I’m not exactly the world’s most social person. This is a bit of an understatement.

Much has been made lately at my place of work of the classic old Myers-Briggs personality tests and their typologies. I have to smile wryly when people ask if I know anything about personality tests. But in those, as can be imagined, my needle is sort of buried in the “I” (Introvert) as opposed to the “E” (Extrovert). Still struggling with why Thinking and Feeling are considered distinct, but boy am I buried in the I.

There’s another letter, though, that probably plays just as much into this particular anecdote, which is “J”. Judging. As opposed to “P”, Perceiving. This burial of the needle toward one side is far less extreme than the old I/E dichotomy, but there’s a whole lot of J goin’ on. And the IJ combination creates not only a lack of prioritization toward the social, but a good deal of dismissal of those one isn’t interested in.

Which leads me to ducking behind pillars. I did it today, and it almost shocked me when I realized that my quick-walk high-tailing it out of the Powell Street melee was, in fact, the proverbial ducking behind a pillar after all. And boy did I need to duck, since I was wearing a blatant Brandeis sweatshirt, making any possible confusion regarding identity impossibly moot. It was not till I boarded the train that I realized the person in question was ducking behind pillars in my presence as far back as when we shared the same school. Mutually assured ducking.

For the unfamiliar, the ducking behind pillar question is a not-too-distant metaphor for indicating people one would rather avoid talking to than ever interact with again in one’s life. I don’t think this is nearly the harsh judgment to levy on past participants in one’s life that most people seem to. The etymology is relatively obvious: who would you, if seeing someone across a room that happened to have a conveniently placed pillar between you, duck behind said pillar to avoid speaking with? For whatever reason.

This exercise emerged from a conversation between Fish and I about this question regarding our high school class. I once estimated, outlandishly according to Fish, that I would duck behind a pillar to avoid roughly 75% of our class of 1998 peers. A later name-by-name analysis we conducted revealed 75% to be a conservative estimate - the actual number was closer to 85%. (Editor’s note: I am still considering attending my 10-year high school reunion this September.)

But before any drastic conclusions are reached about what this implies and how much I must have hated high school and my classmates, I should note my particular reasons for ducking behind pillars. Often it’s simply to avoid the type of conversation that emerges from chance bumpings-into. The person may be completely neutral, or even slightly positive, in general and/or in one’s memory. But the nature of making obligatory small talk, separated by years or even decades from any real contact with said person, is often aggravating enough to turn a good person into a bad interaction. One that leaves one with slightly tainted memories of said individual, souring what otherwise wouldn’t have been given much thought.

It’s often much the same interaction as one has on IM conversations, which is why I haven’t logged into IM (with a couple of weird purpose-specific exceptions) since college. “Hi.” “Hey.” “How’s it going?” “Not bad and you.” “Fine fine.” “Good.” “So… whatchya up to?” “Not much, y’know. Same old same old. You?” “Yup, about the same.” Repeat, repeat, repeat.

And you’d think a distance of years would change this pattern. But it really doesn’t. Often, it exacerbates it. How to even begin to explain the last 8 years of one’s life? One can’t, and doesn’t attempt. Or how to even begin to explain how dull and predictable the last 8 years have been? One can, and doesn’t want to. It’s all the same fucking day, man. (Editor’s note: Janice Joplin)

And yet I’m Facebook-friends with some of these people. Nothing to say, nothing to catch up on, no good times to relive. Just wampeters and granfalloons. (Editor’s note: Kurt Vonnegut) Grand wastes of everyone’s time.

It must be stressed here that I am just as much a waste of their time as they are of mine. This is not some egotistical elevation of my time, energy, or efforts over others’. They should duck behind pillars if they see me first too. I prioritize my time only in as much as I personally make judgments about other people that they, in turn, should be making (Editor’s note: my opinion) about the people they have nothing to say to. If everyone did this (Editor’s note: Immanuel Kant), we’d all be free of those awkward, neck-scratching conversations and be all the more reassured that those speaking to us were really truly interested in what we had to say. (Editor’s note: …or, I suppose, really insecure. Or attention-starved. But mostly interested.)

And about that reunion. Our reunion hosts have made the somewhat dubious decision to have RSVP’s made public in real-time on a website. Presumably this is to create some sort of critical mass and move momentum toward more and more people participating because they just have to see so-and-so and they’ll definitely be there! Of course, I really think the impact is much more to the contrary. Something about having to actually face those names in monochrome on a computer screen. Curiosity can’t get the best of awkwardness in an era where one can just Google anyone with a distinctive name to see what they’re up to. And considering that at least two people who I’d push a pillar on top of rather than have to speak to (Editor’s note: not really) have RSVP’ed in the Yes column, it’s looking like my decision is more and more made up.

Strangers reading this blog are just never going to e-mail me after this post, huh?

Yesterday, I worked a half-hour later than normal because suddenly things happened right at the end of the day that it seemed best to attend to then and there. Then I went to eat at Chipotle after work, mostly because I was hungry, but also because of new and slightly silly influences laden in the whole nature of yesterday.

So these factors combined to put me on the steps up from the platform of Downtown Berkeley BART about 45 minutes later than normal - at 6:30 instead of 5:45.

Racing up the steps, I heard a voice from one of them, a cautious and inquisitive “Storey…?” And one pretty much can’t mistake that for someone calling to somebody else. I turned around to see an older, taller impersonation of one of my old Seneca kids. Smiling at me and saying hello.

Now I have long envisioned meeting Seneca kids later in life - all grown up or at least much older. And most of the time, the picture involves me losing a number of teeth or worse. Most of these visions are in the context of nightmares - not a week ago I was back on the halls of a Seneca house, somehow training someone else and dealing with one of those bedtime blowout disasters that made us all love the place so dearly. But with all the same kids from ‘05, but now three years older and still living in a house designed for those younger than they were at the time. Good times.

But here was not only a kid who had been there back in ‘05, but one who had specifically antagonized me more than other staff. Actually a favorite of many of the staff, truth be told, but one who always just had it in for me. Granted, he was one of the least violent and troublesome youth and had actually even been placed before I left. But there was none of the torment or targeting, none of the sour glares I recalled from nearly two years in the house with him. Instead, he smiled and asked me where I worked now. I happened to be dressed up, so it was all too clear I wasn’t still at Seneca. And I guess he was still in the loop over there somehow anyway.

We talked for 2 or 3 minutes; nothing major, nothing earth-shattering. It was a little awkward, but a good comfortable kind of awkward that denotes that you both understand the other is authentically happy to see you, that the awkwardness is space and time and nothing innate. We shook hands at the end, and I told him he’d done well. He has. He’s graduating from 8th grade (he proudly noted that “I stayed in school!”), he’s stayed out of the system, he seemed like a “normal” kid, just sitting with friends on the steps of a BART station, waiting on a train.

While still working at Seneca, there seemed to be a network of information about people. One worked so intensely and closely with kids, so personally, and then they were often whisked away to places unseen, never to return for so much as a visit. Yet still, managers would talk to other centers and people would get grapevine updates. But upon leaving Seneca, one’s connection to information dried up. I mean, I’m sure if I’d stayed close with a bunch of people still working there, it might’ve been different, but in all likelihood, they still wouldn’t have been folks in the know. There’s no way of knowing the rest of the story. How did that person grow up? Did that turn out okay? Did they stay or go?

So it’s nice to get a postscript here and there. To come face to face with the past and have it smile back. To think that maybe, just maybe, something turned out okay in this world.

By the time his train roared into the station, I was gone.

Food and I have never been friends.

Food is like that friend one has when one doesn’t have a car, who one doesn’t really like or enjoy spending time with, but they have a car! So you hang out with them and get to go places and do things, but putting up with that person is a real pain in the rear and even makes you question, at times, if going places is all that important after all.

(I never had that friend in real life, by the way. The only people I remember regularly relying on for such were my parents, Fish, and Schneider, and I really like all these people a lot.)

The point is that food and I have a long and often tortuous history. Most of my childhood arguments with my parents were about food (at least those that weren’t about haircuts). I didn’t like it - really, any of it - and while I didn’t enjoy feeling hungry, I often preferred the sensation to what was being passed off as “food” at any given meal. A whole lexicon of dealbreakers on food developed, usually summarized into “green things” by my parents, which referred to most any type of parsleyish seasoning in otherwise almost tolerable edibles. I actually liked a lot of the big “green things” that people refer to with that phrase, such as broccoli, celery, or green beans, but if it was microscopic and green, there was no chance. I really could taste these things (or more often feel them - texture was a big deal) and they really did ruin food. My parents were skeptical that anyone could really detect such things and I think often assumed it was psychological. On these grounds, they tried to leverage my love of the color green into an affinity for “green things”. No dice.

And as one can imagine, I spent my childhood being ridiculously thin. There were many jokes about my profile being invisible and I was always able to squeeze through inhumanly tight spaces (though I did get stuck in a window in the Science Center for a really bad 45 minutes in high school). And always I was told to stretch my stomach, to eat until I could feel the stretching.

But as I have aged, as my father predicted, my hatred for many foods has softened. In large part, it’s just been a process of attrition - I was so often told to try things and so often told to eat as much as possible to “stretch my stomach” that I eventually found more and more foods palatable. I am still the pickiest eater any of my friends know, but the range of things I’ll eat positively dwarfs what I’d consume fifteen years ago and I was only recently able to get away from the idea that I have to eat till I am in physical pain to “stretch” my stomach. After all, I’ve suddenly been putting on weight. And while I’m still on the low end of normal in the much-vaunted BMI (body mass index), I’ve been increasingly troubled by the facts that my gut sticks out and that my thighs now touch each other.

This is a tricky issue to talk about, because people are extremely sensitive about weight and many of them have been pretty much straight-up angry with me when I bring up that I’m starting to worry about mine. I don’t really know what to say about this, except to really try to expound on exactly how much of a non-issue this has not only been for me in the past, but I always assumed it would be in the future. Yes, it was probably silly to assume that I would spend the entire rest of my life effortlessly rail-thin and always able to eat as much as possible of whatever junk I wanted. But at the same time, the same people who told me that this was silly also told me it would be impossible to do this at any time. And yet that was a full quarter-century of my experience - no matter what I ate or how “bad” it was, I never put on weight and never had health problems associated with what I ate. And while we can learn from what others tell us if it resonates with our experience, it’s very hard to do so when others’ advice not only contradicts but actually rules out one’s actual experience.

But the impossible dream expired after about twenty-five years, and suddenly I began to slowly realize that what I was eating actually impacted my body. This had literally never happened before… there had been no relationship between intake and output. I would eat massively or fast and stay exactly stagnant in weight, appearance, and feeling. But suddenly about a year or two ago, I was fluctuating like everybody else.

It’s taken about 18-24 months for me to make some sort of peace with this and realize that I should be proactive in correcting this or face suddenly having to take warnings about obesity seriously. I hasten to add that it’s not that I’m obese now (or even close) or in jeopardy of becoming obese tomorrow (or even the next day). It’s that I have realized, after two years of being mortal in the arena of food, that I will no longer blithely be able to consider myself immune to the concept of obesity for the rest of my life unless I change my habits now.

This is a bit of a struggle, because I really don’t like much food and I really can’t stand planning around the concept of food. Scheduled meal times don’t work for me - I’m usually either full or starving and there’s very little turn-around time between these two states. So I eat when I’m starving and don’t when I’m full. I tend to eat one or two foods over and over and over again until I get sick of it and then move on to the next food. And I basically only eat out, a product of both the starving/full quick-change dichotomy (little time and energy for the protracted food preparation process) and in order to incentivize myself in actually trying to eat instead of just riding out the hunger and winding up with a migraine or something. If eating has a fun component beyond the drudgery of having to consume food, I’m more likely to do it.

I guess you’re wondering at this point how I’m gaining weight when my gut instincts are so adversarial to food. I’ve been wondering too, somewhat incredulously, and this has really kept me from truly facing the issues I’m dealing with regarding food until the last few weeks.

I guess it’s a little like the habits one picks up when one’s single. At first, when one hasn’t ever dealt with a real romantic situation, let alone love, one doesn’t really have any bad habits around the gender of one’s attraction. They’re just people and one may be interested, but has a certain amount of innocence in such interactions; one is ready to be surprised by love.

But once one has had a serious relationship fail, one picks up all kinds of bad habits that become increasingly hard to unlearn. One starts seeing every member of the attractive gender as being a possible interest and gets increasingly focused on this as a daily expenditure of time. It’s almost impossible, no matter how much one may want to, to ever return to that first-love innocence of one’s youth and shed all of the trolling outlook on life one had to learn when one was first bitterly single.

Similarly, I’ve spent so much of my time learning bad habits about food. Not just the stomach stretching thing, but also to associate eating as something to increase and encourage in myself, and sometimes even to seek out more weighty foods in order to not be quite so thin. And now that I’m not only not rail-thin, but am actually over the weight I would consider ideal, it’s trouble. Returning to one’s gut intuition is not as easy as one thinks after spending so much time learning something different.

So now I have to make a plan and rules to get myself back where I want to be. I’ve decided that 130-135 is a reasonable place to be; a place where my gut and thighs would sufficiently recede but people wouldn’t stutter in horror about me just getting off the boat from Somalia. This is even “BMI”-approved… 130 would put me at a BMI of 18.7, when the border between normal and underweight is 18.5. How perfect is that?

After topping out at 150, I had some work to do. Although thanks to help from my India trip, which I guess was pretty active (because I felt like I was eating constantly), I haven’t been back up quite that high. Though my first few weeks after India, plus splurging on my trip to Chicago cemented the undoing of much of India’s good work. I basically started this plan at 147.

The plan has been pretty simple, and underway for about 3-4 full weeks, with the brief interruption from Chicago. I have a list of foods that I’m allowed to eat when I’m hungry. In general, these foods have been pulled from a narrow list of foods that disproportionately make one feel fuller than their calorie count would indicate. There are all sorts of articles and indexes on the web about this - satiety indexes and such. It was a revelation to me that calories have extremely little to do with how full one actually feels after eating. Much like money has absolutely nothing to do with the amount of work one does. In both cases, sometimes they coincide, but more often they don’t.

There was another angle to this food thing - I’ve had some recurrent acne and have attributed it after much research to a possible Vitamin A deficiency. I have since probably discredited this hypothesis, but it’s why carrots, which (like pancakes) make one hungrier than one was before eating them, are on this list.

The List:
-Bran Cereal
-Carrots
-Honeydew Melon
-Potatoes (boiled)

Plus, I get one totally free meal a day, where I can eat whatever, wherever. It goes without saying that I’m not to go hog-wild at such meals and eat a double-meal or something, but my low threshold of fullness helps automatically keep this in check.

It wasn’t until the last couple days that this exhaustive list of four foods for all eating outside of one meal/day was starting to wear on me. Thus I have added two brand-new foods!:
-Celery
-Lentils

This diet has knocked me down to 140, though there seems to be some push-back at this line. My nadir was 139, which was pretty exciting, since I could really see a dramatic difference in the distribution of that weight differential. I’ve stabilized in the 139-141 range, but seem to need some sort of prolonged or new move to get below that.

Then there’ll be a larger issue of what it takes to maintain the 130-135 range and whether it requires upkeep of these habits or a slight shift to something different.

After several weeks, I’ve established that this regimen is healthy, effective, and sustainable. It makes me appreciate the one meal out a day more and not have to worry as much about what I’m going to do to fulfill hunger when hunger arises. The foods on the list are simple to maintain, and basically all of them can be eaten raw and stored easily. No preparation time, no real thinking time, just getting eating over as fast as possible - the way it was always meant to be.

Meantime, I can watch my nephew Paul V grow up and see him be exactly like me (through 7 years of life, he’s nearly identical in his relationship with food). Maybe I can warn him about what happens at 26 before it’s too late for him and he has to resort to a plan to maintain what I grew up thinking would always be automatic.

Maybe he’ll just have to find out on his own.

Been nearly two days in Chicago with a day to go. Have seen a full game in Wrigley Field (Cubs 3, Pirates 2), seen both of the previously unseen campuses I passed up as possible collegiate choices, and managed to smash up my wedding ring finger into a purple pulp. You didn’t think this town was gonna let me off easy, did you?

This post will likely be short, in large part because typing with nine fingers is a task I’ve never had to learn. Rather than being 10% slower, it really seems about 98% slower given how long it takes for me to decide which finger to sub in for the S finger. Luckily, this finger is only responsible for three letters (and two of them are w and x), but unluckily s is pretty common. I don’t know if the finger’s broken or not, but I’m leaning towards not at this point given that it’s pretty much stopped hurting. Last night when I willingly took two painkiller pills, was talked into a third, and never refused ice, the signs were pointing to badness.

The method of the smashing was picking up a bowling ball. Just nanoseconds before lifting, I was wrapping my left hand around the ball as support and the old-school see-saw ball-returner shot a ball into the row at breakneck (or break-finger) speed. The entire stopping point of the chain-reaction impact was my hand, primarily focused on one finger with peripheral contact on the two neighbors. Sandwiched between a 14 and a 12, this did not lead to warm fuzzy feelings. Somehow, in about 20 years of bowling, this had never once happened to me. And it really bugged me because it was entirely preventable. And because it hurt.

This is hardly the focal point of the trip, though, and shouldn’t be where I put so much emphasis. The trip has been about an old friend and his new friends. Fish has been the consummate host, as always, and given me a glimpse of both Chicago and alternate pasts that I have turned away from. His group is what I remember of groups assembled at schools - smart, funny, interested, and interesting. Everything about school except for school was always great. If everyone could self-select and come together for such things in the interest of some sort of club or life commitment (or even society?), things would be really cooking. But sadly school seems to be the only thing deemed worthy of bringing like-mindeds together from such distant places in a socially comfortable setting. And thus my path is barred, by my own volition.

Nevertheless, it’s good to see a friend doing well, to immerse in his world, and to talk through all the things it seems go unsaid these days. Examining one’s own life is often so difficult without the full-length mirror that is someone who has known you across a multitude of years and situations.

Debate and discussion. The caterpillar story. A coat forgotten and regained. Misty walks on paths not taken. Cheez-its and carrots, coffee and Cheerios. Once more unto the grocery store. Everything’s different and nothing’s changed. Everything’s perfect and Fish is god. Ow.

It is still too early to be too late.

Oh, Chicago.

It’s been eight full years since my last visit to the Windy City (outside of one of the worst airport stopovers in modern history). The city of my almost absolutely ideal weather (could stand to be a little drier in the summer, but otherwise perfect) and almost absolutely horrible everything else. Past visits to Chicago have been almost universally bad, marked by high turmoil and tension, argument, and almost unending apprehension. Something about the length of time spent seems to correspond to the extent of the badness, or at least the fallout. The one decent visit was in late ‘97, where my Dad and I flew to a debate tournament in Florida via Chicago, with a few hour layover. We didn’t really have time to check out either of the city’s colleges I’d applied to and they put massive amounts of milk in my coffee without asking and it was bitterly cold and we were both a little grumpy toward the end. But nobody got hurt.

And that was by far the best visit. Maybe it’s no wonder that I didn’t give much consideration to either of those colleges when I’d gotten in.

But still to come was the last visit, eight years ago and change, which still stands out as one of the worst trips of all-time. It didn’t help that I’d been anticipating the trip with a wildly inexplicable sense of foreboding that proved as prophetic (though not as seriously so) as I’d feared. I was going into a Model UN conference that I’d been guilted into attending, nearing complete exhaustion with the politics and format of collegiate Model UN. This trip, which proved to be my last lifetime MUN conference, cemented my feelings while just seeming to waste my time. From the 20th day of Introspection ever: “Never been so bored in a MUN committee in my life. That’s 6 years of effort there.”

The trip was not without upside. Chicago is not only a place of bad feeling for me, but of incredibly intense feeling. The severity of emotional spurring gives it a vague potential that I would be more inclined to pursue if the downside tendencies of my state in the city didn’t just scare me. I spent the first night of the trip wandering around the city by myself, lost in reverie that culminated in me literally yelling at myself as March was about to cross over into April…

Sometimes I think I should walk around with a tape recorder. Walking back from that convenience store, I swear I figured everything out. Well, not everything, but more than I’ve had a handle on for a long time. Talking out loud works so much better, especially in cold night air. If I could maintain that focus for days on end, life would almost feel easy. Instead, I end up blinding myself to clarity & getting crowded by my frustrations. I don’t wear my heart on my sleeve, I wear it on my tongue. & I don’t consider that a problem, if only I could express myself as well to others as I can to myself. Seems like they’d be easier to convince anyway.

After the conference concluded, there were then plane delays trying to get out of the city and it felt like that place just had me in its clutches. Note to self: Plane delays where one has incredibly impatience and anxiety about getting out in time are usually a warning sign. Proceed with caution. Or, as I told myself at the time (day 21 of Introspection): “I’ve got to learn to start trusting my instincts. I might hate my intuition, but it’s always right.”

In my memory, I think I’d folded the two days that followed my return into nothing, or transplanted them as being prior to the trip. But that’s only how it seemed in retrospect, because the trip was so awful and everything crashed to pieces 48 hours after my return. But those were a pivotal 48 hours. A very good 48 hours. Until Ben Brandzel caught me reveling in the downstairs portion of the Usdan cafeteria and uttered the worst joke I’ve ever heard in my life:

“So, has she told you about her book yet?”

Though I felt like he’d just winded me with a sucker punch, I refused to be fazed at the time. In less than 36 hours, though, it was all over. With less warning but as much seeming foreknowledge, I had been felled by this comment just as Lisha’s “Doomsday” Prophecy of ‘93 had unwittingly unraveled that situation. Of course the comment had nothing to do with anything, but it sure made it feel like the events had more to do with fate than anything I could control.

I went into freefall. A good bit of this is discussed in my recent post about April. There’s no need to hash out more details and I really should wrap this up anyway. In the swirl of retrospect, the trip and everything that followed were inextricably bound with each other and a sense of powerful, living destiny.

Was there destiny? I don’t really believe in destiny, but it’s hard to argue with what transpired. The wake of the events of March and April 2000 convinced me to start “The Streak” and I never missed an APDA debate weekend thereafter. I decided that I might as well continue with my resolution at the advent of the millennium that I would devote myself to the one thing that was going well in college. The relationship that ended in such a crushing fashion turned out to feel more and more like a dodged bullet than a sincere loss. All of these things led directly to fuel everything that happened in the next two years: staying at Brandeis, debate success, and Emily.

This time around, I don’t feel any sense of foreboding at all. It’s almost uncanny how calm I feel despite the history, despite it being April. Another rejection of destiny, perhaps, or just an openness to change. It’s certain that even the slightest inkling of bad feeling would get blown up in my perception given the context, so it’s really all good. I can’t wait to see Fish, meet his new girlfriend and other friends, see Wrigley, give this city a fourth or fifth or sixth chance.

Forty years after “something very extraordinary died there, which was America,” I’ll be heading back toward the city named for wild leeks once again. My baseball streak is at 3 games, after a beautiful complete game by Felix Hernandez last night. I have a busy day at work, made somewhat more challenging by a mild migraine. I’m getting on a vessel of one of the plane companies that has still managed to stay solvent. Life is mixed, but life is good.

We’ve come too far to leave it all behind.

Had some profoundly vivid dreams last night, after a good long while of vagueness and reprieve from the dreamworld. It’s no surprise, given that I slept for a significant amount of time for the first time in recent memory. Probably the first night over 6.5 hours in weeks. And that, not surprisingly, was due to a major migraine, also the first in quite a while. And that, in turn, was due to insufficient coffee intake in the morning because I was running late.

The world, in short, makes sense.

But dreams themselves do not often make sense, as was the case last night. Or at least they cover the bizarre and fanciful, even when they might be able to be linked or traced to larger themes of relevance. In the first dream, earlier in the night, I was somehow trying to juggle seven or eight part-time jobs. Most of them were jobs I wouldn’t consider in real life - sales jobs and store reception - as well as a couple jobs that resembled actual work I’ve done, such as library positions. And it was all somehow mixed with me leaving Glide or cutting down hours and keeping my options open. Somehow in the dream, showing up to any one of these jobs once a week would clinch the employer’s interest in me in carrying over for the next week or month or so. But it was very difficult to track the schedule of all of these disparate jobs, which ended up boiling down into feeling like any number of school schedule stress dreams. These are a common theme in my dream repertoire, wherein I don’t know when and where my classes are, and I’m usually on the verge of being automatically failed if I miss any more classes. These can be high school or college and fill a truly disproportionate amount of my dreamlife. And compared to a lot of my nightmares, especially more historically, they’re not so bad at all.

The second dream felt better moment-to-moment at the time, but was holistically much more disturbing in retrospect. In this one, I was apparently a baker of all manner of pastries and breads. And the world was about to go to war. It was definitely 2008, and all of my bakery’s machinery reflected this fact. But most of the combatants were historical figures, mostly circa World War II. Each of the combatants came to visit my bakery and arrange indefinably large shipments of my goods to their soldiers who were about to be fighting in this war. The impracticality of shipping huge quantities of perishable food across the world to troops in conflict seemed not to faze anyone, let alone really occur to them (though it was in the back of my mind). Two themes needled me in the back of my mind profoundly - one that I was selling to soldiers, who would clearly be committing violence that I disagree with. The other was that I was unabashedly (though not openly to any given buyer) selling to both sides of the war, to soon-to-be-declared enemies. It was clear that Japan and Germany were going to be opposing each other in the war, and shortly after the anonymous Japanese diplomat left, in walked Hitler.

Hitler was not only the first actual personage I could recognize and name in the dream, but he entered the full-color world and mainframe of the dream in a sepia-tone. He was fully illustrated and visible, but he was completely sepia-tone, as though stepping from a faded newsreel and into my 2008 full-color life. He was officious but not unfriendly and ordered a million cinnamon rolls and a million items that I called muffins. He insisted that they weren’t muffins, however, and began to argue. I suggested that they might be a little more akin to biscuits, if he preferred that word. He said clearly that they were “bread” as though this word had just occurred to him. I conceded that they were a type of bread, but this was unsatisfactory to him. At this point, he began to extrapolate on how long the war would last and that if I played my cards right, there would be orders of far more than just a million cinnamon rolls and a million pieces of bread, but that could all be jeopardized by me insisting on calling bread a biscuit or a muffin. Okay, Mr. Hitler.

At this point, it was clearly disturbing me greatly that I was doing business with Hitler, but at the same time, I didn’t really see a great distinction between this and selling to other armies and other combatants. Indeed, the fact that I was selling perishable items to them and to both sides of the conflict gave me a small secret satisfaction that I was somehow thwarting their efforts and diverting money away from weaponry and into my ability to do some good. Beating swords into rotten bread, and in turn perhaps into plowshares.

The dream ended shortly thereafter - I signed to the deal after convincing Hitler to buy two million cinnamon rolls to go with the original order of “bread”. He went on his way and I distinctly remember a little bell ringing over the top of the glass door as he exited the building. The smell of fresh baked bread filled my nostrils as I sighed heavily and wondered what I was doing with my life.

Is there a message for me in all this? Clearly the compromises and the deferring of my time expenditure I’m making now in no way compare to signing pastry deals with Hitler. But was my subconscious trying to use some extreme illustration to wake me up? I clearly am starting to feel a good deal of guilt about my use of time, somewhere. Especially given that so many of my dreams tend to revolve on me doing unthinkable things in my dreams and wrestling with myself about why I don’t feel enough remorse to stop. The classic among these is, of course, eating meat - I’ve had thousands of dreams in the last 11 years where I eat meat and feel awful, and lately mostly disappointed, with myself. Generally there’s something in these dreams about realizing that I haven’t actually been a vegetarian for the last 11 years, yet haven’t realized it till just now. Waking up to reality is always reassuring in these situations, though it often takes some time to recall that the dream-bacon wasn’t real.

Waking up this morning was less reassuring. Again, I stress that I have no misgivings about my actual job or work or use of time on an absolute scale. It’s only on a relative scale, that in comparison to writing full-time, that I have questions or doubts. Especially since that was going to be the plan for a while, before the latest promotion swooped in and convinced me to stay.

Dreams derive most often, they say, from one’s own hopes and fears. (In my case, pretty much universally fears.) I can’t rule out that there are sometimes larger messages or warnings in dreams, but even they may be from one’s own internal sense of impending doom or difficulty. And clearly this issue has been bothering me lately. The only thing that really shakes me, deep down, is what was happening exactly three years ago around this time. The same misgivings, the same warnings were creeping in all around. And those proved dangerously unheeded. I pledged to not make the same mistake again. And while personal safety was clearly more abundant an issue at Seneca, making the stakes higher, I have a quality backup plan here and now, which I didn’t then. Call it a draw, I guess, which doesn’t make me feel much better.

Muffin?

For some reason, April 8th has been a date that has stuck out in my mind like a sore thumb. I’ve never quite had a great handle on why this is the case. There are certain inherent numeric properties to the day that make it naturally interesting, but it’s way more than that. I’ve worked on a lot of theories in the last decade about specific days and time being charged in some ways, at least as much as places are. And after all, time is a place in the universe because of planetary orbits. Some of this should be review, and I don’t have a ton of time to write this post this morning.

I’m trying to recall if there was some super-significant April 8th in my childhood. I sort of feel there must’ve been. Although I paid less attention to this sort of stuff then and managed to not even put together the incredible slumpiness of April/May until pretty late in the game. Life is nothing if not persistent.

8 April 2000: In the wake of the Try Before You Buy disaster, I head to New York City for one of my two losing records (both 2-3) in my APDA career, at CCNY Pro-Ams. I was an emotional wreck, as captured by this Introspection line: “Most of the tournament on Friday, it seemed people couldn’t determine if my eyes were watering from my cold or if I’d been crying. I was among those people.” To put the cap on the day, miscommunication led to me spending hours in the Broome Street lobby, listening to music that seemed to be narrating to me why I would always be alone.

8 April 2001: Another day of waiting, this time in a bus-stop for the next girlfriend at the time. The relationship’s final blow would prove to be my very blog, perhaps for posts like this (which was from April 9th, but reflecting on how the 8th had felt): “Ah, doubt. Bane of existence. It creeps in, like April malaise, tugging at possibilities in an eerie & unsettling fashion. I wish I could bannish my own musings & sit patiently with contentedness but it never seems to quite satisfy. Why am I reminded of a long-ago argument with Schneider when he jestingly told Fish & I that we keep buying new shoes - the WE lacked the loyalty to stick with something. & I just put in new laces to an old pair, too - literally.” The whole weekend meandered in self-doubt and I remembered pointing back to certain conclusions drawn that weekend that would ultimately lead to the temporary (and then permanent) end my last unsuccessful relationship.

8 April 2002: A pretty bright April 8th, wherein I compiled what then set a record for traffic at the Blue Pyramid, the May Madness of APDA project about a hypothetical design for the Nationals tournament. APDA became captivated by the idea heading into a momentous Nationals weekend where many things went tumultuously poorly, but I proposed to Emily.

8 April 2003: “The 8th of April always seems to be a BIG day. More on this later.” Ironically one of the least significant April 8ths, but the Iraq War was brand new and dominating my view of reality. Everything seemed momentous and charged at a time that looked like the breaking point for a short war. So it goes. Shortly thereafter, I posted another May Madness and returned to Boston for the first time since graduating to judge at ‘Deis Nats.

8 April 2004: In the midst of working at Seneca and contemplating my annual April malaise, I become focused on the problems with antidepressants and how they tend to make people’s lives worse. Shortly thereafter, I become mired in some aspects of my own past: “In transferring some files from old computer to new, I discovered my archive of saved AOL-IM conversations of yore. Just browsing them was painful. In reviewing a couple of conversations, it occurred to me how many times a pleasant conversation turned to something hostile just because of how poorly emotions are conveyed via AOL-IM. I’ve had bouts with thinking about returning to the world of away messages & little dings, but these archives set me back on course every time.”

8 April 2005: The only line from this day is a mix of awareness of this post’s theme and more chilling prophecy, showing just how thorough my warning was for the events that would unfold in May: “I remember when the 8th of April just stuck out in my mind as a pivotal day of sorts. I feel things swirling as being pivotal, but today just seemed mired in the same old mud. At least I’m talking it out, looking for conclusions, trying to find a viable escape…” The moral of the story, at least as much as anything, is to quit bad jobs before they quit you.

8 April 2006: A surprise return to judge at Nationals (shortly after a 3rd May Madness posting) results in an intense colliding of worlds. Late in the day, a sixth round bubble proves to be the best round I’ve ever seen in my life… “Best round I’ve ever judged. I wish I had been able to tape that sixth round, so I could hand a copy of that tape to anyone who thinks the circuit has declined. The circuit is always great, & always has great rounds & speakers at the top level. & they even kept to time! A truly euphoric round.” The next day would yield some disappointing break rounds, but be followed by one of the all-time greatest ‘Deis team dinners.

8 April 2007: Mesco & Afsheen’s wedding reception crosses over midnight into this day and proves to be a fantastic time. Their reception is really just pizza, foosball, and hanging out in a hotel lounge, which is both emblematic of them and something that everyone would’ve chosen over most any other kind of reception. Our whirlwind trip to Atlanta wraps up and dumps us back on the doorstep of reality, shortly before the emotionally observed passing of Kurt Vonnegut.

Looking at them threaded together like that, it seems that the significance of April 8th is as much in my head as it is in reality. There are good ones and bad ones, significant ones and mild regular days. It’s good to check one’s samples like this sometimes. What I can tell you is that the feeling of apprehensive significance is always there, always the same. I can’t tell you why, especially looking through the above, but I search my feelings and I know it to be true.

A first day - no joke. A joke in the bathroom. A dental visit. A decision: no anesthesia. A walk home. A phone call, somewhere between banter and the most important decisions of our lives. A poker game, where a lesson was actually learned. A Mariners game, where all season was lived in a day, or in two tumultuous sine curve innings. A heart-stopping phone call for all the wrong reasons. A joke that just doesn’t work because of history, of context, of life itself.

I could write all the details, flesh it out, spell it out in flesh (a pounding heart in the wake of feeling the Earth slip out from under one for no good reason) and blood (spilling onto the towel from prodded gums). But there’s no need, or no cause - today felt like a day that hearkened for blippy Introspection-style reflection. And some day I’ll read and remember and another dawn of another April will come across from the distance of years or months or weeks or days. And I’ll be just there. Inside it all again. April the first. April is the cruelest month. April come she will.

And has.

Authorities revealed Tuesday that a man carrying a loaded shotgun was arrested in January near the U.S. Capitol, and explosives left in his truck nearby went undetected for three weeks.
-CNN/AP, 26 March 2008

If we all comprehended all that goes into the decisions that impact our lives, we might never be able to sit still again. Let alone sleep. Two people are anticipating such a decision that I’m supposed to be making… it’s entirely out of their hands. It’s one of those many seeming coinflip decisions we make in life. Eventually I’ll find a way to make it a rationally reasoned decision, but I wouldn’t count on others to do the same in my shoes. This one’s for a job as I end a less than 2-month stint of not being a supervisor anymore. How many college admissions decisions, or college matriculation decisions, or moves, or debate judgments, or responses to date requests, came down to the same kind of coinflip? And who here would say they haven’t been deeply affected by one of those kinds of decisions?

I try to remember everything.
Try to remember so you don’t disappear.
-Counting Crows, “Sundays”

Maybe life’s not so hard to predict. We all have free will, but we all tend to make these ridiculously logical decisions. Maybe that’s the only reason that the coinflips feel so dangerous or scary. It’s where our free will really has to ride a gut feeling, or take a chance, or do something out of the comfort zone. Maybe where it lets itself be influenced by some larger benevolent wave. My Dad might call it “mind at large”. Others would go with destiny or fate. Everyone above would agree God’s gotta have something to do with it. Just about. But who has the faith that their contributed portion of the cacophony of wills is always allocated to benevolence? And wouldn’t resting on that faith somehow violate the bargain and undo the magic? Magic. Maybe that’s another word for it.

This is a list of what I should’ve been, but I’m not.
-Counting Crows, “Cowboys”

I used to make tapes, back in late high school and throughout college. I clung to a dying technological medium in large part because I liked the rhythms of 60- and 90-minute intervals, and especially loved having two opposing sides of something. No one was really ever able to record their own vinyl records, and CD’s don’t have sides. The tape was the perfect homemade medium. I made two tapes that come to mind this week… “Poetry in Stagnation” and “Chaos Theory”. The last of these had sides called “Butterfly Wings” and “Consequences” and was probably my most artistically made mix. The latest Counting Crows album, “Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings”, is clearly written with sides in mind. It’s a bit of a concept album with each half of that phrase parsed into its own side. The CD cover is a vinyl album, just in case we missed the point. Like all new albums (these days at least), it sounds godawful the first time one listens to it. The second time through, I’m not sure I’ve heard anything more relevant in my life. Nothing will ever measure up to “This Desert Life”, the album that started my traditions with Counting Crows releases, perhaps the only album that sounded perfect the first time through too. I’ve always felt a special kinship with Adam Duritz (really, what CC fan doesn’t?), but you can hear in this one that maybe it’s gone too far. Maybe he pushed his own opportunities too long and wonders how much of this ends up being his own doing. There comes a time when it’s time to stop blaming the cacophony of wills and start examining one’s own coinflips.

It’s okay, I’m angry,
but you’ll never understand…
And I can’t see why you want to talk to me
when your vision of America is crystalline and clean.
-Counting Crows, “When I Dream of Michelangelo”

Despite all the coinflips, the cacophony, the difficult decisions, there often come times when one can attune oneself to the universe (God, mind at large, fate, destiny, magic) sufficiently where such things no longer seem scary. One still has to play by the rules, to agonize and try. To make the best decision possible for the best reasons possible. As Brandzy would say, to do the right thing for the right reasons. But this attunement, this awareness, this getting in sync seems to take the edge off the decisions. It takes the really vicious teeth out, leaving them more smile and less bared fangs. Some mornings, maybe even a morning like this, it’s not enough for reassurance. Is that the Cheshire cat I’m seeing? What does finding your place look like?

Would you eat a Honduran melon without fear of salmonella contamination?
-CNN’s QuickVote poll for 26 March 2008

Walking out the door to go to Chipotle, checking the mail on the way, and getting a certificate for free tacos therein. The unending awareness that terrorism would be unstoppable and is thus, by its absence, demonstrated to be nonexistent. A friend’s ability to achieve what one has always wanted, while one is doing what said friend is most interested in for his own achievement. Full moons and eclipses. Butterflies flapping their wings. Earthquakes. Timing timing timing.

Life makes its own excitement.

Did you feel that?

Monday was sort of cruising along and everything was going pretty swimmingly. Then morning became afternoon and soon, the day hit a wall like so many bugs catching up to a speeding automobile windshield. Wham. And that’s the ballgame.

I’ve been mulling a post about a unique and uniquely productive Sunday, in which Em and I ventured into the city of my work (San Francisco) and took in the “church” “Celebration” at the place of my work (Glide) and then a play by Em’s favorite playwright (Athol Fugard) with the music of a mutually respected artist (Tracy Chapman). It was good. The celebrating and play-watching were not perfect and there were disconnects, but it was a solid Sunday with the brimming of hope and promise and a little bit more energy, focus, togetherness.

Wham.

I write a lot about feelings and moods and the emotional reality that underlies what appears to be going on. I think a lot of people roll their eyes at this stuff. For those people, I guess I also write about hard facts, like politics or baseball or what I did on my summer vacation. But rarely, oh rarely, is it what’s really going on. Most of the time, what’s really going on is what people can’t know or nail down as fact. It’s the inkling in the back of one’s mind, the ebb and flow of ability to focus and relate, to feel and be felt. The undercurrent that’s always at the edge of consciousness, beckoning to a deeper sense of understanding. But oh, it’s real. More real than the clutter we fill our lives with or the time we spend in various seats (school, work, obligation).

All one has to seek is confirmation. Just articulate what you’re feeling, yield to the emotional authenticity and the reality of it all, and you’ll understand that you’re not alone. You’re not the only one thinking and feeling. You may be more ready to let people know (or less), more willing to embrace (or less), but it’s there for everyone. To deny it is like denying the sun just because there are cloudy days and night.

And I’m telling you, folks, the wheels fell off about 2 PM Pacific. Clunk. Clunk.

I heard Cecil Williams preach on Sunday, apparently a rare treat these days in his advancing years. I joked with Emily afterwards that he was telling me to quit my job (at his organization), embracing a message of truth and freedom that seemed to be beckoning me pell-mell to yield entirely to creative urges, to take the leap of faith to full-time writing at the expense of the comforts and hindrances of a day job. It was all in there. Sure, it was also about substance abuse and living on the street and shedding materialism, but it was about my story too. Whether it’s popcorn or people who threaten us, our time is fixed here and no one gets to stay later than they get to. Not even you.

I used to run a debate case about knowing the date of one’s death, if given the omniscient and presupposed choice. It was opp-choice and it was perhaps my favorite case to just plain old debate. Every round was different, every pick was thoughtful, almost every round advanced my understanding of what it was to live on the planet. And like many cases people run, it seemed entirely one-sided to me personally. I could make the right arguments for every side, but I think anyone who wouldn’t choose, right now, at this second, to find out the precise date of their death, is completely crazy.

Get busy living or get busy dying. And one helps determine the other and how it’s best spent.

Of course, the old argument goes that one should prepare for the worst and hope for the best. Don’t squander everything for today, but live as though you could die tomorrow and feel okay about it. Maybe not good, but certainly okay.

I’m a long way from that, as (I’d guess) are you. And the more we have afternoons like this one, the more it feels it matters.

This is the only life you’ll be living here. Take a good long look.

It’s 4:30 A.M. on a Tuesday
It doesn’t get much worse than this
In beds in little rooms
in buildings in the middle
of these lives
which are completely meaningless
-Counting Crows, “Perfect Blue Buildings”

I have 20 minutes to write this post and I feel like I could take the rest of my life. There’s a lot of pressure on today… not in my world so much as the world. Which in itself is a misnomer, because there are always more worlds, always more lives. Go to India, learn that we are not doing this thing once only for a one-shot deal. Everyone should be mighty thankful for that, because we’ve screwed this shot up pretty mightily. The humbling weight of history is almost all the gives me hope these days. No wonder I’ve been surrounding myself with the past and citing historical context for everything and watching movies about 1980 or 1536.

Americans always vote on Tuesdays. This decision was made in the antebellum years of the United States, with the winds of war looming on the horizon. A move was needed to unify the country, now and forever. Or maybe it was just more practical to pick a day forever. We’ve been living with it ever since.

Tuesday was named for Tyr, the Viking god of war, the equivalent of Mars, the Roman god for whom March was named. We are the Vikings, we are the Romans, we are at war, and we are not paying attention to history. We still believe in Empire and a God of War. And we honor this symbolism with making our most important, or illusory, decisions.

Maybe if we had been voting on Wednesdays all along, we wouldn’t be in this mess. It’s a little naive to think that, given the restrictions put all seven days on who we are able to pick from in the first place. But maybe it’s more naive to think that if you pour this kind of collective energy and symbolism into a specific day, it doesn’t stick at some point. It’s the first War Day in the Month of War. And this will, by all accounts, seal our fate for the next 4-8 years.

Maybe on 9/11, the US should’ve done something useful and declared war on Tuesday instead of terrorism. Declaring war on War, which is the same as war on terror, but perhaps we could actually defeat Tuesday. We know exactly where Tuesday is hiding. We probably have even less understanding of its motives, but at least we don’t have to blow up three countries to get rid of it. Congress already blew Daylight Saving Time into a day-eating monster; it can take out Tuesday just as swiftly.

And instead of renaming, we could just eliminate it completely and have a 4-day work-week, a 32-hour stint that can sustain the same levels of employment for the next three years that we have now. I’d happily donate my 8 hours so that we don’t have a full-scale Depression in the coming days and have to start an even bigger war, perhaps a final one, to try to dig out of it. Are you in?

I don’t really think anyone’s going to win today. The chorus of people with deafening cynicism about Obama is getting louder. Why hasn’t he taken controversial stands, outlined plans or policies? Why does he vote awfully meekly for someone with such vocal courage? I can continue to hope for upside and pray that he’s been sandbagging all along… that the first 100 days would feel like revolution from within. I can’t rule it out yet. But there seems a futility about this whole exercise. If he really weren’t in someone’s pocket, wouldn’t they just get rid of him? Would we really get to keep someone that’s up to the challenge?

But go, vote, hope. I will board my train and get a seat because so many people would prefer to stand in the middle of the train than sit at the front or back. I’ve been trying to discern a motive for this behavior (short of believing that Americans are obsessed with sitting) that makes sense. Why someone would rather stand up for half an hour around others standing just to be in the middle of the train. But I guess it’s explicable… a flight to the middle, toward the average, toward American ideals of pointless effort and uncontroversial conformity. One’s just that much closer to the exit, perhaps, ready to bail as soon as the wind turns. Even if there are twice as many people in one’s way.

Tyr dies in the end, along with all the other Norse gods in the Vikings’ own mythology. Chaos wins, takes over, runs amok over all those seemingly the most powerful and dominant in the universe. Eventually, some far off date after the devastation, there are the small glimmers of the budding of a new world. A big, painful jab at the reset button on a computer that takes quite a while to boot up.

Anyone got a version of Disk Defragmenter that works on this one?

I grew up with stories of “When Daddy was a little boy…”, tales of my father’s childhood lived across adventures from Nevada to DC to Afghanistan to Korea. The preferred setting for these narratives had to be the streets of Kabul, and no Kabul story was complete without some sort of reference to the Noon Gun.

The Noon Gun was a cannon that was (still is?) fired each day at noon, perhaps the atomic clock of its era, to help the residents of Kabul track their temporal progress through the hours. To the uninitiated, it must have caused quite a start to hear the cacophonous blast of gunpowder, an unheralded harbinger of the decades to come in Afghanistan. And there were reassurances and snickers from those who knew, or those who perhaps were just complacent in their noontide reminder.

I was walking to pick up a burrito just now, exploring a new route to a new Mexican (but not New Mexican) place gracing my slightly new location at my slightly new job. And it sounded, a howling wail tolling the end of the world, up, down, up, hold, down. “Take cover, take flight, take heed.” But then when do I go to lunch? And was I at work just yesterday?

It’s San Francisco’s own noon gun, of course, which sounds only on Tuesdays and precisely at noon. It’s a city-wide test of the Emergency Broadcast System, in case of question-marks, so that everyone can know to head for the hills as soon as question-marks happen. You fill in your own blanks, because no one’s really quite clear what it would be. And that fuels the effectiveness… anything can happen, everything is threatening.

But somehow, at the early onset of Tuesday afternoon, it sounds more like a cry for help. Of course it’s only on Tuesdays - when else could it be? And noon, the dawn of the difficult period, the advent of the slow decline into nothingness that is afternoon. Somehow the Tuesday Noon Siren calls out like an affirmation of one’s internal feelings rather than a particular call to action or safety. Why wouldn’t a forlorn, urgent wailing call out at just this particular moment?

But it’s really trying to warn us, like “Vantage Point”, a movie that should probably be protested and picketed when it comes down to it, that the Danger is Out There. “Vantage Point”, a waste of a dear couple hours over this already less-than-precious-weekend, offers an intricate plot that is fiction to its very core. Yes, there are Presidential conspiracies of body-doubles and the fact that no matter how many people came together to kill someone, they will be labeled as a “lone gunman”. But the picture of a terrorist threat, that for the pure power of violence seems to rail against nearly the whole world, that is collected, coordinated, and wants to fight some mysterious war for the sake of never ending it, is the height of American projection. The United States may stand unilaterally for bold, violent action and rogue “heroics”, thus fearing its own image more than any reality out there. But at least if one attacks a mirror with full force, one only gets bloodied by broken glass.

I’m not saying that nothing will change, nothing will happen, and certainly not that nothing will appear to happen. But jumping and running from the mirror is a little distracting when we should be realizing it’s what’s being reflected that should scare us.

And boom.

I have yet to see “I’m Not There,” allegedly a very good film about the many sides of Bob Dylan. And maybe “I’m Not There” is all the message one needs. I have written so much about being there or here lately that it’s hard to imagine what not being would be all about. But I’m thinking it’s time.

Well, he hands you a nickel,
He hands you a dime,
He asks you with a grin
If you’re havin’ a good time,
Then he fines you every time you slam the door.

I’ve never done the manual labor described in the song, but I don’t think Bob did much either. Maybe a little, in those early Minnesota days, but my Mom had a good friend that went to school with “Little Bobby Zimmerman” and he didn’t exactly have the farmer physique. Me neither. The point becomes, really, that any labor can end up feeling physical and manual if it’s bad enough. People go home for backaches, stomach aches, are “just sick” and won’t be coming in for days. There is a word, psychosomatic, but it’s not psycho at all. Why work when nothing is working? Why try when everything’s trying?

Eventually it all feels like you’re out on the farm, being ground into the ground by a machine that nickels and dimes you but carefully controls your feelings and perspectives. Has insidious, trained ways of drawing you back in. Even if you manage to dodge the raining (reigning?) bullets of debt and fear and materialism, they’ll find a way to strike you down, to huff and puff and blow your house down. And hope is not far behind.

My Dad has long (six months?) been saying that “nothing is working anymore.” I’m skeptical as to whether it ever was. But the more I see, the higher my perspective, the more laughable it all seems. What would it even look like? Who is working? Why? The situation is well-nigh screaming at me to cut bait and take my losses. It’s like What is Success? rolled up with Seneca with a sprinkle of Broadway and the Advocate and everything else. I can give myself an India reprieve, maybe. But that depends a lot on the next 7 days. Open future, options and decisions to be made. Is humanity worth saving? Some things are so broken that it’s best to start over.

Emily and I cried at “The Great Debaters” for many reasons, but perhaps most of all because we missed debate. Imperfections aplenty, and some really bad people (mostly great, though)… but rules and order and intellectual rigor and curiosity. Everyone on a (roughly) level playing field in the quest for discourse and powerful voices rising to quiet the din of a confused and ill-informed public. Ivory towers rising to the sky, for sure, but to get above the nonsense and into the light. We will never go back, even when we go back. It’s all over now, baby blue, and maybe when people reunite to run the country it will be different this time. But we know which ones will rise in that way and those were the ones we would’ve voted off the island first (and won the elections there, just as elsewhere, of course). So it’s all for naught, even in the best of cases. What is worth saving?

Well, he puts his cigar
Out in your face just for kicks.
His bedroom window
It is made out of bricks.
The National Guard stands around his door.

I talked at length what seems like eons ago (it was, chronologically, just over six weeks ago) about Distribution and how few to no people in the world would “need to work” if the world were properly distributed. Or how we could all work a few hours a week (like six or eight) and more than comfortably provide for everyone. Maybe this doesn’t sound like the most exciting thing ever to most people, but I would imagine it does. “The Great Debaters” touched on these issues, and many more, about the nature of work and whether it helps or is necessary or is just one of those hurdles a manipulative society puts in the way of its people.

The point is, we have all been trained and raised to believe in work, no matter what that looks like or how absurd it is. I’m reviewing here. But it takes repetition to break down stereotypes. What are you working for? What am I working for? (I’m really asking here.) For debt? For needless planned-obsolescence gadgets? For the opporunity to give offspring more debt and more obsolete gadgets?

Well, I try my best
To be just like I am,
But everybody wants you
To be just like them.
They sing while you slave and I just get bored.

I am chronically addicted to telling the truth and busting the doors open on perceived needs for privacy, and it is for this reason more than any other that I am getting blindly angry this past week or so. When people try to restrict my ability to speak, to say what’s going on, to share and communicate, especially when it’s completely obvious that such communication is the only road to functionality and the converse is the road to ruin, I get really frustrated. And more so the more it goes on and builds up. It gets hard to even sit still, to breathe, to know what to do. If some place is willing to compromise you more than you even knew you could be, what are you doing? What am I doing? (I am asking here.)

I know all my counter-arguments, my rebuttals, my refutations. I understand the temptations that I am drawn in by, the draw of influence and power, proxies for the opportunity to lead. To provide leadership. To be a leader. In some ways, the worse and more profoundly silly things get, the stronger the argument for staying and fighting and cutting through the madness. I could fix this, give me six months and enough “buy-in” (code-word here for the ability to unite, to wield power for the positive, to bring people together). That’s all it would take.

And maybe, it occurred to me just this morning, the job of every worker at a non-profit should be to put themselves out of a job, just like the work of every non-profit is to put themselves out of work. Everyone who’s doing right by non-profiteering is trying to get our distribution away from needing the work of the non-profiteers. We’re making up for things that shouldn’t be as they are. If we do our job, then we won’t be needed anymore. How many parables and lessons carry a central figure as a traveling teacher whose stint is brief but more powerful than 13-17 years of an educational system?

So six months, maybe twelve, to put myself out of work. Then forget it.

But in six days, mark this, it may already be too late.

Let’s go, time’s a-wastin’.

2007, I miss you already.

I don’t often do full-scale year-in-review pieces, but I have always enjoyed reading them. In particular, my work-friend Pete’s 2007 in review was particularly striking to me. I liked his idea of top ten moments of the year, little snapshots of what will really be remembered about the annum. Other things that come to mind include Dave Barry’s annual absurd skewering of the year on a month-by-month basis, or even summation montages on news television (do they still do these?).

I had my own way of reviewing the year on the BP - a little synopsis page that led to my 5 favorite books read during and movies of the year. Here’s 2005, for example. But you’ll note I haven’t even done 2006’s yet, let alone 2007. Not that I don’t intend to still do those pages for 2006 (and 2007), but that’s sort of part of a larger theme in itself. (If you’re wondering, I still can’t discern which would be the top book I read in ‘06 between The Picture of Dorian Gray, A Man Without a Country, and The Year of Magical Thinking. Meanwhile, ‘07 pretty clearly seems to belong to Crime and Punishment.)

So I have undertaken a year-in-review process for a year that dawned with much potential, seemed sort of disappointing and drifty overall, and then (upon this review) looked pretty good. I’m still sorting out the impact of just that process, let alone the whole year. But I think a chronological thing might be better than a ranking. I flagged about 18 moments, some of them days long and others seeming fleeting seconds, that will really stay with me. But a year is not a Book List or a Movie List, so we’ll see how this looks…

2007 Year in Review

Overall Themes
Before getting into a chronology of the year, it seems there are some overall improvements that come to mind in 2007 (as well as disappointments, but I’ll get to those later). Among these are many basic steps that were taken to improve quality of life - some deliberate and some rather passive. These included (1) reading more, (2) getting into tennis with Emily, (3) staying in much better touch with my parents (not that we haven’t been in close contact for a long time), and (4) following baseball more closely by attending and watching more games (and the M’s having a decent season). The other two big highlights that stand out are (5) the transition of this blog (and maintaining it) after Introspection petered out and (6) managing to hang on at Glide despite a tremendous amount of tribulation there. Implicit in this last one are concepts of my making myself somewhat indispensable (including a mid-year promotion) without having the job overwhelm me or other efforts. And since I like sevens better than sixes (7 for ‘07), I’m going to say that the last overall theme of positivity is (7) maintaining Duck and Cover for a full year, while changing its release schedule to better correspond to my life.

Nuevo Year
In January, the year dawned at the Tank (my decade-plus appellation for Fish’s parents’ house), which seemed like a long-standing tradition at the time, but is (with the passage of time) notable in itself because it was probably my last new year rung in at the Tank. I can’t give you an exact count right off the bat of how many years of my life began there, but it’s a high number. Start counting the other memories and it gets a little overwhelming. While there again in December, we all realized that the Tank was the last remaining of any of our close Nuevo friends’ original houses from when we all went to high school. Everyone’s parents had moved. And now Fish’s will be joining the pack, in all probability. In any case, this new year was marked by games of Mafia, snow, and endless speculation about flight delays. No small part of this highlight is the epic snowstorm, one of the largest in decades in Albuquerque, that blanketed the city I love in my favorite kind of weather for days on end.

On 15 January, I hiked Point Reyes with Gris & Anna on MLK Day, one of those stand-out hikes on a pristine day where all the animals seem to be willing to let humans seamlessly integrate as fellow creatures. We talked much of the future and the past and the day seemed like the perfect complement to a new year. Incredibly chilled, we had a warm Mexican meal in a local restaurant on our way back and much hilarity about milkshakes.

Never Forget
February brought the dawn of a short-lived but intense era of Mep Report videos, starting on 2 February with the release of 1-31-07 Never Forget. This lampoon of the events of 1/31, in which the city of Boston collectively mistook hastily-erected AquaTeen HungerForce advertisements for terrorism, was an idea that almost made me return home while walking to work so I could start on it. Instead, we (Greg, Russ, and I) stayed up all night that night to complete a masterwork of humorous tribute. The video was discussed in the Boston Globe online, was our first successful foray onto the front page of a section of the infamous Digg.com, made several YouTube charts in the first 24 hours, and has (of this writing) been viewed 63,548 times. It was one of those breathtakingly fun experiences that seemed to bubble up out of nowhere. Less than a year later, Russ would start using skills he was demonstrating here to pick-up a great job with Boing-Boing TV.

A borderline highlight is 17 February’s launch of One Million Blogs for Peace. This is borderline because while it was exciting and has done well, it has been yet another example of me starting an online project that is very high on maintenance and sets altogether too-lofty expectations. It was really exciting at the time, and now seems like a key component of a laundry list of why my post-collegiate life has been hard to control.

A no-doubter, despite lasting only a half-hour at most, is my walk home in the rain from a movie seen on the night of 24 February. The sky opened up and dumped on me for a 10-block walk, but I was suited up with hat and jackets in preparation and got to just be in the storm. It was one of a few transcendent moments in nature for the year, one of those moments that one feels perfectly aligned with everything.

Goodbyes
On 11 March, we went to Clovis for Emily’s paternal grandmother’s birthday, finding her surprisingly lucid and in good spirits. But another transcendent moment was found when Paul IV (Em’s eldest brother) hauled out digitally salvaged home videos from a trip taken across the country and then on to Italy over 50 years prior. The memories flooded back to her grandmother almost immediately, and she kept pointing out people and places long seemingly forgotten. She was enthralled, and we were all moved. This highlight has gained significance in the passage of time, since it was one of the last really lucid moments we had with her and her condition has since begun to fade. Knowing she had this moment then is great comfort to us.

On 29 March, Emily finally departed PIRG, perhaps my most profoundly joyful day of the entire year. The day itself was ambivalent and strange, in part because of that institution’s incredible ability to continue to disrespect one of its brightest and strongest workers in its history. At the time, there was still a good deal of Stockholm Syndrome being manifest in Em’s perspective, but by now in the full light of time and others’ reassurances, she has come to see how poorly they treated her and how cultish much of their behavior is. We still have friends at PIRG, and most every person I know seems to have worked there for at least a few days, but their methods are medieval. Exhibit A in why the ends don’t justify the means. Putting years of struggle with work behind her was a major step for Emily and for the two of us as a whole.

So it Goes
On 7 April, we attended the wedding of Mesco & Afsheen, to much fanfare and jubilation. It was a great wedding and a really fun trip to Atlanta overall. I got to see the fabled whale sharks on a plane (no longer on the plane), see ‘Lisha before her jaunt to Malawi, and hang out for some quality time with Mesco, Afsheen, and friends of hers from bizarro-Brandeis. And there was much Waffle House. One of those almost unfettered great trips, all told.

Five days later, on 12 April, just hours after the death of beloved author Kurt Vonnegut, Russ, Greg and I had pulled another all-nighter (to be fair, I don’t think Greg made it the whole night) to release So it Goes. (Kurt Vonnegut 1922 - 2007), a tribute which at this point has even passed the previous video in YouTube views (67,445). It makes most people cry and demonstrates that while we’re pretty funny guys, we may have a greater talent for meaning and mourning. Before the phenomenon was over, we made the front page of Boing-Boing.net (a larger accomplishment before they’d even heard of Russ), Lily Vonnegut (Kurt’s daughter) ended up sending us an e-mail, and most YouTube commenters admitted to crying every time they watched it. This is probably the greatest success of the Mep Team of all-time (collectively), to date.

LA Story
A late May visit to LA was one of the best such SoCal visits of all-time, and really enabled me putting a cap on what is nearly always a dismal April/May season for me. Highlights included a baseball game, reconnecting with the LA friends (Jake, Mesco & Afsheen), and a candidate for Conversation of the Year, in which I caught up Russ on the facets of my story that I had somehow overlooked telling him in the midst of us becoming friends back in college. We didn’t manage to get to the Casino for poker, but I think that was the right call in the end. The fires of Venice Beach reminded us all that life is far more transient and malleable than we would ever normally let ourselves admit.

A New Form of Story-Telling
Even before the emergence of this blog, early June brought a rare and strangely enjoyable opportunity to moderate a game of online Mafia/Werewolf for the APDA Forum community. A Forum crash may have wiped out the record of this game forever, which reminds me somehow of those sand mandalas that Buddhist monks create and then destroy for the purpose of demonstrating the impermanence and stunning beauty of our time on this planet. Not to say that “The Witches of Parliam Village,” which lasted a fortnight and was the longest Forum thread ever to that time, was as beautiful as a mandala, but I really enjoyed it. It reminded me of some of the aspects I most deeply miss about debate: intellectual play with many other intellectuals. That’s probably the most fundamental thing I feel I lack on a daily basis post-college.

Oregon Revisited
Emily’s & my trip to Oregon was probably the dominant event of 2007, coming squarely mid-year (July) and throwing my perspective off its axis. I had already been drawing conclusions about the necessity of living more by direction and less by momentum, but this trip was able to throw my perspective into sharp relief against the backdrop of where my consciousness really blossomed. Revisiting (and showing Em) the scenes of all those “formative years” dredged up memories good, bad, and ugly, and brought me to a precipice of self-examination that was necessary to attempt progress. Ultimately, it seems clear that I am still feeling the reverberations of this experience, and still have many changes to be made or clarified. And it wasn’t all heavy weather - much of the trip was just a great deal of fun, as Oregon in the summer usually is.

Old Friends
In August, Lauren Cusick came to visit us and I was surprised at how well we all reconnected (and how quickly). While Lauren and Emily had always been close, she and I have probably never connected so much as we did this trip, making it an unanticipatedly great time and strengthening friendships all around. There are many people who I’ve always been confident that I can reconnect with immediately after extended times apart, and adding a new person to that list was especially good in light of how few friends I’ve made since college.

Prius Present
While September dawned difficult and a long-planned visit from my parents did not go entirely as planned (with Emily having to return home for a funeral), it facilitated the fruition of a plan I’d been developing for months. To wit, I was able to give Emily a blue (in probably her favorite precise shade of blue, no less) 2007 Prius for her birthday with her having absolutely no idea this was coming. I literally bought the car and parked it a few blocks from our house and invited her on a walk of no seeming importance, only to spring the car on her as a birthday surprise. Her reaction took a long time to recover from shock and meld into some sort of happiness. Neither of us are materialists or ever really make big purchases, but with the amount she’s driving for her new job and the improved safety and fuel economy (not to mention car color!), this was sort of a no-brainer. And the fact that months of planning led to a perfectly carried surprise was essential to the joy.

A Magical October
Most of you may think that I overrate the significance of October, but this one was largely demonstrative of why I do. It began with a Weakerthans concert experience that I can do no better than to point you to the original post to describe. It’s not like meeting John K. Samson in itself was a huge deal (though it was awfully cool), but the way this whole night unfolded seemed emblematic of, again, being exactly where I should be.

Less than a week later, Em and I were in Vermont to witness Stina & Dav’s wedding, which proved to carry its own multifarious magic. I may be coming off as a sucker for weddings in this review, but seeing two of my very close friends find, establish, and codify their happiness is one of the best experiences I could imagine. And most all of my friends have jettisoned the traditions they don’t like in favor of establishing a new set of traditions, which is the only way to go if you ask me. As with the prior wedding, there were key friends to reconnect with here (primarily Ariel and Kate), and the memories that eight of us shared in the waning night at the reception hall, restaurant, and fireplace were beyond profound and utterly timeless.

Less than a week after that, I departed for a 40+ hour water-fast, most of it in the woods of Marin. While not a perfect experience, it was part of a continuing series of grounding exercises to remind me of the life I want to be leading and the path I wish to be walking. As a continuing part of the fallout from Oregon, I have been reminded this year that simply being happy, wandering a course without obvious pitfalls, and holding key aspirations is not sufficient to make a decent life. Those three things are all good, to be sure, but a larger component of deliberate movement has to be exerted to bring everything together and make it sing. I’m clearly not all the way there yet, but the quest is joined at this point and I am mostly keeping my focus on what needs to be done. Keeping all this together in the big picture is one of the key challenges for 2008.

Taco Time
When I first made this list of key events in the year, November was the only 2007 month to lack a single highlight moment. Maybe it’s too recent and was too sloggy to really count. My fatigue with my job hit an all-time high and I came tremendously close to giving notice. Day faded into day, leaving me tired and bereft. The only thing I can bring together is a night shortly before Thanksgiving in the San Francisco Chipotle (oddly I seem to have a lot of revelations there) on New Montgomery, between the Palace Hotel and the Academy of Art. It led to this post about my history with Thanksgiving and more context with the larger picture. Of course, this was quickly followed with a brush with materialism and standard America that made me want to move forthwith to Bhutan. So let’s just leave it at Chipotle.

Perseverance and Rejuvenation
December, though recent, already stands out as a month of great highs and lows, but lows which seemed triumphant despite their difficulty. The lows were mostly embodied in having to run the two largest events of our year at work in the midst of a terrible and debilitating illness. There is something telling, perhaps, in that both of my big sicknesses this year were marked by not being able to rest (and thus making them much worse)… the other was debate Nationals at Vassar in April. I simply couldn’t be absent for most all of the days, throwing my voice out twice as I tried to keep things organized and on-point. Fish came to visit as I was reaching a psyhcoemotional low for the whole year and helped salvage me from the worst, even making a big contribution of time and effort the day of our first major holiday event. Getting through those events successfully, hearing from old-timers that it was the best they’d ever been run, was about the biggest thing (on paper, at least) that I “accomplished” in ‘07.

Then it was time to launch what I have dubbed the 2007-2008 EmStor Winter World Tour, with quick whirlwind trips to Albuquerque, back to Berkeley, and then to Fresno/Shaver Lake. I saw seemingly infinite numbers of folks, almost all in quick succession of hellos and goodbyes. I got a bit more time than the average with my parents in Nuevo, with Beth in Berkeley, and with the Garin Clan at Fresno/Shaver. Not enough time with snow, really, in any of the events, but these trips combined to provide a restful recuperation period for the year, and a chance to touch base with many people, however briefly, and connect.

The Downsides
I don’t want to dwell on the biggest disappointments of 2007, but it seems like a few are worth noting. Primarily (1) not writing enough, (2) not paring enough from the schedule, and (3) getting sick at Nationals. The middle factor there may be a bit of a red herring, because at least in 2007 I embarked on the concept of paring things instead of just taking on more and adding projects. But I’m still overall disappointed with how much has been left hanging. And most of this is online and thus sort of silly… a bunch of projects that I “feel” I should maintain despite them not being an important or quality use of time. The temptations of so many chapter ones, the “instinct to nurse every idea to health.” That line just skewers me every time, it’s exactly my experience with projects and opportunities. So I have to continue to fight that instinct, to distill time and its expenditures into the refined projects that have the best chance, the most upside. Which is very closely related to the not writing enough, of course. And getting sick at Nationals was just unfortunate timing, because I didn’t get much chance to hang out with people, I felt cruddy when I did, and I still had to do a good deal of work. And I was sneezing and wheezing through key outrounds, which just can’t have been fun to argue toward.

Looking Ahead…
At this point, I don’t really have time or energy to contemplate 2008 beyond what I’ve already done. I find it all but inevitable that the trip to India, now a scant 11 days away, will set the tone for this year in my life. If a mere trip to Oregon can bend 2007 in a new direction, one can only imagine what my first real international travel in more than 12 years (Scotland so doesn’t count) will do. And that trip is so different than any prior experience that I have that there is simply no point in trying to anticipate it or build expectations. It will be completely fresh and unexpected. And the rest will follow.

It’s the last day of the year called 2007. I am the last one awake in a cabin at Shaver Lake, California. Most all of the Garin Clan is here, save one component family. It is late, and there are less than 24 hours remaining in this annum.

I am writing mostly to check in. It’s been a difficult last few weeks of the year, and this blog in particular has demonstrated that with sparse updates which bear out the frustration of the time. Being sick was debilitating and working through it doubly so. Wrestling with the nature of my job and some of the people I work with wrecked much of my motivation to create or explain.

There is hope, as there always must be, for 2008. There’s a reason we pile the expectant and expected holidays in the middle of winter, and it has very little to do with the weather. Here indeed, we came for the snow, but there is little about. You can call it global warming, but the snow in Boston was allegedly record-breaking for December, they tell me. There’s a reason that people started calling global warming “climate change” instead. The mistake that the last 12 generations of weather-doomsayers made was predicting that things would go in one direction or the other. Saying that things will go in both directions saves us from any contrary evidence. Even the scientific method has been beaten back by propaganda and marketing spin. At least in 2005, everyone banked on more devastating hurricanes. That was a sure bet for 2006-7.

But nothing is sure, as that does a pale job of illustrating. This was meant to be a personal check-in and I’m already off on my high horse about political issues. And ones most of you don’t agree with me on, to boot. That’s no way to end a year. Maybe I’ve forgotten how to write these things. Or maybe the laptop in a foreign house is just no place to be coming back to a familiar venue.

My Dad and I have a running debate about how many units of housing there are per person in the United States. Or, hopefully, the debate is about how many people there are per housing unit. I guess that’s part of the debate. Regardless, it has occurred to me already on this trip that we have utterly forgotten vacation rentals, timeshares, and other such pseudo-units in calculating the equation. How, after years of Pismos and Aspen (PIRG) and a couple cabins at Shaver (Garins), not to mention an entire childhood on the Oregon coast (Seaside) this factor eluded me is beyond me. But it’s not beyond me anymore - vacation rentals must be a huge part of the equation. Em said NPR told her it was in the “high millions” a few days back. Borrowed housing, borrowed time. It’s a great opportunity, like “being in the Real World” noted one of the Clan as we entered the house. Most of my readers won’t need the explanation that this was a reference to a TV show. The Real World is a TV show. Being there is like being on TV. Are we getting somewhere?

Of course the real world is not a TV show, and little could be less like a TV show than the real world (Brandzel’s theory of my life duly excepted). But that pioneer of reality television has brought us an ever-cascading series of series that package the life of aspiration into narrower and more expensive boxes for people. It’s not to say that what we’re doing here (here, as in at the cabin) isn’t great, but it gets me thinking late into the night. How long has the American economic bubble of housing and consumerism been kept afloat by houses intended only for brief visits? And where do these fall in the overall picture as it slides down the screen?

Already three legs into what I tongue-in-cheekily dubbed the EmStor Winter World Tour 2007-2008, I realize I’ve reported on naught so far. It’s been a whirl of hellos and goodbyes, lights on trees and in bags and in skies and on screens. I can no more recount the details on this particular night than I can attempt to sum up the year that falters and fades this very eve. I will say I have had a great time so far and expect much more. That goes for the Tour and the year, and perhaps every day therein.

My expectations rarely are as well developed as they are on this particular cusp. I think it comes with getting older, being a little more conservative, feeling like on has a little more to lose and things to really hope for. I guess that’s the opposite of at least part of the popular perception, but it’s where I’ve been for awhile. Youth is as free as the openness of the future, which tends toward the vast. With age comes a more finite vision, and that specificity lends itself to careful prodding of the future, squeezing it and shaking it like so many wrapped gifts, and having something fixed in mind when tearing open the package. Watching my nieces and nephew this Christmas, I was reminded of my own time when I simply tore at the package in blind blank anticipation of what lay within, letting the surprise hit me at once instead of feeling it out.

I’m sort of walking away from a chance to do that now (or technically soon), instead choosing the more sedate (but wiser?) method of analyzing, holding on, weighing, and deciding. There’s no telling whether that’s the right call (and this fact, in itself, gives me a bit of that bald open future rush), but I feel confident that this is the decision that leaves me the least likelihood of immediate and irreparable regret. What a sad standard that is. It sounds so safe, so sedentary, so moderate. But I used to weigh debates by the better worst-case scenario. And how better to view that than through regret? And yes, I must dance this cryptic dance a few more days until someone gives me the official signal to speak. But many of you know already.

I think this post may exhaust every category I have for this blog. At the very least, it’s exhausting me a bit. Or maybe that’s just my age, or the significance of a year (which I’ve always revered), or the cancer seeping into my legs from this laptop.

You already know I don’t look to 2008 with the aura of political hope. Many do, and I bid you all the best of luck. How you will react to the inevitable crowing of Queen Hillary I from the House of Clinton remains to be seen. Had two royal families ever conspired to take turns with each other and steal the word “demos” from the Greeks, we may never have had experiments in voting and the current widespread form of government in the Western world. But they weren’t as clever as the modern plutocrats, and so we get to test the experiment a little late in the day. I think anyone who knows me knows why I can’t stand Hillary Clinton (well beyond the royalty thing). She will probably start as many unending wars as her predecessor, combining the general Bush/Clinton hawkishness with a unique desire to prove that women aren’t “weak”. And her ability to prove that being someone’s wife is a higher credential than any other experience, leadership, or character for a woman….? That will set everyone back a good few decades.

Whether she gets to kick around Mike Huckabee or Mitt Romney or Rudy Giuliani will probably not be decided till summer, or whenever the Republicans are having their convention. While Hillary will lock things up with a 5-point outright win in Iowa (she has a role-model martyr without having to die, after all), the Republicans are facing a scenario I first anticipated over a year ago with all of the colliding early primaries. They seem almost destined to have the first undecided (read: meaningful) convention since the infamous Chicago ‘68 sham put on by the Democrats. Rudy’s fading and the Huckster’s coming on strong, and Mitt may enter the convention with the most delegates but the startling reality that the Republicans will never ever nominate a Mormon to be their horse. The party bosses are most likely to close in behind Giuliani, depending on how 9/11-crazed people are and just how many decomposing corpses are exhumed from Rudy’s closet. Huckabee will possibly be standing out as a clean bit of contrast and the only mainline traditional Republican in the bunch, so he could end up with it. But McCain has enough followers and Thompson enough watchers to almost guarantee that this convention will see no one close to the magic number going in. It will be exciting to watch, and even more interesting to see the various implosions of the party as they try to consolidate and can’t and end up spending months running 2-3 people against Queen Hillary I.

The most interesting thing to see will be whether the Republicans, after the shellacking of ‘08, will be able to convince King Jeb I to return the favor King Bill I dealt King George I and jump in 4 years early in ‘12. Unlikely, though… it’s far more dignified to let the monarchs have 8 years to reign. Even if it turns out the way King George II did.

So, no, my hope for ‘08 is not political in nature. It is wrapped up instead with projects and possibilities, travel and even turmoil. 2007 has been good, but has felt like a long extended period of practice. 2008 will hopefully feel a bit more of a game. With any luck, that would leave 2009 as the beginnings of a real showcase or tournament.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I don’t really do resolutions, being open to the future and all. Anyway, if a resolution occurs to you, you should probably start doing it right away if it’s a good one. Which means that only 1/52nd of the time that really leads to a New Year’s Resolution. Anyway, the last thing I need is to be making more commitments and promises at a time like this. Let’s just agree to hope for today and leave it at that.

Keep checking back, because I really owe you more details. As they say on the TV shows, “stay tuned”…

My Dad and I have a running debate about whether there’s reason for hope these days or not. In general, not in specific. We buck all kinds of generational assumptions by him being the one who believes there’s hope, and me being the one who’s starting to think everyone’s soul would be better off not having Earth as an option anymore.

I know, I know.

But hope isn’t dead yet. Though, if I’m going to re