From the archives

Anand was hogging the whole place. Whatever. He can keep it.

2008-07-09T23:04:00.000-07:00

Hey folks,

I'm blogging with Sherry these days. I know! She came out of retirement. We are so lucky.

Megan

Anand says bye too.

2008-06-19T18:28:00.001-07:00

Hey folks.

My visit is over and I had a wonderful time meeting you. I had great conversation after great conversation. Your hospitality meant that I got to see beautiful places and sleep comfortably in the houses of friends. I am incredibly lucky that my blog introduced me to so many of you.

I am sure now that I'm done with From the Archives. I'm not done with the friends I've met here, so please come meet me out in the world. At this point, I owe you guys a porch with snacks, a stay in the woods, a helpful ride, a place to stash your stuff for the afternoon, good restaurant recommendations, a delicious dinner with a view of fireflies, a chat over ice cream, a long walk, a tour of my city. You should come claim your share of that. I know this spot on the river...

Megan

Philadelphia Wed night

2008-06-10T07:56:00.001-07:00

Hey y'all,

You guys up for a potluck? Dubin says we can gather on her beautiful porch. That sounds perfect to me, so I hope you guys will come over. I'll make some food, too.

Email, please, to let me know you'll be there. I'll know from your grammar and punctuation that you are not a crazy person, and send you the address.

Looking forward to it!

Fresh Salt tonight

2008-06-09T12:18:00.000-07:00

The real Megan has foolishly given me the keys to her kingdom to pass along an urgent message. I regret a little bit that I don't have the time to fully take advantage of this situation right now, but duty calls. So here's her message minus false information or impersonatory mischief:

Megan would like you to know that she's on a later bus than planned and expects to arrive at Fresh Salt between 6:30 and 7 pm. Go see her then. (And bring a flower. She likes flowers.)

~FauxMegan/Monica

Even more plans

2008-06-06T10:22:00.000-07:00

Hey friends.

It was wonderful to meet hk and Dewb in Boston. (Nathan! We missed you!) They've maintained the streak; I like everyone I meet through here. So I'm looking forward even more to meeting you guys next week.

Sunday - Amherst/Northampton.
Monday - Uncertain arrival time in New York, joint Unfogged meet-up at Fresh Salt after work.
Tuesday - also New York. The morning and lunch are booked; after work I'm leaving for Philadelphia. Afternoon, anyone?
Wed - Philadelphia, morning with Witt, aft free, then lets have a bigger meet-up for dinner. Action item: pick a dinner location in Philadelphia for us.
Thurs - uncertain departure time to DC. I have dinner plans, but am otherwise free.
Friday - DC. Lunch plans, but am otherwise free.
Sat - head back home.

I don't have much internets, but intend to keep these plans. I'll check in as I can, but would love for you guys to make decisions without me.

I'm looking forward to it!

Need details.

2008-05-27T15:47:00.000-07:00

Hey y'all. I think I have a schedule, so now we need locations.

Tuesday June 3rd - Boston meet-up; Cambridge Commons first to play catch. I'll bring a disc and HK will too. Food afterwards somewhere.

Sunday June 8th - Amhearst to see Capella and Northampton to stay with Asymptote Beagle. It isn't clear to me why you don't pronounce the "h" in Amhearst, but you do in Northampton. But that's what my Dad tells me.

Monday June 9th and Tuesday the 10th - New York city.
Monday 9th: Joint blog meet-up with the NY Unfogged crew. After work at Fresh Salt.
Tuesday 10th: I have lunch plans, but would love to meet you for tea time or showing me neat things during the day.

Wednesday June 11th and Thursday June 12th - Philadelphia to meet eDubin!'s handsome son and also you.

Friday June 13th and Sat June 14th - DC. I know imaginary people in DC but don't have plans yet. That is probably because three weeks out is like the next millenium or something. Plan things three weeks in advance. Hah. That's crazytalk.

Anyway, Boston is a week from today. Where shall we meet?

Plan my trip for me?

2008-05-16T09:36:00.000-07:00

OK. Here's the rough outline of my trip:

Fly to Boston area Sunday June 1st or Monday the 2nd.

That Monday/Tuesday/Wednesday is my best chance to do things and meet people in the Boston area or around there. There might be a trip to Maine somewhere in there too.

Thursday-Sat, I'll be busy. Sunday the 8th, I could start to head south.

Perhaps I go to New York for a couple days, the 9th and 10th?

Then Philadelphia maybe for a day or so? Wednesday, then?

End up in D.C. for another couple days, perhaps the 12th and 13th or so.

Here's the thing. I would LOVE if this blog set my activities for me that second week*. I would love to go from meeting people to meeting people. If you guys were all insider-knowledge about your city and wanted to show me cool things, that would be the best. I'll go to where you are; I'm on vacation.

And, I'm not asking, because I do have people I can stay with, but if you want to put me up for a night, that could be fun too. I say this because I would (and have) happily host a reader or blogger I was familiar with and I know that for some of us, welcoming people into our homes is easy and obvious. I don't mean to be all bleg-y about that. I just want to say it is an option, because I don't think you are ax-murderers and it would seem natural to me, and then I could fit more people in and maybe you like the idea too.

So, Boston and north the first week of June. Places between Boston and D.C. the second week of June. Direct me, please. Don't tell me about things I should do in general. But if you want to, let me know where I can meet you and pick something fun. I'll have a frisbee for daytime and I might even bring a dress for evenings. (No promises about wearing it.) Let's!

*What I would really like to do sometime is to have an entirely blog-directed and supported trip (not money support, but hospitality support). Something long, maybe walking or biking across the country. I’d love to check in, write up a post and have the blog tell me where to go that day and who would be letting me camp on their property or putting me up. This is as close as I’ll get to that for a while, but I like the idea that I would see such different things, because my own expectations wouldn’t be setting my path.

You already knew, I'm sure.

2008-05-05T16:08:00.000-07:00

Hey folks,

It is foolhardy to make any pronouncements about something as reversible as closing a blog, but as far as I can tell, I don't have any more enthusiasm for writing here. I've been trying to hold out for just a few more weeks, but I'm embarrassed by my recent half-hearted blogging and I can't seem to do better. In the past few weeks, I've clicked away from the first paragraphs of posts way more often than I've published finished posts, weak as they are.

If I write a post-mortem, it will only embarrass me if I return in two weeks. If I call this a hiatus, you might think I'll be back. If I don't say anything, I'll feel guilty that people might still be checking in. Don't keep checking in. I don't know what to call this, but I don't anticipate more here in the foreseeable future.

I had two reasons for putting this off. The first is that I'll be on the East Coast in June and want to meet you. Boston area the first week of June, heading southward to DC the second week of June. East Coast, we should get together and do fun things. The second reason I was postponing this is that I wanted to post a video of me doing pull-ups. But close as I am, I'm not there yet and I can't fill the days until then. You'll just have to imagine it.

There'll be a couple more planning posts for the East Coast trip, so that's not done. I can't swear I'm done. Who knows, maybe in a few months I'll fill up with stories and rants and you'll need to hear them. Maybe I'll slip back into blogland all quiet and sneaky, and find out what you can say when your friends aren't reading and your face isn't on the front. It'd be interesting to find out what happens when you don't get big links early on. Maybe I'll stay outdoors and play catch and ride my bike.

My hope, as it has been since the very first days of this blog, is that you guys would turn to real friends. I will still be here, and I'll still welcome all the friends who want to cross over into the real world with me. Email me. Let's meet and walk around somewhere neat. We'll find some tasty food, and you can tell me what you've been up to. Tell me over bread and olives and sangria, at a table under lanterns. Tell me face to face.

Wishing you the best,

Megan

Nothing stands in the way of Anand's blogging.

2008-05-02T11:10:00.001-07:00

Megan: Hey, Anand, what does this mean?
Anand: Yeah, not entirely sure. It is not, as far as I know, an approach that anyone else is pursuing. [It also sounds like the guy who discovered this effect was surprised to hear HP doing it.]
From what I can tell, they rely on oxygen diffusion to modulate the resistance of TiO₂. The big obstacle would seem to be the programming speed – O atoms do not move nearly as fast at electrons.
I’ll have to read the technical publications to get a better idea of how they’re doing it. At this point, it’s hard to say if this is important or not.
Megan: Well I surely hope you aren't going to wait to read something "technical" before you blog about it.
Anand: Oh, of course not – I would never let my ignorance stand in the way of my blogging...

I'm in love with Representative Waxman.

2008-04-30T11:48:00.000-07:00

I used to like the Endangered Species Act primarily because it is our best hope of saving species. Now though, I think I mostly like the Endangered Species Act for the way it must drive Vice President Cheney to distraction.

Via SLOG.

Pacing is for suckers.

2008-04-29T14:35:00.000-07:00

Speaking of life with expensive gas, I have anecdotes! I am definitely seeing more bikes out. I don't know whether it is the warm weather or expensive gas, but bikes are chained to my parking poles and we suddenly have to figure out the right of way when bikes arrive at stop signs at the same time. I've never had either trivial problem before. What is much worse, however, is that my last four near-collisions have been with new bicyclists. Dudes. Off the sidewalk!

I know you're scared of cars, and you should be. They're too big and the hazard is all one way. They might kill you just by inattention, which is too dangerous a threshold for something that humans do. But if you're on the sidewalk, I think you aren't understanding where the risk is.

New cyclists, the car that kills you will most likely hit you from the side. In Midtown, that'll be coming out of an alley or blowing a red light. You are much less likely to be hit from behind as you ride in a lane. Even car drivers are likely to see a cyclist moving in their same lane ahead of them. So ride in the street. After getting T-boned, the next most dangerous part is getting doored. DO NOT RIDE WITHIN DOOR RANGE. If the lane isn't big enough for cars to pass you when you are out of the range of doors, take the lane.

Chris and I were hanging out one time when he looked up from his laptop, startled. "That can't be right," he said. I asked what, and he said that he'd done a b.o.t.e. calculation that showed that someone will open a car door on you every ten miles or so. I thought about it. I live about a mile from work, ride back and forth every day, and someone opens a car door on me on that route about... once a week. Yeah. Getting doored is a big risk. Ride on the street like a car, and ride wide.

Anyway brand new cyclists, I hope you're loving being on your bike. But you are scaring me as you pop out of sidewalks or go the wrong way in the bike lanes. Please, get used to riding and then do what you do when you drive. Take the lane and turn from the left turn lane. You should especially take the bike safety courses. My friends teach those and they're good. I so want to welcome all of you to riding Sacramento's streets, but we need you to ride predictably.

Wooo-hooo!

2008-04-29T10:30:00.000-07:00

My comment on How the World Works got a little star! I have been graded and validated! You can't know how my perpetual student's soul craves that. (On second thought, I suspect everyone who reads here knows that feeling well.) One day I will write a post good enough to be linked on How the World Works*, and then I will be happy forever.

*Or one funny enough to get linked by Defective Yeti.

**********************
In the comments where some people got stars and some people didn't, I saw this by futhark:

3. Probably 5 out of 6 people alive in the world today are here because of the bounty we have enjoyed due to using petroleum as a resource to plow, plant, fertilize, irrigated, cultivate, harvest, process, and distribute food. In the days when agriculture depended on real "horse power", a third of the acreage under cultivation was devoted to raising grain and fodder for the horses. When the oil bounty is exhausted, a substantial portion of the world's population will of necessity expire.

That is the unsourced-by-me rule of thumb I've heard as well. A third of the grain you raise with animal power goes to your ox. I knew that cheap energy was a substitute for human labor and I knew that cheap water is a substitute for careful management. But this was a reminder that cheap energy is also a substitute for animals and land.

I didn't agree with this comment by IaintBacchus:

I'd be more concerned about whole metro areas, LA and Phoenix come to mind, that are too large and situated too far from any source of agriculture to feed in a low energy culture.

I think L.A. could provide a good chunk of its own food if it had to. It was an agricultural region in my lifetime; I remember the orange and walnut groves. Even in a low energy culture, if sustenance were on the line, there's a lot L.A. could do. They have a year-round growing season, good soils, aquifers in the San Fernando Valley and available labor. Some of those laborers were peasants recently enough that they still know how to grow food (it would be fun to watch their skills suddenly become valuable). With greywater systems in houses (low energy costs), cisterns (low energy costs), wastewater treatment plants, imported water and solar power, I think L.A. could grow just about everything but major grains. If you switched out lawn for garden everywhere and people re-learned how to do manual labor, Los Angeles could substanially feed itself.

Remember, in food production, cheap gas is a substitute for labor. If you have reserves of labor (on the couch perhaps, watching television) close to your food production, you can do without cheap gas. People would have to be willing and knowledgeable, and I fully recognize that most don't think of themselves as gardeners or growers. But I think if gas got radically expensive, Angeleños would decide to grow their much of their own food before they abandon the region.

(Notes:
I assume they would get major grains by freight or container shipping.
Not much meat in that diet.
I think this is true for the major valleys and L.A. Basin. In an expensive energy scenario, the circumference deserts will be abandoned when air conditioning, fire protection costs, importing water and commutes get too expensive.
When I say "grow pretty much everything" in L.A., I really mean it. They can even grow the bananas I eschew out of fanatic self-righteousness. I have heard, though, that they may be losing their apricot crops for lack of winter cold. That brought a sheen of tears to my eyes, because I can describe the three apricot trees we had in our back yard in elaborate detail. The middle one was the sweetest.
I did not cry one single tear for news that an oleander blight is going to take out all the oleanders in California. Good. Neutral-looking poisonous non-native plants. I never liked them. It'll change the look of California when they don't line the median of our freeways, but I won't miss them.
Of course, if gas becomes radically expensive, food production will be a minor problem for Los Angeles compared to transportation costs. But this is a water and ag blog with a bike fetish, not a transportation blog.)

My WonderTwin!!

2008-04-24T19:37:00.000-07:00

best of craigslist > washington, DC > Want your ex-boyfriend back? [Unfortunately] I can help.

Originally Posted: Fri, 4 Apr 11:52 EDT
Want your ex-boyfriend back? [Unfortunately] I can help.
Date: 2008-04-04, 11:52AM EDT

So, I've recently come to the realization that I possess a remarkable skill. I have the ability to reconnect women with ex-boyfriends that broke up with them. Now, some of you might be saying "Hey, that's pretty cool! How do you do that? I could make millions, or at least I could use that to trick women into sleeping with me!". Let me tell you, it sucks! The last three "girlfriends" I've had have all had their ex-boyfriends contact them shortly after starting to date me!

It took about a month and a half after we began dating for the first girl's ex to reconnect with her. And I really liked her (and he is an abusive asshole, she deserves so much better). Man did that suck. With the second girl, it took about three and a half weeks for her guy to come back (he was supposed to have left the freaking country!). I really liked her too. The third girl, it took her ex literally two days to contact her after our first date (and they had been apart for over five years!).

So, I appear to be getting better at this. Not only can I get you your boyfriend back within a few days, I can bring him back from incredibly unlikely circumstances. Have you been pining over an ex? Want him to give you a call? Perhaps he moved to Russia 12 years ago, got married, has 7 children, and you haven't heard from him since. No problem! One dinner and a movie with me and he'll likely be waiting on your doorstep when I drop you off.

Now, I haven't had a chance to properly test this, but I suspect that my skill works much better if we sleep together. Now, this might not be absolutely necessary, but you do really want to see your ex again right? Why risk it.

* Location: Herndon
* it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests

All right Internets. Are you all-powerful and connected or not? How fast can you guys find this guy in DC and send him here? Tell him I've got him beat by one, and that he can read about it here, here and here. I'll stop the clock when I get an email from him.

I crack myself up.

2008-04-22T23:04:00.000-07:00

I laughed when I saw this news article title: “Residents to oppose water fee increases” and figured I would skip to the next story, the one about how the sun rose in the east this morning. But I read it anyway, and came across two things that caught my attention. The first was this line:

The water district is proposing a $2.30 increase on its pumping fee for large water users in the area…

I am fairly sure the reporter meant $2.30/acrefoot pumping fee, else I can’t imagine why large water users would care. I am sure we all agree that this is yet another example of the flagrant journalistic misconduct that has dominated our discourse for the past many years.

But journalists dropping units from their reporting has been endlessly hashed out on the leftwing blogs, and I was actually more interested in this line:

Smith and Beuhler said if 50 percent plus one of the land owners at the meeting vote against the fee hike, the district will not be able to implement the increase.

Naturally, I thought ‘Fifty-one percent of landowners, or fifty-one percent by acreage?” Did you know that different water districts have different ways to vote in district elections? Some districts have a one-landowner, one-vote structure; others have a voting structure where the vote is weighted by amount of acreage the vote caster owns; others have a voting structure where the votes is weighted by the dollar value of the land the voters owns. ‘Aha!’, you said to yourself! ‘At long last, I know the difference between a water district and an irrigation district!’ Not so fast, Spanky. I thought that too, but we’re both wrong.

After consulting the General Comparison of Water District Acts*, I found that it can be all over the board. Irrigation districts have a one-person, one-vote rule. Reclamation districts go by one vote per dollar assessed value of taxable land and improvements. Water Conservation Districts formed under the 1927 Act go by one vote per acre, but Water Conservation Districts formed under the 1931 Act allow all registered voters to vote in district affairs. Water districts can weight votes by dollars or by acreage.

There are people who think that this is important stuff. I can see that. Water districts have an awful lot of local authority, and the ability to assess taxes on landowners in the district, hold liens on land and use eminent domain. There is a fair amount of room for very large landholders to dominate water district decisions, which can be the same as land use decisions in farming regions. It certainly is not a very egalitarian, democratic voting method. Dr. Goodall looked at water district voting structure in California district and civic life, and found correlations. East side of the San Joaquin Valley has irrigation districts, more varied agriculture, more small farms, nice towns. The west side has big farms, water districts with one dollar, one vote rules, no cities worth, no non-farm anything**.

I can’t get too worked up over it. For one thing, if there is a cause in water district voting structures, it is long lost. Second, most districts assess landowners for improvements by acreage. If landowners are going to pay by the acre, maybe they should vote by the acre. Wouldn’t want a bunch of little guys to decide on a canal that one big landowner would substantially pay for. So I dunno. I don’t have a huge stake in it. But it crossed my mind when I read that article and having two whole thoughts as I read a short article is reason enough to tell you water stories.

*I’ll have you all know that I walked across the street to get a copy of Bulletin 155-94, General Comparison of Water District Acts, and carried a paper copy of it back to my desk. Don’t you ever question my dedication to accuracy on this here blog. I’m glad I did. I’d never heard of half these kinds of districts. A Protection District, to protect property from overflow damage by widening, deepening, changing, straightening, etc., channel of any innavigable stream, watercourse or wash? Resort Improvement Districts? Districts created by individual acts of the Legislature? New obscure forms of government? LOVE IT.

**It is true for the length of the Great Valley that cities on the 5 are horrible places, with the exception of Red Bluff. Towns on the 99 can be lovely and usually have at least remnant downtowns. (Um, Sacramento is on both. I guess I think it has the characteristics of a city on the 99.) But if you really want to go to an eerie place in California, you should divert west of the 5 south of Coalinga to go to Avenal. Avenal and that whole valley is very strange. The prison is there, and there is an entire settlement up on one hill that looks to be entirely makeshift, dozens of houses on dirt, no visible infrastructure. Chickens and clotheslines and no foundations. With zero evidence whatsoever, I’ve decided it is a frontier type place; I imagine it is run by some local strongman. Like I say, I have absolutely no proof of that, but when I mentioned Avenal to my boss, he emphatically agreed that it is a lost place. I’m sure that if the comments were on, someone would show up to tell me that Avenal is just lovely, a place with real great neighbors. (Also, you guys know that Coalinga is named that because it used to be Coaling Station A, right?)

Enough.

2008-04-21T14:53:00.000-07:00

I think the following would be enough to completely satiate my body:

Sleep from ten to six on weeknights. Weekends, sleep as fun allows.

Hour walk on weekday mornings.
Swim at noon five days a week.
Lift heavy three times a week.
Dance hard, outside, two to three hours, about three times every two weeks.
Ride bike for transportation.
Play catch once or twice a week.

Assisted stretching for half an hour, once a week.
Hour and a half massage, once a week.

Sleep next to a man, nightly.
Twice a day ought to be plenty.
Pick a kid up for a hug, couple times a day.

I think that if I got that, I would finally be saturated for motion and touch. My face would relax, my brows and cheeks soften. My shoulders would drop from my neck. My hips would loosen, my gait would get springier. My feet would still hurt, but that's how it is.

Time to learn hardstyle, I think.

2008-04-20T19:47:00.000-07:00

I went to this* last night: a public dance at a BART station in SF. I went by myself and had a really good time. What was it like, you ask, to go by myself to a dance party? Well, it was exactly like going with one of my worthless friends (you should hear that in the most resentful embittered tone you can summon). After years of practice, we have the routine perfected. We go to a party or bar and I hear good music. I ditch them immediately to dance and they drink and hold the wall up or talk to each other. We're past any thoughts that it could be different. I don't ask them to dance anymore; they don't keep me from the dancing, trying to talk to me as I stare mesmerized at the dancers. So really, there was no point in trying to haul one of my non-dancing friends out with me.

I didn't need them anyway. Last night was testimony to the power of self-selection. I have never been in such a big crowd of people who danced just like me. My dance style, I thought until last night, is unusual. Lots of traveling, loose jointed floppy knees, hips sometimes, arms doing things. It is, I hope, goofy and fun; it is not, I don't think, sexy. This is because I do not want it to be sexy. Sexy dancing is mostly boring dancing. Sexy dancing brings some guy who also wants to do sexy grinding and it turns out that grinding gets old fast. If you are not actually going to leave to have sex, there isn't anywhere for grinding to go. Grinding is about the same ten seconds in, a minute in, a song in, and the next song. Yep. Grinding. Hips, back and forth. Yep. If you want to mix it up when the song changes, you can't while you're grinding. Boring.

But the people last night weren't boring. Near all of them danced like me! Exuberant! That was fun. If you don't dance, you might not know how much dancing is a conversation between everyone on the floor. There are people picking the topics and people responding and redirecting. In a good crowd, there is eye contact and smiling. There is a fair amount of joking around. My favorite dance last night came 'cause I was checking out this guy with glasses. I'd sorta seen him and thought he looked smiley, so I danced over and saw he was with this girl. I wondered if they were a couple but couldn't tell. She had short hair and a cardigan over a buttoned up shirt and tie, which made me think that maybe she wasn't dating him. I checked with her before I danced in on the guy she was with. She smiled and offered him up. Dancing with him was fun, but I turned away from him and back to her at one point. Dancing with her was GREAT. She was fun and smart and responsive and subtle, great sense of humor. I danced with her for a few songs. I hope she's at the next one.

Now that I know how great it is to dance outside, I want to do it all the time. Two weekends in a row I got to dance outside. And surprisingly, at a dance of several dozen people in San Francisco, I ran into two people I know. Dan (played on a couple of my league teams, is at the grocery store every third time I go**) and I had this unilluminating conversation.

Me: !!!!
Dan: !!!!
Me: What are you doing here?!
Dan: I came to dance! What are you doing?!
Me: Dancing! But.. you live in Sac!
Dan: So do you!

I gave up and went back to dancing. Truly, a good time.

*Just the first dozen pictures or so. WARNING! Brace yourself and cover the children's eyes. There is quite a bit of breast visible in one picture. I know how you hate to be surprised by glimpses of breasts. I didn't see any of me in any pictures, although one guy took a few shots of me. That happened last week in Sacramento, too. Dude with a huge lens taking pictures of me dancing. I don't care, except that I would like to know where to see them later.

**Dan's one of those people with imaginary spouses. You know they're married, but the spouse never comes to any games, and they go to league parties alone. Despite the fact that I see Dan grocery shopping more than anyone but Dave, I've never seen her there too. And! He was at the dance last night alone. Dude, you're visiting another city for the weekend, going to dances. Where's your wife?

Go emptyhanded...

2008-04-19T18:47:00.001-07:00

...when you go to dance.

It is not a tamarind candy, as falsely reported later in that comment thread. Do not trust the internets, folks.

2008-04-18T10:00:00.001-07:00

This post about the Democratic debates is funny and all, but the important comment is this one:

I'm bitter like that nasty Chinese candy that is made of smoked plums or something like that. makes you want tot tuem your mouth inside out.

Aw holy fuck! Cimhou! Or something. I have no idea how it is spelled. I just know that it is freakin' awful. It is. It is some sort of salted smoked plum, sometimes rolled in sugar. I see it in stores and I back away from it. I hope to never taste it again, and I'll go to some lengths to arrange that. My girlfriend Le doesn't hate it and reports that her uncle loves it. He loves it so much that he makes special trips to a candy vendor in San Francisco two doors down from a vegetarian Chinese restaurant my friends and I like. Anand and I cross the street when we get to that storefront and then cross back to go to the restaurant, so that I don't have to walk too close to the cimhou. Another girlfriend of mine, Heather, loves candy so much that she reads forums dedicated to discussing candy. She says that cimhou makes a regular appearance as the worst candy ever and everyone chimes in with vehement agreement. I am not surprised.

Also, when I read about how bad the moderators were, I wonder, why does everyone accept that they'll see no consequences? I read on all the blogs that there are a dozen particularly shallow journalists and pundits and that their influence harms our discourse. Then bloggers throw up their hands and say it can't be changed. That is simply not true. It could be changed. Everyone is vulnerable to some leverage somewhere.* It would take a concerted effort by a lot of people, but it could surely be done.

A genuine effort to make an example of one bad pundit would focus specifically on that person. That person's behavior is chronicled somewhere and linked to specific damage. With a record in place, you go after the things that matter to his or her employer. You get a group and you apply pressure everywhere that show ever goes. You respectfully contact advertisers to that show and ask them not to advertise there anymore. You keep doing that. You find the lurkers of blogland who know the producer, the director, anyone affiliated with the show and you get them to talk to their friends in the show. The producer's waiter in the diner should mention he hates that host. You use the regular channels to file formal complaints. You have people across the country go to their local channel affiliates and have small markets drop the show as long as that person is the host. You get the candidates themselves to refuse to work with that host. You offer the candidates alternate venues for debates. You get Op-Eds in local papers and in big papers. You make removing that person the low-level buzz of the country.

It is simply not true that these people are invulnerable. It is true that it would take a huge amount of distributed work to remove any one of them. It could be done though, if a lot of people agree that the problem is truly offensive and a compelling person were willing to dedicate two or three years to organizing the effort. That won't be me. I don't watch any media, so I don't care enough.** Someone who does care absolutely could do it, if we skip the step where everyone agrees that it is impossible and go straight to the step where we talk about how.

*I am not talking ridiculous mafia leverage. I'm talking about completely legitimate pressures.

**I also think the fascination with the New York Times Op-Ed page is completely odd. I've never had any concept that the NY Times was some revered influence, or that who wrote for it mattered in the least. It was some paper on the other side of the Sierras, and if I want news, I'll look to the Bee, Chron and LA Times to find out what will matter to me. I never even knew the names of their writers until people on blogs told me they sucked.

As long as I'm going on like this, I'll mention that Harvard holds zero mystique for me. Harvard took three kids from my high school, each of them exactly B-rate minds (and grades, at my very good high school). Whatever their selection process is, it narrowed in on people who had never impressed me. They turned away better thinkers, too. Now Stanford picked out exactly the two people who fucking blew me away and turned me down too. That's the pick I would have made. A Stanford degree impresses me. Berkeley, where I went? They took, like, forty of us, all bright. But Stanford took the creme, Berkeley the crop, and Harvard the chaff. I'm sure Harvard is a fine school, but the name held no glamour for me after that.

UPDATE: This makes me want to continue with my school reviews. I've noticed a Yale theme among some blogs I read and am approaching an opinion that Yale kids are smart but skewed from normal. They have strong perspectives. I am not solidified on an opinion on Yale kids, since I don't have that much exposure. But I have a working theory.

You know who I really respect? Anyone who went to Lowell High School in SF. Lowell and my high school were the one and two high schools in California during my era and I have yet to run into someone from Lowell who isn't very sharp. When I heard that Lemony Snicket went to Lowell I wasn't surprised in the least.

I'm sure you're dying to hear what junior high pedigrees mean to me. Well. Twenty years ago, coming from Reed meant smart but strong RPG tendencies. A Reed kid could make a strong run for highest grades in high school, but you wouldn't expect one to socialize well with anyone not from Reed. Portola kids are dauntingly smart and, I thought, mostly normal despite that. Sepulveda kids were bright and could actually talk to strangers. Eagle Rock kids were stealth. It seemed like they were a little more street, but they were secretly pulling down very solid grades and pretending not to. Shoot. I'm forgetting one --starts with the letter O?? Can't remember. I'll have to leave it off, but then how will you ever know how to stereotype someone based on what junior high she went to in Los Angeles two decades ago?

I'm into having sex, I aint into makin' love. (Would that it were a live issue.)

2008-04-15T23:32:00.000-07:00

The problem with having an amazing dance session is that you remember that it is among the best feelings in the world and you remember how much you want to dance like that all the time. You miss it again and dancing around as you do the dishes just isn't the same.

But as small consolation, I found a mash-up I knew I had heard on the radio one time. I literally cannot watch the video to this, but I've played it through three times with a different window in front. Eminem and Panjabi MC are good, but Nine Inch Nails and 50 Cent are way better.

Anand had better things to do.

2008-04-14T08:43:00.000-07:00

Come quick! Before it is spoiled!

2008-04-13T00:27:00.000-07:00

Sacramento has arrived. It did it. It is the next city you're going to hear about. I'm here for the first weekend I've been in Sac since November. I wanted to go to Second Saturday, when all the art galleries open their doors and put out food. Second Saturday was incredible, and it is only April. I've been going to Second Saturdays for years and they're always fun. You always see people you know and you look at the watercolors of the oak foothills and eat the cheese and crackers. It is a good night. But tonight wasn't like any Second Saturday I've gone to.

I'd say there were four times as many people out as I have ever seen, even compared to the busy ones at the height of summer. Every single bike rack was full; bikes were stacked on every pole. Every block had a band or two. Every store front was open and had a table in front. And people are finally bringing their own creativity, doing their own things without permissions and sponsors. There was a samba parade, instruments and dancers. There was a troop of bikers on little tiny bikes. There was a remote controlled dog out on the streets. Everywhere, everywhere had people. On porches. Eating at sidewalk tables. Playing guitars. Old people. People with babies and people with kids. Fake tan girls and popped collar boys. The queers were out. The skaters were out. Middle age couples strolled. Everyone was out. I've never seen it like this.

I saw some art, but got drawn in by the best house music I've heard in several years. I danced and danced. I danced hard for three hours and people danced and left and came back. We danced, so many of us. A style-y young Iranian crowd. A couple Islanders. Four Hispanic guys, one of them with his three year old son. Black men danced through. A hip girl with bleached hair and tattoos. Sorority-looking Asian-Am girls. Four darling shaggy-haired indie boys. Two ten year old boys. We all danced. I wouldn't have picked the middle-aged Lebanese(?) couple for house music fans, but they were stalwart. It was as much fun as I have ever had, dancing outside on a warm night under big lit up elms, next to a packed street.

I had no idea Second Saturday was going off like this, and I suspect that it hasn't until now. But the point has tipped, the energy was everywhere. If Second Saturday stays like this all summer, you are going to start to hear about Sacramento.

I usually like ephemeral things. But not right now.

2008-04-12T09:58:00.000-07:00

When I went to Uzbekistan, our group stayed in the mountains three weeks. One day our hosts came back to camp, excited by news from the villagers. They knew of snow leopards on a mountain close by. My fierce and wonderful professor drew in a breath. “Which one? Which one has a snow leopard on it?” I was startled; I would never think that she’d be one to lead a hike to find and bother snow leopards. Our hosts hemmed and hawed. “You’d never find them. They’re very elusive.” “Oh no,” she said. “I just want to look at a mountain that has a snow leopard on it.”

My professor loved the idea of snow leopards so much it made one stark white peak stand out from the others. There are so many ideas I love so much. A wolverine in Tahoe. Tall Chris’s sweet new girlbaby. Tom and Susan’s beautiful new boy. All my friends gathered into one place. Bats under rail trestles in the Causeway. The American chestnut. The basil seeds I planted next to the nasturtiums. You opening your door to show me in. Artesian springs in orange orchards. The long narrow table I never built for my own front porch. The aurora borealis. Some of those ideas will turn real, then vanish again. Some will never be something I can experience. Some of them I can make real, to stay with me for a season or until the clock strikes midnight.

But one idea is about to be gone and I won’t ever get it back. In a few days or weeks I will never again know that my grandfather lives in Florida and loves us with all his huge heart.

and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope

2008-04-11T12:38:00.000-07:00

When I'm finally driven off the internet, it will be because of the petty people. Those small, picky, ungenerous men who have to weigh in. It won't be the vicious abuse or the rape threats. Those are rare, and I recover after a while. It won't be disagreement. I don't care if other people think different things. It won't be the humorless, although they're a real problem. They sit out there like sodden lumps, missing the joke and then blaming me for it! But I can't help them. I conferred with my sister; I checked with Anand; I asked the funnier Megan. We don't explain jokes. People gotta keep up. We mourn if the humorless fall by the wayside, but we don't mourn for long, because someone just said something funny. The contrarianism is annoying, but that's because it is so predictable. I skip it. No. Those aren't the problem. The problem is the relentless mind-driven evaluation. You guys can't stop and I can't read any more.

I am done with being evaluated here. I'm done. Y'all don't hire me and you don't teach me and you have no standing. You also don't have nearly enough information to guess whether I'm a good person, what my affect is like, or if I'm an intense control-freak. You can't tell, because you don't know me. You are welcome to know me, and you would do that by meeting me and hanging out. In person. But way too many of you who are moved to post comments offer some sort of evaluation of some sort of contruct of me and after two years, I'm done with that. For weeks now I've been drawing back. I don't post much personal stuff here anymore, because you'll just tell me what is good and bad about it and who the fuck are you to have an opinion about me? I dread policy conversations because I've heard them before. I wouldn't read the comments, except that I have to moderate them. I know there are good ones in there, but the two or three that annoy me infuriate me. I am done.

Teo said that he's not always sure what I want out of this blog, and that made me wonder. I decided that what I want out of this blog is what I always want in general. I want people around and I want friends. And here's the thing. My friends don't evaluate me. That isn't what we do. I say, 'Chris! Silly concept!' and he says 'Megan! Same concept in a new direction!'. I say 'Anand, I did something!' and he says 'Meggie! Was it fun?'. I say 'Sister, the babies are beautiful.' and she says 'I found us a beehive.' I say, 'Roxie! Want to go throw?' and she says 'Yes!'. You know what conversation I never have with my friends? Me, 'Interesting thing!' and friend, 'you're wonderful!'. I also never say 'Some odd angle on something' and have a friend answer 'Your saying that proves this about you.' In real life, you very rarely talk about someone to her. That isn't how friends act. In blog life, I've had enough of it.

Look, in real life, I carry my attention out in front of me, about a foot. When I meet you, I want your attention to join it and then they can zing off together to look at something shiny. We arrive at the same place for the purpose of playing and finding neat things and laughing at stuff. If you force our attention back to me, I'm confused. That isn't what people do and it interrupts the flow. If you evaluate me on top of that, then I remember that you aren't my parents and you have no claim. If you evaluate me by some picky, ungenerous, small, cramped and cautious worldview, then I remember that that we aren't anything alike and why am I writing to you everyday?

I now have two problems. First problem is that I think MOST of you aren't like that. Some commenters automatically understand how we play. They get jokes and make them better. They want to talk about the stuff and point to even better stuff. I also think most of the lurkers fall in that category. I meet you, or you write to me and we talk about the things we do. No evaluation. Dewb and I chattered right along. I hope to go dancing with Asymptote Beagle. Jess and Sherry and Daisy and so many of you are out there and I know that we're friends first and evaluation never.

My other problem is that I think that this constant evaluation is a function of the media. Maybe it happens whenever a person is publicly displayed; people start to think they can have an opinion about her. But in blogging the feedback is easy and instant. Or maybe it is that so much of my blogging circles are the ones where critique is constant. I do it and that's some of who is here. Maybe this is a selection problem, where I disproportionately experience a small fraction of the response.

Three. Three problems. I don't know what to do about the comments. I know that I might be losing good ones. Kwindla's are thoughtful and thorough and compassionate, even as he disagrees. Mitch is funny. JMPP shows me great links. Doctor Pat tells stories. So does Noel. But here's this. I deeply believe that the people who are in this evalutating, critiquing mode can't get out of it. At least, not by some girl blogging about it. The times I've talked about it, they didn't know what I meant. If thinking and judging mode is your whole world, me saying to do something different doesn't make any sense. They tell me that they don't know what an experiental sentence would be or why it matters, and I believe them. So. I had a comment policy I wasn't enforcing and I don't think a comment policy about "No Evaluating Me" will work either. But I've been dreading my own comments, because of the few that disproportionately PISS ME OFF, and that is unacceptable too. I'll try no comments, but I'll miss my friends who act like friends. Dunno, man. Unresolved.

More climate change thoughts.

2008-04-09T16:30:00.001-07:00

I can't do justice to the fantastic presentation by the guy from PG&E, who seriously knew his shit. Here's a slightly older paper of his. Maybe y'all are right that companies that sell things have incentives to know their systems and innovate. But the part I loved best was that he pulled up his first slide and started "California has basaltic faults in the northeast, metamorphic granites throughout the Sierra and [something or other] in the southern Sierra." I nearly wriggled with happiness, because I love being validated.

****

I don't read this stuff because I meant it when I swore off arguing with climate change denialists. (I also meant it when I swore off arguing with libertarians. My traffic has halved, but I will not be an internet cliché.) But The Poor Man linked the type of post I don't read, so I saw it anyway. A sample:

[T]here is no way I am going to buy into global warming as anything but a blatant attempt to control industry, take freedom away from the people and put political power into the hands of a bunch of elitist wimps who would like nothing better than to tell America what to do, how to think and how many trips they can make to the bathroom every day.

People, this is nothing but a bald faced power grab using flawed science and scare tactics aided by a lap dog media and opportunist politicians and globalists who see a way to squeeze America a little more.

Whatever. Sure. But here's the thing I wonder. How do people who deny climate change reconcile that with guys like this, who are spending entire careers on teasing out really non-dramatic aspects of climate change? This guy is not measuring carbon concentrations in oyster shells for the glory. There are thousands of these people, dorkily and steadily piecing out the causes and predicting effects.

If it is all a conspiracy and nothing is happening, how do denialists conceive of these guys? Do they think these monotonous nerds who talk in jargon (don't take that the wrong way. I'm sexually attracted to every one of them.) are making it up to promote the conspiracy? Like, they spend the morning thinking up esoteric ways of measuring wave energy by sand lost at different gauges around the state, and the afternoon faking their data so they can please Al Gore? They've done this now for ten years and they plan to make an entire career out of making up the detailed groundwork for fake climate change? All of them? On nothing? Imagine the secret conferences they must hold to synchronize their stories and settle on an allowable variance between the made-up river data, the made-up precipitation data and the made-up ocean data. Besides the groupies, WHAT FOR?

****

That reminds me that I haven't answered all those emails you guys send me, begging for an open thread to discuss this climate change seminar series. Not all of them have been as dramatic as the really excellent overview, but there have been definite high points along the way. Here's your chance to talk about those.

Some pretty pictures, while we're at it.

Like liveblogging, but really obscure and not live.

2008-04-09T16:24:00.000-07:00

DUDE! I went to the most awesome seminar on Monday. It was on climate change and energy in California, mostly hydropower. I've never thought much about hydropower before because it isn't irrigation, so who cares?! But going over to other people's fields turns out to be neato. Everything is new! Even though those people tended to think about things in skewed and odd ways, they said interesting things.

First thing I noticed is that those hydropower people do not care that water is water. As far as they are concerned, their dams are holding back money. It is money shaped like water that could turn a turbine, but they do not care about its other water-like properties. All they want their dams to do is hold their money until August, when electricity is worth lots to all you air-conditioning folks. The idea that water stored behind your dam is simply stored head reminds me a little of the guy who pointed out to me that wheat is stored sunshine and water.

The first guy to shake me was the guy who gave a presentation on extreme heat events in California. They care about that stuff because heavy air-conditioning days are apparently the peak load. Who knew? It could get a lot hotter, y'all. Under the A2 Scenario* (worst case), there may be about ten times as many T9 heat events (days the temperature exceeds the 90th percentile hot day for your locale (here in Sac, that's 105° F)). Basically, the T9 events will last all summer.

I'm looking at that and thinking, "hm. Well, I like the heat. I don't like everybody whining about the heat, but by then I'll be even better at ignoring it." Then he put up a graph of daily temperature, which looks like you'd think. Low in the morning, high in the late afternoon, low in the evening and night. I'm looking at this and I was actually sure I was reading it right, but I wanted to say the words out loud. So I asked. "Does that chart say that it will be 105° by 7:30 in the morning and will be at least that hot until 10:30 at night?" Yes. That is what it said. Dude. I'm fine through the late afternoon peak, but even I don't like to roll out of bed to 105°F. Then I was thinking, "that's the kind of thing that kills old people" and then I looked at the chart and it said 2050. I'LL BE OLD! CHANGE YOUR WAYS!

Then, they were talking about the ways the new hydrology will change hydropower generation. There'll be two effects. First is that when water falls as rain, it runs off earlier and second is that there'll be less overall. Unlike farmers or flood people, they don't care that it is earlier. They can catch that in their dams whether it shows up in March as rain or April as snowmelt. But they do care that there's less. From the quick look I got, ten percent less water means seven or eight percent less hydropower.

Here's the thing I didn't get, and I'm hoping one of you can tell me. They were talking about strategies for getting more power out of less precipitation. They talked about changing reservoir operations** and raising reservoir heights (to capture more liquid money). Increasing power generation showed up in the presentation, but no one talked about it. Why not? Internet, please tell me. Why not stick more turbines at the base of your dam? I can imagine a bunch of problems, but I don't know which one is the binding constraint. Is it the cost of punching another hole in your dam and attaching it to a new power plant? Is the process of FERC re-licensing prohibitive? Is that when people put in expensive infrastructure like powerplants, they did a really good job sizing them and there aren't a lot more gains to be had? This would surprise me, because I know of power plants in Sequoia that were packed in on mules a long time ago. They're totally gorgeous, with the real brass fittings on the turbines. But can it really be true that you couldn't do much better now? Have there been big efficiency gains in water turbines in the last century? Are the mountains still so hard to reach that it is not economically worth it yet? See, internets? I'm so ignorant that I can't even guess which is the big problem.

*The cognescenti seem to know a suite of model scenarios by name. I'm starting to recognize a couple of them. A2 is Bad News, and what we're doing now. There's the one where we drastically cut back emissions and find Jesus and things only get worse by about ten percent. I think that is B-something. Those are the brackets. I guess they run these standardized scenarios through lots of different models to compare the model outcomes. Sadly, they weren't given intuitive names way back when people were first doing these models, like "SUVs Everywhere" and "I bring my own shopping bag." Maybe if they'd known these were the names everyone would be stuck with for the next fifteen years....

That reminds me that I spent a summer duplicating the very first water model done in California, which might also be the first big water model ever. It was a 1956 study of how much water would be in the Sacramento River during the summer if Reclamation hadn't built Shasta Dam. They originally did it on huge sheets of paper, with hundreds of boxes. At the front of each row, it said what the operation was and what boxes above you multiplied or subtracted or whatever. Then you go down a row and do the new operation. People filled in the boxes by hand to run the model. There was a new version a year later called version C-57 (or something like that). The "C" stood for Computer and freedom from huge scrolls of paper.

**This is code for knowing when your water is going to arrive. If you know you'll only get February storms, you hold on to every drop until you use it in August. If you know you'll get an April storm, you sell your February hydropower and store your April water until August. The big risk is that your reservoir will be full when a flood arrives and you can't catch it. That screws people downstream and also wastes money you could have captured.

We were just talking about this.

2008-04-09T13:00:00.000-07:00

I just now saw a beeswarm, all bunched up at the base of a tree! My sister and I want a beehive. I should box it up, leave the box in my office all afternoon, carry it on my bike to the train station, take our swarm on the two hour train ride, ride another twenty minutes with the box in my arms and bring our bees home to us! It's perfect.

Conversations I have with Chris.

2008-04-08T12:23:00.000-07:00

Chris: Hee.
Megan. Oooh. Fed-Ex traffic.
Chris: I love traffic.
Megan: You love some traffic.
Chris: That's what heaven looks like.

****
Megan: I built this tomato cage my ownself!
Chris: Megan, tomatoes can't run away.

****
Chris: You might want to downshift on this grade.
Megan: More hamsters!
Chris: Bigger, stronger, slower hamsters.
Megan: Different hamsters!

****
After I fall on a series of unlit steps:
Chris: HAHAHAHAHAA! Ahh haha hahah hahah hah ha ha ha! HO HAHA HAHA!
Megan: Dude. I just feel on the steps.
Chris: Yeah, but you fell UP the stairs. Last time you fell down the stairs! Now you're even.
Megan: (in my head) They both hurt, fucker. Why are you laughing?

****
Chris: It is easy to lift the bike from the vertical post...
Megan: (in my head) Did he just give me advice on how to lift my bike? I've been on my bike for TWO YEARS NOW. I lift my bike on stairs and trains all the time. Did he not notice that I've been lifting my bike like that for years? What is a car driver doing telling a bike-person how to lift her bike?
Chris: ...down by the center of gravity...
Megan: (in my head) But sometimes he explains the basics and they're really helpful and I didn't think of that. Is that more helpful than telling me how to lift my bike is annoying? Yes. (sigh).

So wonderful.

2008-04-05T10:49:00.000-07:00

I love the shot and the caption, but most of all I love the title.

New friends.

2008-04-05T00:56:00.000-07:00

My ride home from the Emeryville train station takes me through North Oakland, in genuine bars-on-windows, chainlink fence territory. I can't decide how dangerous it is. There are far too many murders, but I haven't seen anything scary. I get in after dark sometimes, but I feel fine as long as I keep moving on my bike.

Tonight I heard shouts and saw three bikes on the block ahead of me, swooping and veering erratically. I was gaining on them, but relaxed when I realized they were kids, somewhere around twelve. They were shouting to each other, so they didn't hear me ride up on them. I got even with them and was riding fully in between the three of em, when one kid shouted "fuck me". It wasn't to me, they didn't know I was there. They were just feeling all bad-ass. His voice cracked though, so his friends laughed and his other friend said, no, like this, man. He put on his deepest, biggest voice and said "Fuuuuuck me. Bend me over right now."

I didn't think that was proper, so I said "Well, I hardly know you." They jumped and looked me for the first time, and then we laughed. I was nearly past them at that point, so I kept going. One kid paced me for a few more seconds, but saw a man he knew in the street ahead. He turned hard, peeled out pretty sweet and stopped inches from him. Lots of style, that one.

Because it sucks to admit you don't live by your morals, that's why.

2008-04-04T13:35:00.001-07:00

Oddly, widespread media attention to one of their faculty's most famous works does not seem to have made it to the front of the Boalt Hall page. Their bookstore manager is retiring, though.

Also, why aren't we hearing more from people inside the school? There's this guy, who is totally bummed those hippies who live in the past interrupted his class today. But that's the only blog I can find telling us what it is like to be in this situation. Considering how rich this topic is, why don't we have lots of thoughtful people telling us what the dilemma means and what they balance?

Maybe if the country were torturing white girls.

2008-04-04T12:07:00.000-07:00

I want a statement from Boalt Hall and from the Regents of UC clearly stating their position on John Yoo. They could say lots of things. They could say:

Dude. We love torture and wish we could crush the testicles of small children personally, but our dirty hippie neighbors won't watch our houses for us when we go on vacation if we do. Prof. Yoo is our man!

They could say:

Oh man. Firing him would be a huge hassle. You don't know. Besides tenure, there are a million contract issues and the press would be unbelievable. From the inside, on a daily basis, he does a decent job teaching and is reasonably socialized and by now I'm pretty good at walking past him in the halls and shutting out the idea of repeatedly drowning innocent men. Besides, those men didn't look like me.

They could say:

It is too bad that we can't follow the train of causality between Yoo's memo and establishing a novel torture regime in the United States. These things are so complicated and all he did was write a memo. If only there were some discipline, some field that deals with responsibility for crimes, how to weigh those and what the penalties should be. But since there isn't, we don't know what to do. I guess we'll just do nothing!

They could say:

Thinking about this makes me aware that everything we teach about the rule of law is a blatant lie. Thinking about how I violate my personal standards for decency every day that I work with John Yoo makes my head hurt. So I'm not going to think about it. Hasn't the asparagus been tasty recently? I grilled it last night! Delicious.

They could say:

You know what is important to me? Technicalities and protecting the privileged. I love an abstract idea about scholarship way more than I care about torturing brown people. I don't even have to watch the torturing, so it practically doesn't exist! Now see, I can talk how tenure works and if I think about it long enough, it totally balances out practically non-existant things.

They could say:

Yes. Integrity matters to us and so does the concept of consequences. We are not a body that punishes, but we do not have to have a man who enabled our country to descend into torture among us. Praise the day when he is brought before a war tribunal, but until then, we will not tolerate him in an institution dedicated to the principle of law.

They have to say something, though. Dodging the question is unacceptable for a public university. I would respect any of the statements above more than I respect pretending that it isn't a problem.

UPDATE: Full props to Berkeley Law School Dean Edley for explicitly stating his position on Prof. Yoo. Looks like they went with Option 4. Also worth noting is that Dean Edley's read on the Faculty Code of Conduct is very close to Prof. Rauchway's.

UPDATE 5/6/8: Strangely, William Drummond, Chair of the Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate of the University of California went with Option 3, "No Expertise". Honestly, I didn't think Option 3 would get any takers. I thought my made-up reasons were facially ridiculous.

The blog has been good practice.

2008-04-03T16:40:00.000-07:00

One day I want to be knowledgeable. I want to look at the world and know why things happened. I want to understand the forces in motion, and who is reacting to what. I have theories about things now, and I’m not one to back away from a generalization. But I never feel like I know enough. Some people know things. You ask, ‘why is that there?’ and they explain to you the history of that political struggle and how it evolved and how it contrasts with that one neat case that illuminates this other facet. And you’re all, ‘but you’re a limnologist. Why do you know that?’. Anyway, one thing about those people who really do understand things is that they’re usually older than me. This is a relief. I have time to catch up.

I might not catch up. Remember, two years ago when I said that what I really need to do to understand the world is take a soils class? Yeah. Two years later and I still haven’t taken a soils class and I still don’t know how soils work. This despite the fact that I’ve written at least half a dozen posts where the answer to ‘how come?’ is ‘what are you standing on and how does it act?’.

On the other hand, I might finally have enough breadth that I can spot things. I was reading this LA Times article about how the West is warming up faster than the rest of the country and I was idly musing about what it means for cannibals to eat only organic local foods when I came across a surprising name. The University of Colorado climate professor is an Udall? I know I’ve heard the name Udall before. So I check it, and I better know the name Udall. There were lots of them and they did important things all over the west. The fact that there were lots of them makes me feel a little better about not being able to place a single person, but then, looking at this rather great Wikipedia page, I’m a little horrified that I missed an entire important western dynasty. How’m I supposed to catch on to alliances and stories if I can’t even tell you how an Udall acts? I’ve requested Morris Udall’s book, Too Funny To Be President*, so soon I’ll know a little better.

Anyway, I want to be knowledgeable because I’m really looking forward to delivering extended monologues at family dinners whenever anyone asks me any sort of question. For too long I’ve been letting other people speak sometimes. I don’t listen to them or anything, but it is time to step up my game.

UPDATE 4/22/8: Too Funny To Be President was actually pretty good. Some interesting stuff about why Ted Stevens hates Mike Gravel, leading back to a dispute in the 80's. He writes a chapter on the rise of the environmental movement, and describes his choice to support the Central Arizona Project. I mention all this because we now have two data points suggesting that Udalls support water projects. Three times is a law.

*I hear you, my brother.

More counter-factual ineptitude from the Bush administration.

2008-04-02T15:47:00.000-07:00

This is just so, so wrong. Remember Monica Goodling, the appointee at the U.S. Attorney General's office who thought that extreme rightwing political ideology was the right basis to evaluate, hire and fire federal attorneys general? She's also mixed up in firing an "excellent" attorney general on suspicion of being lesbian. According to an anonymous Republican source, "To some people, that's even worse than being a Democrat."

I am so fucking tired of Bush appointees who have no clue about the subjects they are meddling in, or worse, regulating. It is blatantly obvious to anyone even a little bit sophisticated or cosmopolitan, to anyone who has any familiarity with people who aren't narrowminded rightwing religious freaks that it is WAY BETTER TO BE LESBIAN THAN A DEMOCRAT!

Is she kidding me? Being lesbian would be great! You get to be a hot chick and date hot chicks! That's, like, hotness squared! You would like breasts and also have them. If you also like dicking, you can buy one, or lots, and use them whenever you want! You don't have to wait around for men to believe your propositions (if they recognize them in the first place) and be sure of their feelings and crap. It is so easy to flirt with women and flirting with lesbians goes even faster. You're always the coolest person in the room if you're lesbian. Margie says that once you're lesbian and out, everything is easy. As long as you don't wear combat boots and shave your head, you're mainstream. Your choice of pets and cars is totally settled. You only have to choose which singer-songwriter you're gonna go with.

By contrast, being a Democrat is pretty miserable. You always immediately identify with the downtrodden, which sucks because they're downtrodden. You have to watch an administration systematically corrupt and destroy your government, which furthers their arguments that government doesn't work. You have to evaluate your culpability when institutions you are part of do heinous shit like torturing people, because you can't pretend you don't know that the system is answerable to the collective you. You feel cognitive dissonance when your actions and ideals aren't aligned, because you are aware of the small hypocrisies and shortcuts that make life convenient. You don't revel in poor people's hurts because that just goes to show they weren't meritorious; you have to look for causes, which requires unpleasant thinking. You have to look at really painful, expensive truths and do more than hope for unicorns to bring cheap energy or hold levees in place. Doing things sucks, and doing expensive things can mean short-term sacrifice. No one wants short-term sacrifice. Your heart just bleeds and bleeds and bleeds, and it bleeds some more when you think of boys and girls getting thrown into the Iraq War blender, when you know people in your country live in tent cities, when it matters to you that we're ten years away from no more salmon in California, when people are getting raped in jail. Really, being Democratic isn't the fun and games Goodling makes it out to be.

I can't believe that even a Bush official can go around spewing nonsense like 'being lesbian is worse than being a Democrat'. Sometimes I think they've hit bottom, but then the trapdoor opens and I fall into a whole new cellar of bullshit rightwing ignorance.

I will do original reporting!

2008-04-01T13:41:00.000-07:00

The Clintons have been trying to speak in a way my peoples will understand:

According to a Clinton supporter, the Governor's wife, Hillary Clinton, took her husband aside just before a debate and told him: "If Jerry Brown goes off on some wild tangent against you, just remind him he's from California and what they say out there is chill out . Just tell him to chill out."

Sure enough, as Mr. Brown started to inveigh against the Clinton civil rights record, Mr. Clinton interrupted cheerfully with "Jerry, chill out! You're from California—chill out. Cool off a little." That became the sound bite used on all the evening news shows the next day. Note how Governor Clinton slipped in the definition, "to cool off," so that non-Californians would understand.

They're a generation older than I am, and have this mildly skewed by my standards. I would issue a "Chill, dude", without the follow through preposition. In my sister's circles, they say "Chilly" or "Keep it chilly" as an admonition to stay calm and keep one's head in a pressured situation. I think that is an idiosyncratic usage, from their time playing sports together.

Nevertheless, I am in my mid-thirties, which makes me a generation older than anyone who is actually cool. I'm sure that I am not right either. However! I know a ~~four~~fifteen year old girl! I will ask her, and she will tell me what the Clintons should have said to be hep cats.

UPDATE: Seems like the Clintons are more au courant than I am. My fifteen year old source reports that she would use chill or chill out interchangeably.

But...

2008-03-31T18:25:00.000-07:00

But why do they think it is a self-portrait? It could be anyone. It could be his best friend or mom or girlfriend.

Some good books.

2008-03-31T17:17:00.000-07:00

Dude, it’s been a million years since I did a book list. But I’ve read some good stuff since then.

Very good:
Just finished Under a Flaming Sky, by Daniel James Brown, which I heard of here. Oh man. Remember when you read Outlaw Sea, like I told you, and you stayed up late into the night because you couldn’t put down the chapter about the ferry sinking? That’s what this whole book is like. I cried for those moms fleeing with their babies.

I also really liked Prayer for a City, by Buzz Bissinger. I vaguely think I read Friday Night Lights, too, on a flight to Hawaii, but it was obviously the wonky book about Ed Rendell and his efforts in Philadelphia that I remember.

Oh! If you want to understand California ag, which obviously you do, you should read The King of California: J. G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret American Empire by Mark Arax and Rick Wartzman. Super good, a very hard look at the farms in the Tule Lake bed that are bigger than some states. Good technical stuff on cotton, a couple generations of flamboyant doers and a look at very modern ag. Thanks for lending me that, Teddy. Are you going to want it back?

Solid:
American ground, unbuilding the World Trade Center, by William Langewiesche was good, but very obviously three long articles stitched together. That’s cool, though. I’ll read anything he writes. In fact, I think I have. He lives in Davis. I should stalk him.

The Nine Nations of North America, by Joel Garreau. Good recommendation, Ari, better than Redemption : the last battle of the Civil War, by Nicholas Lemann, which was a good explanation of how the Reconstruction went tragically wrong but not, like, a fun story. Garreau plays fast and free with generalizations about regions of American and big trends. He’s a catchy writer, too. He’s practically a blogger!

The Last Stand: The War Between Wall Street and Main Street over California's Ancient Redwoods, by David Harris. Another sad book, about the bad guys winning in a hostile takeover of Pacific Lumber. You see the same bad guys at the thick of the sub-prime mortgage crisis, so it offers a new angle on hating those fuckers. A very good story, well-enough written.

If you think you would like a book about freight transportation (trucking/container ships/trains) by John McPhee, then you would like Uncommon Carriers by John McPhee. Not so much plot, but lots of interesting detail and characters.

Oh! Thanks, Kwindla, for Radio Free Dixie, which was itself a good read, but combined with Blood Done Sign My Name (both by Timothy Tyson) and Redemption have left me struggling to remember that there must be some good in the American South, that I can't happen to see at the moment but must exist.

I had mixed feelings about The Quiet Girl, by Peter Hoeg. I liked Smilla's Sense of Snow a good deal, but thought it went weird in the end when it stopped being about understanding snow and started being a thriller. That was kinda how all of Quiet Girl was. Neat premise, that the guy can hear everything, and I expected to like it more seeing as how I am so disproportionately auditory. But it was kinda a thriller the whole way, with wrongdoing I couldn't exactly figure out and action I didn't really believe. But I read it all smoothly and think I liked it more than not reading a book. So maybe you'll like it too.

Light reads/young adult:

A couple good series:
I very much enjoyed Carrie Vaughn’s Kitty series, in which a contemporary werewolf has adventures and doesn’t leave out the sex. I found these through Prof. Shalizi’s booklists. I would now trust his tastes, except he recommended the Parker series of olde Japan mysteries which were utterly trite except for the annoying exoticism of Japanese honor rituals, which is a different kind of trite, I guess. Don’t read those.

I quite liked Jennifer Lynn Barnes' series about how it, like, totally sucks to have the Sight in high school. Golden and Platinum, so far. I predict a Silver because there is a third sister.

Stand-alone books:
I just read Everlost, by Neal Shusterman, which was sweet and moved smartly along.

I think my favorite read in a good long time and my top recommendation is Princess Academy, by Shannon Hale. That was just great. It really was. The girls from a village of stonecutters get sent to a princess academy, from which the prince will choose a wife. They are not passive about this. I’ve very much liked all of Hale’s fairytale settings and re-tellings, but this one is my favorite so far.

My older recommendations here and here. Tell me more stuff to read, OK? My request list at the library is down to one book.

UPDATE: Heh heh heh. Since I posted this yesterday afternoon, two separate writers on this list have googled themselves and come by. Hi! Sadly, Langewiesche isn't one of them and he didn't invite me out to dinner to tell me how amazing my blog is. The world is bleak and unforgiving.

I'll add some unsolicited advice to one of 'em, since she's been back a couple times: Honey, you're good now and you're going to be amazing when you're grown. In the next few years, as you come into your strength, you're going to stop wanting to be treated like a precocious sweet thing. When you get to that point, switch your photos. No peeking out from behind your hair, no cocked head angle. The cocked head angle is a flattering shot, but it is for listening to taller men and is both sexualized and submissive. When you are ready to be peers with your public, look them straight on. Only smile if you want to. Cutesiness is a pretty good formula (especially if you are cute), but you have even better options. You have so much talent that when you are ready to use other methods, they'll come through for you.

Incidentally, I am SO DISAPPOINTED that Shane Claiborne switched his glamor shots. I suspect these are a truer depiction of his attention and affect, but he had three old ones that were spot-on imitations of the headcock and moue that women often use. Having a scruffy dreadlocked guy use them shows their full ridiculousness. Forcing anyone who wanted him to speak use those shots was even better.

Cesar Chavez Day, of course.

2008-03-31T09:40:00.000-07:00

So what are you doing with your fun, fun day off? Hiking? Going to a matinée? Lounging at an outdoor table at a cafe? Surely you aren't going to sit inside reading blogs on a beautiful day like today! When you get a holiday, you have to make the most of it!

Thanks, taxpayers!

Movie, anyone?

2008-03-28T18:52:00.000-07:00

Anyone want to go see a movie? It is the perfect movie, with underdogs in an alternative sport battling it out AND Asian boys dancing. I could die just thinking about it. I told my friends it was a documentary and it had subtitles, but they're all being far away or otherwise lame. But you aren't far away or lame, right? Movie this weekend, or tonight, in Berkeley? Email me, OK?

UPDATE: YOU SEE?! It would be like this, only international and FOR REAL. I hate every one of you who didn't go to this movie with me this weekend. Why are you living your life wrong?

Yes, that self-centered.

2008-03-27T12:31:00.000-07:00

I don't want to go and see his deterioration and I'll hate the facilities which will smell wrong and wrong, and I don't want to fly there, and I want my fun weekends, and he'll be so grateful, which will make me so sad because it will remind me how little I truly do, and I'll have to confront mortality and life's bad paths, and I will have to be sweet when people say banalities. I don't want to.

But a weekend visiting my deteriorating grandfather now will save me entire depths of self-loathing and regret in the foreseeable future. I am so not brave, but we know what to do, right?

This made me purely happy.

2008-03-26T22:21:00.001-07:00

I confess that my ex and I had a dance routine that we did to this song. It wasn't skanky or anything, just a little something to make parties better. Nothing like this:

*****
Hardstyle, I'd say, although they're both impressive.

Sorta via ebogjonson

Just 'cause...

2008-03-25T17:37:00.000-07:00

...I'm part of the problem and adding more analysis and critical thinking to the steaming heap, don't think I've abandoned my freakish new comment policy.

If you want to add more critical thinking, you have to create something as well. Offer a feeling or tell me an experience or describe something.

I owe bigtime for those two long posts, but for now I'll give you:

Stood in front of the thigh-high box, eyes wide. For all my life, jumping has meant ankle rolling. But she told me to leap and I pumped my arms twice to wind up and hopped lightly onto the box. I could do it again and I did! Lots of times, into a soft crouch, with clearance to spare. I could even jump down, forwards and backwards.

I'll show you "tediously long".

2008-03-25T17:17:00.000-07:00

In a post I otherwise agree with, I think Digby got a tangential point wrong in an important way. I keep telling you that Senator Obama has steeped in mediation, that the precepts and practices of mediation come naturally to him now. If I am right about that, Digby read this line of his speech wrong:

Obama: …It's all around culture wars and it's all ... even when you discuss war the frame of reference is all Vietnam. Well that's not my frame of reference. My frame of reference is "what works."…

Digby: …I certainly understood why Senator Obama would take the technocratic approach and say he was about "what works" rather than about ideology or civil rights. …

I don’t think Obama is talking about a technocratic “what works”. I think he’s talking about a far more difficult “what works”. I think he is talking about the state you get into when the conflict is so intractable and so urgent that the stories that people have been telling themselves about right and wrong stop being interesting. You stop trying to judge fairness or weigh grievances, because that is some long, knotty, unresolvable work. Not only is it maddening work, but you only have to do that work if you intend to punish. If you don’t have the authority for or the interest in punishment, or if your goal instead is to make things better, the real substance starts with “what will work?”.¹

The more you listen to every side, the less patience you have for people’s rock hard notions of fairness. People tell a good story to themselves and to you, about the way that thing was totally unfair. They’re often right. That was really unfair. But you go talk to the next person, who offers another perspective on how it happened, and who thinks that the important part was when an unfair thing happened to them. Wow. That was unfair too. You know, there’s a whole lot of unfairness here, unfairness enough for all the players to wallow in forever. Which they do. When people start telling you about the unfair things, they almost always get a tone². Their voice gets rehearsed because they are walking the rut that injustice has carved in their mind. They have thought it and thought it and made complicated reasons for every piece of it and they understand every single tendril of all the ways it hurt them. They tell you this in this closed, justifying, inauthentic voice that is recognizable as soon as it starts. As soon as it clicks in, you know you’re dealing with someone’s self-protective righteousness. Everyone loves their own precious jewels of mistreatment, but when you see a few of them from the outside, they start to look remarkably alike. When you’ve seen a lot of them, they get repetitive, predictable and eventually uninteresting.

As long as people are in that mode, that thinking and justifying and accusing mode, you cannot get anywhere new. You can’t argue them out of it, because they have been thinking of every possible angle on it for years. They will tell you the most convoluted explanation for why they were right and those people were villains. They will simply disregard contradictions in their story or facts that don’t support them or reasoning that challenges them. You do not reach people in defensive mode by argument. Instead, you lift them out of that mode by listening and showing them they were heard. Only after their story, the one they’ve polished in long nights of thinking, has been heard can you move past it to the real problems.

That, in fact, is what happened after Obama gave his speech on race. He showed white people^2.5 that he had heard their story; he quoted their emotions and content back to them³:

In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don't feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience - as far as they're concerned, no one's handed them anything, they've built it from scratch. They've worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they're told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.

And some people were so shocked they’d been heard that for the first time in a long time, they openly went on to the next part⁴.

On the other hand, I am sick to death of black people as a group. The truth. That is part of the conversation Obama is asking for, isn't it? I live in an eastern state almost exactly on the fabled Mason-Dixon line. Every day I see young black males wearing tee shirts down to their knees -- and jeans belted just above their knees. I'm an old guy. I want to smack them. All of them. They are egregious stereotypes. It's impossible not to think the unthinkable N-Word when they roll up beside you at a stoplight in their trashed old Hondas with 19-inch spinner wheels and rap recordings that shake the foundations of the buildings. . . .

Here's the dirty secret all of us know and no one will admit to. There ARE n*****s.

Perhaps you are revolted. Maybe you are offended by the open racism. But my reaction was “Oh thank god. Now we’re getting somewhere. If this is the real problem, we can work with this.” Look, in his howl, this dude finally told us his real problem. But they wear their pants funny! They listen to the wrong music! Too loud!! Dude, this is the heart of it?⁵ Oh mister, you’re on. This deal is done. If I had two sides sitting down, both wanting a new reality, this one is ready to go. So, in exchange for an end to discriminatory sentencing guidelines and the over-incarceration of black men and an end to predatory lending and free college for any black takers, our young black men will pull up their pants and listen to Mozart once a week? I think I can sell that deal to both sides. Toss in a program to reverse the effects of redlining and I bet I could get them to tuck in their shirts. This is so do-able. The break-through came from the new emotional information. The rest is details and negotiation.

You do three things to get to a new stable arrangement that gives all sides what they want most. You listen, to move people past their reinforced defensive stories. You offer them a vision of a new reality that is even more tempting than self-pity, one that addresses their core wrongs. You change your frame of reference from judging right and wrong to “what works”. Sen. Obama is absolutely consistent on those three fronts. He’s going at our problems in a way that American politics has never tried before. He is doing it in a way that works. I think you’re going to like it.

¹ You parents know this. When your daughters are squabbling and you ask what happened and the stories of hair-pulling and line-crossing and doll-touching and book-stealing and ball-slamming and seat-taking go back to the cradle (when they were so sweet and quiet!), you come to the realization that justice simply isn’t an issue here. The issue is the current resolution and please god, make it last a few hours.
²Sometimes they don’t. When they don’t, when they sound as shocked and hurt and raw as when it first happened, pay even closer attention. This could well be a rare thing in extended conflicts: an innocent. The other roles, of redress and punishment could apply here.
^2.5He told the black stories as well, but I ~~ignore them because of white privilege~~ don’t trust my understanding of black worldviews enough to try to ~~articulate~~write them up in public.
³Look how elegantly he did that. For those of you who thought I was talking crazy talk, go back to that quote and look at all the words about emotions: anger, “don’t feel … privileged”, anxious, “feel their dreams slipping away”, resentment. He nailed that and because he got both parts, the emotion and the content right, everyone knew he’d understood them.
⁴I haven’t read or clicked on the original. I’d be more worried about libeling that guy if I thought such a thing were possible. Instead, I’m linking to a woman who quoted him. I’d like to point out that her gut response, a sincere one that I agree with, does two things that won’t help the problem at all. First, she tells him his feelings don’t matter, because they are despicable. I agree that his feelings are despicable, but unless we intend to wait until he’s dead, to solve racism by generational replacement, his feelings are the ones we have to work with. They matter a lot. Second, she argues with him. You can’t argue. Remember? There is no persuading people in the defensive mindset. Every instant spent in the realm of arguing defensive thinkiness is wasted time. Feels satisfying for a while, but it is waste.
⁵This is probably not the real heart of it. The real heart of it is probably fear of black men, immediate physical fear and fear of them being with white women. That is some fucked up shit. I owe you another painfully long post on fear and trust. Sadly, I’m pondering yet another equally abstract post on grace.

You're going down, strawmen.

2008-03-25T16:25:00.000-07:00

These keep distracting me, so I want to put them here.

Sen. Obama is glossing over problems and pretending they don't exist.

No he isn't. Listen to him. He'll describe any policy problem you choose thoroughly and precisely. He understands the causes and effects. But that's not where his attention is, re-hashing problems and figuring out what was unfair when. Past unfairness gets treated by a full airing, by listening and acknowledgement, and it informs our choice of solutions. But it doesn’t stop us from doing something that would work and offers gains to all parties. When Sen. Obama talks about moving forward, he isn’t glossing over the past or pretending that problems don’t exist. He just wants to fix them the only place they can be fixed, from here on out.

Sen. Obama's pretty words and speech-making aren't a plan.

Y'all. You can read Sen. Obama's policy plans in his policy statements. By most accounts, they're solid and much the same as Sen. Clinton's or Edward's. But that's not what you mean. You're all, "hope" and "change" don't happen because of pretty speeches. People keep saying that he is being airy-fairy, head in the clouds, buy the world a Coke and sing in harmony. He’s not. He is methodically following the mediation playbook to address the real problems. It only sounds abstract to you because you aren't familiar with the elements of mediation and you haven’t seen it work. But I have. It isn't that I have secret insight into this guy. Anyone who is trained in mediation sees each techique he uses. Active listening is where you say the emotion and content of both sides back to them. Y'all were all "ooooooooh, what juju did he use in his race speech?!" and I was like, active listening. Refusing to demonize people. Believing that we will live up to the better sides of ourselves. Offering a vision that is better than what people can get without mediation is the heart of his campaign. His emphasis on "what works". He himself is not magic. He is a skilled practioner of an approach that has a ton of power to resolve problems. If you knew that approach, everything he does would look familiar to you.

It is cruel of him to offer a hope that doesn't exist.

Dude. It better exist. Some big scary stuff is coming our way. The rest of the recession. Bringing our troops home from war. Climate change. Rising costs of living. The persistent effects of racism. Three trillion dollars in household debt. The war debt. We get to deal with these simultaneously. That's gonna be awesome. Those are coming and they will be resolved by meeting them and solving them, or they'll be resolved by our people living in poverty. There had better be hope.

That brings me to thoughts on pragmatism. It seems to me that there are a couple different places to be pragmatic. Some people say that pragmatism is admitting that something won't work. Or they accuse me of hopeless idealism, refusing to be pragmatic. This surprises me, because I think I have plenty realistic assessment of what things are really like. Then I figured out that I am pragmatic at a later stage in the game. For me, the first step is a decision that the problem is solvable. This IS solvable, so what will the solution require? That's where the pragmatism comes in. OK, for us to solve climate change will simply require that our population rapidly understand science, decide to change their individual choices of convenience, re-design the American dream, spend a trillion dollars adapting and mitigating our infrastructure and stop treating the natural world as something to dominate. Cool. Is that all? Oh wait! Develop clean cheap energy, too.

It isn't that I have unrealistic ideas about what solving the problem will take. I know perfectly well. It is just that I've skipped the step where people say it can't work. It has to work, because not-working will suck worse. Bad as the solution is, the problem really is worse. So I don't want to hear that kind of "pragmatism". I want to hear how we're going make the next steps happen.

I'm sure I had more. But I'm also sure you've had enough.

Good work, Mayor Villaraigosa.

2008-03-24T16:20:00.000-07:00

I called my secret insider unnamed source to ask her about this story about the Los Angeles Harbor Commission forcing shipping companies to buy and maintain trucking fleets and employ their drivers. She was psyched. She says it is a big deal.

Until now, truckers doing short hauls out of the ports were doing contract piece work. They’d call a dispatcher who had an order for a hundred boxes to go to Target warehouse and get in line at the port gate to pick up a box. They owned their trucks, and these aren’t nice trucks, and try to get in a few trips a day. If something went wrong, they bore the full brunt of hitting traffic, of the box not being available, anything. They have no health insurance, no guarantee of employment, no retirement; they have to maintain their own trucks; they’re competing with each other, driving down the per-trip prices. Their time isn’t valuable to anyone else. My source says they spend hours in lines of idling diesel trucks waiting at the Port gates.

I asked her who was actually going to hire the drivers and she says those trucking companies don’t exist right now. Either the shipping companies will form those companies or maybe an independent trucking company will form. Either way, the drivers want this. When there’s a company, they can unionize. Besides, the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach have a Clean Air Action Plan that commits them to replacing the truck fleet. The current truck fleet is a big source of local air pollution and the Clean Air Action Plan says that nearly 17,000 trucks must be replaced within five years. There’s just no way the individual truckers working as independent contractors could buy new clean trucks. I asked my source, who laughed “oh, they’re not even like the long haul truckers who drive across country and sleep in their trucks. Those are nice trucks. These are trucks that have done everything else, and now you hope they can make it ten miles to the warehouse.” The new companies who step into this will have to provide modern, less polluting trucks.

I asked my secret source if there are any other alternatives than trucking boxes. She says there is local cargo and discretionary cargo. Discretionary cargo goes to the hinterland by rail; she says they can pick any port depending on how the costs work out. There is a new port up in Prince Rupert designed for only rail transport. It can be cheaper to get stuff to Chicago from Canada by rail than use a closer port on the east coast. I asked if it would be worth it for Los Angeles or Long Beach to switch some of their trucking transport over to rail, but she says that people don’t particularly like having railyards in their neighborhoods either. Local cargo (few hours radius) pretty much has to be trucked.

Anyway, this is great news. These truckers are very poor people who subsidized the price of container shipped goods with their health and quality of life. They won’t have to pay that for us any more.

There will be no pictures.

2008-03-23T14:36:00.001-07:00

There are words that bring people closer together, kind words that bind sisters even tighter. There are also cruel, hateful words that reveal a jealous sister's dark and bitter heart. I will make a list, so that we know which are which:

Kind, sweet words:
homespun
form follows function, I guess
I see you made this by yourself.
authentic
how resourceful! to use our scrap lumber thusly
mostly vertical
simple, rustic
right angles aren't everything
unconditional
I get tired of commercial perfection.
Probably better than the four year old could have made.
I'm so proud that you tried.

Cruel, hateful words:
Dear god, what is that?
I'll hope for no strong winds.
Did you plan it like this?
Tomato cages are cheap.
We have a tape measure, you know.
Perhaps if you had sketched it first...

My sister'll be home from Santa Cruz in a couple hours. Then we'll see who she really is.

UPDATE: "Does it have to look like that?" Now we know...

I will admit that it is pretty out of scale to the yard. But I think it is going to be the right size for the tomatoes.

By my ownself!

2008-03-23T11:51:00.001-07:00

I will build a thing! Right now! Here in the sunshine, I will use scrap lumber to build an extended tomato cage! With long pieces and nails and no real skill. It will have only one function, to support tomato plants in August. How wrong can I make something that only has to stand against gravity and tomato plants?

I could buy tomato cages, but the little fold-y ones are too weak for the monstrous tomato plants I predict. The ones for my community garden are made from the six-foot concrete reinforcement mesh, which I fold into circles and dig a foot into the ground. I have not had a cage tip in years. I don't have room for that here, and besides, I don't really want circles of tomatoes. What I'm really looking for is a solid wall of cherry tomatoes, to serve as a sacrificial perimeter defense of my garden. The perfect nephews have moved on from my arugula to my peas. I'm pleased they understand the purpose of the garden, and blah blah blah connection to their food. Whatever. They're especially cute locusts. I'm hoping that if the first thing they come to is cherry tomatoes (Sungolds, Sweet 100s and maybe one other kind. Not the yellow pear tomatoes. Those aren't that good.) they won't continue to the rest of my garden.

So! A long rectangle, posts and cross bars at two and four feet high, hammered together by me! I will build this! Right now! CAN!

I wasn't sympathizing.

2008-03-22T20:54:00.001-07:00

The guy behind me in line today had lovely eyes, green and brown. We'd already smiled, so I said "Do you get complimented on your eyes a lot?" "Yeah" he said. "You get that too?" "Yeah, but, I wasn't, um, I meant to be complimenting your eyes." "Eh," he grunted, utterly bored. "Thanks."

I'll leave overshot gates as an exercise for the reader.

2008-03-20T13:23:00.000-07:00

Via LGM:

...Dana Perino on women in defense:

Some of the terms I just don’t know, I haven’t grown up knowing. The type of missiles that are out there: patriots and scuds and cruise missiles and tomahawk missiles. And I think that men just by osmosis understand all of these things, and they’re things that I really have to work at — to know the difference between a carrier and a destroyer, and what it means when one of those is being launched to a certain area.

Right...
because men do have an inborn understanding of the difference between a Tu-95 "Bear" and a Tu-160 "Blackjack".

Dude. It took me forever to learn what everything meant in irrigation. It was so hard. I didn't know. I didn't know what was a category and what was a specific name, so that if you misspoke you were actually conveying something else. I wasn't sure what was a brand name and what was a model type. People weren't consistent! Different growers would call the same thing different things. People would say the same thing, but mean different things. "Foot" could be a volume of water (the implied area is an acre or maybe the field we were standing in, whatever), or a flow (short for cubic foot per second), or the pressure (vertical height unimpeded water would rise to for that lbs/square inch). I couldn't always tell what the speaker meant.

It always seemed like the men in my class knew. How did they know? I'd be confused and puzzling it out, but they were just moving on. Should I ask? Would everyone know that I didn't understand a thing about it?

Few things saved me. First, my irrigation professor would ask those kinds of questions. Front of a whole group of students, my professor who'd been in the field for decades, one of the top four or five people in the world at water projects, would ask the speaker what he meant. If there were a couple different interpretations, my professor would openly and immediately interrupt and ask. Oh thank god. If he could ask, so could I.

Second, I knew my problem wasn't 'cause I was a girl. My problem was that I was from L.A.. I didn't know how irrigation systems worked because I didn't work with them my whole life. There wasn't boy-magic to knowing this. You don't absorb the names of sprinkler systems through your cock. There wasn't any reason I couldn't know them, once they were taught to me.

Finally, it took me a little while to catch on*, but at least in water, things are often called things for a reason. Side-arm gates are radial gates, because they swing out from a radius or side-arm. Undershot gates are gates that water goes under. I wasn't always right, but the names could get me started.

In the end, I learned it. That was all it took, learning and repetition. The other thing I learned is that I don't fuck around with self-doubt and confusion any more. Those boys that just understood and nodded and moved on with the speaker? A couple of them were competition for the highest grade in our classes. Sometimes. Now, though, I ask. All the time. Soon as I don't understand something, I ask right away. If my professor could ask the most basic questions, so can I. I know it startles people when I ask like a four-year-old "what does that word mean?" "I don't understand, how does that work?" "I still don't understand. Could you please sketch what you're saying?" I occasionally get patronized for that. But never for long.

*Until I finally caught on, I was using brute force memorization. That's a pretty good technique for me, but it all got easier once I understood the family relations. Oh, those gates are all cousins because they rotate the same. Oh, anything that water flows over is a weir, and can also be other things too.

UPDATE: ~~BobVis!!~~ Comment policy! I will let all y'all know when it changes back. Mark, you're killing me...

No need to name names. Scott, Peter and t_n. Teo, we'll discuss your attitude later.

2008-03-20T11:36:00.000-07:00

When I was a TA, the single hardest thing for me to teach was to follow the test instructions. Follow the instructions. If it said "Define and then give an example", I would explain to the class that I would give half the credit for a definition and half the credit for an example. That means that if you gave a VERY EXCELLENT definition, one that was exactly right and showed how well you understood, you would have answered half the question, which was worth a failing grade.

I would explain this, and then I would quiz the class. "If you only write a definition, what would your grade be?" "If you only write an explanation, what will your grade be?" Then I would ask them what they should do to pass the test. You would think that this was too patronizing, too infantilizing, that they would resent this. BUT IT STILL TOOK THEM TWO MIDTERMS TO FOLLOW INSTRUCTIONS. Yes, no doubt this is how Dr. Schmidt's professionalism is maintained and enforced, and no doubt I am creating a little cohort of mindless direction followers. But I tell you what, potential blog commenters. If you don't accompany your analysis with a feeling or experience or creation, something that you witness or generate, you aren't getting through.

UPDATE: I didn't know this would be this hard. Like, tell me something that caught your eye. Or describe a feeling you had. Without analyzing it. Here:

Evening on a new porch with an easy book. Fizzy water with a strawberry cut into it. Good trees on this street. Purple ornamental plum in front of a budding-out elm, both bathed in late golden light. Wistful for the flowers at my own house, which are so beautiful right now.

UPDATE II: Justus, nope. -A, more feeling about Stupid Directions!. Scott, getting closer. Was the point that you're frustrated?

Anyone?

2008-03-19T22:02:00.000-07:00

Bec wasn't just a great roommate. She likes very funny things.

Uncle.

2008-03-19T14:06:00.000-07:00

I've reached my fill. The length of the presidential election has unleashed a wave of such relentless, picky, position-justifying critical thought that I can't bear to read any more of it. I don’t care who it argues for or the ornate reasoning behind it. It is all so much thinking, so convoluted and abstract. I’ve started dreading it.

Here’s the thing. The people who love to talk about how complicated maneuverings will influence other, less sophisticated voters, are people who want to live in a world of thought and information. Political bloggers and commenters live for this stuff. A dense hit of information! That they can process by their made-up rules! About something that is important, so they can feel like they are participating! But they don’t have to really talk to anyone! Or experience anything that challenges their intricate rules! This is a particular trap for symbolic analysts like us, who get addicted to constant information and seek out thought like junkies. It is so easy for us to get trapped in our minds. As long as the information keeps coming, we never have to experience our lives and feelings!

And then! The critical thought spills over on to everything. Every position that a blogger offers has to be picked apart. Is it true in every extreme? Is there a counter example that dodges the blogger’s careful qualification that could nullify everything she said!!!! Does the post secretly prove your point, if you look at it through the double-reverse periscope of this one thing that happened one time!!! (Odd how much of blogworld supports your original positions once you know how to look at it.) Did the blogger ever once say something that could be read to contradict her current position? She has no more credibility, ever, because the real world cannot possibly be nuanced and people cannot hold two contradictory thoughts, the which they acknowledge and balance to match changing circumstances. It is relentless. It feels like a barrage of this one type of communication, which is useful for some stuff, but is really a very limited mode of dealing with the world outside your computer screen.

I’m interested in the presidential election, but I can barely stand to read analysis anymore. I certainly can’t stand to read counter-analysis. If it is very good, I can handle a personal reaction presented through a very strong lens (like, here’s how studying paleobotany informs my interpretation of the presidential campaign!). That’s still interesting. But otherwise, I’ve mostly given up. All that thought, spinning and tangling with other thought, to no productive end. It doesn’t make anyone feel good, except the person who got the little hit of serotonin when he clicked on ‘Post’. Even that doesn’t last, so you have to do it again and again to compensate for sitting alone in a dark room, bathed in the light of your computer screen.

I’ve noticed that it is bugging other people too, this analysis and cleverness:

This election has turned into some kind of bizarre series of rituals, like an season of Greek theater where everybody knows the plot and the audience is left to judge the work on the presentation. The parade of comment, counter-comment, conference call about comment, distancing from comment, and major speech incorporating remarks about comment is the real distraction in this campaign, diverting from a looming economic recession (a recession at BEST) and a tragic stalemate in Iraq. Rarely does anything good for the country come out of this exchange.

It is repetitive and not productive. It isn’t the only way to carefully hone thought. It is an addiction. It is going to be a long eight months until the presidential election.

So it shall be.

2008-03-19T14:04:00.000-07:00

I am announcing a new comment policy, at least until I regain some tolerance for critical analysis. I’ve started dreading comments, not ‘cause they’re wrong, but because I can’t stand to read another version of “well, but this aspect of what you wrote”, no matter how kindly put. I am as prone to this as anyone, so I’m doing an experiment.

My first thought was: well, if the people who take to blog commenting are the same people who live by analytic thought, then we should see what the other people are doing. I debated asking the regulars to refrain to see if we could lure the lurkers into commenting. Lurkers, won’t you please comment? This isn’t a private conversation we’re having here, me and my friends. This is an open conversation, for you guys. Sometimes you write me and say wonderful things, and then I’m all, but why wouldn’t you say something so observant where everyone could admire it? Don’t stop yourself because you feel like you cannot write anything as trenchant and pointed as the others do. I am sick of trenchant and pointed. I’m looking for different stuff, at least until I fall back into old habits.

My second thought was: well, if I believe my model, that the aggregation of commenters reflects the blogger, and I don’t like that mode of commenting, then I need to fix the blogger. Maybe I should change the ways I communicate. But that’s just wild crazytalk and a dead-end.

I only got as far as a third thought. Here it is, and the new policy. If you MUST make a critical observation (I don’t mean critical in the sense of negative, I mean critical in the sense of analytical.) because you MUST or you will DIE, then before you do, you must tell me about something affirmative. You must tell me about a feeling you had, or something you built or cooked or improved. Counter your relentless thinky-ness with a genuine experience of some sort. Something you saw. Something that actually happened and changed the world or moved you. Criticism is second-hand evaluation of something a different person did or felt or thought or made. No more of that unless you compensate by offering your own creation.

UPDATE: I'm serious. FROM THIS POINT ON, comments that violate this policy won't get through moderation.

Only peasants make fun of names.

2008-03-19T10:56:00.000-07:00

Remarkably similar.

My dad told me to never ever make fun of someone's name. He says that you can't think of anything funny to say about someone's name that that person hasn't heard in a lifetime of having that name.

That's totally true, but the more important reason to never make fun of an ethnic name is that it exposes you as shamefully parochial and ignorant. People with any breadth of exposure step up to learn new names with respect and a careful ear.

Via Obsidian Wings and Yglesias, respectively.

Mostly right on.

2008-03-17T10:48:00.000-07:00

This is a pretty good article about zanjeros. I liked the slideshow a lot as well. I'm a trifle surprised I didn't know the word 'zanjero'. I've always heard them called ditchriders or ditchtenders. Guess that's what you get for never visiting districts south of the Tehachapis.

On ditchriders:
Oh man. Ditchriders are the men who make water districts work. Like the men profiled in the article, they drive their canals every shift, controlling water levels in the canal and opening or closing turnouts to growers. Being a ditchrider is a career. They do it for decades and they know their terrain. They are the people responsible getting water to every grower in time for their irrigation event while keeping a several miles long canal from emptying or overtopping as turnouts open and close. It takes years to get good at running a canal; a retiring ditchrider has to train the incoming kid for months or more. I was surprised that zanjero Curiel said that his dreams of flooding out a field went away after a year. The ditchriders I've talked to say they still get them after doing it for twenty years.

I asked my professor if he knew of any woman ditchriders. He said he'd never met one, although there are a few woman water district general managers. I applied to be a ditchrider at Arvn-Ed*son Water District, but they didn't think I was going to stick around for three decades. I would have taken that job too, so I don't think it was very nice of my father to refer to Arvn, Weed Patch and Pumpkin Center as the "tri-city area" and inquire how I was going to choose between them.

Safety and canal design:

Oooh. This picture from the article makes me hurt. No hand rail? No guard? Who designed that? Was he trying to kill the operators? They lean out over those check structures, pulling heavy flashboards out of the water, cranking gates, clearing trash. I have lots of faith in their strength and balance but I would sure like the engineers to give them some advantages.

I was also surprised to read that they collect so many drowned people from their canals. We were taught to put hand rails on both sides of our canals every couple panels. The very good slide show shows mostly unlined clay canals, so I guess there isn't anything to fix hand rails to.

On automation:

Today, the zanjero is an endangered species, his craft too imprecise, his tools too crude to look after water in a region ravaged by drought.

I wouldn't go so far as "endangered species". In California, I'd say that automation is far more rare than manually-run canals. They are right that water districts are moving toward automation. In an ideal, elegant system, you build your canals with weirs that hold water level very steady and you use undershot gates, and your system is inherently stable. This requires less tending by a person and less automation. But you'll still need ways to control gates throughout the system, and a lot of districts will put in some automation.

So they put in SCADA systems (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition), which I think were developed to control assembly lines in factories. You put water level sensors along your canal, which talk to your computer in the district office (or call you at night, if the levels change too fast) or tell gates to open or close. Talking to people about their SCADA systems usually ends up being a long conversation about which media they use for telemetry. You'd think they'd want to talk about exciting things like their displays and data manipulation, or their fancy new concrete, but I have listened to hours of comparing phone lines, lines of sight for radio, and getting in on some satellite time. I don't have an opinion about these, so I sorta let the jargon wash over me and watch the crops grow.

My irrigation professor is not one to reflexively promote automation. His main complaint about developing countries is that their water projects are overautomated. He says the canals never work like they were modeled, but operators are given very precise instructions about how to move the gates for every flow rate they measure. He thinks it should be way simpler. 'Paint a white line on the side of the canal.' he says. 'Tell your operator to keep the water level within the width of that white line by opening or shutting the gate as needed.' He says he's never met an operator who couldn't do that. If labor is cheap, put a person at every major structure and they can run that sucker tight as anything.

I love thinking about scale.

2008-03-17T10:10:00.000-07:00

But Chris Jordan does it much better. One million plastic cups:

A.W. and Ezra, the representation of kids without health care is stunning.
Sister, check out the freight containers.

At least we have the archives.

2008-03-16T19:15:00.000-07:00

Anand's very new ladyfriend is a private person. She doesn't like to be talked about, doesn't want him telling us all her details. Does she have any idea who she's taking up with? Our Anand? Anand who daily writes copiously on our popular blog? Anand, whose every feeling and encounter must be described at length, so that you guys can hash it out with him? Anand who sets the standard for sensitive hippie-type guy, who knows no emotional or sexual boundaries? Anand who'd blurt anything to a stranger in the produce section? Our Anand?

I don't know, guys. This might be the beginning of a new era 'round here. Obviously he's going to respect her preferences, but what will be left for us to discuss? If we aren't reading about his sordid adventures (no more videos!!!), the way he flits from freakshow partner to freakshow partner, the recreational drugs he does to enhance his extraordinary sex life and the parties that are the backbone of his "lifestyle", what the hell do we have left? Anand's shamelessness is the engine of our blog traffic. I can try to step up, but I don't think I have the stamina for the staggering debauchery that Anand lives and breathes. If he hadn't blogged it, sordid detail by convincing detail, on this very site, I wouldn't even think his exploits were possible.

Yeah!

2008-03-14T12:28:00.001-07:00

This is awesome.

'Long as I'm just pointing:

I assume you guys already watch Red State Update, but this one's as good as any they've done. I bet they wrote it in, like, fifteen minutes. High price prostitutes are obviously the muse Dunlap has been waiting for.

And I have high hopes for an Obama presidency.

2008-03-12T11:25:00.000-07:00

I keep looking at this post on what the Sac Bee thinks is the most important stories of the day. Prof. Rauchway notices that the Bee doesn't mention the presidential campaign; in the comments, PorJ suggests that this is how all newspapers will respond to keep customers: limit the politics, run personal experience stories, be hyper-local. I think the Bee was right on, though. Maybe they're omitting national political stories because they can't compete with online sources for those*, but for whatever reason, I think they've hit on the important stories of the day.

The three stories the Sac Bee chose are a big jump in the cost of gas, the collapse of the west coast salmon fishery and former Governor Spitzer's wife's appearance at his press conference. I could have done without the last, on account of how I don't care, but how political wives act in scandals seems to interest lots of other people. The two other stories, on gas prices and the salmon collapse, will matter vastly more to Californians than anything that happened in the presidential race yesterday.

In fact, either of those stories will have more impact on Californian quality of life than the outcome of the Democratic primary**. Big jumps in gas prices are going to test whether gas price elasticity is as generous as it always has been. Since our housing patterns depend on that, lots of stuff in your daily life cascades from it. Size of house, length of commute, type of commute, city densities... or just the effects of the price of gas, like cost of food, cost of any trucked good, type of car you drive. In twenty years, you'll feel every piece of that much more concretely than any difference between a Clinton or Obama presidency. The story on salmon? Well, it matters a whole lot to the salmon industry, which will likely end this year. It matters a little to people who like to eat salmon. More than that, though, is the fact that the last time a fish species collapsed like this, Californians south of the Delta lost one-third of their water. Yesterday, the water wholesaler for municipal southern California raised their rates by 14%, and wanted to raise them by 20%. These news stories aren't abstract in the least. They point to the drivers that will shape us far more than political contests.

That got me thinking. Prof. Rauchway is a historian, and for most of American history, resource contraints on our behavior didn't really exist. There was more land, more timber, more water, more coal, more everything. Sometimes you needed a technological jump to access a resource, but we solved those. In a place with no effective constraints, you might as well watch what people are doing. Their behaviors will determine what happens. That's not where we are anymore. We are at limits; resource constraints are closing in around us. People will get herded in from urban sprawl when they cannot afford their house and a tank of gas twice a week. People will come in from the desert when it is too expensive to buy trucked food and air conditioning. In this new system, it is entertaining to watch political contests, but they aren't going to matter much compared to the forces operating on us. The best we can do with our political contests is choose how well we transition and who bears the costs. Important stuff, but small compared to the forces our lifestyle has set in motion.

I am pleased with the Sac Bee's choice of stories. They've hit on what is going to matter. We're on a rollercoaster now, so I'm glad they're describing the route.

*Although I've felt some silly regional pride at the journalism coming out of national McClatchy Group. Their name is all over town.

**I'd say either is more important to how Californians experience life than the overall presidential election, except that McCain would continue to spend staggering sums of money to perpetuate endless war. That expenditure will one day come home in ways we feel.

Wasn't me.

2008-03-12T11:19:00.000-07:00

Can you imagine how incredulous and pissed Saddam Hussein must have been to be invaded and deposed for 9/11? The one thing he didn't do!

Go to work!

2008-03-11T11:14:00.000-07:00

I liked this piece by Rebecca Solnit, which doesn't surprise me, because I really liked her book on walking. I had thoughts while I read it, which I sortof want to put together into a complex and elegant post, but am more afraid that if I wait to do that, I won't get to it at all. I think I will blurt! and you, my sophisticated and strikingly good looking readers, will integrate it into a worthy essay. Well done, you.

Similar:
Her piece struck me as a very good companion to this excellent, excellent essay on organizing between professional middle class and working class people. From Ms. Solnit's piece:

Of course dreadlocks and ragged clothes weren’t exactly diplomatic outreach tools either. I spent some of the 1990s with and around activists in the public forests of the West, and a lot of the supposedly most radical had a remarkable knack for going into rural communities and insulting practically everyone with whom they came into contact. It became clear to me that in their eyes the worst crimes of the locals did not involve chainsaws and voting choices but culture and what gets called lifestyle. It was a culture war that got pretty far from who was actually doing what to the Earth and how anyone might stop it.

And from Ms. Leondar-Wright's piece:

In professional-middle-class progressive culture, the axis of the world is mainstream versus alternative. The majority of us were raised in non-progressive families; the exceptions, such as "red diaper babies" and children of hippies, grew up aware of their families' outsider status. We grew up surrounded by expectations that we would maximize our income and status by conforming to PMC lifestyles and career tracks. At some point we made a conscious, life-changing decision to take a different course and to put some of our energy to work for a better world. We each place ourselves in a particular place on the mainstream/alternative continuum, contrasting ourselves with those more and less conventional than ourselves. One thing that virtually all of us PMC activists have in common is that we are proud of living a values-based life. It's our best trait — and leads to some of our most classist traits, such as culture-bound elitism. "More-alternative-than- thou" is not a helpful stance to take in building bridges with anyone, and it's especially unhelpful with people with a lot less social privilege than ourselves.

On farmers:
Heh. Solnit uses country music as a proxy for rural and ag-associated life. She describes liberal scorn for their "racist, reactionary, religiously authoritarian" ways. Yeah. That's one set of associations I've heard. I've also heard glowing paeans to agrarian connections to the earth and their humble, honest stewardship. Whatevers. I'll have you know that I lived and worked with those exotic creatures for two years and made up my own stereotypes.

The only thing I was sure of after two years amongst the sons of western agriculture is that all that work they did showed. Oh man, they were pretty. Really very pretty. All ripply and strong, with such pretty arms and shoulders and slim hips and also nice legs. Um. A very attractive people, those farmers' sons. Going to class was like being in a porn movie, where all the young men were gorgeous and needed the teachings of an experienced older woman, except that it was a terrible horrible sad porn movie, where the music never started and the professor kept lecturing. A childhood of work showed up in other ways; they were better at manipulating physical objects and working in groups than I've ever seen my city peers be. Those were the conclusions I came to after infiltrating the heart of the ag community. Attitudes towards environmentalism and minorities amongst this inscrutable tribe? They varied.

On hippies:
So, like, I know hippies. I lived for years amongst other college kids acting like hippies. I know how annoying some of the mannerisms are. I know. I left my co-op because one day I realized that I could not have one more conversation about whether we should buy bananas. I fully understand how the hippie sanctimony, whether it actually comes from a hippie or whether you're just assigning it to some longhaired target, grates on the soul. But here's the thing. Those hippies? They're fucking right. The reason they grate so is that you know they're right and they remind you of your compromises and since you don't want to look at those, I guess you better vilify the messenger*.

They're right. We should be gentle pacifists. We should care very deeply about the environment; we should be alert to its beauties and hurt by its destruction. We should eat consciously and low on the food chain. There is no harm in bounded recreational drug use and what does it matter how people choose to look and people's bodies are beautiful and we should live close in connected communities. We should even sit around a fire and sit along to a guitar. That way of living feels good and imposes fewer costs on other people.

So I'm tired of the meme that discounts opinions because hippies hold them. Get over that. It is as cheap and dismissive as any attitude discussed in either essay. Sure, small-minded hippies are annoying. Small-minded anyone is annoying and if you're dismissing things out of hand for being hippie-affiliated, that's you.

On the South:
Solnit writes:

So on the one hand we have white people who hate black people. On the other hand we have white people who hate other white people on the grounds that they hate black people. But that latter hatred accuses many wrongfully, and it serves as a convenient coverup for the racism that is all around us. The reason why it matters is because middle-class people despising poor people becomes your basic class war, and the ongoing insults seem to have been at least part of what has weakened the environmental movement in particular and progressive politics in general.

I'm having a real hard time with the South recently. I'm on this reading binge about the South and Jim Crow and Reconstruction and the Civil Rights movement. Honestly, it is very hard for me to not hate historical racist white fucks. It helps a little that they're a hundred years dead, except that, you know, it was pretty bad until pretty recently. Some were murderous and righteous, and a lot of other people thought that was their natural privilege, and if there were good ones they couldn't say much out loud. That is some fucked up bullshit, and I cannot comprehend what could be good enough in a southern heritage to overcome such pervasive viciousness and shame. So I'm trying not to hate, because it is rather pointless for me to get all exercised from a distance at this late date and how does that help anyone's life? And 'cause something something complex and not first-hand and something or other cast the first stone. Except, you know, I'm not really despising anyone for being poor. I'm fucking hating traditional southern racists for thinking their skin color made murder, rape, oppression and soul-killing a perfectly OK thing to do.

Coalitions:
I'm on the fence about environmentalist-resource user coalitions this week. Most days I think they're the only things that can work. Then I read about them falling apart, and I'm not sure they can work either. Someone with the backing of the people should pick winners and losers and the world will readjust to the new drivers and constraints and in only a generation or so, no one will care so much? I dunno.

This seems like enough for you guys to work with. I'll expect your revised and improved versions back by Friday. You can only get full credit if you show your work.

Ms. Leondar-Wright's essay via Spungen at BobVis.
Ms. Solnit's essay via Crooked Timber.

*I don't want to hear it about trust-fund hippie kids. Yeah, it is infuriating that they can use the safety of their middle class lives to tell themselves they are adventuresome. If they're sanctimonious on top of that, that's really frustrating. BUT. Think of it this way. This is what people do when they know they are safe. These kids have felt safe their entire lives and trust the world, and what do they do with that? They choose a lifestyle of openness and gentleness, of connectivity and consciousness. When you know your whole life that you can have what you want, what they want is to be in a tribe and care about nature and spirituality. (Maybe they care about nature and spirituality in an easily accessible way, but as far as cheap philosophies go, it is a kind one.) This is also what impresses me about Burning Man. When privileged people have everything they want, the next thing they want to do is build amazing things for other people (and celebrate and be nude and beautiful). People who have never been scared don't want dominion. They want expressiveness and connection.

One put out cigarettes for guests? Awesome.

2008-03-09T13:05:00.000-07:00

As always, I agree with every word he wrote. He is so right about how driving hurts our social fabric.

I got two benefits I didn't expect from giving up my car. First was that I found out that when I owned a car, I was always a little nervous about it. I lived on a busy street, and got a lot of foot traffic on weekend nights. It wasn't a huge deal, but it was really nice to no longer be worried someone'd bust my car windows just for fun. That was a small boost to my quality of life.

The big boost, however, is that my transportation makes me feel good. Walking, taking the train and biking all improve my mood, every single time I do them. Look. I'm an Angeleña by birth and upbringing. I love driving. I really do. I drive a stickshift, drive too fast and love road trips. But most daily driving is not good driving. I don't get out of the car at the co-op parking lot feeling any better than I did when I left the house. Mostly, I feel the same. But every single time I ride my bike, I feel better for the ride. Lots of times I think I won't. I think it'll be cold or hard. But the bike-feeling always lifts my mood. My very transportation, which is necessary and integral to living, improves my quality of life. Obviously, that isn't necessary. Most everyone gets along without that. But it sure is nice and you don't get it from driving a car.

Ask me about the big black wolf spiders.

2008-03-08T08:04:00.000-08:00

WOLVERINE! A wolverine in Tahoe! A wolverine! Oh man! I'm so glad.

I'm totally curious about how they got the picture. I told you I spent a summer digging pitfalls for small rodents, herps and amphibians in Tahoe? I did. I was one of a group of about forty people doing a multi-species inventory of Tahoe. There were owlers and bat-ers, whom I never saw. Botanists. A rodent team. Two of the funniest guys I've ever worked with on the herp team. I couldn't believe their grown-up job was to go kick over logs and hope to catch a snake, but it was. They LOVED it. Birders. Did you know you have to take a hearing test to work as a birder? They want to know you're catching the high-frequency songs. The rock stars, though, were the carnivore team. They set cameras like the one that caught the wolverine.

The set-up was that they put a whole bunch (couple dozen?) of monuments at randomly chosen sites throughout Tahoe. Every crew, in rotation, went to the sites and did their thing. The botanists took transects on specific angles from the center. We set out three pitfall arrays, thirty, thirty and seventy feet from the center, on assigned angles. The birders walked in big circles around it. The rodent crews set out tens of traps in a big circle. Christ, the rodent team worked hard.

The carnivore team, though, had to be the hardest working. Their shit was insane. They'd hike in, like, a couple days in, sets of the heat-sensing cameras and bait. They'd nail the bait to a tree, set up cameras and come back for the film. The bait was frozen chicken breasts. We had a freezer full of them, which is also where we put the half-eaten shrews and mice we'd find in our pits. The chicken breasts were dunked in bearbait, which I was told was a mixture of skunk scent and chicken blood. There was a five gallon bucket of it in our supply shed, which I never went near. But the carnivore team would have to dip out a container of it, pack it with the frozen chicken breast and pack it in. The cameras and expensive stuff went in the pack, so the chicken breasts and bearbait was in a bag on the outside, slowly warming up for the two days they hike in. It didn't matter how gross the bait got, and they told stories of getting water in the bait bag and opening it to the slimiest, moldiest, grossest chicken breasts ever, which they then had to nail to a tree. Every one of them swore he would never eat chicken again.

Then they'd check the pictures. Got a lot of crows. A nice family of martens. Our fear, on the rest of the teams, is that we never really knew where the cameras were. It always seemed possible that they catch a picture of us visiting the ladies' room. I have to think that would have gone up in the dining room right away, though, so I guess they didn't.

Not defensive.

2008-03-07T17:29:00.001-08:00

The guy at the bike store hurt my feelings. He didn't mean to, he was actually really nice. I guess he took too many phone calls this afternoon, 'cause when I walked in, he glanced at me and Clara and said "the bike that was out in the rain all winter, right?". WHAT? My Clara? Looks like a bike left out in the rain all winter? Clara?!?

It is so hard for me to get rid of my bike inferiority complex. I don't work on my own bike. I have Princess, for snooty fixed-gear cred, but I mostly ride Clara. I don't know about bikes, models or makes or designers. I don't have bike-themed stuff. Or bike gear. My bike still has her factory markings.

But here's the thing. I ride my bike. I ride Clara everywhere. If I go somewhere, it is on Clara. I ride at night and in the rain. When I'm with friends, we ride unless there's some reason to drive. I'm so smooth, locking her up. I bring her on trains and metros. I've been bumped by cars and driven off the road and still I ride. I've taken hard falls and know everyday that I'd rather be on my bike than in a car. I get the calm relaxation three or four strides into every ride. I steer with no hands. I hover at stoplights. I'm coming up on two years on my bike and still have no desire for a car.

I should believe that I belong in the bike community. I don't look like it. I don't know much about it. I don't race or build bikes or wear bike gear. Clara isn't special. But I ride my bike.

In one train ride...

2008-03-07T12:27:00.000-08:00

I saw:

Red winged blackbirds on reeds. I know they're an ag pest, but I can't help but love them.

The redbuds have burst on the Valley floor.

A train station full of Asian-Ams wearing red western wear.

Three times is an omen, but these are some obscure messengers. What could it mean? Does it mean that I should put on a tight shirt and deep red lipstick and go out in San Francisco tomorrow night? I THINK IT DOES.

What a strange thought.

2008-03-06T13:53:00.000-08:00

There's something or other going around blogland about using your bookshelves to impress people. Everything about that idea is so wrong that I hardly know where to start.

First:
My bookshelves? My bookshelves are vast and impressive indeed. So vast that I can not contain them in my house. Instead, I have had built several buildings around this city that are full of nothing but books for me. I have so many books in these buildings that I also retain a staff to take care of them and fetch me books at my whim. This is lovely. I send them a quick note through the internets and they promptly inform me that my book is at the closest of my buildings. My people remember my name and greet me as I enter; they have also set out about the building very many other of my books, in case I feel like browsing on this visit. They change those books frequently. They are so attentive to my needs. I love them.

I suppose that my huge collection is impressive, to those that are impressed by quantity. But out of my innate generosity, I let other people also read my books. Sometimes I see these other people in my buildings and smile to myself, thinking how happy they look with the crumbs that fall from my table. Enjoy yourselves, little people, with literature! Better your minds with my books!

Second:
When you look at bookcases, you are deciding whether to be impressed? Really? You are not looking hungrily at the unread ones, trying to memorize titles and wondering if it would be rude to your host to take one over to that sunny spot and ignore her all afternoon? It would never occur to me to be self-conscious about my bookshelf. Do you have any idea how many books I read? And how small a slice of them end up on my shelves permanently? Any particular collection of books is going to leave out the rest, some of which were light entertainment and some of which were hefty and thoughtful. I used to be self-conscious about reading so much, because I got made fun of for that. But I am not self-conscious about which books I read. They're just books! Next week's will be different!

Third:
People want their bookshelves to impress people? Why? Impressing people is just about the last thing I want to do. Impressing people is what happens by accident, if I let it slip about the graduate degrees or get provoked into a detailed rant or explanation. Up until I impress people, they're friendly and casual and open and tell me things. We chat along and I have what I want, which is to hear what people think. Once people are impressed, they get weird and start monitoring themselves or deferring to me, which does not get me the interactions I want. There are a few people who, once impressed, drop their filters and give me freer, more technical and astute conversations. But most people are less free, less forthcoming after being impressed. I am constantly on guard against that. Why on earth would I want my bookshelf to make the problem worse?

Back on my bike! Almonds in bloom! Snow on the Sierras!

2008-03-05T09:56:00.000-08:00

I’m so happy right now. Euphoric. Thrilled. I can’t figure out why, except that everything is right. I had a wonderful trip and my cousin is this amazing, funny, beautiful woman who wants to talk to me as much as I want to talk to her. Her family is wonderful and her baby liked me extra special. (Or perhaps he just liked football carry and dancing.) France is beautiful everywhere you look; we went to the beach and visited a menhir* and saw fields of hyacinths.

And now I’m home and everything’s right. I don’t know if it is worth being proud of, but my life is so complicated that simply pulling it off smoothly gives me a happy charge. My systems are working! It was easy to get on BART last night, because my BART ticket was right where it should be! I rode up to the train station with two minutes to spare and zero fear, because I had my ticket from before! I brought the right keys for Sacramento, so I could lock my bike! It worked this time, and that is enough for relief. This morning, I had time to shower**, pack breakfast, pick greens from my garden, stop for coffee, call Sherry, and pack, all with a nephew on my hip or underfoot. This means I am on a train with coffee and breakfast, watching the bay***, and writing to you and chair dancing to music in my earphones. Perfect!

Mostly, though, I think it is the daylight. So much beautiful light, from a sky that’s still a little thin, but getting bluer. Light to exhilarate my soul and give me the energy to do everything I think of. You can make fun of me for resenting a California winter, but it is dull and grey and you have to pull strength out of your self just to make it though your chores. Not spring and summer, though. In spring, the energy floods into you with the light. Waking is easy, with a mind full of happy plans for the garden and for picnic tables with chips and salsa and strings of colored lanterns and playing catch and swimming. Life is getting righter every day and not a minute too soon.

*I do like the idea of stacking rocks as a hobby. I like to think that if I were pagan and there were no internet to keep me out of trouble, I’d be out moving boulders around. I suppose there’s nothing to stop me, and yet I never do it. Maybe McKinley Park needs a menhir?

**The nephews like to watch people shower and the door doesn’t lock. It was a little odd at first, to look down and see the biggest sets of eyes ever, watching very intently. Well, hello. It is their great joy to bring you a towel when you finish. My sister says she finishes her shower, then says casually “I sure wish I had a towel”, at which they shout for joy and run to get her one. OK. Thanks, kid.

***Who are you freaks who think it is OK to sit backwards on the train? No no no no no. You sit portside, so you can see the bay for forty minutes, and you look forward, so you know if there’s going to be something to see, like a container ship.

I would pay it twice over.

2008-03-05T09:52:00.000-08:00

Written on my trip:

Ma cousine has two step-daughters, almost six and nine. They are lovely, bright-eyed, sharp, energetic. The younger is something of a force. Last night she came out of her room, late. She cuddled in my lap, then told me in the saddest little voice that she was hungry. I felt terrible for that neglected little girl, so I let her lead me to the kitchen, where she mentioned that a bonbon would be just the thing, so maybe I could reach them down for her? Cookies would be fine, too. Now, I am an American rube, hopelessly naïve and eternally optimistic. I don’t pretend that I can match the sophistication of Old World guile, honed by centuries of Machiavellian politicking. But neither did I arrive in the last rain (as we say here in France), and I know that the answer to “can I have a late night cookie?” is “what would your papa say?” He did in fact come collect her shortly after that, and the last thing I heard as they walked back to her room was “we eat at the table.”

She is a relentless pest to her older sister. She puts her hands in her sister’s face, close as she can get without touching. She snuck into the bathroom while her sister showered, stole her pajamas, turned out the light and held the door closed from the outside. She provokes her sister into fighting, then runs to a grown-up for protection. Her technique is most excellent; I haven’t seen such a proficient and ferocious pest since I left Oakland. My sister doesn’t use her skills much anymore, but in her day, she was as good as any younger sister who ever lived. It was my sister’s great misfortune that I was born boring. I didn’t want to mess with my sister, pick on her or start fights. I just wanted to read and I was happy to read all the time. She says it made her crazy to watch me, just sitting there, reading some more, so BORING. Well, she could fix that.

The goal, of course, is the inarticulate howl of rage just before the charge. That sweet sound is the whole reward. The skill lies in how quickly you can get the older sibling to the howl. My sister still savors it, although indirectly. Watching on the playground, she’ll hear the cry go up and nod to herself. “That was a good one.” It is dangerous sustenance, followed as it is by a raging older sister. But when that is the music your soul feeds on, you get right up to the edge of violence and then you dance.

It isn’t easy, being the oldest. Some things come easy, like being most loved by your parents and the smartest and prettiest. That’s just natural. But having younger siblings makes life hard. There’s the fact that you get blamed for fights even when they totally started it*. Younger siblings can tell when your parents hold you responsible for whether all the chores got done, and they slink off, leaving the kitchen counters unwiped, even though that is their job and they know it. There’s the part about they get to tag along with you and be friends with your friends, but it doesn’t work the other way ‘cause who wants to hang out with a bunch of kids? There’s the terrible day when your parents tell you that if you want to keep doing tkd, you can never hit your sister again. Worse, they also told her. Mostly, there is the ceaseless, constant pestiness. The pestiness that never ends. Being pestered. For years and years.

There is consolation for the years of looking after and suffering from your younger siblings. They grow into interesting people, who do not steal the book you’re reading and run hell for leather to the bathroom, slam and lock the door between you and your book. If you’re lucky, she’ll become the essential invincible friend, the one who will stand by you no matter what happens, because you are sisters and you can’t ever not be sisters. That goes both ways, for youngers and olders, but if life works the way it should, you get one final benefit from being the oldest. If you are the oldest, you should die first, and you will never have to live in a world with no parents and no siblings. You will not be left in a world where no one remembers your childhood and that your parents were beautiful and where you used to play. If you are the oldest, you should not have to be alone in a world where your past left first. The thought of a world without my sisters and brother is so terrible to me that I’m not sure how you onlies make it through your days, but if nature works as it should, I’ll never have to face that. I can hope for that, knowing that it was worth every bit of extra responsibility and the endless torment of pestiness.

*You can check whether a woman has a younger sister by looking at her forearms. Turn her forearms up and check for a set of crescent-shaped scars that would fit a little hand. That’s where the vicious little brutes set their nails and gouge, drawing blood. They aren’t as innocent as they look. Do not be fooled by the big eyes.

Seriously, though.

2008-03-04T21:43:00.000-08:00

If you don't bounce around when you walk on the rubber moving walkways at SFO, your soul is dead.

He loves her so much.

2008-03-04T21:32:00.000-08:00

I will never be able to explain to her why we came here.

I'm not even the passenger. I'm cargo.

2008-02-26T15:38:00.001-08:00

I'm going out of town to meet my cousin's new baby. Might not be around much next week.

I have gotten so casual about travel that I am a little appalled. My cousin was trying to make careful arrangements for picking me up, but until I looked it up on Sunday night, I couldn't even remember whether I flew out on Wednesday or Thursday. I don't think about trips in advance anymore. I'll have figured it out before I have to get on the plane. I have packed, a little. I hate packing with a passion. I hate it so much more than a chore deserves. I hate it especially now, because my crap is in two cities. I invariably pack at the last minute.

I get by, I guess, because I've done so much of it. Maybe packing and travel arrangements bore me so much because I'm decent at them and they aren't intrinsically interesting? Dunno. I feel like a responsible adult would give them more than the scantest attention, but I also notice that I haven't messed up my packing or missed a plane in years. Perhaps I am free-riding on other people's attention to detail, on my cousin's reliability and my aunt's detailed back-up plans? Perhaps I am old and secure enough that if things go wrong, I'll just solve them at the time, with the internets, phone calls and money? Perhaps I'm just not concerned about how it turns out. I'll see my cousin and don't need anything else to happen. I dunno. But in several hours, I'll be on a plane to France. I've got my movements blocked out from now until I board. After that, I am not the driver.

And your feet don't hurt.

2008-02-25T16:45:00.000-08:00

I found out the strangest thing last week. Is it true that you people are not daydreaming constantly? Do you really not have a handful of narratives developing at all times, that you slowly work through for a few weeks until they get old and a new one starts? When you do the dishes or ride to work or swim or even for the seconds when you walk to the printer, you don't instantly revert to a daydream?

I have a few daydreams going at all times. They are shameless, of course. I don't know which are worse, the maudlin ones where He Finally Realizes I Am Perfect or the heroic ones where I Step Up and Take Charge Because I'm the Only Person On the Scene Trained in Emergency Response. Let's see. I've led the evacuation of a burning theater. Right now, me and my friends have come upon an earthquake damaged elementary school. (I don't know why it was a multiple story building. That's not very realistic out here.) Someone has to land the 747 after everyone passes out. It isn't that impressive though. You just do what you have to at the time, and then graciously return to your regular life, blushing when you read all the stories in the paper. They'll pass soon enough. At least your friends still treat you normal.

Do some of you really not do this? I quizzed Anand relentlessly, but he says, no, he thinks about the projects he is working on and maybe how some plan is going to work out. I do that too, but in between it is all "if she hadn't been so quick-thinking, I don't know what we would have done. How astonishing that the catastrophe could only be averted by someone with an in depth knowledge of both irrigation AND deadlifting." You guys don't run these scenarios all the time? Some of you don't even do this some of the time? What do you do when you have to wait for stuff? More importantly, what will you do when you guys are first on the site after a disaster? WILL YOU BE READY?

In LA, this Sat, 7ish.

2008-02-22T15:16:00.000-08:00

I said, 'Hey Joe, could you please make plans for us in LA this Saturday night?' and he sent me this:

Hello!

I got it. Paru's, it's an Indian vegetarian place on Sunset. I've been there before, it's great. Address and more info here:

Afterward we can go to a bar on Sunset called Shortstop, in Echo Park. The one time I've been there, the dancing was good and the DJ was eclectic and groovy. Not sure what will be on offer on Saturday, but I did notice that the jukebox looked solid. Plus it's a fairly easy, straight shot on Sunset from Paru's for a couple miles, whether we pile into a car or two or hop on the Sunset bus.

Now, about when do we want to eat? If a reservation is required I'll call and make it...

See you soon!
Joe

I love so much that he settled the entire evening. That is fantastic. Hope you're there too.

Rats are curious.

2008-02-22T11:48:00.000-08:00

I did enjoy these. I am completely shameless about peering through fences and looking into windows. I'll climb up on stuff to get a better view.

It seems only fair that I didn't put up curtains in the ten years I lived in my house. I'd turn the lights off to change clothing and turn them back on when I was done.

I should let it drop...

2008-02-20T16:45:00.000-08:00

...but I totally can't. Long as I've got comment moderation on, I'm going to enjoy this. Ready?

***
Integrating women into firefighting doesn't hurt the quality of service provided.

Math ability is a predominantly a function of social constructs.

Lawrence Summers was not an innocent victim, railroaded by dogmatic feminists.

FUCK! FUCKING MOTHERFUCKER! CRAP! FUCK! GODDAMNIT!

Men benefit hugely from feminist ethics and welcome the freedom to express a far wider range of ways to be than traditional gender roles permit.

I, me personally, can kick your ass in a fight. This is fact for all but a few exceptions and the odds are against your being an exception.

Integrating queers of all sorts into the military will not damage unit cohesiveness or military readiness after a brief adjustment. Military leaders are responible for setting the tone and enforcing this.

Soldiers in wars do horrendous things, and it is our collective duty to acknowledge that, limit and discipline it, and treat them on return.

Global warming is real, anthropo~~morphic~~genic, and the leading trends are already showing up in our observation systems. Limiting the damage and adapting to new resource constraints will be the predominant task of mine and the next generation. Avoiding personal sacrifice to reduce global warming is shortsighted selfishness.

Arabs are simply people and should be treated as people. They are not inherently an enemy, but are instead pissed off and militarized when we invade one of their countries after an unaffiliated group of people from a different country flew planes into our buildings.

FUCKING HELL! AW SHIT! ASSHOLES! FUUUUUCK!

Homegrown evolutionary psychology is bullshit, and professional ev psych is highly suspect. In the first place, the idea that our nature is revealed by what animals would have done in a brutish struggle for survival IS NOT RELEVANT. What proto-humans would have done is purest speculation, and irrelevant as well. Our standard is NOT ANIMAL BEHAVIOR IN A STRUGGLE FOR SURVIVAL. We can do better than that these days. We have frontal cortexes now! This has been a very exciting development and it allows us to CHOOSE OUR BEHAVIOR! This is great! It means that we can act a hell of a lot better than animals in a brutish struggle for survival. So I DON'T FUCKING CARE what animals would have done on the veldt.

Immigrants, even newly arrived immigrants, contribute more to our society and economy than they drain from our resources.

Men do not come in alpha or beta types, and women do not react to them in some manner illuminated by game theory. Men and women are people, struggling to find connections and get their needs for touch and love and support fulfilled. Their reactions to each other are not categorizable and manipulable.

I can have extravagant, promiscuous, incredibly good sex before marriage, with whomever I choose AND have a wonderful life in all respects. I can be thoroughly loved by a man I love outrageously, NO MATTER WHAT SEX I HAVE before that relationship. Me and my adored can also have fantastic sex and make arrangements with each other for unconventional forms of sex and still have a loving and supportive relationship. I CAN HAVE SO MUCH GOOD SEX and never be punished for it in any form. Yep. I can have all sorts of crazy kinds of sex and be a great engineer and have a good job and have friends and family adore me and never ever suffer for AS MUCH SEX AS I WANT TO HAVE. Lots of conscientious fun sex, with whomever I want, and NO BAD CONSEQUENCES. Even though I am a woman. Having sex.

JESUS FUCKING CHRIST. COCKSUCKING RATFUCKERS.

The value of the taxes you pay is less than the value of the services society gives you, that you never notice because you don't pay for them upfront.

The costs you see should cover the social and environmental externalities. Gas, food, water, clothing, single-family dwellings, parking, should all be considerably more expensive. You should eat local food, in season.

Civil servants are often bright and conscientious, trying to negotiate between multiple contradictory societal interests and established legal constraints. They are subject-matter experts and constantly solicit public input into their decisions.

There are other interests besides economic efficiency, like distribution of utility. Efficiency is simply one value, that should be balanced against other values.

RIDE YOUR FUCKING BIKE. You will like it better. SHARE THE MOTHERFUCKING ROAD and yield to cyclists!

Meat should be an occasional treat, not a dietary mainstay. What meat you eat should be humanely raised. If you can't afford grass-fed beef, you can't afford the full costs of the food you consume.

Being fat is the result of a mixture of complex factors; will-power is only one of them. Demonizing fat people is ineffective and mean.

Refusing to let a malevolent jackass spread ego-stroking, self-serving generalizations on a blog is not censorship or intolerance. It is protecting the discussion for people who want to read more than repetitive inane arguments that devolve into personal attacks.

********
Oh holy shit that felt good. Awwww man. You can't even know how good that was for me. Baby, I'm just gonna lie here a while and glow.

Quick note

2008-02-20T16:21:00.000-08:00

Comment moderation is on for a short time, 'cause I am not interested in letting Andrew pick fights here. Since I'm around a lot, I hope it won't much delay putting your comments up. I don't intend for comment moderation to be permanent.

A large bottle.

2008-02-20T08:00:00.000-08:00

I had a long and tense dream last night, in which I was systematically looting a store because the Collapse had started. I carefully considered what I could carry and what I would need until the next store raid and how each thing could keep and like that.

I'll have you know that the first thing I stole was a bottle of vanilla.

L.A. on Sat night?

2008-02-19T22:57:00.000-08:00

Hey folks.

Sharad is going to be in LA this weekend! Sharad! Yes! THAT Sharad!

I don't actually know Sharad. I've heard about him for years. Most accounts describe him as larger than life, described best by repeating his name and shaking one's head to convey the hugeness of his essence. Sharad!

Anyway, Sharad's visit to LA is reason enough for Anand to arrange a roadtrip, and I do need to see my sibs. So I'm in. I don't know if I'll actually meet Sharad. Having already met Felix, it is possible that I need to keep some people as legends in my life.

So anyway, want to hang out in LA on Saturday night? Strange Bird? aDubin!? Srchngformystry? Others? Maybe we'll connect with Anand and Sharad and their crew. Sharad!

I blew it.

2008-02-19T17:22:00.000-08:00

I got an email from a good friend last night, saying that she takes my very long email silence as a sign that I am no longer interested in our friendship. She is sorry for whatever it was and thought we were close and her door is always open to me. Crap. I am so sorry. I didn't mean it. I wasn't breaking up with her. I just cannot manage all the friends and family that are far away.

It is like this for me all the time and if I think much about it, it kills me. You know who else I don't talk to nearly enough? My baby sister. My baby brother. My mom. My dad. My grandfather, who was just put in a dementia ward. His wife. You know who else wants my attention? The perfect nephews, who have recently started crying when I leave. Oh god. Babies, I would stay and cuddle you forever, except I can't. If I did, I would still be neglecting my friends in Sacramento. And my friends in L.A. My aunt and cousin in Paris have mentioned that I should write more. I love them all so much. I want to. But oh god. Each mention just tugs on the whole chain of people I should write to even more and I can't start on all that.

For someone who writes as much as I do, and has sought out a whole bunch of imaginary friends, I don't know why I don't contact the people I already have. But their correspondences are hard! They should be good letters*, and have to be within some reasonable time. Why can't they just read this and leave me short quips? Then I could still feel close with them (Claudia and Alysia and eDubin! and Amanda and all y'all who were real first! Represent!).

Anyway, I feel guilty all the time anyway. The real solution is for everyone I love to move very close. Then they should come by all the time without waiting for invitations. That is the real solution. Honestly, that is mostly who I see now. People think that there are secret coded messages in the frequency of my contact, but the real truth is that I see the people who are close to me. Then, having seen them, we make more plans and the cycle is reinforced.

I am sorry, far away friend who took it personally. I did it wrong. I am sorry, family that I am still doing it wrong for. Why did we move apart? How come I must necessarily leave some of you to see the others? I want to give you my attention. I love you. But you are far and it is hard and there are close people I love. I'm doing it wrong, but I can't get it right either. It is broken.

*Even crappy letters are hard. "Well, I sortof moved. [long explanation] Sortof doing new things at work. [long explanation] No, no boys. ['cause I'm still a loser] Factual recounting of things. [boring] Cute story. [why don't they just read the blog for that?]

My Chris is right.

2008-02-19T16:01:00.000-08:00

I've been getting involved with the bureaucratic side of California's climate change plan. Chris was right when he said:

All the people talking about climate change are coming from the attitude that we should hold lifestyle constant and minimize greenhouse gas emissions. That isn't going to be good enough. We need to get our greenhouse gas emissions where they've got to go and then maximize lifestyle.

Point of clarification.

2008-02-18T23:02:00.000-08:00

If we're friends and I ask you whether you read the blog, I am not checking up. I really and truly do not care whether my real friends read this. I just want to know whether I can tell the same stories or if I have to find new things to talk about.

Progress

2008-02-18T14:33:00.000-08:00

Three months to the day after I moved out of my house, I'm finishing unpacking at my sister's. It took forever, because I haven't had a wardrobe until Anand came up and helped me assemble one this weekend.

Thoughts:
IKEA solved my problem, but I still think their furniture looks cheap, which it is. I've never liked IKEA stuff, even when the whole concept was new and exciting. I should focus on the 'solved-problem' aspect of it, shouldn't I?

I'm unpacking boxes and finding out that I do too have pretty clothes. I never wear them. If the overlords took away everything but a pair of jeans, three t's and three longsleeve t's, I'm not sure I would notice. The reason I don't wear anything else, especially quite a number of skirts, is that I don't have boots. Just like the wardrobe was the bottleneck for my new room, boots are the bottleneck for my new style.

I have tried to buy boots, but apparently all you women have little chickenleg calves. The usual circumference for boots, I now know, is 14 - 15in. Mine are 18in, and do you people have no muscles? Seriously. I'm sure someone is waiting to call me a fatty, but there is not a millimeter of yield on my calves; if I stand on my toes, you see that shelf and both sides of the gastrocnemius. Also, I think you wasted-away waifs don't have quite as much muscle on the front of your shins. Flexing my toes brings that out. I don't remember what that is from (maybe from the bouncing that these guys do interminably), but I guess it means that I can't wear boots. I am painfully bitter about this, but I make myself feel better by mocking other women's physiques.

Anyway, if boots weren't an insurmountable barrier, I would wear some girlie clothes and then I could wear the jewelry I also own. Found that today, too, with detached interest. Look at all those supercute necklace and earring sets! So exactly my tastes! I didn't miss them at all. I've kindof liked having the excuse of being in the process of moving to neglect all ornamentation. It couldn't last forever, though. Today I faced up to my clothes and jewelry. I unpacked them, tucked them away into the new wardrobe. I hope they'll like it there. That's probably where they'll stay.

Thank you, benevolent universe.

2008-02-18T00:52:00.000-08:00

Dear god I had fun tonight. Thank you, friends who came out to celebrate with me tonight. Having so many friends from different places (and surprise exciting strangers) talk and play together was overwhelmingly joyous for me. Thank you, beautiful setting and delicious food and tall tall flames. I am so lucky and so blessed.

Hey Abby,

2008-02-16T12:15:00.000-08:00

You've seen this, right?

Added 4/17/8: Also very good.

.

Ill-fated.

2008-02-16T10:19:00.000-08:00

He loves her SO MUCH. He loves the thought of her, tells me where he last saw her and what she did. He lights up at the sight of her, leaps into the air, shouts in pure delight. He yells, YEAH!!!, and runs toward her, fast as he can. My poor cat takes off at the sight of him, back to safety under the porch.

Like a freakin' mirror.

2008-02-15T12:15:00.000-08:00

It is a trifle disconcerting to read a field guide to oneself, but at least it is accurate:

A common characteristic amongst white people is the need to over analyze things, so they partake in activities such as therapy, writing a blog, or becoming an arts major.

Sometimes people like to think about things, OK?

But, in order for them to truly enter into whitedom, they need to own the holy grail of white kitchens - the kitchen aid stand mixer (right). They will match this mixer to their kitchen’s color scheme and it will make up the focal point. And much like many religious artifacts, it will remain untouched for months and even years, sitting on the counter to be admired as a testament to their lifestyle.

I have too used Sunshine, and I will again. Soon. This weekend.

And of course, it goes without saying that white people who ride bikes like to talk about how they are saving the earth. If you know a person who rides to work, you should take them aside and say “Hey, thanks. Sincerely, The Earth.” Then give a thumbs up. That white person will ride home on a cloud.

Yes, please. Do say this, and I will glow with happiness.

White people need organic food to survive, and where they purchase this food is as important as what they purchase. In modern white person culture, Whole Foods has replaces churches and cathedrals as the most important and relevant buildings in the community.

There are some regions that do not have Whole Foods, but do have an abundance of white people (college towns), in these situations Whole Foods can be substituted with a local co-op grocery store where you have to pay a membership to shop there.

Whole Foods is weak. Too convenient, buying all your groceries in one place. I go to farmers' markets for produce, the co-op for bin food, and my community garden for anything I can grow.

And more than a little tingly.

2008-02-15T11:30:00.000-08:00

Wow. You sure make a lot of friends when you put mildly smutty stuff up on the internet. Did you know people like that? They're kindof better friends than you guys, too, because lots of them are naked and they put pictures up! You guys never do that for me. They're all hott, my new friends. Every last naked one of them. Well, maybe not this guy, but we disappointed him too, it seems. It wasn't going to work out, I guess.

Anyway, thanks lots, all of you who wrote me a little story to tide me through Valentine's Day. That's the sort of thing that makes a blogger feel warm and cared for.

Time to put out, darling.

2008-02-13T22:07:00.000-08:00

Hello my friends!

Maybe it is already Valentine's Day where you are! Maybe you are reading this on Valentine's Day! Maybe you will have very romantic Valentine's Day, or maybe you don't care or maybe you will sulk! None of those things matter to me, though. What matters to me is that you do me a favor. Or maybe we do each other favors, just a little something nice for each other.

If you want to do a girl a favor, you should click through to Smut Shorts and you should tell me a naughty little story. A true one. Not all porn-y and nasty, but a short little sumthin'-sumthin'. We wrote some for you, because we're all generous and giving like that.

So, my friends, Smut Shorts. Short. Smutty. Tell us a story, then tell your friends.

Happy Valentine's Day.

UPDATE: Also, to the dude who'll recognize himself: Hope that doesn't bug you.

I never really minded keeping my bike in my living room.

2008-02-13T14:24:00.000-08:00

I've gone back and forth on this, but now I'm sure. I want the car that hits and kills me to see me first. I don't know if there is a point to that, but emotionally, I'll be pissed if the driver never even saw me.

Also, my new weekday place in Sacramento has designated, sheltered, locking bike parking. It is the most civilized thing ever.

If this were really a choice, I wouldn't waver FOR A SECOND.

2008-02-12T12:57:00.000-08:00

Why is the U.S. one country? I know that we fought a huge war over that, and it was important back then and stuff. But I am not scared the British are going to invade us anymore. We don't need to be one country to exist as stable entities. There's some good stuff in the U.S. Constitution that I would like to keep, and parts of it and the California Constitution I don't love. Breaking away would be a good time to pick and choose a better constitution.

I am fiercely in love with my state, and feel almost no allegiance to the country as a whole. They aren't like us in those places, you know, the ones east of the Sierras. They're not like us or each other, from what I understand. Like, the Northeast is as different from the Midwest from the South as they are from us. So, besides the Civil War, what is the importance of the U.S. staying one country? I would be thrilled to be one of the states of Pacifica. I would be proud of being a country that was a world leader on environmental legislation. I wouldn't have to be ashamed to be part of a racist imperialist country any more. The different regions can go their own way! The South can ~~rot~~ practice its unique heritage as its own country and fly whatever flag they want, if they aren't embarrassing me by association. I would visit Mesa Country all the time.

Sadly, the California Secession movement does not appear to be ready for us.

Will anybody come to my party?

2008-02-11T16:38:00.000-08:00

When I was fully in the swing of my Sacramento social life, I threw several parties or events per year. They were usually well attended, but I don’t think this is because of my innate popularity as a host. I read or talk to people who are disappointed by their party turnouts, and think that it is a reflection on them. I’ll tell you who doesn’t think that. People who throw a lot of parties don’t think that your turnout is a reflection on you. People who throw a lot of parties think that novice party-givers do not put nearly enough work into their invitations.

For reference, I had a large local circle of friends and the parties were usually annual events, so they had reputations of their own. Working from that relatively strong position, here is what I would consider the minimum effort required to get more than your close friends to attend:

Pick a convenient day.
Craft an invitation specific to the event. Chris makes fantastic flyers for his parties. Roxie’s evites are particularly clever. I try to write up something to set the tone.
Start talking about it a month or more before the event. Talk about it often, with everyone you see.
Send out pre-invitations by email a few weeks in advance.
Send out real invitations by email a week or two in advance.
Remind people with an informal hope-to-see-you a couple days in advance.

That’s right. To get acquaintances to a party, I tell them around three or four times each, at least by email, and hopefully in person. Do you want to know what my response rate for a party is? For a large party, I would guess about four hundred people get two or three invitations from me and the co-hosts. A large party is eighty to a hundred people, so that is a low twenties percent response rate. That’s high, and draws on past success*. If you are bummed that you didn’t get many people to come to your party, it is entirely possible that your response rate was normal. It is hard to get people to a party.

Baby party-throwers make a number of mistakes, most of which are easily overcome by booze, food and a good playlist. But the mistake that shortcircuits all of that is thinking that party attendance just happens and that it means something about the party-giver. Low party attendance doesn’t mean anything about the host, and no one knows that better than people who throw lots of parties. High party attendance does mean something. It means your host worked at it for weeks. If you’re feeling bad about a party that didn’t turn out, and all you sent was an email announcement or two, you should let yourself off the hook. It wasn’t about you. The people I know who throw successful big parties co-host, have a good hook for the party, have party-reputations and put more work into the inviting stage than you ever noticed.

*Response rates among close friends will likely be higher, but even for a small gathering of friends you should get buy-in before choosing a date or event. Easiest is if you move in a crew of people used to coalescing. That's hard to come by, though. Mostly, it is rare that people have enough close friends to throw a large party. So you have a smaller party or you either have to lure acquaintances (hard) or co-host (yay!). Special events, like weddings or the season party for Ultimate, get disproportionately high response rates.

Do I want the person there or not?

2008-02-11T16:34:00.000-08:00

How do I stand it? All the inviting and asking people to please come to my party, oh please? Does it sound mortifying to you? “Networking” sounds mortifying to me, but somehow inviting people to parties doesn’t trigger the same feeling.

First, of course, is that I trust my parties. I can sound enthusiastic about them because I’ve (often) done them before. I don’t generally try out a new theme or party location without having seen it work. I wouldn’t decide on a new type of party without having co-hosts who were willing to see it through with me. So I pretty much know that I am inviting people to come have a good time.

Second is that I’ve ditched a lot of the insecurity associated with inviting people to stuff. Multiple invitations is simply the process one uses. If I decided to invite them in the first place, I decided to remind them twice or more. (‘Sides, if those fuckers could remember an invitation the first time it was offered, I wouldn’t have to.) After throwing big and little parties, some with huge turnout and dedicated followings and some where just a few friends show up, you know it isn’t about you. It is about the rest of their lives and the atmosphere around the party and whether they got sunburned and tired that day. Not personal.

Finally, I don’t mind inviting people that I know will not attend. I figure that an invitation is a way to tell people “You are welcome and wanted. Someone thought of you when planning a good time. Your presence would help your host have a better time.”. Most of the point of an invitation is to get someone to attend something. But some of the point of an invitation is to tell people that I enjoy their company. That part works whether the person comes to the party or no.

So that’s how it is easy for me to issue so many invitations. I was all fraught about it years ago, but since then they have actually worked. People have shown up and a good time was had and the effort of putting out invitations has been well returned in fun.

Standing still, but for a reason.

2008-02-06T17:19:00.000-08:00

These are gorgeous, but why are they all either short tiny little people or way tall? Where are the 5'8" women, so I can compare myself?

Via Krista.

(Also, this reminds me that I was battling my body type the whole time I was in tkd. I'm sure that if I hadn't come in with years of tkd behind me, our grandmaster would have sent me over to judo. He used to walk down the line of new people and tell anyone who wasn't tall and skinny that they had "judo body" and should come back the next night. Which is what you get to do, I guess, when you're the most respected bad ass in the room.

In his late sixties, I saw him heft a very big guy over his head, freeze for a good long time to demonstrate the hold and the throw, and then keep going.

Which also reminds me of the time after belt testing, when the HapKiDo black belts all went out to dinner to celebrate and discuss the results. Our grandmaster and the hkd master stepped outside to talk about the black belt promotions, and the hkd master noticed that a drunk asshole type guy was walking towards them and looking hostile. The drunk asshole guy was sortof approaching down the block, fixating on them and veering towards. The hkd master had no idea what to do, and was frantically reviewing the etiquette of the situation. Does he step in front of the grandmaster, who can't be expected to soil his hands on street thugs? Is that rude? Does it imply that the grandmaster couldn't handle it? Does he inform the grandmaster and wait for permission to handle it?

What does he do about the fact that on the other side of a large plate glass window, there are about thirty macho college-age black belts, who watch Hong Kong movies every single week and would love nothing more than to come running out of the restaurant shouting Siiiiifuuuu!

The asshole thug guy kept walking toward them, picking up a beer bottle out of the trash. The hkd master is not worried, but still has no idea what response will be proper and respectful to his master. At this point, the thug guy dashed the bottle against the wall, to make a jagged edge. The grandmaster heard this, turned to look and stared him down. Looked at him hard and the guy turned around and walked away. Good choice, dude. Good choice.)

I barely know him.

2008-02-03T21:20:00.000-08:00

I wiped out on a turn on wet tiles at the BART station, a huge big fall. The bike went skidding. I went skidding. The sweetfaced skateguy said “Whoah! Are you alright?” I was, surprisingly. No broken arms this time, which is all it takes to make this a good bike fall. It would all have been fine, except that I took the entire fall and skid on my right asscheek, which was already sore from Friday.

Friday I went to see the sports therapist guy about my knee. My knee’s been bugging me. It doesn’t hurt, but I feel it all the time and I think joints should be bent and not felt. I told the knee doctor guy “I’m pretty sure it started the fall I ran stadiums, but now I feel it more the day after squat workouts.” He said “That’s your hip. Lie down on the table.” I lay down on the table, fully dressed. Without asking, he took off my belt, reached down my jeans and pressed on my hip flexor so hard that I doubled up. He flipped me over and jammed his elbow into my right asscheek hard enough to make me cry out in pain. “JESUS!” I shouted, and he said “Nope. My name is Lino.” “MOTHERFUCKER!” I shouted the next time he elbowed me.

He explained how having tight hip flexors had tightened my ass muscles, which meant my knee was torquing during squats. I don’t entirely get that, because I don’t see how muscles carved from solid marble can be any more tightened, but he’s the sports therapist guy. He had me stand and squat, and it is true that my knees felt good. He told me to unbutton my pants and lie back down on the table; on his way to see another client, he stopped to shove an ice pack down my pants, pat me on the shoulder and leave again. It really was a very personal visit.

His prescription for me was lots of pigeon, which I should have known. I love stretching. I love the feel of a stretch, the pull and slight pain of it. I love just about every stretch, will happily spend long minutes deepening any contortion, except pigeon. Pigeon just sucks and makes my hips hurt. I should have connected a pending injury to the only stretch I don't like. Of course tight hips are the weakness that showed up first.

After manhandling me like I cannot remember anyone ever doing before, he showed me some other stretches, which reminded me how much I love love love assisted stretching. I completely hated this article about partner yoga, mostly because people’s bodies are not either gross. The author assumed we shared her snide distaste for bodies, and I don’t. Worse, I’m scared the article might discourage assisted stretching, which I love so much and never get enough of. One of my secret hopes is that the guy I date will already know or be willing to learn how to help me stretch. I don’t expect that, ‘cause it takes a fair amount of skill and work, but I would be beyond thrilled if I had someone who would help me stretch occasionally.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking lots and lots about mind-body stuff recently and have started believing that people’s ailments are linked to their minds and emotions. I really want a good map of what body part or symptom corresponds to what thoughts and emotions, but don’t know where to find one I trust. Without a good map, I’ll start putting one together by myself and it will be the usual Megan esoterica. “Sore shoulders? You’re claustrophobic, aren’t you?” “Shallow arches? I knew you were a sheepfucker.” I won’t say that out loud, because I have manners, and then it will never be disproved, which is exactly the same as being right. So I’ve been pondering what tight hips mean. Probably signifies unusual perceptiveness. Something like that.

Zero < tolerance << infinite.

2008-01-31T14:48:00.000-08:00

One of the most frustrating things about the professor that picked on me was that he was insulated from all my complaints by the ‘Known Asshole’ defense. It was like magic! I would complain to the head of the department that he’d gone after me in class, and the department head would say “Oh that guy. He can be gruff.” Or I’d tell a woman prof about him and she’d say “Yeah. He was inexcusably rude to me in a meeting one time.” I tried a number of different venues, and the answer was always “Yeah. He’s a dick. Bummer that he was a dick to you too.”

It was amazingly frustrating, because I’d spend my appointments with people trying to explain that I’m sure he’s an asshole in general, but he was also gunning for me. I was positive there was an additional increment there, but people kept telling me not to take it personally, he is always rude. In retrospect, I wish I’d said “No fucking way. I don’t care what shit y’all take from him. I don’t care if he’s an asshole to each and every one of you every single day. Even if he is, it is unacceptable for him to treat me like this.” I wish I’d said that.

I’ve seen the Known Asshole defense come up a few places since then. There’s a guy who goes apeshit on our Ultimate fields. We all know he does. He’s done it for years. Most of the time, everyone shrugs; that’s just him and that’s how he does. We finally had to remember that stuff that would be unacceptable from other people is also unacceptable from assholes. Gradually, they do end up being excluded. I’ve been at draft nights where no captain wants to take the guy, despite his athleticism. Someone finally caves, but one day no captain will have him and the league director’ll have to tell him he can’t play in league. In the long run, karma does come for the assholes. In the short run, I vote for calling people on asshole behavior, even if that's how they always are. Especially if that's how they always are.

No manners.

2008-01-29T09:55:00.000-08:00

I just saw that the coffee shop wrote the word "bike" on my cup, to know whom to bring the coffee to. SHE HAS A NAME YOU KNOW! It is Clara.

Peter and Noel or DoctorPat or anyone who knows.

2008-01-29T09:52:00.000-08:00

We finished my second maxing cycle for deadlift last night. Do I care that my deadlift went up only five pounds in the three months since the last one? It felt smooth and easy, though.

Thanks, Daniel, for the excellent recommendation.

2008-01-28T15:51:00.000-08:00

Last August, on one of my recurring posts about how awful grad school was, Daniel left me this:

Daniel said...
An excellent book on the same theme: “Disciplined Minds” by Jeff Schmidt. Dr. Schmidt earned a PhD in physics from Cal-Irvine and worked as an editor at Physics Today for nearly twenty years. After writing the book, he was promptly fired.

In the book, he focuses on the experience of graduate students in physics, and how that professional degree program — like all other professional degree programs — is more focused on selecting those candidates who conform to a behvioral pattern than those candidates who would make the best scientists.

My favorite chapter was “How to Survive Grad School With Your Soul Intact", which includes long quotations from the Army manual on resisting interrogation as a POW.

I finally read it last week. It was an incredible relief to have my vague feelings about grad school confirmed. I knew I was failing something besides the material. I knew it was my attitude that set off the professor who told me I didn't belong. I didn't understand why at the time, because I thought that the purpose of grad school was to process the material and develop independent thought. Trusting that was such a mistake for me. "Soul-battering" sounds like a melodramatic overstatement, but that was truly what the isolation and harangues and endless requirements felt like.

The thing that kills me about my situation in second grad school, which I fled with a masters, is that I wasn't even trying to rebel. I am not naturally defiant; I tend to respect and trust authority. I would have been happy to absorb and parrot the party line. My problem, I realized as I read Disciplined Minds, is that I was in too many programs and they had contradictory party lines. I would have been indoctrinated if I could have been, but I simply couldn't do them all at once.

Coming from an engineering degree, I simply could not believe that policy studies were a science. Since I was in law school, I couldn't catch on fast enough that for ecology students, habitat preservation was the sole and overriding goal of everything and not a subject with trade-offs that we should discuss. While I took econ, I didn't understand why you would have any faith in a law you couldn't derive and prove with data. I wasn't sure about econ's laws either, because after taking all that physics I thought that real laws enforce themselves every single time. In law school, the justice issues behind a decision were worth pointing out. But not in econ or ecology.

I didn't want to stand out and be forever blurting out irrelevent stuff that trivialized people's disciplines and offended them. But I wasn't fully immersed in any one program, so I didn't have time to absorb and adopt any one doctrine. The walk across campus wasn't long enough for me to fully shift gears, so I'd point out something interesting! and then realize that I was defying the norms of the discipline. Again. Enough of that and there was no one who would help me stay and work, much less back me against the prof disparaged me in and out of class.

This makes me so sad. Schmidt talks about preserving your radical soul and challenging power structures and doing socially worthwhile work. I wasn't trying for any of that. I wasn't even being noble. I just wasn't nimble or discreet enough. For the costs being a critical outsider caused me, I should at least have been deliberately disobedient. What a waste. What a relief to understand more of why second grad school was so awful.

(The thing that I find interesting is that first grad school wasn't nearly as oppressive. At first glance, you'd think first grad school might be worse. Smaller school, entirely older male engineers, some overtly religious, in the generally conservative culture of agriculture. But at first grad school, my perception was that the deal was "if you show you thoroughly understand this material, you can think anything you like." I was obviously a very strange bird in that program, but I never once felt like my thoughts infuriated people or that they were evaluating me on anything but my classwork. They'd answer anything I asked and as long as I could tell them how pumps worked, I was never scared they wanted me out of the program. I think it was due to the head guy, who still gets all my respect.)

South Bay! What are you doing tomorrow?

2008-01-25T08:36:00.000-08:00

Hey, South Bay? What are you doing tomorrow? Want to join me'n'Anand'n'Monica for Chaat-Fest '08? Tomorrow afternoon we are going to three or four chaat places in San Jose or Sunnyvale, I think. Now that Anand lives there, we need to know who makes the best chaat. You should come with us!

You should especially come with us if you are a totally awesome woman who has a dog. You really want to date Anand. You do. He's great. He's handsome and brilliant and funny and nice to the core. I know you're tripping over single men, there in San Jose, but Anand is a catch. You? I don't know. You should have a dog. A black lab would be perfect, but Anand knows we aren't all perfect and he'll love your dog the way it is. He even liked his friend's little yappy dogs, which lost Anand some respect in my eyes. If you wear glasses, Anand'll think you are beautiful. I would specify other stuff, but it turns out I don't know Anand well enough. A couple weeks back, I was lamenting that my date was a great guy, but not funny and there just isn't anywhere to go from there. Anand said "I don't know about that. My ex wasn't funny." I said "Jesus! How'd you ever get it up?", but Anand confirmed that it hadn't been a problem. If he can manage that, you know he isn't gonna let you down, ladies.

This'll be a great time to meet Anand, because even though I am socially inept in lots of ways, I am a fantastic wingman. I'll chat you up all nice and interested and you won't even notice that I am slightly backing you over toward Anand. We'll be eating chaat and it'll all be so fun and I will make the transfer over to Anand and all of a sudden leave to fetch us water. I do this for Chris and Anand all the time. You'd think they'd close the deal more, considering that I do all the work. But! The handoff is smoooooth. You won't even notice, and then you'll be talking to the best guy you'll meet all year.

Anyway, you should come to Chaat-Fest '08. I'll post an itinerary when I know one. Or email me.

Chaat Paradise: About 12:45
Chaat House: About 2:30
Lovely Sweets and Snacks: About 3:10

On court.

2008-01-24T12:16:00.000-08:00

Not everyone has what it takes to see the absent, the missing. Most people just see the blatant, or come to some obvious, unsubtle conclusion based on surface evidence. That's fine, I suppose, if your standards aren't higher. It'll get you by, mostly. There is beauty in the stillness though. A finer mind appreciates the presence and the absence, sees the form and the void. I guess it takes a Zen mind to understand what isn't there. A little more sophistication. Not everyone has that, but I don't think they should feel wholly inadequate. Just... common.

I was watching the Kings last night and do you know what I realized? Ron Artest has not gone crazy. Yeah. That's right. Ron Artest has not charged the crowd and punched a fan since he's been here. He has not publicly requested trades, been benched and sulked. He's not throwing flagrant fouls willy-nilly. He hasn't choked anyone, thrown temper tantrums, or made a scene on court. As far as basketball goes, he has been a productive, non-controversial starter. I WAS RIGHT about him. And you weren't.

If you were one of the several people who emphatically insisted Ron Artest = Impending Implosion, or Ron Artest = CRAZYTIME, I want you to know that the comments here are a shame-free zone. You can admit things there, and we won't judge you. You can admit things like "Megan, you were right and I was wrong." "I was so wrong when I laughed at your team for acquiring Artest and I should never have mocked you for having faith in him." Go ahead. The comments are WIDE OPEN. Get comfy in there. Stretch out. Say the words you know are true. Ron Artest did not go nuts playing basketball in Sacramento. People can change. We redeemed him. JUST LIKE I SAID.

You see what I face out there?

2008-01-23T19:29:00.000-08:00

OK, this is funny, right? The comments here. That's funny. I wish she'd taken my bet.