If you saw a faded yellow corolla on the side of the bridge leading from vallejo to the east bay, that was me.
I'll be taking the BART for a while.
A friend of mine has just moved into a basement apartment off of Durant. Yes, he's got a letter instead of a number and the apartment looks like a place that you would open up a door and see a number of indonesian children chained to sewing machines.
Some facts about Dwight's apartment include:
I just finished the practice exam for the foreign service. Overall I did rather well, especially on the English usage. There are some pretty strange questions on there. One was about Charlie Parker (got that one right), another about what the Japanese mean by their silences (right) and what the Argentinians call their plains (pampas, and I got that one wrong).
The areas where I'm weak is in the nuts and bolts of the government and the constitution (I couldn't remember what branch the General Accounting Office reported to), and the principles of management (got most of the questions right, just very slowly).
Books are, of course, the answer to improving these areas. So, I'm going to make a stop at the library tomorrow and see what I can pick up. Luckily the back of the pamphlet has a little list of helpful books.
I've never really read anything on management science before. It might be very difficult to pick out a good one.
I'll have to push some of the things I am reading to the back of my dresser. And stop reading so much election coverage.
Maybe it's not such a good time to be trying to piece together a social life, like I was going to, either.
1 - Leave a comment, saying you want to be interviewed.
2 - I will respond; I'll ask you five questions.
3 - You'll update your journal with my five questions, and your five answers.
4 - You'll include this explanation.
5 - You'll ask other people five questions when they want to be interviewed.
My interviewer was reezon.
1. How'd you get your name, and do you think it suits your character?
It's the real name of one of my favorite writers, Francois Marie Arouet nee Voltaire. I picked it when I was young and in love with all things opposed to superstition and unreason. I've mellowed out about all that since then. But you still don't me to go to church with you.
Also, I almost never have to attach a number to it when I get an account somewhere.
2. What is your biggest mistake?Accomplishment?
Mistake: Living at home for a year after high school while attending the local JC (it's like high school without all the smart people).Accomplishment - pretty much living on my own since then, getting fabulously in debt and getting a degree.
3. Why Starbucks?
Apart from the usual Devil's Laundry List about pay and benefits (and hours that suit my inability to get to bed before 3 a.m. ) I've just kind of been stuck there while waiting for a real job. It's like an old girlfriend that I'm not in love with but who will always take me back.
whew. That sounds sordid.
4. Who do you love?
so many ways to answer this:
Dorky I don't know but he's walked forty seven miles of barbed wire and wears a rattlesnake for a necktie.
Rakish Why, whoever is picking up the tab, my dear.
Celebraphile Maura Tierney, Neko Case and Enid from Ghost World.
Hippy I love everything, especially cute, furry and edible things but not Republicans and bad people.
Insane Toast fucking.
White Stripes Quotation Naw, it can't be love. There is no true love.
Self Effacing The sound of my own voice, apparently.
Facetious Jon Stewart, but not, you know, like that.
Facetious and Yet Disurbingly Close to the Truth Fine food and expensive scotch.
Slutty Whatever will love me back.
Truthful I'm not really in love with anyone, but I am very prone to crushes.
Truthful pII There are a number of friends that I am so fiercely loyal to, in my own quiet way, that it is indistinguishable from love. I think you know who you are. (If you really don't know, if you are a former or current roommate likely to be reading this, then you are certainly in). (Yes, even you).
5. Death by fire or death by ice?
That's a good one. Ice is, of course, nice. But in the end I'm going to have to endorse Uncle Robert's answer and go with fire. Desire is better then hate. Don't be a hatah.
You should check out The Midnight Blog.
There's an interesting pile of links there. It's safe, local and easy to use.
It's pretty neat to get link from a mortal human.
Professor Delong seems to be trying to nudge my reading habits as well as using this as a chance to take a (thoroughly deserved) shot at historian Robert Skidelsky.
Skidelsky has written a few cranky ideas about the USA tricking England into forgetting where her colonies were and why she needed them into his biography of Keynes. He has then cynically retitled the biography to include the word "freedom" because the yanks gobble that sort of thing right up.
None of which to say that Skidelsky hasn't written a fine biography. It's the dog's bollocks, it is. It's just one has to mistrust the man's sympathies. He might up and give them to, say, Oswald Mosley, another man who was, shall we say, overly sympathetic.
Kylee has shown me Moe's books in Berkeley.
It's several stories of fantastic used book store.
It had been so long since I had seen an economics section full of books that I really wanted to read.
I talked myself out of Mankiw & Co. seminal work on Macroeconomics . . .and Bhagwati's slim pamphlet on protectionism. I did pick up some cheaper fare; Capitalism and Freedom, David Warsh's book on economic complexity, part Skidelsky's (mysteriously retitled) Keynes biography and Fareed Zakaria' s book on American empire.
Maybe I'll start enjoying doing economics again.
We'll see.
At the very least it should keep me from bugging elex about when he's going to be done with Quicksilver.
So far, I'm halfway through Zakaria's book, which is largely an attack on something called "Defensive Realism" in foriegn policy. Defensive Realists think that expansion and empire is due to insecurity, that states typically only expand as a response to outside pressure. It's an idea that seems quite reasonable and then falls apart after a few good pokes.
Zakaria maintains the Classical Realist position that empires were acts of conscious positive choice and not simply reacting to another state's ambitions.
It's weird to read a history of the presidential attitude towards expansionism where the author seems to be rooting for the expansionists.
Everyone occasionally succumbs to the 'everything is getting worse' disease. It's the conviction that everything is in decay and that it does not live up to the high standards of your youth.
There are several treatments. One of them is to watch RogerCormen movies.
Death Race 2000 is a Roger Cormen movie.
I just watched it.
It seems like it would be easy to write a review of that movie.
Here we go. Think about the movie. Wait until a word pops into your head.
"Psychotic."
There we go. Here's another word, "coked-up."
"Potato."
Yeah. That actually belongs there. You can watch the movie and find out why it happened. You might really hate me afterword.
David Carradine is in it. He's pretty loathesome, as always.
A very youmg Sylvester Stallone is in it. He sucks, as always.
There's some pretty good nudity, some pretty terrifying nudity and some really retarded special effects.
Oh yeah and it will make you hate and loathe your fellow man. But hey, some of you are already there, might as well watch the movie.
I have never placed much value on sticking to beliefs. I like changing my mind and I do it frequently. The way I see it, beliefs inform you personality as much as they are determined by it.
Some ideas stay with me longer than others do. Are they better, smarter opinions? Am I just more stubborn about them?
Sometimes I think that it is the long-standing convictions that people are the most irrational about. The more important the idea is to us, the less we want to subject to the rigors of reasonable debate.
In the spirit of making things more reasonable, (a dubious enterprise, I know)here are some convictions that I have settled onto at this point in my life. How did I come to them? The same way most of us do; some emotional experience, conviction borne of debate or just a half hearted settling on to a conventional opinion. I use a patented mix of carelessness, inattention, the desire to be right and some modest analytical skills.
I'm pro-choice. There is the technical knowledge of the Doctor and the knowledge that the mother possesses about her abilities to raise the child, what is it that the state is supposed to add to make this situation better? What rule will consistently make the outcome better? This belief springs from my general antipathy towards the idea that people should have their decisions made for them by The State or some other remotely interested party. I have an emotionally libertarian (or 'liberal' as I like to call it) streak.
I do not believe in God. I realize that on a topic such as this, certitude is truly reckless and debate is only debate in a formal sense. I do not think there are any decisive logical or empirical turns that could convince either parties one way or the other.
Still, there comes a time when you must place your bets and I know where mine is placed. I do not think God is necessary to explain any of the particular fact I know about the world, from psychology to physics. I do not desire to live by any narrow set of moral rules. The only thing religion has going for it, as far as I can tell, is a sense of community and some pretty okay music (Gillian Welch and Bach are all I really want from any religion).
I am a computationalist, I suppose. I do believe that even if the mind is not really a computer program implemented on the brain, it is an awfully lot like one. I believe that Darwinism is going to one day tell us an awful lot about human psychology, even if it hasn't done much yet.
I am a legal pragmatist. The constitution does not contain a surefire recipe for good government. It is contradictory, incomplete. People of good sense must interpret it, with a steady eye on the consequences. I don't think any legal decision should be made without some sort of consideration of the consequences.
I am not a Socialist. Large state owned companies have, almost everywhere, been disastrous engines for nepotism. I do believe in government, and when it comes to enforcement of corporate crime I think we are far too lenient. Hang the bastards. All in all, they do more than any petty thief to undermine confidence in our systems of government, our economy and our trust in each other. Hang the bastards.
There's plenty more where that came from. I'll stop now, for your sake, gentle reader.
Okay, so a few days ago former Bush treasury secretary Paul O'Neill is featured in a book that drops all sorts of damaging bombshells and reveals all manner of unnerving facts about the Bush administration. He is, of course now backing off of some of them and certainly not because Karl Rove has put a horse's head in his bed. No, no.
The book seems to get to the heart of what a certain class of Bush critic dislikes about this administration. The squabbles between departments, the steel tariff pander and the still strange rush to war in Iraq. These all seem to me like the symptoms of a poor, indirect style of leading.
But you should read Brad Delong's take on the O'Neill issue because Delong used to work in Treasury and he's supernaturally qualified to speak about what makes for a good Treasury Secretary and what makes a poor one. The man has also been bloggin like a madman on this and everyone he says should be considered.
He's also very Wrath of Khan on GW. In an instructive way.
As you can see I have joined the MT army.
My success in doing this is somewhat dampened by the fact that Kylee has finally gotten me sick.
I think I've done pretty well up until now. Kylee teaches young children and is, therefore, a massive disease vector, a tasty treat for all manner of microbe. I'm surprised that my normally wussy immune system has held out this long. Normally I'm sick from November through March whether or not one of my roomates spends her working hours surrounded by germ riddled monkeys.
I must be going. I'm off to take apart the ghettobucks, weep at the neglect that has been heaped upon the equipment, then put it back together again in a working fashion.
Wish me luck.
Living in El Cerrito is like being occasionally groped by Richmond.
Richmond, California has acquired an awful reputation across Northern California, as the ghetto of ghettos. I am kind of a naive country boy. The worst ghetto I've ever been in was Tuolumne, California a small town in the foothills where they throw garbage in all the empty lots and many of the residents are visibly drunk or drugged by 5 p.m.
Tuolomne might still hold the crown.
Richmond did remind of Tuolomne. It is kind of suburban, and they do throw trash in a lot of the empty lots. It isn't that scary, but it is very weird.
Richmond looks like a stain on the map. There's a large chunk of it just east of El Cerrito. Then there's some Richmond north of El Cerrito and little blotches of it all over the place. The streets in many places are numbered, but unlike many places, aren't continuous. If you are looking for an address on 27th, you can't just follow 27th street because it dead-ends many, many times.
It is hard to find things in Richmond. It appears that gas stations in Richmond do not sell maps of Richmond, but maps of other places instead. I had to go to the El Cerrito Staples in order to get a map of Richmond when that was needed. It didn't help much, except to reinforce my conviction that the city rather arbitrarily disappears and reappears.
I believe if that if I lived in Richmond this would make me angry and my impression is so far confirmed. Richmond residents are at least, very loud talkers, every one. Other than that I can't say I've developed any stereotypes about the residents of Richmond just yet.
We are also wedged in between Berkeley and Albany. Albany has made little impact on me other than Albany Hill and that is mainly to obstruct my view. Berkeley has made a few impressions on me. It has stolen my checkbook, mostly. So far all criminal activity that I have heard about in the east bay has taken place in Berkeley.
Yesterday, Michelle introduced Berkeley and I again and more cordial relations may ensue. Comic Relief made me spend some money and Mod Lang made me wish I had more money to spend.
It's neat, but expensive. You can't park or make a left turn there. I like Berkeley but I think she's a little out of my league.
The funeral is over with. It could have gone a lot worse, although not for want of tryung. They played "Wind Beneath my Wings" to a slide show of Josh's dad.
Sometimes the most innapropriate thing in the world is to laugh. Like at a funeral. I drew blood biting the inside of my lip. Dani nearly lost her composure when the minister said we were to let The Lord use us.
We're pretty horrible people, I guess. But still the whole funeral seemed half-assed and insincere. The only things related about Josh's dad that sounded like the guy I met were related by Josh and one of his coworkers. The minister ventured off into Jesusland and seemed rather happier staying there rather than mentioning Josh's dad and what he was like. (I don't know what denomination this fellow was but it is a mighty poor theology where Jesus is the Maitre D' seating you into the appropriate section of heaven).
We were there to pay our respects, I know. But how respectful is playing a Bette Midler song to a slideshow of the recently deceased?
Then again, this was a church that had a basketball hoop inside it.
The effort was nice.
Yeah that sounds good.
I swear that I'm not an asshole.
Not much of one, anyway.
The Minister of Tool - There is nothing really so useless as a teenage boy. There's nothing nearly as horrible as one who has discovered that a particular band knows all there is to know about life. This one started in on about Tool on his interview and didn't stop until he was fired for stealing.
I don't think I've listened to Tool since I endured two hours straight of talk about Maynard's feminist phase.
Too Bad Jim - I'm not sure which comedy routine originated the point that the most troubling people in the world are not gay people or straight people but mainly those who do not know which camp they really belong in. Thus when you encounter a lisping, oversensitive Asian boy who idolizes Britney Spears, one naturally (and rightly, I still maintain) assumes that he is gay. However, this particular example maintained an elaborate fiction of heterosexuality to a disbelieving world. He got really, really offended when people assumed that and yet he continued in acting like the world's most incredible gay stereotype. This guaranteed that he got off on the wrong foot with every single person he ever met.
He also happened to be horrible at about every task, no matter how mindless, that was assigned to him. He had a special knack for finding the weirdest, worst way to do anything unless he was watched over like he was Abu Nidal or something. He was horribly sensitive about how bad he was at doing basic tasks and any instruction would quickly dissolve into tearful recriminations.
But it was his social ineptitude that was most striking. I once listened to him give a small dissertation to a horrified audience on the various effects that starbucks creations would have on his sensitive digestive system. He would interject the topic of Britney and her superness into topics that were improbably remote from the subject of mildly irritating pop divas. He willingly confessed to believing that she wrote the song "I Can't Get No Satisfaction" with only the smallest prompting.
I'm told that he eventually got less irritating. So, I'm guessing that perhaps his behavior resulted partly from discomfort at his new surroundings. I'm just not really sure I believe it.
The Slowest Boy in Dixon - This one had a special knack for making horrible tasting drinks. No one could figure out how he was doing it. We speculated that he had a secret bottle of special Fontana Brand Ass Syrup that he using when no one was watching (admittedly a rare occasion, there are parolees under less observation). He was kind of gullible, and while not exactly dumb, just slow-moving. People frequently thought he was retarded. He wasn't, so far as I know.
Massive Head Wound Harry - The starbucks management training program attracts some strange candidates. One fellow had an awful lot of stitches in his head and an accompanying lack of attention span and motor skills. He really was unable to do work, and he really should have been on disability. Working with him was awful, because he you couldn't help but get mad at him for being useless and then feeling downright awful for losing patience. He lingered on for something like three months before discreetly disappearing.
The Maneating Cow - A horrible, dwarfish manager that treated her employees like slaves and other managers like rival claimants to the imperial scepter. She was cloned from the same material that they make DMV employees out of, bad perm and all. Her feeding habits were particularly gruesome. Many of the stories about her are too disgusting to be recorded on paper.
Very Fertile Ghetto Brat #3 through #7 - Some sort of strange hiring policy in Vacaville, CA resulted in a statistically improbable number of angry, pregnant teenagers working there.
You can know something is coming for a long time and still not ready for it when it happens.
I guess it is the old psychologist's distinction between "knowing how" and "knowing that" that gets you. There are lots of things things in life that you can pile up a large mound of "thats" but it never amounts to a "how."
I speak mainly for myself in this matter. I won't presume to speak for Josh as to how he is handling the situation. I showed up and we went to The True Love to watch Mr. Show, which was great and perfect for the circumstances.
You can try to be the best sort of friend you can when things go wrong, but you must acknowledge your limitations, and know there's only so much you can do. Waiting is the cheif thing, right now.
Nothing snarky or ponderous will be written here today.
Josh's dad just passed away. Send him the love, friends.
The internet has arrived, just beating out garbage and thus avoiding last place in the great utilities race.
I'm ready to start blogging again.
Much has happened, and I'm all dammed up. I would expect a flood of posts and pictures if I were you.
I realized something about this what I'm doing with this blog while I was removed from it. I missed it for two reasons, both cathartic. I missed writing things that people might read and enjoy, and I missed just spewing onto a page. It wouldn't be the same just writing any more. To me this is a living document, some symbols that bear a structural relation with my life.
I missed having the symbols talk back to me, tell me what my life looks like, layed out in discrete chunks along the way.
But I also write for others, and I wish to know that I am read, appreciated and found amusing. Hence the slightly schizophrenic nature of the blog. I do not pause when I need to hold forth with something that can hold absolutely no interest to anyone but myself, but at the same time my most enduring joy comes from the reaction to certain posts.
Anyway a quick overview of recent events is in order for both of us. I give my presentation, with bullets.
I am looking forward to figuring out this new area, even if certain aspects of have already displeased me, such as the entire city of Richmond and the dumb girl who was astonished that I knew who Dr. Dre was. (Yeah, thanks. Do I put off some sort of home schooled naif vibe?)
I get a certain small joy out of going to the new grocery stores, figuring out where the good comic book shops are, and deciding where's a good place to rent movies. I am thrilled with the newness.
Oh, yeah. From the living room, the sunsets backlight the San Francisco cityscape.
Nice.