one person who will really care about your Valentine's Day plans - you somehow fail to also register your objections to consumer culture? I don't buy it, and I say grow up. Needless to say, I have not considered all objections, and so hold out the possibility that some may be less unreasonable than others. This is not what is meant by the phrase, "quick thinking."

So far, back in this story, so meh. What happened next, though, once the talk turned to other gifting holidays, was even more preposterous than this woman's boyfriend's ho-hum foolishness. She thought it important to share with everyone at lunch, which is what this was - lunch, that the one thing she hated about Mother's Day (try to predict it. I don't care if you turn away for two minutes you won't anticipate this complaint) was those childless women who expect to be treated like mothers on this day because their pets count as honorary kids.

Whose sin against time was worst? Mine, the woman's, or that man's?

Doggerel Days

2011-02-13T18:49:00.001-05:00

Or doggerel years, and a headlong comic lurch into the commotion of practical life. This can't go on forever, though I know no other way. An impostor, a joker, a wanter-and-not-haver.

Thing One: I just recently - at age 30, that is - read that Immanuel Kant called the belief in pre-established harmony a pillow for the lazy mind. I felt that rebuke sharply, as though delivered all-out-of-proportion-to-my-importance straight to me and my evil ways. Ever since this reading I am suspicious of myself; I am a Fyodor Karamazov unmasked. A rat. New theme: what is and what is not redemption?

What the Matter is Not

2011-02-08T22:26:00.000-05:00

That you will never die. This is what is untenable. I spent today making money. And teaching. And tuning out to The Killers' "Day and Age." And eating pulled pork, salad, and green beans. I put on my latest favorite tie. I laughed at people's jokes at lunch, but said almost nothing because I still don't really know anyone, and, uncharacteristically, nobody is asking me a lot of questions. They don't even know that I drive for three hours almost every day. I missed a call from Adrian. I parked on the street like I intended, and nonetheless resented my stupid neighbor's nephew for blocking the driveway again. There's no reasoning with that kid; all I can do is hate him whenever I think of him or see him. I met with my boss for dinner today and all I really wanted to know, but didn't ask, is what he thinks is bad about me. It was the second time we've met. There aren't that many dishes to do now, so that's next, because tomorrow's another brutally long day.

What is More

2011-02-07T22:19:00.000-05:00

As preferable as it is to have time to relax, one benefit of being dog-tired and stressed, as I now am, is prolonged absence from the national conversation. I am continuously and genuinely worried about how my day-to-day life will turn out. Even now, I've just let go of the Monday vine and have no hold of Tuesday's. I do not enjoy this. Especially not when I'm grinding out hundreds of miles a week, week after week. It feels bad. And yet, the deep grooves of civic mindlessness feel just a little less worn today, and that's some kind of relief. At least, it's been a while.

The Matter

2011-02-03T21:35:00.001-05:00

And what do people say is the case? Does one need more time, or is that not really what is needed? I think you could make a persuasive argument that lack of time is mostly cover for a lack of imagination regarding your real problem. That it shuts down reflection rather than encourages it, and so evades, or rather fails even to confront, the substance of the question. Which is what any answer, I suppose, does to some extent - the closing off, that is. However, such an answer should be at a healthy remove from the question. In time, I mean. You know, let yourself mull it over a bit; resist the first and easiest conclusion. Are you aware, even, of a second even-if-in-your-eyes less likely explanation? Surely this signals haste, no? You might object, though, that this is not a way to approach all things, but that there is a continuum on which things like brushing your teeth are okay for indeliberate action, and on which same continuum there are problems, real felt-as-such problem-problems, demanding slower judgment. Also, what's wrong with a lack of imagination? Is there a golden mean of imagination, of the will to be curious? And if so, are we, are you, responsible for it? In short, is there or is there not a task at hand?

Recession Haiku

2010-11-18T01:12:00.005-05:00

It's been a long time
Since fifteen dollars wasn't
A lot of money.

2010-07-26T07:48:00.000-04:00

Going on hiatus, guys. An actual, official break. Not a not-posting because I'm doing something else break; I need to take some time to define my purpose for this blog. My guess is that I should be able to learn something over the next month. So check in then.

Laying Plans

2010-06-26T16:09:00.000-04:00

It should be no surprise to you who know me that now that I have some free time for the first time in a very long time I am aggressively considering different projects to start. Reading projects, of course, torment me with their endless possibilities -- an effect compounded by a couple of graduation gift cards to Barnes Noble. Fitness, perennially on the periphery of my mulling-over, is something I want to map onto actual calendar-concrete discipline. And if things come in threes, then my last project for which I have built a fervor is cooking. I have been cooking much more now that school is over, and I would like to have at least some of that cooking contribute to a systematic improvement of some aspect of food prep.

Let this post, then, mark some outlines for these efforts. Mind you, I have pressing issues besides these to address, not the least of which is my expenses and their payment. That said, on with the possibilities.

Books: After four or five days of deliberation, I accepted that the gift cards had burned holes in my pockets and so I traded them in for books on European intellectual and cultural history. Some of the primary stuff was basic authors I've never read like Voltaire, Rousseau, and John Stuart Mill. I also picked up Robert Darnton's The Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes in French Cultural History and Dena Goodman's The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment. My still half-formed motivation for settling on these books was that when it comes to European history, I'm solid right through the late Middle Ages, and then I effectively check out until World War I. Really, astonishingly long gap that I want to close. And so...where to start? I am reading The Oxford History of the French Revolution, effectively punting the question until I get to other side of its four hundred pages. Updates to come.

Fitness: I did once have this down to a routine, but never in my four years here in New York. Here I really am casting about for ideas. From others, I mean. Step one this week has been getting into the habit of working out on our elliptical machine for a half hour at a time.

Food: I feel the surest sense here of how I want to develop my skills. I make decent salads, but I think that I could really go a lot farther by making my own dressings. I've made a couple vinaigrettes and Caesar dressings, but that's over the course of fours years of cooking. I want to have some salad recipes down cold so I can confidently serve a lot more salads this summer. I've got even more room to grow with breakfast. I can do some pancake variations, crepes, omelets, and hash browns. Just doesn't feel like enough variety. I've been stocking fresh fruit, but there's lots more that I am just not doing at all. Lastly, beans. We have a pantry full of all kinds, but I never use them except for beer-glazed black beans. This is a waste of possibilities.

Let's see how these plans are doing in a week, friends. I'll let you know.

Old Habits and All That

2010-06-25T17:03:00.000-04:00

Is there anything quite like family to get one really worked up? I talked with my little brother today about my upcoming visit to the fam, and I performed my predictably overwrought worry about him, his education, and any-and-everything-family. I've been thinking that he should develop a study plan for next year -- eleventh grade -- and broached the subject with him. I emphasized that he would want a less stressful year than last, and, as he himself brought up, that junior year is often difficult. On the face of it, not the worst thing to talk about. But it felt like so many conversations we've had before. Fundamentally, I come into such discussions in bad faith. At least, I don't get very far before I get so caught up in hyper-awareness about being too didactic that I feel a great weight upon me of having made yet another false start. Like a pendulum, however, I then regret that I let such hang-ups abort what is an important discussion about education. By the time I realize that I'm back in the same place I've been so many times, I've invested a great deal of time and emotion in a swirling phantasmagoria of familial threats, frustrations, and helplessness. Feels like one big swindle; like an addict lurching back to the always and ever down. We are, by the way, long off the phone by the time these episodes come to an end.

This reminds me, too, that this sort of hand-wringing about things never changing used to be much more common in my life. This old record had many tracks, and always the same f'ing song. Take any other frustrated hope and I could go through the same song and dance about being trapped in a hopeless loop. The pattern is familiar to me, and it does indeed take me back to another time in my life. At the same time, it also brings me straight up to 5 p.m. on June 25, 2010. So...I have a relationship I need to work on. Unsure how to proceed.

My Hero

2010-06-02T23:56:00.000-04:00

Ken Griffey Jr. retired today. My god, I idolized this guy when I was a kid. Now I'm thirty years old. How time passes.

So We're Just A Couple of White People?

2010-05-26T08:05:00.000-04:00

Do you know your race? I can't say I've ever had a gut response, and after this year's census, I still don't know. I filled question 8 about Hispanic origin with a "yes" for Mexican, but then also had to fill out question 9 about race. A bolded note in between the two explicitly stated that, "for this census, Hispanic origins are not races." That froze my pen and how. My choices instead were white, black, american indian, and a host of asian/pacific islander nationalities. Faced with those choices, I could see what they were driving at: am I Sammy Sosa, or Selma Hayek? Right? I think what they want to know is: are you, or have you ever been, a member of the African peoples of the earth?

If that's the case, then, to the best of my knowledge, I think I should have answered white. Except I'm not white. There is no social reality that I live in where any of the available terms make sense. I told my brother about this question and asked him what he thinks his race is: "Uh...Latino?" "What if that wasn't an option?" "Hispanic?" "If not that?" "Mexican" "Nope" "...Chicano?" Can it really just be a biology question? The online FAQ explains that answers to these questions help determine fairness and disparities of all the usual suspects: employment, voting, services, etc. Does lumping thirty million Americans of Mexican origin into black, white, or any other of these categories help shed light on such differences? If anything, I'd say the hispanic origins question does that, but then what does it help to add a wholly independent racial component?

So that was one reason the form lingered on my kitchen table. When the census guy stopped by I was on my way to pick up M. I told him I'd be back soon. When I got back he was right outside. And I would've stopped, but we wanted ice cream, so I just gave him the one-index-finger-up gesture that told him I'd be right back. Ice cream in hand, I came back, gave him the form and asked him about question 9. Actually, he asked first. "Did you just want to leave that blank?". I told him no and explained my confusion. And he told me it throws lots of people off. He hears, for example, "Well, I'm white, but I'm Italian." So I asked him what I should do, and he told me that if all I wanted to put was Mexican then I could check "other" and just write it in. Which, however much in direct conflict with the bold explanatory note, is what I did. Not satisfying.

R's Spring 101

2010-05-16T20:54:00.000-04:00

This was one hellish semester, everybody. It ended appropriately with a twenty-eight hour writing session and a mad-cap drive to Saturday's graduation because I chose the wrong time to sleep for ninety minutes. Even more important news is that as of this morning, I became an uncle for the first time! I can't wait to see the little (8 lb 1 oz) guy.

Other "since you were away" type notes.

* I'll be teaching the LSAT and GRE pretty soon. I think I'm going to get a big kick out of it; I do love being on that stage. With the proper preparation, I won't have too many horror stories to share from my first class.

* M will find out her match (for a two-year surgery specialty fellowship) on Wednesday. Wherever that is, and assuming she does match, that's where we'll be from summer 2011 to summer 2013. Big f'ing news, that day. Wish her luck!

*Just being done with this master's program merits its own bullet point. These last eighteen months have been bar-none the hardest I've had to work in my whole life. Forget all-nighters...I often stepped into some weird other category of who-knows-what-day-it-is craziness. Thank you to everyone who made those wake-up calls when I could only get two and three hours a night, tag-teaming sleep sessions with M. Jesus Christ I won't miss that.

More to come, people. I'll have to chance to think through what to make of this blog in a post-schooling environment. Suggestions welcome.

I Know This is Indulgent, But It's the Post I've Got...or...Woo-hoo! 100th Blog Post!

2010-02-22T21:02:00.000-05:00

I miss being here, I really do. The blog, I mean. I think it about it when I'm driving sometimes. Outside of my car, though, I don't think I even have thoughts about it. I can afford to spare some mental space for it when I'm on my way somewhere, but outside of that car life is much the same blur that has characterized the last year. Seriously, just running and running and running. One of the strange sensations of this chaos-life sometimes presents itself in the hour or two of rest that follows a particularly bad run of crazy busy-ness. Early last week, for example, I remember I was in an intense rush one morning. I had cleaned up the apartment some, but I knew I could not afford to lose any more minutes to anything but reading and writing. I looked into my sun porch, where we keep our plants. I had just bought a new pot to replace the smaller pot for an orchid that I'd bought to replace the one that the cats broke. For a few days the orchid had been hanging on in this pot in which its roots had no firm hold. But this was no time to re-pot the plant. That, I thought, was a bridge too far this morning. I stood and gazed at the plant, then made up my mind to get the F out of the house and deal with it later. Sorry plant, you'll have to make it just one more night.

For the next homogeneous like three days, however, my attention was transfixed on any and everything that was the world of my work. I drove three hours a day to school and back. I picked up a substitute gig despite knowing full well I didn't have those hours to spare. I drove M to Hartford, Connecticut, getting in at one in the morning, and then took an eight-hour bus ride back at eight that morning. I read for as much of that ride as I could, then M's dad picked me up at the bus station, we talked for a half hour, and I borrowed his car to go to class. Good; done; class done. I drove back to his house, he dropped me off at the bus station, and I read for the two-hour ride, then got a cab home.

I got in like at ten-thirty at night, and I wouldn't have to be anywhere or do anything until twelve-thirty the next day for a home tutoring job I picked up. M was sleeping. I brought in my stuff, undressed, and sat on the couch. nytimes.com, gmail, facebook, talkingpointsmemo.com, easily distracted, back to facebook, politico, back to gmail, nytimes again. An hour or so passed like this. It was its own trance, but a domestic one. The running was over but in this ritual of getting home and right into mindless web surfing, I didn't really know it. You know, no recognition that I was off that treadmill.

I got up from the couch. How it came to be that I left the couch when I did I don't know; not a decision, really, more like something that just happened. Now up, I walked to the sun porch to feed the cats. Standing on that tile floor, looking at the orchid across the room in its same little pot, I paused. "Oh". Not that I said anything, but looking at that orchid again, I felt such powerful, if exhausted, connection to that last moment I had raced out of the house that I knew with my whole body that I had landed. It was as if I had dived into water when I asked that plant to wait and had only now come up for air. As if that was the last time I remembered making a conscious decision, and returning to that place somehow allowed me to wrest my being from the zombie I'd had to become for the days in between.

I relate this, in part, to say that this is something that I've felt before. This snap back into wakefulness, this back-into-regular-time-ness recognition wherein you know you've just been gone for a few days. It happens sometimes.

An Episode

2010-01-28T23:21:00.000-05:00

Sometimes you have no choice. Take today's experience as a representative case. I stood in line at a library, with people both behind me and in front. At a moment, I sensed the young woman in front of me about to take a step forward. She did not, but I nonetheless had come one step closer to her, and the person behind me edged forward after me. What could I do but endure my reduced following distance? I did not dare take a step until someone else moved for real this time.

Rip Van Reverie

2010-01-26T10:36:00.000-05:00

Last night I had a dream of a kind I don't think I had ever had before. As is true in waking life, I was in the final semester of my masters program. The only difference was that I was fifty-six years old, not twenty-nine. And I knew this in the dream to be a new and unpleasant reality. I thought, "Wow, I'm not going to get a real chance to make a career out of this." I looked back on my life and was surprised that quite so much had passed before I found what I wanted to do. I could have sworn it was only a couple of years that I spent figuring things out, but it turned out to have been nearly a lifetime. It all seemed to have happened behind my back, and yet I didn't question it. And that's how the dream was; no action transpired, just me sitting there awash in my realization that twenty-seven years just sort of flew by.

Five Guys

2010-01-20T18:41:00.001-05:00

So here's something. I start school again this Tuesday and just got an email from the professor letting us know her course materials are now on Blackboard. First I read the syllabus, and it has an exciting set of readings. The course covers American intellectual and cultural history with an emphasis on politics. I've got three of the books already, and am halfway through the second. All good so far. I then looked up the class roster to see if I knew anyone. Two of the guys I know from my program, but not the other three. And maybe because I could see butting heads with the two students I do know I became disheartened that it's an all-male class. I felt myself brace for a less civil, generous classroom atmosphere. It's not my final judgment, but what surprised me is my clear disappointment. Is this horrible of me?

M and I Are Getting Cats!

2010-01-10T10:45:00.000-05:00

That's right, picking up two little kitties later today. I'll post more later, but I wanted to get this news out there and break in the blog for the new year. Woo-hoo!

They Could Be Voice-Cousins

2009-12-20T08:39:00.003-05:00

I watched C-SPAN on Friday night; a live Senate broadcast. Last time I tuned in I came to appreciate how very much John Boehner sounds like Tom Hanks. Like, a lot. This time: more discoveries. First, Al Franken can play boring. Also, Ben Nelson is a very ugly man. I don't know that this is widely appreciated, and I don't want to be mean, but that's an unfortunate appearance. However, the phenomenon I am most interested in is that Dick Durbin sounds like Marty Funkhouser (Bob Einstein) of Curb Your Enthusiasm. It's not pitch perfect, but I really think they could be voice-cousins. I think you hear it best if Durbin is speaking with some passion, so listen to this clip (tune in at twenty-seven seconds) to hear the resemblance to good old Marty. One of my regular pastimes during t.v. or movie watching is to come up with three-person composites for who people look like. I think C-SPAN has turned me on to a new kick. I gladly call on you all to submit your congressional (and other unintentional) sound-alikes.

However, the biggest question is what to call these coincidences. We have doppelganger, double, and look-alike for visual resemblances. What, however, do we do about sound? That is, what do you call someone who sounds like somebody else? Or, as in the Durbin-Funkhouser example, the somewhat-alike occurence? Has this been investigated? Has the word-hunting back page of The Atlantic been alerted to this need? Is the United Nations awere? And if we find the right word, would it be really important or not important? Is this neologism ready to be the unfriend of 2010? I say Impressionist/Impersonation is out of the question because that involves an effort that is totally absent from look-alikes. Similarly mimic and all words that tend toward self-awareness on the part of the double. If my internet translating skills are sharp, the German equivalent would be doppelgesunder - double-sounder. Could that catch on? I kind of wish it would; Imagine walking through a mall and actually thinking, "Whoa, that lady is totally Mrs. G's doppelgesunder." This foray into German also raises the question of whether other cultures have already put this issue to bed. And, what if the plain term sound-alike is all we need. My fear then is that our culture doesn't care nearly as much about sounds as we do about appearances. And so it wouldn't matter one way or another what we call it, because voices are second bananas to faces. What, I ask, are we to make of voice-cousins?

Books in Brief

2009-12-18T19:46:00.001-05:00

As insanely busy as ever, so in lieu of a reflective meditation, here is a snapshot of books I'd love to read right now. I am understandably on a big history kick these days, as I have been teaching global history for the past four months now. Thoughts on the books? The only one I've even started to read is Decade of Nightmares, which I feel confident recommending as political junkie crack. Jenkins saturates every page with a cultural gestalt of seventies and eighties America. A total rush. I listened to a Talks@Google address by David Plouffe that piqued my interest. My interest in Kagan's book is also audio-related. He has a Greek History course from Yale (2006, I think) that I loved. The Vertigo Years is a book I've had my eye on for a while now; I think I liked the New Yorker "In Brief" write-up. I'm hopeful that Lears' book has something new to say about America's endless reinvention narrative. I only found out about The Victorian Internet a couple of days ago--an Amazon recommendation, I think. I just taught the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and feel that Friedman can deliver a page-turner on this. If 1776 is good, I'd love to start reading more McCullough; this book is also a hedge against having to read Gordon Wood's six-hundred some-odd page tome on the revolution. In teaching the Middle East to my ninth-graders these past eight weeks I also became really interested in the Ottoman Empire for the first time; Fromkin got several references in an "intro-to" style book about the region, so I hope it's a good starting point. Pathfinders: this is a book I saw on an uber-history-buff friend's Amazon Wish List; if he's interested, I'm interested. Bergen: I just heard him on NPR's Fresh Air--or was it some other talk show?--and I was impressed. As for Dostoyevsky, do you ever need a reason? I guess I single out "Demons" because I've yet to read any of these new translations, and I'd love to see how they read. If I remember, our bloggin friend III is a big fan.
Until next time, dear readers.

The Vertigo Years: Europe 1900-1914 (Phillip Blom)
From Beirut to Jerusalem (Thomas Friedman)
Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920 (Jackson Lears)
The Victorian Internet (Thomas Standage)
The Audacity to Win (David Plouffe)
1776 (David McCullough)
Decade of Nightmares (Philip Jenkins)
Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War (Donald Kagan)
A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East (David Fromkin)
Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration (Felipe Fernandez-Armesto)
The Creation of the American Republic (Gordon Wood)
Demons (Fyodor Dostoyesvsky - Pevear/Volokhonsky translation)
The Osama bin Laden I Know (Peter Bergen)
1776 - (David McCullough)

For All You Visual Learners Out There

2009-12-09T19:20:00.000-05:00

By way of Talking Points Memo: Take a look at this sweet--supposedly DOD-commissioned--graphic organizer on the path to victory in Afghanistan. Not exactly "Mission Accomplished" but I think the basic take-away is still there. I'll find a way to work this into my class on the Post-9/11 Middle East; I'll post student reactions when we get to that lesson.

Riding the Tiger

2009-12-04T18:37:00.002-05:00

I had fun listening to this bit of Tiger Woods joke analysis from NPR on my drive home tonight. It's a light meditation on how jokes spread after a scandal--especially in the age of Twitter--with special attention to "public domain" humor (i.e. amateur jokes). I know it's a little teacherly of me to say this, but I thought I'd like to hold on this for class use some day. Given the shelf life of topical humor, though, I better try to work it into my Middle East unit for maximum effect. Anyone got any good Israeli-Palestinian conflict jokes?

Naming Names

2009-12-03T17:51:00.001-05:00

In a semester of busy days, this last week has been even more consistently hectic than usual. I've had to resort to a sliding scale of little sleep. Sunday I slept from two to five in the morning, Monday midnight to four, Tuesday ten to two, and last night eight to three. Tonight...I guess it's about bedtime now as it nears six, but I'll stick it out a little longer. Anyhow, I just wanted to check in with Gimme the Mic for a sec to relate two brief matters about names.

For this anecdote to work I will have to ask you to indulge my conceit of anonymity on this blog; that is, you must that my last name is Jimenez, though it is not. Especially as a group of my seventh period girls recently told me they were Googling me, it's best to keep up the facade (though, admittedly, they said that not knowing my first name made the search difficult). I ask you to do this because I have gone through a lifetime of having my name mispronounced with some regularity. Not a lot, but it happens; people can't wrap their tongues around that opening J. I expected this would happen often during this semester of meeting so many new people. Yet, I think I may have had only one instance of a student getting my name wrong. Over and over again it's just right. There are only a handful of Hispanic students I am aware of at the small school, so it's not familiarity, I don't think. Perhaps I shouldn't be so surprised by this, but I've been impressed with the consistency on this point. Should this hold less interest for me? It was on my mind today because one of the teachers I know a little bit seems to have forgotten my name. And speaking of Googling, he now calls me Mr. Rivera (f.y.i., another pseudonym), which surprised me because that's M's last name, and so is one of the more common things I get called now when I take care of some business for her. I'll keep my ear out for any other signs that I'm being cyber-stalked.

My other bit of name news is that the teacher for whom I student teach recently told me that her husband is a state trooper. It just so happens that she has an unusual name (though I haven't heard any students making the obvious prophylactic-themed jokes). As I was driving home, I had a flashback of when I was recently pulled over on the highway because my window tint was too dark. I am like 40% sure that it was her husband who pulled me over.

Quizzing the Quizzer

2009-11-24T17:27:00.002-05:00

If a student teacher is to survive the blackboard jungle all by himself someday, he better get used to making judgment calls. At least, that’s what B, one of my students, has to say.

B (striking his level-best plaintive tone): Mr. R? I did the reading last night but...the thing is...I left my notes at home. Do I have to take the quiz, or can I make it up?

Me: Uhmm…is that true?

B: No, I just wanted to see what you would say. (Big smile). As a teacher you have to be prepared for that. Are you gonna be one of those teachers that says, “Suck it up,” or be like, “Awwwwww, don’t worry--here, I have some notes you can borrow”?

Me: *Smile*

B: No, really, what would you do? Say you had a kid who was really good, always did their work and you knew they were telling the truth. Would you let them take it later?

Me: Uhmm…let’s move on with our quiz, B.

Can you believe it? I had no ready answer, so I stalled and brushed the question aside. Of course, I did sincerely want to get on with the quiz and not drift into private conversation, but still. I’m not sure I have an answer that goes much farther than, “it depends.” In point of fact I have already made a couple of exceptions this year, so I have made some short-term decision toward leniency. Was it the right thing to do? I'm not sure. But I strongly suspect this question will come up again soon. And this time I'm going to study.

Uh-oh

2009-11-21T22:59:00.000-05:00

There is nothing so emblematic of a sudden turn of fortune than the fleeting flash of light that signals a power outage. It's the visual equivalent of the record scratch sound effect, I think, but because of its invariable consequences it hits you in the stomach a lot more suddenly. Life with power, meet life without power. At least, when you have been an apartment dweller who has seen this kind of problem mushroom into two- and three-day intrusions into regular life then that knot in the stomach is quite real.

My circuit breaker blues started mildly enough. I flipped on the light above the stove this afternoon, and it went out. It's just the stove light, so I'm think, "BFD, I'll get to that bulb when I get to it." When I checked the fridge a little later, however, I saw that it had stopped getting power. Again, not the end of the world if you know what you're doing. Perhaps because this problem started with that little stove light, I avoided the usual dread that this was something serious. I grabbed the flashlight from the side of the bed and the keys to the basement. As I made my way to our circuit breaker, making sure not to hit my head on the low metal doors leading to the basement door, I even came upon what might be a good discovery; all the downstairs neighbors' stuff was gone. Might those inconsiderate, shiftless, very likely thieving people be moving out? The first thing I did was check that our stuff was still in the basement, and it was. Were it not M's stuff that's down there but my own, I think I'd trade it all to be rid of these people.

Anyhow, all the switches were still in the "on" position, so I flipped the three kitchen switches off and on. I came upstairs to check on the fridge, and nothing. On my next trip, I tried every switch and when I got back upstairs, that sinking feeling made its appearance. In the three years M and I have lived in this apartment power outages have uncovered not only that our previous neighbors were stealing cable from us, but that this apartment's wiring is a mess. Downstairs and upstairs are in some sort of illegal mix that we thought was fixed, then it wasn't, and now I found out is still all wrong. I lost power to half the apartment's lights--essentially the outer walls in the front half of the apartment plus the inner kitchen wall that powers the fridge. I checked with the neighbors, and as I feared I had turned out half their lights despite touching only the switches for our second-floor circuit breaker box. I expected them to be annoyed, but the woman who answered the door was more detached than anything else. She seemed to be aware of the problem, which surprised me. I remember now, as I did not then, that this has happened once since she's moved in but I hadn't bothered to let her know. Intense heat exited their front door on what is a relatively mild day. Also, the woman was smoking. These things made an impression on me, as did the fact that my eyes were as yet so unaccustomed to the dark that I could barely make out more than her silhouette.

Back I went into the basement, taking extra care with the switches, and on my third attempt I heard through the thin ceiling that the neighbors' lights were back on. (A thanks to my buddy III, who recommended I get back down there and try each switch one-at-a-time. It was then that I discovered the offending one). Good. I marched back up with tentative hope, but after several careful entries and exits I was in the perfectly unsettled, hurried state to make a full-on head bang on that low ceiling. Just...of course.

Back to square one at this point. The only sockets out were those powering the fridge. It was still early enough to call our landlord. I left a message. Then I drove to Home Depot where I picked up a medium-duty fourteen-gauge, fifteen-amp extension cord to power the fridge through the washer's outlet.

Now I'm back and this makeshift plan has done its job. The fridge is getting juice, my night laundry mission is delayed, and my landlord will be here at ten in the morning tomorrow. So now my night mission is to make this place presentable for company. Maybe not a dream Saturday night, but something that I should do anyway. I'm picking up M from work at six in the morning tomorrow, so maybe I can surprise her with an extra-clean home. Indeed, if I manage to pull off more than a so-so clean-up effort, then M has her own record scratch moment coming up.

Dispatch from Student Teaching

2009-11-18T22:58:00.000-05:00

Veteran Teacher: “How’s it going so far?”

Me: “Great. These kids are just so good. I don’t know if it’s just that they aren’t comfortable around me yet, but everything I tell them to do, they do it.”

VT (looking at me quizzically): “I’ll keep my mouth shut about that one” …*reconsiders*… “that will change.”

Two hours later

Me (in my invariably calm tone): I need you to keep your voice down.

Study Hall Student: I don't know why you’re being a fascist.

I suspect this young man and I will be exploring this issue again. Like, tomorrow. Still, that's not my favorite quote of the day. That honor goes to one my ninth-graders explaining to his classmates why sometimes violence is the only answer to a problem. He said, "So, if two countries are having a border dispute and one of them charges into the other one’s territory, is that other country just going to sit there and take the punches in the face?". I really got too much of a kick out of that.

Go Figure

2009-11-14T14:17:00.000-05:00

I actually fixed that expandable post problem. I had to get past a couple red herrings first, and procrastinate on a couple of other things, but this blog is safe to use again. Turns out that the blog had something called javascript:void(0) built into the "Read More" link. And my understanding is that part of what this coding does is prevent links from opening new pages. What I'm not sure about, though, is what changed from one day to the next. I regularly update Firefox, but not IE. So if was a browser update, I'd expect the old version to work. My best guess is that since I've come back to the blog I may have updated a blog layout, messing up this widget.

Upshot: we're good to go, friends. Read on.

Technical Difficulties

2009-11-11T21:34:00.003-05:00

It looks like something's up with the Read More function that allows you to read beyond the intro section of blog posts. Nothing happens when I click to expand the post.

For now, just click on the title of any post you want to read. I'll see what I can do about this, but not tonight.

Conscientiousness Objections

2009-11-11T21:13:00.005-05:00

I was looking up the word painstaking today on dictionary.com, and I read down to the note on synonyms, which discussed the shades of meaning in the words thorough, scrupulous, careful, meticulous, and conscientious. I have always enjoyed the dictionary very much, and tonight occasioned one of those pleasures of reading crisp, economical description. Take a look at the entry on the word careful.

CAREFUL, the most general in sense of these words, implies serious intent to perform well and accurately whatever task one has in hand: a careful housepainter; a careful study of the social structure of gangs.

It really is so pleasing. Not one wasted word.

What I have to relate tonight is an episode wherein I am called out for careless writing.

I don’t know if there’s anything more navel-gazing to write about, but…I received back yesterday. I am in the student teaching semester of my program, during which I take a once-a-week course with the sixteen other student teachers. It’s a light load, and so perhaps I have the luxury of saying that I wish it were more of a challenge. The assigned readings are so rarely discussed that I doubt anyone prepares with any consistency. Instead, most of our time is spent in ad hoc discussions of what’s going on out in the teaching world. Which is okay. This isn’t always fruitful, but oftentimes it is. My fellow student teachers are generally sincere people who have enough trust in each other to bring forth interesting episodes that are real challenges for them to solve.
Anyhow, my grade in this class has three equally weighted components: 1) participation, 2) a seven-to-ten page textbook analysis paper, and 3) an eight-to-ten page personal reflection paper about our student teaching experience. Thankfully, student teaching itself is pass/fail. So, I got the first paper back and the professor tore it to pieces. In the last several years I can only remember one time that anything like this has happened to me. That other instance was in a course on ancient Chinese history in which the professor asked us to write about the Ming dynasty with reference to Gavin Menzies’ 1421: The Year China Discovered the World. Some quick Googling suggested to me that this author was a quack, and so I merely alluded to him in a paper otherwise faithfully sticking to Chinese shipbuilding history. And boy did he lay into me. I remember his calling me out on the “defensive fine phrases” I employed so as to avoid engaging Menzies. I suppose he had a point about my following instructions, but he was a real pain in the ass about it.
This one was different. The professor mentioned the irony of grading papers from a group such as ourselves who have often complained about student writing. He said that he was frankly disappointed with the carelessness of many of us. As you can imagine, you had a roomful of people thinking it’s someone else who mailed it in. Me included. When I first read his note that my many stylistic and grammatical errors were of great concern to him, I did not know what to say. That’s just not who I am to make such elementary mistakes. As I looked it over again today, however, I think he is a lot more right than I could have ever believed. As regards grammar, I strongly suspect he is imposing his preferences upon me.* But as to how unclear and awkward I was at several points in the paper, I think he has me dead to rights. Really, I just condensed some points to such abstraction that the reader would have to make a best guess at my meaning. Just ugh. Though it will affect my grade in this class, I am glad this happened before I have to write something for a more serious occasion. True, writing the paper in a night was probably part of the problem. But that’s been my m.o. for these shorter papers without incident for who knows how far back now. Something different happened with this textbook analysis, and I’ll be curious to look on it again.
*Just in case you are curious about the grammar, here is a representative example. He objects to the red comma in the following sentence: “I sometimes consult a college-level history survey textbook, and, by contrast, each of its chapters begins with a prominent list of focus questions.” Is this a genuine error? Or is it simply ugly enough that it merits changing? I haven’t consulted a reference work, but my first reaction is that I am always free to use a comma to join two independent clauses. Thoughts?

Live Blogging the House Health Care Bill

2009-11-07T23:11:00.002-05:00

Has anyone else noticed that Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner sounds a lot like Tom Hanks? I think this is a solid asset in American politics. What I can't settle on is who Charlie Rangel sounds like. And this bring to mind, of course, the question of how the rest of our Congress stacks up in melodiousness. Arlen Specter comes to mind as someone I've enjoyed hearing. Harry Reid's skills need no comment from me. And that Sessions from Alabama is just so annoying.

On these things I feel on sure ground.

11:08 p.m. House passes bill with 220 votes (219 Dems and Louisiana Rep Joseph Cao)

Class Dismissed

2009-10-31T10:32:00.002-04:00

I was looking through blog posts that I drafted but never posted and found this one that really transported me back in time. Do you remember that almost three years ago now I took an English course at the local community college? It was a real joke of an experience, mostly because the professor asked so little of us. What sticks with me most is his habit of coming up with quizzes right in front of us--hand on his chin, looking up to the sky for the inspiration to ask us such deep things as naming an author we had read that week. Toward the end, I think he picked up on my annoyance. As for my fellow students, I remember very little about them. One was an adamant conservative who scuffled with the professor in tangents that ate up class time. Another claimed to have been engaged five times but never married. The person who half-made it into my blogging that winter was a young man who was too cool for school. He had made an appearance in an earlier post for a similar reason. Read on for a dispatch from February 17, 2007.

I showed up early to class last week, which gave me the chance to finish the week's reading. I got enough of the way through before everyone else arrived. Soon we were all there waiting for the professor and a mass grumbling formed about what an imposition it is to trudge to this sorry class in the dead of winter. Five-minute rule this, and "If we all leave he can't say anything," that. Our resident faux-hawked hipster led the charge of disaffection and mischief. The talk of taking off if the professor didn't show continued straight through his arrival about five after six. As soon as the professor put his stuff down, our hipster told him, "Man, if you let us out early, I'll give you a ride home this time." Another student added, "Yeah, me too. I don't even have a car, but I'll find you a ride if we can leave early."

Class got underway, and went on without any incident until we were dismissed twenty minutes early. It was then that the professor looked to the hipster and said, "So, I got us done early; are you giving me a ride?" To which he replied, "Uh, I was joking...I thought we were both joking."

And then a sustained awkward silence.

A Fool's Errand

2009-10-28T22:30:00.004-04:00

Have I mentioned that I have a terrible sense of direction? Really, it’s pitiful.

Two nights ago I had to pick up a package at the UPS store. I’ve gotten lost on my way there before, so I decided to help myself out and look up directions ahead of time. And the thirteen-minute trip made a lot of sense on the computer screen. I recognized landmarks, distances were easy to judge, this was going to be fine. Again, I had been there before, so this was more of a precaution than preparation for a first trip. So I didn’t write anything down, but instead simply gave myself enough time to beat the 8:30 pick-up deadline. One hour later, having missed the store’s closing time, I was back home looking at those directions again. I’d driven down the parallel road to a dead end, and the store was on the next street. So what had I done wrong? On the basis of nothing, I locked into thinking that I’d overshot, and went back into every street leading up to my dead end. I mean stubbornly checked each nook and cranny, court, drive, and circle; out of that same spite, I called no one for help. I have lived in this city for three years, been in that neighborhood at least a dozen times and still—one hour on the road and no results. Grrr…
When I returned to pick up the package tonight, it went a long way toward my feeling okay again that I got there without incident. Package in hand, all I had to do now was get back. Right? Not exactly. The UPS place is off of a one-way road that runs away from home. Simple U-turn, no biggie. And maybe by my track record, it was simple; I was able to turn the car around in a mere fifteen minutes. *Sigh*, I don’t even want to get into why I got so turned around this time. What is it that is so baffling to me about direction? Is it an affliction? I mean, I haven’t even related the other time I got lost this week, which was an independent fiasco.
I take it for granted that no one reading this will recognize themselves in my frustrations. But do you know anyone else who struggles so badly with direction? Tonight, that’s my question. I’ll save reflection for later.

An Interruption

2009-10-25T00:23:00.011-04:00

I think I'm back.

I don't know why, but I feel like I am coming upon a threshold, as though snapping out of a daze. Some credit must go to my ever weirder sleep schedule, which has thrown me into alternating bouts of no sleep and way too much. Tonight will be a mix, in which I expect to be up until three or so, and supplement with a nap tomorrow.

I have always enjoyed late-night thinking. I was stuck pretty badly earlier tonight, mostly trying to think through the final exam I will assign my tenth grade history students, and so I went out for some coffee before the cafe nearest me closed for the night. M's working nights right now, so it's just me, and that always throws off my rhythm. For instance, I have trouble eating a traditional dinner by myself; tonight, I had cheese, crackers, hummus, and some ice cream. Better than usual. So, I arrived at the cafe and wrote in the yellow spiral notebook that I use for school stuff. I try to keep separate notebooks for each purpose, but I've had to use this one for other notes a couple times, and that bugs me more than it should. I asked myself what I wanted to accomplish with this exam. Actually, I first wrote down the date and title, "Global History Test Notes", across the top.

Hmm...I think I actually want to turn away from this test story for now. What I meant to discuss was this sense that my mindset is changing after six weeks or so of student teaching. Although even for that I think the moment has passed. Instead, I have a few more dishes I'd like to wash.

Oh, Brother

2008-07-24T00:30:00.001-04:00

Seriously? Did Philly really need a rash of people stealing manhole covers? Did anyone? I first read about this in the LA Times some months ago when it hit Long Beach. I guess there was no good reason why only a single city would suffer from this; the high price of metal is not a Long Beach phenomenon. And maybe it's because I don’t see how cities are going to stop this, that it can keep going as long as it wants to, that it really feels like a kick in the teeth. I think that you can get inured to something like graffiti or rubbish-strewn vacant lots—visual eyesores that suggest neglect—more than you can about your streets being gutted. What's disturbing is the suggestion that the only thing holding people back from tearing up their city was that it didn't pay enough.

I feel for you, Philly.

A List to Build A Dream On

2008-07-16T22:12:00.007-04:00

The one thing I learned from the Jesuits is how to complete a project.
-James Joyce (approximate quote)

I'm so jealous. I really am.

Do you ever have those moments when you find yourself being so strikingly true to yourself you have to step back and take notice? Sometimes this happens to me at a low point; I generalize my frustration to all me's and all times, bummed out that I'm making the same mistakes all life long. Tonight, it's a cheerier idiosyncracy: the prospect of "doing a project." I've been reading a lot the past few days--about ancient Greece for school, about finance because I'm a man of my times, and volume one of the kids' series, Pendragon, because I promised my brother I'd read it. Unlike the grueling pace of the past two to three months, though, I'm reading at my own pace and am handling the school/work/housekeeping juggle a whole lot better. So, I did what I always do when the going is good and possibility is in the air.

I make lists.

In a mania, I consider all the projects I'd like to start, and go through them over and over again. Reading campaigns, fitness, cooking, that's just for starters and a perpetual set of projects. Choice is not torment, but a channel-surfing shuffle in which every show is your favorite show. In college, the little maroon College Bulletin was my most well-perused book. It listed every single class offered, and I remember nights spent dreaming up schedule upon potential schedule. I literally filled a spiral notebook with these combinations. And I write small. This is also why I think I've got a hard time sitting down to a movie at home; the prospect of tying down so much time definitively is hard. Even now, a good chunk of each Saturday morning is spent coming up with good reasons for not doing any one thing in particular. And that's the best time to go to the farmer's market, which I've considered and dismissed every seven days for a year. I'm going this Saturday, no ifs ands or buts, how about that? As for the projects intoxicating my brain? More than anything else I'd like to:

Add five hundred words to my Spanish vocabulary. Make my own encyclopedia of gardening and plant care, beginning with each of the twenty or so plants of M's. Cars: how do they work? Make a fitness plan based on one-week rotating intervals in which each successful week occasions a top-to-bottom re-evaluation of the plan. Set a schedule for at least three days out of seven to copy music into portable hard drive with a preliminary goal of one hundred albums. Spend twenty minutes each week reviewing my several algebra and geometry books to come up with a theme for a weekly phone call with j, my youngest brother, whom I already have studying math on his own daily through the summer. I have a guitar once again: re-learn. Start a book club with my friends. Start a book club with M's dad. Greek culture reading project. Geography/Earth Science: worth taking a class? Maybe check out a general book from library and make that decision later. History of the World: I'll have to take a subject test this fall as a first step toward teacher certification, and it will be mostly a chronological survey of multiple-choice questions...draw up a schedule for plotting entire range of facts covered by test in long-paragraph entries with mid-September end date. Enact twenty-one day plan to address self-perceived internet addiction. Make budget. Standardize shopping list. Use a calendar. Learn German, but not before improving my Spanish and French. Play my Wii.

I've been here before, and this is definitely a true kind of me. For now, time to check on the plants, drink some water myself, and not check for the rest of the day if my latest grade is posted online. Good night.

A Little Bit of Wednesday Nothingness

2008-07-09T06:55:00.005-04:00

Hello, world. If you're still checking, thanks for keeping the faith. Just some miscellany to chime in with, no big changes for me. I've learned the important knowledge that you're best throwing out raw chicken that's two--no more than three--days after its use-by date; thankfully, I learned this prior to cooking. So you can add six chicken breasts in a balsamic vinegar marinade to my list of foods I've let go bad and so thrown out. Also, I threw out my third tub of soft ricotta cheese. I really want to use it, and next thing you know it's been four months. Again. Oh, waste. Today, making salt potatoes, an upstate New York dish I've only tried once.

Yesterday I came across a goodreads review of Heidegger's "Being and Time" that warned: spoilers ahead. Really? I mean, it's not exactly The Deathly Hallows. Also, I have the vaguest sense that last night I dreamt about "the economy." I don't have any more specific memory about it. At work--this is real life now--prices and the general badness of times is an everyday topic of conversation. I stay away, mostly, because I've always hated getting into the give and take of political discussion with people around whom I'm guarded anyway. I was asked point blank who I'm voting for and I successfully parried with joke opinions. At least, I don't think anyone believed my line that, "it doesn't matter who wins, we'll never have it as good as we've had it these last eight years."

By Saturday at the latest, I'll be in car dealerships haggling over the price of a 2008 Honda Civic. I've waited twenty-eight years for my first car, so I hope to leverage "playing it cool" against their ploys and rushing tactics. I drove to one place this past Sunday, but it was closed. That was my first attempted visit and it took me at least fifteen minutes to work up the nerve to finally, actually, can't-turn-back go buy a car. It reminded me of the first time I had little league practice. I'd been the single worst player in try-outs--no hits, missed every ball hit to me--and I was ready to vomit on the way to practice number one. He picked up on this and, to my great relief, we skipped it. I made it to all the rest, didn't throw up at any, and got zero hits for the year. Now, on to buy that first car.

How to (Almost) Win Your Oscar Pool

2008-02-21T19:51:00.003-05:00

The past two years I cut out all the work (and, some said, fun) of making Oscar predictions by voting a straight ticket of frontrunners in each of the Academy Awards categories. Ignoring pundits and casting aside my own intuitions, I relied on “prediction markets” like Intrade.com to make my picks. Such markets consist of real people exchanging real money and, with a finger snap of the invisible hand, generate numbers that correspond, more or less, to the probabilities that various events will come to pass.

How did I do? Pretty well, with second-place finishes both years. There were just enough surprises – Alan Arkin edging out Eddie Murphy in the Best Supporting Actor category last year comes to mind – to keep me from claiming the top prize. Prediction markets aren’t perfect, and even if they were, frontrunners given, say, a 70% chance of winning should still be expected to lose 30% of the time. Nevertheless, I can’t think of a better way to pick Oscar winners. While it won’t always win you the office pool, it should help you place – that is, until everyone else in the office starts doing the same thing.

Why Clinton’s Texas Gamble Won’t Pay Off

2008-02-13T08:00:00.010-05:00

As the votes were counted in Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, the Democratic candidates were hundreds of miles away, each pursuing a very different campaign strategy. Barack Obama was in the next big primary state, Wisconsin, while Hillary Clinton had moved on to Texas, a state rich in delegates, but one that will not see a vote cast until March 4.

‘Tis the season for second-guessing, and many have been quick to call Clinton’s focus on a primary that won’t be held for three more weeks symptomatic of a tactical blunder that could cost her the race. The argument goes like this: By essentially conceding all of February’s post-Super Tuesday contests to her rival, Clinton has given him an unstoppable momentum that, come March, will overwhelm all her campaign’s efforts in states like Texas and Ohio.

Maybe. Things certainly look rosy for Obama right now, and the results of the Potomac Primaries – particularly his unexpectedly strong showing among the working class and the elderly – do suggest that he is gaining momentum. But, as the inimitable Tim McCarver once said, “The thing about momentum is that it can change in an instant.”

The surer problem with Clinton’s decision to focus her campaigning on the big states where she is already ahead stems from the manner in which the Democratic Party awards its delegates. In the winner-take-all system of the Republicans, a sensible strategy is to spend the most time and money in the states with the closest races and greatest numbers of delegates. Unfortunately for Clinton, the calculus for the proportional system of the Democratic primaries is quite different.

In any electoral contest, each candidate has a base of strong supporters who will turn out, rain or shine, regardless of the amount of attention the candidate has lavished on their state – plus a few weak supporters who might need a ride to the polls and a few local babies kissed before their vote is secured. In addition, there are the undecideds and independents, many of whom make up their minds on the day of the primary. In a proportional system, every vote in every state matters to about the same degree, and so the optimal strategy is to spend the most resources in places with the greatest number of persuadable voters.

Clinton has done the opposite. By choosing not to campaign in the small states in which Obama had only recently begun to outpoll her, Clinton gave her rival the most precious gift of all: the votes of hundreds of thousands of swing voters, and the delegates who will now represent them. It seems that when Clinton saw how well she was doing in Texas, she reasoned that her resources would be most profitably spent there. But this reasoning is backwards: When candidates are leading in the polls, it is often because they have already gained the support of swing voters, making it difficult and costly to gain even more ground, as doing so would require picking off their rival’s most ardent supporters. By focusing on Texas, Clinton will, at best, hold onto her lead in that state – at the steep cost of losing her edge in delegates overall.

In other words, with her big Super Tuesday wins in California and New York, and with her sights now set on Texas and Ohio, Clinton has got the right strategy, but the wrong party.

Like A Mule on Three-Wheeled Roller Skates

2008-02-12T22:22:00.011-05:00

I concede that the self-propelled Kia Sportage is an auto. But mobile? Only in the sense that Russian Roulette is a game.

Do not, I implore you, take your chances with this public hazard. While M's car is being repaired, we are driving this machine, and its failures during tonight's snowfall confirmed the impression I had in the first five minutes of driving it: incapable of coming to a stop, and wholly unwilling to speed up. The snowfall was considerable, but it's in just this situation that I knew I couldn't trust the vehicle. At anything less than fifteen miles an hour the sporty SUV responded as if continuously emerging from quicksand. And it only rose to this level of performance after a prolonged work-up of attentive tapping on the gas; red lights sent me back to stops from which I battled to escape. Success was so far from a given that the poor driver behind me for most of the way almost missed a light at one point despite my having no cars in front of me when the light turned from red to green.

I thought I had reason to complain when, minding my own business at a red light, I was rammed by one car into another. But intimations of what can happen in a Sportage put everything in perspective. Please, especially if I know you, stay away from this damned car.

The Omnivoter's Dilemma

2008-02-05T18:34:00.003-05:00

I think I blew Super Tuesday.

New York's primaries are closed to non-party members, and I've been a registered independent for maybe three years now. I defaulted to keeping that status, but I realize now that this passivity was just that, a default. If I want to have a say, then why not take the time to fill out the necessary paperwork and have a vote for myself? It's twenty-five days too late to be asking that question.

One of the things that pushed me to drop the Democratic badge was my 2003 vote for John Street for mayor of Philadelphia. At the time, I was thinking about the importance of my beloved Philly turning out for the Dems in 2004. I soon regretted my vote for that schlub; for those of you who don't know Philly, Street is the kind of guy who illustrates its reputation as the city of low expectations. And what did that say about me? I stuck around with the party through the presidential election, but ever since then I've tried to distance myself from tactical voting. I moved to California at this time, and the refreshing presence of Arnold made it glamorous to buck political trends. But does this mean I have to stay out of elections just to preserve virtuous non-alignment? That has little appeal to me. How about I choose to involve myself in whatever elections I wish, labels be damned? If I had done this thinking in time, I wouldn't be sitting on the sidelines on the Super-est Tuesday in history.

Now if only I wasn't undecided.

In which I complain

2008-02-03T20:53:00.002-05:00

So that happened.

Sitting at a red light four blocks from home, I was rear-ended by a car going at least fifty. I don't know how I'm supposed to judge that actually, but it was much harder than the last time I was hit, in which the driver also made no effort to stop. This time, the force pushed me into the SUV in front of me, and hard enough that my hood is bent in three different places. What can I say? There's nothing good about this. I think the seventy-nine year old who hit me will probably have to say goodbye to his keys. In this episode, it was best to be the driver of the front car, whose total losses I estimate at sixty minutes of life.

This is the third time that M's car has been hit when I've been responsible for it. The first time it was parked and the next two I was rear-ended. Of course, it goes down in history as my third accident, no qualifications. Maybe that shouldn't annoy me, but I work in a small office, and even mild ribbing is just one more burden.

More importantly, it's a hassle with no end in sight. Gotta get the rental. Get a figure for the damage. Make sure that the other drivers don't cause any undue trouble--or, more likely, deal with it anyway. As for repairs, I've severed ties with the disreputable dealer that used to fix the car and haven't identified a local replacement. I'll have to miss work for some of this; losing time I don't have at my non-salaried-so-eight-hour-a-day-limit job. And all the while prepare to adjust to life with car and insurance payments (I'm finally going to make a serious effort to buy my own vehicle) at the same time that the prospect of leaving my job, pay, and health insurance to go back to school looms within a year. And even that is only if I get my act together and move beyond my one-class-at-a-time education toward the cultivation of the real relationships and research that will make the transition possible.

I guess you have to be down to know when you're up, but it doesn't mean you have to like it.

Aesthetics, Play Count, and the Best Albums List

2008-01-06T13:46:00.001-05:00

If you are a music critic working today, one of your duties is to put together a year-end list of the best albums. Despite the impossibly large number and great diversity of new releases, critics gamely complete this task every year (click here for a rundown of critics’ 2007 lists). I’m a fan of these lists, if for no other reason than they help steer people to good new albums. Still, using the word “best” to describe their selections seems problematic.

There’s the Philosophy 101 argument that aesthetic preferences, though often convergent, are inherently subjective – suggesting that “This Critic’s Favorites” would be a more appropriate, albeit less elegant, description. My concern, however, is not with mislabeling – even with “best” in the title, no one is going to mistake a critic’s list for some kind of music Decalogue, carved in stone and vested with transcendent moral authority – but instead that the pretense of selecting the “best” albums actually distorts critical preferences, rendering them less accurate and less useful.

The worry is that, to create their lists, critics assume a peculiar role, in which they hold each work up to a set of standards created for the purpose of judging what’s best, whatever that means (is the music original? does it say something important? is there a compelling back story? does this album represent a leap forward for the band? will including it on my list reflect well on me?) – all of which are, at most, secondary to the question of how much the critic enjoyed and appreciated the album while listening to it. As a result, we get lists of albums critics think should be judged best, with an edge given to the justifiable over the heartfelt, the perceived consensual darling over the personal favorite.

How can we tell what people really, truly like? Simple: Ignore what they say and look at what they do. In the case of music, technology has made this easy. iTunes tells me that last year I listened obsessively to new releases from Radiohead, Spoon, and Battles, and that recently I’ve been playing a lot of The National, LCD Soundsystem, and Kings of Leon. It also tells me that, after the first few spins, I’ve essentially ignored the latest from Modest Mouse, Arctic Monkeys, and The White Stripes. A year-end list reflecting my honest responses to these albums would have to favor the first six over the last three – the proof is in the play count.

This straightforward method of determining favorites – tally up the number of chosen exposures to a work – seems most appropriate for music, where the more an album is liked, the more it is played. But its underlying principle, that liking is best gleaned from actual behavior, is universal. If you’re constantly Netflixing Adam Sandler movies, can you really claim to prefer François Truffaut? At the very least, if your goal is to create a list of favorites that would be useful to people like you, shouldn’t you include the Sandler?

My Gambling Problem

2007-11-16T06:43:00.001-05:00

Sometimes even when you win, you lose.

Today, at work, I let two more people in on a bet I've got with Humphrey, the one person there with whom I connect. Our bet is this: if I am at work on time every day through the new year, he pays for two of my lunches. If not, I pay him. Now the reason it's two is that on Monday we started a bet for one lunch and on Wednesday I lost. (You get it? I'm late a lot, though rarely more than four or five minutes). I honored that bet today and re-started for double the risk. When others scoffed at my chances, I should've let it be. Instead, I now have six lunches at stake. Which begs the question: if I win, do I have to collect the reward?

I hate not eating alone. Talking shop with my co-workers is okay, but there's a compelling reason why I almost never join them for lunch. I live only three blocks away; the best part of the work day is coming back to do crosswords, lie in bed, or do some Gmail chatting. Now six instances of this refuge are foolishly at risk. Living so close is a luxury I'm sure I'll miss at my next job, and I miss it already now that I realize what I've done. Even if I lose, it's probably in bad taste to ask the guys to just hand me their receipts. No, I made my bed and now I've got to not lie in it. True, it's getting to the busiest time of the work year, so I may appreciate the time to vent. And maybe I can rope Humphrey into all the meals. He's a curious, talkative guy with a big laugh, and someone I can count on not to call the Dallas Cowboys' quarterback "Tony Homo." Still, today I was a fool, and I wish the only thing I risked parting with was my money.

Got that old time feeling...

2007-11-15T20:10:00.000-05:00

"Go with me, little Omie, and away we will go.
We'll go and get married and no one will know."

She climbed up behind him and away they did go,
But off to the river where deep waters flow.

It's just delicious, this Clarence Ashley joint. In case you're in any doubt, little Omie is not long for this world. Pregnant and broken-hearted, she is cast into the deep water by the man who had promised to support her just hours earlier.

Those who wish to hear more such tales of woe would do well to pick up Tompkins Square's exhilarating People Take Warning - three disks of old time tragedy.

Despite the undeniable brilliance of Ashley's track, what really makes these this collection special are the extended courtroom ballads. Seriously. They're like Law and Order on acid - fantastically detailed, witness by witness, expert by expert... oh and it all rhymes.

Well, I just switched to a Dvorak keyboard so this is taking forever to type. The album is great; buy it!

Illegal Imitation

2007-11-13T00:12:00.001-05:00

With apologies to this man, if I had a horse, I'd name it...

Homely Jim, Run Your Mouth, One More Chance, Second Opinion, After School Again, Lucky Rascal, Here and Now, Rib Tickler, Wrap it Up, Party of Eight, Nickleboy, Almost a Lady, Rich Man's Blues, Mane of Glory, Champ, Or Current Resident, Real Funny, Rhyme and Again, Segue of Fools, Dumb Bum, Fool Me Once, Greedy Bastard, Green Rube, Fo Sho, Black Scallion, Front Row Ticket, Raw Deal, What a Day, That's a Fact, Let Me Be, Ring 'er Up, Mum's the Word, Auto Deal, Screwhole, When in Doubt, Me Myself and Pie, Dangle Rod, Streak, Joey's Horse, Twinding, Rabblerouser, Buddy System, Accidental Death, Grab a Chair, River Pisser, Engine Sludge, Ham Sandwich, Fred Friday, Zero Chance, MegaBillion, Berzerko, Hannah, Blue Ribbin', or Illegal Imitation.

Product Idea #1: The Tummy Rubber

2007-10-28T19:52:00.001-04:00

I believe in making the world a better place. That’s why I’ve decided to begin publishing, from time to time, ideas of mine for products that have the potential to benefit mankind in a deep and lasting way. I am, essentially, giving these ideas away for free, in the hopes that GE or some big Japanese company will take the next steps of designing, manufacturing, distributing, and marketing the product, as well as handling future legal claims about its safety and spearheading any product recalls. All I ask in return is that whoever is first to market please send me a free sample, postage paid.

There is nothing – NOTHING – like a good tummy rub after a big meal. Ask any dog. I don’t know the precise science behind why the tummy rub is the greatest of postprandial activities, situated in the pantheon above smoking a cigar and strolling along a moonlit river, but I have a couple guesses. One is that the gentle, concentric movements of hand on tummy somehow aid digestion, rhythmically pushing the food along while breaking up any troublesome pockets of gas that have begun to form. The other is that the presence of another human hand on your tummy is deeply comforting, a reassurance that someone out there likes you, even though you’re a bloated little piggy.

But that’s the thing: Sometimes no one is around to rub your tummy, and other times people just plain refuse (“No – I rubbed your tummy a few hours ago”). So someone needs to build an automatic tummy rubber. Like, now.

The world is full of automatic back massagers – who hasn't spent a day giving them a try at a Sharper Image store? And for tired feet, there’s a wide selection of automatic foot massagers, some of which even incorporate bubbly hot water as part of the experience. Pretty nice, huh? There’s even a device that promises to massage your head and make it feel “tingly all over.” I would never trust it on my head, but I’m glad I have the option to.

So where are all the tummy rubbers? Hmm? I’ve searched shopping malls, the World Wide Web, and the records of the U.S. Patent Office, and it seems no one has even considered the possibility of building one. Sure, you can purchase a range of handheld devices that will vibrate, pound, and knead parts of the body – but none of these devices comes close to simulating the look and feel of a human hand petting your tummy. I’m no engineer, but I can’t imagine it would be that hard to put together such a device. To get the ball rolling, here’s one idea I had, though I’m sure someone with more expertise in this area could improve upon the design.

Hitting Square Ball Actually A Whole Lot Harder

2007-10-24T22:00:00.001-04:00

Giving the lie to Ted Williams’ oft-repeated claim that hitting a round ball with a round bat is the single hardest thing to do in sports, hitting a square ball with a round bat was found to be “damn near impossible,” baffled hitters reported yesterday.

“When a cube is rotating with that kind of force, it really digs into the air, and it’ll move two, three, sometimes four feet before it reaches the plate,” said Curt Schilling, who struck out 8 batters in 3 innings pitched of an intrasquad practice game. He also walked 8 batters.

The sharp movement of a square ball is not the only factor making it difficult to hit.

“With a traditional ball, the lighting stays pretty constant, so it’s easy to track its path,” said Jason Varitek, who struggled both at and – as Schilling’s catcher – behind the plate. “But with a square ball, on a sunny day like today, it flickers in the light as it comes toward you. It dances – a beautiful, hypnotic, menacing dance. It grows and shrinks. It lurches forward, then backward, then forward again. It bores inside your head, taunting you, telling you that you’re washed up, that you’re not worthy of the team captain patch, that your father never loved you...

“The cube must be destroyed.”

Another challenge for a batter lies in remaining calm as the corners of a square ball spin toward him at 1,500 rpm. If you are a pitcher, throwing inside thus becomes an even more effective weapon with a square ball, one that can literally take batters out of the game. Case in point: After almost being hit by a pitch in the first inning, the usually fearless Dustin Pedroia refused to re-enter the batter’s box and had to be replaced.

When players did, on the rare occasion, manage to put bat on square ball yesterday, the results were typically ugly, with the cube violently caroming off the bat at unpredictable angles. Most batted balls landed in foul territory, and none left the infield. A few stuck in the ground where they landed.

After practice, players expressed relief that their encounter with the square ball had come to an end, unabashedly eager to return to familiar round baseballs. Commissioner Bud Selig, however, was open to exploring possible uses for the square ball at future Major League events. “At the very least,” he said, “it could bring back the kind of excitement that’s been missing from the All-Star Game.”

Big Stuff Redux

2007-10-19T01:13:00.001-04:00

A shame we missed commemorating, this Monday, the one-year anniversary of Gimme the Mic.

After a test post, "The Big Stuff" inaugurated this hodgepodge of pseudonyms writing together. I liked that post. This very night, the big stuff is exactly what I left in the sink. It's late, that's true, and I can let it go 'til tomorrow. Still, I shirk that kind of work much as I ever did. A constant nature. I've tried to change a few things in these 369 days. I became a driver in that span, though I must admit that after nine months of holding a license I'm in that minority that has to own up to being bad at it. I don't like that admission, but when I've ventured outside of my regular commutes, I too often make some dangerous, illegal mistakes. Last trip to NYC, I knocked an orange cone far into oncoming traffic as I slowed down from 80 approaching an EZ-Pass lane that wasn't for me. Yup, bad driver. My studies continue, though I'll need to get my head out of history books and make real-life contacts if I'm to break into actually teaching history. There, too, a dabbling disposition keeps me from getting at the big stuff. I'll stop here, because this train of thought approaches complaint, and I don't think that's the spirit of our dear, one-year old blog. From "gross and cringeworthy event #1" through "A Spam Poet Remembered" we've been of good and bawdy cheer. What I most want to share tonight is that I intend to resume blogging again soon, what readers of you who've stuck with us this long; welcome to Year Two.

Radiohead To Let Fans Determine Content Of New Album

2007-10-03T01:44:00.001-04:00

Radiohead, the popular British rock group, have announced that the content of their next album, “In Rainbows,” will be determined solely by fans. According to a statement released yesterday, beginning Oct. 10, visitors to the band’s website will be able to upload tracks from their personal music collections, effectively giving fans control over both the selection and ordering of songs on one of the most highly anticipated releases of the year.

The band have decided that their new album will have 10 tracks, and have also hinted that its music should be a return to the more guitar-driven rock of 1997’s “OK Computer.” But other than that, fans appear to be on their own. Clicking the question mark next to any of the blank spaces for a track opens a message saying, “It’s up to you.” Click a second question mark, and one is greeted with the message, “Listen. We can’t be arsed to make an album right now. Besides, you know better than us what you want to hear – and, no, don't tell us you actually liked ‘Hail to the Thief.’”

When all 10 songs have been selected, fans will be given the option to burn the album onto their own blank compact disc, which may be adorned with artwork of their own choosing.

you know somebody's gonna be a good drinker when

2007-09-02T11:42:00.001-04:00

Last night I took somebody out drinking for their very first time. 21st birthday and all. In my experience, one's first legal night of drinking should not involve fancy mango, pomegranate, kahlua, spiced-rum, fizzy, coolers.

That's for later in life. One's first hangover should come from cheap whiskey and cheap beer. So A's very first legal bar, at midnight last, was Bob & Barbara's. Hadn't been there in a year myself, what with being gone and all. But the special is still $3 and it's still a Jim Beam and a Pabst. We had four.

Coming out, still standing and belly empty, we locked eyes and said one magic word.

"Cheesesteak"

Oh yes. She's gonna be a drinker. Yippee kay yay!

ps. On a sad note, Nate Wiley has passed on since I was last in. He headed up the regular band and B&B's - Nate Wiley and the Crowd Pleasers. It was a while back, and I hadn't been in, but I owe that man many a good night. We only talked a time or two, but if you've ever gone there with me, next time you're out, I'd appreciate it if you'd order up a stiff drink and just sit quiet for a spell to pay some respects. He took a little offense calling his music jazz. He liked to term it liquor drinkin' music and had been playing it at Bob & Barb's for 23 years every Friday, Saturday, Monday -- which is the name of his only album. Here's to you Mr. Nate Wiley.

There's still jazz at B&B's - but Cliff wasn't swinging the sticks any more either. Still, Frank McKay is there, seducing the B-3 like he always has, and that's more than enough to keep me coming back.

...I found my thrill
on blueberry hill...........

Style Watch

2007-08-17T02:56:00.001-04:00

Listen up, fashionistas! Billionaire heiress and It girl Paris Hilton was spotted in Beverly Hills on Thursday, flashing a new look that's turning heads and setting the fashion world on fire! To go with her Versace sunglasses, Tourneau (Paris Hilton line, duh!) wristwatch, and always-there Chihuahua Tinkerbell, the “Simple Life” star was seen carrying Tootles, a glamorous 3-month-old human infant, in a white Italian leather bag by Melvone.

Ms Hilton, pictured with her pets, Chihuahua Tinkerbell (left) and human infant Tootles.

Hollywood is abuzz with word of Ms Hilton’s new look, and so far local taste-makers like what they see.

“Choosing to accessorize with a purse baby is a bold move for Paris, and I think it’s really going to pay off for her,” writes Britney Belle of style blog CelebrityWears. “It's not a stretch to say that, within a year or two, every young girl in America will want to have a baby that she can put in her handbag before heading off to the mall, or wherever.”

Fashion consultant Jean-Armand Delarue also had nothing but praise for the look. “She’s showing us a softer, more caring Paris. It’s as if she’s saying, ‘Hey. I know I’ve screwed up in the past, but now I’m ready to take on real responsibilities. And my sandals from Jimmy Choo are smoking-hot with this baby!’”

In Defense of Eating Contests

2007-08-14T11:20:00.001-04:00

Let’s clear something up: When the folks at Nathan’s host their annual Coney Island hot-dog eating contest, they are in no way taking food away from starving children in Africa. Starving children in Brooklyn, maybe – but Africa, not a chance.

Still, every year the contest seems to rankle cultural commentators, whose objections range from the aesthetic to the moral. While some are simply repulsed by the idea of watching the consumption of mass amounts of heavily processed meat, others go further to say that eating contests signify – or, worse, glorify – an unhealthy cultural obsession with gluttony and excess. Then there are those who believe that competitive eating is a waste of time and resources, that we’d all be better off if the contests were banned and the hot dogs given to orphans. Finally, there are those keeping a watchful eye on declining journalistic standards who protest that “Man Bites Hot Dog” just isn’t news.

Baloney. I can understand if someone doesn’t like the idea of watching others stuff their faces, but please don’t spoil the fun for everyone else. Eating contests predate the “obesity epidemic” in the U.S., and the best competitive eaters tend to be in pretty good shape, their success owing to big stomachs and superior technique, not inflated BMIs. Nathan’s, for its part, forbids the participation of minors in its contest, which should put to rest any reasonable concerns about harm to children.

The charge of wastefulness seems silly when one considers that, for the cost of a few hundred hot dogs, Nathan’s is able to buy millions of dollars worth of advertising. Gluttony, in my opinion, is a private, bi-weekly beluga caviar eating contest with one’s Yorkie, not a once-a-year hot-dog eating contest that is televised for the world to see.

As for the Times-bashers who bemoaned the fall of a once-great newspaper following its coverage of defending champ Takeru Kobayashi’s defeat at the jaws of Joey Chestnut: You’d have a point if the event were merely a corporate publicity stunt, like one of those car giveaways where the contestant who can stand on one foot the longest while playing “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on the bagpipes gets to drive off in a brand new convertible. But the Nathan's contest is a refereed, international competition with a long history, one that is widely perceived as a fair way to determine the world’s most prolific eater, and whose legitimacy grows each year as it attracts more interest from competitors, sponsors, and the media. At the very least, there are enough people who care about what happens to justify the light, pun-filled news coverage the contest now gets.

I should probably mention that I’ve never actually seen an eating contest, just a highlight or two (nor am I likely ever to participate in one, being the kind of person who carefully chews each bite of Jell-O twenty-four times before swallowing). But I understand what’s to like.

Most obviously, there are the improbable stars of the sport, who make for compelling theater. First there's Kobayashi, the little guy from Japan who, by all appearances, shouldn’t be able to eat more than five or six hot dogs, but who has ruled competitive eating for years. Then you’ve got the 105-pound Sonya Thomas, who once ate 65 eggs in 7 minutes (even Cool Hand Luke, a macho fictional character, took a full hour to eat 50). Finally, there’s Chestnut, the challenger from the U.S. who ended Kobayashi’s reign at the Nathan’s contest this 4th of July, while setting a new world record: 66 hot dogs and buns in 12 minutes.

But just as important to competitive eating’s appeal is the fact that at its foundation is a universal behavior: Everyone eats, and so everyone has had the requisite experience to appreciate – nay, marvel at – the gut-busting performances of these individuals (incidentally, that’s why plate spinning, for all its difficulty, will never reach as wide an audience). So let’s all just sit back, relax, and enjoy the show, safe in the knowledge we will never, ever be called upon to eat that much meat.

Author’s note: This piece was begun long ago, back when it was timely. Oh well.

A Spam Poet Remembered

2007-08-14T10:08:00.001-04:00

I was reading an article in The New Yorker the other day about the losing war on junk e-mail, when I was reminded of the time I looked forward to the writings of a spammer.

Early last year, over a period of a few weeks, I received 13 pitches for a product called “Spermamax.” The first arrived on Feb. 7, at 10:02 p.m., with the subject “Cum like a volcano with Spermamax.” Now, I don’t usually open emails advertising male potency drugs, but this one seemed different. Maybe it was the colorful volcano metaphor, or maybe it was the refreshingly direct product name – by comparison, the folks at Glaxo come across as cryptic and timid for “Levitra” – but whatever it was, I opened the email.

Be popular among chicks with the am0unt of your sperm. Try Spermamax. After you try Spermamax, she will be able to take a bath in your sperm. Spermamax improves your sperm integrity.

I chuckled, picturing a half-dozen beautiful women happily bathing in our Vesuvian hero’s seminal surfeit. The scene was absurd, the drug a solution in desperate search of a problem. For most women not named Jameson, a man’s output is something to be neutralized or contained, a mess to clean up, rather than something to seek out or rejoice in. Invent a drug called “Scheutinblanx” – then you might be on to something.

But it was the last line that convinced me of the author’s comic genius. Sperm integrity? Who writes that? What does it even mean? This was spam that made you think.

At first, I thought the product was a hoax, the email a straightforward satire of the erectile dysfunction industry. But a quick web search revealed that the product did indeed exist, which was enough to persuade me that whoever sent the email was hoping to make a buck or two off it. Still, I couldn’t help but feel that the author was winking at us.

Three days later, a second message arrived.

Subject: Spermamax is your key to amazing chicks.

Cum like a superman with Spermamax. Spermamax improves overall sperm production. To achieve something in your life, you need to have a child. If you have any problems with reproduction, Spermamax can help you.

What range! Did I catch a Nietzsche reference in there? And did the email really just invoke existential anxiety to sell a pill with the promise of symbolic immortality? Where would the author take us next?

Subject: With Spermamax you will need the whole towel instead of napkin to wipe off the results of your orgasm.

You worry of n0t having descendants, Spermamax can help you. Your mother ha$ @lways dreamed of having sweet grandkids but your fertility functions don’t let you make her dream come true. Don’t worry, Spermamax will make your mom happy. When you cum with Spermamax, your bed looks like a little island drowning in the ocean of your sperm.

Whoooaa there! Mom?! The Oedipal undercurrents, the incongruous juxtapositioning, the well-known fact that if you’re thinking about making mom’s dream come true while you’re having sex, then that right there is the source of your infertility – it was all too much. I began forwarding the Spermamax emails to friends, who, it turned out, had also been receiving them (but who, unlike me, had never thought to open them, or at least wouldn’t admit it). This was, of course, just what the spammer wanted, but I was happy to oblige, so long as the poetry kept, um, flowing. And flow it did, with lines like these:

If you cum with Sperm@max on July 4th, people will take it for the firework.

With our Spermamax your ejaculat1on w1Il remind you of bubbling fountains.

If you take Spermamax, women will spin around you like the planets spin around the Sun.

Part Madison Avenue, part dirty fortune cookie, our spammer blurred the distinction between sales pitch and self parody, poking fun at masculine insecurities while leveraging those same insecurities in an attempt to sell a cure.

Alas, it seems, the sales never materialized. Without warning or fanfare, the last Spermamax email arrived on April 5, at 3:37 p.m. The message was simple, the briefest of the bunch at only 10 words. It was also beautiful, in a way. I’ll leave you to ponder it.

Breath the air of life on your spermatozoids with Spermamax.

Desktop Backgrounds

2007-07-31T09:47:00.001-04:00

Yesterday I was driving back from upstate New York. It was dark and there was traffic. For lack of anything else to do, I figured I'd play around with long exposures (C was driving).

The results are pretty cool. I'm not going to pretend they're anything they're not... but they are really kick ass desktop backgrounds. For free! If someone asks "where'd you get that great background" all you need to say is "email PMG."

And many more...

Balancing the Equation

2007-07-30T00:20:00.001-04:00

It's true, the authoritarian streak ran strong in me when I first made my visits home from the east coast. Be it an untightened screw or our myriad drinking glass selection, I brought a college student's vitriol to bear on my poor family. But for a long time now I've learned to manage and curb my hang-ups, while still trying to mould LJ, my youngest brother, into a good little guy. Back from another one-week trip to California, I'd like to say I've dealt with it well. I did recycle or throw out a good thirty pounds of belongings from LJ's room, with his consent, and take him on a Target spree to impart a glimpse of my ostensibly philanthropic dream: order. But by combining hour-long study sessions with him before movies started, we developed a satisfying seven-day rhythm. But a week is not a lifetime, and in trying to be a part of family life and decisions, especially his, I'm still stymied by balancing the imperatives of getting along against those of getting things done.

What's most on my mind here is wanting to get LJ ready for eighth-grade algebra. He struggled with math all of last year--hitting a wall one year before I did--and has a lot to learn before September. It's important to me because I want him to develop character, achieve success, and not have teachers and our parents mad at him all the time. I've worked with him before, however, and at the first sight of an F, all my composure went out the window; despite both my explicit intentions and how I treat everyone else in this world, I was always within one piece of bad news of blowing up. I could never work out a consistent plan with my parents and, despite the handicap of his birth order, LJ was every bit the car salesman to my rube in convincing me how, given this and that, his struggles were understandable and no one's fault really. At some level, he knows my guilt over my ham-handed old self--at least I do--and, like a pendulum, I turn from guilt-ridden conflict to hands-off futility. Are next year's prospects any better?

I'm across the country now, which makes some of this harder. However, I know a lot better than I ever did that if I'm going to be of any help to LJ, I've got to deal head on with the brother/parent line I've blurred as soon as school got hard for him. It might've occurred to you a lot sooner than it did to me to ask why I act like this is my project, and mine alone. It's no doubt occurred to LJ, too, who receives this on-and-off again campaign as a top-down imposition. But more to the point, where are my parents? In part, the answer is that they're right there and yet I don't do them the courtesy of going to them first about how to help him through this. Another part, though, is that they don't seem to be as distressed as I am by this problem. They've talked about his struggles in language of traits and individual character--in short, he's lazy or in a phase he'll eventually get out of--but never in ways that make them do things differently. Whereas I'm alternately plagued by feelings of brutish outrage and passive aggressive silence, they seem to me to be resigned to inaction. (And cue R, the incensed dictator who doesn't get why people won't just let him help them.) As for LJ, my parents and I have got some talking to do with him about something that will need to be a long-term plan; if he, I, and the rest of the family are to see this through, then we may as well talk and listen about why the effort's worth it.

Can a person learn algebra? Sure. Most of the time, you can get unstuck by taking a step back, talking your way through, and picking a place to start. If that doesn't work, you can always take a break and start over. And if that breakthrough insight never comes and you've still a problem you can't figure out, then reach out and ask for some help.

The Scratching of My Finger

2007-07-29T13:21:00.001-04:00

“Oh my, what happened to your poor finger?”

It’s the question that’s been asked again and again this past week. I should have crafted a good lie by now, one that would allow me to escape from casual interactions with a modicum of dignity. A lie like this one:

“Ha ha, this? I was checking in on the old V8, which had been acting up lately, and the intake valves leading to the carburetor didn’t look right, you know, so I switched the ramekin-piston to ON in order to get a better feel for the fuel-injection compressor situation. Well anyway, to make a long story short, the serpentine belt attached to the head gasket of the catalytic converter came loose, and then – with my finger stuck right there in the middle of the pump spigot – the whole fucker blew up!”

Or this one:

“Australian rules – crikey, more like ‘no rules’! Neville was barreling down the pitch, see, and ‘e’d made it past all the defenders but me, so I rushed him and dove head-first, like this see, to try and get a piece of the ball, maybe knock ‘em down to a behind, but ‘e knew what I was up to, so he said forget about the bloody football and just went straight for me head! I saw that and put me 'and out to block his foot, and got me finger kicked in!

Or even this:

“What you need to understand about wild dogs is that when they really want something, they won’t let go until they get it. I’m just lucky Doc was able to reattach what he did…”

But the thing with accidents is that you don't choose them; they choose you. Here’s what really happened: We were entertaining guests, dinner had just ended, and I thought it might be nice if I filled a pitcher with ice water for the table. Maybe put some lemon slices in it. So I excused myself and went to the kitchen. The problem was that we keep all the pitchers way up above the cabinets, near the ceiling. (And I'm 5'8". When measured during the summer. In the morning, lying in bed. With shoes on.) Rather than use the step stool, which I had passed on the way to the kitchen, my not-completely-sober solution was to fish for a pitcher with the rubber end of a spatula. I used this method to successfully move the pitcher a couple inches forward, within the reach of my right hand. But just as I brought the pitcher down, a blue vase that I hadn’t seen, but which must have been right next to the pitcher, fell from on high, smashing into the index finger of my left hand on its way to the floor, where it shattered.

This caused a minor ripple in the dinner party.

“Ooooooowwwww! Christ! Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh!”

“Are you ok in there??”

“Aaaaaaaaaahhhh. Oooooooooohhh. Yeah. Owowowowow. I’m fi – oooooohhhh.”

The situation was smoothed over by my quick-thinking roommates, who, within a minute, had swept up the glass, put an ice pack in my hands, and told me to quiet down already. The finger was purple and swollen, and a bit of blood trickled down the side, but with a little cleaning and a well-placed towel I was soon able to rejoin the party. Still, I was in pain, and when our friends from Colombia opened a bottle of Aguardiente, I eagerly downed 5 or 6 shots. Then I passed out for the night.

* * *

The following evening, after a day spent whinging about my finger to anyone who would listen (“I can’t bend it”; “It hurts to pick up cups”; “How am I supposed to floss with this hand?”; “Is this gangrene?”), I was all but ordered to go see someone at my school’s health center.

“I wish you had come here sooner,” the nurse practitioner said gravely, turning over my hand in hers. “It could be nothing. But it looks like there might be a broken bone in your finger, and from the swelling and the cut on the side it could very well be infected. And the combination of those two things – the broken bone and the infection – would be really, really bad. Very bad…” Her voice trailed off. “Alright? Alright! I’m just going to finish up some paperwork, and you’ll be all set to go to the hospital!”

In the waiting area of the Brigham and Women’s emergency room, I was surrounded by people who were older, sicker, and presumably less well-insured. So while I continued to complain about my injury to S (who was kind enough to accompany me to the hospital, but who must have begun to regret her decision by then), I did so in a whisper.

After half an hour my name was called, and I walked over to the triage room, where I was seen by a Braffish-looking young man in scrubs. As he hooked me up to a heart rate monitor, he asked how the accident had happened. I mumbled something about a spatula and a vase. He frowned, so I offered a bit more, this time trying to make the injury sound more severe, more worthy of medical attention. “It was a quite heavy vase. Very unexpected, too, its falling.”

“I see. How much pain are you in, on a scale from 1 to 10, where 10 is the worst pain you can imagine?”

I thought about all the people who had passed through that room. The knife wounds, the hemorrhages, the gross and cringeworthy accident cases. “Um, about a 1, I guess.”

“Why was it that you came here?”

“My doctor – she, um, thought the finger might be infected.”

“That’s not infected.”

“Oh,” I said, at first relieved but then defensive. “But it still hurts when I try to pick up cups.”

Maybe two hours later, after being seen by a radiologist, a hand specialist, and assorted other hospital workers (one of whom, in the course of a survey about cancer risk factors, asked me if I had, or had ever had, cervical cancer), the initial triage diagnosis was confirmed: the finger was neither infected nor broken, and I could go home as soon as the finger was splinted.

While the nurse taped my finger to a splint, he told me that I should try to keep it pointed upright as much as possible, to prevent the swelling from cutting off circulation to the fingertip, which would be really, really bad. Very bad. Wishing to avoid this fate, I’ve followed his orders, keeping my finger pointing towards the sky for much of the day, as though permanently hailing a cab or signaling a waiter. I think this has helped with the healing, but it’s also led to a series of miscommunications:

“Yes? You were going to say something?”

“What?”

“A brilliant insight, perhaps?”

“Oh, sorry. I was just keeping my finger elevated.”

And:

“What’s that? You’re #1?”

Sometimes in the course of a conversation, I’ll relax my left forearm such that it hangs perpendicular to my body, as though resting in a sling. But this just adds to the confusion, drawing the attention of the person with whom I’m speaking to wherever I appear to be pointing, somewhere off to my right. Usually, nothing of much significance is there, and the distraction is minimal. But a couple days ago, I realized afterward that I had spent the better part of an hour pointing out the breasts of the woman next to me.

I suppose that, for sheer rudeness, there are worse fingers to have in a splint. But to lose the communicative power of the index finger – or, in my case, to not be able to turn it off, to have its attention-grabbing spotlight always shining on something or someone – is far more disruptive. It is with this finger that we point out what we desire or fear, and which aspects of the world we wish to share with others. It is a finger with a grammar all its own: held high, it is a symbol of triumph, but held low, with a slight wag, it sends a swift message of rebuke; pointed at people, the finger can beckon them near or send a warning, depending on whether it is then flexed or jerked; touched to one’s lips, the finger is a plea for silence, but waved in the air, it is a call for cheer. Above all other digits – including that most hallowed one of all, the opposable thumb – the index finger is what makes us human, or, more precisely, it is through this finger that our humanity is most clearly expressed.

At least I’m a righty.

Illustration by C. Beck

Bad Hero

2007-07-19T15:14:00.000-04:00

Whole Foods Executive Used Alias

Using the pseudonym Rahodeb – a variation of Deborah, his wife’s name – Mr. Mackey typed out more than 1,100 entries on Yahoo Finance’s bulletin board over a seven-year period, championing his company’s stock and occasionally blasting a rival, Wild Oats Markets.... At the same time, he wrote glowingly and anonymously of John Mackey. “I like Mackey’s haircut. I think he looks cute!” Rahodeb wrote on April 28, 2000. “You must not patronize any of WFMI’s stores,” the writer continued, using Whole Food’s stock symbol. “Tatoos, piercings, unusual dress and interesting haircuts are everywhere in the stores. In comparison, Mackey looks like a model for Brooks Brothers!”

-The New York Times

WHOLE FOODS VALUATION 12-Jan-05 9:03 p.m.
by sewer_of_wildoats

Can someone explain to me how a company growing at maybe 20% a year deserves a P/E of almost 80? Seems to me that Whole Foods stock is ridiculously overvalued. All those analysts with buy ratings should be rounded up and summarily beaten silly with a Niman Ranch pork tenderloin.

Re: WHOLE FOODS VALUATION 13-Jan-05 12:01 a.m.
by rahodeb

You raise an excellent point, Sewer (love the handle!). All I can say is two words: John Mackey. John is like Doc Brown, SpongeBob SquarePants, Lennon-McCartney, and The Rock rolled into one person. He’s like Batman without the moodiness, Superman without the cape (but don’t you think John would look totally cute in a cape? me too!), and Spiderman if Spiderman was waaayy better looking than that kid from “Pleasantville” (j/k, Tobey!). Maybe they should cast Mackey in the next Spiderman movie! I’d pay to see that!! And I know quite a few ladies who would, too, lol! ;)

So if you want to know how The Street comes up with WFMI’s sky-hi valuation, look no further than the Mack-Attack and his BILLION-dollar smile!

Re: Re: WHOLE FOODS VALUATION 13-Jan-05 8:30 a.m.
by sewer_of_wildoats

Are you John Mackey?

Re: Re: Re: WHOLE FOODS VALUATION 13-Jan-05 9:05 a.m.
by rahodeb

Ha! I wish! Good one, Sewer. This board needs more people with a sense of humor like yours.

Re: Re: Re: Re: WHOLE FOODS VALUATION 13-Jan-05 9:10 a.m.
by sewer_of_wildoats

No, seriously: Are you John Mackey? I think shareholders should know if their CEO is spending all his time posting on a stupid message board while the company is facing the toughest challenges in its history.

ORGANICS VS. SUSTAINABILITY 7-Jun-06 4:21 p.m.
by wholepaycheck33

I was at a Whole Foods the other day (a once-a-year trip, it’s so friggin expensive) and I saw they were selling “organic” asparagus flown in all the way from… Argentina. I don’t know about you, but this strikes me as going against one of the core values of organic farming: sustainability. Do the planet a favor by boycotting Whole Foods and going to your local farmers market instead. They need your money more than that freakshow Mackey anyway.

Re: ORGANICS VS. SUSTAINABILITY 7-Jun-06 4:57 p.m.
by rahodeb

Whoooaaa there, wholepaycheck! In what world does John Mackey qualify as a “freakshow”? Backwards World? Mackey’s about as solid a guy as anyone I’ve ever known. Give him a chance!

Re: Re: ORGANICS VS. SUSTAINABILITY 7-Jun-06 7:05 p.m.
by wholepaycheck33

Forget Mackey, that’s not even what I was talking about. I’m talking about how it’s not ok to fly in produce from another continent and then wrap it in the label of organic goodness. Have you even been to a Whole Foods? Do you have ANY idea what I’m talking about?? Get a job, get a life, and stop wasting this board’s time.

Re: Re: Re: ORGANICS VS. SUSTAINABILITY 7-Jun-06 7:07 p.m.
by rahodeb

I don’t know what you have against Mackey, but it’s clear you’ve never met the guy. I’m placing you on ignore. Good-bye!

COMPETITION FROM WAL-MART 15-Jul-06 12:11 p.m.
by organickalekyle

Any thoughts on how wal-mart’s push into organics is going to affect whole foods? Game-changer, or are the two chains selling to two totally different markets? i don’t really get why you’d pay 3x what you’d pay at walmart for the same thing. Just my opinion!

Re: COMPETITION FROM WAL-MART 15-Jul-06 1:20 p.m.
by rahodeb

Hey, Kyle. Let’s just say you’d never catch John Mackey inside a Wal-Mart!

Can you believe, btw, that Katie Holmes is married to Tom Cruise? Do you think she knows who John is? Probably not, cuz if she did, she’d be like, “Tom who?”

Which do you think sounds better: JohnKat or HolmesMack? I can’t decide…

Re: Re: COMPETITION FROM WAL-MART 15-Jul-06 3:19 p.m.
by organickalekyle

Anyone else just a little creeped out by rahodeb’s posts these days?

Re: Re: Re: COMPETITION FROM WAL-MART 15-Jul-06 3:20 p.m.
by rahodeb

Wait… what’s that sound? Oh, that’s the silence of another Whole Foods basher placed on ignore! See ya later, Kylegator!

Re: Re: Re: Re: COMPETITION FROM WAL-MART 15-Jul-06 3:40 p.m.
by organickalekyle81

Wanker.

Learning from AllofMP3.com

2007-07-04T12:11:00.001-04:00

It appears that the popular Russian music site, AllofMP3.com, is no more, or has moved, or never existed at all. One day it was with us, the next it wasn’t, banished from the web without a trace. Somebody check Siberia.

I’m not here to mourn its demise, which was inevitable and probably for the best. Though perhaps technically legal due to a quirk in Russian copyright law, AllofMP3.com, which sold albums for a tiny fraction of what iTunes charges, clearly operated outside the accepted bounds of the music industry, U.S. intellectual property legislation, and decent people everywhere. As far as I can tell, no artist received a cent from the sale of music on AllofMP3.com, and that’s just plain wrong.

But to write-off AllofMP3.com as simply a rogue business whose success owed to shadowy practices and undercutting of the competition would be a mistake. There’s a lesson to be learned here, one that could benefit nearly everyone whose life is touched by digital music – online vendors, record labels, artists, and consumers: The standard price of most music is far too high.

Over the past two years, I was a frequent customer of AllofMP3.com. The reason I don’t feel so bad about this is also at the heart of what I think is wrong with the industry’s pricing: I wouldn’t have purchased most of what I did had it not been so cheap. iTunes' flat $10 price tag for albums is, with the exception of the latest releases by my favorite artists, too high for me, which has discouraged me from exploring unknown music through its store. In contrast, AllofMP3.com, by offering albums in the tantalizingly low $1-$2 range, enticed me to buy a couple hundred old or unfamiliar albums that I wouldn't have otherwise considered. The little purchases added up, gaining momentum as I discovered new bands that I liked, and in the end I spent an order of magnitude more than I would have had iTunes been the only game in town. The general principle I seem to have stumbled upon is that when prices are low, people spend much more on music (and are less likely to turn to piracy). In a digital world where the marginal costs of distributing music are low, when people spend more, industry profits soar. What's not to like?

I’m not necessarily arguing for $2 albums, but I would like to see iTunes scrap their flat-rate pricing, which might have made sense as a transparent way to introduce consumers to the idea of paying for digital music, but which has outlived its usefulness (I’m not alone on this: a recent Times article quoted the chairman of Warner Music as saying, “we believe that not every song, not every artist, not every album, is created equal”). First, pricing should be, to some extent, market-driven: more popular albums should cost more than less popular albums. When everything is $10, everyone loses: Popular bands like U2 that could charge more for a new release can’t, and relatively obscure bands like Spoon have trouble selling their back catalogues; consumers, meanwhile, end up with smallish music collections that are skewed toward the popular and recent.

But tying prices to popularity is just a start. Online music sellers also need to think about ways to price discriminate based on an individual’s ability to pay and enthusiasm for the music. Discriminating on ability to pay is tricky, but offering discounts to students (verified by a “.edu” email address) would be one way to sell music cheaply to those without much income, and it would have the added benefit of building a young customer base.

Discriminating based on enthusiasm is important because although most people would pay more for a U2 album than a Spoon album, the opposite might be true of a Spoon fan. In a perfect world, individuals would pay more for albums they want more, and less for albums they want less. In our imperfect world, there are a few ways to approximate this ideal. One is to have prices decay steeply over time: An album might cost $12 the first week of its release, $10 the month after, $8 the rest of the year, and so forth, until it eventually settles down to a price related to its popularity. This way, a record label would be able to cash in on the enthusiasm of a Spoon fan who is gaga about the release of “Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga,” while not discouraging a U2 fan from giving the album a try once the price came down. A similar idea is to give increasingly attractive promotions to frequent customers, which would spur them to keep buying music even after their most desired albums have been purchased. Another way to sell music for different prices to different people is to offer the same album at differing levels of quality and special features. A hardcore Spoon fan might shell out $15 for a package that includes a CD-quality album, concert footage, and an interview with the band, while the rest of us would be happy to buy a no-frills 128-kbs album for, say, $5.

iTunes seems to be experimenting with this last idea, but so far they have only increased prices for higher quality music without decreasing prices for lower quality. This step backward points to the root of the industry’s pricing problems: iTunes’ near-monopoly on online music sales, which has allowed Apple to dictate prices, sometimes in the face of protests from the labels. It’s unfortunate, but until other legitimate vendors can break iTunes’ grip, don't expect to see any sub-$10 albums.

When music sellers do finally adopt flexible and multi-level pricing, with all but the newest, most popular, and highest quality music priced far below what it goes for now, the world will be a more profitable place for the music industry, and a more musically varied place for listeners. And we’ll have AllofMP3.com to thank for showing us the way.

Best!

2007-07-04T00:48:00.000-04:00

So I was reading a lifehacker article about email sign-offs. There didn't really seem to be any consensus so I think I'll stick with my "Best," (or if I'm in a mood "Peace," or "Word,").

It did kinda amuse me though when I think about how these things escalate. I mean, so I use "Best," to all my coworkers and people I only kinda know. Anything like "Sincerely" or "Kind Regards" just come off too formal. And the next logical step up the intimacy path is "Love," - which is totally out of the question. So I end up just enforcing it:

"All the best,"

But then that becomes standard so I take it up a notch:

"Truly all the best,"

What's next?

"I'd say it even if I didn't mean it but I really do in this case when I wish you all the best,"

"I bet that's what he says to all the girls."

What we have lost... in your innocence, child

2007-07-02T00:34:00.001-04:00

Yesterday my hard drive died.

I might have a couple interesting things to say about that. The first is that the event was marked not by how much I lost but by how little - kinda. Most of my work, of late, I've been uploading off the computer to my webserver. Not because I'm some responsible back-up person but rather because it's just easier to send people files with links in them rather than huge emails. Combine that with my commitment to google apps (notebook, calendar, iGoogle) and you've got some serious damage control.

Speaking of emails, I basically lost all of them. Which is kinda okay, I had too many... But it's funny - those little things really stick in my craw.

Like there were five or so unfilled requests for signed Yuri Gagarin photos. I'll never get those back and the people will think I just didn't care. And IM logs... so useful to have, now all gone.

The big point, I suppose, is how pissed I've been for two days. It's completely irrational - I'm still pissed - can't even sleep. I mean, I just explained how I lost almost nothing of real value and, in fact, losing 20,000+ emails is really liberating (I get a lot of email receipts when people do things online which I never read)... but god I feel like shit. I mean I should have backed up... of course... but who shouldn't? I mean there's like one or two people who do it regularly right? It's like returning blockbuster movies on time even though there's no fee... So it's not that...

I think it has a lot more to do with the way my computer had become, for better or worse, less of a tool and more of a three dimensional environment. There were places in it I could visit depending on my mood. It has OS X and XP both installed... they had their little differences, their peculiarities. I think I'll miss going back to those places. I mean, I'll reinstall of course but it'll never be the same... different desktop images, different file trees... different bookmarks (all of which I lost - I've already converted to google bookmarks to avoid that again). I know I'll learn to love the new computer but won't be the same. My old folder was called "IDF" maybe I'll go whole hog and call it "I Do Foundation" or maybe even "I Do Foundation Stuff" god... I don't even know.

Oh well... clean break... that's what I needed... thank god for my old workhorse Dell desktop that has been promoted from "machine that holds my mp3s" back to primary computer for the time being.

Son of a gun.

The Take-Out Paradox

2007-06-26T00:40:00.001-04:00

Recently I’ve noticed that more and more restaurants are offering their full menus for take-out. I’m not talking about your local fluorescent-lit falafel house, which has always derived much of its revenue from people who’d rather eat elsewhere, but instead high-end places like Legal Seafood and Greater Boston sushi temple Fugakyu. These are restaurants to which diners have traditionally flocked for their ambience as much as their food.

This development, in itself, isn’t surprising. Sometimes people want restaurant food without the restaurant, and catering to these people is a smart way to boost business, especially since the number of parties that can be seated on a given night is relatively fixed. What puzzles me is that these restaurants charge the same price for take-out orders as they do for dine-in.

From the customer’s perspective, it would seem that the experience of dining in an elegant room for a couple hours while one’s needs are met by attentive servers should command some premium over the wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am of take-out. In my opinion, the social benefits alone should justify a higher dine-in cost: Wooing dates and business partners is best done in a classy restaurant, not on a futon littered with cardboard take-out boxes.

From the business owner's point of view, charging different prices would seem to make sense as well. When prices are the same, profit margins for take-out must be considerably greater, as the costs needed to operate the dining room (rent, electricity, wait staff) do not apply. Higher margins may sound good for a restaurant, but they’re a sure sign that money is being left on the table. By reducing the prices for take-out orders, a restaurant could increase sales while keeping margins at or above those of its dine-in business, thereby increasing total profit. A price-cutting take-out operation would likely cannibalize some of a restaurant’s own dine-in sales, but this wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing if converting a dine-in customer into a take-out customer added to the bottom line.

Then are restaurateurs behaving irrationally? It has been suggested that, contrary to what I’ve assumed, margins might actually be higher for dine-in orders than for take-out, since only the former include greatly marked-up liquor sales. But even if this is true, good restaurants that don’t have liquor licenses – an oxymoron, sure, but one that is common in Philadelphia – should cut prices on take-out orders, and I know of no restaurant, wet or dry, that does so.

So, Fugakyu: I’d like to pay your prices, but my wallet’s kinda empty. But, you see, I don’t need your tatami mats and warm towels, your fountains, boats, and bamboo groves. All I want is your fish. Can’t we work something out?

Second Place

2007-06-23T14:40:00.000-04:00

Research Finds Firstborns Gain the Higher I.Q.

The eldest children in families tend to develop higher I.Q.’s than their siblings, researchers are reporting today, in a large study that could settle more than a half-century of scientific debate about the relationship between I.Q. and birth order.

The average difference in I.Q. was slight – three points higher in the eldest child than in the closest sibling – but significant, the researchers said.

-The New York Times

I’ve always suspected that I was smarter than my younger brother; now I have scientific proof. To those without siblings, three I.Q. points may not sound like much, but it shows up every day in the little things.

Take, for instance, Street Fighter II for the Sega Genesis. When we rented the game it didn’t come with an instruction booklet, so we each had to figure out how to play on our own. After an hour or so of my brother winning nearly all of our fights, I noticed he was mashing way more buttons on his controller than I was on mine, and I asked him how, exactly, he thought one made E. Honda perform his special move, the Hundred Hand Slap. “You gotta keep pressing A, B, and C together really quickly,” he said. “Wrong!” I replied, “You only need to press one of them really quickly – pressing all of them doesn’t make a bit of difference. Did you ever think to press just one?” Of course he hadn’t! And that’s precisely the kind of dimness one would expect from a boy mentally handicapped by his birth order. Mash away, sweet fool!

Then there was that time he caught the chicken pox from me. One afternoon I entered the living room and saw him lying on the couch, scratching away at the red bumps all over his arms and chest. “Stop that at once!” I shouted, “What do you think you’re doing?!”

“I’m itching my chicken pox,” he said.

I, the wise older brother, seized upon the moment to teach him an important lesson. “Oh really? You do know that one doesn’t itch one’s chicken pox, don’t you? No, one scratches one’s chicken pox in order to get rid of the itch. You’ve got it all backwards.” He certainly had! A couple years my junior and almost totally dyslexic! “From now on,” I said as I left the room, “I want you to work on scratching your itches.”

The sad truth is that the I.Q. gap was evident even in our earliest years. While I was pedaling around the kitchen on a three-wheel bike, making intricate figure-eight patterns on the linoleum floor, my brother was walking with a pronounced wobble in his gait, like a bar patron who’s had a few too many – an impression heightened by the great difficulty he had when executing fine motor movements, and by the drool that always clung to his chin. While I was reading early Seuss, my brother was finding even the rudiments of speech a challenge, often struggling to form a single comprehensible utterance. “Ba,” I had to remind him repeatedly, is a nonsense syllable. And while I showed signs of great promise at preschool, my brother seemed impervious to teaching of any sort. He had trouble maintaining eye contact when you were speaking to him, his attention often drawn to a flicker of light on the wall or a bee just outside the window. What he thought he could learn from a bee that he couldn’t learn from me – a firstborn! – I’ll never know.

his/her post

2007-06-22T02:25:00.000-04:00

English needs a full set of gender non-specific pronouns. I'm sick of typing him/her, or thinking of creative ways to avoid using gender bound pronouns in my letters. I know the male gendered pronouns used to be default for either sex, but that just doesn't work anymore (and don't point out I mixed gender and sex in the above sentence. I know, but it's late and I'm not backspacing! And yes, I'm aware of the hypocrisy. But now to change it I'd have to delete the past 3 parenthetical sentences, which would really be a shame.).

And I don't see our cultural etiquettes returning to a state where we're not conscious of the gender(s) of the audience we're addressing. Plus, the general quest to avoid using the slash spliced pronoun often leads to using them or they for their gender neutrality, even when the antecedent is singular. Arggh!

So, we've already got plural gender neutrals. Any thoughts for the singular pronouns?

CAPS LOCK

2007-06-20T19:58:00.000-04:00

Well there's been a bit of silence around here so I think I'll stir the pot. What in Hades is the "caps lock" button doing taking up so much great real estate on the keyboard? (two keys wide? right between Tab and Shift - two of the most useful keys ever?)

Fact: I've never used the "caps lock" button on purpose. Fact: I'm at a computer an average of 10 hours a day. Fact: I've had countless problems with the caps lock being ACCIDENTALLY DEPRESSED... SPECIFICALLY FOR *ahem* passwords and other hidden text. Fact: When I receive an email/online form submission that's all in caps I automatically hate the person who sent it.

Please... I feel this is easy to agree with but will someone please tell me how I'm wrong. Was there ever a significant use for the caps lock button? Am I missing something? I must be, musent I? musent? musen't?

The Evolution of Funny

2007-06-11T18:58:00.001-04:00

If I were to update the American Film Institute’s 100 Years, 100 Laughs list, it would be out with the old, in with the new. Gone would be the abysmally unfunny “Blazing Saddles” (#6) and “It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World” (#40), and in their place, near the top of the list, would be 2006’s “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan” and 2007’s “Knocked Up.” Even 2006’s “Little Miss Sunshine” and 2007’s “Hot Fuzz” would likely make my top ten, giving me four top tens in the past year alone. Maybe I’m biased, a partisan of my time and place in the history of comedy, or amnesic, viewing each new film as though it had invented witty banter and the sex joke. But if you ask me, movies these days are just funnier.

As part of their guidance to critics on what to consider when ranking the funniest movies of the last century, the AFI stressed that movies should contain “laughs that echo across time” – an acknowledgment that what one era finds hilarious might, in a different era, play to a silent theater. Because culture shapes what writers and audiences find funny, contemporary comedies from one’s own society tend to be particularly good at tickling the funny bone (for evidence, consider how England, the United States, Germany, and France all believe that their version of the television show “The Office” is superior). In contrast, dramas stand the tests of time and translation far better than their comedic counterparts, and it would be harder to argue with the AFI’s list of the greatest American films (“Citizen Kane,” “Casablanca,” and “The Godfather” are 1, 2, and 3).

So is my preference for contemporary comedies simply a matter of cultural relativism? I don’t think so. Some things truly get better over time – an example from film being special effects. Realistic T-Rexes and “bullet time” may not, on the surface, have much in common with comedy, but both benefit from a ratcheting upward that occurs when each generation builds upon what the previous has accomplished. At the same time, audiences demand that filmmakers find new ways to thrill or amuse, which provides a financial incentive that drives innovation. The quality of dramatic pictures may improve over time for similar reasons, but dramas are reined in to a greater extent by the requirements of believability, realism, and universality. Effects-laden flicks and comedies, on the other hand, are limited more by their creators' – and audiences' – imagination and cleverness, which expand as the years go by in a kind of cinematic Flynn Effect. As a result, today it takes more than clay dinosaurs and pies in the face to move an audience.

There’s a throwaway scene in “Knocked Up” that illustrates the point. In decades past, a good fart joke took the following form: a boorish man (bumpkin, frat boy, unfrozen caveman, etc.) lets one rip in the presence of well-mannered company (a debutante on a first date, a gathering of Joyce scholars, the Queen Mother). Sometimes this release is unintentional (“Eew, gross, how impolite of the caveman!”), but other times it is designed to puncture the sanctimony of the farter’s company (“Take that, Queen Mother!”). (More recently, in what could be seen as either a victory or a setback for feminism, the farting has been done by women, modern-day Celia’s whose basic bodily functions are funny precisely because they aren’t supposed to happen.)

But Judd Apatow and his terrific cast take the joke to a new level. The main character, Ben (Seth Rogan), arrives at the porch of his house to gather his endearingly slacker roomies for a road trip to Vegas. When the door opens, Ben is greeted by an unexpected sight: gone is the playful wisecracking and ribbing that typically fills the house; in its place is a somber mood, his friends' faces downcast with shame and remorse. Why so glum? As the friends slowly, reluctantly reveal, during the night one of the characters “bare-ass farted” on the pillow of another of the characters, who in turn did the same to the pillow of another of the characters… and so forth, until the circle was complete. All awoke in the morning to severe cases of pink eye. There will be no Vegas for them; instead, they will spend the day inside, thinking about what they’ve done, in an uncharacteristic (and completely charming) act of self-punishment.

The scene is particularly funny because none of the characters finds the situation funny, because the outrageous sequence of events is described in perfect deadpan rather than shown onscreen. The scene also works because it focuses on the consequences of irresponsible actions, mirroring the film’s broader plot, and it sets up not one but two punch lines. Once you’ve seen it, every other fart joke seems primitive.

What does the future hold? I believe that comedy is advanced by new talent, not old talent finding new ways to amuse. In this way, it is like mathematics, where the biggest advances are often made by those who are still in the early stages of their careers. Woody Allen, for example, was at the top of his game in the 1970s when he made “Annie Hall,” and Christopher Guest peaked in the 1980s with “This is Spinal Tap.” Both have continued to make good comedies, but neither has progressed much beyond the genius on display in those earlier works. It’s a fair bet that the funniest scripts of the 2020s will be penned not by Apatow or Sacha Baron Cohen, but by those who grew up watching them.

Forbidden Fruit

2007-06-02T20:41:00.001-04:00

Opponents of all things homosexual will sometimes point out that God created Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden – not Adam and Steve. Let’s ignore for the moment that the Bible isn’t the literal word of God, that God, in any case, does not exist, and that homosexuality is as much a part of nature as pinecones or photosynthesis. No, what is most problematic about their argument from Creation is its erroneous claim that Adam’s partner was a woman.

The truth is laid bare on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Looking at Michelangelo’s “Fall and Expulsion of Adam and Eve,” there’s no escaping the impression – those hulking arms, those tree-trunk legs, that strong jawline – that she is actually a he. If seeing “Eve” a mere head turn away from Adam’s “rib” (below, left) doesn't cause a blushing James Dobson to reach for a can of spray paint, I don’t know what will.

This can mean only one thing: a coordinated world-wide cover-up. For the past several centuries, the Roman Catholic Church has suppressed knowledge that the First Couple was a couple of dudes. Still, it’s surprising how transparent, how amateur the forgery is. I’m sorry, but painting on a few tresses, adding an afterthought of breasts, and rubbing out the manbits does not a woman make. Nor, for that matter, does a rib. So if someone from the Vatican is reading: Please, the next time you attempt a global conspiracy involving the female form, do your homework first.

Casting Pennies into the Fountain of Youth

2007-05-29T02:29:00.001-04:00

I don’t have much money, so what I do have I tend to invest somewhat conservatively, usually in market-tracking index funds and shares of big companies that will likely be around forever. But when Sirtris Pharmaceuticals, a young biotech company with no products for sale and $34 million of debt (and mounting) announced plans to go public, I stashed away money to buy a few shares.

Calorie restriction, a diet low in calories but high in other nutrients, improves the health and extends the lifespan – sometimes by as much as 50 percent – of a variety of organisms, including roundworms and rats. Whether this holds for humans isn’t yet known, but what is clear is that most people would have a difficult time following a calorie-restricted diet, even if highly motivated to do so. The Holy Grail, then, would be a pill that mimics the effects of calorie restriction without requiring a change in diet. That’s just what Sirtris is trying to develop.

Before the FDA will consider a drug for approval, a company must demonstrate its effectiveness at treating a recognized disease. Aging is not considered a disease, and so, ironically, a pill that generally allows people to live longer, healthier lives would not be eligible for approval. Sirtris, obviously aware of this obstacle, has begun clinical trials of its leading drug candidate, SIRT501, in patients with Type II diabetes. There’s good money to be made in novel treatments for diabetes; annual sales top $1 billion for the biggest blockbusters. But let’s not kid ourselves: If SIRT501 is eventually approved, the real money will come from off-label use. There’s already hope that this chemical, a potent form of a naturally-occurring substance in red wine, will be a panacea for patients suffering from cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, and more. Most significantly, if the drug is found to slow aging in humans, baby boomers in every state of health will soon be asking their doctors if 501 is right for them.

Leaving aside the ethical concerns raised by an anti-aging pill (my opinion is that extending life, in itself, isn’t a bad thing, but the sharpening of societal disparities that would likely result is), there are plenty of reasons for skepticism. The most reflexive and, I think, worst reason is this: For thousands of years, people have been fruitlessly searching for a fountain of youth, so why should they succeed now? The short answer is that people are smarter now and have a much better idea where to look. Given that it is possible to slow aging in other animals, a similar breakthrough in humans can’t be too far away. It may not come from Sirtris, but come it will.

A more damning criticism is that there isn’t much known about the side-effects of mimicking calorie restriction. A common theory for why reducing calories slows down aging is that, in periods of famine, organisms kick into a self-preservation mode that allows them to survive long enough to reproduce in a time of plenty. But why not always live longer? Clearly, there must be some trade-off, such that, under ordinary circumstances, it’s optimal not to live to a Methuselahn age. It’s possible the cost of living so long is borne solely by the organism’s offspring – with mom and dad in the way, there are fewer resources available for the kids – but this seems unlikely. Look for a host of side-effects (hypoglycemia? muscle atrophy? reproductive problems?) when the results of long-term clinical studies are released.

While all this gets sorted out, I’ll be bracing for the rollercoaster ride that comes with owning shares of a small-cap biotech company whose main asset is little more than a dream. The reality is that a decade from now the company could be worth billions or, more likely, nothing. Even if I lose everything, however, I’m confident I’ll live long enough to make it all back.

Which came first?

2007-05-24T12:34:00.001-04:00

It’s high time we retired the phrase “chicken-and-egg problem.” Ever since scientists discovered the genetic foundations of evolution, it’s been known that the first chicken had to have hatched from the first chicken egg, which must have been laid by an animal the average person wouldn’t quite call a chicken (but which almost certainly tasted just like one). Hence, in the age-old battle for primacy, the egg wins out.

To be fair, there are plenty of reasons besides scientific ignorance why the saying has persisted. First, there’s its evocative, koanesque quality. Contemplating an infinite regress of chickens, a hypnotic exercise, illustrates well the point that initial causality is difficult to determine when A can cause B and vice versa. Then, there’s the fact that the phrase has been around for so long it has acquired idiom status, such that it can be dropped into a conversation and understood without meditating on the life-cycle of poultry; after repeatedly hearing “chicken-and-egg problem” in appropriate contexts, even a space alien who has never seen a chicken or held the egg it produced (came from) would get the idea. After all, to compare the cold to a witch’s tit one needn’t have firsthand experience of the latter.

But aren’t we living a lie if we continue to use the phrase to signify a deep causal mystery when its own central riddle is long since solved? What kind of message does that send the kids?

I, for one, think we can do better, but not without serious effort – a kind of philological Manhattan Project. What we need is a new phrase alluding to a truly causally muddled state of affairs, preferably one with literary flair and good visuals. A promising place to start would be cases of coevolution, which are difficult or beside the point to untangle and have the added benefit of keeping the phrase in the biology family. To get things going, I ask you: Which came first…

…the hummingbird or the fuchsia? (Hummingbirds rely on the flowers of fuchsias for nectar, and fuchsias rely on hummingbirds for pollination; each is highly specialized – the birds with their long beaks and precision maneuvering, the flowers with their attractive red color and delicious but hard-to-reach nectar – to take advantage of this mutually beneficial relationship.)

…the crab or the snail? (Crabs eat snails, and an ancient arms race between predator and prey has pushed snails to develop ever-thicker shells for protection and crabs to develop ever-stronger claws to break these shells.)

…the wing or the feather? (Most birds have feathered wings exquisitely designed for flight; feathers and wings originally served purposes humbler than flight, but over time have developed together into perfect aerodynamic harmony, each needing the other to keep the bird aloft.)

Clearly, there’s still work to be done – “hummingbird-and-fuchsia problem,” for all its charm, doesn’t quite satisfy. It may take years before a suitable replacement emerges, and, once one is agreed upon, the transition will be hard for many of us. But, as they still say, you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.

If you want it...

2007-05-20T21:44:00.002-04:00

"Over the past year have you had sex in exchange for drugs? For yes press 1. For no press 9."

-9-

"Over the past year has anyone had sex with you in exchange for drugs? For yes press 1. For no press 9."

Rolling Stone's seemingly endless 40th Anniversary year culminated, one hopes, last month in a big glossy self-serving mega-issue with all the people vaguely important enough to warrant 40th anniversary nods but still willing to talk to Rolling Stone (and not dead). Really, in the end, it's interesting enough and sits well on the back of my toilet.

Anyway... the issue, not surprisingly, talks a lot about the sixties (specifically 1967 when RS was founded or something). Anyway... a lot of the articles talked about the Iraq war, in comparison to Vietnam, and all that stuff. Most importantly, it reminded me of this famous billboard paid for by John and Yoko in 1969 (the same billboard as anachronistically reconstructed in 1998):

America's distance (alienation?) from the current struggle has gotten a lot of press recently, specifically thanks to Waffa Bilal's "Shoot an Iraqi over the Internet" conceptual art experiment (article) (interview) (shoot an Iraqi). A lot of the talk around this has been the obvious point that the fact we're fighting a war can, if we so choose, have almost no effect on our day to day lives. I mean there's the deficit, the way we're treated in Europe, airline security... but you know - as the RS articles point out again and again - it's not like there's a draft or rationing or anything like that.

Of course, I'd be remiss to not mention the thousands of families across the country personally affected by the war - either having lost a loved one or knowing their loved one is in danger (a group of people very much not in my life (or, apprently, in the live of the people in Rolling Stone) but very real to much of America) .

Anyway... maybe you disagree but I'd say that in general this one's pretty easy for someone like me to ignore - if I wanted to. I know that most of the people I work with are pretty affected by the events but that's because they feel they need to be.

Which brings me back the billboard. I wasn't there, of course, but I get the impression that, as the Vietnam war kept on, there grew up the idea that there was a certain power in denying the war. Not just the legality or legitimacy of the war but the actuality of the war itself.

Now see, here's where I run into trouble. Yoko claims that her billboard meant, quite practically, that if no one wanted the war there wouldn't be one.

That makes sense and I think gets us halfway there. The idea that nothing other than humanity is causing the war... that every shot fired is based on human decisions and like all decisions they could be made otherwise - that's actually a relatively powerful notion to be reminded of especially when statements like "civil war in inevitable" keep cropping up. "Things cannot help but follow a predicated course of action", "things are out of our hands", etc.

That's good enough and encourages us that something can be done. But what about the possibility of denying the fact that there is even a war in the first place. I suppose there are a couple of ways to do that... (I hope)

I mean the first is what indexers call "splitting" - maybe, anyway - it's somewhat safe to say that war lumps a bunch of violent events together with the supposition that those events will continue unless there is a significant (political) decision to stop them... now see again I'm not sure if that's right... what about long term insurgencies like Palestine, for example, which we don't really call war? But what's actually the difference - clearly the idea that war needs to take place between nation states is bogus (civil wars, tribal warfare, revolutions)... and the whole "declaring" thing is silly - you don't hear it called the Vietnam Police Action.

No... I'm sticking with the working definition: war is "a series of violent events that require a powerful and distinct shift in order to come to an end."

So one possible way of denying the existence of war is to split those violent events up into sets of 1 (a bomb is planted, a prisoner is tortured, etc.). This is relatively plausible and eventually a war does begin to manifest itself as a series of personal decisions (albeit sanctioned by a political hierarchy). So you could say "There is no Second Iraq War; there are just a whole lot of violent events in that area to the point that it has built up a certain momentum and will not end without a large scale shift of policy."

But that gets us simply back to the idea that war will go away if everyone wants it. And I want to get something more out of this really long post....

I could take "splittings" antithesis - "lumping" (yes, I'm reading a book about indexing and those are the real terms, I think) - using "lumping" you could claim that there are no distinct wars... just an eternal struggle between people that sometimes we decide to give distinct names to (for convenience)... For example you could say that there is a constant struggle between the imperialist and his subjects. That that rests as a sort of "eternal struggle" and that the constant threat of that violence occasionally spikes in such a way that the world at large labels that spike a "war" or "revolution" and gives it a name. This notion also has a lot of value, perhaps... as it is far more inclusive of non-violent resistance, work slow-downs, artist protest, etc. into a so-called "significant" struggle. It also helps minimize the "evil man" theory of war and contextualizes violence in order to, perhaps, increase empathy towards the actors.

But how does this stop people from dying? Without some phony crap like "a million wishes make a truth" (Gaiman's Dream of a Million Cats, or whatever it's called)...

Alright, I'll end tritely - if we can get people not to think of a war as just a thing but as 1) a thing 2) a series of violent events lumped together and 3) a spike of activity which is little more than the momentary expression of a larger conflict - simultaneously - then we might have something.

1) things can be evaluated in terms of their legality, morality, fiscal responsibility, urgency, etc.
2) series of decisions can be changed... if people are making each decision then we can convince people, one by one if we have to, to stop making those decisions and the war will end.
3) manifestations of larger conflicts can contextualize a war, help us see why the war happens, empathize with the actors, and potentially take steps towards larger issues

I urge and encourage feedback, refinement and vague hostility towards this exercise.

Those Who Cannot Remember the Past...

2007-05-19T11:20:00.001-04:00

"Analogies are NOT useful in the study of history."

This Monday, I begin the first of two summer online courses, and the professor believes it's important to make the preceding point succinctly clear in her Week One discussion instructions. Having just finished a classroom course where every review of (anonymously displayed) student writing began with, "What's wrong with this?", I think I'm right to want more sympathetic instruction.

I should say, perhaps, that I understand where WebProf is coming from. If someone emerges from a reading of colonial mistreatment of Native Americans with the moral, "They're just like the Nazis", then you've got a responsibility as a teacher to question them into a fuller, more considered judgment. That's what you do for a living. But if your assignment on the Civil War yields thirty conclusions that it was just like thirty homespun versions of Iraq, and discussion of the past keeps reverting to an obvious present, you may indeed want to yell, "Stop it!". I think she sees her blanket prohibition as a plug on the dam of a certain form of, at root, lazy engagement with history.

Unless she intends to actively police that order with reasoned, sympathetic language, then I think she's missing a big opportunity. If you can expect students to approach history with reliably recognizable strategies then you can plan for them and, if you think them shoddy, actually do something about it. In my English class this spring, we spent time on European-Native conflicts, and we put on display an amazingly oblivious display of finger pointing. The blindness and hypocrisy of European violence were key, class-wide criticisms. But, these failures were incomprehinsible, Nazi-style evils, not anyting we could see in ourselves. That we, too, were ideological beings with our own injustices and conflicts, did not figure in discussion. (It didn't help that our teacher's theory of rough draft help was performing the part of an F7 key). In their unelaborated forms, I think analogies to equally inscrutable evil didn't do much for our understanding. But I don't think you fix that by responding, "Please refer to Rule #6."

True, the rules are supplemented with links to style guides. And I've yet to see how she'll engage the inevitable reductions of the complex to the too-simple. But I've got my own Iraq analogy if she thinks that self-evident truths and making guides available flower into a critical student body.

What should really worry me actually, is not small point of curtness and all-caps breach of net-iquette. I intend to become a teacher, and soon. And the need to maintain order and leverage your authority in conflicts is a real, frustrating part of the job. I think she hopes to impart something about critical inquiry here, and hopefully she'll bring enough people as far along as you can in a five-week web class. But what am I gonna do when the rhetorical challenge is, "Fuck you." Working with adults, I can manage the drawbacks of my being exceedingly nice. What, however, will I do day-in-day-out with a band of disaffected youths who'd rather be getting high? That's Vietnam all over again.

Arcade Fire, Boston

2007-05-13T14:09:00.002-04:00

Arcade Fire’s 2004 album “Funeral” is my favorite of the decade. It opens with the shimmering piano of “Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels),” climaxes with the anthemic “Wake Up,” and somehow manages to express the entire range of human emotion in less than 50 minutes. Not bad for a debut LP. Add to this an excellent follow-up, “Neon Bible,” and a reputation for exciting live performances (which have earned the band praise from Davids Bowie and Byrne), and I was glad to pay the eBay markup to see their Boston show.

The Orpheum’s stage was filled with maybe two-dozen instruments, circular screens onto which images and video were projected (black mirrors?), and, of course, a giant neon bible. After a video of a frenzied preacher lady had ended, the band took the stage and opened with a thunderous “Black Mirror” that left my ears ringing. I had a couple pieces of gum in my pocket, and for a moment I considered wadding them up and placing them in my ears (it seemed everyone around me had gotten the memo to bring ear plugs). The message was clear: Arcade Fire, once an obscure French-Canadian group inclined toward introspection and the occasional yelp, was now a larger-than-life rock band.

The rest of the performance had the energy of a Pentecostal revival – exactly the feel the band was going for, with its pipe organ, hymns, and wild gesticulations. The violinist stomped and the drummers beat on everything in their way, as other members shouted out the choruses into megaphones. In return, the audience bounced, writhed, and shouted along with them. And, during the more up-tempo songs, the whole mezzanine shook.

But the most magical part of the show came when the stage was completely empty. The band had just finished the last song of their set, “Rebellion (Lies),” waving sheepishly as they walked off the stage to the roar of the crowd. The applause continued, but, from nowhere and everywhere, came a faint but beautiful sound. It was the violin part from the end of “Rebellion,” but there were no violins, only voices. The wordless song grew in strength as more people joined in, and I – a person who hasn’t sung in a church since childhood – added my voice. For a few minutes, we were the Arcade Fire. Then the band returned to the stage, dancing to our song, and played their first encore.

Putting the News on Notice

2007-05-05T10:56:00.001-04:00

I don't know if I've shared this here before, but I made a decision on election day last November to stop following political news. It was the kind of resolution you make in your head and, like revelatory delusions about working out or getting more done, was more about the decision episode than its follow-through. I had thought about a news boycott before and, possibly, enforced it for a day or two. This time, once the crew cut guy in Montana got his Senate seat, I turned off the news for good.

This first ocurred to me maybe three years ago when I was deep into news consumption, mostly NPR and friends' magazine subscriptions. I consumed news at all times of day, ignoring it and absorbing it like a media ether. Of itself, it did no real harm, just another way to live. But my connection to current event coverage was way out of proportion to my zero involvement with the public in any other aspect of my life--no protests, no letters to the editor, not even giving blood. Coupled with my disposition toward moderation and comfort with ambiguity, I was doubly damned as an armchair fence-sitter.* My initial thought was that radically changing these habits would prompt me into reflection and re-engagement in a satisfying way. Two years and one stint canvassing for John Kerry later, I still didn't know why the news was always on.

Fast forwarding to today, I still have an elementary grasp of my gripes with current eventing. The sense that it's conspicous consumption is still with me; I don't want to dress myself up with buzz for buzz's sake, and I think I did for a long time. It was like being a tv show super fan. That said, issues of fairness, rhetoric, and how to act in public are on my mind all the time; these are all present in the drama of national politics, but I can't get into it anymore. Though I know others get more out of it, it's very low-yield for me. The English course I'm taking has actually been a great angle into these kinds of questions, as has conversation that isn't dictated by a news schedule. And, though I still mess around on the internet more than I like, I'm happier in boycott land.

My immediate motivation for this post has faded away, but I think it's still obliquely relevant. In discussing stories in school, I've run into what different tools people bring to a question. No matter what the question, I bring a rather basic, undergraduate-humanities-major grab bag that I'd like to revisit. A random sampling includes the concepts of: narrative, discourse, instability, negotiation, self-reflexivity, historical conditioning, authenticity, etc... Well, if I'm gonna give classmates a hard time--internally, of course--for not questioning themselves enough, then its incumbent upon me to do it too, because having a regard for "self-doubt" and examing my ways of seeing are not the same thing. And that's the upshot here. Thoughts?

*In full discloure, my avowed even-keeled high horse competes with a lefty sensibility that was pretty sectarian when I still followed the parties.

The Enigmatologist

2007-04-29T13:58:00.001-04:00

Me: Sword, Juno, Gold! Omaha and Utah!
S: Huh?
Me: The Battle of Normandy beachheads. Don’t you see? That’s how he’s gonna get us!
S: Who?
Me: Will Shortz!
S: What are you talking about?
Me: I have this feeling that one of the crosswords will be World War II themed, and that that’ll be our downfall. I just want us to be prepared.
Me: Why are you looking at me like that?

That was in the morning, as we were getting ready to leave for the first-ever Harvard Crossword Puzzle Tournament. The event was organized by a current Harvard undergraduate who, at the age of 17, became the youngest person ever to have a Sunday Times crossword published. Shortz, Wordplay star, NPR Puzzle Master, and Times Crossword God, was going to be there, as were several other prominent crossword constructors. This wasn’t the national championship, but it was as close to it as an average solver like me might ever hope to get. So after downing a bowl of Puffins and two of coffee, I was determined to stuff as many factoids into my head as possible. Gladiator in arena consilium capit.

Working a puzzle with someone else is more fun than going it alone, and so S and I chose to enter the competition as a pair. We had a modest goal: defeat C and M, who were also entering as a pair. When we arrived at the tournament and learned that the organizers wouldn’t be providing pencils, S and I each produced a #2 from our pockets with the confidence of schoolchildren about to ace the SAT. C and M fumbled through their bags and pockets and came up empty. A propitious start.

There were three puzzles, the Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday Times crosswords for this upcoming week. We were given 20, 25, and 30 minutes, respectively, to solve each. We raced through the first puzzle, finishing with about 8 minutes left, placing us solidly in the middle of the pack (for reference, three-time defending national champ Tyler Hinman once did a Monday in 2 minutes flat), and ahead of our nemeses. We found the second one – with the clever hidden theme “Bending the Rules” – to be more challenging, and despite a rush of answers at the end we didn’t finish in time. But neither did C and M, and the score stood 1-0 good guys with one puzzle to go.

Between puzzles, Shortz discussed his unique career path (including how he designed his own special major, “enigmatology,” at Indiana University), entertained us with Times crossword anecdotes (he once helped a man propose to his cruciverbalist girlfriend through a puzzle), challenged us with NPR puzzles (what TV show’s name is an anagram of “Madonna’s Y”?), and shared a little gossip (the May 6 puzzle will feature clues written by Bill Clinton, including a “creative” one for “GOP”).

As Shortz himself handed us the last puzzle, I was filled with self-doubt. If we couldn’t finish a Tuesday puzzle, what hope could we have for a Wednesday? But as with anything, performance is a combination of skill and luck, and on this last puzzle we got lucky, turning in a perfect solution with almost 10 minutes to spare. To celebrate, I conspicuously passed by C and M (“Oh, excuse me – I didn’t realize you were still working!”) on my way to the bathroom.

S and I didn’t place in the pairs division. In fact, the judges, pressured for time, didn’t even bother to score our second and third puzzles, since we were already out of the running by then. But among our circle of friends, we were champions, and that was something.

But What Would That Do?

2007-04-27T13:28:00.001-04:00

You may recall that almost two months ago now, M and I were caught in the power-tripping machinery of border patrol bureaucracy. Re-entering the US, we were detained for two hours with no explanation, culminating in a self-satisfied, "You can go"; I demanded more, and by the time I walked back into their office and said that "Your surnames probably made them suspicious" is a travesty of an explanation, our night was already ruined. We fumed, I spent an afternoon tracking down the direct supervisor to compain by phone, and I began a letter I'd send through as many channels I could think of; if one avenue was at all important, then one maybe one bully would be called out for his actions. And then...

Nothing. I never did send that letter. Or even respond to the Comment Card that the supervising officer dutifully mailed to me. Instead, the episode receded into memory, and I filed it away as something You Can't Do Anything about. Just the other day, Tim Burke painted a memorial of a power-thirsty lunch lady that goes to show that petty, whimisically enforced injustice is just as dispiriting as any systematic abuses of power.

Today, I am going on record that I will speak up for that poor, abused R and M of yesterday. Whether I've been victim or witness, I've looked the other way many times in my life; gay slurs, racism, you name it I've let it go. Burke is skeptical that writing a letter about some jerk will do anything. I think I agree; it's just not the nature of the beast. Still, if only to find out just how little it seems to accomplish, this time I will make somebody read my tale and have to choose what to do with it. I wrote before that there's some satisfaction in believing that, facing similar circumstances, you'd act better. Sure, who can tell, but I know that in my job, being as nice as I am creates more work for me, gives my clients the benefit of the doubt, and asks me to be quite patient. But I still do it, because whatever my job, I know who I am. I know what it's like to be cruel and want no part of it; with some people, that's where you have to start.

Dicey Days at Fenway

2007-04-16T01:14:00.000-04:00

I’ve never quite felt at home at Fenway. This is partly because I didn’t grow up with the heartache and frustration of a native Red Sox fan. In my quiet Midwestern suburb, I was raised innocent of Bucky and Buckner, an ignorance that now disqualifies me from full participation in the team’s recent success. When the Sox won it all in 2004, as I high-fived the guys standing next to me at Good Times Emporium, I felt like an imposter.

But there’s also a basic fan-cultural divide that distances me from the typical Bostonian. It comes down to this: Fenway fans are equal parts enthusiastic and antagonistic, whereas I’m accustomed to taking my enthusiasm neat.

I’m not just referring to the Red Sox-Yankees rivalry, with its perennial bleacher brawls, “Yankees suck” chants, and T-shirts featuring the latest vulgar wordplay about “A-Rod,” but to a more general attitude about the game. I’m from a town where baseball players – including those in the visitor’s dugout – love to play, owing to the fans’ unconditional support and appreciation for the game. When an opposing player passes a career milestone or makes a fantastic catch, he receives a standing ovation. When a home team player is mired in a slump, he is cheered on all the more loudly. These things don’t happen much at Fenway.

And that is why, standing in the bleachers before Wednesday night’s game, I waited for the first pitch with a mix of excitement and concern. Daisuke Matsuzaka was making his home debut, and receiving a hero’s welcome: highlights of his exploits in Japan played on monitors throughout the ballpark; the Dunkin Donuts billboard greeted him in Japanese; and his warm-up routine in right field garnered applause. As he wound up for his first pitch, a called strike to Ichiro Suzuki, thousands of cameras flashed. When he got Ichiro to ground out, the crowd roared. So far, so good. What, then, am I worried about?

A couple things. At Fenway, hope often turns into disappointment, love into hate. The sentiment is that Matsuzaka must perform at a very high level to justify his $100 million cost to the organization. Given the tendency for Sox fans to turn against their own players when they under-perform, this could be a long season for the rookie.

On top of this, Matsuzaka is being regarded foremost as Japanese, as a foreigner in an overwhelmingly white and – I hesitate to use the term, but I think it apt – xenophobic environment. The line between caricature and outright bigotry is fine, and the cultural references that now seem playful – the hachimaki, the cheers in Japanese, the fans dressed as sumo wrestlers – could morph into something far uglier.

In the end, the Red Sox were overwhelmed Wednesday by the pitching of 21-year-old Felix Hernandez, who allowed only 1 hit in a complete-game shutout. It was by no means a disaster for Matsuzaka (7 innings, 3 runs – in baseball parlance, he pitched a quality start) but by the fifth inning, when he gave up 3 hits, including a hard-hit double, the stadium grew restless. A few rows behind me a fan shouted “Dice-K sucks” and called for the organization to “send him back” to Japan. He was almost certainly joking, but no one seemed to laugh, or protest.

Space Cats

2007-04-06T15:11:00.001-04:00

Have you heard of adhesive bras? I hadn’t either, until one of my roommates was cleaning out her closet and came across a pair. She was about to throw the package out but could see I was interested. “Do you want these?”

“Yes,” I said. “What are they?”

“You wear these instead of a bra. They just kind of stick on and hold things in place. I’ve never tried it though – someone just gave these to me when they were cleaning.”

And so I took them into my bedroom, adding them to a pile of old journals and student papers in the corner. It’s a pile that grows and shrinks and grows over time, a place to put things that I’m not likely to need for a while or ever, but I’m pretty sure this was the first time it included women’s underwear. I liked the idea.

Many months later, that same roommate’s mom was coming to stay with us. As the visit neared, my roommate became concerned that some of our decorations were not suitably “grown up” and, wanting to give the appearance that we lived like adults, she began to remove certain items: a stuffed sheep here, a stuffed sheep there. Actually, most of the items were sheep-related. Perhaps unfairly, one of the victims of this purge was a large photograph of sheep meandering down an otherwise deserted Broad St. in Philadelphia, circa 1910. It’s a photograph that raises many questions: Whose sheep are they? What are they doing in the middle of the road? Where are all the people? But, whatever its artistic or philosophical merit, the photograph was judged less acceptable, less adult, than a completely bare living room wall, and so into storage it went.

I am a messy yet considerate person, and so the day before the mom was to arrive, I set about cleaning my room. I began with the easy stuff – neatening my desk, tidying my pillows – but it soon became clear that whatever else I did, the room would remain a mess to untrained eyes unless I did something about that pile in the corner. My goal became to reduce it to an amount that could be neatly tucked away behind my dresser, visible only to the nosy. If someone goes out of their way to find something of mine that disgusts them, whether it be toenail clippings in the waste bin or a retainer in the medicine cabinet, then they have no one to blame but themselves.

I had little trouble throwing away most of the things in the pile. But when I saw the bra package, my curiosity got the better of me. What do these things look like? I opened the package. Inside were two Caucasian-flesh-toned breasts. Except they weren’t like breasts at all, being flat and looking like this:

()_.--._() ()_.--._()
(__ __) (__ __)
(__) (__)

I knew then that I had to stick them on the newly bare living room wall. From time to time, we do things like that for a laugh. My roommate, who finds life-size photos of human faces wholly creepy, will sometimes brush her teeth, put on her pajamas, dim the lights in her room, and pull down her bedspread to discover Thom Yorke or Fiona Apple staring back at her. She screams, and then she curses. It’s pretty funny.

When my roommates came home that day their attention was drawn to the new decorations, and a wave of recognition washed over them…

“Oh my god! Are those – ”

“Nooo! Those are not what I think they are. Are they?”

“Wall Boobs – that’s hilarious!”

“They look like space cats.”

But their amusement quickly turned to concern. “I hope those come off ok,” one said. The thought had crossed my mind that it might not be a good idea to put sticky things on the wall, but it was soon laid to rest by a different thought: Whatever adhesive was used, it must come off easily – why else would women wear these things?

This reasoning was wrong. Perhaps women don’t actually wear adhesive bras, but instead pass them along to friends whenever they clean. Here, you take 'em for the next few months. Or perhaps walls are different from human flesh. In any case, peeling off the bras left behind a thick, gummy mess in the shape of each bra. I panicked. Finding a paint scraper, I began to scrape away at the goo – at first carefully, and then not so carefully. I made some progress, but after 20 minutes of scraping, the shapes on the wall remained clearly visible.

The next day, after a full night of sleep and armed with Goo Gone, I had another go at it. I applied a coat of the goop to each Wall Boob and waited a couple minutes to let it sink in and, I hoped, dissolve the adhesive. Then I scraped. Then I repeated the whole process, and repeated it, and repeated it. An hour later, the shapes were somewhat less pronounced but remained clearly visible. I gave up.

That evening, the mom arrived. She couldn’t have cared less what our apartment looked like – she was just happy to see everyone, especially her daughter. She noticed the residual shapes on the wall, of course, as you would if you visited today. We tried to explain why they were there, but really there was no explanation, and the conversation thankfully turned to other things. But the two ghostly figures stayed right where they were, haunting us into the night, and ever since.

Moral: Women, be careful what you put on your bodies. Men, if anyone offers you an adhesive jock strap, run.

Play Ball

2007-04-01T23:42:00.000-04:00

Preston Wilson, starting right fielder for the St Louis Cardinals in their opening night game against the NY Mets, came to the plate with nothing but zeroes tonight. No times at bat, no fly balls fielded, nothing that could be turned into a number. With a runner on first, he rapped a ball straight to the third baseman for an effortless double play. Too bad for the Cardinals, who couldn't string hits together all night, but from posterity's perspective, one more indelible mark on one more box score.

For the Jim Abbots, my online fantasy team culled from real major leaguers, this entire game can be reduced to a single point for my opponent, the Noams, who'll likely score three hundred this week. Starting tomorrow, the tally of league points will proceed at full, stock-ticker-like frenzy for the next six months. After three years of poring over statistics, saying yes and no to trades, and throwing weight behind different sides in league rule disputes, it occurs to me to ask, "For what?" In the number-crunching race to solipsistically be number one, it's been a lot like cheering on plays in a Pachinko machine. (Plus, I've never even won.)

This season, I'm returning to the narratives of fighting for baseball excellence that make this game actually fun. The Abbots, led by slugger Ryan Howard and a pitching staff of hopeful young men, will have a story this year. Tonight, like children on Christmas eve, they wanted no more than for sleep to magically fall over their eyes, while their one-handed manager sunk into his couch, his woman asleep at his side, and watched Preston Wilson ground out on opening night.

The Verizoniphro

2007-03-27T23:48:00.000-04:00

PMG: "I'm calling because my phone's broken."
Verizon: "Your phone's not broken, it's just not working because of the rain."
PMG: "No my phone's broken, an indication of it being broken is the fact that it doesn't work in the rain."
Verizon: "No the problem's not the phone, the problem's with the weather."
PMG: "A phone that doesn't work in the rain is not a working phone."
Verizon: "Well we can send someone out but if the phone's working it'll cost you $100."
PMG: "When?"
Verizon: "6-10 business days."
PMG: "But it might not be raining then."
Verizon: "So then the phone will be working."
PMG: "No the phone will never be working... but it may or may not be indicating in any particular way that it is broken."
Verizon: "So you're saying that when the technician comes out there may be no difference between how your phone is functioning and how a working phone would be functioning."
PMG: "Yes"
Verizon: "But you say it will be broken."
PMG: "Yes"
Verizon: "So a phone that works now but you are sure will not work in the future, you consider this a broken phone."
PMG: "Verily"
Verizon: "But is it not true that all phones that are working now will not work at some point in the future."
PMG: "Yes"
Verizon: "So you're phone will be no more broken than any other phone."
PMG: "No, because I can duplicate a specific set of conditions that are well within the expected operating conditions of a phone that will always and completely cause the phone to malfunction."
Verizon: "We'll send someone out."

Though this dialog is highly fictionalized, they did send someone out. He did not charge me $100 but he annoyed my neighbors. He also did not fix my phone which is currently still broken, as it would not be working were it raining.