Homo sum. Humani nihil a me alienum puto

Photograph meme (I think this will be fun)

1. Ask me to take pictures of any aspect of my life you're curious about.
2. Leave your requests as comments to this entry.
3. Please look at the previous requests so as to not do repeats.
4. I'll snap the pictures and post them in future posts.

Last June, I saw a play called "Nixon's Nixon" at a local theater near where I grew up (the Round House, for you suburban Marylanders out there). It imagined a late-night conversation between Nixon and Kissinger in the hours before Nixon finally resigned from office. The conversation went through recollections, anecdotes, impersonations of foreign leaders, justifications, rants, pleading, until Nixon finally accepted his fate.

I love stories like that, little intimate peeks into the interior spaces of life, in between more earth-shaking events.

Which has me wondering, at 2:38am Eastern time, how soon-to-be-former-President Bush is spending his final night in office. It would be great material for a story: the President, unable to sleep, stalking the halls of the White House, reflecting on the last eight years, maybe pondering a few last-minute pardons. I want to imagine him sleepless, full of anticipation. I want to imagine that the man has some kind of interiority. I want to imagine him, just once, like me, kept awake at night by his thoughts.

But I have a suspicion that that's not what's happening at all. Everyone says that Bush isn't a reflective guy. He isn't exactly dumb, but he doesn't like to dwell, and he doesn't like to examine anything, especially himself, too much. Honestly, could you imagine him, wandering around the West Wing late at night, maybe talking to an advisor or two, asking those restless, searching questions that only come after midnight?

Chances are, Bush is already in bed, having been there since his usual bedtime, sleeping like a fucking baby. And that, among many reasons, is why I'll be very, very happy to see him gone.

Back in middle and high school, there were certain kinds of music that I hated for what I used to think was a bad reason: the people who listened to it were a bunch of tools.

Remember all of those popular kids who started wearing flannel shirts and growing their hair out when Nirvana got big? That started happening a couple years before I hit middle school, so by the time I got there and saw the entire popular crowd talking about how much they loved Kurt and how alternative they all were, I thought Nirvana - and grunge generally - must be music for vapid conformists. And indeed, when I first heard them sometime in seventh grade, it all just sounded like a bunch of screaming and banging on things. It sounded rebellious, but the vast majority of the people who listened to it were so un-rebellious that I figured that the grunge scene's non-conformist 'authenticity' must have just been a marketing gimmick.

But a few years later, when the popular crowd had cut their hair and moved on to the glossy pop music that was more appropriate to their station in life, I heard 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' on the radio, now divorced from the social context in which I first heard it. It was incredible. Incredible! I re-listened to all the stuff from Nevermind and In Utero, and I couldn't believe it - the stuff probably wasn't as fresh and original as it sounded before years of imitators had poured its themes into the groundwater of alt-rock's repertoire, but it was raw, beautiful, wounded and angry and bitter and vulnerable. I loved it.

So why the change? It could be that my tastes had evolved and I'd finally gotten in touch with my inner angsty grungeboy in the intervening years, but I don't think so. And the reason I don't think so is that this keeps happening, and it keeps happening irrespective of genre or style. Just a couple weeks ago, I listened to some songs by Sublime, a band I had forever associated with this one guy in math class who used to torment me, and it was unbelievable. Never heard anything like them. Or a few months ago, I finally figured out what the big deal with Phish-style jam bands was - I had previously dismissed them because of my exasperation with a certain kind of pseudo-hippie that stalked the dorms of Oberlin. I'm sure that, any day now, I'll develop an ironic-nostalgic appreciation of the Backstreet Boys and start liking mid-90s hip-hop.

It happens again and again, and the only thing that remains constant in all of these situations isn't some aspect of the music itself: it's not that I like more complex music as I get older, or more dissonant music, or anything like that. The only constant is sociology of that music's consumption: it used to be adored by people I thought were tools, and now, after a few years, it isn't.

I said at the beginning of this post that I used to think that disliking something because of its social context was a bad reason not to like something. There's a word for people who like music only before it gets popular or after it isn't anymore, and it's not a nice word: hipster. I don't quite fit the hipster mold - I'm overweight; I don't wear vintage anything, have no trust fund, hate PBR, and I am in fact capable of experiencing joy unironically. Nor do I listen to a lot of indie music (though perhaps I will in a few years, after the hipsters are done with it). But when I'm being honest with myself, I have to admit that I seem to share their knee-jerk distaste for popular stuff. I don't make an ideology of it like a lot of people do - there's nothing more tiresome than listening to someone go on and on about how they don't like 'mainstream, corporate, soulless, etc etc music' and prefer the old stuff, which, always, inevitably, totally sold out right about when the speaker turned 25. And I really hate so-bad-it's-good ironic appreciation of things. But, I tend not to like music while it's still popular.

That was a hard thing to admit. Conventional wisdom has it that people who think like this - people who are influenced by the social context of music so much that they can't appreciate the music itself - are shallow, the scum of the earth, the worst kind of hipster. "You're like a worse version of Hitler!" I can imagine you all thinking. But I think that's wrong. Lovers of no-longer-popular music - hated by all, parodied by Stuff White People Like - may just be on to something.

We know that the immediate context in which you hear music is important - we call it atmosphere. And it's not just lighting or the punk-rock-in-a-Starbucks effect - the people around you affect the experience, too. If you don't believe me, listen to "Bad Touch" by the Bloodhound Gang with your grandparents in the room. Meaning that the situation does matter - music isn't just notes and tone color and dynamics. This much is, I think, pretty uncontroversial.

But if that's true, is it really such a crazy leap to imagine that the broader social context of music is - and should be - a part of the experience? The best analogy I can think of is to fashion - an arena that also, perhaps tellingly, routinely goes through 'vintage' and 'retro' moods. Clothing styles are chock full of the aesthetics and tics of the culture (or subculture) that created them. That's why fashion never seems weird at the time, but years later, looking at old pictures, you seem ridiculous. When you're no longer immersed in the culture, that culture's likes and dislikes are really obvious. I'm pretty sure this is what cultural studies types mean when they say that fashion is like an encyclopedia, chock full of information about the cultures that produced it.

So why not with music? Is it so weird to think that the kinds of people who listen to music, the ways they listen to it, the ways they dress to reflect its style, become bound up in the experience of the music itself? I bet when you hear, say, a Nirvana song, the flannel-soaked fashion style pops into your head pretty quickly. But years later, you can look back on it with the perspective of someone who doesn't have to deal with that subculture on a daily basis, and can finally hear the music with fresh ears.

Or maybe even a little better than fresh, since (and I think this isn't controversial) the musical fashions and conventions in a song have probably also gone out of date. Which lets you see the distinctiveness and inventiveness - the stylishness - of musical choices that used to be invisible to you because they were everywhere, part of the air and the drinking water of pop culture. And now they're not.

People who like vintage things often tell me that they like some particular era because it seems so stylish. Maybe they mean something like what I've been talking about. It's possible that, at least for some of us, something is at its most stylish after its cultural moment is over and its distinctiveness no longer rendered invisible, or hidden beneath the sociology (and obnoxious members) of the culture that produced it.

Just a note: I'm in San Francisco, where I'll be staying for the next month or so. I haven't exactly been active on el jay lately, but I'll be even less active now. This semester, well, I'm glad it's over. I need the break.

If you're in the area and would like to meet up, drop me a line.

You can blame aaangyl for this post. I made a quick comment on Twitter and she demanded that I explain myself in some suitably public forum. I don't want to make a habit of being one of those "blog about the latest headline" LJers. Just to cleanse myself after this, I might write something agonizingly introspective and angsty, or something about obscure childhood memories, or some little patch of the Middle East you've never heard of. Or, you know, something, just to break this pattern of talking about... headlines.

What I said was that I'm not exactly impressed or pleased with this news that Clinton's going to be the next Secretary of State.

It's not just the usual argument, though that one's crossed my mind too: She's shown in the Senate that she's really good at Getting Shit Done policy-wise, but she doesn't exactly have a diplomatic background. There are going to be enough sharp learning curves in this administration without some heal-the-coalition appointee with no particular background in the job becoming a major diplomatic player. And then there's the fact that her Presidential campaign didn't exactly inspire confidence in her ability to run a factionalized organization - she had a bad habit of letting turf wars simmer, and that's, you know, bad for an organization like the State Department.

But my bigger concern is this: Clinton doesn't expect this to be the last, or most important, job she'll ever have.

So, let's think of this in terms of some basic incentives that are common enough to bureaucratic politics. She wants to do well at being Secretary of State, but much more important from her perspective is to make sure that the conventional wisdom knows she did a good job. Meaning, we should expect showmanship, and possibly even undermining political objectives from the President that she feels won't make her look good enough, or don't give her enough credit, or whatever. Instead of someone loyal to the President, the State Department will be run by an ambiguously friendly rival.

And the President won't be able to do much to stop it, if she chooses to do something that will make her look good while undermining the President's policy goals. His strategy seems to be to reconcile with his former opponents. Remember how well that worked out for Caesar? He's signaling - and this may simply be true - that he lacks the strength or will to govern without the help of his rivals. Maybe he's doing it because he honestly, ideologically believes in that different, non-divisive kind of politics he was always talking about, or maybe he's just weak. Either way, the price of this reconciliation is granting them - and in this particular case, Clinton - a degree of autonomy that we wouldn't expect him to give to a loyalist. If he wants Clinton's co-operation, he's going to have to let her pursue her own objectives - to an extent - within his administration.

I suspect that that situation will, in some politically sensitive issue or other lead to 'message discipline' problems, or a situation in which the President and the Secretary of State find that their interests - and their preferred solution - don't align. And, well, do you think Clinton is the sort of politico to sigh and take one for the team?

Maybe I'm wrong and Obama's advisors thought it would be better to bring her into the administration (and thus give her a stake in its success) rather than leaving her in the Senate, but for any number of reasons, I fear it'll lead to some unhelpful drama in the future.

Edit: dubaiwalla informs me that John Bolton said more or less what I was thinking, but a lot more succinctly: you shouldn't hire anyone you can't fire.

Well, that would have saved me a few hundred words. Logorrhea strikes again.

I'm happy Obama got elected. I won't gush on here - for that, you would have had to see me last night, when it became clear that Obama was a lock. Suffice to say I feel pretty good right now (modulo the proposition 8 disaster in CA). Just a quick note to add to everything else, a little request for our President-elect:

Don't get shot.

I'm not especially worried about that happening, in the way that many people I know are. Sure, there are white supremacists and other dead-enders who would want probably want to kill the guy, but it's not exactly my biggest fear for the upcoming administration.

I only mention it at all because I see how excited people are right now, especially a lot of people my age. They feel, umm, hope. Optimism. A vague sense that their dreams are possible. It's not always rational and in fact my cold, scholarly side finds it a bit annoying, but it's here, in big doses.

And then I think back to my parents' generation. I think seeing all of those dashing, charismatic young leaders killed before their eyes - two Kennedys and a King - is a really big part of why they're so messed up. I wouldn't say that hippies would never have happened if Kennedy hadn't been shot, but I will say that a lot of boomers' screwy emotional scars - their weird, cyclical but always self-righteous relationship with idealism and cynicism - has some sort of origin in the assassinations of the 60's.

I don't want that to happen to my generation. I hope Obama does good things, maybe great things, in his time in office. But if not, if we're going to have our innocence and hopes broken, I want my generation's disillusionment with him to come from honestly trying to implement an agenda, and seeing it not quite work out because our (still sort of vague) ideals have run up against an un-cooperative reality. That's how it often works, and in a way it's very healthy. Done right, it's where wisdom comes from.

And even if done wrong, I would much, much rather our disillusionment come from that than an assassin's bullet. I'm sort of fond of my generation, sometimes, and we already have the Bush years messing with our collective psyche. I want Obama to succeed - to do well and to do good at what certainly seems like a very crucial juncture. But if that's not in the cards and we have to get our dose of disillusionment, I'd much, much rather see our charismatic post-Bush redeemer figure fail than see him die on us.

Philadelphia hasn't won any sports titles since the eighties, and this city loves its sports. I wanted the Phillies to win, mostly because this town has low self-esteem, and I'm for anything that'll make people walk a little taller. Besides, the sociologists tell me that sports provide all sorts of social cohesion functions.

I didn't need to watch the game to know that the Phillies won the world series. First I heard my whole block erupt in cheers, then the low boom of fireworks going off all over the city. Some boys have set themselves up on my corner cheering and encouraging passing cars to honk. Ambulances and firetrucks are driving in circles with the sirens on, their drivers waving Phillies hats out the window.

And that's my relatively sleepy part of West Philly. South Philly must be burning to the ground.

Edit: And West Philly being West Philly, they've broken out the drums. It's going to be a wild night.

Barack Obama, a presidential candidate I'm happier about supporting than the other two I voted for, is winning at the moment. But I don't actually believe it, not for a second.

I don't mean that I have cleverly seen something in the tea-leaves that makes me so damn sure he's going to lose. I'm not the first, or probably even the hundred thousandth person to recognize that there are a lot of things that can happen in the next month to cut into that poll lead: the McCain campaign could find a trope that resonates well, random world politics could intervene, Obama could mess up, the poll numbers could turn out to be inflated (Wilder effect, and all that). There are all sorts of ways the campaign could turn around, so it's not like my pessimism is completely unfounded.

But none of that is what I'm talking about when I say I don't believe that Obama will actually win. Even if Obama were leading by 30 points and McCain had just been caught on tape fellating dead boy hookers while chanting "Hail Satan, death to the Impostor Christ" in English and Arabic, I'd have trouble believing that Obama would really win.

I honestly have trouble believing that anyone I support could actually win anything. After all, I like him, so the median voter must hate his guts.

I think this is a common feeling among those of us who find ourselves, for better or for worse, supporting Democrats: The country is against us, and if anyone to the left of center actually gets elected outside of a liberal enclave, it's because we've eked out a tactical victory, this time, and even then only by watering down our positions and/or wrapping ourselves in a cheap populism. Not because the country is with us. Instead, it's very much an 'us and them' dynamic, even if we have to get 'them' to vote for 'us' now and again.

Maybe someone else has had this feeling: when I hear someone talk about "the people", I don't think they're referring to me. I don't know how to identify with that category - it connotes something other than an overeducated gay urban secular Jew. And that problem has bedeviled progressive politics for as long as I've been watching. Even when 'elite' urban or suburban lefty types talk about the working classes and minorities, about creating opportunity and fairness for those who have been denied it, the rhetoric (and the sentiments behind it) treats those people as, well, those people, with all the externalizing connotations of that phrase. They're votes to be mobilized, interests to be brought into the tent, but not actually people we identify with. We're happy to speak for them, but we're intensely uncomfortable speaking with them. The old accusation of elitism is true in this sense, I think.

My political coming-into-consciousness happened right around the 1994 Republican takeover of congress. True, there was a popular (if embattled) Democratic president I was fond of, but even at that age I was pretty clear that he was surviving by triangulation, co-opting what Republican ideals he could and playing a careful, tactical balancing game. A pundit, I forget which one, called it 'the defensive crouch'. For as long as I've been paying attention, it's felt like even when Democrats win, it's been through clever maneuvering in a game where the other side has a practical monopoly on popular consciousness. To confidently, straightforwardly advocate a liberal agenda has been unthinkable in national politics.

Maybe this feeling is still true, and the zeitgeist is still against 'us'. It's possible that if Obama wins, it will have been a mix of tactics, luck, and exasperation with the Bush years: a vote against Republicans rather than for Democrats. But it's also possible that the country isn't so inimically hostile, and that we're wrong to think of politics as "us versus the masses". No matter how much we've been telling ourselves otherwise - in jokes about ignorant hicks and in laments about the Unstoppable Republican Propaganda Machine - maybe Republicans don't have an ideological monopoly on what Middle America is or what it wants. People might actually be voting for Obama because they like what he has to say about the kind of country we should be making for ourselves. If that's true, it will bring up hard questions for those of us whose political identities are based on being, if not exactly outsiders, then at least somehow out of the mainstream.

Or, Obama could lose after all, and we'll go back to our defensive crouch, secure in the feeling that the country really is against us. Between those two possibilities - losing or having to face the thought that those people might not be so alien to us after all - I'm honestly not sure which would be harder for me and some of my self-styled 'progressive' friends to swallow.

It occurs to me that some of the people who read this know a thing or two about economics and/or the business world. So, I don't normally use the journal for this, but I've been trying to sort through explanations of the events of the last week (firm collapses, government bailout, etc), but without the background knowledge, I'm having trouble "evaluating the arguments" as we pointy-headed academics say.

Specifically, I'm hearing about two stories. One is the Libertarian Rage version (seems popular on the Left, too): "The bailout is awful, because it amounts to nationalization, and in any case it rewards firms for taking insane risks, when really the market should be punishing them."

The other is: "Yes, but if the government hadn't stepped in and done this, we would all be screwed, the next Great Depression would be upon us, etc".

Neither says much about the effects of any given action, except in ideological and/or hysterical terms.

It's hard to get a sense of what the consequences of the bailout actually are expected to be. What's at stake here, in other words. Surely there's more than the two schematic stories I just told, right? Right? Feel free to tell me what I'm missing.

I'm told that Harvard students, when they want to sound modest, say that they go to school "in Boston". That way you don't sound like you're name-dropping. I've never met any Harvard students who actually do this, but I only know about half a dozen Harvardians, so it's not a great sample. I asked one friend about it, and he says he doesn't do the "in Boston" thing because in a way it's even more pretentious than just saying you go to Harvard. It's a kind of conspicuous modesty, showing off that you're a little embarrassed by your fancy elite education while still getting to let your audience know that you go to an elite school. It's like trying to have it both ways. Saying "I go to Harvard" has the advantage of being more straightforward.

I was getting some work done in a Starbucks today - I'm in Gaithersburg right now¹ - and business was slow, so one of the barristas started talking to me. He asked what I was doing and I explained I was finishing up some stuff before school started. "I'm a grad student up in Philadelphia," I explained.

He pressed and asked, "which school?", so I responded that I go to Penn.

"Ohh, I see," he said. "Princeton students say they go to school in New Jersey, Harvard students just say 'in Boston', so you're doing the same thing. No need to act modest about it."

And I felt like a jerk, because that's not why I say "in Philadelphia". It's not about trying to seem modest. It's the opposite. See, if I lead straight off by saying "I go to Penn", people will assume I mean Penn State, and will usually say something like "go Lions!" and I have to correct them.

I hate that. I have no problem letting random strangers know I go to a fancy-sounding school. On the contrary: I'm a really insecure person and I love throwing around what little cultural capital I have. I just don't want to have to be a jerk about it by correcting them. "No," *tongue-click* "not Penn State. Penn, the ivy". That makes people feel like I'm an asshole.

So, when I lead by saying "I go to school in Philadelphia," and then explain that it's Penn, I've found the extra geographic cue makes people (on the average) more likely to figure out that I go to the snooty private school, not the giant state school. I'm not trying to sound like I'm downplaying the snob factor - I'm just trying to make sure they understand I'm being snobby on the first try!

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¹Sorry, DC folks. This is not a social visit. I really, really, really don't have the time. (return)

A lot of people are getting twitter, and I've been feeling the peer pressure to try it. I'm not sure if it's actually worth my time, or whether I'll find it useful and/or entertaining, but I'm at least willing to give it a shot for a few weeks. So, expect periodic tweets.

People tell me that the year I'm about to do at Penn is traditionally the hardest: you're still taking classes, you're TA-ing for the first time, and there's a scary set of pass-them-or-we-throw-you-out comprehensive exams at the end (the failure rate on one of them is about 30%, but you do get a second chance before they boot you out).

So, I figure I should post those pictures of summer camp Middlebury before I get sucked into the work, work, work routine.


"Downtown" Middlebury

( Quaint overload )

An allegory of life in Middlebury, drawn by the 10 year old son of my professor

Wow. Umm, I learned a metric ton of Arabic this summer. I just took my final, and for all intents and purposes, I have returned to the land of the English-speaking.


Anything interesting happen while I was gone?

It snuck up on me way, way faster than I intended, but in an hour or so I'm out the door. A train to Baltimore, a flight to Burlington, and then a taxi-thing to Middlebury, Vermont.

So you're clear on what this means: I'm going to be on radio silence all summer. No reading, writing, speaking, etc anything but Arabic. I won't be checking LJ - I'll be sure to check back in though when I get out after August 15th. We'll see if I make it through this sanity intact.

Wish me luck.

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P.S.: john1082, sleep easy. I put it in the mail.

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Edit: I made it to Middlebury, alive and well. It's the quaintest town I've ever lived in, I think. I'll snap some pictures and post them at the end of the summer. I sign the no-speaking-English contract on Monday, so if you really need to communicate with me, do it before then.

I've been thinking back through my childhood lately. No doubt much of it was profound and formative, but I don't have time to write about that right now. But I do remember one adulthood ritual: the first filthy joke I ever learned. Not the first one I heard, mind you. I can't remember that. The first one I ever understood, and got it well enough that I could repeat it to others. I was about 11 years old, and I learned it from an older kid already in high school. For those of you who know me, it's the same older kid who taught me all those kitten jokes. Of course he would be the one to corrupt me. So, here it is:

Some settlers on the Oregon trail hired an Indian guide to help them get across the rough terrain. They'd been walking together in awkward silence for days when they suddenly heard a rumbling in the distance. The Indian guide put his ear to the ground.

"Hmm, buffalo come", he said.

"How the heck to you know that?" one of the settlers asked.

"Ear stuck to ground," he answered gruffly.


So, what was your first filthy joke?

Dadaphobia, n.: 1) The persistent, irrational fear that absolutely everything that happens in an art gallery is actually an artistic prank or a piece of absurdist performance art: some artist trying to pull a 'gotcha' moment. 2) The fear that every mundane object in an art gallery is actually art.

Philadelphia has a burgeoning art scene. I'm guessing it's fueled by the access to cheap loft space and relative proximity to New York, but I'm not actually sure. All I know is that the city is flooded with artists. Cool artists.

Earlier in the spring, a friend came to town and brought me to an art opening her sister had a piece in. A cool art opening. The gallery was a converted bank in West Philly that, despite being right next to the grocery store I get my overpriced veggies from, I had never actually noticed. The bank/gallery had beautiful, ornate fixtures and bas reliefs, probably about a hundred years old. But they had been mostly covered up and replaced with sheer wall and metal piping, in an attempt to replicate a retro-industrial look like you'd see in SoHo or someplace similar. Replacing an actual retro look with a fake one should have been my first sign.

Everyone inside was attractive and stylishly-dressed, in a hipster chic sort of way. I wonder what happens to artists who don't look like artists. I'm told that the gallery scene is a decent part of professional success, and that cultivating an image matters in a more than superficial way - self-presentation is part of the art, in some sense - so I couldn't escape the thought that there are nerdy or jockish artists sitting in a basement somewhere, paying beautiful people to pretend to be them in chic galleries. That would actually be a neat art piece, now that I think of it. Image and reality, the authentic and the beautiful.

Inside was overwhelming, and I couldn't tell what was and wasn't art. Music was blaring. Cool music, sort of techno, sort of alt-rock, sort of hip-hop. You know, art gallery music. There was a big movie screen with girls leering at the camera in a 'girls gone slightly wild' sort of way. I was pretty sure that was art. I later learned that it was a live feed, not a video.

Then there was a bunch of round green boxes on turntables. There were strings attached, each resonating at a different frequency according to some pattern I couldn't figure out. That was probably art, but I couldn't tell what exactly it was about. Something about the fragmented nature of music, I guess.

And then there was a sidebar thingie that I rested against. Or I did until someone yelled at me. Turns out that was art. After that, I was afraid to sit on a nice blue couch I saw at the corner of the room. I was afraid it was art. And naturally, I didn't eat any hors d'oeuvres until someone else I knew tried them first. You know, in case they were art. Or an artistic prank, to see if someone could trick the rubes into eating plastic fruit or art or showing the absurdity of social norms or whatever other damn artistic prank someone could think of.

Within an hour, I felt like an asshole. I was out of place, amid flashing lights and manger scenes with tonka toys and high-concept irony. I mean, even after I got over my paranoia that everything was a prank and every hors d'oeuvre plate was art, there was basically no way for me to engage with any of what was going on except through, uhh, counter-irony. I understand that art can be a lot of different things, that it doesn't need to just be Renaissance masters and pretty impressionists, but that show was so wrapped up in itself and in the conventions of a particular artistic community, that there was no way for someone like me - someone not immersed in the conventions and habitus of that community - to approach it.

It turns out, I'm not the sort of weirdo who can engage with cool art shows. I'm a different sort of weirdo. I have dadaphobia, and I am not ashamed anymore. I am not ashamed anymore.

A memory snippet:

In high school, there was this kid who sat behind me in Physics class. We got along well enough, but he had a habit of giving an obscene running commentary on the day's lecture.

I remember one day, the teacher was laying out an example problem that involved a pool ball traveling 12 centimeters across a table.

"Hey, I've got 12 centimeters of dick for you, heh heh," he growled into my ear.

I couldn't turn around and tell him to shut up because there was a lecture going on, so I took my calculator and handed it to him after I wrote out:

12 / 2.54 = 4.72441

He stayed quiet for the whole rest of the period.

VoicePost 219K 1:06

“Hello world, I'm standing outside of a real life honest to God West Philadelphia poll integration. Well I just voted compared to 2004 when I had to stand and wait for 5 hours in the rain up hill both ways just to look for the loosing candidate today it felt nice. I swapped right in and voted immediately for the guys whose almost certainly going to be the loosing candidate and feudaly(?) and feudaly(?) we're bound against the Philadelphia Democratic Machine by voting for the nominant(?) situational candidate for all the good that will do. So I did my democratic duty and strangely enough didn't have to wait in lines to do it I wonder if that would ___ it would badly but yeah well but the law important point is that in the near day or so the media, the pundits(?), the candidates are going to leave us alone. They're going to go away they're going to patronize somebody else, they're going to ask if somebody else is better or not. Yes, paycheck.” Auto-Transcribed Voice Post

Edit: Do I really speak that unclearly, or is the transcriber just bad? I mean, 'yes, paycheck'? How the hell can you get that from 'yes, they can'? Honestly.

For those I haven't already told, I'll be spending the summer here:


Middlebury College

Not exactly an exotic location in the Middle East, I realize. But, this week I learned that I won the fellowships necessary to pay for the ruinously expensive but well-regarded Arabic language immersion program at Middlebury this summer, so off I go. I'm at the point where I need hardcore (really, really hardcore) language instruction more than I need the experience of being in the region.

It's an intense place, and the upshot of it is that from June 13th through the middle of August, you probably won't be hearing from me at all. When you're there, you sign a contract to only use Arabic, at all times, for the entirety of the nine weeks. If they catch you using English, they throw you out. So, I'll be on radio silence this summer, unless I feel the urge to make a post in Arabic and make one of my friends translate it for all you fine people.

I'm not really on LJ at the moment, either. I've barely checked it in about a week. I even unplugged from the news cycle, for theraputic reasons. I was sort of going crazy; there's probably a post in explaining why. I'll be back soon enough. If you don't hear from me before then, rest assured I still love you.

I do memes pretty infrequently, but itihasa posted one I can't resist, on the grounds that it might inspire some neat posts. So:

"Everyone has things they blog about. Everyone has things they don't blog about. Challenge me out of my comfort zone by telling me something I don't blog about, but you'd like to hear about, and I'll do my best to write a post about it. Repost in your own journal [if you like] so that we can all learn more about each other."

If there's something I really don't feel like writing about, I'll tell you as much, but I'm curious to see what people think would be an interesting challenge for me. So, come one come all. Let's see what comes of this.

The gateway to Woodlands Cemetery

Philadelphia isn't that snowy a city, but in the past it's gotten more of the stuff than we have this year. Until last week, there hadn't been any real accumulation all winter, which is depressing. The winters here aren't harsh so much as dreary and unpleasant - at least snow adds some aesthetic value to an otherwise gray and brown five months. So, you can imagine how happy I was when I woke up last week, freshly over a cold, to find a light blanket of snow covering everything. These old neighborhoods are pretty photogenic in the snow, so naturally I put on my coat and took a walk, camera in hand, through my neighborhood and the large, old cemetery (yes, ladypimpernel and electricpaladin, that cemetery) just a couple blocks from my house.

( Houses and streets in the snow )

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( Woodlands Cemetery )

I'm so proud right now. I haven't seen even one mean-spirited "singles awareness day" rant (if someone posted one today and I just didn't see it, err, don't disillusion me now). For those who haven't been exposed, "singles awareness day" is this sort-of ironic meme, a kind of counter-Valentines day, no doubt spread by single people lashing out with frustration at all of the conspicuous romance pervading all aspects of life in early February.

I get the frustration, both with being innundated by Valentine's propaganda and with perpetual singleness. Believe me, I get it.

But geeky circles tend to attract their fair share of singles who are aggressively bitter about it (including no few who have a really bad case of 'nice guy' syndrome, feeling entitled to a lover solely by virtue of being a really nice person, never mind the absence of other social skills).

Which means that "singles awareness day" had this way of turning really mean. Usually the meanness manifested in a kind of whining about Valentines exuberance that was basically designed to make non-singles feel guilty for having someone and enjoying their time together.

My friends in long-established couples took so much crap and guilt-tripping about how their happiness was hurting their single friends' feelings, that starting somewhere in the middle of college, I swore to never again pull that on someone.

I realize being non-coupled on the Day of Romance sucks, but please, celebrate Singles Awareness Day responsibly. Give your couplefriends some chocolate, not a guilt-trip.

A memory snippet:

Early in my freshman year of college, one of the off-campus houses then known as Queer House threw a party. I don't remember when it was, exactly, but it was cold and the ground was brown, so it must have been somewhere around November. I still didn't really know anybody. I wasn't fitting in well with my laid-back dorm mates. I was lonely.

Queer House passed from the world sometime during my stay at Oberlin - no underclassmen took up the charge of maintaining the gay-themed debauchery, and as far as I can remember that house is now just one crumbling Victorian among many. Queer House was probably already moribund by the time I got to Oberlin - by the time most social institutions get well-known enough to be celebrated, their glory days are usually over - but Queer House parties were the stuff of legend. Blaring music, writhing, sexy crowds, and mysterious black cocktails served ultra-potent by a beautiful trainwreck of a boy named Phil. I know a few of the people reading this will remember Phil. Most of campus had a crush on him, and who was I to go against the crowd?

I went to the party, my first and last big house party while I was at Oberlin. My hall-mates came with me, but I lost track of them in the crowd. Phil wasn't there; the bar looked uninspired. I drank anyway, some vodka somethingorothers. It was the first time I'd drunk anything more than a few sips of ritual wine, the first time I can remember being tipsy.

The music had kicked up. People were dancing in the living room, in the stairwell, wherever there was room. Thanks to the alcohol, I felt my usual inhibitions slide away. I grooved, shook, and yes, even jived a little. I kept trying to dance with this one boy with almond-eyes and oddly-pointed ears, like an elf, but he wasn't making eye contact. Nobody was. I'm now very familiar with that feeling like everyone is looking right through you - I get it all the time in queer spaces. But back then I was only eighteen, and nobody had bothered to tell me that going dancing without friends is a depressing experience. It's just not something that came up much at Quiz Bowl practice.

Somewhere around midnight I gave up and went back to the dorm. I head voices from one girl's room - my hall mates had gathered there to hang out. They were talking about me, not knowing I was back.

"Did you see homais?"

"Yeah, he looked drunk. He really cut loose dancing..."

"You think he hooked up with someone?"

I had never 'hooked up' with anyone, by any definition you can think of. But, I waited a beat for comic emphasis, then swung the girl's door open and popped my head in.

"Why yes," I beamed, relishing the startled looks on everyone's faces. "I did hook up with someone... uhh, sort of. Does making out count?" I grinned devilishly. Relative to my well-known uptightness by their standards, having made out with someone would definitely win me debauchery points.

They all grilled me eagerly. Who was it? How'd it happen? Just some guy, I answered, don't even know who, and it just happened because the music was playing and he was cute and why the hell not? I was the right mix of embarrassed and proud. They were all pleased. The nerd had finally loosened up a little. How cute.

I still don't know exactly why I lied, but I can guess: I was lonely, not fitting in, and just for once wanted to not be an outsider among my own friends, a repressed freak of nature. I didn't want to be the loser who was dancing in a small, liquor-soaked room with most of the queers on campus and couldn't even get any of them to look at me. So I lied. I know their glee at my little sexcapade was more than a little patronizing, but it was better than being sexually invisible. Anything was better than being sexually invisible.

I never told any of them I'd made it up, and as far as I know, they never doubted my story. If they didn't believe me, they had the good manners to keep their speculations to themselves.

I was just watching the Daily Show, and Stewart's opening monologue segued neatly from the super bowl to super Tuesday.

Maybe this comes from having grown up in the DC area, where a high concentration of people are really 'into' politics, but I was reminded of why I don't like a lot of self-described politics geeks. You know, the ones who love speculating about who will win which matchups, which (crudely drawn) constituencies would go for whom, etc.

You'd think, given my profession, that I'd be really likely to connect well with people who describe themselves as 'political', but I rarely do. To me, most of 'em are not all that different from sports fans, and I find that just the tiniest bit crass.

So, as the big primary day approaches, I've heard no few people on the democratic side of things make the argument that Hillary Clinton's no-holds-barred, borderline corrupt political style is a reason to vote for her. Call it the cynic's case for Clinton: yeah, she's full of dirty tricks, but so are the Republicans, and it'll be nice to have someone that ruthlessly effective on our side for once.

Now, don't get me wrong. There are plenty of good reasons to be a Hillary supporter. I'm not - I've been consistently for Obama for a while, for full disclosure - but I can see why people on the center-left, especially if they're into technocratic governance, might be real fans. But supporting her because you think she's ruthlessly effective is a terrible idea. She probably won't be. Our cynicism about politics is being used to make us think that one of her worst liabilities is actually a strength. And to the extent people believe this ridiculous myth, I think it's because aside from our cynicism getting the better of us, plenty of people have forgotten the Clinton years and learned all the wrong lessons from the Bush years.

I mean, do you remember the nineties? The litany of scandals? The hacks who seem to cling to Bill and Hillary Clinton? Not every scandal was a Republican invention, you know. The Clintons dealt and continue to deal with some really shady people (see this New Republic article for some of the worst). How many of those well-meaning technocratic programs the Clintons are so fond of had to be jettisoned because Bill didn't have enough political capital, having spent it all on fighting for his political life against scandal after scandal? Given how the Clintons have behaved in the primary, do you think they've suddenly discovered clean dealing?

But here people will complain, hey, what about Bush and Rove? They rode roughshod over our system for years, forcing their will through with every nasty trick in the book. This is a dirty game, and you can only win by playing dirty. The Republican noise machine would eat Obama alive. Alas, we wish we could live in a world where you didn't have to be a total bastard, but we don't. We need the Clintons.

To which I can only say, man, that mindset is so 2005. We've bought into the myth of Bush's invincibility. I remember it: this feeling of total powerlessness, like Bush could do whatever he wanted and everyone - the congress, the press - were just rolling over for him, and anyone who didn't roll over got slimed and intimidated into submission. We've had a couple of years now to see how that's played out, and the scandals did catch up with him in the end. According to his approval ratings he's just slightly less popular than Hitler, his party despises him, and I don't know if you've noticed, but he's been having trouble getting much of anything done. Maybe history will vindicate him, or whatever, but to me it looks like Bush had to spend a lot of political capital putting out fires caused by his high-handedness and the sleazy people he associated with.

And this is the invincible machine we democrats think we need to imitate? Grow up and stop whining that 'they started it'. Instead, consider that those of you who say Obama supporters are idealists and Clinton supporters are realists are wrong. Consider the possibility that we're realists and you're dumb cynics who assume automatically that the most evil candidate always wins.

So, for those of you who are voting tomorrow (I don't - Pennsylvania, obnoxiously, gets the last primary [Edit: researcher tells me that Kentucky's is actually later and Nebraska's seems to be the very last]), pick whoever the hell you want to pick. But please, for the love of God, abandon this ridiculous notion that Hillary will be more effective because she's, like, such a ruthless political manipulator. If you actually believe that, you owe me a coke when the scandals start rolling in and nothing can get done because she'll be too busy trying to wriggle out of it.

And it still perfectly captures my mood. The dinosaur has a youtube account now. He does a really funny version of the Numa Numa dance.

That is all, for now.

VoicePost 334K 1:43

(no transcription available)

VoicePost 83K 0:24

“So I was recently directed to this website called lowcats.com(?). Which is full of this horrible buck eyed caddies. And I just wanted to tell the world that every time you make a little cat. God kills an actual cat. Like a cute one. So please for the love of the cats. Stop it before it's too late.” Auto-Transcribed Voice Post

Edit: what a terrible autotranscription, but it's funny enough I think I'll keep it.

So, I meant to write a little thing about the Annapolis peace conference (the one where Israelis, Palestinians, and most of the Arab world semi-miraculously all sent delegations)¹ before the fact rather than after, but that just didn't happen, what with me trying to get my work done and still have a life. It looks like that process is already a mixed bag - more hopefullness than I've seen in a couple years, but heel dragging on timeline stuff - but I don't think I want to write a full commentary on that. It would probably just turn into my Disillusioned, Cynical Semi-Peacenik rant. And who wants that?

Instead, I'll be all meta and comment on commentary. What really, really got on my nerves in the days leading up to the conference was the "will this be the 11th Hour Move That Finally Solves The Conflict" speculation coming from the chattering classes, to which the answer was "probably not, but hey, you never know, there are some reasons it might work". It ticks me off mostly because they're accepting some dubious framings at face value.² But it makes sense that pundits would talk like that, because they work under some weird incentives.

Treating each event as though it's sui generis and could maybe change everything, then evaluating whether or not it will do so, is a pretty sweet deal. Aside from the fact it's simple and catchy - not requiring your readers to know a lot of stuff they probably don't - it makes everything feel momentous and direly important. Nobody wants to be the guy who writes punditry on unimportant events. That's what leads to articles of the form: "Will this latest event be the thing that changed everything? Probably not, but maybe some stuff might get better."

So, depending on the kind of public image you want to cultivate, you might want to sound reasonable and balanced. Then, you say, well, things look pretty bad in general, but a few factors - like broad Arab league participation, say³ - could surprise us all. No matter what happens, you just predicted it!

Or maybe you want to be bold and contrarian. Then, since the mood is so pessimistic, the best thing to do is predict resounding success. If you're wrong, people usually forget. The press cycle is fast. And if you're right, you were probably in the minority, and you'll be vindicated. A visionary!

All of which means, the vast majority of commentary is provocative, but disposable. If you know the basic incentives of punditry, you can figure out pretty much all of the standard arguments on your own, and save yourself the time of reading these people.

Oh, and while I'm at it, allow me to predict that despite all the naysaying, SUP's acquisition of livejournal will turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to LJ land, ushering in a new age of online community. Having a company dedicated to livejournal, as opposed to having it as a side project like it was for Six Apart, is on balance a good thing because it's more likely that they'll put more money into lj. But it's not important whether or not I'm right for the right reasons. That can be finessed in my "I told you so" column. The important bit is that I'll have been right. You heard it here first!

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¹And since I have mentioned The Conflict, whose mere name seems to send otherwise reasonable people into ranting fits, I would gently ask everyone to play nice, keep debates above the belt, and avoid flamewars. There are lots of forums for you to scream at people you disagree with. I feel no need for this journal to be one of them. (return)

²Aluf Benn, a man with some unbelievably good contacts and one of the only analysts I generally trust, gets the credit for my favorite pre-conference article: The Real Two-State Solution (return)

³Personally, I take this as a bad sign. Getting this many parties on board might have been a massive displomatic accomplishment for which Condi Rice deserves a medal, but it's more likely that this means that those countries don't take the process seriously, that they're happy to do the photo-op and don't seriously think they'll be forced to make any hard choices in the wake of this. But hey, I'm a disillusioned semi-peacenik. Take me with lots of salt. (return)

A lit-up alley. Those lights usually mean there's a wedding going on nearby: some of the other hints, which don't show up in the picture, are the children covered in glitter and the delivery trucks full of qat.

I probably have something on the order of 100 pictures left from Yemen, at least some of which are pretty good, and others at least interesting. So, as I get nostalgic for my summer in the mountains, I thought I might start finally posting some of them for your viewing pleasure.

Below the cut, a couple pictures from old Sanaa and from the villages of Thula and Kawkaban (the second of which, whose name means 'two planets' is so high up, it's almost always in a cloud)

( Old Sanaa )

( Thula and Kawkaban )