abstract citizen

This better not be one of those descriptions of nature where you use "funnel" as a verb to describe what clouds do.

2012-01-30T16:03:00.001-05:00

But, that leaves me at a bit of a loss, since clouds sometimes do funnel. How else would you describe an arrangement where there is a discernible swirl, pointing toward a singular fulcrum (is that redundant, saying “singular fulcrum”?), that the eye is inevitably drawn to? “Funnel” it is.

Off to learn about Drug and Device law. I believe the term you are looking for in response is “boo-yah.”

Why are all these moms fighting Santa?

2011-11-28T11:21:00.001-05:00

Best Buy or some similar store is running a bunch of commercials where a smug, aggro-mom is all about outperforming Santa. She smiles and eats the cookies and drinks the milk reserved for Santa, while a hapless Santa sputters and stammers on about how it looks like there’s not enough room for his gifts.

Is this really what mom-dom is about nowadays? Competing against everything, including Santa? It’s kind of abhorrent and probably a confusing message for kids.

It led me to think about this recent debate we had in my urban sprawl class, which I enjoyed greatly. The class was divvied up into three teams: one representing the traditional liberal viewpoint, the other representing the traditional conservative viewpoint, and the third group representing the family viewpoint. Just what that is should be evident in a few sentences. The topic, I think, was the definition of progress – each side had to present and argue for a particular viewpoint of what constitutes progress and what the future looks like in light of that definition.

So, you can easily imagine the conservative argument: progress is brought about by markets. It is efficiency that can only come from a decentralized economic system, and it allows individuals, according to their own hardwork or merits, to achieve wealth and preserve it for future generations, unmolested by the government. In this society, all can achieve wealth and purchase the things they’d like to own. The liberal viewpoint is that progress occurs when the government intervenes sufficiently in free markets to ensure that the rising tide lifts all boats: it’s vaccines, it’s public health initiatives, it’s appropriate regulatory interventions. With this, the liberals envision a future where the standard of living gradually improves, so that, in the future, all can achieve happiness, some degree of economic security, and purchase most of the things they’d like to own.

The family group went in and argued that progress is measured by familial relations. It’s a function of emotional growth, of knowing when you have enough to be happy, and of pulling back from the aggressive search for wealth in order to nurture those familial relationships, to give successive generations a moral center, to create good human beings. In terms of the world’s finite resources, it’s easy to see where the traditional liberal and conservative viewpoints put us in the same place, on a similar timeframe: all the resources get used up, and whether that happens in, say, 500 years or 700 years, it still gets us to the same final destination. The family viewpoint stands out, then, as a kind of antidote to using more resources and amassing more material wealth – in a way that’s entirely appealing, even for a careerist such as myself. (The conservatives did repudiate the anti-careerist tone of the family’s position, by the way.)

So, for me, the point of the Best Buy ads may be that they give us the dark side of the family viewpoint: the family as an a single economic unit, a tribe out to vanquish all enemies in the interest of its own self-preservation. A tribe that knows no idols, where traditions are just antiquated notions that deserve to be outperformed.

Also, the more I type the word “family,” the more I think about Mr. Bungle’s ‘Stubb (ADub).’

Obligatory 9/11-esque post

2011-09-06T10:48:00.001-04:00

Driving to Virginia Beach for Sunday’s half-marathon, we passed a stretch of highway near the Pentagon that’s been renamed the “9/11 Fallen Heroes Memorial Highway,” or something like that. I can’t stress how stupid I find this to be. My friend Dave, who’s much smarter than I am, spends a lot of time thinking and writing about the way in which our memory of past events changes as the cultural landscape changes. He’s spent a lot of time at the Shanksville memorial site, doing research for what I’m sure will be a brilliant book, and he’s watched how the dialogue surrounding those events has shifted. I don’t want to scoop, so I won’t say anything else, but here’s what I think:

Some people did heroic things on that day. Fire fighters in lower Manhattan. The people on flight 93 who fought back rather than allow themselves to be turned into a missile. But most of the 3000 or so dead people aren’t heroes –they were victims of a terrible crime. They didn’t do anything heroic that day: they woke up and went to work. If they had done something heroic or extraordinary, their deaths would be, paradoxically, a lot more ordinary. Their deaths are extraordinary and terrifying because they were doing something utterly ordinary on that Tuesday morning.

So, google+ is gonna shame me into blogging again.

2011-08-31T16:26:00.001-04:00

Yup. Let’s try to do this right for the 9^th time or whatever…

Having half the summer off made things fly by in a hurry. I read a couple of great books – in especial Felix Gilman’s “The Half-Made World,” for which no linked reviews will be provided. It’s a fantasy/sci-fi book, and I don’t read a lot of those, so I can’t really judge it from the standpoint of whether it’s successful within its genre. But as storytelling, it’s dazzling. It’s sort of an alternate history of America, with a touch of magical realism lending a lot of weight to the use of archetypes. The mythic West, about which much ink has been spilled, is actually literally unmade: land is “made,” or formed, I suppose, by the sustained presence of humans. Humans name things, and keep the landscape from being quite so inconstant (to pilfer a phrase from Auden.) Far out West, at the furthest point you can travel, land, sea, and sky are inseparable. We become familiar with three distinct factions, more or less: you have The Line, which razes the natural world in its thirst for oil and what it defines as “progress.” You have the terrifying and bloodthirsty Gun, which recruits characters that have Waitsian names like Dandy Fanshawe, to do its bidding – which is mostly to kill and terrorize the men of The Line. And way back when, there was a honest to goodness republic buried somewhere, a society which believed in order, laws, and peace.

Anyway, the book is great fun – the writing is terrific, the characters are all compelling, the archetypal subjects are familiar – native Americans, early Christians, abolitionists - and there’s a pleasant haziness there that keeps some of the images just beyond the edges of what you can imagine. For example, we never quite get a clear sense of what the Engines that drive the Line look like, nor do we understand how the spirits that constitute Gun exist, or where they exist. Anyhoo, I understand a sequel is in the works, and I can’t wait to see where it goes from here.

Stephen Malkmus came out with a new album, and you should listen to it.

I also developed a bit of a musical crush on Jessica Lea Mayfield.

Also, everyone had babies.

And that about catches you up on 2011 so far. More on thesis, school, and other things to follow.

I had gin and tonics at lunch.

2011-04-12T12:40:00.001-04:00

So, when a coworker asked me if Ms. Abstract and I were thinking of kids, I responded that, to date, our copulatory activities are still largely recreational, and not necessarily goal-oriented.

On being immersed in genetics

2011-03-31T11:14:00.001-04:00

Grad school has been a huge time-drain, which is why I rarely get a chance to post anything anymore. Every now and then, a half-hearted attempt, but nothing really comes of it.

Still! Quite a story from the other night. I've been taking a class on genetics and related ethical issues – a strange class, with two policy students, some staff from the university's genetic counseling center, and about 10 med students. It's been a terrific experience, largely because the class delivers on the ethical side, and also because I'm learning a lot about genetics.

Put simply, genetic testing can raise a number of issues, none of them with easy solutions. The first thing that makes genetic information unique is that it typically gives you information about more than just yourself: it gives you information that might have clinical utility for your relatives. In some cases, you relatives may not want to know the information that is conveyed. If your maternal grandmother died of breast cancer at an early age, and if one of your uncles had prostate cancer, you might think it's reasonable to find out if your mom's side of the family carries the BRCA mutation. But say your mom refuses to get tested for it – for whatever reasons (good or lousy – she remembers her own mom's battle with cancer and would prefer not to know, or she's generally afraid of the process, or whatever) – but you want to find out. Well, if you test positive for the mutation, and if there's no cancer on your dad's side, you know that your mom has the mutation. She still doesn't want to know? Fine, you don't have to tell her. But what do you tell her if you opt for a radical bilateral mastectomy as a preventive measure? In a sense, it's impossible for you to make an autonomous decision about your own genetic health without somehow infringing her sovereignty too.

That being said, BRCA testing is fairly simple and fairly straightforward. The mutation is known; once a family is known to be at risk for the mutation, it's easy to do relatively cheap tests on the family to figure out who has the mutation and who doesn't. Once you know your BRCA status, you can decide whether you want to, say, get on with having kids so that you can have your ovaries removed before turning 35 (despite being named for BReast CAncer, BRCA confers a much higher risk of ovarian cancer.) You may opt to go the Christina Applegate route. You may do both, just one, or neither.

Other kinds of testing that are equally deterministic are similarly straightforward. Huntington's…that's the one everyone goes back to. If you have the mutation, by your mid-40s, you will begin to show symptoms of the disease, which is devastating and inexorable, and arguably one of the best arguments for the availability of physician-assisted suicide. Wanting to know if you have the mutation can be empowering or terrifying. Unlike breast cancer, where genetic mutations account for only about 10% of new cases, Huntington's pentrance (the link between the mutation and the disease) is basically 100%.

Finally, there's information that's not deterministic at all. For example, genetic mutations for Alzheimer's disease would tell you that you have a 55% chance of developing Alzheimer's – not much better than a coin toss. (Oddly, there are studies showing that people with some of these mutations are more likely to buy life insurance and long term care insurance, neither of which are protected by the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act.)

Anyway, clearly the stuff is interesting, and as a spectator, I was excited to attend a patient panel (cruelly scheduled at the same time the university would be handing out tickets to the president's kinda-meh speech about energy policy yesterday morning.) Except, after hearing a couple of touching stories from cancer survivors and pre-vivors (eg, someone with a BRCA mutation who has never had cancer but has still opted for the bilateral mastectomy), we were treated to the sound of this dramatic, conceited, self-righteous doc with a family history of diffuse gastric cancer prattle on about how the only right decision to make, in the face of a genetic mutation, is to cut whatever it is out. She actually told another panelist struggling with Lynch syndrome, who had already undergone a partial colectomy, to "use it or lose it." In reference to her uterus. The panelist who wanted not to use or lose her uterus was a sweet woman, in her early 30s, who desperately wants a child before undergoing the procedure. She is single, and painfully aware of the menacing ticking clock in her life, but she has chosen to manage her heightened risk by increasing the frequency of her colonoscopies and uterine biopsies. Another panelist, who had delayed her oopherectomy and mastectomy for as long as possible, acknowledged the doc's strident position by quipping, "Well, apparently I'm screwed."

Probably unintentional, but the panel illustrated, vividly, what several studies have shown: that doctors are much more directive (ie, much more likely to approach genetic results with a perception that there is a right and a wrong course of action to be taken as a result of the test) than genetic counselors are. If this were an academic blog, I'd provide you with references, but it's not, so you just have to believe me when I tell you that, when it comes to genetics, doctors get a lot of basic information wrong (eg, whether men in a BRCA family are at increased risk for anything – they can be, if they have the mutation, as can their offspring, etc) and are more likely to try to get you to do something, with little regard for your own ability to make autonomous decisions about risks and trade-offs.

The phrase “rags to riches”

2011-01-19T10:58:00.001-05:00

I was, to my chagrin, watching an episode of "Storage Wars" the other night – a show whose mere existence still confounds me – when the resident dickhead on the show said that he wanted to name his business "Rags to Riches," after his own life-story, you see. They then flashed a picture of his childhood home, which was…pretty nice, all things considered. Rather than rags to riches, his journey seems to have been more of a "lower middle class to perhaps upper middle class-ish."

More recently, perhaps, I've been chagrined by Speaker Boehner's characterization of his own childhood (the one that so often causes him to weep.) He was one of a gajillion kids, and he worked in his dad's bar. Now, from my vantage point, being the son of a small business-owner in a tiny Ohio town seems like a pretty good family to be born into. Just because you had to share a bathroom with the gajillion kids your parents kept having (because they were either (a) too ignorant to use contraception, or because (b) they want the kids for either free labor or a preferential tax treatment) doesn't mean you were raised in abject poverty.

I would posit that being in a single-parent family, and then managing to attend a prestigious university followed by an Ivy league law school on your way to becoming president of the country is a tad bit more impressive (Clinton, Obama.) But my point here isn't to compare Boehner's biography to that of two former presidents – it's to point out that more and more, the type of self-mythologizing that allows an individual to believe that everything they have acquired in life has been acquired solely through their own hard work and dedication, and that none of it is the result of existing power structures, institutional biases, etc, is one of the most dangerous ideas in political discourse today.

Bill Gates is a popular example of true "rags to riches," but I'm not sure the rags were so raggy in his case (although the riches certainly are richy.) I think that, in all probability, the closest true occurrence of a rags to riches story comes from the world of sports. Terrell Owens, Michael Vick? Terrible humans, in all probability, but they come out of a type of poverty – a setting – that most of us cannot imagine. The rags are there, and so are the riches. (This is doubly true for, say, a Brazilian athlete who makes the national team, or who gets to play in Europe. The amount of work and adversity they face to make it as professionals makes the hardships of being a collegiate athlete seem…well, like first world problems, frankly.)

It might be the case that people are using this phrase as lazy shorthand for "my life-story is improbable." Which is dumb, because every life-story is improbable. But for Boehner not to realize that not going hungry, having dinner on the table every night, being raised in a loving family, and being assured work that would contribute to the family's wealth as a young teenager gave him and his siblings a tremendous institutional advantage over others is either disingenuous or delusional. And the fact that he hasn't been asked to clarify what about his journey is so remarkable seems negligent on the part of the media.

Fuck this year.

2010-12-15T19:20:00.001-05:00

> All kinds of terrible things have happened this year.
>
> I am at MIA, with my mom and sister, about to board a plane to Rio. A few hours later, we'll be joined by my brother.
>
> I'll spend my birthday at a funeral for my grandmother, who died unexpectedly of a heart attack yesterday. She was supposed to be arriving in the U.S. this Sunday morning to spend the holidays with us. Instead, we have a few days there to do all the tedious and cruel legal shit that follows an unexpected death before scampering back to the U.S. to have a grandmother-less Christmas. After my last final, of course.
>
> I'm not a big birthday person. I don't ask for much. I would prefer, however, not to spend it in a cemetery in Niterói, giving my grandmother a place to rest next to her late husband.
>
> Repeat: fuck this year.

Of Election Results and Shame

2010-12-13T10:59:00.001-05:00

The day after the midterms this year, I was in a weeklong meeting with people from a variety of different African nations. During these weeklong meetings, you tend to fall into a pleasant rhythm of amicable "ain't you tired of this thing too?" banter over a catered breakfast before spending the next 6 hours bashing your head repeatedly against a brick wall of language and document editing. The folks from Africa tell us what strange facet of America they've encountered via the airwaves the night before – "what exactly is it that the phrase 'G.O.P.' stands for? Who are they?" – or, "evidently, the issue of querying blood donors about polygamy isn't strictly an African problem! What is this 'Sister Wives' show I've seen?" – while those of us from the office try to provide answers and/or context.

The day after the election last month, our room was in a fairly distraught mood – not just because of the electoral teagasm, but partly because most of us in the room who live in the District aren't fans of Vincent Gray. The day before, he had given a smarmy speech with Marion Barry standing directly beside him. Gray ran a kind of unnecessarily divisive campaign against the incumbent, Fenty, who most people think did a pretty decent job (even if he came across as kind of an arrogant prick.) Gray made several insinuations that under Fenty, life in the city hadn't improved for all voters, and that it was time for a boom that would help the wards that were being left behind. Like I said, unnecessarily divisive from a racial standpoint, and demonstrably untrue from a spending standpoint.

This led of course to some of us explaining why Marion Barry was such an embarrassment to the city, and it may have even been implied that, for someone who had done very little to take care of his health, his longevity was fairly admirable if a tad irritating. This general subject of embarrassment then led to a comment about, sheesh, and now the teapeople will be representing the U.S. abroad, and their understanding of America is so dim that we have to wonder how they see the rest of the world.

"Embarrassing? You think you know embarrassment at your elected leaders?" asked one of the South Africans. Oh, right. Jacob Zuma now, Thabo Mbeki a few years ago. We nod and feel a little vexed to be making such a big deal out of a few teafolk. "And then there's L___!"

Indeed. Someone from Zimbabwe. She definitely has it worse, considering that Robert Mugabe is one of the worst people on the planet. Someone said, to alleviate the awkwardness, "I remember being in Zim in 1999, or so, and everyone was just so ecstatic because they thought…well, they thought he couldn't live much longer."

She answers, "Indeed, he is like your Marion Barry." After some more talk, she added a fairly somber thought – something to the extent of, "In Zimbabwe, you keep your head down and mind your own business. It's easy to die. It's very easy to die in Zimbabwe."

And that was all it took for us to realize that our problems are very much first-world problems. And this is in fact a helpful prism through which to view just about anything.

Example: My internet router at home needs to be powercycled more often than I'd like?

First world perspective: So, a box that gives me a fairly reliable and fast connection to the Internet from my expensive condo in a fairly posh neighborhood occasionally makes it so that I need to wait 30 seconds in order to get online with either my smartphone, one of my two laptops, or my ipad? It occasionally makes it difficult for me to stream some of the 600 gigs of media to a pair of expensive cherrywood speakers? Poor me. Life is SO difficult. I guess I'll simply retreat to the safety of my warm apartment, brew a pot of Peets coffee, and eat some of the abundant leftovers stored in my fridge, while I contemplate how difficult it is to be me.

Example: Drivers are so mean to pedestrians when it's snowing or raining!

First world perspective: Oh heavens! The well-paved streets on which I walk (safely at most times of day or night, I might add), to get to a form of public transit that, while flawed, is still better than the public transit in all but a handful of American cities, in order to get to my well-paid job in a building that is secure, where I have virtually all of the resources I need to perform the tasks assigned to me, are occasionally populated by inconsiderate drivers who occasionally fail to pause a complete beat at a stop sign for me to cross. LIFE IS SO UNFAIR.

It's kind of a big day for Fluminense.

2010-12-05T13:07:00.000-05:00

Here's hoping that in a few hours, I'm crying tears of joy. Not like that other time.

Another chapter of...The Trumpeter Chronicles

2010-11-30T13:45:00.001-05:00

I’m in the office kitchen, rinsing off a Tupperware container – still burping up Banana Leaves’ awesome baba tofu curry – when in walks the Trumpeter.

“So, did you have a nice Thanksgiving?” Trying to shift the conversation away from me while saying as little as possible, I say, “Yes, it was lovely. How was yours?”

“Well, [husband] and I went to a restaurant, and we had a great time.” I let this sit. “So, no cooking at home for you? Like everyone else does?” She quickly tries to explain that for her, Thanksgiving is “all about turkey.” She qualifies this in a way that suggests that she believes it is odd, to insist on turkey on Thanksgiving. “So,” I ask, “they did a special Thanksgiving menu?” “Well, yes, but what’s most important, is that they also had all their regular items. Which was great, because we decided we should go back there some other time.”

I let this sink in. She didn’t go out with her husband to celebrate Thanksgiving at a restaurant she knows, or even a fancy one, given the way she dresses (bag lady chic.) She apparently didn’t even specifically go out seeking a Thanksgiving meal from a restaurant. She just went to some random restaurant, where they happened to be serving turkey. None of this is all that weird, I guess, but it’s hard to capture context. For example, as she’s telling me this, do you know what she’s doing? She’s microwaving leftover McDonald’s French fries. About a half a serving, I’d say. Did she really set aside the second half of her fries the night before and decide she’d get a lunch out of them?

Sigh.

don't you love it when...

2010-11-23T08:38:00.001-05:00

...you drive to a different part of town that you only visit every couple of years - ahem, the DC DMV inspection station on Half Street - and when you come back to your own part of town, everything looks slightly unfamiliar and different? I can't explain why this happens, but I always find it exhilarating.

Emusic is not my beat, but I will fearlessly address something of no interest to anyone anyway.

2010-11-11T15:16:00.002-05:00

"Gordon" does a much better job with emusic than I do, but here are some thoughts nonetheless:

One of the great things about emusic, which this catalog addition will irreversibly change, was the fact that you were somewhat limited in your choices. The fact that you had prepaid for the month or year meant that the money was essentially a sunk cost, and it allowed you to take chances that you otherwise might not have. With a $7.99 transaction cost, I would never have discovered a band like the Rural Alberta Advantage:

It's a lovely little indie debut - heartfelt, awkward, largely about failed relationships, growing old, and moving to a big lonely city. And it's an album that feels totally mine, because I stumbled across it on emusic and thought, "why the hell not?" It matched the number of downloads I had left for the month, and it was "use it or lose it." If they're competing for my attention with canonical things that I never got around to picking up - say, Neil Young, or Prince - I'm probably going to be more likely to spend those downloads on musical vitamins than I am on a wild gamble.

Of course, I'm blaming emusic for my own behavior here, but there was something really liberating about the emusic outlook, and the idea that you're choosing music from a slightly skewed catalog. The constraints were nice, actually, because it meant that I could be current on whatever pitchfork's flavor du jour was, and I could also get a little wacky:

Why the hell not, right? Plus, given the lengths of each track on the Lindstrom - Prins Thomas album, you were looking at a real deal. And this brings us to the other problem I have with the pricing scheme: Fela Kuti albums are no longer 2-4 downloads. Jazz albums - many of which are under 50 minutes in length and no more than 5-7 tracks - will cost the same as a 14-track, 65-minute long indie record. Theoretically. The upside is that, potentially, hip-hop albums will carry less of a penalty (given all the skits, non-musical tracks, etc.) A lot of these trends had actually started once emusic moved from downloads to credits, but I'm afraid that the move to actual dollar values will continue this trend. If a Fela Kuti album is 12 tracks, I'll look for a hard copy in the discount bin instead of getting it from emusic.

Citizens Against Government Waste Apparently Not Against Stupidity

2010-10-25T14:19:00.001-04:00

I caught this ad on Sunday, right before “Meet the Press,” and found it to be pretty jawdroppingly ugly. But what I failed to realize was just how stupid the ad is.

To sum it up: CAGW believe that in a few decades, a random Chinese professor would interpret the collapse of the American economic empire the exact same way that a current teapartier does. WHO KNEW, right? It’s analogous to how Scalia knows that the right way to interpret the Constitution is exactly the way a Regan conservative would interpret it.

To review: China, who have a GDP of 4 point some trillion dollars, and enacted a stiumulus bill of 600 or so billion dollars, will be deriding the US’s foolish, 900 billion dollar stimulus? (The US GDP is, of course, in the neighborhood of 14 trillion.)

To continue: a Chinese political scientist or economist would mock the US not for deregulation of the financial sector, not for two unaffordable wars, not for fealty to a corporatist interpretation of the free market, but for borrowing from China? A country with a highly centralized economy dictated in stringent terms by the government would mock America for turning its back on practices that do not currently exist in China?

The ad doesn’t quite indicate whether this Chinese academic had his “come to Jesus” moment on free market economics, but a small government conservative think tank can dream, can’t it?

(Full disclosure: I got into an argument with a CAGW lobbyist a few months ago in class. Who was right about Stupak, huh? The one of us who said he needed support from single issue voters, or the one of us (ahem, me) who said maybe, just maybe, he really did oppose funding for ending pregnancies for purely moral reasons? Incidentally, what makes this story great is that he announced he wouldn’t run for reelection the day after our argument, proving me right.)

Concussy bruise!

2010-09-30T09:33:00.001-04:00

No one asked for this, but you’re getting it anyway. This post-concussy bruise didn’t start to fill in, colorwise, until a few days after the incident. It started out with those pointy bruises you can see, in the shape of a semi-circular series of puncture wounds, not unlike a half-bear-trap, if such a thing were possible. As the days went on, it started to fill out with red hues, and then purple, on to black, and, finally, as the healing gets underway, a yellow tone suggestive of pus. Who wants breakfast???

Concussy

2010-09-29T12:59:00.001-04:00

So, I went to a glorious Pavement gig on September 21 with none other than Herr Gordo. It was great catching up, having a raucous night in the city, and feasting on some Nobu afterward.

However, a concert that was largely about celebrating the work of a great 1990s band wouldn’t be complete without another kind of flashback – to the Dinkins days, as Malkmus jokes in the liner notes to the S&E reissue. Evidently, I took a vicious blow to the back of the head that left me feeling concussy (as in, memory loss, profound disorientation, etc) and bloody, and staple-y (9 in the back of the head to close the wound.) I got the staples taken out today, and lord do I feel better than I did at around 7 am last Wednesday morning, when I woke up in Bellevue with nary a clue as to how I arrived there.

What have I learned? Well, basically, beyond the need for caution and occasional modesty about my levels of alertness after scotch, I’ve learned that it’s absolutely insane to allow football players to get back into a game after a concussion. The experience of thinking a thought but not being able to integrate it into the rest of my brain was incredibly confusing. I would think of an obligation, or something I wanted to do in the not-too-distant future, and instead of having that thought “downloaded” (for lack of a better word) and integrated into the rest of my brain, into whatever I was doing, the thought would just kind of float out there, with no apparent relationship to me or to my thought process.

Not having any memories is sort of a blessing, from a PTSD standpoint. I’m still fighting with Bellevue to get a copy of my medical records faxed to my doctor – a process that is unnecessarily difficult and laborious given the flintiness of the hospital’s medical records staff. Given that my wife works in a hospital, she’s aghast at the exchanges we seem to have with Bellevue every day. It seems to unnecessarily add salt to the wound of what was already a pretty harrowing ordeal.

Oh, and there’s no way they should have discharged me that morning. My memory of the morning is very episodic – Memento-esque, if you will – and not at all linear. I don’t know what kind of operation they’re running over there, but it’s not one that appears to put a premium on patient safety…

The "real" America

2010-09-14T20:17:00.000-04:00

So, here's a feeble attempt at returning to some semblance of regularly writing here, or at the very least, addressing one of the central topics of this blog: American-ness and non-American-ness.

The other day I found myself in a strange situation, talking to someone at Bethesda Naval Hospital. He was a Vietnam vet, and was classmates at the USNA with Jim Webb and Oliver North (whom he called "Larry North.") He actually told a fairly engaging story about how they all used to box each other, because they were in the same weight, and that Webb fought North in the USNA championship bout - a bit after North had completed a full recovery from a nasty leg fracture. Though Webb knew North couldn't turn to the side of his healed leg, he refused to sneak into North's blindside and give him the business. The rest of the boxers couldn't believe Webb was going easy on a guy with one functional leg. Amazingly, there's a reference to this fight on wikipedia.

Anyway, it turns out this guy's son-in-law is the famous cigar marine. And he is VERY proud of his son-in-law, who is evidently running for office on a cookie-cutter tea party-type platform.

The reason I'm talking about this chortly gregarious fella is because earlier I heard someone ask him if he'd left the United States recently, and he said, "No, I have not left the States. I haven't been to DC." I wasn't sure what he meant at first - was he acknowledging DC's non-stateness? If so, that seemed like a pretty unlikely political statement for this guy to make - but then it dawned on me that he was simply repeating the Palin-type trope about how there are real parts of America and not-so-real parts of America.

I thought about this as we packed up the Smart Car for some tailgating on Labor Day. We went to support Ms. AC's hokies in this debacle. (I should hasten to point out that the game itself was actually highly entertaining despite the result - several lead changes in the second half, etc.) We packed up some beers in the back of the car (there's actually storage back there.) We hopped in our little city car and drove out to some big stadium. We may not have had flags adorning our car, and maybe we mostly don't eat meat. Maybe our pregame music is NPR and rather than Bon Jovi, and maybe one of us wasn't even born here. No matter. What we were doing - packing up the car on a national holiday and heading to a football game - should be eminently recognizable to any American.

I thought of this guy as we loaded up the car, of his conception of America somehow excluding us. I can tell you that, in the parking lot, we chatted with strangers, answered (yes) questions about the tiny car we were driving, and even got chummy with some Boise State people. I still don't understand why our existence in America is any less real than anyone else's.

But which version of "The Office"?

2010-08-09T09:50:00.000-04:00

This story is pretty undeniably cool, until you get to this paragraph:

To relax at night, Stafford said he has downloaded podcasts via Internet satellite phone by British comedian Ricky Gervais and episodes of the TV show "The Office".

Perhaps my lack of interest in the American version of "The Office" makes me an oddball. But if it's lame that this guy is watching "The Office" in the Amazon - which it is, I think - it's twice as lame if he's watching the American version.

And with that verdict, hopefully I set a new record in the "nitpicking an otherwise impressive achievement" category.

A song for your Wednesday

2010-07-28T11:48:00.000-04:00

Delorean's "Ayrton Senna" ep is epic. Too bad they didn't take the high road and follow it up with an ep called "Nelson Piquet." (Wonder about the Venn diagram overlap of people who are into Brazilian Formula One drivers from the 1980s/1990s and people who like electro pop...?) This is off their follow-up album, which is still pretty good.

Linearity, jamming, and soccer.

2010-07-26T09:45:00.000-04:00

So, I went to a Dave Matthews Band show, and while I wasn't necessarily super into the idea, I do enjoy some of the band's music. I was of course dreading the utter abundance of douchitude, but it wasn't terrible, crowd-wise.

What caught my attention was that this was very different from the other improv-oriented rock band that I like (Phish.) Phish structures their shows into two sets. No opening act, just about 2.5 hours total of Phish. The first set typically contains more songs, with creative soloing but not necessarily a lot of improv that changes the musical structure of a song. The second set, on the other hand, tends to have longer songs that are broken open and which completely depart from the song's original mold. This makes sense to me: you start with the familiar, you play around with it, and by the second set, you see openings, cracks in songs, that weren't there before.

One of the endearing things about Phish, though, is that sometimes they have no idea how to structure a show. Because these concerts are often held in sports arenas, a friend of mine once referred to them as "a sporting event for hippies." That's not entirely off, though I don't thing likening anything to a sporting event is pejorative (I think Doughboy did when he made that statement, though.) And sports in America are - generalization alert - largely about the ending of the game.

Michael Jordan, John Elway, Doug Flutie, a pre-injury 2006 Gilbert Arenas - they were all inspiring and engaging to sports fans because of late-game heroics. Even Landon Donovan gets on that list now, with the miraculous finish against Algeria. Now, what does this have to do with seeing Dave Matthews at Nationals Park? Well, for starters, the crowd was sitting down for most of the show. I like sitting just as much as the next person, even if it will kill you, but I also enjoy standing quite a bit. I'd say I'm 50/50 on the sitting/standing thing. But at a show? I believe firmly in standing.

So, I noticed that the crowd was basically very complacent - sort of like a first quarter basketball crowd, or a third inning baseball crowd. Why get up? Why get into it? What happens early doesn't matter. It's all about the finish. And of course, as it became clear that the band was playing the last song, everyone was standing and behaving as though they were at a rock show.

What this has to do with soccer is that, in the context of how much ink has been spilled over the question of whether there is something fundamentally un-American about soccer or not (whatever the hell un-American means, right? Harvey Pekar was radically American, and so is Dick Cheney) and one thing that I think most scribes have missed is that in soccer, what happens in the first minute can make all the difference. In American football, there are so many possessions (and the possibility for half-scores in the form of field goals) that a good team can put themselves in position to remain competitive. Same in basketball, where a team can go on a sudden 12-2 run and make a game suddenly competitive. But in soccer, there are no half-scores, and no linear progression.

Put differently: a good drive in football that takes you 80 yards down the field can get you 7 points or 3 points. Unless you mess up, you'll get one of the two. A great possession in soccer can only result in a goal or not result in a goal. There's no reward for good effort - there's only the goal or not the goal. Similarly, a goal scored in the first minute of a game can be decisive. If you believe that the important stuff needs to wait until the end of an event to take place, you may find yourself sorely disappointed by a game where you can be locked into a bad outcome in the first minute, and spend 89 hapless minutes fighting to change that.

Besides thinking about this stuff, I also overheard a great conversation in the men's room, but I'll save that for later.

This Merkin Life

2010-07-13T14:03:00.001-04:00

Every now and then, I get to actually spend more than an hour getting to or from somewhere in a car, and my default setting is to check out a “This American Life.” We were driving back from Roanoke this past weekend – also known as the town in a place where every town is a town you know from a bluegrass tune, like Flint Hill – and Ms. AC chose this episode to listen to. The second story is unbelievably sad and moving, and when we got home and had a so-called “driveway moment” (though the “driveway” was actually Kalorama Road, but whatevs), I thought I was in for a lesson about the importance of not staring an episode of “This American Life” when you’re too close to home. Typically, if they have a downer story, there’s a third, uplifting story to follow, and I thought, “Oh, if only we had another 12 minutes of driving, we could let Ira Glass finish us off with an unlikely tale of bonhomie and wit.”

Long story short, we timed it right. There was no third story. Just this horribly sad one, which went on and on and on, and which grows increasingly weird and transgressive. You can get curious by looking at this picture, or, even better, don’t look at the picture now. Listen to the show first, and then click through to the picture. Stupid Temerlins.

Have I been gone for a while? You bet I've been gone for a while.

2010-07-09T14:56:00.001-04:00

But I haven’t gone anywhere, really. Just been way too busy to carve out the time to do anything meaningful that isn’t either school- or home improvement-related. Also, the World Cup was kind of a time drain, but Brasil’s loss did give me the perfect excuse to watch the film version of “The Road,” which was lovely and truly inspirational when you hate humanity.

One thing I’ve been fighting for at work, for quite some time, is a fair and broad telecommuting policy. I could have secured a separate peace several months ago, but I kind of decided that I wanted to make my office a better place to work. And in the process – though it’s been miserable and I’ve been confronted with idiocy and small-mindedness at virtually every turn – is realizing that I’m sort of a company man. Not in the boomer “stay with one company forever” sense of the word, though that may come to pass…but more in the sense of enjoying the belonging-to-an-organization part of work.

To be clear, I hate most people, especially those in my office. And not having to suffer these kinds of people is exactly one of the things I envy the most about people who freelance. But what’s not for me is the feeling that I’m only in it for me. The organizational behavior, changing the culture of a place, trying to do a small thing to help senior management realize the world is changing – I really enjoy that part of things. I can’t quite say why.

Sure, it’d be nice to have more autonomy. But I have the obligation of going to work every day to thank for a number of friends (not to mention a spouse) and other adventures. So, even though at times it’s really bad, I’m having a moment of self-satisfaction with the fact that I work in a building with people. But please, let me get this telecommuting policy implemented already…

An immigration quickie

2010-05-24T13:43:00.002-04:00

It's fairly embarrassing that I've never linked to this chart, which does its best to explain the legal immigration maze.

Something to remember when angry people in border states complain that people should come here legally. I'm not advocating for illegal immigration, of course - just pointing out that the current clusterfuck of a process, which results in a few tens of thousands of people becoming permanent residents every year, and a couple other tens of thousands being eligible to work here, is beyond broken.

PS. Hat tip to AF for reminding me of this a few weeks ago.

A worthwhile commute

2010-04-29T10:28:00.001-04:00

I drive to work exactly once a week right now. On Thursdays, we get veggies from a CSA set-up delivered to my office, and since I don’t have class that night (at least till later this summer), everything works out pretty well. This means that I have very few commuter habits: I’m never sure what to listen to, which path to take, when to be in the left lane and when to avoid it. It’s exhausting, that level of decision-making, but every now and then you have a very rewarding commute – rewarding not because it’s especially fast or problem-free, but because it reminds you that live where you live and not somewhere else.

In my case, this morning, it meant seeing the following:

-seeing a middle-aged woman being dropped off by a gentleman caller in a very posh section of Kalorama, doing the walk of shame. I could tell because she was wearing an Ovechkin jersey.

-while caught in funeral traffic, catching the distinct whiff of a presidential motorcade not too far behind me.

-still in funeral traffic, listening to the new Trans Am album, and thinking about how great the music sounds when you’re surrounded by police cars, secret service SUVs, and sirens, sirens, sirens.

-STILL in funeral traffic, seeing Donna Brazile and…daughter, I assume?...emerging from a cab.

-people dressed to mourn, but behaving as though they are at an important society gathering – which, anyone who remembers Craig Crawford being interviewed by Imus around the time of the Reagan funeral will remember, they sort of are. Funerals, protests, and inaugurations: these are the events that infringe on our daily lives.

I was stressed till I realized that being 20 minutes late to work would have no discernible impact on my day or on my relative state of anxiety. Life was good.

I both do and don't hope that this exchange defines grad school for me

2010-04-22T09:45:00.001-04:00

Innocent youngster: Why did Stupak care so much? I mean, there aren’t even abortion providers in his district.

Solid liberal prof, nodding in agreement: For sure, it’s a setback for reproductive rights.

Me: But…I’m not saying I buy it, but if you buy the argument that it’s a moral issue, then, you know, consider it by analogy to slavery. Telling someone, “Don’t like slavery? Then don’t have one” doesn’t work, because you don’t want anyone to have slaves.

Snotty lobbyist from Citizens Against Government Waste who is incapable of sounding nice: Actually? It had, like, nothing to do with that? It was really funding? For his reelection campaign? He couldn’t afford to lose support from his pro-life donors. We always had him voting for it. We knew he was going to support the bill.

Solid liberal prof: Because he said months ago he would? Why didn’t you think the dynamics had changed? As he ratcheted up the rhetoric, he was really boxing himself in.

Snotty lobbyist: Well? Yeah, we knew. We just knew. I mean, the pro-life Democrats had to put on a show, but they were going to vote in block because no one wants to be the deciding vote. But, for him? It was really all about the reelection.

This exchange happened the day before Stupak announced he would not seek reelection.

If I notice that the most recent episode of "Lost"...

2010-04-14T10:05:00.001-04:00

…featured two references to songs on side B of Bruce Springsteen’s “The Wild, The Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle,” what exactly about the statement dates me the most? The old Bruce album, or the fact that I remember that the songs referenced opened up side B of the album? And that side B of that particular album may be the greatest side in the history of rock?

morning-run talk

2010-04-13T16:50:00.001-04:00

She: the physiological basis for ‘the bends’; the meaning of the term (ie, it’s hard to bend your joints when afflicted by it); nitric acid boiled into blood.

Me: Asymptotic covariances; the importance of homoskedasticity; hate of SAS.

But hey, at least we got out for a run.

In which I push music!

2010-04-12T12:30:00.002-04:00

This is really Gordon's terrain (wiredformusic!) here, but I've been known to make the odd mix here and there, and being in grad school has awakened all the angst of being in high school and college, which were my prime mix-making years. I'm still working on an econ/public finance type-mix, but here are a few tunes that have made my quant playlist. There are a few missing tracks (Luna's "math wiz"! Lala doesn't think I own it, but lala, you're wrong about that, just as you're wrong about the Silver Jews not existing, and about me not owning "Supra Genius" by Soul Coughing or "Fractions and feelings" by Malkmus + Jix.)

Without further ado! The quant mixtape! Comments below.

Count me in: Songs about numbe...

1. 4 out of 5 (Soul Coughing)
Few bands spent as much time counting or listing numbers as Soul Coughing. Accordingly, they are something like the patron saints of this mix.
2. One (Aimee Mann)
Pretty self-evident.
3. Don’t tell me to do the math(s) (Los Campesinos!)
Every mix needs token bratty Scottish indie punk. Work on your algebra and stand out in the rain! Plus, the title reflects that charming British locution of calling it “maths.”
4. The Calculation (Regina Spektor)
“Counted up our feelings / and divided them up even / and it called that calculation perfect love.” HAHA, nice try, liar. Multivariate linear regression is the opposite of perfect love.
5. Plus Ones (Okkervil River)
Ah yes, the plus one. Because this song is explicitly about all the things that got left out of other songs that enumerate things (97th tear, 100th luftballoon), I think of it as being about the error term.
6. If you don’t like the effects, don’t produce the cause (Funkadelic)
Funkadelic goes right to the heart of the matter, don’t they? They bypass association entirely and go right to causality. This must be a bivariate model since they don’t touch on interaction effects. I’m hoping that at some point we’ll get to hear George Clinton’s thoughts on multicollinearity.
7. 100% Dundee (The Roots)
In evaluating Dundee-ness, it is clear that the Roots will not tolerate even the smallest alpha. This song mentions sigma, assumptions, and the phrase “lyrically calculus in this arithmetic hip hop metropolis.” It therefore makes math seem much cooler than it is.
8. 6’1” (Liz Phair)
Clearly what’s going on here is that the break-up in the song has caused Liz Phair to reparameterize her height variable, and she’s found that the recalibration gets her an extra 11 inches on her height measurement.
9. 123 goodbye (Elvis Perkins)
Abacus of the rain! Calculus of pain! It’s all there, and it’s all true. Elvis Perkins has written a couple of gorgeous songs about the death of his mom – she was on one of the planes that hit the World Trade Center in 2001. This is one of them.
10. My mathematical mind (Spoon)
My English lit mind does not see the breaks.
11. Neverending math equation (Sun Kil Moon)
Originally a Modest Mouse song. Love this cover. Google the lyrics because they’re good, and while Sun Kil Moon has this great mopey voice, he’s also completely incomprehensible.
12. Feelgood by numbers (The Go! Team)
Except going by numbers makes me feel bad. On the other hand, this song makes me feel decidedly good, so maybe you can feel good by “Feelgood by numbers.” Hmmm.
13. Two sevens clash (Culture)
Marcus Garvey predicted that on July 7, 1977, something epic or terrible was going to happen. The sevens would clash. The band Culture made this prediction famous, and the song was so popular that supposedly when the date rolled around, most of Kingston shut down. Schools, stores – all closed for fear of the sevens clashing. Nothing happened, but we certainly do put a lot of faith in numbers, don’t we?
14. 100% (Sonic Youth)
Much like the Roots’ uncompromising approach to Dundee, Sonic Youth will not accept any degree of alpha in their “love for dead roadie model.”
15. Casiotone nation (Soul Coughing)
Again, with the counting.
16. I wish I could go back to college (Avenue Q cast)
Because this is how Quant II makes me feel.
17. A day to God is 1000 years (RZA)
RZA takes on the delicate issue of scaling in data. Sure, it’s just a day to God, but it’s 1000 years for humans. Be mindful of how to interpret the coefficient on your time variable in this model because of thi scaling issue. And, bonus thematic tie-in: The Wu guys are five percenters, or at least use a lot of it in their lyrics. So, we’re back to Soul Coughing, the oroboros of quant music.
18. Count me out (The Del McCoury Band)
Yes, Del. Sing it.

Unstructured time

2010-04-07T22:11:00.000-04:00

I used to think it was a knock on adult life to say that you would never again have the same kind of seemingly never-ending amount of unstructured time with your friends. Possibly this is true, though at this point in my life, I really don't know what I would do with unstructured time.

It's bad enough for me when Ms. AC leaves before me in the morning - something that had been previously unheard of in our conjugal existence, but which now happens at least three times a week. The extra fifteen minutes or so are pleasant enough - Sportscenter or Morning Joe or possibly even a few minutes of Saved by the Bell - but having to then develop my own routine for leaving the house is worse than death. I never remember to check to see if the many things that should be on/off/open/closed/cleaned/stored are in order. I leave, get halfway down the stairwell, and wonder if I locked the door. So I go back, check, find the door locked, and rush out of the building. Then, across the street, I wonder the same thing. Is the door locked? I do a quick mental calculus - Ms. AC won't be home till xx:xx, which would give the cats z number of hours to play in the hallway of the building, giving them a significant chance of escaping the building entirely. Turn back, go check door, realize I'm ten minutes late already, curse the cats, repeat.

Tonight, I got home at 9 knowing full well Mrs. AC won't leave her campus till 11 pm. So, I went for a run, got really sweaty, took a cold shower, and now...here I am. Baseball game on mute, listening to Bill Callahan, and...well, what the hell do I do? Should I recode some variables for my final quant project, read about health care and the profit motive, or just, I don't know, have unstructured time?

Also, it's very hot, and our building hasn't switched over to cool air, and though I am tropical in genetic makeup, I'm sick of being sweaty at home. New theory: when you're hot, go for a run, take a cold shower, hang out in your boxers drinking scotch, and write about it. It won't make you feel cooler, but the scotch will elevate your body temperature enough that you'll be less cognizant of the heat. Like ice cream in winter.

The bill...

2010-03-28T13:34:00.000-04:00

So, it's been a busy week but I'd be remiss not to post some thoughts about The Bill, as we've taken to calling it - especially given that I am preparing for a class debate about Medicare and have spent an inordinate amount of time learning about the system. (Incidentally, while I'm not crazy about single-payer, reading about Medicare makes it seem much, much more attractive.)

Das Binky has a great post about why mandated insurance is such an important part of the bill. Jacob Hacker - quoted on these pages before - agrees that, while not perfect, the bill is a good first step.

And despite concerns about the constitutionality of all this "mandating" - there seem to be some pretty capable minds who say, yes, this is all fair. I tend to agree with them because to take the other side literally would make, say, a progressive tax scale unconstitutional, and we all know that courts have repeatedly asserted that a progressive tax scale falls within the constitutional provision to tax and does not run afoul of any equal protection provisions.

On a side note, it was particularly rewarding to see my prof - an alum of the Clinton health reform wars - so excited in class this past Wednesday. "We've been teaching this class for years, and this is the first time we've had an expansion of entitlements of this magnitude in the history of the class!" she crowed. Later, she interrupted herself mid-sentence to gush about how excited she was to be finally moving in this direction.

Which is very germane because, going back to Hacker, government programs are especially subject to path-dependence. Half of the genius of Hacker's book/dissertation is chronicling how little steps can significantly restrict the range of choices going forward. Given Hacker's involvement in the writing of the public option and his support for even this neutered bill, he evidently believes that this version will ultimately put us on a path toward a public option which is, of course, fine by me.

It'd be nice if the plan did a bit more. Cost containment is of course the biggest issue, and to the extent that Medicare is successful in containing costs, this is largely a result of Medicare's stinginess. When you pay 81% of the rate that private insurers pay, and you cover fewer services, of course your expenses per enrollee will be lower. But Medicare provides a useful baseline for private insurers to measure their own fees against for a good that is notoriously difficult to properly value. However, the arguments against the bill, near as I can tell from Paul Ryan's roadmap - are basically just variants of the same old "market market market" argument, and I really dare anyone to argue credibly that health care is a normal good, and that health care consumers behave like consumers of other products and services. Not to mention the fact that the Paul Ryan plan is just phooey, from a budgetary standpoint.

I'm not sure where the cost containment will come from until we are able, as a society, to tolerate care that's just good but not ideal. In reality, we always demand the best, the most up-to-date, the most sensitive - and all of that costs more. Unless we are willing to have an honest debate about marginal gains in efficiency compared to marginal increases in cost without someone yelling out "death panel!", I'm not sure how we'll be able to ultimately contain costs. Tort reform is, sure, a part of it (because tort reform also eliminates incentives to always offer the most up-to-date-and-super-expensive care, and lest it sound like I'm arguing for crappy care, I'll just say that if we demand the best and always the best, we should be willing to pay for it. If we are happy to get good enough, we should be ok with the mild loss of quality too. And ideally, we'd be able to put a price on that trade-off, though this is also, of course, notoriously hard to do in the confusing patchwork of American social spending.

RIP

2010-03-07T15:17:00.003-05:00

Mark Linkous made a ton of beautiful music while he was alive. I remember driving through West Virginia about ten years ago and not being sure of what I was looking for. Listening to "Good morning Spider."

A few years later, I was seeing the Flaming Lips on the Yoshimi tour, and for the opening act, this weird guy came out and played a few songs by himself in front a weird projection screen. He wasn't announced before taking the stage nor was he officially on the bill, but by the second song I knew for a fact it was Mark Linkous. Everything I saw that night was consistent with the little that I knew about him - reclusive, shy, tentative. As the years went on and I heard more and more about him collaborating with fairly big names - Tom Waits and Danger Mouse, to name a few - I figured it was a sign that Linkous had realized he belonged, that he had peers, and I kind of tuned out.

The news of his suicide and the grizzly details are really hard to stomach. I rarely mean the phrase "rest in peace" literally, but I really hope Mark Linkous can.

Still beer o'clock!

2010-03-02T16:31:00.004-05:00

But first, let's test your memory. Remember how I once wrote about the Audacity of Hops Inaugurale? No? Fine.

Maybe you remember that more recently I wrote about JJF having some Westvleteren? Oh, you don't remember that either? Fine. I don't know why I bother somedays.

Anyway, readers and fractions thereof, I stand before you today to tell you that worlds are colliding. (When two worlds collide, no one survives, no one survives...)

The guy who brewed the Inaugurale apparently is in Belgium? Or something? That's what his gchat status says. But more importantly, he has a beer blog, and what's the first post I see when I head over to his blog? Worlds colliding, people. Perhaps the Onion was right. I'm getting a real Jacob's Ladder vibe from all this, and it's not just because tonight is Lostnight. Be careful out there, kids. The reddest of reds, the bluest of blues - the saddest of songs I sing for you (if you're beer-less.)

Soundtrack for this post courtesy of the late Mark Sandman.

Eels! Again!

2010-03-01T10:35:00.001-05:00

Slate has a great piece about the life of an eel, but of course, astute readers of Abstract Citizen (all 2.7 of you!) already knew all about it from this post. Right? RIGHT???

Jacob S. Hacker is a bad-ass.

2010-02-26T14:31:00.003-05:00

Jacob S. Hacker has a not-for-the-layperson book about the public/private nature of the American welfare state. His main issues are illustrating the path-dependent nature of the evolution of these programs, and he highlights the importance of applying the same type of government/institutional analytical framework to non-governmental actors in the game. He shows how organized labor played a vital role in securing pension benefits for all Americans but acquiescent on the health front; he shows the ruthless AMA lobby fighting against national health care in the 1930’s – and perhaps most importantly, how private insurance flourished in the absence of a governmental program between 1935 and 1950. After this point, every subsequent debate about national health care has really been a debate about expanding “private” (heavily subsidized) health insurance.

Hacker more recently authored the public option that was left out of the Senate bill.

This quote is from that turning point - where the future of the American health system had been decided by means of subterranean politics and the tax code. Not all at once, of course, but this is the point at which we know where the path is leading...

There was, in short, every sign that private health insurance had won out for employed Americans, just as there was every sign that Social Security would remain the core provider of retirement income.

No votes on this outcome had been taken. No grand alternatives had been put to citizens for a test. Indeed, judging by the debates that did transpire after 1950, there were no real choices to be made. Private insurance received ever more costly subsidies. Yet defenders of the voluntary way denied that government was implicated at all. Some Americans were well served and others were left out, but discussion of winners and losers was lost in the celebration of private progress and the complexities of tax tables. Americans had found themselves caught up in a fierce battle over national health insurance, but the increasingly privileged place of private insurance in the American social welfare regime prompted little debate at all.

And I love this quote, which perfectly sums up the role of the American government in health care in the 20th century:

The federal government had first built up the technological prowess of the medical complex, then become a generous subsidizer of private health insurance, and then finally stepped in as a largely passive financier of private medical care itself.

Cheery thoughts for a cold Friday afternoon.

Carnaval

2010-02-13T12:53:00.003-05:00

Beyonce is in Rio, and apparently pulled off some nice moves at a samba school. My dad complains: "Why is our misery chic?"

But carnaval is underway, people, as evidenced by what a friend of mine reports hearing someone shouting on the street in the wee small hours of the morning yesterday:

"She can be fat! Or she can be ugly! But what she cannot be is BOTH fat AND ugly."

Ah, carnaval...

The problem with snow days...

2010-02-10T09:44:00.004-05:00

...is that they're a string of Sundays, but what we really want is a Saturday. So, we've been in a state of suspended Sundayness for the past 4 days (including the real Sunday) and we may have another Sunday or two ahead of us. Hmmm.

Beer o'clock

2010-02-01T08:26:00.000-05:00

In addition to the Jerome story, here are two more beer tales to warm your malty, hoppy hearts:

Tupper's is back! My wedding beer is back!

And JJF sends this tale from the rockier parts of the country, though it takes place in the city of broad shoulders. Enjoy the background story, if you don't know it, and the appropriately floral description of the beer itself, knowing you will probably never try it yourself:

I got a fantastic surprise that you’d appreciate for Xmas: my brother-in-law handed me one of two bottles of Westvleteren 12 he brought back from Brussels earlier in the year. Not sure if you’re familiar, but it’s been rated as the best beer in the world by numerous publications over the past couple decades. Supply is the issue – they only sell it at the abbey, and even then only in small batches to folks who have local driver’s licenses. Apparently one of John’s classmates (he was there for his MBA program) ended up driving to the abbey and bribing a local to purchase a couple of six-packs. I’m not sure how much he spent, but it was well-worth it for sure. The brew is technically a Quad, which I’d describe as a supercharged Dubbel. Dark, very little carbonation, doughy yeast on the nose, lots of brown sugar / dark fruits on the tongue, and a surprisingly smooth, almost creamy finish considering the ABV (10+%). Highly recommended if you ever have the opportunity to try it.

Jerome David

2010-01-30T14:43:00.002-05:00

I had lunch on Thursday in a place called Urban BBQ. It's located right next door to a purveyor of fine beers that had a truly impressive selection of craft ales. Not knowing what I was doing, I picked out a Mont Blanc blond, a six of 14er ESB, and a Belgian-style ale from Argentine made by a brewery named "Jerome." (I got the Cerveza Diablo.)

As we made our way to the front to pay, one of my friends found out from his phone that J.D. Salinger had died.

I got home that night and thought about that famous Jerome some. I drank the Jerome ale. I had much too much homework to do, but I still set aside some Friday metro reading - Seymour, An Introduction.

A lot of people talk about how the last novella in the Glass family saga is dark, disjointed, and of course, serves as the final coda for Salinger's most challenging and (to some) infuriating characters. I always enjoyed "Raise High the Roof Beam" and "Seymour" because of the tone, the playfulness, and Salinger's refusal to put any meat on Seymour Glass's skeleton. But as I reread it this time, I also realized that there's something else that happens in "Seymour": it's Salinger erasing himself shortly before he disappeared. Here he confuses his own biography with Buddy Glass's and suggests that Salinger's body of work is in fact Buddy's.

At this point, it doesn't seem to me merely chummy to mention that I've written about my brother before. For that matter, with a little good-humored cajoling I might conceivably admit that there's seldom been a time when I haven't written about him, and if, presumably at gunpoint, I had to sit down tomorrow and write a story about a dinosaur, I don't doubt that I'd inadvertently give the big chap one or two small mannerisms reminiscent of Seymour - a singularly endearing way of biting off the top of a hemlock, say, or of wagging his thirty-foot tail. Some people - not close friends - have asked me whether a lot of Seymour didn't go into the young leading character of the one novel I've published. Actually, most of these people haven't asked me; they've told me. To protest this at all, I've found, makes me break out in hives, but I will say that no one who knew my brother has asked me or told me anything of the kind - for which I'm grateful, and, in a way, more than a bit impressed, since a good many of my main characters speak Manhattanese fluently and idiomatically, have a rather common flair for rushing in where most damned fools fear to tread, and are, by and large, pursued, by an Entity that I'd much prefer to identify, very rougly, as the Old Man of the Mountain.

RIP.

First "holy shit" moment in public policy

2010-01-29T16:57:00.002-05:00

So, the scuttlebutt about social welfare spending in the US is that the American welfare state is small – somewhere around 15% of GDP whereas for European and in particular Scandinavian countries, it accounts for about 30% of GDP.

Well, some people have long argued that the way in which OECD used to compile this info (measuring direct government spending) doesn't capture the American reality. Check put page #28 in this document
(it’s actually page 29 in the .pdf, but because of the cover page it’s numbered 28.)

You see that the US leads all countries in what is called private social spending. This takes up a couple of different forms, but mostly it means tax revenue that the federal government is foregoing. What does this include? Well, tax deductions, for one.

While spending on section 8 housing is a small percentage of government entitlement programs, the revenue the government gives up on mortgage interest deductions is huge. (And who does that benefit? The little guy or the medium guy?)

We may spend little per capita on welfare programs, but not once you consider that there’s a child tax credit in the tax code too. Similarly, we have two big sources of income that are not taxed: health benefits (which are considered part of your income in European countries and are taxed – so every dollar you get in health, the Swedish government gets, say, 25 cents of the money back that it’s giving you. It’s just a book-keeping thing that OECD statistics don’t capture very well.) The other is your pension plan – your employer is giving you a ton of money that, as long as you wait till you’re a certain age to use, will not be taxed as income.

So, the issue isn’t that the US spends little, it’s that the US spends weirdly, disjointedly – if you buy the argument that foregone revenue to the fed = federal spending. (Most people do, and I include myself in that category if you limit the rationale to this area of discussion. The problem here is the presumption that the lack of revenue is a form of spending. Then isn't not spending also a form of revenue? Didn't the U.S. then make billions of dollars by not heeding Lieberman's call to bomb Yemen? Also, the Ron Paul-types will object to the presumption that government has any right to my income in the first place – how dare they count money they’re not taking from me, which is rightfully mine, as foregone revenue? In any case, next time you look at your pension plan statement, thank the federal government for not taking a chunk out of it, and thank yourself and all the other taxpayers for allowing you to do that.)

Now, there’s a good argument for enacting social policy through the tax code. For one, you can encourage things you’d like to see – people buying homes and having kids – without setting up a whole separate office or program to administer it. It’s cost-effective in that sense – it’s just one more line on the tax form, and the IRS is already set up to look at that form anyway.

Now, the big problem with spending federal dollars this way is that administering benefits through the tax code is inherently regressive. This is the lightbulb moment for me:

If you’re taxed at the 36% marginal tax rate, each additional dollar of “income” via pension plans or health benefits that does not get taxed is worth 36 cents to you, right? If they taxed you on those dollars as income, you’d be losing 36 cents on the dollar. Yay for you and the high wage earners! But what if you are at the 22% rate? You’re already making less, and you’re “saving” less – only 22 cents – from not having those dollars taxed as your income would be. Inherently, administering benefits through the tax code means that those who are well-off will benefit the most, those who are so-so off will only benefit so-so, and those who don’t itemize to begin with or who can't wait a whole fiscal year to get a government entitlement are up a creek.

Now, think about the fact that many of these programs, as currently set up, date back many many decades. Think about the babyboomers, about the greatest generation, about the expansion of the middle class, and about how those interests have developed over time. Government spending is path-dependent – once you’ve carved out a trail of spending, it becomes easier to justify that path as the way to spend money.

First-movers, in economics-speak, have tremendous advantages: they stake out a claim to that benefit, and once they’ve benefitted from it, financially, they are better armed to fight for the preservation of that benefit. When you start to think about US social spending in that light, you begin to see that our strata of the middle class has a lot to gain from this system, and that we would lose a lot from a more progressive way of spending (ie, direct government spending.)

And while this may all be painfully obvious to some people, I didn't put it all together until just over a week ago. Which goes to show just how grad school can make you smarter, I guess.

why doesn't the iphone have a setting...

2010-01-21T16:31:00.002-05:00

That keeps wi-fi mode but turns off all phone-like features? Airplane mode means no wi-fi, and when you’re out of the country and don’t want to pay roaming, you turn off airplane mode to use wi-fi at your own risk (god forbid someone should call or send you a text while you’re trying to check email.) Who do I hate for this? Apple or AT&T?

This is what happens when you have a conversation with some random person at a brewpub and become facebook friends.

2010-01-08T19:53:00.002-05:00

You find that you are "friends" with this kind of brilliant, nuanced person:

I'm annoyed today because I found out that Stupid Democrats of NJ want to pass a bill in which illegal aliens get to go to college on OUR (NJ) tax payer dollars!!

Can we say WTF?!?

Now, if we are going to allow them to apply to a NJ school - OK.... Are we setting them up to be caught and departed? NO!!! Why would I want my tax monies going to stupid illegals who shouldn't be here unless they come through the proper channels (which would make them LEGAL aliens)???

We all know that this isnt a set up to catch them, we know that we are going to give them free education as well as free medical (if the other stupid bill gets passed).

Is this country that fucking dense?

Oh!! and as for other Obama- What a fucktard! Lets give all them terrorist rights??? Lets allow them access to a lawyer.. so that they remain silent!!! Nice fucking job Obama...

I bet if it was his daughters in peril he would be fucking water boarding the shit out of these terrorist...

Im not a Bush supporter, but you alllll know if Bush was President, these fucking terrorist would be in Guantanamo Bay being water boarded until they spoke! We would have information on those 300 possible future terrorist the underwear bomber was talking about until he was read his RIGHTS!

Stupid Democrats choose an ultra left wing idiot as Presidents.... Hope having civil union rights was worth terrorist having fucking rights.
(FYI- im all about gay and women rights.... But not at the cost of security... I rather a mean republican or not so left wing democrat-- that scares the shit out of the other nations)

Those are my thoughts!

De-friend, de-friend.

Guanabara

2010-01-03T10:20:00.004-05:00

It's always interesting, that flight down to Rio. I feel like there are several different versions of me on-board: Brazilian-born yanks fighting their way home for the holidays. We are of course yankee-fied in different ways, to different degrees, but there's a feeling that we're on this long commute back at the end of the day.

Rio is peaceful. We are quoting Jobim - New York is shit, but life is great. Rio is great, but life is shit. I probably got that wrong.

Amusing too how quickly we forget that the heat and humidity are oppressive. It's hard to envision doing anything, but we trudge outside, almost killing the sweet dog Gabriel in the process.

Pictures to follow, eventually.

Today we had home pedicures - you can get any service in Rio performed at home, don't you know. At night, we cozy up in the A/C with dad's blu rays and some wine. Or, for me, Macallan 18. One of these days we will break the go-to-bed-at-3-am-wake-up-at-noon cycle, but not just yet.

Mostly, we hope Monday arrives soon, so most people can go back to work and we can enjoy mostly empty beaches. We are going to the Botanical Gardens today to avoid the beach crowds and get some good walking time in before we collapse in a sweaty puddle at Porcao.

The colors, though. It's easy to forget just how many colors you see routinely here. Even when they are tiny and red, like the speedos on a heavy-set older man, or tiny and yellow, like dental floss bikinis on a blonde - but especially when they are greenish and faint, like the african palm trees out front that grow for twenty years, blossom once, and then die.

Oh niner.

2009-12-29T09:26:00.005-05:00

We were in New York for new year’s last year. I remember ice skating in Central Park under the falling snow, and I remember my filling my dad’s hotel suite with people playing Mario Party on Rafa’s Wii.

A few weeks later, it was hopey time.

Easy to mock, but it was a really fun long weekend. I had the Audacity of Hops brew (link), and I stood in the cold for hours, and I wish I could do it again.

People moved away in 2009. Too many people spread too thin over the crust of the earth.

For the third time in as many years, we went to Colorado. This time we saw the aspens turning, and I couldn’t help but think of Scooter Libby’s letter to Judith Miller. It’s oddly elegant, isn’t it? “Come back to work – and to life.”

That grad school thing started up.

I got onboard with facebook and twitter, and with the smartphone thing.

Pavement announced their reunion tour.

I heard the best song about the Bush years, but not until Bush had left office.

This year, we celebrate in the heat of Rio. Goodbye, aughts.

Does god shower?

2009-12-23T14:55:00.002-05:00

Dinner at Commonwealth, the return of DK, and scotch eggyness (and cask ales, and scotch-scotchyness) bring on a number of esoteric debate topics, such as whether dinosaurs go to heaven.

More important than discussion of gender construct (like this book or the fact that I was recently "no homo"'d) is the question of whether god showers.

My side: No, why would god shower? Cleanliness is by definition next to him. He doesn't need to shower - he can just, you know, wish himself clean, or wish himself the pleasure associated with a nice hot shower. ("Wish" isn't the right word, but, you know, pretend I used whatever theologian-esque word god would use to make something that is not actual into something actual.)

The other side: Forget about the utilitarian thing! SHOWERS ARE NICE! Not the feeling of being clean, not the feeling after the shower - the actual shower is nice. Why wouldn't god want to feel something nice?

I paused, harumphed. And then said, "But if god is after 'nice,' why wouldn't he just take a shvitz?"

And that, my friends, is how you invoke the ghost of Pussy Bonpensiero to win a debate about whether god showers or not.

More "remember when?" talk

2009-12-22T11:12:00.003-05:00

In the never-ending series of conversations about how people-of-a-certain-age-remember-a-certain-something, my entry for the week is:

Remember when "the crawl" on news coverage was not ubiquitous, but was rather reserved for time periods when there was a lot of stuff going on? I want to say that most news programs went to the 24/7 crawl as a result of 9/11. Am I right about that?

Today in "Jesus, kids, what part of 'I went to college in the 1990s do you not understand?'"

2009-12-15T22:54:00.003-05:00

[Before micro final tonight.]

Classmate KR: How long till we get tonight's grades? Shouldn't they be ready in a week or so?

Classmate ND: Maybe not till January, right?

Me: What are you guys basing this on?

KR: Well, at my college,there was a requirement that final exam results had to be posted on blackboard within 3 days of the final. How long was it at your school?

Me:...see, we didn't get our grades online back then. We had to wait for the mail.

(Predictably, this degenerates into me saying that final grades used to be delivered by pony, in a wax-sealed envelope, and that we rode said pony back to school.)

It's pleasant...

2009-12-12T19:02:00.002-05:00

...how life deteriorates (though that's the wrong word, of course)into a series of weeknight meals that are, more often than not, vegetarian, accompanied by sensible amounts of wine.

how I communicate with my classmates

2009-12-09T10:33:00.002-05:00

Email sent yesterday:

Dear Young 'Uns,

Back when I was in the prime of my youth - before Lauryn Hill went solo, but well after Naughty by Nature's heyday - we used to do this thing called "pre-gaming." Do you kids still have that?

See, during the heady days that opened Clinton's second term, you could buy a pack of cigarettes for less than two dollars, minimum wage was about $5.15 an hour, and everyone had to watch tv when their shows were on instead of after the fact because the Internet was barely useful. We would call each other on landlines, and then come together to listen to cassette tapes while we enjoyed a libation or two before the start of whatever function we were attending. When the song we liked was over, we had to REWIND THE TAPE, unless someone had had the foresight to put "Red red wine" by UB40 or "Once in a lifetime" by the Talking Heads twice on the same side of a tape. Sadly, few of us ever did have that foresight.

In anticipation of the merriment this coming Thursday evening (namely, the GPPI holiday party), I am suggesting that you kids stop myspacing your tweets and recording your auto-tuned albums for half a night and join in on some pre-gaming.

Suggested location is XXXX on P street because apparently they run a BOGO on cocktails during happy hour from 4 to 7 and I think they're always empty. If you're not sure where that is, please consult a PHONE BOOK like we used to do back in the day, and then find yourself a map or a knowledgeable person who can point you there.

Time...6 pm sound ok? You know, before the advent of cell phones, you never had conversations that consisted entirely of "Hey, it's me, I'll be there in ten minutes." No. If someone was late to meet you, you just had to shut up and wait. Which you did while smoking, because it was all the rage back then.

The aughts: best of.

2009-12-06T16:49:00.004-05:00

Besy new Dylan tunes of the 2000s: Workingman's blues and Mississippi.

Best concept/story album: The Sunset Tree, by the Mountain Goats. (Close second: Aimee Mann's The Forgotten Arm. Separation Sunday falls to third because of the band's descent into self-parody.)

Best new label: Soundway. Honorable mention: Numero.

Decade-defining career arc: Wilco. From stratospheric to afterthought. (also: Pixies? Also, Matt Drudge.)

SNL host of the decade: Justin Timberlake. Peyton Manning is a close second.

Footballer of the decade: Ronaldinho Gaucho? (I'm biased, of course, but here's my logic: it has to be someone who has achieved at the club/league, club/continent, and national side/world cup level. Zidane is unfortunately a decent vote, but he disqualifies himself by getting sent off in the final match of 2006. Plus, his crowning achievement was in 1998. The 2006 Italian team may be the least talented team ever to win a World Cup, so they have no one in the running. Kaka might be another vote, but his role in the 2002 title was minimal. And if you put him in there, well, why give someone like Didier Drogba the shaft?)

Quarterback of the decade: Peyton again. Brady won more rings, but we're talking individual accomplishments.

Baller of the decade: Kobe. Unfortunately.

Food of the decade: Sushi. Because you can get it in landlocked states, and in supermarkets. Not good things, necessarily, but unlikely, 10 years ago, to think that supermarkets in Indiana would sell sushi.

Beer of the decade: Unibroue's La Fin du Monde, followed closely by Dogfishhead's 90 Minute IPA.

Album I just don't get from this decade: SMiLE by Brian Wilson.

1980s movie of the decade: Robocop as a new critique of Haliburton. Dick Jones = Dick Cheney.

loyalty, flawed.

2009-11-19T20:10:00.003-05:00

Last night's Wizards game was as fun a game as I've seen at the Verizon Center. The house was packed, the Cleveland frontrunners were duly marginalized, and the Wizards got a semi-meaningful (but badly needed) win.

Because my vitriol for Cleveland frontrunners is severe, I couldn't shut up about it all night. Except that I never considered the company. I was there with a friend, JH, whose loyalties are decidedly fluid. While I deplore the kind of sports fan LeBron James is - he is a Chicago Bulls, New York Yankees, Dallas Cowboys fan - JH would say that successful teams should be rewarded with additional fans.

In this framework, loyal fans who keep supporting losing teams are enablers - complicit in their own misery by not abandoning the teams they love. I have a hard time seeing that, seeing as how I view sports fandom as a grim and desperate battle against the possibility of happiness, but I'm willing to believe that I'm just wrong.

JH, to wit, has an overarchingly difficult set of sports loyalties. I do think that the freedarko attitude is legit - the idea that for some watchers of the game - basketball in this case, but you could say the same for most American sports and for European soccer - the compelling drama has nothing to do with the team name on the jersey, and everything to do with the battle gifted athletic individuals are waging against themselves in an effort to express their personalities through sport. Everything about that freedark perspective is interesting to me, and in the age of free agency, it's hard to think in manichean team-or-nothing terms. There are some guys I just like. Donovan McNabb - I just like the guy. The three guys who formed the core of the 1990 Dutch world cup side - Van Basten, Rijkaard, and Gullit. Chris Paul. Reggie Wayne. The list goes on and on.

So, maybe JH is right. Your team doesn't torture you - they just get boring, and you go with someone else. Nick Hornby alluded to this during the 2002 World Cup - his son not getting that he was supposed to support England, and instead taking an interest i the fates of all the players who played for his favorite club side (Arsenal, right?) There's something cosmpolitan about that. But it also seems like trading your family in, or something.

The other interesting issue JH raised is whether a sport is better when the best team wins or not. He was happy about the Yankees winning the World Series - they were the best team all season, and the playoffs actually, for once, benefitted the best team in the league. This is of course the opposite of the "any given Sunday" ethic of the NFL, or the thrilling fact that soccer is cruel and unfair. I'm totally agnostic about the right answer here, but part of me thinks that if the point of a sport is to be predictable, then...well, I'm not sure there is a point then. That, as the sports bloviators love to say, is why you actually have to play the game: because the better team doesn't always win. Right?

Scattered things

2009-11-09T07:44:00.003-05:00

1. My dad just got the international kindle.This doesn't sound very impressive, until he pointed out to me that this was the first gadget he has pre-ordered and received, in Rio, on the day of its release. He half expected it not to work as advertised. But it does. And people in Italy, Portugal, Australia and so on all report the same. Think of what this takes, logistically. Amazon had to negotiate contracts with cellular carriers in all of those countries. They negotiated subscriptions with newspapers in those countries. They worked with customs officials to get the devices delivered on the right day. And these are not countries with low entry barriers for new technology. These are places with entrenched bureacracies, and yet - Amazon pulled it off. Impressive.

2. With TARP and with health insurance reform, I don't understand the objection to oversight. I hear conservatives saying the money shouldn't have been spent, but then there's all this indignation about the oversight.

3. I've said it before and I will say it again: conservatives equate government intervention with lack of freedom. But a society where people are reluctant to take new jobs or follow their dreams for fear of loss of health insurance is a less free society too.

4. Wizards are off to a bad start, but I can live with it. It would be easier to swallow had opening night not been so great. In any case, in the world of things that I hate, a friend not too long ago asked me with whom I would rather get stuck on a deserted island for the rest of my days: Maradona or LeBron James. Sigh. LeBron didn't go to college; he probably hasn't read a book. Maradona may be a greasy turd, but he would at least have interesting (though shallow and predictably old-guard Latin American leftist) opinions.

5. Unibroue / La Fin du Monde.

Halloween on the 42

2009-11-02T13:33:00.002-05:00

We roll through Dupont Circle, past a tall patrician-looking white guy dressed as a sheik in an outfit that could have come out of a Tintin book.

Me: Isn't that kind of racist?
Ms. AC: Why?

Just then, the bus rides past a group of well-dressed middle-eastern men standing outside of a restaurant.

Ms. AC: See, that guy's wearing a turban too.

God bless our little civil war*

2009-10-20T21:12:00.003-04:00

* see Joe Henry.

I haven't had much to say about the 2016 Olympics being awarded to Rio because like any natural-born Carioca, I'm filled with pessimistic trepidation. Tell anyone from Rio that you know someone who just visited there, and the first reaction you get will be, "Oh god - please tell me they weren't mugged or worse."

As a kid, I remember going out one night - somewhat rebelliously - with my friend Julio. We wanted to get something to eat, there was nothing in my dad's apartment, and so we just went out. This was not often done at our age for some reason. We didn't know why. It was 9:30 on a Sunday or something. And we were a certain age and a certain size: the street kids who could have mugged us a few years back were 3, 4 inches shorter than us now. We did pull-ups and some lifting. We felt pretty bad-ass, even knowing that in Rio, the concept of a good neighborhood or good street is awfully fluid. But going out was a statement of normalcy, I guess, or something like that.

So out we went. And no, this story doesn't end in a mugging or a robbery. It ends with us - two skinny teenagers wearing t-shirts and flip-flops, feeling invincibly middle class - scaring two older women. They heard us walking, heard us talking tough like characters in Rio's version of a Bruce Springsteen song or something, and turned, frightened to death, convinced that we were the very bad guys that our posturing was meant to hold off. As we passed them, Julio sighed and said, "This is what I hate about Rio. You hear someone behind you, in flip flops, when it's late at night, and you're afraid."

There was a recent New Yorker article about the gangs of Rio. I can't link to it, but the author has a pretty captivating two-minute audio slide show here. The keeper line in the article to me was a quote from Alfredo Sirkis about the disparity between rhetoric and actions:

It's all Scandinavian talk in an Iraqi reality.

I thought about the line as I read part of an email from my dad:

I'm not much for giving advice advice these days because I am completely disappointed with life in Riode Janeiro. Everything seems wrong. This civil war is developing an unpleasant momentum as the confrontations escalate. And I find that life is ever more restricted, as we have to choose carefully where to go, and at what time to go out. But this has been more pertinent for me than for Laila. She leaves anytime, to go anywhere, even very late at night. Me, I need a few months away next year.

And that is as good a reminder I can summon as to why life in Rio is beautiful and impossibly difficult. The news continues to be bad. Helicopter shot down, more-dead-than-a-bad-month-in-Gaza bad. The city that, goes the song lyric, greets you with open arms in postcards, but with clenched fists in real life is waiting for its time to shine. Brazilians also like to say that Brazil is the country of the future - and it always will be. Here's hoping that the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games are what helps Rio finally turn the corner.

Best comment I've heard about the Nobel thing so far

2009-10-12T10:23:00.001-04:00

KF: I mean, this is like giving me a PhD even before I’ve written a dissertation. You know, sure, the thing isn’t done, but I have a really good abstract!

M: But remember that the student who went right before you stabbed all the professors.

When I was a little lothario

2009-10-08T14:35:00.001-04:00

Sometime back in 1990 or 1991, my parents sent me to spent to the States to spend a month with a family friend and her son, who was about my age. They thought this would be a positive experience or some such thing. Me, I saw it in terms of having an entire month where I would have access to things like stores that sold Stephen King novels in English, American candy, and most importantly, Nintendo games. Buying these things as imports in Rio was prohibitively expensive, and typically when you knew someone going to the States, you considered yourself really lucky if you could put in an order for, say, Whatchamacallit chocolate bar, or your own copy of Contra (so you didn’t have to hang out with that annoying kid who lived two buildings over just to play it, and that kid always got surly when you were better than him anyway, so you couldn’t ever make it past the third or so level without him throwing a tantrum.)

To be sure, the perks of the trip were many. I read a ton of Stephen King novels during that month. I drank a ton of apple cider (a product that for some reason you couldn’t get in Brazil and which I absolutely loved.) I ate donuts and I became acquainted with American tv shows like “The Wonder Years.” But the apple cider…seriously, I drank it until I realized that it wreaks havoc with the digestive process, and then I stopped completely. I bought games like Super Dodge Ball, Zombies Ate My Neighbors, Gradius, and so forth. This was also my first taste of an East coast winter, being that the family friend lived in Columbia, MD. It was colder than anything I had ever experienced. I remember my first heavy snowfall. I had to buy boots, gloves, a hat. I was so cold at first that we had to go get long johns, and I didn’t even understand what they were at the time. I was like, “But I already have pants…what do I need these for? And why are they so tight?”

I had left summer in Rio behind, and I was shocked to find out that American kids only got two weeks off at the end of the calendar year. Kidsitting arrangements being what they were, I actually had to go to a junior high school for a few weeks during my vacation. (Interestingly – I was here on a tourist visa, and I went to a public school for three weeks. I’m not sure how that worked out, now that I think about it.) I discovered that I was way ahead of the class in math – we spent weeks learning stuff I had learned the previous year. I knew very little about American history, of course, but I did fine in most of the other classes. I didn’t do so well navigating the social setting of an American junior high, but I have relatively few emotional scars to show from that time, so I guess it wasn’t too traumatic. I remember spending an unseemly amount of time picking out a Trapper Keeper. “This is going to be very important, you want to pick something cool,” my friend told me. “Grown-up. Something with sports cars on it, probably.” “But,” I would reply, “this one’s got a tiger on it.” “No,” he would say, “that might as well be one of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. You need the one with the sports car.”

What I remember most about this trip isn’t really the month I spent in Columbia, Maryland. It’s the flight from Rio to Columbia. See, my parents and my grandmother in particular subscribed to the notion that you get dressed up for flights. I had to wear my finest clothing, lest I appear to be some sort of slovenly indigent. This meant dress pants, dress shoes, and a belt. For a twelve year old male, wearing dress shoes and a belt is a fate worse than death, basically. It also meant, however, that I had to wear my “finest” dress shirt. The shirt that was reserved for baptisms and weddings and Christmas. And the shirt in question was a gold silk shirt.

What I remember about the shirt is not how repellent it must have looked, but rather the fact that I learned a valuable lesson about how good of a conductor silk is. Stepping outside of the airport when I arrived – setting foot in 0 C temperatures for the first time since I was a baby living in Chicago – the entire shirt basically turned to ice on my body. One second my body temperature was normal, and the next I was gasping for air as if I’d been plunged into Arctic waters. It sucked.

And what set me off on these memories was Ms. Abstract Citizen, the other day, watching someone being interviewed on Good Morning America – he had saved someone from a fire, or something? And he was wearing a shiny silk shirt. She paused the show so we could admire his shirt, and I suddenly flashed back to that month, and more importantly, to the moment where I thought my lungs had frozen, all because of my gold pink shirt.

When musicians devalue their own back catalog

2009-10-07T12:01:00.001-04:00

Phish, Pavement, Pixies. All “P” bands, all extremely important to me through the last decade and this decade, and all are currently reunited in some capacity.

Phish’s reunion is clearly not a nostalgia act – rather, it seems as though the post-hiatus dreck from the early 2000’s will be the asterisk for an otherwise pretty consistent career. I say “consistent” because if you liked them before, you probably like them now. If you didn’t like them before, you probably still don’t like them.

The question of value with Phish comes into play with how most fans heard the band in the 1990s: we had a few precious soundboard recordings that gave us arbitrary snapshots of performances that we probably overvalued because it was simply harder to get your hands on good concert recordings before the Internet. The NYT did a great piece on the Grateful Dead’s legendary 1977 shows, and meekly suggested that it’s possible that so many people like those shows so much because there was an abundance of high quality recordings from that time period (not that the band wasn’t also playing at a really high level at this point – this has been pretty well established.)

Two things happened since many of us started collecting Phish shows on Maxell XL-II cassettes: one, the aforementioned Series of Tubes known as the Internet brought us bittorrent. The other is that the band opted to begin recording every new performance through LivePhish.com. Since I have a basket full of cassette tapes in the trunk of my car, this creates a strange situation where I almost certainly overvalue some cassettes (Eugene, 4/22/92, for example) simply because of the format. Curiously, though, the new shows tend to be good enough that they make older shows sound less…remarkable. Part of this is a function of the fact that the band is proving they are “back” by over-playing some of their big-show tunes (Harry Hood, Mike’s->Groove, etc.) On the one hand, the move is necessary to win back skeptical fans like me who hated most of the post-hiatus pablum from 2003 to 2004. On the other hand, how do I value a “Mound” from 2009 as compared to a mound from 1994? I have no idea.

Pavement’s reunion is promising: it’s a one-off, they say. There’s no plan to attend to the band’s catalog. It will be a straightforward, “hey, everyone’s still alive, we can still play our songs, these are good songs, why not do it?” sort of reunion. It’ll stand completely apart from the band’s previous body of work, I hope, though it will (I also hope) remain in the glorious shambolic tradition that characterized Pavement shows.

Now, the Pixies…a tough one. They are venturing ever closer to wedding band territory. They pretended they were going to record new material, but instead, the nostalgia act has been chugging along since 2004, like a loveless marriage that lives on out of habit. Now they are playing an all-Doolittle show – hey, that sounds great to me, considering that Doolittle may be the finest single recording from the 1990s – but it’s a little desperate. It’s a little too clearly backward-looking. And the end result is somewhat cheapening, to me, the original output. It was tons of fun to see the band in 2004 – the crowd was old, eclectic, free, everything I expected from a Pixies crowd (having been too young to see them the first time around). But now? Like I said, it seems desperate, in a “do you still like us?” kind of way.

In this manner they sort of resemble Liz Phair, whose insistence on putting out records after “WhiteCholateSpaceEgg” is just absurd. I am less likely to listen to “Exile in Guyville” as a result of this fact. I hate that, I really do, because “Mesmerizing” came up on my ipod today and I remembered how much I love that album.

Of course, the only person who defies analysis in this respect is Bob Dylan, whose body of work increases in relevance as a result of his complete lack of interest in it. It’s not mindful, on his part: you get the sense he has fully digested his past and is just happy not to look back. To use a baseball analogy, Liz Phair and the Pixies seem, in hindsight, like minor league call-ups who got really hot for a couple of months. Mackowiak, Chris Shelton…the list is long. Maybe they love baseball, maybe they don’t. They just happened to be pretty good at this one thing for a stretch of time, so naturally, they milked it. Dylan, on the other hand, had peaks and valleys. But there’s no doubt the man was born to swing a bat.

General immigration: things to remember for whenever The Great Debate happens

2009-10-01T16:40:00.003-04:00

The U.S. is definitely tightening the screws on H1-B employers, though this really just amounts to doing a better job of enforcing existing laws. It's consistent with what Obama promised during the campaign, and what's more attractive about it, it goes after the employer rather than the employee. We'll know in the coming months whether companies targeted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement are known to be repeated violators, or whether they'll spend their time seemingly harassing companies that happen to hire someone who's not American.

This in the aftermath of some interesting recession-type news: immigration (legal immigration, that is), seems to be down across the board, which means filing fees are going up. There's a bit of Gov 2.0 window-dressing to help petitioners, but transparency sometimes only helps reveal the extent of your dysfunction. (By the way, funny to note the comment about how it might be "several weeks" before you find out that your fingerprints didn't take. Try six months.)

Amidst these developments, some truly touching stories: a sad story about a greencard scam ending in murder; and an uplifting tale about a doctor whose emotionally devastating volunteer work includes evaluating the survivors of torture who are applying for refugee status.

facebook, blogs, twitter

2009-09-29T13:50:00.002-04:00

I had a thought the other day that I couldn’t fit into a facebook status update, so I thought, “Oh, right, that’s what a blog is for. Also, to be read by fewer people, that’s also what a blog is for.” I’m signing up for a twitter account at some point because it seems like a great way to consolidate breaking news into a single area. Google reader is sort of cumbersome for that, and I don’t want to clutter up my gmail with all these alerts (you should see the metro feed – 8 emails a day about some track maintenance at Fort Totten.) So, a twitter feed seems like a good way to go. But I really can’t imagine re-calibrating my communication needs down to the point where the decision tree begins with “will it fit into a tweet?” The point is, I guess I can’t imagine myself using twitter as a two-way street. But maybe this is just some limitation on my part.

The funny thing is that at one point in my life, I was definitely an early adopter. Since cell phones became de rigueur, I’ve become a bit of a luddite for some reason. Late on cell phones, late on SMS, late on ipods, late on bittorrent, late on facebook, late on blogging, late on tivo, late on smartphone…and inevitably, I find that the new technology invariably confers upon me some degree of freedom withoutwhich life would be a lot less convenient or fun. (Valeu, Babo - good catch.) So, what is this curmudgeonly need to disparage, belatedly adopt, and then lavish with praise?

In other news, it’s been an active few weeks in immigration news. Not personal immigration news, but like, immigration matters in the news. Post to follow later this week.

The microeconomics of "Me and Bobby McGee"

2009-09-28T15:35:00.001-04:00

The other night in our micro class, the professor rendered the line “I’d trade all of my tomorrows for one single yesterday” in mathematical notation - that is, expressed as a consumer preference, where the sum total of all days numbered little t + 1 (today + 1) up until the death of the speaker (big T) would not be preferable to any element from the data set t – 1 (because the line doesn’t specify a yesterday, it suggests that any yesterday would fit the criteria.)

The professor averred that this line made sense in the context of Janis Joplin’s life, particularly considering that number of tomorrows would probably be severely limited by her extracurriculars. But as I kept whispering, under my breath, the line was written by Kris Kristofferson, who maybe didn’t necessarily expect to have a whole lot more tomorrows than Janis – but who nonetheless did.

This changes the value proposition significantly. The consumer is now trading a much greater number of tomorrows for one single yesterday. I believe this would put the consumer at one of the extreme ends of the indifference chart, where a large number of goods must be given up one axis in order to realize a very small gain on the other axis.

As with race dialogue, remember: when applying microeconomics to popular songs, the speaker matters.

how long does it take to invent a civil right?

2009-09-25T10:10:00.001-04:00

Around twenty years, apparently. The whole article is worth a read, as it gives a nice historical perspective of the relationship between both parties and the courts. But the next time you hear that canard about “judicial activism” being the provenance of the left, remember this quote:

For many decades, into the nineteen-eighties, it was widely agreed among judges and scholars that the right to bear arms belonged only to militias, and thus the Second Amendment imposed no limits on the ability of states and localities to enact gun-control laws. Warren E. Burger, the former Chief Justice (and no liberal), said that any other view of the law was a “fraud,” and Robert Bork (ed. note: !!!!!), the conservative hero, said much the same thing. But Meese and his allies in the National Rifle Association were indefatigable in pushing an opposing interpretation, and their position became widely adopted, first in the Republican Party and then among many Democrats. Finally, in 2008, the Supreme Court, in an opinion written by Antonin Scalia (who was appointed while Meese was attorney general), struck down a District of Columba gun-control law as a violation of the Second Amendment. A fringe position – a “fraud” – two decades earlier had become the law of the land.

about the census worker found dead in Kentucky

2009-09-24T10:35:00.000-04:00

Regarding this sad story - given the incoherence and idiocy that permeate the current strain of anti-guv’mint talk, is it any surprise that the heinous act was committed in a national park? You know, on federally protected land?

ugh, john phillips.

2009-09-24T09:43:00.002-04:00

For a while now, I’ve really enjoyed John Philips’ album “The Wolf King Of L.A.” – I’d even taken to using the opening track, “April Ann,” to wrap up singer songwriter-y mixes. But what the hell am I supposed to do with the allegations (none of which I’m inclined to disbelieve) that he raped his own daughter and forced her into a decade-long sexual relationship, even impregnating her? Ugh. Gifted artists that are flawed humans are fine with me, but I tend to draw the line at truly evil.

"Land of Many Uses"

2009-09-22T13:43:00.002-04:00

From 20090921 colorado

The Abstract Citizen household feels really lucky about having been out to Colorado three times in the past three years. It’s one of those places that is simultaneously way overhyped and completely underrated. We’ve been to the northwest corner (Steamboat Springs), the southwest (Mancos), through the Kansas-like southern plains, and into the craggly center of the state. We saw that Focus on the Family (aka, worst organization known to man) gets a brown highway sign in Colorado Springs, indicating that it’s a place of interest or of cultural importance. We’ve thrown snowballs in June and sat in steamy hot springs surrounded by old creepy men too happy to embrace the “clothing optional” rules. We’ve had chimichangas in Gunnison – well, everyone should have chimichangas at the Blue Iguana in Gunnison – and we’ve had deep-fried soft-boiled eggs at Kim and Garren’s.

One of the stark reminders you get that the West is not like the East is the fact that you’re basically free to die in any number of ways out West. A simple scenic overlook on the east coast would have tall tamper-proof child-safe fences and reduced speed limits. Out west, if you want to drive off a cliff, that’s your call. “Addition by subtraction,” said Mike. There’s something refreshing about a bunch of policy-makers trusting basic human instincts rather than trying to create barriers that dull self-preservation.

From 20090921 colorado

And I’m very aware of the fact that this is all totally cliché. It’s a big state, it’s less developed. This has tremendous upside, sure, but what about all the chain restaurants? The sprawl?

From 20090921 colorado

I don’t really know what to make of the state. It seems perfectly rorschachian, as the signs proclaim. “Land of Many Uses.” Overdeveloped neighborhoods, mountains, statues of Saint Mary, children named after Grateful Dead songs, culs de sac in suburbs named after parts of the wilderness, brewers, meth, dogs, mountains that never look as impressive in pictures, and peril in spades. It was not so long ago, Colorado.

From 20090921 colorado

Is it precocity or precociousness?

2009-09-12T10:36:00.004-04:00

Either way, after many years of always being among the youngest to do ______, it's somewhat of a relief to be among the oldest people in my class now. I did find one person, so far, who is older than me. On hearing us discuss our ages, a much younger guy across the table from us rolled his eyes and said, "Christ. Why don't you guys go watch The Breakfast Club or something?"

And maybe it's just because I'm wearing a backpack now, but I keep getting carded! Ok, maybe it's because we were at (ugh) The Tombs, but still - I'll take it.

"She."

2009-08-31T12:38:00.002-04:00

I'm finding that a number of books that discuss the role of policy analysts default to referring to this person as "she." This seems elegant to me for some reason, though I can't quite say why, nor do I want to hazard a guess that would find me knee-deep in discussions of gender roles. But for the record, I like it.

Believing I had supernatural powers...

2009-08-26T15:45:00.002-04:00

Indeed, I slammed into a brick wall, at least in terms of having time on my hands. More than previous summers, this one just flew by, and I have very little to show for it. We undertook some massive home improvement projects at Abstract Citizen HQ, and we expect that work to be completed no later than Labor Day weekend. I went to see Phish for the first time in over 5 years, and determined that the band is indeed Phish (and not the dreck I saw at Coventry.) I, uh, am in grad school? Orientation is under way, and I have to go to "math camp" a few nights next week.

So, life has been busy, and I fell into one of those ruts where I didnt' post here, and I started to think that I needed a really momentous post to break the silence when, in fact, all I have to do is come here and write something.

And here's my something: I will really miss a pair of shoes I recently took to Goodwill. I bought them in 2003, and have re-soled them a number of times. They were my go-to shoes, and now, they are gone. Sadly.

Ooh, and here's another something: this health care "debate" is ludicrous. Chuck Grassley, you know better than this. More thoughts on that later, perhaps.

Is Whitlock really this much of a bastard?

2009-07-24T08:07:00.003-04:00

Far be it from me to want to keep the Erin Andrews story on people's minds any longer than it needs to be, but why would Jason Whitlock labor to find a silly race angle to this story? Not only does he directly blame Deadspin for the awful incident - despite the fact that Will Leitch wrote one of the more insightful pieces wondering whether the male sports blogosphere created an atmosphere where this horrific act might have been condoned - but he seems to somehow suggest that Pacman Jones, of all people, is the real victim here:

The Pacman Jones stripclub video served no journalistic purpose. It was aired on ESPN and everywhere else solely to titillate and entertain. The raw footage didn't help us understand the crime. There was no interaction between Jones, his entourage and the club's bouncers.

There were black asses shaking and black entertainers demonstrating how fools depart from their money. It was a reality version of Spike Lee's underrated movie Bamboozled.

America couldn't get enough of the Pacman video until Erin Andrews was caught dropping it like it was hot in front of a hotel mirror.

ESPN won't cover that story. It's climbed up on some high horse and is passing judgment on the New York Post for running pictures of ESPN's sideline Barbie.

I haven't read enough of his work to know, but he sounds disturbed or something. Is he really saying being caught undressed, unaware, by some pervert, amounts to "dropping it like it's hot"? And that Pacman Jones has the same expectation of privacy when he's throwing money around in a stripclub as anyone else should have IN THEIR HOTEL ROOM?

Sadly, had his column been about ESPN's sanctimonious silence in reference to the accusations against Ben Roethlisberger, he might have had a legitimate point about race and sports. What a jerk.

The five worst songs a major league player could use as their batting song

2009-07-22T11:48:00.001-04:00

1. Anything by Joanna Newsom, Tori Amos, or Bjork. Imagine Newsom screeching Saaaaaaaaaaaadie over the PA as children burst into tears and dads wearing blackberry holsters cover their ears. Bjork – bonus if you get to play the video for Human Behavior, with its oversized animals running around, or that weird one where she’s in love with her cat. Terrifying and avant-garde at the same time! (And if you haven’t see the cat video, stop whatever you’re doing and watch it right now.)

2. Christmas music in general, but in particular a sad, resigned version of “Have yourself a merry little Christmas,” or something by Nat King Cole. This will be particularly dissonant on a hot August afternoon.

3. Johnny Cash’s version of Hurt by Nine Inch Nails. (Alternate, from the same album: Cash’s cover of Will Oldham’s I see a darkness.)

4. Any version of Space by the Grateful Dead.

5. Trois Gymnopedies by Erik Satie.

Summer in America: A couple of baseball notes

2009-07-10T17:12:00.000-04:00

The first game of the Nats-Astros double-header in Houston last night featured a number of interesting things. The game was the continuation of a game that started in Washington last May, but was interrupted by rain. The Nats won the continued game last night – technically a home game for the Washington – in Houston.

The winning pitcher was Joel Hanrahan, who has since been traded to Pittsburgh. So, he picked up a win for a team that he no longer plays for. (His first win of the season, no less! Godspeed, Hanrahan!)

And the winning run was scored by…? Nyjer Morgan, who was acquired by the Nationals recently in the trade that sent Hanrahan to Pittsburgh. So, the game was won on a run by a baserunner who wasn’t on the team back in May, and the pitcher who won the game no longer plays for the winning team. And, again, the Nats pick up a home win, but in Houston.

Reminds me of the time last basketball season that Miami and Atlanta were playing in ATL. With about a minute to go, if memory serves, Shaq – who then played for the Heat – was ejected for committing his sixth foul. Except it was really his fifth,
because the refs screwed up. The game ended, Atlanta won.

And then Miami protested. The NBA, rightly, decided that the last minute of the game should be re-played, because Miami was unfairly deprived of Shaq’s presence in the game. For months, if you looked at the NBA scoreboard, you would see that this game still hadn’t ended. Kind of fun and bizarre. When they were able to re-schedule the game, both teams did ready to do battle, except that Shaq was no longer a Miami Heat player. They had traded him to Phoenix between the original and the re-scheduled date. So, the wrong being righted – Shaq’s absence – was, uh, not really righted.
If an American sports fan can accept these absurd scenarios – why are ties in soccer so hard to understand?

A "habitual" drunkard? What if you're more of an "inadvertent" drunkard?

2009-07-06T20:16:00.002-04:00

Check out question 22 on page 8.

The mind races with possible follow-up statements:

"Yes, that was a bad night, but I stopped doing shots after that."

"I was HAPPY! I was a HAPPY drunk!"

"Sure, but then again...if alcohol weren't so delicious, we wouldn't be having this conversation, would we?"

And so on. (But for the record, USCIS, in case you're reading, the answer is no. Not a nazi, not a drunkard. Ok?)

The interview: part three

2009-06-30T08:07:00.000-04:00

(This is part three; it makes a lot more sense after you've read parts one and two.)

"Well, that's a relief," says Agent G on his way back into his office.

We look back - snap back, really - looking to see if his face is screaming "green card" yet. And quickly I wonder, "With whom did he just meet? Is there a protocol, or does he go talk to someone and say something like, 'So, I've got this couple in here - I think they're for real, everything seems right, but I can't find his OPT stuff. Do we think we screwed this up? Or is he probably ok? I could just tell them to come back another time if we need to see it...'"

And somewhere it hits me that this guy - he's not giving us a hard time. This is by far the nicest and most congenial interaction I've had with anyone in the USCIS or State department apparatus. The tension - the conflict - is entirely on our side of the table.

This guy isn't at all like that jerk at the US Consulate in Brasilia (which bears the name of the Secretary of State, Robert Dulles, of Dulles Airport fame!) who went off on me - all because my dad's secretary in Rio had booked my interview appointment for me. You should know, to share in my complete fury, that you had to use an arcane phone system to book the interview, that the phone system didn't have an international access number, and that once in Brazil, I would have been stuck there until the interview took place (4-6 weeks after it is scheduled, depending on the season.)

"You are old enough to book your own appointments, aren't you?" he asked me in broken Portuguese, but using borderline baby-phrasing (you'w'a' big boy, awen't you?). "The text on the site doesn't give an option for scheduling from abroad," I answered in perfect English. "Well, that's not possible, because I wrote that copy," he answered, in slightly accented English. Suddenly becoming aware of the power structure, I answered, simply, "I'm sure I misread it, then, and I assure you, it will not happen again. I don't enjoy visiting Brasilia anyway."

No, our guy was nothing like that jerk. He wasn't trying to keep me out - and there was no ego on display. He simply wanted to help an American citizen and her spouse settle into their life together here in her country of origin. Suddenly, we understood that we were getting the green card, that all would be fine. "Now," he added pleasantly, nodding toward our wedding album. "Do you guys have some pictures you'd like to show me?"

All of a sudden, it was more like a dinner party than a federal office. We told stories, named people in pictures (I got Sasha's grandmother's name wrong!), and generally had a great time for the next twenty or so minutes. At some point he let it slip that he'd be stamping my passport and that we'd be ok, and we took it in stride, just trying to keep the interview moving forward.

When it came for him to stamp my passport, he showed a completely different side. We had already noticed that this guy was like us - he probably chuckles over "Stuff White People" like and watches "Top Chef" - but now it really came out. "Ok, so, I'm gonna stamp it, but...oh, I'm so bad at this part. I don't think I do this often enough. Ok, so, where's my calendar? The stamp is good for exactly 365 days, so...that means the day BEFORE today's date next year, right? So, June 3 of...2010. Right?"

We smile and try to seem agreeable. He returns the passport to us.

"Wait, can I see that again? I'm just...not used to this or something. I just don't want you to get into trouble if you use that to travel before you get the green card..."

We hand it back over. Then, he tries to ask a few closing questions, but his mind is clearly...unfocused. "Ok, so, I'm going to ask for your passport just ONE MORE TIME, and then if I ask for it again, tell me 'no,' ok? I just want to be super sure that it's right."

He glances at it, and then again at this calendar. Rising suddenly, he says, "Well, that's it. Let's get you out of here before I find an excuse to look at it again." He walks us to the door, and stops. "I was lying. Let me just look at it one more time, ok?"

By this point, we really don't care. I doubt we'll be leaving the country in the next sixty days, and we're just eager to get on with our day - our day in which, as it turns out, I became a lawful permanent resident after years of legal wrangling and forms and fees and lawyers and detours. We get back in the smart car, draw our usual share of glances, and head out, back into a world that was unlargely unchanged by that morning's events.

so, video-chatting?

2009-06-28T12:09:00.003-04:00

I'm liking this 21st century thing. Having participated in a video chat for the first time ever - and only about 8 years or so after the rest of the humanity! - I strongly encourage everyone I know to get a webcam.

RIP.

2009-06-25T19:06:00.001-04:00

Michael Jackson is in the hospital.

2009-06-25T17:47:00.002-04:00

I admit that I have had long internal debates about how to prepare for the inevitable deaths of Tom Waits, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, and other such sad-bastard types. I have no idea what Michael Jackson tune would be playing if I were to sit down for a melancholy memorial glass of scotch in his name, though.

"To your point" and "it is what it is"

2009-06-22T09:47:00.001-04:00

Over the past four months or so, I think I have heard the phrase “to your point” or “to so-and-so’s point” as an introductory clause more than at any other point in my life. I even heard Alexi Lalas use it on ESPN in discussing soccer. When did this phrase become a standard-issue conversational crutch?

I dislike it because it seems that if we are having a conversation, and if you plan to depart from a point I just made, the burden is on you to indicate that we are switching gears. Otherwise, I will assume that whatever you say is “to my point.”

As for “it is what it is”…didn’t this begin as a malapropism, a phrase uttered by a coach or by Scott McClellan in a presser, and which subsequently underwent a makeover from idiotic statement to zen-like aphorism (like “they are who we thought they were” or Rumsfeld’s “known unknowns”)?

Damn skippy it is what it is. How about you tell me when it starts being what it’s NOT?

Is there something secretly elegant or insightful about this statement that I’m not getting?

Owen! Paul!

2009-06-18T18:22:00.002-04:00

Drove through this on my way home. Well, through the trailers and teamsters and street closures. No sign of Owen or Paul in the flesh, though.

The funny thing about Owen Wilson playing a Nationals middle relief pitcher is that he probably is better than what passes for the Nationals' bullpen these days.

Wait, that's not funny.

add this to the list!

2009-06-17T09:47:00.000-04:00

Avenue Q clearly dates itself during the “I wish I could go back to college” number, I just realized. The Princeton character murmurs, as an aside, “I wish I’d taken more pictures…” The line comes at the end of the song, which makes me think it’s a pretty personal statement that the authors wanting to tuck in there. Well, since I have about 40 pictures or so to show for my four years in college, I can definitely relate. Especially considering that a night out or a weekend trip can easily yield twice that many pictures.

Something about it is nice – the half-remembered past, barely documented. It gives some room for your memory to exaggerate, to downplay, to romanticize things. That’s great, and there’s something about my experience now – going through old journals, looking at frayed pictures – that is very comforting to me, while there’s something about my sister’s equivalent – facebook, picasa – that’s a bit disquieting, though I can’t say why.

Well, along with not being able to get ahold of a friend you’re meeting up with (in the post-cellphone age), getting lost and needing to ask for directions (in the post-GPS age) and not having access to vast archives of all sorts of media in a matter of minutes (in the post-internet age), this “I wish I had taken more pictures” bit is clearly dated.

For fun, try watching tv shows from the 1990s and figuring out what would be different today. George leaves Jerry a voicemail and sends him a text message, for insurance: “J – please ansr ph as Vandalay Industries. If they ask, I sell latex. Will explain l8r. Thx.” Or how about getting lost in that mall parking lot, not being able to find the car? Well, there’s an app for that. And as my brother has pointed out, the one time a Seinfeld episode did feature a cell phone – in the first half of the finale – they completely fail to anticipate the fact that we all “walk and talk” these days. (Jerry admonishes Elaine for making a phone call while walking.)

The other problem I have with the song is the “f___ my T.A.” bit. As a student, I never had attractive T.A.’s. And as a T.A., I never had hot freshmen coming on to me. And because this was not part of my immediate experience, I therefore reject it as false or dated. You lie, Avenue Q!

The interview: part two

2009-06-15T17:03:00.003-04:00

[This is part two of a (likely) three-part series. Part one is here.]

“Hello, I’m Officer G____.” And into the hallways we go, into what should have felt epic and labyrinthine but which was instead sorta…sterile and office-y.

I take an instant liking to him, but don’t really know how to make small talk. Are we together in this? Do I assume he’s having a bad day because they’re obviously running behind? Or is running late par for the course, and would any suggestion that he must be having a bad day sound like I’m making a passive-aggressive comment about how much I think my time is worth?

We go into his office, and sit down across a desk from him. He plops our file in front of him, and this is the first time we’ve gotten a clear look at just how bad the pile looks.

“I know it looks like these have been sitting out in the rain for the past few weeks,” he offers by way of an apology. Actually, it looks like it was rained on and then dragged through the mud. It looks like the file was stepped on repeatedly before being buried in a mausoleum with a deceased emperor a few thousand years ago, and like it was only recently recovered by a team of intrepid National Geographic explorers. The yellowed corners are peeling upward, and we’re both a little disappointed that something we put so much into – making it look crisp and approval-worthy – has been negated by administrative indifference.

“No problem at all,” we reassure him, almost simultaneously. “No worries whatsoever,” I add, and I realize that our cadence – the fact that both Ms. AC and I say almost the same thing, with almost the same beat, should already be a dead giveaway that we have been together for a long time.

“First things first, then. Can you tell me her name and place of birth?”
“Ms. Abstract Citizen, born in Randomtown, New York, on xx/xx/xx.”
“Great. And his?”
“Mr. Abstract Citizen, born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on xx/xx/xx.”
Except that her xx/xx is off by a day. I want to lead her, but I’m afraid of looking like I’m coaching her. He raises an eyebrow. We sit in silence for a second.
“XX/XX! I mean XX/XX! I always get it wrong.”
Whew. No harm, no, foul.

Turning to me, he says, “Ok, let’s start with your arrival. When did you arrive here?”

I purse my lips at an angle. “Which, um, time? On which visa?”
He turns back to my thick stack of correspondence from USCIS. I’ve arranged it chronologically, starting with H1B visa in February 2000. I’m sure most of the cases he sees are much simpler than mine, but I’m used to that feeling by now. “On the J-2. When did you arrive on a J-2?”

I dig around for my old passport, the one with a picture of a 12-year old me, back when I was a little brown boy wearing a shirt commemorating the 1988 Seoul Olympics. “Early 1990s. 1992, I want to say. But note that I have a waiver on the two-year home residency requirement for J visas – a copy of the letter is in the correspondence in that pile.”

Relieved, he looks through his stack and finds the letter letting my mom off the hook for her two-year residency in Brazil following the Fulbright.
“I see that – she got a waiver. But did you get one?” he asks, somewhat nervously. He’s not good at being bad cop.

“Well, I was her dependent when I came in, right? So the waiver should apply to me as well?”

We go back and forth, and he ultimately determines that this is not a big deal. That being disposed of, I’m sure we’re about to move to, you know, this decade, when he says, instead, “Ok, then, let’s jump to 1996. You became an F? Did you bring your college diploma, by any chance?”

Sigh. This is exactly the kind of thing I was afraid of. I want to say, “No, goddamnit, I don’t have my college diploma. Why is that relevant to the fact that I’m married to a U.S. citizen? I would think my international certificate of vaccination – necessary to re-enter the U.S. after travel to certain African countries – would be more germane to the question of whether I ought to remain here than my major in college.” But I just shake my head. I tell him I saw it just that morning – which is true – but didn’t think to grab it.

He doesn’t push it, and so we move on. I’m relieved until I realize that he’s moving on to…something else for which I have no documentation. As he begins to ask me about my first year after college – the crucial transition from F to H visa status – I get that familiar awful feeling, the kind you have in those dreams where you show up for class only to find it’s exam day. (Amusingly, my version of that dream – about not being prepared for something – always takes place at an airport. I am showing up for a flight with no ticket, passport, luggage, and no idea of my destination.)

He is asking me about 1999, the year when I had an optional practical training (OPT) visa that you apply for to work in the field you’ve studied. In my case, part of the reason I applied for my job was because it was the only one in the mega-employment issue of the Washington Post in January of 1999 that said “English or journalism major preferred.” The thinking is that you will work in your field of study, and if your employer likes you enough, they will sponsor you for a work visa – the H1 visa – which you can have for up to 7 years. The move to the H was not simple for me, partly due to the aforementioned Fulbright/2-year-residency rule. You also have to demonstrate that you have unique expertise (like, you wouldn’t be a pure administrative assistant and be able to get an H1 visa), and to go from there to an employer-sponsored permanent resident status can include the requirement that your job be advertised in newspapers and in your workplace.

I can tell you from experience that having your salary posted in the kitchen at work to demonstrate a “recruitment effort” is terrifying and oddly liberating. In any case, that first year – the transition from OPT to the H1 visa - was a pretty traumatic year, now that I think about it. And to think that I cannot remember getting any documentation from USCIS, nor did I have any in the correspondence I’d been saving for years. Ai ai ai.

As a quick sidenote, just imagine how daunting the steps outlined above are for a foreign national graduating from a US college today – into an economy with close to double-digit unemployment, where employers are feeling very pinched. Does anyone think a 21-year old stands a chance of convincing an employer in one year that they are worth an investment of time and money (slightly over $1000 before attorney’s fees) and getting on a track toward a work visa and, possibly, toward citizenship? It seems improbable, doesn’t it, especially as the number of unemployed Americans grows? I wonder whether this will have any measurable effect on the number of people who cobble a life together out of many different visa status classifications the way I did.

But still, I am eager to move on. Except that we don’t. “Well, I’m not seeing how you go from being an F to an H. We really need some of that OPT paperwork. I think,” he says. We are silent. “Maybe,” he goes on, “I should talk to someone. To figure out whether we need to go down this path or not. Because if we do, things will get a little complicated. So, tell you what. I’ll be right back, ok? Would you guys mind waiting for me here?”

He leaves, and I nervously tap the arm of my chair. I look over at Ms. AC. Eyebrows raised. I want to ask if I should freak out, or if she is, or if I’m the only one who thought the guy’s statement was incredibly ominous. But we say nothing, choosing instead to sit nervously for what must have been the most interminable five minutes of my life, and maybe of hers too.

Ex. Tinc. Tion.

2009-06-12T16:54:00.000-04:00

From this great New Yorker article about the search for a general theory of extinctions (hint: we may be contributing to the current one – shocking, I know…)

It is difficult to say when, exactly, the current extinction event – sometimes called the sixth extinction – began. What might be thought of as its opening phase appears to have started about fifty thousand years ago. At that time, Australia was home to a fantastic assortment of enormous animals; these included a wombatlike creature the size of a hippo, a land tortoise nearly as big as a VW beetle, and the giant short-faced kangaroo, which grew to be ten feet tall. Then all of the continent’s largest animals disappeared. Every species of marsupial weighing more than two hundred pounds – and there were nineteen of the – vanished….This die-off roughly coincided with the arrival of the first people on the continent, probably from Southeast Asia.

Do you like feeling smart?

2009-06-11T12:33:00.002-04:00

Sure you do! We all do! That's why I recommend that you sit around and repeatedly answer sample questions from the naturalization test that I will have to take in a few years. And before you know it, you'll feel pretty darn smart.

It only takes a few seconds...

2009-06-09T12:14:00.001-04:00

I’ve been around a lot of babies and small children recently, and let me just say this: holy shit. I had forgotten how a short distraction – a momentary lapse of attention – can lead to horrifying morbidity and even death. It’s nice to be around young and innocent life, but man is it taxing when you know that you’re always only a few seconds away from something terrible and irrevocable happening. Scary stuff. Especially near swimming pools. And in kitchens. And living rooms. And where there are objects, cords, chairs, objects of varying heights that can serve as platforms, and near anything made of glass.

The interview: part one

2009-06-05T13:40:00.005-04:00

Every American should spend time here, in this line – at the gates of admission into the country. The gates of administrative admission, in any case, since we’re all undeniably here, physically.

All government waiting rooms are sort of similar, I think, like all DMVs and all doctor’s offices. This is a large rectangular room, with an informal welcome desk and long rows of seats. Everywhere there are people caught up in the seriousness of their own situation: families, couples, none-of-the-above’s. Seriously, is that a gay couple? Is the new America that cool? Or are they siblings? I know for a fact that sibling-based petitions are pretty low on the administrative totem pole, and that today they would be hearing petitions submitted at least fifteen years ago, based on processing times published on the USCIS site. If they are siblings, my imaginary hat was tipped to them. “That thar is a long wait,” I think in my fake Southern drawl.

Some, like us, have backpacks, totebags, luggage, 20 lbs of documents “attesting to a shared life,” as the interview notice describes it. Other have single folders, sleeping babies, or just attorneys. With apologies to Tom Waits, no one brings anything small into this type of waiting room.

I am too nervous to read Bowling Alone, so I fidget nervously and run down my mental checklist of documentation that I might have forgotten. I look around furiously at the groups of people who didn’t bring reading material and are chatting nervously, or distractedly. I am always more perplexed by this behavior than any other. Who are these people who happily ride trains, who wait for buses, who sit in waiting rooms, without reading material? The new thing of course is fidgeting with some phone-type gadget, but in a situation like this, cell phone use is strictly forbidden. And of course, maybe these people already know what I pretend not to – that this isn’t a time for reading anyway. I go over the same paragraph in my book three times, indifferent to the impact of replacing social capital with financial capital in professional politics. I snap the book shut again.

Ms. Abstract Citizen has her organic chemistry textbook open, and we eventually reckon that it’s a better use of our nervous energy if I quiz her on some new compounds. Asking her about alkenes, halides, and other things I don’t understand, it occurs to me that someone might think I am quizzing her on our life, doing some last minute cramming for our greencard exam.

Some stories in the waiting room are clear. He is in his late 40s, white, cell phone clipped to belt. The belt is that thatchy kind with no holes, his dockers are pleated. He is a weekend golfer who spends a lot of time thinking about real estate. She looks Laotian, late 20s. In fantastic shape, Puma sneakers, holding her baby more carefully than her Vuitton. They have been waiting for a long time, he gets up to pace. He picks up brochures that read (no joke), “Are you a refugee or an asylee?” She gets up and stands near him. They speak quietly, intimately, and she lets out a hushed laugh. He touches the side of her head, strokes her hair once before she turns away.

With the families, it’s harder to tell. A family that looks Irish or Scandinavian walks in. They have long hair, and wear shirts that are somewhere between wolf-fashion and high school metal garb. Who is the anchor there, I wonder. An Asian family is led by us, led by the matriarch. She is the go-getter, quick to approach staff and lobby to move up in line. When she speaks, the others in her family listen.

In our case, we think it’s hard for the others to tell what’s what. And truly, it’s so gratifying to see couples where the answer isn’t clear at all. He could be African-American or Bahamian, and she could be Texan or Persian. Not everything boils down to a version of him-dark, she-fair. Every few minutes, Immigration officers come out through one of the four sets of doors and call out names. We instantly figure out the officer we don’t want: she looks pissed, barking out names and not greeting people as they walk in. I pick my guy: he is skinny, with short hair. He seems nice. He greets people by their first name and shakes their hands before leading them into a hallway, into we-don’t-know-where. I hope we get him.

Occasionally, half of a couple returns. The American, we figure. They are holding the other half, asking more questions, not buying their story. I nod to Ms. AC. “That might be you.” She does a good job of projecting calm, and shrugs. It’s over an hour after our interview time. Children and lawyers are getting antsy, but the rest of us are fine. Every now and then the doors spit out a whole set of people, looking happy, relieved. Hands are shook, congratulations proffered. Lives are changing, irrevocably, all around us.

Sitting on a long bench with bags strewn, Ms. AC is working out mnemonic devices for hydrocarbons, and I am remembering how hard it was to learn about alkanes and alkenes from a Scotsman at the British School in Rio, the distinction between those two words disappearing under the knotty turns of his speech. Alkens and alkens. And then, we get called. Or I do, but we both rise and scurry over to meet the nice-looking fellow who is holding the door open and who is carrying the thick stack of papers we mailed to Mesquite, Texas almost two years ago. He isn’t my pick, but he will have to do.

For further reading: part two.

What the hell is going on at this store?

2009-06-02T20:47:00.001-04:00

Rhode Island and Providence Plantations!

2009-06-02T11:59:00.001-04:00

First of all, did you know that is the real name of the state? I think I did, but then I forgot about it.

In my macroecon class the other night, the professor made a point of saying that 49 out of the 50 U.S. states had a legal requirement – either in the form of an amendment to the state constitution or via popular vote/referendum – for a balanced budget. Right before class let out, I asked what state didn’t have such a requirement. “Rhode Island,” came the answer.

I turned to my chatty tablemate, and raised my eyebrows.

“Wow,” he said. “That was the least interesting answer he could have given.”

Indeed, it was. On a walk to the metro, he pointed out that people from Rhode Island are really from a plantation, which is sort of amusing. And then we agreed that there was really nothing to say about this tiny non-island state that is, confusingly enough, named after an island.

Keeping Current(s)

2009-06-01T15:51:00.001-04:00

The beach is still the beach, even when the weather isn’t beachy. When it’s cold and foggy and the flip flops you stubbornly hold on to start cutting up your foot – the flip-flops you hold on to even though they aren’t a good fit, and they aren’t that comfortable - you still get the beat of the sea, and the wonderful unvoweled whisper of the foam reaching out, spread thinly on the heavy sand.

We like the beach when it’s like that – empty of beachgoers. We may have gotten a bit more than we bargained for in that respect though, considering the soupy fog and chilly evenings. Everyone was waiting for the weekend, and so were we – to get home. Where the sun was, as it turns out.

Thursday is my interview, and I am in official panic mode. There won’t be much sleeping the next few days.

On the drive back, a right-wing nobody blathers on about “homo-promo.”

We finished “The Wire” on Friday night. Happy with the lack of excessive speechifying, save for a few moments. When your drop-off in quality has you going from an A+ to a B+, I’d say you’re in pretty rare televisual company. I’m pretty hard-pressed to think of a show that, pound for pound, was as good for as long as “The Wire.”

I can’t tell if the summer will be really long or really short. But I am enjoying “A message to you, Rudy,” by the Specials. This may be my new favorite summer song.

This missing plane…I’ve done the other leg of that flight – DeGaulle to Rio. Security at CDG broke my bottle of scotch, purchased earlier that day at Spirits of the World in Heathrow airport. This was a flight where passengers were split into 5 groups. The way this goes for flights to Brazil is as follows:

1. The first group gets called. 95% of passengers board.

2. The second group gets called. Virtually all of the remaining passengers board.

3. The third group gets called. I am the only one standing at the gate at this point.

4. The fourth group gets called. Reluctantly – even though I’m group 5 – I board.

The heir to the Brazilian throne, were the country still a monarchy, was on the flight. Supposedly I have a relative who was involved in planning one of his family’s weddings. The family name is Orleans e Braganca. Something about this seems anachronistic: monarchs shouldn’t die in plane crashes. “The prince died in a plane crash” just doesn’t sound right.

And with that, I’ll probably take my leave till after the interview. Hoping for good news.

Smartcar ownership: 6 months in...

2009-05-20T09:36:00.001-04:00

Obviously, parking this car = the business. Ms. AC routinely has to park at 10 pm on weeknights, which – with an ordinary car – would require at least 10-15 minutes of time spent hunting for a spot (and often more than that.) With the smartcar, she can almost always find a spot within half a block of our building on her first pass. What this is worth to us – in terms of peace of mind (her safety, the lack of hassle and anticipatory fretting during the drive home about whether she’ll find a spot or not) – is almost impossible to tabulate.

The drawback is that we are, unfortunately, still a two-car household. The other car is an old Toyota Echo on which we pay a mere pittance for insurance. The Echo gets used maybe once a week, if that. So, the smartcar is a somewhat selfish car, in a sense. Like, it’s incredibly practical, and we feel like we have all this freedom to come and go as we please, but no one else benefits from it – because, by definition, we can’t drive anyone else around. But since the Echo isn’t exactly a burden, we haven’t found that we have any incentive to get rid of it. Which makes us feel selfish, I guess.

Back to smarty: it’s cool that the engine is in the back. The car is very stable and fun to drive, and it handles really well. We’re due for some sort of transmission upgrade, which I hope will get rid of a weird lilt when the car shifts into second gear. The car has a hybrid manual transmission – you can actually disable the automatic transmission and do a weird kind of clutch-less shifting using tabs on the steering wheel. I suppose if we dealt with more hills, we might actually use that…? As it is, I’ve used the fake manual transmission for novelty purposes but never for any meaningful activity.

It’s a light car. It can get rocked a bit by heavy winds, but so can, you know, the Echo.

People definitely stare, though. This is not a good car for people who like to pick their noses when stopped at a light, for example.

Also, parallel parking is weird when you don’t have a back.

The sound system is meh, though I like the auxiliary input and the fact that it has a built-in ipod charger. The GPS that comes with it actually runs off of the dvd player (I know, right? It has a dvd player…), and the stock GPS is definitely alright, but again, not great. Mileage? Can’t complain – easily in the mid-30s per gallon, could easily crack 40 if we spent more time on the highway – good since the the tank is just under 8 gallons, which isn’t much.

All told? It’s cheaper and smaller than, say, a Yaris or a Honda Fit. We’ll see in 5 years what kinds of mechanical issues arise, but from our very limited experience, the car is well worth it. We’re taking it to Rehoboth for a few days and I can't wait to see what it feels like to be on vacation in this thing.

I may have to buy a new laptop...

2009-05-18T14:30:00.002-04:00

...but I'd really rather blow a chunk of change on this. Life just ain't fair sometimes.

In which I maybe, soon, become the "abstract permanent resident."

2009-05-15T10:55:00.003-04:00

June 4, people. I may be planning some sort of greencard party the following night. Stay tuned!

singer-songwriter kind of mood.

2009-05-06T19:06:00.006-04:00

Have really been enjoying Elvis Perkins.

His biography is plenty compelling. Knowing about his mom makes this song borderline unlistenable - it's almost too much to take. [Since many of you might not click through - his dad was Anthony Perkins, of "Psycho" fame. Anthony Perkins died ("complications related to AIDS") several years ago. Elvis Perkins' mom was on the ill-fated American Airlines flight 11, flying from Boston to LAX on the morning of September 11, 2001.]

Turning the corner, we've got Jenn Grant, who, I currently enjoy as a culmination of what Feist, Beth Orton, and, why not, Norah Jones aspire to be. I dare you not to want to hear this on a rainy day.

Woke up this morning...

2009-05-06T18:29:00.004-04:00

...with a benadryl hangover and my fever wasn't gone. This doesn't happen all the time. (Detachable...something.)

But yeah, sick. Shivered the whole night through, in fact (as long as I'm copping lines from songs.)

Took my temperature and found it to be satisfactorily above 100 F. Two days of being sick with ominous "flu-like symptoms"? Yes, I say. Also, I say "FUCK." Because being of a certain age, and being less reckless at that certain age than I was when I was another, less certain age, I now know that one has to heed certain realities. Like, no matter how dumb I may consider the 24-hour news cycle, I still can't ignore the fact that the word "pandemic" is in the news every day.

And while I'm old enough to want to be prudent, I'm not so old that I fall into the group of people who can't be outside on code red days in the summer - so I think, who cares. Swine, no swine. I've had the flu before, and this sounds just like that. Except a little part of me is nagging me, asking what an epidemiologist would want me to do. And part of me thinks, "Hey, I can score one for the District! No more Maryland and Virginia getting all the press! I'll be a DC-based swine flu case!"

Driving up Reno, I notice all the landscaping going on. Surely David Byrne must have written a lyric about the importance of having a well-manicured lawn, even during a pandemic? When I get to the doctor's office, there's a sign taped to the door, urging all those experiencing "flu-like symptoms" - there it is again - to immediately self-report to the front desk upon check-in.

I think this must be over the top. These people are medical professionals, after all. This isn't Anderson Cooper, I tell myself. Facts matter more than emotions here. So, I hand over my insurance card, since they have a new computer system or something and need to re-key my info, and I patiently await my turn. In comes a woman, whose husband is waiting OUTSIDE. That's how freaked out these two are about his flu-like symptoms. "Can he come in," she inquires. The nurse shrugs. "If it makes him feel better, he can wear a mask." Now I feel guilted into self-declaring my own flu-like symptoms. "Should I, uh, be wearing a mask too?"

"Can't hurt," she says. On it goes. Now I'm reading the New Yorker and wearing a mask. Life is grand.

In I go, to get weighed and blood pressure'd and pulse'd. I'm not sure if I'm supposed to keep the mask on, or if it's like I'm among friends now, friends with whom I can make jokes about the silly swine flu mass hysteria. "It's not even THE FLU, people! The real flu is scary! This is just a bad cold."

When the doc comes in, she comes in - what I like about her is the directness, the machine gun-ness of her delivery - "What, have you been to Mexico? Hung out with people from Mexico? Your friends all go to Mexico?" Me: "Uh...none of the above. Listen, I think this is just as silly...[pause to lower mask]...I mean, this is idiotic. I don't want to be here. But..."

"But," she says, "you watch the news. And what they're not saying is, 'EVERYBODY STAY HOME.' End of story. Don't come out here, don't bring it out into the community, exposing our staff and others to it. Just stay home. You're not immune-compromised. You're healthy, you're young. Even if you have it, which I highly doubt, you'd be fine in a few days. Why didn't anyone tell you to just stay home and ride it out?"

Me: "I'm...sorry?"

"God, don't apologize, How is this your fault? Listen, you're fine. We'll run a flu test, and we'll take a swab to send out for swine flu testing. Here's the tamiflu scrip - not that it'll do much, because the virus does whatever it wants to do and then leaves - but I guess it slightly ameliorates the symptoms? That's what people say anyway. Take it, get it filled or don't. Just get home and stay home till you're healthy, ok?"

At this point I feel both great and diminutive. Great because of all the common sense on display. Diminutive because I bought into the great media con of swine flu. This sensation lasts for about two minutes, because when the nurse comes in to swab me...? You know, for the test...? What is she wearing?

What?

A fucking mask, that's what.

Mask or not, as far as I can tell, I will soon be ready to celebrate my continued streak of god-knows-how-many consecutive days of being swine flu-free.

Great idea, but what if someone someday discovers a cure for being a sucker?

2009-04-29T15:40:00.003-04:00

Indeed, what if they do? That would be the most cruel joke anyone could play on the customers of this company.

And yes, if you click around, it looks like all it costs to be indefinitely frozen is around $30,000 dollars. You know, if you're small-minded enough to want to put a price on IMMORTALITY.

Another "Lost" post

2009-04-23T13:34:00.003-04:00

Since I was right about my gut reaction the very first minute we saw Miles on “Lost” – that he was the son of Pierre Chang – here’s my prediction for his arc. I’m going for the win here.

Miles will get to see enough of Pierre Chang’s relationship with little Miles and his mom to believe that he needs to warn his dad about the impending genocide. He will feel that this is the only way to prevent the disaster and confusion of his childhood – having his dad with him as he grows up and being cheated out of that relationship by Ben’s cold-hearted mass-murdering ways. However, Dr. Chang will echo the silly mantra that “whatever happened, happened,” and will hope that he can bargain with destiny by sending his wife and son away, and offering himself up as a sacrificial lamb.

Miles will then come to understand three things:

(1) That he himself caused his own unhappy childhood. He will realize that Dr. Chang drove his wife and child away to save them, and that adult Miles was the catalyst for this action. The alternative to his miserable childhood would be lying dead in a ditch with the rest of the Dharma folks.

(2) That he was meant to have died on the Island and that whatever happened did not necessarily "happen." Or was not necessarily meant to have happened. This is why he can commune with the dead. (Because he is sort of un-dead himself, having cheated destiny.)

(3) That Widmore has brought him back to the island to fulfill his destiny (ie, die on it) because Widmore believes that he must give the Island what it wants in order to re-establish the pre-Linas state of equilibrium on the Island. So, Miles, having been temporarily saved by his father's sacrifice, will ultimately be consumed as Widmore's sacrificial lamb.

This presupposes, however, that not all the principals were brought to the Island for the same reason (similarities in daddy-issues notwithstanding.) But, I can already see that we’re going to grow incredibly fond of Miles like we did Charley, only to find that Miles must die.

And that, my friends, will suck.

Unfixables?

2009-04-20T14:39:00.000-04:00

Why, sometimes, will one of my feet not go where I tell it to? I intend to walk in a straight line, but every, say, fifth step is clearly not quite in the same continuum. This only happens every now and then, but it makes me wonder just how well I’ve figured out this whole “walking” thing.

When drinking a liquid, and it goes down the wrong way…of all the ways to ingest food/nutrients, drinking is the one we have practiced the most. Why do we still get it wrong?

We all rely on umbrellas, but they really don’t keep you dry below the waist. Our faith in them seems childish.

Our brains probably never stop working, and they process more information than any other device known to humans. But when asked, we usually say that “not much” has been up recently, even when we are eager for a conversation or a connection.
Leonard Cohen is 75, and he sounds happier about it and more at peace with it than anyone else on the planet is about anything else. I don’t want this fixed, by the way. I think it’s wonderful that it’s unfixable.

In spring, when the temperature hits 70 F for the first time, people take to the streets in what constitutes beach wear. In the fall, when the temperature finally drops to 70, people take out jackets and scarves. But both temperatures are identical.

I’m having a conversation over a meal. I know I want to say something. But I get flustered formulating the thoughts, and take a huge bite instead. Now, the natural pause in the conversation happens just as I’ve shoveled three bites’ worth of food into my mouth. I indicate through facial expressions and hand gestures that I have something to say and that I want to keep the subject going, but of course, I need 20 seconds to quickly chew the absurd amount of food. Three minutes later, I will do the exact same thing again.

Not enough people listen to Elvis Perkins. This one is very fixable though.

Can I start a new genre of criticism?

2009-04-12T15:56:00.002-04:00

I've been under the sway of the middle section of Essence of Decision. The second framework the authors look at is organizational theory perspective of historical analysis,which is endlessly fascinating to me.

As I watch "Lost" and "The Wire" (we're still in season 4), I keep thinking about how the structure of the organizations in which the characters exist impact their actions. In "The Wire," you have individual agents working within large, stagnant bureaucracies. To get things done, the agents must deliberately confound or undermine their organizational framework - in fact, they seem to thrive in the hand-offs between different departments, and they manipulate the hierarchy because, well, one exists.

The fact that the hierarchy is defined means that the individual agents can take advantage of the routines and idiosyncracies of their organizations, which often respond in predictable manners. Sometimes the ripples cause unexpected outcomes, but what is often exhilarating about the show (besides the fact that the writing makes process narratives seem very vivid and human) is seeing an individual actor taking on the inertia of their bureaucracy - not by challenging it, but by finding a large enough margin in which to operate.

"Lost" on the other hand features a bunch of confused actors. The hierarchies are undefined and very fluid. It's not even clear how many "organizations" exist on the show. And though the individual agents have complete freedom (or so it seems) to act and to do whatever they choose, they are routintely stymied not by routines and organizational inertia, but by the fact that they are operating in an organizational void. As viewers, we are slowly being introduced to different layers of the organization and its management structure, and the knowledge imbalance between someone like Ben Linas or Charles Widmore and everyone else is what temporarily creates a power structure that will, we hope, ultimately be completely flattnened.

Someone smarter than me should write about this extensively. And they should extend the discussion to "The Hudsucker Proxy." Good luck to whoever you may be, smarter person!

Do I like that I ask myself questions out loud as rhetorical device? No. But do I do it anyway? Yes. Am I trying to stop? Absolutely.

2009-03-31T18:59:00.002-04:00

Among the many verbal and rhetorical ticks I’ve tried to fix in myself – including but not limited to the overuse of “um,” an overreliance on “interesting…” when I don’t have something more specific to say, and the tortured locutional use of double negatives (“It’s not unremarkable to me that…”) – the use of self-directed questions to make a point is rapidly becoming public enemy number 1 in the abstract citizen world.

A lot of people use this, I think, because it allows them to set up their own microterms after positing a macro rhetorical strawman. In some cases, the purpose of the sequence is to illustrate that the microterm is a lot less extreme than the macroterm. For example:

Am I for the indiscriminate euthanizing of Rottweiler puppies? Absolutely not. Would I support some measures to identify and track violent dogs and keep them away from children and the elderly? Sure, if it can be done in a minimally invasive way. And would I support taxing all Rottweiler owners to pay for a testing program that? Hell yes I would.

But really, it’s not even that these questions create a dialogue that’s intellectually dishonest or that is manipulative. It’s just…inefficient and inartful. And pedantic. We’re not in a classroom, and I don’t need to run anyone through exercises. Whatever happened to being able to directly express ambivalence or caveats? I’m not for this idea, but I think there is merit to a portion of the underlying argument. Or, I’m for this in principle, but oftentimes good ideas in this area don’t get successfully translated into practice.

Since when do I need every thought to be broken up into a Q and A format? The Ithaca chapter of Ulysses notwithstanding, I think we would all do well to express our ideas as directly as possible, and let questions arise naturally as the result of statements we’ve made, rather than injecting them into our monologues as a preemptive measure to frame the discussion.

Having said all this, will I probably still fall off the bandwagon? You bet. Will I judge you if you fall off too? Absolutely not.

Still life with student of nutrition science

2009-03-30T20:58:00.002-04:00

[The Abstract Citizens are out for a weekday evening stroll. Mr. AC notices some graffiti on a park bench.]

Me: Does that say..."fuck bananas"...?

Ms. AC: Hmmm. Someone must really dislike potassium.

USCIS: where we're at...

2009-03-25T15:25:00.002-04:00

So, you may recall that I thought, naively, that our greencard interview - originally scheduled for June 2008 - would be right around the corner.

In fact, USCIS told us as much this past September. "Oh, you're about to be-rescheduled. It says right here in the system. Your interview will happen in less than 6 months."

Cut to 6 months later. No new date. So, we go through the pain in the ass of re-scheduling and making it to an "appointment" with USCIS to find out what is going on. It seems - oh boy, this is a good one - that a mere 4 weeks after our last visit, in September, my biometrics - taken back in early August 2007 - "expired." Apparently, my fingerprints and picture are only considered "current" for 15 months. So, the person who saw us in September didn't think it would be important to tell us that we were a mere 4 weeks away from having our petition be completely "frozen."

But surely, you think, they told us it was frozen? SURELY the much-touted "check your case status online" function would tell us that our case was something other than "pending"?

To you, I say: "The very pants I was returning!" And then I shall chuckle heartily.

So, now I get re-fingerprinted on April 7, and a few weeks after that, we schedule another "appointment" and beg someone to please please please move our case to the top of the list instead of having us start over from the beginning - a prospect that means, if you do the math...August 2007 to June 2008 (original biometrics-to-interview timeframe) - well, it us in the interview hotseat sometime in February 2010.

Yup. Twenty motherfucking ten!!! The Abstract Citizen will remain a very concrete nonpermanent resident alien for a while longer, it seems.

Yes, I am posting from a USCIS waiting room...

2009-03-23T13:16:00.002-04:00

...But no, our interview has not yet been re-scheduled. We are just here to see if they can tell us when the damn thing will be re-scheduled for.

In other news, there should be a special word for the kind of contempt I felt driving home from the half-marathon on Saturday morning, around 9am or so, seeing people getting all dressed up in their gym threads, going out for 20 minutes of light cardio or whatever...we'd been awake for 4 hours and had already run more that. 13 miles when these people roll out of bed for their "exercise." Bastards.

This Film Is Not Yet Rated...

2009-03-20T09:51:00.003-04:00

Because I roll on the three-years-late wagon, I just got around to watching “This Film Is Not Yet Rated,” which was tremendously enjoyable and appropriately anger-inducing. It’s really hard to imagine this not being one of the most important critiques of the corporate film industry ever committed to, uh, film.

And many of the broad points it makes feel right and seem valid: as a society, America tolerates violence more easily than sex; and even then, male pleasure is definitely more ok than aggressive sexual behavior from female characters (or, perish the thought, the depiction of female sexual pleasure.)

But I have one major bone of contention with the film, and it happens as an aside – taking up no more than 5 minutes, maybe, of the total running time, although it’s a recurring theme throughout the movie. Namely, it’s the implication that the MPAA ratings system somehow makes American culture more bellicose and violent. To review, the MPAA ratings system was born in 1968. Here are a few other things that happened in 1968:

RFK’s assassination
MLK’s assassination
My Lai massascre
The, uh, 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago

…to name but a few. And of all the things we want to single out in that hectic year, that may have left America more divided and more prone to violence – we’re going with the MPAA ratings system? The fact that some kid had to wait till he was 17 to watch “In the Realm of the Senses” is what makes America more violent?

I hate this in otherwise rational liberals. Why presume that a prudish minority is imposing some tyrannical form of censorship over the country? Sure, I have major beef with the process issues surrounding the MPAA ratings system, but I don’t presume that a group that doesn’t reflect my views is automatically not representative of America. A lot of the filmmakers spotlighted say, “Well, I’m a parent too! And I don’t have a problem with my movie! Why do they?” And aside from the solipsism inherent in that argument, it's worth noting that this is just a nihilistic line of thought that leaves no room for any kind of representative committee, because everyone is always going to disagree with something a committee does.

Why is it presumed that the individual’s relationship to culture is a one-way street? In this linear worldview, our cultural beliefs are dictated by the MPAA. We blindly accept the norms dictated by our MPAA overlods and become more violent. But isn’t it just as likely that the individuals on the MPAA ratings board were influenced by something that was already prevalent in the culture - a prudish and socially conservative outlook when it comes to bedroom matters? And that, in turn, the individuals on the board are reflecting back broader cultural norms that they themselves didn’t create, but absorbed just the same as we did? Sure, the MPAA board reinforces certain ideas, but did these people create those norms? Please. And just because a few of us don’t share in those norms doesn’t make the norms any less real. America is, by and large, fairly conservative. Remember that it took a very enlightened Supreme Court justice for Ulysses to be published in America - 10 years after it was released in Europe.

And the conspiracy theory then has to build: that the MPAA board is somehow a cabal of union-hating villains as opposed to well-meaning but naïve and misguided self-righteous people. Does anyone who knows the DC area think that a set of their neighbors from Montgomery or Fairfax county would come to different conclusions than the MPAA board??

To be fair to the filmmaker and to the directors interviewed in the documentary, I get what they’re saying – and I think it’s infuriating. These people count the number of pelvic thrusts in a sex scene, or they disproportionately object to female sexual pleasure over that of males. Sure, this has some kind of impact on children. But only a filmmaker would be arrogant enough to think that real-world violence could have been prevented if more teenagers had easy access to “I am Curious (Yellow)” over your standard-issue action flick. If it were that simple, why would societies that are notoriously more permissive than the U.S. also have problems with endemic violence? (Helloooo, I watched “Caligula” on prime time tv when I was 13 – in a city where a bad weekend can mean 100 homicides.)

Other than that minor quibble, the film is spectacular, and if you don’t know much about how movies get rated PG-13, R, or NC-17, go watch it – three years late. Just like me.

So, to review:

2009-03-16T14:09:00.003-04:00

I'm running a half-marathon this Saturday. Until last Friday, I thought I had two more weeks to go. Awesome.

I haven't run more than 9 miles during this whole "training" period. Awesome.

I have a cold. Awesome.

Around mile 7, the route actually passes directly in front of our apartment building. The temptation to go inside and go back to sleep will be overwhelming. Awesome.

Two good friends moving away. Awesome.

The only truly good news I've gotten today is that the weather forecast for next Saturday looks good. It'll be in the mid-40s when we run, which is very do-able.

Going home to nap. Awesome.