Walking home from the soup kitchen this afternoon, it had started to rain lightly to moderately as I traversed the lonely streets of New Brunswick. The crowd was thin throughout, most preferring to slog through midday drizzle in the stressful carriage of metal motor vehicles, many of which skidded and swerved to dodge the few pedestrians venturing from the newly slick sidewalks. Patrons of the soup kitchen gradually gave way to students and young families who in turn yielded to business lunchers and merchants as the quality of the neighborhood improved around my steady tired feet.

Amidst fleeting unbespoken eye-contact with the variety of east-coasters I approached and then passed, I began to look at the rain itself as it was progressing to the ground. Rather than falling in the expected uniform pull straight toward the earth, I noticed it was often diagonal or at least akimbo from predictably perpendicular. More interestingly, there were particular drops that refused to fall at all, seeming to remain parallel to terra firma as they flew through the air. Were they bouncing off of other drops and arcing horizontal? Were they light enough to catch air and parachute away from freefall? Were they merely windblown in brief detour from their inevitable regression to the planet?

I couldn’t follow any one drop closely enough to truly see. All I could detect in the glint of the half-gray light was that there were many of these drops that refused to cooperate with terminal velocity. Not a majority, not even a sizable sum. But enough to not be coincidence, to almost be a trend.

Not long after, I was passing a church undergoing renovations, its spire scaffolded and the back of its roof under close examination for presumed repair. This particular house of worship houses a small graveyard in a three-sided enclosure facing the street I was walking, holding no more than a few dozen graves of apparent age and significance. One of the workers was late to join his companions, dashed past the dark wrought-iron bars and cut directly across the gravestones and the precious soil before them, tamping grass with long wet footsteps before the mossy etched monuments. At first I was shocked, my personal sensibility incensed at the wanton display of disrespect. But upon almost immediate reflection, I all but heard the soft whispers of the graves’ own occupants, their tingle at brief human contact as the land far above their heads was disturbed by life. As though they were calling, the aching empty bones of past souls, for some small solace in the possibility of movement, of connection, of something waking to penetrate their six feet of loam and half-inch of wood.

The man who did the dashing was laughing as he’d done it, literally ribbing his two co-workers as they razzed him for his tardiness. The trickles of mirth barely made it across the street to me, but I could hear them echoing down the rabbit burrows and earthworm tunnels toward a set of people far lonelier than me.

There are those among us already mostly in the ground. In a rush to get there perhaps. Whose craving for the steady predictable progress toward the inevitable destination overwhelms any observation or enjoyment of the process of falling. It is no fun to fall, mostly. It’s scary and cold and we’re separated from the other drops and the whole thing is over far too soon, before we know it. Bounce with me, fellow droplets. Collide, glide, fly. Let us strive to buck the trend once more before the end.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

It’s hard to believe that I’m already in the process of counting down to my longest trip to New Mexico in nearly a decade. In just a shade over a week, I’ll be winging my way westward to spend almost a month in Albuquerque and the surrounding environs, making undoubtedly endless appearances at the Frontier and Waffle House as I try to more thoroughly get my bearings on what my future looks like. Certainly I’ll be looking at Albuquerque with the new eyes of one searching for a new destination within the year to come. No doubt the place I loosely call my hometown will be on the shortlist for the future, alongside Seattle, Flagstaff, Denver, and probably a couple other cities.

Been working on a project that’s almost certainly going to come out shortly, maybe even in the next 24 hours. It’s another quiz that isn’t the Song Quiz, as I believe I alluded to a few days back. If optimally timed, the quiz would have been released in the early morning hours today, sandwiched neatly between the advent of the WikiLeaks story and what people colloquially call CyberMonday. Most of this year’s CyberMonday articles seem to be decrying the phenomenon as hype, something that never seems to be written about terrorism or national security threats. I don’t know if there’s a lot more Internet traffic today, but I do know that Romania seems to be really into the BP in the last few days. Hi, Romanians! Hope you keep enjoying the Book Quiz.

I’ve also enjoyed a lingering Facebook debate about the WikiLeaks article I wrote and about the phenomenon in general. I was sensing a sea-change in perception when I wrote the piece, but it seems I underestimated the emotional attachment of so many Americans to the sanctity of their government, no matter how far said government strays from its ideals or stated purpose. I think the debate has been robust and fair, but I am still a bit personally dismayed by the idea that almost anything pernicious could be revealed about this country and a large swath of its people would condemn the revelation rather than the initial act itself. All I can try to point people back to is that the principle behind democracy conceptually requires the informed consent of the governed. If the only way our government functions is by concealing reality, we no longer have informed consent, and thus we aren’t a democracy. It’s hard to be a beacon of democracy when one isn’t one.

Maybe I should just skip the west altogether and strike out for Ireland or the UK or something. Not that I’d ultimately wind up vastly more satisfied with those governments, but there’s at least some humility and sobriety to the general conduct of those countries. It’s probably hard to exist in modern Europe without a little more awareness of the balance of things as they really are. Then again, the last thing I need right now is further isolation. Would a small town in Ireland accept me as a novelty, a distant great-grandson come home to write and work? Probably not work – and here’s the real rub: an inability to economically sustain oneself in a place even more economically troubled than the good old USA. Probably better off building up a cache of cash first in the west.

If you like the Facebook debates, it’s a good week for debating. Monday and Wednesday feature two of our three public campus debates this semester, on green energy and vegetarianism, respectively. Basically none of you are in New Brunswick and most of you are horrendously busy, but it’s worth offering the invitation anyway. Debate tournaments aren’t especially well designed for outside observation, but both of these events will be, and there’s even cash on the line in the former one! The latter is for the hearts and minds of college students and my team is thus arguing against one of the fundamental principles of my own life. Of course, debate itself and its ability to endorse the core ideals of the enemy in a convincing way is, itself, a core value. So it’s all worth it.

Would that said core value were more broadly accepted by the American public, no? If the idea of making the case unthinkable for the sake of argument were standard practice rather than unpatriotic treason? It would be a lot harder to dismiss other rational agents as crazy, a lot harder to accept ourselves as infallible.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

The greatest American hero may not even be an American.

It is hard to overestimate the importance of WikiLeaks, already perhaps the most controversial website in the history of the relatively fledgling Internet. If you’ve been near any source of either news or Internet, you’re aware of the fact that said site, despite enduring a brazen and blatantly government-sponsored hack-attack, has released almost innumerable documents from the American diplomatic corps to the world at large. And the results are shocking.

Or they would be shocking, were there not a sort of open understanding that the duplicity, underhandedness, and overt dishonesty ubiquitous throughout the documented correspondence was par for the American course. Or suspected to be so, wherein lies a key significance in WikiLeaks’ recent release. While most of us have long assumed that America’s far-flung diplomats are spies in pretty suits, we haven’t known this. And perhaps most importantly, we haven’t known that they will openly and flagrantly admit it when behind closed doors. But now we do. Now the whole world does.

The reason America conducts such horrendously disingenuous “diplomacy” with foes and allies alike, collecting information to hoard, privately manipulate, and release in spun nuggets destined for spoon-fed genetically-modified consumption, is because it can. One could argue that I’m picking on America and that everyone conducts their diplomacy this way. Possibly, to an extent. One could argue that the only thing that makes America different is its collected disparity in power and expected influence makes its scale of magnitude greater, but its kind of actions no different. Perhaps.

But again, there is an essential significance in whether the American government itself, those conducting the double-dealing and shady gunboat work, believe they are different. And here I think it’s obvious that they do. I doubt anyone feels that America is just another run-of-the-mill realpolitik power broker arranging blandly predictable self-interest while they churn through a brief few years in the limelight before an inevitable decline. Anymore than I believe that every politician who feels compelled to punctuate their stump speeches with references to America as the greatest country that ever was, is, or will be thinks that they’re just spouting platitudes. I genuinely feel most agents of American power believe in the ideas they claim to espouse, be they American supremacy in the form of dominance, moral superiority, or even advanced idealism and inspiration.

And thus WikiLeaks is essential in breaking the myth. In holding the mirror up to our little self-important empire gone mad and forcing us to take a good long look. The fallout of the latest WikiLeaks release is almost incalculable – indeed most press outlets who’ve read and are slowly releasing the information therein are tripping over themselves to report on how many negotiations may radically shift, jobs may be lost, positions compromised, dinner table conversations become decidedly more awkward. In their rush to speculate on all these changes, they’ve overlooked perhaps the most impressive accomplishment so far, which is restoring the dignity and sanctity of the fourth estate back to itself. Suddenly the press is reporting real news. Not manufactured droplets of distilled calculus, but actual raw opinions and facts as gleaned from primary sources. The Internet has not eclipsed the mainstream press; it has saved it.

On a broader level, what WikiLeaks signals (in conjunction with other elements of a free Internet) is a whole new rubric for evaluating life, leadership, and the aim of society. Much hand-wringing and neck-scratching has been displayed in reaction to the fear of ever-shrinking privacy that the Internet writ large portends, and WikiLeaks is surely the fire-tinged spearhead of that movement, slicing straight to the heart of our most divine of private bovines, the National Security files. But what people forget about Big Brother and the symbolic warnings of privacy-loss of our past is that they were laden with information imbalances. Big Brother did not broadcast everyone’s true thoughts and feelings, including high government ministers and Big Brother himself, on a full-screen wall in each person’s apartment. Big Brother was a receptacle for information, a collector, but refused to divulge anything except the most specialized and crystallized fact-bites designed to mislead people and maintain order. Indeed, the disappearance of most individuals was never reported, nor were the true mathematical data that indicated the society’s decline, let alone any reality of history. Truth was monopolized by the government for its own private functions.

Contrast this with the kind of world that the Internet and WikiLeaks are foreshadowing. Where the government is no more illuminated a place than the average computer screen in any given home (or out on a park bench). Where the public has just as much information about the private dealings of their representative or diplomat or executive leader as said person has about them. Maybe more, given the increased scrutiny commensurate with such an individual’s position. Where the age-old question of “who guards the guardians?” is answered with unanimous assent.

Yes, we may all be a bit up in each others’ business and there may be a tinge more trouble with narcissism and navel-gazing. But in exchange for this, we get a government and a society not dependent on duplicity to grease the wheels of interaction. Instead, ideas and thoughts are exchanged honestly, and one’s private misgivings and dalliances will be shared, one way or the other, enabling a freer, more honest form of communication from the beginning. Ranging from the everyday personal encounter all the way up to the highest-level negotiations between governments, businesses, and the public they allegedly serve. It is hard to imagine the flimsy Bush-administration falsifications that justified opening the Iraq War standing up to a foe like WikiLeaks. Privacy begone!

There are only two salient arguments I’ve fielded against this kind of busting open the doors of what most people consider a right (though one whose only alleged enshrinement in the Constitution was constructed for the purpose of allowing abortion in an intellectually dubious fashion). One is that it will create a culture of shaming where people feel bad about things they shouldn’t feel bad about. For example, if you can’t hide the fact that you’re gay in Alabama, you will face undeserved recrimination. The problem here, of course, is that you’ll also know how many closeted bigots in Alabama are also hiding the fact that they’re gay, despite preaching regularly to the contrary or heading to Washington to pass hypocritical legislation. In a culture without privacy, objections to reasonable human proclivities would dry up pretty quickly when it became blatantly obvious how many skeletons people had shacked up in their own back rooms. Will there still be recrimination for people making actually bad decisions in their past? Sure. But should there be? Of course. And if you prefer forgiveness and “starting fresh”, odds are that enough people will have blemishes on their pasts to want to create a certain limit on how much shame they’re going to toss on everyone else. Which will make it a lot like current society, but with a lot less anxiety, hiding, and waiting for shoes to drop. And perhaps a little more human understanding.

The other argument is that there are just some innately private things that are “icky” like copulation or using the bathroom and there’s no need to broadcast these things. Fair enough. Sure. That’s true. But honestly, if that’s the only drawback and in exchange we never again go to war under false pretenses or are lied to by our supposed friends and confidants? I’ll take it. There’s also probably a reasonable moratorium that people could self-regulate on overly icky things anyway, as long as they weren’t cloaking the essential moral facts of whatever ickiness they were up to.

So, honestly, what’s not to like? Give me a reason to fear Julian Assange and his small collection of truly heroic risk-takers and whistleblowers leading us into a new age of information without limit or secrecy. Maybe you like America more than most prior global superpowers, you fear that our shameful decline ushered in by the exposure of blinding hypocrisy will yield to a force with tighter clamps on human freedom. Perhaps, I guess, but I’m starting to think this movement, centered around the Internet, is a bit like Pandora’s box. I don’t think anything’s going back in. I have a running debate with some of my friends about whether there’s a way to effectively shut down the web, and while I think there somehow must be, it’s hard to imagine it working in any top-down way. The best way to kill the Internet has already been tried – cluttering it up with the same drivel and nonsense that clouds the mainstream media and the day-to-day perspective of most of its users. Distract with stories of celebrity and excess while the real deeds go down. Replace blogs with Facebook and Facebook with Twitter and Twitter with something that only allows you to express yourself in a 10×10 pixel graphic.

WikiLeaks isn’t just a possible antidote to that – it is the one all-encompassing cure. With one large transmission of information, it blows the cover off all the distraction, replaces soft news with something very real, and overloads byte-limits with one of the single largest information dumps in human history. One could spend a lifetime absorbing the information in this release alone. No doubt, someone will.

While they’re doing that, our country will be making an all-important choice. Either adapt and change, accepting a more limited range of power in exchange for making good on some of the initial promises of its alleged ideals. Or fight to the death for a world that is disappearing and take its place amongst failed empires and head-cases of the past.

The choice, at least in some small part, is all of ours.

Not much to say today except that I’ve concluded the day after Thanksgiving may be far better than the day of. No, not because of the shopping. I’m not sure I’m going to buy (or accept) any gifts this year. Just because, if one’s not tied up in shopping or being conscripted into working on the day after Thanksgiving, it has all the same advantages of the holiday itself with even less inkling of the pressure or expectation. We spent the whole day lounging, mostly eating, playing board games, eating, reading, eating, talking, and eating. I think I’ve actually gained weight this trip.

Anyway, another installment of my recently increasing proclivity to turn this into a photolog:

Storey is obsessed with leaves, vol. 47.

I just liked that a big van with “Press” in the window was parked so close to a funeral parlor.

The inscrutable sign on the wallside is advertising cheap and safe parking, presumably on the shell of steel beams.

Avoid.

Crisp skyline.

The trash almost made it.

Ben always did like turkeys.

Storey is obsessed with leaves, vol. 49.

Tiers.

Industrial/Waste.

Fish!

Snow!

Heavier snow.

Ariel & Michael’s new fireplace.

Before…

…and after!

First Thanksgiving as a married couple.

Boggle!

Fish =! amused.

Food, glorious food.

Happy cooks.

Risk!

The game gets intense.

As a brief postscript, Fish wants to ask you all what the odds are of getting T-Pain to help out with a cleverly written and imagined spoof of the ever-fabled “I’m On a Boat” web video phenomenon. If you’re not pretty sure he’ll go along, you’re a pessimist in his book. Fish’s, not T-Pain’s.

It’s my first Thanksgiving in Philadelphia since 1998, wherein I stayed with my friend Kate and I met her rollicking family and quotations for the ages were first coined. I’m friends with Kate again, after a bit of a hiatus, so these memories are even nicer and fresher than they used to be and make being back in Philly for the holiday that much cooler. I’m just glad we don’t have a Thanksgiving parade to be in like 12 years ago. In no small part because it was snowing when I awoke this morning.

It’s disorienting to wake up in an unfamiliar place, but doubly so when the sky above is gray and white and mottled with the aura of inscrutability. And while most aspects of this place (Fish’s now longtime home in South Philly) are not unfamiliar, I am unaccustomed to staying downstairs or having it look like a place that’s presentable. I’ve been choosing the couch over the room I spent much of August in, in part perhaps because of that, but also because it’s such a novelty for Fish’s long torn-up place to have a couch. And I think I feel more at home on couches anyway, it keeps me in better touch with transience, makes the adjustments easier. Waking up in a bed unfamiliar can be even more uncertain.

For some reason at Thanksgiving, I’m always tempted to review the last few years’ worth of the days or several. I feel like this blog itself is littered with references to summarative statements about the holiday and my own experiences with same. I’ve been through the political mixed feelings, the eventual distillation of the meaning of this holiday being able to transcend its dubious genocidal beginnings. I’ve been through the touchstone of this holiday with collegiate loneliness, with my adopted long-time family, and now am confronting it on my own again, though with the company of the lifelong family that are my friends. I intend to split the day between Ariel/Michael’s and Fish/Mad’s, getting two dinners for the price of zero and managing to avoid a household with football for the duration. There aren’t even TV’s in these places!

The snow has since given in to rain as the day plows toward afternoon and we are reminded how early in the winter it really is. Yesterday I wandered around the city for several miles and a couple hours, getting myself really chilled before turning around and almost running back to the warm confines of Fish’s abode. This is perhaps the eternal thing about Thanksgiving, that which transcends specifics of location or even the company of fellow diners at a Chinese restaurant outside an empty campus. That humans gather together, in groups large and small, to huddle together against the cold an unforgiving world to consume sustaining foods and celebrate their survival and the bounty of whatever they’ve been offered in life. No matter how isolated I might feel in comparison to Thanksgivings past, no matter how trying the holidays might in some ways feel this time ’round, I can take solace in still being here, still cradling a flame of warmth and light and hope against the torments of a tumultuous unrestrained external reality.

I am thankful for you. And you, over there. And you too. You are my community, my beacon in the darkness. Together we’ll make it through. We need not share the same table to feel the same sustenance this peaceful day.

“Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike
they’ve all gone to look for America”
-Simon & Garfunkel, “America”

My new Allison Weiss CD and I rolled up for an early venture into Philadelphia this evening, carrying plenty of board games and extra jackets in the back. The GPS told me to avoid Route One and I-95 and pay for the use of roads as much as possible, so I decided to be charitable and comply. I was a bit concerned about the possible nature of traffic, but I needn’t have been, aside from the occasional merge or person insisting on driving twenty over the limit into the back of the truck ahead of me. I fumbled through the awkward unsurity of trying to sing along with songs I don’t quite know yet, alone with my thoughts and the vision of leaves blowing down the road like a living advertisement for the holiday to come. As though someone were standing in southern Jersey with a leaf-blower and a pile of bagged cast-offs, swirling the brown mass into the air in the hopes we’d all get in the spirit as they smacked windshields and flew away.

I spent the day with Russ today, wandering around New Brunswick like it’s my new home for the showing. A lost truck even stopped and asked for directions I was all too able to give. We ate at an empty diner and toured the campus of bleary vacation-hungry undergrads and played nine games of chess while we talked of the fickle aspects of place and purpose. How being cognizant and deliberate about these concepts sets one mostly apart from those who let fate clasp them hard by the hand and drag them in whatever direction represents apparent least resistance. That questioning place and purpose looks a lot like being lost. That Russ will always be as at home in New York as I’m not, but neither of us much wants to be there. Or here. Or perhaps anywhere.

The Turnpike dumps Philly-bound drivers out in the midst of Camden to traverse a couple sideroads adorned with signs for Rutgers’ least desirable campus. Navigating these required carefully divided attention between the accented voice of my GPS guide and the Indigo-Girls-imitation (she’s from Athens after all) belting of the disc, already on its third full spin. I was almost able to sing along by now, though a couple more complicated upbeat tunes eluded me as I just managed to keep up with the curvature of the roads. All the while, the wind picked up and threatened to swerve me into the next car, let alone the one brave/reckless individual hugging the cement median as s/he walked slowly in the eighteen-inch semi-shoulder left of the fast lane. What kind of desperation or disorientation has to inform walking that kind of path? And what viewpoint might someone that detached from safety might examine my own alleged risks with? The visage of industrious insects, impervious to the exterminator’s call, determined to build structures that would defy the greatest human architects if only we could make ourselves small enough to see.

The Ben Franklin Bridge and the lights around City Hall were purple and gold, as though Philadelphia had somehow decided to fuse November’s holiday with a February celebration in New Orleans. By the time I got to Fish’s neighborhood, it was obvious that the wind was no less drastic in the city, and also that it was trash day. Bags and boxes, cans and glasses, little bits of refuse and debris were doing their best imitation of leaves on the Turnpike. It took many minutes to find a place to park, jutting up against an overturned fruit crate while just managing to preserve the sanctity of my back-right tire. I gathered up five days’ worth of activities and costume, clutching them close less they intermingle with the billowing garbage on the air. Soon a doorbell rang and I was in the midst of something a bit more like home.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

It’s been a rough couple days in the northeast. People say things like that which they have no business saying. Most people in the northeast have probably been doing just fine. There’s preparations for what appears to be the northeast’s favorite holiday in the offing. After all, Thanksgiving was born around here, built on the backs of people who have since been chased out or eradicated, leaving only the overstuffed turkeys and their caretakers to gloat over the bounty of having more ruthless ancestors than others.

Highland Park today is dressed up in its Thanksgiving finest: overcast and all the leaves have faded to that brown dead crinkle that rattles above or crunches below and makes everything look like red-brown Thanksgiving print napkins. People walk quickly and wear jackets universally and seem even more hurried and annoyed than usual. Maybe it’s from this observation that I acquire the hubris to say things like it’s been a rough couple days in this part of the world. Maybe it’s from spending the better part of a subway ride and an extended period in Penn Station crying without a soul bothering to so much as ask if I was okay.

Yesterday I got home and caught up with the things online I’d missed over the weekend. One of these, among my favorites, is checking out PostSecret, reading the scattered private thoughts of countless strangers as illustrated by their innermost ravings. It’s an idea we all wish we’d thought of and one very much in line with my ideals as a person writing this blog – the exposure of normally suppressed feelings so they might live, breathe, communicate, and ultimately hearten. And then my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a stark postcard:

And the hovering over the card on the page led to the flipping of the ‘card to the back:

Now, this one would’ve caught my eye anyway for a couple reasons. A, I read all the cards anyway and usually pause to contemplate all the implications. B, this is pretty much exactly what Emily would tell you about our situation, though I can’t necessarily speak to the relationship status of the other person involved, so who knows. But the most important issue is that the handwriting on this card is identical to that of said individual. Trust me, I had almost a decade to learn that handwriting, to watch it over her shoulder on debate flows or see it on hastily scrawled notes left behind or to read it on a notebook or textbook I was carefully lifting off her sleeping torso where it had fallen on her exhausted frame.

Now there’s some realistic counterpoints to consider. For one thing, the odds of Emily sending anything to a website like PostSecret are basically nill. The second thing, the most powerful, is that the postmark faintly visible on the back says SC 290, indicating pretty clearly that it was mailed from somewhere in South Carolina, where many zip codes start with those three digits. Is it possible she concocted some obscure way to send a card to Carolina for its submission to Germantown, MD? Sure, but any sense of feasibility or reality is pretty much knocking this down to zero. I often wonder about those postmarks and whether there’s some PostSecret sharing syndicate to make sure that especially high-voltage cards aren’t traceable even to a particular state, but I think this is considered an acceptable risk by most people.

No, the far more likely explanation is that someone else with Emily’s precise handwriting found herself in an almost identical situation to hers, or more appropriately one they would describe the same way. At which point, all kinds of larger cosmic questions arise. There have long been serious subscribers to the theory that handwriting is an indication of personality. In fact, many prison programs attempt to rehab criminals by changing their handwriting first under the theory that the link between letter shape and mental frame is so significant that it can be reverse-engineered. So what does this handwriting indicate about loyalty, faithfulness, approach to marriage? And out there, somewhere, someone who is not Emily or the author of this postcard is reading this and thinking that this handwriting looks an awful lot like theirs and wondering about the role of micro-destiny in their own path.

All this would seem to carry a little less weight had I not nearly bowled into Gwen on the street again the other day, in the midst of ill-informed debaters getting us lost on the streets of New York City on the way to Fordham. (Which, by the way, went pretty well.) She’ll forgive me for reprinting from her subsequent e-mail to me: “I’m starting to feel as though we’re being a bit cosmically messed with. Like we’re tinseled cut-outs in some toy theater production that just happens to be our lives.” And she, like most everyone, hasn’t even read The Best of All Possible Worlds yet. I’m starting to feel like that book is the cork in the center of the island on “Lost” – once I released it, deep important secrets were on the loose that wound up turning my whole life upside-down. This is a ridiculous thing to think, objectively, but most empirical studies would reaffirm it anyway, especially in light of how reality-bending the work itself is. All this would feel less significant had Russ not spent ten minutes trying to explain how LA feels small compared to NYC because you can always bump into people in the former and he never once bumps into someone he knows in NYC because it’s too vast, even though he knows tons of the City’s denizens. And then I told him my experience was a little different.

My experience is always a little different, it seems. Most people don’t have the capacity for such high volumes of things, be it crying or talking or writing or marveling at the construction of the world’s interactions. It’s not very realistic or practical to spend such time on such things. It’s better to do the dishes or laundry or buy furniture or hang pictures and somehow keep it all together. But it’s not all together and rote mundane tasks rarely help keep things that way. All I can do is contemplate, try to keep everything in perspective, throw up the poisons that seem to enter my system, and try to keep the phone charged for when I myself am running out of juice. It’s a good thing I have several scheduled days with other people coming up. Russ’ll be here in 90 minutes and all my dishes are in the sink.

A while back, some friends of mine were featured in the New Yorker’s Book Bench for their pre-marital alignment of wood-housed tomes. So I figured it was time, now that I’ve actually organized them properly, for me to feature my own post-marital stack of reading:

I guess I was surprised overall how few books I actually have, though it’s worth noting that this is a heck of a large bookcase. Not really purchasing textbooks in college contributed to this, as well as long spates of library-based reading, which is starting back up again. This will probably stabilize my shelves for the time being, so this’ll be what I’m looking at perhaps for the duration in Highland Park. You can’t quite judge a person by their bookshelf, any more than a book by its cover, but both are perhaps more indicative than we give them credit for.

Here’s a bit of a more clearly labeled analysis for those who are having a hard time parsing covers or recognizing precise volumes:

No surprise to see Bradbury leading the pack, and many of the others are clearly favored. Kafka and Salinger have few enough works all told that they don’t quite merit labeling, though veteran readers of the latter will at least recognize the rainbow-on-white spines of his slim pieces. Which reminds me that I need to rebuy Nine Stories at some point. Wow, that recollection makes me sad. Anyway, I think Irving and Coelho suffer here a bit from being read during library phases, as does Huxley a bit despite his strong showing. Whereas Card and Rowling might get disproportionate credit for the thickness of their works. Hemingway also suffers from, if anything, a name that’s too long to make look okay on this graphic above.

Now I just want to go read. Maybe for the rest of my life.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

“I’m not a mystery
everything I think is written down”
-Allison Weiss, “Why Bother”

The sun is bright in Highland Park today, casting long stark shadows on the newly bare sidewalks and leafy lawns as people make their way through the crisp air. The sky is still, a pacific relief from two days of unchecked bluster, allowing the full light of early winter to crystallize and hang suspended among dying leaves still clinging to their lifeblood. Few will fall today.

Yesterday marked the second time the Rutgers debate team has graced the pages of the Daily Targum, perhaps the most-read paper in the city of New Brunswick. The article was quite flattering, relying heavily on Farhan’s and my testimony about the changes that have transpired in fifteen months of unprecedentedly hard work. The surreality of our current standing really has yet to fade, so I might as well try to grab hold of it and just breathe. After all, I still vividly recall years of desperately missing debate, of waking from dreams where I had a chance to be back in tournaments, back on the circuit, only to deflate amongst the reality of day jobs and intellectual incuriosity. Those days will be back, perhaps with less pathos given my second chance fulfilled, but I might as well store up for future winters now.

At the recommendation of Russ, I’ve been reading Outliers, officially my first Highland Park library book and perhaps the tenth non-fiction book I’ve read since the days of high school textbooks. In it, Malcolm Gladwell, the hippest pop-culture-meets-academics writer this side of Freakonomics, argues that success depends on luck and good fortune and ethnic traditions far more than Horatio Alger-style bootstraps stories. And while his case is compelling and obvious, he lapses too often into the same trap of Alger and friends, namely equating a mundane capitalist definition of success with true achievement in the course of a lifetime. Which, given his audience and the subtitle “The Story of Success”, is probably to be expected. He borders on really exciting delvings into the nature of real satisfaction with his discussion of what he calls “meaningful” work, but never stops to question the nature of capitalism in imposing the necessity of work itself on the population. Nor does he examine presumed pinnacle professions, like doctoring and lawyering, in the context of how meaningful or satisfying they are. He assumes these jobs and the acquisition of graduate degrees are innate goods in our society by which we can measure the success of potential geniuses on an objective scale.

It would be easy to say my political critiques of Gladwell are wholly tangential to the question his book is trying to explore, and that’s probably mostly right. But Russ felt this was an Important Book for me largely because of my own lifelong struggles with my early academic trajectory and its ultimate failure. Gladwell would blame these on unlucky circumstances (certainly Broadway and CCC failing to be supportive were not ideal situations), my family’s socioeconomic background (would money have made them more tenacious? maybe), and perhaps my culture of coming from European mutts based in the West (um, dubious). But what he goes on to describe me being locked out of just doesn’t feel like anything I’m missing. I could have been a successful lawyer had I wanted to be. Yippee. There’s plenty of good reasons I’m not, and they’re all based in my exercising of my own free will over my priorities. Would I have liked to graduate college at 16 as it once looked like was going to happen? Sure. But probably not so I could go on and collect a full complement of supplementary initials to my name. Probably, instead, so I could get on with it, as Monty Python would say. And the it maybe doesn’t look much better than status quo, save maybe for more public recognition that makes it easier to get published or something.

Tooling around the internet today, I discovered my new favorite musician of the hour. A quotation from one of her stellar just-discovered (by me) songs is above. She’s Allison Weiss and she’s apparently independent and sings mostly about heartbreak. Her song “July 25, 2007″ cut right through me and I’ve already ordered her CD. There’s something about the simplicity and rawness of her storytelling that is pretty much what I’ve always loved about the music that I love. Given that Brad Wolfe and the Moon seem to be long done, I needed a new outlet for the band no one’s ever heard of slot in my life. Hooray.

The next few days are going to be mighty busy, especially in comparison to the quiet stasis of the last few. I almost have all my books sorted and dealt with and the Empire of Boxes has had its unprovoked aggression repelled to a couple small corners. Word is that the couch will be here before December is. Might even be able to get an armchair to go with it, with a little help from my friends.

Out my window, the blue patches through the overwhite collections of condensation almost precisely match the blue of the Prius below. My home is on the road and in the clouds.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Something transpired today, forging just the right mix of wind and rain and airborne upheaval to bring every remaining leaf off the trees in Highland Park. Not really every leaf, of course, for a quick examination of the trunked masses themselves reveals that they still look more the part of autumn plumage than winter barren. Yet whole walkways were obscured, buried in seven-deep layers of yellow dying offshoots of their wise ancient ancestors. Sometimes kicked up into drifts closer to ten- or twenty-deep by the still churning wind. The ability for trees to shed so heavily and yet still retain their dignity reminds me of my own relationship with my hair, which comes out in thick strands each morning only remain in an unnoticed mass still atop my head.

Unlike the trees, however, I am not destined to go bald this winter. At least, that’s the hope.

It was not destiny, but perhaps long overdue, for me to pick up a library card at the Highland Park Public tonight. I remember when being in a new community without a library card was an aching couple days’ torture, not the norm of a few weeks or even months. The first trip to Georgetown’s public library with its upstairs kids section still tantalizes my memory: it was a place of sheer magic. Even the first jaunt to Seaside’s sad answer, to the section I would live in for years I “should” have been in school, the place where I would first learn the quiet steady rhythms of working in hallowed halls of books. It was in getting acclimated to school libraries that far surpassed their public counterparts that I stopped picking up public library cards so regularly, then getting used to acquiring books permanently in California that made a more substantial separation.

But tonight I remembered the budget and the desire to expand my reading, the need to fulfill important recommendations of friends without having to add to the tally of box-filling to be hauled across the country whenever I can re-escape to the west. And so I confronted the yellow-leaf roads, the paths of strewn mayhem still aswirl in onrushing storm. Remembered to bring my proof of residency, my proof of New Jersey driving ability, even my proof of ability to haul books undamaged through the rainswept streets of Highland Park. The woman was kinder than the Jersey average, not yet the grizzled cynic suspecting each new patron of trying to undermine the very system of the free and peaceful transfer of tomes.

It was on my way back, via the grocery store, that I had time to contemplate respective priorities in our society and the very nature of what is free and what requires money. Surely libraries, the uncharged exchange of ideas and knowledge, are one of the greatest contributions to human development we have ever created as a species. And yet, the fact that there is an expectation of payment for food while books remain freely accessible seems somewhat distressing. Sure, I’m spending time volunteering in places that try to combat this expectation, just as there are bookstores trying to set a precedent of financial consideration for access to reading. But the norm is still the norm. I grew up going to libraries and grocery stores. I suspect most of us did. What does it say about us that we can take reading for granted but are expected to devote our time to an employer in order to sustain our lives?

Trudging back into the dark night from the overlit halls of both library and grocery, laden with the weight of this new comparison, I saw a young girl on a bike nearly hit by a turning car in the yellow rain. The driver actually screamed, despite being just short of contact with the child. The girl took it in stride, good spirits, too young perhaps to understand the implications of her mortality. Too filled with wonder from the prospect of a good read or a good meal or a good old fashioned jump in a leaf pile to be worried about the very real world of moving vehicles, distraction, and reduced visibility.

Our paths are dark and treacherous, uncertain and overshadowed with doubt. And yet there is simple solace in the simple act of surviving another day, another night, to watch the constancy of nature in its steady march toward the future. The book itself is little more than pulped tree, adorned with the thoughtful decor of another’s mind. The food falls from the tree, mostly, or grows up underneath it. What are any of us, our time, in comparison to the produce of trees?

Long may they rain. Long may they reign.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Been meaning to let folks know for a while that I didn’t get the job in NYC, so I’m defaulting back to the plan of spending a long time in Nuevo this December and maybe tackling the NYC non-profiteering gigs in earnest in January. Of course, there’s a major question whether I want to put down the kind of roots that taking such a job in January would require. The same trade-offs that existed with this job, I guess, or that exist with most anything. At the very least, I got incredibly encouraging feedback from the place where I interviewed, apparently missing the opportunity only because they had an internal applicant. Like everything lately, I have to believe it’s for the ultimate best.

Something that requires no such mincing or parsing is the recent performance of the Rutgers debate team. As always, you can check the blog, but I will tell you that we won our second tournament of the year, making the third final round of the year, and are now ranked 3rd in both TOTY and COTY, behind only Yale and Harvard in both rankings. Suffice it to say that this well exceeds not only my expectations for the team’s performance this year, but my wildest hopes. Had you told me that Dave & Kyle would win back-to-back tournaments, or win 11 straight rounds, or go to three straight final rounds, I would have been speechless. Having watched them execute these things, I’m not much less so. Not because it’s surprising they’re so good – they’ve worked their tails off and become phenomenal debaters – but because it’s remarkable for any debater to experience that kind of consistent success. I’ve had to remind them to savor this and not get caught up in the trajectory or always waiting for the next tourney. Some truly special things are happening right now and I’m elated to be a part of it.

The thing about winning and losing, be it debate rounds or job opportunities or most anything else that can be assigned a W or L (or a Y or N), is that they depend on other people. Recognizing their merit is part and parcel with ceding control over one’s life, in small measure at least, to outside individuals. Now much of this is a reflection of the innate realities of the control that others wield and the time-honored idea of the cacophony of wills, the explanation for how chaotic the world feels despite being a collection of truly ordered rational agents. None of us really have that much control over our lives. If a college doesn’t let us in, we can’t go there anyway, and every possible outcome of life stemming from that possible road is foreclosed. Same goes for an employment application process, or a qualifying victory, or having someone in one’s life. Indeed, very little can depend on oneself alone. One’s attitude, perhaps, to an extent. One’s choices about what one tries to pursue, whether or not the outcomes come to fruition. One’s use of time when spent alone, or with those who’ve already chosen to be accepting.

And yet perhaps it’s blurring the lines between winning and losing that is the secret to feeling satisfied with one’s path, no matter how hemmed in said trail may be by the acts of others. Surely no one can be quite as happy about losing as winning, but the realization that losing can be a form of winning something else, the refunding of potential opportunity cost to be applied to other endeavors, the blanking of a check so it may be reallocated, this can be quite the consolation. And it’s with this perspective that I try to see losses now, at least at this moment. And as long as I can get myself to a place where I’m pleased with my expenditures of time and energy and hope, then it doesn’t matter what other roads put up a Do Not Enter sign.

For now, I’m in that place, a place where I can galvanize my efforts toward something larger than myself. It’s the Rutgers debate team. Last year, I probably could have used this philosophy about losing a lot more. Right now, I don’t seem to need it much for them. But as long as it’s bookmarked in the back of my mind, it’s going to be hard to get too broken down about the future.

Especially when I’ll have weeks to prepare luminarias without folding a single bag outside of New Mexico.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.