Just a quick note to observe the passage of pumpkins into snow. Sadly not yet in real life (the ninja-squirrels on our porch are still munching pumpkins while we wait for the first snowstorm of the year), but up top and all around this page.

Let me know if the font contrast is too low to make reading functional. I think it’s readable, but my view of the Internet is not equal to everyone’s.

That’s about all to report for now – new D&C below, was able to write last night, everything’s coming up more or less roses. Trying to keep my freaking out about my deadline to a minimum – it’s looking like a real photo-finish is coming up with less than a month to go. But I have to take these things seriously or nothing will work.

I have just leveled up in computer knowledge.

Drawbacks include the fact that I wasted most of my night doing this, that the knowledge gained was largely unnecessary, and that my writing session may or may not be shot as a result.

But hey, knowledge.

It all started when I wanted to know the voting breakdowns of the AL Manager of the Year. In the old days, media outlets would provide the full voting summary of any given award in the same article where the award is announced. You know, with the number of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place votes and then the complete vote total at the end. But for some reason, at least in the last year or so, a lot of outlets stopped doing this. Especially Yahoo!, which for whatever reason (fantasy sports tradition, I guess) has become my personal favored provider of sports news.

So I went looking for the AL Manager of the Year voting. You see, I happen to think that Mike Scioscia was a pretty bad pick and I wanted to see who agreed with me. Not that Don Wakamatsu, rookie Mariner skipper, was a shoo-in or anything, but I actually think Ron Gardenhire deserved the award, with maybe Ron Washington and Wak duking it out for second. Since I agreed heartily with the AL Cy Young (even though my boy Felix Hernandez didn’t get the award) and NL Manager of the Year, I figured the voting on AL MOTY had to be closer to reflect my dissent.

One of the first sites I found, however, failed to tell me the full voting record. It turned out to be someone’s personal ballot, probably not even a baseball writer. And then my manual cookie-acceptance filters started going crazy and extra windows started popping open and I tried to shut down Firefox as fast as I could. Firefox closed and instead of shutting down my computer as fast as possible, I stupidly reopened the browser and started looking for those elusive vote totals.

I found them (Wak got 2 first-place votes! Gardenhire was second overall! Generally intelligent votes abounded, save for the inane voting for Joe Girardi), but also soon found that there was a weird-looking virus “detection” pop-up message on my screen too, letting me know that a program called “System Defender” had found all these viruses and wanted me to take action right away.

I’m not a fan of anti-virus software in general or even conceptually, since almost every anti-virus software program I’ve ever found either (A) charges money, (B) is actually a virus, or (C) both. Making differentiations between the programs seems almost impossible and their effectiveness is often dubious even at the highest level. Recently, though, I have had a good bit of success with the popular (and free) Malwarebytes Anti-Malware program which seems to be pretty well regarded and has yet to act like a virus itself.

Judiciously wary of the purported software, the name “System Defender”, and the Windows-look-alike shield that just says “I am phishily trying to trick you” all over it, I avoided clicking on anything in this program and furiously got my Anti-Malware running. It found several problematic files, then did its magic, and I figured I’d be all set.

It took about three full restart runs of this pattern (restart, swear at the fact that the System Defender dubiously reappeared upon restart, run Anti-Malware, restart, repeat) before I started looking for an end-run solution around this tried and true methodology. And then I had to go to intramural basketball (my triumphant return after a week of illness), so I just shut my computer down for a while to let it think about what it had done.

This post should just be about basketball and my love of the game and how good it felt to be healthy enough to play and still fell I was getting air to my lungs, how I need to start playing twice a week with or without IM’s, how my muscle memory has preserved my downtown 3-point shot but the streakiness of said shooting remains, how we lost by a point in a hard-fought struggle, and so on. But System Defender had other plans for my night.

I won’t regale you with every twist and turn in my battle with this nefarious software or my ultimate conquest. Some highlights of things that I learned or remembered along the way, though:

• Internet forums are generally helpful in aiding the deletion of known virus software, but they only go so far. Eventually, you will be on your own and have to outwit the beast.
• You will have to reveal hidden files, INCLUDING system files that Microsoft warns you against revealing as though it were the file that proves Microsoft is a monopoly.
• You should search by date and try to pinpoint files created within the first 2-3 minutes of infection. Narrowing file searches by date will allow you to find and delete most everything.
• Safe Mode is your friend. Restart in Safe Mode by pressing F8, then delete the files that won’t go down because the nefarious program is still running.

Even if this doesn’t help you, this list will be invaluable to me in the future, so chalk it up to notes on how to combat the dangers of the future.

Of course, once I’d finally deleted everything, had a successful restart without the bad program, danced around the room, and gotten over my euphoria, I realized that Task Manager was still down. It had gone down in the wake of System Defender’s original attack, never to return despite repeated pressing of control-alt-delete and right clicking of the taskbar and so on. Even with System Defender defeated, it had left this one vestige of its success.

To which the answer was, of course, System Restore. That only took 3 Internet forums and several bad pieces of harder advice to figure out. System Restore timestamps the Windows settings every 24 hours or so and saves them for a while in case you want to backtrack in time from a serious mistake. This alone would not have wiped out the virus, but it was enough to put a bow on the restoration effort once I’d taken out all the mysteriously buried files it had installed.

For those of you reading this narrative in terror for the status of my novel which has been written in its entirety on this computer, fear not. I’ve been backing it up almost constantly in several different locations, including my secret cache under the mountains of Utah (seriously). By far my larger concern was lost time in working on the novel if the problem persisted or if I would have to get a new computer or do some larger restart of the whole thing. Not that this program ever looked threatening enough to do such things – after all, I could still access all my files, just with an annoying series of occasional pop-ups in the background.

But System Defender may have won this night, if not the war. My beloved word counter in WordPress tells me that I’m closing in on 1200 words for this post, aggravating if only because that would be a half-decent night of writing, but instead I’ve been regaling the torments of my last few hours. Sigh. Maybe there’s something still left in the tank. Time to go find out.

After working on it on and off for a few weeks, I’m proud to announce the full-scale relaunch of the State Quiz, replete with new images and merchandise.

I guess it’s not technically a relaunch if the quiz was never down, but it’s a good opportunity to, as they say, “take it again for the first time.” The images represent the fulfillment of the original vision I had for them over five years ago when the quiz launched, which was to be state-shaped cutouts of the state flag, rather than outlines that featured the flag in awkward partial locations.

An example, with my current state (one of the better images, if I do say so), is here:


You’re New Jersey!
You don’t just live in the suburbs, you define the culture of all Surburbia. You drive everywhere you go, love to eat at diners, and pretend to have a garden. While everyone knows that your house was built on a toxic waste dump, you do your best to hide this information and keep referring to those mythical gardens. Driving on a road without paying for it was a revolutionary experience you once had that you still think about all the time. You owe the Mafia so many favors that you’re thinking of renaming yourself Sicily.

Take the State Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

I’ve also added the full complement of merchandise available on the now-prodigious Cafe Press site, just in time for the holidays. So if there was ever an old design or description you were looking for on a shirt or a mug, now’s your chance.

And while you’re out and about looking at links and holiday cheer, there are some of you who might not know about my Mom’s latest sock doll project, Buttons and Socks. There’s some pretty neat stuff available there too, all hand-sewn by my very own mother. I mean, can you turn down a face like this?:

I thought not.

Now if I can only get the pumpkins down from this page and start writing again, I’ll really be in good shape!

Being sick is like being in a time warp. Hours, days, even weeks are just taken from you while everyone else seems to go on living out their lives. One attempts to foggily submerge in a book or a handful thereof, in some sort of visual media, in something sufficiently distracting to keep the focus off the pain and on something that’s not pain.

And then, eventually, after a set amount of time, one starts cracking back in to real time, catching up with the events and liveliness that everyone else takes for granted, becoming a real person again. Much as though one had been abducted by aliens or had some other reason for missing time.

I’m not back yet, though I’ve looked at computer news and e-mail and things for the first time in days. I spent a good chunk of yesterday (it feels much longer ago) at Princeton’s clinic, wearing a swine flu mask that made me hyperventilate (I don’t have the flu, but I have been mighty short of breath), breathing through a nebulizer (felt oddly like I’d imagine smoking would), getting a chest x-ray (turns out no pneumonia), and an EKG (hey, I have a prior undiscovered irregular heartbeat – neat!), only to be told that I probably just have a bad and strange cold. Even my ears are behaving this time around, which is pretty impressive work for their usual standards.

What I really don’t understand is why people tell you to get plenty of fluids when you have a cold. As far as I can tell after three decades of experience, deliberately dehydrating oneself at a level just above life-threatening is the appropriate reaction to cold symptoms. This tactic probably doesn’t speed recovery any, but it sure minimizes one’s experience of draining, congestion, watery eyes, runny nose, etc. Without the fluids to grease one’s face, a cold is mostly just exhausting and annoying (once the sore throat phase, which this cold pretty much mercifully skipped, is over). And certainly every time I’ve dallied into cold medicines, all I can feel them effectively doing is dehydrating me. So why get a chemical to do what oversleep and underwatering can accomplish?

I’m not all the way back and I’m hoping very much to avoid the quick relapse that so often accompanies debilitating illness. This is my first real attempt at writing anything (other than my last post) in the better part of a week, which is frustrating but not maddeningly so. I’ve pretty much made peace with having just under a month to finish the book and while it’s going to be hectic and a little scary at times, I think I can do it and be ready. Plus sitting at the monitor while exhausted, annoyed, symptom-riddled, and unable to concentrate isn’t going to do me any good and I’m well aware of that. I handle being sick worse than just about anyone I know, so I’m well aware of when it’s time to just cut bait and hope to crawl out in a good mental space on the other side.

So I’m taking it slowly, preparing to prepare myself. And in the meantime utilizing instant Netflix to further my filmic education. Or at least help me get into the next dehydrating session of sleep.

Just a quick line so that you all know I’m still around… the lack of any updates has mostly been the result of an ambiguous sickness I’ve contracted recently that I have tentatively diagnosed as potential walking pneumonia. It may just be a weird cold, but I’ve never heard of a cold without nasal congestion where it all goes into the lungs directly instead.

Anyway, it’s been a good few days, illness aside. The Rutgers team broke (made the elimination rounds – it’s a good thing) for the first time in two years at American Pro-Ams last weekend, prompting perhaps more excitement from me than even the kids at the time. They dropped their quarterfinal, but by all accounts it was close. Our speeches in the round, which was about pregnancy quotas in a post-apocalyptic liberal democracy, were recorded and are being posted on YouTube.

I also played intramural basketball on Monday, having joined a Monday/Wednesday night league that fits pretty well with Tuesday/Thursday debate practice, giving me something to do out of the house most nights. Although playing as hard as I did on Monday without having played in a long time may have had something to do with breaking myself down enough for this illness. It’s not entirely clear.

In any case, everything’s more or less fine except that I’m exhausted and this is playing a little havoc with my ability to write anything interesting, so I’m having to take a longer break than is ideal when up against the December 15th deadline, now perilously close to just a month away. This last month is going to have to be a barn-burner, especially if this sickness lingers in any way.

Overall, though, things are good. Debate and writing and life are all going pretty darn well. If I can just take a full deep breath, I’ll be set.

Today, I had the rather surreal experience of voting in a New Jersey voting booth. It was surreal because I felt like I was at John King’s touchscreen on CNN, pressing things on an oversized board to make them light up. It was fun.

It sure beats the heck out of Alameda County’s old fill-in-the-blank-with-a-pen-till-you-run-out-of-ink system. The green lights were very clear and made it obvious where and how to vote. Em said she worried that her big board display may have been misaligned or just gone off into the ether, but I think it’s just as easy to burn or discard paper as it is to fail to count something.

My vote really counted, today, though, because I was more than 0.05% of a movement! At current tallies, with 99% reporting, only 1,987 others joined me in voting for Gregory Pason for Governor of the great state of New Jersey. It looks like he’ll finish 9th (of 12 candidates).

I considered voting for Chris Daggett, the independent candidate you’ve heard of in the race. Despite poll numbers topping out at around 18-20%, being widely regarded as the aggregate winner of the debates, and the endorsement of the largest NJ-based paper, Daggett’s running a disappointing 5%+. He still beat Pason by a margin of about 66:1.

I liked Daggett as an independent vote, as a third party (rather than, say, a ninth party), as the man who won the endorsement of the Sierra Club and supports a lot of reasonably progressive things. But ultimately his focus on tax reduction and reshifting burdens to regressive methods was just too onerous for me to sign on to. While I liked his impact on the campaign, I wasn’t really convinced that I’d like him as Governor, and thus voting for him would just be piling on to someone who people had heard of the same way most voters pile on to someone they think has a chance of winning. Not the way I prefer to vote.

So I supported Pason, a man whose portion of the overall vote count was almost as small as my vote was a portion of his total support. There are about two-thousand people who would prefer socialism at this time in New Jersey, at least of those voting and bothering to show up for something like this, and those not choosing to compromise their vote or voice in some way or another.

It seems to bear recognizing at this juncture in history. I’m not saying Jersey will change or anything will, but it’s worth at least recording how things stand tonight. But the next time you hear anyone accused of socialism, it might bear noting how many people are actually supporting socialism, real socialism, these days.

And then you can tell them that you know a real socialist. If you don’t mind not speaking to them again.

October 2009 is one for the ages.

It wasn’t the spookiest October, though one could easily argue that the moment I resigned myself to death made this the literally scariest October on record. Certainly one hopes that this much abject fear is not revisited frequently. And the renewing inspiration of surviving what looks like a deadly threat is always worth experiencing… it had been since May 2005 that I’d had a near-death experience!

It wasn’t the most volatile October by any stretch. Most any prior month seemed stormier for one reason or another. Not that this was devoid of ups and downs. The obvious aforementioned down aside, Em struggled with a more difficult time in grad school than anticipated and I flitted between exhaustion, frustration, and excitement in wrestling with my book and getting some perspective on debate coaching.

What it might have been, almost certainly was, was the most productive October ever. And given that October tends to be high-energy and high-productivity for me, that is saying something. I have tended, the summer of Loosely Based aside, to write more in October and to feel more inspired during the month than any other time in the year, although March tends to be competitive. But this October, though there are about 38 hours remaining in the month (that I won’t be writing during), I have written 34,533 words of American Dream On, making it arguably the most prolific month of my life. That’s over 1,100 words every day, on average, counting several days of no writing. It’s also ~138 pages total, putting me on pace to write well over 1,500 pages a year at this pace. Not that I’m saying I can keep that up, but at the same time, it makes my 3 books/year aspiration look pretty manageable.

American Dream On now stands within 1,000 words of Loosely Based, meaning the next writing session will almost certainly make it the longest piece I’ve ever written. The target size is increasing a bit over time, standing now in the vicinity of 125,000 words as I try to tie everything together and leave myself enough time to explain things. It may run longer as I’m thinking I may need 65 chapters instead of 55, which may even put my December 15th deadline in some jeopardy, though this can be mitigated by stepping up my game. After all, I’ve hardly felt like I’m writing at a breakneck pace. This has actually felt pretty comfortable, pretty sustainable. I’ve likened it to cruise control. I think I could get closer to 50,000 words a month if I really pressured myself.

I know I’ve talked about all this a lot, that I’m probably becoming a rather dull stuck record on the numbers games, writing, and the issues entailed therein. But the discovery of this productivity, really unfolding and getting into high gear this month, is almost certainly the second most exciting discovery of my life (behind finding Emily). The idea that I could conceivably write six books in Princeton, creating a serious portfolio for myself after nearly three decades of struggling with endless ideas and only one manuscript, this makes my whole life seem worthwhile. Let alone if any of those six books catch on, securing some sort of life for myself in this state on a permanent basis.

I’m trying (and failing, evidently) not to get too far ahead of myself. One book at a time, one idea. This book, being in the works for eight years, is certainly going more quickly than something that I just came up with might. It may prove to not be very good when I get around to editing – I can already anticipate that it will require more revision than LB did. There’s a lot of slogging to come and I can’t imagine that I’ll really end up averaging 1,000 words a day over 365 days.

But it’s possible. And after going to sleep at night for the better part of three decades asking myself what I’ve accomplished, telling myself that I’m falling short of my potential, it’s a mighty fine change. I somehow think it would be hard to keep up that narrative for myself if I wrote 4-6 books by the time Em’s done with her program. So, yes, one book at a time. But I can start to see the light on the edge of my life and it feels like the culmination of most everything that’s ever mattered.

And I can’t wait to have people start reading.

UPenn this weekend – debate has given me the perfect break and pacing and interspersing my secluded life with real human contact and discussion, just as planned. Very excited about the teams that are going and the potential to do well. Every weekend, like every book or chapter, is a new opportunity to maximize potential, to start fresh. Every round one starts with the possibility of winning the tournament. It’s amazing how easily I’ve been able to manifest my own need for competition into the vicarious joys of coaching. Maybe not that amazing, if one thinks about how competitive coaches can be, but it’s a relief for me that I don’t feel a big void from not competing. And if I start to, there’s always APDA Cup.

If you need me, I’ll be in the rented 2010 red Corolla with a spoiler and a sunroof. I miss the Prius already.

I love how a bad day can be salvaged by a good session of writing.

I love how I can transform from feeling utterly unproductive, a blob waiting around for nightfall and wondering why I’m squandering my time, into the most productive joyous person graced with a ticket to hang out on Earth.

Most of my days aren’t bad now, most of them have been productive in their own right with shorter works or web projects or just taking care of the household chores. But when they are, what a nice surprise it is to be saved by the “work” of these days. How strange would it have been for any prior job to save me in this way? To keep me going when the chips were down in other parts of life, even if for only a day at a time?

This must be what it means when people say they love what they do.

I spent the better part of a decade, let alone what kind of a use of time even more years at school were, spinning wheels at pseudo-productive pursuits while somehow claiming that this prevented me from doing what I really felt driven to do. Always apologizing to myself, others, the world at large, my earlier years, that I wasn’t able to be productive, wasn’t on the road I needed to travel.

How satisfying, then, that this is what’s going well in my life now. That this, my work, is the antidote to any troubles that arise.

I hope this doesn’t sound like bragging. I hope it sounds like inspiration. To you.

My head has hurt most of the day, I’ve been sore, and I’ve been trying to convince myself that the doctoral advice to rest was indeed on the mark. I’ve been reading and watching TV-on-Netflix and generally grumping about, worrying about the “soft batch” spots on my head and wondering how I managed to bruise it without actually hitting it against anything. It’s an external couple of bruises, not a concussion, and the idea that whiplash could bruise the outside of one’s head is just baffling to me.

Nevertheless, I know that getting back on the writing horse is just as important as getting on the driving horse as soon as I can. And last night I wrote, but I felt pretty bad about what I wrote. It was so choppy and challenging that at times I was wondering whether I had sustained more head trauma than I initially thought because it was clearly impacting my writing. I slogged through, but I still think that section is going to need some major reworking.

Tonight, thankfully, despite hours of wasted time and false starts, I finally got a really solid chunk done, pushing toward nine pages, all some of the smoothest and sharpest production of the whole novel so far. The work stands at over 82,000 words, closing in on Loosely Based for the longest thing I’ve ever written. I’m maintaining a pace to get the thing done early and at a clip around 1,000 words a day, every day since I started writing it again.

There was a pumpkin party in there too, thanks to a lot of help from our friends and the ability to reserve the community room at the Butler Apartments when the weather is inclement. Probably a story best told in pictures, which we don’t have that many of since we ran the camera batteries out taking snapshots of the accident. I am tempted to post some of those too, once I’ve put a little more time between myself and the incident (and I should probably get some kind of insurance sign-off that it’s okay). We had a great time at the party, but the timing has been a bit exhausting. Very stressful for Emily, who is up against midterms this week.

This is mostly just a little recap post, the chaff of another great writing session and further crystallization of my gratefulness, both for being alive and for being able to recover on the writing front while so much else still feels stalled out or downright lousy. As unfortunate as it would have been to die, it would have been perhaps worse to suffer severe brain damage. So I am thankful not only to be here, but to be able to continue doing what I feel I have long been called to do.

And now, for the moment, I am called to rest.

My day was spent differently than I originally envisioned it.

It started with an afternoon trip to the pumpkin patch with friends, as expected. This was a prelude to tomorrow’s 4th Annual (1st on the East Coast) Pumpkin Carving Extravaganza. We were preparing to acquire a bunch of pumpkins and then head out to do party shopping and come home to decorate.

Everything was going pretty well up through being on our way to go shopping. We had plenty of pumpkins and had really enjoyed our time at the pumpkin patch/farm/market place where we’d gone. We were in high spirits and already anticipating the day to come.

I stopped at the first red light after the patch, and was looking to my left to see when I might have an opening to make a right turn. I thought there might be enough of an opening, then hesitated and decided to wait for the next cars to pass. A black pickup truck was coming toward me and then threw on its turn signal to go right. I thought this would possibly make an opening, so I looked behind the pickup to make sure the trailing car was slowing down enough to give me time. I noted with alarm that they were actually accelerating toward the truck. I expected them to start to veer left around the truck at their increasing speed, but instead they drifted right, picking up speed while climbing the grassy shoulder. Then they suddenly took out the corner street sign and I turned away to brace for impact.

It came.

They smashed into the back part of the right side of the pickup, which had almost fully completed its turn, sending the pickup straight into the front corner of our car. I didn’t see what happened to the out-of-control car next, but it somehow ended up crossing the opposite lane of traffic, taking out a mailbox, and winding up crashed into a tree.

I felt for any major damage to myself and noted none, then turned to Emily and asked “Are you alive?” She was, and largely unhurt, and then I looked up to the driver of the pickup. He opened his eyes and looked at me dazedly. Emily and I discussed what had just transpired and I explained it to her since she had seen none of it coming. We left the vehicle, talked to the pickup driver, who proved to be mostly all right, then tried to assess what had happened. A couple of bystanders went over to see if the person in the out-of-control car was okay.

She attested to blacking out and having no memory from seeing a green light in front of her to seeing the tree in front of her on the other side of the road. Somehow she too was generally unharmed. All three vehicles were in really bad shape and everyone had some neck pain and such, but it was a generally amazing survival of the worst situation I’ve ever faced in a motor vehicle.

The thing that’ll stay with me most, assuming that the negative x-rays were accurate and my soreness eventually fades, is that split-second between seeing the street sign go down and the cessation of the impact. In that moment, which was both slow and fast just like you’ve heard (or felt) such moments to be, I had to prepare to die. That feeling of resigning, of yielding the fate of one’s life, is not one I’ll forget soon, or perhaps ever. I was completely out of options – there were cars behind, on my left, and in front. There was no where to go that would not increase the danger of the situation. There was no time to react. All I could do was cede control to the forces already in motion and hope for the best.

There’s no telling the fate of the car, which was towed and will be dealt with by insurance companies and the dealership. I was surprised at how late I got concerned with and upset about the fate of the car – it had been several minutes before I thought about it being unfortunate that our car may be totaled. I was probably more concerned with it catching fire or blowing up and creating a new round of jeopardy well before I thought to be upset that the car was wrecked. It was enough to have spent a second preparing to leave the planet and reopening my eyes to find I was still here.

I have a feeling this pumpkin-carving party is going to be even sweeter than normal.

So, there’s this thing called Wordle that I just discovered on Facebook, which allows you to analyze any piece of writing or webpage for commonly occurring words. Then it spits out something like this:

Pretty neat stuff. My big complaint is that it doesn’t draw on the whole history of the blog, but only the very recent history, which is why this thing reads mostly like a schizophrenic recap of my last substantive post.

I am wholly torn between my temptation to plug in the entirety of American Dream On and the concern that it would somehow find a way to capture it or just fail to function under the weight of 76,000+ words.

Maybe trying Loosely Based would be a good compromise…

I woke up early today (really yesterday, but you know my schedule) because a friend of mine was coming over. Early these days is around ten or so in the morning.

My friend (Ariel) and I met up with Em for lunch, who had already completed a couple classes in the morning. We relived old times we never had at the Frist cafeteria, imaging the student center of Princeton to be the basement of Usdan. With the new student center, even the basement of Usdan isn’t the basement of Usdan anymore.

We then proceeded to the Chancellor Green Library, undoubtedly the coolest interior space on the Princeton campus we’ve yet found. Most people, upon seeing it, immediately dub it the “Harry Potter Room,” though that distinction arguably might be more apt for the Grad College cafeteria, which generally looks primed for an address by Dumbledore himself. In any event, Chancellor Green is an octagonal room with two floors topped by an ornately woodworked dome, adorned with stained glass and bookshelves galore on each level and each edge. Below are comfortable reading chairs and above study desks. The expectation is silence throughout, if not to read than merely to appreciate the hallowed halls surrounding.

I rejoined my Russian friends in Toltsoy’s world, lamenting how little I’ve been able to read amidst the writing lifestyle I’ve developed. Some have said that one should never be writing at a higher volume than one is reading, but I feel that writing takes its toll on the desire to read. Besides, most of my reading is usually done either during a commute or just before sleep. I have no commute and I’m going to sleep after writing sessions that leave me utterly drained as dawn is threatening to break. Yeah, not exactly conducive to reading.

So I appreciated the opportunity to bury myself in a book for the afternoon, spending hours with 75 pages of the world’s most reputedly epic tome. Having discussed my general progression of becoming a slower reader for much of high school and college with Ariel, I was grateful to have sped up enough in subsequent years that I could read at such a pace. There was a time that I was convinced I would someday have to take whole days to read just a single page at the rate I’d been going.

Then home, phone calls, dinner, a brief time with Em as she worried over the day to come and we finally caught up to the current episode of “The Office”, having traversed the show’s entire history with frightening alacrity via Netflix and Hulu. Not everything I’ve done out here in Jersey can be strictly described as productive.

And then writing, the whole of chapter 35, a chapter I’m profoundly fond of suddenly, unanticipated in its depth and implications, all the more satisfying for how much it surprised me. There are chapters I know are going to be powerful, momentous, vital. Some have already passed. This one I wasn’t expecting and I deeply appreciate the characters therein for revealing themselves to me in this way. Really.

And here I am, just this side of five in the morning, worn out and really content. Not content as a proxy for slowly settling into the sediment that one’s life has become, but content in its truest, highest form. Not happy or elated, for I lack the energy for either. Just satisfied, at peace with my place in the world. This life is everything I hoped it would be, for all its solitude and strange freedom. God help me find ways to never let go, now that I’m here.

The final part of an 8-part series regressing through the Stanford 2002 APDA tournament.

Last week: Round 2 (re: chemical weapons)

Today’s round takes us back to the beginning of the tournament, the first filmed round of my career since the quarterfinals at Columbia, wherein Emily and I dismantled a case about China and Taiwan and then Mike Specian, APDA filmer extraordinaire, lost the tape. Before that, it might date back to Dartmouth 2000 outrounds or something, which I have somewhere and would love to get converted as well.

Regardless, this was a pretty fun case for first round. Involving one of my favorite movies of all-time, “Dr. Strangelove”, this case encouraged the speaker to conduct a full nuclear strike on the Soviet Union rather than trying to warn or negotiate with the Soviets. Suffice it to say that I had a little bit to say in response. Generally in debate, nuclear war is the worst-case scenario that everyone’s trying to avoid. When the Gov makes it their case statement, you know you’re going to have a good day…

Stanford 2002 APDA Round 1 from Storey Clayton on Vimeo.

As bad as I felt last night at this time is as good as I feel tonight. What a difference, as they say, a day makes.

I have just rattled off over 3,000 words (~12 pages) tonight, in a remarkably fast and focused session that has yielded what I am convinced is some of the best work of the whole novel so far. This brings American Dream On over the 70,000 word threshold (71,408 words/~285 pages) with just under two months to go and helps offset the fact that there will be no writing tomorrow night. It’s kind of too bad, because I’m in one of those grooves where baseball players find the ball looks as big as a grapefruit. Suddenly, after a week of angst, the dam has burst and things are flowing once more. (Though it probably doesn’t hurt that I’m on to a different chapter entirely, one that did not carry with it some consternating problems from the get-go.)

And Vassar pulled back on their threat to only break to semis, once again going with quarters, joining the ranks of virtually all modern tournaments. And it looks like I will be participating in the APDA Cup, thus getting a chance to compete in rounds that are adjudicated and are not demo rounds for the first time since 2006. (Yeah, I guess I thanked the BU Finals panel for judging my “last round ever”. Oops. We all know I’d debate professionally for a lifetime if I could.) And while I knew that this time yesterday too, it seems a lot more exciting today for some reason. Probably because the whole world does. And I’m almost short of breath and insanely full of energy for quarter till five in the morning, when I should be lapsing and a little tired. And given that the alarm’s set for 9:00 tomorrow, the earliest I’ve been up in weeks, to get ready to go to Vassar, this is all looking a little problematic.

But I don’t care that much, mostly because I’m in the throes of a manic phase of the sine-curve lifestyle. And the mania may be seen as problematic for some people, but I don’t know who those people could be. Being on the upswing of a roller-coaster, sailing upward on a high-energy high-productivity euphoria, this is about as good as it gets in this lifetime. I mean, yeah, the super-contemplative revelations are perhaps a little better, but this is a darn fine second place. I feel like running out into the middle of the early morning rain, whooping with joy at the fact that I get to be alive to see this kind of mood. I wish everyone could be here to feel this. I feel I’ve known people who never get this excited their whole lives.

I don’t know how I’m possibly going to sleep. It may end up an all-nighter and I’ll crash hard after round three at the tournament. But I should try all the same. Try to walk away from the euphoria to get a little shut-eye that’ll ultimately serve me well tomorrow. In the meantime, I leave you with this:

Wooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

Chapter 32 may be long remembered as the one that got away. After four nights and just shy of 5,000 words, I think I can finally put it behind me (for now), but it’s taken its toll.

A lot of how I feel about all this is the fault of the ease with which I’ve been able to settle into the writing life again. I’ve been remarking to everyone how amazingly things have gone, how smooth its all felt, how quick the transition was from moving in to writing full-time. Everything’s been a piece of cake, so the slightest change in the wind looks like a big problem. And compared to serious writer’s block or something truly problematic, it’s not at all. It’s just a vaguely exasperating series of things to write.

It’s hard to discuss exactly what’s frustrating about this chapter without divulging far too much of a plot I’ve kept close to the vest for over half a decade. But a lot of it’s about pacing and timing and trying to cram a whole lot of events into a small space when I haven’t necessarily been on a pace to do so. To make it seem smooth and effortless and intended. To realize that one has written oneself into a bit of a corner and then figure out how to delicately extricate without rewriting half the book.

Ultimately, it’s good for me. Every word written makes you stronger, even if most of those words will probably be rewritten. The chapter felt less elegant, less muse-inspired, pretty much throughout. There were some good turns of phrase and some moments, sure, but it’s just not my best work. On a first draft, though, holding the whole piece to the standard of best work means blowing deadlines. And today is significant on that front: exactly 2 months to the day till the deadline. December 15th or bust, come what may.

The context for the whole chapter is probably a big part of it – it just hasn’t been the best week. Coaching hit some of the first snags, with a low-energy meeting punctuated on either end by low attendance and frayed nerves leading to rising tensions. It all came out okay (I think – we’ll see for sure at tomorrow’s meeting), but my hopes of a potential break this weekend were mitigated somewhat by the surprise announcement that this weekend’s tourney is breaking to semis, not quarters. I didn’t know any tournaments on APDA had broken to less than quarters in some time, so this was quite a shock and one I don’t relish discussing with the team tomorrow. Not that it precludes breaking; it just makes it twice as difficult.

And Em’s sick, given a cold in exchange for her (conventional, not swine) flu shot. Despite the protestations of the injectors, it’s pretty common knowledge that the flu shot gives people cold symptoms and these have hit Em particularly hard this go-round. I’ve been dancing on the edge of catching it from her, but hoping to escape healthy by the time we (the Rutgers team and I) head up to Vassar on Friday. The whole thing has brought our collective home morale down even further though, and it was already on the wane.

It’s just been one of those weeks, more headaches than necessary, writing like pulling teeth, anticipation of everything weighing me down a little. I need to get out and do more, but it’s getting colder and making retreat the more likely response. It’s weeks like this that I’m so grateful to not be working, since at least I can find solace in bulldozing the writing problems in front of me and working through things rather than the dissatisfaction of frustration reminding me how far I am from my life goals. And I’m not much closer, and feeling it, but at least I’m starting on the path. Which is good enough for now.

I just need to set some limits on how I distract myself, on how I keep my focus and stay sharp. Up till this week, it’s been easy, so it can be easy again. But the last couple days, nothing’s felt easy. It’s all been pulling teeth and the desire to pull hair. And now I’m repeating myself and probably frustrating you too.

Join the freaking club. Augh.

Part 7 in an 8-part series regressing through the Stanford 2002 APDA tournament.

Last week: Round 3 (re: Enron executives and their wallets)

Today’s round features one of my favorite opp-choice cases from my senior-year case-writing binge. The case was pretty successful, though it did lose handily once. It engaged in a question I generally didn’t believe in, that being the nature of war crimes. While I personally feel that the concept of “war crimes” is redundant, this case posed an interesting scenario as to whether a breakaway republic should use chemical weapons against an oppressive power if the power they’re fighting made those weapons.

This round featured the surprising choice that the republic should in fact use the weapons, which tended not to be the side opposition chose. Generally people sided with the Geneva conventions and conventional war over taking the risky but potentially effective move to break with international law and go after the power. But the round always made for fun international debate that didn’t rely on having just read the Economist.

This round also features one of my more absurd themed rebuttals, something that was generally my signature, but rarely had such tenuous links as this one.

Stanford 2002 APDA Round 2 from Storey Clayton on Vimeo.

This post is an antidote, a message in a bottle, a documentation of a sensation and a perception about the world that is here and irrevocable. It’s something that I may lose, but no one can take away from me. And this is me, planting my flag, staking my ground, putting forth my chronicle of feeling this way and knowing these things at this time.

It all makes sense. All of it. What happens, what doesn’t, when, why, how. We are all so blessed and so privileged to be able to participate, to take part in this experiment with free will and this existence that is at once driven by our own whims and yet interminably destined to make itself work. It is punctuated by tremendous pain, yes, and tremendous anxiety, but it is all so very worth it. And I can see the pain and see the past and I know that every bit of it is worth it for everything.

To have a planet so well designed as to bless us not only with our own will, but others’ perspectives, with the discourse and dialogue that distill into reasoned perspective and more holistic understanding – this is all amazing. That we can spend so much time lamenting our various fates is at once a testament to our urges to push forward and improve what we have been given and yet also an unfortunate lack of full appreciation. I think the sacrifice of appreciation is often worth the spurs of exhortation to future greatness, but I wonder sometimes if we (I) temper ourselves (myself) sufficiently with sheer appreciation.

Tonight, I have it. I feel it. I have traveled and talked and walked and watched and I am aware of it all and it is overwhelming and beautiful and perfect and in need of appreciation.

This is not the first time I have felt this way, nor, God willing, will it be the last. But it seems, at a point where so much of my life is coming together in ways that I have made for myself, among the most important. It feels like this time around, the profundity has a greater likelihood to infiltrate the rest of daily life, for daily life itself is more deliberate and attuned to the realities that matter.

Ultimately, all I can really say is that I’m happy. Without reservation or qualification, I bask in the offerings of life. And that, my friends, is not something I say or feel very often.

Russ and I worked all night to bring you this stunning awards show:

Enjoy. Tell your friends. Book your tickets on a dirigible!

“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
-Inigo Montoya, “The Princess Bride” (movie)

At this rate, Inigo Montoya is the leading candidate to win the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize. Sure, he’s fictional and is known primarily for making death threats. But the way things are going, that looks like an improvement.

As a nearly lifelong pacifist, I know a thing or two about peace. I know how rare my set of beliefs about the world and human interaction are. I know the joys of explaining to people why one wouldn’t kill the person whose finger was on the button to destroy the world or why killing in self-defense is still just murder you thought of after the guy who you’re killing. I know what an uphill battle the very concept of peace has in this world and how counter-intuitive it is to most people.

This is why it has always been great comfort and solace to me that a world so beleaguered and prone to violence has created (and recently) an award designed to honor my belief structure and those espousing it. Has recognized, with the prestige of the world stage, that peace is and should be a universal human goal and that making strides in achieving it is no more a pipe dream than progressing in medicine or scientific pursuits.

The history of the Nobel Peace Prize is certainly not perfect. They failed to recognize the world’s greatest pacifist of all time, only posthumously offering him acknowledgment once he’d been killed. They have a long history of giving pretty notorious killers the prize for either reforming (see most of the Israelis and Palestinians who have won it) or doing one thing out of the ordinary that’s peaceful (see Teddy Roosevelt and Henry Kissinger). While this isn’t my favorite practice in the world, there has always been a concrete step in the direction of peace, actual peace, that has justified the awarding of the prize.

Then in 2006, a funny thing happened. The Nobel Peace Prize committee completely abdicated their mandate and decided that the spread of capitalism was somehow a peaceful aim, justifying the awarding of the Prize to someone whose only life achievement was setting up a microfinance bank. The link between this and peace is sort of like a bad loose-link resolution extrapolation in a parliamentary debate round: “Well, when I think of peace, I think of pieces of things, like pieces of eight, which is money, which leads me to microfinance.” Okay, that’s a bit of a straw-man, admittedly – the real link is that if we all are democratic capitalists, then some people believe in democratic peace theory and then, someday in the vast unforeseeable future and ignoring the wealth disparity and rampant inequalities of capitalist systems, we might have peace.

It’s pretty weak and it doesn’t make sense. The Peace Prize is supposed to be about direct peace work, work that ends a conflict or prevents a war or replaces a violent movement with a nonviolent one. Muhammad Yunus may, arguably, be a good guy, but he has nothing to do with these goals. Even if you believe in microfinance, believe that it really builds up the poor in a way that doesn’t ultimately destroy their rights, it has nothing to do with questions of violence and non-, unless you believe that everyone receiving a loan would have committed armed robbery and assault instead of running their business. Given the gender statistics on the loan recipients, if nothing else, this is just facially inaccurate.

But 2006’s gaffe was nothing compared to the subsequent year, where the Peace Prize decided to sub in “Environmentalism” for “Peace”. While the co-opting of the peace movement by environmentalists is nothing new, to have it recognized and codified on an institutional level was profoundly disheartening. The fact is that while environmentalism is a good cause (although I have long-stated qualms with the whole global warming obsession, but that’s for another time), it is completely tangential to issues of war and peace. Human violence and natural disasters are on opposite ends of the spectrum – one can argue that humans have the will and capacity to prevent the latter in this age, but the former is clearly preventable and always has been. The sheer preventability and self-inflicted nature of the harm is one of the factors that has made pacifism and the peace movement so powerful. All we are trying to do is prevent man’s inhumanity to man.

But Al Gore’s selection was also appalling because he hasn’t accomplished anything. It’s not like his power-point and movie crusade has led to the adoption of new strict standards on greenhouse gas emissions and power plant methodology shifts. And his personal hypocrisy in having an enormous carbon footprint is a little akin to a pacifist slaughtering people who shout him down while he gives speeches because they are impeding his message. Pacifism is means-based, so the method matters as much as the message. Al Gore may get a prize for effort in a compromising role, but certainly not for achievement in a consistent way.

But all that gets away from the larger point: none of his work is about peace. It’s just not. Even if you believe global warming is the greatest threat to humanity that exists, it’s not a violent threat. It may, very slowly, change the way that some people live their lives by forcing them to move from the coasts or changing what they farm or what animals they surround themselves with. It may even increased the number of natural calamities, though predictions of doom after 2005 have been met with a series of record-settingly light hurricane seasons. But it doesn’t matter: peace is about the violence that people do to each other, not that acts of God inflict on people.

It’s like giving a firefighter an award for being a good police officer. You can say their interests are sort of vaguely aligned, you can say that there’s a common interest in some ways, you can draw tangential links between the two offices. But in the end, it’s a total flub. Firefighting is not police work. It’s just a tautologically false move.

Last year was fine, a refocusing of the prize on the actual work Alfred Nobel charged his committee with enacting. But this year, oh this year. Disaster has struck again, possibly even worse than in ‘06 and ‘07.

Barack Obama has talked an interesting game about peace. On the one hand, he has created a compelling smokescreen of arguments about hope and change and a new day and we being the people we have been waiting for, one that has swept most of my generation away with starry-eyed idealism and the promise of tomorrow. At the same time, his presidential rhetoric has actually closely mirrored George W. Bush on practical matters of the prosecution of wars. This might be a good time to remind everyone that Barack Obama is currently prosecuting two full-scale wars (three if you count the amorphous drone-bombing “War on Terror”) and, despite vague promises, has done nothing to limit the scope or scale of any of them.

I’m going to repeat that. Barack Obama is currently prosecuting more wars than any other standing government official in any nation and has done nothing tangible to bring any of them to a close.

The idea that he was even nominated is insulting to the very concept of peace. It’s like giving it to Kissinger or Peres or Arafat before they turned their policies from killing to conflict resolution. But, you may say, his rhetoric has changed the tone of discourse about peace.

Really? The problem is that, in running against John McCain and then running the country, his rhetoric has actually been remarkably hawkish. He’s made it clear that one of the main goals of the government is to hunt down and kill people who disagree with us in other countries. He’s advocated crossing any border and violating any agreement to do so. He’s said that while the Iraq War may eventually end, the War in Afghanistan is just getting started, taking concrete steps to expand that conflict and widen the violence. He’s continued to advocate a policy of war without end, war without limit, war without definition in the most powerful country on the planet.

Yes, he’s not George W. Bush. He probably wouldn’t have started the Iraq War, even though he’s not in any hurry to end it. Yes, he’s a symbol of greater cooperation and openness. I understand that much of the world just feels better about the planet and this country because the US was capable of electing an African American. But one does not give awards to symbols, especially when what they symbolize is belied by their actual record of action. Not only is it ill fitting of the mandate of the Peace Prize, but it sets a terrible precedent. The message is that warlike leaders can win awards if only they talk a good game, go make a couple speeches that seem to extend an olive branch while directing bombings and troop movements in the back room. This is precisely the kind of message the Peace Prize was created to counteract, to thwart, to pre-empt.

What’s so personally disheartening about watching the crumbling integrity of this award is that I have to question whether I even want to win it anymore. Winning the Nobel Peace Prize has been the highest aspiration of my last two decades and now the company I would be keeping is questionable to the point of absurdity. This is not Time Man of the Year or some similarly meaningless appellation that’s a popularity contest intended to sell magazines or stir controversy. This is a (perhaps until recently) respected, dignified award with lasting consequences. And now it seems to have abdicated its purpose, content to honor people for not being other people or for accomplishments in economics or the environment.

I know there aren’t a lot of true peace advocates in today’s world, that most people are content to urge the killing of all sorts of people. But they are out there. And if you can’t find them, heck, not awarding the prize sends a stronger message than just picking some approximation out of a hat. The Peace Prize has the power to call great attention to a particular injustice, conflict, or method.

Instead, this Prize only calls attention to how far the committee has strayed while endorsing policies belligerent enough to make most world leaders blush. My only hope is that in his press conference in seven minutes, Obama recognizes all these facts and declines the award.

The streak didn’t end tonight after all (as I just just alluded – in fact, I had one of my most productive writing sessions of the whole week. And the word count was higher than it would have been had I been watching the count the whole time in some silly tracker.

Moreover, I just noticed that the URL assigner is all messed up in this format, somehow skipping numbers. All my posts are numbered and there have been a couple discards, but generally the number of the URL of the post aligns with a straight count of the number of total posts I’ve written. But since I installed the beloved “upgrade”, posts 656 and now 659 have followed 653. I guess it counts by 3’s. Hooray.

You know what other number has 6’s and 3’s in it? 63,315. I like that number best of all. At least for tonight.