Anarchy texts

My iPhone vibrated and chimed to let me know a text had come in.

I was sitting at my desk at work, so I dug the silver brick out of my pocket and looked to see who had texted me.

The screen just showed a phone number, which meant that the person wasn't in my address book. The text mentioned a birthday party for the sender, tomorrow night, at a bowling alley. It had the look of something sent to a bunch of people, a blast group text, rounding up a posse.

I had, just a week or two ago, done some cleaning up of my address book. Had I mistakenly deleted someone who still texted me? I couldn't think of anyone - the list of texts I had received in the last few weeks had names and pictures attached to numbers; it looked complete.

Was this from someone I hadn't talked to in a long time? A girl I had dated once or twice and then fallen out of contact with? Did I get included by mistake? Was this spam?

So many questions. I tried Googling the number, but nothing turned up.

I walked over to my friend Ken's cube, sat down across from him. "I just got this text and I don't know who it's from." I showed him my phone.

"It could be spam," he suggested. "Replying might sign you up for something." He shifted to his Announcer Voice. "Congratulations, by reying to this text you are now the proud recipient of a lifetime subscription to the ringtone of the month club, billed in one lump sum of $999.99!"

"Who, me?" I smiled.

"Did you try Googling it?"

I nodded. "I should just reply like I know who it is. Maybe mess with 'em a bit."

Ken gave me a blank stare. "Or you could just tell them that your address book is messed up and you don't know who it is."

"Where's the fun in that?" I was smiling, still. "You and your whole 'be honest and straight-forward' kick!"

Ken turned back to the computer he was working on, quickly. A bit too quickly; he betrayed a little frustration. "Whatever. Just reply."

"This could very likely be a wrong number, or someone I removed from my address book for a good reason," I continued, only half-serious. "It's entertaining to play around a little." Meanwhile, I was already keying in a reply - an honest and straight-forward reply, explaining that I had messed up my address book and did not know who had sent me the text.

Ken said, "You're going to mess something up and piss someone off, just because they invited you to a birthday party! I just do not get you sometimes!" He was a bit rant-y.

"I like things that are entertaining. And if they're not already, I like making them that way. What can I say?" I was needling him a little, even as I hit send on essentially the text he suggested I send.

"You're trying to make it a better story. When it's already a good story to begin with."

"May-be," I conceded.

Soon enough, the reply came back: it was a waitress at the Limelight, a restaurant I eat at frequently. I sent a quick "Oh, hi! Happy almost-birthday!" back to acknowledge I'd gotten the text. Nice!

Good thing I hadn't carried through with my random anarchy plan... • 6:31 AM 0 comments

characterized by or preferring the state or situation of being alone

I haven't been getting out much. Except for my regular Friday nights out with the guys to see Battlestar Galactica's final episodes at the Bagdad Theater, and my obsession to become a regular customer at the Delta Cafe, and getting to and from work, I haven't spent a lot of time outside of my apartment.

I'm not sure why that is: a long, cold winter; most (but not all) of my friends living in other counties and me not having a car; the pressure of financial tightening as the economy worsens; or even grumpy-old-man-ism, a preference for being inside and away from strangers.

Perhaps none of these. Perhaps some of them.

I've even had invitations from new friends to hang out, spend some time, be social and have fun. Some, like Neva's birthday party, I accepted. But several I have not. It's not them; it's most definitely me.

I lack the energy to dig into my own motivations. I think I'm afraid to find out what they are. At least, I think that, I don't know for certain. Because... I'm afraid to examine my own motivations. Duh. QED.

I haven't run in over a week. Last week, after feeling some pain in my groin for several weeks, I finally got up the courage to visit my doctor to figure out what it might be. My fears ran rampant, as you might imagine, considering the sensitive area the pain was in. But it turned out to be a simple ligament sprain, a "sports hernia", requiring nothing more than some prescription NSAIDs and rest. My doctor, Dr. Carl, once he'd eliminated all other causes, demonstrated definitively for me that that was all it was - he literally put his finger right on the tendon and the spot where the pain originated from, and further demonstrated that rest would relieve the pain.

Running is my anti-depressant, on top of allowing me to eat donuts for breakfast and not gain weight and giving me an excuse to be outside and active. Take away my running and I fall inward.

Luckily the waiting and resting is over. I'll be able to run again soon. And hopefully my mood and my energy will return.

And hopefully I can lose the several pounds of... um... fuel... I've gained in this short time.

I think the lack of energy is contributing to my blogger's block lately, too. It's harder for me to come up with a post a day. So excuse this free rambling. I'll be back on track soon enough.

Spring can't get here fast enough, for so many reasons. • 6:10 AM 0 comments

Zombie lies

I think I first heard the term "zombie lies" from Duncan Black. That link goes to top hit for "atrios zombie lies", not necessarily the first instance of him saying it, by the way, and I'm not saying that he invented the term. But he uses it often, and it always seems to refer to the same idea: a zombie lie is an argument or idea that has been thoroughly debunked and refuted, time and time again, and yet still seems to have people in the public sphere promoting and defending it.

Like the zombies of fiction and fantasy, you can't put them down. No matter how many bullets you put in them, no matter how many times you stab one, they just will not die.

And the zombie lies seem to revolve, politically anyway, around conservative policies and themes. Like the whole "Social Security is going bankrupt!" zombie lie. You hear this a lot. You heard it from President #43 right after he was elected in 2004. You hear it even today, while we are in the middle of an economic disaster caused by tax cuts and deregulation. But the fact of the matter is that Social Security as currently structured will pay out full benefits until the year 2041. Y'know, somehow I think we have some time to deal with the "problem" of a fully-funded safety net for retirees and the disabled for the next 32 years. Maybe we could be focusing on the more immediate problems right now?

Another zombie lie is related to, and in argument against, the just-passed mostly-spending bill in Congress, and can be summed up in the phrase "government should be run like a business!" This zombie lie includes the idea that "we're broke - we shouldn't borrow any more!" It's a bit more insidious because individual Americans can certainly understand their own household economics: when income decreases, spending should likewise decrease. You don't borrow money when you're broke. The reason this is a zombie lie, though, when applied to governments and larger economies is that only the government is large enough to absorb the costs of infusing new capital, in the form of spending, into an economy in an effort to reverse an economic depression. If no individual is spending any money because of a depression, it takes the government to step in and make things happen.

How do we know that this is true? Because FDR's New Deal spending is what got America out of our Great Depression. In fact, when FDR gave in to some "fiscal conservatives" in Congress and cut taxes and decreased spending, in 1937, you can plainly see that those cuts reversed the gains from the previous spending. It may seem counter-intuitive to those of us who are clipping coupons and cutting back personally, but if we want to get out of this economic nightmare, we should be cheering the spending portions of the stimulus bill that just passed, and should be booing the Republicans who forced a bunch of tax cuts into it.

Just look at how great President #43's tax cuts were at sustaining and building on President Clinton's budget surpluses. Oh, wait. #43 turned a $127 billion dollar surplus into a $455 billion dollar deficit.

We need more spending; and because #43 left us in a hole with his tax cuts for the rich and his wars of choice in Iraq and Afghanistan that costs us billions, and the free money give-away to banks and financial institutions (which I will admit, President Obama supported at the time and is continuing), our situation is far more dire than it should have been. But that doesn't take away the proven fact that building infrastructure and putting more capital and money into the economy is the answer, in a nutshell.

Luckily, that's what President Obama is proposing. Sadly, the Republicans seem to want to obstruct that spending and, in some cases, Republican state governors are considering refusing the money. That's about as willfully destructive and ignorant as they could possibly be.

Y'know, just like zombies. • 6:11 AM 0 comments

Twelve hours of sleep

Sorry I don't have a real post for you this morning. I've been sleeping.

Got home last night from work, and was immediately tired. Well, I'd been tired all day, and had a bit of a headache. I barely had any energy but forced myself to get a load of laundry done (a bunch of black t-shirts, actually) then crashed on the couch and watched a little bit of recorded TV (last week's Clone Wars) and then... drifted into bed.

Where I slept for twelve hours.

Had a dream about shopping for a VW Jetta that I was sure I couldn't afford. Had another dream about moving into a new house that I, also, couldn't afford. I think those dreams stemmed from the conversation at lunch about the economic crisis our country, and the world, is going through.

But beyond my vague remembrances of dreams, being in bed was a half-day of oblivion.

Now I'm over-tired and stiff, muscles sore, and a bit sweaty (I didn't turn down the heat before sleep so it's too warm in here).

And now, I'm off to work. • 6:04 AM 0 comments

New label added

In case you liked my latest in the "Motels and Hotels I remember" series, you may want to read the past installments.

I've added a new tag, so you'll find all the previous posts here. • 10:04 AM 0 comments

Beat the system

The new Dell laptops we (the place I work) are buying have biometrics built-in - fingerprint readers. You've gotta figure that's pretty secure, right?

The folks at Mythbusters have successfully beaten fingerprint readers, though, a couple of years ago.



Myth Busters-Finger Print Lock - video powered by Metacafe

Wonder if fingerprint readers have gotten better since then? I don't know, but my guess is, no. Not in retail off-the-shelf laptops anyway. • 7:40 AM 0 comments

Motels and Hotels I remember

Fifth in a series.

Oasis Motel in Gretna, Lousiana

Thanksgiving weekend in 1998, I lived in Austin, Texas, working as a contractor for Apple Computer. It was my first-ever Thanksgiving weekend away from my family. The Wednesday before the long weekend, I sat with a bunch of work friends in the backyard of some bar whose name escapes me and Google. It was a chilly night, in the mid 50s, and drinks were flowing. A bunch of us were trying to figure out how to spend our time off. I had no idea, but my co-workers were concerned about finding me a place to spend with friends and food. I got several offers to come over for turkey and all the trimmings. It was nice to feel so wanted.

But the best offer was when I found out that Chris and John were planning a road trip... to New Orleans.

I had never been to New Orleans, but it had captured my attention more than once in books, songs and movies. The Big Easy! Crescent City! Mardi Gras! Let the good times roll!

I asked them if I could tag along, and they agreed. Splitting costs three ways was cheaper than splitting it two ways. Since John didn't have a great car, and neither Chris or I had any car at all, we were taking a rental car.

The following morning they picked me up. It's a 500+ mile road trip, give or take, from Austin to NOLA, or about 8 hours of driving. Luckily, we had a four day weekend, and three drivers to take the wheel. I remember driving through San Antonio, though we did not stop there. To this day I've never been. When we passed through Houston, we stopped at a Denny's for dinner; I remember the oil-covered canal and the huge oil derricks pumping oil and burning off the extra, making the landscape look like a watery Hell.

East Texas was green and swampy, very much unlike West Texas, which is dry desert. And southern Louisiana is, of course, the Bayou, a lush green dense wetlands.

The trip itself was largely uneventful, but once we got to the city proper, it was late and we decided to get a motel first. We drove through New Orleans and over the Ponchartrain Expressway, to the land on the other side of the Mississipi River, into the suburb called Gretna, before getting off the highway. We first came to the Oasis Motel, the improbably-desert-themed resting point for our two night stay.

We were three cheap guys, so we all shared a room. One on each bed and one on the floor, I volunteered for the floor first. Chris and John joked about cockroaches, but I was too punk rock to care. The room was just like every other motel room you've ever been in: smelled of stale smoke and sweat, beige in spirit if not in color, mismatched bed clothes and curtains.

Once we dropped off our bags, we drove back across the toll bridge to explore the wonders of Bourbon Street. It was a foggy night, and the streets were home to wandering groups of tourists. I marveled at the fact that we could get our booze in to-go cups and walk out into the street; just another way that New Orleans was different than my hometown.

The architecture was different, as well; tall townhouses with large wooden double doors, and balconies that looked out over the street. Chris explained that those balconies were filled with women showing their breasts for strings of beads during Mardi Gras - another idea that was new to me, but as a lover of breasts, I approved.

It looked crowded to me, but the bartender at the first place we stopped that night made mention that it was dead due to the holiday. That's right! It was Thanksgiving! I ran into the back to find a pay phone and called home.

My mom and dad could barely hear me over the music and noise of the bar, but I shouted a Happy Thanksgiving to them and happily explained that I was fine even without turkey and stuffing. And then, my family duties discharged, I went back out into the perpetual party that was Bourbon Street. We worked our way down the street, one bar at a time, until we reached the dark end, where Lafitte's Blacksmith Bar and Grill lay. The oldest building in use as a bar in North America, it was purportedly built by the pirate Jean Lafitte and his brother Pierre, back in the early days of the Union. Inside it was black as pitch and lit only by incandescent bulbs made to look like candles.

We stayed out almost all night, and Chris and John had a hard time getting me awake the next morning, because the tradition was to have coffee and beignets at Cafe du Monde. I wasn't a coffee drinker, and I was hungover, so I was grumpy until John patiently explained that I was harshing his groove. "This is a tradition. You don't have to understand it. Just go with it." Since I preferred much more substantial breakfasts (something with eggs and bacon) selling me on light fluffy dough-y things was a bit difficult, but eventually I got into it. Well, I got into it when the coffee and beignets were there in front of me and ready for devouring.

We wandered the city the rest of the day, and in the evening decided to take a vampire and ghost tour. On the drive back to the motel room, we got lost in the thickest fog I can recall, and made many loops of the freeway system around the city before figuring out how to get back across the river into Gretna. And the following morning we toured a Mardi Gras museum, filled with old floats from many past parades.

We probably spent about 10 total hours in that motel room over the course of our stay. That fact, and the huge amount of food and alcohol I ate and drank account for my lack of memories of the place, specifically. But that trip sealed my love for that city. I've been back once but would love another trip someday.

Maybe even during Mardi Gras.

Labels: motels

• 6:40 AM 0 comments

Transit night life

Last night, after having a great time at nevafeva's birthday party in NE Portland, I faced the downer of a long bus ride back to Sellwood.

Bear with me for a little Portland geography; surely most everyone who reads my posts already knows this but just in case, let me set the scene. The majority of all bus routes in Portland pass through, or end in, downtown. The first part of my bus journey was on the #6 bus, which basically traveled up and down the north- and south-bound highway of Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard, before hopping over the Hawthorne Bridge into the downtown bus mall.

Then, to complete my journey from one end of Portland to the other, I had to grab the #33, which hopped back over the Hawthorne Bridge to drive south-bound highway of McLoughlin Boulevard, where I debark and enjoy a half-mile walk to my little apartment building o' fun.

Two boulevards, two straight shots, each with a juke into the city center. Easy-peasy, right? I should be home in a flash, right?

The first part of the trip went smoothly. I love people watching the folks who ride the bus late on a Saturday. The attractive young girls who are going to a dance club. The middle-aged men who still think they're young men talking to the young girls. The older lady, drunk out of her mind, just riding around for something to do. Just another bunch of damaged humanity (including me). I felt a kinship with all of them, but sat in my seat and watched.

I debark downtown, and check the schedule on my iPhone. Side note: I found the best iPhone app for anyone in Portland who rides a bus. Last Friday, the website I have been checking for TriMet bus arrival times went away - I got a 404 error. So I poked around Apple's App Store and found a long list of iPhone programs for transit times. Our local transit agency actually has an API to let others use their schedule information, which explains all the Portland-specific iPhone apps I found. The top rated one was called PDXBus, and it was free, so I downloaded it.

It's full of features! Bookmarks for most-used stops, it can show multiple stops on one page, it lets me organize and arrange the bookmarks and rename them, it uses Core Location to show me the closest stops to me in case I'm in an area of town I'm not familiar with. It even has a built-in blue flasher that I can use to flag down buses at night.

Last night, though, iPhone told me that I had a 35+ minute wait for the next leg of my trip home. It was cold and I was tired and did not feel like standing in the wind for that long, so I walked 6 blocks to the only open coffee shop I could find, the Starbucks at Pioneer Courthouse Square, which was open until midnight. On my short walk, I was asked directions, as I normally am whenever I walk anywhere. I must look like someone who knows where things are. I accidentally gave incorrect directions (no, seriously, it was accidental). Got a small coffee, had to wait a bit while it was finishing brewing, was offered an Americano instead (no, I'll wait for the brewed coffee, thanks), texted goodnight to my bestie, Tracy, found out the wifi at Starbucks wasn't working (which matters much less since I bought an iPhone), and then walked the six blocks back to the bus stop.

And got asked directions once again. His Spanish accent was thick so I had a hard time understanding what he was asking for but we eventually got it sorted out and I pointed him in the right direction.

Got to the stop and the bus was already there, laying over until time to leave. Hopped on, started people watching again while surfing to kill the time. A driver and 15 or so people just wanting to go home, or somewhere else at least, on a Saturday night.

The driver was tall, and white-haired but strong looking, and when it was time to go he pulled out into traffic sharply and crisply. Turned onto Madison to cross the bridge... then just kept going straight.

He should have taken the off-ramp down onto McLoughlin and continued south. He didn't.

A passenger walked up to the front of the bus to ask him about this mistake, which is always a touchy situation. If the driver is defensive at all, or the passenger is rude at all, it can turn into an argument. This passenger was deferential enough, or the driver was humble enough, to avoid that. "I'll just have to go around the block to get back on track," the driver said.

So we continued onto SE Hawthorne, crossed Grand Ave., went one block up and turned right. Now we were parallel to McLoughlin and two blocks away. It's a little complicated by the fact that the major streets are one-way onlies, but the very next right-hand turn would have gotten the driver right back on track.

He kept going straight.

I kept quiet, but made eye contact with a couple of my fellow passengers. We wanted to see where this was going. We didn't want to point out that the driver was lost. Well, I did, but I did it on Twitter.

After just a block or two, the driver was screwed, because McLoughlin becomes a raised thoroughfare with no on-ramps. Now, when he got to an intersection and looked right, he could see that he had no way to get back on McLoughlin and back on track. Now, his little GPS unit was beeping at him that he was seriously off course. Now, he (or at least I) could feel the tension of all the passengers wondering where the hell we were and where we were going. A girl who had been talking on her cell phone to a distant friend started narrating the streets we passed, trying to figure out what the score was and how much longer until she reached her destination.

I thought ahead and realized that the driver was going to have to zig-zag through inner Southeast and past the TriMet Center garage, along SE 17th, before he could get back to the normal route. And so he did.

Because the boulevard is one long multi-lane highway, even with this long detour, the driver only missed one stop. Still, I felt bad for anyone who was waiting at that stop for a bus home; the next bus to pass there wouldn't do so for another hour, and that was the final trip of the night. They'd be waiting a long time, and with no word about what had happened. Maybe they (these hypothetical people I'm picturing) saw their bus pass over the bridge - I've stood there at that stop and I know that where this bus had gone was in line of sight from there. How frustrating that would be, to see your bus be so wrong, knowing the next one won't show up for an hour or more...

Such is life when one relies on transit. • 8:27 AM 1 comments

Coffee cart girl

Friday morning and I approach the coffee cart in my building's lobby. The coffee cart girl sees me coming and smiles.

"Good morning," I say, hopefully brightly but probably, considering the early hour (at least an hour before the normal opening hours for my office), more likely mumbled and blurry.

"Good morning, sunshine!" she replies, her smile wide in her freckled face.

I laugh. "Sunshine? I like that." I move around to the side where the row of brewed coffee [things] are arrayed. I get a medium cup and start to fill it with half decaf, half macadamia chocolate flavored coffee. "Actually, though, my last name is Moon, which is pretty much the exact opposite of sunshine."

She's not facing me; she's setting out the trays of donuts, wiping down the counter. The cart has just officially opened for the day. She laughs, too. "So, then: goodnight, Moon?"

"Ha, ha! 'Goodnight, Moon. Goodnight, cow jumping over the moon.'" I recite back at her, and she and I finish speaking the last sentence in unison.

"I loved that book. It was my favorite book when I was a little girl."

"Mine, too," I say, still smiling. "For obvious reasons." I pull out my wallet and lay down some money for my coffee, and pluck a donut, a giant apple fritter, from the tray. "But I really wanted to get my hands on Harold's purple crayon. Or run away with Max where the wild things were."

"Ah, but do they have donuts?" she asked.

"Wild things don't need donuts," I said. Nor do they need friendly cute redheaded coffee cart girls, I thought as I wished her a good morning and walked away. • 6:19 AM 1 comments

Downtime

My apologies for the downtime on this site this morning. Not sure what happened, but for now I've got things temporarily working on another, slower, server.

Things may be broken - links, pictures, and whatnot and suchlike. Feel free to let me know or you can just wait and I'll get everything working at full capacity (such as it was) eventually.

I tend to forget how much has to be changed/updated to move even a simple blog like this from one place to another.

This is probably a reminder for me to back things up more often, too.

Labels: meta

• 8:51 AM 0 comments

Home cookin'

Last night was supposed to be the Thursday Thing with Kevin. But an early morning email from Kevin announced that he was sick; too sick to hang out after work, he not only did not have the energy, he did not want me to catch what he had, too.

I missed him already, but wished him well.

I went through my day and kept busy, but when the end of my work day arrived, I was both glad to be done but in a strange reluctance to go home. Old Barfy, about whom I've written before, has taken to storing shopping carts of bottles and other recycled goods in the shared backyard, and a couple of nights ago I discovered that these shopping carts (yes, multiple) have multiplied to the point of being right next to my kitchen and bedroom windows, and my back door. I had left him a note about it this morning, and I anticipated having to talk to him about it after work.

What better reason to not go straight home, then? Yes, I'm generally non-confrontational. I will get around to it, but it might take me a while.

Instead, I transferred from my normal #70 bus to the #19, and went up Woodstock to the Delta Cafe (about which I've written before). Kevin and I were planning on going there, and I decided that I would still keep that appointment, even though Kevin had had to bow out to get well.

The thought of the home cookin' perked me up from my already-good mood. Walking in the front door I could smell the BBQ sauce and fried foods. The hostess sat me down near the window, and gave me a menu.

What to have? I knew I'd start with corn bread. I love corn bread.

After rejecting the idea of ordering something I've already tried (I haven't been going there long enough; I need to try more of the menu) I landed on pork chops. Grilled tender pork loin. With applesauce. For my two sides I tried the mac and cheese and cole slaw.

After I'd placed my order with the tattoo'ed black haired dark-mascara'ed waitress, I texted my order to Tracy, who is always down for some food porn.

And it hit me: every item I ordered was something my mom used to make, and serve, as a meal. Not just each individual thing by itself, but the meal as a whole. Corn bread, pork chop, mac and cheese, cole slaw, applesauce. It was literally just like mom used to make. But mom was long gone, buried up in Willamette National Cemetery.

And in spite of my generally good mood that day, and my anticipation of the delicious dinner still yet to be served... I missed my mom.


Forgive a blurry phone cam shot but, daaaamn.

It was so good, with just a hint of sad remembrance. Not that my mom was from the south; she was born and raised in Oregon, though she and dad moved and lived up in Aberdeen, Washington, and outside of Seattle, and in Kalama, before finally coming back to Portland. She visited Mexico a couple of times, and went on road trips with dad back east to visit his family, and down to California a couple of times, and even got her wish to see Hawai'i before cancer took her. But she was an Oregonian in all senses of the word.

She only knew a few recipes, and when she cooked she made lots of use of pre-packaged ingredients, but that was the food I grew up on, and grew fat on, to be honest, so I remember it fondly.

The food at the Delta is higher-end, but the menu could just as well have been the menu when I was a kid. And it took me until last night, my third visit, to realize it.

It's truly comfort food for me. • 6:38 AM 1 comments

What kind?

Donuts (or doughnuts, if you prefer) are tasty pastries, deep-fried fluffy or cake type, covered in frosting, or not.

The canonical donut is a torus; an inner tube or wheel shape, a ring with a hole in the middle. The round nuggets called "donut holes" are, therefore, the bit of a donut punched out of the middle.

But donuts can be other shapes. Two bits of dough twisted or braided and then fried can also be found on donut trays, in donut cases, or in donut shops around the globe. Sweet rolls, without a hole in the middle at all, are also called donuts. Round puck shapes, filled with custard or fruit jam, are likewise donuts, without any hole. And apple fritters, lumpy and irregularly shaped, are also commonly called "donuts".

All of which leads me to a question, on I have pondered for nearly as long as I have eaten and loved donuts themselves:

What kind of "nut" is a donut supposed to resemble?

Is it the nut that you'd screw onto a bolt?

Or a nut that you'd pluck from a tree?

Is this a binary choice? Is it one or the other? Or has the lineage of the suffix "-nut" passed beyond the word it was derived from, so that "donut" no longer has a connection to its root word? • 6:48 AM 0 comments

Green

In these difficult financial times, I'm looking for any way I can to save money.

Which is why I proposed to my landlord that he could get tax credits from the Feds and the state if he installed solar panels for my apartment building.

It's a win-win. My landlord could get money back (up to $4500, if I'm reading these web pages correctly) and I'd save money every month on my electric bill.

Plus we'd both be doing more to reduce our dependence on foreign oil and carbon-based fuel sources. OK, him more than me, but, y'know, still. It's my idea.

I haven't heard back from him yet. But I'm confident I will. Hear back, I mean. One way or the other. • 6:33 AM 0 comments

Crossover

Is it just me, or does the pun in this video make anyone else laugh hilariously?

• 12:11 AM 1 comments

Zipcar's half-hour cheat

To: info@zipcar.com
From: Brian M.
Date: Sun, Feb 15, 2009 at 4:54 PM
Subject: Suggestion regarding Zipcar's online reservation system

First, I love Zipcar in general and all the great ways the company takes advantage of the latest technology, whether it's the keycard access or hybrid cars, or the many ways you use online and internet technology to make things easy for us customers.

That being said, I have a small suggestion for the mobile version of your online reservation system: please change the default time for the start of a reservation to round up, not down.

When I make a reservation on my iPhone at, say, any time between 4:00p and 4:30p, the default starting time that the reservation software assumes is 4:00p - it rounds down. And it's "costly" in terms of how many page refreshes and clicks I have to make in order to change it to a more useful time.

If I'm on my phone to get a Zipcar, chances are I'm either within walking distance of the car or standing right next to it. OK, maybe in that case it makes sense to default the time to round down, so that I can immediately get in the car and drive off. But if I'm making a reservation anytime between 15 and 30 minutes past the most recent half-hour mark, most of the time I'm willing to wait a bit so that I can get the whole half-hour segment I'm paying for, rather than just a fraction of it.

Honestly, it feels like I've been cheated in that case, simply because I didn't go through the hassle of clicking and changing the start time to a point in the future.

Would it be possible for the software to default to the next half-hour, rather than the previous half-hour? Or can you pro-rate me the time I don't actually use?

In any case, I still think you guys rock, and I've been a customer of Portland Zipcar since two mergers ago (Remember FlexCar? I forgot what the company was called before FlexCar but that's when I originally joined).

--
Brian Moon

*****

To: Brian M
From: info@zipcar.com
Date: Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 3:54 AM
Subject: Re:Suggestion regarding Zipcar's online reservation system

Dear Brian,

Thank you for writing. We do welcome your feedback and your suggestions regarding the current reservation systems. We will pass it along. We compile our member's ideas and decide on them in future planning sessions. Thanks!

Regards,

Lynn
Zipcar Member Services

Does that seem like a brush-off to you, too? • 6:00 AM 0 comments

Somber

Here's what I knew about "The Reader" before I saw it Sunday:

• It has been nominated for a Best Picture Oscar.
  
• It stars Kate Winslet.
  
• It has some connection to the Holocaust.
  

All of those things are true.

The movie itself is somber, which is expected for a movie that has some connection to the Holocaust. But that is not the only theme. The script also deals with how normal people can be involved in the most heinous crimes, and how best for us to pass along the stories and lessons of the past, and the murky ethics of seducing teenagers, and whether one has a moral imperative to save someone who appears unwilling to be saved.

"The Reader" may join the list of movies that I enjoyed once, but never really wish to see again. It's given me much to think about.

Labels: movies

• 6:59 AM 0 comments

Faith

Spoilers for "Fringe" and "Lost" below. You've been warned.



In this week's episode of "Fringe", the bad guy forces Agent Dunham to show off her psychic powers to remotely turn off light bulbs. Of course, Agent Dunham does not believe in psychic powers at all, let alone that she has them. The bad guy, however, tells her "Then I have something you don't, Agent Dunham. I have faith in you."

In this week's episode of "Lost", John Locke is trapped in a cave with a lovely compound fracture in his leg, and his spirit guide Christian Sheppard wants him to turn the big ol' wooden wheel of time, collect his six friends and talk them into returning to Hell Island. The word "sacrifice" is used which makes Locke nervous; he doesn't think he can do it. Christian tells him, "I have faith in you, John."

Both of those are J. J. Abrams shows. But if those characters are searching for faith, they need to look to Friday nights, where Faith the Naughty Slayer has taken up a new job as a mind-wiped puppet solving crimes and kicking ass. (See what I did there?) "Dollhouse" looks complex and dark. Really really dark. You may have thought that a show about living over the mouth to Hell and killing vampires for a living (i.e., "Buffy the Vampire Slayer") was dark but that's just peanuts compared to Joss Whedon's follow-up, "Dollhouse". The creepy submissiveness of the blank-slate Echo, played so well by Eliza Dushku, sets me on edge and makes me eager to see her get some retribution for being put into this position. Actually, from even the very first scene of pre-mind-wiped pre-Echo being recruited for this "job", Dushku does an eerie good job of showing someone who thinks they have no other options but to... yes, submit... to this 5-year contract. Have I used the word "creepy" enough? It all gets darker from there.

Between Mr. Abrams and Mr. Whedon, I'm getting more than my weekly dose of well-written, well-plotted dark sci-fi. Which is a good thing, considering that "Battlestar Galactica" only has five more episodes left.

It truly is a good time to be a fan of dark sci-fi filmed episodic television. • 6:54 AM 0 comments

What we see when we look

In the earliest moments of Valentine's Day 2009, I was sitting with a bunch of friends, including Tracy, in the Acropolis strip club, shouting at a friend of the DJ over his cell phone to some guy at home alone.

Tracy and Gina liked the girls at the Acropolis better than the ones we had seen a couple of weeks earlier at Devil's Point. The dancers at DP are Goth-y, tatted, jet-black hair and lots of eyeliner kinds of girls. The dancers at the Acropolis span a much wider range: from tall blonde Barbie types to buxom Bettie Page types to young-seeming naughty schoolgirls to my favorite dancer of all, S., who is a slender sun-worshiping brunette who cracks wise and has a great laugh.

Tracy summed it up thusly: "The girls here look like what we wish we looked like."

I hadn't thought of that... • 9:47 PM 0 comments

Travesty of justice

I haven't yet had a chance to read it but I'm posting it here for anyone else to read.

The United States Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit has issued its opinion in the case of Lea Lakeside-Scott vs. Multnomah County and Jann Brown.

Apparently it has overturned the lower court's ruling and accepted the defendant's arguments.

A travesty of justice. I hope that Lea is not done fighting, because it's not over yet. • 6:12 AM 0 comments

Found things

The flip side of lost things is, of course, found things.

That's a set of memories, however, that is buried a bit deeper. Nothing immediately comes to mind. So I'm typing it out, mentally clearing my throat by just typing randomly, until a memory resolves itself.

Found things. Found objects? I've found money before. I remember working in the mall, nearly 2 decades ago, and finding a small manila envelope with two twenty dollar bills inside. No identifying information at all, just the two bills. It was after the mall was closed, and I was walking through the now-dark empty shopping center. I spent that - on what, exactly, I don't recall. Who lost it? Were they hurt by it's loss? Did losing it prevent them from doing something important? Or was it just mad money? I'll never know. I may have changed a life that night. I hope they didn't come back to find it, re-tracing their footsteps and yet not crossing my path. The money didn't exactly change my life, as far as I can tell, beyond giving me a paragraph to blog about.

Last weekend I I found a restaurant. Not that it was lost, mind you. I'm sure the staff, the owners, and all the previous customers were doing just fine by it before I walked through the front door. But my life is much richer for finding it. I've already eaten there twice. Once for brunch, as I documented, and once again for dinner, the following night, with an old and dear friend. I had the chicken fried steak with gravy, and an amazing corn bread stuffing that I can still taste if I close my eyes. And an awesome spicy Bloody Mary complete with every garnish known to man: celery stalk, pepperoncini, green olive with pimento, and green bean.

Something that may surprise my readers, considering my strong atheism, is that I've "found" God twice. Twice in my younger years I attended a church revival and approached the preacher at the end to be "born again". The combination of the enthusiastic crowd, the charismatic speaker, the time-tested language of salvation, and my own dissatisfaction with mundane reality and my desire to please my friends, all led me to think that giving in to the brainwashing was a good thing.

Fool me once, shame on you... The second time, I rationalized it by thinking that I was a back-slider from the previous time, even though I had done far less than my friends who were supposed to be strong in Christ had done; I hadn't done any of the major sins - no drinking (yet), no smoking, no drugs, no sex (not that I wouldn't have given my left arm to actually have sex, mind you). My worst "sin" was that I played Dungeons and Dragons. So fearful of the powerful damnation caused by a simple game of make-believe that, once, I snuck a Bible in a coat pocket when I went to my friend's house to play, and while engaged in role-play, reached into the pocket and touched the small book of Bronze Age writings, seriously expecting to be burned when I did so. I was not burned. Neither angels nor demons appeared and spoke to me. I did not receive any signs of divine intervention, even though I sincerely hoped and desired for one. It was just a book, and the game was just a game.

But even in my most lamb-like state, I still approached things with an experimental, scientific mindset. I tested the claims of the preachers and pundits. Of course they were found wanting.

Since those early years, I have found something much better: I have found comfort with myself, and with the world, and all the uncertainty that it represents. I don't need an invisible sky man or a magic book to show me how to live my life. Morals and guidance come from a rational base of our social lives, our empathy for others and the world, and our desire to better ourselves and leave a better world for our children and future generations.

That's the best thing I can think of finding. • 6:37 AM 1 comments

Inadvertent

It only just now occurred to me that my previous post was titled "Lost things" and posted on the night that "Lost", the TV show, was on.

And yet there wasn't a conscious attempt to connect those two things.

I picked the topic by leafing through the book "Writing Without The Muse" by Beth Joselow and picking a suggestion at random.

Is the connection a conscious one, a subconscious one, or a matter of apophenia - forging a connection after the fact when one didn't exist prior? Who knows? Who cares?

OK, obviously, I care. Fascinating how the mind works. • 8:16 AM 0 comments

Lost things

Everyone has stories about things they have had, and lost. Small things, big things, personal things, public things, even things that aren't things: ideals, people, senses.

If I reach into my brain and pull out something I've lost, one of the first things that comes to mind is my first car.

My actual first automobile was a truck: a mustard-yellow Ford Courier pickup, which was a hand-me-down given to me by my dad, after he had also given it to my sister, until she could save up for a car of her own. I drove that truck for almost a year, until the engine block cracked because it had overheated and run out of coolant, stranding me on the freeway on a hot summer afternoon. As my dad angrily described it after I had had it towed home, "It's bone dry! It's a big fuckin' boat anchor now!"

Not my finest moment.

Even though I "lost" that truck, that's not the car I think of as my first car. The car I bought after melting the truck was a 1978 Porsche 924. Nutmeg brown, with a tan interior. Sunroof, 2.0 liter 4-cylinder over-head cam engine, four-speed transmission. I paid $2900 for it, and it was the first, and last, car loan I ever had.

I drove that car for years, and drove it hard. It was the car in which my friend and I drove to San Francisco and back.

I autocrossed that car - autocrossing involves setting up a course with orange safety cones in a parking lot, and driving as fast as possible through the course. I earned the nickname "The Unicorn" in that car when I completed one pass through the course with an orange safety cone sticking straight out from under the air dam on my Porsche.

I took so many girls out on dates in that car. Some were happy when they heard I drove a Porsche; some of those were disappointed when they actually saw it. It was not impressive. The interior was a bit trashed. The sunroof leaked and there was a lake in the passenger side footwell on rainy days. And the Nutmeg Brown paint job had faded and chipped in places. But it was still my baby.

There was no sub-component of that car that I hadn't fixed, replaced, or rebuilt. Engine, clutch, transmission, brakes.

And even though I loved that car, I treated it poorly. One time, in my hurry to go meet a friend after he'd gotten off work, I rushed off after a brake job without torquing down the bolts on the wheels. I didn't notice until a mile or so from home, rounding a corner, when the entire car wobbled and shook. I pulled over and only then discovered that I had not one, not two but all four wheels about to fall off! I was able to wrench them down enough to drive, slowly, home, where I jacked it up, examined the damage (the soft alloy wheels had the bolt holes slightly enlarged but were otherwise fine), and called my friend back to tell him I wouldn't make it in time.

How did I lose it? In a car accident. I was operating on too little sleep, and it was an early Sunday morning. I was in a hurry to go pick up a friend to take him back to my house, where other friends were gathering to play a little game of Dungeons and Dragons. When I arrived to pick up my gaming companion, the TV in the house was turned to an episode of Ren and Stimpy, which I had never seen before. The kids of my friend's roommate were watching it. Ren was singing the "Happy, Happy, Joy, Joy" song, and with my sleep-lack, it was perhaps the funniest thing I had ever seen. But I had to be going, so we got back in my car, and I took off. At the first intersection, I looked left, right, and pulled out into traffic. But a car had been coming and I must have missed seeing it; it slammed into the driver's side, spraying glass over me and my passenger, and totaling the car. Even more dazed than before, I drove it over to the side of the road and the older couple in the green VW Type 4 got out, yelling at me. We exchanged insurance information and all the necessities, and my friend ran back the four blocks to his house to call for a tow.

My Porsche was towed twice; once to my home, and then once, again, to the insurance adjuster's lot.

I never saw it again. • 5:53 AM 0 comments

Process

Craig, the building manager for my office, had come all the way into the basement to find my co-worker, Ken. But Ken was not there; he had the day off.

Ken had done Craig a work favor, circumventing the bureaucratic process by which work requests for our team were normally processed. Ken does things like that. He's not, at heart, a functionary.

However, the favor involved two steps: first unplugging, then re-plugging (if that's a word) a computer and all it's peripheral devices. In between the un- and re-plugging, a group of sturdy men would disassemble a desk and work unit and reassemble it in a different, superior, configuration.

The favor was needed because the person who used that computer on that particular work surface in that particular office was located on one particular floor of the building in which I work. The highest floor, in fact, where all of the most important people spent their work hours. People far too busy and important to bother with things like bureaucracy and processes for notifying people like building managers and, well, Ken and I. So Craig had been given very little notice to get this particular, outside-of-the-ordinary work request completed. And so, he had come looking for a favor.

But the cunning plans of Craig and Ken had failed to take into account several factors, including Ken's memory (he forgot about the second part), Craig's lack of knowledge of Ken's schedule (Ken was off today), and the slowness by which the sturdy men had completed their work (they had taken long enough that they were not finished before the end of Ken's normal work day).

Which brings me back to the morning in question, when Craig had come looking for Ken, and found, not Ken, but Ken's empty cube in the basement of the building where I work.

In the cube next to Ken's cube was myself, a giant glazed cinnamon roll, and a steaming hot cup of half-decaf, half normal coffee, with lots of cream and lots of sugar. That's just the way I like it.

"Ken's not here," Craig said helplessly.

"Nope," I said, and I bit off a piece of my cinnamon roll and sipped a little bit of my coffee.

"He was doing me a favor," Craig explained.

"I remember," I replied, eyeing my cinnamon roll and hefting my warm cup of coffee.

"Where is he?"

"Ken?" I asked. Craig nodded. "He's not here." This was beginning to sound like a comedy routine, I thought. Maybe I can make it even funnier.

"I can see that," Craig said. He was normally a patient man but I could detect a small hint of frustration.

"It's his day off."

"Oh, he's off on Mondays?"

I nodded. My coffee wasn't getting warmer. Quite the opposite.

"He was helping me unplug that computer upstairs."

"Right." I could smell the cinnamon and the sugar glaze. Wait. Can one smell a sugar glaze? I could taste it. I tasted it.

"But it needs plugging back in."

"Right." I nodded. I am not volunteering for anything, I thought.

"The movers are done upstairs," Craig said.

The suspense was killing me. Why doesn't he just ask me straight out? "But Ken's not here," I said.

"I can see that," Craig said. "Can you plug it in for me?"

At last! So tempted was I to refuse. However... "Is that where you're going with all this?"

Craig barked out a laugh of frustration. "Yes! That's where I'm going!"

"OK." I carefully set down my cinnamon roll and coffee. "Fine."

I hate it when Ken does favors for people. It breaks our processes. • 6:07 AM 0 comments

Dinner or a movie?

In the winter of 2000 I was far less politically interested than I am now. I was a member of the group of Americans who feel that "all politicians are corrupt liars", which had led me to largely only vote in presidential elections, and then usually for the third-party candidate.

I had little idea what the difference was between a US Representative or a US Senator, except that they were both Congresscritters.

But I still liked the idea of Washington, D.C. And I had family friends who lived in our nation's capital, and their adult son lived in New York City, and I had always wanted to travel to the East Coast. And I had vacation time accruing from my job, and money to spend.

So, in the waning days of the Clinton Administration, I arranged a little vacation.

I'd fly into Baltimore (my friends advised this as a cheaper, easier alternative to flying into National), take a short train ride into D.C., stay a few nights at my friends' apartment, then take another train ride to Manhattan and stay with their son.

I barely remember the details of the flight, in those days before religious extremists flew planes into tall buildings, except that it was easier and more boring. And most of what I did inside the Beltway was visit as many of the Smithsonian museums as I could. The Lunar Landing Module at the National Air and Space Museum actually made me weep for the steps backwards we have taken as a nation in exploration and nearly pure science. I'm so sentimental. And I was suitably impressed with the Hope Diamond.

I've got many stories I could tell from that trip, but the one that makes me kick myself now is my dinner choice on my last night in D.C.

The couple I was staying with were political. Very much so. In fact, Tom had a job working directly with Vice President Al Gore. He was working on policies to help the salmon runs in the Columbia River, on behalf of the State of Oregon. My friends spent a lot of time with other politicians and policy makers, which is the way of things in our capital.

And Betsy told me that my final evening with them, they had already planned on having Senator Ron Wyden over for a private dinner, for some political reason I don't remember now but was probably related to the policy work Tom was doing. And she offered me a choice of joining them, or finding something else to do.

If I had that choice now, I would leap at the opportunity to grill Sen. Wyden on many topics, including but not limited to the corporate bailout or telecom immunity or stealing an election or executive branch accountability or network neutrality or or or... So many things come to mind, and Sen. Wyden has taken brave stands with the majority on some of them, and has given the standard corporate Democratic position on others.

But on that trip, on that night... I opted for going out to a movie.

I saw a restored version of "Rear Window", the classic Hitchcock thriller. I had never seen it before. And the idea of a small dinner with some boring windbag Senator bored me to tears.

Such a lost opportunity.

Can I get a do-over? • 6:40 AM 0 comments

Coming in third place to myself

Cross-posted (with minor editing) from my running blog.

When I race, I have no illusions about competition. I'm a late-bloomer for running, and I'm not in the best of shape. And my gender/age group is the sweet spot for local champions - typically the winner is a man around my age. Those guys are fast!

So I just compete against myself. I try to best my previous record, or my record for that race or course.

Sunday morning I ran in my first race of the year, the Fanconi Anemia Valentine's Day 5K.

I've been running every other day for a couple of months, since my last time of falling off the wagon. I've been working on increasing my overall distance, and in the last couple of weeks have tried to make my five-mile-plus loop my "default" run. I'm somewhat discouraged because on my training runs, I rarely average better than a 10:30-10:20 pace.

So going into today's race, I figured I'd show up, do my best, and just use it to gauge my level of fitness for future races. No expectations. I just wanted to finish.

I did a mini-taper by running a slow 3.5 mile loop on Friday. I've been watching what I eat. I've been drinking plenty of water. Saturday I lifted some weights, mostly upper-body stuff. Got plenty of sleep the night before. Ate a cup of yogurt about an hour and a half prior to the start of the race, and a half-liter of water.

It was cold, below freezing the morning of the race, and windy, but I dressed for it; long pants, two long-sleeved technical shirts (one thin and one thicker in case I got too warm), gloves, skull cap.

The course was very flat - starting under the Morrison Bridge, heading south along the waterfront, then turn around near our beautiful expensive Tram and head back basically the same way.

When I passed the Mile 1 marker, I was astonished: 8:40?! Eight minutes and forty seconds? That can't be right! I was pushing a little but not hard. I decided that the marker must be wrong. But I kept the same pace as long as I could.

Second mile was just around 9:00. Again, that seemed way too fast for how I felt. But, hey, keep going.

I didn't mark the 3 mile point because I could see the finish line. I had slowed down, though, I could feel it. But with the finish line in sight I picked it up. And seeing the number 27 on the clock right next to the finish booth made my spirits soar.

My unofficial time was 28:08.56. Because I hadn't double-checked my previous times earlier, I wasn't sure where that fell in my overall personal records, but I knew it was near the top. I tweeted my astonishment, and my guess at this being my second-fastest.

But, actually, this is the third-fastest 5K I've ever run. First is the 2007 Race for the Roses at 27:30; second is the 2007 Mt. Tabor Challenge at 27:59.

Yes, only nine seconds separates my second and third best times. So close!

This is very very encouraging. Maybe all those slow miles actually do help? I'm happy, though, that my 5K times are starting to be more consistent.

My next race will be the Shamrock Run 5K. I'll be running it in a kilt! I won't expect to set any personal records, though; there's far too many people to navigate around both at the start and finish. I'll just be going out and having a good time. In a kilt. • 8:18 AM 1 comments

You can thank me later

I just had a brilliant idea, and to show some faith in my fellow human beings, I am going to give it away for free on the internet.

All I ask in return if someone takes this and make some money on it is that they tell me about it over dinner someday.

Want to know what the idea is? As I was just sorting my laundry, I thought about how annoying it is that I have to sort socks and match them up.

As I clipped together my running gloves using the built-in hook, prior to tossing it in the washer with the rest of my running clothes, I admired how easy that was compared to socks.

Now, having a clip on your socks wouldn't normally be advisable.

But what about velcro? A little strip of velcro, one fuzzy side on one sock, one hook side on the other, just enough to keep each one attached to its mate through washing and drying.

Brilliant! All socks should have such a feature. I would convert all my socks if these were available.

Now someone needs to make it happen. Can it happen before my next load of laundry? No?! Why not? • 6:07 AM 2 comments

I am home in the Delta

I woke up Saturday morning when I got a text informing me that my aunt was in the hospital for diagnostic surgery after a sudden pain. Not the best way to shake a hangover.

My original plans involved breakfast and wifi, a place I could slowly become one with some greasy comfort food while working on my new project. After the call, the plan became finding some comfort food and waiting until she was out of recovery and well enough for visitors. Wifi was optional at this point; thank whatever for iPhone.

My usual coffee shop didn't have a lot of options for breakfast, and was crowded. I decided to go a little further than normal, take a chance, and see what I could find.

I impulsively got off the #19 bus when I saw a sidewalk A-sign announcing brunch somewhere along SE Woodstock. Over the door was the word "Delta". Walked in the door, not knowing what to expect, and heard the dulcet angry-happy sound of the Dropkick Murphys brand of Celtic punk. As I took in the painted plywood and thrift-store mismatched interior of the place, from around the corner came a skinny girl in all black, with jet-black hair and tattoo sleeves and way too much eyeliner. Holy hotness. "Just sit wherever," she said. She followed me to a booth and set down a two-sided menu.

The positives reached a crescendo when I realized that when they said "delta" they meant the Mississippi Delta, which means one thing and one thing only to me: New Orleans, Louisiana, home of spicy Cajun food, beignets, and lots of fried batter and sauces.

I think I was literally vibrating in my seat in anticipation. I scanned the menu: yes, biscuits and gravy; oh my, chicken-fried steak; damn, oyster po-boys.

Another woman, it turned out, was my waitress. Less Goth-y and more friendly, less ink but still dark-haired. She brought me coffee, and my first sip of the chicory flavor brought back many pleasant memories of soothing a hangover with coffee just like this.

My waitress, Tonya, came back much too soon for me to have picked out one thing from the abundance to consume. "I'm going to need more time. I might just have to order one of everything." Apparently the huge smile on my face and in my voice was contagious because she laughed.

"Or you could just come back again later," she suggested.

I conceded the point.

I eventually decided on the berry-covered French toast, with a side of pepper bacon, dipped in a spicy habanero sauce.

And the food disappeared almost too quickly.

There's no way I'm not going back.

During my visit, I texted and emailed three different friends to invite them to dine or breakfast with me there in the future. And I received word that my aunt had made it through the surgery and was recovering nicely.

Now that my new favorite breakfast place had improved my mood immensely, I would be a better visitor to her and the family when I showed up.

And oh your invisible sky man - I am so going back to The Delta. • 6:25 AM 0 comments

Sleep and wake

I went to sleep last night in a great mood: hung out with friends, full of awesome beer and pizza, having watched a kick-ass episode of Battlestar Galactica, my best friend had just become a great-aunt when her niece gave birth. Nothing but good.

I woke up, hungover, to a text message that my aunt was in the hospital awaiting emergency surgery. That's not a good way to wake up.

Hoping for the best. • 2:37 PM 0 comments

Why does this happen? Part 2 of many

I have a project that I'm working on.

In the course of working on it, I needed more information. Or maybe I just needed the illusion of working on it, while still delaying the actual work. Either way, I found myself standing in the aisle at Powell's Technical Bookstore, carefully considering several different volumes of various technical manuals, one recent sunny afternoon.

I was dressed in fairly new clothing. I had shaved that day, and showered earlier. I wore clean underwear. I was not drunk or sleepy. I was present in many senses of the word.

As I plucked first one, then another, intriguingly titled volumes from the shelf, checking out the tables of content, idly reading random pages, decoding graphs and charts and illustrations, around the corner walked a woman. For a brief moment her silhouette was outlined against the windows behind her. But not in an obviously glowing way; I simply mean that her eclipsing of the light drew an automatic response from my visual sense. My attention was caught.

Just a bit shorter than I, dressed casually but, like myself, in clothing that was neither flashy nor ragged. Slim. She moved deliberately, unclumsy, unhurried but directly; this aisle, lined with books of this specific technical topic, was her obvious goal. I could tell by her body language.

As she turned and approached the books she sought, her intention was not towards me, but indirectly she drew closer, and she passed that invisible line that custom informs us we must make some notice of the other human being. Her eyes flicked upward and made contact, briefly, with mine.

My eyes had been downcast, sidelong, drawn by the simple shadow caused by her movement, but, again, social intelligence below the level of conscious thought made me seek a direct line of sight with her pupils, as well.

A brief moment of recognition as our respective brains decoded the ancient pattern of each others' faces, and the act of common intimacy brings an autonomic response: a microsecond of smile. No teeth. And we break the conduit of sight between us nearly immediately.

In that sliver of time, some level of awareness that was wired generations before my individual birth kicked in: female, my opposite; young, or at least younger than myself; symmetrical features, slender, healthy body; cultural signifiers of about the same social class as myself. A part of my mind outside of logical control concludes: attractive female approaches and appears unthreatened and open to conversation.

That level of awareness judges all systems "go". Do something, it signals.

And then... something else happens.

The initial processing is passed to a different part of my brain - or multiple different parts. One part envisions any and all previous encounters with attractive females, and rapidly flashes through all the worst possible outcomes - whether actual or imagined.

Another part compares the idealized self-image with my current physical state, and every deviation I have from the absolute best I have ever achieved in mental acuity, confidence, body shape, youth, social and financial status - and judges me wanting in nearly every category. Likewise, for no reason I can deduce after the fact, but which seems so compelling in the instant, she is judged to be filled with superior knowledge, and therefore, my superior.

Still another part of my brain analyzes the surroundings. Technical bookstore, a shrine to knowledge. How knowledgeable am I? Not very, since I'm here looking for even more information on topics I have little confidence about. The setting itself resembles a library; hushed conversation, broken only by the soft chatter of the staff and the clap and hiss of bound paper being closed and handled. Social conditioning imposes the librarians' "Shhhh!" admonishing the patrons to keep voices low.

Other judgmental processes take their turns at processing this instant. Some are of recent vintage, and some hail further back in my lifetime. Nearly all, not all, but nearly so, they collapse to inform my next action, which is to say, I take none.

Repeated: I take no action.

Book in hand, I carefully place it back on the shelf from where I plucked it.

She steps past me, stops, turns shoulder-to-shoulder to me, but a socially-imposed correct distance away from me, just outside our fight-or-flight reflex trigger zone, about one to one and a half person-width away. Not so far as to be distant. Not so close as to be uncomfortably intimate.

What feels, in my subjectivity, to be minutes, but in reality are just a handful of seconds, pass. I realize that I should say something, do something. Even just a hello, or some verbal acknowledging of the other person.

Too late, I marshal defenses against the judgements already passed. She is attractive. She smiled at me, even if it was brief. We share physical proximity. We appear to share a similar interest based on our location in the store and in this particular aisle. This is not, in fact, a library, but a retail establishment, therefore there is no onus about speaking up.

I do nothing. I stand there, nearly frozen.

Eventually, she shuffles further and further away, and disappears around the far end of the shelves.

I see her again, on a different aisle, later, as I take the two books I decided on up to the cashier.

But never do I speak to her. And I'm filled with shame for my imagined action and my actual inaction.

Why does that happen? Would knowing why that happens help me to make it not happen again? Or is pursuing the why of this encounter, like the thousands other encounters, a chimera that would lead me further from prevention?

So many questions. And a limited, finite, but unknown number of seconds, minutes, and hours in which I can find an answer.

I feel the answer won't help me take action. And inaction won't help me find an answer. I already know where stasis takes me... • 6:30 AM 0 comments

"The Wrestler"

Yeah, yeah, Mickey Rourke turned in an amazing nuanced performance, subdued and beaten in the real world, powerful and assured in the ring, but the scenes in The Wrestler that I found to be most realistic were in the strip club.

Man, some of those awkward, are-they-friends-or-are-they-working conversations between (naked nearly all the time) Marissa Tomei and Mickey Rourke could have been lifted straight from my life circa 1992-'98.

When I pointed this out, Kevin said after the movie, "It's apparently not just you, after all."

(I should write a full review but this should suffice for now.)

Labels: movies

• 6:46 AM 1 comments

Shameful behavior

A union is not a blood oath.

A union steward is not a defense lawyer.

And a police officer is sworn to uphold the law. All the time. Even when the accused is a union brother or sister.

Except, apparently, in Portland.

Shameful. • 6:18 AM 0 comments

Update to Good and Bad

Since I wrote the previous post two days ago (even though it posted this morning), there's been two developments that I'd like to address.

Interestingly enough, both of them are reversals or improvements on two "bad" things I listed.

First, while I still think Daschle was a bad decision on the president's part (the vetting process had to have uncovered Daschle's tax problem), I am very pleased that Mr. Obama accepted responsibility and admitted his mistake in public. He sets a high ethical standard, and this shows that he's going to try to live up to it, along with his staff.

Second, for all my kvetching about Obama's silence on House legislation to cap executive bonuses, damn if he didn't, y'know, move to cap executive compensation this week, after Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) pushed the idea in the Senate. It was a good idea when Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) pushed it back when the TARP fund was first voted on in November, and it's a good idea now. Congrats to President Obama for implementing it (even if the traditional media is now pushing the idea that the lawyers are just gonna find loopholes, anyway.)

Damn, even when he makes mistakes, President Obama earns my respect for how he handles them. • 8:03 AM 0 comments

Good and bad

It's good that President Obama immediately sought to end the unlawful and undemocratic imprisonment and torture of detainees at Gitmo. That's a campaign promise I am glad he appears to be keeping.

It's bad, however, that there appears to be a whisper campaign to keep the extraordinary rendition and "black sites" - policies that put us all in harm's way and erodes our moral standing in the world community. Don't give in to the horrible "conventional wisdom", Mr. Obama!

It's also bad that the President isn't moving very fast on closing Gitmo... though that may be a result of the previous administration's desire to prioritize imprisonment and torture over actually, y'know, accusing people of crimes and then proving their case in a court of law, and leaving behind "a mess" (in more ways than just bureaucracy).

It's good that Eric Holder has been confirmed by the Senate to be our nation's top law enforcement officer. Good pick, President Obama! AG Holder has spoken out forcefully against many of the corrupt practices of the previous administration.

It's bad that President Obama's nominee for head of the Health Department, Tom Daschle, had to withdraw his nomination because of unpaid taxes. Bad pick, President Obama! I thought that your vetting process was thorough enough to avoid embarrassments like this.

It's good that President Obama was able to work with Congress to quickly pass the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, a progressive bill that restores a bit of equality to our workplaces. Several of the other appointees at DOJ have the appearance of being fiercely opposed to torture, rendition, and abuse of power (I can't believe that's even considered controversial - I want my country back, dammit!)

It's bad that President Obama appears to have been the roadblock to legislation that would have removed the outrageous bonuses to financial executives that have received bailout money (bonuses Mr. Obama has spoken out against, actually). One (public) word from the President would have moved that bill into the Senate.

It's good that Mr. Obama has given himself and his administration strict ethical limits on things like hiring lobbyists who may have conflicts of interest in performing good governance. That should stop the "revolving door" inside the Beltway.

It's bad that Mr. Obama has had to seek a waiver so early for as many as four of his appointees (to date). Why impose the rules if you're not going to live by them?

I could find more, but you get the idea. I'm paying attention, and I'm not just one-hundred-percent pro-Obama. Still, overall, I'm happy with the first weeks of Mr. Obama's administration. There are good things and bad things.

And I'm discouraged that, for every good thing I can remember, I can find a bad thing to counter it. On the other hand, it seems to me that several of the bad things are of lesser importance than the good things he's done. Comparing the ending of the torture regime with a bad pick for the Secretary of Health. Even though this list is "balanced" between good and bad things, the overall balance still tips heavily towards the good. • 6:35 AM 0 comments

Did you see..?

As I surf the internets, I find things. Things like these. Did you see them, too?

• New York "things" made from Legos. h/t to Kottke
  
• Who would have guessed that my new favorite blog would be written by a Tri-Met bus driver?
  
• Congratulations to Eric Holder who was confirmed by the Senate yesterday to head up the Department of Justice! Maybe this time around we can have an Attorney General who will act as the people's lawyer as opposed to the President's cover-up-er in chief. Or at least not demand to be called "General" like Ashcroft apparently did.
  
• If you've ever wanted a computer font of your own handwriting, YourFonts will do it for free.
  
• Yesterday was the birthday of the income tax in the US. Happy birthday! Now pay up!
  
• Dude! Martha Washington was hot!
  
• Scalzi has a surprisingly sympathetic view of the man who gives trained monkeys a bad name, (Not) Joe the (Not) Plumber:

  This is not to disparage Mr. Wurzelbacher, incidentally, and if you are of a mind to, here’s a quiz for you:
  
  Hey, you’re a bald, chunky, blue-collar nobody from a crappy little midwest town! By chance, you find yourself thrust into the national spotlight and have a chance to do something more interesting with your life than sit in your crappy little midwest town and get balder and chunkier. Do you:
  
  a) Say, “no thanks, I’d rather stay a nobody”;
  
  b) Do all the wacky crap everybody asks you to do for as long as you possibly can, because in your heart you know it will never ever get any better than this for you for as long as you might possibly live.
  
  Take your time on that one, people.
  
  So, no: I don’t blame Joe the Plumber one bit for taking up the invitation to talk strategy with the GOP, or fly to the mideast, or any other thing he might be offered to do that sounds interesting to him. Dude’s living the dream, man. As long as they keep letting him, why shouldn’t he. I support Wurzelbacher milking this thing. Good for him. I hope he’s having fun. I suspect he is.

  
  
• I'm pretty sure that this isn't what Mercy Corps actually does. But Elizabeth Banks is hot, right?
  
  ELIZABETH BANKS wants to talk trash - watch more funny videos
  
  

• 6:39 AM 0 comments

Note to President Obama

Just sent the following note via the White House contact form:

I understand the President's desire for "bipartisanship", however, I believe it is naive to think that making concessions to Republicans in order to get their support for things like the stimulus bill. Republicans have pruned their party leaders for the last 30+ years such that they are simply opposed to Democrats on principle. Please simply produce the best legislation you can, and let the Republicans vote on it as their conscience dictates. Don't weaken the bill.

Labels: lettertoObama

• 4:10 PM 0 comments

Tardy

After a couple of months, at least, of having a post ready and posted by 7:00 AM every day, today is the first day I've missed.

I was up last night working on my new project and completely spaced out on writing something up.

I'm now feeling the pressure to post something, something funny or deep or... readable... or... something. Got nothin'.

I'm feeling grumpy today. Luckily my friends are trying to fix that.

But here's me this morning when I dragged my ass out of bed and decided that, yeah, I should go to work.


more animals

I'll be back into the groove tomorrow. Or maybe later today. I should really work on writing ahead. I'm just having trouble juggling more than one thing at a time. • 8:04 AM 1 comments

Why does this happen? Part 1 of many

So, I'm working on a new project. It's kind of a big deal. At least for me. If I do it right, it will make money and possibly make me famous. Or at least famous-er.

Consider this a tease for it.

The project is large and requires me to wear many hats. I'll need to be a business manager, a marketer, technical support and administrator, as well as the creative department.

And each of those functions generate a list of things to do. I write them down, organized into lists. I call these my "to do lists".

These lists are fairly long. And there's multiple lists.

It's discouraging. I know what I need to do. I'm just having a hard time picking where to start. I've been thinking about this project for a month or more.

I feel pressure from the idea itself, sitting in my head, wanting me to start doing it.

The more I think about it, the more items and lists I come up with. How nuts is that? Instead of helping me organize my steps and checking the items off and slowly, surely, putting together a complete, working thing... I'm just making more and longer lists.

I feel pressure from the social, financial and political events that have caused me to come up with this project in the first place. The longer I wait, the higher these external pressures get.

It's not getting done. Instead I keep doing the same things I always do; writing blogs, going to work, running, cleaning my apartment, paying my bills, riding the bus, hanging out with friends once in a while, eating delicious food, buying groceries, logging my calories, surfing, sleeping. All of those things are entertaining or necessary, and they all take time out of my day. Time and energy. I have a limited amount of time, and what feels like a limited amount of energy, and it's all being used up by the things that I'm already doing.

There seems to be no time and energy for this new thing.

The closest I come to working on the new thing is when I come up with an idea for another item on my to do list, or spend a few minutes re-arranging the lists I already have, or when I'm surfing and I come across an article that gives me details or tools or ideas for the new project, and I rush to integrate that new information into my lists. Sure, I'm technically "working" on the project. But it's not getting to "done" at all.

And I get discouraged.

And then...

In my surfing, I came across this video (hat tip to Merlin Mann), from someone I've heard of before but have never taken the time to sit down and watch: Ze Frank.

I set the video aside, because I didn't have the time to watch it right then. A week goes by. The weekend comes, and starts to rush by. Sunday rolls around, and I decide I'm going to focus on my project completely.

And, instead, I go downtown and browse books relating to my project at Powell's Books. I go get lunch at my favorite diner. I head home, intent on working on my project, then stop at the coffee shop to get something caffeinated - to help me concentrate, once I get home, of course. I get home, pull out the books, plug in my laptop, set everything out so I'm ready to start working... and I decide I need some background noise, so I start watching Futurama from start to finish.

More discouragement. I'm not working! I'm delaying!

I start going through my saved articles, the ones I saved for "later". And the video I ignored earlier is there.

This video:



Some language not safe for work.

Wait. So... just start doing it? Even if I don't have all the pieces in place? Even if it's not perfect yet?

What the hell? Why am I waiting?

Thanks, Ze Frank. • 6:52 AM 0 comments

Non-spoiler review of Friday night's Battlestar Galactica

There's something pretty much awesome about watching the final episodes of Battlestar Galactica at the Bagdad Theater, with a respectful and engaged audience of fellow geeks. Nobody talks during the show; they all wait for the commercials. It's gratifying to hear the "shush! shush!" sounds as the episode begins.

That's not to say that the crowd is dead silent. We all laugh and applaud and gasp at the same events, which for me magnifies the intensity of each important moment. And as the show works its way to a finale, each important moment is already stuffed full of intensity.

Friday night's episode was described as "action packed" by many sources and, damn, it delivered. The recent past on the show has created a mood of deliberation and sadness and mourning, after the fleet found Earth but discovered it was a dead world. "The Oath" was the point in the story where someone (Zarek, I'm lookin' at you) takes the darkest turn possible. Or maybe several someones (Gaeta, get in line behind Zarek).

And when that happens, the other characters react. Strongly. With guns blazing.

I guess the message is, if you're depressed because you've striven (strove?) for a goal, only to have that goal turn to ashes and leave you in a self-pitying place, start shooting things; it'll make you feel better.

I'm trying very hard to not spoil anything, here. But just know that all the characters are being shown in stark high contrast. Character, said a famous mad scientist, is what you are, in the dark.

And the end run of Battlestar Galactica has been very dark indeed. • 6:28 AM 1 comments